Posts by matt

Did Olde English make the Web rounds when I wasn’t looking? ‘Cause some of their stuff is hilarious.

Apparently back in February The Guardian put up an 8-page Joe Sacco comic from Iraq. It’s a 37-meg PDF download, to forewarn you, but it’s a quick, interesting look at the war through a keen set of eyes. It’s not as good as his Pulitzer-winning effort in Palestine or his reporting in Eastern Europe, mostly because he’s embedded with the troops this time rather than speaking with civilians, but it’s probably different from any other Iraq war coverage you’ve seen. (Via MadInkBeard.)

In 1947, Raymond Queneau wrote the same simple story about a man on a train 99 different ways. The book Exercises in Style became a bestseller in France, and its English translation is in its second edition. (You can find it here in French.)

This year, Matt Madden wants to do the same thing with comics. His forthcoming book, also called Exercises in Style, retells the mundane tale of a man on a late-night trip to the fridge in 99 different incarnations. A preview of the book is available on Madden’s Web site.

I love the way this little storytelling gimmick fuels the imagination. The way you can spend lifetimes thinking about how meaning shifts in each quarto of a Shakespeare play, flipping through a few of Madden’s exercises can make his nothing little characters come alive in your mind. As you move from drawing to drawing and note the changes in perspective or tone, you can imagine rich interior worlds. In one variation, the trip to the fridge is frightening. In another, it’s fantastical. If you’re like me, by the time you’ve clicked through just a few, you begin to understand the fridge-goer as a character on some deep existential quest.

But my favorite thing on the site is a variation submitted by one of Madden’s guest artists, S

I think this may just supplant the Poe Toaster as Best Tradition Ever. Every year, all the “plebes” at the U.S. Naval Academy use each other’s bodies as ladders to climb a lard-slathered obelisk, which they then crown with the hat of an upperclassman. Wow.

…

Wow.

(Via Chrisafer.)

Another entry in the Everything Bad Is Good for You file, this one noted by Chad Capellman over at morph:

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Johan Santana, he of the 2004 AL Cy Young Award and a ridiculously dominant recent record for the Minnesota Twins, prepares for opponents by locking himself in a room and playing PlayStation.

As reported in the recent issue of Sports Illustrated:

Either the night before or on the morning of the game, he’ll check out the lineup of the team he’s facing, take in how the hitters have done against him. Then, alone on his bed, he’ll pick up his PlayStation Portable, plug in the team he’ll soon be pitching against for real, and go to work. …

“Believe it or not, sometimes I see things in video games that will come true,” Santana says. “Particularly in the last year. They’re coming up with some good games, so realistic — the stats are so accurate, and you can go from there. I’m sure a lot of players will agree with what I’m saying. Because it gives you ideas. I see the scouting reports, though I don’t go by that, and in these video games you can see what the hitters have, how to approach them. It’s pretty cool.

You might have heard that Google let 100 journalists into the Lair last week for a rare “Factory Tour,” previewing some of the goodies we can expect to see in the coming years. (It all sounds a little bit Willy Wonka-ish.) But did you hear this?

One fascinating area Google is aggressively exploring is automated language translation. Engineers have been studying the massive collection of translated documents that the United Nations keeps on its Web site — as well as other document collections — to develop a program that can automatically translate back and forth between documents.

To date, the company has examined about 200 billion words to train its system on the structures of various languages.

“If we can make every piece of the Web, every document, accessible to everybody, that will contribute something to the world,” said Alan Eustace, vice president of engineering and research. “And that’s what this project is aimed at.”

Google showed off a few translations it had performed using the new technology, from Arabic to English and from Chinese to English. They appeared nearly flawless.

The way language translation works now, apparently, is that people have created programs telling computers how different languages work. But with the complexity of language, given all its exceptions and colloquialisms, this doesn’t work very well. (First sentence of this paragraph taken from English to French and back: “The translation of language in manner functions now, apparently, is that people created with computers of programs saying how the various languages function.” Which is actually comparatively good.)

Google’s taking a Rosetta Stone approach, teaching the computers to really learn languages by statistically analyzing existing translations. Philipp at Google Blogoscoped gives his thoughts on where this could lead.

Tune into the Advertising Show sometime during the next couple hours to hear me and [possibly] Robin being interviewed about EPIC. We’ll post the archived show when we’re done.

Update: Robin and I each spoke for a good sixteen seconds or so over the course of the two-hour show, most of which went like this:

Host: So this EPIC 2014 business, eh? What’s that about?
Robin: X–
Host: Fascinating. We’ll be back after 10 minutes to dig deeper into that fascinating answer.

Update: Here’s the link. Don’t go too crazy.

I’ve seen this Technology Review article everywhere, and I have only one comment:

It’s called collaborative citizen journalism (CCJ) …

Is it really? Because that’s hella lame. (Note that exactly one person in the article uses the term “CCJ.”)

I’ve snarked out NYT public editor Daniel Okrent before for his seeming tendency to focus his lens on himself rather than the newspaper. I eventually came around to Robin’s point of view. But for the most part, I always liked what he wrote, and I’ll be sad to see him go. Good show, Mr. O.

Having heard many a stricken, Webphobic news editor decry the introduction of “choice” to media consumption — “What about the delicious serendipity of discovering all the amazing articles we’ve carefully hand-selected for them?!” — this Rafat Ali quote rings of Absolute Truth:

One thing which somehow everyone lamented yesterday: the end of serendipity, as choice in news sources and methods of consumption becomes an increasing reality. My reaction: what you people call serendipity, we call links. What you people call the homepage, we call Bloglines. What you call indepth-reporting, we call blogging a story to death.

Via BM.