emzee

I hacked my iPhone a while back, played with some of the apps that were out there, got bored.. so when Apple disabled the hacks with the latest (v1.1.3) firmware update I didn’t really care, so I let iTunes install the update. Now I’m really regretting it.

Now you can rock out in public places

This guitar-playing mini-game is a perfect example of the type of thing indie programmers can come up with, given a chance, what a fun way to use multi-touch.. I can’t wait for Apple to officially let people make software for the iPhone, this whole locking thing is so asinine.

I’ve been a fan of podcasts for a while, subscribing to everything from business-y fare like Ad Age Today, to the pseudo-businessy but very interesting TED Talks, to just plain cool little snacks from (natch) the folks at Cool Hunting. Living in NYC means spending a fair bit of time on trains or subways, and they’re also not a bad way to make the ol’ gym workout go by a little faster.

The lads from Vampire Weekend crooning away in the car

One of the cooler little ‘casts I’ve come across lately is Concerts a Emporter, a series of videos of impromptu live music performances, shot mostly around the streets of Paris and New York. Some of the bands are a bit obscure, but there are quite a few like Beirut and The Shins that anyone with the remotest interest in indie music will know. The videos are all 4-5 minutes long (1 song), perfect for a little break whenever you need it.

I thought I had an unhealthy obsession with food and health, but NutritionData puts me to shame. Using a huge database of government nutrition data from the USDA, they’ve created a site that lets you look up foods to see how healthy or unhealthy they are.

Hummus - nutritious, not so filling?

What makes the site particularly cool is some of the visualizations they use to help you make sense of the reams of data that come up. My favorite is the “fullness factor” - at first I assumed it was subjective, picturing labs full of test subjects eating all different kinds of foods and filling out surveys about how full they felt. Those experiments did get done, but the site actually uses a mathematical formula:

FF=MAX(0.5, MIN(5.0, 41.7/CAL^0.7 + 0.05*PR + 6.17E-4*DF^3 - 7.25E-6*TF^3 + 0.617))

… which gives you fullness on a scale of 0 to 5. The formula’s a bit hard to read properly, but apparently it does a decent job predicting actual satiety recorded in those experiments with people eating in labs. That said, my experience with hummus is a lot different than the model’s.

The moral of the story is that no matter how into something you think you are, there’s someone out there that’s taken it way, way further than you ever could imagine.

An article in the WSJ about a new “antisnob” way to categorize wines caught my eye last week.. I’m no wine snob myself - I like wines that are good but cheap, more of a Chile guy than Bordeaux - but the headline alone reeked of populist, Rachael Ray style analysis. What made me read it was the pedigree of the guy offering the categorization - Tim Hanni, one of the first Americans to pass the Master of Wine exam, only a few hundred people in the world have the title. So the guy knows his wine.

Does liking salt make you prefer certain wines?

One of his more interesting innovations is an online wine survey that asks you some basic questions like how much you like salt, and how you take your tea or coffee (”black and strong” all the way down to “never touch it”). Based on these answers, it pops up with your position on a spectrum from “sweet” through “sensitive” to “tolerant”, and it suggests types of wines you’d like based on the result.

I tried answering the survey a bunch of different ways, being the market research geek that I am, to try to figure out the model.. basically if you like strong tastes (salt, black coffee, imported beers), your score says you’ll like stronger-tasting wines. Saying you know a lot about wine will further bump you up the spectrum. If you hate salty or bitter flavors, it’ll suggest you drink White Zinfandels. Fair enough, I suppose..

But then I noticed that it asks if you’re male or female. I tried a few different combos of answers, and submitted them once with “male” checked, and then again with “female” checked. Each time, if I checked “female”, it put me lower on the spectrum, closer to the wimpy wines (lambrusco, sweet moscato), and checking “male” would put me closer to the cabernets. WTF?? So he’s an anti-snob, but his model assumes women like less sophisticated wines, just because they’re female.. classy.

The NYT ran one of the crazier articles about Japanese pop culture that I’ve seen in a while, apparently bored Japanese commuters are now composing full-length novels on their cell phones during their mega-commutes. Having done a mind-numbingly long train commute for several years now, I can understand the urge.. the weird part is some of them are so good, they’re not only getting published, they’re making the national best-seller lists. I guess monotony is the ideal field for imagination to take root.

400,000 words to go, better start tapping…

On the other end of the creativity spectrum (i.e. not the good end), here in America we now have political bloggers using cell phones to report on the campaign. Unlike our Japanese auteurs, these guys type one post at a time, sticking to the 140-character limit. Whether this forces them to be particularly eloquent or it limits the volume of crap they contribute to the blogosphere is a matter for debate, depends on whether you agree with their views.

The irony of all this is that we now have miraculously advanced machines for capturing our creative impulses, devices our typewriter-pounding ancestors couldn’t even dream of. But instead we’re all jabbing our grubby little fingers at little hunks of plastic, hoping we don’t walk into a parked car as we mobile-blog our deepest thoughts to our virtual audience while walking down the street.

I still remember when the original iMac came out.. first it was Bondi Blue, shocking a world used to getting their computers in beige, beige and beige. Then Apple really screwed with our minds and put out 5 versions in different colors.. I think that was the first time (ever) that a company had released multiple versions of a tech product where the only difference was the color. The idea that appearance was important enough to justify multiple SKUs remained a heresy in the rest of the industry for years.

My Taser matches my shoes!

Lately the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. Most of the really cool stuff like diamond-encrusted iPhones and wooden PCs is still mainly done by small after-market companies that mod existing products, but slowly the manufacturers are getting into the game.. not always with the most tasteful results, but at least we’re starting to get a little variety out there. I mean, if someone’s going to Tase me, the least they can do is use a cool-lookin’ Taser.

Maybe the fact that I’m in Vegas for CES has made me particularly sensitive to the absurdities of consumer electronics.. I came across a kiosk at the airport just now that, for the bargain price of $3, lets you plug in and charge up a variety of phones/ipods/whatevers.. it has a dozen or so plugs dangling from the front, you pick the right one, feed in your cash, and wait while your happy handheld slurps up its fill of electricity.

How much per watt?

If I was in a geekier mood I’d try to calculate the margin they’re making.. buy 3 cents’ worth of electricity, sell for $3, almost as lucrative as movie theater popcorn. But if my phone was about to die and I forgot to bring my charger, I’d probably do it, because the only other option is paying $30 for a charger across the hall, and I already have 2 extras from prior trips when I forgot to bring one. Design flaw anyone?

I’m ashamed.. I’ve fallen victim to a food-fad book. Not Atkins, not south beach, not the cleanse - a few days ago, I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the book that’s supposed to be the anti-foodfad book. The author even starts off by saying the book was inspired by his outrage at the way the Atkins craze almost eliminated bread from the American diet.

As I read it, I felt a smug sense of intellectual superiority - I was reading a real book about food, not some diet book that weak-minded housewives grab off the shelf as they’re pushing a grocery cart filled with pop tarts and cheetos. The book explains the evils of industrial food production, especially corn - which has infiltrated nearly all processed food in the country. It then presents our salvation - harmonious, ecologically sustainable small farms, where everything is organic, tastes amazing and is good for you.

You are what you read

A couple of days later I dutifully made my way to the Union Square Greenmarket, where I loaded up on sustainably-grown produce and grass-fed meat sold by small farmers in upstate New York. The meals we prepared from that food did taste amazing, and I felt much healthier by the end of the weekend (placebo effect? naaah…).

Then I got on a plane this morning. They handed me a bagel for breakfast.. I looked at the cream cheese packet - mostly processed milk products. I shuddered, but at least it’s still milk of some sort. Then I looked at the jam - high fructose corn syrup, the root of all food evil and the cause of America’s obesity epidemic. I almost couldn’t eat it - how brainwashed have I become? I read a book and suddenly I’m grossed out by a teaspoon-sized pack of corn-sweetened jam. Pretty sad.

One of the things that surprised me most about modern-day Israelis is how they see Arab culture. To the old generation, Arabs are the enemy, the people who have been trying to destroy Israel from (literally) the day the country was founded. Most people here have parents who fought in one or more of the wars in the 60s and 70s, and even grandparents who fought in 1948. A lot of that has rubbed off on the current generation, who rarely have nice things to say about Arabs.

Rockin’ the kefiyeh

The surprising part is how, under the surface, there’s a fascination with Arab culture creeping in. Arab slang words are common, from the everyday y’allah (”ok, let’s go”) to curse words I’d rather not print. Most young Israelis love Arab food, from the ubiquitous houmus and falafel to more exotic fare like sabich. Even the music is starting to filter in - last week we went to a weekly “oriental night” at a local bar, where Arab dance music was pounding and women were belly-dancing on the bar. Last night, at a massive new year’s eve house party, the DJ everyone liked best was spinning a very eastern mix of Indian and Arab-sounding beats.

I’m not optimistic enough to think that cultural diffusion will make the middle eastern political mess go away, but I do believe it can soften some of the harsher edges in people’s feelings towards neighboring cultures. Once you’ve spent a night shaking your ass to someone’s music, they don’t seem quite as evil as before.