Month: April 2011

Hillel Fuld reports:

Another mind boggling statistic about Angry Birds, and you should sit down for this one, is that there are 200 million minutes played a day on a global scale. As Peter [Verterbacka, Angry Birds creator] put it, that number compares favorably to anything, including prime time TV, which indicates that 2011 will be a big year in the shift of advertisers’ attention from TV to mobile.

Joshua Benton gets his calculator:

200 million minutes a day / 60 minutes per hour * 365 days per year = 1.2 billion hours a year spent playing Angry Birds. Or, if Shirky’s estimate is in the right ballpark, about one Wikipedia’s worth of time every month.

Just a lighthearted reminder that, even if the lure of the connected digital world gets people to skimp on the Gilligan’s Island reruns, that doesn’t necessarily mean their replacement behaviors will be any more productive. They could instead bring an ever greater capacity for distraction and disengagement and slingshot precision.

A reader sends the above image and writes:

Since the view outside my window is someone else's stairwell, I offer up a screenshot of my Angry Birds Seasons ranking of 67 out of over 500,000 players. Perhaps I am No. 1 among Dish readers!

These scenes were unimaginable two months ago (although this Youtube has not been verified, so caution). In the restive town of Deraa, the son follows the hideous path of his father:

"The minarets of the mosques are appealing for help. The security forces are entering houses. There is a curfew and they fire on those who leave their homes. They even shot at water tanks on roofs to deprive people of water," he said. Al Jazeera is unable to confirm the reported deaths. Thousands of soldiers swept into the town in the early hours of Monday, with tanks taking up positions in the town centre and snipers deploying on rooftops, witnesses said. "Bodies are lying in the streets and we can't recover them," one activist said, explaining that they have little idea of the total number of casualties…

Al Jazeera's correspondent said that the events on Monday marked a change in methods by security forces. Up until now, she said, security forces have cracked down in reaction to protests. But the flood of troops into Douma and Deraa had come in the absence of any demonstrations.  "Today, we're seeing a different tactic with security forces sweeping the towns," she said, noting reports of house-to-house searches, arrests and random shooting coming from both towns.

The NYT reports:

Bodies were in the streets, but snipers on rooftops prevented residents and medical personnel from retrieving them. “The army forces have invaded the city of Dara’a,” one resident said breathlessly as he filmed footage Monday morning. “They are heading toward the center of the city.”

So we have a fully fledged unprovoked military attack on civilians in their homes. How long before we are informed it is a genocide? And long after that will it be before the glaring precedent of Libya comes back to haunt NATO?

James Gleick explores it:

Like genes, memes have effects on the wide world beyond themselves. In some cases (the meme for making fire; for wearing clothes; for the resurrection of Jesus) the effects can be powerful indeed. As they broadcast their influence on the world, memes thus influence the conditions affecting their own chances of survival.

The meme or memes comprising Morse code had strong positive feedback effects. Some memes have evident benefits for their human hosts (“Look before you leap,” knowledge of CPR, belief in hand washing before cooking), but memetic success and genetic success are not the same. Memes can replicate with impressive virulence while leaving swaths of collateral damage—patent medicines and psychic surgery, astrology and satanism, racist myths, superstitions and (a special case) computer viruses. In a way, these are the most interesting—the memes that thrive to their hosts’ detriment, such as the idea that suicide bombers will find their reward in heaven.

Via Dads: The Original Hipsters:

You want to know how your dad got your mom? The power of his beard lured her in and then his silver tongue made her stay. So hipster, stop trying to grow your face in, you’re never going to kill it like dad.

(Hat tip: Anna Pulley)

Taylor Clark downplays the claim that women are more prone to anxiety than men:

The flip side of being raised to always show strength is that men come to feel that going to a therapist is a sign of weakness or failure (think of Tony Soprano's mopey resistance to the benefits of psychiatry), which is why men constitute just 37 percent of therapy patients, by some estimates. If nearly twice as many women seek help from a psychologist, then they'll obviously be diagnosed more often with anxiety disorders.

Heather Mac Donald takes issue with MOCA’s new director Jeffrey Deitch, his premiere exhibit, Art in the Streets, and graffiti's appropriation into the art world:

The violence that afflicts minority neighborhoods is frequently tied to the graffiti cult. Graffiti apologists insist on the distinction between “bad” graffiti produced by gangs and “good” graffiti produced by tagging crews, allegedly dedicated solely to tagging. The distinction is phony. “The line between tagging and gangbanging is very thin now,” says [former tagger Ivan] Gonzalez. “Young taggers today are not hesitant to carry guns and shoot people like everyone else.” And when cops bust a large tagging crew, they usually find fugitives wanted on outstanding warrants for car theft, assault, and drug trafficking.

(Photo: Street Wars)

Peter Smith praises Mike Berners-Lee's new book, How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything:

Calculations range from a slight 10 grams for sending a text message or drying your hands to the massive emissions embedded in the World Cup, data centers, and war, all of which weigh in around one million tons. There are some surprises—a paper bag has twice the footprint of a plastic one—and surprisingly nuanced discussions about the 80 grams that go into bananas and many other foods.

Eileen Reynolds applauds the mission of Unsuck It:

You type in a particularly odious word or phrase—“incentivize,” say—and “Unsuck It” spits out the plain-English equivalent, along with a sentence for context. (“Incentivize” means “encourage” or “persuade,” as in “In order to meet our phase 1 deliverable, we must incentivize the workforce with monetary rewards.”) One feels a certain cathartic glee as well-worn meeting-room clichés are dismantled one by one: an “action item” is a “goal”; “on the same page” means “in agreement”; to “circle the wagons” is to “defend an idea or decision as a group.”

Alexander Trevi gets the dish from researcher and gardener Paige Johnson:

After WWII, there was a concerted effort to find 'peaceful' uses for atomic energy. One of the ideas was to bombard plants with radiation and produce lots of mutations, some of which, it was hoped, would lead to plants that bore more heavily or were disease or cold-resistant or just had unusual colors. The experiments were mostly conducted in giant gamma gardens on the grounds of national laboratories in the US but also in Europe and countries of the former USSR.

Johnson reveals that mint oil, present in chewing gum and toothpaste and the Rio Star grapefruit, which accounts for 75% of the grapefruit production in Texas, were both developed in gamma gardens and "the genetic change produced by irradiation remains in the commercially cultivated variety" today.

(Hat tip: Nicola Twilley; photo of a Rio Star by Flickr user tofutti)

David Simon defends and expands on his comment last year berating the Jewish community for not doing more for urban blacks, which he likened to “a Holocaust in slow motion":

No, there is no barbed wire around West Baltimore. No, there is no political imperative to segregate them from the greater society, or ultimately, to murder them en masse. That would be a Holocaust at normal speed. Instead, we have simply participated—either tacitly or actively—in constructing a national economic model that throws away 10 to 15 percent of our poorest and most vulnerable citizens. There is no work for more than half the adult black males in Baltimore. Other than the drug corners, of course. Can anyone argue that the percentage of human destruction among adult males of color in these neighborhoods has not for generations approached the genocidal?

… We like to tell ourselves that we are educating the world about the extraordinary nature of the Shoah, that we are sensitizing them to the breadth and depth of the horror. In fact, the opposite occurs. By holding ourselves aloof from the rest of human tragedy, by denying any possible points of comparison, we desensitize ourselves. And we only manage to alienate the rest of the world from their natural commonalities with the Holocaust experience.

I have very mixed feelings about this. I believe that the deliberateness, scale and industrialization of mass murder in the Holocaust places it in a unique position in the annals of human evil. I resisted the attempt of Larry Kramer to analogize the AIDS epidemic as a Holocaust either. But Simon's warning that it should not be used to minimize the brutal segregation and immiseration of the inner cities is surely correct. Not that I know of many who make this argument explicitly.