Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece on predicting box office hits with algorithms relates Hollywood’s efforts to determine the value of a movie when it’s still in script form. The major problem they are facing is that with so many variables it’s hard to tell which elements are helping or hindering box office returns. It seems to boil down to the fact that in the end, “nobody knows anything about anything” or do they? As Gladwell’s works usually are, this one is a tremendously good read.
This American Life
I recently subscribed to the This American Life podcast and I love it. They just started offering their show as a free podcast this week and I’m so glad they did; consider me hooked.
A quick description of their show for those that have never heard of it:
One of the problems with our show from the start has been that whenever we try to describe it in a sentence or two, it sounds awful. For instance: Each week we choose a theme and put together different kinds of stories on that theme. That doesn’t sound like something we’d want to listen to on the radio, and it’s our show. In the early days of the program, in frustration, we’d sometimes tell public radio program directors that it’s basically just like Car Talk. Except just one guy hosting. And no cars.
It’s easy to say what we’re not. We’re not a news show or a talk show or a call-in show. We’re not really formatted like other radio shows at all.
Instead, we do these stories that are like movies for radio. There are people in dramatic situations where things happen to them.
There are funny moments and emotional moments and—hopefully—moments where the people in the story say interesting, surprising things about it all. It has to be surprising. It has to be fun. There are shows on public radio with no sense of fun or surprise and we hate those shows.
Is it a Near Miss or a Near Hit When You Almost die?
There was an accident at work last week. No one was hurt, but I was almost seriously injured.
Here’s the situation, some walls were taken out of the change rooms because they are rebuilding everything. At least one wall had heating vents going through it and when they moved the wall out, they left the bricks on top of the vent.
There was a guy grinding some metal bits out of the ground right where I wanted to pile some blocks. If he hadn’t been there, I would have just been piling away happily. Instead I asked him if I could start my pile beside him—if I would be out of his way or if I should just wait until he was done. He said yes so I just walked a few steps away to grab some blocks from the pallet and a couple of guys—I’m not sure who they are, (they call them the tin-bangers), started hammering on the vents, presumably to bring them down. Even though this particular job was supposed to have been done long before the bricklayers got there and certainly it shouldn’t have been done while there were four of us working beneath the vents, I guess they thought it was a good idea to be working on it right then.
All of a sudden about six bricks came falling out of the sky and landed beside the grinding guy on the ground and right where I was about to pile my blocks. It was so close to hitting him, and me, it was just CRAZY.
Some of the bricks hit the new wall that had just been built and knocked one of its blocks right out of the fresh cement onto the ground.
One of the guys stopped pounding when he saw the accident but the other idiot—probably the one that actually caused the bricks to fall, didn’t even stop for a good 30 seconds. Somebody yelled at the grinding guy to get out of the way because there were still more bricks up there and the guy just kept pounding. Did I mention he’s an idiot!?
Anyway, needless to say, I was pretty shocked that I was almost struck down by six bricks that fell from about four meters. That would have left a pretty deep mark.
Some might call it a near miss, but I think a near hit is a more accurate description. I also don’t think anyone reported the incident. “No blood; no foul” I guess. I can’t wait to finish this job.
This is jeffmilner.com
When I worked in Malaysia for six weeks last year, one of the projects I worked on was creating station ID storyboards for Channel V International. The purpose of these identification “advertisements” is mostly to strengthen their brand by reminding people who is providing the content they are watching.
Many television stations now add watermarks, usually their logo, on the feed at all times so that there is always that reminder of where the channel comes from. It also serves as a protection against others from stealing their content and profiting from their work.
I discovered today that there are websites that harvest posts from my site via XML feeds and place them beside their own advertisements. These sites are called sploggers (spam bloggers). I have no real way of watermarking my posts, so instead I’m just writing this post to say, if you are reading this post from anywhere other than your feed reader or directly from the http://jeffmilner.com website, then you are helping these sites profit by stealing the work of myself and others like me.
But for everyone else, thanks for reading.
TED Conference Speeches
I’ve been enjoying the TED conference speeches lately. I particularly liked the ones by Malcalm Gladwell and Ze Frank. I haven’t listened to every one, but the ones I have are so good that I think it’s safe to recommend them all so, subscribe here. Update: The site has changed. Try subscribing to this feed in iTunes.
Google Buys YouTube
You’ve probably already heard the big tech news this week that Google is going to pay $1.65 billion for YouTube (the creators are happy). What you may not have seen is this anthology video of YouTubers in action, which goes to show that there is a lot more happening on YouTube than just copyright violations.
(via Waxy)
Break on Through
I added a new clip from Break on Through, by The Doors, to my backmasking page for your subliminal viewing pleasure.
As far as I’m aware, I’m the first to have “discovered” this particular clip—though looking in this song was a suggestion by someone who emailed me. Like most of the songs on my backmasking page, I don’t think this is at all intentional, but of course that doesn’t mean we can’t get a good laugh out of it.
I’ve got another one I’m thinking of adding in the next little while, so in the meantime go tell your friends—at long last there is an update.
Warning: This Post Uses Explicit Language Involving Matter Being Ejected From the Stomach
A few weeks ago, when I visited my sister and her family in Drayton Valley, she was so kind as to send me home with a few odds and ends of food from her storage room. One of the items was a can of beef broth with an expiration date of October 2006.
The other day I made Chicken Stir Fry with my friend Heather and she suggested that I use chicken broth instead of water to cook the vegetables. It was a great idea.
So the next time I cooked Stir Fry, this time just for myself, since I didn’t have any more chicken broth, I decided to use the can of beef broth that Jackie gave to me—even though it said October 2006 on the top of the can, I thought, well, technically it’s only the beginning of October, so it’s probably still good.1
BIG MISTAKE.2
The first time I ate it, it was not bad. I had a bit of an upset stomach but I thought it must just be heart burn. As I packed up the leftovers into plastic containers, I poured the broth from the bottom of the pan right over the rice. MMMM, extra flavour I thought to myself—extra food poisoning is what I SHOULD have been thinking.
The next night as I regurgitated the leftovers, I thought to myself—even though I know I’m not going to die, food poisoning does feel mighty close. Since I had thrown up about as much as I could and still felt sick, I decided that it might be a good idea to eat a heaping bowl or two of Raisin Brain, you know to “push the poison through”.
Moments later I was revisiting the entire contents of my two bowls of cereal in several terrific “oooaghhhs”. I quickly came to realize that I should take deep breaths between bouts of vomiting because you can’t breath while your digestive track switches direction.
The next few hours were long and painful. I decided that unless I felt totally better, I would not be going into work this morning. This was not a bad prospect considering how much work “work” actually is and it would be a good chance to let the 7 blisters on my feet heal. However, number one, I didn’t want to call in sick on only my third day of work and on the Friday leading up to a long weekend (how suspicious) and besides, at 6:00am I was miraculously and disappointingly healed (disappointingly because hey, four day weekend) so it was off to work I went; other than another slightly upset stomach at lunch it now appears as though the food poisoning has completely cleared up.
The story of my blisters is another matter. Suffice it to say that the first three days of work have been an adventure. I need to get some new work boots ASAP and hopefully I’ll beef up in the muscles department so that lugging those heavy blocks around won’t be so hard. Here’s to the working life.
And for supper tonight, I went back to my trusty staple… frozen pizza cooked in the oven.
1. This is where one comes to realize how important it is to have a girlfriend/boyfriend to bounce ideas off each other, like hey do you think this mould can just be cut off or is this dark grey block of cheese a write off?
2. For those of you that skipped over this post because it seemed too long, the moral of the story is don’t play Russian Roulette with expiration dates, it will catch up with you.
Mixing Mud
I started my first day of work as a mud mixer today. (That’s the common term for brick layer’s assistant). I’m now fully aware of why I went to university.
The guys I work with are nice enough though and the money’s good, so until I build up a little nest egg that I can use to move on to bigger and better things, for the next little while it’ll be hard labour.
The Extras
I laughed out loud at this hilarious scene from The Extras with guest star David Bowie.