After almost two decades retired, Bill Watterson—the genius who crafted the universally beloved Calvin & Hobbes from 1985 to 1995—has published a new cartoon: A movie poster for Dave Kellett and Fred Schroeder's Stripped. (Wait, is that Calvin 20 years later?)
    
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NASA today will admit that the near-death of an astronaut during a spacewalk last year could have been avoided, according to a report from ABC News. In a report to be released Wednesday morning, NASA will acknowledge that astronaut Luca Parmitano's suit leaked on two occasions in July. The agency had previously only reported one leak, on July 16th, when Parmitano's suit helmet began filling up with water. Today's report will acknowledge that the suit leaked on July 9th, but news of the mishap never made it up NASA's chain of command.
Sony announced a restructuring of its Sony Electronics division, resulting in the closure of 20 Sony Stores across the United States. The restructuring will affect approximately 1,000 employees "across all sites," which Sony says will amount to a...
Steamworks developers now have the option to set up their own sales, and they can opt into Steam weeklong deals at discount percentages of their choosing. Valve announced the new sale system in the private Steamworks Development forum, as spotted by...
We're more of a slice town, it's true, but if you're ever in a position to buy an entire pizza pie, here's some helpful advice: always buy the bigger one. That statement, in and of itself, seems obvious; more pizza = better. But the good folks at NPR have another excellently-reasoned argument for why bigger is better, namely that when it comes to ordering an entire pizza, the bigger the pie, the cheaper the cost. Kind of. Let's go to the tape: [ more › ]
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Phillies Triple-A affiliate the Lehigh Valley IronPigs debuted their new uniforms and hats this week, and one of those designs prominently features a slice of thick-cut bacon across the cap. The visual food metaphor is sort of confusing — did these guys cook themselves, and isn't that bad? — but it's still a cool look, even if someone's inevitably going to get offended. So why stop there? Crawfish Boxes (via Post-Dispatch critic Ian Froeb) takes up the gauntlet with this brilliant and exhaustive survey of a world where every major-league baseball team has its own food-themed cap. The Braves get a Waffle House waffle, clam chowder appears on the Red Sox's hats, the Yankees get thin-crust pizzas, and the San Francisco Giants get kale. The Colorado Rockies, in case you were wondering, get "special" pot brownies. [GQ, Crawfish Boxes]
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Filed Under: big league chew, bacon, baseball, leigh valley iron pigs, uniforms
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Sources tell the San Francisco Chronicle that the massive recall of some 8.7 millions pounds of meat, organs, and beef byproducts shipped by Petaluma-based processor Rancho Feeding Corporation was prompted after USDA investigators learned that the slaughterhouse was illegally processing dairy cows that were sick with cancer. "Rancho was allegedly buying up cows with eye cancer, chopping off their heads so inspectors couldn't detect the disease and illegally selling the meat," report Stacy Finz and Carolyn Lochhead.
The practice of selling diseased animals for meat is illegal, and while no illnesses have been reported as a result of Rancho Feeding Corporation's alleged offenses, the USDA's investigation is nonetheless classified as criminal. As such, officials are not able to comment on specific aspects of the case.
In January, however, it is known that investigators discovered two cow heads infected with bovine ocular squamous cell carcinoma, also known as "cancer eye," which led to the initial recall of 41,683 pounds of meat. The condition, which results in tumors and growths on the animal's eyeballs, may be an indication of cancer elsewhere in the body.
"Rancho, we're told, was slaughtering them, somehow after hours or in other ways where the inspector didn't know about it," says the San Francisco Chronicle's source. "Because the carcass looked good, [Rancho] mixed it back in with other beef that it sold under its label."
Whatever prompted the continued investigation, the recall surged to 8.7 million pounds of meat earlier this month, covering Rancho Feeding Corporation's output during 2013. (For comparison, 43.4 billion pounds of beef are harvested annually under USDA inspection.) On the consumer side, the recall has affected frozen supermarket hamburgers, "Philly Cheese Steak" Hot Pockets, and even meat sold by ethically minded and sustainable producer Bill Niman, former owner of Niman Ranch. Though his animals have no connection to the diseased cows, Niman tells the paper he has no choice but to withhold 100,000 pounds of beef from the market because he used Rancho to slaughter 427 head of cattle, adding he may now lose up to $400,000 in sales.
Slaughterhouse accused of selling meat from cows with cancer [SF Chronicle]
Earlier: California Meat Company Recalls Nearly 9 Million Pounds of Beef Parts
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Filed Under: recalls, bad meat, beef, california, cancer, cancer eye, contamination, food safety, frightening things, hot pockets, meat, rancho feeding corporation
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Andrew Lane is a regular Uber customer with some fond memories of the service. Last year on President's Day he was the lucky rider selected for an "Ubercade" upgrade. "They sent over a free limo with secret service agents and everything. I got my girlfriend and we cruised by her ex-boyfriend's place. It was awesome."
Remember back in 2011 when Activision's ambitious online service dedicated to the Call of Duty franchise and its players was going to be the best thing ever? It's shutting down forever on February 28. That's skull logo has never been more appropriate.
At WWDC in 1997, Steve Jobs, having just returned to Apple, held a wide-open Q&A session. There’s video — albeit low-quality (VHS transfer?) — on YouTube. It’s a remarkable session, showing Jobs at his improvisational best. But more importantly, the philosophies and strategies Jobs expressed correctly forecast everything Apple went on to do under his leadership, and how the company continues to work today. In short, he’s remarkably open and honest — and prescient.
My quip today that Google is beginning to remind me of pre-NeXT Apple in the ’90s — announcing more cool R&D prototypes than they release actual cool products — brought to mind one of the segments from this session. There’s a five-minute clip of just this segment here.
It starts with a testy remark from an attendee upset about Apple having killed OpenDoc. Attendee: “It’s sad and clear that on several counts what you’ve discussed, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Jobs deftly laughs off the insult, and goes on to explain that he has no doubt that OpenDoc contains some great technology — that it allowed for things no other technology could accomplish. But that that alone was not enough.
Then he says this:
One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. And I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. And I got the scar tissue to prove it.
If it wasn’t obvious then, it’s certainly obvious in hindsight that NeXT itself was the biggest of those scars. Amazing technology — an operating system and developer frameworks that debuted in 1988 and today serve as the foundation for almost the entirety of Apple’s product line. But NeXT never turned that technology into a successful product. Without a focus on products, new technologies are a crapshoot.
That’s why Jobs dismantled Apple’s pure R&D department, the Advanced Technology Group. The work ATG had done wasn’t all thrown away, but what continued was product-focused rather than technology-focused. Starting with the product and working backwards to the technology instead of the other way around has made all the difference in the world for Apple.
Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Google, and numerous other companies all outspend Apple on “R&D” today. The WSJ reported that between 2004 and 2007, Nokia outspent Apple on R&D by a factor of 9 ($22.2 billion vs. $2.5 billion). This discrepancy leads some to the conclusion that Apple underspends on research and development. I would argue instead that it shows that Apple is far more focused than any of its rivals.
What is focus? Again, we return to Jobs, on stage at WWDC, 17 years ago. The very first question in the session was, simply, “What about OpenDoc?”
Jobs:
What about OpenDoc? What about it? [Audience laughs.] It’s dead, right? Let me say something that’s sort of generic. I know some of you spent a lot of time working on stuff that we put a bullet in the head of. I apologize. I feel your pain. But Apple suffered for several years from lousy engineering management. I have to say it. And there were people that were going off in 18 different directions doing arguably interesting things in each one of them. Good engineers — lousy management. And what happened was you look at the farm that’s been created with all these different animals going in different directions and it doesn’t add up. The total is less than the sum of the parts.
And so we had to decide, what are the fundamental directions we’re going in? And what makes sense and what doesn’t? And there were a bunch of things that didn’t. And microcosmically they might have made sense; macrocosmically they made no sense. And you know, the hardest thing is… you think about focusing, right? You think, “Well, focusing is saying yes”. No, focusing is about saying no. Focusing is about saying no. And you’ve got to say no, no, no. When you say no, you piss off people.
Apple is going to keep saying no, no, no. And because of that, they are going to keep pissing people off.
The high-profile theft of a single-letter Twitter username has a happy ending — at least for now. Naoki Hiroshima, who managed to score @N, though had it hijacked as part of an eye-opening social engineering scheme last month, is now once again in control of it. Hiroshima tweeted "Order has been restored" from the account today:
MasterCard is testing a new program to protect purchases made on credit cards by using smartphone geolocation. A new partnership with Syniverse lets shoppers limit foreign purchases made on those cards unless their smartphone is also in that location. That measure is designed to keep fraud at bay, while minimizing calls to banks to alert them to travel, something that can make a card useless unless the bank or credit card company knew you were traveling. With this system, the credit card company will simply check the location on your smartphone to see if you're in the same place as your card.
Great piece by Nilay Patel at The Verge:
American politicians love to stand on the edges of important problems by insisting that the market will find a solution. And that’s mostly right; we don’t need the government meddling in places where smart companies can create their own answers. But you can’t depend on the market to do anything when the market doesn’t exist. “We can either have competition, which would solve a lot of these problems, or we can have regulation,” says Aaron. “What Comcast is trying is to have neither.” It’s insanity, and we keep lying to ourselves about it. It’s time to start thinking about ways to actually do something.
Netflix paying Comcast is the canary in the coal mine.
Fine work as usual from Christian Annyas: a look at the design of the Warner Bros logo from 1923 to the present. The classic "WB" shield of my Bugs-and-Daffy-saturated youth will always be a favorite, but I do like the Saul Bass logo of the 70s and early 80s:
Affleck's Argo and Soderbergh's Magic Mike both used the Bass logo in place of the contemporary logo, which is the kind of little detail I love.
Tags: Christian Annyas design logos movies Saul BassIf you haven’t already, drop what you’re doing and update now.
Update: Sounds like there are some significant fixes for Mail in this update, too.
Update 2: There’s a software update for Apple TV, too.
How in the world did I link to this before Jim Dalrymple?
"Penrose Stars", a GIF created by davidope and inspired by the famed impossible object, the Penrose stairs. See more of dvdp's abstract GIFs here. (via Imaginary Foundation)
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The famed pastry chef will appear personally with what we hope is a very large batch of Cronuts on Saturday, March 1 at Barneys at the Grove. The promotion, which benefits Heart of Los Angeles, a nonprofit that organizes after-school activities, will be held from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m., or until the Cronuts run out. We're going to guess that's happening on the sooner side of things. [Dominique Ansel/Twitter, Earlier]
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Filed Under: cronut crush, cronut, cronuts, dominique ansel, dominique ansel bakery
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The World of Warcraft community was up in arms last week, when WoW Insider spotted a level 90 boost item available briefly in the in-game store for $60. Speaking to Eurogamer, lead encounter designer Ion Hazzikostas says the high price tag was established to ensure Blizzard didn't "devalue the accomplishment of levelling".
Eric Jackson, writing for Forbes in the wake of Facebook’s $16B acquisition of WhatsApp:
For the longest time, I’ve sat back nodding in quiet agreement with the Apple bulls who say: “We need to have faith in Tim Cook even though he’s been so reluctant to do any M&A because we don’t know what Apple is working on in its labs.”
No longer. Apple needs to start playing offense.
Apple needs to start picking off strategic assets as if their life depends on it, rather than continuing on with a plodding attitude that doesn’t match the speed of their competitive environment.
This is the worst sort of advice, suggesting a complete ignorance of everything Apple stands for. (Jay Yarow loves it, of course.) Just buy something. Spend, spend, spend. Acquire. Buy all the spaghetti, throw it against the wall, see what sticks. Wrong. Apple’s model is about focus. Apple wasn’t joking about “a thousand no’s for every yes” — that’s really how they think, what they believe. That’s the DNA.
Only one thing Jackson suggests makes any sense: Apple perhaps acquiring Tesla. I don’t think that’s likely, but I think it’s possible, for two reasons: First, Tesla could be integrated into Apple’s core business — selling high quality, well designed products that work well together. If you can imagine Apple making a car (and I can), then you can imagine Apple acquiring Tesla to jump-start the initiative. Second, Apple and Tesla share a fundamental engineering problem: batteries.
But other than Tesla, who else would it make sense for Apple to acquire for billions of dollars? No answers come to mind. Certainly not WhatsApp — as I wrote last week, Apple already has exactly the messaging platform it wants: iMessage, with hundreds of millions of users.
Conglomeration may well work out well for Facebook. General Electric has done well with that model for over 100 years. But it would be a disaster for Apple. Apple makes acquisitions for integration. Exhibit A: PA Semi — a chump change $278 million acquisition that laid the groundwork for Apple to become the leading mobile semiconductor company in the world.
And if you want a sense of how weird, and how fraught, the relationship between science, politics, and commerce is in our modern world, then there's really no better place to go.
In The Daily Beast Michael Schulson provides a alternate view on Whole Foods: America's Temple of Pseudoscience. (The first time I read this, I nearly spit out my probiotic-infused kombucha, kale, quinoa, coconut water shake.)
Tags: food Michael Schulson science Whole Foods
Blizzard has revealed a pair of new Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls pre-order incentives, sweetening the deal for players who plan to delve into the upcoming expansion during its first week of release.
Players who pre-purchase or redeem a Reaper of Souls...
Up until recently, world-famous Philly cheesesteak emporium Geno's Steaks had been slinging its signature sandwiches without current food-prep, private Dumpster, and sidewalk-café licenses. Some of the paperwork had even expired in 2011, the Morning Call reports. But perhaps because you simply cannot keep a good cheesesteak down, the restaurant is now up-to-date and, for the record, passed its most recent health-department inspection with "flying colors." [Morning Call]
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Filed Under: paperwork, cheese steaks, geno's cheesesteak, philadelphia cheesesteak
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Speaking of Steve Jobs’s birthday, Tim Cook tweets:
Remembering Steve on his birthday: “Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.”
That’s Apple in a nut.
This is called a billing block:
You find it at the bottom of movie posters and often at the end of movie trailers. In an Op-Art piece from last year, Ben Schott explains how the billing block is carefully constructed with information from contracts and legal agreements.
Tags: Ben Schott design legal moviesThe content, order and format of the billing block are governed by two things: personal service contracts with cast and crew, and industrywide agreements with professional guilds -- notably the Directors Guild of America (D.G.A.) and the Writers Guild of America (W.G.A.). Thus, while some elements of the billing block remain consistent, others depend of the type of film and on individual negotiations. That said, there has been a marked inflation in billing block credits. An "Ocean's 11" poster from 1960 credited just three noncast individuals; the 2001 remake poster credited, coincidentally, 11.
Facebook is retiring its email service and has begun notifying users that all email sent to their @facebook.com address will soon be forwarded to their primary email address on file. Facebook users can turn off the forwarding feature, which is on by default. Users without a primary email address on Facebook won't receive forwarded messages, but it's pretty unlikely that they're missing anything. "Most people have not been using their @facebook.com email address," said a Facebook spokesperson, who confirmed that the update effectively retires the social network's email service.