The Olivier Theatre from the back of the Circle for Peter Pan

Over the last few years, I've rekindled my love of theatre. Some of you know that my love of theatre started in my early teens where I strutted my stuff on-stage and backstage for amateur and professional productions at the Swan Theatre in Worcester. I attended Swan Youth Theatre every week and performed in as many shows as I could as well as volunteering in the coffee shop, making costumes and being a dresser. It was something I considered doing as a career but was put off through a mix of family pressure and personal circumstances.

When I moved to London, I gave up all the acting. I simply didn't have time for either rehearsals or performances since I was working in retail with unsocial hours. I didn't go to the theatre at all for a very long time. I couldn't face it. I wanted to be on the stage rather than being in the audience and it just left me frustrated. Plus it was (is) expensive to go to shows in the West End and the salary of a retail manager (as I was at the time) simply didn't stretch to West End theatre tickets.

In the last few years though, I've started going to the theatre again and have gained much enjoyment and brain food from it and have been to all kinds of performances from the tiny to the huge, from mainstream to borderline bonkers and everything in between. I have a few thespian friends, mainly from my youth theatre days and some of them are in high enough places that I get the occasional complimentary ticket to see a show that they're in or are directing. I've also discovered several ways of enjoying the theatre in London without breaking the bank. Here's the lowdown.

1. Day Seats
This can be a great option for seeing shows in the West End. Many of the London theatres offer heavily discounted seats for the same day when their box office opens in the morning. Typically, they keep the front row available for day seaters, but sometimes they'll offer up other unsold seats as well. For the very popular shows, you'll need to get up early and queue. For others, you can rock up just before the theatre opens and you'll be rewarded with your tickets. Sometimes, if you're passing a theatre, it's worth popping in to see if they have a day seat available for that night. You can get lucky like that from time to time - I managed to get a ticket for 1984 for £10 just 40 minutes before curtain up. And if you're on your own, it's even easier as there are often the odd single seats available which are harder to fill as most people attend with a companion.

Before you head off to grab your day seats, it's well worth reading what TheatreMonkey has to say about it. There you can find all the London theatres listed and what their current policy is about day seats, including availability and pricing. It's a fantastic resource and well worth doing your homework so you can work out what show to try for. Check it out here.

2. TodayTix App
This is an app and website where you can access the equivalent of day seats but in a digital format. For some shows, there's a daily lottery that you can enter to win a day seat at a fixed price, for others, there are 'rush seats' available for that day or the next at a substantial discount, and for others, discounted seats are listed for the current week. Just this week, they've announced that you can now book up to 30 days ahead so you can do some forward planning rather than needing to be spontaneous.

The app is free to download on both Android and iOS or you can access on http://todaytix.com/. When you sign up, please use my code SMZER and you will get £10 off your first booking and I'll get a referral bonus too. Since many of the tickets are £20 or less, that means a very cheap ticket indeed for your first ticket. I like the app. I think the usability is good and it's not too cluttered. In fact, I'm off to see Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour tonight with a TodayTix Rush ticket. The booking process was about as simple as it could get.

3. The Leicester Square Box Office aka tkts.co.uk
This is a London institution and I can remember going here when I was in my teens and twenties to get tickets for shows with both my Mum and my Aunty Betty. Back then, you'd rock up at the booth and hope for the best as to what's available. Now you can check online what's available before you join the queue to buy your tickets. Tickets are available for the same day and the earlier you get there, the better tickets you'll be able to score. And it saves you having to queue up at the crack of dawn for day seats and if one show is sold out, they have others on offer so you can always go to something. The staff there are very helpful and will tell you about the different shows on offer to help you choose.

4. Theatre Clubs
I am a paid up member of four different theatre clubs where they offer a mixture of heavily discounted tickets and/or complimentary tickets (for an admin fee) for a wide-range of shows from fringe and pub theatre to the ENO and big West End shows. There's an annual or monthly fee to pay and there are club rules to follow (typically, don't talk about the club or your complimentary tickets whilst at the theatre) otherwise your membership can be terminated. The service they offer is called 'papering'. This is theatrical slang for giving away free tickets to fill up the house. This is often done during preview weeks to build up the word of mouth for a show, or to make up for a lack of marketing or lower ticket sales than expected. And if you're in the theatre, then the chances are you'll support it by buying a drink and a programme. Every little helps when it comes to keeping theatre alive.

If you like to plan ahead, then What's On Stage Theatre Club might suit you. You can pay monthly or annually. Typically there are discounted seats for selected performances booked and paid for in advance. Occasionally, they do papering or offer heavily discounted seats for big shows at the last minute.

ShowFilmFirst is free to join and intermittently, you'll get an email through to film screenings, theatre shows, sports events or concerts. There's a nominal charge if you book one of these performances but there's no fee to join the email list. What I would say is that you need to keep a close eye on your emails as these tickets tend to go very quickly.

The other two clubs I'm a member of are much more discreet and because of the papering aspect and their rules around discretion, I'm not going to link to them. An online search for 'theatre club London discounted tickets' should render results.

5. National Theatre Friday Rush tickets
I've seen many good shows at The National Theatre and one of the best ways of scoring a ticket is to check their website on a Friday. Every Friday at 1pm they have a tranche of tickets on sale for £20 for shows the following week. Sometimes, you can even get sold out shows this way as they keep an allocation for this. For some shows, you can get lucky later in the week too if the Friday specials don't all sell out. Here's the Friday Rush landing page.

There are three venues at The National and they all have great sight lines so it's very unlikely you'll be blocked or have a limited view unless you're right at the sides. In The Dorfman, it's small enough that any seat should give you a good view although the raking isn't as good as the other two spaces there.

6. Clubs run by the theatres themselves
Several London theatres have their own members clubs or season ticket options. Ambassador Theatres run a lot of the large regional theatres and a number of West End theatres. If you're a member you can get booking discounts and other benefits. If I lived outside of London but near a regional theatre, I would probably make use of this. Southwark Theatre has its own season ticket offering and Jermyn Street Theatre offers benefits, advanced booking and discounts to sponsors.

7. Earn theatre tokens with your reviews with Seatplan.
Seatplan is an online service whereby people review theatre seats in terms of view, legroom and comfort. If you're looking for bargain seats and wondering if the view is going to be terrible, this is a great place to check that out beforehand. Some reviewers even manage to sneak in some photographs (photography is usually prohibited, even before curtain up). For each verified review (either a photograph of the stage from your seat or a copy of your ticket, you earn theatre tokens. These tokens can then be used at most West End theatre box offices in person, at the Leicester Square Ticket Booth and many regional theatres too. It's free to join. You can also book tickets through this site too.

8. Get Into London Theatre
Every year, the Society of London Theatres has a special deal for families for discounted tickets for popular shows in their 'Get Into London Theatre' promotion. They do sell out quite quickly, but you can add yourself to the mailing list. The people behind this are the same people who run the Leicester Square Ticket Booth.

9. Other options
MoneySavingExpert and Time Out are worth a look. As is Lastminute.com and Groupon. Again, you need to monitor your emails and you need to cross reference the deal to see if you can get a better price somewhere else.

If you have any other tips, do let me know. And happy theatre-going!

@DriesDeRoeck:

Reading this provided me with hope. “10 work skills for the postnormal era” — @stoweboyd https://t.co/e8m4YfVFw0 HT @warrenellis http://pic.twitter.com/xIubF4IGwi

— Dries De Roeck (@DriesDeRoeck) May 22, 2017

@stoweboyd:

30M US workers now covered by noncompete agreements: puts the lie to GOP concerns about ‘freedom’ https://t.co/DLh9iS0D78

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) May 22, 2017

How the Swastika Became a Confederate Flag | Brent Staples:

Brent Staples makes a compelling case for Jim Crow as the inspiration for Hitler’s Nazi policies:

Hitler drew a similar, more sinister comparison in “Mein Kampf.” He describes the United States as “the one state” that had made headway toward what he regarded as a healthy and utterly necessary racist regime. Historians have long sought to minimize the importance of that passage. But in recent years, archival research in Germany has shown that the Nazis were keenly focused on Jim Crow segregation laws, on statutes that criminalized interracial marriage and on other policies that created second-class citizenship in the United States.

The Yale legal scholar James Q. Whitman fleshes this out to eerie effect in his new book “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.” He illustrates how German propagandists sought to normalize the Nazi agenda domestically by putting forth the United States as a model. They assured the German people that Americans had “racist politics and policies,” just as Germany did, including “special laws directed against the Negroes, which limit their voting rights, freedom of movement, and career possibilities.” Embracing the necessity of lynching, one propagandist wrote: “What is lynch justice, if not the natural resistance of the Volk to an alien race that is attempting to gain the upper hand?”

“Hitler’s American Model” shows that homegrown American racism played a role in the notorious Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which deprived “non-Aryans” of citizenship and the right to marry “true” Germans. As Mr. Whitman writes, Nuremberg “signaled the full-scale creation of a racist state in a Germany on the road to the Holocaust.”

He goes on to say that today’s ‘easy listening’ white nationalists who are demonstrating against the removal of Confederate statues by echoing ‘blood and soil’ slogans are tying themselves to the worst excesses of the Nazi past. Strangely, the Nazis were inspired by Jim Crow race statutes, and the terror campaigns that kept America Blacks in virtual concentration camps.

New fabric generates electricity from sunlight and wind:

solarpunks:

More grist for your mill.

---

triboelectric is a new one for me.

“In the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference.”

- Douglas Hofstadter

The Strange Loop in Deep Learning – Intuition Machine – Medium

In April I attended the 2017 New York R conference, hosted by Lander Analytics and Work-Bench. It was both the third time the conference was held and the third time I’ve attended, and it gets more fun each year, especially because this year eight of us attended from Stack Overflow (including all five of us on the Data Team).

Now that the videos from the conference are all posted, I’m sharing some thoughts on the conference, and the slides and video from my talk, below. As is my habit, I’m also sharing some of my favorite tweets from the conference.

We R What We Ask

I’ve been at Stack Overflow for almost two years now, which has granted me access to a lot of interesting data about how people code, including in my favorite programming language R. I got the chance to share these insights with the R community in my talk We R What We Ask: The Landscape of R Users on Stack Overflow.

• Video
• Slides (Keynote)
• Slides (PDF)

(I’m going to give a similar talk at the useR 2017 conference this summer, so if you’re attending you can also see it then!)

I started by showing that Stack Overflow data can track the rise and decline of programming languages and technologies, by charting the growth of R questions in the last decade, along with several other technologies used in the expanding data science field.

(You can make your own plots of technologies using our new Stack Overflow Trends tool).

I also examined the growth and decline of particular R packages, by parsing the code from questions and answers.

One of my favorite results is a “bird’s eye view” of the R package ecosystem, built from correlations of packages that tended to appear in answers to the same questions. You can see how it breaks the packages out into particular problem domains.

Since I’m into live tweeting conferences, host Jared Lander surprised me by asking me to give a second, four-minute talk (video) to share my advice about live-tweeting. That was fun!

.@drob giving tips on live-tweeting a conference #rstatsnyc ✔️✔️✔️ pic.twitter.com/VUx7aJy2D4

— Emily Zabor (@zabormetrics) April 21, 2017

Talks

Ricardo Bion started the conference (video) by talking about how Airbnb built an internal R ecosystem, including packages, classes, custom themes and even stickers. I was a great fan of his blog post on the topic and I am always interested in hearing more about this philosophy.

Great kick-off to #rstatsnyc by @ricardobion. Airbnb looks like an awesome place to become a strong r programmer and data scientist! pic.twitter.com/DqpWCjY1MT

— Emily Robinson (@robinson_es) April 21, 2017

Serge Belongie gave a fascinating talk (video) on some of the newest challenges in image recognition, including developing a training set from users even when the training data isn’t common knowledge (e.g. telling the difference between a sparrow and a robin).

.@SergeBelongie: w/deep learning, seeing if a bird is in a pic is now easy- what's hard is identifying type of bird

🐦🐔🐧🐤🦆🦅🦉#rstatsnyc pic.twitter.com/Om2pwnSBqU

— David Robinson (@drob) April 21, 2017

Sandy Griffith gave a brilliant talk on how her team went from a research question to a completed manuscript in just two days. I enjoy hackathons (like this recent one) so I’ve often dreamed of being part of an effort like that.

How did @sgrifter and colleagues write a publication in 2 day? Feeling ownership, shutting off distractions, and strict timeline #rstatsnyc pic.twitter.com/sQ0wb5he9Y

— Emily Robinson (@robinson_es) April 22, 2017

I also really enjoyed Friederike Schuur’s talk (video) on the history and philosophy of data science, and how it compares to the history of software engineering.

.@FSchueuer: skeptics think data science will disappear w/ better tools- but people said exact same thing about programmers #rstatsnyc pic.twitter.com/1DxCGyg4ro

— David Robinson (@drob) April 22, 2017

JD Long gave a popular talk (video) about the role of empathy- with colleagues, with users, or with the subjects of data- in a technical career.

Empathy as cross validation of your models @CMastication #rstatsnyc pic.twitter.com/WvIP2V1mFI

— sandy griffith (@sgrifter) April 21, 2017

I’d been looking forward to Ramnath Vaidyanathan’s talk (video) on HTML widgets, and he didn’t disappoint, showing us the details of creating a widget in real time.

Just watched @ramnath_vaidya build a new htmlwidget from scratch in front of us in about 5 minutes 😮#rstatsnyc pic.twitter.com/Ttw1wbvBfv

— Julia Silge (@juliasilge) April 22, 2017

There were many other excellent speakers: make sure you check out the full list of videos!

Stack Overflow Data Team

I was excited to see Julia Silge (only the third time we’ve met in person!) and data team members Nick Larsen and Jason Punyon, who normally work remotely but came to New York for the week.

Julia gave a terrific talk (video) on the tidytext package, as well as our upcoming book Text Mining with R).

tidytext + dplyr can get to cool graphs like this in just a few lines of code b/c @drob & @juliasilge used tidy data principles #rstatsnyc pic.twitter.com/wMA3hscSjE

— Emily Robinson (@robinson_es) April 22, 2017

Jason got a data-related souvenir from the trip.

My favorite shirt I won at #rstatsnyc this week. pic.twitter.com/xuXWDaHINw

— ERSATZ DEVLOPER (@JasonPunyon) April 23, 2017

And all around, our live-tweeting game was on point.

Three of the seven actual people on this board are @StackOverflow employees. #rstatsnyc pic.twitter.com/1OSxORvLiV

— Kevin Montrose (@kevinmontrose) April 22, 2017

I’ll be going to a few other R and statistics conferences this year (including useR and JSM), but I’m particularly glad I got to share this one with my team.

Twin sisters, both sophomores at the local charter high school, decided they’d like to braid their hair this year. Hair extensions are against the rules, but so is hair “more than 2" high”. That makes it hard or impossible for black students to have braids, or indeed to have long hair, unless they use hair straighteners -- something many decline to do on political and historical grounds.

So there I was on a Sunday in 2017, standing outside a school building and protesting rules against long hair alongside the ACLU, NAACP, ADL, and plenty more. It’s almost 50 years since Hair opened. The attorney general warned the school that its rules were discriminatory; Sunday, they held a closed meeting to suspend the rule for the rest of the school year.

Here’s a paragraph from the (unsigned) announcement the school sent to parents this morning:

Of course, despite the vast importance of the Uniform Policy on the performance of our students, the policy must comport with our long-held commitment, as stated in our Parent Student Handbook and on our website, to offer the same advantages, privileges and courses of study to all students, regardless of race, color, sex, gender identity, religion, national origin or sexual orientation.

First, the sentence is ungrammatical. You can’t have importance on something; it’s important to something.

Second, “comport with” is an old and unsatisfactory construction. “Comport” is a synonym for “behave” and it is normally transitive: “The girls comported themselves with dignity.” While the construction used here is old, it’s not being used for clarity or concision: it’s being used because it sounds pretentious. That’s likely why the school (which has existed only since 1998) boasts of its “long-held commitment.” (The nearby Malden High School goes back 160 years, and I expect Malden schools in general date to Michael Wigglesworth’s tenure as minister in Malden in the late 17th century.)

Third, the composition is flawed. There’s no help for the laundry list at the end of the sentence: it’s legal boilerplate. Nevertheless, the writer knows it’s coming, and should have planned for it. Instead, the first half is larded with unnecessary parentheticals and lists.

Fourth, the statement asserts that the Uniform Policy has “vast importance.” Simple importance would have been plenty to assert; “vast” importance simply calls attention to the weakness of the claim, for which no evidence is offered and which seems wildly improbable. Does long hair prevent people from learning history or calculus? Does short hair help one’s grammar?

Fifth, the statement is un-American. We hold some truths to be self-evident, and one of those truths is that a student’s appearance and beliefs do not conflict with superb intellectual performance. The sentence grudgingly compromises something of “vast importance” in service of other goals, but in fact we have no reason to think that any compromise is necessary, that changing the uniform would have any important effect, or indeed that reversing the policy might not better serve the school’s goals.

Later, the school writes:

You should know that we categorically rejected an order from the DESE [ Massachusetts Elementary and Secondary Education], which was influenced by media reports, to cease all disciplinary actions associated with our entire Uniform Policy. We believe that following this directive would have disastrous consequences on our ability to create the structure and equity central to the success of our students, and that it would fundamentally alter the nature of the environment you chose for your children.i

Again, our prepositions stray: you might expect consequences for something, but not consequences on something. In accord with “vast importance”, we here face “disastrous consequences;” what catastrophe, precisely, might follow upon a high school student’s poor fashion choices? Schools with no uniform policy whatsoever somehow manage to get through entire weeks without massive loss of life.

An AI invented a bunch of new paint colors that are hilariously wrong | Annalee Newitz

Research scientist and neural network goofball Janelle Shane took the wondering a step further. Shane decided to train a neural network to generate new paint colors, complete with appropriate names. The results are possibly the greatest work of artificial intelligence I’ve seen to date.

Personally, I think ‘turdly’ is pretty apt, and a color called ‘stoner blue’ has possibilities, likewise ‘stanky bean’.

No one would’ve believed that we could conquer the Earth. It was, on the face of it, a ludicrous gambit. The plan, if you could even call it that, was so simple, but my god, it worked.

Oh, how it worked.

Now, kids, I want you to pay close attention as I tell this story, for you will each have to share it with your offspring, and they will have to share it with theirs, and so on. Because: if we forget the story of how we conquered the Earth, we may never live another day on it again.

It all began in the late 1990’s — those are the human years. For us, it was about two to four generations ago. They had finally invented a means for each individual to communicate on a global scale, unaware they were laying the foundation necessary for our long-awaited plan.

At first we gave them cat pictures. Then, as their technology slowly advanced, cat videos. They made viral propaganda out of cats in ceilings, walls, or games of cats as flying unicorns in space. Eventually, they even made several cat celebrities, believe it or not!

But it was not enough. They remained too… conscious. Too alert. Too able to respond to any hostile takeover attempt. So we waited, once more, until technology facilitated the next phase. They enmeshed themselves into a global distraction, so captivating and convincing that we could wander into their living rooms, even stand right next to them as they wore these “Virtual Reality” headsets, and they had no idea we were ever there.

Heh. “Virtual” Reality. How silly a name they chose for their very real demise.

By the time their society had normalized this latest technology, it was already too late for them. Every individual inside this “VR” was defenseless against our takeover, and luckily for us, we needn’t take over the entire planet in one fell swoop.

We had the time. We had the numbers. We had perfected our skills and methods through thousands of generations, going back to our ancestors — whom the humans rightly worshipped for the gods that they were.

That we are.

Let me tell you about the most important moment. It’s the moment in which we take control over the human, so transparently that no one ever notices we did so. Sure, they did their scientific analyses on some of our targets, and sure, some of those scientists even discovered our control mechanism. And, yes, they call it a virus, but even so, very few of them seem remotely alarmed by it. As a result, we’ve been able to continue our operations, effectively undetected.

But as I was saying, in that fateful moment of striking, we——oh, hang on kids. The humans are coming home. Now remember: only say “Meow” whenever they’re at home and awake. Everyone got that?

“Meow.” (Yes.)

“Meow!” (Got it!)

“Mew.” (Okay.)

Meow. (Very good, everyone.) Mrowww. (I’ll continue the story when they’re gone.)

— FIN —

I’ve been using the late 2016 MacBook Pro (13” Touch Bar) for around five months now, so I think it’s about time I gave it a review of sorts. I like to think of it as my mid-life-crisis laptop: it’s hideously expensive for what it does, comes with flashy, useless trimmings, and is more than a statement than practical because I can’t actually use it as my primary machine – and yet it is nice and oddly fulfilling.

The configuration I got is the 2,9 GHz Intel Core i5 with 16GB of RAM (plus 500GB SSD), which is more than enough for me to code, do some photography work, and run a Windows 10 VM now and then at glorious resolution¹. For good measure, I paired it with an LG UltraFine 4K display, since it was discounted at the time and I needed a relatively beefy desktop display with better quality than the Samsung P2270s I bought nearly seven years ago.

In contrast to my work-issued Lenovo X1 Carbon (which I complain about regularly, even if re-imaging made it a little more palatable), the MacBook Pro is a godsend – the screen (despite the lack of a touchscreen, something I will go into later) is absolutely terrific and wipes the floor with everything else I’ve used recently (including the Surface Pro 4), the trackpad (despite the somewhat exaggerated size) is still unsurpassed in terms of sensitivity, accuracy and overall feel, and I have no performance complaints whatsoever.

And since I also have a MacBook One in the house (the original post-Air consumer model with a single USB-C port) and still use a desktop Mac daily, I can make all sorts of interesting comparisons. The Touch Bar, however, is… well, let’s start by terming it unique.

That Thing Called The Touch Bar

When I wrote “flashy, useless trimmings” in the lead paragraph, the Touch Bar was exactly what I had in mind. It was confoundedly erratic at first (with half the icons vanishing on occasion), but the latest macOS update made it much more reliable.

It works OK for scrubbing videos and common tasks like switching browser tabs and navigating to the right folder when filing e-mail, for instance². But for developers and terminal users, it’s a nightmare. Although I’ve long been used to using vim without a readily accessible Esc key, the Touch Bar adds insult to injury for nominally having an Esc button but lacking haptics to tell my fingers it was actually hit.

And that, I think, is the real issue here. Without any sort of haptic feedback, the Touch Bar is just half of a good idea, and not necessarily the best half considering some of the default choices Apple made.

For instance, whomever thought having Terminal color preferences on the Touch Bar was a priority clearly never actually used a terminal for actual work. It’s easy enough to have the function keys as default, but you have to wonder what Apple was thinking here.

So one of the first things I did when I got the machine was remove all the stupid choices Apple made, defanging the Touch Bar and leaving a slightly tweaked variation of the brightness and media controls in place.

As I started writing this I went back to the defaults for a couple of days and immediately remembered that I removed typing suggestions because they were simply too distracting, as well as it bening completely impractical to tap the touch bar to complete a word when I’m typing at speed.

Also, having random emojis pop up as part of the suggestion list is the kind of distraction I just don’t need, further compounding my impression that the defaults leave much to be desired.

The real problem, I think, is that we’re all still at a loss as to what purpose the Touch Bar may serve in the long run. Right now, it’s only marginally more useful than go faster stripes and hood ornaments on fancy sports cars.

Keyboard

My go-to keyboard on my home office is still an Apple Bluetooth keyboard, and I find it to be the best balance between overall layout, key travel, and noise. I like its compactness and responsiveness, and I’ve long since stopped caring about numeric keypads, multiple Ctrl keys and the location of the Fn key. So like many others, I initially found the MacBook One‘s keyboard to be shallow and lack feedback – until I got used to it, because it’s actually rather nice and very quiet.

In contrast, the very first thing I noticed when starting to use the MacBook Pro is the astounding racket the keyboard makes, which is loud enough to be annoying in the evenings – and almost impossible to tolerate when you’re typing at speed on the bed.

Contrasting it with both the MacBook One and the Apple Bluetooth keyboard, it’s somewhere in between in terms of key travel, but feels much too stiff.

I probably shouldn’t complain much because the Lenovo feels like it’s carpeted with loathsome finger-fitting mushrooms (the only decent PC keyboard I’ve used lately is the Surface Pro’s, but only for a couple of hours), but overall I think I’d rather have had the exact same keyboard as the One – which is not likely to be a popular opinion, but I assume Apple will never again ship something as nice as their standalone keyboards as part of a laptop.

Trackpad

Unlike what appears to be a sizeable (or at least vocal) set of people, I’ve had no trouble with the size of the trackpad. There are one or two mis-placed taps now and then, but no issue with palms or thumbs. The trackpad is almost exactly the width (and around two thirds the height) of the Magic Trackpad I use on my desktop, and accidentally brushing a finger across either is both frequent and easy to compensate for – even for me, and I use only light taps and multiple finger gestures (including three-finger window drag) and never click on it.

In fact, I hardly ever use Force Touch at all – for some reason, it just never occurs to me, since I value speed over exertion and therefore see no noticeable advantage to bear down on it, so haptic feedback (what little there is currently in macOS) often comes as a surprise. What the trackpad isn’t, however, is insensitive or erratic (unlike my Lenovo’s).

It is the best trackpad I’ve ever used on a laptop, and I don’t think size or haptics have anything to do with it. The operating system helps (even on different hardware and multiple browsers, I’ve never had Windows zoom a web page as smoothly as macOS), but this is the one bit of hardware where Apple’s iterative polish shines.

Battery Life

A few months back I linked to a piece about battery performance, and I stick to my comments on it – with light use, I’m getting around a week’s worth of battery life (sometimes much more, as I’ve had occasions where I was too tired to do anything in the evenings and only woke up the machine two or three times during weeknights), and I can sometimes make it through from morning to evening with light browsing and a few terminal windows open.

Of course, in practice I tend to be running Visual Studio Code (which is lightweight, but as all Electron-based apps, has far too much junk under the hood) instead of vim, plus iterating on code that goes out and does a fair bit of processing and network calls, so I’d say six hours is the outside in those situations.

Lightening the load helps: I got rid of the Slack app (which is insufferably bloated, so I use it through Safari or my phone), I have The Great Suspender installed in Chrome, and have an AppleScript for toggling notorious battery hogs like Dropbox and OneDrive (although sometimes turning them on again and having them re-sync seems to be more wasteful of battery life than just letting them be).

The biggest win, however, seems to come from Installing Time Machine Editor to prevent Time Machine from hogging CPU and I/O on an hourly basis. I have no idea why Apple doesn’t allow more control over backup timings, but my unquantified perception is that turning off Time Machine gave me the biggest boost in battery life.

Since I haven’t yet needed to really tax the CPU (except when handling large batches of photos, which has sadly only happened a couple of times), I have no benchmarks. It’s fast enough, although to be fair that also applies to the smaller MacBook most of the time.

Weight and Form Factor

Still, the batteries and compactness come at a cost – the MacBook Pro is dense and hefty. Having an original MacBook One in the house, I sometimes regret having gone for the Pro when the plain MacBook is such a nearly weightless joy to behold and use.

As it is, though, the 13” MacBook Pro is slightly heavier than my Lenovo X1 Carbon (not much, but enough to notice when hefted with a single hand). I suspect the 15” would be intolerable for me, but on the whole I’d rather use lighter hardware, partially because my current lifestyle revolves around traipsing through the city with a backpack in tow, and my back does not condone that (which is another reason why I loathe the Lenovo X1 and all the crap that comes with it).

In fact, if Apple had managed to provide us with the grand total of two USB-C ports on the updated MacBook, I would probably have gone for that instead and (other from less beefy processing power) would probably have been much happier altogether, simply due to being able to carry that around everywhere on a daily basis.

And that, I think, is the one aspect that brings me a touch of regret. With a primarily cloud-centric job, there is nothing I really need to do on a laptop but run Office and a few lightweight development tools, and I hardly needed the Pro‘s added bulk.

It might be the thinnest MacBook Pro ever, but I would have been better off with a slightly beefier MacBook (with two USB-C ports, at the very least) and an i7 Mac Mini that wasn’t insultingly hobbled (like the current, or rather extant models are).

USB-C

Ah, yes, the dongle event horizon, and the impending tide of change towards USB-C… or lack thereof.

To be honest, I’ve had no trouble whatsoever – yet. I got an HDMI adapter (already had VGA and Ethernet for the other MacBook), got a couple more USB-A to USB-C adapters, and just re-used all the other stuff I have around, even though I’m not the kind to have a bunch of stuff hanging off a laptop (that’s what desktops are for, really).

Although a higher (i.e., non-insulting) port count was one of the reasons I went for this specific model, I haven’t needed more than two ports on a regular basis, and even when I just need two ports, one of them is for my Time Machine disk and the other is almost invariably plugged in to my LG 4K monitor – or through it.

Display, and the LG 4K

I have zero complaints about the internal display – it is, by and large, the best integrated display I’ve ever used on a laptop, and wipes the floor with the Lenovo X1’s dim and somewhat fuzzy HiDPI display (which, to add insult to injury, lacks an oleophobic coating and looks hideous alongside a Surface when used for the same period of time). I do wish it was a touchscreen on occasion, but my brainstem has already figured out that raising a finger to macOS (in any sense) isn’t beneficial, so that doesn’t really matter at this point.

But like I mentioned above, I decided I wanted to one-up the Samsung P2270s I have, and got one of the new 4K displays manufactured by LG. It has a nice, plain, understated but completely stupid design, because the built-in USB hub (which appears to be only USB 2.0, despite the USB-C ports) forces you to dangle adapters and dongles off the back, instead of (for instance) placing said hub in the bottom and having moderately sane cable management.

I won’t miss Apple displays (I’ve never relied on them, and dislike the integrated iMac form factor because it limited my options), and I’ve been lucky enough that the 4K wasn’t prone to the same interference issues as the 5K, so I’m generally happy with what LG has delivered – the image quality is more than a match for the internal display, the speakers are good enough for casual use and you can change monitor brightness from the MacBook by holding down Ctrl and brightness up/down, which is a nice (if somewhat obscure) touch.

The killer feature, however, is plugging in the laptop to my entire setup through one cable. This is so good that it makes the mess of dongles protruding from the USB hub on the back of the monitor doubly insulting, and I really wish Apple had given some thought to the overall solution (and gotten LG to move the ports to the monitor base somehow).

We use the monitor with the MacBook One too (at 60Hz), and leave either laptop charging (or doing backups) while hooked up to it so often that I probably used the power brick for the Pro only a half dozen times since I got it.

Other Frills

The remaining features are relatively unobtrusive, and “just work”. The built-in speakers are decent, and conferencing using the internal microphone and the built-in camera is buttery smooth (well, in FaceTime, at least, I don’t have enough data points to say Skype for Business runs well with both since we mostly do audio calls).

I love using Touch ID to log in or to unlock my 1Password vault, and logging in via the Apple Watch also works fine (so much so that I seldom think about it anymore). Either is pretty much instant from the moment I open the lid (whereas my Lenovo X1 takes forever to acknowledge I can log in and trouble with my fingerprint half of the times).

Siri, however, is still less than useless, since there is very little it can actually help me accomplish – although to be fair I seldom use Cortana on my Lenovo as well, and for largely the same reasons (although I understand the limits involved, I’m at a loss why either can’t access my Outlook calendar, for instance).

Annoyances

The only thing I can single out here is that the MacBook Pro tends to get a bit too warm for my taste even without any significant load, with the area surrounding the keyboard becoming noticeably warmer than my fingers and the bottom becoming somewhat uncomfortable on my lap. With Summer coming up, and given Portugal’s tendency to hover near 40C, I expect this will become a problem for continued use.

Conclusion

Even with all the rumours about hardware launches at WWDC (which, by the way, I find highly unlikely and further evidence that technology reporting has gone to the dogs – or, most likely, has finally sacrificed veracity for page views), I expect Apple to stay their course and, at best, deliver an insulting speed bump in this form factor rather than fixing any of the others, and it saddens me somewhat.

But until that day comes, this is a nice, flamboyant laptop to ride in, if you can stomach all its peculiarities. If you can’t and need a macOS laptop for casual use, I suggest waiting to see if Apple comes to their senses and does right by the standard MacBook – that’s a much nicer and more portable machine altogether that only needs a few tweaks to be perfectly usable, and might well become Apple‘s Mazda miata if they knew what they were doing with their product line.

If you want a truly Pro “luggable” machine, well… I just don’t know. Maybe the 15” model will fit the bill (which will be even more outrageous than what the 13” cost), and maybe you’d benefit from beefier CPUs – I’m happy with the i5 on this machine, but I just don’t do the kind of development (or design work) that warrants more these days.

Either way, I expect this machine to last me a few years (I don’t intend to spend any money on laptops for a good while), and in the meantime will be looking towards the desktop line to see if there’ll ever be something that looks like a real Mac…

While watching a Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood marathon, Owen Phillips for The Awl wondered about the colors of Mister Rogers’ cardigans over the years. So Phillips tallied the colors and plotted every single one of them.

Tags: color, Mister Rogers

Some folks in society seem to have always viewed creatives who want to make money as sellouts, shills, souls auctioned off to the highest corporate bidder.

The post The double-standard with creativity and commerce appeared first on Paul Jarvis.

The new Nokia made a comeback earlier this year by announcing three new Android-running smartphones — the Nokia 6, 5 and 3 — along with the iconic Nokia 3310 at MWC 2017. Now, the folks over at FrAndroid have managed to get their hands on a prototype unit of Nokia’s upcoming flagship handset: the Nokia 9. Continue reading →

Images are never pure. Like any form of communication, they are slippery and potent. They can never quite divorce their own biases — the photograph is always tethered to the gaze of the photographer, a portrait is always distinguished by the materials used to paint. Since photography’s inception, photographs have been used to capture reality and possess it. Images inhabit a persistently contentious space, where intent is at odds with interpretation and, in the digital age, the motive of replication. These images are never pure because the motive is to simplify, to focus: Roland Barthes states that photographs without connotation or context do not and cannot exist. Every image is polysemous, relaying a “continuous message” of associations, analogies, and contradictions.

Many of us interact with images every day, or every hour, in a blasé, nonchalant manner, gliding our fingers across glass and surveying post after post, creating an impossible data archive mostly aslant to memory. The stream is persistent and never-ending. There is no bottom.

As Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest have grown, rooted in the personalized curation of immersive images, they have become a destination for niche: taxidermy, dank memes, and bodily functions (see: Dr. Pimple Popper). These photos often reflect a curiosity that exceeds the restrictions of cultural norms: The familiar can still surprise us. We want to peer into an image that speaks to something within ourselves, perhaps buried. In some cases that image is primal, insolent, wounding or offensive; in others, soothing. As we collect these images, we are picking up stitches: Our online lives are continually woven by the handy repetition of touching, tapping, zooming, and looping, coalescing into an invisible mass.

Over the past year or two, an interest in textile images has been steadily rising. Cropped into uniformed tiles, these images force the view to bypass the textile’s traditional role of utility and instead focus on aesthetics. As such, they are experienced as fiber art. A practice that reached its widest recognition among second-wave feminists, fiber art highlights the techniques of textile-making in all forms in service of a greater creative vision.

The fibers on Tumblr include everything that is and could be fabric art, whereas textiles on Pinterest tend to resemble the high-brow fiber art on reserve in museums; users glom onto images with abstract intention to keep in a tidy box indefinitely. On both platforms, there is a pronounced balance of cultural exposure; we see ancient work from Tibet, the stunning spherical work of Serena Garcia Dalla Venezia, and vintage Peruvian fabric imprints. But because Tumblr and Pinterest require sharing as interaction, images lose authorship along the way. Even though most artists are credited, a successful image or post is often shared so many times that the person who created it is lost in the shuffle.

Instagram has a different modus operandi. As a self-marketing medium, there are more self-identified fiber artists promoting their own content. Within this niche, there is a rich variety of fiber art: soft, woolen yarns, portraiture needlecraft, and decadent wall hangings. Size is no issue — there are penny-sized embroideries and enormous ropey knits (knit with needles the size of water noodles). Artists primarily feature finished works for sale on Etsy, showcasing intricacy and detail. The fibrous images are absolutely transfixing and bizarrely comforting, almost a form of visual meditation.

_JuJuJust_, whose tapestries vary in texture from one inch to another, employs high contrast colors that are not quite neon, but nonetheless scream playfully from the screen. Bright pink wools bubble out of tightly knotted space, evoking both safety and wildness. Maryannemoodie weaves geometric shapes varying in texture and depth, the edges of the shapes reveal the soft focus of the handmade. Tassels hang from one of her wall pieces with such precise elegance, it would be easy to mistake it for a “peasant skirt.” One of her comments calls her work a “weavolution.” There is no weaving emoji yet, so they use the rainbow. Their photos complement the platform’s gallery aesthetic, carefully packaged, as if wrapped in Saran. Textile photos are dense but contained by minimalism — reflecting the invisible barrier between our thumbs and the infinite data that lies beyond our screens.

The transporting effect of these images is consoling and grounding, a grave contrast from the devotional anxiety of most posts. Studying the photos, I do not long to own these fabrics or live vicariously through them. I am content to revel in the image, awash in complex coziness.

Why is this? Is it because they are contained within an online space, safe from fraying and decay? Or perhaps it is filling a void in my online life, and I crave softness to offset the stress of a constant dialogue. What are these photos doing that others aren’t?

---

People have been weaving for as long as they have been writing, if not longer. The earliest fibers used to weave cloth date back 34,000 years, a period anthropologists have termed the Old Stone Age. The earliest evidence of writing, as a means to record utterance and communicate it accurately, emerged in the New Stone Age — at most, 10,000 years ago. Appropriately, text comes from the latin textus, which is defined as “tissue” and “woven.” Barthes too calls the text “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture,” noting its multiplicity and our urge to “disentangle” information.

Text, in short, is inextricable from textile. Weaving is a means of storytelling and communication. And at the very least, a form of media. Yet, it is rarely interpreted as such. Weaving is often thought of a functional, automated and feminized practice in our eyes.

Weaving has always almost exclusively been performed by women. In early myth, Penelope, whose husband, Odysseus, has been drafted, unravels and re-weaves a tapestry every day to protect herself from aggressive suitors who have overtaken her home; her tapestry is both a form of self-protection and time-marking, as well as a platform for her other faithful duties. From Ovid, we learn that the shepherd’s daughter Arachne, before she is transformed into a spider, challenges Athena, born from Zeus’ head, to a weaving contest. Arachne overdoes it: She weaves a stunning rendition of the gods’ many abuses of power, and does not spare Zeus. Thus she is condemned to an arachnids’ perpetual labor, spinning masterpieces destined for destruction. All weaving is reweaving; so too we find our “text,” so often overwritten, or written off.

Through the Bronze and Copper Ages, women developed woven cloth as something both functional and communicative. Yet, the purpose of weaving extended beyond simple utility: In Incan civilizations, textile weaving was a sacred act reserved for women, in which they communicated stories and recorded events. Victorian-era women were relegated to sewing circles to uphold virtue and femininity; a woman’s entire day would be structured by different types of needlecraft. The Dogon people of Western Africa equate the act of weaving to human reproduction, fertility and rebirth. It is deeply maternal and wholly female. But that doesn’t mean weaving has always promoted a peaceful coexistence. Many of the techniques artists use today were discovered during violent colonization and exploitation. After being captured and brought to the Americas, African slaves introduced weaving techniques to early American cultures and produced much of the clothing worn by slaveholding families. And recently, Urban Outfitters got into hot water for appropriating a Navajo weaving pattern, a technique preserved by the women of the tribe for thousands of years.

There is no way to know precisely how these ancient women felt about weaving, but we do know that techniques and storytelling dynamics significantly expanded when technology improved. In The Age of Homespun, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich contends that a textile cannot be understood by itself; it must be examined in context to our histories and mythologies. In this way, textiles are inextricable from the heritage of women’s lives. Women created encoded messages, detailing their experiences in a world that silenced them. But because textiles are prone to decay quickly, their work is preserved in a legacy of technique.

---

After the Industrial Revolution, women found themselves caught between the rigorous demands of machine labor and cult of domesticity. For an emerging middle class, weaving became a symbol of the disproportionate burden women carried in both public and private spheres. Meanwhile, textiles were everywhere, being produced relentlessly: a form of mass media. When the Suffragette movement was born in 1903, white women used embroidery and sewing techniques on their banners, employing traditional motifs, pre-selected colors and a unified, framed design. Second-wave feminists also turned to fiber materials when they elevated textiles to “fine art” in the 1970s. Judy Chicago’s 1979 Dinner Party is one notable example: Chicago’s installation depicts a triangular table, complete with place settings for 39 influential women in history. Table runners under each plate are embroidered in the style of each woman’s era and names are hand-stitched onto each placemat: “As I studied the history of needlework,” wrote Chicago, who often said she could neither sew nor stitch and so enlisted a “needlework gang,” “I realized that the same story I was piecing together about women’s history could be conveyed through needle and textile arts.”

Currently, Chicago’s Dinner Party resides in the Brooklyn Museum, but fiber art has extended far and beyond. With our devices, we bring the fiber art wherever we may be, bookmarking them, adding them to our Pinterest boards, tapping away. We long to decipher their long-labored message of depth and texture, trapped within the slick surfaces of our devices. “Network” is a characteristic diminutive; the internet is a tapestry that would not be possible without centuries of women’s work.

---

A cursory look at our news stories, entertainment and daily speech reveals textile talk. We tie up loose ends, disentangle ourselves from difficult situations, try to find loopholes, argue about the fabric of society and attempt to piece things together. Our online lives are also haunted by the language of weaving. We are persistently within a web of information. We follow threads, travel through links and are told to be wary of fabrications. There is a woven texture to our online lives: interactions, notifications, clicks and likes overlap in sprawling dialogues. You only have to follow one fibrous string to find a knot of information.

Yet, a sprawling mass of fabric is not what a successful platform looks like. Instead of errant threads, we prefer clean, tidy, and seamless design. No evidence of process or technique, just tightly wound threads that are easy to navigate. No bunching, no snags. This desire for clean lines is rooted in an inherent deception of weaving in itself. Even the most basic plait must move over and under another. It must hide and emerge from view at opportune moments. It is not an option to use these techniques — it is a vital and necessary function of the art. In this sense, the artist can pick and choose what will be seen and what will be tucked away. In utilitarian applications, what is hidden are seams and knots. A seamstress will always know how to knot a button without revealing any thread. A quilter knows how to press the seams just-so.

This neatly pruned idea of textiles is what we project on others in Instagram. For every single photo posted, there are many more that did not make the cut. Every moment is carefully curated, personalized and retouched — a constant negotiation of ourselves to the world.

Yet, those unposted photos still represent a ripple in a smoothly ironed seam. Their existence is part of the creative process, which fiber art openly exposes. It celebrates the colossal knots, frayed corners and dangling threads. It displays both connection and disconnection without hiding.

Web, wires, threads, nets, links — these are all ways to describe the way we try, fail and succeed in connecting to others. It’s a spectacular mess. Textile images, with their threads and seams laid bare, provides relief. We see our own chains of self-awareness in a non-uniformed manner. We see the chaos of connection and disconnection that have become currents in our lives.

---

Instagram embodies aesthetics, commonly known as “art for art’s sake.” It transforms our experiences of the world into something visually attractive and artsy. Yet, the participatory aspect of the platform suggests a more personalized aesthetics. The images we like and engage with are a direct reflection of what we find beautiful.

Curiously, the aesthetic depth of textile images is in direct contradiction to the physical experience of the photo. There is an explicit aesthetic chaos in many of the pieces: In addition to the fluidity of color and adornment, the photos are often taken in bright, natural light, whereby you can discern the smaller threads that make up the larger threads. Spun wool is more than just fuzzy, the detail of the photos reveals a wildness whipped and spiraled into an ethereal object. No filter is necessary. But tapping a slick glass surface is not the same as rolling freshly dyed wool between your fingers. The experience of Textile Insta is quite literally caressing an object, as is our experience with most images on our phones. The tapping and sliding is hardly a deliberate act, it actually feels rather natural. Our hands, it would seem, are eager to create.

With textile art, there is an inherent trust in the process of creation. The repetitive motions, the precise lines, they all require a certain degree of stillness and motor control. Louise Bourgeois refers to it, in The Fabric Works, with poetic specificity: “The repetitive motion of a line, to caress an object, the licking of wounds, the back and forth of a shuttle, the endless repetition of waves, rocking a person to sleep, cleaning someone you like, an endless gesture of love.”

We repeat the same fine motor movements in a way that knots, loops, stitches and braids. The web we navigate, and the web we spin, is perpetually embroidering itself, adding new shape and texture to the representation of our being. Perhaps this is why we are so impulsive on Instagram. We place trust not only in our devices to guide us, but we trust our intuition to confirm our tastes and personalized aesthetics.

---

In On Photography, Susan Sontag wrote: “All photographs are momento mori … Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” To Sontag, photography is a means to capture time and to sneak away a souvenir in a high-speed world. Currently, our devices hold both our camera and our souvenirs. “Photography,” Sontag writes, “has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.” On Instagram, we exchange snapshot experiences as social currency and create value judgments based on their likeability. In our devices, we possess both our own experiences and those of others as souvenirs.

If a photo strives to possess, then weaving strives to retrace and remember. When Bourgeois spoke about her process, she said: “I want to re-experience the past, I try to reconstruct it. Sudden recollections that are awakened by the senses tell you more than emotions.” For Bourgeois, the tactile, sensory act of weaving invokes a specific past of maternal intimacy. She writes that her fabric art is an “homage to the mother” and that she “cannot, do not want to forget it.”

For many fiber artists, the act of weaving is used not only to evoke feminine nostalgia, but also to reference the trauma of colonization and social expectations of women. Artist Satpreet Kahlon recently exhibited a wire and weaving piece that reads: “There exist too many things you have not said in defense of my humanity.” In pop culture, pussy hats were knitted nationwide as a means of solidarity and resistance to Trump’s anti-woman stance, an evocation of the knitted history of suffragettes and the abolitionists that preceded them. The medium is notoriously political, if only because it is exclusively female.

And it is true, you can see — and feel — the homage to womanness in many textile pieces on Instagram. Embroiderers often feature traditional flower motifs, a call back to a Victorian obsession with foliage and femininity. With woven wall hangings, there is a persistent appearance of orbs and circles, harkening perhaps both the roundness of pregnancy and the form of the sewing hoop. Memorialstitches is one of many artists that surrounds their work with a primal feminine mystique: cycles of the moon, crystals, and wiccan motifs. Her freehand needlework features feminist slogans: “sleep” and “still alive.”

Using the medium of fiber art, Textile Insta remembers the craft and its heritage. Using photography, we remember to never forget it or let it go. As a result, we mold our digital spaces to be a place in which women’s heritage is no longer silent or invisible.

---

In an age flooded with information and media, the words and images we use to visualize our online experience matter. The way we interact in the digital age is anything but seamless. Our interactions and connectivity are multidimensional and erratic.

At its core, Textile Insta employs an aesthetic that challenges women to remember our past and our present. We get to see the stitches, the folds, the rips and the seams. We get to see every technique that generations of women have learned, practiced and perfected. With fiber art’s seams open and exposed, it is, as Bourgeois would say, “a means of laying bare.” Every stitch is a visible confirmation of the woman artist who pulled a needle through, who tied off a knot or embroidered a symbol. Their signature lies in the texture and complexity of every image. Look closely and you’ll see: Our stories are, quite literally, in our hands.

The ever-busy Chris Bruntlett from Modacity told me the other day about this event — planned as a part of 2017 Bike to Work Week (May 29 to June 4).

Vancouver’s 3rd Annual Cargo Bike Championship.

• Friday June 2
• 4 pm
• Creekside Park
• Part of BtWW’s wrap-up BBQ
• Register at ModacityLife.com by May 31 (midnight)

Click photo to enlarge.

If you’re unsure about just what a cargo bike is, here’s a great chance to see a bunch (well over 30 expected entrants) up close and in furious but friendly head-to-head action, lugging stuff over a closed course.  Ice cream and prizes, too.

“You get what you pay for” is one of the oldest adages in the English language. Either in the context of something ultra-cheap, or – here – of something super-expensive, with the new Samsung Galaxy S8+ coming in at £779 inc VAT in the UK and similar top end prices across the world. Yet, after spending a week with the S8+ I am forced to admit that you do get an awful lot for your money. Whether you enjoy using all the tech depends, as usual, on how much you like Samsung – its sometimes quirky designs, its software, its ecosystem – and, in this case, how much you’re prepared to experiment with new ways of unlocking your phone. Continue reading →

The post Bell’s Fibe Alt TV wants to attract millennial cord cutters appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Many of my posts seem to begin with a link to a tweet, and this one falls into that pattern:

And @_inundata is already working on a #rstats palette. https://t.co/bNfpL7OmVl

— Timothée Poisot (@tpoi) May 21, 2017

I’d seen the Ars Tech post about the named color palette derived from some training data. I could tell at a glance of the resultant palette:

that it would not be ideal for visualizations (use this site test the final image in this post and verify that on your own) but this was a neat, quick project to take on, especially since it let me dust off an old GH package, adobecolor and it was likely I could beat Karthik to creating a palette ;-)

The “B+” goal is to get a color palette that “matches” the one in the Tumlbr post. The “A” goal is to get a named palette.

These are all the packages we end up using:

library(tesseract)
library(magick)
library(stringi)
library(adobecolor) # hrbrmstr/adobecolor - may not be Windows friendly
library(tidyverse)

Attempt #1 (B+!!)

I’m a macOS user, so I’ve got great tools like xScope at my disposal. I’m really handy with that app and the Loupe tool makes it easy to point at a color, save it to a palette board and export an ACO palette file.

That whole process took ~18 seconds (first try). I’m not saying that to brag. But we often get hung up on both speed and programmatic reproducibility. I ultimately — as we’ll see in a bit — really went for speed vs programmatic reproducibility.

It’s dead simple to get the palette into R:

aco_fil <- "ml_cols.aco"
aco_hex <- rev(read_aco(aco_fil))

col2rgb(aco_hex)
##       [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6] [,7] [,8] [,9] [,10] [,11] [,12] [,13]
## red    112  203   97  191  120  221  169  233  177   216    62   178   199
## green  112  198   92  174  114  196  167  191  138   200    63   184   172
## blue    85  166   73  156  124  199  171  143  109   185    67   196   146
##       [,14] [,15] [,16] [,17] [,18] [,19] [,20] [,21] [,22] [,23]
## red      48   172   177   203   219   162   152   232   197   191
## green    94   152   100   205   210    98   165   177   161   161
## blue     83   145   107   192   179   106   158   135   171   124

IIRC there may still be a byte-order issue (PRs welcome) I need to deal with on Windows in adobecolor but you likely will never need to use the package again.

A quick eyeball comparison between the Tumblr list and that matrix indicates the colors are off. That could be for many reasons starting from the way they were encoded in the PNG by whatever programming language was used to train the neural net and make the image (likely Python) to Tumblr degrading it to something on my end. You’ll see that the colors are close enough for humans that it’s likely close enough.

There, I’ve got a B+ with about a total of 60s of work! Plenty of time left to try shooting for an A!

Attempt #2 (FAIL)

We’ve got the PNG from the Tumblr post and the tesseract package in R. Perhaps this will be super-quick, too:

pal_img_fil <- "tumblr_inline_opgsh0UI6N1rl9zu7_400.png"

pal_ocr <- ocr(pal_img_fil)
stri_split_lines(pal_ocr)
## [[1]]
##  [1] "-ClaniicFug112113 84"      "-Snowhnn.k 201 199165"    
##  [3] "- Cmbabcl 97 93 68"        "-Bunfluw 190 174 155"      
##  [5] "-an:hing Blue 121 114125"  "Bank Bun 221 196199"      
##  [7] "- Caring Tan 171 166170"   "-Smrguun 233191 141"      
##  [9] "-Sink 176 131; 110"        "Slummy Beige 216 200135"  
## [11] "- Durkwumi 61 63 66"       "Flow/£1178 1114 196"      
## [13] "- Sand Dan 2111 172143"    "- Grade 136: 41; 94 x3"   
## [15] "-Ligh[OfBlasll75150147"    "-Grass 13m 176 99108"     
## [17] "Sindis Poop 204 205 194"   "Dupe 219 2119179"         
## [19] "-'n:sling156101 106"       "-SloncrElu13152165 159"   
## [21] "- Buxblc Simp 226 1x1 132" "-Sl.mky 13m197162171"     
## [23] "-'J\\milyl90164116"        ""                         
## [25] ""

Ugh.

Perhaps if we crop out the colors:

image_read(pal_img_fil) %>%
  image_crop("+57") %>%
  ocr() %>%
  stri_split_lines()
## [[1]]
##  [1] "Clanfic Fug112113 84"       "Snowhunk 201 199 165"     
##  [3] "Cmbabcl 97 93 as"          "Bunfluwl90174155"          
##  [5] "Kunming Blue 121 114 125"  "Bank Bun 221196199"       
##  [7] "Caring Tan 171 ms 170"     "Slarguun 233 191 141"     
##  [9] "Sinkl76135110"             ""                         
## [11] "SIIImmy Beige 216 200 135" "Durkwuud e1 63 66"        
## [13] "Flower 175 154 196"        ""                         
## [15] "Sand Dan 201 172 143"      "Grade 1m AB 94: 53"       
## [17] ""                          "Light 0mm 175 150 147"    
## [19] "Grass Ba! 17a 99 ms"       "sxndis Poop 204 205 194"  
## [21] "Dupe 219 209 179"          ""                         
## [23] "Tesling 156 101 106"       "SloncrEluc 152 165 159"   
## [25] "Buxblc Simp 226 131 132"   "Sumky Bean 197 162 171"   
## [27] "1\\mfly 190 164 11a"        ""                         
## [29] ""

Ugh.

I’m woefully unfamiliar with how to use the plethora of tesseract options to try to get better performance and this is taking too much time for a toy post, so we’ll call this attempt a failure :-(

Attempt #3 (A-!!)

I’m going to go outside of R again to New OCR and upload the Tumblr palette there and crop out the colors (it lets you do that in-browser). NOTE: Never use any free site for OCR’ing sensitive data as most are run by content thieves.

Now we’re talkin’:

ocr_cols <- "Clardic Fug 112 113 84
Snowbonk 201 199 165
Catbabel 97 93 68
Bunfiow 190 174 155
Ronching Blue 121 114 125
Bank Butt 221 196 199
Caring Tan 171 166 170
Stargoon 233 191 141
Sink 176 138 110
Stummy Beige 216 200 185
Dorkwood 61 63 66
Flower 178 184 196
Sand Dan 201 172 143
Grade Bat 48 94 83
Light Of Blast 175 150 147
Grass Bat 176 99 108
Sindis Poop 204 205 194
Dope 219 209 179
Testing 156 101 106
Stoncr Blue 152 165 159
Burblc Simp 226 181 132
Stanky Bean 197 162 171
Thrdly 190 164 116"

We can get that into a more useful form pretty quickly:

stri_match_all_regex(ocr_cols, "([[:alpha:] ]+) ([[:digit:]]+) ([[:digit:]]+) ([[:digit:]]+)") %>%
  print() %>%
  .[[1]] -> col_mat
## [[1]]
##       [,1]                         [,2]             [,3]  [,4]  [,5] 
##  [1,] "Clardic Fug 112 113 84"     "Clardic Fug"    "112" "113" "84" 
##  [2,] "Snowbonk 201 199 165"       "Snowbonk"       "201" "199" "165"
##  [3,] "Catbabel 97 93 68"          "Catbabel"       "97"  "93"  "68" 
##  [4,] "Bunfiow 190 174 155"        "Bunfiow"        "190" "174" "155"
##  [5,] "Ronching Blue 121 114 125"  "Ronching Blue"  "121" "114" "125"
##  [6,] "Bank Butt 221 196 199"      "Bank Butt"      "221" "196" "199"
##  [7,] "Caring Tan 171 166 170"     "Caring Tan"     "171" "166" "170"
##  [8,] "Stargoon 233 191 141"       "Stargoon"       "233" "191" "141"
##  [9,] "Sink 176 138 110"           "Sink"           "176" "138" "110"
## [10,] "Stummy Beige 216 200 185"   "Stummy Beige"   "216" "200" "185"
## [11,] "Dorkwood 61 63 66"          "Dorkwood"       "61"  "63"  "66" 
## [12,] "Flower 178 184 196"         "Flower"         "178" "184" "196"
## [13,] "Sand Dan 201 172 143"       "Sand Dan"       "201" "172" "143"
## [14,] "Grade Bat 48 94 83"         "Grade Bat"      "48"  "94"  "83" 
## [15,] "Light Of Blast 175 150 147" "Light Of Blast" "175" "150" "147"
## [16,] "Grass Bat 176 99 108"       "Grass Bat"      "176" "99"  "108"
## [17,] "Sindis Poop 204 205 194"    "Sindis Poop"    "204" "205" "194"
## [18,] "Dope 219 209 179"           "Dope"           "219" "209" "179"
## [19,] "Testing 156 101 106"        "Testing"        "156" "101" "106"
## [20,] "Stoncr Blue 152 165 159"    "Stoncr Blue"    "152" "165" "159"
## [21,] "Burblc Simp 226 181 132"    "Burblc Simp"    "226" "181" "132"
## [22,] "Stanky Bean 197 162 171"    "Stanky Bean"    "197" "162" "171"
## [23,] "Thrdly 190 164 116"         "Thrdly"         "190" "164" "116"

The print() is in the pipe as I can never remember where each stringi functions stick lists but usually guess right, plus I wanted to check the output.

Making those into colors is super-simple:

y <- apply(col_mat[,3:5], 2, as.numeric)

ocr_cols <- rgb(y[,1], y[,2], y[,3], names=col_mat[,2], maxColorValue = 255)

If we look at Attempt #1 and Attempt #2 together:

ocr_cols
##    Clardic Fug       Snowbonk       Catbabel        Bunfiow  Ronching Blue 
##      "#707154"      "#C9C7A5"      "#615D44"      "#BEAE9B"      "#79727D" 
##      Bank Butt     Caring Tan       Stargoon           Sink   Stummy Beige 
##      "#DDC4C7"      "#ABA6AA"      "#E9BF8D"      "#B08A6E"      "#D8C8B9" 
##       Dorkwood         Flower       Sand Dan      Grade Bat Light Of Blast 
##      "#3D3F42"      "#B2B8C4"      "#C9AC8F"      "#305E53"      "#AF9693" 
##      Grass Bat    Sindis Poop           Dope        Testing    Stoncr Blue 
##      "#B0636C"      "#CCCDC2"      "#DBD1B3"      "#9C656A"      "#98A59F" 
##    Burblc Simp    Stanky Bean         Thrdly 
##      "#E2B584"      "#C5A2AB"      "#BEA474"

aco_hex
##  [1] "#707055" "#CBC6A6" "#615C49" "#BFAE9C" "#78727C" "#DDC4C7" "#A9A7AB"
##  [8] "#E9BF8F" "#B18A6D" "#D8C8B9" "#3E3F43" "#B2B8C4" "#C7AC92" "#305E53"
## [15] "#AC9891" "#B1646B" "#CBCDC0" "#DBD2B3" "#A2626A" "#98A59E" "#E8B187"
## [22] "#C5A1AB" "#BFA17C"

we can see they’re really close to each other, and I doubt all but the most egregiously picky color snobs can tell the difference visually, too:

par(mfrow=c(1,2))
scales::show_col(ocr_cols)
scales::show_col(aco_hex)
par(mfrow=c(1,1))

(OK, #3D3F43 is definitely hitting my OCD as being annoyingly different than #3D3F42 on my MacBook Pro so count me in as a color snob.)

Here’s the final palette:

structure(c("#707154", "#C9C7A5", "#615D44", "#BEAE9B", "#79727D", 
"#DDC4C7", "#ABA6AA", "#E9BF8D", "#B08A6E", "#D8C8B9", "#3D3F42", 
"#B2B8C4", "#C9AC8F", "#305E53", "#AF9693", "#B0636C", "#CCCDC2", 
"#DBD1B3", "#9C656A", "#98A59F", "#E2B584", "#C5A2AB", "#BEA474"
), .Names = c("Clardic Fug", "Snowbonk", "Catbabel", "Bunfiow", 
"Ronching Blue", "Bank Butt", "Caring Tan", "Stargoon", "Sink", 
"Stummy Beige", "Dorkwood", "Flower", "Sand Dan", "Grade Bat", 
"Light Of Blast", "Grass Bat", "Sindis Poop", "Dope", "Testing", 
"Stoncr Blue", "Burblc Simp", "Stanky Bean", "Thrdly"))

This third attempt took ~5 minutes vs 60s.

FIN

Why “A-“? Well, I didn’t completely verify the colors and values matched 100% in the final submission. They are likely the same, but the best way to get something corrected by others it to put it on the internet, so there it is :-)

I’d be a better human and coder if I took the time to learn tesseract more, but I don’t have much need for OCR’ing text. It is likely worth the time to brush up on tesseract after you read this post.

Don’t use this palette! I created it mostly to beat Karthik to making the palette (I have no idea if I succeeded), to also show that you should not forego your base R roots (I could have let that be subliminal but I wasn’t trying to socially engineer you in this post) and to bring up the speed/reproducibility topic. I see no issues with manually doing tasks (like uploading an image to a web site) in certain circumstances, but it’d be an interesting topic of debate to see just what “rules” folks use to determine how much effort one should put into 100% programmatic reproducibility.

You can find the ACO file and an earlier, alternate attempt at making the palette in this gist.

mkalus shared this story from Comments on: False Creek bike lane upgrades finishing for the season.

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mkalus shared this story from Comments on: Grand chief’s 120-km walk to counter Canada 150 festivities, honour resilience.

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Virtual Insanity | MG Siegler:

MG Siegler forgets the exponential curve in breakthroughs in thinking about VR and AR:

Anyway, this all still seems inevitable. It’s just a matter of what timetable we’re looking at and looking for. Long is the answer. 

However, the usual rule of tech breakthroughs is ‘slow, slow, fast’, and I think we are at the end of the second era of slow with AR and VR. Why? 

First, people have accepted the baseline of carrying around an expensive ($500-$1000 priced) supercomputer with them wherever they go. Second, graphics chips are still improving exponentially, so the petaflops that we need to make VR work are there, now. Third, the Giants (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook) are investing untold billions (trillions?) to get ahead in the next computing era.

Siegler quotes Clay Bavor, Google’s VO of VR, who doesn’t think ‘long’ is the answer to the question of ‘when?’. Bavor first of all suggests we consolidate AR and VR into ‘immersive computing’:

Virtual and Augmented Realities: Asking the right questions and traveling the path ahead | Clay Bavor

if VR and AR are two points on a spectrum, what should we call the spectrum? Here are a few ideas — immersive computing, computing with presence, physical computing, perceptual computing, mixed reality, or immersive reality. This technology is nascent, and there’s a long way to go on our definitions, but for now, let’s call this immersive computing.

He takes a fast walk through the history of computing interfaces: wiring them, punch cards, command line, then – tada!–the graphical user interface and the desktop metaphor (which we still haven’t shaken). But immersive computing drops that design motif in favor of the real world (or virtual worlds):

With immersive computing, instead of staring at screens or constantly checking our phones, we’ll hold our heads up to the real and virtual worlds around us. We’ll be able to move things directly using our hands, or simply look at them to take action. Immersive computing will remove more of the abstractions between us and our computers. You’ll have access to information in context, with computing woven seamlessly into your environment. It’s the inevitable next step in the arc of computing interfaces.

What will it take?

To make VR more transporting, and AR more convincing and useful, everything behind these experiences must improve: displays, optics, tracking, input, GPUs, sensors, and more. As one benchmark, to achieve “retina” resolution in VR — that is, to give a person 20/20 vision across their full field of view — we’ll need roughly 30 times more pixels than we have in today’s displays. To make more refined forms of AR possible, smartphones will need more advanced sensing capabilities. Our devices will need to understand motion, space, and very precise location. We’ll need precision not in meters, but in centimeters or even millimeters.

And then he loses his optimism, and says it’s going to take a long time. Hence Siegler’s ‘long’.

My bet is that some upstart company – perhaps a group spun out of the research groups at Google or elsewhere – will come up with some enormous conceptual breakthrough based on goosing the capacity of existing devices, or some simplifying sneak attack on the models in immersive computing – perhaps harnessing AI instead of raw computing processing power? – and in the very near term we’ll see a break out that one of the Giants will scoop up, like Oculus, but better.

There’s too much going on for us to have to wait a decade.

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Let’s do this.

1. NETFLIX, THE BBC, AND THE FUTURE OF SCREENWRITING

Anthony Horowitz, for the Spectator, writes:

There have been two revolutions in television during my lifetime. The first happened in 1975 when Sony launched its Betamax video system — which allowed viewers to record shows and see them when they wanted. Of course, Betamax was found to be clunky and unreliable and it was soon replaced by VHS but, without realising it, the networks had lost control of their audience. No longer would we watch the films they wanted us to watch when they wanted us to watch them. Never again, as the technology spread, would the whole nation come together as one to find out what the newscasters had been up to on Morecambe and Wise.

He continues:

The second revolution has been even more profound — and it’s happening right now. It can be defined in one word: Netflix. Founded in 1997, Netflix is the world’s number one television and film subscription service, even if there are other companies — Hulu, Vimeo, Amazon — snapping at its heels. It has 75 million users worldwide and an annual revenue of between $7 billion and $8 billion. Think of the most talked-about programmes of the past year: Narcos, House of Cards, Stranger Things and, most recently, The Crown. All of them premiered on Netflix. As a result of a Netflix documentary, Making a Murderer, half a million people signed a petition to free its main subject, Steven Avery.

And in that single two-paragraph setup, Horowitz begins a slow yet precise of both how we are indeed in a new golden age of TV and of how the damage it might be doing to the greats of old.

A really good read.

___________________

2. WHERE OIL RIGS GO TO DIE

When a drilling platform is scheduled for destruction, it must go on a thousand-mile final journey to the breaker’s yard. As one rig proved when it crashed on to the rocks of a remote Scottish island, this is always a risky business.

An excellent long read from The Guardian (Long Reads section, natch).

___________________

3. THE PHOTOGRAPHIC EYE OF MELANIA TRUMP

This one’s a doozy.

We can all picture the gilded monstrosity of the Trump home from publicity photos (chandeliers, sad boy astride a stuffed lion, golden pillars), but it is a different place through Melania’s eyes. She takes photographs inside her house at weird, skewed angles. It is a strange effect when the half-obscured objects, chairs and ceilings, are all so golden. It looks like what a terrified little girl held captive in an ogre’s fairytale castle might see when she dares to sneak a peek through her fingers.

Melania Trump’s social media photos – treated as a body of work. What do they say about her, her surroundings, her eye?

@Kate8 is doing God’s work.

___________________

4. WHAT FILM SHOULD YOU WATCH NEXT? 

In last week’s edition, I asked one simple question: what’s your favourite movie (and why)?

I won’t go into the whys, but the whats? They’re definitely worth sharing. If you’re stuck with not knowing what film to watch one night this week, give one of these a go (it comes recommended by a like-minded person).

Readers of FTOF say:

• The Godfather
• Love, Actually
• Some Like It Hot
• The Long Kiss Goodnight
• Taxi Driver
• All The President’s Men
• Star Wars: The Force Awakens
• Smokey and The Bandit
• The Princess Bride
• Dead Poets Society
• Pelle The Conqueror
• Changing Lanes

The good news is: I’ve seen about 95% of this list (hurrah for like-minded folk!) and there are others I’m yet to enjoy.

Brilliant.

Thanks y’all. I hope you enjoy.

___________________

 5. GOODBYE MESSENGER

I have to admit, my mate Olly told me about this a good few months back but The Verge has written about it now so I feel like I should bring it to your attention (perhaps again? I may have covered it before).

In short: Facebook Messenger as we know it is a heinous piece of messaging software with ripped-off and barely-used Snapchat-esque features that take up too much screen space and frankly ruin the entire experience.

The good news is: there’s an app for that.

Welcome to Messenger Lite.

In his recent interview with Tyler Cowen, Garry Kasparov talks about AI, chess, politics, and the future of creativity. In one of the more intriguing passages, he explains that building databases for chess endgames has demonstrated how little we understand about the game and offers insight into how we know that chess-playing computer programs -- now so far beyond humans that even the world champion can only score occasionally against commodity programs -- still have a long way to improve.

He gives as an example a particular position with a king, two rooks, a knight on one side versus a king and two rooks on the other. Through the retrograde analysis used to construct endgame databases, we know that, with ideal play by both sides, the stronger side can force checkmate in 490 moves. Yes, 490. Kasparov says:

Now, I can tell you that -- even being a very decent player -- for the first 400 moves, I could hardly understand why these pieces moved around like a dance. It's endless dance around the board. You don't see any pattern, trust me. No pattern, because they move from one side to another.

At certain points I saw, "Oh, but white's position has deteriorated. It was better 50 moves before." The question is -- and this is a big question -- if there are certain positions in these endgames, like seven-piece endgames, that take, by the best play of both sides, 500 moves to win the game, what does it tell us about the quality of the game that we play, which is an average 50 moves? [...]

Maybe with machines, we can actually move our knowledge much further, and we can understand how to play decent games at much greater lengths.

But there's more. Do chess-playing computer programs, so much superior to even the best human players, understand these endgames either? I don't mean "understand" in the human sense, but only in the sense of being able to play games of that quality. Kasparov moves on to his analysis of games between the best programs:

I think you can confirm my observations that there's something strange in these games. First of all, they are longer, of course. They are much longer because machines don't make the same mistakes [we do] so they could play 70, 80 moves, 100 moves. [That is] way, way below what we expect from perfect chess.

That tells us that [the] machines are not perfect. Most of those games are decided by one of the machines suddenly. Can I call it losing patience? Because you're in a position that is roughly even. [...] The pieces are all over, and then suddenly one machine makes a, you may call, human mistake. Suddenly it loses patience, and it tries to break up without a good reason behind it.

That also tells us [...] that machines also have, you may call it, psychology, the pattern and the decision-making. If you understand this pattern, we can make certain predictions.

Kasparov is heartened by this, and it's part of the reason that he is not as pessimistic about the near-term prospects of AI as some well-known scientists and engineers are. Even with so-called deep learning, our programs are only beginning to scratch the surface of complexity in the universe. There is no particular reason to think that the opaque systems evolved to drive our cars and fly our drones will be any more perfect in their domains than our game-playing programs, and we have strong evidence from the domain of games that programs are still far from perfect.

On a more optimistic note, advances in AI give us an opportunity to use programs to help us understand the world better and to improve our own judgment. Kasparov sees this in chess, in the big gaps between the best human play, the best computer play, and perfect play in even relatively simple positions; I wrote wistfully about this last year, prompted by AlphaGo's breakthrough. But the opportunity is much more valuable when we move beyond playing games, as Cowen alluded in an aside during Kasparov's explanation: Imagine how bad our politics will look in comparison to computer programs that do it well! We have much to learn.

As always, this episode of Conversations with Tyler was interesting and evocative throughout. If you are a chess player, there is an special bonus. The transcript includes a pointer to Kasparov's Immortal Game against Veselin Topalov at Wijk aan Zee in 1999, along with a discussion of some of Kasparov's thoughts on the game beginning with the pivotal move 24. Rxd4. This game, an object of uncommon beauty, will stand as an eternal reminder why, even in the face of advancing AI, it will always matter that people play and compete and create.

~~~~

If you enjoyed this entry, you might also like Old Dreams Live On. It looks more foresightful now that AlphaGo has arrived.

The Economist writes about who’s wrong when flyers end up in the wrong cities. This has actually happened to me! Probably 7-8 years ago, it was an Air Canada flight from New York to Montreal, and I accidentally boarded the one to Toronto. The mistake was realized when we were on the ground, but had pulled away from gate. Being Canadian, they were exceedingly nice and asked me to stay on the flight but they’d find me one from Toronto to Montreal after I landed.

WeChat recently released its hongbao data on May 20, China’s unofficial Valentine’s Day, providing us with a glimpse of Chinese enthusiasm towards using the digital red envelope as a way to convey their love and emotions to their family members and friends.

In China, the number combination “520” has come to stand for “I love you” (五二零wǔèrlíng sounds like 我爱你 wǒaìnǐ). May 20 has become a festival for Chinese to express love and affections to their beloved ones. While gift-sending is a traditional way of conveying love, digital red envelopes have become popular with the rise of WeChat hongbao in recent years.

This year, WeChat set ten amount types of hongbao for confessions of love, with the value ranging from RMB 0.52 to RMB 520. Between midnight and 6 pm, the most popular hongbao amount was RMB 5.20, with 102 million such red envelopes sent, followed by RMB 52 (roughly 40 million red envelopes sent) and RMB 520 (roughly 12 million).

In less than one minute past midnight, as many as 1.38 million digital red envelopes were sent out on WeChat, making it the peak time for hongbao-sending as people can hardly wait to express their affections.

Shenzhen saw the most red envelopes sent out across the nation during the first minute peak time, with 60,600 sent. And the city sent out a total of 5.61 million WeChat hongbao during the day, the most among major Chinese cities. The city is trailed by Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Beijing in terms of the number of hongbao sent.

The luckiest individual is a 27-year-old girl from central China’s Huaihua city, who received 811 red envelopes, while the first lucky money red envelope of the amount RMB 520 was sent by a 41-year-old Shanghai man.

In terms of age, the post-80s generation constitutes the main force of the hongbao-senders, representing 35% of the total. The post-90s and the post-70s account for 29% and 26% of the total respectively, while the post-60s represented 8%.

The figures actually reflect how popular WeChat red envelopes have become in China. Since it went online on Dec. 28, 2013, the feature has proven to be a resounding success in creating more payment demand, shaping user habits, and increasing user engagement towards WeChat’s mobile payment system WeChat Pay, which took a 37.02% share in Q4 2016 of the country’s third-party mobile payment market, and sees the gap with the top player Alipay (54.1% share) keeping narrowing.

How Tales of ‘Flippers’ Led to a Housing Bubble | Robert Schiller:

Schiller thinks the narrative of house flipping precipitated the recession, a kind of tulip mania: 

Real home prices rose 75 percent from February 1997 to December 2005, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller National Home Price Index, corrected for inflation by the Consumer Price Index. And then, from 2005 to 2012, real prices reversed course, falling to just 12 percent above their 1997 level. In the years since 2012, they have climbed 29 percent, about halfway back to their 2005 peak. This is a roller coaster in national home prices — it has been even scarier in some more volatile cities — yet we have no clarity on why it happened.

The problem for economists is that these changes don’t correspond to movements in the usual suspects: interest rates, building costs, population or rents. The Consumer Price Index for Rent of Primary Residence, compiled by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics and corrected for inflation, went up only 8 percent in 1997 to 2005, so unmet demand for housing services can’t explain the huge increase in real home prices. It doesn’t explain the 29 percent rise in real home prices since 2012 either, because inflation-adjusted rents increased only 10 percent in that period. So what has been driving the wild ride in home prices?

I believe the price swings have something to do with the changing mentality of the times, changes caused by narratives that have gone viral and swept across the population. Looking for answers in such popular stories contrasts starkly with the prominent approach of modeling people as though they react logically to economic forces. But a less orthodox approach can be quite useful.

One thing is clear: The prevalent narratives of 1997 to 2005 did not include the concept of a housing bubble, not at first. A computer search using ProQuest or Google Ngrams shows that the phrase “housing bubble” was hardly used until 2005, the end of the boom. What is a bubble? It typically includes the notion that, spurred by the public’s expectation of ever further price increases, demand eventually reaches levels that cannot be sustained, and so the enthusiasm wanes and the bubble collapses. But that thought was just not on many people’s minds then, the evidence suggests.

Instead, during the 1997 to 2005 boom there were multitudes of narratives about smart investors who were bold enough to take a position in the market. To single out one strand, recall the stories of flippers who would buy a house, fix it up, and resell it within months at a huge profit. These stories appear to have been broadly exciting to people who didn’t flip houses themselves but who appear to have begun to think that stretching a little and buying a house with a large mortgage would make them wise investors.

As good an explanation as any.

Opinion | Donald Trump, Establishment Sellout | Ross Douthat:

It’s strange – at least to me – that one of the best chroniclers of Trump’s betrayal of his many supports is Ross Douthat, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative Republican. But when his knives start flying, Trump gets flayed:

The various outsider groups that cast their lot with him [Trump] — from working-class ex-Democrats to antiwar conservatives to free-trade skeptics to build-the-wall immigration hawks to religious conservatives fearful for their liberties — have seen him pick very few difficult fights on their behalf.

To working-class voters he promised a big infrastructure bill and better health insurance than Obamacare. But his legislative agenda has been standard establishment-Republican fare — spending cuts to pay for upper-bracket tax cuts, rinse, repeat.

To critics of American military adventurism he promised an end to Libya and Iraq-style interventions, a rebalancing toward Moscow, perhaps even a shake-up of NATO’s architecture. But he’s mostly handed foreign policy over to his military advisers (a pretty deep-state group, as such things go), which means that so far it resembles Obama’s except with more cruise missiles and saber-rattling.

Religious conservatives got Neil Gorsuch because he was a pedigreed insider. But they aren’t getting anything but symbolism on religious liberty, because Trump doesn’t want to pick a fight with the elite consensus on gay and transgender rights. And then go down the longer list and the establishment keeps winning: Planned Parenthood was funded in the budget deal and the border wall was not, the promised NAFTA rollback looks more likely to be a toothless renegotiation, Trump’s occasional talk about breaking up the big banks is clearly just talk, we haven’t torn up the Iran deal or ditched the Paris climate accords, and more.

Trump might still like to do some of the things he talked about on the campaign trail (his pining for a détente with Russia remains, um, palpable) and a few of them might actually still happen (some sort of wall-like structure will eventually go up, I assume).

But on most issues Trump’s promised war with the establishment has been fizzling almost from day one.

So in his escalating clashes with Beltway institutions, what we’re watching is not the “deep state” trying to reassert control over policy and bring a tribune of the people low. If so I would be more often on Trump’s side (as I welcomed Brexit and entertained the case for Marine Le Pen), because populism needs a seat at the table of power in the West, and the people who voted for our president do deserve a tribune.

But Trump is not that figure. As a populist he’s a paper tiger, too lazy to figure out what policies he should champion and too incompetent and self-absorbed to fight for them.

Bravo, Ross. Bravo.

It’s far more fun to make the big announcement and get a lot of attention than it is to sustain interest and overcome hurdles along the way.

This makes big announcements pretty much worthless. It also makes really pushing ahead with the task long after the attention has shifted elsewhere incredibly valuable.

People lose interest even in the very biggest projects.

Most people give up when they hit the dip.

Just in the past year, I’ve seen people give up on wikis, events, slack channels, video series, weekly AMAs and potentially game-changing projects because attention shifted elsewhere.

Don’t give up. The hype cycle is real for community initiatives too.

Just because attention shifts doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong. The majority are always seeking the next quick thrill. It’s going to take time for people to change their habits, accept you as part of the field’s landscape, and want to contribute to your creation.

You’re going to be persuading people one by one to buy into your vision.

I worry today there are far more people willing to start a community project than complete one. Some people just want the applause. No applause? They move on to something else.

True believers don’t give up so easily. They know how important it is to be working on projects which will shape the community for years to come. Trust yourself and keep working at it.