The Confusatory

Football is destroying itself

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:05:00 -0800

(via Kottke) Grantland has two articles, one by Jonah Lehrer and one by Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier, about how concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) may end the sport of football in the near future.

Remember “punch-drunk” boxers? It turns out they were literally pummeling their brains into an Alzheimer’s-like state of neuron death. Chronic exposure to concussions and subconcussive impacts tears apart the brain’s neurons and eventually causes it to destroy itself from the inside out. No one knows why or how, but it’s becoming clear that it’s trauma-induced brain damage, and it’s completely irreversible.

Why Science is Failing Us

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:12:52 -0800

Why Science is Failing Us:

Science is all about telling a story that fits a set of data points. These stories cut corners and ignore small pieces that don’t fit, because the complexity of explaining every bit puts you in a bind to figure out the whole gig, down to every last detail. The problem is, sometimes those small details matter a whole lot, and it’s why medicine (and, in my opinion, economics) is having a tough time understanding, much less improving, the modern world. (via paul)

Vladimir Nabokov’s Transparent Things is a lovely read. The Kindle sample caught me right at...

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:18:09 -0800

Vladimir Nabokov’s Transparent Things is a lovely read. The Kindle sample caught me right at the start, and it’s delightfully short and can be read in one sitting. Despite its brevity, it’s a well-written novel with the same flowing prose and long paragraphs, both interspersed with asides and ambiguous changes in subject, that make me miss David Foster Wallace. It’s only 120 pages, so buy a copy and just read it already.

The really tough problem of innovation is waste disposal.

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:18:56 -0800

The really tough problem of innovation is waste disposal.:

via timoni:

“The way to have good ideas is to have lots of ideas.” That’s one of my favorite axioms and, in my experience, it is universally true. I have many ideas, every day, and some of them are very good. Mostly, though, they are bad.

— The Cooper Journal: Innovation is a waste disposal problem

Give Me Something To Read's 2011 Highlights

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:54:59 -0800

givemesomethingtoread:

Here are Give Me Something To Read’s highlights of the year. This list is comprised of my favourites and reader favourites, selected from articles posted here in 2011 (limited to those originally published in 2011). Open this post in your browser to make use of the Read Later button accompanying each link.
Read More

I’ve read over half of these, and every one was great. In case you’re nothing like me and have a totally empty Instapaper queue, this should fill it up with some very interesting writing.

This Week's Reading

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:08:15 -0800

Jon Stewart and the dichotomy of accidentally becoming a serious news anchor while being a comedian.

There Is No Time in Waterloo: A McSweeney’s short story from their “Life in 2024” issue. Not science fiction, just “futurism-ish”. (I read this online and went to look up which issue it’s in; I recognized the cover from my own copy sitting on my nightstand.)

Mother Earth Mother Board: Neal Stephenson follows the world’s first circumnavigational fiber-optic cable on its journey around the globe, via sea floor and land passage. Written before his staggeringly long books (Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, and Anathem), it’s too long to call it a “short-form” piece, but it is incredibly well-written and well-edited, so settle down with this on a Kindle and have fun.

Informal Foursquare Rules

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:16:40 -0800

Places you shouldn’t check in:

Where you sleep. It’s no fun being mayor of your own flat: you live there. Let your friend that visits all the time earn it. (Important note: this includes the house of your significant other/fling/one night stand. It’s weird to be at a friend’s house and have their roommate’s friend-with-benefits check in (and even weirder when they’re mayor of the place). )
Where you work. No one cares that you went to work today.

Place you should check in:

Everywhere else.

"The governor’s plan slashes $3.1 billion from an estimated $58.8 billion state budget largely..."

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:45:24 -0800

“The governor’s plan slashes $3.1 billion from an estimated $58.8 billion state budget largely by cutting funding to city governments and services… The Ohio Consumers’ Counsel is slated to lose 51 percent. The Department of Education loses 10.2 percent. A local think tank estimates that 51,000 state jobs are at stake… [Kasich] won the 2010 election, barely, on a job creation platform. His budget is called “The Jobs Budget.””

- Ohio’s War on the Middle Class | Mother Jones

The Single Best Thing You Can Do for Your Health - The Atlantic

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 11:00:06 -0800

The Single Best Thing You Can Do for Your Health - The Atlantic:

This went around Twitter a few days ago, and deserves a link. I’ll sum it up simply, though the video is short, cute, and worth watching: “Can you limit your sitting and sleeping to just 23 1/2 hours a day? 30 minutes of walking makes a huge difference in your quality of life.”

I got a Fitbit a few months ago, and simply love it. Having a step count at the end of my day that says, “Yeah, you walked a bunch!”, or, “Well, maybe not today, but tomorrow” gives me a tiny but valuable bit of information about my daily activity levels that I’m constantly evaluating to stay healthy.

Anyone know where I can find a field of sunflowers to...

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 10:34:06 -0800

Anyone know where I can find a field of sunflowers to photograph?

This is not a shovel. Creative Review - The Art of the Factory

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 11:56:22 -0800

This is not a shovel. Creative Review - The Art of the Factory

Prometheus - Movie Trailers - iTunes

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 18:47:53 -0800

Prometheus - Movie Trailers - iTunes:

Firefly? Is that you?

socmoth: This furniture will blow your mind. Simple and...

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 10:36:06 -0800

socmoth:

This furniture will blow your mind. Simple and multifunctional.

Truly modern space-saving furniture design. New manufacturing techniques and engineering advances make it possible to have high quality and high functioning multi-use objects in your house.

who killed videogames? (a ghost story) | insert credit

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:28:12 -0800

who killed videogames? (a ghost story) | insert credit:

This is a four chapter short story about videogames, compulsion, and a bunch of other things. Find the time to read this, ok?

iTunes's iCloud Cache

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 18:05:00 -0800

I had a few hours to kill on the plane on Sunday, so I thought I’d take a look at how iTunes does caching for iCloud songs. This is a new caching mechanism in iTunes 10.5, and only applies to songs you start playing from iCloud in iTunes without hitting the download button. (Downloaded songs are treated like regular store purchases.)

Temporary files from iCloud are stored in ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.iTunes/PlayCache. At the top level of this directory is PlayCacheInfo.xml, a file which describes the total cache size, the account they’re from (they store the DSID, which is the numerical version of your Apple ID), the number of items in the cache, timestamps like last-delete-check, last-load-time, and last-written, a path to the library it’s associated with, and an array of items. Each item contains its access date, its iCloud ID (an int that presumably uniquely identifies this file in iCloud’s music storage system), and its size in bytes. PlayCacheInfo.xml appears to be written out when quitting iTunes.

Files are saved on disk in PlayCache in a fan-out structure which looks like the following:

When a file starts streaming from iCloud, it’s stored in a Downloads folder under the hexadecimal DSID folder. Inside Downloads is a temporary folder named for the file being downloaded (in the rough format of __.tmp), and inside that folder is a download.m4a file and an Info.plist containing some metadata about the m4a file. The file appears to not be a valid m4a file and won’t open in Fission or iTunes (though iTunes is able to play this same file as it’s downloading from iCloud).

The Info.plist contains metadata like the DSID (an int) for the iCloud account downloading the file, the expected full file size in bytes (an int), an iCloud ID for the file (an int), a download-file-name (where the downloaded file is being saved on disk) (a string), a downloadID (a string), an id (which is always 0 for me) (an int), a flag for is-cloud-redownload (a boolean), and an MD5 hash (a string). It also contains a dictionary called partial-md5, which contains a key called partial-md5-info (a string) and another key called partial-md5-offset (an int).

partial-md5-offset looks to be a byte offset for doing a rolling MD5 hash of the file. It’s a 320 byte string with some constant but non-zero padding in the first 26 bytes, followed by some md5-ish hashes. It initially starts with 26 bytes of padding, a 40 byte hash, and zero padding to the remainder of the string when the file is a placeholder file that iTunes can’t start playing. After the file is more fully downloaded, the rest of the string after the first 26 bytes contains a series of hashes, and the offset increases towards the end of the file. I can’t figure out where these partial or full-ish hashes are coming from though, as their byte offset perfectly matches the file’s current size in bytes, and the hash of the file at that size doesn’t match any of the stored hashes in the string. Maybe it’s the hash for the next incoming chunk? Also interesting is the md5 key: the value of it doesn’t match the fully-downloaded file’s hash.

Open questions:

How does iTunes use and/or calculate the partial hashes?
What is stored in partial-md5-info? What’s the 26 byte padding, and what’s the rest of it?
Why doesn’t md5 match the actual MD5 hash for the fully-downloaded file?
What’s the naming rules for the fanout directory structure? (I’ve only downloaded a few files and it’s hard to suss out thus far. I’m guessing it’s somehow based on the song’s iCloud ID, since PlayCacheInfo.xml doesn’t exist when you first start downloading these files and contains no directory path information for cached files once it is written out, and the directory paths for the cached files don’t change after deleting the cache and recaching the files.)

"I like to urge designers to always ask themselves: “Does this logo look like a penis?” The answer..."

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 16:35:16 -0800

“I like to urge designers to always ask themselves: “Does this logo look like a penis?” The answer has to be a resounding “No”. If there is just a slight hesitation, then it probably does look like a penis.”

- StumbleUpon Stumbles on Hidden Shape - Brand New

Why Spotify can never be profitable: The secret demands of record labels - GigaOM

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:18:07 -0800

Why Spotify can never be profitable: The secret demands of record labels - GigaOM:

As a music consumer, I love services like Spotify and Rdio: they let me listen to vast amounts of music and seemingly depthless back catalogues. But as someone who enjoys new bands, I love concerts: they seem to be one of the more reliable ways to send non-trivial sums of money to acts you like.

[daily dose of imagery] - Square Windows

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 20:18:00 -0800

[daily dose of imagery] - Square Windows

Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 18:13:47 -0800

Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction:

You’re reading Bret Victor, right? (You should be.)

Economics focus: House of horrors, part 2 - The Economist

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:38:42 -0800

Economics focus: House of horrors, part 2 - The Economist:

… home prices are overvalued by about 25% or more in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, New Zealand, Britain, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden. Indeed, in the first four of those countries housing looks more overvalued than it was in America at the peak of its bubble.