IMO

The Color Run - Chicago http://thecolorrun.com/chicago/ It was...

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 16:38:00 -0500

Pre-race

Post-race

Katie

Montrose Harbor

Bryan

The Color Run - Chicago

It was our first race ever and we had an absolute blast. I’ll be cleaning paint out of my ears for weeks but it was totally worth it. What a fun morning!

Fish Memory available at Shirt.Woot Too perfect. Just snagged...

Sun, 20 May 2012 10:56:29 -0500

Fish Memory available at Shirt.Woot

Too perfect. Just snagged one for Katie.

(via shirtoid)

Summer 2007 I decided to start making a comprehensive list of...

Sat, 19 May 2012 01:18:00 -0500

Summer 2007 I decided to start making a comprehensive list of all the movies I have ever seen. Today the list reached 1000. The only thing more “me” than a list of movies is a collection of stats that describe a list of movies. So here they are.

1000 movies
34 Best Picture Winners
196 Released Before I Was Born
13 Over 3 Hours Long
Total Runtime of 77 days 11 hrs and 21 min
252 Seen Since September 1st, 2009 (the Katie effect)

Now let’s see if I can get to 2000 before I turn 40!

What artist was born and then buried in the small town of 9 mile...

Thu, 10 May 2012 06:15:00 -0500

What artist was born and then buried in the small town of 9 mile (population 300) and recently included among Rolling Stone’s top 15 artists? Don’t know? Neither did Katie and I. But we didn’t need to because by the time that came up as the final question of trivia we had already amassed an insurmountable lead. Katie suggested we try bar trivia as a team of two at F O’Mahony’s, just down the street. I’d say it was an unqualified success. We walked away with the grand prize, 3 bottles of booze (pictured). Will team “Smell the Glove” repeat next week? A: Bob Marley

Dream Journal #6

Wed, 09 May 2012 06:59:00 -0500

Before his stand up routine, Aziz Ansari solicited $1500 bids to vote on whether the content of the show would be that of his smiley and goofy self, or a rough and angry alter-ego (not wholly unlike his Funny People character, Randy, which he has been known to bring out from time to time). I accidentally put too many zeros on my check, and he decided that $15,000 was enough for me to now have complete creative control of his routine for the evening. The resulting show was terrible. A wonderful lesson in the pitfalls of commissioning art.

Dream Journal #5

Tue, 01 May 2012 20:34:30 -0500

Had a dream that Katie and I were gliding through the air trying to infiltrate an heavily guarded fortress. We came up short and fell in the moat where we were attacked by alligators. I did my best to fend them off but we quickly became overwhelmed. At that point I told Katie, “This is your dream. You need to control it and move us to safety. If you can’t get that done very quickly I am going to have to just wake us up.”

When I couldn’t wait any longer I did just that, forcefully squinted my eyes shut until I woke up, then I turned over to Katie and started pushing on her shoulder, hair, and cheek trying to wake her up so she would not be devoured by the alligators. Eventually I just reached up and pried her eyelids open. She abruptly woke up, very confused, and looked at me like I was out of my mind. And I was. It was only at that moment that I came to my senses and remembered that shared dreaming isn’t a real thing.

I didn’t say another word, just rolled over and went back to sleep. Katie has no memory of being woken up. Thank goodness.

ESPN.com was pretty jazzed that one of the few African American...

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:58:28 -0500

ESPN.com was pretty jazzed that one of the few African American players did something highlight worthy yesterday, MLB’s Jackie Robinson day. Sadly the odds were not in their favor going into the day.

It is fantastic that 65 years after Jackie Robinson played his first game Matt Kemp is tearing it up as one of the best players in the game. However after 65 years how satisfied are we with the fact that just 8% of MLB players are of African American descent? 5% of pitchers, 0% of catchers, 11% of infielders, and 29% of outfielders according to 2010 data collected by UCF’s Richard Lapchick.

Clearly the first is worth celebrating, as are all those who have played since. It just seems like we can do better.

newest data

My iPhone knows I’m laughing harder than I am letting on

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 11:21:00 -0500

My iPhone knows I’m laughing harder than I am letting on

Dream Journal #4

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 08:23:00 -0500

Had a dream that I was up working all last night. Woke up exhausted.

If you’ve ever played the arcade classic Space Invaders,...

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 12:22:00 -0500

If you’ve ever played the arcade classic Space Invaders, you must have noticed those pesky aliens coming at you notably faster as the game goes on. This wasn’t an intentional part of the game at first, but actually became a core piece of its design. According to an interview with creator Toshihiro Nishikado, the hardware only allowed him to move one Invader every 1/60 second. Functionally, this meant that the set speed of the aliens would get faster as less of them appeared on screen. What audiences perceived as the game speeding up to make it more challenging was actually the game’s inherent slowdown fading as fewer enemies were eating up the game’s hardware restrictions. Now it’s an iconic part of gaming history.

(via 1UP)

This is absolutely amazing to me. It is crazy to think of something so integral to the gameplay of this and future games was a prouct of a hardware limitation. Although I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing a lot lately. Games live firmly within the hardware they are written for and played on.

Guitar Hero and Rock Band owe some of their difficulty the their hardware. No, I’m not talking about the parade of shoddy peripherals, I’m actually referring to the fabled strum limit allegedly introduced as an artifact of the NTSC encoding scheme common to US released games and game consoles. NTSC has a lower input per second limit than the European PAL system and this can get in the way when you are attempting to strum Trogdor, at over 17 notes per second.

What about when you attempt to take a game across not just regions but across generations? Recently there has been an uproar about how poorly the Silent Hill franchise (originally released on Sony’s Playstation 2) was updated for the 2012 release of Silent Hill HD Collection. As the forefather of the survival horror genre, Silent Hill lead with atmosphere. It is the atmosphere that is poorly recrated on the HD “update”. Check out the series of links on this detailed review, specifically the fog wall.

Like the radio, the fog is iconic to Silent Hill and it helps define the game’s aesthetic, but in Collection the fog has been downgraded to an afterthought. Originally the fog served a dual purpose: to establish atmosphere and hide imperfections in the rendering of the game environment. But now it does neither. The fog line is incredibly stark as you are traveling outdoors and at times it looked like a large white wall of fog was racing away from James. It didn’t look natural. In fact, one of the scariest elements of the game has been turned into a cartoonish caricature. To be fair: the mechanics of the fog may act the same way in the original but, unlike Collection, there’s a whole lot of fog in that game to mask the wall. Fog completely fills the screen in the original game, making it extremely difficult to see buildings, monsters and objects not directly in front of you – but now the fog is only a minor inconvenience.

High def upgrades isn’t just for games. Blu-ray is home to hundreds of cleaned up classics. Remastering can reduce grain, improve contrast, and sharpen audio tracks. But is that something we should always want? Many great directors embraced their limitations to provide a rich experience. Would Texas Chainsaw Massacre have the same effect if rendered in full HD?

What about 3D remakes? Or color? Or even sound? The Artist just won the Oscar for best picture without any of these things. I think Ian Malcom put it best when he said “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

The fictional Jurassic Park character is right. And that was just hours before “remakes” tore his new friends into little pieces.

So how did my Hunger Games trade pan out after opening...

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 11:55:00 -0500

So how did my Hunger Games trade pan out after opening week?

March 21: (25000) @ 331.62 (four week total)

boxofficemojo reports:

The odds were definitely in The Hunger Games favor this weekend: the big screen adaptation of the immensely popular young adult novel opened to an enormous estimated $155 million, which ranks third all-time behind Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 ($169.2 million) and The Dark Knight ($158.4 million). Remarkably, it debuted above all of the Twilight movies, and it also topped Alice in Wonderland ($116.1 million) for highest debut ever for a non-sequel.

So I doubled down at the new level

March 25: (32469) @ 418.50

May the odds be ever in your favor

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:07:00 -0500

Who’s excited for Friday’s release of the Hunger Games movie! Everyone right? Well if it is indeed everyone I could be in some trouble.

Hollywood Stock Exchange is a website that lets you play with fake money (HSX bucks), betting on the box office success (or failure) of all new releases. I have been playing for a while and betting on the Hunger Games just seemed like the thing to do. I guess I’m some sort of capital noble distanced from the realities of the outer territories right? Either way, here is what I put on.

The Hunger Games security, ticker HGAME, will mark out at a value precisely equal to the number of millions of dollars the movie makes at the domestic (US) box office during its first four weeks in theaters. In the last month speculation has driven the value of the asset up to over 331. So people think this movie is going to absolutely kill it in the US in its first four weeks. I think they are right, but 331 sounds a bit high to me.

So I headed over to boxofficemojo.com and pulled up the list of the highest grossing March releases of all time. Alice and Wonderland tops out the list with total domestic gross of 334M, 293M in its first four weeks. Ok, so if The Hunger Games lands 331M in its first four weeks it will almost certainly be the most successful March release of all time.

Well what if we throw summer and Christmas releases into the mix? Harry Potter 7.2 recently raked it in with 343M through its first four weeks. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen owned summer 2009 with 363M through its first four weeks. In fact scanning the list of all-time highest grossing PG-13 movies it is almost exclusively James Cameron and sequels!

I know The Hunger Games has a huge following (Katie and I have our tickets for Friday night) but 331 million is going to be a tough mountain to climb.

All that being said, tune back in for what will inevitably be a rage filled post when this thing cracks 400M in a blink. Because after all, what the hell do I know.

What do you think? Are you going to see it in the next month? Will it crack 331 million in it’s first four weeks in the US?

So which company do you think provided this chart with their...

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 22:14:33 -0500

So which company do you think provided this chart with their January NPD spin?

Kids got legs!

“Funny until it hits way to close to home” meme of...

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:50:00 -0500

“Funny until it hits way to close to home” meme of the day…

Intermediate Male Ultimate Player

"The ability to split atoms and extract energy from them was one of the more remarkable scientific..."

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:39:00 -0500

“The ability to split atoms and extract energy from them was one of the more remarkable scientific achievements of the 20th century, widely seen as world-changing. Intuitively one might expect such a scientific wonder either to sweep all before it or be renounced, rather than end up in a modest niche, at best stable, at worst dwindling. But if nuclear power teaches one lesson, it is to doubt all stories of technological determinism. It is not the essential nature of a technology that matters but its capacity to fit into the social, political and economic conditions of the day.”

- Oliver Morton of The Economist

The Modern Family Cast shooting on location at Disneyland this...

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 11:30:38 -0600

The Modern Family Cast shooting on location at Disneyland

this collage should reduce my wife to a overwhelmed puddle of glee

(via mynameisdug)

About 5 million people worldwide have a birthday of February 29th

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:37:00 -0600

…or so says the “news” ticker in my office building’s elevator. I found myself very intrigued by this statistic. Let’s break it down a bit here. I saw this less than 2 min ago and I am going to compose at the keyboard so this could be sloppy but bear with me.

First let’s recognize that the probably of being born on any given day is the same across all days. I understand this may not be the case. But I would be stunned if it was wildly wrong, so I’m fine operating under that assumption. However, notice I said days not dates. And that is an important distinction, especially today. That is of course because today’s date only occurs every 4 years and a day, or 1461 days, which is nearly 1/4th as often as any other date on the calendar.

So now we know that about 1 out of every 1460 births occur on February 29th. Well with an global population of roughly 7 billion people, that would predict that about 4791000 of them were born on February 29th. I assume my elevator got to this point, decided to round up, and reported 5 million people celebrating birthdays today. Not a bad estimate. Seems to check out.

But can we do better? Absolutely.

The biggest problem I see with our 4.80 million number is this: it assumes that there are an equal number of living 1,5,9,13,17,21,… year olds as there are 4,8,12,16,20,24,… year olds. Do you see what I am getting at? All of our leap day babies were born in 2008, 2004, 2000, … You know, leap years. This means that as of today (or even better, as of yesterday) people born on leap day are, on average, older than people not born on leap days.

This in its self would not be a problem. After all, take any 4 year bucket of consecutive birth years and you will still find roughly an equal number of birthdays on any given day. But here is the kicker, not all of those people are equally likely to be alive, specifically when you look at those born 1,2,3, and 4 years ago.

The sad truth is that infant death is a huge threat, especially when we extend our scope beyond the United States, to developing countries without adequate healthcare. A quick Google search yielded a world wide population pyramid for every 5 years since 1950 (as well as projections out to 2050). The pyramid shape itself illustrates exactly my point. Death rate decreases as age increases and this trend is especially evident among the youngest population groups.

As a quick side note: It is interesting to note that this trend has grown less severe over the last 6 decades. No doubt a tribute to the technological progress we have seen in the medical field.

So finally we can get a sense for how to better calculate the number of people who are celebrating their birthday today. The figure we are looking for is the number of people who are precisely 1461, 2922, 4383, 5844, … days old. This numbers can be pulled from our population pyramid. At the moment all I have is the plot. Actually finding those numbers and adding them up would take some significant work and my lunch break is over. Suffice it to say that our new number would be south of 4.8 million, already a good 100K people short of the 5 million presented by the news ticker. But we will excuse the small margin of error.

As we just learned, the number of people alive born on February 29th should boom today, and then “erode” at a high but decreasing rate for the next four years, and then boom again.

A depressing thought for sure. Probably good of them to not include that on the monitor in the elevator.

What do you think? Can we do even better?

This flash game is fantastic. Can you beat my current high score...

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 21:23:00 -0600

This flash game is fantastic. Can you beat my current high score of 69:54?

Leon: The Professional During the filming of final scenes which...

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 20:39:04 -0600

Leon: The Professional

During the filming of final scenes which involved dozens of police cars, a robber from a nearby store encountered the movie set by accident and surrendered himself to a bunch of uniformed extras

Is that the coolest piece of movie trivia or what!

The Zesty Lumberjack Plain BagelFried EggBaconGrilled...

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 17:18:03 -0600

The Zesty Lumberjack

Plain Bagel
Fried Egg
Bacon
Grilled Salami
Cheddar Cheese
Tomato
Chipotle Mayo

This has been one of my favorite creations ever since I first had it at a small coffe shop in my college town of Williamstown, MA. Unfortunately the place burned to the ground my sophomore year. But the Zesty Lumberjack lives on! Try it out sometime. Let me know what you think. And please share any successful variations.