The explanation at the top is part of a nicely crafted guided tour — a good blend of sparse text, tight navigation, and what so far seems to be an experience crafted well enough to not require much explanation. When I got my first 40 cards, I was tickled to see old timer names like Cotton Minahan and Pug Bennett:

(I was also happy to think how happy Cotton would have been to pull down $1MM. Probably wouldn’t have been bitter that Batista was getting $5MM).

After setting up my team — The Vishniak Sting — my first challenge was with the 1906 White Sox. BaseballBoss calculates the results of every at bat (presumably pitches as well, but can’t tell yet) and gives you a very entertaining score card.

I was crushed to see the Sting get crushed - 6-0 - but check it out. Ed Walsh, a 1906 pitcher who still holds the record for the lowest career ERA (1.82), pitched the full 9.0 innings! It’s an honor to lose to an ironman like that.

You can also read a highlights play list:

What a dream come true for real baseball fans this must be. I managed to find (through Google Book Search) a Roger Angell passage I remembered about the beauty of the box score for true fans. Rather than text, I got a pic of the page:

I am oddly moved by this whole thing.

The thread of the article is that the author has noticed that while he has become quite adept at scanning a staggering amount of information and number of articles on the web, he has become less and less able to finish books or even articles. Friends of his have noticed that as well.

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

The article, and many of the people cited in it, speak in clear tones of worry that we are losing something, but it avoids being a tedious baby-boomer lament. Instead, it has a nice survey of how we have always lamented new technologies (Socrates worries that texts will undermine memory and deep learning in The Phaedras, Nietszche’s typewriter causes speculation about what his real voice is, people worry that the printing press will make knowledge too cheap).

It goes deeper, though, into how we have always thought about our consciousness and how our consciousness may be shaped, by our technologies. We used to think of our brains as clocks, then machines, now computers . . .

There is a woe to us argument:

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

This puts me in conflict. My tech side, which abhors tech laments rolls my eyes, but my conspiratorial said “uh-oh.” Then there is a genuinely sad part:

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

This upset in ways that upset me: I am no longer even a trailing member of the digital vanguard.  (And the fact that I found the article through a sample of the magazine on the Kindle — the device that was going to get me reading again — is not a comfort.)

The second was a picture of my dog, Maggie, shoving her head into a hill of snow to pursue a scent she had picked up. I love canine moments of abandon.

I didn’t really learn anything concrete about my urge to share, but I did remember that urge to “put it out there” cuz I thought it was good to have it out there and not just on a disk drive in my closet (where pictures eventually must be archived).

I remember, in the early 1990s, reading a NYT review of a Bobbie Ann Mason collection of short stories, in which the reviewer said something like “Mason is terribly sympathetic to small-town people who live away from the things they love. They put up antennae to catch whatever signals they can of a life of the mind that exists only distantly for them” . . . I can’t find that line and am only sure about the putting up antennae part, but I think the urge to share is connected to that kind of reach — send out signals, wait for signals. Put it out there.

This shape reads: “Look at the short pants acting like binoculars dreaming of a hand drum.” This was my favorite, but there were more and they were interconnected, check them out on my flickrstream.

Though I’m totally digging the more robust system tray area. Nice idea to take advantage of better bigger monitors with some widget-y stuff.

There are also a bunch of screenshots with some wheel interfaces:

I don’t know exactly how it works, but I like the idea of a wheel that reflects resource usage and other statuses. Not sure I’m buying the search in middle bottom — there’s a lot of user inertia to reach up and to the right for a search box.

There’s also an intriguing, dense screenshot:

There were no higher res images available of this one, so I couldn’t get a closer look at what’s happening at the bottom . . . but it looked potentially cool. It’s always alarming to see the faux 3D wheels which obscure significant amounts of information (my main gripe with the cover flow mode: cool but thin on data), but I think I’ve seen these kind of pre-release experiments before and they get nixed before release.

UnitedforAfrica maps reported incidents:

The park is named after Dr. Ronald Ervin McNair. I assumed that this was an inter-war physician who had done some service like setting up a clinic or been a benefactor of the community’s arts efforts. It turns out that McNair was, among other things, an astronaut on the ill-fated Challenger mission of 1986. The memorial, sadly neglected (like the park it is in), is pretty cool:

It’s a nice mix of air & space design, interesting sides to a modern personality (the karate kick next to the professorial holding forth confused me and a person standing nearby), and traditional monumental bronze imagery.

Other interesting things about McNair:

• Nichelle Nichols, Lt Uhura of Star Trek, was helping NASA recruit more diverse candidates to the space program in the 70s and McNair was one of those recruits
• He had a black belt in a form of karate and was regional champion several years
• He was an accomplished saxophonist and composed a piece of music with Jean-Michel Jarre before the 1986 mission. (McNair was supposed to record the saxophone part on the mission.)

Things learned from the trip:

• go that extra step — I’ve been in that park many times but never took the extra steps to find out who it was named after
• ride a bike — having a bike meant that I didn’t have to take extra steps to see this
• the internet needs a memorial project to remember people who inspired the dedication of parks, but not quite enough to maintain those parks.

But will it be my FB friend?

Jupiter was my big “discovery” when JRube got me a telescope for Christmas years ago.  I was on the roof of my Brooklyn apartment, in February and was drawing pictures of what I saw (like Galileo!), and found four dots — one big one with three smaller ones — all on the same plane.  Remembered that’s how Galileo found the moons, check my maps and sure enough it was Jupiter.   A few weeks after that, after consulting maps and schedules, I was able to see the red spot.  Nothing like the clarity of the photo above . . . my telescope wasn’t that strong, and there’s too much ambient light in Brooklyn.