Public Enemies, the movie about John Dillinger starring Johnny Depp, is coming out this summer. It was filmed in Chicago, at many places familiar to Dillinger, and some of it was shot in my neighborhood. In fact, the bank they walk into at the start of the trailer is down the street. When they filmed it, they took over the whole block and put up old store fronts. Extras in ’30s clothes were walking around everywhere. The movie comes out July 1st.

• A provocative post from TechCrunch titled Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet.
• I finally got around to reading an article from last year’s New Yorker about the search for a “Theory of Everything” in physics. It is most interesting in its descriptions of the different camps within the research physics world.
• Check out this little gravity toy done in javascript.

Cyclical events like presidential elections, the Olympics, or the NCAA basketball tournament are great opportunities for websites to show off their shiniest new tools. They also provide good benchmarks to see how web coverage has developed since the iteration. These large, competitive events really translate well to internet coverage with the links and information crunching visuals that the web provides. With that in mind, I wanted to survey the field of “Bracketology” for 2009.

The New York Times – Link

Pros: The New York Times has a consistent visual style to all of their flash features. Everything is clean and boxy with plenty of grays, so it’s no surprise that their bracket follows that design. Their bracket has basic competitive features, allowing users to fill-out their own, and keeping a high score list. The integration of staff-picks is a nice touch, but the bracket shines with hovering info boxes that give game details and links to actually relevant articles.

Cons: The Times seems to be a bit slow getting the game times up for the next round. Other sites have the game times up or provide two times if it has not been decided. The NYT bracket is also hurt by a lack of any video. This was the best new feature of some of the other brackets on this list, but, without owning any video rights, there isn’t much they can do.

Yahoo – Link to top ranking bracket

Pros: Yahoo has been doing bracket competitions longer than almost anyone on this list (probably since before anyone knew what a google was). They have the basic functionality down, and have advanced communities features like groups, messaging, and research (showing the breakdown of how each team has been picked). Realizing that many people get into March Madness after it is already underway, Yahoo offers a “Second Chance Tourney Pick’em” for picking the second half of the tournament.

Cons: Having been around forever, Yahoo has lots of users, which means lots of junk groups and messages to sift through. Yahoo is also hurt by a lack of video, but where the NYT links to game recaps and news, Yahoo only links to team summary pages. The bracket itself is spartan, though, as we will see, there are worse things to be.

CBS Sports – Link

Pros: The strongest feature in the CBS bracket is the little camera icon underneath each match-up. Click this and you will get a video recap of the game and be plunged into CBS Sports’ video player where many more clips await. An orange icon means a live game to watch. The video, combined with the stats and recap links, make for a strong, broadcast-oriented bracket. It’s a shame the thing is so hideous to look at.

Cons: The thing is so hideous to look at. Text is spilling out of boxes. Corners are rounded to the point of uselessness, and, in case you didn’t get the point, the same boxes are also shaded. Finally, the thing is too tall to fit on my screen.

ESPN – Link

Pros: ESPN has a very knowledgeable and demanding fanbase, and they have been in the game long enough to refine their approach. They have a very solid bracket that finds a neat middle-ground between an information-heavy presentation and a minimalist style. In short, links are where you expect them to be – click a team and it takes you to a team page, click a game score and it takes you to a recap. The recap page has an article some games show video recaps from CBS Sports.

Cons: The team name abbreviations could turn-off casual fans who are not familiar enough with the names. The bracket is also too large to display on my screen at once, but it feels like less of a problem since it is so well laid-out.

NCAA.com – Link

Pros: The “official” bracket from the governing body is tied closely to CBS’ coverage. It has been my go-to bracket to watch live games for its ease of use. Ongoing games are highlighted and scores are updated in real-time. I avoid sites that run everything in flash, but this is a solid implementation.

Cons: Beveled and shaded to hell like the other CBS bracket, this one is also over-designed. I’m also not a fan of the hovering expanding game score – it enlarges but doesn’t really show any more information. In fact, even when you click an individual game, there are little more than ads for team apparel and On Demand, and no recap features or links to CBS coverage.

Sports Illustrated / CNN – Link

Pros: It has the Sports Illustrated brand name. To compete in a pick ‘em, they have a tie-in with Facebook. I have not tried that, but it must look better than their own effort.

Cons: The worst of the bunch, easily. Terrible design. Ugly as sin. Clicking a game score takes you to a box score page rather than a recap by default. Oh and it’s giant, with lots of what would be white space, if there weren’t a basketball texture behind everything.

• French President Sarkozy commissioned 10 architects and designers to develop their Grand Plan for the city of Paris. It recalls Baron Haussmann’s designs in the 19th Century, but with the goal to make the first “Post-Kyoto” city.
• A periodic table of typefaces. Nearly all of the best and most common designer typefaces are included here.
• Remember the wooden Vespa? It had an original Vespa engine inside. Well, here’s a wooden bike with complete wooden gears and chain.

I was thinking about metaphors that are named after people (like Achilles’ heel). I don’t know what to call this kind of phrase, since some listed below are metaphors and others seem more like philosophical situations. Either way, I’m calling them namesake metaphors, and I like them because they encapsulate a complicated idea or system, but they also remain historically rooted by their names. So I compiled a list. There are probably more of these, but it’s a difficult task for a google search. If you can think of any more, mention them in a comment.

• Achilles’ heel: A fatal weakness in spite of overall strength. The infant Achilles was dipped in the river Styx, held by his heel, and he became invulnerable where the waters touched him.
• Gordian knot: An intractable problem, solved by a bold stroke. Alexander the Great cut an impossible knot with his sword.
• Columbus’ egg: An idea or discovery that seems simple or easy after the fact. Columbus, having been told that discovering the Americas was no great accomplishment, challenged his critics to make an egg stand on its tip; and, after they gave up, he did it himself by tapping the egg on the table so as to flatten its tip.
• Archimedean point: A hypothetical, objective vantage point. Archimedes supposedly claimed that he could lift the Earth off its foundation if he were given a place to stand, one solid point, and a long enough lever.
• Midas’ touch: A blessing and curse that everything one interacts with becomes valuable but potentially useless. King Midas was granted a wish that everything he touched turned to gold, but it became a curse when his food and even his daughter became solid gold.
• Occam’s Razor: The principle that explanations should make as few assumptions as possible. Originally a tenet of the reductionist philosophy of nominalism, it is more often taken today as an heuristic maxim (rule of thumb) that advises economy, parsimony, or simplicity, often or especially in scientific theories.
• Buridan’s ass: A figurative description of a man of indecision. It refers to a paradoxical situation wherein an ass, placed exactly in the middle between two stacks of hay of equal size and quality, will starve to death since it cannot make any rational decision to start eating one rather than the other. The paradox is named after the 14th century French philosopher Jean Buridan.
• Morton’s fork: A choice between two equally unpleasant alternatives. The opposite of the Buridan’s Ass. The expression originates from a policy of tax collection devised by John Morton, Lord Chancellor of England in 1487, under the rule of Henry VII.
• Plato’s Cave: Knowledge allows us to see the true forms of things. In Plato’s cave, people watch the shadows on the cave wall and think they are real, but the philosopher, freed from the cave, can see the reality of the world.

I love the simplicity of this graphic from Dan Meth. With just this reminder, I can recall most of these sets in detail (even for shows I didn’t watch that frequently).

• YoungMe/NowMe is a Ze Frank project where people recreate an old picture of themselves. The results are often charming.
• Someone found a way to analyze music to see if the drummer used a click track while recording. The results are pretty conclusive (but could have been guessed): Weezer and Metallica – no click tracks; Green Day and Nickelback – click tracks all the way.
• A particularly good XKCD on causation and correlation.

From a recent interview with Brian Eno:

In modern recording one of the biggest problems is that you’re in a world of endless possibilities. So I try to close down possibilities early on. I limit choices. I confine people to a small area of manoeuvre. There’s a reason that guitar players invariably produce more interesting music than synthesizer players: you can go through the options on a guitar in about a minute, after that you have to start making aesthetic and stylistic decisions. This computer can contain a thousand synths, each with a thousand sounds. I try to provide constraints for people.