Google Chrome. Google’s web browser to be released later today. In comic form. By Scott McCloud. And here are some more screenshots for good measure.

Anyone following the McCain campaign has heard mention of his time in a Vietnam POW camp once or twice. So many times that Jared Rea mused, “You’d almost think this is Mario Bros the way McCain is hammering away on that POW block.” And by “mused” I mean created a YouTube video:

By the way, for anyone in the Steel City, the cut-off quote about Pittsburgh comes from a KDKA interview in which McCain might have been a little disingenuous about some specifics.

Anyone using the internet a decade ago–when AOL was still relevant and adding version numbers to The Web wasn’t even a thought–will surely have noticed a change in the landscape of comments. A nonexistant phenomenon at first, websites slowly opened their doors to commentators, and now the internet is overrun by them. Unfortunately, as the number of comments has grown, so has the quality of comments dropped. Matt Haughey sketches some possible causes for comment degradation over at A Whole Lotta Nothing, and (ironically?) a long list of readers provide high-quality responses.

Haughey’s sentiments are summed up in his deriding comments as “just another content management feature available to you on the web.” Though Huaghey hints at the technology being the problem, he actually lays blame on the audience, saying:

I’m starting to think there’s this “new generation” that has grown up online only knowing blogs as having snarky comment areas and never realizing it used to be a personal, intimate space where you’d never say anything in a comment that you wouldn’t say to a friend’s face.

A good scratch at the surface, but the mystery runs deeper, and it takes a few dozen comments to take the argument to further, more insightful ends. The audience’s attitude is important, but that attitude is shaped by the available technology and the context in which that technology is used.

As Haughey points out, technology has enabled comments to be added to a website with no thought at all. This has resulted in almost every blog to have a comment system, and a majority of comments to be of “poor quality”. A lot of blogs are of “poor quality” as well, so it is not surprising that comments are no different. Lowering the barrier of entry means letting in both the intelligentsia and the idiots.

But the technology deal cuts both ways. It is easier than ever to comment, and it is easier than ever to blog. As Brad says, “the big problem with comments is most people who want to engage thoughtfully with blogs and bloggers already have their own outlets (blogs/twitter/facebook, etc).” Your mileage may vary with this argument, but you could easily find examples in big name bloggers like Jason Kottke and John Gruber. Really any “cabinet of curiosities” blog with an abundance of links and commentary is an example of someone who took their good comments and turned them into an independent blog instead.

Thirdly, technology’s deficits also play a role. With the proliferation of blogs, and the move away from relatively few structured communities (newsgroups, forums), user identity is becoming more and more fractured. Even when entering the same personal information for each comment on ten different websites, there is no system setup to link one comment to another. On ten different websites, I am ten different Spencer Sugarmans. OpenID is a start, but a million more things need to happen to get from where things are (multiple usernames) to where things need to be (decentralized tracking of user activity). (One of those “million more things” being reconciling the need for community with the need for privacy.) Some grand solution would turn the internet into a single, giant conversation.

Lastly, technology aside, why do we even care about comments? Originally, grandiosely, comments acted as “a conversation between the reader and the author of the original post.” comments falling into this category are generally labeled as “good quality”. “Poor quality” comments, on the other hand, are usually short, off the cuff, and add little in the way of meaningful dialogue. Disregarding spam and flames, “poor” comments are pretty much the linguistic equivalent of an upvote (or downvote) on Reddit or Digg. They scream “I visited!”

But this use of the commenting system is hardly unreasonable. Spurred on by sites like Reddit and Digg, comments have become a system for feedback, showing website owners their users in ways Google Analytics can’t. And often dialogue is not disregarded in total, but shifted from a conversation between the reader and the author to a conversation betwen the reader and another reader. “A place to argue amongst themselves, quite independently of the author and his ad impressions,” as Nick says.

Of course, “good quality” comments still exist (look at this recent Hacker News thread), and are even flourishing. But so are the new kind of comments, at an exponential rate. The crap found below the videos on YouTube is an unavoidable result of changing technology, but this is only the public face of commenting. Thousands of blogs incite deep, meaningful conversations; it is just a matter of slogging through the mud to find the gold.

Half flow chart, half Venn diagram: Things to say during sex. For instance, Bad » Genuine » (not your partner’s name) » (not your partner’s gender). I wish I wasn’t so familiar with the right side of the chart.

I am sorry to say it has been two weeks since my last post, but happy to say those two weeks have not been entirely ill spent. Okay, one week was spent wallowing in tears as I waited for Comcast to install broadband, but the other was productive. I am happy to introduce:

the forward lean

The Forward Lean is a weekly discussion of every substantive piece of information in the world. Every week, a contributor will take a piece of writing (anything ranging from New York Times Magazine articles to arXiv physics theses), be inspired by it, and author a lengthy post describing all the thoughts drummed up by the piece. Throughout the days following, others will respond at length, creating an intellectual conversation about some of today’s most engaging ideas and events.

The inaugural post is inspired by a passage from Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, a 1988 book chronicling the life and times of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. before his emergence as a national figure. Thusly inspired, out comes a post presenting disenchantment with Barack Obama’s ubiquitous declaration of Change™, and deriding the presidential campaigners for not leveraging their money and influence into widespread local transformation. Is it right to stand so tall on a platform of Hope® and Change™ without ensuring all that invested manpower leaves some lasting, local good, not just a fleeting economic bid for votes?

I’ll be providing my two cents when I can, but my main involvement in The Forward Lean is as tech director. I’ve tried to keep the design entirely minimal, and work through some of the complexities of the ExpressionEngine content management system. Things are running smoothly so far, but I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed until we get a few more posts in and stress test the system with more than just a few dozen visitors.

There it is; my life until now. Expect your regularly scheduled programming to be back online momentarily.

dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip – Waiting for the Beat to Kick In (naked edit)

At seven minutes long, with nothing but spoken word and some droning loops, “Waiting for the Beat to Kick In” is going to strike many as pretty terrible. Boring. Except this is Scroobius Pip on the mic and dan le sac on the beats, and this isn’t a song: this is a story. Scroobius Pip drags you along as he falls through the rabbit hole, and it isn’t until the end, when you start to see the ground rushing faster and faster to meet you, that you even realize you’ve been knocked off your feet.

Now quite accepting of the totally surreal time I was having I rounded a corner,
And continued onto my next encounter,
Resigned to the fact this was some dream or hallucination,
I made my way through the now dark street,
To the one window that had a light on,
I walked through the unlocked door which incidentally had blinds down,
And a sillhouetted figure like a film noir scene,
But sadly no sign saying Private Eye.
As I entered a voice promptly said..

“This journey’s almost over, I’m the only one left,
Allow me to introduce myself; my name is Walter Nepp,
The other guys have taught you things of great positive worth,
But I’m afraid I’m here to bring you back down to Earth,
See you can live your life in control and be nice,
But even that will not promise you a happy life,
You may think yourself in general to be a nice guy,
But I’m telling you now – that right there is a lie,
Even the nicest of guys has some nasty within ‘em,
You don’t have to be backlit to be the villain,
Whether it be greed lust or just plain vindictiveness,
There’s a level of benevolence inside all of us,
You can paint yourself an image and live in your own little dream,
But this ain’t a dream, it’s one big silver screen,
So when you think you’ve got your happy ending don’t ever forget it,
It ain’t over til you hear the sound of your end credits,
You’ll be waiting for the beat to kick in,
But it never does,
Waiting for you feet to grow wings,
That lift you above,
All of these tiresome things,
That you know and love,
Waiting for the beat to kick in,
But it never does,
Waiting for the beat to kick in,
But it never does,
Waiting for you feet to grow wings,
That lift you above,
All of these tiresome things,
That you know and love,
Waiting for the beat to kick in,
But it never does.”

In 1998, HUSH opened shop, fueled by the burgeoning technology of CD burners. In the ten years since, HUSH has subsisted on the passion and community of the Portland music scene. But they are offering a gift not just to local fans and friends, but to the entire world. DECA: A HUSH 10th Anniversary Compilation is a tribute to the changing record industry, and a small and beautiful peek into the long list of wonderful acts HUSH has worked with over the years. And it is as free as you want it to be.

We’ve decided to offer this exclusively as a digital download because we’re intrigued by the idea of creating something that takes up more space in your heart and your head than in your house, or in our house, or on the postal truck.

This naked mix is a smattering of the tracks offered on DECA. If you hear even one moment of one song that you like, I implore you to go to the website and download the entire compilation. (If only for the Colin Meloy track you won’t hear anywhere else.)

1. Novi Split – Hollow Notes – There is that inevitable point in the generic Hollywood romantic comedy when the star boyfriend does something terrible to his star girlfriend and loses her, seemingly forever. Filled with anger as he is thrown out of his own apartment, he walks the streets aimlessly, realizing he has lost the one thing that matters most in the world: love. Slowly this regret melts into determination, and he rushes back to reclaim her heart in hand.

This is those moments wrapped up in a song; not because the song is saccharine or banal, but because, like those scenes, they tug at your heart despite their predictability. They hit just the right notes, reach just the right crescendos, have just the right feeling to accompany those weak journeys home at night.

4. Run on Sentence – The Afterlife Pt. 1

7. Norfolk & Western – Hiding Home

10. Loch Lomond – Elephants & Little Girls

21. Casey Dienel – Asleep at the Wheel

27. Dat’r – Humm-na

From symmetry breaking:

The Large Hadron Collider saw its first protons today, around 6:30 p.m. at CERN (12:30 p.m. US EDT), as scientists conducted the first beam injection test in one section of the collider. The protons traveled just a few meters into the LHC in a clockwise direction. The tests will continue through the weekend to transfer the beam from one section of the accelerator complex to another. A second beam injection test is scheduled for later in August. Protons will circulate around the entire collider for the first time on September 10.

Yay!

CERN has a press release going over the ramp up to September 10th a bit more, as well as a link for a live webcast to be streaming as soon as the LHC is. After that, the collider is set to be officially unveiled on October 21st.

August 8, 2008: The start of the South Ossetia War, Summer Olympics, and, now, the Large Hadron Collider.

Godzilla tracking just got easier.

Google has now photographed Tokyo for Street View, which means you can now see both the Golden Turd and the next nuclear attack all in one panorama. The WHOLE city isn’t done, but you can see quite a bit.

Actually, Tokyo wasn’t the only recent unveiling Street View had. Joining the list is fellow cities Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Sidney, Perth, Melbourne, New Orleans, El Paso, Savannah, and a ton in between.

Encounters At the End of the World, the new Werner Herzog documentary film about the community of American scientists in Antarctica, is coming to Pittsburgh. Roger Ebert gives the film four stars, saying:

It is a poem of oddness and beauty. Herzog is like no other filmmaker, and to return to him is to be welcomed into a world vastly larger and more peculiar than the one around us.

Here, the film is showing alongside, but sadly not a part of, “Life on Mars: New Perspectives”, a series of films every Sunday during August co-sponsored by the Carnegie Museum of Art. The series of movies “explores similar themes of alienation, dystopia, and new ways of seeing the world,” themes begging to be explored in a film covering the world’s largest desert. And though Encounters is ostensibly about the people living in that cold world, it is ultimately about the cold world itself.

Over the course of Herzog’s journey, nature-in-the wild shares equal time with human nature. His encounters are alternately surreal, absurd, profound and sometimes, all of the above.

Hopefully, Herzog takes us through not only the beauty of Antarctica, but also the unflinching desolation lying just below a thin, cracking layer of ice, or in the midst of a blinding snowstorm. That thick mix, hardly separated from one moment to the next, is where Antarctica’s real wonder comes from.

Garfield Minus Garfield: The Book

Clockwise:

1. Assembly and installation of the ATLAS Hadronic endcap Liquid Argon Calorimeter. The ATLAS detector contains a series of ever-larger concentric cylinders around the central interaction point where the LHC’s proton beams collide.

2. Lowering of the last element (YE-1) of the CMS detector into its underground experimental cavern.

3. Transporting the ATLAS Magnet Toroid End-Cap A between building 180 to ATLAS point 1.

More at Boston.com’s The Big Picture.

CERN Rap from Will Barras on Vimeo.

© M. Mararian

The Superest: Who is the superest hero of them all?

What is this? The Superest is a continually running game of My Team, Your Team. The rules are simple:

Player 1 draws a character with a power. Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat.