La Tinaja

Links

• Open Notebook History: W. Caleb McDaniel writes about his motivations for experimenting with keeping an open research notebook on his upcoming project. I have been thinking along similar lines with my work turning my dissertation project into a book. The risks and anxieties McDaniel outlines—making mistakes in public, being scooped, etc.—are what has kept me from doing so so far, but I’m going to give it more thought based on his notes.
• Is it time for password-less login?: (plus follow-up) I’ve been working on a new app recently and have been revisiting the conversation started by Ben Brown a couple years ago regarding streamlining the login and identification process for users of low-security services. The use case Brown defines perfectly describes the kind of service I’m looking at providing, and though the trend doesn’t seem to have taken off (though Glenn Fleishman’s online portal for The Magazine is one example), but I still find Brown’s description of both the user-facing and the developer-facing benefits.
• The Username Is a Relic. Here’s How to Fix It—Wired: Along similar lines, last year Mat Honan discussed the decreasing viability of unique usernames as a form of identification for online services as the scale of userbases increasingly outstrips the availability of useful names. It seems silly to worry that my service will have the problem of having millions of users in the first days of development, but the design problem is interesting and could produce interesting problems to solve even if the practical requirement never proves necessary.

Books

• Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski. Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey, and Even Iraq are Destined to Become the Kings of the World’s Most Popular Sport. New York: Nation Books, 2009.

  Encountering the optimistic argument towards the end of this book regarding the positive prospects for Iraq once it returns to more normal circumstances is rather poignant in a 2015 dominated by news of ISIS. This is precisely the sort of historical contingency that makes historians leery of overly schematic and predictive arguments regarding human behavior. Nonetheless, the authors’ irreverent stance towards the conventional wisdom of the footballing world and their rigorous analysis of English soccer make intriguing reading. That history from outside sport intervenes should not devalue the sports-related consequences of their analysis.

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• Bob Fingerman. Minimum Wage. Book One, Focus on the Strange. Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, 2014.

  Fingerman’s slice of life approach does a good job of capturing that late-twenties phase of managing both to be unconcerned about wasting time in the present and overwhelmingly concerned about what might come of the future at the same time. There’s an out of time quality that reminds of me of Linklater’s Slacker. I like the people in Slacker a lot more. I guess it’s no surprise that in this phase of my life I was an Austin guy and not a New York guy.

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