Bloody Elbow Book Review: A Fighter's Heart by Sam Sheridan

Sam Sheridanโ€™s A Fighterโ€™s Heart wasnโ€™t a book I had planned on reading, but a good friend passed on his copy at Christmas. Hereโ€™s the Amazon blurb:
Sheridan joined the merchant marines after high school, eventually graduated from Harvard, and worked his way to Australia on a yacht. There, in 1999, he decided to indulge his fascination with fighting, hoping to test himself and explore what has become a mostly sublimated aspect of masculinity. After some months of training in Australia, he moved to Bangkok to train with a legendary Muay Thai (kickboxing) champion. That experienceโ€“and his first professional boutโ€“expanded into a multiyear odyssey in which he trained with Olympic boxers, Brazilian jujitsu champions, and Ultimate Fighting combatants.
This didnโ€™t exactly get me stoked for the book. Oh great, I thought a dilettante from Harvard is going to tourist his way through the world of fighting and then pump out a pompous tome of first person โ€œinsights.โ€ When a cursory scan of the book revealed that a series of injuries (ribs, rotator cuff) prevented him from rolling with the Brazilian Top Team, cancelled his amateur boxing match and a dispute with a shady promoter precluded his participating in a head-butts-allowed match in Myanmyar I was even less impressed. When I noticed there was a chapter on dog fighting I was really turned off and put the book down.
Then when my bud asked if Iโ€™d read the book and launched into a pretty interesting discussion of ideas he picked up from Sheridan, I reconsidered and Iโ€™m glad I did.
I donโ€™t think this is a timeless classic but it is a worthwhile read. The injuries and screw-ups that prevent him from engaging in most of his bouts do give an anti-climatic feel to several of the chapters. But that doesnโ€™t mean he doesnโ€™t glean some real insights from his experiences.
He spends quite a bit of time with Pat Militech and the MFS crew and is backstage with Robbie Lawlor before his UFC loss to Nick Diaz. His bad luck might have been communicable as he travels with the Brazil Top Team to Japan and is backstage with Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira before his third fight, and second loss, to Fedor Emelianenko.
One of the most interesting chapters details his month in Oakland training with Olympic Gold Medal winning boxer (and current WBO NABO supermiddleweight champion) Andre Ward. Wardโ€™s trainer took Sheridan under wing and trained him alongside his boxing thoroughbreds and a promising female boxer.
Sheridan also dabbles in tai chi and spends time at a Buddhist meditation retreat in Thailand, focusing on the internal aspects of the fighting game. And yes, he spends a chapter investigating dog fighting in the Philippines and Thailand. Despite my revulsion, Sheridan does have come to interesting insights into the human psyche of fighting by learning about the loathsome practices of dogfighting. I still donโ€™t approve of dog fighting, but I hardly think it is the most brutal or inhumane practice in our society (industrial pig farming is infinitely worse IMO).
All in all, Iโ€™m glad I read Sheridanโ€™s book and I think his conclusions about the reasons men and women train and fight professionally are interesting and mostly valid.
Hereโ€™s a bit from the conclusion I liked:
โ€œFighting revealsโ€ฆthat manhood, that endless test is a sham, an illusion of sorts; because when you start fighting, you realize thereโ€™s never an end to it, thereโ€™s always somebody better โ€” stronger, faster, bigger, younger, whatever, somethingโ€ฆThe quest to be the toughest in the world is an empty quest, and fighters realize that pretty quickly, I thinkโ€ฆ.Thereโ€™s always someone out there who can beat you. Itโ€™s about being the best you can be, bringing yourself closer to the perfect version.

Book review: Algeria anger of the dispossessed

The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvoโ€™s 1966 cinematic masterpiece, has powerfully shaped western perceptions of Algeria. The film (which features scenes of Algerian freedom fighters being electrocuted by French torturers to the sound of Bachโ€™s musical epiphanies) incarnates the semi-religious national myth that the victorious National Liberation Front (FLN) imposed on Algeria after driving out the French in 1962. The winners in the bloodiest of French colonial wars were presented not just as victims, but as martyrs, almost as saints.
The gulf between this official myth (which, to this day, sustains a highly unsaintly, corrupt and brutal ruling elite) and the terrible realities experienced by most Algerians for the past four decades, is at the heart of this stunningly important book. Martin Evans and John Phillips have an enviable grasp of the complexities of Algerian identities and the countryโ€™s often opaque high politics and are alive to the multiple ironies of Algerian history. Even as the hard-faced former guerrilla colonels who ruled Algeria from 1962 onwards were feted as the darlings of the nonaligned Third World, they ruined a country rich in oil and gas by imposing a nationalising socialism that masked their promiscuous thievery.
By the late 1980s, Algeria was so bankrupt it had to undergo liberalising reforms that made matters worse for anyone not in the inner circle. In 1988, there was an explosion of discontent by young unemployed urban males, who had developed their own culture of football hooliganism, drink and drugs, and rai โ€“ a fusion of North African folk music with the nihilistic political messages of rap, reggae and punk. Algeriaโ€™s military rulers (who alighted on Islamism as a substitute for a discredited socialism) discovered that they could not contain its more radical manifestations, which included populist preachers intent on channelling the rage of the youthful dispossessed against western modernity. The Levi 501s could be combined with a Koran and a Kalashnikov.
After licensing the Islamic Salvation Front party (FIS) in 1989, Algeriaโ€™s rulers, supported by feminists and the diminished fran-cophone middle class, belatedly realised that the radical Islamist view of democracy was โ€œone man, one vote, one timeโ€, although they were no paragons in this respect themselves since the elections called in 1991 were the first since independence.

In response to clear Islamist victories in the first round of the elections, the military launched a preemptive putsch. Neither side gave any quarter. Victims of the armed Islamists included journalists and novelists, as well as those rash enough to have a satellite tuned to โ€œpornographicโ€ French television: their severed heads were liable to end up in the disconnected dishes. The most radical terrorists declared the population โ€œapostatesโ€, which licensed a campaign of rape and throat-slitting against entire villages.
The regimeโ€™s response was to โ€œmake fear change sidesโ€. Prisoners were welcomed to the prison at Blida, where the blowtorch ruled, with the words: โ€œHere we do not know God or Amnesty International: you talk or you die.โ€ General Smain Lamari, the head of the security police, who died last October, contemplated the necessity of killing โ€œ3m peopleโ€ to eradicate Islamism. As several security-police defectors cited in the book have testified, it was far from clear who was killing whom, since some massacres carried out by Islamists were the disguised handiwork of the army and police. An estimated 200,000 people perished in this war, although in western eyes the atrocities were eclipsed by belated revelations from elderly French torturers about their own dirty war four decades before.
In the present day, the war on terror has ensured a flow of arms and funds to a friendly regime that the CIA regards as a valuable window into Islamic radicalism in both the Maghreb and neighbouring states such as Mali and Mauretania. Algeria is a huge source of oil and natural gas, too, for China, Europe and America, none of which will wish to see the departure of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Although the authors do not spell out the wider implications of their study, they have identified a crucial difficulty for the West, one that extends far beyond the borders of Algeria.
Do we continue to mouth homilies about democracy, knowing full well that it may result in the Islamistsโ€™ โ€œone man, one vote, one timeโ€, or do we connive in the repressions of reliable dictators, even though these also affect the cosmopolitan liberal middle class, who, in an ideal world, we would all like to see in power? Or do we take a chance that the Islamistsโ€™ support is essentially an inch deep, mile-wide protest vote that will not result in the imposition of sharia and the dissolution of Algeria (or, come to think of it, Pakistan) into a caliphate? This outstanding book gives materials aplenty to begin answering those questions.

Google Chrome developer preview (unofficially) released

Digg's Kevin Rose, perennial purveyor of information that just "fell off the back of the truck" shared a link early this morning to Google's new, supercharged, Webkit-based browser -- for Mac.
The new browser, Chrome, is clearly marked as a developer preview, and not meant for general browsing. In fact, as a good Mac citizen, it will refuse to set itself as your default browser.
It scores a 100 on the Acid3 test straight out of the box, but doesn't pass: it fails something called the linktest, which involves interacting A tags and IFRAMEs. A little research suggests that it could be a bug with Webkit. If that's true, then it's a bug that Safari 4 beta has fixed.
Chrome appears to have Flash (and other plugin) support disabled as well. JavaScript support, however, is fully functional. While Chrome performed much better than Firefox on this cursory test, it still didn't beat Safari 4 by a long shot. While only a beta, its performance is respectable and sure to improve.
Again, Google Chrome isn't for everyone, but if you're a web developer who needs to keep up with the bleeding edge of browser development, then this preview should be stable and reliable enough for you to test what you need to.
Read through for the full JavaScript test details.

File under "This won't last": new white MacBook benchmarks faster than unibody model

In a thorough review of the new speed-bumped white MacBook, Macworld notes an intriguing fact: the 2.13GHz model of the $999 entry-level laptop actually outperforms the base unibody model. The magazine's benchmarks show a 4 percent advantage for the new white MacBook over the $1299 2GHz aluminum laptop; the white model even outlasts the next-generation machine on battery life by more than 30 minutes.

Unless you absolutely have to have the new industrial design on your laptop and you're willing to pay an extra $300 for the privilege, it does seem that the new white model is the better buy... for now. A performance gap like this is a strong hint that the unibody models are due for a processor bump sometime soon, if only to restore the proper order of things: faster should equal more expensive. Right?

iPod touch review

Yeah, we know we're a little late with this one, but we see the iPod touch as a pretty major turning point for Apple's iPod line; when it was announced, we finally thought we'd found an iPod we could really get behind. For years technology enthusiasts pondered the possibility of an Apple-made widescreen, WiFi-enabled portable media device, and they finally did just that -- even throwing in a few things that, prior to the iPhone, we might not have expected, like a full-fledged web browser, internet video player (YouTube), multi-touch interface, etc. But after playing with the touch for a few days, it's become pretty clear that Steve was right when he declared that the iPhone is still the best iPod. Read on to find out why.

Late last year. iPods had fallen into a rut: the features were stale, the form factor of the flagship device basically stopped progressing, and it started to seem like Apple didn't care or understand where portable media players were headed -- or at least didn't seem to realize what such devices were capable of. So it came as no surprise that as soon as the iPhone was announced, people began demanding that same device, sans phone. And why not? Not everyone hates their cellphone, or wants to switch to AT&T, or lives in America (or select countries in Europe) -- and from a media player standpoint, the iPhone made the iPod technologically respectable again. Only a handful of other devices, like the Archos 604 WiFi, come equipped with that specific bundle of features (web browser, touchscreen, and WiFi).

Fortunately for that rather sizable group of potential buyers waiting for the phoneless iPhone, it was clear that Apple had invested an enormous amount of effort (and money) into creating its mobile OS X platform, and that all those development bucks weren't going to live on in only one product -- especially not a device that is ultimately beholden to deals with cellphone carriers. So the iPhone without the phone -- the WiFi-enabled widescreen iPod -- finally started to seem more like an eventuality than some distant hope. When it was announced a couple of weeks ago, the surprise was less that Apple had been working on this device after all, and more the myriad iPhone features unexpectedly absent. We'll get to that shortly.Media

Thankfully, as far as media playback goes, all the best stuff from the iPhone made the cut in the touch. It shares the same audio, video, and photo apps as the iPhone, which is a good thing since we still love the new Apple mobile media interface every bit as much as we did when we first reviewed the iPhone. The iTunes WiFi Music Store works exactly as advertised; search is fast, sampling tracks and downloads are easy, and syncing tracks back to your host computer is effortless. Apple really nailed this. To date, most over the air music downloads on a portable media devices have been tedious, if not completely impractical.Also unchanged are our primary complaints about said media playback, the same complaints we've had about the iPod for years: we don't like managing our media through iTunes, and we don't like being limited only to those few codecs Apple supports (AAC, MP3, H.264, and MPEG-4). In fact, if Apple gave us greater codec support (or even just the option to add additional codecs ourselves) and mass storage support for drag and drop while adding media, we'd probably be able to overlook the other, smaller things that ail us about iPods.Software

Since the touch is an iPhone at its heart -- really -- comparisons on the software end of business were immediate and inevitable. We're going to assume you're at least casually familiar with the touch's progenitor, but if you didn't read over our iPhone review or haven't much used one yourself, we're happy to say the touch remains a rock solid device on the software end. We experienced far fewer crashes now than we did with the v1.0 iPhone firmware; the rest of the interface is just as responsive and reliable.

Apple has also since made a number of improvements to the touch which have yet to carry over to the iPhone. (We're expecting the iPhone to be brought to parity with the touch in its next firmware update, due in the next week or so.) One major annoyance, about which we took umbrage in our iPhone review, is that periods are unnecessarily difficult to type. No longer: the touch takes the BlackBerry approach, where pressing the space bar twice types a period automatically. This is a godsend.

Also improved: many of the clicks, chirps, and other system sounds have been tweaked, most often with the result of being slightly less grating than the noises of the iPhone. And, of course, the addition of international support in menus and keyboards means you don't have to be a US American to use the thing.But it isn't what's on the touch that caused us to sit up and take notice so much as what's not on it. The iPhone's suite of apps set certain expectations for what the touch should include. Granted, we understand why the iPhone's mobile email app was omitted from the touch. While we still would have liked to have the option to email over WiFi, its intended purpose is as a portable media player, not a mobile communicator, so we can follow that line of thought. But why leave out its notes, weather, stocks, and Google maps apps? We know the portable doesn't include the same constant connectivity as the iPhone has with EDGE, but it's not like downloading music over the iTunes WiFi Music Store is a practical application in ways that checking for weather, or jotting down a quick note are not. The touch is still a connected portable device, after all, and what we see is Apple mimicking the limited feature set of the old, stale iPod line instead of fully realizing the touch's potential.

And let's not forget the touch calendar controversy. Why allow users to indulge in some PIM basics, like editing and creating new contacts, while not others, like editing or adding new calendar appointments? When we confirmed that Apple had indeed dropped calendar editing from the touch, we were floored. Not even because it's that essential a function, but because we can't possibly fathom why anyone in Cupertino thought to take something of value, however small, away from for no apparent reason. For a company that continually emphasizes its software as being the core of what drives great consumer electronics, we just can't understand why Apple chose curb the touch's capabilities right at the outset.Hardware
With the touch, Apple's hardware is, as usual, striking when compared with many of its competitors. Ever so slightly wider (about 1mm) and significantly thinner (8mm, which is no small feat) than the iPhone, the touch has far harder, sharper edges on its facade, and a sloping, almost difficult to grip rear. It even manages to leverage that space with a large enough battery to put out more than its advertised 5 hours of video playback -- we got about 5.5 - 6+ hours. But despite its impressive thinness, after the last few months of using the far more functional iPhone, the touch left us in want. It may be the ideal size for a device of this kind, but it omits many of the simple hardware niceties we've grown used to in the iPhone.Hardware volume controls were highest on the list of things we miss. We could just as easily live without a mute switch on a media player, but losing the hard volume buttons is rather disappointing. Granted, Apple has made it easier to get to the media controls and volume when the device is in sleep mode; just press the home button three times (once to wake, two more times to bring up media controls without unlocking it). But what's wrong with a real volume switch, too? With no hardware controls, doing something as frequent and essential as changing the volume necessitates removing the device from your pocket. Furthermore, without hard volume buttons, you can't adjust the volume at all while playing music in landscape (i.e. Cover Flow mode). This is pretty basic stuff that drives us up the wall.

Also missing -- and missed: an external speaker. Yeah, we know not every media player has one, and it probably would have added some bulk to a device so slim as the touch. But sharing samples of songs, a bit of video, or -- duh -- YouTube now instantly necessitates friends adventurous enough to use your funky headphones each taking a turn watching Chocolate Rain or the Hipster Olympics. We know in the long run it's a relatively minor thing, but it's still disappointing.

But that's not all. While we appreciate the aesthetic sacrifice Apple made in in adding a proper WiFi antenna to the touch, the odd, asymmetric black corner on the rear looks off and misplaced. We wish Apple have just placed the antenna behind the touch's face, or possibly along the top or bottom of the unit, where its sleep / wake button or headphone jack is. It's a relatively minor aesthetic nitpick, we know, but Apple obviously holds its hardware design in the highest regard, and to us the antenna seems uncharacteristically out of place for an iPod product too pristine to even have hardware volume controls.Then there's the matter of the display. Ours happened to be one of the "small number" of touch units with the faulty screens. It's difficult to capture in a photograph or even explain in text (so far the best shots we've seen came from Apple-Touch), but the result is dark shades -- especially black tones -- look almost inverted. At very least it's distracting, and at worst it makes some darker video almost unwatchable. We hope Apple gets these units fixed on the double, because for us this janky screen teeters on the edge of a return-your-unit-forever dealbreaker.

And then, finally, there's the shiny chrome back side, which is just as easy as ever to keep pristine and unmarred, provided you store your iPod in a vacuum or cover it in armor. We still don't get this. Yes, people like shiny gadgets, but the glee of that first five seconds of ooh pretty hardly outweighs the lifetime of fingerprints and scratches that the iPod's rear mirror finish accumulates. We thought Apple had learned its lesson when it gave the iPhone a matte aluminum back side. Guess not. We can't be alone in thinking chrome doesn't patina like an old pair of jeans. To us it just seems to look worse with time.Wrap-upIt's hard to argue that there isn't beauty in simplicity, especially when it comes to consumer electronics. But there's such thing as too simple -- and sometimes too simple can turn into crippled. Most of our complaints about the touch have to do with what it lacks -- not in general, but when compared its big brother, the iPhone. Had the iPod touch come out first, the lack of a hardware volume switch, integrated speaker, and all those apps might have been perfectly passable, but now the expectations have been set, and we can't see how taking things away from users can possibly add value. Everyone in this industry is trying to give their customers more, but with the iPod touch Apple gave its customers less in what should have been the best iPhone alternative on the market. This time around, in Apple's obsession to edit, they managed to leave some of the best stuff on the cutting room floor