Hunter Walk proposed an alternative movie theater experience where he'd be able to use his mobile devices and talk out loud:

Look up the cast list online, tweet out a comment, talk to others while watching or just work on something else while Superman played in the background.

[…]

I’d love to watch Pacific Rim in a theater with a bit more light, wifi, electricity outlets and a second screen experience.

[…]

If you took a theater or two in a multiplex and showed the types of films which lend themselves to this experience I bet you’d sell tickets.

This idea got a lot of criticism in the comments and elsewhere — John Gruber, for example, called this "The Worst Idea This Week" — to the point where Walk posted a point-by-point response.

I don't think it's fair to call a preference a bad idea. As a business proposition, the "I bet you'd sell tickets" part is fair game. But you don't get to tell someone how they should prefer to enjoy any cultural artifact, whether it's popping open a laptop at the movies or reading the ending of a novel first. You can tell people to respect the prevailing rules of etiquette, which is why I don't pop open my laptop at the movies, but Walk isn't suggesting otherwise.

Since the experience Walk wishes for isn't currently available, is it possible that it's a bad idea in the sense that he only thinks he'd like it, but really people are always happier paying full attention to the movie in front of them? The answer is clearly no. Anil Dash writes that "American shushers are a rare breed overall":

The most popular film industry in the world by viewers is Bollywood, with twice as many tickets sold in a given year there as in the United States. And the thing is, my people do not give a damn about what’s on the screen.

Indian folks get up, talk to each other, answer phone calls, see what snacks there are to eat, arrange marriages for their children, spontaneously break out in song and fall asleep. And that's during weddings! If Indian food had an equivalent to smores, people would be toasting that shit up on top of the pyre at funerals. So you better believe they’re doing some texting during movies. And not just Bollywood flicks, but honest-to-gosh Mom-and-apple-pie American Hollywood films.

Note that Dash questions what behavior should be acceptable in "regular" movie theaters, whereas Walk is proposing separate theaters to provide a separate experience. The distinction is important, but the point remains: there is not just one way to enjoy a movie in the theater.

I'm reminded of an anecdote from Iron & Silk, Mark Salzman's autobiographical novel about his adventures in China. In one chapter, Salzman tells about his visit to a family that lived on a fishing boat, and what happened when they asked him to play his cello. At first he was disappointed that while he was playing, the family proceeded to ignore him, chatting with each other and horsing around.

But then I remembered what a Chinese friend had told me one night at a performance of instrumental music where the audience talked, laughed, spat and walked around during the show. I mentioned to him that the audience seemed unbelievably rude, and he answered that, on the contrary, this showed they were enjoying it. He said that for the majority of Chinese who are peasants and laborers, music is enjoyed as a sort of background entertainment and is intended as an accompaniment to renao, which literally means "heat and noise." Renao is the Chinese word for good fun, the kind you might have at an amusement park in America, and noise and movement are essential to it.

Compared to these descriptions of accepted audience behavior, Walk's suggestion hardly seems bizarre. Even if it were bizarre, it would fall in the category of "preference", not "bad idea".

Walk is criticized not only for how he wants to enjoy the movies, but for how he wants to use his computing devices. One commenter wrote:

That's the issue with people like you today. You can't put your damn phone down to actually interact with a person or place.

The bad-idea angle here is that introducing mobile devices into the moviegoing experience would aggravate a societal problem that has already gone too far. This is narrow-minded and needlessly judgmental, but it's a common sentiment. I would counter with Rachel Smith's blog post, "What I See When You're Using Your Smartphone".

This is from one of many great posts on Rachel Smith's blog.

Facilitation by visual note-taking seems a fascinating and challenging profession. Listening is hard, and you're accountable in real time, in front of everybody, for capturing what was said in a helpful way.

I'm sure it helps to be a "visual person", but that alone is not enough. You have to absorb what's being said by people with different ways of thinking and communicating, some more "visualizable" than others. In a well-facilitated meeting, the participants shouldn't feel their thoughts are translated into visual form so much as reflected back to them. At least that's how I imagine it, and while Smith gives lots of encouragement along with her advice, it still seems very hard to me.

On top of that are the challenges any facilitator faces. There may be tensions within the group due to personalities or politics. There may be resentment at having a facilitator at all. Often people's thoughts will not be fully formed — that's probably why they're having the meeting in the first place. And the subject matter may be highly specialized; I assume a good facilitator does enough homework beforehand so they don't have to interrupt every five minutes to ask about basic terms and concepts.

I've been using a shell script by Olivier Hoachuck to download the WWDC videos and PDFs. The script comes in two variations, identical except that one uses curl and the other uses wget. It puts the downloads in a folder on your Desktop.

The nice thing is that it's a plain shell script. There are no Ruby or Python dependency issues, as I've heard there are with other similar scripts.

The script downloads the SD versions of the videos, which add up to about 52GB in size. To download the HD versions, globally replace "SD" in the script with "HD". I haven't finished downloading the HD videos, but they are about 6 times the size of their SD counterparts, so I'm assuming they will total roughly 312GB.

Compared to the videos, the total size of the PDFs is almost negligible at just under 400MB.

The SD quality seems fine for seeing everything you need to see. I'm downloading the HD versions just in case, and because my eyes need all the help they can get, and because hey, free videos.

We shouldn't read too much into the fact that WWDC sold out in under two minutes this year. In fact, we should get away from caring at all how fast it sells out.

At first glance, Apple seems to have set an impressive record compared to previous years:

• 2008 – 2 months
• 2009 – 1 month
• 2010 – 8 days
• 2011 – 10 hours
• 2012 – 2 hours
• 2013 – 2 minutes

What's different this year, however, is that availability was announced 24 hours in advance. Everybody knew exactly when to be at their computers with their fingers poised over their keyboards. The moment tickets went on sale, many thousands of people around the world hit Apple's web site at the same time — many more than the number of available tickets.

This means the two-minute sellout time tells us nothing about customer interest or demand. It only tells us how fast Apple's servers were at taking orders. And even that's not quite true; it's not clear how many, but Apple had to call some people on the phone to complete orders that the servers had messed up. You could argue that WWDC didn't really sell out until every one of those people got their ticket — and again, that revised time interval wouldn't reflect on the level of demand, only on the efficiency of the order-taking mechanism.

How fast would WWDC have sold out if the servers had worked flawlessly? Not only don't we know; we shouldn't care. We're beyond bragging rights about who can put up the "sold out" sign faster, or whether we were faster this year than last. Everybody knows that WWDC, like Google I/O, has way more demand than supply, and it doesn't seem that'll change soon.

There have been suggestions to prioritize customers by some measure of merit, like old-timers first or newcomers first, but I don't agree. Or rather, I mostly don't. John Siracusa writes about a time when rushing to buy a ticket actually made a difference:

I wanted to preserve at least some aspect of the process that rewarded the most enthusiastic Apple fans: the people who are willing to be roused from bed at 2 a.m. and rush to their computers to buy tickets; the crazy ones; the people who just want it more.

I too would love to see this aspect preserved; I am, after all, one of the crazy ones. But Siracusa goes on to say that we're beyond that now, and I agree with that.

Things being as they are, I think every interested customer should get an equal chance at a ticket. I agree with Siracusa that a lottery, which would slow down the ticket-buying process, is the best way to accomplish this. What Apple should focus on is not speed, but selling its limited number of tickets in an orderly, reliable way with a minimum of stress for its customers.

A friend wrote on Facebook:

As a basic sign of respect for Lu Lingzi, the BU student killed in last week's bombing, can the NPR folks at least take five seconds to learn how to pronounce her name correctly?

I've wished before for a class that would teach how to pronounce various languages. The idea is similar to those crash courses for tourists visiting foreign countries, but the focus would be on pronunciation, with vocabulary only as a happy side effect.

It could be done a lot of ways. It could be taught in grade school; it could be an adult education thing; it could be an app or family of apps; it could be a blog or tweet stream or a daily column in the newspaper or a YouTube channel.

It might help to have multiple teachers who specialize in different languages. Teaching could focus on just Romanized forms or, for the ambitious, it could include how to read non-Roman alphabets like Cyrillic and Korean.

I would benefit from such a class. At Thai and Vietnamese restaurants I'm sometimes uncomfortable ordering things from the menu that I'm not sure how to pronounce. One of these days I should put in the effort to learn.

Mandarin romanizes in a pretty straightforward way that I'm sure most people could learn, especially if we set aside the tones. It would help if reporters would pronounce things right, which they could do on a case-by-case basis with just a minute of coaching. For starters, they could pronounce "Beijing" with the "j" in "jingle bells" rather than the "zh" in "Doctor Zhivago".

Come to think of it, I'm not positive I pronounce "Zhivago" correctly.