I hadn’t figured out what it was about the OS 10.7.3 update that made the user experience more pleasant, but I got the sense there was some subtle change that was registering at a subconscious level.

And I think this was it. Seriously. The different gesture in the pointer hand now totally jumps out at me.

He’s like all three magi, rolled into one.

I don’t mean to undersell this. “The Death and Sleep of Superman” is awesome. Absolutely worth all 16 minutes of your time. It’s like the comic book version of Red Letter Media.

Update: Galley Friend M.R. points out that there’s a Max Landis production for “Knightfall,” too. World. Rocked.

I love the Avengers. I very much like Joss Whedon, both as a writer and directer. Even so, last night’s Avengers Super Bowl trailer left me a little cold. A commenter at AICN figures out why for me:

Pan around the heroes… Norse god of thunder, Super Soldier, super-power armoured genius, mother fucking HULK, then…

girl with a small gun.

Yes. That’s what didn’t work. Everything about the Black Widow in Iron Man 2 felt like a studio note–from concept, to casting, to execution. This looks unsettlingly like more of the same.

It’s hard to know who to root for in a Giants-Patriots Super Bowl. It’s like picking sides in a G.E.-Microsoft fight. But even without having a rooting interest, last night’s game was boring in its predictability.

What I couldn’t understand was why, with the ball and a 2-point lead, the Patriots were not in 4-down mode for most of their last drive. With under four minutes to play, and the ball and a narrow lead, they needed one of three outcomes: (1) Score; (2) Hold the ball until time expired; (3) Give up the ball in such a manner as to allow them maximum time to counter a Giants’ score.

From the way the Patriots’ defense played, it was unrealistic to think that after turning the ball over, they’d be able to keep New York out of field goal range. So why bother with a punt? Better to take your chances in getting a first down (which would have changed the play calls on both second, third, and fourth down of their penultimate drive) because even if you then turn the ball over on downs, all you’ve done is given the Giants a shorter field. I’d argue that the upside/downside part of the calculation would have been: Better to increase the probability of New York scoring (since it was already very high) while also increasing the probability of getting the ball back with more time to counter.

Punting in that situation makes very little sense. (At least to me.) It’s the kind of clock management I’d expect from Andy Reid.

All things considered, I’d probably have preferred a Pats win, I suppose. More Tommy from Quinzee, more squash-court Eli, and their championships weren’t predicated on inexplicably dropped pass from the opposition and two total-fluke circus catches. The Patriots earned their Super Bowls the old-fashioned way: By illegally videotaping their opponents.

An issue or two ago, Wired carried an interesting piece on flash mobs and riots by Bill Wasik. As is often the case with Wired, it’s smart, ably written, and cogent. And yet it manages to accomplish less than it should because the magazine seems to believe, as an institutional matter, than nothing of note happened before 1992.

In attempting to define precisely why some mobs become riots and others don’t, Wasik leans on psychology professor Cliffor Stott:

Stott boils down the violent potential of a crowd to two basic factors. The first is what he and other social psychologists call legitimacy—the extent to which the crowd feels that the police and the whole social order still deserve to be obeyed. In combustible situations, the shared identity of a crowd is really about legitimacy, since individuals usually start out with different attitudes toward the police but then are steered toward greater unanimity by what they see and hear. Paul Torrens, a University of Maryland professor who builds 3-D computer models of riots and other crowd events, imbues each agent in his simulations with an initial Legitimacy score on a scale from 0 (total disrespect for police authority) to 1 (absolute deference). Then he allows the agents to influence one another. It’s a crude model, but it’s useful in seeing the importance of a crowd’s initial perception of legitimacy. A crowd where every member has a low L will be predisposed to rebel from the outset; a more varied crowd, by contrast, will take significantly longer to turn ugly, if it ever does. . . .

The second factor in crowd violence, in Stott’s view, is simply what he calls power: the perception within a crowd that it has the ability to do what it wants, to take to the streets without fear of punishment. This, in turn, is largely a function of sheer size—and just as with legitimacy, small gradations can make an enormous difference. We often think about flash mobs and other Internet-gathered crowds as just another type of viral phenomenon, the equivalent of a video that gets a million views instead of a thousand. But in the physical world, the distance separating the typical from the transformational is radically smaller than in the realm of bits. Merely doubling the expected size of a crowd can create a truly combustible situation.

That sounds reasonable enough. And these rules fit with the universe of evidence that Wasik explores: soccer hooligans, flash mobs in the UK, and impromptu electronica dance demonstrations.

But if you bother to think about these two rules for more than 30 seconds, a single gigantic counter-example jumps out at you: Pope John Paul II’s return to Poland in 1979. You want to talk about unexpected masses–people showed up by the millions. They had a shared identity that went far beyond anything Wasik mentions and their shared grievances were legitimate in ways that make the notion of electronica fans being sad about not having mainstream acceptance seem outright silly.

And you know what the Poles didn’t do? Riot.

I’m not suggesting that this single example invalidates the broader point Wasik is trying to make. Maybe you can reconcile the two. At the very least, it suggests that the theory Wasik presents is probably inadequate by itself in explaining the phenomenon at the heart of his story.

Via the Transom. It’s awesome. Even though it’s about hockey.

Don’t miss Ian Frazier’s fantastic piece on what private equity investment did to two cookie factories. Economic and elegant story-telling played totally straight. Just a joy to read.

I’d meant to note this back in December, but Aimee Mann and Michael Penn’s “Christmastime” is now my new favorite Christmas song. The musical structure is super-ironic and the lyrics are, as just subversive enough to be charming. It’s like a deconstruction of the Waitresses “Christmas Rapping.”

And I think it’s fine to have one ironic and subversive song in your Christmas playlist. Anyway, treat yourself to it and file it away for next year.

PS: As Paul Thomas Anderson once explained, all of Mann’s love-lorn sons are really about the record industry. So who knows what this song is really about. I suspect it might be an inside joke about she and Penn’s marriage.