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September 7, 2009

Tim's thoughts: I contend that it is impossible to give a meaningful side-view of a round coin. For minimal cover... >>

American Numismatic Society, I Salute You

We've been talking a lot about the future of digitization, about how much digitization needs to improve, about the severe limits that digitization still imposes on many things—books, for instance.

So, here's a change of pace. Here is the almost perfectly digitizable object, almost perfectly digitized.

20090906_coin1.png

Small objects, easy to photograph in their entirety? Check.

20090906_coin2.png

Defined number of important views? Check. (Obviously two.)

20090906_coin3.png

Standard set of metadata? Check. (And click on one of the images above to see an example.)

So, given the ideal material for a digital archive, the American Numismatic Society delivers. There's a powerful search engine but their collection is pretty browsable, too. And, listen, I only collect coins that I intend to spend on the train, but I defy you not to get a little lost in these pages.

And every coin has its own stable permalink! Swoon!

The only thing missing is that you can't heft the coins, feel their contours. Fair enough. But I'll bet you could even generate 3D models from these images, using the depth information implied by the shadows. When I finally have a home 3D printer I'll crank out some of these guys and send 'em around.

And you know, ancient coins are perfect tokens of historical imagination, especially when captured so crisply. They're totally familiar but deeply strange. You can imagine keeping one in your pocket, feeling it in your hand.

Check these off the list. Now we just gotta get those books right.

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Posted September 7, 2009 at 5:26 | Comments (3) | Permasnark
File under: Gleeful Miscellany, Media Galaxy

September 2, 2009

Everyday Super Powers

Robin says,

This is a fun idea, and The Morning News' execution of it is crisp and super-readable: What's your hidden talent? Your... super power?

I liked this one, from Jessica Francis Kane:

You know how sometimes when you're trying to pour something from one glass into another, the liquid mostly just runs back down the edge of the first glass and spills all over the counter? Well, not for me it doesn't. Not a drop. I'm the daughter of a chemistry professor and this is my superpower. You have a half-pint you want to finish up in your pint glass so you don't look like such a lightweight? I'm the one you need. The trick is speed, angle, and confidence. You have to go fast, not tip slowly. You have to hold the emptying glass high, not touch it to the lip of the filling glass. Maybe it's a little thing, but aren't superpowers what we make of them? Lots of very thirsty people have been grateful for my help.

So what's yours? I'll start: I can fall asleep on any airplane, in any position, in under two minutes. Flight is my ultimate soporific. Now, great powers sometimes come great cost, and to tell you the truth, I have a hard time staying awake on planes if I have to. But more often, this is a blessing. Mmmokay see you guys in New York. Zonk.

Comments (16) | Permasnark | Posted: 11:57 AM

August 30, 2009

Tim's thoughts: Man, I never get to have any fun. ;)... >>

Your Future Portaphone

I love Matt Novak's blog Paleo-Future, which combines everything I love about paleoblogging and hot buttered futurism into a single delicious pie.

He hasn't posted a ton lately, and really, going after mobile phones is low-hanging fruit, but I was still delighted with today's look at portable phones (from a 1976 book titled Future Facts). It includes this quote:

For a while at least, the portaphone will remain a business tool or luxury item. In time, however, portaphones will get smaller and cheaper, just as transistor radios have.

First: "portaphones!" When did we stop applying multisyllabic prefixes to words? Probably around the same time "port-a" became uniquely associated with outdoor toilets.

Second: today, we would almost certainly have to reverse that analogy: "Over time, transistor radios became smaller and cheaper, just as celullar phones have today." I consider this a sign of the analogy's intrinsic merit.

Last: it's easy to look at old predictions of the future with awe at what they get right and glee at what they get wrong. But this should be taken seriously as symptoms. They show how the past dreamed itself, and indeed, how it dreamed the present, in all of its possibilities and constraints, into being.

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Posted August 30, 2009 at 4:51 | Comments (2) | Permasnark
File under: Gleeful Miscellany, Object Culture, Technosnark

August 25, 2009

Ta-Blet 2010

Tim says,

Fake Steve Jobs explains his non-thinking behind the new Apple tablet:

I started with the big questions. What is a tablet? Who will use it? And for what? If the tablet were a tree, what kind of tree would it be? And what of the word tablet itself? Ta is a Sanskrit root, for "gift." Blet is Proto-Indo-European meaning "to be perfect while lacking usefulness." Will you write on a tablet, or just read from it? Or will you just buy it and put it on your desk and look at it a lot and never use it at all? Or will you maybe carry it around and put on the table in restaurants to show the other humanoids in your tribe that you are more advanced and wealthy than they are, and they should fear you because you have powerful magic that they do not understand? You see what I mean? What is the anthropology here? And what about the ergonomics? Can you mount it on a wall? Will it have a shiny surface so that Macolytes can adore themselves as they use it in public? (Yes. It must.) The tablet must look and feel not like something that was made by man -- it must feel otherworldly, as if God himself made it and handed it to you.

Can't wait.

Comments (0) | Permasnark | Posted: 10:37 AM

August 13, 2009

Welcome to the Choice Factory

Robin says,

Analogies are like soups.

But, even so, an original, well-crafted analogy is one of the best tools that exist for staking out new mental territory. So, here's one that just flipped my lid. Kevin Kelly takes us way back:

A few hours after the big bang 14 billion years ago, the total freedom available within the fine mist of light atoms and zipping particles drifting in the universe was stifling narrow. The possible arrangements between them were dreadfully few. You could count the actionable options for a helium atom on one hand. Compare that prison to the universe one billion years ago (at least in the neighborhood of Earth), when life unleashed an overwhelming explosion of freedoms. Millions of species, each of them an engine of options, filled the surface of a planet with staggering choices.

Reasons why this is mind-expanding:

  • "A few hours after the big bang 14 billion years ago." I know cosmologists talk like this all the time, but normal people don't, and every time I hear it, it's bracing. Like a glass of cold water in the face.

  • "[T]hat prison." Wow. The primordial universe as a prison! Solitary confinement, with no food iron or water oxygen. And it took us 13 billion years to dig a tunnel (or fashion a shiv?) and make our getaway.

  • Earlier he says "[a] mind, of course, is a choice factory" and here he calls a species "an engine of options." I think that's such an interesting lens. +10 to the cephalopods, I think.

Can't get the prison thing out of my head. Maybe the Big Bang itself was the breakout? Jeez. Creation as jailbreak. Evolution as heist movie? I'm taking it too far. Go read Kevin Kelly.

Comments (0) | Permasnark | Posted: 10:58 PM

Compose Your Holes

Robin says,

Okay so first, Austin Kleon does the unthinkable, a photo-blockquote:

20090813_paperblockquote.jpg

The part he's focused on is the line: "It's learning what to leave out. Like with good guitar players—it ain't the licks they play, it's the holes they leave." Then, Kleon writes:

It reminded me of Ronald Johnson, in his introduction to radi os, a long poem made by erasing words from Milton's Paradise Lost: "I composed the holes." (Johnson was quoting a composer whose name I forget at the moment.)

Composing the holes. That's what we do when we craft a piece of art, whether it's drawing or making a blackout poem.

It's often the holes in pieces of art that make them interesting. What isn't shown vs. what is.

The same could be said of people. What makes them interesting isn't just what they've experienced, but what they haven't experienced.

He goes on, and it's worth reading.

There's a really nice, subtle twist here. Our culture focuses so much on experience: soaking it in, racking it up, putting it to use. There are whole industries built around giving you crazy new experiences. So it seems pretty radical to say: Actually, skip it. Embrace the gaps in your experience, in your reading, in your knowledge. They're important, and in a way, productive.

(Via Zach Seward in Google Reader.)

Comments (1) | Permasnark | Posted: 3:09 PM

August 11, 2009

Andrew's thoughts: I don't think I was ever as into airships as I was when I read Thomas Pynchon's <a href="http://w... >>

Airships!

20090811_blimp.jpg

I don't know about you, but I am enchanted by the idea of airships.

There's a new BLDGBLOG post up detailing a student's proposal to transform Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbor into an airport for zeppelins. The student's scheme to get the word out about the proposal is ingenious, and makes the post well worth reading, even if you don't care about airships.

But how could you not care about airships?

They are everything that cool stuff isn't supposed to be these days. They're slow and ungainly. They take up a lot of space. They telegraph their technology—unlike the iPhone, which is entirely opaque and therefore near-magical, the airship is obvious. It's a big balloon. Duh.

And yet. An NYC-to-Paris airship powered by the sun. What could be more grand?

There are, in fact, airship flights up here where I live, so you could say: "Enough with the blogposts, Sloan! Book a ticket." But that misses the point. I don't so much want to be in an airship as I want there to be other people in airships—lots of them—streaming in and out of San Francisco. (From the Ferry Building, naturally.)

Like this, except it wouldn't have to be trick photography, because the airships would all just be drifting... along...

Robin-sig.gif
Posted August 11, 2009 at 8:04 | Comments (7) | Permasnark
File under: Gleeful Miscellany

August 9, 2009

World of Spin and Flame

(From Pruned. More sunscapes.)

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Posted August 9, 2009 at 7:10 | Comments (0) | Permasnark
File under: Gleeful Miscellany, No Comment

August 6, 2009

Jasmine's thoughts: This is the coolest video I have ever seen. No joke. I feel inspired to document. Thanks for shar... >>

Long Walk Across China

Sometimes, every so often, somebody does something crazy to move a format forward. Robinson Crusoe. Citizen Kane. Maus.

And now: The Longest Way takes the photo-a-day video genre up a notch. Two notches. Four-thousand notches.

A few things that make this so ingenious: the characters that flit in and out of the scene, and therefore, the creator's life; his use of photos taken in super-quick succession to create an animated flip-book effect; oh, and China.

(Via Kottke.)

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Posted August 6, 2009 at 10:36 | Comments (1) | Permasnark
File under: Gleeful Miscellany, Worldsnark
Chris Saad's thoughts: Wait hang on - you MADE that - I thought it was an official demo lol... >>

Rhonda, Rhonda, Rhonda!

Wow. Tonight I got a chance to try Rhonda, a crazy drawing application that's somehow both 2D and 3D at the same time. It's like SketchUp for actual, uh, sketching.

So, this is just a video of me using Rhonda, played at 4X speed, which is to say, it might be really boring to watch, so feel free to skip it. All I know is, if some blogger I subscribe to tried out Rhonda, I would want him to post a video:

Robin-sig.gif
Posted August 6, 2009 at 12:46 | Comments (4) | Permasnark
File under: Design, Gleeful Miscellany, Technosnark

August 5, 2009

You Won't Find These on Threadless

Robin says,

Oh man, how much do I love these arcade boot-screen t-shirts?

20090805_boot.png

Reminds me a bit of Gerhard Richter's stained-glass pixels. Or maybe it's the other way around.

Comments (0) | Permasnark | Posted: 1:50 PM

July 30, 2009

Carla's thoughts: Really amazing! I didn