Templated Creation Wizards

Matt says,

Couple newish websites make it easy to make formerly complicated things:

1) BitStrips offers a surprisingly robust tool for making comic strips. Fell in love with it a little at first, but the honeymoon's kinda wearing off. Why can't I save strips as drafts? Why don't I have access to *all* the characters other users have made public? Why can't I make characters based on those characters?

2) AniMoto makes wonderfully kinetic automatic slideshows from your images, synced to a song of your choosing. You can then export the slideshows to YouTube, or dispense with them as you please.

Oh yeh, and also: This has nothing to do with templated creation, but Lifehacker's talking about the best IM clients. Pleasingly, I see they've chosen Digsby, which I've been meaning to blog about forever. Digsby is my *jam*. It connects not only to your IM service of choice, but to your Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and a host of other social apps. And it's got a slick, freakishly customizable interface. And it's fresh out of a private beta, so developers are polishing it up more every day.

But Can It Vacuum My Floor

Matt says,

Forgot where I ran across this, but I was reminded today of the typeface Champion Script Pro, "the most advanced and powerful script ever made. Developed over a period of two and a half years, each one of the 2 weights is loaded with 4253 glyphs (now 4280 glyphs)." What does that mean? It means the typeface is programmed to dynamically adjust glyphs to complement each other in a given word. All for just €175.

Just Because We Can ...

Matt says,

danah boyd writes a typically thought-provoking post on the prospect of exposing users' "Social Graphs," a meme that's been heating up recently. Quick backstory in case you didn't know: Google and a bunch of techy types want to make it so you can easily port your identity and contacts to any application on the Web. The advantages include easier sign-ups for different Web applications, no longer having to maintain the same information in a bunch of different places, quickly finding any contacts who are using an application you just signed up for, etc. Those of us with MySpace/Facebook/Friendster/LinkedIn/Flickr/vita.mn/etc. accounts are planning to be, for the most part, happy.

But danah makes the good point that those stumping for this move are all tech-savvy people who mostly have no idea of what the repercussions will be for some of the most vulnerable heavy users of the Web -- teens. A typical argument in favor of more open data refers to what Tim O'Reilly calls "security by obscurity" -- i.e. we have the illusion we're secure just because all our data is usually tucked out of the way, but this is patently false, as any reporter could tell you. Exposing public data more commonly means fewer people will harbor this false sense of security, ostensibly making them more directly conscious of how they manage their personal data. But as danah points out, it could be an awfully risky way to make a point.

Augmented Driving

Matt says,

Things points to the fascinating idea of the "virtual cable" for driving directions in cars. There's been a lot of recent buzz about projecting data on car windshields. The virtual cable is a three-dimensional line drawn onto the road ahead showing you exactly where you're going. Trippy, probably distracting, but nonetheless fascinating.

EveryBlock

Matt says,

Adrian, Wilson and co. have launched Everyblock, a mashup of several information sources down to the block level for different cities (currently Chicago, New York and San Francisco). The site is very pretty, especially the maps, and as you would expect, there's fun data hidden beneath every click. But it's otherwise hard for me to evaluate how cool it is, since I don't live in any of the included cities. How about it, residents?

Update: One surprise ... no RSS feeds? (Except this one.)

Update 2: Rex reminds me ... Poynter Online interview w/ Adrian (which is how I found out it launched).

Phonergeist?

Matt says,

Needed: a term for when your phone makes calls to random entries in my address book on its own volition, usually as a byproduct of unintentional button-mashing. Somehow, my phone intuits the romance/dating-related entries and goes straight for them. It's particularly enamored of one of my exes, which can be awkward. But not as awkward as the time it sent a discouraged suitor of mine five copies of a text message to a friend describing what I was going to wear that night.

I understand that keyboard lock (and probably looser jeans) would mostly solve this problem. But until I decide whether those are sacrifices I'm willing to make, I need something to describe this phenomenon. Ghost-dialing?

Universal Computing in Two States and Three Colors

Robin says,

As previously noted, I couldn't hack Stephen Wolfram's big book but I like his way of thinking. This new post from his blog is fun and fascinating. It's about a 20-year-old kid who met a challenge Wolfram set out earlier this year -- with a $25,000 reward attached. Good (if esoteric) reading.

The general concept of "discovering" solutions vs. engineering them seems fairly profound, yeah?

The Large Hadron Collider Is, In Fact, Large

Robin says,

Normally not a huge fan of QTVR but these panoramas of the Large Hadron Collider are unbelievable. The color palette in particular is so pleasingly industrial-primary.

Non-Programming

Robin says,

Over at Steven Talcott Smith's blog, tales of non-programmers writing software. Some really fun stories in there, all of which I am entirely sympathetic to, as someone who a) admittedly does not have The Knack for programming but b) really enjoys it anyway.

And besides, knack or not, I think it's on its way to becoming a new required literacy. Sure sure, computers will get easier to program, and the gap between our intent and their instructions will close as they scootch our way -- but you'll still have to learn to think procedurally, to think in terms of objects or messages or other computer-y things.

And you'll have to learn what && means. You always end up having to learn what && means.

35 Years, 10 Seconds

Robin says,

Time-lapse video of Tokyo's skyline. It's crazy. The progress looks cartoony and alien... almost insectile!

Via Long Views.

We've Been Stuck With Violins for Centuries

Robin says,

Given how many hours I spent with a crappy Casio keyboard, I'm pretty sure 12-year-old Robin would never have come out of his room if he'd had one of these.

What's cool about it is not the synthesis (which is kinda boring), and even not the interface per se, but rather the interface in a physical context -- all those buttons! How can you not want to monkey with it?

Google-as-Bank

Robin says,

Great metaphor. (And get your data out from inside that mattress! Don't you know Google's hundreds of thousands of redundant disks are more reliable than your crappy USB external drive?)

The Motion of Motion

Robin says,

1. Select video, e.g. "Run Lola Run."
2. Display thousands of copies of said video on a gigantic wall-spanning video matrix, each offset from its neighbor by a single frame.
3. Observe.

The patterns that emerge out of different kinds of motion in the movie, and different kinds of cutting, are pretty nutso.

All You Need is the Cloud

Robin says,

John Markoff's tale:

Half way into the flight, after responding to about a half hour's worth of e-mail, my laptop hard disk crashed. [...]

On the plane and afterwards in my Vancouver hotel room, I went through the predictable stages of grief that accompany data loss. First you assume that the problem is software and then after employing several disk utility programs you begin to realize that you are really in the soup.

How was I going to write the three articles I had promised without a computer?

[...] I considered a number of stopgap measures. There was the possibility of asking the paper to ship out a replacement laptop overnight. (My call to the paper's computer support hotline was answered three or four days later). And there was the possibility of resorting to the hotel's $15-an hour business center.

Then, while hunting through my bag for some elusive stopgap measure, I came across a CD disk with a copy of Ubuntu Linux. A number of versions of Linux now come with a demonstration feature that makes it possible to run the program without actually installing it on a hard disk.

Inserting the disk, I was able to restart my computer, this time it was running Ubuntu, instead of Apple's OS X version of Unix.

What I discovered was that - with the caveat of a necessary network connection - life is just fine without a disk. Between the Firefox Web browser, Google's Gmail and and the search engine company's Docs Web-based word processor, it was possible to carry on quite nicely without local data during my trip.

Seriously... I find I care about which computer I'm using less and less. This is awesome.

P.S. The NYT's Bits blog is terrific.

Deep History (in 160 Characters or Less)

Robin says,

Went to the Long Now talk tonight and took my parents. Unfortunately: way longer than the normal (snappy) Long Now talk. Fortunately: totally awesome subject, and loads of interesting details. The presenter was Alex Wright, an information architect. He's written a book called Glut about the history of information systems -- the deep history. Like, all the way back to bacteria.

My new habit of notetaking is to text messages to myself. Thus you can gauge the interestingness of a Long Now talk by the pile of weird short emails that's waiting for me when I get back home. Here's what I'm looking at now:

(Okay, actually, one of them is a note about a dream I remembered during the talk. I'll leave it to you to guess which.)

Update: Stewart Brand recaps Alex Wright's talk.

Make RSS Work Again

Matt says,

When David Weinberger talks about how effective the Internet has been at evolving sophisticated filters for processing all the stuff that's on the Internet, this is what he means. AideRSS is a Godsend. It analyzes the activity around each item in an RSS feed -- Technorati hits, comments, Del.icio.us links, traffic reports, etc. -- and calculates a score for the item. It then creates four feeds from the original feed, each set to a higher activity threshold.

Example: So far today, BoingBoing has posted a liver-curdling 18 entries. I could cut that down to two entries by subscribing to the feed of what AideRSS has deemed to be BoingBoing's "best" posts. (Today, I'd be reading the obit of the fellow who could dial a phone by whistling, and a post on this "John Hughes meets George Romero" graphic novel. Among other things, I'd miss cheap plastic toys, fugly sweatshirts, a clay iPhone, and politically-themed crafting projects. Think I'd live.) If I really only want to hear from BoingBoing every couple of days, I could go for just the hits.

For those of you overloading on RSS feeds, but hoping not to miss anything big, this is totally key.

The Thermodynamics of the Internet

Robin says,

Over at Wired's great Danger Room defense-tech blog, there's a post up about DARPA's new programs to monitor internet traffic even as the volume of that traffic keeps increasing exponentially:

But the Navy has been pioneering an approach, called "Therminator," which might be able to do the job a little better. It's one of a number of potential new net-defense tools that DARPA would like to see in action. The idea is to monitor the flow of traffic, rather than the individual packets. To treat it like to movement of temperature -- thermodynamics -- rather than the travels of ones and zeros. "If, all of a sudden, we see a big flow to China, we know there's a problem," Hearing says.

Yeah, I realize the whole "whoah, the net, it's like, it's like, a giant BRAIN" thing is a cliche by now, but even so, it's wild to see this weird creation begin to exhibit more and more of these macro-properties that we associate with other physical or biological systems.

Perl Is a Shinto Shrine

Matt says,

"We don't often talk about love at gatherings like this; it seems too squishy." -- Clay Shirky, in a speech at Supernova '07 that really is quite pleasant. Filled with fun nuggets. (Joho!)

The Google Grid, Broadcasting at 700MHz

Robin says,

Google has committed to bid for wireless spectrum -- as much to influence the direction of the market as to, you know, own spectrum (or so it seems).

And, good news: The direction they want to push it is towards openness.

These days, I find myself less worried about Google's techno-titanic mastery of all data and more excited about its potential as a force for change in public policy and markets. I'm actually really glad they're getting into that game.

iPhone Snark

Matt says,

All I have to say about the iPhone is it sure took Apple long enough to create the wifiPod. :P

Mutation State University

Robin says,

From the Dept. of Alma Mater Promotion:

In the corner of a laboratory at Michigan State University, one of the longest-running experiments in evolution is quietly unfolding. A dozen flasks of sugary broth swirl on a gently rocking table. Each is home to hundreds of millions of Escherichia coli, the common gut microbe. These 12 lines of bacteria have been reproducing since 1989, when the biologist Richard E. Lenski bred them from a single E. coli. "I originally thought it might go a couple thousand generations, but it's kept going and stayed interesting," Dr. Lenski said. He is up to 40,000 generations now, and counting.

In case you glossed over it: "...have been reproducing since 1989." That is, to be clear, an 18-year-old experiment. And counting!

Brave New Biotech World

Robin says,

I know this has been like The Next Big Thing for a long time, but it's sort of starting to happen. From Kottke:

A company called Lifeforce has received FDA approval to store white blood cells for people as a "back-up copy of your immune system." The idea is that those pre-diseased cells could be reproduced in the lab and infused back into your body when needed to fight off infection or deal with the aftermath of chemotherapy.

Soon there are going to be little bits of us stored everywhere. I'm serious! I know! It's weird!

USB Pinkie Drive

Matt says,

My favorite thing in my All-Ett these days is the impossibly tiny Kingmax 2-gb Super Stick. The dimensions? 1.3" x 0.1" x 0.5". Two gigabytes. That's more capacity than my high school desktop PC. And it's made of reinforced steel or something, honestly. Best part? It costs $16.

Why hasn't this device taken over the world yet?

David Brin's Respect

Robin says,

Discover Magazine has a short interview up with science fiction author David Brin. They ask him how he's chalked up such a good record as a prognosticator, and this is what he says:

Peering ahead is mostly art. We all have tricks. One of mine is to look for "honey-pot ideas" drawing lots of fad attention. Whatever's fashionable, try to poke at it. Maybe 1 percent of the time you'll find a trend or possibility that's been missed. Another method is even simpler: Respect the masses. Nearly all futuristic movies and novels -- even sober business forecasts -- seem to wallow in the same smug assumption that most people are fools. This stereotype led content owners to envision the Internet as a delivery conduit to sell movies to passive couch potatoes. Even today, many of the social-net and virtual-world companies treat their users like giggling 13-year-olds incapable of expressing more than a sentence at a time of actual discourse.

Good, prescient stuff throughout.

And! If you haven't read the thrilling tale of the Streaker and her neo-dolphin crew, then by all means, do so immediately!

Threadless for Bumper Stickers

Matt says,

Ha! I bet you thought I was posting an actual link to a site that was, in fact, Threadless for bumper stickers. But if such a thing exists -- which it must -- I'm not cool enough to know about it. Enlighten me, o ye crowd-wisdom.

The Diamond Age Starts... Now?

Robin says,

Physicists just figured out how to address a single carbon-13 nucleus as a memory register -- a quantum bit -- at room temperature. That's an important distinction; all quantum memory to date has relied on freakish near-absolute-zero conditions in the lab.

P.S. It also involves lasers. Of course.

No, Not That Vista

Robin says,

Okay, see if you can guess what this refers to:

VistA stands as perhaps the greatest success story for government-developed information technology since the Internet itself.

Wow, right? The answer lies in Thomas Goetz's NYT op-ed.

(His blog Epidemix is subscription-worthy as well!)

Like a Giant Flower

Robin says,

This is beautiful: a new solar power plant in Seville. It doesn't use photovoltaics, though; instead there's a field of mirrors focusing sunlight on pipes of water. Steam = power. Simple!

No time to clip a picture, but go check it out. It's angelic.

Contextual CO2

Robin says,

Was just booking a flight on southwest.com and saw this:

It's not the site; it's the real costs Firefox add-on, which I installed a few weeks ago and promptly forgot about. Apparently this is one of its least-impressive displays; there are other examples here.

So this is really cool, right? On the web, you don't have to wait for labeling regimes to change... you can just rig up your own view of commerce.

That said, I will concede that the CO2 values shown here did not affect my purchase decision in the slightest. It was only after I bought the ticket that was moved to calculate how much CO2 my Toyota would spew out if I drove it to LA instead: a little over 300 pounds.

Coming Soon: A Bunker With a View

Robin says,

Well, it's not transparent aluminum... but light-conducting concrete seems almost better in a way, doesn't it?

A Glimpse of the Retro-Future

Matt says,

Jarah blogs what may be the best headline of all time, courtesy of Wired's Malcontents.

(Note: This blog post is essentially Jarah's blog post, with an additional layer of attribution. I love how recursive blogging can be. I'm trying to think if I've ever seen a blog post retain the entire meme trail of an item before. How awesome would it be to see "Wired via Jarah via Matt via" at the end of a post? Can you guys think of anything like that?)

BASIC 2.0

Matt says,

Hackety Hack makes Ruby sort of like BASIC. From the fellow who brought you Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby, it's a downloadable program (basically the Ruby language, the Gecko browser, and some helpful libraries) designed to introduce geek wannabes to the world of programming. For a slightly less kid-oriented approach, check out Try Ruby, which is a browser-based version of the same thing by the same guy. (MetaFilterrific.)

Black Rim Glasses

Robin says,

Ethan Kaplan's blog is consistently good. Witness this post on user-generated content where he brings it around to Walter Benjamin in the end. He is a technology guy (perhaps... THE technology guy?) at Warner Brothers Records, so he straddles the line between new worlds and old in interesting ways. Worth subscribing.

A Bit of Foolscap, Talking to the Ether

Robin says,

Despite how dorky it looks, I am a little bit excited about this new Amazon.com e-book reader. It's almost entirely because it has high-speed wireless internet access. That's the whole point of an e-reader, I think: If I just want to tote around Harry Potter, books work fine. But if I want to tote around Bloglines... hmm!

Too... Much... Smartness

Robin says,

This Cornell class-blog, Info 204, is blowing my mind in a sort of cyclical combustion cycle where just as I feel like I've processed one of the posts, another one comes along and everything going BLAM. The class covers "how the social, technological, and natural worlds are connected, and how the study of networks sheds light on these connections."

Military Jumping Beans

Robin says,

Ballistic jumping microbots!

That is all.

Help Me Invent a Need for This Tool

Robin says,

Seriously, this 3D scanning/printing stuff is poised to take off. It seems super-exciting, but the problem is, I have no idea what I would actually want to make with a desktop factory. I am sure this simply betrays a lack of physical imagination on my part. Any ideas?

Doing Things No Human Could Do

Robin says,

Robot bricklayers! I don't know about you, but I always find these industrial robot arms hypnotic: so massive, yet so fast and so precise.

P.S. The link is to the Monocle site. I got a chance to check out the printed magazine this weekend and it is pretty awesome.

Hal Varian

Robin says,

The Berkeley information economist Hal Varian regularly writes cool analysis pieces for the NYT. As part of my quest to transform everything into the universe into a feed: Here they are.

Thiago, What Are You Working on Down There?

Robin says,

Michigan teen makes small fusion reactor in his basement. No seriously, it's real. I'm pretty sure the greatest technical achievement of my tenure as a Michigan teen was, like, connecting to BBSes.

As long as we're talking about science: Remember the world accent quiz? Well, the results are in. The U.S. accents -- Alabama and Wis-CAHHHN-sin -- were a cinch, while the accents from Bolivia, Italy, and Morocco stumped almost everyone.

Make the Web Fun

Robin says,

Ask.com is doing a nice job with things these days. For instance: Here's where I spent most of this sunny San Francisco day!

Natural Social Networks

Robin says,

This seems smart: social networking sites run by airlines. Of course, the target isn't people like me, who always just grab the cheapest fare on Orbitz; it's business travelers, e.g. the Southwest devotees who fly from San Francisco to LA twice a week. I mean, I feel like these folks have a thin, oh-it's-you-again social network built already.

What other businesses regularly convene groups of people in the same space who might have something in common?

Here's my nomination: grocery stores! What if Whole Foods set up a social networking site? I actually think it could become like the best dating site in the world pretty quickly. Either that or the most awkward. Maybe both.

Free Multimillion-Dollar Startup Idea of the Day

Matt says,

A mashup that allows users to create Pop-Up Videos out of YouTube videos. You'd get acquired by Google for $25MM, easy. And it would be soooooo hott.

Dull Alexandrias

Robin says,

This is supposedly a list of the ten biggest databases in the world. But I am suspicious: I really feel like the U.S. federal government ought to rate more of those top spots. What about Social Security? Or some sort of crazy Medicare database?

Also, could YouTube's database really be larger than, say, Visa's?

Anyway, I'm still linking to it just because I love the idea of Really Huge Databases. Any other contenders you can think of?

The Tale of Teddy Ruxpin 2.0

Matt says,

But in the meantime, while we thought about what sort of things the Home Server might do, I came up with the (again, patented, but the patent dropped) idea of an internet-connected teddy bear that contacts a web site to tell stories. People would tell stories to the web site, and in return for these stories, they would be paid per listener. Bear purchasers would pay a monthly subscription fee. The child would get access to every single story ever told via the breadth of the lazyweb, and the parents could configure the bear to tell only certain kinds of stories (e.g. nonviolent, child age 4-6, Jewish, with a moral message, etc. Stories would be reviewed and tagged.)

Search Is a Folksonomy

Matt says,

This is a notion that popped into my head during a discussion with our search vendor today: online search is a folksonomy. Every search a user performs could be seen as a tag she's applying to the result she ultimately clicks on. Over time, you could imagine a page featuring a tag cloud formed of all the searches that got people to that page.

Maybe that's an insight obvious to everyone but me, but it felt novel. It seems we always talk about how tags could help search (hand in hand with the discussion of how no one actually uses/understands tagging, which may not be so true); why don't we talk more about how perhaps the most common activity performed on the Internet is actually a form of tagging?

Bonus: The tag cloud you'd see if we did this for all pages on Snarkmarket would feature "snarkmarket" in giant letters, and then the following phrases, getting progressively smaller: breck girl, media galaxy, googlezon, listenings, robin+sloan, matt thompson, shipbreakers, homeless by choice, matt+thompson, by your command, giantess, media+galaxy, chicken porn, breck+girl, robin+sloan+and+matt+thompson, eminence gris, snarkmarket "this i believe", mothball fleet, "by your command".

And that would be my favorite tag cloud ever.

Old Man Minsky

Robin says,

An interesting (and short) interview with Marvin Minsky over in Discover this month. This passage from page two is provocative:

[Your new book] "The Emotion Machine" reads like a book about understanding the human mind, but isn't your real intent to fabricate it?

The book is actually a plan for how to build a machine. I'd like to be able to hire a team of programmers to create the Emotion Machine architecture that's described in the book -- a machine that can switch between all the different kinds of thinking I discuss. Nobody's ever built a system that either has or acquires knowledge about thinking itself, so that it can get better at problem solving over time. If I could get five good programmers, I think I could build it in three to five years.

From a little later on:

Has science fiction influenced your work?

It's about the only thing I read. General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.

Also, Minsky says wistfully of the old Bell Labs: "I worked there one summer, and they said they wouldn't work on anything that would take less than 40 years to execute."

Finally, GMail for Everything!

Matt says,

I've been waiting for this for months, ever since I first heard Google was testing out the ability for users to manage external email accounts through Gmail. Every few weeks, I'd peek back into my settings and see if I'd been added to the group of users this feature had been rolled out to. And at last, the moment is here.

I love Google the way Winston loves Big Brother.

Icon

Robin says,

TIME.com has another of its great, oblique photo-essays up: Thirty years of Steve Jobs. It's actually pretty remarkable to flip through. Jobs is so quintessentially American.

A New Royal Society

Robin says,

That's what the nascent Make movement feels like on good days. Neal Stephenson invokes the broad appeal of the Royal Society in an interview:

Reason: Your Newton and Leibniz (and the fictional Daniel Waterhouse) are remarkable characters because of their deep interest in almost everything around them. Are there modern figures who in your opinion show that range of interests?

Stephenson: To be interested in too many things is not conducive to professional advancement in the sciences today. You can't write a general Ph.D. dissertation. You have to pick something very specific. What does happen from time to time is that you'll have one scientist working on a very specific problem in one field, and another working on what seems to be an altogether different problem in another field, and somehow a spark will jump between them and they'll end up writing a joint paper.

Freeman Dyson and his son George Dyson are two people with extraordinarily broad scope. Beyond that, it is difficult to generalize. One encounters high-tech geeks, lawyers, ministers, businesspeople, soldiers, and construction workers who have made themselves extremely erudite by reading a lot of history, science, and philosophy. In an earlier era, people like these might have gravitated to the Royal Society, and indeed one of the many remarkable things about the early Royal Society was its ability to gather in such people, combined with its ability to identify and marginalize "enthusiasts" (cranks) while fostering the ones who had something to contribute. Modern-day scientific institutions tend to value specialization. But that is an unavoidable consequence of the advancement that has taken place in all sciences in the last 350 years.

Can we hope for the return of the generalist? Should we?

The Lost Millennium

Robin says,

This ancient calculator is unbelievable. Second century B.C.!

And then:

Dr. Charette noted that more than 1,000 years elapsed before instruments of such complexity are known to have re-emerged. A few artifacts and some Arabic texts suggest that simpler geared calendrical devices had existed, particularly in Baghdad around A.D. 900.

Somebody I know once claimed, only half in jest, that if it wasn't for the Dark Ages we'd have landed on the moon by like 1200. Big ol' imperial space-galleys or something.

PPT Love

Matt says,

TNR's Open University is reviving the age-old discussion of how awful PowerPoint is. (Cf. Gettysburg address told in PPT.) I've gotta dissent. I just think people use it wrong.

As a reporter/producer, I never had to make presentations. I told stories with images, audio, and text -- using Flash, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Word, and the like. My first month at the Star Tribune, I found myself having to use PowerPoint. Initially disdainful, I sniffed around for a few PPT tutorials, and stumbled across this blog. As well as provided helpful tips, the blog espoused an approach to PowerPoint that helped me to see it as just another storytelling medium.

The PowerPoint I created last October still lives on in bits and pieces today, in presentations I've given all over the Twin Cities. And I always get pretty good reviews.

Like a Brain, Like a Heart

Robin says,

Take a look at this graph and try to tell me the internet isn't going to eventually wake up and, like, try to find other internets to play with.

Microcomments

Matt says,

A beta version of The Django Book -- a guide to the Web application development framework Django -- is being released free online, chapter by chapter. OK, nothing new there; I think it's now illegal in 38 states to write a book about technology without either blogging the writing of it or posting it under a General Public License. What's interesting is the system that the authors have cooked up for allowing comments on every paragraph. It could get totally overwhelming, if not implemented just right, but I think they've implemented it just right. Sweet.

Stoner's Delight

Matt says,

I can't tell you what I find so incredible about it, but I spent about 45 minutes just staring at this Flash program yesterday, and I don't regret a minute of it. Turn down your speakers before you visit.

Treatise on Nihilism

Robin says,

xkcd never fails to charm.

P.S. I am a little embarrassed to say I bought the shirt. The rules: It will be worn only on weekends. In the confines of my apartment. While playing board games.

Bloglines Killa!

Matt says,

Speaking of new Google products, know which one I am kinda loving? Google Reader. I think this is the nudge I need to finally abandon Bloglines. (Hi, Snarkmarket readers!!! Remember me??)

Inxplicable

Robin says,

GOOGLE!

Google, you have just released Google Transit trip-planning apps for five new cities.

SAN FRANCISCO IS NOT AMONG THEM.

What the shiz, Goog? Do you not love your people?

I mean... TAMPA??

Update: See the comments. Who knew?

Skyscraping for 70 Years

Robin says,

Man, businessweek.com is the sleeper news site of the year. They consistently have cool stuff. For instance: Seven Decades of Skyscrapers, an article (and more importantly, slideshow) about the work of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Check out slide four, the solar telescope. Slide 10 looks to be pretty hot as well.

No Seriously, It's the WifiPod

Robin says,

Listen, I don't want you to start thinking I'm a shill for Microsoft or anything, but honestly, doesn't the Zune seem way cooler than any of those new iPods?

We're Not a Film Company... We're a Flatness Company

Robin says,

How should Kodak save itself? Get into the laboratory-grown meat business, of course.

Come on, you pretty much have to click that link.

DIY Nuke Detector

Robin says,

I love San Francisco! Resident nerds have constructed and deployed a super-cheap, boat-mounted radiation detector!

Via Peter's unblog.

Containerization

Robin says,

In The New Atlantis this month there's a review of two books on shipping containers (middle item) -- the TCP/IP packets of modern trade. (Come on, you are all blog readers out there, you know what I mean.) Somehow I find this incredibly evocative:

[...] McLean inaugurated the era of containerization on April 26, 1956 by transporting 58 containers from Newark to Houston aboard a ship called the Ideal X.

Also: It is said that the container cranes at the Port of Oakland were the inspiration for George Lucas's AT-AT walkers. It's highly plausible.

There's a couple of interesting-looking pieces in this month's Atlantis, too... one about scientists' memoirs and another on network neutrality. I'll read them and let you know if they're any good.

Second Life and Macromyopia

Robin says,

3pointD transcribes a fascinating keynote talk by Mitch Kapor at the Second Life Community Convention this weekend.

Also, he gives a name to an effect I am constantly citing:

One thing that’s very important to keep in mind is something called Macromyopia. For people who are inside a new phenomenon like Second Life, we tend to overestimate the short-term effects. We think more great things are going to happen sooner than they typically do. Conversely, we underestimate the long-term impact.

Or: In the short-term, things change slower than we expect them to. In the long-term, they change more than we ever imagined they would. Now I know what to call it!

It's the Center of the Universe, I Hear

Robin says,

Earth: just another failed planetary nucleus. Aww.

A Pixel the Size of Everything

Robin says,

Browsing the site for Ask a Scientist, a cool lecture series here in SF, I stumbled across the coolest link ever. Down in the bottom-right corner of the page, it says: "Want to get freaked out? Click here."

Go ahead, try it.

Every time I see that thing my brain folds.

Kitchen Efficiencies

Matt says,

This is an awesome idea: a cutting board with an integrated scale, allowing you to measure your ingredients as you slice 'em.

I've long wished that the task of measuring was better integrated into the cooking process. I've been on the lookout for a set of containers to hold my flour, rice, sugar and other dry goods, with lids that double as measuring cups. Let me know if you see anything.

(Infosthetic.)

News from the World of Science

Robin says,

Fun stuff recently on EurekAlert:

• Mercury sucks
• Social networks and problem-solving
• The virtues of intuitive eating
• Migratory birds calibrate their internal compasses at sunrise and sunset
• Slime molds are survivors

Speaking of science: Here is a depressing graph.

Twelve Movies

Matt says,

From chapter 4 of The Singularity Is Near:

Although we have the illusion of receiving high-resolution images from our eyes, what the optic nerve actually sends to the brain is just outlines and clues about points of interest in our visual field. We then essentially hallucinate the world from cortical memories that interpret a series of extremely low-resolution movies that arrive in parallel channels. In a 2001 study published in Nature, Frank S. Werblin, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley, and doctoral student Boton Roska, M.D., showed that the optic nerve carries ten to twelve output channels, each of which carries only minimal information about a given scene. One group of what are called ganglion cells sends information only about edges (changes in contrast). Another group detects only large areas of uniform color, whereas a third group is sensitive only to the backgrounds behind figures of interest.

"Even though we think we see the world so fully, what we are receiving is really just hints, edges in space and time," says Werblin. "These 12 pictures of the world constitute all the information we will ever have about what's out there, and from these 12 pictures, which are so sparse, we reconstruct the richness of the visual world. I'm curious how nature selected these 12 simple movies and how it can be that they are sufficient to provide us with all the information we seem to need."

Comments (3) | Permasnark | Posted: 7:01 PM

Geeking Out

Matt says,

I've been a bad blogger. When the site I'm working on is launched (aaaaany minute now), I'll make it up, I promise. But since I can't sleep and am up at kind of an ungodly hour, I'd like to take a moment to geek out over Google's answer to Sourceforge. Sourceforge drives me nuts. There's tons of good stuff there, but how's anyone supposed to find it? GCode is much prettier. Of course, the Googletrons say, "We really like SourceForge, and we don't want to hurt SourceForge." I say fiddle while they burn, Eric Schmidt. Fiddle while they burn! OK, back to my cave. (Waxtastic.)

The WifiPod... by Microsoft

Robin says,

Hey, pay attention to this Zune stuff from Microsoft. The emphasis on wifi, social networks, and maybe even gaming is interesting, and the whole thing smells more Xbox-y than Vista-y to me. (Which is a good thing.)

Prediction: J Allard will run Microsoft in ten years.

San Francisco Interactive City Summit

Robin says,

I think this looks pretty fun: a free, open conference about interactive cities -- e.g. ideas at the intersection of urban planning, technology, networks, media, mapping, local social networks... or whatever else you think fits. It's here in San Francisco on August 7 and 8. Sign up if you're in the area!

My Power Strip Always Makes Me Cry

Robin says,

Come to think of it, the power strip has needed re-inventing for quite some time now. Here's a cool new system called E-ROPE designed by students. Energy-efficient, too!

The snarky commenters clearly have not had the struggles with traditional long, uniformly-spaced power strips that I have. Arghhh.

The Happy Hive Mind

Matt says,

Cambrian House: anyone can submit an idea, anyone can vote for or against that idea, anyone can contribute the code/creative work to execute that idea, and the folks who do get paid.

Smack Dat Hadron

Robin says,

Let me just tick off the things I love about this article in Seed Magazine.

Grand claims?

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) currently under construction at CERN is the greatest basic science endeavor in history.

Check. Giant ominous-looking machinery?

Um... CHECK. Big goals?

All these superlatives exist for one reason: To understand the universe.

Check and mate. Seriously, even if you know the basics of the LHC (*cough* don't we all *cough*) it's worth a look -- Seed has gathered short, provocative notes from a crew of smart physicists. It's good reading.

P.S. That blue thing up above? It transforms into a robot.

It's Like a Slow Internet for Cars!

Robin says,

Gems of the U.S. interstate from NPR. The highways just turned 50!

Science Press Release of the Week

Robin says,

"Radioactive scorpion venom for fighting cancer."

AWESOME.

From the always-interesting EurekAlert! feed.

Live Video Earth

Robin says,

There's a company called Skyline that has a Google Earth competitor with live video mapping -- and it sounds like the video can come from any internet-connected source.

I do not doubt Google's ability to clone this feature. And for some reason I feel not a twinge of privacy concern over this; I seriously want everybody to stick a webcam out their window right now.

I'm Feeling Civic

Robin says,

It's Google.gov! Who called it? (Though I should note there is still a lot more they could do...)

Usability Testing in Uganda

Robin says,

Matthew Flannery is co-founder of Kiva, one of my favorite new non-profits. On his excellent blog, he's just posted a video of a Ugandan client using the Kiva site. If you're a web designer, or at all interested in the issue of the digital divide, you should watch it. It's actually a bit harrowing.

In related news, the merchant I helped fund via Kiva just paid back 10 percent of his loan! Nice!

Algorithmic Expressions

Matt says,

The amazing Jonathan Harris is at it again, having completed another super-interesting project with a fantastic interface. (Actually, a pair of them.) This time, he and his collaborator Sepamdar Kamvar have outdone themselves with We Feel Fine, a Java applet that offers a peek at blogged emotions, in aggregate or as snapshots. WFF also enabled a spin-off project called Love-lines, done in Flash. Play around with these for a while, they'll awe you. (Infosthetic.)

Wired at the Walker

Matt says,

Thursdays you'll often find me at the Walker Art Center, cell phone at my ear, wandering from exhibit to exhibit and occasionally punching in digits as I stare at the works of art. It's because the Walker offers this pretty fantastic service called "Art on Call," which lets you listen to the curators (and often the original artists) talking about the exhibits.

Now the Walker's hatched up a plan to lend visitors free iPod nanos, pre-loaded with the "Art on Call" tracks. A great idea. But what's really awesome is the thought the Walker folks have put into hacking the iPods to make them dunceproof. I love this museum.

(BTW: the Walker Channel is really a tremendous resource. Free video of talks by some of my favorite artists, from Ang Lee to Todd Haynes to Paul Auster. Highly, highly recommended.)

Grand Theft Auto-matic

Matt says,

DARPA's next Grand Challenge (the one they usually hold in the desert, where they race robot cars over inhospitable terrain) will be held in a simulated city next year. The unmanned vehicles will have to handle traffic and deal with intersections. (Wired.)

Betta' 'Lexa

Robin says,

By no means do I condone the wanton use of Alexa stats. But if you must query its dark soul (and yes... you must), then by all means use Alexaholic. For instance.

Mashup Mania!

Matt says,

Why haven't I seen the Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix before? It's great! You can just go through and instantly see what two Web-2.0-y things haven't been mashed up yet, and have at it. E.g. noone's put together Del.icio.us and EVDB yet! Here's your chance to get angel funding!

High Concept

Robin says,

"It's like a search engine... except... big."

(How much do you love that home page, though? The box COMPELS you to type.)

World of Wallstreetcraft

Robin says,

It's tongue-in-cheek but I like it: Sun says they power the world's biggest multiplayer online game.

It's the stock market.

My Personal Supermap

Matt says,

Via Unmediated, the GPS-enabled TrackStick has a very limited, but possibly very interesting function: "It tracks where it goes, and it remembers where it's been." Although Telespial Systems, the company behind TrackStick, seems to be most excited about its snooping potential -- Spy on your kids! Watch your employees! -- I love the idea that I could keep it in my pocket for a few months and produce an incredibly detailed map of my life.

Infinite Storage? Here You Go

Robin says,

Whoah. So apparently it's the Amazon Grid. No consumer-ish interface but it seems like it would be, like, a day's work for a web developer to make one.

Yo Quaero

Robin says,

Nicholas Carr has a run-down of an Economist article about Quaero, the European public/private search engine project:

The effort's "stunningly ambitious" technological goals, writes the Economist, "show that Quaero is intended to be far more than just another would-be Google, but a leap forward in search-engine technology." Quaero is, for instance, being designed to allow images and sounds to be used as search terms, in addition to traditional keywords [...]

That sounds cool! And in the wake of a few too many underwhelming new offerings from Google, this rings true:

One thing Quaero has going for it is focus: While Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all have complex business interests extending well beyond search, Quaero does not. It has the kind of clean slate that Google had ten years ago when it came to life in a university.

Hey, shades of Regulating Search here: Maybe there's something to be gained by thinking of search engines as utilities, with the same kind of public/private DNA.

Firefox Wins!

Matt says,

For the first week since I've been keeping track of it, Firefox is more popular than Internet Explorer with visitors to Snarkmarket (for the week beginning March 1 and ending March 8). 46.64% of visitors over the past week used FF, compared with 41.24% who used IE. IE won out by a slight margin (44.56% to 42.85%) over the month from Feb. 8 to Mar. 8, but FF is trending up:

1/11-2/8: IE (49.25%), FF (39.07%)
12/14/05-1/11: IE (47.97%), FF (39.71%)
11/16-12/14: IE (51.7%), FF (35.73%)
10/19-11/16: IE (59.2%), FF (25.6%)

Hi-FiPod

Matt says,

Dammit, Apple. Wi-fi, not hi-fi. What do you think this is, 1973? I've seen frickin' iPod speakers.

Slippery Plastic

Matt says,

File Under: Best invention ever. GE has made a cheap plastic so water-repellent even honey slides right off it. Check out the video at GE's Global Research Blog (side note: check out the rest of the blog too; pretty interesting). You may have to right-click on the video and download it to view the full thing.

What does this portend? For one thing, ketchup (or shampoo or honey, etc.) bottles where all the ketchup slides right out with no coaxing. Technology Review imagines self-cleaning buildings and cool medical applications. (via Everywhere)

Mashup Camp: Where's Waldo?

Robin says,

mashup_07.JPG
Originally uploaded by dsearls.

Dropped Your Powerbook in a Volcano? No Problem

Robin says,

Anecdotes from the world of last-ditch data recovery:

SG: This is our most famous computer: it's a laptop that was rescued from the bottom of the Amazon River. A cruise ship hit an underwater barge, and sank down to the bottom. And the woman, an amateur diver, several days later, against all international law, broke in with a Maglight flashlight. Went down two flights of stairs underwater. Green, dark water. Found her stateroom. Remembered to bring her key, and rescued her laptop, and got it to Drive Savers. And we recovered all the data for her.

DP: She must have had some REALLY important emails.

Remember, kids... back up your hard drive.

Cogs in