Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Hokey but fun: Transparent Screens. Move computer out of the way, shoot image of environs, make it your wallpaper, move computer back into place. Computer becomes window. This technique is similar to research that used to go into real-life cloaks of invisibility (the “chameleon effect”), though current experiments focus on preventing objects from reflecting and scattering light.
Just stumbled upon StumbleUpon, a fascinating mashup of del.iciou.us, Friendster, and “I’m Feeling Lucky” — bookmark rating/ranking/reviews plus social networking plus serendipity, designed to help you break out of surfing habits and discover things you wouldn’t have otherwise. Initially thought the whole thing was just an elaborate Firefox extension and would therefore be in use by a limited audience, but soon realized it’s a well-established web service that just happens to have an FF extension.
Very first stumble landed me at jacksonpollack.org, a nifty Flash-based full-view splatter paint application, which Miles loved.
I’m “shacker” on the service – hook up if you’re in.
Technorati Tags: networking, social
Spending the week with mid-career journalists from around the country, doing multimedia training and webcasting their panel discussions. 4:00 yesterday get a call from Amy that a power transformer has blown near our house, and that a fire ran along the lines for many blocks. Outage affects 21,000 people. Finally get home at 10:30 to find our power just restored, but neighboring blocks still out. Walk to inspect the damage and find news crews all over the hood, lights trained on piles of charred power cable sheathing along the ground.
Stop to watch a Hispanic news team in the midst of a street-corner shoot. They stop to ask me what happened and I tell them what I know.
Me: “… but I’m just a guy who heard some things, so don’t quote me.”
Reporter: “Yeah yeah yeah, OK.” [Says some stuff in Spanish to cameraman, then] “OK, I got it.” Camera rolls and she reels off her live report in Spanish.” I shake my head and return home.
15 minutes later wifey and I are watching the (amazing) 60 Minutes special on the career of Mike Wallace, when there’s a knock at the window. Peel back the drapes to see smiling face of another female reporter, who shows her ABC press badge. “Great, now they want to interview US,” I think. I open the door. “Hi, I’m from ABC News and can I use your bathroom? It’s urgent.” LOL, of course.
Spent Mother’s Day at the DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park – first visit since it re-opened a while ago, and the transformation is radical. Spacious, inviting, tasteful, playful. Miles increasingly interested in art, especially sculpture, and able to comment in small ways on what he likes or doesn’t like about various pieces. Found myself mesmerized by the endless mirrored folds of Zhan Wang’s Artificial Rock – a sea of meditative possibilities. The DeYoung’s center tower pokes up through the center of the park, affording a view of San Francisco unlike anything we had ever seen – absolutely gorgeous. Decided to “do the right thing” and take public transportation, only to get stuck interminably on a broke-down Muni train with the AC kaput. That aside, a miraculous day. Flickr set.
The president of the United States has the power to destroy life on earth. It follows that we should have some assurance that the president has a healthy brain, and that the public should therefore be entitled to view brain scans of candidates.
Dr. Daniel Amen is sitting on a database of 29,000 brain scans, including those of healthy people, drug addicts, schizophrenics, liars, geniuses, alcoholics, and the mentally challenged. No one has a better picture of the connection between healthy brains and functioning humans.
In a talk he gave at Accelerating Change 2005, Amen lays out the connections in stark terms, arguing that allowing children to play tackle football or to hit soccer balls with their heads is tantamount to child abuse (from a brain health perspective), that techniques for developing and maintaining healthy brains should get more emphasis in schools than all the mundane stuff we’ll never use later in life, and that lawyers need to stop fighting to keep brain scans out of court cases for fear of muddying the prevailing idea that either we have free will or we don’t (Amen argues that brains span a huge spectrum of health levels, and that damaged brains exert less predetermined action (free will) than healthy brains).
Amen can tell at a glance how well an individual is functioning in life just by looking at their brain scan. The correlation between the appearance of the brain on a scan and the functional health of the individual is direct. So Amen also argues that Descartes — who made the point that the mind and brain were functionally separate — was wrong. In fact we now have the technology and the data to see for ourselves exactly how wrong Descartes was; the mind/brain connection is not a matter of philosophical debate, but of direct analysis.
The descriptive text at IT Conversations doesn’t do justice to the power of the talk. Juicy. Worth 45 minutes of your time.
TV ad (UK only?) for the new Honda Civic — a choir of human mouth noises, a la Stockhausen.
Tricks of the Trade collects hundreds of little tips specific to various professions, but often useful to everyday Joes.
Painter: Before resealing a can of paint, blow one deep breath into the can and close it quickly. You’ll fill it with carbon dioxide, which will keep the paint from oxidizing prevent it from developing the “skin” that paint gets when it sits a while.
Some of the “professions” are faux, but still clever:
Sandwich Enthusiast: When ordering a “custom” sandwich from a deli, Subway, or college cafeteria, say the name of each ingredient with an air of finality, as though it will be the last ingredient on your sandwich. The sandwich-maker will pile plenty of the stuff on, trying to fill your sandwich to a respectable size, not realizing you intend to ask for more ingredients.
Over the past few months I’ve been going through the tedious process of digitizing a box of old, irreplaceable cassette tapes, trying to preserve their contents before ferrous particles jump right off the Mylar. It’s an eery feeling hearing my own voice from junior high, my grandmother’s voice as it sounded when I was a child, my first girlfriend singing. Amazing how these voices stir long-buried memories.
Some researchers are trying to wake much older ghosts, attempting to restore sounds from before the dawn of recording technologies. The theory is that a potter’s hands could function as a stylus, leaving an acoustical trail on the soft clay, similar to a record’s grooves. In theory, it might — might — be possible to decode those vibrations back to audible sound. Other attempts involve a painter and his/her brush, working soft paint. So far no dice, according to Hamp, though research into archaeoacoustics has been going on since 1969.
I seem to remember seeing a National Geographic article about this technique as a kid, and in that article, they reported hearing the clear sounds of a dog barking more than 2,000 years ago. Research is also going into extracting sound imprints from cave walls.
A new book on archaeoacoustics is available from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
The EFF has assembled a list of ten of the worst patent abusers out there, and wants their heads on a platter for “Crimes against the public domain, willful ignorance of prior art, egregious display of obviousness.” Fortunately, fair use has a posse.
We frequently make bad decisions because of the way we compare things. You’re offered a three-year job, and have your choice of two salary plans:
Most people would rather get yearly raises, even if it means making less overall.
Many of us are convinced that we always get stuck in the slowest checkout line at the grocery store, and that if we make a break for it and change to another line, that one will magically slow down and the one we were in originally will speed up. Of course, the distribution of instances between us getting in the fast and slow lines is even, and bad karma has nothing to do with it. But the experience of being in the fast line causes no stress and no memory. It’s barely an experience at all.
SXSW podcasts are now online, so we can catch up on missed sessions (subscription feed). Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert’s How To Do Precisely the Right Thing At All Possible Times is an absolutely fascinating exploration of the power of comparison in context to mislead our brains, and of the influences we draw from repeated exposure to certain kinds of stimuli, which in turn cause us to draw faulty mental maps and reach incorrect conclusions. Sounds airy, but the talk is packed with concrete examples.
Our perception of value is usually based on comparison, rather than on inherent value. When buying a car, one might opt to pay the extra $300 for the better stereo without blinking, even though we could drive across town and get the same stereo for $100. If we weren’t buying a new car, of course we would drive across town to save $200. But we stupidly judge the value of the stereo relative to the purchase price of the car, not to itself. This drives economists crazy.
Anyway, the MP3 encoding on the SXSW podcasts is unfortunately terrible, but the Gilbert presentation is a gas.
Technorati Tags: sxsw2006