Evidence of Evidence
Evidence (ahem) that Tufte is indeed working on his new book, Beautiful Evidence.
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Entries for January 2004
How to collaborate with others, lessons from string quartets
How to collaborate with others, lessons from string quartets.
Winston Churchill’s 104 year-old parrot is still alive
Winston Churchill’s 104 year-old parrot is still alive but no longer swearing about Hitler. Sending someone to Mars sounds more plausible
Tired of fabric, Christo covers Maine building
Tired of fabric, Christo covers Maine building with ice in latest artistic triumph.
GarageBand!!
When Apple announced iLife ‘04 a couple of weeks ago, a common reaction was moaning over the price, which went from free to $49. Which is ridiculous…$49 is a steal for that bundle of software. After playing around with GarageBand this morning, I can report that GB alone is worth the price. I’ve never had this much fun with a piece of software before…I got my money’s worth after 30 minutes.
(And I’d like to post the song I made — the finest techno banjo tune (w/80s synth) ever!! — but the vast extent of my musical talent is just too much for the world to experience in such a direct fashion. Alas.)
Great “from here to there” digital animation
Great “from here to there” digital animation of the Mars rover.
Is NASA tinkering with the color settings
Is NASA tinkering with the color settings on the photos from Mars?.
Groundhog Day
The legend of Groundhog Day is based on an old Scottish couplet: “If Candlemas Day is bright and clear, there’ll be two winters in the year.” (source)
Kottke and Megnut forever; what, therefore, Software
Kottke and Megnut forever; what, therefore, Software has joined together, let not man tear asunder.
Paul Davies advocating a one-way manned mission to Mars
Paul Davies advocating a one-way manned mission to Mars.
Interpretive spam art
Interpretive spam art. “Even the purest kitten perished on the day the massive unrelenting cock came to town!”
Trailer for Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ
Trailer for Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ.
Subway tops the Franchise 500 list for 2004
Subway tops the Franchise 500 list for 2004. I didn’t know UPS Stores were franchised.
Steven Johnson’s new book, Mind Wide Open, is out
Steven Johnson’s new book, Mind Wide Open, is out.
Battle search engine
Intrigued by a stat that John Battelle pulled out of a Wired News story on search, that “the number of unique visitors to Yahoo Search trailed Google by a mere 10 percent”, I checked my search referers to kottke.org for December 2003 and found a somewhat different story:
Google 60%
Yahoo 22%
AOL 14%
MSN 3%
Earthlink 0.5%
Now, inferring the market share of a search engine from the referers is tricky because you can’t account for algorithm and display differences** (that is, Google may just love my site 3X more than Yahoo! does), so, you know, grain of salt and all that.
** Yahoo!, AOL, and Earthlink search are all currently powered by Google (making their effective search market share 97%), although they may determine and display the results in different ways.
Starbucks opens its first store in Paris
Starbucks opens its first store in Paris. In Paris, France, not in Paris Hilton.
Finalists in the DWR 2003 Holiday Champagne Chair Contest
Finalists in the DWR 2003 Holiday Champagne Chair Contest.
A Sense of Scale, a visual comparison of various distances
A Sense of Scale, a visual comparison of various distances.
Dennis Miller went from liberal to conservative after 9/11
Dennis Miller went from liberal to conservative after 9/11.
Rake it like a John Deere 704 Pull-Type Wheel Rake
Since I don’t often remember my dreams, you poor folks must suffer through me telling you about it when I do recall one. Last night’s dream was a riff on Junkyard Wars, except without the junkyard and the war. It was just my team and me trying to build a hay-harvesting machine out of a full-sized pickup truck. Our workshop was a garage in the basement of a large farmhouse. At the end of the dream, we spent a great deal of time painting the name of our machine on the hood of the truck. We called it “Hay Ya!”
David LaChapelle’s photo of Lil’ Kim as
David LaChapelle’s photo of Lil’ Kim as a Louis Vuitton product is fantastic.
There’s a movie in your pants, uh, jeans, er…nevermind
The first mention of the sequence GATTACA in the human genome is 14109 characters in. It will be several decades before science is able to explain why I spent 20 minutes tracking that down.
A summary of the movie critics’ 2003 top ten lists
A summary of the movie critics’ 2003 top ten lists. Nicely done infographic
TunesAtWork lets you listen to your iTunes
TunesAtWork lets you listen to your iTunes music library over the Web.
Wired magazine did a pretty good job in saving Apple
Wired magazine did a pretty good job in saving Apple.
Cumulonimbus mammatus is my favorite kind of cloud
Cumulonimbus mammatus is my favorite kind of cloud.
What’s your law?
John Brockman has asked his Edgy band of scientists, futurists, writers, and philosophers about “some bit of wisdom, some rule of nature, some law-like pattern, either grand or small, that you’ve noticed in the universe that might as well be named after you”, like those of Newton, Moore, or Murphy. Here are the results.
The more general of such laws are the most interesting because they can enrich our understanding of diverse subject areas and can be very instructive in how they fail. I think maybe this is what Alan Alda was getting at with his First and Second Laws of Laws:
1. All laws are local.
2. A law does not know how local it is.
Here’s a few of my other favorite laws from the list, general and not:
Pimm’s First Law: No language spoken by fewer than 100,000 people survives contact with the outside world, while no language spoken by more than one million people can be eliminated by such contact.
Gopnik’s Gender Curves: The male curve is an abrupt rise followed by an equally abrupt fall. The female curve is a slow rise to an extended asymptote. The areas under the curves are roughly equal. These curves apply to all activities at all time scales (e.g. attention to TV programs, romantic love, career scientific productivity). (see the graphs)
Morgan’s Second Law: To a first approximation all appointments are canceled.
Pöppel’s Universal: We take life 3 seconds at a time. Human experience and behaviour is characterized by temporal segmentation. Successive segments or “time windows” have a duration of approx. 3 seconds.
Brand’s Pace Law: In haste, mistakes cascade. With deliberation, mistakes instruct.
Kai’s Example Dilemma: A good analogy is like a diagonal frog.
Rushkoff’s Law: A religion will increase in social value until a majority of its members actually believe in it—at which point the social damage it causes will increase exponentially as long as it is in existence.
Humphrey’s Law of the Efficacy of Prayer: In a dangerous world there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not.
Minksy’s Second Law: Don’t just do something. Stand there.
Sterling’s Corollary to Clarke’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced garbage is indistinguishable from magic.
Mark Frauenfelder’s six-year-old daughter is on the
Mark Frauenfelder’s six-year-old daughter is on the CAPPS list as a security risk. What’s next for this pint-sized criminal? The FBI’s Most Wanted list at eight?
Weblog following the progress of the Mars rover missions
Weblog following the progress of the Mars rover missions.
The Player
This is the only film during which I’d walked out of the theatre. But that was a long time ago, and I guess I was more in the mood this time around.
The Decline of Fashion Photography, an argument in pictures
The Decline of Fashion Photography, an argument in pictures.
Series of drawings from man on LSD
Series of drawings from man on LSD. done in the 50s as part of a US gov’t study on the effects of drugs
SocialGrid is a dating service using Google,
SocialGrid is a dating service using Google, blogs, P2P, etc.. Best part: “The patent application claims coverage of basically all complex objects, including people, in almost every country.”
What’s the US doing about home-grown, right-wing terrorists? Not much.
What’s the US doing about home-grown, right-wing terrorists? Not much..
In the subway
Listening to NPR this morning as I struggled to regain enough of my consciousness to stumble into the shower, I heard Colson Whitehead read a selection from his new book, The Colossus of New York. In it, he described weary evening commuters vying for seats on the subway like pigeons scrapping for seed. That characterization strikes me as inaccurate. Commuters dash down stairs to catch an arm in the door before it closes and pack into already crowded cars rather than be left on the platform, but even in the busiest stations at the peak of rush hour, people don’t squabble for seats like pigeons for food.
If you want to see pigeon-like behavior, watch instead the tide of evening commuters racing to spin through the turnstiles at Times Square/42nd Street, swerving around confused tourists, colliding, dancing from turnstile to turnstile, searching for the fastest way past the fumbling metrotards and exiting passengers shooting out of the station into the chaos.
Apple revised their famous 1984 commercial; the woman
Apple revised their famous 1984 commercial; the woman with the sledgehammer is listening to an iPod.
Interface Culture
How well does the 6 year-old analysis of how we use and will use information technology contained in the pages of Interface Culture hold up? Not too bad, actually. Consider the following paragraph from the “Windows” chapter on what metaforms the Web might be capable of supporting (paragraph breaks and links mine):
Over the next decade, this stitching together of different news and opinion sources will slowly become a type of journalism in its own right, a new form of reporting that synthesizes and digests the great mass of information disseminated online everyday. (Clipping services have occupied a comparable niche for years, though their use is largely limited to corporate executives and other journalists.)
Total News gives us a glimpse of what these new information filters will look like, but the site neglects the defining element of a successful metaform, which is an actual editorial or evaluative sensibility. Total News simply repackages the major online news services indiscriminately; it may be a more convenient format, but it adds nothing to the actual content of the information. More advanced news “browsers” will include a genuine critical temperament, a perspective on the world, an editorial sensibility that governs the decisions about which stories to repackage. The possibilities are endless: a filter for left-leaning economic and political stories; a filter for sports coverage that emphasizes the psychological dimension of professional athletics; a filter that focuses exclusively on independent film news and commentary.
The beautiful thing about this new meta-journalism is that it doesn’t require a massive distribution channel or extravagant licensing fees. A single user with a Web connection and only the most rudimentary HTML skills can upload his or her overview of the day’s news. If the editorial sensibility is sharp enough, this kind of metajournalism could easily find enough of an audience to be commercially sustainable, given the limited overhead required to run such a service.
When the whole blog thing blew up huge and then people like Rafat Ali, Andrew Sullivan, and Nick Denton started making money off of them, Johnson must have danced around the apartment in his underpants (perhaps like Tom Cruise in Risky Business) shouting, “I told you so, I told you so, I called the hell out of that one! In your face!”
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