Month: August 2006

For the next few days, I’ll be in Northern California participating in Tim O’Reilly’s Foo Camp gathering. Who goes to Foo Camp? Here’s who.

This morning, as we were planning to go to the Boston Aquarium, I checked the website, as you do, to verify the Sunday hours. No point in showing up only to discover that it’s closed on Sunday or undergoing massive renovations or some such thing. As I began typing the letters “boston aq” into the Google Toolbar, the following word completions were helpfully suggested to me.

boston aquarium	1330 results
boston aqarium	1140 results
boston aqaurium	856 results
boston aqurium	682 results
boston aquariam	626 results
boston aquirium	64 results
boston aqustics	14 results

I’m not terribly surprised that the word aquarium is so easily misspelled, but I am amazed that the correct spelling accounted for only 28% of the overall result count, not to mention the fact that it very nearly came in second. This is fascinating data, and it illustrates that Google is in possession of the finest set ever made of data on spelling in English. What could schools do with this? For one thing, we’ll be able to watch trends over time. Are we getting better or worse at spelling? It also seems that by correlating a list of frequently used words against frequently misspelled words, we could at least make our spelling tests more practical. Screw up a word like flagellar and nobody gives a damn, but if you write erotic instead of erratic, it might get you in some hot water. Nobody likes an erotic spellor, or mabe they dont realy care much any more, sinse Google can fix it all.

Google will always know what you mean, even if nobody else does, for Google knows what is in your heart.

Incidentally, Boston Acoustics is the name of a speaker company. And yes, Google will indeed suggest that perhaps by aqustics you meant acoustics.

My nominee for the how-in-the-world-did-THAT-evolve-without-intelligent-design award is the web-spinning spider. While I don’t actually believe in intelligent design, it’s always astounding to watch a spider at work. Via Athanasius I came across this spider site that shows web construction movies and a web gallery. There is also an illuminating little essay on how web-spinning works, which ends with this charming fact.

The spider usually replaces the web every night or every other night. … The old web is ingested and recycled into new silk.

I alternate between thinking this is elegant and poetic on the one hand, and absolutely revolting on the other. Think of all the bugs that have been on that old thing. But then I suppose if you liked eating bugs…

From the O’Reilly Radar I came across this fun tip: use Google trends to investigate words with seasonality. What I like about this so much is that it gets at how we make sense of the world. Just as you can use Google images to see what a fleam looks like without knowing what it means or how to translate destornillador without bothering to find out what language it is, you can use Google trends to learn about words that have distinct temporal profiles.

Perhaps you’ve never heard of Beltane, but a quick trend search shows that it stimulates great interest around the end of April every year. Now consider Christmas. Notice that this exhibits the pronounced anticipatory pileup associated with counter-flowing temporal wind. I discussed this effect in detail in an essay about December birthdays. You might think that New Year has a similar profile, but you would only be revealing your cultural chauvinism: New Year casts two shadows, and depending on where you come from it can mean quite different things. Mother’s Day also makes multiple appearances on the calendar.

A typical causal downcalendar decay is evident in this plot of Incredibles. No one had ever heard of the movie The Incredibles, and then suddenly it burst on the scene. We also see a significant Oscar-related spike. For another interesting profile, Tim O’Reilly singled out poor John Kerry as the archetypal example of “falling off a cliff.” Buh-bye John. So sorry.

I could play with this for hours, much as I did with the mesmerizing Name Voyager. There’s something viscerally satisfying about plots like Memorial Day, Labor Day, summer. Got any good ones?

Here’s a spooky game to play on Friday: Choose any two digit number you like. That is, think of a number that can be expressed like this

10a + b

where a and b are both single digit numbers. Now add a and b and subtract that sum from your original number, like so:

(10a + b) – (a + b)

I am now going to think about your number. Hmmm. Let’s see.

(10a + b) – (a + b) = (10a – a) + (b – b) = 9a

I need perfect silence while I meditate upon the nature of your number… it is… wait, it’s getting clearer now… it is DIVISIBLE BY 9! Pretty spooky, eh? No? Hey, where is everybody going?

Before you run away, go look at this site. milaadesign wizardry. It’s an extremely well-done version of this old mathematical chestnut. They’ve employed some very clever showmanship to obscure the simple math that I spelled out above. First, there is the creepy sound and imagery. The fact that, as an Iranian design firm, they also show the instructions in Farsi just deepens the sense of mystery. But the best hack is the last one. On the last screen you look at a big table of occult-ish symbols and pick out the one next to your number. It looks like all the symbols are different, and after a dramatic pause just long enough for some sort of telepathic voodoo, they reveal your symbol, amid chirping crickets and maniacal cackling. You didn’t have enough time to observe that all the multiples of 9 (i.e. 18, 27, 36, and so on) have this exact same symbol. Finally, for better dramatic effect, they change this symbol the next time you play.

That’s good show business! My hat is off to anyone who can squeeze that much mileage out of a two-bit math hack. (thanks to my sister-in-law Elizabeth for forwarding this one to me)

Ever since Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service launched, I’ve been wondering if it would really take hold. If you haven’t heard of it, the Mechanical Turk, which gets its odd name as an homage to an old chess-playing automaton, is a human-in-the-loop web utility offered by Amazon. Want to transcribe some handwritten notes? It’s hard for a computer, but easy for a person, and Amazon has taken all the hassle out of hiring someone for $0.05 worth of work.

But still, how many people would really do it? Apparently not many people are actually taking advantage of the service. On the other hand, I recently came across the best evidence yet that the Mechanical Turk has a future.

Sheep.

Someone has put up the money for people around the world to draw 10,000 sheep. Little badly drawn cartoons of sheep facing left. All on display at The Sheep Market. To the list of things computers find difficult, add pointless doodles. (via Karim via Ben Hyde)

I had seen pictures of sculptor Alexander Calder’s tiny toy circus before, and I had read how in Paris in the 1920s the “Cirque Calder” mesmerized the like of Jean Arp, Piet Mondrian, and Jean Cocteau.

He would issue invitations to his guests, who would sit on makeshift bleachers munching peanuts, just like the real circus. With the crash of cymbals and music from an old gramophone, the circus would begin. Many of the individual circus animals and performers include mechanized parts—Calder was originally trained as a mechanical engineer.

Still I couldn’t picture how it all worked. What did the performances actually look like? So I was happy to see that someone has YouTube’d a movie of (a much older) Calder and his wife performing his famous circus. Here is the first clip. Find the others with this search.

Watching Calder’s bucking broncos and weightlifting strong man makes me think that he must have done a lot to inspire people like Arthur Ganson. Follow the link and be sure to look at the “Machine with Wishbone” movie.