Author: gulley

Some months ago I described an unusual museum in England put together originally by the slightly mad Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter. Potter’s strange Museum of Curiosities apparently is in grave danger of being liquidated and may go under the gavel this fall if nothing is done. Apparently the inn needs more space for rooms. A gentleman named Richard Taylor posted a message to this site pleading for help and directing us to the
Campaign to Save Mr Potter’s Museum of Curiosities site. Eccentricity is rare in this world and should be preserved. If this museum is sold in small lots at auction, the individual pieces will remain, but the eccentricity will be smashed into oblivion. As Taylor points out on the campaign site…

On its own, a “box containing early Australian travelling salesman’s gin sample bottles” might be of marginal interest. But next to the “shoes worn by Charles Wykeham-Martin MP at Queen Victoria’s fancy dress ball 1845” and “a deformed perch” – it’s extraordinary!

Take a look at this exhaustive inventory of unusual loot and ask yourself where else could I go to see stuffed rats playing dominoes, smoking, and being raided by police? Want to help? If so, go here: http://mysite.freeserve.com/pottersmuseum/help.htm.

Making vaccines is a bad business. If you do your job well, your healthy customers may suspect that they didn’t really need that shot in the first place. And there are multiple ways to screw up: the vaccine might be ineffective, or it might cause an adverse reaction, opening you up to expensive legal attack. Then there are the business complications. If it surfaces that you developed a vaccine, but didn’t make it available for reasons of profitability, you will be pilloried by press and politicians. Altogether, the downside tends to outweigh the upside, so vaccine research hasn’t always been well-funded or hotly pursued.

Some recent research with the Ebola virus is very encouraging, though, and signifies the rise of the genomic approach to medicine. Viruses are recognized in our bodies by their surface coating. Suppose we just take a gene that codes for part of the coat of a disease-causing virus and stick that in another harmless virus? Then the harmless virus can be used to instruct the body about the evil one, just as the sheriff might wave an escaped convict’s shirt under a bloodhound’s nose. Sic ‘im, boy! Neat trick, eh? Read about it here: Fast vaccine offers hope in battle with Ebola. Here’s another good summary courtesy of Corante: But Did They Get A Cold?

Hey, check it out: blog fever is running rampant at work. With increased media coverage about how Google and AOL are taking blogging to the masses, now even the people who have zero interest in blogs at least know what the word means (more or less). Kristin and Mike now have blogs (Snowboard Girl and Mike’s Blog, respectively), and they’ve linked to some other folks I know. Of course Matt has been blogging for some time now, and Kim is a Live Journalist from way back.

It’s interesting to see each person’s approach to the question “what the hell will I write about?” Live Journal steers people, naturally enough, in the direction of a dear-diary kind of journal. Blogs can swing both ways: “My car broke down again this afternoon” or “Christopher Hitchens thinks Ariel Sharon is a butthead, and I couldn’t agree more.” Predictably, women are more willing to share personal details than men. Regardless of gender, I’m often surprised at the things people are willing to share online… I learn things in five minutes that I wouldn’t learn in five years’ worth of work conversations. For the most part this is charming and a good antidote to the closed countenance we generally show the world. But the real test of a blogger is: will you keep it up? It reminds me of a quote by Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad.

At certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book; and he dashes at this work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world, and the pleasantest. But if he only lives twenty-one days, he will find out that only those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty’s sake, and invincible determination may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat … If you wish to inflict a heartless and malignant punishment upon a young person, pledge him to keep a journal a year.

I’ve been working my way through Howard Rheingold’s timely book Smart Mobs, wherein he talks about the new and transformative properties of crowds that are in constant communication by mobile phones and other such devices. This new technology gives heretofore amorphous crowds a robust nervous system, allowing them to precipitate from the clear blue sky, strike like a fist, and then dissipate again. Rheingold likes telling the story from the point of view of smart crowd activists unseating the government in the Philippines. But Americans seem to prefer zany crowd stunts. Here’s a good article that Nabeel sent along about a flash mob in Texas: Stunts involving ‘mob’ silliness latest e-mail craze. Look for flash mobs appearing (and then quickly dissolving) near you. The overall effect is surprisingly similar to the life cycle of a cellular slime mold, in which lonely amoebas congregate, form a slug-like party on wheels, and then dissolve in a dusty sprinkling of lonely spores. That’s progress for you.

Slashdot, the tech news site with the tagline “News for Nerds. Stuff that matters”, generally reports on Cool New Stuff with a predictable editorial bent along the lines of Linux Rules! and Microsoft Sucks! When I read the comments, I get the feeling that the typical reader is a cranky Libertarian open source hacker that thinks most everybody else in the world is at least 25 watts dimmer than he is. But every now and then I see an item that surprises. For instance, look at this one, entitled How Do You Get Work Done? In it, a self-described procrastinator confesses his problem and asks for help. From the loud and prolonged response to this question, it’s clear that this is a common problem. Evolution may have equipped us with the ability to fight off a sabre-toothed tiger, but not a PlayStation and 150 channels of bad TV. Endless and immediately available amusement is one of the great troubles of our age. Here’s the original message.

I am currently a university student and have a major problem: being able to simply sit down and get work done. I can set aside a day to work, whether it is homework or contract work, and I will be lucky to have an hour done before dinner time. The only time I can actually get solid work done seems to be after midnight under a lot of pressure (ie. a deadline the next day) … I know many of you will have had the same problem. Can anyone please give advice on how to overcome this problem, be it a little trick, medication, or anything else?

I found it almost touching to read through the advice. It’s a rare enough thing to hear a young man in a public forum say “please help me.” But when it’s a voice amid the cacophony of cranky Libertarian coders, and when a hundred people swoop in with sincere advice, well, I think that’s encouraging. Heartwarming, even.

Now I happen to know that you, dear reader, sometimes have a problem with procrastination. How do you fight it off?

So much time to squander, and so little time to squander it in!

Here’s another damned impressive illusion. The last time I posted a link to an illusion like this, I made the observation that after years of seeing the same crappy old illusions, we’re now seeing some dramatic new images. Go to
this link and watch the non-moving wheels appear to twitch and turn. If you really want to get annoyed, leave the image visible in the background of your computer and try to get some work done. It won’t be long before you close the wheel window, because those non-moving wheels are wiggling around too much.

I was trying to remember exactly what it means to “wear” a ship as in the sea shanty lyric

She would not wear, she would not stay
Leave her, Johnny, leave her!
She shipped green seas both night and day
It’s time for us to leave her!

and in the process I came across this marvelous document:
Questions for Young Officers from Examination of a Young Officer, The New Practical Navigator (1814). They are study questions for the young men in the early nineteenth century who wanted to be made captains of one of Her Majesty’s ships. It makes me think of anxiety-provoking grad school qualifying exams. Imagine how you’d answer this question: “The sheers are along side, how do you get them in?” Sounds simple enough. I’m sure your answer would be quick and correct, as follows:

Par-buckle them in with their heads aft on the poop, and get the fore and main runners on them for guys; lash on two four-fold blocks, reeve the masting-falls, get girt-lines on the head of the sheers to steady the mast-head, and put heel-lashings on the sheers.

I love the metrical rhythm of incomprehensible technical jargon. Every age has its geeks, and I can just imagine an argument between two fifteen year old sail geeks of 1814: “You idiot! I can’t believe you would get the girt-lines on the head before you reeve the masting falls! Nobody does it that way. Geez, what a loozer!”

If you want to learn more about any of these terms, this website comes with a good glossary. And by the way, sheers are spars lashed together, and raised up, for the purpose of getting out or in a mast. And to wear ship is to change a ship’s course from one tack to the other, by turning her stern to windward. But you knew that already.

Mary Beth sent me a link to a piece on NPR about wikis that aired on Monday. The commentary (by David Weinberger) was good and got to the heart of why wikis are so interesting. Here’s the blurb from the NPR site:

It might sound a little crazy, letting just anyone write whatever they want on your Web site. But that’s just what Wikis are designed for. Wikipedia.org, for example, lets the public collaborate to build a surprisingly accurate encyclopedia. Commentator David Weinberger says wikis are one example of “social software,” intended to allow people to work together with ease.

I wanted to blog the piece, but in situations like this I like to check blogdex and see if all the kids are doing the same thing. I’ll hesitate before I post something that absolutely everybody else is picking up on. For instance, if a big-name print journalist writes a disparaging piece about blogging, you can be sure that thousands of blogs will dissect it the next day. But I didn’t find any comments about the wiki commentary on blogdex. This is instructive in itself. Blogs are bound up with their owners’ egos, whereas wikis are anonymous averages of multiple viewpoints. People don’t get worked up about wiki press coverage the way they do about blog press coverage.

Matt pointed me to an excellent piece of some commentary on this very point by Clay Shirky at Corante (a recent discovery). The gist of it, as Shirky says, is this: “Though both weblogs and wikis support conversational patterns, weblogs are ‘conversation as published comments’ while wikis are ‘conversation as shared editing.’ Weblogs tend towards polarized or divergent views, while wikis tend towards convergent ones.”

Kevin Kelly, who has worked on the venerable Whole Earth Review and Wired magazine, as well as writing several books, is an incurable magpie, collecting and making observations about cool new things. He’s good at it, and he has his own blog/list of the latest things he’s been playing with at Recomendo. It reads a lot like the old Whole Earth Review style, but you don’t have to wait three months to get it. Here, for example, is a good piece on How to Make Your Own Topo Maps.

The greatest gift of the web is the ability to leverage communities. On the web, enthusiasts not only consume maps, they produce them too. Niche maps (bird spots along the Erie Canal for example) now have immediate and reciprocal niche audiences. The future of mapmaking lies in developing tools that allow maximum participation by any person with passion for maps.

Another great gift of the web is that it empowers clever magpies like Kevin Kelly.

Star Chamber trivia item: A few years ago I wrote a piece about his work at Whole Earth Review, and he now points to it from his website.

My neighbor Geoff forwarded this nifty animation of actual economists filmed in the wild. The creator of this animation, Andy Foulds, has put together some amazing stuff on his site. Check out his abstract expressionism generator. Foulds’ real forte seems to be clever picture-morphing. Watch George W. get led around by the nose in this goof on money and politics.