Author: gulley

Have you ever been to the Four Corners monument where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah come together? It’s a relatively remote tourist trap of a place that’s really only good for two things: Navajo fry bread, and standing in four states at once while saying “Hey, look! I’m standing in four states at once!” The surveyors who set the states’ boundaries declared the point to be at 36° 59′ N, 109° 02′ W. And unless you own a GPS receiver you’d never know that the concrete slab proclaiming to be the Four Corners point is actually completely in Arizona. The true Four Corners point is awkwardly situated a hundred yards or so away, as my friend Roy (who does have a GPS receiver) determined. Think of all the misguided pictures of sneakers on that slab! Oh the humanity!

This business of invisible survey lines floating over real terrain is fascinating. After all, as this satellite image of the Four Corners region shows, nothing about the landscape particularly invites us to paint straight lines across it. But in doing so, we make some barren patch of nowhere worth visiting. Cynically I want to say: if looking at invisible lines is so interesting, I’ll put some in a box and ship them to you for a very small charge. But looking at invisible lines is interesting, as the Degree Confluence Project illustrates. In a practice akin to geocaching, adventurers with digital cameras and GPS units are photographing places in the world where lines of latitude and longitude come together. The pictures are charming and the stories are folksy. You can spend hours here. Look at the great big map of coverage and click on some remote place and see what you turn up. I like the story of 49 N 133 E, which is near Birobidzhan in extreme eastern Russia. The author writes “If you ever thought that explaining what a confluence is and why you want to find one to friends was hard, try explaining one to your Russian driver with a translator.”

Incidentally, the ever-helpful Wikipedia also notes

Another four corners, the intersection of the borders of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut in Canada, is not graced with a similar tourist attraction because it is located in extremely remote northern wilderness.

Set up a Navajo fry bread stand there and you could make a killing!

From the Frivolous Links department, we are proud to bring you pet costumes from Japan. This meme is sweeping the net… if you haven’t seen it already, you may as well see it here first: The tailor of a cat CAT PRIN. If you enjoy dressing up your cat in darling outfits, then this is the site for you. Even if the thought has never once occurred to you in your long life, take a look, because, gosh darn it, if there’s one thing those Japanese know, it’s cute. Before purchasing, however, keep in mind that the Anne of Green Gables outfit is recommended for expert tailors only. The site comes with instructions for how to have fun with CatPrin. I won’t tell you what steps 1 and 2 are, but step 3 is “Remove her clothes and give her a hub, say Thank you!”

Before departing these regions, and in the name of equal media access for cats and dogs, here is a Japanese site where you buy costumes for your dog:
Beetle Calcium (sic). Space Dog looks good, but the smart doggie set is stepping out in the Samurai Suit. [spotted on Industry]

Even without the benefit of years of expensive transcendental meditation, you can truly fly. The only trick is that you have to get yourself into space first. But once you’re there, the experience sounds an awful lot like the wishful daydreams I’ve had about it. I say this because I’ve been reading astronaut Ed Lu’s blog-in-space called Greetings Earthlings.

With all this space shuttle mess we’re in, it’s easy to forget that there are people still living in orbit. Lu is doing an entertaining job of describing what it’s like to be there. I was particularly struck by his description of flying.

The next thing to think about is how hard you push off. If you push too hard, you end up going really fast, and the next thing you know you are crashing into something on the other wall. Again, with nothing to slow you down in the middle of the module you are kind of helpless until you hit the far wall. It turns out that you don’t need to push off from the wall as hard as you might think. On the ground, it takes a lot of work to move around because you are constantly fighting the force of gravity trying to make you fall to the floor. Up here, a push of maybe a few pounds is about right to fly across the module at a comfortable speed.

It sure sounds like fun, but I think at some point I’d be ready, as with a carnival ride, for it to be done. Here’s a picture of Ed Lu flying (or maybe he’s hovering, I can’t tell). [via Slashdot]

Here’s some news you can use: AmazingMail, whose tagline is “Real Postcards are Better than E-cards,” will take your uploaded digital photo and send it to the address of your choosing as a real non-virtual honest-to-goodness postcard. It’s sort of like a BlueMountain.com throwback to the pre-cyber world. For a long time I’ve wanted a service that lets me type in a message that gets transformed into a personal letter… and maybe for extra money they could even match my handwriting. Does such a service exist? It seems like it should. Still, a postcard is the next best thing, and it may be even better if the picture is good. My wife heard about this from a friend who said it helps her do thank-you notes three times faster than ever before. And the first one is free. I’ve only tried one, sending this picture to my parents of them with my daughter. But it worked like a charm, so I’m sure I’ll be sending more.

Everybody talks about spam, and no one can do anything about it. There’s no need for me to rail against it here. Spam is bad, okay, but I honestly want to know, what do they want from me, these people who send me email that is not just unsolicited, but completely meaningless? I’m puzzled how some of these messages could be of use to anybody.

Under the subject line “Don’t Disappoint Her Ever Again” (heh-heh, if you know what I mean) I received the following email, which I will reproduce here in its entirety in the name of scientific rigor.

xqhxkugabi xqhxbikqkkyl xqhxmzeyahu xqhxjxmxuks xqhxbgjsfunyzg xqhxlbjdtiyg xqhxgfljmlxqhxcswibcbenv xqhxwob xqhxujlh xqhxxuhnb xqhxsfgnriyg xqhxhyfthr xqhxjnwxqhxnnpusxgfz xqhxseihi xqhxkgxdsgia xqhxcayfgm xqhxrn xqhxgfyxhbk xqhxvpwdxkxqhxxf xqhxgfz xqhxtvkwqmx xqhxanfw xqhxnyfwqa xqhxotzsy xqhxfeakxqhxftphfamit xqhxxnpjtox xqhxla xqhxce xqhxjneaantz xqhxdrghtxqhxrmnrot xqhxnzpqdkukub xqhxvbvgwidi xqhxrgatovr xqhxpvqcee xqhxaovqbdds xqhxwuivtqrnxqhxshk xqhxvhmujrctsj xqhxdhzd xqhxeyy xqhxprvf xqhxdlcpbxqhxhl xqhxovzlunbg xqhxhyzf xqhxky xqhxriwbeaz xqhxpplluk xqhxfrj xqhxzxyigs xqhxuk xqhxblldvqpe xqhxmxlx xqhxxkefjlr xqhxfughivjlppxqhxbzmuaaxnc xqhxolt xqhxpjhtjh xqhxbbehgot xqhxzqtqwy xqhxkjywswnkxqhxwuvkhvrmm xqhxraipzifpa xqhxcliky xqhxbiunlyrfm xqhxwnisdlfza

There were no links, no offers, no products being sold, at least by the time it reached me in this mangled state. Obviously something got lost along the way, but where? I get tons of email like this, and it mystifies me. I can guess they want me to buy Viagra or something like that, but from where? From whom? Maybe this is some kind of transliterated Chinese, but why is the subject line in English? Does anybody know?

According to the UCSC Genome Browser in Santa Cruz, California, the first ten nucleotides of the first (biggest) chromosome in the human genome are TATAACACAA. Pretty cool, eh? But then again, so what? We spend billions of tax dollars, and all you can tell us is “TATA, ACACAA”? The next big trick is understanding what all those genome letters are trying to tell us. For instance, the annotations for the sequence TATAACACAA tell us that it’s part of a repeating sequence called a LINE, so we can safely conclude that it doesn’t code for blue eyes or snorting laughs. In a lot of ways, getting the genome is the easy part. Annotation is hard.

If you want to understand the mouse genome, a good place to go is FANTOM, the Japanese site devoted to the functional annotation of the mouse (FANTOM, get it?). This is a good illustration of the next step in squeezing value out of a genome. Annotations are attached to the genome that not only tell you where the genes are, but what their molecular function is and what cellular components they influence, among other things.

Now here’s the fun part: FANTOM has gotten so many requests for their cloned genes that they can’t keep up. The old way to send DNA samples, mailing them in vials packed in dry ice, was too expensive and slow. So they decided to cook the DNA samples for 60,000 genes straight into the pages of a book. Read about it here on the GNN site: A Novel Way to Send DNA. They’re trying a shorter run of a few genes in the journal Genome Research. If you want a sample of the DNA, just get out the scissors and snip it straight into a beaker. Too bad you can’t download it… but can you fax it?

My secret source deep inside the music industry dropped me a note today with the latest Edison Media Research report on how crappy life is for the recording industry (read more about it here). The report details survey results from a thousand people age 12 and up who were asked to respond to statements like “There is nothing morally wrong about downloading music for free from the Internet”. The news is bad, but not quite as horrible as last year. Whether it will keep getting not-quite-as-bad until it is actually good is another matter. But, as they say in the medical business, all bleeding eventually stops. Heh heh.

The big problem is that music sales are down down down… but why? Do people care less about music these days? Are bands worse now than ever before? Or are people just downloading files like horny MP3 monkeys? Answers: no, not really, and yes they are. So what’s the not-so-bad part? Guilt is making a comeback. Only 60% of teenagers think there’s nothing wrong with freeloading. As opposed to 74% last year. And why not pick up that song for free? All recording artists are rich. I saw it on TV!

[Respondents aged] 12 to 24 buy into the media’s “bling bling” portrayal of the music industry. Half believe that all recording artists and record label employees are rich, live in big houses, and drive expensive cars.

There’s irony for you: MTV is a media virus that hyper-glorifies the music business even as it sows the seeds that will destroy it.

Mom and Dad just came for a visit to see the new baby. Mom was just telling me about this phenomenon: for a healthy percentage, someone will come to your house and clean out your attic for you, sell what they can, and then give you a check. No muss, no fuss, and if you were never going to get around to it anyway, it’s hard to argue too much about the margin. Here’s the article in the NY Times: No Time for EBay? Here Come the Agents.

I don’t have many antiques, but I’ve got tons of books, some of which I’d be happy to pass back into the book ecosystem for little or no money. After all, it’s a sin to throw a book away, and not many places are interested in taking books off your hands. I’ve thought about listing all the books I’m done with on Half.com (now a wholly-owned subsidiary of eBay), but it’s way too much trouble. This smells like an opportunity for an enterprising teenager, if not an outright entrepreneur. For instance, because of some business strategy seminar I went to at work, I’ve got a copy of Competing for the Future by Hamel and Prahalad. Sell that sucker on Half.com and you can clear as much as $0.75. After paying eBay its share, you’d have a good fraction of a subsidized hot school lunch.

Apparently eBay has been so successful generating more business for itself that prices are coming down as attics and basements all over the world are being flushed into the daylight. There are now liquid markets and stable prices for more weird crap than ever before in the history of mankind. At this very instant, I have my pick of 45 different Hemingray #42 glass insulators (I’m partial to the blue green Hemingray #42). Better sell all your weird crap before I sell mine and drive the prices down even further.

In the New York Times magazine there’s an article about how you can become a temporary autistic savant by zapping your brain with electromagnetic pulses. It’s an interesting topic, and my son is autistic, so I mailed it to my wife. Then I noticed, below the “E-Mail This Article” icon, there was a “Most E-Mailed Articles” icon. It leads to the
Top 25 Most E-Mailed Articles From the New York Times page. And whaddya know, the piece I picked was today’s most emailed article. I felt strangely validated.

I’ve become a big fan of these lists. I used to eschew them as pointless popularity contests, representing something faddish and frothy, but not worth tapping into. But I’ve come to believe they save me a lot of time. The key thing here is that they are based on what people do rather than what they say they do. It’s entertaining to look at the top list of emailed items and say not only “hey, this is interesting” but also “I wonder why this topic is so popular?” I’m sure the editors and reporters feel the same way. Wouldn’t you be the proud young Jason Blair to realize your article was the most emailed piece that week?

We do the same thing with our MATLAB Central web site: we list the most popular files on the assumption it is a useful guideline for future visitors to see where past visitors went. Yahoo has a Most Emailed Photos list which is almost always either sexy, gory, or bizarro in some way. They have an Editor’s Pick list too, full of well-chosen well-taken photos, but who wants to see that? Show me what the people want to see! That’s the enduring appeal of pop culture: if the thing in question it isn’t interesting in itself, then it’s interesting to consider why it’s interesting to so many other people. Somebody must be reading all those Louis L’Amour books.

By the way, I was going to say that what I really wanted was an RSS feed for the NY Times most-emailed list. But once the thought occurred to me, it didn’t take me 15 seconds to find out it already existed: http://www.newsisfree.com/HPE/xml/feeds/57/5057.xml

If all goes well (and that’s a big “if” considering our Martian track record) there will be six active missions on and around Mars next year. A pair of identical Mars rovers, significantly bigger than the Sojourner rover from several years ago, will land on the planet. One of these just recently took off, and the other will take off soon. Wish them luck…

NASA is obviously a good place to go when you want to learn about space missions, but I have been very impressed with SPACE.com. These guys launched their site in the middle of the dot-com frenzy, and I remember thinking at the time that it was an unlikely way to make money. Happily, though, they’re still in business, and they have some really good material. For instance, you can visit their Mars rover page or check out the nifty 3-D pictures of the surface of the sun. I particularly enjoyed a philosophical discussion about how colors are applied to Hubble Space Telescope pictures: Coloring the Universe: Why Reality is a Gray Area in Astronomy. What would Mars look like if you were really there? It’s a fair question. Maybe you will go there someday. But what would the Eagle Nebula look like if you were there? It’s a much trickier question to answer. For starters, what does it mean to be “there” when there is the Eagle Nebula? From the article:

The quintessential Hubble photograph is a 1995 image of the popular Eagle Nebula, also known as M16 or the Pillars of Creation. The soaring structures had one of their red emissions converted to green — by the astronomers who took the picture — in order to highlight scientific detail. In “reality,” no green was detected coming from the Pillars. Interestingly, all Hubble images are created with black-and-white cameras. Ones and zeros are sent to Earth. Color is dropped in later with the popular Photoshop program.

For a good demonstration of this, look at this image of the Hourglass Nebula and tell me the Photoshop expert who got their hands on it wasn’t trying to make it look like a giant eyeball. It’s a beautiful and compelling image, but how much of it is marketing?