Author: gulley

I don’t see 21C Magazine on the newstands around me anymore; I had assumed they went out of business, but they have a web site and appear to be thriving. Their latest issue, all of which appears to be available online, has some good stuff in it. Most compelling to me was the piece about the documentary movie “The Devil’s Playground,” which is about the Amish concept of rumspringa. The Amish are famously strict parents, but at age 16, all the rules drop away and their children can do whatever they want until they make their decision (so goes the theory) to commit themselves to their church and community. The wild (and thoroughly modern) partying that goes on during the rumspringa is eye-opening, almost straining belief. Can it really be like this? But sure enough, a lot of the kids, though not all of them, exorcize the wildness and return to the fold. There’s something very civilized about this. It seems saner than either continuous cradle-to-grave repression or anarchic loosey-goosey upbringing.

We should all have a rumspringa. The word has pleasant connotations of a rum-soaked spring break, and the concept brings a certain sensible framework to the inevitable teenage rebellion and dissipation. The only way to avoid the corrosive seduction of the english world is to embrace it and then walk away. Makes sense to me. Here’s a long quote from the article.

The Amish …[prefer] their adherents to join the church when they are old enough to make an informed decision about committing to the religion for life. Therefore when each child turns 16 they can experience the outside “english” world with all its temptations -“the devil’s playground” – in order to make their decision. This period in their life is known in their Pennsylvania Dutch language as rumspringa, which literally translates as “running around”. It ends whenever an individual feels ready – typically between the ages of 18-22 – to make the decision that will determine the rest of their lives.

Nanotubes and other assorted things nano are shaping up to be the next big hype bubble to burst, but it’s fun to surf the wave of unreasonable expectations while it lasts. These nanotubes do have a touch of the alchemical philosopher’s stone about them, bringing magical transformations everywhere they land. As Feynman said, there’s plenty of room at the bottom. Read about it in the New York Times: It Slices! It Dices! Nanotube Struts Its Stuff.

I’ll be on vacation for the next week, so no bloggo mucho till July 29th. I’m flying down to North Carolina on Midway Airlines.
Hey! Wait a second… as of Thursday, July 18th (that’s today) Midway has ceased to exist. The timing is perfect. Midway vanished (it was swallowed up by U.S. Airways, hardly a paragon of solvency itself) on the absolute eve of our trip. We have to go get paper tickets issued to us at the airport and walk to the U.S. Airways desk before they will consider changing them. Paper tickets… walking… no resolution by phone or computer. It all feels so nineteenth century. Perhaps I’ll dash over to the aerodrome first thing tomorrow on my velocipede. Wish me luck.

There was a time when R.U. Sirius and his wacky crew at Mondo 2000 were on top of the world. I was a Mondo 2000 reader, squarely in the middle of their young-geek-yearning-to-make-tech-cool demographic. After a few issues, Mondo began to smell of too much sweaty enthusiasm untempered by any graphical restraint or even genuine content. It was a shooting star, but it set the stage that Wired magazine went on to dominate. Still, what a show! How did they manage to pull it off? Here’s a profile of R.U. Sirius from Shift.com.

This just in: good friend Matthew J. Simoneau has started a weblog, despite the fact that he feels, as he says in his first entry, “a little embarassed to be jumping on the weblogging bandwagon so late.” Nevertheless, he jumps off to a good start with a report of his visit to the museum of giant artwork, MASS MoCA. What is MASS MoCA? Read about it here and on Matt’s blog.

Is there any truth to the rumor that Matt’s middle initial stems from the fact that Rocky, Bullwinkle, and all three male members of the Simpson family (Bart, Homer, and Abraham) share the middle initial J? A visit to his site may clear things up. Then again, it may not.

The BBC sez: Replace your mouse with your eye. It’s a premise with promise, but what do you think? Could you accurately move things around your screen with your flickering eye movements? It just might replace aching wrists with strained eyes. I can just imagine the cursor twitching back and forth across the screen until you go back to the closet and dig out the old mouse in disgust. But maybe I’m just closing my eyes to the march of progress.

I am interested in how computers are used to extend our senses, such that algorithms effectively become eyes, seeing a picture that would not otherwise exist in the streams of ones and zeros returning from, say, an orbiter around Mars. So I was intrigued to hear that Mt. Everest was actually discovered by a computer. It was discovered (in the sense of being the tallest mountain in the world) in 1852, and “computer” is the title applied to a person in Dehra Dun, India who was given the task of grinding through the math associated with the Grand Trigonometrical Survey of India. Determining the tallest mountain means measuring them all against the same yardstick set against the same baseline. This is clearly a complex undertaking, so it perhaps comes as no surprise that Everest was officially observed in 1847, but it took five years to “see” that it was the tallest mountain in the survey (and by extension, the world). Here’s a nice summary with some good pictures: Peak XV. And here’s an oddball piece (written from the mountain’s point of view) from some sort of Nepal tourist office: An Autobiography of Sagarmatha’s Height.

This is the kind of thing that makes staying up late and surfing the web so addictive. I was poking around peterme.com last night reading about information visualization. Several of the ideas mentioned there involved work that had been pioneered by Martin Wattenberg (of Map of the Market renown). So I reflected, web-like, I wonder what Martin has been getting up to lately? and a short trip to Google later I had my answer. THE SECRET LIVES OF NUMBERS is a piece he worked on with Golan Levin. It has an astonishingly elegant interface for understanding the relative popularity (in the sense of web hits à la Google) of all the numbers between 0 and 100,000. The sociology of numbers is interesting enough, but I could also play with it for a long time just for the experience of watching the interface react to my fiddling. It turns out that 415 is a surprisingly popular three digit number. Surprising, until you remember that 415 is a San Francisco area code. Similarly, you can unearth the postal geography of the United States just by looking for peaks and plateaus in the five digit numbers that correspond to zip codes. As they say in the Michelin guides “three stars; merits a special trip.”

No sooner did I post the link to the Welsh weblog then I got a nice message from Nic Dafis who runs it. Fortunately he wasn’t at all miffed that I made a little joke about some Welsh that I quoted at random. In fact, I did happen to pick a joke of his, which is that the transliteration of the word “weblog” into Welsh is “gweflog” which is an actual (though archaic) Welsh word which means “having large blubbery lips.” :-) I mean :-))

According to Nic, if you want to learn more about Wales and the debate about Welsh language, visit http://cymuned.org/. Keeping a language alive raises fascinating public policy questions because it affects so many issues of day-to-day convenience. What do the signs say? What will your child learn in school? Are some people more equal than others? Suppose you were to move to Wales next week. Would you make a special effort to learn Welsh? Would you make any effort at all? Your answer spells the difference between colonization and in-migration.