Author: gulley

The Google API is showing up everywhere, even in MATLAB. Check out Matt Simoneau’s new Google Toolbox and use Google’s SOAP interface to pull data into MATLAB as a structure.

So all the kids are talking about Google Answers, the new service from Google that lets people post questions and that get answered for a fee. I’ll be interested to see if they can make it work… they’re amazingly ambitious and do a good job with most of the stuff they tackle. Anyway, I was surprised at how many people were willing to pay money for things that take 30 seconds to find on the web. For instance, what is the unit of measure for pain? Somebody offered to pay you $10 to figure that out. Ten dollars! Go to Google and type “unit measure pain” and see how long it takes you to answer that one. Okay, I’ll tell you: a dol is the unit of pain. The great irony to me is that people who post questions like this have already managed to find the Google web site. They just couldn’t go the last step and type in a search query. I want to know if ten dollars really changed hands on this one.

Here’s a fun article at Salon about people who write game modifications, or mods: Triumph of the mod. Once again, the gaming industry is leading the way for the rest of us. Simulation, real-time graphics, UI design, and now software process and practice. The incredible game-playing and game-building rush makes people devote insane amounts of energy to games. As one modder says, in reference to the pros, We’re better than those guys, and we’re just a group of dudes! All true. I suppose if you’re going to lose large chunks of your life to a computer game, you’re better off writing code than just playing. At least you end up with something to show for it.

The Soda Constructor was a web hit ages ago; I thought sure it would be an overnight fad. But this thing has legs (literally). The zoo page lets people add their own models, and while some of the results are silly, others are fascinating. It’s very clear the simple model they put together captures a deep biological buglike essence. This has to be how insects work. Go look.

Wanna get the lowdown on computer game addiction? Don’t read the dry reportage on CNET. Visit the front lines and read the discussion at the gaming site ShackNews. I thought all the gameboys were going to slam the psychologist loser-heads who would dare suggest that games are addictive. But some of the posts were refreshingly confessional, as with this quote: I remember sitting at my computer playing Quake, having to piss so bad my legs were shaking, having not showered for a couple days, and refusing my wife’s sexual advances, then dreaming of Quake at night.

See the John Lynch Artist Portfolio at absolutearts.com. John, a painter from Berkeley, California, was originally featured here at our very Star Chamber web site, where you can still see his gallery. Congrats, John, on the new site! Actually, I’m a little puzzled by the fact that they seem to be offering for sale a painting that I own (Blue Door). I hope nobody’s going to sneak into our house and repossess it.

What was the dang deal with Charles Babbage, anyway? Crank or genius? Get the short version of the story with this review of The Difference Engine, a book about Babbage, his almost-but-not-quite marvelous machine, and how they actually built a genuine working version in the 21st century.

I’m listening to some tapes by Robert Greenberg (available from the Teaching Company) on the history of music. They’re very entertaining… I hadn’t realized, for example, how significant opera was in the development of many other musical forms like oratorio and sonata form. Then I remembered that there was somebody else I had heard on the radio who gave talks called “What makes it so great?” But who? Was it Greenberg? One quick visit to Google later, I learned that it’s Robert Kapilow, another clever and inspirational music geek. Listen to him wax rhapsodic about Harold Arlen’s Somewhere Over the Rainbow on NPR’s Performance Today.

PC Forum organizer Esther Dyson has some choice words about blogging during conference talks at the PC Forum. The big idea is that people can use a Wi-Fi network to blog about a talk in real time to the whole world. What does this mean? Esther says: “In some sense, the power of the conference moderator is reduced. Bloggers can add their own value … and they can relay their version from inside the tent to those outside the tent and out of the organizer’s control.” It’s easy to see that A) this will make a lot of people uncomfortable, and B) it can’t be stopped.

The last conference I went to (O’Reilly Bioinformatics in Tucson) people were typing away the whole time all over the audience. But every time I got close enough to peek, they were doing something completely unrelated to the talk: idly surfing the web, writing and compiling code, or playing solitaire. High tech doodling. Tappity-tap tap tap.

From BoingBoing I found this cool pointer to the DOE Photo Library of atmospheric nuclear tests. I find these pictures utterly mesmerizing. I am can’t stop wondering about what it must have been like to witness some of these big boys. The atmospheric H-bomb shots in the Pacific are the creepiest of all. Consider
Castle Bravo, a dry lithium that obliterated Bikini atoll in 1954. It was fully two and a half times more powerful than expected, tipping the scales at 15 megatons. Imagine the consequences of a miscalculation like that… Witnesses on nearby naval vessels said the heat was terrifying in its intensity and persistence. “The cloud top rose and peaked at 130,000 feet (almost 40 km) after only six minutes. Eight minutes after the test the cloud had reached its full dimensions with a diameter of 100 km, a stem 7 km thick, and a cloud bottom rising above 55,000 feet (16.5 km).” Castle Bravo was the largest bomb ever exploded by the United States.

But was it the largest ever? No. That distinction goes to the “Tsar Bomba” (“King of Bombs”) which the Soviet Union exploded over Novaya Zemlya in 1961 for a yield of 50 megatons. Khruschev got the weapon he wanted, but as the FAS site says, “a bomb this size is virtually useless militarily.” Still. Ka-BOOM!