Author: gulley

A pleasant ride on JetBlue

I flew to Seattle last week for the Microsoft Symposium on Social Computing. The best price I got for the flight was from JetBlue. I know they hit some turbulence earlier this year, but my experience was very good. I was impressed with a few things. For one, I had never experienced live network TV while flying before. It’s such a simple thing, but it feels absolutely revolutionary: I can change channels… wow. As a bonus, I happened to be in the air during one of the few recent games where the Red Sox beat the Yankees. I’m sure that fact alone made me feel kindly disposed toward the airline.

And once you get used to the fact that food isn’t part of the ticket price, it stops being such a big deal. Quit crying about it! Once you pull those prices apart, the trip gets cheaper and the food gets better.

I liked the fact that the entire plane was set up for coach. I never thought of myself as having a problem with the notion of First Class seating, but it was surprisingly… soothing without those plutocratic bastards and their oh-can-I-get-you-another-drink pre-takeoff mimosas and their insufferable don’t-pee-in-our-potty lavatories and their goddamned Rich Uncle Pennybags top hats.

Another nice touch: when the captain was introducing himself and the crew before the flight, I suddenly realized he was standing in the aisle looking at us. Strike a blow against the gated community! Look your pilot in the eye!

And my conference was excellent, so all in all it was great trip.

Anybody else have any JetBlue stories?

Voyeurism: Photos Recently Uploaded to Blogger

From the Google Operating System blog I came across this: Blogger Play is a site that shows you pictures that have recently been uploaded to Blogger. It’s sort of like looking at the latest pictures on Flickr, but it’s slightly better: if you see a bizarre or intriguing picture, you can almost always work out the story by clicking through to the blog and reading about it. That’s often not possible at Flickr.

These voyeur sites have been around for a long time. They always seduce me. Whenever I come across them I always A) waste a lot of time staring at them and B) feel like I’m staring at synapses in the Great Brain. This is what people all over the world are thinking about right now. That strikes me as being worth a chunk of my time.

X is the new Y, the network diagram

We’ve had a few interesting discussions here about snowclones. Snowclone is the unlovely name given to the notion of phrasal templates, or what might be called do-it-yourself cliché kits. One of the great snowclones of our age is “X is the new black“, a construction that generalizes into “X is the new Y”.

is-the-new.png

Search engines can give us a sense of the vast destructive power of a rampaging snowclone. A search for “is the new black” returns just over a million documents. I propose a Saffir-Simpson style scale for snowclonic power based on Google reach and associated cultural damage. For instance, Category One snowclones are not dangerous and generally reach no further than the speech of unimaginative mouth-breathers and bloggers. Prose and newscast copy are affected in a Category Two outbreak. A Cat Five snowclone can rip the tongues from unwary media figures and warp the cultural institutions of an entire generation.

I mention all this because I came across this dandy visualization today: is the new at thediagram.com. One small corner of which reads: asleep sleep <= sex <= to text.

Note: points will deducted from Gryffindor House for any mentions of our new overlords in the comments.

Another addictive game

Not wasting enough time yet today? I have just the thing for you. Bloxorz is a dangerously addictive game that will exercise your spatial reasoning muscles. Not to mention your procrastination muscles. I have no idea how to pronounce Bloxorz, but then again, I don’t speak hax0r.

The idea is to roll a little brick past various obstacles while preventing it from plummeting, Q*bert style, into empty space. It’s very nicely made. Love the little metal-brick clinky sounds. And I like the fact that there’s absolutely no time pressure.

Let me know how far you get. I haven’t gotten past stage 15 yet.

(This is another quality link that I picked up from collision detection.)

All the pictures from the Hubble Telescope

Many people don’t fully realize that the appeal of amateur astronomy is cerebral rather than a visual. An expensive telescope can afford you some breathtaking views of the moon as well as a nifty view of Jupiter and its satellites. Saturn is a minor thrill, and a few of the larger nebulae also make for fun viewing. But at that point, as far as pure visual spectacle goes, you’re pretty much done. The moon will look the same the next time it’s full. It doesn’t change much. The Orion nebula doesn’t change at all. And it’s a pain in the ass to move that big telescope back into the yard. This is why, on a typical night, so many telescopes gather dust rather than starlight.

If the essential notion of it doesn’t thrill you, then observing variable stars is about the most boring thing imaginable. An enthusiast will get very exercised about the occultation of Regulus by the dark limb of the passing moon. But what are we really talking about here? The star is there, and then it winks out of sight. I can see both sides of this argument. On the one hand, what a majestic event! The inexorable interposition of massive heavenly bodies made plain to our tiny Earthbound eyebones. Oh, the grandeur! The hand of God is surely there. On the other hand: big freaking deal. I’m cold. Why did I stay up for this?

If, however, you had the Hubble Space Telescope at your command, it would be a different story. For a machine like that, the visual thrills never stop. So I was really happy to find a site that does a good job cataloguing all the magnificent pictures taken by Hubble over the years: HubbleSite.

I’ve always found the Hourglass Nebula MyCn18 to be particularly haunting. I’d be willing to bet that freely available pictures like this will do more to recruit more future astronomers than backyard telescopes ever did.

Ignite Boston and bioscreencast.com

I gave a talk at the second O’Reilly Ignite Boston event tonight, and I was lucky enough to meet Hari Jayaram who was also there to present. Hari is a crystallographer at Brandeis with several Protein Data Bank entries under his belt, including the notorious coronavirus nucleocapsid of SARS fame. Along with several other friends, he is busy creating bioscreencast.com. The site was the topic of his talk. Like JoVE and SciVee, bioscreencast aims to remedy the dreadful dearth of practical advice and information faced by working biologists. For example, how do you use BLAST at NCBI to look for homologous proteins? You could waste a lot of time screwing around on the site, or you could just let Hari tell you.

The Navy discovered that kids who spent a lot of time playing flight simulator games were better prepared to learn to fly. I wonder if, in a few years, freshman biology students will arrive on campus knowing all their protocols by heart because they spent so many hours watching bioscreencast.com videos and paging through OpenWetWare.

Lucky Goes for a Ride

Okay Matt, this one’s for you. Matt Simoneau’s parents have a funny dog named Lucky. If you mention the word “beach” to her, she does an amazing simulation of an amp-mic audio feedback squeal. Here’s the video proof.

Matt wants Lucky to unseat Miss Teen South Carolina from her throne atop the most-watched YouTube videos list. Will you help him? It’s a long shot, but I bet Miss Teen South Carolina would be happy to see that happen too.

You know, parents get busted on for posting cutesy-poo stories ‘n’ snapshots of their kids, but we all have our sentimental weak spots. Even the most hardened goth-punk blogger can’t resist the occasional sneezing panda. I dare you, I dare you not to smile when you see the giggling quadruplets. It can’t be done. Go on, you crusty old web veteran. Click on that link and see if I’m right.

Doodoo data mining: drug testing for cities

By way of Clive Thompson’s collision detection blog, I came across this great article on citywide drug-testing using… wait for it… raw sewage. It only takes a teaspoon to find out the poop on metropolitan pill-popping. They can get good quantitative results on fifteen kinds of drugs. So for instance, they observe that “cocaine and ecstasy tended to peak on weekends and drop on weekdays, … while methamphetamine and prescription drugs were steady throughout the week.”

This is simultaneously funny and brilliant. It will be much more widely exploited in the future. It’s a perfect example of mining valuable data from otherwise unappreciated information flows. How does a cop know when a particular drug has become a problem for his jurisdiction? Arrests and drugs busts are sure to be trailing indicators, whereas community urinalysis is an infallible leading indicator (or rather an indicator that trails by no more than a few beers and a trip to the john).

Furthermore, the extensions are obvious and sure to be pursued. Sample your city by district, by neighborhood, by building. If I was a cop, I’d want to know where trouble was brewing. I can envision a whole new kind of heat map. Imagine the possibilities… test for capsaicin and you could probably use it to find the locations of good Mexican restaurants. Of course, you wouldn’t even need a fancy test to tell if it’s asparagus season.

It’s only a matter of time until suspicious employers are dipping into the used coffee stream at work. And what better way to see what your teenager’s been up to? I can see a darn good business in combination sewage trap tappers and drug test kits. Call it the Poop ‘n’ Snoop: “Once they go, you’re in the know.”

The litter box attachment would verify your cat has licked his blow problem.

Anybody want to invest?

Aiming on Moving Targets at the Lake Michigan

Today I’m happy to present another contribution from the classroom of Alan Kennedy, our correspondent from the front lines of teaching English as a Second Language. This time he’s talking about the surprisingly complicated dangly bits of English: articles and prepositions. You never notice them until they’re out of place.

One of the odd things about learning a language is that it’s easy when you’re young and hard when you’re old. We feel bad about having to teach our children the strange rules of language, but they aren’t really troubled by it. In a sense, they’re the ones who made the problem in the first place. Kids are the ones who cook simple pidgins into rich creoles. There is a time when our brain can effortlessly spin and juggle complex new grammars. In some cases, it seems to border on the extravagant flourish of a peacock display. The Luganda language of Africa, for example, has at least ten different noun classes (not counting the plural forms), essentially genders like masculine, feminine, neuter, large things, skinny things, wet things, and so on. Each one has a different associated affix to memorize. What on Earth were they thinking? Who made this up? You can bet it wasn’t some Luganda government subcommittee. It had to be the kids. You can’t learn this stuff as an adult. You can’t even make it up as an adult.

It seems baffling that difficult and exceptional constructions aren’t eroded from the language by use, as a tumbling stone is smoothed by a watercourse. But there you have it.

Alan teaches English to adults. That puts him in the hot seat when the language gets weird. Here’s what he has to say.

Continue reading “Aiming on Moving Targets at the Lake Michigan”

Hydroptère, the boat with wings

Hydrofoils have been around since the time of Alexander Graham Bell. The prolific inventor is credited with making one of the first practical boats based on this idea. But what exactly is a hydrofoil? It’s nothing more than a wing that operates underwater rather than the air. A tiny water wing moving at sufficient speed can support enormous loads. But it’s tricky to make them work well. Nevertheless, if you want to make a boat go fast, you need to minimize your contact with the fat grabby fingers of the water. You want a hydrofoil.

If you want to set the world record for sailing speed, it follows that you need a hydrofoil sailboat. Check out this video of the French Hydroptère, a boat that sails above the waves like something out of a story book. They’re hoping to break the 50 knot mark this winter.

I think this video is the male equivalent of the Dutch horses video I showed here a while back. Just as with the Dutch horses, not much happens for a good chunk of the video. It’s just a close shot of sailors in foul weather gear shouting at each other in French: “Quarente-deux! Quarente-trois!” (42! 43!) I find it thrilling. Watch the foil strut slicing through waves that would be smacking the crap out of any boat from an earlier century. I think my favorite shot is actually the interior view of crew member hanging on to the ceiling supports for dear life. It’s got to be an extreme adrenaline rush. You can bet if that boat were to pitch forward suddenly and snag its bow, it would be an explosive high-speed train wreck of a crash.

Once you start looking for hydrofoils, you see them everywhere. Here is a hydrofoil surfboard of all things. And the world speed record for human-powered locomotion over water was set by Mark Drela of MIT with a hydrofoil pedal boat called the Decavitator.