Author: gulley

My nominee for the how-in-the-world-did-THAT-evolve-without-intelligent-design award is the web-spinning spider. While I don’t actually believe in intelligent design, it’s always astounding to watch a spider at work. Via Athanasius I came across this spider site that shows web construction movies and a web gallery. There is also an illuminating little essay on how web-spinning works, which ends with this charming fact.

The spider usually replaces the web every night or every other night. … The old web is ingested and recycled into new silk.

I alternate between thinking this is elegant and poetic on the one hand, and absolutely revolting on the other. Think of all the bugs that have been on that old thing. But then I suppose if you liked eating bugs…

From the O’Reilly Radar I came across this fun tip: use Google trends to investigate words with seasonality. What I like about this so much is that it gets at how we make sense of the world. Just as you can use Google images to see what a fleam looks like without knowing what it means or how to translate destornillador without bothering to find out what language it is, you can use Google trends to learn about words that have distinct temporal profiles.

Perhaps you’ve never heard of Beltane, but a quick trend search shows that it stimulates great interest around the end of April every year. Now consider Christmas. Notice that this exhibits the pronounced anticipatory pileup associated with counter-flowing temporal wind. I discussed this effect in detail in an essay about December birthdays. You might think that New Year has a similar profile, but you would only be revealing your cultural chauvinism: New Year casts two shadows, and depending on where you come from it can mean quite different things. Mother’s Day also makes multiple appearances on the calendar.

A typical causal downcalendar decay is evident in this plot of Incredibles. No one had ever heard of the movie The Incredibles, and then suddenly it burst on the scene. We also see a significant Oscar-related spike. For another interesting profile, Tim O’Reilly singled out poor John Kerry as the archetypal example of “falling off a cliff.” Buh-bye John. So sorry.

I could play with this for hours, much as I did with the mesmerizing Name Voyager. There’s something viscerally satisfying about plots like Memorial Day, Labor Day, summer. Got any good ones?

Here’s a spooky game to play on Friday: Choose any two digit number you like. That is, think of a number that can be expressed like this

10a + b

where a and b are both single digit numbers. Now add a and b and subtract that sum from your original number, like so:

(10a + b) – (a + b)

I am now going to think about your number. Hmmm. Let’s see.

(10a + b) – (a + b) = (10a – a) + (b – b) = 9a

I need perfect silence while I meditate upon the nature of your number… it is… wait, it’s getting clearer now… it is DIVISIBLE BY 9! Pretty spooky, eh? No? Hey, where is everybody going?

Before you run away, go look at this site. milaadesign wizardry. It’s an extremely well-done version of this old mathematical chestnut. They’ve employed some very clever showmanship to obscure the simple math that I spelled out above. First, there is the creepy sound and imagery. The fact that, as an Iranian design firm, they also show the instructions in Farsi just deepens the sense of mystery. But the best hack is the last one. On the last screen you look at a big table of occult-ish symbols and pick out the one next to your number. It looks like all the symbols are different, and after a dramatic pause just long enough for some sort of telepathic voodoo, they reveal your symbol, amid chirping crickets and maniacal cackling. You didn’t have enough time to observe that all the multiples of 9 (i.e. 18, 27, 36, and so on) have this exact same symbol. Finally, for better dramatic effect, they change this symbol the next time you play.

That’s good show business! My hat is off to anyone who can squeeze that much mileage out of a two-bit math hack. (thanks to my sister-in-law Elizabeth for forwarding this one to me)

Ever since Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service launched, I’ve been wondering if it would really take hold. If you haven’t heard of it, the Mechanical Turk, which gets its odd name as an homage to an old chess-playing automaton, is a human-in-the-loop web utility offered by Amazon. Want to transcribe some handwritten notes? It’s hard for a computer, but easy for a person, and Amazon has taken all the hassle out of hiring someone for $0.05 worth of work.

But still, how many people would really do it? Apparently not many people are actually taking advantage of the service. On the other hand, I recently came across the best evidence yet that the Mechanical Turk has a future.

Sheep.

Someone has put up the money for people around the world to draw 10,000 sheep. Little badly drawn cartoons of sheep facing left. All on display at The Sheep Market. To the list of things computers find difficult, add pointless doodles. (via Karim via Ben Hyde)

I had seen pictures of sculptor Alexander Calder’s tiny toy circus before, and I had read how in Paris in the 1920s the “Cirque Calder” mesmerized the like of Jean Arp, Piet Mondrian, and Jean Cocteau.

He would issue invitations to his guests, who would sit on makeshift bleachers munching peanuts, just like the real circus. With the crash of cymbals and music from an old gramophone, the circus would begin. Many of the individual circus animals and performers include mechanized parts—Calder was originally trained as a mechanical engineer.

Still I couldn’t picture how it all worked. What did the performances actually look like? So I was happy to see that someone has YouTube’d a movie of (a much older) Calder and his wife performing his famous circus. Here is the first clip. Find the others with this search.

Watching Calder’s bucking broncos and weightlifting strong man makes me think that he must have done a lot to inspire people like Arthur Ganson. Follow the link and be sure to look at the “Machine with Wishbone” movie.

If you want to do cutting-edge science, you need access to cutting-edge data. Exciting new data is generally expensive to acquire and therefore closely guarded. Naturally whoever pays for the data wants to get the first crack at the fame-generating discoveries thereby engendered. You probably could have figured out, for instance, that Jupiter had a ring around it if you’d seen the picture first, but the people who got to write that press release had put in years of sharp-elbowed jostling to be standing in the right place when the data hose opened up.

But most jealously guarded data has a more depressing fate. Like the storybook dragon that guards the captive virgin, data owners often hoard it without any clear notion of what to do with it or how to value it. It reminds me of Harvard’s fortress-like Widener Library. It’s the world’s largest university library, and it’s carefully sealed and locked down to prevent unlicensed books from leaking out and unwashed people (that’s you and me) from sneaking in. Good job guys! Nobody’s going to be seeing those books anytime soon.

Recently, however, the world of data-intensive science has started to change, and the change is this: there’s more than enough data to go around. You can now do (real! serious!) astronomy from your computer if you’ve got the inclination and the chops. The pictures from Saturn and Mars come pouring onto your screen as fast as they do for the lead planetary scientists on the project. The human genome is all yours.

To me, an even bigger surprise than this is that field biology (field myrmecology to be precise) is also opening up to the browser-bound mouse potatoes of the world. You would think that the sweat and effort that goes into collecting ants in Madagascar, not to mention the thrill of naming new species, would keep the data locked down, but pioneering entomologist Brian Fisher is changing the game. As reported in Discover magazine, he wants you to know what he knows as soon as he knows it.

E. O. Wilson, the godfather of ant biology and the conservation movement, calls Fisher’s methods “industrial-strength taxonomy.” He means it as high praise. Fisher himself says he aspires to the time-and-efficiency thinking of a car manufacturer.

Fisher has gone so far as to create antweb.org, where he’s posting pictures of what he’s finding in Madagascar as soon as he can manage it. If you switch on the community features of Google Earth, you’ll find special icons indicating where ant species have been identified. That’s how you put the data where it’ll do some good. Brian Fisher is a scientific hero for the data-rich networked age.

Now that the World Cup is over, we can finally get some respite from that quadrennial scourge, the op-ed piece on why Americans don’t like soccer. It’s an editorial staple, a lazy space-filler that practically writes itself: Americans need high scores! We need commercial breaks so we can pee and get more Budweiser out of the fridge! We hate kicking things! We love using our hands! And so on.

Now if you’re going to write The Soccer Piece, you can play it straight, like Michael Mandelbaum in the Guardian, or you can assume an intentionally combative position, like Frank Cannon and Richard Lessner in The Weekly Standard:

Our country has yet to succumb to the nihilism, existentialism, and anomie that have overtaken Europe. A game about nothing, in which scoring is purely incidental, holds scant interest for Americans who still believe the world makes sense, that life has a larger meaning and structure, that being is not an end in itself, being qua being.

Take that, Old Europe! The Economist contrasts socialist soccer to capitalist American football. Whatever.

I happen to like soccer, so naturally I’m biased to think that, just possibly, Americans can enjoy watching this sport. I think our national predilection is simply a product of history. Soccer spread at a time when Britain had the world’s greatest empire. It’s economic influence was unexcelled. It exercised direct influence over much of the world except for the US. Moreover, this British sports-culture diaspora happened during a time of worldwide nation-building and nascent nationalism. But the US was politically aloof at the time, and we were also, incidentally, making our own weird sportive inventions.

I think Marco R. della Cava, writing in USA Today, gets it right: Hey, soccer’s not so popular now, but sooner or later it will be. In the meantime, cranky Europeans should lighten up. Let us have our strange sports with long breaks and shoulder pads. Big deal. Feel good about the fact that you trounce us so easily in your favorite game. Here’s a good quote from the USA Today piece.

“Soccer is a great passion play for much of the world,” says Paddy Agnew, a Rome-based correspondent for the Irish Times who is covering the World Cup in Germany. “The people I talk to are glad the world’s only superpower isn’t much better than it is. If they won this, too, that’d be the end. What could the rest of the world aspire to?”

As for the time when that blessed hour arrives and America finally rallies around its national club and succeeds on the World Cup pitch, it will be just as easy then to write op-ed pieces about why Americans do like soccer after all. It’s always easy to justify the evident. But sometimes it’s just the opposite that makes more sense. I am convinced that Americans should, by their nature, loathe baseball. If our so-called national pastime didn’t already exist, it would never catch on now. Here’s my fantasy op-ed piece from that alternate reality.

Every four years the Baseball “World Series” rolls around, and people around the globe go apeshit for baseball. Everyone in the world except, of course, for us. And why don’t Americans get it? What’s so un-American about baseball? Here are the top reasons:

• Red-blooded Americans need action. Most of the time nothing is happening at a baseball game. If it weren’t for The Wave, the crowd would be fast asleep.
• We like precise time keeping for that all-important endgame drama. Look at the last-second shenanigans of basketball; consider the football field goals with zero seconds on the clock. How can you pace yourself when there’s no official clock?
• Swatting at a little round ball with a stick? So gay. Maybe that’s okay for a round of golf at the country club, but it’s no way for a so-called athlete to earn his money.

Baseball. Just think of it as God’s way of keeping little countries busy while we run the world.