Author: gulley

Gasoline heat map

How much are you paying for gas? The people at GasBuddy.com will tell you, and they’ll also tell you where to find the cheapest gas in your area. They’ve got a good social network/web application thing going where people around the US regularly report what gas costs near them. So, for instance, here are the prices in Watertown, Massachusetts. They’ve also got historical trend charting available, which turns up some intertesting stuff. I compared Boston to New Orleans for the past year, and I was amazed to see that Boston prices jumped 60 cents in less than a week after Katrina last August, while at the same time gas prices in Louisiana were constant. But it turns out this was more of a legal mandate than anything else… Atlanta and Houston both had the same post-hurricane spike as Boston.

The pièce de resistance for the site, however, is the gas temperature map. Here you can see in one place, county-by-county, what the average price is for a gallon of gas anywhere in the country. It’s very entertaining to make up theories to account for the disparities. California is always most expensive because of its more demanding (and expensive) refining requirements. But what explains the difference between Wisconsin and Minnesota?

Muybridge animations

muybridge.jpg
When a horse is running, is there ever at point at which all four feet are off the ground? That was the question that vexed Leland Stanford, the California governor, robber baron, and eponymous university benefactor. Today high quality photography and video makes it difficult to believe that this could actually be a controversial question. But in 1872, Stanford retained the magnificently named Eadweard Muybridge to determine the definitive answer. Muybridge’s photographic work anticipated the movie; by using multiple cameras he was the first to capture a sequence of images that show exactly how a horse gallops. Muybridge was like a 19th century version of MIT’s “Doc” Edgerton who used strobe photography to stop time as, for example, a bullet exploded through an apple.

Using multiple still cameras to suggest motion has come back in vogue lately, most notably with the so-called “bullet time” effect seen in The Matrix. This effect, known more generally as time slicing, extends the Muybridge idea: the camera seems to move infinitely fast, viewing the subject from multiple directions at the same instant. The technique can also be used for less purely cinematic purposes. Here’s a nifty timeslice video of a cheetah running through an African encampment.

Seeing all this stop motion photography made me think of fun little video I saw over at Google: The Art of Motion by Russell Wyner. It has several Matrix-like homage shots. And finally, when it comes to goofing on the Matrix, you can’t top the magical ping pong video. Turn the volume up and watch it all the way through.

And for the record, galloping horses do have all four feet off the ground at one time or another.

Paperback book notifications

Ben Hammersley has shut down the Lazyweb, but the key insight that it embodied still endures:

…if you wait long enough, someone will implement that wacky idea you had… (or already has!) Alternatively, that if your blog has enough readers, a reader will know and provide the answer to a question you are too lazy to research yourself.

I make no claims to a vast readership, but I am certainly lazy. So when I imagine a web service that must exist somewhere, I ask clever people like you where to find it. The service I’m thinking of this week is paperback release schedules. I love books, but I don’t often buy hardback books. I don’t like them. They are less pleasing than paperbacks in several dimensions: bigger, heavier, harder to handle, more expensive, harder to flip through (if it has those silly ragged pages), and you’re always having to worry with that stupid paper cover thing that wants to fall off. But since they are more profitable, publishers are clearly motivated to sell them exclusively for as long as possible, and so I’m often in the position of seeing a new hardback book for which I want to buy the paperback edition. I want a web service that lets me register my interest in, say, Philip Ball’s new biography The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science, and then emails me when the paperback edition gets released. Does such a service exist? It seems like it should, but my Google scrying glass was cloudy and my searches came to naught.

On a related note, since I consume a good many books by audio these days, I want a similar service that will notify me when a given book is released in audio form (unabridged editions only, naturally).

No business model is the new business model

After much shopping around for online to-do lists that I like, I have settled on one called tasktoy. It’s not very flashy, and it’s not very professional looking, but it works well, and it has a few features that I absolutely must have. The most important is that I can post new items to it using a URL rather than having to go to a special web page and click on a special button. Clicking on buttons is so 2004.

The site’s creator is Toby Segaran, a Boston-based New Zealander who made tasktoy not as a business opportunity, but merely because it scratched an itch for him. And since he found it useful (here comes the fun paradigm-shifting part) he thought, “Say, while I’m at it, why not make this available to everybody in the entire world?”

One reason being cited for all the recent proliferation of hot young Web 2.0 companies is that the cost of launching a business has plummeted since Bubble 1.0. Some cheap hardware, a handful of open source software, and a good idea can take you pretty far these days. But if making a company is dirt cheap, then so is not making a company. I read some recent musings by Toby Segaran in his blog, and the following passage hit me on the head like a figurative heavy thing:

A number of people have emailed and asked me how I’m making money from tasktoy and lazybase. Others have said, somewhat critically, in blog postings and forum comments that they just “don’t see the business model” for such applications. The truth is that I don’t make any money from these applications. They were never intended to be a business. I wrote them because I wanted them, it was an opportunity to learn something new, and like most people I love creating things.

I determined that for less than I spend on coffee, I could put them online and share them with everyone.
… There is no business, and there is no business model. Think of something that you would do anyway and imagine being sent thank-you notes from all over the world just for doing it, and you’ll see why there doesn’t have to be.

I added those italics, because that’s the part that really knocked me on the head. For less than he spends on coffee, he can run a service that adds significant ongoing value to my life and the lives of hundreds of others. Tasktoy is a service I would pay for. At any other time in the history of mankind, it’s a service that would absolutely demand payment or subsidy. This kind of new age gifting is bound to have a significant economic impact over time. Software gets more interesting every day.

Stump the Semiotician

I just got back from a vacation in northern California, and while I was strolling down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, I happened across this sign at the Mediterranean Cafe.

I haven’t seen a sign like this in a long time, but I suspect partial nudity is a bigger problem in Berkeley than in most of the places I frequent. Seeing this sign reminded me of another sign outside the playground just around the corner from my house. I often go there with my kids.

These signs have similar syntactical construction. What about their semantics? If we believe both signs follow the condition-consequence model, then the following is clear: Unless you bring two or more dogs to my park, you may not play golf. Or maybe you can play golf if there are dogs on the premises somewhere. On the other hand, if each is merely a list of negatives, then it follows that patrons of the Mediterranean Cafe should expect neither a shirt, nor shoes, nor service of any kind. How they stay in business is anybody’s guess, but presumably they have no objection to partial nudity, since they dispense no clothes.

Do you find semantic sharpshooting entertaining or intensely irritating? Know any weirdly ambiguous signs? I want to hear about them.

Animal-like robots

We’re definitely entering a new realm with robotics. Before robotic motion was always painfully awkward and stilted, not something you would ever mistake for the smooth motion of an animal. But these days you can find plenty of examples of remarkably fluid “un-robotic” behavior. Things will progress very rapidly from here. The YouTube video below shows human-controlled robots. They’re being driven by remote control, but they’re still a treat to watch.

This next example is a video of a robotic eel, and it truly has to be seen to be believed. Again, it’s radio-controlled, but still, LOOK AT THAT FELLER SWIM! Straight out of a Bond movie.

Tattoos Sacred and Profane

You may have heard about Engrish.com, the site that tracks amusing abuses of the English language in Japan (“Let’s happy and feel the lucky!”). But what about the view from the other side? Are Americans abusing Asian languages by any chance? Yes they are, and whereas Japanese have a knack for zany T-shirts and signs, Americans prefer to make their mistakes in the form of permanent tattoos. Tian Tang, an engineering student who lives in Arizona now but was born in China, has a site called Hanzi Smatter that is dedicated to airing the kinds of mistranslations, mistransliterations, and textual nonsense that pass for Chinese in American pop culture. Recently he’s been getting some high-profile press:

Cool Tat, Too Bad It’s Gibberish – New York Times
Indelibly lost in translation – Los Angeles Times

The whole concept of what people look for in a tattoo, and what constitutes magical writing, has fascinated me for some time, so I collected my thoughts in the somewhat longer ramble below.

Continue reading “Tattoos Sacred and Profane”

Chimpanzees in context

Jane Goodall and her team are still at it, observing chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, but now they, like every other primate on the face of the earth, are also blogging. What’s interesting, even beyond the bit about the chimps, is the fact that the blog appears (primarily) in Google Earth rather on a web page. This allows you to see exactly where Emily saw Fifi’s eighth child Flirt. In a more general sense, it answers the question “Okay, I know chimpanzees come from Africa, but where in Africa? It’s a big place, after all.” Seeing the Gombe preserve set among the mountains of along the shores of Lake Tanganyika and then reading about camp life provides more tangible context than the maps in National Geographic ever did. Plus it’s got news you can use: if you visit, put your shoes in the “large cage where we hang the laundry… because if you leave those things outside unprotected, you will almost certainly lose them to a crafty baboon or chimp.”

No more grinding teeth

I am a grinder and a clencher. Are you?

I wish I weren’t, but once I fall asleep, all the dentist’s good advice fades away, and the bruxism commences. This can lead to temporomandibular dysphoria (i.e. jaw pain). Pardon the language, but this dental jargon is too much fun. It gets much better up ahead. Anyway, I can live with the occasional headache, but it got to the point where I was wearing down my molars. Ick. You can get a bite guard to save your teeth (I have), but the guard actually encourages your perverse jaw muscles to clench more, since you’ve got this nice plastic thing to chew into. This leads to more headaches and eventually receding gums. It’s absolutely maddening when you do something undesirable while sleeping. You want to tell your sleeping self to knock it off, but that person and you are never awake at the same time.

I’m sharing all these lovely details because this story actually has a happy ending, and if you grind your teeth I want you to know about it. I was beginning to despair of finding a good solution, when my technically hip dentist suggested the latest thing in temporomandibular tension suppression. It’s a little plastic clip that goes over your front teeth. It’s brilliant! Your back teeth never meet. Furthermore, since your incisors were never built for grinding, they’re not really capable of letting you clench enough to give you a headache.

It’s called the NTI Tension Suppression System, and boy have they got an entertaining web site. There’s a charming Flash movie about the perils bruxism, and the dental geek jargon is magnificent:

When temporalis relaxation and ipsilateral translation of the condyle occurs unilaterally, the remaining scheme of occluding teeth becomes an influential factor in the presenting symptoms, of which, contacting canines during mandibular depression is highly desirable, as it minimizes condylar translation and muscle intensity, while directing the vector pull on the condyle more anteriorly than a posterior contact.

Amen to that, and may God bless the geeks who make the world a better place. And the condyles too, whatever they are.

Please love me, YouTube – now pay me!

YouTube seems to be taking off as the de facto way of sharing short videos. I’ve used them here a few times before, and I’ve been very impressed with how easy it is to embed video in a blog post. Now, from the heart of Media ContentLand, here’s the Hollywood Reporter on the fascinating love/hate relationship Hollywood has with YouTube: Biz not sure how to treat upstart YouTube. This is the best quote from the article:

“There’s been a few examples of marketing departments uploading content directly to the site, while on the other side of the company their attorney is demanding we remove this content,” YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley says.

This is all part of the complex equation that spells ultimate doom for Digital Rights Management. You will never learn to love me if you don’t meet me, and you will only meet me on sites that don’t have onerous DRM. And if you do love me, will you love me still when I stick you with an unexpected bill? Poor Hollywood can never decide whether she wants to be a coquette or a slut.