Author: gulley

Several years ago I went to New Orleans just before Mardi Gras. Remembering that Mardi Gras is coming up again (Fat Tuesday is February 28th this year), I wondered how well New Orleans was going to rise to the occasion. There’s plenty of brave talk about the show going on, and Lord knows they need the tourist dollars, but honestly, six months after being nearly washed away, how big a show can they put on right now?

I went to MardiGras.com, and to look around there, you’d never know that anything bad happened since last year. But if you look closely, there is a Mardi Gras blog that captures the good and bad news. Various parades have been cancelled due to funding and insurance problems, and lots of corporate money didn’t come through. But the party is on, and no mistake.

From the Mardi Gras blog, I jumped over to the NOLA.com main page and found a Voices of Katrina section. This site asks readers to send in their stories, and it’s pretty riveting stuff. Here’s one I recommend:
The long road out of Mordor.

We saw police cars at the top of the entrance to the bridge. We saw guys in camoflauge holding shotguns. OH MY GOD – PROTECTION!!! I was smiling – we would get help up there. A young guy in camo pants and light colored shirt pointed his gun at us and yelled for us to get off the bridge. It was then that I realized these guys may be worse than the looters. Kevin yelled at him that the bridge is the only way out of the city that wasn’t underwater. He chambered a round and fired over our heads. I felt like the world would never be the same for me. It all came crashing down right then.

I wish them a happy Mardi Gras, wherever they are.

It’s a fairly common thing for technology gurus to bemoan the backwards state of the computer interface world by saying things like “It’s the 21st century, and I still have to use a mouse and a keyboard to look at my data?! When will this madness end?” Typically people who say this don’t offer alternatives, or the alternatives they do offer are impractically expensive. In
this column Jon Udell makes a passing reference to a talk by certified genius Bran Ferren of Applied Minds, Inc.

It’s crazy, Ferren says, to think that the “tiny soda straw of KVM” can be an effective bridge between the external complexity of the Net and the internal complexity of the human brain.

Yeah, whatever, Bran. Udell is wise enough to add “If your pockets are deep, you can hire Applied Minds to build a 3D haptic interface that’s exquisitely customized for your data and your tasks. But for most of us that’s not an option. We’ll be stuck with the keyboard/video/mouse arrangement for a while.” I always feel like the keyboard/mouse thing has gotten us pretty far and will take us considerably farther. Then again, I’m not a famous pundit. Still, the question has to be asked: what comes next? Some of the fairly obvious stuff is still hard to work out. For example, give me multiple simultaneous “touch points” in the interface. That is, why can’t I have two mice and move two things at once?

So here you go. This is a pretty compelling video from the research folks at NYU of what it might look like to touch the stuff on the other side of your screen. Still, I wouldn’t expect this on your home machine anytime soon. (By the way, my hat’s off to the folks at YouTube for making it darn easy to embed this video. Let me know if this doesn’t work on your machine.)

(via Tingilinde)

It’s much easier to be married for a short time than it is to be married for a long time. My parents were married on September 3rd, 1948 and they remain married to this day. That puts them in rare company. New York photographer Robert Fass was inspired by his own long-married parents to do a photo essay on the subject of durable marriages. He documented his work in a piece called As Long As We Both Shall Live. As it happens, through a connection with my sister, Fass interviewed and photographed my parents as part of the work.

The interview was several years ago, but Fass just scored some new publicity with the Christian Science Monitor:
What makes love last?
My mom even gets the last word. You go girl! The story ends with this.

One of his subjects, Sally, said “yes” in 1948 when her husband, Marcus, uttered those four little words, “Will you marry me?” Now, with the benefit of 57 years of experience, she offers this advice to Valentine’s Day lovers – and everyone else.

“There are three words that save a marriage,” she says. “And it’s not ‘I love you.’ It’s ‘Maybe you’re right.’ ”

UPDATE: ABC News has also picked up the story. See Happily Married for 40-Plus Years

I would have bet good money that this kind of fluid simulation wouldn’t have been practical for another few years. This is a link to the gallery of movie clips at Scanline, which appears to be a German computer visual effects company. What they have to show off are various kinds of liquids in motion, and the results are amazing.

Water is notoriously difficult to get right in the movies… your eye is very good at detecting any weirdness in the behavior of badly animated water. As a result, up till now, all movies about naval battles and storms at sea were filmed with little models in great big swimming pools agitated by wind machines and small explosives. Even though, in such cases, the water is real, the waves are the wrong size relative to the little models, and it just looks awful. What the Scanline people are showing is that there are no more excuses for bad water physics in movies. Whenever they make the movie “Tsunami!”, I predict it will be darn disturbing.

Here’s some advice that might’ve done you some good yesterday: I’m going to tell you how to beat your fellow football party-goers when you play that choose-a-square gambling game. If I’ve already lost you, here’s the story in a nutshell… Most football games are boring. So you have to throw money at losing-odds gambling games to make things remotely interesting. In this particular game, everybody chooses a few boxes from an empty ten-by-ten grid. Each box in the grid corresponds to the last digits of each team’s score. If Seattle wins 7-0, and you own the corner of Seattle 7 and Pittsburgh 0, you win. Got it? (you can always learn more here.)

All that is just a set-up for Nabeel’s excellent analysis of Football Squares betting. Even the most casual observer of the sport quickly recognizes that a 7 is worth more than an 8. How does the smart money really line up? Nabeel tells you all about it here: A Closer Look at Football Squares. His article is worth a read because it’s based on real data and even has some nifty heatmap visualizations. The bottom line is that you actually do want to own the corner of 7 and 0, if you can get it. Of course, the real bottom line is that this advice wouldn’t have helped you much yesterday. The result 1-0, while not rare, is half as common as 7-0. Oh well. Wait till next season!

Point Celestron’s SkyScout gadget at a bright spot in the sky, press a button, and it tells you what sort of object you’re looking at, be it moon, planet, star, or galaxy (I wonder if it has a “That’s the sun you idiot!” response). It’s based on GPS and some other undisclosed magic, and it sounds so appealing my skept-o-meter went off. I looked for hands-on reviews, but it all seems to be enthusiastic pre-release press straight from the manufacturer. The SkyScout won’t ship until March. So it might still be a disappointment when you hold it in your hands. But if this thing really performs, wow! It can identify what you’re looking at, and it can guide you to something you want to look at.

If it takes off, it’s bound to lead to many similar products. Imagine a product that answers these questions… What building is that over yonder? Which one of those is Mount Monadnock? Is that store open now? How much did that house cost? Nice! What’s the phone number of the person who lives in there? Is she single? You’re right, that’s a cute picture. Sure, go ahead and call her. Wait! Is that her getting out of the car over there? It is? Maybe I’ll go introduce myself. Do these pants make my butt look big? What? No, I don’t think my butt is Mount Monadnock. Ha ha. Very funny. Keep up the wisecracks, you’re going straight back to the store.

Groundhog day is one of my favorite holidays. Not because of the antics of our rodent friend Marmota monax, but rather because the northern hemisphere is filling up with light again. We are halfway from solstice to equinox, having made it through the dark passage. Congratulations!

Have you ever taken an ice tray out of the freezer and seen a little spike of ice poking right out of one of the cubes? What in the world is going on there? If you’re inclined to believe in Intelligent Designers, you might well believe it’s an example of ice being kissed by an angel. Or perhaps the frozen remains of an aroused Ice Cube Gnome. Hmmm, maybe the angel kissed the Ice Cube Gnome and then… never mind that. Anyway, it turns out this same phenomenon also puzzled some clever folks at Cal Tech. Their research revealed a pleasing physical explanation: as ice is starting to cover the water in the tray, it’s also expanding. Under the right circumstances, the water “crust” on the top is left open somewhere near the middle and a frigid slow-motion volcano of water starts coming up through the hole. The result is a little icy stalagmite.

As USATODAY breathlessly puts it: You, too, can grow ice-cube spikes in your own freezer!. Their coverage focuses on work by Steve Morris of the University of Toronto.

There’s a song that’s driving you crazy. You keep humming it, but you can’t remember the name of it. If you have reasonably good pitch, you can use the Parsons code to work it out on the Musipedia site. All you need to do is say whether each note was higher or lower than the preceding one and you’ve got a pretty good shot at finding what you want in their database. I wrote about Musipedia last year, but now there’s a site that does it one better.

The Parsons code strips music down to ups and downs and omits the rhythm as redundant to the basic problem of identifying the tune. But suppose you do it the other way around… omit the pitch and pay attention only to the rhythm. Is the pitch also redundant in this sense? Song Search by Tapping is a site that tests this idea. Their tagline is “Search for music by tapping the rhythm of the song’s melody.” I tried it with something that I thought they might have in the database and has a distinctive rhythm: “She was a fast ma-CHINE, she kept her motor CLEAN.” No problem: it returned in triumph with “You Shook Me All Night Long” by AC/DC.