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There’s something mesmerizing about watching animated text and graphics that exactly match what’s being said. It’s not exactly a new medium, since hand-drawn animation has been around for ages. But editing tools have made the process a lot easier, and the results are striking.

Here are two examples I came across recently. From Steve Crandall’s blog, I found this rendition of Jonathan Coulton‘s song “Shop Vac”. See how many corporate logos you can spot being adapted for this video.

Shop Vac from Jarrett Heather on Vimeo.

The other example that I saw recently is very different in composition. The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) in the UK has been recording talks and then adding hand-drawn animations to provide visual stimulus. Definitely better than PowerPoint! Here’s a riveting talk on a topic you might not expect to be riveting: Sir Ken Robinson on Changing Education Paradigms.

While trying out Netflix on the new Apple TV widget, I recently watched Dogtown and Z-Boys. It’s a well made documentary about the rise of the modern skateboarding movement in Southern California. By the early 1970s, skateboarding had already come and gone as a thoroughly domesticated Leave-It-To-Beaveresque fad. The Z-Boys were surfers from a disreputable LA beach (Dogtown) who took up skateboarding when the waves were bad. We learn how they transformed skateboarding by completely disregarding the rules. They don’t give a shit, and without trying, they become counterculture heroes for a generation of young skateboarders. This rising generation quickly codifies the sport into new rules and orthodoxies. Turbo Rad Angry EXTREME orthodoxies!!!

It’s an old story, but well told. Icons are smashed, and heretics become saints. Still, I’d have to guess that part of the glowing treatment of the Z-Boys must be due to the fact that the filmmaker, Stacy Peralta, was one of them.

This movie was on my mind when I saw the latest jaw-dropping bicycle video by virtuoso rider Danny MacAskill. He’s an outsider setting a new standard for what can be done. No pop culture analysis can take away from the fact that what he does is just incredible. Imagine being able to do this:

Now compare that with this video. Again, the riding is incredible. It’s amazing how quickly this kind of cycling has been domesticated and codified into, in this case, the Junioren Europa-Meisterschaft Hallenradsport (more here). The polite crowd in the quiet gymnasium. The competitors in matching tights bearing National Emblems. I was so happy they weren’t playing raging fist-pumping rock music that I wanted to hug them by the end.

I think these iconoclast-orthodoxy cycles are getting shorter and shorter.

MapCrunch is a good example of what Bruce Sterling calls “composting”: one technology emerging as an unexpected bright green shoot from a steaming pile of some other technology. Less poetically, we might call it a mashup, or merely an unintended consequence. However we choose to describe it, MapCrunch is a tasty treat growing straight out of Google Maps’ Street View mode. There’s plenty of good fertilizer in Google Maps.

The idea is simple: click on a link and visit a random Street View location somewhere in Google’s vast corpus of street views. Which corpus being essentially comprehensive of the entire planet, you can just go and go and go and go. Their tagline is “teleport to a random place in the world.”

Try it!

It’s addictive. You start clicking and the questions just flow.

What do street signs look like in Finland? Why do they have street view in Antarctica? (It’s a small but entertaining sample. Penguins!)

If you hide the map that shows where you are, can you figure out what continent you’re on? What country? (Where was the image above taken?) How long can your teleport around Germany before you find a blurred-out building? (Only three clicks for me!) Is there a hill in Holland? Can you do better than random playing “Is this Portugal or Brazil”? What’s around that corner?

What meta-MapCrunch games can you come up with?

For lunch on Thursdays I meet up with a few friends in a conference room at work and we watch TED videos. What are TED videos? I’m sure you’ve seen some. I’ve linked to several of them from here. TED is a conference, and the videos are from talks at that conference. But there are lots of conferences… why have TED talks become their own special category?

TED was created by Richard Saul Wurman many years ago as an exclusive conference dedicated to Technology, Entertainment, and Design (hence the name). Since then the ownership has changed hands, and TED has become something bigger. Chris Anderson, the owner since 2001, has pushed it in a more open direction, building on the mission “ideas worth spreading.” With the help of some generous sponsors, TED now makes available an astonishing amount of high quality video for free. The latest Fast Company magazine talks about how TED is the new Harvard. That’s overblown of course, but it does make me happy to know that clever people in all corners of the globe are able to enjoy these talks free of charge. It may not be Harvard, but it’s a darn good education.

Here’s a talk from TED employee June Cohen at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference this year. It’s interesting to see how the process looks from the inside. Even when you have strong managerial belief that giving stuff away is the right thing to do, it’s very scary actually doing it. And yet it’s paid off in the most dramatic way. TED is more successful than ever, and has, in the words of her title, transitioned from “a conference to a platform.” In the same way that Google has been well served by its mission of organizing the world’s information, TED has been able to grow beyond its wildest ambitions by following its own mission of spreading great ideas.

Extra bonus: Greatest Hits of TED Videos. I recommend watching them at lunchtime with friends.

The MATLAB programming contest we run twice a year is currently up and running right now. The rules are here, and there are also some entertaining statistics and graphs showing how things are progressing. I’m particularly impressed with how the code has improved this year. It’s getting better and smaller at the same time, which is unusual (and rare) for code in general, but especially so for our contest.

So it’s lucky timing that we got a nice mention in the New York Times Freakonomics blog: Geeks and Tweaks: What Computer Programming Contests Can Teach Us About Innovation. The post was written by guest bloggers Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman, and it includes a long quote from me which comes from my paper in Interactions magazine, In Praise of Tweaking.

Raustiala and Sprigman’s post is broken into three parts. The contest comes up in the third. The first two (part one and part two) talk about what the world of football can tell us about copyright law. In short form, the argument goes like this: copyright law came about because if creators don’t have protection from the law, they will lose their incentive to innovate and create. That’s the theory, at least. But wait a minute, say the authors. Football is good counterexample to this argument. You can’t copyright a defensive formation, but that doesn’t stop innovation from happening. In fact, football is one of the most innovative professional sports. The MATLAB contest comes up because it offers no special protection to innovators, and yet innovation flourishes there too.

I just like the fact that our programming contest is presented as being analogous (in some small way) to the NFL.

It used to be that biology class was full of pictures of labeled blobs. You could see why: cells are teeny tiny. It’s hard to see what’s going on in there, and there’s a fair amount of guesswork as to what all the parts do. Everything is called a this-o-some or a that-o-some, which just comes from the Greek for “blob” (okay, it’s Greek for “body,” but it’s the same idea). I count 25 different somes of one kind or another on the Wikipedia organelle page. Parenthesomes! Ejectosomes! Spherosomes!

So you ended up with lots of cartoonish diagrams or grainy electron micrographs. Here, for example, is our friend the bacteriophage.

You’d like to zoom in for a close-up and see what’s really going on down there, but the physics of looking at tiny things says no. Move along folks. Nothing to see here.

That’s changing now, because we’ve made such strides in molecular biology. Compare the pictures above with this movie. We now know the molecular structure of this phage down to the last atom.

There’s so much good stuff for biology students to look at these days, it makes me weep. Maybe you’ve seen The Inner Life of the Cell video that was funded by Harvard. More recently they made a beautiful mitochondria video. And since we’re into flu season, take a look at this NPR piece: How A Virus Invades Your Body. While you’re at it, how about this super zoom close-up of H1N1.

Finally, if you like this kind of thing, or if you know someone who does, then I highly recommend a copy of David Goodsell’s The Machinery of Life (second edition).

3D printing is hitting the news a lot these days.

There are dozens of technologies waiting to do the work for you. You can print chairs. You can print cars and airplanes. You can even print skin back onto your body. There is a growing sense that 3D printers are going to start appearing in every house. It’s the new inkjet printer… why buy stuff when you can just print it out?

I’m a big fan of 3D printing, but that’s not going to happen. Not anytime soon.

One of the reasons I enjoy Joseph Flaherty’s Replicator blog, which is dedicated to mass customization and 3D printing, is that he takes the long view on these matters. He knows there are many barriers to mainstream usage of 3D printing. In this post he sums up what is and isn’t possible:

Replacement coat hooks and air conditioner knobs are not going to drive broad adoption and there are too many technical hurdles to take on complex objects like cell phones.

So what is possible then? Is it still worth getting excited about?

What’s possible (and exciting) is that it enables a whole class of serious amateurs. Flaherty describes this as product design as a hobby, and it’s sure to drive a fascinating wave of new products. Here’s a success story of one such product. Two designers came up with an idea for a tripod to support an iPhone. The widget they invented, with the help of 3D printing, is called the Glif. They raised all the money they needed on Kickstarter (another interesting story), and now they have business.

I can’t say for sure whether or not the Glif designers would have built a business without novel technology (3D printing) and novel access to capital (Kickstarter). But even if it didn’t enable it, it sure accelerated the whole process. And in times like these, we need the ideas that serious amateurs are going to bring us.

Early experiments with flying were vexed by the notion that proper wings ought to flap. After all, birds flap their wings, so flying men should have flappy wings. Right? It stands to reason. But then again, we can put a man on the moon and still, to this day, nobody goes flying in a flappy plane. It’s hard to fight the biomimetic urge. I’m guessing the first wheel was delayed by a few thousand years because the prehistoric Thomas Edisons of the world assumed the first technological conveyance should have legs.

How strange that nature should have arrived at inventions that are so wildly impractical from our point of view. The thing that really freed humans as inventors was letting go of the natural precedents. But the temptation is still strong, particularly in the realm of robots. You want something that covers ground? Give it legs. You want to make something that picks stuff up, make hands, of course. And if you’re Japanese, build a humanoid form and teach it to dance.

This week Mike Onken sent me note about a non-anthropomorphic gripper based on “jamming.” You can grab complex objects with confidence and ease using a rubber balloon stuffed with little pellets. First you mash the balloon onto the object. Then, when you’re ready to pick it up, jam more stuff into the balloon and it stiffens into a rigor mortis-like grip.

It works really well for such a simple idea. Here’s a video that appeared on BotJunkie.

As Mike said, this is another example of “just ’cause nature does it that way doesn’t mean that’s the best way to do it.” The desire to create a mechanical man in our image is perversely strong. Perhaps God had the same problem. He could have made something so much more practical, but he just had to make us look like him.

Hey, while we’re on the subject of persnickety language (see the previous post), here’s another good one from the Language Log. The topic is that mischievous creature, the so-called Oxford comma, also known as the serial comma. Which comma is that? It’s the second comma in this phrase: Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe. Should it be there, or should it instead be pitched into a dark hole never to be seen again? Without getting into the question of whether or not God smiles on the serial comma (She does), watch what can happen when the spawn of Oxford goes missing.

The first example is this possibly invented but nevertheless funny inscription: “This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.” This is clearly wrong, if only because there can be no distinction between the two.

More verifiable is this beauty from an article about Merle Haggard: “Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.”

Now that’s what I call fun with punctuation!

It got me thinking about the most mischief that can be caused by the least ink. Just how much can you subvert a serious phrase with a misplaced jot? Here’s my favorite. With the help of a wandering apostrophe, Operation Just Cause, the U.S. invasion of Panama that removed Manuel Noriega from power, becomes Operation Just ‘Cause. Can you do better?

Debbie, a friend of mine from college, is an excellent singer. But the standards in her musical family were high. She told the story of how her uncle, a virtuoso clarinetist, would listen to her singing as they were driving and say “Debbie, you’re modulating!” She wasn’t rehearsing. She wasn’t training her voice. She was in the car, in transit between Points A and B, making a joyful noise. And old Uncle Perfect Pitch just had to poop on her singing. Silence was his reward, may it serve him well.

Does pedantry stem from a desire for excellence or a salve for insecurity? Sometimes it’s hard to tell, but in general it’s the worst kind of tedium. In my opinion, rule-following en route to joy is altogether worthy. Rule-following en route to a job is often necessary. But rule-following to satisfy pedants is a misery. Sometimes joy is remote from us, but too often those who have lost all joy compensate by hardening their grip on rules. Any stick will do when you need to beat someone for your sins.

From the Language Log I found this lovely animated monologue. The animator is Matt Rogers, and the speaker is British comedian Stephen Fry. Here’s a slice of Fry for you on the subject of pedants.

They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs… But do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language?

Now give the whole thing a listen and try to forget that it sounds an awful lot like John Cleese.