Category: Uncategorized

So here’s yet another tie-in to the Creative Internet link I had up last week (the world is full of interesting things), but this time it has a family connection. First of all, my nephew Ben noted in the comments that he is sort of friends with Adam WarRock, the guy who wrote the theme to the Star Wars Uncut project I linked to.

Now Ben’s sister Sarah (follow this carefully) is back from Lebanon, where she had many excellent adventures. And since she’s been back, she’s had lots of time to surf the web and flag cool articles on Google Reader. Which is great news for me, because when it comes to the web, she has a fine and well-traveled palate for the odd, the curious, and the morbid. You should follow her on Google Buzz to get her recommendations. One of her recent links was to a video of a famous clock in Prague serving as the screen for a video about that same clock. It’s a kind of augmented reality art that’s hard to explain but remarkable to watch. This idea of a video of a building remixed and projected back onto itself also features in the aforementioned Creative Internet site. Here’s a good one (from slide 71), to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

Via the Google Operating System blog, I came across this collection miscellaneous cool stuff: The World Is Full of Interesting Things. It was put together by something called the “Creative Lab” at Google, although the stuff they feature doesn’t originate at Google. Some of it’s been around for a while, but much like Greg Rutter’s Definitive List of The 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You’re a Loser or Old or Something, it’s fun to see it all in one place. Although it is a little exhausting.

Out of the dozens of fun items, one that I especially like is Star Wars Uncut, a version of Star Wars in which each 15 seconds is contributed by a different person. If that sounds chaotic and insane, it is.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=10821312&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=62bfe1&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0

Star Wars Uncut “The Escape” from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

New Scientists reports this week on a green technotopia experiment in Portugal called PlanIT Valley (sounds very Portuguese, no?). The idea is to build a sustainable city with loads of sensors to detect when and where energy resources should be applied.

Sensors in every building will measure occupancy, temperature, humidity and energy use. This information will be fed to a central “brain”, along with information on energy production from photovoltaic devices and wind turbines, as well as water used and waste produced. The brain can then use this information to control each aspect of the city.

A centralized superbrain sounds a little off the mark to me. I’m skeptical of “trust our central controller” efficiencies. The projects I’ve gotten more excited about involve ad hoc networks of sensors passing information and making local decisions based on the best available information.

Here’s an example of an ad hoc sensor network: birdwatching. BirdsEye is an iPhone app that tells you where the birds are based on what other people using BirdsEye are saying. The database is constantly updated by mobs of birdwatchers.

“Citizen sensors” wired together can act as a sort of supercharged public watchdog, as with the SeeClickFix iPhone app. Got a nasty pothole on your street? Take a picture and report it. Within minutes, other folks can pile on your request and help bring it to the attention of City Hall.

A small but enthusiastic group armed with cheap sensors can make a big difference in public policy. Consider car emissions. You need to get your car inspected once a year, right? And your car always passes, because it’s well-maintained and you’re a good citizen. But what about those old guzzlers that are destined to fail the test? After all, one stinky clunker can undo the goodness of twenty virtuous hybrids. How do they stay on the road? They cheat. It’s not hard to game the system, because a system of annual inspections is a terrible way to find offenders. But as it happens, it’s not hard to detect these cars on the road. They only offend when they drive, and when they drive, you can find them. You can build systems, something like speed traps, that measure emissions and take pictures of license plates. Laws or not, it may be possible to shame people into cleaning up their act.

Call it vigilante sensing. It’s not Big Brother, it’s the Big Crowd. I admit that it has some dark and dangerous possibilities, but like it or not, vigilante sensing is coming. Are the houses in your town poorly insulated? Do the natural gas pipes in your neighborhood leak? Do the lights stay on all night in the business park? All these can be monitored easily enough by simple networked sensors. And once you’ve got data, you’ve got power.

These images have been generating a lot of comments lately, but if you haven’t seen them yet, you really should. Shown below is a picture of Detroit, color-coded (ahem) by the ethnicity of the residents. If you had to guess, where would you say the border was between the city of Detroit and its surrounding suburbs?

Eric Fischer created this image (and many others like it) using census data. He, in turn, was inspired by Bill Rankin, who runs a site called from a site called Radical Cartography where he created a similar sort of plot for Chicago.

There’s lots of other great stuff on Radical Cartography, including this chart on ethnicity and population density. It tells you something that you already know, but it’s interesting to see: where the population is sparse, it’s overwhelmingly white. I’m going to spend a while crawling through all these maps…

Look at Fischer’s various city maps, and see if you don’t agree with me that the level of segregation in America is disappointingly obvious. By the way, of the various blogs I came across talking about Fischer’s plots, I particularly enjoyed reading Brian Hayes’ discussion on bit-player. He includes a discussion about how one can demonstrate mathematically that sharp segregation gradients can come about through surprisingly mild preferences.

I love the helmet cam. It lets you piggyback along with somebody who’s doing something insane that you would never do. And it’s small and cheap, so no big documentary budget or film crew is required. That means we get to (vicariously) go all kinds of nutty places.

I admit it’s entertaining to watch, from the safety of my Aeron chair, as adrenaline junkies jump off cliffs. But those are crazy unemployed twenty year olds. The great thing about this next video is that it shows you somebody doing their job. And it’s so marvelously underplayed that I wanted to give them a hug. No EXTREME SUPER HYPERBOLE!!! No fist-pumping rock music. Just this: two guys climbing a tower ‘cuz that’s what they do.

Hey, I’ll tell you what… you go on up. I think I got something in my shoe. I’ll just wait down here. Next to my planet.

My favorite line: Now we’ve reached the base of the antenna. From here it’s just another 60 feet to the top! Left unsaid: … which you reach by crawling up a broomstick swaying above the sucking void of certain death.

MST PPL HV LTTL DFFCLTY N RDNG THS SNTNC

That statement, sans vowels, is Claude Shannon‘s example of how information can often be left out of an English sentence without degrading your ability to read it. Shannon, famous as the father of information theory, used various measures to calculate that English is roughly 50% redundant. This may sound wasteful, but Shannon’s information theory is the very tool that tells us that redundancy is useful for rejecting errors, as when you are listening to a conversation in a noisy room.

Google Scribe is a new tool that uses statistics to help you write. It’s like a super-powered spell checker: an about-to checker, as in “here’s what I think you’re about to type.” Here’s how it works. Because Google knows everything, it knows what you’re about to type. Or actually, it’s more like this. Because Google has seen everything written in English so far, and because you’re such a staggeringly unoriginal writer, it’s not hard to guess what you’re going to say. In other words, it may feel like magic, but it’s not magic. You’re just boring. Sorry.

Here’s a sentence I tried to type: “Claude Shannon showed that up to fifty percent of the characters in a typical English sentence are redundant.” That’s 109 characters, including spaces. I counted my keystrokes as I used Google Scribe and got 58 keystrokes, or 53% of the original length. Not bad.

Another fun game is to give it a starting letter and constantly accept the suggestion, just to see where it goes. Start with the letter I, and you get something like this: “In the case of these two types of information that is not appropriate for all users of the catalogue should also be noted that there is anything you would not believe.” Indeed.

If you use Google Scribe to write your term paper, should you cite it as a co-author? Perhaps it will just reach in and add itself.

My brother-in-law Craig is an artist with a special interest in sustainable, affordable housing. This summer he participated in a show at the 1708 Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. Here’s an article in Richmond Magazine about his piece: a sculptural octagonal living unit made out of pre-fabricated ThermaSteel. ThermaSteel is a pretty nifty material. It’s strong, lightweight, and has excellent insulating properties.

Working from the plans of a house he built years ago for himself and his wife (the original and venerable OLU), Craig has designed a 500 square foot living space that can be quickly assembled with minimal effort. He notes that “for about $50,000, it is possible to manufacture, crate, and ship ten of these units, to Port au Prince,” where thousands are still without shelter.

Want to help him house some Haitians?

One of the standard scenes in science fiction movies and TV shows is the image enhancing scene.

PROTAGONIST (furrowing brow): “Computer, zoom to grid 24 14 and enhance.”

Like all good screenplay tropes, it has its own page on the TV Tropes site.

My friend Steve, who has an image processing blog, wrote about the phenomenon here and the follow-up comments suggested a raft of funny scenes. Image processing guys, as you can imagine, love this stuff. And here’s a video montage of “enhance scenes”:

I’m telling you this to set up this excellent real life story. Gizmodo posted this recently: Accidental Photobomb Leads to Bag Thief’s Capture. I like to flip between the two pictures while saying “Computer, enhance” in an English accent.

I’ve written before about the hygiene hypothesis (here and here). To recap: filth is bad except when it’s good. We seem to be discovering a lengthening list of diseases that either didn’t exist or were quite rare back when squalor was mankind’s boon companion. And now that we’ve cleaned up our collective act, autoimmune diseases from asthma to Inflammatory Bowel Disease are billowing like mushroom clouds. When people blame the environment for their ills, they are usually thinking of pollution. Big joke on us to to learn that the problem is pollution’s mirror image. Savage Clean.

Your immune system is a powerful and high-strung jungle cat. It likes nothing better than to rip into its hapless prey. But it’s not in the jungle anymore. Pacing back and forth in its scrubbed little modern cell, it is impatient for action. But nothing ever happens. Pacing, pacing back and forth, back and forth. Eyes darting, nostrils flaring. It hates the smell of disinfectant, and so help me, if they don’t turn off this goddamned Muzak, somebody’s going to get hurt.

So it goes.

I used to think of the hygiene hypothesis as a quirky story, but it’s gone mainstream, gaining tremendous media play in the past few months. Here’s the Wall Street Journal bouncing some commentary off the movie Babies.

http://online.wsj.com/media/swf/VideoPlayerMain.swf

But the best story of all, and the one I recommend most highly, is this
Radiolab episode on parasites. One of the pieces is about a man with debilitating allergies who decides to give himself hookworm in the hope that it will cure him. How does he do this? After all, you can’t just buy hookworms online. Instead, he flies to the smelliest part of Africa and walks around barefoot in other people’s poop. It worked: he got hookworm, and he lost his allergies. You might say that he gave his caged panther a chew toy, and everybody was better off for it.

The coda to this story is that hygiene hypothesis has taken off so quickly that now you can buy hookworms online. Well, actually you have to fly to Mexico to pick them up, but WormTherapy.com will sell you live hookworm eggs so that you can effect your own “helminth induced immune modulation.” My favorite sterilized clinical language on the site reads as follows: “Hookworm ova are collected from a known source.” I.e., “we poke through the poop of our prized hookworm host.”

You know, one of these days we’re going to discover that squeaky-clean prose is bad for the brain.

Via Jon’s Twitter feed, I came across this gem.

By now you’ve seen many parkour videos. The novelty has worn off. You’re ready to move on. But wait! Look at this one. It’s a nicely edited little film, the music is fun, and the skills on display are remarkable. The two protagonists have obviously practiced so much on these few buildings, I kept thinking they must have made some enemies, or at least seriously annoyed, some of the occupants.