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A couple of months ago, Best Buy employee Brian Maupin ended up in hot water for making a video about someone trying to buy an iPhone. He got in trouble (and was briefly suspended) because his video makes fun of obsessive iPhone fans. Here it is:

I find a couple of things interesting here:

1. The deadpan delivery of the actors is the main thing that makes it funny.
2. There are no actors.

This video, created on a site called Xtranormal, takes your script and turns it directly into a cartoon complete with computerized voices for the animated characters. It seems like a horribly cheesy effect, but I think they’re onto something big here. The animation compels you to watch and listen. If it were just a naked script, you would be unlikely to read the whole thing. So the animation places a critical role, BUT improving technology means the animation is essentially free.

Put it all together, and I’m guessing we’re going to see a lot more of these little movies, and others like it. And sure enough, just yesterday I came across this video about the lame efforts of a film maker to “hire” a sound man for free. The format is similar to the iPhone video above: clueless loser won’t listen to informed hipster. Ironical slacker sarcasm, it would seem, is a good fit for monotone mechanical deadpan. And it really is ironic that this ultra-cheap video is itself about a guy who is trying to make a movie on the cheap.

This is a wonderful tool, but my advice is to take advantage of it quickly before the lawyers make it vanish. It’s a Calvin & Hobbes Search Engine. Type in a word and find all the Calvin & Hobbes strips that match. I remember the glory days, back when it was still in the papers. It’s fun to look up specific strips that I can still recall. For instance, a search for bridge brings up this classic dialogue.

“How do they know the load limit on bridges Dad?”
“They drive bigger and bigger trucks over the bridge until it breaks. Then they weigh the last truck and rebuild the bridge.”
“Oh. I should’ve guessed.”

How about all the strips with Susie Derkins? I like the one where she convinces Calvin that a snowball has knocked out one of her eyeballs. The search term “cannonball” brings up this great splash attack. There’s Spaceman Spiff, Calvinball, and the best dancing tiger artwork you will ever see.

Oh Lordy, stop me now. Like I said, go enjoy it before it’s gone. What are your favorites?

Here’s a NY Times piece on the much-discussed topic of happiness studies: Consumers Find Ways to Spend Less and Find Happiness. It starts off with a heart-warming vignette about a woman who reduces her personal belongings to a toothbrush and one shoe, discovering nirvana thereby. Perhaps I exaggerate, but she does get rid of a lot of stuff, and her story gives me the opportunity to tell you about the excellent Freecycle.

You probably already know that you could sell some of the crap in your basement on eBay. I would even say you can sell a surprising amount of it, considering how crappy that stuff in your basement is. But there’s a problem. You have to do a lot of work to make a listing on eBay, and you have to worry about your reputation, and really, you might as well just leave all that crap in the basement. PLEASE NOTE: I know it’s not actually hard to sell stuff on eBay. But if you’re as lazy as I am, it feels that way.

Freecycle is a simple concept wrapped around 5000 or so affiliated Yahoo Groups, each based in a different location. It’s like Craiglist for free stuff. What you do is describe what you want to be rid of, and someone shows up and takes it away. No money changes hands. Say, for example, you lived in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and you wanted to get rid of your Patagonian Donkey Harmonica. You would end up on this page, join the group, and post a message with the words: “OFFER: Patagonian Donkey Harmonica.” And, here’s the really great part, someone will come and take it off your hands.

I’ve got too much stuff in my house. It’s not very valuable, and I can’t be bothered to sell it anyway. It makes me feel really good to get rid of something and know that it’s doing somebody else some good. We use it all the time. It’s particularly good for moving kid-related stuff out the front door once your kids are done with it. There’s no eBay reputation to manage, but you get plenty of soul-enriching karma and a cleaner basement. I call that win-win.

Those people, the ones who lived back then, the ones who made us, what did the world look like to them? When I hear old family stories, I make pictures in my mind, but the details are so fuzzy. I want to look into those faces. How did they hold themselves? What did their clothes look like? Their dinner tables?

A good photo archive will reveal a lot, but most of the pictures from the 30s and 40s are black and white. Perfectly good stuff, but it doesn’t smack you in the face the way color does. Look at this spectacular color photo archive at the Denver Post: America in Color from 1939-1943. There are a lot of resonances for me here. My dad worked in a train yard and later served in the Army Air Corps. I live in Massachusetts now. I like the ads above the singing children. I remember seeing the last of these sideshow barkers back in the 70s (I might have even seen one of those very posters).

But mostly I like looking into those faces.

(via Steve Crandall)

When I was in high school, way back last century, there was a brief nationwide infatuation with generic food. Long stretches of shelf space at our local Kroger’s were devoted to yellow cans with plain text labels. You want sweet peas? Get the big yellow can labeled “sweet peas”. You want beer? Grab a yellow six pack of … “beer”. The price was low, which was the whole idea, but the idea that there was “no” packaging design always struck me as funny. After all, no-design is a design. Just look at the differentiation among these generics.

A similar attempt at generic no-design these days might be outed as ironical knowingness. In fact, I don’t know how you’d do generic packaging anymore. That’s why WalMart and Sam’s Club carry name brands these days. Everything’s cheap, and they might as well be generics. It all sorta runs together.

Via Twitter I recently came across this post, in which the author observed the impulse purchase items near the register were labeled “Impulse Items: Small $1.99 Large $4.99”. That’s either refreshingly honest or annoyingly meta-ironical, depending on your point of view.

I enjoyed reading what the author, Mimi O Chun, had to say, and I was about to add my own Twitter message about it, when I noticed something at the bottom of the page: a little section called Echo that displays all the Twitter messages about the post. If I tweeted something snappy, it would be immediately appended to this very page. It started to feel like a hall of mirrors, me watching you watching me. It’s the hall of mirrors we all live in now. If you start to feel dizzy, remember: the antidote is a simple and straightforward sincerity. For, as Groucho Marx once said, “The key to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

The Cantaloupe

One cantaloupe is ripe and lush,

Another’s green, another’s mush.

I’d buy a lot more cantaloupe

If I possessed a fluoroscope.

[or an MRI machine]

Ogden Nash [with addendum by Ned Gulley]

From Inside insides (Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Foods): behold, the cantaloupe revealed, as pried open by the magnetic fingers of a mighty MRI machine.

But even in this Age of Wonders, you still have to ask, will it taste good when you get it home?

Yow! Here’s an item that trips nearly all my triggers: robotics, biomimetics, aircraft design, 3-D printing, genetic algorithms… <SWOON> Throw in some cooperative swarming and alchemy and you’d pretty much have it all covered.

Here it is: Printing Insects. The idea here is to rapidly evolve flapping robot bugs with the assistance of 3-D printing. I first saw this in DIY Drones, which I’m enjoying more and more.

This work is coming out of Hod Lipson’s evolutionary robotics lab. Great stuff! Based on this video of a staggering starfish robot from Lipson’s lab in 2006, I wrote this a few years back.

William Gibson is often cited for this insight: “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” It’s a brilliant observation, and it leads to an interesting hypothesis: if we distribute the future more quickly, will it get here faster?

The answer is certainly yes. Here’s an example of what I mean.

Last September, two MIT students took $150 worth of parts, including a camera and a weather balloon, and built a rig that took pictures from 93,000 feet in the air. The story got a lot of press, and around the world many clever people said “Goodness gracious, how I desire to do that weather balloon thing too.”

So it was that I was surfing around the estimable SparkFun Electronics site and came across this item: High Altitude Balloon Launch. It’s the first in a seven part series that exhaustively instructs you on the art of building a high-altitude camera. At first I thought they were selling a do-it-yourself kit with all the parts included, but it hasn’t quite gotten that far yet. Nevertheless, this is a good example of the galloping frontiers that result when you distribute the future rapidly. Here we are, a short time after this novel innovation arises, and we’ve all got superb information and access to cheap tools that, in turn, encourage the growth of communities, guidelines, and norms. The weather balloon application caught my eye, but you see this pattern again and again.

There never was a better time to be a hobbyist. Indeed, the rise of the hobbyist has become a widely promoted theme. Here’s Chris Anderson talking about why Atoms Are the New Bits. Punchline: making is manufacturing.

The World Cup is now safely behind us, and life is returning to normal. For most Americans, the World Cup is a non-event, but more and more people here at least realize something important and globally disruptive is going on. You get some sense of this when you look at graphics about things like the insane texting volume that goes on during big games. Here is the US vs. England match. See if you can guess when the goals were scored.

There are plenty of genuine soccer fans here too, and you might be surprised to know that 19 US soccer players now play for leagues in other countries (a.k.a. “Hitting the Big Time”). I know this because of a great interactive graphic I came across on the Flowing Data blog. It depicts the relationship between where players are from (citizenship) and where they work (club team). The original graphic is from Brazil. Go there to try out the interactive aspects.

I wasn’t surprised to see that England has the most voracious appetite for foreign talent (117), but I was very surprised to see that, conversely, not a single Englishman plays for a non-English club. The same cannot be said of North Korea: three North Koreans plays for clubs other countries. Can that really be true? Brazil exports most of their fabulous talent to richer markets. Finally, in keeping with the notion of ever-increasing globalization, it really is impressive how much this intermingling of nationalities has increased since 1994. At that time, the majority of players worked in their country of origin.

Which reminds me: when I see players yelling at their opponents on the field, or arguing with the referee, I always wonder, what language are they speaking? Do they have any idea what the other guy is saying? But on reflection I recall that, as with most sports, it’s not hard to guess.

A few months ago I saw MIT finance professor Andrew Lo give a talk about the causes of the (what are we calling it now?) Great Recession. Professor Lo has a marvelously MIT-ish title: Director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering. I’m picturing Bunsen burners cooking murky brews of currency to test their liquidity. But I digress.

Lo is an entertaining speaker and did an excellent job explaining the mechanics of the collapse of the credit markets. But he then went on to discourage us from looking for scapegoats. He’s become fascinated by the nature of human behavior and what’s known as “normal accident theory”. The idea, first formulated by Charles Perrow in his eponymous book on the subject, is that when systems reach a certain level of tightly-coupled complexity (and especially when these systems are profitable, politically valuable, and generally successful), it can be impossible to prevent multiple small failures from cascading into disasters. Airplane accidents, nuclear reactor meltdowns, credit market disasters, oil rig fires, these all fit the model of normal accidents. They’re all protected by a vast web of safety measures that usually work very well.

Usually. In fact, the better your safety record, the easier it is to set up a really big disaster. Lo, explaining why normal accidents happen in the context of Wall Street, asked us to imagine telling the CEO of Lehman Brothers to shut down his most profitable department because the market is overheating. It’s quite simple: No one will stop a profitable locomotive, even when it’s clearly headed over a cliff. Nothing can stop the train. Nothing except crushing impact with the ground.

What’s the answer? As you might expect from an academic, Lo said: “More knowledge.” We need more PhDs, more smart people to help us understand these fast-moving financial innovations so they can be codified and regulated.

I can’t say I disagree with him; I like knowledge too. But I see an unsatisfying meta-loop, a lurking arms-race logic. More knowledge leads to more innovation, which leads to more poorly understood coupling. You always want to be faster than your problems. That’s the value of being smart. But as you race ahead, you plow up a bow wave of new problems that are just as fast as you.

Autocatalytic systems, which is to say self-interested systems that modify themselves, are the most fascinating and terrifying things in the universe. They usually work well, but you can never guarantee they won’t burst into flame tomorrow afternoon.

Don’t be alarmed. Things like this will happen from time to time.