Category: Uncategorized

Python-Lehrer Tourette syndrome

Earlier this summer I attended my twentieth college reunion. I had a good time. I always have a good time at reunions. Earlier in my reunion-attending career, I had some misgivings, but over time it’s gotten much easier to simply visit with friends and remember the good times. The people I remember as jerks, they keep coming to reunions too, but they get fatter and fainter and more forgettable with each year. Eventually I expect them to disappear altogether.

With age comes perspective. One thing I finally came to terms with at this reunion was my longtime affliction with a social disease. The disease, Python-Lehrer Tourette syndrome, is common among a certain male-dominated geek population. It involves having quasi-appropriate phrases from various Monty Python skits and movies spring to mind throughout the day. During quiescent phases, these phrases can be suppressed. But when surrounded by those sharing the diagnosis (as at my recent reunion), the urge to utter all manner of Pythonesque non sequiturs can be overwhelming. Python-Lehrer sufferers, incidentally, are differentiated from their Python Tourette cousins by their interstitial allusions to the Tom Lehrer musical canon. There is also a notable subset of this malady (as yet without official diagnostic designation) known as Grailolalia, in which the victim specializes only in phrases from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Grailians are fine people, but not terribly nuanced.

I don’t worry much about this problem, and I’ve long since given up apologizing for it. But it is impressive to consider the degree to which this particular comedy troupe dominates the brain space of people like me. I’ve known a few people with Firesign Theater disease, but it’s nothing like the vast spawn of Python-quoters. Why is that? I believe there is a Shakespearean completeness to the Python repertoire. All the comical-tragical-historical varieties of silliness are there. They were around for so long, and they brought such disciplined seriousness to their absurdity, that there truly is something quotable for almost every situation. Furthermore, their absurdity sometimes touches on the profound. To my mind, King Arthur’s argument with a peasant about the origins of Excalibur is the last word on confusing mythology with journalism and the sacred with the profane: “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.” Petty literalism contending with religious mania. That, in a nutshell, is the drama of our age.

Of course, none of this stops Python-Lehrer Tourette syndrome from being intensely irritating to friends and family.

To which I say: Nih!

Desktop Factory: the latest word in 3-D printing

I like Desktop Engineering magazine because it covers the rapid prototyping and 3-D printing business. Printing in 3-D is every bit as magical as it sounds: you tell the machine what you want to make, and it comes out as a brand new three-dimensional solid object.

It sounds like some kind of Forbidden Planet science fiction, but there are still some significant limitations. For instance, you print using a single material (typically plastic or metal), so there’s no possibility of xeroxing your iPod. And whatever you print can be no larger than the print volume of the machine, which rules out printing yourself a new house. And until recently, the price was prohibitive. At just less than $40,000, ZCorp’s ZPrinter 450 was a relatively cheap new entrant. Nifty, but not the kind of thing to drop your spare change on.

But now along comes the Desktop Factory. They claim to be able to sell you a 3-D printer for $5000. That’s not lunch money, but it’s astonishingly cheap. The quality is predictably low, but it’s amazing the thing works at all at that price point. This is the laser printer of our age. What happens when it becomes easy and cheap to print novel 3-D objects?

Good stuff. I bet.

Chester A. Who? The Presidents Quiz Game

Here is a diversion that is quick, fun, and educational, even if you’re a smarty-pants who can do the whole thing without a mistake: Can you name all the U.S. Presidents?

The interface is very pleasing. You just type in last names, one after another, and as soon as it recognizes one, it puts it in the right place quick as a wink. Once you’ve played the game to completion, they have another feature that shows who the most forgotten presidents are. I was correct in guessing that Chester A. Arthur was at the bottom of the barrel, being forgotten by more than half of the contestants, but Chester has company. Rutherford B. Hayes, that other middle-initial-totin’ Gilded Age cipher, scored equally poorly. And for persistent obscurity, it’s hard to beat the Run of the Antebellum Unknowns between Andrew Jackson and Abraham What’s-His-Name. The vacant Warren Gamaliel Harding was our most obscure 20th Century Chief Executive.

I can picture them there, all hanging out in the Dead Presidents’ Lounge. Naturally they are curious about the results of this contest. James Polk didn’t expect to do well, so he’s pleased to have Chester and Rutherford to pick on. But over at the cool kids’ table, you can just imagine how Teddy Roosevelt is giving Tommy Jefferson hell about coming in last in the Rushmore gang. Meanwhile, “Big George” Washington, who’s been at the brandy again, is re-telling the same old war stories while Abe rolls his eyes and tries to read his Harry Potter book.

Now you try the presidential challenge. Or just describe another scene from the Dead Presidents’ Lounge. What would Lyndon Johnson have to say to Andrew Johnson?

China makes, the world takes

The Atlantic has a great article by James Fallows this month called China Makes, the World Takes. Unfortunately it’s behind a subscription wall. But there is a free slideshow narrated by Fallows which pretty much gives you the gist of the article. In a nutshell: China’s manufacturing output is stupefyingly vast, but not only that, the Chinese work hard, they work fast, they’re more modern than you think, and they’re smarter than you are. So quit whining and be gracious when they zoom by… it’ll do you a world of good in the future. Among other observations, Fallows calls out this telling fact about our mutual trade. The Chinese send us almost every manufactured item you care to name. In return, we send those same ships back filled with… scrap metal and scrap paper. Which one is the developed economy?

The narrated slideshow was a nice touch. It’s fun watching newspapers and magazines branch out into other media. You can watch wacky videos at the New York Times and listen to audio dispatches from the Washington Post. Maybe they’ll have some fun as they slide into oblivion.

When lions meet water buffalo

This is one of those videos you should just watch without knowing ahead of time what’s going to happen.

Okay, I can tell you that this video involves lions chasing down a water buffalo. This part is very much dog-bites-man, straight out of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. We’ve seen it all before. Then things get a little loopy. There’s some man-bites-dog action, and there’s also a splash of crocodile-pops-out-of-nowhere-and-bites-terrified-water-buffalo-calf. I’m not giving away too much to say the moral of the story is that it never pays to anger a herd of water buffalo.

YouTube – Battle at Kruger

It’s safe to say this is the luckiest group of camera-toting tourists to visit this place in a long time. You can hear the game-warden guy saying over and over “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

[via the Popular Science blog]

TED Talks: Photosynth demo

You may have seen the demos pages for Microsoft’s Photosynth project, but here’s an impressive video of a live demo from the latest TED conference: Blaise Aguera y Arcas on Photosynth. Photosynth is a tool for managing and aggregating photos and information about photos across whole populations of people. I like how the presenter emphasizes the fact that the true limiting factor for information display is the number of pixels on your screen, not the number of pictures you’re surveying on that screen. There’s still plenty of room to improve the systems we have now. The other thing that occurred to me is that David Weinberger is right to observe that there’s no longer any difference between data and metadata. Your beloved photo is valuable data to you, but a minor metadata reference point for me.

TED, incidentally, stands for Technology Education and Design. I’m amazed at the number of places where you can get free access to interesting videos and podcasts (see IT Conversations and SALT to name just two examples), but these TED videos stand out for their remarkably high production values. I don’t begrudge BMW their little ad in there, because they must be writing some big checks to support this.

http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/loader.swf

Diligent teaspoons: how to put Captchas to work

Regenerative braking is the process by which a car like the Toyota Prius can simultaneously slow down your car and turn some of your kinetic energy into electricity. The basic insight is this: a moving car is lovely energy source, waiting to be harvested. When you step on the brakes, as eventually you must, your ordinary old pre-Prius can only convert that energy into brake heat. But if you employ some clever electromagnetic torque, you can recapture that same energy, energy that otherwise goes pouring down the entropy hole in God’s great plenty every day.

Recapturing energy otherwise lost is the idea behind the reCaptcha, as I learned from this post to the O’Reilly Radar site. To understand the reCaptcha, you first have to understand the Captcha. Captchas were invented by Louis von Ahn and others at CMU as a way of stopping naughty computer programs from masquerading as humans (Captcha is the improbable acronym for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart). When, for example, Hotmail gives you a free account, they want to make sure you’re a real person. The way they do this by making you read some blurry smeared text like this.

recaptcha

Von Ahn’s latest brainstorm was to realize that “in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.” Like cars in motion, that’s an energy source that’s crying out to be harvested. So his new reCaptchas give you two words to decode. For one of these, he already knows the answer. But the other one is from a book scan that a computer is having a hard time reading. By deciphering the text, you’re actually helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive.

Harvesting energy one teaspoon at a time is theme that fascinates me, because it seems to promise something for nothing. Of course it’s really just a matter of spotting untapped energy sources and putting the right machine in place to capture it. Here, for example, is a New Scientist article about harvesting heat energy: Mini heat harvesters could be new energy source. This technique sometimes goes under the heading of energy scavenging, as studied by Rajeevan Amirtharajah’s group at UC Davis. “Energy scavenging” is a marvelous phrase. I think that’s what my son does to me.

Parkour, the art of not crashing into walls

St. Frank recently posted about parkour, the zany and dangerous sport that mixes gymnastics with testosterone and brick walls. When it works, as it usually does in the dozens of parkour videos you can find on YouTube, it’s impressive.

The New Yorker recently did a piece on parkour, and they even put some videos on their web site. But they were careful to include a video of a failed jump. It doesn’t always work.

Still, when it works, it’s something to behold. Here it is working.

I keep thinking that this is exactly how superhero comics start out: “Young Davie Dawson was a brilliant but tortured youth who trained himself to be… Parkour Man.” The colored tights might work out okay, but if you tried some of these moves with a cape, you’d just be asking for trouble.