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NPR recently ran a story on missing teaspoons at a scientific institute in Australia. Spoons were vanishing at an alarming rate, and it became a question of some urgency to determine what was happening.

We’ve all heard the jokes about how washing machines send socks into another dimension. But honestly, this is just one step away from the archaic folk notion of spontaneous generation. As you recall, that’s the theory where rotting meat spontaneously turns into maggots, piles of dirty rags become mice, and valued local stores turn into Starbucks. But spontaneous generation just doesn’t happen, and neither does the spontaneous disintegration of teaspoons. Filling in as the modern versions of Redi and Spallanzani are Megan S C Lim, et al of the Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health Research, Macfarlane Burnet Institute for Medical Research and Public Health, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Their paper is titled The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute.

From the paper, we read

In January 2004 the authors found their tearoom bereft of teaspoons. Although a flunky (MSCL) was rapidly dispatched to purchase a new batch, these replacements in turn disappeared within a few months. Exasperated by our consequent inability to stir in our sugar and to accurately dispense instant coffee, we decided to respond in time honoured epidemiologists’ fashion and measure the phenomenon.

Truth be told, however, this study addresses the rate and circumstances under which the spoons disappear, and it fails to address the root causes. Sadly, it concludes “People have no control over teaspoon migration; escape to a spoonoid planet and resistentialism are equally plausible explanations.” Maybe Starbucks do arise magically from overripe storefronts.

Wow, it’s hard not to love the Nietzsche Family Circus, in which a random quote from Nietzsche is paired with a random strip from Bil Keane.

The insipid blandness of Jeffy, Dolly, et al. is skewered on the angry Teuton’s spear of righteousness, BUT the pompous old Kraut’s gassy bombast is deflated by the chirpy Keanesian bourgeoisie of Life at Home in the Suburbs. Despite nearly tripping the irony overload circuit-breaker, there’s something sweet and true about the resulting ensemble. It’s like finding an unhurt child in terrible car accident. (Spotted at Jeff Mather’s place.)

Here’s a video of last year’s Reno Balloon Race. I’ve seen plenty of pictures of hot-air balloons, and on occasion I’ve seen them in person, and they always struck me as docile, passive creatures. How can one balloon race another? But this time-lapse video shows just how alive they are.

Try to track just one of them around the sky. It’s a very organic scene, and somehow un-human, like a tidal pool ecosystem. The oscillatory swimming motion immediately reminded me of jellyfish. Which all makes me wonder that maybe there’s money in jellyfish races.

Depending on whether or not you’re employed by the music industry, this is either an apocalyptic end time for music or its new golden age. I know people who lost their jobs in the music industry. The professional end of the business is under great stress, but surely there has never been a better time to be an amateur musician than now.

I work with an amateur musician named Greg Bacon. Greg is a skilled performer on multiple instruments and a composer, and his genre is primarily Irish traditional music. He happens to get paid for being a database systems analyst, but the guy is a true musical wizard. Don’t take my word for it! Go to his site: baconworks.com. He’s got details about how he records his music, and then he lets you listen to it for free. He’s got MIDI files and scores in addition to some amazing performances of his original compositions. You know you’re on a musician’s web site when pages are tagged by their musical key. Here’s G major. Listen to the Hazards of Hatteras after you read about his great uncle Stinson, a windjammer captain who had no business living to 104. Great stuff, written, arranged, performed, recorded, and distributed all by one person, and at no cost to you, dear friend.

Thanks for all the music, Greg!

This embarrassing wealth of good free music presents the same paradox that I see all the time in the software world. By welcoming all the smart, motivated people around the world who want to write code even when they don’t get paid, vast quantities of shockingly good free software becomes available. What happens to the profession of software development? What happens to the paid musicians? I don’t know. But I defy you to look at this overspilling wealth and call it a problem.

Remember the experience, from not too many years ago, of trying to tell a travel agent where you wanted to go while they got to look at a computer screen filled with tasty information? I always found it very unsatisfying. The thing I really wanted to do was just see what the heck it was the travel agent saw. Every profession has aspects of it that relate to skill, to training, and to simple access to information. Travel agents have effectively vanished because the main thing they did was control access to secret information.

Fortune magazine recently ran a cover story on Zillow about exactly this topic. It turns out that the same guys who made the Expedia travel service went on to found Zillow. Here’s what one of them, Richard Barton, had to say about information hunger.

“When we were doing focus groups on Expedia, consumers would tell us they could hear the tap-tap-tap of the keyboard when talking to a travel agent, and they wanted to jump through the phone and look at the screen,” says Barton, sitting in his office in the company’s Seattle headquarters. “Expedia was about satisfying that impulse, and that’s also what we’re doing at Zillow. The hunger for information about real estate is infinite.”

There is a growing trend of making all kinds of data available on the web. But this leads to the problem of interpretation. What does it all mean? Is it accurate? So tools for mass interactive validation and sense-making are popping up too, tools like Swivel and IBM’s Many Eyes.

But getting back to real estate, I like this little heat map application called Neighboroo. It lets you superimpose all kinds of housing, property, and census data atop the U.S. map. As is common with these kinds of tools, a lot of it is fiddly-fiddling to demonstrate something you already knew, e.g. New York City is expensive. And there’s always the dangerous temptation of inferring causation from correlation. African American population density fits together neatly with hurricane likelihood. But where do you go from there? For all this data, do you see anything that actually surprises you?

In answer to the annoying and oft-repeated question “I don’t know…. where do YOU want to eat?” consider spinning the Wheel of Food. The inventive Jim Bumgardner (a.k.a. KrazyDad), whose work I’ve admired here before, created a nifty Flash widget that loads nearby restaurants onto a Wheel of Fortune style spinner. Forbear preprandial procrastination: spin the wheel and close the deal. The time you save by not arguing about where to go may just score you the last good parking spot at the Hotdog Hut.

Extra bonus: hack the URL to shape the zip code and kind of food you want. Fancy a burrito in Winston-Salem, North Carolina? Take this out for a spin:

http://www.coverpop.com/wheeloffood/?zip=27104&query=mexican&go=1

Everybody is posting this one, but if you haven’t seen it yet, give it a spin. Its creator, Michael Wesch, is a cultural anthropologist at Kansas. He does a terrific job of communicating a lot of information very quickly (“using high bandwidth” as we geeks like to say) about the evolution of digital media.

In the middle of the clip you see a few quotes from Kevin Kelly’s essay in Wired, We Are the Web. In it, Kelly starts off talking about the Netscape IPO, but ends with a sweeping philosophical flourish. Whether you find the wired world frightening or thrilling, there’s no denying that we are witnessing tectonic shifts in culture and civilization. And you and I both have a front row seat.

Here’s Kelly.

Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.

The festival season is upon us. Groundhog Day may be safely out of the way, but President’s Day is ready to pounce, and Pi Day is right around the corner. Pi Day, you will recall, is celebrated each year on March 14. You’ll want to give your loved one something round, recall some of the splendid history of pi, and maybe recite a pi-ku or two.

What is a pi-ku? A pi-ku is a play on haiku. One form of pi-ku fits the number of syllables in each line to successive numbers in pi. You can find one such offering here by pi poet Mike Rollins of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

If you’re more of a purist for the haiku form, with its distinctive 5-7-5 syllabic stack, you might prefer something like this, as seen at TeachPi.org:

Unending digits…
Why not keep it simple, like
Twenty-two sevenths?

But suppose we doubly constrain the problem and use the number of letters in each word to denote the numbers in pi, while the syllables retain the haiku form. Michael Keith of Salem, Oregon, has some fine examples of this (PDF), including this one-stanza recapitulation of Poe’s “The Raven.”

Now a thud, a knock
unsettles my window panes;
The Raven intrudes.

But naturally what we really seek is a triply constrained haiku, in that it conforms to the syllabic and letter count demands while actually describing the quantity in question. Herewith I offer my own humble attempt at this numerical poetical trifecta.

Let C over D
(wheel perimeter on height)
equal its value.

Can you do better? Give it a try… it’s harder than it looks. (Thanks to my dad for filling me in on pi-kus)

To all the friends of the Star Chamber, to all the readers of the Rambles, we wish you a happy and prosperous Groundhogtide. Those of you in the Northern Hemisphere have successfully made it to the halfway point between Autumn and Spring. With every passing day, Winter is waning. Congratulations!

UPDATE: David Seah over at Better Living Through Media has posted a nice piece on Groundhog Day resolutions. I thoroughly approve and may work that into my annual Groundhog Day festivities. And remember, Groundhog Day is when you are formally empowered and encouraged to remove any Christmas decorations that may be lingering in your neighborhood.

There is weirdness behind every blade of grass. We generally prefer our weirdness packaged and delivered in myths and monster movies, cloaked in comforting otherworldliness. But really, it’s right under our noses all the time. You don’t have to look far. I like how this xkcd cartoon treats the utterly bizarre concept of sleep and dreaming.

From Motionographer, I came across an excellent computer-animated piece in which Anakin Skywalker’s speeder (or Luke’s X-Wing fighter for that matter) is swapped for a ladybug chassis. When you contemplate a bug’s eye view of the world for a few minutes, you realize you don’t need to visit a Death Star for thrills. Provided you have a good imagination.

Voilà: MINUSCULE