Loren Shure keeps a blog called The Art of MATLAB at the MathWorks community site (a.k.a. MATLAB Central). She’s been extra busy this week so I filled in with a guest piece for her called Calendars and Leap Years. As befits the venue, it’s a mixture of prose and the MATLAB language code that’s used to support the discussion.
Part of the piece is the answer to the puzzle: what happens if you don’t have a leap year? The ancient Egyptians didn’t, and it made some weird things happen.
My tent is now visible on Google Earth.
If you wanted to find the world headquarters for O’Reilly Media, you would need to go to 1005 North Gravenstein Highway North in Sebastopol, California. If you just want to take a virtual trip there, Google Maps will do just fine. If you zoom into the complex in the middle of the map, you’ll notice something odd about the back yard. It’s very green and strangely detailed. What’s going on? The rectangular region that constitutes O’Reilly’s “back yard” is filled with tents because the out-of-context snapshot was taken by a low-flying plane during Foo Camp in August 2006.
Foo Camp is a tech conference hosted by O’Reilly (Foo = Friends Of O’Reilly), and the Google Maps folks who attended arranged to have a special Easter Egg inserted into Google Maps: high resolution low-altitude pictures taken while Foo Camp was in progress.
I was lucky enough to be invited to Foo Camp, and we were told that the plane would be flying over during lunch. Some people, in anticipation of the flyover, went to some real effort, making Cylon Raiders and Space Invaders that would be visible from the air. Sadly, at least as of this writing, these constructions lie outside the small box of high resolution imagery.
I can tell you that the Google plane kept flying back and forth, back and forth, and we eventually tired of looking up at it and waving. After a while we got hungry and queued up for lunch. So what you see in the picture is a bunch of tents (the veritable Foo Camp campsite), a few brave souls stretched out in the damp grass looking up at the plane, a robot soccer field, and a bunch of people waiting in line for a free buffet. What’s really nice here is that anything you can see in Google Maps, you can see in much greater detail in Google Earth. And so it is that, if you open Google Earth and zoom in to 38.411360° north latitude, 122.840350° west longitude, you can’t quite make me out in the lunch line, but you can clearly and distinctly see my tent. Here’s what my tent looks like from a human perspective. And here’s what it looks like to God:
UPDATE: By coincidence I just noticed that Tom Coates blogged about this on Monday. He apparently has inside information from Google that the rest of the O’Reilly campus, Cylon raiders and all, will be appearing on Google Earth some time next month. You don’t even have to wait that long: Frank Taylor of the Google Earth Blog posted a KMZ overlay file of the whole thing.
McNaught was the comet that got away. I didn’t realize what a rare find it was until it was no longer visible from the northern hemisphere. Our friends down under had a better time of it. Look at this incredible image of the dying bird’s tail. My my.
Photo courtesy of the always enjoyable Astronomy Photo of the Day.
I was recently reading Sean Carroll’s excellent book on evolutionary developmental biology, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, in which he says that “brain size [in humans] roughly doubled in a million years.” This was a dramatic (and expensive) departure in the brainweight-to-bodyweight ratio compared to all other mammals. Carroll goes on to say:
The brain is a very expensive organ in terms of energy consumpution, drawing up to 25 percent of an adult human’s energy (and 60 percent of an infant’s).
Who knew the brain was such a hog? You can rest your legs and unshoulder your weary load, but your brain keeps drawing current rain or shine. And a good thing too. An evolutionary stockbroker might describe the relationship between the brain and the evolutionary fate of Homo sapiens as this: an expensive investment, but ultimately worthwhile.
These words were in my head as I recalled some articles I was reading about the growing electrical appetite of data centers. It turns out that data centers and server farms are sprouting like mushrooms along the Columbia River in Washington and Oregon. Why? Because that’s where the cheap hydroelectric power is. These giant computing centers, erected in rapid succession by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and others are hot, hungry, and growing fast. The electrical power consumed by computers has become one of the most significant costs of a modern corporation, particularly since it has the knock-on expense of driving cooling costs too. Electrical companies joke about giving away computers and making up the cost on juice.
Who knew the computer was such a hog? We can regulate our trucks and trade in the Hummer for a Prius, but the great Google brain keeps drawing current rain or shine. Every day, as we commune by keyboard with the net, banging out our neuron’s part, the network is evolving.
I’m guessing it’s an expensive investment, but ultimately worthwhile.
Today I attended Mashup Camp in Cambridge, just around the corner from MIT. I went not expecting too much. I came away thoroughly impressed.
What is it? Mashup Camp = mashup + camp. Both parts are worth a digression. So:
1. What is a mashup? A mashup happens when you add new and sometimes startling value to someone else’s work. Because of this, doing mashups can get you in trouble with the authorities. Marcel Duchamp, who decorated the Mona Lisa’s face, was a champion masher-upper and troublemaker. Mashups are inherently derivative, but they can also be exceptionally inventive. If you spend much time thinking about it, you realize that mashing up is what all of us, farmers and artists alike, are doing all the time. Moaning about originality and the sins of derivation is a waste a breath. The marvelous thing that’s happening right now on the web is that mashups are finally getting the admiration and respect they have deserved all along. This is not small matter of internet culture. This is a fact of great significance for human culture.
2. Why the word “camp”? Camp in this context implies that this is an unconference. The salient feature of an unconference is that there is no pre-planned schedule. The attendees make it up during the opening session by signing up for hour-long slots in the master schedule. The final schedule that emerges in a few improvised minutes is every bit as good as one that went through hours of tedious revision in the yearlong run-up to a typical conference. The canonical observation about a typical conference is that the most interesting parts happen outside of, and often in spite of, the official schedule. This exposes a remarkable asymmetry: much of the tedium associated with planning a conference adds no value. An improvised schedule has a number of benefits (accuracy, currency, adaptiveness), but by far the most important is the energizing nature of active participation. Nothing is fixed in fatalistic preprinted timetables. If you don’t stand up and speak right now, you won’t be heard. Speak!
I let myself dwell on the abstract benefits of Mashup Camp, but the particulars were excellent. The Hotel@MIT was a good location, and the steady hand of seasoned conference leaders David Berlind and Kaliya Hamlin was much appreciated. Finally, if you’ve read all this way and you’re still wondering what the hell a real web mashup actually looks like, the best place to go is John Musser’s Programmable Web, a web site devoted to mashups. Take a look at HousingMaps, a site that famously mashes together Craigslist and Google Maps. Also see John Musser’s coverage of the particulars of Mashup Camp on his blog.
If you’re like me, you are generally successful at denying the foolish position you put yourself in. You are fully aware that your hard drive could fail at any moment. You know the mayhem and suffering this event would cause. You even know that, as an imperfect product of human manufacture, your hard drive certainly will fail some day. And every time you reflect on this, you feel a dull momentary pain, because you NEVER BACK UP YOUR HARD DRIVE. Then the moment of guilt passes and your well-honed skills at denial resume their duty. So much to do! You’ll get around to it one of these days.
I need a no-hassle solution to this problem, because I know that I simply can’t trust myself to be responsible. In the past I have gone so far as to buy a backup drive, and then place it, unused, next to my computer, as if some osmotic process might take care of the backup for me. That is why I have been hoping for a dead easy web-based service that would take care of my backup problem for me. Web backup has been available for a few years now, but it hasn’t been cheap. That’s changing now, and the best thing I’ve seen so far is Jungle Disk. Jungle Disk is a free client that plugs straight into Amazon’s industrial-strength dirt-cheap S3 storage network. I don’t know how they make their money, but they seem like the real thing. Here’s an Amazon marketing piece about them. Anyway, the price has finally reached the point where even I can be induced to be responsible. Here is my bill for January. Admittedly, I was only backing up a few dozen megabytes as a test, but the storage cost me exactly one cent for the month.
Even if Jungle Disk doesn’t work out, there will be other S3-based services that jump in to take up the slack. Here’s a list from Jeremy Zawodny on Amazon S3 Backup Tools.
Morgan Spurlock, the hefty man behind the fast food fright flick Super Size Me, has also written a companion book called Don’t Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America. Spurlock takes a dim view not only of corporate fast food purveyors but also of the American public’s ability to make sound dietary decisions when confronted with fancy advertising.
This drives Matt Angiulo crazy. Angiulo is an aerospace engineer who takes quite literally the old adage of Sir Francis Bacon: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Angiulo is also a natural contrarian. Whereas he would no doubt leave Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book safely on the shelf, a book commanding him not to eat it is as good as a double-dog dare to do exactly that. Thus: I’ll Eat That Book. Just Watch Me!, a web site dedicated to the slow consumption of Spurlock’s book.
My friend Rob (one of the original Star Chamber gang) knows Matt’s brother and sent me the news about this fascinating site. To the email he added this
My review of his site would be: “Angiulo brings new meaning to consumerism as he literally digests the smarmy, self-righteous words of Morgan Spurlock in his postmodernist attack on Spurlock’s popular tome on so-called healthy eating.”
Every day he eats another page after reading and summarizing it for the site. No word on whether he uses liberal amounts of Miracle Whip. I’m afraid he is not a charitable reviewer. While he does swallow the arguments initially, what he does with them a few hours later is not fit reading for a family-oriented blog.
I’m traveling for the next week, but I’ll leave you with this excellent music video. It looks like it had to be done with stop motion photography, but then it doesn’t look like it could’ve been done with stop motion photography.
I learned about it from Motionographer site that’s good for finding fun animations and video compilations, typically put together by advertising studios. So much talent out there!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year…
My birthday was last weekend. I turned 42. In addition to being the answer to life, the universe, and everything, 42 also happens to mark a lifetime low point in happiness as reported by various happy researchers … I’m sorry, various happiness researchers. It’s possible to take this news badly, but I look at it like this: I’ve got years of rising happiness levels to look forward to. According to the theory, 42 is about the time you realize that you aren’t actually going to win the Nobel Prize, and so you might as well start enjoying what you’ve got. Please. The rest of us have known for years that you weren’t going to win that prize.
I find happiness studies fascinating. From an episode of the Quirks & Quarks radio program, I learned that there is almost no relationship between things people predict will make them happy and things that measurably lift their levels of reported happiness. Almost none! How did that evolve? Similarly, people grossly overestimate the impact of bad things (job loss, accidents, health crises) on day-to-day happiness levels. Back on the subject of age, older people generally overstate how happy they were in their youth and younger people overstate how miserable they will be as they age. Which all stands to reason, since if Hollywood has succeeded in teaching us anything, it’s that youth = happiness and that old people don’t deserve to appear in movies.
I’m curious to hear your answer to this: if youth equals happiness, then, pop-culturally speaking, what is our “perfect” age? Not the age that you happen to like, but rather that optimal cusp that glossy magazines push at us every day. It is the age that children yearn for and seniors fondly recall. Presumably it is post-drinking age, post-sexual maturity, pre-wrinkle, and pre-hair loss. It is a mysterious still point on a sociological map. I think it’s 24, but it may be 25. What do you think?
I’m sorry to do this to you, but I recently came across not one but two long lists of good small games, any one of which you can start playing in seconds, any one of which you can blow thirty minutes on without breaking a sweat. Beware!
The first list I learned about through Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools page. He was pitching Mark Hurst’s Good Experience site, and that’s how I came across Good Experience Games.
The other list is from a place called Cognitive Labs, which appears to be associated with Stanford: Free Cognitive Games from Cognitive Labs. It’s a weird, chaotic site dedicated to slowing down or reversing the cognitive effects of aging. The premise is that these games are good for your brain. I can testify that they are bad for your ability to go to bed at a reasonable time. Try out Vector Ball and Reverse Asteroids. Also I am specifically curious how long JMike can stay alive at the Impossible level on the type-fast-or-die Word Shoot game. If you’ve never seen JMike type, it is a wonder to behold.
Rambles Blog at Star Chamber 