Category: Uncategorized

Chess PHP pictures

My friend Steve is not only an image processing wizard with a book title under his belt, he’s also a chess player. He is modest about his mad chess skillz, but he has done something unquestionably useful for the chess community in creating a nifty chess diagram widget. Written in PHP, it lets you use a standard chess notation to draw images of games easily. For instance, if you write

rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR

you get a picture like this:

Venturing farther afield, Steve’s little chess board also lets you indulge in fanciful tactical positions. For instance, can Black be expected to win this game?

Or how about this one: a cautious Black has just castled on his king side, and White has retorted with some ugly, aggressive posturing of his pawns. Now, Black to mate in 4. Do you see it?

Believe it or not, this example is from a real match, the famous Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld vs. Kerry match (2004). Also known as the Guantanamo opening (or, less frequently, the “Hanging Chad”), Black narrowly escapes disaster by buying assorted hardware from the Supreme Court. The debt thereby incurred was simply levied on the audience. Brilliant!

Finally, if you are a fan of M.C. Escher, you’ll enjoy reading about Steve’s chess problem epiphany:
Unexpected chess problem at my office.

Don’t forget to vote!

The word “virtual” is meaningless

When I was at Foo Camp last summer, I heard Philip Rosedale, the founder of the 3-D virtual world Second Life, describe how this community has not only virtual newspapers to serve its citizens, but paper versions too. They were handing out free copies copies. I picked up a tabloid that advertised stores and tourist traps that existed only in the electronic ether.

Moving in the other direction, which is to say a real reporter in a virtual world, Reuters recently announced that it will be assigning a regular correspondent to a Second Life beat.

“As strange as it might seem, it’s not that different from being a reporter in the real world,” Adam Pasick, the Reuters correspondent who will serve as the virtual bureau’s first chief, said in a Reuters report. “Once you get used to it, it becomes very much like the job I have been doing for years.”

So my question is: is it silly to put real person on a virtual newsbeat?

This leads to the question: what does the word virtual mean, anyway? And the answer is: nothing. Wherever you see the word “virtual,” strike it out and you’ll have a more compact phrase that means the same thing. Virtual newspapers are newspapers. Virtual neighborhoods are neighborhoods. Virtual economies are economies. A lot of money changes hands in Second Life, and the taxing authorities are starting to notice.

It’s always been troublesome to define a word like “virtual” because it describes something that both is and isn’t real. But increasingly it simply means “what you said, only on a computer.” I was curious to see what dictionaries are saying about the word these days. Sure enough, the answers.com dictionary entry has a long digression on this very topic.

Here’s my interpretation of the word virtual. It means “I’ve just removed from X something formerly considered an irreducible quality of X, and yet its X-ness is intact.” It is a linguistic onion peeler. You thought it was necessary to print a newspaper on paper, so you called my paperless newspaper “virtual”. But somehow its paperness remains intact. That which remains is nessful. That which was virtualized away is nessless.

Comment spam sucks

I’m being hammered by a new round of comment spam, and this one is really baffling. It’s well coordinated, coming in tightly packed bursts from all points of the compass. No IP blocking can stop it, and the strange thing is, there’s no text to it. Just a few random letters in each comment along with a plausible sounding name. What are they selling? What is their motivation? Each new invasion of spam has puzzled me at a different level. Just when I became hardened to the fact that of course unscrupulous advertisers could never be stopped, I get bowled over by a new phenomenon: absolutely pointless site-clogging random spam. It’s as if someone is practicing for a denial-of-service attack. At some point, I will need to use those funny picture queries to stop the noise. Sigh.

Virtual reality radio control flying

Roy sent me this one: a radio-controlled airplane with a difference. Here is a guy who modified his model plane to include not just a camera but a wireless video link so he can see what the plane sees as he flies. If you’ve ever tried to fly a model airplane, you know that it can be tricky to work how the plane is oriented. A video camera helps solve this problem, plus it gives you the opportunity to be a neighborhood voyeur, though not a terribly subtle one. So far this is the kind of thing that the military puts to use over Iraq, but this guy does one better: he puts the video camera on gimbals and matches the camera to the orientation of his head. Then, with the video display mounted on a special helmet, he gets the complete sensation of sitting in a tiny airplane, now looking left, now looking right. Sure looks like fun. Look closely and you’ll see he even painted tiny instruments in the model cockpit.

Improved technology is having a big impact on the world of model airplanes. These days, people can do insane aerobatics at an indoor basketball court with their radio-controlled airplanes.

And as long as we’re on aircraft-themed videos, here’s one of my favorites, this time with great big airplanes. This is an F-18 pilot taking his plane through its paces, but the very best part is the beginning. The action of the catapult has been perfectly timed to match the first chords of Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride.” Turn up the volume!

Watch this if you’ve ever wondered why fighter pilots are saddled with such monstrous egos. If you got to do that for a living, I don’t know how you’d avoid it.

A successful walk for autism research

autism-speaks-banner.jpg
Last Sunday we (along with several thousand others) had a great morning for our Autism Speaks walk along the Charles River in Cambridge. I want to acknowledge everyone who walked and everyone who supported the walk by donating to the Autism Speaks research fund. For the second year in a row, this included two teams dedicated to my son Jay: one in Massachusetts, and one in North Carolina (where much of Jay’s extended family lives). All together we raised more than $13,000!

Here is the Massachusetts team. That’s Jay in the bottom right corner.
autism-walk-MA-2006.jpg

And this is the gang in North Carolina, captained by Jay’s aunt Tonya and full of people who love Jay.
autism-walk-NC-2006.jpg

Thanks everybody!

Industrial beauty

This short video is making the rounds, but it really is a terrific film.

When we see the glamorous beauty portrayed in ads and movies, it’s easy to forget what a construction it is. This industrial beauty is a thing built by many skilled artisans across a significant period of time. As long as we recognize this fact, we don’t have to fall into the trap of identifying it overmuch with the person underneath, the matrix on which it was constructed. It reminds me of those outrageous flower-covered floats on the Tournament of Roses Parade. We can admire the craft of it while acknowledging that it is wholly artificial.

There is an interesting parallel with the makeup required for movies in which the characters are grotesque or monstrous. There are plenty of articles about how this or that actor had to sit for four hours of makeup before each shoot as rubbery tentacles and prosthetic cheekbones were glued into place. It’s understood that ugliness is a movie-industry construct. But when it comes to beauty, we prefer to believe the fiction. How disappointing it is to learn that the man who plays Romeo isn’t really in love with the woman who plays Juliet.

The Last Tree of Ténéré

Look at this satellite view of central Niger. Zoom out, and then zoom out some more, and you’ll eventually see that you’re staring at a vast expanse of the trackless and empty Sahara. Except for this historical footnote: at the very center of this map stood, for several decades, a single tree, as well known by the desert-crossing caravans as an island would be in the middle of the Pacific.

I came across the heartbreaking story of the Last Tree of Ténéré while visiting the estimable Athanasius Kircher Society. Here’s what they had to say there.

The Ténéré wastelands of northeastern Niger were once populated by a forest of trees. By the 20th century, desertification had wiped out all but one solitary acacia. [It] had no companions for 400 km in every direction. Its roots reached nearly 40 m deep into the sand. In 1973, the tree was knocked over by a drunken Libyan truck driver. It has been replaced by a simple metal sculpture.

What a story! A desperately poignant one-tree recapitulation of Jared Diamond’s Collapse thesis. Diamond tells in his book how, some time around 1680, the Easter Islanders chopped down the last of the great palm trees that once covered the island. And he poses the rhetorical question: “What did they say as they chopped down the last palm tree?” Which makes me wonder what our friend the truck driver said on that fateful day in 1973.

Was it: “Oh great! I got the whole freakin’ Sahara and somebody puts a tree right in front of my truck! Now I’m gonna be late for poker night.” Or maybe: “Dude, I am so wasted…” Or my favorite: “Hey, watch this!”

Jesus in the operating room

or-savior.jpg
The Boston Globe did a story yesterday called Healing the Body to Reach the Soul. It’s part of a series on faith-based initiatives called “Exporting Faith.” On the front page it had this picture, taken from a brochure published by a non-denominational Christian organization, of Jesus guiding the hand of a surgeon in the operating room. Without addressing any of the touchy political or religious implications of an image like this, I think that there is no disputing that this is a darn funny image. I confess to adding the speech balloon above the surgeon’s head, because the picture just begs to be part of a caption contest. First I thought, what would Jesus be saying in a situation like this? But then I thought, no, the real humor is going on in the surgeon’s head. What’s he saying?

“Are your hands clean? Because they look filthy.”

“I’m just saying, we’re only one quick miracle away from two martinis in the surgeon’s lounge.”

You tell me what he’s saying.

HP photo slimming

I need your help on this one. Is this a feature or a terrible omen for our deranged times? HP has introduced a digital camera effect called the slimming feature. Here’s their ad copy on the topic.

They say cameras add ten pounds, but HP digital cameras can help reverse that effect. The slimming feature, available on select HP digital camera models, is a subtle effect that can instantly trim off pounds from the subjects in your photos!

When I saw someone had linked to this from a blog I was reading, I was convinced it was a fake. I kept looking at the HP URL trying to work out if it was a hacked address of some kind. But no, this is a real feature on real cameras. I can’t figure out if I’m off base being astonished by this. I’ve talked to people who can’t figure out why I find this so disturbing. I guess slimming your photo is better than sticking your finger down your throat after brunch, but it seems dishonest in some very damaging ways.

If it takes off in the marketplace, though, I’m thinking about selling a JolieCam. It’s a camera that, no matter who you point it at (your dog, your grandma, your half-eaten tuna sandwich), always spits out a glamorous photo of Angelina Jolie. Why look frumpy when you can look vampy?

So what’s your verdict on the slimming feature: funny harmless feature, or one more sign that the apocalypse is near?

Rube Goldberg is alive and well…

… and making videos in Japan.

Please, please don’t start this if you don’t have nine minutes to spare. This is the sort of thing where people usually say “This guy had WAY too much time on his hands.” But the commercial nature of these videos makes it clear that the creator was a pro. He’s getting paid to have that much time on his hands. Good for him, I say. We should all be so lucky.

Can’t… stop… watching…

If you can tear yourself away from the gadget videos, here’s a Rube Goldberg-ish Flash game. Ride down a doodle of your own design. Can you build a successful loop-the-loop track? Check it out: Line Rider by ~fsk on deviantART. (via tingelinde)