Category: Uncategorized

Paperback book notifications

Ben Hammersley has shut down the Lazyweb, but the key insight that it embodied still endures:

…if you wait long enough, someone will implement that wacky idea you had… (or already has!) Alternatively, that if your blog has enough readers, a reader will know and provide the answer to a question you are too lazy to research yourself.

I make no claims to a vast readership, but I am certainly lazy. So when I imagine a web service that must exist somewhere, I ask clever people like you where to find it. The service I’m thinking of this week is paperback release schedules. I love books, but I don’t often buy hardback books. I don’t like them. They are less pleasing than paperbacks in several dimensions: bigger, heavier, harder to handle, more expensive, harder to flip through (if it has those silly ragged pages), and you’re always having to worry with that stupid paper cover thing that wants to fall off. But since they are more profitable, publishers are clearly motivated to sell them exclusively for as long as possible, and so I’m often in the position of seeing a new hardback book for which I want to buy the paperback edition. I want a web service that lets me register my interest in, say, Philip Ball’s new biography The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science, and then emails me when the paperback edition gets released. Does such a service exist? It seems like it should, but my Google scrying glass was cloudy and my searches came to naught.

On a related note, since I consume a good many books by audio these days, I want a similar service that will notify me when a given book is released in audio form (unabridged editions only, naturally).

No business model is the new business model

After much shopping around for online to-do lists that I like, I have settled on one called tasktoy. It’s not very flashy, and it’s not very professional looking, but it works well, and it has a few features that I absolutely must have. The most important is that I can post new items to it using a URL rather than having to go to a special web page and click on a special button. Clicking on buttons is so 2004.

The site’s creator is Toby Segaran, a Boston-based New Zealander who made tasktoy not as a business opportunity, but merely because it scratched an itch for him. And since he found it useful (here comes the fun paradigm-shifting part) he thought, “Say, while I’m at it, why not make this available to everybody in the entire world?”

One reason being cited for all the recent proliferation of hot young Web 2.0 companies is that the cost of launching a business has plummeted since Bubble 1.0. Some cheap hardware, a handful of open source software, and a good idea can take you pretty far these days. But if making a company is dirt cheap, then so is not making a company. I read some recent musings by Toby Segaran in his blog, and the following passage hit me on the head like a figurative heavy thing:

A number of people have emailed and asked me how I’m making money from tasktoy and lazybase. Others have said, somewhat critically, in blog postings and forum comments that they just “don’t see the business model” for such applications. The truth is that I don’t make any money from these applications. They were never intended to be a business. I wrote them because I wanted them, it was an opportunity to learn something new, and like most people I love creating things.

I determined that for less than I spend on coffee, I could put them online and share them with everyone.
… There is no business, and there is no business model. Think of something that you would do anyway and imagine being sent thank-you notes from all over the world just for doing it, and you’ll see why there doesn’t have to be.

I added those italics, because that’s the part that really knocked me on the head. For less than he spends on coffee, he can run a service that adds significant ongoing value to my life and the lives of hundreds of others. Tasktoy is a service I would pay for. At any other time in the history of mankind, it’s a service that would absolutely demand payment or subsidy. This kind of new age gifting is bound to have a significant economic impact over time. Software gets more interesting every day.

Animal-like robots

We’re definitely entering a new realm with robotics. Before robotic motion was always painfully awkward and stilted, not something you would ever mistake for the smooth motion of an animal. But these days you can find plenty of examples of remarkably fluid “un-robotic” behavior. Things will progress very rapidly from here. The YouTube video below shows human-controlled robots. They’re being driven by remote control, but they’re still a treat to watch.

This next example is a video of a robotic eel, and it truly has to be seen to be believed. Again, it’s radio-controlled, but still, LOOK AT THAT FELLER SWIM! Straight out of a Bond movie.

Tattoos Sacred and Profane

You may have heard about Engrish.com, the site that tracks amusing abuses of the English language in Japan (“Let’s happy and feel the lucky!”). But what about the view from the other side? Are Americans abusing Asian languages by any chance? Yes they are, and whereas Japanese have a knack for zany T-shirts and signs, Americans prefer to make their mistakes in the form of permanent tattoos. Tian Tang, an engineering student who lives in Arizona now but was born in China, has a site called Hanzi Smatter that is dedicated to airing the kinds of mistranslations, mistransliterations, and textual nonsense that pass for Chinese in American pop culture. Recently he’s been getting some high-profile press:

Cool Tat, Too Bad It’s Gibberish – New York Times
Indelibly lost in translation – Los Angeles Times

The whole concept of what people look for in a tattoo, and what constitutes magical writing, has fascinated me for some time, so I collected my thoughts in the somewhat longer ramble below.

Continue reading “Tattoos Sacred and Profane”

No more grinding teeth

I am a grinder and a clencher. Are you?

I wish I weren’t, but once I fall asleep, all the dentist’s good advice fades away, and the bruxism commences. This can lead to temporomandibular dysphoria (i.e. jaw pain). Pardon the language, but this dental jargon is too much fun. It gets much better up ahead. Anyway, I can live with the occasional headache, but it got to the point where I was wearing down my molars. Ick. You can get a bite guard to save your teeth (I have), but the guard actually encourages your perverse jaw muscles to clench more, since you’ve got this nice plastic thing to chew into. This leads to more headaches and eventually receding gums. It’s absolutely maddening when you do something undesirable while sleeping. You want to tell your sleeping self to knock it off, but that person and you are never awake at the same time.

I’m sharing all these lovely details because this story actually has a happy ending, and if you grind your teeth I want you to know about it. I was beginning to despair of finding a good solution, when my technically hip dentist suggested the latest thing in temporomandibular tension suppression. It’s a little plastic clip that goes over your front teeth. It’s brilliant! Your back teeth never meet. Furthermore, since your incisors were never built for grinding, they’re not really capable of letting you clench enough to give you a headache.

It’s called the NTI Tension Suppression System, and boy have they got an entertaining web site. There’s a charming Flash movie about the perils bruxism, and the dental geek jargon is magnificent:

When temporalis relaxation and ipsilateral translation of the condyle occurs unilaterally, the remaining scheme of occluding teeth becomes an influential factor in the presenting symptoms, of which, contacting canines during mandibular depression is highly desirable, as it minimizes condylar translation and muscle intensity, while directing the vector pull on the condyle more anteriorly than a posterior contact.

Amen to that, and may God bless the geeks who make the world a better place. And the condyles too, whatever they are.

Please love me, YouTube – now pay me!

YouTube seems to be taking off as the de facto way of sharing short videos. I’ve used them here a few times before, and I’ve been very impressed with how easy it is to embed video in a blog post. Now, from the heart of Media ContentLand, here’s the Hollywood Reporter on the fascinating love/hate relationship Hollywood has with YouTube: Biz not sure how to treat upstart YouTube. This is the best quote from the article:

“There’s been a few examples of marketing departments uploading content directly to the site, while on the other side of the company their attorney is demanding we remove this content,” YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley says.

This is all part of the complex equation that spells ultimate doom for Digital Rights Management. You will never learn to love me if you don’t meet me, and you will only meet me on sites that don’t have onerous DRM. And if you do love me, will you love me still when I stick you with an unexpected bill? Poor Hollywood can never decide whether she wants to be a coquette or a slut.

Googling Air Force One

air-force-one.jpg
Have you ever been flying over some remarkable landmark or unusual-looking city and wondered: what is that? I’ve always wanted, as I stared out from my window seat, an easy way to answer the question “What place is that?” or “Why are those big buildings all arranged like that over there?” Sometimes, on transcontinental or international flights you get a live update of your position, but even that doesn’t always answer your questions. What I want is a way to bookmark wherever I am when I have a question so I can figure it out later. And finally, these days, the tools are on my side.

I recently went on a business trip during which I had a layover in Washington, DC at the airport that I used to know as Washington National, but which is now Reagan National. Flying into DC, our plane passed over another large airport which had a funny hexagonal building at one end. I’ve played the airport guessing game before, and it’s pretty hard to remember enough distinctive details to track it down later. But now I have Google Earth: I can compare what I saw with what the satellite saw. In this case, I speculated that I was looking at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, and I further speculated that the big funny building was the hangar for Air Force One. This was, as we say in the business, a bullshit speculation. I have long known the value of making a confident and plausible assertion pass for knowledge. But it gets to be pretty thin soup if you do it enough. I want real answers. Once I got home, I opened up Google Earth, zoomed into eastern Maryland, and there was exactly the building I saw from the air, and it was labeled as… the hangar for Air Force One. Speculation is cheap, but when you get to exchange your bullshit dollars for real money, that’s darn satisfying.

The tools are getting better all the time. Not only can you use the web to follow the ground track of a moving plane, you can go to fboweb.com to see, in three dimensions, the current location of your plane. I didn’t do this in my case, but theoretically it would have been easy to look out the window, note the time, and then compare that time with the 3-d trajectory of the flight. Where was I? There I was. What was that? Air Force One. Simple.

Beatles juggling redux

I’m betting that in the last two weeks somebody sent you a link to the video of the guy who juggles to Beatles music. In case you are one of the people who missed this gawk-and-forward juggernaut, here it is. Chris Bliss juggles continuously throughout the entire “Golden Slumbers” medley from Abbey Road. It’s a well-choreographed routine, the crowd goes wild, and the video propagated like a wave throughout the entire blogosphere. But what was really interesting was the juggle-geek backlash. If you’re a serious juggler (I’m not), you might look at this guy Bliss and say “What a hack! Only three balls… the only thing he has to be proud of is that he went dropless for four minutes and twenty seven seconds.”

In fact, that’s exactly what a juggle-geek named Jason Garfield said. In fact, he said much worse here, if you care to read it. Garfield is a phenomenal juggler, and he posted a sort of challenge video using the exact same soundtrack as Bliss, but doing a much much harder routine with five balls. Now what do you think about that? It really leads to this question: what is the nature of entertainment? Or rather this: what do you owe your entertainer? Garfield’s opinion is clear: you owe it to him to know the difference between hack juggling and “real” juggling. If you can’t tell the difference, he don’t need your steenkin’ applause. Here’s Garfield: “It’s fine if people are entertained by this. But they should not assume he is a good juggler just because he kind of juggled to the music with three balls. A perfect example of how little people know about juggling is that one of his strongest audience response points was when he JUST juggled the BASIC pattern.” Stupid audience! Doesn’t know its juggling patterns!

People may say Bliss is a great juggler, but what they really mean is they saw him perform and they were entertained. Bliss knows how to work the crowd. John Grisham put a lot of talented writers out of work. The contempt of angry geeks is cheaply had, but an entertainer is an entertainer.

I found this last quote on Garfield’s STOLEN MATERIAL page.

… in the juggling community, if you are performing
these routines you are considered to be at least partly a hack.
The percentage of your entire act that is made up of hack material
determines the percentage of how much of a hack you are.

1. Juggling while eating an apple.
2. Passing around a volunteer and knocking something out of their mouth.
3. Juggling Chainsaws
4. Juggling Knives
5. Juggling fire (Torches)

I know I’m embarrassing you, because I saw you doing that flaming chainsaw routine of yours last weekend. You hopeless hack.

Happy Pi day (3/14)

Today is a good day to give thanks for pi, the magical ratio without which circles would be lumpy misshapen things, wheels would clunk-clunk-clunk, and ball bearings would look like raisins. Pi was invented in 1737 by a Welsh typesetter named Samuel P. Maddock who was in need of a rounder letter O than had been available up to that point. Quickly realizing his invention’s potential, he formed the Grand Rounde Companie in 1738 and promised to “reinvent the wheel.” Thereafter he struggled for several years to secure the financial backing needed to take his invention, which he called the “Maddock,” to a larger market (“This circle of yours sounds wicked and French,” said one banker). Destitute, he eventually was forced to sell out to Leo Pi, who thereby acquired the most lucrative patent in history. To this day, his estate receives licensing fees for every clockface, coin, and bubble.

For some pi-related fun, head over to Pi-Search where you can search for runs of specific numbers in the first two hundred million digits of pi (give or take, depending on how you count the “3” at the beginning). I didn’t find 123456789, but 123456 is in there. More importantly, you can find the run 31415926 starting at position 50,366,472. I have yet to determine if the entire sequence of pi appears in itself somewhere, but I’m off to a good start.

Incidentally, in Europe, today (14.3.2006) is known as Not-Pi Day (or Fourteen and Three Tenths Day in Ireland). (Spotted at tingilinde)

Electric donkey

I’ve been amazed to see how quickly web video has transitioned from novelty to mainstream. So often now interesting links come along with video. Here’s the latest, an electric pack mule.

When I read that Boston Dynamics had made a stable robot quadruped, I was intrigued enough to follow the link and look at the clip. What I wasn’t prepared for was how disturbing it was going to be to see two pairs of skinny disembodied human legs nervously schlepping across a field. I’m anthropomorphizing here, but you’ll forgive me when you see the video. I imagine they put the little black leggings on to keep mud out of the leg machinery, but those tights are perfectly tuned to make the effect all the more disturbing. I kept looking for the people in the machine, the stunt midgets or whatever, that were really making this thing work. Inspiring robotics, but I would be creeped out if these guys were carrying my luggage. Would I have to give them a tip? Would I have to tip both of them? How long after we invent truly helpful robots before they turn into surly, intimidating tip hounds?

As if it weren’t weird enough to see this skinny-legged push-me pull-you donkey freak, the same company makes robotic cockroaches. Here’s a movie of one named RHex. There’s another one that climbs walls, called RiSE, and then there’s a doggy that does a dandy syncopated tap dance of a walk. Here’s the whole family. The movies are all good. The overall impression I get after looking at these videos is either A) these robots are sophisticated visitors from the future, or B) they are villains in a lame Half-Life mod.