Category: Uncategorized

I have the self discipline to keep myself from peeking in a friend’s medicine cabinet, even their liquor cabinet, but when it comes to bookshelves, I have to hover and peruse. What does this person like? Do they have books I have read? Books I want to read? Strange books? Runs on fiction by a single author?

Flickr is a photo service that lends itself to socializing by sharing annotated images. One Flickr image descriptor, or tag, that has taken on a life of its own is the “bookshelf” tag. Follow the link and you’ll see lots of pictures of people’s bookshelves. Some of them are even annotated with little callouts. Some are organized by color. Of course, the books you read and the books you show people are often two very different things. Predictably, some bookshelves are pretentious. Have you really picked up that book since your philosophy class? Did you even read it then?

I love shelves lined with puzzling books, disturbing books, tempting books. Looking at all these pictures makes me want to go organize my books and take some snapshots. Then again, moving books is work; building a virtual version of your library may be the next best thing. A company called Delicious Monster has cooked up something (for the Mac only right now) called Delicious Library that lets you create virtual shelves filled your favorite bookly booty, CDs, and DVDs. I wouldn’t mind having something like this, but this particular company seems to have swallowed a few too many wacky pills. So I’ll wait.

Playing around with a new look for the site definitely makes clear the value of Cascading Style Sheets. With the help of some of Jesse Ruderman’s excellent web development bookmarklets like Edit Styles and Ancestors, you can find a site you like, grab (steal) some of the styles, and painlessly put them in place on your own site. Another good resource is the EditCSS plugin for Firefox, but it stopped working (at least for now) in Firefox 1.0. In fact, I just noticed that EditCSS is based on Ruderman’s bookmarklet. What an incestuous place the web is!

Before the noise of the election dies away completely, you should take a look at some of these electoral maps. They’ve been showing up all over the place, but I would direct your attention in particular to the purple county-by-county map near the bottom of this page: Tim Pierce – maps maps maps maps maps. Anything that smooths out the awful abrupt contrast between the rising red tide and the blue periphery makes me feel a little bit better about the future.

In other election-related news, the George Bush and John Kerry pages on the famously promiscuous Wikipedia joined a small list of pages that had to be “locked down” (made off limits to editing by the public) due to editorial abuse by patrons. Bush’s picture was vandalized multiple times, and even the Wikipedia, it seems, has its limits. Some pages are such hot topics that the editors nail the door shut for an unspecified time. In achieving this distinction, Bush and Kerry join such company as Ariel Sharon, Henry Kissinger, and Jane Fonda. Here’s the article about it in the NY Times: Mudslinging Weasels Into Online History.

Helium balloons stay aloft with no effort, but they’re impossible to steer and easily buffeted by strong winds. Airplanes have marvelous control, but they run out of gas after a few hours. It would be ideal if you could combine in one vehicle the lighter-than-air benefits of a balloon and the controllable aspects of an airplane. No one knows how to do this in the air, but underwater it’s not so hard.

The result is essentially a cross between a helium balloon and a glider. By varying the density of such a vehicle the way a submarine does, you can make it climb or sink. This climbing or sinking motion gives you enough velocity to use your underwater “wings” to generate forward motion, and you’re off to the races. If you constantly vary your depth in a sort of sine wave profile, you can swim huge distances for very little effort.

This is exactly how the diminuitive and unmanned Spray (named after famed solo circumnavigator Joshua Slocum‘s little boat) swam across the Gulf Stream from Boston to Bermuda: Autonomous Robot To Cross the Gulf Stream Underwater. It was a slow, meandering process (check out the plots at the bottom of the Spray project homepage) but it worked, tirelessly and continuously gathering temperature and current data cheaply and where it could not otherwise be had.

Presumably you could do the same thing with a human on board, but it would sure be a slow, uncomfortable ride. On the other hand, I don’t see why you couldn’t ship certain kinds of freight very slowly and cheaply this way.

Here’s an interesting tidbit from Wired News: People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid. According to the article, there are actually more bacteria along for the ride on your body (100 trillion) than you have cells in your body (several trillion). It really doesn’t even make sense to talk about “you” without also including a massive bacterial complement. From your mouth to your bowels to the soles of your feet, germs are a necessary part of you. And now we find out that they outnumber your cell count too.

Just make sure they don’t get the vote.

Competitions to spur technological innovation are much in the news these days. They seem to have the magic power to make exciting things happen quickly. In the last few days, maverick airplane designer Burt Rutan officially claimed the $10 million Ansari X Prize for building the privately funded SpaceShipOne. Ansari Prize founder Peter Diamandis credits as his inspiration the $25,000 Orteig prize that Lindbergh won in 1927 for the solo crossing of the Atlantic.

In the shadow of the very successful Ansari competition, NASA is launching something called the Centennial Challenge. Among other things, the Challenge will provide prizes to encourage private space missions by giving specific awards for things like soft robotic lunar landing, micro reentry vehicle, solar sail station-keeping, aeroassist, and human orbital flight.

The prize craze extends into other industries beyond aerospace. InnoCentive is a company that does nothing but post and award prizes to chemists and chemical engineers who solve chemical problems of commercial value. Who needs an R&D department? Just post your problem (anonymously) and pay off your benefactor only when the work comes in.

I expect we will eventually run into contest fatigue as we squeeze this fad for all it’s worth. Then again, I thought reality TV would fade after a season or two, so who knows?

This one’s been going the rounds, but it’s Election Day, and if you haven’t seen it already, it’s worth a visit.

The scenario: you’re in a sleek, technologically advanced voting booth in Florida with a fancy GUI and a touchscreen. Who do you vote for? Follow the link to the Electronic Voting Machine (it’s a Windows Media file).

The “x-ray” interface that displays two layers of information in one view is generally a cute idea that doesn’t work well in practice. To see an example of this done very well, look at the London Multimap with the aerial photo overlay at Multimap.com. Amazing what you can accomplish with enough JavaScript. I hope this kind of view will become standard at the various mapping portals around the web. The next thing I’m waiting for is the ability to zoom in for a 3-d view of tricky intersections so I can rehearse what to look for in bizarro urban driving situations like you find in Europe (and Boston).

[Note: actual driving conversation from a summer trip to France]
NED: Are we on the road to Coulommiers?
JOE: It said “Chailly En Brie” on the sign. Is that the same direction?
NED: I don’t know. According to the map, we should be on the 402.
JOE: I haven’t seen any numbers on any of these signs. Wait! That said 209. Is that good?
NED: Let me see if I can find it. Is this Coulommiers?
JOE: Should I take this left turn or this hard left here?
NED: What? Oh, I can’t tell from this. Just keep following that truck.
JOE: We’re going in “direction Boissy-le-Chauffry” now. Is that good?
NED: I can’t find us anywhere on this map.
JOE: I think we should’ve taken that left back there.
NED: Are we on the road to Coulommiers?

Not much blogging this week, because all of my late-night blogging time has been taken up with baseball. Incredible, mind-bending baseball. Tonight the Red Sox are American League champs. Since the Sox made it into the championship series last week, I have felt at various times dizzy, giddy, and sick. It’s an odd thing to me, to find myself caring this much about baseball. Growing up in North Carolina, I wasn’t much of a baseball fan, and I certainly didn’t have any affinity for Boston. My only memory of the 1975 series was that it was interesting that both the teams had “Red” in their names. In the same vague, hop-on-the-bandwagon way that I cheered for the Dolphins and the Cowboys in their 1970s powerhouse years, I remember rooting for the Yankees in 1978.

For more than a decade now I have lived in Boston. I think it would take real work to live here for that long and not become a fan; I have succumbed. But the thing that really fascinates me is how someone like me can take eighty-some years of Red Sox history so personally. While I was in college in New Jersey, I was totally indifferent to the wretched fate of the 1986 Sox. But now it feels like a personal affront, as though I suffered through it myself. How is that possible? This is what is so interesting about the Sox: the very thing that has made them so wretched has made them painfully endearing. If I had moved to New York instead of Boston thirteen years ago, would I be a Yankees fan? Probably. But I can’t imagine being caught up in the same way. The Red Sox have come to stand for longing, for endless unrequited painful desire. That is a powerful, mythic force, all the more so when shared by millions of fellow-sufferers. This history of thwarted victory is something to be embraced and honored in some profound way. Why should I care so much about baseball? Because it becomes more than baseball. We can all understand yearning; life is yearning and frustrated needfulness. Everyone in Red Sox nation is free to project onto this team a thousand things from their lives. When you win, you eventually learn that the world doesn’t change, but when you lose, you dream that some day it might. The winner awakes, but the loser gets to dream.

For the last four days, I have been lapsing occasionally into a strange dream state. It’s something like floating in a soap bubble over a barren landscape — so beautiful, so easily punctured, so disorienting. To land on my feet after that giddy flight amazes me in the extreme. I congratulate the team that brought home this victory. Tomorrow the world starts again. But tonight Boston lives the dream.