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This is a marvelous thing. Paradigms collide when a Dutch astronomer builds a web page that uses Javascript to calculate the positions of the sun, moon, and planets based on Ptolemaic methods dating back to the second century AD: Almagest Ephemeris Calculator. That is to say, you will get answers as accurate as possible given the knowledge of the universe 1800 years ago. That’s way before Copernicus, way back when epicycles were the order of the day and the Earth was safely fixed at the center of the universe. Ptolemy could have worked out those epicycles much faster with Pentium-based hardware (although the IEEE sexagesimal floating fraction standard is pretty dodgy). Here’s a quote from the site.

When the web page is loaded the ephemeris calculator automatically selects the epoch date for the tables in Ptolemy’s Almagest as the default date. This corresponds with mean noon at the meridian of Alexandria on 1 Thoth 1 Nabonassar (or 26 February 747 BC in the proleptic Julian calendar, around 10h UT).

You will certainly remember that 747 BC is at or about the time that Sargon II conquered the Hittites. Remember? And then they came out with that lame sitcom about it, Sargon’s Heroes? I’m sure you remember.

Remember the great whale-oil age? Of course not. It started in the eighteenth century and was over by the end of the nineteenth century. But for a time, whale oil was among the world’s primary lubricants and illuminants. Society’s need for light and lubrication has grown exponentially, but thankfully for the whales a new source of oil appeared just as whale stocks were crashing toward extinction: petroleum. A few hundred years from now, our age will seem just as primitive and remote, because in less time than it took our ancestors to boil down almost all the whales, we will have sucked all the oil out of this planet. Whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist with respect to existing petroleum reserves makes only the difference of 40 years or so between now and a serious supply crash. Exponential growth in demand and finite supply will ultimately bring this terrific free lunch we’re enjoying to a close before this century is out. As Kenneth Deffeyes says (see below) “Fossil fuels are a one-time gift that lifted us up from subsistence agriculture and eventually should lead us to a future based on renewable resources.”

Here is a good National Geographic article on the topic with some fun facts and pretty pictures: The End of Cheap Oil.

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Here’s a book (Hubbert’s Peak) written by oilman and geologist Kenneth Deffeyes that does a good job explaining why even at this very moment we are at the peak of the peak of worldwide oil production. Demand will rise, but supply must inexorably fall. Take-home lesson: if you REALLY want that Hummer, buy it now.

I gave a talk this morning about the MATLAB Profiler at the Applied Behavioral Analysis Convention (see the listing here). In order to explain how profiling code works, I wanted one of those Family Circus cartoons where little Jeffy goes wandering all over the neighborhood. I thought I’d find them all over the net, but I only found one. I guess the Family Circus lawyers have been doing their work. For the purposes of my talk, though, this was just fine.

The Family Circus is as lame a comic as you are likely to ever run across. Even so, I was surprised by the depth of the hatred that exists for it out there. In my search for the “real” images of cute li’l Jeffy and Billy, I came across dozens and dozens of anti-Family Circus sites. After a while, I started to have more respect for FC creator Bil Keane. He clearly knows exactly how to poke a sharp stainless steel dental tool into the receding gumlines of Goth punks all across the country. To inspire that kind of loathing is no small achievement. Go Bil!

Anyway, my favorite anti-FC site was over at the Progressive Boink. This is the kind of critique I enjoy. Instead of saying Family Circus = LAME, he really deconstructs it. For instance:

In the comic presented here, Billy explains that he is “mousebreaking” Jeffy. Perhaps Billy meant to say “housebreaking,” because “mousebreaking” is not a word. But even if he did spell “housebreaking” right, it doesn’t make any sense, because Billy is teaching Jeffy to use a mouse, not a toilet.

The great thing about pop culture is that if you love it, then you love it, and if you hate it, then you can sit around and talk about why the hell so many people love it. Either way is a win.

Very simple and nicely designed, 300 Images From 1800 Sites has a clip-art-ish collection of icons gathered from sites all over the web. The juxtaposition of, say, 87 shopping carts makes a lovely little magpie shell collection… so many designers struggling to be original in a tiny 16-by-16 pixel space! You can almost hear the conversations: “Can you punch up that tiny mail envelope icon so it looks a little more edgy, so it’s all floaty and fast with a little dangerous-looking zing to it? Like this would be the envelope your parents wouldn’t let you date, you know, but not in a scary way? Could you do that by tomorrow? Thanks!”

Question: can you spot the ugly Amazon shopping cart?

The Trixie Update is an obsessive baby blog about a little nine month old named Trixie. They (it seems to be mostly the dad who’s doing all the posting) record all kinds of data, things you might wonder about as a parent, but when on earth would you bother to collect the data? For instance: how long will one thousand diapers last? Answer: three and a half months. The sleep log is particularly interesting. They know total amount of milk consumed yesterday (32.7 ounces), and the number of minutes since last diaper change. It just goes on and on! The spectacle of Milk Week alone is worth the price of admission.

Ben MacNeill, the man behind the site, is even releasing software so that you too can obsessively track your baby’s every poop and pee: the Trixie Tracker.

If he can do this much with an infant child, he must have moved worlds before he had a kid.

Suppose it was your job to label pictures with descriptive tags. You’d type in things like PICNIC, LIGHTNING for a picture. Then it would be easy for someone who needs pictures of a stormy picnic to find what they needed. Labeling pictures is very hard to automate, but very useful. So suppose it was your job to label 1000 pictures. Or 100,000 pictures. Or perhaps even 3 million pictures. What would you do?

Some clever people at Carnegie Mellon have come up with a perfect Tom Sawyer hack: turn labeling pictures into a fun game, and people all over the web will spend their spare time doing it. Apparently it’s working like a charm, because they claim to have labeled more than 3 million pictures using the ESP Game. You get paired up with another person, and the object is for you to agree on a label in the shortest amount of time. In the meantime, you generate labels furiously that all get logged into a database for later consumption. Brilliant. (Thanks, Jenifer!)

I asked Kristin how her cool “what I’m reading now” display works. The magic behind the scenes is based on two nifty adaptations of Amazon’s generous web services: MTAmazon and BookQueue. MTAmazon makes it easy (via special tags) to provide information about any book that Amazon sells. BookQueue, when used in conjunction with MTAmazon, helps you manage lists of books. As an ensemble, it’s a beautiful illustration of how heterogeneous tools with clean APIs can work together in an open environment.

Thus inspired, I created a new book blog, Star Chamber Books. I’ve tried over the last year or two to build some useful tools for managing lists of books, but none of them worked very well. Too much work. I love books, and I enjoy managing lists of books that show what I’ve read and what I’m going to read. But even so, I was getting tired of writing special code myself. This way the special code problem belongs to somebody else.

Here’s a nice example of a what photo albums will look like in the future.
Ron and Taylor’s Road Trip takes all of the photos taken during a road trip and puts them, through the magic of GPS, in exactly the right cartographic context. The first page all by itself tells a great story of where the trip went and what was seen. GPS-enhanced cameras seem like such an obvious idea to me, I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of them on the market. You’d never have to ask the question “Where was I and when did I this picture?” The next thing I want to know is exactly which way the camera was pointing. Then I want a back massage and strong drink. The wish list goes on from there, but I’ll leave it at that.

Be sure and click on the little satellite images on the right side of the page.

Check it out. Erstwhile Star Chamber denizen Rob “The Coffee Czar” Mauceri has a professional blog over at Microsoft: FrontPoint. Rob works on the FrontPage team. He’s joining Robert Scoble and Chris Pratley as inside-the-Redmond-beltway bloggers. Go Rob!