Category: Uncategorized

If you haven’t seen it yet, take a spin past newsmap, a news visualization program. It’s designed to take advantage of the space-dividing treemap algorithm made popular by SmartMoney’s Map of the Market. The big idea is that the amount of ink a story is getting in the national press is reflected by the amount of area dedicated to that story in newsmap interface. It’s a nice idea because we are in desperate need of landscape views of our shared information space.

Huge amounts of information won’t wreck our brains or make us babble incoherently. It’s just that we’ll be inefficient and stressed-out until we solve this problem of taking it all in. What we need is some altitude.

I’ve been talking up the benefits for RSS aggregation, but it’s been a while since I reconsidered my choice of aggregator. I use an old horse called Aggie. It looks like it was thrown together by a grad student, but it’s been working very well for me despite its plain appearance. Last week, someone at work was singing the praises of Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon. It costs $30, as compared to Aggie (free) and another highly rated aggregator, SharpReader (also free). I’ve been trying FeedDemon for the past couple of days, and it is a nice piece of work. Slick-looking, and fast, it only has one problem. It’s built like a newsreader, and I hate newsreaders. Specifically, I dislike having to mark things in great big lists as having been read or not. I only want to see what’s new since the last time I ran the program. FeedDemon lets me do that, but I’m constantly having to select lots of entries and mark them as read. FeedDemon is a well-executed design built on the wrong model. Aggie is three-cylinder amateurish-looking design that is built on exactly the right user model. I haven’t seen anybody else using Aggie’s build-a-single-HTML-page approach, and I don’t know if Aggie has any staying power. I hope they do… or that someone else picks up their model. In the meantime, I’ll save myself $30.

When you fly across the country on a jet, you’re used to seeing an oblique view of the landscape with the horizon plainly visible. Most pictures you’ve seen from space, on the other hand, are taken looking more or less straight down. But this turns out to be a matter of convenience and convention more than anything else. Planes don’t have glass-bottomed viewing galleries, and satellites don’t look sideways at the planet. But the International Space Station does offer spectacular airplane-like views of Earth. Look at this picture of Everest and Makalu from NASA’s Earth Observatory Newroom. Be sure and click on the full-size image link… it’s mesmerizing. The view is from Tibet, and Everest actually looks like the second tallest mountain in the picture. I remember years ago looking at fanciful National Geographic diagrams of what a view from this vantage might look like. To actually see it naked before you like this is almost… pornographic.

Ever wonder why Newark International Airport has the three letter code EWR? This article explains it all: Airport Codes: History and Explanation. In the case of Newark, it turns out that the Navy lobbied to have the initial letter N all to itself, so Newark had to make do without it. Similarly the letter W is off limits as a first letter. Why? Because the FCC says that radio stations east of the Mississippi get to start with W. Fair enough, but I wouldn’t have guessed that airports codes had to swim in the same bathtub as radio stations. As a result, the Wilmington airport in North Carolina limps by with a flaccid ILM. I always wondered…

It seems that funny names for Britain’s underclass are much in the news of late. Over at Ben Hammersley’s blog I came across this list of labels: Chavs, Neds, Townies, Kevs, Charvers, Steeks, Spides, Bazzas, Yarcos, Ratboys, Kappa Slappers, Skangers, Janners, Stigs, Scallies. He rounds off the post with a mention of Pikies. Wondering what the connotations of this last were, I asked Google, who sent me to the UrbanDictionary.com. It’s an idea that I very much like: anyone can submit a definition of a slang term, and people vote for the definitions they like. Who better to compile the people’s dictionary than the people? There are things in here that Meriam-Webster just won’t tell you. The number one pikie definition is: “a term used for a common, unfashionable looking youth, usually wearing unsurpassable amounts of gold jewellery and reebok ‘classics’.”

To see if this urban dictionary was any good, I tried out the word “props”. This is a slang term that appears in phrases like “mad props to my peeps, yo.” I understand it from context, but where does it come from? I was pleased to get a satisfying answer: props = proper respects. So: mad props to the urban dictionary, yo.

My friend Judy pointed me to Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words. It’s a great site for learning things like where the phrase tripping the light fantastic comes from (John Milton. Who knew?). What Judy sent me was an entry that says, among other things, that neds are young louts in Scotland. Google for “neds” and “Scotland” and you’ll find a load of stuff from the BBC’s Chewin’ the Fat show. They have an “Are you a ned?” test with a post-test Nedometer to tell you how you’ve done. There are also the NedOlympics (including a game in which you try to smash windows with bricks). But I most enjoyed the Neducation page. It has a variety of helpful phrases translated for your convenience. I’d transcribe one of them here, but I couldn’t understand them.

By the way, according to the Ned Test, I’m only half a ned. I was told

You could do dot tae dot on yer coupon that you’ve that many plooks, ‘n’ ye can handle yer buckie ‘n’ yer jellies, but you’d be keechin’ in yer joggies if it came to a proper square go.

I am about to show you a simple doctored photograph of a woman’s face. But it has been so artfully rearranged that your brain will insist that your eyes are malfunctioning somehow and it will fight to resolve the image into something that it isn’t. If you’re anything like me, this process will give you a headache very quickly. It all goes to show what an active process seeing is. You think you’re just passively taking in the world, but in fact you’re busy busy busy constructing it all the time. It takes an illusion like this to drive that point home.

Here you go: Are U drunk.

Roy showed me this site for teeny tiny pilots: Micropilot. The site bears the tagline “Miniature, Low-Cost, UAV, RPV, RC Autopilots and Autonomous GPS Navigation,” which means that, assuming you have the cash, it’s getting easier and easier to be the pilot of a remote control plane. Tell one of these planes where to fly, and it will take itself there automatically. Want to have an airborne camera loiter over your neighbor’s pool? This is the plane for you. These planes are the civilian versions of what the military is used for battlefield surveillance in Iraq. The sinister side of this boon of cheaper and smaller and better is that it’s getting much easier for the other guy too. Want to land a miniature plane on the roof of the White House? This is the plane for you. What you choose to put on that plane is your own business.

Wait till the hornet-sized assassin planes start coming out.

How you feel about this news tidbit is a good indicator of where you fall on the lawyer vs. doctor spectrum. The NY Times has this rather menacingly-titled article: Hire a Lawyer, Forget About a Doctor? A bunch of doctors in Texas put together a website that records people who have sued their doctors for malpractice. They are careful to say this is not a blacklist, but they were obviously fed up with the number of suits going on. This is publicly available information, and accountability works both ways: if you deserve good medical care, don’t physicians deserve reasonable patients?

So what’s the name of the website? DoctorsKnowUs.com. And what do you see on this website? This:

DoctorsKnow.Us has permanently ceased operations as of 3/9/04. The controversy this site has ignited was unanticipated and has polarized opinions regarding the medical malpractice crisis. Our hope is that this controversy will spark a serious discussion that results in changes that are equitable to both patients and physicians.

Too bad. Doctors still need patients to stay in business, and the marketplace of patients seems to hate this idea enough to shut it down. But doctors don’t have to stay in business.

This idea is too good to die here. I predict other sites like it will pop up quickly.