Category: Uncategorized

Webcams are now passé. Anybody can install a camera pointing at a ski slope or a bored coed (or a bored naked ersatz coed). But if a picture is worth a thousand words, we can agree at least that more work is required to paint a prose picture of what’s going on in front of the computer. In fact, the Rambles Weblog (actually, its Star Chamber parent organization) owns a Texas Instruments TI-2100 ProseCam. Take a look at these scenes captured on the ProseCam. The latest models are apparently much more lyrical… our 2100 is already a few years old now. TI is planning to introduce a TI-5000 PoetryCam next spring (see Gizmodo), but I heard they’re having big problems integrating the Taiwanese scansion unit. (You may have seen the HaikuCam for sale at Spencer Gifts; it’s a joke and should be avoided.)

Do you have an emotional response to your car keys?

A few years ago I bought a new car with one of those nifty keychains that magically unlocks the car when you push a button. Everybody has them now; I was just a late adopter. I assumed that it would be an added convenience, and it was. What surprised me was that using this little wireless gadget would have a noticeable emotional component as well.

Let’s say that, after a long day, I am walking across a cold dark parking lot towards my car. I reach into my pocket as my car comes into view, and I push the little button that unlocks the car. When it flashes its lights and opens its doors for me, I am pleased. And if I’m relatively far away when it “catches sight of me,” so much the better. It’s just like a dog wagging its tail because it’s happy to see me. On the other hand, if the battery is running out and it stops working reliably, it feels just like rejection. The question of a spurned lover forms in my head: “You would make me use the key?”

Years ago the first Tamagotchi virtual pets appeared. They were laughably primitive, and yet they were a pop culture phenomenon. Some people, mostly girls, had a genuine emotional response to these chunky LCD glyphs. Since then, virtual pets have grown vastly more capable and more subtle as well. The emotional attachment that people have to them has grown correspondingly. Aibo the dog is treated as a member of the family. Here’s a good quote from a Mindjack article called Building Emotional Machines.

Aibo’s proud owners dress up their puppies (although this is not recommended by Sony) and teach them personalized tricks that help them develop their own personality. The connection between owners and their pets is so strong and personal, that at one Aibo get-together, owners were able to distinguish their pets from other Aibo dogs.

Expect lots more where this came from. Maybe my next car will run circles around me excitedly when I push the “unlock” button. Is this all good or bad? It’s hard to say, but I know for certain that I would never in a million years have similar feelings about opening a car with a key. If the key didn’t work, I would curse the key, but in no sense would I feel rejected. It’s funny; every time my car opens its door for me, it’s because I pushed a button. I understand the physics. I know how the engineering works. And still, somewhere deep in my limbic system, I think to myself: Oh good! It still loves me.

I like sundials. There’s something primal about how they turn time back into a personal relationship between you and the sun. Everything has been so thoroughly digitized and stylized these days, it’s easy to forget where our basic notions of time come from. So it is both cool and oddly disturbing to see that someone has built a digital sundial. There are no moving parts or electricity. Just set it up and off you go.

The basic idea is straightforward: as the sun moves through the sky, its rays form a slightly different angle with the ground minute by minute. Imagine standing at the bottom of a deep well and seeing the sun pass overhead and then disappear within a few minutes. You can think of a tiny narrow channel carved into a plate of metal as something like a well, but it is also like a pixel that will only light up at a certain time of day. Now it’s a simple step to build a clock image out of an array of well-tuned sunlight pixels. Read the patent to see how it works in detail, if you like. Also, don’t miss the pretty pictures.

You know, it is close to Christmas.

Here’s one that’s been around for a while, but I only heard about it this week: NaNoWriMo. What is it? NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, of course, but it’s already over. Every November 1st since 1999, a bunch of well-intentioned would-be writers give themselves 30 days to write a 50,000 word minimum (around 175 page) novel. I hear you saying “Word count!? That’s all there is to it? Just come up with 50,000 words and you’re a winner?” Well, yes, that IS all there is to it, but then again, it’s not like you win a big cash prize. What you win is a purple “WINNER” label next to your name and the warm glow of satisfaction. But people take it pretty seriously all the same, and the results are posted online. Wanna read some novels? Here are several hundred to choose from.

I was impressed with the guidelines for the site. Do you think bad prose will be the result of a 50,000 word forced march? So do they:

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly. Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

If your end result is too dreadful to contemplate, perhaps you should sign up for (wait for it) … NaNoEdMo: National Novel Editing Month.

What does an artist owe you? Bill Watterson spent ten years drawing the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, and then he abruptly stopped. Do you deserve more from him? What does it mean for someone to sell out? Watterson steadfastly refuses to cash in his creation with anything other than sales of books of the strip itself, despite the fact that he’s sitting on a potential gold mine. No other comics artist has a problem with paraphernalia sales. Do you respect Watterson more now that you know this, or does it really matter?

Ultimately, your opinion doesn’t matter to Bill Watterson. He’s disappeared from sight. Here’s an investigative report from scenic Chagrin Falls, Ohio in which the author tries (unsuccessfully) to track down Bill Watterson: clevescene.com | Missing! Bill Watterson.
It sounds like the father of Calvin and Hobbes has checked out for good and is on the verge of a Salinger-like crackup. His intentions sound noble but… what happens if you start to think that “selling out” means any interaction with other human beings? First you don’t want to be the media’s whore, then you won’t be anyone’s whore, then you stop shaking hands. We’re all selling out all the time. Stop selling out and you stop living. Saints and fascists occasionally impress, but mostly they’re really really boring. [via MetaFilter]

Nick Denton knows how to work the web in a way that evaded hundreds of erstwhile startups. He’s the man behind certified web successes Gawker (a dishy New York blog), Gizmodo (a geeky gadget blog), and now Fleshbot (a naughty blog; beware that last link!). What he’s done right is get the appropriate scale and medium. The medium is a blog, and the scale is one (or very few) paid staff. Pick the topic well, hire some good writers, and you can get yourself quite a readership. As a result, Denton is the focus of the first real post dot-com-apocalypse next-big-thing buzz. Even though he isn’t really making any money yet. When even the New York Times joined in the buzz, Denton got positively nostalgic for his days of obscurity. He says

Honestly, I liked the recession better. No one cared about blogs except for the under-employed lunatics who wrote them, and their under-employed friends. There was all the time in the world, to find under-appreciated writers, and develop an audience.

As he points out a bit later, crash or no crash, Americans are just naturally exuberant. For instance: Federal law and good sense may prohibit me from calling this the start of something Really Big, but just between you, me, and the hard drive, this is the start of something REALLY BIG.

By the way, to give you a taste of the bitchy tone that’s served Gawker so well, read what Gawker has to say about the Times article.

JungleScan is nifty service chronicled in Amazon Hacks that tracks over time the sales rank of many thousands of Amazon items. Add any item you want, and it will automatically go on the list. You can easily imagine that any author who knows about this service would be a regular, even neurotic, visitor to the JungleScan page for their book: “How am I doing today?”

Here’s an example. Benjamin Franklin is one of my heros. A few years ago I was looking for a good book about him, and I was surprised that there were no relative recent readable biographies of him. A few years passed, and BANG! now there are three, not to mention the superb recent PBS special. I conclude that I am either on the vanguard or stunningly average in my desires, depending on how you look at it. Anyway, two of the Franklin books are in the JungleScan database. Here is the chart for Edmund Morgan’s “Benjamin Franklin”, currently ranked at 7311. Here is Walter Isaacson’s book of the same title, now ranked at 22. Obviously Isaacson is giving Morgan a nasty spanking in the sales department, but it’s also interesting to look at the 90-day trendlines and try to guess at other dynamics going on. For instance, did the introduction of Isaacson’s book increase sales for Morgan’s? Maybe so.

As a kid, one of my favorite parts of Sesame Street was when they’d do a segment on how bottles get made or candy bars get wrapped. To this day, I’m fascinated by the machines that turn raw or partially completed materials into the consumer goods we see in the store. These days we’re absolutely swamped by high quality sleekly designed super-processed goods. These things appear magically, having been created far far away and cheaply transported to to our fingertips. We lose touch with how their many pieces emerge from the muck and came together. Some people think the way to fight this modern materialistic loss of connection to the earth is to renounce technology, live in a dark cabin, and grow your own food. I think it’s much easier and more entertaining to visit the factories where goods are made. After all, the connection to the earth is still there. It’s just more roundabout. That only makes sorting it all out that much more fun.

The Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing at Stanford has assembled a remarkable collection of videos on how everyday items are made. Check out the video on jellybeans. It takes up to nine days to make a Jelly Belly jellybean. Even more bizarre than that is the fact that Hot Buttered Popcorn is the most popular Jelly Belly flavor. Who knew?

What’s the dang deal with these cheap Canadian drugs? Will they poison you? Are we idiots to pay so much here in the US? Is the Canadian government subsidizing the medical expenses American senior citizens? There’s a lot of trash talk going on, but when you look at the macroeconomics of it, there are some straightforward truths.

First of all, we can dispense with the idea that Canadian drugs are unregulated and dangerous. This is insulting and absurd. As for subsidy, Canadian drugstores are happy to sell to Americans. They’re making money on every sale. So where is the imbalance coming from? The problem is this: drugs cost a lot of money to invent and develop, and that expense has to be paid for across all markets. But medicine is a funny business. In broad terms, Canada, like a lot of countries, legislates low drug prices; the US lets them float. If you beat down prices one place, they need to pop up somewhere else, namely the US. All this means the US is paying for the lion’s share of new drug development. Of course we can beat down prices here too, but you won’t get many new drugs that way. Profits permit research and development. It’s a very simple equation. Everybody likes cheap pills, but the drug you really want is the one that will save your life one day but has yet to be invented.

My favorite information source on the drug industry is Derek Lowe on Corante.com. Read what he has to say on this topic, including this question: “Just how many of the best-selling drugs in Canada were invented or discovered there?”

Last fall my group from work went on an outing to Six Flags of New England. The Superman rollercoaster (they’re named after superheroes) was a real monster: you accelerate to 77 miles per hour going (what feels like) straight down and spend a mile worth of track looping and twisting before you decelerate enough to stop the train. I was pretty impressed. Here are some pictures that Matt posted from that trip. Then I remembered to check the Roller Coaster DataBase,
a “comprehensive, searchable database with information and statistics on over 1700 roller coasters throughout the world.” I wanted to see how the Superman ride stacked up against the others. It’s in the top ten in terms of speed, but there are some faster ones. Then I noticed that one rollercoaster absolutely dominates all others in the categories of speed, height, and drop: the Top Thrill Dragster of Cedar Point in Ohio. I remember reading an article in Wired about roller coasters like this long ago. I did a little more research and found this extremely entertaining review at ThrillRide.com. One hundred twenty miles per hour, 420 feet straight up and straight back down… here’s what a professional ride reviewer had to say about his ride:

[After three seconds] I can’t scream anymore. Unqualified terror and the forces pummeling my body literally strangle me into silence. We’re still accelerating. Four… Knifing through the air, the train hits 120 brain-splattering miles per hour. And now things really go berserk.

Finally, here’s a video of what it looks like in action (Windows media). I hope my group doesn’t go on any outings to Cedar Point. With enough peer pressure I might end up riding this thing.