Category: Uncategorized

Once on a business trip from Boston to Stockholm, I had a brief morning layover in Amsterdam’s Schiphol International Airport after an all-night flight over the Atlantic. Bleary-eyed and sleep-greasy, I stepped into the men’s lounge to freshen up a bit and lounge. While I was in the process of lounging, I was surprised to see a fly in the urinal. Actually it was a picture of a fly in the bottom of each of the urinals. There was something oddly amusing about this. Why would they put a fly there? Of course, human nature being what it is (okay, man nature being what it is) I couldn’t stop myself from leaning in that direction. Hey, that fly was looking for trouble.

The Dutch are the most sensible, straightforward people in the world. There must be some reason for this display, and it must have to do with its magnetic attraction on nearby downpours. I thought about taking a picture of the urinal… but didn’t. And I have since regretted not taking that picture, because it’s a funny little story.

Still, if the 21st century has taught us anything so far, it’s that you can find anything on the web. So it is with the Fly UI. This link is to a weblog that looks at the urinal’s design from a user interface point of view, and includes the feedback of several honest-to-goodness Dutch industrial designers.

As long as we’re on this subject, I have to mention the mysterious pre-flushing Japanese urinals. Japan, like many other countries, has lots of infra-red triggered self-flushing urinals. No need to touch the hardware… do your business and walk away. But I noticed that many of these automatic urinals in Tokyo flushed briefly just as you stepped up and got comfortable. I couldn’t figure out why they’d waste the water until I realized it subtly encouraged the priming of the pump. The little splash and whoosh gets the ball rolling sooner (à la Pavlov), fights stage fright in a self-conscious country, and probably increases crowded bathroom throughput by 25%. That’s my theory, anyway. Anybody out there know better?

If you had to catch a roadrunner somewhere in the Great American Southwest, where would you turn for quality roadrunner-catching equipment? Where else but the Original Illustrated Catalog Of Acme Products. Someone has spent a lot of time grabbing images off video to put together a catalog of every Acme product placement across many years of Warner Brothers’ cartoons. There are some pre-Roadrunner examples, but the obvious acme of Acme comes with Wile E. Coyote (super-genius). Scroll through the list… it’s long and comprehensive. I had no idea there were so many. Look for the Iron Birdseed and Giant Magnet combination, the Indestructo Steel Ball, the Dehydrated Boulders, and the Jet-Propelled Pogo Stick. They’re all there.

A few thoughts: First of all, I’m impressed that this plucky little Acme company negotiated such an lucrative product placement deal with Warner Brothers. Second, these guys should probably prune some of their slow-moving items (e.g. Do It Yourself Tornado Kits) and branch out into less esoteric products if they want to maintain solid growth. Finally, their e-commerce catalog site sucks. I tried to order some Rocket-Powered Roller Skates, and I couldn’t get anywhere. Bottom line: downgrade Acme Products (NYSE ticker ACME) to weak hold.

Have you ever wondered how place names came to be so different, depending on the language? Paris is still Paris in French or English, although the Italians prefer to call it Parigi. We get the Italians back, though, by calling Firenze Florence. It doesn’t even sound the same! But it does offer a clue as to what’s going on. Firenze, formerly Fiorenza, comes from the same word, flower, as the name Florence.

But when it comes to alternate naming, Germany wins some kind of prize, I think. Even the name of the country is variously given as Allemagne, Deutschland, and Germany. In Estonian, Germany is Saksamaa, and in Hungary it goes by Németország, but if I start throwing around Hungarian we’ll be here all day. And how do I know, you may well ask, the Estonian and Hungarian words for Germany? Because I was lucky enough to come across a multilingual map of Europe and European exonyms. With it you can see what Europe looks like to a Hungarian, but perhaps most intriguing, you can make it so that each country displays its own preferred local name in the appropriate script. Of course even this doesn’t help the Swiss much, who still need all four labels Svizra, Schweiz, Svizzera, and Suisse. Sheesh. What would a similar map of India look like?

I learned about all this from a good post on Geoff Cohen’s Coherence Engine blog. Geoff took a stab at making his own Real Map of Europe before somebody pointed him to the much slicker site described above.

Finally, why is Köln commonly called Cologne outside of Germany? I once had an argument with a German person who blamed this sad fact on post-WWII American hegemony. She was unconvinced when I pointed out that Cologne is a French name that’s been around since before 1945. Still, I was curious. I found a dandy page from a genealogy site that explains it all. Like Firenze (and so much of Europe) both names spring from the same Latin root name, in this case Colonia Agrippina (named by Emperor Claudius in honor of his good-for-nothing wife). So the word colony is the source of the name. So there you go.

More ambient devices in the news. The one that caught my eye today is a “My Traffic” widget that shows, with a simple little clock-like device, how long your commute home is going to take. Unfortunately, I saw that in the print version of Technology Review, so I can’t link to it yet. But the idea is that you program in your route on their server and they talk to the traffic databases to figure out how long it should take. I don’t know how well it works, but it fits in nicely with their philosophy, which is to fold a lot of data into one simple message.

Ambient Devices lists several other product applications that illustrate their philosophy in action, things like weather prediction displays and stock market monitors. According to them, ambient information lives in a sweet spot between push and pull. You don’t go looking for it, and it doesn’t intrude. But you are gently made aware of when you should act.

Think about unobtrusive background information in your workplace that might nevertheless make you get up from your desk and do something. On a sunny afternoon the sky might suddenly go dark and remind you that your car windows are down. Or your stomach might hear “Happy Birthday” down the hall and think of free cake. My favorite example of ambient data comes from when I worked at NASA. My building contained almost exclusively male engineers, and had long echoing corridors with hard floors. Whenever a woman wearing any kind of high heeled shoe came by, the sound was unmistakable, and a dozen mechanical and aerospace engineers would lean out of their offices to take a look. I don’t think they even realized they had been trained by the sound, let alone how rude it looked. It was just a gentle click that correlated with desire, thereby generating heat and motion. Then it was back to the computer.

At work today my friend Jason mentioned a cool music theory site. What is it called? Musictheory.net, of course. It’s published by a guy named Ricci Adams, and it’s darn good. The site is spare and cleanly designed, and it covers a huge amount of ground. As I review the site, I’m just astounded at how much work Ricci has done all for me. Or at least it seems that way. It’s free, and it’s got a bunch of stuff I’ve always wanted to have in one place. The list goes on and on: interval, key, and triad reading… interval, scale, and chord ear training. Check out this chord calculator. I’ve seen a lot of these things, and this is the best I’ve come across. There’s even an exercise devoted to teaching you to distinguish by sound those wacky church modes with the Greek names. Do you know your Phrygian from your Mixolydian? I think not. And now you have no excuse for not brushing up. For future reference, the Phrygian mode has that distinctive minor 2nd, and should not be confused with the “Hypophrygian” plagal mode.

Now look, here’s a guy who’s only a junior in college who’s made a major publication that helps people all over the world. That’s just got to cheer you up.

After I posted about the Ladybug game on Ken Perlin’s site, Kim said it reminded her (in a roundabout way) of the pig stacking game. “The pig stacking game?” said I, “What game? What pigs?” These Pigs.

It’s a pretty quiet, meditative kind of game. I kept trying to stack them up so they would fall over, but it was no go.

Happy equinox! The nights are lengthening, and the stores are starting to fill with Halloween merchandise. One of the cool things about living in New England is that there are lots of nifty old cemeteries to visit. If you’re ever looking for an authentic creepy autumn vibe, you can take a stroll and look at the headstones. Among the very old headstones there are common motifs that come up again and again, like the winged death’s head and the urn and willow. I always wondered what the dang deal was about these images, and a recent post on Peter Merholz’s peterme.com set me straight. Not only is there a great paper about this topic available online (Death’s Head, Cherub, Urn and Willow by James Deetz), but it also has terrific data visualization graphics. A double bonus! Watch as the mysterious Death’s Head morphs into a Merry Cherub by means of cultural memetic evolution and geographic dispersal.

Here’s the big question: by learning about something mysterious, do you make it more or less mysterious?

The Rambles Bookshop is back in business. It’s been a long time since I touched it, but I’ve reworked some of the publishing magic that makes it work (MATLAB, XML, and stylesheets…) so it should be easier to manage from now on. I’ve just finished James Gleick’s book on Sir Isaac Newton that I recommend to you. Here is what I said about it in the bookshop…

Who was Isaac Newton? In his own age, Newton was a god of reason who created a perfect and perfectly rational universe. To a later and more romantic age, he became a monster, a bizarre unsociable creature who stripped the world of its rich mystery. More recently he has been outed as a closeted mystic who delved deeply into religious prophecy and alchemy. As John Maynard Keynes famously pronounced, “Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.” Which Newton do you see? James Gleick does a fine job in this book of telling the story not only of the man, but of how he was perceived. After all, where exactly are the lines that separate magic, religion, and science? They are foggy enough even now, and in the 17th century they were indiscernible. Newton, in pursuing occult matters, wasn’t engaged in a childish sideshow. He was doing the same thing that led him to his law of universal gravitation. He could not know that his investigations into the biblical prophecies of Daniel would not lead him to results as fundamental as his physics. He was simply doing what he did better than anyone before or since: observing, theorizing, experimenting, and systematizing. In so doing he sharpened the lines between what we now think of as the clear and separate domains of science, magic, and religion, though this was certainly not his intent. It’s just that his science succeeded where his theology did not. But who can blame him for thinking that his vision could penetrate any topic? Gleick’s book is very good, a sympathetic and rounded portrait of a strange and extraordinary man.

A friend at work pointed me to Ken Perlin’s homepage, and my goodness, what a lot of cool stuff he has on his site. Professor Perlin is a very busy man. There are a bunch of nifty applets to play with, but one I spent a while messing around with was the highly addictive ladybug game. The path planner applet is also nice, and looks like the it might make the basis for a future MATLAB programming contest.

I never did manage to win that ladybug game.

I should have known the lion by his claw… Martin Wattenberg is at it again. From Matt Jones’s excellent blog blackbeltjones, I found this fascinating report on recent work at IBM on something called history flow. History flow is a way to visualize the history of a living document. And the really nice touch here is that they chose to visualize the history of wiki articles in Wikipedia, particularly those that have sensitive topics like Islam, abortion, evolution, and Iraq. Not surprisingly, this last one grew dramatically as American and British troops prepared to attack.

Only after admiring the tremendous coolness of history flow for a while did I stumble across the fact that Martin was behind it. Matt Jones realized this a few days later, and added these thoughts, which will give you a little more information on Martin. About the same time, Clay Shirky, the ever thoughtful groupware pundit, rang in with a few thoughts of his own.

In a much more limited way, this is similar to work we did analyzing the entries of the MATLAB programming contest by watching who changed the code where, how much, and what difference it made. It would be fun to apply the history flow code to the contest database, particularly since we have a performance metric that the wiki prose lacks.

I was also reminded of Ben Fry’s haplotype plot, because after all, a genome is really just a kind of wiki that’s been subjected to natural selection. It seems only fitting that the history flow concept should apply here too. I know about some other fun haplotype visualization work done at the Whitehead by Gabriel, et al (including my friend John Higgins) last year: The Structure of Haplotype Blocks in the Human Genome. Science 296:2225-2229. I’d give you the link to it, but the Science site is down right now, and they hide the article behind a subscription barrier anyway. But it is certainly intriguing to consider the history flow of your genome extending back to your trilobite cousins. It’s a long story, but a hell of a read.