Rambles Blog at Star Chamber

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.

Technology Research News is a good summary science news site. I guess they’re a print magazine too, something like the Tech Review (only much more modest), but I’ve never seen the print version. All the TRN stories represent original reportage, as opposed to pass-through portals like EurekAlert and the ACM TechNews page. The knowledge spew is so dense these days that it really pays to find editors you like to get you straight to the good stuff.

It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a year since The Onion’s story on the Sept. 11 Anniversary: Two Weeks Later. Take a trip back in time to that memorable 25th of September in 2002. I’ll always remember where I was when I first read that article somewhat later that same week.

Closer to home, why not read (or re-read, for a few devoted Star Chamber readers out there) my thoughts from two weeks after the two week anniversary of the attack.

This is a very popular link these days, but my God! you can’t help but be impressed by these illusions. Stare at them for a little bit and you will get a headache. Stare at them for five minutes, and blood will start squirting out of your eyeballs. Or, as psychology professor Akiyoshi Kitaoka says on his illusions page:

Caution: This page contains some works of “anomalous motion illusion”, which might make sensitive observers dizzy or sick. Should you feel dizzy, you had better leave this page immediately.

He knows what he’s talking about. I nearly emptied out a conference room this morning by projecting these on the screen. On this page he has the explicit warning: “Caution!! The figure shown below might made you feel sick.” But really, nothing can compare with this one… make someone look at it for a full minute on a dare: Koma. Powerful stuff. Here are his latest works.

Well, I’m back after a nice weeklong vacation in Provincetown. Lots of good stuff to blog about, but something that really caught my eye this morning in the Boston Globe was the report about fuel cells that use bacteria to generate electricity directly from sugar. The old-fashioned way to do this was to ferment the sugar with yeast, distill the resulting ethanol, then burn that to generate electricity. But now we can cut out the middle man, thanks to Rhodoferax ferrireducens. Here’s the Globe article that explains the dang deal:
New fuel cell uses germs to generate electricity. The article ends with this fun quote:

“There is a scene in `Back to the Future’ where they throw a banana in the car and off it goes,” said Lovley. “We are not at that stage yet, but this is a big step from what these fuel cells were able to do before.”

I’ve often thought of that very scene when contemplating the future of power generation. And verily that day might come.

The Globe article is pretty good, but it will disappear from view soon. Here’s an article from GNN about the same thing. This one includes a nice snapshot of the bacterium in action. Pretty soon you’ll be intentionally spilling Coke on your laptop in order to recharge it. How do you suppose Word behaves on a sugar high?

My niece Sarah is in town for the week. While we were out eating dinner, her friend Paul mentioned the deranged and wonderfully cranky Maddox site, The Best Page in the Universe. Specifically, we talked about the page I am better than your kids, in which he criticizes the bad artwork of children. Because, you know what? Your five year old can’t draw his way out of a paper bag. It’s hard to argue with the guy. He’s got a lot of good ‘n’ cranky noise up on his site. For an example, see his latest post, poetically entitled “Not sure if you’re an idiot? Play it safe and don’t send me email.”

While we were on our making-fun-of-the-very-young jag, Sarah remembered the old Onion article Study Reveals: Babies are Stupid. Once again, it’s hard to argue the point. Or as the lead for the story says

A surprising new study released Monday by UCLA’s Institute For Child Development revealed that human babies, long thought by psychologists to be highly inquisitive and adaptable, are actually extraordinarily stupid.

A few years ago, my friend Rob (who works at Microsoft) pointed me to the work of Scott Berkun. Up until very recently, Berkun was a sort of in-house evangelist for good UI design at Microsoft. He has lots to say about design at his UIWEB.COM site. There are many web sites out there about web and user interface design, but Berkun seems to be particularly good at dishing out practical advice that you can put right to work. Here’s an essay that caught my eye: How to get the most out of conferences. Anything can be designed and optimized, including how to go to a conference. Is this obsessive or helpful? Maybe both… I found it entertaining, at any rate.

I have always enjoyed asking people how they solve problems that nobody teaches you answers to. How do you read the newspaper? Where do you start and how do you know when you’re done? How do you choose which line to wait in at the grocery store? And this conference question is another good one: how do you like to “do” conferences? Do you float and filter-feed like a jellyfish or attack like a shark? Mary Beth, our usability lead at the MathWorks, likes to focus on a big question for each conference. It gives her a way to start conversations and solve a real problem that’s on her mind. For instance: what is your company doing about online vs. paper documentation? As for Berkun, giving a presentation is highest on his list of things worth doing, and watching a paper session is lowest. It may be better to give than to receive, but if everybody’s talking and nobody’s listening then… hello? Are you still there? Hello?