Google Earth, viewshed, and accountability

After I finished grad school, my friend and fellow graduate Larry Alder was nice enough to invite me on a rafting trip down the wild and scenic portion of the Rogue River in Oregon (here’s another story from that same trip). This was a great treat for me, because Larry, in addition to being an excellent aerospace engineer, was also a professional river guide for a whitewater rafting company. We got the royal treatment, rafting through pristine wilderness for three days… long enough to feel that civilization was far far away. When we finally pulled the boats out and started driving home, Larry took us up an obscure and steeply pitched logging road. Just as soon as we crested the ridge, we saw the forest had been completely cut to the ground. It looked like a massive abrasion wound. The contrast was shocking, but the clear-cut area was artfully situated so as to be invisible from nearby highways and especially from the happy tourists of the Wild Rogue Wilderness area. This was an exercise in viewshed management, and it was a public relations masterstroke for the logging industry.

Here’s a Google map of the area I was in. That’s the Rogue running across the bottom right. And those yellow bald patches in the middle are clear-cut regions exactly where I remember them, just out of sight over the ridge. Try switching to the “Terrain” view to see the topography.

My trip was around twenty years ago. It’s interesting to find evidence of the same practice years later, but the obvious difference is that it’s so easy to find the evidence at all. And it’s even clearer to see what I’m talking about with Google Earth:

You don’t have to use Google Earth for more than a few minutes to see that these days a ninth grader could do an impressive quantitative analysis of clear-cut logging in Oregon for a science project. The data’s all there.

Naturally, there’s no need to stop in Oregon. Look at the corrosive effect of roads on forests along the Congo River. I look forward to hearing stories about how companies and governments are being held accountable in new ways by this new evidence. A satellite has the most expansive viewshed of all.

Enigma and the Danish school teacher

Via the Mathematical Tourist I came across this article on the Enigma machine. The short version of the story is that during World War Jr. the Germans were convinced that their code machine, known as Enigma, kept their military secrets safe. It didn’t, partly through the efforts of three Polish mathematicians and partly because of the British crypto-analysts working at Bletchley Park in England (any story that involves a machine called Enigma and a place called Bletchley Park is already off to a really good start). The story is often told as if the Polish mathematicians had spirited away a physical copy of the machine, but in fact what they had was a reasonable mathematical model of how the machine worked. This they gave to the British. Goodness ensued and Hitler was vanquished.

It’s an often told story, and I mention it here because I was so impressed with this page maintained by a Danish high school teacher named Erik Vestergaard. I consider this to be the best kind of amateur reporting, and the kind of thing that really distinguishes the Age of the Web. It’s got beautiful illustrations, lovely old photos, and deep colorful piles of mathematical detail that really tell you what happened. Vestergaard figured out how Enigma worked, and now he’s telling you. No editor, not even of a specialist book with a limited print run, would let you include all that detail. “Cut out all that boring permutation crap,” says the Editor, Mr. Book, “You’re killing your market!” But Mr. Web, the imperturbable Not-An-Editor, says “Leave it in!”

Mr. Web wins again.

Changing WordPress themes

If you visit this page, as opposed to reading my RSS feed, you may have noticed me trying out various new WordPress themes. When I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress (2.5), I wanted to start tagging my posts, and that wasn’t supported by the old theme I was using. So I tried the more modern Mandigo theme for a while, but it was a little bombastic for my taste. Now I’m trying Misty Look by Sadish Balasubramanian. Actually, I just lifted the idea for both of them from Jason Kuter, so thanks for that Jason!

I was just looking for something calm and simple. But just like when you go shopping for what used to be called “tennis shoes,” you have to sift through an improbable superabundance of doodads and splashy colors just to find something simple.

Of course, if you only ever read the feed, then none of this matters to you.

The performance of visual arts

We’re familiar with the idea of sitting and watching people play musical instruments. The rock star is an iconic figure in our culture, and YouTube has made it possible for people with mad skillz to achieve widespread acclaim even if they only ever play in their bedroom. Here is the famous Pachelbel’s Canon video that’s been viewed more than 44 million times so far. Why not watch it and add a comment to the 187,702 other comments already there?

Less familiar is the concept of visual art as a performance medium. But it’s no less entertaining when done well. I remember being mesmerized as a child watching William “The Happy Painter” Alexander on public TV as he painted kitschy mountainscapes and discoursed in a wild German accent on his philosophy of art and life. Several years ago I featured on this blog a pointer to the sand art performances of Ferenc Cako and got a huge response.

Good cheap video technology is making performance visual art ever easier to produce, and I am still smitten. When I see calligraphy, I know I’m looking at a frozen performance, but what did that performance look like? It’s so cloistered and remote that I can’t fully appreciate it. That’s why videos like this are so much fun. I look at this and say “so that’s how they do it”:

It’s like watching Michelangelo pulling David from the marble. You know he’s in there, but only the artist knows exactly where he is. I found this video on i love typography, a marvelous site. Here’s another video on Pointed Pen Copperplate Calligraphy. It’s a little long, so take my advice: just go straight to 6:40 and watch him write “The End”. It’s worth it. I ask myself the same question I ask when I watch a brilliant guitarist: how did all that magic end up in that man’s fingers?

One final video, this time on time-lapse photography of sculpting, video sculpting using a program called ZBrush. And if sculpting with software doesn’t sound sufficiently compelling, really, you should just look at the video.

The iSousaphone

I was digging around for some Sousa marches on Memorial Day and came up with this. It’s my new favorite YouTube video.

It’s a video, transmitted over the internet, of a phonograph playing a 78 RPM recording of a man playing an arrangement for organ of Sousa marches. When I first saw it, it was streaming wirelessly to my iPod in the kitchen, which sort of enhanced the effect. I like the unsteady cinéma vérité nature of the handheld camera work. And the zoom in the middle is almost like when Luke is attacking the Death Star at the end of Star Wars. Whoa! How close are you going to get to that thing?! Throw in some 3-d goggles and you’d be dealing with some serious vertigo.

The whole thing makes a good history lesson. Kids these days just don’t understand. Why in my day, we had to look at betamax videos of phonographs playing 78 RPM recordings of Sousa marches.

How does my iPod know where I am?

For years my wife has wanted to be able to check email from the kitchen downstairs. Seven years ago she convinced me to buy a laptop for this purpose, but it didn’t get used much, partly because of some trouble with the mail client she was using at the time… checking for mail from two different locations is a pain from a non-web client. Since then she converted over to Gmail, which solved that problem. So she wanted to try again with the old computer. We even went to the trouble of refurbishing the old crappy seven year old laptop (she insisted), and oy! what a dog it was! It worked, but everything took so long.

The solution to the problem turned out to be an iPod touch. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s amazing how much better a computer it is than that old laptop. It’s small and handy and also doubles as the source of music in the kitchen.

The iPod touch is essentially a really thin iPhone without the talky part (or the camera, sadly). It can’t make calls, but it can talk to a WiFi network. I knew it had the basic features I wanted, but I was nervous about the virtual keyboard being too much of a nuisance. I am happy to report that it makes an excellent kitchen computer, especially in a kitchen as small as ours. The instant-on startup time is a wonderful thing, compared to even a modern laptop, and the wireless connectivity is terrific. My son Jay is autistic, so I spend a lot of time walking around near him to make sure he’s not getting into trouble. The touch has just the right form factor for carrying unobtrusively while I check email and Twitter, and then slipping into my pocket when Jay needs my attention.

It took me a long time to get with the mobile revolution, but I’m happy with this as an entrée.

One thing I’m still puzzled about. The mapping application, Google Maps, works really well, and if you push the little “tell me where I am” button, it accurately positions you on the map. I knew this feature existed, but I thought it worked because of cell phone tower location technology. But this iPod is not a cell phone. I would have guessed that all it knows is my IP address, and I didn’t think IP addresses could be pinned down to within a hundred yard radius. So… how does my iPod know where I am?

Historic “Blockbuster” Store

This is a fine example of what The Onion does best. The premise is simple and potentially very unfunny: historical re-enactors at a carefully reconstructed “video store” of the future. But the writing and the delivery is just perfect.

http://www.theonion.com/content/themes/common/assets/videoplayer/flvplayer.swf

Historic “Blockbuster” Store Offers Glimpse Of How Movies Were Rented In The Past

I grew up in a town with a carefully re-created historical village (Old Salem), and Massachusetts, where I live now, is positively lousy with them (Plimoth Plantation, Old Sturbridge Village, and so on). I can never make up my mind if these things are living treasures or pretentious exemplars of a past that never existed, much in the same way that Monsanto’s House of the Future never will exist. I can just picture old Ben Franklin laughing himself silly, his face wet with tears, as he takes a tour of modern day Colonial Williamsburg.

Watching a bad re-enactor perform is painful in the extreme, but even the good ones make me want to knock them off balance with impossibly hard questions. Who is the Crown Governor of the Virginia Colony? How much did you pay for that pewter salt cellar? Who are you kidding with that ridiculous accent? And if I ever visited the Historical Blockbuster Shoppe, I would ask to rent videos that wouldn’t have been released yet. That would show them! Ha ha!

(Thanks for the Onion link Matthew!)

Brain loading and stellar chauvinism

When I meet impressive people, I always wonder how they spend their time. Let’s suppose you meet someone who can play effortless bluegrass on the banjo, quote Shakespeare at length, write luminous heartbreaking prose, and throw together an award-winning web site with their right hand while simultaneously juggling five flaming tomahawks with their left. Not bad, right? But those skills are all frozen snapshots. Those are recorded performances, and you’re just pressing the “play” button. What I want to know is: how did they get there? How in world did they load up their brain bins like that? How do they carve up the same twenty four hours that I get every day and manage to do so much with it?

I suspect, but I’m not sure, that they didn’t watch as many episodes of the Beverly Hillbillies as I did in Junior High.

When someone writes a fabulous book, or even an eloquent blog for that matter, I don’t feel like I get much insight into the crucial question of how they got there. It’s a performance. How many rehearsals did it take? But when somebody impressive twitters (there he goes about Twitter again), I feel more like I’m inside the secret process of how they load their brain. Tim O’Reilly, whom I rank in the “impressive” category, was twittering away this afternoon, and it was like peeking over his shoulder while he packed his brain for another good sprint.

One of the things that O’Reilly mentioned today was Celestia, an astronomy program. I’m a sucker for astronomy programs, especially free high-quality astronomy programs. So off I went to download it and install it. For improving the experience of stargazing, I would give the edge to Stellarium. For access to the best astrophotography, you’ll want to use Google Earth’s doppelganger, Google Sky. But Celestia has another trick. Here’s how they describe it: “Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.” It is a fun game to play.

Naturally, I flew to the most distant star I could find (HIP 88879) and looked back at our little star, and this is what I saw. What are all those blue squiggles radiating from the Sun? Those are the constellations, those curious cartoons of assorted animals and people that inhabit our sky. We’re used to seeing them flattened against the inside of the dome of heaven. But there’s no dome, right? Those zodiacal doodles connect stars that differ wildly in their remoteness, anywhere from tens to thousands of light years.

It’s very thoughtful of them to put on an animal show for us every night.

Twitter is the complement of video conferencing

It’s fairly commonplace these days for people to write an “I’m Falling for Twitter and Here’s Why” piece. For instance, here is North Carolina journalist Ginny Skalski doing an impassioned video blog post for everyone who doesn’t understand Twitter. Twitter is becoming more and more mainstream (read: boring) every day. The true early adopters have long since moved on to newer and more interesting stuff. Nevertheless, I’m Falling for Twitter and Here’s Why.

Twitter is the complement of video conferencing.

Have you ever been in a video conference? They suck. They suck because in a video conference, your job is to stay on topic. Video conferencing is Important and Expensive. You have to make Big Talk, not small talk. Of course, you can make small talk, but it’s hard. The medium works against you. And since small talk is what lubricates Big Talk, video conferences end up feeling stilted and sterile.

But on Twitter, the main thing is not Big Talk, but What You’re Doing Right Now. Which is often pretty dreary stuff. Thus the obvious, and to be fair, quite reasonable, criticism of Twitter is that it is vanity broadcasting at its most asinine. Why should I care that you re-organized your sock drawer this weekend? And do you really want to know what I found when vacuumed under the sofa?

Except.

Except that if I meet you tomorrow, it is in fact extremely valuable to know that, after much deliberation, you ultimately decided to put the athletic socks on the left and the dark socks on the right. Because I need to start a conversation with you about something Big, and there is no better place to start than with something small.

Twitter is for all the crumbs that fall off the video conferencing table. Video conferencing is about intentionality, and Twitter is about serendipity.

Serendipity is a lot more fun. And in the long run it’s a lot more valuable.

So what did you do this weekend? I want to know.

Gasoline, the new moonshine

During the Prohibition of the 1920s and 1930s, moonshine stills in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina supplied illegal alcohol to a great many thirsty Americans. But getting the booze to market wasn’t easy: drivers had to outrun and evade police along poorly-maintained mountain roads. Many of these drivers, the so-called “ridge runners”, became the first generation of stock car racers.

Now, I learn from Rob Carlson’s synthesis blog, you can run your own (legal) still. Only this time the booze is for the car itself. As this article in the New York Times reports, the EFuel100 MicroFueler is homebrew at its finest. Even if it doesn’t make much economic sense to buy one, it’s a hell of a conversation piece. And I don’t suppose they can really prevent you from making some killer Jungle Juice for your next kegger.

Now I’m on the lookout for a Pilsener Prius (or maybe a Bud Bug?), bearing this bumper sticker: “This Car Fueled by the Choicest Hops, Rice, and Best Barley Malt”