Flying in the bird suit

Despite the long line of disappointed, broken, and more or less dead people who have tried to fly like a bird, it seems reasonably likely that eventually someone will succeed. They will do this not so much by flying like a bird as by safely landing like a bird. What defines flying like a bird is a matter of a pinion (sorry), but Rick sent me this NY Times video about a guy who’s making a pretty good case. He’s got a black bird suit that lets him drop from an airplane rather less like a rock and rather more like a flying squirrel. It’s a start. He still lands with the help of a parachute, but at some point he plans to dispense with that. I wish him luck. And I wonder how much his health insurance costs.

It turns out he’s not the only one perfecting a bird suit. Via tingilinde I came across this great video of someone who specializes in zipping down mountainsides, BASE jump style, in his bird suit.

Stick a cape on that man and call him a super hero. That’s got to be a serious rush.

The earliest sunset is here!

Every year this time I am compelled to point out the day in December with the earliest sunset. Where I live, that day is December 9th, which means I am now safely on the far side of the solstitial crepuscular cusp. Since I’m not an early riser, that means I’ll be seeing a little more of the sun every day from now until next summer. That, in my opinion, is worth a stiff drink and some seasonal good cheer.

sunset.png

I refer you to analemma.com if you’re puzzled as to why the earliest sunset does not coincide with the solstice. Celebrating the earliest sunset is a nicely localized tradition, since (unlike the solstice itself) the day varies dramatically depending on your latitude. Speaking of analemmas, APOD recently featured this lovely animation of the sun’s seasonal progress over New Jersey.

Also, in news astronomical, I’m glad to report that my Sky Clock is back in business again. The data source I use to locate the planets, ephemeris.com, was offline for a while, but it’s healthy again. I made an animation to show how the Sky Clock changes over one day, one month, and one year. Below is the animation for a year. Notice the arm-like lines that indicate sunrise and sunset. You can see them closing like a caliper in late December before releasing us for another year. Thank goodness.

one-year-05.gif

Pictures of the New York Stock Exchange

Whenever there’s some news about how the stock market was really awful or especially busy, you see the picture. The picture is a shot of men on the trading floor displaying the essential emotion of today’s market. On good days you get the picture on the left. On bad days you get the one on the right.

stock-exchange.jpg

There something really funny about these pictures. I always wanted to interview the photographers on this beat. I like to imagine them sitting around the newsroom, smoking cigarettes and playing gin rummy until they get the call: The market is melting down, boys! Hop down to 11 Wall and score me some pictures, pronto! But the truth is the pictures always look the same (aside from slow variations in hair style and machines visible in the background): the busy trader or the glum trader, take your pick. I secretly suspected the editors just went to the filing cabinet and pulled out the shots they needed.

Now I read in Paul Kedrosky’s blog that the trading floor is emptying out. However good it looks on TV, computerized trading means you don’t need to have guys yelling orders at each other. Pretty soon there will be no one left to photograph. But the funny thing is that the New York Stock Exchange really wants somebody to stay on the floor, because it’s good marketing. People, consumers of news, need to put a face on the market. They need to see those desperate, disheveled traders elbowing each other out of the way in order to believe something important happened. Kedrosky helpfully suggests that they hire actors to do the job.

I think the answer is simpler. What we need are stock market emoticons. Chat programs already replace the humble smiley :-) with the jazzier regular_smile.gif. We just need a Dow Industrial feed that displays Mr. Busy or Mr. Glum depending on the motion since the opening bell.

This is only a leading indicator, of course. It’s safe to say that we’ll all be portrayed by actors some day. You’ll still want to see a tall pilot-like character in the cockpit of your computer-operated plane. So also with surgeons, architects, real estate agents, and so on. Walt Disney saw it all coming years ago. At Disney World, there are no employees, only cast members.

Cellular pornography

We live in some kind of golden age of microscopy. In the old days, people relied on stains that made cells look like this.

stain.png

Useful, but not too pretty. It kills the cells too, but more to the point, no matter how useful it is, a picture like this is never going to land you on the cover of Science or secure your next grant. Not anymore. Why? Because the bar has gone way way up. This is what cellular imaging looks like now.

cell-image.png

Va-va-va-voom! It’s like some kind of crazy Post-Impressionist fruit bowl on black velvet. That picture has my vote in the 2008 presidential election.

If you want to see some racy, juicy-looking cellular images, look at the winners of the latest Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition. The honorable mentions are just as good. Look, for example, at this brainbow image and keep in mind that individual brain cells have been genetically induced to color themselves distinctly. Not only are they able to live in this state, you simply couldn’t get this kind of cell-by-cell contrast with the old heavy-handed staining approach. As a result, you can draw maps of the interconnections of individual brain cells.

I know the colors are all pumped up with computer graphics, but still, look at those pictures. I am simultaneously impressed with the image-making capability and the thing being imaged. Leeuwenhoek would be proud.

Mike O. and Industry!

Hey, I just noticed my old pal Mike O. has revived his blog (Industry!) from its state of suspended animation. He just posted the video of an oddball Tootsie Pop commercial that I also remember from childhood. When seen through my 21st century lens, it seems strangely edgy. What’s up with that blind fox? Right up to the end I was wondering if this was the actual commercial or a postmodern ironical send-up of same. It’s so hard to tell anymore.

While on the subject of old commercials that stick with you across the years, I was glad to find the old Chuck Wagon Dog Food commercial. I loved that little wagon! How did it just melt into the wall like that? It thrilled me every time.

Any commercials you particularly remember? It must be incredibly satisfying for the old retired ad men to see their material coming around again on YouTube. Look at all them cotton-pickin’ Alka-Seltzer ads.

Amory Lovins on Natural Capitalism

I recommend this series of lectures by the Rocky Mountain Institute‘s Amory Lovins. He delivered the lectures at Stanford, and they’re now hosted at the Social Innovation Conversations site.

I first came across these lectures on Jon Udell’s blog. Udell does a good job of describing them.

What you will hear, in these talks, is the distillation of a lifetime of experience in the creative optimization of the use of energy. The principles are all laid out in Natural Capitalism: integrative design, whole-system engineering, radical resource productivity, tunneling through the cost barrier. But it’s something else again to hear Lovins pile up the case studies, one after another, in a plain-spoken but cumulatively overwhelming stream of revelatory common sense.

Natural capitalism is wonderfully straightforward notion: essentially it states that capitalism is a reasonable framework for solving the world’s problems, so long as you assign reasonable value to the natural capital (clean air, forested land, mineral wealth) you consume and create. Everything belongs on the balance sheet. We suffer now because we thought of carbon dioxide emissions as a zero cost economic output that could go under the rug. Integrative design is another trend that I see rapidly becoming more prominent. And I was struck by Lovins’ use of this quote from Einstein: “I wouldn’t give a nickel for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

With these words still echoing in my ears, I was happy to read in this morning’s Boston Globe about a company called H2O Applied Technologies. According to the article, “They find ways to cut energy costs. They make energy-saving improvements. They buy and install new equipment. And they pay for everything.” They make their money by taking a cut of the resulting savings. It’s a beautiful model. No hand-wringing. No theatrics. No appeals to guilt or charity. Just profit-seeking capitalists trying to make money. If we do manage to save the world, this is how we’ll do it.

Here’s the link: Clients get energy savings, H2O shares the benefit – The Boston Globe (article may be behind a registration barrier).

Soccer vs. Rugby

I like soccer, and I don’t know much about rugby, but this is a funny video.

http://www.ifilm.com/efp

The slow-motion drama queen falls, the poor-me childlike appeals to mommy—I mean the referee—it all starts to make you wonder. If soccer players are so tough (which I don’t dispute), why do they come off like such babies?

It occurs to me that soccer happens much closer to the “edge”. The dividing line between sporting and unsporting play is very narrow. Good play means you’re almost always on the verge of a dangerous foul. The action is around your feet, so you’re more likely to be tripped than in rugby or American football. Tripping has a particularly cruel look to it. Since the resulting penalties are often severe and game-changing, the temptation to put on a show for the referee is irresistible. Soccer is a dance at the edge of a plateau. Rugby is much closer to the ground.

The video closes with the words “Forget about soccer. Leave them to cry.” You can bet that they don’t do the haka before any soccer matches.

[seen on amix.dk]

Google Sky and Comet Holmes

The latest version of Google Earth now has a projection of the sky built into called, fittingly, Google Sky. It’s a natural extension. We’ve got lots of pictures of the starry sky, so why not stick them all together using the Google Earth glue that already exists. But when I tried it for the first time, I was underwhelmed. If you want to learn your way around the stars, the freeware package Stellarium does a much better job. But I soon realized that’s not exactly the point. Google Sky can act as a focal point for aggregating shared data about the heavens just as its Earthbound sibling does for terrestrial data like storm tracks and botanical surveys. See for example this Popular Science note: Google Sky a Hit With Astronomers. Incidentally, there’s a similar professional sky-watching tool called WikiSky, but it doesn’t have a lot of the slickness of Google Sky.

google-sky.png

Anyway, I figured that somebody would have entered special data about where to find Comet Holmes in Google Sky. They had. I was able to follow a link that placed this little indicator of the comet’s location on my screen. I really liked the fact that the interface has this holdover from the Earth-facing side: directions to and from the comet. I’d like to see those directions.

Take exit 9 to merge onto I-84 W toward US-20/Sturbridge/Hartford (41.7 mi). Take exit 57 on the left to merge onto CT-15 S toward I-91 S/NY City (2.6 mi). Turn straight up and head directly toward Mirfak/Alpha Persei (25.43 million mi). Turn right onto Holmes St (1.3 mi).

[originally spotted on O’Reilly Radar]

Earth, Moon, and Sun

Did you know that the Japanese have a space ship orbiting the Moon right now? Known variously as SELENE or Kaguya, it is, as we speak, floating around the Moon, taking gorgeous high definition video. So much of our mental imagery of the lunar landscape is based on Apollo video from the early 1970s, grainy snowy pictures from another world. But video technology, happily, has gotten much much better in the intervening 25 years. And we all get to profit from Japan’s exploration.

This particular video is only YouTube quality, but it’s still mesmerizing. A tiny blue and white Earth rises over the lunar horizon at about a minute and a half into it. You may be impatient to get to the “good part”, but I beg you to press play and let it go at its own speed. There’s no soundtrack, there’s no artificial speed-up. It’s just what you would see out your window, silent as death, endlessly rolling. When our little home comes quietly calling, it is lovely to behold.

Stick around for the whole show, because at around six minutes, you see the Earth (larger this time) sink into the darkness astern your moonship.

When you’ve tired of Earth and Moon, follow this APOD link to look at the video of a massive solar flare. It makes our pale planet seem all the more fragile. I look at these astronomical videos and I have to keep telling myself: these are real. There are no special effects involved. No special effects beyond, you know, flinging delicate camera equipment into the frozen nameless void and whispering the pictures back to our breakfast tables. I guess that’s special.

WikipediaVision: Watch Wikipedia happen

On the heels of TwitterVision and FlickrVision comes WikipediaVision, a real-time Google Maps mashup that shows where edits to the online encyclopedia are occurring: that is, where in the encyclopedia and where in the world. Wikirage (rhymes with “vicarage”) does a good job of showing what pages are most actively under revision, but WikipediaVision has the advantage of drawing your eye around a map.

Self-interest is alive and well… it’s fun to watch how well-correlated location and topic are. You can also click through on the “Diff” link and see the actual edit that was made. I watched a Canadian edit a page on New France, and drilled into it only to discover it was, quel horreur! an abusive edit. It was a contemporary anatomical reference having very little to do with New France. My wiki spectating was complete when I watched the editorial wound heal over in less than two minutes as someone (and their pet bot) came along and undid the vandalism. It was a very satisfying little drama. Wikipedia is a constantly boiling pot.

[via O’Reilly Radar]