The Nietzsche Family Circus

Wow, it’s hard not to love the Nietzsche Family Circus, in which a random quote from Nietzsche is paired with a random strip from Bil Keane.

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The insipid blandness of Jeffy, Dolly, et al. is skewered on the angry Teuton’s spear of righteousness, BUT the pompous old Kraut’s gassy bombast is deflated by the chirpy Keanesian bourgeoisie of Life at Home in the Suburbs. Despite nearly tripping the irony overload circuit-breaker, there’s something sweet and true about the resulting ensemble. It’s like finding an unhurt child in terrible car accident. (Spotted at Jeff Mather’s place.)

The polysemous paragon, or How the turkey got its name

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The topic is Turkey and the question is: Which came first, the country or the bird? The country. But the next question is: Why should an Old World country be associated with a New World bird? The answer is the same as with so many other things in the New World: we tend to name new things by referring to old things that we already know. It worked like this: “Say! That funny bird (Meleagris gallopavo) over there looks like what we call a turkey cock (Numida meleagris) back home.” It’s the same reason Americans suffer with such dreadfully dull city names (“I have a great idea! Let’s call this place New York. New Amsterdam was a silly name.”).

The turkey cock (also known as a African helmeted guineafowl) was so-called because it was at one time imported through Turkey. So the funny American bird might be called The Bird That Looks Like That Bird I Know From Back Home That We Used To Buy From Those People in Turkey. Which is mercifully abbreviated to: turkey.

Okay, that’s easy enough. Polysemy is the word that applies here, and it happens all the time. It refers to the situation when the same word has different meanings, and it’s particularly interesting when there is a non-obvious connection between the two meanings that has been obscured by time.

It’s a Bohemian coffee shop.
We are going Dutch.
Would you care for some Scotch?
I’ll get out the good china.
I would like a Danish.
I am a Danish (cf. Ich bin ein Berliner)

But the really entertaining thing about the turkey is that it is some kind of champion polyseme. The word for turkey in Portuguese is peru. The French word is dinde (from d’Inde, meaning “from India”). The Turkish word for turkey is hindi. What is it about this bird that makes place names stick to it so thoroughly? Is there a reason why birds we eat get place names (Rhode Island reds, Cornish game hens) whereas birds we don’t eat get descriptive names (red-headed woodpeckers, yellow-rumped warblers)? And finally, is turkey an instance of metonymous polysemy or not?

I got launched onto this delightful topic by an entertaining and widely-cited article, How Turkey Got Its Name by Giancarlo Casale. It’s well worth reading.

(The picture shown here is a Meleagris gallopavo that started visiting my front yard last fall. You can just make out my daughter peeking out of our living room window.)

5000 years of Middle Eastern history

Jay Cz and my brother Tad both sent me this one: The Imperial History of the Middle East. It’s a nice idea. Watch 5000 years worth of history as it splashes paint across the Middle East.

http://www.mapsofwar.com/images/EMPIRE17.swf

This animated map is from a site called the Maps of War. They host a number of other interesting maps including a 90 second History of Religion with a premise similar to the one above.

Reno Balloon Race video

Here’s a video of last year’s Reno Balloon Race. I’ve seen plenty of pictures of hot-air balloons, and on occasion I’ve seen them in person, and they always struck me as docile, passive creatures. How can one balloon race another? But this time-lapse video shows just how alive they are.

Try to track just one of them around the sky. It’s a very organic scene, and somehow un-human, like a tidal pool ecosystem. The oscillatory swimming motion immediately reminded me of jellyfish. Which all makes me wonder that maybe there’s money in jellyfish races.

Music as a cottage industry: Baconworks

Depending on whether or not you’re employed by the music industry, this is either an apocalyptic end time for music or its new golden age. I know people who lost their jobs in the music industry. The professional end of the business is under great stress, but surely there has never been a better time to be an amateur musician than now.

I work with an amateur musician named Greg Bacon. Greg is a skilled performer on multiple instruments and a composer, and his genre is primarily Irish traditional music. He happens to get paid for being a database systems analyst, but the guy is a true musical wizard. Don’t take my word for it! Go to his site: baconworks.com. He’s got details about how he records his music, and then he lets you listen to it for free. He’s got MIDI files and scores in addition to some amazing performances of his original compositions. You know you’re on a musician’s web site when pages are tagged by their musical key. Here’s G major. Listen to the Hazards of Hatteras after you read about his great uncle Stinson, a windjammer captain who had no business living to 104. Great stuff, written, arranged, performed, recorded, and distributed all by one person, and at no cost to you, dear friend.

Thanks for all the music, Greg!

This embarrassing wealth of good free music presents the same paradox that I see all the time in the software world. By welcoming all the smart, motivated people around the world who want to write code even when they don’t get paid, vast quantities of shockingly good free software becomes available. What happens to the profession of software development? What happens to the paid musicians? I don’t know. But I defy you to look at this overspilling wealth and call it a problem.

Satisfying real estate data hunger

Remember the experience, from not too many years ago, of trying to tell a travel agent where you wanted to go while they got to look at a computer screen filled with tasty information? I always found it very unsatisfying. The thing I really wanted to do was just see what the heck it was the travel agent saw. Every profession has aspects of it that relate to skill, to training, and to simple access to information. Travel agents have effectively vanished because the main thing they did was control access to secret information.

Fortune magazine recently ran a cover story on Zillow about exactly this topic. It turns out that the same guys who made the Expedia travel service went on to found Zillow. Here’s what one of them, Richard Barton, had to say about information hunger.

“When we were doing focus groups on Expedia, consumers would tell us they could hear the tap-tap-tap of the keyboard when talking to a travel agent, and they wanted to jump through the phone and look at the screen,” says Barton, sitting in his office in the company’s Seattle headquarters. “Expedia was about satisfying that impulse, and that’s also what we’re doing at Zillow. The hunger for information about real estate is infinite.”

There is a growing trend of making all kinds of data available on the web. But this leads to the problem of interpretation. What does it all mean? Is it accurate? So tools for mass interactive validation and sense-making are popping up too, tools like Swivel and IBM’s Many Eyes.

But getting back to real estate, I like this little heat map application called Neighboroo. It lets you superimpose all kinds of housing, property, and census data atop the U.S. map. As is common with these kinds of tools, a lot of it is fiddly-fiddling to demonstrate something you already knew, e.g. New York City is expensive. And there’s always the dangerous temptation of inferring causation from correlation. African American population density fits together neatly with hurricane likelihood. But where do you go from there? For all this data, do you see anything that actually surprises you?

The age of organic knowledge

If you’ve never edited a Wikipedia article, I recommend the experience. Suppose, while skimming through an article, you notice a misspelled word, stray comma, or grammatical peccadillo. Hop in there and fix it! It gives you a surprisingly warm rush. For a very small effort, you’ve made the world a better place.

Here’s the funny thing about our Modern Age: we are manufacturing legions of aimless web-addled click monkeys… but we’re also putting them to work. It takes so little effort to improve a wiki that they grow with manic speed. There has never been a better time to have attention deficit disorder. Which is a good thing because… because… where was I? Oh because there have never been more of us. Web sites that harness collective intelligence, even when it appears in tiny bursts, are working wonders.

I propose that the quantity of effort required to put a single character, one byte, into a working public document be called a “wik”. Never before in history has a wik been worth so much.

It used to be that in order to create informational value, which is to say something that would prove useful to other people, you had to write a book, or at least a news or magazine article. Writing like that requires research, extended periods of concentration, attention to detail. Very high wik counts. Word processing software helps, but mostly it saves you from the drudgery that comes after the hard work of thinking up the words. But web sites like the Wikipedia do something altogether new. In chemical terms, you might say that they lower the activation energy required for information fixing. A wiki acts as a sort of thermodynamic ratchet, enfranchising swarms of the easily distracted, people who would never add a book to a library. Let’s say a novel is half a megawik. Even a short blog post is a kilowik. But the Wikipedia, like a vast unfolding sunlit tree, rewards even one humble wik.

Information is encoded energy. These knowledge harvesting systems are like miniature windmills that capture the tiny breezes generated when one person walks past another. By analogy, consider that the energy that drives nearly all the life on earth is harvested one photon at a time by molecules of chlorophyll, each one quietly jostled by a visiting sunbeam. In this sense, we are living in the age of organic knowledge.

So get in there and do your wikworth.

Say what again: typeset dialogue

The best three-word line in Pulp Fiction is delivered by Samuel L. Jackson in the middle of a pre-hit tirade: “Say what again.”

If you can’t remember the scene, watch this brilliant example of dynamic typography.

Oh, but first:

WARNING: Scorchingly naughty language in use. May singe hair or burn exposed skin. That Samuel L. Jackson got a mouth on him, my my oh yes he does.

Now here’s the scene, as rendered by Jarratt Moody (and as seen at Motionographer): Say What Again.

If you’re in the mood for something more sedate and work-safe, here’s a nifty animated poem delivered as a typographical ballet: Lost. It’s quite wide because it’s designed to display on three large separate monitors. It was created by the Dutch studio Re*Nascent (and once again, I first saw it on Motionographer).

Earth as sandwich

Ze Frank is a web performance artist who first came to prominence back at the dawn of web time with his “how to dance properly” page. Among his many creations is something called the Earth sandwich. The idea is to imagine two people standing on opposite sides of the Earth. At the same instant, they each put a piece of bread on the ground: Earth sandwich.

This is one of my favorite Google Maps mashups. Since you can click and drag the points around so easily, you learn a lot about hemispheric geography that is hard to work out with a typical map. For instance, most of the Earth’s land is above the equator. It’s actually pretty hard to find two interesting places that make a good sandwich. Argentina and China are good antipodal friends, and Spain pairs neatly with New Zealand, but mostly it’s lots and lots of water. Australia drops straight into the Atlantic Ocean, and Africa is lost in mid-Pacific.

Not only is most of the Earth’s land in the north, most of the southern hemisphere’s land is in the northern part of that hemisphere. The Cape of Good Hope, at the very tip end of Africa, looks like it goes a long way south, but in relative terms it only dips as far below the Equator as Las Vegas is above it. All of Europe is above that latitude. Only Cape Horn, poking its godforsaken toe into the circumpolar storm belt around Antarctica, pushes into what we would normally consider high northern latitudes. At 56 degrees south, it matches up with Edinburgh and the dangling tails of Alaska.

Spin the Wheel of Food at lunchtime

In answer to the annoying and oft-repeated question “I don’t know…. where do YOU want to eat?” consider spinning the Wheel of Food. The inventive Jim Bumgardner (a.k.a. KrazyDad), whose work I’ve admired here before, created a nifty Flash widget that loads nearby restaurants onto a Wheel of Fortune style spinner. Forbear preprandial procrastination: spin the wheel and close the deal. The time you save by not arguing about where to go may just score you the last good parking spot at the Hotdog Hut.

Extra bonus: hack the URL to shape the zip code and kind of food you want. Fancy a burrito in Winston-Salem, North Carolina? Take this out for a spin:

http://www.coverpop.com/wheeloffood/?zip=27104&query=mexican&go=1