Rambles Blog at Star Chamber

Everybody is posting this one, but if you haven’t seen it yet, give it a spin. Its creator, Michael Wesch, is a cultural anthropologist at Kansas. He does a terrific job of communicating a lot of information very quickly (“using high bandwidth” as we geeks like to say) about the evolution of digital media.

In the middle of the clip you see a few quotes from Kevin Kelly’s essay in Wired, We Are the Web. In it, Kelly starts off talking about the Netscape IPO, but ends with a sweeping philosophical flourish. Whether you find the wired world frightening or thrilling, there’s no denying that we are witnessing tectonic shifts in culture and civilization. And you and I both have a front row seat.

Here’s Kelly.

Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.

The festival season is upon us. Groundhog Day may be safely out of the way, but President’s Day is ready to pounce, and Pi Day is right around the corner. Pi Day, you will recall, is celebrated each year on March 14. You’ll want to give your loved one something round, recall some of the splendid history of pi, and maybe recite a pi-ku or two.

What is a pi-ku? A pi-ku is a play on haiku. One form of pi-ku fits the number of syllables in each line to successive numbers in pi. You can find one such offering here by pi poet Mike Rollins of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

If you’re more of a purist for the haiku form, with its distinctive 5-7-5 syllabic stack, you might prefer something like this, as seen at TeachPi.org:

Unending digits…
Why not keep it simple, like
Twenty-two sevenths?

But suppose we doubly constrain the problem and use the number of letters in each word to denote the numbers in pi, while the syllables retain the haiku form. Michael Keith of Salem, Oregon, has some fine examples of this (PDF), including this one-stanza recapitulation of Poe’s “The Raven.”

Now a thud, a knock
unsettles my window panes;
The Raven intrudes.

But naturally what we really seek is a triply constrained haiku, in that it conforms to the syllabic and letter count demands while actually describing the quantity in question. Herewith I offer my own humble attempt at this numerical poetical trifecta.

Let C over D
(wheel perimeter on height)
equal its value.

Can you do better? Give it a try… it’s harder than it looks. (Thanks to my dad for filling me in on pi-kus)

To all the friends of the Star Chamber, to all the readers of the Rambles, we wish you a happy and prosperous Groundhogtide. Those of you in the Northern Hemisphere have successfully made it to the halfway point between Autumn and Spring. With every passing day, Winter is waning. Congratulations!

UPDATE: David Seah over at Better Living Through Media has posted a nice piece on Groundhog Day resolutions. I thoroughly approve and may work that into my annual Groundhog Day festivities. And remember, Groundhog Day is when you are formally empowered and encouraged to remove any Christmas decorations that may be lingering in your neighborhood.

There is weirdness behind every blade of grass. We generally prefer our weirdness packaged and delivered in myths and monster movies, cloaked in comforting otherworldliness. But really, it’s right under our noses all the time. You don’t have to look far. I like how this xkcd cartoon treats the utterly bizarre concept of sleep and dreaming.

From Motionographer, I came across an excellent computer-animated piece in which Anakin Skywalker’s speeder (or Luke’s X-Wing fighter for that matter) is swapped for a ladybug chassis. When you contemplate a bug’s eye view of the world for a few minutes, you realize you don’t need to visit a Death Star for thrills. Provided you have a good imagination.

Voilà: MINUSCULE

Loren Shure keeps a blog called The Art of MATLAB at the MathWorks community site (a.k.a. MATLAB Central). She’s been extra busy this week so I filled in with a guest piece for her called Calendars and Leap Years. As befits the venue, it’s a mixture of prose and the MATLAB language code that’s used to support the discussion.

Part of the piece is the answer to the puzzle: what happens if you don’t have a leap year? The ancient Egyptians didn’t, and it made some weird things happen.

My tent is now visible on Google Earth.

If you wanted to find the world headquarters for O’Reilly Media, you would need to go to 1005 North Gravenstein Highway North in Sebastopol, California. If you just want to take a virtual trip there, Google Maps will do just fine. If you zoom into the complex in the middle of the map, you’ll notice something odd about the back yard. It’s very green and strangely detailed. What’s going on? The rectangular region that constitutes O’Reilly’s “back yard” is filled with tents because the out-of-context snapshot was taken by a low-flying plane during Foo Camp in August 2006.

Foo Camp is a tech conference hosted by O’Reilly (Foo = Friends Of O’Reilly), and the Google Maps folks who attended arranged to have a special Easter Egg inserted into Google Maps: high resolution low-altitude pictures taken while Foo Camp was in progress.

I was lucky enough to be invited to Foo Camp, and we were told that the plane would be flying over during lunch. Some people, in anticipation of the flyover, went to some real effort, making Cylon Raiders and Space Invaders that would be visible from the air. Sadly, at least as of this writing, these constructions lie outside the small box of high resolution imagery.

I can tell you that the Google plane kept flying back and forth, back and forth, and we eventually tired of looking up at it and waving. After a while we got hungry and queued up for lunch. So what you see in the picture is a bunch of tents (the veritable Foo Camp campsite), a few brave souls stretched out in the damp grass looking up at the plane, a robot soccer field, and a bunch of people waiting in line for a free buffet. What’s really nice here is that anything you can see in Google Maps, you can see in much greater detail in Google Earth. And so it is that, if you open Google Earth and zoom in to 38.411360° north latitude, 122.840350° west longitude, you can’t quite make me out in the lunch line, but you can clearly and distinctly see my tent. Here’s what my tent looks like from a human perspective. And here’s what it looks like to God:

UPDATE: By coincidence I just noticed that Tom Coates blogged about this on Monday. He apparently has inside information from Google that the rest of the O’Reilly campus, Cylon raiders and all, will be appearing on Google Earth some time next month. You don’t even have to wait that long: Frank Taylor of the Google Earth Blog posted a KMZ overlay file of the whole thing.

McNaught was the comet that got away. I didn’t realize what a rare find it was until it was no longer visible from the northern hemisphere. Our friends down under had a better time of it. Look at this incredible image of the dying bird’s tail. My my.

Photo courtesy of the always enjoyable Astronomy Photo of the Day.