Mashup Camp

marcel-duchamp.jpg
Today I attended Mashup Camp in Cambridge, just around the corner from MIT. I went not expecting too much. I came away thoroughly impressed.

What is it? Mashup Camp = mashup + camp. Both parts are worth a digression. So:

1. What is a mashup? A mashup happens when you add new and sometimes startling value to someone else’s work. Because of this, doing mashups can get you in trouble with the authorities. Marcel Duchamp, who decorated the Mona Lisa’s face, was a champion masher-upper and troublemaker. Mashups are inherently derivative, but they can also be exceptionally inventive. If you spend much time thinking about it, you realize that mashing up is what all of us, farmers and artists alike, are doing all the time. Moaning about originality and the sins of derivation is a waste a breath. The marvelous thing that’s happening right now on the web is that mashups are finally getting the admiration and respect they have deserved all along. This is not small matter of internet culture. This is a fact of great significance for human culture.

2. Why the word “camp”? Camp in this context implies that this is an unconference. The salient feature of an unconference is that there is no pre-planned schedule. The attendees make it up during the opening session by signing up for hour-long slots in the master schedule. The final schedule that emerges in a few improvised minutes is every bit as good as one that went through hours of tedious revision in the yearlong run-up to a typical conference. The canonical observation about a typical conference is that the most interesting parts happen outside of, and often in spite of, the official schedule. This exposes a remarkable asymmetry: much of the tedium associated with planning a conference adds no value. An improvised schedule has a number of benefits (accuracy, currency, adaptiveness), but by far the most important is the energizing nature of active participation. Nothing is fixed in fatalistic preprinted timetables. If you don’t stand up and speak right now, you won’t be heard. Speak!

I let myself dwell on the abstract benefits of Mashup Camp, but the particulars were excellent. The Hotel@MIT was a good location, and the steady hand of seasoned conference leaders David Berlind and Kaliya Hamlin was much appreciated. Finally, if you’ve read all this way and you’re still wondering what the hell a real web mashup actually looks like, the best place to go is John Musser’s Programmable Web, a web site devoted to mashups. Take a look at HousingMaps, a site that famously mashes together Craigslist and Google Maps. Also see John Musser’s coverage of the particulars of Mashup Camp on his blog.

Jungle Disk and Amazon-based backup tools

If you’re like me, you are generally successful at denying the foolish position you put yourself in. You are fully aware that your hard drive could fail at any moment. You know the mayhem and suffering this event would cause. You even know that, as an imperfect product of human manufacture, your hard drive certainly will fail some day. And every time you reflect on this, you feel a dull momentary pain, because you NEVER BACK UP YOUR HARD DRIVE. Then the moment of guilt passes and your well-honed skills at denial resume their duty. So much to do! You’ll get around to it one of these days.

I need a no-hassle solution to this problem, because I know that I simply can’t trust myself to be responsible. In the past I have gone so far as to buy a backup drive, and then place it, unused, next to my computer, as if some osmotic process might take care of the backup for me. That is why I have been hoping for a dead easy web-based service that would take care of my backup problem for me. Web backup has been available for a few years now, but it hasn’t been cheap. That’s changing now, and the best thing I’ve seen so far is Jungle Disk. Jungle Disk is a free client that plugs straight into Amazon’s industrial-strength dirt-cheap S3 storage network. I don’t know how they make their money, but they seem like the real thing. Here’s an Amazon marketing piece about them. Anyway, the price has finally reached the point where even I can be induced to be responsible. Here is my bill for January. Admittedly, I was only backing up a few dozen megabytes as a test, but the storage cost me exactly one cent for the month.

s3-bill.png

Even if Jungle Disk doesn’t work out, there will be other S3-based services that jump in to take up the slack. Here’s a list from Jeremy Zawodny on Amazon S3 Backup Tools.

UC Berkeley molecular biology webcast

In the fall of 2002, MIT proudly announced its OpenCourseWare initiative. They were rightly praised at the time for putting course materials directly online and making them freely available to anyone with access to the web. I was interested in biology classes and poked around the site and came away a little disappointed. Not all the lectures were available as audio, the sound quality wasn’t good, and the lecture notes had images ripped out of every other slide along with some legal boilerplate about how copyrighted material had to be removed. In other words, wherever the lecture snipped a picture out of a textbook (which was often), they couldn’t distribute that slide to the internet masses. Taken all together, I was impressed with the notion of OpenCourseWare but not with the reality.

I forgot about open course ware for a long time, but recently found a page linking to podcast lectures from UC Berkeley. This time it was the real deal. I’m still interested in biology, so I’m watching the lectures for MCB 110: General Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. There’s audio, video, and PowerPoint slides, and the quality is very high. The slides are complete and unexpurgated. It’s a phenomenal resource. There’s just no doubt that free course material like this is going to transform lives.

I’ve since gone back and looked at MIT’s latest OpenCourseWare biology classes. I’m happy to report that now there’s plenty of good stuff there too, including video lectures in which Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute and one of the more famous geneticists in the world, explains genetics to you. To get that delivered, at no cost, to the privacy and comfort of your sitting room, well… that’s remarkable.

Construction, models, and pre-fab houses

Modeling is the word for the new millennium. I don’t think people realize how powerful it is to have an accurate computer model of whatever it is you want to build. It frees you to simulate, iterate, and optimize your design in entirely new ways. Back ten or so years, aerospace geeks (that’s me) were excited about the fact that the Boeing 777 was being “built” entirely inside a CAD (computer-aided design) package. People are used to seeing blueprints, schematics, and design plans, but this was something else again. Not only was the aluminum skin being modeled, but also the wiring, the plumbing, the seats, the carpet, all of the thousands and thousands of parts large and small. This let the Boeing engineers make sure that everything would actually fit before it was assembled. The project was a great success, and every plane since then has been assembled in a computer long before any metal gets cut.

pipe-collision.gifA process that works with airplanes ought to work with buildings too, and so it does. The big difference is that the construction industry moves much more slowly than the aerospace industry. There’s less pressure to go high tech. But once contractors get used to working with CAD systems, the payoff will be huge. Here’s an article from Computerworld about this phenomenon: GM builds on 3-D model. The author follows the story of a factory that General Motors built, and it’s very much like the Boeing story above. Instead of printing out thousands of 2-D blueprints, they worked straight from the computer model. The computer tells you when two pipes are colliding. As a result, they were able to eliminate the costly delays that are endemic to the culture of construction.

Because collisions in 2-D projects are unavoidable, tradespeople try to get their work done first, Lemley says. When a collision occurs, everything stops while the drawings are reviewed. “You go through hundreds of drawings, and you call the architect, and they have to come down and bring a mechanical [drawing] down,” he says. That puts everyone else behind and results in expensive change orders. Building to the model eliminated the problem.

The GM project came in 5% under budget and 25% ahead of schedule. That adds up to real money on a $1.5 billion factory.

A process that works on big buildings ought to work on small ones too, and so it does. In the latest issue of Metropolis, I came across this article on bolt-together pre-fab housing: Bursting Out. Pre-fab housing conjures up images of shoddy workmanship, cheap materials, and bad taste. But in the future it will mean customized pre-cut panels delivered in an Ikea-like flat pack and quickly assembled on site. From the article:

The process borrowed heavily from industrial-design mass manufacturing. After hollowing out the solid model and developing a structural diagram based on the ribs, the architects ran commands to unfold the computer model, break up the surfaces into production-size triangles, label each piece and rib, and then organize them onto sheets for the laser cutter. This information was then run through String IT, a program used in furniture design, which “nests” it—calculating an optimum layout of the various shapes on the given dimensions of the plywood sheets to minimize waste—reducing the amount of plywood required by about 20 percent. At the laser cutter this file was run to produce 1,100 nonidentical plywood pieces, each cut, drilled, and etched to determine its location in the house. In January 2005 these arrived flat-packed in North Haven, where a team of 12 students from the architecture program at nearby Newcastle University was prepped for a fast-build process that the architects likened to a barn raising.

This technique is already proving useful in places, like post-Katrina New Orleans, where old-school house construction is too expensive and slow, too medieval to serve the needs of the community.

The first fruits of modeling are in narrow and specialized domains, but the real value comes when you start to integrate the efforts of multiple teams across multiple domains. It takes a long time to get everybody in the game, but the results can be stunning.

I’ll Eat That Book. Just Watch Me!

Don't Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America

Morgan Spurlock, the hefty man behind the fast food fright flick Super Size Me, has also written a companion book called Don’t Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America. Spurlock takes a dim view not only of corporate fast food purveyors but also of the American public’s ability to make sound dietary decisions when confronted with fancy advertising.

This drives Matt Angiulo crazy. Angiulo is an aerospace engineer who takes quite literally the old adage of Sir Francis Bacon: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Angiulo is also a natural contrarian. Whereas he would no doubt leave Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book safely on the shelf, a book commanding him not to eat it is as good as a double-dog dare to do exactly that. Thus: I’ll Eat That Book. Just Watch Me!, a web site dedicated to the slow consumption of Spurlock’s book.

My friend Rob (one of the original Star Chamber gang) knows Matt’s brother and sent me the news about this fascinating site. To the email he added this

My review of his site would be: “Angiulo brings new meaning to consumerism as he literally digests the smarmy, self-righteous words of Morgan Spurlock in his postmodernist attack on Spurlock’s popular tome on so-called healthy eating.”

Every day he eats another page after reading and summarizing it for the site. No word on whether he uses liberal amounts of Miracle Whip. I’m afraid he is not a charitable reviewer. While he does swallow the arguments initially, what he does with them a few hours later is not fit reading for a family-oriented blog.

A year of full moons on Flickr

Full Moons over Flickr
Happy New Year! Not only is it a new year… a quick look out the window or at the Sky Clock reveals that there is a full moon in the sky tonight. Of course, you might not know that if you were locked in a windowless room. Suppose, for example, you were trapped in a room with nothing but a pen knife, a box of paper clips, and access to all the pictures on Flickr. Could you work out when the moon is full? If you are as clever as Jim Bumgardner you wouldn’t have any trouble at all. But since he’s the author of Flickr Hacks, I guess that’s only fair.

Bumgardner took pictures on Flickr that are tagged “full moon” and plotted them according to when they were taken (Flickr knows that because digital cameras encode it in the image). The result is this: A year of full moons. There’s another lovely image where he uses a similar approach to show the seasonal variation in sunset time: A year of sunsets.

This is an example of the informational residue that gets smeared absolutely everywhere on the web. You can learn the most fascinating things these days if you know how to scrape up the data slime. For instance, from the sunset picture mentioned above we can work out the average latitude of Flickr customers. Google Trends can also give you a sense of when the moon is full simply by watching what people search for. Not surprisingly, werewolf searches are somewhat correlated. [Bumgardner’s photos via the Kircher Society]

Motionographer videos

I’m traveling for the next week, but I’ll leave you with this excellent music video. It looks like it had to be done with stop motion photography, but then it doesn’t look like it could’ve been done with stop motion photography.

I learned about it from Motionographer site that’s good for finding fun animations and video compilations, typically put together by advertising studios. So much talent out there!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year…

Birthdays and happiness

My birthday was last weekend. I turned 42. In addition to being the answer to life, the universe, and everything, 42 also happens to mark a lifetime low point in happiness as reported by various happy researchers … I’m sorry, various happiness researchers. It’s possible to take this news badly, but I look at it like this: I’ve got years of rising happiness levels to look forward to. According to the theory, 42 is about the time you realize that you aren’t actually going to win the Nobel Prize, and so you might as well start enjoying what you’ve got. Please. The rest of us have known for years that you weren’t going to win that prize.

I find happiness studies fascinating. From an episode of the Quirks & Quarks radio program, I learned that there is almost no relationship between things people predict will make them happy and things that measurably lift their levels of reported happiness. Almost none! How did that evolve? Similarly, people grossly overestimate the impact of bad things (job loss, accidents, health crises) on day-to-day happiness levels. Back on the subject of age, older people generally overstate how happy they were in their youth and younger people overstate how miserable they will be as they age. Which all stands to reason, since if Hollywood has succeeded in teaching us anything, it’s that youth = happiness and that old people don’t deserve to appear in movies.

The perfect age

I’m curious to hear your answer to this: if youth equals happiness, then, pop-culturally speaking, what is our “perfect” age? Not the age that you happen to like, but rather that optimal cusp that glossy magazines push at us every day. It is the age that children yearn for and seniors fondly recall. Presumably it is post-drinking age, post-sexual maturity, pre-wrinkle, and pre-hair loss. It is a mysterious still point on a sociological map. I think it’s 24, but it may be 25. What do you think?

Biology parody site

I’m not sure who’s behind NEXTgencode, but it’s a well done parody of the commercial promise of biotechnology. Some of the things they bring up in joke form are sure to be real issues at some point in the future. How much would you pay for a terminally cute PermaPuppy? How much is the gene for blond hair worth if it is disappearing “in the wild?” Since NEXTgencode links to the (more serious) Ethics in Genetics site, I assume the parody is intended to provoke as well as amuse.

Friday games

I’m sorry to do this to you, but I recently came across not one but two long lists of good small games, any one of which you can start playing in seconds, any one of which you can blow thirty minutes on without breaking a sweat. Beware!

The first list I learned about through Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools page. He was pitching Mark Hurst’s Good Experience site, and that’s how I came across Good Experience Games.

The other list is from a place called Cognitive Labs, which appears to be associated with Stanford: Free Cognitive Games from Cognitive Labs. It’s a weird, chaotic site dedicated to slowing down or reversing the cognitive effects of aging. The premise is that these games are good for your brain. I can testify that they are bad for your ability to go to bed at a reasonable time. Try out Vector Ball and Reverse Asteroids. Also I am specifically curious how long JMike can stay alive at the Impossible level on the type-fast-or-die Word Shoot game. If you’ve never seen JMike type, it is a wonder to behold.