Rambles Blog at Star Chamber

Maybe you remember Chris Lydon from his days as the wise voice of the Connection on NPR. He’s an excellent interviewer and an entertaining prose stylist, but he’s also enough of a curmudgeon to get himself tossed out of his Connection job at WBUR. It’s too bad, because he’s still doing great stuff, but I don’t know how many people notice. As far as I can tell, one of the principal outlets for his journalism (in addition to his MP3 interviews) is his blog over at the Harvard Law School. I think he got the blog religion from Dave Winer some time back. He may well be regarded some day as one of the vanguard of the new wave of journalism, but I imagine it gets a little lonely on the frontier…

Anyway, I enjoyed his dissection of the Republican National Convention. His words about the building of a Roman-style American Empire both amused and disturbed. Is Bush, as Susan Sontag says, the Augustus to Clinton’s Julius Caesar? Here’s what Chris Lydon has to say about it.

There’s more than a whiff of Caesarism in mid-town this week, and a lot of the convention Republicans are high on it. You catch some of it on TV: the rigid scripting, the air of reverence around Bushes young and old, the endless strumming of war themes, the laugh-out-loud foolishness of the rhetorical over-reaching–First Lady Laura Bush’s remark, for example, that her husband had liberated 50-million people around the world… that the happy schoolgirls of Afghanistan are now safely back at their desks.

Being the world’s only superpower sounded like such a good gig at the time.

I started reading Eric Snowdeal’s blog over a year ago because I saw a number of his interests overlapped with mine. He was working at a high tech company (Motorola), very much interested in biology and bioinformatics, and also very much into the blogging revolution. He’s also happens to be the kind of person that doesn’t mind sharing a lot about the details of his life online: how he trains for a marathon, ultrasound pictures of his baby, and so on. But I hadn’t visited his site in a long time. I recently noticed by doing a link search that he had linked to me this spring, so I jumped over to his site to see what was new. I was surprised to see that his whole site had pretty much come to a stop in July, with one exception: detailed coverage of the progress of his prematurely born son.

This was a shock; it stopped me in my tracks. I was used to his breezy discussions of the latest technical trends, and instead I saw a picture of an infant boy weighing 1.7 pounds, born after only 25 weeks. It was a frame-shattering moment. I find pictures of premature babies almost too painful to look at, and to imagine the anguish, stress, and hour-to-hour rollercoaster of emotions he must be enduring, it brought tears to my eyes. As the father of a disabled son, I know something about parental anguish, and seeing it here on the web page of professional peer was heartbreaking and very personal somehow.

I have linked from my site to the Trixie Update in the past. It’s a geeky father’s obsessive record of a healthy baby girl’s life. Go look at it… it’s impressive, bursting with details, optimism, health, and good cheer. Oh the zany things kids do! How they cry and poop! It’s an excellent site, but if you want to know what it means to suffer as a parent, go read Eric Snowdeal’s account. He’s still sounds amazingly upbeat, but his tiny, fragile boy is living in the constant shadow of the unspeakable. It’s easy, as a parent-to-be, to imagine yourself like Trixie’s dad. But you just might find yourself in Eric’s tortured position one day. Making children is serious business. We think we know how things are going to go. We don’t know.

Take a look at some of the postcards he’s been getting. This whole episode is a good example of how the web can make more complete portraits of us all if we will let it. To me, Eric Snowdeal had been a two-dimensional image of a confident competent high tech guy. Not anymore. I wish him luck.

How do you decide whether or not you should put on a coat before you leave your house in the morning? I like to open the door and step outside, but my wife likes to open the newspaper and read the forecast. Both of us are reading a display of the weather, but mine is implicit and hers is explicit. Weather is nice that way. It never goes down, and a quick peek out the window is often enough to tell you what you need to know. Other kinds of data aren’t typically available as implicit, or ambient, displays.

A Dutch artist named Koert van Mensvoort has taken on the problem of displaying currency exchange rates between yen, euros, and dollars as the dancing waters of a fountain.
As Koert puts it, “In the morning paper, I can read the weather report as well as the stock quotes. But when I look out of my window I only get a weather update and no stock exchange info. Could someone please fix this bug in my environmental system?” See the DATAFOUNTAIN website for pretty pictures and splashy sounds.

In the future, ambient interfaces will be so common you’ll be able to end awkward conversations with the plausible excuse “Sorry, but I’ve got a call coming in on this daffodil.”

James Fallows, the tech-savvy journalist normally seen over at the Atlantic, has a generally glowing review in the NY Times of the free internet phone service called Skype: Business > Your Money > Techno Files: In Internet Calling, Skype Is Living Up to the Hype” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/business/yourmoney/05tech.html”> In Internet Calling, Skype Is Living Up to the Hype. Free international high quality phone service… already downloaded 21 million times… and now on top of everything else, they have the stamp of legitimacy conferred by a rave review from the NY Times. If you have any stock in phone companies, sell it now.

For the past nine months or so, I have been the proud owner of an iPod. I have a few gripes about it, but by and large it’s been a good purchase. I spend more time using it to listen to books (hours long) than music (minutes long), so the controls that have to do with keeping my place in and moving me through great long recordings are very important to me. It’s truly maddening when your iPod forgets what “page” you were on and you have to spend five minutes zooming back and forth trying to remember where you were.

Be that as it may, iTunes has this feature called Smart Playlists that I somehow missed until last night. Smart Playlists are powerful filters that let you make playlists with rules rather than by handpicking songs one-by-one. For instance, you can say “play all the country music I have listened to exactly once in the last month” (which for me would be a very short playlist). This is a nice feature, but even more interesting is the fact that there is a whole website (Smart Playlists.com) dedicated to helping people share these playlists with one another. An entire website devoted to a feature that I didn’t even know existed. That’s impressive. I’d like to say someday that I designed a feature that inspired a website.

Molecular biology is moving quickly from cartoons to pictures to movies. It used to be that the cell illustrations in biology textbooks were either blurry, grainy micrographs or fanciful, cartoonish diagrams. But pictures based on accurate knowledge of protein structure are becoming more common, and now we are moving into the realm of time with accurate movies of cellular phenomena. It’s a good time to be alive. The most entertaining recent movie short from the bacterial world is this terrific thriller from a lab at Purdue: “T4: the Tiny Terminator”. This animation is an accurate portrayal of the baseplate mechanism for a virus that attacks a bacterium. This is a film of what you would actually see if you could see things that can’t be seen. Here’s the page (look for the movie link in the upper left, or simply download it here): Virus makes its movie screen debut.

I’ve always thought the images of phage-like viruses attacking bacteria had a frightening, sinister aspect. Bacteriophages have these nasty buglike legs and bloated icosohedral bellies, and they squat on the bacterial membrane like pestilent, bloodhungry mosquitos and disgorge their lethal payload. Nevertheless they are, after all, simply a parcel of a few specialized molecules. Even so, this new animation, mesmerizing in the extreme, does nothing to dispel a palpable sense of malevolence. The great gift of modern molecular biology is that it can now begin to show mechanically how we are manifestations of the improbable molecules that make up viruses and cells. Are they sinister? Are we? If we are capable of evil, then so are they. Or, coming at it from the other direction, if we refuse to acknowledge their potential to be sinister, then we must deny ourselves that same privilege. We’re all playing the same game.

This is my daughter Carolyn going to town on a piece of corn. The picture was taken by Rob (a.k.a. the Coffee Czar). I posted this directly from Flickr as an experiment. Looks like it worked.

I’m pretty well sold on this idea of stitching together an online existence from a patchwork of well-tuned tools from places like Movable Type, Flickr, and Bloglines.

Send me an email if you want a Gmail account. I’ve got one to give away, and the first person to send me a note (to gulley@gmail.com, naturally) is welcome to it. [NOTE: I’ve given away my last Gmail account] I’ve been very happy with it so far. They have redesigned the flow of filing email in a way that is likely to become the norm going forward. Actually, I have no idea if this invention was theirs to begin with (maybe it’s another Xerox PARC fumble), but the key innovation is that you just archive everything and then you search for what you need later. No agonizing over whether you should file it carefully or throw it away… just file it. If you need it, it shouldn’t be too hard to find it again. It’s not perfect, but it’s loads better than Hotmail.

Plus, if you get your account now, you might just snag your favorite username. I did.

One of the problems that has faced the aimless web surfer since the web came into being is this one: where do you start? You have a little time, and you have a vague desire to see something new and cool. What then? Back at the beginning, there was the NCSA What’s New list maintained on the UIUC web site (wherein you can even see the original Star Chamber link there from 1996). But the web kept getting bigger and more tangled, “cool sites of the day” generally weren’t, and it was hard to know which way to turn.

Blogs and RSS feeds have changed all that. Using Bloglines and del.icio.us, I feel confident that I can get on the computer at any time night or day and find limitless amounts of stuff that fascinates, amuses, and disturbs. Limitless amounts of high quality, interesting content. It’s almost disturbing, like driving way too fast. For instance, here’s a gem I found on del.icio.us a few days ago. For the love of God, don’t follow the link: WEBoggle. It’s a simple word game, but it’ll suck the time of day right out of you if you don’t tie yourself to the mast and keep on sailing.

It was in this spirit of bewildering richness that I created the page Signal2Noise several years ago.

The problem isn’t noise
The problem is signal
Take away the idiots
You’ll be plagued by the clever.

A problem worth having, but bewildering all the same.