Tag: twitter

Project Dickens

I like Twitter. It’s my favorite way to fill the found minutes that pile up during the day. I’m waiting in the lunch line. I’m brewing coffee. The movie hasn’t started yet. But then a certain third-grader was elected president of my country, and since then I’ve noticed that a surfeit of Twitter is making me ill.

I don’t go out of my way to follow politically-oriented people on Twitter, but these days you just can’t get away from politics. Some fresh outrage presses itself on the fretful populace and people can’t help but tweet about it. And then I can’t help but read about it. And then I get mad, and I follow links and I read analyses and opinion pieces and still more warm suckling Twitter (beware of anything that suggests itself as a solution to the problems it creates). I get more mad. I trade valuable time for stomach acid… and so it might take me an hour to calm down from the outrage of the hour, and by then of course a new one is just beginning to squat on the nation.

And to what end, my Twitter indulgence? Am I a better informed citizen, ready to make a difference? Am I more engaged or just more enraged? In general I don’t advocate avoiding the news or hiding from unpleasant information. But Twitter is full of talented writers with infective invective. With sharable swearable bons mots. Reading it too often is sickly sweet. Sipping from a pitcher of bottomless bile. Picking a fight with the news cycle. It doesn’t end well.

I knew I needed to stop, or at least cut down. And yet, there I am again, in line with a few minutes to kill. I want to reach for Twitter. Because even as it enrages, it always entertains. It really does. This is a classic addictive behavior. When I want to reach for the cigarettes, for what should I reach instead?

That’s when I thought of Dickens.

If you can check the disposition of the Donald every fifteen minutes, you can just as easily check on Oliver Twist. Wherever Twitter is with me, so is there Kindle. Mercifully, it turns out, you can read a novel in the same stolen moments, and it doesn’t sicken your soul. I tried it, and it worked! I still check Twitter, and I still like it. I just don’t read it nearly as often as I used to. I’m calmer, and now I’ve moved on from Oliver to David Copperfield. Clever chap, that Charles Dickens.

So if you should find yourself, like me, dipping into the poison well too often, consider something novel.

Local Twitter trends with Trendsmap

What are people talking about? That used to be a speculative question, but since the advent of blogs and now Twitter, it’s become a more tractable problem. You don’t have the time to read and distill a million Twitter messages, but your computer does. Algorithmically it’s getting to be pretty straightforward.

Trendsmap caught my eye tonight, partly because of two weather related events dominating local weather in two different parts of the world. Trendsmap uses Twitter to show you what the buzz is both globally and locally, and the design is so attractive that you can easily waste a lot of time on it.

Okay, here’s your quiz. What are people talking about in the greater Atlanta metropolitan area these days?

georgia-flood

That one didn’t surprise me, since I had been following that story on the news. But I didn’t know about the dust storms in Australia.

australia-dust

Crikey! It’s pretty apparent that dust is not only dominating local brainwaves, but that the massive storm has an end-of-the-world feel to it. Watch this video from Broken Hill, New South Wales and see if you can see why.

Brain loading and stellar chauvinism

When I meet impressive people, I always wonder how they spend their time. Let’s suppose you meet someone who can play effortless bluegrass on the banjo, quote Shakespeare at length, write luminous heartbreaking prose, and throw together an award-winning web site with their right hand while simultaneously juggling five flaming tomahawks with their left. Not bad, right? But those skills are all frozen snapshots. Those are recorded performances, and you’re just pressing the “play” button. What I want to know is: how did they get there? How in world did they load up their brain bins like that? How do they carve up the same twenty four hours that I get every day and manage to do so much with it?

I suspect, but I’m not sure, that they didn’t watch as many episodes of the Beverly Hillbillies as I did in Junior High.

When someone writes a fabulous book, or even an eloquent blog for that matter, I don’t feel like I get much insight into the crucial question of how they got there. It’s a performance. How many rehearsals did it take? But when somebody impressive twitters (there he goes about Twitter again), I feel more like I’m inside the secret process of how they load their brain. Tim O’Reilly, whom I rank in the “impressive” category, was twittering away this afternoon, and it was like peeking over his shoulder while he packed his brain for another good sprint.

One of the things that O’Reilly mentioned today was Celestia, an astronomy program. I’m a sucker for astronomy programs, especially free high-quality astronomy programs. So off I went to download it and install it. For improving the experience of stargazing, I would give the edge to Stellarium. For access to the best astrophotography, you’ll want to use Google Earth’s doppelganger, Google Sky. But Celestia has another trick. Here’s how they describe it: “Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.” It is a fun game to play.

Naturally, I flew to the most distant star I could find (HIP 88879) and looked back at our little star, and this is what I saw. What are all those blue squiggles radiating from the Sun? Those are the constellations, those curious cartoons of assorted animals and people that inhabit our sky. We’re used to seeing them flattened against the inside of the dome of heaven. But there’s no dome, right? Those zodiacal doodles connect stars that differ wildly in their remoteness, anywhere from tens to thousands of light years.

It’s very thoughtful of them to put on an animal show for us every night.