May 04, 2008
Maker Faire 2008
Maker Faire was this weekend, and it was a truly amazing experience. Hundreds of exhibitors, thousands and thousands of people. My head is still reeling from the whole thing, but a few items stand out in my memory:
Adam Savage from Mythbusters gave a great talk, simultaneously hilarious and inspiring. Savage ran through his pre-Mythbusters career (which included art, sculpture, theater design, and extensive film special effects work). And he talked at length about the combination of enthusiasm and obsession that drives him to make insanely accurate recreations of movie props.
Speaking of obsession, the folks from ARTOO-DETOO.NET were there in force, with their custom-built R2 droids chirping and scooting around the halls.
I was also blown away by Tim Robinson's recreation of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine. The product of hundreds of hours of building and adjusting. I've always been fascinated by the idea of capturing mathematics in mechanisms, and the Difference Engine was the epitome of that. Here's a video of it in action.
But that's just a few of dozens and dozens of things that were amazing and wonderful. Ya gotta go!
Posted by Chris Spurgeon May 5, 2008 12:21 AM Permalink | Comments (0)
May 01, 2008
The end of phone tree hell?
We've all spent endless hours in phone tree hell... Press "1" for customer service, press "2" for tech support... If only there was a better way.
A company called Fonolo thinks they've come up with it. Their automatic systems have dialed hundreds of phone menus, meticulously working through every option, recording it all along the way. As a result, Fonolo has become a kind of Google for automated phone menus, letting you search for the specific number to call and the exact sequence of buttons to push to get to the information you need.
Better yet, the Fonolo system will make the call for you, and connect you in after it's slogged through the phone tree on your behalf.
Right now Fonolo is in limited beta. You can sign up to receive notice when they're ready for more users (sometime this fall). In the meantime you can check out this video of Fonolo CEO Shai Berger explaining his product.
Posted by Chris Spurgeon May 5, 2008 12:21 AM Permalink | Comments (0)
April 22, 2008
Want a used Ferris wheel?
Heads up! You've got just a couple of days to pick up the best backyard accessory EVER. The city of Santa Monica has put their famous Ferris wheel up for auction on eBay. The wheel (technically called the "Pacific Wheel") is staring to show its age a bit, and is scheduled to be replaced with a brand new model later this spring. So it's got to go! From the auction description...
You are bidding on Pacific Park's high-flyin', 90-feet-tall, famous Ferris wheel, which weighs 122,000 pounds, is 30 feet wide, reaches speeds of 3 RPM, includes 20 gondolas with a maximum six riders per car, accommodates up to 800 riders per hour and illuminates with 5,392 light bulbs. Please note: Base support structure of Wheel is not included in price and can be purchased separately, if buyer so chooses. One Pacific Wheel hub included in sale. Other hub donated to Santa Monica Historical Society.
Right now the winning bid is $50,000. A steal! Why not place a bid of your own? (Just remember: the winning bidder has to pick up the Ferris wheel, and PayPal is not accepted).
The LA Times has an article about the auction.
Posted by Chris Spurgeon May 5, 2008 12:21 AM Permalink | Comments (0)
April 15, 2008
Reports as comic books
Is there anything more boring than reading another dry report? Of course not. But what if you your next report was a comic book? That would kick all kinds of ass.
Well, it turns out comic (or magna) format can be a surprisingly effective way to communicate important information. At this year's CHI Conference (a conference devoted to human-computer interaction) Evangeline Haughney from Adobe talked about what happened when she turned a normal dry usability report into comic format. It turns out more people read her report all of the way through. The biggest downside was that she had to print more copies, since people tended to hoard the report instead of passing it around. Not bad!
Here's a four-page pdf of Haughney's research.
(Thanks to Rachael Hinman at Adaptive Path)
Posted by Chris Spurgeon May 5, 2008 12:21 AM Permalink | Comments (0)
Botany of other worlds
Of course there's life on other planets.
The universe is just too big a place for this to be only planet with life. But by the same token, since the universe is so big, detecting extraterrestrial life is somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible. (It's not like we're gonna be able to look at a distant planet through a telescope and see a bug-eyed alien waving back at us or something).
Our best hope may be to look for planetary traits that can only be caused by life. For instance, much of the Earth appears green from space due to the plant life that covers large swaths of the planet. But before you start scouring the skies for green planets, it's worth asking 7quot;Would alien plants(*) be green?" The answer is "Almost certainly not."
There's a great article in the April 2008 Scientific American explaining the reason almost all Earth plants are green. It turns out it's a result of the relative abundance of different wavelengths of light coming from the Sun, combined with how various components in the atmosphere filter that sunlight before it reaches the ground. On some other planet, with a different sun and atmosphere, plants would evolve to make use of different wavelengths of light, and therefore would have different foliage colors. Plants could be bright orange, or blue, or jet black.
All of this will make it a bit tougher to recognize plant-covered continents on distant worlds. But it'll also make picking a corsage more fun when we have high-school proms there.
It also reminds me of this passage from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy...
The Shaltanacs are a race from the planet Broop Kidron Thirteen, who had their own version of the Earth phrase, "The other man's grass is always greener." Although, given their planet's horticultural peculiarities, theirs was, "The other Shaltanac's joopleberry shrub is always a more mauve-y shade of pinky russet," and so, the expression fell into disuse, and the Shaltanacs found they had little choice but to become exceptionally happy and content, which surprised everyone else in the galaxy, who had never realised that the best way not to be unhappy is not to have a word for it.
(*)By the way, by "plant" we don't just mean the leafy things that we commonly call plants here on Earth, we mean any organism that uses sunlight as its energy source.
Posted by Chris Spurgeon May 5, 2008 12:21 AM Permalink | Comments (0)
April 06, 2008
Making friends in the squirrel world
If you spend endless hours tweaking your Facebook and Linked-in contacts, it turns out you have a lot in common with squirrels. According to an article in the April issue of the journal Animal Behavior, Columbian ground squirrels (a common squirrel species in the American and Canadian west) develop complex webs of friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, etc.
Just as is the case with groups of human friends, there are certain individual squirrels who are natural connectors...associating with lots of others in the group. And just like what happens all too often with human cliques, the popular squirrels spend most of their time hanging with the other popular squirrels.
There are layman-friendly write-ups of the research on the New Scientist and Discovery Channel websites.
Posted by Chris Spurgeon May 5, 2008 12:21 AM Permalink | Comments (0)
Pimp my Ikea
A sure sign of any company's success is when derivative companies based on the main company's products start showing up. For instance, companies like Griffin Technology have made a business out of making add-on products for the iPod.
Ikea has now picked up one of these ramora-like companies. A company called Parts of Sweden offers add-on items for Ikea's most popular shelf and cabinet systems. Right now they're a European company (you think Ikea is popular here in the US, go to Northern Europe. Yow.) but there's no doubt that they (or someone else) will open up a U.S. operation.
Posted by Chris Spurgeon May 5, 2008 12:21 AM Permalink | Comments (0)
March 27, 2008
A new hat for the Eiffel Tower
Sacré bleu! The Eiffel Tower is about to get a makeover. In honor of the Tower's 120th anniversary, the viewing area at the top of the Tower is being expanded, allowing twice as many tourists to take in the view at once.
Visually, the addition will look like a large round platform way up by the peak of the Tower. Now obviously, changing one of the world's most famous architectural silhouettes is not without controversy. To mitigate the anger, the architects of the addition have designed it so it can be added and later removed from Tower without damaging the original structure. (It'll be attached via a mesh of high-strength Kevlar cables).
The addition will be unveiled, accompanied by a blizzard of snidey architecture critic essays, next year. Here's an article in the Guardian newspaper about it.
Posted by Chris Spurgeon May 5, 2008 12:21 AM Permalink | Comments (1)
March 23, 2008
The sounds of Saturn
Looking for the perfect sound for that sci-fi movie you've been working on? Cassini to the rescue!
My interplanetary buddy, the Cassini spacecraft, has been busy collecting data from Saturn and its moons for years(*). Way back in the late 90s Cassini recorded the electro-magnetic radiation that occurs in the polar regions of Saturn's atmosphere (similar energy causes the Northern lights here on Earth). A while back some JPL scientists converted the transmissions to audible sound, giving us a sense of what Saturn sounds like.
I think the sound has a wonderfully spooky storm-at-the-South-Pole quality to it, combined with just the type of static that sounds like outer space. In short, it's JUST the sound you would want to use if you were making a creepy sci-fi space horror epic.
Take a listen to the sound of Saturn. Or grab a higher quality WAV file of the sound.
There's more about how the sound was made on NASA's Cassini site.
Wouldn't it be great if movie sound artists started using the Cassini Saturn sound everywhere? If it became as widely used as the Wilhelm scream?
(*) The Cassini spacecraft was launched from Earth in 1997. After following one of the gnarliest flight paths ever devised, Cassini went into orbit around Saturn in 2004.
Posted by Chris Spurgeon May 5, 2008 12:21 AM Permalink | Comments (1)
Evocutlery
If you're reading this, take a bow. For you are descended from a line of ancestors who achieved something seemingly impossible. Consider... every single one of your direct ancestors, all the way back to the beginning of life on Earth several billion years ago, managed to survive long enough to successfully reproduce. It's an astonishing achievement, and the tiny detail that we share that achievement with every single organism on the planet shouldn't make you crow about your particular success any less.
It's evolution and natural selection of course that gave rise to the astonishing diversity of life on earth, processes that are still operating all around us all the time.
Like for instance, while you're eating dinner. And what better way to remind yourself of that fact with every bite, than this set of cutlery by designer Harry White?
Starting with two knifes, two forks and two spoons, White imagined how the utensils would look if they could interbreed and produce offspring. The full 49-piece set includes some truly bizarre flatware hybrids. But nothing odder than what nature itself comes up with.
Posted by Chris Spurgeon May 5, 2008 12:21 AM Permalink | Comments (0)
March 17, 2008
How to think
When Ed Boyden applied for a teaching gig at MIT's famed Media Lab, he pitched the idea of teaching a course called "How to Think". The best I can tell, that course has yet to make it into the official curriculum, but Boyden has written up 10 rules for thinking and posted them on his blog on Technology Review. Among his suggestions...
Learn how to learn (rapidly). One of the most important talents for the 21st century is the ability to learn almost anything instantly, so cultivate this talent. Be able to rapidly prototype ideas.
It's worth reading the full list, as well as the thoughts of the commenters. I also highly recommend the O'Reilly book Mind Performance Hacks.
(Photo of woman thinking by Grace Fell/flickr and made available via Creative Commons license. Thanks!)
Posted by Chris Spurgeon May 5, 2008 12:21 AM Permalink | Comments (1)
March 16, 2008
Still Alive
For a little while now one of the songs in heaviest rotation in my personal music universe has been a soft, haunting ballad sung by a computer program. It's a tune called "Still Alive" from the video game Portal. As I understand it(*), in the game you take the role of test subjects, trying out a hyper-advanced new gun that blasts holes through the space-time continuum. As you move through progressively more hairy test courses you receive instructions, snide comments and encouragement ("If you live, there will be cake") from an artificial intelligence robot with a flat synthesized female voice. (Here's a trailer of the game). Make it all the way to the end, and the AI bot serenades you with "Still Alive" as the closing credits roll.
The song was composed by Jonathan Coulton, who's picked up a bit of minor cult fame for it, including performing it last week for a crowd at SXSW. The song is also going to be included as a number in the popular video game Rock Band.
Meanwhile, I find myself charmed by the song's mix of melancholy and optimism. Now, it times of struggle, I say to myself, "You just keep on trying 'til you run out of cake."
(*) Disclaimer: I've never actually played Portal since I don't have a high end game console or a PC. Lame, but then you don't have a working SX-70 and Apple Newton.
Posted by Chris Spurgeon May 5, 2008 12:21 AM Permalink | Comments (1)
March 14, 2008
Scientists create artificial traffic jams
Long time readers of this blog know that I'm a big fan of the psychological aspects of traffic. So I was delighted to learn that Japanese scientists have been doing live simulations of one of the most enigmatic traffic phenomena... the shockwave jam.
Shockwave traffic jams are patches of stop and go traffic that appear out of nowhere and seem to have no cause. Traffic engineers have been looking at shockwave jams for more than 15 years. Using computer simulations, they've worked out that the jam is started when a driver on a crowded highway slows down. That causes the following driver to tap the brakes, which causes other cars to slow down, and so on and so on.
Computer modeling is all well and good, but until now no one's ever tried to generate shockwave jams with real cars on a real road.
As you can see in this very cool YouTube video, the Japanese researchers spaced 22 cars around a circular track and started driving. Though the drivers tried their best to maintain a perfectly constant speed, they invariably sped up and slowed down by tiny amounts. Those tiny changes got amplified by the following drivers' reactions. Eventually there were times when some of the cars had to stop completely.
There's a write up of the experiment in this week's New Scientist.
Posted by Chris Spurgeon May 5, 2008 12:21 AM Permalink | Comments (1)
March 11, 2008
Hear me speak at Where2.0
Speaking of maps, I'm chuffed to say that I'll be speaking at this year's Where 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I'll be hitting the crowd with true tales of some of history's craziest and most extreme mapping projects. The conference, by the way, is a great gathering of the people behind the most innovative geolocation applications around. See you May 12th to 14th!
Posted by Chris Spurgeon May 5, 2008 12:21 AM Permalink | Comments (1)
Strange maps
It's not pictures that are worth a thousand words, it's maps. Maps are visual reality, a concise (and occasionally beautiful) distillation of a complex world.
But that's not to say that maps have to be straight-forward and dull. The Strange Maps blog is a celebration of the cartography that slips through the cracks. Like the map shown above, showing the Area Code of every woman rapper Ludacris claims to have conquered in his 2001 song "Area Codes". Or a map of South Carolina showing where people prefer catsup and where they prefer mustard. Or the map of the US showing where the most UFO sightings occur. There's something for everyone.
Posted by Chris Spurgeon May 5, 2008 12:21 AM Permalink | Comments (0)
