Extreme trees planted and shaped by arborsculptor Richard Reames.
The Yakov Smirnoff joke -- In Soviet Russia, television watches you! -- is more formally called the "Russian reversal".
The new
A brief history of ten minutes from now, courtesy of ten minutes ago (and Google (Google is the new Yahoo? Google is the new Microsoft? Google is the new Borg? Google is the new Yellow Pages? Google is the new library?)):
Breast-feeding is the new labor
Dumb is the new smart
Cobain is the new Elvis
Fundamentalists are the new avant-garde
Black is the new Jewish
SnowJoggers are the new Uggs
Square watermelons are the new round watermelons
Negative publicity is the new hot hype
Small is the new big
Yellow is the new black
Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism
Armand De Brignac is the new Cristal
Vertical stripes are the new horizontal stripes
Awake is the new sleep
Cell phones are the new cigarettes
Pale is the new tan
JSON Serialization is the new XML Serialization
Sincerity is the new irony
Black is the new gay
Anti-terrorism is the new terrorism
Non-fiction is the new Fiction
RVs are the new homes
Gay cowboys are the new penguins
Oral is the new second base
Libertarians are the new swing vote
Green is the new Black
Bamboo is the new cotton
Cripples are the new Gay
Searing pretension is the new punk rock
Mannies are the new Mary Poppins
Referrer spam is the new Amway
Videogames are the new graffiti
Eco-apocalypticism is the new religion
Colspan is the new <blink>
Foleygate is the new Watergate
Java is the new Cobol
Muslims are the new Jews
Bo Bice is the New Clay Aiken
Clarendon is the new Helvetica
Coke is the new Nike
Gamma is the new beta
Secrecy is the new black
Spim is the new spam
Nanotubes are the new superconductors
No tagline is the new tagline
Organic is the new kosher
Sliders are the new drop-downs
Because nothing is new ("seen it" is the new creativity), this has been done before: Things that are the new black, This Is The New That, Cliches are the new cliche, In with the new..., and Something is the new something.
If you're curious as to how this particular snowclone (snowclones are the new cliches) came about, Wikipedia (Wikipedia is the new Google) tells us (we are the new network):
The phrase is commonly attributed to Gloria Vanderbilt, who upon visiting India in the 1960s noted the prevalence of pink in the native garb. She declared that "Pink is the new black", meaning that the color pink seemed to be the foundation of the attire there, much like black was the base color of most ensembles in New York.
India is the new pink.
In his book, Urban Sprawl and Public Health, public-health advocate Richard Jackson says that "our car-dependent suburban environment is killing us". "If that poor woman had collapsed from heat stroke, we docs would have written the cause of death as heat stroke and not lack of trees and public transportation, poor urban form, and heat-island effects. If she had been killed by a truck going by, the cause of death would have been 'motor-vehicle trauma,' and not lack of sidewalks and transit, poor urban planning, and failed political leadership."
Woo, NASA finally decides to fix the Hubble, repairs that will keep it working until at least 2013. "Scientists expect an upgraded Hubble to continue to make groundbreaking discoveries."
Review of a book celebrating Spy magazine. "You can't overflow with young, reckless rage forever." (thx, emily)
More on the craptacular "Our Country" Chevrolet commercials. The new ones, not mentioned in this article or on Slate, with images of exclusively white, male, heterosexual truck lovers, are possibly even worse. "This is our country...no chicks, homos, Mexicans, or black people welcome."
Sports fans: "It seems to me if you are willing to stick around and watch your team win you should be willing to stick around and watch your team lose."
A list of 20 works of art you need to see before you die. They want to make a list of 50...suggest your favorites in the comments.
Short review of New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. "'I like the cut of his jib' resonates a lot differently than 'shizzle my mizzle fizzle dizzle!'"
Looks like a good issue of the New Yorker this week, including a profile of Will Wright and a review of Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map.
Hair coloring for your "betty"...you know, pubic hair dye, so you can match your cuffs to your collars. (via dethroner)
Alan Smithee is an official pseudonym used for directorial credit when directors don't want their name associated with a movie because "the film had been wrestled from his or her creative control". As you can see from Mr. Smithee's IMDB profile, he's a fairly prolific director.
Transcript of a recent interview of Barack Obama by David Remnick. An 45-minute audio version is also available.
Search, always dead
Via Tim O'Reilly comes this comment from Bill Burnham:
A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of moderating a panel at TIECon on the Search Industry. Peter Norvig, Google's Director of Research, made one comment in particular that stood out in my mind at the time. In response to a question about the prospects for the myriad of search start-ups looking for funding Peter basically said, and I am paraphrasing somewhat, that search start-ups, in the vein of Google, Yahoo Ask, etc. are dead. Not because search isn't a great place to be or because they can't create innovative technologies, but because the investment required to build and operate an Internet-scale, high performance crawling, indexing, and query serving farm were now so great that only the largest Internet companies had a chance of competing.
For Norvig to say what he did seems a little crazy, given the company he works for. The first time that search died was back in 1998. Yahoo, Altavista, Hotbot, Webcrawler, and other sites had the search game all sewn up. They were all about the same in terms of quality and people found what they were looking for much of the time. No one needed another search engine, and starting a search company in such a mature market seemed like folly. Around that time, Google became a company and eventually the world figured out it really did need another search engine.
Turtle with a wheel! A turtle with one missing back leg has been fitted with a wheel to help get around...a turtle/RC car mashup.
Michael Lewis profile of Cowboys coach Bill Parcells. I don't know if this is a typical situation, but the Cowboys seem like a pretty dysfunctional organization.
Pixies fans, this is the news you're all been waiting for: new album in 2007. (via plastcibag)
Suroweicki explans why ever-rising housing prices may be deceiving. "If you control for inflation and quality...real home prices barely budged between the eighteen-nineties and the nineteen-nineties. The idea that housing prices have nowhere to go but up is, in other words, a statistical illusion."
Love it or hate it movies
Netflix, the online DVD rental company, recently released a bunch of their ratings data with the offer of a $1 million prize to anyone who could use that data to make a better movie recommendation system. On the forum for the prize, someone noted that the top 5 most frequently rated movies on Netflix were not particularly popular or critically acclaimed (via fakeisthenewreal):
1. Miss Congeniality
2. Independence Day
3. The Patriot
4. The Day After Tomorrow
5. Pirates of the Caribbean
That led another forum participant to analyze the data and he found some interesting things. The most intriguing result is a list of the movies that Netflix users either really love or really hate:
1. The Royal Tenenbaums
2. Lost in Translation
3. Pearl Harbor
4. Miss Congeniality
5. Napoleon Dynamite
6. Fahrenheit 9/11
7. The Patriot
8. The Day After Tomorrow
9. Sister Act
10. Armageddon
11. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
12. Independence Day
13. Sweet Home Alabama
14. Titanic
15. Gone in 60 Seconds
16. Twister
17. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
18. Con Air
19. The Fast and the Furious
20. Dirty Dancing
21. Troy
22. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
23. The Passion of the Christ
24. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
25. Pretty Woman
So what makes these movies so contentious? Generalizing slightly (*cough*), the list is populated with three basic kinds of movies:
Misunderstood masterpieces / cult favorites (Royal Tenenbaums, Kill Bill, Eternal Sunshine)
Action movies (Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, Fast and the Furious)
Chick flicks (Sister Act, Sweet Home Alabama, Miss Congeniality)
The thing that all those kinds of movies have in common is that if you're outside of the intended audience for a particular movie, you probably won't get it. That means that if you hear about a movie that's highly recommended within a certain group and you're not in that group, you're likely to hate it. In some ways, these are movies intended for a narrow audience, were highly regarded within that audience, tried to cross over into wider appeal, and really didn't make it.
Titanic is really the only outlier on the list...massively popular among several different groups of people and critically well-regarded as well. But I know quite a few people who absolutely hate this movie -- the usual complaints are a) chick flick, b) James Cameron's heavy-handedness, and c) reaction to the huge success of what is perceived to be a marginally entertaining, middling quality film.
BTW, here are the movies on that list that fit into my "love it" category:
The Royal Tenenbaums
Lost in Translation
Napoleon Dynamite
The Day After Tomorrow
Kill Bill: Vol. 1
Titanic
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
By subjecting ordinary water to extremely high pressure and bombarding it with x-rays, scientists at Los Alamos have formed a new hydrogen-oxygen alloy. "Given high enough pressures, even hydrogen will behave as a metal. All the other heavier elements in hydrogen's group of the periodic table are metals."
Hot on the heels of Muhammad Yunus receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006, the New Yorker has an overview of the various approaches to microfinance and microcredit.
A confession: I just spent a little while watching NHL '94 highlight videos on YouTube and consider it time well spent. After all, it is one of the greatest video games ever made. I noticed quite a few of the featured goals in this video were what my little cadre of gamers in college referred to as "cheater" goals where you go across the goal and slapshot hard to the far side. We outlawed them because it was a guaranteed goal and made playing a whole lot less fun. The goal I didn't notice so much of was the "rock the cradle" goal, a beautiful goal and my bread and butter as an NHL '94 player. It happens on the break where you dribble the puck very quickly back and forth from left to right and, when it works, juke the goalie completely. The best part is that after much practice, you can do it with even the slowest players in the game against the best goalies.
Update: Some crazy souls have made a multiplayer version of NHL '94 that works over the internet. You just login to a server, find an opponent, and away you go. There are even leagues!
There's a new Scrabble world record: 830 points, including a play of quixotry on a triple-triple for a record score of 365. "Looking at the game as a whole, it's clear that a lack of expertise created the conditions for the record."
An organization called Scholarships Around the US is offering a $5000 scholarship to a college student who blogs. It's free to apply...all you need to do is write a 300-word essay (and meet a few requirements).
Fascinating story of an amateur cyclist who starts taking various performancing enhancing drugs to see how they affect his performance. "I had a life once, and now I'm standing in the Easton WaWa in the middle of the night, looking like a cyborg, with thousands of dollars of drugs coursing through my veins. I started looking forward to the moment when the whole thing would be over."
The cheapness and small footprint of flat panel TVs has made it much easier for restaurants and bars to just hang them up any old where...and spurred on by the recent World Cup festivities, that's exactly what's happened in NYC.
Line Rider
Line Rider is not quite a game but not quite a toy or drawing tool either. But judging by the 6,000,000 views its gotten since it was posted a month ago, Line Rider certainly is compelling. I don't even like playing it all that much, but I spent a solid hour a few weeks ago watching videos of other people's tracks on YouTube; it's just so fascinating to see how much can be done with simple lines and rules. Here's one of the better tracks I've seen (c/o clusterflock). This little non-game has even shown up in Time magazine. Go, little Line Rider, go.
Update: A new version of Line Rider is to be released soon. New features will include an eraser, new types of lines, line snapping, etc.
If you're looking to record your Line Rider creation and post it to YouTube, you can use CamStudio (Win), Super Screen Recorder (Win), oRipa Screen Recorder (Win), Screen Movie Recorder (Mac), iShowU (Mac), Snapz Pro (Mac), and ScreenRecord (Mac).
For information on how to play Line Rider more effectively, check out the Line Rider Forums.
Richard Dawkins is keeping a journal while he tours around in support of The God Delusion. "This Washington signing was remarkable for the number who bought not just one copy of The God Delusion but up to half a dozen. 'Christmas presents?' I inquired of one man. 'Winter solstice', he instantly corrected me."
Video of a Steven Levitt talk on the economics of gangs and why gangbanger is not such a good vocation (for one thing, the job pays less than McDonald's). The board of directors stuff made me think of the co-op on The Wire.
The Royal Institution of London has named Primo Levi's The Periodic Table the best science book ever written. Other authors in the running: Oliver Sacks, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins.
Gary Wolf talks to three prominent atheists (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett) and concludes that "the irony of the New Atheism -- this prophetic attack on prophecy, this extremism in opposition to extremism -- is too much for me".
It's sad that the Silicon Valley tech scene and press is so fixated on building companies to flip that people need to write about sustainable companies as "a new and better model for Internet startups". Good luck, Ev and company, in finding success on your own terms.
The Enron Explorer lets you search through the emails and social networks of Enron, circa 1999-2002. Even kottke.org made it in there. (thx, dylan)
Now that you've installed the new version of Firefox, here's all the tweaks you need to make it work right.
The story of Tetris
The following is a great 2004 BBC documentary about Tetris, the man who created it, and the lengths that several companies went to in order to procure the rights to distribute it. Tetris - From Russia With Love:
Alexey Pazhitnov, a computer programmer from Moscow, created Tetris in 1985 but as the Soviet Union was Communist and all, the state owned the game and any rights to it. Who procured the rights from whom on the other side of the Iron Curtain became the basis of legal wranglings and lawsuits; the Atari/Nintendo battle over Tetris wasn't settled until 1993. There's an abbreviated version of the story, but the documentary is a lot more fun. A rare copy of the Tengen version of Tetris, which was pulled from the shelves due to legal troubles, is available on eBay for $50.
(Like this story? Digg it.)
A new book called They Never Said That debunks some famous phrases that were never actually said by those that supposedly coined them. "Hundreds of pithy remarks from 'Let them eat cake' to 'Elementary, my dear Watson', turn out to be adaptations of comments that were more clumsy or more boring -- or which were never said by those thought to have coined them."
Story of a dog that was addicted to licking toads for the hallucinogenic effect. Listen to the audio version if you can. "Winter was going to come and we were going to have a dog without toad." (via bb)
Five great movie monologues. #1 is Merkin Muffley talking to Dmitri on the phone in Dr. Strangelove...one of my favorite scenes of any movie ever.
Following the lead of the Six Word Story group on Flickr and Caterina's prompt, Wired asked some prominent writers to pen their own six word stories. "Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words ('For sale: baby shoes, never worn.') and is said to have called it his best work." Got any good ones?
Interview with Cory Arcangel about his new show at Team Gallery. "I made the conscious decision that the viewer shouldn't have to understand it; it should stand on its own and be beautiful. Anyone can have an art moment with my work, regardless of their technical knowledge."
Nike hightops for sale. Price: $8500. Sneakers are the new wine.
An artist diagnosed with Alzheimer's, William Utermohlen dealt with his illness by painting self portraits. (thx, ajit)
I know it's only 8am, but this is the best link of the day. Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, lost his voice 18 months ago due to a strange condition called spasmodic dysphonia. He wasn't ever supposed to get it back, but he did what any good nerd would do: he figured out how to hack his brain to route around the problem and, voila, his voice returned. Awesome. (thx, eric)
Update: In November 2004, Adams also lost the ability to draw because of a condition called focal dystonia. As with his voice problems, he routed around the problem by learning to draw in a different way. (thx, martin)
Free home run tacos, several strings attached
As part of a World Series promotion, Taco Bell will give away a free taco to everyone in the United States if someone hits a home run over the left field wall in tonight's game 3. This is a big offer for a big company so of course their lawyers want to make darn sure that we know precisely what "Taco Bell" means when they say "home run", "left field", and "free taco" with an extensive list of terms and conditions. Surely the first legal document containing the phrase "a completely outside the bun idea", the T&C is a fun read, but my favorite is the first condition that you agree to if you take advantage of the offer:
...to release, Major League Baseball Properties, Inc., Major League Baseball Enterprises, Inc., MLB Advanced Media, L.P., MLB Media Holdings, Inc., MLB Media Holdings, L.P., MLB Online Services, Inc., the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, and the Major League Baseball Clubs, and each of their respective shareholders, employees, parents, directors, officers, affiliates, representatives, agents, successors, and assigns (hereinafter, "MLB Entities") and Sponsor and their affiliates, subsidiaries, retailers, sales representatives, distributors and franchisees, and each of their officers, directors, employees and agents ("Promotional Parties"), from any and all liability, loss or damage incurred with respect to participation in this contest and/or the awarding, receipt, possession, and/or use or misuse of any Free Taco
Man, I really hope someone hits a left field home run tonight. I'm dying to see some creative misuse of free tacos.
Profile of John Hodgman, "archly amusing nerd".
Great photos of the Space Shuttle launch taken from the International Space Station. (via cyn-c)
Update: The photos weren't taken from the ISS but from a chase plane. (thx, greg)
First draft of Rafe's Law: "An Internet service cannot be considered truly successful until it has attracted spammers."
The Moleskine City Notebooks, the cool make-your-own travel books, are being released in the US on Nov 1 and moleskinerie has information on where to find them.
outside.in is a hyperlocal blog/newspaper/information aggregator that Steven Johnson is heading up. Here's his announcement post on his blog. "Type in a zip code or address, and you'll instantly see the conversations that the natives are having about their community."
Time's White House photographers have a daily photoblog. A good look at the stuff that doesn't make it into the newspapers or magazines. (thx, pablo)
Artist Liz Cohen fixes up old cars and then photographs herself with them as a bikini model. Here's a recent article on Cohen's work in the Phoenix New Times and an older article from Wired. (via art fag city)
Portfolio site of graphic designer Si Scott. The navigation is ridiculous and inscrutable, but the work within is worth seeing.
Richard Dawkins: Why there almost certainly is no God. "We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, like those other fantasies that we can't disprove, we can say that God is very very improbable."
Jimmy Wales: what if you had $100 million...what copyrighted works would you buy and then release under an open license? (via bb)
A collection of excuses for not blogging more. "I haven't had the internet and I have been drunk or busy alot."
Let's say, like Steve Wynn, you've punched a hole in your Picasso. Here's how to fix it.
Happy birthday, universe
According to the Ussher-Lightfoot Calendar, today is the 6,009th birthday of the universe. Based on James Ussher's interpretation of the Bible, God created "the heaven and the earth" on October 23, 4004 BC. Happy birthday, everything!
Note: I'm doing Mr. Ussher's precise chronology a disservice by fudging the Julian calendar date that he derived with the Gregorian calendar we now use. For that, I apologize.
PopTech, day 3 wrap-up (with a little of the previous two days as well)
Notes from day 3 at PopTech:
Chris Anderson talked about, ba ba baba!, not the long tail. Well, not explicitly. Chris charted how the availability of a surplus in transistors (processors are cheap), storage (hard drives are cheap), and surplus in bandwidth (DSL is cheap) has resulted in so much opportunity for innovation and new technology. His thoughts reminded me of how surplus space in Silicon Valley (in the form of garages) allowed startup entrepreneurs to pursue new ideas without having to procure expensive commercial office space.
Quick thought re: the long tail...if the power law arises from scarcity as Matt Webb says, then it would make sense that the surplus that Anderson refers to would be flattening that curve out a bit.
Roger Brent crammed a 60 minute talk into 20 minutes. It was about genetic engineering and completely baffling...almost a series of non sequiturs. "Centripital glue engine" was my favorite phrase of the talk, but I've got no idea what Brent meant by it.
Homaro Cantu gave a puzzling presentation of a typical meal at his Chicago restaurant, Moto. I've seen this presentation twice before and eaten at Moto; all three experiences were clear and focused on the food. This time around, Cantu didn't explain the food as well or why some of the inventions were so cool. His polymer box that cooks on the table is a genuinely fantastic idea, but I got the feeling that the rest of the audience didn't understand what it was. Cantu also reiterated his position on copyrighting and patenting his food and inventions. Meg caught him saying that he was trying to solve the famine problem with his edible paper, which statement revealed two problems: a) famines are generally caused by political issues and therefore not solvable by new kinds of food, printed or otherwise, and b) he could do more good if he open sourced his inventions and let anyone produce food or improve the techniques in those famine cases where food would be useful.
Richard Dawkins gave part of his PopTech talk (the "queerer than we can suppose" part of it) at TED in 2005 (video).
Bob Metcalfe's wrap-up of the conference was a lot less contentious than in past years; hardly any shouting and only one person stormed angrily out of the room. In reference to Hasan Elahi's situation, Bob said that there's a tension present in our privacy desires: "I want my privacy, but I need you to be transparent." Not a bad way of putting it.
Serena Koenig spoke about her work in Haiti with Partners in Health. Koening spoke of a guideline that PIH follows in providing healthcare: act as though each patient is a member of your own family. That sentiment was echoed by Zinhle Thabethe, who talked about her experience as an HIV+ woman living in South Africa, an area with substandard HIV/AIDS-related healthcare. Thabethe's powerful message: we need to treat everyone with HIV/AIDS the same, with great care. Sounds like the beginning of a new Golden Rule of Healthcare.
2.7 billion results for "blog" on Google. Blogs: bigger than Jesus.
Invention + art
Photographer Clifford Ross shared his list of the necessary ingredients for invention and art at PopTech:
1. curiousity
2. persistence
3. ready to embrace the unexpected
4. ability and willingness to collaborate
Ross showed some rough results from his new pano-camera. I love Ross' Hurricane series:
Q&A with Thomas Friedman on US oil addiction. (thx, brian)
PopTech day 2 wrap-up
Some notes from day 2 at PopTech, with a little backtracking into day 1 as well. In no particular order:
The upshot of Thomas Barnett's entertaining and provacative talk (or one of the the upshots, anyway): China is the new world power and needs a sidekick to help globalize the world. And like when the US was the rising power in the world and took the outgoing power, England, along for the ride so that, as Barnett put it, "England could fight above its weight", China could take the outgoing power (the US) along for the globalization ride. The US would provide the military force to strike initial blows and the Chinese would provide peacekeeping; Barnett argued that both capabilities are essential in a post-Cold War world.
Juan Enriquez talked about boundries...specifically if there will be more or less of them in the United States in the future. 45 states? 65 states? One thing that the US has to deal with is how we treat immigrants. Echoing William Gibson, Enriquez said "the words you use today will resonate through history for a long time". That is, if you don't let the Mexican immigrants in the US speak their own language, don't welcome their contributions to our society, and just generally make people feel unwelcome in the place where they live, it will come back to bite you in the ass (like, say, when southern California decides it would rather be a part of Mexico or its own nation).
Enriquez again, regarding our current income tax proclivities: "if we pay more and our children don't owe less, that's not taxes...it's just a long-term, high-interest loan".
Number of times ordained minister Martin Marty said "hell" during his presentation: 2. Number of times Marty said "goddamn": 1. Number of times uber-heathen Richard Dawkins said "hell", "goddamn", or any other blasphemous swear: 0.
Dawkins told the story of Kurt Wise, who took a scissors to the Bible and cut out every passage which was in discord with the theory of evolution, eventually ending up with a fragmented mess. Confronted with this crisis of faith and science, Wise renounced evolution and became a geologist who believes that the earth is only 6000 years old.
The story of Micah Garen's capture by Iraqi militants and Marie-Helene Carlton's efforts to get her boyfriend back home safely illustrates the power of the connected world. Marie-Helene and Micah's family used emails, mobile phones, and sat phones to reach out through their global social network, eventually reaching people in Iraq whom Micah's captors might listen to. A woman in the audience stood during the Q&A and related her story of her boyfriend being on a hijacked plane out of Athens in 1985 and how powerless she was to do anything in the age before mobiles, email, and sat phones. Today, Stanley Milgram might say, an Ayatollah is never more than 4 or 5 people away.
Lexicographer Erin McKean told us several interesting things about dictionaries, including that "lexicographer" can be found in even the smallest of dictionaries because, duh, look who's responsible for compiling the words in a dictionary. She called dictionaries the vodka of literature: a distillation of really meaty mixture of substances into something that odorless, tasteless, colorless, and yet very powerful. Here an interview with her and a video of a lecture she gave at Google.
Voting for the future
Juan Enriquez had a nice idea for rebalancing the priorities in the voting booth: proxy votes for parents of children under 18. That is, if my wife and I have two kids, the family gets four votes, not two. Juan's rationale for this plan is that the voting public is currently made up of a lot of baby boomers, who are going to begin to vote for things that benefit their age group, which can be thought of as an investment in the past. By voting on behalf of the 0-18 year-olds, the parents might support issues that benefit that age group (education, etc.) and invest in the future instead. Here's a quote from Juan in CIO Magazine:
Why not give parents of kids under 18 one proxy vote per child? Only then will there be a strong voting block to counter growing gray power. It is also time to quit spending more than we earn. And above all, it is time to realize just how fragile countries can be.
If you missed his talk on PopTech Live, the CIO article covers some of what he talked about.
Twisty Table
One of the coolest little gadgets at PopTech is Onomy Labs' Twisty Table. This one is round and it's got a satellite map of the world projected on it. When you spin the table, the map zooms in and out and tilting the table scrolls it. Here's a photo of the table in action at Foo Camp.
Rodrigo y Gabriela
A couple from Ireland (by way of Mexico), Rodrigo and Gabriela totally blew the audience away here at PopTech with their thrash metal-influenced Latin percussive acoustic guitar. I know that's not much to go on, but trust me on this one. Check out some of their stuff on YouTube and then buy their new CD. (Best part of their set: they threw in a little Enter Sandman by Metallica, which went over the head of everyone in the audience over 35, i.e. almost everyone.)
Hasan Elahi ran into some trouble with the FBI in 2002 (they thought he was a terrorist) and ever since, he's been voluntarily tracking his movements and putting the whole thing online: photos of meals, photos of toilets used, airports flown out of, credit card receipts, etc. His goal is to flood the market with information, so it devalues the information that the authorities have on him.
PopTech, day 1 wrap-up
Since my internet access has been somewhat spotty at the conference (I'm trying to pay attention and power is hard to come by here so the laptop is closed most of the time), I'm going to do rolling wrap-ups as I go, skipping around and filling in the blanks when I can. Here we go, soundbite-style:
Alex Steffen: Cars equipped with displays that show gas mileage, when compared to cars without the mileage display, get better gas mileage. That little bit of knowledge helps the driver drive more economically. More visible energy meter displays in the home have a similar effect...people use less energy when they're often reminded of how much energy they use. (Perhaps Personal Kyoto could help here as well.) At dinner, we discussed parallels between that and eating. Weighing yourself daily or keep track of everything you eat, and you'll find yourself eating less. In the same way, using a program like Quicken to track your finances might compel you to spend less, at least in areas of your life where you may be spending too much.
Bruce Sterling is the Jesse Jackson of technology. He has this cadence that he gets into, neologism after neologism, stopping just short of suggesting a new word for neologism. Wonderful to experience in person. Perhaps not as upbeat as the Reverend, though.
Bruce also related a story told to him by an engineering professor friend of his. The prof split his class into two groups. The first group, the John Henrys, had to study and learn exclusively from materials available at the library...no internet allowed. The second group, the Baby Hueys, could use only the internet for research and learning...no primary source lookups at the library. After a few weeks, he had to stop this experiment because the John Henrys were lagging so far behind the Baby Hueys that it is was unfair to continue.
Kevin Kelly noted that the web currently has 1 trillion links, 1 quintillion transistors, and 20 exabytes of memory. A single human brain has 1 trillion synapses (links), 1 quintillion neurons (transistors of sorts), and 20 exabytes of memory.
Kelly also said that technology has its own agenda and went on to list what it is that technology might want. One of the things was clean water. You need clean water for industrial manufacturing...so water cleanliness is going to be a big deal in China. In a later talk, Thomas Friedman said, "China needs to go green."
Hasan Elahi, during his ordeal being mistaken for -- what's the term these days? -- an enemy combatant, learned that language translates easier than culture. That is, you can learn how to speak a language fluently way easier than to have the cultural fluency necessary to convince someone you're a native. In his interrogations, Hasan liberally sprinkled pop culture references in his answers to questions posed by the FBI to help convince them that he was a native. Workers at call centers in India for American companies are not only taught to speak English with an American accent, they also receive training in American geography, history, and pop culture so as to better fool/serve American callers.
"The best laid plans of mice and men turn into a nonlinear system." -- Will Wright, with apologies to Robert Burns.
Speaking of Wright, a couple of Spore trivia bits. The data for a creature in Spore takes up just 3K of memory. And entire world: just 80K. And these worlds are amazingly complex.
Brian Eno: With large groups of people, the sense of shame and the sense of honor that keeps the members of small groups from misbehaving breaks down. The challenge for larger groups is to find ways of making honor and shame matter in a similar respect.
Stewart Brand: "We are terraforming the earth anyway, we might as well do it right." Stewart also noted that cities are very effective population sinks. When people move to cities, the birthrate drops to the replacement rate (2.1 children per family) and keeps on dropping. Combine that with the fact that by early next year, more people in the world will live in cities than in rural areas, and at some point in the next hundred years, the earth's population will start to fall.
Keeping secrets
William Gibson speaking on secrecy:
It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret. In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.
Taken from Alex Steffen's talk at PopTech.
Not like the 70s
Some notes on a presentation by Thomas Friedman, who I've somehow managed to unconsciously steer clear of. (Doesn't help that his stuff is behind the NY Times paywall. If he really wanted to make the impact on this green stuff, he'd get the Times to move that stuff out in the open so us proles can link to it and discuss it.) Here are Friedman's five reasons why "this is not your father's energy crisis" (ie the 1970s):
1. With our energy consumption in the US, we're funding both sides in the "war on terror". Our oil consumption pays for terrorists and our taxes pay for the armed forces, etc.
2. The world is flat, globalization, opportunities to consume at first world levels are available to China, India, Russia, etc. And they're seizing the day.
3. Clean power and green energy is the #1 growth industry of the 21st century.
4. What Tom referred to as the First Law of Petropolitics: the price of oil has an inverse relationship with the pace of freedom. Oil prices fall, freedom goes up; oil prices rise and Iran starts talking about the myth of The Holocaust.
5. The new economy companies (Friedman namechecked Google and Yahoo specifically) are going to drive clean power and green energy because every time you do a search on the web, it costs them a little bit of power and they are going to want to drive that price down.
He finished by saying that green has been marginalized as being sissy, liberal, and Unamerican, but Friedman says "green is the new red, white, and blue".
It's all in your head
The Brian Eno/Will Wright session kicked things off quite well at PopTech. Lots of interesting stuff to say about this one, but I quickly wanted to highlight two things that Eno and Wright said independently in their presentations. Eno:
Art is created by artists so that the viewer has the opportunity to create something.
Later, Wright said in relation to games:
The real game is constructed in the player's head.
Eno started his presentation by wondering about a overall system for describing culture, from high to low. He and Wright may be onto something here in that respect.
77 Million Paintings, a generative artwork by Brian Eno. "Work that continues to create itself in your absence."
Netlag: infovisualization of the world made of exterior web cams over time. So as the day goes on, you can see Europe light up, then the eastern seaboard of the US, then the western US, and so on.
Steven Reich to Brian Eno to Cory Arcangel
Onstage at PopTech just now, Brian Eno said that a musical piece by Steven Reich had a huge influence on how he thought about art. He said that Reich's piece showed him that:
1. You don't need much.
2. The composer's role is to set up a system and then let it go.
3. The true composer is actually in the listener's brain.
I'd never heard of Reich, but the name sounded familiar when Eno mentioned it. I realized I'd seen it yesterday when reading about Cory Arcangel's show at Team Gallery in reference to his piece, Sweet 16:
Cory applied American avant-garde composer Steven Reich's concept of phasing to the guitar intro of Guns and Roses' track Sweet Child O'Mine. Rather than use instruments, Cory took the same two clips from the song's music video and shortened one clip by a single note. As the videos loop, the two intros grow farther apart until they are back in sync.
He's veered away from video games, but Cory's new work is looking really interesting these days.
Some mobile phones come with water damage stickers that change color when they get wet, thereby voiding the warranty on your phone if it stops working, no matter if the color change and the breakage is related. "As a designer, I would much prefer to look at the problem as 'How can we improve the sealing of phones so that water ingress is no longer a major problem?' than 'How can we design something to cover our backs and shift all the blame onto the user for our design fault?'"
Paul Graham on the 18 mistakes that kill startups. Some interesting stuff here, but heavily technology-biased (#6 Hiring Bad Progammers...what, everyone else on the team can be bad and you'll still succeed?).
Malcolm Gladwell writes about a group of people trying to predict movie hits. As Andy notes, "the problem with their technique is coming up with every possible meaningful variable".
@ the movies
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
This is one of the most disturbing movies I've ever seen. If I had kids, I'd rather take them to see Scarface or Requiem for a Dream. Better: Lazy Sunday, aka The Chronic of Narnia.
The 12 best movie pitches ever. "Idea #3: Two childhood friends who are in love with each other but don't know it (also, they're a man and a woman) have a contest over twenty years to see who can have the biggest divorce, but end up falling in love with a husband and wife divorce lawyer team" ...so far so good... "and the divorce laywer team's daughter has invisible powers and can see fat guys naked and the guy (not the divorce lawyer) has a pet pug and the pug drives a little motorcycle." (via waxy)
An evolutionary theorist has predicted that humans may split into two sub-species: "the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the 'underclass' humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures."
Great SF Chronicle series on sex trafficking: Diary of a Sex Slave. The story centers around a young Korean woman who accrues massive credit card debt and then is sold into prostitution to pay it off.
Praise be! The New Yorker seems to have reversed their position on splitting their articles up into multiple pages...the articles from this week's issue all seem to be one-pagers (for example). Nice work.
Update: I spoke too soon...they are still doing multi-page articles. What I observed seemed to be a technological hiccup. Booo!!!
PopTech 2006
Postings around here may get a little sporadic because I'm heading up to attend the PopTech conference in Maine. PopTech is near the top of the heap of all the conferences I've attended and I'm really looking forward to this year's event, especially since I didn't get to go last year. Speakers include Thomas Barnett, Richard Dawkins, Homaro Cantu, Juan Enriquez, Stewart Brand, Thomas Friedman, Will Wright, and Ze Frank, as well as the sleepers that I've never heard of that inevitably knock everyone's socks off.
If you didn't get yourself in gear to make it to PopTech this year, no need for despair. For the first time, they're broadcasting the whole thing, live and for free. I will also be doing some blogging from the audience (as will others, I imagine), so stay tuned for that as well.
Clay Davis: Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeit. This is right up there with Khaaan! (thx, david)
The economic case against philanthropy: charity is selfish. "Those organizing fund-raising drives for the United Way tend to be disproportionately real estate agents, insurance brokers, car dealers, and other people with something to sell."
Cory posted a nice review of Julian Dibbell's Play Money. I loved the book as well and Cory's review captures what's so compelling about it. It's a shame that it didn't gain a wider readership (and a less unfortunate cover as well)...it's not just some nerdy book about g@m3rz.
Photographer Philippe Halsman took portraits of people while jumping (the people, not Halsman), as a way to loosen up. Subjects include Marilyn Monroe, Richard Nixon, and the Dule and Duchess of Windsor. (viabb)
Just how much women's underwear can be stashed in one person's closet? "Next I discovered two loose pairs of women's underwear. Next I discovered a Pokemon lunchbox containing 20 pairs of women's underwear, and next I discovered a blue hardened briefcase containing 73 pairs of women's underwear."
Headline of the week: "Horniest male beetles have the tiniest testicles". Bravo!
Dori Smith had her personalized license plate ("WEB GEEK") stolen and she wants it back, no questions asked. "I know a lot of people in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area. I know a lot of Web geeks. The chances are good that whoever ends up with my plate knows someone who knows someone who knows me."
Update: Nora Ephron was present at the accidental violation of Ms. Marie-Therese Walter by Wynn and tells her story on Huffington Post. (via zach)
Wally Wallington demonstrates how to move anything by yourself, including a barn and a Stonehenge-sized rock. More information available at Wally's site.
What's so special about the number 1729? (Turns out, quite a lot.)
A collection of artists each picked a page from The Pat Robertson and Friends Coloring Book and "colored" them in. (thx, gk)