Why does is feel so cool to (web) publish a map detailing the smells reported at each subway station in New York City?
My thoughts: it’s documenting an everyday, undocumented experience – making the intangible tangible. And it is using the power of the individual which has been unleashed by the internet, more specifically by “Web 2.0″, the writeable, shareable web (not the old read-only one).
Supremely tired today. Not sleeping. The weather has changed. Wintery for a day or two.
And it seems suddenly darker in the evening.
I trogged across this on Boing Boing: Animation of processes inside living cells. It is a tantalising animation of processes from inside living cells. But since I am reading Tufte’s most recent book, I have to immediately ask “what scale are the images?”, “what are the images of (where are the labels)?”. Without that information the images are pretty but carry little information.
Zero Day
Julian Richardson, 9/22/06
It was a time of great danger. Most critical systems in the world’s security infrastructure still used Windows XP, and Windows XP was so vulnerable, especially now in the last few twilight months before the release of Vista. And then there was the war… if someone was going to try to exploit this vulnerability to do something really nasty and really global, they would have to do it now.
In 2005, the Zero Day Emergency Response Team (ZERT) started issuing bootleg patches.
Hot damn cool collaborative search internet radio site – great interface, recommendations (1) so far are great… www.pandora.com
I got this from a very nice RSS feed: scienceblogs.com, a “combined feed” made from a bunch of other science feeds. Sure beats Scientific American…
A few weeks ago we saw “An Inconvenient Truth”, which had more interesting data and charm than I had expected. Especially interesting was the appalling fact that we really are facing the imminent melting of the ice caps. And the more the arctic ice melts, the faster it will continue to melt, because the open ocean exposed by melting absorbs heat from the sun vastly better than the ice it replaces.
And data is coming in thick and fast now to show that climate change is happening right now: Arctic summer ice anomaly shocks scientists.
I guess that means it is time to do something. Getting the word out is one way. Tackling the nay-sayers – who use similar techniques to those used by the big tobacco companies in the past – is another: British Scientists write to Exxon: stop misleading the public on climate change.
Another approach which might be a good one in the US is legal, following the path of cases against the tobacco companies: California sues car makers.
I am a Scientific American print subscriber and I recently set myself up to get RSS feeds from Scientific American.
My immediate reaction is that the Scientific American website is extremely antisocial. On clicking an RSS link for Scientific American I first get a web page from your “sponsor”, which is usually trying to give me a free screensaver or some other such application which is usually spyware or adware. When I click on the link there to get through to the Scientific American website I always get a popup window asking me whether I am a subscriber to Scientific American print, digital edition or something else.
In my opinion this behavior is not conducive to viewing Scientifican American as an authority on scientific matters in the US.
Sincerely
Julian Richardson
Funny, this morning I was musing about my blog and wondering whether I should name it after my friend and colleague, Tim Menzies, whose blog is entitled “Some People Call Me Tim Menzies”. Which led me to the idea that maybe some people call me Tim Menzies, but they are wrong, because I just had a brain transplant… silly Monday morning musings. I was wondering how the brain would feel about its new body, and starting to conclude that it could be unpleasant. I was imagining my back without the slight ache it has (especially on Monday mornings), my eyes would be different… I might not miss the bad things about the old body so much, but the new things could be overwhelming and disturbing.
And then I come across this story about a man who had a penis transplant and couldn’t deal with it. Neither could his wife. They removed the penis.
Much of the weekend was spent gardening, double digging my new vegetable plot, buying lettuce seeds from Common Ground in Palo Alto. Oliver and I started them in flats. In the course of my garden digging, I uncovered much junk: roots, stones, stakes, bottle caps and… pipes. One enthusiastic forking too far and I pierced a pipe from the sprinkler system. A little pool of water formed in my trench then slowly subsided.
The gardener is fixing the pipe now, and uncovering the other pipes in my vegetable plot so I can arrange the plot around them.
It is a shame those pipes are right under my vegetable plot. On the other hand, it turns out that 6 inches under the water pipe I pierced is a pipe carrying all the electricity cables.
Gardening makes me feel good.
Not much brain spam coming in this morning on the RSS brain-tubes. Found this link off a Spanish blog: Nerdy Rapper. And this trailer for The Shining (comedy version).
Lost and Found
This morning I received an email from a very dear friend of mine from my Edinburgh days. My email habits are terrible these days… I often take days, weeks or longer to reply… but on this occasion I emailed him straight back. Fumbling around for a photo I remembered Tim’s blog and so pointed him there
I remembered the good old days when I could spend hours answering an email, having lunch, or working on something new… I’m happier now than I was then, but I miss the flexibility in my work.
Rabid Prototyping
This afternoon I have been putting together a storyboard for part of my project. I like sketching the interface, imagining clicks and responses, structuring of actons and data… maybe I should do more of this stuff?
I feel like it should be possible to code up a prototype in a jiffy bu at last Java doesn’t work that way. There are always 1000 irrelevant (to a first approximation) details that need to be spelled out…
