Google Maps is the coolest thing to happen to online maps since… online maps. But their basic location and navigation capabilities just scratch the surface. Thrown in GPS data, XML wrappers, and some simple animation techniques, and the possibilities crack wide open. Paul writes:

“Here’s an interesting combination of GPS, Google Maps and Flash (with cellphone GPS and photos to come in the future): A Google Maps walking tour of Keene, NH.”

Jon Udell (who created the walking tour) asks: What will we be able to do when there are millions of people walking around with GPS-enabled phones? And he answers himself: “We’re going to use them to collectively annotate the planet.”

Tub no longer draining. Did I let a Thomas the Tank Engine ColorForm slip down the hole at end of one of Miles’ baths? Nope, they’re all accounted for. Borrow a snake, unscrew the drain insert, snake won’t make it around the bend. Into the abyss — under the house on belly like a lizard, dirt in hair. Looks like once-upon-a-time workmen busted up the old tub with a sledgehammer — a great pile of foot-long jagged steel shards beneath the tub. Unscrew hose clamps from the rubber collar that conjoins downtube with S-curve. Jam snake into place, crank, crank, sweat, crank, cuss, crank. Feel like I’m getting nowhere, back it out, LO! : Massive wad of wife hair, eight inches long and as wide as the drainpipe itself, comes slithering out into my hand. A solid pound of hair and slime, paydirt! Re-assemble, slither back out, test from up top, scour the tub, leave hair prize out on display for all to enjoy.

Hard to describe why a job like this is so rewarding; perhaps it has to do with spending so many hours in front of a screen every day — getting your hair in the dirt and your hands in the goo is strangely satisfying. Life is rich.

If you want your kid to go to Cornell and create a hamster-controlled MIDI device, the trick, apparently, is in making sure he has access to both a Habitrail and a Heathkit AO-1 Audio Oscillator construction set.

Guided by inputs based on hamster movements, Markov chains were used to perform such beat and note computations. In culmination, 3 simultaneous voices were produced spanning 3 octaves and 3 rhythmic tiers. Each voice was controlled by two hamsters: one that was responsible for adjusting the rhythmic qualities of the melody and another that modified the note sequence. With all of these elements in combination, an output was produced with very musical qualities. All of this was implemented using an Atmel Mega32 microcontroller, distance sensors, a HamsterMIDI Controller, and 6 hamsters.

I don’t pretend to understand all of this, but the output is lovely - some fusion of Philip Glass and Twink.

Thanks baald

Tectonic shift? Probably not, but it occurred to me recently that there was a sort of cultural/political musical chairs going on. Pro-nuke Greens! Pro-environment Christians!

On one hand, a growing cadre of pro-nuclear Greens — a notion* that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago.

On the other, an apparently growing swath of pro-environment Christians. This makes so much sense to me - without being a Biblical scholar, I’ve always thought that the teachings of Christ pointed in important ways to environmental sensitivity; so the preponderant alignment of Christians with the profoundly anti-environment Bush administration has always seemed unsettling. It does make you wonder: What Would Jesus Drive?

OK, not a tectonic shift, but evidence that religious and political generalizations are always bound to fail… and to surprise.

* I swore I’d never use the word “notion” here, but there you have it.

Best commentary yet on Christo’s Gates: The Somerville Gates. See About the Gates for a breakdown of differences in construction/installation expense, public attendance, etc.

Thanks Helen

A couple of months ago, Christian Crumlish gave me a copy of his just-published book The Power of Many (How the Living Web Is Transforming Politics, Business, and Everyday Life). I’ve known Christian for a lot of years — back when Birdhouse was primarily an arts collective publishing “new media” works by artists discovering the web for the first time, he invited me to join antiweb (ironically no site currently online) — a loose collective of web developers scattered around the world, trying to find the capabilities and limits of the new medium. Christian, a writer of dozens of computer books, also ran Enterzone, an online literary e-zine.

Christian’s latest book is not only his first to appear in hard-cover, but also his first that’s not a technical/how-to; rather, it’s an exploration — at turns straightforwardly journalistic, nearly stream-of-consciousness, and scholarly — on the transformative power of online communities. Crumlish goes behind the scenes not technically, but anthropologically, examining how weblogs and wikis, social networking sites, web services, SMS, discussion groups, flash mobs, etc. have transformed the way people gather and organize, both online and in meatspace. And he chronicles his involvement in the web-savvy Dean campaign, his deep roots in the Grateful Dead scene (whose online existence in many ways mirrors the ethos of the Dead culture), wanders through topics ranging from spontaneously self-organizing micro-communities to well-funded corporate and political action groups.

On first discovering online journals, most people find them puzzling, a paradox. Who would put their private diary online? … Omigod, my mother read my blog! Indeed, there are countless stories of people who misjudged the effects of putting their thoughts and ideas into the public domain and who lived to regret the confidences broken, the parties offended by their snarky comments, their exposed secrets. In time, though, anyone who continues the exhilarating tightrope walk of online self-examination will manage to cultivate that gray area between public and private that seems just personal and revealing enough to draw in readers and invite scrutiny but that still holds back what truly belongs out of public view entirely.

Christian has always kept a finger in each of a dozen pies — I can never keep up with all the simultaneous online ventures he manages to keep afloat. His Radio Free Blogistan is another great read. And I still love his early hypertext fiction piece No Bird But an Invisible Thing.

I’ve posted before about how the file-based sterility of MP3 listening habits blot out much of the romance of musical discovery, and how the concept of an album as an indivisible artistic totality has all but been erased (I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing - there’s a whole lot of crap on a whole lot of good records, and I scuttle dud tracks without a shred of guilt).

Adding to the discussion, Dave Mandi wonders what shuffle mode is doing to the art of the segue — the ease (and the thrill) of letting a computer or an iPod choose tracks from a collection at random is diminishing the art of the well-selected transition. In Praise of the Segue:

With MP3s becoming the de facto currency of music listening and trading, and with shuffle mode becoming a more and more common way of programming an hour of music—Apple’s recent introduction of the iPod Shuffle is pretty clear evidence of that—the art of the set and the segue is in imminent danger of dying. … We have the opportunity to create greater meta-masterpieces than ever, tailored to people’s moods, or the time of day, or the weather. Why destroy all that by getting lazy and pushing the “shuffle” button?

It’s all true, but… I love shuffle mode, not afraid to admit it. Creating thoughtful transitions is something I make time for when burning the Christmas CDs. For daily listening, accidental random musical collisions charge me up.

Woke up the other day wondering about my career, and trying to figure out how it is that I didn’t end up as a dolphin trainer, which was clearly my destiny. Life is strange. Dad sagely reminded me that as a dolphin trainer (probably living out of a van behind SeaWorld) I would have days where I’d wake up wishing I had become a webmaster. I’m sure he’s right, but dang, just imagine what it would be like to work with dolphins rather than professors!

I’ve added a new Environment category to this weblog, though I haven’t gone through the entire history of posts and added historical entries to it.

Also moved the birdhouse server status subdomain off my home Mac (so I can set it to sleep when unused). Wrapped it in a much more attractive WordPress template while I was at it. Thanks mneptok for hosting the new status server.

In SNL’s famous “Behind the Music” Cowbell skit [transcript], Christopher Walken is the producer during a Blue Oyster Cult recording session. Will Farrell is hard-driving on the cowbell through “Dont Fear the Reaper” — a little too hard-driving, his bandmates think. But Walken insists: “More cowbell. I got to have more cowbell.” The piece has cult status for a reason — we all know deep inside that the cowbell has been woefully under-appreciated in music history.

NPR makes amends with their tribute piece: There’s Just Something About That Cowbell, while The Cowbell Project archives every song readers can think of that centers on that luscious, penetrating sound. The site even calls Christopher Walken “The Patron Saint of the Cowbell.” You can also get Cowbell T-shirts to proclaim your adoration.

It’s the cymbal’s evil third cousin. It’s the dark ring that pounds in the back of your brain and lets you know, it’s time to rock. The cowbell is an instrument that can’t be overused. It should never be underused.

I’m glad for the cowbell that it’s finally being recognized for its place in rock history, I really am, but also feeling sympathy for the even less-lauded Vibraslap. If the cowbell is underutilized in modern rock/pop, the vibraslap is all but forgotten. Once upon a time, the vibraslap was a staple of both big orchestral rock and high school bands; now it’s less than a footnote. (MP3 excerpt from ELO’s “Jungle”):

Granted it’s kind of buried in the mix there — someone point me to a more prominent sample please — I got to hear more vibraslap.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes NewWest.net.

New West is a network of online communities devoted to the culture, economy, politics, environment and overall atmosphere of the Rocky Mountain West.

NewWest is our first client to be hosted on an independent, dedicated server separate from the main Birdhouse shared server. Their site is driven by the excellent Expression Engine content management system.

Massive construction project going on outside my office door - scheduled to last three years (lucky me!). Just heard a huge crashing sound, walked outside, and found a 130-foot eucalyptus tree laying on its side, branches snapped, debris everywhere. And under a large bough, the dean’s car. He was not in it at the time and no one was hurt; he was even able to drive it away. But wow.

Theory is that some of its roots were cut by a Godzilla-sized backhoe during adjacent construction, and today’s high winds gave it enough nudge to seal the deal. Eucalyptus don’t have very deep roots to begin with… I’m sure the contractors are going to have some explaining to do. It really was a beautiful tree.

Photos here.

Every time I sign a credit-card receipt, I wonder what the point is. I don’t recall any clerk ever checking to see whether it matched the signature on the back of the card. Apparently I’m not the only who’s wondered. Old Ziff-mate John Hargrave’s Credit Card Prank is the ultimate real-world proof that credit card signatures are worth even less than you think they are.

NOT AUTHORIZED

Update: I realize now that the prank linked to above is actually just the first chapter of the prank I really meant to link to, which is bigger and funnier.

If you haven’t already, run — don’t walk — to rent Ray, the musical biography of Ray Charles. The cinematography is gorgeous, the story of his life honest and gripping, the history tragic and fascinating, the music… speaks for itself. Jamie Foxx perfect as Ray. We split this over two nights (it’s around 3.5 hours short), and wished it wouldn’t end. Neither of us have enjoyed a movie this much for ages.

Provocative piece in the current issue of Wired on how small swaths of the traditionally staunchly anti-nuclear Green movement are starting to go pro-nuke. My earliest awakening of any socio-political thought whatsoever occurred while protesting the construction and launch of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in the early 80s with Mom and Dad. But now:

Some of the world’s most thoughtful greens have discovered the logic of nuclear power, including Gaia theorist James Lovelock, Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore, and Britain’s Bishop Hugh Montefiore, a longtime board member of Friends of the Earth.

The “green” arguments in favor of nuclear power are not airtight, but the Wired piece does make a pretty compelling case. Not because nuclear power has become as safe as solar or wind, but because the current hydrocarbon-based situation is so dire.

Burning hydrocarbons is a luxury that a planet with 6 billion energy-hungry souls can’t afford. There’s only one sane, practical alternative: nuclear power.

Not to mention the sheer scale of global energy requirements — to generate the kind of power with solar or wind that can be obtained from a single nuke requires enormous masses of land. Space requirements relative to power sources to produce 1,000 megawatts of electricity:

Nuke: .33 sq. miles
Solar: 60 sq. miles
Wind: 300 sq. miles
Biomass: 1,000 sq. miles

So, yes — if we had put all of the effort and funding over the years into solar that we’ve put into nukes, solar power generation today would be cheaper and more efficient than it is. But I somehow don’t think we would have put that much of a dent in the space requirement problem.

I think I’d be willing to reconsider my stance on nuclear power if we had adequate answers to long-term waste storage problems. Unfortunately, the article pretty much glosses those, focusing instead on the possibilities of recycling spent fuel (which are promising). But until the storage problem is really nailed, there is a problem of conscience. We call the ancient Egyptians “ancient” and they were doing their thing just 5,000 years ago. 100,000 years+ is an almost inconceivably long period of time. It is almost impossible to image us not coming up with a good storage answer somewhere in that span. But it is also unconscionable to start laying this stuff in the ground before we’ve figured it out. It’s our problem, not our childrens’.

A couple of weeks ago, as I was reading stories to Miles in the evening, I heard the soft clicking of Amy’s camera going off in the hall. Wasn’t sure whether we were in her frame or not, but found the sound comforting. Tonight we got take-out sushi to eat at home and Miles had his first taste of sashimi — appropriate because we’ve been reading about Yoko, the cat who took sushi to school (none of the other kids in the story could grok it, leaving poor Yoko struggling for cool in a terminally un-hip, merciless world). Miles’ first sushi experience went well, and he actually did succeed in eating with chopsticks, kinda, but he mostly enjoyed making balls out of rice and batting them around while calling out “Rice balls! Rice balls!” After tonight’s storytime, this lovely valentine rolled into my inbox. I love my family.

In the newsgroup alt.os.linux.redhat lives a current thread titled “OsX compared to Linux and BeOS” (gratuitously x-posted to a handful of other OS groups) — a fairly typical bottomless OS war, er, reasoned discussion, either fascinating or tedious depending on your disposition.

First of all, I’m floored that anyone in the universe is asking whether BeOS is a viable alternative four years after the company bit the dust. That’s funny bit #1. But this excerpt had me rolling:

>>> is there anyone who knows OS X and Linux well who can
>>> make an honest and reasoned comparison of the two?

>> Scot Hacker?

> Fribilty Jones.

So that’s what it’s come to. Get a job, have a baby, fade from the OS scene, and before you know it, you may as well be Fribilty Jones. Less than zero. Dang, it rolls off the tongue nicely though. Fribilty Jones. Fribilty Jones. Fribilty Jones. Must … create … pseudonym …

Thanks mneptok.

Somebody had to think of it: Print-on-demand gaining a bit more traction? Qoop (currently in soft-launch) will let weblog publishers offer their blog archives as nicely printed and bound books. Birdhouse customer John Battelle is giving it a shot, offering up his Searchblog in print form.

Just finished the final exam in my Unix Security class — three classes down, a fistful to go to complete my cert. Once again, learned a ton but feel like I just scratched the surface — security is a bottomless topic. In addition to the nuts and bolts stuff, great tangential discussions. One day, discussing the behavior of viruses and the significance of “laying low,” an analogy to the ebola virus:

The disease is often transmitted during funeral preparations in Congo which traditionally require relatives and friends to wash and kiss the dead body.

… and so entire villages are wiped out quickly — the local culture inadvertenly helps the virus to more efficiently kill its own host. If AIDS killed its host immediately, it would virtually be over — its long dormancy is what enables it to spread. Which helps explain why so few computer viruses are immediately destructive — if a virus formatted your hard drive the minute you contracted it, it wouldn’t have the chance to propagate. It wouldn’t become a “popular” virus.

Powerful: A theoretical virus that sits around on a corporate LAN and changes one digit in one randomly selected cell in one randomly selected Excel document per month. And nothing else. How long could such a virus evade detection? How much hair pulling would this cause? How soon before people stopped trusting Excel?

From dubyaspeak.com, a transcript of Bush explaining Social Security reform to an audience, Tampa, Florida, Feb. 4, 2005:

WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: I don’t really understand. How is it the new [Social Security] plan is going to fix that problem?

DUBYA: Because the — all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculated, for example, is on the table. Whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There’s a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those — changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be — or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It’s kind of muddled. Look, there’s a series of things that cause the — like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate — the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those — if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space.

Update: Related: Scott Squire (who hosts nonfictionphoto.com on birdhouse) has produced a photo/interview essay on Social Security reform for Mother Jones.

Hell froze over, and my boss decided to switch from Windows to Mac, got himself a shiny new PowerBook. After one week: “It’s like I’ve been stuck in a lousy marriage for 20 years and finally met a decent woman.”

He wishes to make clear that he is not, in fact, stuck in a lousy marriage (in case his wife should ever read this).

And now, after the umpteenth drive into the ditch with Windows-based hacks and system failures, and interminable battles with spyware and virii followed by lengthy and tedious reconstructions, our sysadmin has announced plans to ditch all Windows servers and workstations on the J-School campus and going all OS X — a massive purchase and conversion planned for this summer. Should be an interesting challenge, but enough is enough. We all have limits.

Gen-u-ine, homegrown American results from a recent USA Today poll.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes coolwater.org: “Roger Moore’s oasis in the cultural divide.” Roger is an old friend and confidante, the only other person I’ve met who shares a not-so-secret love for the Temple City Kazoo Orchestra, a dynamite chef, husband of one of my high-school friends, and one of the Bay Area’s foremost environmental defense lawyers. His weblog thus far comprises brilliantly written mini-essays and musings on the complexities and joys and poetry of Modern Life.

The exasperated chef regains composure as my little daughter, only recently able to walk, starts asking big daddy to bring her foods that her father, with his Midwestern upbringing, did not experience until at least age 25. “Baguette with goat cheese, daddy?” “hummus daddy?” “paella tonight, daddy?” I nod as she delivers a pointed set of requests that unmistakably identify her as a child of the East Bay, offspring of the edible garden. My wife walks in after not speaking to me for three hours, rolls the saffron-scented rice around in her mouth, touches me on the hand and tells me that maybe, just maybe, things will turn out okay. I love you, I didn’t mean it, neither did I, what’s for dessert?

Before the election, I made a plea to prioritize care for the environment (take the long view) over the war in Iraq when casting votes. Now the war in Iraq is (maybe) winding down, while environmental issues that will affect us all in much more profound ways seem to be biting us back (again). Two stories in the Chronicle today left me feeling bewildered and very, very sad.

First, a story about how the EPA has been cooking the books for the Bush administration to meet business-friendly goals.

The Environmental Protection Agency ignored scientific evidence and agency protocols to set limits on mercury pollution that would line up with the Bush administration’s free-market approaches to power plant pollution, a report released Thursday by the agency’s inspector general showed. [... and later ...] “Mercury is a toxic metal … known to have a range of harmful health effects, especially on young children and pregnant women.”

According to EPA insiders, science took a back seat to politics in the creation of the report, and the agency whose responsibility it is to protect the environment became a puppet of the administration.

“I don’t think anyone has ever seen as much political influence in the development of a rule as we saw in this rule,” said one EPA staff member, who attended meetings between administrators and staff. “Everything about this rule was decided at a political level.”

That story was buried on page A11. The second story, which made front page, is about the shocking rise of autism in California (actually nation-wide, but the story is mostly about CA). “The number of autistic people getting services at the centers has increased from 5,000 in 1993 to more than 26,000 now.” (see graphic). And researchers are baffled. Part of the rise can be explained by increased awareness of autism, but the increase is far too drastic to be accounted for via awareness alone. Early childhood vaccinations are not ruled out (but see below). No one can prove anything, and yet someone must. Because the rise is generalized to a huge geographical region, explanations will have to be either environmental or social (e.g. too much TV rots your brain).

On the other hand, the article does point out that dropping the mercury-based preservative Themerisol from children’s vaccinations does not seem to have had any impact on autism rates. So maybe there’s no linkage between mercury in the environment and the rise of autism. But something in the environment is causing it. And the official stewards of our environment are puppets of big business.

I’m not making a direct causal connection between these two stories. I am making a connection between the awesome (and, I would argue, common sense) responsibility to maintain the health of our only human home and the ultimate consequences of failing to do so.

Not into computer games, but this story is fascinating. We’ve all heard about how people gather virtual goods (swords, cash, immunity) in online games and then sell them on eBay — apparently this is now a $4.3 million eBay market. So this dude reverse engineers protocols and violates the terms of service of Ultima Online — he figures out how to script the game, sets up a little server farm in his closet, and creates a bunch of players. He sets these virtual players to work mining virtual gold in the virtual world, then sets up a business selling the gold on eBay for real cash. Gets rich doing it. His biggest danger is getting caught. What if someone walks up to one of his electronic slaves and tries to talk to it? To solve this, he routes incoming messages to an IM service, which is piped to his cell phone. Now his slaves can converse with other players wandering by no matter where the guy is at the time. He was never caught, but finally decided to throw in the towel and confess all. I find all of this mind-blowing.