Treated to an emergency room visit tonight, after Miles suffered a temporary lapse of reason and forgot that pillows don’t have the structural integrity of boards and decided to bridge the gap from couch to coffee table with one. This would not have been a problem except for the fact that he was being a bunny at the time, and everyone knows that bunnies hop with both feet forward. If he had placed just one hand on the bridge, as a fox or rhinocerous would have, he could have caught himself with the other hand when it gave way. But bunny basically dived headlong into the brink and smashed his sniffer on the edge of the table.

Three-year-old noses are still very soft, and the distortion was really scary. Fortunately it snapped back into shape pretty well after half an hour. The good folks at Children’s Hospital were fairly sure it’s broken, but also confident it’ll heal fine on its own, though he’ll have “raccoon eyes” for a few days as busted capillaries eep out into surrounding tissues.

All told, we were lucky this time, and he was a champ about it all. We’re considering it a practice run.

So much more goes on in kids’ heads than meets the eye. Steven Berlin Johnson (Everything Bad Is Good For You) on Serious Games for IT Conversations — relates an anecdote about demonstrating Sim City to his 7-yr-old nephew, giving a fairly superficial tour. “This is the house where the mayor lives, and these are the ports where the boats tie up. These are my factories, but I’m having trouble with them. The workers aren’t happy, and I just can’t seem to make the factories profitable. See how the workers are all covered in soot?”

The nephew, who had until now been listening in silence: “I think you should try lowering your industrial taxes.”

A little Memorial Day contribution — found a book of 1943 war ration stamps in a box belonging to a passed relative. The name written on the book does not belong to my relative, so I’m not sure how they came into the family. Trying to imagine today’s war getting to the point where consumer goods were in a state of similar scarcity, or of Americans today tolerating having their bread, sugar, and gas dribbled out in thin streams by the Feds. But what really bakes my noodle is trying to imagine today’s government printing a tagline on any literature like “Be guided by the rule, ‘If you don’t need it, don’t buy it.’” Or that the U.S. Government once had an “Office of Price Administration.” The actual stamps are quite small - check the high-res versions on Flickr to see them in full glory.

Historically, villagers in water-starved areas have worked hard to manually pump contaminated water up from shallow water tables for drinking - water they then have to carry in buckets back to their homes. People spending their time as beasts of burden.

Inventor Trevor Field is bringing clean, fresh drinking water from deep underground to villagers across Africa with the Play Pump, which harnesses the limitless energy of kids. In place of the traditional hand-cranked pump, Field’s team installs a merry-go-round connected to a deep well pump on school playgrounds. The kids, who often have virtually no access to playground equipment, love it.

The Play Pump can be installed in a few hours for just $7,000, and can bring drinking water to more than 2,500 people — water that’s cleaner than what came from the hand pumps it replaces, since it comes from deeper underground.

Field then sells ad space on the pump’s reservoir to finance pump maintenance — and reserves one ad panel for AIDS awareness campaigns: “We’ve got to get the message through to them before they become sexually active,” he says. “It seems to be working.”

According to comments on the Frontline story, other companies are using similar solutions to generate electricity.

Meebo is a service that integrates AIM, YIM, Jabber, and MSN chat through a web-based interface. From a Meebo blog entry on their reliance on statistical analysis to drive development iterations:

Our intuition is often off. Two releases ago, we considered eliminating the “New user?” and “Forgot your password?” links on the front meebo login page. Before doing so, we decided to track how many users clicked on the links. Good thing we didn’t eliminate them - turns out that 11,000+ meebo users depend upon these links daily!

I’ve seen this over and over again. No matter how many times you encourage users to think of passwords as if they were their ATM PINs, people have too many of them, and too many that they don’t use often enough to remain committed to memory. There are a wealth of password management tools on the market, but those aren’t going to be used by the non-geeks who need them the most.

This is a huge untapped market, but the nature of the problem dictates that it be solved by OS vendors, not shareware vendors. Apple’s made a start of it with the Keychain utility, but the interface is overwhelming to average users. Prediction: The next releases of OS X and Windows will include simple (and hopefully very secure) mass-password-management services.

via Searchblog

Hot on the heels of Hercules’ recent victory over Wal-Mart, Mark Morford on the intended greening of “this most voracious and powerful of low-end, trashy retailers.”

Wal-Mart has already committed to selling 100-percent sustainable fish in its food markets. They are already experimenting with green roofs, corn-based plastics and green energy (which is now used to power four Canadian stores, for a total of 39,000 megawatts, amounting to what some estimate is the single biggest purchase of renewable energy in Canadian history). Is this remarkable? Groundbreaking? Utterly confounding? Well, yes and no.

The motive may ultimately be profit rather than a genuine interest in eco-health, and their move to sell organic food may undermine the critical “small and local” ethos, and there may still be a dozen other reasons to avoid shopping at Wal-Mart, but you gotta admit there’s something very wonderful in this, “like flowers from a dung heap, like vodka from old potatoes.”

If Microsoft has its way (and when don’t they?), their own WMP image compression format will eventually replace JPEG. MS claims to be able to cut file size in half at the same quality levels, and to sit up and do tricks like rotating an image without decoding/encoding. And yes, the format will be available to non-Windows platforms and devices, though there will be a licensing hook (that’s the part that gives me the willies).

What I’ve never understood is why the the open source world missed the boat with PNG, which is free of licensing restrictions and also does neat tricks, but lacks lossy compression and is therefore totally unsuitable for photographic work on the web (and also lacks the ability to store EXIF data). Yes, PNG was designed primarily as an alternative to GIF, but since they had the opportunity to build a format from the ground up, why didn’t they take the opportunity to tackle the two things we use images for the most (digital photography and photos on the web)? By not doing so, PNG left the door open for yet another proprietary format to take hold.

MS also has half a dozen excellent new fonts in the hopper - the six Cs. I could see myself growing to love Calibri.

Technorati Tags: fonts, photography, microsoft

Amy catches Miles jamming a pencil into the 1/4″ headphone jack on the tape deck I’ve had attached to my Mac for the past few weeks, just in time to watch the tip of the pencil snap off inside the hole.

Amy: “Miles, what are you trying to do?”

Miles: “I’m just trying to hook into the internet.”

Well, can’t fault him for trying.

Spending the week with mid-career journalists from around the country, doing multimedia training and webcasting their panel discussions. 4:00 yesterday get a call from Amy that a power transformer has blown near our house, and that a fire ran along the lines for many blocks. Outage affects 21,000 people. Finally get home at 10:30 to find our power just restored, but neighboring blocks still out. Walk to inspect the damage and find news crews all over the hood, lights trained on piles of charred power cable sheathing along the ground.

Stop to watch a Hispanic news team in the midst of a street-corner shoot. They stop to ask me what happened and I tell them what I know.

Me: “… but I’m just a guy who heard some things, so don’t quote me.”

Reporter: “Yeah yeah yeah, OK.” [Says some stuff in Spanish to cameraman, then] “OK, I got it.” Camera rolls and she reels off her live report in Spanish.” I shake my head and return home.

15 minutes later wifey and I are watching the (amazing) 60 Minutes special on the career of Mike Wallace, when there’s a knock at the window. Peel back the drapes to see smiling face of another female reporter, who shows her ABC press badge. “Great, now they want to interview US,” I think. I open the door. “Hi, I’m from ABC News and can I use your bathroom? It’s urgent.” LOL, of course.

Sudden interest in the grace of the ukulele after seeing a master player rendering Sonny & Cher and Tony Orlando songs at a preschool marshmallow roast the other night. Then baald, who recently lent me his own uke so I can learn a few White Stripes songs to play for Miles, sends me this Jake Shimabukuro piece:

… which makes me weep. Get that idea that the ukulele is an instrument for strumming in the back of a canoe out your head.

Some talk over the past few months about how Digg has overcome Slashdot in popularity (Kottke has a few charts from last January, but the numbers continue to rise). Aside from the obvious fact that Slashdot’s audience is technical while Digg’s is general interest, there’s another point I find fascinating:

Slashdot = A team of editors but no authors
Digg = No editors or authors

Digg’s model relies on UGC just like Slashdot, but replaces the editorial staff with algorithms supporting community. A very pure model, maximizing the internet’s collaborative potential.

Now, look at the number of comments on virtually any Digg or /. story — they absolutely eclipse the number of comments on any story at [name your favorite mainstream media (MSM) publication] (for those that even allow comments on normal stories). What is it about the community sites that engenders so much more discussion than traditionally journalistic sites that also happen to offer discussion features? Something about Digg and Slashdot makes readers feel like they’re part of something, in a way that virtually no MSM pub has been able to do.

If MSM really wants to tap into the juicy power of community, they need to somehow cultivate not just discussion, but collaboration and real participation. Part of it is technology, but it’s also about vibe. As long as they present themselves traditionally, with the air of stuffy authority, they’re not going to win the eyeballs of a generation that expects the internet to be a two-way discussion. There’s no reason you shouldn’t see the level of participation on Wall St. Journal or New York Times stories that you see on Digg stories.

It’s going to take a massive mindset shift at the old battleships. If they fail to make that kind of shift, the existing audience will move into nursing homes and be replaced by… no one.

MSM can’t just stand back and hand the store over to software services like Digg has, but they certainly have lessons to learn about how to tap into the bee hive.

Yes, I’ve been listening to Bob Cauthorn again.

Technorati Tags: community, UGC

Photographer Michael Wolf chronicles worn out, improvised, screwed up, tricked out, workhorse street chairs from his travels in and around China. Junk but not junk. Something in this work reminds me of what Amy does so well - revealing all of the humanness we leave behind in the inanimate objects with which we spend time.

$25k for a hand-crafted life-size replica of the famed “Danger, Will Robinson!” robot from Lost in Space… and the reservation list is full. Perfect in every detail, and featuring (partial list):

• Acrylic bubble based on the existing original.
• Laser cut steel brain with polished stainless steel top cover and crown.
• CNC machined light rod ends brain cup and neck bracket.
• Accurate acrylic collar & vents, hand formed based on the original jigs used.
• Fiberglass torso based on the original stone molds.
• Welded steel torso hooks.

Fully controllable, and with “over 500 voice tracks by Richard Tufeld, the voice of the original Robot” built in.

Thanks David Huff

We’re up for another big week of webcasting and multimedia training for mid-career journalists. The lectures/talks tucked into the meal times are open to the public and will be available as both live and archived webcasts.

Featured speakers are Dan Cox of World Online, Terry Moore of the Orange County Register, Michael Skoler of Minnesota Public Radio, Bob Cauthorn of City Tools, Regina McCombs of Startribune.com, Dave Buonfiglio of Internet
Broadcast Systems, Deb Mullins of the Alameda Newspaper Group, and a panel of Oakland Tribune reporters and editors. More info.

Finally made the decision to switch to another webcasting package - now using Vara Software’s WireCast, which supports multiple layers, multiple cameras, has much better titling controls, and a bunch of other goodies. I have distant ties to Vara Software — its lead engineers were also the lead engineers at Adamation, who made the amazing video editing package personalStudio for BeOS and, later, Windows. The past keeps reverberating…

On the surface, Google’s new Google Trends service seems like it could be really powerful. By graphing the relative search frequency of comma-separated terms, you get instant snapshots of the collective consciousness. Trouble is, Trends does a terrible job of reading your mind.

The problem isn’t that the service is in beta — it’s the difficulty of crafting queries that turn up results that actually do demonstrate search trends. Is “diesel” really searched on so much more frequently than other fuels? ethanol, hybrid, hydrogen, gasoline, diesel. Change “gasoline” to “gas” or “petrol” and the chart changes so dramatically that you realize the apparent “trends” are virtually meaningless.

This result seems plausible on the surface: emo, hardcore, punk, alternative. But look at the associated news items and you’re reminded that the word “alternative” can mean virtually anything. Remove it from the query for better results.

Comparing the popularity of mac, linux, windows is really hard. Should you have used “OS X” or “Mac OS” rather than “Mac?” How could you consolidate all three terms to act as one in the query?

More so than with normal searches, the ambiguity or double meanings of certain kinds of words have huge potential to skew results. Try comparing the popularity of internet video formats: quicktime, real, windows media. The results don’t work because “real” means so many things. And it’s very hard to tune the search with variants like “real media” or “realvideo.”

Here’s one that actually is relatively unambigous: beefheart, zappa. None of the terms have other meanings, and people searching on these terms would probably almost always use exactly those terms. Expanding this to captain beefheart, frank zappa yields almost exactly the same chart.

On the other hand, here’s one that can totally invert results if you’re insufficiently specfic: thelonious monk, john coltrane. Now compare: monk, coltrane. In the first query, “coltrane” is way more popular. In the second, “monk” is. But according to the related news items, few of the “Monk” results refer to Thelonious Monk at all. Pay attention.

How does it do with politics? democrats, republicans reflects an even split — it’s captured the zeitgeist. But house, senate does something surprising: I expected the word “house” to screw things up since it’s so generic, but the associated news items indicate that it seems to be contextualizing the query — the graph might actually be limiting the the term “house” to political contexts.

You don’t have to use the service comparatively. Bush approval rating doesn’t reflect the arc of Bush’s approval rating, but how often people searched on that phrase (though I’m not seeing the upward spike in recent months I would have expected).

Gross differences in popularity can also result in less meaningful graphs. If you chart mp3, ogg, aac, wmv, MP3 so mightily outweighs the others that the alternative trajectories are virtually indiscernible. Ditch the string “mp3″ for a clear reading of how other formats stack up.

My attempt to find out which of the Banana Splits is more popular was a total flop, since there isn’t enough search data available for any term but “bingo” in bingo, drooper, fleegle, snorky.

Nor was I able to figure out whether more people prefer paper or plastic. This one can be better refined as paper bags, plastic bags, but the associated news items reminded me that the query really wasn’t addressing the question I thought I was asking. And besides, I would have to be careful to remember that people searching on “plastic bags” more than “paper bags” would only mean that people have more questions about plastic, not that people actually do choose plastic bags more often at the grocery store.

Fair enough, Trends throws a prominent disclaimer:

As a Google Labs product, it is still in the early stages of development. Also, it is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results. Please keep this in mind when using it.

The disclaimer should probably start with something like “Do not use Google Trends to settle bets!” The trouble with Trends goes deeper than it being in beta. Google is going to need a boatload of amazing AI to figure out the context problems. Amazing toy, but mired in caveats.

Technorati Tags: google, trends

In the days of usenet, people found that it was nearly impossible to make bozos go away, but it was very easy to set up a bozo filter to eliminate them from one’s view of the universe.

Cory Doctorow is very excited about Feed Rinse — an RSS pre-scrub service that “Automatically filters out syndicated content that you aren’t interested in.” It’s a cool idea, but subject to “the Tivo effect”: by intentionally gravitating toward your own interests and shutting out everything else, you lose the serendipity of chance encounters.

Flipping through LPs in dusty bins is a very different experience from searching for MP3s on a P2P network. Not because the dust is missing, but because you greatly diminish the number of accidental discoveries. With Tivo, you have the same problem: Your plate is full of stuff you like, so you stop channel surfing, i.e. stop finding things by accident.

I may not be interested in reading your posts about baseball, but I prefer to skim over those rather than miss the opportunity to read your post about some freak baseball accident I never would have heard about otherwise.

These problems are parallel to the echo chamber effect, where people in online communities expose themselves only to information that reinforces their existing world view, rather than challenging it.

Technorati Tags: bozo, rss

Against all common sense and human dignity, Congress is once again considering the discriminatory and barbaric Federal Marriage Amendment. The Senate will vote June 5 whether to define marriage in the Constitution as being between a man and a woman. Once enshrined, it would be very, very difficult for states to rise above. John McCain:

The Constitutional Amendment we are debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans. It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed, and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them, and which they feel capable of resolving should it confront them, again according to local standards and customs.

The Human Rights Campaign is running a postcard campaign to counter a similar one being run by FMA supporters. Whatever you think about the efficacy of digital postcard campaigns, it’s at least worth ensuring that the numbers aren’t grossly skewed by vigorous religious campaigns. HRC also has tips on setting up a meeting with your congress critter.

Technorati Tags: fma, gaymarriage, hrc, humanrights

Been a while since I updated my RSS aggregator, NetNewsWire. Went to do that today only to find that it had been purchased by NewsGator. Great, I thought - here goes another simple/fast/excellent tool, about to be ruined by upstream acquisition. Stoked to find that not only is NNW basically the same product as ever, but NewsGator has done a brilliant job of integrating desktop code into their online service.

First launch required me to create an account on newsgator.com, then allowed me to sync my locally stored feeds to them. At home, was able to do the same and merge my subscriptions into the same collection, giving me access to one constellation of feeds from both work and home.

Icing: NewsGator’s web UI lets me browse the same collection from any browser. The power and smoothness of desktop apps, the universal access of a web app. Nice to see a merger gone right for a change.

Technorati Tags: newsgator, sync, rss

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes awkward.org, home of Andrew Kimpton, former Be, Inc. engineer and Director of Development for BIAS, Inc. (makers of BIAS Peak and other cool tools). Kimpton’s blog is here.

Spent Mother’s Day at the DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park - first visit since it re-opened a while ago, and the transformation is radical. Spacious, inviting, tasteful, playful. Miles increasingly interested in art, especially sculpture, and able to comment in small ways on what he likes or doesn’t like about various pieces. Found myself mesmerized by the endless mirrored folds of Zhan Wang’s Artificial Rock - a sea of meditative possibilities. The DeYoung’s center tower pokes up through the center of the park, affording a view of San Francisco unlike anything we had ever seen - absolutely gorgeous. Decided to “do the right thing” and take public transportation, only to get stuck interminably on a broke-down Muni train with the AC kaput. That aside, a miraculous day. Flickr set.

The president of the United States has the power to destroy life on earth. It follows that we should have some assurance that the president has a healthy brain, and that the public should therefore be entitled to view brain scans of candidates.

Dr. Daniel Amen is sitting on a database of 29,000 brain scans, including those of healthy people, drug addicts, schizophrenics, liars, geniuses, alcoholics, and the mentally challenged. No one has a better picture of the connection between healthy brains and functioning humans.

In a talk he gave at Accelerating Change 2005, Amen lays out the connections in stark terms, arguing that allowing children to play tackle football or to hit soccer balls with their heads is tantamount to child abuse (from a brain health perspective), that techniques for developing and maintaining healthy brains should get more emphasis in schools than all the mundane stuff we’ll never use later in life, and that lawyers need to stop fighting to keep brain scans out of court cases for fear of muddying the prevailing idea that either we have free will or we don’t (Amen argues that brains span a huge spectrum of health levels, and that damaged brains exert less predetermined action (free will) than healthy brains).

Amen can tell at a glance how well an individual is functioning in life just by looking at their brain scan. The correlation between the appearance of the brain on a scan and the functional health of the individual is direct. So Amen also argues that Descartes — who made the point that the mind and brain were functionally separate — was wrong. In fact we now have the technology and the data to see for ourselves exactly how wrong Descartes was; the mind/brain connection is not a matter of philosophical debate, but of direct analysis.

The descriptive text at IT Conversations doesn’t do justice to the power of the talk. Juicy. Worth 45 minutes of your time.

After three days of repeated requests, Miles got his wish, and was granted permission to paint his favorite giraffe purple. Why we originally thought this was not a good idea is anyone’s guess. It’s been a month since he painted his hippo green; at this rate he’ll have his entire animal collection re-classified in the spectrum by age seven. Evolution of a drawing: It’s a car. No, it’s a zebra car. No, it’s a zebra car with legs (a “walkie zebra car”). No, it’s a walkie zebra car driving into some ointment.

Nifty: Postfix Enabler turns any Mac into its own SMTP server, useful for laptop users finding themselves god-knows-where without an SMTP connection. Also includes a full POP/IMAP server, if you swing that way. Postfix is already built into OS X, but unless you’re running Server, you’ll have to jump through a few hoops to get it working. For $10, Postfix Enabler makes it happen in less than a minute, cleanly, con GUI.

Of course if your ISP requires mail to be routed through them, it’s not going to help a great deal - you’ll just have to configure Postfix to authenticate to the ISP anyway. But by telling your mail client to send outbound on localhost, sending at least feels buttery fast.

Technorati Tags: mac, mail, postfix, smtp

New Scientist: “Underneath the uncertainty of quantum mechanics could lie a deeper reality in which, shockingly, all our actions are predetermined.”

Early last month, a Nobel laureate physicist finished polishing up his theory that a deeper, deterministic reality underlies the apparent uncertainty of quantum mechanics.

So all of those mind-blowing paradoxes only look like paradoxes because our minds are too puny to find the order beneath the chaos, and the free will debate is up for grabs again. But remember, not all deterministic systems are predictable (weather, anyone?), and if we can’t predict, then we may as well be free. And even if we aren’t, I’m with Isaac Bashevis Singer: “We must believe in free will — we have no choice.”

How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go?

Technorati Tags: chaos, order, quantum

TV ad (UK only?) for the new Honda Civic — a choir of human mouth noises, a la Stockhausen.

via Life Less Literary