Spent a day of our recent vacation at the Minnesota Museum of Science’s Star Wars exhibit - the largest collection of actual Star Wars props and models ever assembled. Miles was jumping out of his skin with excitement, seeing actual/life-sized land speeders and battle droids, scaled down ship models used by ILM in various episodes, trying to pierce the veil of the Jawas. The exhibit took every opportunity to use the props as learning opps - we got to assemble our own maglev trains, program R2 units to negotiate an obstacle course, build support systems for robots capable of standing both on flat and sloped ground, and C3PO hosted a 15-minute live-action educational robot show… a nice combination of education and learning. Finished up the day by jumping to hyperspace in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, very convincing. If the lines between fact and fiction weren’t blurry enough before last week, they are now!

Flickr set

Three weeks ago, Amy came home to find a rear window of our house smashed, our house ransacked. Missing were my GPSr, a couple of digital cameras, a video camera, and two of Amy’s film cameras, including an old two-lens Mamiya and the Nikon FE2 she did her master’s thesis work on. Left behind, strangely, were a couple of Nerdz wrappers and an English class assignment to read two Shakespeare books this summer. We were sure the heist was done by some local high school kids. El Cerrito police dusted for fingerprints, took a report, and that was that. We never expected to get anything back, and started the insurance process.

A few days later, I realized my checkbook had also been stolen. Immediately checked my online banking and found that, sure enough, a check had been cashed, my signature forged. Since Wells Fargo showed a clear scan of the thief’s name and writing, I forwarded it to the police and called the bank to find out where and when it was cashed. The cop was then able to obtain surveillance footage of the actual “guy” from the ATM where it happened. Wow - a break! But then, two weeks of nothing.

Yesterday, got a call from the PD informing us that they had obtained a warrant, searched the perp’s house, and retrieved Amy’s two film cameras. Interesting that analog gear was the only stuff “he” couldn’t fence. And there was an extra twist - the perp was apparently a very large black transsexual in the midst of hormone treatments, now in custody. Life is so weird.

This morning we traipsed down to the department so Amy could I.D. the two cameras and Miles could get his first jail cell tour (pix of him behind bars unfortunately didn’t work out). But I did get a good shot of the inside of a drunk tank (complete with floors you can hose down in the morning). And of Amy walking out of the department, jubilant with her much-loved film cameras.

Just amazed we got anything back at all. Huge props to the El Cerrito PD for following up so thoroughly, and for caring!

Captchas are so 2007. There are enough good captcha-breaking bots in the wild now that they’re pushing 10-15% success rates at decoding images, and can generate a new attempt every six seconds. Mail systems at Yahoo!, GMail and Hotmail all have been cracked in the past year. And Google’s Blogger service is under seige from spambots creating hundreds of thousands of splogs without human interaction — and they’re doing it through automated captcha cracking.

A new visual authentication system called IMAGINATION, from Penn State’s ALIPR (Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures) program, takes a very different approach. Working with random images rather than characters means the pool of possibilities is not finite (image recognition is far more difficult than character recognition). And the two-part process refines the human requirement further: Find a center, then describe.

But while traditional captchas have had problems with accessibility, ALIPR is going to be completely off-limits to the blind. Oh, and it takes up a whole screen, rather than a few hundred pixels². That sounds like a deal-breaker right there. Or at least a deal-breaker until we get so fed up with being cracked that interaction designers are willing to give up an entire page to make it stop.

Once you solve the captcha, the site invites you to throw your best bot at it. I’m thinking maybe five years before the bots crack this one.

Amazing… just took a break from the all-day Journalism and Databases session we’re running, checked for recent Tweets, and there was one apparently from myself:

Hi.i found this phone.could you tell me how to find the owner..

A few Tweets later, messages from Xian Crumlish, Michael Fitzhugh, and Dylan Tweney, pointing me to the source. A block walk and I had the phone again (which I hadn’t even realized was missing until Twitter told me). Thanks so much Good Samaritan Silje for having the brilliance to check my address book and send an SMS Tweet as me, and to alla y’all for helping to track it down.

Xian’s book title is spot on: The Power of Many.

Update: Whoa! This little  dance just got covered on Wired.com’s blog (by Tweney).

Miles and I had a great time yesterday at Cal Day, UC Berkeley’s campus-wide open house. Miles got to play with a 15 foot python, had cockroaches and stick bugs walking all over him, went fishing for lizards (I remember when my brother and I used to make lizard fishing poles out of car antennas and fishing line), watched his own voice dance on the screen of an oscilloscope, experimented with the Bernoulli principle (a ball floating on a column of air), experienced his first drinking bird, created a miniature earthquake, built an Indian boli, and almost got conked by the physics experiment below - I turned around to get my camera out of its bag and heard a clunk and some gasps - he had been pulling on the steel balls and the whole thing came off the table and wound up around his neck! Fast reactions - he caught the frame with his hands.

Afterwards, went to a musical performance of The Emperor Has No Clothes at the historic Julia Morgan Theater.

Flickr set

Went for a hike, but ended up mountain biking up Schmidt Lane with slick tires.

Note: Despite the date, this is not an April Fool’s post. Can’t believe I have to say that.

“Don’t walk away in silence,” someone spray spraypainted on the wall of a girls school on the lower east side, New York. The school painted over it, of course, and left this note in its place:

The school turned the episode into a teachable moment. “It really gave us a chance to engage in a dialogue with our students.”

via GammaBlog

60 Minutes, The Science of Sleep — We’re sleeping less than ever:

In 1960, a survey by the American Cancer Society asked one million Americans how much sleep they were getting a night. The median answer was eight hours. Today that number has fallen to 6.7 hours - that’s a decrease of more than 15 percent in less than a lifetime. And from what the scientists 60 Minutes met are finding, we may be putting ourselves in a perilous situation.

.. and we’re paying dearly for it. Test subjects allowed to sleep only four hours per night are able to metabolize sugars at about the same rate as pre-diabetics, and have a voracious appetite. In other words, there may be a connection between cultural sleep deprivation and the obesity epidemic. And of course, memory and mental acuity in general suffer dramatically as well. Not to mention nice-ness (tired people are cranky people).

But what refrain is more commonly heard in the workplace than “I’m exhausted?” We’re compensating for the insane pace of everything by staying up later, perhaps fooling ourselves that we’ll be more productive if we just trim off a few of those hours “wasted” on sleep. But it ain’t natch’l, what we do.

“But you know I find it amazing to see how many people are asleep within five minutes of boarding an airplane at 11 o’clock in the morning. You know, sit down and boom. It shouldn’t happen. A normal adult shouldn’t be falling asleep at 11 o’clock in the morning, minutes after sitting in a small, uncomfortable airplane seat. It just shows that, you know, people are exhausted.”

Ever since Miles was born, I’ve been deep in this pattern, getting by on 5-6 hours/night (7 on a mellow day), day after day, week after week. I used to try and get one full 8-hour night per week, but now even that doesn’t happen regularly. You just get so used to being a zombie, it starts to feel normal. Every now and then you get a full night or something close to it, and the mental clarity is astonishing, this feeling of alertness like you remember from a long-ago life. I swear I’m going to reform, get back on the 8-hour track permanently… but I never do. They say we’d be more productive sleeping more than less - that the increase in sharpness more than compensates for hours lost in sleep. But it’s hard to convince myself of that.

Anyway, it’s well worth the watch (or read).

Ooooooo wEEEEE! Made my “annual” pilgrimage at SXSW to Tears of Joy Hot Sauce Shop in Austin (bottom of 6th street, across from Damn Good Tacos). Since I depleted last year’s 8-bottle shipment easily, ramped it up to 10 this time, plus an assortment of mustards (I loves me my mustards) and a bottle of Salt Lick BBQ sauce for good measure. Came home tonight to a big box full of foam peanuts and bubble wrap, which Miles and I dove into just in time for dinner (chicken sandwiches).

First up: Duck Butter. Mmmmm tasty! But too mild. Followed by Bee Sting, a honey-based habanero sauce. Totally different kind of tasty, but still on the mild side (Amy disagreed). I was looking for some real tears of joy, which I finally got with a big dollop of Lottie’s scotch bonnet elixir. Blinding sheet of pain racing up the plane of my face and I’m in heaven.

Just before leaving for Austin last week I caught an article that brazenly wondered “Has SXSWi gone mainstream?,” citing the choice of Mark Zuckerberg for one of the keynotes. What happened to the cutting edge? It’s true nothing really ground-breaking came out of this year’s show, but that had absolutely nothing to do with the conference’s usefulness… or fun quotient.

As usual, I took (and posted) loose notes on most of the sessions I attended. And as usual, there are often two or three sessions you want to see all happening at once. If you realize you’ve stumbled into a clinker, it’s a crapshoot whether it’s going to be worth it to stumble out, walk halfway across the convention center and try for seating in another — but you do your best. The Twitter back-channel helped tremendously… getting bits and pieces of other panels whispered in helped alleviate the feeling that you were missing something big.

Yeah, I fell for the Twitter thing big-time this year (I’m “waxwing,” if you care); remains to be seen whether it will be as fun or as useful outside the context of the show. Twitter was everywhere - at times it seemed like you couldn’t glance at a laptop (must have been 85% Mac, for cripes sake) without seeing someone plotting their tweets. I’m not big into SMS, but between trying to hook up with people and following Twitter feeds, I’ve never done so much texting in my life

Had the inverse privilege of being present at the Mark Zuckerberg train wreck interview … not to be forgotten. Gossip and armchair analysis of the interview dominated conversations for the next 24 hours until we were all just sick of hearing about it.

Got four hours of good geocaching in with mandric on the first day, before badge pick-up. Austin is in love with virtual (no physical box) caches for some reason - I think they just love their history. As a way to discover parts of a new city through serendipity, caching can’t be beat (and I think Milan caught the bug too!) Some pretty creative hides. Thanks Austin!

As for panels… where to begin? The Expression Engine 2.0 demo blew our doors off (coming version fully integrates ORM-based framework CodeIgniter). Jason Fried’s 10 Things We’ve Learned at 37 Signals totally inspiring for the 2nd year in a row. Henry Jenkins keynote an intellectual rollercoaster — tough competition with Kathy Sierra’s Tools for Enchantment (walked out of that one reeling). So many incredible data visualization techniques unwrapped in Data as Art (big implications and challenges for journalists). Went to two scaling sessions: Scalability Boot Camp and Scaling Web Ventures - of the two, the 2nd had more real-world tips, both both full of useful goodies. Interesting web pre-history in The Web That Wasn’t. Still feeling ho-hum about Adobe Air. Building Portable Social Networks attempted to address the coming tower of Babel between SNs, but left us with “We’re in for a world of pain.” Speaking of pain, I felt for the Microsoft guy defending MS Sharepoint against Drupal at the CMS Roundup. More here.

Getting too old for the relentless party scene that is SXSW, now more interested in finding quiet places to talk with old co-workers and friends, but managed to squeak in a couple of good parties. Really enjoyed myself at Opera’s party at Stubbs, where I spent 20 minutes in the bathroom talking with an Opera engineer who was the spitting image of Neil from The Young Ones. Think Opera is dead/irrelevant? Factoid: Opera currently employs more than 500 people - the mobile browser market is huge, and Opera owns it. Also a great party at the Mexican American Cultural Center (gorgeous architecture, and music by Gruppa Phantasma = Santana + War + 2008; break dancing like you never seen. Managed to get by on 5-6 hours of sleep per night, but couldn’t keep up that pace for much longer (despite official advice to NOT try and pace yourself (the “liver hacks” portion of that session were especially interesting).

Finally made my pilgrimage to the Daniel Johnson “Hi, How Are You?” mural at the top of Guadalupe, en route to lunch at Ruby’s - some of the most amazing brisket and ribs I’ve ever eaten, served up by the pound on butcher paper in a ramshackle wood and corrugated tin building that hasn’t been renovated in 70 years (or something like that). Even beat The Salt Lick (but not by much).

Didn’t take as many photos as in years past, but managed to get a Flickr set up. Once again, it takes something like SXSW to lift us out of the .edu miasma and into the new world. Always worthwhile.

Update: Wow - Check out these SXSW Interactive 2008 Sketchnotes. Gorgeous.

Loose notes from SXSW 2008 session
The Web That Wasn’t with Alex Wright Information Architect, The New York Times.

For most of us who work on the Internet, the Web is all we have ever really known. It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without browsers, URLs and HTTP. But in the years leading up to Tim Berners-Lee’s world-changing invention, a few visionary information scientists were exploring alternative hypertext systems that often bore little resemblance to the Web as we know it today. In this presentation, author and information architect Alex Wright will explore the heritage of these almost-forgotten systems in search of promising ideas left by the historical wayside. The presentation will focus on the pioneering work of Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, and Doug Engelbart, forebears of the 1960s and 1970s like Ted Nelson, Andries van Dam, and the Xerox PARC team, and more recent forays like Brown’s Intermedia system. We’ll trace the heritage of these systems and the solutions they suggest to present day Web quandaries, in hopes of finding clues to the future in our recent technological past.

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Loose notes from SXSW 2008 session “Tools for Enchantment: 20 Ways to Woo Users” with Kathy Sierra, CreatingPassionateUsers.

This has so far been by far the most intellectually stimulating / inspiring session of the show. Sierra has a way of turning on your brain by talking about the brain, and running far afield from the usual web talk while still bringing it all back home to make it relevant. Awesome session.

Neurogenesis - Animals in cages have inhibited brain growth. An enhanced environment allows the brain to flourish. Corrollary: A cubicle environment inhibits brain development.

In studies of people who are really good at something: It’s not about natural talent (for the thing they’re doing) but more about having a talent for practicing. Ability to practice is what makes people good at things (could be anything). This is both encouraging and depressing. But you CAN change your brain in profound ways if you just put in the time.
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Loose notes from SXSW 2008 panel “10 Things We’ve Learned at 37 Signals” with Jason Fried.

Similar to last year’s panel on the same topic, but with refinements/enhancements. This stuff is good enough to hear again. Anil Dash twitters: 1000 people watching Jason Fried is like being in one of those evangelical churches.
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Utne Reader, on a Creationist Science Fair that recently took place inside a shopping mall in Roseville, Minnesota, including a diorama explaining how a broken motor disproves evolution, plus fossil evidence that people lived at the same time as dinosaurs.

The projects all used classic high school science language: Start with a hypothesis, move on to testing, and then draw a conclusion. The problem was that much of the science was backwards. In good science, you start with a piece of evidence and try to find a truth. With creationist science, you start with a truth (the Bible), and try to find the evidence.

Humans like to keep all options open. Even when we know some of the options aren’t frutitful. Even when it costs money to keep unfruitful options open (i.e. even when keeping options open is irrational). Interesting summary at nytimes.com of tests conducted on M.I.T. students designed to see just how far we’re willing to go to prevent a door from closing. “Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says.

Life lesson: Let options go. Simplify. Declutter. Know what’s worth your while, go for it, and don’t sweat the decisions that have already been made. Don’t kid yourself that you can follow every path, investigate every avenue. Know small potatoes when you see them. Keep your eyes on the prize. Obvious stuff maybe, but interesting to see it documented in this way.

Since conducting the door experiments, Dr. Ariely says, he has made a conscious effort to cancel projects and give away his ideas to colleagues. He urges the rest of us to resign from committees, prune holiday card lists, rethink hobbies…

Last of the Incas. This old Canon PowerShot G1 from the J-School was dysfunctional beyond repair (not to mention antiquated to the point of unusable), so I brought it home for Miles. Took us 45 minutes to remove nearly every screw, pry apart nearly every surface, snip every wire. Turned out the inverting lens barrel made a very good hat for R2D2. Even when something has no remaining value, feels wrong to tear it apart. Wrong but fun.

Robert Scoble came up with the idea to make a list of obsolete skills - things we used to be good at but no longer need to be, including:

• Dialing a rotary phone
• Putting a needle on a vinyl record
• Shorthand
• Using a slide rule
• Optimizing 640K-worth of memory
• Refilling a fountain pen
• Operating a dictaphone
• Using the eraser ribbon on a typewriter

A wiki sprung up to flesh out the list, and there are now hundreds listed (I added “Cleaning ball bearings in skateboard wheels without losing them”).

J-School professor and Birdhouse Hosting customer Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has a new book titled In Defense of Food - a common-sense manifesto for eaters. Fittingly, Pollan is blogging this month at omnivoracious.com. Don’t have time to read the book? Pollan gives away the kernel:

• Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
• Avoid food products with more than five ingredients; with ingredients you can’t pronounce.
• Don’t eat anything that won’t eventually rot.
• Shop the perimeter of the supermarket, where the food is least processed.
• Avoid food products that make health claims.
• Eat meals and eat them only at tables. (And no, a desk is not a table.)
• Eat only until you’re 4/5 full. (An ancient Japanese injunction.)
• Pay more, eat less.
• Diversify your diet and eat wild foods when you can.
• Eat slowly, with other people whenever possible, and always with pleasure.

Great fun to be had at Mr. Picassohead - seemingly simple Flash-based tools to create Picasso-like paintings easily. Great fun with kids (younger ones need help, but still dig it). I love when simple tools with narrow parameters - married to human creativity - give rise to a zillion fascinating combinations.

Create something of your own first; then page through the gallery for a while to be reminded of all the things you forgot to try.

Miles and I spent an hour with iStopMotion and boxes of toys today, experimenting with animation techniques. The topic’s been on his mind recently since he’s starting to really figure out where real actors end and animated characters begin - the quality of rendering in so many modern kid’s shows makes the line more blurry than it used to be.

This was our second practice clip, unpolished and without sound, but he really got the hang of it after a while. Took about half an hour to create these 10 seconds, but he says he’s willing to put in the time to create more fluid flicks in the future. And I realize now that we should have been working at the default 20fps rather than 15.

Click to play

A friend of his stopped by while we were working on it and he told him “We’re making a movie about animation and I’m the conductor!”

Heard of an alternate stop-motion technique the other day - rather than feeding DV camera output to a Mac and grabbing still frames directly into a sequence, mount a digital still camera instead. Since the images will all have sequential filenames by default, you can drag then into Final Cut Pro, setting the initial duration for each image, and get the same effect. Except that you’ll have had the advanced features of the digital still camera, and the advanced features and controls of FCP rather than being limited to what iStopMotion offers. Hmmm…