Ascent Stage | Entries by Date

« March 2005 | Main | May 2005 »

April 30, 2005

Targetted again

Horrible news from Cairo. A bomb was detonated near the Egyptian Museum today and, in a separate incident, tourists were attacked on a bus elsewhere in the city. This just a few weeks after a popular bazaar was bombed. I fear that the stunning tourism turnaround that Egypt achieved after the 1997 terrorist massacres is officially over.

Infuriating. Especially given the handle that Egyptian authorities seemed to have on security over the last few years.

Posted at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Egypt

April 29, 2005

Tinkertoy iceberg

I finally got a chance to stop by the Art Institute last night to see an installation by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. The exhibit is a two-story nylon lattice fabricated from a radar/sonar scan of an actual iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland. Basically he's taken a structure that is solid for a moment in time (it calves, melts, sinks, reforms), mapped it, broken it down to its wireframe, and created it using rapid prototyping techniques. The result is a complex natural polygon that floats inside a stairwell at the ARTIC.

Much of my work involves scanning artifacts that have not changed in eons in order to most realistically reproduce and preserve them. Which is why Manglano-Ovalle's process -- scanning an ever-changing structure to break it down to its basic geometry and build it back up -- is a bit of an intellectual delight.

My friend Craig noticed this little detail. Manglano-Ovalle includes a 512MB memory key in the lattice. A docent noted that all the data from the iceberg scan is contained on that key.

As a bonus we popped down to see the stunning Photo-Respirations exhibit. Tokihiro Sato uses long exposure times, a flashlight (by night), and a sun-reflecting mirror (by day) to create eerie scenes puntucated with will-o'-the-wispy blurs of light. Definitely worth a look.

Thanks for the tip, Matt.

Posted at 7:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Art/Design

April 27, 2005

Hizzoner

So I says to Da Mayor, I says, "Give 'em hell in Congress, sir." He says "I'll try." He turns to exit as the plane door opens and we walk down the jet bridge to go our separate ways into D.C.

I wonder how he did?

Posted at 9:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Chicago

Four things my cabbie said to me last night

"Your address is the same number as this cab. I've been lookin' at it [the number] all day. Mind if I pull over and buy a Lotto ticket?"
"Corrupt? Like someone slipped pornography in?" Referring to the the error message about a corrupt file in an aborted boot sequence of Windows 2000 on the tourist info LCD panel.
"You see those people standing there staring at the wall under the highway? They are worshipping some image of the Virgin Mary in a water stain. Man, shit, she's been poppin' up a lot lately, hasn't she? If you ask me, she ain't a virgin no more. Maybe that's why she keeps comin' 'round. Why else would she keep appearing to all us sinners? We like to have sex. That's it. I wouldn't be surprised to see some guy humpin' that wall, sayin' 'she ain't a virgin no more!'"
"Can you believe these gas prices? I tell you what, how come you only ever see one gas tanker filling up the pumps but you can select three different octanes? I think it is all the same gas. They just charge you three different prices."

Posted at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Chicago

April 26, 2005

Cingularly interesting

Today when calling to cancel a phone account I arrived at a fork in the voice menu path where I had to declare my reason for calling. Once it was confirmed that I wanted to cancel the line would transfer and then after a short wait I would be informed that the system was experiencing difficulties and that I should call back later. Yet, if I called in and declared some other reason -- billing question, for instance -- I got right through to an agent. I tried this three times and each time when I wanted to cancel (and I used slightly different terms each time) the system was experiencing difficulty. That just seems too baldly nefarious to be believable, but there it is. And no you can't cancel an account online. That's be way too easy.

Oh, and when did voice menu systems go from passionless monotone to Katie Couric chirpy? I'll take robo-operator any day.

Posted at 4:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Notes

Crayon box morning

Last night I was thinking how much the front page needed some color. I had to look no further than a few spring gardens on the walk to the L this morning.

Posted at 7:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Chicago

April 25, 2005

Stabbed in the trackback

A while ago I installed a small script that disallows comments on this blog that are not actually typed in. That is, it looks for multiple keystrokes as opposed to one single dump of text -- the behavior of a spambot (or someone who copies-and-pastes comments wholesale). It has stopped 100% of the spam I used to deal with daily.

Alas, the scourge of trackback spam persists. Does anyone know of anything that will effectively block trackback spam? Ideally it too would be a keystroke-based defense, but anything that really works would do. I'd hate to have to shut off trackbacks as they are one of the most innovative things about blogs!

Help?

Posted at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Housekeeping

April 24, 2005

Olde media vs. the blogosphere

I must heartily second this rant at Whole Lotta Nothing.

For the new year I promised myself (#4) that I would not make fun of sites that position blogs and the "mainstream" media diametrically, but after reading this I think I'll go back to heckling.

Here's an axiom to live by. If you have to cast an issue as good vs. evil, you're probably masking your own insecurity or the indefensibility of your position.

Posted at 8:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Web

April 23, 2005

Favorite things, part the third

Aerolatte - This little gizmo is neither a sexual aid nor a hair removal device, though it looks like both. Warm some milk in the microwave then whip it with the Aerolatte and pour into coffee. Instant latte, no Starbucks or foaming machine. I don't drink latte, but I find myself grabbing it just to stir in sugar. Automate everything!

Stair Basket - With house lots only 25 feet wide a lot of Chicago living happens on multiple levels. Add to that the amount of crap that accumulates and is dispersed around the place with two kids and you quickly find yourself piling stuff up on the stairs to remind you to take it up or down. Add in general clutziness and perhaps drunkenness and you have a real hazard. That's where the stair basket comes in. Now you only have one large thing to break your ankle on as opposed to lots of little things.

Greasemonkey - I join many people in thinking this is the greatest Firefox extension ever. Basically it allows people to write small Javascripts that do some amazing things. My favorites include always providing a download link for embedded movies, stripping the margin crud from Boing Boing, and adding Netflix links to IMDB. But far and away my favorite Greasemonkey script is the Chicago Transit Authority hack of Google Maps. Now in addition to the street and satellite view you can switch to a CTA view that shows you where your address is on the subway grid. Wonderful.

Smarterchild - At work our internal chat client has about a half-dozen bots that can do your bidding for you (fetching addresses, monitoring feeds, etc.) so I was pleased to see this ability on the open interweb. I find myself using Smarterchild most often simply to pop up a reminder at a given time. Smarterchild is my friend.

Plaxo - I was initially very skeptical of this service. Storing all your contacts externally is just asking for trouble, in my opinion. But I am a convert now. Plaxo has a great interface, an online version (so you're not stuck using Outlook), a phone synch option, and -- this is important -- it does not require your contacts to register with Plaxo to use it. I have reconnected with three or four people that I had lost touch with simply because of the one-to-many update requests you can manage with Plaxo. That alone is worth the cost. Which is $0.

April 18, 2005

Getting my fix

Crain's Chicago Business profiles my reading habits this week in their Info Junkie column at the back of the paper. It is an odd way to describe someone -- the sum of what info one consumes -- but in a way it is no stranger than the impression you might get of me from reading this blog. I considered just exporting my RSS feeds as a list and handing that to Crain's, but they wanted a bit more detail.

The story is online but only available as an abstract to non-subscribers. Access is free for eight weeks and no credit card is required, but honestly, what I read is probably not interesting enough to warrant the time it will take you to register. You be the judge.

Posted at 1:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Chicago

April 17, 2005

In a kingdom by the sea

I rediscovered this poem this weekend. Forgot how much I loved it.

Annabel Lee, by Edgar Allen Poe
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea
That a maiden there lived whom you may know.
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love --
I and my Annabel Lee --
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this is the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me --
Yes! -- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we --
Of many far wiser than we --
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the Beautiful Annabel Lee:
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the Beautiful Annabel Lee:
And so, all the night tide, I lay down by the side
Of my darling -- my darling -- my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea --
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Thanks, Anabeli!

Posted at 9:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Topic: Words

April 16, 2005

Wet cement botany

It took me few blocks to realize that Vancouver's sidewalks come preloaded with leaf impressions. The relief is a bit high (extra heavy foliage?), but the effect is kinda nice. Fossils of tree-lined avenues that don't actually exist.

Posted at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Art/Design | Topic: I Like

Innovative, so I'm told

Well, here's a great surprise. Eternal Egypt is on the other side of "and the winner is ..." for a Best of the Web award at Museums and the Web 2005 in Vancouver. The project received the accolade in the Best Innovative or Experimental Application category. Eternal Egypt joins a pretty distinguished group of sites, including the Theban Mapping Project (which still makes my jaw drop) and of course the venerable Hermitage project which garnered the overall Best of the Web award in 2000.

Congratulations to CultNat and the IBM team!

Posted at 9:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Egypt | Topic: Work

April 13, 2005

The Genographic Project

OK, I'm pretty excited about this project. Today National Geographic and IBM announce a five-year partnership to map the patterns of dispersal and change of human DNA across the Earth. The goal is to develop an accurate picture of ancestral human migration patterns by analyzing genetic markers -- mutations transmitted from generation to generation -- in blood samples and cheek swabs from people all around the world. This is forensics on a global scale, macrogenealogy.

What makes this project unique, I think, is the opportunity for public participation. In addition to the indigenous populations that comprise a major part of the study, interested people anywhere can purchase a cheek swab kit and submit their cells for analysis. The process is completely anonymous. All your cells get is a barcode. The results can be interesting, sometimes dismantling preconceptions about one's family lineage going way back. (One Italian-American IBM executive who participated in an early test was shocked to learn that his family line extended into the mountains of Iran. How his family got there from Africa is one question that this project hopes to answer.) Once you submit your cells and the DNA is analyzed you can log in to the site and see the migration patterns, such as they are known at that point, of which your family is a part.

This will be controversial, no doubt. Society itself (not to mention the racist mind) depends on a firm belief in where people come from, who they are, and who they are not -- however dubiously tied to fact these beliefs may be. But better to know the real shape of the family tree than only to imagine it, no?

Info on the specifics of IBM's involvement is available. Some coverage here and elsewhere.

Posted at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (23) | Topic: Genealogy

April 8, 2005

A picture isn't worth a thousand lines of code

I like to prattle on about poetry and code-writing. I've been known to do the same about images and poetry. But I've never invoked the transitive property to claim that painting and code-writing are kindred activities. Honestly, it never ocurred to me. Maciej Ceglowski ruminates on why this is such an awful analogy.

Posted at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Words

The Look-At-Me Cellphone Axiom

The amount that a person wants to look like he or she is using a cellphone in a public place -- that is, how overt the person is about being on a call -- is directly proportional to how advanced the receiver/speaker technology is. For example, people using cellphones in a normal fashion (handset-to-ear) are mostly unconcerned about letting people know that they are using a cellphone. (Though people using cellphones in this way can often be rude they are usually not deliberately so.) In contrast, people who use lavalier microphones are usually loud and demonstrative about the fact that there is no phone at their ear, waving the phone around like a prop to alert passersby to their hands-free-edness. And those with a Bluetooth headset? More theatrical still. Following the slope of wirelessness/overtness, it is fair to assume that when cellphone conversations can be beamed directly to the brain callers will be indistinghuisable from raving lunatics, gesticulating vigorously to let others know that, in fact, they have voices in their heads.

Posted at 9:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Science/Tech

April 6, 2005

Humanities supercomputing

Some of the readership of this blog are people who work in the humanities -- literature, criticism, art, museology -- and some work in technology. Some work at the intersection of both, like me. So I figure this is a great place to pose a question that hit me like a hammer today.

Are there problems in the humanities that can only be solved by a supercomputer or some sort of distributed massive computing platform?

Anything that requires heavy doses of processor-crunching? Large corpus text analysis or image analysis? Help me here.

Protein folding, deep space radio astronomy, thermonuclear explosion modelling, meteorological forecasting and brute-force decryption cannot possibly be the only uses for supercomputing.

Do tell, do tell!

Posted at 8:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | Topic: Science/Tech

April 4, 2005

Google's Ride Finder

My oh my how I am loving this arms race between Google, Yahoo, and Amazon. Google Labs is playing with an enhancement to Maps that plots the real-time position of a city's cabs on the street grid. Here's an example from around my building in Chicago. Plenty of other cities available too. Just more proof that flexible, open design almost always foments new innovation.

Now if you could only flag one of the cabs via the Maps interface it'd be perfect. Hear that, fleet operators?

[Via Gapers Block]

Posted at 1:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Science/Tech

April 3, 2005

The pope thought my Italian sucked

I studied in Rome in 1993. My roommate was a seminarian who made it his job to get to know people at the Vatican. He ended up arranging a papal audience for us -- nothing private, just part of the larger scheduled audiences -- and he was able to situate himself (and me) right on the aisle down which the pope would stroll. Sure enough, il papa came right over to me and asked me where I was from. I responded in Italian (since he asked in Italian) that I was from Chicago. Smirking, he responded in English -- presumably because my Italian was so atrocious -- that he had visited Chicago many times. Then the stream of outstretched hands pulled him further along the aisle and my encounter with Pope John Paul II was over.

When I heard that the pope had died on Saturday I was preparing to attend the wedding of a friend. The radio broadcast I was listening to mentioned that a special service in Chicago would be held by Cardinal George at Holy Name Cathedral, the main Catholic church in the city, at 5:15pm. The wedding I was going to was scheduled for 4pm at that same church.

What a spectacle. Even as the wedding started a steady flow of mourners was filtering into the church, somewhat befuddled that a celebration was taking place therein. Once they figured out that the wedding would end soon enough they seemed not to notice it at all, filling in every open seat all the way to the front of the church. Meanwhile row after row of news cameras were sprouting up along the aisles. Seemingly entire orders of nuns marched solemnly in and took up seats very close to the bride's and groom's parents. A lone bridal party usher -- normally a role whose most difficult task is figuring out which side of the church arriving guests should sit on -- literally had to body-block churchgoers from entering the church down the center aisle. It was all somewhat surreal.

By the time the newlyweds turned around to face their family and friends, the vast cathedral was packed to overflow capacity -- something I'd wager only the most regal weddings even come close to achieving in that space. The bride was completely dumbstruck at the sight. (And I bet the groom was thinking "I hope they don't think they're all coming to the reception.") I have to admit that the bishop presiding over the wedding did a good job steering clear of what could have been a maudlin matrimonial ceremony, choosing rather to focus on the bride and groom almost exclusively. But the swell of silent, mourning Catholics into a space of such joy created one of the most unintentionally bizarre atmospheres I think I have ever witnessed. I'm having trouble dreaming up anything more ridiculous than the sight of weeping nuns pushed aside by a reporter from People Magazine (yes, People -- huh?) trying to intercept the departing bride for an interview.

Posted at 9:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Italy