Favorite links of 2007
359 links posted in 365 days. I just went back through them all and plucked out the most unusual, thought-provoking, or interesting of the lot. In my opinion, of course. Kinda interesting (depressing?) to note the trends of topics that capture my attention over time.*
(As a sidenote, if you’re not receiving these links in your subscription to Ascent Stage add this feed here. It combines the main posts with the links. For you site-visitors the links are called Marginalia and are over in the right gutter. All links historically live at del.icio.us.)
Mindstorms Autofabrik
LEGO robots that build LEGOs. How Skynet began.
How to Speak a Book
Richard Powers on writing fiction by dictation. I knew there was something different about the style of his latest novel.
100 Years of the DJ
From “music waiter” to international superstar. A great audio-annotated timeline.
Vintage Charleston video set to Daft Punk
I enjoy watching this very much. The moves at the end are approximately 60 years ahead of their time.
No ducking foie gras law
Doug Sohn, mastermind behind the greatest hot dog joint in Chicago, takes a stand against an asinine law.
Spaceport Sheboygan
Bratwurst Capital of the World and … the Midwest’s only licensed space launch facility? What the hell?
wikisky.org
Space. Annotated.
One Picture, 1,000 Tags
Museums begin to understand the value of user-created descriptive taxonomies. Says the Met: “There’s a huge semantic gap between museums and the public.” Well, yes.
Wrigley Beer Vendors
Trading cards for the most important people in the ballpark. Fantastic.
Music textile
A fabric-based MIDI controller that is interesting because it raises the possibility of a music score itself acting as the instrument.
How to Turn a Book Into a Picture Frame
Creative. Try matching book themes to photo subjects.
The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel
Hilarious recounting of America’s greatest engineering accomplishment. Viva Maciej.
Forget team-building, shoot an after-work music video
This made my day, maybe my week. Apparently these co-workers did this in one take. Watch ’til the end.
Best Venn diagram ever
So, so true. I am not truly happy right now.
a.placebetween.us
Plot a point between two people. Want to find a bar to meet your mate equidistant from you both? This is your app.
Baseball Geography and Transportation
Alex Reisner explains the impact of changing modes of transportation on player culture and ballpark symmetry. Very well done.
reCAPTCHA
OK, this is currently the most brilliant thing I’ve come across in 2007. Simple, beautiful.
Serial Port: A Brief History of Laptop Music
Serious, thoughtful primer on the laptop as more than just a digital turntable.
Incredible! Why Roger Federer may be the most amazing athlete ever
This is not new, but I never tire of watching it. Kudos to Roddick on his sense of humor too.
Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail
A High Line-type project to convert an abandoned elevated rail line into a linear park through Chicago.
Baby monitor in Illinois picks up live video from NASA mission
See also, how John would be arrested for parental negligence.
If Real Life were like Second Life
Giggle. (Love the away person.)
Dunning-Kruger effect
“The phenomenon whereby people who have little knowledge systematically think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge.” I have an in-law who suffers from this. Or rather, the rest of the family suffers from it.
Thousands of rubber ducks to land on British shores after 15 year journey
Amazing story of bath toys washed overboard in the Pacific that have made their way to the Atlantic.
Bud Light Swear Jar
One of the commercials that didn’t air. By far the funniest. I was crying at “Doesn’t count.”
Man(y) With a Movie Camera
Very cool idea for a “remake” of Vertov’s classic with user-submitted clips.
Watch the World(s)
My god. This is wonderful, gorgeous. Vincent would be proud.
People are reading more in the UK than they were in the 1970s
Interestingly counter-intuitive theory: “Books are ideal to fill gaps in people’s schedules – and with busier lives there are more gaps.”
The Manualist
Hand-fart soloist. (Thank you, Internets. Thank you.)
An entire prison does the Thriller dance
Not sure what to say about this except to wonder how many death threats the choreographer got. Impressive organization.
Barry Bonds surpasses Ty Cobb as the Biggest Asshole in Baseball History
Some contest: “Bonds’ Assholery has been enhanced by illegal drug use. Chemically induced “roid-rage” has artificially inflated his numbers. Ty Cobb established his record fueled by nothing more than bourbon and cold, steely hate.”
Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky
And you thought all English professors did was explain iambic pentameter, eh?
Flickr timeline with Simile
Rob Smart answers my call for a simple timeline view of your Flickr photos. Well done!
Venice charges rude tourists extra
I don’t disagree with this, though it might be nice to have the rudeness quotient work both ways, i.e. a rude shopkeeper discount as well.
Sara and I just got engaged!
Did YOU laser-cut foam core as part of your marriage proposal? No, I didn’t think so.
The immaturity of consumers (or “I want a refund!”)
Glad I am not the only one who thinks that the whining about the iPhone price drop is ridiculous. If you did not think it was worth $600 why did you buy it? (‘Course I’m not going to say no to the $100 rebate.)
x is the new y 2007
Roo Reynolds plots the permutations of x is the new y (e.g., “white is the new black”) based on Google results. Impressive and humorous.
Soundtracker
Fellow baldy Darren Shaw creates a Last.fm for playlists.
Seth’s Blog: Thinking about this war
The War on Terror as a marketing problem.
The Virtual And The Far Away
Gorgeously deserted, compellingly human. From my work pal Jeff Berg.
someecards.com
ecards for when you care enough to hit send
Amazon MP3
Whoa. Millions of songs. Not an iota of rights-management. Your move, Apple.
The Open Workspace Environment: “Where a human becomes a human resource”
Including tips on limiting your odor waft radii, abolishing prairie dogging, comparisons with prison cell square footage, and more.
DOT Unveils Sidewalk Compass Markings
What a great idea. Chicagoans, don’t get your hopes up. The first compass needed by the CTA is to direct it in removing its head from its ass.
Reverse Graffiti
Brilliant. Subtracting grime from walls to create art. But be warned: cleaning a wall may get you arrested.
“The half-life of an irregular verb scales as the square root of its usage frequency.”
That is, the more frequently an irregular verb (to be, to have, etc) is used the less likely it is to evolve into a regular verb (e.g., the past tense of “chide” has become “chided” where in the past it was — wait for it — “chode”.
The Moby Quotient
A handy formula to determine “the degree to which artists besmirch their reputations when they lend their music to hawk products or companies.”
The Future of the Music Business
Hint: one genre of music already provides the model.
Make a Mixa
Forget CD’s. Put your next mix on a cassette tape USB drive. Love it!
Using McDonalds’ As Pizza Toppings
And I thought the Goblin Cock was innovative. As described: “a culinary Frankenstein cooked by Bizarro, a crude combination of deliciousness into an artery-jamming fatty Voltron.”
NeoVictorian Computing
Mark Bernstein’s insights into the software developer as artisan. A good read.
The wisdom of clouds
Cumul.us is a merger of multiple weather feeds, user predictions, and suggestions on what to wear (and buy) to combat the elements. An excellent idea.
This salad container topographic map is genius.
Yes, I would have to say it is.
The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)
Great exposition on the new e-reader from Amazon that people are ga-ga about.
Japan’s melody roads play music as you drive
This is so great. I have often thought that the sound of changing pavement is a lot like half the stuff in my music library. And that’s a good thing.
Forgotten Chicago
Bookmarked so I don’t, you know, forget.
An Open Letter to a Guy I Work With Who Always Comes Into My Office to Tell Me He Sent Me an E-mail Right After He Sends Me an E-mail.
I’d like to append my name to this letter. I HATE when people do this.
Electronic Music Writing Guide
Need to write an electronica review? Here’s your cheat sheet. I particularly like “an arduous slab of Powerbook abstraction.”
The Worst Band Names Of ’07
Worst? I think not! Deny the creativity of this sampling, just try: The Asbestos Tampons, Harmonica Lewinsky, Slut Barf, Coach Said Not To, Bi Furious. And yes, they all have MySpace pages.
Our Dumb World | The Onion
Now an annotated Google Map and Earth layer. A new country is “featured” each week. Hilarious.
You know those computers you see in the movies…
Most of the “fictional interfaces” you see are designed by this guy. What an awesome job to have.
Update:: And here are a few I liked from my stint as Guest Editor of Coudal’s Fresh Signals.
Dopa, funkadelico, scratchare, and suckeroni. Hip Hop Italiano blends American slang and dialect from the bottom of the boot. Viva comic opera.
Zombies vs. Robots, a new comic so conceptually sound it is self-evidently perfect.
Intimate Exchanges is a “multi-play” where two actors make decisions Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style, cycling through 10 characters and 8 different plays. It can be perplexing, but each show is a new experience. Here’s the decision tree.
If you can’t describe it in 17 syllables, perhaps you shouldn’t be drinking it.
This bed sheet with printed rulers should finally give you the data you need to protect your territory.
Underpass as Photoshop. View Layers.
Tom Phillips selectively draws right onto the pages of a Victorian novel. Brian Dettmer takes it a step further and carves into the z-axis of a book. It’s all about layers, you see.
Vader’s labored breathing? Just pausing between sets.
Peter Feigenbaum’s gorgeous model railroad slums.
* Top tags for my links: music, chicago, humor, space, design, art, maps, tools, language, travel, video, visualization, china, secondlife, photography, nasa, google, lego, mashup, ibm, architecture, mac, museum, blog, books, cubs, map, audio, baseball, flickr, ipod, history, web2.0, baby, film, parenting, social, web, gadget, itunes. Yep, that’s pretty much me.
Favorite posts of 2007
Personal blogging is by definition a bit narcissistic. Compiling a list of your own favorite posts of the year, well, that’s downright solipsistic. But so it is. Here’s the best of this year, in easy-to-digest narrative format.
I started 2007 strong by challenging a MacArthur Genius and getting it handed right back to me. Beaten, I went to Russia and contemplated empire. Not content with the glories of the past, I experienced our glorious future of levitating trains in Shanghai.
Full of the future, I discoursed on how to change the world in the here and now, remembering our human knack for figuring out how to destroy the planet utterly. I started local, though, helping envision a better sewer.
But that was all so deep. So I got drunk on a rooftop and focused on the people who really matter, including those I never had a chance to meet. This all led to the meaning of life, naturally.
Now enlightened, I was able to pull back into my iPod-shell and dream of random things. Then I took my parents to Italy on a journey that was both wonderful and harrowing and learned how nothing is ever really random. Like Star Wars, just one story in a much larger universe.
So I relaxed by shooting rockets at friends and, ahem, aiming for the cornhole. Too much of a good thing, but of course nature has a way of balancing things out.
I shook my fist at the natural world and turned to man-machine interfaces and technological humanism. Take that!
But I was too bold. The long arm of the law, aided by border paranoia and Big Business, nearly got me for the love of artisanal fakery.
Nothing left to do at this point but have fun, so thelovelywife and I organized a small get-together.
And that, friends, was 2007.
Here’s last year’s best-of. For god’s sake, is anything improving around here?
Most played music of 2007
| last year | ||
| 1 | Biosphere | 1 |
| 2 | Fatboy Slim | — |
| 3 | Aphex Twin | 17 |
| 4 | Office | — |
| 5 | Sufjan Stevens | 2 |
| 6 | Tycho | — |
| 7 | Justice | — |
| 8 | Mike Relm | 11 |
| 9 | Ulrich Schnauss | 15 |
| 10 | Apparat | — |
| 11 | Amon Tobin | — |
| 12 | Der Dritte Raum | 6 |
| 13 | Ladytron | 12 |
| 14 | Air | — |
| 15 | Matthew Dear | — |
| 16 | LFO | — |
| 17 | The Black Dog | — |
| 18 | Shpongle | — |
| 19 | MSTRKRFT | — |
| 20 | Jóhann Jóhannsson | — |
Interesting how few artists made it on the list from last year. Sorta proud of that. Biosphere of course is unassailable, as ol’ Geir accompanies most night’s trips to sleep. The list is Most Played, you see, not Most Actually Heard.
As I compile these stats year after year it is becoming clear the bias built in. For one, iTunes/Last.fm doesn’t do a great job of logging very long tracks — such as unbroken DJ/live sets — which this year accounted for much of my listening. Not sure a track is logged unless its end is reached, so though I could listen to an hour of a set if I don’t hit the end it is statistically invisible. Also, since I don’t automatically synch music to my iPhone or iPod iTunes never knows about play counts that happens outside of itself. This also skews things mightily since so much of what I listen to is not in front of my computer.
Vinicolor
The idea: use red wine to make a watercolor painting.
Why is this concept art?
A) Because what I tried to paint was the town seal of Barile, my great-grandparents’ home town in Italy
B) Because the wine is Aglianico del Vulture, grown in and around Barile, from the winery of the Paternosters, our distant relatives
C) Because the paper is from Amalfi, Italy, waypoint on our trip this summer
D) Because I am an awful painter, but the concept is quite good
E) All of the above
It can be done well — as this site, where I got the idea, shows.
The thing is, wine is a tough medium. Each time you put the brush to the paper, which in this case was 100% cotton, the wine dab pooled momentarily and then chose the rivulet of least resistance and poured into it. More topographical analysis and fluid dynamics than art, really.
Kinda makes a nice Rorschach though. Do you see an iPod?
All of you on the good Earth
Did I choose to write this post? Or was it chosen for me?
We almost have the house back in order after the cataclysm two weeks ago. One upside to reconstructing the basement is that lots of books have to be put back in place and this has given me the pleasure of rediscovering a bunch of titles I’d forgotten about.
This past week I grabbed two volumes, completely at random, on two separate trips to the toilet: Stephen Hawking’s The Universe in Nutshell and The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Admittedly, not exactly bathroom fare, but such was what laid about en route.
And this is where it gets odd. Not too far into my first, um, session I randomly opened the philosophy encyclopedia to the entry on Molina, Luis de (1535 – 1600). Molina was a Spanish theologian best known for his doctrine of “middle knowledge,” a way of reconciling human free will with the predetermination implicit in the idea of divine grace:
Middle knowledge, God’s knowledge of what persons would do under any set of circumstances, enables God to arrange for certain human acts to occur by pre-arranging the circumstances surrounding a choice without determining the human will.
Basically Molina has it both ways. God has foreknowledge of what humans will do but only because he knows all the possible choices that humans can freely make in the omnipotently-arranged circumstances. He doesn’t direct people’s actions, just sets the stage. And because He set it, He gets to know the possible acts that can be played out on it. The elegance of this proposition, it seems to me, is that it comports with a purely rational view of the world. Remove the deity from Molina’s equation and it is still entirely valid as a description of how people act.
During my next visit to the W.C, I had the Hawking book, a really beautiful follow-up to his Brief History of Time. Just flipping it open I landed in chapter three where he discusses histories of the universe:
Even if the boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary, it won’t have just a single history. It will have multiple histories …. There will be a history in imaginary time corresponding to every closed surface, and each history in imaginary time will determine a history in real time. Thus we have a superabundance of possibilities for the universe. What picks out the particular universe that we live in from the set of all possible universes?
Hawking’s answer invokes the “anthropic principle” which basically states that “the universe has to be more or less as we see it, because if it were different, there wouldn’t be anyone here to observe it.” Might seem like circular reasoning, but it makes complete sense, especially if you flip it around: humans would not exist to think about alternate universes in the first place if we did not inhabit one that could sustain intelligent life. So that’s why we’re in this one.
We can conceptualize alternate histories (e.g., one in which I posted about how much I love taco pizza instead of this rambling) and posit parallel universes that behave differently than ours, but we can only ever know the one we’re carving a path through. Not because the choices have been made for us, but because we are choosing from the finite number of paths that are permissible given the universe we live in.
Now, I’m no philosopher and, though I really did want to be an astrophysicist when I was little, I am regrettably not a member of that profession either. But it seems to me that Molina and Hawking are describing the same thing, essentially. Or something very similar, anyway. Haven’t fully parsed it all out yet.
In a way, both acknowledge that the sum of one’s choices — one’s personal “history” — is constrained in some external way (Molina by God; Hawking by the physical properties of the universe). What I find interesting is that they both also suggest a kind of human obliviousness to this constraint that allows us to live as though we were fully in control. Whatever I’m reading into these two passages, it is strangely comforting to me.
And the fact that I just randomly opened to two passages both related to free will? Well that’s just spooky.
See also: “Gone out of experience”
Hot or not
Been a while since I geeked out about apps and such. Let me rectify that.
Except for the web apps and where denoted* these are all OSX apps. Complaints may be directed to my brand new domain www.whiffofcondescension.com, which may or may not be working because, well, its better than you … and you can smell it.
FacebookSync – Simple little thing that takes your OSX Address Book and yanks down info and photos for matches from your Facebook friends. Really handy.
MarsEdit – Best offline blog editor I’ve found. Blows Ecto away.
Displaperture – Miss the rounded screen corners in Leopard? This is for you. For the pill-capsule-shaped-screen obsessed among you, you can distort the edges much more than Tiger even allowed.
Songbird 0.4* – Mozilla-based music manager. Getting better all the time. Browsing music blogs with this is a dream.
Beatport Sync* – Free app for DJing and beatmatching. Super-simple. Traktor Lite, essentially.
MailPluginManager – Part of the Leopardized widescreen mail hack for Mail.app (which is indispensable), this add-on lets you manage plugins much more comprehensively.
GetTube – Simple app for pulling down YouTube videos locally.
Apps I want to like but have not given them their due. Any experience with these?
MemoryMiner* – Multiple media integrator for narrative-based presentations.
Bento – iWork-like database from Apple’s subsidiary, Filemaker.
Candybar – Icon/Dock über-manager from the makers of Coda and Transmit, which I love.
Web apps/sites:
Gmail IMAP – Just weeks after I moved all my POP mail to a jury-rigged IMAP redirect via Gmail, they released their native version. But the truth is, It is seamless and nearly-perfect. Well done, Google.
imeem – Very comprehensive, user-submitted streaming music site. Each track has an independent page. Really handy for letting others listen to tracks as reference.
5inch.com – Awesome alternative CD/DVD cases and labelling.
Fawnt – Free fonts that don’t look like an accountant chose them to accompany his clip artwork.
Vector Magic – Turn bitmaps into vector files.
And now to bitch a little. All about iTunes, probably the single most used piece of software I have on my machine.
Why is there no way to move or copy part of your library? This seems like an obvious feature for selective backup or at least something that a clever AppleScript could solve.
I’d love to be able to flag or mark sections inside a track for later reference. This would be extremely handy for tracks over an hour long. (I don’t mean chapters like you can break an audiobook into, but actual markers that could be rearranged.)
Related to that, now that the Finder has become iTunes-like how about moving some changes the other way and letting me color-label tracks/albums like you can for files in Finder?
Why is there no way to select multiple playlists at a time? Infuriating.
I love you, iTunes, but why do you treat me so?
Places 2007
Travel. Opens the mind, tortures the back, sates the soul, pays the bills.
Here’s where I’ve been in 2007. Not as eclectic as last year, but more provincial international destinations, which is a good thing.
Update: Using this service (thanks Roo!) it looks like I flew 75,080 miles this year. Yikes.
I’m no longer using overnight stay as the criteria for inclusion. If I visited, it’s here. Asterisks denote multiple visits.
Aransas Pass, TX
Armonk, NY*
Atlanta, GA
Austin, TX*
Barile, Italy
Beijing, China*
Charlottesville, VA
College Park, MD
Galena, IL*
Grand Lake O’ The Cherokees, OK
Hursley, England
Locks Heath, England
London, England
Los Alamos, NM
Los Angeles, CA
Matera, Italy
Naples, Italy
New Orleans, LA
New York, NY
Paw Paw, MI
Portsmouth, England
Potenza, Italy
Ravello, Italy
Ripacandida, Italy
San Diego, CA
Shanghai, China
Southampton, England
St. Louis, MO
St. Petersburg, Russia*
Venosa, Italy
Washington, DC*
White Plains, NY*
Winchester, England
Maybe our paths will cross next year?
Eversharp
In English graduate school my main focus was on technologies of writing, specifically the printing press. Imagine my surprise, then, to learn that I live right around the corner from the nursery (if not actual birthplace) of another such technology: the mechanical pencil.*
Our neigborhood of Roscoe Village in Chicago has seen its ups and downs over the decades. The latest up-cycle was begun in 1980 when the huge Eversharp Pencil Factory at Ravenswood and Roscoe was converted to residential condos, the largest industrial transformation of its kind in Chicago at the time, galvanizing re-development of the area. The Pencil Factory Lofts is an anomaly in our neighborhood of relatively low-density single-family homes, but I’m a little prouder of it each time I walk by now that I know its story.
In 1913 a chap from Bloomington, Illinois named Charles Keeran came up with the idea of fitting a metal stylus with replaceable lead inserts. This became the Eversharp mechanical pencil. He allied himself with Wahl Adding Machine Company (of Wahl clipper fame today — apparently someone else took the adding machine market around this time). In 1917 this partnership turned ugly when Wahl forced Keeran out and began marketing the pencils as Eversharp, a brand which continues to this day. Nearly all of these Pencils of the Future were churned out of the factory at Ravenswood and Roscoe.
In homage to the former life of the factory the developers of the loft painted giant pencils on the side of the water tank atop its roof. Actually they painted regular #2 pencils up there, presumably because mechanical pencils look a lot like pens and that would, you know, defeat the homage. But the tank isn’t there anymore. I went out to take a picture of it yesterday and I could not see it. Either I’m snowblind or it has been removed.
So, next time you use a mechanical pencil please pause to thank my humble neighborhood. Actually, does anyone use mechanical pencils anymore?
* It would have changed the world, too, if not for corrective paper fluid. Curse you Wite-Out!
Undead Yuletide
Last Saturday my six-year-old asked me about the relationship between St. Nicholas and Santa Claus. I said, too quickly, that they were the same person. My son then informed that he learned in school that St. Nick died a long time ago. As I contemplated my options at this conversational juncture, he asked matter-of-factly, “Is Santa a zombie?”
It took every shred of self-restraint not to run with that.
Then, Sunday we encountered the same problem as last year: too many Clauses around to suspend disbelief. I maintain that you cannot call someone who dresses like Santa “Santa’s Helper.” That’s just silly — and it is what elves are anyway. Either you say it is Santa Claus or you say it is someone dressed like Santa Claus. Or now … that it is one of Santa’s dead relatives back from the grave. Now quit being naughty or he’ll feast on your brains!
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
Recently this blog (and my Flickr account) turned 20 years old, forever in Internet years. I went back through it all, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
