The Force is strong with this one
Hmmm, could be my son is watching too much Star Wars.
Today he was sternly reprimanded for smacking his little brother in the face while he demonstrated his light saber tactics.
Later, while crapping, he noted that his staccato farting sounded like laser blasts.
Then, he announced that he needed to go to Alabama because his imaginary friend’s sister Janey was being attacked by AT-AT Imperial Walkers there. (The fact that he knows Alabama being the most troubling part of that exchange.)
Back to Mary Poppins?
It was a different time back then, 1957 or ’58
This is one of the funniest things I have seen in ages. The Old Negro Space Program is a ten-minute documentary that’s one part Negro Baseball League, one part NASA, and all Spinal Tap. The parody of the professor and the crappy Photoshopping cracks me up. Keep your eye out for Peter ‘Stinky Pete’ Carver.
As a sidenote, NASA had a single African-American astronaut, Robert H. Lawrence Jr., during the race for the moon, but he died in an air crash in 1967.
[Via Coudal]
Recontextualizing the Collection
The paper I will be presenting at the Museums and the Web conference in Vancouver next month is now online. I know you can’t wait to get at it, so here’s an appetizer from a section called Tools of Representation.
All museums are places of technologically-enhanced representation. At its most fundamental level, a museum is a place for the re-presentation – the presenting again – of something created, used, or identified with someplace else. Many technologies or tools assist in this enterprise. Plate glass, cases, framing, interior architecture, lighting, climate-control, and signage combine to form a sometimes surprisingly high-tech, if mostly transparent, “machine” for the presentation of a cultural artifact, artwork, or other exhibit. Certainly more complex mechanisms exist. Interactive technologies both in physical space and on-line enable museums to act as platforms for the creation of an experience. In the manner that a theater stage is a kind of machine for the production of an experience or a run-time application is a virtual machine for enabling lines of code to be actualized, the museum today operates as an enabler of visitor experience. For many museums and cultural organizations, this experience is made possible by providing context. But it has not always been this way.
I know, I know, how dare I leave you with such a cliffhanger? The whole thing is located here.
Confidentiality
My doctor’s office has signs everywhere informing patients that charts and presciptions will NOT be faxed or mailed to them for confidentiality reasons. OK, fine. But the walls in the office are so thin that you’d think you were in a confessional. As I was waiting to see my doc I overheard a fellow patient next door nervously-laughing his way through a conversation with his doctor about how he needed to lose ten pounds and change some of his eating habits if he wanted to avoid the heart disease embedded in his genes. Shhh, secret!
Five ways to tell it is springtime in Chicago
- The radiant profusion of alabaster white skin blubbering out from beneath clothing more suited for the tropics temporarily blinds you as people joyously run, skate, and bike down the lakefront path for the first time in months.
- You’re asked to buy a Streetwise every half-block instead of every few blocks.
- People no longer lunge for the heat lamp “on” button on the L platform the moment the timer runs out.
- It is easier to imagine a flower sprouting from dead brown grass than frozen white grass.
- Beer tastes way better.
Eyeball-to-eyeball
My wife’s grandfather passed away a few weeks ago. He was an amazing man for dozens of reasons, but one part of his life that stands out for me was his service during World War II. Grandpa was a fighter pilot running missions out of the UK. In 1944 he was shot down and captured by the SS. He spent the rest of the war in POW camp, tortured but not broken. But that’s a story — and a fascinating one — for another time. Recently I was watching an interview that the National Archives did with Grandpa a few years ago. One section of the interview, which I have transcribed here, was rivetting. It does a good job of presenting this man as he really was: practical, brave, and merciful.
I was on my own, our flight was broken up. I got on the tail of a German who turned at me because he was being chased by two others. He didn’t see me, but he made a 90 degree turn so I had to turn in to him. By the time we passed head on I opened fire and in about two turns I was on his tail — the P51 was good, you could turn inside the other guy.
I chased him all over the countryside, gradually losing height. Finally when he got near the deck he made a most peculiar move. Instead of evading the fire he pointed his nose straight at a church. I said to myself, this man is crazy — he thinks I won’t fire because he’s got his nose pointed at a church. But I realized it wasn’t Sunday and there couldn’t be any people in there so I opened fire.
So then he started going all over the place and finally I got him down to where he lost all his speed and all his attitude and he tried his last trick. It’s called “throwing the anchor out”. You cut the gun, you fishtail, you slow the plane down. He didn’t throw flaps, but all of a sudden he was trying to get me to pass him – that’s “throwing the anchor out.” Well I didn’t pass him because the P51 had a better propeller than the German [planes] did.
First thing you know as far as from here to that wall — 25 feet away — we were flying eyeball-to-eyeball. I was lookin’ at him and he was lookin’ at me. I’ll never know why I did it. I said this guy is going to be dead in about one minute. I felt sorry for him. I just wanted to give him a chance to save his life. So I just gave him the ol’ thumbs-down. Any aviator will tell you what that means: put your plane down. And he knew what it meant. I had those two guys [US fighters] behind me screaming to get out of the way and they’d shoot him down instantly but I gave him his chance, put my thumb down and he turned away put his nose down got the first open field. [He] bellied in, his plane tore itself up the two wings and the tail came off but he landed safely ’cause he landed upright on his fuselage.
There was a huge cloud of dust and those two fellows who originally had him in their gunsights when he turned into me they circled him and if he had not been in that cloud of dust they would have strafed him. Everybody had their choice. I would not strafe a guy who was down, but some of the guys they’d strafe anything. When I was a POW the Germans were especially mad because some of our pilots would kill a man in a parachute. Some people think it’s sporting; others don’t I saved that German’s life by ordering him to put his plane down. He had less than 10 seconds to make up his mind he had lost all of his speed so he didn’t have a chance he was going to be shot down. He decided to save his life and he did.
Somebody asked me once, did you claim that plane was shot down? I said sure I did, what do you think? The plane went down and was tore up, but he saved his life. I hated to see a guy lose his life that could fly that well. I don’t know what happened to him he could have come back up and shot at some of our people the next day but we didn’t worry much about those German fighters as much as if they had been winning.
Full video interview here.
Codewords
It’s not hard to see the similarities between computer code and poetry. Like code, poetry is highly formalized and structural and almost all poems attempt to effect an experience greater than the sum of their words. Call the best of each examples of very artful data compression.
Perlgeeks have been re-writing poems in code for years. Some of it is really quite good, though none of it achieves the grail of actually executing something that might be meaningfully related to the poem. (How cool would that be? A poem turned into an executable program whose runtime output was some kind of answer or manifestation of the poem subject?)
Two gents at MIT have created an application that takes this idea one step further. Metafor is a system for visualizing the “programmatic” nature of the English language. Basically the app takes standard language and creates what looks like a a formalized program. The idea is to use this method of “scaffolding” natural language as a stepping-stone to the ideal of being able to program in plain English. This is sentence diagramming on overdrive.
INPUT: “There is a bar with a bartender who makes drinks.”
OUTPUT:
def __main__(): class bar: the_bartender = bartender() class bartender: def make(drink): pass
There’s also a great video available that makes the process clear.
Like the Perl-ified poems, this code does not actually do anything. And I fear that this method of translation will come crashing down (so to speak) when it encounters allusion, metaphor, or any of the myriad other figurative fossils embedded in the strata of English. But I like the exercise.
See also: E-mailing Richard Powers
So average
Amazing the complexity that simple innovations beget. Flickr continues to inspire and facilitate some really astonishing technical and artistic development. The latest is a set of images created by a user named brevity by averaging 50 photos of a single type of subject — an eye, a candle, a mountain, etc. The result manages to be both numinous and chthonic. Have a look-see.
And if you like this sort of layering, have a peek too at the work of Matt Wenc. He’s an artist (and good friend) who works in thick grids of color that often achieve the same kind of rear-lighting effect that the Flickr averages do.
Via alt text.
UPDATE: Matt points us to the artist Jason Salavon. Check out his averages of residential real estate markets.
The need for feed
Recently I switched from the trusty Sage plugin for Mozilla to the standalone FeedDemon RSS/Atom reader for PC. Sage did the job, but the number of feeds I was tracking was getting too large and I was never completely comfortable (nor have I ever been) with that sidebar window on Moz. So I am here to state my incredulity that I ever lived without FeedDemon. Goodness gracious, that’s a well-done app! Very clean with lots of advanced features like podcast organization and keyboard shortcuts. Highly recommended.
Seems like there isn’t any information source that I care about that doesn’t have an RSS feed these days. Would be interesting to clock time spent in the reader versus in the browser, no?
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
I went back through it this blog (and my Flickr account) on its 20th anniversary, 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.
