October 2007 - Posts
When this book was first pitched to me I thought it was going to be about biofeedback - which is it, a little - but really it's about how the brain literally maps the body as well as its surroundings. Literally, physically, stick-an-electrode-in-your-brain-and-feel-a-poke-in-your-elbow kind of map. It's fascinating and the possibilities of what technology can do once we learn to read and utilize these maps is really exciting.
The mp3 of my interview with the authors is here or else the bottom of this page has the audio set in the video player for faster loading.
The discovery of this site purporting to be that of a plastic surgeon offering "ear pointing" has the subject floating around the Web on this appropriate day. Not everyone believes the site is real but the the procedure definitely is. More images here and here but NOTE: they include the "healing" stage which is a cut ear with stitches, so kinda gross.
Speaking of Halloween items, here's a tutorial on carving an image from a photo into your jack-o-lantern.
Speaking of "speaking of," I don't have any in this entry as I just want to share the links before I have a back-log, rather than wait to see trends in the tea leaves. I'm sure that's your preference as well.
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I read this article over my morning Cheerios and I can't recommend it highly enough:
Motorhead Messiah
For Clicked readers with science interests it describes the creative ways this guy changes the car/truck engines to make them more powerful and efficient.
For Clicked readers with political leanings, it's a compelling story of our country's self destructive addiction to oil.
For Clicked readers who like human interest items, this guy dropped out of school in the 7th grade.
For Clicked readers who look for stories about the environment, this article is the kind of drug that keeps your hopes vested in the cause.
Good stuff. My one criticism is that turning a 9 mpg Hummer into an 18 mpg Hummer might be doubling its efficiency but really, that's still pretty bad - but then again, it's biodiesel.
Accused speeder to cops: My GPS proves your radar gun is wrong - As you might guess from the headline, the GPS recorded his speed. Now the question for the courts is whether GPS data is acceptable proof. What makes this especially fascinating is that I vividly remember the controversy several years ago when a rental car agency used GPS to determine that a renter had been speeding and fined him for it.
Plus... Dumbledore pride, graffiti grows on the north side of the tree and Clicked Court is in session
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"The most important issue to young people in the 2008 campaign is one that no presidential candidate will discuss. ... The issue is the curtailing of corporate power..." It is?
If that's true, it's ironic that Stephen Colbert's fake candidacy, disproportionately popular with young people, is in legal trouble for having a corporate sponsorship. Yeah, it's a good thing the law keeps corporations from having any undue influence over politicians or helping them get elected. (?!) If Colbert is disqualified, can he still be a write-in candidate?
Plus... Anyone seen Sarah Connor? Privacy means you're guilty. And nobody likes a facilitator.
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How is she not shot? The guy is pointing the gun right at her.
You may recall during the Summer I started the interview series Voices in my Head. After a brief lapse I'm picking up where I left off. This first one is with Bill Yenne, author of a book called Guinness: The 250-year quest for the perfect pint.
I confess when I saw the book title I mostly wanted to ask an expert all the thing I'd heard about Guinness as a bartender, so that's pretty much what the first half of it is. The transcript page is here , with a video option so you don't have to wait for the download to play it. But if you prefer to take it with you, the mp3 is here .
P.S. Where else have I been? You may have heard about the big move by MSNBC to new studios . I don't technically have a new desk yet but I did spend some quality time plowing through seven years of accumulated junk, notes, books and ketchup packets.
You should see what the old place looks like now. They didn't take most of the equipment (yet?) so it's basically a fully equipped news center and TV studio but completely empty of people. Totally eerie, kind of like that movie 28 Days Later. I have some pictures, but I also remember this guy so I'm waiting for special permission to post them.
The online coverage of the California fires shows continued innovation in how the news is being reported. The two new items I see this time around are Twitter reports and custom made maps.
The first time I saw breaking news covered with Twitter was during the earthquake in Peru. Now I see it in use in reporting on the California fires both by regular people and news outlets .
Most of the folks making their own maps are using Google's myMaps feature . I remember when this came out and the only thing I could think to do with it was map out my driving routes to work. Now we see it in use by individuals, governments and news outlets to relay vital information.
There's an amazing collection of maps at a blog called "And still I persist ." As I click it now it looks like traffic has brought it down but hopefully that will be resolved soon so I'll keep the link here for you to check back. They have custom maps that include individual houses touched by fire and areas covered by the smoke plumes, photos and informative links . A really impressive amount of work going into this, I hope it's restored soon.
Speaking of blogs with features we haven't seen before, this one has a collection of time lapse videos of the fires taking over the landscape. (I see they're posting so much it's already been pushed into the archives. Here's a direct link to an example. In case you have trouble, these loaded more quickly for me on Firefox than IE for some reason.) They credit the videos to this site , which has feeds from wireless web cams. I can't find any that are showing the fires directly, however. Maybe I'm missing it.
Speaking of blogs, all the local news outlets are keeping them active and updated. The ones I clicked:
The Calfire blog comes with audio clips, though I had to scroll back to yesterday to find one that would load. The audio is of a robot voice reading incident reports, evacuations and other fire conditions. It sounds like it's using text to voice technology.
Speaking of scrolling backward, I looked to the entries before the fires on this San Diego real estate blog and found photos of the kinds of houses that are no doubt threatened or already burning right now.
Infinte Monkeys is blogging the fires in the tradition that made blogging the force it has become. Frequent, copious updates with good links local insight and a personal sense that reminds us that real people are involved in this story.
I'm not sure what to call the pages that have been set up by Rim of the World and Kithbridge . Information pages? They're not blogs exactly but they're being updated with important links and information. Rim of the World is hosting message boards as well.
The TV folks keep showing a NASA map of the region with the smoke billowing out to sea. Notice there's a link at the bottom of the text for a huge version of the photo. I also clicked this sky view .
Speaking of spotting smoke from space, yesterday I was able to see smoke show up on the radar of the Weather.com animated map. Now they've fleshed out their map offerings to cover a variety of Southwest perspectives .
With so many people directly and immediately affected by the fires we've seen a spike in the number of submissions to our FirstPerson project . (That video from James Fabin is really amazing when he pans the camera.)
So too, the traditional (mainstream citizen journalism?) sites, with both Flickr and YouTube showing lots of results in searches on California fire.
The Kithbridge site has a disclaimer that's easy to forget in the whirl of volunteer reporting and information.
"Again: do not rely on unofficial sources to make decisions regarding your safety: these links are provided for information only and Kithbridge assumes no responsibility for the accuracy of their information. Listen to your local authorities, and when they say evacuate --- get out!"
If there's anything I'm missing that you think is worth sharing, please let me know.
My colleague Gary Krakow was telling me about seeing a recent performance by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings and passed me a few links describing their production philosophy. Most striking to me was a line in this Mtv interview in which one of the guys says they've sold over 30,000 7-inch records. I wouldn't have guessed that many people had the equipment to play 7-inch records, never mind a single band selling that many. I imagine there are a lot of people who never made the digital jump. Is there also an anti-digital backlash in the works? ...Plus... Vinnie's bikes would be better anyway, time to make the sausage, and Tin Man infinity
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This is the kind of thing that the lawyers have taken down quickly so I'm posting it now rather than waiting for the rest of today's entry. In short, an old guy shot and killed two burglars in three weeks. A local reporter caught up with him in the parking lot of a store where he'd purchased a new shotgun (his other two having been taken by police in association with the shooting investigations). The reporter has now apparently been suspended in the wake of viewer outrage over the segment.
"When a group of seemingly independent actors are making decisions based on the same limited pool of information, they become more highly correlated, and thus 'stupider.'" ...Plus... Robot sex, open up and say 'Cheese' and 'One piece at a time.'
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Dominating the water cooler this morning is the subject of what a pain in the butt it is to adopt an animal these days. The discussion stems from the video of Ellen begging the animal shelter to return a dog she gave to her hairdresser.
I was surprised at how angry I was after watching the clip considering I didn't know or care about the story a minute and 48 seconds earlier. It's not surprising (though of course I don't condone it) that the shelter is receiving threats and angry feedback .
I know I already linked to a bunch of headlines about Radiohead leading a shift away from the traditional music industry but this week it's been looking like a genuine trend.
If "destroy itself" feels a little too exuberant, we can at least see that some of the possibilities of the past are realities of the present. Consider these five alternative music industry business models .
Much more: What’s the Future of the Music Industry? A Freakonomics Quorum
Speaking of that Radiohead release, for some reason I keep stumbling upon links about secret messages and back stories of the songs. It must be a reflection of the size of their online fan base because as a casual listener it doesn't mean much to me: Pitchfork's Guide to Radiohead's In Rainbows
They're calling this the worst radio interview ever and indeed it's hard not to have some sympathy for an interviewer whose guest doesn't want to talk, but it also highlights something I've struggled with as a media person who does occasional interviews. It always seems a little misaligned to book a musical guest and then sit there and talk to them. I still don't have a good answer for what a musical interview would be like, somewhere between a full on performance and a sit down chat, but when I see an interview like this I have to think, "Well, duh, what did you think? They're a music band, not a debate team!"
Jason Kottke provides links and explanation of "green accounting ." It sounds a little like the idea behind buying environmental offsets. Nature has worth and should be accounted for. Seems like that might run into some problems when you get to evaluating things like the Grand Canyon though.
"Girl with balloon is standing on an eyelash glued to the top of a needle." Microscopic art . The exhibit includes microscopes.
--The truth, in short, is that people don't click links like you might think. I know anecdotally that even the links in Clicked, which isn't much more than links, aren't clicked as much as the numbers of page views would suggest.
Speaking of traffic, who clicked Britney ? - It's an analysis of Britney Spears related search traffic with categorization into what people were looking for.
Speaking of traffic, someone in the mainstream media finally speaks to Ron Paul supporters about their practice of flooding online polls.
Google hits vanity ring - "An electronic ring that shows the number of Google hits when searching for the name of the person who wears it."
The Most Amazing Video Of A Girl Playing Star Wars On The Trumpet… EVER
10 epic Halloween costumes - and they're all safe to view at work.
Speaking of Halloween, a massacre worthy of Calvin and Hobbes .
Tech bubble watchers were abuzz yesterday with word of CBS buying a 10-month-old gossip site for 10 million dollars. This report mentions that the seed investment was less than a million.
Floating LED light show - (not a bomb)
In the comments to my previous post a reader pointed out that txt words like BFF may one day be seen as part of the evolution of the language. This piece is about language evolution in a more literal way . "Verbs evolve and homogenize at a rate inversely proportional to their prevalence in the English language, according to a formula developed by Harvard University mathematicians." "Irregular verbs are fossils that reveal how linguistic rules, and perhaps social rules, are born and die," Michel says." The idea is that there are some verbs that don't follow the regular rules. Those are evolutionary remnants.
Turn a tiny amount of Mountain Dew into a big fat glowstick . The headline says "drinkable" but I'm pretty sure even just three caps full of hydrogen peroxide is going to make you barf - or worse. BURNED AG'IN: It's a hoax. Doesn't glow and you still can't drink it. Thanks to the commenters.
Speaking of instructions on how to do something cool (or kill yourself), a "how to do a backflip " video is not very reassuring when the demonstrations are heavily edited. This is good advice though: "Pull yourself toward you instead of pulling yourself toward your legs."
For a less dangerous how-to, the instructions call it a paper transformer , but it's not a robot-to-car kind of transformer. Still neat.
Cool trick for creating an invisible folder on your computer.
A "mixed reality" avatar is a physical model with a virtual projection.
"Kindersay is a web-based program designed to help preschoolers (Ages 1 to 4) learn English words. Over 500 words, images and English-speaking videos are featured in our interactive "Word Shows"." It's all free but if you want to customize it by adding your own photos or slide shows you have to pay for a premium membership.
The Baby Name Map gives you names ranked by popularity based on map plot points.
A Friday game! Create a portal to move through the screens.
I don't understand the hype around this Washington Post article about mysterious robot dragonflies spying on protestors. The article makes it sound like no one has ever invented a small remote control flying object. Don't they remember all the hype around the Micro Mosquito ? So cheap ! And the Dragonfly , though not exactly bug sized, entered the consumer market months ago.
"This amazing bread recipe/technique sent ripples through the foodie world."
"I've asked ten professional writers ... to assess the net's impact on writers. Here are their answers to the question..." - Reading through the answers, I'm not sure the writers understood the question the same way I did. A lot of the answers are about the impact of the Web on the business of writing, not so much about the art, which is what the intro is about. Long ago I had the idea that chat rooms and instant messaging would herald a new age of literacy and expression through language. Instead we got, "IDK, my BFF Jill." ...Plus... Cup o' Chirps and funky three wheelers
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The pundit blogosphere can be so toxic that even some of its most celebrated participants can suffer the burden of its emotional toll. It's largely for that reason that I try to avoid the daily drama of the punditsphere. But today's firestorm does present an interesting case for followers of Web culture, so I'll try to give it a quick summary and you can click more deeply if you're in the mood to make yourself angry. ...Plus... Hit single or commercial jingle, put on your subway face and what's the worst that could happen?
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The new Sony Bravia "play dough" ad is on their site but since the navigation is a little unusual, here it is on Daily Motion . There was also a teaser video with some of the behind-the-scenes .
Speaking of watching commercials on purpose, the song in that new JC Penny commercial with the magic is Regina Spektor's Music Box.
Someone uploaded just the song (full) to YouTube here .
Last time we brought the cube farm to a screeching halt with a song of hers was Fidelity, which you can hear in its entirety on her MySpace page .
Top 5 Things Every Extrovert Should Know About Introverts - Something I've been thinking about lately (as an introvert) is how/whether the new wave of social software is of use to introverts. ... Plus... Hey you with the MacBook, watching bowling is still boring and my neighbor Spencer's Gifts
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There's an odd similarity between David Letterman putting the screws to Paris Hilton here:
And Jon Stewart totally eviscerating Chris Matthews the other night.
Maybe it's the violation of the unspoken contract between talk show host and talk show guest. "Why aren't you helping me sell my crap?"
Jason Kottke's recent query about the best order in which to indoctrinate one's child into the cult of Star Wars (by order of release, of course, though the best answer is , "Show him Episodes 4 and 5 together and let him know that 'They find Han - he was ok.' Leave it at that. Let him experience the later disappointments as we did - all grown up.") brought to mind my recent attempts to use the Web to entertain my baby. Until this past weekend, the most successful trick had been using Flickr photo slide shows. So by now I believe we've seen a good portion of the 47,146 images in the Fire Truck slide show.
But then I remembered a video clip I had downloaded to my machine long ago, inspired by some bit of childhood nostalgia and now Mah Nà Mah Nà (or, in my house, "Meeya meeya! Doo doo! Meeya meeya! Doo doo!) reigns supreme. So much so that my boy has learned for the first time how to click the mouse button to get the song to play again (and again and again).
The version I'd always known was this:
But apparently the Muppet version has roots in German Sesame Street from 1969 .
It's funny how even with puppets the lips don't match when it's dubbed .
There's also a prime time version from 1969 that's a little closer to the one I know and love.
A behind-the-scenes clip I found shows how the video was made with three different video layers . More work than I would have guessed.
Though I didn't know it until I'd done some research, Sandra Bullock's impersonation of the wild orange haired guy was only one of man celebrity version of the song.
That wild orange haired guy is Bip Bipadotta. His other hits include:
If anyone has links to better versions let me know, I'll switch 'em out.
Of course, once I started digging it was just a matter of time before I pulled up the Wikipedia page . The song was first done by Piero Umiliani. I believe this is his 1968 original . But it also appeared on the soundtrack of a softcore porn movie called Svezia, Inferno e Paradiso (Sweden, Heaven and Hell) also in 1968. There's an audio only version of that here that's very good - arguably better than the original.
I also learned that there's a Muppet wiki which has a page devoted to the song .
Lastly, among the more popular cover versions of the song is a relatively recent version by Cake. IFilm has the clip from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or else I was also able to find the MP3 hosted on this blog .
I saw this item about Bono's Liberty Medal acceptance speech being censored to remove a line about torture and clicked over to the site to see for myself. The line, at least this morning, is in both the video and the transcript. But if you've got a few minutes, give the whole thing a listen/read. I can't remember the last time I heard inspiring, thoughtful, critical yet still celebratory words about America like this. ...Plus... Lead for your laptop, Jackie Chan's dirty work and underboob is a thing
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You'll recall the previous one in this vein was the model make-over "Evolution."
Good on 'em.
