kip/bot/blog

Biking past PS 22 in Crown Heights, I saw some cool fence decorations. From a distance, they looked like old guild symbols, and I thought perhaps this was a magnet school around science and technology. On closer inspection, they were much more: twisty lines of metal text suggesting shapes aspiring to be objects that thought they might be something else.

This shape reads: “Look at the short pants acting like binoculars dreaming of a hand drum.” This was my favorite, but there were more and they were interconnected, check them out on my flickrstream.

Crunchgear has some screenshots of a working version of Windows 7 — about three years out from its projected release date. Looks like they’re going with cover flow:

Though I’m totally digging the more robust system tray area. Nice idea to take advantage of better bigger monitors with some widget-y stuff.

There are also a bunch of screenshots with some wheel interfaces:

I don’t know exactly how it works, but I like the idea of a wheel that reflects resource usage and other statuses. Not sure I’m buying the search in middle bottom — there’s a lot of user inertia to reach up and to the right for a search box.

There’s also an intriguing, dense screenshot:

There were no higher res images available of this one, so I couldn’t get a closer look at what’s happening at the bottom . . . but it looked potentially cool. It’s always alarming to see the faux 3D wheels which obscure significant amounts of information (my main gripe with the cover flow mode: cool but thin on data), but I think I’ve seen these kind of pre-release experiments before and they get nixed before release.

Not sure how I feel about this . . .

From AfroMusing’s photostream on flickr, a program that allows people to report violence through SMS. The objectives for reporting, listed in the poster below are: mobilization, study and tracking, assistance, awareness- and fund-raising.

UnitedforAfrica maps reported incidents:

There’s a small park just east of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. I’ve played chess at the tables near the entrance literally dozens of times over the thirteen years I’ve lived in Brooklyn. But it was only today, while I was riding my bike along Eastern Parkway, that I looked at the memorial.

The park is named after Dr. Ronald Ervin McNair. I assumed that this was an inter-war physician who had done some service like setting up a clinic or been a benefactor of the community’s arts efforts. It turns out that McNair was, among other things, an astronaut on the ill-fated Challenger mission of 1986. The memorial, sadly neglected (like the park it is in), is pretty cool:

It’s a nice mix of air & space design, interesting sides to a modern personality (the karate kick next to the professorial holding forth confused me and a person standing nearby), and traditional monumental bronze imagery.

Other interesting things about McNair:

• Nichelle Nichols, Lt Uhura of Star Trek, was helping NASA recruit more diverse candidates to the space program in the 70s and McNair was one of those recruits
• He had a black belt in a form of karate and was regional champion several years
• He was an accomplished saxophonist and composed a piece of music with Jean-Michel Jarre before the 1986 mission. (McNair was supposed to record the saxophone part on the mission.)

Things learned from the trip:

• go that extra step — I’ve been in that park many times but never took the extra steps to find out who it was named after
• ride a bike — having a bike meant that I didn’t have to take extra steps to see this
• the internet needs a memorial project to remember people who inspired the dedication of parks, but not quite enough to maintain those parks.

But will it be my FB friend?

I’ve blogged about this guy before, but this is one of those places where amateur is really cool.  Flintstone Stargazer is a flickr contact who does astro-photography (as well as other kinds).  In addition to posting his astro-pics, he also posts pictures of his equipment set-ups, the impromptu devices he makes to get things to work (mounts, stabilizers and the like).  He’s been taking a lot of pictures of Jupiter recently:

Jupiter was my big “discovery” when JRube got me a telescope for Christmas years ago.  I was on the roof of my Brooklyn apartment, in February and was drawing pictures of what I saw (like Galileo!), and found four dots — one big one with three smaller ones — all on the same plane.  Remembered that’s how Galileo found the moons, check my maps and sure enough it was Jupiter.   A few weeks after that, after consulting maps and schedules, I was able to see the red spot.  Nothing like the clarity of the photo above . . . my telescope wasn’t that strong, and there’s too much ambient light in Brooklyn.

TechCrunch, while writing about something else (Flowww, a visualized RSS feed algorithm), backs into a critique of the Apple cover flow mode:

The other issue I have is that, while the site is pretty, the Cover Flow metaphor just doesn’t work for me as a navigational tool. It is too slow and it forces you to look at the pre-selected sites in the order that the algorithm (or Zotter) picks them. If you want to read the middle story, you have to flip through all the previous ones to get to it. I’d rather pick my own stories from a list of headlines, thank you very much.

Over the last several years, I’ve seen many versions of this pop up in designs for client work.  I’ve never liked it — the rate of information transfer is slow, the visuals rarely sit together nicely or in a way that allows for easy scanning, there’s a lot of guess work in locating yourself somewhere along the spectrum (and maddening to re-find something after you’ve moved away from it).  I don’t like it, but I keep my mouth shut, usually.  After all, Apple does it, and they . . . well, Apple does it!

The techcrunch writer asks for thoughts and a conversation is starting.  It would be nice to have some data or real learning about this.

The most artistic thing about theatrical [and] advantage of the small theatre is that you are looking through a small window. Has not everyone noticed how sweet and startling any landscape looks when seen through an arch? This strong, square, this shutting off of everything else, is not only an assistance to beauty; it is the essential of beauty - GK Chesteron, 1909

My friends Tom and Donna take me to all sorts of lo-rez, lo-tech, junk-tech performances: puppet shows, performance art based on slide-shows (literal slideshows — with carousels, film-strip projectors, unsynched sounds, live music), and toy theater.

Last night, I went to St Anns Warehouse’s 8th toy theater festival, produced by Great Small Works. It consisted of four shows:

• a traditional Indian story told through one singer and a partner moving toys around various tableaux;
• an Isaac Babel short story performed in a toy theater with Chagall-like backgrounds with accompaniments on clarinet and fiddle;
• a Stalin-era Russian SF novel (in the traditions many of us know through Stanislaw Lem), performed by three voices and a narrator who was also operating an analog synthesizer. (The synthesizer with its weird beeOOOOOOs and staticy sounds was the perfect aural accompaniment to Cold War era, concrete apartment towers, and emerging realities after the bomb. Tom wryly noted that only people from MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies would consider an analog synthesizer to be as lo-tech as stick puppets)
• a story of the devil destroying the world and orgy that precedes it, done with amazing sound and a devil with cool led eyes and the dance moves to rival Terrence and Phillip in Uncle Fuckah

As a digital designer who tracks CG for improved hair and water effects, it’s fun to watch powerful stories emerge from <1 fps, 0-fidelity, 0 apology to artifice media and find them even more engaging than the adventures of Niko and Roman.

One of the cool things with St Anns is that they usually have theater and festival memorabilia on display around the warehouse. So I got a lot of (crappy iPhone) pics of small toy theaters, an art form unto themselves.

Kindle is fast becoming a bigger conversational go-to for me than wikipedia on the iPhone.  Last night, while hanging with my friends (and cultural guides) Tom and Donna, I shared my story about being a real “trouper” versus “trooper”.  This brought up other phrases, like “the proof of the pudding” (or the proof is in the pudding), which Nownow sorted out thus:

The entire phrase is “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” meaning that the true value or quality of a thing can only be judged when it is put to use. (”Proof” in this context means “the act of testing,” rather than our more common “conclusive evidence” sense.) “The proof of the pudding is in the eating” dates back to around 1600, and is more often heard in the United Kingdom than the U.S., probably because puddings of various kinds occupy a more prominent place on the dinner table there.

“The proof is in the pudding,” a fairly common mutation of the proverb, does make a certain amount of sense, i.e., that the final product, not the recipe, is what counts. But personally, I can’t shake the feeling that “the proof is in the pudding” would make an excellent last line for a Sherlock Holmes mystery.

Source:
http://www.word-detective.com/081100.html#proofpudding

They also provided confirmation for my personal pet peeve about the misuse of “begging the question”:

In logic, begging the question has traditionally described a type of logical fallacy (also called petitio principii) in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises. Begging the question is related to the fallacy known as circular argument, circulus in probando, vicious circle or circular reasoning. The first known definition in the West is by the Greek philosopher Aristotle around 350 B.C., in his book Prior Analytics.

In contemporary usage, “begging the question” often refers to an argument where the premises are as questionable as the conclusion.

In popular usage, “begging the question” is often used to mean that a statement invites another obvious question. This usage is disparaged.
* Suppose Paul is not lying when he speaks.
* Paul is speaking.
* Therefore, Paul is telling the truth.

I love these guys.
Toby, at Pondering Points, seems to get quite agitated by misused phrases as well.  Perhaps Nownow would help . . .