Published by kipbot on March 10, 2010
under cool, social
This is just super-awesome-cool trippy. Everything that’s fun about social media — serendipity, diverse circles coming together, fun conversations. It started with a fun fact that I picked up from Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: our digestive tracts have as many neurons (the cells that think in our brains) in them as do our spinal cords. What’s going on here?
The comments below come from former co-workers, a client, my old dog Maggie’s super-wonderful oncologist (I still get teary thinking about how great she was with Maggie), a molecular biologist friend, a poet, a two-time IronMan, an English professor . . . la w00t!
I love this Instructable and wish I could do it for me. The author, responding to that clear-but-squishy-edged school of thought that various stimuli are good for infants, created a remote-controlled pattern of fiber optic lights in his soon-to-be-born baby’s ceiling. He can remotely control the overall brightness, the rate of twinkling, and the phases of the moon (waxing and waning):
Published by kipbot on September 15, 2009
under cool, dataviz
I like this video (found via Flowing Data) quite a bit, especially the reminder about the fragility of the atmosphere and curve of the horizon line. But is this data visualization or is it fact marketing? Data visualization should take data points and reveal patterns unseeable (or hard to see), or coax a story out of a perceived bunch of noise.
Vizworld just posted an interview with Edward Tufte which is a nice reminder of first principles of data visualization:
Not much has changed since Tufte began offering the Presenting Data And Information lecture years ago, other than a fourth book and a couple of new examples, but not much has to change when the point is returning to the first principles of information design: make wise comparisons, show causality, employ multiple variables and, above all, focus on the content. This point was driven home for me early on in the lecture as I internally formulated a question on one of my favorite topics: “How will the techniques presented in this lecture help me better represent 3d digital cities?” As if my mind had been read, the answer came: “Don’t ask how visualization techniques can help display data. Ask how data can be best represented.”
I like that it’s a statement of positive principles — show causality and comparisons, seek out complexity and richness, etc. — rather than the anti-prescriptions that are often associated with Tufte (avoid chartjunk, eschew Powerpoint).
Full disclosure: I get quite a kick out of the Dan Brown oeuvre, despite the horrible writing. It’s like the old computer adventure games made into a book. Literally. The old games — like MYST, Journeyman Project, Tex Murphy, Last Express, Obsidian, Lighthouse, Gabriel Knight, even the fighting adventure games like Resident Evil — had a winning formula:
- gruesome/startling crime in the beginning (Lighthouse wins this one hands down with not one but two great openings: 1) you explore a house with interesting objects, but only when you press the answering machine button to get a hysterical call for help does the game kick in with a great drive through the rain sequence that presents the credits and great animated lightning effects); and 2) when you explore the house of the friend who called you, you see a baby quietly sleeping in its crib. When you return to the baby’s room, you see an alien stealing the child. Seriously jump out of your skin freaky. Dan Brown has the usual Robert Langdon being interrupted in some refined pursuit (dreaming about hiking the pyramids with a babe, or giving a lecture) and then being dragged to a mutilated corpse.
- discovery of solvable riddles — adventure games are riddled with barely- to not even close to plausible riddles that you’re happy to solve. They propel the story. Nearly every image presented in Dan Brown allows the reader to puzzle out the clue.
- obscure reasons for villainy The worst example of this was a ten minute or longer discource in Journeyman Project Turbo. These reasons usually warrant a page or two of monologue and sufficiently flawed logic for Langdon to feel the need to correct the villain on the true meaning of the text. Not quite “that belongs in a museum” but close.
Final disclosure, while I won’t leave my battery on, my morning ritual of turning on the wireless will have an extra jolt of excitement (I like it even when I’m just getting the paper) tomorrow morning.
Ben Fry, creator of Processing (or Proce55ing for those that remember) and data viz guru at MIT, has an absolutely fascinating visualization of how Darwin changed the text of “The Evolution of Species” in the thirteen years following its publication.
The labels across the top are chapter numbers, the dashes underneath represent text from the book which you can see on mouse-over. The color bars indicate the different editions.
I called it fascinating on first look, but should probably be more measured or specific. I hate when we fail to distinguish between fact illustration (making a single thing visual) and data visualization (revealing previously unseen stories through a rich visual worth looking at several times). This falls somewhere in between. The final state of the chart, after the 6th, and lengthiest, revision does tell a story:
The most obvious part of the narrative is the addition of an entire section and extensive revisions to the final section in the 6th edition, indicating a structural bolstering of the argument and possibly responses to ten years of critique. The speckle patterns, small bits of color, show a lot of tinkering/revising in the first three editions. These all support Fry’s introductory point:
We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime
I’m wondering, though, whether this illustration tells the story better than the text?
What does make it fascinating overall is the ability to mouse over the sections (the small gray and colored stripes) and read the text underneath. Might be a better tool (if the stripes were a little bit bigger and easier to mouse over) than it is a data viz.
Just saw in his blog that David Byrne has published/will publish Bicycle Diaries an account of his biking around his hometown of NYC and around countries where he’s touring and travelling. It seems kind of cool — after getting hooked on biking in NYC, he started taking a folding bike with him on his travels. I used to work on 12th and Broadway and would see Byrne fairly regularly on his bike — he was elegant, cool, looking at everything with that sense-of-wonder smile. Can’t wait to see the book. (I also saw George Plimpton and Spalding Gray (RIP) in the neighborhood a lot. Plimpton rode what we now seek out as a vintage bike with a ridiculous white basket with a blue flower on the front).
Interesting sidenote: Byrne’s book has already been published in Serbia and the UK, but will be published in mid-September quickly followed by a half-dozen other countries. One of those stars more beloved abroad than here.
Finally, here’s a video from WSJ online of Byrne’s partipation in the bike rack contest that he judged and participated in:
A colleague just sent me a link to an MIT student project/installation site, called “Personas: How does the internet see you?”, which is part of a larger exhibit called Metropathologies. You type in your name and it assesses what you are/do/care about based on on-line presence. Fun idea, great animation during the algorithm crunch, surprising results:
(Click image for larger, cleaner version.)
Amused: sports so large, fashion that it shows up at all (must be based on client lists)
Saddened: politics is so little (and in black! like a mournful armband)
Pleased: design and art seem to be big
Concerned: medicine?
Can’t tell if this blog is covered in it . . . that might explain the sports, what about flickr? Need to explore.
Psyche! I finally made it to Maker Faire and it was every bit as fun, interesting, and inspiring as I hoped. It was big and massive with welded giants of art and smashery. It was cool and witty with installations that made you laugh and wonder how the hell they did it. It was people-focused, having a large number of things that required no power or revived old skills (from vaudeville to composting to a lotta lotta Victoriana). Most of all, though, it was smart and, I hate to use the word, empowering. Everything had wit and intelligence and everything was comprehensible with a little help from the presenters, who were psyched to explain what they were doing.
My favorite, and I kept going back over and over again, were the soldering areas. Both the MAKERShed (MAKE Magazine’s store at the Faire) and Sparkfun (my favorite purveyor of fine electronic goods) had large tables set up with soldering stations where people could take the kits they had just bought and put them together with the help of staff.
These tables were never less than half full and it looked like there was always a mix of adults/kids, noobs/pros, male/female (though the females were predominantly adult). Sparkfun and Make both did a nice job of putting out projects that were doable, but not simplistic. Some kits let you solder two wires coming out of a battery pack to a thing that’s already running. While you learn to make a decent connection, and you’re not likely to fry any parts, you don’t really learn much and it’s not all that energizing. These kits, involved matching resistors, getting polarities right, and required some precision. I love the intensity on everyone’s faces.
The only disappointment is that there wasn’t much around renewable, social, or eco-preneurial. The DIY ethos was strong — make rather than buy, fix rather than replace — but it seemed like they could have dialed some of that up more, without being over-earnest or taking the fun out of it. Example: they had several playground toys designed by MAKErs. They were fun, looked cool, and had some interesting story to them — one was bicycle powered, one worked like a swing and was powered by leaning and leaning back. It would have been cool, given the theme, to see some of the playground toys that generate electricity or pump water.
Still, it was awesomely fun. I bought my second arduino kit and I’m converting space into a little work area and unpacking my soldering iron and box of switches, pots, leds, resistors, caps, transistors, etc and getting back to work. My first goal is to work with the Peggy:
It’s a board that allows you to address a 25*25 grid of multi-color LEDs. Loads of possibilities, especially if they’re connected and working in synch.
More pictures and vids and more to be added to a set on my flickrstream.
During President Obama’s Inaugural Address, lots of people got jazzed, and many tweeted about supporting, celebrating, and being “”the risk takers, the doers, and the makers of things.” MAKE Magazine is building the Maker Faire and the most recent issue of the magazine about the transformative power of DIY — to innovate,to satisfy, and to solve problems.
In the intro to the issue, Editor Dale Dougherty, makes the big but cool claim that “makers offer one of the best hopes for the future.” He has a list of things people can do to “Make Things”; improve “Energy Usage” (monitoring and improving home usage; make “Transportation” smarter and better for us (bicycles, electric cars, reduced transport overall); better handling of “Food and Water” (raise your own chickens!, cook (gasp!)); and do more “Learning”. I hope the list gets viral (I don’t want to do two scans), but it’s worth re-typing the “Make Things” list:
Make things that people want
Make things so that you don’t need to buy them
Start a business that employs people making things
Make things closer to where they’ll be used
Repair things instead of replacing them
Harvest usable components from devices and redeploy them
Get to know your local salvage yard and recycling center
For a while I have been, not obsessed but itched, by the notion that environment and sustainability has a big maker hook. In an age where men can no longer tinker with their cars (they’re too chip-based, and the engines are increasingly black boxes), focusing on their power supply, tweeking their environment, making their stuff last longer and hacking it to work better, could be a satisfying alternative.
Sadly, for me, the first place my head goes is my last trip to a hardware/home supplies store and my urge to buy a sewing machine and make pillows and curtains, cuz I hate buying that stuff. Ah save . . . I also had the urge to hack motherlovin’ sh*t out of solar panel backup systems at Home Depot. (Flickr link provided as proof that I had this impulse BEFORE admitting to the sewing one. Excessive swearing purely out of compensation, of course.)
