kip/bot/blog

Just spent a very fun hour on BaseballBoss, a fantasy-like service that people have been predicting for years. It allows you to create teams, drawing on players from all eras of baseball. Here’s a sampling of potential team members, using the baseball card metaphor:

The explanation at the top is part of a nicely crafted guided tour — a good blend of sparse text, tight navigation, and what so far seems to be an experience crafted well enough to not require much explanation. When I got my first 40 cards, I was tickled to see old timer names like Cotton Minahan and Pug Bennett:

(I was also happy to think how happy Cotton would have been to pull down $1MM. Probably wouldn’t have been bitter that Batista was getting $5MM).

After setting up my team — The Vishniak Sting — my first challenge was with the 1906 White Sox. BaseballBoss calculates the results of every at bat (presumably pitches as well, but can’t tell yet) and gives you a very entertaining score card.

I was crushed to see the Sting get crushed - 6-0 - but check it out. Ed Walsh, a 1906 pitcher who still holds the record for the lowest career ERA (1.82), pitched the full 9.0 innings! It’s an honor to lose to an ironman like that.

You can also read a highlights play list:

What a dream come true for real baseball fans this must be. I managed to find (through Google Book Search) a Roger Angell passage I remembered about the beauty of the box score for true fans. Rather than text, I got a pic of the page:

I am oddly moved by this whole thing.

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.

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.

I believe this came up while reading a link from a friend about laser etching my moleskine:

It points to this:

Feels like a stunt, but I dig it anyway.

Technology Review ran an article about blogosphere and social network traffic visualizations which featured pretty and interesting pictures as well as insights into what’s worth measuring in social networks. (The full article isn’t yet available to non-subscribers in its full format.)  The picture below visualizes a number of things including, apparently, the relative ego size/socialness of political junkies and designers.

The two regions are held together by popular blogs with ties to both subject areas. The size of the ­circle representing a given blog is proportional to the number of other blogs linked to it. Hurst notes an apparent difference in culture between the two regions: pink lines, which represent reciprocal links, are much denser among the political blogs than they are among blogs focused on technology.

“Join the stuggle while you may
The revolution is just a t-shirt away”

Inspiring morning about invention, innovation, design, and the cognitive surplus. It started with reading Clay Shirky’s web2.0 expo talk on the blog White African (”where Africa and technology collide!”). On White African I read an interview of the founder of CraftSkills, Simon Mwacharo. I’m having one of the moments where accessible technology + surplus time + application to small aspects of big problems == something amazing.
Craftskills focuses on bringing affordable energy to parts of Kenya that are currently off the grid. It has a special focus on wind power because it’s more readily available and less prone to theft than solar equipment. My favorite part of the interview is the origin story. The founder knew that he wanted to do something with wind turbines, and got it moving thus:

I started with two workers. I could not afford to hire trained people so I decided to train myself first then train my two boys. Then I got a friend who repairs radios and TVs in Kibera to help me design and put together a charge controller.

There are so many powerful dynamics in that simple story.

• cognitive surplus: he saw something he wanted to do and trained himself in the skills he needed to do it

• physically accessible technology: he collaborated with friends to acquire the basic skills needed

• intellectually accessible technology: those basic skills (managing electrical power) already existed, just in another place (TV and radio repair) and partly obscured. (Intellectually accessible, doesn’t mean that it’s simple. Rather, it refers to the fact that this technology is transferable among non-experts, without need of a lab or deeper training.)

• small aspect of big problem: the problem of getting people on the grid was defined as simply as: I need to figure out how to build a charge controller

And just like that, Mwacharo is transforming the lives of thousands of people directly, and many thousands more indirectly through the promotion of an industry.

Silly but part of the appeal of the game.  Creating humorous, clever, even downright creative moments with your character and the environs.

I just had my first twitter exchange of real, compelling value. Whitney Hess, whom I know only by reputation (she gets lot of trackbacks and twitter-points from my network) is responsible for it.

It started with me twittering something like: “Just put Shirky’s new book in my bag. That’s a pretty good first step toward reading it.”

The twitters continue:

To which she responds:

A collaboratively generated insight and gag. These twitter people might be onto something.

Seen in Dumbo just this morning:

A very special moment.  This Dumbo bus stop has been moved to yesterday . . . until previous, or should I say advance, notice.