Archive for the ‘The Big Here’ Category

Flickr Planet

Friday, February 8th, 02008

Long Now has been playing with geo-data mash-ups recently as a potential interface for our Rosetta Project. In researching what is out there Flickr Vision and Earth Album (and TwitterVision linked off the same page) is one of the cooler geo-mash-ups I have seen. Using online mapping capability tied to social networking, and online photo services like Flickr, this mash-up is an endlessly rotating ball of earth that shows you pictures as they are uploaded to Flickr by location. The locations are often not perfect correlations (as where a photo is uploaded is often not where it is taken.) None the less it is a fun serendipitous interface to great data that is otherwise un-minable. Another nifty one I have seen along these lines is a Google Earth Layer that tracks Instant Messages…

Universcale

Monday, January 28th, 02008

 Nikon Japan has put together a nice Powers of Ten style interactive Flash animation that does a great job of showing us scale with all kinds of clickable examples called Universcale.  Skip the intro and go right to the interactive part.  Thanks to Stuart Silverstone for sending this in.

First Photo from Space

Wednesday, December 19th, 02007

Above is the first known image ever taken from space and our first image of the really ‘big here’. It was shot from a captured German V2 rocket launched after WWII from White Sands missile range. You can find more about the effort in this excellent article in Air & Space magazine (also a link to this really amazing panorama). While it feels like space imagery is something fairly new because of new tools like Google Earth, this hauntingly grainy black and white image taken over 60 years ago reminds me that the intelligence community has been seeing and using this data for a long time. Also worth noting is that while we have this first image, it is my understanding that NASA is missing a large amounts of the early satellite data due to digital data loss. This is a good case where a real film camera has helped preserve the data.

Naming of a new world

Friday, December 14th, 02007

 Reuters is running this interesting story about a map created in 01507 that is the first to have named the new world “America”.  Even more interesting is how accurately it shows unexplored territories such as South America (within 70 miles of accuracy), and shows the Pacific Ocean which was not known to have existed at the time.  Strangley later maps are less accurate and stop using the term America for some time…

“This is … essentially the beginning or first map of the modern age, and it’s one that everything builds on from that point forward,” Hebert said. “It becomes a keystone map.”

Half Earth Catalog

Thursday, December 13th, 02007

This excellent Toles cartoon from the October 14th Washington Post was sent in by Paul Saffo.

100 Year Photo Blog

Wednesday, November 28th, 02007

 

 I came across this wonderful blog of historical photos recently.  The photo above was taken in 1858 of the temple at Karnak.  It is interesting to look up modern photos on Flickr of these same things.  For instance the columns in the above photos seem to have all been excavated in the last 150 years and now you can see how tall they really are.

The Spread of Slow

Monday, November 26th, 02007

A great Metafilter posting about the spread of Slowing Down — not just slow food, but slow everything else.  The posting — which has links for all these slow threads — announces:

Beginning with Slow Food in 1986, the idea of rejecting the “cult of speed” has gradually spread from a focus on food into other fields. In his book



“In Praise of Slow”

Carl Honore explores the spread of the worldwide Slow movement, urging greater attention to all aspects of daily life, human relationships, and the quality of experience. Meanwhile, on the web, witness the spread of Slow. Slow down your stuff with Slow Home, Slow Travel, Slow Fashion, Slow Art, Slow Craft, Slow Design. Relax with some Slow Reading; check out a Slow Read from a Slow Library. Plan for Slow Cities governed by Slow Leadership. Use Slow Schooling, Slow Research, and the Slow University to explore Slow Science and Slow Math. Bank with Slow Money [PDF]. Explore the world with Slow Travel, using Slow Fuel for Slow Transportation. What’s the rush? Come on. Take it easy.

There’s a typically intelligent Metafilter discussion about the price of slowness in the discussions afterward that is worthwhile. One entry sums up the Slow Manifesto:

The Slow Making Manifesto:

    1.To strive for appropriate excellence in the making process

    2. To make objects that enhance the life of the user

    3. To know the origins of our materials, ensuring that they respect country; the communities who produced or harvested them and are from sustainable sources

    4. To make objects that will last, can be easily repaired when necessary and are made using materials and processes that do not harm the makers, the community or the environment

    5. To deal with our co-workers, clients, suppliers and sellers in an ethical and fair manner

    6. To foster, utilise and pass on skills that enhance the making process

    7. To enjoy and relish the way of slow making

the small-but-growing virtual here

Friday, November 23rd, 02007

Alexa.com allows users to compare traffic to different websites through time according to reach, rank, and page views and using various levels of magnification. It’s fascinating to compare not only the quantity of traffic, but the shape of growth curves. For example, although Facebook is still slightly behind MySpace in terms reach (though it appears to have pulled ahead in rank and page views on November 11th of this year), Facebook exhibits more of an exponential curve whereas MySpace exhibits more of a linear one, enabling predictions about when the former was destined to surpass the latter.

Alexa.com

And although the data only goes back to slightly before 02000, this small virtual here is growing…

Layers of Time

Wednesday, November 21st, 02007

I found this on Otherthings Flickr page. It a multilayered paint chip taken from a public mural wall that was recently demolished.

This is an extreme closeup scan (2400 dpi) of a paint chip retrieved from the ruins of Belmont Art Park by Amy McKenzie earlier this year. The fragment is about 1cm thick, and appears to consist of about 150-200 layers of paint. (For a sense of scale, note the ridges of my fingerprint in the lower right.) This should give you an idea of the staggering number of pieces painted in this spot over the decades.  The park used to be surrounded by one long wall covered with artwork, but that wall was illegally demolished by real estate developers earlier this year.

46518700 6B3B8Ea353

LongPen makes short work of distance

Tuesday, November 20th, 02007

kiosk-31.jpg

Author Margaret Atwood, perhaps best known for the near-future fable The Handmaid’s Tale, has invented a device called LongPen which allows writers to sign their works at a distance, replicating their hand movements.

Says Atwood:

It is the world’s first long-distance, real-time signing and handwriting device.

In other words, the LongPen is not an Autopen, which signs your name over and over without your presence being required. Instead, the LongPen does whatever you have just done at your end, including ‘Happy Birthday Marge’ and a picture of a pussycat — making whatever marks you have just made, in the order and with the pressure you have made them. (The signature is a legal one - which LongPen has just had reconfirmed by an expert in this field.)

The LongPen is known in tech circles as a ‘disruptive technology’, which means - I’m told - that it came out of nowhere, was not anticipated, is not an enhancement of a pre-existing technology, and will radically change how things are done. Author signings are just a small part of the picture!

The product’s website keeps a running tally of the carbon saved by authors foregoing air travel to attend book signings (implying that they would otherwise have attended in person, which may or may not be the case). Still, the green credentials of the LongPen seem clear, and some of the possibilities it opens up are kind of intriguing: signing international contracts without flying anywhere; collaboration on tangible artwork; remote tattooing…

It compares interestingly to robotlab’s project The Bible Scribe, blogged here just last week. Put them together and you can shortly look forward to being the proud owner of an autograph signed remotely by your favourite robot author.


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