Category: Technology
Contrarian and friends on blogging
Contrarian will be at the Inverary Inn’s Thistledown Pub in Baddeck this evening to lead a discussion about blogging sponsored by the Cabot Trail Writers’ Festival, the group that organized this event last fall. In addition to an annual fall festival, the group plans a series of satellite events, of which tonight’s discussion is the first. I’ll be talking about the writerly (journalistic, aesthetic, ethical) aspects of blogging; Mike Targett will be on hand to backstop me on those issues, and to add his technical smarts to the discussion.
The pub serves supper from 5:30 to 8; The fireside blogging discussion, upstairs in the lounge, will begin at 7, followed by live entertainment at 8. So come any time before 7.
Man as machine
In the 1920s, the German writer and artist Fritz Kahn produced a series of illustrations depicting the human body as a machine, most famously in the 1926 poster, Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace):
Now, another German artist, 20-year-old Henning Lederer has created an animated version of the poster:
Hat tip: Flowingdata.com.
McJellyfish
David Beck of Clarkson University and Jennifer Jacquet of the University of British Columbia won an honorable mention in the illustration category of the [U.S.] National Science Foundation’s 2009 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge for Jellyfish Burger.
Other winners include a comic strip about brain development, an animation showing why identical twins become less similar as they grow older, and a two minute video about airline routes. Fuller account here. Slideshow of other winners here. Podcast interview with some of the winners here. (The last two sites may require free registration.)
Adopt a booth
In response to our post about pay phones, Contrarian reader AN points out that people concerned about the vanishing phone booth can adopt one of the gorgeous British Telecom kiosks at left. Well, you can if you are a British municipal authority. The cost? Free, without a phone; £300 per year with pay phone service.
Not sure who would want to adopt the booth at right.
Visual data: landing an Airbus in the Hudson River
Still on the subject of aircraft, remember US Airways Flight 1549, the Airbus 320 that set down safely in New York’s Hudson River after losing both its engines to a collision with Canada geese? Exosphere3D, a Denver company that “specializes in technical animation and scientific visualization of complex data sets,” has combined the wealth of publicly available radar data, cockpit and air traffic control recordings, and flight recorder information to create a series of startling 3D animations the tell the story in a way that would have been inconceivable a decade ago. I’ve embedded the best of the bunch here, but if you have the bandwidth, check out the full screen view on YouTube.
Hat tip: James Fallows.
Where the big cheese sits
Kulula, the low cost South African airline, has decorated its newest Boeing 737 with helpful graphics to guide the uninitiated. The aircraft, dubbed, Flying 101, even lets travelers know where le grand fromage sits.
More on Flying 101 here. More pics after the jump.
Give it away … or make them pay?
O’Reilly, the world’s largest publisher of tech books, decided in 2008 to remove digital rights management — copy prevention software — from its ebooks. The result? In the 18 months since, ebook sales are up 103%.
Long Island’s Newsday, the 11th-largest-circulation newspaper in the US, is one of the first non-business newspapers to put its website behind a pay wall — a step The New York Times and all of Rupert Murdoch’s papers are said to be considering. The result? In three months, Newsday’s $5-a-week website has attracted 35 paying subscribers.
Hat tip: SP.
False positive
An apparently random swab test of Contrarian’s new MacBook Pro at the Stanfield International Airport screening area this morning detected traces of nitroglycerin.
The CATSA agent who conducted the test summoned a supervisor who explained, pleasantly, that the machine had triggered an alarm. She proceeded to check my identification and ask a series of questions about medication, chemicals, and hand creams. My negative answers turned up no obvious source of nitro, resulting in a further swab test of my iPhone, a complete physical check of every item in my carry-on bag, and a rigorous, 90% pat-down.*
In all, my case drew upon the efforts of four CATSA agents, whose demeanor ranged from polite to cheerful. After half an hour, CATSA deemed Contrarian fit to fly.
Regular readers will know that I am no fan of airport security theatre. While I found this rigorous screening unpleasant, my initial reaction is that secondary, intensive screening following a positive indication for nitroglycerin probably falls into the small subset of CATSA protocols that actually make planes safer.
I am baffled as to what triggered the false positive result. The screen cleaning wipes I bought recently? A certain person’s hand cream? The pleasant supervisor said traces of nitro can be persistent, so I now wonder if I should allow an extra half hour for the flight home.
*The pat-down was 90% in the sense that it would not have caught the Christmas Day bomber, if you catch my drift.
Visual data: The words China censors
In response to Google’s dramatic announcement that it is reconsidering its presence in China after a series of disquieting acts of censorship and sabatage, the Information is Beautiful website produced this clever graphic of word searches and websites blocked in China:
Incidentally, China hand James Fallows, whose Atlantic Magazine blog has interesting and measured posts on the Google announcement here and here, tells me that publishing a list of the banned words is itself a crime in China.
Visual data: search completion
Start typing “Is Nova Scotia…” into a search box, and Google will offer suggestions for completing your query:
a country? an island? in Canada? a good place to live?
All four, natch. Now try “Is Stephen Harper…” and watch Google suggest:
jewish? a freemason? a christian? a good prime minister? getting the h1n1 vaccine? liberal? a conservative?
OK, none of the above.
Search engines generate these suggested query completions by keeping a digital eye on the billions of searches they process every day. Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, artist-scientists at IMB’s Center for Social Software, have been keeping an eye on the phenomenon.
Suggestions for the word “why” result in questions about the sky, cats and marriage… along with “why do dogs eat grass,” and “why do men cheat,” and “why is pink the color for girls.” This labor-saving device — part fortuneteller, part shrink? — has opened a window into our collective soul. With millions of people pouring their hearts into this modern-day confessional, we get a direct, if mysterious, glimpse into the heads of our fellow Web surfers.
Viégas and Wattenberg, whose work is hard to summarize in a single subordinate clause, have developed software to create pictures of these collective queries, which they present in an op ed piece in today’s New York Times.
The size of the arrows and words reflect the number of web pages that answer each of the questions.
