By Sheila
Lennon
Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Fair and balanced, too!
April 9, 2005,1:06 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
I've updated the Google map links a bit more, after discovering that
Google thinks Providence City Hall is at Cathedral Square, between the
public library
and Rt. 95. Updated links are below, in italics.
Fixed some typos, added a couple of Related links too good to skip to
the Periodic Table item. Just one of my Saturday errands.
And here's to Charles and Camilla,on the wedding day they must surely
have thought would never come. BBC
does it up, including a story
about and recording of the poet laureate's ode to the pair.
7:52 p.m. Friday
Views from way up: Fenway, the Bay...: Now that
Google Maps is offering satellite views, you can waste all sorts of time
looking
up your
house, the
house you were born in, your alma mater, Fenway
Park (above) and more. And if you'd rather see photos of famous places
from above, there's a site that's already collected some of those.
How to find your house: Practice first; this is a little slippery. Go to Google
Maps and enter an address or a landmark (including its location with
postal abbreviation, i.e. Fenway Park, Boston MA). By default, you'll get
the street map. In the upper right corner of the page, click "Satellite." You'll
get a medium view. If there's a little teardrop icon for the spot you want
-- in this example, A is Fenway -- click on it to center it. Then use the
slider on the left of the page to zoom in, in increments. You may have
to recenter. You may want to look around the area -- use the arrows above
the slider to shift the map.
Once you get the hang of how it slides away,
and how to get it back, take on something easier to lose, like your own
house.
Some tips: Buildings may be disappointing. Roofs are ugly from 30,000 feet.
Google gets lost sometimes and sends you to Somerville. Overlapping maps
may create dead spots, and not every place has been shot in high resolution
yet.
That said, heres the link
to City Hall Cathedral Square in Providence. (Saturday:
Oops, Google moved City Hall. Here's
25 Dorrance St., the actual address of City Hall. Going "up" -- yes,
it's north-- in the photo, you'll see the white of the ice rink and, beyond
that, the green
roofs
of the old train station buildings. Keep going through the new train station
to the state Capitol building.
Or, instead, go east -- right arrow -- from
City Hall. Let your
eye travel right, along the parallel streets that flank the Y where the
river branches. They become Angell and Waterman, the
steep one-way hills slowing
everyone for a glance at the First
Baptist Church in America -- Rhode Island
founder Roger Williams' church -- flattened by distance.)
From there, I recommend centering
on the river,
and taking a map cruise down
Narragansett
Bay.
If you get
lost,
pull back on the resolution till you find the bay again.
T.
F. Green Airport is also a landmark, but a pretty empty one the day
it was photographed.
Before you go hunting for national landmarks, you might want to check out
a site called Google Sightseeing, whose motto is "Why bother seeing
the world for real?" This site is collecting the URLs of places you've
probably never actually seen, certainly never from this angle: The
Pentagon, Area
51, Alcatraz or Michael
Jackson’s Neverland Ranch and much more, and it's all searchable.
I just contributed the Fenway link to the collection. If you find someplace
interesting they haven't indexed yet, you can collaborate, too. Use the "Link
to this page" link on the upper right side of the Google maps page to
learn the URL, and the "Suggest a location" link on the right
of Google Sightseeing to tell the world about it.
Link
to this item | Comment
The
Periodic Table: Reader Karen Anne Kolling sends a link to a story
by Theodore W. Gray that's
based on a misconception:
For well over a hundred years the world has failed to take proper notice
of the word "Table" clearly contained in the name of the famous Periodic
Table of the Elements.
One
evening while reading Uncle
Tungsten by Oliver Sacks, I became momentarily confused. He begins
a chapter with a description of a periodic table display he loved to visit
in the Kensington Science Museum, and in mis-reading the paragraph, I thought
it was a table, not the wall display it actually is. While my confusion
only lasted a few seconds, when I found out there wasn't a Periodic Table in
the British Museum, it left a hole I felt I had to fill.
Actually I would never had had this confusion, or built the table, if
I hadn't been thinking for the previous month about the need for a new
conference table in my group's common office area...
Related: Lyrics to and recordings of The
Elements by Tom Lehrer.
See also The
Periodic Table of the Elephants on this page of astonishing
images at ShadowNet.
The site is in Czech.
Link
to this item | Comment
Philadelphia
reveals Wi-Fi plan: At news.com, and many other places.
The city of Philadelphia on Thursday unveiled a controversial plan to
transform its streets and neighborhoods into a gigantic wireless Internet
hotspot.
If approved, the project will offer low-cost wireless broadband access
throughout the city's 135-square-mile area. The city will build out the
infrastructure and then sell wholesale access to Internet service providers,
telecommunications companies and nonprofit organizations. ISPs and other
providers will handle all billing, marketing, customer service and the
at-home equipment needed to pick up the signals.
Philadelphia will become a customer of the network by allowing city departments
to buy broadband access to communicate with one another. As part of this
new technology plan, the city will also establish a nonprofit organization
that will provide computers and technical training to low-income residents.
Here next, please.
Link
to this item | Comment
Free
weekend games: That link goes to the platform games. There are many
other types available, too.
The screenshot is from a typical game here -- Eggy
Boy: Find the exit and collect fruit."
Link
to this item | Comment
April 6, 2005, 7:52 p.m.
It's been a heavy production day here, and now the Web keeps crashing,
so I'm quitting before I eat my cheeks. Off tomorrow, celebrating my husband's
birthday.
Portrait
of a Pinball Wizard: Pinball
was my game, back when there were pinball machines... Especially when
they were next to a jukebox, if I danced with the machine I could do
no wrong, and the ball kept going, almost by itself, till the song ended.
Gary Stern, dryly profiled in this Business Week story that I can't quote
anayway because I can't get to the Web, owns the last pinball machine company.
At Slashdot, knowledgeable flipper jocks run
with it:
But the Stern machines are not nearly as nice or as well designed as the
old Bally/Williams machines. Pinball is a dying form of entertainment (along
with the arcades) and while its great to see one lone survivor still out
there, it would be even better if they were up to the quality of late Williams
machines. Attack from Mars, Addams Family (BRUTAL!), and Medieval Madness
all come to mind. Revenge from Mars was gimmicky along with Episode 1,
and as a result I see very few of those machines still around. While Stern
makes competetent machines, the Simpsons cannot hold a candle to the sheer
genius that Attack From Mars was.
Link
to this item | Comment
Screencasting: Jon Udell, a developer, analyst.
Web consultant and columnist
at InfoWorld tech magazine, is experimenting with "screencasting,'
a technique that embeds a flash presentation in a Web page. No clicking --
as soon as you get to the page, the movie loads and his voice is is your
ears. (Although here, it takes forever to load as our virus scanner dribbbles
it inbefore letting it all go at once.)
In Jon's Content,
services, and the yin-yang of intermediation screencast, What you'll
see is a Web page within the actual page, and soon a cursor comes in and
starts adding links to the page as Udell's voiceover explains how Google
is adding links to text on pages, and then how he wrote the Library Lookup
bookmarklet, which you'll see at right modified for the Rhode Island library
system.
If you've wondered how it works, needed a bit of encouragement to try it,
Jon shows you how to use it. (More thorough instructions
are here, in a blog post last fall when I first worked out the code for
our local libraries.)
It's a quick way to show or learn a new skill, and Jon is an evangelist
for the screencasting technique.
So how do you do it on Windows? Windows
Media Encoder 9.
Link
to this item | Comment
Spiritual
signage: I would never have thought of this.
In order to map a city spiritually we need a signage system which will
indicate spiritual events and encounters, their location, nature and duration.
Ince it seems unlikely that government bodies will provide such a system,
perhaps the best thing is to supply the signage on stickers. These can
be placed on buildings, lampposts, taxi seats, escalators and other sites
of spiritual encounter....
This will enable us to read the city, spiritually; to follow the scent
trails of God. But it would help to have maps. To make these each sticker
could have a barcode. Teams of 'angels' would comb the city with barcode
readers to add new sites to the official maps via a database. It would
be possible to monitor for spiritual hotspots and deserts, parts of the
city filled with presence and those with no spiritual value whatsoever.
Related: street
memes:
"street meme": a sticker, stencil, or poster that can spread a
single image around the world. Unlike traditional graffiti art where each
piece is unique, street memes can be copied repeatedly, taking on a life
of their own, and spreading through the collective effort of people scattered
around the world.
"meme": A term coined by Biologist Richard Dawkins to describe
self replicating ideas. Read more about the concept of the meme here.
Link
to this item | Comment
Who knew? I got an email today from Colby Buzzell,
the soldier-blogger of My War profiled who's publishing his story in Esquire. (scroll down, or click)
I had mentioned a blog post he had apparently signed Tango Mike.
That's what drew the email, whose subject was "WRONG":
TANGO MIKE was never my name, it's Army jargon for "Thanks Much"
I replied,
Thanks for the correction. I'm laughing because usually readers are all
over any tiny error, but nobody picked up on that one.
It's obscure enough that a
Google search on "Tango Mike" only turns up a bunch of
people who call themselves... Tango Mike!
Link
to this item | Comment
April 5, 2005, 7:50 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
The clocks here are early -- it's 7:50 on the wall, but I see the email
newsletter version of this in my inbox, with an 8 p.m. timestamp and yesterday's
blog on it. Sorry.
Keeping
online daters honest: At Wired.
...TrueDater,
not to be confused with True.com, is a database of reviews written by people
who met through online personals. It's like Amazon.com, only instead of
books, you're reviewing people. More specifically, you are reviewing their
ability to represent themselves online.
The goal here is not to rate (or berate) the person, but to compare how
he or she matched the profile that got your attention. Does she look like
her pictures? Is he really 6 feet tall? Could she quote from every Monty
Python skit you've ever seen, or is she trying to fake it with five snippets
from The Holy Grail?
Currently, you can read and submit reviews for members of Match.com, JDate
and AmericanSingles.com. To post a review, you indicate which dating site
they belong to and enter their profile ID. Rate them with a "yes" (they
tell the truth in their profiles) or a "no," and add a few words
of explanation.
"Very open, fun and is really cute in all the right places," we
learn about one woman who gets a "yes."
"Major baggage and no drive," opines a woman about a man she
rated "no."
"His dog is most likely the best part of him," says another
disenchanted woman. In fact, some of the reviews are scathing enough to
make you wonder how the reviewer didn't catch a clue before the connection
escalated into a date....
Reviewed for all the world to see, even by the jerk who didn't realize you
were making up a reason to go home early. (I'm so happy to be happily married...)
Link
to this item | Comment
Chip
improves vision, baffles scientists: In the Guardian (U.K.),
A small photosensitive chip implanted in the retina has made a huge difference
to the vision of patients suffering from the degenerative eye disease retinitis
pigmentosa, US researchers have shown. And it seems that an implant in
one eye can actually improve vision in the other.
Dr. Ronald Schuchard, a leading researcher in the field, told delegates
at the Vision 2005 conference in London that his team were at a loss to
explain some of their results, particularly: improvements in vision in
the non-implanted eye; improvements in areas of the retina that should
not have been affected by the surgery; and improved colour perception,
despite the fact that the implant is not capable of detecting or distinguishing
colours. Vision 2005 is an annual conference that takes in all aspects
of sight loss, including technologies and medical advances that could help
people overcome blindness....
Link
to this item | Comment
Plant
movies: I love these -- watch 3 morning glories try to find their
first footholds, watch all sorts of flowers bloom. via Robot Wisdom.
Related: High-rez
photo of a bird taking a bath -- drops are perfectly in focus in mid-air,
but the head is shaking so fast that it looks like a baseball cap. Via Grow-a-Brain.
Link
to this item | Comment
The
Digital Media Jobs Blog at PaidContent.org.
If you're willing to relocate, you may find your pot of gold here.
Link
to this item | Comment
$1
candy theft a misdemeanor? Reader Peter Plimpton sends along
this column by Cindy Rodriguez at the Denver Post, saying, "Perhaps
your readers might get a kick out of this one":
This is how absurd zero-tolerance school policies have become: Police
charged an 11-year-old Highlands Ranch boy with theft last year for taking
a lollipop from a classroom jar.
In the 14 months that this case has wound its way through the juvenile
court system in Douglas County, thousands of dollars have been spent paying
for hours of work by the Sheriff's Department, the district attorney's
office, county social workers, and clerks filing the paperwork.
All to teach a boy a lesson.
David Michael Boeke, the kid who was charged, told me he didn't know the
lollipops were being sold for $1 to raise money. He thought it was a teacher's
way of being nice. Now he has a police record...
Link
to this item | Comment
Lego
Tarot cards: Nope,
doesn't get any weirder. Or cuter.
Christopher
Doyle at Reasonably
Clever annotates each card, describing how and why he did what he does.
Here's the link for the suit
of cups (hearts), but links to everything else are just below the thumbnails.
At right, the 4 of cups. Click on it to see the larger version. Here's
the text accompanying it:
Divination:
A card of balanced, equinamious emotions, feelings and relationships.
Letting the next step come naturally and being open when it comes. Recognizing
and enjoying what one has. Not needing to fit in.
Author Commentary:
Yes, that's me.
I put myself in this card not so much because of the divination (although
I'd like to think at least some of it applies to me), but mainly because
the idea of lying on a beach while disembodied hands ply me with tropical
drinks struck my fancy.
Link
to this item | Comment
Google maps has
added color satellite photos as an alternative to street maps. Not high-rez
enough to see your cat in the back yard, but you might see your car.
Link
to this item | Comment
Gore's
new media venture seeks to blend TV, Internet: SFGate reports,
Al Gore never said he invented the Internet. But the new San Francisco-based
cable TV network he's heading promises to transform television by plugging
it into the Internet.
Current, the name of Gore's enterprise, hopes to do that by airing a shuffle
of short news features, some produced by the network but many submitted
online by viewers. Current will also air segments every half hour showing
TV viewers what Google searchers are tapping into at that moment -- everything
from current events to tourist destinations. It's all directed at a generation
that thinks nothing of plugging into more than one media outlet at once....
Oddly, this story doesn't mention that Google co-founder Sergey Brin was
also there and part of the presentation, but the photo proves it.
Link
to this item | Comment
April 4, 2005, 8:16 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
The Making of the Twenty-First-Century Soldier (Part 1): Esquire
puts up the
tale of the soldier-blogger who took the Web by storm.
Last summer, you may recall, MY
WAR - Fear and Loathing in Iraq, was the blog of CBFTW, a soldier from
San Francisco in the Stryker Brigade near Mosul in Iraq. (I blogged it here and here.)
The
blog was fresh, direct, and Colby Buzzell -- calling himself Tango Mike when
he needed a name -- got in trouble for it, got famous, got a book
contract, and, according to the March
4 Army Times, "recently left the Army." My War -- as it was
abbreviated after a meeting with the brass -- is scrubbed now (although you
can still see the
now-missing posts here, as cached by Google.).
I would like to take this time now, to say a nice warm "Mar-Haba" (that's "Welcome" in
Arabic) to all my new readers down at M.I. (Military Intelligence) who
are now reading this site and have this bookmarked on their computers.
Glad to have you all aboard, and I hope you all like the site. Hopefully
you'll find this site more entertaining than most of that other boring
crap I'm sure you guys have to sift through all day.
The Wall Street Journal told the back story on that one: Army
Blogger's Tales Attract Censors.
This soldier's blog seems to have taken him straight to glory.
via metafilter
Link
to this item | Comment
It's del.icio.us: Suppose
you could watch what others are bookmarking, peek in on links others find
worth saving. That's what del.icio.us is. To those who do the bookmarking,
it's a way to have the links available on the web, both at home and at work
and on the road, tagged for easy retrieval with keywords made up on the spot: "japan
music," " shaving razor perfect," "feminism blogPosts," "security," "free-stuff." " book
audio cool," "life," "art computers"... you get
the idea.
To the rest of us, it's an addictive peek at a rolling log of links. Addictive,
because you might miss something if you don't check in every so often every
day.
And it's searchable
(added better link)
The population, at least here in the relatively early stages, is heavy on
tech savants, and some of the bookmarks are computer-related. That will change,
of course, as more people use the free web tool.
It's all the brainstorm of Joshua Schachter, who runs Memepool.
He just quit his day job to run del.icio.us, and Business Week is writing
about him: Picking
Up Where Search Leaves Off.
Del.icio.us a rolling log of the stream of consciousness, bookmark-style.
Dizzying, various and constantly new.
Link
to this item | Comment
In
prog we trust: Epic
songs. Symphonic key changes. Psychedelic cover art. Get used to it -
because prog is the rock that just won't die.
In the Guardian (U.K.),
"How can any innovative, forward-thinking art or music not be progressive?" asks
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, guitarist with the Mars Volta. "We are really
tired of those labels."
If you want to describe Frances the Mute, the Mars Volta's recently released
second album, only the terms "progressive rock" and "concept
album" will do. It has been designed as a pseudo-symphony, with evolving
themes and interlocking movements. There are dramatic leaps from doomy
blues to ferocious nu-metal, punctuated by cacophonous free jazz and mariachi
trumpets. Tracks last as long as 13 minutes and have names like Umbilical
Syllables, Pour Another Icepick and Plant a Nail in the Navel Stream -
titles that recall Genesis albums from the era when vocalist Peter Gabriel
dressed up as a giant dandelion. Even the sleeve is in prog's great tradition,
since it was designed by Storm Thorgerson, whose Hipgnosis team created
artwork for Yes, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd." ...
Link
to this item | Comment
morgueFile
: where photo reference lives. Delights for the eye, and for
your webpag. Free high-rez photos. The large
version of the butterfly at right by Sanjay
Pindiyath of Hong Kong is amazing.:
Click on Image archive to view and download photos, registration is not
required.
This morgue file contains free high resolution digital stock photographs
and reference images for either corporate or public use. The purpose of this
site is to provide free image reference material for illustrators, comic
book artist, designers, teachers and all creative pursuits.
Related: Where
To Find Great Free Photographs And Visuals For Your Own Online Article by
Robin Good.
Link
to this item | Comment
Daughter
of the Enlightenment in the NY Times Sunday Magazine profiles
Ayaan Hirsi Ali -- born in Somalia, and a member of the Dutch parliament
who needs bodyguards at all times. She
...had endorsed the view that Islam is a backward religion, condemned
the way women live under it and said that by today's standards, the prophet
Muhammad would be considered a perverse tyrant. She had also announced
that she was no longer a believing Muslim. The punishment for such apostasy
is, according to strict interpretations of Islam, death.
...A crisis came in 1992, when her father contracted her in marriage to
a Somali-Canadian cousin she did not know. After a wedding ceremony in
Kenya, she followed him on a flight to Canada. During a layover in Germany,
scheduled for the completion of her immigration paperwork, she decided
to bolt -- an idea that did not occur to her, she says, until she arrived
in Europe. She fled across the border on a train to the Netherlands, fearful
that the Somali-German guardian assigned her by her clan would find her
if she stayed in Germany.
An amazing tale.
Link
to this item | Comment
Gotta run-- this blog gets emailed at 8. I'll add pix, permalinks later.
