The City of New Orleans
August 31, 2005 | Nature & Environment | People & Society
Lynne and I had a lot fun in New orleans in October 2000 for the DMA convention. Lots of memories. It also marked my switch to digital cameras, a huge paradigm shift that improved my creative abilities. Now, here's the very sad reality in that once-great city:
- New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper has switched to a weblog format, an excellent decision.
- Photos from Nola.com.
- Live video stream from WDSU.
Like the eventual earthquake and destruction of California along the San Andreas fault, New Orleans has held the kinetic potential of elimination ever since it was built 20 feet below sea level. Will the water drain? No, the water will rise until levees are plugged/fixed and the water is pumped out. I think today is the day we realize that this is going to take a long time, if we can even afford it. As Dave Winer said, this is beyond spin. That might be a good long-term societal change, if it sticks.
Riding on the City of New Orleans, Illinois Central Monday morning rail Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders, Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail. All along the southbound odyssey The train pulls out at Kankakee Rolls along past houses, farms and fields. Passin' trains that have no names, Freight yards full of old black men And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles.
CHORUS: Good morning America how are you? Don't you know me I'm your native son, I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans, I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.
Dealin' card games with the old men in the club car. Penny a point ain't no one keepin' score. Pass the paper bag that holds the bottle Feel the wheels rumblin' 'neath the floor. And the sons of pullman porters And the sons of engineers Ride their father's magic carpets made of steel. Mothers with their babes asleep, Are rockin' to the gentle beat And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel.
CHORUS
Nighttime on The City of New Orleans, Changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee. Half way home, we'll be there by morning Through the Mississippi darkness Rolling down to the sea. And all the towns and people seem To fade into a bad dream And the steel rails still ain't heard the news. The conductor sings his song again, The passengers will please refrain This train's got the disappearing railroad blues.
Good night, America, how are you? Don't you know me I'm your native son, I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans, I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.
-- The City of New Orleans, by Steve Goodman
Probably the saddest thing heard so far, from the Mayor, on the WDSU video stream this morning: "The looting situation is going to take care of itself due to the rising water levels."
Literally Climbing The Walls
August 30, 2005 | Science
NY Times: Geckos, lizards that are notorious for their sticky feet, can run up walls and across ceilings, and hang tauntingly by one toe. They have no suction cups, hooks or glue on their feet, so how do they do it? Five years ago, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford; and Lewis and Clark College found the secret: 500,000 minute hairs cover the sole of each foot, and the tip of each hair splits into hundreds more. The hairs are so elastic that they can bend or squish to conform to microscopic nooks and crannies under the creature's feet, even on the glass walls of an aquarium. [....] In a recent issue of the journal Chemical Communications, the team reported that it had indeed produced synthetic hairs, with 200 times the sticking power of the ones made by nature. [....] The synthetic hairs - one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair - are made of highly flexible carbon cylinders, or nanotubes, embedded in a plastic base like bristles in a hairbrush.
Good Planets Are Hard to Find
August 30, 2005 | Nature & Environment | Science
Fantastic movie of Earth from the Mercury-bound Messenger spacecraft.
Comprising 358 frames taken over 24 hours, the movie follows Earth through one complete rotation. The spacecraft was 40,761 miles (65,598 kilometers) above South America when the camera started rolling on Aug. 2. It was 270,847 miles (435,885 kilometers) away from Earth – farther than the Moon’s orbit – when it snapped the last image on Aug. 3.
via Chris Corrigan.
Liquid Layouts
August 28, 2005 | Site Maintenance | Software
So the new liquid layout for Notio may have some bugs yet to uncover, but the basics are working pretty well. My brother was visiting this weekend, and he has a Treo 650 smart phone. This thing has a web browser with maybe 240 pixels of width. Amazingly, he had a "three-bar" Cingular signal at our house in the woods (far better than the "one-bar" Verizon signal we get on our dumb phones), and so here you see the new Notio in miniature:
Pretty amazing, don't you think? That 1,000px header graphic of the fish just sizes right down, the two columns stay in place (until a content image is too wide) and it basically Just Works. That's pretty cool.
Moveable Type 3.2
August 28, 2005 | Site Maintenance | Software
What the heck, I thought. I updated the weblog publishing software to version 3.2 this morning. The docs are much better than the last version, about which I complained. But the upgrade script hung on the MT::Entries table, and after an hour I ran it again. It skipped all that and seemed to complete okay.
It doesn't find any comments though, even though the summary page shows over 4,400 of them - all but about 200 are junk spam, so it's not like I care, but it doesn't seem correct, and may indicate lurking bugs. I'm hesitant to rebuild the site just yet, because I don't have time today to fix it if it breaks.
So this is something of a test post to see if we're still basically working. Wish me luck!
Notio Redesigned, Again
August 27, 2005 | Site Maintenance | Software
That habit of mine struck again. Every time I get overloaded with work I add on an unrelated diversion, such as reading ten books, throwing a family party, buying a new camera, or redesigning my weblog. Sometimes, like this week, all of them all at once.
I had two goals for redesigning Notio. First, to bring my photography into the mix. I've always loved creating pictures, and everything about the process, from the chemicals in my grandfather's basement darkroom to the paradigm shift of my first digital camera.
Second, a more professional look, including a fresh visual design, structural HTML markup, fluid CSS layout, a better color palette, and a new start for the next level of improvement. Short version: It Was Time. I've tested the layout on Mac/Safari; Mac/Firefox; and IE6.x/Win. If you see anything odd, let me know. Wouldn't surprise me.
You can also visit or subscribe to my Flickr photo stream, if you want to skip the words and just watch the pictures.
Your feedback is welcome!
[Update: I just figured out that I've broken commenting. I won't be able to fix it today. Oh well. More fun to have later! Comments appear to be fixed – I had forgotten to put the comment code in the templates.]
Summer of Rainbows
August 23, 2005 | Life | Nature & Environment
Last night we sat down to supper and Lynne suddenly said, "Oh my God! Where's the camera!?" My view out the two windows showed only a gray sky, but from her angle it was a different story.
Running to the deck we saw an amazing double rainbow, easily the brightest, clearest, and most complete we've ever seen.
She snapped a couple of quick pictures standing in the rain, which I have quickly stitched together here with only minimal processing (Photoshop > Auto Color). Although the photos weren't captured for reproduction, I think you get a sense of the majesty of the thing. It was truly amazing, like standing inside a prism.
This marks the third rainbow Lynne has seen this summer, plus the sundog we saw a few weekends ago in the mid-afternoon southern sky. Beauty abounds.
Evolution of an idea
August 22, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Life | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Software | Technology
Back in the day, memepool was one of my very favorite websites. It was more or less anonymous, had a biting wit, posted very unusual links, and updated frequently so it made for a good daily browse. It was just a guy or two, sharing their cool links with whoever found them. The design remains unchanged to this day.
In 2001 I clicked the "comments" link at the bottom of the page and emailed:
I'm wondering what you use to maintain the site. It has a very nice combination of chronological order on the home page and subject categorization. When I look at 'weblog' tools they seem very overblown if all one wants to do is keep track of 'net flotsam and jetsam.
The entirety of the response was:
I wrote it myself. Memepool predates all those tools and even the notion of "blogs"
I remembered memepool today, for the first time in years, and took a visit. At the bottom of the page now there are two names listed. One of them, Joshua Schachter, has a home page here. As it turns out, Joshua wrote del.icio.us, the social bookmark manager, otherwise known as a way to keep track of your 'net flotsam and jetsam, and share it with the world.
Now does that complete the circle or what?
Here's what Paul Graham had to say about Delicious recently:
The New York Times front page is a list of articles written by people who work for the New York Times. Delicious is a list of articles that are interesting. And it's only now that you can see the two side by side that you notice how little overlap there is.
If you follow the timeline, Joshua graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 1996. Memepool has been running since 1998. It's likely that Joshua started memepool around the time he started high-school. Then at college he studied electrical and computer engineering. Then, either over time or in a fit of creative output, Delicious was born. Perhaps it wasn't "based on" memepool, or perhaps it was designed to address a different set of goals, but it's interesting that at its core there is still a good idea: That people find and collect interesting things (in this case, links) and want to share them with others.
What's most personal is most general. That's the collective unconscious in a nutshell. Observing that Memepool morphed into Delicious is a great example of how an idea evolves.
Any Questions?
August 21, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Science | Software
jumping_in = {
'bandwagon' => 'true'
'initial_impression' => 'good'
'brain_candy' => 'yum'
'project_ideas' => 'too_many'
'time_for_this' => 'false'
}
Saving The Appearances
August 12, 2005 | Arts & Culture | People & Society
Joshua Allen posted a great review of Owen Barfield's Saving The Appearances. He closes with a quote from Barfield which I found interesting:
Here is a choice quote that summarizes several arguments from various parts of the book; arguing that memory (aka semantic web) is a post-totemic idea that depends on lossy symbols. "As soon as unconscious or subconscious organic processes have been sufficiently polarized to give rise to phenomena on one side and consciousness on the other, memory is made possible. As consciousness develops into self-consciousness, the remembered phenomena become detatched or liberated from their originals and so, as images, are in some measure at man's disposal. The more thoroughly participation has been eliminated, the more they are at the disposal of his imagination to employ as it chooses."
I posted this comment:
I'm curious about his use of "participation" in that last quote. Do you think he means "the more time has gone by" or perhaps "the less 'attached' we are to our images" or maybe "the more we observe - during the event - and the less we participate, the better our imagery?"Seems like all of my interpretations are weak. My reading of Bachelard supports the idea that modern culture is imagination-deprived, so I'm sympathetic to Barfield's resonance with increasing imaginative capacity.
(When casual readers tackle Bachelard they often start with The Poetics of Space, but The Poetics of Reverie is the one that deals with imagination and consciousness.)
Saving the Appearances was recommended to me ten years ago, but I never got around to reading it. Your review provides good encouragement.
Update: Joshua responds (copied here for my backup brain):
He goes into quite a bit of depth regarding the word "participation". He refers to the usage of the word by Durkheim, Levy-Brune, and Aquinas and uses in that same sense. He even points out that Aquinas used the word on every page but one in his treatise "on consciousness" :-) The basic idea is that the observer puts a filter on what is being observed -- when we think about phenomena of the natural world, we are thinking about something that has already been altered, or "participated" by our lense. Korzybski made the point that the map is not the territory, and Perls stressed that the "map" itself can be rather individualized. But regardless of whether our maps are shared or not, they all involve some participation. This is all pretty well accepted since Gestalt.
In this passage, he's talking about the fact that purely logical systems operate only on themselves, and are basically divorced from the external world. We can manufacture memories of things that we never perceived with our senses, and we can discuss ad nauseum things that never *could* be perceived with our senses. The next step (he goes on to argue), is that we can imagine things that wouldn't be perceived in the external world, and then manipulate the external world to create what we imagined. Then people increasingly dwell in these completely fabricated animatronic worlds (themselves populated with representations meant to be taken as realities) like Disney Land, Whole Foods, etc.
This is very interesting: "and then manipulate the external world to create what we imagined." It fits well with setting intent, creating your own reality, expecting your desired outcomes, and other sometimes-useful, often-timeless, and frequently new-agey ideas regarding the relation of the internal and external worlds.
I should really get around to reading the book.
