With a single keystroke in OSX, you can invert your laptop's screen and turn it black-and-white. That improves the legibility of things that are hard to see in brightly-lit environments. Repeat the keystroke and you're back to normal.
Here's the key combination:
CTRL-ALT/OPTION-[Apple-key]-8
Bonus: now you can freak out your Mac-using friends who haven't heard of this feature, but who let you near their keyboards.
UPDATE: A NIST employee has explained the service described below.
This just in from fellow SIMian Matthew Rothenberg:]
Here's something strange to explore. A guy I know recently stumbled across this. time.nist.gov is a standard NTP server, used to syncrhonize clocks on your computer to the govt's atomic clock.
However, it also seems to have another strange service running in port 78 and 79. Telnet in, and hit enter after connection is established, and you get this:
-------------------------------------------------------
dream% telnet time.nist.gov 78
Trying 192.43.244.18...
Connected to time.nist.gov.
Escape character is '^]'.
P: P: My name is Patsy: and my husband's name is Paul:
We come from Pittsburgh: and we sell Peaches::
880-223-821-266-590-908-785
$ 0 875 3000 8 1 0 0
Connection closed by foreign host.
-------------------------------------------------------
The names, city, and food change each time, but they always start with the same letter. The numbers on the bottom appear to be doing some incrementing based on time, but the pattern hasnt been figured out yet.
They are not synchronized across ports.
Secret government broadcasts about the JFK conspiracy? The first step of SkyNET becoming self-aware? An equivalent to a Numbers Station? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station) WHO KNOWS! Let's get some smart SIMS minds working on deciphering this, or at least propose some wacky theories.
-mroth
People who attended the 2005 O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference: Here are transcripts of IRC chatroom conversation that took place during the conference, in raw Colloquy format. (These are partial transcripts, but the chatter that accompanied your talk might just be here.)
3/15: #etech channel (490K) #joiito channel (300K)
3/16 to end: #etech channel (1 Mb) #joiito channel (340K)
Congratulations to my classmate Carolyn Cracraft for making it to the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions.
She won the national Jeopardy! College Tournament a few years ago and tomorrow night she will kick ass again in some L.A. studio. Unfortunately the show won’t air for a couple of months, but we’ll still be rooting for you Carolyn.
(As far as I know, she's my only friend who can read hieroglyphics, and I wouldn’t dare play her at Trivial Pursuit.)
Thank you Frances, the largest, slowest and strangest hurricane of my life. Thanks for bypassing my family and my childhood home.
Oh my.
Eva started a weblog.
And I don't say that lightly.
Welcome Eva! It's about time.
No joke. And this follows last year's 30 percent tuition increase. My degree's getting more expensive by the minute.
And its value might be shrinking. This $372 million cut faced by the University of California system, following on the heels of similar cuts each year for the past four years, has the preseident of the UC system "deeply concerned" about the quality of education that UC can provide. Many people consider Berkeley the best public university on the planet, but how long can that reputation be maintained without funding?
John Brockman at edge.org asked many of the world's smartest and most interesting scientists, technologists, artists and authors to draw up potential "laws" or rules of nature that occured to them as a result of their work. So far 160 of these people have submitted nuggets of wisdom from their respective fields, and together their contributions form one of the most entertaining and inspiring documents I've read in months. Here are a few of my favorite submissions:
Tor Nørretranders' Law of Symmetrical Relief: If you find that most other people, upon closer inspection, seem to be somewhat comical or ludicrous, it is highly probable that most other people find that you are in fact comical or ludicrous. So you don't have to hide it, they already know.
Tor Nørretranders' Law of Understanding Novelty: The difficulty in understanding new ideas originating from science or art is not intellectual, but emotional; good ideas are simple and clear, but if they are truly new, they will be hard to swallow. It is not difficult to understand that the Earth is not at the center of the Universe, but it is hard to believe it. Science is simple, simply strange.
Lee Smolin's Second Law: In every period and every community there is something that everybody believes, but cannot justify. If you want to understand anything, you have to start by ignoring what everyone believes, and thinking for yourself.
Steven Kosslyn's Second Law: The individual and the group are not as separate as they appear to be. A part of each mind spills over into the minds of other people, who help us think and regulate our emotions.
Nicolas Humphrey's Law of the Efficacy of Prayer: In a dangerous world there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not.
Rupert Sheldrake's Reformulation of a Traditional Theory of Vision: Vision involves a movement of light into the eyes, changes in the brain, and the outward projection of images to where they seem to be.
Sherry Turkle's Law of Evocative Objects: Every technology has an instrumental side, what the technology does for us and a subjective side, what the technology does to us, to our ways of seeing the world, including to our ways of thinking about ourselves.
Sherry Turkle's Law of Human Vulnerability to An Active Gaze: If a creature, computational or biological, makes eye contact with a person, tracks her gaze, and gestures with interest toward her, that person will experience the creature as sentient, even capable of understanding her inner state.
The human has evolved to anthropomorphize. We are on the brink of creating machines so "sociable" in appearance that they will push our evolutionary buttons to treat them as kindred... We will not be in complete control of our feelings for these objects because our feelings will not be based on what they know or understand, but on what we "experience" them as knowing, a very different thing.
We don't know what people and animals are "really" thinking but grant them a "species pass" in which we make assumptions about their inner states. It is a social and moral contract. Contemporary technology has put us close to the moment when we shall be called upon to make this kind of contract (or some other kind) about creatures of our own devising. We are called upon to answer the question: What kinds of relationships are appropriate to have with a machine? Our answer will not only affect the instrumental roles that we allow technology to play but the way technology will co-create the human psyche and sensibility of the future.
W. Brian Arthur's Second Law: As technology advances it becomes ever more biological.
We are leaving an age of mechanistic, fixed-design technologies, and entering an age of metabolic, self-reorganizing technologies. In this sense, as technology becomes more advanced it becomes more organic—therefore more "biological." Further, as biological mechanisms at the cellular and DNA levels become better understood, they become harnessed and co-opted as technologies. In this century, biology and technology will therefore intertwine.
Stewart Brand's Pace Law: In haste, mistakes cascade. With deliberation, mistakes instruct.
Marvin Minsky's Second Law: Don't just do something. Stand there.
Daniel Gilbert's Law: Happy people are those who do not pass up an opportunity to laugh at themselves or to make love with someone else. Unhappy people are those who get this backwards.
[ UPDATE 12-2-03: Diebold backed down and withdrew its legal threats against people who published the memos. ]
I've jumped on Berkeley's latest truth-and-democracy bandwagon. Election machine manufacturer Diebold wants to steal a page from the Church of Scientology playbook: they're bullying people who speak out against them, trying to silence criticism via threats of frivolous yet expensive lawsuits. Students and indy-media Web sites that criticize the firm have been slapped with cease-and-desist orders from Diebold lawyers.
Now people are slapping back. We've turned this into a game of whack-a-mole -- if Diebold shuts us down, others will pop up to host this information in our place.
Join the good fight; download a copy of the memos that Diebold doesn't want you to see:
You may also browse through the memos in HTML format here (at least until Diebold lawyers tear them down.) There are a ton of memos here; you can check out a list of particularly disturbing outtakes here.
Why you should care: The mainstream American press is fast asleep, and what little it says about Diebold almost completely misses the point. Unless you look elsewhere for your news (in The Independent or on The BBC, for instance), you probably don't know what the fuss is all about. Here are a few things you should know about Diebold, the leading manufacturer of touch-screen voting machines in the United States:
Now Diebold is taking cheap litigious pot-shots at people who bring these facts to light.
Computers offer a superior way of counting votes. The design of a computerized voting system that's simple, secure, reliable, inexpensive and open to public scrutiny wouldn't be a very difficult task. But as I wrote a year ago, if we keep hiring corrupt and incompetent firms to build our voting tools, we will turn this opportunity into a curse.
Spread the word: we cannot trust Diebold with our votes.
Thanks to Joe Hall for pointing out the latest New Yorker cover illustration.
It spotlights the dying megacorporate music cartel's absurd policy of bullying hundreds of its youngest and most important customers through lawsuits.
Here's a detail from Mermaid Wave, a new revelation from my old high school friend David Bollt.
Please enjoy a photo (71K) of the full painting. You'll find more of Bollt's best at davidbollt.com, including the dark and compelling American Spirit series.
I love a filet mignon or a backyard cheeseburger. But the more I learn about the huge corporations behind today's American beef, the guiltier I feel about financing them.
Consider Cool to be Real, a Web site funded by the big American cattlemen's lobby and designed to persuade little girls to spend more time stuffing their faces with beef.
The site poses as a health, fitness and nutrition resource. It encourages partaking in "Nutrition-To-Go," which means gulping down foods like chili and cornbread, and barbeque beef sandwiches. "Smart Snackin' recipes" include "Beef Taco and Cheese Pockets," "Beef on Bamboo," and "Pizza Pie with Mashed Potatoes."
More choice cuts from the site:
"'Real Girls' are busy and need lots of energy. You can get that extra energy and build muscle - which helps your metabolism - by eating regularly, at least every three to four hours. Be sure to get both protein and carbs in every meal. Enjoy a beef wrap for lunch or spaghetti and meatballs for dinner.""As energy requirements increase, so should protein intake. Chow down! "
I don't want to pay these dirtbags another cent of my money. But how can I find American beef that's not affiliated with this site? Won't I have to give up cheeseburgers, or order my beef from New Zealand? Not for long. I hope.
Imagine: when networked wireless devices with cameras are cheap and widely used, I'll be able to take a quick snapshot of the label on the meat that I'm considering purchasing, right there in the supermarket. Server-side software can scan the UPC code and match it to records in a database of food producers, distributors and retailers.
The database, maintained by journalists or concerned citizens, can spit back the information that I want -- in this case, whether the people who brought me this package of meat helped to finance "Cool to be Real." And whether they irradiate their meat. And whether they shoot up their animals with dangerous drugs and hormones.
At my PC, I can specify which criteria concern me. At the supermarket, I can scan a product with my device and then see a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, based on what matters to me.
Already we have technology that can do all of this. To make it happen we just need enough interested people to build it out, enough concerned consumers to read up on these corporations and update the database with the facts about what goes on behind the scenes, behind the labels on the food that we eat.
In the meantime, I'll hold off on that cheeseburger.
(Disclaimer: I didn't come up with the vision of consumers in stores scanning UPC codes on the fly. Versions of this idea have been making the rounds for at least six months. I'm not sure who first wrote about this idea, but it might have been Howard Rheingold in his blog or in his book Smart Mobs. )
Baby photo courtesy of Adbusters.org.
Mein Gott, has it really been more than five weeks since my last entry?
It's been a crazy, hectic, life-altering month. The top headlines:
The grad school decision: My quest for a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Master's degree continues. I was accepted by four great Information Management & Systems schools: Berkeley, The University of Michigan, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and The University of Washington. For reasons I won't go into, this was an unbelievably difficult decision, but after talking to and exchanging e-mails with more than 25 professors, students, and people in the industry, and after spending countless hours reading related Web sites, papers, etc., I chose Berkeley. I'm glad the agonizing decision's over and I can't wait to get started in the Fall.
CHI 2003: I gathered a lot of this knowledge during the CHI 2003 conference, which was held in my hometown of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida (!). How strange it was to see all these brilliant people discussing HCI less than five miles from where I was born and raised, in a region where you normally never meet anyone remotely interested in product development or software development, much less in HCI. I was just a bit overwhelmed while trying to learn as much as I could about the schools I was considering, working as a student volunteer, showing people around town, taking in presentations, tutorials and demos, seeking out my heroes in the field, and just finding my way around my first academic conference. It was an exhilarating experience and a lot of fun.
The new gig: Last month I started my new full-time job at Stanford University's Department of Dermatology. Among other duties, I'll help to manage the input, cataloguing, storage, and retrieval the thousands of digital images that the department creates every month, as well as the associated medical records. It’s great fun so far; I'm the only computer person in the department, but the doctors and staff are super-smart and they seem much more open to change and to new technology than the users I worked with during two other medical gigs. I hope to pool efforts with people elsewhere on campus working on cool medical informatics projects like the Stanford MediaServer but there's not much time until the Fall semester begins and I leave Stanford to start classes at Berkeley. I wish I had started this job a year ago...
Life should be a tad saner now, but now much. Among other things, I have to begin a Java class and possibly a data structures and algorithms class in preparation for Berkeley. These are busy days. But I’m lovin’ it all.
Last night a drunken Fez-wearing turtle came to me in a dream and said:
"You won't know Jack about Experience Design until you visit Attaboy at his Yumfactory."
Strange dream, no?
Attaboy art is featured at a free show that will take place March 15 though the end of the month at Culture Cache gallery, 1800 Bryant Street, San Francisco. New Yorkers can check it out in April at CBGB's 313 Gallery.
Had I read the following essay in middle school, my teen years would have been much less of an ordeal. If you know a kid or a teacher or a parent, send them this: Why Nerds Are Unpopular by Paul Graham. Thanks to Dav for the tip.
Here are beautiful, inspiring, big-picture thoughts about the value of science, from the father of nanotechnology, Nobel laureate physicist Richard P. Feynman:
...I would like not to underestimate the value of the world view which is the result of scientific effort. We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imaginings of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck -- half of us upside down -- by a mysterious attraction to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea... I hope you will excuse me if I remind you of this type of thought that I am sure many of you have had, which no one could ever have had in the past because people then didn't have the information we have about the world today.
For instance, I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think:
There are the rushing waves mountains of molecules each stupidly minding its own business trillions apart yet forming white surf in unison.Ages on ages
before any eyes could see
year after year
thunderously pounding the shore as now.For whom, for what?
On a dead planet
with no life to entertain.Never at rest, tortured by energy
wasted prodigiously by the sun
poured into space.A mite makes the sea roar.
Deep in the sea
all molecules repeat
the patterns of one another
till complex new ones are formed.They make others like themselves
and a new dance starts.Growing in size and complexity,
living things,
masses of atoms,
DNA, protein,
dancing a pattern ever more intricate,
out of the cradle,
onto dry land,
here It is standing:atoms with consciousness;
matter with curiosity.Stands at the sea,
wonders at wondering:I, a universe of atoms,
an atom in the universe.The same thrill, the same awe and mystery, comes again and again when we look at any question deeply enough. With more knowledge comes a deeper, more wonderful mystery, luring one on to penetrate deeper still.
Never concerned that the answer may prove disappointing, with pleasure and confidence we turn each new stone to find unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful questions and mysteries -- certainly a grand adventure!
It is true that few unscientific people have this particular type of religious experience. Our poets do not write about it; our artists do not try to portray this remarkable thing. I don't know why.
Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe?
This value of science remains unsung by singers: you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it.
This is not yet a scientific age.
Feynman made this speech to the National Academy of Sciences -- in 1955!
I read this in a great book of Feynman thought: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out and the Meaning of It All.
Even if you don't spend a minute on any other Creative Commons agitprop, please check out this great Flash movie, Get Creative (7 minutes). It explains in very practical terms the importance of the Creative Commons concept, and how it provides musicians and artists and audiences freedom to innovate.
(I saw this screened at the Creative Commons launch party and couldn't find it online. Thanks to Dav for the URL.)
"There are those who do, and those who sue."
I've crashed plenty of launch parties, and most left behind a slight greasy, cheesy aftertaste -- that flavor that surrounds blind greed.
But tonight I went to a very different sort of launch party. It celebrated the release of Creative Commons' new nonprofit product, a powerful tool than brings real hope for freeing human creativity from corporate shackles.
The product is a set of free, machine-readable copyright licenses that allow folks to simply and easily inform other people that their creations are free for copying and other uses, under specific conditions.
Tools on Creative Commons' Web site allow for the easy creation of these licenses, and the easy use and interpretation of them by machines, humans, and even attorneys. They provide a very practical means for artists and audiences to bypass the wall of institutionalized greed and litigation that has arisen between them since the rise of multinational corporations.
See creativecommons.org to make a license or to learn more.
Other party highlights:
"There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right voice, the right words in the right place can move the world."
How I wish I had read this book as a kid!
Give it to your children. But make sure to give them the second book in the series too, if not the whole series.
Ender's Game concerns a super-intelligent little boy and his struggles with foreign enemies abroad, and with bullies of all ages in his own society. But in the second book, Speaker for the Dead, Ender's tale transforms into a deeper, more thoughtful, more humane story that's especially relevant in late 2002. It poignantly illuminates issues of propaganda, war, racism and xenophobia without going anywhere near that pile of politically correct, regurgitated, happy horseshit that so much recent fiction rolls around in like a freshly-bathed sheepdog.
There was a pivotal plot point here that seemed implausible. Still, this very different second novel provides a brilliant complement and counterpoint to Ender's Game. If you read the first book on its own, as I did years ago, you're missing a lot. Read the sequel!
These are unique, insightful books and I think you'll enjoy them even if you're not a fan of science fiction or of war novels.
My Irish passport arrived.
After more than a year of research, paperwork and waiting, I'm a citizen of Ireland and a citizen of the European Union. I'm still a U.S. citizen, but I can work anywhere within the U.S. or the E.U. without a visa. With so much depressing drama going on in the world, this is the perfect time for a bit of great news.
I scored the passport thanks to Ireland's generous citizenship by descent policy, and if you can prove that one of your parents or grandparents is (or was) an Irish citizen, you can do the same. But finding and obtaining the necessary paperwork (including original birth and marriage certificates from parents and grandparents) requires much more work than you might think. But it's definitely worth the trouble if you plan to ever work or live in the E.U.
Forgive the recent inactivity -- I've been busy preparing grad school applications. I took the GRE exam last night. Work and a class project have kept me busy too. Expect more postings in late December, after my first round of applications.
(left) World War II United States Goverment Printing Office Poster by Illustrator Harold Von Schmidt, 1944.
(right) One of 15,000 posters distributed by the office of San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, October 2001.
Images courtesy of Adbusters.
Soon after the "Open for Business" posters infested San Francisco, a local artist drafted a poignant rebuttal -- an altered version of the poster appeared with missile silhouettes emerging from the top of the bag. The title read: "America: Dying for Business." (Now I can't find a copy; isn't that a surprise? If you have a photo of this revamped poster, please send it in and I'll post it.)
"I was gambling in Havana;
I took a little risk.
Send lawyers, guns and money;
Dad, get me out of this."
Too late for that. Zevon's dying of lung cancer.
He avoided the corporate music cheese machine and his sardonic tunes remain unique and true. His zealous fan base includes Bob Dylan, Carl Hiaasen, David Letterman, poet Paul Muldoon, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, the Eagles, R.E.M, Fleetwood Mac and Hunter S. Thompson. If you've never heard of Zevon, see this excellent L.A. Times article.
So long Warren. Thanks for the music.
"Some of the most revolutionary new ideas come from spotting something old to leave out,
rather than thinking of something new to put in."
We're feeling record-breaking heat in Northern California, and I just learned the perfect tip for the times: to cool down, run cold water over the insides of your wrists. I don't understand why this works so well, but it seems to cool my whole body within a few seconds.
I learned this from the novel The Nanny Diaries; the protagonist cools off this way. It's a strangely addictive book; it's a tragic, funny account of a long-suffering student working for vapid Park Avenue parents who think piles of money can substitute for a Mom and a Dad.
Some characters seem unrealistically shallow and stereotypical, but the authors (two former Manhattan nannies) manage to evoke real pity for New York's poor little rich kids. And that's a tall order.
The book depicts an entire class of people who convince one another to raise their children in an environment devoid of humanity. Is this why so many large corporations are headed by unhappy, destructive, cheesy automatons? Are they raised that way?
Thanks to my old pal Dave Danzig for recommending the novel. ( I love ya Dave, even though you're foolish enough to pay $120 for a haircut.)
Supersnail (Julian Cash) creates fantastic Playa Freak portraits! Rumor has it, he works his magic from a secret white tent studio somewhere in Black Rock City.
His site supersnail.com is a great source of pre-Playa inspiration and it will cheer you up too. (Can you tell I'm excited about Burning Man? It's less than a month away.)
He's got great photos of Open Source geeks as well.
Nervous about that hot date? If it includes dinner in San Francisco, look up the restaurant here for a great icebreaker. Now you're prepared for an enchanting dinner conversation about recent health code violations. Go get her, cowboy.
Thanks to Dav for writing the script that build the list -- it pulls the business names from a Department of Public Health database.