The Longest Now

Both code and roadmap!

Thoroughly awesome.

A Flash remake of the ’70s classic.

Still in its infancy: “A collaborative platform to organize complex knowledge, visualize systems that propel our lives and build a universal exchange for knowledge, wealth and value.”

I love it when one of the seventeen pillars of society starts to emerge anew.

Today CERN and FERMILAB announced 5σ confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson [1], inspiring a burst of heady live coverage from the Guardian. (CERN had leaked a video about the discovery the day before, so everyone knew what was coming, and turned up for today’s Higgs seminar. All of the scientists who had worked on early versions of the theory that pointed towards such a boson also flew in the the seminar, which continues tomorrow.)

CERN has posted and archived beautiful 360-degree photos of the day, a video of the press conference (rather dull), and will soon post a recording of the day’s seminar (which was live-streamed and amazing; come back for it tomorrow).

The media as usual tries valiantly to explain things in a down-to-earth way that is both simplistic and true, but is generally failing. As with a few other recent scientific breakthroughs, I am grateful that Wikipedia offers solid explanations of the topics at hand, and through the magic of hyperlinks (which news agencies are still struggling with 🙂 allows exploration of the topics in as much depth as you like.

Related reading: supersymmetry, scalar field theory, htlhcdtwy.

[1] Note the careful, conservative trend in particle physics: the labs making the discovery are all quick to say they’ve discovered the existence of at least one new particle, which matches the profile of the Higgs boson; it could be one or more of its sibling bosons that have been discovered – supersymmetry suggests there could be 5 of them.

Ultrarealistic and luxurious views.

by T-Recs timelapse recordings.
HT to Sebastian.

A recent kerfuffle about music sharing, free culture, and direct support of artists began on NPR and ended on TechDirt.

Last month, Bob Boilen wrote “I Just Deleted All My Music” for NPR’s All Songs Considered blog; to which summer intern Emily White replied last week “I Never Owned Any Music To Begin With“.  Trichordist’s David Lowery shot off a ranting Letter to Emily White that was a viral hit.

Finally, Zac Shaw of mediapocalypse wrote “In Defense of Free Music“, an eloquent explanation of Free Culture ideals and commitment to supporting artists. And culturist and summation genius Mike Masnick has the last word, wrapping up the discussion and aftermath.

The German solar power grid is among the world’s densest and fastest-growing. They have doubled their capacity for each of the last 10 years, and currently average 25% of all their power from the sun.

This has so far led to a 10% drop in the average price of power on their electricity exchange, thanks to the institution of “merit order” power supply: in which the lowest marginal-cost power is used first at any given moment. However the tremendous growth and success of solar power means they will soon have to cope with an unusual problem for modern national energy grids: storing excess renewable power. (Spain and Portugal have faced similar surplusses thanks to their tremendous wind power grids.)

They recently hit a few milestones: they set the world record for national solar generation (22GW), meeting fully half of the national energy demand. And for two hours, around midday Saturday, their solar output exceeded the national energy demand for the first time, for two hours.

I’d like to see more detailed data on all of this. The annual doubling of solar generation is fantastic and must involve extensive retooling of many subsidiary systems and capacity networks. How centralized/localized are those solar sources? Some data sources say national power production in Germany averages close to 70GW year-round, others claim a peak power draw of 50GW in the winter.

I’d also like to hear more about the limits of pumped energy storage and other uses of excess generated power. We could certainly generate an annual energy surplus for the planet if we tried to; but where’s that market in energy futures, and how much of an energy reservoir could we build up? What are other denser, more robust long-term ways to store power?

Stefano Mazzochi and other former MetaWebbers now at Google have turned out another beautiful structure in the garden of human knowledge: the Knowledge Graph.

This helps visualize one key aspect of information meshes, though it has many limitations still. (It is only a graph, as the name suggests; as defined within Google it is only the part of the universal knowledge graph that they choose to bless as ‘clean’; it doesn’t include any data that they choose not to make publicly visible; and there is no higher level of structure to support a metric, or a multi-dimensional space).

Congratulations to my friend Ken Liu, phosphorescent fiction shaper whose story “The Paper Menagerie” won a Nebula Award for Best Short Story last night! Next stop: the Hugos (chosen by the Chicon 7 attendees :)).

From math teacher Nathan Shields.

R.I.P. Maurice Sendak, brilliant children’s author and dry wit (1928–2012). He died yesterday of a stroke.

In a crossing of the stars, that May 8 was also the publication date of the satirical children’s book Stephen Colbert dreamed up for his interview with Sendak back in January.

In last night’s show, Colbert included more of the interview, to honor Sendak’s memory.

Act 3 (15 min. in)

Colbert: Today is the release date of my beloved children's
classic, I am a Pole (And So Can You!)

It's the heartwarming coming-of-age story
of a pole searching for its place in the world.
It's the perfect gift for mother's day, father's day,
graduation day... and all other days. 

And you know it's a good book because of this blurb:
  "THE SAD THING IS, I LIKE IT" - Maurice Sendak.

Well, the real sad thing is Mr. Sendak died this morning,
at age 83.  I had the pleasure of interviewing him
earlier this year, and tonight we'd like to show you
just a few more things that Maurice had to say.

===============================

Colbert: Mr Sendak, thanks for sitting down with me today.
This is a, this is a real honor.
 Sendak:  No shit!
Colbert: No, I'm not shitting you.  I mean it.

Now what's your favorite of your own books?
  I really wished you'd ask that question.
Well I'm glad I did then.
  I think the best is two books I've done.
  I can have two favorites.
All right.
  One is called 'outside over there'
Terrifying.
  It is my attempt to do a Mozartian book,
  to take elements --

It's terrifying!  these goblins that make
ice babies... and replace a child with it!
  Yes... what can I say.  those were all --
  I was really deeply in love with romantic art
  of the beginning of the 18th century,
  middle of the 18th century.
  Mozart was dead, and this beautiful /thing/
  came out of his generation
  and Mozart of course being the best quality,
  the best artist, the best everything that ever --

Mozart is the highest quality.
He's like the Donald Trump of classical music.
Only the finest...
  I'm gonna have to... I'm gonna have to kill you.
  I'm gonna have to kill you! 

Donald is quality.  You've seen,
Everything he does is gold plated. That's quality.
  Yes, yes, he's just like Donald Trump.
Everything is primo. Primo.
  You got it, you nailed him.

  The other... is called 'Higgelty Piggelty Pop!'
  It's probably the best thing I've done.
Tell me the story.
  It's about a sealyham terrier.
  My sealyham terrier.  The dog i had.
Ok.
  Her name was Jennie,
  and she appeared in all my books,
  up until the time she died.
  And higgelty piggelty pop! was the big book
  I wrote about her
  because I knew she was going to die, soon.
  She was getting old.

What happens in it?
  What happens is
  the little dog goes out into the world
  and leaves her master
  to find out, "is there more to life?"
  and the series of adventures that she has
  where she proves her total inadequacy
  to almost everything that happens to her.

  And - but she accepts that.
  and that is the truth of her life
  that she must accept her inadequacy
  and her failure to live up to expectations
  that others may have of her,
  that she surely has of her.
  And she just ends up a sweet, jerky dog
  which she is, noone ever really wanted
  anything more from her, so...

Does she return to him?

  No. She dies. She dies.
  And she leaves him a letter, saying
  "If you ever come this way, look me up.
  But I can't tell you how to get here."

  The book has had a very difficult life.  All of it.
  Considered like, "why is this a children's book?"
  Why not! What is a children's book?
  I don't have a clue!
  I'm famous for them, I write them,
  I illustrate them, but I don't know what they are
  I don't know why they're for children.

I like that your work does not sugargcoat childhood.
  Right
You bring the pain.  You keep it real.
  But some people think that is not
  appropriate for children -
  To suffer pain, read about it, think about it,
  feel about it.  Yet that's all they do.

Every moment of childhood is a sense of uncertainty
  Yes.  I think childhood is a period of great torment.
  We learn all these things about what is, what isn't
  what you can do, what you cannot do.
  It's hard.  It is very hard.

What's the best thig a parent can do for a child?
  Love him, her.
But what's that mean?
  Take them for what they are.

===============================

Saying thank you with pancakes:

Umino Hiroyuki: Featured at Tokyo’s Katagami Style through May 27.

Meteor: The future of web-apps?

Congrats to deberg and others for pulling off an inspiring soft-launch.

This week I returned to the hack that Jutta Treviranus and I and a few others put together at the OER Hackday for an annual awards ceremony celebrating the world’s best educational materials — where ‘best’ includes openness, accessibility, and flexibility. Right now it seems the focus will be on materials that are:

Open and accessible

• open and gratis: available for anyone to use, online or offline, at no charge
• educational: useful for both K-12 students and autodidacts of all ages
• repurposable:  licensed to allow use and reuse as widely as possible
• accessible: available in many formats and languages, usable by all sorts of learners

Modular and editable

• modular: available as collections / libraries, with sections and components marked for easy remixing
• annotated: with tags and categories, structured data and metadata.
• clustered: with links to similar works and information on how it has been used or modified
• editable: published and maintained in a way that makes it easy for users to share revisions and variants.

These are still draft ideas; your thoughts are welcome.  This will be the first year of the effort; we will likely allow submissions that do not meet all of these guidelines. Each focus describes a spectrum, at any rate.  For example:
Ease of reuse may range from highest marks for “public domain” to lowest for “single copy for personal educational use”.
Accessibility may range from “in major free archives, designed for many extremes of ability” to “on a public website, no DRM”.

Submissions: The awards will allow for direct nomination of great materials by curators in each category, but this year aims mainly to bring greater attention to existing contests in narrow fields, and to recognize the curatorial work they do.  So many entries will be the finalists and winners from those existing contests.   Some of the free knowledge awards and events we mean to ask to participate:

• Open Game Art’s Liberated Pixel Cup — recognizing the best free + open “game art”, and the best games made with such art.
• Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year
• Wikimedia Deutschland’s Zedler Preis für Freies Wissen

Categories: There are a variety of formats and a variety of topical fields to consider. We will have a limited set of categories for the contest, and map the intersections of formats & fields onto them.  This year we may not distinguisn text and physical media from software and digital media in the categories.  We are aiming for enough cross-discipline competition to be valuable without making judging impossible.

Location: We are still discussing where and how to hold a ceremony honoring the winners, or perhaps a number of small events recognizing the year’s most excellent work at other major gatherings honoring developments in education, knowledge, and collaboration.  Assuming we do this in person and not virtually, relevant events include:

July 12-15: Wikimania, DC.
August ??: Stockholm Challenge.
Oct 16-18: Open Ed, Vancouver.
Oct 22+?: oXcars, Barcelona

Stay tuned for updates on this front.  And send in your favorite places to find amazing data, books, art, media, and other free knowledge.

I had the great fortune of attending a workshop recently with a provocative MIT architect, Neri Oxman, whose artistic work I have seen showing up in museums across Europe and the US – it is truly awesome.

I was struck by the excellent practical end results produced from designs with varying textures/ colors/ qualities that are defined by artistic parametric equations. The group’s past prototypes include some armor and body sheaths – presented as art, not as fashion – that were very much what I was looking for years ago when I wanted better load-bearing clothes.

Future projects promise to include living structures and buildings… and, I hope, a line of designs suitable for the public. Work like this deserves to be shared, and should not be hidden in museums and universities.

From the Oxman files

Cubozoa, or Box Jellyfish, are remarkable creatures. Among jellyfish – the oldest multi-organ creatures on the planet – they are some of the most highly developed in terms of nervous response, memory, and sensory organs. Some cubozoa species are among the most venomous creatures per weight on the planet, using a very effective poison for hunting.

They have a ‘neural ring’ which help coordinate their nervous system, the closest thing to a brain that jellyfish have been observed to have. They have some capacity for memory and to learn from experience.

They live largely in mangrove lagoons, where as many as 25 different species of Cubozoa may occupy different ecological niches, and forage at different times of day.

And they have 24 eyes, 4 of which are ‘true eyes’ with corneas and retinas – two of which can see color! They have been observed to navigate by visual cues out of the water, such as trees on shore. The 20 lesser eyes sense light more simply, and some point straight up at all times, thanks to a keen adaptation: they grow small gypsum crystals within their bodies at the base of their ‘eye-stems’, which act as a plumb bob to keep the eye pointing skyward.

In general I am no great fan of jellyfish – and can’t quite believe I am writing about them – but in this case the eyes (and angels) have it. Cubozoa are amazing.