The Longest Now

Rebecca Black: How could you fail to love such a sincere meme machine?

Update: Her latest video, Which seat should I take, is hard to beat.

Compelling, specific, incisive: NYT Mag’s Adam Goodheart traces a central decision at the heart of the emancipation of slaves in the US. Textbook writers, take notice.

Two Icelandic videogame artists/chessplayers/boxers. 12 minutes of speed chess. Up to 5 rounds of boxing. 1 match of CHESSBOXING.

From Zapiro‘s genius sketchbook.

Wikimedia had a terribly successful fundraising campaign ths year, with a team of stats-loving traffic and feedback analysts learning a lot about our reading audience and how to connect with them. There was diverse support for the idea of running some banners to promote donating time and expertise and edits as well as money, and some general-purpose “discover Wikimedia” banners were run the first week of January, but this was soon overtaken by preparations for the (wickedly fun) 10th anniversary celebrations.

We should do more of this. The idea of inviting people more explicitly to edit, and running campaigns dedicated to this, is more fundamental to the nature of Wikipedia than fundraising itself. We should be thinking about all year round, spending as much time and effort campaigning for meaningful content contributions as we have for funds.

What would that look like? Here is one idea: WikiProjects could be encouraged to write copy for their own banners, from a hook to a detailed call for what they need. These would be run for a % of new visitors proportional to the project’s capacity to absorb new contributors. A few generic projects would be geared up for a larger influx of editors, and established editors would be asked to help work with those newbies (and to set up comfort zones where they can find and help one another).

The generic projects would ramp up slowly; with one month’s newbies helping welcome those who came the next month. Some new policies regarding working with newbies would need to be proposed on the major wikis, possibly with a group like the original Fire Brigade dedicated to helping the ambassadors and welcomers with the extra load. And the specific WikiProjects could continue to draw in as many new editors as they want, and could try out different messages to attract just the right sort of reader (including efforts at targetting specific kinds of readers).

What do you think? How would you reach out to readers if you could change the way the site looks? (What ever happened to the idea of highlighting the “edit this page” tab?) Over 1% of people who saw the best fundraising messages clicked through them — imagine what we could do if we showed all of those people that they could really edit.

Hooke liked to note discoveries he had made before he had found time to exlpain and prove his discoveries.  He used the simple mechanich of anagramming an entire phrase:

The true Mathematical and Mechanichal form of all manner of ARches for Building, with the true butment necessary to each of them. A Problem which no Architectonick Writer hath ever yet attempted, much less performed. abcccddeeeeefggiiiiiiiillmmmmnnnnnooprrsssttttttuuuuuuuux

This code, not decrypted during Hooke’s life, was revealed on his death to anagram to: Ut pendet continuum flexile, sic stabit contiguum rigidum inversum — “As hangs a flexible cable, so inverted, stand the touching pieces of an arch”.  The modest original context follows; (more…)

From a world of transient characters and jargon, a vignette about synergy and beauty:

1. Two friends program and voice a two-minute RPG.
   The game becomes somewhat popular.
2. Someone posts a very literal, frustrated, typo-ridden review.
   The review becomes infamous.
3. The voice actor finds and narrates the review.
   The narration becomes very popular.
4. Someone finds the narration and animates its text to Carl Orff.
   A one-hit wonder is born.

Epic win.

We’ve been working on a few different visualizations of the OLPC community around the world.  The most enjoyable and colorful is olpcMAP, a collaborative mashup designed by Nick Doiron that blossomed after last month’s map sprint.  (Nick is an avid map hacker and long-time OLPC volunteer who has also written the popular Map activity for offline Map-creation and -marking using XOs.)

Before this map was launched, the sorts of global visualizations we had were limited to large established groups (mapping chapters and major deployments), average statistics by region, or thousands of scattered individuals without a coherent feel.  olpcMAP combines this with personal and class projects from hackers and teachers around the world, adds search and an API for reuse, and feels above all approachable.

At the moment you can import JSON data and can choose between Google Maps and OSM layers.  The search matches both on locations on the map and on keywords used in marker descriptions. It is designed around the Google App Engine, and the growing olpcMAP API lets you request images, iframes, or KML to use this as  backend for further remixing (say, embedding a screenshot or overlay of part of the map elsewhere on the web).

You can browse the olpcMAP code and try setting up your own instance.  The framework is quite general, and it is straightforward to brand it for other communities.

I would love to see this sort of map of Wikimedians around the world, for instance — I suspect that we would see a very different picture of ourselves as a community than our current self-image.  The distribution of 10th Anniversary events this month was a first step in this direction, and was a surprise to many people.

And it would be amazing to see comparative maps of different global communities — Firefox users, Ubuntu hackers, Red Cross volunteers — using this model.   If you’ve tried to set up your own olpcMAP instance (if this becomes a general community-mapping framework, perhaps we should pick a more universal name), or have features you would love to see implemented, please let us know.

I’m almost back from 2010… here one more from the road, to make you smile or win your fellow linguist’s ♥!. Lyrics and fabulous youtube recording (what, no video?) are (c) Christine Collins:

let me have your heart and i will give you love
the denotation of my soul is the above
if there’s anything i lack, it’s you
as my double brackets, you make me mean things
i can’t say enough
(more…)

For my mother.

Graphene is one of the most remarkable substances in the world. Physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov won the Nobel Prize for their work to manufacture single-layer sheets of it only six years after their first success.

Now it is entering mass production, and being considered for the sort of applications that currently rely on nanotubes. It might also be suitable for very different macro-scale tasks, as sheets of graphene can theoretically be arbitrarily broad (while just one atom thick), once a suitable production process is worked out.

In practice, it is still hard to produce monolayer sheets of graphene, but we are making thinner and thinner ‘platelets’ by exfoliating them from larger chunks. Many current applications depend on the bulk surface area available for interaction with the environment, and platelets are often marketed in terms of their surface area per unit weight (in m^2/g).

The properties of commercially produced graphene are 1-2 magnitudes less than the extreme values measurable with pure monolayer sheets. So on top of the practical economic applications today, there is a decade of Moore-like improvement to look forward to. Costs of production vary according to purity: low-grade graphene (platelets 3-10 layers thick and a few dozen microns wide) are available for under $300/kg, while higher-quality graphene (1-3 layers thick, hundreds of microns wide) can range from $10/gram to $100/gram, and only in small quantities.

Finally, my favorite factoid about graphene (out of MANY): you can use a sheet of it to directly measure the fine structure constant: each layer absorbs πα (that’s pi times the fine structure constant) of light that passes through it!

We like to think of humans as defined by being tool-users and language-users. But while we respect people who create new tools and languages, we don’t prioritize such work, nor have we developed fields that study how to become more efficient at developing, measuring, and improving theoretical tool and language designs and implementations.

There is the idea, in each case, that undirected evolution over time will sort out the best new tools or words or languages, organically producing [successful, widespread] inventions and [popular, widespread] terms that address all significant opportunities for us to become more effective [as tool- or language-users].

I’m not sure where this idea comes from. Three people whose thinking I admire have independently offered a version of this idea as a rationalization for why we the current level of interest in tool- and language-crafting is ‘optimal‘ or ‘sensible’. I think there are quick ways to quantify the extent to which this is not the case.

(As an example of this idea of default optimality: my clever linguist friend last night explained that there is a popular assumption in linguistics that “all living languages are equally good at transmitting all kinds of ideas,” modulo new vocabulary.)

As an example of quantifying what is missing: mathematics & physics in the last century have very actively started creating new collections of axioms, and trying to use them as a language to define what is known about math & the world. If one frames this as language-formation, it was consciously designing a better, more elegant, more expressive language — and designing one that is capable of explaining in simply terms new complex things that we observe or have discovered.

Stephen Wolfram makes the case that there are an enumerable number of different systems of logic (on the order of 50,000), and that we chose one fo these long ago which we’ve built up into moder mathematics and logic, and use to define which srots of theorems or proofs seem ‘elegant’ and ‘simple’ and can be derived quickly from its axioms. He suggests that choosing other systems of logic (and repeating the process of building out an infrastcuture of theorems and propositions) will provide fertile ground for further advances in understanding the universe. What I like most about this argument is the attempt to identify opportunities for understanding which we cannot yet approach conceptually, for lack of language to take us there.

One could do the same by moving backwards in the history of mathematics, trying to describe problems of broad modern interest without concepts and terms developed in the last 200 years. But in that case one could still imagine a single broad highway of ‘increasing sophistication’ along which we progress, adding more nuanced language as we go — when in contrast I feel that here, as in most walks of life, we have made a choice at some point to limit the building blocks of subtle communication, and are filling in the space of ideas that follows naturally from those early assumptions, but are no longer able to see what other building blocks would make possible. In particular, we have no way of estimating gaps in our understanding, or how to reach them.

So the question is: how do we reframe our development of languages outside of math so that we can start improving them consciously, measuring their effectiveness and acknowledging successes that we have discovered in the past through random-walk exploration? How do we merge the valuable properties of different spoken languages; create new auditory or visual languages; develop better sublanguages for effective communication in negotiation, love, large-scale collaboration? How can we use modern tools (wordnik, ngrams) to take control of the language-creation process, identifying trends and demands, and helping visualize new discoveries across all languages?

(more…)

VAHO made one of two things that makes me smile every day when I get up: a little piece of artistry that stares at me from my door and protects my kidney as I walk. (The other is only in my mind, but no less constant 😉 Their work is
delightful and even a bit green.

Shoulder-tip to Mark and family for guiding me there during my recent adventure.

One glance at a time.

We are lucky to have such a cool president. Anyone who takes the time to record a message for a public campaign to keep angsty teens from committing suicide is good in my book, but Obama really put some effort into this — it’s fantastic.

My dear cousin Simon (of Lynch / Eisinger / Design) is an inventive architect and the inspiration for some of my own passion for design work.  His firm put together a showroom for Herman Miller recently, and over the summer it won two serious awards — the highest architecture award in New York State, and California’s state award for Adaptive Reuse.  It’s nice to see this work recognized! See below for some view of it.

Herman Miller building interior

Front view of the building