Cory Doctorow:
The Geek Wreath is a simple and powerful idea: take a strand of lights and weave it around a wreath of all the goddamned power cables, spare USB cables, obsolete SCSI cables and whatever else you've got cluttering up your home.
Link
(via Make)
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Drachten, a small Dutch city with around 50,000 residents has removed almost all of its traffic lights. Major intersections have been converted to roundabouts, smaller intersections just let drivers work make decisions on their own. Basically, it's anarchy. Anarchy that has completely eliminated dangerous crashes and road fatalities and created a surge in bicycle and pedestrian traffic.
Crashes still happen, but they have all been fender benders. The architect of the project, Dr Hans Monderman explained, "We want small accidents, in order to prevent serious ones in which people get hurt." Instead of relying on a set of hard rules, drivers are asked to take their safety, and the safety of others, into their own hands. The result is that people are more aware, more careful and drive slower, but are far less frustrated while driving. Bikes and walkers now rule the roads and can pretty much travel non-stop around town
Mark Frauenfelder:
Cory Doctorow:
The IT Crowd DVDs have just shipped -- with subtitles in leet! The IT Crowd is a convulsively funny British TV show about sysadmins, created by Graham Linehan, who is best known for writing the classic show Father Ted.
The IT Crowd's first six episodes ran last year on Channel 4, and was widely shared online, resulting in major commercial success, critical acclaim, and a renewed contract for another season of the show.
I was privileged to consult a little on the show, and I was able to connect Graham with uber-geek Yoz Grahame, who suggested that the disc carry subtitles in leet (or 1337), the letter/number substitution code used by gamers, hackers and other net-dwellers.
The disc is region-locked to Europe, but I hear that a US version is coming shortly. Link(Thanks, Damien!)
See also The IT Crowd -- the geek comedy I've been waiting for all my life
Let’s kick things off with something a bit unusual: a virtual scavenger hunt.
At some point, nearly every web geek gets a chance to hack on some open data, usually from a government source. The buzzword here is “mashup,” but knowing how to find and consume openly available data will remain a valuable skill long after its faddishness ends.
Unfortunately, governments, and especially the US government, are often incredibly awful at providing this data. Sure, it’s available—but you’ve got to find it first.
So this question is all about finding that data. Since I’m most familiar with the USA, this question is USA-specific (but I’d love to see answers to any questions that apply to other nations).
In each case, the answer should be a URL where you can either download the data in question, or at least find a direct link to the data. There may be multiple sources for each, including ones that could be screen-scraped for the data. I’m not looking for those sources, however—just the ones with easily downloadable data in a format that can be easily parsed by a computer (i.e. CSV, XML, plain text). “Friendly” formats, in other words.
So, where can I download data to:
Post your answers into the comments. For extra brownie points, tell us how you located each piece of data—did The Google serve you well, or were you forced to turn elsewhere?
If you really want to stretch your brain, try to write a tool to import each chunk of data into your favorite relational database. There will be a related question in a couple of weeks involving modeling one of these pieces of data, so you overachievers can start thinking about it now…
Good luck, and check back this weekend for the answers.
This article provided by sitepoint.com.
technorati tags:Site+PointScavenger+Hunt
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Mark Frauenfelder:
Chirag has analyzed "the words that presidents used frequently in their speeches shows which issues they deemed important. The prominence of 'Terrorist' in G. W. Bush's tag cloud is unsurprising while Richard Nixon was all about 'commitment' somehow. Move the slider around to see the changes in tag cloud. Link
technorati tags:President, Speech, Tag+Cloud
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Cory Doctorow:
technorati tags:DefectiveByDesign, DRM, Amazon
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Stargate rocks(ed) well, the seasons with Lt. O'Neil/Gould... and so do LEGOs, so this is just perfect... Kelly writes - "This rotating Stargate is 19 inches tall with light-up chevrons. An RCX drives a treadmill, which spins the inner ring randomly for x seconds, then reverses direction, seven times. Won best medium space award and best brick mod at BrickFest 2005." Thanks edison142! - Link.
Related:
technorati tags:Lego, Stargate, Working, Model, SG1
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Niles sent one of his MAKE stops, he writes - "After seeing the post on Skycraft Parts & Surplus I just had to mention American Science and Surplus! They're located in the Chicago, IL and Milwaukee, WI area and are great stores to explore... Make sure to read the labels on the items, some of them can be really funny!" - Link.
Got a favorite Maker hangout? Let us know.
Related:
technorati tags:A.S.S., American+Science+Surplus, Parts, Random, Stuff
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Xeni Jardin:
All you need to know about this link is that it contains video of shrimp on a treadmill, and that it is not the latest viral release from the band OK Go.
The shrimp treadmill, invented and built by [Pacific University biologist David Scholnick], allows researchers to measure the activity of an exercising shrimp for a set period of time at known speed and oxygen levels.Link
technorati tags:OK+Go, Shrimp, Tredmill, Video
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This is a great hybrid system, and an especially nice idea for lights that might be situated in darker areas of your house. Weed growers will love this, where its reduced power usage won't be as likely to raise a red flag down at the government-supervised power company. Plus, you get a 30% federal tax credit if you install it this year or next. Can't beat that.
Take a look at the Discovery Channel video segment, after the jump.
Product page [Sunlight Direct, via SlashGear]
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SNK clearly thinks it knows its native Japanese market well, otherwise it would never have the cojones to pimp a game as twisted as Dokidoki Majosaiban (Exciting Witch Trial) for kiddies' favorite, the Nintendo DS.
The clever/totally screwed-up otaku behind the game have decided that using the touchscreen on the DS to fondle women (dressed as schoolgirls, naturally) is by far the best way to determine if they're witches. Errr.
I'd expect this kind of thing from a niche publisher – God knows there are enough stores that specialize in this stuff here – but SNK? Anyway, as the pic above suggests, there's also a Wii version in the works, which sounds doubly unpleasant given all the jigging about Wii owners are likely to dig.
technorati tags:Nintedo, DS, Porn, Game, Panties
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I seriously need to get one of these. Maybe not Mega Man, but some kick-ass retro gaming quilt My mother in-law's visiting and she's an amazing seemstress, I think I'm going to start dropping hints. .
technorati tags:Mega+Man, Quilt, Art
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Airliners.net has an incredible long exposure photo of a UPS plane taking off, it looks like a road in the sky... - "N306UP (cn 27759/622) Cleared for takeoff with a southbound turnout. Runway number and piano keys visible! [Canon 20D, 50mm f/1.8 MK-II] Taken @ Des Moines - International (DSM / KDSM)" [via] - Link.
Related:
technorati tags:Airplane, Exposure, Photograph, Take+Off
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BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow gave one of the keynote addresses at ToorCon. The video is 50 minutes and covers all the internet hot buttons like DRM, net neutrality, MPAA, RIAA, EFF, etc. Video on Netscape. Direct link to the 170MB mp4.
technorati tags:Cory+Doctrow, ToorCon, DRM, EULA, MPAA, RIAA, EFF
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Here's a really neat way to see sound waves... With fire! I think if I ever make a fireplace, it'll have something like this. Twinrawk writes - "The classic physics experiment involving sound, a tube of propane and fire. Created for Flash Forward 2006, but useful in any case where you are not allowed to have fire. I push through the tube 449 Hz then higher frequencies, then some jazz and then some rock. This is real life sound visualization." [via] - Link.
Related:
Other things, with fire, on MAKE - Link.
technorati tags:Flame, Visualization, Ruben's+Tube
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Mr A Samuel kindly drew my attention to some lovely YouTube videos of the quite amazing 18th Century automata that were created by Pierre Jaquet-Droz and his son - The Writer, The Drawer and The Musician. Above you can see a French documentary on The Writer, and see for yourself the downright mindboggling complexity and finesse of a machine of cogs and springs, able to write with a goose feather quill. Alas, my French is atrocious, but the images speak for themselves. For more, see links for How the Writer Works, a video of The Writer in action, and some more about Pierre Jaquet-Droz himself. It’s amazing that these things could be made, it’s amazing that they were made in the 18th Century and it’s even more amazing that they were created mostly as advertisements for music boxes and mechanical caged birds. Quite boggling.
technorati tags:Clockwork, Automata, Writing, YouTube
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Another cool research project by MIT.
technorati tags:MIT, Research, Diagram, Simulation, Realtime
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Cory Doctorow:A talented cake-ist made this beautiful wedding cake in the form of the Great A'Tuin, the galactic turtle on whose back the four elephants that support Terry Pratchett's Discworld stand. The cake A'Tuin has marzipan elephants that support a rolled fondant icing Discworld with hand-painted landmasses and miniature cities.
The Discworld books are the most consistently funny genre fiction in the world, combining a wit as keen as Douglas Adams's with a fine sense of plotting and characterization.
Link(Thanks, Diane!)The Disc landmasses are cut from rolled fondant icing, with topographical features moulded in marzipan. These are positioned on a round cake board.Landmasses are coloured, and the seas are added by "flooding" the low areas with blue liquid icing to produce the appropriate continent shapes. At the edge, a black marzipan bevel collar is attached so that the liquid icing produces the Rimfall effect.
technorati tags:Discworld, Cake, Great+A'Tuin
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What is a Tetris?
Hard To Perceive
Easy to Destroy
Just Like Your Life!
From the Tetronominon Ex Mortis (often abbreviated as Tetrominon), as sung by cheery Japanese chiptunes band, YMCK!
technorati tags:Tetris, Tetrominion, YMCK, Flash
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Mark Frauenfelder:
technorati tags:Pot, Marijuana, NORML, Ad, Cheetos, Visine, Brownies
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Mark Frauenfelder:
Fox also reported that "we are at war with Eurasia; we have always been at war with Eurasia." Link
technorati tags:Foley, Republican, Congressman, Fox+News, O'Reilly
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David Pescovitz:Amateur scientists have discovered an unknown massive cave filled with crystals in California's Sequoia National Park. The spelunkers from the Cave Research Foundation found the cavern last month. It's been named Ursa Minor (Latin for "small bear") in honor of the skeleton of what appears to be an ancient bear found in the cave. From National Geographic:
LinkOnly a small portion of the cavern has been explored so far. But researchers say they have already found several large chambers with a variety of formations, including thin curtains of minerals several feet tall, slender "soda straws" up to six feet (two meters) long, and sheets of glimmering crystals on the cave's floors and walls...
"There are things in the cave that could really open windows into our knowledge of geologic history and the formation of caves throughout the West," park cave manager Joel Despain told the Associated Press.
technorati tags:Cave, Calinfornia, Sequoia+National+Park, Spelunking
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The Modern Compendium of Miniature Automata has been around for a while, but nowhere else can you create you own nano-scale cog-driven beasties that then scurry around yellowed paper. Sent to me by MChristian, I think I must have last seen it four or five years ago, but it now seems all the lovelier for its quirky Victorian styled title and Steampunk in microscopic form. Go ahead - make your own little nano-contraption, it’ll be yours to configure, name, describe and then let free on the great big papery universe.
technorati tags:Flash, Miniature, Automata, Machines, Game
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Xeni Jardin:
Shannou says,
Here's a flickr set of pictures documenting the zombie rights march to Austin's City Hall last Friday. The zombies' signs in the march included badly spelled slogans such as "Mairage = 1 Zombie + 1 Zombie", "More Binifits for Zombie Vets in Our Necronomoconomy", "Brains...The Other White Meat", "We're here, we're dead, get used to it!" and "Zombies Was People Too." The zombies, shouting "What do we want? Brains! When do we want them? Brains!" was unhindered by a group of pirates protesting the undead's demands for their rights.Link. You know, when I was in Seattle last week ( self-important clearing of throat ) visiting the Allen Institute for Brain Science and researching this story, I couldn't help but wonder -- what would zombies do with that open, 3D, digital atlas of brains? Plan dinner parties, perhaps.
technorati tags:Zombies, March, Texas
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The Amazing Mr. Pee — a Wildeian wit — sent us this shot of some graffiti in Melbourne, New Zealand. That's not just any Link you're seeing there: that's Link from The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap!
Mr. Pee explains:
It's actually been made out of Carlton draught beer coasters from a pub that have been painted and stuck on the wall.Found near Swanston Street, near RMIT university in Melbourne, Australia.
Is it still graffiti if it's just been taped to the wall? Oh, no matter, it's still cool. Any Melbournians willing to go out to Swanston street and have their hot girlfriends pose naked next to Link, perhaps bent over in an accomodating position? Let us know!
technorati tags:Link, Zelda, Graffiti, Art
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I think this is my favorite bit of gamer themed street art we've ever posted. I like to think that this is less deliberate art than a miraculous coincidence — the sole remaining piece of a Byzantine mosaic's millennia-spanning decay. The rusted pipes give it an air of almost Turkish squalor.
Unfortunately, Etherfreak dashed my own feverish imaginings. It's actually from my home town! "I found this little megaman stuck onto the back of an art store on mass ave in boston. looks like it was composed of many little "pixel" squares separately adhered to the wall. Funny thing is, about an hour after snapping this shot I walked by again, only to see a couple dudes pulling out camera phones and shrieking in revelrous glee at their discovery. Something makes me think that you guys have probably already seen this one. Just in case you haven't...."
I don't think we have (who can tell with our search system so hopelessly broken?), but anything this cool deserves to be posted again, and I deserve to be paid for posting it.
technorati tags:Mega+Man, Art, Graffiti
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Game Tunnel is a website dedicated to the independent gaming scene. Independent games are conceptually different from the mainstream games you typically find. They often represent the work of a small group of programmers and graphic artists who share a specific vision that the large game publishers don’t want to be involved with. For that reason, the games made by the “independents” are often quite unique, innovative and interesting.
Here are the top 10 for 2005. Click on the images to see more.
technorati tags:Oasis, Number+One, Independent, Game, 2006
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Like lots of people who sit in front of a computer all day, I am addicted to email. This worries me for two reasons. The first is the sheer strength of my compulsion. I must hit the 'get mail' button at least a hundred times a day. Sometimes, if I don't have any new mail, I hit it again immediately, just to check. I interrupt my work to check my mail even when I know that I'm not going to find anything interesting and that I should just concentrate on what I am suppossed to be doing. When I come back to my office it's the first thing I do. If I'm prevented from checking my mail for more than a few hours I get a little jumpy and remain that way until I have.
This is all rather sad, but the second reason I am worried by my email addiction is that I work in a psychology department and we're supposed to understand how these things work. Now email isn't a drug - it doesn't deliver a chemical into your bloodstream. Yet it is clearly addictive. I'm a normal rational person (which is to say I'm just normally maladjusted) and I know that I don't need to check my email as often as it do - certainly not immediately after checking it the first time for Goodness' sake! - but still I am compelled. What's going on, and can psychological science help me out?
Read more below the fold
So, I think I've got an idea of what's going on with email, and if I'm right it should provide some clues as to how I can stop myself being so addicted. The key is what psychologists call 'operant conditioning'. This means the mechanisms by which behaviour is shaped by its consequences; how what we do depends on the rewards and punishments of what we did last time. This topic is the heart of behaviourism, that school of thought which dominated psychology for most of the last century. Many lab animals, and many person-hours, were recruited to help understand exactly how rewards and punishments could be arranged to influence behaviour. One suprising finding is that if you want to train an animal to do something, consistently rewarding that behaviour isn't the best way. The most effective training regime is one where you give the animal a reward only sometimes, and then only at random intervals. Animals trained like this, with what's called a 'variable interval reinforcement schedule', work harder for their rewards, and take longer to give up once all rewards for the behaviour is removed. There's a logic to this. Although we might know that we've stopped rewarding the animal, it has got used to performing the behaviour and not getting the reward. Because 'next time' might always be the occasion that produces the reward, there's never definite evidence that rewards have stopped altogether.
We're animals - we have animal brains. All animal brains have the circuitry in place for producing operant conditioning. It's a fundamental psychological process, and just the sort that can create behaviours what operate automatically, or in spite of our consciously telling ourselves we should do otherwise. Like me checking my checking my email. Checking email is a behaviour that has variable interval reinforcement. Sometimes, but not everytime, the behaviour produces a reward. Everyone loves to get an email from a friend, or some good news, or even an amusing web link. Sometimes checking your email will get you one of these rewards. And because you can never tell which time you check will produce the reward, checking all the time is reinforced, even if most of the time checking your email turns out to have been pointless. You still check because you never know when the reward will come.
I have just proved to myself how automatic my email checking behaviour has become. I am writing this in a hotel room which doesn't have internet access. When sorting through my email (you don't need a connection to delete email you've replied to, or are never going to reply to) I still hit the 'check mail' button at the rest points of the read-consider-delete cycle I am performing. My reflective self knows that there is no internet connection, so there is no way in hell I'm going to have new email - but that knowledge doesn't filter down to the part of me hitting the 'check email' button. The habit, engrained in my mind by operant conditioning, is isolated from conscious knowledge, and in part from deliberate control; it can start without me thinking about it or even me wanting it to.
If operant condition is at the root of the problem, what's the solution? Over a hundred years of experimental psychology has provided a rigorous characterisation of behavioural conditioning, and of the process by which reinforced behaviours disappear - known as extinction. By looking at each stage of the process by which a behaviour becomes conditioned, we can throw up ideas for addressing the problem of 'unconditioning' them.
If a behaviour isn't rewarded then it will gradually disappear. The problem is that we don't want to remove the reward (email), so we need, instead, to weaken the strength of the link between the action and the reward. A simple delay would do this - imagine a five minute delay between hitting the check email button and getting new email. A delay is doubly-effective because the longer the delay the more likely you are to have email and so the more consistent the reward will be - and hence the less strong its reinforcing effect (I can see this is action when I go away for a week and check my email when I come back. I might have hundreds of emails, but there's often nothing that seems very interesting. The combined effect just isn't as rewarding as the anticipation of getting one hundred single emails). In theory, the opposite end of this 'consistency strategy' would be to check email constantly. If you check your email every second then the consistency of the reward increases - you consistently get nothing! The action-habit might extinguish because the action is now rewarded so infrequently relative to the number of times it is performed. How to do this practically? Have your inbox constantly visable, so that there is no jump from wondering if you have new mail/seeing a 'new mail' alert and knowing that it isn't that important (although a down side is that if the new email is intrinsically distracting - such as a good joke, hot piece of gossip or invite out - it will now definitely interrupt when it arrives).
Removing the action all together, so that you cannot demand an email check, doesn't solve the problem - we just move the association from the action of hitting 'check mail' to the action of opening your email client to see if there is any mail there. One strategy is to wait 30 seconds from the appearance of the alert before checking to see what kind of mail has arrived - if you can internalise the delay.
Automatic behaviours such as email are contingent on environmental triggers - they need the right circumstance to become active, since they aren't invoked by a smart, deliberate consicous process. So one way to decrease email checking behaviour might be to decrease the association between stimuli and the action. Moving or removing the 'check mail' button will stop it hijacking your action-stream when it is in your field of view. Similarly, so will stopping email alerts all together, but it leaves you with the problem of wondering what is going on while you're attention is on another app (are you missing out on some important information?). Changing the consistency of the environmental trigger could work. If the 'new mail' appeared slowly, so it didn't grab your attention, was in a different place each time, or was a different shape/colour/icon then your low-level monitoring systems wouldn't be able to form an association between its appearence and automatically triggering the 'check mail' interrupt habit. When you wanted to check your email you could scan for the icon - it could still be perfectly obvious, but the lack of consistent appearence would prevent it getting wired into a direct channel in your brain.
I don't think the solution is social - getting people to never email you urgent information wouldn't work. There would always be invites for coffee that someone didn't feel like knocking on your door or phoning you to make, but which they'd still like you to know about (and you'd still like to know, so you'll be checking your email for them). Plus there'll always be important information which isn't urgent, but which we're still going to want to know as soon as it is available (look at news - it rarely has any immediate consequence for our daily lives, but checking it is how many of us start the day).
A classical approach to changing habits is to shift the cost-benefit pay-off. If checking or reading email is made harder to do, mayhbe we can increase the cost of the action and hence make the overall reward of getting email less. More difficult interfaces maybe? Several screens to click through to get the email? Passwords and 'are you sure' dialogue boxes? Punishment is the ultimate ingredient that you can add to alter the pay-off matrix. Except for those of us with immense self-disicipline ("if i check email in the next hour, no coffee at lunchtime") self-imposed punishment isn't an obvious strategy (and are those with self-discipline likely to have a problem with getting distracted anyway?).
[Although, on reflection, I don't think this question is as rhetorical as it sounds here. The problem is not with your ability to deliberately schedule and implement actions (including actions such as self-punishments), the problem is with automatically evoked actions (i.e. checking email) and then getting distracted by the consequences. These are two types of actions and it is entirely conceivable that they might be differently ammeanable to the deliberate control of our reflective selves]
A final strategy, and one that is used in animal training to remove problem behaviours, is to reinforce an alternative, incompatible action. If you have a problem with your pet eagle landing on your head the most efficient way to stop it is to reward landing on a mat at your feet, rather than struggle with extringuishing head-landing. What this would mean in the context of email checking I will leave as an exercise to the reader.
So, what I'm really interested in is in seeing what people think. If some of what I've said makes sense, what other ways are there to use it to make email less addictive? Or maybe I've got the solution completely wrong. Or the problem? I'd like to hear either way
Some things I read while writing this follow (thanks to Marc Baizman for the Katie Hafner article in the NYT)
Andrew Brown on why the internet-addiction will be like alcoholism for this generation of writers
'Husband training', New York Times article about using behaviourist principles in your marriage
February 10, 2005 New York Times, You There, at the Computer: Pay Attention by Katie Hafner (designing interfaces that work with our attention, rather than distract)
technorati tags:Email, Addiction, Technology, News+Feed
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Pick up two for £12.99 ($24).
Product Site [USB Cell via Far East Gizmos]
technorati tags:USB, Battery, AA
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Cory Doctorow:
technorati tags:Tanagram, Bookcase, Wall, Book
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