bshort.com

I love my Billykirk cuffs and I was pleased as punch to find this movie about the brothers Bray and how they live and work.

Billykirk from The Scout on Vimeo.

I never realized that Stephen Wolfram and Richard Feynman had any contact, and this letter confirms many suspicions I’ve had about Wolfram’s research into cellular automata.

“It is not my opinion that the present organizational structure of science inhibits ‘complexity research’ – I do not believe such an institution is necessary.”

….

“You don’t understand ‘ordinary people.’ To you they are ’stupid fools’ – so you will not tolerate them or treat their foibles with tolerance or patience – but will drive yourself wild (or they will drive you wild) trying to deal with them in an effective way.”

From Feynman’s letter to Wolfram.

Look! It’s a new film starring Will Oldham. I sort of wish he would just make films like Old Joy and what this one looks to be: a slow, somewhat depressing meditation on the human experience. Of course that would take away from his incredible recording schedule. I’m torn, frankly.

It turns out that if you come into the office at 8:00 am then you get quite a bit of bandwidth at your disposal. 60 megabits? That’s super-ridiculous and incredibly awesome. It makes me wonder what upload speeds are possible and whether I can put this power to a good purpose.

I want to believe that there’s an alternative to Facebook, but I’m very skeptical about this one: Diaspora. They’re trying to build an open source, decentralized social networking platform. They have a dream and they’re looking for funding:

We believe that privacy and connectedness do not have to be mutually exclusive. With Diaspora, we are reclaiming our data, securing our social connections, and making it easy to share on your own terms. We think we can replace today’s centralized social web with a more secure and convenient decentralized network. Diaspora will be easy to use, and it will be centered on you instead of a faceless hub.

I mean, it could work, maybe, but how do you manage security? How do you determine which users can have what data? How do you calculate social graphs and discover new users? These are hard problems, and I’m not sure there are open source solutions to them.

The new Tron Legacy trailer looks terrific. The graphics are incredible, we get to see old characters in a new setting, and there are mysterious things happening. That’s a recipe for success.

But what I want to know is why do we see Sam pull out a Tron game (at :45 in)?

What is a Tron game doing in a Tron movie? What happens in this game? Was it, itself, about a Tron movie that was embedded in the Tron movie we’re watching? Are the events of the Tron movie in the Tron world considered to be real? Did Flynn create the game (and possibly the movie) based on his experience? Is the embedded Tron movie in some way autobiographical in the context of the film?

I’m sure the filmmakers included the game at least partly because it was such a mainstay of arcades in the early 80s, but it sure opens a bucket of narrative worms. They should have just called the video game “Light Cycles” or something, because it sure puts the internal narrative of the movie on shaky ground.

I desire Courier in a way I crave few things. I’ve decided to buy an iPad because I have clients who are interested in it and it’s part of my job to understand what it’s like to use one, but I don’t dream about using it. I do dream about developing for it, but a lot of what I dream about building is just a slightly different take on what Courier is already doing, or at least demonstrating.

I don’t think of myself as an Apple fanboy, but I sure seem to use a lot of Apple products. I was the first in my company to use a Mac for my work machine, and two years later almost everyone in my group is using one. My personal life and my career have been moving away from the Microsoft gravity well over the last few years, and I really didn’t forsee this changing. I’m as surprised as anyone.

And it’s really about the notebook aspects. Putting things into a personal journal just seems so final, so insular. Once I write something down how will I search it? How will I find it again? How will I back it up? If what I’m dealing with is paper then the answers to all those questions are not what I want to hear.

With the Courier, though, I’m extrapolating functionality based on a few tech demos and some screenshots, but it looks like I’ll be able to create a daily journal that I can add web pages to, that I can copy online photos and paste them into, that I can take pictures with, and that I can draw in. I’m also assuming that I can publish anything I create to… something. Maybe to my main computer. Maybe to a special website that Microsoft hosts. Maybe to my own website.

It’s obviously going to depend on what the actual device is like. I’m also assuming that the Courier is not going to work very well with a Mac, that there’s going to be no crossover between content on the Courier and content in my iPhone, and that there will be massive, deal-breaking problems with the Courier’s software that will keep me from buying it.

We’ll see where all of this goes. Maybe there will be a Courier-inspired app that I can use on my iPad, or maybe Microsoft will come through and build a device that’s the first in a truly new category. But either way I want to interact with digital objects in ways that are analogous to how I interact with physical objects. I want to be able to be able to build meaningful digital content in new ways. I don’t want to click on fiddly little menus and UI objects that are meant to be clicked with a mouse.

I want to live in the future.

Gesundheit Radio from James Chambers on Vimeo.

There are a lot of possible ways to create a fusion reaction, but muon-catalyzed fusion is one I didn’t even know existed before today. The essential idea is that if you replace some electrons in hydrogen isotopes with muons, then you allow two atoms to get closer than they would otherwise, maybe even so close that the strong force is able to dominate and allow the two atoms to fuse. Neat idea, but lots of problems with it.

There’s a lot we don’t know about humpback whales, but we now know a few new things. For the first time the mating battles between rival humpback whale males has been filmed. Make sure you scroll down the page for the “making of” video. Free diving in a pod of 40 ton whales? Puts my average day to shame.

If you’re going to be a jackass, it’s best not to be a jackass in email. At some point one of your employees is going to send your tirade to a popular NYC-centric blog and expose your jackassery to the whole world. I’d quote from the email, but there’s more profanity than I feel comfortable cutting and pasting.

This is a new format for me. For the next week or so I’m going to keep track of what I find on the web that really tweaks my noodle and I’m going to post about it. I guess that’s what a weblog is supposed to be – a log of your web browsing – but in the past I’ve always tried to turn it (unsuccessfully) into a place for long form essays.

Browsing kottke.org this morning I was dazzled by this cover of the Beyonce song Single Ladies by Pomplamoose. It’s in a format that they’re calling a “Videosong” where everything you hear is shown at some point and there’s no lip-synching or pantomime. If someone is playing an instrument, you’re hearing what they played.

Constrained art forms like this often yield amazing results. It’s as though the harder it is to fit your art into a certain shape the harder you end up working to fit the requirements. Of course, that also means you work harder on it than you would otherwise. Pomplamoose’s results aren’t typical, but they are incredible.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIr8-f2OWhs]

It’s hard to describe exactly how much I love watching Ricky Jay at work. He operates on some other plane that gives him enough insight into other people to bend them to his will. Seeing him relieve this group of unsuspecting marks of their pocket money is like watching a live-action Mamet film.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHxVpRvlCfI]

For years I’ve been laboring under the delusion that a male deer is called a “hart“, which is true, but only if you were born several centuries ago or you’re talking about heraldry.

According to the Wikipedia the proper modern name for a male deer is a “stag”, but only if they’re medium sized. If they’re very large they’re called a “bull”. I’m continually fascinated by the huge portion of the English vocabulary that’s reserved for describing animals, especially game animals.