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November 20, 2005
Digg.com
Digg.com is a relatively new 'group blogging' site where readers both submit stories and vote one which submissions make it to the home page. It's like slashdot or boingboing, but much more user-driven. If it weren't for spam submissions and other abuses of the system, it wouldn't need any editorial oversight at all.
I'm usually skeptical of any new project that someone claims to have answered the question of how to have a truly democratic, bottom-up content aggregator (like del.icio.us or any of the 'social software' sites), but digg.com seems to really work.
Posted by mslaybau at 01:01 PM
Douwe Osinga
Douwe Osinga is a programmer with tons of interesting projects on his site, mostly related to artificial life or tricks with the Google API.
Just one example is his "Poetry in Translation" tool which translates sentences from English and back again, with amusing results.
Give it a try below:
He also has Land Geist, "a combination of Googles Zeit Geist, Google Mind Share and Visited Countries. For keywords like 'war', 'poverty', 'party', this project shows which country (names) have the highest relative scores (google shares)."
and, Google News Map, which "shows a map of the World with on top of it projected the latest headlines according to Google News, pointing with their upper left corner to the country where it refers to."
and lots of other little toys
Posted by mslaybau at 12:33 PM
November 17, 2005
Electrical Engineering vs. Computer Science
An uncited fable helps illuminate some thoughts I've had about the tendency to over-rely on computers. People who embrace 'ubiquitous computing' and 'wearables' seem to believe that A) just about anything can be improved by stuffing a fast cpu in it and B) combining two related tools into one super-tool is a good idea.
Posted by mslaybau at 09:27 AM
November 15, 2005
On the Road
Toll booth agents are normally pleasant enough, with a tired "Hi" or an indifferent glance away from the TV screen long enough to take my money.
But the other day the fellow manning the gate had a surly expression and as I held out some coins I mentioned the weather as a way of trying to extract some human interaction from him.
But he ignored what I had said. "Keep it moving, you're holding up the line."
I looked in the rear-view mirror and out the side window and saw that mine was the only car there. "Just trying to be friendly," I smiled. "You look like you've had a hard day."
His face finally brightened a bit. "Yeah, some of the people who come through here are just jerks. When you come across as many weirdos as I do, you can never tell what kind of asshole is going to ruin your day."
"Heh." I laughed, finally dropping the coins in his hand as I shifted into gear. "Tell that to the guy in my trunk!"
Posted by mslaybau at 06:00 PM
November 10, 2005
TV Programming Will Become More Intelligent
The theater used to be people's source of low-brow entertainment. The traveling shows of the 1890s, for example, would have some cornball songs, slapstick comedy, and burlesque.
When film became a popular medium, it initially relied on immitating the successful aspects of theater, and became the principal source of this kind of music, comedic, and otherwise titilating content. (The Three Stooges and others of that era had all been Vaudeville acts)
Theater was more expensive in terms of reaching a wide audience, and responded to this competition by becoming more high-brow and abandoning the corny songs and slapstick in favor of more erudite entertainment.
Film grew in popularity and began adding other kinds of content, such as newsreels and cartoons, which theater had never been able to do (although going to a theater to hear the news is perhaps the equivalent of going to church or a town meting during the age before recorded media).
But then television arrived and competed with film the way that film had competed with theater. TV became the main source of corny songs and slapstick comedy (think of how many TV shows from the 1950s were musical variety shows compared to today).
And, TV also appropriated other types of content from film, such as news and cartoons. It took a couple of weeks to get a newsreel distributed to theaters around the country, while TV had a lead time of perhaps a day, and could even be broadcast live.
Film then responded the way that theater had, by becoming more high-brow. The Stooges were gone and were replaced with the kind of feature-length film that we know today, which is generally better than most content on television.
And now we have the Web, which has - with MP3 downloads, stupid Flash cartoons, and pornography - taken up the torch originally carried by the traveling theater as a primary source for popular entertainment.
The transfer is incomplete, so we are still in a position to see how it all plays out, but my interest is in how TV will respond to competition from the Web.
My prediction is that TV will become more high-brow as the Web surges to dominate popular culture. The fact that shows like "The Office" are now distributed suggests to me that the trend may be starting. Of course, the existence of insipid "reality" shows suggests the opposite.
Still, I will stand by my prediction. Within ten years the majority of people who are seeking simple entertainment will go to their computers first, and will turn on their TV when they want something more intelligent.
Part of the reason for each new medium to supplant the previously new one is that each new medium is cheaper and easier to use and distribute. Each transfer is from that of a production-intensive medium that reaches a smaller number of people to one where a guy with an idea and a little technology can reach a larger number.
The early auteur films could be made with a crew of just a handful, compared to the dozen or scores of people needed to put on a theatrical show. Early television didn't save much in terms of human resources but expense was less and reach was more than film. And with the Web, an individual can produce a song or cartoon by himself.
The bar for expense, and thus quality is lowered each time there is a transfer, which is why the low-brow content is attracted to the newer media.
Posted by mslaybau at 06:49 AM | Comments (0)
Xombie
Xombie is a post-apocalypse Flash animation series with surprisingly good animation and narrative quality - good enough for TV, which isn't saying much, but TV in general has a higher bar than the Web, which has none.
Posted by mslaybau at 06:26 AM
AJAX Risk
AJAX (aka networked DHTML) is a popular subject now, at least among some developers and software organizations, and is most popularized in the Google Maps utility.
Many have used the API for this and made some interesting projects. One recent one, by TehDiplomat, implements the classic board game Risk using Google Maps
The game development is incomplete, and only supports hotseat gameplay for now.
The use of Google Maps is purely gratuitous, in that zooming to get more terrain detail adds nothing to the game (actually inhibits ability to play). Ideally that will change. This could also be a good opportunity to update the rules of Risk, including having a more granular game board with more, smaller territories.
Posted by mslaybau at 04:21 AM
Earth Impact Effects Program
The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona in Tucson has an impact effect calculator that gives estimates of what would happen if a extraterrestrial body were to strike the earth. You need to know lots of information in order to use the calculator, such as the size, velocity, and density of the object, but the results are quite specific, such as how likely it would be that trees within 1,000 miles of the impact would ignite.
Posted by mslaybau at 03:59 AM
November 09, 2005
Louis Armstrong Cover of Britney Spears
I'm tired of most of the "mashups" that cross my desk (though a few are okay) but this is not really one of those.
superMasterpiece has a recording of "Oops, I Did it Again" as if played and sung by Louis Armstrong and his band.
It's quite good, and demonstrates that the song can stand on its own even without the production normally associated with it.
Posted by mslaybau at 01:34 AM
November 08, 2005
Bitey Castle
Bitey Castle is the portfolio of an Aussie named Adam Phillips, and contains some of the highest-quality flash animations I've seen (particularly the backgrounds), the most recent of which serve to expand the world of the forest planet of Brackenwood and it's fantastic inhabitants.
Shown here is Bitey himself, a bad fawn of sorts who is the anti-hero of sorts of the latest series.
Posted by mslaybau at 01:19 AM | Comments (0)
November 01, 2005
ASCIImation
Machinima is just a rip off of this guy. Star Wars done in animated ascii characters. http://www.asciimation.co.nz/ only goes up to about halfway, when Han and Luke are getting Leia out of detention block 1138.
And here it is as an animated gif
http://x2.putfile.com/10/29405035849.gif
There's a whole cartoon series done this way in 2002, Chickenman
And this guy has a way of turning any movie into an asciimation
Posted by mslaybau at 08:10 AM | Comments (0)