Category: history
a very nice map of the entire internet
The implementation is maybe soso, but the actual idea to put all 4,294,967,296 IP addresses into a grid is really nice.
A couple of week ago a high res map of internet connections was widely linked to.
Which does remind me of Aaron Koblin and his“Flight Patterns”.
Call me crazy, but I think that the story of JH Schön could make a great movie. In the right hands. But I am so much out of touch that it might have come out last spring and friends of mine have worked on it.
19 months ago there was Leroy:
(Mr. Jenkins is acting out the essence of Mr Bush foreign policy here, with bigger success I might add)
a year ago some kid did this:
and now Toyota released a truck commerical playing in Wow:
A while back “Second Life” was all the craze. Journalists were mumbling about it. Endlessly. Companies were spending money to be in those virtual world. I think it’s one of these hollow stories that got too much attention despite a total lack of substance. As a journalist you felt all hip and trendy if you would do a piece about it. That’s why so many were done.
In the meantime there were millions (litteraly!) of people just hacking away on WoW. it’s what people do. Naturally ads do follow them. But the basic premise of WoW is not that it’s ‘an alternative reality’. It just seems to be a game that is fun to play for many people. Not enough news for journalists, unless it involves chinese gold farmers, but a pretty thick trend. And one that will continue.
Kyle Wilson wrote an interesting essay about finishing software back in August.
I am wondering why so much great software does not even get started: Since a long time I am using an EVDO modem to connect to the internet. The upside is, that I have Internet wherever I go. If there is the slightest hint of civilisation I can connect to the internet. Which is great. The hardware is smart enough not only to move bits around it also knows where it is. GPS is a rather elaborate system with satelites floating around the planet and all. It is a big commotion, and it works. Just, that the software to connect to that part of the device does not exist on a Mac. With the right amount of documentation a programmer that has done something similar before would only need a few days to program this. And they sold thousands and thousands of these the device. The benefit for my computer to know where exactly I am would be huge. Since I am also connected to the internet a website could replace a 300 US$ GPS device. Still nobody has done it.
The other day I learned that Los Angeles is not storing the traffic data it automatically collects. It is allot of work, and certainly was not cheap, to put all those sensors in place. The data flows to the right places. And then gets simply not archived.
In both cases the effort to add the extra functionality would be ridicolously small compared to the potential gain. In both cases it might never happen: There is no driving force behind it. Nobody is making a living from something similar enough to jump on these opportunities. Even though ideas might be clear and simple, they might never happen, no matter how good they are, as long there is not a similar enterprise already happening. This theory has a sad other side as well: If there is already some kind of business going in certain way, then all sorts of similar activities will be spawned. No matter if they make any sense (Sony’s Mp3 players) or if they are valid for society ( Arms dealer, Mafia, Spam).
Suddenly the NYTimes regained her relevance again. They could have done it all the, and become really great, but the very same corpo-idiots that tried to charge for the normal page think that there is subscription revenue in the years 1922-1986. Idiots. Idiots at the NYTimes. What a funny thought.
I have no idea how I came about to find this site devoted to the Scanimate System. I did order both DVDs and am very happy to have done so: They give a very interesting peek into the technology, art etc of those times. Who knew that I would find out eventually how all those apparently not hand drawn animations I saw on Sesame Street were done.
Lot’s of blog rave about thiscomputer animation right now.
I think it is horrible. Smetana is easy to abuse and misunderstand. Dragging Fallingwater into this is just horrible. The first couple of seconds of this Quicktime from hell are nice enough. Although the font choice and especially the animated glow should have been a clear sign of trouble. Fallingwater is one of the more important things that have been made in the last century. Seing it disolved to death is pure horror. The tasteless low point was certainly the eschereseque pan away from that mirror ball.
Not much more to say than this
This ‘news’ about generating energy from burning saltwater is ridicolous bullshit.
Here we are, using those internets, which are run on computers (just ask Homer) and other products of science to mock it’s very contents and basic laws.
Of course it is an extreme example. But the same principle seem to apply frequently: Those creationists should be consequent and stop using the products and merits of science. All of them. If they don’t like what science has discovered.
Two hundred years ago when people even in the more developed countries were dying left right and center on odd diseases and epidemics there simply was no question: Science was good. Now, that we are reaping all those benefits and so many of us have these careless existences some people think, that the current state of society and wellfare would just be ‘normal’, or god given.Well, it is not. The default is much much more grim. Over the last four hundred years people worked really really hard to make all this possible. It was not easy to harvest all this knowledge our econimies and factories run on. All these efforts were based on the absence of stupity. Now it seems as if some people start to take stupid stuff serious. Since it seems that they can afford to. People living in Rome two thousand years ago were in a similar position. Why would they care? Of all Shakespear plays I liked Coriolanus the least. Now that’s starting to change. Somehow I think that it’s message is not that off after all.
How to hide an Airplane factory
I have this creeping feeling that -although everything seems to be more advanced than ever- certain things that people did back in the day seem to be impossible now.
Now on an more upbeat note: Check out the urban myth in the bottom of the images. As funny as it is, it actually links to a book. And that is really really exciting to me!
So, now people can reference passages in Books via links. There is quiet a bit of information in those things, called Books. Being able to reference this information is
huge. The average book has certainly more content, meaning, honesty and relevance than the average web page.