Posts from — March 2007

Terrifying Russain Playground Equipment

I just put this relic online:
Ogontz Beirut Rules

16 rules that changed the world. Now you can review them any time you want. Just press print and you can post it around your home or office.

These rules also often apply in life, business, politics, and maybe even “beer pong”.

So, though a long adventure that doesn’t make a good story (it starts with an oil change!), I ended up at a coffee shop reading the New York Times and later at a library reading a book about the history of the Soviet Union. I don’t read things on paper that much, and I found it surprisingly frustrating. I think this had to do with two things:
- Lack of hypertext.
- Unavailability of a search engine to cross-reference things.

So, the first one basically means that reading an article on paper doesn’t have any links in it. So, when I’m reading a[n] NYT article and notice a side topic that interests me, I can’t follow a link to learn more about that topic. I just need to keep reading the article that interests me less, or switch to something else. Worse yet, I don’t have a really good way to find more about a topic from the coffee shop anyway, even though there might even be articles in that issues of the NYT that might be related. Of course, smart layout can be used to combat this, but the core of the argument still stands. If I want to learn more about something there, I need to remember it unless I steal the newspaper from the guy who lent it to me. Not surprisingly, I forgot what topics these were.

When reading the book on Soviet history, I ran into a similar problem. Certain passages or terms that were especially interesting couldn’t easily be researched. I mean, I was at the library, but searching for things at the library seems like a task better fit for big topics, like certain movements in the revolution, but not minor ones only covered for a paragraph in the whole book. For that you need something with huge recall, like the internet and a search engine. Additionally, I wanted to know more about the author in order to understand where he was coming from (I don’t remember the name of the book or author now), but I couldn’t find a really easy way to do that.

Now, I don’t typically sit around paging through a book looking up all sorts of things, but these two materials I read this morning happened to lend themselves to that. The book I’m reading in my free time now does this to a lesser extent, since it’s still nonfiction and somewhat narrative. I’ve looked up topics from the book on a few occasions so far.

Anyway, I think that’s all I’ll write about that for now. Hopefully I’ll be over my fever and cold tomorrow so I can go to work.

I saw this image on microsoft.com today, and I don’t quite understand it:

What is going to 11?

from youtube: Reversed videos of exploding sand casltes.

Finally.

Eye tracking applications are pretty cool. They track the focus of a person’s eye on something like a web page, which can give a heat map that will show where people tend to look on a certain design. This can help to do empirical design analysis. This article talks about the use of eye tracking in design, with a bunch of interesting examples. Definitely worth reading if you do any design work.

As a bonus, it includes the line “Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed.”

That last part seemed to be the only one that people talked about on blogs, but the rest of the article is interesting too.

The Show with Ze Frank is ending its year-long run this week, so that’s rather sad. If you haven’t seen it, well, then you missed it. I guess you can go back and watch old ones, but it takes a while to catch on. It’s a great mix of comedy, politics, and ridiculous thoughts. It’ll be interesting to see what Ze does next.

I don’t think anyone who reads this will know what I’m talking about, but that’s ok.

This (really low quality) video shows a very preliminary demonstration of Deam Kamen‘s robotic arm. It has incredible potential. What an amazing set of inventions he’s created. It’s good to see he’s able to support himself with his inventions, too, unlike some great inventors of the past.

In case you didn’t see it, this is pretty cool…

Using a whole lot of data, Matthew Gray (a googler who started the same day as me) generated a map of the world showing places mentioned in books:

Of course, there’s a lot of bias in the data because it only includes books we’ve scanned, but it’s a really neat visualization. It took 45 minutes to generate the map on google’s servers. It’s amazing to think that things like this just weren’t possible several years ago.

More info on the google book search blog

The EU is dumping incandescent bulbs within three years, and you should too. Compact fluorescent use far less energy (75-80% less) and last longer. A lot of other places are switching to CFs.. there was talk of California making the switch, and I know it’s already happening in Australia. Walmart switched away from incandescent bulbs and is saving $8M a year. As much as I don’t like Walmart, they have been pushing energy-efficient bulbs.. it just makes good business and environmental sense. This is often the case, and I’m going to write more on this subject later.

I especially like this quote from an article in FastCompany:
“What that means is that if every one of 110 million American households bought just one [CF] bulb, took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people. One bulb swapped out, enough electricity saved to power all the homes in Delaware and Rhode Island. In terms of oil not burned, or greenhouse gases not exhausted into the atmosphere, one bulb is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads.”