Time Lapse of Galactic Center of Milky Way rising over Texas Star Party

According to William Castleman: The time-lapse sequence was taken with the simplest equipment that I brought to the star party. I put the Canon EOS-5D (AA screen modified to record hydrogen alpha at 656 nm) with an EF 15mm f/2.8 lens on a weighted tripod. Exposures were 20 seconds at f/2.8 ISO 1600 followed by 40 second interval. Exposures were controlled by an interval timer shutter release (Canon TC80N3). Power was provided by a Hutech EOS203 12v power adapter run off a 12v deep cycle battery. Large jpg files shot in custom white balance were batch processed in Photoshop (levels, curves, contrast, Noise Ninja noise reduction, resize) and assembled in Quicktime Pro. Editing/assembly was with Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9.

[via the Primary Tentacle @ Laughing Squid]

Space Shuttle Atlantis during Solar Transit

In this tightly cropped image, the NASA space shuttle Atlantis is seen in silhouette during solar transit, Tuesday, May 12, 2009, from Florida. This image was made before Atlantis and the crew of STS-125 had grappled the Hubble Space Telescope. Photo Credit: (NASA/Thierry Legault)

Thierry made this image using a solar-filtered Takahashi 5-inch refracting telescope and a Canon 5D Mark II digital camera. Photo Credit: (NASA/Thierry Legault)

You can see more of Thierry's fine work at: www.astrophoto.fr

from nasa hq photostream [via slashdot]

I Am Trying To Believe (that Rock Stars aren't Dead)

Last Friday night I attended a Nine Inch Nails concert in Philadelphia with Chris Cera of Vuzit (thanks Chris for your help with this post). At 43, Trent Reznor can certainly still grab an audience by the throat and shake it. It was a fantastic show; the kind of show that has you checking to see if there are other tour dates within driving distance.

During a short break in the sonic and visual mayhem, Reznor spoke for a moment and told us emphatically to steal his music. Later, on my way to the car after the show, a member of the band Cube Head was handing out sharpie-labled home-burned demo CD's in the parking lot complete with a hand drawn "copywrong" marking. It was an interesting contrast between established artist and emerging talent and how they are both figuring out how to make their way in the post-vinyl post-jewel-case economy.

I'll come back to that theme in a second, but first a brief aside. Chris (who has some background in real time video processing) and I were blown away by the amazing stage show; it was geek manifest and a video processing tour de force. During about 1/3 of the show the band played sandwiched between at least two giant video monitors, the one in the foreground transparent when its pixels were dormant and opaque when lit up.

The source video for the display was sometimes heavily processed local camera inputs, sometimes it was prerecorded, and sometimes it was electronically generated. Whatever the source, it was frequently and heavily modified by the audio inputs or by the movements of the artists on the stage. With a sweep of his hand Trent would wave away the static hiding him from the audience and then moments later it would fill back in. It's hard to explain but the effect was very cool. Cool enough that trying to figure it out started to distract both of us from the music. There are some videos out there of it in action but none that I found really capture the full effect. Let me know in the comments if you find one.

The next day, still curious about how the stage show was done, and with Reznor's call to "steal my music" still in my head, I poked around on the web looking for more info. One of the most interesting things I found was this story about Nine Inch Nail's Year Zero Alternate Reality Game. The way Reznor used this new gaming medium as an extension of his canvas rather than as a promotional stunt (and the nascent geekness it suggests) makes me think he has a much better than average chance to figure out the post RIAA world. Or, it may just be that with the state of distribution being what it is, he realized that while promotion might move more units, it would do it in a way so loosely coupled to monetization as to be pointless.

His comments in the story's sidebar make me think it is probably the latter. In particular: "So a couple years ago I realized that music essentially is free now. I'd prefer, it wasn't, but it is. And hey, I've had a pretty good run. I can still make a living touring." .... "I feel that the right model hasn't revealed itself yet."

Here's the thing, I'm not convinced it's going to reveal itself. Or, more likely, it has revealed itself and he already knows what it is: "I can still make a living touring."

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A Graphic Designer Puts Print on Demand Through Its Paces

A report on the UnderConsideration blog outlines a fascinating experiment called Dear Lulu. From the blog coverage:

This past July, fourteen students attended a two-day workshop at Germany's Hochschule Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences with Prof. Frank Philippin and London-based designer James Goggin. The brief, as explained by Goggin:

"My plan for the workshop is to investigate the visible and tangible parameters of graphic design — type specimens, halftone screens and, in particular, colour tests and calibration charts — and make a book of our own self-produced tests which we will send to print on Friday afternoon using the online print-on-demand system Lulu. The book project will therefore act as a colour/type/pattern test of the very system with which it is produced. "Print-on-demand" is an increasingly important production system which can serve to make us designers rethink the impact our profession has on the environment and to question the often wasteful print volumes and production methods requested of us by our clients. Graphic designers, and especially students, have a chance to use and subvert these relatively new (and fairly cheap) technological systems to our advantage."

The result of the workshop is Dear Lulu, a fantastic and imaginative resource that puts digital printing to the test through a Do-It-Yourself presentation that fits right in with philosophy of print on demand that makes it such an alluring proposition for designers looking to publish with little financial risk and with pretty decent results in return.

The report is not only a fascinating analysis of how far Print on Demand has come, but also a great tool for evaluating printers in general, as the output of the process is a book designed to stress the capabilities of any printer. As Amrita Chandra wrote on twitter in response to my post there, "what is great is you can send the book to other printers for comparison."

Food for thought for research firms: what if the output of a research firm were not just a report but a tool for putting a company's own systems through its paces, evaluating against the standards outlined in the report?

The Last HOPE

I made the trek to a steamy hot NYC this weekend to attend one day of the three day Last HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference at the Hotel Pennsylvania. There was too much going to adequately cover it here (or even take it all in), but a few things stood out.

Steve Rambam's eye opening talk on the death of privacy for example. For a solid three hours in front of a standing room only crowd he weaved back and forth between the Orwellian theme of how our privacy is being ripped from us by everyone from Google to Choicepoint and the theme that seemed even creepier to him, self contribution. Over and over he expressed disbelief at how willingly we post our personal details everywhere from Twitter to Facebook while thanking us all the while for making his job as a private investigator that much easier. What the marketers and government don't actively take, we actively give. Naturally I twittered the whole thing.

Cell phone tracking; artificial-intelligence-assisted reality mining; 3000 cameras per square mile in Manhattan; facial, activity, and even gait identification software; government outsourced investigative databases shielded from FOIA requests; UAV-based license plate scanners; beating anonymity by correlating multiple datasets; unanticipated database repurposing; and on and on... Finally I could twitter no more and left the venue hurriedly fashioning a tinfoil hat from a burger wrapper while consigning myself to doubling the dosage on my meds.

I will say this though, there was something deliciously ironic about standing in a room chock full of hackers all listening at rapt attention to a three hour chillingly dystopic harangue on privacy loss while nearly every single one of them was wearing an RFID tag around their necks. Even better, the tag was tracking their every move around the venue and was linked to a comprehensive self-contributed profile.

Moving beyond the privacy nightmare stuff, there was hardware hacking to be found everywhere at Last HOPE. Tables were covered with broken open electronic toys and electronic components and were surrounded by hackers with smoking soldering irons.

Of the completed projects on display, one of my favorites was a something of a hybrid that projected a 3D image onto carefully placed strings.

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Mental Landscapes, David Brooks and the Aspen Festival of Ideas

David Brooks gave a talk last week in Aspen that inspired me and that I can't stop thinking about. Note that it comes in three parts. His book is due to come out in the fall of 2009.

Brooks discusses an intellectual revolution that brings together neuroscience, sociology, psychology, behavioral economics, genetics, and a variety of other fields in an effort to shine a light on non-cognitive skills --- that which cannot be counted by IQ scores, but is important to success.

He addresses the importance of the action that takes place in the human mind below the level of the awareness, in the unconscious; how emotion is the central core for giving value to thinking - it’s the central organizing process of the brain; and the permeability of the human mind.

Brooks speculates: How do you talk about the unconscious or love at a Congressional Hearing? We tend to focus on what we can easily measure. Yet, what really matters is extremely emotional, unconscious, and relationship-based and, for that, we need a new vocabulary.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts on Brooks’ talk. If you have the time, there are a number of talks worth viewing on the fora.tv site from the Aspen Festival of Ideas.

code_swarm - visualizing the life of open source

code_swarm was created by Michael Ogawa with Processing.

This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.

(thanks to Todd Ogasawara for pointing this out!)

BarCampBank is spreading

When Ben Black and I organized the first BarCampBank in North America last year, we hoped that it would spread. According to William Azaroff's post on NetBanker, the movement is there and growing:

What's all this about BarCampBanks? From a North American premiere in Seattle almost a year ago, we've witnessed two more in the last few months, and eight more are either scheduled, or in the planning process.

Well, maybe not exactly “planned.” BarCampBanks emerge more than they are planned.

[...]It started as a technology summit, an un-conference where developers and technology geeks could share exploits, connect, and find like-minded companions to extol the virtue of open-source and emerging technologies over pizza and wine.

And then someone decided that this forum would be a perfect place to talk about banking and finance. Weird. And yet it works.

The next event will be BarCampBankDallas on June 21-22nd at the American Bank of Texas Building in Frisco, Texas. William has details on the other events this year on his blog, and a current list can always be found on the main BarCampBank wiki.

Waxy: "Google App Engine ported to Amazon's EC2"

Andy Baio posts what might be a response to Tim's concerns about Google App Engine. Interesting!

I loved Daring Fireball's one-line description: "So much for the lock-in argument." There's definitely still a concern if/when people find themselves addicted to the services Google provides beyond simple app hosting -- as Andy writes:

The App Engine SDK doesn't use BigTable for its datastore, instead relying on a simple flat file on a single server. This means issues with performance and no scalabity to speak of, but for apps with limited resource needs, something as simple as AppDrop would work fine.

Seems to me that this is where Google should head: getting developers addicted to all the services Google engineers already enjoy. They've started down that road and that seems to be the best approach for making App Engine competitively distinct.

Data Center heating the Town Pool

According to GreenerComputing.com:

A public swimming pool in Zurich will soon be heated for the comfort of local residents, thanks to an innovative solution: heat generated by a data center that would otherwise be classified as waste. The new data center in Zurich is one of three projects in Europe and the Middle East that IBM has announced in recent days. The Zurich project is a new data center for GIB-Services, a hosting and co-location company. In Austria, IBM has announced a plan to construct a green data center for green furniture company kika/Leiner; IBM has also landed the contract to build what it calls the most energy-efficient data center in Egypt, for Telecom Egypt.

For more see IBM Big Green and The Raised Floor blog.

Trendalyzer view of the banking crisis

The team at "And Still I Persist" has created their own version of Hans Rosling's "Trendalyzer" (see: Radar post) to visualize the current US banking crisis.

"First lets look at the top 8 banks and their mortgages that are 90+ days late. Below is a flash charting system, feel free to use the controls and experiment. We chart the total assets of the bank along the horizontal axis, the value of loans that go 90+ days late on the vertical, and the size of the circles represent the total loan portfolio for that bank. You can set the charts in motion by hitting the “Play” button and stop them at any time. Hovering over a circle will show you the value for that data point.

Our charts step forward in time for Q1-2002 one quarter at a time, reading directly from the bank’s own FDIC reports. "
Bank Portfolios - 90+ Days Late

See the original article for more about this visualization and the team that created it.

Update: Bruce Henderson invites anybody interested in working with a larger data set to take a look at the OSG Boomerang tool.

@ETech: Wednesday Morning Keynotes

Another day, another set of expansive keynotes.

John McCarthy, father of LISP, a giant in artificial intelligence, gave a sit-down high-level talk about Elephant 2000, a proposed programming language intended for transaction processing and electronic data interchange. He described Elephant in terms of its ability to capture "speech acts," which I'll define roughly as words that lead to actions. (One of McCarthy's examples: "I now pronounce you man and wife.") McCarthy said these words "create obligations." They're promises, questions, requests, etc. As anyone who has read the code to programs I've written (many of which include the words "hello" and "world" in the title) will know that I'm no expert. If anyone in the ETech audience can do an ace job of explaining the most provocative line in McCarthy's talk, "ascribing beliefs to thermostats is like adding 0 and 1 to the number system," I'll send you a free O'Reilly book of my choice.

Steve Cousins of Willow Garage proposed an open source platform for personal robots. Those personal robots would perform useful activities, and he showed some very enjoyable film clips of humanoid robots performing basic tasks such as picking up a living room. And Willow Garage is balancing its philosophical and business imperatives:The company is privately funded and "focused on impact before the return of capital...The goal is to produce 10 robots and make them available to researchers so we can all be on a common platform."

Kathy Sierra, who ran an inspiring storyboarding tutorial on Monday, told us how to kick ass. Her talk was not merely a paean to mastery, but also a brisk walk through recent neuroscience to "show that the difference between world-class and average is not about natural talent." The research, she said, reveals "that most common thread separating world-class and average is the ability to put in the time, to focus, concentrate, and practice." Expertise, she noted, is not so much about what you know, but what you do. She showed how mirror neurons let us run similations of another persons bran inside our brain -- but she emphasized that the quality of simulation depends on experience. There's still only one way to get to Carnegie Hall.

(Then Tom Coates spoke about fire eagle. My post about that is here.)

Finally, Peter Semmelhack, CEO and founder of Bug Labs, talked about community electronics, a term intended to turn the tradition term "consumer electronics" on its head. He posited a long tail of gadgets. Today, there are relatively few devices, marketed to millions. In the future, he's hoping for millions of devices targeted for the few. To develop these niche devices and custom gadgets, Bug is building a hardware innovation platform that goes from idea through functional spec, all the way to manufacturing. It's not the only way, Semmelhack noted, but it's the way Bug is trying to make it happen.

And now to the breakout sessions: Why are there always two I want to go to scheduled at the same time?

DIY Multitouch with the Wiimote

If you will be missing Jeff Hahn's presentation at Etech next week, you can still make your own multitouch display thanks to Johnny Chung Lee and the Wiimote. Johnny has a number of sensor hacks on his blog, and just announced that EA Games has incorporated his Wii head tracking hack into an upcoming release.

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The LiveScribe Pulse Smartpen

The coolest thing I saw at our Tools of Change for Publishing Conference last week was the LiveScribe SmartPen. This amazing pen includes a microphone and an optical sensor that synchronizes the audio with any notes you take on special microdot paper using the pen. Touch the appropriate point on your notes to replay the relevant section of the audio stream. The quality of the recording was good, and it was really uncanny to point the pen at words written on the paper and hear what actually happened. The 1 gigabyte model can record 100 hours; the two gigabyte model can record 200 hours.

This device is one more sign of what I've been calling ambient computing, the interpenetration of computing with the physical world via sensors. I've tended to focus on cloud computing ambience, though, and this is a personal device. It's also a fulfillment of projects such as Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits, the idea that decreasing storage costs will eventually mean that we'll have the ability to record our entire lives in digital form.

It's also a sign that the physical computing revolution, whose alpha-geek stage we've been documenting in Make:, is entering its next phase, in which entrepreneurial opportunities emerge. It's so wonderful to see an invention that is so much "on trend" that in retrospect it seems inevitable, yet in its first appearance is so unexpected and remarkable!

I've put in my pre-order. This is the coolest device I've seen in a long time. Especially cool that they are opening it up as a platform, with an SDK for developers to build new applications for the device.

Marcel Proust, Alpha Geek

Tim recently sent around a recommendation for The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage's enjoyable look at a decidedly pre-Silicon Valley tech boom, although the inflated promises of that period (i.e., the telegraph will bring about world peace) remind us of some of the more outlandish dotcom-era claims.

Tim's note about Standage's book (which I recommend as well) provides a good reminder of how each new generation brings new technologies, but each generation seems to recreate older technologies as well. Streaming media, for example, reminds me of a service I enjoyed as an elementary-school student in the '70s, when I would dial a phone number (and I mean that literally; touch-tone dialing had yet to come to my part of New Jersey) and listen to a radio station on our hard-wired AT&T-owned phone for as long as I could get away with it.

Turns out I was no trailblazer, as I've learned from my holiday-week reading, William C. Carter's generous and rigorous biography of novelist Marcel Proust. In Marcel Proust: A Life, Carter writes that, in 1911, "Proust subscribed to a new service that brought opera, concerts, and plays into the home. For a fee of sixty francs a month, the subscriber received a theatrophone, a large black ear-trumpet connected through telephone to eight Paris theaters and concert halls... Although the sound quality was often poor, the instrument was a great boon to someone like Proust, who loved opera and the theater but who rarely felt well enough to attend performances. He often listened, even when the sound was so bad he could barely hear the words." Sounds a bit like RealAudio 1.0, circa 1995.

So, gentle readers, do you have any thoughts on what from 100 years ago might be the hot new technology of 2008?

Visualization of names and words used by Presidential candidates

The New York Times has a really interesting Circos/Clusterball style visualization of the names used by US presidential candidates to refer to opponents in the debates preceding the Iowa caucuses. (Link)

A graph of common words used by candidates in the debates is available as well:

Link (via information aesthetics & visualmethods.blogspot.com)

OLPC and the Kindle

When I saw the One Laptop Per Child device, I just had to tinker around with it. So during an hour-long train ride home I explored the little OLPC and was quite impressed. I was impressed because it is a fully functional computer, with a screen size a tad larger than the Kindle from Amazon. I don't think these two devices will compete with each other for market position, but they both have some features that put them in a similar category. And they both cost $399, although the OLPC's price buys two devices -- one for a youngster somewhere in the world who will make good use of it, and one for you to help get more apps built for it.

Both the Kindle and OLPC can browse the Web. However, the Kindle was designed to browse Amazon's library of content to purchase. The OLPC has a Firefox browser and it truly operates like it was meant to browse. The Kindle uses Whispernet from Amazon, which is quite impressive in its coverage. It is not painfully slow either. I have read GMail with the Kindle and checked basketball scores on NBA.com. I did a quick bit of math. If you are paying roughly $49 a month for an internet service provider, you could buy a Kindle and use Whispernet for free. After about eight months, your Kindle would have paid for itself in the savings you were shelling out for an ISP. I am not going to do this myself, but it is possible for low-volume browsing and internet useage. I am hoping the browser delivered in the Experimental section of the Kindle improves with time. I believe Amazon has a good opportunity to make this a very compelling device, even more than it already is. I do like the reading quality of the Kindle. The reading experience is excellent if you keep your thumbs off the sides. I have well-trained/controlled thumbs now. I have a Sony Reader as well and, I am sorry to say, that it just does not compete well with the Kindle's intuitiveness and readability.

But the unexpected entrant is the OLPC. I know it is not intended to be an e-book reader solely, but it does that function very well. I logged into our Safari Books Online and -- voila. A nice experience. For a couple of weeks now, I have been trying to get my Kindle to get into Safari and have had no luck. The OLPC was a snap. I did have some DNS issues so I used the IP address of Safari [193.194.158.109] and that resolved things. The OLPC has another competitive advantage over the Kindle as far as reading e-content -- the OLPC can handle PDF documents just fine. This is a huge advantage. Open any PDF you like and it works. The Kindle requires that you send a document to Amazon for conversion if you want to get it on your device. If you navigate to a PDF with the Kindle browser, it just craps-out because it was not meant to read PDF. I do not understand why the Kindle does not read PDF [the Sony Reader reads PDF quite well] other than Amazon wants to force the proprietary mobi-format on publishers and consumers. This gets me steamed. We have Apple with its wonderfully loaded iPhone forcing buyers to use one cellular service. We have Amazon not accepting the standard PDF format of web documents. Whatever happened to innovators shooting for ubiquity rather than lock-in and lock-down? I just don't get these two cases.

That leaves me with the wonderfully crafted and delivered OLPC. What's not to like about it? Okay, my fingers are too fat for the keyboard, because it was designed for a younger and smaller person. But the keyboard is no more difficult to get use to than a Kindle, Blackberry, iPhone or other small device. And actually it has many function keys that take you directly to menus, scrolls, and page jumps. So one of the big wins is also the business of the OLPC. It is open. It is Linux underneath. It is not going to lock you in, down, or out.

This first picture is the Kindle and OLPC side-by-side. Click to see a larger shot.

The second shot is the OLPC reading Safari Books Online content, Javascript The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition

The bottom line: Both of these devices are going to be around for along time. I hope that Amazon sees the potential of their device and realizes that OPEN is going to get it more consumers laying down $399 than a closed proprietary device. It will also ensure that a publishing ecosystem will build around them. As for the OLPC: here's to you folks. Nicely done. A wonderfully crafted device, a noble vision, and an Open mindset. Brilliant!

Life on the Ice

I imagine that many readers of this blog are fans of Kim Stanley Robinson's books, including Antarctica, so I thought I'd pass along news that Travelers' Tales has just published a collection of real life stories from Antarctic scientists and workers, entitled Antarctica: Life on the Ice. There's a nice review in the Antarctic Sun, the hometown newspaper of the U.S. Antarctic program.

Visualize your Internet use with Packet Garden

Packet Garden is an app that watches your Internet traffic and builds a private world that you can later explore.

Packet Garden is open source software, written in Python by New ZealanderJulian Oliver. Runs on Ubuntu, Windows, and Mac OS X. For more by Julian, see his blog or Select Parks, the hub for open source game and art projects that he founded.

Stephen Fry: Now Blogger and Gadget-Head

I love Stephen Fry. Fabulously intelligent, interesting, and brilliantly talented, he's the person I'd most like to meet. Given that the chances of our meeting stay at zero with every day I don't travel to Norfolk and trespass on the set of his TV show, I'm chuffed to discover that he has a blog. And not just a "today I met this celebrity, dined at this splendid restaurant, and flew to the premiere of this pop culture belch" blog, but something of interest to us geeks.

His first post is an incredible long and coruscating review of a pile of would-be iPhone-killers. I've selected a few gems for your pleasure, but I recommend getting a cup of tea or coffee and sitting down to enjoy the whole thing. He's not just good to read, but he hones in on the strengths and weaknesses of each device. Enjoy!

Since then, in one of the most astonishing public suicide attempts in the history of this industry, Palm have produced a item that EVEN I DO NOT WANT, the Foleo. If it’s got a chip in it, and a keyboard, and WiFi and a screen and I haven’t sent off for one, then by God you’d better believe it’s in trouble. Though mind you, knowing me, I probably would have bought one in the end. [...]

Windows for Mobiles is certainly better than Windows for PCs or, God help us all, Vista, but it is still an insulting offering. The feeling, as with all things Microsoft, is that all design features and functions are there to suit MS rather than to delight, enthuse and compel the user. Compromise, short-cuts, inconveniences, vestigial residues - no one responsible is likely to pat themselves on the back for the design or the s’ware engineering, any more than the architect or project manager of a 60s council flat is likely to point it out with pride as he rides by with his grandchildren. You’re only on this planet once - do something extraordinary, imaginative and inspiring. [...]

Mine arrived at the beginning of this week. What a crushing, lowering, fury-inducing disappointment. Just how dumb are the software engineers, designers and marketeers at Sony E? Believe me, I so wanted this to be good. Instead, it is nothing more than a gesture, an under-considered, badly implemented nod at the market. It’s an M600i running Symbian v 9.1 and UIQ v 3.0 equipped with a camera and WiFi.. That’s it. No attempt has been made to alter the UI or the OS. The result: the clumsiest, most asinine method of internet connection ever devised (yes it has a wizard to download your network’s APN etc., but that’s not enough) comes unaltered, the bugginess and the slowness too have all have been inherited, and the short battery life. Did they really think slinging on a 3.2MP camera and WiFi would make a desirable device, let alone an iPhone killer? [...]