August 31, 2004
Governator Speaks
Anyone who complains about the economy are girlymen.
I want to terminate terrorism.
I'll be back.
August 30, 2004
Roll your own coverage
In response to Matt's post about rolling your own newspaper covering the Republican National Convention, I cooked up a RNC News Page using Magpie RSS and some links from his site.
August 19, 2004
Customizable mapping software
Herself asked yesterday if I could develop a website that gives taxi directions based on neighborhood landmarks which are often essential when navigating from a cab and making sure you are not getting taken for a ride.
This is an interesting idea which has been thought of before, if I am not mistaken. Somewhere I have a link to the sites in question, and if I find them I will link them. Sites such as Flickr and del.icio.us, which handle photos and links respectively, leave it up to the users to tag each image or link without any top down hierarchy. There are only so many ways you can tag science articles or self portraits. Both systems self-organize without a strict taxonomy overhead. Yet, with mapping, it would be easy to allow a strict taxonomy and user defined tagging. Country, state, county, city, and even neighborhood could form a basic taxonomy which user defined tagging could overlap.
The biggest obstacle, it would seem, would be the agreement of landmarks and features. First, you would need to seed a database with a bunch of people's idea of what landmarks actually are and what they look like. The Catholic Church on the corner, the Red Barn, etc all have addresses, or at the very least, a latitude/longitude that could be machine read. The physical address of the Catholic Church (1 Peter Way) would be linked to the user term, "Big Church on the Corner." Perhaps when we all have gps enabled phones with cameras we could email photos with gps data to a into the database and automate the process.
Once you have all of this data in the system, the problem becomes the issue of "bad data." Duplicate addresses, names, etc would plague the system. Not to mention the entries which would be joke entries (because it will happen). To combat this bad data, a system of flagging entries a la Craig's List and some sort of rating system would need to be implemented. Both these systems have a high chance of being gamed, so rating and flagging must be combined with IP and user records. Even then, the system will be gamed, so other ways to secure the data validity would need to be developed. Perhaps not every landmark would be eligible to be rated at the same time, or new landmarks would have a grace period (in terms of rating and history) before it is introduced into the main pool of landmarks.
Finally, a good AI algorithm would have to be written to take all of the landmarks, mapping data, and preferred routes and decide which is the best. I guess if we are going through all of this trouble, getting access to the road based traffic data (those inductive loops set in the pavement) to further add data points for the AI to use, along with historical trends would be useful. This would mean that the "most correct" route would change throughout the day and throughout the year based on vehicle throughput, closures, construction, etc. All of this data take together, you could make paths based on mileage, vehicle throughput, or by landmarks you designate.
Will this ever happen? Probably not. But parts are already here. We have Mapquest based on Navteq data, phone cameras (which have gps transmitters - but we can't access them), and computing power. We have already benefited from this research already - most major cities have central traffic centers, with traffic modeling and (primitive) AI making decisions. Yet, a commercially viable system we have described is not ready for prime time. Someone steal this idea and make it ready, just give me a free membership.
August 18, 2004
Bloomberg offers coupons to peaceful protesters
Bloomberg offers coupons to peaceful protesters. What the hell is he thinking? I have visions of, "Let them eat cake have free coupons!" I am pretty sure that the crowds who are coming to NYC to protest have no desire to go to Olive Garden or fucking Applebees. How insulting! On one side you have a large group proclaiming the need for change, and on the other freaking coupons! COUPONS! On the other hand, the Whitney does have a good show going on now.
August 17, 2004
The Days, brought to you by...
Who knew that ABC's new Sitcom, The Days, was actually writen and produced by advertising executives? The company in question is called MindShare, which describes themselves as "global media company," but represents Unilever (which manufactures food) and Sears (which play prominent roles in The Days). To keep costs down, MindShare brought in unknown actors; our favorite character, due to years of evolution, is Natalie Christine Day played by Laura Ramsey. Laura's only other work as an actress was in that little-known film, The Real Cancun. Nice. I wonder if that is how they kept costs down.
On another note, I wonder if teenage girl's body issues (which stem partly from the media) are twisted by the continual portryal of teenage girls on television by older women. At 22, Laura Ramsey is able to play a teenager, but her sex appeal and grace are facets of her maturity. Look at the other "teen" shows for example: One Tree Hill has Hilarie Burton and Bethany Joy Lenz who play 17 year olds and who are 22 and 23, repectivley. Or Dawson's Creek who featured Katie Holmes who was 20 at the time playing a freshman. Or That 70's Show which features Laura Prepon playing (at the time) a freshman and who was 18. There is no "secret cabal" in Hollywood who are bent passing off more mature older women as younger girls; but the effect I think is the continual acceleration of youth - especially girls - into hyper sexualized women.
Whether or not this is good or bad, I am not sure. Youth has always had a sort of sexual being to it; Henry the VIII married Kathryn Howard when she was 16. Beautiful youth is nothing new, but I wonder if the overabundance of Baby Boomers who are vainly trying to relive their youth are also accelerating the sexualization of youth.
August 6, 2004
the Web is the sum of all human knowledge plus porn
"...the Web is the sum of all human knowledge plus porn."
August 5, 2004
Design your own Hell
General asshats
Circle I Limbo
Hipsters
Circle II Whirling in a Dark & Stormy Wind
Objectivists
Circle III Mud, Rain, Cold, Hail & Snow
Creationists
Circle IV Rolling Weights
Scientologists
Circle V Stuck in Mud, Mangled
River Styx
Republicans
Circle VI Buried for Eternity
River Phlegyas
NAMBLA Members
Circle VII Burning Sands
George Bush
Circle IIX Immersed in Excrement
Osama bin Laden
Circle IX Frozen in Ice
We kid. Republicans shouldn't really be on this list.
August 4, 2004
Words of wisdom
"Son, in this world, everything is possible."
- The Drycleaning Lady
August 3, 2004
Gehry trapped
NOTE: This is an article I am fleshing out, and I posted some of it to Metafilter about Frank O. Gehry, and style.
I really think that the problem with Frank Gehry, is that he is trapped in his fame. Once he completed the Guggenheim Bilbao, and everyone went nuts over it, that is all he has been allowed to do. Client's love that stuff: it is flashy without being terribly earth shattering, his designs make for fairly pretty pictures, and for awhile institutions who had "graduated" to the next just had to have a Gehry building. So, there are literally hundreds of Bilbao's around the world, with different programs (internal space requirements), different locations, different users, all built at a different point in time.
It is if Corbusier's Modernism (big M, the 1930's German version of Modernism) was taken out of storage, given a new coat of paint, and unleashed on the world. Le Corbusier (not to mention Mies van der Rohe) were champions of a modernism that was beyond time and place, and which extolled the virtue of modern technology. Gehry is almost a photo negative of this idea; Gehry's buildings have no contextual frame - both in time and space, do not take into account human occupation, and (when we get down to it) are merely surface creatures. Program spaces are manipulated and then wallpaper, in many cases (expensive) titanium and stainless steel, are applied to that exteriority.
Corbusier's fetishism of the luxury ocean liner, the train, concrete grain elevators has been interchanged with Gehry's reliance on CATIA software (3d positioning software), computer modeling, and stainless steel. Both Corbusier and Gehry reacted to technological progress; Corbusier responded to the horrors of mechanized warfare of World War I and Gehry responded to the acceleration of the computer in design. Corbusier's city for a million people and Plan for Paris could be built anywhere; and that was the point. Many of Corbusier's designs employed devices, such as pilotis (short columns) and large squares in which the buildings were placed, in an attempt to bring order to the unordered. The building, as an object, in a perfect field. Gehry places the building, as an object, but in an imperfect field. Yet, bracket Gehry's buildings, and any single building could have been built anywhere else.
The tabla rasa has come full circle, yet tweaked by Post Modern sensibilities.
Gehry and Corbusier diverge, of course, on many counts. Where Corbusier seemed to grow from a restrictive geometry and ordering system to a more playful modernism, Gehry creates no organizational system for his blobies to operate in. There is no "normal" for the "abnormal" blobs of his to juxtapose. Gehry places his buildings in the heterogeneous landscape because he knows he can no longer control the land.
For example, Corbusier's Villa Savoy operates in a very ordered geometry and organization, with a few objects breaking free of the organizational field. Gehry creates no such rigorous interplay between the rigid and flexible; it is literally all play. Which might sound great, but think of the suburban sprawl, where every house tries to project its own identity, and you get a Geography of Nowhere. Gehry does operate on a type of internal organization, developed from the program brief, yet this internal organization is suspended when the outer wallpaper is suspended over the spaces.
Gehry freely admits manipulating program spaces for aesthetic value - which is fine - but should not be the base of a design-wide organization scheme. There is something glorious in the formal manipulations by Gehry, but the intellectual underpinnings of his work I believe to be weak, especially his one-size-fits-all mentality. He is the great McMuseum builder of our time.