Just got back from Sarah and Aaron’s wedding on Orcas Island. It was lovely!

Everyone has been posting about the Radiohead “data visualization” video on google. I thought the interactive part was kinda nice too.

Kinda makes me wish I had worked harder on my Dustbunnies project.

Anyway, it’s pretty cool that Radiohead is releasing the how-to and the data for the video. If art likes to ape science, we should publish like them too!

Koichiro Tsujikawa is a video artist from Japan who’s done a lot of Cornelius‘ (whose work I love) music videos. Here’s an experiment that I particularly like:

Cornelius, who took his stage name from the helpful primate in Planet of the Apes, uses very short samples. I think the term people who know what they’re talking about is “micro-sampling”. Obviously, I don’t know much about music at all. This style is a lot like those examples I showed in a previous post. Very thinly sliced time.

Anyway, I’ve finally gotten on the twitter wagon. Trying to package up my daily experiences into packets that small is a challenge for me, but it has a strange effect on how one interacts with world. I don’t yet have any real thoughts on this yet… so maybe I should be twittering it.

I saw this on the interwebs a while back, but never got the chance to share. Enjoy!

from Eivind Sorengs lovely portfolio

For work I’m supposed to visualize a recorded conversation. I’ve got no lorem ipsum for this, so I started chatting with javascript Eliza. Transcript follows:

ELIZA: Is something troubling you ?
YOU: I’m supposed to have finished this visualization of a conversation.
ELIZA: Is it because you are supposed to have finished this visualization of a conversation that you came to me ?
YOU: Yeah, I was hoping you could help me with it.
ELIZA: Perhaps I already know you were hoping I could help you with it.
YOU: Wow! That’s even better.
ELIZA: That is interesting. Please continue.
YOU: So I was thinking we could talk and maybe you’d have some insight into how to structure a conversation.
ELIZA: Were you really ?
YOU: Yes.
ELIZA: You seem to be quite positive.
YOU: Well, now I’m not so sure.
ELIZA: Do you enjoy being not so sure ?
YOU: Sometimes it’s fun.
ELIZA: What does that suggest to you ?
YOU: An unhappy childhood?
ELIZA: I’m not sure I understand you fully.
YOU: That makes two of us.
ELIZA: Does talking about this bother you ?
YOU: Nope. Am I making you uncomfortable?
ELIZA: Would you want to be making I uncomfortable ?
YOU: Are you Rastafarian?
ELIZA: Why are you interested in whether I am rastafarian or not ?
YOU: I’m not. Sorry, that was a bad joke.
ELIZA: Do you know anyone else who is not ?
YOU: A few. Present company excluded, of course.
ELIZA: Please go on.
YOU: No thanks. Let’s talk about my project.
ELIZA: You are being a bit negative.
YOU: I’m just changing the subject.
ELIZA: Is it because you are just changing the subject that you came to me ?
YOU: I came to you to talk.
ELIZA: Do you came to anyone else ?
YOU: That’s really personal.
ELIZA: I’m not sure I understand you fully.
YOU: That seems to be the major problem here.
ELIZA: Tell me more about that.
YOU: If your “chinese menu” had more items that were relevant to things I was actually interested in, then perhaps we might have a meaningful conversation.
ELIZA: What would you do if my “chinese menu” had more items that was relevant to things you was actually interested in ?
YOU: Spend more time drinking alone, probably.
ELIZA: What does that suggest to you ?

I remember a site long ago that had an Eliza screen play writing contest. If anyone knows where that is, I’d be grateful.

One of the perks of working here is the free gym membership. The gym has squash courts and I love to play. Yesterday I got demolished by a coworker and now I’m so sore I can’t even walk up stairs. It was pretty fun.

For those unfamiliar, squash is sort of like racquetball. It’s played in a four walled court. There are two important differences, though. First the ceiling and part of the walls are out of bounds. (You can see the redlines marked in the video.) Secondly, the ball is a “dead” rubber ball. This means that spin and power have less importance in this game than placement and position. The game, therefore, become a slower more and gradual strategic accummulation than a series of outright winners. Points can last for minutes. It’s this “slow” pace that I really enjoy.

The video features Jonathan Powers former #1 in the world and the son of the Dartmouth’s squash coach. Those guys make this sport look like walking. On the other hand, I have to haul ace to move around the court.

Watched Battle Royale again last night.

It held up to a second viewing. Mostly because of some pretty amazing scenes and dialog. Some of the images from that movie are incredibly surreal. My favorites are when there’s a slow pan across an overgrown landscape with two school kids dying like a campy version of the Hudson River School. Oh and the scene where this artwork is unveiled is actually one of the great film moments in history. (This isn’t the scene, just the music and some stills.)

I am reminded how extraordinarily difficult it is to make something purposefully bad that is also entertaining. Battle Royale 2 is an example of something that is purposefully bad that is, in fact, just bad. I can’t unwatch that one.

I’ve also been watching all of the original Aeon Flux episodes which are out on dvd. Those things are great. There’s so much interesting architecture in there. Which oddly reminded me of this architects work (stolen from Bryan). Pretty awesome.

According to the bookshelf blog, the Adobe Bookstore in San Fran will organize it’s entire collection by color. (for a week)

Eric, as I recall, does something similar with his books. He adds a secondary category of size. This way you could ask for the “green book that’s this big”. If you’re a visual person who’s got a lot of design books, this system makes a lot of sense.

On the other hand, K organizes her books first by category: philosophy, fiction, poetry, art, then by date of original publication. Which, when you see them on the shelves, especially in the philosophy section, is really awesome. You begin to get a sense of who was thinking what when. And when you ask a question like “why didn’t Descartes think of this or that”, you realize that that book comes farther down the line.

I guess a little of the computer scientist in me has bubbled up. I think it’s because I’m spending a lot of time looking at data visualization techniques these days. Really great visualizations allow you to ask questions you not only didn’t have the answer to, you didn’t think of asking. Oh, and they look pretty too.

Anyway, my system of organization is a stack. The top of the stack are things I’m reading; the bottom of the stack are things I need to store.

That and the internet. A lot of what I own is digital. My coworkers described digital organization as having only two possibilities in the WIMPS (Windows Icons Mouse Pointer) model. Either you’re the type of person who organizes everything into folders. Or you have a desktop with everything on it. But in both modes people use the space of the screen to remember where things are. Trash bin’s always in the top left. My personal files are in the lower right. There’s a number of new systems which take advantage of spatial and bodily memory to organize things, but they haven’t hit the software I use yet. Which I why I need to write my own version of Google Reader. (Ahem, weekend project.)

For George Carlin.

At one point I realized that much of the advice my father had given me when I was young was stolen from a George Carlin stand-up routine. It was one of the happier moments.

Got my new rubber from paddlepalace the other day and installed it last night.

The packaging design looks incredible. It makes me wonder what other sports graphics could be copied– bowling or darts maybe? In the same way that skateboarding and a particular set of graphic styles found it’s way into everywhere.

Side note: A few weeks ago I saw that Indiana Jones movie. Ughz. The only good part was this preview. Amazing. Fincher please don’t disappoint me. In a wierd bit a synchronicity: kottke also posts about the movie.

I’ve had a dreamy weekend.

It was sunny here in Seattle, which doesn’t happen often. And although I’ve been living in this house for over a week, I haven’t really gotten a chance to explore Fremont (my neighborhood in Seattle).

Well, I did this weekend and it was freaking sweet. There’s a canal connecting Salmon Bay to Lake Union 3 blocks away where I can take Mattie swimming. We watched a tug pull a house boat into the city and were wierded out by some really aggro birds. (I’ll have to take some pictures… it’s Hitchcockian.) Along the canal is the Burke Gilman trail which has super running paths along the water.

In town, there’s a bunch of great bars, restuarants, and little shops. On Sundays there’s a market that takes over a street next to the canal.

And get this, 2 blocks away there’s a chocolate factory, that has free tours… with samples. A Chocolate Factory.

Anyway, today I feel like I won the golden ticket.

I’ve never really though of chess as a spectator sport, although I know in some countries/tournaments it is, but I’ve actually thought of it more as an annotated sport. And with digital tools and digital games becoming more the norm. I’d like to see more of these annotated events, but perhaps for content you wouldn’t ordinarily expect.

For example, I’m a big fan of facehunter, a “street fashion” blog. Think the Sartorialist, but for hipsters. Now that they’ve got a facehunter show, I can get my fix all the time. But it’s a tragedy that there’s not annotation or commentary that shows how they made their decisions (which aren’t random… look at the men’s pants on the facehunter blog).

A playback that included commentary on a shopping trip may seem like retail pr0n, but shopping is precisely one of those activities that has a hundred tiny decisions that, here and there, could be made explicit. Although, a call for annotation is not to say that we should be all academic about it, S,M,L,XL and Cathy Horyn (ty, Adrian) have done and are doing that just swimmingly.

Informal annotation and augmentation could be really helpful and even entertaining; for shopping online, the best we have right now is the rating, recommendation and reputation systems of ebay,amazon,etc; wouldn’t it be great if those systems could be read in a more narrative fashion?

Kanye’s blog is pretty much a shopping blog, informality check (He’s such a style monger that he’s even started “shopping” for women. Seriously, he’s a cultural force, but like P-Diddy before him– I’m not a fan.) But no narrative.

There’s thingsI’veboughtthatIlove, with Mindy Chockalingham of Dartmouth and The Office fame contributing. Some narrative, but not from experts and not really a good choose-your-own-adventure type story.

The closest thing I saw was on America’s Next Top model, where the models go look at Japanese street fashion, then have to paraphrase it with purchases at select businesses all around Tokyo.

I’m getting off topic. Time to sleep.