Media Technology

Google released their Google Maps service today — one look shows yet again that interface design is one of their serious strengths. The maps are just plain pretty, the drop-shadows keep you from confusing map & overlay and they’ve even managed to glide to new positions rather than blank the screen and reload when you recenter. The link to directions even includes the zoom level and where you were centered on the screen. It’s also fast, and apparently the client-side stuff is all done in Javascript — I’m impressed.

If I were any of the other mapping services I’d be scrambling to catch up right about now…

I just started playing with Disk Inventory X, a nice treemap diskspace visualizer for Mac OSX. (Windows users can use the older and more complete WinDirStat to do something similar.)

Disk size has nothing to do with importance, but I still get a weird feeling seeing my music collection as a big blue block some 50 times bigger than the project I’ve been working for almost two years. Now I wish I had a treemap for how I spend my time during the day…

Update: and for Linux there’s KDirStat, which is apparently older than either of the other two…

Technology Review recently declared they are trying to get back to being more science & analysis, less breathless hype. Let’s hope David Talbot’s Terror’s Server in the February ’05 issue was just still in the pipeline before they made that decision. Here’s the letter to the editor I just sent:

David Talbot’s “Terror’s Server” was the kind of rambling, analysis-free hand-wringing we came to expect from the mainstream press in the mid 90s, not from Technology Review in 2005. Talbot’s main point that terrorists are (gasp) using the Internet is obvious and trivial. Terrorists are also using telephones, SUVs, credit cards, textbooks and mail-order catalogs to plan their attacks. Why is there no call for the automobile industry to “fix” their terrorist SUV problem?

The Net amplifies individual voices, be they the voices of civil rights activists, cancer survivors or terrorists. The real issue is not whether terrorists use the Net (just like everyone else does these days), but whether society is better off allowing individual voices to be so easily heard. This is an important debate with historic undertones; Gutenberg’s press amplified Luther’s 95 theses and led to hundreds of years of war and bloodshed — and to the Protestant Reformation and Renaissance. Please, next time address the issue directly instead of simply hiding behind the terrorism flag.

Bradley Rhodes
PhD, MIT Media Lab (2000)

The Makyoh (Japanese for “magic mirror”) is an ancient art that can be traced back to the Chinese Han Dynasty (206 BC — 24 AD). They were made of metal, usually with an intricate pattern carved or cast on the back and the front polished to a mirror finish. The front looks like a smooth reflecting surface, but when sunlight or other bright light is reflected onto a wall a glowing pattern emerges. Usually the image seen would be the same as the image on the back of the mirror, often an image of the Budah or other focus for meditation. The art later moved to Japan (especially Kyoto), and after missionaries brought Christianity into Japan in the mid 1500s many mirrors were made with secret images of the Holy Cross or of Christ. Because Christianity was punished at the time, many Christians wore such magic mirror as a secret sign of their faith.

I just received a modern makyoh from the Grand Illusions toy shop, a wonderful site for exotic, clever and scientific toys (and they now accept PayPal). One thing I love about Grand Illusions is that they include videos and articles about how their toys work, including the magic mirror. Much as I respect the secrecy magicians have for their tricks, I much prefer the magic scientists perform — real magic isn’t spoiled when you know the secret, it’s even more amazing.

I’ve posted a few other pictures on my pictures page.

I just finished hooking up voice over IP so it services all my house phone ports, with the Motorola Voice Terminal hiding in the closet along with the house’s patch panel, DSL modem and firewall router where it belongs. I can’t say it was totally painless, but most of the effort was just gathering the right tools, connectors & knowledge. Useful resources included this general phone wiring primer and this one specifically on how to distribute VoIP throughout a home. Since I was starting kinda from scratch, I also found this basic page on how the heck to use a punch-down tool useful.

DocBug Exclusive — Google revolutionized the internet. Now it is hoping to do the same with inter-galactic communication.

The company behind the US-based internet search engine looks set to launch a service that turns unused bandwidth into a powerful signal generator capable of sending advertisements to the far reaches of space. Thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable laid during the boom of the late 90s now lies dormant, and this so-called dark fiber capacity is available at a price that industry experts say is ripe for being turned into a giant planet-sized billboard.

Some believe this is the future for Google

Jules Hewlett, senior analyst at a company that talks to reporters about technology, said: “From an intergalactic advertising perspective there is a big appeal in the fact that Google is a search operation — and of course the Google brand is a huge draw.” We’re not sure what he means by this, but he’s very smart so we’ve quoted him anyway.

Though the project is hush-hush, Google spilled the beans about their new project by posting a job advertisement on their website that calls for a “strategic negotiator” to help the company to provide a “global backbone network” — in other words, an Earth-sized Light Bright.

By investing in capacity, Google could reroute packets to certain parts of the world, lighting up the dark fiber to spell out words or even full phrases that would be visible against the darkness of space for light-years.

Although Google is reluctant to talk about its plans, off the record people close to the company have called reports of the plan “mere speculation,” “baseless rumor” and in one case “the biggest load of malarky I’ve heard since The Times reported we were coming out with telephone service.”

Media Lab Europe is closing its doors after just 5 years (here’s the NYT article, subscription required). I know folks who were there, but I don’t have any deep knowledge of what went down (besides the obvious problem of opening just before the tech crash in 2000), so I’ll just raise a Guinness wish them all a happy landing wherever their next gig lies.

I still think the MP3 player could become a satellite-radio killer, but in the meantime Trax Technologies is coming out with a satellite-radio-to-iPod dock…

Some time ago I posted about the ongoing debate between David Hockney and our Cheif Scientist, David Stork, about whether the great painters of the 15th century “cheated” by secretly using optical devices like the camera obscura. Hockney thinks the realism one suddenly sees in paintings around 1430 proves that such devices were used, even though no record of them can be found (they were secret, remember?). Stork thinks it’s hogwash, and has both proposed numerous ways the realism could have been acheived using technology known to exist at the time and pointed out reasons the optical techniques Hockney proposes wouldn’t have worked anyway.

Now the New Scientist is reporting that evidence of one alternative technology Stork suggested has been found:

Separate findings will be published in March by Thomas Ketelsen, a curator at the Museum of Prints, Drawings and Manuscripts in Dresden, Germany. Hockney has argued that the similarity between Jan van Eyck’s drawing Portrait of Niccolò Albergati and a larger oil painting of the same name could only have been achieved using optical projections. But using a microscope, Ketelsen has found evidence of previously unseen pinpricks in the drawing – suggesting the copying method was mechanical, not optical. He suggests that a type of reducing compass called a “reductionzirkel” might have been used.

Falco points out that the pinpricks could have been made 50 years after van Eyck’s death by someone wishing to copy it, or even 500 years after. “Holes can’t be carbon dated,” he says. But Stork thinks the mounting evidence can’t be ignored. “The evidence doesn’t support Hockney,” he says.

“The debate is fascinating,” Hockney says. “But it cannot end just because someone found pinpricks.”

Hockney’s argument was never strong to begin with, but it’s starting to sound like he’s join the ranks of creationists, alien abduction followers and conspiracy nuts. If so, he may as well have ended his last sentence after the fourth word…

To quote a coworker of mine, “Apple’s going to make unspeakable amounts of money on these.” I’m especially glad to see the Mac mini, since it’s exactly what I’ve been searching around for as the media hub of a new entertainment center I’m putting together now that I’m no longer in a one-bedroom apartment. Cheap ($499 starting, a little over $600 for the bluetooth & 80G version I want), small (6.5″ x 6.5″ x 2″), and quiet — it’ll be my combination CD jukebox, DVD player and MIDI munger for my keyboard.

As for the iPod Shuffle, I could really see this becoming the satellite-radio killer. If the iPod is your music collection in your pocket and the iPod mini is your jogging music / music wherever you want, the iPod Shuffle is going to be the daily download. Mix it with iMix, Wiretap Pro and/or a Radio Shark and you’ve got a personalized commercial-free radio with a “next song” feature. You miss out on realtime info like traffic reports (which really should go to your GPS/nav system anyway) and breaking news, but how much news breaks between the time I leave for my commute and arrive at my destination? I’d also miss out on Howard Stern if I don’t go with satellite radio, but for me that’s a feature, not a bug.

As is traditional, Apple’s stock is down almost %6 as of this writing. Me? I just put in a buy order…