Windows Live Local - Virtual Earth Technology Preview
In 1994 lot of people thought VRML was cool, but it wasn't cool compared to offline video games and it wasn't useful compared to regular web-page search and browse.
This mockup of Microsoft's Local Live' reminds me of VRML. As a video game, it's crude by the standards of 1994 and as a web app it has none of the design sensibility of Google Maps.
The mockup is from a multi billion dollar company whose most obvious online avenue of attack against Google is local advertising - and the end result is a maps application that allows you to choose a view that superimposes crappy vignettes of the interior of a 'race car' or 'sports car', as you 'drive' around maps. The product substitutes kitsch and gimmickery for ergonomics and usefulness.
I love San Francisco, but when you realize that the Castro Safeway and the Sony Metreon are landmarks, you realize that its a small city. It is the worlds best sleepy seaside town.
One of the two landmarks has some architectural merit, the other is the Metreon, a failed attempt at a French style Mediatek - a multimedia library/art complex.
In the end the Metreon, complete is a shopping mall, and now its being sold to a mall developer.
Metreon's shattered dreams via kottke
I put together a wists list of locations in Greenwich Village, which were frequented by Bob Dylan in the early 60s.
Part of Wists rev 2 which I'm busy working on, Wists maps is being released early for a really cool showcase application which will be live shortly.
What is wists maps?
When you click on 'add to wists' bookmarklet and are in the edit screen before you submit your new item, there is a checkbox at the bottom, marked ‘Map this’. Check this and an address form allows you to attach a map to your wists item. Items with addresses will have a ‘map this’ icon below them.
Automatic location tagging.
When an address is added tags are automatically created or the city and zip, of the form location=zip and location=city.
Automatic address addition.
If you highlight a US address with your mouse, then click the add to wists bookmarklet, after choosing your thumbnail image you will see a dropdown menu in the item edit screen asking you to choose whether to use look up a map for the address automatically.
The dropdown also allows you to use the highlighted text in the description field. This means that you can add text from the page you are bookmarking, just by highlighting text.
Future enhancements.
Wists will soon have a complete map making tool built in, so that you can make your own Google Maps ‘mashups’: favorite restaurants; places to go etc. complete with image icons, as easily as bookmarking a page. In addition we will add full addresses in a new profile page, so that you can view all wists near your location.
The best blonde joke ever meme has resurfaced after a couple of years. You put a link that people are likely to click on - like 'best blonde joke ever' and this links in turn to the same headline which in turn links to it somewhere else again, recursively.
Kafsemo has built an edge labeled graph
Yesterday I snuck out in the afternoon to see a documentary called Desert Wind, an unintentional comic masterpiece.
Have you heard the one about the Belgian the Frenchman and the Canadian in the Desert?
The plot of Desert Wind involves following 13 unlucky Frenchmen, Belgians, Canadians and Swiss as they traipse aimlessly around the Sahara Desert with their sickly looking Swiss therapist. It is presumably set outside and in the desert, since watching paint dry or grass grow would provide pretty stiff competition if you took the film seriously.
For starters, the presence of the sickly man begs the question, wouldn't a real guide rather than a metaphorical one be a less risky choice in the middle of nowhere, with no paddle? In the background are a bunch of bemused Berbers who serve as real guides but only get cameo roles on account of their lack of psychology degrees.
The film opens with hackneyed symbolism, the magnificent 13 writing something that they want to give up on a piece of paper and throwing it into a fire. This all goes to dull plan until the French chef (even the people are cliches) decides that he is going to burn his clothing. At this point, someone in the movie audience audibly laughed - before getting abruptly shushed (it is possibly against the law to make fun of therapy, in New York).
What follows is a bunch of mediocre desert travelogue, interspersed with grown men complaining about their mothers. As they open up more and more, we seem to learn less and less about their characters and personalities. By showing the endpoint of dialog, often accompanied by shots of people weeping, the film ignores the subtlety of less dramatic details, and in doing so erases any context or depth.
After bouts of desert Sumo wrestling and Kendo with duct taped staves, the sickly therapist who has been watching too many Kung Fu movies, encourages the Chef to open up and let go of his emotions. After 2 minutes of vacant grinning, the chef's face begins to contort - we don't know if he is laughing or crying, and by this stage in the film, we know the feeling. When the chef finally collapses his quantum emotional state into floods of tears the sickly therapist continues to ask him to open up. The only avenue open to the chef now is to turn a genuine emotional reaction into a fake one. To satisfy the therapist he produces a truly weird but utterly insincere primal screamy type thing. The sickly man is proud of his patient's progress.
By this stage, if it weren't for the fact that I'm a certified, foaming at the mouth, atheist I'd be clamoring to join the religion of the Berber guides, rather than this self indulgent secular bullshit.
Towards the end of the film, the self parody reaches a triumphant zenith, as the unlucky 13 are told to take their clothes off and describe their relationships with their bodies. The sickly therapist does not lead by example. The camera inches slowly down the first victim's torso - oh no, they can't be - they are actually going to gaze in their navels. Alas, they only talk about their dicks, what a let down.
The last scene has each hapless victim stand on the edge of an escarpment and shout a promise into their audience of nobody. Its a bit like a Bon Jovi pop promo i once saw, except without the swirling helicopter shots that a decent budget buys you, or the screams of adoring fans, just empty, desert silence. Then comes the voice over.
My high school teacher told me that the worst thing you can do to end a story is say it was all a dream. That is, in fact, the second worst way to end a story.
Desert wind ends with 'Their journey is over, but the real journey is just beginning'.
How true! Mine was a two stop subway ride, back downtown.
"Now, however, systems are being discovered and studied which are neither obviously living nor obviously dead, and it is necessary to define these words or else give up using them and coin others."
The role of viruses in the continuous evolution of life is further evidence of the fact that there is no finite line between what is alive and not.
Years from now people will be putting stickers in Kansas schoolbooks saying that viruses are just a theory.
Explosions seem messy, the ultimate destroyers of order. What about the biggest explosions of all, the ones that are responsible for the creation of every single atom in our bodies?
This picture shows what happens if you focus a laser with the same bursting energy as the entire continuous electricity supply of the USA on a pinhead sized representation of the elements within a star, in order to simulate a supernova.
Amazingly, the model reveals fleeting, scale free structure reminiscent of a fractal.
They of the bushy eyebrows and general swarthy appearance.
The usual answer when someone says you look like a famous rockstar is 'I wish I had his/her money'. Somehow, Larry can't say that.
link »
tags: [lookalikes]
Boo.com is relaunching in June.
They have a fantastically witty strapline, presumably created by the people that Pajamas media originally hired, wait for it...
"The Boo is Back"
That's right, the Boo is back, cos Boo.com was so successful the first time it was called 'the Boo' - boooolshit. You can almost hear the distant rumble of discount Aeron chairs.
"Haderer published a 40-page book titled, The Life of Jesus. The book contained a cartoon of Jesus, depicting him as
...a binge-drinking friend of Jimi Hendrix and naked surfer high on cannabis.
Unbeknownst to him, the book was published in Greece. He found out when he received a summons to appear in court in Athens in January, having been charged with blasphemy."
Of course there is absolutely no resemblance between Jesus and a pot smoking hippy.
Cartoonist Faces Jail in Greece Over Jesus Cartoon - TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime
There is a difference between blasphemy and the worship of false prophets. Islam fobids images of Muhammad, lest the images themselves become icons, taking away from the real person or idea. The religion supports iconoclasm by definition. A cartoon is designed to be just that, an iconoclastic image, so it is hardly likely to encourage worship of false prophets.
The cartoon issue is blasphemy enhanced by a general taboo of figurative images. A similar kind of taboo, for example, would mean that if you were brought up in a 'Judeo-Christian' environment the idea of a manual depicting someone like Moses or Jesus performing various sex acts, which would be acceptable in less prudish Asian religions, would shock you. In fact it may even make reading the above statement slightly irritate you. I suspect that the irritation that is felt by people who inherit the Muslim meme is the same but much larger.
The equivalent situation to the outrage over the prophet cartoons in a secular society would be if it were considered a similar affront to be messing around with an image that represents a country i.e. flag burning - and in many countries that is illegal.
Image:Jyllands-Posten Muhammad drawings.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
After Carter first warned about energy problems in 1977 he installed solar panels on the White House roof.
When Reagan took office, he removed the solar panels.
29 years later and the looming energy crisis is finally in the hands of both parties.
In last night's SOTU speach Bush said:
"To change how we power our homes and offices, we will invest more in zero-emission, coal-fired plants; revolutionary solar and wind technologies; and clean, safe nuclear energy."
Perhaps the solar panels should go back up?
As it happens, Carters' original panels were on a roof at Unity College, less than a year ago:
"1992 when a Unity College administrator named Peter Marbach drove our old school bus down to Franconia, VA, to liberate them from a General Services Administration warehouse under the government surplus donations program. "
In February, they posted a message saying to call them:
"If you are interested in the Jimmy Carter Solar Panels, please call our development office at 207 948 3131 ext 302 or email mwomersley[at]unity.edu"
Heh, the originals, recycled, what could be better?
Perhaps someone could pick up the panels and drive to D.C. to symbolically give them back?