One Trick Pony

WebQuests are the greatest lesson format ever conceived, right? They will eliminate all ignorance in the world within our lifetime, raising up a generation of creative, thoughtful, clear-headed superhumans to take our place. OK, now that we all agree on that, it’s time to bring this worldsaving formula into the home as well. To lead the way, I just inflicted HawaiiQuest on my family. Will it turn them into enthusiastic Hawaiianologists who will throw themselves into next week’s trip with encyclopedic knowledge of Oahu? Or will they vote me off the island? Tune in next week.

No, not the real one. Today I came on an article describing someone’s visit to Holyland USA, the decrepit mini-city built by a single obsessed man back in my home town. Holyland was perched on Pine Hill, a 400 foot high lump that I could see from my bedroom window, and through binoculars I could watch busloads of the devout lining up to get a taste of Bethlehem without the jet lag. Holyland was never well built, and began to fall apart almost immediately after its creator’s death in the 80s. By now it’s a dangerous debris field with rebar and plywood sticking out everywhere ready to pierce the uncareful walker. Another site contains the disturbing pictures. All is calm, all is bright… not.

For a cheerier set of images, see this wonderful page of QuickTime VR showing Christmas all over the globe.

Turns out that it’s hard to find a Christmas tree after 4pm on Christmas Eve. Who knew?

We’ve all been so busy this month that I put this off until beyond the last minute. But we had to have a tree, so forged ahead to any store that was still open. At Lowe’s I got a little schefflera just in case I couldn’t find anything else. Then next door at IKEA, I got an artificial tree marked down to $10 for some reason along with some Swedish straw decorations to hang on the schefflera. So instead of the usual 7 foot pine, we had two half-trees. Not bad.

Though I was late for tree shopping, I was earlier than usual with present shopping and did most of it online. I got June a tea set and a George Forman grill so that we can cook together and eat home more often. Alex got a lot of books, including the first Riverworld novel, lessons in Esperanto and Hawaiian, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, and the Lord of the Rings 4-DVD set. Alex picked out Minority Report on DVD for me, which I had already bought for him. Some of the books didn’t arrive in time for Christmas, but they’ll be here soon enough. We got some catnip scented bubble stuff for Pumpkin, who was very blase about it all. We opened most of our presents at June’s Mom’s place and all four of us went to Baleen for a Christmas feast. All in all, a right-sized, low-stress day.

Interesting things I’ve come upon today:

• Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002
• Them Durn Lib’ruls
• EdVisions Cooperative
• Stephen’s Web Referrer System
• Jason Ohler’s Wisdom List

I wonder if there’ll be any Christmas trees left at the nursery?

Just read about Rent-a-scope, a service that will give you control of a telescope in Arizona for $50 per hour. That wouldn’t be bad for an evening’s entertainment if one went into it well prepared with a list of targets. I don’t know how long it takes to slew from one place to another, but it sounds like fun. Maybe we’ll have a sky party here some night from the comfort of our den.

It reminds me of the Telescopes In Education (TIE) project, which was created by Gilbert Clark, who I’ve met several times at the Thacher School summer workshops. Gil noticed an unused telescope going to waste up on Mount Wilson. By hard work and a lot of evangelism, he’s created an opportunity for thousands of kids to be exposed to real science. With most people living in cities with light-polluted skies, programs like this are going to become more and more common.

Are you similar to the other people zooming along the freeway alongside you? Apparently at different times of the day, the tastes of commuters vary. That’s true enough that it’s making it economically useful to change the content of billboards to better match the drivers who can see it. How do they tell who’s who? These High-tech billboards tune in to drivers’ tastes by picking up the radio frequencies that leak out of our car radios.

“The system uses a ‘consumer monitoring system’ developed by Mobiltrak of Chandler, Ariz., to pick up radio waves leaked from the antennas of up to 90 percent of all cars passing by and pinpoint the stations being played. Each station has a typical listener profile derived from detailed consumer surveys. The system will assess the most popular radio station during a given hour and target the ads to those drivers.”

Privacy experts aren’t worried about this since it doesn’t pay attention to individual cars. Yet.

It would be interesting to watch the graph of who’s on the road over the course of a day. As I drive the car pool to High Tech High every morning, am I flanked by other listeners of public radio, soft rock, or country? Maybe they should put up a billboard that actually answers that question. “Attention: you are surrounded by Rush Limbaugh listeners. Don’t expect anyone to let you into their lane.”

Alex learned about Bezier curves in his math/physics class yesterday and came home fired up to do something in Flash to play with them. The end result, which wowed and cowed his classmates today, is an interactive movie in which you can manipulate the four points that define a curve and see what happens.

What a wiz! I’m a proud dad yet again.

“RealViz today released ImageModeler 3.5 for Mac OS X, which offers an innovative and intuitive approach to creating 3D models. It extracts 3D information from photographs and helps users to measure and recreate accurate 3D models using automatic texturing from photographs.

Be still my heart! This looks like the perfect tool to carry out a longstanding dream of mine: to create a 3-D world that recreates my home town as it was 100 years ago. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been collecting postcards of Waterbury…. and I now have over 200 of them. I’ve got images of almost every building downtown. ImageModeler lets you take 2-D photographs, trace them to identify the geometric primitives they’re made of, grab the textures and create a model. The

case study on the site is amazing. In only 16 hours, one guy took photos of several streets full of buildings in San Francisco and turned them into a video flythrough that looks very very real.

This is very exciting, in spite of the $700 price tag. I guess this dream of mine is sparked by whatever hormone kicks in to turn normal middle aged men into model railroad geeks. Now if only days were 36 hours long, I could get around to actually doing this.

Dan McDowell sent me the link to Technical Difficulties, a Flash composition that puts in quiet words a lot of what makes me angry these days. Take a look, and pass it on to your friends.

The Technical Difficulties site includes the national anthem in the background, and that reminds me of one of my favorite pieces by my favorite composer. Back in 1974 for the three weeks that I owned a color TV before it got stolen, my roommates and I used to stay up late just to watch WGBH in Boston sign off. They always played Variations on America by Charles Ives, a short clip of which you can hear from this CD.

What made it memorable was that the music was accompanied by wild patterns swooping across the screen thanks to “video synthesis”, a wacky analog process that involved feeding a video signal back on itself (like aiming a camera at the monitor) and tweaking and colorizing the wavy noise that resulted. This was long before computers could do such things so the effect was mesmerizing. Today, it would be outclassed by any cheesy screensaver but in the twilight weeks of the Nixon Administration, it was quite a wow. I’ve got the Ives music on my hard drive now, and whenever I hear it I’m back in Worcester, I’m 26, and the country is purging itself of an outlaw president. I associate the music with legitimate patriotic pride and with New England. Amazing how music triggers memories.

I’m going to have to be careful about what I say in front of Alex. He’s so quick with PhotoShop that he can whip things up things quicker than I could sketch them on a napkin. We were watching TV a few weeks ago when a Chia Pet commercial came on as part of the annual let’s-buy-crap-no-one-needs-to-celebrate-Jesus season. Offhandedly, I wished aloud for a Chia version of our president. Within minutes, he had created an ad for the product of my whim. Now, if only this creative force could be channeled for the good of humanity!