From Wired "Cops Test Cannon That Fires Sticky GPS Beacons at Fleeing Cars":

The gizmo, called the StarChase Pursuit Management System, fires sticky GPS transmitters from compressed-air cannons mounted in the front grill of a police cruiser. A backlit control panel allows officers to arm the capsule and launch it at their target; once the projectile is attached to the fleeing vehicle, it starts feeding real-time location data to police HQ over a cellular network. This lets cops fall back and tail the suspect covertly, avoiding dangerous chases.

So utterly Batman.

Wired Blog Danger Room covers the arrival of the robotic soldiers in the streets of Iraq:

Robots have been roaming the streets of Iraq, since shortly after the war began. Now, for the first time -- the first time in any warzone -- the machines are carrying guns.

After years of development, three "special weapons observation remote reconnaissance direct action system" (SWORDS) robots have deployed to Iraq, armed with M249 machine guns. The 'bots "haven't fired their weapons yet," Michael Zecca, the SWORDS program manager, tells DANGER ROOM. "But that'll be happening soon."

Commenter Mike sums it up best: "Specially made for those causes that are worth killing for but not worth dying for." Indeed.

Link

GPS Chimes are wind chimes that are triggered by my proximity to home -- built with Mologogo and a Phidget Servo. Think of it as mile-wide radius around the wind chimes, where my networked presence and GPS location send a virtual breeze to announce my travel home.


More photos, instructions, background info, and source code available here.

After nearly two-years of on-again and off-again play, we've finally defeated Bowser the end of Super Mario World: Super Mario Advance 2. Some call this the best in the series of Mario games, and based on what I've seen I agree -- an amazing mix of emergent behaviour for your protagonist (Mario or Luigi), a diverse landscape with challenging scenes, and enough flexibility and replayability to keep you hooked.

In the end, my double-jointed super GBA son actually did all the work to get to the castle -- but he wouldn't finish the job...as he simply doesn't care about "winning" or completing the game. How wonderfully zen.

Two years is a nice commitment for a game, even off and on. Just think that all three movements and score and parts for this thing took a mere nine months.

Much has been written about blogs and participatory journalism, which I needn't re-tell, but instead point to two great examples: Yesterday there was a bunch of underground fires and explosions that ultimately shut off power to a bunch of homes (including ours). Baristanet, a local blog (no, probably, the local blog), covered it, practically in realtime with a combination of posts and comments. While TV, print and radio did get there -- the locals were there first, covering it for all the other office-bound commuters anxious to find out of their pets were beginning to swelter.

Meanwhile, more and more folks are descending upon the one part of the Patriots operation that is open to the public: training camp. The net-famous Mrs. B (Karen Cardoza) has been providing blow-by-blow training camp diaries before there were blogs, and now she's joined by many others -- including some amazing photos from Erdoboy. There simply is no other time of year that regular fans get get this close to the team -- and the minute-by-minute coverage of the practices (and Ed's photos) rival that of practically any "real" journalist (although Mike Reiss is hard to beat, and he has a press pass).

Omaha!

Modern medicine isn't all ethical dillemas and pharma/insurance exploitation. It's also about getting your medical records as a JPEG on a CD!

This is a picture of my eyeballs -- I guess to be more accurate, my retinas. I went to my eye doctor's appointment to get dialated and to get examed as last year the doctor found a small blind spot in checking my peripheral vision, and then observed a spot on my retina. A referral to a opthamologist confirmed it was nothing to worry about (perhaps it's fairly common?), but to monitor it every year. So here is a shot, straight on, taken with a big white machine (click for more detail):

On my right eye, way way over at nine o'clock is the vitreous tuft -- it looks like a cannoli (click on the image for a bigger view):


Or maybe like a submarine swimming around the corner of the inky depths of ocean. Or a microbe on a giant grape.

Just had to share. I think it's cool I can have pictures of my body. Proctologist, anyone?

Sarah Trigg's artwork is covered by Karen Steen at MetropolisMag:

A directory of fast-food restaurants in the Detroit Metro Airport; a map of Sprint's cell-phone service across the United States; the grid of Northwest Airlines' flight patterns: all of these are organic systems that developed in response to need and efficiency, much like the systems within the human body.

To painter Sarah Trigg, these urban patterns even look a little like cells, dendrites, and organs. Taking inspiration from secondhand surgery textbooks, airport layouts, and fuzzy aerial photos found on the Web, Trigg maps fictive terrains that are part landscape, part bodyscape.
...

Found via kottke.

I've been toying with some concepts about tags, shared tags and the ability to uses tags as an engine for various things...trying to find any sort of emergent behaviour that may mesh well with my various interests. While it's easy through del.icio.us to see the crowd, I'm wondering how I can dig up the wisdom (see also, Clive's Slate article and his recent pong post).


So I tossed together an experiment in processing, using some of the parsing code I had from Shrunq, and a java library called Classifier4J. It grabs each and every URL available from my del.icio.us feed, and parses and classifies each. The result is a 3D representation of my tags, where their Z-location is based upon the "ranking" of the tag -- much like a tag cloud -- with the actual terms used for classification pulsing behind. Once it's loaded you can click to have it grab pages to test, to see how well random webpages match up to the classification that we've created.


I've already written about this, so I'll do an incredibly silly thing, and quote myself:

I've started to amass a bunch of links in my del.icio.us account. It's not just a bunch of random junk, but it's stuff that I made a point of noting that I had to remember -- at least enough to go to del.icio.us to post it. Tag clouds are cool, and it's a nice way to quickly see the tags, and thus, topics that are most interesting to me.

But I wanted to know more about each tag, to know more about what's under each: What makes that topic more important to me than that topic? How are my tags interrelated? Are there things that connect seemingly disperate topics -- such as "buddhism" and "J2ME" and "wifi"? That is, other than me?

There. I make a lousy quote. See the applet in action, read more, or watch the thrilling video. There are certainly some next steps to this -- just not sure exactly what.

If you'd like to check out a cloud brain based on your tags, let me know, I can build it from my laptop. I've thought about building it out so that people can request it online, and my server will automatically queue and create the necessary data files -- but I'll only write that if enough people are interested...

Found via Kottke, this Wired article covers "The Secret Cause of Flame Wars". Actually, not such a secret -- anyone who deals with email constantly, and in delicate situations, knows that it's much to easy to be misinterpreted.

The researchers took 30 pairs of undergraduate students and gave each one a list of 20 statements about topics like campus food or the weather. Assuming either a serious or sarcastic tone, one member of each pair e-mailed the statements to his or her partner. The partners then guessed the intended tone and indicated how confident they were in their answers.

Those who sent the messages predicted that nearly 80 percent of the time their partners would correctly interpret the tone. In fact the recipients got it right just over 50 percent of the time.

Nice to put some research and numbers behind it. It's interesting that the study focuses on email, and not instant messaging. It's easier, in the fragments of discussion that pass in IM, to get across details of expression...that plus the fact that I'm much more likely to toss in a smiley in IM whereas I won't in email.

Declan McCullagh on how the U.S. government is again skirting our own laws and crossing the line of individual privacy:

But the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice have seized on the ability to locate a cellular customer and are using it to track Americans' whereabouts surreptitiously--even when there's no evidence of wrongdoing.

...

This is an unfortunate outcome, not least because it shows that some judges are reluctant to hold federal agents and prosecutors to the letter of the law.

It's also unfortunate because it demonstrates that the FBI swore never to use a 1994 surveillance law to track cellular phones--but then, secretly, went ahead and did it, anyway.

Link to the CNet article.

Update: 3.2.2006: The Justice Department's surveillance requests were denied in both cases (News.com, Declan McCullagh)

Whether or not you agree with Bill Joy (cofounder of Sun and currently with Kleiner Perkins), he is undeniably a fascinating guy. I'm drawn to his writings and interviews, for his sense of humour and sometimes bewildering brilliance.

In this interview available on AlwaysOn, Joy describes different "types of webs", as related to the modality of the user experience. We've certainly heard the concepts about "lean-forward"/"near-web" or "lean-back"/"far-web" (which Steven Johnson attributes to Jobs in his most excellent book "Everything Bad is Good For You"). Joy describes these, and a few more:

"Then there is the far experience, which is that you are leaning back in more of an entertainment mode. It is a different way of experiencing the information. The near experience today is the web through your favorite browser, and the far experience, the passive one, is watching television but the active and interactive one is really video games. We were thinking about the near and the far user interface and really the near web and the far web—because the kind of content you have, the way you interact, your whole body position, your energy, what you want in those two different environments are very different."

...

"...we really liked what Wayne had said and [thought] there is more: There is also the here web, and the here web is the web to your mobile device because it's here, always with you. "

...

"Near, far, and here. The modality of the near web is mouse and bitmap display and menus, and that is the way we've done that. The modality of the far web tends to be joysticks and maybe gestures more generally or some interaction of pushing buttons—whatever we do in when we're playing games or interacting with entertainment. The modality of the here web is still evolving. Mostly it is a touch screen like on my Treo or cursor buttons up and down. It's voice intensive, and it's very personalized, and the screen format is very small. So the kind of information you have on these three webs is very different, and the style you use to interact with them is very different. To us, these seemed to be three very different modalities, three different markets. And then there is clearly a fourth."

Link to read more about the "Weird Web" and the rest of the article.

Got some results from my CVS Camcorder to share. The story goes, of course, that CVS released a "disposable" camcorder for $29.99, and shortly thereafter many enterprising hacks found ways to get the movies off the camera without having to take it back to CVS and pay the processing fee. There's lots of info at camerahacking and MAKE and hackaday, etc.

I got myself one of these cameras once they came out, and only recently ordered an old Palm cable and followed a tutorial on how to properly modify it to connect to the camera. Of course, I was rushing to try to get it done at midnight before we left for Thanksgiving, and my cable was a little different, and my soldering a little too sloppy. Never fear, I stumbled upon an enterprising dude on ebay, offering a finished cable, and he even included a CD with all the software needed. If you're interested in playing with these cameras, but too lazy to do the soldering and cablehacking yourself -- I would totally recommend you get it from webetics, he's done a nice job of putting the stuff together in a package that's quite user-friendly.

Anyhow, the camera is pretty nice. Replaceable AA batteries for power -- with a little sticker saying "do not remove" that covers the jack. Perfect camera for little hands, and without a lot of fuss if you drop it. As I understand it, the cameras have now been altered so that they require a little more hardware fussing on the unit itself...but my unit was ready to roll. And roll it did -- for my five-year-old's first foray into movie-making with a Predator vs. Grave Digger Hot Wheels version of Monster Jam (Windows Media Player, 400k).

From C-Net News.com, an article about homebrewed cellphones:

Surj Patel is building his own cell phone, bit by soldered bit.

...

Patel says he has lost patience with even the slimmest Motorolas and most advanced Nokias. He has been trying to build new features for cell phones for years, and he--like a growing number of other impatient developers--has concluded that phones have to be as flexible as ordinary computers if he's going to make progress.

"I want the phone to be much more open," Patel said. "The world's best research and development lab is all the hackers out there. Enable them, and they'll do it."

...

Patel is helping organize an Emerging Telephony Conference with tech publisher O'Reilly Media in January, where he hopes to show off as many grassroots development projects as he can find.

Man, do I need to comment? How about a simple -- "Hooray!". Go get 'em Surj.

Here's an article in Wired about a friend of mine, Dean Oliver, from elementary school who's now doing statistical analysis for the Supersonics:

After nearly every game, he produces reports for Sonics president and CEO Wally Walker, detailing patterns that elude traditional observation. This research was critical to the team's unexpected success last season.

...

Oliver thinks possession efficiency is basketball's version of on-base percentage. "Teams that score a lot of points don't necessarily win games, and teams that prevent opponents from scoring a lot of points don't necessarily win, either," he explains. "But if you convert a greater percentage of possessions into points than your opponent does, you win games."

You can check out his book, Basketball on Paper, or his site of the same name (he had more hair when I knew him).

How did I miss this? Found on Tim Shey's (re)blog, dolphins that have learned to sing the theme to Batman:

The researchers first had an adult male bottlenose dolphin position itself in front of an underwater sound projector, called a hydrophone, that produced six different 14-kHz, four-second rhythms. The dolphin was rewarded for performing a certain behavior to each rhythm.

....

"The dolphin was reinforced for producing a specific rhythm to a specific object," said Harley. "For example, when we presented him with a 'Batman' doll, he received a fish for producing a specific rhythm — in this case, a short sound and then a long one."

She added, "If you recall the original 'Batman' TV series musical intro you'll probably remember the way they sang 'Bat-maaaaaaaan.'"

The sound file isn't quite as exciting as you might hope. Not so much a bunch of chirping Flippers going "na-na-Na-na-na", as the high pitched simulation of "BATMAN!" at the end of the song.

And, of no relation to dolphins at all, what is the deal with proto-surf-duo Jan & Dean and Batman? This "Batman" song is horrible --


We need the Batman (Batman)
We need the Batman (Batman)
Criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot
So my disguise must be able
To strike terror into their hearts


What's with THE Batman? Bizarro. I love Jan and Dean more than I have an affection for Bruce Wayne, and yet, this is oh-so dissapointing.

Also from The New Scientist, a report of studies finding fractal patterns, or at least self-similar patterns, underlying abstract art:

A TECHNIQUE designed to detect art forgeries using the maths of fractals may also help pinpoint why we instinctively like some abstract paintings more than others - even if we can't put our finger on why.

The abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock famously dripped paint onto large canvasses on the floor, manipulating it into abstract swirls using sticks or trowels. In 1999, an Australian group found that these swirls contained well-defined fractals - patterns that show self-similarity, that is, they are repeated at different magnifications (New Scientist, 5 June 1999, p 11).

The essence of pattern recognition, or self-simularity, as a primary characteristic of appealing art -- whether painting or music -- is not really a revelation.

Even while the charges that modern 20th century music was nothing but random chaos were relatively disproved by an "experiment" by the BBC (I believe), where "real" pieces of modern music were judged by an audience against a truly intentionally random, improvised piece of percussion music -- even with a made up backstory and an imaginary composer, etc. The audience did not like the random piece -- and instead prefered the other works, which, if I recall correctly, were of your garden-variety Darmstadt-type composers. Of course, underlying the seemingly abstract and chaotic work of the modernist school was a highly principaled and disciplined system of non-tonal relationships.

Fractals found the math for many naturally occuring relationships. Leaves, the coastline. Even Webern.

From "Joy: Future of the Web is mobile devices", Mike Ricciuti, CNET.

"Personally, I'm very frustrated by voice. If you leave me a voice mail, it's not likely I'll get around to answering it. But there is a warmth to voice. It's a media that has been difficult to integrate with the Web experience. I have a friend who holds his notebook up to his head to use Skype. We need new formats."

Cory at Boing Boing posts a "Crafter manifesto" from Ulla-Maaria Mutanen. It is indeed splendid, and points out wonderful reasons why work, including the output of the Gravity Monkey labs, exists and thrives beyond capitalistic logic. An excerpt:

1. People get satisfaction for being able to create/craft things because they can see themselves in the objects they make. This is not possible in purchased products.


2. The things that people have made themselves have magic powers. They have hidden meanings that other people can’t see.

....


12. At the bottom, crafting is a form of play.

An interesting project, as reported by Mari-Len De Guzman in ComputerWorld, by Microsoft Research, the University of Washington in Seattle and Royal Perth Hospital in Australia using Microsoft tools for SPAM detection to find patterns in HIV, in order to develop more effective vaccines.

The great similarity between how spam works and how HIV cells mutate in the human body has allowed researchers to use Microsoft's machine-learning and data mining algorithms to analyze the genetic sequences of the virus. The purpose was to identify patterns within the genetic mutations of the virus and the patient's immune system, according to Schofield. These patterns are then used to create vaccine designs that have more HIV-fighting genetic markers.

I believe the tools and techniques to kill Spam will ultimately prove to be incredibly fertile ground for developing new methodologies and new techniques for data mining and pattern recognition, and into areas still unknown.

Speaking of Spam, as a product of the Islands of Spam, (full disclosure) I must admit I've always preferred Portuguese sausage, myself.

A few links and noteworthy stories stumbled across today:

MMetrics released a study that shows that mobile gaming was the fastest growing sector of consumer content used on mobile phones. While gaming grew the most over February (8.2% change), it's also by far the most underutilized of their seven categories, far behind ringtones or text messages. We don't need to sit around and guess why American's haven't yet gone crazy for games on their phones, it's pretty clear to me that it's still just too damn hard for the average user to download, pay for, and install a game on their phone -- even tho' it's come a long way, there's still a lot of work that could be done by cellphone companies to make it easier and better for consumers. It's not that people prefer to play "snake" -- it's that doing much more is too much to figure out. And while I don't believe that passing games around via bluetooth will do you more good than evil, one of the factors that contributed to the growth of apps for the Palm was the ability to beam and share apps.

From slashdot yesterday: http://www.buzztracker.org/ which plots the location of news items from google news. A peek at the archives shows that the majority of the "top locations" is in the middle east -- Baghdad, mostly. Actually, I'm mostly puzzled about the Google News terms of service for something like this -- is this kosher within the rules?

And I can stop trying to do this myself now (or worrying about expending effort above any Google Terms of Service): http://mobile.google.com/local provides a phone interface (for WAP and XHTML) for looking up local businesses, along with features and functions from the Google Local as well as Google Maps (image above). Nice work -- maybe I'll still try hook it up to the GPS.

From smartmobs, a great link to a real, live working service of phone-based electronic payments -- and, get this, it's not in Europe: it's working in Brookline, Massachusetts.

When customers step into a cab from the Hello Taxi company in Brookline, Mass., they don't have to worry about fumbling in their pockets for cash, or about swiping their credit card in a moving vehicle, or even about finding their wireless fob to wave in front of a reader. To pay and tip the driver, passengers just say the last four digits of their cell phones, and then they can run.

Hello Taxi is one of about 80 merchants in the Boston area working with a creative means of payment processing from a company called MobileLime. MobileLime CEO Bob Wesley says the service is much more than a payment method, as it also gives retailers real-time marketing, a cardless loyalty program and a CRM (customer relationship management) package.

Now, how is this supposed to work exactly? Take the quick performance and terrific usability of Google maps, take the science of GPS enabled fleet management gear already installed in taxi cabs and van services, and you have Google's Ride Finder. The result, for a select few metro regions in the US, is a Google map with plots that represent individual taxis or vans.

Not sure why I would want to know where these vehicles are, unless I'm the dispatcher. In fact, that's just the capability that guys like Mobile Knowledge sells. If I want to hop on a Super Shuttle van to the airport, do I go to the site, find the nearest one, and chase him down the street to let me on? Not unless they plan on booking these vans in a different way (and I don't think they are supposed to take on un-scheduled pick-ups, no?). Maybe I can just call the dispatcher and whine "Why should I wait, he's three blocks away from me now??" Doesn't sound like a great deal for all the Louie DePalma's of the world.

It's a neat feature, and showcases the power of GPS technology and the use of the web. I can dig that (see my own experiences on this topic). And using the existing base of GPS enabled fleets makes practical sense too, for now. But my silly, yet apt description above makes me wonder where this is going. Unless Google is looking to replace fleet dispatch with some sort of free-ranging online click-and-summon travelling salesman algorithm, I don't see the value yet.

Use of GPS fleet tracking to this point has been limited to managing workers in the field. How about deploying it as an added-value consumer-facing service? Surely everyone else has waited for a delivery that required a signature, only to be out of the house (or in my case, probably on the toilet) when the doorbell rings. Chasing the UPS or FedEx guy down the street is kinda fun, sure, but it would be nice to get a SMS or email saying the guy is in your neighborhood -- or that your segment of his route is coming up next. Of course, why not do this for all home or office deliveries? If the infrastructure is already there -- why not extend it to be a value-added feature for the consumer, and a competitive advantage?

Here's another possiblity: imagine if this Ride Finder interface was actually a map, not of cars that are taking people to different places, but of positions of "open-ended delivery" people. These guys are all around the city, and will auction off their time to do your bidding. Example: I see on the map that someone is near a store or restaurant that's a bit too far away from me to be convenient -- I send out a request, a price is brokered for any additional fees, and exactly what I want is on it's way. Include in specifics for a product via passing the data from a handheld UPC scanner, and you can guarantee you get what you want.

It's like the glory days of Urban Fetch or Kozmo, but without inventory or infrastructure. And there are, of course, hurdles to solve -- does the delivery guy have to front the cash? I guess you'd have to have registered users, and you'd charge their credit card before you accept the job (if you knew the price, that is).

So, why not just do this with a regular, perhaps high-end bike messenger service? Because I think the service would work better if the delivery guy's location is public knowledge -- sure, someone who's now in Queens might claim he can take my gig and get it to me in half-and-hour, but I don't believe him, and choose to book with another guy instead. Count in my skepticism the numerous times I've been assured by the car service dispatcher the guy is 5 minutes away, when you know he's 30 minutes away and stuck in traffic with another customer (been on that side of it too, including driving up a sidewalk as the dispatcher yelled at him for lying). More direct contact to the actual individual delivery guy is good, so you can have more trust in what you're ordering and moving about (rather than merely sealed up boxes or envelopes flapping out a messanger bag). You're paying more, and asking more of these delivery guys, so you need more trust there.

Ok, so that's my thought on the matter. Had sketched this to prototype off the new Nextel Blackberry GPS units, but don't have the time to execute it. That's just one of my schemes to replace fleet dispatch with some sort of free-ranging online click-and-summon travelling salesman algorithm.

Now who's gonna give my mom and dad a ride to the bowling alley? That's what we gotta figure out.

A fun processing applet: tree from texone.org. It takes a URL and converts the site, including links and content, into a tree, with external links creating other trees, and thus a forest of information. The trunks reflect a unique color for each domain, and the branches (I believe) represent pages, and leaves are individual bits of tags or content. The image above is the output of this site -- which looks like a few stalks of black broccoli with a touch of blue ink.

A nice example of the power of processing (with more examples in the exhibition). What truly sold me on these guys is that they also did a midi output of this information, and the resulting mp3s (a few sample versions available on the site) are awesome.

A few things that have been widely covered or discussed, but with enough "Wow" for me to react:

1) Amazon's new Yellow Pages service, which includes photos of the storefronts. It's an amazing concept -- but I'm skeptical of real value beyond the whizbang. While it can be neat to see a storefront before trying to get there, the truth of the matter is that the geo-location of the pictures and the actual address lookup leaves much to be desired, at least in NYC where I tested. Not that this stuff needs to be perfect in order to prove it's value, but still, if you don't know where you're going, you need a higher degree of accuracy that doesn't leave you half a block off target. Not Amazon's fault, really, I've found the same issue in NYC no matter who/what, even when I roll my own system.

Also, the nature of this stuff is that even commercial landscapes shift at an amazing rate. The storefronts I glanced at look incredibly different now, not only in winter, but with the natural attrition of businesses. While I'm impressed by the effort involved to accomplish this much, I have to wonder why I feel like it's such a commendible *near miss*....is it the fact that webcams and real-time viewing makes me feel like each shot should be a live picture?

2) Keyhole Systems, which was acquired by Google, and their amazing application for browsing satellite imagery. The images themselves are amazing -- rich, detailed, color photos. But the Keyhole application makes zooming, panning, and scrolling them an incredible experience. After plotting my work address, and my home address, and watching the view from Keyhole as it leapt 80 miles in the air to land at my doorstep -- a'la the Hulk jumping from place to place -- the train seemed like a hopeless method of transportation. Stunning stuff.

3) TiVo to Go. After days and days of checking to see if I'd gotten the update, it finally arrived. Does it do what they say? Yeah, but in a weird way -- and many of the noted shortcomings are true: transfers are slow, the resulting video seems a bit warped, the password protection is a shame. But, all that having been said, the set up for the desktop app was quite solid, and it works as expected, and the value of getting the files off the TiVo unit and stored onto other media is a huge step forward. I'm a long-time subscriber and a fan, so I'm not apt to chuck it all and run to a homegrown solution, or to the Windows Media thang -- but for a company that's been used to delivering miracles, this one is just a solid step forward, especially in an environment when their mere survival is a valuable asset alone.

And, since I've had blinders on with a J2ME project for the Blackberry, I missed what looks like a ton-of-fun: http://tivohme.sourceforge.net/ the TiVo developers SDK. Yummy, yummy.

4) maps.google.com. That trademark Google usability. Clean, smart, fast. The maps themselves are actually so much clearer without all the crap that MapQuest sticks in there -- and the user interface just so much more pleasent and clear. The matching of local data is amazing....now to figure out their javascript enough so that I can post a lat/lon to it and squeeze it onto a phone!

Found by way of a note on Tech Dirt Wireless, C|Net has a good article on a judicial ruling that allows police to drop a GPS transmitter on someone's car without a court order.

A federal judge in New York ruled last week that police did not need court authorization when tracking Moran from afar. "Law enforcement personnel could have conducted a visual surveillance of the vehicle as it traveled on the public highways," U.S. District Judge David Hurd wrote. "Moran had no expectation of privacy in the whereabouts of his vehicle on a public roadway."

Kudos to Declan McCullagh for a very even-handed article. Not falling for typical hysteria -- on either side of the fence -- that GPS technology is the slippery slope to a technology totalitarianism, or that GPS or location-aware technology is the *next*big*thing. Declan covers the many positive uses of GPS for business, for crime fighting, etc., and notes that the ruling will probably hold up in court, as according to Dan Solove, a law professor at George Washington University, "The court has a very narrow and crabbed understanding of privacy. If something's not totally secret, you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy."

The article goes on to cover GM's OnStar system, which has a built in GPS system as well as on-board communications. Reminds me of the Tony Soprano comment about "ripping OnStar out" of his truck (so the Feds couldn't track him), or his use of coins on the Garden State Parkway in the opening (no EZPass, also trackable).

From Steven Garrity at Acts of Volition, The Sound of Data, where he takes data and pipes it out to an audio output -- just to, uh, you know, to hear what it sounds like:

Spurred on by a recent weekend full of hot-tub induced dehydration, beer, and lack of sleep, some friends of mine discovered an interesting (I think, I at least) capability of the command line computer interface. Prepare to be really geeked-out.

As I wrote briefly about last year, on the Linux command line, you can pass the output of one program into another by joining them together with | (the "pipe" character).

...

It occurred to one of us, in our sleep-deprived state, that you might be able to pipe the output of the random number generator into an audio player, and hear random noise. So, we tried this:

cat /dev/urandom | aplay

Most of it is much as expected -- white noise from random data, the self simularity and repetition of file systems. The coolest example, tho', is the American flag -- which sounds like a strange techno-dance thing. A faint, frantic pulse under a dial-tone like high pitch, and a field of ascendent scales.

From the venerable eyebeam reblog, a unique project called "Crossroads" as covered at turbulance.org.

In this project music is generated from the colours of cars which meet on the crossroad. As cars pass by they create impulses which carry the basic informations equal to music like tone and interval, rhytm, structure. This information is used as the source code for the music composition created in realtime.

I then tweaked it to read the color yellow, hoped to base it off taxi traffic going down 5th avenue. I found my cable was too short, and that was the end of that project. (boy, of all the half-ass excuses to abandon a project)

867-5309, as the song from Tommy Tutone and a phone number, is put to the test by Dan of DanTheMan, by calling every area code (using his free nights and weekends on his cell) to hear the response. It's awesome to see this breakdown -- mostly not in service, but a few messages worthy of Tutone fame.

I once called someone who's number was written on the wall. First year of college, K3, Dakin Hall, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA. His name was Jeff, I think. The conversation went like this (I'm in italics):

Hello?
Hey Jeff
Hey
What's up
Not much
What are you doing today
Eh. Just hanging
(sounding a bit irritated) You gonna swing by or what?
Yeah, yeah. Sure.
Alright
Uh. (pause) Who is this?
Heh. Funny, dude.
(pause) No, seriously, who is this?
Nobody. Just got your name off a wall next to a phone.
Then take my name off of there.
It's carved in a wall, Jeff. That ain't my job.
No, just scratch it off, and don't call me.
I ain't gonna do it. (pause) I suppose you are gonna come by, then?
-click-


This is the same phone I called "Dave's Soda and Pet Food City" to sing them my version of "Suffragette City" which used their name, as a suggestion for a jingle. He hung up on me too. (413) 786-WOOF.

Philistines.

Nope, not Press Conference, Pete Carroll or Personal Computer: Politically Correct. From the Sun-Sentinal, an article about Florida's new regulation to rename offensively named streets and locations (emphasis mine):

So far, the state's list reads like a handbook of slurs and names many consider pejorative: Jap Rock, Negro Island, Jewfish Creek and Cracker Swamp. That some names are open to interpretation, however, has caused confusion. The well-intentioned legislation does not list which words could be considered offensive, nor does it penalize locales for refusing to change a name.

...

"I've heard about Hooker Highway in Belle Glade and Cracker Street," said Todd Bonlarron, Palm Beach County's executive director for legislative affairs. "It's really subjective regarding the history. We need to figure out whether or not it was done in a derogatory manner."

I laughed my ass off just reading those names, and how incredibly insensitive they are. Who knew? I thought Jap Rock was a derogatory name for Hoobastank. Here's a picture of "Jap Rock" (below, from Wanna Surf) but where's the rock? Makes me almost wish we had a "Imperial British Venereal Disease Sailor Bay" in Hawaii.

But wait, just like everything else in the news, it gets better and better. The article goes on to try to explain away those names as "unoffensive", or done in a "non-derogatory manner." Turns out "Chink Rock" has nothing to do with the Chinese -- it's because, the rock, uhh, has a, chunk, a chink in it. And "Jap Rock," why them Japs used to fish on it!

"Jewfish" also is open to interpretation. Three years ago, the American Fisheries Society changed the name of the "jewfish" to goliath grouper after it was determined that the fish got its name because it looked like a big nose. Still, a subsequent effort to change the name of Jewfish Creek in Monroe County stalled when local residents decided it didn't bother them. There are currently eight creeks, basins and islands named for the fish.

While you certainly can't legislate away racial tensions, I find this article also points out the fact that you can't legislate away sheer stupidity either.

Link here.

David Pescovitz, a regular over at Boing Boing, has a great feature at, umm, The Feature, called Birth of the Bluetooth Robots. He breaks downs a variety of small robots that utilize Bluetooth to communicate, including info about the Acroname Brain Stem kit. I'd want one even if was a bendy-straw attached to a paperclip, what a cool name.

Oh well, another birthday, perhaps.

Stumbled across something fun at K-Mart. When I was probably ten or eleven I tried to build myself one of these, but thankfully they sell 'em now: a model rocket engine on a car. I took an all plastic toy truck -- the kind that sell for $2.99 now and that has a hard time keeping the wheels attached -- and taped on a model rocket engine. Left sufficiently unsupervised, I got the whole thing set up, and positioned in the garage and ready to go down the driveway, to land in the neighbors pile of leaves in their macadamia nut field.

Luckily, my own fear of fire stopped me from continuing to try lighting the thing, as it was always a pain to get the rockets lit properly, I know I burned out more igniters than I had engines. And, even then I think I knew that the force of the engine was too much for the little truck. So, I dismantled the rocket truck before anyone came home to yell at me about it.

The neighbors never knew how close they came to being under mini-car-bomb-rocket-attack.

From boing-boing, a site that manages to be intelligent, charming and funny, without even a breath of pretensiousness: A Softer World. Honesty seems very natural for those Canadians.

A stunning toolkit found over at the reBlog for text mining that has some really lovely visual output.

Requires Mac OS X 10.3....

Holy cow. Microsoft gives up $20 million for Lindows to stop using their all-too-Windows-like name. I really had to look at it twice -- must be a misprint?

"It's all over. The Microsoft vs. Lindows saga reached a stunning conclusion with the joint announcement of a worldwide settlement Monday. The agreement involves the Lindows name itself as well as the usage of copyrighted Windows Media files that are currently shipping with their Linux distribution." (link)

Actually, it's $15M upfront. They can only get the other $5M if they can actually get Network Solutions to manage to transfer the rights. I guess it's chump change for Microsoft -- it's not like Peyton Manning money, anyway.