I gotta say I have days when I leap too high and fall down, and I feel just like that.

(Best before… via infosthetics)

not so random “timeout” link in a blog comment by Tony Hirst

He relates balancing rocks to mashups:

“When I play with mashups – when I play with ideas – I’m balancing logic rocks. Sometimes they fall over, but that’s okay; if I wanted to build something a little longer lasting, I’d use concrete…. we need to find ways of exploring how to doodle with new technology.”

Alan Levine has detailed the SnapTell experience (via blog comment). With my iPhone I took a photo of 3 random books on my side table and they were quickly cataloged with wikipedia references and google searches.

This seems way cooler than QR tagging which seems to be popular in Japan. Why create a weird looking block code? Why not just snap a photo of a company logo or storefront to find a webpage?

By printing a little square pattern, using my webcam, I got this little creature to appear on my desk:

It was a little fragile — I couldn’t get it to appear reliably and it disappeared when I moved it.

I can’t wait to try out the native code apps for the iPhone (lots of cool links at OUseful)… reminds me of the VR-GPS art installations in Spook Country by William Gibson which I just started reading.

Here’s his original map of US oil imports by region:

Here’s his latest graph about where the global oil reserves are:

Comments on Udell’s latest post point out that this kind of graph is called a cartogram, which is a map where areas are scaled to indicate the scalar value of the statistic that is being displayed on the map.

My favorite (via Tony Hirst) is from a series on 2008 election results:

Popular vote results displayed on a map of the US.

Update: further reading in the comments reveals an interesting insight by Tim:

“The thing that irritates me about the first visualization is that by visualizing some data you imply that the data is important. But visualizations, like statistics can lie.

‘In fact, where the US gets its oil is almost completely irrelevant. The oil market is a world market. The transportation costs are startlingly small but-all things being equal-it’s easier to get oil from countries that are near you (and hard to get it from countries you don’t trade with).

“The ‘dangerous disconnect’ between American perception–the US is dependent on Middle Eastern oil–and the reality–we get a lot of our oil from Canada–is actually misunderstanding that is *healthier* than the misunderstanding the chart might lead one to take.

“Reading the chart one might imagine that, if the Middle East were plunged into a giant multi-state war, we’d be basically fine. Of course, unless the United States invaded Canada-and Africa, yay!-and commandeered all the oil for US consumption, we’d be in the grip of massive undersupply and a resulting rise in the price of oil.
It’s also worth saying that reserve numbers have all sorts of spin on them…

Personally, I think the graphs help illustrate the conversation. Your mind doesn’t have to do a double-step between a list of numbers and the narrative that discusses them. Graphing statistics helps tell a story, but as Tim says it is only part of the story. We need to fill in the causal effects and the consequence, and in doing so, draw conclusions and learn.

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it looks like work” Thomas Edison

“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas” Linus Pauling

“Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work” Chuck Close

Notes…
* Companies benefits by releasing something that they know people want/need.
* Developers want access to be able to do something collaboratively with the product, to contribute code so that the next version will have the feature or bug fix they need.
* In open source, intelligence is distributed, so it is harder to kill
* Let people decide what they like, economic benefits accrue to the popular
* Ted wants to see as large a substrate for innovation as possible and sees open source as a way to do that
* We’re not there yet… people who are good at blogging cause their projects to be more widely adopted, which doesn’t necessarily cause the best stuff to win

Further reading…
* The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman & Rod A. Beckstrom
* Democratizing Innovation by Eric von Hippel (Read Ted’s review)
* slides from Ted’s talk on open source anti-patterns

Conscious thought is overrated. I don’t believe that our brains stop working on something just because we leave the office, switch tasks, or even go to sleep. Electrons keep traveling around our brains exploring connections and sometimes a connection is made that is so startling or so right that it breaks into conscious thought.

I’m unexpectedly reminded of Utah Phillips, folk singer and labor organizer, who once noted that we give our brain over to someone else for 8 hours a day and expect it back unmodified. Work-life balance is a precarious notion. I believe we do have some conscious control over which problems we solve in the shower. And I hope only some of them are not in the service of the corporation or client we are currently working for.