Just finished reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (of A Walk in the Woods fame). It was an engaging tour though our understanding of the universe and our place in it. Basically it turns out that most of human history is littered with scientists that have really bad ideas but sometimes good ones, the bad ones often sound better and they become orthodoxy, the good ideas often don’t match so the scientists are treated as crackpots, with ideas that finally get accepted years later and move our understanding forward a bit, and then of course those ideas get popularized by someone else and the scientists die in obscurity. Mix, repeat.
I really enjoyed (I don’t think that’s really the right word) the story of the guy who came up with putting lead in gas to make the engines stop knocking (ethyl) which led to lead in our atmosphere even today that is wildly higher than ever before (well we actually didn’t really have lead in our atmosphere before the invention of leaded gas in the mid-20th century), he showed off pouring leaded gas over his hands to show it was safe as his company was burying factory workers who were making the stuff, and then later he came up with this great idea of using CFCs to make things cooler. Nice guy. Thanks.. Oh, yeah the ethyl corporation is still around.
While I was on the section about the 1918 flu outbreak (really the section about Yellowstone Park is just way way more scary) when the news broke about the H1N1 outbreak. Of course we can’t help but look for patterns and that was just plain spooky.
But this, on the other hand, could.
It was put together by our very own sister company Rhiza along with Dr. Henry Niman, a biomedical researcher that has been tracking the flu’s spread. For background Rhizalabs makes web-based tools to import, fuse, and share different kinds of data into our universal information commons. It is part of our effort to build a parametric model of the world’s information. Their tools are already being used extensively by everyone from conservation biologists to community groups who often call it the youtube of data.
On a slightly related note, you can finally see some of the top secret stuff from one of our other favorite fellow travelers (who have done amazing things with our core research into information-centric thinking) finally starting to get shown in the light of day… Click here to see some early clips from a new GDViz product called Comotion Trials It might be hard to make out all that’s happening (they’re working on higher res and deeper dive examples) but you can start to get an idea of the kinds of tools they’re making for deep collaboration and decision-making at the enterprise scale.
“Oops, I mentioned the word “information-centric design” up there and realize that not everyone knows what that really means. We coined that term back in the early days of our research because we found that by treating the information itself AS the interface we could build digital environments that were radically more powerful than traditional tools (it turns out that by turning information into directly manipulated objects we can tap into our innate abilities… humans have lived in a world with objects for a heck of a lot longer time than we’ve lived with computers).
One of our researchers has written the first in a series of primers about information centricity centricity-101 that will give you a little bit of background. If you’re in any way involved in the future of information you should read it, if you’re not you’ve really got to scroll right down to the top five links and just immerse yourself in weekend surfing.
Ok, we still live in a world where information overwhelms (or soon will overwhelm) just about everything we try to do. Here is a troubling but not surprising recap of an adventure through modern electronic medical records that are the opposite of information or human centric…
Ok, on to the links…
————Top Five————-
1. Brilliant. A short film about a notebook.
2. Worth downloading if you like brain-teasing games, reminds me of Neverhood.
Clearly physics is the new black.
Can’t wait to see good user-interfaces that exploit our surfeit of computing power!
4. Well if the universe does wake up I hope it doesn’t decide we were just a bad dream…
————-The Rest—————
Bendy maps…
This week in classic and bizarre vehicles
If you liked Helvetica, you may be interested in Comic Sans… which is considered by Microsoft to be a “groovy script font,” but I didn’t have to tell you that did I?
Related (I guess), @Issue is now a blog…
RGB radio-control plane… you only have to watch the first minute or so to get the idea…
The finalists for the Buckminster Challenge are now posted… we submitted something at one point but it only made the semi-finals.
Seems kinda silly but maybe going somewhere…
