Ascent Stage Weblog + Marginalia

8tracks

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:39 GMT

Time to death predictions, ala Muxtape and the RIAA?

Trying out molecular gastronomy on my picky son

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:21 GMT

Kids don't like your food? Try chemistry.

The Art of the Brick: Life-Size Replicas

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:16 GMT

His-and-hers brick sculptures for a mere $60,000.

$3 million virtual tour of the Forbidden City | MetaFilter

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:41 GMT

MeFi takes a crack. Many longing for a virtual Starbucks.

NuevaSync

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 05:35 GMT

Over-the-air iPhone synching of contacts and calendar, ala Exchange or MobileMe, without either. Free. Nice.

Above and Beyond

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:01 GMT

Today, after many long years of work with a team I can only describe as better than the best, The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time was made public.

There is much to say and show, but for now I'll give you a description, a video, and a link -- and much appreciation for those of you who have followed, supported, or helped build this most amazing project.

The Virtual Forbidden City is a 3-dimensional virtual world where visitors from around the world can experience the Forbidden City in Beijing. You can explore the magnificient palace as it was during the Qing dynasty, which ruled from 1644 until 1912, the end of the Imperial period in China. [More ...]

www.beyondspaceandtime.org

Minor Landscapes and the Geography of American Political Campaigns

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:37 GMT

"The idea that 'an old-fashioned soda shop' might give someone access to the mind of the United States seems so absurd as to be almost impossible to ridicule thoroughly." Great article.

It's not Its

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:09 GMT

Learn it, love it, live it.

Suburban mom's duet with Sting

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:48 GMT

Holy hot damn. This mama rocks it.

Authentic Guinness® Home Pub

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:22 GMT

For only a quarter million dollars you too can own a traditional Irish pub built into your home -- with stout for a year.

Fire and life

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 08:38 GMT

Africa affects me in little ways.

Like recently when I was contemplating my annual purchase of firewood. Burning real wood in a fireplace is one of my great loves during long Chicago winters. I easily tear through a cord per winter, sometimes needing extra. And yet, that's a lot of wood for what is largely aesthetic comfort (though our basement needs all the heat help it can get).

So this year I wanted to learn more about my options. Usually I get wood from one of any number of local, similar operations. A couple of laborers-for-hire pull up in a pickup, throw a bunch of wood in a pile in your garage, and then depart. God only knows where they get this wood from. Or if the company has any interest in the sustainability of the forests from which the wood comes.

So I turned to Ascent Stage's resident guest restoration ecologist, Cory Ritterbusch, for his usual clarity of insight. I asked about places in northern Illinois where I might deal with a firewood vendor who thinks about his source as much as his sale. Cory noted:

Right now our firewood industry has not been hit by the same environmental stewardship programs that paper and building materials have. So there is nowhere to point to for sustainable, managed firewood processes locally.

Most green thinkers choose their firewood by species to reduce the risk. Oak and Hickory are the preferred woods to burn in the fireplace, but that is done at the detriment of cutting very important slow-growing specimens. Environmentalists will ask for Red Elm or "Elm" as they are usually standing dead trees having died due to Dutch Elm Disease. It is also a great burning wood offering high temperature, little ash and easy split-ability.

Didn't know that. Did you?

The smell of burning firewood was constant in Ghana. In the morning, stepping out of my room to the call of the roosters; in the daytime walking down a crowded Kumasi street; at night when the smoke of a thousand dinners ascended and mixed above the town. The tang of wood on fire is for me essential Ghana. I came to love it.

But the wreckage it has caused! The denuded countryside, once rainforest, strikes you like returning to a loved home without any furniture in it. The same space, but not the same place. The soil, suddenly chemically-bereft of sustaining anything but what just got ripped out, is no longer landscape but ecological cul-de-sac. Redwood-sized trunks lashed to wheels and an engine barrel down dirt roads one after the other. it is stark cause-and-effect, easier to see than in the West with our complex chains of supply.

This is what Africa has done to me. Not a blinding moment of enlightenment, but many small moments that creep up without real thought. The things I saw there will be with me forever, ineradicable viruses of the imagination.

Supercharged culture-geeking

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 07:55 GMT

This past Monday, IBM and the Office of Digital Humanities of the NEH convened a bunch of smart folks to talk about what humanities scholars would do with access to a supercomputer, real or distributed. I had been looking forward to this discussion for months, if not years in the abstract. It was a wonderful convergence of two of my life interests.

We had a broad representation of disciplines -- a librarian, a historian, a few English profs, an Afro-American studies professor, some freakishly accomplished computer scientists, and a bunch of "general unclassifiable" folks who perfectly straddle the worlds of technology and culture.

The Library of Trinity College, Dublin

The topic was how to get scholars thinking in terms of problems that require high performance computing to solve. The NEH is out front on this, partnering with the Department of Energy (of all places) who run most of the world's fastest machines (modeling nuclear blasts, etc) and who have graciously and enthusiastically offered time on their monster boxes to humanist scholars. IBM is in the mix too (besides being the maker of said monster boxes, e.g. Blue Gene) with our World Community Grid project, a distributed "virtual" supercomputer.

The grid has about a million devices on it and packs some serious processing power, but to date the only projects that have run on it have been in the life sciences. We were trying to think beyond that yesterday.

My job was to pose some questions to help form problems -- mostly because, outside the sciences, researchers just don't think in terms of issues that need high performance computing. But that doesn't mean they don't exist. It's funny how our tools limit how we even conceptualize problems.

On the other hand you might argue that this is a hammer in search of a nail. OK, fine. But have you seen this hammer?

Here's some of what I asked:

Are there long-standing problems or disputes in the humanities that are unresolved because of an inability to adequately analyze (rather than interpret)?
Where are the massive data sets in the humanities? Are they digital?
Can we think of arts and culture more broadly than typical: across millennia, language, or discipline?
Is large-scale simulation valuable to humanistic disciplines?
What are some disciplinary intersections that have not been explored for lack of suitable starting points of commonality?
Where is pattern-discovery most valuable?
How do we formulate large problems with non-textual media?

I also offered some pie-in-the-sky ideas to jumpstart discussion, all completely personal fantasy projects. What if we ...

Perform an analysis of the entire English literary canon looking for rivers of influence and pools of plagiarism. (Literary forensics on steroids.)
Map global linguistic "mutation" and migration to our knowledge of genetic variation and dispersal. (That's right, get all language geek on the Genographic project!)
Analyze all French paintings ever made for commonalities of approach, color, subject, object sizes.
Map all the paintings in a given collection (or country) to their real world inspirations (Giverny, etc.) and provided ways to slice that up over time.
Analyze imagery from of satellite photos of the jungles of southeast Asia to try to discover ancient structures covered by overgrowth.
Determine the exact order of Plato's dialogues by analyzing all the translations and "originals" for patterns of language use.

(Due credit for the last four of these go to Don Turnbull, a moonlighting humanist and fully-accredited nerd.)

Discussion swirled around but landed on two major topics both having to do with the relative unavailability of ready-to-process data in the humanities (compared to that in the sciences). Some noted that their own data sets were, at maximum, a few dozen gigabytes. Not exactly something you need a supercomputer for. The question I posed -- where is the data? -- was always in service of another goal, doing something with it.

But we soon realized that we were getting ahead of ourselves. Perhaps the very problem that massive processing power could solve was getting the data into a usable form in the first place.

The Great Library of the Jedi, Coruscant

At present it seems to me -- I don't speak for IBM here -- that the biggest single problem we can solve with the grid in the humanities isn't discipline-specific (yet), but is in taking digital-but-unstructured data and making it useful. OCR is one way, musical notation recognition and semantic tagging of visual art are others -- basically any form of un-described data that can be given structure through analysis is promising. If the scope were large enough this would be a stunning contribution to scholars and ultimately to humanitiy.

The possibilities make me giddy. Supercomputer-grade OCR married to 400,000 volunteer humans (the owners/users of the million devices hooked to the grid) who might be enjoined to correct OCR errors, reCAPTCHA-style. Wetware meets hardware, falls in love, discuses poetry.

The other topic generating much discussion was grid-as-a-service. That is, using the grid not for a single project but for a bunch of smaller, humanities-related projects, divorcing the code that runs a project from the content that a scholar could load into it. You'd still need some sort of vetting process for the data that got loaded onto people's machines, but individual scholars would not have to worry about whether their project was supercomputer-caliber or what program they would need to run. In a word, a service.

Who knows if either of these will happen. It's time now to noodle on things. As always, if you have ideas for how you might use a humanitarian grid to solve a problem in arts or culture, drop a line. We're open to anything at this point.

A few months ago Wired proclaimed The End of Theory, basically noting that more and more science is not being done in the classical hypothesize-model-test mode. This they claim is because we now have access to such large data sets and such powerful tools for recognizing patterns that there's no need to form models beforehand.

This has not happened in arts and culture (and you can argue that Wired overstated the magnitude of the shift even in the sciences). But I have to believe that access to high performance computing will change the way insight is derived in the study of the humanities.

cabel.name: On Wedding Design

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 08:27 GMT

Wow. Amazing. Cabel obsessed as much over his wedding design as I do over our Christmas Party.

Chicago To Become High-Speed Amtrak Hub?

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:35 GMT

Yes, please. Chicago to Galena, hooray!

The Counter: Custom Built Burgers

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:16 GMT

Just opened in Chicago. Fantastic food, great service. And fun to create a Frankensteinian burger.

Elegy To The 2008 Cubs - Bleed Cubbie Blue

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 20:49 GMT

He nails it. There is no curse, but there is generations of collective anxiety that put unbelieavable pressure on the team.

Blip.fm

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 21:07 GMT

= Twitter + Last.fm. I'm Immerito, of course.

Mr. Walker's Cabinet of Incredible Collectibles

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 12:46 GMT

If I were stinking rich this is the first thing I would build/buy. (PDF)

Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 06:31 GMT

As we know, lax composition practices since the advent of modernism led to irresponsible poets and irresponsible readers. Simply put, too many poets composed works they could not justify. We are seeing the impact on poetry, with a massive loss of confidence on the part of readers.

GeoCommons Maker!

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:46 GMT

Promising DIY map service will lots of cool data ready to go.