Preoccupations

Dymaxion cubicle

A week ago today, I was in the Design Museum (enjoying the Zaha Hadid exhibition — a few photos here, though sadly I couldn't do her wonderful project paintings justice). A surprise to me was the Buckminster Fuller cubicle door drawing — in the Gents. I seemed to have the room to myself, so I took a couple of photos of the door (wondering what I'd say if someone came in or, worse by far, if the cubicle turned out not to be empty after all).

So that was that, and then Stowe noticed that Dopplr had used Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map in their Dopplr 100 launch. From Wikipedia:

The Dymaxion map of the Earth is a projection of a global map onto the surface of a polyhedron, which can then be unfolded to a net in many different ways and flattened to form a two-dimensional map which retains most of the relative proportional integrity of the globe map. It was created by Buckminster Fuller, and patented by him in 1946, the patent application showing a projection onto a cuboctahedron. The 1954 version published by Fuller under the title The AirOcean World Map used a slightly modified but mostly regular icosahedron as the base for the projection, and this is the version most commonly referred to today. The name Dymaxion was applied by Fuller to several of his inventions.

Unlike most other projections, the Dymaxion is intended purely for representations of the entire globe. Each face of the polyhedron is a gnomonic projection, so zooming in on one such face renders the Dymaxion equivalent to such a projection.

Dymaxion map folded into an icosahedron

Fuller claimed his map had several advantages over other projections for world maps. It has less distortion of relative size of areas, most notably when compared to the Mercator projection; and less distortion of shapes of areas, notably when compared to the Gall-Peters projection. Other compromise projections attempt a similar trade-off.

More unusually, the Dymaxion map has no 'right way up'. Fuller frequently argued that in the universe there is no 'up' and 'down', or 'north' and 'south': only 'in' and 'out'. Gravitational forces of the stars and planets created 'in', meaning 'towards the gravitational center', and 'out', meaning 'away from the gravitational center'. He linked the north-up-superior/south-down-inferior presentation of most other world maps to cultural bias. Note that there are some other maps without north at the top.

There is no one 'correct' view of the Dymaxion map. Peeling the triangular faces of the icosahedron apart in one way results in an icosahedral net that shows an almost contiguous land mass comprising all of earth's continents - not groups of continents divided by oceans. Peeling the solid apart in a different way presents a view of the world dominated by connected oceans surrounded by land.

Which set me thinking: that Buckminster Fuller is someone we ought to be teaching in schools, of course (and I can see how we might start doing that easily enough — and soon), and about Dopplr and good design. For another very cool Dopplr ... er ... effect, if you've not seen their sparkline stack and read Matt's post about it, you really should.

Technorati tags: Buckminster Fuller, dymaxion, dymaxion map, maps, mapping, Dopplr

Gawping in amazement: Flickr & Upcoming

Prelude: TechCrunch says 'Flickr continues to rock along, with 4.5 million registered users and 17 million unique visitors per month. They have just under 230 million total photos uploaded and 900,000 new photos are uploaded daily on average'.

And after that, the stats for geo-tagging (launched 28 August) are still amazing! '24 hours in, there were 1,234,384 geotagged photos (and now more than 1.6 million geotagged photos as I write this, about 9 hours later)' — Stewart Butterfield, Flickr blog.

But how much more impressive is this (all from Stewart Butterfield's posting):

One of the "little" things that was incredibly complex technically was the integration of location-based searching into our existing tag and text-based search technology. That means you can do things like search for photos matching "food" in southern Asia or architecture in South America. … marrying "traditional" search with spatial search in a real-time context is extremely hard, especially at our volumes and rate of growth. More than 228,000,000 photos have been uploaded, with over a million new photos being added on a good day. There are billions of bits of data that go into the search (more than half a billion tags alone), along with privacy controls, group membership, and so on. This is one of the largest real-time search indexes in the world. In contrast, nearly all web search is done in a "batch" mode with periodic updates, while nearly all real time search is done on a small set of items which "expire" after a short period. But new or updated Flickr photos are typically searchable in under a minute.

And:

… today we're also releasing extensions to Flickr's API to enable adding and retrieving geo information, setting privacy permissions, and searching by location: everything you need to roll your own. … This also means: "hey, if our maps don't work for you, use whatever maps you'd like!"

Finally:

… if you take a photo "near" an Upcoming.org event (in time and space), it'll automatically get tagged with the correct Upcoming event and show up on the corresponding event page without you doing anything.

For developments at Upcoming (also 28 August), go here: undiscovered events ('a very deep well of events that Upcoming members haven't added yet, collected from around the web and updated daily by our friends over at Yahoo! Local. To put this in perspective, we increased the number of upcoming events by 3000% overnight'), event filters, Flickr photos for events, buddy icons, new event pages.

All this is already old news on the web. I blog it because the value of this to anyone involved in education is immense and the achievement it represents (on the part of Flickr and Upcoming staff, but also, of course, the user communities) is the kind of stuff about which we should be telling our students — the next generation of innovators and co-creators.

Best overview of Flickr's geotagging I've seen to date? Thomas Hawks', here. (Hawks is the Chief Evangelist for the photo sharing site, Zooomr — 'We would be seen as a competitor to Flickr'.) A 'Go Read'.

Update:

1) Bokardo has posted on it, too: 'With geotags, Flickr pushes the envelope that much forward. I think it’s a great social feature, and one whose surface has only been scratched so far. I’m excited to see what other views people will come up with, given what we’ve seen in the first few days'.

2) Google Earth Blog: Better Method for Geotagging Photos for Flickr Using Google Earth/Picasa.

Technorati tags: Flickr, geo, geotagging, maps, mapping, Upcoming, events, calendars, calendaring

GPS puzzle ... cleared up?

I've wondered why GPS isn't embedded in cellphones. Charlie Schick said both there and on his own blog that he couldn't be certain but 'I am sure there is a reason related to size of chip-set, power issues, usability, licensing, pricing, target users'.

David Weinberger's just posted this:

Nikolaj says that it'll be at least five years before we can programmatically and ubiquitously locate someone in terms of latitude.longitude based on their phone positions, but we can already (see Imity) see who is around a particular phone number. GPS will take that long to get put into cellphones because of battery life...

(Nikolaj is Nikolaj Nyholm of Imity — whose app impressed me so much at Reboot.)

Technorati tags: GPS, phones, cellphones, location, battery life

GPS

Having some fun today with the tiny Holux SiRF Star III chip-set receiver, the GPSlim 236. The size of a matchbox, it is breathtakingly smart. PocketGPSWorld has a glowing review (the photo comes from there):

'… if you are considering a GPS purchase then you should not consider any other chipset. The performance improvement is massive and makes a GPS system very much more usable as a result. The time to first fix (TTFF) and high sensitivity of this chipset makes use practical in areas such as inner cities, when worn around your neck on a lanyard with a smart phone solution and any other use where marginal reception conditions make it difficult for other lesser chipset's to function. … This has become my Bluetooth GPS of choice ever since I first began using it. I thought I could never again be amazed at the places a SiRFStarIII receiver would work in yet the GPSlim 236 once again sets new boundaries in terms of performance. It is a well designed unit, small and light and sits nicely on the dashboard thanks to its rubber feet although I have taken to throwing mine in the glove box or even leaving it in my briefcase where it works just as well! I've given it 99% because nothing can genuinely be 100% perfect and it would be nice to have the Mouse USB cable included but that really is nit picking in the extreme.'

Nav4All has an excellent offer on: you can buy the GPSlim 236 for €69.50 and enjoy free Nav4All until 15 August.

This post by Charlie Schick led me to Nav4All and the receiver. Nokia are about to produce a new GPS device, but can't we have them built into the phone?

Technorati tags: GPS, SiRF III, Holux, GPSlim 236

Layered, furcating stories in time and space

Kim posting Stories in Urban Spaces and my happening to be re-reading Borges (in the Andrew Hurley translation), made me go back to 'The Garden of Forking Paths' (1941).

Borges' narrator, Yu Tsun, is the great-grandson of Ts'ui Pen, a 'governor of Yunan province … who renounced all temporal power in order to write a novel containing more characters than the Hung Lu Meng and construct a labyrinth in which all men would lose their way'. Ts'ui Pen is murdered after 13 years of work on these labours, and what survived was a 'novel (that) made no sense' — and 'no one ever found the labyrinth'. Early in the story, Yu Tsun, on the run, reflects that 'all things happen to oneself, and happen precisely, precisely now. Century follows century, yet events occur only in the present; countless men in the air, on the land and sea, yet everything that truly happens, happens to me.' Choosing a name from a phone book (the reason for which choice only becomes fully clear at the end of the story), he finds himself at the house of the famous Sinologist, Stephen Albert. Improbability is heaped on improbability (after all, this is anti-literature, no matter that it is also literature of exquisite skill, intelligence and inventiveness), and Stephen Albert is not only intimate with the life and work of Ts'ui Pen but has, he believes, cracked the secret of both novel and labyrinth: they are one and the same. Ts'ui Pen had left a fragment of a letter: 'I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths'. Stephen Albert explains to Yu Tsun:

'I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.' Almost instantly, I saw it — the garden of forking paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase 'several futures (not all)' suggest to me the image of a forking in time, rather than in space. A full rereading of the book confirmed my theory. In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the work of the virtually impossible-to-disentangle Ts'ui Pen, the character chooses — simultaneously — all of them. He creates, thereby, 'several futures', several times, which themselves proliferate and fork. That is the explanation for the novel's contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a secret; a stranger knocks at the door; Fang decides to kill him. Naturally, there are various possible outcomes — Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they can both live, they can both be killed, and so on. In Ts'ui Pen's novel, all the outcomes in fact occur; each is the starting point for further bifurcations. Once in a while, the paths of that labyrinth converge: for example, you come to this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another my friend.

… 'The Garden of Forking Paths' is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as conceived by Ts'ui Pen. Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times. That fabric of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries, contains all possibilities. In most of those times, we do not exist; in some, you exist but I do not; in others, I do and you do not; in others still, we both do. In this one, which the favouring hand of chance has dealt me, you have come to my home; in another, when you come through my garden you find me dead; in another, I say these same words, but I am an error, a ghost.

Life as layered narrative, diachronically and synchronically; shared and individual, typical/general and unique — knowledge fundamental to our sense of being human. The advent of technologies which could allow us to interact with place and time raises questions that are profoundly old. (Kim's questions towards the end of her post made me think of urban plays, from medieval pageants to contemporary community projects — The Dillen, for example.) The extension of all this, in and through new technology, into new "theatres" of play, entertainment and education … The possibilities for grass-roots up development, for social and communal initiatives which bypass official or authorised pictures of the polis … 'infinite stories, infinitely branching' (Borges, 'A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain', 1941).

But in Borges, 'infinite stories, infinitely branching' suggests a weariness and meaninglessness. (Ecclesiastes, 12.12: 'Of making many books there is no end and much study is a weariness of the flesh'.) This melancholy may even embrace the world. 'The Library of Babel', 1941, conceives of a universe, the Library, as 'unlimited but periodic': 'If an eternal traveller should journey in any direction, he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder — which, repeated, becomes order: the Order'. In this story, the librarian finds this an 'elegant hope'; this reader finds the thought dispiriting.

Will a glut of gorgeous visualisations and interactive, highly social "games" deepen our melancholy — too much meaning to be finally meaningful? Or, instead, will the glamour of technology encourage us to forget and to take again the picture for the world? I doubt there will be anything new in the range of answers we come up with to either of these questions.

In 1984, Harold Fisch published A Remembered Future and wrote of how art can give us 'the unappeased memory of a future still to be fulfilled'. More recently, Heaney has written of how 'We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. The best it can do is to give us an experience that is like foreknowledge of certain things which we already seem to be remembering. What is at work … is the mind's capacity to conceive a new plane of regard for itself, a new scope for its own activity' ('Joy or Night', 1990, in The Redress of Poetry, 1995). New ways of presenting layered narratives, as yet but 'tiny glimmers' (Kim's phrase), will acquire their maturity as art when they allow us to conceive a new plane of regard for ourselves as both unique and typical, simultaneously liberating us from the lonely egotism of Yu Tsun, where 'everything that truly happens, happens to me', and the merely 'unlimited but periodic'.

Two sites

Google Earth (via Helmintholog) is well worth watching — both immediately and as the layers feature fills out (for the UK) and the resolution at high-zoom improves for all mapped areas. Playing with it today made me think back to Matt Jones' piece, Practical Mirrorworlds.

And then my thanks to anti-mega for introducing me to Bleep, 'the digital distribution arm of Warp Records'. Excellent site and anti-mega's nudge got me to download Jamie Lidell's new album, Multiply.

My thanks, too, to Ol for telling me about Tom Vek's We Have Sound.

Traces

Traces, from Plazes:

At Reboot 7.0.

Click on the down arrow for a (daunting) world perspective. It's all … relative.

Hover over the red dots for info about previous Plazes, and over the dancing red down arrow for more on my current whereabouts.

Google local mobile

We were on a roll after we launched Google Local UK last month, and went on to build a mobile web browser version of Google Local for our UK users. Users can now access Local on their mobile by going straight to the Local home page (that's http://mobile.google.co.uk/local) or the Google UK home page (a.k.a. http://www.google.co.uk/xhtml). So we say: step away from that computer. Click a few buttons on your keypad and head to that new Thai restaurant near Piccadilly Circus. If you're slightly disoriented once away from the screen, Local gives you Google Maps and driving directions too. Google Blog

Googling the UK

Google Blog:

• Google Maps UK
• Google Local UK
• Google SMS UK

Link via anti-mega

The Genographic Project

The National Geographic Society, IBM, geneticist Spencer Wells, and the Waitt Family Foundation have launched the Genographic Project, a five-year effort to understand the human journey—where we came from and how we got to where we live today. This unprecedented effort will map humanity's genetic journey through the ages.

The fossil record fixes human origins in Africa, but little is known about the great journey that took Homo sapiens to the far reaches of the Earth. How did we, each of us, end up where we are? Why do we appear in such a wide array of different colors and features? Such questions are even more amazing in light of genetic evidence that we are all related—descended from a common African ancestor who lived only 60,000 years ago.

Though eons have passed, the full story remains clearly written in our genes—if only we can read it. With your help, we can. If you choose to participate and add your data to the global research database, you'll help to delineate our common genetic tree, giving detailed shape to its many twigs and branches. Together we can tell the ancient story of our shared human journey. The Genographic Project

What a pity that the participation kit 'costs U.S. $99.95 (plus shipping and handling and tax if applicable)' — per person. Not many people are going to be taking this up … Ironic, given that the 'Genographic Project will work with the relevant authorities to achieve the broadest level of public participation possible' (this in the face of restrictions imposed by some governments, eg China, on ' the export of genetic material').

via EurekAlert!

Graffiti Tags & Street Memes

via Paul Golding, this link to John Geraci's Grafedia:

What is Grafedia?

Grafedia is hyperlinked text, written by hand onto physical surfaces and linking to rich media content - images, video, sound files, and so forth. It can be written anywhere - on walls, in the streets, or in bathroom stalls. Grafedia can also be written in letters or postcards, on the body as tattoos, or anywhere you feel like putting it. Viewers "click" on these grafedia hyperlinks with their cell phones by sending a message addressed to the word + "@grafedia.net" to get the content behind the link.

What Kinds of Things Can I Do With Grafedia?

You can make street art with grafedia, or just leave behind simple calling cards for others wherever you go. You can have running dialogues between authors, or create interactive narratives or poetry in public spaces. Grafedia is a boundless, interactive publishing platform, base, cheap, and easy to use. It is an open system - the places and ways to use it are limitless. With grafedia, every surface becomes potentially a web page, and the entire physical world can be joined with the Internet.

How is Grafedia Made?

Grafedia authors can make hyperlinked text at any time in three easy steps. Simply: 1. Choose a word. 2. Send a media file from your cell phone to that chosen word plus '@grafedia.net', e.g. 'myword@grafedia.net'. 3. Write that word anywhere in the real world in blue with an underline. That word will then be linked to the media file the author sent to grafedia.net, and viewers will be able to retrieve the file. You can also upload media from your computer directly to the grafedia.net server here in order to create grafedia with more precise images.

Also via Paul Golding, a link to Tristan Manco's Fotolog. Tristan Manco is a graphic designer and partner of Tijuana Design in Bristol; he is also the author of Stencil Graffiti and Street Logos, and editor of Graffiti World.

Paul Golding has posted about the graffiti recorded in Street Logos ('an absolutely wonderful collection of graffiti art. Unlike other books on the topic, Tristan has documented a very diverse set of styles and concepts'):

Some of the graffiti work definitely inspired connections with mobilisation. I am attracted to the idea of marking meeting places with graffiti as a kind of "war chalking" tag. However, instead of marking open WiFi access, the points would mark virtual meeting places. At each tag, users could "log in" and download, or exchange, information.

What really excited me were some of the graffiti styles and concepts that seemed to lend themselves to this idea. For example, the floor-based renderings of a compass by L'Atlas would make excellent visual markers for meeting places and allow directional information to be included, perhaps to the whereabouts of the next tag. This would blend well with the location-based potential of modern mobiles.

Other tag schemes had a very distinct style that in my opinion seemed to allow for a socially acceptable, or ascetically possible, use of graffiti for mobile communities. The Space Invader invasion is particularly interesting in this regard. Interestingly, the website contains invasion maps. This reminded me of war chalking maps, but is representative of the location theme that is already strong in this particular graffiti movement.

Finally, a third key link via Paul Golding, to Julian Bleecker and his project, Street Memes:

"street meme": a sticker, stencil, or poster that can spread a single image around the world. Unlike traditional graffiti art where each piece is unique, street memes can be copied repeatedly, taking on a life of their own, and spreading through the collective effort of people scattered around the world.

"meme": A term coined by Biologist Richard Dawkins to describe self replicating ideas. Read more about the concept of the meme here.

Jyri spoke about graffiti tags last November at the 2004 Radley conference (see here), and a (zipped) pdf file of the same is available: 'Free Speech in Urban Space: Past, Present and Future'. The talk was fascinating — and now I have a lot more to follow up on and to play with. My own (as yet very small) collection of 'graffiti'-tagged Flickr photos is here.

Linking up

Much related to my previous posts on Mind-Web, there's what Jeremy Zawodny says we should 'Expect to see more of … in 2005.  Lots more' — as developers join the pieces together: Geo Moblog photos, a combination of Windows Moble Smartphone, Neil Cowburn's imaging library for .NETCF, MapPoint Location Server and Flickr.

More info here, Windows Mobile Team Blog.