tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73741720149684886552024-03-05T05:10:14.385-08:00Testing RangeRichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.comBlogger49125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-42904233080288579062011-02-09T13:10:00.000-08:002011-02-09T13:10:14.454-08:00Twitter makes for sound bite conversations.No surprise, but Twitter is good for updates, for pointers, and for questions with simple answers. It is horrible for conversation. Here are specific tweets which require more than 140 characters to reply to.<br />
<br />
<br />
--<br />
# Elliot Ronen ElliotRonen<br />
<br />
@RichGibson And if I'm teaching Shakespeare? Or music composition? Or political studies? Does no physics make everything I say untrue? 27 minutes ago via TweetDeck in reply to RichGibson<br />
--<br />
<br />
(note on format: this is a tweet from @ElliotRonen, to me)<br />
<br />
Elliot, my tweet said "But not knowing basic physics means you can't tell the truth about many things." I am seriously confused that you would interpret 'many things' to mean 'everything.'<br />
<br />
I believe that it is possible for a teacher to construct a lesson which is true without knowing any physics. But like in war, no plan survives contact with the students. They ask questions. Further, without <u>any</u> physics you lack the ability to understand the context of a large number of things.<br />
<br />
1. Shakespeare - At first I thought Shakespeare was largely 'physics safe,' but then the questions started to bubble up. Examples: the histories are deeply concerned with war. <a href="http://www.enotes.com/shakespearean-criticism/war-shakespeare-s-plays">"Commentators point out that during the course of these conflicts, the cult of militarism changed dramatically and traditional notions of chivalric warfare declined, partly as a result of early modern developments in armaments."</a><br />
<br />
The development of armaments, the conduct of wars, the limitations on travel, why castles were very good defenses and how the development of siege warfare changed that are all questions with a physics component.<br />
<br />
2. Music composition - I don't think you can get very far in music composition without using physics. I have many examples, but I am going to assume that you just misspoke when you included music in your list.<br />
<br />
3. Political Studies: The requirement to understand physics in order to understand Political Studies seems, well, self evident. War, terrorism, nuclear weapons, dirty bombs, the Strategic Defense Initiative, Nuclear winter, civil defense, global warming, scientific policy, 'Winning the Future' - all of these require some understanding of physics. See <a href="http://nortonbooks.typepad.com/physics_for_future_presid/">Physics for Future Presidents</a>, the popular version, or go to the <a href="http://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/physics10/pffp.html">UC Berkeley course page</a>.RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-57945435928537600222010-12-16T19:55:00.000-08:002010-12-16T19:55:03.838-08:00Proposal for an open cloud delicious alternativeThe news is out that Yahoo is going to close Delicio.us. This hurts me at a deep level. I was early enough on the delicious train that I have my first name as my delicious login.<br />
<br />
We need an open cloud. I have thoughts about what that means - peer to peer, distributed hash tables, caching, etc. And replicating delicious seems like a great project to test out the idea. Delicious links are intrinsically open, so you don't have to deal with privacy issues on the reading side.<br />
<br />
Etc.<br />
<br />
Anyone want to work on it? Email me, rich.gibson@gmail.com.<br />
<br />
So...on to my rant.<br />
<br />
For various reasons I didn't use it much over the last seven years. (yes, seven years). I only have a bit over 1,000 links.<br />
<br />
But those 1,000 links are important to me. And the piece of web infrastructure which delicious provides is important.<br />
<br />
OTOH, the social aspect of delicious became less valuable as it grew. Sadly we have not yet figured out a very effective way of filtering out the ordinary wankers which doesn't also sanitize our news of the exceptional. To be all current meme, we want tools to hide the white swans and expose the black swans as soon as even a hint of them appears.<br />
<br />
But we don't have that. For the first little while, early 2004, Delicious did that. But it did that service because only interesting people had adopted early.<br />
<br />
It will require someone more clever than I to solve that problem. Fortunately there are clever people out there.<br />
<br />
But in the meantime, the basic function of allowing us to save our own links to 'Delicious' for our own research and use, and to publish for people who actually want to follow us, is useful.<br />
<br />
Major and minor players who made, or attempted to make, their fortunes aggregating user generated content have repeatedly demonstrated a callous disregard for those users.<br />
<br />
People put their creative effort into generating content, and then one day after being more or less responsible about providing exports and notice and all the data is gone.<br />
<br />
Yahoo did it with GeoCities, and now with Delicious, and Google is regularly guilty.<br />
<br />
Right now I am utterly disgusted at Google Groups. Each time I log in it seems that a new feature is being removed.<br />
<br />
Now they are disabling 'pages and files' from Google Groups. They announced it Sept 22, and 'in Feb 2011' you will no longer be able to access this content.<br />
<br />
How kind of them to provide such notice. <br />
<br />
I sort of expect it of Yahoo, since they have been completely unable to keep from turning everything they touch into mush, but for Google to kill content after 5 months strikes me as deeply disturbing.<br />
<br />
Have they run out of disk space?RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-66873272895623380082010-12-14T00:44:00.000-08:002010-12-14T00:44:30.958-08:00Try 2: Capturing personal and shared spaces with explorable gigapixel imagery.(This is an extension of the abstract for a proposed session in the <br />
upcoming <a href="http://www.personalarchiving.com/">Personal Archiving conference</a>, Feb 24-25, at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. This is a work in progress, which I intend to extend)<br />
<br />
<br />
Explorable images, GigaPans, allow us to capture details of the spaces in which we live our lives in ways which are currently lost.<br />
<br />
The world is the stage upon which we live our lives, the studio or workshop where we allow our imaginations to erupt into physical or virtual form, and the museum where we keep the artifacts which we have gathered as evidence of our existence.<br />
<br />
(I split the post because there are numerous embedded GigaPans and I don't want them crashing my regular blog)<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
We attempt to capture that experience of space. We take pictures, we write diaries, take videos, but all of these forms lose the key context of our spaces. In many ways we live our lives the way a museum exhibit or a piece of theatre is created, viewed, and cleared away.<br />
<br />
INOBERAbLE is 'the premier space' in Vienna promoting and exposing <br />
Urban Art forms, such as Street Art, Graffiti, Poster Art, Tattoo Art, and Lowbrow."<br />
<br />
What happens at the Gallery? Shows are put up, and art sold, or not, and shows are taken down.<br />
Here is what the gallery looked like in December 2009<br />
<a href="http://gigapan.org/gigapans/tag/inoperable/most_popular/">Inoperable art gallery in Vienna</a>.<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="400" scrolling="no" src="http://www.gigapan.org/media/gigapans/38816/options/nosnapshots/iframe/flash.html" width="100%"></iframe><br />
You can pan and zoom on that link and see things about the space. See things about the positioning of the pieces which is now lost. There may be other pictures of the gallery during that show, but the context is lost.<br />
<br />
A well curated museum exhibit or a finely directed theatrical work create physical, emotional, and cognitive spaces where an audience is able to expand their minds, and experience reality in new ways.<br />
<br />
But a curated exhibit or a theatrical extravaganza are transitory experiences. After an exhibit is over, or the curtain falls, there are a few artifacts left behind: a museum catalog, posters, reviews, some photographs, perhaps a web site, or a video. But ultimately the artifacts are returned to their permanent homes, the walls are repainted, the set is struck, and the space becomes again a blank canvas, an empty stage, a tablula rosa ready for the next show.<br />
<br />
Most of our forms of archiving our experiences: of life or museumship or theatre lose the context required to make sense of the whole. A museum catalog may have images of every piece in an exhibit, but it loses the context of the full creation. And a photograph catches just the one part of our experience.<br />
<br />
The <a href="http://www.posterfortomorrow.org/pages/view/the_pencil_is_mightier_a_glance">Poster For Tomorrow project</a> had an exhibit 'The Pencil is mightier' which was in 24 locations world wide to celebrate Global Human Rights Day, December 10th 2009. It included a display of posters by the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna, and I <a href="http://gigapan.org/gigapans/tag/posterfortomorrow/most_popular/">GigaPanned some of the posters</a> - I wanted to go back and capture more images, but the exhibit was up for a limited time.<br />
<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="400" scrolling="no" src="http://www.gigapan.org/media/gigapans/39457/options/nosnapshots/iframe/flash.html" width="100%"></iframe><br />
<br />
One day there was an exhibit of posters, and the next day it was gone. It had been wiped clean, and only the empty pavement was left. Poster For Tomorrow has the original posters, and some of them are now in the permanent collections of museums, but the context of the exhibit in Vienna is gone.<br />
<br />
Using explorable gigapixel images we can capture more detail about a space, and the context of that space. <br />
<br />
In January of 2008 I took <a href="http://gigapan.org/gigapans/most_popular/?q=long_now">Gigapans of the Long Now Museum</a>.<br />
<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="400" scrolling="no" src="http://www.gigapan.org/media/gigapans/2795/options/nosnapshots/iframe/flash.html" width="100%"></iframe><br />
<br />
The last time I talked with folks at the Long Now they had either changed the museum, or they were planning to change the exhibit. But there is inevitable irony in anything which the Long Now Foundation does which involves the past or the future. The whole idea of the Long Now Foundation (at least, the idea that got me to donate money and time) is mostly to serve as a way to have discussions about time which transcend the present. Or perhaps which simply extend our idea of 'Now' to past and future.<br />
<br />
Except perhaps only 'future' is on the official agenda... The Clock of the Long Now, a clock intended to keep time for 10,000 years, a clock intended to 'tolerate neglect but reward attention" (in Danny Hillis' words) is less a practical artifact to me than an expression of an intent to work towards a world in which thinking about a future 10,000 years from now does not seem absurd.<br />
<br />
I grew up in the Bay Area, doing 'duck and cover' drills, where we hid under our desks and pretended that we might survive a nuclear attack. Many of my cohort developed a bit of a nihilistic streak. We lived in a place which had intentionally hid it's past, and where a future was far from certain.<br />
<br />
How different an experience to live in Europe!<br />
<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="400" scrolling="no" src="http://www.gigapan.org/media/gigapans/39398/options/nosnapshots/iframe/flash.html" width="100%"></iframe><br />
<br />
Rupertkirche, St. Rupert's, the (currently claimed) oldest church in Vienna. dates to perhaps 800 AD. It holds the sarcophagus of a Christian Martyr, and the church is right by where the Gestapo headquarters was. So there is an added emotional weight to the commemoration of martyrdom. And then you can walk 10-15 minutes, maybe less, and be at the Monument Against War and Fascism.<br />
<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="400" scrolling="no" src="http://www.gigapan.org/media/gigapans/39265/options/nosnapshots/iframe/flash.html" width="100%"></iframe><br />
<br />
All bridges between past and present. And erupting outside of the center of Vienna into the 21st century.<br />
<br />
The Monochrom office is almost the perfect example of a space in continuous transition, brimming with details which can be missed by any but the closest examination.<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="400" scrolling="no" src="http://www.gigapan.org/media/gigapans/39311/options/nosnapshots/iframe/flash.html" width="100%"></iframe><br />
<br />
And history keeps moving, fashion, which seems at first glance ahistoric, has deep roots.<br />
Here are images from the exhibit <a href="http://gigapan.org/gigapans/tag/mqitalian50/most_popular/">"Fifty years of Italian Fashion" from December 2009 in the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna</a>.<br />
<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="400" scrolling="no" src="http://www.gigapan.org/media/gigapans/38723/options/nosnapshots/iframe/flash.html" width="100%"></iframe><br />
<br />
We seldom document the places where we work. Maybe a few photos, but most of us have few records of the places we spend so much of our time. Here is what the <a href="http://gigapan.org/gigapans/most_popular/?q=global_connection">Global Connections Lab looked like right before we moved. </a> <br />
<br />
This is where the Gigapan was developed, including this <a href="http://gigapan.org/gigapans/43813/">gigapan of gigapans</a> - prototypes and beta units.<br />
<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="400" scrolling="no" src="http://www.gigapan.org/media/gigapans/43813/options/nosnapshots/iframe/flash.html" width="100%"></iframe>RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-70997680226609590522010-12-10T22:46:00.000-08:002010-12-14T00:45:32.372-08:00Capturing personal and shared spaces with explorable gigapixel imagery.An abstract proposal for a session in the upcoming <a href="http://www.personalarchiving.com/">Personal Archiving conference</a>, Feb 24-25, at the Internet Archive in San Francisco.<br />
<br />
See this <a href="http://testingrange.blogspot.com/2010/12/try-2-capturing-personal-and-shared.html">extended version of this content.</a><br />
<br />
<br />
I am currently working on highlighting particularly relevant examples. For example, here<br />
are gigapans of the <a href="http://gigapan.org/gigapans/tag/inoperable/most_popular/">Inoperable art gallery in Vienna</a>.<br />
<iframe src="http://www.gigapan.org/media/gigapans/38816/options/nosnapshots/iframe/flash.html" frameborder="0" height="400" scrolling="no" width="100%"></iframe><br />
<br />
The <a href="http://www.posterfortomorrow.org/pages/view/the_pencil_is_mightier_a_glance">Poster For Tomorrow project</a> had an exhibit 'The Pencil is mightier' which was in 24 locations world wide to celebrate Global Human Rights Day, December 10th 2009. It included a display of posters by the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna, and I <a href="http://gigapan.org/gigapans/tag/posterfortomorrow/most_popular/">GigaPanned some of the posters</a> - I wanted to go back and capture more images, but the exhibit was up for a limited time. I guess that illustrates the importance of capturing context of transient events!<br />
<br />
<iframe src="http://www.gigapan.org/media/gigapans/39457/options/nosnapshots/iframe/flash.html" frameborder="0" height="400" scrolling="no" width="100%"></iframe><br />
<br />
Here is how the <a href="http://gigapan.org/gigapans/most_popular/?q=long_now">Long Now museum looked about three years ago</a>.<br />
<br />
The Monochrom office is almost the perfect example of a space in continuous transition, brimming with details which can be missed by any but the closest examination.<br />
<iframe src="http://www.gigapan.org/media/gigapans/39311/options/nosnapshots/iframe/flash.html" frameborder="0" height="400" scrolling="no" width="100%"></iframe><br />
<br />
Here are images from the exhibit <a href="http://gigapan.org/gigapans/tag/mqitalian50/most_popular/">"Fifty years of Italian Fashion" from December 2009 in the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna</a>.<br />
<br />
We seldom document the places where we work. Maybe a few photos, but most of us have few records of the places we spend so much of our time. Here is what the <a href="http://gigapan.org/gigapans/most_popular/?q=global_connection">Global Connections Lab looked like right before we moved. </a> This is where the Gigapan was developed, including a <a href="http://gigapan.org/gigapans/43813/">gigapan of gigapans</a> - prototypes and beta units.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>The abstract:</b><br />
<br />
Explorable images, GigaPans, allow us to capture details of the spaces in which we live our lives in ways which are currently lost.<br />
<br />
The world is the stage upon which we live our lives, the studio or workshop where we allow our imaginations to erupt into physical or virtual form, and the museum where we keep the artifacts which we have gathered as evidence of our existence.<br />
<br />
And we attempt to capture that experience of space. We take pictures, we write diaries, take videos, but all of these forms lose the key context of our spaces. In many ways we live our lives the way a museum exhibit or a piece of theatre is created, viewed, and cleared away.<br />
<br />
A well curated museum exhibit or a finely directed theatrical work create physical, emotional, and cognitive spaces where an audience is able to expand their minds, and experience reality in new ways.<br />
<br />
But a curated exhibit or a theatrical extravaganza are transitory experiences. After an exhibit is over, or the curtain falls, there are a few artifacts left behind: a museum catalog, posters, reviews, some photographs, perhaps a web site, or a video. But ultimately the artifacts are returned to their permanent homes, the walls are repainted, the set is struck, and the space becomes again a blank canvas, an empty stage, a tablula rosa ready for the next show.<br />
<br />
Most of these forms of archiving our experiences: of life or museumship or theatre lose the context required to make sense of the whole. A museum catalog may have images of every piece in an exhibit, but it loses the context of the full creation. And a photograph catches just the smallest bit of our experience.<br />
<br />
Using explorable gigapixel images we can capture more detail about a space, and the context of that space. In this talk I will present a number of examples of GigaPan images used to capture more or less transient spaces, from museum and art gallery exhibits, to work spaces, and temporary events. I will also offer a suggested starting point for a conversation about developing best practices for capturing explorable images which show the context of the spaces in which we live.RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-67223904262435832382010-11-20T21:47:00.000-08:002010-11-20T21:47:45.117-08:00Grace as an emergent property of complex systemsGrace means many things to theologically minded people. But what it means to me is the tremendous amount which has been given to me for no other reason than that I have been gifted. 'Blessed' with Grace.<br />
<br />
We can do nothing to deserve these things, other than, imho, call them 'Grace' (or some other term) and just accept them.<br />
<br />
There is no such thing as a free lunch, so say some folks, but that is absurd. I have all sorts of free lunches, and we all do, and we did nothing to deserve them.<br />
<br />
Nothing.<br />
<br />
This is not a matter of theology, of how various groups interpret 'Grace' but of my personal view that we get so much for free.<br />
<br />
This is true at so many levels. How many of you paid the R&D cost of developing the language which you think in? None? Right. We get language for free. But this was not actually free, it represents an enormous amount of genius work by generations and generations of people - mostly in prehistory, but still they still deserve props.<br />
<br />
And none of us did anything, none of us _can_ do anything, sufficient so that we can 'deserve' being able to read Shakespeare, or listen to Bach. And we sure as hell did nothing to allow us to deserve the fruits of the tortured genius of Beethoven.<br />
<br />
But that is all old news. And as Kevin Kelly notes, 'Technology is anything created after we were born.' The stuff which is older than we are is simply accepted as being our due.<br />
<br />
And moving up, I did nothing to deserve Gutenberg. But I did perhaps a tiny amount to 'deserve' HTTP - I was writing and evangelizing non-hypercard pre-http hypertext systems before HTTP, and everything I said was right (though mostly in truth I underestimated the true power!) but I did not actually do anything to deserve a global network of, let us be honest, effectively magic.<br />
<br />
And yes, I understand how each element in the protocol stack works (more or less :-) and it was all created by clever people, not by magicians, but that does not change the fact that for all intents and purposes, we are living in a magical time.<br />
<br />
I'm leaving out the deep 'magic' of our basic existence. What did you do to deserve your self awareness?<br />
<br />
When you look deeply at things, I think all you see are free lunches piled on top of free lunches. The ability to stand on the train wrecks of giants to see just a glimpse over the fence of universal ignorance.<br />
<br />
The world may be flat, and small, but it is still bigger and more amazing than anything we could have done to deserve the world we have.<br />
<br />
And I choose to call this undeserved bounty 'Grace,' intentionally using strongly overloaded language from religion because it does not actually matter whether God exists, and cares about us, and gave us these undeserved gifts. Personally I believe that these moments of grace, defined more or less as benefits we do not deserve (and perhaps what you could classify, as an economist, as positive externalities) are an actual specific emergent property of complex systems.<br />
<br />
So I posit that 'Grace,' defined as benefits we did nothing to deserve, is actually an emergent property of complex systems.RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-82948706774480261092010-11-17T23:30:00.000-08:002010-11-17T23:30:15.137-08:00The illusion of the moment, frozen in timePhotographs are a single instant, captured. Without the context of surrounding time. We all know that.<br />
<br />
And there are lots of examples to support this. I just went down a wikipedia data search spiral looking at some of the iconic images from my lifetime. Mostly they are sort of depressing.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/rich_gibson/5183909140/" title="Ass by Rich Gibson, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1296/5183909140_43472f5f8e.jpg" width="500" height="333" alt="Ass" /></a><br />
But the world is big and time is long.<br />
<br />
And this photo is, as the kids say, just covered in win! I could say we have some serious winkakke going on with this image.<br />
<br />
There is so so much win in this photograph. First, it is a completely unmanipulated image. The shutter opened. And photos came through the lens and hit the sensor, and then the sensor closed. First Tobias walked across the 'set' carrying an ipad which was running a persistance of vision application. Then he kneeled down, and I painted him with the red light from my head lamp. And finally the three of us bent over, and I pushed the remote flash trigger, and the soft box on the right fired at its' lowest setting. The paper is against the window, and you can see, through the course of the long exposure the gobo effect of the venetian blinds and the window frame. I love that the paper is all scarred up, and taped together on the bottom, and that the lights are in the picture and the whole roll of paper with the light stands, and the cluster of cables on the right. just win win win.<br />
.RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-31298433042962403852010-10-31T16:10:00.000-07:002010-10-31T16:10:18.537-07:00Don't judge a book by it's cover. Not.'You don't judge a book by it's cover' is a cliche. Cliches can reflect truth, but usually they are the sign of a lazy writer, and it is almost always useful to assume the cliche is false. In the case of people the cliche is poor advice in both the literal and metaphoric sense.<br />
<br />
In the literal case, book covers are carefully crafted by professional book designers. These people work very hard to create a cover which will attract the audience which the author, publisher, and designers believe will want to read that book.<br />
<br />
And at the metaphorical level, especially with people, we all make many choices about how we are going to present ourselves. <br />
<br />
To exclusively judge a book, or a person, by their 'cover' is short sighted. But to ignore the cover is to intentionally ignore key elements of design and self presentation.<br />
<br />
Or am I guilty of 'judging a book by it's cover?'<br />
<br />
I think the real point is to not make judgments about people based on things which are not relevant. And especially to not make pejorative judgments based on things which are outside of our ability to control.<br />
<br />
Frank Zappa said"Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform, don't kid yourself." So should we ignore the uniforms we each choose? Or just consider that any particular uniform or presentation provides information, but that it is not all of the information?RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-33507364494419225192010-10-13T21:15:00.000-07:002010-10-13T21:15:23.104-07:00Crazy people who are 'electro-sensitive'The Sebastopol City Council decided, amazingly enough, not to oppose a wireless technology and voted _not_ to oppose PG&E's smart meters.<br />
<br />
A person who I greatly respect, a person who helped me a great deal during a hard time, wrote a letter to the editor of the Sonoma West paper in which he was against the council's actions. It was titled <a href="http://sonomawest.com/articles/2010/10/13/sonoma_west_times_and_news/opinion/letters/doc4cb62af1504cc810385192.txt">'Cowardly Council.'</a><br />
<br />
This is a recapitulation of the previous decision in which the council voted to reject free WiFi offered by Sonic.net because of 'electro-sensitivity.'<br />
<br />
Rather than remain silent, I wrote my own letter to the editor.<br />
<br />
Read on...or simply accept that I think the opponents to WiFi are dangerous cranks.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Thank you to the Sebastopol City Council for their stand on PG&E's Smart Meters. It<br />
is the first rational thing they he done with respect to Technology.<br />
<br />
There is no evidence that the meters cause harm, but there is a great deal of evidence<br />
that Meter Reading is a dangerous, and low paid job which includes an elevated<br />
risk of injury and death.<br />
<br />
There is also substantial evidence that one of the best ways to lower energy consumption<br />
is through increased real-time tracking of energy use. When people drive a Prius they<br />
drive differently because they are given real time information about how their moment <br />
to moment choices impact their overall fuel usage.<br />
<br />
When people have real time information about their electricity use they are able to make<br />
choices which lower both peak and total electric consumption.<br />
<br />
So I will go on record as being one of the people making the 'fatuous' request for Smart Meters.<br />
<br />
I respect Will Riggan a great deal. He is a kind and empathetic person, and by all accounts he is<br />
a skilled and talented Psychotherapist. But his argument that we must protect a 'besieged<br />
minority of electro-sensitive people' is not supported by the evidence.<br />
<br />
He asserts that 'there is no question that numerous people are electro-sensitive.' But at the<br />
most generous interpretation 'electromagnetic hypersensitivity' is a highly speculative diagnosis<br />
which is not recognized by the medical or scientific communities. <br />
<br />
A number of provocation trials have been conducted in which claimed sufferers have been <br />
unable to distinguish between exposure to real and sham electromagnetic fields. And over <br />
half of these people also report 'multiple chemical sensitivity,' which is another sham ailment.<br />
<br />
Will refers to his work as a mental health professional, and reports that there is 'anxiety and fear'<br />
being reported by people in response to these meters. I am sure that there is anxiety and fear<br />
among the meter opponents in his practice. <br />
<br />
These are people who are specifically suffering from a mental disorder, not from a physical ailment.<br />
<br />
With respect, as a medical professional it is Will's job to help to alleviate the anxiety and fear of people<br />
with irrational psychosomatic disorders. Not to buy into their delusional systems and attack a <br />
technology which we know will save lives and will save energy.<br />
<br />
We should not cripple our society, endanger low paid meter readers, and waste energy<br />
in order to pander to a small number of mentally ill people.RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-67342692685022794832010-10-01T03:45:00.000-07:002010-10-01T03:45:49.607-07:00There was a young man from Eugene, and a Golden Kleene.The Golden Kleene<br />
<i>There was a young man named Kleene<br />
Who invented a fucking machine.<br />
Concave or convex,<br />
It fit either sex,<br />
And was remarkably easy to clean!<br />
<br />
(limerick, attributed to John von Neumann)<br />
</i><br />
<br />
In any event, it is also the name of the prize from <a href="http://www.monochrom.at/arse-elektronika">Arse (not _ars_) Elektronika</a>. And Rosie and I shockingly won a Golden Kleene.<br />
<br />
This is cool.<br />
<br />
But the limerick as I heard it was:<br />
<br />
There was a young man from Eugene <br />
Who invented a fucking machine. <br />
Concave or convex <br />
it could serve either sex <br />
And play with itself in between<br />
<br />
And I heard it attributed to my birth father, Dick Gale, from his high school or college days.RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-8574758783673368832010-09-12T11:22:00.000-07:002010-09-12T11:39:29.399-07:00Puppy Mill of death.My daughter bought a puppy from a horrible puppy mill, WALABS, 3363C Centralia Alpha Rd<br />Onalaska, WA 98570<br /><br />This breeder sold my adult daughter a puppy which according to his records was underweight and failing to thrive.<br /><br />The puppy died 6 days after getting home - after a horrible day of being at the Vet and my daughter spending $600 or more in vet bills.<br /><br />At the end of the day Molly had to drive an hour and a half to the state vet lab in Corvalis, with her beloved dead puppy in the back seat, in order to get it tested for rabies.<br /><br />This happened a week before Molly graduated from College.<br /><br />But then it gets worse, this horrible breeder has now chased my daughter and her reviews off of the internet, even getting Yelp to 'filter' her review.<br /><br />Here is her Yelp review, which Yelp chose to 'filter.'<br /><br />Here is the <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/walabs-onalaska#hrid:XVgDgqcteq2hSWYhu3MxIg/src:self">Yelp page for the breeder.</a><br /><br /><blockquote>This is a Labrador dog breeder who I would discourage anyone from buying a puppy from. The puppy we got there was only 5 lbs at 9 weeks of age, and died one week after I picked her up. The breeder, Jim Young, was hostile and unsympathetic of the situation even after it was apparent from talking to the vets that tried to save my puppy's life that the cause of her death was likely related to his breeding program. He did not even offer an apology, yet alone refund any of my money or offer me another puppy. Also, after posting on the forum that my puppy was sick, and that other new owners should watch out just in case, he deleted my comment, and blocked me from the forum. I received emails from other people who had gotten his puppies only to have to deal with incredibly sick dogs. The breeder is a nasty mean person to deal with, and should not be around animals yet alone breeding them. He is only one step removed from a puppy mill.<br /></blockquote>RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com32tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-11020875301881257332010-06-14T13:53:00.000-07:002010-06-14T13:57:38.409-07:00Sara Winge really is awesomeQuinn Norton writes about O'Reilly's <a href="http://www.mpiweb.org/Magazine/Archive/US/June2010/WingeingIt.aspx">Sara Winge.</a> <br /><br />There are a lot of people at O'Reilly who do incredible things, but Sara is very high on the short list of coolest people at O'Reilly.RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-50512580517260448862010-06-08T14:07:00.001-07:002010-06-08T14:15:22.800-07:00Censorship and control is annoying.I sent the following item to 'class list' for my son's class. The 'class list' is a cc of everyone's emails.<br /><br />--<br />"California and the Bay Area is currently experiencing an outbreak of Whooping Cough. So far five babies in California, all under four months, have died from it.<br /><br />Immunity, even for vaccinated kids, and those who have had Whooping Cough before, wears off with time. For vaccinated kids immunity is pretty much worn off by high school, perhaps before, and we have a large reservoir of unvaccinated and under vaccinated people in our school community.<br /><br />The tDap/dTap vaccine against Diptheria, Pertussis (Whooping Couch), and Tetanus<br />and is licensed for use in adolescents ages 10 to 19." <br />--<br /><br />It seemed pretty benign to me. But the teacher promptly admonished me. "Please don't use the class email list unless clearing it with me first. "<br /><br />Sorry, but you don't get to control speech. You especially don't get to control speech involving actual threats to our children created by the nutcase anti-vaccination crazies in the community.<br /><br />This is the teacher who told me on another instance, 'what did you expect sending your child to an anti-technology school.'<br /><br />I talked with the principal today, who refused to answer the question if the school was 'anti-technology.' But did say that the school has no policy on vaccinations.<br /><br />70% of the kindergarten has 'vaccination waivers' - which is a pretty clear statement that the school certainly does have a 'policy' on vaccinations, that the policy is to accept the creation of a dangerous cesspit of infection and put our children in the middle of it.RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-42351011271452719852010-04-09T17:06:00.000-07:002010-04-09T21:26:47.823-07:00D-RATS GigapansI just got to go to Arizona for two days of Gigapanning Volcanos and Lava flows for this years 'D-RATS' tests.<br /><br />This is NASA's 'Desert Research and Technology Studies' tests. See the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Research_and_Technology_Studies">wikipedia article on them.</a><br /><br />My gigapans of the test are all tagged 'd-rats-2010' - but so are some other gigapans, so do a <a href="http://gigapan.org/gigapans/tag/d-rats-2010/most_recent/1/">search for the d-rats-2010 tag sorted by date.</a><br /><br />Brian Monteleone, a Post Doc from ASU, drove up and we spent Sunday night planning our assault, and Monday and Tuesday gigapanning.<br /><br />The first day was the windiest Brian has ever experienced while doing field work. My netbook was pulled out of my hands by the wind _twice_ (once is an accident, twice just carelessness?)RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-55034671902261050452010-02-04T12:23:00.000-08:002010-02-04T12:26:41.273-08:00Chile a long time agoToday is Feburary 4th, 2010. I have some dates seared into my memory. And other dates which turn out to be a little less 'seared.'<br /><br />I sort of think that Feb 4th, 1980, was the date I arrived in Chile for my year's exchange with AFS. But now I am a little fuzzy on the exact date.<br /><br />Memory and all. Sort of funny. But it was pretty close to Feb 4th, so 30 years ago - about.<br /><br />Ten years ago I had this thought that it would be interesting to transcribe my hand written journals, on the 20th anniversary. Maybe even do it day by day - transcribe a day each day. Relive the year over a year.<br /><br />But goodness, that seems, well, discursive? Distracting? Painful?<br /><br />But in any event, thirty years ago I was an exchange student. And suddenly it is now.RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-54943959366893730932010-01-24T00:44:00.000-08:002010-01-24T00:59:56.193-08:00Oakland Farmer's market says 'eat less salad'<p>The Oakland Farmer's Market has banned plastic bags. I wrote a comment on the <a href="http://oaklandlocal.com/article/oakland-farmers-markets-ban-plastic-bags">Oakland Local site about this article.</a></p><p>But comments on other people's sites are, well, on other people's sites. And this seems important somehow.</p><p>The key is that in Europe people mostly bring their own bags. But if you don't bring your bag you can just buy a bag for about 40 cents. No moralizing. No fuss. Simple, and (and I know this is a bad word in the progressive community, but it is true) this is a 'market based response' to the issue.</p><p>OTOH, the Oakland farmer's market has decided that ideological purity means that you can not buy salad greens which are guaranteed for seven days in a plastic bag. Rather, you have to decide to eat your more fragile produce earlier in the week, and eat your robust vegetables later.</p><p>WTF? For want of a 1 cent plastic bag the Oakland Farmer's market is literally saying 'eat less salad.' You can't eat salad every day if you shop at our market because we have decided that one particular bit of the modern economy, the one penny plastic bag for salad greens, is morally evil and must be banned.</p><p><br /></p><p>Here is the comment I posted.<br /></p><p>--<br /></p><p>I am personally disgusted by our practice of throwing out bags, and general lack of reuse, but I am a little confused here. </p><p><br /></p><p>As near as I can read, the headline on this article should be "Oakland Farmer's Market says 'eat less salad greens'"<br /></p><p> At least in the case of salad greens I think this article is specifically saying that a bag which costs 1 cent allows people to keep salad greens fresh so that they can be consumed over the whole week before coming back to the market to get more. And that the fact that this bag is made of plastic means you should just not eat salad during the later part of the week.<br /></p><p>The alternatives to having fresh salad greens which are offered are, well, none. You can eat your salad greens early in the week before they spoil and eat root vegatables or something for the rest of the week.<br /></p><p>I think this is a major 'WTF' on the part of the market. At least in the limited case of the salad greens the market is now banning (no, this is not a 'policy' it is a ban -please don't newspeak this!) the current best state of the art way of delivering salad greens to people because of a specific ideological crusade against plastic.</p><p>I just spent five weeks in Vienna and Berlin. Almost everybody there brings there own bags, but if you don't there is a nice stack of bags at the register.</p><p>They are nice bags. A bit nicer than our use-once stupid bags, and a step below our (and their) reuse many times heavy duty bags.</p><p>And the clever hack which is part of why most people bring their own bags is that they moved the store bags from the right side to the left side of the cash register.</p><p>If you want a bag you pay Euro 0.25 for it. About 40 cents plus or minus.</p><p>And with that simple move people have the incentive to bring their own bags, and the store makes money if you need a bag, and you have a gentle reminder that reusing bags is a good idea plus it will save you a real amount of money.</p><p>And there is no moral watchdog banning your actions. There is noone who is shaming you if you forget your bag.</p><p>OTOH, the Oakland Farmer's markets believe that shaming people and banning the best technology for the specific task of getting salad greens home and preserved is reasonable.</p><p>Again, WTF? </p><p><br /></p><p>I'm going to post this comment on my blog http://testingrange.blogspot.com and I welcome comment there or here. Maybe I am missing something important. But it just seems that telling people that a 1 cent bag which will let them eat salad all week is wrong is stupid of the market. And that dictating policy with bans which hurt both consumers and producers is simply stupid.</p><p><br /></p>RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-71137498041249850472009-12-28T02:01:00.000-08:002009-12-28T02:30:29.520-08:00Paleogeographers, Neogeographers, Psychogeographers, taggers and StorytellersI have been thinking and working with maps and location and GPS units for a long time now. I coined a phrase, Quantitative Psychogeography, which has not yet caught on, co-wrote two books, _Mapping Hacks_ and _Google Maps Hacks_, preached to the choir and to the unconverted, and I have been tracking and geolocating many of my travels and photos and gigapans for years.<br /><br />And I have been frustrated. And I finally realized why: I just want story telling and life logging tools. Paleo and Neo geographers have created amazing tools. I've been part of some of that energy. And it is great fun, and it is powerful, and it matters.<br /><br />The engineer in me likes these tools. I like PostGIS, I like GDAL, I like Google Maps and My Maps and I am even making my grudging peace with KML. But none of these tools really hits the story teller in me. They don't hit the artist, the life logger.<br /><br />And none of them is appropriate for managing a 'personal geo-repository.'<br /><br />For a long time I just collected the data, and either whined, or offered constructive criticism, when the subject came up. And I gave hope that tomorrow's software would be able to make sense of yesterday's data. But then in Vienna I decided that I could no longer deal with a fundamentally broken model of managing waypoints.<br /><br />Too much, all of it in fact, depended on my remembering wayoint names - key words - and too little of the work was being done where it should be done - by the computer.<br /><br />I say it was a decision, but there was jet lag and anxiety to blame as well. There was waking up at 3 in the morning and not being able to sleep again, worrying that I was not doing enough here to justify the trip. To justify the trust placed in me by my boss, and by my self, the trust that I would do something great.<br /><br />So I figured out my waypoint repository challenge. At least well enough for now. See <a href="http://testingrange.blogspot.com/2009/12/annotating-waypoints-partially-solved.html">'Annotating Waypoints, partially solved'</a> And as you read that remember that I am trying for a system which can operate comletely offline, on a minimal computer, with minimal software dependencies, and maximum flexibility. And I don't care if there is a bit of command line involved if that preserves flexibility and if it so importantly doesn't hide anything from me.<br /><br />Storing points in GPX format, and importing them from the GPS with GPS Babel seems the best option. I can imort them into Google Earth (or better, convert them to KML using GPS Babel, and then import the KML into Google Earth) for viewing, but basica annotation and management seems to need to be kept in a text file format, and in a text file format which won't suddenly be magically and terribly reformated in a way that causes me to lose timestamp information for the individual points (and yes, KML, I continue to be confused about how you manage time, and why those choices were made :-(<br /><br />I feel like I am refining my keyboard shortcuts for using a TRS100 laptop computer. I know KML is how everything is done, but damnit, KML and Google Earth hide more of my story than they reveal. <br /><br />OTOH, Google Won, right? Everybody loves Google Earth, I love big junks of it, but I don't trust it to not just accidentally cause me to lose that which I find most important.RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-84939120283992569722009-12-28T01:38:00.001-08:002009-12-28T02:01:48.927-08:00Annotating Waypoints, partially solvedI have been fretting about the problem of annotating way points for a decade. The general issue is that I wander around a place,and I mark points of personal interest. And later I don't know why I marked a place 'Pieta' or 'aslice.'<br /><br />I have a long rant about this, but the main problem seems to be that the 'artistic' side of my brain knew that the system I had didn't work, but was not able to articulate that back to the 'engineer' side to let me just solve it.<br /><br />The trick is to have a repository of points which you trust, and then to merge in new points, and to add annotations to those points.<br /><br />I made a small script with GPSBabel. It handles most cases. Patches and suggestions welcome.<br />The key is a 'repository' of waypoints, in a GPX file, and then I merge that file with the GPS using the GPSBabel filter duplicates command.<br /><br /><pre><br />#!/usr/bin/sh<br /># save the current 'repository' of waypoints in version control.<br />sudo svn commit -m "automatic commit before merging new waypoints from GPS" netbook_annotated.gpx<br /># Merge master file with the GPS. deduplicate<br />sudo gpsbabel -i gpx -f netbook_annotated.gpx -i garmin -f usb: \<br />-x duplicate,shortname,location -o gpx -F netbook_annotated.gpx<br />sudo chown rich:rich netbook_annotated.gpx<br />echo now edit netbook_annotated.gpx and write it back to the GPS<br />sudo vi netbook_annotated.gpx<br />echo temporarilly not writing back to GPS.<br />#sudo gpsbabel -i gpx -f netbook_annotated.gpx -o garmin -F usb:<br /></pre><br /><br />Here is a sample waypoint in GPX Format<br /><pre><br /><br /><wpt lat="48.202771470" lon="16.369452886"><br /> <ele>201.039795</ele><br /> <name>Operapassage</name><br /> <cmt>27-DEC-09 6:58:05PM Where the u2 karlsplatz line comes out</cmt><br /> <desc>27-DEC-09 6:58:05PM</desc><br /> <sym>Flag, Blue</sym><br /></wpt><br /></pre><br />The key for my Garmin GPSmap 60CSx is that the cmt field does get written back to the GPS by GPSBabel, but if it is too long it will be abbreviates. <br /><br />I have some waypoints where I seem to have done something wrong in editing the name field, and GPS babel attempts to shorten the name and thus generates new waypoints. I am working on that.<br /><br />Also, I should take the date out of the desc field and reformat it in a proper GPX time field.<br /><br />But for right now I am able to comfortably sit at the Ubahn station with a train which won't arrive for 4 minutes, connect my GPS to the netbook, import the waypoints, add annotations to them, and usually even pull my most recent track log in and look at them both in Google Earth.<br /><br />In four minutes while waiting for a subway.<br /><br />The next big challenge: how do I annotate track logs in a reasonable fashion? How do I mark the spot where we turned wrong and ran into a new adventure?RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-32441458287022261872009-12-27T08:21:00.000-08:002009-12-27T08:26:32.467-08:00Another Big Reveal<span style="font-family: lucida grande;">We stopped at the Gasomotor stop on the U3, and I experienced another in the series of 'Great Reveals' from train stations.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Of course I took a GigaPan :-)</span><br /><br /><iframe style="font-family: lucida grande;" src="http://www.gigapan.org/media/gigapans/39571/snapshots/115094/iframe/flash.html" scrolling="no" width="100%" frameborder="0" height="400"></iframe><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">You come up the escalater and face this massive victorian building which was a gas storage tank from the</span><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">city Gas Works.</span><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">And there is a whole row of 'crazy' green apartment buildings next to the four gas towers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">The towers are now redeveloped, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasometer,_Vienna">see the wikipedia link</a>:</span><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;"></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">And see this link</span><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">http://www.wiener-gasometer.at/en/</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">This is high on my list of awesome city 'reveals' = those places where you come out of the ground, or around a corner, and suddenly your breath is taken away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Coming out of the Roman Subway at the Colisium stop is another classic, and the Stephanplatz station here in Vienna.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">And perhaps every subway stop, every ascent from the underworld, provides the opportunity for the grand reveal. Symbolically, and literally, we are exiting the underworld, escaping the lost place below and entering again the land of light and warmth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">We are Persephone coming up in the spring to bring warmth and fertility, or perhaps, just coming up into the warmth and fertility. </span>RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-65855831637581065742009-12-25T08:49:00.001-08:002009-12-25T08:53:14.301-08:00Nipple Jesus is on my Christmas TreePart of the decorations for our Christmas Tree are flyers for art exhibits, hung from the tree with bits of wire. It is all very Kultural. My favorite needs to be the flyer for Nipple Jesus.<br /><br />There was (possibly) a work of art of Jesus made up of nipples from porn magazines, but there was definitely play about a work of art of Jesus made from nipples from porn magazines.<br /><br />Here is the description I found at some <a href="http://www.dschungelwien.at/cgi-bin/page.pl?cid=8">random web page listed on the flyer</a>.<br /><br /><br />----<br />"NIPPLEJESUS<br />DSCHUNGEL WIEN<br />105 Minuten / age 15 plus<br />Directed by: Juergen Maurer<br /><br />Roli Winkler, a former employee of a guart service, finds himself in a strange, new job. Among students and retirees he works as a museum attendant. The picture he has to observe is one of the most shocking ones he has every seen. It`s called “NippleJesus” and shows a reproduction of Jesus, made of nipples taken from porn magazines. During the exhibition of “NippleJesus” Roli meets quite a lot of different visitors and their arguments. At first he goes along with those who damn and want to destroy “NippleJesus”, but after meeting the painter he changes his point of view over the meaning of art und identifies with it more and more."RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-76811557561116137482009-12-25T06:44:00.000-08:002009-12-25T06:49:09.449-08:00Kid's a little delayed, and funny keyboards...I was all decked out in SFSlim's Santa Suit which I wore for Santa Con a few weeks ago. <br /><br />I was waiting in the main entrance to the MQ. I worked on the netbook until it got too cold, then I just waited and waited. Adorable cute tourist girls would ask me if they could take pictures with me, but that was no real recompense...<br /><br />I just waited, getting excited at each arriving taxi cab...is it them? Is it them? I was out there waiting for a long time.<br /><br />I finally came back in, and there was a gtalk chat up from Molly<br />"Molly: hey<br />were going to be late<br />in venna aroo--nd 8<br />our flght got delazed<br />love zyou<br />were readzy to be there<br />but we have maps and should be able to get to you guys<br />lwe a-ll love zou"<br /><br />Molly is normally fairly good at her grammer and all, so I think that represents a combination of lousy/limited connectivity plus a European keyboard.<br /><br />The 'love zou' is a give away, with the y and z in unexpected places!RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-60992450583796507262009-12-25T00:52:00.001-08:002009-12-25T02:29:55.321-08:00What we see and places we fall in love withYesterday, Dec 24th, we went shopping at the Naschmarkt. And my eye was stuck by these incredible buildings, and I had to GigaPan them, RIGHT NOW, even though I didn't have my mast or a tripod. But there was a handy electrical transformer, so I made an effort by balancing the Gigapan on the surface.<br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.gigapan.org/media/gigapans/39461/snapshots/114743/iframe/flash.html" frameborder="0" height="400" scrolling="no" width="100%"></iframe><br />It turns out that they are already pretty famous without my GigaPanning. "Majolikahaus and Medallion House' "Designed by Otto Wagner, the genius of the Viennese Jugenstill. The facade of the Majolikahaus, entirely covered in tiles, is an explosion of pink and green ceramic floral designs. Gilded medallions depict female forms on the walls of the adjacent apartment block (1898)."<br /><br />It was here that Rose said to me that it was important that "you confess to yourself that you are madly in love with Vienna."<br /><br />I wake up and if the sun is up I sort of panic, I have an urgency to be out there. Not sure where, or doing what. Taking GigaPans and experiencing the city. Rose says <br />"I mostly think that it is just you wanting to take pictures of your beloved."RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-53148664727556150192009-12-25T00:37:00.000-08:002009-12-25T00:43:34.402-08:00Subway trains and the Great RevealI love the U-abhn in part for the dramatic reveals that you get. The best is coming up the Stephansplatz exit. You ride up an escalator, and then look up, straight up, and the spires of St Stephans reveal themselves, at first high, impossibly high and then you ascend to street level and it is still massive, but then there are some near human features. You can see the doors, and the ground for reference and you are not lost entirely within the heavens. You have been Revealed.<br /><br />Donauinsel has another reveal. Especially in the whispy snow and grey sky which I had. You glide to a stop, get off the train, and then you are in the MIDDLE OF THE RIVER! Really. You walk a bit to Donauinsel, or to the Vienna International Center and all of the new buildings, but you are in nature in a primal sense.<br /><br />Exploring a city is filled with connetions. Where you realize that the 'Naschmarkt' that everyone tells you to go to is really the same place you had been going to - you just didn't realize the name.<br /><br />Stumbling onto Karlsplatz via Ubahn was one of these experiences for me. First, the station is great fun. It is massive, because there are entrances at each of a number of far corners.<br /><br />The exit towards Karlsplatz is like an underground garage. You could drive cars right now a ramp and into the station. You stroll up and you are in a gorgeous park and in the middle of Vienna.<br /><br />And there is another amazing church, and a Christmas market, somewhere on the other side of the station is the Naschmarkt, and the Secession space - which as near as I can tell is a hacker space for artists, largely supported because one of the group did something cool which is kept in the basement and spits out euros.RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-58794455301653414492009-12-21T05:41:00.000-08:002009-12-21T05:48:10.240-08:00Das leben ist kein ponyhoff, auber das leben ist GigaPanhoff.This is for Mizchalmers. Rose intends to get you a t-shirt with this<br />slogan. I tried to translate it, but I kept getting confused. I am<br />having trouble with words which are totally different in meaning based<br />only on a single letter difference.<br /><br />lieben and leben are different, but related. 'Lieben' is 'love' and 'leben' <br />is 'life.' And 'Klein' is 'small,' but 'kein is 'not.' <br /><br />I tend to mix up klein and kein which might explain why waiters sometimes<br />bring me bier and sometimes bring me dirty looks.<br /><br />It is like they have their own language here!<br /><br />But back to 'Das leben ist kein ponyhoff.' Life is not a pony yard, or maybe 'life<br />is not a rose garden.'<br /><br />Auber das leben ist GigaPanhoff. But life is a GigaPan Yard!RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-61333377826376984262009-12-21T05:26:00.000-08:002009-12-21T05:41:17.081-08:00History of BuidlingsThe other day we had dinner and beer at a delightful beer pub, the 7 Stern or 7 Star. <br />To us it was a nice place. Maybe like Gordon Biersch at home. A place to socialize, eat some yummy Tafelspitz and beer and warm up.<br /><br />Tafelspitz is boiled beef in broth Viennese style. And I really really like it! They serve you the broth the beef was cooked in, and you eat it like a Starter (and I like the word 'starter' more than 'appetizer,' just saying). And then you have beef. And maybe some Rosti potatos on the side (Rosti are sort of like hash browns) and horseradish with apple sauce.<br /><br />But Rose just read that before it was a brewpub this building was home to a communist newspaper, Volksstimmeit, and before that was a Gestapo headquarters.RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7374172014968488655.post-12978503642480602082009-12-21T04:42:00.000-08:002009-12-21T05:25:33.025-08:00Karlsplatz rocksI am back from adventures. I am going to sit in the apartment until I feel like it would be sensible to take off my hat and scarf. Then I will pursue the next adventure. I only returned because I had batteries to recharge, plus I was cold :-)<br /><br />I took the GigaPan out again today (shocking, I know!). It was cold, another shocker - in December, in Central Europe, the weather tends towards the nippy side.<br /><br />I took a few Gigapans of the poster displays, but this time in daylight. At one point I wanted to get each wall, in full detail. But today I decided that I can't do everything. I have now taken enough pictures of poster displays to demonstrate that gigapans of that sort of display are a good way to share the message.<br /><br />Or perhaps I have not made that point. But more images will not be more convincing. And there are other things to image!<br /><br /><iframe src="http://api.gigapan.org/beta/gigapans/38870/options/nosnapshots/iframe/flash.html" scrolling="no" width="100%" frameborder="0" height="275"></iframe><br /><a href="http://gigapan.org/alpha/gigapans/38870/">View the full image at GigaPan.org</a><br /><br />It is so much easier to take images in daylight! After the posters I continued to my original goal of the Naschmarkt. Should be a great subject for GigaPans! I assume so, but I don't yet know. I was cold I took the UBahn. The MuseumsQuartier is so big that there is a separate train station on each end, the MariaHilferstrasse side and the Burgrasse side.<br /><br />I took one stop on the U2 to KarlsPlatz. I figured I'd take a picture of the Secession in the glowing light, and then hang out in the Naschmarkt taking images. But I was distracted and pulled away by Resselpark, and the Christmas market there.<br /><br />The ATM has been broken the last few days, so I only had 6E with me, but that was enough for roasted chestnuts - 'bitte, Marone, Grosse' - please, large chestnuts...<br /><br />And I gigapanned Karlskirche, with its' fabulous towers and the christmas market below, including pony rides and a petting zoo in the actual Karlsplatz in front of the church.<br /><br />Karlskirche is undergoing rennovations, so right now you can ride an industrial elevator up to the base of the dome and then take stairs up to see details of the restoration work. This gives you a totally unexpected view of details in the dome which are normally invisible.<br /><br /><br />I wandered a bit more and took a couple of more GigaPans, and looked at the Technical University museum with the plaque that the Strauss brothers went there, and entertaining stencil art, but then I realized that I was too cold, and had too few working batteries, so it was best to zip home and warm up and charge batteries.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_UY03DkeHUjYd4nBhPYHuMUkCZC3OoOykWuLx304Rap3-uruqFAuwcPkmfjwxVnTI7krvUlg7PosBfbc9XTk52GarBi9sa6fsfPHBre13CfD8HIBmG6kioLGOdr2KYAGhAM7E8g-RCuc/s1600-h/IMG_6067.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_UY03DkeHUjYd4nBhPYHuMUkCZC3OoOykWuLx304Rap3-uruqFAuwcPkmfjwxVnTI7krvUlg7PosBfbc9XTk52GarBi9sa6fsfPHBre13CfD8HIBmG6kioLGOdr2KYAGhAM7E8g-RCuc/s320/IMG_6067.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5417679278306055314" border="0" /></a><br />But the key is that Karlsplatz is well worth returning to. With the market, and church rennovations to look at, and University buildings, and park - which looked like more fun<br />in the summer :-) and then the Naschmarkt and Secession Museum right across the street.<br /><br />In Psychogeographical terms, the Karlsplatz U2 Station is more interesting than Stephensdom.RichGibsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02427826316415364444noreply@blogger.com0