hello typepad

Art History Through Sci Fi-Colored Glasses:

John Mattos took on Marcel Duchamp’s mechanically abstracted Nude Descending a Staircase and brilliantly reset it with C3PO. Then took Pablo Picasso’s Three Musicians to the Star Wars’ Cantina.

Usually this kind of pastiche doesn't work that well, but these are great.

Switch to Open Street Maps

New guide to switching to OpenStreetMap: switch2osm.org Everything you need in one handy place: how-tos, links, and why. #switch2osm

— Stamen (@stamen) January 25, 2012

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was hoping to see wider adoption of Open Street Maps this year, and the new site Switch2OSM.org is a great resource, with articles ranging from "Why Switch?" to different tiling sets & server strategies. With Google's recent announcement that they're going to share data and identity between projects & products, I expect this initiative will find the wind at it's back.

People don't think about location search as something that betrays confidential data, but of course it does — starting with where you live, work and shop. Of course lots of people proactively share this data with Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, and other products, but as Google reduces the number of privacy controls that they allow users to control, they cede one of the last philosophical differences (advantages?) they had over Facebook.

Reindeer Alternate

Reindeer Alternate, originally uploaded by Steve1949.

If you see Shadow coming out of your chimney tonight, give him a lick (and expect one back!) and wish him a merry Christmas!

They Had Me at "Scale of 1:20 Million"

The Sweden Solar System is the world's largest scale model of the solar system. The sun is represented by the Ericsson Globe in Stockholm, the largest hemispherical building in the world. The inner planets can also be found in Stockholm but the outer planets are situated northward in other cities along the Baltic Sea. It was started by Nils Brenning and Gösta Gahm. It is in the scale of 1:20 million.

via Andre Pang.

Don't miss "How to find the stations" on the Sweden Solar System home page. For instance, Mars is in Mörby Centrum:

How to get there: Take the subway in Stockholm to Mörby Centrum and enter the shopping centre. The model is at the western entrance at the bottom plan

Leigh Van Valen, Evolutionary Biologist, Dies at 76

Dr. Van Valen, who died in Chicago on Oct. 16 at the age of 76, changed the conversation about how life works in 1973 when he put forward “a new evolutionary law.” Others call it Van Valen’s law.

Based on the study of fossils, it states that the length of a species’ existence says nothing about its chances of dying off. For Dr. Van Valen, evolution was an “arms race.” The best a species can do to survive, he said, is to respond to an adversary’s adaptations, quickly and ceaselessly. A modern lion, for example, might easily outwit an ancient antelope, but it might be no better at outwitting modern antelopes than ancient lions were at outwitting ancient antelopes, and vice versa. (The antelopes might run faster.)

Dr. Van Valen’s metaphor to describe this idea came from the Red Queen in Carroll’s “Looking Glass.” In the book, Alice complains that she is exhausted from running, only to find she is still under the tree where she started.

The Red Queen answers: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”

via www.nytimes.com

I'm pretty hard on the New York Times. But they do obituaries better than anyone else, and it's not close. Are there good obituaries blogs? What would motivate someone to start an obituaries blog, and who could possibly enjoy dealing in only the macabre? I'd like to meet them.

richest "etc" ever?

via www.thestylerookie.com

My costume is Joey Ramone+Ramona Quimby=Joey Ramona Quimby. Hence, little girl dress, leather jacket, Converse, etc.

Leigh Johnson of Nowness has many more pictures of Tavi's Halloween costume, and I'm now having my "Where is Tavi from and how is she possible?" moment. I know that many friends of Hello, TypePad have already had such a moment, and I am way behind on this. I've arrived now.

Hitchcock vs. Minnesota

Cannot be unseen:

I have lived in Minnesota my entire life. I just noticed that it looks like Alfred Hitchcock smashed his face into the east side of the state.

via www.cynical-c.com

My geography is embarrassingly bad. Now it is a little better.

Blockbuster's New Logo

via @ScottMcCloud

Also see James Surowiecki in The New Yorker:

Why didn’t Blockbuster evolve more quickly? In part, it was because of what you could call the “internal constituency” problem: the company was full of people who had been there when bricks-and-mortar stores were hugely profitable, and who couldn’t believe that those days were gone for good. Blockbuster treated its thousands of stores as if they were a protective moat, when in fact they were the business equivalent of the Maginot Line. The familiar sunk-cost fallacy made things worse. Myriad studies have shown that, once decision-makers invest in a project, they’re likely to keep doing so, because of the money already at stake. Rather than dramatically shrinking both the size and the number of its stores, Blockbuster just kept throwing good money after bad.

Surowiecki outlines the ways that Netflix is vulnerable, but doesn't go so far as to suggest that the age of "category killers" is over, since categories are continuing to narrow.

Health Month

I blogged this already, but health month is excellent. I am really impressed with the site & execution from head to toe — when someone has really thought through a product, it always shows.

Building Megaobjects in Minecraft

via www.youtube.com

OMFG

I've always wanted to make a 1:1 scale model of the Enterprise-D. Even when I was a kid, I thought how cool it would be to build the ship and live in it. One project I embarked on about a year ago was to build a 1:1 scale model of the enterprise in Sketchup. I got pretty far too.

Sadly, my hard drive blew and I lost six months of work. The only thing I had was my original framework and It was just too painful to start over. One of the things that was not lost was the deck plans and a nice computer-friendly vector format, converted from the Whitefire plans (Not the Okuda ones). The plans are pretty rough, but workable. One day I need to go through and clean them up.

The Minecraft world uses 1m^3 blocks, and so, I simply converted my already scaled plans into a format that minecraft could take and imported each deck in batch, leaving 4 spaces in between for walls

The original Enterprise is 642.5 Meters x 467.0 Meters x 137.5 Meters. This is about 3m per deck. Sadly, with the 1m deck you have to walk on, that only leaves 2m left over for hallway space. As your character is only 1.7m tall, you will be bumping your head around a lot. I decided to make the ship 22% bigger, so I could have 4 m per deck. That puts the final size @ 785m x 570m x 168m. I made my "pit" 800x600x180 to fit all 42 decks and almost made a critical error. Even though there are 42 decks on the enterprise, the 2nd deck is split into two half-decks, making actually 43. I made the pit bigger than she ship so I could have a little wiggle room and just missed making it too shallow. In my testing, the halls can get a little cramped. The current decks are just a guideline and framework. They don't call it "Creative Mode" for nothing.

The halls are going to be sand-obsidian-sand (To give that light brown look with the black touch panel in the center) I'd show a demo, but Minecraft is down. I would like to mod my server so that sand doesn't fall. That would bee cool. I also don't know how to fly yet, will be making it much easier to work on the ship.

Thank you @jkottke for the stellar link.