I Believe Two Things

"UP!"

While baby Mila Enersen is sleeping, her mother imagines what Mila might be dreaming and enacts it in reality.

She might be a rock star, be surrounded by giant candy, or have an imaginary friend. Mrs. Enersen explains, “I use only few minutes per picture, including creating idea, implementation and editing, ’cause I don’t want to disturb her sleeping and most of my time is for my family.”

This reminds me of an Eddie from Ohio song titled Hey Little Man (recreated there by Madrigals at the Messiah Methodist Bazaar).

"A Space Odyssey 2010"

Are you gonna dream about the colors of the rainbow and the pot of gold that’s waiting at the end

May luck be by your side and the spirit be your guide

And may you know the blessing and may you know the joy and may you know the love of a true friend

(via Kottke)

I normally despise all things pertaining to Twitter, so it has perhaps taken me longer than others to discover that Charles Darwin is on Twitter now.

The posts are a real-time account (time delayed 176 years) of Darwin’s travels, culled from the Beagle Diary and from other journals, notes, et cetera that Darwin left for posterity. Upon first following the link I expected to find satire, but the reality is so much more interesting. It’s actually possible to get a sense of Darwin’s thoughts and the timeline of his voyage.

These sad updates, for example, were posted on April 7th:

What will become of me hereafter, I know not; I feel, like a ruined man, who does not see or care how to extricate himself

It is a comfortable reflection to me, that a ship – being made of wood & iron – cannot last for ever & so this voyage must have an end.

Behind the scenes of this delightful operation is David from metaburbia, a software developer in the United Kingdom.

I’m not sure why, but this photograph from shallow_wing photography is terribly compelling:

Saci, from shallow_wing photography

I’m pretty sure this is what summer looks like.

I just stumbled onto OkTrends: the official blog of the free dating site OkCupid.

OkCupid asks members to answer questions that other members have written, and uses the answers to find good matches.  Because anybody can write a question, the topics are not limited to smoking preferences and pet ownership, but cover the entire range of human activity.  Have you been in prison?  Would you prefer to go to a movie or a musical?  How often do you shower?  Do you like trying new foods?  Should flag-burning be illegal?

The OkTrends blog studies this trove of data in the aggregate to derive some fascinating conclusions about dating in general and our society as a whole.

Consider The Case for An Older Woman. We see here, for example, what ages men prefer their partner to be.

From OkTrends

Based on their “allowable match” settings, men are perpetually okay with women a little older, but are reluctant to give up on dating a young woman.

More importantly, the heat map shows whom men are actually contacting, with green areas indicating lots of messages.  A 30 year-old man will say he’d only date someone 22 or older, but he “spends as much time messaging teenage girls as he does women his own age.”

Read the full article to see how women’s preferences compare.

OkTrends also translates data into practical advice for finding a match.  For example, see Exactly What to Say in a First Message.

It’s heartening to see that messages with “netspeak” (like “ur” and “ya”) tend to elicit responses less than 10% of the time, compared to an overall average response rate of 32%.  The word “sexy” also discourages replies, while non-physical compliments like “fascinating” encourages them.  ”Atheist” gets answers, but “God” does not.  And discussion of specific interests (“vegetarian” or “zombie”) goes a long way.

Finally, the blog dissects some of the implications of its data for our society at large, in posts like The Democrats are Doomed, or How a “Big Tent” Can be Too Big.

Economic vs. Social Beliefs

I like in particular this depiction of social vs. economic beliefs.  Perhaps we lose sight of our ideals as we get older?

Some of these broader conclusions suffer from the flaw that we can see only a snapshot in time.  People who are 50 today grew up under different conditions than people who are 20 today, and may favor their economic beliefs (for example) for reasons other than their age.  It’s fascinating either way.

Even though I’ll never need an online dating site again (nor any other form of dating, for that matter), I’ve still subscribed to this blog.

Design Milk published a pictorial a few days ago on offices built in people’s backyards titled The Rise of the Backyard Office. Evidently building a separate office in one’s backyard is a trend now.  Many of those pictured are elegant and intriguing (and make me jealous), but I can’t can’t quite get past this one:

dmvA’s Blob VB3

If I worked in that office, I’d feel compelled to come home every evening (across the yard, of course) with a joyful greeting of, “Nanu, Nanu!”

(Mork & Mindy?  Anybody?  Is “Nanu, Nanu” still a usable catchphrase?  How about “Shazbot?”)

Clara Moskowitz at MSNBC reports on a study about traffic planning.

Researchers arranged oat flakes to mimic the layout of cities around Tokyo, and then set some slime mold loose.  This mold grows as a large, interconnected network that tries to get the most efficient access to food — in this case, Japan-mimicking oat flakes.

The resulting network of mold ended up looking suspiciously similar to the train network that connects the real Tokyo to its real suburbs.

Apart from the quip Freakonomics makes about whether transportation engineers are as smart as mold, there’s also something to be said for the similarities between what we humans do to our environment and what mold does in its own.

(via Freakonomics)

I’ve stumbled onto perhaps the most astounding collection of videos since TEDTalks: the “University of California” channel on YouTube.  Fully 3,575 videos are posted at the moment on topics ranging from psychology to science fiction to poetry and music.  Bill Clinton, Noam Chomsky, Ray Bradbury, and the Dalai Lama are all featured giving talks or interviews, along with countless others I have yet to even discover.

With most videos about an hour long, this trove will take some time to explore.

I’ll recommend first a talk by Stephen Wolfram, inventor of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha:

I’ve watched only the first 15 minutes or so of this to verify it looks like the same talk I saw Mr. Wolfram give in person about five years ago.  At the time, it was the single most astonishing idea I’d ever heard.

Starting with a very simple rule for how to color in a row of boxes based on how the previous row of boxes was covered — i.e., a cellular automaton — one can obtain a “pattern” so sophisticated that it produces what, by any known measure, appears to be completely random data.  It’s so random, in fact, that “Rule 30” is used as the basis for random number generation in Mathematica.

And this talk by Douglas Adams is similarly enthralling.  He discusses several journeys he took to find and study endangered species, and what we humans can learn from them — and he does it in a speaking style that anyone who’s read Hitchhiker’s Guide will find oddly familiar:

These photographs come from Mike Hollingshead, a storm chaser in Nebraska:

Mike Hollingshead - Storm Photographs

Mike Hollingshead - Storm Photographs

I’ve just spent an entire hour clicking through the photography on his site, not knowing whether to be more amazed at Earth’s capability to produce weather like this, or man’s ability to capture such absolutely stunning imagery of it.

Paris 26 Gigapixels took 2,346 pictures of Paris from atop the tower of Saint Sulpice and stitched them together into a 354,159 x 75,570 pixel panorama of the city.  Pan and zoom at your leisure.

Like in Google Earth, the zoom feature is blurry at first.  Give it a second to crisp up and you’ll be absolutely astonished at how much detail is there.  Zoom to the absolute far reaches of the image and you’ll still be able to see individual people walking around.

Special challenge: find the bright green “3:14π” sign and identify what the adjacent shop most likely sells.

(via Kottke)

The JetBlue blog is a mixture of press releases, behind-the-scenes anecdotes, corporate culture, and occasional bragging. It won some major points on February 11th, when JetBlue canceled its flights in the Northeast in advance of the latest big storm to hit the region.

With the forecast calling for icy conditions throughout the day, we decided to cancel flights rather than wait-and-see with our customers in the airports.  Why?  Because on the suckiness scale, getting a call that your flight is canceled while you’re still at home, at a hotel, or at your family or friend’s house is a lot better than getting up early, going to the airport and waiting for hours with the possibility of flight cancellation to come. Still sucks. Just a little less.

I liked in particular this explanation for why aircraft are out of position at the beginning of the day:

That would work if we could park aircraft overnight in the cities affected by weather, but we try to avoid that.  Ice would build up on the wings overnight and it would take hours to deice all of the aircraft we normally start the day with at New York’s JFK, let alone Boston, Washington’s Dulles and the Mid-Atlantic cities.  So we put those planes in warmer weather ports for the night to get them to the frozen North first thing in the morning the day after the storm, then start the operation from that point.

I love logistical challenges like this, and I’d probably enjoy figuring out how to reposition aircraft in this manner to have the least impact on operations.  I don’t envy the planners who have to endure (albeit indirectly) the ire of stranded travelers who are entirely too willing to blame their airline for the weather, though.