I Believe Two Things

Err

Artist Jeremy Hutchison wrote to factory managers and asked to order one of their products, but with an error. The error had to render the product unusable (for its ordinary purpose), and the factory working making the object had to choose the error.

Some factories ignored the request. One produced a flawed object only to have customs destroy it before it could leave the country. But many produced delightfully… erroneous objects.

This shovel with the handle backwards is one of my favorites. There’s also a pipe with nowhere to put tobacco, a comb with no teeth, and a variety of other misassembled or destroyed objects.

(via Creative Review)

My first attempt at teaching Sophie to ride a bike was made without any prior planning. It did not go well. Even well-armored with a helmet, elbow pads, knee pads, and wrist guards, riding a bike just isn’t fun after you’ve fallen enough times.

Learning to ride is really all about learning to balance, and unfortunately the most intuitive ways to teach bike riding do absolutely nothing to teach balance.

One common approach is to run alongside the child, helping to steer with the handlebars or with the back of the seat. This means the child can ride for quite a distance successfully, but only because it’s the parent who’s doing all the balancing work. The child learns nothing important.

The opposite approach is to give a push start and then let the child fend for herself. This means she alone is responsible for staying upright — but since won’t be able to at first, she’ll likely fall so quickly that it will be hard to learn anything from the experience.

We tried both these techniques with Sophie for a couple days without really getting anywhere.

Since the new rider has to learn to balance independently, touching her or the bike is completely off-limits. But since the cost of crashing is too high (with too little time to learn and the potential for injury), letting her ride unaccompanied is also not appropriate.

The solution: run along behind the bike with outstretched arms, forming a rigid frame — rather like rollbars. As long as Sophie was riding upright, I wouldn’t be touching her and she’d be balancing herself. But when she did start to tip to either side, she’d be leaning into my arm. I wouldn’t push her back up — she had to learn how to do that with her own body weight and the bike’s handlebars — but at least she wouldn’t fall to the ground. In fact, she could continue riding even while tipped impossibly far to the side, trying the whole time to figure out how to correct her balance.

And she did. After just 30 minutes of practicing with this technique, she was riding independently. That was last summer, and now that we have nice weather again she’s back outside riding like a pro. The only difficulty she has anymore is that we’ll ride so far at once (we’re up to about a mile now) her legs get tired and she has to take a break.

The only penalty for me was getting a good workout — which I probably needed anyway. This approach requires running behind a moving bike (at about six or seven miles per hour) while hunched over and often supporting the entire weight of a five year old and her bicycle.

This whole idea came from the advice of Sheldon Brown from Harris Cyclery in Newton, Massachusetts (apparently located just 15 minutes from my old apartment in Boston) on teaching kids to ride. Besides offering basic tips on building balance, the page also discusses some novel teaching techniques that would have been our next step if Sophie hadn’t learned so quickly.

See if you can name every country in the world over at sporacle.

You get only seven minutes, but the game will help you out tremendously by automatically naming every country that borders the ones you type. So just entering “Russia” will also get you credit for Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea. Plus Lithauania and Poland. You forgot Kalingrad was over there, didn’t you.

I managed only 158 of the 195 countries included (since some disputed territories like Palestine and Western Sahara aren’t counted). I think that’s a B minus, though if my math is as rusty as my geography it could be anything.

Think it’s too easy having all the bordering countries handed to you for free? Not to worry! You can also try to name all 195 countries without any hints in 15 minutes. You do at least get to see a blank world map there which is labeled as you go. I managed only 150 countries there.

If you’re discovering you need to brush up on your geography skills, I recommend the games over at Sheppard Software. They’re designed to teach, not quiz. You can choose a region (either a whole continent, or just a few countries at a time) and then click each country as its named appears and is spoken. If you miss (twice) the game will show you where the country is so you can learn quickly from your mistakes.

Maybe with enough practice you’ll be able to identify all the countries by their capital city.

In the ongoing wake of the Fukushima Daiichi crisis, news outlets have been saying “Three Mile Island” and “Chernobyl” a lot. To help alleviate the ensuing confusion and help us all understand radiation doses a little better, Randall Munroe of xkcd fame has prepared a chart of radiation doses on the xkcd blag.

We can see at the 1µSv scale the effect of eating a banana, at the 1mSv scale the dose one gets during a mammogram, and at the 1Sv scale the doses that are likely to kill you. The dose for “Ten minutes next to the Chernobyl reactor core after explosion and meltdown” is pretty astonishing.

The Science Channel now has the rights to Firefly and will be re-airing the series, but unfortunately won’t be producing any new content. Nathan Fillion gave a brief interview to Entertainment Weekly in honor of the occasion. In it, he said, almost offhand:

If I got $300 million from the California Lottery, the first thing I would do is buy the rights to Firefly, make it on my own, and distribute it on the Internet.

And that’s the story of how HelpNathanBuyFirefly.com was born.

The current theory is that enough Firefly fans exist that we can just raise $300 million. And since $300 million is a figure Fillion pulled from thin air, it probably wouldn’t take that much. And while nobody wants to donate money to a random website with the vague hope that it will somehow result in new Firefly episodes, who wouldn’t willingly give their savings over to Malcolm Reynolds himself?

The Internet is pretty awesome.

This American Life is a Public Radio International show (also available as a free podcast from iTunes) and is unlike any other television or radio program I know. I’ve been listening for years and no two episodes are alike. It’s not a current events or documentary show per se; rather, each episode dives head first into the details of a situation — any situation — and gives us a perspective we’ve never had before.

When “toxic assets” were famously ruining our economy last year, This American Life and Planet Money bought one (nicknamed “Toxie”) and spoke with some of the homebuyers whose mortgages they now owned. Each had a different and unexpected reason for falling behind on their payments.

In 2009, the Princeton Review named Penn State the “#1 Party School in America” so This American Life went there to find out what it’s like for students, administrators, and residents of the surrounding community. A surprising number of drunken college students wander into strange homes at night and pass out.

Mr. President

And just two weeks ago the show aired what may have been its best episode to date: Kid Politics. What would the world be like if it were run by children? In one segment we hear about a simulation where students become president, press, and Navy in 1983 when something’s about to happen in Grenada. Now, Mr. President, would you like to invade? And would you like to change your plans now that the press has leaked news of your “covert” invasion?

In another segment, we visit The Brooklyn Free School: a real school where there are no traditional classes and the students are in charge. At one point a student calls a meeting of the entire school because she’s just been called a whore again. If you’re thinking that’s an overreaction, some of the other students agree. But the victim’s justification makes a lot of sense: these boys just used a very offensive word without even knowing its meaning, and she wants them to understand the severity of that action. Essentially, she’s able to react with as much force and impact as every student who’s ever been called a name has ever wanted to. And perhaps those boys will be wary of doing the same thing again.

You can listen to every episode of This American Life ever aired for free in the show’s Radio Archive and you can subscribe to new episodes through their free podcast in iTunes. Perhaps Kid Politics is a good place to start. When you’re sufficiently impressed, don’t forget to donate some money to the show (through PayPal if you want).

Cameron’s House from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, where Cameron famously destroys his father’s 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California, is on the market. Now you too can park a really expensive car in a garage somewhat inexplicably suspended over a forrest.

Cameron's House

The Sotheby’s listing shows a $1,650,000 asking price.

Google Labs has a new toy to play with: the Google Books Ngram Viewer. The tool graphs how frequently words and phrases appear in all the books in Google’s library, dating back to 1500.

As one simple example, a search for war will show some things anyone with a decent high school education would expect: the word was used far more frequently around 1916 and 1944 than at any other time on record. Meanwhile, a search for “hamburger” shows an inexplicable (at least to me) sharp uptick in use of that word between 1930 and 1940, consistent usage levels for 25 years, and then another dramatic climb lasting into the present.

What makes the tool especially interesting is that you can plot multiple terms on the same axes in order to draw comparisons. Here’s a search for ”war,peace” that shows something a bit more subtle. After a slight uptick in use of the word “war” leading into 1970, use of both “war” and “peace” fall dramatically — both to lower levels than we’d seen in 200 years.

War and Peace

Every search I’ve tried has had interesting characteristics that suggest something about our society — or at least about what people are writing about it. See how often “Russia” and “USSR” have been used. Limit a search to just British English books and compare uses of London and New York over time. Search for “potato,rice,corn” and see which side dish is mentioned most often. Politics, entertainment, history, and fantasy can all be graphed. And while it’s not always obvious what the data are telling us (if anything), it sure is an addictive toy to play with.

In a TED Talk in July, designer David McCandless highlighted some interesting data, including data from Facebook analyzing when people end their relationships.

Breakups on Facebook

Plotting the information in 10,000 status updates shows what times of year see the most breakups, and it looks like we’re headed into one of the worst seasons. Apart from the strategically placed highs and lows (e.g., hardly anybody breaks up over Christmas) what I find most fascinating is the apparent constant, inescapable breakups that are happening every day of the year.

I’d love to see what the graph of people beginning relationships looks like. I’m betting some parts of it overlap (suggesting people are breaking up because they’ve found someone else) while others may show gaps indicating more people tend to be in (or out of) relationships at a particular time of year.

These data are reminiscent of those on the OkTrends site I found in April. Neither is an exercise in inarguable statistics from random samples, but for the people who are included (i.e., those who self-selected to use Facebook or OkCupid) we get a truly fascinating picture of their social lives we may never otherwise have seen.

(via The Atlantic, via designer Mathias Mikkelsen).

The Ballerina Project showcases photographs of ballerinas posing in everyday locations throughout New York City and Boston. It’s an enthralling mixture of the surreal beauty of ballet and the very different beauty of a historic city.

Dane Shitagi is the photographer behind the project and describes it this way:

The New York City Ballerina Project grew from the idea of New York City as a magnet for creativity; each photograph is a collaborative work of dance, fashion design and photography played out against the city’s landscape.

One of the most striking features of the photographs is the almost complete lack of other people in the background. The dancers pose in apparent isolation, reminiscent of the magical departure from reality that ballet always seems to bring.