I Believe Two Things

The Harvard Pops gave a delightful baseball-themed concert tonight, including Boston’s own baseball favorites like Shipping Up to Boston and Sweet Caroline.  ”Sporchestra” commentators narrated the event, providing (for example) play-by-play analysis of Beethoven’s 5th symphony:

The brass section has the theme… and now the basses have it… and now nobody has the theme!  The audience can’t find the theme!  Wait… what’s this… he’s introduced a new theme!

Mengruo Yang performed a mesmerizing and technically impressive solo on flute in Fantasie Brillante from Carmen (performed here, perhaps even more impressively, by 7 year-old “Emma“).

Megan Savage narrated the poem Casey at the Bat as Adam Lathram brought it to life.  The Boston Pops had included this poem in their own baseball-themed concert last year, but I honestly liked conductor Allen Feinstein’s original music from tonight’s performance better.

My favorite line of the evening came when Adam Lathram was about to start a rigorous training routine for his upcoming bullfight in a montage set to the music of Rocky:

You’d better get a move on.  You only have 163 measures.

All this begs the question: where were you while all this was going on?

Patrick Jean made a video depicting what would happen to New York if it were attacked by 1980s video games:

I like the bit with Tetris best, but the entire thing is wonderful.

I was unimpressed with this the first time I watched it, but after trying it again I’m finding it entirely remarkable.  Todd Lappin handed his new iPad to his 2.5 year-old daughter and filmed her first few minutes using the device.

This is cheating to some extent in that she’s already used an iPhone and therefore understood not only the basic interface but also many of the applications (including her games in particular).

That aside, however, the basic idea that children born today are faced with clear, intuitive interfaces for interacting with computers — and that they can learn to use a device like an iPad before even being able to read — is truly astounding.

YouTube has quite a few videos of children using an iPad (a surprising percentage of whom are 2.5 years old) which only emphasizes the basic point that we’ve invented a device young children can perhaps universally understand.

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.

Google generously sponsored free wireless Internet access at 54 airports during last year’s holiday season, including Boston’s Logan International.  This made hectic holiday travel a little more fun, and surely got Google a metric boatload of ad impressions on all the “wireless jail” pages we see when first connecting.

I don’t mind terribly paying for the resources I consume, as a general rule, but the pricing model for Internet access at airports is a terrible fit for most people.  At Logan, the cost was $7.95 for 24 hours of access.  On its face, that’s not bad.  But of course, most people aren’t spending 24 hours in the airport; they’re just checking their e-mail in the one hour buffer surrounding their flight.

Well, good news, citizens of Boston: Massport has arranged to keep the Internet free at Logan — indefinitely!  Unsurprisingly, use of the wireless network grew sixfold during Google’s sponsored access, and Massport is finally ready to continue offering the third basic element of human survival at no cost.  Excellent decision.

Logan Wireless Internet

I love the number of shared libraries that appear in iTunes at the airport.  My favorite selection this time: “Stud Beefpile.”  I didn’t dare look to see what was in that one.

I stumbled upon The Four Quarters on YouTube this morning and immediately had to play every video they’ve made.  Among my favorites: Downtown, Lullaby of Broadway, and the “Teenager in Love, Lollipop, Earth Angel, Sh-Boom” medley.

Don’t be surprised when you open the “National Anthem” video and hear an off-key “Oh” at first.  It’s actually on key, it’s just followed by “Canada” instead of “say can you see.”  (That was a discouraging little realization of some intrinsic assumptions I apparently make about the universe.)