Author: Ben

Ben http://benjaminfenster.com/

Children in a World of iPad

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.

Skin Condition

This is my favorite unintentionally funny database table name ever:

skin_condition

This application, like many applications we create, supports different templates so that the application can look like a natural part of a variety of different websites.  That’s a skin.

Each such site might want to limit which records are shown, so the School of Management can show only their own faculty’s records, for example.  That’s a condition.

A condition for a particular skin?  A skin_condition, of course!

Moldy Highways

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)

University of California Television

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:

Storm Photography

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

Mike Hollingshead - Storm Photographs

Mike Hollingshead - Storm Photographs

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.

Danger! Hula Hoops!

It’s an interesting week for me and crosswalks.  I caught this sign in front of Terminal E at Logan Airport this afternoon:

Hula Hoop Crosswalk

Hula Hoop Crosswalk

I’m not sure if this means drivers need only stop for passengers using a hula hoop, or that pedestrians not using one are forbidden from crossing here.

(While the cynical among you will surely dub this vandalism — and my cell phone camera seems to lend credence to the theory — it looks awfully convincing up close.)

Beware of Curb

I like this sign down by the Boston College T stop, aimed directly at the trains leaving the yard:

Beware of Curb

Beware of Curb

I’m not a railroad engineer, but I image that simply refraining from building any curbs across the tracks in the first place would alleviate the need for such signage.

The Boston College station was renovated last year. While the shiny new platform and shelter are a welcome change from the aging infrastructure they replaced, the logistics of the whole affair are just embarrassing.

Outbound trains stop just short of the sidewalk (or crosswalk, more properly) cutting across the mouth of the rail yard, affording easy access to passengers running west to catch their trains.

The new design erected a short railing ostensibly blocking direct access to trains, and forcing passengers to overshoot the station and backtrack down steps (or a ramp) to the platform. This is almost certainly meant to be a safety measure keeping harried commuters from running in front of trains that are about to move, but realistically a small segment of railing will do little to prevent that.

Everything’s 20% Off

I liked this coupon found on a particular restaurant’s Foodler page:

20% vs. 20%

20% vs. 20%

Although completely illogical and irrational, this made me postpone placing my first order with this restaurant since I see that I can get 20% off any order.

Paris: Up Close and Personal

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)