Coolth #2: Quoin Basket
October 14, 2007
Semi-coolth: The third piece in the kiln
October 14, 2007
Forgot to mention, also pulled this one out of the kiln last night:
Coolth #1: Amber basket
October 13, 2007
Pimping pumpkins
October 13, 2007
(more people than produce at the Pumpkin Patch today)
My friend and colleague Jason, an SEM wizard who can make search engine bots sit up and beg (really), is also a sustainable foodie. He keeps chickens in his backyard, exotic varieties that lay delicious celadon and brown and aqua eggs.
(I asked Jason if the chickens were as delicious as the eggs and he gave me a pitying look. “When you have children,” he explained carefully, “you don’t generally eat their pets.”)
Anyway, Jason mentioned that Portland recently passed a law restricting the number of chickens that its residents could keep within city limits to three. Since most of the Portlanders I’ve met think chickens grow in little yellow packages marked “Tyson,” I didn’t think this would be a huge issue, but it did impact Jason’s little family: One of his four chicken pets needed to find a good home. Due to the afore-mentioned children, the frying pan was not an option.
They took the chicken to a farm on Sauvie Island and visit her on the weekends. “YOU haven’t been to Sauvie Island?” he gasped, “It’s great. You’ve gotta go, especially if you’re looking for local produce.”
Can you hate Big Brother if he’s doing a good job?
October 13, 2007
OK, so I’m human. (and no, I didn’t just find that out)
Humans tend to root for the underdog, cheer when he succeeds, grow suspicious when he keeps succeeding…and then root for his downfall when he becomes so successful that his competitors start looking like underdogs.
This is why, I suppose, that we’re starting to talk about Google as if it were Microsoft. Or Dell. Or Apple. Or DEC. Or Hewlett-Packard. Or Intel. Or IBM…get the picture? There’s a cyclical quality about media darlings, at least in the high tech world, that gets kinda monotonous.
Same old song: Little company with crazy ideas and uppity know-nothing (but admittedly bright) kids. Floats a stupid idea and succeeds beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Stock’s in the stratosphere, ideas come pouring out like viruses (and are just as prolific)…and the Horatio Alger-style press that congratulated them for buying their first jet grumbles as they buy their second…and suggests that the company is too big, and the feds oughta do something about them.
I wonder if the old-timers at Microsoft are giggling in their cornflakes. “Heheheheh, Google. See how YOU like it.”
Has Google peaked? Is it following the pattern of most high-tech companies? (i.e., evolve from a bunch of guys doing really cool stuff to a bunch of bureaucrats scrabbling to grow marketshare)
Seems almost inevitable: One day the reputation ride is over and the bureaucrats hire a new ad agency to come up with what I call a legacy campaign: “Google. The company you trust,” or “Google. Don’t be fooled by cheap imitations,” or “Google. The guys that made (a really old version of) search engines great.”
And then the senior execs will go on record as promoting a “culture of innovation” because “our people are our biggest asset.” (dire sounds from the pipe organ)
When I hear that, I know the company’s started that long downhill slide that ends in total reorg, lots of layoffs and–usually–a fresh new brand that confuses the hell out of everyone. It’s a sad little tailspin that only one pilot in a thousand has the strength and skill to pull out of.
At least three biggies slid into that in the last 12 months, but I don’t think Google’s there yet. Here’s why: Hit up Google Maps this morning for directions to this pumpkin patch/cornfield maze thing. Didn’t like the route it proposed, and there was a little tag telling me I could pick another by dragging the blue route line to a different road.
I did. Zingo. The page rewrote the directions, I got a prettier drive, and it took me all of a two seconds.
Instead of blathering on about how innovative they are, how much they’re spending on R&D (another kiss of death–making R&D into a foreign country you have to spend money on so your stockholders can read about it in the annual report)…Google’s still just doing neat stuff and sticking it out there for you to discover.
I’m seeing some of that in pockets at Microsoft–like the stuff they’re doing with Live, and some of the little-discussed things that probably don’t generate much revenue. Would sure love to see them do more of it.
I think Google’s got a ways to go before the plane runs out of gas.
Culturelativitially
October 10, 2007
Every good journalist knows that it’s important to report news in terms that people relate to. For example, instead of writing:
“Joe has manufactured 3,235,329 hammers, which is a lot”
you write:
“If you whacked the guy that invented voicemail routing once each with every single hammer that Joe has ever manufactured, you’d make a hole 5 miles deep with a satisfyingly icky puddle of goo at the bottom.”
This seems especially true of boring, stodgy technology news; by relating it to pop culture we apparently make it readable. It’s kinda like saying “Robert Goddard and Wernher von Braun developed the first modern rockets, which led to the invention of Tang,” or “Albert Einstein developed the theory of relativity, which allows ‘Ice Truckers’ to start and end at precisely the right time.” (Work it out, folks…)
In that vein, Drs. Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg won a Nobel prize this week for discovering giant magnetoresistance, or GMR. One of the first real applications of nanotechnology, it allows engineers to easily strengthen resistance of very small magnetic disks, increasing potential for very dense data storage.
In effect, it lets us break an unbreakable law and make data storage devices tinier and denser at the same time. It’s revolutionized our ability to efficiently miniaturize massive silos’ worth of data, saving on datacenter storage space. And it’s enhanced our ability to effectively transport and mine data that could one day lead to cancer cures, more accurate weather predictions, etc., etc.
So how did Scientific American, the UK’s Guardian, Nature and many others make this news interesting? Here’s Scientific American’s headline:
Like your iPod? Thank this year’s physics Nobelists
Now I’m not saying that GMR’s use in rich media portability hasn’t been a significant boon to mankind; GMR has pretty much built the portable MP3 player industry and done worlds of good for video gaming. But there are days when we take this culturelativitially thing a bit far.
Just as an aside, Dr. Fert was born in Carcassonne, France, which sits on the Canal du Midi (one of the great engineering marvels of its day, BTW). He grew up in the last of the medieval walled cities, where every one of the narrow, cobbled streets pitilessly routes visitors to the Museum of Torture. Walk down any street, duck into any dark alley, open any door…and find yourself in the Museum. Even if you don’t want to learn about the little metal propeller thingee that looks like a lemon reamer (and performs a similar function in dungeon victims), your resistance will be broken and it will be etched into your memory.
There’s a metaphor there somewhere.
Appendix = boot disk
October 8, 2007
So here’s an interesting tidbit: Some researchers now believe that the appendix is designed as a kind of digestive system boot disk. It’s full of all the good bacteria that are needed by your gut to digest your dinner effectively.
When something comes along and strips your gut of its helpful fauna, the appendix repopulates it and gets things working again. Apparently its close proximity to the digestive tract got scientists thinking and…voila: the little wormy bit suddenly made sense.
Hmmm. I had my tonsils out when I was 4 or 5 (still remember it vividly, in fact). Do you suppose they were the repository of my extra brain cells? The germ of many an idea I’ll never have? (which, given the number of ideas currently clogging my brain, might be a blessing)
Just a thought, anyway.
Field trip for glass
October 5, 2007
Just got back from the Oregon Glass Guild’s field trip to Seattle; had a lovely time, very nice people. Special thanks to Robin Knoke for organizing the trip, which was amazingly inexpensive and very informative.
OGG chartered a bus to drive us all up to visit the Spectrum glass factory, stop in at Olympic Color Rods (which supplies a fair amount of stuff for my casting work) and then head over to the Tacoma Museum of Glass and the William Traver/Vetri gallery next door.
Highlights:
- Lots of great discussion on the bus about glass and animation, so I was in hog heaven, of course.
- Very nice (and knowledgeable) fellow at Spectrum, Hassan, served as our tour guide and spent a lot of time answering my (many) questions about their production lines and furnaces.
- The ladling robot on Spectrum’s smaller glass furnace lines was probably worth the trip. Took care of my interest in robotics, gadgetry and glass in one go.
- The Glass Museum’s hot shop is always fun and they had a reasonably interesting main exhibit showing the contrasts in glass. I do wish, though, that they’d get over this notion that glass must somehow be justified before it can be considered as an artistic medium. The exhibit discussed the neat-o differences in glass (it can be opaque, transparent, soft, hard, cold, hot, etc.) and I really wanted something more than “wow, it’s shiny.”
- Never yet, though, been disappointed by William Traver and their current exhibits were fun. Ironically, they’re occupying the formerly abandoned building next to the museum that I photographed during the museum’s opening. The shot I took of the old, broken window (now part of the grand entrance) is still one of my favorites.
Anyway, most enjoyable trip. I’m glad I went.
Sushi Takahashi
October 3, 2007
Location: Downtown Portland
Price to fill up two people: $14.50This place proves that great sushi doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. In fact, the bill was so low that we pulled out the menus and added everything up again, certain the waiter had shortchanged himself. He hadn’t; we paid $14.50 for a VERY filling and tasty sushi dinner for two people.
About two blocks away from the new Contemporary Crafts Museum (who recommended the place), this place is so, er, unpretentious that I almost didn’t go in. You sign in, wait for the hostess to call your name (it’ll take awhile) and when she does she’ll tell you to go find a seat. You have your choice of the traditional “food goes by on a train” sushi counter or a few little threadbare booths at the back.
Five-finger revisited, part II
October 2, 2007
