I spent the day yesterday in a ballroom listening to data visualization guru Edward Tufte. Given my increasingly hummingbird-like attention span, a full day of concentrated focus was as welcome as it was unusual. A good time, and well worth the money.

Perhaps the coolest things of the day were when he produced a copy of the first English translation of Euclid’s Elements — the book where he laid out the basics of geometry — dating from 1582. And the other was his showing a first edition first printing of Galileo’s 1610 observations of the moons of Jupiter and sunspots (and, oh by the way, the heliocentric model of the solar system).

But what I found most provocative…

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OK, now that I’ve got your attention…

At 12:01pm on January 20, the whitehouse.gov Web site got turned over to the Obama administration. The old site was swept away into the loving care of the National Archives, along with the rest of the Bush/Cheney documents — with the possible exception of the torture docs that I suspect VP Cheney threw his back out moving a few days earlier.

After every inauguration, White House operations start afresh. This is why the W-less keyboard meme from 2000 was so powerful; it was, in fact, possible — even if it isn’t true. But all files, all computers, all phone programming — all of it — gets zero-ed out at noon on January 20th. That may be one reason that the White House has been having such terrible trouble with e-mail this week.

But even though an inauguration is a transfer of power, it isn’t The Great American Reboot. Government continues. People continue to need services. It’s not like a new company taking over vacant office space. It’s more like getting a new CEO. The new boss may eventually want his own equipment in there — and some it may be open source — but it’s wasteful and bad IT practice to crash an upgrade on your way in the door.

I’m migrating this blog to version 4.0, so things may be even odder than usual for a little while. My host, LivingDot, is being of minimal assistance in this process.
I’ll keep you posted — if I can

Testing, testing. If this posts, it’ll be deleted shortly.

The New Scientist has this story:
Sound Neutralzing Technology ‘Confuses’ Abusive/Racist Chants at Stadiums

During tests of the prototype system, volunteers were surrounded by loudspeakers simulating the sound of a chanting crowd and were asked join in. But one speaker replayed the crowds chant with a short delay. When the delay was greater than 200 milliseconds the volunteers found it too difficult to chant coherently.

My 4-year-olds can do kind of the same thing. It’s really annoying.
The downside of the technology, of course, is that its use won’t be restricted to sports crowds. Expect repressive political regimes to be first in line; this thing would be great at breaking up political demonstrations.

read more | digg story

From the Beeb:
There are some new GPS-based products — in the $50 range — that are designed to let parents know where their kids are at all times. Or, at least, at all times when they have a clear view of the sky. Which they wouldn’t have if they were, say, in a club or a crack house or a friends’ basement playing video games.
Simon Davis, director of Privacy International, voices concern that parents might go a little nuts with this stuff:

‘What this can result in – and we’ve seen this through visual surveillance technology and bugs that can be put into children’s bedrooms – is parents becoming obsessed, to the point of having an unhealthy and destructive relationship with their children,’ he said.

True enough. Of course, parents who use this stuff in an unhealthy and destructive way would very like find other means to behave in an unhealthy and destructive way regarding their kids. Or their spouses. Or their business rivals.
Once again, the problem isn’t with the technology, it’s with the user.

Maybe it’s that good PR for oil companies is so rare that they don’t know what to do when they get some. That appears to be the case for Shell Oil, which looks like it’ll get a billion people looking at its logo during the World Cup soccer tournament — more or less for free.

The Trinidad team will be accompanied by 10,000 steel drum players, according to Bloomberg News. (And you thought they were noisy in the subway…) Steel drums, you may not realize, are made from discarded or otherwise liberated 55-gallon oil drums.

"For many of the world’s estimated 35,000 panmen, the sweetest-sounding music comes from the 55-gallon, 20-gauge red steel oil barrels made in Shell’s lubricant mixing plant on Barracones Bay in Trinidad."

This means that the billion people tuning in to the World Cup have an excellent chance of seeing the Shell logo in a fun upbeat setting. Great product placement.

The trouble is, there are Rules about reusing oil drums. If Shell says Yup, those are ours and isn’t it great, they’re polluters. If they say, Nope, we have no idea how our logo got on those instruments, they look Dumb. Which is why you get quotes like this in the same story:

" `It’s officially against corporate policy for us to hand out oil barrels,” the 37-year-old [Gerard] Mitchell  [country head of shell Trinidad Ltd.] frets. “We really don’t know what to do about all this.”’

 and

"Suppressing a grin, Rosales, Shell’s barrel superintendent, says, “I know we make the best musical oil drums in the world.’"

 The story’s great fun, with lots of detail you didn’t know you cared about. Check it out.

You don’t want to laugh at the dead, and you don’t want to make fun of the disabled. But it just strikes me that if you’re deaf and walking along active train tracks, you really ought to make sure that you’re

a) walking against traffic

b) walking far enough from the tracks that a passing train won’t hit you, and

c) paying attention to your surroundings.

Text messaging when you can’t hear what’s going on around you (whether being deaf or listening to your iPod — a pre-deafness condition for many) is not being aware of your surroundings. If it was in New York, it probably would have been a cab or a bike messenger instead of a train. But the lesson’s the same.

This is entirely skippable, but the hed on UnBeige appealed to the print geek in me.

732, by the way, is a deep shade of brown. 

I just saw a Victoria’s Secret TV ad starring Bob Dylan.

Yes, that Bob Dylan.

No, I haven’t been drinking.