NY Times on the resurgence of classic video games.

Ray Kurzweil has a new book coming out in October called Fantastic Voyage. “The science behind radical life extension. Live long enough to live forever.”

This is a visual metaphor.

Update your firmware on the Canon Digital Rebel to make it run like the more expensive 10D.

Amazon is blogging

If you’re logged into Amazon and visit the front page, you’re presented with your Plog, or personalized blog. Basically, The Great and Powerful Amazon looks at what you’ve purchased, looked at, and rated and posts links to other items you might find interesting. It’s the same recommendations they’ve always given people, only more timely (this DVD is out today, we thought you might like to know because you liked this other movie) and in easily digestable chunks. Blog as interface; the content exists and this is just another way of presenting it.

Update: Matt says that he’s not seeing his Plog. Maybe they’re only testing it for some people, so you may not see it when you hit Amazon’s page.

ForwardTrack and Tom’s Petition

Eyebeam has launched their latest project, ForwardTrack. It’s a system for diseminating petitions that not only keeps track of who supports the petition, but how that support has developed. The description from the site:

ForwardTrack is a new system created by Eyebeam R&D designed to promote on-line activism. The system tracks and maps the diffusion of email forwards, political calls-to-action, and petitions. Our goal is to help people understand decentralized networks and see the power of “6 degrees of separation.” ForwardTrack technology helps prove that one person can make a difference.

It’ll be interesting to see if petitions are more viral when people can see exactly how they’ve made a difference in spreading the message. The first project they’ve set up is Tom’s Petition, an effort to renew the national Assault Weapons Ban which automatically expires at the end of the summer. If you’d be interested in signing this petition (or in seeing a neat map detailing how I got signed up and how many people I’ve signed up), you can go to my Personal Petition Page and enter your name, zip, and email address to get the petition sent to you. When you forward that email back to Tom, I’ll get credit for introducing you to the petition. You can forward the petition to friends, family, etc. and, if you’ve got a Web site, also point people toward your Personal Petition Page.

Trailer for Fahrenheit 9/11.

Addicts of fossil fuels

Kurt Vonnegut is all over the place in this recent essay for In These Times, but his last two lines find the mark:

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.

In the long term, the potential of the West (and the Middle East for that matter) will be limited until we stop relying so heavily on oil. Since few in politics seem to be thinking past the next election (or even the next news cycle), this presents a problem.

Manhattan Timeformations, mapping Manhattan’s skyscraper districts through time. Transparent New York is the best one; overlay the 1811 grid on top of the map of farms.

Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 will be out in theatres on June 25th. This will break all sorts of records for a documentary and make Moore a rich(er) white man. Is it time yet for someone to make Michael and Me?

Design Observer on the latest issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and Complex Simplicity.

The Taxicab Metric “is equal to the length of all paths connecting [two points] along horizontal and vertical segments, without ever going back, like those described by a car moving in a lattice-like street pattern.”. Also known as the “Manhattan distance”.

City planning and constructing supercomputers have more in common than you might think.

Me talk pretty this morning

On the way to work this morning, a man holding a folded subway map motioned to me and then his map. Happy to give directions when I can, I walked over to where he was standing. As I approached, he motioned to the map again and began, “excuse moi…”

Before I could even think about it, I replied, “oui, monsieur?”

That elicited a surprised look and a stream of French dialogue. I think I heard “parlez” and “francais” in there somewhere. “Non, non, non, monsieur. Un peu, un peu.” My crude way of saying that I don’t speak French very well.

Slightly disappointed in my unwitting deception, he cut to the chase. Rockefeller Center. Good, something easy. I pointed in the general direction, but he seemed skeptical, motioning to it on his map. Reaching back into my memories of high school French, I conjured up the approximate French version of “49th and 5th” and pointed once again in the right direction. Relived that I seemed to know where he wanted to go and that I was able to tell him so in (mangled) French, he gave me a nod, said “merci monsieur,” and headed off.

“C’est rien. Au revoir monsieur,” I replied after him.

He looked back at me, suspicious, as if to say, “are you sure you don’t speak French?”

Tons of great photography in the PDN 2004 Photo Annual.

Glassdog returns as a blog, flush with color and attitude.

Timeline of the history of information. From cave paintings to the dissemination of the Starr report on the Internet.

The New Yorker attends a Dorkbot meeting.

Four teams named as finalists to design the NYC High Line.

Raining in New York. Nice photo diptych from Redrick deLeon.

GeekDIY points to all sorts of geeky projects, like building your own Mac or catapult. Or putting Linux on Big Mouth Billy Bass (the talking fish).

Long thread on how Jesus is better than Mohammed because he’s more popular or something. I forget the exact details…just tell me which format I should worship!

Chapter on sparklines

Tufte has revised his chapter on sparklines. Sparklines are “intense, simple, word-sized graphics”.

• Beautiful Evidence
• books
• Edward Tufte
• infoviz
• sparklines

Nuts..