The American Museum of Natural History has a collection of old photos taken around the museum online. The ones of workers creating exhibitions are very interesting:
“Oops, so sorry about that….let me just put these back here…”
Photos found via Pruned.
Woe is me \ ‘o, > o,’ / !! Thesis thesis thesis will you never be done? You are so difficult. But listening to Bach on strings helps. It just makes me feel so *siiiiiigh* sorry for myself. They will find me, 2 days from now, a spider spinning a web between my brow and blue pen, my face stuck to interview transcripts, dead with a cringed when-will-it-end expression on my face. And waffles will be softly crying behind
THE MOST AWESOMEST SCREENSAVER (via BoingBoing)
SurveillanceSaver is an OS X screensaver that shows live images of over 600 network surveillance cameras worldwide. a haunting live soap opera. it is the first release of my ongoing experiments with network surveillance cameras.
It is truly somewhat haunting to view these feeds. Even if only a rural intersection or abandoned warehouse. Oh wait - I guess that’s why they might be haunting.
A happier song just came on. I’m not dead anymore.
I am learning that if you search Flickr for pictures tagged “couch”, it is very difficult to find a vacant couch. They are all occupied with pets, children or naked women.
The other night at supper A reminded me of craigslist missed connections. I had forgotten about them! Not so interesting when in another country and there is 0% chance of surprise…1% chance and I am sucked in!
I wrote about them before and this time, I’m thinking about the different types of posts. Some of the characteristics or variables are:
The one thing I am not liking is this one dude pouring his heart out over an ex (I assume) that he misses deeply. Now I know, missed connections can be a good emotional outlet for broken-hearted people and there is that word “miss”(ed) in there. However, when somebody posts they are doing so for their own benefit - the small possibility that the person they seek will read the post and they can reconnect or connect again. At the same time, they are benefiting the community of missed connection readers by adding to perceived chance, arousing curiosity and satisfying some voyeurism. I feel like the sob letter posts do not provide the same benefit and enjoyment to the community and they add noise to the information I am interested in. Not that this is a service for my enjoyment, its purpose is missed connections, and maybe some people do enjoy reading about the heartbreak of others but…I wonder if a separate craigslist category would be more suitable? One between missed connections and rants and raves.
I was also wondering, if I was an Asian woman and I saw “Asian girl on the skytrain” how would I identify with that? Like…especially living in Vancouver. Maybe I wouldn’t even think about it. It is a physical description. I am “Tall girl on the 25″. But I wonder if the difference is that “Tall girl on the 25″ could be posted by any man but, I am going to guess that the guy who posted “Asian girl on the skytrain” is not Asian. Tell me if I am wrong but, if this is the case then it is interesting how, while specifying filter information, the man implicitly includes information about himself.
Finally, I have never written a missed connection myself and I wonder, if the occasion comes about in the future, will I be reflecting on the saucy man I saw in the soup aisle at the supermarket (sorry about that) and think - I should missed connect! Or, will I be composing the classified the moment I see him walk away with a can of Campbell’s tomato?
(Actually when I think about it, the soup aisle might have the lowest flow of male customers but I have no evidence to back that up. Though I am sure someone has researched male versus female flow through the grocery store and if I can’t fall asleep in the next 15 minutes I might just have to look that up.)
I am currently on hold with air miles. Want to book a flight for this fall. They are playing the mooooooooooooost depressing music. I am talking Seal’s Kiss from a Rose interrupted by a please hold message every 10 seconds which itself gets interrupted by another please hold message from another woman. This is the part that is not free I guess. Oh yeah and there’s also the taxes and gas prices and other fees…I am sleepy and tempted to hang up. Or at least the skype equivalent of hang up button which is not as satisfying and you still feel like the person on the other line can hear you.
My sister pointed me to this:
check the about - it is kind of interesting and a nice change from the usual Google interface.
More from Pink Tentacle: writes about a mini documentary on the guy who makes the tape signs in Shinjuku station. Construction in large stations can be HELL and involve a lot of redirection signs. The man making these ones does an incredibly beautiful job at it.
They are in Japanese (with Japanese subtitles) but watch it for a bit at least to see this man’s work. Reminds me of something I love about this country: people take pride in their work and people take pride in other people’s work. But I guess pride is not the right word because people are humble. Maybe…”put importance”…please replace that for me I’m leaving early….
K I have not gotten into it that deeply yet and won’t tonight because I am supposed to be working on the T-H-E-S-I-S but yubnub looks soooooooooo cool. A google like interface with a command library expandable by…yes…you! You can enter something like “g nunnery” and it will do a google search for nunnery. Then there’s the mash command. Enter “mash g wp nunnery” and get a google/wikipedia split pane of nunnery results. Entering “simpsons” gives you a random simpsons quote (Homer: The problem in the world today is communication. Too much communication.) and the list goes on…
Literally hours of entertainment awaits me…motivation to get back to work!
From Popgadget - the chalk mug. The second after I realized what it was a shudder ran through my body and I writhed around in my chair for a bit. Even now, having a hard time handling the thought of handling this mug. Chalkboard…dusty chalk…putting your mouth on it…….aahhhhhuurrrghhhdhfdsfdsfadfbdsfajkhvbalgkhsdkgjahewaoruiy(’489y6!!!
Can I get the magic marker mug please?
I was searching for a project done by a woman I am meeting on Monday called “kotonoha” and came across kotonoha.cc. Very interestingly because both are related to my work - object interface to information and (given the current direction of things) questions, surveys, and polling for personal expression and satisfying that desire to see what other people think.
Kotonoha.cc looks addictive and with my current Japanese and browser translator I am already enjoying the type of questions posted and the responses. Oh yeah - what is it? It is a site where people can indicate their opinion on various “things” (koto) by choosing “O” or “X” and add a little explanatory comment. The “O” “X” o tsukeru system is the common “yes” “no” system in Japan. Examples of things are:
- which are scarier, spiders or cockroaches
- can you remember numbers past 3.1415
Users have simple profiles (photo, nickname, URL) and you can subscribe to different users and receive feeds of their posts in an site-based inbox.
Browsing the questions so far has been really really interesting. I am not just learning about the people or “community” through their responses but also through the questions they are posing. Yes some (like my examples above) are about mundane, general things but others are about current events, issues, popular things (indicators of what the “current” in the country might be) and others about the kotonoha community itself.
モスバーガーはモスと略す O X
(”mos burger” abbreviate to “mos”?) from what I can tell, most people do. It is good that I know this.
The one thing that bugs me is that they don’t display (from what I can tell) a tally of “O” and “X”. I can see that 690 have responded to the mos burger question and a list of the most recent results and comments…but not those two numbers - how many “O” and how many “X”. But…is this intentional? To avoid bias?
What if it went a step further and I had to respond before seeing any responses/comments? While this might motivate people to respond and eliminate bias from seeing what the majority thinks, it might take away from the experience of being in the kotonoha social space which, now that I think of it, seems less to do with knowing what the majority thinks, what the winning side it, etc. and more to do with knowing that people have an opinion.
It is Golden Week and most people have taken Tuesday and Wednesday off of work as well so currently there are like 6 out of 40 some people in the office. It is a good chance to travel but expensive so I am limiting my adventures to the park/tokyo bay by my apartment which actually has been very vacation-y and relaxing. Both Sunday and Monday afternoons were gorgeous and I sat by the water drawing with the sound of waves lapping over voices of children and BBQ aromas in the air. A nice prelude to the summer and enough alone / meditation-y time spent for me to get to the thesis for the rest of this week. Except for on Thursday - I am going to check out the digital public art festival in Tokyo.
But…the reason why I called you here…please look at these amaaaaaaazing works of art in cake form. Astonishing.
In case you didn’t catch this one: Mario Brothers 3 theme for Firefox. It is rocking my day. My favorite part - pipes as scrollbars. I can’t stop scrolling. Then to stop loading a page - the statue dude…genius! Now are there sounds for this too? Ooo and I just remembered that I don’t have all my toolbar items up. Added a koopa and fuzzy beetle (is that what they are called…can’t remember).
If you try it, make sure you orientate yourself with the back button (unless you are one of those key command people)…Mario running to the left. I did a google image search on spatula at work thinking it would be relatively harmless and it was mostly harmless but I didn’t want to stay there for long. Lost a few seconds trying to find the back button.
This world disasters alert map is strangely addictive. When I look at it I sort of feel like I am sitting at a steel desk in some underground lair feeding a blue crow white gummy bears.
We become used to being informed about cases of crisis and pain around the world and perhaps, besides a bit of “wow that would suck”, we are mostly desensitized to it. The map brings about a different perspective - perhaps the flashing icons make the situations feel more urgent? or maybe it is making me visualize and sympathize more because I can position myself on that map and suddenly something that is happening on the other of the world is so much closer because it is also on that map, somewhere relative to me. (Yeah that might sound cold but I believe I sympathize more when I can relate.) On the other hand, it kind of looks like a video game and there were a few tiny moments where I questioned the data presented.
On a completely unrelated note: my sister came to Japan last Saturday for a two week visit. I took her to Kamakura on Sunday and have been working since then but tomorrow (Friday) I have a day off and we will go to Kyoto for the weekend. I have no clue what we are doing there. I think we’ll figure that out on route but I am really looking forward to staying in the ryokan we have reservations with. I might even be in my yukata by 8pm on Friday night.
I hope you all sleep as much as I will this weekend…have a good one : )
Two enjoyable links via Lifehacker:
Spurred by stories of the device that emits a high frequency tone to repel teenagers while aging-eared adults go about their business unbothered, this guy made some sample tones to figure out what his frequency threshold was. You can listen to the sound bits, 10kHz to 25kHz in 1kHz increments, and find out how much you have been affected by these portable music device times.
I already kind of know that my hearing in the high frequencies is shot but I gave it a try. First with both ears, then with left and right individually (my right ear is worse than my left). With both ears, I could hear only the 10kHz and 11kHz tones….heh - that was my left ear doing all the work because individually, I could not hear any of the tones in my right ear.
How to Detect Lies from WikiHow
Some are obvious, some very interesting…especially this:
A typical right-handed person tends to look towards his left (your right) when remembering something that actually happened (remembered images, sounds and internal dialogue)and towards their right (constructed images, sounds and kinesthetic sensations) when they’re making something up.
Reading through steps I thought, but this is how I act around men I find attractive. Then I read the tips at the bottom:
Some of the behaviors of a liar listed above also coincide with those of an extremely shy person, who might not be lying at all.
Ok then…but are shy people really not lying? Having tendencies to shy away myself (fewer as I age but I have missed many opportunities for experience and friendships because of timidness) I have pondered over shyness being a masquerade of sorts. An act we play (consciously or not) to avoid revealing ourselves because we are scared of them knowing or thinking something bad. Is it just hiding or is it lying?
I tend to avoid NSFM (not safe for mother) material here, but this is too good to pass up. I was googling the word “bathe” to get to dictionary.com’s thesaurus and the top site caught my attention:
Have not ventured past the first page of the site and don’t think I will but…oh boy. I laughed, and then it made me a little sad, then I laughed again.
This makes me think about the meaning of words based on their top google results. Search for “apple” and you get Apple computers, far from the fruit…”banana” leads me to Banana Republic first. Search engines load and expand the meaning of our words.
Now the meaning of “bathe” shall be forever changed to me .
One more thing before I go to bed. I haunt the Vancouver Craigslist missed connections page. I’ve never posted and don’t know if I ever will, but I find the posts amusing, interesting, and comforting. I like reading them at night, then remembering them when I’m on the bus the next day. I wonder, who on this bus has posted a missed connection. It might be a rare find. The two most common missed connection buses are the 22 and the 99 B-line. Someday I will do a statistical analysis of the craigslist archives and prove that.
Before that, I should at least start compiling a list of where beautiful(?) people in Vancouver work. Here’s a start, just in case you’re up for some food or fitness this weekend, delivered by people who are apparantly hot:
guy with piercing at the counter of Spartacus Gym
Blonde Male Cashier at Main Street IGA
Cute Cashier at 57th and W Boulevard grocery
Running Room sales girl
Actually, it seems like there’s a lot of action going on at the Main Street IGA. I might have to commute.
