My dad just sent me a demo for jaw-dropping “computational knowledge engine,” Wolfram Alpha, which went live this past weekend. You put in a search term, which could be a mathematical formula, two cities, whatever, and it analyzes the term and its context and returns related statistics, plots a curve, gives you a map, shows mortalitiy rates, whatever! Off the hook!

The design reminds me of a suggested contextual search engine design from Tufte I remember reading somewhere…anybody remember?

Check the demo, it’s a must see.

Wolfram Alpha demo

Boston.com offers these easy instructions to help you hallucinate with common household items.

ping pong hallucination

h/t Watson

Thursday’s New York Times carries an article on research into how happy people spend their time. The results are not surprising:

Wellington Grey‘s full poster (excerpted above) reads “Warning! In case of terrorist attack: KEEP YOUR WITS! Do NOT discard brain.”

I also particularly enjoyed his comic about The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil.

But a man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger. Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs. Furthermore, the logogram of any authoritarian society remains fairly inflexible as time passes, but everything else in the universe constantly changes. The result can only be progressive disorientation among the rulers. The end is debacle.

The schizophrenia of authoritarianism exists both in the individual and in the whole society.

I call this the Snafu Principle.

From Never Whistle While You’re Pissing, by Hagbard Celine.

(Celine is a fictional (?) character in the Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Bob Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. Celine’s treatise appears in the second book of the trilogy, The Golden Apple.)

Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo flagged it, and it’s simply too good not to share:

(For the videophobes out there, here’s what McCain says: “Across this country, this is the agenda I have set before my fellow prisoners and the same standards of clarity and candor must now be applied to my opponent.”)

He wasn’t even talking about prisoners, or POW’s, or his Vietnam war experience, in any of the adjoining sentences. WTF?!

Delightfully summarizing so much that is wrong with contemporary western capitalism, psychology, and industry:

“For most of our history, we’ve sold newer and better products for habits that already existed,” said Dr. [Carol] Berning, the Proctor & Gamble psychologist. “But about a decade ago, we realized we needed to create new products. So we began thinking about how to create habits for products that had never existed before.”

Thanks to Toshi’s educating me on the matter, one of my all-time heroes is R. Buckminster Fuller. He’s featured in a wonderful article in the current New Yorker. The occasion of this article is an upcoming Fuller retrospective being mounted at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Sounds like a field trip is in order!

UPDATE:
The Whitney show is on view June 26, 2008-September 21, 2008. I plan to try to go in mid July when I’m on the east coast. – Toshi

A lot more meat in this installment… wonderful, colorful, straight-forward writing:

http://www.dailyspeculations.com/wordpress/?p=2929

Author and professor Clay Shirky has an amazing essay posted on his blog about what he calls the “cognitive surplus” – all the extra time and mental energy we have in our society, and why we don’t realize it.

Thanks to his new book, Here Comes Everybody, he was being prepped by a producer to appear on a TV talk show. He was talking about the participatory nature of Wikipedia, and the amount of activity on the discussion pages, and so on…

She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

I have that tingly feeling that I only get when a new, clear articulation of an idea has been introduced into my noggin. I love that feeling. Thank you, Clay!