Al Gore – Didn’t You Notice The Zig Zags?

On his global warming lecture, Al Gore is displaying CO2 levels spanning 650 000 years. On the graph behind him, CO2 levels go up and down and backward and forward in time. In other words, there are occasionally two or more CO2 levels at the same time.

Al Gore, how is it possible? Didn’t you pay any attention to the massive screen behind you?

You can see the full video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jxi-OlkmxZ4 [the graph is at 7:30]

- – -

Some background for this post. I watched An Inconvenient Truth movie two years ago, and believed every word of it. After studying the issue more carefully, I was surprised: the movie has been proved to contain material which is misleading, incorrect and false. All in all, it is full of scaremongering without any science to back it up. Almost every segment of it.

Yet, governments are making large decisions based on false theories promoted by non-scientists who can not even produce a simple graph correctly. Yet, even Barack Obama – whom we all regard highly and is currently the man with the most power on this planet - is being misinformed and misled.

Al Gore says the science on man-made global warming is settled; there’s a consensus, scientists stand behind it. That’s an easy argument to validate. Just search the web to see whether it’s true. You will see how the whole house of cards begins to crumble.

Wolfram|Alpha Test Drive

Ok, Wolfram|Alpha – the computational knowledge engine – is up and running. Granted, I’ve seen three different versions of “site is currently under heavy load”. Do remember that there’s a large amount of on the fly computation and algorithm crunching behind each result. 

These are the queries I tested it with:

Where are you? gives a good result.

Where am I? gives the correct answer.

Who am I? gives the same answer.

sin(n/10) * 100 draws a nice chart.

What are you doing? is the first computed tweet.

What time is it? surprisingly gives nothing.

green, red – minimum result.

BMW presents stock information.

Weather in Lahti Wow!

Weather in Lahti June 2003 Double-Wow!

Neuron is not that interesting for Wolfram to have knowledge about.

Are you OK? opens a “Human Discourse” functionality which is under development. What will it be?

All in all, Wolfram|Alpha provides an interesting approach and implementation. It’s certainly one to follow and use.

However, I do get ”everything is a number or a taxonomy” feel from the data it contains. It mostly answers with numbers; even Madonna boils down to a straight line between two dates.

So, Wolfram|Alpha is the engine Douglas Adams wrote about. 

Google left, Wolfram|Alpha right.

I do not know why, but the system creates an impression of an autistic Rain Man recalling phone book numbers and curated minutia with precision. Whereas Google is the outgoing guy with all the fun; its bots gathering data from the web carelessly, and giving noisy, vague answers at times.

Blog Book Hybrid – Navigation Changes

Those who follow have noticed daily changes on The Book of W. I took the final step and overhauled the navigation on that tumblr based site.

The site is now a good mixture of a blog and a book. The starting page displays recent updates like in a blog, and navigation at the top opens pages like in a book.

Main thing was to add page tags to each post. Now I can control which blog post belongs to which book page. In a way, this is a misuse of tags but…

With tags, users can link and refer to a certain page easily and intuitively, like in a book. As you probably know, blog pages are something one can not link to because they change dynamically.

I removed timestamp of the posts: books don’t have dates under their chapter titles. I like to think the contents are not glued to a certain time period, they are valid also in years to come.

Some things to prepare for are:

• Sooner or later, as the page count increases, I will notice that the page numbering at the top will need some changes.
• The cover page contains a water related photo from Flickr;  for some reason it doesn’t load 100% of the time and displays only some white space. Then it doesn’t look that good. Anyway, it’s great to have a dynamic cover page. Although, sometimes, the photo is not that close to the subject matter.
• One of the worries is that users find themselves lost caused by the duplicate page concept: there are book page numbers and blog page numbers. This is something that needs to be addressed.

I’m pretty satisfied with the end result. Next task is to fill the blog book with top content.

Onion Joke That’s Not

Uncannily good prediction from The Onion archives, dated January, 2001.

The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far from The Tree

Funny thing happened. My 11-year-old daughter just came to me and said: “I want the new Banjo game for Christmas. I want all the games made by Rare, because they make Viva Piñata and it’s so good.”

The funny part is this: when I was a young boy in the mid-eighties and playing with my friend’s Sinclair Spectrum, all the Ultimate games were must-haves. Ultimate was a company created by Stamper brothers – later they started Rare.

The Guy Working At The Top of The Tallest Building

Have you heard about the guy working at the top of the tallest building?

On his office wall, he has a map of the world. There’s a knob on top of each country. On the spur of the moment, he turns knobs left and right. Rain pushes into the windows. Lights of the city low around him flicker as he slowly moves his gaze to another knob.

His telephone doesn’t ring.

As he turns the knobs, commands are sent down to the stories below for an army of his minions to execute. This country goes in the red, this into black. Rates of the currencies change. He releases a knob, goes to sit on his chair. Looks outside.

His companies have many names, his products are made from iron and binary digits. You wouldn’t recognize him on the street. An inverse Domino effect gathering all the money from the world, from your pockets, ends to where he stands.

He doesn’t play golf, he plays the world. After the deeds of the day are done, he enters the elevator, goes down, crosses the street, grabs the evening paper and silently goes into a taxi. Arrives to his home where his two kids and wife are already sleeping deep. In the night, his dreams are like the dreams of any other person.

My Second Photosynth Experiment

Deomo booth on OLO.MUOTO trade fair here in Finland - I took several pictures with the Canon Ixus 950 camera, and photosynthed them: 

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=29a44f5f-e48b-488a-8cf0-c87aee0491b6&i=0:2:0&z=467.0787043003208&g=2&p=-2.50427e-014:6.92928e-014&m=false&c=-0.664613:-0.656377:-0.145462&d=-1.56066:1.1653:0.877044

Do remember to set the Photosynth viewer to full-screen mode (icon on the bottom right), it’s much better that way.

Regarding the Photosynth tech, I learned the lesson that one needs to change the camera angle and position only a slight amount between pictures. Otherwise, the end result is too jumpy as the Photosynth algorithm leaves too many images without context.

And yes, I’m bloody proud of the booth we did with my wife, Nina.

The Book of W: A Book or a Blog or a Blog Book?

As you have probably noticed, I’ve partially moved my act to thebookofw.com.

On that site, I’ll create an experience which takes all the good parts of books and blogging. Furthermore, the site should be readable with mobile devices also.

One of the simple, minor, mundane things that bug me is how the pages are numbered. In blogs, the most recent page is the page number 1, by default. In books, page number 1 is the beginning. In my view, the best solution would be to number the oldest (i.e. first) blog post with the page number 1, and increase from there on. I haven’t yet found a way to accomplish this feature with Tumblr technology without relatively heavy scripting, or manual tagging (using tags like “page1″, “page2″). Yeah, I could code it using Tumblr API, but we’ll see.

Anyway, The Book of W is an interesting experiment. You wouldn’t believe how much, how long, how dearly I kept the contents and the subject hidden. Only my wife knew something about the unpublished, unprinted, unagented book. My face blushed and hands started to shake on those rare moments when the discussion reared it. And now, I’m on the other extreme as I publish the chapters to the web for you all to read.

When I was younger, I hided all my creative works (music, writings, …) from others. The rationale – if you can call it that – was that the works felt too personal, they gave out too much of me and made me vulnerable. Now I’ve learned that life’s too short for that. So, if you have something to present, just pour it out. Thanks for the web, it’s easy, fast, inexpensive and leads to an uncharted territory…

Cybertecture Apartment in Dubai

It’s always interesting to follow what they are up to in Dubai. The developments there are just amazing. According to some info, one fifth of world’s cranes are there in gigantic 100 billion dollar construction project.   

One particular building caught my eye: The PAD, also known as iPad. The tower is…

…targeted at switched-on, creative and hip business executives to whom we refer to as “the digital generation” or apple brand lovers who are constantly mobile and connected.

Every apartment will be intelligent and have its own cybertecture to provide a unique experience. Everything from communications, entertainment, health and shopping is covered by the cybertecture of the apartment.

Among the usual household stuff like colour changing tiles are the iFeatures. The iFeatures list contains: iReality (a virtual reality projection wall), iHealth (monitors residents health), iRotation Rooms (rotate your lounge), iArt (project a painting from a server to a wall), etc.

In Dubai, science fiction really becomes a reality. I commend their bold adventures in architectural design and pushing the edge of technology in living spaces. Oil money well spent.

Something Wet Is Out! Really Wet…

It’s quite natural for a guy nicknamed raindropper to create a book covering all aspects of water, don’t you think?

So, point your browser to The Book of W and start exploring. There will chapters and postings about science, business, arts, cultures and religions – all of course water-related.

It looks like a mish-mash of blog postings and book chapters. But there’s a simple, common theme underlining all of those – and it’s clear as water.