Michal Migurski

"Copenhagen was much worse than just another bad deal, because it illustrated a profound shift in global geopolitics. This is fast becoming China's century, yet its leadership has displayed that multilateral environmental governance is not only not a priority, but is viewed as a hindrance to the new superpower's freedom of action. I left Copenhagen more despondent than I have felt in a long time. After all the hope and all the hype, the mobilisation of thousands, a wave of optimism crashed against the rock of global power politics, fell back, and drained away." - Michal Migurski

I like this, too, Aaron, but the artist statement can be loosely translated as: "I do stuff with things and people. I don't like to spend very much money, and sometimes I just let things happen on their own. Often it looks like I'm making an effort, but a lot of the time I'm not! Whatever happens, something definitely changes along the way." - Michal Migurski

Interesting conjecture on fighting in space via Jason Kottke. Reminds me of the Aubrey/Maturin books and how reliant on current and wind ship battles were two hundred years ago: "First, let me point out something that Ender's Game got right and something it got wrong. What it got right is the essentially three-dimensional nature of space combat, and how that would be fundamentally different from land, sea, and air combat. In principle, yes, your enemy could come at you from any direction at all. In practice, though, the Buggers are going to do no such thing. At least, not until someone invents an FTL drive, and we can actually pop our battle fleets into existence anywhere near our enemies. The marauding space fleets are going to be governed by orbit dynamics – not just of their own ships in orbit around planets and suns, but those planets' orbits." - Michal Migurski

Via Andy, haven't watched it yet but sounds worthwhile: "Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law and Faculty Co-director (and co-founder) of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, gave a presentation at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View about a month ago that ought to be required viewing for anyone interested in Cloudlabor and Crowdsourcing. Drawing examples from all over the Internet - including a certain iPhone app that you may have heard of - Zittrain raises some serious (and some seriously entertaining) questions about ethical and legal aspects of distributed human computing." - Michal Migurski

"On 27th November, Norwegian broadcaster NRK broadcast a 7.5 hour documentary showing every minute of the scenic train ride between Bergen on the Norwegian west coast, crossing the mountains to Oslo. Now, after removing all extraneous interviews, music clips and fancy trickery from the documentary, they are offering the entire, clean, 7 hour continuous front-camera version for free Creative Commons download. All 22Gb of it. Here's a fantastic 10 minute taster on YouTube." - Michal Migurski

Paul Hammond sent me this Flickr set of a few decade's worth of transit plans for the Bay Area, from underground Muni routes in the 1920's to a variety of possible BART alignments. I'd be curious to understand some of the reasoning behind what was kept and what was tossed. - Michal Migurski

Uh thanks Coda. "Dancehall outdoes itself in the silliness stakes once again, demonstrating at the same time its skill in co-opting even the most outlandish sources and reversioning them in an interesting and devastating way." - Michal Migurski

Alex Bogusky, describing a huge office projection that fits their physical space very well: "Keeping track of all the jobs flowing through is a challenge for every agency. For about a year we've been fantasizing about a huge status board that was accessible to the whole shop. Something that was live and constantly updating. Like the arrivals and departures in Grand Central Station. Unfortunately, the status of 'Project Ticker' has been ON HOLD for about 9 months and then I looked up yesterday and it was done. Man, it is really cool." - Michal Migurski

I figured I'd watch one or two of the seven 10-minute segments, but the entire silly-voiced meditation on art and adversity is engrossing. The narrator compares the narrative of the original Star Wars to Episode I, and between bizarre frame-breaking obscenities that leak in around the edges, he completely takes apart the most recent film while coherently explaining basics of filmmaking and storytelling. The bit about the visual dynamics in the rebel ship vs. imperial star destroyer scene from Ep IV alone is worth the price of admission. This has been making the rounds, I found it via Andy Baio. - Michal Migurski

K-Punk: "The X Factor has seemed as impregnable as capitalism. ... The most significant use of sound on the X-Factor is not the blandness of the constestants' singing, but the audio-blitz used to hype the show and the performances. This flash-cutting neuronic barrage resembles the hypnotic film montages in The Parallax View or A Clockwork Organge. No sonic cliche is left unused , all those Star Wars whooshes, electricity crackles... (wouldn't it be good if someone could develop a proper typology of these sound effects used in film and TV hype - perhaps they already have.) It is a sonic war in the media sensorium, in which the "mediocre audio-visual proramming" that Underground Resistance's Mike Banks warned about is ruthlessly enforced." - Michal Migurski

"Posting to twitter meant I didn't have to do a dreaded phone call to dozens of people immediately after hearing my diagnosis, and for me it was both a time saving way to get the word out as well as the easiest way to communicate while I was exhausted and in and out of consciousness in the hospital. ... The obvious sticking point in many stories about this drowning incident seems to be about new media and old. No one is surprised at frantic cell phone calls in a hospital waiting room, but apparently button mashing on a cellphone to alert friends via text to twitter is a surprise, simply because it is new." - Michal Migurski

"The USGS continuously collects, geo-codes (where the information is supplied, perhaps by a GPS enabled device) and stores the tweets. When the national seismic network detects a quake, the new system then checks back to see if there was a significant increase in messages following the event. If there was, it can send interested scientists emails that summarise where the tweets were coming from and the text from a sample of them." - Michal Migurski

"I guess where I was originally going is that nobody wants to write endings in television. They want to sustain the franchise. But if you don't write an ending for a story, you know what you are? You're a hack. You're not a storyteller. ... We're an urban people. Eighty percent of us live in metro areas. I don't buy the whole Republican convention with its small-town values and 'We represent the real Americans.' I live in Baltimore. I'm concerned with big-city values and I live among real Americans. I could give a fuck about the other 20 percent of the country. I care about how we live together in cities." - Michal Migurski

Dan McKinley on the abysmal database driver situation in Python. Why aren't these particular batteries included with Python? "DBAPI2 is all well and good. To a point. But if you have the usual website scaling problem, namely the one where you have a master database that worked fine when you were tiny and–dear god–not so well right now, the idea of interchangeable database libraries is basically a crock. Before I am inundated with hate mail let me dial back my rhetoric a little bit. The existence of an API that works with altogether different databases is a wonderful thing and without it, things like Django or SQLAlchemy would not be possible. So rest assured I am not a complete maniac. I am not even really here to talk about dbapi2. I am just saying that 1) no two libraries are the same, 2) given sufficient scale this will matter to you, 3) the devil is in the details, and 4) the devil likes screwing things with white hot pokers." - Michal Migurski

Ben Hammersley responds to Mag+: "a real design challenge for e-books isn't to design the user experience (which is dependent at the end of the day on the device capabilities anyway, which are pretty much unknown) but rather on designing a system that would allow existing publishers to transition their operations from ramshackle print to All Knowing Digital. We already know much of this: you can take the lessons from blogging CMSs, add in photography handling from places like Photoshelter, combine metadata collection from sources like Google Maps and OpenCalais, and version control from Git, and you're halfway there. Combine it with process changes, where you require writers to file direct to a system that forces them to add in metadata for example, and you're closer still. Of course, in two sentences I've described a process that really encompasses the whole old-media crisis, but I do think it's a challenge that can be met." - Michal Migurski

I have developed a similar fascination with Michigan and Ohio since visiting Dearborn a few years ago for Sketching In Hardware. Conor Friedersdorf: "Last week, I traveled briefly to Kansas City, to visit a dear friend who I met a couple of years ago in Washington DC when she worked for National Geographic. The photographer, Lara Shipley, has since moved back to her home state of Missouri, embarking on a more informed effort to capture what I sought to learn about - the essence of the Midwest at this particular moment. The photo above is hers, as are those that follow." - Michal Migurski

Weston Ruter via Simon Willison: "Recently Google Translate announced the ability to hear translations into English spoken via text-to-speech (TTS). Looking at the Firebug Net panel for where this TTS data was coming from, I saw that the speech audio is in MP3 format and is queried via a simple HTTP GET (REST) request." - Michal Migurski

"...things we used to know that are no longer very useful to us, a few examples include: Dialing a rotary phone, Putting a needle on a vinyl record, Changing tracks on an eight-track tape, Shorthand, Using a slide rule, Refilling a fountain pen, Operating a dictaphone, Using the eraser ribbon on a typewriter." - Michal Migurski

"I've been playing around with Ganglia for the past couple of days, trying to make it to work with EC2. It was a bit of an adventure. There are two keys for running Ganglia on EC2: use unicast and set send_metadata_interval. Amazon doesn't support multicast on their network, so the default configs for Ganglia don't work." - Michal Migurski

David O'Reilly is really rocking my world about now - this mostly-monochrome video is super lovely. - Michal Migurski

This lent a certain je ne sais quoi to Aaron's birthday last night, though Stewart escaped unscathed. - Michal Migurski

Seth explains how to get all the necessary spatial hoo-hah working on Mac OS X without using MacPorts. GDAL, Mapnik, NumPy, Boost, Cascadenik and other necessary bits and pieces all included. - Michal Migurski

Andy Allan: "Over the last few months I've been involved in three different aerial imagery projects, all of which were to make imagery available for OpenStreetMap contributors. It's nice that we have imagery available from the guys at Yahoo!, but on occasion we lay our hands on some better stuff." - Michal Migurski

These seven videos are really fantastic. - Michal Migurski

I hadn't ever heard of Dean Allen or Favrd before it was shut down the other day, but my respect for the guy started out on the right foot with his excellent comment attached to Jeff Zeldman's bitchy complaint: "Long before I began thinking about the damage being done in the use of authoritative judgement as fuel for creativity and wit, I found myself having to work out ways to stave off gaming of the site, in particular dealing with sock puppets and self-starrers and the recent, baffling phenomenon of people finding several hundred things a day to be their 'favourite'. ... Interestingly enough, to me anyway, it was the strong emotional judgement I was then making toward people’s 'neediness' which got me reading and learning a great deal about the interplay of authority and emotion." - Michal Migurski

A summary of recent debate on the OSM license change. "Yet still the footpath was rough and muddy. It was even rumoured that the footpath had actually been built one drunken night to a set of instructions for a BMX track, and should never have been used for carting fish back to the village. Some of the villagers, principally those who had come from Saxony, decided the best course of action was to spend endless hours in the village hall debating whether the muddy path should be called a 'footpath' or a 'path for feet' or a 'designated permissive fish (freshwater) pathway for bipedalous ambulation in a progressive fashion'." - Michal Migurski