Year: 2005

Design

Three generated artwerks from Scribbler…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date July 8, 2005
2 Comments on Three generated artwerks from Scribbler…

I’m still trying to work out what I think of all the things that happened yesterday. When I got home last night, I spent most of the evening watching Close Encounters of the Third-Kind and trying to distract myself with manageable jobs and activities that didn’t requite too much intense scrutiny. Today, I’ve been pottering around the edges of bits of work and elaborating on concepts and letting things fall out of my head rather than trying to attack anything too meaty head-on. So if you’re wondering about the tone of my posts today, that’s probably why…

One of the things I did last night was play for the first time with Ze Frank’s Scribbler web art toy which I stumbled upon via draGnet. I found myself carving out and growing abstract spaces and shapes and then nuancing and rebuilding bits of them – like I was helping crystals coalesce or something. Here are the three that I came up with. They are all unnamed.

I’ve found using Scribbler such a therapeutic activity that I might go back at it again this evening. I can very much recommend using a graphics tablet with it, if you have that option. It’s so much easier to conjure curves and organic shapes with a pen than with a mouse or a trackpad…

Navigation Social Software

On Live Journal mood tracking and zeitgeists…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date July 8, 2005
3 Comments on On Live Journal mood tracking and zeitgeists…

There are two or three major things I’m thinking about at the moment – and one of them is zeitgeists. Which brings me rapidly to The World according to LiveJournal which is an awesome tracking system of LiveJournal moods over the last seven days. If you go and look at it now and try moods like ‘sympathetic’, ‘distressed’ or ‘nauseated’ you can see that the bombings in London have had a real impact on people’s moods. If you invetigate more thoroughly you can see that other moods have been inversely affected or show more complex relationships. There was a parallel drop on ‘horny’ during the coverage, an enormous drop in ‘irritated’ which then turned into a spike. Fewer people felt ‘guilty’, more felt ‘grateful’.

A couple of obvious things fall out of this for me – you could use this data to articulate relationships in moods really effectively – which things in the world cause reactions, what kinds of reactions do they cause, which moods are more closely correlated or act against one another. I keep looking for clear moods that you’d expect to see appearing twenty four hours after an event like this, but so far I’m only seeing a few (people seemed to become irate in two major spikes – I wonder why).

Another obvious thing would be to use this data to alert people to things that were going on in the world or to track trends over time. I believe that LiveJournal knows which country people are from – combining that data with the stuff from the site would be tremendously useful. Sending alerts to news gathering organisations would be interesting too. Mood expression and collation is such a fascinating area and has some real possibilities for data-mining and zeitgeist taking. Can anyone else think of good ways to get this information from people and to employ it – ideally in an open way? The best I can come up with off the top of my head is AIM status messages using controlled vocabularies and opened up in some spiderable fashion…

Politics

Brief thoughts about the make-up of the G8…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date July 8, 2005
7 Comments on Brief thoughts about the make-up of the G8…

While watching the lunchtime news today I was suddenly struck by what a strange assortment of countries constituted the G8 and so did a little research on Wikipedia. The G8 constitutes: France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Russia. This group is termed eight of the world’s leading industrialised democratic nations. It does not include Spain or China or India presumably because they’re not leading, industrial or democratic enough.

Anyway, I then decided that I didn’t really know enough about the spread of power inside the G8 so I swiftly knocked up a couple of pie-charts to try and get my head around who had most or least influence in the group and came up with the following (stats courtesy of the impressive CIA World Factbook):

This first one is the make-up of the G8 by population (and ordered by population). The United States contains around 300 million people, which is roughly a third of the population of all of the G8 countries combined – equal to Japan and Russia combined and to Germany, France, Italy, Canada and the UK combined.

This second one is the make-up of the G8 by GDP (ordered still by population though so you can see disparities). The US makes up almost half of the GDP of all the G8 countries combined, much more than its population alone would suggest. In contrast, Russia has much less of a proportion of GDP than it does population. Japan, Canada and the European countries have roughly the same share of GDP as they do of population, with European members again making up a third of the overall proportion.

All of which leads me to two conclusions – firstly that it’s hardly a shock that the US has so much influence in these organisations, and secondly that it’s also hardly a shock that the US right-wing is so snotty about the concept of a United Europe.

The other thing that it reminds me is that the British shouldn’t be so negative about our country. Sure, as a nation we don’t stride the world like giants any more. But for Christ’s sake – we’re a country which at its widest point is only a few hundred miles across and yet we’re the eighth biggest economy in the world. (Or higher – depending on who you ask) That’s enormously impressive. We could change the world with that…

The images were replaced on 5 August 2026 for clarity. The originals are available here and here.

Random

A long time ago…

“As I was walking home this evening, a little girl was riding her bike in the middle of the street. She still had the training wheels on as she wobbled and struggled to peddle. It reminded me of when I was little and how badly I wanted a bicycle but couldn’t get one. My parents wouldn’t let me have a bike until I was 12; my mom was too afraid I’d hurt myself. I’d pass the bike section in the store and just look, having given up asking my parents about it long ago. I eventually did get one after much pleading and begging. Amazingly, getting my driver’s license at 16 and the subsequent borrowing of the family car passed without incident.”

Random

Links for 2005-07-08

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date July 8, 2005

Jobs offers support to dad of teen killed over iPod Apple CEO offers condolences ‘from his heart’ to family of teen killed last week over iPod.
London tube bombing on Flickr Apparently this is a picture from within one of the carriages (or leaving one of the carriages underground)
The “Light Play” Sunlight Table traps light in fibre-optic threads and uses it to create pinpricks of light in a table top… “By doing so, it encourages a dialogue between work and nature and re-establishes a connection with the outside world”
Blogs respond to London blasts “News of the suspected terror attacks across central London has quickly spread across the net as people try to get information about the chaos. “
War of the fire ants – the extraordinary reproductive habits where “Males pit their genes against females by chucking DNA out of eggs.” “The result is that both the males and females have their own, independent gene pools, leading some to speculate whether each gender ought to be technically classified as its own species. “
Wikipedia article on the London bombings “On 7 July 2005, beginning at 08:49, during the height of morning rush hour, a series of four explosions struck London’s transport system.”
Google Employee Blogs A list of weblogs by people who work for Google – a good number of people then. I wonder what their policy on weblog stuff is (if they have one)
The Guardian is to change its size to a ‘Berliner’ format halfway between broadsheet and tabloid… Clearing out the tabs brings this story about the Guardian’s proposed change in size that I first heard about at a typography event last year…
Software patent bill thrown out which is bloody good news “European politicians have thrown out a controversial bill that could have led to software being patented.”
Robot Wisdom on the Street – a weird and disturbing article about what happened to Jorn Barger “Coined the term ‘weblog,’ never made a dime.”

Life

Explosions rock London's infrastructure…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date July 7, 2005
3 Comments on Explosions rock London's infrastructure…

I was in a meeting when the bombs went off – which it now looks like was the cause of the explosions that have been going off around buses and tube stations around the capital. At this moment in time, the best coverage is on TV and radio, although Londonist has good weblog-related coverage. So far there has been reports of explosions at King’s Cross, Moorgate, Aldgate East and Edgware Road tube stations and on a number of buses, although at the moment I don’t know much more than that. Here’s some coverage from BBC News, CNN and The Guardian. The Guardian’s News Blog looks pretty good for coverage too. There’s not a lot more that I can say at the moment, except that the timing with the G8 summit and the Olympics yesterday makes it look like a terrorist thing. Update: The BBC now has an overview section which I can recommend: BBC News on London Explosions.

Random

London wins the Olympic bid…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date July 6, 2005
7 Comments on London wins the Olympic bid…

Wow. There’s a surprise. London is hosting the 2012 Olympics! Who the hell expected that one!

Random

Links for 2005-07-06

BBC intends to revive ‘This Life’ “The one-off show would bring the characters up to date, looking at their lives 10 years after the events of the final episode.”
Which Web Development Guru Are You? Turns out I’m Shaun Inman, which is, you know, nice…
Don’t Click It Interesting experiments with non-click interfaces that work really well up to a point (but I don’t like the way that irreversible dialogues don’t require an additional layer of confirmation)
Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget – How We Built Flickr Now coming for a workshop in London – very much recommended for anyone on the architecture / systems / software engineering side of developing a web app

Radio & Music

BBC Listen Live OSX widget…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date July 4, 2005

We’ve been developing a prototype widget for Macs running OSX at work as an experiment with network-enabled applications. It’s allows you to listen to BBC national radio stations on your desktop computer as if it had a built-in radio (although you do need RealPlayer installed). It’s a pretty nice – simple – piece of work and I’m quite proud of it. Kudos here goes mainly to Duncan Ponting who did the heavy lifting, with me doing the pretty pictures and UI work (and with contributions along the way from Mr Biddulph and Mr Hammond among others). This is what it looks like:

And here is where you can get it: BBC Listen Live Widget. We’d love to get your feedback and thoughts around this area – so we’ve put up a feedback box to collect it. Make sure you use it!

Random

Links for 2005-07-04

Tom’s Birthday from July 2003 Things just turn up on Flickr even years after the event and it’s pretty cool to see my memories being filled in by other people…
Jeffrey Veen’s “The Art and Science of Web Design” is five years old And Veen’s only gone and released it as a PDF. Smart arse. S’kind of annoying actually. No, actually, it’s just great…
Flickr on your TiVo No idea why I’m on that picture, but it’s kind of funny. I’m still waiting for subscribable Flickr live photostreams as a TV screensaver. That would rock.