Accept no substitutes

Category: General (Page 33 of 135)

My Five Sons — In WashPost on the Bros Romney

Whilst I was in a meeting about the Earl Scruggs Center today, I got an email and a call from Jose Antonio Vargas of the Washington Post. Fred was too busy to have an opinion on the blog that may be written by the five sons of Mitt Romney. I have been reading a few of the blogs hosted or sponsored by the various presidential candidates. The Democrats have the lead in the blog/net space as far as I can tell, but I hadn’t seen the Blog of the Brothers Romney til today.

Okay, it’s a blog by nice people. They take nice pictures. They say nice things — unless you are Hillary Clinton. They won’t embarrass anyone. You feel good about them. You probably won’t read the blog very often.

Wait! There is drama afterall! Ben, the different one, the blonde one, the bearded one, the one in med school. He feels different. He has an article about his beard. He has an article about his dog. His dog is nice. He might shave his beard. He did shave his beard. His wife wishes he didn’t. His beard is still shaved.

The Brothers Romney miss the message from Tolstoy: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Or do they? They aren’t about drama but about the lack of it. Small harmless sagas may appear, the beard, but like My Three Sons + Two, they won’t take our minds off FaceBook. The blog is a sort of family featured version of “Morning in America” idealized and safe.

But is it effective? Does it energize the Romney base or make converts? Probably not. Unlike TV, the web is interactive, utile and social. There is no reason to go to boring places that don’t have much interaction or utility.

But the blog could be improved and become interesting, maybe starting with something like this.

Badminton without a Net

Robert Frost famously said that writing in Free Verse was like playing tennis with the net down. But for the past weeks, we’ve been swatting the birdie about with no net in sight. I don’t feel all that bad about it either. Badminton, afterall, is so affected by the slightest breeze that all serious games are played indoors.

Since we lack a certain seriousness, we play to see how long we can keep a volley going, we sent the shuttlecock high into the air, we smash to birdie into each other, at least one of us tries to bounce the birdie off his racket several times before swatting the thing at his opponent. In general, we are having fun even in the wind. And we use no net.

TechCrunch is loaded today: Last.FM to CBS, Twitter to work, Mahalo: Human Powered Search

Among today’s news in tech, first found by me at TechCrunch:

DCampSouth – Design and Usability BarCamp – This Saturday

Jackson Fox writes to alert us about DCampSouth:

DCampSouth
Date: June 2, 2007
Time: 8:30 AM – 5:30 PM (Schedule)
Location: School of Communication Arts, Raleigh, NC

DCampSouth is a BarCamp for anyone interested in design and user experience… And it’s in the south. DCampSouth was inspired by DCamp, held in May 2006 in Palo Alto, CA. The goal of DCampSouth is to bring together people of all professions interested in user experience and design, to help foster communication between professions, and help foster community.

Friendster founder details failures (?)

Today at 1 pm EDT WUNC’s Dick Gordon interviews Jonathan Abrams, founder of Friendster. The Story is described here:

Jonathan Abrams founded Friendster – the first online social network to attract millions of users. The site was wildly successful after its launch in 2002, and by 2003, Jonathan faced two options: sell out to Google for $30 million, or partner with private investors.

Jonathan chose to partner, and in his eyes, things went downhill from there. By 2004, Friendster had been eclipsed by sites like MySpace and, more recently, Facebook.

Dick talks with Jonathan about what he learned from the success and later failure of Friendster, and how he plans to compete with a new social networking project in what has become a very crowded field.

Bloody battle on Memorial Day

At the local multi-plex the battle is between Pirates 3, Shrek 3 and Spiderman 3, all full of computer effects, loud noises, cute creatures, thwarted loves, and bloody battles. And none in the same class as the original.

We went to the bloodiest or so I hear, Pirates. Craig Lindsey of NandO writes a review that I agree with (for a change) here. When Depp finally showed up, the movie was beyond saving at least as far as having any coherent storyline goes. But then maybe having a coherent storyline is overrated.

Still, Depp could have been deployed much better and then there is Keith Richards. You bring in someone like Richards because he’s recognizable, not because he’s a great actor — he isn’t, but he does play a great Keith Richards if you let him and don’t overdress him to the point of having him wear a fake nose that makes him look like Cyrano’s lost brother! Yikes! If you have to wear a nose like that, you should get to be in the sword fight scenes.

Even when I tried to let loose and not care about the details and let the effects sweep over me — I didn’t care.

I wonder of Disney or the audience is aware of the various ironies in the text. The armada of evil are at the command of a large faceless corporation whose goal is to eliminate Pirates from the face of the earth. Not only that but the corporation has manipulated the government to act on its behalf even to the point of suspending the freedom of assembly, of habeas corpus, of trial by jury and a number of other civil liberties. Yes you can’t help but think Gitmo and then oddly of Disney and copyright.

No copyright is not equal to Gitmo. I’m not so dumb as to make that assertion. The messages are tangled in an odd way. But no matter before too long my brain like Depp/Sparrow’s had checked out. I let my body react. I didn’t fall asleep, but I wasn’t very engaged either. I should have been in awe when Naomie Harris grew to a giant size then turned into a rain of crabs (I am not making this up) but I wasn’t.

OM – The Scores are In

The Odyssey of the Mind World Finals are complete. The scores are in. The awards have been given. And we’re all heading home.

Among the Balsa Builders, where we spent a lot of time observing the action, the Middle School teams out performed the High Schools. No High School team this year built a structure that held over 1000 pounds — the best, 980, was achieved by two teams –, but no less than 5 Middle School teams held over 1000. The top Middle School team held 1220. But that was overshadowed by the performance of a structure build by Elementary School students from Oak Hill Elementary in Herndon, VA which held 1280 pounds.

Our buddy team from Guangdong, China finished second in the Middle School division of the small vehicle problem, Tag ‘Em.

And our team from Smith Middle School in Chapel Hill, NC finished 10th in their problem, The Large and Small of It.

We’re all packing up and heading out.

Synopsis of next year’s problems
are already posted. Information about finding OotM (the preferred abreviation of Odyssey of the Mind) can be found by contacting your state or country directors.

Note: My entire OttM 2007 collection of stories with pictures is over at GeekDad.Com.

WCPE Head Deborah Proctor on Saving Internet Radio

Deborah Proctor
Fiona Morgan of the Independent did a great interview with WCPE head Deborah Proctor about the latest Copyright Royalty Board ruling, the evil that is SoundExchange, current pending legislation in Congress as regards Internet Radio and the future of independent radio streaming on the net.

You too can help Save Internet Radio (see here).

Note: ibiblio provides streaming for WCPE and 7 other independent stations including the first station on the net, WXYC.

Two Hidden Treasures of East Lansing

Not all in East Lansing is Odyssey of the Mind or even Michigan State University.

Thanks to former local David Harrison, we turned up at the International Travelers Club and Tuba Museum where we turned up some rich local micro-brews last night.

Today walking down the street after the cold rain, we found a wonderful almost indescribable used bookshop, The Curious Book Shop, has the best collection of vintage pulp I’ve seen including tons of great old edition Sci-fi and such wonders as the “Two Loves of Nurse Ellen” and “Diary of a Hell Cat.” You could not make this titles up, much less write 150 pages to match the titles — then the lovely covers. They are of a certain age and so are ageless.

Folkstreams.net and Tom Davenport on NPR Today

Tom Davenport and fairy tale film collaborator Sarah Toth
I wrote a quick note about the Weekend Edition story about Tom Davenport and folkstreams.net this morning earlier, but I’m just now getting to hear it (thanks NPR site) and it’s great. Tom and Bill Ferris do a wonderful job of describing the project and telling us why it’s so important.

The associated website gives a close approximation of the audio with links to several popular and very different (from each other) Folkstreams films.

OM – Friday Sampler

We attended a selection of Middle School competitions today at the Odyssey of the Mind World Finals here in East Lansing. I’ve posted the article with images over on GeekDad.com.

First I should tell you that the Balsa record set yesterday was broken when the team from Valley Springs Middle School in Arden, NC build a structure weighing 18 grams that supported 1220 pounds. No high school team risen above the 1000 mark so far this competition, but tomorrow at 10:33 the high school fed by Valley Springs, T. C. Roberson in Asheville, will be weighing in. We missed the Arden team but here is a close up of the Edison, NJ (Victor Ho, Bryon Le, and Jerry He) team’s structure as it began to buckle at 740 pounds.

[pictures of the NJ team here]

We saw an extraordinary performance by the buddy team from Fushan Jiujiang Town Middle School of Guangdong, China at Tag ’em. This problem involved small vehicles traveling independently across a “Transfer Zone” pausing as different payloads were dropped into the vehicle from distant crane then delivering the treasure to a Home square. The payloads were then sorted into bins. The detail in the sets was matched by the ingenuity of the vehicle and crane builders. The whole team was elaborately costumed and danced their skit as a kind of ballet.

[pictures of the Chinese team here]

Our team had some tough competition in the “Large and Small of It.” In the pictures below, the team from Pinetops, NC created a travelogue of their state with ghost stories at every stop from the mountain to the sea. Their small paper mechanics pages changed exactly like their detailed larger counterparts. And at the finale their quiet pet became an inflated pillow spewing confetti on the stage.

[pictures of the Pinetops presentation here]

The hovercraft that delivered Rat Man from his isolated existence a Wishing Well was put to good final use as a pleasure craft for one of the team’s coaches. Then the teams celebrated by sharing gingerbread baked in Poland, added to a costume and flown the Michigan for the competition. The rest is in the dumpster — except for recyclables of course.

[pictures of the hovercraft, gingerbread suit and dumpster here].

OM – Among the Balsa Builders

Note: improved version of this article with pictures can be found on GeekDad.com.

No problem group at Odyssey of the Mind touches people as deeply as the Structure or Building problem — as our Geek Dad Commentors remind us. We spent this morning among the young builders picking up on secrets that have been passed down through dynasties of balsa builders.

This year’s problem is called Out of the Box Balsa:

The team’s problem is to design, build, and test a structure made of balsa wood and glue that will balance and support weights. The team is allowed to use materials other than balsa wood and glue to assemble the parts of the structure. The structure will be designed to fit completely inside a box that is smaller than the assembled structure. When competition time begins, the team will remove the parts and assembly materials from the box, creatively assemble its structure, and test it by placing weights onto it.
Cost limit: $125 USD.

There are some interesting aspects to this problem if you think out of the box. One team did today and their structure which weighed in at less than 18 grams held 1050 pounds! Even so that team may not be the winner; a team from Arkansas was rumored (only one source and he from Arkansas) to have held 1452 pounds at their state competition. That Arkansas team will be up tomorrow.

The inside the box balsa tips are:

  • Pick your wood carefully. Inspect the grain. Look for cracks, dents and imperfections.
  • Carefully apply your glue and trim any you don’t need.
  • Bake your balsa. Weigh in is 2 hours before the performance and moisture is unneeded weight. We saw teams take their structures hot out of a toaster oven and direct to the weigh in.
  • Level your structure. The best builders use levels and/or plates of glass to check that the weight will be evenly distributed.
  • Deploy your team members wisely. One coach told me that her team formed a fire brigade from the weights to the structure in such a way that the member putting on the weight and most others didn’t even move their feet. This gave them plenty of time to be careful when placing the weights.
  • Four legs are better than three. I would have thought that a triangular prism was stronger than a square prism, but the coaches and builders I talked to said no, you need the four legs or you’ll be off kilter for sure.
  • Think outside the box. The structure that held over 1000 pounds was actually three square prisms placed broadly apart and joined by some very light string spreading the pressure out nicely.
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