Let me take you back to an era before computer control of all aspects of spaceflight was considered necessary. It’s the early 70s, and although additional flights after Apollo 17 were eventually canceled, there were at the time plans afoot for longer duration stays on the lunar surface. However, a longer stay entailed an increase risk that the LEM ascent engine would not ignite when the time came to return to orbit.

What would the two surface bound astronauts do? Would they wait for a rescue mission? No. They would unstow a wire-frame with small thrusters and collapsible fuel bladders from the LEM.

They would then transfer the ascent stage fuel to these bladders, and climb onto a perch on top, with life support supplied only by their space suits. They would then ignite their small rockets, and arc into the sky, guided to a rendevous with the command module only by an attitude indicator, a clock, and a list of desired pitches and times.


Once the pitch and time sequence was complete and they were in orbit, they would sit tight and pray they matched the checklist close enough that the CSM could find them before they ran out of oxygen.

It seems impossible that such a guts-only scenario would come up in the future. Imagine riding from the surface to an orbital rendezvous on essentially a jetpack, holding a joystick and a stopwatch.
I love this.


Apollo Lunar Escape System at Wikipedia

This is awesome:

via Machine Thinking

I came across an entry on Google Books, and realized they have a map with all locations mentioned in the book tagged on the map. This is a neat feature. Check out the map for Around the World in 80 Days. Certainly an interesting way to access data in a book.

I was recently reading how St. Jerome was partial to plagiarizing the hell out of Origen and other sources, in some cases most of entire biblical commentaries. The author makes the point that plagarizing was quite a bit easier in the ancient world, as there weren’t that many copies of the books floating around when each copy had to be written out by hand. Printing was one paradigm jump in text availability, and we’re now going through another one.

I hear often how the internet makes it a lot easier for people to cheat and plagarize, but I think the increased accessibility of our accumulated texts actually makes the opposite true. We’re just coming through a period where people aren’t yet submitting papers electronically, and these papers aren’t yet routinely run through a programmatic comparison with the database of all books to check for plagarism. (This won’t address paying someone to write your paper). Think of how accessible human knowledge is now compared to even 10 years ago. Doesn’t it seem astronomically harder to find plagarism if you have to look through a physical book for the copied text?

Perhaps one of the more stress inducing aspects of throwing together Ignite Ann Arbor, was figuring out how to play all our speaker’s slide decks, with 15 second auto-advance, but also with non-timed slides interspersed between, all while avoiding cross-os font imbroglios and ugly on-screen GUI manipulation. I’ll describe what I used here in nauseating detail. Hopefully this will be useful to other Ignite organizers, or anyone trying to give a talk without whipping out powerpoint.

I’ll be giving a little demo at the MichiPUG meeting July 2nd.

I settled on Impressive, a presentation framework written in python. It allows you to give a slideshow type performance using either PDF files or a directory of images as source. We asked all presenters to submit their slide decks of exactly 20 slides, in PDF format to ensure they were platform independent. We also supplied the projector resolution ahead of time so they would have that information; It was particularly relevant to Laura Fisher’s talk on ratios. I made additional slides with the Ignite template, an introduction with name and title for each speaker, and a thanks slide. I then exported these as individual one page PDFs with the presenters surname.

At this point, I had three directories (intros, presos, thanks) each with 14 PDFs, using surnames as the filename in each directory. Each presentation was to be kicked off individually. I ended up running Impressive in cygwin, although you could also run it natively. Thus I had a shell script to launch each presentation, also titled by surname. An example shell script:

impressive -T 0 -I single.info -C m.png ./intros/Ackasu.pdf ./presos/Ackasu.pdf ./thanks/Ackasu.pdf

This calls impressive on the three PDFs, which are strung together as though they were one presentation. It also sets the transition time to 0 to eliminate slide transitions, calls the info file single.info, and uses m.png (which was a 1 pixel transparent image) as the pointer icon. The info file system is one of the really powerful tools Impressive offers. You can basically add flat out python to customize the slideshow. My single.info file consisted of this:

for page in xrange(2, 22):
   SetPageProp(page, 'timeout', 15000)

Thus, a 15 second timeout was placed on each slide except the first and last. There is a -a command line option to just flat-out give every slide a particular transition time, but using the .info file let me apply the timeout to just the slides in the actual presentations.

I then made a windows shortcut calling cygwin’s bash.exe and the relevant shell script for each presenter, which I numbered with the speaking order, so that all the shorcuts were in order. During ignite, I could then just go down the list of shortcuts and running each presentation one at a time. Incidentally, we could have changed speaking order by simply reordering the shortcuts.

I think it worked really well. Impressive provided a nice slick way to organize everything and it’s visually pleasing. We didn’t use a fraction of it’s capabilities, which you might want in a differently structured presentation. For instance, you can hit to get a view of all your slides if you have to jump around, you can use a spotlight effect, there’s different transitions (ok, even though the transitions are nicely animated, please, please do not use transitions in the name of all that is holy). Check out the documentation to see what else you can do with it.

If you’ve ever tried controlling an iPod touch or iPhone in a car dock, you probably are aware of the benefits of tactile feedback provided by mechanical controls – something that’s lacking with touchscreens. Hence this research into dynamic physical controls which double as a multi-touch display looks really interesting.

While this programmable tactile control technology looks really cool, it seems it would be too bulky for small personal devices. I never understood why the touch iPods didn’t include gestures to control playback in car situations, that would be supremely useful.

via infosthetics.com, which is a great blog btw.

Elegant and crisp interface design is an important whether you’re designing an automotive dash or a command-line tool.  I find good design practices can be harvested from a variety of seemingly unrelated sources.  The underlying thread, is to keep things as simple and straightforward as possible.  It’s been said a million times, but it’s so true, whether you’re paring down your argument list or making sure your diagrams have functional uses for the colors you introduce.

Some resources:

• Any of Edward Tufte’s books, the first of which (The Visual Display of Quantitative Data) has the least eye candy, but the most basic truth in it.
• The Art of Unix Programming
• The Universal Principles of Design, a great coffee table book with a different design concept wonderfully illustrated on each page.

Spore is an epically conceived attempt to provide a game that lets you oversee your little creature from tidepool to galactic domination.  While this sounds like an educational game about evolution, this is not a science based game about evolution by natural selection.

It’s a game about intelligent design.  You have godlike powers over your creature’s abilities and appearance, and you can modify this to achieve your desired ends.  There is no random variation, all of your creatures are identical.  There is no selection, as death of your creature never affects the rest of the species.  If you notice there is fruit hanging high in a tree, you can stretch your creature’s neck in a Lamarckian fashion.

Also, contrary to what I first thought, modifying attributes like your creature’s gait doesn’t appear to change their ground speed.  That seems to be entirely dependent on whether they have +1 or +2 leg parts.  Also, adding a second set of horns doesn’t increase their charging ability.  Thus, most of the creature editor is aesthetic, and doesn’t affect the creature’s abilities other than as an inventory of parts.

To be fair it may be impossible to create a realistic evolution by natural selection game, by definition.  If there is nothing for the god-like player to tweak, it’s not going to be a very engaging game-play experience.

I’ve been following the Long Now Foundation and their quest to build a 10,000 year clock for several years now.  This episode of BoingBoingTV showcases some of the physical artifacts the foundation has machined, including an orrery, and a chime system developed in part by Brian Eno.

There are a lot of challenges associate with building a 10,000 year clock, from durable materials, to non-sticking bearings, to power sources, some of which are touched on in the video.  The Foundation’s overriding purpose is to encourage more long term responsibility.

I need to explore the anecdote told by Alexander Rose in the video, where when it was time to rebuild the roof of the hall in New College Oxford after 500 years, it turned out that nearby they had planted the oak trees that would be needed when the building was originally constructed.

via Machine Thinking

The New York Times has a great information graphic showing Olympic medals won by various countries over time.  It reminds me a lot of gapminder, although I’m not sure if it is related.

The user interface design snafu that bothers me the most is the “hit cancel for credit” routine while swiping your card at a local retailer.  Clearly, it would be ideal to present a choice between credit and debit with separate buttons on the touchscreen, as opposed to defaulting to debit and requiring the user to take the obscure step of cancelling out and then going to credit.  The interface is software, it can be changed, I don’t understand why this horrible user experience has persisted for so long.