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Festival of Maps: Chicago Architecture Foundation’s Map This!

Festival of MapsYesterday was another (half) day of Festival of Maps exhibits, and this time a friend and I visited The University of Illinois and the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s Map This! Envisioning a Global City.

First up was the CAF. A great institution, offering lots of tours which both tourists and locals (as well as suburban tourists who think they are locals) would likely find interesting. Located across from the Art Insititute, it’s nice and central and well worth checking out if you are in the area, and are interested in architecture or the city in general.

Map This! is a series of ten Chicago centric infographics assembled by architecture students at IIT and UIC under the guidance of architects from Chicago’s UrbanLab.

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Mar 11 2008 Media & Culture Comment

Cosmos dropped by the Science Channel?

When my TiVo didn’t record Cosmos on Tuesday night, I did a search for upcoming episodes, but none were to be found. The Science Channel’s episode guide shows that they had planned to air the whole series, but their TV schedule widget seems to indicate that a show called The Planets is airing in Cosmos’ time slot for at least the rest of March.

Their forums provide no indication of what or why, but if they stopped the airing after the first 8 (of 13) episodes, that’s a real shame. The DVD set is still available, but since I now know that there is an HD version that was broadcast, I would personally rather buy it on Blu-Ray or, if iTunes could ever swing it, from their store.

Anyhow, a rather disappointing turn of events for all the kids who can’t pop for a $130 box set and who are also most likely bored by their sub-standard science educations. You know the ones, you probably were one yourself back in the day. Evil Science Channel..

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Mar 06 2008 Media & Culture
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Helix Wind - residential renewable generation

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I’m the first to admit that these posts are pretty much all over the place in terms of subjects, but my intent isn’t to write about one particular topic area, but rather the various things which I find interesting and worth passing on.

The latest in that wide ranging set is Helix Wind’s Savonius wind turbines. Right now, I’m in the early stages of finding out if I can get one of these installed at my house when they come out later this year.

Why is that? Well, Chicago natives will know that the term Windy City actually refers to our politician’s propensity talk without end. But those same people will also agree that it does indeed get a bit breezy here. About two months ago I happened across this company and it appears that they have, when combined with utility metering improvements, a pretty affordable and viable residential/small commercial wind generation system on the way.

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Mar 04 2008 Personal Technology Comment

Festival of Maps update: Adler and MCA

FOM.png First off, both of the exhibits described here are actually finished, and I apologize for the delay in posting about them. I saw the MCA’s exhibit back in early December and didn’t actually realize it was part of the Festival of Maps until I looked at the schedule a few days back. The Adler’s exhibit was OK, but not amazing, and I don’t really think I would have convinced anyone to drive down to see it in any case.

Anyhow, on to my thoughts on both.

First up: Mapping the Universe

Frankly, this exhibit paled in comparison both to Finding our Place in the World, (which, by the way, is going to run from March to June at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. I highly recommend east coasters get there to see it) and to the rest of the Adler permanent exhibits. Contained in a few smallish rooms, it was a limited overview of topics which could have been covered much more effectively and in greater depth, I think.

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Mar 04 2008 Media & Culture Comment

Apple TV - my take on Take 2

atvtake2.pngApple recently released a major upgrade to its Apple TV software which sports a new interface as well as additional features, the most significant of which is movie rentals in both standard definition and, in some cases, high definition.

I didn’t jump on the upgrade bandwagon immediately because over the last year I’ve been using my Apple TV primarily to watch videos stored on my NAS in non-Quicktime format, and I didn’t want to lose that capability, so I decided to wait and make sure that the various hacks which allowed me to do that were going to be updated to support Take 2. They are all in various states of beta testing at this point, so last week I did the upgrade and began playing with the new release. So far, here are my thoughts:

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Mar 02 2008 Personal Technology Comment

ic.stars, do you?

ic.stars.png Sometime last fall, while I was working on nothing in particular, 3 completely unrelated people mentioned a local non-profit called ic.stars to me in the span of one week.

I personally believe that things like that are more than just coincidences, and so I looked into what they do. Then I contacted them about volunteering and, as timing would have it, was told that they just lost a technical resource for a project that was about to start the following week. I signed up and have been extremely impressed with everything I’ve seen with both the organization and its people since.

ic.stars is a Chicago based career internship program which has the goal of creating 1000 community leaders by 2020. They intend to do this by training interns in basic business and technology skills ranging from project planning, estimating, and management on the business side to general concepts and specific skills on the technology side. They also put an equal amount weight on proper work ethic and other soft skills which are, of course, just as important as the core curriculum. If you don’t think that’s an important thing these days, consider this from Lehigh Valley, PA.

Anyhow, on to some details:

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Feb 12 2008 Soapbox Comment

Seriously artistic visualizations

I haven’t seen this before, though the artist/programmer, Jared Tarbell has done some amazing things over the last few years. Take a look at his Gallery of Computation and be prepared to see attractors, fractals, and other algorithmic visualizations in a whole new way.

[From Twitter / culturedcode] The makers of Things, a rapidly up and coming MacOS task management tool. (which is pretty slick in its own right)

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Feb 09 2008 Media & Culture Comment

Be careful when you bring up strange topics

vacuuming.png I’ve spent a great deal of time over the last few months working with a Chicago based non-profit called ic.stars. In that time, I’ve been able to work with a couple dozen very hard working and talented interns and help them work towards new careers.

One of the intern groups (Cycle 15) once asked me for book recommendations. My first response was a silly one, I mentioned Knitting with Dog Hair: better a sweater from a dog you know and love than from a sheep you’ll never meet (KWDH).

While I did go on to give them real useful titles as well, such as The Plenitude the dog hair one stuck in their heads, as all unsettling things should. And earlier this week, the Cycle 15 folks presented me with my very own copy of KWDH, signed like a high school yearbook. It was a very nice, yet rather disturbing, gesture. Of course, I planted that particular book in their heads, so I am the only one to blame for the disturbing part of the deal.

But since I now have my own copy, I may as well review it. Which is good, because I’m typing this right now instead of sleeping. I think it might be a little while before I can sleep again, actually.

I should note that I don’t know how to knit, so I’m not really able to cover the technical details of the patterns or instructions. Instead, I’ll simply relate the highlights:

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Feb 07 2008 Media & Culture Comment

Even an average monkey can make a difference

seesaw.pngWhile the stories about the studies from which this site gets its name may not be entirely complete or even remotely accurate, there certainly seems to be a real world case to be made for the idea of popularity breeding popularity.

Historically, the thinking has been that popularity is driven by the popular, and that if you knock down the right domino, all the rest will fall.

That’s basically the point of books like The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell) and The Influentials (Jon Berry, Ed Keller). It’s even the basis of product endorsements and giveaways to celebrities and the like.

Now, why the whole country didn’t go out and buy Oakley Thumps when Dog the Bounty Hunter started wearing them is a mystery.

Or maybe not, according to Duncan Watts, and this recent article:

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Feb 04 2008 Soapbox Comment

Why I blog - or - demented and sad, but social

I’m sure there are as many reasons as there are bloggers, just as there as as many opinions on how best to blog given those various reasons. For me, thus far, I’ve written on this site for me and an audience of my friends.

Very specifically, I’ve used the Critical Monkey name for years, posting here and there on sites of friends about topics they asked me to, and began building this site about a year ago. Through the entire course of that year, I’ve kept this site pretty well contained. I blocked search engines, disabled comments & trackbacks, and only gave the URL to friends and colleagues - mostly when they asked about something I had already written about.

My intent was not to use the democratized publishing power of the Internet to reach a wide audience. I have my reasons, which I won’t ramble on about here, but essentially, I was using this site as a private conduit to share my thoughts and ideas with people I knew directly.

Recently, a few things made me start to reevaluate that approach:

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Feb 01 2008 Soapbox Comment