the edge of chaos
"When we observe botanical trees, we find that the leaves, branches and their arrangement can often easily be extracted, in spite of their very large numbers," says author Huub van de Wetering. "What would happen if we try to visualize hierarchical data as botanical trees?"
Wetering's group at Holland's Eindhoven University of Technology mapped hierarchical data to three-dimensional trees with branches and leaves representing files and directories. Groups of leaves are shown as fruit.
from seed
i also like that the other images are of networks, which by the way, is actually what this was all about (plus some other details)
office funny
regarding an emailed excel file...
"Excel 2007 said the file was corrupt. I think it was being metaphorical. Anyway it opened just fine in Excel 2003. Thanks."
sorry for the short random snippets - my brains have been MIA these past few days...
overheard at brunch
"if i could eat myself out i'd be skinny as a toothpick"
or something like that
and it was not just me that heard it, either.
grow your own
and i thought i waited a long time to move into my new flat.
ignoring for the moment that this is a
conceptual design - if we use the species proposed by the designers, if i want one of these, i better get started now - so that my great-grandchildren could live in one!
a tree ring study we just finished says that it can take over 80 years for an oak to reach a 40 inch diameter in queens... falling quite short of the twenty-five year timeframe illustrated
here.
a faster house could be built using the proposed elm trees (up to 51 inches diameter in 50 years) but then you just might lose your house to a
foreign fungus.
but it's still really, really cool, and makes me wonder how long it takes to grow a single house's worth of wood...
actually, this also reminds me of the
strangler figs that i saw in australia and panama except that these trees aren't trying to kill each other; even though it was great fun to climb up to the canopy from
inside a hollow fig tree.
anyways. for more detail check out the full proposal
here.
excavation
one of the things about moving, is that you discover things that well, you forgot that you owned. while some discoveries were a bit more, um,
exciting than others, i also found a massive and completely incomprehensible
geological map of
canyonlands national park, where i had gone backpacking for a week almost ten(!!) years ago, in the needles district. i will hopefully come up with some low cost framing solution so it can take over a wall... we'll see.
i find maps super-interesting - even the incomprehensible ones. and with the whole
hackable google maps situation, interactive maps are now ubiquitious; such useful ones like
housingmaps (especially when cross-referenced with a
climate change sea level rise map. however, i haven't been able to find one more fun (or more time-wastable at work) than one of
overheard in ny quotes. gems found so far include:
in williamsburg - Woman: Yeah, well, I'm gonna slap the fuckin' lesbian right out of her!---
at the met - Girl #1: So did you guys fuck all night?
Girl #2: Yeah, till I had to stop to smoke a cigarette because I needed to throw up...I felt so fat just laying there while he rabbit-humped me.
---
in williamsburg again - Woman on cell: Why do you have to tease me by pooping at your house?
---
Hipster guy: I need a woman to love me so I can alienate her. The love part, that's where it gets difficult.
Girl #1: Oh, come on. It's so easy to find a needy bitch.
Girl #2: Have you tried AA?
careful. it's addictive!
eyes and ears
andrew i fucking love you
you've given me back
my eyes and ears.
and yet another reason to love apple.
and yes, i'm thinking back to having to navigate the annoying connection software
while trying to map points
with a crap interface as we drove past
the federation of black cowboys on a very-nice-yet-somehow-disappointing PC.
and yes, i can't believe it took me
this long to google it either.
moving ongoing in pics
since i've moved but my internet has not, this is going to be in crappy phone camera pictures with a few words.
packing is like archeology; under all those postcards on the cork board was no less than five currencies
for ten glorious minutes before detritus of my life arrived, the only thing in my bedroom was a new bed.
and finally, today was plant moving day. with jester and robstar's help corraling the primary productivity, it was as if there was a meadow growing in the middle of my ex-kitchen.
the guys on the corner
down the street from my loft, there is an empty lot that for as long as i've been here, has been filled with empty cars. there are fewer cars these days. recently a hot dog stand with an umbrella took the place of a rusty mercedes. i remember when the weeds grew tall in between the cars, and there was a huge
thornapple growing right by the chain-link fence, its huge white flowers would
tempt me. the thornapple doesn't grow there anymore.
louie lives there, in his collection of cars. in the winter mornings i would walk by and he would already be in the van - parked on the corner, idling the engine to keep warm. one summer he somehow got a generator, and would sit on the sidewalk watching television in the steamy night. sometimes he and his friends would bbq under the tree that is more or less growing out of an old jeep. one of them would usually offer me a hamburger. on other days they played dominoes under the linden across the street.
eventually, every day, someone would say hello - ask about school, out on dates (especially at first), my truck, the weather, where i've been for the past week, etc. i met chris, a vietnam vet who would visit his sister who lives on my block. he would lecture louie about the tall weeds and how sanitation would give him a ticket. he told me that he helped louie get the lot. i used to see him on the
b61, going to the VA to get his benefits or cheques or whatever, and would tell me about the apartment he's trying to buy in southside. more recently one of louie's friends started setting up a flea market of sorts on the weekends by the lot, shiny musical instruments and gadgets on display.
anyways. i walked by them today, and louie called out "what's this i hear about you leaving the neighborhood? what'd you go and do that for?" i told him i'll still be around anyways, that i'm not gone yet, and i'm not moving far away. mike said that he thought i'd gone already, because i'm rarely around anymore anyhow. chris made a comment under his breath about how the polish people over there were weird, and when i looked at him he growled "i know, i am polish!" and told me to be careful, and if there are any weird ones, to let him know, cause he still knows some people up there.
as i continued on my way, beers in hand (now that i've managed to actually get out of my flat!) to continue packing (eleven boxes of books, and five of ceramics - so far), i could hear louie behind me say, "what is up with all the good people leaving the neighborhood?"
yep. instant inner mush.
i love brooklyn.
moving drama no. 1
this is called moving drama no. 1, because i'm sure to have another one coming. it's been going a little too well so far... it appears i have enough boxes, i actually have bubble wrap to swaddle my pieces in (even one casualty is too many), i have found homes for everything except the couch, my magazine subscriptions are already changed. i felt i could reward myself with a beer from the bodega. i go to unlock the apartment door to - er. nothing. the latch turned but the door did not open. two more days in this place where i've lived for six years, and the lock breaks
now. thankfully, i have good friends that can leave their non-works and be helpful without laughing too hard, and i ended up escaping through the previously unbreached
hatch on the roof, which could only be opened from the other side, of course, not that i had any
dynamite handy. makes me think that maybe those escape roof ladder things may not just be for the superparanoid. a parachute would be more fun but at this height i imagine i'll hit the ground before the damn thing opens. maybe a glider?
is this is a sign that i should, or should not, be leaving?
