Gone Astray: Russell Johnson » Tech & Science

Go Do It With Goby

Russell Johnson — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:36:22 +0000

Sometimes I feel like a little kid on weekend: “Mom, I’m bored, what can I do?” Often my wife and I pore over the broadsheets or dive into our dogeared hiking guides. Sometimes we sail off into the uncharted bitstreams of Google, clicking through page after page of irrelevant links. Point is, we sometimes waste so much time looking for something to do that it becomes too late to do it.

Goby is not so much a search engine as a “do” engine. It works on the forehead-slapping premise that people often go to the net to make decisions not just to access a pile of poorly-sorted data. With Goby, you simply type in what you want to do, where and when. I keyed in “hike” and my location and immediately got eleven pages of nearby treks, complete with maps.

Too nice a day to be at a computer. I’m outta here. http://www.goby.com

Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age

Russell Johnson — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 19:40:52 +0000

Here is an interview we did with our friend author Kurt Beyer, who has just published “Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age” (MIT Press www.admiralgracehopper.com). It is the story of a woman who broke the glass ceiling in the 1940s as second in charge of the room-sized top secret computer at Harvard that designed the atom bomb while establishing the notion that computers weren’t single-purpose devices for calculating weapons trajectories, but could be taught languages to do everything from accounting to predicting election returns. She proved the latter at Remington Rand in the 50s when UNIVAC predicted the 1952 presidential election. Hopper retired, then returned to the Navy and became a minor celebrity in the 1980s after appearances on 60 Minutes and the David Letterman Show as the cranky/brilliant world’s oldest Admiral.

Grace Hopper broke through gender and corporate barriers and inspired a new generation of technology developers and entrepreneurs.

Augmented Reality – Star in Your Own Cartoon

Russell Johnson — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:36:51 +0000

I have enough trouble with real reality, but add software (in this case, something with the unfortunate acronym/name FLARToolKit) and the mind unreels. Try living in your own cartoon here, at this site developed by GE to demonstrate wind and solar energy.

Qik: Yikes, Is That A Reality Show in Your Pocket?

Russell Johnson — Fri, 01 May 2009 02:00:47 +0000

I used to dread it when my wealthy aunt dragged out the magic lantern, put up the screen and proceeded to torture us youngsters (and I am sure our less-traveled parents) with fuzzy slides and stilted stories about her encounters with the pigeon pocked monuments of Europe. Now, thanks to the internet, we have tedium on demand…or as it is on demand and we might not choose to demand it, we can choose spontaneity and entertainment instead. And that fun, these days, could just come from the little device that has become our love it/hate it sidekick, our mobile phones.

Qik is a game changer in video. It is a free software program that works on almost any video-capable phone, that enables you to broadcast live video on the internet for the world to see: to your own free video page, to YouTube, to MySpace, to almost any place your cyber pals lurk. It also stores your video on line, so those who are asleep while you are mugging your way through the Montmartre can watch it later. But Qik’s possibilities are endless, like catching an evil-doer in the act and storing the evidence online before he can wrench the phone from your hands. I spent some time with Rishi Malik of Qik.

[See post to watch Flash video]

Most Qik video is not ready for prime time…yet. It is not the fault of Qik, but of mobile phone manufacturers who use poor quality cameras and codecs (the software schemes that process video). My wife’s Samsung Blackjack delivers passable video while my Blackberry Bold is virtually worthless. Rishi’s Nokia produced a good picture. But Rishi says the future is HDTV. Samsung has a phone (the Omnia HD) that shoots 720p high definition television, which, if your carrier can handle the bandwidth, should look just fine on that big Plasma TV you went into hock for.

Charles Darwin Meets Gilbert and Sullivan

Russell Johnson — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 20:49:23 +0000

If it ever comes to your neighborhood, as it did ours last night at San Francisco’s Jewish Community Center, see Richard Milner’s “Charles Darwin: Live and In Concert.” Milner combines his love of musical theater, especially Gilbert and Sullivan, with his scholarship as an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History to do Darwin in song. He wrote the lyrics himself and manages to pull them off in a number of vocal styles: Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, Jimmy Durante’s “Inka Dinka Doo” and Maurice Chevalier crooning the love song “If You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish,” even something vaguely resembling a Blues Brother. It is 80 minutes of rollicking edutainment.

Milner wouldn’t play well communities that still believe that “Father Knows Best” and that man walked with tyrannosauruses or probably even with some free marketers who foster the principles of Social Darwinism, the notion that anything unproductive should be allowed to wither…or worse. That doesn’t jive with the complex ecological and social dependencies Darwin and his successors studied and proved.

Darwin probably never sang about his studies of finches and barnacles. Unlike Milner, he was said not to be a very funny guy.

Here is a video story about Milner produced by the New York Times: