DorkbotColumbus - the Blog

Unique approach - Powers of 10

Many students of science remember Philip Morrison and Phyllis Morrison's classic exploration of the concept of scale - called Powers of Ten, Published originally by Scientific American Press (no longer in print).

Page by page, the book showed increasing/decreasing magnitudes of size, and what phenomena lived at each scale.  The book was followed up by a popular film by Charles and Ray Eames in 1977.

Since then, the concept has been tackled by a number of creative minds on the web - from a simple textual listing of what can be found at each scale, to the descendants of the Eames project, to a high-tech laboratory.
 

Now that concept is being explored in a neatly animated kind of way, in a site produced by Nikon - called Universcale.  The subtle pacing and the music are hypnotic.  Thanks to Matt Howard for the tip!

It is probably a healthy exercise to be reminded where we fit, within the enormity - and the infinitely small - scope of the universe.  It resonates the fractal nature of these repeating patterns, and the new insights we now have of the nature of our world, and the worlds in and around us.

Dreaming of the Internet on 3X5 cards

Link: Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society » Mundaneum, the Index Card Internet.

Humans have been trying to collect and organize their knowledge, almost from the time we became conscious of the concept of "knowledge" as separate from just "behavior."  From the Greeks to Alexandria to the universities of the Renaissance - it seems there has been an ongoing effort to create a central access point for the collective knowledge of the species.  In most modern times, Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language and the Encyclopedia Britannica may mark our first attempts to match the best information publishing technology with knowledge. 

But here is an interesting and little-known story of the creation of a knowledge bank based on the simple premise of 3X5 cards, organized in a system devised to retrieve the knowledge when needed.  It reminds me most of a paper-based version of Douglas Lenat's Cyc project.

The futility and ultimate failure of the effort seems - from here - pre-destined.  But, as this writer points out, the concepts were echoed later in Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" - a description of the Memex - which is often credited with being the conceptual root of modern information storage and retrieval systems.

So the question emerges - what if the Internet turns out to be - in retrospect from some future date, less than 100 years from now - as klutzy and cumbersome and obviously futile as the Mundaneum.  What will that next leap look like?

Sometimes the best tech is low tech - Stonehenge solved?

The mystery of how Stonehenge was built has been with us for more than 2000 years.  Suggestions have ranged from thousands of people gathered to move and lift the rocks - to mammoth earth-moving techniques - to aliens.  But a Canadian man may have discovered that the answer could be simpler - and more elegant - than any of the proposals made to date.

This video shows how he - by himself - has used the simple mechanics of earthly physics to lift and position 10s of tons of material - and how the ancient Britons might have done the same thing to build the monument at Stonehenge.

Thanks to John Edwards for bringing this to the blog's attention!

A Brief History of Information | The Register

Link: A Brief History of Information | The Register.

The first of a two-part discussion about the discovery of the concept of "information" and ways to use it it in ways previously unconsidered.  A very nice background piece.

The author is "Ted Byfield is Associate Chair of the Communication Design and Technology Department at Parsons the New School for Design in New York City; he co-moderates the Nettime-l mailing list."

100th anniversary of radio broadcasting

Link: BBC World Service Discovery - Fessenden: King of the Radio Waves.

Maybe one day there will be a room in the Smithsonian dedicated to Dorkbot projects that went awry and become accepted commercial products.  Until then we can only acknowledge significant anniversaries when they pop up - and certainly the birth of radio as a broadcast medium - crude as it was in the beginning - must qualify.