Category: Tools and Technology

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs

Stately, deskbound storyteller Mike Daisey brings to D.C. his most recent polemic, both a celebration of this century’s magical technology (especially as designed by Apple Computer) and an amateur’s powerful exposé of toxic working conditions at the Chinese factories responsible for final manufacture of that magic. The piece is even more powerful than last season’s The Last Cargo Cult, showing as it does the unspannable divide between the poorly paid laborers who hand-assemble exotic electronics and the Western consumers who enjoy those gadgets.

Daisey’s physical gifts of narrative are again on display. If he sometimes chooses soft targets (we all enjoyed a rant about PowerPoint in which he bellows [accurately] that Microsoft is great at making “tools to do shit we can already do”), his language has deepened: his allusions range from highbrow to pop, from Walt Whitman and the Gospels to a telling description of downtown Shenzhen “like Blade Runner threw up on itself.”

Just as Apple’s revolution in personal computing changed the metaphor of what it meant to interact with a small computer, Daisey urges us to reconsider the metaphorical lens through which we view technology: his is one of the few theatrical pieces I know of that ends with a call to action in the lobby, with pointers to China Labor Watch and Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehaviour.

A self-described Columbo in a Hawaiian shirt, Daisey delivers a moving piece—but with a light touch. As he admits, he has suppressed the most gruesome stories that he collected from South China’s Satanic mills, lest his listeners tune out. The work sparks reactions that move beyond head-nodding in the auditorium to genuine conversations on the way home.

  • The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, created and performed by Mike Daisey, directed by Jean-Michelle Gregory, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

I’ve narrowed it down to five

Dave Pell helps me understand why it is taking months, may take years, for me to replace my old phone and PDA.

Stop. Do not send me your pick for best note-taking app.

I can’t take any more options. I’ve already spent weeks comparing sets of features I’m pretty sure I’ll never need. I tried out at least fifteen applications on my desktop, phone and on the web. I was completely overwhelmed by choices. The process began to take over my life. I spent hours in front of my laptop, I’d demo various features for my wife and kids…

I thought I could pick one web-based tool for notes and diaries. Right now my bookmarks bar has an entire folder of tools, each for its own special purpose.

Ready for Maker Faire

Antique Trades Dept.: As A.G. Sulzberger reports, blacksmiths for New York’s parks department still hand-build hoops for the city’s basketball courts. The dare-we-say artisan rims are sturdy, and hence cost-effective.

They have survived endless rounds of slam dunks, and occasionally served as chin-up bars and, for the especially nimble, even as spectator seating. Once, the blacksmiths strung a cable around a rim inside the workshop, which they used to tow a van halfway off the ground.

Three on a match

Aunt Taki showed some of the diaries that she has been keeping since forever. Her secrets are safe from me, as well as her kids, since she keeps them in Japanese. She usually uses a book with a cool set up: entries for three years on each daily page—sort of the hardcopy equivalent of blog entries that link to this time last year. She gets her books from Hakubunkan Shinsha (alas, no English page to link to).

Conspicuous by its absence

Linton Weeks reviews the current state of (online) surveys and survey software.

Then came the Internet, interactive voice recognition and other methods of collecting data that involve less cost and quicker turnaround times for corporations thirsty for consumer information.

There are two salient reasons for the burgeoning survey industry, [Nancy Mathiowetz, past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research] says. First, the corporate desire to make empirically based decisions “requires the collection of data to examine satisfaction, how people view products, etc. Second, the marginal cost of data collection — for some modes of data collection — has dropped.”

A new botany tool, perhaps

Anne Eisenberg reports on a prototype digital field guide, an iPhone app (from a team including Peter N. Belhumeur of Columbia Univ. and W. John Kress of the Smithsonian) that identifies tree species on the basis of scanning a single leaf specimen.

“We believe there is enough information in a single leaf to identify a species,” [Kress] said. “Our brains can’t remember all of these characteristics, but the computer can.”

We might call this an active field guide, as opposed to passive guides like National Geographic’s Handheld Birds for the Palm Tungsten platform, which leave the identification decisions to the user.

I’m skeptical. Plant identification is hard (at least it is for this birder), even though the plant just sits there, and you can examine leaves in the hand as long as you like. It’s not for nothing that the discipline has evolved elaborate ID keys that consider opposite vs. adjacent branching structures, leaf texture, bud scars, characteristics of flowers and fruits, geographic distribution, and more. Ironically, the screenshots accompanying the story demonstrate the identification of a leaf from that tricky genus, Quercus. A more realistic assessment comes from P. Bryan Heidorn with the National Science Foundation:

The computer tree guide is good at narrowing down and finding the right species near the top of the list of possibilities, [Heidorn] said. “Instead of flipping through a field guide with 1,000 images, you are given 5 or 10 choices,” he said. The right choice may be second instead of first sometimes, “but that doesn’t really matter,” he said. “You can always use the English language — a description of the bark, for instance — to do the final identification.”

Some links: 32

Hugh Powell explains how cannon nets work and what can go wrong with them in “Twinkling the Whimbrels.”

Cannon netting consists of firing three projectiles over a flock of birds, trailing a single net that traps the birds underneath. Setting up the cannons is a daylong process that involves digging three separate metal tubes into the ground about 15 or so feet apart and stuffing them with a long, metal projectile, each of which will carry one section of the long nylon net.

When the tubes are dug in and properly aimed, we hook each cannon into an electrical system and place black powder at the base of the cannons. Then we string a set of wires back to a control box strategically placed a couple of hundred feet away in a well-hidden vantage point. After all of that is in place, we dig a trench to conceal the net and cover it with seaweed and other detritus. Then it’s a matter of hiding and waiting for the birds to arrive. Just imagine Wile E. Coyote trying to catch Roadrunner with a big contraption triggered by TNT in the old Looney Tunes cartoons.

Or, How a mistake by the fabrication shop became a design element

Via The Morning News, Paul Shaw tells “The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway” in a deliciously-illustrated nine-page essay, which includes digressions into the history of the system map, the Chrystie Street Connection snafu, and a refresher on 1970’s-era type technology.

Improvisation

please be gentleThe lobby of the building where RFB&D has its Washington offices on the third floor is being renovated. Scaffolding and plywood platforms everywhere. Somehow the workmen have rigged up a dual-direction call button for the elevator. I count five different hands adding instructions and admonitions to the board. Judging from the cutout, I think the original idea was just to frame the existing two-button panel, but frass happens on a job site.

Some links: 29

Amy Cortese spotlights Blaine Brownell’s transmaterial.net, a blog (and associated books) of green building materials and other technological innovations in construction. She singles out plans by Serious Materials to introduce EcoRock, a carbon-neutral gypsum board replacement.

A typical gypsum drywall plant consumes one trillion to two trillion B.T.U.’s of natural gas a year, according to [Kevin] Surace [of Serious Materials].

Later this year, his company—backed by $65 million in venture capital funding—plans to offer a zero-carbon drywall called EcoRock. It looks and performs like traditional drywall and will be priced comparably, but it uses no heat in its creation. Instead, the mix of ingredients, which Mr. Surace would not disclose but said were mainly materials diverted from landfills, are heated through a chemical reaction. “This is brand-new materials science,” he said.