atlas(t)

cap'n jazz family tree

neat-O!

Robynn at nonogirl radio turned me on to this nifty family tree diagram of bands related to the nineties band Cap'n Jazz. The diagram is interactive; click on the band for info, catalogues, liner notes, etc.

how defining pluto impacts our worldview

a neat article this week in The Washington Post by Shankar Vedantam on why it matters how Pluto is defined.

Whether or not it is rational, human beings do care intensely about definitions. Some of our most contentious public debates are about definitions. Is the conflict raging in Iraq a civil war? In the abortion debate over when life begins, what exactly do we mean by life?

Definitions and categories are the handles by which we grasp the world. If we change the handles, we change how we see the world.

Peter Lipton, a University of Cambridge philosopher of science, argues that science itself is a composite of external reality and human interpretation of that reality. This is why, after a paradigm shift such as the redefinition of a planet, reality itself can feel different. Whether we say the solar system has eight planets or nine or 12 makes no difference to the solar system, but it makes an enormous difference to us.

Much of the business of science, in fact, has to do with the construction and demolition of categories.

Indeed. Consider how much time was spent (in the previous post) mapping science---i.e. making up representations of how sciences are to be categorized. How arcane! How abstract! How geeky! Yet:

definitions are markers for group identity, said Barbara King, a biological anthropologist at the College of William and Mary who studies social behavior in primates. Wanting to see the world a particular way is an extension of our innate tendency to form groups, coalitions and tribes.

For a Democrat who thinks the war in Iraq is a mistake, for example, it makes sense to define the ongoing carnage as a civil war. For a Republican who thinks the war is justified, it makes sense to define the internal conflict as a hurdle that can be overcome. Arguing about the definition of a civil war, therefore, is an effective (and ostensibly high-minded) shortcut to arguing about politics.

But what in the world does eight planets or nine have to do with group identity and social behavior? Knowledge, King said, is also wrapped up in social experience. King's 12-year-old daughter, for example, is upset that Pluto is no longer a planet, partly because one of her cherished memories is of a trip to Flagstaff, Ariz., where the family went to see the place where an astronomer discovered Pluto. Questioning the importance of Pluto implicitly undermines the importance of that family trip.

It seems a weak argument, but if you look at the comment threads of bloggers debating the issue, you'll find a lot of emotional arguments ... hell, if you look at the scientists voting on the issue you'll find a lot of emotional, sentimental, and nostalgic arguments. And why not? If it doesn't matter, then it doesn't matter, and no one should be categorizing at all.

places and spaces: mapping science

André Skupin's In Terms of Geography, which organizes the overlapping topic areas covered in contemporary critical geography using the metaphor of a topographical map.

one of the exhibitions I knew about before my New York visit, and one that I most looked forward to seeing, was Places and Spaces: Mapping Science, a physical exhibition with a more extensive online component, examining how traditional mapping techniques may be used to define the contemporary fields of science.

Today, the word "science" encompasses myriad arenas of physical and abstract inquiry. This unique exhibition, at the Healy Hall in midtown Manhattan, uses innovative mapping techniques to physically show what and where science is today, how different branches of science relate to each other and where different branches of study are heading, where cutting edge science is erupting as archipelagos in the oceans of the yet unknown - and - how it all relates back to the physical centers of research. The world of science is turned into a navigable landscape.

I was very excited but ended up disappointed.

The exhibition consisted of printed out images (even the matting was printed). No original documents. It would have been more exciting to see these images online in high resolution. Unfortunately the online component is also disappointing because the images are so small that you can't view them in any detail. It would have been better if they had spent the money they spent on printing buying more server space and putting really large, high res, detailed images up online. Then, if they had to have on site exhibitions, they could have built kiosks, or projectors. Otherwise, just distributed CD-ROMs.

This would have been more appropriate to the topic: virtual or metaphorical space. Ideal space. Something could have been made out of the exhibition being virtual and drawing the viewer's attention to the "space" they were entering and to the possibility of external linkage.

That said, the content of the exhibition is very exciting. It was well curated: a good collection of pieces illustrating an interesting idea. The exhibition was divided into: historical maps of geographic space, historical maps of ideas, and then maps of science. There was a very beautiful (but difficult to read) light installation at the end of two maps, one a more typical topical map like the others, and one that showed the geographic locations of article citations to show the geographic spread of ideas. I won't get into further detail on the maps themselves. All the exhibited maps, plus more examples, are available on their website, although you'll get a better view of the exhibited ones if you check out the physical exhibition.

I found it interesting that most of the maps seemed to operate on the principle of organizing topics according to citation importance, as determined by how often an article or study is referred to. This is also reminiscent of the internet, where hit count (quantity) is often more important than the quality of the reference. There's not much information about how this is done, so we can't know if any of these references are perhaps negative: scientists ganging up to laugh at a silly or universally repudiated idea. Maybe a work is cited because it has no influence at all. Scientists can be a clique as much as anyone else.

This traces the influence of formally ratified ideas but not of any other types of influence. It also makes the taxonomy of science entirely self-referential---even subordinating real world application to articles discussing real world application.

It would be thrilling to create a taxonomy/map of science based on topic areas and connections provided by the man in the street. Each person would create a map and then the maps would be morphed together to make a consensus idea of the world of science. Since it's all perception anyway, it wouldn't be a Fool's World Map where the makers just take a few of the most ridiculous misperceptions they can find and use those. If done scientifically (i.e. with a proper sample) this would be just as legitimate, and in some ways more so, than the maps created by the scientists themselves.

Because the most fascinating part of all this is that these maps, which create powerful consensus in how science is to be taxonomized, also create a sense that "science" is an actual physical place that can be mapped, whose contours can be revealed; that the landscape of science is somehow fixed and knowable, even though everyone provides the meaningless caveat that it is not. There is, of course, no such terrain, and science (like science fiction) will always be exactly what we mean when we point to it, and no more.

I had an argument with a friend about the legitimacy of Chinese herbalism. (He's white, male, pushing 40 and hysterical about scientism.) The faith he put into the scientific method was as astounding as the contempt he had for anything that did not employ it. The fact that, for example, a certain ointment has healed burns for a thousand years, and has been tested in a variety of ways over that time, got no traction with him. Only clinical trials (whatever those are, he couldn't say) could determine whether a medicine could truly heal.

Ultimately, as interesting as it is, what this exhibition does is help cement (or at least reveal) this magical thinking about western science as a hard physical location, a physical destination that you actually can reach, and one that renders all other such supposed destinations fantasy. Ironically, it was in thinking about this that I articulated for the first time, for myself, that "science" is rather a culturally determined set of precepts and prescriptions---and proscriptions---more like an ethical system than the final definition of reality.

The exhibition ends August 31st so get yourself down there if you're in New York. And don't forget to check out the online exhibition, which is more comprehensive.

local projects

yay for humanity! Local Projects is a New York-based design business dedicated to groovy design, urban landscapes, and storytelling. They use these tools for both public and commercial projects, such as for clothing manufacturers and companies like JetBlue.

Local Projects is an award-winning design studio that seeks to tell stories in public spaces, museums, and over the internet, often simultaneously. By committing to projects that combine information design, media, and interactivity, Local Projects has made high-tech to no-tech interfaces that engage visitors in innovative and effective ways. We design interfaces, information presentations, motion graphics, physical structures, and projection systems to tell unlikely stories in unlikely places.

The image above is from their "Memory Maps" project for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington DC. They displayed several enormous maps of New York City and allowed the visitors to add their memories of certain places directly to those locations on the map. This is the analog version of the digital storytelling projects Organic City and City of Memory: harder on the eye, and less easy to experience, but much easier to add to.

Another terrific project is "Timescapes", a three-screen video installation at the Museum of the City of New York (which I wish I had known about when I was visiting!) This 20-odd-minute video follows the history of the building of New York City using a map and various other images (above). Be sure to check out the video clip from the website.

"The Chronoscope", a piece for the Times Square Centennial exhibit, models Times Square in 3-D, and then lays famous historical photographs over their appropriate places in the model, drilling you down in that history.

Local Projects seems less interested in geography, mapping and urban planning, than they are aware of the essential importance of these in their focus, which is storytelling. Local storytelling, or perhaps more accurately, locale storytelling. Storytelling of place, or telling a place's stories.

This is an interesting trend to me on two fronts: mapping, geography and urban planning, although having a strong tradition in the Bay Area, are not necessarily the first metaphor Bay inhabitants will reach for. The Bay is not a single city, although it can be seen as a single organism, so Bay inhabitants do not think of the urban landscape as the overriding order of their lives, although it clearly is. New Yorkers, on the other hand, no matter of which borough, seem to think of themselves as New Yorkers, city inhabitants, and to be supremely conscious of the metaphor of their lives being an urban one. Thus the trendiness of noticing urban planning and geographical concerns is almost passe already in New York, while still fresh and problematic where I live. (Bottom line: it's fun to watch trend waves go from East to West, and change in meaning in the process.)

Also, this trend of putting a self-explanatory weight on the term "storytelling", as if the telling of stories were an essential virtue of our society, puzzles me. In fact storytelling is a fundamental value, although that value is not one that can be used fundamentally without examination. As an administrator in an ethnicity-based nonprofit with a strong literary program, I used the term "storytelling" myself to denote virtuous activity. I often, without thinking, used the argument that the stories we were bringing to the fore through our programming existed already, but would not otherwise be told.

Being a fiction writer, I cannot argue against the idea that our society, even our species, may be defined (in the same way that some ants may be defined as hill-builders) by its compulsion to narrate. But then to make as one's mission the facilitation of narrative where no narrative would otherwise be seems to be actually redefining our society as one where narrative is not so much an internal as an external compulsion. Simultaneous with this change from internal to external compulsion is the sensation that our casual storytelling is endangered, that it requires an external motive to get these stories told at all.

If, as with singing, there are strata of narrative (casual and formal) and a hierarchy of storytellers (trained professionals, talented amateurs, and levels of everybody else) don't these exist anyway? Aren't we going to tell our stories anyway? The storytelling of Local Projects' projects is definitely the popular, everyman variety. Why are they facilitating the telling, and the hearing, of popular storytelling, a background noise which any frequent flyer or DMV-line queuer can tell you can't be shut off?

I'm wondering if there's a connection between the contemporary city and this apparent unremarked fear that casual storytelling is somehow endangered. Is there some connection between the growing alienation of neighbor from neighbor in the contemporary city and the feeling that stories already extant in people's heads can't/won't be heard? Is it that simple?

Or is it maybe implicit in the digital formats of Organic City and City of Memory, or the limited space of an installation like "Memory Maps", that casual storytelling must be contained, stripped down to a much smaller space ... concentrated like poetry into its utmost meaning?

Or is it that we, in the city, have become such sophisticated story-hearers that we can no longer bear the amateurishness of our neighbors' storytelling, so we must provide a mechanical prop to make their stories bearable?

Saint Joe

okay: if you're the (slightly) adventurous type, and if you don't live in San Jose, California, just call 617-712-3060 or 617-712-3061 on your phone or cell phone. Yes, right now. Use the map above (of the light rail system of Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority) to help you answer the questions you are asked when the phone picks up. Pretend you're on the train.

If you are in San Jose, or can get there easily, take this number and your cell phone with you, and get on the light rail, wherever you may find it. Then call the number once you're on the train.

If you're like me, and can't be manipulated into doing random things by being asked if you are "adventurous" or "spontaneous", this is the latest installation by artist John Klima (whom I interviewed for a post last month, if you'll remember.) Klima is not averse to being manipulated into offering studio visits to visiting bloggers, so I got to tread the sacred boards of his Williamsburg studio during my recent New York visit (the occasion of a transportation adventure of my own, since you can't get to one part of Brooklyn from another part of Brooklyn; welcome to American transit, folks, where the lunatics are running the food service.)

The installation, titled "Saint Joe" and created for the 13th Annual International Symposium of Electronic Art, is simple of conception, and very complex in the experience. The phone number connects you to a computer phone system Klima set up, containing a love story told in fragments of narrative: one for each station in each direction. You begin by telling the system where you are (and to a certain extent, who you are.) The system then tells you the story. You navigate from narrative fragment to narrative fragment by telling the system when you've passed the next station. Or, as the New York Times puts it:

By dialing another number from within the city's light rail system, callers can access a ''sci-fi erotic'' narrative by the New York artist John Klima that will unfold differently depending on your particular train route.

For his sprawling story Mr. Klima cooked up a strange cast of characters, including a modern-day incarnation of St. Joseph of Nazareth, for whom the city was named, and a cross-dressing bicycle acrobat who is based on a historical figure. But the plot varies with your stated romantic orientation and inferred location. Once the computer program at the other end of the line identifies where you are and where you're heading, it will start dropping in chunks of story that incorporate a McDonald's, a church or a public urinal that are visible from the train window.

The story will become more erotic the longer you listen, Mr. Klima promises. ''There is a huge amount of narrative that gets pulled together on the fly,'' he said. ''Everything I do is complicated and baroque. It's all a game with a complex set of rules.

... yeah, just call the number and follow the directions. You'll pick it up.

Klima has done a lot of research into the locations, toponyms, and history of San Jose (named after Saint Joseph, Jesus' stepfather, who is a character in the story.) The locality is woven into the story---and is relevant to the telling as you pass each station. Ideally, you'd experience this from the train. I played around with it with my cell phone and a VTA map in Klima's studio, but I'm saving most of the experience for when I return to the Bay Area. (And I'll post more about it when I have been and done.)

In the meantime, the festival is over, so presumably the signs in the VTA with the number posted on them have been taken down, but Klima is leaving the phone system running as long as there is still interest in it (i.e. as long as people are still calling), and he's also still altering and adding to the narrative as the mood strikes him. So call in from afar and be sure to pass the word on to your friends in the Bay Area.

Here are some links to official text about the installation. (He hasn't gotten around to putting it up on his website yet.) And click here for the New York Times review of the exhibition.

statcounter recent visitor map

who says that progress is dead? Upon my return from vacashe, I found that my web counter (statcounter.com) had added a google mashup to its services that shows me where my most recent visitors visited from.

Here's an example above, which shows someone from China logging in, and someone from the ocean, on the equator, off the west coast of Africa. WTF? Is that a ship? Do I have sailors on my blog? Looking for tattoos? Isn't that too much of a stereotype?

Other maps show folks from Dubai, Pakistan, Iceland, Uruguay and Sri Lanka checking out the tattoos. And some crazy cool cat from Lesotho actually came to look at the mappiness. Hey there, person from Lesotho! Holla!

The only problem is that statcounter lists recent visitors twenty to a page and the map only maps them page by page. So I can't get them all on one map. Neverthe', it's very cool and very mirrors-into-infinity for me to post a map on my mapping blog of people who visit my mapping blog. Yeah.

(Back to our regularly scheduled blogging tomorrow or shortly thereafter. And I did and saw lots in New York that's blog-appropriate.)

pluto planet controversy

in trying to retaxonomize Pluto as either a planet, or a "minor planet", or an "ice dwarf planet", or a somethin' else, apparently the International Astronomical Union have (again) ruffled geeky feathers.

Roughly 3,000 astronomers and scientists are meeting in Prague this week for the union and are expected to determine whether Pluto is a planet under newly defined terms.

The planet, which was first discovered in 1930 and is the farthest away from the sun, is considerably smaller than the other eight planets in our solar system.

By defining exactly what a planet is, scientists could be forced to downgrade Pluto's status and promote 14 other bodies.

Science fiction writers John Scalzi and Scott Westerfeld engage in some disagreement, in which Scott wins the maturity award, but John wins the I-got-my-daughter-to-manipulate-a-puppet-Cthulu-into-eating-my-opponent award. Plus, Scott explains his side of the debate rather handily.

what google maps needs

know what google maps needs? It needs to put subway stops on its damn maps, that's what it needs.

Anyone know of an online mashup that does this?

Plus, above is where I will be today. Keep an eye out for me, New Yorkers!

heatwave map

via José at Outis this bbc.com map of the heatwave last week.

According to the article, 130 people have died in California so far in heat-related deaths. Global warming in action. Also check out José's link to things to do to cut down your electric bill (not to mention your CO2 output.)

amoeba gap

alexander Trevi, at Pruned has a lovely flight of fancy around the new Japanese machine, AMOEBA, that can write images in water by creating pixels out of vertically-oriented conical waves.

Unfortunately, there is also the possibility of weaponizing AMOEBA waves in the same way one could easily turn any natural earth systems, e.g. earthquakes, into a national security threat. Because once the machine falls into the hands of al-Qaeda, they can then easily wipe Los Angeles off the map with a tsunami. In the shape of Versailles.

It'll be a new kind of maritime warfare. New York comes under attack with an endless barrage of Italianate gardens propagated with Atlantic waters. First the Villa Lante, then the Villa d'Este, next comes the Boboli, and then another one and another. Vaux-le-Vicomte is mathematically translated into a Bessel function and then supersonically launched towards Boston. San Francisco gets torpedoed with dozens of allées. Miami is sieged with zen gardens. No coastal cities would be safe. Unless, of course, you have your own AMOEBA machine, in which case you could simply send your very own waves to cancel out any incoming tsunamis.

Resulting in a tsunami gap. Seriously, subscribe to this blog.