NP-Contemplation

NYC Resistor is a group in NYC that created a “hackerspace”, a dedicated hang-out where hackers can get together and work on projects. From their lightning talk, it includes both hardware and software hacking, and results in all kinds of crazy projects. It looked cool and fun, and more things like this could go a long way towards re-establishing non-commercial third places in the modern world.

GigaPan, as described to me by Jason Campbell, is a method for very cheaply taking very high-resolution panoramic images. The basic idea is to have a commodity digital camera in a computerized servo-mount on a tripod. The servo-mount pans the camera over the desired areas, taking pictures at appropriate intervals as it goes. The gigapan web service then stitches the entire set of images together and provides a convenient interface for viewing.

Bonus nifty #1: no special interface is needed to the camera. It just uses another servo and a stick to manually depress the shutter switch!

Bonus nifty #2: Because the entire panorama isn’t taken at once, but over the course of several minutes (for potentially large values of several) as the camera pans over the scene, it doesn’t capture a point in time but a distribution. This occasionally creates strange artifacts when images are stitched together, but potentially has some very cool implications. Imagine if you had enough storage to keep one of these running throughout the course of an entire event of some kind, or even a significant span of time. Would it be possible to present an interface to the resulting time-distributed panorama that reflects the wealth of information gathered?

Martin Wattenberg is just plain awesome. I’d seen Name Voyager before (it’s great fun to play with), but his presentation on Many Eyes was really cool. It’s apparently being used extensively by a lot of linguistics and literary researchers, including Bible scholars. One of the more interesting observations from his talk: the key to Many Eyes was “stop words”, garbage connecting words that most software types would be inclined to throw away. However, the presence and usage of these words can offer more information about a piece of text than “significant” words!

And Evil Mad Scientist still has the best company name ever.