A team of student engineers at the University of Maryland are closing in on the American Helicopter Society’s $250,000 Sikorsky Prize, which has remained unclaimed for over thirty years. The requirements of the prize sound simple enough. The winner must build and demonstrate a human-powered helicopter that can lift off the ground vertically and hover for one minute, reaching a height of three meters (about 10 feet) without drifting from a 10-square-meter area. But as this video from the NPR “Radio Pictures” series explains, those parameters test the limits of light-weight aircraft design. After four years of trial and error, the Maryland team has satisfied two of the three requirements. In one recent flight they kept their helicopter, the Gamera II, in the air for a world-record 65 seconds while staying within the required 10-meter area–but only reaching a height of two feet. In shorter flights they’ve approached the 10 foot goal. To learn more about the project you can read and listen to Adam Cole’s story at NPR, “Human-Powered Helicopter: Straight Up Difficult.”
Note to those cave dwellers who’ve yet to succumb to Mad Men mania, it’s not that same route so traveled by the dodo. For a while it looked like the world’s supply of Underwoods and Olivettis was being requisitioned for hipster jewelry, but their recent comeback is rooted in their intended purpose. These days, they’re near fetish objects for romantic young writers conceived in the shadow of the Mac Classic.
Meanwhile, the likes of Cormac McCarthy and David McCullough, author of 1776, have yet to turn their backs on their beloved, quite likely lucky analog implements.
All due respect to the young Turks seeking to digitize the dinosaur, but the real hero of the typewriter’s post millennial survival is Paul Schweitzer, the ink fingered medicine man at the helm of Gramercy Typewriter. His once-robust competition consigned to the ash heap, Schweitzer has both the stubbornness and expertise to tough it out, in an analog lair that’s the antithesis of sleek.
No one will fault you if your heart lies with your various screens. But let’s not forget where you came from.
So much of what we experience as digital is intangible. The color and texture of the Internet exists only for the time we have that particular site loaded. With just a click of the mouse, the lushness disappears.
Except that it doesn’t, really.
Backstage, every email, photo, YouTube video and document we share lives in a very real place, which is weird when you think about it. These massive data centers are like vaults of ones and zeros, some of which could wreak havoc in the wrong hands but, honestly, most of which will never mean anything again to anybody.
Every time anyone uses a Google product, for example, like conducting a search or looking up directions, their computer talks to one of the world’s most powerful server networks, which are housed in huge data centers. Very few people actually get to see where Google’s servers live. These data centers are high security, for good reason.
The company recently launched Where the Internet Lives, part of a mini campaign to pull back the curtain on how the web works. They hired a photographer to capture eight of their data centers on, well, not really film, but you get the picture. Oh, and the data centers aren’t brick and mortar either. More like glass and drywall and pipes. Lots and lots of pipes.
And like Willie Wonka and his famous factory, Google invited Wired magazine reporter Stephen Levy to visit and write a story about the previously off-limits facilities.
Take a street view tour of the North Carolina data center (and see their “security team” at work). Photographer Connie Zhou’s images are lovely and the facilities are beautiful in an eerie, futuristic way. See how water is used to keep the processors cool, where data is backed up, failed drives destroyed to keep data safe and how workers get around.
It’s a peek behind the scenes, but it’s also marketing. And what’s interesting is that it’s a lot like the automobile industry’s marketing (think of Saturn’s ads in praise of the assembly-line worker) and campaigns by the Big Three to attract auto workers in the 1940s. Some of the photo captions recall the nostalgic, Utopian messaging of the post-War era, when efficient, modern suburban communities were sprouting up around industrial centers. This lunch room looks pretty nice, and the sauna is right outside.
Kate Rix writes about digital culture and education. Visit her work online at katerixwriter
It has been said that “the true voice of [Hunter S.] Thompson is revealed to be that of American moralist … one who often makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him.” That ugliness served its literary and journalistic purpose, no doubt. As for the purpose it served in his private life, in the realm of getting nitty-gritty, mundane things done, that’s a whole other question. Not much is known about this clip other than it features a NSFW voicemail that the gonzo journalist left for his local AV guy in Woody Creek, Colorado. The poor man.…
There are good and bad online instructional platforms for everything: some language courses work better than others and some approaches to teaching music are more effective than others.
This is just as true for computer programming, where, like everything else, an abundance of free courses and tutorials from MIT, UC Berkeley, Harvard and Stanford offer interactive tools for learning web development and computer programming. You can find a long list of free comp sci courses from these great universities here.
One new site that is getting particularly good reviews is Codecademy, a free online learning system for learning everything from HTML Basics to Python in a “user active” style—meaning that users can use tutorials to design projects of their own choosing. It’s also easy to track your progress.
What sets Codecademy apart from other programming tutorials is that all student work can be completed within a web browser. No software downloading or installing is required. Responding to criticism that the site didn’t initially offer enough courses, Codecademy has added numerous courses in 2012 and launched a Course Creator program. This is a boon for users interested in learning how to teach. Codecademy does not put user-created courses through an approval process and gives course creators a link that they can distribute as they wish. Codecademy does, however, screen the courses and selects which to feature on its own site.
Enrollees in its Code Year program receive a programming lesson in their email inbox every Monday, starting with the fundamentals of JavaScript and then moving on to HTML and CSS. Hundreds of thousands of people signed up at the beginning of the year (including the White House and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg). If you were one the enrollees, it’s still not too late to keep that New Year’s resolution.
The “Politehnica” University of Timisoara, Romania, an engineering school established in 1920, takes its motto from Ferdinand I: “It’s not the walls that make a school, but the spirit living inside.” While the walls of “Politehnica” are as stately as anyone could ask for, what’s inside, according to the short documentary above, is also pretty spiffy—the spirit of computing history, Romanian style. With a score that sounds a little like an outtake from Logan’s Run, this video gives us a tour of the university’s Museum of Information Technology and Communications, opened November 16, 2001.
We meet a number of ancient machines, many of which were responsible for designing buildings and hydroelectric dams and some of which still function. There’s the Mecipt 1, a massive 1961 mainframe system covered in dials, switches, and routing systems and looking somewhat more industrial than the machines built by Fairchild and IBM at the same time. Next comes Mecipt 2 in 1963, which was in operation for sixteen years and did much of the building design. The microcomputers TIMS and MS-100 resemble the original business machines made in the sixties by companies like Hewlett-Packard and Data General Corp. Overall, the short doc takes us through the experimental course of Romanian computing from 1961 to 1989. The reader who brought this to our attention points out that there’s little material out there on Romanian computer engineering. This short doc offers a rare look at a very little-known and fascinating history.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
Yesterday saw the launch of what you’ll surely find the most intriguing use of Syria’s domain name extension yet, especially if you follow the visual arts. It serves the punning site Art.sy, to which you’ll soon point your browser whenever you want to discover new imagery that appeals to your aesthetic sensibility. Thus holds the theory, in any case, behind this service created by the Art Genome Project. It aims to become to visual art what Pandora has become to music: a virtual mind that can take your tastes, turn right back around to recommend works that please those tastes, and — in the best of all possible outcomes, little by little — broaden those tastes as well. Tell Art.sy what has recently captivated you in the museums, and it will dig through pieces from Washington’s National Gallery, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the British Museum, and elsewhere, trying its best to find something else that will do the same. In total, Art.sy hosts “17,000+ artworks by 3,000+ artists” from “300+ of the world’s leading galleries, museums, private collections, foundations, and artist estates from New York to London, Paris to Shanghai, Johannesburg to São Paulo.”
Melena Ryzik in TheNew York Times describes Art.sy’s elaborate system of code-based aesthetic classification as developed by “a dozen art historians who decide what those codes are and how they should be applied,” in which “some labels (Art.sy calls them “genes” …) denote fairly objective qualities, like the historical period and region the work comes from and whether it is figurative or abstract, or belongs in an established category like Cubism, Flemish portraiture or photography,” while others “are highly subjective, even quirky.” Ryzik lists the possible codes for a Picasso as including “Cubism,” “abstract painting,” “Spain,” “France” and “love,” and those for a Jackson Pollock as “abstract art,” “New York School,” “splattered/dripped,” “repetition” and “process-oriented.” Here we have yet another reason to maintain a high artistic awareness in our high-tech time. Still, I can’t help but recall the wise counsel Stephen Fry offered in an interview we featured back in August: a truly life-enriching recommendation engine wouldn’t give you the same art you’ve always enjoyed; it would give you the exact opposite.
You can learn more about the ins-and-outs of Art.sy here.
It took five years and five models, but Amazon has finally released a new generation of the Kindle — the Kindle Paperwhite — that delivers the goods. The problem with the previous models boiled down to this. The screens were fairly muddy. The contrast, poor. The words didn’t pop off of the page. If you ever tried reading a Kindle indoors, especially in lower light conditions, you know what I mean.
With the Kindle Paperwhite, Amazon has made a pretty big leap ahead. They’ve made improvements to the font contrast and screen resolution, which definitely enhance the reading experience. They’ve also added a touchscreen to the e‑ink model. But the big stride forward is the built-in light that illuminates the screen. The screen is sidelit, not backlit (à la the iPad). The point of the light isn’t to make the screen glow like a computer screen. It’s to make the screen stay white, like the page of a book, under varying light conditions. If you move from brighter to dimmer lighting conditions, you nudge up the brightness so that the page continues to look white. And then you stop there.
It all works quite well, until you start reading with the Paperwhite in pretty dim light conditions. Then you’ll need to dial up the light until the screen actually glows, and that’s when you’ll start to see some imperfections in the design. As David Pogue mentioned in his New York Times review, the Paperwhite has some hotspots (areas of uneven lighting) along the bottom of the screen, which detract minorly from the reading experience.
The last thing Amazon got right is the price. The entry model starts at $119, which means that Amazon is basically selling the e‑reader at cost, and then making money on book sales. But that doesn’t mean that you need to spend very much. You can always download texts from our collection of 375 Free eBooks. Or, if you’re an Amazon Prime Member, you can borrow up to 180,000 books for free.
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