shopsin's

i bought the tummy trilogy in 1999 and calvin trillin almost immediately became my most favoured writer about food. like the best, he is as concerned about the context (cultural, personal, historical) as he is about the food. or, as mfk fisher put it, "When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and it is all one," because "there is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk."

in the trilogy, trillin writes rapturously about an unnamed greenwich village restaurant close to his apartment run by an unusual owner with a rigorous cooking and patronage policy and an enormous, multi-page, highly eclectic menu. it sounded like the archetypal Secret Restaurant In the Sky—eccentric, with unusual food and a distinctive style. entree gained not by vigorous applications of cash, but by local knowledge and the accumulation of time. (just like the restaurant john mcphee describes in "brigade de cuisine," the final essay in in giving good weight, a marvelous essay collection whose title piece is about the union square greenmarket). trillin could only write about the restaurant on condition of keeping it anonymous; this stymied and frustrated me until early 2002, when he revealed all (including the name) in a new yorker article. shopsin's was about to move to a new location after thirty years and, for the first time, sought publicity.

in spring 2003, i went to new york and, on a slow morning, went down to greenwich village to look for shopsin's in its new location on carmine street. i arrived just after they opened for lunch, there was no one there, and i had the most amazing chicken tortilla and bean soup. i thought about shopsin's again on december 28, 2007, while seeking a place for lunch; i decided then that shopsin's would always be there so i could just hit it up on my next trip to new york. naturally, it closed a few days after.

yesterday, lauren from atlanta came back from the aspen library with a small stack of DVDs—among them was a 2004 documentary by matt mahurin called i like killing flies, about shopsin's in the time of transition. it's a great film, well-directed, well-edited, with a superb, well-contained subject. the most visually-compelling part of the film is how it illustrates the way spaces form themselves around institutions of any size. the original shopsin's was tiny and seated just over 30 people; over three decades, it accumulated a crust of paraphernalia and objects that seemed light only by dint of the gradualness of its accretion. stripped of the stuff, the old restaurant looked naked; the new restaurant looked like a person wearing someone else's clothes.

more valuable was the exploration of something done right—not in the sense of something done by rote or process but something done right deep down to the essence of being; great ventures by great people. kenny shopsin explains that

it gets into a subject that really has not much to do with me but has to do with humanity ... the great lack in america, the great belief that was our flaw once we lost our christian backgrounds or whatever the fuck we had. we never intellectually, as a country, tried to figure out what the meaning of life is. and we still don't ... not that that's easy to achieve. am i with my busy work seeking to inject meaning into my life? the way that i choose to do this is to choose an arbitrary stupid goal and pursue it with vigor; and what happens to you in that pursuit is your life. i understand that the goal is stupid, but it's not stupid to pursue because it's the only way you can inject meaning into your life. otherwise you're left with this great 'why bother?'

craft (whether the production of mingei, or in engineering and the sciences, or in cooking), with its gradual accumulation of incremental technical competency, has been one pathway for people to get to the meaning of life.

geneshirt

maps, annotations, and wearable. do we want one? yes. yes, we do.

leaving and arriving

the last four days have been distinctly surreal. leaving a totalizing job is a wrenching experience, the more so if you have had, last minute, a bit of a change of heart.

i had dinner in mountain view with aaron and jini; the streets were full of people recovering from work, happy, talking to friends, drinking wine, browsing in stores. it was unseasonably warm. the late afternoon had been a blur of leavetaking and salvaging emails and files. i had the distinct sensation time was running out with many things left to do, yet i was compelled and wanted to spend time with as many people as possible. when i got back from dinner, i had about 45 minutes before the last valencia shuttle arrived, and waited outside reading the cunning man. it was a funny feeling, heavy and light at the same time.

on saturday morning, i woke up early and walked out to the farmers' market. it is cherry season now, and piles of them sat gleaming in the sun. i ate a sample strawberry and listened to the counter folks talk about j.i. rodale and began to miss san francisco even before really leaving. someone in noe valley showed up to buy my feather bed, then i went out again to buy chewy sourdough pizza breads from the bennet valley bread lady. it was the first half of a valedictory lap around the city. dave showed up mid-morning and we drove up to north beach to meet zach and the rest of the party. there was some 3 on 3 basketball, shotguns of tecate, then a long drive to stinson beach. along the way, the most expensive dried fruit and nuts ever. another day of no food. tecate and pacifico, cold water and surf, tans. dinner at pakwan, drinks at bourbon and branch (amazing martinis, the austrian) then la trappe (a phenomenal unibroue ephemere), then back to zach and catherine's for liar's dice.

sunday morning, i was up early to sell yet more stuff. i dropped off two boxes of stuff at the goodwill box, then walked down to the safeway at 30/mission in search of a coinstar machine (which i didn't find). this being a true valedictory lap, i stopped in mitchell's in search of ice cream, then walked up cortland for a kefte sandwich at progressive grounds before catching the 23 bayview into the shop. refinished the top of the chair, carved out the rest of the bowl, and made a very awkward leavetaking. john was sweet and dropped me off at the hospital. it was 6.30pm and still light, and i walked home, stopping at ritual along the way. around 8pm, people started trickling in. pelly, zach, mary zhang, may, halsey, peterson all showed up. we made our way through a case of tecate, and then i made curry thai noodles. i went to bed at 1 after tearing the pictures off the walls.

monday morning, up at 5.30. the room felt empty, and i folded up the last of the linens and took out the last of the trash. the bags were huge and reminded me again of why i want to travel light. the line at the united check-in was glacial, then the line for security stretched almost to another terminal. flight to san diego delayed nearly an hour, then flight from san diego to denver delayed 40 minutes. i just caught the denver-aspen flight, but of course the bags didn't make it. susan working picked me up from the airport. i met wyatt and whit, the other two wood interns (stories to come). we moved stuff, we did a grocery run, we had pizza and beer, we came back. i think i will like this.

true names

i was up near toronto last week at the university of guelph, hanging out with the people from the biodiversity institute of ontario. paul hebert, who's the director of BIO, is one of the main proponents of DNA barcoding as a way of identifying organisms (major paper available here, for those so inclined). the project currently consuming the bulk of his time is the international barcode of life, an attempt to sample all (or most) species on the planet, sequence a reference portion of the DNA of those samples and construct a library of these reference DNA sequences. his facility at guelph has a group of passionate, intense staff, a workflow, a really nice bioinformatics platform, and partnerships in place to sequence hundreds of thousands of samples each year.

DNA barcoding and identification techniques like it represent a fundamental change in our orientation toward the world: we begin to move away from the imposition of presumed parameters and toward learning what might be called the true names of things. for the longest time, we've organised the world of organisms into groups, each composed of individuals that we observe to be more like each other than they are like other organisms -- taxonomists examine morphology, habits, and other characteristics, then divide up the world based on what these examinations reveal. these groups nest within each other (the hierarchy of groups is kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species), species being the lowest level of group organization. the binomial latin name (a naming system introduced by linnaeus two centuries ago) is usually how we refer precisely to an organism that is a member of a species. the first part indicates the genus, the second the species name; there are, for example, many types of maples (genus Acer) but Acer rubrum means you're talking about just the red or soft maple. it is the latter-day version of the naming of the animals (on which note, see this marvellous article).

the value of this exercise depends on there being at least one sequence of DNA in any major group of organisms that varies enough between species to be a robust identifier. for most eukaryotes, paul's operation sequences a short (648 basepair) section of cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (CO1) which is a part of the mitochondrial DNA -- the sequence then becomes that species's barcode. DNA is the group name that's written into the organism itself, and it identifies precisely -- the barcode as currently implemented is a short form of that true name that seems to identify relatively robustly for the species to which it has been applied.

the idea of a power-conferring true name is liberally sprinkled through the tradition of magic (i like best ursula le guin's earthsea, where magic is declarative and verbal and depends on systematic acquisition of the true names of the world. this is a particularly nice section from a wizard of earthsea). with a library of such reference barcodes, rapid, robust, and accurate identification of animals, bacteria, plants, viruses, and all manner of other things becomes possible just by sequencing the same part of the DNA of whatever sample you've collected, comparing that sequence to the reference library, and finding matches. there is obvious value in rapid, accurate identification. for example, it would revolutionise and dramatically increase the efficacy of programs for the control of vector-borne diseases; immediate applications can be found in natural resource management, water quality monitoring, climate change early warning, agriculture, and many other domains that concern us.

needless to say, the guild of academic biologists and taxonomists is debating the value and validity of this DNA barcoding exercise hotly.

brand elicitation

here's an interesting project: ask people what comes to mind when they see a brand, then show the results as a tag cloud with frequency indicated by size. the result is a real-time map offering online brand surveillance. all it needs is a time-slider (like the one in google earth) that allows viewers to navigate the histories of brand tag clouds.

looks like nike's not doing so well with the child labour and sweatshops though, admittedly, everyone does think they're big on shoes.

chair update: it's alive!

i've been trying to finish this side chair before leaving for aspen and i spent all of last weekend shaping the seat and back, then sanding them down. the back post and seatback are separate from the rest of the chair, so i glued those up last sunday and then started on the rest of the parts this week, finishing all of the pre-glueing sanding before getting into the shop today. i was all ready to glue, and then realized that i'd have to make clamping blocks for almost every piece since nothing in this chair is at right angles with anything else. after making those, i got ready to glue again, then remembered that i'd have to make the wedges for all the through tenons. i started glue-up around 3.30pm, beginning with the two sides of the chair frame, then connecting those with the midrib and the footrest. the seat is attached to the legs with mortise and tenon joints, two of which are fox-wedged. those last were fiddly to measure but worked out beautifully. here is the chair in clamps:

bent objects

bent objects is full of things (many of them strangely orange snacks) doing things to other things. the circus peanut circus is a personal favourite:

(thanks, hammer)

palisade at skaftafell

the ground at skaftajokull was hard at 8am on the second day, and the water from brushing my teeth congealed and froze in just a few minutes. the sky was bright, but the sun hadn't yet come over the moraine in whose shadow we'd made camp the night before. though the night had been filled with gusts of wind coming off the glacier, as with almost every other morning there was little wind and barely any sound. i pulled the groundpad a little ways out of the tent and lay there in my sleeping bag looking up at a cloudless sky rimmed by brown and white peaks for an hour before rustlings in the other tent got me moving.

after breakfast and breaking camp, we brought the gigapan up to the top of a nearby hill and took a 360-degree panorama (which turned out to be all wiggly), then crossed into one of the gullies to make sculpture #1. partway down and in the middle of the gully, a large, smooth, ovoid boulder sat perched on its narrow end amid an expanse of unconsolidated gravel and gray volcanic mud. the sun had just come over the edge of the gully and we sat on the western wall soaking up the light for a while before starting to build a jagged wall of snow around the boulder. truth be told, there wasn't much consideration at the time; after the fact, it seems a logical inversion to set a palisade of craggy snow around a smooth stone boulder in an landscape of jagged rocks nestled amid soft spreads of snow.

we shot a few minutes of footage of suitman coming over the lip of the gully and finding the ring of snow. he comes slipping and sliding down the gully wall and examines the ring, then completes it and strikes out on foot across a rocky plateau. as we filmed that last part, a small cluster of sightseers appeared, considered us (one person in a big blue suit, another carrying lots of camera equipment, a large shovel, and an ice axe), and turned tail.

smashing pumpkins

(thank you, julian.)

balloon animals

more stuff from joshua allen harris

neat things today

the HD video of chad pugh's science machine, entirely made from scratch in adobe illustrator.



christiaan postma's prose clock


lead pencil's maryhill double, close to PDX:

photo from today and tomorrow

caffeine and a sandwich

a highly-caffeinated 4 hours in seattle.

first stop was the espresso vivace at e denny and broadway to get some of emails out of the way, make a call, and wake up at a window counter made of blue volga granite. like any institution, vivace makes much of its history and the space (a large, high-ceilinged room sparsely populated with tables and chairs) reminds me of the original peet's coffee on walnut/vine in berkeley. apart from a wide selection of literature about coffee-making, vivace distinguishes itself by celebrating the latte art of its baristas. particularly beautiful latte art is commemorated with framed and dated photographs on the walls of the cafe (also turned into postcards on sale for a couple of dollars), and it appears to be a badge of honour to be placed on the wall. my latte was excellent (with velvety, micro-foamed steamed milk) and a perfectly symmetrical heart of a rich, rust-red hue; it was made by someone who was very proud of having just gotten her first wall photo (2nd column from the left on the east wall, left side, 2nd from the bottom). before leaving, i got a single-shot espresso just to see how much they were able to preserve the caramelised sugars in their roast; it was probably the sweetest, least bitter espresso i've ever had.

with two hours remaining, i wanted to get lunch at salumi, the fabled cured meats place in downtown seattle run by mario batali's father, armandino. on the way there, i passed stumptown roasters on pine street and was unable to resist stopping in for my third coffee in 2 hours (latte, also excellent), then walked the rest of the way to salumi feeling brittle, as if sudden motion might have unfortunate consequences.

southern aspect of the seattle public library, from 4th ave

on 3rd avenue, i joined a crowd of walkers leaning into the wind as they walked south, and nearly missed the light yet massive angularity of rem koolhaas's seattle public library, which stacks are arranged in an unbroken spiral climbing many stories up into the prismatic volume of the building. i ducked in for a quick look and took a long series of escalators up to the reading room at the top of the library. the inside was as crystalline as the outside, and filled with medium-toned wood paneling and plenty of matte aluminum, lime green paint, glass, light, and high ceilings. it felt a lot like being inside the fortress of solitude, except with more books and lime green paint.

just down the street, the line outside armandino's was relatively short but glacially slow, and i was bookended by people who had never been there but had seen it on the food network. counter staff came out periodically to pass round small dishes of cured meats for the people in line to try: winter salami (with cracked black peppercorns), finocchiona (with fennel and black pepper), lamb prosciutto (a dark and translucent ruby colour). 45 minutes after getting in line, i got a hot braised oxtail sandwich with peppers, onions, and salsa verde on a baguette-shaped section of bread that actually tasted much more like damper than baguette. the crumb was dense and a pale grey, with large crystals of gluten and only a few airspaces; the crust was firm with only a light crunch. the oxtail had been braised for so long that it had fallen apart into small shreds bound together by a light marinara sauce. very nice.

in the time of trees

time's photo essays are compelling and strange (they have one about avant garde gardens, another about wool gathering, and a third about papal fashion). stuart franklin's in the time of trees is of variable quality, but worth looking at. the best photograph is of the canopy of a rainforest in malaysia:

stuart franklin

the machine that made us

stephen fry, the bbc, and typography: an entrancing combination. fry, author of many and various books including moab is my washpot and making history, and also host of the bbc show QI (which has a clubhouse and a devoted following among certain of my erstwhile schoolmates from the humanities programme), now turns his considerable talents to investigating the history and technology of gutenberg's development of movable type by trying to recreate a working replica of the press today. (the exercise reminds me a little of thor heyerdahl's kon-tiki and ra ship recreations.) fry's 60-minute show is available in six parts on youtube. part one:

the last one to go

on the second floor of the library at the MBL/woods hole oceanographic institute, a letter left behind by a japanese researcher abandoning his research station on one of the japanese islands ahead of the allied invasion:

This is a marine biological station with her history of over sixty years. If you are from the Eastern Coast, some of you might know Woods Hole or Mt Desert or Tortugas. If you are from the West Coast, you may know Pacific Grove or Puget Sound Biological Station. This place is a place like one of those. Take care of this place and protect the possibility for the continuation of our peaceful research. You can destroy the weapons and the war instruments. But save the civil equipments for Japanese students. When you are through with your job here notify to the University and let us come back to our scientific home.

The last one to go

the craftsman

from the new yorker review of richard sennett's the craftsman:

The template of craftsmanship ... combines a “material consciousness” with a willingness to put in years of practice and a strategic acceptance of ambiguity, rather than an obsessive perfectionism.

the soft earth

i've been in woods hole the last couple days for a meeting of the biodiversity informatics advisory group for the encyclopedia of life. (about which, more anon.) i got in on sunday afternoon, after driving two boxes of books over to glenn and ilene's and walked out to get a cup of coffee and get some work done. along the way, a poster in a window of the firestation caught my eye: "the soft earth, ocean sediment glazed pottery." i called the number listed and joan lederman answered. we arranged to meet outside the coffeeshop so i could see the studio.

the soft earth neatly encapsulates the approach to art that depends on and embraces a degree of unpredictability in process, as well as the consciousness of ephemerality (of opportunity, material, result). some sediments work well, others work poorly, some don't work at all; as joan puts it:

The more I use a sediment, the better the outcomes are, usually ... but then they'll be gone, so I'm always testing some while relying on others I know better. I have over a hundred glazes, including some untested from recent cruises. That's why my work constantly changes.

the sediments come to her from oceanographers after they're done with whatever tests they collect them for -- each sample of sediment has a relatively precise location attached to it, as well as a bunch of metadata (the collecting vessel, date, etc). she adds water and that turns it into a glaze, but the variability of composition causes glazes made from different sediments to act and look extremely different. despite the variability, there's a certain morphological similarity in how glazes from the same sea look. here's a plate featuring sediments from seven seas (indian, atlantic, bering, antarctic, mediterranean, black, pacific), collected by seven ships (atlantis II, r/v knorr, uscg healy, r/v oceanus, r/v thomas thompson, r/v new horizon, nathaniel b. palmer)*, which of course brings to mind the seven seas passage in john fuller's a skin diary.

joan lederman

some of the glazes automatically produce a dendritic pattern on firing. apparently this is produced by the dead skeletons of foraminifera in the sediments affecting the flow of the fused glaze material. here's a particularly nice one:

joan lederman

it would be great to be able to navigate her work using a map:

• plate-view: where each work is represented by markers showing the source of the glazes and earths
• world-view: where pins represent the world of work, with a marker for every glaze source

* the catalogues and lists are deeply evocatory, particularly of ships, since they frequently are qualities or eponyms that bear a certain weight of their own. everyone knows of the catalogue of ships in homer, but iain m banks has also, clearly, taken it to heart (and also here).

flight patterns

this has been around for some time but i just saw it over the shoulder of another attendee at this meeting i'm at. flight information over time, displayed with relative positions, then animated.

a high quality version is available here on aaron koblin's website.

gigapan: jökulsárlón after sundown

north-facing view of jökulsárlón

gigapan: jökulsárlón after sundown

this is gigapan #2 and the smallest of the iceland gigapans (only 112 photos). it still took longer to stitch together than seemed probable, but turned out surprisingly well. the view covers about 120 degrees of horizontal arc and is of jökulsárlón, a glacial lagoon that is remarkably new (it is apparently less than 80 years since it first appeared), and the glacier breiðamerkurjökull that calves chunks of ice into it. in the middle field, you can see a bunch of seals hanging out on the edge of the ice; while we were there they did nothing but swim about and loll in the sun. we ended up harassing them for a few scenes in the short film (of which, more later). the big flat white area in the right half of the composite photograph is breiðamerkurjökull, and you can see huge chunks of ice falling off. the entire sequence was taken around 9.25pm on 4/4 (just after sundown) and was completed in just 12 minutes, hence the remarkably uniform light in the sky.

we also have a 360-degree panorama of jökulsárlón just after sundown taken on day 2 that shows some of the sculptures we made. it has over 250 photos in it and is now in its seventh hour of stitching.

more on champion

just found -- a video showing the typeface:

portuguese semi-industrial confectionery

fabrico proprio (english text is below portuguese text on most pages) is a project to document the semi-industrial confections of portugal. the idea of semi-industriality is compelling: in the case of confections, somewhere in the collective there exists the idea of a set of cakes, each of which has individual variation but also an internal logic, coherence, and uniformity, just as individual members of a species do. pastels de nata from one bakery will be reliably uniform from day to day, but will be different from those from another bakery. semi-industrial production is the mode of certain varieties of craft, specifically of the production of mingei (referenced previously).

many countries have archetypal foods and confections. japan comes to mind, and certainly there is a reassuring uniformity in the variety of offerings at singaporean neighbourhood bakeshops, but perhaps the fabrico proprio folks are accurate in saying that the diversity of the portuguese set is unique.

from their self-description:

Portuguese semi-industrial bakery is a unique component of our gastronomical heritage. Shapes and contents are replicated every night in tens of bakeries and small factories scattered over the country, always in the same way, in a perpetuation of a mould or recipe that we know nothing of, but that we recognise immediately. It is also a phenomenon exclusive to our country; no other has such a richness in what we call "everyday bakery". Unlike French and Central European "haute pâtisserie", or exotic Asian specialities, there is nothing sophisticated about this bakery that feeds our days in Portugal. The recipes can be secret, but its results are widely available to all of us — from the finest traditional pâtisseries to high school bars, from train stations and airports to the corner café.

Fabrico Próprio means "Own Production" and is a term used by most cafés and cake shops in their shop signs, windows and packaging. It is a warrant of freshness and quality, but also of uniqueness and prestige, of the baked goods they sell, most of them sweet, one-portion cakes.

We are not talking about regional sweets or specialities (even if we acknowledge that some of them are part of the daily set of cakes available in some cake shops): all the cakes we choose with or café (expresso), galão (latte) or glass of milk, are the same from Braga to Tavira, from Angra do Heroísmo in the Azores islands to downtown Lisbon. They are, throughout our national territory, not only part of our culinary landscape, but also part of our material culture. And this is a reality we easily and often overlook. And this is our point of view, as designers, when we look into Portuguese cakes. We see them as design objects in their own right, as a result of the project-based process that characterises this discipline, where form, ingredients, materials, method, production tools and machinery come together to originate a final product.

leaving reykjavik

i woke up 20 minutes before landing at keflavik when the plane banked and a host of cellophane-wrapped dinner rolls tumbled over the aisle at me. i was in reykjavik an hour of traffic later. ben got me from the bus terminal and we unpacked everything. the assorted equipment filled up the small room in gamli gardur, the hotel next to the national museum of iceland that the university of iceland has converted into student housing. we went to pick up a HD video camera from the rental store on borgartun (rental largely funded by the generosity of the icelandic fulbright foundation), then ben went off to his last class of the week ("introduction to runes") and i went to a shower. the shower facilities in gamli gardur are not unisex; additionally, they are labeled only "karlar" and "konur" and accompanied by tiny person icons presumably intended to signal who goes where but actually are indistinguishable from each other. the hot water was abundant and smelled mildly of hydrogen sulphide. we made lunch—"alfredo sauce" featuring canned corn, covering an earwig-shaped shell pasta whose package claims it to be gnocchi.

we did not make many plans for The Work other than to make sculptures out of stone, ice, and snow in iceland because it's a country of long views, the exploded sense of scale, and seems to float through a waking dream. also it's a country where there is so much room that no one will mind or, probably, notice. here's an extract from what might charitably be called the planning document:

Principles

• use minimal material not native to the site.
• no permanent contamination (pack stuff out)
• full combustion of starter materials
• harm only small, useless animals and people

Ideas

• build light-permeable structures in series and kindle small fires inside them. photograph and/or videorecord fires burning inside them from dusk through full fall of night. cairn of stones, ring of ice blocks, stack of driftwood. the flickering and fragmentary light should be pearlescent in the ice, sharply-outlined in the wood, and pointillist in the cairn. the fires will be relatively small, built of driftwood, and contained in aluminum baking dishes so that we can introduce and remove them easily.
• fire-circles.
• stone walls leading to the sea, with fires built along their length
• dark-art. Things built and removed during the night. These may not have fires. So may not even be possible to see them.
• A colored iceberg? Use food-coloring to color water bright orange or red, then freeze it and release into a glacial lagoon among the other icebergs.
• cliff-art. Suspend a sculpture off the side of this cliff I know, which is above the Mid-Atlantic Rift
• Aerial fires. Suspend an item. Then burn it in mid-air. Possibly combine with (6) and burn it as it hangs off a cliff.

the equipment also included a bright blue hazmat responder training suit (purchased on ebay, shipped to a certain vince tan, finally tracked down, and then hauled to iceland over thousands of air miles) and a rented video camera because there are additional—and at this stage in the project, mostly-unformed—plans to shoot a short film about a visitor to a planet of snows whose suit marks and protects him. the car (a suzuki jimny) packed, we left reykjavik around 1.30pm and headed east onto 1, the ring road that runs 1200 kilometres around iceland. reykjavik is about the size of manhattan. it recedes rapidly and the road unspools ahead into vast expanses of mostly-unfilled space. on the right, there is sea and, on the left, high, jagged basaltic mountains covered in snow variously a dim grey or a blue-white as the sun passes behind a thin, growing layer of cloud. the sky is at times so white it doesn't seem like sky.

most of the three hundred or so thousand people on iceland live in reykjavik, akureyri, and surrounding communities. the remainder of the population is spread thinly across the margins of the island: a diffuse community that appears to mostly fish, grow greenhouse vegetables, and raise icelandic horses (fuzzy, stocky, and heavily-maned) and dairy animals.

we stop for gas and provisions at a grocery store in vik. there are not many towns, even on the main highway, that are big enough to support a market. the dairy case is fully-stocked with many and enormous blocks of cheese from a variety of icelandic producers; we have the choice of mild and extra-mild gouda.

around 6pm on the first day, we arrive at the waterfall skogarfoss, where the falls have carved out a region at their base such that they are fronted by a piece of land overlooking a sandy beachlet.

here, we shoot the first of many short and enigmatic snippets featuring the man in the blue hazmat suit. as it turns out, the suit's faceplate fogs up almost immediately, turning the landscape into a haze in which even large and pointy rocks are difficult to make out. we film suitguy walking disconsolately toward the waterfall and pausing often to evaluate his footing, then leaping off the edge of the land right in front of it and vanishing into a chasm. trouble is, ben has not caught this spontaneous effusion of the actor's craft on tape and i have to do it again. after almost an hour of monkeying about near the base of the falls, we've confused a few tourists visiting the falls for serious sightseeing and become damp with the mist coming off the falls. the light has begun to fade and sheets of rain have appeared in the skies over the sea far to the south and we move for skaftajokull, a tongue of the larger glacier myrdaljokull, about 30km to the east, to make camp for the night.

in gathering darkness, we pitch the tents in a spot south-east of the glacial protrusion. it only gets dark after 9pm and the glacial ice glows softly as the long evening fades. we cook and eat, then play a few rounds of scrabble. outside, after dark, the wind rises and the temperature falls.

to the land of snows

i left san francisco for iceland by way of boston on april fools night, having spent the day collecting the last provisions on my list (a large fra'mani salami, a wedge of argentine parmesan, beef jerky in several flavours, power inverter, digital SLR, gigapan robot replacement bits, gloves, waterproofing compound, and the like). arriving in logan at daybreak, i made my way into cambridge weighed down heavily and bulkily. after finding them (and being betrayed by google maps), worked for a few hours in our new cambridge center offices, then left the small mountain of bags behind and walked about a mile down broadway to the darwin's outpost on cambridge street to have lunch with sabeel. the city smelled of melted snow. a roast turkey and cheddar sandwich restored my faith in the well-made simple sandwich, a restoration cruelly and repeatedly denied at the darwin's on mount auburn street. in the evening, i picked up two handsaws at dickson bros, bought books for the plane from the harvard bookstore (robertson davies's the cunning man and the lyre of orpheus, and peter matthiessen's the snow leopard), then walked down to toscanini's in central square with magali before meeting aly at the broad institute right next door to the office. they're developing platforms for basic research, which i think is a great approach. after we saw the new robotic high-throughput assay rooms (all equipment inside made by high resolution biosystems), i got my stuff and left for the airport.

first gigapan: caterpillars

after lots of messing about with mounting the canon S5 IS on the the gigapan, i bailed on it in favour of charlie's fancy new canon G9 camera (smaller, fits perfectly in the mount, 6x optical zoom, 12.1 megapixels). i took 4 gigapans while there and have only stitched and posted one. the others are either inexplicable (there are tiles there that don't fit in the mosaic no matter what i do) or so large that i don't yet dare try to stitch them together. this first gigapixel panorama is of the interior of the caterpillar barn at the 190,000 hectare area de conservación guanacaste (ACG) -- a place where caterpillars collected in the wild by ACG parataxonomists are raised to maturity. (they're feeding on leaves in the plastic bags on clotheslines strung under the roof of the barn.)

picture courtesy of kris norvig

part of the challenge of studying the lepidoptera is that a single individual passes through three active lifecycle stages, each morphologically distinct (larva, chrysalis, adult) -- raising the larva to maturity in captivity allows all three stages to be documented and connected. because each kind of caterpillar generally feeds only on one kind of leaf, caterpillar-rearing is more challenging and relies much more heavily on highly-granular local knowledge than it may initially seem. the parataxonomist team (and the local knowledge it represents) has helped the ACG caterpillar barn produce a tremendous constellation of knowledge surrounding the lepidoptera of northern costa rica -- over 3000 different species to date, with thousands yet to go.

to come: a few gigapans, and a bit about the methodological orientation of the ACG and its exemplification of a peculiarly sociologically-enlightened approach to the production of biological data.

gigapan

it's great to come to work and have a new gizmo waiting to be fooled around with. randy sargent from CMU west came over on monday from his office down the street to show off the latest GigaPan mountings and left some loaners behind. one of them is coming with me to costa rica tomorrow and then to iceland next week before it gets shipped off to zurich.

we messed with it for about an hour before establishing that we had an incorrectly-tooled camera mounting plate; after some experimentation and a few photos exchanged with randy while on the phone, we got the thing working. it's a brilliantly simple idea: a bracket mounting that rotates around the x- and y-axes combined with a little shutter button actuator allows most small handheld digital cameras to take a mosaic of overlapping photos that can then be stitched together digitally into multi-million pixel panoramic images using gigapan's proprietary stitching software.

lolo

i ran by lolo (22nd st, between mission and valencia) over the weekend and noticed the intelligent use of waste materials (mostly fabric and plastic offcuts, and recycled papers) in the furniture. the bar is a continuously laminated sheet of newspaper announcements of lottery winnings, and the wall of the bar appears to be made of recycled bags from colima salt from mexico. the people at the tsuji school gave me a small twist of colima salt to highlight the superiority of the hokkaido salt rubbed over the grilled ayu served at dinner.

in any case, food and wine were good and appropriately priced. lolo seems to resist classification in any cooking tradition, though there are a few unusual and ethnically identifiable ingredients (most obvious: huitlacoche) and more unusual spanish wines and latin american preparations than i'd expected. at the barman's suggestion, i got a glass of rotllan torra priorat reserve 2001 (good, but overpriced -- fortunately, a generous pour) while waiting.

• octopus tiradito was excellent; cold, tender but not mushy, just chewy enough, and dusted liberally with something red and spicy that wasn't paprika and might have been annatto.
  
• fried shrimp taco sounded lame but was actually marvellously done. it came dressed with a spicy remoulade/sour cream sauce and was served on top of rounds of thinly-shaved jicama.
  
• the seafood corn sopes were filled with a barely-cooked mix of shrimp, scallop, and octopus bound with a light mayonnaise and came with a salad of shaved red cabbage and persian cucumber.
  
• duck confit was DIY and came on a huge square plate with four quadrants containing a mound of shredded duck confit, a small pile of cilantro (someone had gone to the trouble of plucking the leaves from the stems and discarding imperfect ones), a steamer basket full of fresh corn tortillas, and a small bowl of a sweet/tart sauce reputed to contain grapefruit.

lolo joins the pantheon of Good Eats in San Francisco:

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well-formed data

(again from vinay)

moritz stefaner has a great experiment in organizing and displaying structured data -- he's taken the nobel laureate database and made it much more navigable by intelligent application of filters and by adding (though it seems a bit of an afterthought) edward tufte's by now famous sparklines (tufte himself, and diy). the display ideas in here are interesting particularly in the context of search -- for queries that have broad semantic ranges, metadata about the distribution of results becomes potentially quite useful both as a selection tool and as a filtering tool. a term like "tiger" could be most relevant, depending on your interests, to great cats, golf, public-domain GIS data, magazines, a low-cost asian airline, a traditional liniment, and more. allowing power-users to cluster results by nearby terms (something like a filter preview) would probably be really helpful.

traffic simulation

this neat flow simulator for traffic from ETH zurich's sociology department (the ornate Chair of Sociology, in particular of Modeling and Simulation) lets you control a few parameters (flow rate, % of trucks, etc) and see what happens to the simulation. trucks seem to have a disproportionate effect on bad traffic, which i suppose should come as no surprise.

(thanks, vinay)

the journey of mankind

the bradshaw foundation has an animated spatial chronology of the spread of humanity from africa to the rest of the world covering over 150,000 years of human history. the site was created in association with stephen oppenheimer from green college (and, oddly, universiti sains malaysia). the chronology was done with mitochondrial DNA analysis of Y-chromosomes. neat idea, but the visuals are clunky and look like the late 1990s. i can't help feeling that it would have been better done as a time-animated KML with plenty of image overlays.

new from the lathe #2

a few weeks ago on a sunday, jini called me from atop a mountain in san diego and asked if i wanted some lumber. the next day, i went to jess's car and beheld, in the back, an assortment of huge logs. i brought one back on the shuttle, breaking the luggage compartment in the process, and sliced it up into an assortment of small pieces, two large bowl blanks, and a pile of sawdust. two of the little pieces went back to gainesville, where dina even now is using them as rustic bookends. one of the two blanks is now a bowl. this was the palest white oak i'd ever seen, so i figured i'd make it look as unlike wood as possible:

i look like ceramic

5.5" dia., 6" high
spalted white oak