Had a fun nerd-night out last night at MIT’s Fast Light exhibition, part of the university’s 150th year celebration. Highlights? 

This helix-like structure, made out of aluminum, that stretched up a 4-story stairwell:

These public rocking chairs have solar panels that suck up light during the day, and feed it out at night. They come complete with chargers for your laptop or iPhone. Really.

This big inflatable 3D screen was pretty sweet.

And these butterflies (which don’t photograph as awesomely) lit up sporadically in a dark hallway like fireflies. The paper for the butterflies was lifted from manuscripts, musical scores, and books from MIT’s libraries.

And, maybe coolest of all, the MIT Mood Meter from MIT’s media lab analyzes the faces of people in the corridors, decides whether they’re happy or sad, and generates an aggregate mood for the campus. Smile, and you get a smily face. Don’t, and you look like a grumpy Nintendo Mii.

Great show from all the kids — I’m always chastising myself for not taking better advantage of the cool nerdery going on around Cambridge. Thanks to Nina and Jeremy for inviting me to this one.

Came across this in a completely unrelated story: what a quant little neighborhood the internet was in 1995:

One summer afternoon, he was reading the local Usenet groups for Cal Poly and came across a post from a “Lisa” who said that she was bored and wanted some new people.

Ambler recalled, “she said that she was a model and essentially described what I’d call my ideal woman. Of course, I didn’t believe it for a second and said so! I told her if she was real, she should show up at the Inferno at noon the next Saturday and I would take her to lunch.”

When Saturday rolled around the doorbell rang right on time. Ambler went to the door expecting to see some of his friends standing there laughing at him. “To my surprise, the most gorgeous woman I’d ever seen was standing there! Unbelievable! I proposed to her about a year later and we were married in July, 1997,” Ambler said.

Unbelievable.

[ link ]

Simply awesome: Irina Werning photographs people recreating photos of themselves from decades earlier.

[ link ]

Yesterday, I was using the Evernote app and made a mistake entering text (deleting accidentally). After the ‘oh shit’ moment, I shook my phone on a whim. I won! It asked if I wanted to undo!

It made me so happy, I decided to fast-track adding undo to an as-yet-unnamed-still-very-secret app I’m working on now. (More to come on that soon…) Because, as Apple says:

The ability to perform undo and redo operations is a valuable and differentiating feature

And damn if they don’t make it easy to implement! The official docs are here and here, but I found a great walkthrough on CocoaDev that gives you the ‘Holy shit, it’s that easy?’ realization in a couple of paragraphs. 

Unicode symbols (⬅, ☂, 𝄫 are great to mock up designs with stand-in symbols until artwork is ready.

I am constantly Googling for this big, amazing list put together by Alan Wood. Linking to it here more to help me remember where the ‘good one’ is, as much as to share with everyone else.

A quick Wikipedia primer on how to include unicode symbols in HTML without needing to promote the character encoding of that HTML file:

In order to work around the limitations of legacy encodings, HTML is designed such that it is possible to represent characters from the whole of Unicode inside an HTML document by using a numeric character reference: a sequence of characters that explicitly spell out the Unicode code point of the character being represented. A character reference takes the form &#N;, where N is either a decimal number for the Unicode code point, or a hexadecimal number, in which case it must be prefixed by x.

So the snowman character, for example:

☃

Has the decimal code 9731.

& + # + decimalCode + ;

☃

produces:

☃

I just ran across this very, very cool iPad app called Harmonizer. From the developer’s site:

The pitches on the Harmonizer are arranged in a hexagonal matrix according to three interval types.

+++++++++++++++ 

NOTE: Be sure to manually quit this app when you’re finished. Although cool, I’ve found it drains your battery when sleeping because, I believe, it is somehow still listening to your microphone.

—————————-

Pitches a perfect fifth apart are hexagons adjacent on vertical columns:

Pitches a major third apart are hexagons adjacent on rising diagonal rows:

Pitches a minor third apart are hexagons adjacent on falling diagonal rows:

The pitches of major and minor triads are arranged in a triangle:

Because of the kinds of apps I make myself, I’m always on the lookout for interesting ways to visually represent music. Check this one out - it’s free, novel, and very well done.

link

Just a note for cocoa developers - try to keep your exported UTIs in check, and always use protection to guard against imported UTIs. If you think you have exported UTIs, you should contact any coding partners immediately.

I found this really interesting - a chunk of Marco’s piece on why he’s not worried that Apple is readying itself to release an Instapaper-ish service in the next version of Mac OSX: 

The Starbucks effect

Starbucks practices extremely predatory site selection for their stores: they’ll intentionally move in right across the street from or immediately next door to independent coffee shops, in an unnecessarily aggressive effort to drive them all out of business. It puts the bad ones out of business, but it actually helps the good ones: “[Starbucks] just flat-out said, ‘If you don’t sell out to us, we’re going to surround your stores.’And lo and behold, that’s what happened—and it was the best thing that ever happened to us.”

[…]

Soon after declining Starbucks’s buyout offer, Hyman received the expected news that the company was opening up next to one of his stores. But instead of panicking, he decided to call his friend Jim Stewart, founder of the Seattle’s Best Coffee chain, to find out what really happens when a Starbucks opens nearby. “You’re going to love it,” Stewart reported. “They’ll do all of your marketing for you, and your sales will soar.” The prediction came true: Each new Starbucks store created a local buzz, drawing new converts to the latte-drinking fold. When the lines at Starbucks grew beyond the point of reason, these converts started venturing out—and, Look! There was another coffeehouse right next-door! Hyman’s new neighbor boosted his sales so much that he decided to turn the tactic around and start targeting Starbucks. “We bought a Chinese restaurant right next to one of their stores and converted it, and by God, it was doing $1 million a year right away,” he said.

via marco

Incredibly creepy: Spider attack (by Ahmet Ozkan)

via kottke. Also, check out Ahmet’s other creepy spider videos here. Spiders are the lions of the micro-world. 

Three fingers up or down to switch between .h and .m files. Classy.