Recently Matt told me that Google is in the game now, and their image search engine, through the magic of Google being Absolutely Huge, will probably crush TinEye in short order. At any rate, I was intrigued, and so later that day when I came across an interesting image in an article I was reading, I thought I’d try a little detective work.

Here’s the article: Branching and merging: the heart of version control. Don’t worry about the article itself. See that stock photograph of a highway interchange? It’s pretty cool. Where did it come from? Where is it in real life? In the Future, by which I mean now, we will be able to answer these questions with a few serene keystrokes. Watch this.

First, grab the URL for the image and do a search.

So this picture is Image 4848603 available from 123RF Stock Photography for a modest fee. And where is it? It tells us it’s from Atlanta. That’s not a lot to go on, but there aren’t that many large freeway interchanges in Atlanta, and since we live in the Future, we can use Google Earth to fly over the metropolitan area. The background shows it’s in a fairly rural area, and after a brief search, thar she blows, cap’n, off the starboard bow!

It’s the I-285/I-85 interchange near Doraville, Georgia.

I found the whole exercise profoundly satisfying. I could use a cigarette right about now.

I remember seeing a picture like this in National Geographic when I was a kid. It’s a picture of a waterfall, and a lovely one no doubt, but something strange is going on. Later I learned it was taken with a long exposure so the fast moving water gets this dreamy gauzy veil-like effect. I remember thinking to myself: What in the world is going on here? I’ve never seen a waterfall like that. It’s not a sin for style to trump verisimilitude, but it sure can be confusing if you just want to know what the damn deal is.

Photos and videos of the Northern Lights, the aurora, suffer from the same treatment. There are lots of picture and videos of the aurora, but they are typically brightened and saturated, and the videos are almost always sped up. Or at least I think they are, given that I’ve never actually seen the aurora borealis. What I most want to know is this: what was it really like to be there?

Here is a video that shows you. I like the fact that they show you people and houses in the foreground and then pan around slowly and deliberately. Its the first time I’ve felt like someone was interested in letting me stand next to them, as opposed to expecting applause for their technical skills. Winston Churchill once described a gentleman as someone who knows how to play the bagpipes but refrains. I would say the gentle videographer knows how to use hyperactive jump cuts in the best music-video style… but refrains, choosing instead to offer us a chair and let the heavens speak for themselves.

Dance of the Spirits. Real Time Aurora footage. from Ingenious TV on Vimeo.

[via Steve Crandall]

I tell you, these hype cycles are exhausting. It’s enough to make you pretend you don’t care and hope for the best.

When sorting out the hope from the hype, I like to find technically trained people with clear voices, people like Rob Carlson and Tom Murphy. Carlson is on the leading edge of biotechnology and has some encouraging things to say. I enjoyed this piece on The new biofactories. Biotech is promising because it’s granular, scalable, and distributed. Granular, in that it can work in sizes from the humble test tube to a 1000 liter stainless steel brewing tank. So you don’t need a hundred billion dollars just to see if it will work (cough, fusion!). And biotech is scalable in the sense that if it works, you make a lot of product. The fact that it can be distributed means you can make stuff close to where you use it. So not only can you avoid going to the most dangerous part of the world for what you need, you also get to avoid the long trip home from Godforsakenville.

Clearly it would be foolish to say that biotechnology is going to solve our problems, energy-related or otherwise, but it’s coming faster than you think. Read Carlson’s essay and see if you can picture his image of cowborgs mildly sucking on sewage as we milk them for butanol.

Who knows where it’s all headed, but that’s the hype that I’m buying this week.

I’ve collected and admired Berry’s videos for some time, so I was delighted to come across a TED talk in which he discusses and showcases his work. I was surprised to learn that he was originally inspired by none other than David Goodsell, the other guru of biological visualization, and another hero of mine. What’s great about these guys is that they keep up with the science so you know what you’re getting is not a watered-down version. Everybody knows the basics of DNA, but Berry is going to show you the weird whiplash mechanics required to replicate the strand of DNA that’s moving in the “wrong” direction (3:50 in the video below). Every biology student has seen the blobby diagrams that correspond to the phases of mitosis, but Berry is going to show you the teeming construction site view of the microtubule scaffolding that attaches to the chromosomes. Watch those dyneins and kinesins zipping up and down the microtubules like trams in a train yard (8:20 in the video). Finally, you may have some understanding of the life cycle of malaria, but Berry will bring it to life in disturbing detail. Watch as the nasty little parasite smashes the window on a red blood cell, crawls inside, and turns it into a clotted crawling nest of writhing plasmodium babies (12:40 in the video).

I’ll close with Berry’s own words. This is from an article describing his MacArthur Grant award.

My approach is the opposite tack to simplifying the science. Rather than dumbing it down, I set out to show the audience exactly what the scientists are talking about. By building accurate visualisations founded on real scientific data, the animations come alive of their own accord, engage the audience, and go a long way towards explaining what the science is about. The science is rich, detailed and fascinating, and if you can watch it in action you will intuitively get to know how it works.

UPDATE: I just noticed that Apple is featuring Berry’s animations prominently in their recent iBooks textbooks announcement.

Kickstarter is a site that helps people who need a little capital to reach out to the world and ask for it. It’s a clever idea, but they’ve executed on it so well that it has become a remarkably successful platform for launching small companies. By asking people to support ideas that haven’t been funded yet (like windowfarms or hamburger wrapping paper), Kickstarter builds “pre-communities” for their products. This helps in multiple ways: builders get money, early customers, and word-of-mouth marketers. Consider the alternative. You beg a bank for some money, then make a product, and only then try to market and sell it. It’s all the wrong way around. The bank wants its money back before you even start to attract enough customers.

Kickstarter thus has an alchemical effect, reducing the energy required to start selling niche products, which means products get nichier and weirder. They did a nice review of 2011 featuring some of their favorite videos. If you’re wondering why I keep using the word weird, take a look at the Freaker. They’re not all weird, but this one is. In a good way.

Play this game: you are a banker. Zach walks into your office and asks you for $48,500 to support his great new idea, the Freaker. Do you give it to him? In a bland and demanding world, Kickstarter is your friend. Gold is everywhere if we can be bothered to see it.

Old Kim never tried to pose in the heroic mode of Putin, but he sure looks at a lot of interesting stuff. He comes across as the more honest of the two. I suspect Putin doesn’t actually spend all his time wrestling with tigers. But I can believe that Kim Jong-Il really did spend a lot of time, you know, looking at stuff. Stuff like soft drinks and chickens. Here he’s totally cracking up the umbrella guy. And here’s a great shot of him in a Supervillain Lairmobile. Next stop, secret volcano laser control room! Or hell, whichever comes first.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, as we all know, was a governor who played action heroes on the big screen, but when it comes to mixing high-octane politics with super-hero hijinks, it’s hard to beat Vladimir Putin.

Putin may be having his political troubles these days, but no autocrat since Benito Mussolini has been quite so handy with a photo-op. Please take the time to flip through these pictures from The Atlantic of Vladimir Putin, Action Man. Which is the best image? Shooting a crossbow at a whale? Driving a tank? Playing the concert piano? So many to choose from! Which one do you like?

Right, you knew that. But did you know this? Google Earth lets you research the topic on your own. Like Superman, you can spin the globe forward and backward in time to see what the yesterworld looked like.

I zoomed in on a region around Ariquemes in Rondônia, Brazil. Once there, I used the “time slider” to change the year in which the pictures were acquired. For this particular part of the world, Google has satellite imagery reaching back to 1975, at which time Ariquemes scarcely existed, and none of the nearby forest had been cleared. Paging forward in time, I saw this.

[This is an animated GIF image with four frames. If you want to see it animate again, click on it or reload the page.]

The forest, there she goes, eh? I resisted the urge to play sad music in the background.

But something big is happening in Brazil right now. Despite our economic troubles up north, Brazil is in the middle of a tremendous boom. That’s more bad news for the forest, right? Not at all. It’s the best possible news. Because what’s happening is people are leaving the impoverished countryside and heading to the city. In many places, subsistence farms are being abandoned.

So there’s this interesting question: if left alone, can the rain forest repair itself? For a long time, we had a ready answer: no. The rain forest is a fiddly machine perched atop poor soil. Smash that machine and you’ve got a parched wasteland that will never bloom again. This is a good story if you like sad-face dystopias, but when you gather real data, a different story emerges. The forest wants to come back if we can just leave it alone (or perhaps help it a little). Here are two encouraging articles.

• Tropical Comeback: Can New Growth Save the Amazon Rainforest? (Spiegel Online)
• How long does it take a rainforest to regenerate? (New Scientist)

Some people see a moral hazard in calling out good news like this. Does being hopeful mean we are perforce denying the severity of the problem? That we are abetting the enemies of the earth? The answer must be an emphatic no. The point is not that the situation is good, but that it is not hopeless. Ignoring the problems of deforestation and global warming is harmful, but giving up in despair is worse.

It doesn’t help anyone to make a scary story scarier than it is.

Borders are indeed hard to see from on high, but what do they sound like? The Strange Maps blog is featuring a marvelous language map created by Eric Fischer with help from Mike McCandless. It’s based on the languages that people are using when they tweet and the result will make your eyes bulge. Here’s a big version, and here’s a HUGE version.

So many stories here: you can see the French and Dutch oceans splashing together in mid-Belgium. Portugal and Spain are more clearly differentiated than I would have expected, and what’s that country on the Mediterranean coast of Spain? Why that’s no country, that’s the Catalan-speaking region of Spain centered on Barcelona. Francophone Corsica, birthplace of Napoleon, is a stone’s throw from Italian Sardinia. The Greek and Turkish sides of Cyprus are obvious. And wowie-zowie, the division between North and South Korea is even more stark than the Earth at Night photo.

Cruise around that big old map. There’s hours of fun in there.