Nick Veasey photographs familiar objects, but he’s able to capture incredible details we’ll never see with our eyes. That’s because his camera is an industrial x-ray machine. Wired recently ran an article on his work.
The 46-year-old Englishman estimates that over the past decade or so he’s x-rayed more than 4,000 objects: flowers, football players, alarm clocks, tractors, even a 777. “I’m interested in how things work, and x-rays show what’s happening under the surface,” he says. “Plus, they look cool.” To get his pictures, Veasey uses industrial x-ray machines typically employed in art restoration (to examine oil paintings), electronics manufacturing (to inspect circuit boards), and the military (to check tanks for stress fractures).
This was going to be a post about a telescope, or rather a computer that mimics a telescope. Specifically Microsoft Research’s Worldwide Telescope, which uses data from the Hubble telescope, as well as ten other earth-bound telescopes, to allow users to fly through outer space, zooming out or swooping in as close as the data will allow.
But when I read on Microsoft’s website that the Worldwide Telescope project was dedicated to Jim Gray, my world tipped a bit off-kilter. Jim Gray was an award-winning research scientist at Microsoft who, on a short solo sail just off the coast of San Francisco, was lost at sea in January of 2007.
I became aware of Jim’s disappearance when a friend from Seattle asked if I could help with the rescue efforts. Through Amazon’s human-powered, computer-managed Mechanical Turk service, I and countless other people from around the globe scanned thousands of satellite images of the ocean near where Jim was last seen — looking for the tiniest sliver of white that could possibly be a boat.
The Mechanical Turk, named after an 18th century chess-playing “robot” that turned out to be a human in disguise, served up image after image of the ocean, which I dutifully scanned and logged. It also displayed a sample photo of what the boat might look like, should it be there. The satellite images were the same endless, patternless gray swirls. A few times, there was a small blip of white buried deep within an image and I logged that, too — nervous it could be a false alarm but hopeful that it might not be.
Reading Jim’s name on the Worldwide Telescope site made me again think of his last hours, and the huge honor and responsibility it was to have looked for this lost man from the safety of our offices and homes. According to Coast Guard reports, he disappeared on a calm, clear night. I wondered if he found any comfort in the stars he studied for so long. And where, on Earth, did he go?
Sadly, Jim’s boat was never found. In May 2007, UC Berkeley held a tribute in honor of his life and accomplishments, which were many.
Jim’s legacy lives on through his work. The Worldwide Telescope project enables us to gaze into space, shot through bright threads of wonder and hope, just as I once searched pictures of the sea looking for Jim.
TreeHugger has a great post on how the city of Monterrey, Mexico is using methane gas harvested from landfills to power their rail transit system by day — and light up city streets by night. And this is just the beginning.
children with XOs in South Africa (credit: Reuters)
The One Laptop per Child project has truly lived up to its name in Niue — a small island nation in the South Pacific — where every child now has an XO laptop, reports the BBC.
It is not the first time that Niue has proven to be ahead of the technological curve; in 2003, it became the first territory to offer free wireless internet to all its inhabitants.
Besides instant wireless websurfing, the schoolchildren will also be able to communicate with each other within a radius of one kilometre without going online.
Secretariat of the Pacific Community director general Jimmie Rodgers was quoted by the AFP news wire as saying that the laptops “have the potential to revolutionise education in ways that are difficult to imagine.”
More news about OLPC’s distribution can be found on their news wiki.
Pop!Tech would like to give an official hat tip to some newly-minted Olympic medal winners and Maine residents (or former residents). Since we’re headquartered in Maine and the Pop!Tech conference is held in beautiful Camden each year, we were thrilled — and proud — to see several athletes from our backyard recognized on the grandest of stages.
You might have caught the women’s rowing team ripping it up across the water as they raced for the gold. Rowers Anna Goodale, originally of Camden, and Elle Logan, from Boothbay Harbor, have made their respective hometowns very proud by bringing home Olympic gold in the Women’s Eights.
Anna, a Syracuse University graduate, is now a member of the U.S. National Team and living in Princeton, New Jersey. She’s also a trained artist with her own illustration and mural business, and lists her Mom as her personal hero. (Yay, Anna’s mom!) Here’s a fun video from last summer showing a typical day in Anna’s life. Spoiler alert: there’s a lot of rowing involved.
Elle is currently studying at Stanford but says the Farmer’s Market in Bangor, Maine, is one of her favorite places. Somebody send her some congratulatory goat’s cheese!
It’s not just the women of Maine who won medals. Wyatt Allen, formerly of Portland, Maine, and currently living in Princeton, New Jersey, took home the Bronze in the Men’s Eights event. This was his second time at the Olympic games and the U.S. team won medals both times.
With all these award-winning rowers, there must be something in the Maine water. Congratulations to all of you — your dedication, talent and passion are truly an inspiration.
David Byrne, the Talking Heads icon who recently gave us Playing the Building, has designed a new line of eye-popping, geographically-relevant bike racks for New York City. From the Wall Street Journal:
The Global Oneness project is a website featuring high quality videos that explore the diversity of our world:
We are committed to documenting what is being born during this time of planetwide transformation. While we are confronted with unmistakable signs that our current way of life is no longer sustainable, inspiring and innovative people and programs are blossoming in all areas of our collective society. From a pay-it-forward café in Ahmedabad, to a youth program that brings African wisdom to Los Angeles, from the General Secretary of the Andean Nations, to the spiritual guardian of Uluru, our film subjects live and work with many of the following values, attitudes, and beliefs:
- We are responsible to each other, the earth, and future generations.
- There are enough resources for us all, if we share.
- Free exchanges of information allow for greater, collective creative potential.
- Love, care and compassion have the power to transform the fabric of society.
The website is nicely designed and the videos are top notch. There are also interviews with people making a difference all over the globe. All contents are licensed under Creative Commons and the project’s entire collection of short films — titled Living Library — is available free to anyone interested in organizing a community screening.
“Paradoxically, the notion and the perspective of ‘oneness’ opens us up to the diversity of things as they are”
Jay Rosen, the celebrated journalism professor at NYU, Twittered Monday: “The natural authority of any reporter, pro or amateur, celebrated or unknown, lies with, ‘I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.’”
As a reporter who reports on issues global and virtual, he got me thinking about where ‘there’ could be in my beat. My value as a reporter, I realized, is actually in defining the location — mapping — where the news lies stranded in interwebs.
But it’s not just reporters who create value detailing what’s happening out in the real world. It’s a big place and it’s easy even for the world’s largest boats to slink around unnoticed out there. That’s why the New York Times wrote that Petro-Logistics “can sway world oil markets,” even as BusinessWeek tells us it’s just “a tiny company that operates upstairs from a grocery store in Geneva, Switzerland.” The researchers’ main strategy? Just knowing which oil tankers are loitering around which ports.
Industry analysts, in general, generate authority by saying, “I know a lot of people who were in a lot of theres. Let me sell you about it.” They create value by having data about the real world in a spreadsheet. The rest is just marketing (or futurism without the imagination). But we sort of have to listen to their prognostications because we don’t have that spreadsheet which turned a lot of “theres” into a model of how a slice of the world has been working.
(We know so little, really, about our world in aggregate. What’s amazing about the hullabaloos that result from earnings reports by corporations is that their blustering executives are actually telling people what happened months in the past. It’s just that no one can actually figure out what happened until the companies disclose the information.)
But what if resources begin to arise that revealed data about the world’s industrial and commercial bowels? To free the information about infrastructure, we need some kind of citizen eyes to bring data to the people, so we can begin to sort and understand it.
And that’s where the world’s most underrated mash-up comes into play.
Over the past few months, writer, venture capitalist and tech evangelist Guy Kawasaki (plus a team of online helpers) have built a powerful new resource for All Things Blog. Launched in March 2008, the site Alltop.com aims to achieve “cessation of Internet stagnation” by providing “aggregation without aggravation.”
Alltop is basically a ready-made feedreader, with topics divided neatly into categories and displayed at a glance on individual, color-coded pages. Started as a celebrity gossip amalgamator, Alltop now boasts over 100 categories with more coming online all the time. There are even entire blogs devoted to the new topics being added.
I was excited to see that last week Kawasaki and crew launched africa.alltop.com, which features blogs like afrigadget and The Zambian. This week they launched aids.alltop.com (with HIV info and resources, too). The pages represent a smart and simple way to track all that’s happening in these domains.
Some other Alltop topics of interest to Pop!Tech readers:
The Alltop lists are hand-built, so the category selections are not always comprehensive. Still, they’re a great resource for quickly locating and listening to a wide range of voices from all corners of the Internet.
Because Guy is such a voracious consumer of media and just generally an innovative thought leader, I sent him a few quick Pop!Techie questions that he was kind enough to answer:
Q: When is the last time you were amazed?
A: It depends on what you mean by amazed. Like religious, life-changing experience? It’s been a while. Like delighted in something that’s an unexpected joy? Then everyday my kids amaze me. Yesterday I had a hat trick playing hockey–that amazed me and everyone else playing. There are more than seventy people helping me with Alltop by tweeting announcement to all their followers–that amazes me too.
Q: Who inspires you?
A: I don’t have these heroes like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Oprah, etc–not that they aren’t heroic. The people who inspire me tend to be “unknown”–for example, the people who go right into the thick of poverty and violence and try to make the world a better place. Teachers, for that matter, who change the world one student at a time. Those are inspiring people.
Q: What’s happening right now that you think might have the potential to change the world?
A: Alternative energy research impresses me. Oil’s days are numbered–someday we’ll look back and say, “Wow, once society got fed up with a dependence on oil, we got off that drug a lot faster than anyone predicted.”
We look forward to seeing what Guy and Alltop roll out next.
Last month I blogged about the drinkpee project, which provides a DIY kit to turn your urine into fertilizer, separating the nitrogen and potassium content so the water is safe for other usage.
Now the residents of Orange County, California are really drinking their pee, without they DIY-ing. The OC Water Replenishment recently opened a state-of-the-art water treatment system that transforms flushed sewage into drinkable water, reports the New York Times.
When you flush in Santa Ana, the waste makes its way to the sewage-treatment plant nearby in Fountain Valley, then sluices not to the ocean but to a plant that superfilters the liquid until it is cleaner than rainwater. The “new” water is then pumped 13 miles north and discharged into a small lake, where it percolates into the earth. Local utilities pump water from this aquifer and deliver it to the sinks and showers of 2.3 million customers. It is now drinking water.
children with XOs in South Africa (credit: 
There are more than seventy people helping me with Alltop by tweeting announcement to all their followers–that amazes me too.
