randomosity

(if this image is just a pretty palace, click refresh to reload the animated gif and enjoy a quick look at the rebuilding of the schloss)

I am always both fascinated and charmed to see an older building lovingly restored and doubly so when its role is thoughtfully reconsidered and creatively re-purposed. The magnificent ducal place in Braunschweig has been carefully reconstructed and redeveloped as part of a shopping arcade in the city centre. The palace itself was torn down in 1960 following years of gradual disintegration and bomb damage during the WWII that left much of the city centre devastated. Although remnants of the old palace were used in the reconstruction begun in 2005, the bulk of the construction material is new. Despite this, the effect overall effect of the reconstruction is gorgeous, and tribute to the craftsmanship of those involved. There have been a number of critics that feel that such a building should only be used as museum or a public non-commercial space. I heartily disagree.

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I have mentioned the Exhibit project out of the Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Enviroments (SIMILE) lab at MIT. Their Timeline project was one that I immediately was interested in. It takes and XML of JSON feed and creates a graphical animated chronological timeline. I threw 450 events from the life of Napoleon at it for fun and was quite pleased with the results. A couple months back they introduced Exhibit which allows a user to quickly and efficiently display a JSON dataset in a variety of flexible formats including searchable tables, Goggle maps, and the Timeline format above. Or as they state:

Exhibit is a lightweight structured data publishing framework that lets you create web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and rich visualizations by writing only HTML and optionally some CSS and Javascript code.
It’s like Google Maps and Timeline, but for structured data normally published through database-backed web sites. Exhibit essentially removes the need for a database or a server side web application. Its Javascript-based engine makes it easy for everyone who has a little bit of knowledge of HTML and small data sets to share them with the world and let people easily interact with them.

The beauty of this scheme is that it is a client side framework and approachable by anyone wishing to share their data and requires little knowledge of javascript or the like. Its quite robust and extensible. In fact, over the past week, the developer added scattercharts to the mix and the framework continues to evolve very quickly. In fact, the developer has been soliciting comments on users needs for future development. There’s a very active development community growing around this product.

Johan HolmbergThe Probabilist has a very interesting way of looking at one’s lifepath. He describes a way in which we can envision our self-improvement as a topographic map, or as he posits a topography of existence. His blog “links probability calculus with personal development,” and seems to do much more at times. The concept of seeing one’s lifepath from topographic perspective immediately suggests that if you can adopt this perspective, you can be in a position to appreciate numerous possible paths and trajectories rather than remaining focused and possibly trapped on a single linear route-based one. His example of envisioning oneself on a hill or plateau defined by current dietary or income-generating assumptions, but able to scan adjacent or even distant hills with differing definitions is quite apt. I now have a certain mental picture of myself on this vast schematic terrain…I wonder how you see your world after reading his thought-provoking article.

The release of Google Earth 4.0 features the addition of Panoramio to their georeference layer. I was using a competing product for geotagging, but the seamless flow between Google Earth and Panoramio intrigued me. After tagging a few pictures in the product, I am reminded of the fun. This is one more wonderful time sink, but its also a wonderfully collaborative project. I added some of my pics from the CaSTA conference in Fredericton and I am waiting to see how long it takes for them to show up. The weather and time of season was optimal when we were down and I was quite pleased with a few of the snaps.

Also take a look at the tour of high-rise buildings in London’s downtown core. Superb integration of a temporal slider into the spatial world of Google Earth.

On the subject of impressive focus on detail, comes this amusing exercise…Mapping the various timelines in the collection of back to the Future movies to allow for the creation of alternate timelines due to time travel. This Wikipedia entry charts the various characters, their ancestors and particular events and attempts to portray all the skipping around through time in a straight forward chart. The author does an great job…this is information distillation extremely well accomplished. The article is fun in its own right, but the imagining of the alternate timelines is particularly astute.