randomosity

We all know I love my gad­gets. As I blogged earlier in the week one of the first things I picked up on arrival was a new dis­pos­able cell phone. I chose a little Sony Eric­sson 530i from <a href=“http://three.ie” target=_blank”>3.ie because it allowed unlim­ited Skype usage. I have been blown away by how well the Skype func­tion­lity is imple­men­ted on this phone and the mobile itself has demon­strated a few other neat fea­tures. My ori­ginal plan was to get the cheapest thing I could for the interim and purely util­it­arian con­sid­er­a­tions. Then come July 11th pon­der the 3G iPhone. How­ever, I have to admit that I am rather pleas­antly sur­prised by the little 530i. Its a solid little phone and pure candy bar form factor. I am glad to be back to candy­bars and from exper­i­ence will not use a slider or a flip in the future. I put a crys­tal case on the 530i to pro­tect the screen (exper­i­ence with my last SE).
The cam­era on the 530i is a com­mon 2Mb. I love hav­ing a cam­era with me at all times and the res­ult­ing pho­tos are quite fine. Being able to bluetooth these back and forth with my Mac­Book Pro is bril­liantly con­veni­ent. And then I noticed that the photo menu offered an option to Blog This…
When I pressed the blog this but­ton it was clearly linked to blog­ger and I figured (intriguing) I’ll attach this to my exist­ing blog­ger account at some point and try this. As it turns out its much easier than this and I am very impressed.
To blog one’s life on a Sony Eric­sson 530i with 3, you snap a pic, choose blog this and leave the rest to the phone. 3.ie cre­ates a brand new blog on blog­ger for you, uploads the pic­ture and then emails to your phone a spe­cial token. The phone is now linked to this blog. You claim your token via a browser and are then given the option of per­son­al­ising the blog that was auto­cre­ated or simply link­ing the incom­ming posts to an exist­ing blog. I happened to have an old one sit­ting around (Napo­leon­ic­Tour­ist…unused since 2006). I poin­ted to this one and lo and behold there was the pic (not too excit­ing as I grabbed an image of the wood floor in the apart­ment). How­ever, this is a very slick and smooth pro­cess. It would be very cool if I could send it to my own wp blog, but haven’t figured this one out yet…maybe. But as it stands…very cool and I am going to play with this, see what hap­pens and make 3.ie a little richer for every post ;-)

There was a time when the the bril­liant illu­min­ated manu­scripts of Irish Mon­as­ter­ies rep­res­en­ted the pas­sion­ate col­lec­tion of the works of the sol­it­ary monk/artisan/craftsman. The intric­ate knot pat­terns are a study in a real pat­tern lan­guage. Years ago, when my cre­at­ive juices were sought a middle ground between a clear sys­tem­atic approach and yearn­ing to find break out of these same sys­tems, I dis­covered the work of George and Iain Bain. — father and son. The elder Bain made a life­time study of find­ing the pat­terns in the knot­work and devis­ing tech­niques to allow oth­ers to appre­ci­ate these and to rep­lic­ate these celtic mas­ter­works for them­selves. His son built on these tech­niques to devise a an even sim­pler way of cre­at­ing the ela­bour­ate designs. I was hooked and pro­duced some large scale knot pat­terns. I also dis­covered the won­der of dood­ling in square and tri­an­gu­lar knot pat­terns. At one point I even delved into zoomorph­ical celtic art­work and dic­sov­ered and even lar­ger challenge.

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Faced with find­ing a place to live in Dub­lin, I decided to quickly attempt to cre­ate a mashup of poten­tial prop­er­ties mapped through­out the city. This is, I sense, an increas­ingly com­mon sort of mashup. But when I did a quick scan, I couldn’t find any­thing that accom­plished this for the area I wanted. Yes, you could plot each place manu­ally in either the My Maps sec­tion of Google Maps or cre­ate a KML over­lay for Google Earth. Viable, but I wanted a tool that would allow the list to be dynam­ic­ally gen­er­ated and cap­ture the list cur­rent to when I was look­ing at it. I would note that many sites have their own spa­tial dis­plays, and there are a lot of mashups involving craigslist, but none for me and the Dub­lin scene. The site I was using to look for rental oppor­tun­it­ies is daft.ie. It’s got a great search engine, and it will map your selec­tions on a rental by rental basis, or will present all (unfiltered) list­ings in the area of the list­ing you have chosen. You can addi­tion­ally select a par­tic­u­lar agency and have their list­ings plot­ted on a Google Map, but this was not quite what I wanted. My object­ive was to cre­ate a cus­tom search, take the detailed res­ults, identify the loc­a­tion, geo­code it, and then pipe it into Google Maps. In concept simple — in prac­tise sub­ject to the vagar­ies of daft and the tools used.

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As I was wan­der­ing to the whole food store tonight I heard the dron­ing of an air­craft I couldn’t identify. There was the beat of a heli­copter blade, but I could identify the comingled drone of a heavy engine. Then as the sounds grew closer a huge Ford Tri-motor roared over the trees a block away. The Tri-motor was cruis­ing at no more than 1000ft accom­pan­ied by a heli­copter shoot­ing video. It was an amaz­ing sight. The sun was at a lovely even­ing height giv­ing a won­der­ful orangey ambi­ence, the sky clear and I was trans­por­ted to another era. I was drawn back to a time when an air­plane was the nov­elty (rar­ity) that the Tri-motor is today. What would it have been like to have seen this virilely power­ful metal beast soar­ing over a small town bring­ing the hope/promise/threat? of a faster com­mu­nic­a­tion and trans­port? The sheer size and mech­an­ical won­der must have inspired an awe even more sub­stan­tial than my serendip­it­ous amaze.

The heli­copter buzz­ing about the lar­ger ship seemed like a hawk being men­aced by a spar­row or two. Espe­cially as another heli­copter came shoot­ing across the sky­line head­ing in for a closer look as well. I will have to find out where the mag­ni­fi­cent beast was head­ing. A new addi­tion to the Cana­dian War­plane Her­it­age at the air­port per­haps. Given that only 18 are known to still exist, I was blessed with a rare exper­i­ence tonight.

Mar­vin McIn­nis chal­lenges the widely held belief that Cana­dian agri­cul­ture was adversely affected by the First World War. His talk at the Uni­ver­sity of Guelph Rural Roundtable yes­ter­day, presen­ted a nuanced and revi­sion­ary look at the com­mon story that war­time demand drove Cana­dian farm­ers to double acre­age devoted to wheat and unwit­tingly cre­ate a dan­ger­ous mono­cul­ture. A situ­ation that led to a massive col­lapse in GNP when the price of wheat col­lapsed after the war. McIn­nis’ earlier paper “Cana­dian Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment in the Wheat Boom Era” sets an appro­pri­ate stage for this fur­ther dis­cus­sion. In this paper, McIn­nis ques­tions the con­clu­sion that Canada’s rapid eco­nomic growth dur­ing the first dec­ade and a half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury res­ted on west­ern set­tle­ment and the ‘wheat boom.’ This has been a per­sist­ent and widely accep­ted view until more recent re-examination has ques­tioned the role of wheat in this growth and determ­in­a­tion that other factors were of greater con­sequence to this growth. This story though has sup­por­ted the con­sequent one that envi­sions war­time demand and response to it as greatly affect­ing Canada’s agri­cul­tural economy.

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The latest addi­tions to The Great Unsolved Mys­ter­ies in Cana­dian His­tory Pro­ject were pub­lished today. When I took a look at the three new mys­ter­ies I was reminded what a power­ful addi­tion to the teach­ing of Cana­dian his­tory that this col­lec­tion is. The new mys­ter­ies: “The Red­path Man­sion Mys­tery”, “Death on Painted Lake: The Tom Thom­son Tragedy,” and “Death of a Dip­lo­mat: Her­bert Nor­man and the Cold War” keep rais­ing the bar of how to effect­ively present mater­ial using the web. The pro­ject is a col­la­bour­at­ive effort amongst Cana­dian his­tor­i­ans to provide enga­ging and fun teach­ing tools dir­ec­ted towards high school and uni­ver­sity level stu­dents. The mys­ter­ies are presen­ted as self-contained web­sites, each one with its own theme and approach. Typ­ic­ally they provide com­pel­ling nar­rat­ive and also offer a wealth of primary doc­u­ments and other source mater­ial to aid in learn­ing about Cana­dian His­tory and his­tor­ical meth­ods. With the addi­tion of these new mod­ules, the breadth of the site is reach­ing a point of crit­ical mass and offer a nicely diverse col­lec­tion from through­out time and geo­graphic area.

The folks at Many Eyes recently intro­duced their new com­par­ison cloud tool. Basic­ally, it lets you visu­al­ise two frag­ments of text dis­play­ing word fre­quency for each in the same cloud. It’s an inter­est­ing addi­tion to the more famil­iar word cloud. Using a stand­ard word cloud you get a mat­rix of words with rel­at­ive size, weight or col­our high­light­ing fre­quency in a selec­ted text. This quickly allows you to visu­ally per­ceive an author or speaker’s emphasis on a par­tic­u­lar theme or style of writ­ing or speak­ing. With Many Eyes hybrid tool, words which occur in both text are abut­ted. You can now visu­ally com­pare two texts from the same author for sim­ilar empah­sis or quickly determ­ine a dif­fer­ence between texts. In the example presen­ted at Many Eyes, they com­pare the US pres­id­en­tial State of the Union addresses from 2002 and 2003. In this example they note the less fre­quent men­tion of Afgh­anistan and the increase in men­tion of Sad­dam. Whether this allows one to con­clude a change in policy or not, it does demon­strate the use of the tool for pro­vok­ing ques­tions for fur­ther exploration.

On Sat­urday, the Ontario gov­ern­ment offi­cially announced how much fund­ing each uni­ver­sity in Ontario is to receive for main­ten­ance and renewal of facil­it­ies. I just happened to see announce­ments from a few insti­tu­tions appear sim­ul­tan­eously in my RSS reader and was struck by the rather dif­fer­ent ways in which they presen­ted this news.

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I use both GraphViz and Omni­Graffle to con­struct charts involving rela­tion­ships and pro­cesses. Over the last few days I was nood­ling my way through a schem­atic of sec­tarian asso­ci­ations in North­ern Ire­land. Try­ing to get the play­ers and organ­iz­a­tions straight was simply impossible for me without some sort of visual aid. I did a quick scan of the usual sus­pects to determ­ine whether any­one already had some­thing that would suit my needs, but only found tex­tual com­pil­a­tions. Although com­pre­hens­ive, these required more than cas­ual scans to get an imme­di­ate sense of who fits where. I put the chart before the horse this time and star­ted draw­ing on a nap­kin. I pre­sup­posed that I would need to visu­ally dis­tin­guish between polit­ical organ­iz­a­tions and para­mil­it­ary ones, and also between religio/political affil­i­ations. The col­ours green and orange sprang to mind as good visual cues ;-) I was able to access the CAIN data­base which provides a superbly author­it­at­ive com­pen­dium of organ­iz­a­tions on on ‘the Troubles’ and polit­ics in North­ern Ire­land from 1968 to the present. Chro­no­logy was also a factor and I had an addi­tional tem­poral dimen­sion to con­sider. The nap­kin was overwhelmed.

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About a year ago I adop­ted the French Repub­lican Cal­en­dar for my per­sonal journ­alling. Why? Really for no other reason than to be dif­fer­ent. It offered me the oppor­tun­ity to learn the Repub­lican Cal­en­dar through prac­tise (a word-a-day sort of arrange­ment). The upheaval of the switch to a new sys­tem in France in 1795, caused con­fu­sion, was not widely adop­ted and in the end was dis­con­tin­ued by Napo­leon dur­ing the Empire. This was not before such ref­er­ences such as the Coup of 18 Bru­maire and lob­ster Ther­midor forever embed­ded the poet­i­cisme of the cal­en­dar­ing sys­tem in our his­tor­ical memory.

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I was enter­ing some dummy cita­tions into a social net­worked text shar­ing pro­ject on the week­end.
Serendip­it­ously I chose the genre of his­tor­ical fic­tion and ended up reflect­ing on some of the more mem­or­able books I have enjoyed. At the top of that list is the mem­oirs of Bartho­lomew Wolfe Bandy by Don­ald Jack. This multi-volume series was very deservedly awar­ded the Stephen Lea­cock Award for humour on three occa­sions. This is all the more appro­pri­ate given the very Lea­cockian style of the Bandy papers them­selves.
If you have not ever been exposed to Bandy, I can not recom­mend these books enough. They are superb examples of the comedic novelist’s art down the line of P.G Wode­house, Evelyn Waugh and George Mac­don­ald Fraser. Set in early twen­ti­eth cen­tury Ontario, B.W. Bandy, the hero is an Ott­awa val­ley farm boy who heads off to fight in the First World War. He meets real life not­ables along the way, enjoys some of the most bril­liantly told adven­tures and des­pite the comedic deliv­ery actu­ally teaches much about Cana­dian his­tory. These nov­els demon­strate the close con­nec­tion between lit­er­at­ure and his­tory — the endur­ing import­ance and beauty of a tale well told.

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