Zach Pousman

Slap fight!

Google has been lobbying western states to create a legal way for them to drive their self-driving cars on the roadways of each state. Their efforts have born fruit in Nevada, as PhysOrg.com reports:

“The Nevada state legislature has just passed has just passed a bill, Assembly Bill No. 511, that does two things. First, the law allows the Nevada Department of Transportation to create rules and regulations regarding the use of self-driving cars, so that they can be used legally on the road. The second part of the law requires the Nevada state Department of Transportation to designate areas in which these vehicles can be tested.”

They’re not legal yet, and I think that this bill’s primary intent is to allow some (legal) real-world testing, and not a way for individuals to get a car, wire up a few sensors, and let ‘er rip. I do wonder sometimes if my young daughter will every really learn how to drive. Or will she just say “Google, take me to the mall” and let the car do the rest?

This is teh cool. Average color of the sky in NYC, updated every 5 minutes (with #hex values!).

The golden ratio is all over the Apple iCloud logo. Nice analysis Alan van Roemburg (via Sean Gerrity’s UX Kitchen). 

Here’s a quick now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t graph “fix” from Kevin Drum at Mother Jones. The graph on the left is how the original creator from the WSJ chose to divvy up the bins. Each bar represents the total aggregate taxable income for the group, but each bin is quite arbitrary (some span $10,000, others $5 million). But the one on the left shows how much the representation changes when you combine the richest 6 bins into a single 200,000+ bracket. Quite a different conclusion to draw.

[Note: via John Gruber at Daring Fireball]

I think we need more time travel-based ‘photo bombs’. But I sure do love a nice political toldja so.

If you’re into user experience design, interaction design, and human-computer interaction, you should follow this twitter list of CHI 2011 attendees. It’s going on this week in Vancouver. Note: I am only following a certain subset of the (quite large) CHI community, so my bias is: information visualization, everyday technologies, sustainability, design researchers, critical technical practice, and awesome people.

Local No. 12, a collective of some of the best minds in game-design and “play” generally, created Backchatter. It’s a way to turn the twitter stream of your conference or event into a game! Here’s the installation guide to start hosting rounds of the game on your own server! As an example, here’s where CHI 2011 will be playing.

The Economist added a small visualization to their site recently. It allows visitors to quickly see what topics (seems like they’re using entity extraction to identify people, places, organizations) over a period of time.are mentioned most in comments on the site. The visualization shows the relative importance of each topic by size, and also the relationship networks as well. It’s a very nice overview and is relatively space-constrained. See the full-sized topic cloud here.

How does your gender and age influence how gentle or rough you like your sex? How about whether being a vegetarian is tied to your desire (perhaps just willingness) to give oral sex to your partner? Inquiring minds now know.

Maxwell House Haggadah

So I love the Maxwell House Haggadah.

It was created by Joseph Jacobs Advertising in 1923. It wasn’t just a brand trying to solve a (very niche) problem for people, Maxwell House had its own problem too. You see, the laws of Kashrut (Kosherness for you non-Jews) dictate that certain things are okay to consume on Passover, while anything that contains bread flours, or rice or legumes, can’t be eaten for the week. Not that it matters to this story, but some Jews do eat rice and legumes during passover, but the reasoning why American Jews of eastern European descent don’t is interesting but an aside. So, these American Jews were of the opinion that coffee “beans” are really beans, and beans are out on Passover. But are coffee beans really beans? No. Coffee bushes have hard red fruits, inside of which is the bean (the fruit part of coffee is sometimes called a coffee “cherry”). So Maxwell House was looking at this dip in coffee consumption during the holiday of Passover and they decided to do something about it.

Instead of blanketing the world (well, the world of the lower east side of Manhattan) with an advertising message, they created a branded utility, the Haggadah that we know and love. It tied the brand to the holiday, gave people a reason to come into the grocery store’s Passover-specific isles, and was a clear pronouncement that coffee, specifically Maxwell House Coffee, was Kosher for Passover. I never knew this story until this weekend. And I never knew how much I missed that particular Haggadah until I tried to do a Seder last night without one.

So I’m going to order up a few from Amazon for next year. Next year in Jerusalem, that is!

Postscript: see also the Atlantic Monthly on why Jews drink terrible sweet wine on Passover.

Owen Mundy, an artist and designer focused on data-driven works, created a facebook app to export all of your Facebook data: relationships (in graphviz dot format even!), posts, and other meta data. It’s called Give Me My Data and I’m going to scrape my Facebook data today. It works with Nodebox, which is a Python visualization framework that I’ve played with, so maybe I’ll start posting findings and analyses soon. I only wish I’d known about this before the “great purge” of 2010 where I culled from 600+ friends to only 300 or so now (in the vain hope of making Facebook useful).

We’ll be seeing about 1,000 *not facebooks* launch in 2011 and 2012. I ran across this particularly elegant one via Stowe Boyd’s blog (though small world, path, and others certainly apply).