thursday, october 16, 2008
A map of three summers in the Bay Area
Here’s a book I made recently for my book arts class. I’ll talk about my other classes at some point too.
This is a tetra-tetra flexagon that folds open three times to zoom in from California to the Bay Area to San Francisco to the Mission/Castro area. A flexagon sounds fancy but it’s just one piece of paper cut and folded in a certain way — here are directions for making your own (it’s easy, but it helped me to see them in person first).
This map only covers what I know. I labeled the cities and neighborhoods that I’m familiar with, and I left areas blank if I haven’t spent much time there. (Except I left parts of the Mission/Castro blank because I’d gotten tired of tracing and painting.)
A darker yellow background means I’ve spent more time in that area. A darker orange freeway or street means I’ve traveled along it more often. Green means a park.
So, this book is a way to look at my three summers during college, focused on the past two summers because I couldn’t put the Sunset, the Mission, and the Castro together on one spread. If you fold up the map from its fully open state above, it tells a kind of story:
[4: Mission/Castro] I lived at 18th & Valencia in summer 2007 and 19th & Collingwood in summer 2008 (and 41st & Irving in summer 2006), and I spent a lot of time near those places. [3: San Francisco] I wandered around the city on weekends. [2: Bay Area] On weekday mornings I walked to the Yahoo! shuttle stop at 16th & Mission and rode to Santa Clara, and on weekday evenings I returned the same way. [1: California] At the beginning of each summer, I went from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles for a couple weeks since that’s my home, and then I went up to San Francisco. At the end of the summer, I returned from San Francisco to Los Angeles and then went back to school in Santa Barbara. I work part-time remotely from here.
An animation of reading the book, starting with it closed:
This book also ties in with the Flickr photo map of my summer photos and seeing the Bay Area from above when flying to New Jersey for a few days during the summer, when my grandpa was dying, which is the part of my summer that the map doesn’t reflect.
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saturday, september 06, 2008
Top 2 Fractals and Top 10 Tags
Inspired by a thread in the Delicious forum, here’s another [slightly self-indulgent] thing to post on your blog: annotate your Top 10 Tags on Delicious. These are mine.
- *broken — I add this tag to bookmarks that have rotten links.
- silly — I think these bookmarks are amusing, dumb, or both.
- photos — I like looking at pictures.
- transport — I enjoy learning about ways that people go from place to place.
- food — I’m interested in what people eat.
- web — This is supposed to be a tag for websites that engage with the nature of the web, or something like that.
- books — I care about questions like “What are books?” and “What role do they play?” and that’s pretty much why I’m a Literature student.
- architecture — I enjoy learning about places that people build.
- animals — I’m interested in how people interpret and relate to animals.
- drawings — I like looking at pictures.
Update: Thanks to Lauren Sperber and Edward Vielmetti for taking this up!
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tuesday, august 19, 2008
The quiet summer vacation
I think that everybody who might happen upon this blog knows this already, but for the record: I’m working at Delicious and living in San Francisco again. I like it here.
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monday, june 09, 2008
How UCSB got to be an ARPAnet node
A while ago, somebody told me that UCSB had been the third ARPAnet node. This is pretty cool, but I didn’t know how or why it happened. The first two nodes were at UCLA (with Leonard Kleinrock) and the Stanford Research Institute (with Douglas Engelbart), and my school doesn’t seem to logically follow.
Then a month ago, a person who helped UCSB connect to the ARPAnet, Larry Green, came to my college to tell us all about it. He was an engineer at UCSB from 1965 to 1977, and he led the team that designed the interface between the university’s IBM 360 mainframe and its Internet Message Processor, a piece of hardware that connected to the other nodes of the network. I found an old description of a podcast with Larry, but the images and the link to the podcast are broken, so here are some pictures from his slides (which he kindly emailed to the people who attended) and my memory of what he said. I liked his friendly presentation; he balanced technical detail with human stories.
First Larry talked about early computers and the beginning of the ARPAnet, including a look at the log of the first successful net connection (the third entry sounds like the student closing up in order to go home). This general history is covered in a recent Vanity Fair article and the National Science Foundation’s “Birth of the Internet” special report, but neither of those publications mention UCSB more than in passing.
Next Larry explained the important Interface Message Processors, which were these big heavy boxes that functioned something like routers, handling the information sent between the different kinds of computers at different campuses. They had lifting rings on the top for potential helicopter transport or lowering into ships — this was still a Pentagon-related project.
It came in handy that the first ones were ruggedized like that because UCSB’s IMP traveled from Los Angeles International Airport to Santa Barbara by pickup truck. UCSB had invested in this hardware because it already owned a mainframe computer and there were some interesting people messing around with it. Larry and his team worked to make the big IBM 360 computer and the IMP communicate with each other, and that allowed UCSB to connect to the ARPAnet in 1969. (Larry explained that the diagram of the first four nodes looks hand-drawn because it was made using a light pen.) His team ended up selling a dozen IMP interfaces to other organizations that owned IBM 360s, so that they could connect to the ARPAnet too:
The protocol that connected the IMPs to each other was called BBN 1822, and Larry explained this diagram of it:
Larry also showed us this cartoon ad that ran in Datamation and said that yes, most of the people working on ARPAnet at the time were middle-aged white men:
UCSB was involved with all of this partly because of Glen Culler, a math professor who was inspired by J. C. R. Licklider and saw computers and networks as a way to help expand human minds. He developed the Culler-Fried On Line System, which ran on 65 classroom workstations connected to the IBM 360, all designed for teaching math. Quoting from Larry’s slides, the system’s “technologies of interactive graphics and on-line time sharing were exciting developments and the reason that UCSB was selected as an original ARPAnet site.” UCLA and SRI had nice important research, but I like that we had a very early online education system.
The IBM 360, the IMP, and the workstations were all located in North Hall on campus, and one of our professors said we should go over there and poke around in the basement to see if we can find any forgotten remains.
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friday, may 02, 2008
Another dumb Wikipedia game
Find articles that have (or have had) self-referential warning tags.
