Sadie Lou

There’s no denying it: it’s summer and it’s scorching.

GeekDad celebrates the heated occasion (pun intended) with a few remarks on the godfather of air conditioning, Willis Haviland Carrier:

It’s thought that the first cooling of buildings was engineered by the Romans, who ran aqueducts through the houses of the upper class to cool them. In Cairo, during the middle ages, many homes used ventilators to move air through houses. Then, during the 19th century, there were several advances in cooling through evaporation. But it wasn’t until 1902 that Carrier put all of these concepts together.

To coincide with tonight’s much-anticipated release of The Dark Knight, NPR is hosting a wealth of Batman-related material.

There’s last week’s edition of Fresh Air, which re-airs Terry Gross’s 1990 interview with Batman creator Bob Kane. Kane, who died ten years ago, talks about the superhero’s origins, his own preference for drawing slapstick comics, and how Bruce Wayne nearly became Harvey Schwartz The Tailor.

In Character reporter Alex Cohen traces the evolution of a villain with her piece, The Joker: Torn Between Goof and Evil. To quote:

Humor has always been a pivotal part of The Joker, and though we usually think of humor as an enjoyable, likeable trait, it can also be tinged with evil says Paul Levitz, president and publisher of DC Comics.

“There’s a level in humor, where humor can verge on being offensive or invasive of your space or your life — where you don’t quite know what’s going on. Is this guy putting me on? Is he actually going to do those things to me?”

And if that isn’t enough, the 2002 Present At The Creation: Batman features everything you need—history, video clips, sound bytes—to satisfy your superhero sweet tooth.

[Update: Over at Wired, Daniel Dumas gives the scoop on Batman’s latest collection of toys. Also, Scott Brown shows us what happens when directors of comic book films abandon digital special effects for the real thing. Really cool stuff.]

Visit FreeRice, and the following things will occur:

1. You will help fight world hunger.
2. You will improve your vocabulary.
3. You will not be bored.

As the sister site of Poverty.com, FreeRice strives to solve world hunger through the power of Internet programming. Visitors of the site play a fun, definition-based word game; for every right answer, 20 grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Program. The game itself has 60 levels of difficulty, and people are welcome to play for as long as they want.

From the FreeRice FAQ:

The UN World Food Program works around the globe and FreeRice donations are made with no restrictions. This freedom of use allows WFP to apply the donations to countries that need it most, often those that don’t make the headlines in the news, yet where chronic hunger continues unchecked. Often WFP is able to purchase the rice in the very countries where the beneficiaries are located, cutting down on the transport time to reach the hungry and helping to stimulate local economies at the same time.

Click here to watch the first consignment of rice being distributed amongst refugees from Myanmar in Bangladesh.

In this month’s Atlantic, Nicholas Carr ruminates on how the Internet is manipulating the way we receive and process written information:

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Wired writer Clive Thompson takes this notion one step further, pointing out how the Internet and other forms of technology have depleted our memory systems:

[…T]he line between where my memory leaves off and Google picks up is getting blurrier by the second. Often when I’m talking on the phone, I hit Wikipedia and search engines to explore the subject at hand, harnessing the results to buttress my arguments.

My point is that the cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we’ve outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us.

And you thought HAL was bad…

In case you missed the memo, on February 8, 2008, Polaroid Corporation announced it would shortly discontinue all instant film production. The news, along with the already-discontinued production of instant cameras, has not boded well over the past few months, and could force everyone from crime scene photographers to modeling agencies into the digital age if nothing’s done by 2009.

The fine folk at Save Polaroid, however, are on a mission to rescue the beloved film. In addition to collecting testimonials, they’ve put together a campaign of sorts to convince Polaroid, Fuji, and Ilford of the need for continued production. From project co-founder Dave Bias’s essay:

We live in a world of endless replication, and especially in the music business (and soon in the film business) I think we’ve seen very clearly how the people of the world value things that can be duplicated and freely distributed at will with no real costs. Quite simply, we don’t value ubiquity. This is the future of the terabytes upon terabytes of “photos” that live in the ether – existing only because [of] a tacit agreement that a certain sequence of ones and zeros makes a picture of grandma. They are doomed to valuelessness.

The Polaroid print has value. It has worth. It is real.

Far from being nostalgic or blindly obsessive – our campaign to save Polaroid from extinction is based on our ability to think beyond the all-consuming present and toward a time when we all realize how worthless those strings of ones and zeros have become.

See Rob Walker’s NY Times op-ed piece for an insightful look at the cultural impact of Polaroid instant photography.

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Wired editor Chris Anderson has a bold piece this month with an even bolder title: The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete. The thrust of his observation is that data analysis is replacing scientific inquiry:

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

Former Wired editor Kevin Kelly tries to put a positive spin on Anderson’s theory:

My guess is that this emerging method will be one additional tool in the evolution of the scientific method. It will not replace any current methods (sorry, no end of science!) but will compliment established theory-driven science. Let’s call this data intensive approach to problem solving Correlative Analytics. I think Chris squander a unique opportunity by titling his thesis “The End of Theory” because this is a negation, the absence of something. Rather it is the beginning of something, and this is when you have a chance to accelerate that birth by giving it a positive name. A non-negative name will also help clarify the thesis. I am suggesting Correlative Analytics rather than No Theory because I am not entirely sure that these correlative systems are model-free. I think there is an emergent, unconscious, implicit model embedded in the system that generates answers. If none of the English speakers working on Google’s Chinese Room have a theory of Chinese, we can still think of the Room as having a theory. The model may be beyond the perception and understanding of the creators of the system, and since it works it is not worth trying to uncover it. But it may still be there. It just operates at a level we don’t have access to.

This is too much fun not to share:

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

There is no such thing as New Wave from luze duze on Vimeo.

Parkour – Simple Truths from Danny Pack on Vimeo.

Chronotopic Anamorphosis from Marginalia Project on Vimeo.

Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Itching to get rid of any new or barely used books just lying around the house? Slate blogger Christopher Hitchens proposes a solution that stretches beyond the idea of simple donation:

[…] I do believe that many people wish they could do something positive and make a contribution, however small, to the effort to build democracy in Iraq. And I have a suggestion. In the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniya, the American University of Iraq has just opened its doors. And it is appealing for people to donate books.

[…] As anyone who has read the Arab Human Development Reports will know, the Arab region—which at the time of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad was one of the world centers of humanistic learning and philosophy—is in a profound crisis of intellectual unfreedom. It boasts of no great centers of study; it translates pathetically few books from other languages and cultures; it is prone to waves of intolerance and fanaticism under which books are actually burned. Thus the attempt to reverse this trend and to lay the foundation of a liberal and cosmopolitan education for the next generation of educated Iraqis is of the highest importance from every conceivable point of view.

Michael Erard describes how English spoken among non-native speakers may be evolving into a new form of English:

Thanks to globalization, the Allied victories in World War II, and American leadership in science and technology, English has become so successful across the world that it’s escaping the boundaries of what we think it should be. In part, this is because there are fewer of us: By 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language. Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca.

The future of unified language is, of course, already known to fans of the show Firefly.