I am … unhindered by talent

Just stumbled across Wordle, a neat tag cloud/text visualization tool, and am having way too much fun.

Some of my most common Flickr tags (click on the cloud to see it bigger on Wordle’s site):

The contents of the front page of my blog as of 3 July 2008:

I like how the latter captures our time in Spain quite nicely, and I really like how Wordle can intermingle the ascenders and descenders. Wordle can grind pretty hard on your CPU, but there are lots of neat options to play with and some very fun results to be had. w00t!

Thanks to banned photography inc for the tip.

Related posts

• We can all make history come alive (0)
• The strange mysteries of popular opinion (4)

This is what Naples has become through a combination of mismanagement and a complete lack of any sort of recycling system. (Apparently GreenPeace came in and set up a demonstration recycling system in one neighborhood had showed that over 70% of the trash there could be recycled if people would just get it together.)

And I’m going there in a month for EuroGP.

Here’s hoping that the situation gets resolved and/or the weather doesn’t get too warm…

Thanks to Roger Taylor for the very cool poster shot of the situation on the ground. It was interesting that when I search for “real news articles” on news.google.com I got some useful stories, but very few decent images. A search for Creative Commons licensed images on Flickr, however, turned up a bunch of excellent images (including this one).

Related posts

• UMM students are just so cool! (4)
• Almost ready for EuroGP! (0)

Almost had an alliteration in the title, but then lost it at the end. Sigh.

I’ve finishing dumping all my Dagstuhl photos (uncleaned and unedited) to my event account on Flickr, so those with more time than sense can rush over and gaze upon them all. Over the next week or two I’ll work on cleaning some of my favorites and posting them to my “real” Flickr account, but who knows how long that will take.

Related posts

• Far too many photos from Dagstuhl (0)
• Wrapping one’s head around the data (0)

Just before we came up to Preston for the holidays I was able to spend some time taking photos in the beautiful frost we’d been having in Colchester. This is one of the results of that little adventure.

Happy Xmas Eve!

Related posts

• With joy shall ye draw water (0)
• Unrelenting, the seasons change (0)

In just over 2.5 years I’ve posted 1,380 photos on Flickr. I’ll be the first to admit that they’re not all brilliant; some are silly, some I put up to support blog posts, and some seemed like a good idea at the time. I must say, though, that I am frequently mystified by the responses (or lack thereof) to photos. Sometimes I post something I really like and it just sinks without a trace. At other times I debate whether to post something, only to have it get a huge reception.

Just before we headed north for Xmas, I posted this shot of an odd little stencil I saw in Dublin. It’s a neat stencil, and a technically reasonable photo of it, but it’s hardly amazing. Yet it caught some traction (perhaps in part due to synchronicity with the season) and ended up on Flickr’s “Explore” pages. This has lead to 60 favorites in four days, over 4 times as many favorites as every other photograph I’ve posted with one exception. I’m thrilled by the response (it’s always nice when people see your work), but according to Flickr’s “interesting-ness” algorithm this is currently the 5th most “interesting” of all the photos I’ve posted, a “claim” which clearly doesn’t bear any significant scrutiny.

I realize that any algorithmic determination of “interestingness” is going to have substantial oddities and be subject to gaming in various ways. And I suspect that the “rich get richer” part of this is a common experience for anyone who posts stuff on-line or, more generally, puts any of their work out in the public. Still, it’s weird when it happens.

OK, I’m done navel gazing - you can go back to your holiday revelry.

Related posts

• Wordle makes tag clouds all pretty (0)
• Hey-dee-ho! Spiffy new version of WordPress all around (0)

We’re back from an excellent little 24 hour whirlwind visit to the Mighty Metropolis aka London. Most of it was spent in the British Museum, where we had tickets to see the Chinese terra cotta army. No photos from that, but it was quite remarkable and absolutely worth it.

I took lots of photos (many quite mediocre, or worse) in other parts of the British Museum, including this in a small temporary exhibit right by the entrace called "Divine Cat". This bronze egyptian scuplture was donated to the Museum by a Major Gayer-Anderson, who "was a keen restorer of ancient metal objects". Recent analysis (including X-rays) revealed that the good Major jammed a metal cylinder in the head to give it more strength, repaired a major crack, and applied a thick layer of green paint to help hide the repairs.

Oh.

An excellent little exhibit, and a nice example of the many complexities of managing a collection such as theirs.

And the cat was cool too.

I’ve posted the whole unedited lot up on my Flickr events account, and will post tidied up versions of some of the more interesting ones to my “main” Flickr account.

Related posts

• More fun (with skulls) in London (1)
• Darwin, dinosaurs, and flesh-eating beetles! (0)

My 15 minutes would appear to be scattered like little breadcrumbs across the trail of my existence, and yesterday I discovered a few more.

It all started when kjell mentioned on Twitter how cool Flickr’s new stats were. I hadn’t heard of them yet, but being a good data head I immediately rushed to sign up and started poking around as soon mine were available.

A little poking turned up some unexpected clicks from ScienceBlogs. Digging some revealed the fact that two of my photos are being used in their channel photos this week!

Way cool.

Oh, and the originals are here and there.

Related posts

• Wrapping one’s head around the data (0)
• The strange mysteries of popular opinion (4)

UMM’s brought in some outside consultants to assist us in our “branding”. I find the term quite shudder inducing, but what little I’ve seen from these far off lands suggests that the people they’ve brought in are saying some useful things. One bit I liked from their recent report:

UMM’s “quirkiness” [is] appreciated (e.g. Zombie Dance, drag show, etc.) [by the students], but
students felt this was not presented prominently enough

One of the things I’ve always loved about UMM is that it is quirky. Maybe not quite as a “out there” as Reed was, but there are people being individuals and pushing some boundaries in important and valuable ways. We seem shy about sharing that, though, usually in the guise of not wanting to scare off potential students. So instead of emphasizing the cool and strange things that our students are doing, we have tended to focus on a kind of ethnically diverse whitebread image (if that makes any sense).

Our web site, for example, has usually featured these predictably bland photos that wouldn’t typically remind an alum of anything they remember from their time in Morris. A few years ago Jess Larson and others in Studio Art got those replaced by a lot of cool photos that UMM art students took. The student photos were much more visually interesting, and I think actually said something about what UMM was at that time. It didn’t last long, though, and at the next major revision of the web site all those images got replaced by bland professionalism once again. Sigh.

I think there’s a ton of still imagery, video, and audio that we could use on our web site to promote what a neat place UMM is, but we don’t. Below, for example, are four really nice shots from UMM’s Flickr group. Only a handful of people know about or use that group, and it’s probably 75% my stuff, but there are quite a few excellent (and interesting) images there that I think would be really cool on our web site.

Daniel J. Moore	Michael Anderson
Cory Q from Monkey River Town	bam.bam.

Thanks to all those folks for sharing their photos on Flickr!

Related posts

• UMM students are just so cool! (4)
• Contemplating a major change in direction (11)

I wish I could say I’d taken this gem, but Imago gets all the credit.

Related posts

• Unrelenting, the seasons change (0)
• With joy shall ye draw water (0)

I first noticed this sign yesterday walking home after my morning walk with Sub-Evil Boy. Presumably they’ve had some big lorries follow their sat nav system and get stuck down the end of this little road. Can’t quite decide whether I think this is hilarious or sad. Perhaps both. (Geotagging it on Flickr was a pleasantly ironic experience as well.)

Related posts

• Right in the thick of it (0)
• New ways to bore you with our holiday photos (1)