I took this photograph a fews years ago while in Leh, India, a town in a high mountain valley in the far north of the country. I love the sense of teamwork and camaraderie it conveys. The line of people are passing trays of cement from person to person unti they reach the mason. Not the kind of construction scene you would see in the US!

A group called La Blogotheque has been convincing musicians touring through Paris to do “Concerts a Emporter,” or “Take Away Shows.” A band or singer plays in a public place with no fanfare or previous announcement. 

In this video of Menomena playing a take away show, it’s the reaction of the children to the spontaneous music that is so much fun to watch. It seems to me that they are the only ones really reacting appropriately… and the result is incredibly cute and heartwarming.

I love coming across beautiful, strange facets of nature. This mysterious underwater pattern was discovered on the seafloor in the East China Sea by underwater photographer Yoji Ookata. After some investigation, the source of the pattern was discovered to be a puffer fish working to attract a mate.

The full story is here.

“Because we are educated to believe that salvation is found in the doctrines of a single system, we are naively susceptible to dissimulation and cant.”

- From Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken.

Hawken is right to identify the human tendency to look for a single source of truth (salvation), and I also agree that that tendency carries enormous risks. I had a conversation yesterday with someone who is doing her PhD on the relationship between culture and cognition. The thought I came away with, which continues a thread I’d already been thinking about, is that culture consists of socially legitimated “realities.” In this case, let’s call something “real” if it has observable effects. Thus a party, a country, a holiday, and a law are all very real.

A person’s survival is dependent to some extent on how well they’re able to function within the culture in which they live, so it’s no surprise that we would have evolved to be culture sponges. There is no survival benefit in rejecting the “reality” of ideas like party, country, holiday, and law. It’s not a question of whether those ideas are true/untrue, they are simply common social definitions that allow us to navigate the world and each other.

The danger is that our evolved sponge nature leads us to unconsciously assume, for what were once very valid survival reasons, that we can find a 100% dependable and beneficial reality within the bounds of a single cultural system (single in the sense that it is named). The loudest voices within any given system are, almost without exception, more than happy to feed into that assumption for the simple reason that it is entirely in their interest to do so. Thus “capitalism,” “communism,” “Christianity,” “Islam,” etc. self perpetuate as supposedly complete solutions to, well, everything. I’m not saying that the average person consciously thinks that salvation can be found in a single “-ism,” I’m saying that too often we unconsciously act that way.

The antidote lies in embracing “what works” over any single ideology.

Also from Blessed Unrest:

“In contrast to the ideological struggles currently dominating global events and personal identity, a broad nonideological movement has come into being that does not invoke the masses’ fantasized will but rather engages citizens’ localized needs. This movement’s key contribution is the rejection of one big idea in order to offer in its place thousands of practical and useful ones.”

David Rumsey is a map geek in the truest sense of the term. At 150,000 maps, his private collection is one of the largest in the United States. He is a pioneer in map digitization, and has made over 29,000 maps from his collection freely available in digital form on his website. David Rumsey is a board member of The Long Now Foundation, Yale Library Associates, and the Stanford University Library, among others.

Late in 2011 I had the chance to sit down with Mr. Rumsey to discuss the future of map digitization, the shifting role of libraries, and how science and the humanities can work together to help us manage and understand the vast quantity of information that we are producing as a society.

Gettliffe: You’ve used the terms “close read” and “distant read” in your discussions of maps. What do those terms mean?

Rumsey: The whole notion of a close read and a distant read comes out of the analysis of books. The close read is a more traditional read of a book from cover to cover. A distant read would be using computers to analyze the content of a million books, looking for overall patterns.

Franco Moretti, the scholar at Stanford who more or less coined the terms, wrote a book called “Graphs, Maps, Trees” before the Internet and global digitization. It was an analysis of a thousand books in which he was trying to see them all together, not in terms of a traditional humanities analysis of style or theme, but literally looking at occurrences of words.

Gettliffe: How does the concept of a distant read apply to maps?

Rumsey: A map is a text, just spread out spatially or on many pages in an atlas going in all directions. I think it’s why I love them so much. While I love to read books, I really like that text going everywhere. It’s just the way my brain is.

So how could you then do distant reading of maps with computers? With texts you can do optical character recognition (OCR) of every character and then transform that into a searchable text; but can you do that with maps? Conceptually you could but it’s a lot harder. So that’s a project I’ve been working on for several years. How could we OCR maps? Because if we could, the results would be phenomenal. It isn’t just a matter of being able to read the text faster. With maps you simply have information that is nowhere else.

The other kind of distant read that I’ve been exploring is putting together large groups of maps visually. Then you start to see patterns. For example, we joined together 674 maps of a German survey from the 1890s into one gigantic image. It’s a little different when you’re doing it with visual materials because you’re using computers but you’re also using your eyes.

Gettliffe: It seems like there are incredible challenges in the first method of distant reading you described. Whereas in words and letters you have a pretty stable symbolic system, at least for a given point in time, every single map has a different set of symbols that mean different things.

Rumsey: It gets you really excited about how great our brains are! We can look at a map and know that this is a river, this is a broad leaf forest, this is a town, and this is a province. We learn the ontology of the system. Of course we may have to look at the key a little bit. Every complicated map has a legend. The German maps have a big legend card that says, “these are the symbols for railroads,” “these are the symbols for broad leaf forests.” So you read that and then bingo, you’re doing what you want the computer to be able to do. I can’t believe that it won’t be possible, because it’s a mixture of OCR and image recognition.

Gettliffe: So you would have to include the ability for the computer to read the legend. But how consistent are legends?

Rumsey: They’re not! Exactly. So you’re going to wind up having analysis of a particular set of maps. So initially you’ll say “where is it worth doing this hard work?” and you’ll choose national map sets where there are enough similarities.

Gettliffe: What’s your intuition about where the ability for computers to read maps will lead us?

Rumsey: A couple of obvious things. It will allow us to create historical gazetteers. A gazetteer is a dictionary of names of places. They exist now but the biggest challenge has been showing changes in names of places over time. It may sound a little arcane but it’s actually incredibly important for historians and genealogists.

In addition there’s the whole question of land use, human and natural. There’s a group of environmental historians in France who have used my Cassini survey maps that I have in Google Earth to measure in analog the entire forest cover of Germany in the 1700’s and then compare it to today. Today we get that through satellite imagery. So: land use, natural coverage, historical gazetteers, roads, railroads, all the information that is in maps that you just won’t find elsewhere because it’s either highly spatial or simply not around. The idea is that it would fill in the gaps.

Gettliffe: Would it be accurate to say that what you come out with is a framework or a fabric with which you can start to piece together stories?

Rumsey: I think that’s right. See I’m primarily a librarian by nature, so I like to structure information in ways that others who are different from me, particularly scholars and historians, can find useful. So I can’t tell you exactly how they would make use of it, but my hunch is that it would be very useful.

Now I’ve been around technology long enough to see that some things we think will happen really do. Other things that we think will happen don’t happen at all, or they happen quite differently from the way we thought. I think you could make an argument that this OCR, or rendering maps into digital form that can be analyzed by computation, is way too complex. It may be that it’s 10-15 years away, and that’s en eternity at the current pace of change.

The other thing we can do is simply make these maps much more readable by humans and trust in our own ability to actually absorb and read them. Perhaps we can’t literally measure all the forest in Germany, although this French team was willing to spend the time to do it manually. Perhaps all we’ll have is an impression in our brains of what the forest was like, and that in itself will be sufficient. 

Gettliffe: It seems to me is that there’s a natural tension between the concepts of a close read and a distant read. A close read seems to be more of a traditional humanities type of analysis, while a distant read sounds like a much more scientific approach. They have different values associated with them, and it seems like there would be the potential for them to come into conflict in terms of how we prioritize, store and manage information. 

Rumsey: I think they exist side by side. In my map world I do both all the time. I’m looking at a particular map and really exploring it up close, and then I’m pulling back and searching across a whole group of maps and trying to get a sense of trends. They should reinforce each other over time.

The close read vs. distant read issue brings up a lot of the issues around technology and humanity, and those are really wonderful issues. For me it goes back to graduate school at Yale and a whole relationship with art and technology. I got my bachelor’s in studio art at Yale College, in film, and then did a three-year master’s in fine art doing art and technology. I formed a collaborative group of 7 people that included the head of the Yale electronics lab. This was 1967, which is pretty early in computation. We essentially built interactive environments that programmed light and sound and space using video. Our group had two names. “Yale Research Associates of the Arts” was the name to get grants, because it had this sensible sound to it, but our real name was PULSA. That was a 7-year involvement for me, and it was all about technology and art, and using technology in art, and the issues that creates.

Gettliffe: One of the things I’ve noticed that comes up as a massive obstacle to potential synergy between science and the humanities is the sense that there’s trauma imposed on one side or the other; often times on the humanities side of things there’s a sense that science or close logical thinking devalues creativity and direct experience.

Rumsey: Yes, the scientific method doesn’t lead from the heart; it’s a matter of proof and replicating results.

Gettliffe: Exactly. And there’s often a sense of devaluation on both sides. People who see things in a more artistic free-flowing kind of way also often say and do things that are interpreted by the other side as devaluing objective truth.

Rumsey: They have to compromise. At the time PULSA was formed we were all in our twenties.  We took very seriously the idea of community and actually all lived together. We found the compromises we had to make very enlightening and wonderful and useful, but it took a lot of discussion and wine and time together just to get people to relax and share.

Currently that divide is a lot more promising because it’s a lot grayer. You have technologists and computer scientists who view themselves as very creative people. The whole world is getting closer to humanist values, and at the same time humanists, because they’re engaging with computation, are really technologists themselves. I think the way you bridge the gap is you have those skill sets and ideas literally crossover, rather than having specializations at both ends and then trying to speak.

In the library world we’re acutely aware of the need for technology skills in the education of the 21st century librarian. It just has to happen. The new librarian has to be a computer scientist as well, and needs to understand the whole language of search and digitization.

Gettliffe: Do you feel that that shift is occurring?

Rumsey: I do. I think the problem is well known now. Some librarians are engaging in it more readily than others, but it’s definitely front and center, both in terms of education of the next generation of librarians and at the libraries themselves.

I was at a board meeting of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) in November. We’re essentially a think tank for major research libraries, supported by Harvard, Yale, the Library of Congress, and others. We help libraries transition to the digital age. One of the great pieces of fun we had at the board meeting was to go to Culpepper, Virginia, to the Library of Congress’ special sub-library for audio and visual information. It’s unbelievable. They’re there digitizing all the old films, LPs, CDs, and tapes. They’re also pulling down a hundred channels of live TV every day and archiving it. All that is going to enable technology to analyze culture.

Gettliffe: It sounds like the domain of libraries is expanding with our ability to store and analyze digital information. What challenges does that raise?

Rumsey: One of the biggest challenges for some of these major research libraries is catering to the contrasting modes of research and consumption. At Stanford, which is the library I’m the most closely involved with, we have to manage millions of volumes of books in the “legacy library” that are still being read. There’s no question that the digital side of information seeking is growing fast, but Stanford can’t just put all those physical books at a storage facility somewhere because when that possibility was raised a lot of scholars said “No, we still need some books on campus. We need to be able to browse stacks. It’s how we think. We need to be able to see the edges of the books. We want to go down those rows, and we want the serendipity of finding a book that may have been misplaced.”

And then you have to ask, “Where are the students and the faculty and the graduate students? What do they need?” It winds up that libraries are social spaces, though I hate to use the word social because there’s not much talking; they just like to work together. You can see it. They’re working on their computers in various reading rooms and they’re not talking, but there’s still something going on with them being together. It sounds a little ethereal.

Another challenge is that as a librarian you have to figure out what to save. Often what you think is of interest now won’t be of interest in 50 years, and then in a 100 years it’ll be of interest again.

The problem for librarians now is that there’s such abundance. The abundance of digital information, video, audio, emails, e-books is astounding. So the question is what to keep. The current paradigm is to keep everything because storage is getting cheaper and smaller, but that’s only going to last so long. The science information coming down is huge. Astronomers looking at the universe are producing petabytes of information. You can’t keep it all because it becomes like the one to one map of the universe; where are you going to put it? So this is hard. I don’t know the answer to it. It’s one of the interesting challenges that are out there.

Gettliffe: How has the whole digitization push impacted the way people read?

Rumsey: There have been a number of things in the press lately stating that traditional book sales are actually up. With all the worry that e-books were going to replace books, it doesn’t seem to be happening. What’s wonderful is that more people are reading everything. E-books are pulling people into reading, and then they’re often getting a physical copy as well. Some of the publishers are putting out hard cover editions now with very beautiful bindings. It’s like they’re rediscovering the art of bookmaking because they’re seeing “oh, our strength is in the physical object; let’s make it beautiful!”

Gettliffe: It’s as if the contrast between physical and digital is reawakening an awareness of what’s really valuable about a physical book.

Rumsey: It’s a good illustration that contrast is healthy. I think it’s been great there. 

Thomas Traherne (1636 - 1674) was an English poet and religious writer in the 16th century. Much of what he writes about relates to appreciating the gifts that our lives are steeped in, but that we tend to forget or ignore (i.e. stars and air). This passage is a wonderful example of his writing. 

“Would one think it possible for a man to delight in gauderies like a butterfly, and neglect the heavens? Did we not daily see it, it would be unbelievable. They rejoice in a piece of gold more than in the sun, and get a few little glittering stones and call them jewels. And admire them because they are resplendent like the stars, and transparent like the air, and pellucid like the sea. 

But the stars themselves, which are ten thousand times more useful, great, and glorious, they disregard. Nor shall the air itself be counted anything, though it be worth all the pearls and diamonds in ten thousand worlds. A work of God so divine by reason of its precious and pure transparency, that all worlds would be worth nothing without such a treasure.”

It takes effort and attention to appreciate the gifts that saturate our everyday lives. To make sure that I do, I’ve started to keep a list of things that I feel thankful for and I add to it most mornings. Feeling gratitude is great way to start the day. 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how people navigate their internal emotions, and how tough it can be sometimes to turn the boat around when negativity starts to resonate. 

Then I got to thinking about how smell is such a powerful conjurer of memory. Ever had a familier smell waft your way only to be brought back vividly to some obscure childhood moment that you had all but forgotten about? There are lots of interesting studies on the subject.

So why not deliberately use the link between smell and memory to “bottle up” emotions or certain kinds of experiences?

Over the next year or so I’m going to be smelling essential oils every time certain emotions arise. The idea is to intentionally create a neural link between specific smells and specific emotions, to see if later it becomes possible to conjure an emotion in a powerful way using smell alone. I have a little pouch with vials of a few scents that I’ll be carrying with me.

In order to make the experiment a little broader, not all of the things being tried are emotions per se. It will be interesting to see which kinds of experiences lend themselves to being associated with smells, and which are more elusive. Update to come in a year or so.

Jordan Webster, a friend of mine who is studying particle physics at the University of Chicago and who has worked at CERN, recently did a fantastic and very straightforward email write up on the Higgs boson in response to questions from another friend. I’ve made a few small edits, but otherwise all the work is his. Enjoy!

The model does have some flaws (e.g. it assumes that neutrinos have no mass, which we now know not to be the case), but it is still widely used since it has more experimental support than any other model. This is largely because all of the particles in the standard model have been discovered… that is, all except for one. The Higgs boson is the only part of the standard model that has not yet been observed, and this is one of the many reasons the LHC (the particle collider at CERN) was built.

Now for some background on how particle physics works. Experimental particle physics is basically just statistics — the LHC is just a big counting experiment. Protons collide inside a detector at a really high energy, and as a result a bunch of matter is produced (in the form of electrons, muons, photons, quarks, gluons, etc), and the matter is “seen” by the detector. Different events can be categorized based on which particles are produced — e.g. category A might include events with just one electron, category B might include events with an electron and a photon, category C might include events in both categories A and B, etc. Then using the standard model you can make predictions about how many events you would expect to see in each category. For example, one might predict that after a year of running experiments and collecting data at the LHC, we would expect to see 100 events in category A if the Higgs doesn’t exist, or 150 events in category A if it does exist. Now suppose the actual number of observed events in category A is 107. An experimentalist then has to crunch through the statistics to make some sort of statement like “given the number of events observed, there is only a 5% chance that the Higgs exists.”

The result that went public today has a different story. The two detectors at the LHC, ATLAS and CMS, both saw a reasonably large excess in observed events, above what they would expect to see if the Higgs doesn’t exist. ATLAS claimed a 2.3 sigma excess. This just means that the probability of observing the number of events they observed assuming that the Higgs doesn’t exist is ~1% (which comes from integrating a Gaussian distribution from 2.3 sigma to infinity; understanding this isn’t critical to getting the whole story). CMS reported a 1.9 sigma excess, which corresponds to a probability of ~3%. At first glance, this seems like pretty convincing evidence that the Higgs exists. It is especially interesting that both CMS and ATLAS see an excess of events associated with a Higgs of a particular mass, around 125 GeV. However, there are a bunch of little caveats that are probably not worth going into. The short story is that the physics community will not accept thatthe Higgs is discovered until the excess reaches 5 sigma, or until the probability that the Higgs does not exist is around 0.00003%. This requires more data.

Q: Does this have any tangible effect on technology in the near future?        

No. The Higgs is responsible for giving other particles mass. Other particles are said to gain mass via their interaction with the “Higgs field.” This is an exciting concept, but even if the Higgs exists we are a looooong ways away from applying this idea to anything outside of fundamental physics.

Eric Fischer has created some fascinating maps that expose aspects of San Francisco (and many other cities) that are otherwise latent or ignored.  

The first map (click for link to full version) shows the geographic concentration of flickr photos taken by tourists (red), locals (blue) and uncertain (yellow).  The actual map data comes from openstreemap.   

Even more striking is this map below showing racial and ethic distribution using data from the 2010 census.  Here Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Gray is Other, and each dot is 25 people.  Well known ethnic enclaves like China Town and the Mission are clearly discernable, as well as other areas with strong ethnic and racial concentrations like Bayview, Hunter’s Point, and Oakland.  

Eric’s maps are actually quite beautiful, but they’re also challenging (in a good way).  A map, it turns out, is an incredibly blunt instrument for representing reality.  Perhaps that’s part of what makes them so effective in yanking us out of our everyday human experience to see a bigger picture.  That’s not to say that we don’t already experience San Francisco in terms of “touristy or not,” or “asian,” or “black,” or “white.”  We do.  The point is that because they’re basic categories of how we divide and and delineate places, we often forget that we’re doing it at all.  Maps like these help remind us of that, and also help to expose the underlying realities that lead to our experience in the first place.  

You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t agree that “livable” cities are important. I happen to think that they’re critical to a future we’d actually want to be alive for. But the question of what exactly “livable” means is up for debate.

1. Mobility - Packing hundreds of thousands or millions of people into constricted spaces can result in a drastic reduction in ease of movement. Humans need to be able to move through space freely to access goods and services, and to live in a way that feels unrestricted. There are both practical and psychological issues at work here. Transportation infrastructure is obviously critical (including pedestrian infrastructure!), but just as important to mobility are a sense of safety, comfort and confidence. This becomes a massive issue when you consider that over a billion people will move to cities worldwide in the next 20 years, and that 6 of the 7 billion people on earth have never used a street map (digital or otherwise). 

2. Community - Humans need to feel close to and supported by other humans in order to thrive. Cities are a double edged sword; they can foster strong communities, but city life can also result in a profound sense of isolation (which can be significantly related to mobility). Humans evolved in small tribal groups, and are neurologically wired to have individualized relationships with no more than 150 or so people. If you were born 10,000 years ago chances are you would have had one community of ~150 people that would have lasted you your entire life (with some turnover, of course). By contrast, the communities that exist in cities today are much more fragmented, temporary and less encompassing. As such, they don’t provide nearly the emotional or psychological “safety net” that tribal communities did at one time in human history. 

3. Nature - It’s been shown that people who have access to nature are happier, more optimistic, more productive, heal faster, have lower stress, you name it. That’s no surprise, seeing as how “nature” was where we lived for the first ~200,000 years of our existence as a species. Cities need architecture and urban design that invites nature into buildings and people into nature, and people need to have the tools and knowledge to know how and where to find nature when they want it.

4. Basic Amenities - Fresh food, clean air and water, access to medicine and education. ‘nuff said.

5. Culture and Entertainment - Humans seem to like museums, restaurants, bars, gyms, theaters, concerts and sports, to name a few.

6. Identity - Some archeologists have speculated that one of the initial forces towards early urbanization (synchronous with the agricultural revolution) was people associating certain places with religious meaning. This led to a strong desire to remain in one place in order to be closer to sacred ground, which in turn led to the agricultural innovations which enabled that lifestyle. In the same vein, people today choose to live in places that reflect and express their own identity and beliefs about the world. Cities need to have strong identities that people can either reject or fall in love with. A bland urban identity, it turns out, is far worse than an identity that alienates some people. It’s very much OK that some people hate NY but love SF and vice versa. What matters is that a city has a vibe, a feeling, even a meaning, that people can choose (or not choose) to make their own. 

The order above isn’t accidental. Mobility is the enabling factor that allows people to experience 2-6, and Identity is in many ways the summation of 1-5. If people can’t move about within a city safely, comfortably and confidently, none of the other factors have a chance to matter, and if they can’t fall in love with the whole of a city it doesn’t matter how good the food is or how well the city performs in any other single category.

The beautiful cycle is this: living in a city that is full of people who are in love with where they live makes a place a whole lot easier to fall in love with.