September, 2011
22
Sep 11
Driving is a good thing
After a long day holed up in the office and a perfectly acceptable afternoon in the classroom, this was my first view of the evening.
That gave way to a little storm, which turned into the lightning cloud that managed to stay just off in the distance. As dusk turned to night the electrons lit up the clouds into eerily serene spectres of yellow. And when all of the light was gone from the sky the lightning stood out in pale white sheets in the far off clouds.
It was a terrific show, a starkly beautiful piece of nature that felt like it lasted forever.
When I finally stopped admiring it and decided I should try to capture this somehow, it was too late. I set up the camera to do a little video, but what I captured was a cloud that had all but exhausted its energy. So there’s not much to see, beyond the dying gasps of a ferocious energy.
So I won’t show it to you. The video isn’t very good, even though I want it to be.
Now I just have to find the right mixture of conditions. A storm off in the distance that I’m continually chasing. Lightning. The proper lighting conditions at just the right time of day. Who knows? All of these things may never happen with me behind them. And there’s the eternal question: will I have the wherewithal to record it if I am there?
Truly it was beautiful. Sometimes, there are things about your commute that are worth remembering.
21
Sep 11
Things to read
Jeff Sonderman finds too many apps behaving as modern day shovelware. And that should not be. Apps should solve a problem.
News organizations whose mobile apps only provide users with their articles or videos are missing a big opportunity.
An application, by definition, should be applied to perform a task, to solve a problem. Most news doesn’t do that.
Rather than just feed readers recent stories you wrote about their problems, apps can provide tools and data that enable users to actually solve their problems. When you solve problems, you get more loyal users and a chance to make more money.
I love this because it will become one of those points that is so obvious we’ll wonder why we overlooked it. Consider your favorite, most frequently used apps.
Flipping through my phone I clearly have many problems to solve as Sonderman puts it. There’s:
an alarm clock to wake me up;
weather apps (I have many radars) to keep me informed;
camera to document things;
photo/video editing apps which process what I record;
a QR reader, for when those things finally get popular here;
voice recorders, vital for interviews;
my indispensable RSS reader educates and entertains me;
social media apps to listen and talk;
reference apps like Wikipedia and Dictionary to help me learn;
What Was There gives me a sense of history in a specific place;
audio and video apps make sure I’m never bored;
food apps give me reviews and ideas;
shopping apps to buy things and
local apps to keep me in the know.
The things I use the most are apps that serve a function, beyond just saying “Here you go.”
No app should work without a social media component, and it should be more than “Tweet that you’re using this app” or “I’m here” or “I’m listening to…” all of which are appropriately pointless.
Apps should dream up ways to allow someone to upload something to contribute, which is my only complaint of the otherwise lovely What Was There mentioned above. I love that one, but you have to go to the site to upload things into the cloud, and into their conversation and others’ knowledge base.
Look, the simple truth is mobile is rapidly arriving, immediate future. Whatever tool the end user chooses — something in your pocket, purse or backpack or some fantastic thing not yet invented — apps, for as long as they exist as movers and shakers, are going to need to be a dynamic multi-lane stream of information.
If your app should help me solve my problem, wouldn’t it be nifty if another user of that app could too?
Things you heard on the playground that turn out to be true:
Research at Nanjing University has found that strands of RNA from vegetables make it into our bloodstream after we eat them, and can regulate the expression of our genes once they’re inside us.
MicroRNAs, or miRNAs, are little strands of RNA that selectively bind to matching sequences of messenger RNA, resulting in repression of those genes. Their role has only been understood in the last decade or so, but miRNAs are currently believed to take part in a vast number of processes in both plants and animals.
Turns out you are what you eat. Keep that in mind at the dinner table.
21
Sep 11
Not a lot, just enough
A day of reading, writing and grading. The writing and the grading seemed to dominate.
I also worked on a lecture for class.
There were a few meetings, conversations with colleagues, drafting a student into some social media work, critiquing the newspaper, making sure the Crimson’s site looked respectable. I like the new design, and played around in the guts of it for a while today.
The only other things that happened were a morning trip to the gym — I lifted weights, brah. There was a marginally unhealthy lunch, because I’d lifted weights. I followed that up with a working dinner that a rabbit would find delicious.
A full day in four paragraphs. That’s not disconcerting at all.
I wrote that thinking “That is disconcerting, actually.” The more I think of it, though, I’m OK with that. Paragraphs are ideas and actions. Make them worthwhile, right?
