Reality Crowd


Timelapse: Nightscapes from Tom Lowe on Vimeo.

Sometimes our view of the world around us is held back by our own perceptional limitations. When we use technology to work around those limitations a whole different view of our surroundings is opened to us. Check out these timelapse shots of the night sky. Amazing.

“People will then often say “But surely it’s better to remain an Agnostic just in case?” This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I’ve been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would chose not to worship him anyway.)”

- Douglas Adams in an interview with American Atheist

We have seen robot walkers before, but nothing like this. Watch what happens when the developers try to knock over the Big Dog. It suddenly seems very much alive! This has all sorts of applications, from offroad transport to our soon to be invented robot overlords (pray they have mercy on us!)

Thanks Laughing Squid for the link!

More content is on it’s way soon from RealityCrowd.com, but we just wanted to take a minute to showcase a new service that we have signed up for. It’s called Tipjoy and it’s a way to show your appreciation for content that you enjoy. The idea is actually incredibly simple… you just enter your email in the box below and tipjoy will create an account for you on their site and start a running total of your tips. When you feel up to it you can go to the tipjoy site and pay off your balance using paypal (credit card and amazon functionality are coming soon) or if you are having tippers remorse you can simply not pay.

We highlight this service not simply because we like money (hint hint) but also because you can use tipjoy to send a tip to any email address or website (even if they have not yet signed up for the service). So you can send tips to any site that you enjoy. It is a simple and effortless way to show content creators that you appreciate their work. Any questions? Check out the Tipjoy FAQ.

Thanks for your support!
~The Reality Crowd team

Sorry for my second Star Wars related post this week, but this one is too good not to put up. Often the opening credits to a movie define the tone of the film and help get the audience (hopefully) to the place the filmmaker wants them. Here is the opening credits to the original Star Wars animated in the style of Saul Bass. It really shows just how far an opening sequence can go in terms of defining a film’s feel. What if Star Wars had started off like this, instead of the famous crawling text and orchestral score by John Williams?

Thanks to LaughingSquid.com for the Link

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
- “Politics and the English Language”, 1946

Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
- “Politics and the English Language”, 1946

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
- George Orwell

See Update to this story Below

Science Educator Roy Gould and Curtis Wong from Microsoft give an amazing preview of the Worldwide Telescope. Think of it as a Google Maps for the entire Universe. Set to debut this spring, the worldwide telescope will take images from many different telescopes and stitch them into one comprehensive view of the universe. This is a revolutionary idea, for the first time normal everyday people will get to see what until now only astronomers and astronauts have had access to. What’s the cost for all this amazingness? Nothing!

Update - Here is another great video from fastcompany.tv

Here are some highlights from the www.worldwidetelescope.org frequently asked questions page (FAQ):

Q. What is WorldWide Telescope?
A. The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground- and space telescopes to enable seamless, guided explorations of the universe. WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft®’s high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience.

Q. What are some of the most compelling features of WWT?
A. WorldWide Telescope is an observatory on your desktop, allowing you to see the sky in a way you have never seen before; individual exploration, multi-wavelength views, stars and planets within context to each other, zoom in/out, and a capability for anyone to create and share a tour of the universe.

The Visual Experience Engine delivers seamless panning zooming around the night sky.

WWT delivers seamless integration of science:-relevant information including multi-wavelength, multiple telescope distributed image and data sets, and one-click contextual access to distributed Web information and data sources.

You can also download this video in High Definition from the TED website (highly recommended).

Here is a 3 year old explaining Star Wars… it’s pretty interesting what she focuses on in her summary of Episode IV (the original Star Wars). Enjoy!

Found on Amber Mac’s Blog

*****Update - See below for an update to this story*****

If you have recently been using the website recommendation site StumbleUpon (like we have), you might have recently stumbled across something like this:

Depending on your point of view, stumblecards are either the latest, greatest craze sweeping the internet or yet another marketing scheme ruining the social media landscape. But what exactly are stumblecards? Lets start from the beginning. The internet recommendation site Stumbleupon.com uses a tool bar that integrates with your browser. There are 3 main buttons on the toolbar, Stumble!, Thumbs Up, and Thumbs Down. Hitting the Stumble! button takes you to a random website that other users who like similar things to you have recommended (by hitting the thumbs up button). The more thumbs up votes a site gets, the more Stumbleupon users it is shown to. Stumbleupon is a great way to discover new articles and websites that you might normally have missed and has gained a huge following. The latest (and most contentious) thing to hit the Stumbleupon network are stumbecards. Rarely has any topic (other than Spam) elicited such a huge response…both positive and negative.

The positive reaction to Stumblecards is baffling at best. They are not actually cards in any meaningful way, just images placed on an image of a card. They appeal to the collector in us (the text above them even asks us to ‘collect them all!’) yet there is no real way to “collect” them. You can thumb them up, which will add them to your Stumbleupon list of ‘liked’ sites, but that seems a rather poor substitute for actual collection. They don’t contain any useful information, nor are they funny. They also don’t take any skill to ‘collect’… you can run across them while hitting the stumble button looking at random websites, but if you actually want to find them you can just search for “stumblecards” in the stumbleupon search engine. There is also no ‘official’ list of cards to collect and anyone can make them. So in other words you have a collectible card game where:

There are no actual cards
There is no discernible game or strategy
There is no fundamental difference between ‘collecting’ the cards and not
There is no use for the cards once you find them
There is no way to know if you ‘have them all’

So in other words we have a ‘game’ that is not a game at all. The interesting part is that for some reason it seems to bypass people’s usual mental filters against promoting stuff like this. Something about them makes people who are otherwise pretty discerning about what they give the mythical ‘thumbs up’ to ignore their inner voice and gleefully promote stumblecards to the masses. While the stumblecard backlash seems to be in full force on StumbleUpon, the phenomenon has yet to show signs of slowing. This raises interesting questions for social media in general. We like to think that social media sites are a way to sort the good sites from the sea of mediocrity that is the internet. But if it is so easy to short circuit our filters for ‘quality’ with a simple psychological trick, how can we trust the wisdom of crowds to filter the internet for us? And this is just the beginning… as marketers infiltrate social networks they bring with them all their psychological tricks. Are we ready for it, or will social media websites become just another marketing channel?

So what do you think? Do stumblecards have any redeeming quality? Are they the ruin of Stumbleupon or just an annoyance? Is there hope for humanity? Let us know in the comments!

****Update - 2/19/08****
Adam Atom, the creator of stumblecards, stopped by this post to give us some information. Apparently there is an official list of stumblecards available. You can find that list at http://www.upnatom.org/ the official site of stumblecards. In addition, Adam did an interview with E3internet where he describes the point of stumblecards. It makes for an interesting read as it turns out Adam is not a marketer at all, he was merely trying to create an interesting new game. From the article:

People seem to be attributing this meme to SEOs or online marketers but from my own investigations, you come from an artistic or web design background. In fact your website doesn’t offer any marketing services at all. Do you find it strange that the first StumbleUpon viral came from a non-marketer?

I don’t think it’s strange at all. I’m a web designer so it’s important that I have at least a basic understanding of viral marketing. However, my intentions were always coming from a desire to inspire, entertain and engage Stumblers in the hope they might participate. I don’t have anything to sell or advertise, only the idea itself.

A couple of interesting points of note from this new information. The official list is interesting in that it doesn’t actually contain some of the cards that most of us think about when we think of stumblecards (the Joker card being a prime example). In fact, most of the postings out there on the internet talking about stumblecards use cards that are not ‘official’ as an example of what they are.

Adam’s interview does shed some light on the origin of the phenomenon as well as the original intent of the game. Adam places the blame on marketers and copycats for a lot of the negative reaction the stumblecards have been getting. However, it seems the goal of the game and the way that StumbleUpon works are almost inherently at odds. The game seems to be about searching out the cards, almost like a treasure hunt. StumbleUpon is designed to serve you random webpages that match your interests. If I was looking for something very specific (such as a specific page) I would never really use StumbleUpon to find it, I would use something like Google. It would seem that the random delivery of StumbleUpon and the specific nature of a stumblecard are somewhat at odds. If I am actually looking for stumblecards I would look some other way, and if I am just using stumbleupon to find useful websites then stumblecards are just an annoyance. This combined with the quick appropriation of the phenomenon by marketers would seem to be at the heart of the stumblecard backlash.

Thanks to Adam for stopping by and adding to the conversation.

*****Update 2*****

Adam has now updated the official site to clear up some confusion about stumblecards

In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.

Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

- Mark Twain