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ivory-billed peckerwood, sparklines, here comes GNP, Magnolia

Listening to:	Straight as the Crow Flies, Kim Richey
Reading:	Earthcore, getting really good!
Weather:	56, overcast

I love birdies. Apparently there's been a recent siting of the ivory-billed woodpecker in the swamps of Arkansas, thought to have been extinct for over 50 yrs. How cool is that!? The only known video is from the 30's or something, and photos are rare, most images you find are paintings. It's a gorgeous bird, 3' wingspan, used to live off the bugs and shit in huge 10' diameter dead cypress trees in the swamp. Ornithologists say it's habitat is making somewhat of a comeback, so if it made it this far, it's probably got a chance of keeping on keeping on. Yeah!

My groovy pal Rory turned me on to sparklines, via his blog. Edward Tufte, who coined the term, calls them "data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics." Here's one representing global warming data I totally love this notion of putting the graphic into the flow of the text, really matching the presentation of information to the way your brain best grabs it. I'm also all about the beauty of information, and pictures worth a thousand words and whatnot. How do we make them? Some folks are already creating applications for that, and fonts and whatnot. I think favicons are like sparklines, too, especially when used in tabbed browsing. But the coolest uses I think are trent over time data. Love that. Check some of this out for yourself link link link. As I write this Google finds 5730 links for sparklines, 824 for sparkline. How many as you're reading this?

Tonight is GNP. The 35th annual. See, these Jersey kids formed a band in the 60's. Some of them went off to Waynesburg College. In 1970 the band played a show at the college, and they've done it annually ever since. Now it's a giant musical thang, scads of other people joining in, sometimes lasting 6 hours. The come into town from all over, practice for a couple of days, and put on the show at the performing arts center at the college. I played it first with Paul Burger, the jersey connection, with our fresh little band Angel Patrol, some years ago. Now I'm playing bass for Daria and Randy on a couple of songs. One I'm listening to now, and also Gotta Get Back by Shelby Lynn.

Dude, have you seen the movie Magnolia? "The book says, we might be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us." This film is way whacked, and usually I'm into whacked, but I'm not sure about this one. The bits I saw on IFC commercials were intriguing, Tome Cruise as some weird motivational speaker. But that's just one shard in this crazy broken thing. The music is excellent, Aimee Mann. And according to IMDB it inspired the movie's creation. K. Uh. Whatever.

permalink posted by cat 9:15 AM

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