I saw him perform a few times, and I can tell you that he knew how to make it work. I once heard him give advice to younger storytellers on what to do when the audience is mostly empty chairs. Just think, said Blue, that those chairs are filled with angels. And when you heard him say it, you knew that for him, they were.

The most valuable thing I learned from Brother Blue was his secret. Brother Blue’s Secret. I have thought about it before every talk I’ve given since I first heard it eleven years ago. It’s a good one. I wrote it down, and I’ll share it with you: Brother Blue’s Secret.

There, on the left, that’s a Japanese robot. And on the right there, that’s a US robot. They are both walkers. And yet… something seems different.

Now, to be fair, these robots serve different purposes. But I feel certain that a Japanese roboticist would take one look at the headless wretch from Boston Dynamics and cry out, “For the love of God, why didn’t you put a face on that thing? Some Mr. Potato Head eyes, or a Hello Kitty sticker… anything!”

I’m not sure why humanoid robots are so popular in Japan. I’m told it has something to do with Astroboy. I will grant you there’s something creepy about the lawnmower-with-legs in the video.

There’s a URL in that mess somewhere, but it took some real work to figure out after a few weeks had passed. Not so helpful. Sure enough, this article got lost in the shuffle.

Yesterday, sitting in a different Starbuck’s reading Technology Review, I found an article that I want to write about, and this time technology was on my side. The article in question had a QR Code embedded on it. This made it possible, with the help of a free NeoReader app, to jump directly from a low-res grainy photograph to a URL. Once I had the URL, I could open it in Safari and then bookmark it with Instapaper’s Read Later feature. This transferred it from the phone to the cloud where I could retrieve it from my PC later that night. That’s still a lot of steps, but easier and more likely to succeed than a scrap of paper.

Ironically, neither method gets me past the last hurdle: a content paywall. I can’t blame a journal for wanting to make money off their content, but it’s too bad that I can’t point you to more of the article than this: Engineers restore high-resolution photos of the moon.

The reason I wanted to link to that article is a personal connection. NASA scientists are rescuing a bunch of mildewing lunar photography archives that were scheduled to be destroyed. In the meantime, they’re working out of an old McDonald’s at Moffett Naval Air Station in Mountain View, California. Here’s the defunct McDonald’s. Zoom out and look at the giant dirigible hangars. My connection is that I used to work at NASA Ames. I used to eat at that McDonald’s. But when I was there, there were no Lunar Orbiter tape reels blocking access to the fryolator.

Demand Media feeds the hunger exposed by Big Search.

The article is about Demand Media, a company that uses algorithmic search analysis to research the niche market needs of the day. It then immediately underwrites the rapid (and cheap) production of text or video content so that it can be used for its own ad placement. If you want to make money efficiently, don’t scratch where it doesn’t itch. But when it itches, scratch fast!

I immediately thought of Peter Drucker’s Five Deadly Business Sins, one of which is cost-driven pricing. As Drucker puts it: “The only thing that works is price-driven costing. The only sound way to price is to start out with what the market is willing to pay and design to that price specification.”

The media business these days is full of hand-wringers fretting about the collapse of journalism and the Decline of Western Civilization (by which they mean they aren’t getting paid). The bonfire in the newsroom is genuinely disturbing, but hand-wringing won’t make it stop. There’s something refreshing about how Demand Media smashed right through the problem and onto the next promontory. How much are people willing to pay for their media diet these days? Not much! But that doesn’t mean you can’t make a successful business. Now shut your piehole and get to work.

My latest find, courtesy of a recent reference to The Juggernaut Bitch!! is KnowYourMeme, a sort of Snopes of the meme world. I was pleased to see a reference there to a neighbor of mine. FU Penguin, written in the town where I live, is a profane tonic to counteract CuteOverload and LOL Cats. It appears on KnowYourMeme as one of many Single Topic Blogs. Cake Wrecks? Owl Tattoos? WTF?

Start your engines and prepare to waste a lot of time.

Back in the original desktop publishing revolution, it took people (non-designer people) a while to figure out the basic aesthetics of fonts and page layout. After that, some people who would never have become commercial artists or designers just happened to have a flair for design, and their snazzy documents gave them an advantage in the workplace.

These days something similar is happening with video. The tools to make high quality video are now in people’s hands. Not everybody can take advantage of those tools, but some people are naturals. This video was made by grad students. I’m reminded of the awesome Six Minutes of Terror video made by JPL about the two rovers arrival on Mars. It’s a professional job, for sure, but it’s much slicker than it “needs” to be. My favorite part is the cinema verité shot of the parachuting space probe headed for the surface. We’re looking through a shaky camera being held by a (purely imaginary) guy skydiving next to rover.

Anyway, videos are getting better and better, even when made by grad students. I’m betting that screwing around with the demo reel is a great way to put off actual work on the dissertation.

For example, I read a fascinating article in Make magazine about the GPS-driven autopilot you can put into your kit. Sadly, the article is not online, but the article’s author Chris Anderson (who happens to be editor in chief at Wired magazine), runs a whole web site called DIY Drones. They’ll help you get started, and when you’re ready they’ll sell you an miniature open source inertial navigation unit that costs less than $100. That’s something that couldn’t be had for less than a hundred times that cost only a few years ago. By the time you’re done, you’ll have a device that can go spy on your neighbors. I won’t dwell on the point, but you can easily imagine many more mischievous uses for a cheap easily built spy plane.

If you make them small and nimble enough, you can fly indoors. Here’s a simple blimp that can pilot itself around your building, but the engineers at MIT have made something much niftier: precision-controlled helicopters. This video is especially impressive.

Here’s a Popular Mechanics article from last year about MIT’s indoor flight lab: Crash-Proof UAVs Fly Blind at MIT’s RAVEN Aerospace Controls Lab. I wish I had this stuff back when I was in grad school!

There are a lot of charities competing for your money. Let me tell you why mine is the most important: my son Jay is autistic, and dealing with autism sucks rocks. That’s the most accurate statement of my situation… I chose this malady because it chose me. This gives me great sympathy for others in my predicament.

I realize that, by itself, my personal connection may not convince you to give, so I ask you to consider this. Autism rates continue their mysterious climb, and now parent-reported rates of autism are greater than one percent (1 in 91). If you don’t already know a child with autism, you will. Unless you can do something to stop it.

You can.

Donate to Autism Speaks by supporting Jay’s Team (http://bit.ly/give4jay).

Many of you already have, and I thank you for that. As usual, I conclude this note with Wendy’s annual message.

A letter from Jay’s mom.

Here in New England, the nights have turned colder, the days are getting shorter, and autumn is closing in. That means that soon the racetrack in East Boston that is usually reserved for horses will be populated by 20,000 people, all walking for the same cause. The young, the old, grandparents, friends, babies in strollers, and kids who shriek “eeee!” with glee, like my darling Jay.

The 2009 Greater Boston Walk Now for Autism will take place on October 18th, to benefit Autism Speaks. The location and the name of the walk have changed over the years, but this will be the 9th consecutive year Jay’s Team will participate. Over the past eight walks, Jay’s Team has raised over $50,000 and we will not rest until there is a cure! Many of you have donated to this walk EVERY SINGLE YEAR since we’ve started, and Ned and I want you to know how grateful we are. Your money has helped fund research that gets more varied and promising every year. Walk funds are also now used for autism awareness, advocacy for legislation, and family services. (Please see http://www.autismspeaks.org for more info on the amazing work they do.)

This annual email appeal always includes an update on Jay. Last year I wrote about some hopeful academic progress that Jay was starting to make at school. I am happy to report that his progress in academics has been nothing short of astonishing this year. He is identifying the names and values of all U.S. coins and bills, and can even come up with the value of a pile of several different coins. He is identifying synonyms and prepositions and can answer comprehension questions about what someone has read to him. He can identify well over 100 written words. The intriguing thing has been that, in many cases, no one needed to teach him these things. They only needed to figure out how to ask. For example, if you ask Jay to point to the letter ‘C’ on a board that contains the letters A, B, C, D, and E, he can’t do it. But if you ask him to point to the letter that begins the word ‘cat’, he can do it! The journey to discover how to ask has involved three trips to Austin, Texas in the past year, where I have been studying the Rapid Prompting Method, invented by Soma Mukhopadhyay from India. And the journey has included critical work by the clinical director at Jay’s school, who has been open to Soma’s insights and ideas and brings in successful ideas of her own. The journey is far from over, but the past year has been extremely exciting.

On the flip side from the academics, there’s Jay’s behavior. As already mentioned, Jay’s aggression has been a difficult issue for us this past year. The worst period was two months in late winter, when Jay had strep 3 times in a row. We were slow to diagnose the strep the first two times and he was very aggressive. We started a new medication in May that decreases the aggression without side effects, though not eradicating it completely. Jay still requires almost full assistance with his daily living skills, is still not toilet-trained, and still spends most of his time stimming (shaking objects and making loud sounds). His challenging behaviors include wandering out of the house, climbing up high on whatever he can, and touching hot objects.

So, there it is, the good and the bad of Jay’s past year, condensed in a couple of paragraphs, though of course there is so much more to the story. An endless blur of little and big challenges, tedious supervision, new strategies to try, data to collect, emails to respond to, appointments to go to, scheduling of help at home, and the coming and going of the helpers themselves– the various people that serve as our angels to help us get through…

You may know other people with autism who are not as affected as Jay. But the scary truth is that only 7% of people with autism make enough progress to grow up to be independent. Most people with autism require lifelong supervision and care. And the numbers keep rising. Currently the cause of autism is unknown. Only through biomedical research will we ever understand what causes autism and develop methods to treat it. Ned and I realize that these are tough economic times and that many worthy causes vie for your attention. Any contribution to this walk, large or small, will be greatly appreciated.

You can make a secure online credit card donation here: http://bit.ly/give4jay

Wendy Gulley

On Jim Bumgardner’s KrazyDad blog I came across this talking piano. It’s from a German-language documentary, but the modeled words are in English. What’s going on? In a process similar to Fourier analysis, you can play lots of piano notes that together add up to a pretty good approximation of someone talking. Spoken words have lots of structure, and musical notes are building blocks of acoustic structure. With the help of a computer and many-fingered robotic pianist, you can make a piano talk.

It’s an uncanny sound. I think it’s just begging to appear in a haunted house movie.

The Extreme Ice Survey is basically the world’s largest time-lapse photography experiment. Only when you put on the slow eyes of time lapse do you see the glaciers staggering and collapsing like expiring dinosaurs. Here’s a video of a shrinking Icelandic glacier.

Also be sure and watch this Greenland glacier calving a massive iceberg.

It took years for scientists in the 1800s to become convinced that glaciers were actually moving rivers of ice. Let’s hope these videos help people understand more quickly what’s happening now.