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It’s a scene right out of Mad Max: someone pulls up to the back of a restaurant in the middle of the night, siphons off 300 gallons (gallons!) of used fryer grease into a tanker truck, and goes home to convert it into fuel for their rag-tag vehicles.

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure?

Never mind $4 a gallon at the pump, you really know we’re screwed when people start stealing skunky grease out of restaurant garbage dumps. What’s next? Obese people kidnapped and drugged, waking up in a bathtub full of ice, 30 pounds lighter after thieves lipo’ed out their fat for conversion into biodiesel. You read it here first.

Online package tracking has been around for so long (a whole decade!) that we take it for granted that it works.. I actually get annoyed now when someone on ebay sends me something via USPS and is too cheap to pay for parcel tracking. So I got a little surprise when I checked on my latest amazon order…

If they did deliver it to St. Louis 18 months ago then amazon’s technology is even scarier than I think it is.. forget cloud computing, time travel anyone?

After many Sunday afternoons tramping around Manhattan, three unsuccessful bidding wars, and guessing games with slightly sketchy selling brokers, we finally nailed one down and are In Contract. You would think a recession would take a bit of the pep out of a real estate market, and maybe it has - two of the places we lost out on only had one other bidder, maybe in better times there’d be 3 or 4, but all it takes is one shmuck with more money than you and bye-bye charming brownstone apartment.

It actually looks like this, no retouching…

Now the fun begins - the co-op board. Let’s see your finances. What about your health records? How are your teeth? Can you provide us a family tree? Five generations back will suffice, though we’d prefer 10. Any pets? They’ll have to submit to a psychological exam, to make sure they’re stable and won’t growl at the neighbors. Ahh the dream of home ownership…

So speaking of different perspectives, I stumbled across the famous (for some) 1977 Eames short “Powers of Ten” that starts with an idyllic picnic scene, and then zooms all the way out to the limits of the known universe, and then zooms back in all the way into the subatomic particles in one of the picnickers’ hands. 

Part of this thought process feels very familiar to any engineer who has worked with computers or microchips, they’re inherently organized in hierarchies of small units that are grouped into bigger and bigger modules that perform more and more complex functions.. microscopic wires and silicon wells -> transistors -> logic gates -> arithmetic & memory modules -> chips -> circuit boards -> computers -> operating systems -> applications (i.e. final cut) -> digital films that get distributed on youTube.

My latest celeb sighting - Willem Dafoe, buying groceries at Whole Foods yesterday afternoon. It’s not often you run into an actor who’s done everything from playing Jesus to a soft-core sex scene with Asia Argento. I wish there was a way to sneak a photo without feeling like a celeb-stalking creep.

He looked good, skinny as ever, he was laughing and joking with the checkout clerk. He was buying a lot of green vegetables, very healthy-looking load of groceries. He looked exactly the same as he does on screen, which is rare for actors. I wonder if he’s a good cook.

I was browsing around the Harvard GSD site, looking at examples of student studio projects, when I came across one that was about canals to bring water back to the Dead Sea. It’s a big urban design thesis, all about layering transportation flows etc on top of the canals, but one of the many visuals was a comparison of different parts of Israel and the occupied territories to Western groupings of population centers of similar density.

Overlay of West Bank & Gaza on top of SF Bay map

Having actually driven through a good chunk of the West Bank, I already knew it’s not that big.. but seeing it compared to the Bay Area (which I’ve driven through many many times) really puts it into perspective. Amazing what a good graphic can to do your worldview.

Cutting-edge guy that I am, I’m only the 1.2-millionth person to see this video demo of Crayon Physics Deluxe, a game prototype that was shown at the Game Developer Conference last month. It’s just brilliant in its simplicity, though it’s more of a conceptual demo than an actual game.

There have been a lot of games made by now that have really simple control interfaces, most of the casual games out there are controlled with just a point-and-click mouse scheme. But nearly all of these games give up user flexibility in the process - while the games are easy to control, you can’t actually control very much in them, usually little more than the direction and timing of some gun or character movement.

What makes Crayon Physics interesting is that it combines a simple interface with a very wide range of possible user behaviors - nearly unlimited once you let people start to play with the physics of the objects they create. And it’s done with out any of the pop-up menus or other devices that a lot of other games end up adding. While this particular demo was created by a hobbyist, hopefully someone will take the idea and build on it, it has so much potential.

I wonder if other cities go gaga over obscure niche restaurants the way New York has reacted to Momofuku Ko. It opened a few days ago, turning even jaded food critics into gushing groupies… their online reservation site (the only way to book a table) was down for most of the week, probably from all the rabid foodies hitting refresh trying to snag a table… though they were claiming a DoS attack - a bit weird, who would want to take down a web site belonging to a 14-seat East Village restaurant?

I guess they’re busy…

When I went to the site yesterday it wasn’t down, but it did crash often, spewing a screenful of database error messages when I tried to register. I guess chefs aren’t generally very good programmers. I finally managed to set up a user ID today, and of course, not a chance of getting a table. Thanks to the New York Times I probably never will.

I’m in the Fresno airport. I didn’t know Fresno had an airport until I had to get a connecting flight through here..  The airport code here is FAT, which is a bit unfair, people here look no fatter than anywhere else in America. Two fighter jets just took off in tandem, almost blew the windows out.. guess there’s an air force base here too.

Huuuge mural (note the cars at the bottom) funkifying downtown Dallas

Dallas was cooler than I expected, though that’s not saying much.. hung out in the “historic” west end, ate some buffalo steak.. it’s no Austin, but not quite the wasteland I thought it would be.

I remember reading Idoru years ago, where one of the characters is a purely virtual pop idol, a software construct created to entertain the masses. You can imagine the advantages - no rehab, no paparazzi, no romances with sketchy guys.. though there’s always a risk of a software bug causing her to freeze up in mid-concert (please be patient while we reboot the performer..).

Frank Sinatra’s royalties are safe for now

A virtual pop star is a lot way off, but synthetic singing software already exists… enter whatever words and notes you want, and it sings them. They of course created a virtual idol (limitations be damned) called Miku Hatsune, whose songs are all over Japanese charts.. it’s all still pretty scripted, so we’ll have to deal with the Britneys and Winehouses for a few more years, but I’m looking forward to the day when tabloids are full of rumors that the latest virtual idol has caught a deadly computer virus (planted by a jealous rival, natch..).