Each frame of this stop-motion video is an picture of 1000 decisions.

In this unique time-lapse video created from thousands of individual frames, photographers Scott Andrews, Stan Jirman and Philip Scott Andrews condense six weeks of painstaking work into three minutes, 52 seconds (read here how they did it).

When it was done, Poindexter had what he’d wanted—a unique visual record of an intricate workflow that’s been going on at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center for nearly 30 years—and, with the shuttle’s impending retirement, is about to come to an end.

It is rare that people take a step back and honor the processes that were put in place to make a complex endeavor, like the shuttle launch, happen in a matter of minutes.

*My apologies for embedding a video with a long 30 second ad. It was the only one I could find

Canon did not want to comment directly upon the C.H.D.K. project or whether it could harm the camera, saying only that untested software might “damage Canon equipment.”

It would have been a great move on their part to comment favorably to some degree on the innovations that were made here. It would also be relatively cheap for them to start up a blog about working with Canon technology, but they don’t even have to go that far. Mere acknowledgment is all that is needed.

This map was created using the Ushahidi open source software by students at Tulane University in conjunction with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and site host Radical Designs so that you, the citizens of the Gulf Coast have a voice to speak out in testimony of the how the Gulf oil spill is threatening your livelihoods and the ecosystems that you love and rely on. More about the group »

They also have a long list of other news and community resources that are pulling together updates and service announcements for all the communities that are affected by the spill.

So why is this so interesting?
Because it is a web recipe that has the possibility of gaining some real weight as it attempts to collect the news, information, and community service messages that make up the oil spill story as a whole. When I say web recipe, I mean it uses tools (an obsessive list of links + Ushahidi) that are being made available to anyone with basic web skills and the will to pull together the information.

The point at which we’ll know if their endeavors are fruitful will be when they have collected enough of the right information and news to generate a compelling experience of the whole story. I will be watching and encouraging, and I wish them all the best.

Ushahidi is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, e-mail or a web site and visualize it on a map or timeline. Watch this short video on it.

It is nice to see the students at Tulane University putting it to the test.

I find a person’s blog to be the determining factor for a follow, not the number of followers someone has. The bio and the linked website are the 2 elements that are the most relevant rich – maybe the photo as a distant 3rd option – which is why I am surprised to see that the follow notification e-mails still don’t include the profile information.

@xrisfg on Twitter

I am assuming that most people don’t comb through the follow notification e-mails as often as I do, but I am quite convinced that if Twitter would include the user’s profile information in them, they would find that the notification e-mail would be a richer means of following more users.

This week, The New York Times launched a new video series called, TimesCast.

The program, called TimesCast, lasting a few minutes, will appear on the nytimes.com home page at 1 p.m. each day; after 2 p.m., it will move to a less prominent position on the site. (It can always be found at nytimes.com/timescast.) It features interviews with editors and reporters who are covering the major stories, and scenes from meetings among the paper’s top editors discussing events that might go on the front page.

— from Media Decoder

For the most part I would say it is an accurate description of the candor that I experience while working in this large newsroom. In a lot of ways, it is kinda like watching a dry version of The Office. The camera angles are more immediate, and the editing appears to be mostly in-camera, which is refreshing. It also is an example of appointment based viewing on the internet, which doesn’t happen very often on the web, and is still a bit foreign to the way I expect to consume media these days.

I would like to know what the average person thinks about this series. Does it provide more context to the top stories of the day? Is it too much inside baseball?

All said, I have been excited to sit down and watch it take shape.

Note: While I do work at the Times, I do not work on the TimesCast video production team.

Welcome to SXSW! This Sunday, March 14 at 11:00 A.M., I will be speaking on a panel titled Online News of Tomorrow.

Whether newspapers are dead or not, the media is innovating online. Rather than debate journalism’s future, let’s look at where we’re headed, and what the online news sources of tomorrow might look like. This panel will survey some of the most exciting experiments and propose some interesting new directions.

The panel was graciously organized by Andrew Huff, the editor and publisher of Gapers Block in Chicago. My co-panelists are

• Jeff Jarvis – work – twitter – blog
• Adrian Holovaty – work – twitter – blog
• Brad Flora – work – twitter – blog

Ping me on Twitter (@silencematters) if you interested in meeting up while here in Austin.

Update: I am also on Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla, Flickr, and many many more…

I think that once you liberate the code, you put yourself in a place
where you are forced to become more creative and move beyond the
original idea.

There are 2 ways to think about this: you can hold on to your idea, and
it will only grow out of your own experiences with it. Or you can let it
go, and be inspired by how other are using your creation.

At the root, it comes down to respecting the idea. If it is not ready to
be shared, then it should not be shared. Once it is ready, I think you
have to let it go, and enjoy it’s effects on the world around you. This
is true for any medium. It is about having respect for your idea. I
agree, it is a very hard switch to make, especially with code, because
it feels like people can copy what you have done much more easily than a
painting. You can always get a Creative Commons License on it that
specifies that the person interested in using part of, or all of your
code, contact you first – but that it is open to use.

The greatest thing about technology is that it fosters collaboration of
ideas…. and to think that collaboration is not part of your process,
then you had better not look at the source code of a nice site/piece
ever again, or for that matter, stop thinking about process altogether.
Code is about copying & pasting – it is remixing what the person before
you has done with what you have done. This is also true across all mediums.

How well have you taken the ideas of the past, remixed them, and made
them new again?

I think it is also important to look at why your piece is successful.
Does your piece rely on you knowing something about programming to fully
enjoy the piece? If your piece relies on the fact that you made some
genius little script to ‘wow’ the viewer, then that leads me to think
that your code could be considered part of the art.

these are just a few ideas…

On one hand, the whole world has changed on the internet since February, 2006. Then again, all of the same principles still apply. This still leaves open the question, what constitutes as Art from here forward?

Here is the original Rhizome thread.

Kepler, An Opera by Philip Glass will make it’s U.S. premier this November at the Brooklyn Acadamy of Music (BAM). Dennis Russel Davies will be leading the Bruckner Orchestra Linz through for 3 nights of Kepler.

Philip Glass’s opera, written expressly for Landestheater Linz and Linz09, deals with the intellectual cosmos of the great astronomer.

Johannes Kepler lived and worked in Linz from 1612 to 1627. The opera raises fundamental questions of the kind that Kepler worked on all his life and that he hoped science would be able to answer. Historical ruptures in the wake of the Counter Reformation shaped the world into which the astronomer and mathematician was born in 1571. Surrounded on all sides by war and religious strife, he sought to decipher the divine order hidden in the “book of Nature”, in the unshakable belief that his efforts would be crowned with success. “God has based everything on numbers”, was the motto that inspired his research. Philip Glass, one of the best known composers of our time, bases his approach to Kepler on the astromer’s conviction that “without genuine knowledge life is dead”. - Glass Notes

Kepler

An Opera by Philip Glass
Part of the 2009 Next Wave Festival at BAM
Libretto by Martina Winkel
Bruckner Orchestra Linz
Conducted by Dennis Russell Davies
Nov 18, 20 & 21 at 7:30pm
Visit the event listing »

And yes, Juliette and I have a 4 month old named Kepler Cezzar Zilar. He was named after Johannes Kepler. It was mere coincidence that Philip Glass did an opera of the same name. Also a coincidence that NASA launched the Kepler Telescope into space last May, after we had chosen the name. NASA’s Kepler Mission went into full operation July 24, 2009, one day after our Kepler was born.

Juliette and I would like to introduce you to our new baby boy!

Kepler Cezzar Zilar

Born on July 23, 2009 at 6:32am in New York City.

He weighed 5lbs 7oz, is 18in long and is healthy from top to bottom. The nurses have been calling him the little astro-nut.

You cen see more posts, pictures and video of Kepler and our new family on our Futuretree blog. Or you can see the full gamut of Kepler photos and videos on Flickr.