visual

Got a minute? Create (or edit) a solar system at Galaxiki.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. ~ Carl Sagan

(Public domain image created by NASA and the European Space Agency. Hubble material is copyright-free and may be freely used on the condition that NASA and ESA are credited as the source of the material.)

Oh, I love Carl Sagan! And I think Sagan might have really liked Galaxiki, a wiki site created by Jos Kirps where users collaborate to edit a fictional galaxy. You can edit for free or — if you want to play God — you can lay down a little local currency ($12 USD) and become Creator of your own solar system.

Here’s part of Kirps’ description of Galaxiki:

Millions of stars, planets, moons, pulsars and black holes can be explored using an intuitive 2D map. The site software manages most of the physical properties and behaviours of the solar systems, from orbits to the chemical composition of planetary atmospheres. Some planets offer conditions that may allow life - the idea behind Galaxiki is that community members can create fictional life forms and write about their histories on their planets. The ease of use attracts all kinds of users, so that the target audience is not limited to science fiction and astronomy addicts.

The Galaxiki physics allow taveling faster than light, and journeys between solar systems become possible within a reasonable timeframe for advanced fictive civilisations. This also means that different civilisations may meet each other at different time points, the challenge for advanced users will be to keep the global history of all civilisations in the galaxy consistent. Galaxiki is both fun and challenging, for individuals and for the community. It’s like dreams becoming true, and you’re part of it - I think that’s what makes it so attractive.

Meanwhile, back in this world, I’m not likely to be baking an apple pie any time soon. But I just might invent at least a tiny part of a universe…

~ Ivy Wigmore

LOLcats: I can haz control of the Internet meme space?

Sometimes, Internet memes are just too powerful to ignore. Especially for a blog that delves into online humor at times. Witness the rise of the LOLcats.

For me, the tipping point may have been when a fellow editor emailed the WhatIs team a Schrodinger’s LOLcat.

For those unschooled in quantum theory, Schrodinger’s Cat is a famous illustration of the principle of superposition, proposed by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. Our definition of the concept also happens to be one of the most popular pages on WhatIs.com, as you’ll often see on our recently added/updated page.

As pictured on the right, it’s just darn funny.
 story of how the Schrodinger’s LOLcat was created, if you’re intrigued. Credit goes there for the image, naturally.

It’s just one of the latest creations (albeit one more thought-provoking than some) to emerge from the minds of punchy technologists and quirky geeks.

So what is an LOLcat?

Put simply, an it’s an image of a cat with text on top of it.

As usual, there’s considerably more history to the etymology of the word.

Adam Koford, in fact, believes that the idea is much older, going alllll the way back to the early past of last century, where a cartoonist (his great-grandfather, Aloysius “Gorilla” Koford) he produced a comic strip entitled “the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats.”

Whether you believe the modern phenomenon is based upon that or not, LOLcats are in many ways a throwback to the early days of the Internet, where Usenet posters would use image macros to insert an appropriate image behind text captions to make a more emphatic point.

And, in fact, that concept fully fleshes out an more accurate definition for LOLcat, an image macro where humorous, idiosyncratic or insightful text is pasted as a caption onto an image of a cat that’s engaged in some sort of funny activity.

Call them “cat macros” for short.

For once, we might be “chasing the tail” of deadtree media, as TIME Magazine wrote about the LOLcat phenomenon recently, bringing this element of Internet culture out of the blogosphere and into mass culture.

While the fervor over LOLcats has subsided a bit over the past few months as netizens hit the beaches, these furry funnies are still popping up everywhere, not just encyclopedia entries over at Wikipedia, UrbanDictionary, Encyclopedia Dramatica or Answers.com.

And, lest you think this is just about “kittybloggers,” BoingBoing has been blogging up a storm about LOLcats.

Witness this tremendous post that dives deep into the etymology of the LOLcat (alluded to above.)
Or this one, where Xeni alternately praises, with tongue firmly in cheek, a “pedantic overanalyzation” of LOLcat history.

Personally, I rather admired how the author, David McRaney, offered such a thorough discussion of leetspeak and Internet slang.

BoingBoing and David aren’t the only commentators on the phenomenon, of course. Anil Dash, of SixApart fame, made a thoughtful post about LOLcat grammar and Internet pidgin languages.

Mahalo also has a great LOLcat roundup.

If you just want your LOLcat fix, however, Xeni also linked to two huge archives of LOLcat pictures, here and here. You can find more at LOLcat.com, LOLcats.com and ICanHasCheeseburger.com.

If that still isn’t enough, you can sort through images and pages tagged with lolcat at Flickr, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and WordPress. (This relatively new phenomenon of being able to link to tag aggregations on social bookmarking sites as useful reference material is, by the way, one of my favorite outcomes of the Web 2.0 movement.)

If those reams of LOLcats still don’t slake your thirst for cat macros, you can always make your own at either of two great LOLcat generators, LOLcatr.com or kscakes.com.

If you want to extend the LOL meme beyond cats, you can also roll your own LOL at laughingsquid.com.

Above is a personal favorite, to round out the post for those of you who love a good unexplained paper jam.

(Credit: ljg)

The Encyclopedia Of Life: An individual Web page for every species of life on Earth

Can you imagine a comprehensive, illustrated encyclopedia that documented and described every living species known to humankind?

If scientists succeed in a new, boldly conceived project, such a dream might become reality. Meet the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). [Press release]

A steering committee of senior officers from Harvard University, Smithsonian Institution, Field Museum, Marine Biological Laboratory, Biodiversity Heritage Library consortium, Missouri Botanical Garden, and the MacArthur and Sloan Foundations has proposed that “an online reference source and database for every one of the 1.8 million species that are named and known on this planet, as well as all those later discovered and described. Encyclopedia of Life will be used as both a teaching and a learning tool, helping scientists, educators, students, and the community at large gain a better understanding of this planet and all who inhabit it.”

The EOL project has its roots in the writing of biologists Dan Jenzen and E.O. Wilson. Wilson’s 2003 essay on the topic and then a speech 2007 speech (read his wish on TED.com) at the influential TED Conference have brought the concept to wider attention.

Essentially, the EOL hopes to combine collaborative editing using wikis and mashups of a number of other sources of scientific materials. Crucially, entries will edited and approved by scientists to ensure the authenticity and accuracy of the information.

Draft species pages that demonstrate some of the possibilities of a fully implemented system are already available at http://www.eol.org.

The project’s creators hope to have actual, authenticated species pages available by mid 2008. You can learn more by reading the EOL FAQ or watching this video on YouTube.

Mark Frauenfelder over at BoingBoing has also posted about EOL , noting that while the project has received a $50 million dollar funding commitment led by the MacArthur Foundation, the EOL “reminds [him] a lot of Kevin Kelly’s All Species Foundation, which ran out of funding around 2003. It was a TED-borne idea.”

Yahoo Pipes: Create data mashups from Web feeds using a visual editor

What is Pipes? According to Yahoo!:

Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code.

If you’re a particular flavor of Alpha geek, the concept of “pipes” is nothing new. In fact, naming this project “Pipes” was a deliberate nod to the Unix programmers that, over the years, have done extraordinarily clever things by connecting simple utilities together using pipes built on the command line.

So the concept of pipes has been out there for years — but creating a fluid, visual and (mostly) non-technical interface that enables non-coders to create mashups of sites like Craigslist and Google Maps may be. Tim O’Reilly certainly thinks so. He posted that Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is “a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.”

Yahoo!’s Jeremy Zawodney believes that Pipes ” will unlock the data web.” Six Apart’s Anil Dash writes that Pipes “lets users with a relatively low degree of technological expertise combine structured sources of web data such as feeds.”

How user-friendly do you think it is? Try it out and let us know about your experiment in the comments.

Videopedia: Find short video solutions for any practical question

Dennis, one of our most dependable sources for interesting links, submitted “Videopedia” today. It’s quite interesting — think of it as a sort of Wikipedia, where the content is not just text, hyperlinks and Creative Commons images but instead user-submitted videos.

The vision is quite straightforward: Everyone is an expert in something. Knowledge of that something can be visually explained in less than 5 minutes. Users can easily upload their shorts, using a visual storyboard to annotate videos and add outbound hyperlinks. While the Web site is still relatively new, there’s already some useful content in the tech section including Running ScanDisk in XP and How to do a Google Search.

Video: Web 2.0 Explained

If you’re looking for buzzwords, you’d be hard pressed to find one more over-used than “Web 2.0.” The hype and marketing, unfortunately, obscure the rapid growth of social media and the associated technologies. Fortunately, a brilliant little video popped up online last week and was immediately hailed as a much-need breath of sanity and clarity by BoingBoing, Kottke and many others.
We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did. Watch the “Web2.0 Explained” video here.

Riya.com: Visual search engine for the public domain

Riya is a visual search engine that uses face and image similarity to search the Web. While it’s still technically in beta, you can already try it out to find pictures in the public domain.