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I’ve just posted this to a mailing list, and since I’m rather proud of the gag I’m going to repeat it here:

> Was there no news, or is the great urban public waking up to wacky science?

Let’s not kid ourselves. The entire planet is watching football, which rather limits the range of stuff that can go in the front part of the papers – it’s a terrific experiment – and the EepyBird video which seems to have kicked all this off was stupendous.

Much as I’d love to walk down the street and see people filming experiments on every corner, I somehow doubt it’s going to happen. Hmm… shame, really, it’s rather an appealing image. Mind you, people would only complain:

“This neighbourhood’s gone downhill. Kids here used to be making cyclotrons and Gauss cannons, now it’s just nucleation and elementary surface physics. Next they’ll be into ghetto stuff – optical interferometry or – oh, mercy! – chemistry. If only they’d get off the streets and do something useful with their lives, like learn how to play World of Warcraft.”

The EepyBird video has been around for a while – I linked to it here a couple of weeks ago – but it’s got some serious traction in the mainstream media. Yesterday it was the lead story on the Metro website, and this morning Today did a feature. It’s possible I was still half asleep, but – it went out in the 8:10 ‘big interview of the day’ slot, didn’t it?

The Today phonecam video is online… at YouTube. Yes, you read that right. The BBC have published video online via YouTube. Freaky.

Meanwhile – if only there was a national competition for films like this. But hey, what are the chances of a genius project like that actually existing, hmm?

[cough] more later [cough]

The giant pinhole camera using an entire aircraft hangar. Good effort, I look forward to seeing the results.

See, if you build your whole site in Flash it may look like you want, but it doesn’t work like anyone else wants. If they can’t link to the bit they like, they’ll just bung your video on YouTube so they can. Which means that everyone sees a crappy-quality version, and they don’t find your site. Durr.

Example: the ‘Spin’ video is quite, quite beautiful. If you can’t be bothered clicking around on that site, however, here’s the YouTube posting.

Ooh, now this is interesting – FIA President Max Mosley has floated an idea about changing the way Formula 1 is regulated. Instead of the engines being limited by capacity (currently they’re 2.4 litres as V8s, I’m not sure if the V10s are the same), they’ll be limited by power consumption.

It’s not as if efficiency isn’t an issue today, since you don’t want to be lugging excess weight around the circuit in the form of fuel. Nevertheless, at first glance this is an interesting idea for making F1 a bit more relevant to road cars. It shifts the emphasis from how much power you can make per litre of engine, to how much you can extract from a litre of fuel.

Cynically, it’s clear that F1 will have to head in this sort of direction if it’s to avoid looking even sillier than it does now – and the 2011 time-frame proposed for this idea may seem tardy once it rolls round. But still – shifting the power/performance/efficiency balance towards the latter is a good thing, right?

It’s more than a year since Zeldman proclaimed that tag clouds were the new mullets, and you know what? I still quite like them. More useful than a blank search field, they can help drill into a site’s content. I’m still not quite convinced they make sense on personal blogs, but for blog-like content sites they can be a useful addition.

There are, of course, always counter examples. Case in point: what in the name of all that is Monkey happened on the Potential Energy blog? Are they attempting to explain the concept of a runaway chain reaction by building a folksonomy that, ultimately, will go critical? At the current rate of growth, I estimate their tag cloud will take over the sidebar in 1.2 weeks, their site in a month, the IoP‘s server in three months, and the entire web in under a year.

Stop! For the sake of our children, stop!

Blatantly ripped from Kottke: the film Powers of 10 is online. You’ll probably have seen it before, or one of the rip-off imitations (few of which are as good as the Simpsons version). What I never knew is that it’s by Charles and Ray Eames, who are perhaps better known for… er… designing chairs.

I think I’m going to have to go and read about them, now.

Drat. Just heard back from NESTA, and the latest news is that my online science video/competition project, SciCast, is extremely unlikely to happen this year. They’re all still hugely keen on it, but the funding is quite likely to take another few months to come together. Better, they all think, to set a specific start date as a target and work towards that.

From the project’s point of view I think they’re absolutely right. If we could start now, participatory web video would be a novel and exciting thing in its own right, and by my reckoning we’ll lose that novelty with a 2007 start. But that’s about all we lose, and anyway, we’re simply not in a position to start in the next month or so, and then the timing’s wrong for schools, and… etc. So it all makes sense, and I don’t begrudge the decision, even though I wasn’t in the room when it was made.

From my personal point of view, though, this is an utter arse. It’s not that I disagree, nor even that it puts me in a worse position – it’s been looking precarious for a while, and a definite ‘not yet’ at least doesn’t leave me hanging any longer. But emotionally, it’s gut-wrenching. This project was how I wanted to spend 2006. I turned down proper work to try to make it happen, and consequently I’ve been out of TV for six months now. Looks like I’ll have to head back in again, somehow.

Now, bless ’em, NESTA’s throwing me a bone and saying that they’ll commit to building up the website and running a few more test workshops to provide material to populate the site. That’ll give us something solid to point potential funders at, and it should also allow us to work out some of the inevitable kinks. That’s a lovely thing to do, and not an easy decision for NESTA – reaching a prototype stage won’t be cheap, and I get the feeling they’re doing it largely so they can offer me something rather than merely saying ‘thanks, can you come back next year? Bye!’

So they’re doing everything they can – more than seems reasonable, actually – to soften the blow. Right now, I actually have more work lined up than I did yesterday.

But it’s still gut-wrenching.

Excuse me, I need to go and swear loudly now.

So, John ‘Tell me what to think, John!’ Gruber links to VisualHub, a new video compression front-end by the author of the brilliantly simple video-to-iPod iSquint. For some reason, I start reading the manual – I think because if this NESTA project happens, I’m going to be encoding potentially hundreds of short videos, so things like batch operation are important to me. Apple’s Compressor is rather good, but I’m open to options.

And there, towards the back of the manual, is an entire section titled ‘Xgrid.’

Oh. My. Heavens. This is genius.

See… if this project happens, I’m going to end up with a nice little pile of MacBooks (yes, I could in principle do video production workshops in schools with Windows, but without iMovie and GarageBand, where’s the fun? So, MacBooks). MacBooks, you will recall, have fairly quick CPUs. Core’s SSE3 still doesn’t seem to be a match for Altivec for video compression, but there’s an ace up the sleeve – two processors per MacBook. And they also support gigabit ethernet.

‘If only,’ I find myself saying, ‘if only I could farm out batch compression jobs across the network.’

…which is where Xgrid comes in: it’s Apple’s clustering technology. It’s been part of Mac OS X for a while now, but I don’t think I’ve ever used anything that takes advantage of it. VisualHub does. It would have been (relatively) easy to bundle up ffmpeg and all the other open-source bits in a pretty Aqua wrapper, but Xgrid support takes VisualHub from ‘meh!’ to ‘woah!’ The 4Gb file limit is a bit of a git – movies originated as DV and longer than about 16 minutes need not apply – but for my project that’s not an issue.

Oh happy, happy day.

WordPress, it seems, grows by leaps and bounds. It’s a terrific tool, and its popularity is deserved. What’s weird is that it’s starting to pull away from Movable Type – I think the common perception is that it already has, though I’m not quite convinced by the reality of that, yet.

It appears Movable Type is being positioned by Six Apart as a high-end blog-derived CMS on which developers can build bespoke sites, like the Guardian’s bafflingly subtle Comment is Free. As a result, we lowly individual users don’t get the glossy goodness that WordPress is starting to offer.

Case in point: the recent and surprisingly lackluster Movable Type Styles Contest. While there are some notable exceptions, the range and quality of schemes is faintly embarrassing compared to WordPress’ similar offerings. And I’ve seen nothing to rival the complexity, care, and insight of K2.

Now of course, this is a community effort rather than a core development issue, but if the product isn’t inspiring the sort of creative community one might expect, doesn’t that reflect badly on the product?

Six Apart, I suspect, would rather amateur bloggers used TypePad (if we’re fairly serious and public bloggers), LiveJournal (if we’re MySpace wannabe/escapees) or eventually Vox (if we just want to tell friends and family what we’re up to).

I’m not the only person to be at least concerned by this plan. The fact is, I like Movable Type. While The Daily Grind has been running reasonably well for four years, none of my WordPress sites have survived that long. When I was building the How2 site recently, something Very Bad happened to the WordPress back-end and, four hours before launch, I rebuilt the whole thing in MT. (Which explains why it doesn’t look finished – it isn’t).

I’m building lashing together two new sites in the next week or so. My current plan is to use the new MT3.3beta for one, and WordPress for the other. My CSS skills are rusty, I get bored debugging IE6 issues very quickly, and I can’t really be arsed hacking templates. I just want things to work. I’ll let you know how I get on… or if I give up and use iWeb instead. I’d be in good company.