The Last Days of Disco

I’m in New York all month for my annual homecoming plus a bit of reconnaissance. I’m working on a personal project (all will be revealed!) that, at this stage, requires me to sift through old family photos distributed between my mom’s house, my dad’s apartment and my grandmother’s apartment, in search of three-dozen specific photos. This has come with its own obstacles that I’m sure I will detail before too long.

My Parents

These are my parents. They met in the late ‘70s at Adam’s Apple on the Upper East Side, a disco that, unlike Disco Stu, did indeed advertise.

This photo is awesome, and you might think it’s because THEY CAME FROM THE SEVENTIES and that is definitely part of it but there’s this other thing. I’ve never ever seen my parents happy together. When they were married they tolerated each other. When they divorced, their exchanges were entirely hostile. This photo is awesome because it’s the only evidence I’ve ever seen of my parents enjoying being together and not being completely over it. I didn’t know they could do that.

Tagged with personal

Science Hack Day

Didn’t know what time it was and the lights were low
I leaned back on my radio
Some cat was layin’ down some rock ’n’ roll ’lotta soul, he said
Then the loud sound did seem to fade
Came back like a slow voice on a wave of phase
That weren’t no D.J. that was hazy cosmic jive

David Bowie, Starman

This past weekend I attended Science Hack Day in San Francisco. I’m afraid of both these things, so this is a big deal. I faced many of my fears this weekend: Fear of being away from home for more than three hours. Fear of the affluence and pressure of San Francisco. Fear of crowds. Fear of hack days. Fear of birds. Fear of talking about front end development. Fear of public speaking. Fear of being seen without makeup. Fear of being my stupid self.

Science Hack Day was an incredible experience. It was held at the California Academy of the Sciences, and after the Academy closed to visitors, we were permitted to explore without the nuisance of crowds. We were generously given a private after-hours planetarium show, allowed to sleep in the aquarium overnight, and treated so grandly. Spending the night in the aquarium was a memorable and wonderful experience even though I woke up really sinus-y. I don’t have the best track record of feeling at ease at hack days, bar camps, conferences or parties and I didn’t think I’d fit in, but it was so personally important that I attended and participated. It was basically like a cool specialized summer camp where everyone is interested in the same thing that you are and it ended with a science fair. It was amazing to see all that could be made in just one weekend.

For Science Hack Day my friend Jeremy and I built (and deployed!) Radio Free Earth. We know that radio waves broadcast on earth travel through space and time through a local (to us) region of the universe known as the radiosphere. Radio Free Earth finds the #1 song according to the Billboard Charts on a random (or determined) date, measures how long ago that date was, finds a named star that distance away, and then outputs which star that #1 song is just reaching at this moment. You can also listen to that song and imagine you are on that star! For instance, On Wednesday, April 24th, 1985, We Are the World by USA for Africa was Earth’s number one song. It’s now playing on Chara FOR THE FIRST TIME. It’s like a personal mix tape to the stars from Planet Earth.

Warp over to Radio Free Earth →

The idea went through many phases (compromises), because we were limited by our dataset, which only had data for stars 80 or so light-years away. Jeremy’s initial and more dignified idea, in Chloe-speak, was to associate meaningful events in history with the stars through the length of their light cones. I thought this was very beautiful because looking up at the sky and seeing our history here on Earth is so damn moving. But because our dataset was limited to the past 80 years, this would basically have ended up being a stellar translation of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” instead. We also lacked a reliable machine-readable dataset of historical events. A discussion about the radiosphere during the planetarium show inspired us to consider mapping which television shows have reached which stars (trite), but because of familiarity with music APIs and more enthusiasm regarding music data overall, we decided to measure the influence of pop songs instead. Because Echonest didn’t have the particular data we needed and the Billboard API has been disabled, I mined Wikipedia for a complete list of all the Billboard #1 songs since 1940, tidied it up, and converted the HTML to XML to JSON. One of the best things about the whole weekend is that we now have the only machine-readable dataset of every single #1 Billboard song since 1940, and it’s on GitHub, and it’s my greatest accomplishment. You’re welcome, the internet.

We both had similar ideas on how we thought it could look and function – some sort of timeline correlating a list of songs with their star – but given the breadth of our data, it made better sense to rely on a single date instead to pair a song and a star. By midnight, Jeremy had gotten the functionality functioning, I had done some pattern-matching to produce two datasets, and we had a plan for the morning to style and integrate Rdio playback. We also had plans to include the hilarious visual gimmick of spinning the Golden Record while a song plays which I am most excited about because every time I work with Andy on a music project I always want to put a 50% border radius on the album art and make it spin and Andy hates it and this time I finally got to do it. HACK DAY.

Something else that I finally got to do that I’ve wanted to do forever to was to make something that didn’t rely on jQuery. There aren’t a great many DOM manipulations on Radio Free Earth, and our only dependency is the Rdio API, which made it a perfect baby step. It was empowering as hell.

The next morning after not enough coffee and with Swollen Sinus Face, I integrated Rdio playback. We styled it which was actually the low point of the project and deployed it to Heroku mid-morning. Definitely the coolest most best thing ever was learning from Tantek that Firefox supports unprefixed CSS animations while Chrome still needs the -webkit prefix. I was very impressed to have learned this. Evangelize!

Radio Free Earth Poster

My Grandmother The Introvert

My mother tells me that today would have been my grandmother’s birthday. She died in 2011 of complications from a stroke. She was relatively young.

Depending on your tolerance for the diversity of human behavior, you could describe my grandmother as either a recluse or an introvert. In 1996, she moved from Brooklyn to upstate New York, and, with the exception of one Thanksgiving in 2001 and two months after her stroke, that was the last time I saw her. She was invited to my brother’s Bar Mitzvah but she never showed up. She was invited to my mother’s second wedding but she never showed up to that either. She and my mother had gotten into a fight on the phone at some point, and my mother hung up on her. My grandmother never called back, and they didn’t speak for years.

Being alone was the most important thing to my grandmother. She loved reading, doing crossword puzzles, watching movies, and she spent maybe a dozen years working on building a beautiful and obsessively detailed dollhouse for a family of Jewish dolls (all the doorways had mezuzot).

There has been much damage control done lately to correct the public’s perception of introverts: We’re not misanthropic, we just prefer our own thoughts. We’re not antisocial, we just need time to ourselves after being around people. It’s not that we find extroverts vapid, but because it takes such an incredible amount of energy to keep it together in public, we prefer to use that energy on more meaningful interactions.

In my family, we are not The New Introvert. My terminally rude mother who leaves everything early is constantly grousing about how exhausting and boring everyone else is. My dad, a hoarder, has used boxes, bags, electronics, mail, torch lamps, Aeron chairs and toys to keep people out of his apartment and life for decades. And my grandmother has missed out on every single milestone achieved by her entire family since the mid-‘90s. I get incredibly impatient in casual conversations because suddenly I’m aware that I’m going to die soon and I don’t know if I can spend the rest of my limited life trying to think of more Things to say. I joke to my dad that all I want out of life is to buy a studio apartment in the city, and then, 50 years later, die.

Here is how my grandmother died: In May 2008, on a Friday night, she had a stroke. Because she was Sabbath observant, and, because she was so reclusive, nobody thought it was odd that they hadn’t heard from her all weekend, despite there being warning signs (confusion, mini-strokes). The following Monday, a neighbor had to break down her door with an axe and found her lying on the floor of her kitchen. She had been bleeding into her brain all weekend, and had broken her leg in the fall. She was in an induced coma to control the swelling in her brain for weeks and, because my mother is really melodramatic, she arranged to have the breathing tube removed on Mothers Day. Miraculously, she survived, for almost four more years actually. She gained mental function back, was able to understand the gravity of her situation, to talk and to articulate her environment, but she was paralyzed and unable to take care of herself. She would beg my mother to kill her. She was unable to return home, to be alone, to work on personal projects, to have any control over her time and her solitude. She died two and a half years ago of kidney failure following an infection. She barely existed in anyone’s life.

Tagged with personal