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I love taking mass transit—subways in particular, but ferries, buses, trains, I dig all these modes of travel. Part of the appeal is all the people arrayed in front of me as models for my sketchy purposes. I thought I’d start documenting these sketches that I make; here are the first installments. Quick little things, banged out before the subject gets up and walks out the door, or changes position, or looks up and realizes they have been subjects of my doodly designs.

Can I get some peace on Earth with that?

Here is one of the creators of TweetMobile, Jorge Just demonstrating his mashup between the microblogging service Twitter, and actual physical objects. Here’s how TweetMobile works: if you tweet certain words, that causes mechanical birds to flap around in real life.

Check the video to see TweetMobile in action.

Rotobooth Pic

Originally uploaded by jonny goldstein

Anybody there? This pic was taken at the Interactive Telecommunication Program (ITP) 2008 Winter show. ITP is a graduate program at NYU where people make cool interactive stuff. In the Rotobooth intallation, participants dialed a simulated old school wall-mounted rotary phone which triggered a camera to take a photo and which then uploaded to flickr. Something about this kind of interface puts people in a state where they are good photo subjects, even if they aren’t hams like me. Take a look at examples of Rotobooth pics here here

My friends over at Vision Education and Media have just written a book, The Young Inventors Project, on the use of Lego Mindstorms NXT in creative projects for Middle School kids. I spent a great year working at Vision and I know first hand that they do spectacular work in using Lego Mindstorms to help kids build engineering, programming, team building, and expressive skills. If you are thinking of giving a child Lego Mindstorms NXT kit, this book would be a great complement to that gift.

Vision has been a pioneer when it comes to using Lego Robotics in a non-competitive educational context, so I am delighted that they have distilled their know-how into this book. Congrats Vision!

(Jonny Goldstein doing his Evard Munch impersonation at the Reichstag)

I just got back from a brief trip to Germany to visit a relative. Look, I’m Jewish, so it’s no shock that the German brand does not resonate totally positively for me. I had a kind of multi-pronged discomfort with brand Germany that I have never felt for any other brand, not even Nestle, Union Carbide, or Exxon.

Let’s take it one step at a time.

Trains:

Just being on a German train creeped me out. Made me think about relatives of mine who might have been transported on German trains to concentration camps. Of course this is reinforced by documentary and fictional TV, film, and print works I have absorbed during my life. I have soaked up way more Germany hate than your average US citizen. You should have seen the Third Reich Reenactment day at my Jewish Summer Camp. I’m serious.

The German Language:

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(This is a Jonny Goldstein original recording, based on war comics I used to read)

There’s no escaping it, evil Nazi Germans when portrayed on movies and TV tend to speak…German. And most of the Germans I have seen on TV and in Film are evil Nazis. Thus, I have developed an association between the German language and evil Nazis. I know that this is not fair. I in fact have German speaking relatives who I love dearly. But the negative brand association came about before they came into the family, and it sticks.

German Accented English:

German accented English screams Nazi to me, even when the person speaking it is not torturing someone with medical tools, as above.

Dates:

From a positive brand engagement perspective, you don’t want to remind me of dates between 1933 and 1945. When I went by a building that had the construction date 1935 on it in a German town, it rubbed me the wrong way.

I had the pleasure of drinking a few beers with Chris Abraham and John Brownlee in Berlin. I was a little low on Euros, so they picked up the tab. Thanks fellas! Very fun, smart, guys. I got the impression that they really like Berlin, and there is a lot to like. Berlin has got that nice combination of decadence, good pastries, and affordability. Here’s some a video of Chris talking about why he likes Berlin:

Hey, I enjoyed Berlin too. But it also gave me the willies.

I took a bike tour of Berlin with Fat Tire Bike Tours. We checked out various historical and cultural landmarks, Checkpoint Charlie, the Berlin Wall, and inescapably, various Nazi era sites. We rode our bikes over the site of Hitler’s bunker, and swung by the Reichstag.

There was a funny looking stone sculpture outside the Reichstag that looks like a Flintstone Era bike rack. When we mentioned it to our guide in an attempt to lighten the mood of our bike tour, it turned out that each stone memorialized an individual parliament member murdered by the Nazis. Argggh.

Germany sunk some positive hooks into me too.

1) The trains may have creeped me out, but they were clean, frequent, and, yes, on time
2) Great pastries

3) Great hot beverages (spiced wine, coffee, hot chocolate)
4) Lack of beggars and homeless people
5) Friendly enough
6) Great beer

7) Pretty buildings

I left the country with mixed feelings. The current incarnation of Germany in many ways is less screwed up than the USA. There’s universal access to health care, they have lots of bike paths, and they have uniformly superior baked goods.

They also have a very disturbing history which includes murdering and incinerating my relatives. I doubt I will ever reconcile these crosscurrents, but I know I will be back, both to visit my living relatives who reside there, and to keep picking at this scab.

I just ate this.

A year ago, my brother moved to Rostock, a small city 3 hours north of Berlin. This is my first visit. Had a good time walking around today. Above are some of the sites I saw. High points: some trippy old cranes by the waterfront, some cool wooden boats, and an awesome cup of hot chocolate.

Here’s my contribution to the 1st ever Rustbelt Bloggers Photowalk. Some of these photos are pulled from other folks. The photos are from different parts of Philly, not from a single neighborhood. For links to other Rustbelt Bloggers Photowalks, go here.

Above: The rusting hulk of the ship United States, which is in drydock in South Philly on the Delaware river. There are plans to rehab it and turn it into a working cruise ship.

Above: Interior of Tallito’s Talluto’s, a famed purveyor of fresh Pasta in the Italian Market district in South Philly.

(Photo Credit: Wilpix.)

Above: The Divine Lorraine Hotel, currently slated for redevelopment into condos. According to Wikipedia, the development has stalled for the moment. The building is in North Philly, at the intersections of Broad and Fairmount Streets.

(Photo credit: shawnzam

Above: Philly Chinatown. Philly has a decent sized Chinatown with a very diverse East Asian population–you can hear Cantonese, Vietnamese, Mandarin, and Fujianese as you walk around.

Photo credit: Nick Hobgood

President Elect Obama said a lot of powerful stuff in his acceptance speech last night. Among the obligatory shout-outs one stood our particularly:

And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world – our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.

It’s the bit about people “huddled around radios in forgotten corners of the world” that sends a tingle down my spine. The fact is, that image describes a huge slice of people on this planet. I love that Obama is aware of that reality. He comes from that reality on his father’s side.

I could picture people smiling as they sit around a radio in the countryside, in a thatched hut, breathing tropical air, as they are recognized by the future president of the United States.

A community organizer never stops, and with this line, Barack Obama acknowledged a big, often forgotten part of our global community full of real human beings, each as important as you or me.