The phone number of the new Apple Store in Bellevue, WA is the same as that of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, except for the area code. Has Apple already reserved the 206 version of Gates’ (I assume) unlisted Medina, WA number for use when they open a store in Seattle?

Historical maps galore of New York City and Long Island. Think back to a time when maps of a town included the name of each property owner. You can see the pattern of families who divided up parcels or, perhaps, purchased adjoining lots. You can also marvel at the plethora of “Smiths.” (via Anil’s purple sidebar)

It’s the time of year to cull what wisdom we can from those commencement speeches that few college graduates remember clearly after they descend from their ivory towers. As always, I start with my own shiny tower where this year NPR’s Linda Wertheimer gave some election advice: “I would suggest, vote all women. Generally speaking, they haven’t been around long enough to be seriously evil.” At Trinity College, Garry Trudeau exhorted graduates to “go forth and raise hell” as “Civilization has always advanced in the shimmering wake of its discontents.” Opera singer Renee Fleming totaled up a statistic that Julliard students may not have wanted to sum up: “Those of you who perform – musicians and dancers – will have by now practiced perhaps 3,000 hours a year, times 15 years, which equals 45,000 hours.” As a group she calculated that the graduates had practiced 11 million hours. Thus she encouraged them to make it time well spent: “Challenge the idea that the arts are for a select few – teach, make more people love what you love, and help them to understand why you dedicated those 11 million hours in the first place.” (more commencement excerpts from the New York Times)

On Sunday the sluicegate of China’s Three Gorges Dam will be closed, ten years after work began on the controversial project. Water from the Yangtze River will begin to form a reservoir, eventually flooding 312 million square feet of land. 1.13 million people will be relocated by the project’s end in 2009. But the upside is electricity. Generators will be providing power as early as this year, and ultimately 26 turbines will create 18,200 megawatts of power, supplying the energy for China’s expected massive economic growth.

I have to quibble with two of the quotes in this article on the new gesture interface from FingerWorks. First, their CEO says “Unlike having to remember a sequence of keys, the gestures become part of your motor movements, so they are a part of your motor memory in your brain.” While I believe that gestures will be a nice, natural way of communicating commands to a computer, it is untrue that key sequences do not become motor memory. Typing is a very rapid means of communication, and much of it is motor movement memory. A better memory example would have been the gesture device’s improvement over the mouse. Mouse movement, because you can not guarantee where the pointer will be, is not as reliant on motor memory (though the best-designed mouse interactions with user interfaces like pie menus become motor memory gestures). The second quote is from interaction guru Don Norman who says “Having to move your hand back and forth from the keyboard to the mouse really is an unnecessary activity.” True indeed. But you can solve that easily with many alternate pointing devices that fit into your keyboard. Quotes taken out of context can be deceiving, I know, but let’s pull out quality reasons for why gestural interfaces will be so useful. How about: typing and mousing is unnatural, but humans gesture all the time!

Nagoya TV has a collection of 8000 Japanese wood-block prints and has scanned some into a lovely virtual museum. Most descriptive text is available in English (as well as Japanese of course). (via Yahoo New & Notable)

11% of the total weight of the cargo accompanying the San Francisco Symphony on tour in Europe is comprised of seven timpani. That’s 2,450 pounds of heavy duty percussion. Sheperding not only the musicians but also their most valuable possessions through a ten city, three week tour is a monumental task handled by the orchestra’s two operations managers. They are coordinating logistics for train, plane, and bus travel for the players, and truck, cargo plane, and ferry travel for the 11 tons of instruments and other necessities. Twenty-two violins arrived baked in Dublin (rosin cakes had melted and reformed), but no serious damage was found. Missed connections and airport security give the two coordinators much to worry over, but the show always goes on. (thanks Lynn!)

Swerve, a new milk-based drink from Coca-Cola, will be launched this summer to appeal to children and teens. A cow with dark glasses will pitch the new beverage which comes in chocolate, vanilla/banana and blueberry flavors.

Discussion about ambient devices made the Internet rounds earlier this year, and I was reminded of them again when Gizmodo mentioned them recently. My first ambient device was the LED on my phone when I interned at Lotus Technical Support in college. The color of the LED indicated the length of the caller hold queue. I thought the color ranged from green to yellow to orange — until the day they opened up all the trunk lines as an experiment and I saw the LED turn a bright, stress-inducing red. When I saw the orb from Ambient Devices, I started envisioning many useful products, most of which I’m sure have been thought of already. A baby monitor for moms who want to do yoga in peace and quiet, a thermometer for the doneness of your roast, a pollen count indicator (perhaps partially funded and branded by an allergy medicine company), moisture indicators for plants, color feedback on your target pulse rate while exercising. Imagine having a customizable glowing light or two on your wristwatch or jewelry that you could set to indicate whatever you wished. The concept also took me back to my minimal encouters with fuzzy logic, where computing doesn’t necessarily always result in a one or a zero. Ambient Devices’ orb FAQ is a fun read. Here’s some speculation on Apple’s glowing LED case and whether it will be an ambient device. And there was a Slashdot discussion on building your own device. Ambient technology continues the evolution to make the actual computer less obvious. And think of the potential art projects!

In a superbly unintentional publicity stunt for Meow Mix’s new kitty TV show, Meow Mix CEO Richard Thompson was bitten on the posterior by a Rottweiler.