Culture Hunting

I'm avoiding the Super Bowl today. I'm not at the same level in terms of football as I am for baseball, and my teams dropped out of the playoffs is the championships (The Pack and Pats). So while I'm cleaning the house - I'm taking breaks.

I have a few favorite jumping off points for wandering the internet. The Verge is a great technology blog and podcast - the tagline is that it's about technology-culture and culture-culture. Digg was an old favorite that was growing stale, but was relaunched and has, recently, provided many a great starting links. All Things D is the New York Times tech blog, and has a Must Read section which aggregates tech writing from others. So where did I end up?

About a year ago, Google launched a video aggregator along the lines of TED - it's called Solve for X, which is full of inspiring techie video presentations. The one that I connected yesterday was by Anthony Sutera, who may lack something in the area of charisma, but his company's research and product sure sound pretty cool: "The nanoparticles in the spray act as nanocapacitors that work without producing the heat waste that make normal antennas less efficient." I've been having no end of problems with the Wi-Fi at the Museum and can only imagine how we might increase the efficiency of our wireless tech while minimizing the impact on our urban landscape and architecture.

I had found Solve for X some months ago when a TED Talk by Max Little was cross-posted there - a video about how to test for Parkinson's Disease by making a phone call. Which got me thinking about my Dad, which got me thinking about where we might go on our next outing, which got me thinking about Taiwanese food - I'm hoping to try Street Food in San Mateo. Then I caught a bit of an interview with Eddie Huang on NPR and found this series of video about Taiwanese street food called Fresh Off the Boat (FOB - NSFW warning):

I truly enjoyed the videos, crude as they were, and I loved the pay-off in the third part where Eddie and his Dad get some food, play some basketball, and visit his grandfather's tomb. Eddie has a Taiwanese street food place in New York call Baohaus, where he makes pork buns and other specialties.

My friend Peter has a license plate that says BOWHAUS, cause his dogs are often passengers in his mini-van. We were were in Boston in December, we had a great lunch at Myers + Chang in the South End, a Taiwanese-Asian-fusion place that we really enjoyed. While watching the FOB video embedded above, he sent me the car video embedded below - and recalling his penchant for Dan Dan noodles, I sent him the FOB link. I'm afraid he did not enjoy the Eddie Huang show. Oh well.

We're planning a trip to Italy, and Peter wants to take a side trip to Maranello to visit the Ferrari Museum. The Ferrari video reminded me that the Audi TT Car Club is about to shut down. It's been about a decade since I started posting there and almost nine years since I bought the TT. When the shutdown notice went up, I took a few minutes to go through some of my old posts and remember all the conversations and the community we had there. A bit sad, but the TT marches on.

I thought back on my time at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum and how that got me into teaching. How the teaching moved me to Berkeley, and then I ended up back in a museum in Oakland. We are working on a refresh of our web site, so I am constantly on the lookout for cool museum web sties - and this one is a way up there:

It's about how technology can extend the art experience, and create something similar enough and different enough that it is a complimentary thing. It's about collecting culture, high culture or low culture, and sharing those stories - which is not all that different than car experiences or food experiences.