29 December 2007
Priorities
Whatever you're doing now, stop it. I don't know what strange trail of links and memes led you here like a trail of breadcrumbs through the dark forest of the web, but you need to put them aside immediately, and go read Pinakothek. I mean, seriously, stop reading this, click on the link (the underlined word at the end of the previous sentence), and read that blog. All of it. If you aren't impressed with that prose, you need to go to the hospital and donate your eyes to someone who will put them to proper use.
Metal Fever
I'm linking "Metal Fingers in My Body" mostly for the following quote:
I ranted about this a few times in the past, but who the hell listens to me? But said article provides the only positive note I can find in China's firewalling of wikipedia. In fact, I will delude myself into believing they block the resource only to prevent me from getting my blood pressure up the next time I find myself looking at that damned graph.
As to the article itself, I don't know a delicate way to phrase this. Mr. Levy says, "I believe that sexbots will change our perceptions of human relationships." Perhaps I'm missing something here, but what he's describing looks for the world like using more sophisticated technology for the purpose of jerking off, and if any group will focus a disproportionate amount of their time to said pursuit, it's those who work in the technology industry. I would even say that the necessity that's nominally the mother of inventions is the need to enhance the inventor's onanistic practices. I'm not criticizing or judging anyone. Lord knows I've spent countless lonely evenings thinking of great technological advances, to the point where I began to read microprocessor specifications and A.I. research summaries with an unhealthy gleam in my eye. But let's remember what we're saying here. It's still just a spectacular advancement in porn. If it leads to real, useful, world-changing advancements, wonderful, but for now, it's just a more complicated way for nerds to beat off.
Personally I do not have much faith in the uncanny valley. The original publication on this topic (dating from 1970) was not based on any empirical research ... it was more an intuitive feeling expressed by Masahiro Mori that has since been hyped into an assumption of fact.Every mention of interaction, sexual or other, with robots/androids seemingly requires a link to the wikipedia entry on "The Uncanny Valley." Doing so indicates that you're cool enough to be linked on boing boing and Metafilter.
I ranted about this a few times in the past, but who the hell listens to me? But said article provides the only positive note I can find in China's firewalling of wikipedia. In fact, I will delude myself into believing they block the resource only to prevent me from getting my blood pressure up the next time I find myself looking at that damned graph.
As to the article itself, I don't know a delicate way to phrase this. Mr. Levy says, "I believe that sexbots will change our perceptions of human relationships." Perhaps I'm missing something here, but what he's describing looks for the world like using more sophisticated technology for the purpose of jerking off, and if any group will focus a disproportionate amount of their time to said pursuit, it's those who work in the technology industry. I would even say that the necessity that's nominally the mother of inventions is the need to enhance the inventor's onanistic practices. I'm not criticizing or judging anyone. Lord knows I've spent countless lonely evenings thinking of great technological advances, to the point where I began to read microprocessor specifications and A.I. research summaries with an unhealthy gleam in my eye. But let's remember what we're saying here. It's still just a spectacular advancement in porn. If it leads to real, useful, world-changing advancements, wonderful, but for now, it's just a more complicated way for nerds to beat off.
08 December 2007
What's Up?
I just chanced upon Pinakothek a little while ago. Only two posts, but they're both damn fine reads.
Somewhere in the recent quick updates, Firefox fixed the arrow keys and the page up/down home/end things. I reached the point where I would try to scroll with the arrows and Slashdot would go to the bottom of the long-ass page (and good luck finding which iteration of "first post" or "Natalie Portman" you were skipping by looking for the actual discussion). Today, I pressed the down arrow, immediately said, "Oh shit," and then noticed that the screen merely advanced one line. At first, I was delighted. Then I realized that I was getting really excited over the computer doing something that might reasonably be expected. OK, perhaps you wouldn't expect the windows version of a program to do what the mac and linux versions do, or to do what every other program on windows does, but I have higher standards. Now, if I could figure out why the mouse goes absolutely apeshit every couple hours, I might finally make peace with this damned machine.
Long read of the week: Lester Bangs interviews Brian Eno. Eno made me want to be a musician, and still inspires me to think about that stuff. In fact, the ideas I heard him espouse led to my interest in the technology that would make such ideas feasible, and that, in turn, led to my studies and career in computer science. Then, at one point, I realized that what I liked more than the music itself was the description of the music. I purchased many obscure LPs, sometimes spending a great deal of time and money searching them out and badgering record store clerks to order them in for me. Almost none of them lived up to the expectations the reviews created. I'll extend that a little further, and say that software development went that same way. The expectations I had for tools, languages, methodologies, etc. were never matched by experience. I like the aesthetics of code, but actually trying to find something that needs to be written leaves me asking myself why I bother. I had a notion to write a version of vi for a 6809 machine I owned over twenty years ago. There's a nice emulator, and I have some development tools for the platform. But really, why would I do that? Vim has been ported to every platform I'm likely to encounter.
So, what did we learn today? I learned that writing is more interesting than music, software, or games. As wonderful as Eno's music is, it's more interesting to hear his theories and observations about composing and recording (or any other topic he chooses to expound upon). I learned that running jokes have finite lifespans, after which they are no longer amusing to sober, sane individuals. I learned that just because something is conceivably possible it's not automatically a good idea. I also learned that a small bag of nacho cheese Doritos will cause strong recollections of home, and that writing a concluding paragraph the way I was taught in middle school kind of blows. Fuck it. There's maybe five of you that will ever glance at this page, and at most, three of you even scroll this far down. All semester, we've struggled with trying to impart the skill of the five-paragraph essay to the freshmen, and then I recalled that in many, many years of public school, I never really mastered the format myself, and many of my classmates had an ever weaker grasp of the subject. If Chinese students have managed for over 5,000 years without that skill, I'm not going to push it. I'd rather they spoke out loud in oral class, instead of handing me notes that said they don't know how to "talk good enough English." I need to sleep now.
Somewhere in the recent quick updates, Firefox fixed the arrow keys and the page up/down home/end things. I reached the point where I would try to scroll with the arrows and Slashdot would go to the bottom of the long-ass page (and good luck finding which iteration of "first post" or "Natalie Portman" you were skipping by looking for the actual discussion). Today, I pressed the down arrow, immediately said, "Oh shit," and then noticed that the screen merely advanced one line. At first, I was delighted. Then I realized that I was getting really excited over the computer doing something that might reasonably be expected. OK, perhaps you wouldn't expect the windows version of a program to do what the mac and linux versions do, or to do what every other program on windows does, but I have higher standards. Now, if I could figure out why the mouse goes absolutely apeshit every couple hours, I might finally make peace with this damned machine.
Long read of the week: Lester Bangs interviews Brian Eno. Eno made me want to be a musician, and still inspires me to think about that stuff. In fact, the ideas I heard him espouse led to my interest in the technology that would make such ideas feasible, and that, in turn, led to my studies and career in computer science. Then, at one point, I realized that what I liked more than the music itself was the description of the music. I purchased many obscure LPs, sometimes spending a great deal of time and money searching them out and badgering record store clerks to order them in for me. Almost none of them lived up to the expectations the reviews created. I'll extend that a little further, and say that software development went that same way. The expectations I had for tools, languages, methodologies, etc. were never matched by experience. I like the aesthetics of code, but actually trying to find something that needs to be written leaves me asking myself why I bother. I had a notion to write a version of vi for a 6809 machine I owned over twenty years ago. There's a nice emulator, and I have some development tools for the platform. But really, why would I do that? Vim has been ported to every platform I'm likely to encounter.
So, what did we learn today? I learned that writing is more interesting than music, software, or games. As wonderful as Eno's music is, it's more interesting to hear his theories and observations about composing and recording (or any other topic he chooses to expound upon). I learned that running jokes have finite lifespans, after which they are no longer amusing to sober, sane individuals. I learned that just because something is conceivably possible it's not automatically a good idea. I also learned that a small bag of nacho cheese Doritos will cause strong recollections of home, and that writing a concluding paragraph the way I was taught in middle school kind of blows. Fuck it. There's maybe five of you that will ever glance at this page, and at most, three of you even scroll this far down. All semester, we've struggled with trying to impart the skill of the five-paragraph essay to the freshmen, and then I recalled that in many, many years of public school, I never really mastered the format myself, and many of my classmates had an ever weaker grasp of the subject. If Chinese students have managed for over 5,000 years without that skill, I'm not going to push it. I'd rather they spoke out loud in oral class, instead of handing me notes that said they don't know how to "talk good enough English." I need to sleep now.
25 November 2007
Ionosphere
After I posted the link to BLDGBLOG last night, Geoff Manaugh came right back today with a long article about shipping container architecture, which also fascinates me. I can very easily imagine a subgenre of architecture-obsessed science fiction, though I pray it will not have a "-punk" label.
Some twenty-five or thirty years ago, I went to my first estate sale. My mother took me to a big house, and we wandered around, looking at the possessions some deceased man's family no longer wished to keep. I had a small amount of cash from my lunch money savings (I went without eating or drinking every single day until I got home, and pocketed the quarters) and a sawbuck my grandmother gave me for my birthday. The kind old widow who was parting with her late husband's worldly goods half-heartedly bargained with me until the arithmetic would allow me to purchase both a banjo and a shortwave radio. She said the old man had only used the radio tune in WWV and reset all the clocks in the house when daylight savings time began or ended. While she explained that, she and my mother rolled their eyes, agreeing that men have strange obsessions when kept in the house for too long.
Later, a drummer I went to high school with also turned out to own a shortwave set. We compared ideas about the best use for such a thing. I mostly tried to find amusing programs or decipher numbers stations. He monkeyed with the controls to make odd noises, and said it was better than the cheap synthesizers available at the time. As the radio I had featured a quarter-inch earphone plug (the same size as an electric guitar) I incorporated it into my musical career.
Every few months, until I moved out of my house suddenly a couple of years ago, I would drag that radio out and try to find proper antenna and ground connections, but there was less and less to be found by way of signals. Mostly religious broadcasts and the BBC was all I found at the last. Anyway, the other justification I came up with for keeping the thing was as a source for samples I could incorporate into musical compositions. There are a lot of web sites where such samples can be found now, so that notion is quashed to the point where I don't even try to look at the handheld radios on display over at Hymall.
Today, someone mentioned The Radio Kitchen on Metafilter. It's run by a man known only as "The Professor" and is a vast treasure of recordings of long-distance radio broadcasts. I also love the pictures of vintage receivers that surround the page.
Bear with me a moment now, because I'm going to try and connect all this stuff into the big concept I see it as fitting into, like a big puzzle. As we, humanity, progress into the future, things change. Technology advances, and radio is forgotten. Notions of living space change, and dwellings evolve from four-bedroom standalone ranch-styles in the suburbs to repurposed shipping containers hanging on the backs of billboards or the rafters of shopping mall parking garages. Notions of personal space and privacy change. Maybe more and more of our belongings will exist only virtually, and "real life" homes will only be places to sleep and have sex, all other activities being open to public scrutiny. We might move away from George Carlin's view of having a place to keep the stuff we accumulate, and toward an existence where the online and offline merge, the division blurring, until we come to view chat sessions and web pages as places in the same sense as the diner on the corner or the mall are places.
It's starting already. Customer service is an automated voice at a toll-free number, advising you to go to the company web site to seek assistance. Large corporations find the need to set policy for employees doing work inside Second Life. We're already in the future William Gibson predicted (and many pooh-pooh'ed in the early 1980's), or well on the way to it. The only questions that remain is how we will all react, and who will successfully adapt.
Some twenty-five or thirty years ago, I went to my first estate sale. My mother took me to a big house, and we wandered around, looking at the possessions some deceased man's family no longer wished to keep. I had a small amount of cash from my lunch money savings (I went without eating or drinking every single day until I got home, and pocketed the quarters) and a sawbuck my grandmother gave me for my birthday. The kind old widow who was parting with her late husband's worldly goods half-heartedly bargained with me until the arithmetic would allow me to purchase both a banjo and a shortwave radio. She said the old man had only used the radio tune in WWV and reset all the clocks in the house when daylight savings time began or ended. While she explained that, she and my mother rolled their eyes, agreeing that men have strange obsessions when kept in the house for too long.
Later, a drummer I went to high school with also turned out to own a shortwave set. We compared ideas about the best use for such a thing. I mostly tried to find amusing programs or decipher numbers stations. He monkeyed with the controls to make odd noises, and said it was better than the cheap synthesizers available at the time. As the radio I had featured a quarter-inch earphone plug (the same size as an electric guitar) I incorporated it into my musical career.
Every few months, until I moved out of my house suddenly a couple of years ago, I would drag that radio out and try to find proper antenna and ground connections, but there was less and less to be found by way of signals. Mostly religious broadcasts and the BBC was all I found at the last. Anyway, the other justification I came up with for keeping the thing was as a source for samples I could incorporate into musical compositions. There are a lot of web sites where such samples can be found now, so that notion is quashed to the point where I don't even try to look at the handheld radios on display over at Hymall.
Today, someone mentioned The Radio Kitchen on Metafilter. It's run by a man known only as "The Professor" and is a vast treasure of recordings of long-distance radio broadcasts. I also love the pictures of vintage receivers that surround the page.
Bear with me a moment now, because I'm going to try and connect all this stuff into the big concept I see it as fitting into, like a big puzzle. As we, humanity, progress into the future, things change. Technology advances, and radio is forgotten. Notions of living space change, and dwellings evolve from four-bedroom standalone ranch-styles in the suburbs to repurposed shipping containers hanging on the backs of billboards or the rafters of shopping mall parking garages. Notions of personal space and privacy change. Maybe more and more of our belongings will exist only virtually, and "real life" homes will only be places to sleep and have sex, all other activities being open to public scrutiny. We might move away from George Carlin's view of having a place to keep the stuff we accumulate, and toward an existence where the online and offline merge, the division blurring, until we come to view chat sessions and web pages as places in the same sense as the diner on the corner or the mall are places.
It's starting already. Customer service is an automated voice at a toll-free number, advising you to go to the company web site to seek assistance. Large corporations find the need to set policy for employees doing work inside Second Life. We're already in the future William Gibson predicted (and many pooh-pooh'ed in the early 1980's), or well on the way to it. The only questions that remain is how we will all react, and who will successfully adapt.
07 October 2007
03 October 2007
Are we there yet?
One of my recurring obsessions is with the division between public and private space and the mindset shift as one moves from one to the other. Sitting at home in your bedroom reading a book is different from sitting in a laundromat reading a book, or even sitting in the lobby of a hotel reading a book. Even if you have a comfortable chair and the temperature is just proper, you're visible. You aren't alone, even if you're the only one there.
Another idea I can't seem to divest myself of is the perceptions of retail space installations. I've worked in retail, and seen the shitty plywood/cheapest-ass carpet assemblies that serve as platforms for mannequins to stand on, and yet, they look a little magical when I'm wandering through the aisles, contemplating how to get the mannequin out to my car without being caught (there was one in particular that I would've paid big money for, just because it had a facial expression that messed with my brain every time I passed by on my way to the stationery aisle).
So, I read all the related links to this story of a group of artists that covertly built an apartment in a shopping mall in Providence. Actually, I read a bit of the original article last night, then left it when I was called to the other room. I woke three times during the night, convinced that I had some deep memory of a similar meme. Then, I recalled that William Gibson had a bit in one of his novels about people building makeshift homes in Tokyo train stations, or something similar. Every notion I've had for a science-fiction plot line turns out to have already been covered in one of his stories already. I would suggest that explaining the mechanism by which this coincidence occurred might be a suitable concept to base a story on, but I'm sure his next manuscript already has it penciled in the margins (he writes on an old manual typewriter, you know).
4 October 2007 9:43 AM
UPDATE:
I almost forgot this bit. BLDGBLOG had a mention of the A.I.R. unit, which is a lightweight "deployable condo unit." I could easily see something like this being covertly stuck to the back corner of a strip mall, or a few of them being placed together to form a community on some interstitial bit of land, the kind of place where exact ownership of that spot is not easily determined, and maybe not interesting to anyone else. The diagrams look a bit luxurious for my ideas, but something along these lines, discretely attached to the back of a bus station, Shoney's, or interstate rest area, would be as cool as the club house in the mall garage loft.
Another idea I can't seem to divest myself of is the perceptions of retail space installations. I've worked in retail, and seen the shitty plywood/cheapest-ass carpet assemblies that serve as platforms for mannequins to stand on, and yet, they look a little magical when I'm wandering through the aisles, contemplating how to get the mannequin out to my car without being caught (there was one in particular that I would've paid big money for, just because it had a facial expression that messed with my brain every time I passed by on my way to the stationery aisle).
So, I read all the related links to this story of a group of artists that covertly built an apartment in a shopping mall in Providence. Actually, I read a bit of the original article last night, then left it when I was called to the other room. I woke three times during the night, convinced that I had some deep memory of a similar meme. Then, I recalled that William Gibson had a bit in one of his novels about people building makeshift homes in Tokyo train stations, or something similar. Every notion I've had for a science-fiction plot line turns out to have already been covered in one of his stories already. I would suggest that explaining the mechanism by which this coincidence occurred might be a suitable concept to base a story on, but I'm sure his next manuscript already has it penciled in the margins (he writes on an old manual typewriter, you know).
4 October 2007 9:43 AM
UPDATE:
I almost forgot this bit. BLDGBLOG had a mention of the A.I.R. unit, which is a lightweight "deployable condo unit." I could easily see something like this being covertly stuck to the back corner of a strip mall, or a few of them being placed together to form a community on some interstitial bit of land, the kind of place where exact ownership of that spot is not easily determined, and maybe not interesting to anyone else. The diagrams look a bit luxurious for my ideas, but something along these lines, discretely attached to the back of a bus station, Shoney's, or interstate rest area, would be as cool as the club house in the mall garage loft.
08 September 2007
"I" is for "I don't know if it counts as irony or not."
It took the better part of two weeks, but bittorrent finally coughed up the second half of "No Maps for these Territories" this afternoon. I saw the first half, which was not marked as "part one of two" in the listing, and then waited not-so-patiently for the rest to download (after I googled the torrent out of another site entirely). Anyway, I watched the rest of it as soon as it finished downloading, and at the very end, after all the credits finished rolling (and I watched them to try and discern who did the music that played over said ending credits) there were two URLs displayed for a few moments before the video ended. One was the site for the film itself, and the other was www.atomcandy.com. The latter gave me the message: "The server at landing.domainsponsor.com is taking too long to respond." Since the title of the page is "Search the web" I'm just as glad nothing showed up, because I know the idea is for a blinking, flash-polluted advertisement asking too much money for the domain. In fact, whoever purchases the name is likely to get sued by some real candy manufacturer who has been selling "Atom Candies" since early 1946. You know the things, red dye #2 color and artificial cinnamon flavoring. Maybe you recall getting sick from eating too many of them while you absent-mindedly skimmed a yellowing copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland.
Or maybe that was just me. I still feel queasy when I smell those candies.
Or maybe that was just me. I still feel queasy when I smell those candies.
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