February 2, 2010 – 7:44 pm
This semester (as time for me is broken into semesters) I’ll be working on taking a few documents through a multiplatform publishing work flow. The first objective will be take all the Leon stories from the 100 Days project and make them available on mobile, e-reader, and standard screen.
The core technologies are HTML, XML, CSS3, and javascript, with some dipping into Objective C for experiments with applications. I have mixed feelings about building device-specific apps but working with Xcode is fairly straightforward and the time spent won’t be wasted.
I was a little surprised at the ease with which EPUB handled html documents. Tinderbox, therefore, will play a key role in producing hypertext content. The content will then be tailored for mobile, iPad, web, and other reading devices. The territory looks pretty interesting at the moment.
January 12, 2010 – 6:59 am
Over the past several weeks I’ve been watching Journalism, the Humanities, and the Marketplace wonder about itself. We have Tiger Woods to watch and now a variety of gripes about the Edwards’ and “what was really going on.” The news this morning is a round table expressing justifications for the story. Nothing about trivia.
In the larger context, we need to think hard about markets in their broadest sense: ideas, goods and services, information, energy. The jobs figures still suck but in my estimation this has a lot to do with players sitting on their hands wondering what Mr/Ms Entertainment will do next, what new revelations will come, or about the fate of Google’s new phone. Google and Apple are apparently doing something, while, according to one speaker on a Sunday morning show, “businesses are reluctant . . . . and for good reason.” Nobody asked: what the hell are you talking about?
Kindle, Nook or Apple tablet? Should we wonder about the device already or about what goes in the thing: convention, links, other media. This headline from the Washington Post is an instance of a problem in logic: “U.S. job loss report is blow to still-fragile recovery” link. How does this make sense? The “report” is “blowing” the “recovery.”
One trend I’ve noticed in the camp who launched Obama into office is to kick back and wait for him to do something, to solve several pressing matters. A powerful narrative in the press (for most people this means TV World) at the moment is that Democrats will not come out for Congressional voting. Wow do we have short memories. Really, since when is everything Obama’s problem?
January 5, 2010 – 7:22 pm
Stacey Mason at HTLit asks an interesting question:
And then it occurred to me: Perhaps for the first time, we’re moving into narrative media that are not backwards-compatible. The written word can be spoken, the printed word written, movies can be translated to books, but games and hypertext narrative don’t go backwards.
I disagree but on nuanced questions.
I would submit that
1. The dramatic questions are different: what story would we tell with the latest rendering of Prince of Persia, given the game?
2. What path would we follow creating a script for the film version of Patchwork Girl? Or would we local a generalized core?
I would suggest that compatibility would work fine, if we synthesize PG and reconsider the narrative arc of the game. But these films would not “be” the original, as I disagree with the notion of adaptation by definition. There are no adaptations. There are narrative versions, however.
January 5, 2010 – 6:55 pm
Via Nick Montfort, we have Pall Thayer’s Microcodes, a wonderful presentation of micro programs. My favorite is Two of love:
}else{
sleep(22) && print “fun”;
}
Question: is Thayer’s work compatible with micro fiction or short poetry on the literary side. Intense. I love it
December 27, 2009 – 8:09 pm
The weekend incidents on flights tell a strange story. Here’s a bit from McCLatchey on the Sunday incident:
The latest scare aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 involved what the airline described as a “verbally disruptive” passenger and triggered an examination of baggage on the Detroit tarmac to determine if there were explosives on the plane.
Although the passenger spent an “unusually long time in the aircraft lavatory” – an echo of the Christmas day incident — he was suffering from legitimate illness and is not viewed as a terrorist threat, the Department of Homeland Security later said.
Anyone in the world can disrupt a security zone. It could be Iraq, Texas, London, a small flight. Once the troops leave, one person can bring the old anxiety back simply by waiting. This is untrue of battles, which end, but may indeed erupt years later in a different form. Has the definition of war been changed to involve internal states of being?
December 21, 2009 – 10:59 am
Alan Atkisson on Copenhagen
The world will never be the same.
But it’s the way that the world will never be the same that interests me, for the events of the past two weeks in Copenhagen signal not just a change in global climate politics, but a change in global politics, period. The primary outcome of these negotiations is not just the Copenhagen Accord, the relative merits and demerits of which will now be debated endlessly in the months and years ahead. The second, and likely more important, outcome is the global realization that the balance of things on this planet has shifted irrevocably. Copenhagen marks a phase shift in the way the world sees, understands, and governs itself.
December 21, 2009 – 8:56 am
Critical message from the Otto team:
OTTO, the Tunxis Art and Literary Journal, is seeking submissions from all members of the Tunxis community for the 2010 issue due out in April.
Submit your work by December 31 via email to otto dot tunxis at gmail dot com. Submit literature (creative or expository) as a Word or RTF attachment (please do not paste it into email). Submit art as TIFFs or JPGs (low res is ok for now). Please name your files with your last name and then a number or short title of your work: LastnameMystory.rtf or LastnameSelfportrait.jpg
December 19, 2009 – 4:07 pm
Susan Gibb’s Blueberries is up at the New River Review.
Sometimes I don’t wash myself for two days after making love. I’m afraid that if I rinse off the lingering scent of sex that I will disappear into the clearness of the water. That place where all the other men in my life have evaporated.
The story has edge and is a particular favorite of mine. The other accompanying works are by Jason Nelson and Roxanne Carter, just to name a few. We are definitely not done with hypertext.
December 19, 2009 – 3:08 pm
James Cameron’s Avatar, 
much like Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, takes computer generated graphics and human to digital gesture drama and expands the possibilities of filmic space. Films are learning what computer-based games have knows for years: that you can use the tools to envision creatures, characters, and worlds that simply cannot be done with scissors, lace, and painted cardboard. The movie has the look and feel of the worlds of Cyan and any number of computer and video games, complete with boss battles and level-design transitions. As I watched the film, I wondered what the future holds given the tools.
On the other hand, the story comes no where close to the wonder of the screen. I guess I might call Avatar a billion dollar cliche. The viewer knows what Avatar is coming in (war, greed, climate change, genetics) but I thought there would be at least some sophistication brought to accompany the high tech engine. This is a CG rendering of Dances with Wolves, an invader versus native story where the invaders must be dehumanized to humanize the indigenous people and this hammer home an ethic. But I’m already with that ethic. The evil corporation will take what it can’t negotiate from the nature-connected Na’vi by brute force to save the earth from its own disconnection. The corporation has military and genetic technology on its side; the Na’vi have their spiritualism, size, and ingenuity. Sully will fall in love with Neytiri and become a member of the clan and betray his “people” for the greater good. This premise is totally new. Sully, paused on a massive limb, is surrounded by luminous jelly fish, which is a sign of his promise to the people of Pandora. Haven’t seen that one before.
One greater issue with the story is history and perspective: no one seems to have much of it with the exception of the Na’vi. In this universe, corporations and their security forces have no sense that “We’ve actually done this before.” Earthers can travel to Pandora (such obscure names for places) for the required ore, which is incredibly valuable, using wonderful technology but other than technology the evil doers are never more than muscle heads, which, I believe, cheapens the narrative. It always strikes me as coincidental that the indigenous peoples’ sacred grounds are always right where the invaders need to go. We need grand conflict here but we don’t need to keep yanking out the same old rabbits.
As a final note, the first few minutes of ads were selling the Marines and the National Guard. Ironic? Not at all. These followed by two films that draw from Greek mythology. Fun fun.
December 4, 2009 – 12:47 pm
Physorg on the question of computer vision:
“Reverse engineering a biological visual system—a system with hundreds of millions of processing units—and building an artificial system that works the same way is a daunting task,” says Cox. “It is not enough to simply assemble together a huge amount of computing power. We have to figure out how to put all the parts together so that they can do what our brains can do.”
“While studying the brain has yielded critical information about how the brain is wired, we currently don’t have enough information to build a computer system that works like the brain does,” adds Pinto. “Even if we take all of the clues that we have available from experimental neuroscience, there is still an enormous range of possible models for us to explore.”
December 4, 2009 – 12:33 pm
Dave Winer makes a good point in a post on the identity of government
The cure, imho, is to create new business entities that serve the users first. Sure the shareholders make money, when you take a risk and produce a product or service that people want, that’s great and there must be rewards or people won’t risk. I’m a capitalist. But the things these companies are doing now is not capitalism. They know we don’t have time to understand all the ways they can screw each of us individually. If we did, there would be no time for living. So we should hire people to study what they’re doing and route around it. Either make it illegal, or start a co-op to offer the same service or product without the gotchas.
That’s the reasoning behind the health insurance “public option,” which is a damned good idea. We’ve tried it the way the insurance industry wants to do it, and the result is a lot of needless death, sickness, and wasted money. So, they can keep doing what they’re doing, but we’re going to pool our resources and self-insure. We could either form a new entity to do it, or we could use the one we already went to the trouble to create.
I’ve been complaining in other posts about how entities do business in the local village, what services are offered and how this is done or not done to service of a core need. What is capitalism? Is it making a living and providing service (insurance companies don’t wield scalpels) or is the business plan about money first? The role of government, in a definitional sense, also comes back to every congressperson’s role, as well.
December 3, 2009 – 8:49 pm
Dale Daugherty at O’Reilly writes,
On this same day, I heard from a physics teacher in California that he can’t access the Makezine.com site. He was trying to download a project plan for the Wooden Mini Yacht in Volume 20 of Make to use in his class. His school district uses software to block access to any sites that have a “blog.” The teacher said he calls up regularly to request access but even when he gets it, the change only lasts a few days and then the site is blocked again. It’s a second such comment made by a teacher in recent weeks so I don’t believe it’s unique to this school. This is a high school teacher seeking free resources on the Web to use with students in the classroom. It’s too bad that it’s so hard for him to do what he wants. It is just one example of how our educational system fails to grasp the fundamental uses of technology.
There are several complicated issues with technology in schools and Daugherty only scratches the surface. One of the issues at the college currently is the continual attack on our systems by malware, which makes our undernourished office computers nearly impossible to use for meaningful production.
November 28, 2009 – 9:00 am
Real Climate has posted a page for those looking for climate data.
Much of the discussion in recent days has been motivated by the idea that climate science is somehow unfairly restricting access to raw data upon which scientific conclusions are based. This is a powerful meme and one that has clear resonance far beyond the people who are actually interested in analysing data themselves. However, many of the people raising this issue are not aware of what and how much data is actually available.
Therefore, we have set up a page of data links to sources of temperature and other climate data, codes to process it, model outputs, model codes, reconstructions, paleo-records, the codes involved in reconstructions etc. We have made a start on this on a new Data Sources page, but if anyone has other links that we’ve missed, note them in the comments and we’ll update accordingly.
Canavan’s ‘Avatar’ and the War of Genres
Just a bit of Gerry Canavan on Avatar and the question of genre, re science fiction
The overall critique here makes sense. As I watched the film I never considered the genre really as science fiction but as straight forward “fantasy” as magic or “faith” is the core logic of the narrative.