Avatar

December 19, 2009 – 3:08 pm

James Cameron’s Avatar, avatar.jpgmuch 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.

By Steve :: Posted in Film :: Comments (1)

On Digital Vision

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.”

By Steve :: Posted in Epistemology, New Media :: Comments (0)

Health Care and the Role of Government

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.

By Steve :: Posted in Politics :: Comments (5)

Daugherty On Schools, Computers, and Papert

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.

By Steve :: Posted in New Media, Teaching :: Comments (0)

Real Climate’s Data Page

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.

By Steve :: Posted in Science :: Comments (0)

Performance

November 25, 2009 – 10:22 am

Lawrence Johnson on FB has sparked yet another conversation related to education and culture, drawing on an example of textbook company incentives and the seeming de-emphasis of the value of hard work required for excellence in learning: use this tool and student performance will improve. The conversation is proceeding but as I don’t like the FB firewall, I’ve decided to provide a more open discussion on the weblog.

From my point of view the United States is suffering two crises: a learning crisis and a governance crisis. The learning crises is described as a growing disconnect between higher and secondary education, the measurable lack of critical thinking skills of incoming freshman classes, and the amount of resources in education systems, which the current budget won’t really change. The second crises has to do with how we govern ourselves and the belief wall, where every issue and subject is viewed through the ideological glass. This crises is a long one. What’s the significant difference between the Conservative Coalitions now and for Roosevelt? Witness the current gripe on the right on the subject of the CRU Hack. The list of ergo propter hocks is astounding. The best writing on this is still Orwell. When a Congress person can claim miming a baby as grand appeal in the commons, the governance crises shines through in all its ironic illumination. What was it that Twain said about how fast lies can run?

Budgets are lots of things. They are expressions of value. They are also expressions of the future, as every budget will reflect the language of the next. I write this to suggest that the defense vs education budget is a statement of value in the marketplace of ideas and to also suggest that such a budget signals the root of several other problems not directly tied to line items.

In economic terms, things these days are overvalued, which is bad news for homeowners and solar cell makers. A computer’s value, for example, can be assessed by how it’s used and by its potential. Even the stingiest laptop can create what only a movie studio could do years ago. Laptops have lots of “potential” value that goes beyond their “market” value. The value of a thing is tied to the value of its potential, which, is, of course, difficult to turn into data, as good carpenters and surgeons know. We can, to extend the notion, re-conceptualize the value of a college degree to include the amount of effort students and faculty put into gaining learning vs. market vs. system costs. People who waste their time making minimum effort cost the public system more. If it’s a top dollar school, what is fifty thousand dollars of student effort even for best and brightest? If the answer is a grade, then individual grades are now worth $5,000 (and Shadegg would have received an F in public speaking class). But is the significance of learning tied somehow to the cost of lighting and the physical plant? Yes and No. The best answer is No.

Conclusion: Does the United States value education by investing and vesting in it? Not in my opinion. While most people agree that public education is a “need” we don’t really put the money behind it. But every politician will still claim the “need” and “value” of a college education. If you turned them around, however, they would be secretly tapping the keys to their cell phones and updating their Twitter accounts to assure their publics that they will never raise their taxes.

I often ask the question: what does an automobile really cost? This is tough as we would need to assess the value of things that aren’t cars but could be used to make them, from petroleum to the cost of electricity at a given time. Here’s another way of asking the question: what is the value in not making cars? Well, we saw how the bailout responded to that question. What, therefore, would be the value of not providing excellent learning opportunities for adults? What would be the answer to that? More money for defense, I assume.

I have some solutions to the learning crises but the governance crises would see them as anarchical. One item would be to base-line teaching pay at 60K starting but at the same time make education schools very difficult to enter. (My students and I came to the conclusion the other day that to raise pass rates all an institution has to do is triple tuition rates. It’s the same idea but with a different context.) The other incentive is to eliminate grading systems and move to performance measures described in narrative terms. Not A but “this is what this person did and can do,” given that forklift operators know how to drive forklifts and surgeons typically don’t slice into that 30% percent of the brain that they missed on the exam. This method would make learning transfer easier to understand grade to grade as it would involve answering the question why does grade 9 come before grade 10 in ways other than the obvious. There’s a fairly deep elitism in this proposition, but I don’t mind taking the heat for that.

By Steve :: Posted in Culture, Epistemology, Teaching :: Comments (0)

Buddha

November 22, 2009 – 9:02 pm

The buddha in me is burning.

By Steve :: Posted in Culture, Epistemology :: Comments (0)

History

November 22, 2009 – 7:08 pm

How the contexts of history repeat themselves.

At the outset, no one was sure the New Deal would work, but it did. Soon afterward, economist John Maynard Keynes provided the reasoning: Contrary to economic orthodoxy, government action and deficit spending are essential tools to combat the failure of the private economy in a depression.

The essence of the draw above from this San Francisco Chronicle article is not the cursory truth of the recovery but how it recalls structures in Congress at the time, such as the Conservative Coalition. Walker and Brechin are right to argue more now will probably be better than misguide frugality in the future.

Politically, it’s going to be tough to add more money to the economy. I watched the morning shows again and listened to foes blame just about everything on a “public option.” In this insipid, safe climate party politics isn’t about the issues but about future narratives, which is how the sin curve of Congressional power undulates.

By Steve :: Posted in Culture :: Comments (0)

The Moon in Poetry (and Code)

November 13, 2009 – 6:07 am

I was particularly taken by the poetry of Li Po and Du Fu after a recent discussion with the World Literature students. There’s something about “talking it out.” I’ve been involved in reading Chinese poetry over the last few years in an effort to see and hear better. The study of these poems is linked to the study of code, particularly with the new media students who are writing in the Inform 7 environment, and my independent study with Kristen, a student in fiction, who, at the moment, is examining Stanley Elkin’s technique of compression in A Poetics for Bullies.

Consider Li Po’s My Feelings

Facing my wine, unaware of darkness growing,
Falling flowers cover my robes.
Drunk I rise, step on the moon in the creek–
Birds are turning back now,
men too are growing fewer.

Li Po’s is a striking moon, as this moon is a reflection and, at the same time, written as the moon itself, the moon but not the moon, a perfect reflection or “not moon.” The poet steps on the moon and, of course, shatters the perfect reflection. In this vast but little poem, Li Po supplies a definition of poetry: poetry is “the moon in the creek.”

The moon returns in the poetry of Du Fu. Here’s Moonlit Night, the translations of which differ greatly and conflate interpretation (it’s always a little foolish to take translations too seriously):

The moon tonight in Fu-chou
She watches alone from her chamber,
While faraway I think lovingly on daughters and sons,
Who do not yet know how to remember Ch’ang-an.
In scented fog, her cloudlike hairdo moist,
In its clear beams, her jade-white arms are cold.
When shall we lean in the empty window,
Moonlit together, its light drying traces of tears.

The poet’s wife is drawn with memorial closeness or nearness, as if the poet and his wife are in he same room. The poet is, however, behind enemy lines, cut off from his family by An Lu-shan. In the poem, the poet isn’t thinking about his wife. He’s “with” her in the form of a poetic image. Rather, he’s thinking about “daughters and sons” who are too young to write poetry and thus “don’t know how to remember” him.

I can only imagine the chunks of marble and stone dust about their desks, even if Li Po could hammer them out quickly, as legend has it. But the process and the work reminds me of work the students are doing writing convincing worlds in Inform. These students, much like student poets, are trying to capture reality in their room work, creating objects in rooms that could be written in more compressed manner. Indeed, this is one of the links between poetry and code. The writer doesn’t try to recreate reality, but writes with an efficiency that they think best reflects the world. Consider John Timmons’ Arrest example in Inform 7

[Create a type of a person that can be applied to different persons.]
The guilty is a person that varies.

[Create a new verb for arresting persons.]
Arresting is an action applying to one visible thing. Understand “arrest [someone]” as arresting.

[As the game starts, we randomly select one of the persons in the game as being guilty - but not the player character.]

When play begins:
change the guilty to a random person who is not the player.

[This provides a clue to the guilty person simply by examining them.]
Instead of examining the guilty:
say “[The noun] certainly looks fiendish!”

The Foyer is a room.

The gun is in the Foyer.

Joe and Ed are men in the Foyer.

Sue and Mary are women in the Foyer.

[A new rule for arresting the guilty party and provide actions as appropriate.]

Instead of arresting a person who is guilty:
say “‘[The noun],’ you slowly begin, ‘you have the right to remain silent…’”

[A new rule for trying to arrest a person who is not the guilty person.]
Instead of arresting a person:
say “[The noun] is not who you are looking for.”

Timmons supplies four lines of code that create the world for the player: the foyer, the gun, Joe and Ed, and Sue and Mary. The gun, however, is the key image. The gun turns a potential evening out or return from a movie into a “problem.” It’s a clue that signifies something wrong in the world. But the gun doesn’t have to be held. The gun doesn’t have to do anything but provide a clue. We might add that Joe is tall and keeps touching his ear and that Ed has a monkey on his shoulder. But the monkey won’t have to be written into the code as an object, as the monkey merely gives Ed a little flavor, a little character. If we did want the monkey to do something we wouldn’t create a monkey in Inform, we would simply identify a monkey as an animal and give that animal a description as close to rhesus as possible or, as Timmons does with a dog in this snippet, write:

Ralphie is a male animal in the Kitchen. The description is “Ralphie, a black lab, sleeps quietly in the corner.” Understand “dog” as Ralphie.

In other words: follow the rules of Li Po and his moon.

By Steve :: Posted in Fiction and Poetry, New Media :: Comments (1)

eLit Camp

November 9, 2009 – 8:48 pm

Come to eLit Camp. It’s going to be very cool.elitcamp.jpg

E-Lit Camp is an informal weekend gathering for writers, artists, and programmers currently involved or interested in electronic literature. Work on your projects, give a presentation, collaborate, and learn from others.

If you’re a writer, artist, journalist, coder, or some combination of the above, E-Lit camp is for you. Have a project? Bring it. Don’t have one? Bring your skills and creativity. Fiction is fab; documentary is cool. Bring your camera, laptop, projector, ideas, and anything else you need to be creative. Bring electronic works, Interactive Fictions, and videogames that you like, so we can try them out!

This is an Unconference, loosely based on BarCamp and RailsCamp. Think of it as a weekend-long writers colony for electronic literature. If you have something to share, bring it along; there’s no approval process.

One evening, some of us are hoping to see “Sleep No More”, a hyperdrama at the American Repertory Theatre.

Time: Friday afternoon, 11 December, to Sunday night, 13 December.

Location: Eastgate Systems, Watertown Mass.

Registration info

By Steve :: Posted in General Literature, Hypertext, New Media :: Comments (1)

Steps

November 6, 2009 – 3:36 pm

1. Open export folder for Cadif
2. Open iPhone and story.css in editor
3. Open Tinderbox file for Cadif (it synthesizes poetry and prose)
4. Pick up on last action before leaving to blow leaves, which was to find individual poem spaces and crowd the stanzas
5. Click note and open html view and reduce tags to appropriate breaks
6. Continue till all spacing is correct (some tweaking must be done in the individual export files)
7. Go back to css and consider the aesthetics of color and font (1em or .9em?)
8. Persist
9. Remember to go back into html individuals and tweak whatever needs tweaking

By Steve :: Posted in Fiction and Poetry, Hypertext :: Comments (0)

SciFi Media Making

November 3, 2009 – 7:56 pm

Stories set in the future have the tendency to envision innovations in media (so does CSI, which is very much SciFi). Nell’s interactive book in Stephenson’s The Diamond Age is an example, using most technology we know now in interesting ways (speculative applications), such as real-time production content. Minority Reports gesture media, of course, is another speculative performance of media use but really of content making. I mentioned that my son and I were watching Spock’s Brain on Twitter the other day and Dennis Jerz made this comment in the Twitter/Facebook comment space:

I love this show for Chekhov’s technology-assisted “Which planet do we search?” presentation on the bridge. Yes, this episode was silly, but the bridge viewscreen does quite a bit in this show. We see some long shots of an alien spaceship, there’s a close-up of Kirk with stars moving behind his head, and thankfully there are no bullet lists in the 23rd century!

I mentioned back:

You’re right. We can only imagine from what we have. I was thinking about this in another episode when a piece of static text went up on the screen above Spock’s console a la pdf and thought, that would have been better as a video or hypertext. It might have been the M-5 episode, but I can’t remember.

The “no bullet list” item Dennis identified got me thinking about other stories where characters make, save, or interact with media not necessarily with devices. Babylon 5’s crystals (I can’t remember others at the moment other than the news broadcasts). I had noted the orange orbit/planet graphic Dennis remarked on and many others as my son and I have been watching the three season Classic Star Trek, already mentioning the near 16:9 main view screen of the Bridge on Twitter a few months back.

I had thought two things about the episode graphic: that’s really about background interest and not really effective as a display as the subject under discussion is fairly complex: Spock’s brain must be on one of three planets and what’s the evidence for the best answer. A graphic of the Sigma Draconis planets in a row doesn’t really provide significant assistance. But it is evidence of production value and thinking about how the Bridge view screen may be used as a static media display.

On FB Dennis mentions many other examples of media making and interaction, including DS9’s writing PADD and the holonovel of Voyager. Dennis writes:

do you remember the alien abduction episode of TNG that had a bunch of people using the holodeck to reconstruct a recurring dream?

My wife and I make fun of that specific scene as the holodeck seems to know exactly what’s on Riker and Co’s mind: “make a flat table” and the deck makes a dentist chair.

By Steve :: Posted in Media Space :: Comments (1)

Narrative Moments

October 25, 2009 – 7:46 pm

When we open up Kalidasa’s Sakuntala and the Ring of Recollection we’ll ask a simple but important question: what is the process by which the King enters the hermitage? It’s a pretty simple context: if the king doesn’t go into the “tranquil place” of the hermitage, he’ll never encounter Sakuntala. I won’t necessarily ask whether the hermitage itself is significant as a setting, though it may matter, as the hermitage is a “tranquil place.” As we all know from stories, tranquil places are a great places to get the heart thumping.

Wild rice grains under trees
where parrots nest in hollow trunks,
stones stained by the dark oil
of crushed ingudi nuts,
. . .

I’ll ask the students to consider how the king progresses from outside to inside.

I might ask about about the hunt, as hunts are great metaphors for conflict and narrative development. The hunt has a subject. The hunt has an object. The hunt has ritual. The space in Kalidasa’s work is ripe. The king is hunting at the top of the play and within the circle of the hunt is the grove wherein is the hermitage, which will be penetrated by the king, and once inside the hermitage the king will assume a different shape and he will penetrate still deeper into the circle taking us with him. Prior to entering, the king says, “We shouldn’t disturb the grove.” He tells his charioteer that he shouldn’t enter the hermitage with his hunting gear. At the appropriate time, the king says, “This gateway marks the sacred ground. I will enter.” Ah, the crossing.

Hopefully the students’ reading of the Mahabharata will assist them in their reading of the king’s thinking about entering the grove and his little twinge: ” . . . do I feel a false omen of love / or does fate have doors everywhere.” Sometimes we wonder about the significance of our actions, especially when we don’t know what’s beyond the door. If nothing of consequence occurs, no worries; if consequence follows, then we have narrative importance.

By Steve :: Posted in Fiction and Poetry :: Comments (2)

On Sleep No More

October 24, 2009 – 7:33 pm

Mark Bernstein on Sleep No More:

This was extraordinary theater, an unforgettable penetration of the fourth wall. It is also extraordinarily difficult. It’s not improv: the story, it turns out, is scene 21 of Woyzeck. You’re acting across from a stranger. A different stranger every night. In a closed room. The rules are unclear, we’ve just started. It seems that anything can happen. And there’s no distance at all; the acting and the sets have to work from the back of the room and they have to work if you’re standing right there, reading the slip of paper someone left on the dresser, feeling the actress stroke the back of our neck.

This sounds really exciting.

By Steve :: Posted in Fiction and Poetry, New Media :: Comments (0)

RIP Knickerbocker

October 23, 2009 – 3:03 pm

When Knickerbocker was a puppy, he’d dash around and knock the hell out of our older terrier X, Arrow, unmindful of her own age and ricketiness. Like all Labs he couldn’t help but fling himself into everything. He had a few good years after a serving of diabetes, back troubles, and arthritis and eventually couldn’t cope with his own size, and eating wasn’t that easy either. He’s passed the fun onto two cats. And so a toast to Knickerbocker, 1998-2009.

RIPKnicky.jpg
By Steve :: Posted in General Comment :: Comments (1)