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November 30, 2005

Firestarter

This winter season if updates to this blog stop for an extended period you may plausibly attribute it to this cause: I have burned the house down. I really look forward to cold weather because I love building fires -- stoking, proding, accelerating them. I had my cord of wood delivered in September when it was still 80 out. But, man, I screw up one out of every five fires. Usually I know why: too windy out, didn't heat the flue up enough, ember torched the rug -- that sort of thing. But there's that one instance out of, say, ten when I can't explain why the house is filling with smoke. Like tonight, when I had to scurry around ripping the smoke detectors from the ceiling. I did everything right. Might it have something to do with the fact that there are two fireplaces -- one right below the other -- that feed into the same chimney? Some sort of backdraft coming in through the other fireplace? Or something with starting a fire with a not-completely-burnt log from a prior fire? Perhaps the arsonist is just an idiot. Is that it?

Posted at 7:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Topic: Science/Tech

November 29, 2005

Set it to purée

"Now the making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many do's and don't's. First of all you're using someone else's poetry to express how you feel. This is a very delicate thing." - Rob Gordon, High Fidelity

What's more fun than making a music mix? Making it via e-mail with friends, of course -- especially friends with extremely different musical perspectives. So we did. The rules of the game were that we would rotate theme selection and then pick songs one after another. You didn't have to defend your selection (though some of them begged defense) but each person got one veto per mix. After looking at these mixes I'm sure you wish you had a few too.

Guilty!
The Top 15 Choons You Will Rock Out To Till The Day You Die.
(but won't admit publicly...until now)

• Unbelievable - EMF (Unbelievable [single], 1990)
• The Stroke - Billy Squier (Don't Say No, 1990)
• Night Fever - Bee Gees (Saturday Night Fever: The Original Movie Soundtrack, 1977)
  
• Fire It Up - Busta Ryhmes (Turn It Up/Fire It Up [single], 1998)
• The Devil Went Down To Georgia - The Charlie Daniels Band (Million Mile Reflections, 1979)
  
• Parents Just Don't Understand - DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince (He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper, 1988)
  
• Here I Go Again - Whitesnake (Whitesnake, 1987)
• Love Machine - Girls Aloud (What Will The Neighbours Say?, 2004)
• Man! I Feel Like a Woman - Shania Twain (Come on Over, 1997)
• Rock Your Body - Justin Timberlake [Sander K retouch] (Rock Your Body (single), 2003)
  
• America - Neil Diamond (The Jazz Singer [soundtrack], 1980)
• I Wanna Be Your Lover - Prince (Prince (s/t), 1979)
• Billie Jean - Michael Jackson (Thriller, 1982)
• Jesus Built My Hotrod [Redline/Whiteline version] (Jesus Built My Hotrod [single], 1991)
  
• Jane - Jefferson Starship (Freedom at Point Zero, 1979)

Musical Meds
Songs that can make your mood do a 180°

• Hazy Shade of Winter - Bangles (Less Than Zero [soundtrack], 1987)
• Sixyten - Boards of Canada (Music Has The Right to Children, 1997)
• Electric Avenue - Eddy Grant (Electric Avenue [single], 1981)
• Oblivious - Aztec Camera (High Land, Hard Rain, 1983)
• Sexuality - Billy Bragg (Don't Try This At Home, 1991)
• Gorecki - Lamb (Lamb [s/t], 1996)
• Uncertain Smile - The The (Soul Mining, 1983)
• Love Song - The Ocean Blue (The Ocean Blue [s/t], 1989)
• The Same Deep Water As You - The Cure (Disintegration, 1989)
• In the Garden / You Send Me / Allegheny - Van Morrison (A Night in San Francisco, 1994)
  
• Impact (The Earth is Burning) - Orbital (Orbital 2 [The Brown Album], 1993)
  
• Song 2 - Blur (Blur [s/t], 1997)
• Add It Up - Violent Femmes (Violent Femmes [s/t], 1983)
• Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me - The Smiths (Strangeways, Here We Come, 1990)
  
• It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) - R.E.M. (Document, 1987)
  

Agree, disagree? Discuss.

Posted at 7:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Topic: Music

November 28, 2005

Tale of two online music stores

I've been known to buy music from iTunes Music Store. What's that, you say? Why buy from iTMS when the Russian sites offer the same tunes for a fraction of the price? In part, I like the pay-for-what-you-buy mode better than the give-us-a-bunch-of-money-upfront-and-then-we'll-debit-per-track mode. Something is just a tad slimy about that. Even so, there's really only one reason I buy from iTMS and that is JHymn, the program that immediately and easily allows me to rip the crappy digital rights management out of the files. If I bought it I want to be able to play it whenever, wherever, and on as many machines as I damn well please.

But this isn't an iTunes screed. I'd like to make a simple comparison between iTMS and the other music store I use a lot, Bleep.com.

		iTunes Music Store	Bleep.com
unencrypted music		no	yes
web-based		no	yes
playable on all devices		no	yes
full song preview		no	yes
zipped download of multiple files		no	yes
reviewer bias in comparison		yes	yes

I'm not sure these factors matter to the average online music buyer, but I wonder how long iTMS can stay dominant. Sooner or later the casual music buyer will figure out the problems in the iTMS model. In fact, I know a few people who just want to make mixes for their friends -- for instance, as party favors -- and have no idea why they can't do so with their iTMS-restricted files. Something's gotta give.

OK, maybe it was an iTMS screed.

Posted at 8:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Music

November 27, 2005

Survival

Recently, coincidentally, I read two books with remarkable similarities. You'd not think there was much overlapping advice in How To Survive A Robot Uprising and Cheap Psychological Tricks for Parents, but the techniques for dealing with children and automata run amok are mostly interchangeable.

Test yourself. Which of these tactics refers to sugar-addled toddlers and which to killer cyborgs?

Stay out of sight
Individual -------- may be weak and dim-witted, but as word spreads the entire swarm will react as a single organism to engulf and destroy you. Kicking an anthill is no fun when the ants are the size of a pit bull.

Stay calm and seem uninterested
No matter how hard you try to make your point in your best stentorian English, no matter how emotional you get, -------- just looks at you with that "whatever" look.

To save a comrade: First merge, then separate
Run to a comrade, deliver a quick bear-hug, and then dive in a random direction. A -------- might temporarily lose track of your identity during the hug, especially if you are wearing similar clothing. You can gain precious seconds while the -------- reacquires its target.

Distance before familiarity
Brief exposures and slow movements toward the object reduce fear and create an atmosphere of familiarity.

Administer punishment within minutes of misbehavior
The -------- who sees the behavior should deliver the punishment immediately instead of waiting until the other -------- gets home to do it.

Memorize your lies, or be honest
A -------- has a stellar memory and laser-beam concentration. If -------- doubts your veracity, this menace may refuse to listen to any further emanations from your slobber hole.

Useful, eh? Doubly so for those of you who skipped the adoption route and built android children instead. Good luck out there.

Posted at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Fun

November 26, 2005

Simulating a simulated city

One treat from my recent visit to UCLA was meeting the Urban Simulation Team. This small group develops detailed, precise 3D models of cities past and present for educational use, as a tool for urban planners, and even to facilitate emergency response. Their main focus is currently a complete modelling of the Los Angeles basin, but what really piqued my interest was Prof. Lisa Snyder's "side project" to recreate the fairgrounds of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She's creating the White City -- and doing a great job with limited resources.

While Leonardo di Caprio and Tom Cruise vie for the movie rights to Erik Larson's wonderful telling of the story of Burnham, Olmstead, and proto-serial killer H.H. Holmes, Snyder patiently slaves away at the reconstruction with surprisingly scant documentation. For instance, we think of the buildings as being white, of course, which is supported by the monochrome photography of the period. But we know from architectural plans that the buildings were not uniformly white. The devil may have been in the White City, but he's also in the details of recoloring it. Snyder has her work cut out for her.

Even in its half-finished state, the model is sublime. Viewing the fairgrounds from the gargantuan Ferris Wheel or from the elevated train or from Olmstead's electric canal boats or from the futuristic moving sidewalk that jutted into Lake Michigan are all experiences not available with the strictly controlled photographic record of the city. The sense of scale is immediate. There's a bleak majesty to it when you consider that it was all gone by the turn of the century. (Except for the refaced Fine Arts Building, now the Museum of Science and Industry -- where, incidentally, I asked my then-girlfriend to marry me.)

I ride my bike in the area of the fairgrounds a few times each summer. There's some historic signage and some replicated statuary, but the landscape itself is really the only place you'll find evidence of the Expo. A long split boulevard bordering the University of Chicago marks the fair's Midway (Snyder tells me that the concrete pads the Ferris Wheel rested on are still there, beneath the park's sod) and neglected lagoons are evidence of Olmstead's triumphant carving of the waterways throughout the fairgrounds. As the UST recreation of the White City proceeds one can dream of integrating it into the landscape itself, perhaps as a location-based service offered through the Chicago Park District or, better, as an outside-the-walls extension of the Museum of Science and Industry. Mapping the virtual structures onto the shadows of the fair embedded in the landscape would be a moving experience indeed.

Posted at 7:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Chicago

November 24, 2005

Thanky

Happy Thanksgiving to the US readership of this blog! Here's hoping you get your fill of family, friends, and fowl.

And to those readers not in the USA thanks for reading. Here's a list of places people have visited Ascent Stage from recently. I don't know who you are, but I'm glad you stopped by!

Buenos Aires, Argentina
Vancouver, Canada
Beijing, China
Stockholm, Sweden
Silkeborg, Denmark
Valladolid, Spain
Pune, India
New Delhi, India
London, England
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Kitchener, Canada
Mechelen, Belgium
Hong Kong, China
Fleet, England
Arequipa, Peru
Dusseldorf, Germany (Kraftwerk, is that you?)
Nottingham, England
Coventry, England
Montreal, Canada

Posted at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: America

November 23, 2005

Meet the Friendlies

China recently unveiled the sporting event pictograms for the 2008 Olympics. I've been a fan of these little icons since Australia somewhat amazingly created one for each sport using little more than boomerang imagery. Athens continued the trend of using culturally-specific imagery in the pictograms by styling each event icon as if it were found etched on the side of an ancient amphora. (What, Plato never played ping pong?)

But China has gone further, entering the realm of the awesome and bizarre. Meet the Friendlies. The five main mascots -- Beibei, Jingjing, Huanhuan, Yingying and Nini -- are endearing and meaningful (spelling out "Welcome to Beijing" among other things). It can't erase the horror that is the Whatzit mascot from the Atlanta games, but it helps.

Their cuddliness is deceiving, though. The actual sport pictograms truly kick ass.

From left to right that's the Modern Pentathlon, Taekwondo, and Shooting, also known as Plunder, Uppercut, and Make My Day.

More on Olympic pictograms and logoing:
The Graphic Design Olympics
A Mini History of Olympic Pictograms
Logos and Mascots

Posted at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Art/Design | Topic: China

November 22, 2005

Dear Santa

I know this is a lot to ask, but we're a bit strapped for cash what with two kids and a nice mortgage rate that is about to become unfixed. Are you aware of the new A/V receiver from Denon, the AVR-4306? Obviously it is high on many people's lists, but if you've forgotten, this is the one that finally is doing something with the Ethernet port on the back. Sure you can listen to Internet radio -- big deal -- but you can also finally treat your receiver as a network-controllable device, just like everything else on your home network. Need to re-route the DVD output, adjust speaker volumes, change the input to the trusty cassette deck? Just bring up the device's web page and do it from any computer in the house or -- if you're really a control freak -- from work or on the road.

So you probably remember it now and you'll also recall that this puppy has two built in iPod ports, one in back for a permanent hookup and one in front for spur-of-the-moment guest DJ'ing like, say, at a party. (I know, I know, I wouldn't think this would be useful either, but some friends of mine have an iPod dock built into the wall of their kitchen and let me tell you it makes for an outstanding get-together to be able to have guests pop their 'Pod's into it. Trust me.) Once docked the iPod is controllable just like everything else from the unit's web page. Oh, and another thing, there's a USB port on the front for hooking up removable media. The AVR-4306 mounts the drive and reads the media for immediate playback. Oh, oh, and do you see those four HDMI ports there? Do you? Three in, one out. That's the coup de grâce, the pièce de résistance, That Which I Must Have. (Is that greedy? Sorry. I've been good. Really.) This spectacle of modern audiovisual magic actually upconverts any video signal -- composite, s-video, component, hell if you sketch it a picture it'll probably try to convert that too -- straight to digital HDMI for a single output to your TV.

Bliss, no? At forty-some pounds it'll be a bit heavy to lug here, I admit. So maybe, if you agree that I deserve it (and, frankly, I'm unable to conceive of a scenario where you would not) then may I suggest using Fedex Overnight shipment? Preferably to arrive before our annual Christmas Party? Sure, you're invited. Thanks!

Oh, my kids have a list for you too. But I've misplaced it at the moment.

Posted at 7:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: I Like

November 21, 2005

FightAIDS@Home

Lots of great new things happening at the World Community Grid. It seems like it has been running for a lot longer than a year, but our first birthday just passed and we're happy to announce a new project running on the grid to contribute to AIDS research. FightAIDS@Home uses computational methods to identify new candidate drugs to block HIV protease, a key molecular structure that, when blocked, stops the virus from maturing.

For the last year the World Grid ran the Human Proteome Folding Project, which has been providing scientists with data on how individual proteins within the human body affect health, enabling them to develop new cures for diseases like lyme disease, malaria and tuberculosis. Scientists now have descriptions of 120,000 protein domains that are critical to human well-being.

Also new is section for children at sister-site TryScience.org that explains the concept behind grid.

If you're unfamiliar with the Grid project, it basically allows you to use idle processor cycle time (or share it with other apps) to conrtibute to large, distributed computationally-intensive problems. A great way to participate in meaningful research.

Yes, I'm still hoping for a humanities-related grid project, but it is hard to argue for limited resources when there are so many humanitarian and life sciences challenges to solve.

Posted at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Work

November 18, 2005

Spam of the day

"Smith & Wesson: The original point and click interface."

Made me laugh. If only computers were as easy as guns, you know? You can pry my computer from my cold dead hand.

Posted at 5:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Words

November 17, 2005

Hanging out in Bel-Air?

Just a reminder that if you're in the area I will be speaking this evening at UCLA. Logistics here.

Artifacts from the Future: Experience Design for Cultural Spaces

November 17th, 2005 • 7:00 p.m.
Melnitz Hall Sound Stage 1 (Room 1451)

Posted at 7:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Notes

November 15, 2005

There's got to be a better way

For me these days it seems that the task of creating a presentation is really an act of merging and culling prior presentations, then creating new material to stitch it all together. Powerpoint is awful at this. What's really needed is a way to view multiple presentations (trying ... hard ... not ... to ... say ... "decks") in a single window with all available slides so that you can mix and match and group. Sort of like the thumbnail view but with the flexibility to arrange stuff non-linearly. I don't think Keynote does this either. I end up printing it all out and arranging on the floor. The GTD people surely love this low-tech information design, but I'm not convinced software couldn't solve the problem (and free up my kid's play area floor space)

Tinderbox for Windows where are you?

Posted at 7:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Topic: Science/Tech

November 14, 2005

More junk for your inbox

Those of you don't use newsreaders and who hate coming to the site only to find it looking exactly like it did last time you checked may be interested in the e-mail subscription option I've added at the very bottom of the page. For the exceptionally lazy, you can avoid scrolling and subscribe here.

Check your junk e-mail folder for my upcoming posts on Viagra, mortgage deals, brazen teen nymphomaniacs, and East African investment opportunities.

Posted at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Housekeeping

November 12, 2005

Deliberately wearing the wrong clothes

I'm a Civil War novice. Dad paraded my siblings and I yawningly through battlefield after battlefied in our youth and I've come to know patriotic Galena, Illinois -- Ulysses Grant's place of residence at the outbreak of the war -- as a second home over the last decade and a half. Still, I know next to nothing about the war or the period. I'm just an unreconstructed European Studies major dropout, I guess.

That's changed recently, though. Or, is starting to anyway. During the course of the International Freedom Center project and the Eternal Egypt History Channel documentary I had the fortune of working with Peter Kunhardt, principle of the documentary team at Kunhardt Productions and descendant of Frederick Hill Meserve, one of the earliest and certainly the most prolific collector of Civil War photographs in the country. The collection, begun in the 1890's, contains nearly 200,000 images including all of the known extant photographs of Abraham Lincoln. (Yeah, you read that right.) Peter and his brother Philip are conscientious stewards of this trove and their enthusiasm for the subject matter is infectious.

I met the brothers in Springfield a while back to tour the new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. It was a surprisingly moving experience. Hard to impress when it comes to museums, I left thoroughly so. So my interest was piqued and I purchased David Herbert Donald's Lincoln. The biography was engrossing and powerful, an ample primer to the universe of scholarship and opinion surrounding Lincoln as we approach the bicentennial of his birth. Donald sticks very close to Lincoln and the primary sources, letting the eloquence and complexity of the railsplitter's life emerge on its own. The picture that develops of Lincoln is of a politically-engaged but heretofore mostly politically-failed misfit whose genius, once in office, could be attributed to his ability to hold together magnetically repulsive personalities in his cabinet, to capitalize on his caricature-as-character backwoodsiness, and to steadfastly adhere to conviction inside a tempest of diverse national opinion.

Donald's biography ends a few sentences after Lincoln is pronounced dead, basically hanging this Civil War-era neophyte off the narrative cliff. But, rather than pick up the thread at Reconstruction I've backed up a bit and started on William McFeely's Grant. A different type of book than Donald's, McFeely's Grant often tells the story from inside Grant's head, reading into his spartan correspondence and statements with something approaching pscyhoanalysis. Where Mary Todd Lincoln is a big part of Donald's book, Julia Grant is the key to the life of her husband for McFeely. Her letters to Grant do not survive, but his replies to her serve as a touchstone for much of the insight into the man's character. Grant's relationship with his father -- who seemed never happy with his son's increasing accomplishment -- is also closely read.

One similarity between these two very different giants of American history is striking. McFeely calls Lincoln and Grant both "masters at deliberately wearing the wrong clothes," that is, at being able to use difference as an advantage, deriving vitality from the friction of idiosyncracy rather than the comforts of likemindedness.

I'm not finished with Grant nor, I suspect, with this period. You won't see me re-enacting Bull Run any time soon, but I fear I'm hooked. Suggestions for future reading are very welcome.

Incidentally, for you parents out there, the Kunhardt brothers have another claim to fame. They are the grandsons of Dorothy Kunhardt, author of the classic children's book Pat the Bunny.

Posted at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: America

Shallowed ground

I took a long weekend fishing trip to coastal Texas last week, which explains the brief posting hiatus. It was in almost all respects the very opposite of the fishing trip to Canada I took earlier this year -- except that we were still catching large fish, thankfully.

This time, instead of a maniacal Indian guide who used his free time hunting moose with an axe, we had Larry, a weathered good ol' boy with enough life experience stories to have our rapt attention during the lulls between finding fish. Larry was a native of Aransas Pass, Texas, a small nearby town whose economy, like most of coastal Texas, ebbs and flows with the fortunes of the energy sector and the abundance of catchable wildlife that swim in or fly over the intercoastal waterway. Tip: when talking to a guy about his experience working on a deep sea oil rig don't make the mistake of jokingly asking him if he still has all his digits. To my mortification, he raised a hand and showed me that, in fact, he didn't. Ha ha, bad joke. But he took it in stride and proceeded to tell us a horrifying story of being trapped in a cage elevator that had stuck under the drilling platform. Perfectly describing the universal fear of climbing partially out of an elevator only to have it begin moving again Larry told us matter-of-factly how the unstuck cage sliced off his finger as he grasped the ledge. Comes with the territory, I guess. He actually seemed more irritated at having been hooked in the nose by a huge spoon lure from a novice client's cast on his guide boat. (This client, unbelievably, tipped Larry $5 and said he should get himself a beer after he removed the barbed tip from his face and continued to guide them the entire day!)

Of course, even with Larry, Mother Nature rules. Some houses on the coast were still boarded up from Rita, which thankfully missed to the north. The intercoastal waterway itself is an ever-changing expanse of extremely shallow water whose sub-surface topography is a constant challenge to boaters. The waterway with its dredged shipping channel for barges is more like a series of rivers that flow together and apart -- except that the "land" between the rivers is water too. I'm glad I was drinking beer in the passenger seat. Navigation is the real reason to have a guide. Lifelong natives of the area can flit around the waterway at high speed deftly reading slight changes in the surface to know when three feet of water suddenly changes to six inches. The ability is uncanny and more than once our tag-along boat without Larry grounded itself suddenly, embedding its prop into the mud and spewing a halo of muck far into the air. (Incidentally Larry hates tag-along boats. He says it is "like dating a fat girl.")

You too can experience the stories and marine life expertise by visiting Larry's website. Be sure to check out the Blast and Cast special (hunting ducks in the morning, fishing in the afternoon). I don't hunt, but I like the sound of it.

Posted at 1:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Fun

November 10, 2005

Yep, he's a geek

I had the chance to steal Nicholas Negroponte's laptop last night. I chose not to. He put it down for only a second.

We were on the same flight from Chicago to White Plains and, just as you'd suspect, his nose was buried in a laptop from the moment I spotted him in the gate area, through check-in, down the jetway into his seat -- pause for takeoff, nervously -- back on the whole flight -- pause for landing, grumpily -- balance on palm and back into it off the plane, into the baggage area. He actually made his chaffeur stand there, bags draped off him, while he did something on his laptop, still balanced on his left palm. What the hell was he doing? Surfing? Not typing, certainly. Being ... digital?

(Actually I think he was working on this.)

Posted at 7:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Science/Tech

November 1, 2005

UCLA

If anyone is in the LA area on Nov. 17 you're hereby invited to attend a lecture I will be giving at UCLA. Here's an abstract and logistics. The talk is part of series put on by the talented people at the Center for Research in Engineering, Media, and Performance and the Experiential Technologies Center. Should be a lively evening. Drop me a line if you'd like to meet up.

Posted at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Notes

Post-Halloween morsels

Miniaturized for easy distribution.

I should have known when Craig ate his words about this guy, but only now do I understand the genius that is Four Tet. Folktronica is a silly term I will type only this once, though what it is trying to describe is accurate enough. I'd like to see Kieran Hebden and Amon Tobin go head-to-head in a sudoku tournament.

Further afield is Tadd Mullinix, an Ann Arborite with two beautiful, intricately glitchy albums to date. Good stuff, if you like abstract electronica.

Why I never thought of using power tools to carve pumpkins before this season is a mystery to me. For example, in addition to creating new patterns and being a lot easier than hacking with a paring knife, the power drill whirls pumpkin crud all over the kitchen when it pierces the pumpkin shell. How fun is that?

There is a doctoral disseration waiting to be written in probability theory about the certitude that the moment you begin futzing in a gym locker the person occupying the locker immediately to your left or right will return from the gym to do the same, causing crampedness and often nude crampedness. Which is uncomfortable. This happens in gyms where you bring your own lock and also in those that distribute keys (where, presumably, some sort of front desk intelligence could space out locker assignments over time).

This month's Wired contains a short piece on the way technology itself is the ghostly medium in most recent horror films. Clearly the Wired staff reads Ascent Stage.

Posted at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: I Like