Echoes and real voices
I recently finished the latest novel from Richard Powers called The Echo Maker. It was one of the finest books I’ve read in years. Powers is by leaps my favorite writer. His books are poems trapped in the novel form. The craft with words every bit as compelling as the stories they tell. I’m a big fan.
But there’s something different about this novel. It is still superbly crafted for sure, but the narrative engine revs louder. There was something about it. Something I couldn’t quite identify. As I was reading the book a fellow Powers fan friend of mine alerted me to an article in the NYT (login required), written by Powers, about how he composed the novel using only speech recognition software on a tablet computer. That was it, I thought. This must be the stylistic difference. A novel voice-crafted versus hand-crafted.
Except. The more I think about it, the more I can’t believe it. I work for IBM, a company deeply committed to speech recognition, text-to-speech, and machine translation. It is hairy, complex computing — bordering on AI. Personally I’ve been working in Arabic-English translation since 2000 and I know just how thorny the problems are in getting good recognition. I simply can’t believe an author as talented as Powers could create a book as linguistically complex as The Echo Maker using speech reco alone.
I’m not saying he’s lying. I’ve had some interaction with Powers, all positive. He kindly responds to e-mail, for one. And yet, there’s precedent for this tale of novel-by-dictation being fiction too. In 2002 at the Chicago Humanities Festival Powers delivered a talk called “Literary Devices” about an ELIZA-like machine that sucked him into an e-mail conversation that was as real as any human author’s output. I bought it. Most bought it. We bought wrong. The story itself was fiction — which only made it better. Humans falling for a story about a machine that tells stories indistinguishable from human stories. Amazing.
So, I guess I’m asking this. Mr. Powers, did you really dictate this whole novel? Or should we nestle comfortably in what is admittedly a damn good story even if you didn’t? All half-dozen readers of this blog are dying to know. And if we can’t tell your response from a computer impersonator we’ll obviously consider the dialogue valid. Do tell!
UPDATE: Powers replies. Wow. More on this in a bit …
See also the follow-up post Thamus (partially) vindicated.
Forward with backup
Is there any subject as thrilling as backup? Many– nay, most — in fact. But lately it seems like I spend at least as much time worrying about how to preserve my data as I do creating it.
I could create a rather interesting map mashup of all the places and ways my laptops have decided to crap out, so I’m more than normally concerned about comprehensive backup. But recently over the holidays I entered a whole new stratum of data management. I thought, gee, it would be nice finally to digitize all the family video we’ve had laying around since my first son was born in 2001. We’ve not been obsessive about videotaping family gatherings; we had only 20 tapes — few full — in six years. I thought, I’ll just whip up a quick DVD as a stocking stuffer for the wife. Idiot me. A full week later of nearly nonstop chip-searing rendering I had produced five full DVD’s of video. (And if I had heard another rendition of “Happy Birthday To You” I would have lost it.) It turned out well, though the data it produced was both priceless and ginormous.
So this added to a few of my backup needs, detailed here. Ideally I need to:
- Backup my main work laptop daily such that in the event of catastrophe I can boot from the backup image and resume work immediately.
- Backup two other essential machines in the house.
- Synchronize the main work laptop and a secondary work laptop. Oh, one is Mac OS the other is XP.
- Establish a schedule that includes local, accessible backup and offsite storage in the event of real catastrophe. (“Fire! Grab the kids … and the drives!”)
- Deal with the a massive music library and new half-terabyte of digitized video — offsite.
I’ve worked almost all of it out. For nightly backup I use SuperDuper! — a great app — to dump changes to a perfect image of my work laptop (a MacBook Pro) to an external, bootable Firewire drive.
The other machines in the house backup monthly to a networked Lacie drive.
I synchronize the MBP and ThinkPad using Apple’s smart folders, just copying over files from a Modified Since Last Backup folder to the ThinkPad. If you’ve ever used iTunes smart playlists you know how easy this is to set up. I suppose I could create an Automator action to do this automatically too, now that I think of it.
The last two present the problem. And this where I need your help. All told I have about a half terabyte of data to backup offsite, in case the shit really hits the fan. Time was, I’d just burn DVD’s and shuttle them to friends, family, or work. But I’ve surpassed the feasibility of burning DVD-R’s, HD-DVD storage is a a very rare thing these days, and the feasibility of online storage is hampered by cost and upload bandwidth. You’ll say, buy another external drive and move it offsite monthlyl! But I loathe to buy a fourth external drive in a calendar year. What to do?
The real problem is more philosophical. Backup to another device is relatively easy — and it is where most backup people do (if at all) stops. But to be truly comprehensive about it you need your backups in two different physical locations. Things happen. Robbery, fire, flooding. And this is where I am stuck. Help me, won’t you?
Monsters and Saints
Well, this is an interesting turn of events.
Like most anyone who came of age in Chicago in the 80’s I’ve been a Bears fan since their Super Bowl season under Ditka. I’m a fan. Not a die-hard who attends games shirtless in December, but a fan nonetheless.
Which is nothing compared to my wife’s family. Born and mostly raised in New Orleans, they are living caricatures of all-for-the-team dedication. The day I met the men who were to become my father- and brother-in-law — December 28, 1991 — was a Saints playoff game against the Atlanta Falcons — the result of the Saints’ first Division title ever. New Orleans came out strong but ended up blowing it.
I sat in wide-eyed horror as my girlfriend’s brother swore, stomped, threw things, and beseeched God to smite Jerry Glanville (then Atlanta’s coach) with a slow and painful death from cancer. My girlfriend’s father also was disconsolate and enraged, switching from cursing the TV to reprimanding his son not to wish death on anyone. It was a surreal event and one that would repeat itself in style if not in substance during innumerable other football games on which serious money rather than lifelong passion were wagered.
As a long-time Cubs fan I know the perverse pleasure that comes from loving a loser, so I have always respected — if not fully understood — my in-laws’ devotion to the Saints. I have in fact become something of a Saints fan vicariously. But as anyone who knows me or this blog, my heart is with Chicago always. I even mustered some pride when the White Sox won the World Series, I hesitate to type.
So, as Chicago barely squeaked into next week’s confrontation with New Orleans today I received a hug from my son who said “congratulations, Daddy.” I looked at him, looked at my wife shaking her head in anticipation of the inevitable, and said “son, you have one week to make a very serious decision about who you will cheer for next weekend.”
“Oh that’s easy,” he said. “Who dat!?”
City of the Future
Urban Labs’ “Growing Water” design for a future Chicago wins The History Channel’s City of the Future design challenge. It is a really smart concept.
Let me summarize:
- Start with the turn-of-last-century “Emerald Necklace” of parks and boulevards meant to create a green orbital around the city. (It sorta works and makes a great bike route.) Use this as a lush anchor for what’s to come.
- Return to a respect for the subcontintental divide that splits water flowing to the Mississippi from water flowing to Lake Michigan (the solution to this Ascent Stage quiz of yore) and the fact that the Chicago River now disregards this natural phenom based on human engineering. (Or does it?)
- Repurpose the current labyrinth of water and sewage tunnels to house the much-desired expansion of the L. (Urban Labs meet Craig Berman, discuss.)
Yes, IBM, was a sponsor of this competition. Alas, I had no part in the judging.
Most played music of the year
I end 2006 having played 17,677 tracks through iTunes since I started using Last.fm last year. Here are the top twenty artists for the last 12 months, in order.
Biosphere
Sufjan Stevens
Casino Versus Japan
Richie Hawtin
Midwest Product
Der Dritte Raum
Yagya
Plaid
Imogen Heap
Gary Numan
Mike Relm
Ladytron
Junkie XL
Boards of Canada
Ulrich Schnauss
Four Tet
Aphex Twin
Boom Bip (huh? haven’t listened to this in ages)
Girl Talk
Ryan Elliott
Interesting to compare the change since the 10,000 mark last March.
Resolutions 2006 in review
Time to review the resolutions from 2006. Last year I went 7-for-12 with two partials. And this year?
- Cook.
Done. Not every night, not even every week. But a few dozen times is more than zero. And no reports of foodborne illness. - Visit San Diego, Philadelphia, Portland, or Santa Fe, all US cities I have never been to.
Thank goodness for the or. Got to Santa Fe in March. (But Los Alamos was cooler.) - Rip DVD collection.
I’m going to call this complete. I didn’t do the whole thing. In fact, not even close. But I did rip several dozen. I did all the children DVD’s in the house. (These have been uploaded to TiVo for easy access. No more ruined DVD players from kid-smarm.) I also ripped anything that I knew I’d want to watch while traveling and any I wanted to send back to Neflix immediately to plow deeper into my queue, usually to stock up for travel. - Get to know the south side of Chicago.
Uh, no. Apart from a few trips to the University of Chicago and Pilsen and some bike routes I barely stepped foot south of Congress. - Look into Italian dual-citizenship.
I have the link. Does that count? - Shave head.
Well, not completely. But I’ve gone quite short. Call it a partial. - Visit Xian, China.
Nope. You’d think with four trips to China this year I could have done it. I even called this a “safety” resolution last year. Jeez. - Find Jim LoBianco.
Task complete. Took barely three months. God bless The Google. - Run a half-marathon.
Ha! No. Worst fitness year ever. - Teach sons how to swim.
Gonna go for the stretch on this and say complete. Could I thrown them in a lake and walk away? No. (Well, not without pulling a Susan Smith.) But they can wear floaties and putter around the pool and that’s all I was going for. - Call (not ping, not e-mail) my mother more often.
Um. She reads my blog. Ruling? - Return to home winemaking.
Yes, though we made no wine. Our brew this year was cider. Same gear, same principals.
Yikes. 6-for-12 with one partial. At this rate I’ll be 0-12 by 2012. Now that’s a goal!
Favorite posts of 2006
Lists. That’s what the end of the year is about.
It was a slower year on Ascent Stage than last, but as I’ve said I think the quality went up a notch. As the primary (sometimes sole) reader of this blog, I offer you my favorite posts of 2006.
“Mama, I gotta make my guitar louder”
“Today one of my colleagues noted that he was going to devote the next few years of his life to becoming as young as Les Paul. To this Les, in a room full of academics and museum-types, leaned back on his chair and mimicked taking a long drag from a joint. This man is 90 years old.”
City of the Dead
“On this gray day nearly every mausoleum was stained about four feet off the ground with the puke-green demarcation of high water — a grim reminder that most of the bodies of loved ones were submerged during the weeks before the floodwaters receded.”
Turkish delight
“This is no massage. For one, you’re on hard marble. For another, these gentlemen are probably former interrogators from the Turkish military. Despite the presence of soap and a loofah glove the whole thing is like a wrestling match where you’re not allowed to fight back.”
Scissorhands
“See, five blades does give a nice shave on the open fields of ones cheeks, but for actual styling or for navigating any kind of variance in facial topography it is simply too big. I have a goatee, so getting close in to the beard is key. If I don’t I look like a hick meth addict festooned with different lengths of hair around my mouth.”
Regeneration
“Only a specialist could point to what is original to the hall’s 1406 construction and what parts are copies installed since. This happens in the West too, of course, but the difference as I’ve experienced it in China is that it doesn’t matter. The originality of the building is the idea of it, what it represents.”
In which I offer a series of exciting thoughts about punctuation in the 21st century
“What it comes down to is only this: I am getting to the point where I don’t trust online writing that does not contain links. Just like you’re wary of the grocer who sells “apple’s” or the the writer whose sentences run on for miles without a period, I’m increasingly uncomfortable with writing that’s link-free.”
Bathroom ethnography
“The Stall Jiggler – This is the guy who won’t take no for an answer when he encounters a locked stall door.”
Urban scar tissue
“We were driving posts into the dirt for a fence on an irregular diagonal property border when we hit something solid that turned out to be a railroad tie. We later learned that the screwy lot line was the result of surface train tracks that once cut through the area, the remains of which we had dug up.”
Culinary turntablism
“What would this meal sound like if the zhuan pan were a recording?”
The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time
“System design verges on science fiction here as we move through the implications of a community space that exists on different timelines. For example what happens to the field trip group when some of your classmates decide to peel off for the 16th century?”
How to create a LEGO mosaic
“My daughter was born a few weeks ago and so naturally I went back to the Brick-o-lizer to create her mosaic. Imagine my horror to find out that it isn’t available anymore. How could I deprive my baby girl of her LEGO mosaic? Well. Obviously. I couldn’t.”
Zodiac desktops
“Not sure who first said ‘wallpaper makes bad stationery,’ but it was my guiding principle. Backgrounds need to be easy to work against, contrasting highly with the folders and files that live on it. Photos of children, hot rods, and (sigh) rocket ships generally don’t offer this.”
Wired up in my capsule to the moon
“A few weeks ago I went back to the tanks armed with a heartrate monitor in addition to the waterproof iPod. In I went, on came the album, and the simple EKG started logging.”
Ore consequences
“I struggle to list a hazard that this mine doesn’t contain so in the interest of having something to blog about I’ll here detail those that it does.”
Nike plus iPod minus Nike
“But I hate Nike running shoes. I think most people hate Nike running shoes. Well, this sucks. It’s like … Nike is locking people in to proprietary hardware just like … Apple.”
All it takes is one bad apple
“At one point in this process my wife asked nonchalantly ‘Is there any possibility that this will kill us when we drink it?'”
When the metaverse is your town hall
“You just try corralling talented, curious, script-wielding colleagues in Second Life to serve as virtual extras. It is like arranging toddlers for a photo shoot. Everyone wants to show off their latest set of wings or ability to make it rain.”
Party as a verb
“We were worried about the fire marshal and the ATF. The first because we invited way too many people and we don’t have a gigantic space. The second because, well, let’s just say the freeze-distillation of the homemade apple cider succeeded.”
Places 2006
My travails travels this year. Defined as any place I’ve stayed at least a night with asterisks representing multiple visits. (Bit of a meme, isn’t it?)
Albuquerque, NM
Armonk, NY*
Atlanta, GA
Austin, TX*
Beijing, China*
Chicago, IL (sweet home)
Eddyville, KY
Galena, IL*
Houston, TX
Istanbul, Turkey
New Orleans, LA
New York City, NY
Nicosia, Cyprus
Orlando, FL
Paw Paw, MI
Rockport, TX
San Jose, CA
Santa Fe, NM
Southampton, England
Washington, DC*
White Plains, NY
Merry Christmash
Looking for some interesting new holiday tunes? Look no further than Wayne&Wax. Wayne Marshall is one smart DJ. An ethnomusicologist by training, Wayne is currently a postdoc at the University of Chicago (lucky Chicago), a prolific blogger and masher.
Have a listen to Remix-mas and check the other free tracks listed from that post, including the new Christmas compilation from DJ BC of The Beastles fame. (For the love of all that is holy download “Imagine Santa” if you only can take one track. Goosebump material, that is.)
Other Wayne&Wax mashes of note include the Boston Mashacre, it’s followup Boston Smashacre and A Crunk Genealogy. The last was created for a course on Electronic Music he recently taught at the Harvard Extension School. The syllabus itself is a work of art, with custom mixes and a deep bibliography every week to illustrate major themes. Just superb.
Wayne also blogs at the riddim meth0d.
Twelve islands
It isn’t exactly news that IBM is interested in virtual worlds, but Friday represented a bit of a milestone when we unveiled our official land in Second Life — twelve interlinked islands, open and built-out for business use, research, internal collaboration, and anything else we can think of. As always, Eightbar has the inside scoop.
It’s exciting times, but not because we’re in Second Life. We’ve been working in SL for months, albeit without the sanctioned presence that this island megaplex gives us. This is important because it represents the results of collaboration between a somewhat bewildering variety of interests inside IBM and it points to much more to come. This event, the founding and development of the twelve islands and not Sam Palmisano’s announcement in Beijing (much as I loved it), is the real beginning of IBM establishing itself in this space (literally).
But what really interests me — end press release, start me release — is that this will be a springboard to the rest of the metaverse. Second Life itself is but an island, really, a popular walled garden that was one of the first to the game. Zoom out and move forward a few years and SL will be just a powers-of-ten-sized chunk of a much larger universe of virtual worlds. The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time will be one, as will thousands of others. In fact, to really make an impact there shouldn’t be distinctions between the various worlds. One should be able to hop about as from webpage to webpage, seamlessly. That’s a bit of a dream these days with the leaders in the industry less interested in standards and interop than community-building. But we’ve seen that before with the browser hell of the early web days and we’ll no doubt see it again.
If you’re in Second Life and would like to visit, just search for IBM on the map and pick an island. There’s a lot to see. I’m Immerito Foley in-world. Ping me if you need a guide.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
I went back through it this blog (and my Flickr account) on its 20th anniversary, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
