Searching, searching
Remember those trips to Egypt from late last year and early this year where I was traipsing around with a film crew? Well, the documentary is finally going to be broadcast and I’m very pleased with it. Kunhardt Productions and especially the writer-director Graham Judd did a fantastic job. I get to play armchair geek Egypt tech guy in the last part of the show.
The subject of the show is the history of Egyptology, a survey of major trends in the discovery and documentation of Egypt’s historic past. The work of my team at IBM and our partner CultNat on the Eternal Egypt project is featured in the final “act” of the show — the high-tech continuation of a tradition of documentation and preservation that stretches back in the modern era to Napoleon. My team also developed the prominently-featured 3-D environments used to illustrate certain segments of the show. The fidelity and dramatic quality of these environments surpass anything on the website.
We don’t chisel into the pyramids with a robot. We don’t claim to have found the mummy of Nefertiti. We don’t even mention the death of Tutankhamun. But this is why you are going to tune in, right? Something fresh!
More information at The History Channel.
An Evening With Kraftwerk
The venerable German quartet Kraftwerk returned to Chicago tonight, the first time in seven years. No single group has influenced my listening tastes more than Kraftwerk and so seeing them live is always a treat.
I was struck by a few things tonight. Though Kraftwerk is praised for its groundbreaking style and influence on hip hop, industrial, and electronica, their style is often denounced (and parodied) as stiff, unfeeling, and immutable. It is true that the energy from the stage doesn’t come from band members doing Townsend windmills. But in fact if you consider Kraftwerk’s output not so much songs as themes (leitmotif seems the most apt word here, ja?) which are reworked and tweaked over the course of decades you see that they are in fact quite dynamic as artists. Consider that there are only a handful of themes in their ouevre — transportation, fame, energy, human-machine integration, computing — and that each has evolved either by incorporation into new songs (Tour de France into Aero Dynamik), by digitization and reworking (The Mix),or by considerable updating (Tour de France into Tour de France 2003). A good example is the way Radioactivity has evolved from a paean to Marie Curie to a polemic against nuclear energy.
The live show is extremely nostalgic. As pathbreaking as Kraftwerk is their live visuals contain long sections of period-specific artwork, vintage video, and command-line-aesthetic computer graphics. In fact, the band has never actually been about the future, though their subjects are often futuristic. Though they are all digital now, the aesthetic of Kraftwerk is still firmly rooted in sensibilities of the past. This is atypical in their musical genre. But then, they pretty much invented the genre, so they’re entitled.
I am embarrassed to admit that after 25 years of listening to Kraftwerk and attending three live shows I only tonight noted the irony that the Most Sampled Band in History actually invented the sample well before digital recording made it possible. Rather than pre-record sounds of everyday life Kratwerk usually imitates them. The clank of a train hitch, the crank of a bike wheel, the Dopplery overlap of horns on a highway — all these things are imitated using sounds and parameters from the synthesizers, rather than samplers. Call it mimetic synthesis, low-fi sampling. Call it royalty-free.
I, Cartographer
One of the most popular posts on this blog was my copyright-unfriendly screenshotting of images of future Chicago from the movie I, Robot. I really loved the way the film layered future urban development into the current cityscape. I annotated some of the images and developed a map of where I thought the film’s main building, the U.S. Robotics headquarters, was located.
Well, turns out the special edition of the DVD just released contains a shot of a pre-production map (above) that the CGI team used when rendering Chicago 2035. I’ll leave the comparisons to those who care but suffice to say that I think they got the placement of USR HQ and Spoonerville wrong.
God help me if I am turning into the type of person who submits continuity errors to IMDB all day.
A long walk out of Africa
UPDATE: see Macro-Genealogy.
I’m just back from Canada (great trip, more soon) and my genographic data analysis is complete. The first finding is that I am, in fact, of the human species — a data point which generates almost limitless disbelief among acquaintances. Second, it is interesting that, well, it connects my genography to my actual genealogical line (the family I actually know about as opposed to my descendants 60,000 years back) and plops it right where I thought it’d be: southern Italy. I didn’t expect that kind of linkage.
My Y chromosome exhibits a genetic mutation known as M172 which makes me a member of haplogroup J2. M172 itself is related to a mutation called M168 which astonishingly can be traced to a single individual called “Eurasian Adam,” the common ancestor of every non-African person living today. His descendants are the only line to survive after leaving Africa. But back to M172. This line heads out of east Africa to the Arabian peninsula, takes an incunabular pitstop in Mesopotamia, then treks west through Turkey, Albania, and into Italy. But what’s that fork across north Africa? And all the other forklets? Well that’s what this project hopes to figure out as it analyzes DNA from indigenous people around the world.
Oh boy. I got some reading to do.
See also: The Genographic Project
Where the sidewalk ends
Off the grid until next Thursday. I’ll be fishing in a lake with no roads in much less telecommunications infrastructure.
My normal travel gear has been stripped to a shell of its former glory: iPod, noise-cancelling headphones, iPod battery pack, digital camera, cellphone (won’t work, but gotta bring), and phone charger. My god, that kind of minimalism makes me shudder. Like a tech methadone clinic.
This will be good for me.
Corporate Lingo Watch
Got smacked with a new flavor of corporate metaphor this week. This is so meta it deserves a post-modern critique.
Guy is referring to a business deal that is taking longer than it should. The metaphor here is that it doesn’t have much energy. Running out of steam. Batteries are low. That kind of thing. What does he say? “This deal is low blood sugar.” After the split second what-did-he-say? I next wondered if there were any diabetics on the line.
Also, please do not use “uptick” and “downselect” in the same sentence. Makes me need to grab the desk to steady myself.
Sibling stance
In Ghana if a young child bends over to look through his or her legs it is a sign that the child’s mother will soon be pregnant. The bent-over youngster, according to West African tradition, is looking for a sibling. Interestingly, this idea must have currency in other cultures such as Louisiana French, because my wife’s grandmother also knows of it. My youngest son conks his head on the ground to look backwards all the time and whenever he does it sets off a flurry of giggling Twi, the dialect that our Ghanaian nanny and all her neighborhood pals speak. If translated I believe they would be saying: “job security”.
“A turbulent zone of near-nothingness”
No, not my marriage — which is nine-years-old today, hooray! — but rather a description of the edge of the solar system which the spacecraft Voyager I has finally reached. Launched when the first Star Wars movie came out in 1977, this diehard explorer (and its twin) embody the best of NASA: trailblazing and science-oriented. If today’s NASA could regain that clarity of purpose we’d be so much better off than wondering how long we can keep a geriatric low-earth orbiting big rig from falling to pieces.
NASA
Voyager is truly alone now. Even the sun is just a pinprick of light. Here’s hoping someone — some thing — eventually encounters her golden cargo. Seeya, V’ger!
Idiot and the Odyssey
As I am getting on the elevator at work today a gaggle of dronish businessmen get off on my floor. Clearly they don’t work on the floor and are looking for a meeting. I hear one guy say “Odyssey. We’re looking for the Odyssey room. I wonder where that is.” Some other guy snickers “Next to the Caravan room, maybe.” Consensus chortling and I think even a ha-ha backslap ensue. I spend the elevator ride wondering what the hell he means. Some obscure Homeric allusion? Then it hits me. A minivan joke. The guy made a minivan joke, for the love of god.
Oh suburbia, is there any limit to the ways you enrich our culture?
The Complete Angler
My father and brother and I are headed to Canada with friends for our first fishing trip in over 15 years. Naturally, we had to restock our gear supply. So we visited the frighteningly expansive Bass Pro Shops in search of a craggy old fisherman who could help us find what we needed. We certainly found him: a leathery, nearly-toothless Vietnam vet who could speak in English for sentences on end without seemingly ever using a word I understood. (“Psst, Dad. Did he just say that the crawler harness behind the bottom bouncer might catch on the planer board? Right, OK, thought so. Good to know.”)
Who would have guessed that fishing line and condoms would be marketed so similarly? You have XL for extra long, smooth action and XT when extra toughness is required and of course there’s new-kid-on-the-block Sensation monofilament for “Greater Sensitivity, Strength, and Control.” Having Mr. Fishervet unironically explain the differences between the types of prophyl- er, fishing line made me feel slightly unclean, quite honestly. He didn’t particularly care for the condom analogy, either.
And because I know you’re wondering, we bought Sensation … for pleasure.
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.
