Over the holidays, Mike Monteiro discovered there was a Nacho Libre game for the Nintendo DS. Thinking that an arbitrary choice for a movie tie-in game, he started the DS Tie-In Games I Wanna Play group on Flickr to showcase other possible odd media tie-ins for the DS. Some of my favorite submissions so far include: The Passion of the Christ, Birth of a Nation, Empire, Remains of the Day, My Dinner with Andre (Bon Mot controller sold separately), Super Mario Bros, Learning GNU Emacs, Requiem for a Dream, The Cremaster Cycle, and Getting Things Done.
Here's a couple of ones that I've done: Dancer in the Dark and The New Yorker Draw Your Own Cover Electronic Entertainment (with noncompulsory coöperative mode), pictured below.
If you join the group, there's a Photoshop kit you can download to join in the fun.
Last Saturday, Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg collaborated on a music video for a new holiday gift idea: Dick in the Box. If you haven't seen the video yet, go now and then come back...it's pretty funny and you won't understand the rest of this if you haven't seen it. So go!
You back? So, my favorite part of the song is the instructions and yesterday while we were alternating between watching the video like 50 times and assembling some IKEA furniture for the office, I had the obvious idea. Ikea instructions for making Dick in a Box:
More Dick in a Box: Mr. and Mrs. Potatohead version, Line Rider version, some guy dancing in his living room with a box fastened to his crotch with a belt version, and a this is either brilliant or completely stupid (DURRR! DURRR!) video response.
The recent New Yorker piece on Will Wright is a thorough profile of the game designer, but also functions as a bibliography of sorts for the games he's created over the past 20 years. Bibliographies are something normally reserved for books, but Wright draws much of the inspiration for his games from articles, books, papers, and other games that a list of further reading/playing in the instruction booklet for SimCity wouldn't feel out of place. Because I like utilizing bibliographies -- they allow you to get into the head of an author and see how they sampled & remixed the original ideas to create something new -- I've created one for Will Wright. Sources are grouped by game; general influences are listed seperately.
SimCity
The Game of Life, John Conway.
Montessori school. "It's all about learning on your terms, rather than a teacher explaining stuff to you. SimCity comes right out of Montessori -- if you give people this model for building cities, they will abstract from it principles of urban design."
Urban Dynamics - Jay Wright Forrester. "This study of urban dynamics was undertaken principally because of discoveries made in modeling the growth process of corporations. It has become clear that complex systems are counterintuitive. That is, they give indications that suggest corrective action which will often be ineffective or even adverse in its results. Very often one finds that the policies that have been adopted for correcting a difficulty are actually intensifying it rather than producing a solution."
World Dynamics - Jay Wright Forrester.
The Sims
A Pattern Language - Christopher Alexander. "By understanding recurrent design problems in our environment, readers can identify extant patterns in their own design projects and use these patterns to create a language of their own. Extraordinarily thorough, coherent, and accessible, this book has become a bible for homebuilders, contractors, and developers who care about creating healthy, high-level design."
A Theory of Human Motivation - Abraham Maslow. Paper on human behavior and motivation.
Maps of the Mind - Charles Hampden-Turner.
Other Sim Games
Gaia hypothesis - James Lovelock. "The Gaia hypothesis is an ecological theory that proposes that the living matter of planet Earth functions like a single organism."
The Ants - E.O. Wilson. "This is the definitive scientific study of one of the most diverse animal groups on earth; pretty well everything that is known about ants is in this massive work."
Spore
Powers of Ten - Charles and Ray Eames. "The film starts on a picnic blanket in Chicago and zooms out 10x every 10 seconds until the entire universe (more or less) is visible. And then they zoom all the way back down into the nucleus of an atom. A timeless classic."
Drake Equation - Frank Drake. "Dr. Frank Drake conceived a means to mathematically estimate the number of worlds that might harbor beings with technology sufficient to communicate across the vast gulfs of interstellar space."
SETI. "The mission of the SETI Institute is to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe."
2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick.
Panspermia - Freeman Dyson. "This approach was directly inspired by Freeman Dyson's notion of Panspermia - the idea that life on earth may have been seeded via meteors carrying microscopic "spores" of life from other planets. (Dyson's concept is also the origin of the game's title.)"
The Life of the Cosmos - Lee Smolin. "[Smolin's] theory of cosmic evolution by the natural selection of black-hole universes makes what we can experience into an infinitesimal, yet crucial, part of an ever-larger whole."
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle - John Barrow, Frank Tipler, and John Wheeler. "Is there any connection between the vastness of the universes of stars and galaxies and the existence of life on a small planet out in the suburbs of the Milky Way?"
The demoscene. "The demoscene was originally limited by the hardware and storage capabilities of their target machines (16/32 bit micros such as the Atari and the Amiga ran on floppy disks), they developed intricate algorithms to produce large amounts of content from very little initial data."
General influences
PanzerBlitz - Avalon Hill. "PanzerBlitz is a tactical-scale board wargame of tank, artillery, and infantry combat set in the Eastern Front of the Second World War."
Super Mario Bros. - Shigeru Miyamoto. "[SMB] encouraged exploration for its own sake; in this regard, it was less like a competitive game than a 'software toy' -- a concept that influenced Will Wright's notion of possibility space. 'The breadth and the scope of the game really blew me away,' Wright told me. 'It was made out of these simple elements, and it worked according to simple rules, but it added up to this very complex design."
Go. "[Go] is a strategic, zero-sum, deterministic board game of perfect information."
--
Sources: Game Master, The Long Zoom, Master of the Universe, Interview: Suzuki and Wright, Spore entry at Wikipedia, Will Wright entry at SporeWiki, Will Wright Interview.
Update: This interview with Wright at Game Studies contains a list of references from the conversation, many of which have influenced Wright's body of work. (thx, phil)
Since my internet access has been somewhat spotty at the conference (I'm trying to pay attention and power is hard to come by here so the laptop is closed most of the time), I'm going to do rolling wrap-ups as I go, skipping around and filling in the blanks when I can. Here we go, soundbite-style:
Alex Steffen: Cars equipped with displays that show gas mileage, when compared to cars without the mileage display, get better gas mileage. That little bit of knowledge helps the driver drive more economically. More visible energy meter displays in the home have a similar effect...people use less energy when they're often reminded of how much energy they use. (Perhaps Personal Kyoto could help here as well.) At dinner, we discussed parallels between that and eating. Weighing yourself daily or keep track of everything you eat, and you'll find yourself eating less. In the same way, using a program like Quicken to track your finances might compel you to spend less, at least in areas of your life where you may be spending too much.
Bruce Sterling is the Jesse Jackson of technology. He has this cadence that he gets into, neologism after neologism, stopping just short of suggesting a new word for neologism. Wonderful to experience in person. Perhaps not as upbeat as the Reverend, though.
Bruce also related a story told to him by an engineering professor friend of his. The prof split his class into two groups. The first group, the John Henrys, had to study and learn exclusively from materials available at the library...no internet allowed. The second group, the Baby Hueys, could use only the internet for research and learning...no primary source lookups at the library. After a few weeks, he had to stop this experiment because the John Henrys were lagging so far behind the Baby Hueys that it is was unfair to continue.
Kevin Kelly noted that the web currently has 1 trillion links, 1 quintillion transistors, and 20 exabytes of memory. A single human brain has 1 trillion synapses (links), 1 quintillion neurons (transistors of sorts), and 20 exabytes of memory.
Kelly also said that technology has its own agenda and went on to list what it is that technology might want. One of the things was clean water. You need clean water for industrial manufacturing...so water cleanliness is going to be a big deal in China. In a later talk, Thomas Friedman said, "China needs to go green."
Hasan Elahi, during his ordeal being mistaken for -- what's the term these days? -- an enemy combatant, learned that language translates easier than culture. That is, you can learn how to speak a language fluently way easier than to have the cultural fluency necessary to convince someone you're a native. In his interrogations, Hasan liberally sprinkled pop culture references in his answers to questions posed by the FBI to help convince them that he was a native. Workers at call centers in India for American companies are not only taught to speak English with an American accent, they also receive training in American geography, history, and pop culture so as to better fool/serve American callers.
"The best laid plans of mice and men turn into a nonlinear system." -- Will Wright, with apologies to Robert Burns.
Speaking of Wright, a couple of Spore trivia bits. The data for a creature in Spore takes up just 3K of memory. And entire world: just 80K. And these worlds are amazingly complex.
Brian Eno: With large groups of people, the sense of shame and the sense of honor that keeps the members of small groups from misbehaving breaks down. The challenge for larger groups is to find ways of making honor and shame matter in a similar respect.
Stewart Brand: "We are terraforming the earth anyway, we might as well do it right." Stewart also noted that cities are very effective population sinks. When people move to cities, the birthrate drops to the replacement rate (2.1 children per family) and keeps on dropping. Combine that with the fact that by early next year, more people in the world will live in cities than in rural areas, and at some point in the next hundred years, the earth's population will start to fall.
Onstage at PopTech just now, Brian Eno said that a musical piece by Steven Reich had a huge influence on how he thought about art. He said that Reich's piece showed him that:
1. You don't need much.
2. The composer's role is to set up a system and then let it go.
3. The true composer is actually in the listener's brain.
I'd never heard of Reich, but the name sounded familiar when Eno mentioned it. I realized I'd seen it yesterday when reading about Cory Arcangel's show at Team Gallery in reference to his piece, Sweet 16:
Cory applied American avant-garde composer Steven Reich's concept of phasing to the guitar intro of Guns and Roses' track Sweet Child O'Mine. Rather than use instruments, Cory took the same two clips from the song's music video and shortened one clip by a single note. As the videos loop, the two intros grow farther apart until they are back in sync.
He's veered away from video games, but Cory's new work is looking really interesting these days.
A few months ago, I found a map online (which I cannot for the life of me relocate and I'm keen to find it again...any ideas? it's from Bill Rankin's The Errant Isle of Manhattan...see update below) of Manhattan pasted next to Chicago, as if the island had taken up permanent residence in Lake Michigan. Recently I decided to explore the unique aspect of Manhattan's scale with a series of similar maps of places I've been to or lived in: Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Barron, WI (my hometown). Manhattan Elsewhere is the result.
Depending on your vantage point, Manhattan seems either very big or very small. On complete map of the New York City area, Manhattan is dwarfed in size by the other four boroughs and surrounding megopolis. But for someone on the ground in Manhattan, the population density, the height of the buildings, the endless number of things to do, and the fact that many people don't often leave their neighborhoods, much less the island, for weeks/months on end makes it seem a very large place indeed. This divergence sense of scales can cause quite a bit of cognitive dissonance for residents and visitors alike.
For the top image, I used the Google Maps representations of Manhattan and Chicago to create a composite map. In the bottom image, I used Google Earth's 3-D views to create a approximate view of Manhattan from Chicago. In all cases, Manhattan is to scale with the other cities. Click through for larger images and other cities.
Update: The map on which Manhattan Elsewhere is based was done by Bill Rankin, who runs the excellent Radical Cartography site, and is part of The Errant Isle of Manhattan project. He also did maps for Boston, SF, Door County, WI, Philly, and Los Angeles (look at how gigantic LA is!), which I completely forgot about. He also made more of an effort than I did to connect the roads. (thx, zach)
While walking through Chelsea Market to get some lunch, I ran across a band comprised of more than a dozen 10-12 year olds with trumpets, clarinets, flutes, guitars, and percussion instruments. They were playing Superfreak by Rick James when I walked in and segued from that right into Hava Nigila. Awesome.
Two people got standing ovations for their presentations at GEL. The first was Barry Schwartz for his talk on The Paradox of Choice. The second person, who gave the most fascinating presentation I've seen at a conference in a long time, was inventor/artist/mad scientist Theo Jansen. For the past fifteen years, Jansen has been creating (growing?) "beach animals" made from commonly available tools like plastic tubing, cardboard boxes, plastic bottles, hose, tape, and all sorts of other stuff. Wired News did a pretty good article on Jansen earlier this year:
Jansen is evolving an entirely new line of animals: immense multi-legged walking critters designed to roam the Dutch coastline, feeding on gusts of wind. Over the years, successive generations of his creatures have evolved into increasingly complex animals that walk by flapping wings in response to the wind, discerning obstacles in their path through feelers and even hammering themselves into the sand on sensing an approaching storm.
It's hard to know where to begin in talking about what's so cool about Jansen's beach animals. They're evolved for one thing; he worked out the optimal 11-piece leg using evolutionary algorithms on a computer but now prefers to race his animals on the beach and "breed" the most successful ones together, taking the best bits from each to make their offspring better. His animals have legs, muscles (pneumatic pistons within the plastic tubing), stomachs (plastic bottles for storing air), and nerves (collections of on/off values that work pretty much like logic gates).
And watching the videos that Jansen showed...his animals were so organic and lifelike as they moved under their own power across the beach. He's got a few of the videos on his site, but for some reason, the best ones he showed at GEL are not among them. To see evolution happening like this, a clumsy, imprecise process of trial and error that nonetheless produces beautiful and organic results, it was a real treat.
When you're out to eat with friends and family, it can be challenging to decide what to order off the menu. There are often too many choices on the menu, everything sounds good, nothing sounds good, you're unfamiliar with a particular type of cuisine, you'd like have what that woman over there is having but you don't know what that is, etc. etc.
Luckily, a group of authors has recently released a series of pop science books focused on solving this particular problem. Here are some lessons on ordering food from those books:
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Glance quickly at the menu and order whatever catches your eye first. Spend no more than 2-3 seconds deciding or the quality of your choice (and your meal) will decline.
Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
The key to ordering a good meal in a restaurant is understanding the economic incentives involved. Ask the server what they recommend and order something else...they are probably trying to get you to order something with a high profit margin or a dish that the restaurant needs to get rid of before the chicken goes bad or something. Never order the second least expensive bottle of wine; it's typically the one with the highest mark-up on the list (i.e. the worst deal).
The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
Take the menu and rip it into 4 or 5 pieces. Order from only one of the pieces, ignoring the choices on the rest of the menu. You will be happier with your meal.
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
Poll the other patrons at the restaurant about what they're having and order the most popular choices for yourself.
Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson
Order anything made with lots of butter, sugar, etc. Avoid salad or anything organic. A meal of all desserts may be appropriate. Or see if you can get the chef to make you a special dish like foie gras and bacon covered with butterscotch and hot fudge. Ideally, you will have brought a Super Sized McDonald's Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese Meal into the restaurant with you. Smoke and drink liberally.
HTTP in tha House takes the text from a URL and constructs a rhyme out of it. Here's what it spit out for kottke.org this morning:
vs commission
i'm in fission
been asking and
have made bland
flat out fantastic
what a drastic
purchase a movie on dvd
basically done ghee
since u been
study tall slender chagrin
rates of whites go
women who had a low
lines more than
d levitt stephen plan
fake restaurant quot
plasticbag a glee
WWW DOT KOTTKE DOT ORG IN THA HOUSE
WWW DOT KOTTKE DOT ORG IN THA HOUSE
WWW DOT KOTTKE DOT ORG IN THA HOUSE
WWW DOT KOTTKE DOT ORG
See also old school kottke.org content Straight Outta .Compton, a collection of rhymes inspired by the dot com boom:
i'm gonna touch your audience, touch them down below
wave our space inter-face 'til your eyeballs glow
stick my vortal in your portal and suck your paradigm
we're a reinvented army whose gonna revolutionise
Shout out to my homie Sean for emizzailing the HTTP in tha House link.
Just got back from seeing Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, Larry Lessig, and Steven Johnson talk about "Who owns culture?" at the New York Public Library. They webcast the event, so if you've never seen Lessig wield his formidable PowerPoint clicker, you may be able to catch it archived there at some point. I'm not going to try to weave this into something narrative, so here are a few random thoughts/observations:
My favorite quote of the evening, from Tweedy (I think I got this down accurately): "I'd like people to hear my music and say they don't like it rather than not be able to hear it because they can't afford it".
Tweedy: "Music is finished in the audience". He credited the audience with 50% ownership in the creation of a musical piece...the creator is not much until someone listens to the music they've created.
Lessig: Fair use doesn't apply to music or movies like it does for text. I can excerpt a book and critique it, but if I wanted to play a clip of a new Fischerspooner song on a podcast and then review the album, I'd need to secure the rights ahead of time.
Johnson: Why isn't there a company that has come along and basically done what the record companies do for artists (distribute and promote records) but do it without all the overhead and let the artists keep the rights to their material? This is probably being done on a small scale (Factory Records comes to mind), but at first blush, this seems like a fantastic business opportunity. All the economies of scale without the monopoly.
Wilco's cover of Don't Fear the Reaper. I think it goes without saying that it needs more cowb, ah screw it.
Tweedy: Wouldn't it be great if an artist like Paul McCartney decided that he had made enough money and just started giving his music away to people to enjoy because that's what music is all about for him. Quote from this Wired article: "If Metallica still needs money then there's something really, really wrong."
Tweedy: What the music and movie companies are asking of artists, to create in a vacuum, is impossible. Not being able to sample, use a piece as a jumping off point for another piece, borrow tunes from other songs, or otherwise be influenced by an artist or poet or writer, it's not possible because that's what art is.
Lessig/Tweedy: Legislating against things like remixing and sampling is racist (also mentioned briefly in this Wired article). The argument goes that genres that tend to rely heavily on sampling and remixing (like hip-hop and rap) tend to be practiced by minorities and that legislating against them is de facto racism. More generally, it's about the powerful (who, in the US, tend to be middle-aged white men) trying to keep their power by limiting the powerless (i.e., the poor and otherwise disenfranchised, who, in the US, tend to be minorities). (Apologies if this is confusing or I misrepresented Tweedy's views on this or overused the word "tends"...racism is one of those hot button issues and I don't want anyone to fly off the handle and say Tweedy or I said that all poor people are black and like rap music or some nonsense like that. Anyway, tried to be careful with it, but the above may not necessarily reflect the nuance of Tweedy's views on this issue.)
At one point, Johnson and Tweedy started talking about alternative models for music distribution and Tweedy made the point that music has been around for a lot longer than the record companies and there's lots of ways that music (and other forms of media) has traditionally been distributed, like via subscriptions and patronage. And Steven missed the perfect opportunity to say, "a friend of mine is exploring a micropatronage model for blogging...." ;)
This is the best thing I've seen on the web in the last few weeks. An artist from the UK named Banksy went into four of NYC's most prominent museums -- the Met, the Museum of Natural History, the Brooklyn Museum, and the MoMA -- and installed four of his own pieces of art:
Dressed as a British pensioner, over the last few days Banksy entered each of the galleries and attached one of his own works, complete with authorative name plaque and explanation.
He says - "This historic occasion has less to do with finally being embraced by the fine art establishment and is more about the judicious use of a fake beard and some high strength glue." Banksy continues -"They're good enough to be in there, so I don't see why I should wait"
Staff at the New York Met discovered and removed their new aquisition early Sunday morning while Banksy's discount soup can print took pride of place in the MoMA for over three days before being torn down.
As of now, the other two pieces currently remain firmly in place.
Be sure to click through to see the photos. As far as I'm concerned, this is probably more interesting than most of whatever else is happening in the art world right now and instead of tearing it down, the MoMA should move it into their contemporary art collection. Thanks to cityrag for the link.
I'm a bit wary about throwing myself in the middle of the whole Google Toolbar AutoLink business (Dan Gillmor has a good summary and lots of trackbacks to opinions, pro and con), but I'm sort of dumbfounded that so many people are so vehemently against it...at least for the reasons being given. The three main points I've heard articulated by those opposed to the feature are:
1. Browsers and toolbars should not modify the content or layout of Web pages...they should render them only as stored on the Web server.
2. Microsoft tried to do this with Smart Tags in Windows XP and everyone hated it so why are we willing to give Google a pass with a similar feature?
3. Google can unfairly use their growing clout to exploit AutoLink users.
I'll address the second point first because it's sort of beside the point and not an argument at all. One of the big reasons why people were so upset about Smart Tags is that Smart Tags were on by default in early preview releases of IE. The browser was automatically rewriting every single page you loaded, adding links here and there. I agree that this sucks (although users may become used to things like this in the future and not think it's such a big deal), but AutoLink is not on by default. It's optional...you have to specifically push a button to make something happen.
But the main reason people seem to be up in arms about AutoLink is that Google is modifying the content and display of other people's content and that browsers and toolbars should not be allowed to do that. Aside from the first part of that statement being factually incorrect (more on that below), browsers and toolbars already modify other people's content and no one really complains about it. In fact, people love it:
- Firefox, Safari, Google Toolbar, IE, and several other browsers/toolbars all give end users the option to block JavaScript popups, which typically contain ads. This very much goes against the intention of the content provider and is a clear example of software that modifies a site from how it was intended to be displayed. But users love it so browser/toolbar makers include the feature.
- Browsers allow users to use custom stylesheets when browsing sites, turn off JavaScript on pages, and browse without viewing images or other multimedia files.
- There are tons of bookmarklets and browser extensions that let people modify the page they're viewing in interesting ways (this one inserts links to Feedster on NY Times and WaPo article pages).
- Since the early days of the web right on up to the present, browsers have purposely misrendered badly written HTML so that people could view the pages instead of getting junk or a blank page.
All of these features break the supposedly cardinal sin of "thou shalt not modify the content providers content from the way it was intended by them to be viewed" and I don't hear anyone complaining about it. The fact is, once a user downloads a copy of a content provider's web page from their server, the page becomes just that, a copy. As a user, I should be able to use whatever software is available to me to manipulate, modify, or otherwise remix that copy which I've downloaded for my own personal use. If I can, for my own personal use, photocopy magazine articles, rip my CDs to mp3, make backup copies of my DVDs, and scribble in the margins of books, surely I can do the same with copies of web pages I've downloaded.
Now, if you're against AutoLink because you think Google is becoming too big, they're evil, they're abusing their power, or they bought another blog company instead of yours, then that's fine. Just be up front about why you're upset. It's a trust issue. Do you trust Google's software to do what it says its going to do and not take advantage of you? If the answer is no, don't use it. But if you're saying that Google should not provide this feature at all and that consenting adults in the privacy of their own homes can't choose to use the feature themselves, I don't think that's a good deal for the users. As content providers, let's not try and reach into our readers' computers and dictate what they can or can't do with the copies of our content that they've downloaded for their personal use...let's leave that sort of wishful thinking to the nutballs in Hollywood.
When I first watched the cool new VW Golf GTI commercial featuring an updated Gene Kelly poppin' and lockin', I guess I wasn't paying that much attention to it.
Then the other day a friend IMed me and asked, "hey have you seen this Golf GTI commercial with that guy from the crazy Kollaboration video?"
"It's the same guy? I know that guy!" I watched the video again and sure enough, Gene Kelly was dancing with the unmistakable style of Elsewhere, aka David Bernal. After a quick search, I found a message board post from Elsewhere himself that it was indeed him in the commerical:
yup that was me along with Crumbs and another popper named Jay Walker.
I emailed David to ask him about the experience and he graciously took the time to answer a few questions.
Jason: How did you get the Golf GTI gig? Audition or had someone seen your stuff and specifically wanted you for it?
David: They specifically wanted to use me for it. I had done a Heineken Commercial several months prior and the special effects people for that commercial were going to do the effects for this VW commercial. I got an email asking me if I could dance in the rain with a prosthetic mask on and several weeks later I was in London doing just that.
jkottke: That scene from Singin' in the Rain is one of the most famous in film, and certainly the most famous dance number in film. What was it like to be a part of an attempt to recreate and update it?
David: It was an honor and a privilege being one of the dancers in this commercial. Gene Kelly was a great dancer, singer and actor which is a lot more than I have to offer. It's extremely flattering having a commercial that essentially implies that my moves are an updated version of Gene's dance skills.
jkottke: Some folks have complained about the crassness of using a dead guy's likeness to sell automobiles. As one of the actors playing the deceased, do you have any thoughts on that?
David: Yeah it's kind of weird, but imo it kind of comes with the territory when you're a legend. I don't know if Gene would be too hot about the whole thing but obviously the Gene Kelly Estate approved it, so it's apparently not that crass to them.
jkottke: I've read that you often freestyle when you dance, making it up as you go along, but that you also have little micro-routines that you rely on as you do. In shooting the commercial, how much of the choreography was scripted and how much did you get to ad lib? How much did you need to change your style much based on specific shots from the original film or Gene's style?
David:It was different for each shot. For example with the close-ups they would say just do a bunch of wavy stuff, so I would simply freestyle with some waves. Most of the full body shots were more routine based. They would specifically want me to do a list of moves, but to connect everything I would naturally freestyle.
I didn't have to change my dancing stylistically at all. They wanted me to dance the way that I dance. In fact they had us watch the original Singing in the Rain scene so many times that I started unconsciously moving a bit like Gene Kelly. The director at one point even told me that I was moving too much like Gene and I needed to move more like me.
If anything the parameters and conditions of the shoot inadvertently changed my style. The sound stage was cold and we had to dance under artificial rain for hours. To avoid freezing we wore wet suits under our already thick, tight costumes. This restricted my movement a lot. My shoes were quite uncomfortable and fake flooring we danced on was soft and spongy. I had to keep my head up and smile constantly which was very unnatural for me. Yet the biggest difficulty for me was the rigid time restraints. Since it was a commercial we had to do a lot within a small amount of time. This forced me to speed up my style more than I usually do.
jkottke: Thanks, David.
You can see more of David's stuff on the Detours Video site, by purchasing some DVDs, or by doing a search for "david elsewhere".
Having seen many of his presentations and read many of his articles, it's been enjoyable watching Larry Lessig refine his copyright arguments over the past few years. Many still wrongly assume that he's anti-copyright, but his views are much more nuanced than that, certainly more subtle than those of the media industry or the US government. Here's a short passage from his latest article on copyright term extensions:
We rightfully grant the monopoly called copyright to inspire new creative work. But once that work has been created, there is no public justification for extending its term. The public has already paid. Term extension is just double billing. Any wealth it creates for copyright holders is swamped by the wealth the public loses in lower costs and wider access.
A limited term of protection in exchange for freely available creative work...sounds reasonable to me.
One of my favorite talks at Poptech was Janice Benyus' presentation on biomimicry, or innovation inspired by nature:
Biomimicry is a new science that studies nature's models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems, e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf. [It] uses an ecological standard to judge the "rightness" of our innovations. After 3.8 billion years of evolution, nature has learned: What works. What is appropriate. What lasts. Biomimicry is a new way of viewing and valuing nature. It introduces an era based not on what we can extract from the natural world, but on what we can learn from it.
In the talk, Janine outlined 12 ways in which nature can inform the development of technology:
1. Self assembly
2. Chemistry in water
3. Solar transformations
4. The power of shape
5. Materials as systems
6. Natural selection as an innovation engine
7. Material recycling
8. Ecosystems that grow food
9. Energy savvy movement and transport
10. Resilience and healing
11. Sensing and responding
12. Life creates conditions conducive to life
Those are a little vague and I wish I'd written down more notes, but it was hard to type and really listen at the same time. To fill in the gaps, you can listen to the audio of her 30 minute presentation.
I'll write more in-depth about a few of the speakers here, but for now, here are some soundbites (my comments in brackets):
- Andrew Zolli: All societies have an image of the future. Those that have optimistic images have better outcomes than those with pessimistic images. [The US right now seems optimistic overall, but getting a bit more pessimistic. At PopTech this year and last, about 1/2 the speakers said during their talks something to the effect of "we're screwed".]
- Malcolm Gladwell talking about a chapter from Blink:
One of the many ways in which asking someone what they think isn't necessarily the best way to find out what they want: people move away from the more sophisticated idea and they go for the simpler choice because they don't have the necessary "vocabulary" to explain their real feelings. [You may prefer The Hours to Goldeneye, but when asked to justify that choice, you may find yourself favoring the Bond flick more than you would if you didn't have to justify it.]
- Frans de Waal studies primate behavior to gain insight into human behavior. One of his findings: aggression does not disperse, it brings primates together more often than normal. [Destruction is creative. Creativity is destructive. Or something.]
- Bruce Mau: Not all countries have embraced democracy, but most have embraced traffic (individual transportation). [There are many different ways in which openness can be introduced into a culture.]
- Thomas Barnett: China is 30% Marxist Communist, 70% The Sopranos.
- Phillip Longman: Secular societies that cannot reproduce will be replaced by fundamentalist countries where children are an economic asset and a gift from God. And in Brazil, television viewing time predicts birth rate...the more TV a woman watches, the less likely she is to have children.
My new fighting, filing, chatting, voting, hand holding, glazing, brain eating, planting, shirt folding, updating, blogging, waxing, screaming, litter scooping, sewing, theater going, parenting, dressing, programming, turning cool, randomization, swiping, Election Day news gathering, exercise, hamburgering, atomic browsing, laundry folding, penguin smacking, fucking, coloring, dustpan, thread killing, replying, actionscripting, tabbed browsing, publishing, vote rigging, Rumsfeld fighting, reinforcement learning, designing, folding, hibernating, muffin eating techniques are unstoppable.
Credit: the original new personal technique and a few Google searches.
Hollywood is living in some sort of fantasy land. George Lucas had this to say when questioned about why he moved up the release of the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD (bold mine):
Just because the market has shifted so dramatically. A lot of people are getting very worried about piracy. That has really eaten dramatically into the sales. It really just came down to, there may not be a market when I wanted to bring it out, which was like, three years from now. So rather than just sit by and watch the whole thing fall apart, better to bring it out early and get it over with.
In the words of a famous sports announcer, let's go the videotape. The Web site for the DVD Entertainment Group (their BOD is stocked with bigwigs from the large entertainment and electronics companies) states that "DVD [is] the fastest adopted consumer electronics product ever". There have been literally thousands of news articles written about the explosive growth of DVD sales; here are some quotes from an article on the CBS News Web site (from 10/2003):
Home video sales now account for nearly 60 percent of Hollywood's revenue. DVD sales are not only the fastest growing part of the movie business, they're changing the way Hollywood does business.
He says DVD sales can save a film like "Dark Blue," which pulled in a modest $9 million in theaters. "It actually did more revenues in DVD than it did at the box office," says McGurk, because the DVD market is a man's world.
Blockbuster films now often sell more than 10 million DVDs in the U.S. alone. And that's at $20 a pop. And with DVD players still in only half of American homes, Hollywood believes those soaring sales will just get hotter still.
Finding Nemo grossed $320 million from DVD sales in 2003. "Consumers spend more money on the DVD version of almost every movie than they do on that same movie in theaters, including blockbusters such as The Lord of the Rings, Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean" (USA Today). CNN/Money reports that the movie studios "pocket roughly 80 cents of every dollar on each DVD sold, a take well above the 50 cents for each dollar at the box office" and The Hollywood Reporter says that "studios are earning about 60% more upon initial release from video sales of theatrical feature films than they did during the VHS-only era". So, not only are video sales up overall, DVDs are more profitable for the media companies than VHS or the box office.
And the future looks rosy as well. PriceWaterhouseCoopers has a sample chapter of their Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2004-2008 report** online which says:
We project filmed entertainment spending in the United States, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), Asia/Pacific, Latin America, and Canada will rise at a 7.5 percent compound annual rate, reaching $108 billion in 2008 from $75.3 billion in 2003. EMEA will be the fastest-growing region, rising by 10.3 percent compounded annually to $36.9 billion in 2008 compared with $22.6 billion in 2003. The U.S. market will expand at a 6.3 percent rate, from $34.3 billion in 2003 to $46.6 billion in 2008. Spending in Asia/Pacific will increase from $13.3 billion to $17.3 billion in the five-year period, growing at a 5.4 percent compound annual rate. Filmed entertainment in Latin America will total $1.6 billion in 2008, up from $1.3 billion in 2003, representing a 4.6 percent gain compounded annually. Spending in Canada will rise from $3.9 billion in 2003 to $5.6 billion in 2008, 7.7 percent compounded annually.
This is anything but piracy "dramatically" eating into sales. Mr. Lucas, would you like to change your answer?
** The same report also says that "piracy will cut into spending, particularly on rental, with the most pronounced impact in Asia/Pacific and Latin America, although all regions will be affected", but there is no evidence given. In fact, in all the articles I read, piracy was handled in a very hand-waving fashion with no numbers or evidence to back up claims.
Dropcash is a little project that Andre Torrez and I have been working for the last few weeks:
[Dropcash is] a simple way to organize a fundraiser. Are you raising money for a charity, a trip overseas, a family gift for mom, or to pay off a surprise hosting bill? DropCash lets you set up a page so everyone can follow your progress as you near your goal.
Andre came up with the idea and did the coding and I helped with the design, HTML, and a bit of IA. It's currently in beta and we plan on making improvements as time goes on. Gomi No Sensei has some nice things to say about it.
In celebration of Alien vs. Predator's box office win this weekend, here are a few more "sequel" ideas to keep the gravy train going for Hollywood:
Teen Wolf vs. The Godfather
Terminator vs. Spiderman
Cujo vs. Annie
Gladiator vs. Amadeus
Dirty Harry vs. Mrs. Doubtfire
Popeye vs. Anchorman
Annie Hall vs. Donnie Darko
The Wizard of Oz vs. The Man who Wasn't There
Gandhi vs. Tootsie
Nixon vs. All the President's Men
Henry V vs. Lawrence of Arabia
Forrest Gump vs. Rain Man
Rambo vs. Rocky
Kramer vs. Kramer vs. The Princess Bride
Happy Gilmore vs. 12 Angry Men
Unbeknowst to me, Matthew Baldwin covered similar ground a few days ago with his Cinematic Supervillain Showdown. kottke.org: I may not get there first, but I get there eventually.
Inspired by Dana's post about Flickr colors, here's the Flickr spectrum, starting with the Flickr Homeland Security Advisory System:
SEVERE: brick, flag, carpet
HIGH: flower, sunset, kitty
ELEVATED: daisy, cab, fries
GUARDED: sky, jeans, hair
LOW: tree, wasabi, watermelon
couch, blueberries, flower
football, ice cream, hats
cat, tie, sky
sky, feet, chairs
tile, sculpture, polaroid
maude, bitch whips, pillow
Cory Doctorow recently gave a talk about DRM (Digital Rights Management) to Microsoft Research. He dedicated the text of his talk to the public domain using a Creative Commons public domain dedication, which means:
Dedicator recognizes that, once placed in the public domain, the Work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.
Using GarageBand and the built-in microphone on my Powerbook, I recorded an audio version of Cory's talk. Andy is hosting an mp3 version of the talk (mirror) and a Bittorrent of the file is available here. (Thx Patrick and Sverrir for mirrors).
It's 36.4 MB and 40 min long. If you want to mirror the mp3, let me know and I'll put a link up. The audio is covered under the same dedication as the original text. If you'd like to do something with it, go nuts. Also, listen for a little easter egg about 8:20 into the audio.
Sort of disclaimer: I make no claim as to the quality of this recording. It may be too quiet or contain too much background noise. You may hear fast-talking, mumbling, my cracking voice, or flubbed pronounciations of difficult names. I do not do justice to Cory's animated passion about the subject...at times, I sound like I'm reading James Joyce on NPR rather than enthusiastically arguing for the hopeful future of media and technology.
But it's out there. You can put it on your iPod, you can listen to it while you have breakfast tomorrow morning, listen to it on your shower mp3 player while scrubbing your bits and pieces, or you can burn it to a CD and listen to it in your car on the way to work. Or whatever. It's not a high-quality professional recording, but as Cory says in his talk, it doesn't have to be because it's got other things going for it.
ps. I'd love to see someone other than Cory give this talk at a conference. Now that would be "exploitation by anyone for any purpose".
The Frontline special on the music industry covered a lot of ground, perhaps too much for just an hour. The main theme of the show was that music hasn't fared too well as an industry. Media companies, including the big five record labels and the radio station chains, have lost touch with their customers, marketing what will sell instead of providing a good product. Big media blames the industry downturn on free music availability on the Internet, but as Michael "Blue" Williams, Outkast's manager, puts it, the labels have gotten lazy and are pushing out crap; he says if the labels "started putting out good records, quality records, the public will buy".
If you missed it, don't worry; the entire episode is available on the PBS Web site in either Windows Media or Realplayer format**. Also on the Web site are all sorts of additional interviews and information.
** Go PBS for putting episodes online. As taxpayers, the shows are ours anyway...we should be able to choose when and how we watch them. This way, we don't need to go downloading illegal copies of missed episodes of our favorite shows.
(Oh, and I tried looking for the weblog world's reaction to the show, but all three of the blog search engines I tried -- Daypop, Blogdex, & Technorati -- were down, so you'll have to dig that up on your own. Will someone make a reliable weblog search engine that doesn't suck? Hello, business opportunity!)
Last week's season finale of The West Wing was on smack dab in the middle of game 6 of the Timberwolves/Kings series. I opted to watch the game instead of the Wing. Of course, since NBC wants to make their media artificially scarce, the episode wasn't replayed later in the evening nor will it until later in the summer (if you haven't seen it, it's new to you!). This weekend, I found a torrent for the finale...without commercials and in letterbox no less. A couple hours of downloading later and voila, my own personal rerun.
My dream of distributing couch potato behavior has been realized by Simon Thornton: Sending Live Television Via iChat. Simon says:
However, if you just so happen to be someone that has purchased an analogue video -> DV (firewire) converter box in the past, such as the Formac Studio, you might be suprised to learn that when it's plugged in it is presented to the Mac (and specifically the iChat application) as a perfectly valid firewire input device. In other, shorter, easier, words: you can use your converter box to stream live video from something - oooh, let's just say your Sky Digibox for example - to someone else using iChat anywhere else in the world. If you happened to have one of the outputs of your Sky box (it has two) connected up to the inputs of your converter box, you might see how this could work.
Fantastic. No wonder the entertainment companies want all sorts of DRM built into everything.
Media artist Jason Corace will play the part of Super Mario in Ctrl-shift, an online game he's developing for release this summer:
Ctrl-shift is a multi player online game that gives its players collaborative control over my freewill. The goal of the game is to fulfill a series of game missions that take place in the real world, in real time. Players attempt to collectively complete these missions by suggesting and voting for actions for me to perform, in response to live streaming video broadcast from wireless hotspots around New York City.
Players will control Jason through a Flash interface, voting on what actions he should take to achieve the game's objectives. Jason, roaming around New York City, will be equipped with a camera & mic to keep players informed of where he is (not sure if GPS is involved), and he'll send data and receive commands with a mobile device (like a laptop or handheld device) using wifi hotspots. According to the site, prototype games will be running this spring with a full-scale 5-day game to be initiated sometime this summer.
Games similar to Ctrl-shift are Noderunner (a race to collect and upload photographic proof of as many wifi hotspots as you can), The Big Urban Game (people vote online to move huge chess pieces around the Twin Cities), EA's Majestic (game sends you email, calls you on the phone, etc. as part of the gameplay; it flopped badly), Can You See Me Now?, and Uncle Roy All Around You (both from Blast Theory, with virtual and real players interacting on the same board).
Since no one has the time to read books anymore, I used the text version of Lessig's new book, Free Culture, and Word's AutoSummary feature (like I did with the Matrix thread) to produce a ~100 word summary of the 368 page book:
FREE CULTURE
"PROPERTY"
The copyright warriors are right: A copyright is a kind of property. First, about copyright. That copyright is their property. America copied English copyright law. Actually, we copied and improved English copyright law. In 1790, Congress enacted the first copyright law.
"Copies." Obviously, however, some uses of a copyrighted book are regulated by copyright law. It is therefore regulated by copyright law. The law of copyright is extremely efficient. Obviously, copyright law is not the enemy. Copyright law is one such law.
Extending copyright terms pays.
The law extended the terms of copyright generally.
Copyright is a brake.
I believe in the law of copyright.
Sounds like Rain Man explaining copyright. Here are some other versions of Free Culture, made possible by its release under a Creative Commons license:
- PDF from the author himself
- Paul Bausch's random quote generator
- collaborative audiobook
- wiki
- HTML
Just for fun, I've (temporarily) added a small link after those sites on my "not recommended" list in the sidebar whose editors have Kinja public digests. Just look for the (k) after the site names. That way, visitors to kottke.org who like what I have to say can read sites I recommend and then check out what those recommended people are reading. That's right, all that mumbo jumbo means I've created Friendster for weblogs! Genius! Where's my $30 million in VC money?
(Oh and let me know if you're on the "not recommended" list and you'd like me to add/remove your public digest.)
Fundrace2004, which is shaping up to be an extremely interesting and unique source of election information, has a new feature called Neighbor Search. You put in an address (or ZIP) or the name of a friend/neighbor/co-worker/celebrity and it returns the names, addresses, company names & job functions, and campaign contributions for persons matching the search criteria. Like all public data sets that have previously been available only in dusty books or individually by request (allow 6-10 weeks for delivery), the effect of seeing this data in aggregate and being able to slice it and dice it at will is both thrilling and a little unnerving. Ain't the Internet grand?
Here are a few people and their contributions:
Bill Gates: George W. Bush, $2000
George H.W. Bush: George W. Bush, $2000
Craig Barrett (Intel CEO): Joe Lieberman, $2000; George W. Bush, $2000
Harvey Weinstein (Miramax): Howard Dean, $2000; John Edwards, $2000; Dick Gephardt, $1000; and possibly Wesley Clark, $2000
Larry Lessig: Howard Dean, $2000; John Edwards, $2000
Warren Buffett: Bob Graham, $2000; Wesley Clark, $2000
Jimmy Buffett: Bob Graham, $2000; Wesley Clark, $2000
P. Diddy: Al Sharpton, $2000
Also of interest is this map of Manhattan showing political contributions by building. Lots of Republicans on the UES and lots of Democrats below 14th Street...no surprise there. (via reBlog)
kottke.org is grey today because I believe that musical sampling without prior consent of the copyright holder should be legally allowed because it does our society more good than harm.
Late last year, a DJ named Danger Mouse took The Black Album by Jay-Z, mixed it with samples taken from the Beatles' White Album, and produced The Grey Album. He sent the album to a few folks and now -- blame the Internet -- everyone has a copy.
EMI, one of the big five record companies, parent of Capitol Records, and owner/controller of the Beatles musical catalog, sent Danger Mouse a cease-and-desist letter, claiming that he had infringed on their copyright of the Beatles tunes in question. (Jay-Z, on the other hand, released an a capella version of The Black Album so that precisely this type of sampling/remixing would occur.) Andy Baio and several other people posted MP3 copies of The Grey Album on their Web sites and were also sent letters by representatives of EMI ordering them to remove the songs from their sites.
Believing that "the record industry has become a huge drag on creativity", music activist group Downhill Battle organized Grey Tuesday (Feb 24) and urged Web sites to turn grey and/or host MP3 versions of The Grey Album. I'm not hosting any of the MP3 files (you can find the files on these sites), but I have turned the site grey for the day to show my support for more permissive copyright laws. Instead of locking creativity up, I say set it free and see what happens.
I love what the judge had to say to one of MGM's lawyers in the MGM vs Grokster case:
Let me say what I think your problem is. You can use these harsh terms, but you are dealing with something new, and the question is, does the statutory monopoly that Congress has given you reach out to that something new. And that's a very debatable question. You don't solve it by calling it 'theft.' You have to show why this court should extend a statutory monopoly to cover the new thing. That's your problem. Address that if you would. And curtail the use of abusive language.
The audio transcript is available on MP3 and is in the public domain, which means you can share it with your friends, share it with strangers with P2P software like Grokster, or do a remix of it with GarageBand and release that into the public domain (which you could then share with your friends or strangers however you see fit). Gosh, wouldn't it be nice to have a collaborative culture instead of a culture dictated to us by Universal, Sony, EMI, Time Warner, and BMG? (link via bb and Copyfight)
John Brockman has asked his Edgy band of scientists, futurists, writers, and philosophers about "some bit of wisdom, some rule of nature, some law-like pattern, either grand or small, that you've noticed in the universe that might as well be named after you", like those of Newton, Moore, or Murphy. Here are the results.
The more general of such laws are the most interesting because they can enrich our understanding of diverse subject areas and can be very instructive in how they fail. I think maybe this is what Alan Alda was getting at with his First and Second Laws of Laws:
1. All laws are local.
2. A law does not know how local it is.
Here's a few of my other favorite laws from the list, general and not:
Pimm's First Law: No language spoken by fewer than 100,000 people survives contact with the outside world, while no language spoken by more than one million people can be eliminated by such contact.
Gopnik's Gender Curves: The male curve is an abrupt rise followed by an equally abrupt fall. The female curve is a slow rise to an extended asymptote. The areas under the curves are roughly equal. These curves apply to all activities at all time scales (e.g. attention to TV programs, romantic love, career scientific productivity). (see the graphs)
Morgan's Second Law: To a first approximation all appointments are canceled.
Pöppel's Universal: We take life 3 seconds at a time. Human experience and behaviour is characterized by temporal segmentation. Successive segments or "time windows" have a duration of approx. 3 seconds.
Brand's Pace Law: In haste, mistakes cascade. With deliberation, mistakes instruct.
Kai's Example Dilemma: A good analogy is like a diagonal frog.
Rushkoff's Law: A religion will increase in social value until a majority of its members actually believe in it--at which point the social damage it causes will increase exponentially as long as it is in existence.
Humphrey's Law of the Efficacy of Prayer: In a dangerous world there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not.
Minksy's Second Law: Don't just do something. Stand there.
Sterling's Corollary to Clarke's Law: Any sufficiently advanced garbage is indistinguishable from magic.
Customized Classics takes novels & stories that have passed into the public domain (A Christmas Carol, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Alice in Wonderland, among others) and prints personalized paperback versions of them on demand..."starring YOU!" Instead of "Call me Ishmael" or "Oh Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?", you could get "Call me Jason" or even "Oh G. Gordon Liddy, G. Gordon Liddy! Wherefore art thou G. Gordon Liddy?" They've even modified Romeo and Juliet to make a "happy ending" version:
SCENE IV. IN THE SEPULCHRE.
[Romeo and Juliet awaken, rubbing their eyes]
Romeo: What uncommon commotion stirs these folk? Ah, blessed apothecary, whose potion miss'd its mark!
Juliet: And perhaps 'twas the keenness of mine love that hath dulled the dagger's blade.
Romeo: What sayest thou we hasten to Verona?
Juliet: Come, prince, love, husband, shining angel! Let's leave this cold sepulchre for Verona's warm embrace.
[Exeunt Romeo and Juliet hand in hand]
This is exactly the type of thing that gets Michael Eisner's panties in a wad w.r.t. Mickey Mouse, but I think it's fantastic. (thx Jenn)
From Criminal Records, an article from the Sunday Times Magazine on UK pirate radio:
There is a studio mobile too. It vibrates every few seconds like a faulty alarm clock, as listeners call and text. Scrolling through its inbox, I notice scores of "missed calls". Big N explains that this is how pirates gauge a record's popularity. If listeners like a tune, they call in and then ring off, so the studio mobile registers a "missed call". This costs callers nothing. If Xtreme receives over 20 missed calls from different numbers before a track ends, the DJs play it again. This is why teenagers listen to pirate radio: it's interactive in ways legal stations can't match. Some tune in on their mobiles - on the bus, in the high street, even at school.
The big record companies are (smartly) using statistics from file-sharing networks to get a TiVo-level look at what people are listening to, but are keeping it on the downlow because it weakens their legal case against those networks:
According to on-the-record statements by many major labels, the scene I witnessed in Fleischer's office couldn't possibly have happened. But Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, says his firm is working with Maverick, Atlantic, Warner Bros., Interscope, DreamWorks, Elektra, and Disney's Hollywood label. The labels are reticent to admit their relationship with BigChampagne for public relations reasons, but there's a legal rationale, too. The record industry's lawsuits against file-sharing companies hang on their assertion that the programs have no use other than to help infringe copyrights. If the labels acknowledge a legitimate use for P2P programs, it would undercut their case as well as their zero-tolerance stance. "We would definitely consider gleaning marketing wisdom from these networks a non-infringing use," says Fred von Lohmann, staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the San Francisco-based cyber liberties group that's helping to defend Morpheus, Grokster, and Kazaa.
I was wondering when this issue would arise. There's just too much information available about people's music-listening habits on file-sharing networks for the labels to ignore, even if it means that those networks would be legally allowed to exist. The labels and the RIAA must have some inkling of this because their tactics have changed in recent months; they're now going after individuals in addition to the networks. Might they are willing to concede a distinction between legal and illegal use of file-sharing systems? (via bb)
Reading some mailing list messages just now, I came across a post titled "PHP to enter NULL into MySQL". Sounds like a headline from the world's dorkiest newspaper.
alsop the mend
mescal hove cranks
pleader bender hying
tensest estimations horseshoer
bramble addicted illustrious
eventuality polygonal terrors
popularly maturity courtesy
excretion bergman horsefly
scopes advertisements terminated
eta hornblende crimson
adoptions metronome argive
boardinghouse posters hypothyroid
botany couching talker
administering hoydenish bourgeoisie
testifiers sawyer barnes
meeker savers admits
polygonal bateman bessel
schoolroom acts bouncing
bergman posers expeditions
teacart hypodermics audubon
ali takeover adventurers
bottoming sculptor bravo
telecommunicate acknowledge pledge
accumulator icebox exceptionally
tee expedient plungers tamely cradled boob
matrices exhausting sawfish at&t mechanics
remove mail
testings mended boundlessness
advertisement actinolite tainted
administratively meaningfully advanced
crashing body exceptionally
cortege courted arnold
cottony tattle humorous
midst illume covariate
scents imaginate expunging
adair bowler benson
boatload actively pouting
bookseller boom saturdays
creamer policed boniface
euphemism cretinous bonnets
actuators pragmatism sayings
scheme andersen crackling
poop pomade boasters
aegean mien mechanics
pragmatically bra plurals
exhortation plebiscite termed
hovers tension postmen
ibis tenable possums
executor cowboys hypothalamus
accesses telecommunication poles
scrutinize breakers mattered
schoolhouses meanwhile testes pluck porphyry expressively
temporary anheuser schoolhouse telescoped actuality
-- Gary Milano, webm@yahoo.com
This is neat, a rotary dial interface to a web browser:
A web browser that uses a rotary phone dial as a custom physical interface. To use it, one dials an IP address rather than typing a URL. Dots are entered by pressing a button, external to the dial.
So, when I fix it so I can control my TiVo via the web and buy an Apple iSight camera & point it at the television, I can watch Junkyard Wars and Family Guy at work via iChat AV, right?
Also, at next year's O'Reilly Etech conference, someone** will do something with iSight/iChat AV that will allow people attending one panel to tune into the other two concurrent panels (much like Hydra let people textally eavesdrop on concurrent panels last year). The really cool thing? The organizers of the conference won't have to do anything to make this happen, aside from providing the wireless network. No setting up a streaming, teleconferencing, blah-de-blah server, no renting of video cameras or microphones, no A/V people. Just give people a medium for communication & collaboration and they'll figure it out for themselves.
** Here's a suggestion: a presenter could mic him/herself, make the audio available over iChat AV, and make the presentation available on the web so that anyone who has iChat can follow along from anywhere in the conference area. Add in real-time stenography with Hydra and you can enjoy the conference entirely from the bar or one of the sofas in the lobby.
Network Effects: Use of the Internet in the Chinese Rave Scene describes how Chinese music promoters and DJs are using the Internet to download & share music, read foreign music-related media, plan events, and generally share knowledge about their interests & craft, despite the Great Firewall of China:
I began to see a number of distinct effects of the rapid increase in Net usage on the nascent Chinese club scene: local DJs and producers were using the Internet to obtain new tools for producing and distributing their own music; websites were springing up to inform users about new developments in the Chinese scene and provide new opportunities for participants to communicate with one another; and music makers and clubbers alike were using the Net to learn about and obtain new music from both domestic and international artists.
and
Some Chinese DJs even use music downloaded from the Net in their live sets, making their own compilations of MP3 files of music from China and abroad and recording them on CDRs; I have observed DJs at some of the largest clubs in Shanghai and Guangzhou using these CDRs in the DJ booth. Among some in the Chinese underground hiphop scene, only tracks which have been downloaded are considered truly "underground" and thus valuable, while any music which is available for purchase in physical form is seen as being tainted by commerciality to some degree.
When I was in Beijing in 1996, I observed several people handing out club flyers around hotels and in the more hip/affluent parts of the city. They were particularly keen about giving flyers to anyone who looked like a tourist.
Now that people have had a couple of weeks to tinker with it, it's become apparent that in iTunes, Apple has created their own little Napster. Well, half of Napster anyway. Just like with Napster or Kazaa, users of iTunes can share their music libraries with anyone with anyone they want. Several public sites and applications have already sprung up to help people find folks who are sharing their music, most notably ShareiTunes and SpyMac.
The catch is that you can't save songs from someone else's library to your local library using iTunes. However, a few enterprising developers looked at how iTunes shares music and have been building applications that provide the other half of the Napster experience, the downloading of music from remote libraries. iLeech is a very simple, tiny program that lets you download music from any publically available iTunes library (and there are other apps that do similar things).
Conventional wisdom is that Apple seriously fucked up, the RIAA is going to sue Apple's pants off, and Apple's new iTunes Music Store will be shut down by the some seriously pissed off record companies.
I'd like to believe an alternative theory. Apple had to know what they were doing with iTunes. Their engineers aren't stupid. They left the whole thing wide open and had to know how trivial it would be for developers to figure out the protocol and write apps to download the music directly. Maybe Apple is taking a stand here, saying that this type of software is not illegal and that it is individual users who choose to break the law. Apple knows that it's in our nature to want to share music, photos, and movies with each other and is building applications (social software?) to support that behavior. Apple wants to make a business out of this and maybe they're daring the RIAA to sue them over it. Or daring the RIAA not to sue them. After all, Apple and the record companies are all buddy-buddy now with the iTunes Music Store...are they willing to sue Apple right after getting Jobs on the cover of Fortune with Sheryl Crow? If Apple is in fact taking a stand here, I say, go Apple!
Some unintentional editorializing by the Google News computer program:
Excellent.
Paul Nixon took all the band names from the recent music post and compiled them into a neat text file:
Downside of this list: Little to no context to the musician or musical style is given on this list. Some context may or may not be gathered from reading the actual commentary. Also, formatting and duplication errors abound.
Organizational note: The alphabetized list ignores the "The" bands by alphabetizing the band based on the second word in the name (e.g. White Stripes, The). Unfortunately trying to alphabetize the band "The The" ended in a vicious, never ending cycle from which I have yet to escape.
Above quote is from this post.
Adam Greenfield has written an RFC on the idea of an open-source constitution for post-national states:
The question then becomes, what kinds of constitutional structures are appropriate to furthering the stated aims in an internetworked, interdependent age? What sorts of arrangements of power between humans can account for the deep variation in beliefs and assumptions among the six billion of us who share this planet, while still providing for a common jurisprudence? What measures can be taken that enhance the common security without unduly infringing on the sovereignty of the individual?
I believe that a useful model for the desired structure can be found in the open-source or "free" software movement.
In practice, the open-source software community is quite good at producing software for techies by techies (Linux, Apache, Sendmail) but not very good at making software for use by a general audience. Will open-source government turn out the same? Constitutions for constitutional enthusiasts?
Our spies have been hard at work here at kottke.org, drudging up the latest news, gossip, and graphical user interfaces related to the Google/Pyra deal. Here's an early peek at what Blogger could look like now that Google has its multicolored mitts on it:
The inclusion of the "I'm feeling lucky" button in the interface has already turned the so-called "blogosphere" upside down, creating a schism between the "luckbloggers" and the "luckisfortheshallowthestrongcreatetheirownluckbloggers". More information on this important conflict as it unfolds.
(Ok, this wasn't working earlier, but it's fixed now. Get to it!)
Reversible is a site that collects referers and trackbacks from pages that point to or ping it. For example, if I link to and then click through to http://reversible.org/kottke, that page will link back to me. And creating pages on Reversible is easy...just type in anything after the domain name: e.g. http://reversible.org/sports/basketball/kevingarnett.
One way to think about inbound links to Reversible is as votes. A link to a page from your site is a vote...one site, one vote. I'm going to vote on some stuff, just for fun:
I like Paris in the fall
I like Dr. Strangelove
I like pancakes on bunnies
I like taking photos with my digital camera
I like Infinite Jest
I like Meg
I drink Pepsi
I like Radiohead
I don't think the US should go to war with Iraq right now
I like scented candles
I like my TiVo
I like typography
I like weblogs
I like BoingBoing
Join in if you'd like by adding these or other links to your site.
Dave Hyatt, member of the Safari team at Apple and former contributer to Chimera, posted a bit on his weblog yesterday about integrating RSS reading into the web browser:
I've heard a lot of people state that RSS and news aggregators are for 'geeks' and 'blogging enthusiasts,' but I simply don't believe that to be true. It should be possible to make an application for managing a large amount of information flow that is accessible to mainstream users. Browsers are trying to make information easier to manage with smarter bookmarking systems and page management capabilities (tabs), and news readers are emerging that (in effect) push new information to you in as it's posted and allow you to switch rapidly between different information sets as well.
His comments and the ensuing thread mirror much of the discussion around the Sherfari idea (follow-up). I envy Dave...I think this would be a really fun project to work on for Apple.
Update: yet another post/thread on Dave's weblog re: Browser++. The ensuing thread is useful only if you like reading about what technically-inclined power users (about 0.0002% of the population) want out of a web browser. User-centered whuzzah?
Liz Bailey recently wrote an article called Lo-Fi Allstars (PDF) for Graphics International on the trend toward simpler, more usable web design. The article includes a few quotes from me about weblog design. Here's part of a rambling email interview I did for the article:
Weblogs have definitely affected the look and feel of the overall Web. With weblogs, the design doesn't matter so much. It's not even really design, not to the people who just want to get a blog online so they can get their voice out there quick. All they want is something reasonably readable and distinct (and even the distinct part is optional...there are loads of BlogSpot sites that look exactly the same).
The explosion of zero-budget amateur publishing (nearly impossible before the Web) we've seen with weblogs, has resulted in a parallel development of zero-cost amateur Web/graphic design. Everyone is a writer. Everyone is a designer. As opposed to the design of personal home pages in the mid 90s where people were designing pages that expressed their individuality and personality, weblog design is much more functional in nature. There's so much content flowing through the site that the design is almost a non-factor. If people can read the posts and if the design isn't getting in the way too much, then it's done 95% of its job.
Weblogs very much embrace the idea that the Web is ever in flux. In the late 90s, many Web design firms developed a 'prototype, test, reiterate' approach to information architecture and Web design, with various degrees of success. Webloggers seem to have developed a similar system on their own. The content they post is so fleeting that the weblog is always a work in progress. The writing is never done so why would the design ever be done either? Everything is malleable. Get a bad design up...if it works, tweak it using the feedback from your audience, and if not, throw it away and start over. But quickly, there's writing to do.
Best practices are huge. If someone else is doing something that works, why change it? If you load up 10 weblogs at random and squint your eyes at the screen, they all look about the same.
In response to my post on building a better browser, several people argued for the Unix approach to software design: build apps that do one thing well.
Q: What is this one thing that a web browser should do well?
A not-so-good answer: Judging from the comments about my post, most experienced browser users & software developers would probably say that a web browser should download and display HTML documents quickly and accurately. In the same way that cameras are designed to transfer real-life scenes to film, that is technically correct and helpful to remember when it comes to implementation.
A better answer: Let's apply the Unix approach so that it makes sense from a user-centered design standpoint rather than at the application level**. Web browsers help people find and share information on the web. Sherfari was an attempt at envisioning a browser that does this better than the current crop of browsers by adding the capability to do a few things that people commonly use the web for. Some cried "bloat", but as long as application features and capabilities are useful and appropriate to an application's function (the "one thing"), there's no bloat.
The web offers so much information and so many opportunities that there is much room for the addition of features to improve the browsing experience without creating a bloated application. With their iLife apps, Apple has demonstrated the restraint and ingenuity necessary to build balanced applications that are powerful without being overwhelming. Let's see them apply that to their web browser.
** Here's what I mean by that. If you were building tools to help people to send and receive email, ham handedly applying the Unix approach solely from an application point of view might result in one app to receive mail (or perhaps two separate apps: one to get IMAP mail and one to POP it), another app to write mail, and yet another to send it. But from a user-centered perspective, one application to do all those things (and more) makes more sense.
