Small Streams

All I Want Is a Driving Wheel

I'm reading Bootstrapping by Thierry Bardini, another book about Doug Engelbart, the man who foresaw and proto-typed windows in computers, graphical user interface, the mouse, and hypertext. The book is fairly dry and I'm wondering if Bardini is as much hindered as helped by his background in sociology. But, shoot, I didn't take the time to research and write about a sometimes complex subject that affects us significantly at the moment.

In just getting started with this book, I'm already getting some sweet bits. One is Bardini's illuminations of the differences between associations and connections and what that means in the use of hypertext links. Formerly this was a subject of academic debate — or, perhaps, an unvoiced day-to-day argument of heierarchical vs. non heierarchical ordering — but now the arguments become more common as more people decide how to get machines to sort information, our own and others. You can observe examples of this playing out in the emergence of the Google search engine, the development of tags, and the creation of folksonomies.

The other is the very idea of personal computing. Personal computing might have been inevitable, but at one time the fate of Engelbart's "crusade" was not such a sure thing. Engelbart uses the simile of the transition from railroads to personal vehicles:

I suggest that the parallel of the indiviually manned auto-motive vehicles will develop in the computer field, contributing changes to our social structure that we can't comprehend easily. The man-machine interface that most people talk about is the equivalent of the locomotive-cab controls (giving a man better means to the contribute to the big system's mission), but I want to see more thought on the equivalent of the bulldozer's cab (giving the man maximum facility for directing all that power to his individual task).

Bardini follows with this:

This is the first reference to personal computing in Engelbart's thinking: the difference between locomotives and automobiles or bulldozers points to a difference between technological servitude and technological liberation, between individuals being subsumed into a task defined by some massive technological innovation and that innovation being put at the service of autonomous individuals . . . [I lopped off the qualification and the qualification of the qualification. If you want some sociological rigor, go see the book.]

In some ways, Engelbart seems like one of the most subversive characters of the sixties.

Anyway, quo what-you-call your vadis. The computers are here, and as Bardini pointed out, at the same time we've been empowered or liberated, we've made computers our servants, and now have an arrangement which implicates us in a master/slave relationship.

Perhaps the result will be a mixture of bad behavior and alienation. Materials like computers and communications media, however, might offer an opportunity to transcend our circumstances. I'm thinking of last night's Bob Dylan show, and the one interviewee talking about Dylan's propensity toward acting, "once you're acting you can pretty much take it anywhere."

Pardon me for my leaping from one thought to another, but I'm beginning to see the parallels between folks in the early 20th C. leaving the farm and the folks of the 21st C. leaving their skins. While we're about to immerse ourselves in and with the help of new technologies, expand our minds, join a virally-organized network of ideas and programs, we've not even dealt with the ethical problems of the last migration.

Total Immersion

I'm still thinking about Don Marinelli's presentation at the Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center. He talked about total immersion in space and time, I couldn't help but think of recent offerings in providing map info tools. Here's something that can be done, check out this video of Seattle highlighting tourist destinations. I think that comes close to the the ultimate goal of show-me-where-I-want-to-go request. I think, perhaps, it's too much information. I wouldn't mind some line drawings versus, full color representation, or a text only segment. One of the things I think Marinelli gets wrong or ignores is the popularity of games that have less information such as Kingdom of Loathing.

I've played with the Google Map API and even started making a map. But the javascript was a little non-intuitive for me and gets a little unpredictable, although I do like the debugger thing that tells you where your mistake is. Undoubtedly the debugger method could be an education model of the future (or the past, if you take it as a modern day equivalent of a knuckle rapping ruler). I'm not familiar with Yahoo, and have only a glancing familiarity with ARCview and ARC GIS products.

I've used flickr, and put in the greasemonkey script so it's easy to do the flickrgoogle maps.

Have been checking out Map Hub, which covers just the City of Pittsburgh for now, but will move outside. The benefit of Map Hub is that it's easy to add extra information. I'll have to become much more competent with the Google API to add information as easily. I also like Map Hub's tag line. "Shared Urban Storytelling."

I believe Don M. was making a point that machines are always falling short of reality and that when faced with phenomena such as the wind on your face, you should appreciate it as something in which machines fall short. But we should open ourselves to the possibilties of Nature. We then have many tools upon which we may improvise a responses, computer I/O devices being just one of them. Poetry comes to mind.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

—T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

Blowed Up Real Good

Click to see the Garfield Heights Hi-rise implosion.

Find What You're Looking For

Just found blog entry about finding video on the web. Truveo has a search engine that looks specifically for video. Who's got a clip? Who needs a clip?

That's [Will Be?] Entertainment

Some thoughts on the Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center which I got a chance to visit last weekend . . .

Don Marinelli gave a bang-up presentation on the center. Especially in emphasizing the reluctant convergence of fine arts/theater and engineering to create new tools for the future. A few of the concepts, such as multi-sensorial states of being, were a little un-nerving to contemplate. But Marinelli underlined that a revolution is now going on that allows more people to join the once exclusive club of performer. Avatars are cheap (and sometimes costly, Marinelli pointed out) and plentiful. More and more people are choosing who they are online. And interestingly, those avatars, have powers far beyond say Godot's Vladimir and Estragon. Vladimir and Estragon can become Godot, perhaps. Marinelli's speech also called to mind Kurt Vonnegut's "Who Am I This Time?", a short story about a man and woman who need to have acting roles to manifest their love for each other.

We also got to tour the ETC facilities, see the Hazmat game, play with the Jam-a-Drum, and talk with the marionette/robot (mobot?) Quasi, which got me to thinking about the uncanny valley and the Turkish chess-playing automaton of the late 18th century.

Look Around You

The azimuth is the horizontal component of a direction. The verticle component is the altitude. Assuming each component is divided into 360 degrees, you can measure the degrees of the azimuth or altitude by holding out your arm: one degree is the width of your pinky finger, five degrees is the width of your boy scout pledge fingers — index, middle, and ring, and ten degrees is the width of your fist. Liz just told me that, in drawing, a good way to imagine the lay of the land is to think of the landscape as a turntable divided as a clock, divided up in twelve segments, each segment representing one hour (each hour then representing 30 degrees).

In such a way we can imagine ourselves within visual spheres. No reason we can't imagine this metaphor to apply to other sensations. We live within aural bubbles, beyond which a bunch of trees are falling. We live in olfactory bubbles, which I imagine to be more blob-shaped than spherical.

We can even apply the concept of bubbles to our reactions, real or imagined, to other natural phenomena. Some obsessive types imagine they live within spheres (bubbles) that are under constant attack by pathogens. But the best way to fight the pathogens is to let others into our bubbles. That is, letting people into our bubbles is good for our us.

Hugs may not be the answer. Hugs may not be all that we need. But considered probabilistically it's a good thing to do.

Take a Trip with Me

I took a stop action movie while I was in Annisquam. I took pictures of hedges at the edge of the pasture by Lighthouse Beach.

Chop Wood, Carry Water

Our lives are filled with the trivial and mundane. Do you realize that the average person spends more than a hundred hours in their lifetime chopping wood and carrying water?