The Brunch Table

Here’s a fascinating Guardian article about the logistic difficulties of conducting EU business in the language of all 25 member countries–simultaneously.

Once the new countries are let in on May 1st, according to Plastic, the EU will have more people than the U.S., a bigger GDP, and–most interestingly–a little more than half our military budget. (Considering that our military spending, not counting Bush’s wars, is about 2/3 commercial-tech R&D, that could actually work out to a larger standing army, if they can get the legalities of a common military hammered out.)

Man, the EU is really fixin’ to be a lovely place to sue for asylum.

Devol, who is 78 and has clear memories of growing up with 11 brothers and sisters during the Depression, said it is easier to understand what is going on now “if you’ve been there before.”

A stunning profile of current conditions in southern Ohio.

Interview with Bill Kroyer, Director of Animation for Tron. The most interesting part is where he talks about the film’s computer elements being rendered on a Cray mainframe–which meant that rendering anything meant dealing with the Cray company technicians, who were the only ones allowed to touch it. That never occurred to me before…suddenly the very ’80s Kraftwerkish “scary computer” makes a lot more emotional sense.

The overall tone of the article is a bit keynote-addressey, but it’s these little hints of a bygone production process that are amazing to read:

The Cray was a cool computer, able to do six billion computations a second. It was engineered to such a high level of performance, that it was actually designed to crash three or four times a day. And the only people who could start it back up again were people from Cray. So, when you bought a Cray, they sent people who would live with it, called Crayons, in a trailer in the parking lot…

If you watch the credits, you’ll see a couple hundred Chinese characters at the end: those are the names of the artists who painted mattes in Taiwan. A year later, that was totally obsolete. Computers could do all that. That’s how fast it changed…

When we did FernGully: The Last Rainforest, which we ink-and-painted using traditional methods, we used 4 tons of paint and produced 16 tons of finished art just to make one film. Now it’s on a few tapes or disks.

Sony’s LIBRIé ebook reader appears to be the first consumer device on the market with an honest-to-goodness e-ink display. The device retails for about ¥41,790 ($380), has a 170dpi high-contrast black-and-white display from E Ink/Philips, and can display 10,000 pages on 4 AAA batteries. I’m hoping that this means that widespread availability of e-ink for device displays (and my company’s signage work) is right around the corner. More coverage here.

Update: Some first impressions are up. Screen is impressively readable (though very slow to refresh), UI is mediocre, DRM sucks. Interestingly, it’s built on embedded Linux, and therefore some of the source code is downloadable.

What a wonderful find (and this is a genuine, first-hand excavated link; I didn’t get it from Boing-Boing or nothin’). It’s a video lecture from Jared Diamond on the origins of human geographic variation (aka “race”).

His core argument is beautifully simple. Three selective forces shape species. The first, and most famous, is natural selection–the external forces that make for many ways of being dead and only a few ways of being alive. Then there’s sexual selection–the fact that offspring resemble their parents, and therefore successful mates will cause the general population to look more like them. And, last, there’s neutral selection–features that neither help nor hurt an organism, and therefore gradually grow more different, like fingerprints.

He says that 19th-century eugenics pegged geographic variation as a result of natural selection, claiming that people near the equator developed dark skin to protect against the sun, and people near the poles developed light skin to compensate for a deficiency in sunlight. (Right away, insidiously, this theory gives us an inexorable division in the human species.) Diamond throws this out on two counts–first of all, skin cancer and vitamin-D deficiencies tend to kill us long after we’ve reached reproductive age, if at all, so they’re very weak selection factors, especially when you consider the short life expectancies of early humans. And second, we don’t actually see a consistent distribution of the darkest-skinned people near the equator and the lightest-skinned at the poles–although the assumption has been repeated so often for the past few hundred years that most of us assume it’s true.

Instead, he argues that our variation comes from sexual selection–when people spread geographically, the small first wave of people that settled in each new territory (”The first people across the Bering Strait, the first people across the English Channel”) exercised an outsized influence over the superficial appearance of their descendants. Sexual selection is the opposite of natural selection; instead of producing functional differences that help us survive, it’s the preservation of arbitrary differences in successful survivors. (After all, says Diamond, “Nobody [in eugenics] can explain the survival value of red hair in Ireland, when Britain has pretty much the same climate”).

And there’s a fascinating discussion at the end in which he mentions that, thanks to advances in transportation over the past few thousand years, we’ve already been doing a lot more “intergeographical dating” than we realize. Large statistical studies of married couples around the world have revealed that, even when the pair appear to belong to different ethnic categories, they’ll commonly have matched features like proportional fingers, eyes, or earlobes, suggesting that their ancestors have already swapped some genes….

Hey, I got asked to ghostwrite a short discussion of live performance software for one of the deans here…it’ll be delivered to a semi-tech-literate audience with no visual aids. (They’re theater people…which in my experience means they’re comfortable with computers in familiar theatrical roles–”the light board” and “the sound board”–but get skittish around video gear, aka “The Technology.”) Has anybody got some ideas for improving this writeup….?

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Over the past twenty years, computers that record and play back video have become commonplace tools in the arts. Only in the past few years, however, have they seriously begun to infiltrate the world of live performance. The problem wasn’t that earlier machines particularly lacked for power and speed, but that they didn’t work reliably, as theatrical equipment must. An occasional breakdown is an acceptable price to pay when creating a pre-recorded video piece with an exciting new technology, but a similar risk is too great to take in theater. Thankfully, though, the situation has improved significantly, and plenty of new live performance software has sprung up to take advantage of it.

These programs may each take different approaches, but they all start with the same idea. Once you’ve created a series of video clips than you want to use as cues in a performance, you use the software to design the way they’ll be played back and controlled. Isadora, by Mark Coniglio, isn’t the most powerful of the lot, but it’s probably the easiest to learn and use, and also one of the cheapest. Maybe the most attractive thing about Isadora is that it’s designed with theatrical performance in mind, which distinguishes it from more general-purpose live-video-processing software. This restricts it in some ways, but it also results in a program that’s streamlined and oriented towards a single goal. For example, when you load in your video clips, they arrive in a “cue sheet,” and you can break them down into “scenes,” anticipating the way you’ll need to organize your material for a show.

Isadora’s basic design concept is similar to that of Cycling 74’s Max software series, which may already be familiar to theatrical sound and video designers. You create your desired setup by choosing objects from a list, and then draw lines that link them together to perform various functions. For example, to make a simple series of video cues, you’d draw lines between the “video player” object, a “counter” object that counts up from zero, and a “keyboard” object that will recognize when the space bar is pressed. The resulting setup will play the next video cue each time the operator hits the space bar–a basic theatrical need. More complicated Isadora setups can be created to manage fades, dissolves, and special effects, all triggered by the operator with the keyboard or mouse. If you want, you can also add elements that are not directly controlled by the operator, responding automatically to MIDI messages from another computer, or to live video and sound from the stage.

This last feature has particularly interesting implications; it allows the performer onstage to take control over sound and video playback, using only their own bodies. By linking a few objects together, you can make a video camera “watch” for movement above a certain threshold and trigger a sound in response, or you can make a microphone “listen” for sound above a certain volume and play a video in response. And because you can connect one object to any other object as you like, you can come up with simple, elegant tricks that work very well in a theatrical setting. For instance, in a 2002 CalArts performance, artist Carole Kim hid a microphone in a wooden cutting board, leading to an Isadora computer that would speed up a video clip whenever it picked up a very loud sound. As she chopped apples on the cutting board, the video drove rhythmically forward in time with each impact. In another example, a 2004 performance by Nick Fox-Gieg and Sean Clute pointed a camera at a blank pad of drawing paper, and had Isadora “key” video into the dark marks left by an ordinary black marker (the same process that puts an animated map behind a TV weather reporter). Onstage, a slight touch with the pen would create a large, fiery red streak on the projection screen.

It’s important to keep in mind that a computer running Isadora is significantly more expensive, more complicated, and more difficult to operate than an ordinary DVD player. But wherever the demands of theatrical video design are greater than simple playback, it can be an invaluable tool.

So the other day, in class, somebody whistled incredibly loudly right next to my ear. This class happens in a solid-concrete basement room, and the whistler actually provided the foley whistles for the crowds in Eight Mile. (And if you’re imagining a burly dude from Detroit, she’s about half that size, which makes it extra funny.) But, of course, I could only appreciate that later, ’cause the hyperacusis kicked in and I sort of fainted for a second.

After class, somebody asked me, out of nowhere, did you know that’s a sign that you might have had Asperger’s as a kid? (I already knew that there’s a strong correlation between hyperacusis and Asperger’s.) And she–qualified, as it happens, by being the offspring of a pair of psychiatrists–proceeds to ask a couple questions about my social navigation. I answer with logical propositions, like, “He stopped when he passed me in the hall, so that means he must want to talk to me.” But, apparently, the vast majority of folks, when asked similar questions, will answer with straightforward perceptions: “I noticed she wanted to talk to me.” They don’t have to consciously process the non-verbal cues.

So the social commentary track is an alternative strategy for getting the same results with different brain hardware–sort of a Nintendo emulator for your mind?

What do y’all out there think?

I got this from Boing Boing, but I had to give this Electric Company site another shout-out. Not only does it offer many of the great funk & psychedelic songs from the show (including some by Tom Lehrer and Morgan Freeman), but it also has a quicktime of my favorite children’s show bit ever, Counting Pinball. Watching it now, I find the style and music reminiscent of Fantastic Planet.

I made a blank staff image for myself…printing is free here, so it makes good economic sense. Just in case anybody else would like some.

I’ve been thinking a lot about citizenship lately…you’ll notice that Bush, and Reaganists in general, don’t like to say that word too much. “Consumer” tends to be the word they choose instead. A while back, I read Philip Dray’s history of the Ku Klux Klan, At the Hands of Persons Unknown, and it had a lot of interesting asides about the persistent factions in American politics that have always opposed the concept of citizenship–taking the philosophical position that the rights of a citizen of the republic undermined the landlord’s power over those who lived on his property. (The Confederacy is the most famous of the anti-citizen movements, but the beliefs certainly aren’t confined to the South; the Bushes are thoroughbred New Englanders.) He keeps coming back to those opposing poles of citizen vs. landlord as the fundamental unresolved issue in American society…and, following from that, he says that “white” and “black” (or, more technically, “non-white”) are not ethnic categories, but the political states of “non-citizen” and “citizen” that correspond to ethnic categories (Bantu, German, Mexican, English, etc.).

So, in this vein, I found a little writeup the other day on Roman citizenship, which I’ll now share with y’all:

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ROMAN COLONIZATION from www.ualberta.ca/~csmackay/CLASS_378/Citizenship.html

1. Conquered people designated as “free” (they could keep their own government) or “tributary” (government installed by Rome).

2. New tributary government turned into a “municipality.” Old local rulers were often granted Roman citizenship and given positions of authority, but under a Roman magistrate.

3. Once sufficiently urbanized, the municipality would be turned into a “colony.” Colonies had more autonomy–they could once again run their own governments–but they were required to let Roman citizens settle there (land grants were often offered as a reward to distinguished Roman soldiers). Colonies were also expected to adopt Roman culture and language.

4. Roman citizenship was bestowed by government grant. Military service was the most common way for colonial subjects to become citizens. Citizenship could be inherited and conferred by marriage; colonial soldiers would return home after their tour of duty with a Roman name and a certificate of citizenship, marry, and make more Romans. Near the end of the Empire, after generations of soldiers had created large citizen populations in the colonies, the Roman government found the rights and protections guaranteed to citizens a serious inconvenience to their rule. So they solved the problem by declaring every subject of the Empire a citizen–and abolishing the rights that came with citizenship.

from memepool:

1. Grab the nearest book. 2. Open the book to page 23. 3. Find the fifth sentence. 4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Holy crap. The book nearest to me right now is Heart of Darkness. There’s probably an outrageously offensive fifth sentence just waiting for me on page 23. Let’s see…

One…two..three…four…five. Shit. I knew it. I’m really tempted to just put the thing down and grab another book. Or just forget this exercise entirely. But here goes anyway:

“Well if a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of fearful weapons suddenly took to travelling on the road between Deal and Gravesend catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very soon.”

It’s interesting, though…having finally gotten around to reading the story (and I’m not quite done yet; it’s thick as syrup, slow reading), it’s easy to see how it’s managed to piss people off. But my edition has a lot of footnotes, and the historical background in the appendices takes up more space than the actual story…and so, looking at the footnotes, I learned that Deal and Gravesend are towns in England…so what sounded like dumb, outwardly-projected hatred suddenly twists around and turns into self-criticism (Marching around with fearsome weapons and enslaving villagers is exactly what the narrator’s outfit is there to do.) And there’s an early passage where he imagines an ancient Roman’s thoughts on the savage Angle tribes in England…it sounds like an obvious point to make now, I guess, but it struck me as a pretty interesting attitude for 1899.

Oh, and a quick google check confirms that other people have thought what I’ve been thinking–there’s a big ol’ homoerotic, sadomasochistic vibe running through this thing too…all that talk about bodies–men’s bodies; the female characters aren’t really described too clearly at all–and torture. Self-hatred on a whole lot of levels…

‘Course, however you come at it, in 19th-century terms, the narrator’s a heroic explorer; in modern terms, he’s a war criminal with a conscience….

That was a rough press conference for Bush. Plenty of great moments–I can’t wait to see what the Daily Show makes of it…

Leafing through the New York Times today, an ad for Areva caught my eye. Not only did it tout Areva’s expertise in nuclear and wind energy harvesting (the most promising “greenhouse-clean” energy sources for the post-petroleum era), but it did so in an appealing infographic style.

If the style is familiar, that’s because the it was created by H5, the French collective that was responsible for the nifty animated-infographic Royksopp video (not to mention a distinctively cel-shaded Goldfrapp video). Now, who is Areva? They’re the pseudo-privatized French atomic energy/weapons agency. I’m guessing that the campaign emphasizes wind power as a sop to those pesky environmentalists.

Okay, I wrote this up yesterday as preparation for a short video I wanna do of it…yeah, I know it’s been done to death, but although a google prior-art check turned up plenty of alternative versions, as Schwarzenegger once said, “All of them were bad.” Especially unforgiveable are the ones that get their theology all screwed up, and have the Rabbi arguing for Original Sin (which isn’t part of Jewish doctrine) instead of the Pope. I found an actor (he doesn’t know I’ve found him yet) who has the perfect booming voice…the spitting image (aural image, anyway) of my departed uncle who loved corny jokes just like this:

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One gray, rainy day, the Pope wakes up in a really bad mood. “Today,” he announces to nobody in particular, “I’m going to expel all the Jews from Rome.” He gets up, his servants bring him breakfast. “You know what I’m going to do today?” he asks the guy pouring his coffee. “I’m going to expel all the Jews from Rome.”

They dress him up, he climbs onto his throne. His court assembles for the morning’s business. “First off, you there,” says the Pope, pointing to the closest cardinal, “find me the top Jew in Rome. I want him here by noon at the latest.”

“What for, Your Excellency?” asks the cardinal.

“This morning, I decided, I’ll kick all the Jews out of here.” explains the Pope. “My mind’s pretty much made up. I just want to give him fair warning.”

The cardinal heads off on his mission, and the day drags on. It’s mid-afternoon by the time he returns to the court, bringing a guest with him, a little old man with a long gray beard, dressed all in black.

“Who’s this?” asks the Pope.

The cardinal looks a little embarrassed. “Er…we’re not sure, Your Excellency.”

“What, you don’t know?”

“Oh no,” answers the cardinal quickly, “everyone we asked, they said he’s the wisest man in the ghetto.”

The Pope frowns. “So he’s the one in charge?”

“Well, for miles and miles around people come to see him. Who owns that stray goat? Whose bastard child is that? Problems in philosophy, the natural sciences, riddles that have no answers, he’s the one they talk to.”

“Why doesn’t this fountain of wisdom speak up for himself?”

“Well…” stammers the cardinal.

Still the old Rabbi is silent.

“I’m getting irritated,” snaps the Pope.

“But, Your Excellency, he doesn’t speak Latin.”

“Greek?”

“I don’t think so.”

“French? Turkish?”

“He’s a very holy man, they told us. So he can’t speak any common language, you see, only–”

The Pope holds up his hands. “Silence!” The Pope lurches to his feet and stalks down from his throne. He stares at the Rabbi. And the Rabbi stares back.

The court watches and waits.

The Pope extends his right arm and points straight out the door.

The Rabbi looks hard at the Pope, then slowly points down at the ground.

Shock flashes across the Pope’s face. He thumps his chest, once, twice.

The Rabbi’s eyes narrow. He points up at the ceiling.

The Pope snorts in anger, and grabs a communion wafer and a chalice of wine from the nearby altar. He shakes them furiously at the Rabbi. The audience trembles in excitement…

…but the Rabbi shakes his head again and smiles. He reaches into his robe and produces a shiny red apple. He takes a big bite.

The Pope blinks once, twice, and then slowly nods in agreement. “The man is right,” he breathes softly. “It pleases me to change my mind,” he says to the Rabbi. “The Jews may stay. Now get out of my sight.”

And the Rabbi is grabbed and hauled out of the room. The Pope sighs deeply and climbs the stairs to his throne again. “Let me tell you what happened,” he says to the court:

He extends his arm and points. “I said, ‘Your people have turned away from God.’” He points down at the ground. “And he said, ‘No, God is here with us.’” He thumps his chest. “I said, ‘I, the Pope, say God has abandoned you.’” He points at the ceiling. “And he said, ‘Who can say? God is above us all.’” He mimes shaking the wine and wafer. “And I said, ‘But you have sinned, you have rejected Christ!’ Then he said, ‘Are we not all sinners?’” He mimes biting the apple. “It’s true.”

It’s still raining, and the sun is setting at the ghetto gates by the time the Rabbi returns. He shows his papers to the guards, and is allowed to enter. Despite the weather, people gather all around him in the street, worried and eager for the story.

“Rabbi, what happened?” “Were you frightened?” “What’s the Pope like?” “What did he say?”

The Rabbi raises his hands for quiet.

“What a conversation I had,” he begins.

“It doesn’t start out well.” He points away. “‘The Jews are gonna get out,’ says the Pope.” Points down. “‘No, we’re gonna stay here,’ I say. Does this make him angry!” Thumps his chest. “‘I, the Pope, say you’re out.’ Finger in the air. “And then, I’m sorry to tell it, I lose my temper. ‘Up yours, my friend!’ That’s what I say.”

The crowd gasps, hanging on his words. “Yes?” “Then what?”

The Rabbi shrugs his shoulders. “He’s a very strange man, but not so bad after all. He just said, all right, forget the whole thing, break for lunch.” He pulls the apple core out of his robe and tosses it into the gutter. The rain washes it away.

A few years ago, a scrappy startup called Slim Devices started selling the SLIMP3, a very hacker-friendly home MP3 player. The thing’s basically an audio dumb terminal with a fluorescent display and remote control sensor, which streams audio from a perl server running somewhere on your ethernet. I got the impression that they started the company because no one else was making the device that they wanted. The server component is open source, so naturally, it runs on every platform known to man–even, in a nice bit of synergy, the sadly-discontinued Martian NetDrive wireless storage module. It supports iTunes and WinAmp smoothly out of the box, comes with a wide range of user-contributed skins for the web interface, and even lets you play tetris on the device’s display. Thanks largely to the goodness of the smart server, dumb hardware combo, Slim Devices has done well enough to roll out the Squeezebox, which adds most of the things that the SLIMP3 was missing, like wi-fi, digital out, a headphone jack, and an actual case.

Enter Roku Labs. They started out with an HDTV slideshow viewer which clearly hasn’t attracted as many customers as they’d hoped–it debuted for $500, and now sells for $300. Recently, they unveiled their second product, the Soundbridge, very slick-looking thin audio player. As far as I can tell, the basic model matches the Squeezebox feature-for-feature (except the headphone jack), and raises the stakes with a nice case, bitmapped display, and hardware decoding for more formats. The list price is exactly the same, though they also sell a gargantuan version for those who want $250 more fluorescent display area. The interesting bit appears when you scroll to the bottom of the Soundbridge product page–the product is unabashedly based on SlimServer.

Even though Slim Devices is clearly peeved, Roku appears to be playing by the rules, claiming that they’ll contribute their enhancements to SlimServer when the Soundbridge comes out. Slim Devices appears to be on the losing end of this deal–Roku can benefit from the community efforts on SlimServer as much as Slim can, while focusing their efforts on besting Slim’s hardware value-add. Assuming Roku doesn’t drop the ball on this one (the Soundbridge is still vaporware), Slim either has to improve their product line or get out of the business.

Did Slim do the right thing in making their server open source? It certainly improved their product more quickly than they could’ve done it by themselves, and the hackability definitely appealed to the early adopters who were the obvious market for the SLIMP3. So on the one hand, the open server brought them this far–but it also helped the competition leapfrog them. Sure, the customer wins, but it sucks to be Slim right now.

So, when does it make sense to build your business on top of an open source project?

(Incidentally, I just picked up one of the refurbished SLIMP3 units that Slim is selling at a decent price–it’s definitely a handy piece of kit, even if it’s not as smooth as the newer devices.)

Here’s a transcript of a recent talk given by Princeton geosciences professor Kenneth Deffeyes. Basically, using Hubbert’s methodology (which predicted the peak of domestic oil production in the 1970s), he has determined that the global oil production peak will happen this year.

Perhaps some deus ex machina technology or discovery will swoop in and prevent us from having to care about how much our lifestyles are dependent on cheap energy–but it’s worth thinking about how the world will change if that doesn’t happen.

Finally, I can buy music from Apple without worrying about my lost DRM keys. It’s still at the compile-it-and-run-it-from-the-command-line stage, but playfair definitely converts protected Apple store M4P files into unprotected M4A (AAC) files. Thanks to Rod for the tip.

The New York Times has pronounced the net art movement (strictly speaking, works that’re available only online, preferably exhibited in a gallery on a late-model Apple product) over.

I sure hope they’re wrong…I mean, even the article admits it’s primarily due to economic concerns, the across-the-board cuts in public and private arts funding brought by the dep recession. After all, we’ve hardly scratched the surface of what we can do with colons, forward- and backslashes, brackets, parentheses, randomly-mixed upper- and lower-case letters, numbers that sort of look like letters, “cartoon cursing” punctuation….