The Brunch Table

An article on digital library projects in the latest New Yorker has a helpful explanation of the orphan works problem:

A conservative reckoning of the number of books ever published is thirty-two million; Google believes that there could be as many as a hundred million. It is estimated that between five and ten per cent of known books are currently in print, and twenty per cent—those produced between the beginning of print, in the fifteenth century, and 1923—are out of copyright. The rest, perhaps seventy-five per cent of all books ever printed, are “orphans,” possibly still covered by copyright protections but out of print and pretty much out of mind.

Finding a legal resolution to the orphan issue is even more urgent in new media, where there are only decades, rather than centuries, to intervene before a work decays past any hope of restoration. An experimental program to grant individual licenses for the use of orphan works was launched last year in Canada, and may provide an example of how this can be made a standard feature of copyright law worldwide.

Nobody around these parts could tell me why the U.S. and Canada share the same country code. I mean, today, the actual phone systems certainly aren’t integrated–foreign companies are locked out of Canada, while there are no such restrictions in the U.S.; long-distance and cellphone billing work pretty differently too. So why do we both have that +1? Because of these guys:

The one on the left is Alexander Graham Bell, and on the right is his dad Melville. The Bell family emigrated from Scotland to Canada, and Melville stayed behind when A.G. moved to the U.S. When AT&T was founded, Melville ran its Canadian branch, Bell Canada, which remained part of AT&T until its antitrust breakup in 1956.

I highly recommend Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert’s Peak to anyone who’s interested in the near future of energy consumption (which really should be everyone in the developed world). Deffeyes is a petroleum geologist who has come to believe that we will likely hit the peak of global petroleum production sometime this year, if we haven’t already. (He’s using the methodology that his Shell co-worker M. King Hubbert used in the late 1950s to successfully predict the U.S. production peak in the early 70s.)

As the title suggests, the book is mostly concerned with what our other energy options are as crude oil becomes more scarce. As a geologist, he wisely sticks to his area of expertise, covering natural gas, coal, tar sands, oil shale, uranium, and hydrogen–he doesn’t spend much time discussing solar, wind, or tidal energy. Clearly an experienced lecturer, Deffeyes spices up the dry science with digressions, like an anecdote about how he got access to good uranium mining records by plying the night computer staff with pastries and soda.

After enumerating the problems with most of the alternatives (for instance, tar sands have high capital costs and require expensive hydrogen to convert into more usable lighter crude), Deffeyes concludes that our most promising prospects for the near future lie with coal and uranium. Though they both have significant environmental costs, they’re both proven fuels that we have in plentiful supply.

I’m in a position now where I’ve got to learn 3D, quick, to stay employable. I’ve tried to learn Maya (In ‘99, I took a year of classes in version 1.0 at CMU), but always found it infuriatingly imprecise–and it’s considered the best of the consumer 3D programs as far as interface goes. (One general problem with consumer-level 3D, I’ve learned, is that a lone animator has wrestle with three or four diverse areas of human knowledge. On a big production, each of the other major tasks in CG, besides animating, can be handled by dedicated artists–sculptors model the characters, programmers decide the physics, etc.)

When I was at CalArts, I took a crack at Maya again…version 5 this time. There had been a lot of improvement, of course–modelling was now much closer to sculpting out of blocks of clay, and not so much like gluing spheres and cones together. And you could paint right on your model, too, which helped a lot. But getting around in it still felt awkward to me. Mondi Anyango, another student at CalArts, is in the business of creating custom interfaces for his 3D work, including one made with a freeware motion-capture program called EyesWeb. But that sort of thing is pretty well beyond me. (And also, I guess, the Polar Express folks–take a look at this animator’s opinion on what they did wrong, complete with photo examples.)

…so recently I downloaded the demo of version 6, ready to grit my teeth and try again…and I got a wonderful surprise. Version 6 has full integration with a Wacom tablet. They’ve let you paint and sculpt with the tablet for a while now, but you still needed a mouse to get around the 3D space. Now you don’t. The difference is amazing. Something in my brain just sort of clicks into place.

And now, the best part–they’re starting to make Tablet PCs that run Maya.

…does the Windows XP “ding” remind you of anything? Like…a certain pop hit from the days of the First Iraq War? I can’t help completing the rest of the phrase in my head (ba-ding, dum da-dum-da-dum-da dum-da dum dum) every time I hear it.

Naughty By Nature should sue Microsoft. Let the big guys try and prove a negative in copyright law for a change.

A history of recording media…all the way back to the days when the Gramophone Disc battled the Edison Cylinder.

“This October 1900 advertisement for the Gramophone emphasizes how 52 discs can be stored in the space of 8 cylinders.”

I’m at LAS a few hours before my flight because I didn’t want to deal with the mobbed baggage check at the hotel, and on a whim I open my laptop and discover that they have free web-access Wi-Fi. It’s a good thing, because the in-terminal slots weren’t giving me any love. (I’m far more addicted to websurfing than to gambling, in any case.) This is the second airport in three days that’s had free wireless–PIT even had unrestricted TCP/IP access in terminal C, so I could run AIM and SSH and other nifty things. Score!

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.

I received unsolicited mail today from “Napoleon Franks” and “Youngblood Benzedrine.” I don’t know about everybody else, but my spam names definitely tend toward the macho…With these two latest additions, I now have enough characters saved up to make a TV show. I call it “SpamCops.”

INT. POLICE STATION, DAY

     CERVANTES      But take a look at this.

He holds out a grainy black-and-white photo of a grinning fat man seated behind a desk. Youngblood and Napoleon stare at it intently. The face is hard to make out, but…

     YOUNGBLOOD      It’s Paperboys J. Mercantile! I knew it.

Napoleon shakes his head slowly.

     NAPOLEON (in fake British accent)      Don’t you worry, Chief, we’ll take care of that jolly old fellow all right.

     CERVANTES      Now, no rough stuff….

I was watching North by Northwest last night; it opens with Cary Grant dictating a memo to his secretary as they walk side-by-side along a corridor. It took me a minute or so into the scene to realize that she was his subordinate, writing down whatever he said. I thought she was a colleague taking notes. Because why on earth would he need another human being’s help just to create and transmit a printed document?

The Christian Science Monitor says a new, carbon-free process for extracting hydrogen cuts the (theoretical) consumer cost by a fifth, down to $1.50 per kilogram. According to the article, that would make currently-existing fuel cell technology competitive with coal prices….

Lowtech is a UK computer-recycling company. They’ve got an interesting philosophy–if they’re asked to dispose of a machine that they think is still usable, they fix it up with open-source software and resell it. And through their wonderfully-named Redundant Technology Initiative, they distribute healthy, free Linux machines (233mhz and up) to artists and other charity cases.

Best of all, hidden away on their site are some lovely diagrams on the economic effect of obsolescence on computer prices.

If only our Goodwill Computer Stores had this kind of political vision…although they did once let me borrow 30 elderly PCs for an installation.

Back in the early 90’s, the Cypherpunks made a lot of noise about how cryptography was going change the world, keep people from snooping on your email, tell you who you can trust, and the like. Well, the math may have been sound, but getting the stuff to work for ordinary people has been much harder.

A decade has passed, and just about everyone still sends email that the feds (and anyone else who’s watching the network) can read without breaking a sweat. Sure, it’s possible to send private mail from most modern mail programs, but setting it all up is such a hassle, and how many people would actually know how to decode it once they received it?

As for the trust thing, trust certificates are better than nothing when you’re giving Amazon your credit card number, but they’ve got their own issues. I got an email today from someone I’m working with, asking if this Sun alert affected the program that I’ve been working on. Essentially, one of the most basic Verisign certificates that many programs and websites use to express trustworthiness expired recently, causing some websites and Java programs to toss up confusing error messages, and prompting Norton Antivirus to go on a Windows-hobbling rampage. Sure, there are some good reasons for these certificates to expire, but the fact of the matter is, software is built by humans who forget things like certificate renewals. The potential for end-users to suffer for the negligence of others is all too great.

So now software and website publishers are scrambling to install fresh certificates, and in the meantime, VeriSign is telling people that it’s OK to ignore the “invalid certificate” error messages–which kind of defeats the purpose of having them in the first place.

Ultimately, cryptography has turned out to be more of a user interface problem than a math problem.

Stanford is using a new Swiss-designed robot to digitize some of their library holdings:

Inside the room a Swiss-designed robot about the size of a sport utility vehicle was rapidly turning the pages of an old book and scanning the text. The machine can turn the pages of both small and large books as well as bound newspaper volumes and scan at speeds of more than 1,000 pages an hour.

Can’t wait ’til the day when I ride around in rocket cars
Wear short-sleeve shirts
And all I eat is chocolate bars
–Buck 65, Man Overboard (part 3)

After trying out the Apple Music store yesterday, I was almost convinced that I didn’t mind the fact that the purchased tracks were crippled by “rights management” encoding. I always find myself going back to the bit-rot question, though. When it’s 2030, and I’m sitting in my bubble-skyscraper apartment or mad max desert car or cyborg body, will I still be able to listen to the music that I’m buying today? Or more generally, which digital file formats are most likely to remain completely legible over the long term? (more…)

About five years ago, I introduced two people to each other at lunch in the school cafeteria. They ended up getting married and having a kid. It’s kind of strange to think that I’ve caused a certain specific new human being to be created.

Anyway, I just googled my own name and discovered that I’ve also brought a specific high school football song into the world. They actually credited me for the music–it’s a MIDI file that I wrote around 1995, the theme from the movie Animal Farm. They think it’s the Russian National Anthem. I ain’t gonna tell ‘em.

A squad of California high school cheerleaders, singing the theme music from a 1954 British cartoon about Stalinism. “Hail to Schurr High School / Mighty and Strong / We’ll meet and conquer every foe / Our whole life long…”

Hydrogen didn’t destroy the Hindenburg, according to a new analysis by a UCLA engineering professor. Hydrogen flames are colorless; the fire is clearly visible in newsreel footage and photographs.

His report suggests that the paint coating the airship’s fabric skin was to blame, freakishly flammable stuff that “might well serve as a respectable rocket propellant.” (Immediately after the Hindenburg exploded, the paint’s manufacturer stopped using that particular formula.)

“The public must be made aware that hydrogen may be used as a fuel with the same degree of safety as gasoline,” he said.

Why is everyone so hard on the guy who said “Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons?” He was right, wasn’t he?

Boing Boing has an excerpt from a talk by Howard Rheingold at the Reboot conference that discusses how a lot of technical innovation is bottom-up, not top-down, and how certain common resources escape privatization. Czech it out.