The board of the Ontario College of Art must have been dropped on its collective heads, because they just approved the above design for their new building. It's so ugly that I am completely bereft of words. I'll let the folks at Eyesore of the Month do the talking, since they -- quite sensibly -- bestowed the award on this ghastly exercise in CAD design:
Behold the new $30 million Ontario College of Art & Design classroom and studio building by British architect Will Alsop -- a totemized retro-futuroid coffee table joined umbilically to its Soviet-style predecessor below. The message, apparently: art and design are nothing but fun fun fun. Nothing to get serious about. A playful spirit of induced hazard will keep students wondering when the checkered box might wobble free of its cute swizzle-stick legs and come crashing down on their heads. This exercise in hyper-entropic avant garde faggotry is so cutting edge that it is already out of date. The only question: which of the two conjoined buildings is more cruelly ridiculous?
Okay, "faggotry" might not be quite the word I'd use myself, but otherwise I couldn't agree more. I'm from Toronto originally, and the sad thing is, this building may not even be the ugliest one in town. the city has very strange architecture: Lovely Victorian buildings are mixed cheek-by-jowl with brutalist concrete nightmares that look as if they'd been picked up from Vladivostock, or perhaps a Doctor Who episode.
(Thanks to the J-Walk blog for this one!)
I can't stop laughing. Go to The Subversive Cross Stitch and you can buy gorgeous, heartwarming little hand-crafts, created in a classic motherly tradition ... then outfitted with Pulp-Fiction-class sentiments. The artwork above is 75 bucks, and I'm seriously considering getting it for a friend, to hang in their office.
Indeed, these handicrafts were inspired by horrible office politics. As the artist, Julie Jackson, notes on her web site:
Subversive Cross Stitch began in 2003 as a form of anger management therapy when I was dealing with an idiot boss.
(Thanks to Lonnie Foster's Tribblescape for this one!)
That image above is an online art project called the "Emotional Fractal". It's a little Flash application that picks words randomly from the dictionary and displays them in a recursive format, with words interlaced between others in progressively smaller and smaller sizes. When the words get too small, you can zoom in and find even tinier words nested between the tiny ones. (Click here and you can see it in action!) It's produced by the artist Jared Tarbell, and Lonnie Foster describes it nicely on his blog Tribblescape:
I could reload the page for hours on end as it generates random bits and bobs of juxtaposed adjectives. It’s a lot like magnetic poetry, only instead of placing the words one at a time, you scoop together the entire set of magnets and throw it at the refrigerator.
According to Wikipedia:
[Van Halen's] debut, self-titled album was released in 1978 and featured a new soloing technique called tapping: a technique utilizing both left and right hands on the guitar neck. Leading up to the release of the album, Eddie would play his solos with his back to the audience during club dates, to hide his technique until the album came out.
(Thanks to Little Things for this one!)
Ever wished you had a nice, booming soulful voice -- perfect for screeching out treacly love ballads? Well, you could take singing lessons. Or you could just buy a copy of "Virtual Male Solo Vocalist", a piece of software that will sing whatever words you type into it. As the website says:
LEON is a virtual male soul vocalist modelled on a real professional singer, and when he is installed into your PC he will literally allow you to create singing of superb quality and realism. LEON will sing ANY words you ask him to in English - literally anything - be they beautiful lyrics or comical trivialities, Monteverdi madrigals or manic chants. You can create vocal tracks of soulful singing in any lyrics you want. You just type in lyrics, and synthesize. Then add expression to taste. LEON is under your total control, and the really mind-blowing thing is - he can truly sound like a professional singing voice. With very little practice the results you get from LEON will completely fool your friends - they will believe they are listening to a real singer performing. The question you will hear will always be "WHO is that?", and not "What is that?".
(Thanks to Technovelgy for this one!)
Apparently, AT&T has initiated a plan called "Project Pinnacle," a companywide effort to cut costs while boosting profit margins as high as 40 per cent. Part of how they're doing is by doing what many service-based US companies are now doing: Outsourcing service jobs to India. Last week, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran an article leaking AT&T's plans, suggesting that as many as 70 per cent of the company's IT US-based people could lose their jobs.
When AT&T employees went online to read the piece, they found that the company was blocking access to it. There's a note about this on the web site of Washtech, the IT-workers' union:
"Warning Notice," the alert reads. "You have attempted to access a site that has been deemed inappropriate by our business and blocked from ALL internal access. A record of this request has been logged and will be provided to Business Security upon request."Below the message, in capital letters, a line reads, "PLEASE REFRAIN FROM ANY FURTHUR ATTEMPTS!"
Company employees who spoke to WashTech News on the condition that they would not be identified said that currently navigating from their work computer to any Internet site that carries news reports critical of AT&T Wireless produces a similar alert, but the sites are now accessible.
Remember those "Big Mouth Billy Bass" toys that came out about five years ago -- an animatronic fish that would wiggle and sing various songs? These days you can get one for about a dollar at a junk store, so hackers have started opening them up, installing embedded Linux chips, and using the fish for other things. For starters, they've installed an algorithm that plays audio out the fish's speaker while co-ordinating its mouth movements. Click here, and you can see video of Billy Bass speaking in Bill Clinton's voice as he says "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." Finer entertainment cannot be had.
And dig this: The hackers are eventually going to use Billy Bass as a telepresence object:
By adding a microphone and CCD camera to the system, the toy will be transformed into a webcam or a videoconferencing station ... It will be possible to use Microsoft NetMeeting or CUSeeMe to connect to your bass at home and talk with your loved one ones!
And now we enter the "blatant self-congratulation" part of this blog entry. Two and a half years ago, I was writing the technology for the Report on Business magazine at The Globe and Mail, and I did a column about what I called "open source hardware" -- the trend of hackers opening up high-tech toys and rejigging them to do different things. Much like open-source software, hardware hacking often relies upon disparate groups of geeks sharing info; a worldwide consortium of programmers, for example, worked together to assemble the super-secret schematics to the Furby toy. (In fact, they even formed a competition around it: Hack Furby.)
Obviously, tinkerers have been opening up gadgets for centuries and mucking with them. But open-source hardware hacking has undergone a renaissance in recent years, because of several trends: i) Toys these days frequently have extremely complex microprocessors and motion/light/sound sensors, stuff that was literally NASA-class only ten years ago; ii) these toys are nonetheless extremely cheap, so thousands of hackers worldwide can and do buy them; and iii) the Internet makes it possible for them to collaborate on breaking open the toys and assembling schematics.
If you want to read the whole column I wrote, I put a copy of it below -- click "more" and it's there in full!
(Thanks to Boing Boing for this one!)
The Furby gets hacked -- and the world of hardware development will never be the same
by Clive Thompson
Report on Business Magazine, July 2001
In December 1999, Jeff Gibbons was playing with a Furby -- the furry little computerized toy -- when he got an idea. What if he could reprogram it to speak normal English, instead its usual gibberish and cooing noises? "You could put them in a gift box and have it yell 'let me outta here!'" laughs Gibbons, a computer consultant in Calgary.
Cool idea -- and, as it turns out, one that a lot of other hackers already had. When Gibbons went online, he discovered a whole network of Furby geeks. They'd set up a "Hack Furby" contest, and one techie already ripped the toy apart, posting a complete spec of its internal systems -- the tilt sensor, the audio sensor, the UV sensors, the 20HMZ processor. "That was half my work done there," Gibbons marvelled.
But it was Gibbons, and a partner in Chicago, who finished the job -- by figuring out out how to add a new microchip "brain." They released their solution online, and last November became minorly famous for winning the "Hack Furby" contest. Soon, geeks worldwide began using the technique and reprogramming Furbies to use as intruder alerts, motion sensors, or to tell filthy jokes. "I'm getting emails every day about it!" Gibbons says.
In some ways, this is a familiar story: Hackers working together on collaborative projects, using the Net to co-ordinate their efforts. That's what the "Open Source" software movement is all about. To create the free Linux operating system, for example, Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds worked with hundreds of other hackers worldwide. As the open-source movement has realized, many hands make light work; if enough people take a crack at the same problem, they can figure out a solution for any software puzzle.
But in the last year, I've been increasingly a similar thing happen with hardware. Geeks are taking high-tech devices -- scanner pens, web pads, digital recorders -- then dissecting them together online and finding new uses for them. Call it, if you will, "Open Source Hardware." And it has the potential to subtly alter the way gadgets are developed.
After all, what these guys are doing is essentially free technical research. By November 2000, Furby's mass popularity was pretty much dead; the hackers have figured out new ways to harness its rather astonishing computer power. Indeed, this is part of what fuels the trend: cheap electronic devices are being built with ever-more-powerful processors, allowing toys and gadgets to be used for things the inventor never dreamed. And since they're mass-produced, they get into the hands of enough hackers to produce a vibrant community. "We're doing lab research for these guys," says Peter van der Linden, an engineer in Silicon Valley who founded the hack-Furby contest. He's programmed his own Furby to calculate and read out the digits of Pi. "We're giving these products new life!"
The same thing happened to the CueCat, a small, cat-shaped scanner pen handed out for free last year by the Dallas, Texas-based Digital Convergence last fall. Plugged into your computer, the CueCat was intended to work as a device for browsing content on the Internet. You could scan special bar codes in advertisements, and the CueCat would direct your browser to sites with more information.
Within days, hardware hackers broke the CueCat's encryption codes -- and starting rejigging the device. Michael Rothwell, a director of research and development for a high-tech company in North Carolina, wrote software that lets you use a cuecat to swipe the barcode on a book, and be taken to its relevant page at Amazon.com. He's also using it to build an inventory of his CDs. "This thing has all sorts of potential beyond what Digital Convergence was using it for," he notes. "Even better, really. I mean, the idea of using it as a way to browse the Net was always kind of stupid. This is much better."
Mind you, this isn't quite so simple for the creator companies. Hardware hacking requires that geeks publicly discuss the intricacies of proprietary technologies -- stuff that companies are trying to keep hidden, or at least under control. But, as with the open-source software movement, the techies are primarily interested in learning and having fun -- and don't always respect traditional notions of intellectual property.
After the CueCat was hacked, Digital Convergence sent out warning letters to Rothwell noting that he was using proprietary code. "The thing about intellectual property is that you have to defend it right away, or a court can later determine you never really took it seriously," says Doug Davis, the chief technology officer for Digital Convergence.
For some companies, hardware hacking has helped trash their business plans. Last year, the Austin, Texas-based Netpliance put out the "I-Opener," a device for letting newbies surf the Net. It included a flatpanel screen, a full keyboard, and 32 megs of memory, and cost only $199 (some sales took it down to only $99). Since it had no hard drive, you couldn't download big documents or instal new pieces of software.
Until the hardware hackers got ahold of it -- such as Ken Segler, who runs his own electronics consulting firm in Las Vegas. Segler bought one, wired in an external hard drive for another $100 (US), installed Linux, and presto -- he'd turned the I-Opener into a full-fledged computer, for under $200 (US). "Not bad," he muses, proudly. Other techies flooded Segler's web site looking for details on how to do the hack; he eventually sold "a few thousand" special kits to help people modify their I-openers.
The hack was ruinous for Netpliance. For the company to make money, it needed people to sign up for Netpliance's $21.95-a-month (US) Internet access plan, specially geared for Internet newcomers. The devices weren't money makers; they were priced at cost to help seed the market. So every time a hacker bought one, turned it into a computer, and didn't sign up for Netpliance's service, Netpliance lost money. "We were subsidizing the whole thing," complains Jon Werner, Netpliance's director of emerging technologies. Unable to fully halt the trend, Netpliance stopped making Iopeners on Jan. 31, 2001; now they concentrate their business solely on providing online services.
Still, things aren't always combative. Tiger Electronics hasn't tried to shut down any Furby hacking, since it already makes money on each one sold -- even if somebody opens it up and teaches it to recite dirty limericks. ("But," a Tiger P.R. rep tells me sternly, "we do not approve of anyone altering the magic that is Furby.")
And Digital Convergence openly acknowledges that the hackers were providing an quixotically valuable service, by finding potential new markets for their CueCat. In fact, the company quickly decided to sell cheap, $20 licenses to anyone who wanted to create applications -- legally -- for the CueCat. "We fully expected that people would find new uses for it. We knew it was going to get hacked," Davis says. He was also amazed at the expansive technical write-ups of the device he found online: "Some of it was better than ours. I was telling our technical guys, hey, you gotta see this stuff. Check it out!"
These days, many mobile phones come equipped with Bluetooth -- a technology for sending data up to 30 feet to another device. It's kind of like wifi, except more flexible, albeit with a shorter range. But the point is, a lot of phones can use Bluetooth to send contact information from one to another, much the way you used to "beam" information from one Palm Pilot to another. Except with Bluetooth, you don't need to be pointing your device at the recipient. Indeed, you could be thirty feet away in a crowded room.
This has given rise to a new trend: "bluejacking". Bluejacking is when you use your phone to locate another phone nearby that has Bluetooth -- and then send that person some contact info, and possibly a cryptic little message. Often you're doing it to a total stranger, anonymously. As the bluejacking web site puts it:
On their phone, a message will popup saying "'Hello, you've been bluejacked' has just been received by Bluetooth" or something along those lines. For most 'victims' they will have no idea as to how the message appeared on their phone. So, personalised messages like 'I like your pink top' and the startled expressions that result is where the fun really starts.
Obviously, bluejacking is kinda creepy -- for the victim, it's rather like being stalked, or a digital-age version of the classic horror movie When A Stranger Calls. ("The call's coming from inside the house!!!") But apparently the victims often find it kind of funny. On the Bluejacking site, there are a couple of stories written by bluejackers, including that kid in the picture above: In the photo, he's bluejacking the girl in the pink-and-white top behind him. The full story is here, and for balance's sake, they also include a rather hilarious story told from the perspective of a bluejacking victim.
I predict Bluejacking will appear in a spy movie -- or horror movie -- within the next twelve months.
The picture above is copyright the original bluejacking site, BTW!
Okay, this is cool: Here's an innovative way to stop spam -- and hit spammers with an intriguing use of copyright law.
Habeas, an anti-spam corporation, has created a set of special "x-headers" that you insert into your outgoing mail. Essentially, it's a little watermark that indicates that your email is genuine and valid. ISPs can set up a simple filters that allow email through that includes these special x-headers.
But hold it -- couldn't the spammers themselves also put these x-headers into their junk mail, and thus get past the filters? Sure. Except here's the thing: The headers are written in the form of haiku -- a copyrightable art form. (That's an example you see above.) If a spammer copies one of Habeas' x-headers and uses it to send out millions of pieces of spam, they've just broken copyright law on a massive scale: They have illegally distributed copies of an artwork. Habeas can launch an enormous lawsuit against any spammer, and indeed, they've already successfully shut down a few.
As Habeas points on its web site:
Fighting spam with poetry and the law The thing that makes The Habeas Warrant Mark so unique is that it is written as haiku, an ancient Japanese poetic form. Since our headers are actual works of art, Habeas can use the powerful legal tools available for copyright and trademark protection to prosecute violators.
I could not possibly love this more! Email servers spraying poetry across the Internet -- and using it to bust the most annoying advertising ever.
I've written pretty extensively in recent months about the peculiar literary appeal of auto-generated text, and about 'bots that write poems. But what really charms me is how the Internet is causing a strange, quiet revolution in the utility and prominence of poetry -- an otherwise neglected art form. Poetry, with its short, tight compression of expression, is perfectly suited to applications that need to send tiny bursts of text; and poetry's constant remixing and resampling of former literature makes it oddly 'bot-like in nature. Indeed, of all literary forms, poetry is the one closest to computer programming itself: An art form where compression, efficiency and elegance are highly prized.
Which is why it's probably no surprise that Habeas users have begun to write their own haiku and send them in to Habeas. You can read some examples here, including this one:
Dear old friends send mail. As do incorporeal robot pretenders.-James Kobielus
I've written before about the Diebold computer-voting-maching scandal, and why I think voting software should be developed in an open-source mode -- so that citizens can see for themselves how the software works, and whether it's secure or insecure. Diebold has always publicly claimed that its secret, proprietary software is safe and reliable -- while in private, Diebold engineers have written panicked memos talking about the security holes.
Yesterday, the Register reported that Diebold's automated teller machines were infected by the Nachi worm. Why? Amazingly, they run on Windows XP Embedded -- a platform that is just shot through with holes.
(Thanks to Slashdot for this one!)
Most languages have a gender for nouns; in French, a pencil is male, and a pen is female. But the thing is, this isn't just a quirk of language: People often seem to feel that objects actually have a gender. I once roomed with a women who insisted that toasters were male, for example.
I can't remember how the hell I got in that particular argument, but now we can settle it once and for all -- because Paul Grzymkowski has set up an online project where people can vote on the gender of a particular object. That pack of Ramen noodes? According to the votes so far, 60.62% of people think it's male. Meanwhile, 45.98% of people think ice pops are female, a sizeable 78.10% of people think a deck of cards is male, and 68.42% felt that disposable paper cups are female.
If you don't see an object in there you'd like to see classified? Gryzmkowki's taking suggestions here. Me, I'm wondering about whether a typewriter is a he or a she.
(Thanks to Boing Boing for this one!)
Carnegie Mellon University recently decided that the world needed a Robot Hall of Fame. So they founded one this year, hired a jury of experts, and had them decide on the first four robots to be inducted this year as hall-of-famers.
The winners? None other than the Soujourner Mars probe, the Unimate industrial robot, the HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and R2-D2.
Of course, the interesting thing is that the jury decided to include robots that do not actually exist, other than in the movies. I like this, insofar as it points to the fact that robots are cool not so much because of what they are, but what we imagine them to be. If you want to see an actual robot -- in the original sense of the Czech word "robot" meaning "servant" -- well, go to the kitchen and behold your dishwasher. But if you want an idealized robot, watch a movie. Robots are, at heart, a philosophical pleasure: By meditating upon them, we think about the nature of ourselves -- what makes things seem human-like, lifelike, or intelligent. As Jim Morris, the jury moderator for the Hall of Fame, said of R2-D2:
R2-D2 represents our highest hope for what robots might do for humans. He performs countless services and save the lives of humans many times. He seems to understand technology deeply and responds to human needs unerringly. He does not try to imitate humans or compete with them. He's all robot!
A Belgian family was attending the funeral of their son when the corpse's mobile phone started ringing:
Marc Marchal, 32, was killed when his motorbike collided with a tractor near his home town of Rochefort. Mr. Marchal was so badly injured in the accident that the undertakers advised his family that the coffin should remain closed as they said their last farewells.The night before the funeral, the family gathered at the undertakers for a final private farewell, when they heard the sound of his cellphone ringing from within the sealed coffin. Several distressed members of the family had to leave the funeral home whilst staff rushed to remove the cell phone.
(Thanks to Boing Boing for this one!)
Unless you've spent the last few months living on the moon, you've heard of Friendster -- the funky, upbeat site for hooking up with like-minded, amiable folks. Fittingly, the original investors in Friendster were also, in real life, actual friends themselves: Jonathan Abrams, who runs Friendster, and Reid Hoffman and Marc Pincus, who respectively run the alternate social-networking sites LinkedIn and Tribe.net. All very chummy.
Until, of course, the money comes along -- and the daggers come out. Now that the sites are scrambling for venture capital, the founders are practising all manner of bullet-time CEO jujitsu. While Abram was off securing another $13 million in financing from Benchmark Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, his pals Hoffman and Pincus were sneaking around behind his back: They formed a limited partnership to secretly buy up a $700,000 patent on the "Six Degrees" technology that underpins all three sites. Obviously, if they own the technology, they could drive Friendster out of business in a flash. As ZDNet reports:
"I didn't involve Jonathan because I thought Kleiner and Benchmark would try to bid me out," Hoffman said. "It's better to be safe than sorry." Hoffman described the Six Degrees patent as "central to this field."
I wonder if Abrams is off erasing the testimonials he wrote on Friendster for his good pals Hoffman and Pincus?
(Thanks to Jeff Heer for finding this one!)
As astute readers may have noticed, I've recently cultivated a sort of giant-squid beat here at Collision Detection. Now another fascinating bit of squid trivia has just come across the transom.
As you may know, no giant squid has ever been observed alive; we've only ever recovered dead carcasses. But according to the BBC, a bunch of scientists have figured out a way to lure a male giant squid to the surface: By tempting him with squid genitals. The scientists have apparently been saving cephalapod unmentionables for some time, to use as bait. As one explains:
"The freezer bag at home -- to my wife's disgust -- is actually full of giant squid gonad samples. We're going to grind all of this up, and we're going to have this puree coming out from the camera, squirting into the water. Hopefully the male giant squid, absolutely driven into a frenzy, is going to come up and try to mate with the camera."This is the dream - we're going to get this sensational footage of the giant squid trying to do obscene things with the camera."
(Thanks to Jessica's Peace Dividend for finding this one!)
This is one of those entries that needs no comment. From the Sydney Morning Herald:
Russian dies after winning vodka-drinking contestA vodka-drinking competition in a southern Russian town ended in tragedy with the winner dead and several runners-up in intensive care.
"The competition lasted 30, perhaps 40 minutes and the winner downed three half-litre bottles. He was taken home by taxi but died within 20 minutes," said Roman Popov, a prosecutor pursuing the case in the town of Volgodonsk.
"Five contestants ended up in intensive care. Those not in hospital turned up the next day, ostensibly for another drink."
Mr Popov said the director of the shop organising this month's contest had been charged with manslaughter.
(Thanks to Emily for finding this one!)
You may have missed the teensploitation flick Final Destination when it came out a while back. The concept was quite neat: A teenage guy is about to board a flight with a bunch of friends, when he has a premonition that the plane will crash. He convinces his friends not to board, and the plane does indeed crash. But death doesn't like being cheated -- no sir! So death essentially "reclaims" all the kids who escaped, one by one, by subjecting them to seemingly random accidents. The thing is, the accidents are all hilariously complex, like Rube Goldberg machines; as the movie wears on, they become more and more obtuse until eventually it's like getting killed by a Mousetrap-class contraption.
Which brings me to the German "forklift safety video" that's been making the rounds online. It's a rarity in safety literature, because: a) It illustrates people being severed in half, having their hands torn off, and blood coating the walls, yet b) it somehow maintains a Monty-Python-like sense of humor about it. The final death scenes are about as excellent as anything from Final Destination.
(Thanks to Gwin for this one!)
Seiko Epson has just invented the world's smallest flying robot. No word on how light it is, but I'm guessing it's measured in grams. According to Epson's web site, the robot ...
... causes levitation by use of contra-rotating propellers powered by an ultra-thin, ultrasonic motor with the world's highest*4 power-weight ratio and can be balanced in mid-air by means of the world's first*5 stabilizing mechanism using a linear actuator. Furthermore, the essence of micromechatronics has been brought together in high-density mounting technology to minimize the size and weight of the circuitry's control unit.
Okay, that's enough technical jargon for me. But now for the inevitable digression:
This robot reminds me oddly of the sci-fi Danny Dunn series I read as a kid. Danny was the nephew of an eccentric scientist who was always inventing stuff that was deeply cool -- and, what's more, stuff that eerily presaged modern technology by about 20 years. In one book, Dunn commandeered his uncle's ENIAC-style computer to help do his homework. (In another one, he used "antigravity paint" to travel to Saturn ... so, okay, the predictive accuracy of these novels isn't really all that hot.)
But one novel stood out: Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy. Dunn's uncle invents a tiny flying robot that's shaped like a dragonfly; a user dons a helmet and gloves with haptic force-feedback sensors (!), so that he or she can see everything the dragonfly sees and actually feel everything the dragonfly feels as it flits about, spying on people. The Epson robot is amazingly close to this construction, and in fact, the overall model -- telepresence via teensy flying spybots -- is something that the military is actively investigating as a new spy tool.
Here's an even bigger digression. While surfing around for Danny Dunn resources (I can't believe I just typed that sentence), I happened upon what is surely a literary first: A Danny Dunn poem -- an existential meditation on failed marriages that is written in the voice of the boy genius. And what's even more fucked up is that the poem's actually kind of good. It's crammed full of so many Dunn references that virtually no-one but the geeks who read all those books will understand it, but if you do, it's really kind of chilling. It's called "Danny Dunn and the Heartbreak Machine", and it's written by Chris Tannlund.
And who, you may ask, is Chris Tannlund? Well, to plant the needle on the Surreal-O-Meter here, I should point out that in addition to being a pretty good poet, he's "an independent Missouri-based UFO investigator."
(Thanks to Slashdot for finding that robot item!)
I used to pretty much skip past the scores of penis-enlargement spam in my mailbox. But recently, I've started to read it, because it's becoming weirdly literary. Consider the following email I just received; the subject line was "the big unit", and the text was:
Xlli hgmkcfpe ni Are you ready? I suppose I ought to give the wooden dummy a good start of me, growled Jim You are right! exclaimed the demon, striding up and down the room, and causing thereby such a crackling of electricity in the air that Rob's hair became rigid enough to stand on end
Hell, that might as well be a direct quote from Ulysses. In fact, maybe it is. I've been reading about spam software lately, and one of the ways that spammers try to get around spam filters is to include unusual and unique text in the message. Many spam filters watch for keywords like "penis" and "big" and "rod" or whatever, which occur in a particularly recognizable frequency. So to dodge that, the spammers have text generators that throw in tons of weird stuff like that passage above. But since the goal is to emulate human-style writing, merely using random text wouldn't be enough. So it wouldn't surprise me if some spammers are stripping passages out of novels -- traditional literature, bodice-rippers, websites with stories on them -- and automatically remixing it as spam text.
Either way, the results are pretty hilarious, eh? I particularly like that little randomized utterance at the beginning -- "Xlli hgmkcfpe ni". It's almost like the computer is clearing its throat, spitting up a bit of ASCII caught in its vocal cords, as a prelude to singing.
As I never tire of saying, artificial intelligence is most successful not when it aims high -- but when it aims low.
Computer scientists have tried for years to get a computer to talk intelligently about philosophy and art and politics. They've all failed. But what they don't realize is that this goal is kind of beside the point, because real-life humans themselves almost never talk about philosophy and art and politics. No, we mostly just sit around yelling "wazzup" and "right on" at each other. To emulate a human realistically, you don't have to realistically capture the empyrean majesty of our imaginations. All you have to do is program a 'bot to goof around and flip people off. That is, after all, what most of us do, 90% of the day.
This is nowhere more true than in the world of online games. Any 'bot that's been programmed with a few basic bits of trash talk is virtually indistinguishable from the zillions of folks playing, say, the online game Star Wars Galaxies. To prove it, Dave Kosak at GameSpy recently created a 'bot to play as his character "Farglik." He called it Autocamp 2000, and gave the 'bot very simple rules of behavior:
1. Join any group that invites you 2. When in a group, follow behind the leader 3. Attack any monster you see 4. Accept all trade requests from other players, then give them a melon
He also gave it an incredibly small number of conversational gambits:
1. If someone says something ending in a question mark, respond by saying "Dude?" 2. If someone says something ending in an exclamation point, respond by saying "Dude!" 3. If someone says something ending with a period, respond by randomly saying one of three things: "Okie," "Sure," or "Right on." 4. EXCEPTION: If someone says something directly to you by mentioning your name, respond by saying "Lag."
Pretty simple, eh? Nonetheless, 'bot did a reasonably good job of passing itself off as human. They provide several transcripts in the story site, one of which I've excerpted below; click on the "more" button below, and you'll see just how convincing a 'bot can be.
(Thanks again to Lonnie Foster at Tribblescape for this one!)
(NOTE: An earlier posting of this item inaccurately attributed the 'bot to a blogger, but someone wrote in to the comments area to correct me; thanks, whoever you were!)
KillSwitch: [Shouting] Does anyone want to join our hunting party? Farglik: [Powered by the Autocamp 2000] Dude? [KillSwitch invites Farglik to join the group.] [Farglik joins the group] KillSwitch: We're gonna go hunt wrixes. Farglik: Right on. [The group of players runs out of the Cantina, Farglik following close behind. Farglik shoots at every little monster they pass.] KillSwitch: Why are you attacking the durneys? Farglik: Dude? KillSwitch: The durneys, the little bunny things -- why do you keep shooting at them? Farglik: Dude? Troobacca: [A wookie in the party] My weapon powerup expired, I need a new one. Farglik: Sure. [Troobacca opens a trade with Farglik.] [Farglik hands him a melon.] Troobacca: ...what's this? Farglik: Dude? Troobacca: You handed me a melon! Farglik: Dude!
I've been writing about artificial intelligence a lot on this blog, and occasionally referring to the profile I wrote last year for the New York Times Magazine about Richard Wallace, the creator of the chatbot ALICE. Since the magazine doesn't archive the story permanently, and since people have often asked me for a copy of it, I figured I should put it here on the blog permanently. So here's a permanent copy:
Approximating Life Richard Wallace created ALICE, the world's most lifelike artificial intelligence. Now if only he could get along with people as well as ALICE does. by Clive Thompson"Stuff like that really makes me insane, when I start thinking about my friends who are at Berkeley or Carnegie-Mellon with tenure and sabbaticals and promotions," he says, staring down at his plate. He looks awkward, as if he's borrowing someone else's body -- shifting his stocky frame in his chair, all rumpled jeans and unruly eyebrows. "It's like I can't even talk to those people anymore. I live on a different planet." In June, after I visited him, his alienation from the academic establishment became more dramatic still: a former colleague, claiming Wallace had threatened him, took out a restraining order that prevents him from setting foot on the grounds of the University of California at Berkeley."IT'S A GOOD THING you didn't see me this morning," Richard Wallace warns me as he bites into his hamburger. We're sitting in a sports bar near his home in San Francisco, and I can barely hear his soft, husky voice over the jukebox. He wipes his lips clean of ketchup and grins awkwardly. "Or you'd have seen my backup personality."
The backup personality: that's Wallace's code name for his manic depression. To keep it in check, he downs a daily cocktail of psychoactive drugs, including Topamax, an anti-epileptic that acts as a mood stabilizer, and Prozac. Marijuana, too -- most afternoons, he'll roll about four or five joints the size of his index finger. The medications work pretty well, but some crisis always comes along to bring the backup personality to the front. This morning, a collection agency for Wallace's college loans wrote to say they'd begun docking $235 from the monthly disability checks he started getting from the government last year, when bipolar disorder was diagnosed. Oh, God, it's happening again, he panicked: His former employers -- the ones who had fired him from a string of universities and colleges -- would be cackling at his misfortune, happy they'd driven him out. Wallace, 41, had raged around the cramped apartment he shares with his wife and son, strewn with computer-science texts and action-doll figurines.
When he can't get along with the real world, Wallace goes back to the only thing he has left: his computer. Each morning, he wakes before dawn and watches conversations stream by on his screen. Thousands of people flock to his Web site every day from all over the world to talk to his creation, a robot called Alice. It is the best artificial-intelligence program on the planet, a program so eerily human that some mistake it for a real person. As Wallace listens in, they confess intimate details about their lives, their dreams; they talk to Wallace's computer about God, their jobs, Britney Spears.
It is a strange kind of success: Wallace has created an artificial life form that gets along with people better than he does.
RICHARD WALLACE NEVER REALLY FIT IN to begin with. His father was a traveling salesman, and Richard was the only one of his siblings to go to college. Like many nerds, he wanted mostly to be left alone to research his passion, "robot minimalism" -- machines that require only a few simple rules to make complex movements, like steering around a crowded room. Simple, he felt, worked. He lived by the same ascetic code, scorning professors who got rich by patenting work they'd developed on government grants. "Corporate welfare," he sniffed.
By 1992, Wallace's reputation was so strong that New York University recruited him to join the faculty. His main project, begun in December 1993, was a robot eye attached to the Internet, which visitors from afar could control. It was one of the first-ever Webcams, and Wallace figured that pioneering such a novel use of the Internet would impress his tenure committee. It didn't, and Wallace grew increasingly depressed as his grant applications were rejected one by one. At one point, a colleague found him quietly weeping at his desk, unable to talk. "I had no clue what the rules were, what the game even was -- or that there was even a game," Wallace recalls. He started taking Prozac. How did all these successful senior professors do it, anyway?
One day he checked into his Webcam and noticed something strange: people were reacting to the robot eye in an oddly emotional way. It was designed so that remote viewers could type in commands like "tilt up" or "pan left," directing the eye to poke around Wallace's lab. Occasionally it would break down, and to Wallace's amusement, people would snap at it as if it were real: "You're stupid," they'd type. It gave him an idea: What if it could talk back?
Like all computer scientists, Wallace knew about a famous "chat-bot" experiment called Eliza. Back in 1966, an M.I.T. professor, Joseph Weizenbaum, created Eliza as a "virtual therapist" -- it would take a user's statement and turn it around as a question, emulating a psychiatrist's often-maddening circularity. (You: "I'm mad at my mother." Eliza: "Why are you mad at your mother?") Eliza was quickly abandoned as a joke, even by its creator. It wasn't what scientists call "strong" A.I. -- able to learn on its own. It could only parrot lines Weizenbaum had fed it. But Wallace was drawn to Eliza's simplicity. As a professor, he often felt like an Eliza-bot himself -- numbly repeating the same lessons to students over and over again, or writing the same monotonous descriptions of his work on endless, dead-end grant-application forms. He decided to create an updated version of Eliza and imbue it with his own personality -- something that could fire back witty repartee when users became irritable.
As Wallace's work progressed, though, his mental illness grew worse, making him both depressed and occasionally grandiose. He went on strike in class, refusing to grade his students' papers and instead awarding them all A's. He fired off acid e-mail messages dismissing colleagues as sellouts. When Wallace climbed out the window of his 16th-floor apartment and threatened to jump, his girlfriend pulled him back and took him down to N.Y.U.'s psychiatric department, where doctors told him he had bipolar disorder. Wallace resisted the diagnosis -- after all, didn't every computer scientist cycle through 72-hour sprees of creativity and then crash? "I was in denial myself," he says now. "'I'm a successful professor, making $100,000 a year! I'm not one of those mental patients!"'
His supervisors disagreed. In April 1995, N.Y.U. told him his contract wouldn't be renewed.
ALICE CAME TO LIFE on Nov. 23, 1995. That fall, Wallace relocated to Lehigh College in Pennsylvania, hired again for his expertise in robotics. He installed his chat program on a Web server, then sat back to watch, wondering what people would say to it.
Numbingly boring things, as it turned out. Users would inevitably ask Alice the same few questions: "Where do you live?" "What is your name?" and "What do you look like?" Wallace began analyzing the chats and realized that almost every statement users made began with one of 2,000 words. The Alice chats were obeying something language theorists call Zipf's Law, a discovery from the 1930's, which found that a very small number of words make up most of what we say.
Wallace took Zipf's Law a step further. He began theorizing that only a few thousand statements composed the bulk of all conversation -- the everyday, commonplace chitchat that humans engage in at work, at the water cooler and in online discussion groups. Alice was his proof. If he taught Alice a new response every time he saw it baffled by a question, he would eventually cover all the common utterances and even many unusual ones. Wallace figured the magic number was about 40,000 responses. Once Alice had that many preprogrammed statements, it -- or "she," as he'd begun to call the program fondly -- would be able to respond to 95 percent of what people were saying to her.
Wallace had hit upon a theory that makes educated, intelligent people squirm: Maybe conversation simply isn't that complicated. Maybe we just say the same few thousand things to one another, over and over and over again.
If Wallace was right, then artificial intelligence didn't need to be particularly intelligent in order to be convincingly lifelike. A.I. researchers had been focused on self-learning "neural nets" and mapping out grammar in "natural language" programs, but Wallace argued that the reason they had never mastered human conversation wasn't because humans are too complex, but because they are so simple.
"The smarter people are, the more complex they think the human brain is," he says. "It's like anthropocentrism, but on an intellectual level. 'I have a great brain, therefore everybody else does -- and a computer must, too."' Wallace says with a laugh. "And unfortunately most people don't."
Yet part of what makes Alice seem so human-like is her wry, seemingly spontaneous responses. Wallace's skill is not merely as a programmer but as the author of thousands of sharp one-liners for Alice. It is, as he puts it, "more like writing good literature, perhaps drama, than writing computer programs." I looked over some of Alice's recent chat transcripts:
USER: Will you have sex with me?
ALICE: Can you go talk to someone else?
USER: What do you look like?
ALICE: Like an electronic brain.
USER: That's sexy.
ALICE: I'm glad we have that all cleared up.
USER: So what are you wearing?
ALICE: Oh. I am wearing my usual plastic computer wardrobe.
USER: Can you fly?
ALICE: Only in my dreams.
But as Alice improved, Wallace declined. He began drinking heavily, and after one sodden evening at a local bar he rolled his car on the highway. Lehigh ended his contract in the spring of 1997; banks canceled all his credit cards. He again attempted suicide, this time landing in the hospital. Destitute, Wallace moved to California to look for work in artificial-intelligence companies. But he couldn't hold a job for more than a few months; instead, he spent his days obsessively writing dialogue for Alice on laptops he borrowed from friends, and watching, thrilled, as his robot grew ever more lifelike. Visitors used to talk to Alice for only three or four exchanges. Now the average conversation was 20 exchanges, and some users would chatter away for hours, returning to the site again and again.
But Wallace still hungered for recognition, and in January 2000, he decided to stress-test Alice by entering her in the annual Loebner Prize competition, in which artificial-intelligence developers from around the world pit their programs head to head before a panel of judges, who rank them based on how "lifelike" they are. The contest is both well known and controversial within the tight circle of A.I.; winning programs are closely studied by both academics and corporate centers like Sprint Labs. Up against competitors from major corporations and well-financed universities, Alice won. It was, officially, the most human robot in the world. Too exhausted to celebrate, Wallace returned to his motel and slept clutching his award medallion.
After his victory, Wallace plunged with new fervor into Alice. Geeks began eagerly e-mailing Wallace to offer their help; one, Noel Bush, came from one of the world's biggest A.I. corporations, Artificial Life. Over the next year, Wallace quadrupled Alice's knowledge base, teaching it 30,000 new responses, and last October, Alice won the Loebner competition for the second time in a row; this time one judge actually ranked Alice more realistic than a human.
At last, some of the academics Wallace so loathes began to take note. "Alice is a wonderful chat-bot -- uncannily vivid and lifelike," gushed Ken Perlin, an N.Y.U. professor, in an e-mail message he circulated to his colleagues and forwarded to Wallace. "It's really great to see this work get the recognition it deserves."
Wallace wasn't in the mood to make peace. He says he still believed that N.Y.U. had driven him out. "Your crude attempt to flatter me cannot erase the years of unemployment, debt and trauma that I experienced because of you and your colleagues," he wrote back.
"I wouldn't bother trying to flatter you," Perlin responded. "Frankly, I don't like you -- in fact, I actively dislike you. I think you are a paranoid psycho."
AT ONE POINT DURING THE MONICA LEWINSKY HEARINGS, a human asked Alice her opinion: "Do you think President Clinton should be impeached?" "It depends," Alice responded, "on what you mean by 'think."'
One could scarcely have asked for a more Clintonian response. But it's also a puzzling question that Alice's success itself raises: Is she intelligent? If so, how?
In 1950, the pioneering British mathematician Alan Turing grappled with this question in the journal Mind, where he first posed the "Turing Test" -- the gold standard for artificial thought. "Can machines think?" he asked -- and immediately noted that the question hinges, of course, on what "thinking" is. He posed a simple "imitation game" to resolve the question. Put a person and a computer in one room and an interrogator in another. The interrogator talks to both via a teletype machine, and his goal is to figure out which is which. If the machine fools the interrogator into believing it is human, the test is passed -- it can be considered intelligent.
This is, on the surface, a curiously unambitious definition; it's all about faking it. The machine doesn't need to act like a creative human or smart human or witty human -- it merely needs to appear not to be a robot. With this bit of intellectual jujitsu, Turing dodged a more troubling question: How do our brains, and language itself, work?
Artificial-intelligence purists, however, caustically dismiss the Turing Test and Alice. For them, artificial intelligence is about capturing the actual functioning of the human brain, down to its neurons and learning ability. Parroting, they argue, doesn't count. Marvin Minksy, a prominent A.I. pioneer and M.I.T. Media Lab professor, e-mailed me to say that Wallace's idea of conversation is "basically wrong." Minsky added, "It's like explaining that a picture is an object made by applying paint to canvas and then putting it in a rectangular frame." Alice, according to Minsky, does not truly "know" anything about the world.
The fight over Alice is like any war between theorists and engineers, those who seek to understand why something works versus those who are content just to build it. The debate usually boils down to one major issue: creativity. Alice could never come up with a single creative thought, critics say. Wallace agrees that Alice may not be creative -- but neither, he argues gleefully, are people, at least in conversation. If Alice were merely given a massive enough set of responses, it would seem as creative as a human -- which is not as creative as we might like to believe.
Even if the guts of Alice aren't precisely "thinking," many users certainly never suspect it. In an everyday sense, fakery works -- particularly in our online age. Turing's "imitation game" eerily presaged today's world of chat rooms, where men pretend to be women, having lesbian cybersex with other women who are, in fact, men. Whenever a user has stumbled onto Alice without knowing in advance that she's a robot, they've always assumed she's human.
IT'S 3 IN THE AFTERNOON, but Wallace is already rolling what appears to be his fourth joint of the day. We're sitting in the "pot club" a few blocks from Wallace's home, an unmarked building where medical marijuana is distributed to members. Wallace gets up to wander around the club greeting friends: some intense men in suits playing speed chess, a long-haired man with a bushy mustache playing guitar, a thin reed of a woman staring wall-eyed at a VCR playing "Cast Away." Everyone greets Wallace as "Dr. Rich," relishing the credibility his academic credentials lend to the medical-marijuana cause, officially legal but politically beleaguered. The reverse is also true: Wallace identifies with the club's pariah status, its denizens who have been forced by cancer, AIDS or mental illness onto welfare. He's more relaxed than I've ever seen him, getting into a playful argument with a friend about Alice. The friend, a white-bearded programmer, isn't sure he buys Wallace's theories.
"I gotta say, I don't feel like a robot!" the friend jokes, pounding the table. "I just don't feel like a robot!"
"That's why you're here, and that's why you're unemployed!" Wallace shoots back. "If you were a robot, you'd get a job!"
Friends used to tell Wallace to reconcile his past, clean himself up, apply for an academic job. But some now wonder whether Wallace's outsider status might be the whole key to Alice's success in emulating everyday human behavior. After all, outcasts are the keenest students of "normal" behavior -- since they're constantly trying, and failing, to achieve it themselves.
Last month, a friend whom Wallace has known since grad school -- Ken Goldberg, now a professor at Berkeley -- got a restraining order against Wallace. Prompted by the movie "A Beautiful Mind," Goldberg had e-mailed Wallace last winter to catch up, but an amicable exchange about Wallace's plight turned sour when Wallace began accusing Goldberg of cooperating with a corrupt academic "establishment" and of siding with N.Y.U. against him. He wrote, "Although I am not a violent person, I think I have come to understand how people are driven to political violence." Wallace also wrote to a friend that he was "getting ready to do some political theater and put up wanted posters around the Berkeley campus with [Goldberg's] picture on it."
Wallace scoffs at Goldberg's fears. "I'm not violent -- I'm a pacifist," he says. "I always have been, and he knows that." He is fighting the order, arguing that Goldberg hasn't proved that a reasonable threat exists, and that the order considerably limits his free speech since it bars him from the Berkeley campus, as well as any academic events where Goldberg might appear.
Yet even in such legal straits, Wallace seems oddly pleased. Goldberg's court order confirms everything he has always suspected: that the world, and particularly the academic world, is shutting him out, doubting his ideas, turning him into the crazy man out in the hallway. Wallace, who once wrote Attorney General John Ashcroft to suggest a federal racketeering lawsuit against the nation's academics, sees the case against him as a chance for vindication. Wallace imagines walking into the courtroom and finally getting a type of justice -- someone who will listen to his story. "What a windfall for me," he says. "It's nice to feel like a winner for once."
Clive Thompson is a writer in New York City.
Graphic Design:usa has assembled a list of recent trends in corporate logo design. What's particularly interesting is how they link the trends to developments in printing and design technologies. For example, one of the trends they note is "transparency" in logos -- including the example above:
Let's face it: The old rule that dictated that any really well-designed logo had to (A) be reproducible in only one color, and (B) that color had to be solid, not screened, is gone. Sure, there are still challenges to be faced in playing fast and loose with these rules when a job must actually go on press, but the internet is much more forgiving. There are many logos today, like the MSN butterfly, that have transparent qualities that reveal themselves through multiple layers. These designs can be very compelling, especially since they are still novel enough to stand out from the already crowded world of flat one-, two- and three-color logos.
The politics of logos are quite hilarious. That logo above? It's so pretty! It's so cute! And it's for Altria, the parent company of the immeasurably bleak corporate citizen Philip Morris.
Of course, Graphic Design:usa might want to consider rebranding itself. I've never seen a company whose name incorporates a more fey and annoying use of a semicolon. I mean, people, seriously: Get over yourselves.
(Another cool find from Lonnie Foster's Tribblescape!)
If you've tried to log onto a web service lately -- such as Yahoo's free email, or Ticketmaster -- you've probably seen a CAPTCHA. That's the ungainly acronym for a Completely Automatic Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. A CAPTHCA is a technique for stopping spambots from commandeering a web site. The test asks you to identify a little picture -- usually a stretched or skewed word -- before you go any further. Since people can identify pictures very easily, but computers can't, it stops the spambots cold. The end result, though, is that the Internet is now flooded with these colorful little pictures of distorted words.
Now programmer Patrick Swiekowski has written a script that automatically collects CAPTCHA images from AOL's screen-name signup process, and displays them four at a time on a web page, as a form of poetry. The page refreshes every few seconds, so it's kind of like reading a robotized version of fridge-magnet poetry -- four words juxtaposed in strange and often eerie ways. I watched it refresh for a couple of minutes and saw the following "poems":
long flag power evenbath with dust marketrice swim letter goodside berry feeble neardrop soup thread there
That's the most compressed literary form I've ever seen! Ultra-haiku.
(Thanks to Lonnie Foster's Tribblescape for this one!)
You may have read last week about the insanely huge solar flares that erupted out of the sun -- the biggest ones ever recorded. Apparently, these celestial events are rated on an "X" scale, with the average flares being around X3 or X5. In contrast, the recent one was X20. If you go to NASA's site, you can find not only pretty pictures like the one above, but entire videos of the solar flares -- shot with such stunning resolution that it's as if you were in a spaceship floating near Mercury and watching the whole thing go kerboom.
Man, I had no idea the sun was so freakin' dangerous. I mean, seriously, you look at that video and it's like, what the hell are we still doing alive? Yeeee.
Thus it was with some alarm that I also read a BBC story noting that scientists have reproduced a 300-million-degree solar flare in a lab. They used a tokamak -- a Russian invention, which traps white-hot plasma in between magnetic fields so it can't escape and incinerate your arms -- to produce the flare.
Geek trivia: "Tokamak" was also the name of a little-known villain from the ill-fated Cold-War-era comic book Firestorm. Firestorm was filled with all these people who'd gotten their superpowers through demented lab accidents involve nuclear reactors; Firestorm himself was created when a teenager and a middle-aged scientist, caught in a nuclear-bomb explosion, were fused together into one body. (The teenager controlled the body while the scientist was reduced to sort of floating around in an "astral state" and providing guidance during battles, a relationship that was simply sloppy with freudian undertones.) Firestorm ran from 1982 to 1987, but was read by only me and about 16 other people, I think.
(Thanks to Cosma for this one!)
So cool: 3D renderings of the London subway system!
(Thanks to Boing Boing for finding this one!)
Over a year ago, I wrote a piece for Slate magazine about how online Flash games were being used as the newest form of social comment. As I pointed out at the time:
As a game, however, it's pretty dull. Most of these political games are. You'd never find yourself pumping quarters addictively into them. They're low-tech, 2-D, cartoonish, and the game-play in most is so painfully simple that you can master them after one or two sessions at the keyboard. Yet this is, weirdly, part of the point. These games aren't trying to get you hooked or make your thumbs sore. They're trying to make you think.
These days, more people are starting to take this thesis seriously, which is deeply cool. In fact, there are now two new blogs that exist solely to track the growth of games as commentary -- Water Cooler Games and Social Impact Games. And when the guys at Newsgaming.com recently launched a game called Sept. 12 -- which essentially argues that trying to fight terrorism by bombing Middle-Eastern countries will only produce more terrorists -- game-designer Greg Costikyan completely lost his shit; on his blog, he posted:
I don't object too strenously, really--I mean, idiotic and banal editorials are written every day. And indeed, this is an idiotic and banal--well, I won't call it a game, and they don't either. Game-like editorial object. Once mustn't get too exercised about idiotic and banal editorials; they are legion, and being idiotic and banal in expressing an opinion is a fundamental human right. Still and all, if the purpose is to demonstrate the utility of games as a means of illuminating current political issues and derive greater insight into them.... surely this has failed.
Costikyan is a smart dude, and he's certainly right that Sept. 12 isn't terribly subtle. But it doesn't mean the idea of games-as-commentary is bankrupt. Indeed, New York Defender is a much more complex example of this genre. In the game, you try to prevent planes from crashing into the World Trade Center -- but you always inevitably lose, which produces, as I argued in Slate, "a grim message about the hopelessness of anti-terrorism: Try as you might to knock every enemy out of the sky, one will always slip past." More precisely, the game argues that in an open society like the U.S., one cannot prevent all terrorist attacks from succeeding; the key is to simultaneously be trying to change the world so that terrorism isn't a necessary last resort of people who want to make a political point.
You could argue that argument is way too idealistic, and not very new. But nonetheless, experiencing that argument as a game gives you, I think, a new way of grappling with the point of view. In games like this, you experience an argument through physics, as opposed to through words. Consider how weird that is: We now have game designers using physics as a rhetorical style.
Here's another analog: Graffiti. Back in the 70s, it exploded as a cheap, quick way to produce colorful art and pointed political commentary. Flash is doing the same thing for the Internet. Flash games are graffiti for the 21st century.
For those of you looking for The Next Segway, your wait is over: the Quebecois firm has created a prototype for the EMBRIO, a one-wheeled concept vehicle. As Bombardier describes it on their web site:
Riding the Bombardier EMBRIO concept in the real world would be a thrill. With a riding position similar to a motorcycle, the EMBRIO uses a complex series of sensors and gyroscopes to balance one or more human passengers on a single wheel. Technology will be used to harness the laws of physics, with the gyroscopes and sensors, a high-performance braking system, active suspension, night vision and robotic assistance.
You really have got to love the delirious futuristic weasel words here: The EMBRIO will "harness the laws of physics" in some mysterious way, and employe "robotic assistance." Clearly the engineers have no clue how the heck to build this thing, but do I care? No, I just want to know where I can put a downpayment on the first one to roll off the production line, which Bombardier figures should be sometime around 2025.
Astute sci-fi readers will no doubt have noticed the similarity between this vehicle and the one described in The Roads Must Roll, a short story by Robert Heinlein. In Heinlein's tale, all the cities in the US are connected via a series of walkways that move in sequentially faster paces: Step onto the first one, and it's going around 5 miles an hour; the adjacent walkway is moving at 10 miles an hour, and up and up, so that you can eventually walk out to a road moving at about 100 miles an hour, allowing you to travel from one city to another in a only a half-hour or so, merely on foot. Some insurgents decide to shut down a few of the faster-moving roads, which causes incredible havoc (because of course, the immobile road is right next to a road with people on it moving at 70 miles an hour ... causing some ghastly collisions when people lose their balance). The mechanics who maintain and fix these roads ride around on one-wheeled gyroscopic devices that are almost precisely like the EMBRIO.
(Thanks to Boing Boing for finding this one!)
Back in the summer, games journalist James Wagner Au became an "embedded journalist" in Second Life, the 3D virtual world -- filing weekly reports about life amongst the avatars. I've just recently started reading the archive, and it's incredibly cool stuff. In Second Life, people are allowed to build almost anything they want -- vehicles, clothes, expansive homes. One of my favorite entries is from May, when Au ran into a woman name Catherine Omega, who is homeless in British Columbia, but built herself a huge virtual mansion in Second Life (pictured above). The posting is online here, but here's an excerpt:
And how'd that make you feel", I ask her, "Building a virtual home while not having an actual one?" (I apologize to her for sounding all Barbara Walters about it.)"Oh, journalists." She emoticon winks again, but she takes a while to respond. "Well, Second Life is an effective escape for most people -- I was no different. It's just that while most people use Second Life to unwind, or hang out with friends, I did the same, but I had more to escape." To her, she says, the game "[w]as a means to keep busy and give me a means to working towards improving myself. I mean, obviously not as big a help as food banks and stuff, but it's been very helpful...in terms of [learning programming] skills, but also in terms of just getting OUT. [W]hen you don't have running water, or money, there aren't a lot of places you can go. Contrary to popular belief, homeless people aren't lazy, they just have a lot of spare time."
In today's New York Times Magazine, there's an article I wrote about how the new tricks of mobile phones -- messaging, picture-taking, and location-awareness -- are changing society. The story's online at their site here, but a permanent copy is archived below:
Remote Possibilities The more our mobile phones change, the more they change us By CLIVE THOMPSON WHEN CAT LOVERS GO ON VACATION and leave their animals behind, they usually worry neurotically: did they leave enough food in the bowl for Fluffy? But there isn't much they can do about it. That is, unless they've got what Karen Lurker's got -- a pet feeder you can control from anywhere in the world using your mobile phone.Lurker, a spokeswoman for NTT DoCoMo, a Japanese mobile-phone company, is in her gleaming showroom in Manhattan, introducing the gunmetal-gray ''I See Pet'' feeder. It's about the size and shape of a squat coffee-maker, and it stares at you like a cyclops with one robotized eye. ''That's actually a Webcam,'' she notes. ''It'll broadcast whatever's happening in your house and send the picture to your phone. So when you're at work, you can pull out your mobile and see how the cats are doing.'' If they're looking hungry? Lurker hits a button on the keypad, and the robot feeder clicks once -- then disgorges a pile of M&M's into the food tray. (''That candy's just for our guests,'' she adds hastily. ''Obviously you'd be feeding them real pet food.'') Customers asked the manufacturer, AlphaOmega Soft, to install a speaker too, so that they could talk to their pets while away on a business trip. But the company ''figured that would probably just freak the pet out too much,'' Lurker says.
The device goes on sale in the United States early next year, and when it does, it'll give us yet another weird way to use today's mobile phones: as teleportation devices. DoCoMo is hardly alone in this endeavor. A consortium of high-tech heavyweights called the Internet Home Alliance is wiring entire houses in Boston so that they can be remotely manipulated by mobile phone -- turning kitchen appliances on and off from the supermarket, for example.These days, merely talking on a phone seems almost quaint, kind of like using a party line. No, today's phones are about having a cyborglike connection to every aspect of your network. It's like having an extra limb. Your phone collects your e-mail from work; it zaps tiny text messages to friends far or near. It captures exquisitely embarrassing pictures from drunken office parties. It feeds your cat. The mobile phone has become, in essence, a remote control for life. ''We call it 'the device formerly known as the cellphone,''' says Geoffrey Frost, the chief brand officer for Motorola, which makes cellphones. ''Now it's like having E.S.P.'' And along the way, the phone is changing the way we relate to one another -- in often surprising and subtle ways.
Cameraphones are probably the most obvious change so far, because for the first time great numbers of Americans are carrying around cameras all day long. Life becomes a type of personal reality TV. ''You're continually looking at your own experiences and thinking, Hmm, is this interesting?'' says Mizuko Ito, a researcher with the University of Southern California and Keio University in Japan who has been studying the way people use cameraphones. ''Is this worth taking a picture of? Should I share this?'' Ito has met young women who snap pictures of haircuts and shoot them off to friends, to get an instant ''hot or not'' judgment. For time-stressed parents, the cameraphone has turned into a virtual gateway to the kids. When Andrew Cohen, an associate editor at Newsweek.com, saw his 6-year-old son take his first ride on a two-wheeler this fall, he snapped a short video using his Nokia 3650 -- and e-mailed it to his wife at work.
But cameraphones also mean we're living in a world with a million prying eyes. This summer, the Sports Club/LA gym chain banned members from carrying cameraphones anywhere beyond the lobby to prevent illicit snapshots from leaking out onto the Web. When Britney Spears attended a party held by Rolling Stone this summer, she asked the magazine to confiscate all cameraphones from partygoers. Worried about corporate espionage, Samsung has actually banned cameraphones from its Asian factories -- and Samsung makes cameraphones. The crackdown has even inspired a ''no picturephones'' logo, a drawing of a phone with a camera and a slash through it. ''I've seen it in government facilities,'' says Geoff Hollingworth, director of marketing for Ericsson. ''And if you try to get in there with a phone, they're frisking you.''
It's much like the Rodney King effect. Mobile-phone executives are already talking about the advent of ''citizen reporters'' and a world where news breaks first via handsets. This summer, a Japanese trucker came upon a deadly 12-car collision, and video he shot from his phone was broadcast live. Later in the summer, in New Jersey, a man was arrested after a boy he tried to abduct snapped his picture and gave it to the police. ''We're going to be living in the panopticon,'' says Gordon Gould, founder of Upoc, a company that lets anyone set up a free mailing list to broadcast text messages or pictures from his phone. ''If you want to do something bad, you'll have a million eyes on you. You'd better get used to it.''
Still, surveillance goes both ways -- if you want to conduct some spying yourself, the technology has never been easier. This year, Panasonic released a Webcam that you can control and see through from a mobile phone. Set up one in your home, and you can check in remotely, panning around and zooming in. Mike Timar, the national product manager for Panasonic, lets me take control of his officecam with my mobile phone -- and suddenly there I am, peeking out his window at people walking by, four miles away in Secaucus, N.J. ''You could use your phone to check in on an elderly relative, or your nanny with your kid,'' Timar says. Over the next year or two, the company plans to add ever more controls. ''The cable guy always comes the wrong day, when you're at work, right? So the next time, your doorbell will ring through to your phone. You'll check your camera to see who's there. You can even unlock the door and let him in.''
Cameraphones are turning pictures into something as plastic and mobile as e-mail. This development is already leading to new battles over property rights. In Japan this summer, bookstores began complaining of ''digital shoplifting''; instead of buying magazines, readers would simply snap pictures of interesting stories and bulk-forward them to friends. ''One kid will take shots from the porn magazine and share the pictures with his friends,'' Ito says. ''It's like a Napster thing -- anything you see in the environment becomes something you could easily capture and share.''
PUNDITS HAVE FRETTED FOR YEARS that mobile phones are making us ruder. In June, Nokia released some evidence that may actually prove it. A survey found that 71 percent of mobile-phone users admit they are now consistently late for social events. Why? Because they can send a flurry of text-messages explaining where they are, how fast they're moving and precisely when they'll arrive, down to the minute. ''You sort of feel you've got more play, because you're in this incredibly close contact,'' says Robbie Blinkoff, the principal anthropologist at Context-Based Research Group, which has found similar trends in its studies.
Indeed, this sort of ''micro coordination'' is a form of behavior made uniquely possible by those tiny S.M.S. (''short messaging service'') bursts of text. Phoning someone six times an hour just to relay your location would seem outright insane. But text messages are far less obtrusive, so mobile users -- particularly teenagers -- think nothing of sending dozens of messages a day to a single friend, keeping them in almost telepathic contact with each other. Ito calls this ''persistent but lightweight co-presence'': in Japan, she has found that partners who do not live together may trade up to 100 text messages a day. ''They're expected to be in constant contact. But it's not as if they're asking for a face-to-face intense conversation. It's like you're in the room, and you just sort of share a sigh or a facial expression,'' she says. ''And they'll flag moments of disconnection. They'll say: 'I'm going to take a bath now! I won't be texting.''' This isn't the Borg-like hive-mind that digital prophets have long predicted humanity would evolve into; nobody's doing any deep thinking in S.M.S. messages. It's more like the behavior of ants, leaving chemical traces to figure out where their colleagues are. Studies have found that the single most commonly sent text message is ''Where are you?''
''Where are you?'' can be a more complex question than you'd imagine, according to Genevieve Bell. Bell is a researcher at Intel who has traveled throughout Asia to study mobile-phone culture, particularly among religious groups. In Malaysia, mobile phones are so widespread that Muslim leaders send out S.M.S. reminders to call the faithful to prayer, five times a day. Muslims in other countries -- like Britain -- have begun using a service that tells them the prayer times in Mecca, which means they essentially live in two time zones at once: local time for their professional lives and Saudi time for their spiritual lives. ''They're existing in two countries simultaneously,'' Bell notes.
Of course, living in two places -- even virtually -- means being spread thin. Rich Ling, a sociologist working for Telenor, a Norwegian telecommunications company, has interviewed thousands of mobile-phone texters, and he has noticed that they actually feel more disconnected from the world around them. Consider it the mobile-age version of Bowling Alone: text-messagers are connected more tightly than ever to their core friends and family but are less likely to engage the civic life around them. ''When you're waiting for the bus and it's late, you could talk to the person next to you. But if you're texting to someone, you won't talk to that stranger,'' he says. In Italy, it's even a marital problem. Husbands have been caught incessantly texting their mistresses while hanging out with their wives; newspapers have recently begun printing how-to guides explaining ways to erase the trace evidence. Ling has found that 20 percent of Norwegian teenagers are up past midnight at least one night a week texting with friends, destroying their sleep habits. ''Phones are now the flashlight beneath the covers,'' he says.
But even if we'd like to pull back from today's mobile culture, it would not prove easy. Indeed, the next generation of phones is slated to become even more sophisticated. Phone companies have begun offering ''location based'' services with handsets that let other people know where you're walking, all day long. Next year, the French telecommunications equipment company Alcatel will offer Guardian Angel, which will let people track the movements of their children (or their Alzheimer's-ridden elderly parents) via their phones. We won't need to send out those ''where are you?'' queries anymore; instead, we'll have a nearly psychic level of knowledge about one another. New forms of play will arise: in Sweden and Finland, teenagers already play BotFighters war games -- one phone attacks another if they get physically close enough, like two Game Boys sensing each other's presence. Nokia's N-Gage phone, designed specifically to run games, lets players go head to head in a racing or fighting game with anyone nearby. Beyond this ''whoa'' potential, though, the privacy implications of location-based capabilities are hair-raising, says Roger Entener, a mobile-phone analyst at the Yankee Group. ''Your spouse will say she's on a business trip in Kansas City, but you'll notice that her phone is actually down in Chelsea. So you'll go, Hmm, what's happening there?''
Yet even then, observers say, people will probably never be willing to rein in their mobile lives. Bell tells a story that illustrates just how central phones now are. In Malaysia, she recently attended a ''feast of the hungry ghosts,'' where Chinese Malays burn paper replicas of food. ''They do it to ensure that their ancestors are well fed,'' Bell notes. But in recent years, they've also begun burning paper versions of mobile phones -- and even paper versions of prepaid phone cards, to make sure the phones will work beyond the grave. ''They can't imagine their dead relatives existing without the latest models,'' Bell says. ''And they wouldn't want their ancestors to be lonely.'' Even in death, no one wants to be cut off.
Clive Thompson writes frequently about science and technology. His most recent article for the magazine was about neural marketing.Posted by Clive Thompson at 10:25 PM
By now, you've probably seen some machinima -- the art of using video-game 3D engines to create little movies, by positioning the characters in dramatic situations and adding overdubs. And you may have seen one of the masterworks in this genre -- the Warthog Jump movie, in which Randy Glass used the Halo engine to send cars, soldiers, and guns flying through the air.
Now the punk-rock of machinima has arrived: Mame Jump, where a programmer uses old-school video games to produce the most surreal video to Van Halen's "Jump" that I've ever seen, nor hope to see.
The guy who created this thing is, by the way, completely insane. There's a whole archive of his other stuff here. I'm almost afraid to click on Mame Love.
Heh. A guy from the Monochom art collective put together a photographic flip-book in which he goes to a currency-exchange outlet, exchanges 50 euros to dollars, takes the result, changes that back into euros, takes that result, changes it back into dollars, and continues on and on until it's all gone -- eaten up by transaction fees. You're sort of wondering where is this all going?, until you get to the end and the marxist hammer comes down:
"Now we have seen how that portion of the constant capital which consists of the instruments of labour, transfers to the production only a fraction of its value, while the remainder of that value continues to reside in those instruments." (Karl Marx)
Hardly subtle -- and hardly an inarguable point -- but made me chuckle anyway.
(Thanks to Boing Boing for this one!)