Brian Stokes: The Intermittent Super-genius

New Rare Condition to Add to My Collection: Pellucid Marginal Degeneration

2010-02-08T17:38:00.000-08:00

Went to a new eye doctor today. Turns out I do not have Keratoconus after all. My left eye has Pellucid Marginal Degeneration, which is often confused with it and is much more rare. The good news is that it does not lead to blindness and does not get worse with age.

I had been wearing soft contacts for almost twelve years until one day in 1998, my new optometrist gave me the usual eye tests. Right eye was fine. Left eye though, not so much. "Which of these look better, one or two?" "Neither" This went on for too long as I sat nervously, wearing those steam-punk goggles. The doctor seemed very puzzled, then told me "Well it looks like you have Keratoconus, or a curved cornea. There's not much we can do. We could give you glasses, but the left lens would be about 5 inches thick. Sorry." Wha?!

Luckily, we have an optometrist in the distant family. Called him, and he said the doc was crazy and recommended another one. He too declared "Keratoconus" but claimed "your last doc was wrong -- you can do something about it. Hard contact lenses." Rigid gas-permeable, to be exact. They are like tiny translucent blue versions of those saucer sleds kids play with in the snow. In fact, they are so similar to those that it's very easy to lose them in the sink drain.

David Crane: Videogame Pioneer

2010-01-26T15:52:00.000-08:00

David Crane, creator of the first so-called "platform" videogame Pitfall! is to be honored with a Pioneer Award soon. He worked at Atari back in the days when its Atari 2600 ruled the world. Atari's games were each designed and programmed -- game, graphics, sound and all -- by one person. But that person had no bonus, no recognition. Not even in the game itself*, out of fear that he might get stolen away by a competitor.

Also at that time, videogame console manufacturers produced games for their own systems. David and other Atari programmers left and formed the world's first third party game company, Activision. They changed the rules -- programmers could now get recognition, and a percentage of royalties. Activision spawned all other Third Party game companies and, I would argue, invented Rock Star programmers.

Somewhere there is a photo of my really high score on Pitfall!

via WIRED

* Although there are programmers who hid "Easter Eggs" signatures, like Will Robinette in his game Adventure.

Supreme Court to Corporations: Take all the Megaphones You Want, It's Your Right

2010-01-26T12:42:00.000-08:00

This week, the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to lift spending restrictions on corporations and unions, claiming that such restrictions are a violation of Free Speech, a right given to all "citizens" by our Constitution.

Given that corporations are allegedly "Persons"*, and given that there is legal precedent dating back to the 1970s for equating money spent on lobbying and advertising with Free Speech, the winning side here believes that the Constitutional Rights of these poor helpless fictional entities have been justifiably restored

To me this means we've just cleared the way for America to be a Corporate Fascist nation, not a Democracy.

Sure, there are Constitutional Purists, like Glenn Greenwald, who drank the Kool-Aid and think this ruling was about an abstract fight against the notion of limiting free speech to some category of entities. He and others think having any such regulation in any context is paramount to censorship and must be stopped.

I don't buy it.

We're dealing here not with stopping ideas we may or may not agree with. Glenn is right when he points out that government banning and censoring human communication in one context, but not in others, is unacceptable in a true Democracy. Either you have Free Speech or you don't. If you don't, you live in China and mere mentioning of certain topics will get you imprisoned or killed.

But, even if we don't restrict its content, the intent of Free Speech was never to allow one group of entities to have more of it than anyone else. The problem is how to mix all the communications channels in a fair, informative way. Prior regulation kept the Corporate voice lower in the mix. Now that regulation will be off.

Thanks to these Supreme Court idiots, Corporations will able to seize the control room, crank up the volume and mix everyone else out of the dialogue.

The Megaphones vs. The Unmiked.

It is not that Corporations have not been able to speak. (They already have).

It's not that they cannot speak the particular messages they would like to (even if those might be misleading or false).

No. The problem now is that Corporations do not speak. With billions of dollars, they can YELL.

They can now yell louder, and across more loudspeakers and channels than any other entity on the planet. These entities can now buy up all the megaphones and boomboxes.

Speech? Or Corruptive Influence

Then there is the matter of corruption. Corruption can trump even the fairest of dialogues and messaging between elected officials and the citizens voting for them.

When a human being donates money to a politician in the hopes of getting him or her elected, there is the hope (or expectation) he or she will vote in a way pleasing to the donor.

But with a corporation, we're talking HUGE sums of money that no mere mortal human being can simply walk away from. In effect, the politician will think twice before enacting any laws against such a "generous" donor. In effect, the Corporate Donor has just bought the Law, custom-made for its own self-interest.

Theodore Roosevelt and our preceding governments recognized the danger of granting unlimited power to Corporations. We had protections in place to separate government and commerce. They gave corporations a voice, but muted so that the rest of us could be heard too.

But now our members of Congress are former members of Corporations and vice versa. They have debts to repay, Laws to create on their donor's behalf. This ruling will make he voice of the Corporations so overwhelmingly loud that we human beings might as well call it a day and do what Douglas Rushkoff suggests -- forget about government and do stuff ourselves.

* Albeit fictional, and only made so in the 1800s by a clerk writing notes on a court case about granting rights to slaves.

Golden Globe Award Snafus

2010-01-18T10:11:00.000-08:00

Hollywood must be severely broken if a Golden Globe for Best Picture for a non-drama goes to The Hangover?!! Unbelievable.

Ooh! Me want! Moldover's new custom controller, the Mojo now for sale

2010-01-13T14:55:00.000-08:00

Electronic music performer Moldover has long been a pioneer in unusual ways to DJ and perform music. His modus operandi has been to hack apart off-the-shelf MIDI USB controllers (like those from M-Audio and Novation), add his own bits, remove the ones in the way, and hook up the Frankensteinian result to a laptop running music software such as Ableton Live and Reaktor.

Moldover calls this increasingly common practice of making and using new DJ interfaces "controllerism." Like many DIY and Open Source creators, he has been very open about his techniques, offering many youtube demonstration videos and giving regular talks at music technology user groups.

Well now Moldover has a new toy to play with, and you can play it too! (For a mere $1800) This one he had custom-built with rugged, ergonomically-aligned arcade buttons, and an industrial-grade metal and wood case.

French music video tribute to The Muppet Show

2010-01-12T10:47:00.000-08:00

This is the second French CG animation homage to Jim Henson's Muppets I've seen so far. Many elements of the Muppet Show are here -- the red curtain, musician Muppets, audience Muppets, a human performer singing a classic song. No heckling Statler and Waldorf-like characters though, sadly. Since these are all key-framed CG characters, these puppets do things no ordinary foam hand-and-rod puppet can do! Dance with legs showing! Throw things!

Unfortunately, the animators focused so much on exaggerating the "puppety-ness" that puppetry basics like lip-synch and eye-focus are less than stellar. Still, it's great to see a large-scale Muppet Musical Number again.

The Futility of Censoring Online Chat

2009-12-03T15:53:00.000-08:00

Online Virtual Worlds are semi-mainstream now, with World of Warcraft, Club Penguin, IMVU, Sony's Home, and Second Life all relatively well-known by a large chunk of the population. But they all have their roots in MUDs (Multi-User Domain), MOOs (MUD, Object-Oriented) and BBS (Bulletin Board System) chat rooms that originated more than 20 years ago. These text-based virtual worlds were run on university networks, accessible almost entirely by college students who happened to have computer access, a rarity at that time. The basic features of today's Instant Message clients (ICQ, AIM, MSN, Jabber, and Yahoo!), and every chat feature inside online games and website assistant windows are descendants of these proto-Chat systems.

Somewhere back in the mid-1990s, Chat met the World-Wide Web. Companies like iChat (not the Apple webcam software) were selling chatting plugins for the fledgling web site industry. Yahoo's own chat system used iChat's plugin originally before it developed Yahoo! Instant Messenger. I recall going to iChat's booth at a Linux Conference where a representative from some large corporate site was asking a product specialist a question along these lines:

Corporate Representative: "How do we make certain that users don't curse and only talk about our products?"
Product Specialist: "Ummm... You can't."

Non-technical people in boardrooms have always come up with the same seemingly obvious solution: "Can't we just make a big list of bad words and filter them out?" The answer, it turns out, and always will be NO^*.

In the mid-1980's, a pair of programmers Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer developed a 2-D graphical virtual world called Habitat, that ran on the Commodore 64 home computer. Since then they've been behind many online worlds. Whenever there's a corporate backer for one of their projects (such as Disney, for their ToonTown virtual world for kids), they encounter (just like the one I encountered) the fundamental assumption that censorship is possible.

On their website, Habitat Chronicles, Randy Farmer blogged about how even their best laid censorship filter plans can be bested by a clever (and naughty) teenager:

"We spent several weeks building a UI that used pop-downs to construct sentences, and only had completely harmless words � the standard parts of grammar and safe nouns like cars, animals, and objects in the world."
"We thought it was the perfect solution, until we set our first 14-year old boy down in front of it. Within minutes he�d created the following sentence:

I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny.

Alas, for better or for worse, communication finds a way. It's built from finite materials combined in infinite ways. So long as there are clever people, someone will find some way to say something you (or other players) don't like through your corporate playground.

You hear that, China? (AT & T?)

^* That is, without having an impossibly expensive (and potentially corruptible) army of workers monitoring every conversation.

Playing a DVD movie on a Blu-Ray Player = Weird

2009-11-30T11:26:00.000-08:00

We watched Four Christmases on DVD played via a Blu=Ray player on an HD flatscreen TV. The result was very strange -- it was like being there on the set as the actors were making the movie. All cinematic distance was squashed and flattened into something too close to regular every day eye-sight for there to be any magic. (The fact that it wasn't a particularly funny or interesting movie did not help matters)

Not entirely sure how this happened. Had we watched the Blu-Ray version would we have seen this, or was this an artifact of the playback enhancement?

Day One of Boston Trip 2009, part III

2009-11-10T14:45:00.000-08:00

We took a cab to Colin and Jessica's house.
Mom and Dad arrived later.

Mom watches over Theo.

Here I am with Theo and Dad (who will turn 70 in a couple of days!)

Tricia rubs Theo's head. So soft!

Day One of Boston 2009, part II

2009-11-10T14:14:00.000-08:00

Completely exhausted from our Red-Eye overnight flight, we strolled around the city of Boston.

We went into Fanuel Hall and found some "Chowda".

There was an open-faced building...

and nice old architecture.

Day One of Boston Trip 2009, part I

2009-11-10T14:09:00.000-08:00

Tricia and I went to the New England Aquarium...

..where we saw a lovely green sea turtle...

... who had a funny way of swimming (only with his feet).

Nephew Theo is 1 Year Old

2009-11-10T13:59:00.000-08:00

Happy First Birthday, Theo!

FYI: The term "infovore" was coined by me, circa 1996. Hmmph.

2009-11-06T15:04:00.000-08:00

Don't you hate it when you hit upon an idea and don't do much with it, let it sit around for years and years -- then suddenly, you find articles about someone else being credited for doing something significant with your idea? This happened to me today while reading BoingBoing, and an Urban Dictionary entry, and a blurb about some neuro-scientists who claim to have coined the term (2006) for that craving humans have for novel things.

But as far as I know, I was first. Came up with the word sometime in the mid-90s and used it to describe myself at an Oracle interview in 1996. Had anyone used it before me? Maybe. Please comment below if you have evidence.

Since everyone was purchasing domains back then, I bought infovore.com in 2000 or so, but let it slide. (Now it's owned by somebody in France).

At least I still have mediavore.com. And anyway, as Douglas Rushkoff has since written, we are more consumers of meaning than information.

What I need now is a word to describe this situation: discovering an idea, sitting on it, then later finding that others have since done something with it.

To blog, or not to blog...

2009-09-25T14:46:00.000-07:00

The question running through my head lately is, now that most people seem to be reading my Facebook updates, should I maintain this particular blog (which has been up and running since 2002!!), or start a new, improved (more focused?) one? You can see I don't update it as frequently as I should. It's partly due to lack of motivation, lack of time, and a small amount of blogger envy (or "Wow, those blogs are getting all the attention. Why isn't mine?")

Seems like when I do write, I write mainly about puppetology, music and music technologies, videogames, the evils of corporations and politics, and myself.

Dear reader, which of these do you enjoy most? Should I break this site out into specific blogs about each subject? Or do you like the haphazard mix as it is? How can I improve it?

Save the Poor Health Insurance Companies!

2009-09-22T11:07:00.000-07:00

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

Awwww... There, there monstrous corporate entities -- it'll be all right in the end. Don't worry.

Robot Vs. Barbed Wire Fence: 1, Zip

2009-09-17T11:38:00.000-07:00

Comic Con '09: Highlights

2009-07-27T12:21:00.000-07:00

Tricia, her friend Erica and I got back from Comic Con yesterday. We had a blast!

This year was the first for me to stay at the Marriott Marina Hotel, and boy, that sure made it a lot less tiring. The problem with the San Diego convention center is that it separated by a light-rail train and only a couple of walkable crossings over to most of the nearby hotels and restaurants. These passages are overwhelmed by the hundreds of thousands of sweaty nerds and geeks baking in the hot sun as they head back to hotels to drop their loot or head out to the Gas Lamp district for some food. It is already taxing enough to move through the hordes and stand in mile-long lines within the Con itself, so this extra pain can really add up.

The Marriott, on the other hand, is right next door to the convention center. A quick walk and you're in its comfortable air-conditioned lobby. It seems to be where a lot of the more famous attendees stay. David Fury (producer on Buffy, Angel, Lost, 24, etc.) and his kids, and a writer from Family Guy were in front of me in the Starbucks line Saturday morning. Legendary Marvel writer Stan Lee sat a table down from us in the pub. Adam from Mythbusters was in the elevator with us. Erica's Marriott Rewards card got us a free upgrade to a room on the 19th floor, which was quite nice.

Some highlights of the weekend:

Participating in the standing ovation for Hirao Miyazaki

Seeing our friends at booths and walking around (Jeff, Anita, Michele, Eric & Jodi, Tim, Dave & Jenn, Joji, Edwin...)

Tricia & Erica getting photo ops with Tyrese Gibson

Me getting an autograph from Leonard Nimoy

Chatting over drinks with my brother-in-law, Hayden

Getting some great art prints and a steam punk raygun for our apartment

Unexpected harbor fireworks right next to our table at Roy's

The insanely good chocolate dessert at Roy's

Photos coming soon!

First-Person Shooter Disease

2009-07-20T13:20:00.000-07:00

Hard-core gamers, this could happen to you!

via Jeff Pidgeon

"War Horse": Intricate horse puppets on stage in London

2009-07-14T17:27:00.001-07:00

Handspring Puppet Company from South Africa created amazing horse puppets for a play called War Horse, now playing in London.

(Click the link above to read about it in the New York Times)

Back in 1998 at the Henson Puppetry Festival in New York, I saw this troupe perform a sublimely great piece about apartheid, featuring an incredibly compelling alligator puppet. I'm excited to hear they are still around and getting into larger projects.

Here's a slideshow with more images.

from BoingBoing and animator friend Barry Purves

X-Files: My Face Is Out There

2009-06-26T09:55:00.000-07:00

As you may have read here last year, I wound up on the set of Chris Carter's movie X-Files: I Want To Believe. While Chris and another friend of his were both somewhat certain I made it into the final cut of the film, neither I nor my friends were able to find me when we went to the theater to see it. Aaaargh! Unfortunately, seeing the movie once is enough and I gave up after the first viewing.

Months later, the DVD came out and I figured I would try the deleted scenes to see if I hiding in there somewhere. Nope. I tried combing the two main emergency room sequences. Sure enough, while running scene 12 (where Skully is doing the stem cell operation on the terminally ill boy) in slow motion, I found a few spots with me! Whohoo!

Me staring at Skully and the incoming big-ass needle, second one over from the left (the only nurse with chest hair).

I am in the background on the upper left, pointing at the X-ray panel for no reason.

Closer view of me pointing at the X-ray panel, left side.

I'm dead center, facing away from camera standing at the foot of the stretcher.

TED: Portable "Minority Report" interface!

2009-06-23T10:10:00.000-07:00

For those of you haven't seen Minority Report, the movie showcases some seemingly futuristic gestural interfaces that Tom Cruise uses to control a complex computer system. Yet only a few years after it came out, we're already seeing just how possible this is. In this TED video, Pattie Maes from MIT demonstrates a low-cost ($350) system that lets the user use any available surface (a wall, a free hand (!)) as a multi-touch interface. Granted, it's a bit slower to use than Jeff Han's table or Microsoft's Surface, but hey, it's cheap and you can bring it with you.

Kutiman + Youtube Amateur Music clips = The Future of Media?

2009-06-19T13:30:00.000-07:00

Man, we are almost at Beatles-level in the world of mashup artists. DJ Earworm continues to weave top 40 hits together. Now, Israeli artist Kutiman has taken unrelated bits of amateur music performance clips on Youtube, blending them together magically to make new creations, like this one:

My advice to the RIAA and media conglomerate executives? It's time to learn to love the world without excessive copyright, because this IS the future, like it or not. No amount of litigation, government crack-downs, or lobbying will end these "violations." Not even a doomsday lock-down on electronic communications itself, China-style. Time to evolve new business models, not cryogenically preserve archaic ones.

Microsoft's Project Natal: Motion Capture, Mime, Puppetry For your Xbox 360?

2009-06-02T10:30:00.000-07:00

The computer vision wizards of Microsoft (including the Internet sensation Jonny Lee, the guy who hacked a Wiimote into a virtual whiteboard) have been busy working on a controller-less technology that, apparently, can sense shapes and forms and track their motions.

Imagine the uses for puppetry or mime! In the video above, the boy gets to perform the rampages of a giant Japanese monster. The girl drives a car by miming the hands on a steering wheel. I can see this being used for virtual Muppets, where a simple two-handed rod puppet could drive a virtual puppet decorated to look like whatever you want.

Some questions to ponder. Can Project Natal track depth accurately? What's the latency? How many things can it track? If a tracked object gets occluded and then reappears, is there a delay before it gets picked up again?

Low-cost motion capture / digital puppetry inches closer and closer. I hope Microsoft opens this up to XNA so that indie developers can play with it.

Reactable: Multi-touch Tabletop Synthesizer Now Available

2009-05-12T10:50:00.000-07:00

Oooh boy, me want!

This is the final product version of the Reactable, previously a thesis project by grad students at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain.

What is it? It's a tangible multi-touch projection surface hooked up to an interactive modular synthesizer. In other words, take the Evil Supreme Being's water surveillance screen from Time Bandits:

and combine it with a virtual version of Robert Moog's modular synthesizers:

What I like about this multi-touch screen is that it can "see" special barcode-like glyph patterns on the sides of objects. These glyphs can generate specific controls on the screen, or represent modes (like say "octave" or "turn on delay"). The screen detects their position and rotation. In contrast, something like the iPhone tracks fingers, but once you remove the finger, the tracking and control (as well as the visual representation of the control) are gone unless something tells the software to make that control "stick". This is not as intuitive as a tangible control. (After all, we know what to do with blocks as soon as we're old enough to grasp things.) The blocks on this surface are the signal to the screen to make a control. Removing them makes the control disappear. No extra interface to learn. It's also a nice way to partition the work of many users. Each player can control something (or many things) with his/her own block and participate with the overall result of everyone else's control blocks.

Looks like this incarnation of the Reactable is meant for museum and art installations, rather than personal use. And of course, it's running a specific application, namely a synthesizer. Wonder how much it costs!

As mentioned before on this blog, the last couple of years have been great for multi-touch interfaces. Jeff Hahn's interface, Jonny Lee's Nintendo Wiimote hack for a multi-touch whiteboard, the Reactable, Microsoft's Surface and the iPhone. Keep 'em coming!

Douglas Rushkoff's "Life, Inc" book and short film preview

2009-05-11T09:47:00.000-07:00

Media ecology professor, author, and documentarian Douglas Rushkoff has been writing a book called Life, Inc: How The World Became a Corporation and How To Take It Back. While Joel Bakun's book (and documentary film), The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Power, describes how public corporations are basically psychopathic neighbors that are bound by Law to make choices detrimental to humanity and the environment (in the pursuit of infinite profit growth), Rushkoff's book will discuss how Kings fabricated an economic environment designed to control the merchant class, bringing rise to chartered corporations and a mindset of self-interest, consumerism and profit above all other virtues that people, particularly Americans have adopted as the default nature of being.

Above is a short video preview.