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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.