a weblog by Paul Fidalgo
Twitter released its strategy statement to investors on November 12, 2014, to (at best) mixed reception. Here, Kermit the Frog performs the statement, word-for-word.
See also Kermit performing Mitt Romney’s explanation about releasing his tax returns from 2012.
HP has announced something truly new and novel, a desktop PC that is entirely touch-based, but not by reaching out in front of you to touch the screen (which you can also do), but via an overhead projection onto a giant touchpad where a keyboard would normally be. Questions of practicality aside, it looks at first glance to be both a logical step in the direction technology is going, and a refreshingly new take on the desktop PC. It’s called the Sprout.
Skepticism is of course warranted. My immediate reservations include what appears from the video to be a big lack of saturation in the projection. I see this as a problem for two big reasons: One, it’s your primary way of interacting with the computer, so having things look dim or hazy could make it hard to be precise. Two, I’d worry that aside from when you’re typing, you’d be looking at the projection more than you would the primary display, which means most of your time is spent looking at the faint projection instead of the big, pretty monitor in front of you. That seems ergonomically awkward to say the least.
Perhaps in real life the image of the projection is much better than it seems in the promo videos (but I bet not as good as it looks in the promo photos)
But I suspect this is the right idea for where things are going. Take this concept as a foundation, and imagine that you have a rich, high-resolution projection with an iOS-style interface in front of a Retina iMac. Or instead of a projection, you have an iPad-style surface that adapts to the needs of the task at hand, and can even scan and sense dimension and distance of your hands and other objects. Now you’re talking.
Ross Andersen’s interview with Elon Musk at Aeon, on Musk’s ambitions for Mars colonization, is a gem. “Interview” doesn’t do it justice; it’s part interview, part examination of the motivations (Musk’s and civilization’s) for a Mars migration, as well as a meditation on the humanity of such an endeavor.
A big takeaway is how Musk sees a Mars trip not simply as a lofty goal of humanistic enrichment, but as a last and only best hope for a species tied to the unpredictable fortunes of a single planet and its fragile ecosphere. If we’re to go on as a species, we have to leave, sooner than later.
But you know, it’s not even about our species, per se. It’s about what we carry within us: consciousness.
Musk has been pushing this line – Mars colonisation as extinction insurance – for more than a decade now, but not without pushback. ‘It’s funny,’ he told me. ‘Not everyone loves humanity. Either explicitly or implicitly, some people seem to think that humans are a blight on the Earth’s surface. They say things like, “Nature is so wonderful; things are always better in the countryside where there are no people around.” They imply that humanity and civilisation are less good than their absence. But I’m not in that school,’ he said. ‘I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness, to make sure it continues into the future.’
And about those humans. Leave Musk for a moment, and read Andersen’s musing on the hypothetical trip to Mars by the future colonists:
It would be fascinating to experience a deep space mission, to see the Earth receding behind you, to feel that you were afloat between worlds, to walk a strange desert under an alien sky. But one of the stars in that sky would be Earth, and one night, you might look up at it, through a telescope. At first, it might look like a blurry sapphire sphere, but as your eyes adjusted, you might be able to make out its oceans and continents. You might begin to long for its mountains and rivers, its flowers and trees, the astonishing array of life forms that roam its rainforests and seas. You might see a network of light sparkling on its dark side, and realise that its nodes were cities, where millions of lives are coming into collision. You might think of your family and friends, and the billions of other people you left behind, any one of which you could one day come to love.
Do you, or do you not, feel the anxiety of being adrift? Do you not picture that blurry sapphire sphere receding from view as you realize how utterly surrounded and engulfed you are by blackness, pushed with direction and intention, but somehow still lost? My heart is beating faster.
And somehow, it all puts me in mind of Ernie from Sesame Street. I think it’s safe to say that as adventurous as the lad is, he would not be among the passengers on Musk’s one-way trip to Mars.
And a bit of trivia to tie it all up: Somewhere there exists, perhaps with my dad, or maybe only with my grandmother, a well-produced recording of a 5-year-old me singing this song, accompanied by my dad on guitar. I didn’t really get it then, but I do now.
Did you already know about this? You probably already know about this.
Look, I had heard of MC Frontalot, but being 36 and out of touch, I never heard any of his stuff. Little did I know that he is artist rapping about toilet paper manufacture in Elmo’s Potty Time, which, let me tell you, I have seen many, many times. So I’m already impressed.
But lemme back up. Something recently got me thinking, wow, Voltron‘s lips sure are drawn prominently, aren’t they? Yes, I was thinking about Voltron’s lips. It amused me so much to realize that, here I was, a grown man thinking about Voltron’s lips, that I made a Twitter account for it: @VoltronsLips. The bio?
“And I’ll form…the head.“
Because that’s what Keith, the leader-guy, always says at the end of the forming of Voltron, which, if you haven’t figured out, is a gestalt robot thing, a la Devastator, where five mechanical lions, piloted by humans, join together to form a super-robot.
Okay?
Okay, and then as I’m tweeting about with @VoltronsLips, @LenSanook points me to the video below, and it is now my favorite song of all time.
So you probably knew about it, it’s been around a little while, but I’m having a religious experience over this.
I’m doing some light Twitter culling tonight, as the relentlessness that is the Torrent of Feelings, the constant barrage of snark and attacks and outrage and disgust, is getting to be too much.
Tonight I came upon this song by Jonathan Mann (the song-a-day guy who has been kind enough to pal around with me a little on Twitter). It’s just right.
Physicist Lawrence Krauss was recently the guest on Triangulation, the interview program on the TWiT network. It’s one of those lovely convergences where science and skept0-atheism cross paths with tech media, so I thought it’d be a good thing to post here.
Content-wise, it’s fairly introductory stuff. If you follow Krauss’s science popularization work, you probably won’t get a whole lot new here. But host Leo Laporte is obviously enamored of his interview subject, and the conversation touches on some of what I try to cover here at iMortal, how technology and science are parts of our lives at a cultural level and at the level of personal meaning. They note that you can’t appreciate your gadgets unless you accept the science that makes them work, or as Leo puts it, there are no angels in the iPods. “If you reject science,” he says, “you reject everything that science has brought us.”
Smooth McGroove, he who produces amazing a cappella renditions of music from video games, has created his masterpiece.
I’ve previously heaped praise on him for his versions of the Final Fantasy VII battle and Mega Man II Dr. Wily stage themes, and my absolute favorite, the DuckTales Moon theme. They all delighted me.
But this, well, this is something else entirely. Here’s Smooth McGroove doing “One-Winged Angel,” the theme of the final battle in Final Fantasy VII versus Sephiroth — complete with the Latin-singing choir of multiple Smooth McGrooves. Not only is it musically impressive (this is an entire orchestral piece done entirely with his voice), but also his best video editing.
And those scenes from the battle with Sephiroth, man, that’s some strong feelings that brings back. I tip my hat to you, Mr. McGroove.
In this video from Nature, we are introduced to Laniakea, the incomprehensibly vast supercluster of galaxies of which our own Milky Way is an infinitesimal part. Astounding.
“Laniakea,” by the way, is Hawaiian for “immeasurable heavens.” Well, they measured them.
There’s something particularly insidious about homeopathy, isn’t there? I can’t put my finger on it, but something about it gets under my skepto-atheist skin more than almost any other kind of pseudoscientific malarky.
I think it has something to do with the fact that things like religion and faith are kind of vague and etherial, making claims about things that are overtly and almost-explicitly imaginary, while homeopathy makes a nonsense claim about something that is actually supposed to be physically present; though a solution contains only a “memory” or “essence” of a substance, it’s still supposed to be there, if in only negligible amounts, and have some effect on you as a result. At least one’s qi or chakra or aura are as imaginary and ethereal as anything religion claims. Homeopathy is just straight up wrong.
This is all to say I made up a dumb joke on Twitter about what a homeopathic hospital might be like.
Homeopathic hospital: Huge empty building, one real doctor walks in, walks out again.
— Paul Fidalgo (@PaulFidalgo) August 1, 2014
And then other smart folks on Twitter took the idea and ran with it, and I thought I’d share some highlights.
@PaulFidalgo He’d have to jump around a bit on the inside first, because it’s hard to shake a hospital. — David Dennis (@The_Wolfster) August 1, 2014
@PaulFidalgo It would be a building with billions of staff and if any were doctors once, there’s no record of their ever having worked there — David Bradley (@sciencebase) August 1, 2014
Indeed, you need something that gives a similar effect to what you’re trying to cure. A mass-murderer wd be better. @AI_Joe@PaulFidalgo
— Stephan Brun (@tibfulv) August 1, 2014
@tibfulv@AI_Joe@PaulFidalgo Clearly the Dr. wouldn’t just walk in and out. He would have to at least twerk for an hour or something. — SCROB TV (@scrobTV) August 1, 2014
@PaulFidalgo Construction workers then remove one corner room at random and attach it to another hospital. #LatherRinseRepeat — Len Sanook (@LenSanook) August 1, 2014
@LenSanook@PaulFidalgo After each reconstruction, they whack it ten times with an enormous leather and wood wrecking ball. — Charles Richter (@richterscale) August 1, 2014
@PaulFidalgo Homeopathic hospital: Huge empty building, occasionally the janitor opens the window to recirculate the BS. — Travis Estrella (@AI_Joe) August 1, 2014
@AI_Joe@PaulFidalgo a bunch of water coolers labelled “help yourself”? — CBat (@ImADataGuy) August 1, 2014
And then Thomas (@tehabe) sent me this video, which I can’t believe I’ve never seen, and won the day.
There hasn’t been a Generation-1 Transformers animated movie since Transformers: The Movie (discussed in depth on my podcast) in 1986. As excited as many folks my age were that the Transformers were coming to live-action film in 2007, despite the return of Peter Cullen as the voice of Optimus Prime, the Michael Bay versions clearly aren’t quite what a true fan was hoping for.
But why? Aside from terrible writing, which even the best iterations of Transformers were always plagued by, what about the Bay Transformers movies doesn’t work? Too many humans, for one. Sorry, but Spike never will be interesting enough to carry a movie.
But I think the biggest problem is that in the live action movies, the Transformers don’t look like Transformers. Now, the bots never sported svelte, Jony Ive-approved designs, and much to my disappointment, as the years passed, newer versions of Prime and other characters had so many guns, blades, spikes, and other protrusions glommed onto them, that they looked like big mechanical jumbles.
The Michael Bay movies take that into the stratosphere, and make the Transformers all so busy-looking, so, well, messy, that they no longer resembled the robots we used to know. They were now robots in disguise in disguise as, well, junkyards? If shape-shifting robots were to emerge from Saruman’s forges, I think they’d look a lot like Michael Bay’s Transformers.
This is part of what makes this video so great. Harris Loureiro of Malaysia has taken what look to be the “masterpiece” versions of Generation-1 Transformers toys (so-called because they are built to mimic their platonic ideals from the cartoons and comics, articulating and transforming just as they would), and using stop-motion animation to create his own short Transformers films.
He’s using sound and music from the 1986 animated film for this, a battle between some latter-day version of Optimus Prime and the Constructicons, which of course form Devastator. (They apparently have different names in different parts of the world, but it’s them.)
But it’s tremendous. There’s nuance, there are graceful moves, suspense and surprises, and yes, they look like Transformers. Loureiro’s done an excellent job with this. He has some others on his YouTube channel, which seem more like experiments and expositions of what he’s able to do, but they’re worth checking out too. But this is the one with an actual conflict, and it’s rather bad-ass. Hollywood may need to hire this man.
Many thanks to Len Sanook for pointing me to this.
“Yes, the soon-to-be-famous Jeff…Dun-Ham…with his puppets.”
I love stuff like this, when a stuffy-seeming artistic institution embraces a piece of pop culture with genuine enthusiasm.
However, I feel like I do have to note that there is something a tad menacing about a wall of Russian law enforcement officers boasting how they will be up all night in order to “get lucky.” Yes, boys, I’m sure you will be.
See also: Superheroes staying up all night to get Loki.
Hat tip to Cherry Teresa.
Last year, I made a little photo montage video as a gift for my wife on our fifth anniversary. Today is our sixth, and I have her permission to share it with you now, one year later. I’m not posting it because I think it’s amazing, but I don’t often enough tell the universe how much she means to me. So this is one way of doing that.
My new favorite YouTube star, Smooth McGroove has fulfilled what he told me was a very popular request (and one of my requests as well): The Moon theme from DuckTales, the 1989 NES game based on the Disney cartoon.
I remember as a kid playing this game, and being really impressed by this piece. Most of the game’s music, as I recall, was pretty standard happy-Disney-video game fare, and then Scrooge McDuck gets to the Moon, and this oddly moving and nuanced piece of 8-bit symphonics hits your brain (and my 11-year-old brain).
As always, Mr. McGroove, well done.
Near-Earth Object 