I had a little unintended hiatus for the last 8 weeks or so. Hopefully, I’ll be back to more regular posting.
To catch up on the news. Media Access Project, where I work, has filed challenges against the licenses of the commercial television stations in Chicago and Milwaukee. You can read the press release here. You can follow the links to the Chicago petition and the Milwaukee Petition. Or you can see my quick analysis about why you should care below.
MIT puts science to good use:
Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government’s invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.
By the way, this is why I have a problem with scientists: always pointing out problems, never solutions. Nevertheless, it’s important to keep asking. Here is the proper form of address when formulating a question for scientists.
Sign up here for a free Laszlo Mail account.
I remember the first time I heard of Hotmail. About fifteen years ago a friend of mine mentioned something about her “hotmail account”. This person was known to have a bemused, anthropological, Alfred Kinsey-like interest in social conventions related to sex and sexuality– I remember her photos from the “Museum of Sex” in Amsterdam–so when she mentioned “hotmail” I assumed it was some kind of vaguely kinky service that she used for that part of her life.
In the years since then, web mail has become ubiquitous. Everybody has a hotmail account or a yahoo mail account, or, recently, a gmail account. (I have a yahoo account that I use for this-and-that; my wife lives by her Hotmail account.) Is there a person on earth who doesn’t have a webmail account, or several of them? So why is Laszlo Systems, my employer, introducing Laszlo Mail today? Aren’t we a little late to the party?
The answer to that question, presumably, is that “Laszlo Mail is better”.
If you’re like me, you use your web mail account as a backup. My main mail accounts are at wetmachine.com; I usually use the Apple Macintosh mail client to read them (as well as my mail at Laszlosystems.com). However, if I happen to find myself someplace where I have access to the Internet and I don’t happen to have my Mac with me, I can check my wetmachine mail using the mail client provided by the ISP that hosts wetmachine, I can use Outlook Express to check my Laszlosystems mail, and of course I can read my Yahoo mail the usual way. What these web mal clients have in common is that, relative to the Mac mail client, they suck. Of course, it’s great that I can check my mail from anywhere. That truly is a revolutionary capability, when you think about it. But the user experience — composing, previewing, spellcheckng, managing folders– sucks.
Laszlo Mail does not suck. I’m considering switching to it as my default mail reader on my Mac. Go get yourself an account and see what you think.
Also, and this is the cool part, Laszlo Mail is built using OpenLaszlo, a free, open source platform for making rich internet applications.
The entertainment industry continue to pursue what has to be labeled as an all out war on the consumer. We all know about the lawsuits filed by RIAA and the MPAA regarding alleged illegal downloading. Aside from the fact that any sane business model doesn’t include “suing your customers” as a major money making scheme, it seems that the RIAA lawsuits are simply a shakedown… pay us $7500 and we won’t sue you. Fortunately, some people are fighting back with the help of lawyers who realize the judicial system is being used like a bank robber’s gun.
But, of course, there’s another front in this war…
Today was my boss’s last day, and, ironically, my first anniversary. Julian Lombardi will be Duke’s Assistant Vice President for Academic Services and Technology Support. He’ll be responsible for the university’s IT customer service and development.
They made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
I’ve been trying to capture “what it is” about software that has a sense of fun, is toylike, and which allows users to feel they are directly manipulating “real” objects that they more-or-less understand. I want to shorten the link with pen pointers instead of mice. That’s a lot of words. There’s something more basic.
Touchability. I think human beings are uniquely wired to fondle stuff, and to want to do so. My dog sniffs and tastes. Ants use their antennae. We comprehend and alter the world with our hands. I play with my so-touchable wine glass, but not with the utilitarian water glass next to it. No child can resist touching a musical instrument left out, particularly strings and pianos because they don’t need lips. I always reach for my leather coat before my ski jacket. Bad Flash sites are visually stimulating, but good ones make me want to touch it all over to be rewarded with workings and sounds.
Ars Technica is reporting about a proposed amendment to the Violence Against Women act that would let police collect the DNA of everyone they arrest, just in case they are a sexual predator. What could possibly go wrong with that? Oh, you know, just fostering a future like Gattaca where genetics rather than actual merit is used to determine who advances in life. But then, merit doesn’t really play much of a role these days, does it?.
Of course, if those arrested by the police were to have their DNA confiscated, there are several rather interesting people’s DNA would now be on file… and perhaps even leaked out to the public. Who knows what could be turned up in that…
Der Lauf der Dinge is that film in which a whole series of objects cascade in a very long Rube Goldberg. (I understand many cultures have had similar cartoonists. I think its wonderful that where previous generations drew pictures, civilization has developed to the point where individuals can and do actually realize and record such fantasies.) You may have seen a take-off of this in a car ad.
I think the reason for our fascination with this has to do with movement carrying the action. You can have theme and variation without movement, and without physical objects. Consider novels, painting, music, and zillion other things. But here we have a case where there is nothing of interest at all except for the theme and variation expressed by the movement and positioning of physical objects. And it is fascinating. A reviewer has written of the film that it is like watching a Hitchcock film with objects instead of people.
I think this all relates to previous discussion on narrative and 3D.
[This is fallout from a session at OOPSLA.]
I admit I haven’t thought through the implications of the FCC’s recent orders about the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, but I’m pretty damn sure that our leaders haven’t thought it through.
The idea is to create the biggest unfunded mandate in history by forcing all Internet service providers to retool their systems to make it easier for the feds to monitor communications. The cost to universities alone is said to be at least $7B. I don’t know what this does to municipal and home grown mesh network systems. I suppose that the intent is to make it too expensive for anyone but a TelCo to operate anything other than restrictive high-level services. The prophetic David Reed laid out the the issues five years ago, saying it much better than I can.
To this I would add an uneasiness as to what steps a person must now apply, or is allowed to apply, to protect “intellectual property.” We are required to take practical precautions to keep our freedom of privacy else we loose it. If we wreck the Internet in a rush to destroy any practical means of protecting privacy, then who in the end will be allowed to actually claim the priviledge of privacy? Only those large institutions who can afford to run their own government-approved private networks?
Last week Dear Wife Betty & I were out in San Francisco where we took in, as they say, Dr. Atomic at the San Francisco Opera. It’s about the Manhattan Project on the eve of the test detonation of the first bomb in 1945; in particular it’s about the moral ambiguity of the bombmaking enterprise, layered on top of deep uncertainty about whether the thing would actually explode (and perhaps ignite the atmosphere and destroy the earth).
The composer is John Adams, and the musical style is modern quasi-minimalist. The director is Peter Sellars, and the staging is Sellarian, with giant stylized props representing the bomb-test tower, the remote dry mountains, the physics laboratories; even Mr. & Mrs. Oppenheimer’s marriage bed. During most of the opera, the characters Edward Teller, Robert Oppenheimer, Robert Wilson and Leslie Grove sing about bomb designs and yields, war strategy, sin, physics and whether lightning from a desert storm will accidentally set off the bomb before they can set if off on purpose. In the second act two women sing poetic nonsense over a crib; Kitty Oppenheimer the while holding a highball glass in one hand and a grasping the neck of a mostly empty bottle of rye with the other. Throughout both acts there is a large chorus dressed in Army fatigues frantically moving about hither and thither as Oppenheimer, dressed like David Bryne in an oversized zoot suit, broods metaphysically, spouting Baudelaire and John Donne.
Also there were dancers who appeared at random times and did balletic stuff like you used to see on shows like Solid Gold in the days before MTV. (Betty said that they looked like the Maoist dancers you used to see on the Ed Sullivan show, only without the long ribbons on sticks).
Despite many misgivings, I liked Dr. Atomic a lot.
After all, how often does one get to see a full dress, high, arch, 80-piece orchestra, operatic treatment of the heart-numbing dread that is the essence of technoparanoia?
More impressions (and some spoilers) below the fold.
