tech

On Wednesday at the 2009 Intelligence Warfighting Summit in Tucson, Raytheon, the military contractor, announced an iPhone application that tracks friends and foes, shows their positions on live, real time maps and provides secure communications.

—The New York Times, The iPhone Goes to War

More troublesome tech conference talk, this time by RMS. David Schlesinger posts an email exchange with him about a recent talk he gave:

The more significant problem was your comments regarding “EMAC virgins”, which you defined as being specifically “_women_ who had never used EMACS”, and for whom being “relieved” of this “virginity” was a “holy duty”. My reaction, and the reaction of a large number of members of the audience with whom I’ve spoken was one of great dismay.

Your remarks gave the distinct impression that you view women as being in particular need of technical assistance (presumably by men, since there’s apparently no such thing as a _male_ “EMACS virgin”); additionally, women are quite capable of making their own decisions about who might relieve them of whatever sort of “virginity”. I (and many others) viewed these remarks as denigrating and demeaning to women, as well as completely out of place at what is, in essence, a technical conference.

Stallman responds, but in this off-kilter, evasive way that doesn’t really address or attempt to refute the issue David is raising:

Continue reading “RMS, and nerd sensitivities” »

Seriously, what the fuck.

He opens his keynote with one of those “Ignite”-esque presentations — where you have 5-minutes and 20 slides to tell a story — and the first and last are a close-up of a woman’s lower half, her legs spread (wearing stilettos, of course) and her shaved vagina visible through some see-thru panties that say “drink me,” with Hoss’s Photoshopped, upward-looking face placed below it.

Via jwz, the path of a Roomba, photographed over 30 minutes:

The New Yorker’s George Packer tells of hiring a roofer, and that roofer’s complaints about a new class of customer who are so immersed in communications technology that they’re mechanically inept and strangely awkward at communicating with him:

“It’s the technology,” the roofer said. “They don’t know how to deal with a human being. They stand there with that text shrug”—he hunched his shoulders, bent his head down, moved from side to side, looking anywhere but at me—“and they go, ‘Ah, ah, um, um,’ and they just mumble. They can’t talk any more.” This inadequacy with physical space and direct interaction was an affliction of the educated, he said—“the more educated, the worse.” His poorer black customers in Bedford-Stuyvesant had no such problem, and he was much happier working on their roofs, but the recession had slowed things down there and these days he was forced to deal almost entirely with the cognitively damaged educated and professional classes….

This was a completely new phenomenon in the roofer’s world: a mass upper class that was so immersed in symbolic and digital cerebration that it had become incapable of carrying out the most ordinary functions—had become, in effect, like small children with Asperger’s symptoms. It was a ruling class that, out of sheer over-civilization, was quickly losing the ability to hold onto its power.

For the record, I’ve never owned real estate and as such have never had to hire a roofer, but I know how to use a drill and have put up drywall.

The Economist on technology and North Korea:

Andrei Lankov of the Australian National University, an astute observer of North Korea, describes how a relatively minor technological revolution in China changed the lives of many North Koreans. Earlier this decade DVD players fell dramatically in price, so South Korean households quickly dumped their old VCRs in favour of the new players. Smugglers picked up the old units for next to nothing and sold them in North Korea for $40 or so apiece—a price that plenty of urban North Korean families could afford if they saved up.

The consequence was what Mr Lankov calls a “video revolution”: a flood of South Korean soap operas, melodramas and music videos entering North Korea by the same route and delighting new audiences. The impact of the astounding affluence on display—the stars’ clothes and cars, Seoul’s glittering skyline—exposes the central lie on which the regime bases its claim to rule: that South Korea is backward, impoverished and exploited. Korean-language programming from abroad on radio sets imported from China (and thus not tuned permanently to state radio) reinforces this discovery. Thus, disillusion and anger with the regime only mounts.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, this is a headline from a genuine newspaper site, and not from The Onion:

“Man gets Windows Vista to work with printer”

(Thanks to Albert for the pointer.)

Most of my friends have heard me rave about my brother Albert’s cool Wiremap project before, but it’s a difficult thing to fully grok without actually seeing it. Wiremap uses a single projector to project fully 3-dimensional images; instead of projecting on to a flat screen, it projects on to a series of wires strung vertically at varying depths to fill out a rectangular volume. By knowing which wire is at which depth, the single projector can project volumes 3-dimensionally; for example, one of the Wiremap demos involves a globe that floats towards and away from the projector itself.

Much of the impact is lost if you can’t see Wiremap in person. But if you live in New York City, next Wednesday you can do just that at Dorkbot NYC.

Dorkbot NYC
Wednesday, November 1, 7 p.m.
Location One
26 Greene Street (betw. Canal and Grand)

For a new media artist working solo, Wiremap represents a daunting technical achievement. The computer driving the projector has to have intimate knowledge of each wire and what depth it’s at; and just physically calibrating the volume to the projector is an exacting task.

If you want more info, Albert has a pretty extensive wiki page up, and a long, explanatory video on YouTube. But trust me, the online representations of this work pale in comparison to seeing the real thing.

From Dan Savage, whose Savage Love column also brought us the use of “Santorum” as sexual slang.

Because if the Führer comes back as a cat, we’ll need to be prepared.

Some of these are fairly subtle: I like the idea of someone at a bar trying to figure out what this one means.

This fake “Move to Philly” ad campaign is pretty convincing. Still, when we were chatting about it in #nyc.rb, David Black said “Whenever I see the words ‘Move’ and ‘Philly’ together, I just think of those buildings burning down.” Oh, no you didn’t.

My brother Albert recently graduated from theater school. He studied directing, but since getting out of school, he’s been tinkering with online video and dance—the stuff you’d see at a rave, not what you’d learn in a conservatory.

In last week’s video, Virtual Boxes, he combines planar movements with overlaid animation to manipulate translucent blue rectangles hovering in air with his hands. There’s an interesting connection here to mime or prestidigitation, and in fact Albert is pretty good at card tricks.

But I think my favorite is Finger Dancing, a closely shot video of Albert dancing mostly with his hands. Apparently this is a nascent style that goes by the name “digits” (or “digitz”), and he’s combining it with a more fluid West-Coast approach.

One curious takeaway from this is that it would appear that club dancing communities are starting to take root online through free video sites. Go to YouTube and search for terms like “digitz”, “tuts”, or “rave”, and you’ll find lots of people videotaping themselves dancing in their own bedrooms and living rooms, and then posting the results online for others to comment on. Possibly kids are now learning moves from YouTube, the same way they once did from American Bandstand or Soul Train—the difference being, of course, that now everybody can have their own show.

Secondly, videos such as these point to possible new directions for what we could term “microvideo”: videos with small budgets, small resolutions, and small durations, meant to be displayed through portable devices such as PSPs, cell phones, and video iPods. The tight framing of Finger Dancing makes it easier to watch on a subway ride than, say, an episode of Lost—and when the picture’s so tiny it’s not as noticeable how low-budget it is. Maybe this is obvious, but it would appear that the future of portable video rests mostly on freely available viral content, not clips from movies or TV shows that you download for a fixed price. On a 2-inch screen, a $50 million movie and some suburban teenage girls dancing to “My Humps” look different, but you know, not that different.