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Sunday, September 01, 2002

In another CACM article, there's a photo of Carlo Sequin's Sculpture Generator. Cross your eyes and dig this! Anyway, the article is by Danny Hillis and makes the important point that just as digital artifacts reflect reality, so too is our reality increasingly being influenced by digital artifacts. The thing that I'll always remember on that point is the way that cars in the early 1990s suddenly transformed into bars of soap. Now the transformation is happening strikingly in the field of public architecture, where you have things like the Bilbao Guggenheim which is famously "neo" (-architected, -constructed, etc.). Tina and I had a long conversation last night about whether any art created on a screen (specifically digital photography and video) was inherently crippled by the media. While I had to concede her points thatworking on a computer today is a cramped, RSI-inducing solo act, but I argued that if you look at something like the gesture interfaces in Minority Report, you can overcome all but the tactile feedback, and even that is probably somehow going to be overcome. 1:08:54 PM    comment []

The latest issue of Communications of the ACM includes an article (The Reality of Simulated Actors) that estimates that it will be 20 years of computing power advances before we'll see digital actors truly capable of verisimilitude. 20 years == 4 orders of magnitude. One can't help but wonder if grid computing couldn't bring this to fruition significantly faster. What would be involved in creating Olivier @ Home ? The author, Alvy Ray Smith, divides the problem into two parts -- the "model problem" (representing the appearance of reality in a convincing way) and the "control problem" (the interface to the model). He sees both as requiring major increases in computing power, but more importantly, the "control problem" may be "difficult" (e.g., you can't hand-animate all the surfaces involved in an amused glance). 12:48:25 PM    comment []

Just finished reading the August 2002 issue of Scientific American and, once again, was dismayed at how this magazine that I grew up adoring has declined. There's an article by a scientist who states that his alternative equation for gravity explains the whole "missing mass" problem with the universe. Okay, fine, the guy's probably wrong but never mind the fact that the article doesn't give a mechanism, it doesn't even give the equation! What in the world is the point of such an article? It's neither a primary source nor an introduction sufficient to guide you towards claims or counter-claims regarding the subject. What a waste. (To be fair, there's an article on asynchronous computer chip design which I found worthwhile because it actually had helpful explanations of two interesting circuits.) SA is now nothing but a pale imitation of New Scientist. A few years ago, when I was flush with cash, I paid up my SA subscription for something like five years. Then, last year I stumbled into some great offer to get New Scientist for a reasonable price (as opposed to its standard cost of US$200 per year). That will be up in October and I am already anticipating New Scientist withdrawal. 12:18:06 PM    comment []

"We modeled the [unmanned aerial vehicle's] controller after the PlayStation 2, because that's what these 18- and 19-year old Marine have been playing pretty much all their lives. If a Marine can use Microsoft Word, he can get this plane to fly." -- Major John Cane, Marine Corps Airfighting Lab, as quoted in the July 2002 Communications of the ACM 11:37:41 AM    comment []