Sound, shower, battery

Yes, another Wired issue has been read and enjoyed - and here are some of the things that made me think and surf around for more information.

Steaming

The company Kohler has run some rather spectacular ads in Wired (and presumably elsewhere, considering the number of great ads) Great use of artists -not to mention that the product looks kind of fun as well, a build-in shower so you can put up several and have your own say in how and where you want the water. "22- and 54-nozzle bodysprays and showerheads that deliver lavish amounts of water for a stimulating or soothing hydrotherapy experience." Now to find a suitable house and I'm all set for Cribs dropping by.

Sweet small

I really enjoy having my Zen mp3 player - it works great for shuffling through podcast (using WMP and four smart playlists to sync only the new ones of various types) and the occasional burst of music. But I have to admit that the newer Zen Plus does look really nice, with about 40% less volume (cut in all dimension, 16 mm off the height) and a color screen. On the downside the battery is embedded so you can't just swap it - not that I've had to swap the one I have, or ever had both charged and brought along, and I'm unsure how well the joystick works on the go.

Lap-car

Well, seems like it is promotion time all over this post (which is why I've grouped all three together) - because bring up the rear, presumably not for long, is the Tesla Roadster featured in Wired as well. A battery-powered sportscar, it takes the li-ion batteries normally found in laptops and supercharges them - in fact 6831 of them - to make the light car go 0-60 in 4 seconds.


But with recent Sony-problems looming in the background, I'm not to sure about putting a whole batch together is the best stunt at present.

And speaking of laptop batteries - why are there (to my un-googled knowledge) no "minibatteries" for office use, containing only enough juice for the ten minute walk to the meeting - thereby making the laptop a bit less heated when used in an office setting day in and day out?

Since we are getting on a tangent here - have a math tidbit and read up on Pingala, an Indian mathematician who 'invented' binary numbers.
In the fifth century BC.

Flickr goes mapped

Now there is a new way to play with your flickr images - a drag and drop interface for showing where the images is from (or geocoding if you want it in technical terms). It is really easy to use, since you can filter your own images by several different kinds of criteria (date uploaded, set, not coded etc) - and then simply drag them onto the map to assign a location.

Convenient? Check
Fast? Check
Fun? Check

So, a visual online world has just taken one step closer to becoming a reality. Even if they might need to do some minor adjustments (such as easily allowing you to add to the same 'spot' as others by chosing accuracy or getting a pop-up), it is a great step forward and a good response to the ease of upload from the Picasa beta


...and the sun is well hidden, fall is coming on fast with rainclouds closing in from all direction...

Mix or match?

The myth of the living-room PC: "My tech-savvy friends who can afford anything they want set up a huge HDTV with TiVo, cable, and DVD playersÂ?then sit in front of it with a laptop on their knees. They use Google and AIM while watching TV, but they keep their 2-foot and 10-foot gadgets separate." (Paul Boutin - Slate Magazine)

So, no need for convergence? There is more than enough to do on each "island" (especially if you add in a PS2 and/or Xbox to the mix, then you have all you need both places) - youTube isn't ready for a huge screen, and with dvd burners you can easily transfer the content you want both ways.

Convenience is probably the key factor - at least for me. It is a lot faster to pick up a series on a dvd boxed set, than it is to program the vcr or hook the pc up to the cable and the tv. Because we have the whole season at once, we decide how many episodes to watch - and how frequently. And the quality is always top notch.

Maybe that is why I haven't included any TV cards in the planned setup for a new home pc - but have been considering getting a separate box and just use some of the old components for a pvr and mediahub.

And the new Slate design? Nice, especially the slide-menu.

MySpace on Daily Show

Youtube offers up several versions of this clip from Comedy Centrals The Daily Show, originally aired in February; MySpace trendspotting
Brilliant stuff, really catches the problem and the upside of social networking: you can have lots and lots of connections with very little effort - making it easier to experiment and find the ones you do want to stay in touch with more frequently.

Could 70 million "people" be wrong?

I want to be a part of it

“the urban as a psychological state inside each individual, due to the number of impressions and the physical space so populated that the senses need to adjust and adapt to the ‘nerve intense’ space. A fusion of the spatial and social that each one of us has to deal with in order to stay sane”

That quote is from a book review of Marshall Berman and “On the Town. One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square”. (264 pages, published by Random House, 2006). The review is written by Erling Dokk Holm (Norwegian academic and opinionated media personality). And it is an interesting take on how different city life is. I can feel it sitting here on the outskirts of the city proper, seeing nothing but forested hills in one direction – and the massive rail and cargo terminal, supplemented by the ever-fuming pipes of the waste recycling facility, in another. The balcony is large enough to spend a lot of time there, lost to the world as such. But the subway is quick enough to bring me into the hubbub of inner-city in 15 – 20 minutes. And even if Oslo is a small big city, there are times and places that just feel to intense.

Another reference to follow up on is “Georg Simmel”, a turn of the century (not the last one) German sociologoist who wrote on the effect of modern life and urban relations among other subjects.

"Times Square has been the space of jazz as well as porn, of music as well as poetry. This is why this urban landscape is so culturally soaked” And so it felt when I was in New York. A true mix of all the world has to offer up. Shiny brand-stores and darker alleyways side by side. Staring tourists and vigilant police officers, passing each other by like leafs on the autumn wind. It felt at once wonderful and grotesque. The highs, the lows and everything in between that our modern society has to offer.

“Berman is as believable when quoting Shakespear as Beasti Boys, Sex and the City as Karl Marx” And that is what makes NYC larger than life, yet still so familiar. It is the setting and the influence for cultural expressions from NYPD Blue to Sex and the City, from 50 Cent to Frank Sinatra. And of a whole host of things in between, from yellow cabs to pretzels, from the death of John Lennon to the trials of the Apprentice. It is the city of cities, the modern Rome and Athens, the Olympics of the urban spirit. And for the last five years, when ever you look at the skyline with the gap – it is also a reminder of the challenges we face as people, as a part of a globalized world where the boundaries between war, advertising and opinions are blurred, quite possibly beyond repair.

Khaldun on civilization

– it is good to remember that history is not filled with joyful progress, but rather with a discreet number of good times, followed by a fall or a break from the trend – either because the next “empire” is taking over, or simply because the sustainability isn’t there any more.
The Roman Empire, Alexander the Great, the Khalifs, the various Chinese empires through the ages, the British Empire, the Third Reich and perhaps now the USA and the EU – the CCCP is already fragmented and gone.
Hindsight is 20-20, and the optimism on our own behalf is over stated. We are unable to think forward into the future with any sort of accuracy. As Robert Charles Wilson, author of Spin said – there is a cognitive divide; ask people what the world will be like in 50 years, then what they will be doing in 50 years. Then try to combine those two pictures into one description… “the future looks bleak, but I’ll be in the Caribbean after retiring from a well paying job”.

• “There will perhaps be a market for five computers world wide”
  
• “ No one should need more than 64k of ram”

Things change, and it is only afterwards that we really understand what has happened – or at least what we need to do going forward.

- and here ends the backlog of post written in the sun with Word (so some funky formatting might need cleaning up) - but the stack or read books and magazines still has some good thoughts, hopefully during the week I'll get a few more completed and then review these a bit for possible links and updates


...and the sun is breaking through the clouds after solid rain most of the day...

The drive and the baby steps

In an interview (with Morgenbladet - almost rivaling Wired as my #1 source lately -at least until I pick up the notes from the last two issues) early this summer the Norwegian author and sort-of-philosopher Jostein Gaarder made some interesting comments. What follows are rough translation, preserving the intent if not the wording and nuances, followed by my reflections and links.

"The whole authorship is recognizable by an eruptive need to express oneself when it comes to the big questions"? Just do it, like the old Nike slogan said. Some times this blog feels the same way. Some articles or events are just too big to let go with just a casual discussion. The drive of reflection and the possibility of interaction drives the words from the mind, into the fingers and out to the page (be it html or paper). But not all of us want to end up translated into tens of different languages, recognized at sight (not to mention sound) in large parts of the world. The act of thinking and writing is in many ways its own reward.

"?Descartes was concerned with the relation between soul and body. That is something I'?m extremely fascinated by, but today I would discuss it with a neurologist. And the existence of God is best discussed by astrophysicists" -? the science and understanding of the mind is making leaps and bounds right behind the covers of SciAm Mind (note to self: pick up the latest issue, and finish the last couple of articles from the summer issue,? post are in the queue). We are approaching the mind from all angels; chemical, electrical, decisions and DNA. And with each understanding we uncover a whole stack of new questions and areas of research. So the amount of knowledge and specialization grows until it truly is too much for one person to grasp? and then we start looking at the stars, where the numbers are in billions, and the distances beyond our ability to truly grasp. In a way I'm glad the sky is blue during the day, so we can "forget"? the stars and go about our business, leaving the dreaming for the nighttime.

"There are fewer and fewer cultural references in my books. Previously I could walk around thinking about something Schiller had written. Today I'?m thinking about the Devon age, when the amphibians crawled out of the seas." The second I read this, one name and one book jumped up and shouted "?hey, over here"?; JG Ballard and Drowned World. A scifi masterpiece, one of the key concepts of the book is the pre-historic core memory we all possess. Normally it is hidden far down, but extreme events or prolonged exposure to the right climate (hot, humid and limiting) will bring it right back. And during the last fortnight I've felt it coming on -? the heat phasing out the need or desire to do anything other than just sit still in the sun. Leaving all things requiring mental input until the sun goes down, sometime after nine, be it making dinner or washing clothes.

Stick around or do it again

Art is in the eye of the beholder. Ever since Andy Warhold and Marcel Duchamps decided that art is what artists say it is – as long as the buyers are willing to pay, or the gallery willing to display it, there has been a (muted) debate on where the new boundary should go. The last fuel to the fire is the news of Damien Hirst and his work “The impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” (basically a shark suspended in formaldehyde). Sold by Saathci two years ago for a reported $2 million, it is now so decayed and faded, that Hirst has proposed to “repair” it. How? By changing the shark and the chemicals. So out with the old, and in with a new set of components that matches the original. Does that make it into version 2.0 of the work, or into a cheap knock-off? Is it still art, and still a classic work? Or simply a product of our media-infused age?
On relevant tangent would be the Asian (Japan / China) view of history and permanence. A temple that has been rebuilt six or ten times, is still considered to be hundreds of years old – as long as the location, design and purpose remains the same. There is even one temple in Japan that exists in two instances – one being used for (???) ten years, while the next is built. Then the first is torn down and rebuilt while the second takes over as the “actual” temple in use. It is more the IDEA of the temple than the actual building that is at the core.

There will always be sunshine after rain – laughter after pain, so why try to limit expression or devotion to a (random) given set of building blocks? Why not just go with the flow and erosion of time, and let the guiding concept take center stage?

What did you expect?

Half Life 2 is a great game, at least in the opinion of the hordes of fans who waited years for it, and most of the "industry" - from retail to reviewers. But perhaps what we enjoy is the contextual change from Wolfenstein and Doom, the improvements that make sense within the FPS "paradigm" (or frame of reference).
A feature in Gamasutra; "Constraint is Design" interviews Katherine Isbister and Nicole Lazzaro, and gives the following quote
"Students who were not already fans of this genre felt really frustrated interacting with the Half-Life 2 characters. They expected even more interactivity and lifelikeness from them because of how good they looked"

So, what did you expect when you picked it up? And how did that change and mold your impression?

Burn out or fade away?

Article by D Pink in Wired (14.07) on the economist
David W. Galenson: "By examining the careers not only of great painters but also of important sculptors, poets, novelists, and movie directors, Old Masters and Young Geniuses offers a profound new understanding of artistic creativity."

Interesting topic - at least as long as you keep it "tabloid" with "there are two types", rather than what it says inside the article;

"In his later papers, as well as in the book he published this year, he has refined his theory to make it less binary. He now talks of a continuum Â? with extreme conceptual innovators at one end, extreme experimental innovators at the other, and moderates in the middle."
apparentlyy Malcom Gladwell (of Tipping Point and Blink, the last of which I'mcurrentlyl almost done with) also wrote an article but had it rejected by the New Yorker. There is an pdf link at Galesons site, 24 pages.

But, back to the subject: is it true that some people find their "way" early, while others need time to find their inner genius? Or is it simply that we appreciate different things from (in/by) various creators - be they artists, authors or poets? Maybe we enjoy Cezanne because he doesn't try to give answers, while we celebrate Picasso (too much, some argue) for having to go beyond the norm to findchallengee and a separate voice?

What would you rather do? Find the formearlyy, then spend the rest of your days in "decline" (or dead... only the good die young) - or spend years and years refining, learning, exploring - until finally one day you had the golden touch?