« May 2006 | Main | July 2006 »
June 26, 2006
The Conversations Network
IT Conversations is kind of like NPR for the web. They provide original interviews as well as audio recordings of conference presentations and panels on a diverse range of subjects of interest to technology enthusiasts. I've been a fan of the site for a long time. Awhile back, I even compiled a list of some of my favorite IT Conversations shows.
Like NPR, IT Conversations is listener supported. Which means that, in addition to a ton of great free and public-minded content, they provide one of public radio's most powerful products: guilt. At the start of each mp3, Doug Kaye, the site's founder, comes on to remind you that IT Conversations only survives because of listener donations and that, as a non-subscriber, you are a worthless parasite.
Recently these pleas for funding changed. Kaye started pitching The Conversations Network. The Conversations Network's website describes it as "a non-profit online publisher of recordings of spoken-word events" and IT Conversations as simply its first channel. It's starting to look like Kaye is really taking up the task of creating a new public radio system for the internet age, rather than simply a public-interest audio site for nerds. And the recent premiere of TCN's second channel, Social Innovation Conversations, confirms that impression. SIC, picks up and extends a theme that ran through many IT Conversations programs: innovative uses of technology, business, and social organization to attempt to solve the large-scale problems of the world: global warming, third-world poverty, etc.
The advent of Social Innovations Conversations finally pushed my guilt meter far enough into the red that I could no longer help myself from becoming a paying member of TCN. I just finished the process of starting a Basic Level subscription for $5 per month, and in oder to encourage you to possibly do likewise, I've compiled another set of my favorite recent shows, this time from both Conversations Network channels:
- Globeshakers -- Dean Kamen
- Despite the misfortune of being best known for his only real failure, the Segway Human Transporter, Kamen's inventions, including an external automatic pancreas and a sophisticated indoor mobility device, have made real differences in many parts of medical practice. This interview delves into Kamen's current attempts to improve the world on a grand scale: FIRST, his program to make science and technology as attractive to US teens as sports and entertainment, and his attempts to develop decentralized, cheap, and widely available sources of electricity and clean water for the third world.
- Peter Diamandis -- The X Prize
- The X Prize offered $10 million to the first private company which was able to launch a human-carrying vehicle into space and in the process launched an entire private space flight and development industry designed to bring about all those middle-of-the-twentieth-century dreams about mundane space travel and suburban communities on alien worlds. Diamandas also discussed the prospect of using prizes like this to solve the world's more intractable problems like sustainable energy and universal health care. The best part is the new sport he's working on founding: airborne rocket-car racing!
- David Bornstein -- How To Change The World
- Bornstein is one of the world's foremost experts on "social entrepreneurship", the process by wish people who want to see large scale improvements to the world harness market forces and individual human ingenuity to acheive them. He studied the Gramin Bank, which provides micro-loans of ten and 25 dollars to small Indian farmers and villages so they can buy a donkey or a generator or start a local cell phone distributorship.
- Alex Lindsay -- The Next Generation of Digital Craftsmen
- Lindsay is the founder of the Pixel Corps, a kind of internationally socially conscious media-workers guild modeled on the organization of the organizations formed by 16th century skilled laborers. He makes a coherent, believable, and optimistic account of the future of the globalization of high skill media labor.
- Drew Endy -- Open Source Biology
- A fascinating look at the IP and access issues starting to come up in biological engineering, which is, apparently, getting to the point where the tools are cheap and the methods simple enough that anyone could do their own genetic engineering if only the basic building blocks of life hadn't already been patented.
- Rob Curley -- The Newspaper in an Online World
- Rob Curley is a caffeine-fueled firebrand of online newspaper revolution. In this talk he explains how he helped transform the sleepy Lawrence Journal-World into a cutting-edge interactive community-driven local-obsessed multi-media juggernaut. From covering local little league teams like they were the New York Yankees to forcing political candidates into direct online chats with their constituents, Curley uses the best of internet publishing technology to fulfill the long-standing missions of local journalism.
- Don Gould -- Pure Water 4 All
- It's hard to put my finger on exactly what was so exciting about this conversation. It's about a clay water filter designed to be built, distributed, and sold locally in poor countries around the world to prevent water-borne diseases. There's something about the elegance of the whole project: from its low tech but extraordinarily sophisticated engineering to its brilliant bottom-up distribution methodology, every part of it is incredibly carefully considered, even beautiful. It approaches a problem which often attracts abstract, utopian, and ultimately temporary solutions (poverty-based health issues in the poorest parts of the world) with an idea that is concrete, natural, and organic.
- Jamais Cascio -- The Participatory Panopticon
- Exciting and scary talk about how ubiquitous recording technologies like cameraphones and other "personal memory management" aids, which appeal to our desire to document and perfectly recall all of our experiences, will gradually evolve into a restricting universal observation system that penetrates even into our own memories and most private moments. Cascio descibes this dis/u-topia as evolving gradually not via top-down imposition by some Big Brother, but step-by-step through our own choices.
Posted by Greg at 4:26 PM | Comments (1)
June 25, 2006
James Elkins' Idea Mapping Method
Note: This post, while long and somewhat rambling, was once longer and even more rambling. I excised a sizable intro, which, I hope, helps with readability. Unfortunately, the intro also added some useful context and was, if I do say so myself, snappily written and packed with insight. Typically, I came up with a half measure. I separated the intro out into a separate document. You can read it here. Read it if you're interested or if you just plain old have too much time on your hands.
James Elkins of the University of Chicago is a leader in the type of art history I studied in school. He's written a series of accessible and extraordinarily insightful books on the often overlooked practical influences on art, art history, and art education including What Painting Is, an examination of painters' physical relationship with paint itself; Why Art Cannot Be Taught, a scathing dissection of college and graduate level art education, with a particular emphasis on the irrationality of critiques; and What Happened To Art Criticism, a look at the vast body of non-academic writing produced about art nowadays and why it is almost totally irrelevant to the creation and appreciation of art.
I just finished another book of his called Stories of Art in which he examines the diversity of different available histories of art from the classic western narrative of the triumph of perspective (like the one most people study in school) through a massive Russian anthology called "Universal History of Art" which includes, in its volume on the 20th century alone, chapters on, amongst others, Indonesian, Icelandic, Burmese, Scandinavian, and Ethiopian art.
Elkins starts, however, with personal histories of art. He proceeds through a series of exercises meant to make himself conscious of his own perspective and he invites the reader to follow along. The first stage is relatively open-ended brainstorming. He draws his own favorite art and artists arranged as a constellation of stars around the central moon (in Elkin's case, "natural images"):
(click here for the full-size version)
The things that cluster around the center are more important to him and those around the edges are the eccentrics and outliers.
The goal here is self-representation:
To most people this constellation would be fairly meaningless or just quirky; but for me, it conjures the pattern of history that preoccupied me at the time [when it was drawn -- ed.], and it does so surprisingly strongly: as I look at it, I find myself being pulled back into that mind-set.
In other words, the exercise helps with externalizing your own patterns of thought so you can, in turn, think about them, make connections amongst them, and find the gaps between them. Elkins also says that it could help you "loosen the grip of your education and start looking for the pattern that history has for you."
I decided to try it. I didn't go quite so far as to make a pretty little picture with stars and clouds. But I did manage to write down a bunch of the things and people that make up my visual aesthetic, the art I've studied or seen that's made an impact on me:
(click here for the full-size version)
And do you know what? It worked. When I look at this list, I see something in common where maybe no one else would. At least in my head, all of these things match like the furnishings of a well-decorated house. I can see how new art that I come across (like Jochem Hendricks who I wrote about recently) fits into this pattern, which gives me a starting context for thinking about it. Also, I can see gaps in the pattern -- areas that I know only by their general outline (like 19th Century commercial illustration and early-Renaissance painting) and should investigate further as well as artists or styles closely-related to those appearing here but with which I am unfamiliar.
The success of this exercise got me thinking about other areas in which I could apply it. In the last few years, my interest in technology has gone from near nothing to beginning to rival my absorption in art. I thought I might get a clearer picture of the shape of this interest, and especially of its gaps, by undertaking Elkins' exercise again.
Instead of using my Moleskine for this one, I thought OmniOutliner might be more appropriate:
(click here for the full-size version)
Just like in the last case, this picture seems surprisingly coherent to me. Well, it's a little more anal retentive, obviously. Like any good productivity nerd, I just couldn't stop myself from dicking around in OmniOutliner for much longer than necessary, organizing the technical areas into a kind of map of my interests and connecting related ones with arrows.
What else can I say about this picture? For one, I can explain some of the connections that might not be obvious. For example, the line connecting "big games" and "municipal wifi" is Pac Manhattan, a class project of NYU ITP that used cell phones to play a giant round of human Pac Man in downtown New York. Which is also why Processing is nearby; it was invented at ITP. "Social networks" are connected to "big games" and "metaverse" through Massively Multiplayer Online Games like Second Life, as well as "frameworks (Ruby on Rails)" partially because of my experience in the social network of Rails developers but also because of how easy Rails makes it to create social networking sites on any subject (take, as a case study, Cuppin' created by my office mate Peat for RailsDay 2006). Beyond the obvious technical relationships, there are personal experiences and ideas like these connecting all of the rectangles in my diagram.
I wonder a bit about what would go in the lower left corner of this picture where there is now nothing, what whole area I might be missing. And I wonder about the two unconnected rectangles ("lifehacks" and "nanotech (K. Eric Drexler)"). I put them near the areas to which I thought they were related, but I didn't draw connecting arrows; I didn't feel the links were strong enough. Interestingly, since I drew this diagram, I found out that K. Eric Drexler invented the term social software, so maybe that box should be at the top of the chart, or maybe the edges of the diagram are connected like those of a real Pac Man game.
Anyway, if you have an area of expertise that you're looking to improve, if you want to figure out what direction to look for new and original ideas, making an Elkins Map might just point you right in the right direction. And, if it doesn't do the trick, Elkins has two more exercises waiting for you: The history of art imagined as a map and The history of art imagined as a coastline.
Tagged: james elkins, university of chicago, art, technology, OmniOutlinerPosted by Greg at 12:27 AM | Comments (1)
June 23, 2006
Introducing the Institute for Figuring
During college, I worked for a summer at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, an eccentric, and poignantly beautiful, victorian-style domestic museum housed in a storefront on Venice in Culver City, California.
Over the years since, I've kept in touch with David Wilson, The Museum's founder and auteur, visiting whenever I'm in LA. One of the many perks of maintaining this relationship (beyond Wilson's constantly surprising depths of personal warmth and technical knowledge) has been exposure to the international network of 'outsider' institutions to which The Museum belongs: from its neighbor, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, to St. Petersburg's Freud Dream Museum.
Today, I made my first pilgrimage to The Museum in more than a year and wasn't nearly disappointed on this count. While taking me on a tour of the now nearly complete exhibit of Innuit and 19th century folk string art for which I helped The Museum acquire some funding, David showed me the materials for an attached temporary display of puzzles and toys for children on loan from the Institute for Figuring.
So, what, exactly, is the Institute for Figuring? David described it as "great" and "having to do with math". Knowing the exquisite caliber of David's taste in museums, I found this vague description tantalizing and committed to find out more.
According to their website:
The Institute For Figuring is an educational organization dedicated to enhancing the public understanding of figures and figuring techniques.
The Institute’s interests are twofold: the manifestation of figures in the world around us and the figurative technologies that humans have developed through the ages. From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding, the tiling patterns of Islamic mosaics and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring.
I don't know how clear this makes things, but, linguistically at least, we are definitely in MJT territory -- elusive as to specifics, but clearly contained within that fascinating zone where the cold-eyed scientific swoons into the arms of the personal and poetic.
The relationship only seems closer when you realize that The Institute is itinerant (as The Museum was in its beginnings) and features, on its website, exhibits with titles such as Lithium Legs and Apocalyptic Photons, Philosophical Toys (the show making an appearance at the MJT), and, my personal favorite, Crocheting the Hyperbolic Plane. Further, the website features a graphic (pictured at the top of this post) depicting "the location of the Institute for Figuring on the Mandelbrot Set", which is highly reminiscent of the famous allegorically crashed microscope in The Museum's front hall.
If you are at all interested in math, its history, and/or museological whimsy and/or nineteenth century science and live in New York or LA (seemingly the only places The Institute's work is currently available for viewing), I would love to hear some firsthand reports from its existing events and exhibitions. To facilitate, here are The Institute's calendar of events and its schedule of exhibitions.
Tagged: museum, jurassic, technology, David Wilson, LA, Institute, Figuring, mathPosted by Greg at 2:27 AM | Comments (1)
June 21, 2006
Hendriks' Computer-Aided Contour Drawing
Although it may be hard to tell from the above picture, contemporary artist Jochem Hendricks practices a drawing technique originally advanced by New York Art Students' League instructor Kimon Nicolaides in the 1920s.
Near the beginning of his posthumously-published philosophy-summarizing work, The Natural Way to Draw, Nicolaides introduces the practice of contour drawing this way:
Sit close to the model or object which you intend to draw and lean forward in your chair. Focus your eyes on some point -- any point will do -- along the contour of the model. (The contour approximates what is usually spoken of as the outline or edge.) Place the point of your pencil on the paper. Imagine that your pencil point is touching the model instead of the paper. Without taking your eyes off the model, wait until you are convinced that the pencil is touching that point on the model upon which your eyes are fastened.
Then move your eye slowly along the contour of the model and move the pencil slowly along the paper. As you do this, keep the conviction that the pencil point is actually touching the contour. Be guided more by the sense of touch than by sight. This means that you must draw without looking at the paper, continuously looking at the model.
Contour drawing is about touch. Nicolaides directs the student to make his eye into the vehicle by which his pencil comes into contact with the object, to convince himself that his "pencil point is touching the model instead of the paper". The classical goal of keeping the proportions of the drawing 'correct', of ensuring that it corresponds to the appearance of the model, is forgotten. In fact, the student is explicitly prohibited from looking at the developing drawing in order to ensure these proportions. The goal here is a different kind of accuracy, tactile, physical, and direct rather than graphical or illustrative. And these are exactly the qualities towards which Hendriks' works strives.
Hendricks makes digitally-aided contour drawings. He uses a head-mounted scanner to track the movements of his eyes while he looks at his subjects. His final drawings constitute printouts, reports of the history of these movements. Through this system, Hendricks achieves a kind of bionic version of Nicolaides' proposed unity of pencil and eye. Rather than mediating his vision via classical draughtsmanly craft, he uses the contemporary sources of objectivity: digital sensors, computer-aided image processing, and high-resolution laser printing.
The results are similar in meaning and general appearance to Nicolaides' examples and those of his students (look here for a typical example), though they diverge in texture and breadth of subject matter. They have a kind of visible digital 'grain', or roughness and their groping-quality, which they share with traditional contour drawings, is sharper, more angular.
Finally, because of the nature of his drawing tools, Hendriks is able to make contour drawings of 'internal' subjects not traditionally visible.
Light:
and its after-image:
(I first found Hendriks' work via David Ross's 010101: Art in Technological Times)
Tagged: jochem, hendricks, contour, drawing, kimon, nicolaides, contemporary, art, eye-trackingPosted by Greg at 4:53 PM | Comments (0)
June 15, 2006
Superman Jesus Quoted on MSNBC
Sometimes it's surprising which posts catch on with you people. Great ideas go unremarked upon while tiny throwaway observations sit there collecting comments and stirring controversy.
One example of this trend that I've never understood was a post I wrote last November called Superman Jesus. The post contained a simple expression of my surprise at the heavy religious imagery in the trailer for the upcoming Brian Singer-directed Superman movie. A tsunami of comments ensued, ranging from corrections of factual mistakes in the post itself to a debate about the arkana of the original movies and comics to this incredible interpretative insight from an honest-to-god rabbi:
It's pretty obvious that Superman is a Jesus figure. His kryptonian name is Kal-el, which in Hebrew means "voice of God". His father's name is Jor-el, which in Hebrew means "fear/awe of God".This comment, in addition to being brilliant, was posted just last week, a full eight months after the original post.
Thus, we have the classic Christian paradigm of the supposed Wrathful God of the "Old" Testament sending the human-word to earth, with, of course, powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.
And, if that doesn't top it, the post, along with Rabbi Shevack's great comment, was quoted in an MSNBC article about the Christian imagery in the film, published on Tuesday. I probably wouldn't even have found out about the article if it wasn't for Mikey's post yesterday on Let's Get Famous, the Urban Honking blog that tracks the influence of us UrHo-ers on the larger world.
I've never been one to bash the so-called 'mainstream media' as such, but seeing their reporting from the point of view of a source certainly makes it tempting. They quoted my blog without talking to me. They generalized Rabbi Shevack's comment so as to avoid attributing or verifying it. The whole story was reported second, third, and fourth hand through web searches and hearsay.
Tagged: msnbc, superman, singer, movie, blog, post, idfdzPosted by Greg at 3:42 PM | Comments (1)
