A limerick for Dr. Barrett...

Here's a little Christmas present I wrote for Craig Barrett, relating to my article: Dr. Barrett, should they eat cake?

It seems that Intel's Craig Barrett,
Think the poor are without merit.
He only gives tech
When he gets a check
The poor need to just grin-and-bear it.

Merry Christmas, Dr. Barrett.

Kong in 60 Seconds...

This movie blew my mind. I hate to say it, I like to be all intellectual about these things, but I went on the same ride as everyone else in the theatre. I had a bit more composure than the woman behind me who starting yelling, "Look out for the plane, Kong!" However, to be honest, if I hadn't been raised right I would have been shouting too.

Visceral.

The only way to describe the movie. Kong is not CG. Kong is not an ape. Kong is an embodiment of every time a dog looked into your eyes or you saw a polar bear in a zoo. Kong represents the cruelty we inflict on animals with such impunity. Kong represents the loyalty the animals give so endlessly in return. Kong had to be CG to embody these ideals. And it took an artist like Jackson to bring those ideals to life.

Is Peter Jackson our Rembrandt? Is film our Oil Painting of the day? I think so. He's at the height of his art creating photorealistic soulful imagery much as Rembrandt did. That's got to be qualification enough. Look below and see if you agree?

Both Gollum and now Kong are enough to capture your belief 100%. Amazing. This guy and his team deserve all the credit they can handle. I will say this though - if Jackson is our Rembrandt, that means all the Impressionist and Pointalist movies are yet to come. Bring Advil.

So go see the movie if you haven't already. Ali and I had no idea what to expect. We went because we read reviews and liked LotR. Neither of us had ever seen the original. It is mind-blowing and worth the theatre experience. 60" Tv or no, you need a theatre for this.

Dr. Barrett, should they eat cake?

The full article, "Intel calls MIT's $100 laptop a 'gadget'" (Reuters) can be found here at CNET News.

For those that don't know, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of Wired Magazine and MIT Media Lab, has developed a laptop prototype that costs under $100. The purpose of this computer is to enable third world nations to extend the range of technology to rural and poverty based areas, giving children there educational opportunities that they simply could not have otherwise.

So we have this wonderful altruism, and then whoops! Intel, big bully on the block and left out in the cold, decides to beat this 1 year old malformed child with a stick.

The big bully in this case, specifically, is Dr. Craig Barrett, Chairman of Intel. Here's his take:

"Mr. Negroponte has called it a $100 laptop--I think a more realistic title should be 'the $100 gadget'," Barrett, chairman of the world's largest chipmaker, told a press conference in Sri Lanka. "The problem is that gadgets have not been successful."

"It turns out what people are looking for is something that has the full functionality of a PC," he said. "Reprogrammable to run all the applications of a grown-up PC...not dependent on servers in the sky to deliver content and capability to them, not dependent for hand cranks for power."

This is a truly bizarre stance for an Intel exec to be taking. This would be simliar to the Perdue or Armour families coming out against Sally Struthers, saying, "Ethiopians don't want rice. That's a side dish. They want steak and chicken." Marie Antoinette would be thrilled.

I think Mr. Barrett would be shocked to discover that people in developing nations are desperate to move out of poverty, and will fight for the chance with whatever edge they can get. Even if it means using a $100 laptop "gadget"...Which represents 4 months of salary to a working man in kenya.

Perhaps Dr. Barrett is most concerned that a billion people may soon be using (and developing software for) an ubiquitous computing platform that has no "Intel Inside". A strategy that I think I'll adopt myself.

And your little dog too!

Now a little about Dr. Barrett. Over the last 5 years, his total salary has been $92,524,000. This makes him the 105th highest paid executive in the country. His Net Worth? About 400 Million. Yes, Dr. Craig Barrett is worth 4 million of Mr. Negroponte's computers. Or more importantly, he's worth 4 million third world futures. C'mon Dr. Barrett, if you don't educate these third-world folks, who will you outsource our jobs to?

Another good take on this can be read here: Craig Barrett's $100 laptop smackdown

The Adventures of Fat Man Sam...

Been sketching Fat Man Sam on my Tablet PC. Think he'd be a great comic strip character. He'd never talk, people'd put words in his mouth. Same expression regardless of scenario...maybe? Don't know. Regardless, here's the latest sketch...


Update: FatManSam now in video form!

Teenagers finally get into Astronomy

CNN actual headline...seriously:

Hubble finds new moons, rings around Uranus.

Follow up headlines:
Charmin soon to be sponsoring Hubble.
Teenagers let into NASA.
Hubble found crusin' the strip.
Hubble gets mooned, rings around Uranus.

Anonymity, where art thou?

I checked our server logs today. I do this every couple of weeks to make sure traffic is healthy and nothing is going awry on our sites.

Anyway, was checking out the logs, and see that my wedding site was getting a lot of hits last night and today. This is unusual as the wedding was a couple of years ago. So I took a look at the raw logs, found the IP that was doing the hitting, and checked it out on geobytes.com's sweet IP tracking/mapping app.

Well, the IP address maps to a certain location near Cleveland. Now I know of someone who has family near there. So I look up their family name in Whitepages.com. Yup there they are.

So now I have a map of the address of where the IP is coming from, I pop in the address from whitepages into google maps, and a new map pops up. Lo and behold, the map is identical to the IP map. To make matters even better, I switch to satellite view in google maps, and I am now looking at the house of the person that has been hitting my site! Wowza!

5 minutes, a little knowledge, and anonymity is completely out the window.

So to the person that was checking everything out: I'm glad you're well. We think of you often. And I'm excited about everything I've heard regarding you're life since we last spoke. Rather than checking out my outdated wedding site, send me an e-mail. I'd love to hear how you are.

Ace

Wikipedia vs. Britannica - the Aftermath...

This post is in relation to:

Wikipedia vs. Britannica, Posted by Will Richardson from the Wiki Watch dept.

And the followup conversation, Wikipedia vs. Britannica at the OK Corral. Posted by Steve at Teach42.com

If you are familiar with the battle, just read the latter link, to understand where I'm coming from with this. You may have to scroll. Steve's got an HTML bug on his site....:-)

Anyway, the highlights:

Will Richardson:
In case you didn’t see it, The Journal Nature compared 42 entries in Wikipedia to the same 42 entries in Britannica and found the each had four major mistakes, and that on average Britannica had three minor errors in each entry compared to four inWikipedia.

Steve Dembo:
So can someone explain to me what’s different? Believe me, I’m not saying that the Wikipedia is the greatest resource in the world, but I do believe that students need to apply the same critical thinking skills to print resources that they do to online resources.

My Response:
What I think is great is the concern for accuracy. I think people forget how totally inaccurate history is! All Wikipedia is history being reported in real time. The people being reported on are actually alive - which is something Brintannica hasn’t had to worry about so much. The fact that the facts are open to debate at all is a testament to what Wikipedia is. In 2080, someone will be reading about Brintannica on Wikipedia, not the other way around.

So screw the people that are complaining about Wikipedia. They were the same people that said Gutenberg had some typos…

History is written by the victors, or at the very least, the most concerned party. Applied to Wikipedia, where history is now, as well as then, history is written before there are any victors, and the combatants get to fight it out virtually. I guess in the case of Wikipedia, history isn’t written by the victor as much as the person who posts loudest and longest.

To Steve’s point, though. Can Wikipedia be trusted? Can you toss it in a bibliography? And has someone figured out how to format internet references in a bibliography yet? I always got points off for not formatting my bibliography properly….

I say yes, it can be trusted as far as anything can be trusted, but I am not saying it’s right. Steve said that he wanted his students to apply critical thinking. That’s the key. I remember I had a report due on someone in grade school. I copied the World Book verbatim and got busted for it. I learned from that. Anyone that does that with Wikipedia, will hopefully get busted likewise. But what’s key here is that anyone that is copying anything verbatim is missing the point - and a teacher has failed if that’s the case. Start with Wikipedia, cross reference with Britannica, then throw a couple of subject specific books and maybe a History channel special. Hell - even Dan Brown! Get lots of opinions on everthing. The internet is making this easier and easier as more content gets added. Hopefully the internet as a whole - and not just the scapegoat, wikipedia, will end up being the vehicle for critical thinking and cross referencing.

Final Point:
To address Steve's point, as well as my last comments. Information is not only as good as your source. Information is only as good as your "source net"; The integrated information that results from crossreferencing multiple sources.

But here lies the rub. Wikipedia is incredibly accessible. Google is accessible, but the information is a joke. Most other references are complicated to access or even find. So kids that would rather be doing anything than studying or working on a paper, will follow the path of least resistance. They will do one stop shoppping at wikipedia, and get back to having fun.

Google and Amazon had the solution for this by archiving the content of all books, and making them searchable. However, they've been blocked as a result of publishers getting whiny and claiming they own all the words in those books, even if only 20 are shown at a time. (Read about this here: Google's Escalating Book Battle, by Burt Helm, BusinessWeek Online)

It is essential to teachers and learners that access to information be fluid. Getting all huffy because someone can finally find exactly what they're looking for in a book is just goofy. Publishers have been all for the unwieldy and ridiculous card catalog for decades. Make a better card catalog, and let the bitchin' begin. Allow kids the ability to reference "reputable sources" as easily as they can wikipedia, and you have the ability to develop a quality "source net" at the breakneck pace demanded by todays educators.

Ace

Efficiency vs. Artistry p. 1

So what survives? As a designer, I deal with identity design. After watching a commercial for Smirnoff tonight I noticed what must be their new logo. For those of you that haven't seen it, it's a minimalist coat of arms - two eagles rampant - or something like that. The eagles are skewed in perspective and wearing a minimalist crown. As you can probably tell...what got to me was the minimialism. Smirnoff is an old school company, with an old school look, why did they shift to what they did?

Moving on, I started to wonder how the design was chosen for production. How did the Ad firm pitch it? Why did Smirnoff accept? It's not a bad logo. It's very "of the time", "hip", "edgy", "fast". Was that the design brief? Or did Smirnoff say to their firm, "give us a logo" and that's what the firm did after taking into consideration lengthy focus groups?

Personally, I think this is about as detailed a design as can be done in Illustrator. And since that's the medium of the day, that's all you can get.

Having briefly been an architect, I not only studied, but helped produce a number of modern buildings. There is a definitive beauty to modern architecture's simplicity. Form follows function as Mies would say. Cut away the crap, and just leave the important bits. But having been an architect, I got to see the other side of the quote - Value Engineering. The removal of "non-important bits", the archetraves, the pediments, the nonsense, well...ummm. Did the owner of the Barelona Pavillion mention to Mies, "Hey, uh, Mies...I want you to keep this on the down-low, but can you leave out some of the expensive crap? This'll really help the budget. Oh, and make up a bunch of tripe to give the media so we still get good press."?

Who knows. Leave that to the historians.

Regardless, there has been a lessening of detail in everything crafted in the last century. Maybe it's manufacturing processes, maybe it is because minimal is "hip". Maybe it's because Mies had to cover his ass. However why is this happening? It's Everywhere! A BMW and a Honda used to look different. Now they don't. How much further can this go?!

We are living in the homogenized age of design. We no longer buy things on intricacy and detail, we look for clean lines. But clean lines are different from simple, which the Smirnoff people will eventually be forced to realize.

One final thought. It's very simple to make minimalist things. Any medieval craftsman could have done it, instead they'd spend a year carving a single stone for a cathedral, or making a table. Maybe true clean lines were too hard to make back then. It's possible that this was a result of what a Arch. Professor of mine, Ed Deam, used to talk about - the passionate pursuit of symmetry. He said (And this is also the reason for the name of this blog):

It's impossible to achieve true symmetry in the age of the electron microscopes and lasers, but it's worth it to spend a lifetime trying. However, in the meantime, stick with Asymmetry, and you'll live a happier life.

-Ed Deam

Audiophile's Unite

I recently wrote a letter to Wired News regarding an article that they'd written on Digital Music (Old Rips: May They Rest in Peace). I was thrilled that they posted my letter as part of another article. (Audiophiles Unite! Draws Feedback). My letter reads as follows:

I keep wondering why everyone is worried about compression so much when it comes to selling new music. I want RAW sound files so that my music is future-proof. In our digital history, more fidelity and more resolution are what have led to new media buying crazes. Look at DVDs, HDTV and digital cameras. You don't buy an HDTV TiVo and look forward to smaller file sizes! You simply buy more storage capacity.

We are no longer limited to a CD's delivery format of 700 MB (that's only a 10-minute download now), so why is my music still being ripped by Apple Computer, Napster and Musicmatch from a CD in the first place? The music on a CD is compressed to begin with! I want what comes from the studio, whatever the file size, before it's ripped, before the highs and lows are taken out, and definitely before it's compressed. That's future-proof, that's what the internet allows and, most importantly, it will finally shut up the vinyl people.

-Adam Emery

However, regarding feedback I've received since that letter: I am not an audiophile! I am a digitalphile. My life is almost entirely digital. I actually just purchased a Tablet PC so that I wouldn't have to use paper anymore. I have high hopes that I actually won't have anything physical at some point in time. While this may aggravate any archaeologists that may be interested in my remains at some point (ummm....yeah). I seriously don't want the hastle of getting a disc, finding a DVD, whatever. I am firmly the product of the "right now!" generation.

This leads to the point of my letter. Smaller File Sizes. Compression. B.S. Give me the full files, or at least give me the option. I spent weeks ripping my CD collection two years ago, only to look at my 160kbps file size and wonder if I should rerip.

Years ago, people were worried about small file sizes for things. Because of this we ended up with Y2K, Atari video games, and Apollo 13. These were not good things. I recently went to BestBuy to pick up a new 120gb hard drive. I couldn't find one. All they had was 250gb+ drives. Small file sizes are really NOT an issue anymore people. Storage capacities will outpace our need forever.

My friend, Josh, recently sent me this e-mail regarding Hard Drive space and the above article:

Nice... although you're definitely taking the "money is no object, HDD space is free" point of view. If you were to take regular 700MB CDs and dump to your drive uncompressed, you'd fill up a 240GB drive in no time - not to mention if you wanted blu-ray music or HD video. Don't think the tech is quite there yet...

He's right to a certain extent, however my point is that music we're buying now should have the benefit of full fidelity. I am NOT rebuying the 400 Cd's that my wife and I already own. However, in the course of the last year I've purchased 20 albums. Call each album a gig without compression, and I'm looking at 20gb. I already have 40gb of compressed audio. This is 60gb. That's nothin' So at this rate, I'm looking at what - an additional 20gb a year? So what? Storage capabilities are doubling every 12 -14 months. However uncompressed audio sizes are a fixed size. Therefore, storage is going to definitely outpace whatever is being done with music.

So back to the article. All media companies need to stop worrying about compression. Make that our problem.

One final note. I read an article about "The future of music" a few years ago in PcMag. It might have been a Dvorak article - not sure. He was saying that music needs to go exclusively to a leased model where you have access to your entire collection forever, at the highest fidelity technically possible at the time. I strongly agree with this, and intend to find a link to this article as soon as possible.

Ace