Author: admin

The Space Age has just
One more year to go until
It will turn sixty

The other day I came up with a cool idea for a slogan for our lab. I ran it by a friend, and she really liked it.

Then I ran it by some colleagues and they really liked it too. In fact, they all agreed that it would be great if they could also adapt it as their lab’s slogan.

Unfortunately, none of us can really use it, as catchy as it may be. I will tell you what it is, and let you decide:

“We’re creating the future, so you won’t have to.”

As you can see, it’s a very catchy slogan, but completely unuseable. Which is a shame, because I hate to see such a great slogan go to waste.

I’m thinking of donating it to the Trump campaign.

Today I had planned to plunge into a discussion about how wearables are about to follow the arc of the transition from iPod to iPhone. But then I read J. Peterson’s comment on yesterday’s post, and it really struck a chord.

Let’s assume that some large corporation does what Apple did, and creates a plan to “encourage” young kids to stay within that company’s bespoke ecosystem. In that case, wearables might follow a well understood arc.

Parents will first give their little kids a “games only” wearable, one that does not provide full access to the big bad world. On this device, which will be the future equivalent to the iPod Touch, those kids will gradually accumulate apps.

But unlike today’s iPhone apps, these will be more like Pokemon Go — appearing to exist in the world itself. Once kids have these shared apps, they will be able to play all sorts of games and activities together in an augmented reality. These games will be filled with virtual characters that will appear to enhabit the physical reality around them, somewhat like a high-tech version of Philip Pullman’s daemons.

Then when they reach the age of 13, these kids’ parents will grudgingly get them a grown-up wearable that communicates fully with the world. This will be a sort of future equivalent of the iPhone.

Of course the brilliance of this plan is that kids will stay within the ecosystem that allows them to continue to have access to the games and activities that they have learned to love. Except that their loyalty will be even more extreme than the loyalty that today’s kids have toward the Apple ecosystem.

After all, it will be the very reality around them that they will be choosing not to give up. If you ask me, that’s a pretty impressive way to market a product.

A new month, a new set of possibilities. What a fine time for making predictions about the future!

Sometimes (although not always), analogies with past technological advancements can give some insight into future ones.

Take, for example, the Apple iPod. Introduced in October 2001, the iPod was not completely revolutionary. The first digital music player to hit the market was Elger Labs MPMAN F10 in 1998, followed by a succession of rivals.

But 1998 was too early. Digital storage was still too expensive back then, so you couldn’t fit much music on those early devices. But three more years of Moore’s Law made a world of difference.

As usual, Apple jumped in at the right moment, and did it well. The iPod was far more user friendly (and better marketed) than its competitors, and it managed to capture the public’s imagination.

The iPod continued to evolve until 2007, when Apple jumped again, this time to the iPhone (with the iPod Touch serving to help ease the cultural transition). Now, rather than a mere media consumption device in your pocket, you had a general communication device. Where the iPod had been about tuning out, the iPhone was about tuning in.

Now, about fifteen years later, we are starting to see a similar progression with wearables. Perhaps we can use the transition from iPod to iPhone as an analogy.

More on this tomorrow.

Before last Monday, many friends told me they were dreading watching the debate. Quite a few said that they were tempted to simply wait until it was over, and then hear about it afterward. That’s how anxious everyone was.

As it happens, all of those friends did indeed watch the debate, and they are glad they did. In the circles I travel, there has been a decided change of mood this week.

There was something wonderful about seeing the actual Hillary Clinton in action. Her quick wit, her confident smile, and her sense of humor are so much more fun than the mythical creature some in the press have been creating.

It was also heartening to see, as some have pointed out, that there is no “other” Donald Trump, and that he didn’t rise to the occasion after all. That is most likely because, as far as Trump is concerned, he is the occasion.

There are three more debates to go. I find myself looking forward to watching them.

I had to stop watching Game of Thrones, in spite of many friends telling me that it was the best thing ever. I stopped because it was filled with psychological violence.

I’m just not very good with psychological violence, people being cruel to each other, stealing away their dignity or even their souls. I appreciate the attraction of Grand Guignol — the psychic spit take on the human condition that is just so awful you cannot look away.

But I can’t seem to sit through it for purposes of mere entertainment. I’m not saying that others are wrong to do so. Everyone’s entitled to their own brand of enjoyment, and this one is certainly very well done for what it is.

On the other hand, I have absolutely no problem with the violence in Gotham. Lots of killing, maiming, severed hands and heads aplenty. The show portrays all sorts of violence that is completely beyond the pale.

But it’s all cartoon violence. There is no psychological depth to it. The show is written in such a way that you know none of the violence is even remotely real. It telegraphs its fakery.

So I guess for me it’s not about the level of violence. It’s about the kind of violence. Cartoon violence is ok. Depiction of real psychological harm, just for the purpose of entertainment, is not.

Only Donald Trump
Could get so many people
To vote Democrat

So here’s a question: Just how weird and off-message and defensive would Donald Trump have needed to be before his supporters felt that he had “lost” the debate?

There were so many topics in his campaign’s playbook he could have used to attack Hillary Clinton on, and he used pretty much none of them. Instead, he let her make the debate a referendum on him, time and again. There were so many moments when he simply lost the thread. Here are just a few.

When reminded of his various on-the-record “climate change is a hoax” statements, he claimed he’d never said them. When asked why he had continued to publicly tout the “birther” conspiracy between 2012 and 2016, he just replied that no one was caring much about it. Do you understand that answer? Does anybody?

When called by Clinton on all the nasty things he has publicly said about women, he didn’t deny it — he just defended himself by claiming those statements were all about Rosie O’Donnell. I mean, um, really???

He also seemed sincerely unaware of NATO’s decades-long history of antiterrorism programs. His assertion that NATO only started doing something about terrorism after he’d personally suggested it was so outright nutty that it was almost charming.

And just when I figured things couldn’t get weirder, Trump started brazenly touting his new hotel, right in the middle of the debate. You can’t make this stuff up.

So I wonder, what would Donald Trump have needed to do for his supporters to think he had lost? Literally pull down his pants?

I watched this evening’s presidential debate at our lab. I was joined by several students.

It was hard for me to properly assess the outcome, since at this point I can’t be anything close to objective. I saw what looked to me like one candidate calmly giving detailed and informed answers to questions of policy, while the other candidate seemed to just be reciting the same few slogans over and over. But your mileage may vary.

After the debate had ended, we spent some time discussing it. At some point an undergrad asked me how they decide the winner.

I told him that it was easy: “Fox News will announce the winner. Also, the New York Times will announce the winner. But they won’t announce the same winner.”

I generally work all the time. It’s not that I have a work ethic, more that I like what I do. Especially the programming part, prototyping, experimenting, or just noodling around in the code to make something look better.

But today I did something very rare: I took the day off. Completely. No coding, no administrativia, nada. I read the newspaper, solved a crossword puzzle, relaxed, took a nap, saw an episode of Gotham, cooked some food, but absolutely nothing even vaguely responsible.

I don’t think I need to do that very often, and I probably wouldn’t even enjoy it if I did it too often. But every once in a while it feels great!