Aesthetically terrifying

Erin Scavino inadvertently came up with the perfect phrase to describe what the U.S. president and his enablers are doing to our nation’s capital. Between the destruction of the East Wing and the Rose Garden (and apparently the imminent razing of the Kennedy Center), tearing up the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, that hideous “ballroom”, the even more hideous proposed King Kong Arch, down to the idiotic tendency to cover every available surface of the Oval Office with tacky gold leaf — the list goes on and on.

Yes, it is all aesthetically terrifying, but it also clearly serves a purpose: Distracting Americans with the sheer ugliness of these monstrosities gives the administration cover to do the really terrifying stuff, like removing anyone from the U.S. Military command who might have moral authority and a backbone, delegitimizing the voting process by attacking mail-in ballots, attacking independent centers of thought like Universities, and establishing an armed paramilitary presence in cities that didn’t vote for the president.

Those aesthetically terrifying projects in Washington D.C., to use Erin Scavino’s apt phrase, are there for a purpose: To distract everyone from the truly terrifying projects — the ones aimed not at destroying our nation’s capital, but at our nation’s ability to conduct an orderly democratic transition of power.

Transform simulator

A number of years ago I had the privilege of visiting the lab of Professor Hiroshi Ishii at the MIT Media Lab. Luckily for me, that visit coincided with the awesome TRANSFORM project that was going on at that time.

In a nutshell, Transform is a dynamic shape display that move more than one thousand pins up and down in real-time to transform a tabletop into a dynamic tangible display.

To help with the project, I created a little on-line simulator. A code editor lets you vary the behavior of the simulated pins.

The examples I started with were some movements based on sine waves and, of course, some movements driven by the noise function. You can play with the simulator for yourself HERE.

Dolly Parton

I was saddened to read of the death of Dolly Parton. She was one of my heroes.

I don’t know of many people who wrote more than 3000 songs, and most songwriters are not also leading philanthropists, with seemingly infinite generosity. She was all of those things and more.

I had the privilege of meeting Dolly Parton once in person, and she was every bit as wonderful as you would think. We will all miss her.

Enders Game, the documentary

I was saddened, but not enormously surprised, to read that Russian drones used to kill Ukrainian citizens are powered by inexpensive computer gaming chips from Nvidia. The same embedded A.I. capability that makes for a good computer game also makes it possible for a drone to autonomously recognize and target gas stations, where it can kill actual humans — which is what a Russian drone just did.

Anyone who has read Enders Game will feel a tinge of deja vu. I’ll bet Orson Scott Card didn’t know he was writing a documentary.

A virus is destroying our military

A dangerous virus is destroying our U.S. military capacity. It is doing this by attacking our most senior and trusted military officers, the very individuals who have the proven talent and decades of heroic combat experience to lead us in the event of war.

Here are just some of the senior brass who have already been rendered inoperative by this virus:

Admiral Franchetti: Chief of Naval Operations.
Admiral Fagan: Leader of the U.S. Coast Guard.
Vice Admiral Chatfield: The U.S. military representative to the NATO Military Committee.
Vice Admiral Davids: Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy.
Lt. General Short: Senior military assistant to the secretary of defense.

But which of our nation’s enemies released this dangerous virus? What it China? Russia? North Korea?

Whichever enemy it was, they should be proud of themselves, because the results have been fiendishly effective. Our nation’s ability to be war-ready, should that ever become necessary, has already been seriously compromised.

It appears that the virus is still, as of today, running unchecked, so I suspect that things will only get worse, as our nation’s military readiness continues to degrade. God help us all.

From demo to tool

Yesterday I posted a demo that showed the creation an interactive world consisting of ray traced boxes. Since that is just a demo, there were limited things you can do with it. Yes it’s a working demo, but it is not yet a useful tool.

For example, you can’t use it to add or delete a box, or to change the color of a box. You also cannot assemble your own boxes together to create a higher level composite shape, like I did with the chairs or table or lamp or the people in the scene.

But having a working demo is a crucial early step in creating that sort of fully functional tool. The demo shows the kind of thing such a tool could produce in practice, and it also illustrates the quality level of run-time performance.

Compared with a demo, there are many more design decisions involved in creating a fully functional tool, because there are so many more things that a user is able to do. But going from working demo to working tool is usually a good idea, because the result empowers many people, not just one.

I think I’ll work on that. 🙂

A world of ray traced boxes

Ray tracing is a great way to render things in computer graphics if you want advanced features like cast shadows. Unfortunately most real world shapes are difficult to render in ray tracing.

But what if an entire world is created out of one simple type of shape, like a box? In that case, ray tracing becomes much easier.

In that spirit, I built a little scene of a ray traced room, with walls and floors and furniture and people, with everything made entirely out of boxes. You can move any object in the scene by dragging on it with your mouse.

You can also use the ← and → keys to rotate any object, and the ↑ and ↓ keys to tilt your view into the room. Check it out for yourself here.