Digital Composting

Picked up a rather awesome book the other day – The Art of the Modern Movie Poster.  It features movie posters from around the world (but for well-known movies) and it’s fascinating to see how some of these films are ‘translated’ by artists from different countries.  And as I was paging through the book I realized that I’d have a hard time even guessing what movie some were from.  So, with that in mind, here’s a little quiz.  Several posters from the book are shown below but with, in many cases, identifying information obscured.  Name the movies that go with them.  (Yeah, there are several unobscured/obvious ones too that I just added because I think they’re cool!)

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UPDATE: Here’s all the same posters with the obfuscation removed:

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Just got done troubleshooting a problem I had with installing the update to Office 2008 for Mac and figured I may as well write up my fix and toss it out into the webz, just in case someone else finds themself in the same predicament.  In other words, unless you got to this post after searching for how to fix your Office install, don’t bother to read any further because it’s not going to be even slightly interesting.

(This is also for people that are savvy with a bit of UNIX – if you don’t know what ‘vi’ is, don’t bother to read any further because I’m not going to want to explain things to you beyond what I’m writing here).

So here’s the problem – Word tells you that there’s a new update of the software – version 12.1.9 in my case but I suspect that subsequent updates may have this same problem.  So you click on the ‘update’ button and it spends time downloading and then gives you an error that says

You cannot install Office 2008 12.1.9 Update on this volume. A version of the software required to install this update was not found on this volume.

No further information is available.  Nice.  Poked around a bit and found out that it was actually due to a rather overaggressive disk-space cleanup I’d done a while back to remove a bunch of foreign language stuff that I’ll never need, using the tool monolingual.  Languages were removed from my Office directory somewhere and the updater thinks something important is missing and won’t let me go any further.  So yes, mostly my fault.  Still, annoying.  

Here’s the fix that’s seemed to work for me:

1) Download the actual update from here: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx

2) Copy it out of the DMG and onto your desktop. 

3) Open a shell and cd into the ~/Desktop/Office 2008 12.1.9 Update.mpkg/Contents/Resources directory.

4) vi the package_updatable file.

5) Find the line that says found_valid_version=False

6) Change the ‘False‘ to be ‘True‘

7) Remove everything after that line, up to (but not including) the line that says if not found_valid_version:

8) Save the file.

9) Go back to a Finder window that’s looking at your desktop and then run the modified update installer by doubleclicking on the Office 2008 12.1.9 Update.mpkg file.

… and it should now run the update and install properly.  If not, well, you’re on your own.  No warrantees, guarantees or contracts are implied.  Use at your own risk.  Lather, rinse, repeat. Flush after using.

In other news, Word for 2008 still sucks, is still buggy, and they still haven’t fixed the bug that’s been there since they first released Word 2008 where the state of what you’ve got collapsed in Outline mode doesn’t get saved when you close the document.  Which is annoying, very.

If you’re like me you often carry around a point-and-shoot even when you’re primarily shooting with a larger DSLR.  A lot of times it’s just there as insurance in case your big camera suddenly has problems, or is buried deep in the bag and not worth pulling out for the sake of a quick snapshot.  Or maybe you just keep your little P&S handy because you use it to shoot short video clips.  But there’s one more use that a lot of people may not think of at first – using your P&S as a handy ‘macro’ camera.  

One of the nice things about the smaller sensor you get on a P&S (and the equivalently smaller lens assembly that goes with it) is that your minimum focusing distance is often drastically shorter than you’ll find on a DLSR.  Which means you can get a lot closer to your subject.  This, coupled with the deeper depth of field that comes with having a small sensor, means that you can get surprisingly good macro shots using your little point-and-shoot.  

Here’s a quick comparison, shooting the cover of a book I pulled off the shelf.  Using the normal ‘walkaround’ lens I keep on my 40d – a Canon 17-85 that theoretically has some ‘macro’ capabilities – this is about as close as I can get to this book and still keep it in focus.

But using my Lumix LX3, I can get much closer.  In fact the bottom of the lens was touching the surface of the book for this shot:

And the detail’s still in there if you need it – here are direct 500×250 pixel extractions from each image so you can see exactly what you’re getting.  DSLR is on top, P&S is on the bottom.  (Both shots were hand-held, f5.6, by the way).

Now I’m not saying that your point-and-shoot is going to give you better results than a dedicated, expensive macro lens setup, but I would suggest that you take a minute to get familiar with the tradeoffs, so that the next time you’re out wandering around you’ll know which tool is the best/fastest/easiest/mostconvenient for the job at hand.

After many many years of working with digital data I’ve gotten to be pretty careful and conscientious about doing backups.  I’ve had plenty of data lost over the years when I was young and naive but for the last several years I would run a nightly script that would clone my computer to a backup drive and I felt pretty safe.  Safe, that is, until the one day that the hard drive on my laptop decided to fail spectacularly right in the middle of the clone operation, spraying bits&bytes all over both drives as if they had been ejected from an active volcano.  It wasn’t a complete loss – I had some additional backups in place that were only slightly out-of-date – but it was enough to make me realize that I needed to have at least one more backup plan in place.   It was time to put on both suspenders and a belt.

Clearly the ideal backup situation is to make sure that your data is not just located on more than one disk drive but also located in a couple of different geographical locations.  So I went about exploring what my options were for some sort of cloud storage.
And after a bit of looking around I ended up trying out Mozy.  It seemed to offer what I wanted – a decent price for unlimited backup capability and it would continually run as a background process, making sure that anything new that showed up on my computer would get backed up in reasonably short order.

And it all seemed to be working fairly well, at least for the small drive in my laptop, and so I paid for a year’s worth of service and wrote a blogpost about how I was using it and also set it up to start backing up my big macpro (which has a lot more stuff on it).

But… then things got ugly.  For one thing, Mozy just couldn’t quite seem to handle the bigger machine.  And it was really slow – throttled bandwidth that meant it was going to take weeks, if not months, to get uploaded.  But that was almost a non-issue because it would keep timing out and/or just plain failing with the uploads anyway.  And Mozy would issue software updates that wouldn’t fix the problem and I would send off emails to their customer service and I wouldn’t get any decent responses and I would complain about them on Twitter and they’d contact me but then wouldn’t follow up and eventually I lost all confidence that they were every going to get their act together.

And for several months now I’ve been meaning to write a follow-up blogpost to that last one.  Because that post still gets decent traffic and I’ve been concerned that it’s misleading people into believing that I’m happily cruising along with Mozy as my backup solution.   Because I’m not.  Not even close.  Nope.  Mozy = Dead To Me.  Maybe they’ve since gotten things straightened out (though a bit of googling will show that my experience with them was far from unique) but after paying them $100 for what amounted to an exercise in Raising Ron’s Blood Pressure, it was very satisfying to uninstall the application from my systems.  [Note:  Technically I'm still 'using' them since I paid for a full year of service before I finally gave up and that year doesn't expire for a few more months and I don't feel any need to actually delete the files that I did manage to get uploaded... but nothing new has been put up there since I pulled that plug.]

Fortunately this story has a happier ending.  Another company came across my radar a couple of months ago – www.backblaze.com.  Backblaze offers much the same scenario as Mozy.  $5/month or $50/year for unlimited backup.  Automatic background-process uploading of data to keep the backup as up-to-date as possible.  Local encryption prior to upload. Etc.  Beyond that, Backblaze (unlike Mozy) doesn’t throttle upload speeds unless I tell it to.  So instead of waiting for weeks/months for all of my stuff to get uploaded, I could take advantage of a fast network and get my data – lots of data – safely backed up in a matter of days.

So I downloaded it and installed it and told it to get to work doing backups.  And, well, that’s pretty much the end of my story.  Because after that, I really didn’t think about it much.  Because it just worked.  It just happily kept shoveling files up to the Backblaze storage area and eventually everything I wanted was up there.  Everything, as in about 1 terabyte’s worth of my important files, documents and, in particular, photos.

And, finally I’m getting around to writing a good follow-up blogpost that makes it clear what my offsite backup solution of choice is.

There’s one other really nice thing about Backblaze.  It actually keeps a 30-day archive of incremental changes that you’ve made.  Sort of a mini time-machine.  So if you overwrite a document with a new version and then a few days later realize you need that original version, you can do a very quick, single-file download of last week’s version of the file.  I’ve already made use of this a couple of times.

But the bottom line for me is that Backblaze just seems to behave exactly as advertised.  Exactly as expected.

(Update:   One of the cool things about doing a reasonably-popular podcast like This Week in Photography is that we sometimes hear back from people and/or vendors that we talk about on the show.  I’d mentioned Backblaze a while back – recommended it to our listeners as a good service that I was happy to endorse – and recently got an email from Gleb Budman, the Founder & CEO of Backblaze.  We chatted a bit and he thanked me for mentioning his product on the show and I thanked him for creating a product that was worth mentioning.  And I offered to help get the word out a bit more by giving away (on their behalf) some free subscriptions.  Backblaze didn’t paying me for that nor did they give me anything for free – I’ve happily paid my $100 for my two computers and will continue to do so every year as long as the service continues to deliver what I need. But, in the spirit of ‘full disclosure’, I thought it was worth mentioning.)

The sister of a dear friend of mine has been missing for some time now. Marilyn Bergeron was last seen in Québec City nearly a year ago and my friend and her family are organizing an effort to try and jump-start the search and to turn up any new information that may be available. Please visit www.findmarilyn.com (English) or www.trouvermarilyn.com (French) for more details. They’re planning to put up flyers in several of the larger Canadian cities on Sunday, February 15th, and if you’d like to help with that effort please get in touch with my friend at contact@findmarilyn.com.

I met Marilyn several times when she came to visit California and every time I talked to her she was sweet and full of laughter and full of life. Any information on her disappearance, no matter how small, might be the key to finding her so please take a minute to look over the website and to see if there’s anything that you might be able to contribute to the search.

Thank you so much for helping.

-ron

Youtube user AgraphaFX has collected and curated a whole lot of visual-effects related videos into one place. Behind the scenes ‘making of’ stuff on everything from Star Wars to Doctor Who – lots of classic old stuff in particular. Worth checking out! www.youtube.com/user/AgraphaFX

Just because I like to share, here’s some things that I enjoyed in 2008.  This isn’t necessarily a ‘best of’ or a ‘must have’ or even a set of recommendations… it’s just a stream-of-consciousness dump of things that I, personally, enjoyed.  Feel free to add your own list in the comments!

The RadioLab podcast, which never fails to teach me something new and fascinating.

Cudas Amigo Flipflops.  You do realize that I am a world-class authority on what makes a good flipflop, yes? 

Bob’s Red Mill Organic Golden Flaxseed Meal (just sprinkle it on your morning breakfast cereal – makes it even better.  And it’s like healthy, too).

The Taj Mahal

Blueberries. Matcha Tea. Rhubarb pie.  Sushi.  Not necessarily simultaneously, however.

Trader Joe’s grocery stores.

Panasonic DMC-LX3 I’ve only had this for a few weeks now but I’m really liking it.  Decent low-light capabilities for a point-and-shoot, a true wide-angle lens, and it’ll shoot HD video as well.  

Neil Stephenson’s Anathem.  

The Wire. (Which I only got around to discovering this year, and then spent a month watching all 5 seasons on DVD, completely addicted).  One of the best television shows ever?  Yup, probably. Definitely.

Not Getting Shot.

Versailles Cuban Restaurant (Los Angeles area).  Roasted Garlic 1/2 Chicken with a side of plantains.  OMFGDrool.

I walk past the Rovzar Gallery here in Seattle almost every day now and I’m really digging these sculptures they’ve got on display by artist Don Charles.  Made from a combination of animal parts, hardware, sculpted bits, and… um… spoons.

On the latest This Week in Photography show we chatted a bit about this great story of a guy who found a beat-up old suitcase set out as trash in front of a neighbor’s house.  He looked inside, realized it was full of old photos and decided to bring it home.  Only then did he realize that they were photos of Hiroshima, taken just a couple of months after the atomic bomb was dropped there.  Read the story here.

I’m a sucker for a good found-treasure story, even when it doesn’t involve something as historically significant as what is described above.  A day after reading that story, I came across this tale of a crappy old car that eventually sold on Ebay for $225,000.   

Can’t say that I’ve had much luck in the found treasure department.  Thinking about it just now, about the best I could come up with is a couple of old comic books I found in my Grandpa’s attic when I was a kid, including a somewhat beat-up copy of Detective Comics #105.  If it was in better shape it would be worth a decent amount but in the condition it’s in the sentimental value outweighs whatever I could sell it for.  But that does bring to mind the all-time best found-treasure comic-book story, which you can read here.  If you didn’t grow up being a comic-book geek that you probably won’t be all that impressed, but I’m sure that plenty of you out there can appreciate the uber-coolness of that story. 

So what about you, dear readers?  Anybody out there have good stories about treasure you’ve found?

Or, failing that, anybody out there with a box of old comic books (or pulp magazines) sitting in their attic that they want me to take off of their hands?  :-)

Nov20 ‘08 update:  Another great ‘found treasure’ that was just uncovered (literally) is here.

Soon after the election results had come in to the point where the major networks were willing to call it for Obama, I could hear from my 15th floor apartment in the heart of downtown that there was some growing activity going on in the streets.  So I tossed on a coat and wandered on down, straight into a spontaneous ‘flash mob’ that had gathered to celebrate.  It was a moving party, both literally and figuratively.  As it wound its way around downtown (and eventually up Pike street to Broadway) I was surrounded by a really wonderful mix of people – multi-ethic, generation-spanning, mixed-gender & everyone proud not only of their candidate but also of their country. 

I was trying to experience the moment rather than play the documentary photographer but I did grab a few snapshots along the way – feel free to check ‘em out on my flickr page.

Spent some time this weekend organizing some older photos and came across a batch from a trip to Moscow a few years back. And since today is the 51st anniversary of the first dog to orbit the planet (and, unfortunately, the first dog to die in orbit) it seems only appropriate to toss a few photos from the Moscow Cosmonautics Memorial Museum up onto flickr. And yes, there’s even a few stuffed cosmonaut-dogs in the museum. Feel free to help me out with identifying specific spacecraft (or dogs) in these photos, since (at least when I was there) all of the labels were written only in Russian. The whole photoset is here.

Again, only for those of you who don’t follow me on twitter, here’s a compendium of tweets from the last couple weeks:

——

TheBigPicture covers Yann Arthus-Bertrand: is.gd/3BpA His classic book “Earth From Above” (is.gd/3BuF) is magnificent, BTW #

Oh, and incase you didn’t notice it on the Big Picture blog, all those images have [map] link @ bottom to open googlemap of the location. #

Did you know that the string 777777777 occurs starting at the 24,658,601th digit of π? And my birthday’s around the 180millionth digit. #   www.angio.net/pi/bigpi.cgi #

Coolest thing I’ve seen on the web all week: cellar.org/showthread.php?t=18334 Set the shutter speed on camera to 6 MONTHS! #

I love it when I can justify browsing around cool websites like this as ‘part of my job’ (sort of): is.gd/3KAh #

This is sweet – and nicely planned out. tinyurl.com/534bth 

Photo of a chick embryo – do people find this weird or (like me) strangely beautiful? is.gd/3O1W #

fxguide just posted podcastinterview they did w/ me – visual effects geekitude & a bit of ‘I remember when’ oldfart stuff: is.gd/1nLE #

Re: fxguide interview – I feel bad that I totally spaced on mentioning Emmanuel Mogenet, the other primary developer on Shake. :-( #

Cool news for low light photography tinyurl.com/47m7wt #

The Big Picture of Sol: tinyurl.com/4hay23 #

According to glassbooth.org/ I should be voting Green party… but only barely – 1% more than Obama. Think I’ll factor in reality. #

Incidentally, that bump in twitter followers may have been due to an old blogpost getting picked up by reddit: is.gd/4jVy How random. #

Nice little bit of Greenpeace artwork: www.scaryideas.com/print/8973/ #

regarding old-time radio shows, X-1 and Dimension X featured an amazing array of classic SciFi stories adapted into radio plays. #

Just tossed a few quick photos from my hike up to the top of Mount Si  onto my flickr page.  A nice easy day-trip from Seattle – Only about an hour to get there and then a good two hours of uphill as you gain 3500feet of altitude.  Base of the mountain is the town of North Bend, where they filmed Twin Peaks, so that’s awesome too.

Well, I’ll be the first to admit that I do a much better job of posting 140-character tweets on twitter.com than long&thoughtful blogposts. But on the (potentially mistaken) assumption that some people who follow this blog don’t also follow me on Twitter, I thought I’d try to do a bit of crossposting. So in the true spirit of digital composting, here’s some pithy passages culled from recent twitter activity.  I’ll probably do this periodically.

• TheBigPicture covers Yann Arthus-Bertrand: is.gd/3BpA His classic book “Earth From Above” (is.gd/3BuF) is magnificent, BTW #
• Oh, and incase you didn’t notice it on the Big Picture blog, all those images have [map] link @ bottom to open googlemap of the location. #
• Did you know that the string 777777777 occurs starting at the 24,658,601th digit of π? And my birthday’s around the 180millionth digit. #
• for more pi fun, visit www.angio.net/pi/bigpi.cgi #
• At LAX. The muzak is rickrolling me. That’s just not fair. #

… and then there was a fair bit of political chatter.  Which I will try to summarize and comment on at some point.  Maybe.  See a brief discussion in the comments of this post 

The inflatable trash-bag street art of Joshua Allen Harris (someone create a Wikipedia article for this guy!) has been floating around the youtubes for several months now but I just watched a recent video and was struck again by how organic the sculpture’s movements can feel.  

As someone who has spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time dealing with what it takes to make animated (CG) characters feel alive, it’s rather humbling to see what some random air-currents can invoke.  Watch the video that I’ve linked to above and pay attention to how much you naturally tend to assign emotional overtones to the action you’re seeing.  There are parts where you’d swear there’s an intelligence/awareness behind the movements of this creature – I see shyness, curiosity, etc.  I can easily build up a narrative in my head about how this lonely creature has come down out of the wilderness and is trying to understand how to survive on the streets of the big city.

It’s no secret that our brain tries to assign familiar patterns to the unfamiliar so it’s not all that surprising that we would tend to mentally map this four-legged inanimate object into a standard animal-model.  But is there more to it?  Does the actual construction of the sculpture contribute to this, where appropriate placement of leg or neck joints can cause the body to move in a more lifelike fashion?  Does the artist ‘tune’ the construction to enhance this?

More importantly, does the fact that everything is based on an ‘engine’ that has a significant quantity of randomness in it teach us something about how we should approach our own animations?   One of the most obvious problems with poorly-done computer animation is that it can feel far too deliberate and predictable – and consequently it has no soul.  Maybe introducing a bit of randomness, particularly if it’s partially influenced by a number of environmental factors, could help significantly with the problem of creating a personality.  

One of the most amazing things in the video comes from the fact that the air-currents which inflate and surround the creature are modified as people come near.  This, consequently, affects the movement of the sculpture itself, making it seem as if it is intentionally interacting with anybody who approaches.   It will sometimes flinch away if someone moves too quickly but it can also decide to show spontaneous affection, leaning it’s body against someone who is reaching out to pet it, in a motion that I’ve seen cats do a thousand times.  (Take a look at about the 55-second mark).

Has anybody ever analyzed the micro-movements a human makes whenever someone new enters the room, or walks nearby, or starts to speak?  In my book I have a chapter that focuses on how all the lights in an environment interact with each other and make the point that ultimately everything is a light source – it’s either generating light or it’s reflecting it.  And if you introduce a new object into an environment – set a red ball down next to something – you need to recognize that the light reflecting off of that ball will affect everything that it is near.   

But we need to recognize that the movement of a living creature is much the same.  Our head will turn slightly whenever a new noise occurs, be it the sound of a door opening or a car honking in the street.  We constantly readjust our position and stance relative to others in the room as they move about and come closer to our personal comfort zone.   This is a concern even beyond the boundaries of animation.  With so many movies being constructed in postproduction – people shot on bluescreen and added to a scene later – we have exactly the same problem.  Yes, an actor can do their best to react to a co-star that isn’t actually on stage with them at the same time, but can they also do a convincing job of reacting to all the other missing stimuli?  The characters and objects and sounds and smells that will surround them?  These reactive movements may be tiny tiny tiny in some cases but they’re definitely there, and I’m sure we notice them if they’re missing.  Maybe not consciously, but in the back of our brains the primitive subconscious who has a deep-seated distrust for the unnatural and the unfamiliar will start to scream ‘FAKE’ as things slip towards unreality. 

Which of course takes us straight to the concept of the Uncanny Valley.  The term has generally been applied to the ‘creepiness’ factor we feel if a face (robot/animatronic or computer-generated) is nearly believable but not completely.  If it’s cartoon-like then we’re fine with it – our mind can interpret it as purely symbolic and the reality filter doesn’t click in.  (See Scott McCloud’s brilliant Understanding Comics).  But that borderline area where it’s trying to be real but doesn’t succeed – that’s the deadly valley.   

And I would claim that this problem exists any time we’re trying to emulate reality, including for instance the bad physics of a character doing a stunt that relies on wires (which we later remove).   When we see a superhero fly, it’s rarely the actual flying that feels strange, it’s almost always the take-off or landing.  The flying itself is too broadly unnatural for us to worry about, but we’re all familiar with what it should look like when someone jumps or when they touch ground again after jumping.  Then again I suppose you could probably just broadly categorize bad acting in general as being firmly planted at the bottom of the uncanny valley…

Getting back to animation, I’m wondering if it makes sense to develop tools that can be applied as a post-process after all the primary animation is done.  Tools that analyze the rest of the environment/scene/characters and then algorithmically add in the final bits of nuance mentioned above to produce subtleties that are appropriate and motivated and organic.

I’ve been wondering for a while about when user interfaces are really going to move out of their mostly Euclidean worldview, giving us something more like this:

(click on the image to pop up a video in a new window… at least until I can figure out why WordPress isn’t letting me properly embed a Vimeo video).

The reason why I think an interface like this can be superior in many ways is that it allows you to specify an area of interest where you get full, detailed information yet you can still see the full document/page/object at the same time.  Which means that one is able to avoid the zoom(in/out)-scroll-zoom(in/out)-scroll paradigm that you often get stuck in when using, for example, the iphone.   In many ways it gives the user an analogue to the way peripheral vision works in the ‘real world’.  You have an area of interest that you can focus on but then you’re also aware of the surroundings and glean information from that as well.

(The mockup I did above just shows a single point-of-interest but it’s certainly expandable to multiple points if you’ve got a touchscreen or other such device.  And there’s all sort of little refinements you’d want to implement if you really wanted to make it swank – drag&drop from one place to another might want to keep the source area zoomed but also follow the dragged object with a zoom-region until you get to the appropriate destination. This all gets even sexier once eye-tracking becomes more available – the area you’re looking at would bubble up to full resolution but you’d still be able to quickly scan the entire page and re-target the area of interest.  Somebody get busy on this, okay?)

Of course it’s not like nobody’s started down this road – there’s plenty of what I’d consider ‘minor’ examples, including an optional behavior under OSX for the ‘Dock’ application launcher.   (Although that particular implementation is done primarily to make the target icon easier to find rather than to add information in the enlarged area).  But the general concept of having an adaptive interface that is smart about where it shows you more detail is really only in its infancy.

Following the same thoughts in a slightly different direction, I’m wondering if anybody has done a video game yet where this sort of rendering is implemented?  In such a scenario we’d have the bulk of the image presented in the normal fashion but as you get nearer to the edge of the screen you’d have a much larger field-of-view (like, out to 180degrees) compressed into a relatively small space.  Yes, you wouldn’t be able to see a whole lot of detail about what exactly is going on to your extreme right or left, but you would be able to see/sense any anomalous motion along the borders… exactly the same sort of thing your peripheral vision provides you.  Take a look at these examples:  For this first one we’ve got a normal rendering of the scene.  Looks safe enough out there.  Relax.

Now consider the same setting where we’re rendering with peripheral vision implemented.

See the guy on the left-hand side?  The one with the BIG GIANT GUN who’s getting ready to SHOOT YOU IN THE FACE…

(Click here to see a video comparison of what these look like in action).  [UPDATE, OCT 17.   VIMEO has some silly policy about not allowing 'Video Game Footage' on their site, so they just tookdown the videos.  So this now links over to a slightly lower-rez version on Flickr.]

Clearly our survival as a species has relied on exactly this sort of wider field-of-view awareness of our surroundings and having a game provide the same feeling (at least until we get to the point where fully immersive displays are common) would seem to be a compelling feature.

Just came across some interesting numbers from Russ Daggatt, who apparently doesn’t blog, just sends interesting emails off to interesting people.   In this case I’m taking them from a recent blogpost by David Brin (scroll down in the post a bit to get there).  At any rate, here are the stats that I thought would be worth passing along:

here is an update in our comparison of eight years under Clinton versus nearly eight years under Bush:

Job growth under Clinton : 22.7 million jobs – 237,000 per month.
Job growth under Bush: 5.8 million jobs – 72,000 per month (and going DOWN).

There has been a net loss of jobs every month so far in 2008. Bush will have the distinction as the first president since World War II to preside over an economy in which federal government employment rose more rapidly than employment in the private sector (civilian federal government employment went DOWN substantially under Clinton).

The earnings of the average American family (or “real median household income” in economic parlance) peaked in 1999 at $49,222 and has fallen since. This is the first economic expansion in this country’s history when household income failed to set a new record. It will certainly decline further this year.

And how did investors do under Clinton vs. Bush? The Dow Jones Industrial Average went up from 3253 to 10,587 under Clinton (325%). It has gone up to 11,503 under Bush (8.7%). The S&P 500 went up from 447 to 1342 under Clinton (300%). It has gone DOWN to 1279 under Bush ( 4.7%). The NASDAQ went up from 700 to 2770 under Clinton (395%). It has gone DOWN to 2347 under Bush (-15.3%)

When Bush took office oil was $31/barrel. Now it is roughly $125/barrel. (That’s what happens when you put oil men in the White House.)

When Bush took office it took 93 cents to buy a Euro. Now it takes $1.56 to buy a Euro.

When Bush took office gold was around $250 an ounce. Now it is $915 an ounce.

I could go on, but you get the idea. The US economy did MUCH better under the fiscally-responsible “high tax” policies of Clinton than under the irresponsible “borrow and squander” policies of Bush.

Read the post linked to above if you want some more in-depth analysis of both McCain’s and Obama’s tax and healthcare plans and much food for thought.

And feel free to comment on the statistics too, because I’m sure someone out there has an opposing viewpoint :-)

UPDATE:  Russ Daggatt is finally doing a blog - http://daggatt.blogspot.com/  

Filled with all sort of good stuff, at least if your politics lean to the left… (like mine do).

Wandering around Copenhagen a couple of weeks ago I stopped into a 7-11 to get a quick drink.  (For those of you that haven’t been to Copenhagen, understand that 7-11’s are more common than Starbucks are in Seattle.  Like, significantly more common – pretty much one on every block it seems).  And I noticed the following sign:

Yup, Ubuntu Cola.  Naturally the cynic in me had to wonder if this was some extremely niche-focused marketing attempt to appeal to UNIX users or something.  I didn’t actually buy a can, mostly because I don’t generally drink sugar water, but did take the photo which then prompted me to do a bit of Wikipedia-searching once I was back home and sorting through everything:

        Ubuntu Cola is a soft drink certified by the Fairtrade Foundation.

But more importantly, I learned that:

        The cola is named after the African philosophy of Ubuntu, or humanity towards others.

Which is, I think, a worthwhile term to know.  And to share.  Which is why I’m writing about it.

Finally got some time to fire up Aperture and organize some of the pix I shot while wandering around Europe last month.  South of France, Berlin, Copenhagen and a brief day-trip across the bridge over to Sweden.  As is usually the case, it’s a fairly random collection – hopefully more weighted to interestingness rather than just aesthetic or technical merit.  Check ‘em out here.  

I’m gradually trying to get photos from some of my older trips online as well – the collection is kept here.

(higher quality version here)

Been dealing with stereo a fair bit lately, thinking about how The Foundry’s optical flow stuff applies to a variety of interesting problems.  So when I came across this gizmodo post, it was pretty clear that another fun way of presenting a stereo pair would be to animate between the two eyes.  An easy big of magic for The Foundry’s retiming tools (you could of course do it using Apple’s Shake or Motion and a bunch of other packages – though the quality of the results would probably vary).

So here’s an animated gif that, instead of merely flipping back&forth, smoothly moves the (virtual) camera between the two eye positions.  A bit less painful to view I think…

This is pretty fun. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Shorpy (www.shorpy.com) it’s an awesome website (or RSS feed as I use it) that is constantly publishing wonderful high-resolution photos dating to about 100 years ago. Today they put up a photo of a street in New York City and then linked to the present-day Google Street-view .

It’s probably not quite as significant as getting slashdotted (or boingboinged) but here’s what the ’stats’ on my blog showed the other day after my hot-water-bottle post got linked to by Gizmodo and Lifehacker.

Which just goes to show how tough it is to have a consistently-visited blog… you’ve actually, like, got to work at it or something… :-)

I just saw that Mozy for the mac has officially released their 1.0 version (after a really really really long time in beta) and I figure that’s as good an excuse as any to do a quick post on my experience with the service. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Mozy. Conceptually I think it’s great – it’s a low-level background process that periodically backs up whatever files you’ve selected to an online storage space. The cost is reasonable ($5/month) and (as I discovered when a recent hard-drive failed DURING a clone operation, destroying both the original data AND the safe copy) having an offsite backup of one’s data is generally a Very Good Idea.

But on the other hand my experience during the Mozy beta period (nearly a year long… is it really fair to charge people full price for a piece of software that lives in beta that long?) was hardly a pleasant experience. The file uploader was extraordinarily flaky, failing so often that it felt like I was constantly babysitting the thing. Part of the issue may have been the amount of data I’m (still) trying to get uploaded to the server – about 300 GB. But hey, that’s the whole reason why I went with Mozy and their ‘unlimited’ storage offer. If you’re planning to upload that much stuff, figure it’s going to take a few MONTHS to get up there. If you’re lucky.

In terms of the recovery process, things aren’t that much better. When I needed to download a good chunk of data back down from the server (19GB of stuff that had been on the laptop whose drive crashed&burned) Mozy conveniently (not) provided me with 46 separate .dmg files to download and then re-assemble by hand. That wasn’t pleasant.

One final gripe – a nitpick really. The little ’status’ window – the one that Mozy pops up to tell you what’s going on with your backup – it features a big “Your Files are Backed Up” at the top of the window, even if your backup didn’t yet complete. Sorry, but my files aren’t backed up yet… so don’t claim that they are!

Bottom line, of course, is that Mozy did do the job when I needed it, so I can’t complain too much. I just wish it was a little cleaner and more user-friendly, particularly when it comes to backing up larger chunks of data. Actually, what I really wish they offered was a way to do the initial backup to their server using a nice fast FTP upload. It’s pretty clear that they don’t want to do that because the annoyance factor prevents people from backing up as much to their servers, but do you really want to manage your users by keeping them on the edge of frustration?

At any rate, I guess I’m going to continue with it for a while longer and hope that the released version has now managed to iron out a few of the kinks I’d experienced. The year’s worth of service I pre-paid expires in July and by then I should have a better idea if I’m going to continue with this or look for something else.

Update:  After much pain and suffering, I finally booted Mozy to the curb and am happily running Backblaze.  See here for more.

If you read the gadget blogs with any kind of regularity you’ve probably noticed that just about every few week there’s mention of yet another form of laptop stand. And they’re all generally overpriced or (if it’s via some lifehacker do-it-yourself article) a pain-in-the-butt to put together. So, purely as a public service to everybody out there who is as bored of reading about these as I am, let me share the secret solution for the ultimate in laptop cooling happiness:

Yup, buy a hot water bottle, ($6 at Amazon, for instance), fill it up with tap-water (room-temperature is fine) and insert strategically between laptop and lap. It’s comfy, acts as a nice heat-sink, and as a bonus it probably blocks a fair bit of the dangerous ‘electronic rays’ that are shooting out of the bottom of the computer straight at your important bits. Or you can set it on the table and lean the laptop on it that way – the rubber surface is grippy enough to hold it in place. Simple, cheap, elegant – what’s not to like? If you search a bit further you can find them in a variety of shapes and colors even. And yes, you could probably design something that uses the same filled-with-water concept but is more specifically targeted to the task – if someone has access to cheap offshore manufacturing to whip this up then I’ll be happy to do the design work. But it’s probably not worth the effort when this solution works just fine. I’ve been using it for about 2 years and haven’t had any problems with laptop (or with lap – all important bits are apparently functioning properly, thank you). And if it’s a cold night you can tuck it under the covers when you’re heading to bed.

Okay, for those of you who saw a few cryptic twitter posts late last night, here’s the full story. My friend Buckley and I went to catch the 8:15pm showing of the movie Street Kings at a theater in El Segundo. (For those of you who don’t know the area, it’s generally very quiet, safe, upscale… But continue down the street several more miles and you do end up driving straight into Compton.) The movie, by the way, which featured Keanu Reeves in a surprisingly decent performance, was competently made but ultimately a bit unmemorable I guess. Violent, set in LA, lots of (mostly crooked) cops shooting each other. How ironic…

We’d sat through most of the credits (something that those of us who occasionally work in the film business generally feel compelled to do) and wandered out into the main lobby. It was reasonably full of people and I did notice that there were two police officers hanging around at the concession stand. I’ve been to this theater many many times and while I wouldn’t say it’s common to see police there, it’s also not totally out of the ordinary. And it was a Friday night.

I popped into the bathroom, took care of business, and was coming back out and talking to my girlfriend on my mobile phone – laughing at the fact that she’d called me while I was standing at the urinal. And then it turned into one of those moments that would seem almost cliche’d in the way the mood immediately went from lighthearted and silly to something much different.

Gunshots in real life don’t sound anything like they do in a Keanu Reeves movie – there’s none of that deep rich subwoofer-enhanced fullness to them. Rather it’s more like a firecracker going off – pop, pop, pop. It takes a fraction of a second to actually register what I’m hearing and I look up and across the lobby as I hear people starting to scream. All I can see is one of the police officers grappling with some heavy-set gang-banger type. This is probably 20-30 feet in front of me. And shots are still being fired. At this point I wasn’t at all sure how many guns or people were involved but clearly the sensible thing was to get the hell out of any potential line-of-fire. There was a little alcove just outside the bathrooms – an area where they have 4 or 5 arcade videogames set up – and I stepped back into that area, taking a quick look around to see if there was any additional exit from there (nope – a dead end). My memory is that several more shots in very rapid succession continued for a second longer and, as I came back to where I could see more of what was going on, there were people screaming and scrambling for cover. The shooting seemed to have stopped and looking back out towards where the action was taking place I could see one police officer down on his knee, gun drawn and looking out the glass door to the sidewalk in front of the theater. There was a body on the ground there – the guy who had been grappling with the officer. He wasn’t moving.

Talking to various witnesses and officers after the fact (as we were waiting around to be interviewed) it seems what happened was this: The ’suspect’ (you find yourself starting to talk like a cop after listening to them chat amongst themselves for a few hours) had been in the lobby and angry about something – wanting a refund for a movie ticket? Someone said they thought he was drunk as well. The manager of the theater (a middle-aged asian woman who was still way freaked out when I talked to her later) asked him to leave and when he didn’t one of the officers went over to make it happen. Apparently the officer at some point started to (or at least tried to) do a pat-down on the guy and he pulled a gun (or grabbed the cop’s?) and started shooting. I’m assuming that’s the point where I heard the shots and looked over – the cop and the suspect grappling for the gun? Somehow the suspect made a break for the exit – only few yards away from where things started – as shots continued to be exchanged. Part of this is what my friend Buckley saw then – the 2nd cop was shooting as well, firing out of the glass exit doors and ultimately following the suspect outside and continuing to shoot until he was certain that the other guy wasn’t going to be firing back. Ever.

Backup police officers showed up relatively quickly, as did the EMT’s. I don’t even remember seeing the 2nd officer after that – I’m assuming he was standing outside near the body. The first cop was just inside the entrance on one knee and then eventually being worked on by the paramedics when they arrived. Best information I have is that the first officer was shot in the leg and the face and the 2nd was shot in the shoulder. According to news reports, none of the injuries were life-threatening.

As we were all standing there a few people who clearly knew the guy laying out on the sidewalk walked by me, and a couple of them went outside to see. I just remember one guy in particularly coming back in, distraught, saying in near-tears ‘oh God they shot him’. A woman with him also saw the body and she came back in and fell to the ground, sobbing. Strange mixed feelings at this point – I felt bad for these people and the obvious trauma they were experiencing. But at the same time I recognized that there was clearly a very real possibility that they, too, were carrying weapons and were in a state where their next actions could easily be to pull a gun as well. Don’t really remember where they went after that – I think I took a step back so that I was a little bit out of their line of sight even though they were only a couple of feet away.

But fortunately the ‘excitement’ was over, and the rest of the night turned into mostly a lot of waiting around. Massive numbers of police showed up over the course of the next half-hour – I’d have to guess that the total was several hundred by the end of it all. Local city cops from the various surrounding towns, LAX airport police (Los Angeles Airport is 10 minutes away from here) Sheriff’s deputies, and eventually a large number of fully-equipped SWAT officers. This might sound like a rather overzealous show of force – that’s what I was thinking at first – but the point of it was that they had a building full of people – there are 12 screens in this complex – and no idea if any of the shooter’s associates were still around, what they were doing, etc., and the fact is that some of them had probably slipped into the darkened rooms where movies were still being shown.

So we were effectively locked-down as the various different forces tried to coordinate their efforts and figure out a way to keep track of witnesses and check everything else. Three of us (Buckley and I and one of the security guys from the theater) could identify some of the group mentioned above and eventually as they started evacuating the individual theaters one-by-one (and searching everybody for weapons as they exited) we had to stand there and see if we saw anybody that had been associated with the shooter. Lines of people filing out, some scared, some annoyed, all of them walking past us and probably wondering why the hell we were looking at them.

Didn’t see anybody I recognized, although (in what I believe was an unrelated incident) there was one guy who left the theater and then apparently took off running once he made it outside. Turns out he’d been carrying a gun and had dumped it in the theater and tried to get away before someone connected it to him. Fail.

Once all the theater had been evacuated we still had to wait around to give recorded statements to the sheriff’s investigators… and we clearly weren’t at the top of their priority list. But sometime around 4am-ish they came and got us from one of the theaters where they’d stashed us and took us outside to this mobile command center they’d brought over. Big trailer that had desks and chairs and 5 or so detectives. At this point, about 5.5 hours after the actual shooting, the forensic investigation was well underway and they had the body partially stripped of clothing and now laying face-down on the sidewalk as we walked past. We gave our statements and we were finally let go.

Chatted for a second more with one of the sheriff’s officers – she’d been tasked with babysitting us for part of this. And there was this really fucked-up juxtaposition of a table full of little sandwiches and fruit-bowls set up for the investigative team… all within a few yards of this now completely nude, face-up, bullet-riddled body.

Walked back to the car, home, sleep by 5am.

Actual news coverage of the event is fairly thin. Mostly just stuff like this.

Yeah yeah, okay I’ll twitter then. User name ‘ronbrinkmann’. Don’t expect wisdom.

I’ve come across a couple of articles recently that got me to thinking about, well, truth. Not so much Truth in the grand secrets-of-the-universe sense of the word but rather in the basic simple sense of not telling falsehoods.

Because it’s starting to look like one of the most significant societal changes we’ll have to deal with in the near future is that it may soon become nearly impossible to tell lies. Or, more specifically, to tell lies without a really really good chance of getting caught.

There are a few things pointing towards this:

First of all, the accuracy of brain-scanning lie-detectors will become radically better within
the next few years. Technologies based on MRI will almost certainly become accurate enough that we should start using them in court. Whether or not we will is a different question, although having done jury duty a couple of times I’m absolutely convinced that, overall, justice would be much better served than with our current system where the skill (or ineptitude) of the lawyer ends up being far more influential on the verdict than the evidence available in the case.*

But that sort of thing – requiring someone to undergo an obvious and overt brain-scan – isn’t particularly game-changing. Rather it’s all the work being done on passive lie-detection that’s really going to impact our day-to-day. The ability to truth-check even the simplest social interactions.

The Department of Defense certainly believes this is possible – they’ve called for the development of lie detectors that can be used without the subject knowing they are being assessed. (The Department of Homeland Security is also getting in on the act.) And if they’re successful, I’d personally rather have this technology available to the general public than to have it solely controlled by a group of military elites. Not that I’m skeptical of their trustworthiness or anything. <cough><eyeroll><cough>

There is also work being done on algorithms that can detect potential lies purely based on word-choice in written correspondences, and obviously voice-stress analysis is eventually going to get much more sophisticated as well.

Finally, there is some very interesting research going on to detect lies by analyzing the speaker’s face – both via the recognition of microexpressions and with the aid of infrared photography.

Now, granted, some of these things may take a bit more time to develop – machines (see here) are still notoriously unreliable when it comes to accurate lie-detection. But I’d be willing to bet the timeframe is going to be measured in years, not decades.

Even if we ignore advances in technology that are specifically designed for lie-detection, there’s still the issue of good old fashioned fact-checking. We don’t necessarily need to tell if someone is lying directly if we have massive resources available to confirm what they’re saying. From ubiquitous security cameras to the army of cellphone-camera-toting individuals who can be anywhere (what Jamais Cascio, riffing on a Charlie Stross essay, has dubbed the participatory panopticon), nobody can be certain that they weren’t recorded doing something or saying something that would contradict any statements they’re currently making.

Finally, even if many of these technologies don’t all work perfectly, they really don’t have to. As long as people believe that the chance of getting caught in a lie is a significant probability, they will adjust their truthfulness accordingly.

Of course it’s going to be an arms-race, just like everything else. There will be technologies developed that can counteract various lie-detection systems, there will be legislative hurdles put in place to prevent the use of these systems, etc., etc. But ultimately I have to believe that the baseline for how easy it is to tell an untruth will be changed significantly. Which, in turn, could dramatically affect the way that we deal with each other. Can we survive without the little white lies we use as social lubrication? The small untruths (like the foma in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle) that we need to keep us happy?

But enough about the future. Let’s talk about now. Because those last few video/audio analysis techniques I mentioned raise a particularly interesting scenario: Even though we may not have the technology yet to accurately and consistently detect when someone is lying, we will eventually be able to look back at the video/audio that is being captured today and determine, after the fact, whether or not the speaker was being truthful. In other words, even though we may not be able to accurately analyze the data immediately, we can definitely start collecting it. Infrared cameras are readily available, and microexpressions (which may occur over a span of less than 1/25th of a second) should be something that even standard video (at 30fps) would be able to catch. And today’s cameras should have plenty of resolution to grab the details needed, particularly if you zoom in on the subject – don’t frame like this:

Frame like this:

(Photo of GWB chosen completely at random – I would never suggest that our fearless leader might, perhaps, just occasionally, say something that is leaning towards the realm of non-truthiness)

Which brings us to the real point of this post.Is it possible that we’ve gotten to the point where certain peoples – I’m thinking specifically of politicians both foreign and domestic – should be made aware that anything they say in public will eventually be subject to retroactive truth-checking… Because it seems to me that someone needs to start recording all the Presidential debates NOW with a nice array of infrared and high-definition cameras. And they need to do it in a public fashion so that every one of these candidates is very aware of it and of why it is being done.

Or am I just being naïve in thinking that the fear of eventually being identified as a liar would actually cause people (or politicians) to modify their current behavior? Maybe, but it seems like it’s at least worth talking about.

And in the meantime I need to hurry up and post this to my blog so that I can run off to my dinner with Angelina Jolie get busy on the secret mission that the United Nations has asked me to undertake answer some questions that the Nobel Prize committee has about my work uhh, do some laundry.

*Incidentally, I’m not really advocating that we replace juries with lie-detection machines yet.  But I’m wondering if the next sensible step might be to consider the lie-detector as, effectively, a member of the jury.  Give the machine the equivalent of a vote in the verdict, instead of using it as a sole arbiter.  Unfortunately this probably still stretches the interpretation of  ”a jury of one’s peers” a bit too far…

Poking around on Amazon and I just realized that the 2nd edition of my book is now available for pre-order. It features the somewhat-finalized cover, shown below. (Although it’s hard to see the fact that the ‘old’ cover image is actually being used as the dark background for the more colorful artwork). At any rate, the link is here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0123706386