URLs From the Edge

This article suggests that US firms have developed advanced surveillance technologies with taxpayer money, and which are now being resold to China for the purpose of strengthening China's repressive, dictatorial controls over their people. --> China's all-seeing eye

Sigh. If even 50% of this story is true, I am stunned and disgusted. I do not support our government condoning or allowing such active suppressions of democracy or personal freedoms without at least rigorous examination and oversight, as it is likely against our short and long term national interests.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Ubiquitous law enforcement is already a very slippery slope, never mind putting such tools into the hands of a repressive government bent on wholesale thought-control for the ‘betterment’ of their society.

With the rapid pace of technological development, it is easy for the affordances / utility of new technologies to become instruments of national power. The traditional slow pace of bureaucracy will not keep pace with logarithmic rates of change without conscious and active planning. To summarize my point: export controls must be rapidly and continually reassessed from an intelligent and informed point of view - we can no long afford to think about them as consisting of just missiles and supercomputers, but must rather implement a careful, expert level of scrutiny, with an eye towards secondary and emergent re-uses of seemingly innocuous technology.

I can't help but think that the Chinese government is laughing at us.

I just spent an hour removing several hundred spam comments on my blog. Apparently the settings were such that Anonymous Users could leave comments. I thought I had disabled that, but I guess that slipped through my testing. If you want to leave a comment, it now needs to be approved by me first (part of the entry form) or you must create an account (just drop me a note and I'll approve it).

Why don't we prosecute companies that USE spammers, instead of just the spammers?

Sigh.

I was reading over on BoingBoing about people finding some old EPCOT artwork.

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/04/06/more-fantastic-epcot.html

While it was cool art, I was disappointed to see that it was from the marketing campaign for the 'new' EPCOT, and not the original. I posted the following comment on the blog, which I thought I'd share here as well;

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While I love the art style, I still mourn for the wondrous EPCOT that Walt (and his WED team) originally designed, rather than this mundane thing they eventually built.

Chris Cole used to tell a sad story that went something like this:

"Walt Disney said "Let's make cartoons in color!" and marketing people said "You're crazy, Walt, no one wants or needs that" and then he did it anyway and it was amazing and successful and the marketing people said "Wow, Walt's a genius!".

Then Walt said "Let's use cartoons to tell full length stories; tales which can never be told with real films and actors" and the marketing people said "You're crazy, Walt, no one wants or needs that" and then he did it anyway and it was amazing and successful and the marketing people said "Wow, Walt's a genius!".

Then Walt said "Let's create an amusement park like no other - a clean, friendly place, where we can build narrative spaces and meaningful experiences that people will remember all their lives" and the marketing people said "You're crazy, Walt, no one wants or needs that" and then he did it anyway and it was amazing and successful and the marketing people said "Wow, Walt's a genius!".

Finally Walt had his greatest vision to date; He said "Cities are in horrible shape, poorly laid out, designed by chance and greed, and giving rise to all kinds of environmental and social ills. We can do better than this! Besides, mankind will someday journey to the stars, trips that may take centuries - we'd best learn how to live together soon; let's build a carefully designed arcology that puts the people's needs first, and which improves and changes efficiently as technology evolves. We'll call it EPCOT; Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow!" and the marketing people said "You're crazy, Walt, no one wants or needs that".

...and then Walt died...

and the marketing people took control of the company said "Walt was crazy, let's build a big themed shopping center - people want and need that!"

Sigh.

Here's a wish list of all the strange projects I'd like to accomplish this year:

+ Build and fly an L2 class Rocket. Too much time spent looking at Steve Jurvetson's pictures of LDRS and Rocket-Mavericks for my own good. This is a hobby I could embrace!

+ BIG Movie Screen on the side of the house for parties (sound system, power, old projector, etc.). All the parts are ready, just need to assemble it from all the scraps I've been stockpiling.

+ a Cloud Chamber with a good CCD camera (and a good use for all those old smoke-detector alpha sources).

+ Halloween Alien drama - The less said, the better.

+ The Burning Man art project with my fellow mad-sci buddy, Squirrel (shhh!)

+ Build a large Aviary/Flight for the birds so they can spread their wings and spend more time outside. The price of stainless steel means I have to be clever here.

+ Garden Temple - We've been sketching and planning how we'd upgrade the garden/back-yard since the week we moved in... now it's time to start getting it done.

+ LED lights in crown-molding. I've always thought that the new high-output/low-energy LEDs were the right answer to ambient lighting so why not try it?

That should be enough for now... :-)

So, I've been musing about energy management; that is, emotional energy management. I'm currently working at a small game/tech start-up company (I'm a founder) and for a variety of reasons it's very draining emotionally... So, like many people who have a stressful job, I use my weekends to recharge in preparation for the next weeks toil. With this as the warp/weft of my life for a little while, I began thinking about ways to better manage my emotional energy.

For instance, I noticed that in a week where I have a day off (sick, work-from-home, holiday, etc.) that my overall quality of life goes through the roof. I sleep better, I'm more productive and sharper, etc. It doesn't seem to be about physical sleep/exhaustion, it seems more about having a break in the routine, or a context switch that lets all the pressurized emotional static get discharged. I suspect it's much the same with why mammals need to dream; there is some complex chemical/emotional/memory-processing thing that needs to happen or the brain can't process any more input effectively.

If there weren't so many other people's needs tied up with how/when I take vacations, I might think about taking my years vacation time and spending it the moment it accrues. Eg. one day off every other week... perhaps Wednesday or Fridays. It would be an interesting experiment, that's perhaps better run when I'm not a partial owner of the company.

I was going to make this post about *how* I spend my free days; all the weird mad-scientist stuff I do for fun... but I'll save that for another post.

It's funny how Burning Man gets into the blood. I was having a great discussion the other day about the message of hope that is delivered directly to my soul when I see thousands of people collaboratively building something complex, creative and social. BM does this in spades, with a distinct flavor that reeks of ritual and culture. There are deep things happening here.

I'm beginning to develop a new appreciation for being in a startup. The amount of focus on 'getting stuff done' quickly subsumes everything else in your life. The alternative is failure and disappointment.

I'm finally starting to get enough time to contribute to Fabula Rasa (the Interactive Story team site from Project Horseshoe). Many of this years PH reports are fascinating reading.

If you are interested in how games are evolving as a professional storytelling medium, check it out; PH

Actually, my new office at C3L3B is right down the hall from my old office at Emergent... but my view is a little better now.

The trees and things make for nice backdrop. Notice (in the foreground on my desk) Kurt has set his USS Excelsior officers wardroom coffee-service china. Probably Ok I guess, since my shirt looks like a Star Trek uniform. Yep, the geek-meter is set pretty high around here.

So Nikolai is finally getting over his fear of being upside down. What does this mean? It means I have a loud, insane, adrenalin-junkie circus-bird with no regard for his own safety.

We recently added some rings to the ceiling so we could hang up various parrot-things (ropes, nets, etc.) for play-time. OMG.

In these images he's swinging hard to gain momentum. Then he lets go with one foot and *spins* until he's incoherently dizzy. Oh, he screams with glee at the top of his big avian lungs pretty much the whole time too. Eeep. At least he's having fun.