dreamshovel

Three things that are, literally, the stuff of dreams:

• levitation
• telekinesis
• teleportation

All of these will be common in the next decade via metaverse-based human augmentation.

The obvious and core component is the necessity to surmount the “interface plateau” and enable efficient, low-effort avatar manipulation and I/O. Over the next several years this will be done by crude EEG/EMG-driven controllers combined with very primitive haptics. Yet even such a coarse interface will be far superior to the mouse + WASD keyboard kludge common today. And those primitive interfaces will deeply catalyze the expansion of human experience to the greater mindspace, of which the physical form is just a part.

Assuming of course, that we can stave off the violence of ignorance and the pornography of authoritarianism for the next couple of decades.

Will the toddlers of today grow to regard these “elements” less as magic than just half-implemented features of Human technology? I hope so, if only because by reifying some dreams, some magic, we make room for more, wonderful things to come.

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.
—John F. Kennedy, May 1961

At the time of that speech US had a total of about 15 minutes of manned sub-orbital spaceflight experience, all of which came from Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 Mercury flight only three weeks earlier.

About 6 years later the Saturn V, the launch vehicle for all moon bound flights, made its maiden flight. Not one of the 13 Saturn V’s launched ever failed. The Saturn V cost around $43B in today’s USD, about the same as the combined 2009 payroll cost for the top TWO Wall Street banks.

And about 2 years after that we made it to the moon. We went back a few times to show it was no accident. Total cost of about $100B (today).

Now a couple of generations have passed and the country is in dire need of some inspiring accomplishments. And although we will probably need every cent and brain to tackle adverse climate problems and resource depletion, insane political posturing may well keep anything transformative from happening on that front anytime soon.

So, Mars in 2020 anyone?

Metaplace is gone. Along with the site, thousands of user-created worlds representing untold amounts of time and creativity have collapsed into canned screenshots and video clips. Call it business imperative, another walled-garden tragedy, whatever, in the end (that would be NOW) it makes no difference. Things existed before and now they don’t.

For my own SlideMountain world (a work that I’m most proud of) I decided that the proper send off would be via a blaze of scripted destruction. Performance art, in a 2.5D metaverse.

After a maddening series of lag and connectivity issues, I kicked off the process today around 8pm or so.

The harbingers of doom arrived early

It seemed only fitting that I use the Multim0d script sequencer that I released a few months ago (and I have to say it worked pretty well :-)). The various effects plugins were written in an insane rush, between holiday obligations, etc, and could only be tested up to a point. Oddly it was not easy to guess exactly how long it would take to erode things from fully-running world down to bare tiles. Turned out to take almost an hour.

Yeah, you really “had to be there, XD”, but here’s how it went: First random clusters of objects were suffused with a blue-ish glow and then slowly pulled across the world into cluster of 4 moai surrounding a sparking lava core. Once there they were slowly deleted. Gradually, the clusters increased in size and the sliding speed was increased until all world objects had been destroyed. Then the moai vanished.
For the last stage the terrain began to “melt” in a multistage fading and leveling process, randomly distributed across the world grid. This was the one part which worried me a bit and sure enough the “erosion” process code caused a stack bust when tackling the 100×100 grid and a crowd of onlookers. I quickly flipped to a fall-back that spiralled through quadrants and everything completed nicely.

And that was that, weeks of work nuked in less than an hour.

It was a sad but strangely satisfying end to something I’d worked hard to complete and which was a source of amusement for many people. But to me at least, better than letting things evaporate at the flick of a switch in a server room.

And to all the avs who popped in to watch the “Meta Meta Immolation” let me just say thank you for your attention, camaraderie and support. Indeed, Best Wishes to all the MP community!

Metaplace is dead: the metaverse is just getting started. Onward.

The collection started when I pulled a thin, translucent sliver from the battery compartment of a holiday toy. It had been placed there in order to insulate a battery terminal from the battery during shipment and thus help assure that the toy was ready, literally, out of the box. Now it had become a forlorn bit of exotic garbage, placed at the corner of my desk to be admired.

It was soon joined by: a narrow strip of tape holding a set of underwear in a bundle, a jagged tear from a jasmine tea packet, a small, fragile and ripped anti-static bag, a twist cap from a water bottle, some remnants of shrink-wrap, a blade guard from a safety razor and a millimeter long fragment of red tinsel garland.

Only the water bottle lid is marked with a plastic identification code (#2, high density polyethylene) indicating recyleability. All the rest, every dinky bit, is without any obvious further use, destined for the garbage sack and dim points beyond.

Perhaps they will migrate far away, down the hill across the valley and out into the Great Pacific Trash Vortex, a mass of plastic crap twice the area of Texas. Perhaps they will drift evil and help choke a pelican or a turtle.

At best they will just be passive parasites, adding noise to food identification signals and taking up space until something comes along that can digest them. Will it be something that is friendly to the human-sustaining ecosystem? Maybe a microbe that sinks some carbon and excretes some water and oxygen along the way. Can we wait? Do we have to?

It seems that the potential of crap to commodity (”C to C” ?) processing should be a multi-billion dollar business, even with the current fledgling state of bio-engineering. Waste farmers armed with tweaked-out microorganisms, wielding digestion for the greater good.

Or perhaps the little bits of plastic crap are here to stay, a secondary life form condensed by an enzymatic action of human industry. A quiet organism whose replication and adaptative core is completely external to its form, residing instead in human memes. These controlling and facilitating memes are in turn parasitic aspects of human adaptation which must be culled in any long-term human future. A subtly toxic grey goo, independent of nanotech.

But likely it’s just a lot of garbage, produced by ignorant meat-sticks in their haste to earn a cheap buck. And the first generations of waste farmers will taste a new and hyper-lucrative arbitrage game thus far undampened by serious competition. Perhaps too, waste farming/mining will be the coming-out event for bio-engineering, as the science quickly begets the tech that begins to suck up all those discarded commodities.

For the moment however my little pile of resin orts requires a trivial immediate personal cost to discard, against an equally trivial near future return. The reversal of that time-valuation calculus will truly represent an economic revolution.

I’ve never read Stephen King’s “The Stand”, nor seen the movie. But I know it involves an end-of-the-world flu pandemic. With the Swine Flu hype escalating and references to “Captain Trips” percolating out of every social media stream, I figured I’d get the book before someone hits me with spoilers and anyway what better choice for bedtime reading in the midst of an actual influenza outbreak, right?
Proper pandemic protocol dictates that I order-in, thus avoiding tedious and harrowing interactions with possibly (oh noes!) INFECTED hosts. Obviously, this is a job for my trusty Sony eReader…

Popping over to the Sony ebook store I immediately find they have “The Complete & Uncut Edition”. Excellent! I hate how King’s novels always get cut down to a whispy scant 800 pages or so.
And the price is…US $35. Wow! That’s a lot for an ebook version of a novel published in 1978 by a super-popular author. Isn’t it? Since I find the Sony store prone to overpricing their books I’ll just look elsewhere.

OK, top of the search results: same edition ebook available from Random House. Hmm, US $50! No thanks.
A few dodgy torrent sources pop up, but I like books and authors and have this silly idea that artists should be compensated for their works. So no leeching. (hold that thought.)

Just for kicks, I check the Amazon store, as if I had a Kindle, but find only “Title is not available”. So much for that. It is however, fairly encouraging that other King ebooks recommended on that page are about $8 bucks each. And amusingly, a new DVD copy of the 1994 movie for sells for just $26. But to be fair it’s not the new “uncut” edition. Anyway King’s work is usually better in book form.

Other vendors offer the novel in a range of formats and prices, from $15 - $43, but none of the formats will work on my PRS-500 eReader. Hoorah for standards.
I could just grab the mobipocket version and do some conversion voodoo, but I’d like to avoid possible conversion artifacts and legal PITAs.

So for my $350 ebook reader I can either buy an unsupported version for about $15 bucks and perfom a possibly low-quality / quasi-legal format conversion or shell out $35 for a bona-fide Sony-compatible version of “The Stand’. And to think they say these things will never take off!

EPILOGUE:
OK, nevermind the ebook and H1N1 virus, how about regular, olde-school paper?

Amazon lists a range of hardbacks, used-new-first editions, $15-$500 + shipping, but since I have to go out anyway I decided to just swing by the local big-box bookseller. Unsurprisingly, they have it. The nice stack of fat paperbacks is prominently displayed right next to a speciality section of disease-disaster thrillers. Well that’s some responsive marketing, you sick puppies!

But the real disaster is the $8.99 paperback itself. Very poor quality, uneven printing, flimsy pages (all 1000+ of them). Worse even than the regular paperback edition of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (which literally fell apart in my hands as I was reading it).

A Prime Argument in any iteration of the somewhat silly “ebook vs paper book” debate involves the tactile and other sensory aspects of holding a physical book in the hands, riffling the pages, the the look, the feel, smell, etc. And also the keepsake element of a tangible object. This argument is largely neutered by shoddy printing and cheap bindings. Yeah, I know, it’s a mass-market paperback so what do I want? Well, how about something that allows me to experience the author’s art without eyestrain? How about something that doesn’t look like it will fall apart well before the 1000+ pages can be turned? I have a copy of the similarly massive “Swan Song” by Robert R. McCammon that I must have bought 15+ years ago. Its clearly printed pages are still intact and readable thus demonstrating that at least a nominal level of paperback quality IS possible.
After a few minutes of trying to convince myself to just buy the damn cheap paperback I walk out of the store empty-handed.

So in the end I’m left with the public library, that dependable bastion of the written word. And indeed I should have gone there first, since they had a nice hardcover copy of “The Stand” just sitting quietly on a shelf, waiting for me. I was mildly surprised that some other twisted soul hadn’t beaten me to it ;^)

POSTSCRIPT:
While I’m of the firm opinion that ebooks should be priced less than their paper-based versions, I might have paid about $15 or so had a compatible ebook version been available. It’s also clear that I’ve been spoiled by the crisp e-ink display of the Sony Reader (also on Kindle) as evidenced by my somewhat snobbish dismissal of the cheaply-done paperback. And whomever may benefit from hefty ebook pricing and cheap paperback printing the only certain thing is that, just as in the case of ‘piracy’, Stephen King lost a sale.

Libraries Rule!

Wafery thinness

On a rainy afternoon in 1995, during one of my regular runs from Shadyside, up and over to Squirrel Hill (in Pittsburgh) I stopped to scribble down a few things I felt were characteristics of that time. You know, subjective, pretentious drivel. Later that evening I typed it up and put it on a personal web page now long gone.

So for whatever reason I was thinking about that stuff recently and spent some time digging around the web. Unsurprisingly no luck, and no Wayback luv either although I’m sure there is a paper copy boxed away somewhere.

Anyway, it seems like it’s time for another ’snapshot’, this time scribbled out on a somewhat higher ‘hill’ in the Sierras and posted on a somewhat more memorious Internet. So, here’s the 2009 version:

The 1995 version rambled on for a couple of pages, but I live a more terse life these days so I’ll stop now ;-()

Updated: May 8 2008
Update 2: May 16 2008

Around early March the northwestern Reno neighborhoods of Mogul and Somersett began getting a lot of seismic activity, sometimes dozens of small M1-M2 quakes in a single day. There have also been a number of M3s and a few M4s, including a late-night M4.7 that shook up a lot of people. Because most of these quakes have been very shallow they are very noticeable, even M1 and M2 “micro-quakes” that usually  escape notice. And the M4s are way more violent and frightening than any M4 quake should be.

At the moment the rate of the quakes seems to have dropped off quite a bit and are no longer a kind of all-day background shimmer, but the sudden and often booming shakes continue. Just last night (about 4am) for instance a sudden loud M2.6 sounded like the ceiling cracking open.

The USGS web site has a lot of interesting data feeds so I thought I’d generate a bit of chart porn for the 2008 Reno Quake Swarm.

Continue reading ‘The Reno Quake Swarm of 2008’ »

So I am finally getting around to this archive. Some content has previously appeared here and there around the web in various venues and under one or more pseudonyms. And between the IMs, the txts, the ‘casts, the tweets, the communities, the voips and the emails, I’ll add some new stuff as well.