Category: Sufficiently-Advanced Technology

Cosmos-1

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In a page that reads like a shooting-script from a BBC4 Quatermass revival crossed with Warren Ellis’s Planetary Gun Club, we learn of the developing fate of the world’s first solar-sail spacecraft, launched from Russian Nuke Sub, by a club of private investors:

21:50 UTC
Cosmos 1the first solar sail was launched as scheduled at 19:46 UTC today from the nuclear submarine Borisoglebsk. The three stage separations occurred normally, and 15 minutes after launch a doppler signal was received at the temporary ground station at Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka. The signal lasted for around three minutes, and was then cut off for unknown reasons.

No signal has been received from the spacecraft since that time. The portable telemetry station at Majuro in the Marshall Islands did not receive a signal during the time it could have been in contact with the spacecraft. The next possible contact will be with the ground station at Panska Ves in the Czech Republic.

The fact that the spacecraft has remained silent does not necessarilly mean anything is wrong, according to Project Director Louis Friedman. Contact with the two portable stations at Petropavlovsk and Majuro was always considered marginal. We are now waiting for the contact periods with the permanent stations in Paska Ves, Tarusa, and Bear Lakes.

Practical Synasthesia

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Alan Moore, interviewed:

"There’s an awful lot of synasthesia, I mean one of the greatest writers, a lot of the greatest writers, one of my favourites, Vladimir Nabakoff, he was a synasthetic…to him, the letter ‘O’ was white, the word ‘Moscow’ was green flecked with gold…olive green, flecked with gold. I can see that. And it’s a good thing to try and develop. Synasthesia is a great literary tool. You’ll be able to come up with perfect metaphors that are really striking and strange, because they maybe jump from one sense to another – try describing a smell in musical terms.


Actually, it can be quite easy. Also, it’s how we tend to do things anyway. They’ve just proven that – you know when Jilly Gordon gets on a roll on The Food Program and she’s talking about: “..it’s a kind of buttery, composty, tractory – I’m getting peat, I’m getting burning tyres…”. Now they’ve done tests – those people who describe the flavour and bouquet of wine, they’re not describing the flavour or the bouquet at all – they are synasthetically describing the colour. They’re taking visual cues. They did things where they’d put an odourless and tasteless colour agent into white wine to make it look like red wine, and then they’d note the kind of language the wine-tasters were using. When it was white wine they were using: “…buttery, new-mown hay”…you know, yellow, basically, was what they were saying, whereas when it was red wine they were saying: “…its wonderfully fruity, blackcurranty”…talking about red things. It’s synasthesia. It’s how a lot of our senses…I think synasthesia is probably a lot more common than the sensory aberration that it’s made out to be, and there’s probably a key there, somewhere, to how we sense everything. Synasthesia. There’s something there."

I hope so.

It would be wonderful to harness synasthesia in the UI of mobile devices. Going beyond multimedia output and multimodal interfaces – delivering meaning in Gladwellesque thin-slices of preattentive recognised patterns.

I’ve got about a month of my time in April to look into this at work. I’m thinking of looking at the Mindhackers, Damasio, Hiroshii Ishii, Ben(s) Fry and Schneiderman, and Ambient Devices as a start.

I’m very aware this is far from an exhaustive list; and moreover, it’s only the cognitive science / interface research worlds I’m thinking of so far.

I have a feeling, inspired by Alan Moore’s thoughts,  that looking into other fields of sensory endeavour might also be revealing: sculpture, painting, drama – or ritual, religious or otherwise – ways of constructing feelings and understanding through all our senses.

Ns_sensesIt it looks like we have at least 21 of them to play with…

With recent announcements of the increasing capabilites for new visual possibilites (Flash, SVG in Nokia mobiles) and coincident pronouncements on the constraining nature of the WIMP interface hangover into  the mobile context, I think it’s a good time to look into this.

Anyway – if you have any thoughts or contributions, or want to get in touch about the subject, leave me a comment, trackback or drop me a line to the usual address…

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See also, Abe Burmeister’s reflections on the seminal "Interface Culture" some 8 years on from the publication of Johnson’s book.

Walking City: 21st Century Mirrorworlds remix

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Walking_remix_1

^ Comparison of YRM/Tom Carden’s  ‘Destinations’ (Detail) with Ron Herron/Archigram’s ‘Walking City’ (reversed out-of-black by me)

Congratulations to Tom Carden on getting a piece selected for the architecture section of The Royal Academy’s prestigious Summer Exhibition this past year. It’s called ‘Destinations’ and is a beautiful simulation of passenger movements through an airport terminal over a day. 

Many things notable about this: that an artifact that is a simulation of flow through architecture is included in a celebration of the aesthetics of architecture, that these complex simulations of ‘people weather’ are not only working tools of large-scale architectural practice, but also now boundary objects that communicate to wider audiences, and that as David Gelertner put in his mid-90’s book MirrorWorlds, that now we have the power to make magic mirrors of what might be, how does that inform our actions – as architects, designers and citizens.

I was fortunate to sit down and have a chat with Tom this week in London, where we talked about simulation, visualisation, cities and agency and if those sorts of fields fascinate you, too, I recommend subscribing to his blog, Random Etc.

The other thing that struck me about Tom’s image was it’s superficial resemblence to Ron Herron’s iconic Walking City – appealing, as it’s an image of that peculiar 21st century transient city: the airport and it’s inhabitants – walking…

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See also: Rodcorp’s "life in the walking city" [via Anne G. to whom I apologise for the non-ironic utopian, technological, democratic discourses I hope she keeps reading 😉 ]

The art of the twenty-year dropkick

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From Ecyrd:

“Look at us: every year, we churn out more computer games than your entire industry is worth. You know how we do it? We like our customers. We don’t treat them like potential criminals, and try to make our products do less. We invent new things like online role-playing -games, where the money does not come from duplication of bits (which cannot be stopped, regardless of your DRM scheme) but from providing experiences that the people want.

We saw that you were old and weak. So we took advantage of it: told you things that you wanted to hear so we could kick you in the head in twenty years. Some of us told you that the future is going to be interactive – what did you do? You started to think how to make interactive movies (CD-I, anyone?), not what it really means, while we wrote games and tried to understand the new mediums, not how to bolt it on onto old things.

We lied to you. And we apologize for that, but it was for the greater good. So we’re not the least bit sorry.

Signed: The Computer Industry”

» The Butt Ugly Weblog: We lied to you

UPDATE: So poor old Ecyrd is getting smacked by everyone, especially Les Auteurs. As Yoz points out, Ecyrd glosses over some very salient points when it comes to some of his supporting arguement, but I know some of the back story to what he was trying to say, so I think characterising him as some uberzealous /.’er who wants everything to be free is not quite right. I can’t speak for him, but when he’s done this riff before IRL, it’s been about the inability of the computer industry to deliver on it’s promises/appeasement to/of the content industry, while simultaneuously shafting the users and the artists – NOT that all art and creativity should be free. Maybe the humour and the message got lost in translation. I’ve personally seen Ecyrd pay an awful lot of money, over and over again for art and creative works, especially those of Hayao Miyazaki! What this does however illustrate is that both artists and users are pissed off at how broke this stuff is, and the current options presented by the Redmond/Anaheim axis. Joshua and Warren are two artists doing something about it at least. Let’s move on from the smackdowns to a militant, united front between smart artists like those guys, and smart users/technologists like Ecyrd that can and will present compelling alternatives to the technology companies. Like mine I hope.

Architecture and use

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Peter Lindberg has posted a nicely considered piece on computer architecture and it’s relationship to the general meaning of architecture, including this definition by Fred Brooks whom he entered into correspondence with on the topic:

“Computer architecture, like other architecture, is the art of determining the needs of the user of a structure and then designing to meet those needs as effectively as possible within economic and technological constraints. Architecture must include engineering considerations, so that the design will be economical and feasible; but the emphasis in architecture is on the needs of the user, whereas in engineering the emphasis is on the needs of the fabricator.”

I would contend that great architecture has it’s emphasis on the end-user – at least, on the end-user alone.

The emphasis is on the needs of the culture it is to embed itself within; via the consideration of site, place, history, context, ecology, arcology, archeology, climate (interacting with climate both to modify it for it’s inhabitants and it’s immediate external context) and the aesthetic / symbolic impact it may have. Also, the consideration of the end-user’s needs (in architectural terminlogy, the programme of the space) is done with this cultural-embedding in mind. How does the programme mesh with it’s surroundings? Do the end-users of the space feel part of a continuum, whether rural or urban; or isolated and hermetically-sealed off from their surroundings.

Can this extend into software? Clay’s situated-software meme scratches the surface of the above – it’s throwaway in most cases: coop-himmelblau or archigramesque digital urban intervention, not digital architecture or digital urbanism.

What would computer and software architecture that was truly analagous to architecture be like?

DNA on sufficiently-advanced technology

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Great Douglas Adams quote found at Helmintholog:

“Of course, we don’t have real intelligence cracked – it’s a bit like Zeno’s paradox: we get closer and closer to the actual business of language, without ever reaching it. Like sawing someone in half: considered as a medical problem, it is very very difficult indeed. But if you just want to convince a large audience that you have sawn a lady in half in a cabinet – that’s easy.

I say that we really want to be fooled, and that is the secret of persuading people that we have found artificial intelligence. Even very stupid bots can appear intelligent if they are acting in accord with our preconceptions. “

Eternal sunshine of the spotless spokesperson

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From Corante Brainwaves:

“Today’s movie release of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind stars Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey who want to have their bad memories erased. While memory erasure inc. doesn’t exist yet, the issues presented in this movie do.

I am sure the actors and producers would be very interested in CCLE’s work. Should you have access to them through your network please let them know about CCLE’s real life fight to protect their cognitive liberty. Now in their fourth year, they have many accomplishments, including arguing for freedom of thought in the U.S. Supreme Court. Please help them protect your cognitive liberty.”

I haven’t seen the film, but can’t wait. Kaufmann is a flawed genius – his films give me a buzz equivalent to reading a Morrison comic, a Webb post or an Egan novel.

I’m sure he would appreciate the CCLE‘s attempts to protect his cognitive liberty, and yet would probably debate whether there can ever be such a thing.

» Corante Brainwaves: “Neuroethics Non-Profit Calling Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet”

(Artificial) life during wartime

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Helen Greiner of iRobot gave a keynote address this morning, Tom has great commentary.

I asked her after the event, a very specific question based on some past speculation here. A question on their ‘Bloodhound’ research project and whether their battlefield medical robots would have the Hippocratic oath at the core of their behaviour.

Would these robots that are tasked to shield the fallen on a battlefield limit their care to those on ‘their side’?

Greiner replied that they would not, and they would attend to all endangered human life, of whatever stripe. That the Hippocratic oath, or behaviour in its spirit would have to be encoded into such robots.

Update
Helen Greiner posts the following comment:

“That’s not true. I would never say this. It way way beyond the state of the art technically. We simply can’t program the hippocratic oath into a robot.

I said that the Combat Medics would be controlling these robots for the time being. If the medic is a doctor, he is bound by the hippocratic oath. If not, my understanding is that combat medics try to save ALL lives.

This work is still very much research, but we look forward to the day when robots can amplify the reach of the combat medics.”

Apologies to Helen for misconstruing her answer at Etech.