My new job is going against the grain. Big time. I must now become an online personality. I must become a public figure. Holy shit. Here I go – in front of the world. Open mouth – insert foot.

My friends assure me I’ll do well. I won’t make too big a fool of myself. I guess I’ve just got to thicken my skin and take my lumps. It’s going to be a ride.

I think one of my big reasons for being so hesitant is that I fully realize that I don’t know everything. I don’t want to put my thoughts out there as being authoritarian – someone’s got a better idea or a better way of looking at things for sure.

Commenting on blogs, emailing random people out of the blue, blogging myself and good god, I’m even on Twitter. I ask my friends to please be understanding of my new job and my new dual identity. I’d like to keep facebook as my one refuge from the public. Don’t know how long that will last though.

Into the deep end I go.

The first big one that got me was the change to their iGoogle homepage.  They think it’s better – whatever. It’s not good for me anymore.  The tab on the left hand side of the page eats valuable realestate.

Now, in the middle of my gmail session, it changes colors on me.  Now it’s got ‘themes’.

My complaint isn’t that they’re coming up with new things, but that they’re springing them on me with no warning or (in the case of the iGoogle homepage), no way to switch back.

This could be a great opportunity for Google – let people sign up to be part of a beta program (yeah, I know it’s all beta anyway) to try out these new features. It would be a great opportunity to get feedback on what works and what doesn’t (and without the masses griping just because it’s “different”).  Also, these people will feel special that they’re part of something exclusive and cool.  They’ll be more likely to tell their friends – “oh hey – gmail now has themes – awesome!”  or if their friends see it over their shoulder it’ll generate desire for change, “Oh wow – why is your gmail purple!?  I want that!”

For the people who opt not to be part of the bleeding edge, you’ve got to give them notice that things will be changing so they’re not caught unaware.

I understand not being able to maintain older code/modes/models (but would one rev back be that hard?), and even if you don’t give people a choice on switching, just give us some warning!

Not giving warning for changes undermines my confidence in your service and your brand.  It makes me not trust you.  If this keeps happening, I will eventually stop using your service.  It’s not that your product is bad – you keep making it better, but if you lose my trust, then all the features in the world won’t win me back.

Because of the homepage changes, I’ve moved to an rss reader.  And guess what?  I’m not using Google’s.  You burned me on how I tracked my rss feeds via the homepage, and I’m not coming back to get burned a second time.

Come on, Google.  You can do better!

Fake hologram

What concerns me most about this is that it was a lie.  Plain and simple.  CNN and Blitzer threw away their standing as journalists for a cheap gimmick.  This is the nail in the coffin of mass media journalism.  I for one, will no longer watch or trust CNN (that trust has been eroding for a looong time).

When will we see a return to journalistic integrity?

Let me introduce you to Emily. She’s not real:

She’s not motion capture either. Her face is fully simulated. Granted, there is still a ways to go to achieve true realism, but this is a big step above what I’ve seen before. Her eyes especially have broken through the uncanny valley.

What does this advancement mean for us? What does it mean if you are unable to tell if someone is actually real or not? This is not something entirely new – we’ve been dealing with manufactured news and doctored photos for quite some time. But we’re getting to a point where the manufactured news and stories are becoming increasingly realistic.

Here’s a well done example that’s obviously fake:

However, what if instead of the Death Star over San Francisco, it was a US stealth bomber over an Iranian village. A manufactured video like this, even if it were finally shown to be false, would undoubtedly wreak major damage to the US reputation, incite riots, and the like.

How can we as a society seek to protect ourselves from falsehoods and lies? The biggest salvation I see is the first amendment to the US Constitution. Free Speech, Free Press, and Freedom of Association are key values that guarantee someone’s ability to share information. This is the first step. The problem of the quality of the information is still in question.

Quality of information is an issue we struggle with today. How do you know if a web page contains accurate information or not? Generally, you’ll trust information if the source has proven reputable in the past, or if the information can be confirmed by multiple independent sources.

What’s this change? What does this mean? Here are a few ideas:

* You will appear in commercials to yourself – wearing new clothes, new haircuts, going to events, having a great time using the product that is being sold to you.

* You and your friends will be able to appear virtually in games with one another – modified however you like.

* You’ll be able to use other’s images in a similar way with or without their permissions – this is an interesting moral & legal topic.

Fun times ahead!

It looks like the response rate is a bit laggy. From the comments, it looks like that’s because the camera is set to a 60Hz refresh rate and it could be better at 120Hz.

I’m curious as to what the actual display medium is. What is it displayed on?

Today is meeting day, and I was out of food.  I’m down to a bag of shredded cheddar, a handful of diet cherry colas, a couple beers, a half filled container of raspberry jam, and some olive oil.  I was facing hours upon hours of mindnumbing meetings filled with inaction and circular logic.  A full stomach could mean the difference between hours of blissful disconnected zoning out and agonizingly watching the minute hand on the clock inch closer to sustenance.

My answer was Tim Hortons.  It’s your standard coffee-chain (a la Starbucks) type of place.  They don’t seem to have spread down to Texas yet, but they’re all over up here in New England.  I ordered a large regular coffee and a bagel with cream cheese.  “What kind?” was the response to my order.  Oh yeah.  They had different kinds of bagels.  “Do you have blueberry?” I asked.  “No, but we have cinnamon raisin,” was the reply.  “Perfect!”  The last time I went to Tim Hortons, I asked for my coffee with cream and sugar.  It came out too light and too sweet for my taste.  This time, I was just going to get it black, savor the bitterness, and raid the office supplies if I needed to doctor it.

Unfortunately, Tim had other plans for me today.  I got in to the office, my coffee and bagel unopened, booted up my laptop, unwrapped my bagel, and flipped up the plastic tab on my coffee.  I took a cautious sip, expecting the hot coffee to attempt to scald my lips.  It tasted funny.  I peered into the cup, expecting the shiny dark pool of black, but there it was – light and sweet.  Amazing.  In this day and age.  I ordered a coffee, and they made it light and sweet by default.

Maybe Tim is ahead of the curve.  Facial recognition tracking software, databases, and computer networks have come a long way.  Maybe my earlier request was logged in their databases and I’ve been tagged with a ‘HortonID’ – forever relegated as “light and sweet.”  What will happen when I want something different?  Will they think they know better than I?  It can only end in a “Falling Down” style freak out…

–Light-n-Sweet

However old you are, think back through your life at the rate of the passage of time. The older you get, the faster time seems to move. When I was six years old, I remember thinking that it was taking an eternity to get to age seven. Summers in primary school lasted ages. Now, a week passes in the blink of an eye. Ask a senior citizen. They will confirm this phenomenon as well.

This is how Moses lived for so long. Thousands of years ago, it took forever for anything to happen, even age. Check out any graph of “events” in history. The further back you go, the less happened. Now look at your calendar for this week. It’s jam packed!

I do not know where this time acceleration is leading us. Only time will tell.

Just don’t blink.

James Casico has a blog entry on a term new to me – Griefing – with a great example of it at play in the online gaming world.

To me, this is nothing new. It is about the human situation. Trust, betrayal, the weighing of doing the “right thing” versus personal reward. We’ve been struggling with this since we came out of the trees. Several Greek tragedies (and the Bible) have themes involving breaking trust. Think of Abraham’s willingness to kill his son, Judas’s betrayal of Jesus, or Atreus serving his brother Thyestes the flesh of his (Thyestes’s) own children in Agamemnon in which Cassandra’s vision shows:

“Look there, see what is hovering above the house
so small and young, imaged as in the shadow of dreams,
like children almost, killed by those most dear to them,
and their hands filled with their own flesh, as food to eat.:”

This decision with “right” and “wrong” is part of our nature, part of what it means to be human, and it is up to each individual to decide how they will act in a given situation. What morals and ethics they will hold to and live by. What role “honor” plays in their life.

A different dynamic in online games versus the real life is the lack of consequence in the virtual world. You can be a jerk with no (or virtually no) consequence.

How we as a society, and how individual games/sims/organizations adapt to that challenge in the future is a very interesting question. As our lives become increasingly virtual, that line between game morality and the rest of life will thin and blur, and consistency of your personal honor will be all the more important.

“Roadrunner ushers in a new era for science at Los Alamos National Laboratory,” said Terry Wallace, associate director for Science, Technology and Engineering at Los Alamos. “Just a week after formal introduction of the machine to the world, we are already doing computational tasks that existed only in the realm of imagination a year ago.”

Based on the results of PetaVision’s inaugural trials, Los Alamos researchers believe they can study in real time the entire human visual cortex—arguably a human being’s most important sensory apparatus.

The ability to achieve human levels of cognitive performance on a digital computer could lead to important insights and revolutionary technological applications. Such applications include “smart” cameras that can recognize danger or an autopilot system for automobiles that could take over for incapacitated drivers in complex situations such as navigating dense urban traffic.

http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/home.story/story_id/13602

For a bit more write up on it, check out this article.

top500.org maintains a listing of the top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world. I’ve been fortunate enough to run two of them (both now long off the list). One was an IBM SP2 whose highest rank was #140. The other was a Linux Itanium2 cluster running Myrinet whose highest rank was #102.