Not (yet) my tribe (day 143)

It's odd to be surrounded by thousands of people and feel alone.  This is the second time I've attended this conference and I thought it would be different this year.  But I'm starting to realize that there is a fundamental mismatch between the average SD&A attendee and me.  I remember once sitting at  Tim Horton's waiting for someone to pick me up.  I wasn't eating the doughnuts but I was watching other people eat doughnuts.  The atmosphere was ok and I was enjoying reading the paper.  I think I might have been sipping coffee too.  Anyway.   At some point I looked around and I thought "If I hung out here all the time, eventually I would look like the people that come here regularly".  The thought was sobering and I looked for my friend's car.  I feel the same way about this conference.  I look around and I think "I don't want this to be me in 10 years."  Needless to say the feeling seems to be mutual.  They can't see me becoming like them so they don't bother engaging in more than superficial conversation.  The saving grace?  Some pretty great content.  And there are other sub-conferences happening so I can duck out and take in some other type of information when I've had enough.  I will keep coming here because of the content and because I think eventually it will change.  And if it doesn't, maybe I'll start my own regular stereo conference.

If I could change SD&A I would add some art tracks, change the venues to be smaller, and add some technical courses.  Maybe change the management team to proportionally include fewer engineers.

BTW, Disney is converting the original Beauty and The Beast to stereoscopic.  They showed a preview and it is beautiful.  They said they aim to have it done (start to finish) in a year.  

A song for this post.

Belligerence will not be tolerated (day 141)

I arrived in San Jose a few hours ago.  Walking in the warm(ish) night air was refreshing and familiar.  I've been here a number of times before.  I'm not a frequent traveler.  As much as I like a change of environment, the indignities of air travel prevent me from looking to leave very often.  Plus there's the cat to consider.  Traveling by air is really only a short portion of the actual air travel experience.  The airport is impersonal yet invades all personal space without apology.  It's lures and rejects in a way that makes you want to stick to the middle of the runway halls.  No chair is comfortable and sitting itself is an indignity when you are sitting to wait to sit some more.  Healthy food is camouflaged amongst the bright colours of junk food that promise an immediate hit of comfort.  It takes a will of steel to reach for the salad or the apple, harnessing faith that it's the fluorescent lights making them look so sickly and alien.  Most of the time hunger is not the reason for eating.

Tomorrow an early start will continue the bizarro yet common experience that is conference attendance.  A relentless streams of scheduled information dissemination will delight until it overwhelms and then guilt as it forces the memory of how rare a moment this is.  I will eat more 85% chocolate and keep absorbing hoping the information won't get blurred out of existence overnight.  Then I will have every good intention of using the new information, even disseminating far and wide with colleagues.   At the very least I will remember the highlights and be grateful for renewed enthusiasm.

A song for this post. 

Celebration of perfect events (day 140)

A very quick post today.  I just got back from my friend Zeenat's Henna party leading up to her wedding on Monday.  It's a very small wedding with just immediate family and this was a chance for all her friends to come and celebrate with her and Chris.  My hand is henna'd and I'm exhausted.  It was a bit of a relentless week and tomorrow I leave for San Jose for the Stereoscopic Displays and Applications conference.  It will be a nice change of pace.

Bacterial update:  yesterday's Kefir has ripened for 24 hours and I tasted it this evening.  It had perfect taste and consistency.  My version of perfect taste is sour like yogurt or a bit more, with nice tones of yeast.   Consistency was like buttermilk...maybe a bit thicker.  The fizz was minimal because I 'burped' it a lot while it was ripening.  I wouldn't mind a bit more fizz but it was a fine fine Kefir.  I added a little maple syrup and had a little piece of heaven in my belly.  I will try to reproduce this result when I get back from San Jose.  I've put the grains in milk and they will sit in the fridge for the week...hopefully go dormant in a pleasant way.  To recap, the way that seems to work is to do a pretty strict 1:7 ratio of grains to milk, covered but not tightly, paper bag covering the jar, agitated after 8 hours, agitated again at the 20 hour mark or so (more if I happen to be around) and monitored until very small pockets of whey start to form, then strained and put in the fridge covered but not tightly, agitated and burped a few times in the next 24 hours.
The kombucha tea is still alive and well as far as I can tell.

A song for this post.

This is not their war (day 139)

Bacterial update:  the batch of Kefir I was so giddy about yesterday was indeed the best so far but after 'ripening' the milk kefir at room temperature for another 24 hours, it turned sour.  I threw it out.  In hindsight, given the amount of separation of curd and whey after being strained, it had fermented slightly too long.  The batch I just strained this evening is again the best so far (better than yesterday's).  This time I'm ripening it in the refrigerator for a day.  So far the separation is minimal.  Ripening is said to increase Vitamins B (folic acid in particular).   It also changes the flavour.  We'll see.  The Kombucha scoby seems to be starting the creation of a daughter on its back.  For some reason I thought it would be on the belly.  When I get back from San Jose on Friday next week I'll have the pH testing strips to see how things are going.  By that time the brewing should be almost done.

Steve and I have been watching the Lord of the Ring trilogy.  We're almost done the third one now.  It's quite an epic.  Just like the first time, I can't help but feel sadness for the suffering of the animals in a battle that is not their own.  While I know that these particular animals were not harmed, it does remind me that animals were and are harmed in battles.  Horses seem to me such gentle animals.  To use them in battle must have been tremendously traumatic.   In the film they kill elephant-like animals as well as horses, dog-like creatures, and so on, merely for their supposed allegiance with evil.  Indeed the animals are depicted as having a will to kill beyond their human riders.

I recently had a conversation with someone about the next big injustice to be noticed and righted.  At the time we bandied lots of things about including, in partial jest, the injustice of a world made for early-risers.  Since that time, because of various sources and acquaintances, I've come to realize that it may be animal rights that become a focus.  Our inability to consider non-humans as having consciousness, worthy of freedom and respect no doubt stands in the way of us feeling compassion on much deeper level for the earth in general.  Julie Andreyev, Carol Gigliotti, and Karolle Wall are all faculty members at Emily Carr working with animals and ethics as subject matter.  Julie is currently building an interactive art piece (called *glisten) HIVE) for the Cultural Olympiad (Code Live exhibition) where text emphasizing evidence of animal consciousness will be rendered in real-time, responding to human actions in the space.  She is actively seeking textual input for the piece using Twitter (@glisten_HIVE).  You can tweet examples of how your animal companion shows their conscious relationship with the world.  Example questions she asks are: "how do you  know when your animal companion is sad/happy?", and "Is your animal companion ever conflicted?"

A song for this post.

May the light shine on Haiti (day 138)

Bacterial update:  I think this Kefir batch is the one.  The one that looks like the picture.  I decreased the amount of milk and left the lid ajar.  I also covered the jar for the last 5 hours of fermentation.   I haven't strained it yet but I'm giddy with anticipation.  My kombucha tea mother is not dead.  This is a small victory that accumulates momentum every day.  I bought some pH testing strip from a shop in Ontario.  The shipping was more than the strips.  I'll try to find a supply in Vancouver when I have some time.  Is this a giant distraction?  Yes, perhaps but sometimes following something thoroughly fascinating is a gateway for inspiration in other areas.

I took some time today to look at  pictures of the damage in Haiti.  It is much worse than I thought.  I am so stunned by the symbolic destruction of the palace.  It seemed so solid, so regal.  My friend Jer posted a visualization of why this disaster is especially sad -- hiting a country already weakened.  I donated to Architecture for Humanity.  I like what they stand for and I find their rebuilding message hopeful.  It may be too early to think in those terms but building better for the future is a worthy thing to be prepared for.

A song for this post.

Why d'you do it, scorpion? (day 137)

No real change in bacterial life today.  I am still on the hunt for pH testing strips so I can reassure myself of the Kombucha tea progress.  I (foolishly?) thought it would be easy to find these testing strips at, say, a wine making store.  Not so.  I think the internet will have to come to the rescue this time.  An initial search reveals the shipping is as expensive as the product...incentive to buy more.

The most interesting thing I heard about today is Google's sudden reversal of policy regarding search result censorship in China.   Some will remember that a few years ago Google's reputation ('don't be evil' motto) took a significant hit when they moved into China and voluntarily censored search results as a condition of doing business.  It was a stunning and calculated move on their part.  The rhetoric was that of constructive engagement.   Over time people forgot.  The release of Android and the continued popularity of Google Apps helped.

In a maneuver reminiscent of the story of the frog and the scorpion, Google was recently the target of an attack on their servers coming from China.  The stinger was that the attackers seemed to be targeting email accounts of suspected so-called Chinese dissidents.   Surprisingly, Google's response was to publicly announce that they will no longer censor search results in China.   They further qualify the response by acknowledging that this may mean the end of their business in the country.   This goes a long way to redeem their initial reputation hit.  Part of me wonders though if it's only one move in a significantly longer conversation with Chinese officials.   I do appreciate the candor of the post - a rare display of ethical values by a company.

A song for this post.

Drink in culture (day 136)

I strained by first quart of Kefir today and it is quite delicious.  I didn't find quite thick enough but that may be because I didn't stir it while it was culturing, or perhaps I didn't culture it long enough.  I am making another quart which will be ready in a day and half.  Apparently every batch is different.  Different milk and fat content should help with that.  Also slightly more grains than last time.

The kombucha scoby is not dead or moldy.  I'm happy with that.  I'll be getting some PH testing strips tomorrow to keep track of the progress.  I'm curious.

So that's it for today - just a bacterial update.   Actually here's a gem I came across today as well.  It talks of serendipity and I find it quite charming.

A song for this post.

Scoby do (day 135)

I've stumbled onto culture, the bacterial kind.  I now know what a scoby is and I am worried about mine.  I hope I didn't kill it.  A scoby is a symbiotic combination of yeast and bacteria.  I have two types now:  one for making Kefir and one for making Kombucha tea.  Both were gifted by a kind soul in East Vancouver.  

After being sick I started drinking probiotics to replenish my gut with good bacteria.  But probiotic drinks are super expensive and knowing that all they are is fermented milk was bothering me.  What could be easier than multiplying bacteria?  I looked into making yogurt but the effort seemed to outweigh the returns.  Then I came across Kefir, a drink originally from Russia which kind of tastes like yogurt but with some yeast tones and effervescence.   An acquired taste to some maybe but I took to it right away.  It's quite good with chocolate.  Anyway, it too is expensive but unlike yogurt it is quite easy to make.  It requires room temperature and a typical kefir will take 24-36 hours to make.  The catch is that you need to know someone with the Kefir grains to start the process.  Thankfully the gift culture of craigslist yielded a kind person who not only gave me some grains but also showed me his method of making Kefir.  

As a bonus he also gave me a Kombucha tea mushroom (it's called a mushroom but it's not really a mushroom).   I'd never had Kombucha tea but I was thrilled to get the scoby after tasting his tea.  It's fresh tasting, a little bit like a cross between cider and beer.  It only has 1% alcohol. 

A big learning curve of an afternoon later, I have two things brewing:  Kefir and Kombucha tea.  The Kefir should be ready tomorrow night.  The tea, perhaps in two weeks if I didn't kill the scoby with the wrong PH or an invasion of another bacteria or mold. 

Who knew sickness could yield such treasures.

A song for this post.

On publicly being (day 134)

Being more public is apparently something that we are urged to do by the new norms of being online.  Twice today it came up in things I was reading:  the new generations are not so concerned with privacy.  They will be used to sharing their lives online.  My generation is at a disadvantage because we have to unlearn being private.   I must admit that is not at all what I had in mind when I made my new year's resolution last year of being more public.  I felt I had to contribute more, become a less passive participant in the information space.  I am still ultra concerned with my public persona.  Even this blog contains almost no personal details about my life in the sense of the high frequency of daily ups and downs.  It's still somewhat surprising to see some of my earliest posts to newsgroups back in the early nineties.  There's nothing there to be embarrassed about but I wonder if I'd been posting in my teens what I'd be regretting now.

The problem I see with the new generation being so unprivate is that their sense of decorum might not be developing in tandem with their online temerity.  Their awareness of the archive may not be so keen now but it may be painfully so later.  It's possible I'm only worried because my generation is more concerned with public image and the archive.  It may be that future generations will build in a generous sense of forgiveness into the archive.  A sort of 'what happened in facebook, stays in facebook' for the teen years...that is, until a bitter career fight or divorce proceeding.  Who knows.  If I had a kid I would talk to them about the inherent responsibility of being public.  And I would educate myself about how to erase the archive, the legal issues related to that.  Because if you can't control your information it's not really you being more public, it's whatever the applications want to take from you.

A song for this post.

Fresh interruptions (day 133)

I popped in to work today for the first time since the break.  I loved it.  There are so many smart, beautiful, interesting people there.   I felt refreshed hearing about new developments from my students, a simulation and modeling project for emergency rooms, and general lab plans for the new year.   It was a constant stream of interruptions and I welcomed each one as a pleasant surprise.  I am grateful to work in a place that is constantly reinventing itself.  There's always a sense of unbalance: just when you where starting to get comfortable, something changes.  There are definitely some less desirable aspects to that state but overall it's kept me feeling alert and interested.

It's hard to remember now how tired I was at the end of term...and hard to believe how tired I'll be at the end of this term.  For now, I relish the freshness in the air.

A song for this post.

I'm in my way (day 132)

Resentment is an interesting emotion -- feeling put upon by your own life.
"Always meditate on whatever provokes resentment" is a Lojong slogan.  When I first heard it I didn't think I had a lot of resentment in my life.  It seemed to me that resentment was a big sentiment like resenting being disrespected as a woman or resenting Stephen Harper's policies, things like that.  It seemed like it was something that we feel when situations are beyond our control yet affect us.

Turns out the majority of resentment is much more subtle than that.  It's much more about resisting life.  Instead of joyfully acting in the world, we grudgingly act, as if someone is making us do it.  It's a trick of the mind, where for whatever reason we create an other that makes us do things.  And then we resent that other.   When I first noticed this, I thought it was tragic and funny....and easily remedied.  It's not actually that easy but it's as simple as getting strong abs.  Repetition is key.  Practicing taking responsibility for whatever I'm doing.  Not easy when I'd rather be doing something else.  I have my own slogan: "Anything worth doing well is worth doing over and over again."

Bigger resentment that is very specifically targeted at other people is somewhat easier to deal with.  The antidote is related to another slogan "Be grateful to everyone".

So why am I writing about resentment?  I've been feeling a lot of it lately.  Partially it's circumstance:   a vacation that didn't go as planned, projects getting in the way of other projects, people needing things I don't feel I can give, relentless feeds of information.  It's like I wake up to a traffic jam.  I'm working on it.

A song for this post.

In praise of boredom (day 131)

I try to meditate every day for at least 10 minutes.  These days because I'm still on semi-vacation I sit for 30-60 minutes.   There is a special kind of boredom that develops while meditating.  You see, at first meditating is extremely interesting - there is so much going on.  Then it gets repetitive and frustrating.  Then you kind of give up and it gets really really boring.  I call it the grey zone.  It's like feeling eternity or something.  Apparently it's a good thing.  If I could relax into the boredom there would be something else.  I've had glimpses and I think it's worth staying with the program.   Someone once told me "it's worth asking the questions, what or who is boring exactly? And, what or who is bored? There's no one else here after all."

Meditating is almost the exact opposite of being online.  When I'm online if I wait long enough I will be entertained and if I'm bored it's my fingers' fault for not clicking fast enough.  The days of 57 channels are over.  So yes, asking the question of what or who is bored and boring is indeed worth asking especially when I'm bored online.  We spend a lot of time making sure we are not considered boring, and are not bored.  The state of boredom is so avoided it's suspicious.

Turns out boredom is empty space and feels a bit like standing a little too long on a suspension bridge - the possibilities are existentially frightening.   The anxiety of not knowing where to click next for a byte of entertainment may force us to see what we're not looking at, not doing, not thinking about.  We're not bored, we're scared.

Like disappointment, boredom has some good potential content.

A song for this post.

The almighty untethers us (day 130)

Something unusual happened today.  I learned of a current news event from Twitter before I learned it from anywhere else.  This is in part because I haven't been scanning my usual news sources and I've been at home but it's also because so many people twittered about it, in various forms.  I eventually had to pay attention.  My feeds, they are changing.

The ReadWriteWeb blog recently posted that RSS feeds were dead.  A brave and controversial thing to write.  Turns out I wasn't the only one that thought so.  There were many many comments from people that still rely on RSS feeds.  I was glad because when I first read the post I totally felt behind the times.  "But I still love my RSS feeds!", I wimpered.  It felt a little bit like coming back from sixth great summer break and finding out that my favourite game was now uncool.  The memo hadn't reached me in time for me to avoid making a fool of myself.   Thankfully RSS feeds are not dead and RWW had to capitulate.

The news that had people all atwitter is almost as exciting as my feeds changing - Google has announced the latest Android phone and it's not tied to a carrier.  It's the last part that's amazing.  That's right, you buy the phone and you can use it on any network!!!  This should not be such a gift because it should have been the norm all along, but there it is - a gift from mother Google.  I have no idea if any of this will be valid in Canada but it's only a matter of time.   This means that my previous rant may be moot in a year or two when carriers will be forced to compete for my phone's attention.  Take that Bell/Telus/Rogers.

A song for this post.

The limpics (day 129)

I don't think I've blogged about the Olympics yet.  It's kind of the elephant in the room.  The limpics.  That's what it starts to sound like after a while.  There is one wonderful thing about the limpics:  The Cultural Olympiad.  It's a somewhat grand title for a pile of events that showcase art and culture with a focus on Canada.   It's not that I don't care about sports, I do.  I love the idea of peak performance but I'm impressed by peak performance whenever and wherever I see it.  There are many more people operating at an impressive level than are chosen for the Olympics (even without taking into account the limited choices of sports for the big O).   The world coming to town is the event.  The show we're putting on is the event. 

So I am staying in town (the most frequently asked question),  and not just because I have to.  I'm staying in town to catch the shows, formal and informal.  I don't have tickets to any sporting event (the second most frequently asked question) but I've thought about it.  I am involved (the third most frequently asked question).   Emily Carr is hosting part of the CODE (Culture Olympiad Digital Edition) Live Exhibition.  And part of the Emily Carr exhibition will be in the Intersections Digital Studios (IDS).  It will be amazing to have such world class artists so close.  IDS is also hosting CodeLab, an artist-in-residence project which features work in the public realm by local artists and students.  Lastly I'll be participating in the CODE dialogues which are a series of talks/interviews with the artists.  If all goes according to plan, I'll be one of the hosts. 

It's hard to follow China but someone told me that we'll be the fun and eclectic second act.  I believe it.

A song for this post.

The earth needs a hero (day 128)

There are three times more people than there were in 1950.  And we all have to have jobs, be fed, housed, and contribute something of value.  I remember how the web made the world seem much more populated, but that was a perceptual awareness trick.  The reality of tripling the population on the earth is staggering on a much deeper level.  I picture the earth having to yield more crops, the fresh water having to hydrate those crops plus all the extra people, the cattle needing to be raised for meat eaters, the extra land for all that, etc.  We are leaning pretty heavily on a very thin biosphere.

Someone recently said to me: "I'm not worried about oil depletion.  We'll find another source of energy, perhaps even more powerful and renewable."  I shudder at the thought.  A lot of the population growth was fueled by oil.  A more powerful source of energy would kill us.  We'd get drunk and crash.

The climategate scandal and the Copenhagen talks illustrates two things for me:  a) we desperately want to believe that the biosphere can sustain what we are doing and more, so we can keep doing it; and b) doing nothing until absolute proof that we need to something still seems like a sane approach. (side note:  I prefer to think in terms of biosphere instead of earth,  because the extremely thin biosphere is the part of the earth that is actively producing and supporting life)  Climategate would be nothing more than a typical academic quarrel if we all agreed that this is a game of probability, not absolutes.  The probability of the biosphere being able to support another tripling of the human population is low.  The probability that we'll breathe easier in five years if we don't do anything different is extremely low.  The probability that we will willingly give up something is also low.  I didn't expect much from the Copenhagen talks but I secretly hoped for a hero to save the day.

A song for this post.

Sanity is a triumph (day 127)

We apparently forget most of our day when we go to sleep.  Only the most salient parts remain and even they are blurred into prior similar experiences.  I've probably written about this in another blog post, in fact.  I have a vague notion that I have but it's blurred enough that I'll assume it's acceptable to write about it again because presumably the memory will also be blurry in my reader's minds.   How voluntary that nightly amnesia+blurring might be is, I suppose, a matter of definition.  It is my being that is doing the forgetting after all.  If I wanted to keep something in memory presumably I would and could take the necessary steps (all systems operating within normal parameters, assumed).  

The forgetting that is annoying is more the short term forgetting.  The distracted attention that comes from multiple threads competing for attention combined with lack of sleep, and...age.  Yes age.  I'm 38 and I think I can say this without eliciting laughs of derision from baby boomers.  But who knows.  In any case, I notice the difference...I think.  The problem is that I don't have a clear memory of how my mind functioned when I was in my 20s.  I remember not keeping a calendar because I could remember all my appointments in my head.  But that may have been because I didn't have that many appointments and no one scheduled an appointment weeks in advance.  I remember new facts being easy to remember.  I kept all phone numbers in my head.  Perhaps the most telltale sign of decline though is that I don't remember being anxious about forgetting at all.

But rather than think of it as a decline I choose to look at it as a triumph of organization.  It is rather miraculous that sanity prevails in most of us given the accumulation of experiences and knowledge and the relentless progression of time.  Think of the network and partitions needed to make all that (potentially contradictory) information stay together, and still allow you to utter things like "I need to do the dishes".   Marvelous.  The fact that I sometimes forget little things is forgiven in a flash of admiration.

But for those that are still worried, the NY Times says we can look for contrarians to keep our brains nimble.  And I don't think they mean 2 years olds, though in my experience toddlers are a great source of brain scrambling experiences.

A song for this post.

Steps to generosity (day 126)

I used to think New Year's resolutions were contrived and stupid, usually involving losing weight.  An ex changed my mind about that, though his impact was not really felt until years later.  He made serious resolutions with serious intent.   On the one hand I found it pompous and self-important.  On the other hand, I found it admirable and courageous.   I was torn possibly because I didn't share his sensibilities -- his resolutions would not have been mine.   Even though I secretly admired his courage, I did not mimic his actions.  Sometimes the presence of an experienced resolutioner is enough to intimidate one away from practicing being a resolutioner.

Fast forward a few years and, no longer hampered by the long shadow of someone else's experience, I'm intrepidly eliciting resolutions of my own. 

The resolution for this year:  To be more generous.
I like this one because it can have so many interpretations.  Being generous is related to being public which gives some continuity from last year.  I'm not sure what form being more generous will take yet but I suspect I will work on creating more space for good communication with the people in my life.  Maybe this means changing the way I communicate,  inviting people for dinner, giving my time to projects that need it.  In general, I think generosity means giving without fear.

If I lose weight from being more generous, awesome.

A song for this post.

A year by any other name (day 125)

2009 was an interesting year.  I am grateful to have been there.  And as Woody Allen says, "80% of success is showing up".  As a buddhist I find this quote extra funny given the apparently very slim chance of being born human.

Here are some highlights for the year:

• My resolution last year was to be more public.  To me this meant taking steps such that the things that I am working on are more visible.  In some ways it meant being less quiet but with the added reality of the expectations of an online world.   I made good on this resolution by posting to this blog almost everyday, posting to the Breath I/O blog, being more diligent in processing emails, answering more phone calls (those who know me well, know that I have phone aversion).  It was good to have this focus for the year and I'll keep working on it in the next year.
• I received two SSHRC grants, one for the Interactive Futures conference which happened in November, and one for the Breath I/O project.
• The school received an NSERC grant on which I am one of the principal investigators.  This will fund many projects including some in stereoscopic video, mobile narrative, and design for health care.
  
• Two of my Masters students graduated, Alex Hass and Kara Pecknold.  Both have continued their practice and are very successful and beautiful human beings.  I take no credit for this.  I am simply delighted to have been along for the journey.
• A new Centre of Excellence for Stereoscopic 3D (S3D) was started as a partnership between Emily Carr University and Kerner Optical.  This will allow students and independent filmmakers to have access to state of art equipment for live action S3D, and professional instruction.
• I quit caffeine (though I must admit chocolate is still very much part of my life).
• I bought my first Mac laptop (and I'm in love).
  

 There is so much to be thankful for and I am.

A song for this post.

Gravity of time (day 124)

I saw my friend Yutai today.  He was visiting from San Francisco with his girlfriend.  Many of us met at a pub to see him.  Looking around the table it struck me how we are all aging.  That's what happens when you only see people every few years.  It's as if the context of the friendship stays frozen and the realization of change is a cosmic joke tinged with sadness. 

Sitting around the table looking at everyone and hearing the plans everyone has to say goodbye to the decade, I remembered how ten years ago saying goodbye to the decade had been a much more even mixture of hello and goodbye.   True it's hard to compete with a new millenium but this year has also had quite a lot of bad news on a global level.  Who could blame us for not being super positive about the year ahead and for not wanting to think in ten year terms.  Not one person asked about New Year's resolutions.

Yutai claims this year has been 42% less fun.  Surely that's reason for hope for next year and a reason to look for ways to brighten someone's day.

A nostalgic song for this post.

Norwalk with me (day 123)

One of the hazards of hanging out with young kids is germs.  Kids touch everything and then they touch you...on your face, on your hands...it's a germ heaven.  On this particular bliss-filled vacation with my niece and nephew, a Norwalk-type virus found its way in.  I started feeling sick as we rolled out of the driveway and it took all the will power I had to keep everything in until we rolled onto our street.  I barely made it to the bathroom.  Then ensued the harshest ten hours of purging I can remember, including all my childhood (perhaps my mom would differ in opinion).   So this is why two days of blogging were dropped.

I am now getting back on solid foods and wondering why the world looks so bleak.  It's an interesting side-effect of being sick - a sort of dead zone where all your plans were dropped and now the threads are nowhere to be found.  I'm actively looking for the threads -- trying desperately to restart the routines but so far this blog is the only thing that's been restarted.  Before this I hadn't been sick in fifteen months...I'm out of practice.

I figure I can view it as a type of rebirth into the new year.  A clean slate.

A song for this post.

T'was the day after christmas (day 120)

The strange world of being implanted into a young family continues.  Today we were all a little hungover from the sugar and chocolate rush of the day before.  Schedules were disrupted, tempers were short, and naps were needed all around.   We all recovered long enough to walk to the beach, make sand castles and watch a beautiful sunset.   One of us is now quite sick though and the rest of us are living in fear of contracting whatever it is.

Yes, it's a christmas hangover.  The upshot?  The environment is so different I feel like I've rebooted my brain.

A song for this post.

Chaos Collage (day 119)

Tickling monsters
make you run
your voice stretches
scares all who run past
freeze!
can I have another cupcake?
five more minutes?
'nightie night

A song for this post.

I caught many weasels (day 118)

I wasn't sure how it would be spending the day with a four year old.  I was out of practice.  The last time I visited was August.  But she made it easy.  Catching weasels, playing with glue sticks, hide and seek, tickle games, catching monsters, making princesses, making tea -- there was a full range of fun from an unencumbered imagination.   My favourite part was gluing stuff together.  What could be more fun than collage on christmas eve?

Looking at her, listening to her, I could believe that violence is not our true nature.

A song for this post.

Talking peace (day 117)

This is the first post away from home.  After spending the last 10 minutes trying to remember my brother's wireless password, I've given up and I'm writing in Evernote so I can post the entry tomorrow.

It took almost seven hours to go from my doorstep in Kits Point to my brother's doorstep on Bainbridge Island.  That's a cab ride (15 minutes), a wait/customs/wait(1 hour), a train ride (3.5 hours), a wait (1 hour), a ferry ride (30 minutes), and a car ride (20 minutes).  That's long enough to listen to an audio book almost in its entirety ("Speaking Peace") and get through a big chunk of a physical book ("Open GL Shading Language").

"Talking Peace" is an audio recording about non-violent communication (NVC) that was recommended by a couple friends of mine (independently).  NVC is a fascinatingly simple yet effective way to communicate without judgement.   At its core is the belief that human beings like to make other human beings happy, and also like having their own needs met.  It's an optimistic belief but I reason that it is less depressing than the alternatives so why not.   Plus it seems to work.  The idea is to state what we feel, need, and want (in that order).  Then listen and empathize.  And repeat. 

One problem is that most of us have poor vocabularies with which to state what we feel and need.  Another is that we often want to state our wants in terms of negatives ("don't do that") and demands ("if you don't...").  So NVC is hard and requires a lot of mindfulness and awareness, not to mention trial and error.

I wonder how many people come to a point in their lives when they realize that they could use better communication skills.  When they realize that conflicts never seem to quite resolve and relationships stagnate because of it.  Is this the same as coming to the end of my twenties and realizing that now the expectations were going to be much higher going forward?  In my forties, I believe I'm expected to have better communication skills. 

A song for this post.

Avatar (day 116)

Color me blue.  I just saw Avatar.  We were first in line so we got the best 3D seats in the house.  The whole outing took 5 hours.  As long as a flight to Montreal.

Verdict:  Absolutely go see it, for the visuals.
Subtext: It's no Matrix but it will have a generational impact nonetheless...maybe similar to Toy Story.

Here are some observations in no particular order:

• Patriarchy in movies is getting really annoying.
• Beautiful visuals, light as a theme, networks, greens and purples.
• Headless robots as avatars for military men.
• Blue lithe bodies as avatars for peace-loving, planet-connected, people.
• The blue people never eat.
  
• Great body movements.  Wonderful choreography.
  
• Great flying scenes.
  
• Standard Hawks vs. Doves story.  Hawks attack doves, doves initially retreat, eventually become hawks.  No one really learns peace.  A sequel would be another war.
• Movie was long but not noticeably.
  
• 3D was extremely well done and for the most part, for good effect.

Getting out of the movie there was a feeling of coming out of a dream, like disconnecting from an avatar.  Christopher and I had a discussion about how long we would stay in a movie for, if there were options of say day long or week long movies.  An accelerated life, like Total Recall.  In fact, Avatar is very much in the same vein as Total Recall, Strange Days, Existenz, Matrix.  The difference is that Pandora is a world you might actually want to stay in.   And of course the possibility of fully letting go of your human body is different.  A rebirth from hawk to dove (ostensibly...though in practice the affect was not exactly that).

There are so many parallels to be drawn, it's hard to put a finger on why it misses the mark exactly.  It's a dark film with lots of suffering, lots of fighting.  You should maybe get out thinking about the earth differently but instead you wish to escape it, to go to a better place.  It seems hopeless at its core even though we are shown the protagonist finding his way 'home'.  Because the vast majority of humans are shown as vicious, and heartless, going back to earth -- no doubt preparing for another battle.

A song for this post.

Look for certified organic GBs (day 115)

Between 1980 and 2008, the number of bytes consumed by Americans increased 350 percent. The average annual growth rate was calculated at 5.4 percent.
-- Don Reisinger (CNET news story: "Study: You'll wolf down 34GB of data today )

I don't think Canadians fared much better.

How many GB for a healthy body?  What proportion of news, twitter, fiction is ideal?  Should one ingest any TV?  Is there a difference between wolfing down words or images?  Are images really worth a thousand words?  Is reading tweets the equivalent of snacking? 

Here is my recipe for a healthy information day:

Total GB: 14.84-17.3
Preparation Time: Pre-packaged
Cooking Time: Pre-cooked

50 tweets - 6.8 KB
50 emails - 600KB
3 videos (10 minutes each, HD) - 2 GB
1 hour of podcast - 25MB
one of:
   1 tv episode - 550MB
   1 movie - 3GB
2 hours internet browsing - 88MB
2 hours of virtual reality - 12 GB
1 hour of reading print -5MB
background music (3 hours)- 180MB

I know it seems like a near starvation diet but a good choice of media will make you feel full with less.  You'll thank me later when you slip in to that accessorized story full of just the right references, perfect for a late night conversation.

A song for this post.

No dead air please (day 114)

Multitasking was a desirable trait back in the early 90s.  Saying you were a multitasker was a winning interview strategy.  Multitasking meant you got a lot done.  Now the word is old and the belief is waning.  Whatever way it's sliced, the time to do something is the time to do something.  The real killer quality is the ability to find the minimum amount of time to do something particularly amongst other things.  Optimization is key.

If I had an app in my iphone that could somehow tell me the most efficient thing to do given:

• the list of things pending
• deadlines
  
• the time before my next meeting, lunch time, etc.
• proximity and availability of resources
• time of day
• location
• energy level
  

...I would be very efficient.   My friend Christopher gave an example of an app that would be aware of all the gifts you need to buy in the next year and the state of your bank account.  It could then suggest that you stop in at certain stored based on proximity to a store, state of bank account, and the other person's preference.   It may start to feel like an onboard gps navigator: "please turn left.  turn around.  turn around. "  Maybe it could be a once a day schedule suggestion based on previously entered data, which would be less annoying.

It is based on a notion of slotting in the appropriate thing at the appropriate time which is the hardest problem most of us face in our work lives.   But it comes with an assumption of complete quantifiable data.  Even if that assumption were satisfied, someone would have to enter that data.  Would it be worth it?  Perhaps if some learning was taking place over time and the dependence on the app lessened. 

I can't shake the idea that the solution may be in doing less though.

A song for this post.

Change for feed's sake (day 113)

I got sidetracked today.  I spent an entire afternoon porting my blog from my custom site (www.marialantin.com) to blogspot.  If all worked well, you're looking at this post from the site.  I've set up redirect links from the old site so I'm hoping everything mostly works out and 404's are limited.  If you are reading this from a feed reader,  it is obviously still working with the old address.   But if it's not too much trouble, I would love it if you could change your rss feed to the newer one by using the drop down menu on the actual site or by copy&pasting this address:
http://marialantin.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
to your reader.
(if you go to the address it'll redirect to feedburner which is not as desirable)

How did this happen?

I was reading IEEE news and there was a news story about URL shortening services.  Apparently Google is releasing their own but it will only work with a limited number of services, Feedburner among them.  I had been hearing about Feedburner from some other sources and I got curious.  Turns out it's a kind of analysis service for bloggers.  It was simple enough to sign up so I decided to try it out.  To my dismay I couldn't get it to work to my satisfaction unless I was hosting my blog on blogger's own server space.  So I made the ambitious decision to port everything over.  That part is actually easy...it's the making sure the links and stylesheet are working that is not so easy.    There was another reason to switch over:  the ease with which I could change my stylesheet by adding widgets.  Just for that, the switch was worth it.  I know a lot of people swear by Wordpress and I have a couple of blogs on Wordpress too.  But I do like the simplicity of Blogger.  Fewer things can and do go wrong.

Anyway, I hope things work out ok.  Let me know if there are any issues.
The search feature won't work until Google gets around to indexing the site.  For now it always returns an empty set.

A song for this post.

Missing the gap (day 112)

Yesterday I listened to a Stanford lecture on depression.  It was a link from the Open Culture blog (which I highly recommend).   The lecture was an hour long and fairly engaging but throughout I couldn't shake the feeling that the facts we currently hold to be true are in fact quite brittle.  He kept saying "it's not a matter of just getting over it...there are real physical obstacles, physiological changes...".   The experiential gap there is so massive that it's really hard to believe him.   I cannot picture a mental state that I couldn't affect by doing something different...however small.  I can't imagine not being able to bootstrap myself out of a situation.  It's almost like in hearing his presentation I lost touch with the idea of free will (which I know is a problematic concept but let's just say free will with a very small f).  Surely there remains in a depressed person a small gap where something different could happen?   It seems that the manipulation of neurotransmitters is a pretty coarse tool, and not a sustainable one.   It seems that by saying 'it's not their fault, they can't do anything about it' we confirm the helplessness they feel.  The professor in the lecture anticipates my reaction and says we would never say something like that about a diabetes patient.  He has a point except he's relying on an arbitrary definition of disease.   There are lots of diseases that weren't diseases just 5 years ago - especially diseases of the mind or behaviour.  To be clear, I have no qualifications to be saying anything categorical about depression.  I just want to believe in personal agency for change and I'm suspicious of the language we use around depression.

The same applies to alcoholism.  The accepted fact is that an addict is an addict for life, there are recovering addicts but they can never take a drink again because they can't control it.  They appeal to a higher power, etc, etc.   I know it is useful to draw a strict boundary between drinking and not drinking, to help break the habit.  But is it sacrilegious to think an alcoholic could ever return to normal social drinking patterns?  It seems so.   A quick search on google points to circular definitions - "if you are able to go back to social drinking, you were not an alcoholic to begin with".  It's suspicious.  Again I have no deep knowledge in this area, just wondering how something can be such a one way street.

On the other hand, lately there's been lots of talk about the plasticity of the brain and how much we can change.  We've come a long way from the story that was around when I was young when neurons died every day and were never regenerated.  Every day you became less smart.  At least now we know that the brain is a bit more resilient than that.   So how does one resolve the plasticity with the unequivocal statements of inability to change?

A song for this post.

Embarrassing nudge (day 111)

I started the self-surveillance project almost a month ago now.   At some point I was telling someone about it and they asked if I was also taking a picture of myself every 15 minutes.  I had thought about it but decided against it because I thought it was a bit tacky to include pics of myself in an art context.  But after talking with this person, I reconsidered.  I reasoned that one can never be too rich or have too much data.  So last week I started taking pictures of myself on the macbook, the only one of my computers with a built-in camera that could easily be coaxed into taking the picture. 

This experiment has not been good for my self-esteem.  But it may be good for modesty.   Almost none of the shots are flattering.  In almost all of them I'm looking absent-minded, bored, or just unhealthy.  Granted, some of this is from the camera angle and the bad lighting but still looking at a computer is not the most embodied experience, and it shows.  The best pics were when I was watching a TEDxSV talk...I think there was some sort of performance that I was really enjoying.  There were also some pretty intense pics when I was updating my web site profile.

But here is the upshot of all this.  Knowing that the camera will spring to action every 15 minutes, I've become more conscious of my body.  By virtue of seeing shot after embarassing shot, I've trained myself at least a little bit to stay present -- an unexpected benefit from an unlikely source.

And now to conquer some of my fear...here is an example of an embarrassing shot.  It's not the worst.  I'm not that advanced yet.  The next shot is one of the intense ones.

A song for this post.

Identity maintenance (day 110)

It's getting late for a long post.  I spent a little bit of time tonight updating my page at the new Emily Carr website.  It's actually a pretty cool website that functions sort of like a social network and allows some nice linkages based on tags.    I don't think I've seen any school sites that well integrated.  It'll be great to see how it evolves.   I still have lots of work to do to make my page shine.  It's a start.

A song for this post.

Who thought it first (day 109)

I wonder about ideas and who they belong to.  I've been listening to talks from the TEDxSV symposium and I can't help but be impressed with the insights and talents of some of the speakers/performers.   Today I also scanned the Top Ten Products of 2009, many of them having to do with social networking, idea spreading, the cloud, and so on.  I also listened to Spark talk about copyright legislation.  We are becoming very good at knowledge spreading and with that, there seems to be an anxiety about acknowledgment and reward.  The cold fact is that the larger the spread of an idea, the more likely it is to be appropriated.

But I'm also interested in where the ideas that eventually spread like crazy come from.  Because when we are talking in the hive we are thinking collectively, bouncing ideas around to see what sticks.  No different than brainstorming in a physical group in concept, but quite different in possibilities because of the sheer numbers involved and the potential reach of a sticky idea.  The issue is that even though the hive may have produced the idea, the authorship remains important.  Authorship is what gets people paid and promoted.  Having been in the academic world for a while I see the anxiety of authorship, I sometimes personally feel it.  I see people getting included or cut out,  getting scooped, getting copied, getting cited.  When information is free as is mostly the case with academic works, authorship is currency.

Obviously there many shades of grey in what I'm talking about here but in a general sense I wonder about what will happen to authorship in the future.  I wonder if the performance of information spreading will become more important.  We see this trend already with 'star' bloggers and tweeters.  We probably also see it with TED speakers that are chosen based on their ability to perform in front of an audience.  There may be someone out there with deeper knowledge of the subject but without the ability to perform that knowledge for half entertainment and half edification.

If authorship fades in favour of performance, then we are faced with the same problem as the recording industry:  who pays the knowledge producers, the ones that are not necessarily performing the knowledge?  When authorship becomes separated from the means of spreading the product, there is a problem of credit distribution.   This gets even more complicated when authorship is muddled by the means of production as is the case for mash-ups and other collage type of activities, not to mention the hive thinking by sharing.

I have no solutions or even predictions for any of this, just observations.  I see individuality being eroded for the benefit of the collective.  At the same time I see performance gaining some ground.   These are contrasting trends.  Their co-existence is of interest to me.

A song for this post.

Sleep before snow (day 108)

Just a quick post today.  I have to go to bed so I am at least partially awake for the defense tomorrow.  This student may have an advantage for having scheduled a morning defense with me as external.

So they said snow and everyone get excited.  I got excited.  But there is no snow, just rain.  I was so hoping to wake up to a quiet snow covered city.  Maybe next week.

I'll end with a video of the wearable technology I'm going to hear about tomorrow morning:



A song for this post.

Tale of an inefficient review (day 107)

I spent the day reading a thesis today.  I'm an external on a MSc defense on Tuesday.  I'll read it again tomorrow and formulate some questions.   As I was reading I wondered how I could be more efficient at making notes on what I was reading and formulating questions from the notes.  Also wondered how the system could in turn be useful for the student when revisions are necessary.

I prefer reading the thesis on paper and make notes in the margins.  I would prefer the notes be stored electronically with appropriate context.   I don't really want to stop reading to open up my computer and type so perhaps an e-book type of idea would work.  Adobe has done lots of work on a system for review and annotation of documents but I can't say I've ever used it officially.  I've left tons of comments on grad student papers submitted to me as pdf but I haven't enabled a shared review of any kind.   I think it would be useful for my students to dialogue back and forth on the comments.   It's like all the pieces of the puzzle are around but they are just not integrated. 

Ideally, the thesis would be submitted to me on an e-reader with a stylus and could write my comments in the margins.  The review would be shared with the student and other committee members but only after the defense is finished.  While the defense is going on, I would have easy access to my comments (visual list) and could modify them based on the student's input and the input of the other committee members.  After the defense she can look at my comments and ask me more questions.  Each time I open up my e-reader I could see comments that are awaiting a reply.   This would be my ideal situation.  As it is, she will do the same thing that I did: take 3 paper copies with her and flip through to consolidate and address each point.  This is tedious and it may actually miss some crucial points like sections of the thesis that were flagged individually by all committee members for slightly different reasons...pointing to a general problem with the section.  Add to this the fact that I used a black pen to make my comments (should have used red!) and her revision task will not be as efficient as it could be.

A song for this point.

A collective cozy (day 106)

I feel Christmas less than I used to.  Every year it feels a little more arbitrary than the year before.  I watch the lights go up and hear the peripheral chatter about gift buying.  The cards trickle in.  The party invites beep into my inbox.   Most of it feels like someone else's concern.   Despite feeling it less, I do love this time of year.  Especially right after school ends when there is a quiet anticipation of the silence in the city on Christmas day.   For a few days there is a collective relaxing that I really appreciate.  When it's ok not to check email because we've collectively agreed that business can wait.  It's a magical time but it has nothing to do with the usual descriptors of christmas.  It's a magical time because culturally we're taking time to look around.

January 1st marks the end of the magic but the start of a slightly different direction -- sometimes subtle but always hopeful.  It's hard for me to imagine that feeling of renewal right now.  Like many people who are tied to an academic schedule, this time just before the Christmas break is frantic and a bit hazy from the accumulated exhaustion.  It's like seeing the finish line accentuates the tired but also triggers a kind of third wind.  I am curious how it will feel on January 1st.

I'm looking forward to taking some time to work on my projects and read some books.  I might even do nothing for a couple of days.  Let it snow...

A song for this post.

What does online feel like (day 105)

I had an interesting discussion with Miles today about what the feeling of being online.  I've been thinking about this a lot lately because of my self-surveillance project that snaps a picture of my desktop every 15 minutes on all 3 of my screens if they are active (and sometimes my iPhone too, though that is not automatic).   I've now collected close to 500 screenshots and looking at them in a fast (10 screenshots/second) sequence it doesn't even get close to the feeling of being online.  I'm going to investigate varying the duration of each frame by random amounts and see how that changes things.  I've added a bit of blur to the movie for privacy but here is what the movie for one my screens looks like for now:


226 screenshots (test) from Maria Lantin on Vimeo.

The feeling of being online is hard to describe.  It's not embodied but it can feel vast and rich.  It sometimes feels social but sometimes anxious.  Much of my time is spent processing the information that is coming at me (the social network as recommendation engine).   Making decisions about this information seems to be the source of a low grade anxiety stemming from a reluctance to spend time and the fear of missing out (FOMO).  There are moments of relaxation into a time commitment such as watching a show, scanning family albums, or programming an application.  There are quick smiles like interesting pictures in twitter.  There are lots of interruptions, little blips and popups.  Email anxiety is never far but seems to ebb and flow depending on time of day and how much the physical world needs my attention.  There is a both a satisfaction to answering email and an anxiety about the conversation progressing too quickly from there.  There are moments of boredom when there is not enough will to separate from the online but not enough interest to continue (the feed has slowed and the stand-bys are exhausted).  There is definitely a feeling of being in the flow of information but it is usually interrupted by having to click or type which brings me back to the screen.  A bit like being into a novel and someone asking you a question about work.

The more I think about it the more the rhythm seems to be important.  I'll see about adding different timings.   I also thought about doing a character recognition scan which would give me a data set to maybe assign an emotional 'score' to an image (many of my screenshots are mostly text).  Either way I'd like to play around with adding an emotional curve which can then be mapped the lung breathing pattern.

A song for this post.

Empty bookcases one day (day 103)

e-ink had been just over the horizon for so long it seemed like it would never get here.  But here we are at Christmas time with more e-readers than we can shake a paper-cut finger at.   I read a lot but so far the urge to get an e-reader registers at about a 2 on the gadget Richter scale.   First off, the Kindle is gimped in Canada because we can't download over 3G (who decided that?  I dunno...but it smells suspiciously like a BRT downer...)  What's the use of a reader without a connection?   The Nook is a possibility but it's not out yet.  The Sony reader is out but it also has no connectivity (by design, that one).  But it does have a stylus for notes.  Then there is the mythical Apple tablet which may make a miraculous appearance next year.  As always, the urge to commit is hampered by the imminent.  My wish list for an e-reader:

• easy on the eyes, good in the day and night.
  
• some cue about how much I've read, how much is left
• a nice page-turning feel or something completely different than page turning...either way something to cover the length of the book with some sense of context within the book.  This may have to do with book design more than interface, or maybe both.   Maintaining contextual awareness without the physical cue of the book is an interesting design problem.
• annotation for reviewing papers, and making marginal notes.  A way to add voice annotation. 
• good interface for browsing annotations, including a group's annotation if need be.
  
• wireless connection
• ability to lend and borrow books
• good collection browsing...ability to browse my friends' collections
  
• durable and light
• private
• open
  
• interoperability with my other devices
  
• color (though I'll deal with b&w for now if the above features are there)
• video (though I'll deal with static for now if the above features are there)
  

I do love the smell of paper and the feel of a book but I'm quite willing to trade them in for the benefits of e-reading.   I sure won't miss moving boxes of books.

A song for this post.

The phone is smarter than its carrier (day 102)

I think today is a rant day.   The best rant topic is cell phone companies.   Have I already ranted about this?  Probably.  I'm convinced that whoever runs Bell, Rogers and Telus (BRT) are just not passionate about the cell phone business.  They're big and got fat on another technology.   They are just not that hungry.  Add to this the fact that we have a sleepy CRTC that got fat on the crumbs dropped by BRT and you get a public that is getting extorted for the sin of wanting a smart phone.    I have limited data to back any of this up.  I have no idea to what extent the CRTC is getting lobbied.  I have no idea how hard it is to run a cell phone network.  Intuitively, though, it seems that having a smart phone shouldn't be an automatic $90/month.   And even if the profit margin wasn't %30 (I do have a news report to back that up), surely a mandatory 3 year contract is just over the top arrogance for a market that has almost no competition.  Before the smart phone,  you could refuse the contract, buy the phone and get yourself on a month to month plan.  With the iPhone (for example),  there is no good way around the contract.  Even if you buy the phone full price, you still need a contract to get on a data plan.   The iPhone is not very useful without a data plan.  I find the whole idea of a contract offensive.   Being tied to a company means they have stripped you of a pretty fundamental power as a consumer - the power to walk away if the service sucks or if the price is too high.  Not only am I not getting the service I want, I have to pay to switch.  Injury+insult.  A further insult comes when I realize that the phone I bought is useless on another company's network unless I commit the illegal act of 'unlocking' the phone.  That's even if I paid full price.  If I complain about my indentured servitude,  I suspect their internal dialogue is a version of "Oh well, I see you're still with us for another two years...oh you're still talking?".    They have a steady stream of new contracts that basically means they don't have to innovate to keep people around.  The consumer feedback loop is sluggish at best.   It's a lazy approach to business.  With so few players in the market, don't tell me they need contracts to stabilize their business.  Even gyms have done away with contracts.  I suspect if contracts were declared unacceptable business practice, prices would come down and service would go up.  I don't know what the CRTC should be doing, but this seems like pretty easy pickings for some great PR. 

A song for this post.

Inside/Outside awareness (day 101)

I created another test of the lungs breathing.  The breathing pattern is the calm breathing that I had worked out with the egg.  The videos are the same two videos of the pelicans and garden.  One video plays on the lungs and the other on the trachea and bronchi.  The lungs fade out at the top of the in breath and fade back in at the bottom of the out breath.  The video slows down at the in breath and goes to normal speed at the out breath.


I was trying to emulate a feeling I have when I meditate of the out breath being a little anxious with only a slight pause at the top, and the out breath feeling more relaxed with an extended pause before the next in breath.  In that pause there is lots of space and a feeling of being more aware of the outside.  This is why I ended up with the fade in at the bottom of the out breath.  I initially had tried it the other way (fade in at in breath) but it somehow didn't work. 


The next step is to get the video to slowly come in to the trachea/bronchi as the breath comes in.  I have to write a small shader to do this.  I'm hoping to have some time tomorrow.


Here is a video.  Unfortunately it's only 2 minutes long.  It's really  nice to keep breathing with the lungs.  Very calming.  Next time I'll make the video loop.  It's too late right now to rectify that little oversight.



fade out lung test from Maria Lantin on Vimeo.


A song for this post.

But I don't want to know (day 100)

Michael Boyce tweeted "i resent knowing about tiger woods without even trying to know about tiger woods".  So well put.   In talking with some friends at a party last night we figured that the metaphor is of the information superhighway super crowded with billboards.  You can't help but be assaulted with drive-by celebrity trivia.   But in this case, the Tiger Woods story I think was more of a celebrity crash where we were implicated as implicit if not complicit rubberneckers.  You see, Tiger crashed from a great height.  He wasn't exactly a jumper...more of a tight-rope walker that we watched with fascination waiting for the stumble.  Even those that weren't watching couldn't help but overhear the story of the one that fell from a great height.

There's not much I can do about celebrity drive-by's but I do improve the scenery by using a firefox plug-in called Add-Art.  It replaced ads with art.  After I first installed it, I sort of forgot about it.  I still catch myself thinking things like 'what IS that?' when I see a piece of art where an ad should be.  It's such a strange thing to be seeing that it catches my eye almost every time.  I highly recommend it.

No I'm not linking to Tiger Woods.

A song for this post.

When can you move in (day 98)

Sometimes you get what you wish for but time has passed and you don't want it anymore.  That happened to me today.  I think it did anyway.  I will re-evaluate my degree of want in the morning when I've had time to contemplate my future with or without the thing that has come.   The 'road not taken' situation is so hard.  This one is particularly hard because this crossroad has come up before and at the time I wanted to take the path that is now offered but it was denied.   Priorities change and the heart warms to the current situation.  It's harder to change when it's not necessary.  It's always best not to resent choice but at this very moment I wish this situation had come up about six months ago.

A song for this post.

Google waved and people craned their neck to see (day 97)

Google Wave made a splash.  It broke on the beach of cloud tools.   It was a private beach though everyone could see something was going on from the parking lot.  Soon there were paparazzi posting unauthorized pictures, and who you knew became something to be evaluated and mined.   This has happened before.  I remember not having a gmail address.  I remember who did.  I remember how I became in.  How early was I into the wave?  What number was I?  I want to know but much like my Francis Bacon degree of separation (2),  I wonder what such a number really buys me besides social anxiety.  Soon everyone will be in the wave and we'll all be wondering what we're supposed to be doing.

I don't think I've ever opened a tool that confused me as much as Google Wave did at first glance.  It really stumped me.  The feeling was uncanny...like familiar and foreign at the same time and mixed with a unsatisfied anticipation.  I clicked and felt really lonely.  I added some people to my wave.  I said some mundane things like 'what is this for'?  I forgot about it.  I read a report about it.  I came back to it.  There were more people so it felt less crazy to say something less mundane.

I've now figured out that Google Wave is a sort of mix of email,wiki, google docs, and IM.  It's a mix of synchronous and asynchronous.   It may be a replacement for email but the average wave message seems to have more commitment than the average email.  There seems to be more purpose to the wave and more community.  There also seems to be more longevity to the conversations.   So maybe the workflow is that you 'move' email conversations to the wave when they become too complex for email and you need more collaborative authoring.  

The best part is that it's a protocol so it can be reskinned.

A song for this post.

Breathe with the egg (day 96)

I've started to animate spheres stretched into egg shapes (as stand-ins for lungs).   They breathe.  I'm trying to simulate regular breath, calm breath, excited breath, anxious breath, and so on.  So far I've got calm breath down I think.  I'll post a video soon.  It's an interesting process.  I tweak the animation curves and breathe with the egg.  I keep breathing with the egg and notice how I'm feeling.  Sometimes I end up out of breath and feeling like I need to breathe more often or more deeply.  Sometimes I feel I have to get up and do something.  Sometimes I feel light-headed.  Sometimes I even feel good.  It's an interesting process.

Just looking at the eggs breathe makes me think that we might want to consider a more stylized model for the lungs.  Not necessarily cartoony but maybe something with more personality.  I'm not sure which would be more effective.  Certainly the anatomical look of the current lungs gives a kind of visceral feeling.  Something would be lost with a more drawn look.   May be worth a try though. 

A song for this post.

No matter what, I want cleaner air (day 95)

I came across an article in the BBC talking about the new role of science in the democratic process.  It's a well written article with lots of insightful comments about the possibility of science becoming corrupted when faced with a high stake issue like climate change.   We've had separation of church and state for good reasons and it's worked out well.   But we don't have separation of business and science.  Maybe we should.  Perhaps all science should be publicly funded.  The issue is further compounded because predictions coming out of climatology are easily attacked on the basis of potential biases from the choice of data sets and methodologies.  It's too easy for factions to form on the basis of beliefs in a particular set of ingredients to the complex system.   Add to this observers which have a stake in shopping for the right climate change answer and you have an explosive mix which leads one's belief (or not) in climate change to be treated as a religion.  It's a sad state of affairs and it points to the general fear around what we we might have to change about our lifestyle to be kinder to the environment, to breathe easier.  Seems to me no matter why or if the climate is changing, we stand to gain a lot from decreasing pollution.  Unfortunately lots of money has been made on the fast pace enabled by oil.  Many have been successful with the current system and understandably want no change.  But we go faster than anything else, to our detriment.  We forgot the rhythm of the earth.

A song for this post.

Random learning, things that stick (day 94)

Some random things I learned today:

• you can become addicted to your own stress hormones
  
• stay away from chiggers (they'll make you sick and dissolve your flesh so they can eat it).
• Corelam is a very good sound absorbing material (amongst other things) and it was invented by one of Emily Carr's Industrial Design faculty, Christian Blyt.
• CMHC allowed an exhibit of small houses ('Homes for Less') designed to help homelessness but drew the line when one of them became inhabited.
• The repetitive nature of the commute (or the running track) can be exploited for narrative design.

A song for this post.

New is beautiful (day 92)

I get a special little thrill when I think about learning something new.  It's a similar thrill to opening up a novel already in progress.  The moment of anticipation of something unexpected and engaging.  It's different but similar to the thrill of creating something which feels exciting and risky all at once.  Learning something new feels hopeful and young.

I know a lot of people don't have this experience but I liked school so much when I was a kid that I would miss it in the summer.  I would ask for extra homework.  I would read books from the grades above me.  I particularly loved looking at algebra books and later calculus books so I could figure them out.   I loved things that had answers and were self-consistent.  Playing with coloured shapes and grouping them together was fun too.  Anything that was well framed and logical.

Looking back now, it doesn't seem crazy that I ended up in computing science.  Though at the time it wasn't such an easy decision.  The hard sciences like Chemistry, Biology, and Physics were much more respected.   And computing science (I'm not even using capital letters), in my mind, was for play...not serious business.  I was so serious.

I still love cracking open a computing science book though I would never immerse myself back in the field as I was.  I love the frame of a system that is logical and responsive.  It's a refuge from the open-ended and much more arbitrary art world (I don't say this pejoratively...I mean arbitrary in the same way that the law is arbitrary...complex systems built over time and highly contingent).

This weekend I'll learn something new about GLSL.  I look forward to it.

A song for this post.

Self-surveillance (day 91)

I just started taking a snapshot of my computer screen every 15 minutes.  It's all automated on all three screens I typically use (mac laptop, PC laptop, PC desktop).   It's actually fascinating to see the shots at the end of the day.  How long I spent on something.  The tidbits I read during the day.  The videos I watched.  The emails I wrote.  Sometimes I don't remember having looked at a particular thing.  It all goes by pretty quickly and somewhat compulsively.  It would be neat to get a snapshot of my face as well...and to record my breathing pattern.  For now, it's just screenshots.  It's for the Breath I/O project.  I'll collect hundreds of screenshots and make a quicktime to map into the environment and onto the lungs.

For those that are interested, it's pretty easy to set this up.  It's easiest on a Mac because cron runs natively.   All you have to do is issue the command "crontab -e" and edit the file that opens.   I run the following script in mine:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/sbin/screencapture -x $(printf "/Users/mlantin/Pictures/screenshots/macscreen-%04d.png" $((`ls ~/Pictures/screenshots| grep -c ''`+1)))

On a PC it's not as easy.  I downloaded and installed the MiniCap application.  Then I made a script in cygwin, again using bash.   Then I made a batch file to run the bash script.  Then I made a shortcut to the batch file so I could set it to run minimized (so it wouldn't pop up the svchost.exe window). Then I used Scheduled Tasks to make the script run every 15 minutes.  Here is the bash script:

#!/bin/bash

/cygdrive/d/Program\ Files/MiniCap/MiniCap.exe -capturedesktop -exit -save "$(cygpath -w $(printf "/home/mlantin/screenshots/desktopscreen-%04d.tiff" $((`ls /home/mlantin/screenshots | grep -c ""` + 1))))"

Here is the batch file (called takeashotdos.bat):

D:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe -l /home/mlantin/takeashot

exit

Here is the command in the Scheduled Task:

D:\cygwin\home\mlantin\takeashotdosshort.lnk

A song for this post.

Efficient language (day 90)

My friend Nathalie said something interesting tonight at dinner.  She said that religious language is very efficient.  It bypasses the frontal lobe and goes directly to the limbic system.  It creates affect without trying very hard.  It's efficient language.   I wonder then what the relationship between art and religion is.  Perhaps other people have wondered this and there is a whole discourse for which I have a blind spot.  But tonight marked the first time I'd ever really parked my awareness on the question.   It seems that art is related to religion in their desire for short-cutting preconceptions to create emotional insight or affect.   Art can be very efficient communication.  I suppose when people talk about the sublime and sublimation are referring to that efficiency of state change.

A song for this post.

Tribal misbehaviour (day 89)

Today on my twitter feed there was a news article about being tweckled.  A nice word that belies the extent of damage it can bring.  It's basically bullying on a mass scale in a conference backchannel.  If someone is daring to bore you at a conference you can blow off steam by insulting the speaker with your closest backchannel friends, loudly, in the public twittersphere.  The backchannel group referred to in the article, retrospectively feels justified based on the grounds that the speaker was obviously disrespecting them so they had the right to disrespect them right back.   In the moment, I doubt the thinking even went that far if anywhere at all. Another oft-stated argument was that this is the new world and you better come prepared to face the backchannel.   It rewards richly and punishes harshly.  It's the new world.  Hardly.  It's the gauntlet, revisited.  I've seen this behaviour in snowboarding terrain parks too.  It's not so new.  It's, in fact, as old as the hills.

As evidence of their good nature, they pointed out that they had collectively bought a new laptop for someone in their group who had lost theirs. Seems to be the same tribal behaviour flipped over.  I wonder which felt better.  It's a real question.

There is so much to say about why their tribal misbehaviour and lesser forms of it is harmful.  Part of me refuses to even spend the time thinking about it.  My high horses are so ready to ride but the real argument is based on a humble principle of generosity.

'the world owes me nothing, we owe each other the world'.  -- Ani Di Franco

A song for this post.