Beware of God

I just finished reading Shalom Auslander's hilarious and thought-provoking collection of short stories, Beware of God.

With story titles such as "Smite The Heathens, Charlie Brown" and "Holocaust Tips For Kids," it's apparent that Auslander's perspective, and sense of humor, is not for everyone. Drawing upon the indoctrination he received growing-up Orthodox, and his keen observations of both day-to-day human nature and the hypocrisy of religion, Auslander skewers the religious closed-mindedness and bigotry of both Goy and Jew alike.

Stories such as "Waiting for Joe" and "It Ain't Easy Being Supremey" ridicule the blind obedience, moral certainty, and resulting factionalization amongst religious zealots by transferring those tenets of belief onto the worldview of Hamsters and Golems, respectively. "Heimish Knows All" does the same for preachy moralizing, from the viewpoint of a family dog. And the obsequiousness obedience to an unreachable deity is shown for what it is, just another form of celebrity worship, in "They're All The Same." Possibly the most moving of the stories is "Holocaust Tips For Kids," which relates a young boy's perspective on the Holocaust and how to survive it (presumably, Auslander recalling his own childhood thoughts on the subject).

Every one of the stories in Beware of God is an easy, entertaining read, while at the same time making keen observations on humanity and our relationship to belief. While the humorlessly observant and easily offended need not apply, the rest of us can have quite a good laugh along with our critique of the foibles of religiocity.

Indieauteur.com on hiatus for a while

Yahoo! is much too buggy, and their customer service is nonexistent. I've decided to cancel my hosting account with them, and find an alternate provider or build WP on my colocated server and run it myself (I'd rather not, I'm way past bored with system administration).

I will re-launch indieauteur.com after I've found a better hosting site, and come up with a decent design template for the site (the current one, which I just found and downloaded, is pretty awful). There wasn't any real activity on that blog, anyway -- I spent most of my time fighting bugs in the Yahoo! system, including having to delete and re-create the site four times because Wordpress irrecoverably hung (at least, the Web management console became detached, so without console access I couldn't do anything). Yahoo! offers no support for restarting it on their end (or, really, much support at all). Their servers are also very slow. I highly recommend avoiding them for Web hosting, even for something "simple" like a blog.

Someone has recommended "WebFaction" to me. I'm going to give them a try. They are three times as expensive as Yahoo! (about $35/month vs. $35 / 3 months on Yahoo!), but their pre-sales support folks answered two sets of questions already -- infinity times the number of answers I've ever gotten to a support e-mail as a paying Yahoo! customer.

SIGGRAPH 08

My report on SIGGRAPH 08 will be relatively short because even though I enjoyed going, there wasn't a lot to talk about. I gave a talk, with Max Planck (no, not the famous dead physicist), about our system for shading the background robots on WALL-E. Though I've been co-author on a presentation previously, when I was at Bell Labs, I have never spoken at SIGGRAPH before so that was interesting. It was a much different experience than the free-for-all arguments that break out at the Transhumanist and Real AI events I've primarily spoken at. At SIGGRAPH, everyone listens politely, and follow-up questions are either nonexistant (in our case) or very nonconfrontational (a colleague's talk) -- at least, that's the case if you happen to be there representing Pixar. Perhaps more relaxing, but also a bit less amusing.

The Computer Animation Festival this year was shown in a very unsuccessful format. Instead having a few showings of the exact same juried Electronic Theater, and the other clips running in 4-6 category-based sessions that repeat multiple times, they merged the film show and animation screening room concepts into a series of different "competition screenings," so everyone saw a slightly different program -- but not different enough to warrant seeing all of them.

The seven "competition screenings" were subject to an audience prize vote. I saw two, one of which inexplicably ran after voting was closed. There was plenty of overlap between the two sessions, even though I chose the two that appeared to intersect the least. Under this arrangement it was entirely possible that you could miss seeing the winning entry unless you sat through other clips at least twice, if not more. Even worse, the Demo Scene, Japan Media Arts Festival, and similar screenings were only shown once -- and each was 15-30 minutes. If you were late, or a session you had to be in (say, if you were a speaker) was on at that time, you had no other chance to see this material. This hasn't been the case in the past, and I have previously always managed to see all of the clips. It was frustrating to miss some work I heard was very good. The theater, however, was amazingly excellent. Fortunately, I still managed to see a lot of good stuff anyway, such as Oktapodi, Mauvais Rôle, Rua das Tulipas, Appleseed: Ex Machina, and a few others.

Two interesting panels were presented by people from start-up studios Lightstream and MeniThings. Both are doing independently funded feature animation, and had a lot of interesting perspectives about starting a studio from scratch. Lightstream is doing a feature called "The 4th Magi," and MeniThings one called "Terra." The latter is much more technically primitive, but I think will be accomplished for a very low budget. It has the possibility, from what I saw, to be decent at the level of an average Don Bluth film. If that is the case, and my estimates of how cheap it is are correct, "Terra" could show that feature CG animation is within reach of independents, rather than being solely the domain of very wealthy studios (and individuals, like Laika's Phil Knight).

The technical and production talks I went to were all good, but nothing mindblowing. I did enjoye the four "Kung-Fu Panda" presentations I saw. They did good work on that film, and their presentations made me want to go see it (I haven't yet, but will soon). The "Horton" crew did some very nice hair work with hairs growing from hairs and tons of LOD management to make a very hairy show managable, and I hear some folks at work are doing something similar in our hair system, which I'm excited about. Their work was very nice, but it didn't make me want to see yet another Dr. Seuss story savaged by insipid hipsterism and faddish, crass humor.

I also saw the Clone Wars film. It was better than I expected -- but I expected my eyeballs to burst into flames within a few minutes, and for me to run screaming from the theater just in time to narrowly avoid my head exploding. We were softened-up by an enjoyable Q&A in which John Knoll asked Director Dave Filoni a bunch of snarky insider questions which essentially only John Knoll could get away with asking. It was done on a TV show budget, with a TV show crew. Go into the film expecting to vomit copiously, and keep in the back of your mind that the film was dirt cheap (by Lucas standards), and that nobody involved ever wanted it to be seen anywhere other than on TV (except Lucas), and you might make it through only throwing-up a little bit (such as whenever the phrase "sky guy" is uttered, for example). Taking the spirit of Filoni and Knoll's Q&A to heart as we watched it, we were able to even somewhat enjoy the moment. However, since you probably won't get to see it under such ideal conditions -- don't.

I actually like being down in LA, and we also got to see lots of friends, so all in all it was a good trip, even if SIGGRAPH itself was merely "pretty good" rather than awesome.

Donate To Help The Prids

I just found out that my friends, The Prids, were in a serious automobile accident not too long ago (while I was away, so it took me a bit of time to hear about it from other mutual friends).

Fortunately, none of them were as injured as badly as Todd Blair, but being an indie band working full time at recording and touring, with the paltry income from it that so many indie bands endure for years, several of them were not insured. Their hospital bills are enormous. David being airlifted to the hospital alone cost over ten thousand dollars.

So, please donate to help The Prids. They aren’t just the world’s best independent postpunk band, they’re also a nice bunch of people who are not going to be able to easily afford these hospital bills without a huge community of people lending a hand.

Ponyo

One of the great things about my workplace is that Japan's fabulous Studio Ghibli has their U.S. premier showings of their films at our studio. Not only do we get to be the first outside of Japan to see the films, but we get to see them subtitled rather than dubbed (the general releases of their films here are dubbed).

Miyazaki's latest, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, is a very charming love story between a boy and a goldfish. I don't want to give away all the twists and turns of the story, but suffice it to say it has all the requisite unusual, magical elements that people expect from a Miyazaki film. This film skews younger than several of Miyazaki's recent films, and that is reflected both in the storytelling and the artistic styles used in the film. However, that does not mean it isn't highly enjoyable for older audiences as well.

Ponyo manages to mix in an environmental message, without beating you over the head with it, and some philosophical reflections on love and life as well. However, given the younger intended audience, there is not the depth of probing and degree of conflict found in a film like Princess Mononoke. I think this led to a third act with some unfulfilled potential, especially with regards to the adventure and element of the story and challenging the main character, but it still manages to be at least satisfying.

That one criticism aside, I still highly recommend seeing Ponyo (and, if possible, to see it subtitled so you can hear the original voice acting).

To Upgrade Or Not To Upgrade

A G5-based Mac is the center of my home studio. I've got some quite expensive software (Waves, NI Bundle, etc.) which costs a lot to upgrade each time Apple releases a new, incompatible technology (this happened when going from OS9 to OSX, and again when Core Audio reared its pointless head). Intel Macs have been around for a while now, so I have to decide whether or not I should spend the money to upgrade everything, or just keep it running on the old Mac as long as possible.

The other alternative is to switch to Windows, running Steinberg Nuendo, and cross-grade Waves, etc. onto that platform. This would also move me to Avid or Premiere and away from Final Cut Pro (not that big of a deal), and while initially expensive it would mean the end of spurious incompatible hardware and OS revisions cropping up. Microsoft, to their credit, understands that their users run other software on their OSes and that incompatible OS upgrades mean cash outlays to upgrade/replace these apps. I've been delaying this decision for quite a while. I'd like to just get my studio stabilized and focus on using it rather than maintaining it, so I'm inclined towards just running the G5 until flames shoot out the side and it melts into a pool -- but that means that eventually I can no longer get new upgrades and plug-ins for Logic and other packages.

This flurry of incompatible upgrades that Apple released over the last few years was a big part of my turning from being platform agnostic and running all 3 major OSes, to really regretting ever having bought a Mac at all. Apple has always been antagonistic towards many of their developers and corporate users, but in the last several years their attitude towards customers has also become "either you're with us, or you're against us." Buy into the Apple hype wholesale (and be rich enough to do it), or forget it. My current plan is to get a trial version of Nuendo and see what I think.

Supply And Demand

According to various pundits, my generation is the first one that is predicted not to have a quality of life that exceeds that of their predecessors. Quality of life is ill-defined, but what has been presented in these arguments seems to revolve around cost of living vs. compensation, amount of leisure time, job satisfaction, and feeling of control over one's own destiny. Clearly, this is a rather American definition of what constitutes a quality life. Being an American, it resonates with me.

I feel that if the pundits are correct about the effect, the cause they are always claim to be seeking is fairly obvious. It is not some mysterious conflation of economic subtleties. It isn't globalization, global warming, or even wage deflation, per se. Those things are all symptoms of what I think is the larger issue: the supply of people exceeds the demand.

It is not popular to talk about population control. Many people feel it is their God-given right to reproduce as prolifically as is conceivable. They forget that with rights come responsibilities, and that the world's excess supply of people is leading to compensation deflation and resource contention as there are more people than jobs and resources in our current markets. New jobs can indeed be created the by new demands placed on the global resource system by new people, but there is a tipping point beyond which this benefit is exceeded by the detriment of trying to incorporate many new people into the economic system. I don't know if we're past that tipping point, but it is obvious to me that our current economic and social structures, when coupled with this population boom, put us at least dangerously close to it.

Related to this issue is longevity. I am in favor of longevity, since I myself would like to live a nice long time, but with these increases in longevity come extended stays in the workplace for a large number of people and this taxes the economic system. The market is not expanding at a rate which creates quality, desirable jobs for younger people who are unable to fill existing positions, because those positions are held by Baby Boomers who are neither retiring nor dying. With increased longevity either needs to come an economic system in which opportunity expands proportionally to population growth (and given that the world is not infinite, there is a tipping point here also beyond which that is impossible), or a decrease in fertility. If we haven't passed the tipping point, the market could in theory expand in this way -- but it currently is not.

But don't just blame the so-called third world, or "foreigners" in general. Sure, many jobs (not just blue collar ones) in the U.S. and Europe are experiencing wage drag due to competition from China, India and other developing nations. Never mind that American and European companies owned by American and European investors also encourage this competition in order to increase their profit margins by stifling compensation gains -- right here at home we have a different kind of disparity based on job displacement by population.

The Baby Boomers, that 60's generation who thought they would save the world, are actually a population bubble whose longevity, fertility, and expansive lifestyle (and concomitant resource usage) is in fact a population spike which is causing (or at least stoking) a number of the economic and social justice problems they claimed were of utmost importance to them. Despite America's youth-centric culture, the Baby Boomers are the largest population of any generation to cling to power, authority, and money so late into life.

Someone who was 20 in 1968 is now 60. With current projected lifespans, these people are likely to live another 20-40 years. Those who do retire will strain the Social Security system, requiring my generation to pay an unprecedented amount for their upkeep, for an unprecedented length of time. Those who do not retire are ensconced in all the jobs that my generation would like to have, which might make it possible for at least some of us to own our own homes, and destinies, and at the same time chip in for the care and feeding of aging Boomers.

It is possible that growth will increase, and certainly folks like myself who have attempted to help create new markets such as computing and biotech are trying to make that happen. However, should sufficient growth not come to pass, the "correction" to compensate for Boomer-inflated markets will fall squarely on the shoulders of me, you and a lot of folks just like us. This would be a much bigger correction than the ones after either the Internet or housing bubbles, and it's already starting to happen. In order to curtail this economic slide, many more people need to become involved in opening up new markets and expanding existing ones -- especially those who benefit from the current system and might not see the benefits to adjusting it, as they control the resources needed to do it.

Even if we can stimulate sufficient economic growth, we also, as a global community, still need to start looking seriously at population. No matter how sensible new policies and how robust new markets may become, the planet is a finite system and therefore there is some number of people beyond which there will simply not be enough resources to go around. In order for a maximal number of people (all around the world, not just in the US) to live a good life, there must be fewer people than this limit. I certainly don't support either genocide or eugenics, but rather I'd like to see sensible population planning policies which use education and economic incentives to encourage birth control and responsible family planning. Fecundism at any cost is a dead-end path, and it's about time the human race let go of this misguided ideology.

Sweet Dreams Are Not Made Of This

In the last few years, I've noticed hard drives failing at a spectacular rate. This phenomenon has cut across vendors. I've had Western Digital, Maxtor, IBM and Seagate drives all fail on me, regardless of whether internally or externally mounted. Just this week, one of the drives in my Buffalo DriveStation Quattro failed, and so did one of the drives mounted in one of my machines at work. External housings also fail at an alarming rate (I've had controllers or power supplies fail on about 40% of the ones I own).

Electronic devices in general are either failing more often, or their ubiquity is making apparent failure rates that have always been there. My new computer shipped with one or two chips of bad RAM. Our GPS navigational device failed recently. All manner of components fail regularly, often bringing down an entire system.

As someone who engages himself in discussions and debates about Transhumanism, I have come to believe that while it is fascinating to contemplate the high-level concerns about the feasibility of uploading -- ranging from whether or not the human mind is sufficiently represented in determinate hardware for it to be at all feasible, to trying to determine if scanning brain states or understanding the underlying logic is a more tenable approach -- that a much more mundane concern must first be addressed before any of those discussions move beyond the realm of fantastical speculation. That concern is reliability, both of hardware and software.

Simply put, nothing lasts forever. But, if we want to explore the idea of allowing our minds to outlast our body hardware, we must deal with the decidedly unsexy problem of reliability. Hardware and software will always fail, though hopefully not always as frequently as is the case now. A major component of reliability is trust, which is placed in the hands of other people. In the case of Transhumanism, that trust is placed in the hands of future generations who may have no real attachment to their wards, depending on what differences would emerge between uploads and humans should this become feasible.

What we are trusting others to do, even in contemporary society, is to maintain systems that keep us alive. Aircraft mechanics, hospital equipment technicians, traffic systems engineers, and a whole host of other people are entrusted to maintain and repair systems we've come to utterly depend upon. Uploaded minds would not only need more reliable hardware, but also a trustworthy system of stewardship in which redundancy is provided, timely and complete backups are maintained, and hardware and software failures are addressed before minds are literally lost.

One limiting factor here is cost. Doing all these things requires resources, and as more and more minds got uploaded, more and more resources would be needed. Incentives would be needed to give the stewards reason to perform their duties, both the promise of future uploading for themselves and material supplies and comforts in their biological lives.

Perhaps this all becomes a moot point once computers can reliably maintain, repair, upgrade and replace themselves without loss of data. But we're so far from this point that there is a legitimate bootstrapping concern here. Waving it away with hopes for a magical "hard singularity" by which a rapid transition causes the universe to go from chaotic and flawed to perfectly managed in a matter of minutes may palliate some people's concerns in this area. Personally, I don't see how we could get anywhere near a Transhumanist ideal of preserving our thoughts, memories, and personalities in such a way as to afford "eternal" life with continuity of consciousness, without first addressing immediate concerns about reliability.

Moore's law hoodwinks Transhumanists into believing that eventually all mundane problems of computing capacity will "solve themselves" with time, but I contend that these pragmatic issues of computer hardware and software development pose a far greater challenge to Transhumanism via uploading than the dyed-in-the-wool idealists are willing to accept.

Even without taking into account Transhumanist fantasy, the problem of system reliability is a very real and pressing issue as our society becomes increasingly computerized. Transport, medicine, finance, the military, and law enforcement all rely heavily on computerized systems. These are systems upon which lives, sometimes millions of lives at once, utterly depend. Reliable systems engineering is an incredibly boring area of research, which also happens to be utterly essential if we're to continue to expand the degree to which we rely upon technology to maintain our way of life, and indeed life itself.

Social Futilities

There are too many social networking sites. Enough that there are emerging, competing standards for a universal login / universal online ID like Open ID and Friend Connect, so that you are have one ID for all the myriad sites that want you to have an ID. I have even tried Gravitar (I don't like it -- the restrictions on nicknames are arbitrary and stupid).

But what is the point of all this divergence and reconvergence and redivergence -- and so on? How many social network utilities does one need? I am already a member of MySpace, Facebook, Linked In, Plaxo, Friendster, Orkut, Tribes, Notch Up, Naymz, Twitter, Flixster, Good Reads, vfxConnection, Digg, Stumble Upon, Del.ici.ous, Flickr, YouTube, Live Journal, and of course Blogger (and probably a dozen others I'm just forgetting about). I was gung-ho about social utilities for a brief period, convinced by friends and the media that they provided good value in terms of fun, meeting people, and career opportunities. However, I quickly realized this was just another "history repeats itself" moment for the Internet -- social utilities are just Web user interfaces slapped on old ideas that have been around since my BBS days. Even Digg and Twitter are just interface updates of the original core concept of the BBS -- a bulletin board. People invite me to join new social utilities at least once a week. I literally can't keep track of them all, and considering how little value they provide, why bother?

I rarely log-in to most of them. I just don't have time to compete with, for example, the seemingly full-time Diggers, in terms of becoming a popular contributor of articles. (And, like being a DJ, I'm unclear as to why merely presenting the creative work of other people earns respect in the first place.) I certainly don't have time to take random stabs at befriending people who happen to like one of the bands I like. Indeed I don't have time to do much of anything online these days except write. My life outside the Internet, the actual physical life of food and wine and travel and art and literature and myriad other interesting things, which we're supposed to be living, takes precedence these days over jostling for virtual position with people who have too much time on their hands. And the irritable idiots who patrol the Internet looking to assert themselves in their self-appointed roles of cybercop (for all manner of "infractions" usually related to their disagreeing with something you think) just aren't worth the bother. When I was a teenager it seemed like grand fun, all this online arguing and jostling for the role of minor digital celebrity or king of some obscure corner of the networks (when I was a teenager, there wasn't a single monolithic Internet -- things like FidoNet and Compuserve were still separate worlds). Nowadays, it's dull as dirt.

I could look at the explosion of these sites as information overload, but the problem is that many of them don't really have much in the way of information. At least, not any that's useful to me. For all the effort some people put into social networking, what rewards do they reap? It's difficult to say. The occasional Internet phenom gets their Warholian 15 minutes and perhaps some cash, but people also still can get their moment in the sun doing decidedly old-school things like writing books -- on paper. What sites to engender success of some kind are the ones which are most focused on having something to say (mostly blogs, art/photo portfolios, and plain old hand-built websites).

The majority of social networking sites, like Facebook, do not facilitate anything but time-wasting. Facebook's stock in trade are games which are actually less fun than the old mail-order, turn-based games of the 80s on which their gameplay style is based. Old promises of the Internet being interactive, and therefore engaging people in new ways, seem to be broken most hypocritically by social utilities, as these sites all promised that their raison d'etre was to revitalize that aspect of the Internet. Most of them serve primarily as engines for passive fandom, combined with the same kind bickering that has been around since BBSes and Usenet. Media stories explaining the necessity of having such a "presence" uniformly fail to explain why, other than that this is the latest fad in herdlike conformity to sweep through the human race. It is very primal, the urges that play out in social networking. Each page is like digital urine on a virtual tree, marking territory and announcing to all sniffers-by that you are the alpha dog of a whole realm of Web pages.

But there are no trees, and the territory is free. It's a safe, non-zero-sum game of territorial conquest. Sure, occasionally the ego-bashing Vandals swarm through your digital space, stabbing at everything they see with all the elegance of a ruptured sewer pipe -- but there's no real territory for them to seize, and anyone with any sense merely ignores these intrusions (or, if you're sufficiently bored, they are generally easy to make sport of as their own egos and IQs are nothing to write home about). The toothless predators are safely ensconced in their mothers' basements, and only those chronically predisposed to being victims are ever victimized by them. But other than the chance at an occasional dull fight with a halfwit, or to waste time deleting spam, what exactly does digital social networking provide its users?

Once upon a time, it was a decent way to expand one's network of actual friends. I've made friends -- the kind I'd at least e-mail off-system, if not get to see in-person -- both on MU*s (Qwest, then Delusions, in particular) and Orkut. But, since then, all this social networking just seems to serve to either amuse or annoy people I already know. Nearly all of my connections on Facebook, for example, are people I know. By force of pure number of users, I have managed to reconnect with old friends through Linked In, Facebook, and MySpace -- so that was a genuine benefit -- but I still immediately try to shunt those conversations to real-space or e-mail rather than use the slow, buggy, clunky and advertising-laden interfaces of any of these sites. And how I'd get to know people I don't already know on Facebook or MySpace is uncertain, because their message boards are either nonexistant, not nearly as active as they once were on Orkut (before exhaustion at dealing with spammers drove most people away), or active but vapid (no creative role-playing, or joke telling, or word games, or exquisite corpses, or even debating science or politics -- just the same boring trolling and arguments about sex and fandom that have been rehashed over and over since at least the early days of Usenet). Sure, MySpace is ok for finding out about bands I'd never heard of before -- but frankly, even though I can hear tracks for free on MySpace, I still think magazines like Maximum Rock N' Roll or review sites like Heathen Harvest do a better job of organizing and presenting information about what bands and albums might be worth hearing.

Blogging (words or photos or videos) has its benefits, in at least it requires thought and activity on the part of the individual to create the material. Much of what is presented is not worth a first look, never mind a second, but I can't criticize people for at least trying. What complaints I do have about blogging will come with more details in a follow-up post some time soon, but let me state that it revolves around the problem of totally devaluing content, and leaving only advertising as a means of compensation for content creators. Eventually there will be nothing left to advertise, because people will come to expect to get everything for free (even physical goods) in return for watching ads.

Even with social utility sites, the cost of all this "benefit" is non-stop advertising (or, in the case of Facebook, invasive datamining and targeted spamming). I'm not opposed to the idea of social networking on-line, indeed I did some pioneering work in this area as a software developer in the 1990s, but before I sign-up for one more social networking site, whoever invites me better be able to explain what conceivable benefit will come to me, and at what cost before I even bother to spend the time necessary to fill-out the sign-up form.