Aku Aku

the ordeal of Princess Masako

Where's the A-Team when you need them?

Tradition Afflicts a Modern Princess (washingtonpost.com):

Toshiya Matsuzaki, 66, a Tokyo-based commentator on the imperial family who has followed them for 45 years, said Masako had essentially become a prisoner: "There is a great outpouring of sympathy for this woman, a modern woman, a woman educated in America and who is finding it very difficult to adjust to the demands and peculiarities of Japanese imperial court life. One has the feeling that she is suffering under the strain."

Masako, among other expectations, is under pressure from the courtiers to bear a male heir.

Get with the program, Japan. Queens rule!

rubberband desktop

Neat idea for a table top: Gispen ElasTop desk with a stretched rubberband surface. I don't think I'd set my glass of water on it though.

tough guy ball stealer

I pay like zero attention to major league sports (although I do like to try to catch the rugby or soccer world cup series when they come up), but some friends mentioned this incident which occurred at a recent baseball game that I thought had a funny ending:

St. Louis led 12-0 in the third when a foul ball hit into the stands by Matthews got more attention than anything on the field.

In the ensuing scramble, a husky man jumped over a row of seats and pinned a 4-year-old boy against the seats with his legs while diving to get the ball. To no avail, fans started chanting "Give him the ball! Give him the ball!"

The man held the ball up like a trophy and refused to give it to the boy. In the end the child received bats and balls from members of both teams, but the man who left two innings later didn't get his special gift from the players:

There was also a little extra for the man who got the ball, but he left two innings later and never received the Cardinals T-shirt on which "Tough Guy" and "Ball Stealer" was written by reliever Steve Kline.

Long Now Seminar mp3/ogg

Wow, I just found that all of the Long Now seminars have been recorded and the audio is available here: SALT - Seminars About Long-term Thinking. I was wholly bummed to have missed some of these, now I am wholly unbummed! The talks include speakers Brian Eno, George Dyson, David Rumsey and Laurie Anderson. Bruce Sterling's talk "Your Future As a Black Hole" just got added!

digital photomontage

Check out this stunningly clever digital photomontage software that was presented at the 2004 SIGGRAPH conference. It makes the task of combining multiple source images into a single composite that is superior to any one of the sources. There is a 7 minute demonstration video available that's worth the download if your bandwidth can stomach the 140 meg size (I used freecache to make that previous video link).

We describe an interactive, computer-assisted framework for combining parts of a set of photographs into a single composite picture, a process we call "digital photomontage." [...] The power of this framework lies in its generality; we show how it can be used for a wide variety of applications, including "selective composites" (for instance, group photos in which everyone looks their best), relighting, extended depth of field, panoramic stitching, clean-plate production, stroboscopic visualization of movement, and time-lapse mosaics.

For instance you take 4 photos of a group, and in each one someone has their eyes closed. Using this software you can trivially combine the best aspects of the four photos into one.

It can also do things like allow you to take a series of photographs of a landscape from slightly different angles and then composite them together into a single image that has removed all the power lines. My Canon G5 digital camera allows me to take a series of shots to create a panorama, but since I have to take the images in sequence, people moving around or at the image seams can become distracting artifacts. This software makes it easy to remove them.

Found at CleverCS.

2004 power tool drag races

Attended the Power Tool Drag Races today. Took about 120 pics and a few videos, here they are: 2004 Power Tool Drag Races (Saturday).

your future as a black hole

Tonight I attended another excellent seminar presented by the Long Now Foundation. This one was given by Bruce Sterling, entitled The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole.

In his typical contrarian style he laid out the hype about the coming singularity predicted by futurist think tanks (whom he likens to listless cults) and then tore it apart with a dismissive sneer. It was a beefy talk; here's some of the highlights I can recall:

• What if we can crank our posthuman intelligence to an 8000 IQ, might we not find it incredibly dull, or worse yet might we be completely stricken with shame of our past imbecilic actions?
  
• There have been three singularities already. Events that irrevocably changed everything. 1) The Atom Bomb. 2) d-lysergic acid diethylamide. 3) Computer viruses.
  
• He doubts that AI will ever achieve "intelligence". It's a bad metaphor driven by
  anthropomorphic conceit.
  
• If a ruling body wanted to prevent the singularity, one of the best ways to do it would be to begin attacking science.
  
• There's are only a couple of dozen futurists really leading the "movement" worldwide, they would be easy to round up and incarcerate.
  
• Perhaps enhanced human intelligence would be like LSD that actually worked, and even for more than 8 hours.
  

Maybe I'll type in a few more as I remember them. Next month's seminar is entitled "Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence - A Necessarily Long-Term Strategy". Could get wacky!

gmail invite

Thanks to Jim at Everything Burns I have recovered a lost gmail invite. Most everyone I know who would want one probably already has one, but just in case you don't have one and you want it, let me know.

Update June 28, 2004: I should have seen this coming. This posting's google page rank is prety high on a search for "gmail invite" now, so I'm getting a lot of requests for invites. I've handed out eight to people who have left messages here but I'm currently out of them. If I get more, I'll start giving them out in the order the request was received, but it is unlikely I'll ever get enough to catch up with all the requests. If I have sent you an invite and you later get invites of your own that are extra, please email me (you'll know my gmail email from your invite) and I can give you the contact info for more people to invite and maybe working together we can catch up to all the requests. My personal opinion is that gmail is probably going to go out of beta soon and become open to the public so the invites won't matter anymore.

Resource Shifting

North Korea zone: US wants to cut South Korean troop numbers by a third

The U.S. has notified the South Korean government that it plans to pull out around 12,500 troops -- or about one third of all troops it has stationed in South Korea -- according to Yonhap and other local media on Monday afternoon.

Funny how we're moving troops away from the nutty guy who definitely has weapons of mass (nuclear) destruction.

freecache.org

This afternoon I noticed my Internet connection was crawling and after poking around I discovered that PeopleFallingOver had linked to a 29 meg video file I created a few years ago (the video, btw, is the infamous amateur video of the wedding reception floor collapse in Tel Aviv on May 25, 2001; I set it to music by Godspeed You Black Emperor! and stretched it out for effect. Yes, it is macabre, but the video is so compelling I couldn't help myself).

I started looking around for someplace else to host the file with a fatter pipe than my house. The ever knowledgable Boris on #joiito quickly pointed me to freecache.org. Freecache is a rather smart system:

FreeCache works by moving content "hot spots" on the web closer to users. This provides several advantages to various parties involved: Users get faster downloads, content providers pay less for Internet-bound traffic, and ISPs pay less for Internet-originating traffic.

The nice thing about it is neither the user who will be doing the downloading (the PeopleFallingOver users) nor the person doing the hosting (me) have to download or install any software to take advantage of the freecache.org network. As the host, I only had to have my webserver automagically redirect all requests for http://myhost.com/myVideo.avi to http://freecache.org/http://myhost.com/myVideo.avi instead. Now when the user requests the video from my server, it actually causes it to be cached on a nearby Freecache caching server so subsequent requests will be shared between my original host and the Freecache servers around the world! Genius!

So if you'd like to see the video, czechy doubt here (courtesy of freecache).

Update: 12 hours later, it appears to be working. My apache log shows many more downloads but my ISP connection doesn't seem to be overtaxed.

(nods to Sean).