http://www.ne.jp/asahi/saiga/yuji/gallary/gunsu/thumbnail.html
via Brett Tribble and mefi
27 February 2006
26 February 2006
Country Music poh-try
A poor girl wants to marry,
and a rich girl wants to flirt.
A rich boy goes to college,
and a poor boy goes to work.
-- Charlie Daniels band, from "A long-haired country boy"
and a rich girl wants to flirt.
A rich boy goes to college,
and a poor boy goes to work.
-- Charlie Daniels band, from "A long-haired country boy"
24 February 2006
VW Advertising
Volkswagen has sure done a lot of great ads over the years.
And now they have more: http://www.leftlanenews.com/2006/02/22/vw-strikes-again-un-pimp-my-ride-videos/
And now they have more: http://www.leftlanenews.com/2006/02/22/vw-strikes-again-un-pimp-my-ride-videos/
19 February 2006
Snow On Tam
Our hiking group decided to head up Mt. Tam today to try and catch some snow... we were successful beyond our wildest expectations! Here's a sample, catch them all at http://www.flutterby.com/archives/photo.cgi?id=elph0158.
13 February 2006
05 February 2006
Ants and Turn-of-the-Century Thinking
This morning I was reading Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn. I saw the movie version of Kwaidan a few years ago, and have also seen a lot of references to Hearn as one of the first interpreters of Japanese culture in English. It's definitely a neat collection of Japanese ghost stories.
However, the last essay in the book is about Ants, and sheds light both on Hearns' wide erudition and on the thought processes of turn-of-the-century thinkers. In addition to being a journalist and writer on Japanese culture, Hearn was very current in the scientific ideas of his day. In particular, in this essay he expands on some theories by Spencer to the effect that ants represents a more evolved form of social evolution than humans, because the sexual function of workers and warriors is cut off in gestation. Spencer believed this is what enabled them to function selflessly for the good of the colony without concern for their own reproductive ends.
Spencer believed humanity was, over time, evolving more and more sophisticated social mechanisms, and saw ant social organization as a kind of prototype of this. Thus Hearn says, "... it should not appear improbable that a more highly evolved humanity would cheerfully sacrifice a large proportion of its sex-life for the common weal, particularly in view of certain advantages to be gained."
What I thought fascinating about these passages is how they showed that even widely educated, open-minded men of the turn of the century had no ability to dissociate sex and reproduction. They clearly saw that an ever-increasing human population presented a tremendous, and in the limit insurmountable, challenge. Since they saw reproduction as an unavoidable consequence of sex, they were forced to contemplate re-engineering the race as the way out of the challenge.
Growing up as I have in the era when the Pill was known and condoms were cheap, I've always seen that there are ways to achieve "certain advantages" (i.e., not growing the population) without the wholesale abandonment of a sex life Hearn and Spencer were suggesting. These widely-read individuals were able to think about re-engineering humanity in the womb -- but not to imagine that sex and reproduction would be separable choices.
Yet, the change Hearn and Spencer were seeing as desirable -- zero population growth -- has been achieved in the first world, and in our children's lifetime will almost certainly be achieved globally. And perhaps even more surprisingly, as with ants, much of it has been accomplished by physiological manipulation implemented via diet -- the Pill. Maybe ants were more of a prototype than we care to think.
However, the last essay in the book is about Ants, and sheds light both on Hearns' wide erudition and on the thought processes of turn-of-the-century thinkers. In addition to being a journalist and writer on Japanese culture, Hearn was very current in the scientific ideas of his day. In particular, in this essay he expands on some theories by Spencer to the effect that ants represents a more evolved form of social evolution than humans, because the sexual function of workers and warriors is cut off in gestation. Spencer believed this is what enabled them to function selflessly for the good of the colony without concern for their own reproductive ends.
Spencer believed humanity was, over time, evolving more and more sophisticated social mechanisms, and saw ant social organization as a kind of prototype of this. Thus Hearn says, "... it should not appear improbable that a more highly evolved humanity would cheerfully sacrifice a large proportion of its sex-life for the common weal, particularly in view of certain advantages to be gained."
What I thought fascinating about these passages is how they showed that even widely educated, open-minded men of the turn of the century had no ability to dissociate sex and reproduction. They clearly saw that an ever-increasing human population presented a tremendous, and in the limit insurmountable, challenge. Since they saw reproduction as an unavoidable consequence of sex, they were forced to contemplate re-engineering the race as the way out of the challenge.
Growing up as I have in the era when the Pill was known and condoms were cheap, I've always seen that there are ways to achieve "certain advantages" (i.e., not growing the population) without the wholesale abandonment of a sex life Hearn and Spencer were suggesting. These widely-read individuals were able to think about re-engineering humanity in the womb -- but not to imagine that sex and reproduction would be separable choices.
Yet, the change Hearn and Spencer were seeing as desirable -- zero population growth -- has been achieved in the first world, and in our children's lifetime will almost certainly be achieved globally. And perhaps even more surprisingly, as with ants, much of it has been accomplished by physiological manipulation implemented via diet -- the Pill. Maybe ants were more of a prototype than we care to think.
26 January 2006
"Japan Year in Review -- Pop Culture Revolution" Report
For the last eight years, the Japan Society in SF (http://www.usajapan.org/) has held a "Japan Year in Review" lecture/panel series. Last night they had their 2005 wrapup focusing on Japanese Pop Culture. This one ended up being more interesting than I expected! There were only two panelists, but they both had a lot to say. Here are the highlights:
Kaori Shoji is a Japanese journalist. Her headline for 2005 was "the rise of the otaku" -- in her opinion, last year saw the Otaku move from being a reviled, un-talked-about figure in popular culture to being the central figure in it. She cites a couple causes for this, among them the rise of a new group of (mostly Korean) male romance stars, such as Bae Yong Joon. The characters portrayed by these stars are not work-obsessed, not pushy, and not misogynist -- they're sensitive, caring, and must wear (try Google-image-searching Bae Yong Joon -- all of his characters wear glasses).
She traces the evolution in the role of the otaku this year to the book "Train Men" (I haven't yet been able to find the web reference for this book yet). In the book, an otaku ends up dating a "intimidatingly" beautiful woman, and constantly text-messages his entire group of otaku friends about what he should do/say next ('constantly' meaning, every five minutes in the middle of their dates). His group of friends bands together to be available for advice all through his dates, and turn what could be somewhat disgusting into a charming display of devotion. She also talked about the rise of "Maid Cafes" (where the waitresses are dressed in maid costumes and/or anime character costumes); the concept of "moe", the emotion behind patronizing the cafes; and the increasing patronage of them by both male and female otaku.
The other panelist was Eric Nakamura, the editor of (the LA-based) Giant Robot magazine. Eric talked about the broadening out of various toy companies' product lines; specifically, he mentioned that Medicom (the company behind Kubrick figures) has started making furniture, coin purses, and bags; he had some slides with examples there, but I haven't been able to find any references on the web to it (I've emailed him to see if I can get some references).
The other neat phenomenon he talked about was Gaisei and the Design Festa. If you know about Komiket (the huge market held once a year for amateur comics) that's a starting point for talking about these. Design Festa is like Komiket but for physical objects -- some of the entrants are more like crafty things (hand-knit caps) but many are more along the lines of Kubricks or other figurines. In addition to the booths of items, Design Festa is a contest with prizes awarded to some of the best entries.
Takashi Murakami, the visual artist (http://www.takashimurakami.com/) sponsors a higher-end event called Geisai ("gei" refers to fine arts). Geisai (http://www.geisai.net/) has the same quality of being an event in a huge convention hall where hundreds of booths are set up by attendees. At Geisai, what they're showing is their art, so it's kind of like a beauty contest for artists. Especially given the sponsorship of Murakami (who just had a huge exhibit in NY), it has much more of an explicit connection to fine arts than the other event. Geisai isn't curated (it's "pay to display" as one poster on livejournal put it), but it has a very organized competitive element -- the judges examine what's on display at the conference and award prizes in various categories to the winners. Like most art contests, the primary prize is publicity though -- Eric talked about a couple examples of the price runups some of the winners saw in their art.
Both speakers discussed a few other things as well, such as the increasingly US distribution of muji ("no-brand") products -- they're sort of Japan's Ikea, their non-logo-logo is their trademark. They're being sold at the MOMA store in NY and the MOCA stores in LA. In general the above was the most interesting, though!
Kaori Shoji is a Japanese journalist. Her headline for 2005 was "the rise of the otaku" -- in her opinion, last year saw the Otaku move from being a reviled, un-talked-about figure in popular culture to being the central figure in it. She cites a couple causes for this, among them the rise of a new group of (mostly Korean) male romance stars, such as Bae Yong Joon. The characters portrayed by these stars are not work-obsessed, not pushy, and not misogynist -- they're sensitive, caring, and must wear (try Google-image-searching Bae Yong Joon -- all of his characters wear glasses).
She traces the evolution in the role of the otaku this year to the book "Train Men" (I haven't yet been able to find the web reference for this book yet). In the book, an otaku ends up dating a "intimidatingly" beautiful woman, and constantly text-messages his entire group of otaku friends about what he should do/say next ('constantly' meaning, every five minutes in the middle of their dates). His group of friends bands together to be available for advice all through his dates, and turn what could be somewhat disgusting into a charming display of devotion. She also talked about the rise of "Maid Cafes" (where the waitresses are dressed in maid costumes and/or anime character costumes); the concept of "moe", the emotion behind patronizing the cafes; and the increasing patronage of them by both male and female otaku.
The other panelist was Eric Nakamura, the editor of (the LA-based) Giant Robot magazine. Eric talked about the broadening out of various toy companies' product lines; specifically, he mentioned that Medicom (the company behind Kubrick figures) has started making furniture, coin purses, and bags; he had some slides with examples there, but I haven't been able to find any references on the web to it (I've emailed him to see if I can get some references).
The other neat phenomenon he talked about was Gaisei and the Design Festa. If you know about Komiket (the huge market held once a year for amateur comics) that's a starting point for talking about these. Design Festa is like Komiket but for physical objects -- some of the entrants are more like crafty things (hand-knit caps) but many are more along the lines of Kubricks or other figurines. In addition to the booths of items, Design Festa is a contest with prizes awarded to some of the best entries.
Takashi Murakami, the visual artist (http://www.takashimurakami.com/) sponsors a higher-end event called Geisai ("gei" refers to fine arts). Geisai (http://www.geisai.net/) has the same quality of being an event in a huge convention hall where hundreds of booths are set up by attendees. At Geisai, what they're showing is their art, so it's kind of like a beauty contest for artists. Especially given the sponsorship of Murakami (who just had a huge exhibit in NY), it has much more of an explicit connection to fine arts than the other event. Geisai isn't curated (it's "pay to display" as one poster on livejournal put it), but it has a very organized competitive element -- the judges examine what's on display at the conference and award prizes in various categories to the winners. Like most art contests, the primary prize is publicity though -- Eric talked about a couple examples of the price runups some of the winners saw in their art.
Both speakers discussed a few other things as well, such as the increasingly US distribution of muji ("no-brand") products -- they're sort of Japan's Ikea, their non-logo-logo is their trademark. They're being sold at the MOMA store in NY and the MOCA stores in LA. In general the above was the most interesting, though!
09 January 2006
Double taste violation
This morning on the way to work on the 101, I saw a Hummer (with of course a single person in it) with... spinny hubcaps! It was such spectacular bad taste I laughed out loud in the car.
08 January 2006
Display PostScript
A friend asked me about the history of Display PostScript, which Jack Newlin and I wrote together with Adobe when I was at NeXT. I thought I might as well post the reply where people can comment on it!
-----------
Sure, I've forgotten most or all the proprietary stuff I knew back then :) besides the key proprietary element was what we now call Type 1 Fonts -- they (Adobe) decided to publish that stuff a few years after I left NeXT.
Basically, we actually made the window server a PostScript interpreter, and sent over a binary-encoded form of actual PostScript calls. To get efficiency out of it, we created new PostScript operators that were array versions of many of the calls so that you could draw more per primitive, but you were still sending a program to the sever that was interpreted by the interpreter.
There was one PostScript thread per connection (kind of obvious) plus some thread to handle user input. And of course, all of the windowing operations were implemented as new PostScript operators (newwindow, movewindow, sizewindow, etc., etc.). You could supply PostScript callback procedures to be called on user events in your window to filter, process, or do whatever to them (including passing them back to the client). The model was very similar to Sun's NeWS server, which we were influenced by, but they put a lot of emphasis on doing much of your application event-handling in PostScript, whereas we regarding PostScript-level event handling as the outlet of last resort (I gave a talk at SIGGRAPH once called, "Why PostScript is my least favorite programming language").
Obviously, picking PostScript defined the 2D graphics model pretty clearly. The other wise choice we made was to choose Porter-Duff compositing as the basis of all image combination operations supported by the system. That allowed programs to be very independent of the framebuffer depth and provided a much more powerful layering system as well.
Frankly, though we got it all working pretty well, I don't think actually using a language interpreter was the right idea. I think the stream-of-asynchronous-procedure-calls model, as implemented by X or by OpenGL among others, is a better model for that kind of performance- and memory-sensitive interface. I still think PostScript was a great (2D) graphics model, so we chose correctly there -- it's just that with 20-20 hindsight I would have defined a procedural interface with a clear mapping to PostScript, but which wasn't directly tied to a language interpreter.
Peter Graffagnino, who took over for me when I left NeXT, certainly thought so -- in Cocoa, that's kind of it works. There's a DPS procedural layer, and it's not subject to redefinition by the window server's PostScript interpreter, which allows a more efficient interpretation of the protocol stream and a lighter memory overhead. You can still pass PostScript down to be interpreted a drawn, but that's not the usual interface to the window system.
Hope that helps!
Leo
On Jan 7, 2006, at 12:11 PM, Justin Ryan wrote:
hey leo, i noticed on your website that you worked at NeXT on
DisplayPS technology. I'd really like to chat with you about this, if
your knowledge of the technology is not overly proprietary. I mostly
want to understand more about this, as I've seen that a number of
f/oss projects are striving to move the f/oss user interface into the
new world of non-x11 display drivers on unix.
:)
-----------
Sure, I've forgotten most or all the proprietary stuff I knew back then :) besides the key proprietary element was what we now call Type 1 Fonts -- they (Adobe) decided to publish that stuff a few years after I left NeXT.
Basically, we actually made the window server a PostScript interpreter, and sent over a binary-encoded form of actual PostScript calls. To get efficiency out of it, we created new PostScript operators that were array versions of many of the calls so that you could draw more per primitive, but you were still sending a program to the sever that was interpreted by the interpreter.
There was one PostScript thread per connection (kind of obvious) plus some thread to handle user input. And of course, all of the windowing operations were implemented as new PostScript operators (newwindow, movewindow, sizewindow, etc., etc.). You could supply PostScript callback procedures to be called on user events in your window to filter, process, or do whatever to them (including passing them back to the client). The model was very similar to Sun's NeWS server, which we were influenced by, but they put a lot of emphasis on doing much of your application event-handling in PostScript, whereas we regarding PostScript-level event handling as the outlet of last resort (I gave a talk at SIGGRAPH once called, "Why PostScript is my least favorite programming language").
Obviously, picking PostScript defined the 2D graphics model pretty clearly. The other wise choice we made was to choose Porter-Duff compositing as the basis of all image combination operations supported by the system. That allowed programs to be very independent of the framebuffer depth and provided a much more powerful layering system as well.
Frankly, though we got it all working pretty well, I don't think actually using a language interpreter was the right idea. I think the stream-of-asynchronous-procedure-calls model, as implemented by X or by OpenGL among others, is a better model for that kind of performance- and memory-sensitive interface. I still think PostScript was a great (2D) graphics model, so we chose correctly there -- it's just that with 20-20 hindsight I would have defined a procedural interface with a clear mapping to PostScript, but which wasn't directly tied to a language interpreter.
Peter Graffagnino, who took over for me when I left NeXT, certainly thought so -- in Cocoa, that's kind of it works. There's a DPS procedural layer, and it's not subject to redefinition by the window server's PostScript interpreter, which allows a more efficient interpretation of the protocol stream and a lighter memory overhead. You can still pass PostScript down to be interpreted a drawn, but that's not the usual interface to the window system.
Hope that helps!
Leo
On Jan 7, 2006, at 12:11 PM, Justin Ryan wrote:
hey leo, i noticed on your website that you worked at NeXT on
DisplayPS technology. I'd really like to chat with you about this, if
your knowledge of the technology is not overly proprietary. I mostly
want to understand more about this, as I've seen that a number of
f/oss projects are striving to move the f/oss user interface into the
new world of non-x11 display drivers on unix.
:)
18 December 2005
Persepolis
I've been catching up on a number of great new graphic novels lately, including Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. It's the story of the artists' life from the age of 6 until about 10, when she lived through the overthrow of the Shah in Iran. The author comes from an educated family that had connections to the pre-Pahlavi regime, and it turns out the suffering in her family started well before the events in the book.
Sufficiently dramatic events -- and the revolution is clearly such -- help pull the reader through any book, but what makes Persepolis so compelling is the consistently child-centric point of view. The parent's reactions to the events are quite divorced from the reactions of the six-year-old Marji's; and, the multiple moments where events force the family to educate this child in a hurry as why tragedies are befalling them dazzle you with the impact they must have had.
Two other things I took away from the book where the Iranian people's perception of Arabs as "invaders from the West" (not something that gets a lot of play here) and the phrase, "...which they subsequently called an Islamic revolution" as Marji's intelligentsia-connected family watches the expected Marxist-proleteriat form of the revolution morph into something much more sinister.
Highly recommended.
Sufficiently dramatic events -- and the revolution is clearly such -- help pull the reader through any book, but what makes Persepolis so compelling is the consistently child-centric point of view. The parent's reactions to the events are quite divorced from the reactions of the six-year-old Marji's; and, the multiple moments where events force the family to educate this child in a hurry as why tragedies are befalling them dazzle you with the impact they must have had.
Two other things I took away from the book where the Iranian people's perception of Arabs as "invaders from the West" (not something that gets a lot of play here) and the phrase, "...which they subsequently called an Islamic revolution" as Marji's intelligentsia-connected family watches the expected Marxist-proleteriat form of the revolution morph into something much more sinister.
Highly recommended.
11 December 2005
ii eiga da naa? (Samurai Rebellion)
I finally caved in and ordered the Criterion Collection box set "Rebel Samurai -- Sixties Swordplay classics" from amazon. I think of it as, "branching out after you've watched all of Kurosawa's films." Tonight I sat down for the first film in the set, "Samurai Rebellion" by Masaki Kobayashi. It's allegedley the most traditional of the four, as befits the director of Kwaidan -- it was his first independent film after leaving the studio system -- and it wears the Kurosawa mantle of heavyweight samurai drama well. After this, I can't wait to watch the rest of the set!
10 December 2005
SF's best pizza
After jonesing for Zachary's a lot, a friend told me about Little Star Pizza (http://www.littlestarpizza.com). It immediately replaced Zach's as the Bay Area's best. If you eat in, you'll also be sitting in the world's hippest pizza joint -- both the restaurant and the clientele look like you should be eating asian fusion food rather than yummy deep-dish Chicago-style pizza. The Classic or the Little Star are my faves...
27 November 2005
Russian Couple on Ocean Beach
I went to Ocean Beach to go running on the most beautiful Saturday on the beach in SF I've seen yet. It was warm, sunny, and clear -- even on the beach itself. As I made my way down to the water to begin running, I passed an elderly couple. They had brought out beach chairs and beach umbrellas, and were sitting reading the paper in full street clothes. As I got closer, I could see that the newspaper they were reading was in Russian. Suddenly I flashed to their story: elderly Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union, I could hear them saying in the strong Eastern European accent: "Yah, whatever. Beachs in Russia, Beachs in Georgia, beaches in San Francisco. We've seen 'em all, and they're all the same, they're all good places to read the newspapah."
15 October 2005
Moving to Blogger
Well, I'm not the world's most active blogger to start with, but even so my old (self-hosted) blog got clobbered with blog spam. And so, here I am on blogger.
I was amazed how angry the blog-spammers make me. Email spam doesn't really get to me anymore, but somehow having to pull down my blog under a deluge of f*&^ing online poker ads really lit me up.
I was amazed how angry the blog-spammers make me. Email spam doesn't really get to me anymore, but somehow having to pull down my blog under a deluge of f*&^ing online poker ads really lit me up.
06 September 2005
Redundancy via Google
The cached page feature means your website can be up even when it's not. This afternoon, nVidia's main web site was down -- it looked like one of their internal servers was offline, so the web server couldn't find some file it needed. But it was awake. I had just received a new graphics card, so I really needed to get the latest driver downloads.
After thinking about it for a minute, I did a Google search for "NVidia driver". I then loaded the cached version of the nvidia page, and used the Javascript app to select the correct driver. The page after that was half-broken, but did have the needed links to nVidia's ftp sever, which was still up! Therefore, I got my drivers successfully even though nVidia's site is still down!
two comments, already:
It’s also quite useful when you’re looking for pages long-gone, not just temporarily down.
Matt (osarusan at gmail dot com)
After thinking about it for a minute, I did a Google search for "NVidia driver". I then loaded the cached version of the nvidia page, and used the Javascript app to select the correct driver. The page after that was half-broken, but did have the needed links to nVidia's ftp sever, which was still up! Therefore, I got my drivers successfully even though nVidia's site is still down!
two comments, already:
It’s also quite useful when you’re looking for pages long-gone, not just temporarily down.
Matt (osarusan at gmail dot com)
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