From bumpers for a Japanese TV show called pitagora suiichi
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6176491654107670145
17 April 2006
15 April 2006
Couloir Article on Vallée Blanche
Couloir magazine is a magazine for serious backcountry skiers/snowboarding/showshoers/etc. So when I saw their Winter 2006 issue had an article on skiing i Chamonix, I was psyched. We went to Chamonix in 2002, and I figured that Couloir's reporters would have some awesome hardcore of places we missed.
Instead, it turns out, the article had the benefit of making us feel like total studs!
Sweet! When we went, we were six people and all six of us skied the Vallée Blanche multiple days.
Heh. On the last day we were in Chamonix, Oren, Justine and I took this route (see Snowboarding to Italy on the website).
Wow, I guess the next time we go we'll have to write an article of our own!
Instead, it turns out, the article had the benefit of making us feel like total studs!
My friends and I skied with Vincent Lameyre (their guide). He auditioned us on two lesser ski areas to evaulate our skills and stamina - routine for guides. ... Of the 15 of us who hoped to ski the Vallée Blanche, Vincent was taking eight.
Sweet! When we went, we were six people and all six of us skied the Vallée Blanche multiple days.
Groups with cross-border ambitions do the first part of the Vallée Blanche ... and then angle to the south to skin up the Col de Toule, as small pass right on the French-Italian border. ... We had neither the legs nor lungs for this detour.
Heh. On the last day we were in Chamonix, Oren, Justine and I took this route (see Snowboarding to Italy on the website).
Wow, I guess the next time we go we'll have to write an article of our own!
24 March 2006
Dream or Nightmare? You decide
So last night, I woke up in the middle of the night from a dream where I went back to work at Pixar. The movie we were working on a was a new Star Wars movie. The Empire is trying to build a big weapon, which was a giant cigar shape that sits underneath a Star Destroyer (I guess they hadn't come up with the Death Star thing yet). At the end of the movie, the star, Bruce Willis, hotwires the device so that when the Empire fires it, it blows up.
18 March 2006
The Pay-to-send Email World [was: RE: nytimes: goodmail]
I've thought through schemes like this any number of times (it's not a new idea, contrary to what Dyson implies in her article), and many of the things I value about the internet become unworkable if most internet email shifts to a pay-to-send basis. Unfortunately, you actually have to think about it to realize that.
Running a mailling list like friends@ourshareddomain.com [note to blog readers -- this discussion thread was moved over from a thread on a mailing list I'm on] is one of the things that will go away in a pay-to-send internet -- current membership totals about 30, so sending a message to ourshareddomain.com means somebody has to fork over $0.30. Well, who's gonna be the person to fork out that $0.30? We have no way to make you pay at the moment you hit send. This discussion thread is just about to cross over the $1 point. Would you pay $1 to be part of every email thread on the hiking alias?
Advocates of pay-to-send schemes claim, "Oh, no, you can still send free email, it's simply that free email won't have the little icon next to it." Yet, Goodmail and other pay-to-send scheme advocates claim they're going to resolve the spam problem. Well, they only are solving the spam problem to the extent that covered recipients ignore all email without the little icon. So, they're lying about their side effects: for them to achieve the benefit they promise (fixing the spam problem), free email must be ignored. So much for friends@ourshareddomain.
Don't think that will happen? One of the geniuses of this idea as Goodmail is advocating it is that they're going to share their revenue with AOL. Once that happens, your ISP will have a vested financial interest in making it harder and harder for you to read free email (after all, they'll be "solving the SPAM problem" for you). Their motivation will be to start quarantining (i.e., not sending to your mail client by default) free email.
The scotchnight problem recurs over and over when you look at a pay-to-send internet: evite; topical mailing lists e.g. sourceforge.net; alumni networks at your college; the mailing list for a condo homeowner's association; the expixar mailing list; the neighborhood association mailing list; etc., etc. What happens in that form of the internet is that all players in the internet will be highly disincented to relay email in any form whatsoever.
A second problem has to do with open standards. Goodmail -- and all of its' proprietary competitors -- have strong motivation to make their network closed, requiring their own software in order for you to share in their revenues, because it represents real money. That is, they are motivated to make it so that non-free email cannot be relayed except by their own software. If Dyson is right and their are multiple competitors, the nightmare will unfold: to be a viable ISP, you need to have five or six different proprietary email relays installed, and somehow sort out which mail should be processed by which relay, and have revenue-sharing agreements in place with those five or six companies. That speaks to what the pay-to-send proposal in this form is really about: providing a new revenue stream for large ISPs.
The pay-to-send schemes allows ISPs to collect money for sending spam, rather than no one being paid for it. The large ISPs are willing to see this experiment run because if it's successful, they and the new companies will share in taxing the senders of Spam.
Dyson asserts without proof that "I also think it [Goodmail] and its competitors will eventually transform into services that more directly serve the interests of mail recipients." Of course, she has to state that without proof because there is no evidence any such thing will ever happen. She's asserting the equivalent of, "Give some more money to the beleaguered phone company, and they'll probably decide to share some with you." Both by logical deduction and historical precedent, she's wrong: they will keep that money and be thankful they're being paid for the spam they deliver.
Lastly, Dyson makes the counter-economic assumption that because the ISPs are making money, they'll be more vigilant in guarding against Spam. Unfortunately, the pay-to-send scheme that we have long experience with -- the Post Office -- demonstrates nicely why this is false. In every country, the post office is highly motivated to promote the sending of junk mail, because it is their primary source of revenue. The fact that it costs $0.20 or so to send me a piece of junk mail has clearly not stopped a deluge of companies from deciding to assault my mailbox. The post office makes sure there's no effective way to screen it, because effective screening of junk mail would put them out of business (you can register for "no junk mail" at the post office: all that does is stop mail that isn't specifically addressed to you. So by the Post Office's definition, the AOL disks I periodically receive are not, repeat not, junk mail).
Some people might still prefer the pay-to-send internet, because one thing you can't deny is that the Nigerian and Chinese spammers will largely be gone. Like postal mail, your overall volume of email will be lower than the current internet. Like postal mail, most of email will still be junk, but like postal mail, the delivery service will have been paid to bring you the junk. And like postal mail, you won't trivially send emails to 30 friends, you'll have to find some cheaper, easier way to get a hold of them, like email used to be.
Leo
On Mar 18, 2006, at 9:35 AM, david fix wrote:
I don't know about the merits of her position but this argument strikes me as sophistry.
"What shocks me most about the opposition to Goodmail is that people who claim to believe in the free and open Internet, with its welcome attitude to innovation, want to shut down an idea. That's wrong."
From: Bill Polson
Reply-To: ...
To: ...
Subject: nytimes: goodmail
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 21:33:43 -0800
This seems reasonable to me, but on a recent hike I advocated something like this and got an earful from a fellow hiker. No names, but he hikes too fast and knows way too much about cooking and obscure technologies.
-Bill
----
March 17, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
You've Got Goodmail
By ESTHER DYSON
A COMPANY called Goodmail Systems thinks it has come up with a potential (and partial) solution to the problem of spam and fraud on the Internet. According to Goodmail, market forces are the answer, rather than the kinds of ineffective regulations that have so far failed to solve the problems.
What Goodmail is proposing is a sort of FedEx for e-mail. For a penny or less per message, the sender gets guaranteed delivery for mail and the promise that it will stand out in the user's mailbox. The recipient pays nothing. (Goodmail, of which I am not an investor, has tested its system with the participation of a few companies, including this newspaper.)
Internet service providers like America Online, which receive and process mail in bulk, can share in Goodmail's revenue if they want, as long as they promise to pass the mail to their customers without filtering it for spam. The payment encourages AOL to adopt the service and to display a "certified e-mail" icon to users on each "stamped" message, indicating that the message is wanted and safe.
Goodmail's customers have to prove that recipients want their mail, and Goodmail checks the sender's mailing behavior and manages the quality of the mail through a system that makes it easy for recipients to complain about unwanted messages. Too many complaints and the senders lose their accounts.
This all sounds perfectly sensible to me, but Goodmail has been met with a barrage of criticism and calls for a de facto boycott from several nonprofit and public interest groups. These organizations seem to think that all Internet mail must always be free, just because it was free before. Yet they pay for computers and Internet access and office supplies, just like everyone else.
Goodmail, in my eyes, does not raise moral issues. It simply wants to make the Internet a better place — and yes, make a little money along the way.
Of course, the critics say, this is the first step. Pretty soon all mail will cost money, and then the free, open world of the Internet will be closed to poor people, nonprofits and other good guys, while multinational conglomerates fill their ever-growing pockets.
I agree that pretty soon sending most e-mail will cost money, but I think that's only right. It costs money to guarantee quality and safety. Moreover, I think the market will work, and that it will not shut out deserving senders, if we only let it work freely.
In fact, I hope Goodmail succeeds, and that it has lots of competition. I also think it and its competitors will eventually transform into services that more directly serve the interests of mail recipients. Instead of the fees going to Goodmail and AOL, they will also be shared with the individual recipients.
There's no question that we need to try some new approaches to e-mail. The current situation — where the Internet is ridden with spam, most mail is unwanted and some is objectively dangerous — illustrates a market failure. When the Internet began, it was a small community, one that needed neither markets nor regulations. The people on the Web mostly behaved well, and things worked.
But the Internet has become mainstream, which means we have abuse and crime and freeloaders. We need a way to deal with the abuse. Spam filters are imperfect, partly because the senders of "bad" mail are getting better and better at defeating them. And those who take advantage of the Internet aren't paying for the costs of their abuse.
Instead, the recipients' Internet service providers are paying the cost of spam filtering, and recipients are paying when legitimate messages get caught in those spam filters.
Senders should bear the costs of sending mail, and it should be the senders' duty to figure out whether each piece of mail is wanted. Ultimately, I believe, Goodmail or its successors will develop a mechanism to rebate some of the fees to the senders whose mail is wanted. That's why I don't worry about individuals and nonprofits being squeezed out.
In the short run, AOL and others will serve as the recipients' proxies. If they don't do a good job of ensuring that customers get the mail they want, even from nonpaying senders, they will lose their customers. And in the long run, recipients will be able to use services like Goodmail to set their own prices for receiving mail.
In my case, I'd have a list. I'd charge nothing for people I know, 50 cents for anyone new (though if I add the sender to my list after reading the mail, I'll cancel the 50 cents) and $3 for random advertisers. Ex-boyfriends pay $10.
What shocks me most about the opposition to Goodmail is that people who claim to believe in the free and open Internet, with its welcome attitude to innovation, want to shut down an idea. That's wrong.
If people like those little stamps that mark their mail as safe and wanted or as commercial transactions, then let the customers have them. And let other companies compete with Goodmail to offer better and less expensive service.
Goodmail isn't good because it's new, but neither is it bad because it's new. If it's a good model, it will succeed and improve over time. If it's a bad model, it will fail. Why not let the customers decide?
Esther Dyson, an investor in technology start-ups, is the editor of Release 1.0.
Running a mailling list like friends@ourshareddomain.com [note to blog readers -- this discussion thread was moved over from a thread on a mailing list I'm on] is one of the things that will go away in a pay-to-send internet -- current membership totals about 30, so sending a message to ourshareddomain.com means somebody has to fork over $0.30. Well, who's gonna be the person to fork out that $0.30? We have no way to make you pay at the moment you hit send. This discussion thread is just about to cross over the $1 point. Would you pay $1 to be part of every email thread on the hiking alias?
Advocates of pay-to-send schemes claim, "Oh, no, you can still send free email, it's simply that free email won't have the little icon next to it." Yet, Goodmail and other pay-to-send scheme advocates claim they're going to resolve the spam problem. Well, they only are solving the spam problem to the extent that covered recipients ignore all email without the little icon. So, they're lying about their side effects: for them to achieve the benefit they promise (fixing the spam problem), free email must be ignored. So much for friends@ourshareddomain.
Don't think that will happen? One of the geniuses of this idea as Goodmail is advocating it is that they're going to share their revenue with AOL. Once that happens, your ISP will have a vested financial interest in making it harder and harder for you to read free email (after all, they'll be "solving the SPAM problem" for you). Their motivation will be to start quarantining (i.e., not sending to your mail client by default) free email.
The scotchnight problem recurs over and over when you look at a pay-to-send internet: evite; topical mailing lists e.g. sourceforge.net; alumni networks at your college; the mailing list for a condo homeowner's association; the expixar mailing list; the neighborhood association mailing list; etc., etc. What happens in that form of the internet is that all players in the internet will be highly disincented to relay email in any form whatsoever.
A second problem has to do with open standards. Goodmail -- and all of its' proprietary competitors -- have strong motivation to make their network closed, requiring their own software in order for you to share in their revenues, because it represents real money. That is, they are motivated to make it so that non-free email cannot be relayed except by their own software. If Dyson is right and their are multiple competitors, the nightmare will unfold: to be a viable ISP, you need to have five or six different proprietary email relays installed, and somehow sort out which mail should be processed by which relay, and have revenue-sharing agreements in place with those five or six companies. That speaks to what the pay-to-send proposal in this form is really about: providing a new revenue stream for large ISPs.
The pay-to-send schemes allows ISPs to collect money for sending spam, rather than no one being paid for it. The large ISPs are willing to see this experiment run because if it's successful, they and the new companies will share in taxing the senders of Spam.
Dyson asserts without proof that "I also think it [Goodmail] and its competitors will eventually transform into services that more directly serve the interests of mail recipients." Of course, she has to state that without proof because there is no evidence any such thing will ever happen. She's asserting the equivalent of, "Give some more money to the beleaguered phone company, and they'll probably decide to share some with you." Both by logical deduction and historical precedent, she's wrong: they will keep that money and be thankful they're being paid for the spam they deliver.
Lastly, Dyson makes the counter-economic assumption that because the ISPs are making money, they'll be more vigilant in guarding against Spam. Unfortunately, the pay-to-send scheme that we have long experience with -- the Post Office -- demonstrates nicely why this is false. In every country, the post office is highly motivated to promote the sending of junk mail, because it is their primary source of revenue. The fact that it costs $0.20 or so to send me a piece of junk mail has clearly not stopped a deluge of companies from deciding to assault my mailbox. The post office makes sure there's no effective way to screen it, because effective screening of junk mail would put them out of business (you can register for "no junk mail" at the post office: all that does is stop mail that isn't specifically addressed to you. So by the Post Office's definition, the AOL disks I periodically receive are not, repeat not, junk mail).
Some people might still prefer the pay-to-send internet, because one thing you can't deny is that the Nigerian and Chinese spammers will largely be gone. Like postal mail, your overall volume of email will be lower than the current internet. Like postal mail, most of email will still be junk, but like postal mail, the delivery service will have been paid to bring you the junk. And like postal mail, you won't trivially send emails to 30 friends, you'll have to find some cheaper, easier way to get a hold of them, like email used to be.
Leo
On Mar 18, 2006, at 9:35 AM, david fix wrote:
I don't know about the merits of her position but this argument strikes me as sophistry.
"What shocks me most about the opposition to Goodmail is that people who claim to believe in the free and open Internet, with its welcome attitude to innovation, want to shut down an idea. That's wrong."
From: Bill Polson
Reply-To: ...
To: ...
Subject: nytimes: goodmail
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 21:33:43 -0800
This seems reasonable to me, but on a recent hike I advocated something like this and got an earful from a fellow hiker. No names, but he hikes too fast and knows way too much about cooking and obscure technologies.
-Bill
----
March 17, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
You've Got Goodmail
By ESTHER DYSON
A COMPANY called Goodmail Systems thinks it has come up with a potential (and partial) solution to the problem of spam and fraud on the Internet. According to Goodmail, market forces are the answer, rather than the kinds of ineffective regulations that have so far failed to solve the problems.
What Goodmail is proposing is a sort of FedEx for e-mail. For a penny or less per message, the sender gets guaranteed delivery for mail and the promise that it will stand out in the user's mailbox. The recipient pays nothing. (Goodmail, of which I am not an investor, has tested its system with the participation of a few companies, including this newspaper.)
Internet service providers like America Online, which receive and process mail in bulk, can share in Goodmail's revenue if they want, as long as they promise to pass the mail to their customers without filtering it for spam. The payment encourages AOL to adopt the service and to display a "certified e-mail" icon to users on each "stamped" message, indicating that the message is wanted and safe.
Goodmail's customers have to prove that recipients want their mail, and Goodmail checks the sender's mailing behavior and manages the quality of the mail through a system that makes it easy for recipients to complain about unwanted messages. Too many complaints and the senders lose their accounts.
This all sounds perfectly sensible to me, but Goodmail has been met with a barrage of criticism and calls for a de facto boycott from several nonprofit and public interest groups. These organizations seem to think that all Internet mail must always be free, just because it was free before. Yet they pay for computers and Internet access and office supplies, just like everyone else.
Goodmail, in my eyes, does not raise moral issues. It simply wants to make the Internet a better place — and yes, make a little money along the way.
Of course, the critics say, this is the first step. Pretty soon all mail will cost money, and then the free, open world of the Internet will be closed to poor people, nonprofits and other good guys, while multinational conglomerates fill their ever-growing pockets.
I agree that pretty soon sending most e-mail will cost money, but I think that's only right. It costs money to guarantee quality and safety. Moreover, I think the market will work, and that it will not shut out deserving senders, if we only let it work freely.
In fact, I hope Goodmail succeeds, and that it has lots of competition. I also think it and its competitors will eventually transform into services that more directly serve the interests of mail recipients. Instead of the fees going to Goodmail and AOL, they will also be shared with the individual recipients.
There's no question that we need to try some new approaches to e-mail. The current situation — where the Internet is ridden with spam, most mail is unwanted and some is objectively dangerous — illustrates a market failure. When the Internet began, it was a small community, one that needed neither markets nor regulations. The people on the Web mostly behaved well, and things worked.
But the Internet has become mainstream, which means we have abuse and crime and freeloaders. We need a way to deal with the abuse. Spam filters are imperfect, partly because the senders of "bad" mail are getting better and better at defeating them. And those who take advantage of the Internet aren't paying for the costs of their abuse.
Instead, the recipients' Internet service providers are paying the cost of spam filtering, and recipients are paying when legitimate messages get caught in those spam filters.
Senders should bear the costs of sending mail, and it should be the senders' duty to figure out whether each piece of mail is wanted. Ultimately, I believe, Goodmail or its successors will develop a mechanism to rebate some of the fees to the senders whose mail is wanted. That's why I don't worry about individuals and nonprofits being squeezed out.
In the short run, AOL and others will serve as the recipients' proxies. If they don't do a good job of ensuring that customers get the mail they want, even from nonpaying senders, they will lose their customers. And in the long run, recipients will be able to use services like Goodmail to set their own prices for receiving mail.
In my case, I'd have a list. I'd charge nothing for people I know, 50 cents for anyone new (though if I add the sender to my list after reading the mail, I'll cancel the 50 cents) and $3 for random advertisers. Ex-boyfriends pay $10.
What shocks me most about the opposition to Goodmail is that people who claim to believe in the free and open Internet, with its welcome attitude to innovation, want to shut down an idea. That's wrong.
If people like those little stamps that mark their mail as safe and wanted or as commercial transactions, then let the customers have them. And let other companies compete with Goodmail to offer better and less expensive service.
Goodmail isn't good because it's new, but neither is it bad because it's new. If it's a good model, it will succeed and improve over time. If it's a bad model, it will fail. Why not let the customers decide?
Esther Dyson, an investor in technology start-ups, is the editor of Release 1.0.
QotD: [GameDev] Design Docs
"At the onset of development, completed design docs are not always very useful to us, as we're not yet sure what will be fun."
-- from the Post-Mortem of Harmonix's "Guitar Hero", the best game of 2005 IMHO, published in Game Developer magazine
-- from the Post-Mortem of Harmonix's "Guitar Hero", the best game of 2005 IMHO, published in Game Developer magazine
17 March 2006
Snow on Mt. Tam
Last month we went hiking up Mt. Tam into the snow. Dan Lyke has some photos here, it was amazing.
15 March 2006
Proud to be a Member
I'm only halfway through it, but already the March 2006 issue of the Commonwealth Club newsletter has knocked me up side of my head twice. Daniel Pipes, a Middle Eastern scholar who was living in Egypt in 1979 when the Oslo accords were signed, has a scathing article called "The Palestinian-Israeli War." Robert Fisk is a "mouse journalist" who has been sneaking around Iraq (and Bosnia and Afghanistan and...) in decrepit rental cars and getting shot at for 20 years.
While I don't rush to embrace either's worldview, they both have been up close talking to the participants more often than I have and have a logic to their point of view.
Leo
I couldn't find either printed article anywhere on the web; your local library may be able to oblige (or you can borrow my copy when I'm through!). However, the Commonwealth Club has the audio archives of the lectures online.
Pipes' lecture is at: http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/05/05-11pipes-audio.html
Fisk's is here: http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/05/05-11fisk-audio.html
While I don't rush to embrace either's worldview, they both have been up close talking to the participants more often than I have and have a logic to their point of view.
Leo
I couldn't find either printed article anywhere on the web; your local library may be able to oblige (or you can borrow my copy when I'm through!). However, the Commonwealth Club has the audio archives of the lectures online.
Pipes' lecture is at: http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/05/05-11pipes-audio.html
Fisk's is here: http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/05/05-11fisk-audio.html
02 March 2006
Brain Training and Seniority as a determinant of Ranking
So this evening at Scott & Amy's house we checked out Brain Training, a "game" for the Nintendo DS that alleges to try and keep your brain fit into old age. It's a series of simple puzzle and math games that really is kind of akin to doing crosswords puzzles to "keep the brain sharp".
The UI was a little difficult for us only because I can't read Japanese fluently, but in general the UI of Brain Training is super supportive. It very clearly tells you where to click next and when you should get ready because the "test" is coming up soon. It reminded of a persistent difference between Japanese and North American games: Japanese games are often easy, with an emphasis on putting in your time rather than insight and/or skill.
Brain Training has some drills that require thought, or at least attention, since one of the raison d'etres for it is to keep your mind sharp. But in general it very gently guides you through a series of exercises which, if followed, promise to decrease your "brain age". The most obvious analogy is to Japanese RPGs, which typically reward time and effort rather than any particular skill.
Today it finally occurred to me to congruous this is with the postwar Japanese culture: in the traditional sarariman structure, your place within the company is mostly determined by seniority, with individual merit and/or achievement having only a minor effect. These sort of games that kind you very strongly through them are an entertainment equivalent, where the 60 hours of gameplay will surely be rewarded by saving the universe, whether or not you applied any special insight along the way.
Of course, the sarariman culture is collapsing in the post-buble Japanese economy and currently Korean and Chinese fashions are all the rage there. Who knows what systems Japanese games will reflect in ten years?
The UI was a little difficult for us only because I can't read Japanese fluently, but in general the UI of Brain Training is super supportive. It very clearly tells you where to click next and when you should get ready because the "test" is coming up soon. It reminded of a persistent difference between Japanese and North American games: Japanese games are often easy, with an emphasis on putting in your time rather than insight and/or skill.
Brain Training has some drills that require thought, or at least attention, since one of the raison d'etres for it is to keep your mind sharp. But in general it very gently guides you through a series of exercises which, if followed, promise to decrease your "brain age". The most obvious analogy is to Japanese RPGs, which typically reward time and effort rather than any particular skill.
Today it finally occurred to me to congruous this is with the postwar Japanese culture: in the traditional sarariman structure, your place within the company is mostly determined by seniority, with individual merit and/or achievement having only a minor effect. These sort of games that kind you very strongly through them are an entertainment equivalent, where the 60 hours of gameplay will surely be rewarded by saving the universe, whether or not you applied any special insight along the way.
Of course, the sarariman culture is collapsing in the post-buble Japanese economy and currently Korean and Chinese fashions are all the rage there. Who knows what systems Japanese games will reflect in ten years?
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!
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