Uber running geek

Once in a while, I see lithe, beautiful people running along the street with their ipod nanos snugly attached to their arm band, blasting getting-jiggy-with-it music into their ears. Now what if they had a pair of NIKE+ running shoes – the latest offering from Nike that allows you to monitor your running progress? There is a sensor in your shoe that communicates with the receiver that hooks up to the bottom of your ipod nano and while pounding the tarmac, the display on your happy little nano tells you how long you’ve been running, how fast, how far, how many calories burned etc. You can even download the details of your run onto their website, set goals and monitor your progress. Now that is some serious geeky running.

Bruce Sterling: We need a new word for Neologisms

A neologism is a word, term, or phrase which has been recently created (“coined”) — often to apply to new concepts, or to reshape older terms in newer language form. Neologisms are especially useful in identifying inventions, new phenomena, or old ideas which have taken on a new cultural context. The term e-mail, as used today, would be an example of a neologism.

Bruce Sterling (author, journalist, editor, critic) gave a very short, tight presentation on neologisms and this “semantic battlefield” where no one has any idea what they are really talking about. (I suppose that is the perennial challenge with new things – everyone is just muddling about).

My main takeaway was his story about at engineering professor who split his students into 2 groups: the John Henrys, who had to do all their research in the library and the Baby Hueys who had to do all their research on the net, using amongst other things “bizarre blogger blither”. In the end, “the Baby Hueys were wiping the floor with the John Henrys”

Now, I graduated in 2002 and as much as I hate to use the phrase, “in my time”, then no one had ever heard of using blogs and wikipedia as bonafide sources of research information.

Candy floss and chemical substrates

If Willy Wonka had access to liquid nitrogen and lasers, he would be Homaro Cantu. I mean he made me eat printed “paper” – it was some sort of chemical substrate – that tasted like candy floss. Some weird shit is happening.

5 questions on generative technologies

1. Who makes the rules?
2. Won’t you get a lot of crap that way?
3. How are you going to shift through all that crap?
4. What is the role of community in a generative system?
5. How do you move from the traditional model to a generative model?

What is podcasting?

A short break from all the Pop!Tech content. I’ve just jumped onto the podcasting bandwagon. Funky little things these podcasts and I will always be eternally grateful for the podcast on “prediction market technologies” that helped me prepare for a last-minute meeting in super-quick time.

So what is a podcast? If you ask a ninja, he will tell you that a podcast is like apple pie for whales. (That is probably the most out-of-context thing to say, ever. But click here and you will understand why.)

Random thoughts on gaming

I am still thinking about computer games (and more broadly, computer simulations). At lunch, Ivan remarked that his young nephew was quick to pick up WoW because he basically just got stuck into it and started playing. (I would have probably taken at least one look at the manual). Do playing computer games make you more willing to try out new things and less risk adverse? Now I am absolutely from the theory-first-practical-implications-later school of thought so I really wonder about the implications of gaming that go beyond mere entertainment.

Just do it?

Will Wright: Spore

I’ve only ever played 2 computer games:  Worms and Sim City.  So it brought me a great deal of pleasure to listen to Will Wright (creator of Sim City) speak at Pop!Tech.  Now, I’ve always been cynical about computer games.  I have pretty appalling hand-eye coordination so I never got into the whole gaming culture.  And the idea that you spend all that time on something and have nothing to show for it baffles me.

But Will’s demonstration of Spore absolutely blew me away.  At first, Spore seems like a god-game.  You create a little creature, guide it through a couple of generations, it evolves, lives in a little herd community, the herd becomes a society and progresses on towards becoming a space-faring civilization.  The idea is that with a few relatively simple rules, an extremely complex game can develop with every player no longer Bilbo Baggins but rather JRR Tolkien.  Players collectively make the game as you go along and as your little creature roams around in its little virtual world, it has the opportunity to interact with creatures that other players have created (although, this is still a single-player game – multi-player games take this concept to a whole new level).

 As an aside, later at lunch, I had the opportunity to sit with Ivan Marovic.  He is a young Serbian activist and a key figure in the Otpor (”Resistance”) movement.  He spoke at last year’s Pop!Tech on this game he developed called “A Force More Powerful”, which teaches players the tactics of non-violent resistance.  Wow.

With everything online and freely available, the economist in me wonders what kind of meaningful data these games will generate about human behaviour and preferences.  And if the argument goes that violent games cause people to be violent in real life, shouldn’t we make more room for games like “A Force More Powerful” that teach peaceful conflict resolution?  The idea that gaming and social justice can interface in a productive way fascinates me.

Brian Eno: It’s Gonna Rain!

(It is probably already obvious to everyone that I am trying to rehash all my thoughts from every single one of the Pop!Tech talks. Very ambitious, I know. And it makes me wish that I had a swankier laptop and could do this real-time like some of the other conference participants.)

About Brian Eno (from the Pop!Tech Speaker write up)

Brian Eno has become an iconic figure within international contemporary culture. As an artist, musician, ideologue and systems-maker, he has not only written, performed, recorded and produced some of the most intoxicating and original music of the last thirty years, but has also established a philosophy of cultural production which links the enquiring spirit of conceptual art to the broadest applications of popular culture and sociology.

Best known in the field of music, Eno’s discography as a musician, producer and artistic collaborator includes some of the most acclaimed recordings in the history of modern music. Artists as seminal yet varied as John Cale, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, David Bowie, Bono, Peter Gabriel and most recently Paul Simon have chosen to work with Eno, and he is one of the most sought after figures working across the spectrum of contemporary music, from guitar driven rock to film scores and electronica.

And yet music is only one strand of Eno’s creative project. As a lecturer, visual artist, writer, political activist and futurologist, his opinions and ideas have been requested by institutions and think tanks on subjects as disparate as concepts of time, urban futures, perfume making and the history of art.

Okay. So this is going to make me sound like I have a brain the size of a pea but I had never heard of Brian Eno. I also know almost nothing about generative music. In fact, I had to google “generative music” to be convinced that there actually is such a term.

“Generative Music revolves around the idea that music, or sounds may be ‘generated’ by a musician ‘farming’ parameters within an ecology, such that the ecology will perpetually produce different variation based on the parameters and algorhythms used”

He tells of a piece of music by Steve Reich, where 2 tape loops of an American preacher saying “Its gonna rain” are played together but slightly out-of-synch and they interweave and intersect in beautifully elegant ways. He makes the point that you really don’t need much material to create great music and that most of the music is actually created in the head of the listener. Fascinating stuff. (And I really want to have a listen to that track now).

Why is any of this stuff important to anyone? It is important because it illustrates the dangerous idea that simple things can give rise to very complicated things (Brian quotes from Daniel Dennett’s controversial book “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” to make this point). Brian puts it this way: humans are complicated beings and the traditional way of viewing the world is that we always make things that are slightly less complicated than ourselves. But what if intelligence didn’t create reality but instead reality creates intelligence? What if simple things could interweave and intersect in ways wondrously more complex than ourselves? It does take us out of the driver’s seat somewhat and implies that we are no longer the superior species. He mentions a lovely quote by Hildegard von Bingham, saying that we are “a feather on the breath of god”.

I haven’t yet decided how much I agree with Brian’s point. I don’t necessarily believe that everything can be explained by algorithmic processes and that the reality of the world probably involves both some sort of evolutionary process and a whole lot of intelligent design. But I do agree with his conclusion that the magnitude and majesty of the universe should create in us humility, not pride. There is far too much we cannot explain.

Generative: Complexity from Simplicity.

The first Pop!Tech session was on “Emergence” and featured Brian Eno and Will Wright. Basically, they spoke on the idea that very complicated things can be derived from the simplest of parameters. I was hardly impressed when I first heard this. I mean it was so obvious! And surely, the challenge is to distil simple first principles from observing complexity. How very 20^th century! Clearly, I am an analyst and not an inventor.

I can’t think of a better way of describing this idea than using Lego. On the one hand, you can explain that your little Lego house is made up of 10 or so very basic Lego pieces. On the other hand, understanding that your 10 or so basic pieces can create a myriad of weird and wonderful objects is mind-bogglingly liberating. Besides, weren’t you pissed off when Lego forced you to make the pirate ship on treasure island with the plastic palm tree when you were really happy with your basic bucket of simpson-yellow and cobalt blue standard-issue pieces and could create just about anything. (Okay, not the most elegant way of making a point but you get the idea).

Maybe some ideas are so revolutionary because they are so DUH! Check out Spore (the video game – not the minute reproductive body produced by primitive organisms, like ferns and fungi) for a glimpse of this principle at work.

I (heart) Rodrigo Y Gabriela

Okay. I know this has nothing to do with technology or economic development. (In my defense, they did perform at Pop!Tech) . I’m not even going to pretend that this is anything but a shameless plug for Rodrigo Y Gabriela. I (heart) them.

Who are these people?!! (Trash metal Brazilians playing rockin’ flamenco-esque guitar in Ireland, that’s who!) Okay, so I’m biased and I love the acoustic guitar even when I play my 4-chord repertoire. But seriously, Gabriela is one talented chica with awesome technique. The music just makes you want to laugh, cry, dance with wanton abandon and fall in love with a handsome stranger all at the same time.

And catching the random “Enter Sandman (Metallica)” guitar riff just felt like sharing in a juicy secret that I was pretty sure the grey-haired gentleman next to me didn’t get. I am probably slightly overstating my point for effect but really, buy their CD/VCD. Give them your money. Trust me.

Edit (26 Oct 2006) : Check them out on MySpace.