Decent photography, you say? Well, whatever you think about this picture, the most impressive thing about it is that the person in it isn’t real. She was rendered. The future will definitely be interesting if we manage not to blow ourselves up. If you want to check out more cool rendered portraits from the CG Society, click here! Watch out Hollywood, you may be the new manufacturing sector 
SpiralTruth
Just another post-modern quest for meaning.
Browsing the archives for the into the great unknown category.
I am convinced that this post at soundmeme.com describes the future of independent music (and perhaps the future of music, period – as more and more of it transitions away from the classic record deal structure). It’s a great article that describes a very different way of thinking about releasing and making money off of music: one that my own band has been experimenting with for over a year.
…or dumber. According to James Surowiecki, the jury’s still out on whether or not the Internet will improve us via collective intelligence or seduce us into conformity. Check out his fascinating talk about the wisdom of crowds on TED.
Highlights:
Each blog post, each blog commentary may not, in and of itself, be exactly what we’re looking for, but collectively, the judgment of those people posting, those people linking, more often than not, is going to give you a very interesting and enormously valuable picture of what’s going on.
The more tightly linked we become to each other, the harder it is for each of us to remain independent… One of the fundamental characteristics of a network is that once you are linked in the network, the network starts to shape your views and starts to shape your interactions with everybody else… Groups are only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. This is sort of the paradox of the wisdom of crowds or the paradox of collective intelligence… Networks make it harder for people to do that because they drive attention to the things that the network values…
Looks like France is well on its way to becoming a pioneer in overly harsh anti-piracy legislation. Get accused of pirating three times and you lose your internet access for a year. The legislation is still pending approval from the lower house of parliament. I seem to remember Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing suggesting that when adopting any of these three strike policies, there should be a reverse policy – if you make three spurious copyright infringement accusations, your internet gets cut off. But then, maybe the big media companies could operate without internet connections. Their business models certainly suggest that they have no awareness of this new medium that can do their advertising for them, reduce the cost of production, add value to products, etc., etc. The article identifies one of the goals of the legislation being to drive citizens to legitimate online music sellers like iTunes – which is interesting because Apple seems to be doing just fine with iTunes sales without the legislation. In fact, when Steve Jobs announced Apple’s entry into the market, he rightfully brushed the piracy issue off, saying that all iTunes needed to do was offer a better product at a reasonable price.
As we witness what could be the beginnings of the collapse of the last remaining superpower, one has to wonder if the rest of the world isn’t royally screwed as well. After all, great civilizations are no longer isolated experiments. With that in mind, check out Jared Diamond’s talk on common characteristics of societies that collapse, with the sliver of a hope and a pinch of advice on how me might pull ourselves out of this one. Unfortunately, the parallels he draws to the United States (and western society in general) are circa 2003, which means you should multiply the ominous overtones in his talk by about a billion to bring them up to 2008′s standards.
Check out this article in Popular Science that suggests bringing some of the efficiencies discovered in popular online communities like Wikipedia and Facebook and applying them to government. Given McCain’s general ignorance of all things involving computers and Obama’s already stated support for a “google for government”, I think he’d be the most likely candidate to bring these changes about, so let’s hope that something weird doesn’t happen in the next few days that would land a 72 year old and a proud Creationist in the White House – not exactly the way to secure better democracy through technology.
David Perry predicts that the video games of the future will blur the lines between reality and fantasy. In his talk, he presents two great montages: one shows the evolution of video game graphics from ridiculously simplistic to almost indistinguishable from film (it’s hard to believe we’ve come so far in only a few decades); the other is a self-described video game addict’s ideas on how the medium has affected us, and how it might affect us in the future, for good or ill.
iPosture is a new device that can tell you when you’re slouching. As I type this, I’m displaying horrible posture, making the $75 price tag seem like a steal, if it would truly kick me of my bad habits.
I’ve been intrigued by the concept of biofeedback devices for a few years now. Disciplines like Zen Buddhism use the same principles to cure us of our psychological hangups – the idea being that if we were truly aware of what was going on, we’d automatically correct it. But anytime you try to make yourself more aware of something for any length of time, you’ll realize how hard it actually is. Our awareness is usually pretty undisciplined and will soon drift off onto more exciting things, leaving whatever it was we were trying to obvserve to the mercy of our subconscious. We need all the help we can get, and the notion of a small electronic device that would be focused entirely on something we wanted to fix – in this case, our posture – is an interesting solution.
Right now, this gadget has its limitations, the main one being that it only makes its measurements on one point of the body, resulting in an inability to notice some forms of bad posture. That said, it will be interesting to see where this goes.
Tags: iPosture, biofeedback
Chris Cornell is once again moving out of comfortable territory and working with Timbaland on his next album. You can check out some of the new tunes here.
Of course, those still stuck in the nineties will be quite upset, but as a fan of Cornell’s previous work, especially with Soundgarden, I’m excited to see him going in this direction. Perhaps if more mainstream rock musicians showed this kind of willingness to experiment, the rock scene would get back some of the life it had in its early days.
There’s this notion that Alan Watts brings up about Buddhism that I think applies very appropriately to the twenty-first century. Watts suggests that when the Buddha says things like “renounce all desire,” really all he’s trying to do is start a conversation. The conversation will start on false premises. It’s impossible to renounce desire because if you really care to do so, it means you have to stop desiring to stop desiring, and that kind of thinking can drive you mad. But the idea behind this approach is that there is a central truth to it all and that this truth is not something you can communicate with words. You have to circle around the truth until you get close enough for that sudden enlightenment that we’re all looking for. I didn’t know why I reserved spiraltruth.com at first, and for years the domain just acted as a catchall for various projects. But I like this idea of truth as a spiral rather than a single point. You never really get there, but you can get closer, and that’s really what matters. This is blog for bohemians. It will most likely end up unapologetically left leaning and eclectic, something that will showcase the things I find interesting and beautiful in the world, and it will hopefully appeal to most of the fine folks I like to hang around with. What it will not be is a personal diary. Please send me hate mail immediately if I break this rule. It’s not that I’m not fascinated by reading about the various dramas that go on in other peoples’ lives – it’s just that I think that there’s already enough of that on the web, and I don’t need to add to it here. Now that that’s done, let’s see where this goes…