cheesebikini?

John Brockman at edge.org asked many of the world’s smartest and most interesting scientists, technologists, artists and authors to draw up potential “laws” or rules of nature that occured to them as a result of their work. So far 160 of these people have submitted nuggets of wisdom from their respective fields, and together their contributions form one of the most entertaining and inspiring documents I’ve read in months. Here are a few of my favorite submissions:

Tor N¯rretranders’ Law of Symmetrical Relief: If you find that most other people, upon closer inspection, seem to be somewhat comical or ludicrous, it is highly probable that most other people find that you are in fact comical or ludicrous. So you don’t have to hide it, they already know.

Tor N¯rretranders’ Law of Understanding Novelty: The difficulty in understanding new ideas originating from science or art is not intellectual, but emotional; good ideas are simple and clear, but if they are truly new, they will be hard to swallow. It is not difficult to understand that the Earth is not at the center of the Universe, but it is hard to believe it. Science is simple, simply strange.

Lee Smolin’s Second Law: In every period and every community there is something that everybody believes, but cannot justify. If you want to understand anything, you have to start by ignoring what everyone believes, and thinking for yourself.

Steven Kosslyn’s Second Law: The individual and the group are not as separate as they appear to be. A part of each mind spills over into the minds of other people, who help us think and regulate our emotions.
Read the rest of this entry »

Last February I requested a small, cheap mobile device that:

Brace yourself for breathtakingly belated coverage from San Francisco SantaCon 2003. Yet another conference hits the City by the Bay.

Yikes! How did I miss Microsoft’s release of the World-Wide Media eXchange? Microsoft calls it “a centralized index of digital photos, where photos are tagged by the geographic location where they were shot.” Developers affiliated with the Locative Media Lab and the Place Lab initiative have been discussing and working on very similar ideas for years, hoping to build out open and broad foundations for such systems before these capabilities can be locked down by narrow megacorporate interests.

As Jo Walsh put it, “interfaces and standards from meshed hyperconglomerates like Nokia and Microsoft present us with a square pinhole through which to attempt to view a potential wild and vivid world.”

It’s time to get cracking. Thanks to Scott Lederer for the wake-up call.

“Do I really need a camera attached to my mobile phone? Honestly, isn’t this just a gimmick?”

Lately I’ve fielded those questions many times over from friends and family, and even from other tech people.

Even the phonecam manufacturers don’t seem to have a clue what people will really use these things for, judging from the foolish scenarios they portray in TV commercials. But that’s typical; new technologies are never born fully-formed. Nobody knows how networked cameras will evolve, and nobody knows just how we’ll grow to use them. But special properties of networked cameras have convinced me that these tools won’t be abandoned any time soon. Some of these capabilities haven’t emerged yet but I think they’re all on the way.

Here are five important capabilities that seem unique to networked digital cameras:

1) A photographer can use such a camera to send all her photos to a single, central storage place as she takes them. This eliminates the handling of film, smart cards and other intermediary media. It means that cameras can be smaller and cheaper because they don’t need massive amounts of storage space. It dramatically simplifies problems involving backups, sorting, and after-the-fact annotation. No more rooting through PCs, CDs, servers, drawers and albums to find that great family portrait from last Thanksgiving.

No single firm or agency can or should store and control everybody’s photos. Nobody’s photos should -physically- be stored in just one facility. The media should be backed up and mirrored at multiple sites in case fires, floods or whatnot destroy the data at one site. But as far as the user is concerned, the photos should “live” in one secure spot in cyberspace. You should have just one virtual “place” to search through when seeking your photos, so that you don’t have to worry about inadvertently losing important photos, and so that you don’t have to constantly copy collected photos from one device or place to another.
Read the rest of this entry »

The dark side of interaction design:

Experimental Interaction Unit.

[ UPDATE 12-2-03: Diebold backed down and withdrew its legal threats against people who published the memos. ]

I’ve jumped on Berkeley’s latest truth-and-democracy bandwagon. Election machine manufacturer Diebold wants to steal a page from the Church of Scientology playbook: they’re bullying people who speak out against them, trying to silence criticism via threats of frivolous yet expensive lawsuits. Students and indy-media Web sites that criticize the firm have been slapped with cease-and-desist orders from Diebold lawyers.

Now people are slapping back. We’ve turned this into a game of whack-a-mole — if Diebold shuts us down, others will pop up to host this information in our place.

Join the good fight; download a copy of the memos that Diebold doesn’t want you to see:

“When life gives your SARS, make sarsaparilla.”

Thanks to Joe Hall for pointing out the latest New Yorker cover illustration.

It spotlights the dying megacorporate music cartel’s absurd policy of bullying hundreds of its youngest and most important customers through lawsuits.

I finally joined the 21st Century and set up a live photoblog: http://www.cheesebikini.com/cam.

Technically my phonecam belongs to its manufacturer, Nokia. But it’s mine for the semester.

(Definitions: A phonecam is a mobile phone with a camera built in. A live photoblog, also called a “moblog,” is a site where snapshots from a phonecam appear live as they’re taken in the field; the photographer can update the site using nothing but a phonecam.)

The phonecam I’m babysitting is a Nokia 3650; it can capture still photos, audio and short video segments, and it can send this content to any e-mail address. With a little messing around, you can use this to build a photoblog.

I’m working on a project for Nokia at Berkeley; we’re developing applications for these phonecams and creating metadata frameworks that we hope will make it easier for regular people to create, annotate, retrieve, share and work with photos and video. Here are details of the project.