Category: looky

Okay, I know I’m going off the deep end with this one, but I have another idea for a utility that would make outlining documentary footage a whole lot easier.

So, you shot your documentary. You’ve got your insanely large quantity of footage. The focus has changed a little from when you started the project, but you’re not quite sure how to organize the additional themes that have started to emerge from the footage.

Organizing the clips into topics is the first step. Some clips have multiple themes, where the speaker says something relevant to multiple topics of your documentary. Some of their utterances are a good transition from one into the other.

Right now I have a nice giant spreadsheet with every clip on it, sortable by themes. But keeping track of these potential transitions between topics is tricky. It requires another chart… and I get to look at two charts at the same time. Not so good.

Quick background: in computer program algorithm studies, there is a model called a “graph.” A graph in this context is a collection of points called “nodes” and lines connecting them called “edges.” Any picture you’ve ever drawn which was a bunch of circles connected to each other by lines is potentially a graph. Edges only connect nodes, they never intersect other edges.

A lot of algorithms focus on travel between nodes, along those edges. So a “Directed graph” is a graph where the edges can only be traversed in one direction. Like a bunch of circles, with a bunch of arrows each starting at a circle and ending at another circle.

How does this help us? Those circles are our documentary topics. And the arrows are the transitions. If someone talks about our film topic of “dogs,” the clip belongs to the “dogs” node. If someone talks about our film topic of “cats,” the clip belongs to the “cats” node.

If they say something like “they were fighting like cats and dogs!” that is a transition! The clip can be used at the end of the “dogs” segment to introduce the “cats” segment, or vice versa. It can be marked on the graph as an arrow between the “cats” node and the “dogs” node. For that matter, it could go either way, so it should be a double-headed arrow.

If we graphed the entire topic list like this, we could find an outline to the movie by following a path along the topic nodes and remembering which transitions represent which edges between the nodes.

So, I’m looking for an easy dynamic graphing applet which supports directed graphs. Either that or I”m going to have to draw a 40+ node graph and redraw it over and over until it looks legible… gah.

But wouldn’t that be a great add-on to my dream documentary outline software?

Maggie Muggs was made by Larry B Cottrill aka Cottrill Cyclodyne out of about $60 of hardware from the store.

ASPO: Amaze your friends! Blow up your house!

The same guy also made the Synchrodyne miniature jet engine… apparently as part of an effort to make a very very simple jet.

I like how all the jet engine products are seemingly made in his garage and have the word “dyne” in them- very 1950’s sci-fi. Larry could be up for a What Has Science Done award.
Web link of note: Coffee Mug Ramjet
(At http://www.cottrillcyclodyne.com/Maggie_Muggs/Maggie.html)

The site’s name, 妖怪絵巻, means “ghost picture scroll” – yokai emaki. “Yokai” being a genre of monster which is more uncanny than your standard bigfoot type of monster. A vampire or a zombie would be a Yokai. The Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot or a jackelope would not.

Anyway, the site is full of paintings of Japanese monsters. I’m not sure if the site owner paints them himself, or what- my Japanese isn’t that good!

Web link of note: Ghost Scrolls
(At http://www.blu.m-net.ne.jp/~uma001/FrameSet1.html)

I was reading about Electronic Voice Phenomemna– recording the voices of ghosts. The recordings themselves are pretty creepy.

According to the recording procedure posted by the AAEVP,

If the taper wishes to speak to a specific friend or loved one in the next dimension, he should ask helpers on the other side to please get this person for him. For best results, it is advised to make this request as you end recording for the day. As an example: “When I return tomorrow, I would especially like to speak to my mother, Mary Smith. If you would please try to bring her to me, I will be very grateful.”

I’m thinking this is to give the dead time to contact the requested party, and then for the Beloved to re-arrange their schedule to plan to be at the next contact meeting.

Is this such a bizarre concept? When you make an (unexpected) long-distance call into a developing country, the operator has to schedule the call’s connection, and leave a message for the call recipient. Also, sometimes the only phone is in another village and the time for the incoming call must be relayed by friends or neighbors from the village with the phone to wherever the call recipient lives. This could take several days.

What if the only phone in North America was in Salt Lake City, and you lived in San Francisco? The phone only takes incoming calls. Even with trains or the Pony Express, getting the message that you had an incoming call would take weeks. Then you’d have to travel to the phone, which would take more weeks.

So I propose the following: At the end of your recording session or what have you, list off the next few people you intend to contact, in order, from nearest future to furthest. the list only would move every week or so. That way, someone on the top of the list has about a week to make the connection, and people in future slots on the list will have ample warning, possibly several months. Sort of like a “upcoming events” list for contactees.

But there is a slight complication- we all know how communicating with the Departed is a fairly unreliable proposition. The dead aren’t as direct in their communication, and rarely stay on topic. There may be a large degree of garbling of communicated messages- like a long chain of myna birds relaying spoken messages. Or maybe being on the Other Side makes you a senile flake.

In either case, the message, even “I want to talk to my grandfather,” must be repeated simply and with a high frequency. Like a simple, easy-to-remember and therefore easy-to-repeat phrase. Maybe have a tune that goes along with it to make it even easier to recall. Whoever or whatever receives this message can then more easily relay it to the Loved One, who then can in turn be at a future scheduled recording session. For maximum exposure you would repeat this short song with a single sentence every five minutes or so, during the recording sessions, for several weeks.

Oh crap. I’ve just invented Radio Advertising for the Dead.

This album rules. It’s radical hip-hop that sounds good and carries a lot of information. It’s like gangsta rap with all the news you aren’t getting from your mom’s TV network. I’m buying copies and giving them away to friends!

B0000UX58E

Interesting articles – his grouping of the “cheap-labor right” really makes a lot of sense.
Web link of note: Conceptual Guerilla
(At http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/)

I just heard a fascinating talk by Catherine Austin Fitts, about how large companies have giant contracts in the very federal institutions that are investigating their criminal behavior! Perhaps not so surprisingly, their malfeasance goes unpunished and for the most part undetected.

Example: 56 billion dollars is “missing” from Iraq. How do you suppose it “went missing?” I think we have a pretty good idea. But why isn’t the government on this? 56 billion buys a lot of debt… or say Iraq War expenses.

So, instead of just screaming and yelling (which no doubt the citizens/taxpayers are entitled to do!) Catherine Austin Fitts and others have set up Solari.

Of all the initiatives, I like the July 4th Kick Off of the Solari Circles Campaign, in which everyone simply changes banks- from the large multinationals (Bank of America, Citibank) to locally-run banks, like a credit union.
Web link of note: Solari
(At http://www.solari.com/)

They buy unclaimed baggage from the airline hubs and sell it. There is some really insane stuff here!
Web link of note: Unclaimed Baggage
(At http://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/)

1. Call 1-877-BELLHOP (235-5467) to order your Virtual Bellhop service
2. VirtualBellhop then prepares a quote, either one-way, multiple destinations or round-trip
3. Items to be transported are picked up at the traveler’s residence, business or other agreed upon point and flown as airfreight, separate from the airplane the traveler uses. The baggage is then sent by ground courier directly to the hotel or other designated location, and precedes the arriving guest.

Web link of note: Virtual Bellhop
(At http://www.virtualbellhop.com/)

JWhich is a simple tool that unambiguously identifies which Java class in your classpath will be loaded. Depending on the complexity of your classpath, it’s not always clear which class will be loaded first by the Java class loader. JWhich displays the absolute pathname of the class file loaded first by the Java class loader.

Web link of note: JWhich
(At http://www.clarkware.com/)