Month: August 2004

After spending over $75 million on fraudulent attacks, Karl Rove is back to selling the true Texas cowboy. Throughout August, Bush campaign commericals will feature President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Join ACT and our friend Will Ferrell for a behind-the-scenes look at “White House West.” We promise it’s the best commerical you’ll see this election.

Help stop the Republican’s fraud by joining ACT today and signing our petition to the FCC.

Web link of note: White House West
(At http://whitehousewest.com/)

The Orbitouch keyless keyboard! It’s a keyboard alternative where you have your two hands on these orb things… you move the orbs in one of 8 different directions, and the combinations of the two orb positions makes the different keystrokes.

Except… it’s not really a “keyboard” because it doesn’t have any “keys.” And doesn’t it seem like a very weird input device? Maybe I’m having a male moment, but doesn’t this remind you of playing with boobs?

Come to think of it, even the name “keybowl” has a sexual implication- key parties of the late 1970’s, where men put their car keys in a bowl and their wives/dates pulled one out at random, and had sex with whoever owned the associated car. A Key Bowl. A Bowl for Keys. SEX KEYS!!!!

They should make a RealDoll edition of this- they could just replace the orbs with Booby Balls!
Web link of note: KeyBowl
(At http://www.keybowl.com/)

A few weekends ago, we went to see a benshi performance with Midori Sawato, one of the greatest living benshi.

As that article I linked describes, the benshi is a narrator for Japanese silent films – usually accompanied with a traditional orchestra, sort of like a kabuki performance. However, unlike in a kabuki or even a western narrator, the benshi does all the voices in the story. In the days of silent film, the benshi was more of an attraction than the film itself- since the emphasis of entertainment was on the artist’s live performance.

So, the Castro Theater was showing “The Dragon Painter” (starring Sessue Hayakawa) as a part of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. The musical accompanyment was by the Mark Izu Ensemble, and the whole performance will be available on DVD from Milestone Films in 2004.

The performance was very cool but not quite as “Japanese” as I would have liked, which probably makes sense because it was filmed in Yosemite by an American hakujin crew led by a Japanese-American. Part of what makes benshi movies interesting to me is the zany, animistic feeling you get from the shots and the story.

We did get a special treat though – Sawato Sensei performed another piece, a short samurai story, which she wrote and performed entirely in English. The film looked to be from the 1920s, and was jerky and extremely melodramatic. The samurai is an antihero involved in I believe the civil war that began the Meiji Restoration. Of course he dies in the end…

The short was entertaining enough, but the narration definitely made the movie- my favorite parts were her serious intonations of

“…and turned the temple into a blood-stained battleground”

and

“he wrote his epitaph, in his blood!!!“

Something I didn’t know until the performance is that traditionally, benshi wrote their own scripts, and not necessarily with the original intentions of the filmmakers in mind. In this sense, the benshi is much more like a bard than a simple actor or narrator.

Ho ho ho! Celebrities! Boobs! Schadenfreude!
Web link of note: Awful Plastic Surgery
(At http://www.awfulplasticsurgery.com/)

A foundation sponsoring various causes, with well-known celebrities and prominent ad campaigns… because, well, it is the entertainment industry, and self-promotion is their business.

The Entertainment Industry Foundation responds to some of the most critical needs facing our society. We help raise awareness and funds for important causes such as childhood hunger, cancer research, creative arts, education, cardiovascular research, and much more.

Web link of note: Entertainment Industry Foundation
(At http://eifoundation.org/)

When I first saw this, I totally thought it was a cult. The name of it is “Circle of Friends” and the URL is “join the circle”… cult imagery. If I didn’t know better I would say it was a practical joke.

And it still might be! It also might be sponsored by an actual cult, especially considering the celebrities they got involved… I have no idea.

What it is: evangelical non-smoking. Really! You even get a little symbol to wear on your wrist.
Web link of note: Circle of Friends
(At http://www.join-the-circle.org/)

If there is ever a Mad Science Awards, I nominate Dr Hugo de Garis. Tesla was crazier, but he’s dead.

Dr de Garis will tell you that he specializes in “brain building.” He runs a lab at Utah State University in Logan, and ran his now-defunct company before that called “Starlab” (as opposed to S.T.A.R. Lab, which is the research group that helps Superman). I believe before that he was in a lab in Japan, because in the mid 1990s when I first started following him that is where his press releases we staged…

Ok so to get back to the point: Dr de Garis will tell you that he specializes in “brain building.” No. Actually what he specializes in is press releases. Every so often, he broadcasts to the world that he and his lab are just on the verge of making a brain that is smarter than a human brain. That the new electronic brains will be superior to humans, and in the end will replace them.

Then he starts getting nostalgic about the human world he’s destroyed… but he has to continue on creating these things for SCIENCE! !!! Of course the press eats this up with a spoon… they’ve all seen the Terminator movies.

I have to say, his older press releases were funnier. He would actually talk about how the machines would be capable of wiping out human civilization… Maybe he is getting more mellow with age. Too bad!

The Details

What almost all these projects are based on:
they take Xilinx chips, which are basically reconfigurable logic gate arrays, and they make neural networks out of them… the way this works in a nutshell, is they have a stream of data which is input in a cellular automaton, which from the look of things is a 3D implementation of a variant of Turing’s CA. The stream “grows” a network of “neurons” through a blank CA medium… after this “brain” is formed it is ready for use. The brain’s configuration stream is tuned with Genetic Algorithms or something to optimise its performance.

Don’t worry, I’m not making this up… I actually read a bunch of his papers, and no, I didn’t sprain my brain.

BRAIN: I need to show you Hugo de Garis
BG: whats that?
BRAIN: a real guy who says stuff like that
BRAIN: http://www.cs.usu.edu/~degaris/
BG: wowl hes scary
BG: did you ever read galetea 2.2?
BRAIN: read this – it’s hysterical. I’ll try to find you a funnier one
BG: this is almost laughable. its great!
BG: wait, hes implying that the journalists will be theh ones who in
the end, make the decision!
BRAIN: To the Cosmists (based on the word ‘cosmos’), building artilects will be a religion (compatible with and based upon modern science), as the destiny of the human species, as the magnificent goal of creating the next rung up the ladder of dominant species. To the Terrans (based on the word ‘terra’, the earth), building such artilects means accepting the risk that one day, in an advanced state, these artilect gods might decide, for whatever reason, that the human species is so inferior and such a pest, that they should exterminate us.
BRAIN: For me, the tragedy of seeing the human species wiped out is less significant than not seeing the birth of the artilects. This sounds monstrous, and it is in human terms, but to deny the creation of the first true artilect, which would be “worth” a trillion trillion trillion human beings, would be a far
greater tragedy, a “cosmic” tragedy.
BG: AWESOME!
BG: that is SO CLASSICAL BAD SCIENTIST GUY!
BG: he could get a nobel for that!
BRAIN: this one is the same article, but better formatting
BRAIN: isn’t he a fucking riot?
BG: its like nukes or gunpowder!
BG: Building Gods! HOOT!
BRAIN: well, that is the best I could find for now
BRAIN: what he does is this-
BRAIN: he’s a “brain builder”
BRAIN: he works on this technology where you take a string
BRAIN: and tweak rules governing it’s self replication
BRAIN: and eventually the string forms a “brain”
BRAIN: a closed system which “thinks”
BG: i like the idea that they can think thousants trillion trillion trillion times faster
BG: we need names for new numbers
BRAIN: we have names for all those numbers already
BG: i wonder if computers will actually be smarter than humans…
BRAIN: so
BRAIN: every so often he releases a press statement
BRAIN: about how close they are to making a synthetic human brain
BRAIN: and then he waxes poetic about how sad it will be
BRAIN: when the brains surpass humanity
BRAIN: and decide to wipe us all out
BG: that is so sweet of him. i like to think about the day we are killed by robots!