A glimpse of the holodeck?

The Third and the Seventh : a short film made entirely using CGI.



The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Advice: Click through to Vimeo and watch in full-screen, HD.

Of course doing this in 3D would be a whole order of magnitude(s) harder, and aren't people hard to do in CGI?  But still, it's remarkable.

(HT Robin Hanson)

Trend Hunting

Hunted by kaibara87

1 - In 2010 real people who you know, not geeks, will switch their family and personal calendars out of that that blasted book in the kitchen (you-think-you're-going-out-do-you?-well-its-not-written-in-the-diary) and on to their iphones and blackberries. Calendars belong in the cloud. Before the end of this year you'll be inviting your friends for a beer electronically.

2 - Before the year is over you'll discover one of your friends is taking a smart-drug like Modafinil and Adderral or Ritalin. Unless you already have. Or perhaps you already do. And if your friend is buying it off-prescription then congratulations: they've joined the war on the drugs. On the dark side.

3 - At some point between now and the General Election you will come across the Pirate Party somewhere other than on my blog.

4 - Just starting up in 2010 public opinion will almost imperceptibly start to shift against cats, in a few short years time it will come to seem incredible that we tolerated such carnage amongst small animals, and put up with so much cat mess in our flower beds. It wasn't so long ago that we shrugged at dog mess in our parks and pavements.. once that tide turned it didn't take long

5 - During 2010 it will become possible, in polite society, to criticise the values of Islam.

6 - If you are not on Facebook already then you will join it in 2010, which is ironic as in rerospect 2010 will be recognised as Facebook's zenith, the last year of unstoppable ascendancy. Before the end of 2010 doubts will appear.



Your task is to rank these predictions in order of likelihood.

You are 45 minutes from the dinosaurs.

The diplodocus in 1904

and in 2008, by Richard Carter

A wet Bank Holiday afternoon in London.

I didn't get where I am today without spending wet Bank Holiday afternoons in London at the Natural History Museum looking at the dinosaurs; so that's where we went.

It was rather more crowded than it was in 1904 - we queued for 10 minutes until we reached a sign. "You are 45 minutes from the dinosaurs", it said, so we went to the Darwin exhibition instead.

Darwin changed the world with an astonishing idea
which he hugged largely to himself for over 20 years until the same idea was had by Alfred Russel Wallace who wrote it all up in a neat essay and sent it to... Charles Darwin. Oops.

One idea, two authors. The reason we now remember name of Darwin is because Darwin was a partner at McKinseys the more senior and illustrious and able to speak with the right voice.

The reason Darwin had sat on his idea for so long seems to have been largely because he didn't want to upset his wife. The ironic thing is: he nearly didn't have a wife, for the most memorable item in the exhibition is his notes on the pros and cons of marriage and you can see for yourself it was close run thing.

Which point was it, do you suppose, decided him in the end?


In Victorian times most people refused to believe that a species could change, despite the clear evidence of their own eyes. Even now it can be hard to believe what's in plain sight: for instance if you look closely at the two pictures you'll notice that at some time in the last 100 years the diplodocus has stirred, stood up and lifted its tail...

New Year Makeovers & What We Are.

Just like John Thain, I have redecorated.

He spent $1,200,000 on his office; I can report, dear reader,  that on my cubicle I spent less: Approximately $1,199,985 less.

Thain's centrepiece was a stupidly-expensive designer rug, purchased solely to demonstrate his wealth and power  (only a banker could do that, right?)  My centrepiece was some new art postcards from the National Gallery, which I blu-tacked onto the glass partition between myself and my neighbour to allow me to surf the internet undetected improve our mutual privacy.

Thain was sacked. But even so, I guess he won't have to worry about his pension like I do. Oh well.


New Years Resolutions - because We are what we repeatedly do.


This year I have stolen three themes from older, wiser friends, who know better.

Theme - learn moderation, not abstinence

• in drink: to drink with friends and loved ones not with clients or co-workers, to oil a conversation not to wash down a plate of pasta, to accompany a smoked salmon blini, not Trial and Retribution
  
• food: to eat three meals a day not four (or two). To be able to tell whether I am hungry and if I'm not, to stop eating. At all costs to avoid canapés.

Theme - to OCD only the good habits (because it's hard when a habit takes a hold)

• to weigh myself once a week, exercise five times - and blog twice
  
• to have breakfast with my children every Wednesday -  whether they like it or not
• to be nicer to Mrs Botogol
  

Theme - to have more human contact at work

• fewer emails, more phone calls
  
• seek out Kate, whomsever she is
  
• find out the name of the youtube, Ocado and google-news fanatic in the next door cubicle. I mean - why not? after all these years...
  

Meanwhile... at work 

In our secret santa  last month an anonymous co-worker bought me a book of art pictures. It turned out to contain two of the postcards I have on my cubicle wall.

My first thought was "That is an unusual present for a secret santa" 
My second thought was: "Ah, I can see why they bought this: just because I have art postcards on my cubicle wall they think I am some kind of arty-type of person"
My third thought was "But I do have art postcards on my cubicle wall.... perhaps I am some kind of arty-type person"

What we actually are.

We are what we hang on our cubicle walls.

Random Connections

Connections by alles-schlumpf

[There now follows a geek interlude. Normal service will be resumed in the next post]

When I see something interesting on the internet I post a link to it on the sidebar here on my blog ¹ . Most days I post two or three links for delight of my readers who have all - so far as I can tell - entirely failed to notice.

The good news is I can do this in just a couple of clicks using delicious, which is a cool tool: for one thing: when you make a link you can see who else has bookmarked the same page, and then click through to see what else they have marked and if they are interesting you can add them to your 'network'.

So, wouldn't it be interesting, I idly thought one day, if there was a tool to search all of delicious and find users with similar bookmarks?   A cyberfriend-finder, no less.

Well, if you have an idea nowadays you can bet your IP-Address that someone else has had it first first and sure enough, after three minutes googling, I find myself on this website, which turns out to belong to one  andreas.s  - who is (drum-roll) one of only four people already in my delicious network.

Spooky eh?



So, now you are asking:  OK, then, Alibert, go on (sigh)  so which delicious user does share the largest number of wierd, random bookmarks with you, then?  And where can I find his blog? Perhaps he's writing about something more interesting today.

Well, using this cool tool  I found someone: he has bookmarked 604 sites - I have 900 -  and between us we have (drumroll, drumroll) no fewer than 12 bookmarks in common.

He is  Matthew Paul Hansen  - and he doesn't list any contact details but if he uses google alerts on his own name (and doesn't everyone) then I imagine he'll be along shortly.


--------------
¹ Over there, on the right,  "Seen Elsewhere", see it?

He Sings the Songs that Remind Him Of The Good Times

picture by MatthewBradley

From: YouTube [mailto:no_reply@youtube.com]

Sent: 21 November 2008 03:18

To: botogol

Subject: A copyright owner has claimed content in one of your videos

Dear botogol,

Video Disabled A copyright owner has claimed it owns some or all of the audio content in your video TRFC U9 Rugby.

The audio content identified in your video is Tubthumping by Chumbawamba. We regret to inform you that your video has been blocked from playback due to a music rights issue.

Now, I'm all in favour of copyright and I understand why record companies have a hard time with Limewire, and I'd be really miffed if people copied out Greenideas and pasted it all over the internet ¹ but I find it hard to believe that Chumbawumba's inalienable rights and long-term financial security are being seriously violated by the TRFC U9s.

In fact the reverse: you would think that in the world of the long tail, and a sea of content flooding the internet, that sound-track might serve to keep their ditty alive and remembered a little longer.

So how does it work anyway? Have record companies built bots that download all the video on youtube, and listen to it, searching for their unique chord sequences?  That must be a rewarding job: "I'm in the Music Business" "Oh, yes, what do you do?"  "Umm - music silencing department"

And all that effort to prolong a business model that must, surely be dead. I think we'll look back at the music business as a distinctly 20th century coda, a wierd period where large companies were, astonishingly,  able to control the distribution of . . . music. Kind of like GM seeds.

Sigh - so there must be a service that allows me to disguise the soundtrack so that it is unrecognisable to robots and but sounds exactly the same to the mums and dads of the U9s?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
¹Transparent lie warning : of course I'd love it :-)

Bon Mots

picture by divedi

The citations in the Oxford Book of Quotations must be a google-game now..... "That's a good! I wonder when they said it first. . . . so, let's see...ooh look, somebody blogged it in 2008"

So here's two for posterity....

Kelvin Mackenzie "I like rich people, I wish there were more of them - I'm fed up of being surrounded by the dim and skint" At the Intelligence2 debate on taxing the rich (more)

Lisa Reichelt "We registered his domain name before we registered his birth" At Interesting2008, on having a child in the digital age

I was there.

(Aside - could you make money by cybersquatting names? Could a shortage of domain names reinforce the trend for silly-made-up-ones? Like botogol?)

Interesting2008

photo by rooreynolds

Well it was .... well, what do you know: it actually was interesting.

It was also a little bit thirtysomething, Mrs Botogol and I must have been - what? - 10 years above the average age. Well, judge for yourself, there we are in the picture... if you can spot us.. Either way, I was glad I had had my one-and-a-half on Thursday.

Twenty-Nine speakers, with between 4 and 20 minutes each on a range of topics from Lego (a highlight) to Winston Churchill; from Acoustic Cosmology (cough) to scotch eggs and all led by the lugubrious yet excitable Russell Davies

I guess eclectic is the appropriate word.

My favourite: a cleverly constructed ten minutes from Matt Webb where a stream of apparently random ideas dovetailed together to prove that before the Europeans arrived there was a different sort of physics in Patagonia. Yes, you at the back, you can smile.... but....

A lowlight: don't you just hate Mexican Waves?

An interesting fact: did you know that horses have a great big blind-spot right in front of their faces? Given that this is an animal capable of forty-miles an hour that seems to pretty much spell curtains for intelligent design.

I spent the breaks planning my smash-hit appearance at Interesting2009. But what to talk about? I am torn between My-experience-on-the-fourth-plinth, and J P Alibert: Hero of Botogol

14 Wild Ideas

by mskogly

So here's a fun article: 14 Wild Ideas, 5 of which are true from the always fascinating Robin Hanson

Sounds like a challenge. Call me systematic if you like, but on the train home I couldn't help but rank them myself: high chance, medium, low and fat.

It's a game you can play at home.

In the buckets I placed four, four, three and three ideas respectively. I wonder if anyone can guess my top four. Or bottom three.