Gamasutra -Technical Event Wrap Up - "SIGGRAPH 2005"

I am peripherially interested in video games. Partially because occasionally I do play them, but mostly because the technology is interesting, and I expect good physical simulators to eventually come out of video game development that are both fast, and accurate for anything I'm likely to care about.

My future plans include good physical simulators that are easy to interact with for a private person like myself, and it seems a far safer bet to count on the forces of game development, than the largesse of research science.

Besides, what I'm really interested in, is performance, and perception, which just so happen to be the raison d' etre of game development.

Convenient, no?

danger + opportunity ≠ crisis

Fascinating. I personally believed this one too, I suppose I should have known better.

There are two basic reactions to the poorly understood. One is to assume equivalence (examples include popular misinterpretation of animal facial characteristics as representing human emotions. (a bad idea with chimpanzees, for whom baring teeth is a threat, not smiling.)).

The other is a mix of xenophobia and exotic idealization. The Foreigner is a character that both has strange knowledge and powers, yet does not qualify for many of the protective social dynamics. Chinamen were exploited for manual labor in america at the same time that novelists and newspapermen were making money hand over fist on sketchy stories of the Mysterious East.

It's easy to see eastern Martial Arts, and Sun Tzu, and their grand history of warrior culture, and imagine that the Chinese have some special lock on fighting, whether with hands, or with armies, or in schlocky manager-ese self help books with names like the Tao of CEOs, with the idioms like Business is War.

Antonio Banderas will sell many movies, now and in the future, to people who would vote for a President proposing to halt all immigration from Mexico.

It's hard for me to consider China with anything but a kind of reserved trepidation, with parallel intellectual historical awe. China is so obviously a country whose modernization threatens not only to change the order of the world, but also to force someone who wants to follow the thread of things in the most interesting places on the internet to learn chinese. I'm so used to an english internet, I don't really know what to think of that.

It's hard to remember that we are simply people, and the differences that divide us are miniscule, both when I'm wondering what it would be like to live in the second most important country in the world, and when I'm watching Hong Kong cinema, and decrying Hollywood as stupid and boring and old.

I suppose I'm not as comfortable with change of all kinds as I would like to be. Being a novelty seeking human isn't saying much, in the end. We are too used to exploiting the natural order of things to be steady on our feet when that order isn't reliable.

freesound :: home page

This is fantastically cool. As a non-musician, my uses of this are limited, but I fully expect a lot of interesting things to come of the project.

Potentially a rich place for procedural generation of sounds, like video games, automatic music, etc.

The New Commonplace - The SENS Challenge

Some know of the unpleasant anti-Aubrey de Grey articles some time ago published in the MIT Technology Review. For those that don't, Aubrey is a biogerontologist who works in anti-aging research, specifically for halting and reversing age-related decline in adult subjects, currently mice. (see Methuselah Mouse Prize) Two articles were written, one a mildly negative biographical sketch of de Gray and his opinions and goals, the other a much more negative abstract dismissal of de Gray and his goals. Needless to say, his more erudite defenders(including yours truly) wrote the Technology Review and chastised them for poor science, poor journalism, and poor form.

Pontin, the writer of the more negative piece, went to some gerontologists for return ammunition for a further piece, but was shocked to find that no reputable gerontologist would be dragged into the fracas. And so, MIT Technology Review begins their attempt to find some decent arguments, by offering a 20,000 dollar bounty on a 750 word piece explaining why de Grays ideas wouldn't work.

((In capsule form, de Gray proposes seven architectural strategies, which he calls SENS(Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) which will provide it's patients with indefinite, or at least indeterminitely extended natural lifespans. ))

In my view, and de Gray's, this editorial desperation is emblematic of two things. First, the surprising intellectual honesty of mainstream science, unwilling to deride radical ideas, so long as they do not violate known scientific law, and second, the unusual resistance from journalists to admit they are not qualified to judge the scope of scientific progress. To further a nasty analogy I am reminded of a New York Times article which lampooned rocketry pioneer Goddard for stating that rockets would work in a vacuum. ((The author of that piece confused the methods rockets work on(inertial reaction mass) with an aerodynamic interaction(like propellors) and claimed rockets would have nothing to push against)).

Three cheers for Aubrey de Gray for sticking to his guns and being quietly scientifically credible. Having big wild ideas doesn't mean you have to be ridiculed by Established Science, because for the most part, scientists are people too. It's just when you run around saying ridiculous unprovable things that scientists are forced to disagree.

I'm glad this sort of thing is happening. I am a supporter of Aubrey's work, and believe it deserves support. Now back to creating an artificial intelligence.