Quote of the Moment

It's as if we have an industrial-age presidency, catering to a pre-industrial ideological base, in a post industrial era.

The Age of Enlightenment Cycle of Terry Gilliam

I saw The Brothers Grimm on Sunday, and was pretty happy with it. It was, as I suspected, the "mainstream Hollywood action film" version of The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen. Although the script wasn't Terry Gilliam's, their did seem to be a lot of coincidence with Munchhausen.

Neal Stephenson has made a huge impact (in sheer weightage) on book shelves with his overly baroque, overly wordy treatise on The Age of Enlightenment. I've read two parts of it now, The Diamond Age ("The End of The Age of Enlightenment" in my eyes, as it chronicles a lot of the "return of Magic and Fairy Tales" as well as sets the precedence for the style of writing to come in the later parts) and Cryptonomicom (honestly, I have no idea what the themes there represented). Quicksilver sits on my shelf in hard cover just in case I ever feel like actually reading it. Maybe the day Stephenson writes a short 100-page "key" to decipher his treatise with I might make the effort to read all of it. The important thing to note is that obviously it is a major theme that offers a lot of infatuation for the author, as it has spawned thousands of pages and millions of words of writing. Baroque music (and culture) is said to have swept in the Age of Enlightenment, and Stephenson has remarked that the irony of his series being long and baroque was intentional.

On the other hand, David Brin has left his fiction writing mostly free of it, but he's spent many interesting website rants and blogsite posts on the subject. Some of which is fascinating reading and all of it is clear text that can be easily followed.

Somewhere along the line I think Terry Gilliam (subconsciously ...

Some web page updates...

Did a few things I had been meaning to do:

• Added a status update to Mythoi.com. I still think the project has potential, but there's no snowball just yet.
• Finally installed the Trackback module.
• Finally re-added the blockquotes.js script to the template. I missed it.
• Did not re-add the xfn.js script, as I'm not so sure about the icons I had created. Maybe I just got tired of them. Maybe someone with better graphics wizardry should give it a shot.
• Updated the "Friends" block. Pentrant has a new address.
• Updated my resume with the Spring Semester dates. Time to start sending out my resume, again. I was chuckling that the coop department is angry that the University career services department is stupid understaffed and now many other co-opees are going to be sending out their own resumes like I've been doing the past couple semesters.

Google Talk

Google has released the first version of Google Talk, an IM/VoIP client. It's neat for its close ties to Gmail (new email notification; same account name/password; automatically add gmail friends to Buddy List). On the other hand, it is not quite as full featured as my current Jabber client (Exodus) or Jabber server (jabber.louisville.edu). This wouldn't be a problem (because Google Talk uses the Jabber protocol) other than that currently the talk.google.com server doesn't yet seem to accept connections from external Jabber servers and there is no way in the current client to "dial out" to other Jabber addresses (it will instead say, "Hey, I'll try sending that person a Gmail invitation by email").

It would be cool just to see more people use a Jabber-based client (as opposed to the crappy spyware-added, closed protocols). Also, the "Jabber bridge" Google's page promises should be up soonish, so at that point all things are groovier.

Mass Transit, where are you?

This post got long... I've been sitting on it for a while, hoping to get it better organized, but I think this says most of what I wanted to say, and soon I won't have the time to organize this. I'm not paid to write essays on transportation.

Transportation is yet another one of those complex systems that I enjoy from time to time thinking about. I had been thinking about it some during my vacation in San Francisco. We stayed about 45 minutes outside of San Francisco in the "east bay" area and most of the days of the trip we drove to the near BART station, commuting into Metropolitan San Francisco via the train. Once in the city it was then a combination of walking, cable cars, ferries, and the MUNI light rail/bus lines. (We didn't make use of MUNI's subway lines, however.)

One of the striking things to me was how much less cohesive San Francisco's transportation systems were in comparison to NYC's MTA, particularly the integrated MetroCard system, which greatly simplified transportation (I had a lot of fun with an "unlimited ride" MetroCard on my trip to NYC).

Then there is my hometown's transportation systems. The city is a transportation town, and wouldn't exist if not for early transport needs (it sits on the only natural obstacle in navigating the Ohio River). However, where commercial transport continues to flourish, public transportation is somewhat overlooked. A good overview, for those who live here, of Louisville transportation news is provided by (fellow Speed Computer Engineering student) Darren S. Embry's Louisville transportation page. However, let me provide my own rough outline: Louisville transportation is heavily dependent on cars and the local Interstates (as is our rival to the ...

Google and Asimov

First of all, let me say that Google is a company that I would probably get a kick out of working for, and I've submitted my resume to them in the past, but no personal response. I still get a kick out of mocking them or occaisionally parodying them or creating useless rumors about.

Most recently I was struck with the brief fascination about how Google at times seemed to resemble the Foundation of Asimov's Foundation series. The company is filled of mostly secretive data collectors, for instance. In the books the Foundation first appeared right before the major collapse of the Galactic Empire. I'm hoping that Google isn't predicting anything of that sort. In the books the Foundation runs the Encyclopedia Galactica to help preserve human knowledge. Google's Cache, Scholar, Press and more all are efforts to preserve and promote human knowledge. Google has also shown some fascination to help the Wikipedia project, which itself jokes that it is something of an ad hoc Encyclopedia Galactica.

The most fun of this stupid resemblence comes from the weirder aspects of the Foundation series, and maybe I might build some fictional parody work around it. For instance, the Foundation had an even more secretive fraternal twin the Second Foundation. I wonder if there is telepath-lead Second Google that nobody yet knows about. (In the books, during the interegnum between Galactic Empires, a telepathic dictator named "The Mule" is the guy who sets off the search for the Second Foundation.)

On second thought, maybe this comparison isn't all that bad and maybe some in Google have already thought about it... The Foundation was meant to be a philanthropic and "good" organization (even if some of their methods were extremely questionable).

World Design as College Study

More incentive to move one state north for grad/post-grad work. IU Bloomington, in addition to being the nearest school that continues to have a respectable Linguistics department, is also the current home of Edward Castronova, one of the most interesting modern Economists, and the Center for the Study of Synthetic Worlds, which sounds precisely like the academic playground I would most prefer to try. The Center is throwing its first conference at the end of September, and I would love to attend (Bloomington is within "easy" driving distance, too), but I just can't afford the $500 attendance fee and I'm just a poor under-grad... [semi-sarcasm]what would I have to offer such a prestigious collection of academics and industry?[/semi-sarcasm]

Book of the Moment: Vacation Reading

As is often usual, I got some good reading in during the vacation transit time. Here are the books I touched this past "long" week.

• A Scanner Darkly - Phillip K. Dick's psychodelic book of psychosis and drugs involving the twisted schizophrenic cop narcing on his own undercover drug-using identity. I felt I had to read it as it is the next PKD work up for the Hollywood Chopping Block. I'm not sure what to expect of Richard Linklater (screenplay/direction), but I am frightened of Keanu Reeves taking the emotion out of the main character's dual roles. Charlie Kaufman wrote a screenplay that was not used for the film, and I'm guessing that I'm going to end up unfavorably comparing the film to Kaufman's screenplay.
• The Man Who Folded Himself - Great, quick read of a man and his travails in time, as he deals with meeting himself (over and over). I'm always a sucker for a good time travel tale.
• The End of Eternity - Yet another time travel book, this one a classic from Master Asimov. I've always loved reading Isaac Asimov's works. The contrast of End of Eternity to The Man Who Folded Himself was striking and fun, one a light "diary" and the other a complexly plotted "crime novel".
• Mortal Engines - I finished only about half of this book, but will probably finish the other half relatively shortly. Whereas Asimov and PKD are both "old friends" now, Lem is much more a new friend. I was delighted by The Cyberiad and its whimsical tales of robot life. Mortal Engines was also translated by Kandel, and I found myself nodding when Kandel spoke (in the introduction to Mortal Engines) of how much he enjoyed the "Baron Munchhausen Lem". The first ...

Vacation Preparation

Going to bed soon... tomorrow will be busy as I take the second half (oral) of the German "final" test and then proceed to throw together some sort of packing arrangement and head to my parents to do what laundry I might need and spend the night. Then Saturday morning we fly out to San Francisco. It should be a fun trip. I'll probably bring Quark (my laptop) to my parents' tomorrow and do some last minute email reading, but most likely this is my last blog entry until I get back (Aug. 16, spoketh the Sunbird).

I should have been packing tonight, but I got distracted by the Leadership Advantage festivities. I ended up lending a hand with the meal preparations (nothing says College like cooking 60-ish JTMs on a big honking grill), which was something like a pre-tailgate season practice. Football starts in September and I'm going to have to be there on the tailgating frontlines. The older guys have mostly matriculated and now its my turn to help carry on the legacy. After dinner I hung around a bit and got to watch the scavenger hunt videos.

Finished the written half of my final German test today at Highland Coffee, then nostalgically walked around the newly renovated Bloom Elementary (I went there for two years) before heading home. The new addition looks pretty nice and they attempted a decent replication of the aged highlands school style with a modern (read: cheap) style. The big thing it was missing was column decorations and roof line decorations. All in all they did an astounding job of meshing the styles unlike a certain University I could mention. Each day passes and the Ekstrom Library Expansion looks uglier and clashes more with the over-bearing blocky Library. It's funny ...

Idea: "Action" Exercise Courses

I was thinking that someone could create fun "action" cardio-workout courses. Instead of the Theme Park "action" rides where you let a cart do the walking. Think about any clich&egrav;d foot chase you've seen in an action movie, and it could be a simple story. "Dr. Yes set up a bomb on the top of this building... you have 10 minutes to reach it and 'disarm' it." "Watch these people on this crowded street for a jewel thief and give chase to that person."

A person might not have the stamina to "beat" a course on the first time, but you could still make even "losing" fun. You could even segment courses into "difficulty" levels.

The impetus for the idea came from the idea for an "advanced" course involving the standard movie sequence of chasing someone across several rail cars of a moving train. Obviously this one would take a person being in reasonably good shape and would require quite a bit of good supervision, but it would probably be "fun".

Add a musical score and "DVDs of your action adventure on sale in the Lobby!" and you have a commercial venture.