tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53166192012-01-29T00:03:04.635-08:00Welcome to A Transparent Life, an ongoing journal of art and futurist thought.Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.comBlogger381100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-45107214428770154052009-01-25T23:45:00.000-08:002009-01-25T23:53:28.667-08:00

If you have found your way here, I'd like to invite you to follow me to my new location:oddbillI finally decided to get my own url and set up a site to serve as an online art portfolio and general clearinghouse for everything I do online. I'll be posting there on these same topics and more, and much more frequently than you've seen here.Please jump on over. I'm keeping several omnidirectional

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-46131709173341168732008-05-18T13:57:00.000-07:002008-05-18T14:05:29.909-07:00

After watching this:I started reading Clay Shirky's book: Here Comes Everybody.In there is the following quote:Wikipedia invites us to do the following disorienting math: a chaotic process, with unpredictable and wildly uneven contributions, made by nonexpert contributors acting out of variable motivations, is creating a global resource of tremendous daily value.Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-31366713524985050782008-05-15T21:47:00.000-07:002008-05-15T22:48:25.605-07:00

Since I started writing again, I'm trying not to do too many miscellaneous posts that amount to nothing more than "Hey! Look at this cool stuff I saw online!".But, well, look at this cool stuff I saw online: MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.I could watch this all day. I want it to just keep going and getting bigger. It's really mesmerizing, and it has these moments that

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-15578342023313386452008-05-13T21:10:00.000-07:002008-05-13T21:50:24.267-07:00

This is partly expanded on an email I wrote to someone, but the ideas have got lodged in my head and I need to type them out.There is a magazine called Dwell. Since that magazine came out I've gawked enviously at the open gorgeousness of the houses photographed in there, but I stopped reading it a while ago out a an odd frustration.The editors promote a philosophy based on affordable

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-32357832157347550752008-05-12T23:32:00.000-07:002008-05-12T23:47:25.652-07:00

It was Mother's Day this past Sunday, and consequently I called my mother. In among the updates on weather, the stray cat that lives on the porch and the shocking lack of yard space in front of townhouses by the river, she mentioned something that turned our conversation in a direction I rarely go with the parents.Apparently there is some large amount of effort going in constructing manageable

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-36478031222097926642008-03-02T20:58:00.000-08:002008-03-02T21:32:00.030-08:00

Did I mention I'm prone to developing kidney stones? I produced my first back in 94, and have seen them return twice since then. I am a kind of sentient quarry that produces calcium oxalate crystals and pain in a measure disproportionately favoring the latter. In between these episodes, I function largely in the disguise of a human being.My mineral nature has reasserted itself today, and I look

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-80362277010161097762008-01-31T20:18:00.000-08:002008-01-31T20:59:44.418-08:00

About a month belatedly, but Happy 2008!We'll be widening the scope here this year. I'll still be posting those half-formed thoughts about the future, and probably more rambling video conversations. But the big change this year is a PROJECT, and the goal is to expose all its detailed workings here. Back in 2003 I had a large credit card debt, a car loan and still some unpaid student loans. I made

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-64811533450878452992007-07-20T18:24:00.000-07:002007-07-20T18:33:12.471-07:00

While were in conversational mode, I realized I never finished posting these YouTube conversations, though Eric and I did finish editing them a while ago.I like the idea of this kind of taped conversation, though I think the production could be a bit more polished, even on no budget. We'll try some more in the not too distant future, but for a dry run of it, I'm content with how this turned

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-46082911136640701402007-07-18T22:10:00.000-07:002008-01-05T23:21:23.282-08:00

I've started having an email conversation with a friend about consciousness, and whether we gain anything from having it. I think it might be fun to post some of it here.This has come about from both of us having read Peter Watts' novel Blindsight, which is available for you to legally download free here, but which I strongly recommend you actually purchase with real money.A good, and

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-73690755559274132312007-07-17T21:59:00.000-07:002007-07-17T23:07:10.392-07:00

All right, for all my gripes about the Tofflers' Revolutionary Wealth being a bit short on revolutionary notions, here's something they tossed off on page 167 that whirled the gears in my head:Vikram S. Kumar has been working with the Joslin Diabetes Center to design what he calls a "community-based, predictive game" for children with type I diabetes. DiaBetNet aims to develop mental models of

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-73169512906204145402007-07-04T15:29:00.000-07:002007-07-04T16:19:03.298-07:00

In Verner Vinge's space opera A Deepness in the Sky, he proposes that one of this future's most valuable professions is that of Programmer-Archaeologist. Essentially, the layers of accreted software in all large systems are so deep, inter-penetrating, idiosyncratic and inter-dependent that it has become impossible to just re-write them for simplicity's sake - they genuinely can't be replaced

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-4242805210770425572007-05-02T19:25:00.000-07:002007-05-02T19:29:05.849-07:00

Sorry this is late, I've been slammed! Here are a couple of entertaining fellows to make up for it:I'll have more soon - there seems to be a froth of interesting futurist news this past couple of weeks.

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-32642248578302563272007-04-23T18:50:00.000-07:002007-04-23T19:09:31.771-07:00

This one is really neat:This piece of robotic awesomeness come courtesy of Cornell University.The starfish like robot starts out with no internal model of itself. It goes through a series of self-directed motions which it uses to figure out what kinds of pieces it has, where its joints are, how many limbs it has, how it can possibly move, etc. Then it uses the knowledge it has gained to figure

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-6051963345548310472007-04-19T00:42:00.000-07:002007-04-19T01:09:54.715-07:00

I came across a great article today on Ars Technica about a do-it-yourself personal fabrication machine.What's a fabrication machine? It's this:Basically, Evan Malone, a mechanical engineering grad student at Cornell University, has designed a rapid prototyping 3D printer that you can build for yourself for under $3,000.00.The article linked above points out that this is an equivalent cost range

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-64916556959148987662007-04-17T18:10:00.000-07:002007-04-17T18:16:48.269-07:00

Here's an experiment - I started writing this because I needed another outlet to toy with interesting ideas - the way I usually do this is in elaborate conversations with friends. My friend Eric and I have talked for a while about recording some of these conversations and seeing what we could do with them. Soooo - here's the first installment of A Transparent Life on Youtube:It's at least 1980's

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-48749873936418224762007-04-16T19:15:00.000-07:002007-04-16T19:18:09.142-07:00

Pretty good overhand:So far, most of the Japanese robots I've seen have really nailed showmanship in their movements. I love the way this one winds up before the pitch!

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-63088862600100922772007-04-13T07:54:00.000-07:002007-04-13T07:53:38.903-07:00

With all the spectacle of wealth excreting semi-conscious software based juristic entities (still working on that name) that has gone on this week here, now seems like a good time to consult our old friend Benjamin Franklin for a word of caution:"Whenever we attempt to mend the scheme of providence, we had need be very circumspect lest we do more harm than good."- Benjamin Franklin, found in

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-4786051869217895102007-04-12T19:18:00.000-07:002007-04-12T19:19:54.027-07:00

But we don't need to go as far as all that yet!Stopping short of imagining these Juristic Entities taking on autonomous lives, there are interesting things to think about how they could be better used in the lives of more people today. Right now, the very wealthy already take advantage of versions of these kinds of constructions. Trusts, Investment portfolios, Corporations and LLCs are today

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-5970476878006276232007-04-11T00:09:00.000-07:002007-04-11T00:43:34.063-07:00

I find the concept of Juristic Personhood to be really interesting.That's the practice of assigning some or all of the legal standing of a human being to a non-human system, like a corporation, in order to, as I understand it, simplify questions of ownership around the materials used by that corporation in its business, as well as to protect the actual humans who form that corporation from

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-76890720206836236882007-04-10T13:46:00.000-07:002007-04-10T01:46:22.614-07:00

Yesterday's Rubik's Cube solving robot is a good starting point to raise the question of whether or not it is possible to model intelligence to such a fine degree that the model could be considered intelligent itself.This picture of a mental model linked to from Steve Jurvetson's Flickr photostream, he owns the picture; made available under a creative commons license, some rights reserved.There

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-48279017367486721972007-04-09T00:10:00.000-07:002007-04-10T01:47:37.201-07:00

Although there is a significant amount of showmanship in the pre-programmed human interaction this robot displays, the actual Rubik's Cube solving is legitimate. In this video the cube isn't too badly mixed up by the little girl to begin with, but the robot can usually solve the cube no matter how mixed up it is in about 35 seconds, or about 20 moves total:Rubik's Cube solving machines actually

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-24136586751061360972007-04-08T19:29:00.000-07:002007-04-08T20:33:41.194-07:00

So I left my apartment today to go get some coffee from our neighborhood Famima!! (a popular convenience store chain in Japan, apparently, and locally featuring the ruggedly handsome snack food Men's Pocky) and, on my way back, found the street temporarily filled by what I mistakenly at first thought must be some kind of Easter Parade (today being the day, after all) but which I soon realized was

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-60062716207354004432007-04-02T21:57:00.000-07:002007-04-02T22:09:22.995-07:00

In keeping with the run of dramatically different locomotive techniques being experimented with in robotics, here is an extended video segment from a Japanese television show featuring a robotic water eel (it's in japanese, but if you watch it all the way through, it's really visually informative on how the mechanism actually works, and there's a bit comparing the motion of a snake across the

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-20668442915005458282007-03-26T23:52:00.000-07:002007-03-26T23:55:07.743-07:00

This clever design can sort of transform itself into different configurations on the fly - it's pretty neat:These robot posts are really alot of fun. I had no idea the variety of experimentation there was out there!

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-53901309064457241442007-03-19T19:05:00.000-07:002007-03-19T20:00:48.633-07:00

You might have heard about this one already, but it's one of the more astonishing things to have happened in the past couple of years. Duke University Doctor Miguel Nicolelis has successfully wired up monkeys' brains to a robotic arm which they have learned to control using thought alone: - Here is a New Scientist article on the subject.Although not exactly a robot in the autonomous sense, this

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-12533162217809891382007-03-14T22:02:00.000-07:002007-03-14T22:57:15.080-07:00

The Rising Tide that Floats all BoatsAnother of the more actually revolutionary wealth creation ideas in Charles Stross' Accelerando is the early career of the character Manfred Macx:Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with wacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-6557625685145502592007-03-12T22:41:00.000-07:002007-03-12T22:54:41.761-07:00

Robot of the Week: Robot Hottie!I'm in love:And, coming next week... the Robot Monkey Cyborg Special! For real. You'll love it!

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-74473139586677307972007-03-06T00:26:00.000-08:002007-03-06T01:07:21.558-08:00

Some Science Fictional ideas about the future of Wealth creationPreviously I was criticising the book Revolutionary Wealth by Alvin and Heidi Toffler for having a lack of real revolutionary ideas about how new wealth might be created in the years to come. I'm not far enough through their book to make a serious critique, but I've found some fairly interesting ideas around the subject in a couple

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-57140066696522979712007-03-05T23:28:00.000-08:002007-03-05T23:49:42.024-08:00

Robots of the week: Teeter and PokeNot their real names, but you see what I mean:A little more info on these guys can be found here, and also on the Anybots website.If I had ever struck it rich early in the dotcom boom, this is exactly what I would have done with the rest of my life.Well, or maybe this:

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-40135942577327974532007-03-01T22:44:00.000-08:002007-03-01T22:50:05.527-08:00

The Future (and Past) of Wealth CreationI'm still a bit underwhelmed by the Tofflers' Revolutionary Wealth. There may be better insight to come in it, but right now it seems to be lagging conceptually when compared to a couple of science fiction novels I've been reading.One of the new-wealth concepts that the Tofflers' mention is the idea of "prosuming", by which they mean non-monetarily

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-17784182407138804932007-02-26T00:45:00.000-08:002007-02-26T02:02:11.832-08:00

Robot of the Week and John Von Neumann's Self-Replicating MachinesHere is a self-replicating, self-repairing robot:If you want more information on this one, check out the Cornell website for this project.This is kind of an macro-sized, awkward and simple example of John Von Neumann's notion of a self-replicating machine. Basically the idea is to design a machine that has the capability to

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-26705425753503790342007-02-19T18:51:00.000-08:002007-02-19T18:58:22.552-08:00

Dream Office Building - AcceleratedRemember when I asked if anyone was making a certain kind of building?Well, check it out!Consider the Hearst Building, by Norman Foster & Partners, which opened in August, becoming the first building to receive a Gold LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) rating in New York City.The diagrid (a diagonal grid building structure) frame of the tower

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-51978182951632174732007-02-19T18:35:00.000-08:002007-02-19T18:39:58.395-08:00

Robot of the Week: Robo-pocalypse DelayedOne of our readers advises me that my concern over the impending conquest of cute, diminutive mechanical people may be a bit premature:We'll all be safe for a while, as long as we're upstairs.

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-42846493542408620032007-02-14T01:30:00.000-08:002007-02-14T02:13:30.204-08:00

Dream Office BuildingI'd love to work in an office building that had fiber-optic delivered direct sunlight on every floor.That had both windmill and solar power generators incorporated into the structure of the building.That collected rainwater for use in plumbing functions that don't involve making the water available for drinking.That incorporated air-freshening, oxygen producing greenery into

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-65554821900886178052007-02-12T00:38:00.000-08:002007-02-12T01:04:17.993-08:00

Robot(s) of the Week!It's Monday again, and these adorable little terminator precursors are your Robots of the Week:When they rise up, that's how they'll get us. Dancing and being cute and all that. Honda deliberately made their ASIMO robot the size of a small child to put people at ease that it wasn't going to go all T-800 on them.Now we have these insidious little dancing homunculi. Be

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-90773309971066815202007-02-07T21:51:00.000-08:002007-02-07T22:42:24.079-08:00

Book TalkI've started reading Revolutionary Wealth by Alvin and Heidi Toffler, and I'm finding it odd that I want to argue with this book even though I'm only three (very short) chapters into it.So far what the book has essentially laid out is:a) Wealth is neutral, not good or bad. It is created by desire. Desire is not the same as greed. Stigmatizing desire leads inevitably to poverty.

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-18287978751249617382007-02-05T22:18:00.000-08:002007-02-05T22:25:03.752-08:00

It's Monday, here's your Robot of the Week!There are alot of robots, but not all of them have such nice legs. Let's see if I can keep this feature up all year.

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5316619.post-43187936709736751602007-02-04T23:45:00.000-08:002007-02-05T00:37:08.435-08:00

It didn't start with Trading Spaces, but a minor addiction I developed to that show was maybe one of the first strong signs. Next came a fixation on the magazines Dwell and Make, and now there's Craft.I built a computer desk with the exact configuration of sliding keyboard/wacom trays I wanted, from scratch. After moving to my new apartment, rather than throw/give away the moving boxes, I made a

Billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17538834011773567990noreply@blogger.com0