Brian Stokes: The Intermittent Super-genius

Day One of Boston Trip 2009, part III

2009-11-10T14:45:00.000-08:00

We took a cab to Colin and Jessica's house.
Mom and Dad arrived later.

Mom watches over Theo.

Here I am with Theo and Dad (who will turn 70 in a couple of days!)

Tricia rubs Theo's head. So soft!

Day One of Boston 2009, part II

2009-11-10T14:14:00.000-08:00

Completely exhausted from our Red-Eye overnight flight, we strolled around the city of Boston.

We went into Fanuel Hall and found some "Chowda".

There was an open-faced building...

and nice old architecture.

Day One of Boston Trip 2009, part I

2009-11-10T14:09:00.000-08:00

Tricia and I went to the New England Aquarium...

..where we saw a lovely green sea turtle...

... who had a funny way of swimming (only with his feet).

Nephew Theo is 1 Year Old

2009-11-10T13:59:00.000-08:00

Happy First Birthday, Theo!

FYI: The term "infovore" was coined by me, circa 1996. Hmmph.

2009-11-06T15:04:00.000-08:00

Don't you hate it when you hit upon an idea and don't do much with it, let it sit around for years and years -- then suddenly, you find articles about someone else being credited for doing something significant with your idea? This happened to me today while reading BoingBoing, and an Urban Dictionary entry, and a blurb about some neuro-scientists who claim to have coined the term (2006) for that craving humans have for novel things.

But as far as I know, I was first. Came up with the word sometime in the mid-90s and used it to describe myself at an Oracle interview in 1996. Had anyone used it before me? Maybe. Please comment below if you have evidence.

Since everyone was purchasing domains back then, I bought infovore.com in 2000 or so, but let it slide. (Now it's owned by somebody in France).

At least I still have mediavore.com. And anyway, as Douglas Rushkoff has since written, we are more consumers of meaning than information.

What I need now is a word to describe this situation: discovering an idea, sitting on it, then later finding that others have since done something with it.

To blog, or not to blog...

2009-09-25T14:46:00.000-07:00

The question running through my head lately is, now that most people seem to be reading my Facebook updates, should I maintain this particular blog (which has been up and running since 2002!!), or start a new, improved (more focused?) one? You can see I don't update it as frequently as I should. It's partly due to lack of motivation, lack of time, and a small amount of blogger envy (or "Wow, those blogs are getting all the attention. Why isn't mine?")

Seems like when I do write, I write mainly about puppetology, music and music technologies, videogames, the evils of corporations and politics, and myself.

Dear reader, which of these do you enjoy most? Should I break this site out into specific blogs about each subject? Or do you like the haphazard mix as it is? How can I improve it?

Save the Poor Health Insurance Companies!

2009-09-22T11:07:00.000-07:00

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

Awwww... There, there monstrous corporate entities -- it'll be all right in the end. Don't worry.

Robot Vs. Barbed Wire Fence: 1, Zip

2009-09-17T11:38:00.000-07:00

Comic Con '09: Highlights

2009-07-27T12:21:00.000-07:00

Tricia, her friend Erica and I got back from Comic Con yesterday. We had a blast!

This year was the first for me to stay at the Marriott Marina Hotel, and boy, that sure made it a lot less tiring. The problem with the San Diego convention center is that it separated by a light-rail train and only a couple of walkable crossings over to most of the nearby hotels and restaurants. These passages are overwhelmed by the hundreds of thousands of sweaty nerds and geeks baking in the hot sun as they head back to hotels to drop their loot or head out to the Gas Lamp district for some food. It is already taxing enough to move through the hordes and stand in mile-long lines within the Con itself, so this extra pain can really add up.

The Marriott, on the other hand, is right next door to the convention center. A quick walk and you're in its comfortable air-conditioned lobby. It seems to be where a lot of the more famous attendees stay. David Fury (producer on Buffy, Angel, Lost, 24, etc.) and his kids, and a writer from Family Guy were in front of me in the Starbucks line Saturday morning. Legendary Marvel writer Stan Lee sat a table down from us in the pub. Adam from Mythbusters was in the elevator with us. Erica's Marriott Rewards card got us a free upgrade to a room on the 19th floor, which was quite nice.

Some highlights of the weekend:

Participating in the standing ovation for Hirao Miyazaki

Seeing our friends at booths and walking around (Jeff, Anita, Michele, Eric & Jodi, Tim, Dave & Jenn, Joji, Edwin...)

Tricia & Erica getting photo ops with Tyrese Gibson

Me getting an autograph from Leonard Nimoy

Chatting over drinks with my brother-in-law, Hayden

Getting some great art prints and a steam punk raygun for our apartment

Unexpected harbor fireworks right next to our table at Roy's

The insanely good chocolate dessert at Roy's

Photos coming soon!

First-Person Shooter Disease

2009-07-20T13:20:00.000-07:00

Hard-core gamers, this could happen to you!

via Jeff Pidgeon

"War Horse": Intricate horse puppets on stage in London

2009-07-14T17:27:00.001-07:00

Handspring Puppet Company from South Africa created amazing horse puppets for a play called War Horse, now playing in London.

(Click the link above to read about it in the New York Times)

Back in 1998 at the Henson Puppetry Festival in New York, I saw this troupe perform a sublimely great piece about apartheid, featuring an incredibly compelling alligator puppet. I'm excited to hear they are still around and getting into larger projects.

Here's a slideshow with more images.

from BoingBoing and animator friend Barry Purves

X-Files: My Face Is Out There

2009-06-26T09:55:00.000-07:00

As you may have read here last year, I wound up being on the set of Chris Carter's movie X-Files: I Want To Believe. While he and another friend of his were both somewhat certain I made it into the final cut of the film, neither I nor my friends were able to find me when we went to the theater to see it. Aaaargh! Unfortunately, the movie itself isn't that great and I couldn't muster enough energy to see it again.

Then the DVD came out a few months ago and I figured I would try the deleted scenes to see if I hiding in there somewhere. Nope. I tried combing the two main emergency room sections. Sure enough, while running scene 12 (where Skully is doing the stem cell operation on the terminally ill boy) in slow motion, I found a few spots with me! Whohoo!

Me staring at Skully and the incoming big-ass needle, second one over from the left (the only nurse with chest hair).

I am in the background on the upper left, pointing at the X-ray panel for no reason.

Closer view of me pointing at the X-ray panel, left side.

I'm dead center, facing away from camera standing at the foot of the stretcher.

TED: Portable "Minority Report" interface!

2009-06-23T10:10:00.000-07:00

For those of you haven't seen Minority Report, the movie showcases some seemingly futuristic gestural interfaces that Tom Cruise uses to control a complex computer system. Yet only a few years after it came out, we're already seeing just how possible this is. In this TED video, Pattie Maes from MIT demonstrates a low-cost ($350) system that lets the user use any available surface (a wall, a free hand (!)) as a multi-touch interface. Granted, it's a bit slower to use than Jeff Han's table or Microsoft's Surface, but hey, it's cheap and you can bring it with you.

Kutiman + Youtube Amateur Music clips = The Future of Media?

2009-06-19T13:30:00.000-07:00

Man, we are almost at Beatles-level in the world of mashup artists. DJ Earworm continues to weave top 40 hits together. Now, Israeli artist Kutiman has taken unrelated bits of amateur music performance clips on Youtube, blending them together magically to make new creations, like this one:

My advice to the RIAA and media conglomerate executives? It's time to learn to love the world without excessive copyright, because this IS the future, like it or not. No amount of litigation, government crack-downs, or lobbying will end these "violations." Not even a doomsday lock-down on electronic communications itself, China-style. Time to evolve new business models, not cryogenically preserve archaic ones.

Microsoft's Project Natal: Motion Capture, Mime, Puppetry For your Xbox 360?

2009-06-02T10:30:00.000-07:00

The computer vision wizards of Microsoft (including the Internet sensation Jonny Lee, the guy who hacked a Wiimote into a virtual whiteboard) have been busy working on a controller-less technology that, apparently, can sense shapes and forms and track their motions.

Imagine the uses for puppetry or mime! In the video above, the boy gets to perform the rampages of a giant Japanese monster. The girl drives a car by miming the hands on a steering wheel. I can see this being used for virtual Muppets, where a simple two-handed rod puppet could drive a virtual puppet decorated to look like whatever you want.

Some questions to ponder. Can Project Natal track depth accurately? What's the latency? How many things can it track? If a tracked object gets occluded and then reappears, is there a delay before it gets picked up again?

Low-cost motion capture / digital puppetry inches closer and closer. I hope Microsoft opens this up to XNA so that indie developers can play with it.

Reactable: Multi-touch Tabletop Synthesizer Now Available

2009-05-12T10:50:00.000-07:00

Oooh boy, me want!

This is the final product version of the Reactable, previously a thesis project by grad students at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain.

What is it? It's a tangible multi-touch projection surface hooked up to an interactive modular synthesizer. In other words, take the Evil Supreme Being's water surveillance screen from Time Bandits:

and combine it with a virtual version of Robert Moog's modular synthesizers:

What I like about this multi-touch screen is that it can "see" special barcode-like glyph patterns on the sides of objects. These glyphs can generate specific controls on the screen, or represent modes (like say "octave" or "turn on delay"). The screen detects their position and rotation. In contrast, something like the iPhone tracks fingers, but once you remove the finger, the tracking and control (as well as the visual representation of the control) are gone unless something tells the software to make that control "stick". This is not as intuitive as a tangible control. (After all, we know what to do with blocks as soon as we're old enough to grasp things.) The blocks on this surface are the signal to the screen to make a control. Removing them makes the control disappear. No extra interface to learn. It's also a nice way to partition the work of many users. Each player can control something (or many things) with his/her own block and participate with the overall result of everyone else's control blocks.

Looks like this incarnation of the Reactable is meant for museum and art installations, rather than personal use. And of course, it's running a specific application, namely a synthesizer. Wonder how much it costs!

As mentioned before on this blog, the last couple of years have been great for multi-touch interfaces. Jeff Hahn's interface, Jonny Lee's Nintendo Wiimote hack for a multi-touch whiteboard, the Reactable, Microsoft's Surface and the iPhone. Keep 'em coming!

Douglas Rushkoff's "Life, Inc" book and short film preview

2009-05-11T09:47:00.000-07:00

Media ecology professor, author, and documentarian Douglas Rushkoff has been writing a book called Life, Inc: How The World Became a Corporation and How To Take It Back. While Joel Bakun's book (and documentary film), The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Power, describes how public corporations are basically psychopathic neighbors that are bound by Law to make choices detrimental to humanity and the environment (in the pursuit of infinite profit growth), Rushkoff's book will discuss how Kings fabricated an economic environment designed to control the merchant class, bringing rise to chartered corporations and a mindset of self-interest, consumerism and profit above all other virtues that people, particularly Americans have adopted as the default nature of being.

Above is a short video preview.

Joe Raposo's song "Wonder Child"

2009-05-04T19:11:00.000-07:00

I remember being in my grandfather's high-rise apartment in Philadelphia sometime in the mid-to-late 70s. I was sitting on the bed in his bedroom. An off-white Zenith TV with a thick, noisy spring-loaded button metal brick remote sat on a stand in front of a large window overlooking the 30th Street Train Station. On the screen, a fuzzy PBS station was airing Sesame Street, and Helen Reddy was singing a song that has been stuck in my mind's infinite shuffle playlist ever since.

Of course, where else do I find it but YouTube, the ever-present fountain of nostalgia?

Lovely song. But then I discovered the Ritchie Havens version, also on Sesame Street and possibly the original version of it:

Tricia and I love this version even more!

The song was written by the late Joe Raposo, the primary musical force behind the early Sesame Street and The Electric Company years. Probably best known for his "Bein' Green" song sun by Kermit The Frog. Musically, he's got a trademark sound built upon flutes, piccolos, glockenspiels, chimes, harpsichords, player pianos, 70s funk bass and guitar, random sound FX and banjo. He believed very strongly that children should hear music from everywhere else, and that it wasn't over their heads.

Obama Giving In?: The U.S. May Spy On You; You Can't Sue

2009-04-09T13:14:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Well I for one am disturbed. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against AT&T and the Bush administrations's illegal surveillance hit a humongous snag -- Obama's Department of Justice filed a brief saying they not only endorse the Bush administration's reasoning that the suit cannot be pursued because of national security, but that retroactively, from now on, NO ONE may sue the government or its contractors for warantless wiretapping unless that information is made public by said government.

But more importantly, it undermines Obama's entire campaign.
This is a complete about face, folks. He vowed to hold our government accountable for illegal activity, to preserve the Constitution which expressly forbids surveillance without warrants. To sneak around having to do this to prevent rocking the boat this early in his term is a horrible sign that perhaps, we were all duped. I really hope this isn't the case -- Obama is a nice friendly figurehead but, despite election promises, unwilling or unable to fix the corruption his predecessors engineered.

He better do something. That we are in a manufactured "War on Terror" (a term the Obama team no longer uses) is NO EXCUSE for tramping the civil rights of its citizens. Unless of course you want a fascist nation. (Some do -- better for business.)

Is Obama's DOJ full of lingering Bush administrative people seizing the opportunity? Is Obama oblivious? How could he support such a thing?

More editorial about this here.

If you're angry with all this, please sign the CREDO petition.

Will Wright: Software Will Write Itself

2009-04-08T14:32:00.000-07:00

Found this quote from Will Wright -- game designer extraordinaire and creator of SPORE, The Sims and Sim City -- about Software:

Most of the software that we�ve used thus far has been designed software�procedurally designed software. We�re just getting to the point where we�re getting a lot of automatically generated software�you know, CASE tools or adaptive programming, where I�m pretty convinced that in a few years a lot of the software is going to be evolved, as opposed to written by humans. So over time, we�re going to be able to understand the way the software works less and less. It�s going to become a soft biological system. But at the same time, it�ll be very robust, very fault-tolerant compared to the very brittle software we have today. Once we lose control of software design, once software can design itself, write itself, improve itself, I think we�re going to have a different relationship to it. You can take a very complex piece of software, like an airline reservation system, and there�s no one person who understands the way the whole thing works.

Maybe soon we'll be able to breed software the way we do apples, roses, or cattle.

via Dr Dobbs

Hovering Hotel In the Sky?

2009-04-07T16:06:00.000-07:00

Now this is how I want my Future! I love this French dirigible flying hotel by designer Jean-Marie Massaud.

I've always thought the world was better off with blimps. (Infamous inferno-causing Hindenberg excluded, of course.)

Today's Musical Inspiration: Nick Drake

2009-04-06T12:19:00.000-07:00

Tricia and I watched Seven Pounds on DVD last night and while we did not like it all that much, one redeeming part was that there's a song in it I recalled hearing before on another movie soundtrack (Garden State), a jazzy guitary piano tune with a vaguely Cat Stevens vocal and lyrics like "Could've been a sign post...could have been a crook." I thought perhaps it was a modern artist returning to an earlier production style, something KCRW might play.

Turns out this is "One of these things first" by British folk singer Nick Drake, recorded in 1970 on the album Bryter Lyter. Sadly, as seems typical of many Romantic poets and painters, Nick suffered from depression and died way before his time (age 26). His work is only now starting to get some attention in movie soundtracks.

TED for Underprivileged Kids, and other Brainstorms

2009-03-27T18:46:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend Tricia and I have both been enjoying the TED videos for a while. It's great that the otherwise expensive and exclusive TED Conference can be viewed by anyone with broadband Internet access, but this week was TED's first foray into bringing the live experience to a university setting, where students and some of the more general public can attend.

Still, something feels amiss. We had a conversation this morning -- what about the kids in bad neighborhoods, in bad schools? Who is bringing great ideas and inspiration to them? What TED-like experience could be brought to them and would it have an impact on their literacy, their motivation, and future success in life?

TEDx USC: The Bavard Hall Reception

2009-03-26T21:19:00.000-07:00

After all that inspiration, motivation, and thought-provoking it was time to partayy! (Or at least, get something more substantial to eat than cookies and coffee.)

TEDx attendees (and staff) hob-knob and eat hors d'oeuvres, drink free wine and beer, and do some triadic networking...

Others look at the dazzling exhibits, like the eight-player tabletop retro arcade game unit, or ...

... Moldover's Synchomasher!

After scarfing down some egg rolls, mini-pizza things and a glass of wine, I explored a bit and mingled. Thanked various people who had made the event possible, shook hands with Junoon, and thanked Moldover himself for getting me in.

Looking forward to next year!

TEDx USC: Elizabeth Gilbert and Having Your Own Personal Genius

2009-03-26T20:38:00.000-07:00

Moving talk shown at TEDx (which I had seen online before) from the author of the best-selling book Eat, Pray, Love. After the unexpected success of her book, the maddening pressure of coming up with a second success made her realize that perhaps the ancient Roman belief of "genius" being a voice in your wall that gives you great ideas wasn't such a bad idea after all. Keeps a creative person from going insane!