That's a big number.

That would require hella signatures

This is the kind of shit the internet is made for. Boing Boing reports that a buncha people are launching a useless and doomed-to-failure hopefully successful campaign to make the prefix for 1027 “hella.”

For instance: ‘the sun (mass of 2.2 hellatons) would release energy at 0.3 hellawatts.’ It would also come in handy for eventually measuring Internet traffic and US national debt.

My rough calculations suggest that there are 110 hellamolecules (hover for calculation) comprising No Doubt’s “Rock Steady” album, which contained the song Hella Good. For those who complain that “wicked” is not being considered or that this is “imperialist” or “anglo-centric,” I ask you to have a happy Saturday on another blog.

Who's that stud?

Youtube auto captioning

Youtube is rolling out automatic captioning on videos! It’s far from perfect, but props to Google for doing something to make their mountains of data accessible to those unable to hear.

My best guess on this is that Google will begin to allow users to suggest and tweak their captioning engine until it gets them much closer to perfect. If you think of the YouTube video library as the world’s biggest collection of natural speech, this could be Google’s ticket to leapfrogging any competitors in natural-language text-to-speech. You might see them allowing users to record and index phone and in-person conversation, a practice that would fall in their typical space of both creepy and awesome.

The happiest house

Secret millionaire gives away $7 million dollars

Now that’s hella dollars! I love this story because it reminds us that money is a means to ends of shelter, experiences, travel, etc. but has no value in and of itself. The ideas that all of us must strive to earn more, that our worth is our economic worth, and that if we had more we would spend more, can quickly become sicknesses. We can’t forget that on a big enough scale, our net worth rounds down to zero.

From the Los Angeles Times:

“She enjoyed other people, and every friend she had was a friend for who she was. They weren’t friends for what she had.”

Groner was born in a small Illinois farming community, but by the time she was 12 both of her parents had died. She and her twin sister, Gladys, were taken in by George Anderson, a member of one of Lake Forest’s leading families.

The Andersons raised the girls and paid for them to attend Lake Forest College. After Groner graduated in 1931, she took a job at nearby Abbott Laboratories, where she worked as a secretary for 43 years.

In 1935 she bought three $60 shares of specially issued Abbott stock and never sold them. The shares split many times over the years, Marlatt said, and Groner reinvested the dividends. Long before she died, her initial outlay had become a fortune.

If the Jonas Brothers made you feel old, Justin Bieber–the most famous kid you’ve never heard of–certainly will. The fifteen-year-old tweenage heartthrob was discovered singing to his webcam and catapulted to the top, where he now has Usher on speed dial and practices artful product placement.

But even more terrifying than this musical Macaulay Culkin are his fans, including a three-year-old who only wishes that she has a spare set of panties to throw. And “because he cares,” he visited her!

Is it the same pesticides that cause early puberty in little girls, or is a more sinister force at work here? I don’t dare to imagine.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

To me it is more than a blank computer screen staring at my eyes. It’s the blank canvas of choices and decisions, with one brain to guide them. A block is the failure to self actualize: thoughts running through my head that wither when I open my mouth or put fingers to keyboard. Vivid dreams, fierce insights, a deep and rich inner world that cannot coexist with the mundanity of its own expression.

The issue is not just writing–it pervades my life. The shred of divine within that sees deep mystery and understands human relationship has an energy blockage. The boundary between will and expression, thought and action, is stilted and rough, and sometimes it’s easier to keep thought inside than to hurl it into the world.

Questions of talent aside, there is a skill to be learned here as well. The discipline to sit in the fire and practice writing in patience, carefully collecting the gems and discarding the rest. The mastery of dialogue and metaphor, of anticipation and presentation. Writing a movie is nothing like editing a documentary film.

I never wanted to be a writer, I wanted to make movies and found writing as a possible entrée into that world. Upon sitting down to do so I realized how much I have to say, and how woefully unprepared I have been to say it. How incompatible a narrative screenplay is with a single flashing passionate thoughts-that those thoughts may take days or years or more lifetime than we have left to be crafted into a storyline.

There’s always the blog, where half-thoughts are welcome. And thankfully living gives opportunity to practice.

Discipline to sit, discipline to meditate, discipline to allow flow to happen. That’s what she said.

so it seemed...

This would make for a very funny video art installation:

A couple friends and I went to a swanky hotel bar tonight. We usually go to more mellow places (and did afterward,) but the peoplewatching is sometimes more fun in swankville.

Across the table from us was a man, who was quickly joined by a woman with two full drinks in martini glasses. They chatted occasionally but spent more time downing their drinks, looking around the bar, and staring into one another’s eyes. Two rounds of very alcoholic drinks, and they raised their eyebrows at each other and left for the elevator.

Within two minutes another couple sat down–the woman also to our left and the man to our right. He ordered two martinis and they downed them quickly. She stared at him, flitting her fingers back and forth across his shoulder. He ordered another two. They didn’t talk much. She sucked all three olives in her martini down at once, then the drink soon after. They quickly left.

We thought this was hilarious – a revolving door of precoitus boozing, we thought. And how strange that it happened in succession and with the woman sitting on the same side both times. It was like watching a video art installation.

And then–dear reader, this is not a joke–within two minutes a third couple sat down with mixed drinks. They looked into each others’ eyes but mostly gazed around the room, downing their drinks.

(thanks Aartik!)

From the New York Times

Everywhere I go in New York I see closed-down stores. Whether they are foreclosed, in search of a tenant, or undergoing renovation I assume varies by the storefront. But I do know that the broken window theory holds here: papered-up windows or cleared-out stores spread bummer around the city, and I’d bet petty crime is not far behind.

So instead of paper why don’t we blow up artists’ paintings or allow artists to paint on rolls of paper that then gets hung in the windows? The artists then have a forum to display their work in prime locations appreciative passerby – it’s cheap, quick, and easy to set up. A nonprofit could supply paper with this art and compensate artists to the city and landlords for a nominal fee.

Okay–who knows someone who knows someone who could make this happen?

LAX -> JFK

I tried to capture my state of mind in that moment. It’s not supposed to be pleasant.

Influences

• Nina Paley, All Creative Work is Derivative
• Hyper Jean-Luc Goddard (suck it, Kuleshov)

Video contains:

• Engine sounds
• Delta’s In flight Safety Video
• Barack Obama 2008 acceptance speech
• FOX, attempted shoe bomb
• NBC, Tom Brokaw, 9/11/01
• Osama Bin Laden 2004 speech
• Brassed Off, sampled in Tubthumping by Chumbawumba: Truth is, I thought it mattered.
• CNN, first 5 minutes of 9/11 attack coverage
• John F. Kennedy: We choose to go to the moon.
• My family singing Maot Tzur to me over skype
• First Moon Landing
• Ted Hope receives Trailblazer Award at Woodstock
• Battlestar Galactica miniseries
• CNN, Ivan Eland on the Terror Alert System

Music (not where I got the audio from, I had most of the MP3s:)

• Fischerspooner, Emerge
• Vivaldi, Four Seasons – Spring I
• Andy Suzuki, California
• Eartha Kitt, Santa Baby
• Beatles, All You Need Is Love
• Beach Boys, California Girls
• Alicia Keys, Empire State of Mind
• Beatles, A Day In The Life
• Simon and Garfunkel, 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin Groovy)
• Kelly Clarkson, Star Spangled Banner
• John Lennon, Imagine

Whee!

I had a kind of nightmare today as I showered, rushing in as I considered it and then damming against my brain when I turned towards other thoughts. I was handed a giant megaphone that broadcasted into every home and mind for five minutes. I could say anything, and the entire world would have listen. And I was speechless. I had a million thoughts and none of them complete, all ringing somehow false, all with preimaginings of a million counterarguments and scoffs. (In retrospect I would have said ‘all you need is love’, and it would ring hollow and without much hope of impact.)

My grandfather buys and sells real estate. He once asked me about the indie film industry and I told him that most people don’t have money to pay anybody, and nobody knows what’s going to happen to it all in a few years. He said “It’s the blind leading the blind” and I said “but Grandpa, aren’t we all blind?” And he said “your father and I aren’t. We have goals and we move towards them.”

What are goals? Does hope count?

Tomorrow I will shadow a friend in Law School. I read the case studies and saw the reasoning of judges, dissecting the meaning of a dozen precedents in the context of a host of laws and coming up with concrete answers using abstract reasoning about imprecise thoughts. And it’s necessary that this happen for society to move forward. I’m reminded of Descartes, who “proved” that god exists by heaving words around a page. I’m reminded of Henrietta Lacks, whose cell line was taken and replicated a million times over without her consent, and whose descendants feel robbed. How can you lay claim to the descendants of your cells? “Possession” is only what you hold on to.

Standing in the shower thinking about the megaphone, I borrowed someone’s shampoo (it’s a friend’s shower–I’m in Boston.) Then I looked for conditioner. There was a bottle next to the shampoo of the same brand but a different shape — shampoo. Another bottle next to it — shampoo. Eight bottles of shampoo, and no conditioner. I thought it was hilarious.

New York is good, work is going well, I’m happy, things are great. I’ve got five meetings this week – three films I might work on and two related to jobs. No I don’t know what I’m doing next year. I’m finding it hard to reconcile these most productive, interesting, and adventuresome years with this pervasive experience of hamsterwheeling. And I’m finding it exceedingly difficult to reconcile purity of intent and my quest to do good, with drive and ambition to succeed and achieve.

No matter what, though, I’ve never been able to escape the feeling that something fantastic and sublime is right around the corner. I haven’t been wrong about that one yet. So I guess that’s how New York is.

Wish me luck for my day at law school!

25 Awesome Joseph Ducreux Memes

SO 80's - check out the website I helped design!

In interning at This is that, I’ve had the opportunity to do a number of tech projects with Ted Hope, an incredible accomplished filmmaker. I recently designed his Facebook page and built  an iPhone app for his blog. It really was an honor to complete this latest project, a redesign of his six blogs. These blogs provide endless insight and wisdom, not just about the future of film but also about politics, good movies, and life. In fact, they’re how I discovered him and This is that.

His most popular blog, Truly Free Film, along with five (!!) other blogs that he posts to less frequently, resided on blogspot.com. It didn’t give him much control over them or allow him to integrate them into a coherent blogging identity, so we decided to put them all together under a new “Hope For Film” moniker. I Hope their individual traffic will build off itself and cause people to stay at the sites longer.

It was a lot of fun designing six separate color schemes that all somehow integrated, and we were guided by Ted’s existing blogs and favorite album covers. When we finished a draft this morning, he added tons of wacky suggestions, giving us the hot pink and green These Are Those Things and the pseudo-porn-like, ironically uncinematic Let’s Make Better Films, as well as the antics of Krazy Kat and a multiracial nose bowl.

If you want to make the Blogspot jump yourself–and it’s highly recommended–check out this useful guide as a jumping-off point. Officially, we used a meta redirect, but what really got this site pumping was a lot of love and just enough mojo.

Frazzled

I have a number of projects and clients, all in various stages of production.

For each of them I need to track emails, meetings, and to-do lists. I also have documents, URLs, timesheets, and other financial documents associated with them.

I know about basecamp, but is there a free app or solution that integrates with my email (Gmail/Apple Mail), my calendar (Gcal/Apple Calendar), and even potentially my contact list (Apple Contacts).

There’s got to be something for this other than maintaining separate sets of tags. Anybody know?

Tablet?

Tablet.

Buzz buzz buzz. It’s fun to make predictions. The Apple Tablet (which we presume will
be launched today) has been on everyones’ mind and blog, and im going to join in and predict things on top of what we already think we know. Let’s see how I do:

• newspapers, magazines, blogs, and books (duh). Following the New York Times’ recent announcement, more content sites that have been “forced” into providing free content to compete will bet that on a closed device that makes it easy to pay, people will.
• A transaction system. This is the buzz-idea of the year. The iPhone platform will now include a way to use your iTunes account to pay for anything. Expect an app, and an RFID chip in future iPhones that works with tap-to-pay credit card machines.
• A cloud-based, touch-screen version of iWork. This has been suggested before and makes sense. Google Docs and other services encourage you to not care what kind of computer you are using. Apple has an incentive to change that.
• Cloud music and sync. It’s time has come. Access your library of purchased tracks even if they’re not on your iPod. Do a full sync if you’re on wifi. I’d bet money that Google will be implementing this on the Android platform, and Apple also has a lot to lose in competition with “radio” services like Pandora.
• The “Verizon” iPhone will accomplish this through 4G compatibility. The current Verizon network uses CDMA technology, which is not compatible with the rest of the world. Integrating it would serve little purpose when the 4G “LTE” technology will be compatible. Using thus assumption, this iPhone will not be ready until closer to September. You may not even see it announced.
• iPhone 4.0 software will not come out today. When it does (in the next few months) it will allow anyone with current iProducts to buy these magazines, etc. with those products.
• A matte screen or new screen technology, making it look less backlit and more like a book. Im not as sure about this one
• Apple’s stock price will drop today, because people are bonkers.

Ah, tablet.

COMMENT, tweet, im, or facebook AND GIVE US ur predictions on graph shapes, linearity, marginal cost of calories, etc. in healthy vs unhealthy restaurants Well compare your hypotheses with our results in the blog post.

Thanks!

I bought $10 aluminum bottles at amazon.com for my roomies and I, and swore off drinking these terrible things. CALL THREE FRIENDS and buy them bottles too – if you pool together you get free shipping, and think of the plastic use you will have saved. Or, just try some Onion humor!

If you like your news NYTimes style check out their article, or read the facts on water bottles below. Individual facts have gotten a lot of criticism in the comments on the site where I found the infographic, but that shouldn’t change the overall conclusion: it’s really bad and don’t do it.

Man, I’ve thought that before.

Why Twitter is Great Now

There are a few revolutions contained within Twitter, and I will explore each of them before concluding with the reasons I think the service will be replaced with something better, or morph itself.

The first is its radical openness. My usual description is of many people speaking loudly in a big room. Conversations are audible by everybody, even if they are formulated as private thoughts or 2-way conversations. The benefits of this model are tremendous and readily apparent: massive polls can be taken quickly, everyone can shape a conversation, and like-minded people can quickly span multiple degrees of separation to encounter one another. It takes the process begun with Facebook wall posts to a more extreme, less personal level. All well and fine.

The second is is aggregate-ability. The buzzword “live search” is now being used, describing the body of tweets as a rich live data source that can be collated and related together through search. Add to this a shifting tag cloud and you’ve got a real hive mind going.

The third, and I believe least important, is its character limit. Much is made of the effects of 140-character limits on discourse, but I think it is arbitrary and silly. Longer thoughts are broken up into multiple tweets or included in a link; shorter sentences probably would have been short anyways.

Twitter’s Limitations

What I believe is important about the 140-character limit is that it has made our tweets accessible. They are easy to create and easy to scan through and aggregate; but I don’t think that a 140-character limit is necessary to achieve those aims.

While Twitter has given us the ability to speak in the moment to anybody, its ability to collate these discussions is actually piss-poor. Yes, it’s clear that many people are tweeting about healthcare, but what are they saying. A click on the tag might reveal 50 tweets; how do those possibly represent the many thousands of tweets? How many Twitterers are for a healthcare bill and how many are not? How many are watching CNN and how many are actually Senators?

Twitter’s primary limitation, which it will never be able to overcome as long as it is passing only little bits of plain text, is that it leaves all the processing to our own brains. Two friends might tweet that they are in Boston for the weekend, and unless they or somebody else notices this, neither will find out. Thousands will review a movie on Twitter, but it will take a special website to extract this information.

Twitter’s secondary limitation is its inflexibility. 140 characters is enough to link to anything, but this is a simple hack. We need a platform that contains longer articles, photos and multimedia, television broadcasts, flight schedules, etc.

On to the Future

The future will look a lot like what we call the semantic web. The concept has been lambasted many times but I believe in it wholeheartedly. It’s a web where relationships between data are defined and actionable.

The future platform I envision will encompass everything you let it. Typed documents, IM conversations, emails, blog postings and articles, and all other forms of media. The platform will have a rudimentary ability to determine the meaning of typed words, which will grow with the size of the data collection. It will know what you have seen on TV, what you have read, etc., and when you type something similar to something you have read, a box will pop up asking you whether the thought came from that source. Far more sophisticated than something like a Retweet, the platform will collate your life with that of those around you, identifying shared throughlines and influences.

With this platform any information will be shareable, and innovative ways to browse and query this information accessible to anybody. If you are working on a paper and would like help with a question, select which part to make public and throw the question out into the ether. People who have written similar papers or helped you on papers before will be notified. Like a wildly more advanced version of Facebook’s News Feed.

The only thing left will be our day-to-day conversations, and these will certainly be indexable too. What horror will come when the Google haze comes to rest on even our day-to-day interactions, but I think it is inevitable.

The Chief Contender

Did somebody say Google? When considering the requirements for a next generation of Twitter, I begin to see Google Wave as its visionary successor. I think that Google Wave’s current presentation is only a subset of what it will be able to do, and see its ambition as extending far beyond its current state. What Wave is really creating is a socially mediated way to share everything, with no regard for location on the web or medium. It’s all integrated into one platform (like Twitter) that can be searched and aggregated. But it comes with complex social webs and privacy functions built in, and is infinitely more flexible.

Imagine if your cell phone creates Waves, not calls, that can be indexed and edited, synced with information already known about your contacts. In not so much time, text messages and voice conversations can be incorporated into a shifting, interrelated mass of information that is your experience.

Now yes, that’s creepy. But tell me it’s not coming. And tell me it’s not going to blow Twitter out of the water.

“There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”
-pacifist A.J. Muste

“Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal.”
-Martin Luther King Jr.

Follow me for a moment on a journey through the human mind. (or a heady rant…you decide) I have been contemplating and discussing these ideas a lot recently and would be very interested to hear your thoughts.

Think about cause and effect in your conception of action. With each action we conceive of, the effect of that action in many ways defines it and casts judgment on its validity. A few examples: when we are racing to make an appointment, the racing is defined by the appointment. If we are then too early, the racing is considered foolish; if we are on time, it is considered wise. The act of listening is defined by what we end up hearing, or are trying to hear. The act of giving money to a homeless person is defined by their reception and use of that money. In my usual way of thinking, an effect is necessarily the reason for doing an action. I learn Spanish in order to know Spanish.

Now consider that this paradigm is a subjective lens by which you are viewing the world. It comes from the experience of time passing us in a particular direction (forward) and from the fact that we have human needs which must to be managed, so we have been programmed to seek results. We construct narrative around every action and moment, and privilege later moments in time over earlier ones as the final judgment of a story. And why should it be? Where is the one final moment that tells us whether all we have done is futile or not, and why should it have more power than the present one?

So let’s deny ourselves this modality for a moment. There are now entities and there is intention. Results of actions are no longer the reason for them. It’s a total mindfuck if you’re really in it; people and entities that just are, set in a location in the sphere of ideas. The dominant mediator between acts is now ideological similarity and not causality. For example, what we before considered “giving a dollar to a homeless person” now becomes a smile, a human connection, and generosity. Rather than traveling through the 3D world we see with our eyes, we are traveling through a multidimensional world of ideas and experiences. Rather than do an action to achieve a specific result, we can try to remain in one location in this multidimensional world. And when others follow us on this journey, that is the change we seek.

Causality...yah bitchiz!

Some important Buddhist tenets stem from this mindset: present-mindedness and attachment to one’s own action rather than its result. It is a very human way of perceiving the world, and after some consideration it I think it has tremendous validity and wisdom.

This is the vision of A.J. Muste and Martin Luther King Jr.: that separating our life and work into 1) goals and 2) the means to attain those goals is fallacious, and that a goal is not something to attain but to embody. This concept informs the meaning of activism and the search for positive change, and I like to think the philosophy can be applied to a banker as much as to Mother Theresa.

So in respect for Dr. King and all that he stood for, I hope we as a world strive to embody his ideals at every moment and become the change we seek.

The question “so what are you doing these days?” is so difficult because the answer takes about five minutes. It’s everything and nothing, I’m busy but I’m not. It will be different tomorrow and was different yesterday. Here’s what it is right now:

1/3 of my focus is devoted to my current internship and freelance work, 1/3 is devoted to finding a steady job in film, and the other 1/3 is focused on personal screenplays, videos, and pitches. Videos and pitches are always preliminary until they happen, and it is in the nature of this industry that they often do not happen. The failure of these endeavors is always a useful experience. A contact may come out of it, or the germ of another proposal or project, or a useful exercise much like an academic paper. But take that to mean that many of these projects will never see the light of day except in this casual mention.

Here’s a few of the projects I am working on and will be blogging about in the future. Want to work together? We’ll talk!

• I’m pitching a video art installation. An immersive exhibit, with televisions and video cameras placed all around the installation connecting visitors with themselves and others. The effect of time and causality dissolves and visitors are left to explore their own desire to observe others. Facial recognition and other technologies are leveraged to turn the entire exhibit into a platform that can be extended through programming and placed into other spaces around the world. (If that was gibberish, just know it will be really awesome and the most interesting peoplewatching experience you’ve ever had. If I can make it happen this will go up in New York this year.)
• I’m writing a miniseries on a young teenager coming to terms with his homosexuality, family, and the corrupted value systems of his town. It’s going to be about five seasons and take him through different locales, many phases of his life, and loads of interesting characters.
• I’m brainstorming a web startup relating to internet video.
• Oh right, I really. Need. A job.

Combine all that with the hope of continuing to work with Oren Jacoby, Mirra Bank on First Pitch, Susan Campos, Andy Suzuki on a music video, and new projects with a number of different people, and it’s looking like some great movies will be made.

My family is pooling our donation and splitting it across Doctors Without Borders, Yele, Oxfam, and Planting Peace.