Friday, July 4, 2025

Ken Perlin's Lab at NYU

On this last trip, a fast visit to Ken Perlin's Future Research Lab (FRL) at NYU. I think of it as his new lab, but he has been there for 9+ years.

The first thing I noticed was all the extra space and high ceilings.  A lab like this needs to be able to do an instrument grid in the ceiling.  I also noticed a real kitchen and several couches to sleep on for exam week or project crunches.

Ken showed me his Augmented Reality (AR) work with the Meta Quest 3.  For the moment, we will ignore that Meta / Facebook is run by fascists who helped Trump  get elected in 2016 by supporting the Russian disinformation campaign against Hillary Clinton.  I have always felt that this was cause enough to go  to war with Russia, but not everyone agrees.  

The work with Quest 3 was compelling.  I never got a headache although I was using one for at least 1/2 hour or possibly longer.  

The reality view was perfect, the synthetic imagery was stable.  There were some  issues as you might imagine for a research lab but it was perfectly presentable.  






Wednesday, July 2, 2025

Mysterious Lockheed Constellation at JFK


When I arrived at JFK on June 24th and walked out of the terminal, across the way I was greeted by the sight of a Lockheed Constellation in TWA livery before the TWA terminal.  What it was doing there I do not know but when I left two days later, June 26th, it was gone.  Some people think this is one of the most beautiful airplanes ever designed.





Here is a picture of it in its WW2 USAF C-69 form.



Monday, June 30, 2025

Booking.Com and the Death of Customer Service


I had a wonderful trip to NYC at the last minute thanks in large part to my friends at the American Museum of Natural History.  In another post I will talk about all the wonderful parts of the trip but this post is about warning you off of an internet scam called Booking.com.

I make the plane reservation with Google who sent me to Booking.com.  I thought nothing of it.  I made my hotel reservation with Priceline.  This worked perfectly.

But when I got to LAX I discovered that booking had put my trip in July and the return trip to Ontario, not LAX.  I dont know how they did this.  I always said June, that was the whole point.  I never said Ontario, why would I want to go there.  So Jetblue, at the gate, puts me the plane I wanted at a very reasonable price on top of what I had paid Booking, of course.

Then started the nightmare of trying to reach booking to see what could be done.  The short version is that you can not reach customer support.  It is obviously deliberate, they just found another sucker, me, stole the money and that was that.

Jetblue was able to recover some of the money and I could fly home at a reduced rate, no thanks to Booking.com or to Google.

Caveat Emptor, I suppose.







Sunday, June 22, 2025

Yeehaw Another War


There are people in this world who incorrectly believe that America just loves to go to war and will do so on the slightest pretext and without much thought.  Of course that is not true!  And we can trust Trump, the moron king, to only do what is good for America!





Saturday, June 14, 2025

Biographical Sketch Written for ACM SIGGRAPH

Apparently ACM SIGGRAPH keeps a web page of biographies of a sort for those who volunteer.  They provide a list of questions.  Here is what I wrote:



1. What do you do, and how long have you been doing it?


Its very nice of you to ask.  Whatever it is I do now is different from what I did then.  The world was a different place and it is hard to explain.  No one thought that computer animation would be useful for much.  There were some of us who felt compelled to show that it was useful in various diverse ways.  Some of these true believers had to sneak around and publish ideas and hope their management never found out.  Some of us postponed graduate school or took a cut in pay or otherwise did career damaging things that seem irresponsible in retrospect.  


So I did some of those things.  I wrote an animation system (primarily a renderer) for a leading production company.  That software, to everyone’s surprise, turned out to be the prototype for a system that got used by 500 studios worldwide and won me a Science and Technology award from the Motion Picture Academy.  Then I helped friends produce a short animated film that featured behavioral animation as a way of supporting my friend Craig Reynolds who was publishing on that topic that year.  After that, being unemployed, I got into business with my friend Brad deGraf, starting out in his garage, and that was pretty crazy.  We ended up hiring everyone we knew and helped produce a real time character for SIGGRAPH with one of the earliest SGI workstations and then did a bunch of other productions for theme parks and feature films back before CG was used for that.  


The point is that whatever my role may have been in those underfinanced exercises in idealism, they didn't pay well nor did they lead to normal employment.  It was fun but not very practical.  Now, everyone does this stuff and for many years I have been looking for things to do that might be valued in society, like money laundering or destabilizing governments.  While I wait to win the lottery, I try to keep busy by making pictures with computers and teaching a class now and then.


2. What was your first job?


My first real job was with the RAND Corporation. They put me on one of those well-meaning social research projects from the 1970s.  They paid my way back to school and let me work with some amazing people and gave me access to their facilities. 


3. Where did you complete your formal education?


I have degrees from UCLA.


4. How did you first get involved with ACM SIGGRAPH?


Suzy Landa of RAND hosted the Los Angeles chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH in a conference room there. This was perhaps 1976 or 1977.  That is where I met Larry Cuba, John Whitney Jr, Gary Demos, Richard Hollander, Art Durinsky, Craig Reynolds, Doug Kay, George Joblove, Bill Kovacs, Jim Blinn, Pat Cole and others. My management at RAND insisted that I attend at least one academic conference per year and so I suggested the national SIGGRAPH Conference.  


5. What is your favorite memory of a SIGGRAPH conference?


Most of the national conferences took place for me in a haze of sleep deprivation and fear. 


At the conference in 1980 I went to hear a talk by someone named Dr. Ed Catmull on the topic of what he had learned running a CG lab at the New York Institute of Technology.   I went up to introduce myself afterwards and he spent about an hour talking to me about what he wanted to do next which was to make feature length, narrative-driven, animated films with computers. At the time, very few people thought that would be possible.  Ed and friends went on to found PIXAR.


The technical reception was small enough that you could meet people.  Three of the young people there in what might have been 1981 carried a notebook with test pictures.  They had just graduated from college. They were Carl Rosendahl, Richard Chuang, and Glenn Entis, the founders of Pacific Data Images.  


I sat next to Larry Cuba when his film “Calculated Movements” premiered at the Electronic Theatre.


Trey Stokes, Brad deGraf and I performed the synthetic opera in real time at the Electronic Theatre of 1988.


6. Describe a project that you would like to share with the ACM SIGGRAPH community.


Just want to say hi and thank anyone who helped out who I might have forgotten to thank at the time. 


7. If you could have dinner with one living or non-living person, who would it be and why?


I wonder what restaurant and who is picking up the check?  Will someone provide a translator to come to dinner with us in the case that our guest does not speak modern English? A few names come to mind as potential candidates.  Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde, Eric Blair, Evelyn Waugh, Napoleon Bonaparte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Georges Danton, Maimonides, Hugues de Payens, Malcolm X, the Marquis de Lafayette, Karl Marx, Oleg son of Rurik, Crazy Horse of the Lakota, Richard Henry Lee of the Virginia Continental Congress, Charles Darwin, Dr. John von Neumann, Kandinsky, Man Ray and others.  Maybe we should have a dinner party?


8. What is something most people don’t know about you?


I don't think I should talk about that.


9. From which single individual have you learned the most in your life? What did they teach you?


The great American author Louis L’Amour, in an airline magazine, once said that you should never tell your age.  There is too much ageism in America.  


Willis Ware of the RAND Corporation showed me a 16 mm film shot off the screen by someone named Ivan Sutherland.  It was part of his thesis project, I think, about something called Sketchpad. 


10. Is there someone in particular who has influenced your decision to work with ACM SIGGRAPH?


My parole officer


11. What can you point to in your career as your proudest moment?


Pride is a sin



V 2   5/7/2025


Monday, June 9, 2025

Selfies June 2025







Cantamus


In examining software for text to song, I came across Cantamus.app.  I know very little about it beyond their demo and that they are located in Barcelona.  If you get a chance, please listen to their demo, especially from 00:39 forward.



cantamus.app


Saturday, May 31, 2025

The Democrats Failed Again

I would have thought that after Schumer failed to hold up the Trump budget that the Democrats would be on their best behavior.  I was wrong.

Apparently the Republicans in the House passed their fascist budget by 1 vote.  But the Democrats had lost three votes because some old members had refused to retire in time to be replaced but died in office.

OK, this disqualifies them from leadership.  

AOC and Booker should form a new party.




Wednesday, May 28, 2025

Administrative Note 5/30/2025


As you know, I dont actually know who reads my blog.  I am getting bored with all the politics.


Thursday, May 15, 2025

For R&D Using Machine Learning Now is the Time


It turns out that science has its periods of boom and not-boom.  We are in a period of boom for many sciences and industrial processes that are using machine learning.   If you want to be a part of that, you have to act now.

Astronomy is a great example of the boom theory of scientific advancement.  Some Dutch guy invents the telescope and suddenly you have Galileo and others.   Same thing with planetary probes, radio astronomy, and so forth.  When they have new data, they can publish new work.

And now,  AI or as we might call it, machine learning, has opened up a hundred doors, or a thousand doors, all at once.  And everyone is running through those doors and if you dont, well too bad, there is still work to do but it wont be as easy and may not be possible.

Fortune favors the prepared mind, and it also favors those with the resources who are enabled to do the work when the time comes.

This is all obvious, I am just complaining.

Forgive me.