Election Predictions Midterms 2018

draft

What a clusterf*ck this has been.

It has been excruciating to read the mainstream press the last few months as they agonize over numbers that tell us nothing.  I have literally read every possible prediction contradicted by some pundit within days.

1. Dems take the house by 20 or so votes.  Anything more than that is a victory that makes it harder for the republicans to spin.

1.1 But the Dems need a minimum of 40 votes majority to spin it as a Blue Wave and who knows if they will get it.

1.2 The people who claim that young people will vote, will vote Dem, and who say that women will vote Dem as a block will be wrong.  The Women Vote will be mostly dead (except as a slight majority, not a block) after this election.  That is my prediction.  You will still hear about the youth vote and the women vote because there will be stupid lefties who cant get it out of their heads, but it isnt real.  Sorry.

2. Reps pick up at least one seat in the Senate, maybe two.  Beto is defeated by Cruz.

3. The Georgia race is too close to call.

4. Dems win Florida governorship for a net gain of several governorships.

5. Nunes and Hunter are reelected.

6. Trump declares victory and voter fraud in the House.  He uses that as an excuse to ignore subpoenas.

7. Dems in the House unleash hell but it does them no good, not really.

8. Because the Senate is firmly in Trumps hands and does his bidding.

9. Trump and the Senate continue to place stupid right wing thugs in the judiciary.

10. The Supreme Court starts fucking with our freedoms.

11. Violence increases.

12. The Trump revolution is pronounced real and not an aberration.

13. Most Americans still fail to understand that they live in a dictatorship and that most of the constitution has failed.

14. Mueller indicts Stone and the Wikileaks asshole but what he does beyond that is a mystery to me.

15. Voter Repression goes full force.  Right wing courts uphold most of it.  Voting rights, fuck that, this is Trump Country now.

Coming Soon on Global Wahrman

Coming right up on Global Wahrman: an essay on what Baggage means to a Human Resources person and why nearly all, or all, experienced workers have "baggage", an essay on the literary genre of entertainment fiction known as predicting the future, and an essay on America's slide into failure, poverty and submission to the new world leader, Communist China.

Also, in the cyberwar between the US and Russia, we have new news on Russia's paid trolls and the stupid morons in this country who believe and enable them.   My goodness, when you need a stupid American, it isnt very hard to find one, now is it?

Not to mention a post about what Nina Z (Miles G's significant other) told me about middle class values.  Its very interesting, you will want to know this.

And the passing of Tanith Lee and Christopher Lee.

Also, a post on a distant colleague who committed suicide and what a surprise it was. Yeah, right, bullshit. Even I knew she was depressed.  Maybe her death is more about our community's failure to act proactively to help those who are in distress, he wondered, out loud, sarcastically.

Where is Anne Graham of after science when I need her?   I am looking for that pure spirit of inspiration that comes from the untainted.  Anne ?

I appreciate all of you out there who do seem to be reading my blog, even if I do not know who most of you are.  I do wish that you would comment more as I have a feeling your comments would add a lot..

We just ran an unscheduled experiment on my brain by going off all ADHD medication for several weeks, and the results were very surprising.  You see, even though I slept most of the time, and could not do even the simplest tasks that needed doing, in certain very important ways I was very productive, more productive than I normally have been in spite of my reliability and calm demeanor brought on by the ADHD medication. This is a real problem.   What do I want?  Creativity or stability?

The Old Religion at the End of the Year

The years go by faster and faster, it seems, and our fate is known and approaches swiftly and inevitably. Yet as horrifying as our reality may be, it is always fun for me to remember that they have put up an evergreen in the center of Manhattan and decorated it with toys and mistletoe again this year. I doubt very much if most of the people who view the tree are aware of the meaning these rituals had to some of our ancestors, but it is impressive that the tradition survives at all.

This is the story of an ancient state religion that survived disaster not once, but twice, and survives to this day in two different forms. And whose fundamental principles you recreate every time you look at a clock or tell the time. But first lets set the stage for what the French historians call the longue duree. (2), or the long view.  It has various other names, but it means to try and take a longer perspective.

So first I indicate how astronomy does not change much in our lifetimes, but does change over a longer period.... so ...

The earth spins on its axis in a somewhat eliptical orbit around the so-called Sun and while it does so, entropy inevitably increases and nothing you or I can do will change that. The universe is by no means static and will change on the scale of the solar orbits, but we won't notice because by that time the trillions of nanomachines partitioned into the various cellular entities that make up our so-called individual physical existence will have collapsed into a soup of decayed matter long before.

I know that is a little depressing, but read on, it picks up.

We call the circle of circles around the solar mass a "year", having picked a point on that ellipse to demark the beginning and the end for accounting purposes and because it corresponds to an inflection point on the curve. This subdivision of a year into 360 circles as the planet rotated and circled the sun was noticed by an ancient people "between the rivers" (== Meso Potamia) many years ago and they developed a "sacred mathematics" to explain what they observed in the sky and all around them and made this a central part of their religion and world view. In fact, it formed one of the pillars of their religion and the rituals that held up the state that they lived in.

Consider what it means for there to be a state religion in a country. It means that certain beliefs that are critical to the legitimacy of the government are built into the fabric of society in a very functional and specific set of ways that has evolved over time. When our constitution discusses "separation of church and state", they did not mean that it was unconstitutional to have religion in our government, it meant that the religious leaders would not be selected by the state, or paid for by the state, or that these religious leaders would be part of government by the very fact of their role in the religion. The specific counterexample for the American Revolution was that the Archbishop of Canterbury, the top bishop of the Church of England, was chosen by the King and acknowledged the authority of the King over the Bishop of Rome (e.g. the Pope).

In ancient times, this relationship was much stronger between religion and governance, though of course there was a huge amount of variation. To give some examples and to simplify to make the point, the heads of religion of the Roman Republic were all members of the leading familes of Rome. The rituals that were performed and how they were performed were considered of the utmost importance to the survival of Rome and its rule in the world. They did not care for the most part what people believed as long as those rituals were performed in the correct way and that whatever else you did or believed did not prevent you from doing those essential rituals.

In many ancient societies that we know of, the ruling class or monarch would consult with various religious leaders before starting a war, or fighting a battle. The Romans certainly did. It was believed that the gods that you worshipped had an opinion about what was the right thing to do in such a situation and by using certain technical arts that the gods would tell you and help you to choose wisely. Or possibly that you could influence the outcome of the situation with proper ritual and sacrifice. The ancient Romans were big on making deals with "god".... you do this and I will sacrifice 100 cows to you, etc.

Although there was huge variation in the ancient world, I think it is fair to say that aspects of the religion of a people was very tighly bound up into the legimacy and process of how they lived their lives, paid their taxes, went to war, and chose who ruled over them and in what way. The more formal a state, with a bureaucracy, taxes, and so forth, the more likely they were to have a formal state religion.

But if the state religion said that the rulers ruled by divine right and were in fact themselves gods, or Gods, whatever, then if they got deposed that was bad for the religion. To say the least. And that is what happened to the Neo Bablylonians when their boys lost the war and the Persians came in about 539 BC.

So what is a religion to do? Well, it adapts. Now instead of the gods being planets and stars and comets, they are more universal forces and archetypes. And you formalize some of the loose influences of the stellar bodies into their archetypal forms. And if you are lucky enough to have Alexander the Great around, you adapt all this to Hellenistic culture and become the dominant way of predicting the future with the cachet of being based on "old Babylonian religion" and there you have it: modern astrology. Based on the former state religion of NeoBabylon.

On top of that, and not entirely independently, part of that astrology branches off and without the prediction part and morphs into a science of Astronomy. Now the astronomers don't much believe in the influence of the Zodiac, for example, but they do take a lot of terminology and conventions and continue using them: like 360 degrees in a circle, to name one obvious example. And so, too, Astronomy maintains some fundamental beliefs that comes from the Old Religion.

We should only hope that some of our belief systems should be so resilient and last even half as long.

For a good bibliography of Babylonian Astronomy & Astrology, see:

http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gent0113/babylon/babybibl.htm

Rodents of Unusual Size Found in Ancient Italy

When life imitates art, one must ask how the artists knew what they knew and when they knew it. Did they just make a lucky but inspired guess, or were they diligent enough to research the topic and talk to a specialist and then make a considered and informed extrapolation of what is known into the unknown? (1) Movies about the future and the distant past know in advance that they must make predictions where certain knowledge is missing, but even in these cases the filmmakers shrug off an obligation to make solidly grounded predictions and lapse into the cheap or predictable.

I would say that cheap and predictable is Hollywood's metier.

However it occurred, in the case we have here the filmmakers have unexpectedly triumphed when they probably just thought they were creating an inexpensive but exciting moment in a film that has a certain reputation for being unusually entertaining. I am referring here to the "rodents of unusual size" in the esteemed movie The Princess Bride (1987).

To refresh your memory, the kidnapped princess and the Dread Pirate Roberts, revealed to be her former servant and lover, Wesley, try to escape their pursuers in the Fire Swamp, known to be inhabited by horrible ROUS, which are "rodents of unusual size". Of course they are attacked by ROUSes (ROUSi?) in the swamp and a terrible battle ensues before they are able to defeat the ROUSes and escape the swamp. The ROUSes are not a shining moment in the history of visual effects, being somewhat cheesy and, well, ratty in appearance.

Although filmgoers of today demand the highest quality in visual effects, the best that technology can imagine for their quota of zombies, giant robots, and superheroines, it wasn't always so. Back in the day, long ago, movies were often about telling a story and made economic use of the resources available. The effects only had to be good enough to move the story forward. In some cases, one could even accuse the filmmakers of being tongue-in-cheek cheesy. The gopher in Caddyshack (1980) comes to mind.

So we might dismiss the ROUSes as being merely enlarged and fictional examples of an imaginary rodentia, until science made the following amazing discovery. Apparently, in ancient italy, rodents of unusual size, giant hedgehogs, roamed the countryside, eating and otherwise annoying the other flora and fauna of its time. Although this is probably just a lucky guess on the part of the filmmakers, I think you will agree that it is an amazing resemblance.

It may be a hedgehog but it certainly looks like a rodent to me

Since one of the theme's here at Global Wahrman is to analyze the process by which one can successfully predict the future, we plan to use this example in our case studies of successful, if inadvertent, predictions.

Read more about the Ancient Rodent

http://www.sci-news.com/paleontology/science-deinogalerix-masinii-new-giant-fossil-hedgehog-italy-01535.html

________________________________

1. In this case, I think we can rule out the use of Atlantean Crystal Wisdom. There is no evidence to suggest that any of the filmmakers were aware of and using the Esoteric Knowledge.

Arrival in NY, NYU, Brigham, Speer and the Virgin Mary

Revised 11/11/2013

Dearest Marie

I have arrived safely in New York City, a city I have heard so much about but not really visited since earlier in the century.   These notes will record some of my impressions and now that I have given into Satan and bought a digital camera, some pictures as well eventually.

Your idea of buying a cheap notebook worked great, mostly.   Windows 8 can be tamed it turns out, Microsoft is its own worst enemy.  The keyboard can be used but the mousepad is so big on the palm rest that if you indeed use it as a rest you mess with the touchpad and your mouse goes to hell and gone.

I checked into NYU and Perlin arranged for me to have a badge!  I did not have the heart to tell him that I still had my old one from 2000.   They want me to return it when done, fat chance.  The 12th floor looks very very similar to the way I remembered it.    I feel bad bothering people when I need something.   Ken has an interesting vision and we will see where it all goes.  I know from experience that in academia, things are complicated and may not be what they seem.   Danger everywhere!

I did notice that Chris Bregler when he did motion capture did not use the basic ballerina / stripper approach of so many of his peers, but went straight for an Olympic diving champion.  I applaud his taste in exploiting women and plan to complement him on this the next time I see him

I found Tom Brigham, and he is doing better than I expected.  His subterranean basement appears at first to be a junk room, but when you go further in you see there is order in the madness.  He thinks this is camoflage, but I think its just bad marketing.  He has to convince people he is not a flake, and presenting his office/workshop as a pile of junk to the casual observer is the wrong approach.

Speer took me around on Saturday and we got in Chelsea, the MET and some music.  The man is a dynamo of energy, the prototypical uber-new-yorker.   If I had stayed with him on Sunday instead of doing who knows what I would have seen the apparaitions of the virgin mary as photographed by the fabulous Veronica Leueken.  The Church does not believe these are true visions of the Virgin, then what are they?

These are her predictions as recorded in her ecstatic visions.  See link below.  Note that in 1977 under Revolutions she predicts the 3 W as a sign of the end times.   3W could mean 3 wars, or could it mean she predicted the WWW (world wide web) as a sign of the coming collapse of civilization?

http://www.roses.org/prophecy/seqevnt.htm

But now I must get out of Arlene's shelter for the poor here on Broome street and face the cold hard world and go to NYU and play with all the great stuff that Perlin has collected.

PS The MET was wonderful but the Rome exhibit was very underwhelming.

I miss you greatly and look forward to returning to our little Rancho in Siberia.


                                                     Your devoted Dimitri.

Evidence of Vast Improvement in Los Angeles Mass Transit

I have recently been shown evidence that we are on the verge of a vast change in the way we do mass transit in this country. Well maybe that is a little bold and overreaching.   The evidence relates to Los Angeles specifically, not very well known for being progressive in this area.

In order to understand this evidence we first have to discuss certain techniques used to predict the future and also certain aspects of the history of the topic as it relates to the evidence. But don't worry we will get there.

It is a theme of this blog that predicting the future is sometimes easy and sometimes very hard if not completely impossible, but that it is always entertaining. One complicating factor in predicting the future of course is predicting when it will happen. Predicting what will happen is not enough. When is just as important as what.

One technique used is a concept known as the "indicator". The indicator, stolen from the fields of National Security and Economics, is nothing more than a carefully chosen event or trend that is used as a signal that something of greater scope is happening. The price of corn, the temperature of sea water, and whether a nation's troops are mobilized are all examples of indicators.

Recently I have come across solid evidence that we may be on the verge of a genuine revolution in how we do mass transit in urban areas. I suspect that this might be autonomous vehicles, which I discuss briefly below, but it might be something else. The evidence is not too specific although it is clear that something is coming.

Autonomous Taxicab, the JohnnyCab, from the original Total Recall.  If its good enough for Arnold, it should be good enough for us.

I am a firm believer that autonomous vehicles are in our future and that this is a good thing. I think that they have the potential of changing many things about how we deal with transit in an urban and non-urban environment and that many of these changes will be somewhat unexpected. Maybe we will not own cars, maybe we will just call one up from a pool when we need one. People may never have to worry about parking again and a host of other possible changes.

But being certain when this change will happen is less clear. There have been a lot of promising technologies in the past that have never been deployed in real life: people movers, monorails, levitating trains, not to mention personal airplanes and jet packs. And there are many obstacles in the way of deploying autonomous vehicles beyond the merely technical ones. I will mention just two which are daunting: the greed of the insurance industry and the stupidity of local city governments. Just navigating those two barriers will require more skill and probably more money than solving the technological issues.

Consider the following evidence of imminent change.

Slowly, and without a lot of fanfare, Los Angeles is in the process of building two mass transit systems that will reach the west side of Los Angeles. One is light rail, the Exposition Line, and it is well along and already reaches Robertson near Culver City. The other is a subway down Wilshire and it is in the early stages of construction. The estimated completion of all this work is a date well beyond 20 years from now. But there will be incremental deliverables and parts of the system will be in production sooner than other parts.

The Expo Line actually runs to Culver City.  Its like a Miracle from God that they built this thing.  

To understand why this matters you have to realize that mass transit in Los Angeles is different from other places. In other places, mass transit may be controversial, it may be a compromise, it may be expensive, it may be bankrupt, but it proceeds. But in Los Angeles, you literally have world class crime, political malfeasance, and fraud not to mention racism and major lawsuits. Volumes have been written about the stupidity, short-sightedness and corruption (e.g. bribery).  But most of all, this is an area where the politicians and the civic community failed together to find a solution to a problem that was clearly going to get worse.  In other words, they "kicked the can down the road" and hoped that others would solve it.

The problem is that in this area, as in others as well but this is an excellent test case, solving the problems require capital investment, tremendous political will, short-term grief, and a lot of time to execute.   It is an excellent example where naive, one might say, stupid, reliance on "free market solutions" is obviously a failure.   The benefits of mass transit take many forms, but several of them require the system to be planned and executed and in place for a period of time so that things can be built around it and make it all the more useful.   In other words, the transit system may have to be there for 20 years before all the benefits accrue to the investment (through the placement of hotels, universities, theatres, etc).

To ask politicians and citizens in LA to face a problem 20 years in the future and a benefit also 20 years or so in the future is so far beyond their limited intelligence and wisdom as to be beyond funny into farce.   Los Angeles was built for a reason, and that reason resounds in every decision that the civic body makes.  Los Angeles is built on a desire to steal money and fuck people right now, not on stealing money and fucking people in some future day.   This is obvious in the cheap architecture, the lack of zoning to control cheap real estate development, the dumping of wastes into the water system, the failure to control pollution generated by container ships at the Port of LA that causes a substantial percentage of the air pollution in the LA basin (is it 30% ? 40% ? No one knows).

The point is this:  it isn't possible or plausible that LA would just get around to fixing this problem, or at least some of this problem, by building a transit system, eventually.  I don't buy it.  If something like this is happening, it is an indicator, as previously described, of a larger process that is taking place behind the scenes, even if the people executing this idea are not aware of it.  I think that the will of the people and the force of shame and the collapse of the transit system in Los Angeles over the last 15 years or so has finally caused the City of LA and related areas to finally move in an area that should have been addressed 50 years ago and therefore there is no possibility of this being a wise move.  By the time it is done, something will have happened to expose why this was at best a very late decision for LA to make.

Therefore I am very optimistic that we will see a sea-change in urban transit technology in the near future, as these things are measured.  Its about time.

In a later post I will discuss why I am holding back my real feelings here about Los Angeles and their failure to deal with fundamental issues.

I grew up here.  I know where some of the bodies are buried.

Links:

Ancient History of the Expo Line
http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/history/la-as-subject/rail-to-the-westside-the-expo-lines-historical-precursors.html

One Day My Autostereo Will Come

Autostereo is the odd term for being able to see stereo without glasses. It may sound like the sound system for your car, but its not.  Lenticular images are an example of one form of autostereo.

I first became aware of how practical autostereo was at Ken Perlin's lab in 2000. There I learned the following things as we wrangled the demo for his autostereo paper to SIGGRAPH that year, some of them are technical and some are "industrial".    The point of this is that the technical issues are dwarfed by the industrial issues.

Is this the future of autostereo?

Here are two obvious technical issues followed by two, much harder issues involving commerce.

1. Most autostereo does not pay attention to where the observer is, and has just built into it a number of views that are visible from different angles. Alternatively, you can track where the user's head is in 3D and regenerate the two views that are necessary for that observer in that location which is what we were doing. But then you discover that most head and eye tracking algorithms are 2D not 3D. So reliable 3D head tracking became one of the hardest parts of the problem.

2. But if you are doing more than a store window display, then you will need to be able to generate 3D images from whatever the user sees, whether that be text, the OS window system, or some exciting 3D database of a giant robot. That requires good integration into a high performance (or a suitable performance) graphics device. This of course is very possible today, even on a handheld device (up to a point).

3. But then you discover that there are in fact very few manufacturers of the displays that go into devices. In fact, there are, or were, exactly 1 manufacturer left of CRTs and 4 manufacturers of LCDs and all the people who sell displays buy from these 5 manufacturers. And you discover that they can not just whip out 5 or 50 of something special, that is hideously expensive. And building a new factory is not less than billions of dollars, many billions.

4. On top of that you discover that the primary industrial uses of stereo in industry, are actually quite pleased with the quality and price of their LCD goggles. So that undercuts any productization you might consider that does not go to the consumer.

The point is that everytime you see a press release of a new cool technology or display, you should realize that almost exactly zero of these will reach the consumer. That is a little negative, but it has to do with the costs and risks of ramping up to the scale that would make it worthwhile in that very competitive market.

So we take all announcements of new technology displays, say with 6 phosphors instead of 3, or new autostereo with the grim realization that the probability that any of these becoming available at prices that anyone but the DOD can afford is nearly zero.

On that positive note, HP has announced what seems like a very cool way to autostereo on a handheld. It was just published in Nature.

You can read about it here.

https://socialreader.com/me/channels/78427/content/Sp2UM?_p=article_related[3]

A Wikipedia article on general autostereo is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereoscopy

The citation at Nature is at:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v495/n7441/full/nature11972.html

A multi-directional backlight for a wide-angle, glasses-free three-dimensional display

David Fattal,
Zhen Peng,
Tho Tran,
Sonny Vo,
Marco Fiorentino,
Jim Brug
Raymond G. Beausoleil

Multiview three-dimensional (3D) displays can project the correct perspectives of a 3D image in many spatial directions simultaneously1, 2, 3, 4. They provide a 3D stereoscopic experience to many viewers at the same time with full motion parallax and do not require special glasses or eye tracking. None of the leading multiview 3D solutions is particularly well suited to mobile devices (watches, mobile phones or tablets), which require the combination of a thin, portable form factor, a high spatial resolution and a wide full-parallax view zone (for short viewing distance from potentially steep angles). Here we introduce a multi-directional diffractive backlight technology that permits the rendering of high-resolution, full-parallax 3D images in a very wide view zone (up to 180 degrees in principle) at an observation distance of up to a metre. The key to our design is a guided-wave illumination technique based on light-emitting diodes that produces wide-angle multiview images in colour from a thin planar transparent lightguide. Pixels associated with different views or colours are spatially multiplexed and can be independently addressed and modulated at video rate using an external shutter plane. To illustrate the capabilities of this technology, we use simple ink masks or a high-resolution commercial liquid-crystal display unit to demonstrate passive and active (30 frames per second) modulation of a 64-view backlight, producing 3D images with a spatial resolution of 88 pixels per inch and full-motion parallax in an unprecedented view zone of 90 degrees. We also present several transparent hand-held prototypes showing animated sequences of up to six different 200-view images at a resolution of 127 pixels per inch.

Predicting the Next Pope: Atlantean Crystal Wisdom Makes Shocking Predictions

[Addendum: now that the Pope has been selected we can see that the Wisdom was correct about items 1 and 4, the jury is out on 2, 3, and 6 and item 5 is a n/a.  So we are 100% so far with more to be seen in the future]

The Roman Catholic Church is picking a new Pope. Whenever this happens, the Western news media loses its mind a little bit as do many other people who, even though they are not Catholic, seem to know all about this and have plenty to say about who the next Pope should be, and why, and what they should do.

I feel it is time that I, as a student of the esoteric knowledge, who has been trusted with Atlantean Crystal Wisdom, reveal to you what I know about picking a new Pope and indeed to peer into the future, misty though it may be to make some predictions. Even now, I feel the cosmic energy forces collect, the gray wall begins to disperse and I see many things....

 The future becomes clear ... 

1. The next Pope will either be a Hasidic Rabbi or a Roman Catholic !

Yes I can see him.... he is ... a Catholic!  The next Pope will not be a Radical Nun or Richard Dawkins or a Jain, as interesting as those various religions and religious types may be. He won't even be an Orthodox Jew, although that is a funny thought. Nor will he be a secular businessman or politician or even Brad Pitt called to the cloth in these desperate times. He is going to be a man, within a certain age range, who has spent a great deal of his adult life, if not all of it, working within the Western (e.g. the Roman Catholic) church.

2. The next Pope will be a Serious Man Who Believes Things You Don't !

Oh my God, the Crystal Wisdom predicts that the next Pope will not be a white liberal Protestant who only thinks what we want him to think.   Thats horrible!   Yes, I think it is likely that the next Pope, or for that matter any Pope, is going to say things you don't want him to say. I recommend you lighten up about it, because there is nothing you can do. The fact is that not only is he going to be a Catholic, he is going to be a serious and dedicated Catholic and there are lots and lots of things such people study and worry about and you don't. So go ahead and get upset if the next pope reminds you/us that Europe as a concept came into being as a result of armed warfare with Islam. He is/was 100% correct and it was an interesting thing to say. Whoever the next Pope is, and whatever he does say, it is likely to be outside your experience, unless you have spent many years studying the theology of the modern Roman Catholic Church.

And you thought Black Tie was annoying

3. The next Pope Will Fail to Disavow Pauline Christianity !

Now the Crystal Wisdom is being cruel.   It has revealed the bitter truth.  The next Pope is not going to turn his back on the last 1500 or so years of Pauline Christianity.   He is NOT going to change fundamental doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church in spite of the nice letter you wrote him.   That means no women priests, a rather negative opinion on birth control whatever the faithful may actually do, and at best a pass on homosexuality in the church. The Church  does have major theological issues to deal with here but they will do so in their own damn time and at their pleasure if they do so at all.  So the Crystal Wisdom reveals!

4. The next Pope will have some elements of being an Italian / Vatican insider as well as being a member of the international scene in some sense.

In order to be functional, the next Pope must have experience with the Vatican hierarchy and organization.  Whether he be from Zimbabwe or the suburbs of Rome.   And that means that he will have some history about something you do not like about the church.   Whether it is an opinion you do not like or a position on a scandal you do not like.  The odds are that you will find something you do not like.

5. Whatever Papal Infallibility Means It Probably Doesn't Mean What you Think it Does.

So don't worry about it.

6. The next Pope is NOT the Antichrist.  Trust me.

I know you have weird beliefs about the end of the world, and how Satan will occupy the Vatican and make all children have 666 on their foreheads and shit, but I have looked into the future and I see that the time is not yet. Be patient. The end of the world is coming, just not now. The Crystal Wisdom has revealed who the AntiChrist really is but the time has not come to reveal his Identity.  And no, it isn't President Obama or Hilary Clinton, so calm down.

I know its disappointing, but Obama is not the AntiChrist either.

It is pretty clear that the Pope is one of those "jobs" like the President of the United States for which finding the right person is nearly impossible because no normal human could possibly be up to the challenge, and because it would be difficult to build a consensus of what constituted a good solution anyway.   There are several levels here of both success and failure, from pure inspiration and brilliance to sheer disaster and with merely competent being in the middle and the most likely.  The Pope only has so much power, contrary to what you may read on the Internet, and the organization he nominally heads has a lot of momentum of its own.   

This is all that I am shown, the Atlantean Crystal Wisdom now grows dark.

The Future of the Humanoid-Computer Interface as Seen in 1951

This post will showcase two designs for a future human-computer interface from two different movies, one from 1951 and 1960. I think that they both hold up remarkably well for being over 50 years old. The two films are The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The Time Machine (1960). The second film also illustrates the importance of a good voice actor, in this case one of my favorites, Paul Frees.

When you make a film about the future, or about an alien visit to earth, almost by definition you have to show sets, props, costumes and so forth in that future world.   Which means of course you have to design the future, or what the future will look like in the context of the film you are trying to make. Whenever a character has to interface with technology, then you have a man-machine interface or in this case a humanoid-computer interface (HCI).

In other words, you have trapped yourself into a situation in which you are forced to show the entire world how limited your imagination is, and how badly you failed to predict the future, there on the screen for everyone to see.  Your humiliation, inevitable and unstoppable, is assured unless you come up with a solution that convinces the audience that they are seeing the future (or an unknown technology) that lasts the test of time.  And this time around you may not be able to use giant robots to get out of this mess, either.

A notable recent example of a humanoid interface is the multi-touch display in Minority Report (2002), although not enough time has passed to be able to judge how it will hold up.  But for me, the best of the best is still "the button" at work in The Jetsons (1962) from Hanna Barbera.   George got tendinitis of his button pushing finger decades before people in the computer industry started complaining.    Its not perfect, notice the use of a CRT, but the design is so great that it doesn't bother me at all.  

Push the button faster, Jetson!

But most films do a lousy job of this.   They don't have the money, or they just don't care.   So they design something that looks silly, but not silly in a good way.   Its a hard problem and for many reasons including: things (e.g. technologies) move fast, they don't always move the way you think because of issues of style, economics and politics, its hard to estimate how fast things will move from the lab to the real world, and because you are telling a story and the audience has to understand what they see so it has to fit their preconceptions in some way.

It is also used as another excuse to substitute visual effects for design or story in many films.   

But rather than emphasize the negative, here are two examples from films that are quite old now, that I think stand up pretty well, at least to some extent.

The original Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) is actually a fairly interesting film hiding inside a black and white science fiction movie. The plot turns on a visitor from another world who brings a message from the local galactic union about Earth's place in the universe, a message he has trouble delivering because he wants to deliver it to all the nations of the world simultaneously. Why doesn't he just broadcast it to the world from space, one wonders. My guess is that the alien humanoid grew up in a nice family of space humanoids in a more courteous civilization and believes that bad news needs to be delivered in person.

Anyway, getting back to our HCI, it turns out that our visitor must arrange for a dramatic demonstration that catches everyone's attention and forces them to listen.   To do this, he must go to his ship and arrange the events that give the film its title.

This is the only time in the movie that we see inside the ship, beyond a tiny glimpse through the open door and one giant robot whose design does not hold up at all well. I expected the worst. But what we see is not incredibly technological at all, it is simple, minimal, and darkly lit.  It suggests more than it shows.  We see that the circular design motif of the ship itself is repeated throughout: a circular access corridor, a circular control room, a circular workstation of some sort where our hero probably sits when navigating, and a control console with circular panels. All controls are activated by gesture and voice. He enters the ship, uses gestures to activate the systems, which respond with light, and issues commands by voice. The feedback is in devices that light as activated and in an abstract display. It is completely understated and minimal.

I met Michael Rennie when he reprised this role of an "understated alien with incredible power" in a two-part episode of Lost in Space (1966).   My father was able to arrange a visit to the set at 20th Century Fox because he knew the head of PR for the show, an old Marine Corps writing buddy (e.g. Combat Correspondent) from the Solomon Islands campaign.   Visiting a set of a TV show is a lot of fun for a little kid.

In The Time Machine (1960), the H.G. Wells and George Pal masterpiece, our hero is trying to figure out what has happened to earth and civilization in the future. The vague and blonde kids who live there can't tell him and couldn't care less, just like teenagers today. After a while, the classically blonde romantic interest tells our hero about "rings that talk". What do they talk about, he asks. Things that no one here understands, she says.

The rings turn out to be encoded audio, and the power for playback is generated from the energy used to spin the rings centrifugally on a table that illuminates when they are spun. As the ring loses energy and slowly decays to the table, the voice slows down with it. The technology appears to be robust, survivable, and works without any power but the power you use to spin it. I am pretty sure this design comes from the Wells book itself, and is realized well and simply here in the movie. The voice is the voice of Paul Frees, one of my favorite voice actors of all time, and noted previously on this blog.

In both of these cases, at least, the "advanced technology" did not look completely stupid a few years later, which is more than we can say for many films.

The moral of the story may be that in predicting the future, showing less and letting the imagination fill in the gaps is a plausible strategy.

Of them all, I still think that George Jetson's button at work is the best.

Day the Earth Stood Still on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043456/

The Time Machine on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054387/

Michael Rennie on IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0719692/

Paul Frees on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Frees

Minority Report on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181689/

The Jetsons on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055683/

Some Modest Suggestions in Light of the Disney Acquisition of ILM

I have hesitated to comment on the Lucasarts / ILM acquisition and what it may imply for the future of ILM because, oddly, I did not want to annoy people. Besides, how would I know, or what would I know that could possibly contribute? Other than the history of the field, and the history of various studios when it comes to visual effects facilities and how the studios think about such things, that is.

In a future post I will review some of the structural reasons why it is so hard to have a facility like ILM at a studio like Disney, but first, I am going to review some ideas that may be useful. I am pretty sure that my friends at ILM know these already, but there are others who are interested who may not. And it doesn't hurt to discuss these things a little bit, as far as I know.

Suggestion #1. Do not lose money.

Of course it is better to make a lot of money, but if you do not lose money then you are not obviously a perceived drag on the profits of the company. Its more complicated than that, a lot more complicated, but making a dollar is a much better position to be in than losing a dollar. But whatever you do, do not lose a million dollars on some project and expect them to want to pick it up.

Suggestion #2. Be low maintenance.

Manage yourself so well, that keeping you around seems effortless to Disney management. No big horrible scandals, no personnel disputes that become newsworthy, only positive modest press releases that help you get more work but does not interfere with anything that Disney is doing. Fly low, avoid enemy fighters. Avoid controversy.

Suggestion #3. Find a way to deal with Disney producers.

The standard problem in this situation is that a company like Disney Studios which makes movies, will encourage their producers to use an in-house facility, which ILM now is. But the producers are interested in saving money, and will want ILM to give them a deal. This always happens, that is the good side of the situation. The bad side is what happens when people don't love each other anymore, when they do not like the deal, when they do not like being charged for adding a billion shots at the last minute, when they do not like being charged because they went to the lowest bidder they could find then call on ILM to save their stupid ass at the last minute. Then people get unhappy and they take their unhappiness out on ILM.  You see, the producers have access to the top management at Disney and they are not shy about complaining about being charged for the work.

Suggestion #4. Find a way to deal with the fact that you work with the competition.

ILM makes its money by doing excellent visual effects as a work-for-hire production service facility for a fee.  The point is, ILM does work for whatever studio is willing to hire them. But the Walt Disney Company competes with these other studios and they may have a film coming out that competes with a film you worked on for another studio, and the producers and executives at Disney may not like that. I have no idea what you do about this situation, it is not reasonable to expect the producers at Disney to be mature on this topic. I suppose that one thing you can do is to be low profile and not try to get the normal publicity that a successful visual effects film often generates.

I predict that if you are able to do these things, that you will be able to continue the remarkable track record that ILM has generated thus far. There are major institutional reasons why a company like Disney does not normally have a facility like ILM as part of their company and those reasons are all still operative (the subject of a later post). But I am hopeful that you can find a path through this jungle and that the (somewhat obvious) ideas above may be of modest use.

Predicting the Future of 3D Printing: Sex, Killing People and Stealing

Predicting the future can be straightforward if you follow certain rules.   They are more guidelines than rules, actually, as I will expound upon later when we get to discussing one of the pioneers in this field of prognostication, that well-known 16th century writer of entertainment fiction, Nostradamus.  One approach to this art of prediction is to apply certain constants in human nature to otherwise unrelated trends.  Whatever it is, you can be pretty sure that people will find a way to apply it to the themes of sex, killing people and stealing.  Its almost guaranteed.   Airplanes? Internet? Automobiles?  It doesn't matter, people will use them for sex, killing and stealing.

So lets apply this approach to the emerging field of 3D printing.

3D printing is hot, it is not only in our future, it is in our present. People are printing out parts for their vintage cars already.  As always it helps to have a lot of money because then you can have access to printers that can print stuff that is really hard and very precise, but even the cheaper printers are fun.

So, first sex, then killing, and finally stealing.

In the area of sex and 3D printing an obvious approach is to consider the impact on sex toys.  I know very little about sex toys I admit, but I once employed an animator who was very involved in collecting items made in Bakelite (the classic original plastic) and other plastic items on Ebay.  She was particularly fond of Hello Kitty sex toys.  If she had a 3D printer today, she could print her own and possibly reveal a whole  new dimension to her already formidable creativity.  So it is easy to predict new and creative forms of sex toys unleashed with 3D printing, no problem.

Notice adorable Japanese color choices of their Hello Kitty sex toys.  Why are they all in the "on" position?

How about using 3D printers to print semi-automatic weapons?   Again, no problem, it is already being done.  See this excellent link to a hardworking pioneer in the field and his discussion of how the topic is regulated on various 3D printing sites.

As a technical addendum to this example, I should point out that the history of modern weapons since before WWI has been to design a very reliable, accurate and functional weapon that can be produced in quantity.  The standard infantry weapon of most modern armies can be made out of a remarkably few pieces of stamped metal.   The author of the post referenced below, as a student of firearms, was well aware of this.  

"Gunsmithing with a 3D Printer, Part 1" on haveblue.org
http://haveblue.org/?p=1041

AR-15 rifle, minus barrel and stock, with .22 magazine attached

Finally, how do we use 3D printers to steal money?   One way of course is to use the weapon you just printed to rob a grocery store.   Simple, clean, and yet very stupid.   After armed robbery the first approach that comes to mind is the low-quantity counterfeiting of valuable art objects, collector's items of one type or another, including objects from antiquity.  The feasibility of this depends on how the choice of materials evolves with 3D printers and how clever people can be with emulating the characteristics of objects made of other natural materials as well as how clever they can be in emulating that feeling of antiquity at the surface of the object.  Of course none of this would fool an expert, we are just talking about fraudulent items on Ebay in this scenario, I think.  It would take a very precise "printer" indeed to sculpt out of metal a simulation of a rare Roman coin, perhaps a counterfeit Sumerian cone would be more amenable, though less valuable on the current market.     But whatever the future of art fraud is with this technology, I have no doubt that the biped mammals will make me proud and find ways to use this technology to steal.

Only time will tell if I am right or not, but I am optimistic about this.

Autonomous But Not Debugged: the Case of ED 209 and Bomb 20

This post is about a US Air Force report about future technology which seems to foretell a well-known plot point in science fiction, the autonomous device that has been "insufficiently verified".

At various times, groups within our government attempt to give direction to the research and development that they are doing over the next decade.  This is the sixth version of the USAF report, the first being issued in 1945 and co-authored by Dr. Theodore von Karman and General Hap Arnold.

In the words of the current authors:

"Technology Horizons" is neither a prediction of the future nor a forecast of a set of likely future scenarios. It is a rational assessment of what is credibly achievable from a technical perspective to give the Air Force capabilities that are suited for the strategic, technology, and budget environments of 2010-2030. 

A link to the current version of this report, issued in 2010 is at the bottom of this post.   There are a variety of very interesting things in this report but here are three statements near the beginning which I paraphrase here:

1. The USAF must pursue the use of autonomy (e.g. autonomous devices and systems) in an aggressive manner in all areas of its operations and work, far beyond what is currently being done today.   Autonomous in this case means airplanes and equipment operating without humans aboard or directing their actions.

2. But the science and technology of "verification of this autonomy", in other words, how you know it will do the right thing, is far behind the science and technology of the autonomy itself.

3. And this is even more urgent since there are other countries who are far less picky about verification, and who are much more OK about things occasionally not working.  Not working might mean blowing up the wrong building, or dropping on the wrong person, for example.

Thus, research and progress in the area of "verification of autonomous systems" so you don't blow up the wrong thing/person is the highest priority issue addressed by this report.

Now this is of course very funny as any student of science fiction or movies about the future is well aware.

The field of SF is filled with autonomous systems that go crazy or do the wrong thing with disastrous results.  See for example Colossus: The Forbin Project,  2001: A Space Odyssey, the Terminator series, and literally hundreds of other examples could be cited.

Two of my favorites in this genre include the Ed 209 character from Robocop (1987) and Bomb 20 from Dark Star (1974).   

ED 209 (Enforcement Droid Series 209) is a classic stop-motion model done by Phil Tippet. I am pretty sure that this is stop-motion and not go-motion, although I could be wrong.  And I think that the stop-motion artifacts contribute to the character and animation of Ed.   Ed is a great, if somewhat minor, character, who, in his enthusiasm for law enforcement executes a corporate executive inappropriately.

We have on Youtube two versions of this famous boardroom test sequence.  In the first version, we have the complete demonstration, but with much of the physical make up prosthetics at the end modified to suit those of more delicate sensibilities.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9l9wxGFl4k&feature=related

In this version of the famous board room sequence, notice the full use of practical makeup effects to contribute to the story.  This is from the so-called director's cut.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMihmYf4WJI

Then there is the case of Bomb 20 in Dark Star.   Who could ask for a better low budget prop ?  And it has one of the more amusing speeches by a deranged synthetic intelligence in any film, maybe not as great as HAL 2000, who is our Hamlet of deranged synthetic intelligences, but very good nevertheless.

PINBACK (to bomb): But you can't explode in the bomb bay.  Its foolish.   You'll kill us all.
        There is no reason for it.
BOMB 20:  I am programmed to detonate in nine minutes.
        Detonation will occur at the programmed time.
PINBACK: You won't consider another course of action, for instance,
        just waiting around a while so we can disarm you?
BOMB 20: No.

Here is one of the scenes with our unverified Bomb 20.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjGRySVyTDk

Clearly these are good examples of autonomous devices who could have benefited from more testing and  verification.

There are other interesting technologies and surprises in the report.  

http://www.af.mil/information/technologyhorizons.asp