SIGGRAPH 2012 Mini Trip Report

[This post will be regularly updated as I think about things to add.   I have put a comment in italics about a test that I saw that I was not supposed to see.  It was by far the best thing I saw at SIGGRAPH].

I always try to get my friends to write trip reports of conferences they attend so that we can all benefit from the experience.   Of course they never do, its too much trouble.

So, to lead by example, here is my micro trip report of SIGGRAPH 2012.

It was a plausible and useful addition to the long line of national SIGGRAPH conferences. It was a worthy addition to the "new SIGGRAPH" I might argue, one that does not demonstrate breakthroughs per se, but does let colleagues talk to each other and does have new ideas and some progress on some fronts if you concentrate on the technical program. The best part of SIGGRAPH was the individual conversations and relationships that occurred, as always. This is also often hit and miss.

The worst part of SIGGRAPH was that, as far as I can tell, there is no economic opportunity there. If you went to SIGGRAPH to get work you were going to be disappointed as there was none there worth speaking of. And none that anyone knew about either. A total zero.

I took the opportunity to try and get to know some people better that I had only seen over the years, particularly Copper Giloth and Jane Veeder. I had an opportunity to talk to the head of something at SIGGRAPH, possibly the national conference, Jeff Jortner.

At the Pioneer's event, I ran into Rodney Stock. Rodney has apparently become fabulously wealthy by creating (with some partners) a device which cuts paper to designs. Something about a partnership with China. I was delighted and thought it was also very funny. He claims that their major customers are in the "Red" states, e.g. he is referring top republican women who cut little paper ornaments for parties, or something.

Technically, the two best parts were the Lytro camera and the MIT work on taking pictures of photons and showing global illumination through a coca cola bottle.

The best animation that I saw was something I can not talk much about.  Through my friend Josh Pines I met someone who had been at ILM and we talked about a number of things, and it happened to come up that I am a giant fan of "tests", which I think are a misunderstood and underrated art form.   He showed me a test for a project that is now cancelled.  He just happened to have it on his laptop.  I can not say what it was.  It did involve motion capture and human figure animation in a non-realistic usage (e.g. animated characters was the goal, not Benjamin Button reality).  It was about 5 minutes long.  It was done at a production company that no longer exists.   

This test was fantastic.  It was a really, really good job.   Of the four main characters, I completely bought the realization of three of them.  The fourth was problematic, but they knew that, and if the project had been continued it would of course have been worked on.   

I saw one thing at Emerging Technologies that was great.   Unfortunately, I am at a loss of how to describe it.  It basically was an exhibit that showed the influence of vision on the sense of touch.   When I find the references and a picture or two, I will do a post about it.

The trade show was about the right size for me. I did not get a chance to do more than about 1/4 of it. I was particularly fascinated by the presence of ESRI which is a major company in the Geospatial world. They were there with their software CityEngine.

I had essentially no contact with anyone from Autodesk.

Other than the Disney party that had no Disney people at it, there were no parties of note that I was invited to. At that party I ran into a fabulous entrepreneur who I will write up in a later post.

I had lunch with Tom Duff, Keith Goldfarb, and Ken Perlin. I talked to Pat Hanrahan, Jim Kajiya, Glenn Entis, Carl Rosendahl, Maija Beeton, Paul Debevec and Ed Catmull. I ran into Peggy Weil and Perry Hoberman. The 80s party was pleasant and among other people, I ran into Liz Ralston, Jane Stefan, Anne Marie and even Brad deGraf from dWi. Also Kerry Colonna who denied ever meeting his famous Roman relatives.  Also Jeff Kleiser, Allen Battino, Joan Collins and Phillip Bergeron of course.

I had a nice conversation with Greg Turk while trying to get him to his train on time.

I was able to track down Mark Levoy who told me that he was no longer working with the Forma Urbis Romae.

Michael Kass was very generous with his time and tried to generate new ideas for me, in terms of what it is I am supposed to do next.

For the first time in many years, I did not see Nick England or Mary Whitton at SIGGRAPH.

They tell me that Jim Blinn did not attend this year.

I tried to attend the awards thing this year, but found it impossible to sit through.  I did not attend the Keynote speech as it did not seem very relevant or interesting.   It may have been, but there was no way I could guess that from how they presented it.   I did not attend the Electronic Theatre, that event has been dead for over 15 years.

As always, the Job Fair was completely useless for me. I did have a very pleasant encounter with someone who tried to couch me on style and approach.

I ran into Bob Lambert briefly at SIGGRAPH. He looked a little thin to me, and he was tragically dead a few weeks later.

Special thanks to Michael Deering and David Coons who helped sponsor me at SIGGRAPH. Without their help, I could not have attended.

20th Color Imaging Conference Nov 12-16 2012 Doubletree Hotel in LA

The 20th Color Imaging Conference is in LA this year from November 12 - 16 at the Doubletree Hotel in Downtown LA.  In spite of a major dose of Hollywood glamour, it looks very good.

It looks as though they are repeating the Academy Tech Council presentation on color in the history of the motion picture industry.  This is a fabulous presentation (if indeed that is what they are doing) and if you haven't seen it you should.  I plan to write about the original presentation in this blog eventually.

One year, many years ago now, I took a course on color from Dr. Hunt.  It was great, although I am not sure he is teaching it any more.

This is a really great conference, for what it is worth.  It is not inexpensive.

http://www.imaging.org/ist/conferences/cic/CIC20%20Preliminary%20Program.pdf

Fromkin on British Diplomatic History and its Role in Understanding Lawrence of Arabia

From time to time, this blog is going to recommend some book or books on a topic.   The goal is to help my readers be so much better informed on important issues that we face every day: from the Indo European language "problem", to deciphering Linear B, from the name of R.E. Lee's horse:  these are topics which we all need to know well in order to live in our modern world.

The recommended book is basically background for the Israel/Palestinian dispute.  It amazes me how many people I know who have strong opinions on this topic and yet do not know much, if anything, about the history of the region and its people.

So since this topic is considered to be one of the top threats to world peace, it seems to me that my well-informed readers would be better off to know a little more about the history, and one particular period is especially relevant, and that is the period right around WWI when the Ottoman Empire was collapsing and the League of Nations assigned Great Britain to partition that region between the different competing groups in a way that could be perceived as "fair".   This is the period when, among other things, the Balfour Declaration happened, when Allenby took Jerusalem, when Jordan was created, Syria was created, Lebanon was created, etc.   What you think is the "always been there" configuration of countries in that part of the middle east was created, out of whole cloth, by the British with a little "help", thats sarcasm by the way, of the French and a few other countries.

The book is David Fromkin's book "A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East".

If nothing else, it will make Lawrence of Arabia all the more interesting when you see it again. And while we are on the subject of Lawrence of Arabia, check out the link below to a web site that goes over this movie in infinite detail.

Die!  Die!

The book:

http://www.amazon.com/Peace-End-All-20th-Anniversary/dp/0805088091

The analyis of the movie:

http://filmladd.com/?LawrenceOfArabia_05

Paperman Breakdown / Disney Project of Some Sort

Tom Brigham found this on youtube.

This is a Disney project called "Paperman".

This is the sort of project I would love to do if I am ever in a position to do a project.  It has, at first glance, some interesting technology and a noble goal, or at least, so it seems, which is to do 3D animation with some of the aesthetics of 2D animation.

3D animation is in many ways a step backwards from 2D.  I was shocked when 3D appeared to wipe out 2D: how unexpected, unfair, and undesirable!

Damn.  Where did I leave my keys?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKl9mpGMCiA&feature=youtu.be

All copyrights in all ways owned by the Walt Disney Company.  I presume they do not mind us publicizing this work, but who knows, we will find out.

Tom Swift and His Amazing Underground Conspiracy Theory

When researching my posts on "Do Mysterious Booms Indicate a Secret Aerospace Project?" for this blog, I started to delve into the beliefs on the Internet regarding secret underground facilities, to broaden the piece beyond its limitation to secret aerospace projects. The origins of many of the recorded mysterious booms are almost certainly underground, not showing the signs of sonic booms, hence the research into subterranean construction. But I recoiled in horror and quickly turned away.

My impression was that the "underground conspiracy" theory people are really nutty. Of course, I must recognize that some of this perceived nuttiness is in the eyes of the beholder. How do we differentiate "wackiness" from "scary nutty"?  I will now compare and contrast a UFO theory with an underground theory by way of example.

Some of the UFO people believe that "the CIA is reverse engineering the alien anti-gravity drive from the spaceship that they recovered at the end of WWII from the Nazi secret laboratory where they had been working on it since the spaceship had crash-landed in the 1930s." This has a certain ring of fabulous imagination to me, for some reason, even if it is a little, just a little, unbelievable.

But many of the "underground" people believe (so I read on their web sites) that "Giant tunnels underneath the USA, from coast to coast, connecting secret and huge underground bases, built by atomic tunnel creation machines that can create a massive tunnel at a rate of 7 miles per day and leave absolutely no residue (the mass displaced is somehow coated onto the side of the tunnel making it perfectly smooth and robust, instantaneously). No radiation, no waste, just instant tunnels. And why is our govenment secretly building these tunnels? Why to destroy civil liberty of course. And they are all in it, all of them, all of those people building these secret tunnels to destroy liberty are keeping this dark secret and those who dare to talk about these tunnels, and the secret bases, and the vast conspiracy are silenced! Except of course those on the internet who talk about it, I guess they are not silenced. But they will be! Just you wait and see! And somehow this is all linked in with the Chemtrails conspiracy and some others that I did not completely follow, something about making us all impotent, I think.

For some reason, I find this much more disturbing than the theory that the CIA is reverse engineering the anti-gravity drive, but maybe it's just me.

Nevertheless, I want to propose to you a theory for where some of these arguably insane belief systems come from. To the best of my knowledge, this theory has not been presented before and so I am out on a limb here as my evidence is circumstantial at best. But maybe someone with more resources, time and credibility can take this idea and develop it sufficiently in the proper venues. If it is perceived to have merit, that is.

It occurred to me that in order to have many of these beliefs, one must be really disconnected from any sort of understanding of physical realities. Gravity is still gravity, even if you have an anti-gravity drive. Matter is still matter, and hot matter has to cool, even if you have a magical tunnel boring machine. Heat, you know, energy, neither created nor destroyed, you know? Just calling something atomic doesn't mean much in this day and age, and hasn't meant something all that special since the 1960s or so. Maybe even the early 1960s at that. Flying saucers from outer space will still make sonic booms in our atmosphere unless they can change their shape during the boom, perhaps, but they will have to do something. They are not exempt because they have a "mysterious" energy source.

Where could these crazy science magic ideas have come from?

Well I do know one potential source. As a child, I had read a series of fake-science adventure stories, where just calling something Atomic did mean that it had magical powers, and where a small number of "brilliant young scientists" could build devices in no time at all that could do amazing things, work the first time, never kill anyone, save the world from the Brungarians (1) and yet everyone could be home in time for dinner. Mom, I have to test the atomic rocketship! Tom, you just be home for dinner, I have been cooking all day! Oh, ok, Mom.

Yes, Tom Swift, Jr.

I read all 33 of these books and even then, 10 years old, I did not think they were plausible. Nothing in our world works the first time, but every one of their amazing inventions did. Never over budget. Never any problems that a good screwdriver and a wrench couldn't fix. And never any lack of money. No US government or local city government to come in and say what are you doing building rockets in your back yard? No problems at all.

So here is my theory. That somehow there are people out there who read Tom Swift Jr but did not realize that this is not the way the world works. They believe that people can actually build the Repelatron Skyway, the Ultrasonic Cycloplane, the G-Force Inverter, the Diving Seacopter, the Atomic Earth Blaster, and yes even the Giant Robot and the Flying Laboratory.

You and I might not be able to, but Tom Swift, Jr could.

And be home in time for his home-cooked, American dinner.   

So maybe these sad, conspiracy theorists are actually just manifesting reflections of a pulp fiction dream, the American inventor who can do anything, for whom no problem is too hard, for whom money is not a limitation, and where the family supports him. All gone wrong of course, and twisted into an evil conspiracy, but a reflection nevertheless of this dream, now long abandoned and never to return.

_____________________________________________________

1. In the Tom Swift world, the bad guys were almost always the "Brungarian", which seems to be some conflation of "Bulgarian" with "Hungarian", both of which were at the time these novels were written behind the Iron Curtain.

Anne McKenney ( - 2009)

[I just got email from Elizabeth/Beth McKenney and she had some corrections for me.]

I just got the word that Anne McKenney passed away several years ago in 2009. I had been out of touch with the McKenney family and just got back in touch and found out.

Anne was like a second mother to me. I was friends with her five children and spent a huge amount of time in their great three-story house in Richmond, Va. Anne's husband, "Speed" McKenney, was friends with my uncle Harry and the two of them famously built the Virginia power grid out to rural areas in the 1950s (I think).  Beth tells me that no one knows where "Speed"'s nickname came from.

The good news is that I am back in touch with the family again and maybe I will somehow figure out how to get enough money to visit them in Richmond, Va.

In the small world category, Anne was the Aunt, I think, of Glorianna Davenport of MIT.  In other words, according to Elizabeth, Glorianna is Anne's niece.  I always have trouble keeping these relationships straight, I admit.

This is a picture of Anne.  Yes, a bit older, but definitely looking like her and with the same smile that I remember.

This makes three friends that I hear have passed away in the last month. I certainly hope that this trend does not continue.

Thank God that this is not going to happen to us and that we are not going to get any older.

[Addendum: A friend heard how distraught I was that I had not visited Anne when she was still with us (because of poverty of course) and he is determined to visit an elderly friend of his, assuming he is still here, we can only hope.  So maybe some good can come from this.  Learn from my mistakes, you who are reading this.]

A Tree Falls in Los Angeles

The following story is mostly true, just slightly abbreviated for impact, so to speak.

A few years ago a person was killed while sitting in his car waiting for a street light to change. I didn't know him, I just read about it online. At the time, Los Angeles was having a particularly bad case of the Santa Ana winds, and things were being ripped apart all over the city, and one of the worst dangers is that an older tree or branch will be torn off and smash into something and that is what happened here. To avoid this sort of thing is the reason that the city and local communities send out units to trim older trees while everyone complains that their favorite tree is being mangled. The city tries to prune the trees before something breaks off in a storm and hurts someone and then they get sued. Obviously they missed one.

The man was sitting in his car waiting for the light to change near the Sepulveda dam, out in the valley, and BANG a tree dropped on him without warning and killed him.

So I told a friend in Los Angeles this story. "A man was waiting at a street light in his car," I said, "and a tree fell on him and killed him."

"Oh my god!", said my friend. "Thats terrible! What kind of car was it?"

Not Even Quatermass Can Avoid the Youtube Copyright Checker!

From time to time, I put some video excerpt up on Youtube usually as supporting evidence in favor or against some point in some discussion I am having with someone. So for example, whenever someone calls me crazy, which really irritates me, I want to point him to the scene from Jon deBont's masterpiece, Speed (1994), in which Keanu Reeves calls Dennis Hopper crazy and Dennis replies "No, Jack.", he says, "Poor people are crazy. I'm eccentric".

So I use these different scenes to illustrate ideas, or technique, and of course I rarely if ever own the copyright.   I think that I am allowed to do this but it depends on one's interpretation of the FCC Fair Use Guidelines, which are not black and white but are subject to interpretation. I think I am ok in this use for the following reasons:

(a) I am not making money with these excerpts, nor am I trying to make money,

(b) I am not causing the legitimate owner to lose money, nor am I trying to do so,

(c) Only a small part of the original material is being used, e.g. an excerpt not the complete piece,

(d) The purpose of using the material is education or analysis

I actually hope I am helping the real owner get more money, not less, from his film, by exposing people to a teaser from their work.   Thats what I hope.

[I will insert link to good fair use guide when I find one]

But that is not how Youtube sees it, and sometime after I post the excerpt, Youtube detects it and sends me a nasty note of varying severity. I am fascinated by how they detect these pieces among the hundreds of millions of scenes that they are managing, roughly 120,000,000 of them, and about 200,000 new ones a day.

Of course Youtube does not discuss the process they use. But here are a few things that are observed and inferred and submitted here for your consideration:

1. Sometimes its fast, sometimes its slow.

Sometimes I post a clip and before I know it I have an email from Youtube telling me that it is part of someone else's copyrighted material. From that we conclude that Yourtube pays particular attention to newly loaded videos. But sometimes it ignores a video for months and then discovers it. Why is this? It could be because new material is being added to their checking process all the time, and maybe this particular piece is part of something newly added. Or it could be because some pieces are on a "check often" list, and some are on a "check occassionally" list, or it could just be random. Usually however, if it does not discover and complain about a piece within 1-12 hours, then it probably won't complain for at least a few weeks if not longer.

2. Reversing the video does not seem to help.

It is believed among some people that reversing the video (e.g. flipping it horizotally) defeats the checking algorithm. My experience says that this is not true, but admittedly I only tried once, and I reversed the entire piece. Maybe you have to flip various sections of a piece to confuse it, or something.

3. Some believe that the audio is the key.

Some believe that they are really checking the audio, not the video per se. As audio is harder to mess with and still get the meaning across, whereas there are many things one can do to distort the video. I dont know, it seems plausible to me that checking the audio would be part of their bag of techniques.

4. Some pieces they hate much more than others.

Once upon a time, an afterschool special was shown on NBC that had a very funny conspiracy theory about GE (which owned NBC) controlling the news in this country. The piece ("Mediaopoly") was animated, tongue-in-cheek, humorous. It suggested in a non-serious manner that there was a relationship between the news that NBC and the other networks printed/aired and other corporate issues such as nuclear power plants, the B1 bomber, and possibly even the JFK assassination. NBC went through the roof, the piece was never shown again, and they have been suppressing this piece in all media ever since to this day. I have a very bad copy of this piece which was downloaded with great difficulty from the Internet many years ago. I can not get it up on Youtube for longer than about 1/2 second before it is banned in all forms and all countries and a nasty note is in my inbox telling me that if I try that stunt again they will permanently disconnect my Youtube account.

Why you would almost think that there was a conspiracy not to allow this piece to be seen, wouldn't you? Why you could almost believe that they were afraid of something.

5. But mostly they just want to sell advertising.

But there has been a new policy recently on all excerpts except "Mediapoly" which I am delighted with. They send you a note that says that your piece may be copyrighted by someone else, but don't worry, thats ok. Its just that when someone views it, they may also see some ad that is appropriate given that someone else wants to get some benefit from this. I think this is great, I get to show the piece, they get to make some money, everybody is happy.

Not even Dr. Quatermass is safe from Youtube. I had the following excerpt up on my site for months when just yesterday they told me that it was owned by a 3rd party but that I should not worry: the video can stay up and my viewers may see some ads from time to time.   I love this solution.

Here Quatermass and his lovely assistant are reviewing the ancient records involving mysterious and possibly devilish activities at Hobbes Lane.

Dr. Quatermass and his lovely assistant.  We all suspect that they are having an affair.

The excerpt is from "Five Million Years To Earth" (1967) which is a remake of the famous BBC "Quatermass and the Pit" from 1958, starring the esteemed Dr. Quatermass. This is from the remake, the original from BBC, which you can find on Youtube at last, is remarkable and may even be some sort of live television event.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwvnCVzNpOQ

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062168/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051305/

Online Panoramas, Streetviews of Ruined Cities, Archaic Panorama Technology

If travelling is a fools paradise, as Emerson said, then what is virtual travelling?  Here we have two examples of recent virtual travelling to exotic places, and one archaic travel photography technology, the ancient but still expensive roll-film panorama camera.   But first the online paradise(s).

1. Online Panoramas

www.airpano.com has collected a variety of photographic panoramas and given them a consistent user interface. We have some of the usual suspects, the Great Pyramid of Luxor for example, but some unusual ones as well. Here is a picture from the Sawminarayan Akshardham in Delhi.  (Thanks to Speer).  I have trouble controlling the interface with these things, so I find them frustrating.  But the photography is pretty good, but better yet, there are some unusual places here.  This first one is pretty amazing and I have never heard of it before, let alone have a clue how to pronounce it.

Link to this and other panoramas.

http://www.airpano.com/files/Akshardham-India/2-2

2. Street Views of Ruined Cities

On the one hand, I love this panoramic photography that has been enabled and inspired by digital photography. On the other hand, I find it annoying after a while that I can see these places virtually, but am so impoverished that I have no hope of visiting them myself. A virtual "street view" of Pompeii is fabulous as an educational technique and I am delighted with it, but it just reminds me how much wealth matters in this world and how stupid one is not to have it.

To get to the Pompeii street view, go to www.maps.google.com, type in "pompeii, italy", and zoom into the street on one of the gray areas to the north which are ruins. At some point it will enter street view mode, and tell you which ruin or building you are looking at.

3. Archaic Panorama Capture Technology

For those who have not seen or know of the non-digital way of creating panoramas, they are pretty amazing. The following all use so-called "roll film" which was one of the earliest film formats that were not individual "plates" of film, such as 4x5 or 8x10. Roll film comes in 120 and 220 format, or roughly 10 or 20 6x6 cm (e.g. Hasselblad) exposures.

In the following cameras, one may get only 1 or 2 exposures per roll of film and the frame will be very long and horizontal. They use large format photography lenses with very large image circles, and they have tremendous vignetting. One normally shoots such things with huge anti-vignetting filters and one shoots very long exposures, which makes them suitable for landscapes but not for anything that moves.

Fuji 617

Linhof 617

The Deeper Meaning of the La Brea Tar Pits

Its easy to look at the surface of Los Angeles and miss a lot of, indeed, most of, its nuance and subtlety. To understand this city, you must dig beneath the surface, and when you do, you will probably find petroleum byproducts.

Petroleum is all over Los Angeles, it is at the center of a lot of the secret history of the town. One place to see Los Angeles' relationship to oil, at least symbolically, is at the La Brea Tar Pits.

The La Brea Tar Pits was part of the Rancho La Brea land grant and became Hancock Park in Los Angeles before the turn of the century. The name comes from the Spanish: la brea means "the tar" so "The La Brea Tar Pits" means "The The Tar Tar Pits".

Discovery of fossils happened in 1901 with more formal excavations in 1913-1915. Intermittent excavations have happened since then, most recently in the last few years as they excavated for a new parking facility for LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) but other than that they have been mostly inactive for decades. In these excavations they have found the fossilized remains of bison, mammoth, sloth, bears, lions, tigers, saber-tooth tigers, vultures, eagles, deer, falcons, a huge number of dire wolves and one human, a Chumash lady, killed by a blow to the head with a blunt instrument and pushed into the pit many thousands of years ago.

Image by Charles Knight for the American Museum of Natural History in NY.

They built a nice museum to hold the remains of the bison, wolves and Chumash lady, the Page Museum, and its the best place I know to buy your Giant Sloth hand puppets. The Chumash lady is no longer on exhibit because the Chumash quite reasonably felt it wasn't very dignified. She is still there if you know where to look, however.

But there is a deeper meaning to the Tar Pits, a darker meaning: one that is not appropriate for the Page Museum.

Some people believe that the La Brea Tar Pits are a metaphor for life in Los Angeles.

To see this, imagine life 10,000 or so years ago. We are in the arid valley that one day will be Los Angeles. It is not a desert but it is very dry.  Arroyo might be the more appropriate term.  There appear to be some pools of water.

Notice the oil wells discreetly in the background of this picture of the Tar Pits

A little deer comes to the edge of what she thinks is a pond to drink. Her mother is nearby. Delicately stepping to the pond, the deer discovers that her foot is stuck in the tar and she can not get out. This is not a pond, of course, this is the La Brea tar pits. She calls for her mother who tries to help her, but in doing so, also gets caught in the tar. All their struggling just makes it worse: they sink deeper into the wretched tar. Now they look closer and see the bodies of other animals that have gotten trapped by the fake pond and who have died and are half-buried in the muck all around them. A dire wolf hears their struggles and comes loping over, sensing an easy dinner. They struggle but they are no match for the vicious dire wolf, but now, ironically the wolf is also caught in the tar and desperately struggles to get free.  A sabre-tooth tiger seeing their dead and rotting bodies comes to scavenge but gets trapped as well. Later the same thing happens to a vulture and other scavengers.

Driven by greed to exploit the innocent victims of a cruel and sticky trap, the opportunistic predators are themselves trapped, and the predators of the predators as well. They become a horrifying, rotting, collage of death, some dying in the act of trying to devour the others and, covered with the filth of petroleum byproducts, they sink into the bottomless pit, forever lost from sight, destroyed by their greed.

Very little has changed in Los Angeles since then.

Revised 1/15/2013
Revised 10/11/2013