NYC Trip Report November 2013

(draft, photos to follow)

There are about 100 things that occurred during this trip, and it is not clear to me what, if any of them will be of interest to you.

This post gets all the little things out of the way. The more interesting things will be separate posts of their own over the next week.

1. By being absent from NY for several years, my expertise in getting around decays. I estimate a 2X penalty in time and money for the amateur (e.g. tourist) getting around NY.

2. The World Trade Center replacement is adequate. It looks nice at night. It is in no way a replacement for the mass of the original building(s), nor is it interesting enough on its own merit to be a replacement. However, I think this is all irrelevant, in a few years, no one will care.

3. There is an amusing statue commemorating the special forces who went into Afghanistan immediately after 911. The siginficance of the American mounted on a horse will not be lost on those who know the history of the cavalry in this country.

4. The cost of a slice of plain pizza has gone up to $2.50.

5. The State of NY is pulling out the stops to encourage technology startups. More on this in later posts.

6. I found the documentation at the Metropolitan on their exhibits to be irritating. More on this in a later post.

7. The former ease with which I dealt with my ADHD medication in NYC is no longer. Yes, the DEA has struck even here.

8. B&H is much larger, much more computer oriented, and a great resource. I actually had people who knew somewhat about cameras help me with my temporary digital camera choice. It was a great experience.

9. United has really pissed me off with its reticketing policy. I have switched to American Airlines. Alert the media.

10. The weather in NY was amazingly warm.

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.

Late Breaking News: BOIDS tests from 1986 Found

Just as I walk out the door to NYC, I read some old email, and find that Tom McMahon has resurrected the long missing Boids tests from Stanley and Stella.

Boids are what we called the early behavioral animation tests by Craig Reynolds.  It was to showcase that technology that we did the film Stanley and Stella.   This is all shot off the screen of a very low res Symbolics window.

I thought these were lost forever.

When I get back from NY, I will add some more pictures.

The test video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96LIKfKcoxk#t=170

Leaving on A Jet Plane, Don't Know When I WIll Be Back Again

I am leaving for NY tomorrow and will be gone for about 10 days.  No doubt this will affect the blog as it may or may not be easy to make posts remotely.  The problem is not internet access of course, the problem is having the time to spend several hours to write something.

No doubt the trip will stimulate all sorts of topics for the blog, eventually.

As an aside, I find it very difficult to live my little comfortable prison here.  If it were up to me, I would probably just stay here and not move.  Not moving means not spending any money.  Less anxiety.   Putting a blanket over my head and leaving it at that.

And speaking of that, I plan to now go and put a blanket over my head.

See you in a week.

Comments on the VES "State of the Global VFX Industry" White Paper Part 1

(this is a draft and is in progress... send comments to michael.wahrman@gmail.com or leave a comment below).

The Visual Effects Society issued a report on the global visual effects industry right before SIGGRAPH 2013. I have been meaning to review this report for Global Wahrman for some time, but I have not because I did not understand it.

Its not that the report is unclear or badly written, it is in fact very well written in some ways. The problem for me was that I could not figure out what it was trying to accomplish or for whom it was intended. In particular, I could not figure out what its point of view was.

So now I have read it several times, and I think that I have the answer to my questions. It is studiously trying not to have a point of view, to be all things to all people, as it were. But to paraphrase Frederick the Great, he who defends everything defends nothing. And that is what I think we have here, a report that does mention many of the issues and many of the proposed solutions, and asks some of the right questions, but not all of course, but ultimately leaves us where we were before. Which is nowhere.

You are going to have to look up the report for yourself. Right now, Google Chrome is not letting me get the URL here for the report. Search for "VES global vfx industry report" and it should come right up.

As I understand it, this report was initiated because in light of recent events, particularly the demise of Rhythm and Hues in the aftermath of Life of Pi, the VES felt that it had to do something, anything, to respond to the dismal situations of so much unemployment, uncertainty and so forth. So they assembled a group of worthies in the industry (leaving out many who could equally be there) but certainly including a group of people who I would want involved in such a report. Nancy St. John, Mike Fink, John Nelson, Scott Squires, Bill Taylor, Peter Chiang, Ray Feeeney, Warren Franklyn, Sari Gennis and so forth. All of these people are worth listening to, that goes without saying. I felt that it was a little light on the VFX workers (e.g. digital artists) themselves, but whatever.  There was one token technologist that I noticed.

Ok, yes, there are some things I could quibble with. Did I see a mention of ageism?  I dont think I did, but hey maybe I missed it. I felt that the issue of proprietary software needed expansion, the situation is an icky one and one is kind of screwed either way (damned if you write your own software, damned if you don't). I felt that the section of what describes "the business model is broken" could be greatly expanded and frankly it would be a very dark part of the report.  IMHO the so called business model never really ever worked.  Two of the biggest problems that I see in visual effects, the fierce competitiveness between facilities and between individuals that leads to things such as underbidding a project to put a facility out of business and the character assassination that is an everyday occurrence are not mentioned that I noticed.

But I think that the problem here with this report is actually structural with the VES.  In other words, the same problem that the report has the VES has.  Arguably.  The VES does not want to say "end subsidies" because there are lots of international people out there who like subsidies (of course) even though subsidies are the number one cause of the demise of a dozen worthwhile visual effects firms in this country.  Thats pretty darn politic of them, an outsider might say, or one might use the word spineless as well.  The VES does not want to complain about facilities making people move all over the planet then laying people off, because they are also trying to represent the interests of the facilities. Somehow the VES does not see recent events as a complete disaster (the laying off of not less than 1000 people in the west coast in the last year by my estimates). Somehow the demise of the Los Angeles visual effects community is not a cause for concern (which it may not be).  The VES does not want to take a position on the massive oversupply of artists (quote end quote) but until that is dealt with no one but the facility owners or studio executives are likely to have a secure job in this field, except that these two groups don't have secure jobs either.

Subsidies? What subsidies?

Before I get into some specific suggestions, I want to pose to you the following question: is visual effects a reasonable career for a young person (or any person) to get into? Is it likely that they will have a career that lets them do such things as have a family, have a life, build a retirement fund, all those boring things that become so important as you grow older and do not have a trust fund. Is it? Is it a reasonable career? I want to suggest to you that it is not, except for a privileged few and that is the fundamental dilemma here.   To be specific, I am saying that visual effects is not a reasonable career for a person to have and that people are being duplicitous and unethical by encouraging people to go into it.   I have written much more on this topic, you can find the posts on my blog if you care to look. 

So here are some specific suggestions, some of these may be redundant to the report, but it doesn't matter. I am sure I am going to be ignored anyway.

1. Finally put together a matrix of positions / skills in visual effects to try to bring some order out of chaos of who does what and what you need to be qualified for it.  

2. Issue a strong statement about a union, I think that visual effects should have one in order to represent the interests of the workers of the USA in visual effects. An organization that can ask why their elected representatives have sat on their hands and looked dumb while thousands of jobs left S. Cal without worrying about whether it annoys the studios. Of course it annoys the studios.  (By the way, why did our representatives sit on their hands while thousands were unemployed and have to leave the county?  It must have affected their tax base.  It couldn't be slavish obedience to the studios, now could it?)

3. Issue white papers whose purpose is to educate clients on fundamental principles. A fundamental principle might be to explain why changes late in the day might be easy, or it might be very hard and explain why.  I doubt it will do much good but 1 in 100 producers actually wants to do a good job and not just fuck people to make a dollar, and so that 1 person will benefit.

4. Help create a professional development path (paths) for people in the field. This is what they should be learning, doing, whatever if they want to progress in the field and be better professionals.  Instead of just saying every person for themselves, yahoo, go say you're an effects supervisor, no one will know the difference anyway.

5. Help create a way for out of work individuals to have access to the tools they need to stay current. Without the tools, they can not practice and their skills will get both rusty and out of date and then they are completely, as the French say, es fucque.

6. Take a strong position on subsidies.  Subsidies destroyed employment in Los Angeles where a huge number of your workers have/had lives.   Sure LA may be a sucking sewer of smog and corruption, but it is *our* sucking sewer and we should defend it.

7. Finally I think that one of the largest problems visual effects has is that everyone tries to be like everyone else.  As long as they do that they will be treated like the commodity that they are.   Only by creating their own vision as artists will they be unique and be able to command a better price, or so I argue.  We do see a little bit of that in this field, but I think we should see a lot more.

I will elaborate on all of these in future posts.

I want to thank the people who took the time to write the report. No, its not what I would ideally want, but it may be the best the VES can do, given the various interests they have to accommodate, and it certainly was a lot of work and I certainly appreciate it.

Russians Discover Chinese Home Appliances Designed for Crime

We are told to accept Globalization as inevitable and beneficial. Just trust us, says Congress, as they pass free trade act after free trade act, and pass exemptions to polluting transport companies to lower costs for container ships. It may be that most Americans are impoverished in the short run, says Congress, perhaps for the first 50 or 100 years, and are thrown out in the street giving up all hope of having a home or family, but ultimately no doubt Globalization will benefit all Americans and not just the rich, they promise. Really.  One day.

But what if all those cheap devices that flood our shores contain Trojan Horses that are secretly working for our destruction? Sound far fetched? Maybe not.

We believe that Americans are in denial about the extent of cybercrime and cyber-espionage that is going on in the world. Russia in particular seems to be the home of cybercrime whereas China seems to be home of cyber-espionage, although all countries dabble in all the black arts, perhaps.

Many Americans have come to rely upon their home appliances.  What could be more trustworthy than a coffee maker that helps us wake up in the morning?  Or a blow dryer that dries our hair?  What about a blender or food processor?   We rely on these instruments of modern convenience and it is inconceivable that these items could be turned against us.   They are as American as Apple Pie even if they are no longer made in America in order to increase the profits of the wealthy.

Now something has happened that may yet wake Americans out of their complacency, and it comes, ironically from the Russians. They have been discovering for some time covert cyber penetration devices in home appliances manufactured by that supposedly "friend of cheap manufacturing", the People's Republic of China, and they have gone public with this shocking news just recently.

Home appliances of all types including irons, blenders and even the beloved toaster oven have been found kitted out with the most devious of devices, including and especially WIFI hardware designed to penetrate any unsecured WIFI within 600 feet or so of the appliance. Once such a WIFI is found, the innocent-looking home appliance transforms itself into a network-based spy (or "Snowden" as they are known these days) and tries to penetrate any computer it can find on the local network in order to insert viruses (virii?) into the defenseless computers. Of course these home appliances phone home to their masters in Beijing as well.

Are these innocent looking home appliances in fact criminal devices from the East?

The Russians believe that the primary purpose of these devices is to find and make robot slaves for Spam delivery, but we don't buy that. The Chinese are guilty of the largest espionage program in history in their attacks against the United States and have totally raped this country of both military and industrial intellectual property. The theft is vast, persistent and hostile and we are just now starting to calculate the costs, billions of dollars, of changing various military-related apparatus (e.g. electronic warfare) based on the knowledge of this theft. I propose that countries only do this level of espionage if they believe that they are going to war.

Now on top of the previous attacks, we learn of the Russians under attack by home electric appliances. Are Americans also under attack in the same manner? How can we tell? I call on the President and Congress to pass a Homeland Appliance Defense Act and investigate this potential threat to our freedom at once.

For one article on this emerging crisis, see here.

Sexual Perversity in Blog Posts or What I Have Learned from Blog Statistics

One of the reasons for writing GlobalWahrman is to get first hand experience about what is involved in writing a blog. As part of that I am writing various meta-posts, posts about the writing of the blog, from time to time.

This blog meta-post discusses some of what I have learned about who reads my blog and what that says about the blogging process, at least in my case. There are some surprises here for me, but mostly what I have discovered is both encouraging and even somewhat positive.

I know its hard to believe, coming from me, but its true, a lot of what I say below is along the lines of "hard work is rewarded".

1. The more energy I put into the blog, the more the readership increases. In other words, I can increase readership, in both the short and medium term, by putting more energy into the blog on a regular basis. The half life of any improvement is several weeks, perhaps.  (For this discussion, short term changes in readership is measured in days, medium term in weeks, and long term in months).

2. Inversely, when I am not contributing actively to the blog, this is clearly reflected in the statistics particularly in short term hits, but also in the medium and long terms but more slowly.

3. There is also a fine art in increasing readership on top of the above "hard work is rewarded" meme, and that involves how one structures posts to be found by search engines and the extent to which I promote some of the posts in social media. If the goal of this blog was to demonstrate a large readership, there is a vast number of details and things that one can do to help people find the blog that are ethical. There are also unethical ones, which lots of people use but I find obnoxious.

4. Some posts become perennial favorites and generate a large percentage of the total usage. It is interesting and surprising to see which ones these are. Some may be by accident (e.g. "Bin Laden" in the title getting a hit on a search engine) but some are not. Some of my favorite posts are completely ignored.

5. The theory that a blog has to reach a critical mass of content before it finds its stable readership is not contradicted by the data. I figure I am roughly two years at least from basic critical mass. I think that there is some luck involved here as well.  In other words, a post may have to go viral in order to introduce the blog to a larger group of people, some of whom may become regular or occasional readers.   I also suspect that critical mass will require paying serious attention to the issues discussed in point 3 above.   Global Wahrman is intended to be eclectic, whatever its long term readership may be, it is unlikely to be a mass market blog.

6. Understanding the statistics requires work. They are not well documented and there are default options that need to be changed to get rational numbers. Basically all defaults are set to generate the largest possible numbers, e.g. counting your own page hits on your website and counting someone reading 10 pages as 10 different users.  One must penetrate the incredibly badly documented blogspot/blogger infrastructure and change the settings or the numbers will just be inflated or wrong.

7. Underlying all statistics is a constant murmer of fraud and crime from Eastern Europe, Russia, China and India. Occassionally also Brazil. In other words, the BRIC countries. There is some theory in the blog forums that what the criminals are doing is getting paid for every page hit that they stimulate on certain web sites. Why anyone would pay them for that I do not know, but that is the theory.

8. The post about "repressed lust of CIA analysts" generated the most traffic on a single day in the history of Global Wahrman.  In other words, "sex sells" just as we have been told.

GlobalWahrman Reveals Highly Secret NSA Project from the Cold War !!

From time to time when working at the RAND Corporation, I would occassionally pick up information that I was not supposed to hear. It was very rare, and no harm was done. In all cases, the specific information had been printed in the NY Times or similar venue anyway.

I do have one story that I think is amusing and which I plan to tell you here.

I hope that by telling you this, I don't accidentally become internationally famous, have my picture in every newspaper, have beautiful women throwing themselves at my feet, get offered huge fees as a freedom-loving journalist, and be acclaimed a hero. I doubt however that any of these things will happen because by telling you this story I am not intentionally or actually damaging America and violating trust based on narcissistic self-delusion, unlike some self-righteous assholes people I could name.

The RAND Corporation was an early site on the ARPAnet, which was the prototype of what we now call the Internet. Much, but not all, of the fundamental technology of the Internet was invented for the ARPAnet and then scaled up.   (Actually, this becomes less and less true every year as the Internet evolves, but it was true at the beginning).

Among other things, the ARPAnet allowed heterogenous computers to communicate in a way that was reliable even if parts of the network went down. This is the famous "packet switching" concept, in which a message is disassembled into packets, the packets are sent by the best available route, and reassembled at the destination.

The computers that handled all this disassembly, re-transmission, reassembly, etc was all in the background and were called IMPs and TIPs and they were highly reliable, special purpose computers built by Bolt Beranak and Newman (BBN) under contract to ARPA. Although very reliable, BBN had maintenance people in various places to fix anything that broke. One of those maintenance people, the one who handled the west coast, was a good friend of ours, for some reason. He had long hair and a beard, was a surfer, was very straight and had a Top Secret / CRYPTO clearance.

CRYPTO is the clearance you need to handle cryptographic material. All cryptographic material is managed by the NSA.

Why he had that clearance was not entirely clear to me, but I think it was because there were places he had to go to fix various computers that were inside places where people did highly secret work. The ARPAnet was completely open and not secret at all, but we were aware that there was a secure version of it inside the basement of NSA, there was a version used between some military commands called MILNET, and so forth.

One day my friend got a call from his boss who told him to grab his kit of spare boards and his passport because they were sending him to London and he was leaving that afternoon. All he was told was to keep his kit of spare boards with him, fly to London, go to his hotel and wait. He would be contacted. I am not exactly sure when this was, but it was probably 1978 plus or minus a year.

So he did that. He got on a plane to London and checked into the hotel they told him to go to, and when he had been there for a few hours, trying to get some sleep, some people came to his hotel and asked him to take his parts kit and whatever tools he needed and come with them. They took him to the basement parking garage of the hotel, put him in a car, put his head down so that he could not see where they were going, and proceeded to drive over an hour somewhere.

At some point, the car stopped and they let him sit up. They were in another underground parking garage for a different hotel somewhere, but of course he had no idea where he was.

They took him upstairs to a hotel room and there, in that hotel room, was an IMP, sitting there looking completely alien and out of place. It had obviously just been moved from somewhere else. They told him it was broken and could he fix it please. Indeed it was broken, he ran diagnostics, swapped some boards and fixed it.

The people who were escorting him, and who stayed with him the entire time he was fixing the computer, then reversed the process: they took him down to the basement, put him in the car, put his head down, proceeded to drive somewhere for an hour or so, and delivered him back to the basement of the hotel he was staying at. They thanked him and told him he could go home now.

So he did.

What does it all mean ? It probably means that there was a special project somewhere that was using a very secure version of the ARPAnet for communication. It was so secret that when one of their IMPs broke, they took the trouble to move it someplace else to have it fixed, and then presumably took it back to where it was being used.

So far as I know, we never heard what project it was.

The Mighty Sphere

About two years ago, I decided to learn NVIDIA's GPU programming environment, CUDA. I wrote a volume renderer in it which can render anything you want as long as it is a sphere.

The problem of course with volume rendering is getting data to render. Volume datasets are usually associated with scientific visualization and when you can get them at all they are not trivial to process. They are real data about real things and it requires serious work to make something of them.

So, for my tests I used normal 3D objects but made every vertex a sphere. It turned out pretty well. Here are two test images, one with glowy spheres and one with spheres that were more hardedged.

You get extra credit if you can figure out what they were originally.

Give up?  The one on the bottom is an upside down SR-71.   The one on top is something with a backbone, you can see the vertebrae clearly.  Dont remember what it was, though.

The Repressed Lust of the CIA Analyst in ZDT

[revised 11/24/2013]

I just saw ZDT, or Zero Dark Thirty, that controversial film by Kathryn Bigelow. I expected to hate it, but I actually loved it and I believe, modestly, that most people have misunderstood this movie but that I understand the director's vision.

This is not a movie about Osama Bin Laden, terrorism, torture, or any of that.

This is a movie about the repressed lust within obsessed CIA analysts.

This is a beltway bodice ripper ¹ about Maya, the waif-like, strong yet vulnerable, intelligent yet feminine, CIA analyst who single handedly finds the bad guy and saves the world. Why don't you men just listen to me?, she seems to be saying. I am woman! I am strong! I wear a conservatively tailored suit!

But deep inside that slender, athletic, neurotic, nearly anorexic female form lurks a hot volcano of repressed sexual desire.

In the shadows of the secret hanger, surrounded by 30 or so alpha males any one of which could rip her apart like a fried chicken wing, Maya is turned loose by her long-suffering CIA bosses to tell these bearded, athletic, casually dressed, men what their secret mission is.  

Does our angry CIA analyst enjoy the intense attention that these men pay to her?   They *do* pay attention to her, in the hanger, in the desert and God only knows where else.

And Kathryn Bigelow knows only too well what men like our Seal Team 6 find attractive: sports, stealth helicopters in secret hangers, and intense 26 year old repressed redheads.

Completely deadpan, the total professional, she basks in their attention and explains where she believes Bin Laden is hiding.   The men are gruff, uncertain, hostile.   A mistake could land them in Pakistani prison for a very long time.

But her confidence wins them over.

Notice how much more relaxed she appears after spending a week or two "training" with her men in the desert.   There in the desert the M-to-F ratio is probably about 75 to 2 or 3.   If that.   She could have her pick of the litter.   

She looks more relaxed and happier, somehow.

ZDT on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1790885/

____________________________________________________

Notes

-1.  The sequence of the briefing of the Seal Team by Maya is also a brilliant example of an explanatory scene, the highest form of filmmaking.  In explanation cinema, the characters just talk to each other and explain things, no actual action is necessary.   In this case, notice how the Special Forces guys make the context switch between thinking they are there for a mission in Libya to the much more interesting project of taking out UBL.   Their reaction is very amusing and is one of the reasons that I think that this movie has value.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kG4k21PoCs

0.  The day that this post went live my blog received the single largest number of views / hits of any other single day in its life.  Proving one more time that sex sells.

1. A bodice ripper is a type of romance novel. Wikipedia has a good introduction to the categories of the genre and how it has evolved.

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

2.  Has "Beltway bodice ripper" been used before?   Did I just make it up?   The Beltway, for those who don't know, is the term locals use for Washington DC.