SIGGRAPH, Suggestions and Misunderstandings

But I'm just a soul whose intentions are good:Oh Lord! Please don't let me be misunderstood.  (1)

I have had some useful feedback from two different people with impeccable credentials at the national level of SIGGRAPH and they both had a similar message: many of the things I “propose” (or seem to be proposing) in my writings about SIGGRAPH are just not possible for an educational institution. End of discussion.

I have no doubt that they are in part completely correct (although I do not know the details I am willing to believe that those details are there) but I have also been misunderstood. Terribly misunderstood. You see, I have made no recommendations. None whatsoever.

What I have done, though, is to say that SIGGRAPH needs to consider what, if anything, needs to change to avoid contributing to the disaster which is employment in computer animation in this country and the unthinking boosterism of the entertainment uses of computer animation that I have witnessed over the last few decades and where possible change their behavior and see what can be done to improve the situation. If the answer is “Nothing can be done”, then at least we will have understood the situation and turned over every stone. But I am quite sure that there are things that can be done.

But let me for the record reassure everyone of the following points:

1. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a bomb throwing anarchist.

2. I do not expect nor would I encourage SIGGRAPH to do anything that would violate ACM or other rules of behavior and endanger their not-for-profit status or good standing with ACM.

3. Were the membership of SIGGRAPH to agree with my program points (2) and see fit to elect me to the executive committee, they should know that I would be a voice for these points at the committee but would expect to act in consensus with the wishes of the committee and never act unilaterally.

4. I am very confident that very reasonable changes could be made at the national SIGGRAPH level that would address many of the issues I have brought up in other essays to my satisfaction at least. Remember, I am not arguing that SIGGRAPH should stop encouraging people to take risks involving their future employment, I am arguing that SIGGRAPH should stop the unthinking boosterism and temper the rah-rah glamourization (sic) of the entertainment industry with some basic facts about the nature of that industry and the likelihood of serious long-term employment.

5. I am quite aware that organizations such as SIGGRAPH have constraints on them that are different from those on private corporations or individuals, although some of the specific details of the constraints in the case of SIGGRAPH may be a surprise to me. I am however an adult with serious and relevant experience, e.g. running a laboratory at the RAND Corporation, and I know something about these matters.

6. All that we are discussing here is whether I can be allowed to be considered for memebership to the EC, to put my name before the membership of SIGGRAPH and let them decide whether they want someone such as me to represent them.

7. Frankly I am concerned that I might be biting off more than I can chew.  I am one person, unaffiliated, mostly unemployed and without resources.  Perhaps the people on the EC need to have a large corporation or University behind them to support them?   Stranger things have occurred.  No one has mentioned this to me however.

Keep in mind that I have had serious trouble getting in touch with the committee in a way that leads me to believe that they understand the issues and are taking steps to correct them.   Whoever runs national SIGGRAPH seems oddly distant and abstract.  My self-nomination for the EC is in response to that.

I hope that I have addressed any concerns that anyone might have about my suitability for nomination, and that if they need any more details about my qualifications and agenda that by all means they send me an email so that we can address their concerns. (3)

I appreciate very much the time and diligence that people have put into this matter and I am hopeful that they are easily resolved.

For all I know, no one else at SIGGRAPH is concerned about these matters and thus would not be elected to the EC, which would be fine.

Its probably the red hair. I have noticed over the years that it really does seem to freak some people out.

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1. Lyrics for the first stanza are:

Baby, do you understand me now?

Sometimes I seem a little mad.

Dont you know that no one alive can always be an angel?

When things go wrong, I seem a little bad.

But I'm just a soul whose intentions are good:

Oh Lord! Please don't let me be misunderstood.

Wrjitten by Bennie Benjamin, Gloria Caldwell, Sol Marcus

Original cover by Nina Simone

Most famous cover by The Animals.

Live performance of the song by the Animals is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR7h-4yvd-o

Particularly noteworthy here is that the drummer wears a very narrow black tie. Lets return to the days when our rock & roll musicians showed a little respect for their audience by dressing more formally.

2. Program points are: A. Be realistic about the state of employment in computer animation, whether internationally or this country, B. Avoid the boosterism that has occurred regarding the entertainment industry and deal with that industry more realistically (e.g. the industry has no long term employment a priori and does not finance research except in the most extreme circumstances), C. Broaden SIGGRAPH to include other application areas beyond entertainment such as the two session panel on cultural heritiage of a few years ago (I note in passing that cultural heritage has employment issues of its own) and D, See what can be done to increase employment in the areas covered by computer animation and/or see what programs can be developed to help people who have made the commitment to computer animation and are now suffering hardship because of it make a transition to other industries, and finally E. See what can be done to make it easier for people to connect to the formal programs and individuals in computer science at SIGGRAPH, something I have found very difficult to do in the last decade or more.

3. Send email to michael.wahrman at gmail dot com.

Journal of Information Warfare

Cryptome has put on their site an NSA journal that is unclassified with the fabulous name of “Journal of Information Warfare”.

It has a variety of entertaining articles, and I have put the table of contents below. I think that most normal people will find it a little difficult to read as it seems to be written with a very turgid government style. One can get used to it but it is certainly not very evocative prose. I suspect that if one were to work in the NSA that one would have to learn to read and write such things effortlessly.

See for yourself.

The Journal of Information Warfare volume 13, issue 2

http://cryptome.org/2014/06/nsa-jiw-2014.pdf

Kate Mantillini Memorabilia

Many readers may wonder why anyone would care that Kate Mantillini's closed suddenly after many years of service.    Kate's became a standard for many of us who had the misfortune of living and working in Los Angeles for the last three decades.   It was close enough to the West Side and to Hollywood to make it possible to meet people there for lunch without driving all day.  It was right next door to the Academy La Peer screening room where the VFX bake off was held and became the traditional meeting place for our VFX clan to meet before or after the screenings. I must have had 100 meetings at Kate's over the years, if not more. There was almost always legal parking on side streets if you knew where to look and if all else failed there was reasonably priced valet parking.  You could tell someone to meet you at Kate Mantillini's later that night and know for certain that it would be open and that you would get a table.

But its gone.

I was able to pass by Kate Mantillini's about two weeks before it was closed and managed to take a few photographs and two (jerky) walkthrough's of the restaurant.  It seems silly, even to me, but I guess I am a sentimental guy.

In chatting with the employees there I learned that Kate's was owned by the family who runs Hamburger Hamlet, and this was, I guess, their more high-end, themed restaurant.

Many of the employees I talked to had been there for years and were then thinking about looking for new jobs in about two weeks when the restaurant closed (about June 15).

If you listen to the dialogue track at the end of the B walkthrough, you will hear me talking to the manager of the restaurant who wanted to know what I thought I was doing. I told him that I had been told that the manager had approved it.... he replied that he was the manager.

Ooops.


I apologize for the jerkiness of the two walkthroughs below.  It was all very ad hoc and spontaneous. I had my cheap digital camera with me and so I just held the camera about chest high, tried to be discreet, and walked purposefully towards the bathrooms thanking everyone I came across.  You can see me in my dissolute and degenerate form reflected in the mirror at the end of take A.   Yes, that is me whistling in the background, trying to be nonchalant.

Kate Mantillini Walkthrough A

Kate Mantillini Walkthrough B

Coming Soon: A Solution to the Problem of Getting Researchers to do Practical Work

Coming soon on Global Wahrman !

Underbidding in Visual Effects: Conclusions and Recommendations

In three previous posts we discussed the practice and mythology of underbidding a project in visual effects, something that is alleged to happen quite often and is commonly believed to be a major cause of instability in the visual effects industry.   You can read these posts here, here and here, or you can just read the next paragraph.

In these posts I argue that (a) there are some legitimate reasons for underbidding,  (b) it rarely happens by mistake except in the case of a new production company,  that (c) sometimes when a project is underbid it was done so because of politics or because a grave misunderstanding or breach of trust between the client and the visual effects facility occurred, and finally (d) when we hear retroactively that a project was underbid, it is often just spin on the part of the client to pin the blame for whatever occurred on the visual effects company and cover their own ass.

In fact, very few people realize that the origins of the word "underbid" contains this meaning of "under appreciated".  "To underbid" comes from the German compound verb unterbitte: unter meaning under- or sub- and bitte meaning "please".  Thus "under please" which we might say in English as "under appreciated" or "no good deed goes unpunished".   

If a production company were to stupidly give a client a deal and got screwed for it, then we might say that they have unterbitte the project.

If you are a potential worker, artist, supervisor, or facility owner in visual effects, I think you should keep the following in mind:

1. Do not throw your pearls before swine.

2. Be sure to charge a lot of money.   In Hollywood, getting paid is the most important sign of respect.  If they pay you a lot of money, they respect you.    Its the only way you can tell what they think.   So charge the studios a lot of money and at the end of the day, you will probably say to yourself that you still did not charge enough for the work given what your time is really worth and how stupid the project really is and unpleasant the people really are.

Otherwise you may become the next victim of the unterbitte.

All Will be Well in the Garden: Summer 2014 Edition

These are my notes from my ongoing container garden experiment for the summer of 2014.

The goals of the experiment has been to understand a bit more about what it takes to grow your own food and to perhaps improve the quality of my life (or food) just a little bit by having higher quality ingredients around (e.g. fresh string beans, herbs, peas, etc).

The result has been mostly positive and enlightening if uneven. To recap: there is a constant war between the garden and pests, the startup and operating costs are rather high unless you can exploit economies of scale, and finally, gardening is fun but farming is work. I would hate to have to make a living this way.

I could not feed myself at this scale of effort. I can at times have a better fresh salad, or tastier food, with the garden and that is entertaining. I can see where strategies of having citizens owning “victory gardens”, e.g. USSR in WW2, would have been value added.

This is the 5^th or so planting and there are two plantings per year. I have focused this summer on my past successes: beans, peas, cucumbers and the ongoing herbs and peppers. The basil was renewed. There has been a constant war with the aphids. No tomatoes this time. Experimenting with arrugula and green onions.

Because the container garden here is somewhat mature, the startup costs are pretty much over. Now what is involved are expendables (making my own potting mix, fungicides, insecticides, seeds) and an occasional refresh of the infrastructure.

Recent observations:

1. Aphids are astounding in their geometric increase. Similar to the breeding rate of Tribbles and for the same reason: they are all females and born pregnant. The current methodology is water spray to knock them down and professional (not homemade) “organic” insecticidal soap bought in quantify (brand Safer) and sprayed with higher quality sprayers. Consistently observed: if three days go by without an aphid inspection, they will have multiplied insanely in that time and become a major problem. The little ants that service the aphids are an excellent clue to the presence of the aphid menace.

2. The higher quality sprayers (at roughly $15-$20 per sprayer) seem to do a much better job than the cheap $5 versions.

3. The $25 water control hose head timer has caused a huge improvement in the garden. The system is set to water twice a day outside of the time of bright sunlight for 4 minutes a pop.

4. I destroyed one of my industrial strength hoses by walking on it to and from the kitchen. Now I have raised the replacement hose above the floor and along the cabinetry so it will not be stepped on.

5. I briefly experimented with Dacomil, a non-organic fungicide and pesticide, but did not see any particular good results so I have stopped using it.   I am continuing with the organic insecticidal soap, copper (bordeaux solution) spray, and Neem oil, all bought in quantity.

To repeat myself: gardening is fun but farming is work. I could not feed myself at this scale but would have to expand many times and I only have to feed one person. I would hate to have to make a living this way.

The Homeless in the Morning

Sweating it out for the date to change, and my prescription to become active, it is only luck that I did not drive the 30 miles last night after midnight to my 24 hour Rite Aid, as I would have found it closed. Yes, they changed the hours of the pharmacy from 24 hours to 10 AM to 6 PM but neglected to change the hours on the Internet.  “What's that you say? InterWhat? Dont blame us, we dont know what you talkin bout. We's simple country folk.“

So I get up at 6 AM after having been awake all night scratchin something fierce at the annual no-see-ums or whatever they are out here in Rancho Rincon del Diablo (the Devils Place) and go to my other local pharmacy but they don't open until 10 AM either.  

But all is not wasted.

I got to watch some of the homeless of my local community gather in the morning. There was the guy collecting recyclables at the Von's. There was the old guy with the bad limp who needs a haircut over by Rite Aid. There were three other guys (two with shopping carts, one with backpack) each independent of each other. Then there were the two guys with the skateboards and the coffee.... homeless? They looked it, but no shopping carts.

All of them well-behaved. All of them needing a bath and a clean set of clothes and a haircut.  No hassling people like me for spare change. No begging at all so far as I can tell.  About 50-50 white-black. None of them obviously Hispanic which is a little odd given the demographics of our community.

But all of them bad people.

Every last one.

Because in America, if you are poor, you are bad.  Thats all there is to it.  Or maybe if not bad, then lazy.  I suppose you could be both bad and lazy. Thats what I hear. Thats what they tell me. Dont want no social services, neither, to help those people because that might raise taxes.  It might encourage other homeless to come here.   And besides it would do no good because those people are bad.

They gather in the beautiful cool morning here in Escondido, CA.

Its going to be a very hot day.

Animators Without Passports Turned Back from Border, Blame Education

As a result of last week's announcements from two major players in the visual effects business, (1) animators have been attempting to cross the borders into Canada and flying into the UK at Heathrow Airport, only to be turned back or put into immigration holding areas due to a lack of passport or work visa. Apparently the would-be immigrants, nearly all of them 3D animators and graduates from art school, were completely unaware that Canada and the United Kingdom were separate countries and required the appropriate paperwork for entry.

“I am completely gobflapped,” said one animator, “art school taught me how to stab colleagues in the back, to take credit for their work, to slander competitors whenever possible, and to point & click at moronic 2D and 3D packages but nothing about being a migrant animation worker. Now what am I going to do? “

When explained that Canada had its own government, constitution, military, courts, education and health systems separate from the US of A, several of the animators became violent and demanded their mothers. They were quickly brought to heel by being told to take their afternoon nap.

Quite a few were upset to hear that Canada and the UK had “socialized medicine”.

Arrangements are being made to ship the illegal immigrants home to their parents.

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1. Sony Imageworks announced that they would move the headquarters for their visual effects operation from Culver City to Vancouver, Canada and Industrial Light & Magic announced they were opening permanent offices in Vancouver and London, England. In both cases, the announced reason was to take advantage of government subsidies for filmmakers of the two countries.

Guidelines for Reader

At least three different people have outed themselves as readers of my blog in recent weeks. I am flattered and astounded that they have the time to read what I write, even if only occasionally.

Perhaps this is a time to remind everyone some not-so-obvious 'guidelines for reader' for Global Wahrman.

1. The first goal of this blog is to be entertaining. I may not always succeed, for example this post you are reading now may not be entertaining, but entertainment is the primary goal here. There are also some secondary goals such as creating writing samples, pointing out something I think is interesting, test chapters for a book I might write, relating an anecdote or even expressing an opinion, but that is not always the case. I am certainly writing about the history of computer animation in Los Angeles in the 1980s. On the other hand, I do not really believe that Nazi War Criminals founded my prep school in Virginia or that accepting the Metric system is a step to the end of our civilization although I may have my doubts.

2. Posts marked “draft”, “in progress” or “being rewritten” indicate the post is not done, in ascending order of possible revision. In other words, it might change direction 180 degrees, for all I know. I have noticed that after about a week it seems to settle down. Most posts settle down in a few days. A few days after that I normally remove the “draft”, etc, label.

3. Some posts may just be taking an outre debating position or I may think I am being funny.

4. I will attempt to occasionally tag my posts with such modifiers as “humor” or “sarcasm”, but this is not guaranteed.

5. I could be accused of having an odd sense of humor from time to time.

6. Even when I am being deadly serious, or deadly sarcastic, I do not expect everyone to agree with me. I have extreme positions on many topics because of my life experiences. I think that most people who do not relate do so because they have had an easier time of it, frankly.

7. I do like comments. Sometimes people comment to me by email, and that is ok, but by adding to the blog your ideas and thoughts you improve the quality of this effort and I appreciate it. In pretty much all cases but the not-so-occasional spam, the comments are certainly value added.

7. So what is the point? What makes you think that there is a point? Maybe it is just meaningless, like our lives.

Thank you for reading, I hope I continue to be interesting. As far as the content that I started this blog explicitly to write, I am about 10% through my topic list, if that. My current impression is that an average of 1 in 5 posts are actually pretty good, and worth reading, another 1 in 5 are OK and the rest are what they are.

But we will see.

Writing for Wikipedia Part 1

I have wanted to learn how to contribute to Wikipedia for some time now.   This means adding new articles and editing mistakes in existing ones.   So I started reading the online documentation and ran into some surprises, mostly pleasant ones, but surprises nevertheless.

But maybe they should not be surprises, maybe it should have been obvious.

1. There is a rather large culture around writing Wikipedia. They have their own language and their own jargon. It is extensive. Just reading the tutorials takes hours and to read all the documentation would take days. So, considerable and laudable attention has been spent on making it possible for new people to come in and contribute.

2. The technology is very text based, and assumes you can handle basic non-WYSIWYG editing. It feels like solid, old-school geek.

3. A great deal of the documentation involves conflict resolution between authors and a reminder to everyone to be civil.

4. The emphasis on the anonymity of authors and editors and the ability to contribute anonymously at all surprised me.

5. They have the concept of group ownership of any article, an emphasis on “not one single author”, e.g. when you write something you have no more control over the text than any other person.

6. There is an extensive audit system that keeps any change forever and gives one the ability to roll back and forth between edits.  This makes it easy for an "editor" to return an article to a previous state.

8. There are extensive prohibitions on “original research” and "conflict of interest", which includes writing about someone or something you know, because of the likelihood that this will result in bias. Thus for example, I would, at first glance, be discouraged from writing about the history of computer animation because of my knowledge (and hence bias) on the topic.

So the first thing I notice is that my friend and serial-entrepreneur Marc Canter's (1) web page has a pretty amazing, and frankly somewhat offensive if you check the citations, discussion of his alleged politics in the overview/introductory paragraph. This surprised me because I have known Marc for a long time and I certainly knew none of this, nor do I think it is all that relevant to what it is he has done, e.g. to what makes him notable for a Wikipedia entry. At the very least it ought to be in its own section, but by Wikipedia rules it actually ought to be removed because it is not verified by citation.

But since I know Marc, and that is considered conflict of interest, I resisted the temptation to make the edit myself but followed what I read is “procedure”. I went to the “talk” page and made a comment.

This is what I said.

I am new to Wikipedia and I am feeling my way around. Also, I have a COI here, as I have been friends of Marc Canter off and on for 30 years. We are not terribly close (I havent seen him for 15 years) but I know of his work and do admire the man. So my request here is that someone read this and, if they agree, make the simple edits to fix one issue that just slaps you in the face when you read this article. I have read a lot of biographies on Wikipedia and Marc's is the only one that finds it necessary to discuss what may or may not be his political beliefs and the unverified beliefs of his relatives in the summary paragraph. (At least I should say, the only biography of a technical person, maybe there are biographies of Marxist revolutionaries that do so, but Marc is hardly that. ) Furthermore, this discussion of Marc's supposed politics and of the politics of his relatives is unverified ... if you look at the citations you will see that one is to Marc's blog (which should not count for verification) and is no longer an active page, and the other is a semi-pornographic picture of Marc Canter's head put on top of a so-called red diaper baby. I hardly think that this counts as verified, and at the very least is rude and in bad taste, if not actually libel. So the simplest request I could make to improve this page is to remove any mention of Marc's relatives and his politics and delete these two non-citations. Please contact me if you have any questions and I will check back to this talk page from time to time. I have a lot to learn and I hope this is a legitimate use of the talk page. Thank you. Michaelw newyork (talk) 02:05, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

We will see what happens.

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1. Marc was founder of Macromind in 1982 and is one of the most important influences in the creation of interactive multimedia, imho.