Clarifications about Unity 5

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There is some misunderstandings about Unity 5 out there, so here are the facts as I know them:

1. There are three scripting languages, but one of them is not Javascript. There is a “javascript-like” language but it is not Javascript.

2. It is said that Unity has its own IDE, but it seems to use MS Visual Studio for C#

3. C# seems to be standard but of course there is no .NET, there is an equivalent to it however.

4. I was advised not to try and read data files from Unity but in fact it works very well.

5. Unity does seem to support GLSL shaders for standalone systems (e.g. desktop Mac, Windows, etc) Documentation for this can be found here.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/GLSL_Programming/Unity

I have mixed feelings about this.

When Neil deGrasse Tyson Spoke at the Virginia Military Institute

Recent events have conspired, one more time, to paint the Southern United States in a bad light. People are so negative and instead of lauding the fabulous cuisine (grits, cornbread, Smithfield ham), for example, they always emphasize the same old negative stuff. You know, racism, slavery, segregation, separate but unequal schools, that sort of thing.

So much for tolerance of cultural diversity.

But I am here to testify to you that at least parts of the South has changed in recent years and I have an example that is pretty amazing, and very specific to Virginia.

A few days ago, while throwing away my life while surfing the Internet, I came across an article on the AAAS website (American Association for the Advancement of Science) about science education that featured Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson who was a speaker at a conference on the subject. You can find this article at the following URL and I have provided some screengrabs of it at the end of the post.

http://membercentral.aaas.org/blogs/stemedu/neil-degrasse-tysons-battle-cry-stem

Neil deGrasse Tyson is, of course, the very eloquent spokesperson for Astrophysics at the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History. A PhD in astrophysics, a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, an author of many books, the star of the recent Cosmos reboot, and so forth, Neil is very entertaining and is very well known in the New York area and now because of Cosmos is also well known nationally.  I worked with Neil for a few years as a consultant on the Hayden Planetarium rebuild and the NASA Digital Galaxy project and Neil was very entertaining even when he was not in public.  He is also, apparently, a nice guy.  Or at least he was with me.

Here is a picture of Neil.

I don't know if you noticed, but Neil seems to be an African American. Well I am not sure what the whole story is, but no doubt Neil is definitely a person of color, we might say. Or maybe a scientist of color. I dont know, whatever.

Now we get to the point. I can prove to you that Virginia, at least, has come a long, long way since the war, even if it may still have a long way to go.

The conference on science education (STEM) where Neil was a speaker was held at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington, VA.

(pause for reaction)

Well, I can tell that you are not from Virginia, because if you had been from Virginia and I had just told you that Dr. Tyson had spoken at VMI and your jaw did not drop, or your eyes bug out, or you fell out of your chair, then that is a pretty clear indication that indeed you are not from the Old Dominion.

Its a long story but it goes something like this. VMI is considered to be a bastion of Virginian aristocracy. It was said for many years that if you wanted to become Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, that it was helpful to have attended VMI. Many famous people have been alumni of VMI including Gen. George Marshall who was the Chief of Staff of the US Army during WW 2, George Patton's grandfather, who died in the War Between the States defending liberty and grandson, the third George Patton, and the one they made the movie about, attended VMI before he left to go to West Point.

There are many other colorful stories one might tell about VMI that would help to illustrate how tightly VMI is tied into the self-image of Virginians. Here is the well-known story behind a famous Southern nickname, not of a student, but of one of the early VMI professors. It seems this professor of Philosophy from VMI got his nickname during the very first battle of that destructive and stupid war between the states when he refused to retreat from the field and the commander of a Texas regiment, exhorting his troops, said “There stands Jackson like a stone wall”, although some people think he was saying that Prof. Jackson was dumb as a rock.

In other words, no less than the Country Club of Virginia, and maybe even more so, VMI is a part of the established order of the very aristocratic would-be aristocracy of Virginia who are still pissed off about the whole slavery thing.

That a black man, however famous, spoke at VMI is not to be sniffed at.

At the very least it surprised me and I grew up there.

Should I want you to conclude that there is racism in Virginia? Of course there is racism in Virginia and I wish it would go away. But things do change slowly for the better. A few years ago there was actually a black governor of Virginia which is a pretty amazing situation right there.

At least many Virginians realize there is racism present which is more than I can say about most of my friends in Southern and Northern California who seem to be in complete denial of the racism in their own communities.

Here are some scans of the article and quotes from Neil that prompted this post.

Virginia Military Institute

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Military_Institute

Cosmos (2014) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2395695/

Bronx High School of Science

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bronx_High_School_of_Science

Stonewall Jackson on Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_Jackson

Stonewall Brigade on Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_Brigade

Jim Shaw at the New Museum

        This world is mine, in time. You best of all of us, Gabriel, should understand ambition.

                                                                              Lucifer/Satan from Constantine (2005)

I am happy to report that an alumnus of degraf/Wahrman (dWi), Jim Shaw, is having a retrospective of his work exhibited at the New Museum in New York (see link below).

I have not one, not two, but at least five friends from the early days of computer animation who are recognized as successful contemporary fine artists to varying degrees. But all of the others are involved in the digital arts in one way or another.  Jim is the only one I know who has achieved his success through what we might call "old media", you know, painting and drawing, with no computers involved.

Of course there were many “artists” who helped found computer animation in the 1970s and 1980s and “art” is one of those culturally laden terms that mean different things to different communities.  Hollywood is particularly fond of giving its own meaning to the term "artist" as is discussed in this post:   What is Meant When it is Said Hollywood Needs Artists    Other types of artists in this world might include production designers, fashion designers, commercial art directors, graphic designers, visual effects supervisors, and so forth.

But we are not talking about that kind of artist, as difficult and competitive as some of those fields are. What we are talking about here is the varsity squad, an artist of the sense of museums, collectors, galleries in NY and London and notices in certain elite magazines.  This is what we might call the :"real" world of fine art.

What you may not be aware of is that this is the dream of so many artists, or at least of people who went to art school, and it is far from easy to achieve. Of 100 talented people who attend art school, how many become recognized artists? Of the people who attend film school, how many become noted directors of film?

But the really disturbing thing is not just that my friend, Jim Shaw, is successful at pretty much exactly what he wanted to achieve back when I knew him in 1980, the really disturbing thing is that he is to have a retrospective one person show.  Retrospective?  I just exchanged email with Jim and he is as always creating new pieces right and left.  Perhaps I am giving too much emphasis  to one meaning of the term "retrospective".

There is much more I could say about Jim Shaw, but I will just mention a few of them here. First, he never secretly aspired to be a commercial art director, or a visual effects supervisor, or anything else but what he did. Second, as long as I have known him, from when I believe he was an assistant art director at Robert Abel & Associates, he was producing his own work every day. Publishing his own books of his artwork. Putting on a Thrift Store Art exhibition. Third, and finally, we hired him at deGraf/Wahrman as an art director for various reasons, but the most important one to me was that it would help him make a living while he was building his career as a fine artist.

I haven't talked to him for about 20 years but I recently exchanged email with him courtesy of John Nelson (I had had trouble tracking Jim down).   Not only is he doing well, but he has a life, apparently, and has been married for over 20 years.  Amazing.

Information about his show in New York is at

http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/jim-shaw-the-end-is-here

His public statement from the Thrift Store Art exhibit is here:

http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/2013/01/statement-from-thrift-store-art.html

The Russian Pageview Anomaly on Global Wahrman

Something rather odd has happened to the Global Wahrman pageview statistics over the last few days. Although these events are as yet unexplained, no reasonable person could look at them and not see the influence of some covert menace, a menace that may even at this moment be conspiring against the Free World and Democracy.   

Although I try not to obsess about my audience, like any writer I am gratified to have an audience at all. Google/Blogspot provides several mechanisms to track one's readership and from the very beginning I noticed a certain underlying activity, a murmur if you will from such places as Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia, Armenia, China, Montenegro, Serbia, Albania, Pakistan and of course Russia.

But as time went by and as I presumably built up a readership, this poking and occasional comment spam reduced until I barely noticed it.

Well in the last three days, someone in Russia seems to have become very, very interested in Global Wahrman, to the point where it far overshadows my normal readership. In fact it overwhelms the exceptional readership that happens from time to time (such as when someone in France seemed to notice my post about SIGGRAPH (see here) and my pageviews from the country that invented Semiotics skyrocketed for a week or so which makes a certain sense to me, somehow.

But Russia all of a sudden can't seem to get enough of Global Wahrman. Could this be Putin interested in the history of Computer Animation?  Perhaps they are interested in my analysis of secret aerospace programs? Or on the archaeology of the Cold War?  Am I being recruited by Russian Secret Intelligence?

Should I mysteriously disappear or hang myself in my cell, please notify the appropriate authorities that I may be a victim of some sort of Russian conspiracy.

[10/12/2015 The interest in Global Wahrman from Russia is continuing.  I wonder why?]

Is that you, Vladimir, reading my blog?

Communication & Anecdotes About Early Computer Animation

Dear Friends,

Some of you have noticed that it is hard to reach me on the phone.  That is correct it is, and it will continue to be so for a while.

One of the fun manifestations of being abused by the medical community is the difficulty in getting the medication necessary to process stress, where stress may include such things as going to the grocery store or starting thermonuclear war.

Therefore in order to prevent you from experiencing thermonuclear war, I constrict most communication to such things as email and text messages, with no guarantee for a prompt response to either.   Its for your own good, trust me.

Now on other news, we are collecting anecdotes on how you first did computer animation.  I had to walk through the snow for five miles each day, for example. Someone else had to type up vector lists on punched cards.  Still a third took a course in programming a plotter in Fortran from Nelson Max in 1975.  Please send me your stories.

You suffered and now you should get some recognition for your suffering.

Sincerely,
MW

Learning Unity 3D

Unity (3D) is one of those all-in-one, inclusive, cradle-to-grave 3D packages that has a billion and one things that it tries to do in an effort to provide some sort of structure or environment for real time 3D animation, what many would call “games”. Or “VR”.

It is clear that they have done a valiant job to both provide a framework, and also to provide scriptability and programmability at every level. Thank goodness the bad old days when somehow people thought they were going to do computer animation without being able to program computers seems to be dead. It is also clear that Unity has put a lot of serious effort into providing real documentation in contrast to so many other firms out there who seem to think that they can "group source" their documentation from random users.  I appreciated that they recognized that there is user documentation online that is not very good.  They have an entertaining IDE that seems to work right out of the box and supports not one, not two, but three different but related scripting languages.  This is all good news.

The bad news is simply that with software of this type there are barriers to entry and one needs to reach a certain critical mass before you can do much of anything useful with it.  This is just a fact of life.  And at least in Unity's case everything makes sense, at least so far.  That is more than I can say about many other software packages out there whose name I will not mention, other than Photoshop and Gimp, those two I will mention by name.

So it takes time to get traction as with any serious software package.

There is one silliness which I have noticed they try to conscientiously document.  One of their three embedded scripting languages is "Javascript-like" but when you look closer you realize it is not Javascript much at all.  So that is a little weird and it has the side effect that in fact you only think you know how to program one of their scripting languages, the reality is different.

So why do I mention all this?  Its because a friend asked for some help on a demonstration he was doing in Unity and he had a little less than a week.  The problem is, in about a week one can start thinking about getting something simple done in a system like this.  A month would be more realistic.

And this is not an isolated situation. The fact is that there are dozens if not hundreds of these packages out there, each in their own niche, and none of them are terribly difficult to learn, at least up to a point. But it is not instantaneous and figuring out which ones to learn and become good at is not intuitively obvious, most of the time.

[10/16/2015 As an addendum, although it has taken longer than I like to learn elements of Unity, it is proceeding and it will be entertaining and useful to pursue this at least as far as doing a non-trivial trial application, maybe something in the so-called VR world which is certainly trendy right now]

My "Hello, world" script in C# for Unity.  From tiny acorns might oaks grow.

Words Stolen from the English Language

First Uber, then Jaunt, two of my favorite words, now gone forever. Or at least as long as I live.

It used to be that I could show some multilingual sophistication by creating Germanic compound words, using Uber, such as uberdog, uberschmuck, and uberswine, just to name three. But now with Uber, the taxi service which is worth billions because it is able to find a way to employ the masses of unemployed that the US has created with globalization and with failing to provide any alternative for them, Uber is forever associated, in this country at least, with that quasi-taxi scam.

In other words, a favorite word has been stolen from me, and I dont like it.

Another such word is Jaunt. You may not be aware that “jaunt” a rather rare but normal part of the English language also has a secret meaning and a secret history. One of the most important early science fiction novels is/was The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester in which teleportation is called “jaunting”, or “to jaunt”. Now it will probably lose that meaning because everyone will assume you mean the new, very well financed, VR game company.

You want to steal a word from me, fine. Love you too.

An early use of the concept of synesthesia

The Stars My Destination on Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars_My_Destination

The Stars My Destination on Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/The-Stars-Destination-Alfred-Bester/dp/1876963468

The Tourist Guide to Cemeteries, War Zones and Prisons

I have come across a site which will be of interest to all readers of Global Wahrman.

A former academic linguist by the name of Peter Hohenhaus has created a site which catalogs for the international traveler sites of interest for those who are entertained by the macabre or darker side of history.

Such sites would include famous cemeteries, battlefields, unused nuclear reactors, missile launch sites, sites of massacres and crimes against humanity and so forth. His categories include grave tourism, cult of personality tourism, prison and persecution tourism, communist tourism, cold war tourism, disaster area tourism and so forth.

His sites include all the big hits of recent history.

Everything is very well organized. He offers practical experience, what is involved in visiting most of these sites, and so forth. Its quite a resource.

www.dark-tourism.com

Dr. Hohenhaus himself 

Why the Socialists Will Always Be a Fringe Party in American Politics

For the first time in my life, there is a candidate for the President for the United States for a major party who has a chance of winning the nomination who is also, at least in part, a Socialist. There have been many presidents and even more candidates with agendas that came originally from a Socialist agenda, suitably sanitized and sold to the American public, but none to the best of my knowledge that could explicitly identify their origin as Socialist.   And there have been major candidates (and contenders) who have been slandered by their opponents as being Socialists, or even card-carrying Communists, who of course were nothing of the sort.  

But as long as one hides the origins of ideas, a reasonable portion of the Socialist agenda from the 1920s and the 1930s were achieved in this country for a period of time, such things as the 5-day and 40 hr work week are all from the Socialist agenda and were opposed by all the major parties as being too radical, back in the day.

So with Bernie Sanders being a leading candidate for the Democratic Party nomination, I thought it would be interesting to see how the “real” Socialists, the hardcore, the truly committed, what they thought about his progress.

The answer is too predictable to even be funny.

They hate him.

No, more than that. They passionately despise him.

You see, a real Socialist would never work with the Democratic Caucus in Congress. A real Socialist would never, ever disagree with the Party Line in any way. To do so would be betrayal, and that is what Bernie is in their eyes. A traitor to the cause.

So helpfully, www.truthdig.com has published a nice 6 page article on all the things you must be willing to die for to be a Socialist, or you are not a Socialist.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_it_means_to_be_a_socialist_20150920

For example, in order to be a Socialist, you must immediately call for the destruction of Israel in order to protest their “genocidal” policies against the “Palestinians” or you are not a Socialist. Say again, what? Although I think that pretty much every American wishes that particular conflict to go away and many of us are aware that it never will, to make that a precondition for Socialism means that the Socialists have no interest in being in any way a part of the mix of American politics.

This helpful piece goes further into the beliefs of a real Socialist, but most of all he makes clear that any failure to completely support *all* of these issues means that you are not a Socialist.  What I like about this approach is that it is very clear.  Clear writing is important.  Ambiguity can be good as well, but ambiguity allows doubt.  Ambiguity might promote inclusiveness and the point of this well written article is the opposite of inclusiveness.  If one could be a "Cafeteria Socialist" then there are many of their proposed economic policies that I think Americans would find appropriate.

Its all very well to say that we must prosecute Pres Bush and Pres Obama for war crimes, but I think it is going to be hard to build a consensus to go after both of them.   In fact I would venture that about half the American public would agree to one but not the other, and the other half the reverse.   

Unilaterally destroy all nuclear weapons?  That would be nice!  Call for full employment and unionized workplaces?  Absolutely.   Declare Global Warming an emergency and invest in renewable energy and turn away from fossil fuels.  I am all for it.  Nationalize all public utilities, banks, railroads and energy companies? You bet. Give full citizenship immediately to all undocumented workers?   Hmmm, thats quite a few people, isnt it  Give $600/week to anyone who is unemployed or disabled.  Sure! Demilitarize all police (e.g. disarm all police).  Uhh, well, uhh.

And he goes on and on and on, irrespective of whether or not any of these can achieve a legislative majority, and certainly without prioritizing.  They are all equally important.  I think by the time he is through there might be several 1000 people nationwide who will agree with his entire agenda.  Maybe.

Impractical is not the word.

I like it when he goes on to say ... 

Socialists do not sacrifice the weak and the vulnerable, especially children, on the altars of profit. And the measure of a successful society for a socialist is not the GDP or the highs of the stock market but the right of everyone, especially children, never go to bed hungry, to live in safety and security, to be nurtured and educated, and to grow up fulfill his or her potential. Work is not only about a wage, it is about dignity and a sense of self-worth.

Whether our Socialist likes it or not, or whether the Tea Party likes it or not, the American political system is based on being able to find a workable compromise.  Extremists who insist on moral purity make the system unworkable as the Tea Party has proven so well over the last decade or so.

So what this article convinces me is that Socialism, at least in its pure form, does not have a chance in hell in the American political system, short, perhaps, of armed revolution.

Pat Cole, Kathy White, Nancy Bernstein, Brian Jennings: In Memoriam

All of the above were each in their own way involved in the early days of computer animation, Pat Cole was earlier than any of the others. Nancy was involved in NY, the rest mostly in Los Angeles, and in Pat's case also SF.

Pat Cole first came to my attention when she worked at JPL for Dr. Jim Blinn and Bob Holtzmann. She was also responsible for some very important early parties in Los Angeles, where I met many people. I know that she struggled with some sort of very long term illness for many years before she passed away.

Kathy White had been a technical director at Robert Abel & Associates after I was no longer there and then was one of the early technical directors at Rhythm & Hues. I barely knew the woman, but she was friends of friends and seemed like a very nice person. She was also depressed and her passing was unexpected to many.

Nancy Bernstein was an early producer at R/Greenberg & Associates and then came out west to work at Digital Domain. She died after a long illness.

Brian Jennings was a computer animator who worked at Kroyer, at deGraf/Wahrman and many other places. He moved to India and seemed to love the place. His passing was a surprise and a shock.