The Vicious and Unfair Attacks on Cap'n Crunch

America loves a scandal and the best scandals of all are when we can drag a respected public figure through the mud. Throughout history people have inflated their resume, have snuck around to have sex with someone they should probably not be having sex with, or otherwise have a skeleton in the closet.  Then at the proper moment, this dirt can be dragged out to destroy an otherwise virtuous scumbag and drag them down to his or her proper level.   This is as American as apple pie.

But sometimes an innocent cartoon figure is accused of villainry that we would otherwise only expect from a public servant.   Such is the case with the esteemed marketeer of sugary breakfast foods, Cap'n Crunch, whose character and background is being slandered by self-appointed guardians of public decency.

A fallen icon sacrificed to the bloodlust of a fickle American public?

The controversy has apparently been raging for some time, and it involves whether or not Cap'n Crunch is a real captain. The Wall Street Journal in a recent article, included below, has a discussion of anomalies in the Captain's uniform, the issue of Crunch's naval record, and the affectation of the Napoleonic-era hat.

When will America stop this self-destructive attacks on their cartoon characters? Cap'n Crunch is an icon of everything that is great about America: sugary breakfast foods, great animated commercials (by Jay Ward), appropriation of other culture's insignia, the use of the name by an underground phone phreak hero, and nostalgia for a happier time in our youth.

What could be more American than that?

I call on all Americans to stop this senseless and immoral attacks on a great animated public figure and support Cap'n Crunch.

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The Wall Street Journal article can be found here:

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/06/19/u-s-navy-no-record-of-capn-crunch-service/

WASHINGTON – A new scandal is consuming the U.S. Navy and one of the world’s most venerated captains: Cap’n Crunch.

The legendary cereal icon’s status as a captain has come under fire after eagle-eyed writers noticed that Cap’n Crunch only wears the bars of a Navy commander, not those of a captain. In the U.S. Navy, captains wear four bars on their uniforms, while commanders — one rank below captain – have three bars.

“The cheery Santa Claus in blue Napoleon hat is really just a big, fat LIAR,” wrote Charisma Madarang on Foodbeast, an online food news site.Gawker and other sites reported on the scandal as well.

Cap’n Crunch took to Twitter to defend his honor.

“All hearsay and misunderstandings!,” @realcapncrunch wrote.”I captain the S.S. Guppy with my crew – which makes an official Cap’n in any book!” And: “Of course I’m a Cap’n!” he wrote to anguished supporters searching for answers. “It’s the Crunch – not the clothes – that make a man. #PaidMyDues”

But his protests failed to tamp down the sense of betrayal and anger.

The controversy deepened on Wednesday when the Pentagon said it had no record of a Cap’n Crunch ever serving in the U.S. Navy.

“We have no Cap’n Crunch in the personnel records – and we checked,” said Lt. Commander Chris Servello, director of the U.S. Navy’s news desk at the Pentagon. “We have notified NCIS and we’re looking into whether or not he’s impersonating a naval officer – and that’s a serious offense.”

The Navy’s repudiation is fueling speculation the Cap’n Crunch, who wears a Napoleon-style hat, may actually be French.

According to official lore, Cap’n Crunch first set sail in 1963 when Quaker Oats Co. introduced the sweet children’s cereal.

According to his official biography, Cap’n Crunch, whose full name is Horatio Magellan Crunch, was born on Crunch Island in the Sea of Milk – “a magical place with talking trees, crazy creatures and a whole mountain (Mt. Crunchmore) made out of Cap’n Crunch cereal.”

It remains unclear if Crunch Island is part of the United States.

He took command of the S.S. Guppy and spent decades battling his arch-nemesis, the pirate known as Jean LaFoote.

The captain came to rule over a small empire of sugary cereals, from the original Cap’n Crunch to Mystery Volcano Crunch.

In 2011, Cap’n Crunch had to fend of rumors that he was being forced into retirement by health-conscious commanders at Quaker. “Food police kill Cap’n Crunch,” one headline proclaimed.

Cap’n Crunch survived. But the latest scandal – and a potential Navy investigation – could prove to be a bigger challenge. If tried and convicted of impersonating a military officer, he could face six months in jail.

A Cap’n Crunch publicist said she was “shocked” by the Navy’s allegations and she is investigating the matter.

“The Cap’n doing hard time? Gasp,” she said.

Encouraging Free Expression by Users

I am having a phone meltdown and going through the hell of figuring out which provider, phone, etc, has minimal acceptable service for a price I can afford.

Here at Global Wahrman, we want to encourage the oppressed user to stand up for their rights, and along those lines, I pass on to you a first class review of Virgin Mobile that brings forth I think some important ideas.

From Ebony M on Yelp:

At first, I was IN LOVE with Virgin. I thought, "AT&T, you can kiss my big, black shiny hiney!" However, now that our relationship with each other has left the honeymoon phase, I see my chaste little Virgin for what it REALLY is: a greedy, no account whore.

WHY, am I constantly being billed for minutes I don't use? I just topped up. I have a boyfriend and a friend name Gerard whom I talked with last night only this billing cycle. My boyfriend and I talk for a few minutes, then we're off the phone. Where my minutes at, bitches????!!!!

Next, your "broadband-speed" internet is ass. It's slower than my mom's dial-up, and that fool's still using AOL. AOL, people. I didn't even know that company still existed. Can't watch Netflix. Got a faster computer but still can't watch hulu. And you KNOW I loves me some "Top Model."

So, now I'm back to f*cking around with whores: At&T, Verizon, Time Warner, come and get me, you skanks. Screw me and then rob me blind. I'll bend over and take it, just as long as the service is better than with Virgin.

http://www.yelp.com/biz/virgin-mobile-usa-walnut-creek#hrid:P8xHfZaT_Y9lBRXgjr5PLQ

The Fate of Giant Robots in Cinema

[in progress 7/1/2013]

There is some real content here: and it is the following.  First, that Pacific Rim is an example of a video game character / voice makes the transition from games to film.  In this case, its the voice of the computer in Portal and it is also the voice of the computer in the giant robot, I think.  It is usually the other way around (e.g. from movie to game).   Second, that water in visual effects is hard, very hard.  And big water, e.g. water that is scaled up is even harder.  I don't care how fast your computers are, although that helps, it is a very tough problem for reasons we can go into later.  Third, the plot device of the "neural bridge" has amusing psychosexual implications, I hope they make good use of it.  Fourth, its been a long time since we destroyed Tokyo in cinema, I hope the filmmakers are up to the task.

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Minor Spoiler Alert, but nothing you would not learn from any trailer.

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The very future of Giant Robots, the apex of sophistication of all cinematic art, is at risk.

This important subgenre, pioneered by the Japanese and others in the far east, was created and nurtured in the field of Anime. But then it jumped out of that subgenre and into the world of mainstream filmmaking through the genius of Michael Bay, that underrated director of robotic conflict, whose Transformers can be said to have changed the very face of the cinema, transforming, as it were, the worn and old-fashioned ideas of story, character, mere plot and nuance into a vigorous and renewed art form of the clash of giant robot on giant robot.

Whereas previous narrative was limited to "person vs nature", "nature vs nature" and so forth, we can now add "robot vs robot" and "robot vs alien" greatly expanding the range of narrative possibilities.

No more weak cop buddy movies for Hollywood, or High Noon in space, or a repeat of Halloween XIII, all were swept away by the magnificence of the Transformers films. But as geniuses are wont to do, Michael Bay became bored with the genre he had helped to create and lost his way. And the genre of giant robots itself fell into decay, fallen from its former glory.

Now the entire field of Giant Robots in the hands of a tyro, a beginner to the art form, Guillermo del Toro, who is an esteemed but imperfect filmmaker. His first Hellboy was a triumph, and so were some of his earlier low budget films to a varying degree, but Hellboy II was a disappointment for reasons that were entirely under his command.  He recouped some ground with Labyrinth of Pan, but one could hardly call Labyrinth a giant blockbuster hit and, as we all know so well, in American all that really matters is money.

Thus the fate of this important genre may ride on the box office performance of Pacific Rim. Hollywood being what it is, were Pacific Rim not a "monster" at the box office, and failed, it would impose a chill on the financing of other giant robot projects, no matter how worthy. That is the normal craven behavior of Hollywood and is just a fact of our lives.

The premise of Pacific Rim is sophisticated and rich in nuance. Giant aliens menace the earth from under the seas, not from outer space, and proceed to destroy civilization and small children while we are powerless to stop them. Perhaps we have a homage here to Godzilla, even though of course Godzilla was not an alien, but an earth creature mutated into its cinematic form through the plot device of nuclear mutations. So the first thing we know is that the plot premise "aliens attack and try to destroy earth" is totally original.

From out of the alien rift comes this aquatic menace to destroy Tokyo

The second important element of Pacific Rim is that all our weapons fail to stop this menace, and we are reduced to one last chance, one last resort, a vintage, early-model Jaeger, which is a giant robotic device controlled by not one, but two, humans in concert.

Is there any science in this fiction? Well, there might be. It is generally believed by those who study such things that a large part of the brain mass of different creatures is proportional to the size of the creature. In other words, whether or not an elephant or a gorilla is intelligent (which they certainly are), a certain amount of their very large brains is used up by the sheer mechanics of controlling their large bodies. The larger the body, the larger the brain, so this argument goes.

The two buddy giant robot controller team

Thus in Pacific Rim, we need not one, but two, humans whose combined brain mass, roughly divided left and right, is necessary to control the Jaeger in its sophisticated war against the sea aliens. The two humans are brought together in "neural fusion" which is a privacy destroying mechanism in which all their dreams, mistakes, fears, emotions and memories are fused. Anyone who agreed to neural fusion must be a very brave person indeed, who would want to be fused with their girl or boy friend? You would break up at once.

The incredibly hot Japanese martial artist teenage lust object robot controller

So through this plot device we actually have a nice undercurrent of sex/relationship politics. Do we have two beefy guys in a homosexual neural fusion, or do we go the heterosexual route, particularly with a hot oriental martial arts master. We do go the heterosexual route, indeed, and it could be fun. Will the neurally fused couple be able to stay together long enough to beat up the giant sea aliens, or will their relationship break apart, will they start throwing things at each other instead of the deadly Kaifu, leading to the defeat of all humanity?

For those of you who are interested in mere visual effects, there are a number of interesting challenges to this film and they generally have the word "water" in them, lots of water.  Water in scale.  Very hard to do.  Very expensive, very annoying.

Pacific Rim has another first to the best of my knowledge.  A voice character from video games has made the transition to feature films.  You may recognize the voice of "Portal" in key places in Pacific Rim as the voice of (what I think is) the computer that helps manage the Jaegers.  If you listen carefully near the beginning of this trailer, you will hear a very recognizable voice say "Pilot to Pilot connection: engaged".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6irOTZ0WskU#at=16

So much is riding on this one film, I hope Guillermo doesn't "fuck it up" as they say.

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Pacific Rim on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1663662/

The Rich Make Sacrifices Too

Although it seems as though America has just in the last few years gone into a structural collapse, sending its manufacturing to an enemy who has vowed to destroy us, impoverishing vast numbers of Americans, it is not only the lower and middle classes which have suffered.   Not only do the rich care deeply about the poor and middle classes as has been shown by their creation of the right wing of the Republican party and their economic policies, but the rich themselves have suffered, terribly suffered, more than most people know.

I am here to testify to you that I have personally witnessed some of the ways that the rich have suffered. These sacrifices have been made behind the scenes and hidden out of shame.  Yes, the cold wind of poverty has blown on the faces of the rich as well as the poor, and yes even the owners of the biggest corporations who laugh at the misery of the poor, even they have had to cut back on essential services.

I got to witness this firsthand when my brother was by accident elevated to the upper classes on a trip to NY.   

Many years ago, my brother, the famous film editor, came to NY to show the movie he was working on at a preview screening. The way this works is that the film editor flies out with a print of the film, works with the projectionist and makes sure that everything is done right, and then returns home with the film. These days of course, there is no film, and the film editor just loads the work print up on his thumb drive and flies to NY.   But back then, the editor flew with the film and kept it under his or her control.   In this case, I think the screening was for World War II submariners as part of a documentary being made for the History Channel, sometimes called the Hitler Channel, and the film was U571 (2000).

Although my brother is certainly not rich, his hotel reservations were made on the director's credit card, and when there was some sort of confusion, they did a complementary upgrade to a suite. And I visited him in this suite and got to see how far down the ladder the rich have been forced to descend.

The suite was a pretty good size, it seemed to be about one quarter of a floor of the 4 Seasons Hotel with a nice view of the Chrysler Building. There were several large bedrooms, and the main living room was of modest but acceptable size, you could have a party for perhaps 200 people in it.   Off on the side, there was a nice room which served as a library / study with built in bookcases. There was a goofy but expensive and large tube television (yes, must have been just before flat panels took over) that sank into a concealed space and then would automatically raise itself on command and other televisions, less ostentatious perhaps, in various rooms.  There was a kitchen for entertaining and a bar or two of course.   There were windows on three sides of the 4 Seasons and at least two entrances.   A sensible hotel room, with the basic amenities.

But you could see, you could tell, that already people were counting pennies and cutting back on essential services.

The suite only had four bathrooms, that I recall. The first three, the master bath and two others had all the normal features, with shower, bath, sauna, a telephone and a television. But the fourth bathroom, although it did have a telephone, did not have its own television.

Its shocking, isn't it, how far down we have come so quickly? One of the bathrooms does not have its own television, so its come to this? When I finally asssured myself that this was indeed true, despite my disbelief, when I figured out what this meant, I had to sit down I was so shaken.

That our rich should have to suffer so cruelly was a shock to me. America was such a great country once.

U571 on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0141926/

Did Space Aliens Fix my Scion XB ? Mercury Retrograde and Other Issues

Mercury has just gone Retrograde again and it will stay that way for approximately three weeks.  I know that some of you do not believe that there is a lattice of causality that underlies the apparent coincidences of the material world, what Jung called "synchronicity", but he was a fool ! He never listened !   

Anyway, I have a story here which should convince even the most doubtful of you that cosmic energy forces must be at work, even if we do not completely understand them.  (I am joking of course, see note 1)

In a previous post we discussed the mystery of Reverse Mercury Retrograde Syndrome which says that the victim will spend most of the year unable to communicate or get much done but that when Mercury goes Retrograde, he / she will suddenly be able to communicate and get things done, things will start working and so forth.   And in this example, we described a case where cosmic energy forces manipulated me into a meeting with the relatives of a very colorful friend.   

You laugh at this superstitious belief, but just wait.

The following is a true story.

Understanding this story requires that you accept that I am *reverse* mercury retrograde, e.g. in this time period is when things go *right*.   

In the last Mercury Retrograde, I was at UCSD to file my paperwork to get a new passport as UCSD is by far the most convenient place for me to get this piece of official business done.  So I am on this beautiful campus, far away in a corner where some outlying administrative buildings are kept. As I come out of the passport office and approach my car I see a person in a pickup truck examining it. He asks me, am I the person with the Scion XB who needs his windshield replaced?

Well, in fact, I do have a Scion XB and it does have a cracked windshield, which I have not gotten fixed for a year because I simply do not have any money for it (sure I have the money, but one of the features of poverty is that you do not deal with problems that are easily solved because you do not know where the next check is coming from). Yes, I say, but I didn't order a new windshield. He looks at his form, he shows it to me, it is not my name, but it is someone else with a Scion XB who ordered a replacement for his windshield and he works in one of these out-of-the-way admin buildings in an obscure corner of the UCSD campus and had made an appointment for this nice person to order the part from Scion and come by at this time to fix his Scion.

In other words, a nice car repair person just happens to order a part for my car, the exact part I need, and delivers it to UCSD in the exact 2 hour period that I am on the UCSD campus (the second time in my entire life that I have ever been on that campus), at the exact place and moment that I am walking to my car (otherwise I would never have even known about this), but it is not for me.

Could this be just a coincidence or did space aliens arrange for the windshield to be there?

Carl Jung's Astrological Chart which must be relevant to this whole discussion in some mysterious way

I would not know how to even begin to calculate the odds of this happening.   People do not just drive around at random with replacement windshields for my car just in case I happen to need one.

Thats the sort of thing that happens to me when Mercury goes Retrograde: cameras start working mysteriously, a friend offers me a project, people appear out of nowhere with spare parts for my car that somehow they knew that I needed.

When the lattice of causality is on your side, any door can be opened, any windshield replaced, any obstacle overcome.

But when the lattice is against you, well, its best not to think too much about that.

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1.  The funny thing about this, is that in fact it probably *is* just a coincidence.  But what are the odds and how would we calculate them?  What this really means is actually something more interesting but explainable/rational than Mercury Retrograde, something along the lines of:  our lives contain examples of "miracles"  (as defined by extremely small chances of occurring) but they probably occur because we are constantly rolling the dice, we just don't notice it.  This is not a new idea, but it probably needs more discussion than I have done here to make it comprehensible.  I admit it, cosmic energy forces or conspiracy would be the more amusing explanation.

2. In a Facebook discussion with Ken Cope, Ken pointed out that many people do not realize that Mercury does not go backwards, that this is apparent motion which is a result of the elliptical orbits of the planets around the sun.   But what is also interesting (to me at least) is that in the 3rd Century BC, if you observed the sky and did not realize about elliptical orbits, and just reported what you saw, you would describe a dot of light that appears to regularly move in a path in the sky, but then from time to time reverses direction, then resumes its original path.  That part was not superstition, that is what they observed, and you could observe it too, and predict when it would happen.   Astrology may be wrong as an explanation of phenomena, but in general it is based on real observations made as best they could at the time.

How Mazewar Escaped from a Lab at MIT in 1977

[6/28/2013 See comments at end from MIT Alumni that fill in some details here]

This is the story of how an early multiperson computer game, way ahead of its time, escaped from a lab at MIT and ended up on networked computers on the West coast and from there out to the rest of the world.

This is also an example of how difficult it is to understand events that happened in another time, another period of history, when the technology was different than we are used to. When this story took place, people used minicomputers or ran batch on mainframes, there was very little graphics, local area networks were research projects, and on and on.

I was taking a break from college and worked at the RAND Corporation and had been on the ARPANET since 1973 which is about as early as you can be on the ARPANET. I had made a lot of friends at MIT at the AI Lab and what we then called the Architecture Machine Group.

RAND sent me on a trip to Cambridge and I stayed a few extra days and slept on Lee Parks' couch at the Architecture Machine. It was on one of these tours that I saw the Spatial Data Management System at the Architecture Machine, or "Put that There". Seth Steinberg was working with Bob Frankston and working on their product after Visicalc, something called TK Solver! which was spectacular.

For some reason, Charles Frankston, who was at the AI Lab then, took the time late at night to show me a multiperson game called Mazewar. Mazewar ran on a PDP 10 computer that had a bunch of graphics computers attached, something called an Imlac. An Imlac was a 16 bit computer all its own that could do dozens of vectors a second, barely. I remember a room with a dozen or so Imlac's against a wall, so I am guessing that this was a graphics lab at MIT of some sort.

The basic game was this: you were in a maze. You can see whatever direction you were facing, down the maze, at a wall, whatever. If you saw another player, you could see them as well, represented as an eye and the eye had a direction so you could see which way the player was facing. If they were facing away from you or at right angles it was quite possible they had not seen you. Using the keyboard (there were no mice), you could navigate (forward, backwards, to the sides), or turn right or left, or stop, or fire straight ahead. If the bad guy was ahead of you, and you fired first, you won. The other player would be reincarnated somewhere else in the maze. In modern terms, it was an early 1st person shooter.

This was probably 1977.

I return to LA and go back to school to get my degree, and my friends leave RAND and move to Xerox where they are working on a secret project. I get a demo of some of their technology, called the Alto, and I am blown away. This is the future. It is the Alto that Steve Jobs was shown when he came up with the idea for the Macintosh, so they say.

The Alto was perfect for Mazewar. It had the screen, the user interface (keyboard/mouse), the network to communicate. It did not have a central computer like the PDP 10 so we came up with a distributed architecture for the game played over the network. Jim Guyton at Xerox did most of the programming. I described the game (Jim had never seen it) and figured out how to make the graphics efficient. Jim releases the game inside Xerox.

My friend Marc Cantor, founder of Macromind aka Macromedia, sees it and does a Mac implementation. Jim is asked to write an article about the Alto implementation for Byte magazine and he does in 1980. This turns out to be one of the first, if not the first, network distributed multi-person game with various points of view, in the public literature.

I am sure we were not the first. But apparently we were close to the first to talk about the ideas in print. Jim now becomes an expert witness to break weird patents on networked games. So do I.

Anyway, Mazewar has a loyal following, it even had a 30 year reunion that I did not know about.

The point is, that back then, people helped you, you shared ideas, it wasn't about making a fast buck, it was about showing these ideas would work when no one but us believed it would.

Now of course, things are different.
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We got the following comments from MIT Alumni:

From Tom Knight on 6/24

That would have been in the Dynamic Modeling group Imlac installation, on the second floor of 545 Technology Square.The Imlacs were connected by serial lines to the Dynamic Modeling PDP-10, running ITS, one of three KA-10 ITS systems on the 9th floor of Tech Square at the time. JCR Licklider, who ran DM, didn't like those new fangled bitmaps. In my opinion (and that of many others) the Imlacs were a programming and support nightmare. The epitome (with the possible exception of the similar GT-11) of the catch phrase "There is a special name for a little bit of intelligence. It is stupidity." Cleverness in the console program led to unending complexity and failure in the mainframe.

From Ed Schwalenberg on 6/24

Fascinating!
Here are a few things I remember:
The Imlacs were owned by the Dynamic Modeling group of MIT LCS, headed by Al Vezza.  Vezza was not fond of Maze, because randoms like you would come in at midnight, pound on the keyboards and break them.  So the installed version of Maze was typically neutered; you had to have a guide like CBF to know where to find a good copy.  Also, there was a screensaver for idle Imlacs; one of the images was a Maze playing position where user AV (Vezza) was directly in front of you, his eyes directly on you.
The cognoscenti also knew how to activate various cheat modes. A regular shot had a propagation delay to the target; control-mumble-cokebottle eliminated that delay.  Another patch activated keystrokes that would let you remove walls in your copy of the maze.  A third would show you the positions of others in the overview.
SAIL had some Imlacs, notably one at John McCarthy's home; I wonder if that was the first "home computer"?  I also wonder whether he ever played Maze on it.
Dynamic Modeling or Dynamod was located in what was then NE43 aka 545 Technology Square. I well remember (from midnight tours led by KLH) the room with a bunch of Imlacs, but I don't remember the room number.  That building has been engulfed (the east wall is now the west side of an enormous atrium) and renumbered 200 Tech Square; it's now Novartis.
Dynamod the research group, and DM the machine, played another role in gaming history, employing the hackers who wrote the original Zork.

Kris Karas adds

Imlacs not withstanding, DM was also home to MDL, a wonderfully cuspy
language, if anybody remembers it.  (I still have my MDL software
reference, forlornly gathering dust on a bookshelf.)  I probably owe
some personal success in the field of software to MDL, MACLISP, and DM.
I taught myself elements of good software structure and design from that.

Bill York adds

I remember that as an early MIT student, getting in to the 2nd floor of 545 TS to play Maze was one of the rarest of privileges, and as others have said I owed my access and my Maze training to Charles.
As Ed mentioned, the key gameplay difference between the standard Maze game and most FPS games was that you weren't so much firing a gun as dropping a time-delay grenade in the hallway. This made for very challenging game play, allowing you time to avoid getting killed if you could manage to duck into a side passage in time, or to doom an opponent by baiting him into chasing you into a corridor where you had left a nasty present waiting.
In addition to Zork (which I lost much more time to than Maze) the DM group (or at least individuals) also produced one of the first wide-area multi-player games, an ongoing trivia contest based on user-submitted content. I believe that there were players from all over the ARPAnet-connected world. I think that Peter David Lebling (part of the Zork creation team with Tim Anderson and Mark Blank) wrote and maintained it. He also perpetually occupied the top ranking slot with a commanding lead over the rest of us peons, though I held down 2nd place for a while. Anyone else remember this?

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Mazewar page on Wikipedia

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

Xerox Alto on Wikipedia

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

Imlac PDS-1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imlac_PDS-1

Should SIGGRAPH Encourage People to Go Into Computer Animation ?

This essay is an editorial on the role I see SIGGRAPH playing over the years to encourage people to go into the field of computer animation in spite of very serious employment issues in the field.  Let me be clear that I am not referring here to the technical part of SIGGRAPH and the role they have played to publish research in this area, nor am I referring in any negative way to SIGGRAPH as an institution in some greater sense, I am however trying to get people aware that people attending SIGGRAPH are making life decisions based in part on the impressions given at SIGGRAPH and that they are being given what I think is a false impression of the likelihood that this field will be able to support them economically.   

I hear a lot of people say "Computer Animation has changed so quickly in the last few years!!". I hear some people say "The business model of visual effects is broken!!"

That is what I hear them say.

Its true that in the last six months over 1,000 people have been laid off of work.  At least 500 at Dreamworks, an unknown number at R&H but well over 500, an unknown number by Sony in Vancouver and an unknown number by Cinesite in London.   And those are just the ones I know about.  1,000 at least.

But I disagree that there is anything surprising about this.   Everything that is happening today was obvious 10 years ago or more, modulo a few details of this corporate takeover or that merger and acquisition. And the business model of visual effects is not broken, not in the least, it never worked to begin with. Nothing has changed, not for a long time. People just didn't want to know. They were too busy selling a vision that they wanted to be true. And many still are selling that vision.

Computer animators lining up for SIGGRAPH

But now one hears that there is a crisis and so people say "What can we do about it?" There are a number of things that people can do about it, but they probably won't because it will violate every bone of their rah-rah, marketing positive body.   Ok, that is not entirely fair.  But the writing has been on the wall for over a decade or more, and people / groups have not taken action until recently, and even then I am not sure that the actions that they are taking are going to help.

The first thing that SIGGRAPH could do that would be responsible here is for them to stop encouraging people to bet their careers and their lives on this field without first understanding what the likelihood of success will be. To encourage people to choose computer animation as a career, whether in technical, research or production, without a clear understanding of what the actual opportunity is would be irresponsible on SIGGRAPH's part, and yet year after year I see SIGGRAPH doing the same thing.   Which is to say, pushing the field and making it appear glamourous and rewarding in spite of the hardship, the collapse of employment, the nature of the companies and business in this field, the failure to establish computer animation outside of a few niches in entertainment, and most of all, ignoring the genuine hardship and poverty of people who have gone into this field, helped to create it, and now struggle to make a living, or fail to make a living, as the case may be.

How many black kids want to grow up and be professional basketball players? A lot, I hear. But in fact there are a very limited number of positions for basketball players even if most of them do turn out to be black. Basketball is a good way to get some exercise, and some fun if you are into that sort of thing, and work off some aggression. I used to play basketball badly, and I went to UCLA for part of my so-called higher education, so I take (college) basketball very seriously.

But as much as I think it is great to encourage kids to play sports, I would consider it irresponsible for people to go around and tell a bunch of ghetto kids that playing basketball is going to be their ticket out of poverty. It isnt, not for all but a tiny percentage of them. Hard work, education, learning skills that people want to pay for, becoming a lawyer or a computer programmer or something else that is practical will get them out of the ghetto, more likely than not.

I bet that pretty much anyone who wants to be a poet when they grow up, or a writer of american musical theatre, or a photojournalist, or a film editor or a contemporary artist of some sort, is well aware that they have a hard road to travel. In general, I would not advise anyone to try to become a professional writer of the sonnet if that is how they expect to make a living. If they can make a living another way, and then spend all their time being the best writer of sonnets that they can be, well that is a different matter. If they are independently wealthy and do not actually have to make a living when they grow up, then indeed it is a reasonable strategy to spend all your time writing sonnets.

But what if you are not independently wealthy, and you have a family to support, and you are expected to be self-supporting, and you discover that in fact there are very few real jobs in this business and you, unfairly or not, do not happen to have one of them? And you are 35 or so years old or older? And you went to SIGGRAPH for 15 years and never is heard a discouraging word? What are you going to do then?  Well, whatever it is they or you are going to do, SIGGRAPH is not going to be there to help you.  They do not even recognize the problem exists.   At the very least, new people should have expectations set correctly, and then they can perhaps make their own choices and take their own chances.

The University of Oxford Graduate Program in Archaeology is arguably the best program for archaeology in the world (or at least it is up at the top of the list) and it used to have a notice on their website that I thought was completely remarkable. I think it said something like

"We hope you will apply to our program and that you will attend. We would love to have you. But you should know that there are very few jobs for Archaeologists in this world and it might be better if you also had some other way to make a living."

I have looked recently and I have not been able to find this notice, maybe they took it down, maybe I don't remember correctly where it was. But I thought to myself, what a classy thing to do. Wouldn't it be great if SIGGRAPH would start doing the same thing?

But they won't, not in a million years.

So what I am saying here, in case it was not clear, is that SIGGRAPH could do a lot better job of letting people know how risky this field is to be in and give people fair warning.

One panel after all these years is not enough.   A Keynote speech that presents successful animation directors is unlikely to be a hard-hitting, no-holds-barred, analysis of where we came from and where we need to go.   Its much more likely to be another in a series of Hollywood promotion events: "See how glamourous and rewarding it is to be a director of computer animation? "

I wonder, did anyone at SIGGRAPH stop to think how this Keynote might appear to someone who has been laid off again and again, whose various companies have gone bankrupt around them, who has to work 80 plus hours a week for people who are not fit to be their assistants or who has been unemployed for years?  "Here are the successful ones, they became directors," SIGGRAPH seems to be saying,  "Too bad you are not one of them, you must be a failure."

Until we as a community come to an understanding of who can be supported economically by this field, I think it is ethically wrong to let people think that they can have a career here.   And if they can not have a career here, then I think that SIGGRAPH ought to try at least to help those who have an investment in this field to find another way.  We, as a community, and SIGGRAPH as our leading professional organization, needs to get on solid ethical ground.

I have some suggestions on how we, SIGGRAPH, can do that, but whether you like my suggestions or not is beside the point.   First, we have to agree that we have a problem here.

Reviewed 3/7/2014

I Am The Most Guilty (Administrative Notes 06/21/2013)

Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa.

I am guilty, I am the most guilty.  It has been hard, very hard, to face reality of another summer here and another SIGGRAPH approaching.   Although I am starting to work and having a little money is an amazing change in my situation, even so the real problems, the 800 lb chickens, are all still coming home to roost, and I am powerless to stop them.

There are about 10 blog posts in progress, each of which needs a solid dose of energy, focus and courage to finish.

The topics include:  when design and story combine with visual effects (an example from television), why the current changes in computer animation are not at all a surprise or even really a change, comments by real people as drawn from the internet about the bankruptcy of computer graphics in film, why and how SIGGRAPH lures children to their doom, why the recently announced Keynote speakers for SIGGRAPH is unbelievably cruel and uncaring, what it is exactly that I think SIGGRAPH should be doing that they are not, whether or not I have had some impact on a recent policy change at SIGGRAPH, the current dismal state of film in cinema.  Not to mention some of the history of computer puppeteering or at least my small part in it, as well as a discussion of the origins of the .obj file format, and other trivia.

I am not entirely sure who is reading this blog, but apparently people are so, thank you, whoever you may be.

The Failure of Moral Progress: The Tragedy of Javascript

From hope to despair, then to hope, then to despair again, is that the fate of all civilizations? To give in to sloth and decay, their monuments to reason covered with the slime of intellectual and moral weakness? To sink again and again into corruption, incompetence, venality and death ? Is hope for progress mere pablum for the weak minded to keep them enthusiastically at their tasks until it is too late and their fate is sealed?

Something has been revealed to me recently that would make me think so.

A computer language is many things but one of them is a (usually formal) specification of a grammar and a syntax that is useful to the bipeds in expressing their ways of doing things, what are sometimes called algorithms, named for the jazz trio of Johnny von Neumann, Alan Turing and Alonzo Church whose band, The Algorithms, dominated avant garde jazz in the 1930s up into the 1950s and whose influence is still heard today. Although writing computer algorithms is a very personal and idiosyncratic form of expression, the notation that the individual artists (and groups of artists) use to express themselves will subtly affect the elegance of the algorithm and can by its nature guide and channel what can be expressed. They may all be Turing equivalent at some theoretical level but they "feel" very different.

There is no one such formal language, there are many, and there will be many in the future. Like music and music notation, they will evolve and some will be appreciated by an elite, and some will be used by the masses. Some, like SNOBOL are esteemed but not in current usage. Others like C++ (pronounced "C Double Cross") are as common as flies on shit and just as attractive.

As in all things there is the matter of taste and the issues of elite style vs common style. The avant garde must by its very definition be avant, changing and moving forward.

Even so, we can look on in horror or at least puzzlement when something that is fundamentally flawed, something that we know is just not going to be good, becomes established and then through the vicissitudes of the uncaring fates explodes onto a hundred million computer screens to become encrusted into just as many computer programs and taught to our children and then to their children in perpetuity.

I have just looked more closely at HTML 5 which is already everywhere and soon will be truly everywhere. One day there will be an HTML 6 no doubt but until then it is HTML 5 that will be used to mark up what our civilization has to say about itself. HTML 5 is a synonym for Javascript, as Javascript is integrated into the very essence of HTML 5. There can not be one without the other. Where you find HTML 5 you will find Javascript.

The more I learn Javascript the more I realize that Satan and the Illuminati, another band from the 1930s, must be chortling with glee at the little joke they have played on our world. For Javascript is a pastiche which pulls a little from column A and column B and column C and Java and Scheme and C and blows smoke in our face. It is a tale told by a billionaire, Mark Andresson, who was in a hurry at the time and would we have done any better if we were in his shoes?     I would hope that we would, but it is very hard to know until we are tested, and we probably never will have that opportunity.   It is what it is, however.

Javascript is not the best we, the computer community, can do in a perfect world.  But it is not a perfect world, and at least Javascript is not the worst that there is out there.    At this point, it is just a fact of life.

___________________________________

HTML 5 Working Group
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/

HTML 5 on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5

NSA, Surveillance, Secrets 5: Motivations, Congressional Approvals and Legal Remedies

[Revised 6/22/2013]

As we learn more about what is going on here, I have to feel that that there are some surprises, but nothing too exciting.  The UK and the USA is using massive metadata collections to do social network analysis and find people.   Many people are surprised by this, I am not.   I am surprised however by some of the vagueness in the approval process.     Whether what Snowden actually released will turn out to be a clear and present danger is unknown at this time.  

Here are some references to articles about how the NSA uses the metadata, a brief discussion of how congress and the judiciary approvals in the process and my own personal opinion that the foreign policy and intelligence uses of this kind of data are so important that we will never get them to stop.  The best we can do, I think, is to control what other uses the data is put to.   This is a somewhat cynical opinion on my part.

I am disappointed to read that the NSA can turn over material that they inadvertently quote end quote stumble upon to the domestic agencies.   I can not see why that would be a good idea; it would not be used directly in court as that surveillance was done without an explicit warrant, (if I understand the law correctly and I probably don't), but I suppose that information in that surveillance could be useful for other parts of an investigation which could be used in court.   The point is that since such surveillance is done under a blanket "warrantless" procedure on metadata, it seems like a very bad idea to use that information for any domestic criminal matter.  It seems to me like you are just asking to get people mad at you over their constitutional rights.

0. So far the best article I have read on the issues here is this one:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/17/evil_in_a_haystack_nsa_metadata?page=0,0

1. The NSA could not care less about your pornography.

You should have concluded from the previous discussion of where the NSA came from that the NSA has bigger fish to fry. They dont read your email and then hand it over to the FBI. Now, on the other hand, the FBI may very well read your email so you should start encrypting it. I don't trust the FBI as far as I can throw them.

2. Approvals

Congressional approval of this cluster of conflicting intelligence agency actions is a work in progress and a subject of debate and acrimony.    The various agencies are under the control (nominally at least) of the executive branch.  The executive branch is supposed to inform Congress of any operation in progress in a timely fashion.   But what is timely and what happens if you have 24 hours to stop someone from doing something bad?   So there are a variety of compromises in place and I will inaccurately try to characterize them here:   (a) Not all of congress needs to be informed, just the select committees on intelligence of the house and the senate.    Between them, that is still quite a few people, about 40, and it is very difficult to keep secrets when 40 people know something.  Nevertheless, that is the basic procedure.  (b) A fallback from that is to brief what is known as the "Gang of Eight".  The Gang of Eight consists of the House and Senate Majority & Minority Leaders, and the ranking bi-partisan members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, for a total of 8 people, a much more manageable number.    (c) For many activities, particularly where surveillance is involved, a special court has been set up involving especially cleared justices to review whether a proposed surveillance can go ahead.   For this purpose, basically a special court/judge has to be on call 7/24.    There is considerable debate about whether this is a real process or whether these courts generally rubber stamp the requests.   This last item is under a body of law that has changed over the last 30 years known as FISA or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act  of 1978.

What you want to do if you want to understand this is to read about FISA and how it is has changed and what the controversies are.

But in the case of the current matter, when Pres. Obama says that "Congress and the Judiciary were informed" he is probably referring to the briefing of either the Gang of 8 or the full intelligence committees (I am not sure which) and the special court set up by FISA.

I promise you that this is all complicated and you will spend time understanding how it is supposed to work, and then how it is alleged that it does work, or, depending on who you talk to, does not work.

https://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/
http://www.cfr.org/intelligence/crs-reauthorization-fisa-amendments-act/p30877

3. Future Direction

You will never be able to get the intelligence community to give up looking for the next Zimmerman Telegram.   But it might be possible to make the fruits of surveillance less useful to the state apparatus. The simplest way is to make information gained by surveillance inadmissable as evidence in criminal or civil court.  Furthermore, it would be useful to make the release of surveillance material for purposes other than national security a criminal act.   If they are just sneaking around for national security purposes, then there is no need for them to be able to use the data for anything else, like violations of the criminal code.   Furthermore it should be possible to sue for damages for the non-national security uses of their research.  These changes in law, which may or may not be possible, would certainly reduce the harm that came from surveillance, a surveillance which I should say is probably inevitable.

The jury is out about whether these recent events are net positive or net negative. 99% that has been revealed is the least bit of a surprise to me. (Note, ok there were some surprises when I read more details about FISA and how that works.)  Maybe it will activate people to outlaw even this kind of surveillance, and that might be good.

We will see.