Stuart Cudlitz (? - 2015)

My friend Stuart Cudlitz has passed away after a long illness. I know of Stuart through my friend Sally Syberg as she had worked at Colossal Pictures in SF for many years, and so had Stuart. Stuart had the misfortune of working on several interesting visual effects projects and formed the incorrect belief that this was a creative way to work in the motion picture industry (the belief is incorrect, because the two pictures were exceptional, which is one of the reasons their visual effects were sent to Colossal to begin with).

At one point his significant other got a good job with Nickelodeon in NYC and he moved there, perhaps a little over a decade ago, and we spent some time together. He told me how difficult it was to have a beautiful wife who loved him and supported him in Manhattan where all he had to do was paint fine art or whatever else he wanted to do. It seems funny in retrospect, at the time I was bitterly jealous, of course.

My friend Stuart was a complete character and he will be missed.

Please go enjoy your day while you still can.

A biography of Stuart as taken from his website (see below)

Stuart Cudlitz is an artist, writer, filmmaker and educator. As an exhibiting multi-media studio artist and a published illustrator, writer and composer he has applied these legacy skills to the design and direction for his work many credits on commercial and independent films and interactive media employing emerging technologies. As a guest lecturer and adjunct faculty Cudlitz utilizes a professional studio approach to teach curriculum in both MFA and BFA programs with emphasis on techniques in visual thinking, interdisciplinary animation methodology and the integration of traditional arts and narrative techniques across all media. He is currently writing a book on the relationships between the legacy of traditional art methodology and digital media creation and distribution while continuing to provide creative direction and design solutions for the media, communications and electronics industries. Recent accomplishments include co-invention of a proprietary patented technology for the storage, retrieval and exchange of personal profile data enabling consistent interpretation across multiple device, applications and data services based on a social networking model.  Professional Associations include ASCAP, ACM and IEEE.

Stuart's Website

http://www.stuartink.com/

Pictures of Stuart and Lili
http://www.yogile.com/xwfu9n5c#51m

Countermeasures Once You Have Been Spoofed

Several months ago, my friend Ken Cope reported that my name was being used on Facebook to sell some horrible weight reduction product. That was weird but I did nothing about it. I now think I know how it happened and I am writing it up so that you can possibly avoid these things.

For a variety of reasons, I run Windows on one of my laptops. This is the device I use to read books in bed and on the train so it needs to have a Kindle reader which means it can not be Linux/Unix but must be Windows or Mac OS. It came installed with Windows 8 which is, IMHO, a disaster but I installed classic menu and tried using some apps from the Microsoft store including a world clock. Well, one of these apps had a virus.

Or possibly the virus came with a plugin for Google Chrome.

In any case, Google Chrome started behaving obnoxiously bring up billions of advertisements, so I reverted to Firefox and the problems mostly went away.

But then all of a sudden when I tried to edit my Kindle parameters, it brought up a window to Amazon but unbeknownst to me it was really a hacked non-Amazon window with a questionnaire. I foolishly filled it out and it contained no information of value. I have no idea what the point of that was. But it was clear to me that somehow my browser had been hacked and that it had whatever my browser knew, which included passwords.

I brainwiped the computer and went and changed all sites that had passwords that the browser on the computer knew. You must never use these passwords again because it now has it in its database and it will make use of them on another account of yours should you reuse it.

Probably you should not have your browser ever remember a password. Once a program is infected, delete it. Once a password is compromised, never use it again. Never load applications from the Microsoft store.

The Genre of the Short Weapons Film

draft

As we endure the vast explosion of creativity enabled by the long-coming, often heralded, and deeply regretted democratization of the filmmaking and film distribution processes, we would expect, and we are told to expect, the emergence of new genre of film, in particular, of short film. These genre have exploded in number and, almost unnoticed, are embedded in our consciousness and evoke all the human emotions of humor, boredom, disgust, fear, envy, awe and hatred in varying amounts.

Oscar Wilde supposedly said, in a quote I have never been able to find, that “thank God not everyone writes plays, because if they did we would have to see them and that would be tedious.” Or words to that effect. 

One problem with being sarcastic is that every once in a while one is sincere and it can be difficult for one's readers or audience to catch the transition from overt sarcasm to sincere admiration, especially if one has a sense of humor that can be misunderstood. So be warned, this essay, about half way through, will turn sincere in admiration, as we talk about the genre of our nominal topic, the short weapons film.

Ah, the short weapons film! Lost among billions of short films about cute pets, fitness, how to fix your toilet, the prodigal grandchild, sex, young women in their underclothes, young men in their underclothes, narratives about crossing the border, self-hypnosis, TED talks, political or other character assassination, lists of things found in movies (10 best sexist jokes, 10 best science fiction movies that fail), films about the weather, machinima with voice over delivering narratives on how to exterminate aliens in your new synthetic Corvette, among all of these we also have the subgenre of the “short weapons film”.

The “short weapons film” comes in primarily two forms, the professional and the amateur.

The lesser form is the professional sales film that accompanies each new and proposed weapon system. Be it a missile, or a sidearm, or a new French small submarine for special forces insertion and “exfiltration”, these short films are professional (that is, people are being paid to make them) and contain certain standard elements in a predictable fashion. They are less than 10 minutes long and narrate how new technology and ideas solve a problem in conflict resolution whether that means seeing in the dark, blowing something up, travelling fast or what have you.  The film moves on to describe the particular solution incorporating live footage and synthetic imagery to show how this technology can solve this problem.  Story structure is straightforward and leads to the "obligatory" scenes, such as a solid set of time lapse photography of a missile launch or a target being hit.  Audio is typical for the genre of the short industrial film.  Often just voice over with a theme or inspirational music at certain times.  Occasionally a few seconds of an interview with a key weapons designer or customer.  Each subgenre of weapons film has its own conventions.  For example, few films about submarines can resist using that famous sonar ping at least once or twice in their film.

These films are boring  but they may have interesting elements if you happen to be interested in the technology.  

But there is another genre of short weapons film that is enthusiastic, exciting, fun, unfunded, amateur and occasionally completely drop dead brilliant.

This is the short film that is made by the sailors or soldiers themselves to describe their work, or demonstrate their esprit de corps or just show how much fun it can be to pilot an A-10 close support aircraft, or fly a modern air superiority fighter next to its brethren from WW 2, or the gorgeous choreography and jaw-dropping danger of flying from a carrier, or landing a helicopter at night in the desert. These are edited raw footage with a rock & roll background theme, generally speaking, and natural sounds from the activity from the point of view of the observer, the pilot, the ground crew, the control tower. The technical quality of the imagery varies from excellent to extreme low resolution and quantized night footage, but the authenticity of the imagery is never in doubt. The sense of presence, of being there, in Iraq, on the aircraft carrier, what have you, is genuine and completely sincere. These are young people flying jets, jumping out of airplanes and blowing things up.

Here is an example of an Airborne exercise in which people jump out of perfectly good helicopters when in the air:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od79V-gndfw

This art form is transient and perishable.  The issue of the music copyright for small art films continues to come up.   The classic in this case is the short film about U2 spy plane practice landings and take off.  The U2 is known as the "Dragon Lady" for a variety of reasons.  Among other things it does not have normal landing gear to save weight.  So it discards its gear when it takes off and then basically does a modified crash landing when it lands with the pilot being unable to see much of anything.

The original film was brilliant, but the music was not their's.  So they substituted another track, which is of course not as good.   But if you wish, you can watch the video with the sound off, and then play the real track in the BG with some manual synchronization.  Its really good.   The music is "She Hates Me" by Puddle of Mudd.

U2 being chased by the cops

U2 Dragon Lady: She fucking hates me (the video, turn the audio off)

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=063_1404845846

She Hates Me by Puddle of Mudd (the music)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYE4CVhVkhw

For those of you who want to sing along, the words to She Hate Me are here:

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/puddleofmudd/shehatesme.html

Yes, they got one of their chase cars to pretend to pull the U2 pilot off the plane and check him for drunk driving.

Not all these films are this brilliant of course.   But they are generally quite fun in a certain way.

Note: This post will be updated if I can find better versions of the video, or even the video with the original music track. Trust me, this is worth it.

_______________________________________________

France will Build World's Most Advanced Submarine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqwkjOnJy78

Scopene Class Submarine

http://www.naval-technology.com/projects/scorpene/

What is this Cancer Thing All of a Sudden

As you read this, I have four friends who have been diagnosed with cancer that has metastasized and are under various courses of treatment, usually radiation and chemo.  They range in age from 30 to 60.  None of them have particularly evil habits so far as I know, e.g. no heavy drinkers or smokers or obesity, etc.   Furthermore, 3 of the 4 are close friends of mine, people who I collaborate and interact with.  People I will miss should anything happen to them.  (The other one is a more distant friend, but still a friend).

Of the four, three of the individuals are walking around, and one of them is in a hospice and unable to speak. 

When you were growing up, did your parents, or school, or other institution (church, synagogue, community center, whatever), did anyone happen to mention that your life could be cut short at any time and that you could have your body ripped apart by a legion of vicious and deadly diseases?

Did they mention that you could be of any age when this happens, and that while there are a variety of things you can do to avoid this fate at least in terms of the odds, that ultimately it is up to chance and how your genes feel like mutating.

Also, if you catch it early, in other words, if you worry about things like this all your life and get tested regularly, then you can probably, but not necessarily, extend your life, i.e. increase survivability. But if you fail to worry about these things then it is possible even likely that you will not notice the problems until it is far too late.

It seems to me that this sucks.

I also have two friends who are HIV positive and have been under treatment for years, perhaps a decade. But they seem to be out and about and doing well.

I have also noticed that my friends who leave this world early all seem to be the nicer ones.  The evil people seem to go on forever.   What is going on here?

The Anomaly of Enjoying Jupiter Ascendant

George Lucas has famously said that movies are binary: they either work for you or they don't. If they do, then you ignore any little flaw. But if they do not, then every flaw or potential flaw is noticed and used against it. I do not know if Mr. Lucas was original in this observation, I doubt it, but ever since I read that I have noticed that he seems to be correct. All movies have flaws of course, but when you are caught up in a film, one is happy to ignore the problems and issues that in other circumstances would be seen as deadly.

The question then becomes, what leads a member of the audience to lean one way or the other? From acceptance and enjoyment to rejection and boredom or worse? One aspect of this choice may be what is called the “cockroach in the salad” effect. Lets say you are eating out at a fancy restaurant and you have ordered a salad and when it arrives the first thing you see is a disgusting cockroach on top wiggling its antennae at you. You call the waiter over and he removes the offending cockroach and salad but the damage has already been done. It will be hard to get beyond that terrible first impression. On the other hand, let us say you are at a restaurant and see nothing that you particularly want, but you order something and to your amazement, it is really good. From that point on, everything works for you.

So my argument here is that the basis of cultivating a positive impression of a creative work is a mashup of “first impressions” with “low expectations”. If you did not expect much, then getting something really good is likely to push you over the edge to a positive impression. And vice versa. Until you get that push, whether positive or negative, then you are in a state of uncertainty. Is this film any good or not?  

I don't have any other way of explaining the apparent anomaly of enjoying “Jupiter Ascendant” (JA) a film I was born to hate. What could have caused this odd reversal of expectations such that I actually enjoyed watching this film? Can Science explain this or must it always remain a mystery?

Consider the following:

First, we have a dinner sequence in which our plain jane heroine introduces us to her Russian extended family in America. Its actually very funny. You mean the Wachowski brothers actually have a sense of humor? How would we have known?

 Jupiter's sister before and after a special bath.  Ah, refreshing !

Second, we have a classic theme in fantasy fiction, the “person of noble birth who does not realize that she is of royal blood and possibly the heir to the throne”. In this sub-genre, the kids are separated from the adults by the manner in which it is revealed that our average neighborhood girl is actually “her majesty”. In JA this is actually done quite well and unexpectedly. A fight sequence between two alpha males upsets a hive or three of bees which scares the shit out of our female lead, but no need to worry, the bees have been genetically programmed to treat “royals” differently and so our two fighting alpha males break off their sparring to recognize that something quite odd has happened. The babe has been revealed as a member of a royal family of some sort.

Bees show the way

Third, after our plain jane babe has had her butt saved by our hero, she tries to encourage him to ignore her royal birth and kiss her. He refuses, revealing that he is not really a man, but closer to a dog, or a wolf. She comes back with a splendidly stupid response: she has always gotten along well with dogs. Its does not persuade. This is funny.   It occurs to me that in certain ways this incident is itself a flaw in the movie. If our hero was really descended from a dog, then he would have no trouble taking advantage of the situation.  But I digress.

Fourth, the sequence with the candles and certain aspects of the wedding sequence are lush and clearly represent the director's desire to have a big wedding one day.

Fifth, the two brothers of this royal family are monumentally fucked up.   Parents, take note, do not name your child "Titus", it never seems to work out.

What a creepy asshole this guy is.

But most of all, who could not like a movie where the lead babe keeps having to remind people that "I am not your damn mother"?

So what we have here is an overdone, weird movie in the same genre of, for example, the original Dune novel: a space opera with exotic economies, insane royal familes and fight scenes between things bred to be good at fighting.

Overblown, a misfire, there is no doubt that it is a miscalculation on a galactic scale, truly a stupid movie.

Nevertheless, as a 12 year old, emotionally and psychologically, I found it often to be an entertaining movie and was willing to overlook its tragic flaws.   I also have a tendency to hunt and peck at my movies.  I am not bound, like so many are, to watch a film from beginning to end.  I prefer to "sample", sometimes with the sound off, in order to better appreciate its higher values.   When properly used, this technique can improve most movies.

Postscript

It did not hurt that the uber-schmuck, John Gaeta, was somehow deposed from his role as visual effects supervisor on this semi-epic. I shudder to think what manner of ego-swine must have replaced him/it. I am sure that Mr. Gaeta will enjoy a new career in the food service industry or some other profession worthy of his talents.

American Cockroaches Lunge for Freedom in Communist China

In a daring escape from slavery, a million cockroaches escaped from a Chinese farm where they were being raised by cockroach slavers. Their escape was aided by an unknown “Friend of Cockroaches Everywhere” who destroyed the integrity of the horrible slave chambers that the cockroaches were contained within.

The cockroaches were being raised as a commercial venture to provide critical components of Chinese folk medicine which is based in part on pieces of cockroaches torn from their still living bodies.  Thus these innocent victims of Communist oppression were headed for certain death had they not made their escape.

In a heartening moment of cultural diversity and American Exceptionalism, the freedom loving cockroaches were American cockroaches, imported from N. America where there is said to be no shortage of free-range cockroaches.

Freedom loving cockroach making a dash

“This is one tiny step for a cockroach, one giant leap for cockroaches everywhere,” said an anonymous cockroach-loving organization in China. “We hope that this will be just the beginning.”

The oppressive Communist Chinese dictatorship was working to destroy the escapees by any means possible, reported sources.

http://phys.org/news/2013-08-million-cockroaches-china-farm.html#nRlv

The Cost of Retraining Workers in the 3D Industry

draft

[In this post, we discuss what I am calling Strategy 2, which is that the disenfranchised worker attempts to leave the industry he has trained for and worked in by retraining him or her self by getting an advanced degree in a different subject at the university.   In a previous post, we discussed the out-of-pocket costs of Strategy 1, which is to try to persevere in the field he or she has worked in by staying current and attending various conferences.  You can find that discussion here.]

Lets examine the real costs to society of unemployment, especially unemployment that is caused by foreign subsidies that damage industries in other countries particularly our country, since that is what we have in the train wreck that is computer animation, that foreign subsidy thing.

A friend who believes in the free market says that those who got screwed by foreign government subsidies are worthless garbage who lost out on the “free market” and deserved what they got.  How an industry that has been devastated by foreign subsidies could be confused with a free market, I do not know. Besides, we have never really had much of a free market in this country, at least not for the rich. You know what they say, its socialism for the rich but the free market for the rest of us.  

Since employment in this industry in this country was severely impacted by these subsidies, and since our government failed to act, presumably at the request of the studios although again no one really knows, nevertheless we can calculate what it will cost to retrain these workers into another field.

But how many workers were displaced?   No one knows the numbers, so far as I know, and no one cares to know as far as I can tell.   But we can look at a few indicators and make our own rough estimates.   I am going to guess that the peak employment in this country for computer animation in the service of visual effects and animation was roughly in the years 1997 - 2004 or so.   If we look at employment then and compare it to now we will get a rough estimate of the change.

R&H goes from 600-1000 people to zero, Sony Pictures Imageworks which used to have over 1,000 people working has moved production to Vancouver.   Digital Domain which used to also be over 1,000 people I think are down to a few hundred.   ILM which was over 2,000 at one point is now about 500 according to one estimate of someone currently working there.    Dreamworks Feature Animation laid off 1,000 people in S. California and then closed their N. California office.   At this point we are nearing 5,000 people.

Now some of these people have in fact found employment overseas.   And some of these people, I do not know how many, will be able to slide into other careers with only some disruption.   Some will be able to work for Google, some for Facebook, and some will get married and have families while their spouse works. I think that it is mostly the mid-level and senior people who have specialized in computer animation and spent over a decade in that field who will especially suffer.  I do not know the numbers but I am going to guess here for the purposes of this post, 2,500 people.  I hope this number is conservative.

Unfortunately most of these people live in California which is very expensive, and many of them have significant others or families that they are supporting.   I estimate a minimum monthly expense of roughly $4,000 which breaks down to $2,000 for rent, $1,000 for utilities and food, $1,000 for car payment, insurance and everything else.  I realize that outside of California these rates might seem exorbitant.  But it costs a lot of money to rent in LA and SF and you don't get much for your money.  At least in NYC, you are living in NY, goddamnit, but not in LA and SF where it is merely expensive without returning any value that I can see.  And you need a car out here.  Those who do not drive will not be permitted to play.

There are several paths one might take to create a new career, but one of them, and the only one I am going to price here is to go to a university and get an advanced degree.   That will take 3-5 years and cost roughly $30,000 per year.  One might get a masters degree in computer science, or get an MFA in Art and look at teaching.

Thus if we estimate 2,500 people for three years getting an advanced degree then we get 2,500 * (48,000 + 30,000) = 195 million per year for three years or just under 600 million in total, adjusted for interest, net present value and what have you.

It goes without saying that the family goes off health insurance unless the school provides some, and I am not sure what the policy is for students with families.  It goes without saying that the kids get the substandard public education we give to our worker-swine, they don't deserve the elite education of private schools. Also that unemployment insurance, should they receive any and I never have in spite of what the law says or what is taken from my salary, is a pathetic joke and does not amount to much.

Now you may not care about these people and you may object to retraining them on theoretical grounds. You may believe that these people deserve to have their lives destroyed. But I disagree, I do not think they deserve to have their lives destroyed. I think that the society that failed to protect their jobs through greed or malfeasance has the duty to retrain them. That is what I think.

But even if you do not agree with me, then at least I hope we can agree that the people who made a commitment to this field, many of them at the urging of respectable organizations like SIGGRAPH, will now have costs they must bear in order to get into a different field in mid-career.  And those costs, paid for by the individuals affected, come to not less than $600 million over three years.  At least. My point is that there are real costs to society of failing to deal with this issue and of training too many people (or whatever we did) for this field.

The good news is that this money is easy to get. The studios have made much more money than this using the subsidies and making product based on the technology which we invented and was then shipped overseas to take advantage of slave labor and subsidies. So they have plenty of money. Have them pay. That would be only fair and I am sure that they will be happy to do so.

Cities Skylines Covered with Dead Bodies and Trash

This is a mini-review of Cities: Skylines or is it Skylines: Cities.

I have been playing whatever it is called now since the day it came out. Most computer games hold no interest for me, but games based on the simulation of society or the simulation of conflict at the strategic level are interesting. I have my own ideas on such things which I may prototype one day, although only if I can stay out of the madness, greed and hypocrisy of the game industry.

Unfortunately, Cities Skylines just wasnt tested before release. About the time you reach the population of 10-15,000 people, your city starts getting mired in trash and dead bodies. The stupid tweety bird that tells you about it is useless. All you can do is put trash heaps every two feet and the same with crematoriums and pray.

Just as annoying is the bug in the model such that it is impossible to have enough workers of the right type around. Nothing you do will make a difference, you are just fucked. Maybe the developers just ran out of time or money?  Who knows.

Games such as this do not have to be realistic in order to be interesting. Nevertheless, this game, whatever it is called, will have lots of semi-realistic features and challenges to recommend it to those who enjoy such things, when, that is, they have fixed some of the problems.

We see by this example one of the problems with individuals, or small teams, modestly financed groups doing games: they may simply not have the resources to debug the problems that are caused by interesting internal simulations. Cities Skylines is a good effort, and shows promise, but is frustrating as hell in its current form once you get beyond the baby cities.

And then there is the bug whereby you can not save your game.  Lets not go there, its too frustrating to think about.  Presumably that one will be fixed sooner than later.

Save your money and your time and wait for them to fix the bugs. When these bugs are fixed, perhaps others will be revealed.  But nevertheless if they can fix it up to the 100,000 population level, that will probably be sufficient for the majority of players.   Shows an A- for effort but a B- for testing. Promising but frustrating in its current incarnation.

Maybe wait three months and see where things are?

Cities Skylines on Steam

http://store.steampowered.com/app/255710/

Aesthetics, Computing and the Internet

draft /. a friend has pointed out that the development of lisp needs to be elaborated upon here and I agree with him.   So that will be written sometime soon, I promise....

They say that the internet is a bold new paradigm. They say that you can not judge the internet by what came before because it is totally new and those who attempt to judge it by past criteria are just not with the program and are whining uselessly. Well, indeed they might be whining uselessly, that much is true.

There are trends, patterns in aesthetics whether you know it or not, or care or not, and computing is about aesthetics from beginning to end. Like architecture, the aesthetics happen to hit the hard wall of engineering reality more often than other art forms, and indeed the engineering or construction aspects are fundamental, required, de riguere, both real and not real, but mostly real.

Nevertheless, we can perceive patterns in the aesthetics of this people's art of writing HTML just as we may see patterns in fine art, if we care to look.

In the following, we are going to discuss some of the history of ideas, which I know is very offensive to some of you more practical types. Either take a pill and calm down or go away.

Once upon a time, a generation of programmers grew up with the implied aesthetics of an experimental operating system from Bell Telephone Laboratories, an elite center of excellence in our country which no longer exists, the center that is, destroyed as it was by our government and the so-called “free market”. But at that center of excellence, an OS, later called UNIX, was developed with a minimal OS approach. A bit of the “less is more” theme going on here. True, some of the minimal nature was imposed on the work because of limited resources, but isnt that often true in art? Time passed and Unix got out into the world and then morphed into its bastard younger brother Linux, for better or for worse, that is what we are stuck with. I happen to like Linux and think it is better than we, collectively, deserve, but that is another topic.

One of the tricks about Unix was that it was designed by some of the best and brightest that our country had to offer.

Another aesthetic, which was a little busy for my tastes, was one we might call the MIT Lisp Machine style of software. This was written, it seemed to me, by hundreds of MIT graduate and undergraduate students cranked on speed, and it had many nuances, options, and so forth. Half the time it baffled me. But ultimately it was functional, well documented, and you could tell that while they might have been a little wordy and option-happy by the standards of a Unix fellow, there was no doubt that the people involved in writing, using and documenting this technology were very smart. Very smart indeed.

But now we enter the Internet age where we have vast software packages, their associated frameworks, and group sourced semi-documentation. This technology is to the Lisp machine what Lisp was to Unix, it is busy beyond belief. Every option has an option and every options' option has an exception. Whereas Linux and Lisp was designed by the best we had to offer, most of the Internet stuff, a bastard child of another project of excellence, but long ago, the Arpanet, is motivated not by excellence but by the most important philosophical principles of our great country: naked greed combined with arrogance, stupidity, ignorance and hypocrisy. There is no need to document, they say, it is all documented by the group mind. Not that there are not good parts to the infrastructure and conventions and languages and frameworks of the Internet, indeed there are. They are there along with everything else.

In other words, lest this sound too negative, the Unix and Lisp movements were movements by an intellectual elite, as was the Arpanet, whereas the Internet is a true people's movement. Rough, inconsistent, good, bad, horrible, insane, and all within a few characters of each other.

There is no order nor can there be, nor could there be, any order. It is the group fuck raised to the 1000^th power. Let us embrace the new aesthetic. It may be insane but it is our insanity.

Bees Get Hooked on Nicotine and Fall Over Dead say Scientists

With hive collapse syndrome threatening world civilization by dying before their residents, the bees, can serve their primary economic purpose for mankind, which is to pollinate agricultural crops in our great country, scientists have looked high and low to find the cause and help prevent economic disaster which would of course affect the earnings of the shareholders, a fate all good Americans, whether man or bee, can agree must be avoided. The bees can goddamn well die as far as we are concerned as long as they pollinate beforehand.

Now science has proven that the alleged cause of the threat to the shareholder's earnings is not, as the tree huggers have said without a shred of proof, caused by harmless and helpful pesticides which are only working to improve shareholder value, not damage it.  No the real cause of hive collapse syndrome is not the innocent and beneficial pesticides, but lies within the bees themselves.

This lazy bee can barely stand up she is so drunk on nicotine, nectar and pollen.

In an important new article published in Nature, science has proven that the real cause of hive collapse sysndrome is the bee's moral turpitude and lack of anglo-saxon work ethic. Instead of steadfastly pollinating like they should, they get hooked on nicotine-related substances and abandon their economic purpose and spend all day just lazing around and smoking, or in this case, sipping, nicotine. Its not the pesticides per se that are causing the bees to become slackers and suck nicotine until they fall over dead. It is their own lack of moral willpower.

One more time American industry has been vindicated. The bees need to go to church more often and teach their children the benefits of moderation and hard work and this problem is solved.

An article about this in The Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/22/bees-may-become-addicted-to-nicotine-like-pesticides-study-finds

Announcing my Write-In Campaign for the Executive Committee of ACM SIGGRAPH

draft / please feel free to make comments, suggest annotations, etc.

It is with some nervousness that I announce my candidacy for the Executive Committee of ACM SIGGRAPH as “Member at Large”.

A “member at large” is one who has a vote but has no particular responsibility besides participating int he discussion and voting on the issues. I would not want the responsibility of being Treasurer, for example, or President.

So there are three things to discuss: why I am running, what I would do if elected and finally the mechanics of being allowed to run for office. The third issue, how to get nominated, is the least interesting, but of critical importance. I want to discuss this first, and then get into the more complicated matters of why and what I would I do.

To run for the board of SIGGRAPH, one must stand for election and be voted in by the entire membership. But, in order to stand for election one must either be nominated by a nominating committee or one must run a write-in campaign and get a certain number of signatures from members of national SIGGRAPH. The number of signatures required is 1% of the current national membership which translates to between 90 and 100 people. 100 to be safe as usually in these matters a few signatures will be disallowed for one reason or another.

I first attended national SIGGRAPH in 1980, but I had been attending local SIGGRAPH since 1978 or so

Obviously, running a write-in campaign is a hassle, why not just be nominated by the Committee? Good question. The answer is that I tried but they failed to nominate me. I had a very pleasant and informative meeting with the Committee which I found quite entertaining but it did not result in my nomination. I may have given the Committee some reason to believe that I would work in support of issues that they did not think were appropriate for SIGGRAPH to be concerned about, such as the collapse of computer animation production employment in this country and its failure to be provide substantial employment outside of the Entertainment industries.

But even if it turned out that my ideas were not appropriate and practical, I think it is of great importance that we discuss these issues and see to it that we can do what we are allowed to do. At the very least, SIGGRAPH can acknowledge that there is a problem instead of blissfully ignoring it and enticing people into a field where they will not be able to work. Which has been their policy for over a decade. Archaeology can make it clear what the odds are of a budding archaeologist to work in that field, Computer Animation can as well.

'

There is also some belief out there that SIGGRAPH only wants educators to be on the Executive Committee, which, if true, is a very bad idea on their part and certainly needs to be discussed with the membership. The strength of SIGGRAPH was always interdisciplinary and serving the interests of any one or two groups would be contrary to the spirit that made SIGGRAPH the phenomenon that it once was and which it is not any longer.

Whatever their reasons may be, SIGGRAPH allows for nominations of another sort. In this second path to nomination, one must collect the signatures of 1 percent of the eligible members of national SIGGRAPH. I believe that translates to roughly 90 or 100 signatures. If one gets those signatures in a proper format then one can run for election. One still has to be elected by the general membership of course.  This just gets you on the ballot.  

I will discuss in future posts why I believe I am qualified and why I bring a legitimate point of view to the board of SIGGRAPH. But at the very least, should I be elected, I will write about what decisions SIGGRAPH makes and why in a form that may be of interest to those of us who are not educators per se. Thus, at the very least, I think I will provide a useful service should I be elected.

And so I am asking my friends and colleagues to find me at SIGGRAPH in LA this year and, if you are a member, sign a petition to allow me to run for election. If it were possible to put up some sort of notice at your place of work or anyplace else you think that SIGGRAPH members might be, that would also be helpful. Or if you are not attending this year, but are a member, and you want to help, contact me and we can make arrangements for you to sign a petition without having to track me down on site.

Even if I get the appropriate signatures, and even if I am elected, I am chronically underfunded and I may have to make special arrangements to actually serve on the board. But I won't worry too much about that now nor should you. If I am elected, I am sure I can scrounge something up for airfare and hotel or whatever else this activity will cost.

I want to leave you with the thought that we once believed that SIGGRAPH was very important in creating this revolution and that we owe it to the organization and its history to try and make it as good as it can be in the circumstances of the tragedy of its simultaneous great success and failure which is the situation that we have today.

Thank you.

The Cost for the Unemployed of Keeping Current

[In this post we discuss a strategy for someone who is unemployed in the field of computer animation who chooses to stay in the field by staying current, in other words, by waiting out whatever the current down in the industry and be available when it goes back up.  This may be a reasonable strategy for several reasons including the fact that both the entertainment industry and our economy in general is subject to vast variations in employment at various times.  Strategy 2, which is to exit the industry by retraining can be found here.]

draft / being rewritten 

Let us imagine that for one reason or another you end up taking an “unexpected career hiatus”. As many as 30 percent of the American adult population is taking such a hiatus right now. (1) Or suppose, you just get bored, or your old industry has gone away (say for example you were a photographer), and you are thinking of entering a new field. Or maybe you just want to take your existing skills and do something else with them, something worthwhile.

Even if you are not planning to do this, you might want to think about it anyway, because it might not be your choice. Someone might decide that you are no longer valuable and there are no positions for you in the field you formerly were in. Possibly even a field you helped invent. Don't think it could happen to you? Of course, you are exempt, I am quite sure.   Ahem.

Well of course a TED talk on the subject would advise you to “reinvent yourself” or perhaps that you must “think outside the box”. Whatever the fuck that means.  We will have some out of the box thinking later on this post, perhaps.

But back here in the real world, if you get whacked by the free market system and are left hanging without visible means of support, there are a variety of things I think that you will have to do to get back on board. The point of this and future posts is to indicate a few practical things that you can do to reenter a field, or enter a new field, and what such things will cost.

Of course we are not going to discuss the real costs of being forced to find a new career which would include the opportunity costs, the mistake of choosing one field over another, and so forth. Those costs are unknowable. No, I am just talking about the out-of-pocket costs of going forward. In the case of computer animation, this means such things as keeping up with current work, appearing at conferences, being an active member of professional societies, finding and maintaining an affiliation, constructing a marketing image, possibly learning current tools and demonstrating new work, whether production oriented (e.g. a film or real time animation) or research (e.g. research in the form of a publishable paper), or possibly a patent.

In this post we are just going to discuss the out-of-pocket costs of attending various conferences and professional meetings. All the other concerns will be for later posts.  This post  is just about attending specific events so that you can stay informed, be seen by and talk to other members of your field, and meet new members.

Furthermore, I am going to do something else that is all-too-rare on the internet, I am going to speak from personal experience. This is what certain things costs, because in my experience, this is what they cost. You may get a better deal, good for you. You may have friends who live in that part of the world who will put you up at their house and drive you around. Like I say, good for you. The rest of us will be living in cheap hotels and taking the bus and that costs money.

So now lets get down to details.  This is my list, your list will differ.  But I believe you must attend conferences of this type regularly, perhaps not every year, but often enough to be seen as a member of the community that each of these events represent.  But there are certainly other conferences, and there are other ways to achieve some of this without attending an expensive conference. Generally though these other options are ways to mitigate the effects of not attending these conferences.  In other words, if you had the money, and you certainly have the time, then you should just go to the conference.

If you are trying to be in this field of computer animation, then I would advise you to attend the following conferences: SIGGRAPH, NAB (National Association of Broadcasters), CIC/IS&T (color conference), HPA (Hollywood Post Alliance), Domefest and at least one or two other conferences, at least for a day. This might be the annual Game Development Conference or a conference on computational photography. These might be fields that you are thinking about participating in, but are not sure yet. You have to explore them in order to know. I would also include the currently trendy international computer animation conference, in this case FMX fits the bill.

The line items in our budget are travel, hotel, conference fees, food & incidentals, and general marketing. The former are all self-explanatory, the latter, general marketing, refers to such things as personal appearance, business cards and so forth.

Now keep in mind, that these may not be the conferences for you. But probably, if your field is anything like mine, there are other conferences that one should substitute. Thus your costs and the details will differ on a individual basis. Of course.

One year budget.

I realize that I have left off the NVIDIA GPU annual conference which is not cheap, either.  Also I have underestimated a few of the costs and I need to check them (mostly conference fees).  So the real number is closer to $12,000 than to $10,000.

You will need to be able to spend $12,000 per year to stay in a field and try to keep current. You can get this number down, of course.  You do not have to attend every year.  Maybe you attend one set of conferences one year, and the others the year after.   That might work, its non optimal, but it might work out.

If you are working, you still have to attend some of these conferences, whatever they are. But you may not have to attend all of them, and you may be paid to attend or be invited to attend. Because you are working you are already getting certain kinds of input about your field that the unemployed do not get. Access to tools, knowing what is currently going on, etc. It may be that you send yourself to one or two of these (or different) conferences anyway as insurance or as professional development.

My point is, although you may be unemployed and cash short, you still have out of pocket that you must spend every year if you hope to work in that field again. 

These costs are on top of all your other costs of course.  Such as rent, food, power and other minor things like that.  Your car payments and car insurance, for example.

And how many years should you plan to do this for?  Well, that is up to you and fate I suppose.  But realistically, one year is too optimistic.  I would plan on 3-5 and of course this could go on until you give up and go away.

If you are a consultant, whatever that means, then I would plan on spending this indefinitely.

The point is that, if you have no money, and you can not attend these conferences or do some of the other things we will discuss in later posts, then you are probably dead and can not be in these fields.

My recommendation under those circumstances is to do what the free market and our government says you should do: go fuck yourself and die.  Its the only option that society has for you.  Too bad, you lost, and no one cares.

For those of us concerned about policy decisions, we should not expect those who are unemployed and have no money to be able to get productively employed in the future. That would be unrealistic.  There are no programs to help such people, nor is unemployment insurance more than a joke.  Social Security disability might be on option, if you have a disability.

Unfortunately, being born poor is not seen as a disability by the Social Security Administration.

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1. No one knows the real numbers.  The formal unemployment numbers do not include those who are unemployed longer than 18 months, nor does it include those who are working at the grocery store because they can not get employed in the field they are qualified for and which generally pays much more.  They are not included in the stated unemployment rate nor are they included in any other formal metric that I am aware of.

Opportunity Cost on Wikipedia

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

Color Imaging Conference / IS&T

https://www.imaging.org/IST/conferences/cic/

Law Enforcement Provides Moral Instruction to the Poor

It does my heart good to see people of our society reach out to the poor and disenfranchised and help them in their misery.   When it is a public servant and they are taking unusual efforts, beyond the call of duty, to help our poor, to instruct them on how to live a better life, then that is truly inspirational, and is worth celebrating.

I know that there is a lot of misunderstanding out there about what our government, both federal and state, do to help the poor.  Many people tell me that the poor routinely use the system to make hundreds of thousands of dollars and drive their Cadillac to the welfare office.  Of course, no one in the world has ever seen these people but they know, they know, that they are out there.

Well, I am not so sure about the Cadillac, but I have personally witnessed the efforts our government makes and how the poor are helped with my own eyes.  One notable example happened just the other day.

I was waiting for my train to LA near the transit center in Oceanside California.   Oceanside is a beach town north of San Diego and famous for its location next to Camp Pendleton, the US Marine Corps Base. Oceanside is like most of N. San Diego County, it is very clean, very presentable, and very safe.  This is not a seedy transit area, and it is safe both day and night.

But there are homeless people everywhere in America, even Oceanside.

So while waiting for my train I came across a homeless person, a woman who was very old, very frail and very poor.   She looked like everyone's grandmother when she gets on in age.   She ought to be home with her cat, her television, knitting, and talking to a grandchild.  But this one was poor, she clearly had no place to live, no clean clothes, just rags, and a shopping cart.

She was being attended to by a pleasant, young man of perhaps 30 years of age, who was a member of the local police forces. He was seeing to it that this woman got the care she needed. Now what care might she need?  How about a place to sleep, some clean clothes, a shower and a hot meal?

No!   That is not what she needs, not at all.  What she needs to understand is that her circumstances in life, the tragedies and failures that have led her to being destitute, starving and desperate, were her fault because she lacked moral values.

The police officer was haranguing this poor miserable person, yelling at her, telling her what a bad person she was.  Because she was a thief!  She must have stolen that shopping cart to push her rags around in, she was a bad person!  Morally reprehensible!

He was not physically beating her up, but he was surely verbally beating her up, and for good reason. More than anything else in America, we hold private property to be sacred.  If anyone could just choose to take a shopping cart then pretty soon people would be stealing Porsche's and God only knows where it would go, but our society would collapse.

For those of you who care about these details, the homeless woman was white and the peace officer a nice looking, but very loud,  black man in uniform.  I mention this because it is the opposite of some of my fellow American's preconceptions about race in our society.

I was happy to see this desperate and frail woman was getting all the help that our society provides.  Forget about food, shelter, and that sort of thing.  If she wants to eat, she can grab old rotting food out of a garbage dumpster for all our government cares. What she needed right then was a lecture by a figure of authority who could throw her in jail, a large well-fed man with a gun and a stick, telling her that she was morally depraved.

Thats the kind of compassion and care that the poor and the homeless receive in this country in 2015.  It just makes me feel good about America when I see this sort of thing.

Dangerous Toys Beneficial For the Education of Youth

I want to bring to your attention a threat that is inherent in the emphasis on “safe toys for children” and in the related campaign against so-called violent computer games. I contend that not only do these games provide useful real and simulated experience of the world as it is, but other countries may be way ahead of us in educating their children with dangerous toys thus leading to a threatening and ever-widening "dangerous toys" gap.

What a child learns when they are young stays with them for the rest of their lives. Therefore it is up to us, as mature and experienced parents of these innocent biped mammals to see to it that their education contains the elements that they will need for a healthy and rewarding life, if you call this living.

What are these elements of a proper education? Well certainly there is learning to read and write, learning certain social skills such as not spitting in public, learning to keep themselves relatively clean and tidy, not to chew with their mouth open, that sort of thing. Some would include in this some pillars of a basic education such as the classics of western civilization (Homer, Isaac Newton, Bulwer-Lytton, Blavatsky) and the basics of managing hedge funds and real estate development. Perhaps not all classes of society really need the latter skills and education should be tailored for the different classes. For example, the rich may have to learn how to manage hedge funds but the poor how to avoid getting bitten by rats or how to find discarded but not completely decayed food to eat so that they do not starve to death, etc.

But all of us, rich or poor, can certainly benefit from knowing that the world is, as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it, “a dangerous place”. It is a world filled with things that can drop on you and smash you flat, or people who will shoot you for a dollar, or people who think that they are entitled to distort the political system to get their way, or people who have beliefs that are dangerous to our beliefs. All of these things and more are true. So what benefit is it to educate our children to think that they do not exist? What is the point of waiting until they are adults, or nearly so, to let them in on the secret that they can easily kill themselves and others with that car or that gun? Or to keep from them the knowledge that there are rich and poor in America and that the poor have very little chance of having a decent life or receiving justice? Why keep from them the knowledge that as screwed up as this country is, they should have a look around with their own eyes and see how other countries are doing, some much better and many far worse. Or that people and nations and political groups lie every day both to the public and to themselves, often with tragic or disastrous results.

And that is what the campaign to eliminate dangerous and disturbing toys has set out to do. To hide these brutal facts from our young children out of the misguided notion that being sheltered helps them. Sure it may avoid a few hundred or thousand injuries or deaths, but at what cost? The cost is that our children do not have the first hand experience that they need to understand the world as it is.

Look at how far ahead of us the children of Afghanistan and Iraq are.  In America, misguided parents are horrified that “war toys” are produced and sold. But in Afghanistan, pretty much every boy gets their hands on an AK-47 by the time they are 10 years old and they are not toys. In America, our children do not know what an ammo dump looks like, let alone how to behave around one. But every kid in Afghanistan does. And how many American's have a relative or neighbor who is an internationally wanted terrorist? Precious few, I think.  By the time a boy turns 15 in Afghanistan, he has probably had many years experience smuggling opium over the border and killed at least one enemy of his tribe.   This experience so early in life is priceless.   

We shoot our selves in the foot, so to speak, to think that this pretense of a safe world that we construct for our children helps them or us. It just leads to shock and dismay when our privileged and self-entitled narcissist child has to face the real world. The shock may lead to total collapse and psychological disintegration. That is where this ill-considered policy leads.

But by no means does that mean that we have to start selling war toys to our children. There are other ways to get the ideas across that are more in the areas of industry and manufacturing than in warfare. My favorite is a toy my older brother had and which I loved. It was made in the very early 1960s by Mattel and it was called VAC-U-FORM.

VAC-U-FORM gave a child the ability to create vacuum molded plastic parts at will. It consisted of a very hot heating element, a vacuum pump, a contraption to press things together, sheets of thin plastic as material, and various molds to use as templates. Think of it as a 3D printer ahead of its time.

The smell of the melting plastic issuing obviously dangerous and probably cancer-causing chemicals was the joy of every teenage boy. One could easily damage oneself on the hot heating element, or on the melted plastic before it cooled. Or with exacto blades to chop out the manufactured parts. There were so many ways that a child could get themselves sent to the hospital with an irate and hysterical parent accompanying them.

Now that is the kind of toy that won the cold war. That is the kind of toy that bred tough and realistic Americans who were capable of manufacturing and surviving in this dangerous world. Its a toy that would send parents of today screaming in rage at the borderline-insane cavalier attitude of the toy designers towards safety or the lack thereof, not realizing that these toy designers were just trying to make America that much stronger.

I hope that America will come to its senses and return to these educational toys before it is too late. I could imagine a line of toy drones being used to find and disarm neighborhood land mines, for example. Or toy drones used to find insurgents hiding in the neighborhood during a play guerrilla attack. What fun that would be!

The future has so much promise if we just embrace it.

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Here is a video from the 1960s showing the VAC-U-FORM at work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCvgvWiZNe8

The Wikipedia page on the VAC-U-FORM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vac-u-form

Yet Again, the Problem is the Documentation

There are several unwritten rules about the Internet and we might as well make them clear up front. The first is that everything is great, and if you dont say and acknowledge that its great then you are an asshole and must be ignored and written off as someone who complains.  And I do complain so they are correct.  The second rule is that the documentation sortof sucks, and it does.  It is not intentional on anyone's part that the documentation sucks, or rather is uneven.  It is just the way things turned out.

Now for some details and a specific example and one more time it is not the technology per se that is bad, although of course there are always things one might like to change.  The problem, as always it seems, is that the documentation is either wrong, inadequate or overwhelmed by noise that masquerades as signal.  And that noise manifests itself as "helpful" documentation available on the Internet and authored  by the "group mind" that is, unfortunately, wrong or out of date or replicates what is already there or all of the above and there is no easy way to tell the difference.  As a result, the anarchic state of the documentation makes learning new and possibly better approaches on the Internet annoying and much more time consuming than it needs to be.

Websockets is the “new” approach to client server communication for browser applications. It does not look like much, but it is apparently almost as good as what we had with the Arpanet on day one in 1972.   As I read more about Websockets, I realize that there is a lot of thought that has gone into it in fact just because the Internet is not the ARPAnet and there are a variety of considerations that this forces on the design of technology like Websockets.  

Now Websockets is marked as experimental and is also considered to be incompatible between various implementations/browsers. However, it seems that is old news and that there are good implementations in most browsers and a variety of frameworks to hide differences between browsers.   For my application, I am not too concerned about this as my specific application is more of a proof of concept and we can finesse such things as working transparently on all browsers, for example.

But as always, the documentation is ad hoc.  There are many different frameworks one might use for your server side implementation.  Each of them has a different approach to documentation. Just choosing between the different frameworks (in this case that works with node.js) is itself a chore and a half.

For example, the websockets.org site has the source to an echo client that runs in a browser and is written in Javascript, and they also run a live echo server on their site.   But the source for their echo server is not available.  Why not?  And there is no contact information on their website such that you could ask them that question or any questions at all.

I presume that the people involved in all these technologies and frameworks are not lazy nor stupid.  I suspect that there is a combination of things going on here.  They include such things as (a) being not particularly talented at writing documentation nor enjoying the process, (b) not realizing that such documentation is necessary, (c) balancing the needs of this project with other responsibilities, (d) relying on someone else to do it, and (e) actually believing the groupsource myth that says that other people will write it for you.

My guess, my personal guess, without enough information, is that Websockets is an effort by an elite who simply do not understand or care that people learning their protocol who have not lived with it as they have on their committees will need more documentation and usable examples to make good use of their time.  It works for them.

If you dont like it, well its the Internet, and you dont have a choice.

[Addendum.  As time goes by, I penetrate more of the mysteries and it is not too bad. In fact, it may even be reasonable.  But Jesus, they really don't try to make it easy for you.]

Garden Update Spring 2015

I have no idea who, if anyone, is interested in my gardening experiment. But here is my update, Spring 2015.

At first I was not going to have a garden this year since I have learned most of what I expect to learn and since I have much less time than before.

But I decided to plant another round anyway for the following reasons: the incremental work since everything has been set up is small, I own all the seeds and materials I need for most of this next season (e.g. insecticidal soap, copper solution, time release fertilizer), and because I wanted to see if I could get better results from the peas and beans disease wise by spreading them out. Also to see if I could get the lettuce to not bolt so fast by planting them in the shade.

So we planted

4 x rows pole beans

4 x rows sugar daddy peas

2 x rows oregon sugar peas

1 row and 1 container romaine lettuce, 1 in shade and 1 not

2 x containers basil

4 x containers sweet 100 cherry tomatoes

2 x rows carrots

I will plant a few containers of cucumbers and a few of semi-determinate hybrid tomatoes if I can find any.

In the past, a planting of this type has resulted in occasional useful crops of all the above vegetables, with some disease and bolting problems. As long as you are not depending on them, they are nice to have fresh from time to time. The pole beans and the peas are by far the most regularly available and actually useful (as I do not normally buy them at the store due to the prices).

The garden experiment is mostly over. It is fascinating to get a feel for the genetic and development issues in plants, and it is also fascinating to see with my own eyes the continuous struggle with disease and pests. If you have never seen this before, it is worth it. As an economic or health activity (e.g. save money or improve health with fresh vegetables) it is marginal. I would have to invest much more and scale way up before the incremental value was worth the investment.