Computer Sciences Corporation Makes A Fast Buck by Betraying Country

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This story today about greed and stupidity features CSC, the Computer Sciences Corporation, a very well known and very large government contractor on important security projects. What you need to know going in is that there is zero possibility that CSC was unaware of what a gross violation not only of law but of trust that the government has, or had, in them by doing what they did.  What did they do?

CSC and another company was hired to engineer an important secure communications system at the Pentagon. A whistleblower revealed that the two companies had subcontracted out a significant part of that project to Russian programmers in Moscow which is not only a direct violation of the letter and spirit of their contract but incredibly stupid as well.

Of course they did this for the best reason that all companies, from Volkswagon to Exxon, violate the law: to make a fast buck at the expense of the people they claim to be working for.

And furthermore, the top executives will probably use the "Volkswagon Defense":, that is, if anyone asks them why they did it, they will no doubt say that they didn't know, and that "engineers" had done it.  That is why we pay these executives 10s of millions a year in salary, bonuses and termination packages, to come up with stupid shit like that.

In this case, it is known that there have been security breaches because of this immense stupidity, at least one virus inserted by the Russians, and who knows how many more, but are the companies punished?

Not really.

The two companies have not admitted to their flagrant violation of law, they have paid a trivial penalty that would not cover even a few pennies of the real costs, and it is now up to the craven and weak Department of Justice to file criminal charges if they dare. But the DOJ never files criminal charges against major US Companies, that would violate every principle that the DOJ stands for which is to protect and exalt the rich.

So one more time we have an example where the so-called free market, e.g. naked greed, violates any and every principle or morality that they claim to uphold.

Good going CSC.

This story is not being covered by the mainstream press as it uses too many big words and probably would not sell as many newspapers, or web clicks, but you can read about it here:

http://intelnews.org/2015/11/12/01-1809/

The US Government should immediately cancel all contracts with CSC and investigate to see in what other ways this criminal organization has violated the trust we had in them.

The Computer Sciences Corporation can be found here.  Their web page gives no indication of to what extent they are a defense contractor.  

http://www.csc.com/

Never Mind the Whining

One side effect of the cavalier medical system available to the citizen with ADHD is that he or she will be required to go without medication for an unknown period of time on an irregular schedule. For those of you who know better and know that it must be the fault of the patient, you are very sincerely advised to get this problem and try to solve it without money. You are invited. I have been managing this for about 30 years and I assure you what I tell you is true. You will be expected to go without medication.

And when that happens, there will be or rather, there may be, a variety of transitory mood states.

I inflicted one of these states on my friends on Facebook and my blog in the last few days.  I am very sorry and I hope you will accept my apology.

When I go off medication, then various anxiety disorders that I normally manage (e.g. suppress) work there way out to the world.

I wish I could promise you that it will not happen in the future but I cant. I know that I will have to go without medication and I know that this will bring out the anxiety disorders. From there it is hit and miss whether I will bother my friends with it.

The alternative, of course, is what you already know, which is that I become a recluse in order to avoid bothering anyone.

I hope that my readers are filled with patience and understanding.

Thank you.

Relentless Universe, Immersive VR, This Sat and Sunday, Audri Phillips Performing

On Saturday and Sunday there will be a performance of Relentless Universe, a VR immersive event starring among other Audri Philips, whose blog is featured on Global Wahrman.

Read all about it here.

There must be something the matter with this blog that this is the first use of the tags "live performance" or "immersive VR".

Something must be done!

Go see Audri and make this genre of artform happen.

Relationship Between Sugar - Based Nutrition and Superhero Movies in America

As we all know, there have been recent, well-publicized attacks on American core values, on our culture and our civilization. These attacks strike at the very center of what it is to be an American and is nothing less than an attempt to destroy America from within.

I am of course referring to the disingenuous attempts to get Americans to stop eating sugar.

Americans instinctively know what is good for them and foods made out of high fructose corn syrup is as good for you as a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns and grits. America was built by strong hands that were made strong through breakfasts of this type. Not to mention coffee with a lot of sugar. Maybe a muffin or two.

Lets look at the types of foods that these pretentious intellectuals would have us remove from our diet. Coffee with several heaping tea spoons of sugar, glazed donuts, ice cream sodas, waffles with syrup, Sugar Frosted Flakes, chocolate cake with ice cream, candy of all sorts.

The American diet is a healthy diet.

If America which is surely in its decline were to abandon its values and turn its back on the traditions that made this country great, were it to fall into this decadence and sin, then those that lead this attack against righteousness can be expected to attack another pillar of American strength, movies about comic-book superheroes.

They will say, these scum will accuse, these movies of being as empty of nutrition and cultural content as a box of Skittles or chocolate-covered raisins. These self-appointed keepers of nutrition and elite culture will try to tell us that we do not need another movie about the X People or the Avengers or even Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The food of the God's encoded in chemical form ?

They are wrong, of course.  Not merely wrong, but anti-American.

Just as these wanna-be arbiters of our diet would point to a donut and claim it is nothing more than dough fried in grease with a lot of sugar, so they would point to another great movie about superheroes, for example, Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) and claim that this movie has no worthwhile plot, characters, motivations, while it is filled with violence and stupid helicopter-like aircraft carriers.  Yes it is true that a donut is made of fried dough with sugar and, on the surface, A:AOU is empty of even the flimsiest justification for its fulsome budget, in reality it speaks to the greatness of the American filmmaking tradition just as the donut speaks to our fine and healthy American traditional cuisine.  This does not even need to be defended.  Even the most craven of anti-American sentiment can see this is true.

Besides look out in the world.  What else would we do with the money, the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on such fine films?  Feed the starving in Sudan?  Please be serious.  Educate our poor and disenfranchised people? Why bother? They are poor and they deserve to be poor. Everyone knows that.

There is a link between the great nutrition inherent in sugar frosted flakes and the cultural content of another Bat movie. These are the elements that have made America strong.

Yet that is what the so-called experts are saying we should do. Turn our backs on this bountiful harvest that we have grown with our own two hands. This very nectar of the Gods. The calories, vitamins, minerals, proteins, steroids, and most of all, the sugar that has powered Americans through the abolition of slavery, war and oppression and enabled us to make superlative superhero movie after superhero movie.

Faithless people! To turn your back on the great cuisine of America, brought to this shores by the huddled masses yearning to be free, free to drink Coca Cola, get an ice cream soda after the drive-in movie, or to start the day with a dozen or so glazed donuts and coffee, waffles with butter, and breakfast food cereals.

I think that subconsciously Americans realize that this is wrong, and feeling guilt, yearn for a simpler time. A time when we ate chocolate cake with pride, and not disgusting boiled kale with sesame seeds. A time when a real man would smoke unfiltered Marlboros and get up on his horse and go punch cattle.

Stand firm, America! Do not let these so-called nutritionists badger you to abandon the foods and movies that have made America the land of the free and the home of the breakfast food cereal marketing a superhero movie. Stay true to your values. This too will pass.

As American as a slice of hot Apple Pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. 

Health Threat of Sugar is Vastly Underestimated Study Claims

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/27/sugar-health-threat-underestimated-obesity-study-claims

Ultron's Lament

When society looks back to this period of filmmaking, will they see great work? Will they perceive the depth of character, talent and genius that informed the works of Ibsen, Checkov, Pushkin, Moliere, de la Barca, Jan deBont and Michael Bey? Or will they see a noble artform brought to its knees and destroyed by waves of computer animated visual effects full of sound and fury and signifying very little.

Only time will tell but let us not forget that it took decades before critics saw even masterpieces like The Mummy (1933) with clear eyes and recognized its genius.

So it may be with the current crop of endless X-People, Fantastic 4, Avengers, Bat People and so forth. There may be substance behind their otherwise superficial facade waiting to be discovered.

I think that there is such depth and I propose to you as an example an otherwise overlooked scene in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). When I first saw this film I did not understand why it was made. It seemed not shallow, but paper thin shallow, without an idea in its head beyond the mere empty greed of the studio executive and his or her insatiable desire to exploit children for every penny they were worth.

But sometimes great work needs time and space to flower and demonstrate its greatness and I had occasion to watch this film several times in pursuit of another idea, one that demonstrates a linkage between the campaign against sugar in the American diet with a similar conspiracy against films about superheroes, when I noticed a scene of great pathos and feeling hiding among the explosions and pointless plot elements.

The scene involved the Scarlett Johannsen character as a foil for the attention of the uber - robot and AI intelligence, Ultron, the nominal villain. In this scene, he plays the part of the villain who feels the need to explain his evil plan for world domination or destruction to our hero, or in this case, our heroine.

Our token woman or lust object, one of three women with a speaking role in the entire film, lies unconscious on the floor after a battle. She groans, not realizing where she is, Ultron's laboratory, and Ultron notices she is awake and begins his great soliloquy.

We are at approximately 1:29:17 into the film.

                                                             ULTRON

                              I wasn't sure you would awaken. I hoped you

                              would, I wanted to show you.

                              I know, I haven't anyone else.

                              I read a lot about the meteor, the purity of them.

                              Boom! The end. Start again.

                              The world made clean for the new man to rebuild.

                              I was meant to be new.

                              I was meant to be beautiful.

                              The world would have looked to the sky and seen hope.

                              Seen mercy.

                              But instead they will look up in horror, because of you.

                              You've wounded me. I give you full marks for that.

                              But like the man said ... what doesn't actually kill you ...

METAL EXOSKELETON EXPLODES TO REVEAL THE NEW ULTRON

                              just makes me stronger.

CLOSES PRISON DOOR

Admittedly this scene ends in a noisy way not entirely compatible with the early monologue, but this is by far the most human and interesting acting in the entire film with the possible exception of when Ultron has his heart ripped from his chest, by the other woman superhero, near the end of the film.

Ultron is just a fool for women, it would seem.

Why do they make these movies?  

Station Eleven and the Fate of the English Major When Society Collapses

Warning, this post contains very modest spoilers associated with the novel Station Eleven by Emily Mandel. They are not much of a spoiler, but you are warned.

One artifact of science fiction becoming mainstream is that one has to deal with reviewers and even readers who have not had the benefit of knowing the genre, those who have not submitted to the discipline required to truly understand faster than light travel, telepathy, multi dimensional time portals and a host of other topics.  These mainstream critics may thus not be qualified to understand the field and its conventions. It can lead to some unfortunate encounters such as when a fellow undergraduate at college once said "You should read Pynchon, he writes science fiction that is actually good" and I thought to myself, I will probably hate Pynchon.  Well, I did not hate Pynchon, nor do I hate Station Eleven by Mandel, but it is not great science fiction despite what the reviews say.   But Station Eleven did have an unexpected benefit.  Although it was not intentional on the part of the author it alerted me to a terrible danger facing this nation as it awaits the inevitable collapse of civilization.

Station 11 is the highly acclaimed fourth novel by Emily Mandel about the world after a pandemic. It has its moments. I might give it a sold B- or so, but never, ever the acclaim that it is getting. The point of this post is not to review the novel per se, but to report to you an unexpected weakness that could inhibit our recovery from the type of disaster the novel describes.

You see, one of the unintended subtexts of the novel is to reveal just how powerless and incompetent a bunch of liberal arts majors are without their internet. This was not an intentional theme of the author, rather it is an accident that is revealed by the author's (and the reviewer's) ignorance of what would be possible technologically even in the absence of electrical power, the internet, and high octane gasoline. This is apparently a disaster novel written by an English major. Very good at crafting paragraphs but not too bright when it comes to technology about which she clearly knows almost nothing.

So now two light spoilers although the first one isnlt much of a spoiler since you probably can not get through the first two pages without figuring it out.

Spoiler number one: Station 11 is set in a near future where 99.9 percent of humanity has died of a particularly infectious and fatal form of the flu. You can be infected by being around someone who already has it, no direct contact is necessary, and anyone who gets it is dead within a few days which is presumed to be long enough to infect everyone else. The end result is that within about a month pretty much everyone is dead. The people who do survive have to go out to the country to find food and create the setting for the rest of the novel.

In our second spoiler, we reveal that people are reduced to bows and arrows and it is a major plot point that some unknown people have actually recreated a small electricity grid. Technology you see has completely gone away and we are back to perhaps Late Antiquity or so. In other words, people know about horses, wheels, and plows, but can only dream of having a refrigerator or an electric light.

This is what comes of a deficient education system. This is what comes of having children raised on the Internet and reality television.

You see, seeing as how this is set in the near future, Toronto and the state of Illinois, where our plot mostly takes place, has something called a library. Probably every small town has one. And in this library are books. And down the street, now abandoned, are machine shops. And yes, while the rotary tools might very well be powered by electricity that is not immediately available, there are other ways to use those tools even without electrical power.

First, build one of these and use it to distill alcohol... 

Then go to your local abandoned hardware store and pick up one of these....

On top of that, it is not so hard to build a steam engine out of all the spare parts left around after everybody dies. One could easily build water driven devices and steam engines even without electricity or gasoline. A handy stream and some wood will do. And they can be rigged to drive a magnet with wire (which is lying around after the apocalypse in every building) and you have an electrical generator.

If you want to repurpose any of those millions of abandoned automobiles, where, you might wonder, would the gasoline come from since the story has established that gasoline went away through evaporation in a few years?

Well, not all engines run well on alcohol, but many can be tuned to run acceptably well.   Many engines such as one finds in things like portable power generators, available and in stock at your local hardware store, are made to run on a variety of fuels.  Even more useful, but more specialized and less immediately available, are belt driven generators which can use a variety of motive forces.  This is something that could be easily interfaced to a water wheel or wind mill.

Here is an article on converting your car to run on alcohol and how to distill your own by Mr. Keat Drane. See http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/ethanol_drane.html.  This article is filled with interesting information about the history of fuels to power engines, and how to distill your own fuel.

The great American philosopher, Clint Eastwood, said that “A man has got to know his limitations” (1) and very clearly Ms. Mandel does not know what she does not know.

But Mandel has done us a favor and just in the nick of time. She has alerted us to the complete ignorance so many of our citizens have about how the basic things in their life work.  We can not choose who will survive the inevitable destruction of civilization, and if they are all English majors then we would have a second disaster on our hands. 

I hope you will join me in petitioning our public servants to create remedial education programs, programs which must be made mandatory for all English majors, to correct this dangerous knowledge gap before it is too late.

Station Eleven by Emily Mandel on Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Station-Eleven-Emily-John-Mandel/dp/0804172447

_________________________________________

1. This is from Magnum Force, and Mr. Eastwood was being sarcastic.

The Journalism of Runaway Blimps

Is it too much to ask journalists to spend five minutes trying to understand what they are writing about, or is it just hopeless.  In particular I am tired of journalists fucking up when it comes to writing about defense or intelligence matters as these areas are so expensive and important that we should stop being ignorant about them.

Misinformation is a problem.

For example, lets review the case of the runaway blimp in Pennsylvania. Its a medium sized blimp, that is or was normally tethered to the ground.  It apparently broke away from its mooring because of the weather although that is not entirely clear.   Like all modern lighter-than-air craft, it is filled with helium.

See, for example, the Guardian's discussion of the rogue blimp.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/28/us-army-blimp-breaks-free

Its a big helium balloon.  It is not clear whether it caused the power failures in PA.   Maybe it did, and maybe it didnt.  But the balloon did not cost 2.8 billion.  The moron journalist could read about the JLENS project here had he wanted to.

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

Its not a space shuttle. It is part of a program that over the last 10 years or so probably did cost that much money because it is part of an effort to create an over-the-horizon radar for air defense, and radar, which is usually very exotic, weird electronics, can be very expensive.

But the blimp, oh I dont know, maybe a million or two.

Get a grip guys. Make a phone call. Use the internet and read up on the program. Yes, even you, the jounalist, should be able to figure it out with a minute or two of thought.

I know you can do it.

R Stockton Gaines in Memoriam

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One of my favorite people from the RAND Corporation and its no long existent Information Sciences Department has passed away.

R. Stockton Gaines was a PhD from Princeton, a longtime editor of the ACM for Operating Systems and a pioneer of secure computing.

There is a memorial service coming up this weekend.

This has been a very bad year for this sort of thing.

This post will be updated with more information later.

Clarifications about Unity 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have mixed feelings about this.

When Neil deGrasse Tyson Spoke at the Virginia Military Institute

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

So much for tolerance of cultural diversity.

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

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

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

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

Here is a picture of Neil.

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

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

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

(pause for reaction)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia Military Institute

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

Cosmos (2014) on IMDB

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

Bronx High School of Science

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

Stonewall Jackson on Wikipedia

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

Stonewall Brigade on Wikipedia

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

Jim Shaw at the New Museum

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

                                                                              Lucifer/Satan from Constantine (2005)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Information about his show in New York is at

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

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

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

The Russian Pageview Anomaly on Global Wahrman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is that you, Vladimir, reading my blog?

Communication & Anecdotes About Early Computer Animation

Dear Friends,

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,
MW

Learning Unity 3D

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Words Stolen from the English Language

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

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

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

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

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

An early use of the concept of synesthesia

The Stars My Destination on Wikipedia

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

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

The Tourist Guide to Cemeteries, War Zones and Prisons

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

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

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

His sites include all the big hits of recent history.

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

www.dark-tourism.com

Dr. Hohenhaus himself 

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

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

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

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

The answer is too predictable to even be funny.

They hate him.

No, more than that. They passionately despise him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Impractical is not the word.

I like it when he goes on to say ... 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Applying to Graduate School Self-Destructive?

At this point I am well into the process of applying for graduate school, although I am also in the awkward, anxiety driven stage where literally none of the important milestones have been achieved.

And so the the topic “applying to graduate school when outside the normal demographic” or some other title to-be-determined will become a formal topic of this blog.

As is often the case in this blog, the reasons for having such a topic, which could potential expose me to public derision or embarrassing failure, include the usual ones of (a) working through my own issues during this process and (b) as a lesson to the others who might have similar aspirations.

It is probable that the topics of this blog will change as this and other activities become more active.

It is probable that I will become unavailable to write for the blog as I slam into deadlines, although sometimes the reverse is true in that the blog becomes a meritorious way of procrastinating.

It is probable that I will create posts that accurately explain what I have learned and what I feel about them in the context of expectations about life and society, and that these posts will then mysteriously disappear as I reconsider whether they can be part of a public image.

This latter is pretty sad because these posts are usually among the most interesting, and I already have pretty high standards of self-deprecation, so these extreme posts can be entertaining. But thats too bad, as it is this blog could use more editorial to keep it on track and avoid random diversions and self indulgence.

The first topic, probably, coming soon is why in the world I would do something as silly as applying to graduate school.

More later.

Understanding Kusonoki Masashige

draft

More good information from Yayoi which needs to be added to this post.  Let there be no doubt, whatever was originally meant by this epigram, I am sure that it is not the meaning that I would want it to have.

I came across an intriguing poem, or maybe an epigram, written by a historical figure of 13th century Japan, Kusonoki Masashige, who is as famous in Japan as Abraham Lincoln or Brad Pitt is in America.  

It seemed to me that this poem had been translated in a way that probably left out a lot of nuance that would be clear to someone Japanese when read in that language, but to a contemporary American was somewhat inscrutable.

It did not help to discover that this poem had been used as the motto of one or more of the Japanese Special Attack Units of World War 2, nor did it help to discover, after I first wrote this post, that it had been used by Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow.  It just reinforced the impression that there was some sort of deeper meaning concealed within.

This epigram/whatever is apparently so well known that it has its own abbreviation in Japan, based on the Chinese characters HI RI HO KEN TEN.

In one translation to English we read

        Wrong cannot prevail over Truth

        Nor Truth conquer the Law

        The Law cannot prevail over Power

        Nor Power conquer Heaven

Although Thomas Pynchon would translate it as 

        Injustice cannot conquer Principle, 
        Principle cannot conquer Law, 
        Law cannot conquer Power, 
        Power cannot conquer Heaven

We will update this post as more information is acquired.

So my first guess for what this means is as follows: An unjust act, however excused, can never triumph over the principle of what is right and what is wrong. Stealing from the poor as the banks do in this country can never be the right thing. But that principle of right and wrong can not triumph over the laws of a society, however unjust. Thus when the banks conspire with the judiciary to impose grossly unfair tariffs on the poor to punish them for being poor, then the law overrides the principle of right and wrong, even though the principle still holds.  But the laws of a society will submit to power. In Japanese society this might have been the power of the individual lords, in America this may mean the power of wealth and privilege. So a wealthy man steals and nothing is done but a poor man goes to jail for life. Power conquers the law. But ultimately power must submit to Heaven, the powers of life and death.   

This is probably not what Masashige meant, this is just my first effort at understanding this.  So far, none of my Japanese knowledgeable friends have been able to help.  One thought is that Law refers to Dharma, but that would not work with my definition here.

____________________________________________

Notes: 

1 The quote from Pynchon is:

2. A french glossary found on Google Books has the following

3. Kusunoki Masashige's page on Wikipedia:

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

4. Japanese Special Attack Units on Wikipedia

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