• Neau – No Water (this is an old one, article from 05, product from 03; but new to me)
  From Holland, a brand of bottled water that is an empty bottle. You fill it with tap water. A neat idea for a movement, sort of like an aboveground culture jamming experiment.

Months ago Troy Worman

posted a tip where he suggested that I write something about the Singularity.

“What If the Singularity Does NOT Happen?” Vernor Vinge, Cowell Theater, Fort Mason, San Francisco, 7pm, Thursday, February 15. The lecture starts promptly at 7:30pm. Admission is free (a $10 donation is always welcome, not required).

Science fiction writer Vernor Vinge invented the concept that dominates thinking about technology these days. He called it “the Singularity”— the idea that technology (computer tech, biotech, nanotech) is now accelerating so exponentially that it will lead to a massive, irreversible, and profoundly unpredictable transformation of humanity by mid-century.

This Thursday evening Vinge will challenge his own idea for the first time: “I have some plausible, non-singularity scenarios that get us into a human-scale world with long time horizons. I’ll describe the near-term peculiarities I see for such scenarios and then discuss what such a world might be like across ten or twenty thousand years. Finally, I’d like to talk about dangers and defenses related to these scenarios.”

Put on by The Long Now Foundation, with info on seminars (and downloads of previous ones) here. We saw one of the best presentations I’ve ever seen – Will Wright and Brian Eno – at a previous Long Now Seminar.

A few months ago I read The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge. Now, I grew up reading Golden Age science fiction (Asimov, and others who I can no longer name on a whim), and then moved into Heinlein, Silverberg and the like. I read those books when I was young and the books were old. Even if Heinlein was challenging sexual mores (i.e., Time Enough For Love), it was more about the novel than the ideas for me. The ideas seemed secondary. Maybe I just liked stories about robots, spaceships, and planets.

This changed for me about 10 years ago when I read Snow Crash, a book that took the ideas of right now (or right then) and played with them, taking some things to an extreme, but always with a clear line back to today. Given a lifetime of reading science fiction, this was a sea change. Indeed, much of the sci-fi I’ve read or watched since then has been along those lines (just like I posted yesterday).

But where’s that balance between being a visionary and being a storyteller? I tried to read Accelerando a few months back, but the story merely served as a carrier for the torrent of ideas/social commentary Charlie Stross wanted us to think about. It was fun for the first 50 pages, trying to keep up with it all, enjoying the stimulation, but after that it started to get annoying, then ultimately untenable. I hurled the book across the room, giving up in frustration.

Vinge’s collection of stories didn’t provoke such a strong reaction, and I was easily able to finish it. But it left me cold. The older stories seem more about current ideas, now dated, and less about the characters and the plot. I didn’t care about most of it and I couldn’t connect with most of it. Only the most recent story had any cultural or technological currency (in both senses of the word) and was therefore entertaining to read.

Obviously much of this has to do with where I’m at in engaging with the world when I come across these stories. Comments or ideas about culture are obviously more resonant than when I was 10. But I wonder if this is always how science fiction was read and written, or if the landscape has changed?

I’ve uploaded some new pictures to the Museum of Foreign Grocery Products

I’ve got quite a few more to do.

Children of Men is an intense and incredible movie, but also a tough one. There are very few typical futuristic elements in a movie set 20 years hence, basically since things have gone to shit in a big way. But here’s a couple:

A virtual keypad used by a wealthy young man who may have been autistic. He was not able to interact with other people and he was required to take pills. That’s all we know about him.

The buses are old and run-down, but they feature digital billboards with full-motion advertising.

The film played with time in an interesting way. Very little obvious sense of the future, fashions resembled today’s, London simply looked more like Mumbai (or Mexico, as the directed had suggested) than what we might think of today. And familiar songs (i.e., King Crimson) swing between the soundtrack and Muzak-like background that the characters hear in posh settings. And so the Battersea Power Station (where art is being preserved) is a location…with a pig floating in the background.

Yes, the pig from the Floyd album cover for Animals.

detail

Update: a reel of displays, interfaces, fake ads, and other visual artifacts is here [via DesignObserver]

• CW Nevius says that to many women her age, it’s like losing a girlfriend
  Interesting cultural take on Anna Nicole Smith, pointing to a strong gender divide in how she was perceived. I don’t buy it. Do you?

Last night I started watching The World According To Sesame Street. I say started, because while it was interesting, it wasn’t all that entertaining, and I eventually gave up. The film deals with the various international co-productions they’ve set up in other countries, and how they tune their tried-and-tested approach to the various local cultures by involving people from those cultures to create with them. The idea of the film is fantastic, but it was a little too heavy on the earnestness, looking at how wonderful these places are despite all their hardship due to poverty, civil war, or AIDS. It may have just been my mood, though.

Great quote about their process:

Because of the way that we work which is to basically to repeat the experiment that we did in the United States in 1968, which is identifying what the needs are and then coming up with some sort of curriculum that addresses those needs, and then bringing together researchers and creative people to produce a show that does, we rely very heavily on local people.

Here are some images of various versions of the show in different countries.

Last night we tried to check in online for a flight with US Airways/America West. Ultimately we were unsuccessful, receiving one of those frustrating errors where they acknowledge your reservation exists, but ask you to speak to a representative at the airport the day of your flight.

But their check-in interface is horrible. Dated and ugly. Oh, and hard to use. This was my favorite part:

[nb: I edited the screencap slightly to fit in the space here]

That pull-down menu is asking you to select which airline you’d like to use for your frequent flier miles. Presented in the most arcane form imaginable, the two-letter airline codes. What? You mean most people don’t automatically know that TG is Thai Airways International? Or that OZ is Asiana Airlines? (I cheated, I looked here).

Those codes are for industry insiders, not consumers. It’s sheer laziness on their part to fail to create a system that is usable. It’s hard to imagine how anyone thought that was a good solution for the design, it’s hard to imagine how that got designed, it’s hard to imagine how they failed to test it, and it’s hard to imagine how they failed to make changes based on that feedback.

This is really simple stuff here. There’s some big-ass lameness at US Airways.

I blogged before about the missing-the-point push

approach to getting energy-saving but unappealing fluorescent bulbs adopted. Now, a California lawmaker is going to introduce a bill that will ban incandescent bulbs, forcing people to make the switch. Sure, it won’t get very far legislatively, but disappointing to see effort wasted in forcing rather than fixing.

I will be showing photos at Pecha Kucha – San Francisco, on February 21st. My theme will be Unconsumption

as part of the evening’s theme of Observations and Obsessions. More on Pecha Kucha here; basically it’s a series of presenters who show 20 images at 20 seconds per image.

• The Psychology of Security: Security is both a feeling and a reality. And they’re not the same.
  Bruce Schneier’s thoughtful and thought-provoking essay is worth checking out – at least the first third deconstructs and parses out the different perceptual attributes that inform how we think of risk.