A robot learning to flip pancakes from Sylvain Calinon on Vimeo.

This starts off very funny. The ending is interesting, but the beginning is wonderful.

Since Delia Derbyshire’s initial treatment of the title theme, each version has gotten slightly worse. It’s what happens when a creative experiment is successful, I suppose: rather than learning from it to do more creative experiments (which are often unsuccessful, after all), subsequent creators often just kind of polish up the remaining artifact to try to retain what success it had.

Lagoa Multiphysics 1.0 – Teaser from Thiago Costa on Vimeo.

There’s music, but watch with the sound off if you must.

This is interesting to me not just for pre-rendered things like movies and TV shows, but for interactive simulation, as shown at 1:47. If we’ve learned anything from the pressures on the digital processor market, it’s that we’re going to start seeing this kind of capability on our desktops — no, in our phones — no, in our glasses* in just a few years.

Consider that, along with the augmented reality technologies being so furiously developed, my friends. Now imagine looking at an object, being able to scan and interpolate its structure (or perhaps look it up in a database of structures), then being able to deform and reconstruct at will. You tag the simulation with the location, and everyone sees what you’ve done to this rock, or this tree, or this skyscraper.

*In our vision itself?

A little more Academic technology from the real world. If you were to put a 1200 dpi reflective/transmissive display on each of those planes, then increase the resolution to the point of imperceptibility, then pack it full of sensors and computation, you’d get their smart Paper.

OK, now that you’ve watched Janelle Monáe rock her shit out, read what she has to say. She’s like James Brown, but she says smart things.

Over at io9, there’s an article about languages in science fiction, using as an example how much ours has changed since Shakespeare’s time. It’s neat, and timely, as I’m working on the language section of Shock:Human Contact next. If I do another Preview Edition, it’ll be about language and war.

I’m also drawing on The Language Construction Kit, an indie publication by Mark Rosenfelder. The website is good, but the book is more comprehensive. It really twiddles my linguistic fun center and I’m looking forward to reading the book really thoroughly when I’m done laying out Human Contact. It covers syntax (how words are assembled with each other), lexicon (words and what they mean), morphology (how spoken words are formed), and alphabet construction. I’m also wrestling with the nonfiction Writing Systems of the World and the (comically dense) World’s Major Languages.

If you’ve played Human Contact, you know the placeholder rule: you come up with a handful of syllables, then make names for people and places out of them, adding to the syllabary as needed. The primary function, though, is not just to make proper nouns (and certainly not to replace words we already have with alienish ones), but make words that really represent the way a people thinks. When a society has a concept that we, as players, have a word for, we use that word.

In our game right now, there’s a clan structure in the colony. Clans have made up names (Jun and Bri, for instance, which are added to one’s name, and changed when one changes clan, which happens rather a lot), but the word we use for clans is “clans”. On the other hand, those who serve in a clan military are by definition men, whether or not they’re male. It is scandalously impolite to point out that a marine or spacecraft crewman is female. But one’s biological mother might very well be in the military. The society can’t abide homosexuality, though, so they have a word for one’s female father: drokun. It sounds close enough to the word for “father”, drokung, that you can get the idea across without having to be explicit about it. Everyone can make believe that they heard “drokung” when you said “drokun”, but you’ve conveyed the requisite information. Likewise, I’ve got some stuff about the Academic language, Kepho-Rn, in the wiki, covering a few useful Academic concepts and their pronunciations.

My intention is to have a system that floats at a LeGuin level of language construction, where there are words or phrases to describe particular culturally unique phenomena. I also want to give optional rules for broad language construction for those who, like me, get excited about the linguistic-anthropological  aspects of the game.

The gadget was the iPhone. Earlier smartphones (I’ve got a Treo) don’t really do it. They’re little computers that communicate, sure, but they don’t actually integrate into daily life well. The iPhone does, and I’m hoping Android gives it a good run to stop their bullshit.

But, like it or not, an important thing about modern society is the ability to trade money for goods and services. PayPal’s iPhone app is a joke. For some reason, it didn’t occur to them that people might want to use it to get paid for things.

When I heard about Square, probably a year ago, I jumped. This is just that thing! This means that you can pay for things in ways aside from cash when you’re in person. It’s not embedded in a particular object (I suspect that will come when computation and sensors are cheap enough that you can actually embed it in the cards themselves), but it fulfills that function.

Square found itself in a patent fight with its own hardware designer for months, which is sad. They look to have done some excellent information and object design, and I was worried that their creation would never reach the market. But now it has.

Now, my friends consider it ironic that I was so excited about the prospect of such gadgets all my life, but don’t own an iPhone or iPad. The great irony is that I don’t have the money right now. But expect to see me taking credit cards at my next selling-con.

Fast Company has just posted the kind of panic article I ain’t seen since, oh, Jack Dempsey’s article, “I Can Whip Any Mechanical Robot“. It refers to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, even. And the company that they’re freeeeakin’ out about? Frog Design. The guys who designed the Macintosh. (And the Frollerskate.)

The article also misses some important technical aspects: the dating thing is just like current online dating, only you’re actually there with the person. The fast food example doesn’t need to tell anyone but you the information — the only public information is the nutritional value of the food. That’s an input-only situation. And the jacket-oggling situation both works against the market failure of capitalism by giving more perfect information to the consumer and keeps the wearer unperturbed. And all the computer’s doing is recognizing where the consumer can get the jacket, not where the wearer got it, or how much she paid, or what color underwear she’s got on under it.

The article closes by somehow relating this AR, data-rich environment to HAL 9000. The issue with HAL, if you’ll recall, was not that the computer had too much information about everybody. It’s that he was in the service of insanely sui/genocidal plutocratic idealogues. To be sure, there are privacy concerns. But my biggest privacy concerns are about those with power who don’t share. Not the people around us who do.

If you want to see Frog’s original post without the freakouts, it’s over here.

Also, it just occurred to me: this is how Academics see the world(s). Whuffies and all.

Here’s side 1.

Here’s side 2.

A primer: An antiseptic world, where (almost) everyone is engineered and lives a life of pleasure while being grist for a self-perpetuating caste system wherein, in fact, none are free. Huxley thinks that it’s denigrating to women to have multiple sexual partners, which is kind of weird, but the story’s very, very strong science fiction for 1931.