be the change you want to see in the world

With Apple (and presumably other companies) getting closer to rolling out two-way LCD panels, what are the implications for the web? The LCD panel is set to become a big image sensor. It doesn’t seem to be much of a stretch to plot incoming and outgoing photons against each other. What possible relations could they have with each other? And if it is possible with photons, why not other forms of radiation? Infrared? Ultraviolet? Chemical sensitivities?

And what about sound? Why can’t the panel become a highly sensitive directional microphone? Plotting sound as it hits the screen in different areas could tell you a lot about direction and the movement of objects emitting sounds in a space. Imagine a screensaver that reflects the room around it, mixing sounds and images into a pattern…sorry. What about useful things?

I don’t have the answers, just some wild speculation, but the applications could be of a form we have not yet imagined. It seems to me that there needs to be some new APIs that communicate all the possible inputs of these new two-way LCDs with web pages that can gather information.

Medical: “put your hand on the handprint outline so we can collect some vitals on you before we proceed with this remote web-based diagnostic.”

Financial: “Please press your thumb against the thumbrint box on our banking web page.”

Personal services: “Please center your eye in the make-up analysis box and we will generate your ideal pallette of colors for each season.”

Plotting web page input zones or sectors agains actual input would seem to me to be a major advance. We need software that will gather and plot external inputs directly against sensitive areas on a web page. Looks like we’ll need some new form elements. Visible Light Input Box. Infrared Input Box. Directional Sound Input Box. I’m sure there are some smart people out there who will see the potential and figure out how to do this.

Peripheral devices are about to become not so peripheral.

Well, not right way, but hopefully soon. In the category of true innovation, Apple is once again set to shake things up by getting rid of the traditional lens/ccd combination for digital imaging.

Recall that in Star Trek and other sci fi imaginings the actors all speak directly to each other through imaging technology. Anyone who has used computers to Video conference knows it doesn’t work that way, and the experience is far more askew.

Apple has filed patents for technology to change all that:

The clever idea is to insert thousands of microscopic image sensors in-between the liquid crystal display cells in the screen. Each sensor captures its own small image, but software stitches these together to create a single, larger picture.

A large LCD screen filled with image sensors would be ideal for videoconferencing, Apple suggests, as participants would always appear to look straight into the “camera”. The technique could also add a camera function to a cellphone or PDA without wasting space, and light from the screen should help illuminate a subject.

The more sensors there are, the wider and clearer the image. Sketches accompanying the company’s patent show as many sensors as liquid crystal cells in a screen. If some of the sensors have different focal lengths, switching between them would make the screen behave like a zoom lens.

Recalling our previous discussions of the future of the iPod, we have to conclude that the iPod is destined to integrate this view screen technology as well. Combined with enhanced mobile data rates we’re talking about the true audiovisual communicator. No lens or eyepiece to get dirty. Direct eye contact.

Depending on how the technology develops, those old jokes about the secretary holding the paper up to the monitor to use the computer fax modem won’t be so silly anymore. Use your flat panel LCD to scan? Why not? With software image correction, it may not be that far off.

How about signing into a website by pressing your thumb against the sign-in box on the screen? Or how about retinal scanning? Facial recognition? Seems like some important implications for Identity 2.0 may be inherent in this development.

And think of the interesting possibilities if this technology could be coupled with flexible displays. Roll it up and have panoramic image capture. Put it on the outside of a sphere and have an all-seeing-eye for surveillance. No more lenses for wide-angle.

Things just keep getting more and more interesting.

A logical career progression for a FOX News anchor:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Sources close to the White House said Monday that Fox anchor Tony Snow is likely to accept the job as White House press secretary, succeeding Scott McClellan.

The sources said they expect him to announce his decision within the next few days.

A source familiar with the discussions said Monday that newly appointed Chief of Staff Josh Bolten asked Snow to make a decision by early this week.

Two sources familiar with the discussions said Bolten wanted to fill the post this week, as early as Tuesday.

People under the age of 20 have this massive hole in their soul. And they have built their personalities around cynicism. Cynicism means, simply, aping or putting into an ironic form, mocking, existing institutions, instead of building institutions of your own. What I’ve discovered is that because these people have such a deep need for something to believe in that if someone like you, who has a powerful set of beliefs, or someone like I, who has a powerful set of beliefs—I’ve been searching the Gods all my life and now I know them, the Gods inside of us. Or I feel I do. Someone like me or you who can come along and show these people that there is a meaning to life, that there are things worth believing in, that there are things worth being passionate about, they respond immediately. Now, we’re either going to have the new Adolf Hitler’s coming along, who know how to manipulate this need, and do it with the new nationalisms and the new tribalism’s, and the new hate groups, or we’re going to have a you or a me, who will come along and pour a positive message—a positive sense of something to believe in, a positive crusade for emotionality.

The only messiahs who exist are as human beings. We human beings are all basically cockroaches at heart. That is to say, we’re insecure when we’re alone by ourselves, we have all kinds of self-doubts, we have our depressions, and we have all kinds of reasons to believe that we’re nobody at all. But it’s the “nobodys-at-all” who become the Isaiahs of the world, it’s the “nobodys-at-all” who become the Einstein’s of the world, it’s the “nobodys-at-all” who become the Jesus Christ’s of the world. And it’s incumbent on us, having learnt the lesson—we’ve been able to learn a lesson from the history of Christianity. Jesus put together a movement that was based on respect for the humble and the poor, on seeing their possibilities, on seeing that they had to be treated as human beings too.

But what happened to his message? When it was taken over 322 years later by Constantine, Constantine had the cross painted on the shields of his men. And suddenly, Christianity became an excuse for mass murder. Christ would never have allowed that. OK, we know that now. And we know that Christ was just as human as anybody else. Why did he cry out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” when he was on the cross? Because he was insecure about everything he had believed in up until then. He was as human as we are.

It’s up to human beings to be the messiahs. We’re the only ones who are there to do it. And we have to do it. We have to do it. Because if we don’t do it, someone with an equal belief and passion to ours, who believes that the way to achieve things is through the old animal way (…) built into our limbic system, built into the lower parts of our brain, who knows that the best way to unite people is by uniting them in hatred against an outside group; and uniting them in mass murder.

We have to come along before that person comes along. We have to fill that void, and we have to fill it with positivity. It’s about digging into the elemental passions (…) All of this plays a part in trying to give to the new generation a movement that’s based on something extraordinarily passionate. That you can powerfully believe in. That you can use to advance humanity tremendously, absolutely tremendously—but that excises, deliberately, the God of War.

When you find the Gods inside yourself, you’ll find the God of War. You’ll find the God of bloodlust. You’ll find the God of genocide. And he will be one of the most powerful passions in you. And you have to knife him out of existence. You have to freeze him in his own private Hell, and make your positive Gods the Gods that take you over.
And by “the Gods that take you over” I mean you have to find those passions that are so much more powerful than you, than anything you’ve been allowed to express in your life, and making those things the things you work on. In other words, not putting off until you’re 40 or 50 the things you feel passionate about at the age of 15 and 16 - but going directly to those things, and trying to implement them when you’re 20.
Pass ‘Go’. Forget the 200 dollars. Go directly to Park Place. And put your life there, on the line, with all the emotion and power and passion and insight in you.

And fuck the God of War.

- Howard Bloom

If you are like me and have yet to plunge into the world of Intel Mac (my MacBook Pro arrives next week), you may be wondering how key productivity apps function under Rosetta (Apple’s trick for running PowerPC code on Intel Macs).

Here’s a pretty clear indication of how Office 2004 runs:

We won’t keep you in suspense. In general, Office 2004 under Rosetta works “well enough” to “very well,” and in some cases, it’s even faster than on the PowerPC machine.

To determine this, MacTech ran over a thousand tests across three models of Macs, and the four major Office applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage. And, since graphics code is shared between Office applications, we ran a suite of graphics tests as well. These are each covered in more detail below.

In one of the most critical set of tests, we specifically looked at whether the user could type or interact faster than Office could keep up, and even in the slowest of scenarios, we never found the user waiting for typing, or other interactions like selecting menus. Even when typing at over 100 wpm, Word was able to stay ahead of the user.

Of the four applications, PowerPoint, is the one that struggled the most. It appears this is due to Office graphics engine shared by all of the Office applications.

At the other end of the spectrum, Entourage was not only on par, it was faster in many cases than our PowerPC baseline. In fact, with the exception of launching the application, Entourage was faster across the board on the Intel iMac, while the MacBook Pro was about on par with the PowerBook G4 (slightly faster in some cases, slightly slower in others).

Whew!

Of course, universal binaries are highly desireable and hopefully will come sooner than later.