We are our patterns. I’ve been thinking about how many ways this is true. Certainly our habits, the little repeated actions we do or don’t do every day, determine many outcomes: whether we lose 10 pounds, learn a language, get cirrhosis of the liver. You’re not a gardener unless you garden, nor a runner unless you run. Habits are intimately connected to identity.

I think living things, especially conscious things, are processes—we are coalescent waves passing through time. Conscious thought or experience is collapsing that wave function at a specific moment. I’m not the same person, at a cellular level or in a conscious sense, that I was a year ago… or five minutes ago. Yet I am the same person, in the sense that there are unique patterns (of cells, of thoughts, of behaviors) that make me me. In that sense we are patterns, too.

As waves, we leave digital ripples everywhere. We travel, shop, carry phones, read online, skype, use mobile apps, post on blogs, drive rental cars... our presence, location, and the context of our activities cause ripples in the information space. The ripples we make bounce off each other and interact with other ripples.

In the past, our digital ripples occurred in a vast ocean of unintelligible intersecting wavelets. But lately it’s become clear that even in chaotic storms of data, our unique patterns, our identities, can often be teased out. Our patterns shine through even if we try to hide.

On one hand, it’s disconcerting that it’s harder to be anonymous than you might think. Thankfully many people are working on how to ensure digital anonymity. On the other hand, maybe our unique patterns can’t be suppressed… just like we can’t become invisible or stop our hearts from beating. Our patterns cease only when we cease.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think that we are ONLY patterns. You can’t capture my pattern, mimic it with a computer, and duplicate my consciousness—we’re particles, too. But our wave nature is sure interesting.

More info:

In the last few years there have been some eye-opening examples of companies releasing anonymized datasets, only to find out some people could be re-identified by cross-referencing with other datasets:
AOL
Netflix
health records
genomics

Latanya Sweeney found in 2000 that 87% of all Americans could be identified using only their zip code, sex, and birth date.

Arvind Narayanan – privacy and anonymity researcher

Ed and I had the pleasure of flying just after a young Nigerian ignited hs underwear on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day. Fortunately since we were flying domestically, we weren't impacted by the TSA's clumsy response (one carry on, no moving or anything in your lap the last hour of the flight, no wi-fi, etc.).

We had braced ourselves for a repeat of the day we flew to Hawaii in 2006, the morning authorities in London apprehended a group planning to use liquid explosives. That day we spent 8 hours in the security lines, 15 hours at the airport, and arrived exhausted and liquid-less, but no safer than any other day.

Bruce Schneier summed up everything I feel about air security and what he calls security theatre in his excellent essay, "Is aviation security mostly for show?" There are so many, many ways to blow things up, so many things to blow up... the meager and misguded tactics we employ to provide "security" absolutely does not prevent all bad things from happening.

Schneier lays out the situation perfectly, but here are a few choice bits:

Our current response to terrorism is a form of "magical thinking." It relies on the idea that we can somehow make ourselves safer by protecting against what the terrorists happened to do last time.

[...]

...It's not security theater we need, it's direct appeals to our feelings. The best way to help people feel secure is by acting secure around them. Instead of reacting to terrorism with fear, we -- and our leaders -- need to react with indomitability, the kind of strength shown by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill during World War II.

By not overreacting, by not responding to movie-plot threats, and by not becoming defensive, we demonstrate the resilience of our society, in our laws, our culture, our freedoms. There is a difference between indomitability and arrogant "bring 'em on" rhetoric. There's a difference between accepting the inherent risk that comes with a free and open society, and hyping the threats.

We should treat terrorists like common criminals and give them all the benefits of true and open justice -- not merely because it demonstrates our indomitability, but because it makes us all safer.

Once a society starts circumventing its own laws, the risks to its future stability are much greater than terrorism.

I highly recommend reading the whole essay here: http://www.cnn.com/2009/OPINION/12/29/schneier.air.travel.security.theater/index.html.

UPDATE: M. mentioned some tag lines for the TSA floating around twitter. The best: "Protecting you from yesterday, tomorrow." Brilliant!

In my spare time, I’ve been thinking about a new mobile app called WTF. This is a search app reduced to pure context.

WTF has just one function, simply select WTF and you will get the most appropriate response based on who you are, where you are, what you're doing. Your phone already knows who you are, where you are, where your friends are, what you've been searching for, who you've been talking to, etc., so we ought to be able to leverage this contextual data to provide a rich search experience.

Traffic at a dead standstill? Select WTF and you will be told "Blue Angels are in town."

Waiting for a friend at the restaurant? Just press WTF to learn, "Steve's been in the bathroom on the 3rd floor for the past 20 minutes. Maybe you should ask if he's ok?"

Girlfriend not texting you back? Press WTF to learn: "She's with Bill--maybe it's time to move on."

The Thing is with smart, GPS enabled phones, there's no reason an app couldn't infer all of this information today. So why not WTF?

WTF was part of a lecture I gave November 19, 2009. I'll add a link to the lecture in the next day or so.

Who would you trust with the health of your child?

 

 

 

 

 

A) Jenny McCarthy - Playboy Centerfold and Comedian who has a child with autism.

Or...

 

 

 

 

 

B) Barry Marshall - Winner of the Nobel Prize and vaccine researcher.

If you chose "A" you're among a growing number of well educated and presumably otherwise sane adults who eschew vaccinations.

A recent Wired article “An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All” written by Amy Wallace summarizes the vaccination debate. She reiterates the facts, which are sufficient to my mind to make disagreement sound like the deranged spoutings of conspiracy theorists. Wallace documents how medical researchers who unambiguously support vaccinations are being demonized simply for stating their professional opinions. The pseudo-science of the Web is drowning out the conclusions of legitimate research.

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I'm getting really excited about going to Ražanj Croatia next summer. My friend Kim Collmer has been going there for years to participate in an artist residency called sub-art. Ražanj is a rustic village on the coast of the Aegean sea in Dalmatia, across from Italy. Artists gather there for a few weeks each summer to create under water art works, or art that is simply inspired by the sea or being in that place.

I have an animation I've been thinking about for a very long time that I hope work on there. I can't wait. Following are some things I've been looking at for inspiration.

Water Level 9,40m ... from Alex.Be. on Vimeo.

I love the sound of the bubbles as he goes under. And the way the flowers on the trees are so perfectly preserved. And floating along the underwater paths. What a fleeting moment.

The Fold, by Kim Collmer. This was created with footage from sub-art residency in Ražanj.

underwater from celina jerzmanowska on Vimeo.

Coral Gardening from Jonathan Clay on Vimeo.

The last weekend of summer, we went camping at Second Beach near La Push, WA. It's a magical place, and we got very lucky with the weather. Typically I return home from trips to the coast or the Straits of Juan de Fuca with pockets full of rocks, shells, or sand dollars that end up in boxes on shelves I never look at.

Lately instead of bringing these finds home, I'm trying to capture them in situ, as they are, with a photo. It's not just about documenting the object, but trying to capture the context of the object in its environment -- that's what I really want to remember anyway. It's less about the thing itself than about the moment the tableau made an impression on me, and what that impression was. I think of it as a candid portrait, trying to capture the personality of the thing.

Here are a few attempts... taken with a simple consumer point and shoot, albeit a good one (Fuji F200 EXR).

alien life forms


portrait of a baby kelp


mysterious island #1


mysterious island #2


More photos from the Second Beach trip--not all object portraits--on flickr here.

For now 2D photos are ok. I'm trying some video, but am not happy with the results yet, in terms of being true to the feeling of the scene. I need a mic and a tripod. I look forward to the day when I can shoot (and easily view) high res 3D video footage.

Thanks to Bing, one of the US Navy's most closely guarded secrets has been revealed. I learned of this major security SNAFU from "Focus on Military," a little electronic newsletter I subscribe to which is published by techonline. In short, Microsoft's mapping software clearly displays the propeller of an Ohio class submarine in dry dock in Bangor, WA. (Incidentally, Bangor Naval Submarine Base stores 1700 Trident missiles--each with multiple warheads--making it the 3rd largest collection of nuclear weapons in the US.)

Why should a picture of a propeller be such a secret? Well, the shape of the blades and placement angle are what make the submarine so quiet and therefore difficult to detect. The Navy has been at great pains to classify submarine propulsion systems since the Navy's first submarine. On the bright side, perhaps wind power generators will benefit from the design.

The exposure of the Ohio's propeller reminded me of my experience as Chief Game Designer for Zombie Studios' Spearhead, an M1A2 Main Battle Tank simulator. In a continuing drive towards realism, we took an audio engineer out to the Yakima Training Center Firing range to record all the sounds associated with a tank. We recorded everything from radio chatter, to the 7.62 loader's LMG, to the commander's .50 cal, to the sound of the engine revving up (a jet engine) to the firing of the main gun (really LOUD--can't imagine what it's like on the receiving end). The Army was quite generous in allowing us to photograph everything--well, everything but one thing. We were not allowed to photograph the main hatch at an angle that would allow someone to determine the thickness of the armor--this was highly classified.

When I was 5 my older brother, David, was on Zoom. I'm not sure how popular Zoom was to the rest of the world, but in our family, no show was more important (except maybe Star Trek).

To this day, the elevating electronic noise/music of the WGBH-TV title sequence still excites me because it signaled the beginning of Zoom. (I like the WGBH sound so much I made it my cell phone ringer. WGBH also produced Cosmos, another favorite growing up.)

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This space has been dormant for many months... my online communication habits changed steadily as more and more of my friends joined facebook and it became a rewarding place to share quick links and quips. To some extent I find it a good place to genuinely connect with people who are far away. But it's also a lazy way to communicate publicly... it takes 5 mins to check out boingboing, neatorama, pink tentacle, wfmu, we-make-money-not-art, or other fb posts to find something others have pre-filtered to be delightful, shocking, weird, puzzling, nostalgic, whatever your mood. And it's all as if we are in this big room each making individual random proclamations, flitting from person to person, diving in with a comment, not waiting to hear a response. Like a giant flock of sparrows in a bush cheep-cheep-cheeping away. I’m one of them, for sure...

But I think I’d like to keep up with my own thoughts in a separate place, here, where I set the context. Take a little more time to say something thoughtful. A friend of mine is concerned that current digital culture is devolving us into expressions of disconnected fragments of ephemera and trivial mash-ups—“a culture of reaction without action.” Can’t say I disagree. I’ll try to be more generative, or at least wrap the things I find interesting with some critical thought. I’ll keep the mere “wow, look at this!” items on fb.

There will be an opening for my new solo show of light boxes at Cafe Racer...

Opening: Thursday November 20, 2008, 7-9 pm

Café Racer: 5828 Roosevelt Way NE, Seattle

Show runs Nov 20 – Dec 16



About High Anxiety: I have a love/fear relationship with flying, and am continuously fascinated by the design of commercial jet aircraft, the airline industry, air security, pilots, flight attendants, and luggage. Most of my work in the past few years has pondered the act of climbing aboard what amounts to a time/space machine pipe bomb hurtling seven miles above the Earth's surface, while pretending to be on a big bus. I think about being inside the plane, and all the strange things that could happen there.

http://www.caferacerseattle.com/

Update: photos from the opening
http://www.flickr.com/photos/janetgalore/sets/72157609623366765/

While studying in Berlin, Ed had a blog he posted to frequently, with his thoughts on his studies and his experience there. I finally converted the blog to a regular web page, so now it reads in chronological order as a record of that time.

It's great reading. Edward recounts getting attacked by little kids in Mitte, synagogues under guard, concentration camps in the suburbs advertising dance parties, coal-heated apartments, the Dresden goth scene, Hitler and Bush, an argument in a Mosque... it was an adventure.

It's here: http://galorebot.com/berlin-travelog.htm

I got a new tooth this summer. It’s porcelain.



I had been contemplating a tattoo of this equation, but when I found out I needed a crown, I thought it would be better in my mouth. I was inspired by a friend who has a nice Led Zep on one of her molars.

The equation is more typically written:


What does it mean?

It’s an identity with confounding implications. I was completely blown away when my calculus teacher wrote it on the board so long ago. In this simple statement, huge branches of mathematics came crashing together—natural logarithms, trigonometry, geometry, complex numbers, infinite series, and the concepts of one and zero. How the hell could an incredibly weird transcendental number be the same thing as negative one? No previous teacher had even hinted that the varied subjects in math were part of a larger whole. I was never the same after that—math became more than just random facts and puzzles. There was something very deep going on, and I ended up studying math seriously and going to grad school because of it. (Well that, and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem.)

What are the elements of the expression?

"e" is Euler's number, roughly equivalent to 2.71828183... It is an irrational and transcendental number, never repeating. It is fundamental to natural logarithms, and is related to growth of populations and radioactive decay, among other natural processes.

"i" is the imaginary unit number, otherwise known as the square root of negative one. It is the basis of complex analysis, fundamental to physics, number theory, fluid dynamics, and fractals.

"pi" is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, roughly equivalent to 3.14159265... It is also an irrational and transcendental number, fundamental to geometry, music & sound, trigonometry, and waves of all kinds.

There are several ways to prove that e^(i*pi) = -1, but none of them are really satisfying to me. One involves infinite series, and another involves graphing on the complex plane. I can understand and accept the proofs, but the proofs don’t reveal everything that is going on, at least for me. (Maybe that’s part of why I didn’t finish my PhD...)

Regardless, Euler’s equation is a beautiful expression that binds together fundamental aspects of our world, and it will always be close to my heart, er gums.

A cool post on pink tentacle challenged me...

"Dr. Norihiko Ishikawa of the Department of Telesurgery and Geomedicine at the University of Kanazawa demonstrates the precision of the daVinci Surgical System by using the device’s remote-control robot arms to fold a penny-sized origami crane."



That's pretty cool, but I knew I could do better, even with my giant human-sized fingers. So I did one that's about half the size of a dime.





More pics here:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=tiny%20origami&w=15675128%40N00

I like distracting myself at a bar or meeting folding small things. There's usually a wrapper or something around to work with.

Inspiration: Gaff the paper folder in Blade Runner.


http://www.brmovie.com/FAQs/BR_FAQ_Origami.htm

There are many more astoundingly small origami examples on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?ss=2&ct=6&w=all&q=tiny+origami&m=text

Last weekend we headed out to Lind, WA (near Moses Lake) to see the Combine Demolition Derby. Our friends Heather and Chris knew the folks who own the Devore Motel, where a bunch of people were crashing. We had no idea what to expect.



It was an incredible time, burned into my memory... sweet, surreal, dangerous, dusty. Not wanting to impose (no open rooms at the Devore, but there was a school bus that might have extra space), we instead stayed at a little motel in Ritzville, a town about 15 minutes away from Lind, and rolled in Friday night. We knew we were off to a good start when we saw all the Harleys parked next to our room and the magic fingers machine next to the bed.

Saturday morning we awoke to brilliant sun. We headed to Lind, windows down, warm desert air blowing through our hair. The Devore Motel in Lind was home base. It has a main building on one side of the street, and a little ranch-style row of rooms on the other side of the street, ringing an empty lot with a bunch of living room furniture, a fully equipped sound stage, a school bus (extra beds), a cinderblock barbeque, and an old yellow lab named Jake. That morning people were just getting up after a long night of partying. Potatoes were sizzling in bacon fat on the outdoor griddle. We were offered hot cups of espresso, and encouraged to fry up whatever we wanted. Rick Klu was riding his bike around, as other friends emerged from their rooms, blinking, holding out empty cups to be filled with bloody marys.

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Pink Tentacle (one of my favorite blogs) has a post on awesome bento lunches done in the style of various album covers.

http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/04/bento-lunches-decorated-as-album-covers/



I love this one of Aphex Twin.


And here's an insane set of bentos on flickr by Sakurako Kitsa.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kitsa_sakurako/sets/72157600857507834/


This one is Ichi the Killer (a movie by Takashi Miike). That's cigarette smoke coming out the sides of his slit cheeks, and his tongue next to him.

More bento porn on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/396900@N24/pool/