_ Web.log

This online procedural drawing interface (click + drag in the big white space beneath the bar) simultaneously inspires awe and unease in its instant transformation of scribbles into intricate drawings.

It's made possible by the new HTML version 5 and its <canvas> tag, which allows for images to be dynamically created and modified within a web browser -- here using the JavaScript port of Processing. Exciting (and occasionally unnerving) times ahead.

I don't make a habit of posting compilation gotchas, but this one was a phenomenally unpleasant time drain. Looking to interface python with MIDI on Snow Leopard, I came across pyPortMIDI, based on part of PortMedia.

Compilation seemed OK, following these hints (also found in pm_python/hints.txt in the portmidi dist), but running the pyPortMIDI test.py script returned the following:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "test.py", line 11, in
import pypm
ImportError: dlopen(/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/pypm.so, 2): Symbol not found: _Pt_Time
Referenced from: /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/pypm.so
Expected in: flat namespace
in /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/pypm.so

Following some excrutiating exploration with dtrace and nm, it transpired that it boiled down to an architecture issue: according to the portmidi xcode build file, /usr/local/lib/libportmidi.dylib was compiled as i386/ppc, but my system is 64-bit.

Solution:
* Open the .xcodeproj file in XCode, change the .dylib Target arch to x86_64, rebuild and install over the existing /usr/local/lib/libportmidi.dylib
* Clean up the pyPortMIDI build, rebuild and reinstall

Now working without a hitch.

In an abominable act of oversight, one of the major projects keeping me occupied in 2010 has yet to receive an official announcement here. So, I'm belatedly pleased to herald Variable 4, an environmental installation taking place on the other-worldly shingle plains of Dungeness in May 2010.

In partnership with James Bulley, and with kind support from the PRSF and Campbell Scientific, we're building a system which will be embedded into the desolate landscape and equipped with an array of meteorological sensors. Using algorithmic compositional techniques, it will then respond sonically to the real-time weather conditions, transforming and recombining a bank of precomposed movements and recordings via a multi-channel all-weather soundsystem.

It is taking place over a single 24-hour period, from noon till noon on 22-23 May, and so encompasses one complete daily cycle of solar and environmental conditions. For those not living in the Romney Marsh area, there will be a couple of coaches operating from London - booking info coming soon.

It's been a bit of a baptism of fire as far as project administration goes; who'd have thought that licensing and insurance concerns could occupy so much time? Current top of the anxiety checklist is ensuring that local fisherman aren't somehow entangled in wiring as they begin their 3am working days. Anyhow, we're finally well into the composition phase - leveraging Max For Live and the endless generative musical possibilities that it offers.

We'll be documenting the compositional and technical development on the Variable 4 blog and twitter @variable4, releasing relevant sourcecode and patches wherever possible.

Imperial's Complexity and Networks group are hosting a day-long meeting on music, beauty perception and neuroscience this coming May (Wednesday 19th). With a focus on the neural correlates of creative and aesthetic processes, and the complex dynamics thereof, it's one not to miss for art-and-emergence junkies.

See the attached list of talks (PDF) for more info.

The Goldsmiths Digital Studios (GDS) is a new audiovisual interaction laboratory here at Goldsmiths, University of London. We're celebrating its opening with GDS EXPO 2010, a day of seminars, installations and performances taking place next Wednesday (17 Feb).

As part of the launch, I'll be showing a new AV work in the studio's ambisonic space, hooking into the 3D motion capture and projection system. Above is an advance screen grab; more info, video and code coming soon...

What's better than graph paper? Of course, it's a tool to grow your own printable graph paper, sufficiently configurable to cater for the wildly divergent graph-paper needs of our times.

This Processing sketch (PDE) will generate single-weight, multi-weight and cross-grid graph paper in PDF format, with configurable weights and colours, support for metric and imperial measures, and control over margins and paper sizing. Unsupported, but should be simple to modify.

Collections such as this series on the gold industry are why I am endlessly infatuated with The Big Picture - hands down, the richest and most fulfilling source of photojournalism on the web. The scaled-down images below seem like weedy thumbnails in comparison! Unmissable.

More... (total 37)

The close of the decade is almost upon us, and so it is time for us to join Tomorrow's World, the British Broadcasting Corporations's flagship documentary programme, and look to the future of science and technology.

We'll be taking you through each of the gloriously illustrated sections of this period-defining book, checking out the advances that are predicted for the 1980s and seeing how they tally up with the miserable hindsight of three decades.

Without further ado...

Lifestyle

The boundless optimism of the early silicon age shines through in Tomorrow's World's lookahead to how daily life will be transformed by the nascent technologies of integrated circuits and networked telecommunications:

"You will awaken some morning five years hence, speak a few simple words from your bed to your toaster, coffee pot and frying pan, and walk into the kitchen fifteen minutes later to a fully prepared breakfast.

"The same computer that is wired into the walls of your house and built to recognise your voice will turn on lights when you walk into the kitchen and turn them off when you leave."

Sounds idyllic. Sadly, as the authors themselves observe, such predictions are made on a regular basis. Thirty years later, countless automated housing schemes have appeared and often subsequently vanished: the Xanadu Houses (1979-2005), Japan's TRON House (1989-1992), and Honeywell's TotalHome (1992-). Integrating automation into an existing structure is difficult and expensive, and the TRON commentary describes early journalistic objections to intelligent homes, describing the experience as "like a haunted house".

However, miniaturization has today progressed and stabilized to the point where realizing many of these technologies is relatively straightforward. Smart homes and automation (under the sometime-aegis of "domics") are pushing forward, with open-source software making implementation possible for eager hackers. Even Microsoft are chasing the action.

In the living room, Tomorrow's World report on the imminent rollout of interactive television in the form of QUBE. Linking viewers to the TV stations, these home controllers allowed for live interaction for applications such as quiz shows and Comedy Store-style popularity metres. A noble idea, but a false start in this case: seven years later, the Qube network was axed in a cost-cutting exercise, and it took another decade to catch on once again. Today, we have TiVo and countless other interactive TV endeavours (including, of course, the UK's freeview monstrosity that is Rabbit Chat And Date), though it's still hardly commonplace.

Cookery's salvation is on the horizon in the form of "microwaves"; despite resulting in "sausages which are both limp and colourless" and "chicken which looks, and tastes, slightly parched", they're on the money here. However, a bleak warning is given:

The beam is inherently dangerous. Subject your hand, or worse still, your brain, to that agitation and it will be comprehensively addled.

Be careful, readers.

These's also some coverage of infra-red ovens, which it seems are currently returning to fashion.

Finally, the office has the prospect of electronic word-processing systems, capable of digitally storing text before it is printed to paper, saving on materials and obsoleting the typing pool in one fell swoop. Can't really fault this prediction.

Transport

Written shortly after the last Concorde was born, the Tomorrow's World team are a little more cautious in their transport forecasts: removable, high-capacity batteries may begin to give us electric vehicles (well, nearly), and the prototypal Advanced Passenger Train promises high-speed rail travel at over 100mph (which we finally got, two decades later, with the Pendolino, bringing us almost to where the French have been for aeons.

More exciting is their account of an in-car auto-navigation system, using induction loops laid along the length of the road system and bleeping when a turn should be taken. Being then trialled in Germany, such a system could also warn of impending fog, ice or traffic, but must first be "programmed by a traffic policeman".

Natural Power

"What will happen when the oil runs out?", asks Tomorrow's World. Thirty years later, it's still unclear. This chapter is dedicated to renewable power sources, yet it's clear to see that its optimism has thus far failed: at the turn of the millennium, only 3% of UK electricity came from renewable sources, and it's only a couple of percent higher today.

One radical idea, illustrated by this lovely diagram (above), is farming seaweed for biofuel: offshore kelp plants produce micro-organisms on a huge scale, which are then dried and fermented to produce methane. It's still being investigated today.

Inner Space

Slightly out of left-field, a whole chapter dedicated to deep-sea exploration. Perhaps it was popular at the time. First up is several pages dedicated to dredging for "nodules", accumulated nuggets of manganese, nickel, iron, and other valuable minerals which lie on the sea floor. It seems that these were a great hope at the time, but, according to Wikipedia, the prohibitive expense and proliferation of terrestrial resources caused interest in nodule extraction to wane. Shame.

We've also got the prospect of deep-sea rescue missions and the WASP submersible, for a single diver to explore the untapped wealth of the ocean. It seems it was successful in its goals, and one-man submersibles continue to look cooler and cooler.

Media and Telecoms

"One day we all may find it useful to have a facility for sending documents, writing and pictures across the telephone lines". The breathless coverage of the future of telecoms is a winner, particularly the up-and-coming Prestel technology, rolled out by the UK Post Office to provide interactive data through our television sets via telephone lines. The author describes using Prestel for such purposes as to determine whether to adopt a child, as well as for informing your wife that you are not coming home.

We are introduced to technologies such as LaserDisc, home video and the digital audio revolution. There is also a sombre page-long description of the "knuckle-whitening" thrills of the new new loop-the-loop rollercoasters.

Outer Space

Another advance which today remains in the eternal "forthcoming" pipeline is the Powersat, or space-based solar power. Collecting solar energy with satellites from outside the atmosphere and beaming it to earth via non-ionizing EM waves, the theory remains sound; earlier this year, PowerSat corp filed a new patent for space-solar tech.

Likewise the space colony (below), home to the first galactic settlers, estimated to be "well under way within fifteen years". We've had a good shot with Mir, but it's a far cry from the colonies of 10,000 described here.

Whatever Happened To..?

What really brought Tomorrow's World into its own is its championing the off-kilter and quintessentially British inventions which were to define our future age. As a rather sad closer to this look to the future, we hear back from two inventions prototyped earlier in the 1970s.

The 360 Degree Scissors, from Devonshire designer Richard Hawkins, are an ingeniusly simple (if faintly hazardous) concept: with double-sided blades, they can spin round fully to be operated equally effectively by right- or left-handed users. Hawkins took his idea to the show, making repeated journeys to the scissor-forgers of Sheffield to gather support. However, a manufacturing deal with Wilkinson Sword was thwarted at the last minute: it turns out that his idea had been patented over 50 years earlier, through a now-dormant patent, meaning that it could be freely manufactured to a US market and bypassing Hawkins.

The last news is that Hawkins was investing £5,000 of his own capital to manufacture a limited run in the UK. I can't track down any further trace; Richard Hawkins, if you're out there, I'd love to hear from you.

And finally, the Moulton Coach (above). There's no designing the streamlined elegance of this vehicle, constructed from parts in DIY assembly kits and using a simple, rigid frame. Yet, despite passing its wind-tunnel tests and being described by William Woollard as possessing "remarkable" braking power, the coach was deemed to not be cost-effective. The Moulton Coach never went into production.

James P. Crutchfield - Is Anything Ever New? Considering Emergence (1999)

James Crutchfield is a veteran of the Santa Fe institute and director of UC's Complexity Sciences Center. From an information-theoretic standpoint, he here considers the optimal approach for an observer to explain the behaviours emerging from a black-box natural system. The solution put forward here is to attempt to built a machine which generates a corresponding output, minimising:

• the model size, and
• the error margin between our model and the observed data

From the complexity of this model (which here takes the form of an FSA-like ε-machine), we can deduce the structural complexity of the underlying natural system. These ideas form the core of the computational mechanics field, behind which lie Crutchfield, Shalizi and others.

It's an incredibly dense yet engaging paper, itself a reduction of The Calculi of Emergence (pdf), probably the most essential piece of work on quantifying emergence and effective complexity.

Robert Laughlin and David Pines - The Theory of Everything (1999)

Read as PDF

In which Laughlin and Pines continue the many-body physics discussion of Anderson, arguing that the "more is different" tenet holds so strongly in certain contexts that the idea of a reductive Theory Of Everything is effectively impossible.

The objective of a Theory Of Everything is a set of base-level equations which underpin all activity in the universe, from which the phenomena of higher levels can be constructed. Evidently, this is quickly computationally unfeasible for (say) a biosystem. Laughlin and Pines' position is stronger than this, however, citing principles such as Laughlin's fractional quantum Hall effect as transcendent "higher organizing principles", in that:

"..they would continue to be true and lead to exact results even if the Theory of Everything were changed. Thus the existence of these effects is profoundly important, for it shows us that for at least some fundamental things in nature the Theory of Everything is irrelevant."

The effects in question relate to their notion of a "quantum protectorate", key to the FQHE, in which the effects of macroscopic principles eclipse those on the microscopic level, to the point that the latter becomes negligible. The consequence is that strongly emergent laws do exist, structurally independent of the underlying equations that govern single-particle interactions.

My flimsy understanding of theoretical physics forbids me from attempting any further analysis of this paper. Interested readers can find it here; Laughlin's A Different Universe expands his ideas into book form, most notably the view that emergent processes should be the central focus of theoretical physics.