Revolutions are a Good Thing. Countries routinely celebrate their revolution day. Even when the spirit of the revolution has been completely twisted and turned into a pacifier for the masses, the authorities still keep up the form of celebration. Which means that to the collective (sub)conscious at least, revolutions are welcome. This is also confirmed by the marketing world, which heralds every new tweak on an existing product as a revolution that finally gives us that utopian frictionless comfort.

I've long regarded the guitar as a proto-2D piano, because whereas the piano keyboard is linear, one-dimensional, the guitar fretboard has cells arranged in 2D. However, on the guitar, one hand has to pluck the string whereas the other shapes the chords. On the piano, of course, it's enough to press the keys, so both hands are used to play notes.

So I was wondering what a true 2D piano would look like, one where both right and left hands would play notes. Turns out the answer has been with us since the late 70s, when Eddie Van Halen introduced tapping. But the full realization of it came yesterday when HC showed me some YouTube vids of contemporary (and young) musicians. Check out ZackKim and weep!

I was watching episode 9 of the excellent documentary "Jazz", by Ken Burns yesterday when I bumped into this shot. I immediately grabbed it from the screen. Louis Armstrong was indeed a worldwide ambassador of jazz.

PS. You can buy me the print from the New York Times store ;-)

If you're looking for folk expressions of infoart (and who wouldn't), check out XScreenSaver. This wonderfully simple system is the standard screensaver on Linux, and it shows how the stock Windows screensavers are an insult to the genre.

Each screensaver is humbly called a hack, and each hack is a small program that displays an interesting animation on the screen. Interesting is the key word here, and probably an understatement. Most people who are in the room become mesmerized by them - my cat too! I wish I was such a hacker.

Ce soir, je me descerne un Bonbel de linguistique, et un autre en physique quantique. Pas mal pour une journée !

It's more fun to compute

I am not a computer gamer. My favourite computer games were Pac-Man, Tetris, River Raid, Time Pilot, Commando, then Castle Wolfenstein and Doom. I pretty much stopped at the shoot'em-up, perhaps because I'm so lazy.

But when I played tennis on Nintendo Wii at a friend's place, I knew I had found a gaming platform I could start enjoying again. To me it was the fact that I was /standing/ in front of the TV, and moving my arms and my wrists to hit the ball, as in the real game. Suddenly a whole new dimension of computer gaming opened up for me.

Because things never happen on their own, it so happened that a few months later I was invited to meet Gregory Niemeyer, a computer artist from UC Berkeley who was demoing his new game on the streets of Cairo, courtesy of the Townhouse Gallery. The game is called the Return of Balance, and it allows players to control a virtual paddle by shifting their weight on a platform equipped with sensors. The paddle is used to deflect bouncing balls inside moving hoops - all this in software of course, displayed on a wall via a projector. It reminded me of my wind-surfing days when I learned to keep my balance, hence the name.

Among my saddest moments are those when I realize that people who are dear to me have succumbed to negative habits, beyond redemption. I feel it as yet another victory of the dark unconscious over consciousness.

What is a habit? It's a tendency to react in a specific way to a specific set of circumstances - but that actively discards all other possible ways to react. In that sense, it's like an alien living inside our mind. When I get home from work, tired and tense, I will reach frantically for that first cigarette because I know that it will make me calmer. I'm possessed.

A habit starts as a behavioral trait that occurs only occasionally, and that can be debated consciously, both internally inside the subject himself, and between the subject and his peers. It makes me think of the famous movie line:

10. The main intellectual activity of your childhood consisted of making lists, from airplane models to French words of Arabic origin.
9. Your parents took you in their Trivial Pursuit team, encouraging you to memorize all the cards.
8. Your high school teachers gave you books that you keep rediscovering every decade.
7. Now that you've grown up, your innocent list-making has turned into an addiction for collections: music, books, films, whatever can be acquired into a hierarchy of categories.
6. With the advent of the Internet, your addiction has taken a turn for the worse. You've now become a multimedia pirate but you're spending unreasonable amounts of money on bandwidth and disk space.

For those of you who bookmarked my Computer Science Fiction wiki, please be advised that its content has been merged into the present site. Just click on some Dimensions (like Informatics) to find the articles.