It’s been a month and a half since I last posted here – you might wonder where I went. If you’ve been following my other blog at http://aigantighe.livejournal.com, you’ll know it’s because I’ve been moving from New Zealand to the US in order to take begin studying towards a PhD at the University of Washington. Classes have started now, and while that means I won’t have much time for idle meanderings of the mind, I do expect to be writing a number of pieces that will also be suited for posting here.

So, without much ado, here’s the first thing I’ve written since being here that’s not just a journal entry..

My arrangement here at UW has me in the Department of Industrial Engineering. Those who know me as mostly interested in computer science, education and games might find this a little bit odd, and, when first arriving, it seemed to me like it might be, too.

However, it’s becoming obvious that it’s actually quite a good fit for several reasons. Here’s why:

• It’s really cross-disciplinary. In addition to my primary area of interface design, IE bridges all of the various engineering fields, as well as law, business, economics, policy, and psychology. It’s about studying and managing large systems that incorporate elements of all of these different disciplines. I’m a generalist, so this suits me just fine.
• There’s lots of applied mathematics. I like mathematics for all sorts of reasons – its elegance, it logic, and its absoluteness. Most of all, though, I like its relationship to the real world. I love the beauty and economy of expression with which mathematics allows us to describe, talk about, and even predict things in the real world.
• It’s about long term thinking, strategic thinking, and systems thinking. One of the things that bugs me most about the world today is our tendency to think short term, to think only about how something might benefit ourselves, and to only look at what effect things have in our own little corner of the world. This is an understandable human tendency, of course, but I really like the idea of education that encourages me to think long term, strategically, and at the level of wide systems.
• Here’s the really geeky reason (if the rest weren’t geeky enough already). I’ve come to realize that industrial engineering is what I do when I play almost any resource management sim or god game, even some RPGs. I apply heuristics and my understanding of a game’s mechanics to a problem, namely, winning the game. That’s what IE is. Working out the optimal order in which to research upgrades in Rise of Nations or Civilization? IE. Determining the optimal layout of housing, markets and industry in Pharoah, Zeus, or Emperor? IE. Optimally transporting coal, passengers and candy cane in Transport Tycoon Deluxe? IE.

  This is cool for two reasons: Firstly, it makes it fun – I’m studying a formalized version of one of my favourite forms of entertainment. Secondly, it means I’m intuitively familiar with a lot of the techniques – I just need to work on formalization and rigour.

Anyway, that’s the geek-out over. Now, I’ve got to go prepare a presentation covering five types of user interfaces for devices that could augment the experience of gardening. An interface theme and variations, if you will.

I’ve begun to think that I want two different sorts of bookmarking service:

1. For reference links – pages I refer to frequently and that I want to be able to find quickly when I need them, from any computer. Ideally, these should be listed within a drop down menu in my browser. I use Google Bookmarks for this, and it’s great as it integrates neatly into my Firefox menu bar. If I’m somewhere unfamiliar, I browse them via the iGoogle widget*.
2. For interest links – pages I found interesting that I’ve now read and probably won’t need to read again, but that I might want to revisit sometime, or maybe pass on to other people. This solves the ‘oh, I saw this really cool page once but now I can’t find it’ problem without relying on 100 different favourites lists on 100 different web apps. For these, I want to be able to quickly tag things and throw them in a pile. If I need to find something later, I’m generally fine putting in a little effort to discover things. It’d also be nice to have some sort of chronological order so I can go back in a time machine and see what was amusing me in life in the past. Finally, I want to be able to pass things on to my friends, and have lists of ‘interesting stuff’ that I can feed into my blog.

I’m currently looking for recommendations on a service that fits the second problem – does anyone reading this have particular opinions? I’ve briefly used both del.icio.us and Magnolia in the past, but failed to fit them into my browsing habits, mostly because I was trying to use them to solve the first problem rather than the second.

* I’m a bit of a Google whore – if I’m using a computer on the net for more than 20 minutes, I’ve invariably logged into one of the various Google services..

On the TPN blog, Cameron talks a bit about the wholesale acceptance of the ‘it preserved lives’ justification for dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He doesn’t accept it at all, and quotes from an article by John Pilger questioning this justification.

I read three main points in what he says and cites:

• evidence of a desire for ‘demonstrating the weapon’
• evidence suggesting Japan was willing to surrender before the bomb was dropped
• that if Japan was unwilling surrender unconditionally, she could have been coerced into doing so through conventional means short of a land invasion (such as strategic bombing).

I don’t think there’s sufficient evidence to determine that the US purposefully refrained from accepting a Japanese surrender in order to test their weapon. That said, the evidence does seem to suggest this as a possibility worth considering.

Anyway, here’s what I said:

I think you’re right that there was a desire to demonstrate the new weapon to the world in the decision to drop it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But, I’m also pretty convinced that there wasn’t another way out that would have resulted in less loss of life, assuming the Japaneses weren’t willing to sue for peace.

I don’t attach any special moral value to the use of a nuclear weapon as opposed to, say, massive loss of life due to strategic bombing or a land invasion. Consequently, it doesn’t seem logical to suffer or cause more deaths than those caused by the bomb in order to avoid it’s use*. I’m not a military expert, but given the casualties caused by strategic bombing and the experience of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, I think both would have resulted in more deaths. I’m not sure you’re arguing that these would have been better choices, though.

I also don’t see it as particularly useful to dwell on the fact that American generals held such gung ho attitudes towards the war – it’s awful, but I’m not convinced any other winning side would be more gracious.

To me, the really interesting part of this is the possibility of Japanese surrender, and the suggestion that these overtures were simply not followed. This is a pretty strange attitude for the American government to have taken, particularly given the losses taken at Okinawa and Iwo Jima – conducting those campaigns in the face of a Japanese desire to surrender (and, given the losses taken on both sides) would be truly twisted.

Have you seen any more evidence of this desire? It would be really interesting to see primary source material for this – particularly on the idea that America was treating the late Pacific campaign as preparation for an eventual confrontation with Russia.

One telling piece of evidence to attitudes at the time was recently mentioned on BoingBoing – a survey of scientists at a US national lab in Chicago taken four days before trinity. The plurality of votes was for ‘a military demonstration in Japan followed by a renewed opportunity for surrender’, suggesting that no such opportunity would exist during the lead up. Even more interestingly, the second most voted option was for a non-military demonstration in front of Japanese delegates – meaning that those who voted for the military demonstration were actively deciding that people needed to die for the ‘demonstration’ to be compelling. Chilling..

Anyway, interesting and provocative post, as always..

* Of course, to honestly play ethical calculus with this, you have to take into account the long term effects of the bomb on the environment and the surviving populace; effects that simply weren’t understood at that time. The risk of these long term effects can’t then have been considered, and it’s pretty reasonable to be appalled by this.

Thought I might give a quick little plug for Ainevoltas 2, a quick little platform RPG that I got an hour of enjoyment out of Tuesday..

Basically, you’re a guy with a sword, and there’s a castle full of monsters. Slay them, gain experience points, go up levels, and gain stats. Collect gems and other items to gain special abilities. Nothing special so far – what makes this game interesting is its flat genre mocking sense of humour, and all the little secrets that it’s full of. It’s not difficult or drawn out, just distracting and funny.

In Second Life, everything is made from primitives – cubes, cylinders, prisms and so forth that you can place together to create pretty much anything. There’s a size limit of 10x10x10 metres that’s sometimes a real pain in the arse.

I’d heard of something called megaprims that allow you to make much larger blocks (for walls and the like) and, wondering how they worked, I found out why they’re banned.

Kuula buried under Megaprim – in which, on Jan 11, 2007, Kuula and nine other regions (about 50 hectares in total) were struck by disaster – a massive sheet of 5m thick virtual plywood plummeting from the sky. Those underneath were not crushed, but caught inside the prim, causing bizarre and erratic behaviour

It’s not quite the alien attacks of Sim City, but as far as virtual disasters go, pretty awesome

While waiting for pizza this evening, I read an article by David Allan Grier in IEEE Computer about the ways in which technology has changed entertainment, particularly the theatre, over the last 40 years or so.

In particular, he discusses how automated lighting, sound and so forth can afford a stage manager the opportunity to calibrate the response of the audience by controlling the timing of cues much more closely, much in the same way a live television producer does the same. What this has meant is that show production, in addition to be a massive organizational exercise, is now a performance unto itself.

Later, he goes on to talk about ways in which producers of other media gauge audience reaction and adapt accordingly – focus groups for TV and movies, golden ears for music, and now, with technology, learning systems based on customer profiling and crowd-sourcing, that can supplement socially driven recommendations such as friends or local record store owners – last.fm being a prominent example.

So inspired, here’s an interesting extension that occurred to me:

What if specialized AI, running locally, could be injected into traditionally mass-produced media like music, TV, or movies to act as a kind of virtual stage manager? It could observe you, the audience, a focus group of one, then tweak the timing, the content, the tone, and even the script of media to better suit your current mood, your tastes, to stimulate you in ways to which you are more sensitive, or even to better fit your available time.

I’ve been using the chat client Digsby for a while now, and it’s pretty awesome. It’s comparatively new (less than a year), but quite stable, feature complete, and adds a bunch of new features that simplify things substantially.

• Cleanly integrates with all the traditional instant messenging systems, adding gtalk, facebook chat, and twitter.
• Integrates mail and event notifications from almost any mail source, as well as facebook and myspace’s event feeds
• Free!
• Almost cross platform – the initial release is Windows only, but they’re releasing OS X and Linux versions soon
• Lets you neatly merge multiple accounts on different services belonging to the same person. Then, just tells you if they’re online on any service, and intelligently uses that one to communicate with them.

Given the proliferation of social networks and messaging networks, it’s quite nice to have one tool that bridges them. I don’t have to deal with the fact that not everyone uses the same tools – Digsby gives me a list of everyone, and when I want to talk with them, it just works.

I love tools that hide complexity without being simplistic.

A while back, there was a post on Coming Anarchy that referenced this fatwa concerning the question of whether a woman could, under Shariah, lawfully refuse her husband’s request for sex if she is tired from having performed her other Islamic duties (such as nightly prayers).

I’m not at all impressed by the conclusion reached – at best, it’s medieval sophistry, at worst, it’s little more than institutionalized rape. That’s not what motivated me to write this post, though.

For those not in the know, a fatwa is basically a ruling on Islamic religious law issued by an imam or other Islamic authority. Since they’re issued by a wide range of individuals and institutions distributed throughout the Ummah, they often disagree with one another, sometimes violently. Taken together, though, they’re an organic body of law quite different to what we have in the West – probably the closest parallel is English common law – Shariah, however, is much more diverse and, it seems, much less structured. As a method of making and applying law, its distributed nature is actually somewhat attractive; however, as it’s based on literal interpretations of a religious text, it is, by definition, fundamentalist, and thus thoroughly unattractive.

There’s a number of online repositories containing fatwas, some with comparatively liberal outlooks, others extremely conservative. I find them interesting because they offer a window into Islamic law and culture that I’ve not had before. While I’m sure there’s a selection bias based on which groups are willing to put their fatwas online and in English, they still contain a diversity of opinion, and really interesting to browse through.

Bias time – I’m a filthy materialist, looking with a perspective similar to someone visiting the zoo. Some fatwas repulse me, others vaguely disturb me, and still others make a certain amount of sense.

It’s really important not to judge Islamic culture in its entirity by these; many Islamic cultures do not rely solely on law derived from fundamentalist interpretations of a religious text. Even so, it’s hard not to be dumbfounded by the quaintness of it all. Take, for example, the particularly convoluted line of reasoning in the first link below, in which video recordings bypass restrictions on images by virtue of the fact that you can’t actually see little sports people when you look at the tape. It’s a good demonstration of how literally applying 1400 year old writings to modern situations leads to absurdity.

So, in the interests of learning, here’s a few that I’ve dug up:

• Fatwa Online – on the watching of sports competitions
• Fatwa Islam – on suicide as a tactic in war
• Islam Today – on the laws of war
• Islam Online – on homosexuality.
• Dar al-Ifta – an almost utilitarian ruling on abortion in the case of harmful deformity

The BMW GINA uses a rubbery fabric stretched across metal struts in place of metal skin. This makes the design seems eerily alive in places.

If you’re in the business of writing and delivering presentations and you think that there might be people out there interested in seeing them, I heartily recommend SlideShare.

It’s simple – make an account, fill out your profile, then upload presentations as PowerPoint files or PDFs. Then they’re viewable in your browser using their flash widget. You can restrict who has access to slides, or make them public. There’s even a full screen presentation mode; in principle, you could substitute it for actually hauling copies of your presentations around with you – just bring them up in the browser..

Anyway, I’ve chucked up a bunch of old presentations from my Masters. Later I’ll upload some more recent works including the lecture slides for Educ122. All available at http://www.slideshare.net/xorgnz