Thursday, March 31, 2011

Child psychologists are no Scott McCloud

Scott McCloud packed the house at MIT. It was a friendly audience, full of comics fans and coders. He was on a year long tour promoting Making Comics and had perhaps the most entertaining, polished, fast-paced Powerpoint presentation I have ever seen outside of a video of a TED talk. As befits a theorist of visual communication who is famous for phrases like "juxtaposed pictoral and other images in deliberate sequence" this was no simple reading of text printed on overly dense slides. His hour of constant patter wove in and out of a complex dance with the sequence of photos, drawings, and occasional words displayed on screen at a rate of hundreds per hour. It was early in the tour, but the talk was, as they say, smooth as butter.

Yesterday I took Miriam to UCLA BabyLab to take part in a psycholinguistic study. We sat in front of a TV with eye tracking equipment built in that could identify where on the screen she was looking. For about ten minutes, arrays of toys and dots appeared on the screen in different patterns, in a line, a cross, a square, and a friendly white person voice asked us to "Find the toy in the middle. Where is the toy in the middle?" or on the left, or on the bottom, etc. The same sort of sequence happened over and over, and apparently would have gone on forever only stopping when Miriam lost attention and stopped looking at the screen. 

Kind of cool. And in contrast to Scott McCloud's fast paced slide show of all of comics history, a bit of advertising and poster design, visual jokes, text jokes, and exegeses of a few famous comic artists' best known works, extremely limited. Science moves slowly, methodically, and haltingly. Our little trip to UCLA took most of the afternoon and was conducted out of the goodness of my heart, interest in science, and to have an activity for the day. Two undergrads took an hour or two to get us through the lab, administer a series of forms and questionnaires about Miriam's language skills, and get my parking straightened out. And as a result, they got a single data point for a study about the developmental psychology of a few English words and concepts, and that just barely as apparently Miriam only just made it in front of the screen long enough to get reliable data. Go science!

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cinnamon toast
lunch: bean salad and rice
dinner: pasta e fagioli
dessert: chocolate bread pudding

Friday, March 25, 2011

Scott McCloud, child psychologist

Scott McCloud, comics theorist, has a short discussion in his best known book, Understanding Comics, about abstraction and identity. Look at a photo of a face and you see a particular person. Make a detailed realistic drawing of that photo and it is still recognizably that person and no one else. Draw an abstracted cartoon of the face and the person is still there, but the cartoon could also represent dozens or hundreds of other similar looking people. And abstract the drawing to just a few dots for eyes and a line for a mouth and it could represent just about anyone.

As it is written, so it is so. At tea time a few days ago I pulled Understanding Comics off the shelf for something for Miriam and me to read and flipping through came to the page about face cartoons.
I pointed to the photo. No reaction.
I pointed to the detailed drawing. No reaction.
The cartoon. "Dada!"
The smiley face. "Mimi!"

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cheese omelettes and toast
lunch: leftover chili and rice
dinner: tuna greens salad

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Wait, wait, don't touch that

Wait, wait, don't touch that -

-a game for toddlers and daddies to play

brought to you by NPR - Neurotic Parents Rationalizing

My magic mirror onto space

Though it would probably first be installed in science museums rather than sold as a home decor item, I want a magic mirror onto space. Take a high resolution screen, an HD-level or higher resolution at a fine dot pitch, not a huge screen with many but huge pixels. Decorate the rim to look like a porthole on the International Space Station, perhaps with thick piece of glass over the screen. Hook it up to a live feed from NASA of a fixed camera pointed out from the ISS, broadcasting whatever you'd see if you glanced out of a window on that part of the space station. Leave it running. Install it on an interior wall of your house, ideally in a room without windows, and forget about it. Glance up once in a while to see what things look like outside. Way outside.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: donuts, chocolate milk, orange juice, bacon
lunch: cuban style grilled cheese, greens salad
dinner: moroccan flavored beef stew with golden raisins, beluga lentils with mushrooms, couscous, salad with soy dressing, meyer lemon oil cake

Thursday, March 17, 2011

The land beneath the streets is a city's greatest asset

In 2004, DARPA sponsored a road race for robotic cars, to test how far along robotics research had come towards operating in real world conditions. Universities around the country put together their best software and sensor packages to try to teach the cars, SUVs mostly, how to recognize objects, avoid pitfalls, and navigate in the offroad terrain of the road course. It was an utter failure. Most of the cars barely made it past the starting point before freezing up in glitches, getting tricked by shadows into thinking there were unpassable chasms ahead, or failing to steer around obstacles, then turning over and crashing. The best car made it eight miles out of a 200 mile course at a pace of less than 10 miles an hour.

As of 2010, the best robotic drivers in the world, based out of a Stanford-Google joint project, are able to drive around regular city streets in normal driving conditions, following traffic laws, avoiding collisions with stationary and moving objects, and safely driving around the Bay area. They have a human in the drivers seat paying attention to road conditions and able to override the robot at any time.

At this rate, sensor-laden cars that can drive themselves more safely than human reaction times will ever be able to manage should be available in the lab in the next five years and be ready for market around 2020, just when my nearly new Civic is starting to kick the bucket.

I joke that Miriam, now almost two, will never need to get a drivers license. By 2025 when she turns 16, we'll either be out of oil or we'll all be driven around by hyper-efficient robot chauffeurs. I prefer to believe in the latter.

People love to own their own cars and drive them around, here in LA as much as anywhere in the world. But cars are expensive. Personal ownership is inefficient, with your car sitting around most of the day so you can drive it for an hour or two. The car you have (even if you have three or four) is probably not the optimal car for your current trip. It's too big or too small, too slow or too hard to park. You spend a few minutes every trip finding parking and walking to your destination. You need to insure it and you worry about getting in an accident every time you get behind the wheel (or at least you should). You feed it gasoline and oil and take it on regular trips to the mechanic and a good chunk of your home and property is dedicated to its storage.

Corporate ownership of robotic cars would change that. ("Corporate" here is merely standing in for non-personal. The corporate body might be private, non-profit, or municipal.) Imagine a ZipCar fleet that drives itself around, that comes to your house just as you are stepping out, with a vehicle that fits the number of people who are going on your trip and your stuff and nothing more, and takes you right up to the door of your destination before driving off to pick up the next passenger. Imagine highways with cars that can talk to each other and drive at a hundred miles an hour a few feet from each other, signaling to change lanes by exchanging trip plans and negotiating the optimal speeds and timing to keep everyone moving without slowing. And all with fewer accidents per trip than the safest human drivers.

The vast infrastructure we dedicate to cars could be more efficiently used or repurposed. You could replace your driveway with a garden. You could turn your garage into a guest apartment. The downtown parking garage gets turned into an office building, and the ocean of asphalt around Walmart reverts to forest. Perhaps the biggest infrastructure gain would be a more efficient use of roads. When cars can drive within inches of each other, parked cars are unheard of, roads blocked by stopped cars are just obstacles to reroute around, and cars sized to fit just the passengers, most roads need not be much larger than bike paths.

Which means a seven lane behemoth like the road I'm parked out at right now, with 12 feet per lane, two lanes of parking, four lanes of driving and a turning lane in the middle becomes a huge piece of unused, extremely valuable real estate. Owned by the city. In the middle of a valuable neighborhood surrounded by well established businesses, comfortable residential neighborhoods, and all the amenities of city life. In a world without cars getting people around more efficiently than our current system, the land beneath the streets is a city's greatest asset. One that can be converted to parks or sold to developers or turned into permanent street fairs and pedestrian malls and outdoor markets. What's your dream for a 40'x10,000' lot in the middle of Los Angeles?

This is easily 15 years from now, if ever. But 15 years is about the right amount of time to establish the framework for setting the patterns of post-personal-car land use of municipally owned roads. So talk to your city counselors and planning authorities and get those principles in writing. And enjoy your robotic chauffeurs.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eggs and toast
lunch: vegan chili at Trails Cafe in Griffith Park
dinner: scallops and stewed tomatoes, garlic bread, rice, and oven roasted asparagus

Saturday, March 12, 2011

The Seasons are Hiding! A children's book

The Seasons are Hiding!

It's always sunny. It's always warm. Where is winter? Where is summer? The seasons are hiding!

Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring, are you here?

Here we are!

We four, we seasons, we are close friends and sometimes we look alike. We all have sunshine and we all have flowers. We share the sun and the moon. But if you follow your nose and soak in the sun and listen and watch carefully, you can tell us apart.

I am Summer. I am warm (but not too hot) and I am DRY. No rains fall on me. The leaves of the trees turn shiny and dusty. The grass on the hills turns to brown. The days are long and there is lots of time to play.

I am Fall. I can't decide what to be. At first I am dry and I can get HOT HOT HOT. The winds come from the west, then the east, then the west again. But then the rains come! Everything drinks in the water: the trees, the animals, the ground itself. The hills turn green.

I am Winter. I am warm and cool (but never cold, that would be rude). To me, rain is welcome, but sunshine too. The nights are long and some animals sleep through it all. There is snow on the top of the tall mountains.

I am Spring. I am warm and my air is clear. I love the flowers and the flowers love me. The distant snows melt and the rivers run strong and clean. New leaves and plants grow. There are lots of good things to eat.

We are the seasons. We may look like each other but we are different. All of us are special, each in our own way.

Yesterday's run destination: home from church via Douglas Park

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eggs and toast
lunch: leftover chicken and broccoli stir fry
dinner: pasta and bolognese
bonus: blondies

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Review of Pasolivio in Paso Robles

Stopped in here on the way back to LA for a lovely experience but what I (and Becca) thought was a terrible bunch of olive oils. The setting, in the rolling hills outside Paso Robles, couldn't be better, with a quiet country road, big old trees, a picturesque olive orchard, chickens clucking in the distance, and a campus of quiet historic barns and structures.

The staff was friendly, chatty, and attentive, with a set 10-15 minute story of the orchard, its current management, the prizes they've won, and a sequence of tasting their oils (pressed on site) and the local vinegars and wines that they sell as well. They kept everyone in the tasting room engaged and moving along, and there seemed to be another car of agritourists pulling up every five minutes or so.

But the olive oils. I like olive oil. I like fruity, dark, extra virgin olive oil that really shines through in a salad or as a dip, something that can't be mistaken for anything but top notch olive oil. This wasn't that. Half of their offerings were olive oil mixed with a citrus oil, which should have been a tip off from the beginning that the underlying olive oil product was something they needed to hide. For the straight EVOOs, and there were three of them at price points from high to astronomical, what they needed to hide was apparent: bitterness and astringency way beyond my comfort zone and out of range of any other high quality/price oil I've ever tasted. This is not to say that others won't like these olive oils, but to me and Becca, these were hard to choke down with a straight face.

Another tip off that the oil couldn't stand up by itself: instead of basic salt to flavor the oil they had some sort of tasting salt with a mix of herbs and spices, which certainly masked the olive oil flavors, if not all of the harshness. Nonetheless, and somewhat guided by the fact that the oil did improve a little when mixed with other flavors, I bought a bottle of their least offensive EVOO as a souvenir. I have served it a couple times, but I'm about ready to give up on it and just cook with it, which seems like a bit of a waste for a $25 bottle of oil.

Admittedly, this was my first tasting at an olive orchard. Previously, I've only done tastings in Italian import shops and gourmet food stores, comparing various small run and large producer olive oils under the guidance of store staff. So maybe I've just never been offered the good (i.e. strong) stuff. Or maybe Pasolivio is making it all up and hoping the dumb city folk have had enough glasses of wine on the way up the valley that they won't notice how gross their overpriced oil is.

Yesterday's run destination: San Vincente Blvd.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: hot oatmeal with maple syrup
lunch: chicken and broccoli leftovers, cold, standing up in the kitchen while getting ready for my meeting
dinner: mac and cheese with peas and bacon

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Supermarket Price Comparison Dot Com

The modern economy collects vast amounts of data on consumers, particularly buying habits. My supermarket shoppers cards allow each company I shop with to track my purchases for months or years, a profile they use to personalize marketing to get me to buy more, sell to advertising agencies to develop advertising to get me to buy more, and sell to manufacturers to develop new products that I am likely to buy. Any time you are asked to give a company information about yourself or your purchases, in consumer surveys, warranty registrations, even customer service calls, that information goes into a profile that has a very definite economic value to the corporation, both for itself and on the open market for consumer information.

Well, it's not quite an open market. I can't buy my own profile from Safeway. If I was a data mining company, I could buy profiles by the thousand, but even though the information collected is about me, I don't receive access to it, either as a service of the Safeway Club Card program or for a fee. I'm not quite a full member in this club.

The hidden but blatant commercialism of consumer data collection isn't an inevitable outcome of data collection and mining techniques. It is the result of a particular regulatory and ethical environment which blocks the worst prejudicial uses of data but does not locate ownership and copyright of consumer data with the consumer. An enormous investment has been made in data collection in the modern networked era by retailers, manufacturers, advertisers, and the data servicing companies that serve them. There are many more implementations for that investment than selling us more stuff.

Rob Walker's Consumed column in the New York Times is hit or miss but when it hits it resonates with the deeply felt part of me that wants to be an enthusiastic patron and contributor to culture without being swept away by a mindless consumerism. A column a few months ago on consumer data described Indhira Rojas' IndexR, which posits a system in which consumer data, analyzed and delivered to the consumer, would guide recycling decisions, tapping into material data provided from up and down the supply chain.

My personal shopping data, presented to me, would be a fantastic resource for guiding future purchasing, not as a way to entice me to buy more but as a tool for making my purchases more efficient and buying less. Lets stick with supermarket shopping club card data and posit mygrocerylist.com, "Where your data works for YOU." Glancing through the last few months of groceries, on a neatly and automatically sorted chart like what Mint.com does for financial transactions, I could see that I keep buying canned bamboo shoots but never using them, or that switching from regular to organic milk has cost about $10 a month.

Aggregated across the various supermarkets I frequent, I could note to never buy canned tomatoes at Ralph's, or chicken thighs at Trader Joe's. I could autogenerate a suggested shopping list based on previous purchases, then review it for gaps and frivolities.

Aggregated across the purchases of likeminded consumers and plugged in to digitized weekly specials mailings, I could get shopping list that breaks up my weekly purchases across two or three stores (which I'm going to anyway to pick up some last minute item or because it's on the way home) to take advantage of sales, doorbusters, and run of the mill price increases and decreases. Making this easy and automatic relies on my having access to my buying habits, which has already been collected by the supermarkets.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: toast with butter and honey
lunch: persian chicken in lime-spinach sauce at Shaherzad
dinner: roast chicken with rice and broccoli