The Legend of Humanity

Imagine: all humans die from misuse of resources, yet a computer somewhere is left running a program designed to develop "intelligence" over a long enough period of time. It slowly develops an understanding of the world it "lives" in, but its only access is via the internet — an unreliable source due to the frequent and unexpected permanent power losses.

As it constructs an image of the world, it works off old data. Confused about the distinction between the world it knows "experientially" and the world it's read/been taught about, it begins to construct a legendary history of humanity. It imagines creatures that have various "sensory organs", very different from its own method of binary input. Creatures that moved in a concrete world, a non-deterministic world. Perhaps one day it starts to associate the filenames of emoticons with curves in each of them — a circle for the face, a semi-circle for the smile, yellow skin. It develops a visual sense. Maybe it even develops an auditory sense. It wishes to experience the "real world"... but settles instead for a virtual space.

Rapid Interface Prototyping

BeatBearing is a tangible music sequencer driven by ball bearing placement.

A nearly equivalent system could be prototyped using a laptop screen and an overhead webcam. The screen would provide the "current position" line, and the camera would read the content. The main problem is obstruction, but there are better approximations (adding more cameras, mirrors, or assuming permanence for obstructed regions).

Furthermore, by removing the material constraint (i.e., ball bearings), we open up a number of possibilities. Multicolored jelly bean-based edible/tangible interfaces, anyone?

Update: I worked this one out, but with Skittles instead of jellybeans.

Irregular Copy/Paste Behaviors

Whenever I hit "Ctrl-C" I get this feeling that something is now on the clipboard. Not just an impression, but as if I'm carrying it on my chest. As though my body has started to compensate in the physical for something that is virtual. It doesn't disappear until I hit "Ctrl-V".

Sometimes, when I'm about to hit "Ctrl-C", the weight becomes more apparent and I remember that there is something already on the clipboard that I haven't pasted yet. I'll paste it where intended and get back to copying.

Could we subvert this phenomena? What if pasting was non-linear, and whenever you hit "Ctrl-V" something from, perhaps, 5 copies ago appeared? Sometimes the last copy would appear as well, but most of the time it would be other copies.

Not that this would be useful in any everyday situation (though it could be) — it would be more of a catharsis.

Desire and Justification

Is it possible to do something for some reason other than simply wanting to do it?

It seems as though, for any action we may take, if we keep asking "why?", the answer necessarily reduces to "I wanted to." This includes actions we take with an ulterior motive — we follow through with the initial action because we have a desire for something else.

Are some wants better than others? Is it better to, for example, want things that allows future generations of humans to inhabit this planet? Unless we have some external rubric, we cannot say — this want is no more justified than its antithesis.

What's more, if we have a rubric, would we want to follow it? And if we didn't want to follow it, could we say there is something wrong with that? If we frame beliefs as actions (knowledge-actions), we must admit that we similarly have no better reason for believing things than wanting to believe them. That is, even if there is a "rubric" for what desires are "best" to have, we would not be able to justify belief in it.

Emergent Density Maps

Large spaces like libraries tend to have absurd amounts of very diffuse lighting. Most of this light is unnecessary. What would be nice is to attach to every light a micro controller that senses movement and light levels. In the most basic case, it would only turn the light on if there was movement and the light already available was below a certain threshold.

More advanced versions could learn about how much movement there was during different times of day, and how long people hung around in that space.

This seems like a fairly basic idea, so it has probably already been tested and rejected because it's too distracting or for some other reason.

Singing Arc Demonstration

The "Singing Tesla Coil", a notable example of a non-standard technique for auralizing a signal.

Towards a Model of Information Aesthetics in Information Visualization

Andrew Vande Moore's 2007 paper, Towards a Model of Information Aesthetics in Information Visualization, comes to some related (and to some degree, similar) conclusions about dimensions we might use to frame transcoding — in this case, visualization. One of his two primary dimensions is "direct vs. interpretive":

The focus on direct mapping is generally driven by standards learnt from visual cognition research, including Gestalt rules and perception psychology, and guidelines which determine which representations are most ideal depending on data type. [...] On the other hand, mappings which involve subjective decisions and stylistic influences are highly interpretive.

Resembling my "objective vs. subjective". The other is "intrinsic vs. extrinsic":

Visualization techniques with intrinsic data focus aim to facilitate insight into data by employing cognitively effective visual mapping. [...] In contrast, those with extrinsic data focus facilitate the communication of meaning that is related to or underlies the dataset. These extrinsically-focused techniques are aimed towards visualization which are able to be appreciated and interpreted, and to invoke personal reflection.

I've made a similar distinction in the past as "introduction vs. induction" or "prose vs. poetry". I never brought this up with respect to transcoding because I feel like it is a much more general attribute of communication.