{ 2003.07.24 } Greg Egan is the coolest scifi author out there (even apart from the loads of short stories free online). He writes java applets too, and this one is genius -- play Quantum Soccer: "In the game of Quantum Soccer, the aim is to shape the wave function of a quantum-mechanical 'ball' so that the probability of it being inside one of the goals rises above a set threshold".

{ } The Journey to Wild Divine is a Myst-like game that you play using biofeedback. Controlled sweat gland activity and heart rate is actually used for navigating through the game. "To succeed in the game, according to Whitehouse, players have to learn certain principles, which basically require what he calls an 'allowing attitude'--a kind of passive will. [...] In biofeedback terms, the game is set up so that players might actually have to raise either their sweat gland activity or heart rate in order to get through one particular barrier, while moving into a more balanced, or even calmer, state to successfully navigate another area. [...] 'At some point in the game, if a player has learned how to control their internal states to a degree, they can have an internal shift--something akin to an 'aha' experience, where they just know how to do things,' said Whitehouse, who particularly enjoys working in the area of optimal performance. 'The game actually begins to occur in their minds. For example, they might just automatically let the inhale and exhale become equal in their breathing and deepen it a little bit. This would result in their going into the desired pattern of increased heart rate variability. Or they might accomplish the same thing by connecting with positive emotions.'"

{ 07.23 } eyes that will not open wide enough/ have not the deepenough lungs for gasping. i wish i could do something worthy of this [---]. i can't speak it. the only way to do it justice is to speak it all, and it's being spoken all around us, already. tears, perhaps, or laughter. both. awe. there is nothing/ there is it all/ simultaneous. isness. thisness. here we are! can't you see? oh my.

{ } Stupid beta! Got MMS and a camera on your phone? I'm trying to find out the www's favourite colour. Send photos of your favourite colour here. Usual warnings: The pictures and sender details are stored; the address might not work in a week's time.

{ 07.22 } Consider that light follows the path minimising travel distance through space, between two points A and B (a straight line, or curved by gravity). It's as though each possible path was identified, and the shortest actually used (a single virtual actualised). Now add to the gedankenexperiment a block of a special material, not on the direct path. This special material is something that bends space in as complex a manner as possible - maybe a metre cubed block of a foam of tiny black holes, that would do - and make the foam a three-dimensional fractal so finding the optimal path through it is really hard. Then do two things. Firstly, calculate the fraction of possible paths that would pass through the material, and secondly calculate how difficult all possible paths through the material are to compute (use some universal computing measure). Then let some light out at source A, and record what happens when it gets to destination B.

What might happen is that it takes a tiny, tiny time longer to reach B than when the block wasn't there. That tiny extra time is the measure of the raw computing power of the universe itself, how long it takes for the universe to compute the paths through the black hole foam cube and discover that none of them are shorter than the straight line. And possibly, just possibly what will happen is that the front of the beam of light will take longer but all subsequent light in the ray won't take longer at all because the path will already have been calculated, so the head of the beam will be slightly yet measurably brighter. That is, if the universe has also implemented caching.

{ } Urban Bedtime Stories "is a live cable TV show in which the TV audience members and internet users become characters in the show's mise-en-scène. They talk with the TV characters and other audience members through internet chat within the context of the story -- the actors address audience members as character" (premiered late 2001).

{ } Entertaining early (1995) take on the internet/cyberspace and it's metaphor of space/territory/place: Baudrillard in Cyberspace: Internet, Virtuality, and Postmodernity. A few points jumped out at me. That the screen is unbridgeable with the body, so the internet collapses into a single physical point, however the internet creates its own world with connections between computers, a virtual terrain that has no frontiers: what exists is what is already mapped. There's lots more.

Also, I liked this: "'Information' has become a term to describe movies on demand, electronic malls, and expanding numbers of television channels; the media is 'accelerating in a void' of the banal. Increasing sophistication in technology produces more convincing simulations of information and more convincing strategies of deterrence. The fascination of the depthless screen--'the superficial abyss'--keeps us firmly rooted. With a wealth of information, we have no time to realize that we have nothing to learn". The superficial abyss.

{ } Whatever happened to serendipity? On moblogging (the intersection of people, place and information)... "Without wanting to take anything away from her, she was simply doing what just about any observant, curious human being equipped with this technology would get around to doing sooner or later. This is my house, this is my neighborhood, this is my best friend, this is where we hung out last night: this is, in short, any feature of my world that I find interesting or inspiring or worthy of comment". Some good uses, good challenges, and nice identification of weblog paraphernalia.

{ } Understanding use through mythology: "user mythology is a set of received or generated knowledge based on the experiences of a user base. a user base can be one person or the entire user community of a product. users create stories about their experiences in the often inscrutable world of computers and the internet all the time. those stories are refined, reformed, and passed on in accordance with how well they explain what the computer is doing, and how best to handle it. for instance, a computer that is swapping is often perceived to be 'thinking very hard'. both novice and expert computer users, even those who know a computer does nothing close to the process of thought, will interpret a swapping or slowed computer as thinking very hard. this metaphor is so useful it often supplants known factual data- namely that computers don't think". Good!

{ } As We May Communicate challenges the metaphor of the workspace (the desktop) as the way we work with computers: "Imagine that instead of seeing a quaint desktop when using a computer that we see a portal into a world of animate senders and receivers of information: avatars for agents, programs, operating systems, distributed systems, and, of course, other humans. Ideally, we could exchange and distribute information with a natural language system, handwriting recognition, or more traditional input systems. When we wish to gain information about a computer, software, or another person, we communicate directly with the representation for that object. [...] As in a conversation, we could be simply introduced to a communicative entity at first, but over time we could gradually be given a more complete picture of exactly what 'it' is and what "it" can do. Instead of overwhelming users with a dizzying array of unfamiliar features and commands, a communicative entity could gradually ease a user into a more comfortable relationship with itself".

In the communication space model, documents become collaborative artifacts created by users (who are human or software). Also touched on is the need for public and private selves. I'm not convinced, but it's good exercise.