Setpoint Originator

Flooble's Random Blog Post Generator

Check out this app from a company called Flooble. I hear some fairly well-regarded blogs have been written this way:

"You know how sometimes you feel like you haven't posted anything to your blog for a while, and you should really get around to doing it, but there's nothing to really write about? We've all been there. That's why we at flooble have decided to give you an Instant Blog Post Generator.

Now you can have a ready-to-post entry for your blog with just one click of a button. Our system is random enough that there's thousands of variations to the post that it can generate, so if you don't like how it came out, you can simply keep clicking until the generator comes up with something you find acceptible.

(Because of the random element, some of these will not make too much sense, but some can be pretty funny!)"

Here's the first random post I got:

"A couple of days ago my teacher was watching a TV show about art in today's cut-throat corporate world. She was really disturbed by the whole thing, so she started telling my friend Bob about it, and he started bitching:

"That's amazing!.. Wow! If I hear another thing about today's cut-throat corporate world I'm going to shoot somebody!"

But then when my teacher got to the part about the art, Bob ran away all of a sudden. And the next day, Bob's father told me that the reason Bob was so freaked out was because he had to study art in class. There are days when Bob can be very stupid like that, but I have to live with that...

Link of the day: Give Points!"

Wow. I actually have a friend named Bob and I think this concocted scenario is totally plausible. Ha. Makes me think of my colleague John Smart's writing on Personality Capture and Digitial Twins (scroll down to B2. Personality Capture/Digital Twin (DT)).

IT Conversations Rules!

I'm a huuuge fan of John Brockman's Edge group. I greedily gobbled up their awesome video archives several years ago, but sadly they aren't adding many new ones.

Enter Doug Kaye and his listener-supported IT Conversations. Different from Brockman's bunch in that the ITC presentations are audio-only (far from a problem, you can take them to go) and mainly about business and the Web (you know: IT) rather than the whole-Universe-as-tinker-toy set over at Edge (you know: edge stuff), but the spirit of creative community feels similar to me, the cast and content are world-class, and best of all it keeps on a comin'.

One of my favorite classic Edge videos is Ken Kesey discussing the role of writers and poets(/artists) in shaping society. Excerpt: "You can't blame the President for the state of the country: it's always the poet's fault. You can't expect politicians to come up with a vision. They don't have it in them. Poets have to come up with a vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold." The Merry Prankster also performs some hysterical foul-mouthed dramatics that you'll be imitating in your friends' faces in no time.

One of my favorite IT Conversation talks is Thomas Barnett speaking at Pop!Tech. Tom wrote a great book called The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the 21st Century. His book and talk are a big picture framework for thinking about globalization after 9/11.

IT Conversations is also hosting audio from Accelerating Change 2004 which from my point of view as an organizer is just too cool. So if you want to check out stuff from the conference I work on, please browse their growing list of AC2004 downloads. It feels satisfying to be contributing in my own little way to a resource and community that I find so valuable.

Point, Shoot, and Map the Whole Friggin' Scene in 3D

(Cross-posting of an article write-up for the next edition of Accelerating Times:)

Augmented-reality machine works in real time, by Will Knight, NewScientist.com news service, 02.03.05

[Commentary by me] Researchers at Oxford University, UK, have developed a way to build real time 3D models of physical environments using a single video camera. As long as their system knows the dimensions of a single object within its view it can deduce the sizes and distances of all other objects, even while the camera is in motion.

The application could be a significant step in developing machine vision for robots. It also allows digital objects to be transposed onto real scenes in consistent and believable ways, in real time (creating a fluid mixed reality at 30 frames per second). A demo video (80 MB) on the project site shows virtual furniture added to live footage—something that until now had only been possible in post-production.

Examples of commercial applications mentioned in the article are home decoration and planning engineering projects. Some other applications that come to mind are gaming (as in an advanced Sony EyeToy—EyeToy inventor Richard Marks showed us some amazing new apps at Accelerating Change 2004 that are already barking up this tree), a tool for mass customization and personalization (BodyMetrics writ large?), and eventually maybe even something like David Gelernter’s vision of Mirror Worlds: high-resolution software versions of entire cities. In previous newsletters we’ve flagged Google’s purchase of Keyhole’s eye-in-the-sky geo information system and A9’s use of GPS-enabled cameras for carving out pseudo-navigable 2D maps of cities at street level (Block View). Could this new process (or something similar) eventually be the most time and cost efficient way to realistically map the real world in 3D at all scales and, significantly, to make the model navigable by human-controlled avatars?

(Monetary note: The project (named Real-Time Augmented Reality and Personal Localisation using Single Camera SLAM) has been awarded £255,000 ($480,000) of funding from the UK Government's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.)

(hat tips and dance dips to Cory Ondrejka for sending me the link)