a thaumaturgical compendium

If you click on “Index” above, you will find a page that is absolutely useless, and has been for at least a year. So, I decided I should put a FAQ of sorts. Then I thought, why not make it a FAQ-bot?

I’m basing the bot on ALICE, and trying to train it to answer questions of relevence to myself, my research, the program here at Buffalo, and the like. Unfortunately, she’s a little bit dumb right now, but if you get a chance, play with Ada, and ask her some questions. I’ll be doing this as well. If she has stupid answers right now, hopefully that will show me where improvements need to be made.

Frida: Life mixed with art mixed into film rather than biopic; makes you dream in color; Hayek injects life into the character and the viewer.

Emperor’s Club: Moralizing parable that tries not to be heavy-handed and fails, despite Kevin Kline’s presence; cliché-fest in which every actor is upstaged by the campus of the Emma Willard School (which also had a cameo in Scent of a Woman).

Adaptation: Irony-laden ouroboros of a film plays off of similar themes in Being John Malkovich, (nearly) sans said actor, and hovers at the brink of film school “high concept” stupidity and brilliance (while, naturally, reflecting said brinkmanship in the story itself).

Charlie’s Angels, Part Deux: Take the trailer, drop it in water, it expands to two hours; which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a summer popcorn flick.

The Fourth Hand: Unlike The World According to Garp, a Prayer for Owen Meany, or the Cider House Rules, this Irving novel about a man who has sex with many women, falls in love with one, and has his hand bitten off by a lion is unlikely to be the next film adaptation; unless Charlie Kaufman options it. (Update: turns out that the first third of a Widow for One Year is the next one up, later this year.)

As of today Jamie and I have been married a decade. Every day, I am thankful that I was lucky enough to meet her.

The accepted knowledge these days is that to have a successful marriage, you have to be two independent people; you are likely to have arguments, but that these can be worked out. That’s not the case for us. Jamie is very much a part of who I am, and the part of who I am that I like the most. And we almost never argue. I thought this was strange at first, and we tried for a few years to start arguments, but it never really worked.

I hope I can be as good a spouse over the next decade as Jamie has been over the last ten years. We’re moving into a new phase in our lives. Jamie, having supported me through graduate school—in every way—is now back in school. I am very proud of the way she has excelled in her law program. I think that she increasingly sees herself through my eyes, and in my eyes she is perfect. We will certainly have new challenges, especially with new members of the family, but even when everything else in my life is unsure, I can always turn to her for certainty.

So many people get married for so many wrong reasons, it’s easy to forget how good it can be. I can’t imagine the last ten years in any other way. If I had the chance to get married to Jamie today, I would jump at it, and I look forward to spending the rest of my life with my love and my best friend.

Jamie: everyone I know already knows this, and I know you know this: I love you and I always will.

Just installed the window air conditioner and I’m feeling guilty. Our house was built in the 20s, and has decent cross-ventilation. I shouldn’t need air conditioning. It is supremely unstylish and unromatic. When picturing myself in the middle of a Maugham story—which I do more often than I would like to admit—I keep thinking a Singapore sling, a slow-turning ceiling fan, and a crisp linen suit should be all that is needed. It ruins the illusion when the air conditioning starts blowing.

Unfortunately, when it gets hot, I feel like a stunned lizard. I can’t think and can’t move. This was always a problem, and now that I have achieved, shall we say, some measure of corpulence, the problem is further exacerbated. I am now a stunned chuckwalla.

And so, in the middle of last summer, we gave in, went to Wal-Mart, and bought window air conditioners for the office and bedroom. Oh, the immanity. Not only do I feel like a cad—using a steady flow of coal-fired electricity to make my side of the wall 10 degrees cooler than the other side—but I am cut off from the rest of the house, and the doleful looks of my canine compadre. But, as my pal Somerset once said: “It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.”

Perhaps what I need to do is go underground. I mean literally, live underground; where the temperature is a constant 57 degrees Fahrenheit. If I won the lottery today, I’d go and buy an old missile silo and turn it into the coolest school around. (Er, both literally and figuratively, this time around.)

As devices become increasingly mobile, the interfaces are also smaller and smaller. I was thinking this morning (in the shower, where I usually do my day’s thinking) about how to make more effective input devices. Way back in my undergrad days, there was a lot of talk about the direction of chording keyboards and the like, and I even worked on a chording keyboard research project. I used a Twiddler for a while, then accidentally left it behind in the lab at UW and it was stolen. But I also knew that there was a better solution. To really increase typing speed, you need something that allows you to enter more than a single letter at a time.

So I started thinking about how to increase the speed by giving more than binary options. Ideally, I’d like to be able to type in words or phrases. To do that, you need a broad set of options for each “hit.”

The first question is how to do this. If you had a system that could recognize the form a word had to take, like a probabilistic grammar checker, you could have a workable system with just a few thousand gestures. Like in Japanese, many combinations of such gestures could lead to more complicated words. The system I was thinking of consists of a glove with air bladders that lead back to pneumatic switches (either binary or with a range of pressures). These could be correlated to hand gestures. The learning curve would be tremendous, but people could type at the speed of thought.

There are a number of non-Twiddler options out there right now, including the very interesting DataHand, but the pricing is silly. I thought this was largely a dead area of development until I saw this article about a Sony haptics lab on the FT site.

Back to my pneumatic hand… How many air bladders on each hand would you need? The finger tips are obvious, but then you can add others; at least two for the heal of the hand, for example. Perhaps several on the thumb.

The really interesting question is whether you would be able to use these same bladders to answer the typist—i.e., to read. Reading with the fingertips is not a strange idea, even when using touch as a computer display. But could you learn to interpret the pressures on your hand as words and sentences?

And what about more graphical information. I have been waiting patiently for many years for the virtual retinal display to become a commercial reality, but it doesn’t look like that will be happening soon. I wonder whether standard video projectors, which are getting smaller and smaller, might be a solution. They wouldn’t need to throw an image more than a foot or two (though they could be boosted for more high-power tasks). You could then compute anywhere you could find a square foot of empty wall or table.

Go look at this. Now go give this person some money.

I just put in a paper to HICSS talking about the blog searching tool I’m working on. It’s not my greatest work. But it’s getting a little crowded lately for those looking at “bursty” words and phrases in the blogosphere. Intelliseek is the newest kid on the block, I guess, with their BlogPulse. Where’s Google? Anyway, just another push to finish my project before the big boys crowd me out :).