100 Interesting Things 86-90: Super Nerds, Strategy, and Oil Paintings
A nearby galaxy, Messier 36. Only 30 million light-years away. According to NASA’s photo of the day it is nearly the same size as our Milky Way Galaxy, at 10,000 light-years across.
This post is part of a series I started after reading “Notice, Collect, Share” by Russell Davies. I’m more inspired than ever to get back into the habit of…noticing, collecting and sharing. As part of that return to habit, I’m going to try and find five things that interest me every week, and share them here on my blog. 5 things per week, for 20 weeks, equals 100 Interesting things. Maybe one of these things will inspire you. Maybe one of them will inspire me. We’ll all learn something along the way.
I’ve also been tracking all of the stuff I find in my “Deck Of Interesting” - it’s screenshots, links, and assorted notes of things that might make into one of these posts.
UPDATE: I’m a bit off my usual cadence of posting here. Vacation, changing jobs, and a 13-month old son will always get in the way of posting.
#86 The MIT Wearable Computing Lab A few weeks ago I came across an image of these rad-as-hell looking dudes. I uploaded the photo to R/Cyberpunk on Reddit and the crowd went wild: hundreds of enthusiastic comments and nearly 5,000 upvotes (and counting).
The MIT Wearable Computing Team Of the Mid-90s
More interesting than the photo itself (and Reddit fame) is that a lot of the commenters there knew who these people were, and were able to add more colour to the story:
“Far left is Steve Mann, who has/had a wife in spite of giving himself cybernetic brain "damage" (IIRC, he wore a HUD for so long that he got used to having his eyes focusing at two different distances. When he had to fully de-gear when returning to the US after 9/11(!) the vertigo left him temporarily wheelchair-bound.). Far right is Thad Starner, who I have less direct intelligence on, but I am quite sure has been as successful as he cared to be.”
Steve Mann (far left of the photo) had been doing that stuff for nearly 20 years at that point. Before it was a computing platform, his rig was a wearable photography assistant system with controllable lights and sensors and stuff.
I remember reading about him running down to a grocery store and opening up a live video stream while voice-chatting with his wife in the produce section so she could give him real-time pointers on how to select fruits. I don't remember which year of the 1990's it was, probably somewhere between 1997-2000. I think the data network he was using was something set up for his use and didn't cover much of Boston - but it wasn't a shallow demo. He could do that stuff whenever he chose more than a decade before anyone else could, and he did it on hardware that he built himself for the most part.
This group as a whole were some of the first folks to seriously experiment with sensory enhancements meant to be ubiquitous. The early big winner was a belt - it had a compass module, some batteries, and 16 vibration motors arranged evenly around it's length. It was a tactile compass and could either buzz continuously to let you get a detailed reading on North, or it could just buzz every set period to remind you. Wearing it for two weeks or longer did more than just tell you which way north was. You became aware of things like unmentioned bends in roads and which direction your home was in from where you were. One wearer noticed that he could sense the curvature of the Earth while riding a train that was going dead East for over 100KM, he could feel the angle between his facing and the magnetic pole change.
Thad Starner, far right in the picture, tried some visual sensory enhancements that ran through an unusual pathway to the brain. he wore a headpiece with a spectroscope that was sensitive to a large number of distinct frequencies of light both in and outside the visual range. The computer onboard took the intensity of each of those frequencies and used it to form various kinds of white noise. You had a low hiss of static that changed based on where your head was pointing and how the object it was pointed at reflected IR, visible, and UV light.
Starner's headpiece did NOT integrate seamlessly into his sensory experience - he still heard the signal as opposed to making it a part of his visual understanding of color. BUT, that did not mean that he didn't gain some new discernment during the project. He wrote about realizing he could "see" through the paint on a car and tell which parts were paint-on-steel and which were paint-on-bondo, even though no difference could be seen. He found himself scanning a friend's yard and being able to point out sections that might need care based on how the sound of the light reflecting from the grass changed.
I don't really have a great way to explain it all, other than to say that these folks were able to do the sort of stuff we show off on Hackaday and r/cyberdecks around twenty years before it became something just any interested party could pick up. It wasn't like there was nothing like the tools we have today, but they were much rarer, much more limited, and generally more expensive. What these MIT nerds managed to create was our present, to a great extent.”
There are tons of other great comments on the thread below. Thank you, Reddit users, for not letting the memory of these heroes of a different era be forgotten. But also thank you for reminding me of what the internet can be when it’s at it’s best: people celebrating interesting work, however nerdy it may be. And genuine conversation about niche topics. The majority of the internet is starting to feel like a discount strip mall. But there are small slices that still feel like a library, cafe, or well-visited games shop.
#87 Hugo Award Winners Meta-Analysis My social media consumption goes in waves and cycles: I give one network a try for a few weeks or months, then give it up and shift my attention to another one for a while. Right now, I am on a bit tired of the AI-sloppified world of Instagram and LinkedIn and have been enjoying more nuanced conversations and threads (and Simpsons memes) on Reddit. One of my favourite sub-reddits has always been r/PrintSF (the “SF” stands for “Speculative Fiction,”, not “Sci-Fi” as some purists would want). It’s been a great source of recommendations for new books to read, and a great place to discuss the books I’ve read. I’ve even made friends there!
Over the last year or so a user by the name of Stowski has slowly worked his way through all of winners of the Hugos, Sci-Fi’s biggest and longest-running award. I disagree with some of the books he liked, I disagree with some of the books he didn’t like, but I appreciate and applaud his effort. And he has motivated me to pick up a few books on the list that I haven’t yet read.
More than that, I liked his analysis of the themes he saw. It’s been said that Science-Fiction is a product of it’s time more than anything else, and with asking “What If” of that time.
From Stowski’s post:
”I thought it was interesting that winners seemed to reflect the trends in the world at the time. To me it felt like there was a slow shift between some themes:
Imaging future technology in early science fiction and more of “what would the world be like in the future” as technology developed so quickly IRL;
Inspiration taken from unpopular global conflicts (cold war / Vietnam etc.) of the time;
Cloning as the technology developed and it was at the front of debate IRL; and
Environmental collapse reflecting the shift to concerns around climate change (more recent focus)
Obviously there are books that go against these themes, but these are some that jumped out to me as I moved through the past 70+ years.
I’d also highlight there has been a clear and obvious shift from male to female protagonists since 2010 (women barely getting a mention in early books except as a passing love interest)”
#88 The AI Backlash Is Here For every post raving about the possibilities of AI that I see, I have two other conversations with people who are uninspired, bored, or frustrated at it.
We’re drowning in a sea of bland takes, impersonal writing, and generative slop. And Jason does his best at explaining what we’re all feeling:
#89 Why Does Strategy Matter Strat Scraps by Alex Morris is the weekly strategy newsletter I wish I wrote. It’s an odd mixture of drawings, sketches, diagrams, thoughts, quotes, more sketches, links, and interviews. It might have been inspired some of my own thinking for the turn that BlogCampaigning has taken.
This week he posted a few notes on what he learned as an independent strategist over the last year, and the quote below really stuck with me.
#90 The End Of The Age Of Sail I’m not sure where I found this painting of a sailboat under attack by two World War I era planes with machine guns. It’s obviously tragic, and no doubt based on a real battle. And it is also beautiful: the light on the water, the positioning of the aircraft, and just enough detail to give a sense of what’s happening.
Although I can’t remember where I gabbed it, I do remember the title: “The End Of The Age Of Sail.” It makes me think about what life would have been like then. Great sailing ships would have ruled the seas, captured the world, and dominated the military. Until planes and engines and higher firepower made them obsolete almost overnight.
I imagine that the pilots and gunners in those planes would have spent time on sailing ships, either as part of their training or just as life in the era and might have even been aware of their role in destroying and literally sinking a different a way of life.
An online search gives me almost no information about it, except that it was used as artwork for a model aircraft kit.
Super Nerds, Strategy, and Oil Paintings