When Malcolm Gladwell says you’ve got the most brilliant mind in America, I’m guessing you can write pretty much anything your little heart desires and it’ll sell like hotcakes, even with a hellsafugly cover.
At any rate, Freakonomics sounds fun. This excerpt and this one, both about baby names, are fascinating. OK Kottke interview | The NYT Mag article I assume led to the book | A NYT Mag piece also co-authored by Levitt and Dubner | Other writings by Dubner
It’s not often one sees a hard-hitting piece of entertainment journalism, like this Q&A, in which Der Spiegel grills Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg about their Scientologist beliefs. (Waxtastic.)
Clive Thompson links to what he calls the most impressive piece of fan art yet, a 40-minute Star Wars, downloadable online, created with $20,000 and a lot of love. Check out the trailer.
JKottke brings us the best look I’ve seen so far at the new technology. His reaction?
What you can’t see from the photo is how insanely crisp and clear the text on the “screen” is. It was book-text quality…it looked like a decal until you pushed the next button and the whole screen changed. It was *really* mind-boggling and you could instantly see how most books are going to be distributed in the very near future. Despite looking like a computer, when you were reading, it felt like a book because of the resolution (a very odd sensation). And it’s not only for books…I was told that there’s e-paper that’s capable of full-color 24 fps video. Can’t say enough about how blown away I was by the Librie.
Update: No, wait, actually, here’s the best look. Here’s a pretty good one.
Having just fired off two ranty e-mails to Robin, I thought I’d just go ahead and take the rants public. My beef was these three reports/manifestos/speeches that have been setting the hearts of the likes of Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis all a-flutter.
If you haven’t read them, they all make essentially the same point — old-school journalism’s in trouble. Shorter Merrill Brown: Young people don’t read newspapers. Shorter Tim Porter: And it’s the fault of backwards-thinking journalists. Shorter Rupert Murdoch: No, seriously. Young people like never read newspapers.
I’ll take my rantings past the jump, so you can continue unassaulted, if you so prefer.
I finally gave in and looked at Processing.org, the programming language for artists, and spent a good few hours today agape at the beauty and creativity on display in the exhibitions. Then I encountered Moovl, which stopped me in my tracks.
Remember the Soda Constructor? Well, they’ve taken that and made it mindblowing.
Moovl applies the laws of physics to your doodles. Remember that Gamespy article about Spore, Will Wright’s new game? The article describes character creation in Spore thusly:
The 3D version of the creature editor was amazing, in that the creature was totally configurable. You could stretch and pull and tug or fatten it any way you liked, almost like working with clay. More importantly, you could add functional elements, like heads, mouths, eyes, tails, fins, claws, even legs and feet. Wright proceeded to add not two, but three legs to his creature. Then he let it loose.
Now, suddenly, his creature could walk. And he did so — he walked right out of the sea and onto the land. This incredible moment in the history of evolution was made even more remarkable by the technology behind it: the game had figured out, procedurally, how a creature would walk if it had three legs (it was a kind of lopsided gait, if you’re curious, with three steps: left, right, then middle.) No 3D modeler created the creature, and no 3D animator was required to make it move around — it was all created out of a gamer’s whim and a computer program smart enough to make it work.
Moovl can basically do that. Not in 3D, but it’s cool enough in 2D that I don’t mind that right now. Draw a hilariously simple doodle of a three-legged blob, train three of the feet to move, and voila, you’ve got a creature.
The official site is targeted to children, and the examples there aren’t very inspiring, even though the applet’s slightly better. I prefer the pared-down version and its examples over at Processing, especially “lovehurts” and “fistycuffs.”
Part of what’s amazing to me is how much those simple doodles in motion seem to suggest narratives. The story and the interactivity unite in these very logical rules and relationships which you have the power to build on or alter.
Something tells me that’s going to be the storytelling model that ultimately turns video games inside out.
I was going to post a link to Steven Johnson’s excellent NYT Magazine article called “Watching TV Makes You Smarter.” Now I’ll up the ante by also posting a link to a thought experiment on his blog where he asks what today’s video game detractors would have said if video games had come before books. Both well worth reading.
Douglas Rushkoff, who’s only the coolest ever, not only has a new book coming out (via), but also has a book available as a PDF online — Open Source Democracy: How Online Communication Is Changing Offline Politics.
Lexicon is a game in which you and your fellow players create an encyclopedia for a world that doesn’t exist. For example. (Via.)
One of my favorite Olde Worlde reporters, Anne Hull (c.f.), has been a Pulitzer finalist six times, but not yet a winner. Now, the Washington City Paper is calling on the Pulitzer board to give Anne one of their rare “Special Awards” for her continually outstanding work.
