Category: Me Myself&I

Read this NY Times article yesterday (if the article doesn’t show up, copy/paste the title in Google and then click the link). Can’t really get my mind off it. Cold hard facts:

• "Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys."
• Also, young white male students who are in poverty do as well as young black male students who are not in poverty.
• "In high school, African-American boys drop out at nearly twice the rate of white boys, and their SAT scores are on average 104 points lower."
• Only 5% of college students in 2008 were black men. At the same time, black men were incarcerated more than any other demographic group—at 6.5 times the rate of white males.

Between that and thinking about what I see here in L.A. or what’s happening in the South after Katrina, all these families broken etc

For the first time in my life about this racial issue, I feel hopeless. Desperately hopeless. How to break the loop, I don’t fucking know.

In France well it’s not as dramatic but it’s awful enough. It’s like black people there saw how much the US way wasn’t working during the past thirty years and how hard it was for a handful of them to succeed. And France has a colonial past, meaning a past of slavery with its minorities that makes some people able to hire illegal immigrants from Africa, get their passports and make them work for 20 years without doing nothing to legalize their situations. It doesn’t feel like an open environment to succeed for their children. It’s survival, by any means necessary, anger, violence etc Add the fact that the culture of praising self made people is inexistent and you have a recipe for disaster.

Meanwhile an old white man is dying in its old white small village, a man that a lot would consider racist though he took care of me for six years, made me jump on his lap and has a giant picture of me above his bed. I don’t know what connection we have, it’s hard to define. But we have it, no matter what. By reading all that stuff on black people vs the world it seems inconceivable but this shit is real to me. Real. Defying the norm and reducing it into powder.

Extremely lucky. Extremely isolated too.

I can’t get over this Lonnie Johnson story. It’s actually old news from a few years ago.

I’m speechless reading his amazing journey. I’m excited with his invention, backed up by the scientific community as something that has enough potential to dramatically change the world (yeah, I’m into this shit these days).

And yet Lonnie struggles to finance his research. I can’t get over this either.

When I read about his perfect career at the Air Force and NASA (received multiple achievement awards), his perfect life (helps children in Georgia and created jobs around his hometown), I don’t understand. There’s something deeply wrong in this country well known as Entrepreneur Land when a man like Lonnie is in difficulty to do research on his JTEC engine prototype and maybe start a worldwide revolution.

I mean the effing PARC said  about the invention “ it’s a very clever way to extract energy from a heat engine … It’s incredibly elegant.” But the defense about why Lonnie’s concept and prototype are not heavily funded is basically this (comment from ycombinator):

Investing in this is a huge risk since even though the concept might actually work it may turn out that there’s no economical sane way to enter mass production. In addition there’s still the doubt of "too good to be true" because it usually is.

A huge risk to invest a couple million dollars in order to change the entire energy economy, opening new markets? We have games, websites, failing with hundreds of million $ of funding, how come investing even half of that in the potential of the JTEC is crazy?? And if there’s still a doubt how the fuck are you going to make it disappear if you don’t help? It’s the kind of argument you could use for any invention Humanity discovered. It’s almost nonsense to stop at “it’s a risk” in R&D. R&D is about taking risks and minimizing or at least manage them.

Like another comment said, “if an electric sports car for the rich can get funded, so can this guy.”

Well apparently not.

Yeah, he’s a minority. In his skin. In his way and fields he’s doing research –from working on spacecrafts for the government to create squirt guns on its own to building an engine with both private and public interest-, he’s different, not academic, too cool. Probably a bad seller too.

But the man’s definitely got something, how come he be pretty much left alone in his little town in Georgia with no or very little funding available? Lonnie wants to stay independent and that doesn’t make it easy to get funding I guess. Still, how come?? MIT? Jay Z? Bill Gates? Fucking somebody??  

He gave a keynote almost two years ago and the goal was to develop a 25 Kilowatts engine in less than three years with the help of PARC.

Nothing in the news.

During that time, here’s a scale of R&D investments in different types of energy compared to the cost of the war in Iraq. Scroll down and cry.

So my question is: should I start a Kickstarter project and help a brother out?

When you type “how much” in Google, the second choice is “how much house can I afford”.

It made me think about sustainable housing, I’m reading fascinating stuff about it. I realized how much it was a huge game changer thing.

A rent @ 1500 a month for 6 years equals 108 000. That’s a lot of money. It bothers me that people pay rents for years for shitty places they will never own and that for the exact same amount of money they could afford to finance and build in a few months, a highly efficient passive house providing a really good quality of life for their family. Today.

We need to spend more time on this problem. Now.

The game changer thing is that for the first in history, we’re disconnecting Quality of Life from income even for something as definitive as owning a house. Before, only people working like crazy and making a ton of money could afford nice and comfortable places we all deserve. Now with cheap material, highly efficient designs and technology costs going down all the time, there is no scarcity about it. It’s actually the opposite.

What I envision is that young people will at some point have mortgage to pay for owning their sustainable space. Instead of paying for education –which is going to be soon all online, anytime, anywhere, for almost free- people will pay for their future home, maybe design and assemble it too.

What would it be to work two jobs to pay the mortgage and going back home confident, to a durable nice shelter of yours instead of working two jobs, pay for education and huge rent for a poor place while not knowing if all that is going to make you live decently later? Why later again?

I think the difference is mindblowing. I think it’s going to make people so much less stressed out. At a big scale it might change the world in a way I can’t even really imagine now.

Meet Fincube, a sustainable modular small house (47m² 505 sq/feet).

Anyway for now the focus is to get the price down and there’s a lot of room for it: local, natural, recycle materials, new design, better efficiency… Sustainable housing requires a lot of customization on site and that’s another big plus: it drives small businesses, you know, 99.7% of employer firms and usually around half or more of the economy of a country.

By the way America, you lag very hard on the subject: as today there’s around 25 000 certified passive structures already built in Europe. There are 13 in the United States.

So prop 19 didn’t make it. For me the good thing about it wasn’t really about California, where everyone can smoke some good weed pretty much everywhere, anytime.

For me the purpose was to send a message to the rest of the country and the world. Yes, we’re pretty smart and responsible now and we want that shit to be legal, thank you.

But it’s more complicated than that. Some well known pot-activist were saying no and there’s a lot that makes sense.

Anyway this morning I stumble upon some Le Monde article: "legalizing marijuana, tracking E.T., props rejected".

sigh.

These fuckers know how to turn a title to make you think that UFOs and drugs are you know, hippies and weirdos.

Yes Le Monde, I see what you did there and knowing the situation about drugs in France, knowing that there’s certainly a good amount of people at the newspaper HQ doing drugs, reading a title like this reminds me how much you’re a bunch of fucking hypocrite dinosaurs, lame ass bitches only good to suck anything that any government will tell you to. I hope you die in hell.

When I was young reading this classic manga, I always thought that the world described in was absurd and yet charming with this blend of high tech, simple country life with a few mega pole.

I am now considering that it might be our future. To a curiously accurate extent.

Here’s a  (full) description of Earth in the Dragon Ball world:

Politically, Earth has a planet-wide constitutional monarchy. It is divided into 43 "sectors"

Absurd!! I was thinking during the early 90s. Kings are things from the past! Well now here’s the facts:

“The total household wealth in the world has been estimated at $125 trillion in year 2000. 90% of this wealth is held by people in North America, Europe, and high-income Asian countries, and 1% of adults are estimated to hold 40% of world wealth, a number which falls to 32% when adjusted for purchasing power parity.”

Of course it’s worse in 2010 (in the US the top 20% holds 85% of the wealth, note the opinion difference).That just looks like a monarchy, including the fact that this 20% of people can do whatever they want politically. Oh wait they can and they abuse it!

But what makes me think that this planet-wide monarchy could happen is that the 99% other adults are often dreaming about being part of this over-wealthy 1%. Just in the software realm the Apple AppStore works this way, even controlled by a dictatorship people are happy even if the facts are bad, really bad (half of all developers will earn less than $682 per year, read that twice). People believe and you can’t do nothing against that. Hope, even a not-so-smart one is powerful.

Hope ensures the system to go on and on forever to deliver just that, a constitutional monarchy across the world populated by millions of little communities everywhere (decentralization from a corrupted and pyramidal state) with 4 or 5 mega pole simply called East West South North Central City where people would try to make it. It doesn’t seem crazy for me: L.A./NYC, Paris/Marseille, Barcelona/Madrid… It’s already the case. Also we definitely need the same rights, assignments, economic rules everywhere. If we solve all the conflicts of today, it would do that: making everybody ok on how we live on Earth, under the same “mega” state.

Other point, younger I thought the future would be you know, all the future at once, crazy cities and flying cars. But probably it would happen as in Dragon Ball and as in real world today: technology adds itself but doesn’t destroy the older one. We spend insane amount of time in front of computers yet books are still here and worth some big businesses, still.

Let’s go deeper. 

“Though less common, intelligent anthropomorphic (and sometimes non-anthropomorphic) animals such as Oolong and Puar are integrated into the population and are well-adjusted and are also accepted as people. (This is similar to fairy tale animals in European fiction)”

I don’t know if intelligent anthropomorphic animals are going to happen but we’re sure crazy about these dogs cats and whatever animal you like. We even use terrorist-class systems to track down people treating kitties badly and the internet is having some sort of obsession with cats dogs and other cute non human living things. And maybe evolution is going to help them getting more like us: some dogs know how to ride Moscow metro to hang around the city.

So to conclude, a world based on a monarchy populated with robots (btw look at this video, I want one too and also, ROBOT NANNIES via Sean), old and weird people, indestructible old machines, little businesses, community-driven jobs, cheap and simple high quality of life with smart animals, ruled by a powerful, arbitrary but distant political system seems plausible.

I don’t know if Akira Toriyama thought about the accuracy of its world… Anyway, looking forward for these capsules…

One of the first on the road.

General Sherman, largest tree in the world.

Lords of the forest since the Ice Age.

 
It wouldn’t bend over.

After a few hours of driving from the level of the sea to around 2000 meters up in the mountains, there they are. Thousands years old fat ass sequoias. It’s amazing because it’s so sudden: from L.A. you cross the big plain before Bakersfield with nothing but flat fields. Then it’s little bushes on hills on the way to the forest. And then in 20 minutes there are trees everywhere and “holy shit” giant trees.

Magic. You feel you’re going to see a giant monster ala Shadow of the Colossus or Totoro walking slowly in the mist…

I have always looked at religions from the side like, “Hi. Why you’re here?”.

My dad was doing catechism and it never worked with me, I was laughing at the silliness of it. I wasn’t a rebel but for that thing, totally. No offense but it seemed too dumb. First I was reading a ton of stuff about rockets and space (future Ariane 5 was in the work) and science and nothing seemed limited for humans so why would I ask “God”? And if God is the answer to everything, stop asking questions and bugging me about it then.

Second my mother didn’t participate in any religious activity nor she was talking about it. She was the only person not to go to church when it was happening (rarely) and for my Mini Me, that was something. She was pretty much never wrong so if she wasn’t going, that was probably the right thing to do, wasn’t it?

 
Some people truly believe that. Think about that.

I went to a private catholic school later, but religion was only a cross on a wall and that was pretty much it. The 90s were starting and religion in France seemed to be a thing of the past. Meaning, nobody in the streets would wear anything religious or nobody would care, US based TV shows with references to God –yeah, quite often- always were a source of lol, medias were always ready to kick religion in the balls at the first occasion etc. All we had was the pope message for the New Year which would always triggered “isn’t he dead already?” jokes about him, this old dude from the past, having no influence, except maybe the Latin world. The pope always has been a Mummy Star there.

Seriously, I thought at some point that religion and mostly the Christian thing, was about to slowly die around 2000 and that sounded about right for the New Millennium filled with obvious jetpacks and holo-computers.

Turned out to be the exact opposite way.

I think that even worse than the wars triggered by 9/11 is the resurgence of religions and especially the ones based on the same stories. Soon after the tragedy every single president in Europe was having a trip to the Vatican and when Jean Paul II died it was almost like we forgot about all the stupid shit he and his posse supported. JP II dies and medias with live TV events ask, seriously, if the white smoke announcing to the world the election of a new pope is white enough??? That really was the 2005 WTF moment. Yesterday I watched a video of a young French woman saying about an aggression in the metro “Thank God protected me”. That someone younger than me born in France is turning herself to religion and pray  (for Islam “infidels” to be punished I suppose) kind of hurts.

It simply shows a high level of desperation. We fail to build a post-religion social structure evolving with us while providing security. That’s the challenge. Technology is accelerating so much, changing paradigms, transforming our lives, even businesses have a hard time keeping up with it. States are so far away it’s not even funny, not capable of providing this balanced social structure we want, making us angry. In this constant changing world I can see how an unchanged and stable system like religion is appealing, even more in the US where the state is so not providing enough. But to me it just seems insane to go this way…

I don’t know religion much, but I know they aren’t that right

Religions tend to be so totally outdated for our times, especially for women, how do they rise in popularity in a Facebook and Internet world, I don’t know. It makes me think about someone like Ron Paul, a Republican who can be wise voting against the Iraq War, opposing the War on Drugs , not supporting death penalty, being gay friendly or be tech friendly and at the same time being so WASP that he doesn’t believe in evolution (so yes, he’s pro-life). The dude is a libertarian until it hits his religious nerve. Religion is just fucking people up, that’s all I see.

These days, here in the US people laugh at an over religious woman but you have to be in a very religious country to found something like Scientology and make it work so good. In France people think that Islam is bad for women when everybody knows how bad Catholicism has been for women since forever. Like any religion I’d say.

The point is religions today should not be part of culture or being seen as part of it, period. It was, History is here to prove it thanks. But it’s not now, at all, it just makes things worse from France to Germany to NYC. Immigration and melting pot are unstoppable so let’s make it fluid by not fighting over really old virtual stuff that don’t matter in the world of today.

People prefer to rumble between groups instead of just being themselves, individuals who can enjoy any culture of the world and have their own preferences without attacking or degrading others because they don’t share them? Fine.

I’ll be somewhere, playing with robots.

Somehow this company is under the radar when it comes to complain about software but jeez, they should be on top.

I remember the times when I didn’t get what was the difference between Shockwave and Flash. I didn’t give a damn because it was all so great to see and try this brand new technology. All my graphic designer friends were just too happy and it was like we’re going to do animated movies for the intertubes and become billionaires.

I’ve never had problems with Adobe until I use their products of course. Photoshop is such a standard that there’s no question about it (although they’re slow at updating some obvious stuff). For their graphic tools,  their first business, nothing to say more than competitors.

But for the rest… Their fucking formats. The PDF. So awesome in the concept. So awful to use, even professionally the software is full of bugs and UI inconsistencies.  And Adobe Reader is more annoying that Norton. Maybe not, but really close.

Nooooooooooo

Flash. As long as it was used for games (and especially downloadable) it was great but since it became the standard for media players on the web, it’s not ok. The difference between having Flash installed or not when you’re browsing is astonishing, it’s more fluid, it doesn’t hang, the computer stays cool etc. But of course at some point, you have to fucking install the plugin…  I made it for a month without it and I now use a Flash blocker. HTML 5 should fix the problem but it’s still a long road from being able to deal without Flash, the slow and cpu intensive media player. Damn I hate it.

I’m creating e-learning content with their tool Captivate and besides the annoyance of having updates all the time for the Helper (???) Adobe AIR or for Flash security, the software is a pile of shit. They rewrote a new version that has been late and went out in June this year. It’s worse. Like, opening a template from Adobe and having the app crashing immediately. Every time. The menu Insert offers you to insert New Slide and Blank Slide which is the fucking same thing. I can’t target old computers with Flash 7. The AS2/AS3 mess. The Help is awful with a shitty in-app browser, I can’t open the help pdf with Foxit Reader (gotta love Acrobat The Retard) and so on.

It’s a tool meant for productivity and all I get is terrible frustration by loosing time trying to do simple things that barely work.

They sell Captivate 5 at a whooping 800$. For a world-class company that size, with that price and a poor quality like that, it feels like they’re spitting in my face. It’s the first time I’m so pissed off after purchasing a download. I think I’ll never buy any Adobe product ever again.

Adobe just doesn’t give a shit or they’re in panic mode, reaching for every creation tools market possible and extend their shitty formats use I don’t know but it’s now really ridiculous.

Yes, there’s no big competition against them and that’s the main problem.

Releasing some music always feels like being naked while presenting some architecture project to a group of people.

The workflow in my mind looks like this:

“Good…Mmh ok so there’s a conflict of sound at this moment, what should I do, lower this synthesizer volume or cut through frequencies with the EQ or lower the cycle of that operator? Let’s try and then apply the master compressor to see if it works… Almost… Now if I just get enough of reverb feedback at this moment, that should add to the consistency in the background… Right, so that grooves but because the HPF adds a lot of overhead on this track, I’m going to lower it at the same time… Nice curve, be smooth, less than -4 dB.. OK! Now rewind and PLAY”

Repeat. And that is just the mixing stage, but the point is that I really feel building something, creating it with plans, expectations, failures, progress and some sort of deadline… Daniel Cook did an amazing blog post about visualizing the creative process and it fascinates me how well it defines design, could it be music or a game or even your own way of skateboarding. The creative process is the same. It’s probably the same for a lot of people. Even you.

Anyhoo, here’s the last track:

Patchwork by Harold

I wish it was used in some demoscene stuff… Enough, let’s play some bass.

Or the complicated relationship between software and hardware and how the software is always the most important thing.

The best example of the complexity would be the HTC case. HTC makes phones. They’re so fast at iterating their models that they jumped into the software wagon after witnessing the iPhone’s kick in the mobile butt. HTC started its work on user interface in 2008 with TouchFLO 3D which became HTC Sense, both for Windows Mobile and Android. Really neat integration with social media and stuff that wasn’t available anywhere else in these ancient times, last summer.

iOS/HTC Sense/WP7. I’m totally bored with icons now, so WP7 is really appealing to me UI/UX wise.

These user interfaces (software) really had a huge role on selling phones (hardware). Today, manufacturers all try or do that: customizing the phone’s OS they’re selling. Which is the reason they all embrace Android and are not big fans of Windows Phone 7 which doesn’t allow customization like Windows Mobile 6.5 did. And yeah, they embrace Android now because the next version, Android 3, will not allow that skinning and rebranding shit.

The biggest bad point of this customization craze is that carriers and manufacturers abuse it and basically lock phones on features. Thankfully it’s mostly a US thing. In Europe, laws are behind consumers on that matter and phones can not be locked to carriers, it’s anti-competitive practice. Carriers already fuck us up quite well, thanks.

The second bad point is that having a customized phone software makes you unable to update easily and you all know how much it’s important these days. HTC finally released the update of HTC Sense for Android 2.1, except that Android is now at 2.2 and Google just released a new Gmail app that only works on 2.2… See? What was supposed to be a seemingless experience, is not. And HTC is trying the same with Windows Phone 7: adding a layer of user interface because it used to sell phones.

Manufacturers and carriers, face it: users don’t need your interfaces and widgets anymore because the main OSes of the market are today well mature and are looking good, thanks. Moreover, developers NEED a homogeneous market so that they can focus on the quality of their products and by making special OSes or blocking features, you’re not helping that.

True, the closer the relationship is between the hardware and the software, the better it is for everyone. The problem is that if it works, people will always forget about the hardware: I don’t have a HTC Hero, I have an Android phone. That really sucks for hardware people. How can they differentiate themselves? Yep, software customization and bigger marketing (SamsungGalaxyyy) that’s about all.

Hardware people want to shine like Apple. The problem is Apple works because it’s small, the Apple way cannot work with dozens of hardware makers and multiple OS providers.

Can’t wait to see the output of HP’s Palm critically acclaimed webOS.

Seriously, the tablet market is going to be such a mess especially for developers. That’s not good news, more time spent to try to make an app work everywhere… Like usual right, but I thought we were learning from our mistakes somehow.

This is where a hardware-wise open platform with a widespread OS like the couple x86/Windows, serving everybody quite well from the developer to the user, is pretty remarkable. Because looking at the mobile market and the overall trend in technology from a business standpoint, this kind of balance sounds like a dream.