Technological Thanatopsis

News item:

'Lost in Space' Actor Harris Dies
Mon Nov 4, 9:44 PM ET

By ANTHONY BREZNICAN, AP Entertainment Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Jonathan Harris, the flamboyantly fussy actor who portrayed the dastardly, cowardly antagonist Dr. Zachary Smith on the 1960's sci-fi show "Lost in Space," has died. He was 87.

And so another bit of pop culture passes from the scene, assuming a kind of iconic immortality on some cable channel. Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs thought that after death, they would ascend to heaven as a god, and be seen as a star. These days, the more modern view is that you become a star first, and then die in syndication.

In another ten years or so, very many of the shows in syndication will have casts made up almost entirely of dead people. Keeps costs down, I suppose. Why do you think that RCA re-issues a new Toscanini set every 10 years or so? Think about it, though. For the first time in history, we have the world-view of previous generations being passed down directly (in color, even) to generations with very different demographics and cultural outlook. Some big discordancy there. Fred MacMurray may have gone to that big Disneyland in the sky, but his early 60's earnestly square outlook is still being beamed out to millions every day as the picture of normal California family life (if that's not an oxymoron.)

The 21st Century is being continuously inundated with scenes from life in the mid-20th Century, a vicarious form of time travel. People are now able to escape to eras of their choosing, if only for a little while, and if only in the imagination.

But what if the good old days could be brought back to life, in some directly experienced way?

There are already speech synthesis techniques that work by concatenating tiny pieces of utterances from a human speaker to form new utterances. Given enough voice samples, you could have the voices of famous people saying things that the people themselves never said in real life. More than that, you could have the voices of famous people speaking lines in new productions, long after the original people are gone from the scene.

Now the real fun begins. Who owns the rights to the voice, appearance, and mannerisms of people who are no longer alive?

Here is a semi-facetious suggestion. Doctors, lawyers, and other professional people already incorporate themselves. Everybody should do this, using incorporated status to file copyright notices on their voice, appearance, and mannerisms for use by future generations. I can see a new kind of investment vehicle, where instead of leaving your loved ones an insurance policy, based on the statistics of a lottery cushioned by the demographics of growing population, you can leave them - you! Or at least the distinct, IP-protected bits that make you, you, in standards-friendly digital form, ready for licensing and evergreen revenue production.

Note that Microsoft already owns an encyclopedia (Encarta) and a multimedia archive (Corbis)? What happens to shared cultural experience when it is no longer shared, but licensed out?

My guess is that as the real world becomes more entangled with the virtual world, personas will be as important as persons, and that the future of the future lies in customizable re-creations of the past.

Two Haiku on DMCA

Bitstream is secret
Do not even try to look
Else visit Club Fed

Bitstream comes with curse.
Crack it, incur the awesome
Wrath of Valenti.

One More Haiku on Program Structure

Unlike consultant
good script writer is never
ever go-to guy.

(with thanks to Bob Perlman)

Seven Haiku to While Away the Time

Can you loop the loop?
Not just aerobatic tricks
Software does it too

For loops are easy
No extra variables
The loop does it all

While loops are tricky
Am I repeating myself?
While loops are tricky

While condition met
Loop iteration goes on
Without end, maybe

Time to exit yet?
Bump the loop counter or else
Never-ending loop

Dyjkstra had it right
Use of goto is harmful
Use of while is, too

What is to be learned?
Keep track of your indices
Or memory full

The Future Isn't What It Used To Be

Long ago and far away, but stunning in retrospect to consider what might have been.

I can recall a sales guy in 1976 saying "I can sell a mini for $25K or a micro for $2.5K. How many of these things do you think we can sell? With 30,000 machines in the field, we already have the second largest installed base in the world."

Intel has since shown us that:

• More than 30,000 CPUs can be sold, before breakfast, even.
• Architecture is not a strong predictor of success
• What almost all computer companies do efficiently is packaging, not fundamental design

Seven Haiku for a Departed Tooth

Tooth number thirty
Lost its filling, always hurt
Tooth and pain gone now

Bad tooth. What to do?
Root canal? I don't think so.
Extraction action

An "abridged" comment
Brush your teeth every day
Or gap in the back

Dentist was perplexed
Endodontist helps too late
Nothing left to save

Root canals are easy
Says young dentist to patient
Now both know better

Dentists need practice
Experience teaches them
But why me, O Lord?

Oral surgeon knows
Dentist's failure his success
"Mind the gap" he says

Information Utopia

There was a speech at RAND a while ago on the development of the Internet. The main points were that information utopia and a new era of personal freedom were almost here, because of the free flow of data along the many distributed networks of the Internet which are accessible to most everybody.

I disagree with this cheery assessment because I think there is a kind of funnel or information diode effect going on. Users logging onto a site are visible, searchable, and ultimately knowable, by both corporations and governments, for purposes ranging from the benign to the annoying to the truly frightening. The organizations doing the observing are not themselves so observable - all the visitor sees is what's on the Web site, while the Web site can get quite a bit of data on the visitor, more if spyware is used. The relative anonymity of organizations and their databases ensures that the information diode flows mainly from people to organizations, not the other way around.