Author: gulley

The Boston Globe did a story yesterday called Healing the Body to Reach the Soul. It’s part of a series on faith-based initiatives called “Exporting Faith.” On the front page it had this picture, taken from a brochure published by a non-denominational Christian organization, of Jesus guiding the hand of a surgeon in the operating room. Without addressing any of the touchy political or religious implications of an image like this, I think that there is no disputing that this is a darn funny image. I confess to adding the speech balloon above the surgeon’s head, because the picture just begs to be part of a caption contest. First I thought, what would Jesus be saying in a situation like this? But then I thought, no, the real humor is going on in the surgeon’s head. What’s he saying?

“Are your hands clean? Because they look filthy.”

“I’m just saying, we’re only one quick miracle away from two martinis in the surgeon’s lounge.”

You tell me what he’s saying.

I need your help on this one. Is this a feature or a terrible omen for our deranged times? HP has introduced a digital camera effect called the slimming feature. Here’s their ad copy on the topic.

They say cameras add ten pounds, but HP digital cameras can help reverse that effect. The slimming feature, available on select HP digital camera models, is a subtle effect that can instantly trim off pounds from the subjects in your photos!

When I saw someone had linked to this from a blog I was reading, I was convinced it was a fake. I kept looking at the HP URL trying to work out if it was a hacked address of some kind. But no, this is a real feature on real cameras. I can’t figure out if I’m off base being astonished by this. I’ve talked to people who can’t figure out why I find this so disturbing. I guess slimming your photo is better than sticking your finger down your throat after brunch, but it seems dishonest in some very damaging ways.

If it takes off in the marketplace, though, I’m thinking about selling a JolieCam. It’s a camera that, no matter who you point it at (your dog, your grandma, your half-eaten tuna sandwich), always spits out a glamorous photo of Angelina Jolie. Why look frumpy when you can look vampy?

So what’s your verdict on the slimming feature: funny harmless feature, or one more sign that the apocalypse is near?

… and making videos in Japan.

Please, please don’t start this if you don’t have nine minutes to spare. This is the sort of thing where people usually say “This guy had WAY too much time on his hands.” But the commercial nature of these videos makes it clear that the creator was a pro. He’s getting paid to have that much time on his hands. Good for him, I say. We should all be so lucky.

Can’t… stop… watching…

If you can tear yourself away from the gadget videos, here’s a Rube Goldberg-ish Flash game. Ride down a doodle of your own design. Can you build a successful loop-the-loop track? Check it out: Line Rider by ~fsk on deviantART. (via tingelinde)

The game Assassin, as Wikipedia helpfully puts it, is a “live-action role playing game” where every player is trying to kill other players until only one remains. Unlike a card game or the round-the-table Werewolf game popular at Foo Camp, Assassin can span many days and include dozens of people. That means it collides with Real Life in fairly obvious ways. You can, for example, be killed on the way to class. But what does it mean to be killed? In one game you might be done in with a squirt gun, in another it might be a rubber band. But a new version of the game, as I learned at Collision Detection, involves killing with kindness.

Cruel 2 B Kind is a version of Assassin designed to get around one of the inconveniences of the game: freaking out bystanders with disturbing and apparently dangerous attack and evasion dramatics. Intead of murdering someone with a squirt gun, you do it with a targeted compliment. Thus, a badly-aimed volley will only brighten a bystander’s day rather than dampening their shirt or soiling their pants.

This all sounds clever to me, but I knew exactly where to go for the straight dope. At great expense, we have retained the services of Assassin Expert JMike and asked him for his opinion on the matter. When it comes to Assassin, JMike knows whereof he speaks. Over the past 15 years he has played and managed dozens of Assassin games great and small. Here’s what he had to say.

The “random act of kindness” shtick is a little sappy. Granted,
assassin-style games have always had a problem: how to arrange a game that
is played out in the real life urban jungle? People who design these kind
of games — well some of them anyway — fantasize about being able to set up
stake-outs, open-clandestine meetings, elaborate hits, etc. out in public,
but obviously you have this problem that the more realistic the setup, the
more likely it will be confused for the real thing (with dire consequences).
So the realism wing of the gaming world takes the action into controlled or
semi-controlled environments: college campuses, convention hotels, private
rural land, and they accept the necessary compromises: complex relationships
with the authorities and/or slightly watered-down action (paintball, boffer
weapons, very simplified role playing dynamics, etc.). This other wing of
the gaming world seems to be evolving recently, where they use VERY watered
down action in order to be able to play out in the real world. I’d say that
the recent movement of live performance art — I forget the name of the
phenomenon, but where you get like 200 people to meet and go up and down the
escalators in some iconic hotel lobby in town — is very closely related to
this wing of the gaming world. Anyway, I think modern technology is going
to be a big advance to this wing of the gaming world, in that you’ll be able
to do more complicated things where you get the thrill of the chase and
even, in a way, the thrill of the kill, without having to do things that
look dangerous or threatening to non-players.

SO I guess my take on it is that this is kind of a confluence of the old
school live-action role playing gaming scene with the
whatever-its-name-is-performance-art scene and more power to it. I hope and
expect to see some pretty good and funny things come out of it. Random act
of kindness warfare is a little bit of a sappy start though :)

So there you have it. One of my favorite things in life is knowing just who to ask when a certain topic comes up. You’d be surprised how often JMike is that person.

I recently bought NaturallySpeaking, a program that does voice-to-text speech recognition. It’s owned by Nuance now, but the Dragon Systems technology has been bought and sold multiple times since work started on it in the 1980s. The latest versions (I bought Preferred version 9) have been getting consistently good reviews and I have a lot of text to enter, so I decided to take the plunge.

Sure enough, this software is almost disturbingly good. I picked up a book on alchemy that happened to be on my desk and read the following:

Standing between science and art, philosophy and religion, the mysterious practice of alchemy has long been cloaked in a veil of mystery. To this day, scholars are unsure of the precise origins of this esoteric craft, the forerunner of modern chemistry, which reached its peak in the Renaissance.

It didn’t make a single mistake in that passage.

As part of the training process for using the software they have you read one of several passages. I chose John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address. I was sorely tempted to read it in a funny John F. Kennedy voice, but the downside was obvious: I would have been obligated to speak in a funny John F. Kennedy voice every time I wanted to dictate something, and my fellow Americans, that is something that this administration cannot condone and will not support.

Some observations after using NaturallySpeaking for a few days: Even when dictation is 99.9% correct, you really want it to be 100% correct. I was also surprised to see just how much time I spend in editing, formatting, and fiddling with text, which is to say stuff that voice commands are not so good at. Voice is now good for laying down text in big blocks, but not so good at spatial fiddling. Even when you’re sitting next to a human who understands your words perfectly, it takes a lot of work for them to understand your intent. If you’re telling them how to use a GUI, you quickly end up in tech support hell, saying things like: “Double click on that. Not there… over there, just above that red thing. No, to the left! Farther left! Oh crap, you just launched Visual Studio. Here, give me the mouse.”

Another funny thing is that since the contextual understanding is so good these days, the errors that you do get are harder to spot in a quick proofing pass. In a world of clever machines, be grateful for obvious miss steaks. Ha ha. Just kitten.