garry’s posthaven

Japanese band Sour features some very imaginative use of webcam footage by their fans. It's like those coordinated crowd card stunts that you see at football games... only much nerdier.

Electricity greatly improved our quality of life. But I'm not going to get excited about buying a basket of utility companies. Same for the Internet. Can't live without it, but can't live with it (in my portfolio).

James Altucher will eat his words. To count tech out at a local minima is absolutely absurd. Fred Wilson is right: Tech is alive and well. But there are deeper reasons than what Fred Wilson mentions.

Other than computing technology, what field can boast exponential gains? Green tech is much talked about of late, but what are the rates of improvement for battery power, photovoltaics, and clean energy? Miniscule, in the single digit percentages. We can only wish for exponential advancement in almost all fields of technology. It's just not a reality.

With computers, we are blessed by the exponential curve of Moore's Law. Ray Kurzweil plots this exponential curve:

Just look at the innovation that has happened in 40 years. Bill Gates is famed to have said in 1998: "If General Motors had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty five dollar cars that got 1000 miles/gallon."

Instead, GM has gone bankrupt, and now we have one-inch-thick netbooks that we can buy for less than $300 that provide 300,000x the computing power of the ENIAC, which cost $500,000 and filled a very large room in 1946!

The exponential march of software begets the exponential march of software capability. Software has gone more and more high level. Instead of slinging machine-readable bits, we started writing assembly. Then C/C++. Then Java and Perl. Now, Ruby and Python -- each step is less efficient for the computer but more efficient for the human. In 1946 you needed a PhD to even get near a computer, and only now are we seeing the rise of the truly interconnected, paperback computer that costs next to nothing but is indispensible for everyday life -- not just for an educated elite but for every person on the planet.

The advent of the Gutenberg printing press and modern mass-produced book changed society at its core -- at its basic fabric, humanity as a whole became more educated, more equal, more enlightened, and far more human, rising out of the depths of ignorance. The rise of cheap, ubiquitous books formed the modern world. But now we have a book that is infinite in length and unbounded in capability to teach, share, educate, and think.

So we've got an exponential engine of innovation, and it is transforming society before our eyes. And we're at a such a local minima where the WSJ is calling the whole engine dead.

We're still only beginning this mad experiment of infinite and ubiquitous computing. The greatest, most earth shattering software has yet to be created. On the upslope of an exponential, you'd be insane not to go long.

This is some really phenomenal core technology that could finally solve the classic problem of blurry low light photos. The leftmost photo is a photo taken with a dark flash, and the 2nd photo is one taken using ambient light at high ISO (noisy!). The 3rd photo is the synthesized version that actually looks even better than the 4th reference photo taken with a long exposure.

As a photographer, one of the hardest tradeoffs has always been ISO (fast shutter but noisy, vs slow shutter but blurry) and whether to use flash (annoying, noticeable, vs. having enough light). But this sounds like best of all worlds.

At the very least, tech-savvy paparazzi will now be able to take low light photos undetected.

Like this one of my friend Mike and the band he is lead guitarist for -- The Fancy Dan Band. Must have been over a year ago!

Portrait photography is about capturing that kernel of humanity. It's the hardest to do well, but the most rewarding by far. Makes me sad my SLR is sitting alone on a shelf.

But there are many other things to be created in the meantime.

After 10 hours of being awake, the early birds showed reduced activity in brain areas linked to attention span, compared with the night owls. The early risers also felt sleepier and tended to perform tasks more slowly, compared with the night owls, when their level of alertness was measured.

“The results suggest that night owls generally outlast early birds in the length of time they can be awake without becoming mentally fatigued,” the study concluded.

Just kidding. But interesting research nonetheless! I think this makes sense, though -- I tend to a waking-up-at-noon / sleeping at 4am to 6am sort of schedule, and it seems to be my most natural schedule.

I find that around 2am or so, often I'm so engaged in something that I have no interest in sleeping. Part of the beauty of working on a startup is being able to work at your most optimal hours. If i'm on a roll, I can keep going til dawn. If I'm not, I'll turn in, and wake up refreshed and ready to rock.

If I was an early riser, I have to go to sleep even when I might have something left in the tank. And I just don't feel like that's a good use of my limited time on this planet.

Hat tip Kenshi Arasaki

[Researchers have] found that if they boosted production of a protein called RGS-14 (pictured) in that area of the visual cortex in mice, it dramatically affected the animals' ability to remember objects they had seen.

Mice with the RGS-14 boost could remember objects they had seen for up to two months. Ordinarily the same mice would only be able to remember these objects for about an hour.

via io9.com

That's absurd. and in the comments, someone has highlighted fodder for some unhappy horror sci fi: What if you were taking this drug and saw something you desperately wanted to forget?

Imagine what this would mean for rote memorization for test taking! Maybe this would be awesome. Primary and secondary education could finally expand beyond mechanical drudgery.