Scott McCloud

I think I can officially say that I'm a comic book nerd, or at least dangerously close to that line because I thought this was a really cool perspective on the future of comic books. McCloud's emphasis on maintaining the "comic-book-ness" in a digital comic is really important for someone who actually follows comic's. The entire idea is that there is still enough room in between frames for your imagination to be activated. Once it becomes too fluid it turns into an animated show, and then there's no longer any brain power involved (although I'm sure many will argue that there's not much brain power involved in reading a comic book either, but I would debate that).

Life-logging

Is this considered self-stalking? Is the assumption that we are not paying enough attention in our lives? I would probably agree to that, and that's why I think this continuous photography idea could be interesting for a day, but to record your whole life this way seems obsessive, and not practical. As we discussed in class, it might be fun to use at a party to catch some candid shots that you might have otherwise missed or forgotten. Maybe it could be passed around between party members to catch more action, but it's pretty much just that, a good party trick. However, in the video that we were watching with James May, it seemed as though it got cut off right before they were going to explain some kind of software that would recognize specific patterns, and potentially (although I may be over-speculating) determine specific traits in a person or use this information to perhaps diagnose someone. I'm not sure what that data could be used for, but until I hear some of the possibilities, I'm not willing to wear this day in and day out.

Scots with Lasers?

I like lasers as much as the next guy, but it's hard to get super excited about this. I like the idea of 3-D models made from photographs better than of lasers, although I see how it might be useful, and of course any time we get closer to actually recreating star trek technology, I'm for it. Obviously lasers are much more precise and create better accuracy for surveying a building/object, but I don't think this is really new technology.

Erin McKean's Wordnik

I just want to start this post by saying, I'm now totally into TED. I watch every TED video that I come across now because it's just so fascinating. There really are people out there with incredible ideas and it's great to find that they're all getting together to cheer each other on. Erin was a great TED presenter, and she gave a great argument for the importance of a better system of dictionaries. It's something that no one ever thinks to improve upon because, as she said, everyone has this awful connotation of the dictionary. I keep thinking about times when I was really young and any time I asked my parents what a word meant I had to look it up in the dictionary (all while my dad claimed that he once read the dictionary back to front...there's no way) and how grateful I was when we finally got the Internet and I could just type it into Google. The interesting thing about that is, it really was better to type it into Google, other than it being faster and more convenient, because I would end up with more results from various sources, and sometimes even a Wikipedia page to give the word some context. This is why I love Wordnik so much, because it compiles all those results for you and gives you the context you need to actually understand a word aside from a stiff, unrelatable definition (as I'm typing, blogger is telling me unrelatable is not a word, but I'm going to throw caution to the wind and use it anyway because Erin said I could...)

Piano Stairs

These piano stairs make me smile. I would love to have those installed in more places, although I'm sure that would be fairly expensive. Who doesn't want to have more fun doing mundane activities, especially when it could be good for you, such as walking up stairs. I loved seeing the reactions of the people who experienced the stairs, and how generally gleeful it seemed to make everyone feel. I have to walk up 5 flights of stairs every day to my apartment, and part of me feels like this would make it more bearable, and another part of me thinks that it would definitely become annoying when the neighbor comes home at 4am. I want more ways to make my daily life more fun, maybe I can think of a better final project that would involve more fun.

Eric Rosenthal

Eric Rosenthal's lecture was a little too biologically specific for my taste, but when he started to discuss the implications of archiving I definitely perked up. So for my sake, I'm not going to bother to discuss the human vision system, accept that I think it would be great for a camera to work more in line with how our eyes work. I would love to see some of the test shots that he did with the technology he came up with, I can't even imagine how much better a camera image could look (I've been so impressed with the Red camera lately, but a camera like the one Eric describes sounds like it would blow it out of the water).
As for archiving, it's something that I unfortunately haven't thought much about in my life, but hearing him talk about it I suddenly feel this great sense of urgency to start printing everything I find (although that seems like a terribly un-environmentally friendly option). I can't believe this is not a bigger issue for our government, and in general for the world, but it seems like no one has yet to discover a way of keeping information in perpetuity. Certainly the options we have in place now don't seem to have been given much forethought, and I wish there was an easy answer. For now I suppose I should just try to be more mindful of the information I store on my computer and remember that my laptop is not infallible. I have recently learned the importance of external hard-drives after having two laptops stolen, but I wonder if I should consider keeping a written log of important stuff somewhere (who am I kidding, I'm way too lazy for that).

Ken Perlin: Where the Wild Things Are

I love his account of how Pixar came to be, I had never heard that before. I always felt that Pixar had much better graphics, and ultimately better films as well, but I love that it developed because the people at Disney didn't want to go in the digital direction, how ironic. Go Ken for being the instigator that started Pixar.
As for the actual animation, I was interested to hear Ken's description of how they did the lighting. I like that they really thought about making it both real and fantastical so that the effect would be a realistic storybook world. Today we keep trying to make graphics look more and more like reality, but I think for some things, and definitely animated kids movies, that there should be an effort to maintain the fantasy. However, when he started to discuss the actual software, I became pretty confused. I'm not sure what "divide by the blurry silhouette..." means, or even how the smearing works, but I think I'd need to take some more tech classes for that.