Crickets Chirping

I’ve been reading Goldhaber’s “What is Attention?” chapters as he posts them his blog. (Highly recommended btw.) The phrase “Attention Economics” sounds like bullshit, but I really think Goldhaber is onto something. This post isn’t about attention economics but rather a related subject I’ve pondered since I first heard the famous quote from Andy Warhol:

Q: Can everyone actually be famous for 15 minutes?

This obviously leads to another question: what constitutes “fame”? For the sake of argument I propose a few different definitions and examine each.

Some Proposed Definitions of Fame:

1. You are the subject of a global television broadcast lasting at least 15 minutes.
2. n > N people pay attention to you at during the same time 15 minute interval at any point in your life.
3. n > N people pay attention to you for 15 minutes each, cumulatively over the course of your life.
4. n > N people pay attention to you for 15 minute each, cumulatively over all time.

Where N is some arbitrarily large number, perhaps even proportionate to world population. Obviously there are other ways to define “famous” and I’m sure they’d be interesting to ponder, but I had to start somewhere.

I’ve created a google spreadsheet to share my calculations.

You are the subject of a global television broadcast lasting at least 15 minutes.

For everyone in the world alive today (6.5 billion) who is awake 1026 minutes a day for each of the 1.9M days in their life to appear on any one of the major TV channels (say 500 of them) for fifteen minutes at least once before they die would take 372 years. In this model, lots of factors are ignored in order to see if it’s even possible, like using the average #hours we watch television instead of the #hours we are awake each day. So that number is actually a lot bigger if you make the the model more realistic.

So I’d say the answer to Famous(1) is NO.

I had written up an exploration of the other three types of Fame from my list, but after discussing it privately with some esteemed colleagues I think I need to do some more work on it.

My initial approach treated the “n > N people paying attention to stuff” as a sort of Global Network of Directed Attention, where each person has one outgoing edge (their attention) which connects to another person. This forms a scale free network, so I piled up a bunch of calculations based on the power law and came up with what I think are some interesting results.

Then I ran the question by a PhD student friend of mine who got his masters in Operations Research. He naturally came up with a completely different way to look at the problem: machine scheduling. You’ve got one bin for each person, and each bin has slots for each 15 minute segment of a person’s life. You can then schedule each person’s attention to other people into those slots. The down-side to this approach compared to the scale-free network is that the answer becomes NP-hard, meaning I’m probably not going to solve it.

How would you model the problem? What other interesting definitions of fame would you consider?

I’ll elaborate on the scale-free network/power law/Global Network of Directed Attention thing in future post.

Drive around office parks with a laptop, looking for unsecured wifi networks that have printers attached. Queue up a bunch of print jobs of this:

Step 3: Profit.

IBM’s Many Eyes is like Flickr for data visualizations. Hm. That phrase sounds familiar.

Many Eyes left a much better first impression on me than Swivel though. Here are Causes of Death, and US government expenses 1962-2004:

Go watch this movie.

Description from the website:

Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand ‘association-chain-massacre’. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable tv, emotions and hamsters.

Thanks to this wordpress plugin this wordpress plugin, I’m automatically disabling comments on posts that are over two weeks three months old. Comment spammers seem to like older posts so this is a blunt way to deal with that problem.

I got this idea for a web-based photo booth application (yeah yeah real original, I know) but the only practical way to access a camera from a browser-based app is through Flash.

Now, I know databases, networks, application servers, frameworks of all kinds. If it’s code I’ve probably at least tinkered with it if not built an app and got paid for it. I take pride in my breadth of knowledge of all things programmery.

Except Flash.

I wrote this long rant on how Flash programming sucks if you’re used to doing “Real” development because the tools are all jumbled up with this Movie metaphor and the tools are bulky and sclerotic.

But then I deleted it because if I were you I’d skip past the ranting and look for the meat.

So here it is (you need to have a web cam in order for it to work):

Demo Page

.zip of the source code

This is just the first baby step, so it doesn’t do anything besides show you the live image and if you hit the space bar it grabs the current frame and shows it to the right of the live video. I’ll add more to it later but I figured if anybody else is looking for a basic starting point for a mostly actionscript-based flash app, this is pretty damn dependency-free and cruftless.

To build it you do need to have MTASC and SWFMill installed. I wrote a brain dead build.sh script for my little project. Oh sure I could do something complicated for the build using ant or rake but I’m lazy and this build.sh gratification was instant.

MTASC is an open-source flash compiler and SWFMill is used to bundle resources into a .swf file, which is what the web browser wants to load and run.

Here are some links I found helpful, since I haven’t found any good “ActionScript/Flash for People Who Have Been Spoiled by Decades of Using Real Development Tools” articles anywhere. “Flash for Programmers” would be a good short name too.

HOWTO: Develop Flash on Mac OSX with Rake, MTASC, SWFMill and TextMate

This post that’s in French but who cares since the code make sense.

This article on capturing bitmap data from the web cam. Hint: BitmapData is why there’s a “-version 8″ flag in my build script.

Snapshotter is a very similar application with source code (.fla tho so I couldn’t make much sense of it) and a bunch of server side stuff that’s all in Cold Fusion.

The comments here are helpful too.

Things I have learned so far:

Somebody at Macromedia has a hard-on for MovieClips. Fucking everything has to be goddamn movie clip to these people. Seriously- need a button? Make a movie clip of a button. Need a background image? Make a one-frame movie clip and loop it or whatever. [shakes head]

Saying ActionScript is just like JavaScript is misleading. DHTML apps have the Document Object Model, which is pretty well documented and widely implemented. ActionScript apps have a “stage” and they feel lost and lonely without a big crusty IDE hanging around them with timelines for all their movie clips.

MTASC and SWFMill are really cool. I didn’t have to pay a gazillion bucks to Adobe or use their bizarro tools.

I’m cleaning out my book collection since a) I need the space for new books and b) Half Price Books is just around the corner from me. Picking through the older, dustier volumes in my collection, I ran across a couple of ‘zines from this girl Tania Rudy. She contacted me because I had an Operation Ivy fanboy web page on my college CS account and she sent me a couple of copies of her own ‘zine, Stool Pigeon:

(sorry, my scanner is old and shitty)

We got to talking and eventually exchanged photographs over snail-mail. I remember this now because tucked into one of the zines was an envelope postmarked Decemer 1996. Inside was hand-written letter written on “epitome of girliness” stationery (her words, not mine) she got for hanukkah, and a photo that revealed her legs but not her face. You can kind of make it out but it’s obscured by the lighting. I was supposed to return the photo to her, but obviously never did. Sorry Tania! I sent her one of me that had my face all close up and ugly. She doesn’t show up in the Google either (unless she’s a photographer for a canadian metal band, which I doubt). It wouldn’t be right for me to post the photo here, but I think she’s pretty cute. That was over ten years ago (yikes :() so she probably doesn’t even have the same last name any more.

Her writing was witty and often quite personal. This is one of my favorite things from her ‘zine, a cartoon which could easily be made into a pretty good skit:

I wasn’t going to write about this at all, but I recieved a sign telling me to do so. She wrote about being in love with Aaron Cometbus (among many other people, so who knows). This is important because as I was waiting for Half Price Books to tell me what my used books were worth, I perused the humor section looking for some bite sized entertainment to pass the time. Lo and behold my eyes settled on Despite Everything: A Cometbus Omnibus. I was tempted to buy it (talk about Worlds Greatest Bathroom Reading, pick any page and just go from there) but that would defeat the whole purpose of shedding my literary litany. So instead I decided to write about this girl that I kind of had a crush on even though I never met her, who had a crush on Aaron Combetbus like, ten years ago.

Back before blogs made it so easy to spill your guts.

Dear Abby: I have a friend who tends to buy lots of stuff but then returns most of it- if not immediately then the next day. I think she’s buylimic. Should I confront her about this problem?

Before I go and try to do this, please let me know if you’ve seen something like it before.

Title: Inanimte Object Abuse

Concept: A series of photos, each consisting of a person posed with an object they have damaged out of frustration or anger. Below the photo would be a description of the situation leading up to the damage.

Example: Lord knows I’ve got plenty, but one in particular is a white-box PC from the late nineties. The photo would look something like this, but maybe with a cloth backdrop and better lighting:

Damage: I kicked it and broke the front panel, bending the case severely.

The Story: The motherboard kept doing this thing where it would beep really faintly, and while it was beeping the CPU froze. I couldn’t get any work done and I finally snapped. I was wearing steel toed boots at the time, which probably saved my foot (and a fate such as Jack Daniel’s) but it didn’t do the computer any good. In all fairness there were a lot of other things bothering me at the time. The beeping thing was just the last straw.

I had to duct tape the case back together. It stil worked but the cd drive would misbehave from time to time.

Did it make me feel better? No.

The people in the photos would pose calmly, not angry or attacking the object in a re-enactment. I’d like to contrast what a normal person who isn’t enraged looks like next to damage they’ve done while they were angry.

Plus I think it’s funny when otherwise sane people break things out of frustration.

You can’t negotiate with physical objects. You can’t scare them into operating differently. You can’t punish them (or reward them for that matter) to change their behavior. And yet people try to do exactly that all the time.

Have you ever broken something out of frustration?