Realm of the Imponderable

New Nonsense

So it's been about half a year maybe since my last post. I don't know what possessed me to come back here and write something. Maybe it's the very slight offchance that someone might actually come back and read this thing.

Or maybe I'll be the only one that might come back here in 10 years to see what I wrote and realise what a fool I was back then...

Atlanta Juggling Festival.

Expenditure:

• fuel - about $70
• Motel room - about $65
• Food - about $23
• Thumb blisters
  

Gains:

• learned some new club stealing tricks
• found that of all the people that are willing and able to drive up to 5 hours to the Atlanta juggling festival, I'm the best devilsticker by far. This has happened numerous times at many festivals
• tried twin flaming devilstick props
• and, of course, met tons of other juggling geeks.

Priceless.

One more note. Don't eat at Waffle House. Ever. Overpriced bad food with plasticky hash browns.

random musings

Lately I've been blogging less and less. It seems either I'm getting less interested in the world around me, or in recording what's going on. Or maybe it's just that nothing really interesting is going on.

Some random thoughts about things I've seen over the last few months:

I found out from a friend here a few months ago a little tidbit of information about how recording industries work. Though the authenticity of the information sources may be questioned, I think that one conclusion that we can certainly make is that the recording industries are far more interested in making money than in promoting the music of the artistes that pay them to do so.

My economics teacher made a very interesting observation about the way criminal organizations work. In the context of economics, they behave like a monopoly. What does a monopoly do? They have exclusive control of a product or service, they have the power to control the supply and hence the price of this product and they will actively work to ensure that they stay the exclusive producer of this product. Sound familiar, recording industry?

You are the conduit through which artistes reach the people, their audience. Most fledgling musicians don't have the clout or resources to reach the the general public with their music (beyond their own local area where presumably they do performances etc.) so they need a little big brother to come along and give them a helping hand to reach the wider audience. Ideally the way it works is, they come to you, make a recording, you distribute their music out to the big wide world and you get a cut of the profit. Of course, there are kinks; maybe the music won't sell so you end up losing money.... shit happens. It's understandable that you take some precautions to protect yourself from things like this happening too often. But here's the bottomline: you're providing the artistes a service. You are the middleman between the musician and his/her audience. The poor guy is not your bitch for you to screw one day and throw out the next like yesterday's garbage, yet that is what seems to be happening. Here's why:

Somewhere along the way, a secret little amendment was made to the law about contracts that musicians sign with the recording companies. It classifies the music composed as a "work for hire" that the artiste does for the company. That means that once it's given to them, it's theirs and not the artist's anymore. They can't do squat to get it back. If you want proof just google "work for hire" and "recording industry" and you'll see billions of articles about this. So they're swindling the poor guy out of his original compositions and happily keeping the profits, paying him only a pittance.

Now you also need to ask, how does a new musician promote his stuff? Radio seems to be the most powerful option. Pandora and other online streaming sites are a good alternative, and I'll write more on that later. For the radio, you get a song played and millions of people get to hear it. If they like it, millions of people are going to want to buy your music. Who controls what gets played on the radio? Record companies! So... they control not only the distribution, but also who gets the most exposure and hence, who's going to make it big. How do talentless people like Britney Spears get up there? Some guardian angel decides to make her a star? Kind of... a guardian angel in the shape of a music company that spends millions promoting songs she sings but doesn't compose. So what this means in the end is... the most successful artistes are not always the best ones, but the ones that the record labels promote the most. That looks like a huge flaw in the system.

Then there's DRM. In this day and age the internet makes it easy to get any music you like for the price of a few megabytes of bandwidth. That puts the middleman, a.k.a. the record labels, out of the picture. You can argue that this means the musicians and the distributors don't get paid. More correctly, the distributors aren't getting paid... the artistes are getting paid a pittance already thanks to the exploitation of the aforementioned party. So the big labels respond with DRM and the RIAA. DRM is there to limit the use of the music product to what the producer thinks is fair use. That means if they think it's not fair to let you put your mp3 file on anything other then an ipod, you can't. What if you owned a Creative Zen instead of an ipod? Tough luck... Yet that's precisely what Apple's DRM software on i-tunes does. Currently they're in a deep puddle of crap about it and I haven't bothered to follow it and see if it's been resolved.

Now for the RIAA. They use bullying and fear tactics to try to scare people away from downloading illegal music. A few weeks ago some poor woman lost a lawsuit and was fined $200,000, more than she would ever be able to pay. The reason? Could be any number of things... maybe there was more compelling evidence against her than in other cases where the defendant contested the case, maybe the jury was sympathetic to the RIAA, maybe the RIAA used underhanded means to influence the jury, maybe the woman just didn't have the money to hire a good lawyer... I don't think we'll figure out why this case eventually spat out a guilty verdict. What's telling is the punishment meted out to her. $200,000 for illegally downloading / uploading 20-something songs!!?!?! Clearly she's being made an example of. So when someone analyzes the potential cost / gain of illegally downloading music they'll go, okay, the chance of me getting caught is this much, add to that what will I get fined if I do get caught and... oops it's now $200,000... that's what the RIAA hopes. But... but but but... the number of illegal music downloads has done anything but decrease!

Pandora. It's a great idea, allows users to customize their own personal music station to their own taste. They get to hear music not only from the groups / artistes they like but every now and then Pandora will throw in someone they've never heard of before, but with a similar style to what they like. Seems like a great way for musicians to advertise. And it's not like it's going to replace the CD anytime soon; you don't have complete control over what you get to listen to, you can't play this anytime, anywhere, only when you're at your computer with an internet connection. But nooo... RIAA sees this as a threat to its profits, and does everything in its power to shut it down. Net result... people outside the US can't listen to it anymore. Pandora itself is paying significantly more for its license to stream music and I don't know how much longer it will last against the relentless onslaught of the greedy bureaucrats in the RIAA.

So... in a nutshell. End users get shafted because of DRM. Artistes get shafted because they can't effectively use Pandora, radio and other means to advertise their stuff, and on top of that they get swindled by the record labels. And the record labels get shafted because instead of adapting and changing their business model for the internet age, they chose to be technophobic, stick to an old fashioned distribution system and force everyone to comply with them. Now the smart artistes make their own record labels, the smart consumers download their music anyway and don't get caught, the patriotic consumers support their favorite artistes by buying their CDs, the unlucky consumers get caught downloading music and get ass raped by the RIAA, and the RIAA continues to send out zillions of lawsuits to random people and frankly IMO most of these lawsuits should be on the Stella awards.

BTW if you want to see how the RIAA works check out the blog called RecordingIndustryVsThePeople.

Don't underestimate the caffeine monkey

After three weeks here at IHMC I notice something. On the days when I happen to have a morning coffee I not only don't feel tired in the afternoon, I also don't feel hungry at lunchtime and I get this floaty, fuzzy feeling. I wonder whether it's something they put in the coffee here.

Somehow the idea of going back to Singapore to work doesn't seem all that bad to me, as opposed the the views held by many of my peers. I wonder if it's because the trait of quiet acceptance has been so thoroughly and subtly drummed into me that it's there but I never realized it?

Life as an underpaid but not (at least for now) research assistant

It's been a week since I arrived here, sunglass clad and reeking of car air freshener after my 18 hour drive south from Michigan. IHMC is a small research institute here that prides itself on providing technology that augments human capability, or removes human disability. The latter appears to be a closer description of the project that I am working on.

Some of the people here are (based on their past accolades) some of the most intelligent people I have met. Jerry, the overseer of the project I'm working on, has probably published more papers on the mechanics of human walking than anyone else. The projects here are extremely varied, ranging from exoskeletons to tongue displays. The latter consists of a grid of electrodes stuck to your tongue that are able to stimulate your taste buds in certain patterns so that you can "see" patterns on your tongue. Sounds like an outlandish idea but it apparently works.

The research assistants here are all very interesting people. Many of them hail from overseas, Europe and such. No jugglers, unfortunately. And some of them are apparently big fans of warcraft (The RTSG, not the MMORPG) and play in the office on occasion.

People and work aside, however, the town is pretty run down. It felt pretty much like a trip out to rural Malaysia when I drove through the so-called suburbs of the city. Even in the downtown area there are no high rise buildings, no busy, bustling streets or anything. One big indication of how laid back things are around here: shops in my area don't even open monday to friday, more like tuesday to thursday, and afternoons only, or something like that. All I can say is, I'm glad IHMC isn't run down, I have internet and AC at home, and there's a nice beach nearby. The beachfront is pretty well developed, as property there would obviously be quite expensive and hence profitable to develop. Too bad the beaches are mostly artificial though.

So as for my project.. it's to build a device to help an injured person to walk. Someone injured in war, with a spinal injury of some sort resulting in partial paralysis. Right now almost everything is still up in the air, and questions are all still wide open.

A little bird told me recently that I have been remiss with posting on this blog. I had assumed that my readership had dwindled to the magic number of zero, at which point it seemed pointless to write when the only audience would have been myself.

But then, I think, perhaps even for such an audience, it may be worthwhile to write. People keep journals of their lives and it is only much, much later that these journals seem to develop any sort of value. If that person turns out to be someone famous, that is.

So, as I am packing up to move to Florida where (hopefully) I will have an enriching and *insert cheesy optimistic blurb about education and broadening knowledge and whatever* I had a couple of random thoughts:

Will I ever come back to Ann Arbor again?
What have I learned during the (roughly) four years that I've been here?
What have I left behind?
Five years down the road, where will me and my friends be?
Isn't it amazing, if you have some skill in packing, how much stuff you can fit into a station wagon?

Will I ever come back to Ann Arbor again?
The answer to the first question would be, very likely yes; but with a little sidenote that the more interesting question is when, and why?
Would I visit Ann Arbor ten, twenty years down the road? I don't think so. By then, all the people I knew here would have moved on. The university would still be here, as would the students and the particular atmosphere and feel that they would bring to the air. But then again, I cannot truthfully say that the school spirit, the very strong sense of identity, has rubbed off on me. The sense of belonging, at least to me, is more in the people that I meet, and the friends that I made here. It would make little difference if we were to have a reunion here in the heart of the institution that brought us all together in the first place, or in some other place like California, or even back home in Singapore. I have friends here in Ann Arbor who are likely to remain here, and that's pretty much the only thing that would make me want to come back to visit.

What have I learned here?
Beyond the obvious things that I learned in the classroom, there are many lessons in life to be gleaned from living by myself without the protective umbrella of my parents less than a stone's throw away. Recall Aesop's fable about the two guys carrying their donkey. His lesson there was: think for yourself, what others say or do may not be right. But, usually it is. You can learn a lot just by talking to people. When you're out in an unfamiliar place, you need to get to know the lay of the land. First thing to do: Find out who to talk to. Second: talk to them. Third (or concurrently, whatever) find out yourself what the hell is going on. The internet works wonders. But you gotta take some things with a pinch of salt. How do you know what to trust, what to interpret lightly and what to not even bother to read? Talk to people. But in the end, it's your experience that should be the judge.

Second is that you need to go out and do stuff. In Singapore, everything's cut and dried. Everything's planned for you. You're spoonfed what the government or people in authority think you should be getting. Doing things out of the norm is frowned upon. It reeks of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Over here, you do what you want. There's billions of things to see and experience out there and what you need to do is find the subset of things that interest you and go do them. Paradoxically, College is the best time to do it. You are living on a shoestring budget, but you have the most time and the greatest freedom to see the world. Take part in some research project. Join some weird club that you've never heard of before. Do something you've never thought of before (Or wanted to do but just never had the chance to). Ever wanted to literally take a baseball bat to a computer? There's an event here called springfest where you actually get a chance to do just that. So you have the most time and opportunity to do things but the least amount of money to do them. Then when you start working the situation reverses. Or sometimes you don't have money and you also don't have time. That's what we call a sucky job... because it sucks to be you.. ;)

Thirdly, never underestimate the power of teamwork. It has the ability to make a project into a huge success, it also has the ability to turn a good project into the most miserable failure of your life. You remember all that teamwork stuff they taught us in the army? Bullshit. In the army its one person barks orders at everyone else and everyone else scrambles to do them. That's easy. When you're in a team where everyone's an equal, and not everyone has a clear set of responsibilities and goals, then you're going to need some brain re-wiring from the army mentality. You need to make sure everyone knows what you're thinking. You need to know what everyone's good at, and what everyone's bad at. You need to know how to guesstimate things like time, money and other resources. In Singapore, they describe leaders as people with this mythical thing called "vision". PFffffttt... like they're some kind of oracle or prophet. Good leaders are just people who know what they want, know how to judge a person (what they're good at, etc), know how to use what they have, and most importantly, know how to convince you that what they want is what you want as well. By that criteria, Singapore minsters are terrible leaders. They want more money, the rest of the people just want to get on with their lives.

What have I left behind?
Nothing, really. Some stuff that I sold to some random people.. maybe a little legacy with the juggling club, having achieved the status of the best devilsticker who's been a member of the club. Maybe I left an impression on some of the professors here. Maybe some of the projects that I've worked on might have some impact on the research that goes on in the university. Maybe I could have done more by getting more deeply involved in a research project of some sort. I didn't run for any student government; I don't like leadership roles of that sort. I don't like to be in the limelight, I prefer the background, being the wizard that magically gets things working. For the most part in my class projects, I have actually been in that role.

Have I made any impact on the Singaporean students here? I think I have. Maybe not earth shattering or rousing them up to be the greatest academics or leaders of whatever. One thing I'm fairly certain of is that I'll be remembered as the person that juggled fire. Another thing perhaps is for my work in the freshman orientation of 2004. To this day I still have a copy of the video / slide show I made for it and it was there that I also experienced the vast difference between working in a group of Singaporeans, as opposed to working with an American or international group. Till this day, I still puzzle over how the orientation committee spent half an hour debating a simple thing that was chair placement and when or how it should be done. If we were hosting dignitaries or famous people, sure that's an important issue but we were dealing with wide eyed, fresh out of school (or the army) Singaporeans who probably wouldn't care less if they had to arrange their own chairs or whether they sat next to someone's parents or not.

Five years down the road, where will my friends and I be?
That's the hardest question to answer, but the more informative thing to think about is how did my answer to that question change over these last 4 years?

When I first came here I didn't even think about that question. I just thought, all I want at the end of this is a job that I like, probably something to do with robotics or mechanical engineering or that sort. The second part hasn't changed. I still like robotics, and am keen on any job that's related t it. But also, other questions come to mind now. What else do I want to do with my life? What are the things I enjoy doing and how can I go about doing them? What's the big picture - the possible far reaching effects of whatever I work on? Or the things that I do? Bill Clinton said something during his commencement speech about giving back to the human race, of somehow through all the skills that we've acquired, give something back and make this world a better place. Idealistic? Definitely. Something we should work for or at least keep in mind? Again, definitely. And I think in the long run, anything that I do or work on will ultimately benefit someone out there.

But life's not all about work and no play. So what do I want to do outside of work? Well, there's still a billion and one things out there to do. We cannot all do everything. What do I like to do now? World of Warcraft? Certainly, but one 's life can't revolve around a computer game. Juggling? that too, and I'm not like the professionals who have some magical ability to practice 7 hours a day, everyday for years on end. I like to be recognized as a skilled juggler. I like to teach other people how to do it, or now to improve. I like to perform. I don't have the stage presence that other people have, the ability to command an audience's attention for however long the show is. I don't know if I'll ever get that. But just the personal satisfaction of doing a new trick is a lot. What else is there.. traveling? Aye. Where to? I don't know. I like nature. Hiking, all that stuff. And somehow my instincts tell me I should get all that done soon before things like pollution and global warming make a mess of the whole place. If it hasn't done so already.

So, the time has come to bid farewell to Ann Arbor. A quiet, (yet vibrant when the students are about) town in the (almost) American Midwest where Deans dress like pickles on Halloween, where smoking Marijuana is not considered a criminal act, where American Football is such a big thing that on football saturdays the town virtually comes to a standstill, where I made friends with some of the most whacky (and intelligent) people I've ever met and above all, the place where I learned many valuable lessons in life.

What do you do with an old fishing net?

So that's the topic of my term project. What the hell can you do with the tons and tons of fishing nets that wash up on shores the world over? They're broken, full of sand, salt, bones and other rubbish, and apparently they smell really bad too.

This is part of an exhibition put up here called "Mass Collaboration = Innovation" where the idea is that we get the visitors to participate in the exhibits and contribute to real world problems that we present to them.

'course, the cynic in me would just say we're try to get free ideas here. But the goal isn't only to get ideas (and I really don't know how many of the ideas that we do get are going to be workable) but to just get people to think about something they may not have thought about in their everyday lives. Think about these:

How much power does an electronic device consume even when it's on standby? Do you think it's significant?
In the US alone, if you added the power consumption of all the electronic devices on standby (TVs, hi-fi sets, computer screens, handphone chargers that are plugged in but not charging a phone, etc), you would equal the power output of about 11 coal fired power stations. Also consider that two thirds of power from a powerplant is lost in transmission.

How much fishing net gets lost at sea every year? What damage does it cause?
During peak fishing season in the pacific, Japan and the US estimates that up to 17 miles of net are lost every day. The nets are lost, but their ability to catch fish isn't so they carry on for years catching fish, marine mammals and sea birds.

How much ozone does one can of CFC containing aerosol spray have the potential to deplete?
Roughly one part of CFC can break down about a million parts of ozone in the stratosphere. This is because the CFC isn't consumed in the breakdown process, it merely acts as a catalyst. Fortunately most of the CFC takes a long time to reach the stratosphere or never reaches it at all. But it is still a very potent greenhouse gas.

Your car on a typical commute to and from work throws out maybe a pound or two of carbon dioxide. Now picture how many million people drive to work everyday.

Kinda depressing isn't it?