Last minute burningman art project

I thought I'd allocate a lot of my copious free time this year to doing a huge burningman art project.  Instead I ended up traveling for a long time.  I'm back, it's now July, and there isn't much time.  A friend told me today that I have one more day to submit an art project for placement in the open playa.

There's an idea I've been kicking around for a bit.  It could work as part of a well-attended theme camp or as open playa art. 

If you're interested in helping me on the project or if you think it would work well as part of your theme camp, please let me know.  I haven't chosen a place to camp yet.

Here's the idea:

CONVERGENT EVOLUTION:

I have noticed during my travels around the world that there are certain similarities that show up across widely varying cultures.  I have a huge number of pictures documenting this, and they often make interesting side-by-side comparisons -- eg beachgoers in England vs beachgoers in Vietnam, a temple in Vietnam vs a church in London, kids playing in India vs kids playing in Amsterdam etc.  They are signs of how ideas have spread across our world yet evolved to suit the local environment.  Since I have a large number of photos that I plan on tagging, I could fairly easily write a program that picks potentially good compare-and-contrast photo pairs based on the tags, and presents them to a user.  The user can vote yes or no based on whether the photo pairing is interesting.  As more and more photos are voted on by users, the pairings will get better and better.  (I will be using the user input as the "natural selection" fitness function in an algorithm that will basically evolve better pairings)*

The user experience will consist of sitting in front of a big projected screen and pressing buttons to vote on the image pairs as they show up.  People could run through the pairs as fast or as slow as they want, and known (or evolved) good pairings would be mixed in to keep people entertained.

*My backup plan is that if the awesome algorithm doesn't produce interesting results, I'll turn it into a photographic version of "hot or not" where people repeatedly vote on the best photo of a random pair, and the photos that show up will start getting better and better.

The overall contraption would likely consist of a 8x8x8ft cube made by stretching fabric over a pipe skeleton.  Since projectors suck power, I'd need to have (or have access to) a generator.   It could work well as part of the inside of a theme camp's dome (provided the theme jives with this project).

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Anyway, if this could be of interest to your camp or is something you might want to help with (even if it's just contributing photos), please let me know your thoughts.

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[personaldev] Getting Things Done, applied to your emotional life

I recently read this article and thought you all might find this interesting:

It’s a theory of mine that the way you manage your emotions is critical to managing the rest of your life. If you are confused and/or distracted by something emotional - ie. not tangible and in your head - it will negatively affect your work and the people around you.

So why not apply GTD methods of organization to your feelings and everything icky? It may sound stupid to some of you, but I know people who would immediately benefit from this kind of thought process.

If we can manage our emotional relationships like we do business relationships, maybe we’d have less trouble. If we could organize all personal stuff like you do your work stuff, could we become emotionally productive

Read more at  http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/gtd-your-emotional-life.html

[personaldev] Rebuilding the Machine

While traveling, I had relatively few things to worry about, and a very tight system for organizing my interactions with the world.  Everything I needed was organized into a small backpack, some pictures on my camera, and a few computer files.  The system was fast, nimble, and flexible enough to meet the needs of everything from the Sahara desert to a big European city.

The Sci-fi author Greg Egan refers to this sort of system as an exoself in his far-future stories.  (In the stories, the exoself consists of hardware/software modules that plug directly into the brain.  We're not there yet.  For now I envision the exoself as the physical, software, and procedural tools that we have chosen to use to interact with the world.  Quite literally, I imagine these things floating in a kind of orbit around each person.  

Now that I'm back, I'm realizing that I need to resurrect my system for making things happen as a person with lots of ambitious goals and project ideas as well as an ongoing social life.  The transition is harder than I realize, though I'm taking advantage of the opportunity to basically re-think a lot of how I used to do things.  I was starting to think about reshaping my exoself back before I left for the trip, but now is the chance to do it right. 

It does seem like the full exoself I need is dauntingly huge.  Most people have big exoselves -- houses full of stuff and computers full of files.  I think the key to successfully handling a large exoself is to figure out an information flow that will work well to keep top priority tasks easy and clear while letting me think long term about what projects are important.  The ideas from Getting Things Done are really good for this. 

I'll be reporting more about what is/isn't working well as things progress.

[personaldev] Big monitors save you time

I was at Fry's the other day, and I was amazed at how cheap big monitors have become.  They had some 28-inch monstrosity for $400.  A 24-inch monitor was a little over $250. 

If you don't have a lot of space on your computer screen (either at home or at work), you should get more.  The jump in productivity you get from having 2-3 full sized windows open side by side is huge.  It more than repays the cost of the monitor within a few weeks or even a few days.

While I was traveling I had a 9-inch screen on my little eee pc travel laptop.  I can say that tasks like putting together a blog post with pictures can be done like four times faster now that I'm back in front of a couple of larger screens.

If your computer supports it, you can get two screens instead of one, and use the second screen as a "side" screen.  You can leave open email or some other thing you frequently switch to on the side screen.