i've taken to twittering. and then gareth kay pointed out that don draper, the lead character of the AMC show "Mad Men" is also twittering. so i followed his tweets, and now he's following mine, and so is peggy olsen, and so is betty and so is salvatore and it's just so much to follow! i'm not even sure if it's linked to the show, and there seems to be office intrigue that's going on in the twitterverse but not on the screen and it's just really so much big geek fun. i heart it the heartiest.
and then i put up a simple tweet about trying to combine don draper and robots. a simple dream, from a simple girl.
the other day, on the plane to dallas, i caught up on mad men - a show i find so resplendent, so detestable, so delicious in its period accuracy that i can't turn away. i noticed two important things.
i'm a better tv viewer on a plane with my iPhone then i am at home. i actually watch the show instead of also checking email or also reading my googlereader feeds or also playing mah-jongg.
don draper destroyed a robot. little bobby was playing with the robot at the dinner table and he knocked over sally's glass with the robot and betty went apeshit and don, fed up with the day and probably most of his life, picked up the robot and dashed it against the kitchen wall. i have one word for this: hot.
i did some searching for the robot. i didn't get a good look at it before it met its unfortunate end, but i think this might be it... you see, robots are for everyone. i bet i could work some serious symbolism out of that robot - robot as symbol of labor, lack of free will, oppression, slavery. a mere plaything to a child, but a tyrant to a man. who keeps don draper down? only himself. when his wife tries to submit him to her will, force upon him decisiveness and authority to overwhelm her own parental defects (and what's with her total resentment of the kid?), he rebels, grasps the idol of his own slavery and demolishes it like some golden calf. i think this means that don draper is moses.
well that's not quite right. so let's try wikipedia. it says:
While there is no single correct definition of robot,[2] a typical robot will have several, though not necessarily all of the following properties:
is not 'natural', i.e. it is artificially created
can sense its environment, and manipulate or interact with things in it
has some ability to make choices based on the environment, often using automatic control or a preprogrammed sequence
is programmable
moves with one or more axes of rotation or translation
makes dexterous coordinated movements
moves without human intervention
appears to have intent or agency (See anthropomorphism for examples of ascribing intent to inanimate objects.)[3]
The last property, the appearance of agency, is important when people are considering whether to call a machine a robot, or just a machine. In general, the more a machine has the appearance of agency, the more it is considered a robot.
this seemed reasonable. so then Laila asked, "what about those robots in car factories - do they have the appearance of agency?" a fine question. for a moment, i was stumped. and then i remembered.
i realize that title is desperately lame, but i'm tired and i exceeded my 1 drink maximum because the conversation was good. my bad.
but hey, check it: robotic fish that can communicate and form schools.
apparently, this is potentially very useful for tracking oceanic pollution or marine life, but the most important part of this video comes when the aussie calls them, "fishy robots" entirely unironically.
it's not that impressive, though. at my parent's house, they had robotic fish that could form schools. and these were so cool, someone made an ad for them. here they are:
and then, while i was looking for something to illustrate my point, i found something fairly entertaining, albeit with nothing robotic (except perhaps these kids' acting -snap!):
the way in which this reminds me of robots is, let's say, tenuous. for the uninitiated, steampunk is this:
a subgenre of fantasy and speculative fiction that came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian era England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date. Other examples of steampunk contain alternate history-style presentations of "the path not taken" of such technology as dirigibles or analog computers; these frequently are presented in an idealized light, or a presumption of functionality.
Steampunk is often associated with cyberpunk and shares a similar fanbase and theme of rebellion, but developed as a separate movement (though both have considerable influence on each other). Apart from time period and level of technological development, the main difference between cyberpunk and steampunk is that steampunk settings usually tend to be less obviously dystopian than cyberpunk, or lack dystopian elements entirely.
Various modern utilitarian objects have been modded by individual craftpersons into a pseudo-Victorian mechanical "steampunk" style, and a number of visual and musical artists have been described as steampunk.
think Wild, Wild West. think wood and chrome and steam pipes and engines. victorian styling + high technology. excellent.
recently, here in brooklyn, we had the other half of an installation called The Telectroscope. an only half-clever idea, but rather amusing nevertheless:
Hardly anyone knows that a secret tunnel runs deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean. In May 2008, more than a century after it was begun, the tunnel was finally completed. An extraordinary optical device called a Telectroscope was installed at both ends which miraculously allowed people to see right through the Earth from London to New York and vice versa. On 15th June, having helped more than 50,000 people establish or rekindle transatlantic friendships, the Telectroscopes vanished, as mysteriously as they had first appeared.
and here it is:
a whimsical idea brought to life with video conferencing, The Telectroscope has the definite stylings of a steampunk piece. friends said it was a bit disappointing, but i have to say i'm sad i missed it at Brooklyn Bridge Park.
and then, the other day, i saw that Nokia is doing some steampunk interpretations of their own... you can't deny this looks beautiful - and taps in to the iPod + iTunes idea of music as a form of individual expression as much for the listener as the performer.
it's this print piece that caught my attention. again, in addition to just being beautiful, the steampunk interpretation makes me think of an older idea of contraptions and machines - something perhaps more elegant, or at least more ornate.
and then that got me to thinking, too. where did this notion of robots come from anyway? i was out to dinner at Jane with my friend Jeff the other day, and he busted out with a bit of trivia (i'm telling you - everyone has something to say about robots!!). It turns out that the word 'robot' was, if not coined by, first used in public by a Czech writer in a play about a factory that makes artificial people. Wikipedia has more:
The word robot was introduced to the public at large by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which premiered in 1921.[15] The play begins in a factory that makes 'artificial people' - they are called robots, but are closer to the modern idea of androids or even clones, creatures who can be mistaken for humans. They can plainly think for themselves, though they seem happy to serve. At issue is whether the "Robots" are being exploited and, if so, what follows?
in fact the word was coined by Čapek's brother, and is derived from the slavic word robota which means 'labor, work' but in the sense of drudgery or serfdom. and from here we have the underlying notion of what a robot really is - something artificial we have created to do work; a machine enslaved to the work we wish to free ourselves from. perhaps this is why we often imagine robots throwing off their master's shackles - we can't imagine any entity, regardless of it's fakeness or realness, embracing drudgery and slavery. we believe that eventually, everyone will want to be free. we see freedom as a virus or environmental impetus to evolve. we believe in freedom so earnestly, in fact, that we think that machines may develop those attributes that make the desire for freedom possible. and yet, for some reason, that scares us - we worry that those same machines will try to turn the tables on us, and place us back into the slavery we invented them to escape in the first place.
it's kind of like those dreams you have where you're running as if in slow motion - trying so hard to get away, to break free, to reach your goal, but unable to get anywhere. is it simply that we know this desire for freedom is futile? or is it that we can't yet envision what freedom would really look like, and therefore hold ourselves back from it, even in our fantasies?
and speaking of fantasies - in polish, there's a phrase "robić loda". it's based on that word "robota" again - which means in this construction, "to do." the word "loda" means "ice-cream." but "to do ice-cream" is not what this phrase means. it means to give a blow job.
I just watched a film classic - one I'd been meaning to watch for some time but had sat on the shelf, still wrapped in cellophane and three sides of tape, ever since Christmas when my dad got it for me. Dad and I always liked to watch movies together, could spend whole days watching movies and talking about them and then deciding what to watch next. We weren't particular - any movie would do. One of the last times I spent with him, we watched a sort of triple feature, beginning with Pitch Black and ending with The Chronicles of Riddick. If it was loud and fun and had special effects and great one-liners, we were happy. Even Vin Diesel couldn't ruin our good time. But we also liked those Great Films, the ones that Say Something.
Dad loved science fiction. He grew up on the greats - on radio with Flash Gordon and the Avenger, and then on television Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, and of course comic books and sci-fi novels. He taught a course on Ethics at Lewis & Clark College using sci-fi novels. He loved Star Trek and Star Wars; he even seemed to believe in The Force, and didn't let George Lucas's silly blood tests for Jedis get in his way. A lot of times, it was these sorts of movies that Said Something. It seemed easier to explore interracial relationships and nuclear war and racism and sexism and anti-semitism and hunger and disease and fear on a spaceship or in the future. Science fiction is about allegories. It's about exploring our many demons and our better angels and prompting us all to think about what we really believe, and what we really believe in.
I felt, still feel, like he and I were the same person. I wish I knew more about him - it might help me understand myself better. But I think that's the trouble with death. Someone goes and you suddenly can think of all the things you wish you'd asked, but never thought of as urgent or pressing. Everything is urgent now. So today, I opened the wrapper on that film classic, and I popped it into the DVD player and I watched. Gentleman's Agreement is about a journalist who poses as a Jew in order to write about anti-semitism. It attempts to tackle, through only one of our many societal diseases, what it really means to be human - or at least it endeavors to show that flesh is flesh, after all. And it shows that we all begin to buy in to notions of good and bad, same and different, right and wrong - as though they were ideas made concrete, something you can sink someone's feet into before you toss them off the bridge. But it also demonstrates how much we accept the worst of the world around us. We let the tasteless joke go by. We believe that others are better than we are. We cut ourselves off from what life is, after all - messy and imperfect and dirty and often simply amoral. We so often want to be 'better' that we invent degrees of betterness and then include ourselves or exclude ourselves based on our own ideas of our self-worth.
And it's all a bunch of nonsense anyway. Not everything can or should be explained. Sometimes you hurt because you simply do. Because all this is hard. Because we're doing this instead of something we want to do more, because we don't know ourselves very well and we think we know what we want until it's right on top of us and we want it to go away. Because we know we want something but don't know how badly we really need it until it's slipping away from us.
In many ways, then, this whole thing is for my Dad, about whom I can't stop crying.
So I leave you with this - it's a lovely little story, and yes, it involves a robot. Unfortunately, it's an ad for detergent.
Look at that monkey, feeding itself what looks to be some delicious pastry with a robotic arm that it controls WITH ITS MIND. To wit, from the BBC:
With the probes inserted into the monkeys' motor cortices, computer software was used to interpret the brain's electrical impulses and translate them into movement through the robotic arm.
With a bit of training, the monkeys could change speed and direction. The scientists speculate the monkeys began to regard the prosthetic limb as their own, after first observing the movement and then, by observing, activating brain cells that send the appropriate signal.
There are two aspects of this I find fascinating - first, the potential application for those with spinal cord injuries or for amputees. The second was this observation from the same article:
However, this important paper confirms that the brain controls movement just by planning where to go, rather than by directing individual muscles how to make the limb get there.
This calls to mind some arguments made by psychologists and sociologists - and of course amateurs of both who make their livings in the ad business - that we decide before we know that we've decided, and that we typically act in simple mimicry of others. Perhaps I just can't give up the free will ghost, but it seems to me that this robot monkey experiment actually shows that there are multiple, yet nearly instantaneous, aspects of decision-making. Planning and directing and acting can all happen so simultaneously as to be nearly impossible to disentangle. But, arguably, the 'true' decision happens at the moment just before we plan.
That's how many pairs of shoes I own. Many of them, frankly, need to be retired and replaced. But I love them so - especially the pink and lavender ones with the cool brushed metal piece on the heel. Perhaps I'll take those in to the Cowboy Boot Hospital to have the little divots in the heels replaced and the toes buffed up and shined. Maybe new suede lining put in... Pardon me as I fantasize about refurbishing my shoes...
I used to stop into Otto Tootsi Plohound when I lived in Union Square. I called it the Art Store. Pretty, pretty shoes. Mostly unaffordable to me. But I did love to look. Nowadays I'm too busy to go into an actual shoe store, so I wind up using the Internets to satiate my shoe cravings. And Zappos is definitely a great way to go. Multiple views of the shoe itself, descriptions of the fit and comfort, reviews by others who've bought the same pair giving advice on whether to size up or down, how well a boot fits around the amply-calved, and whether the heel is sturdy enough to make it through a night of dancing on beer slicked tables at German Mardi Gras. I have purchased many a shoe from Zappos, especially last summer when my Michael Kors fetish was in full effect (this year it's Corso Como, baby!).
I mean, come on people, check these beauty booties!
I heart them.
However, while they are indeed gorgeous, they are not much robot-like. I mean, except insofar as metallic booties can take you in the direction of some sex kitten robot from the future. You know, like the Svedka robotrix:
But WERE YOU AWARE that Zappos serves up their shoes using actual, bona fide robots?!?! Well, were you?!?!
The Kiva Mobile Fulfillment System from Massachusetts-based Kiva Systems, is basically a team of autonomous, stout, orange robots that sort, store, and move inventory in warehouses. The robots essentially bring the assembly line to the warehouse worker to fill orders more quickly.
Instead of having people walking around a warehouse with a cart and looking for ordered items to put into boxes, the robots automatically bring the items to them.
I love the thought of a shoe warehouse in Kentucky, buzzing with the hum of an efficient, orange, robot army. And now that I've spent the last twenty minutes or so looking on Zappos, I have come t this conclusion: Oh, Michael Kors, prince of American sportswear, you do make a fine lookin' shoe! I think I may need those robots to fetch me some sassy pumps! Fetch, bot, fetch!
i did some searching for the robot. i didn't get a good look at it before it met its unfortunate end, but i think this might be it... you see, robots are for everyone. i bet i could work some serious symbolism out of that robot - robot as symbol of labor, lack of free will, oppression, slavery. a mere plaything to a child, but a tyrant to a man. who keeps don draper down? only himself. when his wife tries to submit him to her will, force upon him decisiveness and authority to overwhelm her own parental defects (and what's with her total resentment of the kid?), he rebels, grasps the idol of his own slavery and demolishes it like some golden calf. i think this means that don draper is moses.
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