A new composition

Indian Sunrise by David Hagar

Optimism and Dreamers

I found this quote from Theodor W. Adorno while watching one of the last episodes of Bill Moyer's Journal.

‘The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from self contact with its objects – this alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of all things, because consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its opposite. But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape. The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible, but beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.’

Some more original compositions ...

Evil Clown Opera and Back Alley Ghosts

A GarageBand composition that turned out to have a Halloween theme :)

Sink + Laser Pointer

Messing around at home with a laser pointer.

Restore an Old Marker with a Drill and Rubber Band

I needed to get more out of an old marker and thought, "if only I had a centrifuge", I do, a drill.




CAUTION!! This can dump ink into the cap and drip everywhere when you take it off. Take my word for it. Alcohol for clean up works.

GarageBand Experiments 2

Here is part two of some GarageBand original compositions.

Garage Band Experiments

I made these original compositions with GarageBand on a Mac by laying down tracks with an external Midi keyboard. All the backgrounds are from the Internet. These are just the first 5 of 9. The others will be posted soon.

Time Lapse Experiments

I took these using my old iPhone.






I made these by:
1. running GorillaCam on my iPhone taking one pic every 10 seconds for a few hours
2. download to iPhoto and export using "Sequence" option. This saves photos as cloud-1.jpg, cloud-2.jpg, ... .
3. running ffmpeg to stitch all the images into a video feed. The command is:

nice ffmpeg -r 10 -b 4000000 -i cloud-pics/cloud-%d.jpg sunset.mp4

-r 10 is frame rate of 10 frames a second
-v 4000000 is a bitrate of 4Mb
-i cloud-pics/cloud-%d.jpg just says this is the input %d gets replaced by a counter that starts at 1.

I installed ffmpeg using Mac Ports but its possible to get the source and build. There are lots of examples on Google.

Apollonian Circles

I am a geometry nut. I used to make stuff like this all the time. I love the complexity of how these circles interfere and seem 3D.

Initial set of circles with 90 degree separation (4 sets)

Same but thicker lines

60 degree separation (6 sets)

My source code for these is in java and will print direct to a printer. I'll send it to anyone that is interested.

Some interesting reading:

Source Code for above
Apollonian Circles (Wikipedia)
Apollonian Circles( Google Images )
A Tisket, a Tasket, an Apollonian Gasket

Bluring the Line Between Investor, Customer, and Buisness

Most businesses are built on the idea of "build it and they will come". I'd like to propose the opposite, a "find people that want it and it will get built" model.

Fractional Effort

The Nasa budget is $7 billion a year.
$7 billion a year / 300 million people = $23.33 a year per person
$23.33 / 12 months = $1.94 a month
$1.94 / 30 days = $0.06 a day

How many 7 billion dollar projects could be created for $0.06 a day ? How many problems could be solved if you could break them up into $0.06 worth of effort ?

Bootstrapping

How do you get critical mass behind something that needs to be done ? Suppose you could:

1. Get allot of people to say what they want and how much it would be worth to them.
2. Group people that want the same or similar things
3. People post solutions or ideas to problems that have allot of money behind them.
4. People with the problem "invest" in people solving the problem.
5. The investment return could be stock or a discount off the first purchase.
   

If there are millions with a problem, the investment would be pocket change.

Research

Not all businesses have immediate solutions to peoples problems. Maybe you need a prototype, proof on concept, scaled down test, etc. People contribute to make it happen and move things down the pipeline from risky far out idea to proven techniques that are ready to go.

Think how this would be radically different from a market where only things that are known to return a profit get built. Collecting and concentrating micro-investment from customers gets people that really really want something to take allot of risk and push to the edge of whats possible. What if a million people put in $10 to build and design an open source iPad ?

Idea Economy

The Flow of The Network

Here is the problem. You have ideas, people, and time. How do you route ideas to people in the least time ?

A solution is to:
- organize all the ideas so they are browsable, searchable, linkable, and commentable.
- allow people to express how important the idea is so that it is seen by more people
- allow people to directly route ideas to people they know
- create an idea economy

An Idea Economy

How it works:
- You have an idea or you hear of one.
- You decide how much you would pay groups of friends to read the idea. Some you might pay more, some less.
- You decide how much you are asking friends to pay you back if they like the idea.
- Your friends read the ideas that pay the most first and payback the ideas they like.
- You see who liked the idea. You group people by what ideas they pay for and use this to set how much you promote your ideas to those groups.
- You use your profits to promote ideas further.

Small World Networks

A small world network is one where the average number of connections between any two nodes is low. This is the "6 degrees of separation" between you and everybody on the planet idea. So you can imagine that the idea economy way of passing the same idea from person to person might route it to that one person that really really needs to know it.

Not Just Ideas

So maybe its not an idea but a problem, a wiki, or a top 10 list. Everyone gets paid to participate and contributes funds to pay for people's participation. X amount for every problem solution and Y for every solution that works. X for every item added to a top 10 list. Y for voting for an item. Z for any item that makes it into the top 10.

Gourmet Spam

What if you could answer a question and everyone out there could pay you to read their ad, or idea or whatever. Maybe you have a separate inbox for it all. It would let all the information about you out there get info to you. Maybe you assume an anonymous identity and people pay you to answer questions. Are you going to buy a house in the next 6 months ? Are you looking for a better job ? Maybe you have a really specific question you want people to answer. You only pay people in city X to answer. And its really not spam. Spam is free to send. Someone could set up their inbox to only accept messages that are pay to read. Spammers would be forced to send to a narrow audience. Someone might set a question/ad adrift like a message in a bottle among everyone that answered a question with a specific answer in hopes someone might pick it up.

Why

If people get paid for the information they share, they will invest more in what they share and create economies of social interaction that scale and self organize beyond the simple barter economy of friendships.