Marry Christmas From Geek!

A bit late, but I wish you all the love, joy and personal development that will potentially lead you to higher levels of understanding, awareness and self-transcendence.

As the ancient Chinese curse says:

"May you live in interesting times".

[image credit: Futurama]

Remove Universities, Tax People Outside Cities (and Other Extreme Ideas For 2010)

The new issue of Wired features a great collection of short radical manifestos from different authors for new policies in 2010 Britain. However, they are so extremely great, that they could be easily applied anywhere else. I strongly recommend you to read all of them, but below I made a review of my favorite ones.

1. Tax People Who Live Outside Cities, because it's not sustainable - rural households have much higher CO2 emission per person (larger houses, more cars per houshold, etc.). If we tax cigarettes to reflect the harm, we should also tax lifestyles that are damaging health of our planet (by PD Smith).
2. Turn Cities Into Self-Sufficient and Carbon Neutral Jungles, with eliminating using cars (walking, cycling and public transport is sufficient to move in the cities) and applying genetically modified (GM) crops everywhere, with making vertical farms on buildings (thick plantings of trees would absorb CO2 and extra luminescence genes would remove the requirement for city lights). Office building should be turned to high-tech beehives, shopping malls into bazaars and majority of buildings refurbished using bioarchitectural solutions, without building a new ones to save space and decrease the carbon footprint (by Paul McAuley).
3. Promote Another Credit Crunch, our economy is based too much on financial services, which consume themselves. Let is collapse. (by John Lanchester).
4. Slash Universities and Go Virtual, because it's too expensive and irrational to maintain the current system of higher education. Only 99 universities in England and Wales cost £8 billion of UK public money. Students graduate with an average debt of £20,000. To cut the costs we should revise and eliminate the pointless, non-vocational courses, make as much as we can online based, create more options for skill trainings. National service should be restored to promote social cohesion and civicmindedness in youngsters to get them out of negative circulation - we don't need university for this (by Glen Newey).
5. Recycle dead and introduce them back into the food production :-) (by Dinos Chapman).

[photo credits: Wired]

Geolocated Augmented Reality

Is it possible to have Terminator-like augmented vision on our mobiles?

I mean, yeah, we have some basic augmented reality apps and I already spoke about them in one of my previous posts. However they all suffer from obvious problem - the mobile GPS location is accurate ONLY down to about 8-12 meters or even more. The consequence of this is that the augmented reality data floats all over your screen and it's not accurate enough.

I want to look at my phone and have a nice icons, descriptions, clips and images overlying on the surrounding reality in the right places without the irritating floating effect. I want to be able to pick an object in city space and label it in a way that will effectively display for other users. I want it to be like in a science-fiction movies.

But how to achieve that?

One company thought about interesting way to solve the floating and accuracy problem. Earthmine has adapted a 3-D space mapping technology used in Mars rovers to capture the city street and create a detailed, 3D representation of space. At first it sounds just like a sophisticated Google Street View. However, Earthmine vision is to merge 3D maps they capture with location capacities of mobile phones and create a fully interactive, and stable geolocation engine. So inaccurate GPS signal from the phone will be combined with the recognition of the surroundings you are standing in, which will allow you to get a precise augmented reality display.

I just hope that Google have a plan like this, and can use that in their Street View to apply such technology, because it would really be... the quickest solution, considering how much of the world they have already mapped....

[photo credit: Earthmine]

Reactive Music and Reconnected Reality

I have different soundtracks to everyday world, my iTunes library is filled with playlists for different moods, actions and places.

Those playslists also allow me to escape from the surrounding noise, and therefore from the actual experience of auditory reality that I exist in.

However, I've recently discovered reactive music, the type of music that is shaped by your everyday world sounds.


I have two apps on iPhone: Kids on DSP and RjDj, both based on the same engine - that is to play some pre-recorded samples, but morph and mix them with sounds recorded in real time from microphone placed in the headphones. So the software records sounds that surround you and sample them into a continuously evolving soundtrack. As a result you actually listen to your environment which makes you more connected to reality. Your medium returned you to the world that surrounds you.

It is very crude and simple, it needs to be improved, but I see a type of augmented reality here that works like boomerang, that comes back to you with some upgrade of your actual experience of the moment and the sounds of your surroundings. You don't actually cut yourself from the noise, but you use those sounds to make your music.

So I recorded my trip back from work today using different 'scenes'* from RjDj and Kids on DSP and I managed to make a small album out of it, ;-)

*'scenes' are small programs inside RjDj that control how sound is recorded and sampled with the default sets. Those 'scenes' can be programmed and published for users by anyone who make one.

Geek On Acid: Back From Work
[recorded with RjDj and Kids On DSP]

Record Your Unconscious Mind with 'The Psychosqope'

A device that every respected psychodynamic therapist dreamt about has now became a reality.

A device that is an answer to Freud's and Jung's search for unconscious diagnosis emerged from the calculation power of the vacuum lamp.

The Psychosqope - a machine for recording the unconscious mind.

The Psychosqope consists of two parts - the Vacuum-Sonic Unconsciousness Sampler (VSUS) and the Subprojective Nonperception Test (SNT).

The VSUS is highly advanced device designed to detect Rorschach Waves' emitted by any unconscious mind/monad. Rorschach Waves were normally difficult to read, due to interference with electrical brain waves and some external frequencies. However, by using combination of subsonic reading of sound waves generated by unconscious monad and combing it with the calculation power of vaccum lamp processor, the VSUS is able to extract Rorschach Waves from the spectral chaos of energy and combine this information into a meaningful diagnosis.


The VSUS is used only with specially designed Subprojective Nonperception Test (SNT). SNT is heavily based on the Rorschach Test and Alcohol Stimulation Theory. SNT can't be described here due to make sure it doesn't leak into the collective unconsciousness, biasing the results of the diagnosis.


The Psychosqope has been fully attested to apply in psychological diagnosis and research.


The first global presentation of 'The Psychosqope' will take place in this year Steampunk Conference 'Nordcon' by its creator - Psychomechanikus Piveq.

[photo credit: geek on acid]