Flexible Display Technology

So, this stuff has been in development for quite awhile now. I've been keeping tabs on it, but it appears that the dev process has finally culminated in some results. Here are a bunch of videos of this stuff in action. The work is handled by a sub-group of Phillips called Polymer Vision. Mostly, their site talks about business and mobile applications, but I think the obvious applications are far more interesting: stealth camouflage! There are tons of things this would be awesome for. The current implementation only has 4 shades of grey, but with full color and touch-screen technology integration, this thing is going to be freaking AWESOME.

Phillips Radius


Plastic Logic demo


Phillips e paper technology


Electronic ink display from Philips


For a little bit more background on this, it actually doesn't have a refresh rate, and hence it uses very low power. Additionally, it is perfectly visible in regular daylight conditions. I believe it is actually a changing in a pigment configuration of the material, almost? I'm not 100% certain on that. At any rate, color models have also been in development, but certain of the color elements degrade at different rates (with the most difficult element being blue, degrading within a few weeks, I believe) so until that is stabilized, flexible screens in color are not ready for release.

Here is a site with some more background, videos, and pics: here

Racism in Japan

If you've seen the Japanese movie called Densha Otoko, or Train Man, you probably remember the one scene where he's walking around on the street, and somebody is advertising for a company that sells something called Men's Water by giving out samples of it to passers-by on the corner. This is a common form of advertisement in Japan. When the main character gets to the corner, the girl giving out the free sample retracts it suddenly. Only later on, after he has gotten an extensive make-over, cut his hair, and purchased an entirely new wardrobe, is he offered the sample. His first rejection is an overly obvious attempt to show his undesirability and ostracization from the rest of Japanese society. It's the most blatant form of rejection, the Train Man is so reprehensible companies don't even want his damn money. This exact thing happens to me every single day. When I told my ex-girlfriend about this (she's Japanese), she was angry. Her immediate response, and this isn't paraphrashing here: "just because you are gaijin (a foreigner) doesn't mean you're not human being. you have a hand to take!"

At a sometimes wavering attempt at academic remove, I face racism on a daily basis here in Japan. It's rare that I will face it in overt forms, such as direct confrontation, but it's something that's on everybodys' lips. Generalizations are waiting to come out, words like, "that's how Americans think." People leaving seats empty on either side of me, in otherwise cramped subway cars. People trying uncomfortably to avoid eye-contact, or, alternatively, staring at me openly as if I was the first white person they've ever seen. Even those things don't bother me too much though, what gets to me is when I pass the workers on the street, trying to advertise their beauty salon or their spa or whatever, and they offer a little packet of napkins or a flyer to every single person passing except me.

Sometimes I don't want to understand it more deeply. I just want to say fuck it, and be mad at people. But that is not a fair response. At least, that's not a mature, and reasonable response. I try to train myself to avoid the knee-jerk response to events in my life. When I hear about terrorists, I don't instantly think they should all be killed, or even think that's possible. I think that the mechanism by which terrorists are being created, the real issues and grievances they have that may have radicalized them and caused them to choose their current path however reprehensible it may be, and, believe me, I in no way attempt to shift guilt for a reprehensible act such as terrorism, regardless of the factors that motivated it, are what need to be investigated, and eliminated, so as to reduce the production of more terrorists. (because let's be honest, saying "let's kill them all," and bombing tiny villages somewhere only produces more hardship, parentless children, and, in short, factors that will make a new generation hate the west even more, turn radical, and seek to destroy it) In the same vein, I seek to resist my urge to respond to racism in kind. That is a shallow and unproductive impulse. Instead, I try to understand what creates this situation, and how I can defuse it somehow. Often, I make the effort to bridge the gap, offering help or smiling, and trying to present an open and approachable image.

Japan for Japanese

The thing about Japan is that it's full of Japanese people. To clarify, ethnic Japanese comprise the vast majority of the population. Further, the sense of Japanese identity in Japan is very strict. There is a very large population of Koreans living in Japan, who were born here and, in some cases, who have parents that were also born in Japan, and yet still possess Korean passports. These are people who couldn't speak a single word of Korean. Japan is the place they know. Japanese is their language. I was having a really great conversation about this with one of my friends.

Some background: my friend grew up entirely in Japan. She went to an international school, which is sort of a segregated school. Full Japanese students can attend, but they face heavy tuition fees, as opposed to the children of international parents. International students are admired, at best, and often end up famous in different ways, my friend notices people she knows when she walks through a clothing store and sees pictures of models. At worst though, you can depend on the fact that international students are at times envied, ridiculed, and made to feel apart from the rest of Japanese society. Unfair attention, either positive or negative, is racism.

What my friend described to me was pretty horrible. She is half Portuguese and half Japanese. Her face looks fairly Japanese, although she has naturally brown hair. When walking around Japan, people assume she can't speak her own language. They are scared of, mistrusting, or reluctant to approach her, assuming that she is a foreigner. In her home country, the people on the street passing out flyers and product samples won't give her anything half the time. When I was talking about it with her, I noticed she ended up using the word "they" often. In response to the generalization she faced, the entire Japanese "in-crowd" became a generalized object to her, one that she was not a participant in.

So what can be done about things? I don't really know. Japan as a society is in the ongoing process of change, playing a role in the global economy and also having to deal with the influx of foreign labor as a result of the low-birth rate. In order to hasten the process, or at least make it somewhat easier, the only thing I can think of is what I personally try to do. Every day, I try to ignore those hardships I face, understand the situation that creates such hardships, and reach out personally to others. If enough people were to think this way, I don't doubt that the majority of the world's problems could be easily solved.

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Democracy 2.0 or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet

So I followed a link to the MediaShift blog, on the PBS website, from somewhere on digg and I had to say something. On MediaShift, Mark Glaser talks all about the media revolution, the meaning of things like the explosion of popularity in sites like YouTube that feature user-generated content, and what it means to people who want to keep up with it all.

This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. In Glaser's latest entry, Spelling Out the Media Shift, he describes the media shift for which his blog is named in terms of movements towards more free media, greater degrees of user participation, etc. I haven't exhaustively read all of Glaser's writing, but his thinking seems to be going in the right direction. While this process is only in its fledgling stages at the moment, I believe that us members of the Web 2.0 movement are presiding over the beginnings of the overturning of the traditional structure of information generation, distribution, and consumption. We make our own entertainment, writing, art, movies, and music. We distribute it ourselves, for free, via unrestrictive licenses such as Creative Commons, and websites such as YouTube or Google Video, or this blog website. We search for it on the recommendation of other users, via social news sites, and decide when and where we want to see what. Everybody still has a tv set, but even tv is changing, with OnDemand and newer levels of interactivity.

According to Mark Glaser, all the typical leaders in the traditional structure of content creation and delivery will have to sit down and rethink their approaches and adapt in order to survive this shift. According to me, the typical leaders of the traditionally restrictive content-delivery system can go to hell, although they probably won't. The vertical structure is going to eventually collapse though, because everybody from the base is climbing up. Even if it is, as I've heard in some places, only about 1 in 10 users that make the effort to create and post original content, that's still a vast sea of talent and content in the long run, and I think its eventually going to reach the point where it obviates the backwardness of production studios and other restrictive media groups, such as publishers of books, record labels, etc. They probably will live on, but the way things exist now, they are just trying to stem the tides of change in order to protect a stupid, inefficient system where they are the sole distributors and hence can reap the greatest degree of profits.

What YouTube's explosion of popularity means, and what the open source movement, and the creation of Wikis, and propagation of blogs all mean, is that users are, when enabled with the proper tools, fully willing to assemble into groups all on their own for the sake of talking about, thinking about, and developing topics of interest to them. We don't need others to make it happen for us so much anymore. Web 2.0 isn't just the clever use of css and ajax, its the means of organization by which human beings can thwart the typically better equipped systems of old governance, television standard's bodies, editors, etc. Web 2.0 is the mortar between the bricks in the massively distributed processing of human achievement. This is the 20th century crashing down around our ears.

Does that seem too radical? Consider your own personal browsing habits at YouTube. If you're like me, you end up on that damn site for hours at a time just clicking through videos. Consider the fact that now there are Peer to Peer networks created not just for the sake of file transfers, but also a P2P lending group and ideas for things like P2P labor arbitration on the horizon. Open source software development is distributed and peer-reviewed arbitration of labor already, just limited to software development. This is still in its early stages, but this is more than just a media shift. This is a better way to do things, in the way of which stands large corporate interests, opposed to progress for mankind at large, in exchange for the profits that can be reaped by keeping us all held back.

Application to the Political Process

A P2P network is, in essence, an assembly of people to further their common interests. This sort of assembly is actually protected in the United States constitution because by its very nature it is powerful, and it should be the essence of a democracy such as the US. In nations with more strict governments, the freedom of assembly is, of course, denied, because the government cannot tolerate an organizational structure rivalling its own. In fact, the work done on Wikipedia and open source software is often far more transparent, rapid, and thorough than that done by groups of people that are paid to do the job. How long before that same transparency, thoroughness, and efficiency is allowed to be applied to something like the voting process? It wouldn't even be a question of liberal or conservative either, it would be the overhauling of a system that has outlived its usefulness. So it will be as more and more of the pieces of industry and government are relinquished to the networks of individuals that will handle them best.

In fact, I would argue that file transfer networks are the MOST democratic construct we have seen so far. Their entire goal is the sharing and spreading of information. In the United States, at least, the body of citizens has been granted the right to self determination. This is a meaningless power without an informed populace. Hence, creating tiers to the internet, limiting the spread of information, and other such nonsense in the vein of the net neutrality laws are movements totally opposed to a segment of the population that has gone to great effort to both acquire more information and share it with others. Not to be blind to those who merely swap files for the sake of free entertainment, but many forms of art present differing points of view and serve to alter the understanding, political and otherwise, of those who view them. These are meaningful exchanges of information and signs of a populace going to great effort to inform themselves. As for copyrighted works that are transferred, the sheer popularity of the file transfer movement also serves to underline the failure of the current distribution system of movies and music already in place. This is something that will need to be dealt with in the future, rather than simply criminalizing those who transfer files, and outlawing technological progress for the sake of keeping companies represented by the RIAA profitable.

It is imperative for us to look to leaders in defending the internet, such as boingboing's Cory Doctorow, and groups like the EFF. Long live the American Pirate Party! Restrictive governments such as China's are right to attempt to censor and control the internet, because freedom of information is poison to those who would attempt to rule unjustly. Eventually, its all going to be out in the open and subject to peer review, and then may the user with the highest reputation rating win.

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Damn it feels good to be a gangster

Today was totally badass.

In a haze of sleep-deprived paranoia, I found myself in the middle of Tokyo with that Counterstrikey sort of feeling that things were moving at the edges of my vision. Things with guns. That's probably because I played Counterstrike all night.

Having long become accustomed to the vague unravelling of reality during my marathon waking sessions, I basically was going about my business, being the best damn english teacher you can get for 2500 yen an hour. Despite the gargantuan effort it took, however, merely remaining awake was not enough. In preparing course materials, I soon found myself at an awesome little place called Moopa. I dunno what the a moopa is, but it was a pretty cool little internet cafe.

I sit myself down in my tiny sheet-metal cubicle and immediately begin slamming out an english lesson. Naturally, I turn on the tv right beside my computer. To help me focus. And porn was on tv! No, porn is not enough to describe this. This was the most Japanese porn you could possibly find, short of tentacle rape. Girls in school uniforms, semi-hideous men with tickling fetishes, and simulated rape scenes taking place in restaurants full of people. Oh god, it was beautiful. I ended up being late for my lesson.

So yeah, then I get to this lesson and I have all this stuff prepared and I just watched a ton of porn and, needless to say, the lesson kicks 12 types of ass. Then to top it all off, I get handed 4000 yen, as opposed to the 2500 I'm contracted for. My initial response to this knowledge is, of course, that I do not deserve the money, and I have in fact done something very wrong. I immediately try to secure the cash on my person, fearing the authorities. Coming to the slow realization that, for once, I've actually done nothing wrong, I finally manage to loosen up, get the bills back out of my ass, and consider the possibilities. This is 4000 yen. This is salvation, financial freedom, and a new life in my pocket! This is like thirty-five motherfucking dollars!


And then I got home and saw this thanks to kotaku:

Tetra Vaal (Third World Robocop)

The Eagle Has Landed

I am alive and well in the land of the rising sun. Everything looks different around here, and it feels really good to be back. I've already picked up two students that I'm teaching private english lessons to, and I've got a head full of ambitious ideas, and a mouth full of pizza with corn and mayonnaise. Here is a map to give you some context on my location, so you'll know where to drop the care packages (mm, sweet emergency rations):

I'm in the little green building to the left of center. If you zoom out a bit you can see the giant metropolitan sprawl that is Tokyo. I love being in this vast artificial construct, I feel like the world's largest cities are the pinnacle of man's achievement. I grew up in the mountains, so believe me, I know all about nature. I'm sick of freaking trees already. There's power in places like this, vast amounts of wealth and human resources harnessed to create and change. I just want to be where the action is. Functioning mass-transit and employment opportunities also tend to be pretty convenient.

In the weeks to come you can expect all types of stuff from this spot, covering news and items of interest from Japan, how-to's on crap I have mastered, and the internet - my one true love. I'm never homesick as long as I have you, sweet internet. If only I had a wireless connection in my head. The future cannot possibly happen fast enough. Using my memory is stupid, I demand Mind Notepad.

At any rate, I've already made a pilgrimage out to Akihabara, the nerd capital of the whole world, and I've returned home with a fat sack of loot that I'll talk about in a future post. For now, you'll have to be content with this image:

That's a Nintendo 64 along with the 64DD, it comes with Mario Paint, Polygon Studio, and Sim City 64. There is a mouse and a microphone bundled in as well. How much should you expect to pay for a semi-ancient, stripped down pc? Around $500. I'd be screaming N64 like a retard too if I got that as a kid.