How to find lost things!

In my endless rambles across the web I came across this cute little reference from a "findologist" calling himself Professor Solomon (well it seems he was featured on Good Morning America...!??!).
Funnily enough what he writes is in accord with my personal findings. Although I must confess to some digressions:
First - as a rule of thumb if I don't find something after three minutes of thought I turn to my wife!!! If you follow that rule (which I am sure many people are familiar with) it will lead to success 8 out of 10 times. Its a gender thing, women are just better at multitasking and usually more thorough - so they perform better at this kind of hyper threaded thought process that also requires meticulous execution.
Another technique that I use is Reverse Stream of Consciousness where I sort of meditate and try to reverse my actions and/or sayings in time. In doing that I usually am aided by both visualization (i.e. - close my eyes and see it) and strong use of exact phrase or word contexts (e.g. - I ask the person who is was talking to to repeat the exact phrase they said to me and that usually evokes similar memories or thoughts)


MC

Chloe !

Terribly late - but here it is: we have given birth to our second daughter Chloe a couple of weeks ago. We are all well, except for the sleeping part ;(
I find it hard to say that it seems all i have been told by my parents and others about children seems to be true:

• Its a very tough 24/7 job


• the kids love you but take you for granted and give you hell


• The second one is much more than twice the work!!!


• Your retire from this job only at the morgue

It got me thinking about what is it in raising the kids that is so hard. My current theory has to do with the fact that although raising them is very rewarding there is no compatibility between the resources that they require to the utility/output they give. If you think of it in terms of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs you realise that what you give is (especially in early years) at the lower levels and what you get back is at higher ones. This IMHO create some of the discrepancy that we sometimes feel after 1.5Hrs of holding someone in your arms at 4AM.

In other situations in life you can see that for people to function well there need to be some correlation between these inputs and outputs -that is the reason that it is very difficult to write blog posts at 2AM but fairly easy to play ultimate until 23:30 or dance until daylight.

Well as my computer has crashed I currently don't have a photo - but will add one soon!

MC

So now I have a new photo!

Almost famous! (I knew her when...)

As I am reading through the November issue of Scientific American I come across a short blurb about a new method for attaching carbon nano tubes to electrical circuits...and who is the chief researcher leading the team? No other than Dr. Yael Hanein one of my class mates form uni. Of course I was aware of her work at the Tel Aviv University Nano center but SciAm! that is pretty darn close to being on the cover of Fortune ;) I still have some photos from the good old days that can prove that I knew her when..
At any rate a slightly more detailed account can be found here, and her homepage that also links to many of the very interesting stuff done at the Nano center is here.
MC

Someone is going to make a lot of $$ here (or: why haven't MMOVSG taken off?)

If you ask yourself what are the real basic needs or killerapps that people will probably spend money on endlessly no matter what, you will probably narrow it down to something like : gambling, sex, sports, shopping (on a slightly different note - my good friend Gil once quoted his father's saying allegedly a relic of the communist era- "there are three things people can look at tirelessly: flowing water, dancing flames... and someone else working ;)

I have been troubled for quite some time with the question of the seemingly underserved market for online-virtual-multiuser-sex/porn (MMOVSG - Massively Multiuser Online Virtual Sex Games). With the massive popularity of "2D porn", the emergence of VW and MMO's and the ever increasing sensitization thresholds one would imagine that this would take off????

Yeah - there are some beginnings like RedLightCenter a lot of talk about sex in SL center (see this for some funny updates) but by and large there has yet to surface any major adult industry player and move in on this market. A good MMOVSG site (is that an oxymoron?) to see the current state of the industry would be this place.

so here are some thoughts:

• Geography 1 - this will happen in Japan - no doubt! Why - first they are really into technology, gadgets and all that, they are way up there on the social networking thing and because of cultural idiosyncrasies porn is absolutely mainstream there (when I was working there i was initially shocked to see serious adult business men in the subway in rush hour browsing through kiddie anime porn - and i mean this in the best of ways;)




• Geography 2 - Japan - obviously 3D visualization technology is not up to par with real live video. In the Japanese market there is already a great abundance of adult anime (called Hentai or Adult Manga) so they are already used to consume non-realistic forms of adult entertainment. I read somewhere that the Hentai adult market is 200Billion Yen (~1.8B$). I think that was a 2006 number.




• First wave?: although some MMOVSG's are already out there it is reasonable to assume that the first wave of mass adoption would be in single user applications that will mimic the conventional adult entertainment experience. As always web killerapps seem to be based on taking something that is already working great and just transforming it into a new venue/level and not changing the rules of the game totally. That being said - the ability to customize the experience and share it with others is probably a really strong incentive that, over time and with market education will drive users here.




• I/O devices...!: I have been saying for a while that the whole VR thing is highly dependant on input and output devices that will enhance the experience and transform it from a cool game into highly believable experience. Nowhere is this true as here - obviously the sexual experience is something that derives from visceral emotions/senses and not from enlightened thought so the more sensory inputs you've got working for you the better. Some people have decided to bud this field of adult remote sensory stimulation "TeleDildonics" (fancy that on your business card). I would start just by taking a look at Kyle Machulis' site slashdong



• I/O 2: beyond the "specialized" devices that i mention above, obviously stuff like 3D cameras and VR goggles with HD quality will probably be a big boost to the space of VR and of course to this area as well (I know of a few companies that allegedly work on the 3D one of which is my friend's Eldar MantisVision...)



• Pornnovation - A great place to look at if you are thinking seriously about this field is Arse Elektronika - THE conference about innovation dealing with digital media, robotics, the web and adult entertainment.



• A perfect fake - this is an amazing (really) and disturbing 60 min documentary directed by Marc de Guerre about the myth of the search for the perfect human drone/fake. Of course it focuses on the female figure and touches on adult entertainment but also airs some interesting views from academia and such - really a must see!

Some last thoughts on a slightly different note:

I have long held the opinion that loud music, violent movies and porn are great avenues for venting violent thoughts and have lobbied for opening up the Internet connections of our neighboring countries to stuff like that with the thought that if you are watching BayWatch you will not go to war. Some time ago my good friend (and serious economist and novo Zionist) Yoav found some interesting corroborating evidence for that...see here in his blog ;)



MC

VR, vision and sense of self

A couple of days ago I received a post from a team mate (its in Hebrew so I wo'nt bother with it). It basically talks about two separate experiments that were carried out in Europe and deal with recreating rigorously "out of body" experiences for tested subjects by using sensory inputs from video cameras to their eyes in which they see themselves. These were both part of the latest Science issue but the two originals can be found at the UCL Neurology institute and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Laussane. ostensibly what both researchers demonstrated was that projecting people with images of themselves from the back in real time, while conflicting physical sensory inputs (touch) to their bodies, created a perception of being outside ones own body.
As an anecdotal side note - about 10 years ago while at a government research facility and dealing with stereo vision I had pondered seriously on the implications of manipulating the points of view of our eyes and what effect that might have on our perception. My concept was somewhat different and basically talked about using the same video camera feed but with one "eye" set to normal and the other changing perspectives. I hypothesized that as long as the two images were towards the front of the subject (such that when she moves to her "real" front both eyes get closer to the far wall) she will retain her sense of balance and self. I expected that once this relation was broken (say one camera was 90 degrees to the other, or pointed backwards) our consciousness would break down and our sense of self localization could suffer. Unfortunately this was not part of the agenda at the time and I never returned to it. I wonder if some of the neuroscientists looking into this field could take on this experiment...
At any rate out of body experiences connect directly to the issue of self and the connection of our physical and mental existence as a unified pair. This has been something revisited by many philosophers theologists, cognitive scientists and even physicists over the years and seems to be a critical hub of both social science, brain and neurology, physics and artificial intelligence and a hotly debated issue these days.

MC

First win for the Israeli Junior Ultimate National team in EUC07

So I have been absent for quite a while - the pressures of moving to a new house, some reserve duty in the army and just the increasing load of working on my new venture have caused a leave of absence...but I just had to jump in with the breaking news:
The Israeli Junior National Ultimate Frisbee team (of which I was one of the coaches together with Chen, Tomer, Asaf and our ever energetic Dori) have nailed down their first victory over the Estonian squad!!!!!
A really exciting event - this being only their second international tournament after world's last year (here is a cool vid from WJUC06).
Way to go guys!!
Look here for updates on our site's front page

p.s. - expect some real news form our HL team website soon
MC

Zoe's Ahh moment!

Last night the funniest thing happened - I came home around 18:30 so I could see Zoe before she goes to sleep. As usual I take off my "work" cloths and prepare to slip into something more comfortable. Zoe comes over to me with my just taken off shoes and says "Daddy, LALA" (which are shoes in her lingo). So I smile and say " yes these are my shoes, maybe you want to put them in my room?" and she shrugs me off...

Later she comes over with my just taken off socks (!@!@) "daddy - BAYIM" (again similar to socks in Hebrew) and I reply "yeah - why don't you put them in the laundry" shrugs me off again....

THEN I tell her "you know these are my pretty shoes - now daddy wants to put on his slippers" - what does she do?....

She replies "Ahh" and then proceeds on her own to take my shoes to the bedroom, take the socks to the laundry room and comes back with my Crocs (which are my slippers)

MC