Animals as Leaders

I know I said I was going to talk a lot less about music and that's still broadly true but I just cannot get over these guys. Animals as Leaders is the project of Tosin Abasi and represents some of the most interesting technical metal to come out of the US in the last 5 years in my opinion.
Tosin used to play lead guitar for technical metalcore band Reflux (who're also awesome) but was approached to do a solo album shortly before Reflux broke up. AaL have released two albums so far and their latest, Weightless, is one of the best albums of 2011.

What particularly appeals to me is the complexity of the guitar tracks and the fusion of traditional progressive drumming with IDM elements. If this got any more glitchy I don't know if I could deal with it.
Tosin manages to maintain a heaviness I've not come across before without degenerating into the heavy metal circus music of Dream Theater or the classical wankery of Yngwie Malmsteen.
Partly I'd say this is simply because he's a younger guitarist and thus has been exposed to a wider range of heavy music growing up but there's probably a multitude of complex reasons which I can't hope to guess at.

They're playing here in a week or two and unfortunately thanks to my exams I don't have time to go. Really really disappointing. Oh well, education comes first.

Big thanks to Jeph of Questionable Content for recommending these guys.

Check out An Infinite Regression;

I want a helicopter...

Further to my last post on using quad-rotors/any-kind-of-rotors as pixels in a 3D screen, I've just seen this;

There's talk of apparently using these to patrol Queensland beaches for sharks and to drop life-preservers to people in trouble (since they can carry around 7kg). 
It's gotten me thinking, how difficult would it actually be to put something like this together from scratch? Presumably fairly difficult since these sorts of things are being commercialised all the time.
But similarly, there must be a software package out there that you could use to run some sort of rotor based flying device? You wouldn't need to use some sort of embedded system, surely you could drop it onto a rasberry-pi or an arduino?

Anyone got any ideas on the matter?

In unrelated news there's some suggestion that it might be possible to make an Alcubierre drive with a reasonable power demand (rather than the previous estimate of 3 times the output of the sun...). So that's pretty fucking exciting!

3D imaging

This video depicts 49-50 quad-rotor's all working synchronously to make patterns. What if we could scale that down, and have each rotor just a few cm or even mm across, each carrying a single colour changing LED, acting as a pixel. Imagine the 3D images you could create! Imagine the 3D images you could walk through.

I think I may have to dig a bit deeper into this.

On the death of Facebook...

In the coming years we will see the slow death of Facebook, in the same way we saw the death of myspace five years ago. This death has been building slowly but as with all social networks, it was inevitable. You can see a definite increase in the number of articles titled "How to delete your Facebook" or "How to escape Facebook and still have a social life", titles which point to a severe concern that Facebook has supplanted "normal" methods of interaction.
There's certainly an increasing number of people actually doing the deed and *gasp* removing themselves from the advertisers clutches. This suggests to me that people have grown tired of Facebook, as you would expect they would. I can think of only 3 people though who have actually removed themselves. One of those returned with a newer minimalist profile and no personal information.

So; why are people leaving? There seem to be a multitude of reasons, some centering around the gradual removal of privacy, others around decreases in functionality. I would suggest another, boredom. People tend to get bored with just about anything given enough time. A constant addition of new features, unless truly revolutionary, is never going to change that. In my estimation I give your average social network 5 years of true popularity followed by another 5 years of slow crash.
Take myspace as a test case; Started in 2003, it peaked in popularity around 2006 and slowly crashed until it was overtaken by Facebook in 2008. Now commonly the only time people refer to myspace is to check out bands. Certainly there are people who still have myspace pages, mine's probably still there, but I would imagine the majority don't maintain them and more than likely forget they have them unless reminded.

How is this relevant to Facebook? People left myspace once there was a more functional competitor, in this case Facebook. They didn't abandon it straight away, they kept updating their myspace's until gradually Facebook integrated the useful functionality that myspace had and people forgot they used anything else. Perhaps another factor may have been Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation purchasing myspace, people don't like to feel like they're buying into a media institution.
The suggestion here is that people are unlikely to jump ship until there's an effective competitor offering at least the same if not better service for less. Being a free service therefore means you've got to convince people they want to be involved, why they want to sell away their details to your site. Facebook succeeded because it offered more functionality than myspace (events, better photo management, better status updating etc) and conversely less (simpler friend management, no garish themes etc).

People are already beginning to strain against the yoke of Facebook despite the lack of an effective competitor. Why is this? The same reason people left myspace, a combination of boredom and changes that didn't add to the functionality of the site. Remember the ability to tag your friends in photos on myspace? A notion facebook did vastly better and something that frankly wasn't needed.
The same thing is occurring on Facebook; the constant layout changes, adding the ability to like individual comments, claiming your friends used the friend finder service. None of these add to the functionality of the site and actively detract from the use. How would you like it if someone kept rearranging your room and putting your things in places you didn't expect? This is how I would describe the constant layout changes. Regular users will be mildly annoyed and irregular users will be downright frustrated. The golden rule of software usability (if I remember Jakob Neilsen rightly) is "Put things where users expect them", so why would you shift all the primary functions from the bottom of your main page to the left-hand-side without warning?
Now I don't presume to suggest a better idea, no doubt Facebook have numerous highly paid usability testers and developers.

I've considered deleting my Facebook page as well but I haven't done it for a number of reasons. I'd be socially isolated as people don't invite non-users to partys, gigs etc simply because they forget people don't use the service.
Plus as a recent migrant to a new country it's useful to have about as a networking tool and to get to know new people. Finally, much as I hate to admit it, using facebook is well ingrained into my routine at present and I'm not sure what I'd replace it with.
In saying that, I have noticed a massive reduction in my usage in the last year and that of my peers. There are people I'm friends with who I'm fairly sure haven't posted anything publicly in well over a year.

On the future

I haven't written anything here in a long while and I don't expect this trend to change. I maintain a more regular presence on twitter and facebook (no surprises there) so I get most of my outrage/info out in a less constructive space.
However, with that in mind I've decided that I should probably take this blog in a slightly different direction. I will continue to write about bands and music that interests me but I'm also an engineering student. So there's probably going to be a bit more fucking around with technical concepts and perhaps some discussion of technical activism as I am still "tru punx" at heart (of course, my love of material things, showers and expensive liquor prevents me from being "tru punx" in life).

With that in mind I thought I might try to talk a little about "the future", the nebulous and grandiose place that we all dream of living in and yet fail to reach on account of time's constant failure to move faster than one second per second. If you don't dream of living in a better and brighter future I suspect you and I probably won't get along (neo-primitivists fuck off *to the tune of nazi punks by Dead Kennedys*) so now might be the time to stop reading.

As ever, I haven't planned this out and am making it up as I go along so this will get rambly.

I'm likely to be wrong if I attempt to make any kind of predictions about the future so I won't try to do that. Instead perhaps I will talk about the kind of future I want to live in and ways in which this might be achieved. Tamora and I have been talking a little about solar-punk (a reaction to steampunk/cyberpunk/life in general) and the nature of the future. Rather than just send her an email I figured I'd write something a little more public.

So:
3D printers. Gonna be huge and ubiquitous at some point (perhaps also invisible like plumbing and electricity in the first world now). That point is still at long way off though. People more eloquent and informed than myself have predicted that 3D printing will replace all basic commodity goods but that crafted/boutique goods will still be in demand so retail isn't quite dead just yet. That said, there's going to be a massive market for printable object maps and hopefully we'll solve the whole intellectual property/copyright debate before then.
Interestingly the Pirate Bay is already offering "physibles" for download, the first of which I believe was a bust of the head of the MPAA. The IP debate is something I'd like to talk about further but I'll save that for another post.
If we can come up with a 3D printer that's cheap enough and easy enough to use I don't see a reason we couldn't have a similar project to One Laptop per Child.

This leads nicely to the next point;
Climate change/peak oil. The question of peak oil is not whether or when we'll run out but rather will we actually have enough energy and capability to make the transition away from fossil fuels. Bruce Sterling's Viridian Design movement connects nicely to this in the sense that sustainability is crucial to our future.
I'm confident that the current moves to mitigate climate change are too little too late but similarly, I don't think we're going to see an apocalyptic collapse of society either. Things are going to change (probably radically) but I suspect we'll (my generation) live to see a shift in the functioning and power structures of society thanks to climate change. I don't know enough (any) geopolitics to accurately talk about who will come out on top but I don't think the USA has what it takes to survive as a super-power any more.
India, China and SE Asia I think will be the new rich of the 21st century with Australia and maybe Scandinavia in strong positions also. This of course assumes that climate change doesn't obliterate Australia, drown Scandinavia and starve Asia.
Then there is the demands of the developing world to have "luxuries" and lifestyle of the first world, something that climate change may well prevent.

More on this later.