What else isn’t a con?
A few weeks ago I got sick of being constantly sore after exercise and I bought some protein powder from some nice french chaps in Kings Cross. I’d always thought of it as a massive con, but miraculously I felt fine the next day after an epic gym session, so I kept going, and I’ve felt great after everything I’ve done since.
Whilst this sounds like a ringing endorsement of the wonders of nutritional supplements, really it is a combined shriek of frustration and an a big ah-ha moment. It all leaves me thinking “well if this isn’t a con, then what else isn’t a con too?” I’ve had a few suggestions, with “Jesus” being the most worrying 
(If that’s all real then I’m stuffed!)
We talked about this recently at the Sydney Less Wrong meetup, and one guy admitted to discovering that he’d been tying his shoelaces wrong all his life. We didn’t manage to work out a way to find out how to tell if your brain is lying to you about non-cons and things that you are telling yourself that you are doing right, but are really doing wrong. I’m starting to really distrust my brain.
What else isn’t a con? Any suggestions? I don’t want to miss out any more on the good stuff.
compDesGrp Brisbane
I’m presenting tomorrow at the Brisbane compDesGrp session. This’ll be the first time I’ve been up to Brisbane in about 2 years, and the first time I’ve ever been to one of their cdg sessions. If you happen to be in Brisbane then come along!
Blackberry Motorist
Paul sent me this today, and I thought that it would be nice to share it:
The blackberry vines grew all around and climbed like green dragon tails the sides of some old abandoned warehouses in an industrial area that had seen its day. The vines were so huge that people laid planks across them like bridges to get at the good berries in the center of them.
There were many bridges reaching into the vines. Some of them were five or six planks long and it took careful balancing to get back in there because if you fell off, there were nothing but blackberry vines for fifteen feet or so beneath you, and you could really hurt yourself on their thorns.
This was not a place you went casually to gather a few blackberries for a pie or to eat with some milk and sugar on them. You went there because you were getting blackberries for the winter’s jam or to sell them because you needed more money than the price of a movie.
There were so many blackberries back in there that it was hard to believe. They were huge like black diamonds but it took a lot of medieval blackberry engineering, chopping entrances and laying bridges, to be successful like the siege of a castle.
“The castle has fallen!”
Sometimes when I got bored with picking blackberries I used to look into the deep shadowy dungeon-like places way down in the vines. You could see things that you couldn’t make out down there and shapes that seemed to change like phantoms.
Once I was so curious that I crouched down on the fifth plank of a bridge that I had put together way out there in the vines and stared hard into the depths where thorns were like the spikes on a wicked mace until my eyes got used to the darkness and I saw a Model A sedan directly underneath me.
I crouched on that plank for a long time staring down at the car until I noticed that my legs were cramped. It took me about two hours to tunnel my way with ripped clothes and many bleeding scratches into the front seat of that car with my hands on the steering wheel, a foot on the gas pedal, a foot on the brake, surrounded by the smell of castle-like upholstery and staring from twilight darkness through the windshield up into green sunny shadows.
Some other blackberry pickers came along and started picking blackberries on the planks above me. They were very excited. I think it was the first time they had ever been there and seen blackberries like that. I sat there in the car underneath them and listened to them talk.“Hey, look at this blackberry!”
Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970
Brautigan wrote a book of poetry called “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”. Wikipedia says “The title poem envisions a world where cybernetics has advanced to a stage where it allows a return to the balance of nature and an elimination of the need for human labor.“, so I’d imagine that Sam would love it! (He actually recommended that I watch the Adam Curtis documentary of the same name last week, and if anyone has a copy then I’d love to add it to my stable of Curtis docos!)
H+ Conference in Melbourne
I’m going to try to get down for this. It looks like it’ll be interesting!
Generative Components tutorials
One of my students asked what order they ought to do the GC tutorials that are on the tutorials page. For some reason I hadn’t actually thought about that – duh!
So here it is:
- Theoretical framework
This is actually slides for a lecture, so it doesn’t make as much sense as it could if had been designed with being read in mind. That said I think if you use a bit of imagination then it is a pretty useful place to get started. - Making a reactive component & Programming a scribble
These have a long history, he reactive component tutorial was first written sitting in the Qi cafe in Oxford to use with Kathrine Findlay‘s students at Dundee university. Since then it’s been through more than 20 major revisions and I’ve used to teach a huge number of people, so it should have a fair few of the kinks ironed out. However, I haven’t updated it for a while, so there are some changes to the interface, mainly the look of the buttons, and that thectrl+clicking is no longer needed.
It is both tutorials in one PDF. There are also videos to go along with both of these: - Fabrication planning tuorial This was written sitting in the Sydney Botanic Gardens with my laptop plugged into a post and then the wire hidden under a bag so that the rangers didn’t see it! It was for Anthony Burke‘s masters of advanced architecture students. It’s quite simple, but just gives a bit more practice with GC, and starts you thinking about making real things.
- Scripting fundamentals
This explains a few things about scripting that are not about what to write to make the computer work, but more about how to write code that makes your life easier, formatting, commenting etc. - Testing
This is the modelling equivelent of the scripting fundamentals tutorial, it is essentially theoretical/philosophical, so it leaves you to apply the idea in your own way. It tells you about how to think about your project to avoid getting bitten later. - Strategies – These two are about how to make planar quads. They are a bit light, and becasue GCuser is no more, there are no example files. I’ll try to make some one day.
- End
By this point you know everythign there is to know about GC.
Whaaaat, not a chance! Keep playing, and go to the forum and post a lot of questions. Rob Woodbury‘s website (and book – Elements of Parametric Design) has a load of great stuff too.
So there you go. There are lots of other tutorials out there, and if you think that one would slide into this sequence well then let me know and I’ll link it in there.