1001 Books to read

Here's a list of great books one is apparently supposed to have read. Sadly, great non-fiction works are omitted. Here's how I add up:

Book - Author (Reason)

Read:
Choke – Chuck Palahniuk (last year, I think)
Life of Pi – Yann Martel (borrowed from Dad two years ago)
Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson (read two years ago, must read again)
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco (read after an undergrad class in Semiotics. Great.)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (all Douglas Adams is excellent. I have read each of three multiple times)
Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons (A graphic novel. Excellent.)
Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Finished recently. I tried reading when I was 11, but I was too young and gave up.)
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (in Southeast Asia last summer)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick (read in an anthology a few years ago)
Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein (read a few years ago)
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller (my favourite novel. ever.)
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (for high school english)
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien (Long, but imaginative. My opinion is mixed on whether books should have multiple appendices.)
Lord of the Flies – William Golding (for high school english)
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger (during high school, outside class)
A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift (not sure why this is on the list, as its an essay. But I have read it)
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe (during high school, outside class)
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell (during high school, outside class)
Animal Farm – George Orwell (during high school, outside class)
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien (I think when I was younger than 12)
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (during high school, outside class)
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald (for high school english)
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad Defoe (during high school, outside class)
The Time Machine – H.G. Wells (when I was much younger)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain (in Southeast Asia last summer)
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott (Mom gave it to me?)
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (for high school english)

29!

In Progress:
Ulysses – James Joyce

Saw as a movie:
Atonement – Ian McEwan (recent)
Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh (twice)
American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis (on David's recommendation)
The Cider House Rules – John Irving (few years ago)
Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally (motivation for Schindler's List, which I saw on Sunday.)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke (I actually really don't like this film. It does nothing new for me and is horribly paced.)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick (Bladerunner)
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak (Mom's favourite movie)
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell (This was playing a few times around the Freeman household in my youth)
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (As the excellent adaptation Apocalypse Now)
Ben-Hur – Lew Wallace (Dad's favourite movie)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo (yay Disney!)

Gave up:
Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco (A book profoundly stupid in detail. I realized I wasn't gaining by reading it)

Want to read:

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
Neuromancer – William Gibson
Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
Foundation – Isaac Asimov


Originally taken from John August's blog.

Can you copyright a brain?

I just got back from an interesting (although limited) session on Canadian copyright for artists at Kingston's Artel, which got some mental juices going from something I heard about when I was visiting the Dynamic Graphics Project (where I'm doing my Master's)



There is currently ongoing research in augmenting participant's memory and other cognitive abilities using recording devices, for both Alzheimer's and Autism. From what I have heard, the results of using a recording device is incredibly valuable. In one case where a camera would hang around an Alzheimer's patient's neck and intermittently take pictures throughout the day, memory performance was compared to a control group and the use of a diary. It was found that not only did reviewing the recorded pictures perform better in event recall but that, whereas other memory-recording techniques would fade over time, the use of pictures which were reviewed once ensured that the memories created were permanent. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the original paper to link to.

Now, let's return to copyright. Recently, there has been an unfortunate movement to ban public photography, frequently on the basis of copyright as a guise to prevent terrorism. While I think that this is clearly ridiculous, not to mention simply impractical, it raises the question of where the information is going (and how can we wrangle it!). I mean, should my friend with photographic memory not be allowed out in public, unless she is equipped with some sort of distraction device so she can't concentrate on creating a "copy" of the surroundings? I think we all can agree that we cannot control the existence of a "copy" in a human brains, except perhaps that which falls under a non-disclosure agreement. This is illustrated humorously above in the ingenious xkcd.

So then, if we cannot copyright brain contents, yet we can copyright pictures, then what about the Alzheimer's patients who could use photography to augment their daily lives. In fact, they would not be able to function as normal human beings without it. You could say, then, that the camera is, in fact, an extension of and therefore is a part of their brain and similar laws should apply. I'm on the patient's side.

Weekend Roundup

This past weekend:

- My best friend Dave came up from Guelph.
- I volunteered for Admitted Students Day at Queen's.
- I saw Iron Man with Dave, and my other friend Daniel and housemate Jack.
- Visited Free Comic Books Day, saw nothing I really liked.
- Watched three famous movies I had not seen before: Shawshank Redemption, Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock and Amadeus.
- Started playing with some Image Processing stuff on paper.
- Went for a bike ride.
- Had a recording session for the radio play I'm in.

Generally, I had a pretty sweet weekend. Let there be more!

Improv Show Videos

For The Improv Show's last gig on April 14th, I managed to record both our longform and the jam. The Jam is our half-cast, half-audience thing whose format I nabbed from Upright Citizen's Brigade in New York. I've youtubed it for the loyal fans who missed it.

Here's the longform:




Here's the jam:

I broke 50 kilometers!

I just got back from a 54 k bike ride!

Here's the google map.


View Larger Map

Now, my average speed sport of sucks, as it took over two hours, but that can be improved. I think I'll need to buy a bike clock.

Massive Life Update

In the last month, I:
- got an Iron Ring
- finished my last exam in the Mathematics and Engineering Program at Queen's
- was accepted for a Master's in Computer Science with the Dynamic Graphics Project at the University of Toronto, where I'm hoping to focus on Human-Computer Interaction and Ubiquitous Computing.

Phew! Post-graduation, I was also looking into the Master's of Digital Media program in Vancouver, but decided I wanted to follow a more academic route. After lots of soul-searching, I realized I'm more of a researcher than a business guy, and if I continue to follow the academic stream I get to keep teaching! My specific research interests are pretty fuzzy right now, but the advisory possibilities at UofT are really fantastic and fluid. More on that to come.

So this means I only have four months left in Kingston, the city I was born in and have lived for the past 11 years, after stints in Calgary and Vancouver. Although Kingston has its own funny hijinks, it's going to be weird to leave this quaint place for the big smoke. I'm really looking forward to Toronto's theatre scene though - I know that I'm going to keep doing improv and theatre wherever I go.

This summer, I will be working in the Human Media Lab on 3D videoconferencing from multiple 2D capture (details to come), but that's pretty much all I've planned for now. On Thursday, I wrote down a very broad summer to-do list:

Buy a guitar and start learning stuff on it
Buy a camera
Write a play or short story
Buy a laptop and get it all pimped up
Buy an OLPC XO and learn how to program on it.
Have sex outdoors
Read Ulysses
Finish Godel Escher Bach
Learn about Information Theory
Be on stage at least once
Learn about Decentralized Control Theory
Bike greater than 50 km in one day
Buy/Fix my bike
Get glasses (my old ones broke)
Find a house in Toronto

And then on Friday, I went on a bike for 35 km! Maybe I'll have to increase that goal. I'll keep you posted.

ps. playing through Bioshock now. Despite it's flaws, its pretty awesome.

Rock Paper Scissors is live!

After some helpful comments, Rock Paper Scissors Infinity is now live!


Rock Paper Scissors Infinity is a massively multiplayer matching game. Honestly, the best way to experience it is to just go look at it. And play with it, so it grows, of course.

From the about page:

By playing this massively multiplayer game, you are creating a huge network of verb-noun-verb connections. If someone tries to add a "play" or "connection" that already exists, then that connection is strengthened. The strongest connections are listed on the infinity page.
As people add more and more connections (as n goes to infinity) then this network will begin to resemble human understanding. Or maybe that's just a crazy idea. I'm probably wrong.
In only the short time I've had this online, I've already learned a ton from the people who have "played" it. Please, look around, play, don't be afraid to break the rules I've made.
- Dustin

So do it! Play around!

Real-Life Spam

Well, the house just received 30 identical looking standard-size envelopes, none of which were addressed to any of us. Most of them were weird variations of either Phillip Van Stone (18) or Andrew Collins (9). I opened one for "Mike ColinManing", which I assumed I couldn't get prosecuted for since it obviously wasn't a real person. It was an invitation to some $20,000 tournament (for which we had OBVIOUSLY already been considered) at PartyPoker.com. Below is a scan of all of the Phillip Van Stone variations:

Blobjects are fun!

Blobject? A photo from a research project I'm working on.

City 7: Toronto Conflict Reactions

I've had the install file for City 7: Toronto Conflict sitting on my desktop for a long time, but I've been too lazy to install it. So, here it is. It's a mod for Half-Life 2 that represents an alternate timeline where, at the beginning of the game, Gordon Freeman gets teleported to Toronto (City 7) instead of Half Life 2's City 17. I played the game for an hour (so far) and I've recorded my reaction's, a la Games for Lunch. So here's my stream-of-consciousness thoughts:

- sweet, the first two minutes are exactly like in Half Life 2.

- I've teleported, and someone says he recognizes me, then runs off. Odd. I definitely get a "Valve" feel from this. Good job team. I definitely had low expectations, as I thought it would just be an excersize in modeling Toronto's landmarks, which doesn't count as game design at all. It looks like they used the same character models, but used new landmark art with a ton of new voices. Its definitely unnerving to see the trademark Half Life 2 walls next to a Future Shop.

- Holy shit! The parking meters are just like in Kingston. This both increases my immersion and destroys the fourth wall.

- No reaction from the Combine guards when I stand awkwardly in front of them. Darn.

- I tried to get past that pool into what looks like an elusive area. I climbed up onto the fence next to the park and smacked into an invisible wall. That sucks.

- I like that I'm not given any explicit goals in the beginning. Still exploring around is nice and, by the nature of the exploration, equates me with the conventions of this new world without forcing it down my throat. It does help that I'm naturally inquisitive.

- I walked past some guards into an area that was restricted and was instantly plugged full of combine gun energy. A warning would have been nice, like some warning shots at my feet or nose.

- Hmm, still want to get across the pool...in the middle of the pool...uh-oh, sniper lasers...dammit. dammit. First death.

- Restarted. There are humans wandering around, one of them complained about "typical combine maintenance". Ah, some things never change.

- I'm on a roof now. Yay, I found a crowbar! Now what? It occurs to me that I could kill a lone combine and steal his gun, but they all are in the open. I go to the one nearest to the stairs that go up to the roof and smack him a bunch of times. When he dies, he gives me a grenade but I'm still in a smacking frenzy and it goes flying uselessly. The explosion draws about five more combine and I still only have a crowbar, so I run back up to the roof. They don't follow. Maybe some of them will drop a gun, so I try to skirmish out, entice a few and lure them up to the roof, but it isn't happening. They just stay down there, and then mumble something about "losing the target". Lame.

- I try the same thing a few times, doesn't go anywhere. I go to a point on the roof where I can watch a crowd of people. Someone mentions something about "Hank" going nuts. Suddenly, Hank runs out, kills a combine with his pistols and tries to make a run across the pool. Hilarious. Results are similiar to my attempt, but it appears that Hank didn't bother to save his game. So, I guess the designers are telling me that that approach is futile. Or are they? I mean, I DO have an MIT education and I'm wearing a hazardous materials suit.

- I look around, and pick up a filing cabinet (?) to step up onto the roof. It looks like there is an area enclosed by a red fence that I can now reach. I gleefully grab a medkit and hold it (my health is at 100%, but you never know when you may need more) and trounce over to fence, standing directly on top of it. I throw the medkit down so that it lands on the ground inside, and then gleefully smack into another invisible wall. I can't jump down! The medkit sits inside the fence, mocking me. Lame.

- I go into the "restricted" area I went to before and manage to kill about four more combine this time before I bite the dust. I was picking up some health packs I found and managed to stay alive by skirmishing out, killing a combine and taking his grenade, then returning to behind a box as they all shot at me. If only they clumped so I could take them out all at once, but it looks like I'm not that lucky.

- Wait? What is that on top of those discarded(?) train cars? A generic supply crate? Goody!

- I manage, with some difficult box-moving maneuvers, to get a box on top of another box to get on top of the crate. Somehow, though I'm most likely making a racket and looking like a moron, the combine ignore me. This is pretty odd, considering that they seem to keep a tight control on the other humans.

(Oh yeah, I forgot to mention all the rations humour. Hilarious)

- I got to the top! I gleefully bash open the crate to find...no guns. Its some energy batteries for my suit. Well, now my health totals 170 or so. Now should I make a run for it?

- I turn on the sprint and race through the crowd of combine and people to cross the pool. Somehow, I avoid sniper fire and fly up a staircase and wham, into a door which is clearly non-interactive due to its pixelation. I get swarmed by about 5 combine, and its game over again.

Verdict: I'm looking forward to keep playing this, considering that its design strategy closely follows Valve's, which is superb. The jury is still out on whether or not the goals should have been clearer.

Also, "Enter the Mind"? Lame! What am I, twenty? I need to change that.