Go bother Leonard Cohen!

It's possible that you know and love TED as much as I do - if not, I am honored to introduce you to it. I haven't been watching TED Talks in the past few monts - lost sight of them and forgot, in the face of work, personal work, personal life, and the seemingly insane shortness of days, weeks, and months. Luckily, I ran out of new 'All Things Considered' content on my NPR app, and happened to remember TED.

So, tonight I wanted to watch a quick talk while I ate, before turning my attention to a project that needs very badly to be finished, lest I fall so far behind that the universe collapses. What I watched was, not only hilarious at moments, but the most interesting discussion of creativity that I've heard in a long time, if not ever. I hope you watch and enjoy.

The Evolution of Beach Animals

If you've spoken to me during the past few weeks, I've no doubt told you about the project I'm on at work. That's not what this post is about, however. For the project I've been on, we used the AS3 port of Box2D to manage our collision and physics. As I was working through figuring out how to use Box2D, I was checking out the demo file, and one of the demonstrations had this spidery walking machine, labelled as a "Theo Jansen Walker." Of course, I couldn't contain my curiousity, so to Google I went...>

Turns out that Theo Jansen is, quite simply, an evil genius. This guy is just throwing down some incredible stuff. It started, it seems, 21 years ago - Theo Jansen wrote a computer program that created virtual 4-legged walking machines that would race each other, and then emulate the winner, evolving towards increasingly faster machines. As a programmer, that is a cool enough concept for me, but he wasn't satisfied - he decided to take the concept analog.

So he's been building these multi-legged walking machines out of plastic tubing and cable ties. Let's pause for a moment - he builds multi-legged machines. That walk. They capture the power of the wind, and they walk. How. Cool. Is. That.

STRANDBEESTEN from Alexander Schlichter on Vimeo.

And he keeps them evolving. He tries variations, and when something works, he takes that "dominant" gene and puts it into other machines. His 'beach animals' have even started to sprout wings, store compressed air into bottles for later use, or hammer themselves into the sand to ride out storms.

The cynic in me rolls my eyes a little at Mr. Jansen's hope that someday his machines will be able to self-evolve, and that he'll be able to turn them loose on the beach to live their own lives. But then again, with the strides he appears to be making, maybe he will be able to pull it off, at least a partial - beasts that can react to their surroundings well enough to go around obstacles and hardy enough to survive on their own. It'd really be quite something to see these things just crusing on a beach somewhere.

So check it out - it's awesome. Not only is it awesome on a technical level, I really love the aesthetic of his beach animals.

Quality Check

So... been working on a dev project at Struck, but ran into an a bit of a bug. Loading in images and then trying to apply smoothing to them:

However, when scaling the images down, it was clear that they simply weren't smoothing. I asked around, and tried lots of things - cacheAsBitmap, everything everyone else could think of. Don't know if it was because I'm building it as a ActionScript project in Flex Builder, don't know if there was some setting somewhere that I messed up - really no clue.

Well, I have to say, still don't fully understand what is wrong. Something strange is definitely going on. What I did discover, though, is this: while when I right clicked on the flash player, it told me that the quality was set at 'High.' However, if I manually reselected a 'High' quality level, poof, everything started smoothing!

So, while I'm still completely baffled by the bizarre quality bug, but if I set it using Actionscript, it works correctly! So in my base swf, I just include

And, well, it works. And I think I'll be using that all the time from now on - according to the Adobe AS3 docs, setting the quality to StageQuality.BEST will smooth everything automatically, and how many times have I heard the question "Why don't images just smooth by default?"

Techfit props

Well, this morning, the Adidas Techfit site, the first of a series of microsites that Struck is building for Adidas, was given the FWA Site of the Day award. If you're not quite sure what that means, suffice to say they're a good thing to receive.

I didn't really work on this one at all - I just want to give props to Tyler, Wes, and Thom for rockin' the development of this bad boy, and of course Jeramy and Jon for the design. Well done, gentlement.

History: Standing Room Only

Today, I joined a crowd of 2 million people on the National Mall to witness the Inauguration of President Obama. At the base of the Washington Monument, I watched what is, to be sure, a milestone - neither the beginning or end of a journey, but the beginning of a historic presidency, and an amazing moment.

With friends from swimming at RIT, I journeyed out this cold morning to gather in anticipation of the Inauguration. It was a very cold morning, but every bit worth the experience.

Watching on the Jumbotron and listening to the speakers, we watched the arrival of celebrities, politicians and dignitaries. We listened to prayers and beautiful music - the performance of "Simple Gifts" by Yo-Yo Ma, Anthony McGill, Gabriela Montero and Itzhak Perlman was amazing, and my breath caught in my throat.

The oath of office flew by. President Obama's inaugural address was inspiring, moving. (I am still very cold and tired, as I didn't sleep much last night, so you'll have to bear with my limited vocabulary at the moment.) The speech was a perfect indication of why I believed Sen. Barack Obama should be president, why he inspired me and made me believe.

He speaks of common purpose, of working hard, working together. When he spoke of our forefathers who came across the sea with few belongings to build a better life for their children, I was moved almost to tears, thinking in that moment of my own family - I am removed only far enough from that immigrant history that I've never met them, but it was only a precious few generations ago my father's family came to this country, and I am always aware of how much we've come in so short a time.

Further, President Obama spoke not only of the challenges facing us in our country, which will require our best ingeniuty and hard work to overcome, but also challenges in the world that we face. We must recapture our place in this world by remembering that we are measured not by the most prosperous, but those who need the most, and in our behavior towards them. We must feed the hungry, work for peace and prosperity and justice in all the world, not just in our own backyard and not just where it is convenient. As long as any are enslaved, none of us can truly be free. I believe that President Obama eloquently pointed out that we have both national and personal obligations - it depends not on a "they," but rather on "us."

I believe in a hope that is more than a campaign slogan, and I saw it today. Hope for the future, for the future of all.