Artechnik Podcast by Assembler FM

June 30, 2013 63 - Penultimate Championship

Our next-to-last episode!

That's right, ONLY ONE EPISODE LEFT!

Today we talk about Virtual Environments:

Coffetivity and The Madeline,

The PRISM Proof Search Engine,

Transhumanist Rich Lee's Cyborg Clubbin

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Transcript for this episode:

“Hello?

Oh, I just lost you guys. Huh.

Let's take a moment and stop here and see if we can get Adam back.

Hey, everybody, here we are.

Welcome back, welcome back.

For those of you wondering who we are, we are Artechnik Podcast, a podcast about the intersection of art and technology, and I'm Jeff.

I'm Adam. I'm Adam.

I'm Aaron.

Separately from Adam.

Well, hey, guys. It's been a little bit since we talked last. I don't know who has what in the way of updates, but I have a couple of things.

Most importantly, Adam, I took your advice from last time.

What did I say?

Well, last time we... Kind of. Kind of, yeah.

Last time we were talking about messages to our younger selves and things that we could do over and things that we should do or we could have told ourselves to do when we were younger. And you put down the challenge of, it's not too late. Why don't you just do it?

And so I did. My thing was that I would not play music and stuff in front of an audience of actual human beings.

“And so Marty, who I was staying with when I was in Athens and she was on the show, for those of you who don't know, Marty, our musician friend, encouraged me to play for her and sing a song for her. And so I did. And it was one of those, it was a dark stormy night, quite literally.

And we were supposed to go see the Shakespeare. And then suddenly the storm gets so big, the power goes out, and we light a bunch of candles and sit around and talk and end up playing music. And so rather shyly, I did end up playing my song, and she and her husband Noel both really, really enjoyed it, both the lyrics and the singing and everything else and the playing and stuff.

And Marty said, you need to go to Hendershot's on Monday and do their open mic. And I said, to hell with you, I won't. She says, yes, you will.

And I did. And I'm really glad that I did. And it was received pretty well.

“And then I ended up playing it again somewhere else. And I was just really happy that I did that. And I appreciate you for laying down that challenge because it was definitely in the back of my brain when I said, OK, I'll do it.

That's my update.

Well, cool. That's good. That's good to know.

Very, very.

What about you, Aaron?”

“I am in the middle of my six week run of Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat at the Center for Puppetry Arts. We had three performances today on a Saturday, and the kids, they're having a good time. They really like the show.

We're having a good time doing it. You know, it's hard when you're doing 13 shows a week, but we're still enjoying it. It's a great show.”

“If you're in Atlanta between now and July 27th, come on out and see it. Stand by the stage door afterwards and say hi. I know you from Artechnik.

I like the pictures of you in the blue. And I know I've got a couple of kids from the camp I was running in Athens who will be coming to see your show.

Oh, fantastic. Yeah. It's a weird Czech blue covert puppetry style.”

“There is overt puppetry, which is like Avenue Q, where you can clearly see the puppeteer you are intended to, and you perform with the performer being a part of the visual. What we can be seen, we're wearing these blue velour outfits instead of the Czech black traditional black velour, where you stand in the shadows and hold the puppet into the light. So technically we can be seen, but after about five minutes, your brain edits us out.

So of course, we are Czech blue, and I've named it covert puppetry rather than overt puppetry, because while we are there, we aren't seen anyway.

And why do they go with blue exactly?”

“Because the cat is a black puppet. The cat, to draw him like he's in the book, has to be predominantly black fur. So if you do check black and have the puppeteers disappear, then the cat would as well.

So they were like, well, all of the backgrounds in the book are this sort of baby blue color. What if we tried the style with that? So it was a grand experiment, and it seems to be very successful.

The kids are not like, but it wasn't a puppet show. I could see the people. But it is very strange, because normally we have these hooded sacks over our heads with a little piece of scrim to look out of.

If you're doing it, check black. But they were like, well, we're going to see them anyway. So just having a weird blue sack over their head seems weird.

“So all of the hoods have, on the front of the little baseball brim that holds the hood a little bit away from your face, we have a nose and whiskers. And then on top of the hood, we have these soft fabric ears that stand up on our head. And we have for the very beginning of the show little blue, but dark blue, light blue striped hats that fit on top.

And so they look like the cat in the hat hat, except they're light blue and dark blue instead of red and white.

Oh, that's very cool.

Yeah.

So Adam, what have you been up to?”

“Well, I'm doing my offsite residencies, and so I'm mostly not here at Lexington Children's Theatre. I drive usually at least 20 minutes away. It's about 20, 20, 35 minutes away.

I was in Winchester, Kentucky, I think, last week. This most recent week, I was in Frankfort, Kentucky at the Grand Theatre, which is a really nice space. The last time I was in it was actually when I was still a tour actor here, and they were still, they had just started renovating the space.

And so it was all, it was just basically a black stage with folding chairs, and I remember a lot of plastic being hung over the walls because whenever it rained, it would leak into the building. But it's just absolutely gorgeous now. But the theatre, I think it originally was a vaudeville house, but they renovated it in the 40s and 50s, maybe even sooner than that, to be a movie house.”

“So the seats are really low relative to the stage, because it was expecting you're going to be looking up at a movie screen.

And so you can see, everybody could see our PW performance on Friday, but it was a lot of, you know, your head was up. Everybody was craning up, which was interesting. But it was very successful.

It was fun. We did this, what was it called? Stinky Cheese Man is based on the book by John Sheska, which is just a bunch of little sort of vignettes of fairy tales you know, but like in a with a twist and some weird, awkward thing about it, like Little Red Running Shorts or The Other Frog Prince or Goldilocks and the Three Elephants and stuff like that.

So it was, you know, it's weird. And it was fun. So yeah, I've really almost exclusively been teaching.”

“Like every moment of my life is either consumed with planning for teaching, actually teaching or driving to or from the place I'm teaching.

It's like every moment of Erin's life will soon be consumed with learning, planning to be learning or planning to be planning to be learning. So Goldilocks and the Three Elephants, is that where the Three Elephants all kind of feel Goldilocks with their trunks and try to describe what she looks like because the elephants are all blind?

They're all blind. No, no, that's actually the shortest one. They literally just rattle that one off in like about three lines at the very beginning.

And I think just to give the audience example of like, hey, these stories are going to be messed up. And here's an example. And I think all it really is is because everything is so oversized, Goldilocks can do no damage to it.”

“Like she can't even get in the chairs because the chairs are so high off the ground. She can't get in the bed. She can't even reach the table to steal their food.

So she's like, she gives a shrug and says, you know, bump this and she goes home.

Yeah. Oh, boy. How long till you're off to Italy, Aaron?

I leave in 58 days, and it's about a week and a half after that that classes start. So you do get a little bit. And then I'm going to, yeah.

Keep going. Yeah, I remember now you said you build in some time to not rush.

A few days in Chicago, and then a few days in Arezzo. I arrive like the Thursday before the Monday of classes. So I've got all weekend to sort of cry myself to sleep.”

“Party.

Party, yes.

That is a better plan.

You got to have that first day of grad school hangover.

Is there a first day of grad school hangover? Having never been.

Yes, it's called every day of grad school. The hangover is from learning.

Kevin Patrick has anything to say about it.

Jeebus. Hey, I also saw last week, and I went out and saw Man of Steel. Oh, man, I haven't seen it.

You guys see that?

Did you walk out crying halfway through?

Did I cry? Actually, I did cry a little bit through, and I totally get why the movie came out on Father's Day weekend.

There's a lot of the pull of Clark between, what's his name, Kent? Jonathan? Thank you, Jonathan Kent.

Yeah, Jonathan Kent and then Jarrell. But it was awesome. I mean, it was really good.”

“I could see why a lot of people were angry by it and felt that aspects of it don't line up with what they think is canonical.

People were angry about it?

Some people. I mean, just online, you saw some people that were like, you know, just they felt that there were certain characters were behaving in certain ways that were not true to their comic book cells. But the thing is, I mean, there's been so many versions of them over the years.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, it's been around since 1937.

It depends on who's writing and drawing. And I will say, though, that there was the most interesting aspect about the film to me, which I felt they peppered throughout, but they never really developed. And there was one particular scene that I felt was, like, really heavy-handed with, you know, Superman is like this messiah Christ figure that will, you know, save the planet, blah, blah, blah.”

“But there's this one really good conversation he has with Jonathan Kent at one point when, you know, he's still growing up and he's struggling with his powers and trying to find his place. And Jonathan says something to the effect of, you know, you're going to change everything. You're going to make people question their beliefs in God, you know, in terms of, you know, because we have this sense of we are created by gods and, you know, therefore, it can't be from another planet because we created them.

Right. And we're the pinnacle. And also then, you know, in every religious Earth tradition, there is, you know, we are the pinnacle sort of creation.

And so, yeah, now you have this other that is more powerful and, you know, than a locomotive. I'm so tired. You know.

I think I drank one of those once.

A locomotive. Is that like, Krakachino?

Krakachino.”

“I so need a Krakachino right now. But yeah, yeah, it was just this interesting, they sort of touched on, and there were a couple references to it throughout. And it was like, I wanted to see a movie where like all the religious leaders were in a room debating about, okay, here's this like super man from another planet, and what are we going to do, guys?

Yeah, sort of super man.

We wait for two kinds of smoke. One kind of smoke, religion can go on. The other kind of smoke, everybody give up.

Is it a blue smoke and a red smoke, like that time you split into two, Superman split into those two entities?

You know, they did that in the 50s, and then they brought it back in the late 90s, early 2000s, something like that.”

See, I don't remember the 50s one. I only remember when they did it in the 90s, when he was all electric and stuff. Yeah, the electric suits.

I don't remember why, and I don't remember how they rejoined him, but I remember for a while, I remember for a while, Superman looked like some extra out of Xanadu.

Yeah. He had like magneto powers for a long time. Well, not for a long time, but it felt like a long time.

I mean, he was all like lightning and magnetism and zappy powers, which was very different. And then some character took on that costume called Strange Visitor. What an awful name.

He would have to be. They ran out of names. They probably have like two jars like in the DC comic headquarters, and one is an adjective and one is a noun.

Hey, this one says Strange, this one says Visitor.

Strange Visitor is part of Superman's extended definition, you know, his extended title. Strange Visitor from Another World brought in.

This was a lady. Yeah. So we're waiting for more powerful than a locomotive.

Girl.

Speaking of able to leap tall buildings, there is also a good moment where he he doesn't know he can fly. And so the first time he moves great distances, it actually is a leap like he's jumping. He's jumping and about halfway through the jump.

And there's this tight shot of what's his name, Henry Cavill's face. And you see him realize, wait a second, I feel something else. And it's like, oh, my God, I can fly.

And you see this joy on his face that like as he discovers this power. And it's a really it's a really nice moment.

So is that where they've secretly put Christopher Reeves face over his for a moment, according to the Internet?

Oh, I have not heard.

There's a there's a thing going around that there's this and it's a very it's a close up of the guy's face. And he's sort of going through clouds and light and stuff so that like it's this very flickery sort of I'm traveling very quickly. And while like a couple of frames, it looks like Christopher Reeves.

“Well, then it would have to be that moment because that is the moment. It's like an extreme like it's just his face basically in a little bit of like clouds. And you see the crackling energy as he's as he discovers he can fly.

So that's got to be the scene.

You know, I had begun to paint a very different image in my head when you said like, you know, he's jumping and he's jumping and then he feels something else and there's look on his face. And I thought the next thing you're going to say was Megafart knee levels like the Redwood Forest. That's how he discovers he can fly.

Fortunately, that's never been part powered superhero propelled to space by not since Howard Stern's Fart Man.

Yeah, a real thing.

That is a real thing. He had this character he would kind of just riff on when he was on the radio and he actually had a suit created. And I remember it was during one of the MTV, I think either video or music awards.

“He actually flew in as Fart Man like they made up a whole costume for him. It was Howard Stern.

There was an independent film called Thunder Pants where the one kid is like a genius and the other is gassy, but a good person. And so the smart kid makes him these fart pants that filter and then use that energy to give him superpowers. And so he becomes Thunder Pants.

My apologies to any ladies who might be listening, but we're almost done except to say this one thing. Aaron remembers this. I had these characters, Nelson and I had these X-Men parody characters called the Unfragrant X-Lax.

And I'm going somewhere with this. And the Cyclops leader type character, I think his name was Butt Flops, and he had a butt for a head and he had a visor and whatever. You can draw your own imagination to what he did.

“But the point was is that he was the butt head leader, and he was a real jerk, and he was the leader of the group, the captain or whatever. And flash forward to recently, Sarah is making Commedia masks, and she's making, I thought, I think it was a Capitano, and she puts a little crease in it to kind of remind you of a butt. And I was like, oh, he's just kind of a stock.

It kind of makes sense. That's funny.

So, Jeff, did you ever try out the digital coffee house?

No, I have not tried out the digital coffee house yet. I think I went to the site to download the... Because it was like an audio file, right?

You just turn it on. So, Adam, my sister sent me this thing that there was research done that the peak creativity level for creative endeavors is approximately the decibel and chaotic mix of what one catches at a regular old coffee shop. It's enough to keep you from sitting there in silence and fretting about your project, but it's not so loud or specific enough to distract you from your project, and it's why…

“Well, people go to work at coffee houses for a variety of reasons, but it turns out it's actually beneficial for those creative projects. It says it's not for, like, if you're doing your taxes or doing expense reports or spreadsheets, but if you're creating, writing. And so Coffeeativity website has sprung up, and it has, they've gone to several coffee houses and decided that the best one is this one they recorded and now have sort of a live looped stream so that you can, like, play it in the background as you work, wherever you're working, and get that peak coffee house level of distraction and noise.

And I was like, this sounds so perfect specifically for Jeff, though in general, I mean, I go work on my scripts at coffee houses and things.

That's where I go to learn my lines. Yeah, because there's something about the buzz of noise around you.

And the buzz of the caffeine.”

“And the buzz of the caffeine, yeah, to be fair. And yeah, that kind of keeps me focused in a way that if I was home, where it was like dead silent, no distractions, I would get maybe 20 minutes of good focus, and then my mind would be gone. Right.

Yeah, I actually did go to the site. I forgot there were a lot more plates clanking than I was used to. I remember that.

So I listened to it for a little bit just to check it out. I haven't tried working with it yet at the house. I think I would have to put on a pot of decaf or something just for the smell, just to get the two going together.”

Yeah, but I think it would be a great idea when you know you can't go out, but you need that kind of thing, because things with words like lyrical music, it's going to mess you up if you're writing, especially at least me. But you know what, Aaron, you provided me with a great... By sending me that article, you helped me understand why I am sometimes productive in a coffee house and why I sometimes am not.

And I hadn't realized until the article pointed out, like you mentioned, that if you're doing tasks that are creatively productive, like you're writing your story or something, then the coffee house helps. But if you're doing something that's more logistical, like I just finished this brochure design, I can go and I can design and do all the layout of the coffee shop. But I didn't do the registration form, because I've got to get the data entry points right, and that's a whole different brain set.

“And I had to do that at home in silence. And I understood that's what I had to do after reading that article you sent me. And I think it ended up saving me a lot of frustration.

So I appreciate it.

Something's come out of it already. But I was like, maybe if we could work as if we were at a coffee house, but not spend $5 a day to do it, our projects would ultimately be more profitable.

Yeah.

Let's dream.

Spend $10 on a bag of coffee and ride it out.

Yeah.

I'm going to try that soon. I'm back in the polar home office, if you will, and I've got to kind of set that office space back up because I've been mobile for a couple months now, I guess. And that's one of the tricks I should try to try to get back in my daily routine.

“That and get up, get dressed, leave the house in the morning, you know, and come back as if I'm coming in to work. I think, Aaron, I think you mentioned that once, and I think that's a good idea.

Well, this may save you money on all those $10 bags of coffee, especially if you're drinking decaf these days. This other thing I found this week is scentography. And a engineer and artist has designed a working scent camera.

And we'll have to post a picture of it. I'm going to do my best to describe it on this radio broadcast. So there is a central unit that looks like sort of a white, like a Chinese takeout box, but like hexagonal.

And it's got four tubes that come out of it and meet at the center. And then those tubes all go across the room as one to this sort of glass dome.

Cone of silence?

Cone of scent capturing.

“And so you put whatever it is you're trying to capture, coffee beans, for example, under the glass dome, and the Madeline, which is the name of the project, captures the little scent molecules that are actually coming up off the object and capture it in tenax, a porous polymer resin that absorbs the volatile particles that make up the smell.

And from there, you can get the exact mass spectrometry of that particular odor and sort of recreate it like Pantone colors, but for scents.

This sounds like Farnsworth's...

Smelloscope.

Smelloscope, thank you, yeah.

Are they going to register those scents like Pantone does their colors?

Well, you know, there's only the one prototype working model at the moment, but it can create these delicate files of the scent and then a bronze disc with the formula information.

“So, I mean, but if you can copyright perfumes... I guess so. And if you can copyright recordings, which, like, if I go out and I shoot a recording of a tree, you know, even though the tree was there...

I don't know if anyone sees it. But even though the tree is out there in nature, right, and exists on its own in nature, the recording of the tree is still mined by copyright. So even though the scent goes out and exists in nature...

As long as you're not trying to copyright an existed copy, you know, like, you couldn't say, well, I've captured the scent of Chanel No. 5, therefore, this is my new version of Chanel No. 5, and I'm going to sell it.

But you could remix it.

But you could catalog it, I guess.

You could remix Chanel No. 5.

You're thinking of Mambo No. 5.

I am. I am. But wouldn't it be neat if there was a way that...

“And I guess it's impossible because it's particles of matter, but if there was a way where the scent could abruptly change as quickly as a piece of music can abruptly change and the scents not jumble together. Do you know what I mean? Like, do you smell this?

Well, you could blast the white scent they created for the perfume display in between. So you could have Emotion No. 1 scent, White scent, Emotion No.

And then you could sample and remix Chanel No. 5.

Or, and I heard this on a little piece on NPR the other day, you could create little microbes, and you could alter their genetic structure so that maybe they ate the previous scent and what their output, whatever gases or things they give out, turn into another scent. And I swear to God, this was a legitimate thing I heard on NPR the other day. This scientist, and I think his name was Kiesling, and I was trying to find it online, but I guess I did spelling his name wrong, whatever.

“But it was on NPR and Morning Edition yesterday about this guy, Kiesling, that he is currently, he's already successfully done this once with microbes, where he has genetically, at the genetic level, modified them so they take in organic materials, but their output and things they produce are synthetic. And so he's actually created microbes that produce basically malaria vaccine. And there's one company out there that the way they make their product is through these microbes.”

“And so currently he is trying to, and he has successfully done it, but it's not cost effective, of creating microbes that their output, their synthetic output, is basically a diesel, a diesel fuel. So it's a biodiesel, essentially. And that, and he's on the process of, but it's a diesel fuel that when you burn it, it does not have, it does not burn giving off carbon dioxide, or carbon monoxide, the bad carbon, the bad carbon output out of the back of your car.”

“It doesn't put that out there. And so currently he is already, it can already make the diesel fuel, but it's an expensive process right now because what they're ingesting is very complex sugars, and sugar is expensive to refine. And so now he's trying to create microbes that do it off of simple sort of plant matter, like cellulose and...

Like almost like any raw just...

Right, grass, leaves, yeah.

Now, they could do it with an elephant so that the output volume was increased exponentially.

We are making some really high-level poop jokes today, and I'm impressed. I'm impressed with us.

It all started with poop.”

“Yeah, speaking of animals, I just saw... We were having some technical difficulties before the show, and I just saw, Adam, your text message, and it said, My Google Cat has frozen.

Oh, really? I was trying to type it while you guys were talking, because I thought, should I say it?

Cat must be in beta.

I guess. Oh, well.

Google Cat has frozen.

Yep, there it is. My Google Cat is frozen. And then right when I sent it, that's when I lost you guys.

I bet they're developing a Google Cat.

What are they not developing?

Now that they're into hardware, they might as well make pet animals.

Ethics. Ethics. That's what they're not developing.

Waka waka waka waka waka.

Is Epic an acronym for something or just like a story that I give a damn about?

Ethics is one of those recursive acronyms, like GNU is not Unix. It stands for Ethics That Have Integrity Tomorrow Come.

Oh.

Soon. I was almost at it.

No, you didn't.

Almost.

“Almost. And I, well, I totally misheard you. I thought you said Epics, E-P-I-C-S.

So, I was very confused. We were having two different conversations.

But think how cool it would be, like, if you took, like, the Google Glass technology and put it into, like, a robotic pet that, like, followed you along, like this companion animal, and you could be like...

And you'd say, Cat, go search for something?

And it could, like, lead you, and be like, show me the way to the closest movie theater, and you would follow your cat down the street.

Oh, that would be cool.

Would it be an actual, like, hardware cat or, like, some virtual cat that only you could see through the Google Glass?

I am envisioning a robotic hardware cat instead of having to wear the Google Glass myself.

Oh, instead of...

It's like a robot His Dark Materials.

Yeah, like, everybody's robotic Google Demon.

“Or if you have, like, a home version dedicated to, like, take-out services only, it would be Go Fish, and it would be a fish in a bowl, like Klaus, and you would say, I want pizza, Go Fish, and he would call up the delivery people, know what kind of pizza you want, and it would show up at your door. Or the I don't want to go out version, and then the cat and the fish would probably have an interesting relationship.

What if, you know, in the meantime, you could have, like, your virtual fish tank, like, on, like, a Google tablet hanging on your wall, and you'd be like, Go Fish, and it would do it, and, you know, the fish would disappear and reappear on the pizza delivery person's tablet and be like, this is the order, and then it would swim back to your tablet, and then you could, like, give it, like, fake virtual digital fish flakes.

“So now it's like a Harry Potter portrait.

Yeah. So who's using DuckDuckGo, by the way?

What is that?

What the hell is DuckDuckGo?

I don't know what it is.

DuckDuckGo is a search engine that has, is becoming popular based on the backlash to all of the search engines that are having to deal with the prism stuff that's happened recently. Prism, prism, prism, come get me. Anyway, DuckDuckGo does not personalize or save your search queries in the way that Google does.”

“So first off, it doesn't catalog and save your searches supposedly. I mean, you have to just trust them, I guess. But also it doesn't tailor any of the searches based on your IP address, based on anything, any way that it would garner information about you.

So it's not going to give you like local results for X or how you and I can enter the same search terms in Google, even if we are logged out and we are going to get different things. DuckDuckGo just gives you the straight results of its algorithm. And mostly for privacy reasons, people are at least temporarily jumping ship over there.

We'll see if it's just a fad or if it's going to give them enough to do something with it. But my question is, well, how are you going to monetize anything that you're doing, DuckDuckGo? I like your idea.

I like another competitor, but how are you going to make any money off of it?”

“Yeah, when it comes down to it, they'll sell out and become like every other company that's out there.

Well, you can still do...

That's nice, Adam. That's nice. It's real hopeful.

It's true.

It's true. I'm a pragmatist.

But I think you can still basically do instant result ads, couldn't you? I mean, just because they can't be personalized to an environment, you could still do...

Yeah, I think so.

You know, the word camera takes you to give you a Canon EOS ad.

Like it used to be. Yeah, like it used to be back when Google started. Right?

Because before they were so good at collecting everything, I mean, they had to start learning how to do their ad some way, and that sounds like the most basic one-to-one way. So that makes sense. I'm not saying there's not a way to monetize it, but I'm just asking what their strategy is.”

“Anyway, so DuckDuckGo, if you are scared of Prism, go check it out while you can. But the truth is, is that if you are submitting that search...

It's too late...

.on an unencrypted network, you're still sending data, especially over Wi-Fi, but you know, you're still sending data over the air that can be picked up by packet sniffers and stuff like that before it even arrives at DuckDuckGo and those milliseconds that it takes. So, you know.

I mean, this is kind of related, but on an extreme end. I got an email just the other day from Vendini. Vendini's servers were hacked, and so people's personal...

I got that one, and apparently, I think they said it affected over 400, 500 different arts companies in the country, and actually Lexington Children's Theatre was one of them. And so, yeah. And so it was just...”

“Yeah. So there you go. That happens.

For those of you who don't know, Vendini is a box office software solution for nonprofits and other companies that do live events.

Tracking patrons and events.

Yeah.

The ones that are trying not to...

But as I recall, as I recall, Vendini doesn't actually store credit card data, if I remember correctly. I know that they'll store user addresses and names and stuff, but no card data, thankfully.

I think that is true, because when I take orders over the phone from people, you always have to enter the information each time.

Yeah, and you would need a whole different level of certification. If you were storing credit cards locally, you'd have to be, oh, God, what is it? RSI?”

“Whatever the hell it is. Whatever the hell it is, there's a certification you have to get to store credit cards, and you get audited annually and stuff like that.

But you get enough information, personal information about people, and you can take reasonable guesses about passwords and create false identities.

One, two, three, four, or password. Go. I was staying at someone's house one time.

Adam knows this story. I was staying at someone's house one time, and I couldn't get on to their Wi-Fi. And I said, hey, what's your password for your Wi-Fi?

And they go, I don't know. We didn't set it up. I don't know what it is.

And look on the router. I look on the router. I can't find anything.

So I just go, password. And it works. And I go, you know, your password is password.

And they go, yeah.

I mean, like, I frequently. The router, the wireless, you know, there's not a lot of I mean, I live in a large enough neighborhood that my neighbors aren't close enough to the system to usually pick ours up anyway. And I agree with wire.”

“The digital gentleman had a report on whether you should secure your Wi-Fi or not. And he was like, no, most people can't do anything with it unsecured. And some guy who's really in trouble and needs to pick up a Wi-Fi signal for a moment could really use that.

Although there was one case, because I read a more in depth article one time talking about essentially keeping your Wi-Fi open, because there are more benefits than there are the opposite of benefit. Risks. Thank you.

Problems. There we go. But they did mention the case of this one guy that he had an open Wi-Fi, and his neighbor was using his Wi-Fi signal to download child pornography.

And so this guy got arrested because he was the owner, and I guess the gatekeeper of that particular IP address, that Wi-Fi signal, whatever. And so he actually got arrested. Eventually, they cleared him, but it was a very expensive process.

“Yeah, I am not a believer in open Wi-Fi personally. When I was younger, I was like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. But stories like the one you're talking about, and just as many open devices as I have in my home, where I want everything to wirelessly share files between things.

And even on my machines, everything is configured along the chain to have a password so they know to talk to each other and not to other things. And everything is pretty clamped down here. But why throw the gate open in case?

You know what I mean? Because sometimes you discover, oh, there's this vulnerability here that if they get access to your Wi-Fi, then for these three months until there's a patch, there's this little thing. And it's like, you know what?

Why invite trouble? But I also have to do things like upload large videos and stuff like that for work. So it's like I don't need someone else streaming down Netflix, pulling out of my bandwidth when I need these things for work.”

“That all makes sense.

But Aaron, you're a better human being than all of us.

Well, no, really, the most important thing is my dad gets new gadgets that he uses for like three seconds. And so he's constantly putting things on and taking things off. And he's like, I don't remember how to put this on.

So I was like, oh, I'll set it up so it's easier. Oh, look, all your gadgets work. Leave me alone.

Ta-da!

That's funny. Well, speaking of new gadgets, there's a guy that I found this week online. Not personally.

That'd be awesome if I knew him, but I don't. His name is Rich Lee. And he is Rich Lee.

He's an adverb.

He is an adverb, although I said him as a question. Rich Lee?

Rich Lee?

“Anyway, he is a self-described transhumanist and into sort of body modification, very similar to the cyborg man that we talked about in some episodes past. And this guy, Rich Lee, what he did was he saw a little how-to on that website, Instructables, which Instructables has a bunch of like sort of how-to, either crafty or gadgety tech things. I've pulled a couple of things from him before.

But basically, he has taken two tiny little magnets and he has implanted them into that little flap that covers like your ear hole. I don't know what it's called. Not the lobe at the bottom, but the little sort of juddy out pointy part.

The nubbin.

The bit you push when you want to hear people in the club.

That is the button you push. The clubbin.

I don't know why it works, but it does.

“He put two little magnets in the clubbin, and he has created a necklace that is basically like another sort of magnetic coil that's connected to an amplifier, a tiny amplifier that then plugs into like his iPod and smartphone. And so he can play music that broadcasts directly into those magnets that are implanted in his ear through the amplifier necklace thing that he has created. And yeah, so he has like permanent sort of headphones implanted into his ear in a way.

And yeah, go ahead. You look like you want to say something. But part of the reason why he did this, he actually, he was thinking about sort of other upgrades and things he can do.”

“He wants to create like sort of an echolation device so that he can tell depth and distances of things. And the reason why is because he is going blind. He has a degenerative eye disorder.

And so, you know, this seems extreme to play music, you know, all the time. But he actually, it's more towards this progression of wanting to create this sort of echolation device that will help him navigate the world when he eventually and inevitably loses his eyesight. But yeah, his name is Rich Lee.

Yeah, I was trying to look him up on the interwebs on transhumanity.net.

And if you find the right link, yeah, yeah, there's actually you can, he's got like a little video of showing him using the device and kind of they describe how it was done. And, you know, a little incision right at the clubbing and, you know, very little scarring. Yeah.

I hope that becomes a term that maybe he picks up and starts using the clubbing.”

“But it says here on transhumanity.net where he, if it's the same guy as an author, and I assume he is, it says Rich Lee is a space gangster businessman, grinder and black hat transhumanist. He promotes tech piracy, biohacking and committing grand theft future. I like his bio.

He's pretty cool. There was another little thing that stood out. I remembered because he's trying to figure out all of these other devices that he could connect to the magnets in his ear.

And one of them was a Geiger counter. Because a Geiger counter detects the radiation with these clicks. And he apparently lives in Nevada somewhere or he frequents in Nevada.

And there was a lot of nuclear testing that went on there in the 1950s. And there's still a lot of hot spots with low level radiation. And so he kind of wants to go out there and go amateur uranium cake hunting.”

“Wow, that's a perfect segue from my first experience with a Geiger counter, which I've never experienced in real life. But I always think of the scene in the original Incredible Hulk comic origin story, whatever it was, with him in the desert. And he's sitting there and Bruce Banner's, you know, the bomb's already gone off, and he and I think Rick Jones are sitting in the cell, and he's getting all sweaty and weird, and the Geiger counter starts going off.

And that's how I learned what a Geiger counter was. Click, click, click, click, click, and then he hulks out.

I think the first time I ever saw a Geiger counter was in Ghostbusters 2. And looking back, I don't understand why they were using a Geiger counter. It didn't make sense.”

“I mean, maybe ectoplasm gives off some low level radiation, but they never used the word radiation. They were just like, Yeah, the Geiger counter says there's a lot of slime down here. So, you know, oh, well.

And you wonder, guys, why I had such a confused understanding of science and scientific facts and theories. Because I would go...

Geiger counters measure slime.

I would just watch these, you know, bullshit movies that would just throw in technical terms. And, you know, like I've said in the past, I would just wholeheartedly believe any story. You know what I mean?

I would throw myself into it. And so, yeah, Geiger counters are used to find snot. So...

Why not?

I believe them.

They go crazy at Nick Studios back when that existed a long time ago.

Yeah.”

“I always find it funny how much of Nickelodeon is still slime-oriented when you can't do that on television, hasn't been on in decades, and nobody knows...

Yeah. Nobody knows where it came... Where is it?

The current watchers are not hip to their ancestry.

And I hate too that the slime texture has changed. It's essentially green water, you know? There's a little bit of viscousness to it, but not much.

The theme park slime is still the goopy slime. It's what they use in the award ceremonies where they're just having to make metric tons of the stuff. But I have a friend who worked at the theme park division before Nickelodeon Studios closed, and he knows the slime recipe.”

“Ha, ha, ha, ha, that's cool.

Hold him hostage. Yeah.

I don't know what we'd do with it, but...

I know what I'd do with it, but...

What? What would you do with it?

I maybe can't talk about it on the podcast, but I know what I would do with it.

You're saying you can't do that on podcast?

That's right.

Nice. I want to slime you.

We're going to Alanis Morissette. She was on that show.

Calm down, be a coolie. Calm down. Cut it out.

Articles.

Anybody been doing articles?

Yeah, we've been doing articles.

I just feel weird when I don't say it.

Actually, I think we're running to the end of our time for today.

I think we are. We are, actually.

Yeah.”

“Bless the heck out of. Oh, he's making slime. Well, very bodily today.

And I heard that in our over here, better that in than the other. Tick.

Frozen cat!

Give me a pizza, Google cat.”

—-

From Artechnik Podcast: ArTechník Podcast - Penultimate Championship, Jun 30, 2013

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/artechnik-podcast/id513745386?i=1000647589974

This material is protected by copyright.

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