Theoreti.ca – Page 241 – Research notes taken on subjects around multimedia, electronic texts, and computer games.

MFA as the new MBA

In the February 2004 issue of the Harvard Business Review there is a short article on “The MFA Is the New MBA” by Daniel H. Pink. (Pages 21-22). He argues that it is harder to get into good art schools and that businesses are hiring MFAs to get creative talent.

An arts degree is now perhaps the hottest credential in the worlds of business. Corporate recruiters have begun visiting the top arts grad schools … in search of talent. … McKinsey says other disciplines are just as valuable in helping new hires perform well at the firm. With other arts grads occupying key corporate positions, the master of fine arts is becoming the new business degree. (p. 21)

Why is this?
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File-sharing behavior

The RIAA campaign against music downloaders has apparently had an effect according to news sources like, Slyck News – The State of Music Downloading. Something like a third of the people who used to download have stopped or lessened because of the suits launched by the RIAA and the associated publicity.

What does this mean for the Internet and P2P sharing?
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Futurist Generator

THEORIES OF PLAY is a site Matt Didemus did for an independent study which includes a neat little Futurist text toy that generates circles and triangles of text. You paste in some text and choose how many of each (circles and triangles) you want and it generates a SVG. Very nice and clean.

I think we now need a general environment for such text toys like Proce55ing.

blosxom: Zen Blogging

Matt Patey has suggested I look at blosxom a simple clean blogging tool which uses flat files to edit entries and the file structure rather than a database for linking. Matt’s one of the smartest I know about these things, so it is worth looking at.

XAML: eXtensible Application Markup Language

ONDotnet.com: Inside XAML [Jan. 19, 2004] is an article on Microsoft’s XML languag for interfaces in Longhorn. This is not the first such attempt. There is XUL for Mozilla and I had a MSc student develop a simple XML interface language for skinning. The idea is good, we need a standard – Microsoft might be able to promote one, but it needs to be cross platform.

MOCA Digital Gallery

The MOCA Digital Gallery has a number of interactive art works. MOCA is the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, not to be confused with MASS MoCA which is in Massachusetts.
MASS MoCA has some neat interactive installations in their kids area. They also had a neat exhibit on games called Game Show. (Note: my uncle’s work was part of this show.)

Stephenson: In the beginning was the command line

In the Beginning was the Command Line is an idiosyncratic essay about interface and operating systems by Neil Stephenson of Cryptonomicon fame. It is almost a memoire and almost a plug for Linux.

I am now reading the second of the The Baroque Cycle series, The Confusion. It con-fuses two story lines that split in Quicksilver, that of Eliza and that of Jack. The prose is sinking into academic prose as Stephenson can’t avoid lecturing his reader about details of the history of culture that he has learned or invented. Eliza remains an unbelievable character who gives hand jobs to cryptographers and, of course, is beautiful. You wonder if Stephenson has met a woman who has interests other than his? I am annoyed by the tendency of science fiction writers to create women characters who are not women, but are admirable men in babe’s bodies. The prose equivalent of Lara Croft – action hero with boobs.

That said, Stephenson plays well with history in this retro scifi book, especially the history of economics and science. It remains to be seen if he can pull all the threads together in the third novel. Is he going to pull off “the ideal history of computing, the internet and commerce”?

Raymond: How to become a hacker

How To Become A Hacker by Eric Raymond is an interesting approach to hacking that opposes hacking as a form of inquiry and philosophy to cracking which is about messing with other people’s accounts.
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HumanDescent

HumanDescent is a site with images that morph together animals (including humans) into believable hybrids. The mixing of species using Photoshop creates believable mutants straight out of H. G. Wells’, The Island of Dr Moreau.

PNG and GIF

So we were discussing whether the PNG (pronounced “ping”) graphics format included vectors. I thought it did since Fireworks lets you draw vectors and uses PNG as its native format. Turns out I was wrong. Fireworks extends the PGN format to include chunks for features others than bitmaps. See PNG feature support in Fireworks.
On a related note – PNG (Portable Network Graphics) was developed as a networked graphics format that was unemcumbered by patents the way GIF was until GIF Liberation Day (June 2002) when the patents expired. Now JPG is having problems as Forgent sues over JPG patent.
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