So, the wailing, the sobbing, the gnashing of teeth from the so-called intellectual and cultural elite over the runaway box-office success of American Sniper is pure music to my ears … all the more so since I started calling for this kind of movie to be made … oh, in the early days of the Daily Brief, back when it was still called Sgt. Stryker. It didn’t take the WWII-era studios to get cracking and crank out all kinds of inspirational military flicks within a year of Pearl Harbor, the disaster in the Philippines and the fall of Wake Island. Of course, those were full-service movie studios, accustomed to cranking out movie-theater fodder on an assembly-line basis. There was, IIRC one attempted TV series, set in an Army unit in Iraq, which was basically recycled Vietnam War-era military memes, and died after a couple of episodes, drowned in a sea of derision from more recent veterans, especially after an episode which featured an enlisted soldier smoking dope. On deployment. In a combat zone. The producers of the show had obviously never heard of Operation Golden Flow. Or maybe they had, and assumed it was something porn-ish.
Blogging
Lewis Shepherd on the IC/Mil/NatSec Potential of Holographic Computing
Cross-posted from zenpundit.com
Lewis Shepherd, formerly of the DIA and IC and recently of Microsoft, has an outstanding post on Microsoft’s exciting ambient/holographic computing interface HoloLens. What I saw in the videos is stunning and I then ran them by an extremely tough, tech savvy and jaded audience – my students – their jaws dropped. It’s that impressive.
Insider’s Guide to the New Holographic Computing
In my seven happy years at Microsoft before leaving a couple of months ago, I was never happier than when I was involved in a cool “secret project.”
Last year my team and I contributed for many months on a revolutionary secret project Holographic Computing which was revealed today at Microsoft headquarters. I’ve been blogging for years about a variety of research efforts which additively culminated in today’s announcements: HoloLens, HoloStudio for 3D holographic building, and a series of apps (e.g. HoloSkype, HoloMinecraft) for this new platform on Windows 10.
For my readers in government, or who care about the government they pay for, PAY CLOSE ATTENTION.
It’s real. I’ve worn it, used it, designed 3D models with it, explored the real surface of Mars, played and laughed and marveled with it. This isn’t Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance.” Everything in this video works today:
These new inventions represent a major new step-change in the technology industry. That’s not hyperbole. The approach offers the best benefit of any technology:empowering people simply through complexity, and by extension a way to deliver new & unexpected capabilities to meet government requirements.
Holographic computing, in all the forms it will take, is comparable to the Personal Computing revolution of the 1980s (which democratized computing), the Web revolution of the ’90s (which universalized computing), and the Mobility revolution of the past eight years, which is still uprooting the world from its foundation.
One important point I care deeply about: Government missed each of those three revolutions. By and large, government agencies at all levels were late or slow (or glacial) to recognize and adopt those revolutionary capabilities. That miss was understandable in the developing world and yet indefensible in the United States, particularly at the federal level.
I worked at the Pentagon in the summer of 1985, having left my own state-of-the-art PC at home in Stanford, but my assigned “analytical tool” was a typewriter. In the early 2000s, I worked at an intelligence agency trying to fight a war against global terror networks when most analysts weren’t allowed to use the World Wide Web at work. Even today, government agencies are lagging well behind in deploying modern smartphones and tablets for their yearning-to-be-mobile workforce.
This laggard behavior must change. Government can’t afford (for the sake of the citizens it serves) to fall behind again, and understanding how to adapt with the holographic revolution is a great place to start, for local, national, and transnational agencies.
Now some background…
Read the rest here.
I remarked to Shepherd that the technology reminded me of the novels by Daniel Suarez, DAEMON
MORE…..
WIRED – Our Exclusive Hands-On With Microsoft’s Unbelievable New Holographic Goggles
engadget –I experienced ‘mixed reality’ with Microsoft’s holographic …
Arstechnica.com –Hands-on: Microsoft’s HoloLens is flat-out magical | Ars …
Mashable –Microsoft HoloLens won’t be the next Google Glass, and …
Gizmodo –Microsoft HoloLens Hands-On: Incredible, Amazing …
New York Times –Microsoft HoloLens: A Sensational Vision of the PC’s Future
Reading “Hard” Books vs. Pretending to Do So
[cross-posted from zenpundit.com]
The other day, some friends shared an old post by controversial conservative activist, writer and publisher of The Federalist, Ben Domenech, that struck a chord:
The Top Ten Books People Lie About Reading
Have you ever lied about reading a book? Maybe you didn’t want to seem stupid in front of someone you respected. Maybe you rationalized it by reasoning that you had a familiarity with the book, or knew who the author was, or what the story was about, or had glanced at its Wikipedia page. Or maybe you had tried to read the book, even bought it and set it by your bed for months unopened, hoping that it would impart what was in it merely via proximity (if that worked, please email me).
I have not, though I frequently catch many people in conversation and even more online who do.
How To Read This Blog
Chicago Boyz has been around since 2001 (2003 in its current form) and has thousands of archived posts on all kinds of topics from an unusually diverse and thoughtful group of contributors. Many of these archived posts are still worth reading.
The problem is that the blog format is poorly suited for organizing information. Once it’s off the front page it tends to disappear. Information may want to be free but first you need to be able to find it.
What to do? Manually creating, updating and occasionally reorganizing a table of contents is more work than I want, and I don’t think there’s a good way to automate it. Some of our contributors occasionally re-post outstanding examples of their own older posts, for which many thanks (and please keep doing it). Categorization of posts helps a bit. There’s a Google search box that works pretty well as an index if you know what you are looking for. I maintain a list of links on the blog’s right sidebar to a very few of our most interesting discussions. There’s also this new post that I have permalinked on the upper right sidebar where I hope readers will see it.
Maybe there are additional things that we can do to make the gold in archived Chicago Boyz posts more accessible. Please feel free to chime in in the comments if you have any thoughts.
Notes From All Over (22/06/14): Rise of the West, Island Disputes, & Too Much Stuff About China
This collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit was originally posted on The Scholar’s Stage and is reposted here upon request.
TOP BILLING
“The Little Divergence“
‘Pseuderoerasmus,’ Pseudoarasmus (12 June 2014)
In this blogpost I will argue the following :
- While very few economic historians now dispute that East Asia had lower living standards than Europe well before 1800,
- …there is no agreement on whether European economies prior to 1800 were “modern” or “Malthusian” ;
- … if they were Malthusian, then the “little divergence” is rather trivial and unremarkable.
- Furthermore, the income “data” for years prior to 1200 are mostly fictitious.
- While real data exist after 1200 for Western Europe and China, output estimates are still calculated using assumptions that, were they better understood, would shatter confidence in the enterprise of economic history !
“Addendum to The Little Divergence“
‘Pseudoerasmus,’ Pseudoarasmus (12 June 2014)
Two of the most popular posts on the Stage are “The Rise of the West: Asking the Right Questions,” and “Another Look at the Rise of the West, But With better Numbers,” which take as their subject global energy consumption and wealth production on a millennial time scale. Pseudoerasmus–who chimes in regularly in the comments section here–has written a series of posts that put most of this analysis in question, arguing that the Madison and Broadberry data sets these posts use cannot be relied on.
Both posts are admirable examples of how to write about technical social science debates found deep in the literature and present them in an engaging fashion without dumbing the content down. Strongly recommended.
China’s Information Management in the Sino-Vietnamese Confrontation: Caution and Sophistication in the Internet Era
Andrew Chubb, South Sea Conversations (9 June 2014).
China’s expanding Spratly outposts: artificial, but not so new
Andrew Chubb, South Sea Conversations (19 June 2014).
Andrew Chubb’s South Sea Conversations (讨论å—海） is the first website I check whenever things get hot in the South China Sea. Both of these pieces – the first published formally in the Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief, the second a blog post of the more standard type – are examples of the site’s general excellence.