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William Shatner played some big roles. Everyone knows him as Captain Kirk in Star Trek, or the panicky passenger in the Twilight Zone episode Nightmare at 20000 Feet, or his bizarre foray into cover songs. He also had some offbeat roles like Incubus – filmed entirely in the dead-on-arrival created language of Esperanto.

I recently watch The Outer Limits season 2 episode 2 titled “Cold Hands, Warm Heart”. He plays an astronaut – which is some real-life foreshadowing of his later roles. It’s also got some really good Shatner over-acting in it and definitely worth a watch for people wanting to see some of his early ultra-cheese.

Shopping on Black Friday is not as simple as “Buy it because it’s the cheapest price all year!” You have to actually do your homework to figure out which items are actually a good buy.

Here’s some great resources to help you figure it out.

Check out the Black Friday ads to make your plan:

The first thing you should do is be prepared for Black Friday before it comes. You’ll do this by starting a few weeks in advance by reading through the ‘leaked’ Black Friday ad scans and seeing if there is any deals you’re interested in.

• Slickdeals Black Friday page – Not only does it have all the ad scans, it also has the normal Slickdeals voting system so you can tell what deals are actually deals.
  • Black Friday sub-category

Check the reviews:

Sadly, it’s all too common for review sites to be purchased and largely just paid advertising. Anything endorsed by Twitch streamers, celebrities, or any online personality through Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc – are almost 100% guaranteed to be paid advertising. Websites that are reliable and accurate one year turn into paid promotion sites with shocking regularity. You need to check who owns the sites and see if the founders are still standing behind their reviews.

• Hardware Unboxed – Good rating site that’s probably best for its gaming monitor reviews
  • Monitors Unboxed – A dedicated subchannel of Hardware Unboxed that is just monitors.
• RTings – good for TV’s and monitors

Tools for reviews:

• CamelCamelCamel – check this historical price of any item on Amazon and see if it’s really on sale, or not. Just be aware that Amazon often changes the product links, serial numbers, and other tricks so you can’t get a long-term historical price on some items.
• FakeSpot – a website that uses AI to determine how fake the reviews of a product are. Sadly, too many products are subject to very easily manipulated fake reviews. Some utilize very sophisticated methods, other markets like the mattress review industry are almost fully controlled or owned by the mattress companies themselves.
  • Interesting article from Fast Company on how mattress companies bullied, coerced with lawsuits, and bought out review sites. This was from 2016, so you can be assured it’s become more standard practice.

¹ When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all assembled together in one place. ² Suddenly, there came from heaven a sound similar to that of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house in which they were sitting. ³ Then there appeared to them tongues as of fire, which separated and came to rest on each one of them. ⁴ All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different languages,^[c] as the Spirit enabled them to do so.

⁵ Now staying in Jerusalem there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven. ⁶ At this sound, a large crowd of them gathered, and they were bewildered because each one heard them speaking in his own language.

⁷ They were astounded and asked in amazement, “Are not all these men who are speaking Galileans? ⁸ How is it then that each of us hears them in his own native language? 

So many things happen around the octave of Easter that it’s easy to be overwhelmed and miss the important and deeply rich events.

Pentecost (Hebrew Shavuot, Greek pentekoste fiftieth) was an annual Jewish festival marking the end of the barley harvest and the beginning of the wheat. It is also called “the day of the first ripe fruits” (Numbers 28:26), and in the Greek Scriptures is the name used for the Feast of Harvest (Exodus 11:16) or Feast of Weeks (Exodus 34:22). Shavuot unfolded ‘seven full weeks after Passover from 16 Nisan, the day when they offered a sheaf of barley (Leviticus 11:15).

According to Jewish tradition, the day of Pentecost correspond to when the law was given to Moses at Sinai and Israel became a people apart. The apostle Paul draws a comparison of this event by saying that the Christians are a ‘holy nation’ (1 Peter 2: 9) a kind of first fruits to God (John 1:18), met on a heavenly Mount Zion as part of a new covenant (Hebrews 12: 18-24; Luke 22:20).

Jean Restout II’s Pentecost is currently housed in the Louvre (room 924, Sully Wing, Level 2), but was originally painted for the Abbey of Saint-Denis which is outside of Paris and is definitely a painting you should see if you get a chance. Click below for a bigger image.

Links:

• https://louvrebible.org.uk/oeuvre/213/annexes
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jean_II_Restout_-Pentecost-_WGA19318.jpg

The Old Church downtown is a concert hall and has a number of cool things. One of the fun things is their free lunchtime concerts. They have started live casting them on YouTube, which is even more convenient.

The October concert for the last 2 years has usually an organ concert by Michael Barnes in which he plays classic spooky organ music like the ones below. Plus a guest performer with some more folk classics.

• Funeral March of a Marionette (Charles Gounod)
• Toccata and Fuge in D Minor (Bach)
• Scherzo from Grand Sonata in E Flat (Dudley Buck)
• March of the Dwarves
• Have you seen the Ghost of John?
• Addams Family Theme
• Rondo Alla Turca (Mozart)

Anybody remember hypercolor shirts – the ones that changed color based on heat?

Project Primrose, displayed here as an interactive dress, uses wearable and somewhat flexible non-emissive light-diffuser modules that change state electronically. They can display source content from various Adobe products.

Here’s the demo from Adobe MAX Sneaks 2023 or read the research paper.

Reminds me of similar efforts being tried out by BMW on their color changing cars.

Valve is paying open source developers

The Steam Deck is a wonderful bit of hardware. The software that underpins it uses open-source packages like the Mesa graphics driver, the Vulkan graphics API, and Valve’s own Proton compatibility layer. This means the Steam Deck only runs thanks to open-source developers.

In a recent chat with the Verge, Steam Deck designer Pierre-Loup Griffais mentioned that the company is paying over a hundred open-source devs to work on the various bits of software for the Steam Deck. Valve has them working on stuff like Steam for ChromeOS and Linux, too.

Griffais said Valve’s corralling of open-source devs is part of “a larger strategy to coordinate all these projects and set up kind of an overall architecture” for gaming on Linux.

This also means the Steam Deck may never be “stable” like a traditional console. “I don’t think you should expect that,” says Griffais. “Stable in terms of having a great experience for people? Yeah, absolutely. But I think we are always going to be pushing updates as long as there’s people playing.”

For updates, the team is primarily working off two big lists, says Yang: “things we want to fix, and things we still want to make.”

It’s a fascinating and different way to develop a gaming platform. One I’m happy to play with since I own a Steam deck myself.

The Verge article also has more information from Griffais about hardware fixes, future plans, and other great tidbits of information and insights as to what Valve is planning. It’s worth a read.

Installing Epic Games Store on Stream Deck

Windows Central gives you instructions to show it’s possible to install the Epic Games store and it’s games on the Steam Deck. You use the Heroic Games Launcher to access and install games from not only Epic, but Good Old Games as well. It takes some work and jumping through a number of hoops but seems like a great way to get even more games on your Steam Deck.

Articles

• https://www.theverge.com/23499215/valve-steam-deck-interview-late-2022
• https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-is-paying-a-whole-lot-of-developers-to-keep-the-steam-decks-open-source-software-going/
• https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/pc-gaming/how-to-install-epic-games-on-steam-deck

#12 – Obey Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

Gall’s Caveat: Working big systems come from working smaller systems – but not every small system can solve/scale to big systems.

Healthcare.gov (the health insurance exchange website linked to the Affordable Care Act) was a disaster by almost all metrics. A report by the Office of Inspector General offers ten key reasons for the disaster, everything from lack of clear leadership, an overly bureaucratic culture, failures of integration, communication, execution, and oversight. The report is thorough, but too vague. Instead, we should have paid attention to Gall’s Law.

In 1975 a pediatrician and systems design theorist John Gall wrote the book Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail, in it, he wrote “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.” There’s a tremendous amount of wisdom wrapped up in those lines. Wisdom that explains why lots of great big ambitious projects become huge failures. Healthcare.gov is one, various megaprojects in Dubai, Boston’s Big Dig, Portland’s I-5 bridge, and countless other projects that devolved into massive cost overruns and failure to deliver on major promises.

Instead, extreme programming and the requirement that startups have working prototypes have espoused this simple but functional operating method based on Gall’s observation. In my own work at Intel Labs and other new products, getting a working proof of concept 100% nailed before you move to production assures success is possible while failures happen while things are still cheap.

Which brings us to Jennifer Pahlka’s article where she covers a number of other observations. One of which is Mike Byrne. Byrne built the broadband map for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and estimated that most government tech projects could cost 10% of what they do and still provide 85% of the functionality. Apple works this way as well to a certain degree. They do not provide an experience for everyone. They focus the problem, solve it in a particular way, and ignore the critics. They don’t always try to cover all cases nor provide all the features people want – but the cases they do cover are expected, and usually are, rock solid. And that has led them to be the biggest success in tech.

So, instead of designing a system to handle every possible case like was done with Healthcare.gov, it’s ok to leave some cases on the table for manually addressing via phone centers. But the core should work flawlessly.

Gall’s Caveat of Small Systems

There is one caveat Gall observed. This is something I have encountered with younger and recent developers/designers. Some teams/designers rush to a working prototype which is flashy and makes a big splash with some aspects of the key functionality, but quietly and knowingly doesn’t address a number of critical requirements that the design absolutely cannot deal with. They usually hand wave that those will be solved by someone else/some other time – when the reality is that a complete re-write or re-design would be required to handle the requirement. In my experience, that usually happens after they plan on being long gone with the money and awards for the first part. This is probably why we’re see a large number of the Forbes 30 under 30 crowd ending up in jail for fraud.

Gall wrote this caveat: Working big systems come from working smaller systems – but not every small system can scale nor handle all cases it needs to handle. If you need to handle a number of key design requirements, you need to have a working (small) system to solve each of them. Then you combine them.

You must do the design and smaller proven system work for all the things you do need to handle even if you do not deliver those parts today. Do not use simplicity and just building a small core to handle 85% of the cases to avoid the work of ensuring you can handle the remaining 15% of cases. You should always have a design and a plan, even if you don’t need it today (or ever). Maybe that plan is that call centers will handle the remaining 15% – maybe forever. But when things are planned, they can be accounted for, have fixes planned, and not be a huge surprise.

“That the neural activity of 33 people can predict if millions of others listened to new songs is quite amazing. Nothing close to this accuracy has ever been shown before.”

Have you ever read Isaac Asimov’s short story “Franchise“? The short sci-fi story tells the story that in the future, the United States has converted to an “electronic democracy” where the computer Multivac selects a single person to answer a number of questions. Multivac will then use the answers and other data to determine what the results of an election would be, avoiding the need for an actual election to be held. The story centers around the very average and reluctant Norman Muller of Bloomington, Indiana, who was chosen as the “Voter of the Year” in the 2008 U.S. presidential election and ends with the ironic statement that the US public has “exercised once again their free, untrammeled franchise (voting)”.

Sounds far fetched? Think again.

Researchers in the US have used a comprehensive machine learning technique applied to brain responses and were able to predict hit songs with 97% accuracy. Not only that, but they can do it with as few as testing the song on 33 people.

“By applying machine learning to neurophysiologic data, we could almost perfectly identify hit songs,” said Paul Zak, a professor at Claremont Graduate University and senior author of the study published in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. “That the neural activity of 33 people can predict if millions of others listened to new songs is quite amazing. Nothing close to this accuracy has ever been shown before.”

This ability to determine things before they hit markets of scale is being called “Neuroforcasting”.

In the experiment, they equipped participants with off-the-shelf sensors who listened to a set of 24 songs and were asked about their preferences and some demographic data. Researchers used different statistical approaches to assess the predictive accuracy of neurophysiological variables. Linear statistical model identified hit songs at a success rate of 69%. When they applied machine learning to the data they collected, the rate of correctly identified hit songs jumped to 97%. They also applied machine learning to the neural responses to the first minute of the songs. In this case, hits were correctly identified with a success rate of 82%.

This ability to predict hits is called ‘neuroforecasting’ and could even be used instead of recommender systems like you see in Netflix and Pandora.

“If in the future wearable neuroscience technologies, like the ones we used for this study, become commonplace, the right entertainment could be sent to audiences based on their neurophysiology. Instead of being offered hundreds of choices, they might be given just two or three, making it easier and faster for them to choose music that they will enjoy,”