I’ve been getting up to speed on WebGL, the JavaScript 3D API. It’s supported right now in Chrome and Firefox. It can be enabled in Safari, but isn’t by default currently. Opera has it in beta too. That basically leaves only IE, which still has around 50% market share. Microsoft has no plans currently to support it, but it can be with plugins such as Chrome Frame. Microsoft of course has it’s own 3D API and is historically opposed to the cross-platform OpenGL (the layer behind WebGL) becoming the de facto standard. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens there. Perhaps they’ll enable their own 3D Javascript API. This wouldn’t be ideal, but since it’s far easier for developers to work with one of the various third-party API layers above WebGL (such as THREE.js or Scene.js), all that would need to happen is for those third-party API’s to work in support for IE. But all of that is yet to be determined for WebGL to be ready for prime time. (And actually in a big way, it’s already in the prime time, as Google Maps now uses it on supporting browsers to render certain layers).

There are some fantastic demos out there showing what is possible. A couple of groups have done something very close to Google Earth, running fast and smooth entirely in the browser, without plugins. So you can do 3D terrain models, with streaming level of detail, that gets progressively higher in resolution as you zoom in (using AJAX to load data, stored as a directory tree of image tiles and text vertex data, which is far from ideal, but it works).

I’m really stoked to see this technology take off. The lack of a 3D API was perhaps the single big area where native apps had a clear advantage over web apps.

Director Matthew Parkhill’s psychothriller The Caller might be the most terror-ific movie you see this Halloween. Putting the sociopathic killer in the past, but able to communicate to a victim in the present was a genius move; it reminds me of one of my favorite sci-fi stories, where a jilted lover is time-traveling to the past to manipulate events to cause the break-up of a couple in the present. In The Caller, as in that story, the protagonists usually have a brief memory of what there present was, before it is shifted into a new reality. This is a nicely done movie in every aspect and it avoids the obvious clichés of the genre.

Awesome directing, acting, characters. Highly disturbing content. Terrible writing. This is a movie that could have been great if the screenplay had just been through a few more drafts. It could have made a powerful statement for tolerance, or against the power of institutions and authority (which it almost does, but blows it all in a hokey ending). I was very disappointed.

Section 4: “The validity of the public debt of the United States… shall not be questioned.” This basically means, in my opinion, that our government cannot re-neg on what it owes to the people. Section 5: “Congress shall have power to enforce… the provisions of this article.” This explicitly gives the legislative, not the executive, branch the responsibility. In fact, it has nothing to due with the debt ceiling.

Unless I’m missing something (and I really hope that is the case), the state of online educational resources is in the dark ages. I’m talking about the availability of coursework, in particular things like exercises, quizzes, etc. In my case, as I’m trying to brush up on Russian and take it the conversational level. I could pay hundreds of dollars for something like RosettaStone (and maybe I’ll end up doing that) but that is besides the point I’m trying to make here. What it comes down to is that very, very close to 100% of the substantial work that teachers do in preparing supplemental materials for their classes is never, every re-used by anyone else. This is more than an immense waste of time due to teachers duplicating each others efforts, it’s a missed opportunity to really accelerate learning.

To be sure, there are some things out there. Sal Khan’s Khan Academy is a tremendous resource, particularly for those learning a subject on their own. But, right now, it is heavily focused on Math topics. More importantly, it is really lacking in the area where re-use is most needed and would be most effective, and that is in problem sets and other such things that take more time and mental effort for teachers to build.

MIT’s OpenCourseWare has been going strong for a few years. It’s kind of hit-or-miss based on what I’ve sampled—some courses have exercises, but many just have short supplemental notes.

Wikipedia’s Wikiversity is a great idea, especially seeing as anyone can contribute and make the resources better, but at this point there are, likewise, just a few courses that have more than a tiny amount of material.

So this is an appeal to all the teachers of the world, to make everything you do available on Wikiversity (or other collaborative site). Every quiz, every set of exercises should either be based on an existing online resource, or kick start a new one. Now I know that copyright can be a stumbling block here; if the material is tied to a particular, copyrighted textbook for instance, teachers will not want to risk running afoul of publishers by putting such content online. The obvious solution is to make the material more generic so that it is not derived from any particular text.

Just post it. You’ll ultimately be making your own job much easier and, more importantly, making the world a better place.

• In Music: Led Zeppelin IV, Who’s Next, John Lennon’s Imagine, Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality, Concert for Bangladesh.
• In Film: The Andromeda Strain, A Clockwork Orange.
• Starbucks Coffee founded.
• First interplanetary orbiter (Mariner 9 at Mars). Apollo 14 & 15, 1st use of the lunar rover. First space station (Salyut 1).
• Pentagon Papers published.
• Inaugural flight of the Concorde. Southwest Airlines begins operations.
• Walt Disney World opens.
• First CPU, the Intel 4004, becomes available.
• Koko born at S.F. Zoo.
• War on Drugs launched (!!).
• D.B. Cooper parachutes into legend.
• 1st email sent.
• U.S. oil production peaks.
• Nike “swooosh” logo designed (for $35)
• U.S. Voting age lowered to 18
• 1st black hole discovered by astronomers (Cygnus X-1)
• U.S. Federal Reserve goes off the gold standard
• Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth founded
• First commercial electronic video game, “Computer Space”
• World’s first electronic stock market, NASDAQ, opens

Writing in this week’s New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has an article on artificial general intelligence. There’s a really neat conclusion about how, as software begins to encroach upon tasks that we think of as fundamentally human, we redefine what is fundamentally human so as to not include those tasks. The general premise of the article, that true AI is still far beyond the capabilities of today’s best computers (Watson and the Google Translate service serve as examples) is a given.

What was kinda interesting was a little off-hand speculation that computers could really benefit from mortality. Fear, as they say, focuses the mind wonderfully. Mr. Gopnik insinuates that a fear of death may be responsible for the achievements of the human race and that, under such pressure, AI would likewise experience accelerated development. Now, I don’t buy this conjecture, but it is interesting to consider. First, genius-level breakthroughs in every field of human endeavor are almost always done when the genius is young, usually in their twenties. At this age, mortality is the last thing on ones mind. However, it could be that a drive at a biological level—the need to impress potential mates or drive away potential foes—is a large factor. Personally, I don’t believe this is the case, I believe that certain people who are capable of great intellectual achievement will under the right circumstances be motivated to use those powers simply because they can.

But secondly, we may not want to build a fear that we’ll shut them down into our machines… the unintended consequence might be that they seek a way around this restriction, i.e. seek to defeat us!

I found it interesting, though this is just anecdotal evidence, how rare iPhones are in a group of “real-world” folks (i.e. outside of my workplace, which has a high proportion of Macolytes). It was a group of a dozen people, besides myself, who met up via social networks. For those with smartphones, Android predominated, followed by Blackberry in a distant 2nd, and one of the Blackberry owners said she planned to switch to an Android phone. I think that it took a couple of years, but Android achieved parity (on phones, not yet on tablets obviously), and the lower prices and choice are capturing this segment of the market.