the path to a self

Imagination gives us an ability of seeing ourselves from the outside to realize how we come across to us. If this kind of amazing recursive perception is (possibly) unique to human being, that might be a critical point in evolution of humanoid. Imagine what was it to imagine yourself for the very first time! Now we could imagine ourselves in the past (remember) and then use the past-to present extrapolation to imagine ourselves in the future – first 2st-person (point of view) dreams.

To do that we had to get at the beginning some important abilities – to have first conscious predictions and ability to imagine alternative reality.

When we dream and extrapolate our imaginary future based on memories, our minds build the time-independent (or salable) sampled (in neural system) structure for subset of subjective realities. Essentially from this point we could build new alternative realities. At the very beginning it was only extrapolation of existing reality (to predict and get evolutional competitive advantage), but then the extended deviation in prediction caused outliers – imagination of something totally not related to reality. What was that first time? Maybe two-headed dangerous predator was giving a birth to a fear of imaginary? Maybe the will of getting a mate produced an image of some beautiful creature – first dreams of love ?

These days, the animals “actively recall themselves” and not just respond to a recorded past (“state machine”) as we know it happens in dreams, when they imagine themselves running, they are moving legs.

And so it begins – the path to a self.

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Scientists Oath

The Scientists Oath is about a non-disclosure and protection of scientific discoveries from getting to military or other institutions, in case they provide crucially high power that can lead to a disproportionate domination or discrimination, or distinction of human race, or irreversible damage to the environment.

Touch 5 control

Nice implementation of Microsoft Surface Studio had two main innovations at least from external visual perspective. One is the Hinge, which put a focus on a mechanical part, that from TRIZ theory and its laws of system evolution was “screaming” to be a next part to evolve. I put several times this system component at the frontier of next changes. The law is that every system is evolving heterogeneously, so you can take a look at old legacy components to bring a next breakthrough.

Another component that has been added is a Surface Dial. Nice idea to increase the control ability and improve interaction design. While, what MSFT did, is good from margin aspect (addition to a BOM/sales), from system evolution perspective they have added another component to the super-system. It makes new functionalities, but adding complexity. Thinking TRIZ, you can tell that the next phase would be “trimming” by “changing dimension”. For example you can remove this component by determining the touch of 5 fingers altogether to call for the same functionality. Something like this:

To make the interaction design of the feature more convenient I would add the functionality of next action once the “Touch 5” is triggered. It can be a single finger left to rotate the wheel or finger taps to choose the next action.

Makes sense?

Evolution of Books – Words, Pages and “Book multiplication law”

Accidentally found couple of nice charts I did once during the work on linguistic data and (as usual) thought that it worth sharing. REALLY (there is a new LAW at the end)!

Recovery Waves

The concept of Recovery Waves is showing a probable scenario of ecosystem evolution for next hundreds of years. It is the kind of “rolling back” of annihilation waves that we have caused throughout human history.

First Annihilation Wave Catastrophe

About 50,000 years ago, there was the biggest and fastest nature annihilation disaster in a world history for 65 million years (since  dinosaurs were destroyed). The flaring expansion of homo-sapiens was the cause for this phenomena. Although back then they were hunters-gatherers only, the damage they have caused was the extermination of nearly half of terrestrial mammal species that lived prior to the migration.

Second Annihilation Wave Catastrophe

Agricultural evolution and enhanced migration of humans brought another disaster – the second annihilation wave. For thousands of years, humans went farther and farther to islands, to Australia and the Americas, spreading their settlements, burning forests to free up lands for agriculture, hunting and multiplying. The evidence we are gathering is not only archaeological as in the first wave, but since this wave was until recent times, we actually can follow up on the last migrations to distant islands such as Madagascar and New Zealand. Every time when homo sapiens went to any new area, the variability of the animal population in the area was immediately and dramatically decreased. In Madagascar until human arrival there were huge Elephant Birds, Giant Subfossil lemurs, and others that disappeared with our first appearance.

Size of Aepyornis Maximus (Elephant Bird) (center, in purple) compared to a human, an ostrich (second from right, in maroon), and some non-avian theropod dinosaurs. Each grid line is one meter in height (by Matt Martyniuk)

 This is the same picture we see over and over again all over the earth and throughout the whole human history.  

Human interface modeling for communication trends – Part Three (Model-driven applications: Motoric, Touch, Literacy, Content View and Sum)

Intro

This is a third and the last part of the article, that is about applications of last three human communication channels that I am talking about – Motoric, Touch and Literacy. To understand the model there would be a need to get through a first part and to get interesting insight into Audio and Visual human communication channels there is a second part of the article. Lots of important questions for entrepreneurs, Interaction designers, system architects and other fellows that care about people as part of their technology.

Human interface modeling for communication trends – Part Two (Model-driven applications: Audio and Visual)

This is a second part of the article I am working on that is providing actual applications of the model. You can find here examples of existing products and usages as well as some possible directions of communication evolution or get some inspiration.  To understand what the #$!% am I talking about, it is recommended to read a first part that describes the model. Enjoy!