MIND08

so, while in nyc, i decided to take advantage of the scene, and attend a day long conference called "mind08: the design and elastic mind symposium." here are the highlights, and my reflections:

chuck hoberman: this dude invented the ball that can expand and contract. he is an architect using that idea to build dynamic spaces. turns out, dynamic spaces mostly means motorized blinds with weird shapes. they have a certain aesthetic appeal, but it is not clear whether there is any other practical advantage.

paul steinhardt: this dude has a theory about the universe. essentially, our universe lies on a membrane (or brane for short). apparently, some of the dilemmas posed by string theory can be solved by postulating the existence of another brane, orthogonal to ours. according to his theory, our brane and the other brane lie out the boundary of a dimension, and the branes cyclically collide and then spread apart again, repeating infinitely many times. thus, no single big bang, but rather many big collisions. seemed like a smart and nice dude, and he wrote some contemporary popular science books, the cool thing is that this theory actually makes predictions that should be testable within a few years (we gotta wait for technological developments).

janna levin: she's totally cool. she tackles the question of whether the universe is infinite in size, and if not, does it have boundaries. consider earth: it is both finite and boundaryless. potentially, the universe could be like that too. on earth, if one looks straight ahead, and light bends around the earth, then one would see one's own back side. similarly, if one looked backward, one would see oneself looking backward. if the universe had the same property of finiteness yet boundarylessness, then when we looked at the stars, we might be looking at the same stars at different points in time. it would be difficult to determine whether the different things we saw were actually the same thing in different times or not. that's cool.

kevin slavin: this dude makes games. turns out, games historically have taken place in "somewhere else." typically, some fantastical place that lacks any ties to our material world. he made some games that do not ascribe to that convention. in particular, shark-runners is a game about chasing sharks. you pretend to be on a boat trying to intersect shark paths. you are playing against sharks - real sharks. they implanted sharks with a little GPS, so they are actually playing against you in their real space. Crossroads: a 2 player game, played on one's cell phone. the goal is to run to as many intersections in lower manhattan as possible, in a 30 minute period. this requires actually passing through the intersections. a bad guy may be chasing you as well, so people apparently run away from a virtual villain, but they are running in real space. Plundr is a pirate game, where you live in a virutal world, and can steal or sell or trade goods. however, you can only do things in the place that you currently occupy in real space. if you go to a place on earth that nobody has played from yet, you can create your own island there, make taxes, etc.

henry markram: he is doing something called the "blue brain project" in collaboration with IBM. they want to simulate a human brain, a feat they claim to be able to accomplish in 10 years. besides the fact that it takes 200 PB to even store all the info one would need to simulate, it is not clear to me that the parameters are identifiable, given current experimental constraints. as such, they are limited to finding an equivalence class of parameters for the small stimulus space they are able to explore, and therefore probably lack the ability to simulate anything novel to make useful predictions. time will tell.

overall, it seems as if some people were literally trying to transform the way we understand reality, and others were simply making things that look cool. in general, while i was impressed with many of the designers' grasp of science, it did not seem as if they were able to make a useful contribution to science or understanding, but rather just something pretty that abstractly connected to a cool new scientific idea. also, calling this conference "mind08" seems like a misnomer, as almost nothing was actually about the mind. maybe something like "real design" would have been more appropriate. nonetheless, i'm glad i went.