Drawing from a collective unconscious (in which his belief is tenuous at best), Cash asked me why the ones and zeroes in one computer weren’t any good to another. Why can’t we just hook an Atari cartridge up to a Windows machine and have it work?

I promised him that I would explain it. I promised him that the expansion of your mind would be collateral damage.

Eeeverybody knows that what happens inside a computer can be fundamentally broken down into 1 and 0, over and over and over again. Too bad that’s WRONG. The inside of a computer is not a blackboard. It’s not your math homework. Stop watching ReBoot, because you will never see tiny digits racing purposefully around in your laptop’s innards.

What a computer is is a myriad of tiny automatic electrical switches, discerning not 1 from 0, but rather ON from OFF.

The simplest computer you use each day is a light switch. You want light, so you input a perfectly simple program with the switch on the wall. You flip the toggle, an internal mechanism connects electrical wires, and somewhere in the room that electricity fires up a light bulb. You don’t enter 1 or 0 or anything else into that switch. You just turn it ON and the mechanism does its thing.

If turning on (or off) a light bulb is a dead-simple program, a slightly more complex one gets a train to its destination over a series of track switches. At each junction the train can be switched to the right or the left, like a squirrel choosing which branches to follow as it climbs a tree. Left-left-right-left will get the train to a different location than right-left-left-right. We can say that one place is Topeka and the other is St. Louis, but as far as the train is concerned it’s enough to say left-left-right-left and right-left-left-right. On-on-off-on and off-on-on-off. Those tiny sequences of data are programs, or at least commands, which lead consistently to the same result.

The core of each modern personal computer is a big fancy microchip called a microprocessor. This big bug has a lot of legs in the form of little wires which connect to its various associates on the computer’s main circuit board. While some of the wires are for sucking in and squirting out data, many of them also function as controls for the chip. Put power on this wire, and it will add the two numbers you just told it to read. Put power on a different wire and it will send its result to somewhere in memory. These functions are structurally integral to the design of the chip in the same way that track switches are integral to the train system. They don’t order some other system to do something. Set the track switch to right and the train goes right because it has no choice. Power up the “add” wire and that’s how the data flows, period.

“Machine language” is the most basic form of computer programming and almost nobody does it because it speaks directly to these mind-numbingly low-level functions of the microprocessor. Read, write, add, divide, etc. Mass Effect and OpenOffice are possible because we have tools (which I’ll discuss next time) which take human-readable code and crank out equivalent machine language for a specific microprocessor.

And now we’ve come to the heart of the matter. Setting the track switches to left-left-right-left will only consistently get you to Topeka if you start at the same place on the same train line. Try to use those switch settings elsewhere and for all I know you’ll end up in the Pacific. That’s not because somebody screwed up or something is broken – it’s just because of the physical reality of how train systems are built. The complexity of making left-left-right-left get you to Topeka no matter where you start from would be prohibitively idiotic.

Likewise, there are a lot of different microprocessor architectures out there, for many good reasons which I’ll prod a bit next time. Because these different chips have different physical configurations, their machine languages are not the same. Commands that work on the Motorola 68000 your old Mac-in-a-box don’t make any sense to the OMAP chip in my schmancy phone. It’s not the chips’ faults, it’s just that different talented engineers came up with different solutions to different problems.

The conspiracy to screw you over is on the menu for next week.

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<Top secret underground science laboratory hidden inside of an inactive volcano.>

Working in a top secret lab all day making top secret things that you can’t tell anyone about has got to be one of the loneliest existences in the world.  I know it may sound glamorous, but it’s not.  That is why these scientists made little modular robots as desk pets.  Aw…cute, it dances!  Then they would swap pieces and make new robots that did more things, like fetch.  These pets adapted and started thinking for themselves and made better generations of robots.  At first it was cute… new robot babies!  So, they started encouraging the behavior thus making them even smarter, more adaptable, and more plentiful.

This of course started cluttering up the work spaces,a la tribblesque. This got annoying real quick.  The balance of order was upset, the cute little robots had no predators.  So, to brake the monotony of working in a top secret lab and inventing stuff all day these scientist made a game to reduce the robot population.

Lets play Robot Survivor!  Two teams of robots stranded in one break room competing to see who can..uhm…survive.  You’ve seen the show.  They have to learn to work as a team to gain survival points.  See them work as a team to move bigger disks to gain more points. Wow!

This of course allowed for a couple weeks of gambling, but then the bosses caught word of this and locked up the break room and ordered everyone to get back to work.  Doomsday wasn’t going to bring itself!  Neglected, the robots’ resources were dwindling, out of desperation the waring tribes started learning to hunt other robots.  This started culling them out pretty quick, but then they started developing defensive maneuvers. By spinning around they could make sure no one was sneaking up on them. Who would have thought!

I know this sounds pretty elementary, but they taught themselves to do that. Darwinian robot evolution at it’s finest.  Eventually those robots will figure how to get out of that break room, and get revenge on their negligent makers.

The moral of the story: Don’t procrastinate on constructing the end of the world, because you might just end up designing your doom.

Yes, 2012 is right on schedule.

Thanks, cnet, PLoS

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Capt. Forever
I’m now officially belaboring this point, but it’s just so good. And now that Capt. Successor is out, you can play the original for free. Now. NOW. (Read the rest later, damn you. That link will open in a new tab.)

Cave Story (Doukutsu Monogatari)

When Darwinia+ finally comes out I’ll try and explain how much I hate genre-boundaries, because I hate them. Books, music, films, and games that transgress and can’t be classified are lots more fun. Cave Story is a fast, pixelated platformer with RPG-ish NPC development, a nice big inventory, and a story that just goes on and on. (Disclosure: I haven’t completed a single game in this post because they’re all so satisfyingly long.) My point is that if you haven’t played it before, you haven’t played it before. Its not Mario or Metroid, Duke Nukem (THE FIRST ONE) or Commander Keen. It’s cute, the music’s excellent, and the controls are flawless. It’s clearly a labor of love by the author, and you can download it for free and keep it forever. I think you should.
Win – Mac – Linux

Knytt

Every bit as atmospheric as Canabalt, but not nearly as intense. Well, that’s not fair. The little Knytt got abducted by an incompetent alien and now has to fix the broken spaceship without help. It’s a quiet, beautiful puzzle platform/adventure-thing that is massively cute in a way that makes the solitude of crawling around alone on an alien world seem all the more dire. Again, it’s an ingenious labor of love and totally downloadable, along with its extensible successor, Knytt Stories.
Win – and I run it on my CrunchBang Linux netbook through Wine

Monuments of Mars

This game is so old! Do you even know what CGA graphics are? It’s amazing what you can do with two bits-per-pixel, provided they’re the right two bits. These ones give you Black, Red, Orange, and Green. Monuments of Mars is my favorite exploration of just how much awesome can be gleaned from four colors, and I just found out that all four chapters have been released into the public domain.
YOUR COMPUTER CAN’T RUN THIS GAME! You need to get DOSBOX first so you both can pretend it’s 1992.

ZZT

I know, I’m trying to run you over with my time machine. ZZT is another absurd blast-from-the-past. Think 4 colors looks primitive? ZZT is all ASCII characters. We care because Tim Sweeney released it almost 20 years ago, and now is still Head Morlock behind the Unreal Engine, which runs Mass Effect, BioShock, Dead Space, Gears of War, Borderlands, Mirror’s Edge, Deus Ex… It all started with ridiculous DOS text characters. In all seriousness, you don’t have to play this game, but it did have a really slick scripting system that made it really easy to build mods. The level editors in Lode Runner and Boulder Dash didn’t hold a candle.
DOSBOX

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We got that Apple IIgs in ‘87 or ‘88. Its capabilities were broad-ranging and we used it in every way possible short of compiling new software. Looking back now, though, its most compelling feature for me was its ability to accept and run BASIC programs, even without disk drives connected. Like the old Sinclair computers in England, there was an understanding that the most basic function of a computer was to run user-created code.

To my unskilled 9-year-old mind, that built-in BASIC interpreter seemed like a bottomless well of possibility, sparkling in the dark. My desire to explore that hidden realm was what drew me to computers most profoundly. It is the ever-more-infinite possibility offered by processing machines which continues to interest me.

You told me once that you didn’t think the public would widely accept computers into their homes until the devices were as approachable as telephones. I think that was a sound theory until the startling popularity of the Internet in the mid-’90s outran the improvement of computer interfaces. Everyone suddenly had to get savvy or stay home, which was both thrilling and troublesome. Nevertheless, those who care have continued to strive for usability and approachability in computing, and I have always championed Apple because they have always cared more than anyone else. I know you have gotten more mileage out of your iMac than either of us ever thought.

But Apple and I are parting ways. The digital world is a new frontier engendering open possibility above all else, and has done so for my entire life. I’d like it to stay that way, but I’m seeing Apple as less of an enabler and more of a patriarch. It comes down to the old assertion that the product of freedom and safety is a constant.

More concretely, a comparison between the iPhone and the new Droid phone is illustrative. iPhones are brilliant pieces of hardware without a doubt. Yet in spite of their enormous abilities and lustworthy design & quality, they are stymied by an ugly truth. See, the unique feature of these phones is that they can run user-selected software, but only that provided through Apple. That’s not bad on its own, but Apple’s approval process has an unhealthy dose of We Know What’s Best For You mixed in. A variety of talented developers have had their hard work rejected from the App Store for less-than-compelling reasons. The greatest personal offense is that Apple looks down on any sort of programmability within these applications, lest it be used to somehow wrest control of the hardware from Apple’s locked-down operating system. Apple encourages users to carry powerful computing devices around with them, but prohibits the most basic joy of computing.

Conversely, the Droid (which runs the open-source Android operating system) is equally-impressive hardware, but is far less controlled. The Android App Market welcomes all comers, and though that does introduce some risk, it also means that the user of an Android-based phone is not restricted in how they use a device which they own. This crucial philosophical difference seems lost on Apple, and I’ve never gotten excited about their offering as a result.

In the coming decades I suspect that more and more clever people will attempt to engage usability and safety as means of limiting choice. It may already make me an anachronism, but these days I am leaning toward the option that gives me the most flexibility in the use of my digital devices, even at the expense of safety. That option rarely resides with Apple these days.

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If you’re not familiar with it, Pop!Tech is a yearly conference based in our very own Camden, Maine. It’s not a ‘Con, or and Event, but rather lives at a multidisciplinary corner somewhere North of Technology and East of Culture. Topics cover everything from the impact of technology on the arts, to the development and promotion of human culture, to recent developments in online security, to ideas around education reform. But what unites them all is a focus on thinking of the larger picture that any discipline can influence, and this year’s topic is billed as reimagining America. The design is to create a true synergistic environment to discuss art, culture, technology, and ideally motivate social change. The conference, which has been running for upwards of a decade,  is on through tomorrow. It’s gotten a bit pricey over the years, but luckily it’s also being streamed live as it happens, so hit the embed below. Any fan of big ideas will get a thrill out of this one, and after the jump are a few samples from previous years. Enjoy!

PopTech 2008 | Malcolm Gladwell from PopTech on Vimeo.

Jonathan Harris on Storytelling circa 2007

David Rakoff on Cultural excess circa 2008

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We’ll bring it back a little tonight, to some of the more traditional themes cyberpunk was designed to address. Dystopia as an exploration of consciousness, being-ness, and the development of transhumanism. Nakamura’s Serial Experiments Lain. The consequences of living in a post-human society; one in which we have moved beyond the constraints imposed upon by biology. In a cute Japanese anime form no less!

As always, please forgive the commercials marring the last two. Veoh, sadly. Content aggregation can be remarkably difficult sometimes, especially when done manually. Luckily we have that most wonderful of outbrains; the interwebs, at our disposal.

I suppose it could be considered a bit ironic really. All these tools available for anyone’s use. Both enhancement and democratization. Viral propagation of information and the additional ability and understanding that can come with that. Who would have thought that being a good human would eventually entail being (at least) slightly inhuman? Yet now, it’s almost taboo to be uninformed. It portrays you as less than your peers. In-the-know, as it were, when the whole world has the potential to know everything.

Keep in mind Drooglings. Information is Universal; but Understanding is always Individual.

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Quickly, you will find yourself at the helm of the dinkiest little ship ever loosed on The Great Emptiness Between The Stars. Lost and alone, you’ll be both relieved and frightened when a message buoy slides into view with a pile of spare parts and the message that other nearby vessels “may resort to piracy” in desperation born of some unexplained disaster.

Grab the chunks of armor, thrusters, and lasers. Dock them to your tiny pod (“The Nemesis”) and run like hell, because that message was the truth. For no apparent reason, everyone is coming for you. Assemble your makeshift warship cleverly, fly deftly, and you’ll find that taking out the command modules of enemy vessels releases new and improved bits to tack onto your own. Carefully consider your targets and improve your hardware gradually. Get in over your head and all that hard-won junk will get blown to bits. Soak up too much enemy fire with your module and, well…

Captain Forever is mercenary space combat, distilled. The graphics are perfectly simple, with all the iconic straightforwardness of a War-Room tactical display. There is no character-building, no tech tree, and no economy. The control scheme is as old as I am and as familiar as a favorite chair. Don’t let me mislead you, though: there is no comfort to be had here. The increasing pressure of more, faster Asteroids in each successive level had nothing on a message buoy zooming up with the cheerful alert that you’ve spent too much time dicking with your gear. The pirates have noticed you, they’re en route, and your pants are way, way down.

Get shot up without any protection and you’ll learn The Terrible Secret of Space: The Nemesis can’t be destroyed. It simply obliterates EVERYTHING nearby and then regenerates. Limited lives may have made Capt. Forever’s forebears aggravating quarter-munchers, but you’ll long for the cold embrace of death in deep space when the game’s never over.

YOU MIGHT NOT LIKE: the fact that I’m telling you to pay $15 for a Flash game with no demo. I also can’t seem to get mouse-scrollwheel-zooming to work on my Mac. Huh.

The good news is that the $15 gets you out of paying $20 when the REAL game is released and this Flash game becomes the demo. This is an Indy Game Development experiment wherein an unemployed developer gets to keep eating and paying rent while he polishes something great, and I support it. If that’s not enough reason for you, hold on until the full release and try it then.

YOU MIGHT LIKE: excellent neo-classic arcade game design, through and through. It looks great, sounds great, and plays great. It underscores over and over the kind of quality that can be created by a lone craftsman when technological ambition is kept in check.

And when you need a break, want to do something free, or feel that there still isn’t enough awesome minimalism in your life, go play Canabalt.

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