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Pleomorphic adenoma with neoplasm evident
I'll start with a brief description, then talk more about what this means to me.
Last Wednesday I was operated upon to remove a tumor from my right salivary gland. It was benign, but growing very quickly so chances were that it "intended" to go malignant eventually. This is a very common kind of tumor that can grow benignly for years without presenting great danger, safely contained within the salivary gland, though it always has the risk of malignancy and once it crosses that threshold it can set up colonies anywhere else in the body... and, well, I prefer not to talk about that.
The operation was quick and effective. They took the grape-sized tumor out with about half my right salivary gland. The incision, while quite large (about 5 inches long) down the side of my neck in front of my ear to part way down my throat, will probably be fairly well hidden by the way I have my hair. One of the biggest (though fairly remote) risks of the surgery was possible damage to the facial nerve, but I escaped that completely. One slight hassle is that my right external ear is now almost completely numb. I don't know how much feeling I will regain there -- almost certainly not all of it. A disturbing fact is that this tumor has an annoying tendency to return. This seems pretty logical -- if a form of cancer is common it is because many of us are are routinely exposed to the cause. If someone develops it once then they have shown a sensitivity that is likely to do its nasty work again unless the cause is removed or lessened. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, nobody seems to have any idea why this particular tumor appears where it does.
What has this meant to me?
Like most of us I know that cancer is incredibly common in our society, but had not really considered that it would collect me in its vast, impersonal statistics. I tend to sail on through momentous events fairly easily so it was a surprise to me that I became somewhat ruffled on finding I had this tumor. I thought I would just handle it and move on, like I do with pretty-much everything. I mean, it is no big deal, right? I found the tumor before it was life-threatening and it was removed quickly and effectively with minimal side-effects. But it caused me to call into question my life and what I am achieving and what I am not.
I haven't reached any firm conclusions yet, but so far I can see that I haven't used my potential as much as I should. I have been on this planet for a few months short of half a century and considering the talents I was lucky enough to develop with the kindness and encouragement from others I have fallen considerably short of where I should be.
Where should I be?
- I am a passable artist. I should be making better use of that.
- I have fairly good writing skills and I should be accomplishing more there.
- I am able to articulate concepts and project them into people's minds in a way that few can. I should be using that to encourage more kids to learn.
- I am a moderately good (though pretty slack) 3d artist, and should have achieved far more with that, especially in view of my ideas on VR fiction and how VR has potential to repair most of society's and the planet's ills.
- I have an unusual breadth of knowledge because I compulsively learn almost randomly and almost constantly from a very wide range of interests. But this is not only good in that it exposes me to a plethora of stimuli, but bad in that I never really developed any ability to direct my interests, and in fact explicitly relinquished such control in favor of letting my attention wander free. My reasoning was that you can never know where important information can come from so it was best to leave myself open to as many sources as possible. I should be using this more to develop my other abilities -- drawing, writing, teaching, and VR -- by synthesising disparate facts into information that is denied others who specialise more narrowly.
I don't know. I have to think on it more. I am tired and more than a bit sore just now.
Gonna have a nap to recharge.
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On the topic of your VR skills, Dominique now has access to a bunch of world-class special effects software. Come next year, we might need someone with your abilities to help design, implement and animate a lot of the SFX we'll be lobbing into the trailer. Not so much Jar Jar Binks as Helm's Deep, if you see what I mean.
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Not sure what software Dominique has.
I have been using Lightwave3d for years and have version 6.
I have also been using POVRay since it was DKBTrace back in the mid-80s.
Both those produce photo-realistic results. Lightwave was developed explicitly for film and video work and is very intuitive to use.
I've used 3dStudioMax and never liked it.
Never got around to trying Maya though have been told by many people that I should.
Used FilmBox a while back when working with Company In Space for a live dance performance in VR -- it is neat, very optimised software and works nicely with Lightwave.
VRML might be a nice way of doing proof of concept stuff. You can change the point of view to what you feel would work better while the action is going on, because it all operates in real-time, unlike raytraced offline renderers.
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The software Dominique most recently acquired is After Effects. Something they used on The Matrix, apparently.
As we get closer to implementing all the SFX I'll be able to give you a more solid idea of what we're up to.
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It is strange isn't it that a lot of free software and file formats these days are turning out to be much better than their oftentimes expensive alternatives. Linux vs MSWindows, GIMP vs Photoshop, PNG vs GIF, tmpgenc and VirtualDub vs Premiere, etc...
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Read about The Gimp here http://www.gimp.org (http://www.gimp.org)
And the MSWindows port here http://www.gimp.org/win32 (http://www.gimp.org/win32)
If you get confused about all the possibilities for downloading and installing then check out http://www2.arnes.si/~sopjsimo/gimp (http://www2.arnes.si/~sopjsimo/gimp)
That makes it really easy. He has all you need (on the ugliest web page you will ever see) with a step-by-step set of instructions near the bottom of the page.
Oh, and while many Photoshop and PaintShopPro plugins will work with The Gimp, not all will. But you will hardly miss them because it comes with a plethora of extra capabilities of its own. The main thing to remember is that most operations (other than direct painting) are carried out by right-clicking on the image and choosing from the pop-up menu. There are hundreds of Gimp-specific plugins available from the homepage, and unlike commercial paint programs you can roll yer own plugins if you want.
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Raytracers take a lot longer to render each frame, but produce the wonderfully realistic images we have come to enjoy in modern films.
The reason I was talking about using VRML for proof of concept is that it lets you work out your camera angles, frame the action, and so on, then when you are happy with it you can do that with the raytracer and have it run for a few weeks generating the pretty images.
I should also have mentioned that POVRay is free, can do a lot of things that raytracers costing thousands of dollars can't do, and produces gorgeous results, though it is kinda hard to use. Here are a couple of examples:
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Still, we actually have After Effects so I guess we dont need free software. What we need are people who can use it in order to divide the man hours needed to render this thing. Dominique tells me that if you're a wiz at Photoshop, mastering After Effects should be a breeze.
If I understand raytracers, that involves creating your animations from total scratch, yeah? As in creating the wire model, animating it, then wrapping a texture map around it? If I understand the principle behind AE, it's giving depth and perspective to 2D objects, and then animating those.
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When I spoke of cartoony I was referring to VRML. I will try to whip up some similar images using VRML for comparison.
Yep I think After Effects just lets you fake 3d by compositing 2d stuff... I may be wrong there... but I think that is how it works. I am not denigrating it -- any shortcuts are valuable! I should take a look at it.
Yes, VRML and raytracers require 3d models built inside the computer which you animate. It is totally different from 2d compositing, but it also needs some 2d image skills in order to create surface textures for the models. It is also pretty different from string-and-glue models in that you get to create mini-universes -- ya get to play god. :)
I am comfortable with Photoshop -- a whiz, by no means. I don't expect AE would be hard to get the hang of.
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The sub pic looked great, but it still looked - well - like it had been rendered. From what Dominique told me of AE, it's photorealistic. She pointed to a lot of the work done on Band of Brothers for examples. Massive, massive amounts of stuff on that 10-parter were CGI. That's kinda what we're looking at: subtle stuff. There's some major SFX setpieces, but any of the CGI we want to be unobtrusive and effective and convincing. So, for example, with a battle scene let's say, looking at a field of warring men, the vast plains of troopers in the background are CGI while those in the immediate foreground are actors. That's kinda what we're aiming for: seamless and invisible.
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Yeah, a lot of people seem to think I am much younger. Heavens! I think I am much younger. I get a real shock when I glimpse the truth from time to time. :)
It has been really interesting watching POVRay develop over the years. It is an extraordinarily capable piece of software. And I just love the fact that it is free. It is a real vindication of my belief that money will become useless sometime over the next 50 years or so. People will do things because they are good at them or because they want to learn more. For the first time in history we won't have a large part of humanity crammed into frustrating positions where they do what they do purely to earn a crust and waste most of their lives doing it. The opensource community is lighting the way. It is a matter of scarcity not being mistaken for value. Dunno if I have written about this... I guess I should. But not now... I'm going back to bed. :)
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Money becoming useless? God, I'd love to believe that. I don't see how Big Business would ever permit altruism to usurp capitalism though. A lot of very wealthy people have everything vested in maintaining a very rigid status quo.
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But I think it will still go the way of the dinosaurs. It has been very useful for a time, but I think that time will draw to a close in the next few decades.
Every time I talk to people about this people look at me funny. :)
But think about it... why do we have money? It is trading tokens to let us put a value on goods. Unfortunately that value is largely assigned by scarcity rather than intrinsic worth. That is how you get some of the crazier results of money-based systems. (Think, for example, of an artist's work suddenly becoming much more valuable after the poor bastard dies.)
Suddenly comes the information age. For the first time in history we have the ability to distribute wealth (data) free or almost free. It costs a negligible amount to duplicate data millions of times and distribute it. So far this is only so for images, text, music, and similar things. The old system has been thrown into a panic by it and tried to chain it with denunciations and laws and emotive language, but the simple fact is things have changed. Data is fundamentally different from all other commodities that went before.
People have shown how amazingly beautiful they can be when faced with such an opportunity -- the entire open source movement has grown up in such a short time it has taken my breath away. People are producing mindblowing software projects purely because they want to and giving that wealth away to humanity. Not only do they do it, but the quality of such endeavors generally seems to outshine the money-driven efforts. Who would have thought?!
But for the moment people still need money -- we still live in a world ruled by scarcity. We still need to buy food, clothes, a roof over our heads, electricity, transport... but hopefully not for long. There is work going on in various quarters to solve each of these and I expect them all to be solved not too far away in the future. I should write a piece about that. It is too much to cover here.
Hmmm...what is that saying? You can fight an army, but not a good idea when its time has come.
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Do you think tight regulation of the internet will hamper the doing-away-with of money, preserving ownership and the like? Do you think major companies will simply target and buy out competing open source projects, ensuring the continued monopolies?
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I don't think the internet can ever be truly locked up. Some companies may have some success in creating bottlenecks but people will become so annoyed that they will always end up working out ways around that.
Thanks to the brilliant insights of Richard Stallman the GNU Public License can't be subverted by corporate interests without them breaking exactly the same copyright laws they themselves want to maintain. GPL software comes with one assurance: that the user's rights are never taken away. All GPL software must make the source code available, and any software that is built on the GPL software must make the source code available. Read some of Stallman's writings on the subject to understand more fully the ramifications of this. Here is a nice clear piece he wrote about it.
I have heard right-wing nutters rant and rave about how evil this is and that it is a communist plot. heheheh Amazing how often that happens. All you need to point out to them is that nobody forces them to use open software. They are perfectly entitled to go back into the closet of secrecy and beaver away on stuff by themselves, but if they want to use other people's sweat then they should comply with those people's requirements. That much is written in law.
It is a wonderful world when the law can actually be used to protect people from robber barons. :)
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Stallman's article is http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/stallman.html
Others especially worth reading there are Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond. Heck it is all good. The whole book is online. I have a paper copy if you want a lend of it... it might be a bit hard to buy these days. Though it might be possible to buy online.
Eric Raymond is a particularly eloquent exponent of open source. His work "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is a very influential piece. You can find it at http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/ along with a lot of other cool stuff.
Also I should have mentioned that all this talk of GPL and open source is why it is impossible to buy out open source projects. If you think about it for a little while you can see why. A company that tries to do so just changes itself into an open source company. A lot of companies are seeing that this actually makes good business sense and are doing just that.
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Where? You seem to have misplaced the link. :)