Disrupting reality

Most television viewers don't realize just how much of what they watch contains a lot of visual FX, or “virtual reality” if you will. Check out this reel from Stargate Studios.

Sometimes, the only thing that's “real” is the main actor. Increased computing power and advances in visual effects software and techniques mean we're only going to see more and more productions turn to the trusty green screen. More and more, the cost of shooting against a green screen and drawing in a background is lower than shooting on location. That's a sea change that has happened more quickly than most viewers realize.

It's not a short step, but perhaps not more than a few vigorous hops and a few cranks of Moore's Law to imagine the same convenience tradeoff happening in our own lives, the swap of physical reality for virtual reality. As long as the quality is good enough, the lower cost/higher convenience solution wins out. For virtual reality, that bar is not to match reality exactly. It is simply belief.

We're finally at the point in history when we have an alternative to the shadow costs of the real world.

Reality is bloated.
 
It started off as a lean, mean MVP with a minimal feature set — hunting and gathering, procreating, a little story-telling around the fire, fighting for dear life — but now every last use case has been crammed in. There are so many layers of cruft on this thing, it’s a wonder we get anything done at all.
 
This is one of the ultimate drivers of consumer VR — not (just) to provide experiences we couldn’t have otherwise, but to replace many of the crappy physical experiences we slog through every day. Business travel. Middle school. Conferences. You know: pain relievers, not vitamins.
 
There’s been no choice until now, since we’ve been living in a platform monoculture where the monopoly provider hasn’t had any competition to keep it honest. Thankfully, that’s about to change.
 

That's Beau Cronin on unbundling reality. It's perhaps one of the greatest disruptions we'll live through this century.

Why are apes skinny and humans fat?

Scientists studied dead humans and bonobos in an effort to understand why humans became the fat primate. What happened when chimps and humans diverged? It's not clear, but the results thousands of years later are.

...humans got fat. Chimps and bonobos are 13 percent skin, and we're only 6 percent skin, but we compensate for that by being up to 36 percent body fat on the high end of average, while bonobos average 4 percent. That's a wildly disproportional fatness differential.
 

From an interview of one of the authors of the paper.

So what happened on the path from common ancestor to Homo sapiens?
One of the things is, you've gotta shift the body around and change the muscle from the forelimbs if you're a quadrupedal ape. Our ancestors—and most apes—can venture into open areas, but they live in forests. They're really tied to having tree cover available, because they get hot.
 
So we developed fat so we could get away from forests?
Compared to the apes, we have less muscle, which is an energy savings, because it's such an expensive tissue. Two important things about the way we store fat: We store it around our buttocks and thighs, but you want to make sure that you're storing fat so it doesn't interfere with locomotion. You don't want it on your feet, for instance. So you concentrate it around the center of gravity. And you also don't want it to interfere with being able to get rid of heat.
 
What was the benefit of having fat down low and weak arms?
If you're moving away from the forest and tree cover, you want to be able to exploit food in a more mosaic habitat that has areas of bush and a few forests around rivers. You want to be able to move into a lot of different areas. So you've gotta get rid of your hair, and really ramp up those sweat glands. Our skin has really been reorganized for a lot of different functions.
 
Do chimps and bonobos not have sweat glands? 
They have sweat glands. They're not really functioning. All primates have eccrine sweat glands in their hands and feet. Monkeys have them on their chests. [But] they're not stimulated by heat.

Prime Day

More than 90 years ago, holiday shopping found its official start the Friday after Thanksgiving, eventually becoming Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. Over the years, Amazon has helped make Black Friday even more of a global online shopping phenomenon. Next week, Amazon turns 20 and on the eve of its birthday, the company introduces Prime Day, a global shopping event, offering more deals than Black Friday, exclusively for Prime members in the U.S., U.K., Spain, Japan, Italy, Germany, France, Canada and Austria. On Wednesday, July 15, new and existing members in the U.S. will find deals starting at midnight, with new deals starting as often as every ten minutes. They can shop thousands of Lightning Deals, seven popular Deals of the Day and receive unlimited fast, free shipping. Not a Prime member? To participate in Prime Day, Amazon customers can sign up for a 30-day free trial of Prime at amazon.com/primeday.
 

Amazon is creating its own shopping holiday. Economists and retailers have long debated what would happen if there were two Christmases a year instead of one. Would that just move consumer spending around or would it increase the share of the pie? Amazon doesn't have to worry about that here because they're just focused on their own revenue, and if this shifts retail spending share to them, all is good.

It can be dangerous for a retailer to become dependent on sales, but Amazon is a special case. Restoration Hardware has a twice a year sale on its towels, also on its lighting. Customers feel a bit silly buying those items from them any other time of year. Criterion DVDs go on sale at 50% off from time to time. To buy one at any lower discount feels like you're leaving money on the table.

Amazon has such a large catalog of items, and the items it puts on sale are so random, that it's immune to creating artificial seasonality with its sales. Its customers buy from them so often that it's not practical to wait until items go on sale to shop there.

Besides, the core of Amazon's value is everyday low pricing, so most customers feel like they're getting a great deal on most everything purchased there anyhow. A bunch of random deals on Prime Day are just gravy. And if this goes off well and becomes an annual occurrence, it may drive more people to join Amazon Prime, even better for Amazon because of the loyal customers Prime memberships create and the increase in shopping volume and frequency from that cohort.

Decoding restaurants

Last year, on the fiftieth anniversary of restaurant desegregation, we celebrated a signifying moment in the long march toward full and equal citizenship for black Americans. But we delude ourselves if we don’t acknowledge that there is a difference between being admitted and being welcomed.
 
The court order that ended desegregation stipulated that every cafe, tavern, Waffle House, and roadside joint must open its doors to all. It did not, could not, stipulate that whites in the South must also open their hearts and minds to all. Welcome was, and is, the final barrier to racial parity.
 
We have witnessed remarkable progress over the past five decades, yes, and we should acknowledge this, too. What seemed fanciful, even utopian, a generation ago is now so commonplace as to not bear any comment at all. We have come to expect and accept black and white in the workplace, on the playing field, in politics, in the military, and we congratulate ourselves on our steady march to racial harmony. But our neighborhoods and our restaurants do not look much different today than they did fifty years ago. That Kingly vision of sitting down at the same table together and breaking bread is as smudgy as it’s ever been.
 

Todd Kliman set out to try to understand why, decades after desegregation, so few restaurants host a mixed clientele of black and white. Of course, the issues is about more than just restaurants. The questions he asks and the theories he uncovers can be pointed at bars, clubs, neighborhoods, and schools.

It was a man named Andy Shallal who helped me to understand the possibilities for a better, more integrated future while also reinforcing the manifold problems of the present. Shallal made me understand that no one ever need say, “keep out.” That a message is embedded in the room, in the menu, in the plates and silverware, in the music, in the color scheme. That a restaurant is a network of codes. It’s a phrase that, yes, has all sorts of overtones and undertones, still, in the South. I’m using it, here, in the semiotic sense—the communication by signs and symbols and patterns.
 
I don’t see coding as inherently malicious. But we need to remember that restaurants have long existed to perpetuate a class of insiders and a class of outsiders, the better to cultivate an air of desirability. Tablecloths, waiters in jackets and ties, soft music—these are all forms of code. They all send a very specific, clear message. That is, they communicate without words (and so without incurring a legal risk or inviting criticism or censure from the public) the policy, the philosophy, the aim of the establishment.
 
Today, there are many more forms of code than the old codes of the aristocracy. Bass-thumping music. Cement floors and lights dangling from the ceiling. Tattooed cooks. But these are still forms of code. They simultaneously send an unmistakable signal to the target audience and repel all those who fall outside that desired group.
 

The same codes are at work in websites and applications, though they often act subconsciously. Color, typography, imagery, layout, and so many other aspects of the user experience make different users feel more welcome than others.

Is your service more welcoming to the old or the young? Women or men? One ethnicity or another? The rich or the poor? The tech savvy or those less so? Those with fast internet access or those without? The visually inclined or the more textually focused? To new users or longtime users? The famous or the not-so-famous? Content creators or consumers?

It's rare the service that is perfectly neutral.