Photos for You

I finally uploaded the interesting photos from the Darfur Rally and my haircut. I even chose to show my ugly mug (there's a warning for all of you). I put the pictures on Flickr because there are more than I'd like to put here. So here are the links, I hope they work.
Darfur Rally
My Haircut

I'm a little frustrated with Flickr's options for how to organize the presentation of my photos, but whatever. Sorry if you don't like my haircut or face. There's nothing I can do about what I was born with.

The Electronics Entertainment Expo is currently going on and there's some pretty exciting stuff going on for nerdy people. Like a Halo 3 trailer, and some Nintendo Wii game previews. There was also a new technology that maps a person's face for sports games, and the example that EA used was a model of Tiger Woods that was disturbingly real. Anyway, it led me to what might be my new obsession, Uncanny Valley.

Uncanny Valley, if you don't want to read for yourself, is when robotic or animated "humans" reach a point where their likeness is so close that it creates a jarring effect because we can tell that there is something that's just not right with it. This is mostly in CG movies, like Toy Story. The toys look real because they look like animated toys. But the people look weird. Anyway, it's a fascinating concept that I knew, but didn't know it had a name. Some choice quotes from the Wiki article:
"Pixar stated that the reason for stylizing the characters in The Incredibles was not due to an inability to make the characters more realisitic, but an attempt to avoid the Uncanny Valley."

"Erotic sequences with Uncanny Valley characters, as featured in Final Flight [of the Osiris, from the Animatrix], are particularly disturbing, since they provide conflicting messages of 'this is arousing' and 'this is non-human'." Dwell on that.