Avatar (from one pony-tail port to another)

So it's been a few days since I saw Avatar, and the desire to say something about it has not gone away. Firstly, if you have not seen it already, I urge you to go see it in 3D at the first opportunity. The characters are flat, the implications are political, the plot is sickeningly formulaic, and, if you are like me, you will have a few good chuckles at poor dialogue decisions. This movie would be a throwaway if not for the most amazing CGI that I have ever seen in my life. This movie is a game-changer and will no doubt go down as a significant landmark. I have to give James Cameron kudos for an unparalleled ability at making trite plots into successful films. I don't care who you are, you are lying if you saw this movie in 3D and say you didn't enjoy every minute of it.

Avatar is the environmentalist's version of the Singularity, complete with mind uploading and ubiquitous pony-tail ports. The Na'vi obviously embody a Native American aesthetic, but their nature-worship is justified in way that is not a traditional environmental rationale: their goddess Eywa is, apparently, a sort of planet-wide superconsciousness that inheres on the interconnections between the roots of all the plants and trees. This puts Earth's Gaia to serious shame, IMO - you could say that the ecological systems on Earth have some semblance of conscious intelligence, but then you'd have to face Ned Block's Chinese Nation head on. Making roots neurons sidesteps this - but is Cameron a neural-chauvinist? I wonder if Daniel Dennett has seen Avatar yet.

This is conceptually pretty cool, but why would this evolve? Well, at least its not so unlike technologic notions of superintelligent computers managing human society in a much more efficient way than possible by human social institutions - Eywa optimally manages the organic resources of Pandora for the benefit of life (and further organic resources from the death cycle, etc.). I'll buy it. Given a world-wide neural network, it may be survivally advantageous for animal species to be able to tap into it as a means of, perhaps, sensing activity in the nearby forest. In a most predictable plot twist, the animals of Pandora come crashing through the underbrush to drive out the technologic menace and save the day. In a world inhabited by a superintelligence with biological access to the brains of animal species and an obvious interest in preserving itself by ousting the humans, this plot twist is perhaps more believable. Much harder to reconcile is how the Avatar bodies are linked with their human inhabiters, and how exactly the human DNA contained in the Avatar bodies has anything to do with it.

The HCI in Avatar is cool and obviously a lot of thought went into it. I particularly liked the round rotating screens that the air traffic controllers were using - an example of a spatially situated interface with a natural mapping to the airspace around the spaceport. The mecha fighting suits put Star Wars AT-STs to shame. And the gesture recognition technology is not so far away. In fact, I don't ever remember seeing a movie with as much HCI eye-candy as Avatar. James Cameron shows us that technology is sick, nature is sicker, and he can make both look unbelievably ridiculously amazing.

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Technology making a anti-technology film? Good call on the irony:
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2009-12/avatar-review-we-have-technology-now-what

The real Chinese Nation
http://w3.uniroma1.it/cordeschi/Articoli/block.htm

Paypal Teletubbies

Witnessed a very strange Paypal presence at a Berlin Christmas market: Paypal Teletubbies. I later found out that they were not officially associated with the singing Asians and that there were many more of these bulbous blue characters walking around. Sorry for poor video quality, there were many distractions.