Now, the Wikitude AR Travel Guide, created by Mobilizy, is an augmented reality application for the G1/Google Android. Judging from the video demonstration, the graphical overlay is quite a few notches smoother than Enkin.

According to Mobilizy’s website Wikitude should already available—but I didn’t find it in the Android Market, and the few 3rd party reviewers I looked at didn’t showcase the AR function. Perhaps there are two versions? In any case, reality is inching closer to augmentation.

[Subscribers, visit the site if you can't see the video]

Or, perhaps a more credible scenario; of those that get one out of need, how many will be content with human dexterity when super is an option?

The Scotsman reports the i-Limb, an artificial arm that the creators say is “better than the actual thing”.

The researchers say their new arm is capable of repeatedly lifting a weight of 10kg up above head height and could do so all day, compared with the average human being who would tire within minutes. The wrists could rotate 360° and anyone using it could perform hundreds of push-ups.

However, the sheer power of the limb means its creators are faced with the problem of deciding which patients could be trusted to use it safely, as it has the potential to be used as a weapon.

A weapon. How about marketing it in the U.S.? Dangerous cyber-enhancements could be taken up under the wing of the Second Amendment. A second-and-a-half amendment emerges proclaiming the people’s right to bare super “arms”.

[John German with an i-Limb]

Imagine a support call to a support line in the near future: “I’m sorry sir, we can’t replace your broken arm … it says right here on page 5 in the manual that any tampering voids the warranty. And we’re going to have to remove your current one. Could you come in around six thirty?”

What about the legalities? Would a tuned up arm void the warranty? Could a handicapped individual be denied a limb because he longed to be better, stronger?

The i-LIMB Hand offers a unique, highly intuitive control system that uses a traditional myoelectric signal input to open and close the hand’s life-like fingers. Myoelectric controls utilize the electrical signal generated by muscles in the remaining portion of a patient’s limb. This signal is picked up by electrodes that sit on the surface of the skin. Users of existing, basic myoelectric prosthetic hands are able to quickly adapt to the system and can master the device’s new functionality within minutes.

[via medGadget]

Close to bionic superiority

All jokes aside, the potential of a better-than-biological limbs is becoming increasingly likely. A recent and real example was Oscar Pistorius and the Olympics; a runner athlete with two bionic leg prostheses who was almost barred from trying out. The lack of meat was temporarily considered an unfair advantage because, for example: (a) they are longer and allow a greater stride, and (b) bionic prostheses don’t require oxygen/aren’t subject to lactic acid build-up. Below is a video of Pistorius competing in a 400 meter race in 2007; well worth the watch.

A quick search will get you several good online articles on the Pistorius story. He was allowed to try out in the end, and didn’t make the cut. His prostheses are Icelandic, created by the company Ossur. They’re embedded with AI that learns how the wearer moves.

A surreal future, or real possibilites

If we imagine stronger, faster, limber bionic legs and arms emerging in the near future; is it unreal to imagine that people who have suffered the trauma of losing a limb would want to make up for it by tuning up their prostheses?

Moreover, if it were illegal to bare super- strong, limber or dextrous bionic limbs, there would inevitably be individuals who’d find black market paths around it. It would be surreal to imagine anything else.

Links & References

• i-Limb found on Futurismic
• Scotsman on the i-Limb
• Pictures are copyright ©Touch EMAS Limited.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, Watchmen is a graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Gibbons. It’s the only graphic novel to receive sci-fi’s most prestigious award, Hugo Award, and the only graphic novel to make the NY Time’s 100 best English-language novels. Those of you who’ve read it, read on for the real life Dr. Manhattan. For those of you who haven’t read it fetch yourselves a copy, enjoy some great sci-fi, and then come back to this post. If you don’t the writing style of this entry won’t make sense to you.

In the novel, Jon Osterman, scientist with a Ph.D. in atomic physics, accidentally gets locked inside a test chamber for removing “intrinsic fields” of objects (a made up concept). In a blue glow of fury, Osterman is torn to shreds and—as you know since you read the novel like I asked you to—later reconstructs himself to become the worlds only superhero. First appearing as a brilliantly illustrated walking nervous system.

Below is the depiction of the accident from the upcoming Watchmen film directed by Zack Snyder (Official site, IMDb, Wikipedia). Which will hopefully hit the theaters in March 2009 (Fox is currently suing Warner Brothers in an attempt to block its release due to copyright concerns. That won’t happen (fingers crossed)).

It’s May 21, 1946, Louis Alexander Slotin, scientist with a Ph.D. in physical chemistry, is working on the Manhattan Project with his colleagues. Their experiment involves fission reaction, placing two half-spheres of beryllium around a plutonium core.

Recreation of the accident.

His colleagues report seeing a “blue glow” as the air ionized and felt a wave of heat. Slotin retracted his hand in reaction and the upper hemisphere fell on the floor. He was exposed to a lethal dose of radiation, equivalent of being 1500 meters away from a detonation of an atomic bomb.

Nine days later, Slotin becomes the second victim in history to die of a criticality accident.

It’s March 6th, 2004, and the article for Doctor Louis A. Slotin is being created on Wikipedia.

It’s 2008, 4.5 years later, and I’m discovering the article. One hundred and fifteen minutes later I adapt it to publish on Think Artificial.

Links & References

• Text adapted from Slotin’s page on Wikipedia

Important Notes

I don’t know if Slotin was really an inspiration for Alan Moore, but it doesn’t seem unlikely. And regardless, if there is a real life Doc, then it’s Slotin. Which brings me to another point: I didn’t find any online mention of this likeness — could it be that after all these years this hasn’t been discussed?

By a key combination you bring up a command-line interface that let’s you write natural language instructions. For example, selecting text on page, bringing up the window and then typing “email this to xyz@something.com“. A similar example is translation; i.e. translate this to French. I’ve recently been migrating many of my desktop activities to web applications, including moving entirely from desktop email to Gmail, and a big plus for me is that Ubiquity works with Gmail right out of the box.

Here’s a recap of the initial features, as stated in the Ubiquity prototype announcement:

Ubiquity 0.1

• Lets you map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; lookup and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more. Ubiquity “command list” to see them all.
  
• Find and install new commands to extend your browser’s vocabulary through a simple subscription mechanism

And then there’s the introductory video for your enjoyment.

Head over to the Ubiquity page and try it out for yourself. It’s a bit buggy (it’s a prototype, after all)—but it looks like it has great potential.

I salute Sony for moving into the realm of augmented reality. Like I was discussing recently, we’re on the verge of an augmented reality craze—given that the powers that be jump on the opportunities offered by our latest technologies.

Origins of the sketch-idea

The extent of the image recognition system is unknown to me, but it made me remember an older tech-demo that made it’s way around the blogosphere last year; a series of prototype sketching games, created by Anton Mikhailov. The one shown in the video below allows you to draw a lunar lander on paper which is then turned into a real lunar lander game. Apparently Anton’s demos made it into a product!

We need augmented reality glasses

While the EyePet is cute and looks really cool for a few minutes, I can’t help but feel that there’s not much more to be seen. Sure, kids never get tired of virtual pets and their immortality saves you from flushing things down the toilet. But this pet you can’t take with you anywhere, it’s confined to your screen and it can’t possibly be able to interact with but a handful of objects. In my honest opinion, the Eye-cam idea has been bonked from the start. The EyeToy made you wave your hands …. and that’s it. This time you can (thankfully) do more than wave your hands, but to what extent? Lift, push and pull? Sounds like too little too late, considering it’ll be competing for consumer attention in a world where we can do that using only our minds.

The thing missing from this picture are augmented- or virtual reality glasses. That’s something with an edge. Say, for example, making Doom3 monsters not emerge from dark corners on screen but out from behind your couch. They certainly have the computing power for it, in their little black PS3 boxes.

I remain fairly certain that the Eye-cam idea won’t go very far, and that the mobile industry will prevail with augmented reality games and applications using phone cameras.

Links & References

• EyePet video via VR Geek Blog

Not only do we lack understanding of our own creative mechanisms, but the basics of computer programs seem to oppose the idea of achieving unbound originality. Here’s a look at that important, fundamental problem when implementing creativity. In easy digest format, no less.

A Brief Introduction to Creativity

Crucial to what follows is pointing out that creativity is ill-defined and people generally have very different ideas of what it is. This can make it difficult to discuss and debate.

Art is typically strongly tied to creativity, and many scientists are focusing on this. The painting on the side was created by the computer program Aaron, which is one of the more famous creative systems. But while creativity exhibits itself very strongly amongst artists and is easily associated with them, that’s nowhere near the whole story. For example, there’s software like Thaler’s neural networks that have invented new, patentable physical materials. This is another type of creative expression.

And to go even further; in Emergence of Creativity, my chapter in the book Intelligent Complex Adaptive Systems, I explain and define creativity and its origins in a way that accounts for even the actions of primitive organisms — not only human abilities.

But for this article’s purposes, all we have to agree on is that creating something new or being original is an essential part of creativity. Given this agreement, we shouldn’t run into a problem with the following explanations. But even so, keep in mind how extremely multifaceted creativity is and that I’m simplifying the concept (to keep this article from becoming a book).

A problem when creating creative systems

To properly explain the problem, how programming seems to oppose creativity, we must understand what computer programs are: instructions. A set of steps the computer executes. Typically, when we create computer programs we specify a certain problem and in turn devise a set of instructions that addresses this problem.

A program that can add numbers is a very simple example of this: we specify that its input are numbers and operators, how it should apply the operators to the numbers and that the output should be the result of the computation. Note here that before we create a program we need to know what we want it to do and what instructions achieve that purpose.

Computer programs are instructions, even when they become more complex.

An example of a creative system

Consider an intelligent agent model. An agent is a system that perceives its environment (input) and acts upon that environment (output), and broadly speaking, an agent’s input can be anything from keystrokes to streaming video (or a combination).

Our agent is a writer, to stay within a creativity setting most are comfortable with (here’s to hoping you think people like Shakespeare are creative). For this particular case, the input is a human’s demanding to hear a story about a particular subject, like a story about detectives or robots. Our agent composes a story, puts it in a file and then acts upon the environment by displaying it on-screen.

But in order to make our agent write something other than gibberish, he must have a dictionary of words and he must know grammar. He must also have common sense to know how the world works or otherwise we’d be getting stories where a bucket drinks from a detective.

In the real world we would have to take our agent’s architecture quite a bit deeper. We would have had to give him some way of choosing plots, paragraphs and words, for example. But we’re going to look past that and just focus on what we already have at this point.

Instructions are limitations

Note now that when we gave our agent a dictionary, a goal, grammar knowledge and common sense, we effectively restricted him: He’s not a painter. He’s not a musical composer. He’s not a programmer, a witch, a lion or a wardrobe. And when we look at it as a creative writer, we begin to see he’s not that creative at all.

A goal limits the objectives of a system and thereby helps us organize how the system will behave¹: Our agents should write a story — he’s not about to write a groundbreaking paper about artificial creativity. And what about his stories? He has common sense that dictates no man can fly without the help of machines. We killed our creative agent’s Superman right there.

But these restrictions were also necessary for him to do anything at all. To explain this with a familiar analogy, it’s like writing a cooking recipe: To bake a cake we need certain ingredients. When we bake it the ingredients define what kind of cake it becomes. But we’re baking a cake, not bread. And the cake is sweet, not sour. The ingredients are restricted to define a particular outcome of the baking. Similarly, the instructions we devise are what defines a programs behavior and outcome.

Basically, to make it do what we want it to, we impose restrictions — a confined set of rules out of all the possible rules in the world.

What kind of instructions make limitless systems if instructions themselves are limitations?

Now here’s the core of the problem, finally: We agreed in the beginning of this article that an essential part of creativity is originality and creating something new. But like we’ve discussed above we know beforehand how a program should behave before we make it, including what it should produce.

The basics of programming require us to explicitly design mechanisms that produce certain outcomes. By giving these explicit instructions we inadvertently decrease the potential of the program surprising us since clearly it means that we know beforehand how it will behave.

The instructions that define our program (and make it work) are in turn the exact reason it can’t produce surprising, novel and interesting ideas.

But how about a self-organizing program that writes its own code on the fly to overcome its restrictions? Yes, that sounds appealing and is what many scientists working on artificial creativity are trying to do, in one form or the other. And it would be really easy too… if the program wouldn’t have to be creative to write new code!

Edit (Aug. 25th): Due to some comments from readers (thank you) I feel inclined to emphasize what I mentioned in the article: many creative systems have already been made (have a look through the creativity category).

I’ve personally created and worked on systems that present creative behavior. Making them more robust is just a question of time, research and development. The example used here is intentionally simple and raw to flesh out an essential problem that scientists face when developing creative systems—but this is a problem we are overcoming.

Links and References

• Aaron painting retrieved from Wikipedia
• ¹ Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig (2002). Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2nd edition). Prentice Hall. 60.

Here’s a video giving us a taste of what’s possible—an iPhone app capable of displaying 10 frames per second in live-video realtime tracking. It was made using version 4.4 of the ARToolkit, created by ARToolworks.

Gizmodo mentions that this won’t be found in the Appstore anytime soon, and quotes the creators:

It’s running slowly, but once Apple releases a video [API for the iPhone] SDK, performance should get to 20-30 frames/second. We’ve all seen the awesome 3D games that can run on the iPhone, so fast AR applications will also be possible in the future, with all that multi-touch goodness thrown in as well.

I’m thinking there must be someone already brewing AR apps of some sort. Evernote is close, letting you take a picture of text (e.g. a poster or DVD cover, etc.) and making the text searchable. Location-based social applications are also on a roll, displaying people in your area and what they’re up to.

With the iPhone’s 3G version there’s nothing that stands in the way; there’s bandwidth, GPS location and then the phone’s accelerometer. These combined could be used to make a label-application like I mentioned above: The accelerometer could track which way you’re facing and when you turn, the GPS where you are and the 3G could provide a fast and live connection to something like Google’s maps.

I doubt AR is an area that Apple hasn’t considered conquering. Even though it currently seems they’d rather want to use the phone’s accelerometer to make lightsaber sounds.

If your comment shows up with a gray person like the third comment above, it means you’ll have to get yourself a Gravatar. If you haven’t heard of Gravatars, or Globally Recognized Avatars, they’re a service that allows you to upload and associate an avatar with your e-mail address. Since they’re in use by many popular websites, it’ll spare you some time when commenting or creating accounts there—all you’ll have to do is enter your email address and they’ll pop up automatically (email encrypted via the MD5 algorithm). For the record, the people on the pic with me above are Gnorb and Esther — both of which run great blogs.

See you around.

To answer this bluntly: Game AI is very different from it’s non-game counterpart, and it’s not my field of study. I’ve only compared modern games through a window. However, Alex of AIGameDev has superb coverage of AI in games and the top AI games of 2007, by community vote. The top of the line are Half-Life-2.ep.2 and BioShock.

But regarding Game AI in general: modern games are horribly void of intelligence. It depends on where you set the bar, certainly. There’s tons of AI in modern games compared to 5 years ago. But the first thing to note is that Game AI is not the same as AI. It’s a subset of it. Just like discrete mathematics are a subset of mathematics. And moreover, Game AI is a very specialized subset—it has well defined goals, models for construction and limitations.

Games are governed by laws of commerce first, then innovation.

A game is governed by different laws than academic, general AI R&D. It’s a commercial product, and commercial products depend on older methods wherever possible—methods that have proven successful. Most (sane) business men do not put all their money on a new and untried idea because they don’t know if it will succeed. So, most of commercial products are bulked up with a lot of things that’ve been successful in the past and then leave a breadcrumb for innovation.

This is very different from academic AI research where the point is to do things that’ve not been done before.

Now aside from these drastically different goals of commercial ventures and academic ones, a game’s purpose is to entertain. As long as the player is entertained it doesn’t really matter what goes on under the hood. Because of this, there’s a certain witch hunt that takes place in the game industry:

A modern game developer is on a mission to slaughter innocent intelligent processes wherever possible.

A game AI developer tries as hard as he can (usually at the bidding of a project manager) to minimize intelligence. One reason is that intelligent processes are massive processing-power hogs. Thus, like an obese overeater the systems must forcibly give away every other meal to accommodate an average person’s desktop PC — and those machines don’t have much elbow-room to replicate the massive crimson jelly residing in the heads of animals. Human or other.

And then there are graphics, another obese overeater, who also need a place at the table. And because games are governed by the laws of commerce, Game AI must leave at least five chicken wings more than it ate itself for its obese, graphics rendering sibling. Beautiful games get a lot of coverage and attention, and developing graphics is a question of engineering. In a business plan it’s therefore rational to emphasize graphics. Both in terms of predicting the amount of effort required to implement it and the potential payoff.

Because of these severe limitations on how much processing power the intelligence is allowed, developers are forced to dumb-down the processing and make their AI appear intelligent instead.

To some it may not be clear what the difference is between making something appear intelligent and actually making it intelligent. After all, there has to be some amount of intelligence if something’s intended to keep its appearances. Right?

An intelligent system is expected to produce solutions to problems, uncertainty and often in complex situations. Appearances, however, are concerned with making an observer believe they are intelligent. To accomplish this in games the environment (the input to the AI) is kept controlled and limited. For a vivid example of this:

• NPCs in games don’t use computer vision to perceive where the player is, instead they get fed (X, Y, Z) coordinates, giving the appearances of eyesight and visual processing capabilities.

The game designers tailor the environment and its limits to make sure that the intelligent processes can handle them, and vice versa. It’s the lifelike gatekeeper who doesn’t need to know how to find his way home because he has no home. It’s the terrorist that can pull a trigger but couldn’t count his fingers if you took his shotgun and held it to his head (and you can’t).

For a different and real-life example of appearances versus actual intelligence, to show how diversified the game AI “trickery” can get:

• The developers of Halo 3 found a correlation between how smart the AI was and how tough it was. If they made the NPCs smarter the game became tougher. If they increased the health of the NPCs, making them tougher, the human players perceived them as more intelligent.

The first rule of AI in commerce is that you don’t talk about AI in commerce

Like I’ve stated in another post, the gaming industry is pretty much the only industry that dares market products using the term artificial intelligence. The reason for that is complicated and I won’t talk about it from all perspectives. But what I will tell you is that its partly due to people knowing what to expect from games.

The gaming industry builds from the sets of platform resources and devteam innovation. These are sets that the consumers know. It’s the set that the elite gamer knows because he understands the nature of programs and what the required Hz’s actually stand for. And it’s a set that the average gamer knows because he’s fought space aliens so many times that he’s learned what they’re capable of. With consumers that know what to expect, the term can be used without people boiling a can of hype.

In contrast, Academic AI builds with a set that appears to the consumer as one of infinite possibilities: Because people don’t know (exactly) how the mind works, they/we can’t evaluate how far we are from recreating it in machines. It’s unknown. And because the average consumer can’t accurately evaluate the unknown, it doesn’t matter if yesterday’s AI was primitive; most will still anticipate it advancing leap-years overnight. Just like kids in the backseat of a car asking if it’s: “human now? it must be human now? how about now?“.

Thus, when the term AI is used in areas where the limitations and previous products don’t foretell the nature of the next, people start imagining Terminators all over again. And then they get incredibly disappointed when they realize all the AI can do is answer questions about farm animals. (And only when you begin a sentence with “What is…”).

That’s obviously not a scenario a businessman would like to encounter, so it’s best just to focus on something else when marketing, like Apple does when presenting its operating systems to the public.

In summary

Game AI is just one of many different subfields of AI and is governed heavily by the laws of commerce, entertainment value and modern desktop computing resources. While it may seem it must intersect with other subfields, the truth is that its a somewhat isolated field with its own sets of tricks and tools. (Mostly tricks.)

At times, games may also feel like they are the only commercial products successfully employing AI. But this is largely because of too high consumer expectations to AI in other products, and the consequent fact that companies don’t like mentioning that their product uses, what is by definition, artificial intelligence.

And finally, a difference between apparent intelligence and actual intelligence is that the latter figures out solutions to problems, while the former doesn’t care about what happens under the hood as long as an observer thinks it’s intelligent. A lot of the times—that doesn’t involve intelligence at all.

Links & references

• Halo 3 AI “Trick” example from Teaming up with Halo’s AI

Following that step I was faced with whether I should flag the number of subscribers on the site. To set myself a goal I decided I wouldn’t reveal the number until it reached 300. And now it has happened.

Subscribers to TA have been holding at around 300 for about a month now—subscribers being people that are either subscribed to the site’s RSS feed or via email. Not counting those that visit the site regularly.

My thanks to everyone who’s been reading. You’re the reason I’m still at it.

Where we’re headed

Compared to my usual posting frequency I’ve been non-verbose lately. Business, but mostly personal issues have had my attention. I won’t make any promises on whether this will change anytime soon, but if it does I find it likely that posts will continue at the current pace (c.a. 1 post per week) but gain more meat and originality instead.

People sometimes think it’s easy to blog on a regular basis. It’s not. Keeping to a posting schedule without spending too much of your time or turning the whole thing into a chore is difficult. There’s also, at least for me, the importance of saying something for a reason — not just talk about your sore throat and the weather. Not to mention that you’ll hit dry spells or lack of enthusiasm and that’s when you have to push yourself to keep interested; to go out and thread your mind, the web or something completely different to inspire a fresh perspective.

.. a fresh perspective

One of my explicit goals when I started to blog was honing my writing skills. As it turns out, blogging couldn’t have been a better way to challenge myself with regards to content and especially presentation. It’s very hard to notice developments in writing because it happens very slowly. But there comes a time when you’ve changed so much that you look back and suddenly realize how much you’ve improved.

It’s not uncommon to realize at the same time that you’re ready to take things to a new level. At that point you need to take a step back and think about how you want to change. What new directions you can head in to continue to grow and develop.

I feel I’ve outgrown pure reporting or brief commentary in the way I’ve done so far. I (we) need a paradigm shift that makes better use of the new skills that I’ve developed. There’s no point in writing in the same manner you wrote when you were a baby. I recently started writing [science] fiction and I’m allotting some time to that on the expense of TA posting frequency. I may post some of it here later on, but in any case I’m sure that my new area of writing will prove vitamins to Think Artificial articles.

As I develop this fresh perspective we’ll have to wait and see how it translates to blogging. Creativity can’t be rushed. For the moment a lower posting frequency will continue to reign. And we’ll possibly a few oddball content experiments.

[Subscribers - visit the post if you can't see the video]

You can view more- or create your own art with Algorithm Ink.

[via Hackzine]

The site’s feed has been having some trouble since June 13th which may coincide with a software update I did around that time. The bug caused the site to stop generating an RSS feed.

It seem I’ve resolved the issue. If anyone has still not received updates since the post “Reaper UAV Used Against Enemy Targets” I’d appreciate that you report it.

• Director/Writer: M. Night Shyamalan / M. Night Shyamalan
• Release Date: 11 June 2008
• Plot outline: A paranoid thriller about people on the run in a natural crisis that presents a large-scale threat to humanity.
• Freebase entry.

[UPDATE] See the conclusion in the comments below.

And now for a look at science fiction: I watched Shyamalan’s The Happening last night and, you know, this may have just been the most interesting movie this year. No really: simply because I can’t wrap my head around it. What the hell was that? Why the bad acting, why the goofy protagonist? Is there a puzzle in there somewhere? Read on for a brief rant.

Mark Wahlberg admittedly has his good sides when he has a gun, is on the run and shoots his co-actors on sight. But here he was simply a horrible actor. Horrible. And it wasn’t only him-there were other horrible scenes.

I honestly think Shyamalan made them act bad on purpose.

There’s no question that Shyamalan knows how to direct, we’ve seen that in his previous films. We also know that he can be brilliant and can tailor elaborate plots supported by logical ideas (e.g. Unbreakable). But The Happening? For the life of me I cannot trace what he was thinking.

The likeliest thing I can imagine is that he was going for some kind of old-school horror film style. There is the piano music which supports that, but still, how does that tie in with the notion of seemingly harmless natural things being able to fight back[make something Happen] via distributed intelligence (which, by the way, is a horrifying and brilliant concept).

Is there some meaning in the odd combination of characters plus bad acting? Or was he inspired by the Global Warming issue and in his craze to point out our stupidity threw together a film in haste?

I’m going to watch it again.

The rules are:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you’d like.

You must excuse that I thought about what I should write due to a failure in my random-thought function. But the following are selected facts from a brainstorm.

The se7en random facts

1. Six years ago I underwent brain surgery. I had a tumor the size of a large chicken egg pushing on my cerebellum. Keen eyes can spot the tumor on the online 3D model of my brain.
2. Since I left kindergarten all friends I’ve made have been older than I am.
3. I’m an agnostic atheist. My mother fears I’ll go to hell.
4. I read Snow Crash in English when I was 10 years old. My teacher couldn’t believe I understood it and questioned me about its content. (Remember that I’m Icelandic)
5. I take pride in that last fact and sometimes mention it in vain.
6. I recently started doing Zen-flavored meditation.
7. The lovely summer of 2006, a baby raven with a crooked leg landed in my lap. I fixed his leg with braces and raised him for a year. (that’s him in the header pic). He’s living in the wild now. I miss that crazy bird dearly.

And then to name the next seven minds (in no specific order):

• Norbert Cartagena
• Nils Geylen
• John P.
• Eli James
• Josh
• Jason Ellis
• David Seah
• Aasemoon

Hat’s off to the tagged!