Episode 010 - Toru Hasegawa

Toru Hasegawa from Proxy Design Studio and Morpholio Project visits the studio and blows our minds. We talk robots, amazon drones, Gary Kasporov vs Deep Blue, he solves a rubik's cube during the podcast...it's a great episode.

Download it on iTunes!

Show Notes

1. Toru founded Proxy Design Studio with his partner Mark Collins in 2005

2. Toru and Mark also teach and run the GSAPP Cloud Lab

3. Toru and Mark (busy guys) also co-created the Morpholio Project, a suite of apps meant to enhance the user’s creative life and plug them into an exciting design community

4. Toru sports a modified version of the Van Dyke

5. How to care for your mustache

6. Architecture schools are the Girl Talk of technology education

7. What robots really make sense for AECO?

8. The House of Tomorrow was a 1949 cartoon by Tex Avery satirizing the technology of the future

9. The Roomba is a vacuum cleaning robot by iRobot. It has become self-aware on Twitter and has made a cameo in Parks and Recreation

10. Here is a cat riding a Roomba in a shark hoodie

11. There have officially been more mobile devices than people since 2014

12. Bendgate refers to the iPhone 6’s tendency to bend in people’s pockets from being so thin

13. Do robots have souls?

14. Skynet is a fictional AI network from the Terminator movies

15. Autonomous cars are happening in a big way

16. How will streetscapes change with autonomous driving?

17. Amazon Prime Air is a future drone delivery system

18. Amazon Prime Now provides near-instant gratification through guaranteed two-hour delivery

19. Supply chain logistics are the means and methods of coping with a complex network of supply and demand

20. Truck drivers are subject to Hours-of-Service safety regulations to reduce fatigue behind the wheel

21. Computing and the Manhattan Project

22. John Henry is a folk hero whose prowess as a steel-driver was measured in a race against a steam powered hammer which he won, only to die immediately afterward when his heart gave out.

23. John Henry is not to be confused with John Locke, who’s an English philosopher from the Enlightenment...or this guy aka Zach’s dad..

24. Neither of these Johns is to be confused with John Boy

25. Gary Kasparov’s loss to IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997 marked the first defeat of a reigning world chess champion to a computer under tournament conditions. It is suspected that IBM cheated, a allegation that features prominently in the 2003 film Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine

26. Cut to 2011 and IBM’s Watson is winning Jeopardy using higher level thinking

27. The Turing test is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from a human.

28. A Turing test based on lust (Ex Machina)

29. Geminoid is an android project designed to look and act exactly as it's researcher - prepare to have nightmares as these robots fall deep into the Uncanny valley

30. Or a robot could just be a box

31. Voigt-Kampff test blade runner

32. Ex machina gives AI sexuality

33. Skycatch is working with AECO to develop site scanning by autonomously flying drones and are also working with Komatsu on autonomous construction

34. DJI’s Inspire 1 drone looks terrifying. Pimp yours out in carbon fiber, or 3D print your own.

35. Cell phone towers camouflaged like cacti

36. Swiss bunkers camouflaged like nature

37. Face perception is an individual’s ability to interpret emotion and other information from another individual’s face

38. The Homunculus represents how your brain sees your body

39. Remap cities based on population also (not what we talked about but still cool)

40. Banjo is an app that searches for geo-based anomalies to give a real-time understanding of world events, kind of like a less cool version of Minority Report Precogs

41. Speaking of Precogs, guess who’s getting their own spinoff

42. We don’t really know what to do with all this data

43. Data exhaust is the excess data we produce

44. A state machine is a model of computation conceived as an abstract machine used to design computer programs and sequential logic circuits.

45. T.T. Smith is the guy who thought of outlets. But who needs outlets when you have wireless electricity

46. Filters are killing photography

47. Men are more attractive when holding a guitar

48. To swipe right is to approve of someone on Tinder

49. Enhance your love life with the Apple Watch

50. Before there was Tinder there was Hot or Not (Scroll to bottom for Zach Hot or Not pics).

51. Reddit is perhaps the most successful in a series of attempts to crowdsource the best pages on the web - other well known (but arguably failed) examples include Digg, Delicious, and StumbleUpon

52. Delicious

53. Stumbleupon

54. 4chan is the internet’s asshole

55. A group of volunteers led by the Van Alen Institute and Columbia GSAPP’s Cloud Lab donned EEG readers and crawled DUMBO for the Neural Cartography Project

56. Don’t be a Glasshole. Wait, you can’t anymore

57. This guy is a HUGE Glasshole

58. A mesh network is a network topology in which each node relays data for the network

59. Rendering porn: The eVolo Skyscraper Competition and suckerPUNCH daily

60. Decision fatigue is the deteriorating quality of decisions after long sessions of decision making

61. That time Frank Gehry designed a concert hall for Springfield

62. A duck, part of a well known dichotomy from Learning from Las Vegas, is a building designed to be a literal representation of a program, famous examples being the Big Duck building on Long Island and the Longaberger Basket headquarters in Ohio

63. Can everything be reduced to an algorithm? Stephen Wolfram thinks so

64. Is this real life?

65. DRY is a principle of software development that's an acronym for Don’t Repeat Yourself

66. Brian buys as much of his clothes as possible from UNIQLO and often runs into Zach there (this definitely happened at least twice)

67. Brian swears by the black Levi’s 511

68. HE’S ON FIRE!!!

69. All death scenes from Attack on Titan

70. Memory palace, or the method of loci, is a mnemonic device in which the subject associates items that need to be recalled with discrete loci in an memorized physical space or layout

Lightning round:

1. What book(s) are you reading right now?

   1. The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves by W. Brian Arthur (2011)

   2. The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp (2006)

   3. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer (2012)

   4. Brian - War in the Age of Intelligent Machines by Manuel De Landa (1991)

1. What’s your favorite sci-fi film?

   • Interstellar

   • Ghost in the Shell (1995)

     • The original Japanese title of Ghost in the Shell is "Kôkaku Kidôtai" which literally translates to “Mobile Armored Riot Police”

     • Ghost in the Shell is also a comic series, a TV series called Stand Alone Complex, and has a 2004 sequel Innocence

     • A third Ghost in the Shell movie was released earlier this summer in Japan

2. What’s your favorite retro-game?

   • Rubik’s cube

   • Timed Rubik’s cube solving is called Speedcubing or Speedsolving

   • The current world record holder is American Collin Burns who solved a cube in 5.25 seconds, who’s not quite as fast as the Lego Mindstorm robot Cubestormer 3 who clocked in a full 2 seconds faster

   • You too can solve Rubik’s cube with these algorithms and this lube kit

   • Rubik’s cube has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible configurations and can always be solved in 20 moves or less

3. What’s your favorite childhood cartoon?

   • Doraemon (1969-1996)

   • Transformers (1984-1987)

   • Captain Tsubasa (1981-1988)

4. Describe your productivity ritual.

   • Time and quantify everything

   • Follow a brainless starting point: Breakfast, coffee, turn on lamp

   • Use time stamps for starting tasks and write down things that need to get done to keep self from getting sidetracked

   • Don't check emails until 11

   • “As soon as you check your email your on someone else’s agenda and not your own.” -Zach

   • Uses good ‘ol fashioned Excel - trumps apps like Harvest

   • Brian uses JIRA Tempo to timetrack

   • Externalize memory through note-taking

   • Multi-tasking is a myth - it’s important to focus on a single task to allow the brain to parallel process and temporarily caches complex relationships. This type of focus is important for tasks such as coding