Ted Goranson - Personal Blog

There is a lot going on behind the scenes. There will be something to announce on FilmsFolded soon, but this note is about progress on the Kutachi Project.

Within Tinderbox

We have done a lot of behind-the-scenes work to make the publishing platform more capable for what we need to do here.

• Our parenthetical stretchtext has been working for some time, but internal improvements have made this easier on the authoring end.
• Our image inserts have also been working since the beginning, but they were limited to small images. We now have infrastructure for large media, in display and storage size. The Kutachi essays will be heavily media-centric. (This was a lot of work.) Media storage is now on Amazon S3.
• We've solved our immediate need to display our special notation when necessary. We will likely make a post on this when it appears. No equation editor can deliver what we want, and that was frustrating.
• Independently, Tinderbox, is soon to be upgraded and that brings a new capability to our published product. The vitality of this platform is very encouraging.
• Disqus comments are up and running in the essay area. We have started the essays. The way we plan to make early progress is that I will post initial drafts of essays with the idea of migrating the ideas and essays based on user input.

Legal Issues

As noted earlier, we have set up a non-profit corporation to manage the community-generated results. Also, we have been working to properly manage inherited intellectual property, mostly by filing patents. Our take on patents is noted elsewhere.

The Symmetry Society

We belong to a group that matters, the International Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Symmetry. This group has been around since the eighties and without fail has an exciting meeting every three years in different areas of the globe. This is one of the most stimulating things I do, and many of the ideas for the Kutachi Project originate here. Among the members, we have seen a Fulkerson Prize, a million dollar DNA computing prize and since the last meeting a Nobel! But even this doesn't indicate the richness of the artists, scholars and intuitives that are involved.

As the project gets going, I hope to have some of them participate in the Project. So we have made a heavy investment in factoring them in.

• We announced the start of the Project at the Society's triennial meeting, this time in Crete.
• At our cost, we have built a website for the society. It is ostensibly run by the Kutachi Foundation trading as Symmetry-US. In fact it is funded by Sirius-Beta, which is just Beth and Ted. The new photo-based front page needs some work, but administrative functions are complete. Some photos of meetings have been collected on a Flickr account. We are considering a Tumblr strategy for cool images.
• At a much more significant investment in time and energy, we've been scanning and posting the Society's journals. We have all of the former electronic journal up on the site and all of the print journal through 2001. There are some astonishingly valuable things there. Indexing them has been hard, but the index is here. We still have a ton to do: all the more recent journal papers, but this is a good start, well over a thousand I guess.
• We now have a new site. The function of the site is to serve as an annotated bibliography of ideas from others that may inform the Project. It serves as a sort of bridge between selected papers and the Kutachi Essays. I've mentioned it here before. The initial focus is on the Society's papers. We only have a few posts up at present. It was someeffort to build, and populating it in conjunction with writing the essays will be a ton of work.

Plans

We have the Kutachi Project's infrastructure done. (We still need to establish conventions for the graphics, which I think will be all custom.)

Content on the Essays (and Annotated Bibliography) will take second priority to the FilmsFolded Project. I'll post separately on the infrastructure progress there. The reason is that we will be rebooting our startup plans to start with a film annotation site and use Kutachi concepts in the user interfaces of that experiment.

Subscribe to the RSS feed here to get announcements when an essay on either project is up. Our first Kutachi Essay will likely be on Virtual Environments because the key ideas have no anchor in the Society Journals.