The Amazing Klutzini

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Technology and Magic

Arthur C. Clarke once said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Certainly technology can do things that would once have been considered magic.

One of the things I’ve waited a long time for is technology that lets me create drawings, cartoons and illustrations as expressively and intuitively as pencil, paper and other traditional media. Keep in mind that I’ve been studying and creating art technology for ... well, quite a few years. I’ve observed the technologies at Walt Disney Feature Animation and the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab, most of whose talent later became Pixar. I’ve collaborated with researchers at the MIT Media Lab and the artists at Paws, Inc. (makers of Garfield) on tools for animation and cartooning. I’ve seen early uses of frame buffers and digitizing tablets back when these were highly specialized and expensive equipment.

And in all that time, I had not seen anything to replace paper and pencil.

Until now.

I just got a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2, a device that combines high end digitizing technology with a Windows tablet, so it can run Photoshop, Painter and other real graphics software, and lets you draw and paint right on the display screen. In just a few minutes, I did this rough blue pencil sketch.

And then inked it with a pen tool.

All while watching Jeopardy.

I was going to write something fiendishly clever about technology and the magic of Penn and Teller, but that can wait. I’m having too much fun with these tools.

HPL

In an earlier post, I compared some of the magic in the Harry Potter stories with technology that's available today. It occurred to me that the best use of this overlap would be to implement a computer programming language whose built-in operators are spells from the Harry Potter books. We will call this, naturally, HPL (Harry Potter Language). As I first step, I'm proposing the following:

Command	Effect
Accio	Download file
Alohomora	Enable access
Avada Kadavra	Ctrl-Alt-Del
Confundus	Display engineer-written help message
Engorgio	Fill available memory.
Expecto Patronum	Launch a new process
Expelliarmus	Eject CD
Imperio	sudo
Legilimens	Show stack trace
Lumos	Brighten screen
Obliviate	Delete
Patrificus Totalis	Freeze computer1
Prior Incantato	Undo
Riddikulus	Can be substituted for any program written in HPL
Wingardium Leviosa	Upload file

¹Redundant on Windows systems.

Harry Potter Magic vs. Technology, Part 1

Harry Potter Magic	Technology
Floo Network fireside chat	Skype
Broomstick	Zipcar
Priori Incantatem (Show previous spells)	Undo
Portkey (Touch to travel instantly to a pre-assigned location)	<a href=""> ... </a> Web page link
Pensieve (Relive memories)