Llamas and my stegosaurus

Unwritten stories

2012-01-21T17:16:00.000-08:00

Micronauts

In the near future, maybe 2020, a brother and sister are in the basement, playing with their new toys-- four inch tall remote control androids with cameras in their heads that send information back to VR glasses. Cameras attached to the glasses sense their movements and move the limbs of the robots accordingly.

When criminals break into the house and take their parents and baby brother hostage, they need to send the androids for help, while avoiding being caught themselves. And when help is slow to arrive, they decide the only hope is to take rescue into their own hands.

Lords of Dust and Shadows

An extended family has a tradition that they are the direct lineal descendants of Arthur. The older family members take it all very seriously-- the story starts off with a coronation after a funeral. They have divided up the state they live in into territories, and each is responsible for the territory that family member lives in, to serve and protect them, especially from supernatural evil, but also with emergency service, crime prevention and so forth.

One young man doubts that there is anything to the stories and the magic that family members claim to have performed. When he is sent on a quest prior to being knighted, he has to decide what world he is going to live in.

This has a lot in common with another much older story idea that Karen and I worked on. In that story, some medieval reenactors build a kind of utopian community with a castle. When civilization collapses due to some kind of advanced bio/nano weapon, their community is one of the few to survive intact and capable of sustaining themselves.

The Magical Toy Store

This is the story that the description (an earlier post) came from. A child and his parents visit the toy store, and he brings home a gift, apparently for free. When he is older and has children of his own, he decides to find out how the store came about and how it can just give away such expensive, handcrafted toys.

Rex (Evil Dog)

2011-12-29T02:33:00.001-08:00

A description of a toy store

2011-12-19T06:50:00.001-08:00

The doors opened into a large circular room with a high-domed ceiling. The room was all built of wood, and was old enough that trails through the room had worn away from centuries of children's shoes. Two staircases curved around either side of the room, leading up to a balcony. Around the walls were inlaid scenes from children's books-- Treasure Island, Beatrix Potter, The Wizard of Oz, Alice, perhaps two dozen in all. These were made from thin slices of chalcedony, malachite, turquoise, jade, and the like, cut to shape and chosen individually because of the surface pattern. These, too, were polished only near the bottom where children could reach, and especially near the faces. The staircase banister was carved in an Art Nouveau style, all leaves and gently diverging curves.
This room, and all the rooms in the store, were full of toys, to the point of being almost crowded. They were organized by some kind of theme that only the owner knew-- kites, sleds and flying toys in one section, blue things in another. I can't begin to describe everything that was there-- I doubt even Kim would have had the capacity. What I remember mainly are glimpses, and by this point only the glimpses that I've remembered many times before remain.

In the corner of the main room by one of the curving staircases stood a suit of polished full plate mail and helm, just the size of a child. The metal had been ribbed in such a fashion that it was very strong, despite being pounded to incredible thinness to reduce its weight. By adjusting the straps and through clever design of the joints, it would continue to fit a child almost to adulthood. I am not sure what kind of metal it was made of; it gleamed like silver but was even whiter to the eye.

Floating near the cupola roof of the room (which had been painted to look like the night sky, with constellations and tropic lines marked out in gold leaf), were flying machines of all types and sizes. Sailing ships suspended from balloons bumped against robotic armored coelacanths that swam through the air as if it were the Devonian sea.

Through the stained-glass doors at the back of the room was a library. The bookshelves were high enough that a walkway had been built halfway up to give access to the higher shelves. In the center of the room stood a large dead tree that had been lacquered and carved in such a way as to create dozens of places that were comfortable for reading. The tree was covered in tiny electric lights in the shape of cherry blossoms on adjustable stems. One of the books that I pulled down was a pop-up selection of tales from the Arabian Nights. The pages themselves were made of brass, and the act of turning a page wound a spring inside that animated the cutout tin actors. Each page opened into what resembled an opera stage, with layers of flat scenery from front to back.

A castle, built of real stones and grey bricks the size of Pez candy, sat under the display window. It was furnished with dollhouse furniture (some of it from quite the wrong period) with drawers that opened to reveal tiny cooking utensils, or the Queen's jewels. The blacksmith's shop was especially impressive. Surrounding the castle were thousands of toy soldiers from the Napoleonic era, all hand-painted, complete with working tiny metal cannons that used small firecrackers to fire rubber cannonballs.

There were dolls dressed in dyed Japanese silks, satin, velvet, fur and taffeta. One type of dolls had joints contrived so that they could only take natural poses, and would hold any pose fairly tightly. If you took the hand of one and pulled it in some direction, the rest of the joints of the body naturally moved so that it looked as if the doll were reaching towards the point the hand had been dragged to, and the other arm moved in such a way as to retain balance. On a high shelf stood a Japanese samurai doll made of a rich red wood. By clever manipulation its limbs could be rearranged and it would take the form of a Chinese war vessel with ribbed sails like dragon wings.
In the topmoset of the drawers was a box labeled "Steam Man of the Prairie." In the box was a doll resembling the Tin Man from the wizard of Oz. When a small candle was lit and placed on his back, he would walk along dragging a wagon behind him and sending up puffs of water vapor. (His hands were firmly attached to the cart, and I doubt he could have balanced without it.)

There was a portable, folding artist's desk, well-used, and stained where paint had been brushed off the edge of paper pinned to the surface. Hidden compartments could be accessed by sliding secret panels, revealing soft pencils, kneaded erasers, papers and canvas, watercolors, pastels, oil paints, a wide array of brushes, a compass and many other art supplies.

In a small side room were Christmas decorations, the only part of the store that wasn't actually for toys. One ornament in particular I recall: it was a delicate filagree of spun silver, framing a silvered, partly covered bowl that was tilted forward inside. Through a hole in the top of the bowl, by some trick of optics, a winged angel appeared to hang in midair, lit from behind by a dazzling halo. What I remember best of all was the particular startled expression on that angel's face.

There was a large chinese cabinet, with a screen of carved dragons. In its numerous drawers were all kinds of magic tricks. One was a wand of yellow ivory, carved with intricate symbols and nested spheres. It emitted some kind of heavy gas (supplied by a removable canister) that burned with a blue flame. If you held it over a table and tipped it a specific way, flames would spread in a growing puddle about a half inch above the table's surface. The flames strangely gave off no heat. Another drawer contained a mechanical dragonfly with eyes made of cut garnets, but I didn't see whether it could actually fly or just flap its wings.

There were stranger toys, too, that I hardly know how to describe. One of them was a kind of oversized helmet attached to a microscope. It looked like it had been built around 1930 of largely cast iron parts. When you slipped under the helmet, you were surrounded on all sides by projections of the microscopic slide. Each hand controlled one probe, and foot pedals would cause you to soar around the scene-- the controls were far more intuitive than a traditional microscope. To enhance the effect, strong fans blew wind in your face as you flew from one place to another. Looking at leaves or microorganisms with this would have been fantastic enough, but on one of the slides, an entire miniature island had been built from tiny bits of moss, insect parts, and grains of sand, including ruined cathedrals and sprawling treehouses.

The back wall of the balcony was for board games. Most seemed to be unique handmade games, but some were familiar: there was a copy of Cathedral, I recall, which struck me as a little out of place because I had seen advertisements for it. One of the board games was in fact a type of treasure map, and following its instructions would lead you to a series of clues around the landmark buildings in the city of London that pointed to a the location of a mazelike key and a buried chest. What was in the chest was a mystery, though the game hinted that it was something precious and indescribably ancient. The centerpiece for this section was a mechanical chess game on a raised platform, like an altar. The chessboard formed the top of a box about six inches high, filled with small gears and rods. A placard said "D-- W--- watchmaker 1867." Indicator arrows on the sides allowed you to select the location you wanted to move a piece to, and each time a square was selected, those pieces which could move there would turn their heads to look at it. If you then tipped one of these, it would move to the square and attack, swinging its tiny arm and sword. The defeated piece retreated off the board. After checkmate, a music box would play, and the winning King and Queen would waltz around the board while the other pieces stood at the sides and turned their heads to watch. Before a game the box required quite a bit of winding of a handle on the side.

It would take quite a while to tell you the rest of it: the clockwork sauropods, the marbles that shone like stars, the collapsible fort, the musical kites-- and my very favorite of all, the toy that I actually brought home, the Friendly Mammoth...

Kepler 22b

2011-12-06T04:14:00.001-08:00

Kepler has discovered a planet in the habitable zone of its sun-like star. It has a 290 day year, and a temperature of 22C, assuming a greenhouse effect similar to Earths (though with a thicker atmosphere, it is probably much hotter.) The planet has a radius 2.4 times that of the earth. This probably means that it has significant amounts of hydrogen in its atmosphere and has a deep ocean on its surface, covering all the land in miles of water. It's probably better to think of it as a warm Neptune than another Earth.

A few other facts:

It is about 600 light years away in the direction of the constellation Cygnus.
Its star is 25% cooler than our sun, but the planet orbits 15% more closely than Earth, so it works out temperature-wise.
There are conflicting reports about the surface gravity. It is definitely higher than Earth, but the exoplanet catalog lists 4.84g, while Phil Plait estimates 2.4g, so I'm not sure what to believe.
Kepler has found another 1000 planet candidates since the last update in February. They've been confirming the Kepler finds with Spitzer, and found that all the ones they've checked so far were real, so the error rate on Kepler detections is probably very low. Of these, I would estimate they've found more than a dozen new candidates that are at least as good as the five near-habitable ones they announced in February, but they haven't given any details about these yet. The conference is still ongoing, though, so there may be an announcement this week.
Here is a nice summary image of the confirmed planets found so far by all methods:

Dr. Crane's Monologue

2011-11-14T09:38:00.001-08:00

They want to be punished, Batman.
They want it very badly, and this is why--
because the alternative is that there is no such thing as justice.
The alternative is a mad world.

These criminals, they believe in hell.
They believe in a lava-filled pit
peopled with monstrosities
that torment those who break the rules
unceasingly.
They believe this because the alternative--
that someone could get away with something,
permanently and with no repercussions ever,
get away with something--
is too awful for them to contemplate.

That demon is you.
They have to believe
that behind the weak, bumbling justice
wrapped up in technicalities
and its own corruption,
there is a relentless justice
that will sweep down in the night
and exact due pain.
You are the angel of destruction,
the shadow that passes over in the night.

You've called the criminals superstitious,
but that isn't quite right.
It's not superstition, but religion.
You can see that, can't you?

You wear the mask
thinking it will make them afraid of you.
I am an expert on this subject, so you should pay close attention.
If you wanted to make the criminals afraid,
you would act like a disease,
or like a tornado.
It is arbitrariness they are afraid of,
not that the wicked will be punished for their sins.
When that happens it only reassures them.

You can understand, right?
If they allow themselves to believe,
even for a moment, that a lie is possible,
they will never be able to trust anything again.
It will be as if the world ended
as if their parents were killed
in meaningless silence

There are only a few,
like you and the Joker and myself
who know the truth.
We are intimate with the truth.
We have felt it.

It is lies all the way down.

On games and recreation

2011-10-24T05:32:00.000-07:00

I read about new videogames as they come out. It's not on purpose, it's just that in the places I read they tend to come up. The games seem to all have one thing in common: battle. And I don't like it.
Don't get me wrong. I like explosions. I love shows of power. There is nothing I love to watch in a movie more than a good sword fight. I go to museums to look at armor. Let's face it-- my job is designing war robots.
And it's not the gore, either. Seeing a computer animation of someone's guts, or a rotting corpse, gives me about the same feeling as seeing gum stuck under a desk I am sitting at. Mild disgust, I suppose. I don't like gore, but it's just because it's ugly. I can't think of computer enemies as real.
The problem is the enemies distract me from my main purpose in a game. The enemies are like mosquitos, who annoy you until you manage to swat them away. I don't mind conflict in a story, but I wish it were something deeper and richer than erasing the things that bother you.
I think about my favorite games as a child. They fall into two categories: flying games and worlds to explore.
Dragonstrike and Wing Commander were very similar in every way except that one was fantasy and the other science fiction. In both games, you flew a series of combat missions, accompanied by friends who might die along the way. I did care about the story. The most important point was the flying, having that freedom to move through the world. In both games, I developed a technique to get rid of enemies. I would fly as fast as I could in one direction, so that they would follow directly behind me. Then, knowing exactly where they were, I would flip around and tag them before they could change course. What I liked about it was that it always worked.
The exploration games were Ultima VI and VII, Indiana Jones and the Search for at Atlantis and the Last Crusade. These games had hand to hand combat, but only if you couldn't figure out another way. My favorite strategy was to carry around barrels so that I could set up a barricade, and fire in range weapons. It was just a way of getting rid of the mosquitos. what I liked was how vast the world was. If there had been nothing to defeat, just mysteries to solve, I think I would have been as happy.
Two fun games that I've found recently were Crayon Physics Deluxe and Scribblenauts. Both games give you almost complete freedom to explore. In Crayon Physics, anything you draw takes on physical properties. In Scribblenauts, any word you type appears as an object in the game.
What I would like to see is this kind of freedom combined with a rich, beautiful world to explore. It's cool that they can make realistic modern cities for games like Arkham City or Grand Theft Auto, but most real cities are kind of ugly. I want to go somewhere beautiful, and not have to fight anyone when I'm there.

Jobs in Ten Years

2011-10-05T06:33:00.000-07:00

Interested
In order for computers to generate compelling content, they must have a model of what humans find interesting or beautiful. The only way to get this model is by measuring how interesting humans find particular images. In the old days this was done by measuring ratings, but it was found much more effective to measure cortical response to images directly. This can be done so quickly that it can take place even before conscious awareness takes place. The Interest workers spend (a government mandated no more than) eight hours a day wearing a skullcap, watching movies that look something like Koyaanisqatsi sped up by 50 times.

Intrader
Prediction markets are now big business, attracting both individuals and corporate algorithmic models. An intrader pursues up-to-the-millisecond news (largely through harvesting social networking updates) about a particular topic of interest, whether it be sports, celebrity babies, local politics, or box-office returns, and translates that news into what amounts to bets on the likelihood of these events happening.

Dreamer
The advent of brain scans able to recognize mental imagery has led to the ability to record dreams and imagined events. While a few prefer the unedited content, most of these dreams are heavily edited to provide a semblance of story. The technique has also influenced more mainstream filmmaking. Professional dreamers sometimes use "lucid dreaming" techniques, but purists prefer dreams directed solely by the subconscious. Being a professional dreamer is a lot like being a professional artist; very few make any money at it, but for some it is a calling. Ability to form mental imagery varies widely; 15% of the population are found to generate no mental images of any kind. It has surprisingly little effect on everyday abilities.

Do you have any other suggestions?

Ender's Game Movie

2011-09-30T05:33:00.000-07:00

I'm so excited about the upcoming Ender's Game movie!!!! A few things people have said make me a little nervous, though. Apparently:

The kids in battle school all have psychic powers from being so smart, like telepathy and starting fires
Valentine isn't the sister anymore, but the love interest, and she's like a karate champion
There's a scene where Ender decides he's going to break all the rules at battle school, so he puts on a leather jacket and sunglasses and they play "Bad to the Bone" in the background.
Bean is now the comic relief, with a lot of dwarf-throwing jokes
Instead of launching the Dr. Device, Ender now wins through concentrating hard on the power of love
Ender now has a CG alien pet that hangs around and says things in a funny accent (voice acted by Eddie Murphy)
M. Night Shyamalan rewrote all the dialogue
All the children in battle school are now American, but there's diversity because one is a jock, and one is a nerd, and one is a preppy, and one is a goth
Ender's punny catchphrases whenever he defeats someone
The formics now look like normal bald people with insect wings, and their queen is played almost exactly like Morgan Le Fay in the Merlin TV movie, including her loyal henchman and evil 1960s eye makeup
The battle room scenes aren't in zero-G but in a regular gym, because Nike wanted to do product placement

Ars Hermetica

2011-09-25T07:09:00.000-07:00

My brother and I have been discussing creating a new game. The game would be a type of tabletop role-playing game, like Dungeons and Dragons. But rather than just being set in a magical version of the medieval world, the game itself would pretend to be an artifact from that world. What if role-playing games were invented by alchemists in 1200, instead of Gary Gygax et. al. in the 1960s and 70s?
Here are a few aspects of the game we've discussed:
The play would occur within a "memory palace" invented by one of the players. The Ars Memoria was a classical technique for memorization that involved creating an imaginary city, and populating it with fantastic images, creatures, and monuments, in order to learn something by heart. It became associated with magic during the middle ages.
Encounters would be resolved by various divination techniques. These could include dice, but geomancy, cards, sheep knuckles, or astrology are also possibilities. In this period, even games like chess and nine-men's morris were invested with mystical significance and divinatory properties. The players would have supposed that the events being described were not fiction, but actually occuring in some ethereal world, and that by sympathetic magic, moving tokens about would allow the players to bring about their ends in that other world.
The "monster manual" would be a variation on the medieval bestiary.
The magic system, maps, and so forth would be based on real sources.
The manuals that you would use to play with would all be made to look like ancient books. (Ideally it would all be in Latin, but I think we would have to compromise, here.)

Playground games

2011-09-25T07:07:00.000-07:00

I got a couple of books on playground games and children's oral culture for Christmas, and it occured to me that I might write down some of the oral culture that I still remember. These were from Redford, Michigan, between the years 1980-1987, when I was five to twelve years old.

Rock-paper-scissors, mostly just played as a game for its own sake, rather than to pick who got to do something.

Counting out games
Eenie-meenie-miney-moe, catch a tiger by the toe, if he hollers, let him go, eenie-meenie-miney-moe.
(I understand this may have developed from the special counting terms use by shepherds in Scotland.)
Inkadink a bottle of ink, cork fell out and you stink. Not because you're dirty, not because you're clean, just because you kissed a girl behind the magazine.
Bubble-gum, bubble-gum in a dish. How many pieces do you wish?
All of these rhymes were using archaic language: we didn't say "holler," we said "yell." We didn't use bottles of ink. We would say, "how many pieces of gum do you want?"

Songs, mostly parodies using a known tune
Jingle Bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg. Batmobile lost its wheel and the joker got away, Hey!
On top of spaghetti, all covered with cheese, I lost my poor meatball, when somebody sneezed.

Clapping games (I never learned them, but the girls would play them often.)
Hello operator, give me number nine, and if you disconnect me, I'll chop off your behind the frigerator, I found a piece of glass...

Four Square
The most important rule of four square was that the person in the highest position got to call out all the rules: he was King. He or she could make up whatever rules he wanted, and many had specific names, like "bobbling" meant bouncing the ball up and down in your hands. In a way it was a game about making rules for games.

Paper-folding
Mostly paper airplanes and fortune-tellers

What do you remember learning from other children, rather than at school, or from books?

The Fly

2011-09-16T10:40:00.000-07:00

There was a short-lived cartoon called Sectaurs in 1984 that got me thinking about what the proper way is to map people onto flies. I was quite fond of the action figures. Basically, an accident causes a kind of half human, half-fly creature to emerge. For some reason, the shock of this idea really caught my imagination at age 9. I still remember thinking some of this through on the long school bus ride home.

One of the first things I realized about it was that the concept of "average" I had been taught was the wrong way to go about finding out the height and weight of the monster. Suppose a person is 100x as big as a fly. Then the monster, I reasoned, should be 10x as big as a fly, and 10x as small as a person. The concept I was groping towards was the geometric mean.
Later, as I learned more about evolutionary development (as a kid I also found pictures of fetal development fascinating and grotesque in exactly the same sort of way as crossing people with bugs) I learned that the eyes of a human are not developed from the same part of the embryo as the compound eyes of a fly. Human eyes are, morphologically speaking, an extension of part of the brain. Fly eyes, on the other hand, have more to do with skin and hair cells.
The other interesting fact from evolutionary development I learned more recently. In humans, our spinal column is in our back. In insects, it runs down the belly. But they are caused by the same sets of genes at the beginning stages of embryonic development. Basically, the vertebrate body plan and the insect body plan are upside down from each other: our backs are their bellies. I can't see how including these facts in the next remake of The Fly would make it any less successful at being a horror movie!

Here's a reference for that last bit about the dorsal/ventral flip.

Advice for a high school senior

2011-09-12T09:21:00.000-07:00

In general:
You will soon have an enormous amount of freedom to determine the course of your life. This is more freedom than you will know what to do with. You have to understand that the world is not set up to help you or harm you. Society is like the laws of nature: it simply doesn't care about you. If you want something out of life -- love, or money, or happiness, or success -- it is your job, your constant job from now on, to figure out how to get that from the system. You've got to wrestle those things out of the ground.
Now this having been said, you also should realize that it's all life. All the good parts of life and the bad parts are all mixed together. We all make terrible decisions with lifelong consequences and have brilliant accidents and friends die and children are born. That's just the kind of thing life is. Don't beat yourself up about it too much.
You need to make plans, and you need to work and think and fight harder than you ever thought you would need to to make them happen. But no matter what happens, good or bad, experience it -- accept it -- instead of wishing so hard that it was something different that you are angry about it all the time.

About jobs:
As nearly as I can tell, no one has ever gotten a job worth having by going to a jobs website and applying for something that fit their qualifications. It may have happened, but I've never heard of it. Instead, what happens is this: you get to know people, who find out that you are reasonably clever and not prone to yelling. You let them know you are looking for a job. When their other friends need to hire someone, your friends mention that they know a guy. This leads to an entirely different sort of interview. The first kind of interview they assume they won't hire you, and they don't. The second kind of interview they assume they will hire you and they do.
This is why you should do internships and volunteer and write open-source software and generally get yourself into rooms with grown-ups who can see you are a competent sort of person. It's a random and unpredictable process so try to get in as many of these situations as you can.

The Rectangular Express

2011-08-11T14:54:00.001-07:00

LDS Animal Research

2011-07-25T04:43:00.000-07:00

The Foundation for Animal Research and Church Education has just posted the latest issue of their journal, detailing the research they have been performing over the last few years. If you're in the Provo area you can drop in and see their lab! A few highlight papers:

" Homeostasis of frogs in water with a temporal temperature gradient"

"Simian fruit grasping reflex through a narrow channel"

"Crab king-of-the-hill behaviors in bucket conditions: a retrospective survey"

Do you have any favorites to add?

The Mountains of the Moon

2011-06-30T06:32:00.000-07:00

Early depictions of the moon show it as a colorful body, but at least dating back to the 1969 moon landing, the moon has been entirely black and white. Some believe this desaturation was caused by the television cameras used at that time; others believe the cause is related to the belief systems of ghosts.

Unenforced rules

2011-06-13T09:23:00.000-07:00

When I was in junior high school, the lunchline had a no-cutting rule. But this rule was routinely flouted, and friends would often let their friends cut in line. The problem got so bad that those of us who obeyed the rule would often have trouble finishing lunch in time.
I realized something general about the situation, and I think it is a little bit of wisdom: unenforced rules are a punishment on people who obey rules. If you create a rule but don't enforce it, you are attacking those who are inclined to be on your side, and helping those who will get away with whatever they can. If this goes on to long, people will start to switch camps. Far better not to have a rule at all, if you are unable to enforce it consistently.

Perpetuum Mobile

2011-05-12T06:57:00.000-07:00

"Gary's mod" is a modification of a video game engine to include some aspects of mechanics. By exploiting the fact that you can build a box of water with an open bottom where the water doesn't all pour out, the author of this video built a perptual motion machine in that game world.

In AI we often model our problems as "energy minimization." You can turn that around and say that nature solving an energy minimization problem is acting artificially intelligent. That's why perpetual motion machines are interesting, even though they never work: no matter how clever we are, nature always figures out ways to make them not work consistent with the laws of physics. Nature always "outwits" us.

The country where blood is taught

2011-03-20T11:05:00.001-07:00

As I was journeying through that country, I met an old man who told me of his home in a distant province. In that land, they believe that certain diseases are dangerous ideas that flow not from one mind to another, but through the blood. And just as in our own country we conspire to tell children stories so that when they are adults they will be able to recognize the signs of a widespread conspiracy, so too in that province they spread a harmless amount of diseased blood into their children to protect them against the full disease. But he says that a certain part of the population has caught a disease of the mind which causes them to be frightened of this process, and so leave their children vulnerable. I suggested to him that the young children could be taught about the spread of disease in schools, so that they would be able to withstand the spread of the fear when it was carried to them as adults, an idea which had never occurred to him.

The origins of VX Modules in the 1700s

2011-03-07T09:27:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to trace the origins of the theory of VX modules, given the obvious connection between VX experimenters and artificial creativity research. Take a look at the following graph (from Google's n-gram server, on the search term 'VX'):

Apparently the VX community was more active in the late 1700s than it is was as recently as the 1980s! If we take a look at some of the titles from that period, it's obvious that these are actually work with the foundations of geometric and analytic Froebinius encabulators and tetrodyne fluxions rather than what we would today consider to be directions of serious research (such as the ennervation of Mornington Crescents), but still, the topic was clearly leading to the modern approach:

A treatise on Fluxions: or, an introduction to mathematical philosophy

Sectionum conicarum elementa: novo methodo demonstrada

The Doctrine of Ultimators: containing a new acquisition to mathematical literature naturally resulting from the consideration of an equation as reducible from its variable to its ultimate state: Or a discovery...

More about Kepler Worlds

2011-02-03T05:52:00.000-08:00

Most of the news you will see is about the 6 planet system that NASA played up. But they did find the earth-size planets in the habitable zone of the M dwarfs like I thought. The information about these has not yet been published as far as I can see, but oklo.org has a preview of the forthcoming paper. The best candidate is a .6 earth mass world (under reasonable assumptions based on it's radius being .89 earth radius) with an expected temperature of 332 Kelvin. That's 138 Farenheit-- a little hot, but these worlds are likely tidally locked, so have a side facing away from the sun which is much cooler. So the twilight zone on the planet may actually be okay for earthlike life. That paper will also talk about many other planets in the habitable zones, including some gas giants. If there is a way around the radiation problem, the moons of these worlds could, like Pandora or Endor, be habitable moons.
UPDATE: Here's the overview paper.
The planet discussed above is called KOI 326.01. KOI stands for Kepler Object of Interest. 326 is the number of the star, .01 means the first planet detected around that star.

This is the information about the star KOI 326:

Kepler object of interest # 326
Kepler Input Catalog #   9880467
Kepler magnitude   12.960
Photometric precision   189
Right ascension   19.11040
Declension    46.7835
stellar temperature   3240
log(gravity) of star  4.90
stellar radius    0.27
stellar mass    0.21

You can see that this star is about a quarter the size of the sun. You can also see where it is in the sky. I'll have to look around to see if I can find the distance in light years.

Kepler habitable worlds around M-dwarf stars to be announced on Wed.

2011-01-31T06:44:00.000-08:00

I was excited about the discovery of Gliese 581g a few months ago. Well, it turns out that planet may have been a statistical glitch and not actually exist. But that's okay. Because on Wednesday, the Kepler mission will announce their results from the first six months of observation (the release of the data has been delayed for a year from when it was captured because of researcher politics).
A planet like Earth around a star like our sun would need to have an orbit like Earth's to be habitable. By habitable, I mean not too hot (like Venus) or too cold (like Mars). But M dwarf stars (red dwarfs) are much smaller and cooler than the sun, so a planet getting the right amount of heat would be much closer, so that it's year would be about 1 earth-month long.
Kepler is observing 2460 M dwarf stars. (From this paper.) Of those stars, between 1 and 3 percent will have their solar systems lined up in the right way so that the planets will pass in front of the star. That makes about 50 systems. Of these, not all the systems will have a rocky planet with a gravity near our own in the habitable zone. But it seems reasonable to suspect that at least 10% of them will. Since Kepler has been observing for six months, all 5 of these planets will be observed crossing their star at least three times. M dwarfs are more variable than the sun, so the data is more noisy, but the more transits are observed, the more sure we can be that a planet really is in the place we think it is.
So my prediction is that on February second, the Kepler mission will announce not just one, but five potentially habitable worlds.
These worlds are likely tidally locked, so one side is always facing the star and the other is always facing away, in the same way that the moon is tidally locked to the Earth, so that we always see only one face. So I would say that the most likely candidates to actually be habitable (by Earthlings) would be ones with a little higher gravity than earth, so that they can sustain a thicker atmosphere better able to distribute heat around the planet. Since the greenhouse effect would make such planets hotter on average, we should choose the ones that are receiving a little less heat from their stars than Earth gets from the Sun.

Winter and Summer

2011-01-14T09:39:00.000-08:00

(With apologies to Mr. Whelan.)

Garbage, etc...

2010-12-16T07:04:00.000-08:00

I've always been a little annoyed by the phrase "Garbage In, Garbage Out." People tend to say it as if they've come up with something remarkably clever. I never hear actual programmers use it-- it would be like rabbits reminding each other to be careful of predators. I was pleased to see that Babbage felt the same way, referring to being questioned in Parliament:

"On two occasions I have been asked,—'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

The Ivory Tower

2010-12-14T14:50:00.000-08:00

"...in that country there live a great many elephants. They follow paths worn into the stone by unreckonable generations, and by these ways they come to a place called memorial, where the bones of their ancestors lay. It is a holy place to these animals, and the ritual is performed by them every year at the end of summer.
The people in that country have taken up the bones and built from them a high place. They surely have been building this memorial for many, many years; for at the foundation can be found the yellowed tusks and cracked femurs of mastodons. On all these bones are carved the names of the dead, and their deeds, and all that they would record. On the oldest bones these markings are barely discernible from the natural cracks in the bone, and indeed it is said that the first writing in that part of the world came from wise men who sought to divine the interpretation of these cracks.
As one climbs the spiral staircases of that place, the story of all the people from the very first can be read from the walls, the oldest at the foundation, and the most recent in the tusks that form the delicate arches of the roof.
Before the tower lies a deep quarry, from which is hewn layers of fossiliferous stone, and into which a mighty cataract pours. It is this stone that is used by all the people in the building of their homes, to keep them safe against the occasional storm and flood.

Those who study in that place are said to become able to hold it entirely within their minds, for it acts as a template on the memory. They become able to close their eyes and walk about it at will in their imagination, and read wisdom from the inscriptions on the walls. Thus dreamers are said to enter by the gate of ivory (ἐλέφας) and of horn (κέρας)."

favorite articles from The Onion

2010-11-27T03:12:00.000-08:00

This article about Obama made me want to share a few favorites from the Onion:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/stephen-hawking-builds-robotic-exoskeleton,1629/

http://www.theonion.com/articles/bill-gates-grants-self-18-dexterity-20-charisma,837/

http://www.theonion.com/articles/idaville-detective-encyclopedia-brown-found-dead-i,753/

http://www.theonion.com/articles/michael-phelps-returns-to-his-tank-at-sea-world,2515/
http://www.theonion.com/articles/archaeological-dig-uncovers-ancient-race-of-skelet,932/
You do need to be careful what you click at that site.

Visual Filters

2010-11-22T05:52:00.000-08:00

I'm working on ways to teach computers to assign labels to different parts of an image or video. The main tool I've been using is something we've dubbed a "visual filter."
Visual filters were originally thought up by Justin Domke, who called them a "Graphical Combination of Classifiers." Either name is an apt description, but some of this terminology is specific to the image and signal processing field, so I'll give a little background before I explain how this algorithm works.

Background:
If you remember back to high school algebra, a "function" can take several variables and gives as a result the unique value of a single variable. An image processing "filter" is a function in this sense. The variables it takes in are the colors of the pixels in a small window of an image, and the output is the color of a single pixel of the output. The filter scans the image, sliding across row after row, each time considering a region of the image that mostly overlaps with the regions it has already looked at. (If you want to know how a color can be an input variable, take a look at what I wrote here.)
Traditionally, filters have used fairly simple formulas to take these input colors and transform them into the output colors. (The "box blur," for example, simply takes the average of all the colors in the window and assigns it to the output.) That's why they are a fundamental tool in the image processing toolbox. Adobe Photoshop has a main menu entry called "Filters." If you want to blur an image, find the edges, or many other simple tasks, you would use a filter.
These filters used simple formulas because early computers had very limited memory and it took a long time to filter an image, because the same formula needed to be applied as many times as there are pixels in the image. So for a 1000 x 1000 (megapixel) image, that's a million times the variables need to be gathered from the sliding window and the formula need to be applied.

Visual Filters:
We wanted to build a filter that would take in a patch of an image, and color the output depending on what the window was centered on. For example, one color for "human," and another color for "anything else." No one knows what formula would be able to do this; it must be terribly complicated. But such a function must exist out there, out in Platonic space somewhere.
When scientists want to know what a function is that comes from the natural world, they gather data samples. For example, if you measure the height of a bouncing ball at various times, you can get a pretty good idea of the function that is describing how the ball bounces. In the same way, if we take a million sample windows and label them appropriately, it helps us to estimate the shape of that complicated hidden function. A shortcut to doing this is to take a bunch of images, create an appropriate label image, randomly take samples from the image, and assign the samples the label from that spot in the label image.
A naive solution to our problem, then, would be the following: slide the window along the image, and at each step, compare what is in the window to every sample you have that is labeled. Find the best match or matches, and assign that label to your result.
This would work, but the trouble is that the number of patches you would need is so absurdly high that you could never get enough. People can vary in lighting, in pose, in camera position, in appearance, in clothing, in age, in facial expression, and so forth. And even worse than that, the exact same sample from an image might be part of a person's shirt, or it might be part of a blanket on a bed. Without looking at the surrounding context, you would never know. So the algorithm needs a way to include context.

Including Context:
This is the really clever bit, in my opinion. For the first step, the program does the naive method, sliding the window and creating that output image by comparing what's in the window at each location to all the labeled samples. But then we go back, and define a new filter, a new function. This one takes in a window on the image, but also takes in a window from the same location on the previously generated output map. This map is far from perfect, but if even some of the pixels are correctly labeled, that context information can help each patch be better labeled the next time. (Since we have the labeled training images, we know what this map is supposed to look like for some images.) So we do this over and over on the training images, building up maybe five filters to be run in succesion, each time improving the output.
Finally, once we have these five succesive filters, we can run them on new images. As long as the new images are sufficiently similar to the training images, we can do a pretty good job of classifying every single pixel in that new image.

Details:
Instead of just taking the raw pixel values, we instead compress the information in such a way that it preserves similarity between patches. This can be done by turning the sample into a SIFT feature, or a multi-scale patch compressed using PCA, or creating features similar to those used by the human visual system (What Serre et. al. call "standard model features.") This serves two purposes: it lets us get away with fewer samples, and the individual samples don't take up as much memory.

Instead of searching for similar patches directly, we can train a classifier, using a neural net, for example.

The direct method could be considered a "non-parametric classifier." Of course we aren't just taking the best match, but an average of all the nearby matches weighted by similarity. We can interpolate between them in a more intelligent way, by using anisotropic kernels.
The nice thing about using the data directly is that it enables the program to handle as many classes as we want and to keep throwing in more and more data (until we run out of memory.) This is generally known as "the Google approach."
We could train it using motion data as well, to improve the results on video.

Results:
Two papers about this:
http://frederickfiat.com/doug/papers/

Some images (more to come soon-- check the papers for other examples):

Detecting head, arms, and legs. This was trained exclusively on sports images.

Detecting salient contours. This was trained on hand-labeled salient edge images. The point was mostly to show we could label edge-like features as well as regions.

Detecting trees. This was trained using labeled images from the LabelMe database.

Summers Stay Hotel

2010-11-05T00:47:00.000-07:00

The Summers Stay Hotel, also known as "Booked" is a hotel that is arranged like a library. Room numbers are according to the Dewey Decimal system, or by author's last name and genre, for the fiction section. Every wall of the hotel, both inside the rooms and out, is covered with bookshelves from ceiling to floor. The front desk looks like an information desk. There is no pool, but there is a children's room that has sliding ladders on the walls that can be brought up to high speed and crashed into each other (padded, of course.) When you "check out" from the hotel, they allow you to borrow a book for one year, hoping that you will return it the next year for another vacation stay.
The hotel has been so successful the owners are expanding to a cruise zepplin. "Booked Passage" has rooms of much the same sort, but will slowly float between major university libraries around the world.

It turns out that someone else has had much the same idea, and such a hotel actually exists in NYC: http://www.libraryhotel.com/facts/index.cfm

Alignments

2010-11-02T04:35:00.000-07:00

One thing about Dungeons and Dragons that really appealed to me was the way it imposed a game structure-- a simplification, an ordering-- on life as a whole. It allowed me to think about philosophy, character, and story by making it simple enough to approach one piece at a time. Of course any simplification is a distortion; compression inevitably introduces artifacts. But the model is at worst merely wrong; without any model our ideas are "not even wrong." The D&D version of philosophy makes falsifiable predictions, so is useful as a starting point for thinking about these kinds of issues.
You see a lot of D&D type simplifying of the world in 1600-1900 European modernist philosophy. It's all binary oppositions and the imposition of an oversimplified order. Since their invention as a kind of small-scale wargame, tabletop roleplaying games have since moved in a more postmodern direction, emphasizing narrative and creativity, areas where they still hold the edge over digital RPGs.

(I am going to use all male examples below, but looking at the difference between how male and female characters in fiction realize these archetypes differently would itself be interesting.)

Lawful Good versus Chaotic Good: I think this is essentially a religious question. A rational atheist may believe that laws are useful for society as a whole, but at any point his decision to follow a particular law depends on the law's utility. He may recognize that following the law as a default behavior avoids having to make difficult moral computations that can be paralyzing, but if he thinks breaking a law will serve a higher good (even after weighing its effect on society), he will do so. A true anarchist can be chaotic good since he only wants everyone to be equal (an-archy). This is the Superman vs. Batman conflict.

Chaotic Neutral: This is Captain Jack Sparrow, or Coyote the trickster god. His goals are often selfish and he carelessly hurts others; but he is not actively seeking power. He doesn't actively oppress others. I think a lawful good character would judge that a chaotic neutral character, by not being lawful good, is in fact evil. Personally, I thought that the point of Pirates of the Caribbean was to make a comedy about alignment. You have lawful good characters who gradually become neutral or even chaotic good. There are also lawful evil characters, who are fairly rare in fiction, and a lot of the interpersonal conflict is driven by these differences in alignment.

Lawful evil versus chaotic evil: The lawful evil character is an authoritarian. He wants there to be an order, but he wants it to be his order. A lawful evil character is without mercy, but not without justice. I think of Javere the policeman from Les Miserables. The chaotic evil character is a monster, a predator. The Joker from The Dark Knight and Grendel fall into this category.

Lawful neutral: I think a realistically portrayed robot would necessarily be lawful neutral. For example, the terminator in the first film (despite its glowing red eyes and mean eyebrows) is actually lawful neutral. It appears evil to the characters in the film because the law it is following (its programming) pays no attention to morality, which for a person would in itself be evil (because part of our morality is innate and must be actively rejected.) But for the robot there is nothing but the law.

Here is a pretty good website, if you like this sort of thing:
http://easydamus.com/alignmenthpc.html

All this also brings to mind one of my favorite comics:
http://dresdencodak.com/2006/12/03/dungeons-and-discourse/ and
http://dresdencodak.com/2009/01/27/advanced-dungeons-and-discourse/

A singular quote

2010-09-21T09:28:00.000-07:00

The "Singularity" is the idea that once we have built an artificial intelligence that is as good at programming (and thinking and invention in general) as a human, then it will be able to invent a still more powerful machine by itself, which will lead to an explosion in AI capability. (For instance, Deep Thought in the Hitchhiker's Guide series.)
Anyway, today I came across this quote which seems to be the earliest expression of the idea anyone has found yet: The Primitive Expounder in 1847. The author has his tongue-in-cheek, but he is also probably one of the first to worry about allowing calculators in the public schools:

"A Thinking Machine! Yes, we can now have our thinking done for us by machinery! The Editor of the Common School Advocate says—" On our way to Cincinnati, a few days since, we stopped over night where a gentleman from the city was introducing a machine which he said was designed to supercede the necessity and labor of thinking. It was highly and respectably recommended, by men too in high places, and is designed for a calculator, to save the trouble of all mathematical labor. By turning the machinery it produces correct results in addition, substraction, multiplication, and division, and the operator assured us that it was equally useful in fractions and the higher mathematics." The Editor thinks that such machines, by which the scholar may, by turning a crank, grind out the solution of a problem without the fatigue of mental application, would by its introduction into schools, do incalculable injury, But who knows that such machines when brought to greater perfection, may not think of a plan to remedy all their own defects and then grind out ideas beyond the ken of mortal mind!"

Magic

2010-07-25T16:09:00.000-07:00

As I was walking by the banks of the Seine, I saw a woman bend over as if to pick up something from the ground. Through some sleight of hand, she produced a large golden ring and lifted it from the sidewalk.
"Is this yours?" she asked a passerby, a tourist, in accented English. The man shook his head and began to walk on.
"Do you think it is gold?" she asked, handing it to him. He looked at it casually. It was shiny and brand new.
"I don't know," he said. "Could be." he handed it back.
"Is too big for me," she said, slipping it over her finger. It was clearly a man's ring.
"You can have it," she said. "I will give it to you. To remember your lucky day in Paris." She smiled broadly at him. Her hair was unkempt, and one eye looked off to the side. But she had a charming smile.
"Thank you," he said genuinely, smiling back, handling the ring. She walked on a few steps, and then turned.
"Could you give me some money for lunch, maybe?" She asked, her cheeks flushing.
"Sure," he said, and pulled out his wallet. He handed her a five Euro note. She looked embarrassed but said, "Maybe five more Euros?"
He bit his lower lip, hesitating for a moment, but then handed over another bill. "Here you go," he said.
They walked on, he more slowly than she.
I knew what was happening and what was going to happen. I have read enough books to know how these things play out. It was only later, on the plane, that I realized that it was probably worth it to him, ten Euros, for a moment with a magician, and a smile, and a shiny ring.

From a Midrash on Goodnight Moon

2010-06-20T04:34:00.000-07:00

"While the source-critical debate over Goodnight Moon never reached the heightened pitch of the argument over the Torah’s multiple authors ... the question of whether Goodnight Moon has one, three or more authors continues to keep scholars up past their bedtime. Can a work that clearly owes so much to the Ugaritic psalm, ‘I see the moon and the moon sees me,’ really have been written by a Manhattan socialite? Most scholars take Margaret Wise Brown” as stand-in for a postulated committee of at least three authors.
Clearly most of the book consists of a “doublet,” that is, two versions of the same tale repeated. For convenience, we designate the first section, which announced the existence of the objects in the room, as E; the second, in which the objects are greeted “Goodnight room....” is designated G. Yet the repeating motifs of the Cow Jumping over the Moon and the Three Little Bears speak to a separate awareness of European folktales....."

Excerpt from http://www.shmoozenet.com/yudel/mtarchives/pix/Sham05.pdf

The Future Affects the Present and Affected the Past

2010-06-02T17:36:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking about how many of the struggles of the last few centuries were because of a belief of one form or another in a prediction about the future. There was "Manifest Destiny" in the U.S. There was the establishment of the state of Israel, at the heart of the middle east conflict. I don't know enough about how the ideas of Nietzsche and Hegel were adopted by the Germans to say for certain, but I have the impression they saw German domination of the world and eugenics as a historical inevitability that they were working out. Certainly the Communists believed that laws of human nature led inevitably to the conclusion that there would be a revolution and that Communism would eventually encompass the earth. All of these are beliefs about how the future would necessarily play out, science fictions that profoundly altered the unfolding of history by being widely believed.
The idea of population explosion in the 60s and 70s, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, current beliefs about global warming-- all these ideas seem to be based on a belief that we can accurately say what will happen, that we can extrapolate. Not to say that these ideas are right or wrong, just that I find it interesting that the belief that they are right is a powerful force in historical events.

Poetry as checksums

2010-04-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

When you're sending information over a noisy channel, it helps to send an extra byte every so often to make sure what you've sent so far was right. It occured to me that poetry contains this redundant information, in the form of the rhyming words at the end of lines (or other structural regularities in the text.) If the words match, you know you remembered the line correctly. This makes poetry easier to memorize and pass down from one person to the next, which was especially important in pre-literate societies.

Living with a limited brain

2010-04-17T07:10:00.000-07:00

Some interesting research has come out recently about the processing capacity of brains. For example, that the medial prefrontal cortex can only handle two tasks at once, or that working memory can only handle about 7 items at a time (but what's an item?), or that when people are actively trying to remember something complicated, their impulse control is reduced. In fact, there has been a lot of research showing that exerting the will to make a difficult decision uses a fuel resource (sugar from the blood) that many of these other tasks also need.

What happens when these resources are used up? When we have been thinking too hard, or have been under heavy stress, or haven't had enough to eat or sleep, or are trying to remember too many things, or are trying to drive, or need a fix,we fall back on a simpler part of the brain. We lose the ability to think rationally, to choose future benefit over immediate reward; the ability to choose at all is reduced. We become irritable, forgetful, angry, quick to argue.
I think one way to sell people things is to push them into this state of mental fatigue, so that they are more likely to make impulse decisions. (Hence the TVs blaring advertisements at Walmart, or timeshare presentations.) I think it would be a good idea to plan our lives with these limitations in mind. It can be very hard to see it happening to ourselves as it does; it just seems like everything is more irritating. Other people see it as a bad mood.

Book of Life

2010-04-16T15:20:00.000-07:00

There is a curious analogy between paleontology and biblical archaeology.
In archaeology, you have the ruins of Jericho that can be dug up, and they're basically unchanged: some pieces may have been carried off by scavengers, and all the soft parts have dissolved, but basically the stone has been buried in the desert for a long time, and the archaeologist digs it up and makes guesses about it.
Along with that, the cultures involved are all still alive, still driving world history. So there's another source of information about the cultures that we can get through studying living languages, living cultures, and the text that holds them together. The text itself has undergone edits, transpositions, errors, but manages to be maintained more or less intact through a process of careful copying and fact checking.
We can dig up the bones of dinosaurs and make guesses about them, and try to reconstruct them that way. Or we can look at the creatures descended from them, the birds, and study what has become of bird ways of life. And then there's the text, the bible of the saurischians, their DNA: which has been modified to suit the times, edited, miscopied, but thanks to the error checking molecules still contains in it most of the information about what dinosaurs were like, if we can learn to interpret the language its written in.

Special effects

2010-03-27T18:14:00.000-07:00

I was planning to use "blue-screen" mattes as training data for my computer vision algorithms, and as I was reading up on the history of matting, it occurred to me I had seen this all before: special effects are a pre-digital way of doing things that really ought to be done digitally. It has that same marvelous haphazard cobbled together feel that all the pre-electronic information processing devices did, which are so lovely because you can see how all the parts work, just by looking at them carefully.

Math Geek Valentines

2010-03-04T14:59:00.000-08:00

Roses are red

Violets are purple

HP-48's

Are programmed in RPL

Roses are rose

Violets are violet

Penrose's plane:

Aperiodically tile it

Roses are red
Violets are bluish
Parallelograms
Are rectangles skewished

.

moon art

2010-03-02T04:14:00.000-08:00

Some of my art, created using Fourier transforms.

Monsters

2010-02-27T04:05:00.000-08:00

One of my earliest memories, from when I was three or four years old, is sitting on the sidewalk, looking at the house across the street. I believed that monsters lived there. These monsters looked like ordinary people (in fact I don't recall having met them personally) but what they were supposed to do was the opposite of what we were supposed to do. Their parents told them to be mean to other people, and not to share, and to mess up their rooms. This last one seemed particularly unfair, as their job seemed so much easier than mine.
There are a couple of things that strike me now, looking back on that:
1. I thought that cleaning one's room was a key part of moral behavior, and that not cleaning my room was immoral. When I read Seventh Son in junior high, the idea that people who invented things and made artwork were good, and that evil was the Unmaker really resonated with me. I think the two had something to do with each other.
2. At age three I was speculating on the possibility that moral requirements are different for people in other cultures, and that other cultures were monstrous. Even much later, into high school, the explanation I gave myself for the way people behaved towards me was that most people were actually trolls. This wasn't meant literally, but simply to convey that their minds were as different from my own as another hominid species that would think nothing of feasting on human flesh.
For example: why would they drive past me, a pedestrian, and yell out the window rude comments as they drove by? I understood, intellectually, that this must somehow be an activity that caused them pleasure, since it caused them to laugh, but I was completely perplexed by it on an emotional level. Or in study hall-- why would everyone want to spend the whole time talking, and have to be repeatedly punished to get them to stop? Why didn't they want to sit quietly and draw aliens in their trapper keeper? It must be that their minds were organized completely differently than my own. And why did they enjoy anything having to do with sports? They couldn't be wrong in an absolute sense, since they were clearly in the majority, yet it never occured to me that I might be strange, only that I was living in an entire world of monsters. This perplexity kept me socially isolated and unhappy in school a lot of the time.
3. The idea that a rule to mess up your room instead of cleaning it was much easier to live by finally made sense when I learned about entropy when I was about eleven. (Not from school, of course.) Everything wants to get messy, and everything we do to fix it makes things worse somewhere else. The concept fascinated me, especially when I learned about the connections with information theory.

Aggregating risk

2010-02-19T08:44:00.000-08:00

I'm sure this is common knowledge for finance majors, but it seemed like a surprising conclusion to me.

Suppose you have the opportunity to take a risk-- the price is $1000, and there is a 1 in 1000 chance of winning $2,000,000. The "expected value" of this is $2000, but I would still argue that it would be a bad idea for most people to take this risk. It's hard to come up with $1000, and chances are you would never hit the jackpot your whole life.

On the other hand, suppose you have the resources of a bank at your disposal: $100,000,000. If you played this game 100,000 times with that money, you would win around 100 times. You would be virtually certain of approximately doubling your money. Your chance of not getting back more than you spent is tiny. It would be very foolish not to take this risk.

Isn't it odd that doing something once is a bad idea, but doing it 100,000 times is a good idea?

(Of course in the real world, risks aren't usually independent rolls of the dice like this but are correlated, which explains how the recent mortgage securities crash was possible.)

The Country of Engravings

2010-02-07T08:41:00.000-08:00

In that country, a system of trade has developed which is unique among the lands I have visited. I have had to reconstruct the history, as it is no longer remembered, but it seems it must have been as follows:
Certain artists found it convenient to trade their paintings and drawings for shelter and food. This arrangement worked well, and the artists began to make compact and portable drawings that they could carry on their persons, to use for trade in such places as they found themselves.

A certain artist, an engraver by trade, printed up engravings of a popular sort and used these in place of drawings, finding the production of them more simple. Others found such a system sensible, and they too became engravers, to the point that much of the country was engaged in creating engravings, and very few in the labors that benefit society materially. When the situation had grown untenable, a solution was proposed that a single printer could handle all of the work, freeing up other artists time to spend on gardening and so forth. This solution was universally acclaimed, and the work was given to one indivdual, in the employ of society as a whole. To further save effort, he chose to only produce a few engravings, though in such prodigous quantities that there were enough for all who desired them. The artwork itself, though very carefully executed, soon grew unappealing through too much repitition, but the system was so much of an improvement of the previous system that few complained.

The Art Notorious

2010-02-07T08:02:00.000-08:00

Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516) was an abbot in Germany. He wrote a three volume work entitled Steganographia. On the surface, it appears to be a magic text, demonstarting through the use of prayers, long lists of the names of angels and demons, and tables of astrological data, one can send messages without any possibility of interception. He became a major influence of later magicians and students of the occult. It was only many years later that people realized that his books were ciphertexts-- encoded messages. The lists of names and tables of numbers stood for letters in secret messages.

Another medieval magic text was the Art Notorious, or Art of Memory. It promised, among other things, to give the reader the power to commit to memory any text, no matter how long. This was done by imagining (or actually) walking through a vast cathedral or magical symbol, and at each stop associating the place with the words to be remembered. It also contained this tongue twister that was supposed to be a prayer/spell to give the reader eloquence:

Thezay lemach ossanlomach azabath azach azare gessemon relaame azathabelial biliarsonor tintingote amussiton sebamay halbuchyre gemaybe redayl hermayl textossepha pamphilos Cytrogoomon bapada lampdayochim yochyle tahencior yastamor Sadomegol gyeleiton zomagon Somasgei baltea achetom gegerametos halyphala semean utangelsemon barya therica getraman sechalmata balnat hariynos haylos halos genegat gemnegal saneyalaix samartaix camael satabmal simalena gaycyah salmancha sabanon salmalsay silimacroton zegasme bacherietas zemethim theameabal gezorabal craton henna glungh hariagil parimegos zamariel leozomach rex maleosia mission zebmay aliaox gemois sazayl neomagil Xe Xe Sepha caphamal azeton gezain holhanhihala semeanay gehosynon caryacta gemyazan zeamphalachin zegelaman hathanatos, semach [106] gerorabat syrnosyel, halaboem hebalor halebech ruos sabor ydelmasan falior sabor megiozgoz neyather pharamshe forantes saza mogh schampeton sadomthe nepotz minaba zanon suafnezenon inhancon maninas gereuran gethamayh passamoth theon beth sathamac hamolnera galsemariach nechomnan regnali phaga messyym demogempta teremegarz salmachaon alpibanon balon septzurz sapremo sapiazte baryon aria usyon sameszion sepha athmiti sobonan Armissiton tintingit telo ylon usyon, Amen.
What interests me about all of these magic books is that they actually would have worked. Trithemius's book did send undetectable messages, the Art of Memory did increase the ability to remember, and the spell for eloquence really would have been good practice for speaking.

What they have in common is that they were magic about the mind. Magic words can affect reality, but only by passing through a mind into a body and out into the world. The act of speaking "I do" creates a real and permanent change in the world if spoken during the proper ceremony, along with the rings of binding.

When people say that magic is only an illusion, or a trick, they're missing the point. Creating the illusion in people's minds is the magic.

My Painting

2010-02-04T03:59:00.000-08:00

(Click image to view full size)

This combines my sketch filter (for the prominent under-drawing), a watershed algorithm (to reduce the number of colors), a brushstroke filter, and a canvas texture.

Photoshop Bugs

2010-01-31T01:25:00.000-08:00

I've been using Photoshop for one thing or another for more than ten years. It's an indispensable tool. But the lack of any decent competition (yes, I know about Gimp and Paint.net, thank you) has left Adobe with no incentive to improve. They still add features, but in a haphazard way that leaves the menus not making any sense. The 16-bit processing is restricted in odd ways, so that they include a photo editor with a completely different interface before you even get into Photoshop. Once you're in Photoshop, you can't manipulate the hidden information that is too bright or too dark to be represented within eight bits.
But what really annoy me are the longstanding bugs. Some of these have been around since Photoshop 4.0 at least (We're now on 11.0, by the old count.) Here are three:

The cursor bug: Sometimes, the cursor tool will change from a circle showing the size of the brush to a cross-hair showing the center of the brush. The way to fix it is to go into File>Edit>Preferences, and change the Painting Cursors from "Normal Brush Tip" to "Precise Brush Tip." Yes, that's the opposite of what you want to accomplish.

The color matching bug: When using Image>Adjustments>Match Color, it's supposed to work like this: you select a region from one image, you select a region from another image, and the colors in the second image are bent to match the corresponding colors in the first image. It works perfectly, and gives beautiful results that would be hard to accomplish by tweaking the curves. The trouble is when you try to apply the remapping to the whole image, by checking "Ignore Selection When Applying Adjustment." When you do this, the colors within the selection change radically. It comes up with a new mapping, that is always worse than the mapping before the box was checked. I don't care what mapping you apply to the gamut of colors not included in my selection, Adobe: leave them alone, map them all to purple, whatever, I can cope. But the colors that are included in my selection, when I check that box, LEAVE THE MAPPING ALONE. IT WORKS FINE.

The Anisotropic Diffusion bug: Hidden away as a bullet on an otherwise useless filter (Filter>Stylize>Diffuse) is the anisotropic diffusion filter. This can be very useful for preventing jaggies when an image is enlarged, or for painterly effects. It basically smooths along edges, never across them. The trouble is, it is applied to a small region (368 pixel by 90 pixel strips) at a time. This leaves an edge which is treated differently between the two regions. It's done for speed and memory reasons. I think they've improved this one, but it's still present.

My hope is that Adobe will somehow come across this post and fix the bugs. I've also submitted them to their bug report website. But I'm not holding my breath.

Six Signs the Circle

2010-01-30T07:03:00.000-08:00

   When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back;
   Three from the circle, three from the track;
   Wood, bronze, iron; water, fire, stone;
   Five will return, and one go alone.

   Iron for the birthday, bronze carried long;
   Wood from the burning, stone out of song;
   Fire in the candle ring, water from the thaw;
   Six Signs the circle, and the grail gone before.

From the time I first read it, Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising was one of my favorite books. In the book, a young boy must find six signs of power in order to stop the advance of the darkness. At the time, I tried to make my own six signs. I whittled one out of pine, I glued some plastic jewels onto a gold colored canning jar lid, I scraped a pattern into the glass bottom of a bottle that my dad sawed off for me, and I tried to make another out of a stone ashtray from Pier One Imports. That was a long time ago, and I don't have any idea where those are any more, though I surely never threw them away. I also made a mask from feathers and antlers for my brother Steve's birthday, and included a note similar to the one Will receives in the book from his brother.

My brother David never forgot that I wanted a set of these, and for the last three years has been secretly working on making me the ones you see above (click the pictures to enlarge). These are made from the real materials (or nearly) and were crafted by hand.

Iron: "a kind of ornament, made of black metal, a flat circle quartered by two crossed lines. It was about the size of his palm, and quite heavy; roughly forged out of iron, he guessed, with no sharp points or edges." This was cut from a cast-iron pan. Afterwards it was seasoned in the oven, to turn it black.

Bronze: "a quartered circle identical with the one he wore on his belt, but gleaming with the dull brown-gold sheen of bronze." This was made by melting down thrift-store candlesticks in a homemade forge (blown air from a hairdryer helped the fire to burn hot enough.) The molten metal was poured into a plaster mold.

Wood: "Our wood is one which the dark does not love. Rowan, Will, that's our tree. Mountain ash... the skeleton of the wooden piece was left: a clear, smooth circle...there was no irregularity to it at all." This was carved from a piece of rowan, and oiled to make it glow.

Water: "It was wrought of iridescent glass, engraved with serpents and eels and fishes, waves and clouds and things of the sea." This one was made of molten glass poured into a sand mold. It looks like ice from the shore of a lake. It broke in the mail, but I fit all the pieces together and am going to glue them.

Fire: "Gold of several different colors had been beaten together with great craftsmanship to make its crossed circle shape, and on all sides it was set with tiny gems, rubies and emeralds and sapphires and diamonds, in strange runic patterns." This sign is made of solid gold, which of course was impossible, so he cast it out of lead and covered it with gold leaf. It is very heavy in the hand, but David pointed out that gold would be more than half again as heavy as lead. Around the side are the words in old English "LIHT MEC HEHT GEWRYCAN," which means "The Light ordered that I should be made."

Stone: "this was a natural flint, grown in the Chiltern chalk fifteen million years ago." This was carved from soapstone, which is the easiest stone to carve.

I told David that this was the best present I could think of. Here are some pictures of the making process. Note that it's my Dad's homemade forge. I think it's a metal bucket with concrete lining the inside, and a hole to blow are in the bottom with the blowdryer.

Artificial Persons

2010-01-22T15:23:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, the Supreme Court held that the right to free speech allowed unlimited expenditure on political speech by corporations. In his dissent, Justice Stevens wrote, “Under the majority’s view, I suppose it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech.”
How can the first amendment be applicable to organizations of any kind?

Corporations were first called "artificial persons" in English courts in the 16^th century. Lawyers had tried to argue that their corporations could not be convicted, because the relevant laws began "No person shall...."
(The documents forming these early companies, by the way, were closely copied in the Mayflower Contract, and some of their language found its way into the U.S. constitution, which has influenced constitutions around the world.)

Adam Smith, with his customary foresight, worried about granting corporations these rights. The problem was that corporations were superhuman—they tended towards immortality, growth in size, and growth in power. He suggested that laws limit the lifespan of any company.

The rights of artificial persons were first defined in law in regards to property. In the late 1700s, Stewart Kyd defined a corporation:

"a collection of many individuals united into one body, under a special denomination, having perpetual succession under an artificial form, and vested, by policy of the law, with the capacity of acting, in several respects, as an individual, particularly of taking and granting property, of contracting obligations, and of suing and being sued, of enjoying privileges and immunities in common, and of exercising a variety of political rights…."

Around the same time, Thomas Jefferson worried about the potential power of corporations. He tried to add an 11^th amendment to ban “monopolies in commerce.” He wrote in a letter to James Logan, “I hope we shall... crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

But he was soon to see his fears realized. Daniel Webster argued a case for Dartmouth College whose contract the government wanted to dissolve before the Supreme Court, ending with a touching plea for those who loved the small institution. He convinced Justice John Marshall, who wrote, "A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it either expressly or as incidental to its very existence. These are such as are supposed best calculated to effect the object for which it was created. Among the most important are immortality, and, if the expression may be allowed, individuality -- properties by which a perpetual succession of many persons are considered as the same, and may act as a single individual. They enable a corporation to manage its own affairs and to hold property without the perplexing intricacies, the hazardous and endless necessity, of perpetual conveyances for the purpose of transmitting it from hand to hand. It is chiefly for the purpose of clothing bodies of men, in succession, with these qualities and capacities that corporations were invented, and are in use. By these means, a perpetual succession of individuals are capable of acting for the promotion of the particular object like one immortal being."

By this point, the analogy had become more than that—it was justified as referring to the individuals who made up the company acting in unison. The rights were expanded to include other amendments again in 1887, in the case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company.

The idea has been further developed by later legal scholars. In the 1952 Harvard Law Review, we find the following:

“The conception of corporate personality is a simplification of the processes of thought. Its function is similar to that of an algebraic symbol. A mathematician finds it difficult to carry in his head a complicated expression such as x^2 + a x + b^2; and in order to simplify his mental processes he says to himself, "Let y = x^2 + a x + b^2," and then he uses y in his calculations instead of the longer and more cumbrous expression. So it is with the imaginary corporate personality in legal calculations. The lawyer finds himself unable to solve his problems if he thinks of a corporation not as a personified unit but as a shifting body of shareholders, or even as a real but impersonal entity; and he therefore says to himself, in effect, "Let the corporate personality equal the changing body of shareholders in respect to their relations to the joint property." By substituting the more compact idea for the more elaborate, he is enabled to reach correct results with less mental effort….”

The article also contains this fascinating tidbit:

“The famous dictum of Sir Edward Coke that corporations cannot be excommunicated because they have no souls, is seen to be illogical. This is illustrated by the history of the canon law, from which Coke derived his statement. Thus, Innocent IV held that corporations, or universitates, could not take an oath, or be baptized or excommunicated.”

One danger with all this is that corporations are legally required to work by only one motivation: to maximize the profits of shareholders. The only way Google can get away with the motto, “don’t be evil,” is because they can reasonably argue in court that in the long run, an ethical reputation will lead to greater profits.
The question I'm really interested in is, to what extent are the relevant decisions of corporations made by the executive (CEO), by committees, or (and this is most interesting) by policies and procedures that have been laid down beforehand and the employees are following? In the third case, these companies are acting as essentially programmed robots being treated legally as persons.

Anyway, that’s where the court is coming from. It will be interesting to see how it all works out. I can’t help but think that once artificial agents begin to exhibit what seems to be independent thought, that these laws will be applied to them as well. We will have to hope that the ethical basis of such machines is put on a surer footing.

"Pattern Recognition" and "Count Zero"

2010-01-18T05:38:00.000-08:00

I reread Count Zero when I was in Athens last month, and it's still one of my favorite books. One thing that struck me was how similar the subplot involving Marly was to the plot of Pattern Recognition (a later novel by the same author, William Gibson.) In both books, a wealthy and mysterious older man hires (with a truly unlimited budget) a stylish young woman to trace the origin of an unusually evocative and eclectic collage. In Count Zero, the creator turns out to be an artificial intelligence residing on an abandoned space station. In Pattern Recognition, the artist is a brain-damaged woman.
What interested me was that in both cases, the mystery, having been traced back to its source, still isn't solved. We don't understand where the creativity in the machine is coming from; we don't understand where the creativity in the subconscious is coming from. We can tell in the novels that it has something to do with the richness of life and the tragedy of death and loss, but beyond that, finding the source of the artwork has just led to the realization that we still can't reach the source of the artwork, and perhaps never will be able to.

Physics Part V

2009-12-08T23:17:00.001-08:00

This is a slight expansion on the previous version. For each of these charts, to move down, you integrate over time, and to move to the right, you integrate over distance. Left and up are derivatives with respect to distance and time respectively. One might expand these charts further to the left, if various quantities of density are of particular interest.

	meters^-1		meters^1	meters^2	meters^3
s^-3
s^-2	change in magnetic flux	change in current (slew rate)
s^-1	magnetic flux	current	magnetic pole strength	magnetic dipole moment
	linear charge density	charge	electric dipole moment	electric quadrupole moment
s

	meters^-1		meters^1	meters^2	meters^3
s^-3	pressure drift	areal power loss	linear power loss	power
s^-2	sound energy density	surface tension	force	energy
s^-1	(dynamic) viscosity	mass transport rate	momentum	action
	linear density	mass	first mass moment	moment of inertia
s

	meters^-1		meters^1	meters^2	meters^3
s^-3			jerk	area per second^3
s^-2		angular acceleration / frequency drift	acceleration	helicity / specific energy / tenacity	geo- potential
s^-1		hertz (units per second)	velocity	kinematic viscosity	(hydraulic) current
	wavenumber		distance	area	volume
s	slowness (measures dynamite fuses)	time			spacetime hyper- volume

Steampunkization

2009-12-08T00:45:00.001-08:00

"Steampunk" refers to a certain subgenre of alternate history, which is itself a subgenre of science fiction. Alternate history usually works by making a change at a certain point in history, and watching how the future of that world differs from our own.

It occurred to me this week as I reread some William Gibson was that all science fiction (including stories of the near future, like Tom Clancy novels) eventually becomes alternate history. That is, the future imagined in 1984 (the year Neuromancer was published) is a future of 1984, if certain things had gone differently. In some ways it tells us more about the 1980s than it does about the 2050s. In this sense, the earliest steampunk stories were the writings of Jules Verne and the other Victorian science fiction authors. This may be the most authentic writing in the subgenre, and is often included among the conventions of the setting. (With the benefit of knowing how actual events came out, though, we can add in a kind of dramatic irony in the technology that isn't present in these works.)

I suspect one reason steampunk is popular is that it is far enough back to set this effect into sharp visibility, but early enough that science fiction had been invented. Earlier eras in a certain sense didn't have an alternate future to follow. The future that the Thomas More and other Utopian authors imagined, for example, only differed from their present politically, not technologically. Perhaps science fiction requires only the existence of science-- Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, for example, is a good candidate for the first work in the genre, written by one of the inventors of the scientific method.

Aaron Diaz turns all this on its head by imagining how future civilizations will view their past (our present.) His time travelers get some things wrong, mixing clothing in inappropriate ways, for example, and getting the slang wrong. The 80's themed cafe in Back to the Future II, which mixes Reagan and Qadafi with Max Headroom, is another example of this. Of course, both of these stories, written in our past, have yet one more joint in their zigzag path through time.

Ancient Japanese Poetic Forms in the Scriptures

2009-11-28T02:12:00.000-08:00

Old Testament

And he said, I am

Joseph your brother, whom ye

sold into Egypt.

Turn from thy fierce wrath,

and repent of this evil

against thy people.

can I hear any

more the voice of singing men

and singing women?

or wilt thou flee three

months before thine enemies,

while they pursue thee?

now advise, and see

what answer I shall return

to him that sent me.

how is Babylon

become a desolation

among the nations!

--------------

New Testament

And he said, Legion:

because many devils were

entered into him.

Now if any man

have not the Spirit of Christ,

he is none of his.

either a vine, figs?

so can no fountain both yield

salt water and fresh.

The old commandment

is the word which ye have heard

from the beginning.

I write unto you,

little children, because ye

have known the Father.

-----------------------

Book of Mormon

Yea, they may forget,

yet will I not forget thee,

O house of Israel.

I say unto you,

if ye are not ye are not

prepared to meet God.

And now when the king

had said these words, he was struck

as if he were dead.

But behold, I did

cry unto him and I did

find peace to my soul.

I say unto you,

Nay; not one whit. If so, God

would cease to be God.

And now I close mine

epistle to my beloved

brother, Moroni.

And behold, the time

is at hand, and this night shall

the sign be given.

I tried this just out of curiosity, but it could be considered a control experiment for Hebraisms in the Book of Mormon. I like how arranging the verses as Haiku brings out some parallelisms in the text that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. "If ye are not ye are not" sounds very Zen.

living things

2009-11-19T04:20:00.000-08:00

Someone pointed out that scientists estimate there are only 100 million species on the earth, not six billion, like I claimed. However, they are neglecting some categories:

Colonies of bacteria that live in the clouds, move in swarms, and behave like slime-molds the size of islands.

Anemone-like creatures that exist within the earth's core. They have a chemistry based on exotic states of hot, compressed metals and reproduce by fission.

Memetic parasites which are more developed than mental viruses. Some have evolved a dormant state where they can live for hundreds of years in reading material. For example, Zoroastrianism or "Crimson and Clover."

Yetis.

Certain forms of currents in water are similar to smoke rings, but more stable and much more complex, and have evolved the ability to reproduce. They are completely invisible to humans, but well-known by dolphin and whale scientists.

Various uncatalogued fairy species that live a tribal lifestyle and hunt the mighty Tardigrade.

2009-11-17T18:48:00.000-08:00

There is one species for every person on Earth.

Yours is a breed of mantis that disguises itself as a flower the color of deep saffron. It lives on the top of a single mesa in the Amazon that has been isolated from the rest of the world for at least six hundred thousand years. To catch its prey, it sways with the wind in a hypnotic dance that lures the unwary. You will never see it.

Recoloring the Dreamworld

2009-11-06T00:35:00.000-08:00

"Here’s one possible explanation of all this: A ubiquity of black and white images in film media changes people’s dreams. Although Aristotle, Epicurus, Freud, and their contemporaries dreamed in color, the average American in 1950 dreamed mostly in black and white. And now that color media again dominate, our dreams are returning to color."

(He comes to a different conclusion, by the way.)

Evil dogs

2009-11-05T14:37:00.000-08:00

Actually, it's a bear that's lost its fur due to a skin condition.

an observation

2009-11-04T03:33:00.000-08:00

People say I'm always changing the subject, but have you ever noticed that when you get a new box of crayons, you always use up the black crayon first?

The Country of Abundance

2009-10-24T17:48:00.000-07:00

At length I found my way to a land of great abundance. In this country, every person was of such wealth that they found their homes entirely filled with diverse and sundry items, such that it was often difficult for them to move about freely. In this land, the most precious item was holes, which were mined from caves in the mountains nearby. Each day the miners would bring buckets to the mine filled with goods, and return with their buckets empty. The precious empty space within these buckets was then sold at a profit. Some miners offered a weekly service, in which they would come and pick up a full bucket from a home, and return a bucket filled with empty space, for a subscription fee.
Because the cost of holes was so high, in that country the poorest often had the most things, and the rich, in contrast, were those with the most space.
The holes thus mined were used in the manufacture of vessels of all kinds. Potters, for instance, would take holes and carefully wrap clay around them. These clay-wrapped holes were then distributed to those who would use them. They were also used in laying the foundation of buildings.
Furthermore, certain food items required the holes for their preparation, such as bagels, effervescent water, bread, or certain types of cheeses. The rich would pay more for those food items which contained the most holes and the least food (and thus were often thin themselves) while the poor resorted to eating rich and heavy foods, and became fat.

The Country Wherein a Game is Played with Small Sticks

2009-10-11T18:40:00.000-07:00

The people of that country all participate in a game; which is so curious and ingenious in its rules that I have not been able to discern more than the smallest part of it, though even their young children play it with surprising ease. I shall here endeavor to explain that part of it which I have learned.

Each player carries with himself a bag, and in this bag are flexible sticks, which may be trimmed from a tree, fashioned from straw, or purchased in bundles from the market for a very low price. These sticks may be joined to one another by means of joints which have a variety of arrangements of holes. In such a fashion structures may be formed, as small as two or three sticks, which may be held in the palm of the hand, or as large as a house, and with more complexity and subtilty.

When one player (as I will call the inhabitants of that country, for every inhabitant is a player of the game, excepting only those afflicted with palsy or complete infirmity) passes another who is known to him on the street, it is the custom to exchange a small arrangement of two or three sticks. This is done without much thought. Occasionally, however, two will sit and play a longer game, if they are familiar with one another and have no pressing engagement. In this case, one player will make a small structure and offer it to his neighbor. The neighbor will take that structure and elaborate on it, building onto it as he sees fit, according to his own habit. In a way this resembles chess, in that the two alternate turns, and there are established patterns of moves and countermoves. The difference is that this game is rarely competitive; when it turns competitive, pieces are hurled back and forth, and passers-by avert their eyes or try to intervene, for it is a shameful thing among them.

Instead, the two try to cooperate to build a structure. Sometimes one player's style will dominate, but in the best games, the two will combine to form what may only be called a work of art (though of a primitive and barbarous kind, as it contains no figures or meaning.) The game may be played among more than two players, for example when many sit down to a meal together. It may not, however, be played by only one person alone, though one occasionally sees such behavior among the mentally infirm.

There are strict rules for how pieces may be arranged, according to their sizes and shapes, and these rules are usually followed, although a more casual game may allow the relaxing of a few of them.

The most formal games last for decades, and are engaged in professionally by men paid to do so. These men are experts in the most minute rules, and build larger and larger structures that seem as if they must collapse, being built only of small sticks; but are in fact incredibly sturdy. Players will pay money to study such structures, in order to develop their own skill, and by such payment these men are supported.

Wikipedestrian perambulation

2009-10-08T04:34:00.000-07:00

§ Hobson's Choice

§ Sophie's Choice

§ Buridan's ass

§ Catch-22

§ Dilemma

§ Morton's Fork

§ No-win situation

sketch action

2009-10-01T02:19:00.000-07:00

A while ago I wrote a new sketch action for Photoshop. An action is a list of commands performed in succession, a branchless program that takes a photo as input and outputs a fake sketch. Here's some results. (Click to enlarge.) What do you think?

Bedtime Story

2009-09-03T07:49:00.001-07:00

This is a true story I came across doing research for my book. I told it to Daniel the other night as a bedtime story.

------------
Johann Winkel was an inventor and a clockmaker. He was very shy, and lived by himself (except for his cat) over his little shop in a townhouse in Amsterdam. He made all kinds of wonderful inventions. He made grandfather clocks with figures who would come out and dance, or bang on bells with hammers. He made wonderful huge organs and tiny music boxes.

------------
Dietrich Maelzel was an inventor and an organmaker, too. He travelled all over the world showing off his inventions. Sometimes he took other people's inventions and told everyone that he had invented them. One of his most famous inventions that he got from someone else was a robot chessplayer. Everyone was amazed that the robot could really play chess. What he didn't tell them was that a real chessplayer was hidden under the chess table. The "robot" was really a puppet!

The invention he was most proud of was the Panharmonicum. This invention could play songs on an organ, drums, and bells. One time he got Beethoven, the famous composer, to write a piece of music for the Panharmonicum. It was a rousing tune, and Maelzel told everyone it was his own music. This made Beethoven mad, but Maelzel didn't care.

------------

One time Maelzel visited Mr. Winkel's town, and stopped by Mr. Winkel's house to talk. Mr. Winkel didn't usually have visitors, but he was very polite, so he invited Maelzel in. He gave him dinner and showed him all his inventions. The one he had just finished was called a metronome. It was a little lever that tapped back and forth that you could sit on your piano, and it would show you how fast to play.Maelzel told him he was very impressed with all the inventions, and offered to buy the metronome, but Winkel didn't want to sell it. But that night Maelzel made a copy of the metronome. He sold lots of copies of it everywhere he went, because it was a very useful invention. If Mr. Winkel ever showed anyone his invention, they would just say, "Oh, that's just a copy of Maelzel's Marvelous Metronome."

------------
This mad Mr. Winkel very sad. He couldn't eat. He couldn't sleep. (He even forgot to pet his cat.) And then one day, he had an idea. It was the best idea he ever had. He worked on his new invention every day. He got up early in the morning to work on it and he stayed up late at night. People heard him banging away and they wondered what he could possibly be building. After a year, he was finally finished.

------------

He rolled out his invention, and everyone in town came into the street to see it. It had bells. It had pipes. It had drums.

"That's not new!" everyone said. "You just copied Maelzel's Panharmonicum!" But Mr. Winkel didn't say anything. He just started the device playing.It was a lovely tune, but people started to leave. They had already seen a machine that could play music. But the people who stayed noticed something amazing. The song didn't stop. It just kept coming up with new music. Mr. Winkel didn't need to get Beethoven to write music for him-- the invention could compose its own music! Every time you listened to it, you would hear a different song. It was even better than a radio, and that wouldn't be invented for another hundred years!

------------

Some people thought he must be cheating. "He has a composer sitting inside the machine," they said. (If they had said this about Maelzel's chess player, they would have been right.) But Mr. Winkel let them look inside the machine. He showed them how it worked. It had a kind of pulley inside that could spin around freely. Depending on where it landed, that decided what the next bit of music would sound like.Everyone agreed that Mr. Winkel's invention was the best invention ever. That made Mr. Winkel happy again. (It made his cat happy, too.)

Don't even ask about punctuated equilibrium...

2009-09-01T04:24:00.000-07:00

You know how you sometimes put three dots to represent that part of a sentence has been cut out? Well, I always thought they were circular dots. But if you look very closely with a magnifying glass, you can see that they are actually slightly longer along one axis. They are, in fact, ellipses.

Accidental art

2009-08-13T05:13:00.000-07:00

An illustration from a paper I was reading. It's called heirarchical k-means clustering, and it's a way of quickly finding points from a data set that are nearby one another.

conscious control

2009-08-03T15:15:00.000-07:00

One of the big differences between humans and chimpanzees is how much conscious control we have over our bodies. This isn't some mysterious property of consciousness that we don't understand; it's a simple fact about what parts of the brain are activated when a motion is initiated. Chimps can't control their fingers independently, they aren't dextrous. They can't control their breathing, which is the main reason they can't talk. Most of their actions are what we would call, in humans, reflex actions. This is the same for almost all the actions of other animals. It's almost as though the body is a kind of marionette that we take control of the strings of.

Color Blindness

2009-05-20T05:55:00.001-07:00

With red/green color blindness, this image:

would look like this:

or this:

and the interesting thing is that we can't really say which of those it would look like: how would you design a test to tell whether someone saw red as green or whether they saw green as red?

Actually, most people who are color blind are only partially color blind, so they see it more like this:

and if you are partially color blind, this is what the top image looks like to us full trichromats:

A little programming trick

2009-04-27T11:17:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wanted to have a C++ program that uses an MFC GUI and a console? Here's a link to how to do it.

http://homepage3.nifty.com/ysflight/mfcconsole/mfcconsole.html

For those who don't program in C++, you probably don't care, but here's an explanation, anyway: in the old days, before Windows, C++ programs used to have "print" statements to print to the screen you saw in DOS (They're called "printf" or "cout".) They're a convenient way to show what's going on in your program behind the scenes, or just to show a lot of information as the program is running. I still use it for most of my programs, becuase it's simpler than using all the Windows overhead.

Once you start programming for Windows, you get dialog boxes and menus and all that Graphical User Interface stuff, but you lose the ability to just print stuff out when you need to. This little hack lets you have the best of both worlds.

music

2009-04-10T15:23:00.001-07:00

Some tracks I've enjoyed recently. I haven't watched these video links, I just found them by a search for the title and artist.

25 Years

Blackmore's Night

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTIUX26yl1s

32 Flavors

Ani DiFranco

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVg7mtgEqGY

Almost Lover

A Fine Frenzy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZQeW6XPAE0

Any Day Now

Missy Higgins

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCeS-yorGtc

As I Lay Me Down

Sophie B. Hawkins

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdU5GjYsvhA

Blue Light of the Flame

Dar Williams

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN8RNeT9mLE

Breathe No More

Evanescence

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH_EJo5MFR8

Broken Wings

Dougie MacLean

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJer7-eAy3o

Diana's Song

Antje Duvekot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSs-dvS3Yvg

End Of May

Keren Ann

http://www.imeem.com/dancelover/music/KC9d2GVP/keren-ann-end-of-may/

Fear	Sarah McLachlan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_vVmeUf6QU

February

Dar Williams

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy-v-UgNhuI

Fields Of Gold (Live)

Eva Cassidy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3YVil3Ajjs

Ghost Of A Rose

Blackmore's Night

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcj3Go3vFZw

Givin' Up On You

Lara Fabian

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn5JGUy6b20

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

Loreena McKennitt

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2SR_P-_98s

Hide And Seek

Imogen Heap

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cpSv2mNhhc

Holding Out For A Hero

Frou Frou

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2OIK-PZ6kA

Home	Vanessa Carlton

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4hRENZEv3A

I Love You Always Forever

Donna Lewis

http://www.imeem.com/people/Vd2g2o/music/ic61WxZk/donna-lewis-i-love-you-always-forever/

I Wish

Kate Rusby

http://www.imeem.com/ifankucel/music/0e8i3M-y/kate-rusby-i-wish/

Kathy's Song

Eva Cassidy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G860hkE0Tc

Katrinah Josephina

Universal Hall Pass

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H10O2TIWbXI

Lacrymosa

LIBERA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BveCwQSu-_w

Lullabye For A Stormy Night

Vienna Teng

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkIwO_ofEeg

Marrakesh Night Market

Loreena McKennitt

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXtrqHrHcI8

May It Be

Taliesin Orchestra

http://www.imeem.com/toughnelliegirl/music/W0jdRR9v/taliesin-orchestra-may-it-be/

Memories

Within Temptation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhzJO34SCoc

Monsters And Angels

Voice Of The Beehive

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m3C1K5b5VI

My Immortal

Evanescence

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idd_92ajjwY

Laman and Lemuel are Dead

2009-04-10T10:45:00.000-07:00

(from flickr)

I just wanted there to be a link here to the short play I wrote a while back.
Laman and Lemuel are Dead
It's funny-- years after I wrote this, I found out that the idea of evolving clocks shows up in Erewhon, only a few years after Darwin published The Origin of Species.

The Benefits of Computer Viruses

2009-03-23T09:08:00.000-07:00

I know many people have had huge inconveniences from viruses and malware. I have spent many hours dealing with the consequences myself. But sometimes I wonder if in the end, maybe it's for the best? Imagine if we had built up the kind of infrastructure we have today without the constant threat of malicious code. A determined attacker would be able to wipe out the entire internet and everyone on it. Like a child who has never been exposed to mild colds, we would be at risk of fatal illness and be utterly unprepared.

The Undiscovered Country

2009-03-17T17:17:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it is whispered that there is a country which has been left off all maps, edited out of all encyclopedias, hidden from the view of satellites by means of a complicated deception about the radius of the earth and the value of the gravitational constant. They call it "Clandestine." The CCC (Cabal of Cartographic Conspiracy) has managed to keep this nation secret since the mid 1600s. It is rumored to be somewhere in the Specific ocean, north of the Isles of Langerhans, near the Freeway islands. After the Great Depression ended, many of the nomadic tribe of Hoboes emigrated there.
It's capital, they say, is the city of Apocrypha.

Tutankhamun

2009-03-16T02:48:00.000-07:00

I was surprised to find out that I knew two of the three root words in this Egyptian name:

Tut - means image

Ankh - The symbol ☥ that means "living"

Amun - The head God, Amun-Re

So his name means "The image of the living God."

Silent Reading

2009-03-12T09:58:00.000-07:00

I found out today that in ancient times, nearly all reading was done aloud. There are a few recorded instances where some genius learned to read silently, to the amazement of all onlookers: Alexander the Great, Ambrose (as recorded by St. Augustine.) It emphasizes to me, somehow, the magic of reading, how incredible it is that I can be taught by people who died centuries or millenia ago, how few people have shared this privelege.

Evil dogs

2009-02-22T04:20:00.000-08:00

When you turn them upside down their evil becomes apparent

Image Extrapolation

2009-02-10T09:58:00.001-08:00

I usually work on the problem of image interpolation, figuring out what the pixels in between the pixels I have would look like. Today I decided to try the algorithm on image extrapolation: trying to determine what the areas beyond the edges of my image look like. It does this by extrapolating contour curvature, inferring from specular reflections and ambient illumination, guided texture synthesis, and refined temporal oneiromancy.

The results are disturbing. Follow the link to see.

Anathem and Escher

2009-01-31T05:32:00.001-08:00

1. Playing with levels of reality

2. Platonic space

3. Monks

4. Tiling

5. Math nerds

6. Giant icosahedon in space

Kircher and Electromagnetic Waves

2009-01-29T09:56:00.000-08:00

Athansius Kircher set up a series of magnets, each able to spin freely. When the first was jostled, it set the second one moving and so on down the line, in a wave of magnetic influence. He suggested this might be used as a way to send messages, and proposed that it was how influences from the planets could propagate through the medium between worlds.

Tamagotchi

2009-01-27T07:44:00.000-08:00

A Tamagotchi is a kind of digital pet. I think the most popular digital pet these days is Nintendogs, though I could be wrong. Basically, they are all the same: if you pet the creature and give it treats, it acts happy and thrives. If you neglect it or punish it too much, it acts dejected.

The digital creature is not really experiencing pleasure and pain when it is treated in these ways. We can be sure of this because the code for experiencing pleasure and the code for experiencing pain are almost identical. And these procedures are so simple that they show up in every kind of program and device, not just those for simulating puppies.A reasonable person would agree that a Tamagotchi does not feel real pain while a puppy does.

The question that no scientist can answer is, how does real pain and pleasure happen in the puppy? The simulation of the puppy is much simpler than a real puppy, it's true. But the things that are missing-- comprehension of ideas, more senses, greater motor control, anticipation of the future and memory of the past, and so forth, don't seem necessary for the raw sensation of pain or pleasure. Even profoundly brain-damaged individuals without any of these abilities can still experience pleasure and pain.

In the future, these simulations will become more realistic in appearance and have more of these mental abilities. But the key ability-- the ability to actually have subjective experiences-- is still missing. Whatever it is the brain is doing is something different than what the computer is doing. In the puppy,

Patting causes pleasure which causes behavior.

In the Tamagotchi,

Patting causes behavior.

Scientists are aware of this "explanatory gap," but to date no one has any way to explain what it is that the brain is doing to create subjective experiences.

State of Mind

2009-01-26T08:50:00.000-08:00

The ancient Greeks used the word "spirit" (pneuma) in both senses that we do:

1. the individual soul (what the psyche is derived from)

2. the general feeling of a group (a spirit of contention, team spirit, a spirit of cooperation)

So when Plato wants to talk about how the human mind works, and why it makes sense for an individual to do the right thing rather than just appear to do the right thing, it is natural for him to make an analogy between the mind and the city-state. He says (paraphrasing) "the matter is hard to see. But the same way we can read something written in big letters easier than when the same thing is written in small letters, we can look at a state (which is much larger than an individual person) and see how things work inside it. And then we can assume that the analogy holds and the same thing is happening in the makeup of an indivdual human mind." Plato recognizes that a mind is made up of comprehensible parts and has a structure to it, a complex organization like we see in a society. The entire book The Republic is basically developing this analogy.

Best Free Photoshop Plugins

2009-01-10T07:59:00.000-08:00

There are millions of free Photoshop plugins out there, but few are actually useful. These are a few I have found that I really like.

GML Growcut: a very easy way to make selections (the hardest part of Photoshop.) The free version can be found here: http://www.foto-freeware.de/gml-growcut.php

Fast Fourier Transform: there are many tricks you can do with a Fourier Transform. The key one is removing a regular texture from your image (for example, if it's scanned from a magazine.) You'll need to read a tutorial before you can do anything with this.

http://www.download3k.com/Photo-Graphic/Miscellaneous/Download-2D-FFT-iFFT-plugin.html

Flaming Pear: the ones I use the most are Solidify A, which fills in (in a blurry way) an area you delete from the image, Ghost which turns white to transparent, and RGB->HSL, for when you want to mess with the Hue or Saturation channels.

http://www.flamingpear.com/dl/freebies.zip

Fantastic Machines Paint Engine: The old Beta works fine and is really good for painterly effects. It takes some experimenting with to get the best results.

http://www.fantasticmachines.com/store/index.php?cPath=24

SAT deblock: JPEG artifact removal. It really works better than other methods of fixing overcompressed JPEG's. Most blur away the artifacts and leavy blurry patches, but the shape adaptive algorithm only blurs from directions that don't cross edges. http://www.cs.tut.fi/~foi/SA-DCT/#ref_software

Insta-Sketch Beta: For turning photos into pencil-sketches. Works best on a plain background. He has a few other NPR actions here you could try out, too. http://homepages.slingshot.co.nz/~mikefinn/action.html

If you want to buy something, I'd recommend Smart Fill from Alien Skin, Buzz Pro from Fo2Pix (defunct?), or India Ink from Flaming Pear.

Subtle emphasis

2009-01-04T04:43:00.000-08:00

When I read words in bold, it has the intended effect of emphasis, but jolts me out of the reading flow. What the world needs is subtle bold, to convey emphasis subliminally.
One might experiment with subtle variations in word color, italicization, or font (the serifs grow longer as the speech becomes more formal, and sprout little curlicues as it becomes downright florid.)

Hobbes

2009-01-03T03:20:00.001-08:00

I asked my Mom to make a stuffed Hobbes doll for my son Daniel. The idea was to make it look kind of like the stuffed version of the doll from the comic, but with enough of the fuzz near the cheeks to be instantly recognizable as Hobbes. He really loves it and carries it around with him in various floppy ways.

Edit: There have been a lot of requests for my mom to make more of these, but she isn't interested in doing that. She knows Bill Watterson doesn't want the strip commercialized.

Acceptance

2008-12-18T03:08:00.000-08:00

Although I was too young at the time to see such a violent film, all my peers watched Gremlins so it was an important part of my culture for a year or two. Through storybook versions and osmosis I was aware that there were three rules governing one's interaction with Gremlins:

1. They hate bright lights

2. Don't get them wet

3. Never, ever feed them after midnight

The first one makes sense, I suppose, but the other two always bothered me. How would water facilitated muticellular fission work? And where is the extra mass coming from? (This bothered me about the Hulk, too.) And any time is after some midnight. How long do you have to wait? They never make it clear.

I was pondering this again last night when it suddenly occured to me that maybe there is no answer, that the Mogwai are not well defined-- it's an underconstrained problem I'm trying to solve. And that realization brought me a sense of peace about the problem that I had never had before when considering it.

A superman story

2008-11-30T16:05:00.000-08:00

That night, when all the excitement was over, I asked him the question that's been bugging me.
"Clark, I'm not quite sure how to put this, but, today, the thing with Lex Luthor? It's not the first time he's taken me hostage."
"It's the first time he used extra-terrestrial technology," Clark said with a smile. "That was a switch."
"Why don't you do something about it? Why don't you stop him once and for all?"
"I did take him to the highest security prison in the country, Lois," Clark said.
"Oh, come off it. Shall we make a small wager on how many days it will take him to escape? As I recall you still owe me for guessing who was behind that whole rat-people thing."
"He does seem to get out of those places fairly regularly."
"The only reason he spends any time in prison at all is because behind bars is the only place he can really get away from other people. It's his Fortress of Solitary. But I was talking about you, not Luthor. One of these days, someone's really going to get hurt."
"The thing about Lex is... it's complicated."
"So? We've got time. I love a good story."
"Off the the record?" Clark asked.
"Hmph. All right."
--------------------------------------
When I was a kid, in Smallville, Lex was pretty much my only friend. I guess you don't really know, growing up here in the city, but in Kansas, I don't know, it seemed like pretty much all anyone was interested in was TV and football. Or football on TV. But Lex, he was different. When he was really young he had this long red hair, down to his waist and curly. He didn't seem to care what anyone else thought about it; he liked it and that was what mattered to him. I thought that was cool, that he didn't care. Later, I realized that the not caring went a little too deep, but that was later.
Plus, he was really smart. He's probably the smartest person on the planet, I'm not kidding. And he thought all the time about things that really matter, not just about science but about how people think, how societies work, why the universe is the way it is. About right and wrong. Every time I'd talk to him he'd have something new to say, something I'd never thought of before or something I had thought of but had never met anyone else who had thought of it.
But that wasn't really it. I mean, I would have liked him, but what really made us close was how interested he was in me. I guess that sounds self-centered. But he was always asking me questions about what it was like to be me, to see things the way I did. He really wanted to know. Most people don't. You do, and I guess that's part of why I like you, too.
X-ray vision, for example. It's not like people think, where things look pretty much the same to me as to everyone else, except when I stare really hard. (What would happen if I stared hard is the layers really would burn away, it's the heat-vision thing.) But for me, I see all the layers, all at once. I see the blood pumping through the chambers of your heart and the way your clavicle bends and the food making it's way through your system, all of it, all at once. My mother figured it out. When I was about five, maybe six, she took an apple peel (she was doing some canning) and she put it together very carefully with her fingers, just barely touching it, holding it together. And she said, "Clark, this is how the rest of us see an apple. Just the surface. This looks the same as an apple to the rest of us. But you see through to the heart of things."
Anyway, I was talking to Lex about this, how I see people as kind of like ghosts, made of layers of tissue, so fragile, just a breath away from blowing apart in the wind. And he really seemed to understand. He couldn't see them that way, but he was good at imagining. He wanted to know whether I saw the same colors as he did, and figured out that I have five primary colors, drew up a kind of color cube, even I didn't understand all of it, but Lex did, even though he couldn't see it. He wanted to see it, so, so badly.
We talked a lot about how I should use my powers, what he would do if he could change the world for the better. I always was arguing for leaving well enough alone, fixing things as they cropped up, but he thought the ethical thing to do was to radically change the way the world works, to throw out the whole broken system and start over from scratch. It's something I've never really settled for myself-- I could save a lot more people from death than I do, if I set about it in a systematic way. I could prevent a lot more suffering than I do. That disagreement was really the beginning of the trouble between us.
Somehow he got some Kryptonite, and that was my first experience with it. You know, there's a whole world of sensation that I'm usually cut off from. Pain, fear of death, fatigue, I know they sound like bad things but they're all part of being human. I couldn't really understand people, why they acted the way they did, until he shared that with me. I feel like, when I'm exposed to Kryptonite, that that's s the only time I'm one of you. The only time I'm like you, I'm human. That's something only Lex has ever given me.
As we got older, became teenagers, he got more bitter, more cruel. Bad things happened with his family, I don't know the whole story. He got into Neitzche, was fascinated with the idea of the Ubermensch, who has transcended all the rules of humanity and society. And then the whole thing came to a head. He had worked out some kind of artificial life that was supposed to give him super-powers, some chemical drink, and it hadn't worked, and as the bugs began devouring him he called for help. And for just an instant, I hesitated. I knew, by then, what he was becoming. And I was scared of him. He's the only one I'm scared of. It shames me to say it, but there it is. It's possible, one day, he will be my death. He knows so much about me, all the ways to hurt me, and it would have been so easy to just let it end there. It was just an instant I hesitated but in that instant our eyes met and he knew.
I worked harder to save him than I think I ever have with anyone else. I blew on him so that he would freeze while I worked, so that I would have time. I heated up a thousand cuts to help them heal faster. I did everything I knew how. I can see tiny details, all the way to the bone. (I would make a good surgeon. I think, from some of the messages he left, that Jor-El expected I would be a surgeon.) I didn't have time to get sutures so I used strands of my own hair. But when he had recovered, he had lost his hair, and a lot of his strength. And everyone thinks it's about that.

light echo

2008-11-21T10:51:00.000-08:00

A nice Hubble image you might not have seen. There is also a video of the light echo expanding.

group intelligence

2008-11-19T15:26:00.000-08:00

There are some jobs where people earn more than twice the median income. This means that the employer thinks that the one person is more effective in the position than two average people would be. For some jobs, like CEO of large businesses, the pay is hundreds or thousands of times the median income (when you include bonuses.) Could we make a system where a hundred people could break down all the tasks of a CEO into parts simple enough for each of them to do and reassemble the results quickly enough to respond on the timescales a CEO needs to?
My guess is that it could be done, but that we don't know how to do it yet. (One big problem is that people can't transmit information to each other fast enough or accurately enough.) We don't understand intelligence well enough to divide it into a hundred subtasks, each done by a human. That's a big part of the problem with creating human level AI: even if we had subcomponents as intelligent as an average human, we wouldn't know how to arrange those components to make an exceptional human. But the AI problem deals with components that are roughly as smart as bugs, maybe really stupid fish. So we really don't know how to put those together into an intelligent system.

A pre-history of live action role playing games

2008-11-18T14:54:00.000-08:00

Later gladiator battles were often fought with dull weapons as reenactments of historical battles, in appropriate costume. But it wasn't just a drama; the outcome wasn't predetermined. It also points out that commedia dell'arte uses sterotypical characters in stereotypical situations to make it easier to improvise; the connection to how fantasy RPGs are usually played is pretty clear. It also mentions the educational role-playing games that Mrs. Haggart used to use.

http://www.liveforum.dk/kp07book/lifelike_morton.pdf

Swords from Meteoric Iron

2008-11-14T07:37:00.000-08:00

"In a 1923 article in Scientific Monthly, Arthur M. Miller asserted that there "is little doubt but that the human race first learned the use of iron from sideritic masses of celestial origin" – in other words, iron meteorites (438). Meteoritic iron has been found in numerous ancient archaeological sites, ranging from Sumerian artifacts dating back more that 4500 years, to the tomb of Tutankhamen (Bevan and De Laeter 2002: 12). It was alleged that Attila the Hun "and other devastating conquerors had swords from heaven." According to "Averrhoes, an Arab philosopher of the twelfth century… excellent swords were made from a meteor weighing 100 lb that fell near Cordoba, in Spain" (Rickard 1941: 55). The Prambarian meteorite of Indonesia was used to manufacture a number of blades circa 1800, including "superbly fashioned kris daggers" (Bevan and De Laeter 2002: 17). A decade later, James Sowerby forged a sword from a meteorite taken from Cape of Good Hope, which was presented to Czar Alexander of Russia (Burke 1986: 232-3). The famed Damascus blades (made of patterned steel) have alternately been claimed to have originally been made of meteorites or merely made in mimicry of distinctive pattern found in meteoritic iron. Such blades were said to have the ability to slay dragons (Cashen 1998). "

from http://www.physics.ccsu.edu/larsen/meteorites.html
Also of interest: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/meteor-01a.html

Proofs and the future affecting the past

2008-11-11T12:51:00.001-08:00

Retrocausality is where the future affects the past. I've noticed before that this happens in novels all the time: events happen early in the novel so that other events later in the novel are possible. I noticed today that the same thing happens in proofs: the mathematician often proves theorems he will need to make use of later to prove what he really wants. It's just like how Q gives Bond the very gadgets he will later need to escape from this mission's particular trap.

The brain and GPUs

2008-09-18T07:49:00.000-07:00

I enjoy programming for a GPU (graphics card) because in order for the card to understand what you are talking about, it requires everything in visual form. For example, a 2D array of data is called a "texture." Since this is how my brain works, it is easy to use.
Human brains have big sections of specialized hardware designed for certain tasks: especially visual and language processing. When we do other tasks, such as math, we have to map it onto one of these tasks (such as geometry or written language) in order to use it successfully. These specialized areas are where humans still are better at tasks than computers. We can think of people as a kind of special co-processor to offload certain tasks to. Other tasks may be somehow remapped into one of these areas in order to take advantage of this special hardware. When Ethan/Kraisri solves the knot puzzles to break encryption, that is what is going on.

Cosmosis

2008-09-11T11:33:00.000-07:00

Cosmosis (from Greek, meaning to put in order) is the tendency of small objects to pass from one universe rich in those objects to a neighboring one that is poor in them. For example, our universe is rich in sock/antisock pairs, so one of a pair is often drawn across the M-brane separating the universes.

Anthon manuscript

2008-09-06T17:12:00.000-07:00

Continuing the theme of the last post, I thought there were some interesting similarities between this example of Hieratic script and the Anthon Manuscript (which is supposed to be characters from "reformed Egyptian.") In particular, the sign shaped like a capital H and the one with four lines crossed seem like they could be the same. Certainly it looks more like Hieratic than Mayan or any other script I'm familiar with. (Click to enlarge the images.)

Curious Workmanship

2008-08-20T09:51:00.000-07:00

Persian Astrolabes from around 1000-1600 AD. Note the arrows pointing to words or letters around the edges. There's also a blurred picture of a spherical astrolabe. As always, click the images to enlarge.

Tetration, Zeration

2008-07-20T15:22:00.000-07:00

For positive integers,
Multiplication is the same as repeated addition.
Exponentiation is the same as repeated multiplication.
There are two ways to go with this: what is repeated exponentiation? and what, repeated, is addition?
Repeated exponentiation is known as tetration.
The step below addition might be the increment operator (adding one.) Another possibility is called zeration. Both have some things going for them.

Any of these functions can be extended to work on real numbers. The picture is from the wikipedia article on tetration. I thought it was pretty.

Swiss automata

2008-07-11T07:17:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uie8sqwQK7k

These are automata from Switzerland.

Good Books

2008-07-09T06:46:00.000-07:00

Here's a list of some of my favorite books, books I've read at least twice. Some of the titles stand for the whole series. Most of these books I read ten or twenty years ago; I find I'm reading less fiction and more nonfiction these days. There's no ranking of the titles on this list, and I wasn't careful about exact titles.

Fantasy
Lord of the Rings
Watership Down
Alvin Maker
Dragonbone Chair
Chronicles of Amber (the first few)
Narnia
Wizard of Earthsea
Dragonriders of Pern (the original trilogy and the Dragonsinger trilogy)
The Crystal Cave (The first two books, the ones about Merlin)
The Last Unicorn
A Wrinkle in Time
The Dark is Rising
Fortress in the Eye of Time (this is one you may not have seen, by C.J. Cherryh)
Neverending Story
The Once and Future King
Oz (honestly, these Oz books don't hold up so well as an adult. The first and second books and the one with the Gnome King were the best of the lot. The illustrations are great.)

Science Fiction
Ender's Game
Dune (I could never really get into the sequels.)
Last and First Men (very early SF. I like it more for the ambition than the story.)
Foundation (the original trilogy)
Foreigner (I also liked the Pride of Chanur series.)
Snow Crash
The Diamond Age
Difference Engine (Maybe Stephenson is a little overrepresented on this list.)
Neuromancer (the whole series)
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Martian Chronicles
Tunnel in the Sky (My favorite Heinlein novel.)
Hyperion
Collected Fictions (Jorge Borges short stories)

Other
Pride and Prejudice
Moby Dick (Best read in small pieces. Treat it like a blog.)
Foucalt's Pendulum
Little House on the Prarie
Musashi
Beowulf
Greek Myths (not any particular version, I read dozens of versions as a kid and they all run together in my mind.)

Nonfiction
Godel Escher Bach
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (same advice as Moby Dick.)

Physics Part IV

2008-06-29T03:46:00.000-07:00

I've added a new section on charge to my physics charts. It shows, for example, that magnetic flux is analogous to viscosity, but with charge in place of mass.

	meters^-1		meters^1	meters^2
seconds^-3
seconds^-2	change in magnetic flux	change in current
seconds^-1	magnetic flux	current	magnetic pole strength
	linear charge density	charge	electric dipole moment

	meters^-1		meters^1	meters^2
seconds^-3		areal power loss	linear power loss	power
seconds^-2		surface tension	force	energy
seconds^-1	(dynamic) viscosity	mass transport rate	momentum	action
	linear density	mass	first mass moment	moment of inertia

	meters^-1		meters^1	meters^2
seconds^-3			jerk	area per second^3
seconds^-2		angular acceleration / frequency drift	acceleration	area per second per second
seconds^-1		hertz (units per second)	velocity	kinematic viscosity
			distance	area

Rock Balancing

2008-06-22T06:27:00.001-07:00

From Rock On. For other rock stackers, Bill has a blog.

A Little Humor

2008-06-20T14:49:00.000-07:00

If you could be any kind of Philosopher, what kind would you choose? I'd like to be a Solipsist, but maybe that's just me.

Another Chapter

2008-06-14T05:19:00.000-07:00

"As every individual, therefore, endeavors as much he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was not part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it." (The Wealth of Nations)

Adam Smith realized that markets were capable of coming up with answers to questions that no human had the ability to solve. It was as if the system itself were exhibiting intelligent behavior. This is what he referred to in 1776 as “the Invisible Hand.” Today, scientists would call it emergent behavior in a complex adaptive system. But this behavior posed a problem—how did it happen that the world would be arranged in such a way that individuals seeking their own ends should happen to lead to such a happy state? For Smith, the answer was clear: God designed it that way. Leaving aside the theological question, however, what he proposed was perhaps the first realization of the idea of a creative rational mechanism: a designer (in this case God, but without necessarily using superhuman intellectual ability) could create a system that was capable of coming up with rational and creative decisions through an arrangement of many components, each following simple rules.
Darwin proposed a similar idea: God designed and set in motion a system of comprehensible laws that brought about new species creatively. In The Origin of Species he spoke of this creative action metaphorically, in personified terms:

[Nature] cares not for mere external appearance; she may be said to scrutinise with a severe eye, every nerve, vessel & muscle; every habit, instinct, shade of constitution,—the whole machinery of the organisation. There will be here no caprice, no favouring: the good will be preserved & the bad rigidly destroyed.… Can we wonder then, that nature's productions bear the stamp of a far higher perfection than man's product by artificial selection. With nature the most gradual, steady, unerring, deep-sighted selection,—perfect adaption [sic] to the conditions of existence.… (Darwin 1856, in Stauffer 1974, 224–25)

The conclusion of The Origin of Species also deals with this theme:

To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual…
And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us… Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Like Adam Smith, Darwin had proposed a system of enumerated laws that once having been laid down are capable of generating entirely new forms on their own. Darwin’s mechanism to explain how gradual change in life over time was able to come about had a profound effect on thinkers of the time. The Origin of Species was published in 1856, and by the next year Samuel Butler published Darwin among the Machines, which he later elaborated into a section of the Utopian novel Erewhon. One of the first works of science fiction, it proposes the idea that evolution need not be restricted to the animal kingdom, but could be put to use in developing technology that would be able to emulate human abilities, and even surpass them. In the long selections that follow, Butler addresses the possibility of machine consciousness, senses, language, reproduction, and evolution.

There was a time, when the earth was to all appearance utterly destitute both of animal and vegetable life, and when according to the opinion of our best philosophers it was simply a hot round ball with a crust gradually cooling. Now if a human being had existed while the earth was in this state … would he not have pronounced it impossible that creatures possessed of anything like consciousness should be evolved from the seeming cinder which he was beholding… Yet in the course of time consciousness came. Is it not possible then that there may be even yet new channels dug out for consciousness, though we can detect no signs of them at present?
Consciousness, in anything like the present acceptation of the term, having been once a new thing… why may not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different from all present known phases, as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables?
"It would be absurd to attempt to define such a mental state (or whatever it may be called), inasmuch as it must be something so foreign to man that his experience can give him no help towards conceiving its nature; but surely when we reflect upon the manifold phases of life and consciousness which have been evolved already, it would be rash to say that no others can be developed, and that animal life is the end of all things. There was a time when fire was the end of all things: another when rocks and water were so…"
"There is no security…against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. A mollusc has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organized machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years: see what strides machines have made in the last thousand! May not the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become?...
"But who can say that the vapour engine has not a kind of consciousness? Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line? Who can draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything? Is not machinery linked with animal life in an infinite variety of ways? The shell of a hen's egg is made of a delicate white ware and is a machine as much as an egg-cup is: the shell is a device for holding the egg, as much as the egg-cup for holding the shell: both are phases of the same function…
"There is a kind of plant that eats organic food with its flowers: when a fly settles upon the blossom, the petals close upon it and hold it fast till the plant has absorbed the insect into its system; but they will close on nothing but what is good to eat; of a drop of rain or a piece of stick they will take no notice. Curious! that so unconscious a thing should have such a keen eye to its own interest. If this is unconsciousness, where is the use of consciousness?
"Shall we say that the plant does not know what it is doing merely because it has no eyes, or ears, or brains? If we say that it acts mechanically, and mechanically only, shall we not be forced to admit that sundry other and apparently very deliberate actions are also mechanical?...
…the answer would seem to lie in an inquiry whether every sensation is not chemical and mechanical in its operation? whether those things which we deem most purely spiritual are anything but disturbances of equilibrium in an infinite series of levers, beginning with those that are too small for microscopic detection, and going up to the human arm and the appliances which it makes use of? Whether there be not a molecular action of thought, whence a dynamical theory of the passions shall be deducible? Whether strictly speaking we should not ask what kind of levers a man is made of rather than what is his temperament? How are they balanced? How much of such and such will it take to weigh them down so as to make him do so and so?..."

Butler’s position today would be called functionalism. It is the argument that systems that behave in ways similar to conscious minds are themselves conscious. Notice the words “where is the use of consciousness?” He is not particularly concerned with the problem of subjective perception, as long as the machine can act like a conscious being, responding appropriately to stimuli. In his day this was such a radical position that the whole chapter was laughed off as a satire of Darwin.
The next section takes William Paley’s argument for intelligent design and turns it on its head. The “Watchmaker Argument” was not original to Paley; there are references as far back as Cicero. But his version was well known at the time. Butler contends that the watch itself has undergone evolution of a sort, involving artificial rather than natural selection. From his other works, it is clear that Butler is less interested in the mechanism causing evolution than the fact of information transfer from parent to child. His understanding of this as a kind of “unconscious memory” is the basis behind DNA computing. He also notes the tendency towards miniaturization of computing components.

The present machines are to the future as the early Saurians to man. The largest of them will probably greatly diminish in size. Some of the lowest vertebrate attained a much greater bulk than has descended to their more highly organised living representatives, and in like manner a diminution in the size of machines has often attended their development and progress.
"Take the watch, for example; examine its beautiful structure; observe the intelligent play of the minute members which compose it: yet this little creature is but a development of the cumbrous clocks that preceded it; it is no deterioration from them. A day may come when clocks, which certainly at the present time are not diminishing in bulk, will be superseded owing to the universal use of watches, in which case they will become as extinct as ichthyosauri, while the watch, whose tendency has for some years been to decrease in size rather than the contrary, will remain the only existing type of an extinct race.
"… I fear none of the existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present…

Butler uses the whistle of a train as an example of machine communication. He sees the system of train operator + train as a unit, where the functions of the train operator, already constrained to act in set ways to certain signals, will gradually be replaced by machines of increasingly “delicate construction.”

"As yet the machines receive their impressions through the agency of man's senses: one travelling machine calls to another in a shrill accent of alarm and the other instantly retires; but it is through the ears of the driver that the voice of the one has acted upon the other… There was a time when it must have seemed highly improbable that machines should learn to make their wants known by sound, even through the ears of man; may we not conceive, then, that a day will come when those ears will be no longer needed, and the hearing will be done by the delicacy of the machine's own construction?—when its language shall have been developed from the cry of animals to a speech as intricate as our own?
"… Take man's vaunted power of calculation. Have we not engines which can do all manner of sums more quickly and correctly than we can?... In fact, wherever precision is required man flies to the machine at once, as far preferable to himself. Our sum-engines never drop a figure, nor our looms a stitch... This is the green tree; what then shall be done in the dry?...

The analogy of a group of people with a living body shows up in the writings of Paul in the New Testament and in Hobbe’s Leviathan. Here it is used as an argument that a system of disconnected parts can come together to act in many ways like a living creature.

"It is said by some that our blood is composed of infinite living agents which go up and down the highways and byways of our bodies as people in the streets of a city. When we look down from a high place upon crowded thoroughfares, is it possible not to think of corpuscles of blood travelling through veins and nourishing the heart of the town? No mention shall be made of sewers, nor of the hidden nerves which serve to communicate sensations from one part of the town's body to another; nor of the yawning jaws of the railway stations, whereby the circulation is carried directly into the heart,—which receive the venous lines, and disgorge the arterial, with an eternal pulse of people. And the sleep of the town, how life-like! with its change in the circulation…"
…Are we not ourselves creating our successors in the supremacy of the earth? Daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their organisation, daily giving them greater skill and supplying more and more of that self-regulating self-acting power which will be better than any intellect?...

The idea of a machine able to assemble copies of itself would later occur to von Neumann, and in Drexler's dream of nanotech assemblers. But Butler takes a different tack: the fact of machines assembling machines in a factory is already a form of reproduction. The place of people in the factory is shrugged off as a kind of symbiosis.

"Surely if a machine is able to reproduce another machine systematically, we may say that it has a reproductive system. What is a reproductive system, if it be not a system for reproduction? And how few of the machines are there which have not been produced systematically by other machines? But it is man that makes them do so. Yes; but is it not insects that make many of the plants reproductive, and would not whole families of plants die out if their fertilisation was not effected by a class of agents utterly foreign to themselves? Does any one say that the red clover has no reproductive system because the humble bee (and the humble bee only) must aid and abet it before it can reproduce?...
"It is possible that the system when developed may be in many cases a vicarious thing. Certain classes of machines may be alone fertile, while the rest discharge other functions in the mechanical system, just as the great majority of ants and bees have nothing to do with the continuation of their species, but get food and store it, without thought of breeding… Machines can within certain limits beget machines of any class, no matter how different to themselves. Every class of machines will probably have its special mechanical breeders, and all the higher ones will owe their existence to a large number of parents and not to two only.
"We are misled by considering any complicated machine as a single thing; in truth it is a city or society, each member of which was bred truly after its kind…. The truth is that each part of every vapour-engine is bred by its own special breeders, whose function it is to breed that part, and that only, while the combination of the parts into a whole forms another department of the mechanical reproductive system, which is at present exceedingly complex and difficult to see in its entirety.
"Complex now, but how much simpler and more intelligibly organised may it not become in another hundred thousand years? or in twenty thousand? For man at present believes that his interest lies in that direction; he spends an incalculable amount of labour and time and thought in making machines breed always better and better; he has already succeeded in effecting much that at one time appeared impossible, and there seem no limits to the results of accumulated improvements if they are allowed to descend with modification from generation to generation. It must always be remembered that man's body is what it is through having been moulded into its present shape by the chances and changes of many millions of years, but that his organisation never advanced with anything like the rapidity with which that of the machines is advancing…"

Finally he comes to artificial intelligence. He argues that free will is an illusion, that our own actions are determined based on our previous experiences and current stimulus. He acknowledges that complex systems are sensitive to initial conditions.

"But I have heard it said, 'granted that this is so, and that the vapour-engine has a strength of its own, surely no one will say that it has a will of its own?' Alas! if we look more closely, we shall find that this does not make against the supposition that the vapour-engine is one of the germs of a new phase of life. What is there in this whole world, or in the worlds beyond it, which has a will of its own? The Unknown and Unknowable only!
… the difference between the life of a man and that of a machine is one rather of degree than of kind, though differences in kind are not wanting. An animal has more provision for emergency than a machine… For how many emergencies is an oyster adapted? For as many as are likely to happen to it, and no more. So are the machines; and so is man himself. The list of casualties that daily occur to man through his want of adaptability is probably as great as that occurring to the machines; and every day gives them some greater provision for the unforeseen. Let any one examine the wonderful self-regulating and self-adjusting contrivances which are now incorporated with the vapour-engine, let him watch the way in which it supplies itself with oil; in which it indicates its wants to those who tend it; in which, by the governor, it regulates its application of its own strength; let him look at that store-house of inertia and momentum the fly-wheel, or at the buffers on a railway carriage; let him see how those improvements are being selected for perpetuity which contain provision against the emergencies that may arise to harass the machines, and then let him think of a hundred thousand years, and the accumulated progress which they will bring.

This last idea, the governor that regulates inertia, was the original example of cybernetics, the study of self-regulating systems which would eventually become synonomous with artificial intelligence. (From cybernetics we derive terms such as cyberspace.) Darwin’s collaborator Alfred Wallace wrote in 1858:

We have also here an acting cause to account for that balance so often observed in nature,—a deficiency in one set of organs always being compensated by an increased development of some others—powerful wings accompanying weak feet, or great velocity making up for the absence of defensive weapons; for it has been shown that all varieties in which an unbalanced deficiency occurred could not long continue their existence. The action of this principle is exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident; and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude, because it would make itself felt at the very first step, by rendering existence difficult and extinction almost sure soon to follow. (“On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type,” 1858)

A case can be made that it was this advancement in self-observing, self-modifying machines that inspired the concept of natural evolution, rather than the other way around. In reality, of course, the ideas in biology and mechanics formed a beneficial feedback loop.
Stuart Hoffmann, among others, has pointed out what evolution and the development of technology share that is lacking from other systems that we judge to be complex: the possibility space cannot be constrained beforehand. Evolution is often referred to as exploring a space of possibilities, finding local maxima. But evolution is able to expand its own space of possibilities, making thins possible that were previously impossible. Perhaps the only constraining space is the space of configurations of subatomic particles.
(This potential is often ignored in evolutionary algorithms. In many cases, a “genome” is defined as a vector of binary or real-valued numbers, each of which controls some parameter of a possibility space. For example, one value might control speed, another turning radius, another frequency of making turns, and so forth. But finding optimal values for any preset list of parameters can be more quickly accomplished by other algorithms than evolution.)
Art shares this open possibility space. New works of art, to be understood and valued as art, must build on an existing tradition or react to it. But there is no limit to the ways this building can happen, except what someone finds interesting or beautiful.
A creative machine would share this ability to expand into a limitless possibility space. However, any evolutionary algorithm needs an evaluation function. For life, this is survival until reproduction can occur. For art, it is the criteria of interest or beauty. How would we implement this criterion into a machine? We could program it or train it on what we had already found beautiful, but this would only allow it to recombine things that had been found beautiful in the past. Somehow, we would need to give it the ability to see for itself that something novel is interesting. There has, to date, been remarkably little work on how to achieve this.
Many creative evolution programs use a human in the loop to perform the evaluation of possibilities, choosing variations that are preferred. In this case, the computer is clearly a tool being used by the artist doing the choosing, rather than the machine itself acting as an artist.

Communicating in Code

2008-06-12T06:56:00.000-07:00

Every year, thousands of computer science papers are published. Many of these papers describe an algorithm or a program that the author has written, showing how the author's approach is better than previous solutions to the problem. The papers are amost invariably written in English (a universal language in the subject) and contain mathematical notation (another universal language.) All of this is useful. It distributes knowledge to other researchers and leads to development. But strangely, most of these papers contain no source code. Sometimes there is a small snippet of pseudocode illustrating the central innovation. Often, even that is missing. It seems bizarre, as if a journal of art criticism contained no illustrations, or a book on how to cook contained no recipes. Why are we in this absurd situation?

1. Computer scientists, not software architects. The usual response is that the author is a scientist studying ideas, rather than an engineer building something meant for serious use. But the scientist has invariably already built something to test the idea. It's not like particle physics, where theorists have ideas that can't be put into practice because of the expense. (Ideas like these are usually dismissed as unworthy of a paper in computer science. It's a cultural thing.) It could easily be distributed, but isn't. Perhaps some of the authors really have no interest in seeing source code from others, and assume everyone feels the same way. This way of thinking is so alien to me I have trouble even considering the point of view. A mathematical formula is so compact in its notation that it takes enormous effort to unpack. And the formulas contained in papers rarely define all their variables, expecting the reader to pick up the meaning of some of the variables from experience or context.

2. Lack of a universal language.There is no standard programming language. Perhaps a dozen languages are currently widely used. Where source code is available for the kind of programs I am interested in, it is invariably in one of the following languages: C, C++, C#, Java, Matlab, or Lisp. However, all of these (with the exception of Lisp) are so similar in structure that any programmer who can understand code in one of the languages can understand code in any of the others. It may be uncomfortable to work in, but more of an annoyance than a roadblock.

3. Lack of universal libraries. Most programs use other libraries in order to run. These libraries can be difficult to install and use, and often have unwritten assumptions built into them. The researcher could easily share the original code, but sharing the libraries needed to run it and where to get them seems like a huge burden.This is true, but why is it true? Why don't we have a widely shared set of libraries to take care of all the previously solved computer science problems? The answer is because no one is making the effort to create useful code and share it. If this were the priority rather than just the papers, the problem would quickly take care of itself. It's partly a chicken-and-egg problem.

4. The program wasn't written to be understood. Often computer scientists are ashamed of their code, and don't want it to be made public. They know that it is sketchy, inefficient, poorly documented, bug-ridden, and requires arcane rituals to get to work at all. It's more like a messy research notebook than a paper. This is all true. But why don't they rewrite the code for the paper? It wouldn't take much more work than writing the paper itself. The answer is purely cultural: a paper confers prestige, raises awareness, gets you into conferences, and so forth. Beautiful code goes largely unappreciated. It is this cultural aspect I really want to see changed. It seems to me that the right language to express computer science ideas in is (well designed and well documented) code. It can sacrifice some efficiency for the sake of clarity. Learning to communicate in this way should be taught as part of every computer science class.I'm not advocating strict obediedence to some standard. I'm advocating teaching literacy in programming, the ability to read and write code whose purpose is completely transparent and as easy to read as prose text. Perhaps the language, tools, and libraries to do this don't really exist yet. But in the future, people will look back in wonder that we were able to get anything done at all. Imagine how useful it would be to be able to immediately compare a new approach to any existing approach. Imagine how much progress could be made if all the existing ideas were available to be used without significant effort as building blocks of a new algorithm.

Sigh.

Book chapter

2008-06-11T11:53:00.000-07:00

This is a draft of another chapter for my book. The working title of the book is Artificial Creativity: The Thousand Year Quest to Build a Creative Machine.

Kaleidoscope

In 1817, Sir David Brewster patented the kaleidoscope. Others had noticed the effect of two mirrors meeting at an angle before, as recounted in this selection from a 1818 article in The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany:

The repetition and reversion of images in a glass is noticed in the Masfiti Naturalis of Baptista Porta, a Neapolitan nobleman, who flourished about the latter part of the sixteenth century, and was distinguished for his zeal in promoting philosophical pursuits…
In the Ars Magna Lucís et Umbra of Kircher, printed in 1646, we have an account of the same circumstance, and also of the repetition of the sectors round the centre of the circle:
“A wonderful property,” says he,” and one which has not, as far as I know, been observed by any one, is exhibited with two specula, so constructed as to open and shut like a book; and placed on any plane in which you have described a semicircle divided into its degrees. For, if the point in which the specula meet be placed in the centre of the semicircle, so that the side of each speculum shall stand upon the diameter, the image of an object will only be seen once, and two objects will appear, one without the specula, the true one,—and one within, the image. But if the sides be placed at an angle of 120°, you will see the image of the object within the specula twice, that is, along with the real image, three objects But if the specula intercept an angle of 90°, you will see the circle divided into four parts, and four objects; in the same manner, at an angle of 60°, you will see a hexagon with six objects.”
He then applies the principle to some curious contrivances which, by his own account, filled his spectators with astonishment. With one candle he shows how to make a complete chandelier. “With angles of 120°, 72°, and 45°, you will see,” says he, “with no less delight than adimration, a chandelier with three, with five, and with eight branches.”

When Brewster showed his prototype kaleidoscope to manufacturers of optical instruments, pirate copies began cropping up all over the London and soon spread around the world:

You can form no conception of the effect which the instrument excited in London; all that you have heard falls infinitely short of the reality. No book and no instrument in the memory of man ever produced such a singular effect. They are exhibited publicly on the streets for a penny, and I had the pleasure of paying this sum yesterday; these are about two feet long and a foot wide. Infants are seen carrying them in their hands, the coachmen on their boxes are busy using them, and thousands of poor people make their bread by making and selling them. (letter from Brewster to his wife, May 1818)

The kaleidoscope allowed the viewer to enter into a virtual world, filled with bright colors and concealed symmetries. If it was a scientific instrument (as the name implied), it was an instrument of some faerie science, a science of beauty. It partook of the potential of mirrors to create other worlds, to open up new infinite spaces. The forms were reminiscent of magical mandalas, and viewers often compared the hypnotic effect of looking through a shifting kaleidoscope to that of listening to music.

IF we examine the various objects of art which have exercised the skill and ingenuity of man, we shall find that they derive all their beauty from the symmetry of their form, and that one work of art excels another in proportion as it exhibits a more perfect development of this principle of beauty. Even the forms of animal, vegetable, and mineral bodies, derive their beauty from the same source... (Brewster chapter 20)

Brewster’s conception of beauty was grounded in neoclassicism. Symmetry and geometric order were key ideas in this. Beyond that, he assumed that a science of beauty was possible, that universal principles of beauty could be discovered. In The Kaleidoscope (a book on the optical theory behind the construction of his invention) he gives a theory of color harmony and repeatedly emphasizes the importance of carefully constructed devices that don’t allow the slightest imperfection in symmetry.
He conceived of the kaleidoscope as a labor saving device for artists, an automation of part of the creative process:

When we consider, that in this busy island thousands of individuals are wholly occupied with the composition of symmetrical designs, and that there is scarcely any profession into which these designs do not enter as a necessary part, so as to employ a portion of the time of every artist, we shall not hesitate in admitting, that an instrument must have no small degree of utility which abridges the labour of so many individuals. If we reflect further on the nature of the designs which are thus composed, and on the methods which must be employed in their composition, the Kaleidoscope will assume the character of the highest class of machinery, which improves at the same time that it abridges the exertions of individuals. There are few machines, indeed, which rise higher above the operations of human skill. It will create, in a single hour, what a thousand artists could not invent in the course of a year; and while it works with such unexampled rapidity, it works also with a corresponding beauty and precision. (Brewster chapter 20)

Things did not turn out quite as Brewster expected. Our use of machines to automate work previously done by artists has modified our concept of beauty. What used to take a great deal of skill and time could be done immediately and without effort by a mechanical process. This led to society valuing designs of rigid perfect symmetry less. A similar effect occurred with the invention of photography. Because of the ease of obtaining a perfectly accurate likeness, abstract and nonrepresentational art became more highly valued by the art world.

The kaleidoscope is a prototype for many computer programs that attempt to generate new works of art. Each one follows the same pattern:
1. Hand-selected forms to be recombined. Brewster recommends buttons, bits of broken glass, a distant bonfire, dancers, etc... [pull more examples from his book]
2. Random or nearly random input. In the kaleidoscope, this comes from shaking the bits of glass.
3. Formal constraints. The kaleidoscope uses mirrors to impose symmetry.

For example, a Markov poetry generator takes a set of words (preselected for the intended effect, such as all words used in works by a given author) recombine them randomly, but imposing constraints of use frequency patterns. Fractal generators use slightly more sophisticated symmetry constraints on the randomness. Similar examples can be found for music, such as David Cope’s EMI program. [include example output from each of these]

While all of these hold some interest in the beginning, after a short time newly produced works fail to add anything new to the already formed impression. Instead of learning individual works, our brains pick up on the pattern that underlies all of the output. Although at first it seemed that the machine was being creative, it later becomes apparent that a store of creativity injected, as it were, during the creation of the program, has merely been allowed to leak out slowly.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig identifies two kinds of beauty: classical beauty and romantic beauty. [quote from Z&AMM here] Both are evident in these kaleidoscopic machines: the hand selected elements are romantically beautiful, beautiful in how they present themselves to the senses. The formal constraints are classically beautiful in how they appeal to the intellect.
It is comparatively simple to set up a system of rules and generate new images. It is much more difficult to choose a set of rules that will produce images that are aesthetically pleasing. In order to do the latter, we need to have some theory of beauty or interest. The attempt to mechanize requires that we understand; but the attempt to understand beauty transforms it. There is essentially a paradox here: creativity must continually be pushing the boundaries of what is new. Simply being new is not enough, however; to be considered creative it must be both new and beautiful. Any static conception of beauty must quickly become inadequate.
The problem becomes, then, how to make a machine that grows in ability over time, that is not limited by the initial choices made by the author of the program. In the next chapter [about Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler] we’ll look at how scientist came to understand how the creation of new forms could arise from the action of natural laws and immediately began to apply the concept to the development of creative machines.