Llamas and my stegosaurus

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.