Links and quotes, May 2015

On race politics and gun culture:

"American guns are meant to represent the white man’s freedom to protect himself from government and from the colored hordes that surround him," Messiah Rhodes writes. "When a black man handles a gun of his own accord, he reverses the gun’s supposed purpose, and white people get scared."

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Maths: Steven Wittens illustrates How to Fold a Julia Fractal. This visual essay is full of excellent illustrations and animations, including a beautiful demonstration of the square-and-shift operation on polar coordinates which really helps build intuition for why the Julia fractal is shaped the way it is.

I'm linking to Marsaglia's Random numbers fall mainly in the planes (1968) solely for the puntastic title, though its content -- finding unwanted patterns in a simplistic modular-exponentiation based random number generator -- is nothing to scoff at either. (Unless, presumably, you're currently making your living hawking said RNGs, in which case, scoff away.)

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Source: Tumblr / jinamong.
Other slice-of-life fantasy creature sketches by the same artist: 1, 2.

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I'm continually finding interesting perspectives on the "activist language merry-go-round" -- a term coined, I believe, by Serano in the last few years to describe a certain focus within activist communities on the fastidious quarantine of words known/found to be problematic. Cristan Williams describes the exercise as "[chasing] the ghost of empowerment through the reactionary policing of highly nuanced lexical epistemologies", and further notes that which words are considered accepted or problematic is a relative notion even between different activist communities.

I am fascinated by the implication here: the Internet provides the illusion of a global homogenised speech community, but organic language usage still happens subject to the constraints of geography and social group structure. Whomever's interpretation of various terms becomes canonised happens to be enjoying an unusual privilege.

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The prose in In Flight, an extract from Mark Vanhoenacker's book, Skyfaring, is gorgeous through-and-through. The following extract is technical and poetic in equal measures:

Planes following altitudes referenced to the standard atmosphere collectively and continuously adjust their degree of wrongness — gently climbing or descending in a collective, school-of-fish-like movement as the true air pressure below changes with time and location. Locked for hours at what our altimeters show to be 31,000 feet, our true altitude may vary constantly. Think of an ocean, of all the boats across its vast expanse rising and descending on their local swells. All the boats are on the surface, though their true elevation varies. An altitude referenced to the standard atmosphere is called a flight level and it is just like such a surface: a membrane encircling the Earth, pressed with indentations and textured with rises, shimmering invisibly on the aerial imperfections of the world.

Mark Vanhoenacker, In Flight.

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Creative Mysticism and “Don't Hug Me I'm Scared”

I am a little in love with Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, the cult hit Youtube short and Tumblr darling (and 2012 Sundance Film Festival nominee(!), did you know that?, I didn't know that) by Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling.

DHMIS and its sequels sit within the genre of subverted kids' show: it's a short in the style of an educational kid's show that quickly turns subtly creepy, culminating in full-blown nightmare fuel. But of course, there's plenty to delve into.

Let's take DHMIS at face value: as educational, or at least as a work responding to educational shows. Quoth the creators on their Kickstarter pitch:

Don't Hug Me I'm Scared is a show about puppets learning stuff.

DHMIS series Kickstarter pitch

That's common to all of the DHMIS videos so far: the main characters (three puppets: red, green, and yellow, with distinctive personalities) are taught about some abstract topic by a teacher figure. Topics as of writing include: creativity, time, love, and computers.

It's not a huge leap to say that The teacher-student "dialogue" in DHMIS mirrors that between society and the individual.

Here I'm using "society" to refer to a very generalised "main" memeplex; an amalgamation of the education system and media and advertising and business culture and pretty much everything that's in the business of declaring how people ought to think. Related but not the same: Fiorenza's "kyriarchy", Moldbug's "cathedral", caricature hippies' "The Man". (And, disclaimer: I'm restricting the scope of this claim to English-speaking cultures since [1] I have more familiarity with [i.e. ability to speak meaningfully to] the "Western society" memeplex and [2] that's the cultural context DHMIS originates within and critiques).

This interpretation is hardly unique. That said, I'm not familiar enough with the literature (as it were) on DHMIS hermeneutics to know whether it's the accepted wisdom.

Anyway! Let's talk about the first DHMIS. The teacher is Notebook, who I'll be using "she" pronouns for since that seems to be the Tumblr consensus and I'm a lazy fuck (but remember, the official line is that Notebook's gender is paper). The subject: creativity.

Lesson summary: creativity is bad news.

Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling, 2011.

Creativity as a black box

— How do you get the ideas?

— I just try to think creatively.

There is no complete mechanistic account of how to be creative, no process summarised by an A4 flow chart. Instead, it seems that the creative process is a black box so far as monolithic organisations are concerned.

When Notebook says "I just try to think creatively", she effectively writes off the process of creativity as an inscrutable, atomic thing. She could have easily presented any number of actual suggestions, with all their varying pros and cons (e.g. any of the usual cliches: asking guiding questions, taking a walk, playing word association...). But she doesn't, and that's because (as a metaphor for "society") she has no interest in offering partial answers, in suggesting that there are pieces of the puzzle she can't provide. It's far more convenient to suggest that creativity is something that you either have or you don't.

The closest Notebook gets to providing constructive advice on the subject is "Listen to your heart / Listen to the rain / Listen to the voices your brain". Notice that these are all platitudes. They pattern match to some standard vague picture of what creativity is, but they don't actually offer any actionable advice.

(Compare to similar after-school special messages: "The power was inside you all along." "Real love prevails." Even when such platitudes do provide an account of something real, they do so in an entirely opaque way.)

Links and quotes, April 2015

From The New York Times comes this explainer on the mathematics of fair division. Highlights include an interactive visualisation of Sperner's lemma and a shout-out to the not-for-profit app Spliddit.

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In an observational study, The University of Texas at Austin gave a group piano majors a Shostakovich passage to learn and perform a day later. They found that the amount of time spent practicing the passage didn't have much bearing on mastery. What did distinguish the top performers was how they handled their mistakes. The best ones took pains to individually locate and correct errors, addressed them immediately when they arose, and strategically slowed the piece down to address problem areas.

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On the pros and cons of trigger warnings as standard classroom practice: "oh god oh god I want to be dead I want to be dead is just not a good mindset to be in when you’re trying to grasp the nuances of Derrida."

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Sea Stills: Photographer Ray Collins captures giant waves in otherworldly moments.

Bash completion of aliased commands, revisited

When you alias a command in Bash, tab completion no longer works. If you regularly take advantage of tab completion, this undoes most of the convenience of aliasing.

A quick web search throws up an old script by Ole Jorgen that solves this problem by "wrapping" the original completion command with some code that modifies variables to make the complete believe you'd typed out the aliased command in full and are tab completing as per usual.

Unfortunately, running that circa-'08 script on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (using bash 4.3.11) causes it to choke on most attempted tab completions, with error messages like:

$COMP_POINT: substring expression < 0

The problem: the script modifies two of the variables made available to Bash completion (COMP_CWORD and COMP_WORDS), but misses others. With a little hackery we can modify that script to alter the other variables, COMP_LINE and COMP_POINT.

# Author.: Ole J, Chris C
# Date...: 14.06.2015
# License: Whatever

# Wraps a completion function
# make-completion-wrapper <actual completion function> <name of new func.>
#                         <command name> <list supplied arguments>
# eg.
#     alias agi='apt-get install'
#     make-completion-wrapper _apt_get _apt_get_install apt-get install
# defines a function called _apt_get_install (that's $2) that will complete
# the 'agi' alias. (complete -F _apt_get_install agi)
#
function make-completion-wrapper () {
    local function_name="$2"
    local arg_count=$(($#-3))
    local comp_function_name="$1"
    shift 2 # For convenience, drop the extracted arguments
    local arg=${@:1}
    local function="
function $function_name {
    ((COMP_CWORD+=$arg_count))

    local cmdlength
    cmdlength=\${#COMP_WORDS[0]}

    COMP_POINT=\$((\$COMP_POINT-\$cmdlength+${#arg}))
    COMP_LINE=\"$arg\${COMP_LINE[@]:\$cmdlength}\"

    COMP_WORDS=( "$@" \${COMP_WORDS[@]:1} )

    _init_completion
    "$comp_function_name"
    return 0
}"
    eval "$function"
}

Then usage proceeds as before:

alias sdr='screen -d -r'
make-completion-wrapper _screen _sdr screen -d -r
complete -F _sdr sdr

Links and quotes, March 2015

The "March" in the title is purely decorative. (Or: that's when I read them.)

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(CW: Homestuck) What do Magic: the Gathering's five colours, Pacific Rim's drift compatibility, and the Houses of Hogwarts have in common? Yes, they're powerful in-universe metaphorical devices that connect character arcs to physical things, Sam Keeper of Storming the Ivory Tower writes. But more importantly, they're both structured and hyperflexible. They're given well defined rules and categorisations but aren't overly prescriptive. They're open-ended but not too open. This makes them amazing hooks for fanworks and remixes.

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Philip Sandifer's A Mild Curiosity in a Junkyard is an impressive tour de force work spanning the fifty-plus years of Doctor Who's run, and its place in the greater historical and social context. Highlights include the flippant creation of central parts of the show's mythos (regenerations, Gallifrey, etc.), Hartnell's retirement as marked on-screen symbolism of end of the show's early "noble savage" era, Tom Baker's spiral into egotistic "one man show" self-centeredness, the voluminous official tie-in books produced in the 90s and 00s that later turned into some of the best post-revival scripts... It goes on and on and it's utterly fascinating.

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Melissa Thomasson says that what we have combines the worst of the market and the worst of government. Markets are usually really good at controlling costs... Government can be good at... ensuring universal access... For Melissa Thomasson, she says that either extreme, a competitive market system where consumers know what price they're paying, what they're getting, which would probably drive the price of health care down, or a government run system, which would cover everyone would be better than the accidental mixture that we have today: a really expensive system that doesn't cover us all.

This American Life, episode 392, “Someone Else’s Money”]

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Joey Camacho of Raw & Rendered has a very impressive portfolio. The above image is taken from his Progress Before Perfection collection.

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Yanis Varoufakis (formerly, "that economist who did cool things at Valve", currently, "that economist who's Greece's finance minister"), explains the influence of Marxist theory on his economic work over the years. "Even my non-Marxist economics was guided by a mindset influenced by Marx, he writes." His take on Marx's work is interesting, and definitely not what I would describe as 'socialist' -- indeed, he laments that a lot of the political discourse on the subject centres on fairness and justice ("bequeathing the concept of freedom to the neoliberals") rather than a greater, causal underlying problem: that capitalism as it functions is inefficient even on its own terms, that it wastes everything, of value or otherwise.

Mad Max: Fury Road as worship of classical physics

Still from Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).

Mad Max: Fury Road is thematically rich. There's bodily autonomy (I count at least three different invocations of the motif); femininity and choice; culture and identity. But as a newcomer to the franchise, I was most struck by how raw physicality plays into it all.

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Earlier this year, Venkatesh Rao (riffing on Penrose) described a trichotomy of ways reality and fiction give us affective experiences: physical, social and mathematical. Think Matthew Reilly vs. the Brontës vs. Agatha Christie; Angry Birds vs. The Sims vs. Tetris. (As with most systems of classification, it falls apart quickly when interpreted as a sharp-edged "either-or", but it does provide a useful framework to begin from.)

Action movies, as you'd expect, deliver most of their gratification through the physical. But it's not just these. Interstellar, for example, achieves a great deal of its emotional highs through moments of pure physics -- conservation of momentum, torque, thrust. It's an ode to the raw mechanics of piloting a spaceship (much as The Hunt for Red October is an ode to submarine piloting).

Similarly, Mad Max: Fury Road is a panegyric to the automobile, but its homage to physicality extends beyond that.

War culture. Ibid.

Conservation of energy

In a world without electricity, energy isn't abstracted away behind light switches. Giant pulleys are moved by human pedalling, cars are pushed out of mud with sheer grit, waterways open at the pull of a gargantuan lever. Every reaction is directly caused by an equally visceral action. This is a world without power steering.

The war drums (and war guitar, of course) embody this -- camera shots lingering on the drummers as their entire bodies swing into beat after beat, so entwined their riggings that they seem to be an extension of their war machines.

Indeed, even social power in this world is only ever a single level of remove from physical power. The characters with high standing -- Immortan Joe, Furiosa, and so on -- are characterised by martial prowess and brute strength.

This all certainly borrows heavily from the pre-feudal warlord culture the film riffs upon, but it's tangibly a part of the film's direction, not some contingent bit of stylistic afterthought. Energy and physical motion is currency.

Scarcity

And if physical motion is currency in Fury Road, then engine fuel is its most fungible manifestation. Fuel is the resource that raiding parties are sent out to hunt for; fuel is the bartering chip that gets the War Rig into the canyon. Unlike paper currency, its value is intrinsic -- characters count the fuel they have left, the number of days' mileage they can make on it. Even in a dystopian wasteland it can meaningfully be hoarded and stolen. And, of course, it can be destroyed.

Fury Road both depicts and embodies the worship of scarce resources. Fuel, water, bullets: everything is in short supply. Every shot fired, every extra gallon of gas, counts.

This attitude pervades the entire culture -- even the most cloistered of the escapees know like second nature how to count bullets and match them to their firearms. Water is coveted and fought for; its long-forgotten cousin, "green", spoken of with religious devotion. Human bodies are treated as scarcely more than sources of scarce commodities -- milk, blood, physical labour.

Ibid.

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Physicality embeds itself within the film in plenty more ways: the fetishistic cultural artefacts of the different factions; the motif of Furiosa's arm as both source of strength and mask; literal masks and exoskeletons and cyborg symbolism; telescopes and rifle scopes as an extension of the body. It's pervasive. The physical is everywhere. That's what makes Fury Road so effective as an action movie -- everything about it is written in the same dynamic language of force and momentum that underlies the genre.

What random feels like

In the pilot episode of Numb3rs, CalSci professor Charlie Eppes (David Krumholtz) describes how people confuse randomness with uniformity. "You've distributed yourselves at equal intervals, while true random patterns will include clusters... [Simulating randomness] is pretty difficult."

Whether it's nature or nurture, we're really bad at knowing 'random' when we see it. This is what lets Eppes solve the case-of-the-week. This is why the Fire Emblem games badly underexaggerate their probabilities of peons hitting other peons -- because it takes 80% real odds for something to feel like 70% certainty.

"If a unit has a 15% displayed chance... their actual odds of hitting are a paltry 4.65%... if a unit has an 85% displayed hit chance [it's] actually a more reliable 95.65%."
Screenshot: lparchive.org.

TagTime

I recently installed TagTime for Android, a barebones app that randomly polls you every forty-five minutes on average¹ to ask you what you're doing at that exact moment. It's a completely random sample of your day.

(The results are distressing. Over the last four days, approximately 1 in every 8 pings has occurred while I was on Facebook, i.e. three hours a day, give or take a generous error term. [Image link])

The thing about the 'random sample' part: it's really random. (Specifically, it's a Poisson process). The key part here is that it's totally memoryless -- you can't say "it's been nearly forty-five minutes so I'm going to do something productive now so I can write that down when the app next pings me". Nor can you say "Well, it just pinged me a second ago, so it's safe to hop onto Twitter for a few minutes". There's no gaming it (and thus no need to worry about gaming it). At any given moment, minute to minute, your odds of getting pinged are exactly the same.

As I mentioned, this really doesn't feel like how we expect random distributions to behave.

The reviewer in the above image, in addition to not understanding probability, gives a fairly good description of what having the app switched on feels like. Sometimes you'll get a ping from it three times in two minutes. Sometimes you'll watch an entire movie without it going off. A lot of the time it feels like I'll do a solid hour of work and then open Facebook for a minute and then immediately get pinged asking what I'm up to². There's no predictability to it.

At any given minute, there's about a 2% chance of the app pinging me. Thus I've started to learn what "a 2% chance" really feels like. It's strange.

A 2% chance feels small but not that small. It sounds like nothing but it still manages to happen anyway, once or maybe twice an hour (and every now and then, five times).

There's perhaps a larger note about probability (fine, about independent probabilities) here: the odds of getting pinged during a given second are less than one in a thousand. And so on, and so forth. One in a thousand, one in a million... those odds may be small, but sometimes, over once an hour, even, things that unlikely still do happen.

It may be obvious on paper, but it feels a lot stranger in the real world when you first really notice it.

That seems like a good lesson to internalise.

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Footnotes:

¹ For a user-defined value of forty-five.

² In these cases I'd still say "I was on Facebook". Even if it doesn't feel fair, on average, over the course of weeks, the pings will cover a representative sample of your time.

On a similar note, a lot of the employee surveys at work come with instructions to answer the question about how you're feeling that very day, even if you're having an unusually up or down week. Across the whole sample, they assure us, a genuine picture of "typical" will appear.