tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87522452069575216652024-03-13T13:35:35.190+11:00Open Endings"When you're finished changing, you're finished."Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.comBlogger73125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-74390028116695462722015-08-05T19:04:00.002+10:002015-08-05T19:05:15.941+10:00Classes vs. sets
<p>Over the last couple of years I've become increasingly interested in various foundational approaches to mathematics -- logic, set theory, category theory, lambda calculus, and so on. It's fascinating to see how these different schools of thought provide accounts for each other, and themselves.</p>
<p>Classes, simply put, are an elegant dodge to get around <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox">Russell's Paradox</a> while retaining some of the expressive power of universal quantification.</p>
<p>To elaborate: if we allow a set theory to express "the set of all sets", or "the set of all cardinal numbers", or even just "the set of all singleton sets", we quickly run into the ground. Contemporary set theories like ZF give us restricted quantification, allowing us to say "\(\forall x \in S \cdot P(x)\)" (given a set \(S\) and a predicate \(P\)) but not "\(\forall x \cdot P(x)\)". But it's still useful to be able to quantify over collections of things that are too large to be sets. E.g. "all sets either contain an element or are empty"; "all sets admit a well-ordering".</p>
<p>Classes (effectively) correspond to <em>predicates</em> in language. For example, "is a singleton set" might be described by "\(\textrm{Singleton}(x) := \exists y \forall z \cdot (z \in x \Leftrightarrow y = z) \)". In the usual first-order presentations of ZF, "is a set" is a predicate that always returns true. And "represents a well-ordering of \(S\)" might be shorthand for "\(x \subseteq S^2 \land \textrm{IsWellOrdering}(x)\)", where \(\textrm{IsWellOrdering}\) itself is shorthand for a more complicated predicate that checks whether something encodes a reflexive antisymmetric transitive relation without infinite descending chains.</p>
<p>Claims that all members of a class satisfy some additional property can be encoded as universal quantifiers in the language, "\(\forall x \cdot P(x) \Rightarrow Q(x)\)". (The logic <em>itself</em> is still allowed universal quantifiers: it's the set building axioms which must be denied access to these.) </p>
<p>Classes typically exist in the <em>metalanguage</em> (i.e. are not <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pun">first-class</a> citizens of the theory itself). Classes can correspond to sets (e.g. the class of all empty sets, the class of natural numbers) but this is not guaranteed. This distinction is enough to get us past the classical presentation of Russell's paradox:</p>
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<p>"Does the set of all sets that don't contain themselves contain itself?"</p>
<p>This question is ill-formed! Our set theory's language doesn't allow us to express the concept, "set of all sets". The meta-language lets us talk about "all sets" as a <em>class</em>.</p>
<p>"Well, does the class of all sets that don't contain themselves contain itself?"</p>
<p>Still slightly ill-formed! Sets can't contain classes. Classes aren't <em>objects</em> in our language the same way sets or natural numbers are, whereas the containment relation, "\(\in\)", exists within the language and is only defined on pairs of objects within the language.</p>
<p>"Does the class of all sets that don't contain themselves contain the predicate corresponding to itself?"</p>
<p>That really depends on how we encode predicates within the language. Presumably, yes, we need some kind of Godelian encoding of predicates into objects, since predicates are prima facie not objects in our language.</p>
<p>If we encode predicates as specially structured sets, then the answer is trivially yes: the set doesn't contain itself (otherwise we have unsoundness). If we have a multi kind language with predicates encoded as tuples or other specially marked constructs, the answer is trivially no: the predicate for the class is not a set so it's not part of the class.</p>
<p>Either way, we've avoided paradox, largely because there's a complete disconnect between collections' encodings and the collections themselves.</p>
<p>We might try to restore the paradox by moving away from sets altogether and asking only about classes and their representations: </p>
<p>"Does the class of all predicates (encodings) that don't apply to their own encodings contain the predicate (encoding) corresponding to itself?"</p>
<p>This is thorny! Except it's ill-formed in a far more subtle way than before.</p>
<p>The catch is, we need to capture the concept of “this encoding of a predicate applies to that” within the object language. Which is to say, we need an <em>interpreter</em> for encodings. But to implement that, we’d effectively be recreating the preconditions for Godel’s incompleteness theorem. That is, an interpreter could be used to give a <em>truth predicate</em>, which is thus vulnerable to <a class="c4" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%B6b%27s_theorem">Lob’s theorem</a>.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-3755155097480208282015-08-03T21:37:00.001+10:002015-08-03T21:38:57.640+10:00“Endless, formless ruins” (Invisible Cities)<p>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">
<b>In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them.</b> There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies’ protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that <b>this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin</b>, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing.
</blockquote>
<footer>Italo Calvino, <cite>Invisible Cities</cite></footer>
</figure>
<div style="display: none"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/Z7TFvnA.jpg"></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-78846508572532339402015-07-27T21:44:00.001+10:002015-07-27T21:44:29.020+10:00Links and quotes, June 2015<p>Paul Ford's monolithic essay for Bloomberg, <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/"><em>What is Code?</em></a>, is a tour de force across the world of computing, spanning from software engineering practices down to low-level assembly. It's an excellent guide for newcomers, and has just enough wry humour to keep veteran coders entertained, too. A must-read.</p><p>On a more algorithmic note, <a href="http://maryrosecook.com/blog/post/the-fibonacci-heap-ruins-my-life">the Fibonacci heap ruins Mary Rose Cook's life</a>. (And for good reason; functional data structures can be a <em>pain</em> to update.)</p>
<hr>
<p>On working in the game industry:</p>
<figure><blockquote class="pretty">
<p>If you’re anxious; depressed; if you’re mentally or chronically ill, it’s expected of you to adapt to a harmful work environment. But if you don’t – if you break – you’re just another expendable talent who burned brightly and quickly. In a way, you were the dream; someone who delivered high-quality work – or even perfection – without staying at the company long enough to get paid.</p></blockquote>
<footer>Eira A. Ekre, <a href="https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-expendables-how-game-development-standards-are-inherently-harmful"><em>The Expendables: How Game Development Standards are Inherently Harmful</em></a></footer>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>That feeling when <a href="http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201311/fake-hitman-murder-for-hire">the hitman you hired</a> sells you out to the police.</p>
<hr>
<figure><img src="http://i.imgur.com/JxGL090.jpg" alt="A tranquil waterfall scene in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan." style="max-width: 100%">
<figcaption>
<br/>Source: <a href="http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/best-of-travel-365/june-2015#/waterfall-aso-kumamoto-japan_90670_990x742.jpg">Hideki Mizuta</a> / <em>National Geographic</em></figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>Bad Horse writes on entropy(?) and art in <a href="http://www.fimfiction.net/blog/286808/thoughts-on-listening-to-mahlers-fifth-symphony-three-times-in-a-row"><em>Thoughts on listening to Mahler's Fifth Symphony three times in a row</em></a>. They attribute the noise-like properties of many avant garde art styles to a fetishisation of randomness, per se.</p>
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<p>This... is what happened to music. Composers internalized the <em>theoretical</em> belief that unexpectedness made music more complex and interesting, rather than just listening to it and saying whether they <em>liked</em> it or not."</p></blockquote>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>Katherine Cross on the proclivity of mainstream cis-dominated media to treat trans women as a monolith:</p>
<figure><blockquote class="pretty">
<p>The real double standard lies in certain cis feminists’ obsession with outward displays of femininity on the part of trans women. Elinor Burkett sees the death of feminism in the abyss of Jenner’s corset, but ignores Fallon Fox, a triumphant female athlete whose whole career is a spurning of feminine stereotypes. Were she white and cis she would be a cause celebre of people like Burkett. Instead, she’s ignored.</p></blockquote>
<footer>Katherine Cross, <a href="http://feministing.com/2015/06/12/what-is-truly-unspeakable-trans-women-and-double-standards/"><em>What is truly unspeakable: trans women and double standards</em></a></footer>
</figure>
<hr>
<figure><blockquote class="pretty">
<p>I’ve never found convincing evidence that bad grammar is actually indicative of poor ability outside of writing; the construction crew that put together my house probably don’t know when whom can be used, but my house is a lot more stable than it would be if Lynne Truss and I were the ones cobbling it together.</p></blockquote>
<footer>Gabe Doyle, <a href="https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/what-good-is-good-grammar-without-good-logic/"><em>What good is good grammar without good logic?</em></a></footer>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>"The concept of pitch needing to be “correct” is a somewhat recent construct," writes Lessley Anderson, chronicling the
<a href="http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/27/3964406/seduced-by-perfect-pitch-how-auto-tune-conquered-pop-music">history of Auto-Tune</a> and asking exactly how ill its portent is.</p>
<hr>
<p>Tadhg Kelly ponders <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/09/patreonomics/">what Patreon teaches us</a> about the relationship between artist and viewer.</p>
<figure><blockquote class="pretty">
<p>When the relationship between the artist and the audience loses its intermediaries then external ideas of integrity become irrelevant. Whether you’re crafting the most noble of interactive artworks or the most naked of real money bingo games, there is no standard by which to judge.</p></blockquote>
<footer>Tadhg Kelly, <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/09/patreonomics/"><em>Patreonomics</em></a></footer>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>If brand recognition ads lure us into buying things by repeated positive conditioning, then why are there brand awareness ads <a href="http://www.meltingasphalt.com/ads-dont-work-that-way/">for shoes but not for mattresses</a>?</p>
<hr>
<figure><img src="http://i.imgur.com/OZnrlj9.jpg" alt="Surreal neural network feedback loop generated art." style="max-width: 100%">
<figcaption>Everyone's seen <a href="https://github.com/google/deepdream">Deepdream</a> by now, right? Right.</figcaption></figure>
<hr>
<p>It's not the first time someone's spent column inches pondering what MOOCs tell us about <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/upshot/true-reform-in-higher-education-when-online-degrees-are-seen-as-official.html">the signalling value of university degrees</a>, and it certainly won't be the last:</p>
<figure><blockquote class="pretty">
<p>The only thing MOOCs provide is access to world-class professors at an unbeatable price. What they don’t offer are official college degrees... and that, it turns out, is mostly what college students are paying for.</p></blockquote>
<footer>Kevin Carey, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/upshot/true-reform-in-higher-education-when-online-degrees-are-seen-as-official.html">source</a></footer>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>Old news, still interesting: the political power granted to ultra-Orthodox parties in Israel ("the fulcrum of every single government coalition from 2006 until early 2013") has given them a great deal of leverage on domestic and social issues. The result: <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114124/israels-orthodox-women-new-face-feminism">increasing state interference/restrictions towards women in public spaces</a>.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-45217538626707923872015-07-05T10:35:00.000+10:002015-07-05T10:35:55.459+10:00Links and quotes, May 2015<p>On race politics and gun culture:</p>
<p>"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 <a href="http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/scary-negroes-with-guns/" rel="nofollow">writes</a>. "When a black man handles a gun of his own accord, he reverses the gun’s supposed purpose, and white people get scared."</p>
<hr>
<p>Maths: Steven Wittens illustrates <a href="http://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-fractal/" rel="nofollow">How to Fold a Julia Fractal</a>. 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.</p>
<p>I'm linking to Marsaglia's <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/61/1/25" rel="nofollow">Random numbers fall mainly in the planes</a> (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.)</p>
<hr>
<figure><img src="http://i.imgur.com/ZcqufDc.png" alt="A pale red-haired centauress and a clothed, dark-skinned human wearing jockey boots curl up together on the ground, sharing a tender hug." style="max-width: 100%">
<figcaption><p>Source: Tumblr / <a href="http://jinamong.tumblr.com/post/117698284918" rel="nofollow">jinamong</a>.
<br/>Other slice-of-life fantasy creature sketches by the same artist: <a href="http://jinamong.tumblr.com/image/117696903398" rel="nofollow">1</a>, <a href="http://jinamong.tumblr.com/image/117697797823" rel="nofollow">2</a>.</p></figcaption></figure>
<hr>
<p>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 <a href="http://www.cristanwilliams.com/b/2013/07/17/transwomans-vs-trans-woman/" rel="nofollow">describes</a> 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 <em>even between different activist communities</em>. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<hr>
<p>The prose in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/14/opinion/14-in-flight-mark-vanhoenacker.html" rel="nofollow"><em>In Flight</em></a>, an extract from Mark Vanhoenacker's book, <em>Skyfaring</em>, is gorgeous through-and-through. The following extract is technical and poetic in equal measures:</p>
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<blockquote class="pretty">
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<footer>Mark Vanhoenacker, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/14/opinion/14-in-flight-mark-vanhoenacker.html" rel="nofollow"><em>In Flight</em></a>.</footer>
</figure>
<hr>
<a name='more'></a>
<p>Alok Jha wrote a lovely popsci piece for The Guardian on <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/global/2015/may/11/water-weirdest-liquid-planet-scientists-h2o-ice-firefighters" rel="nofollow">how and why water is so damned weird</a>. (Spoiler alert: hydrogen bonding.)</p>
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<blockquote class="pretty">
<p>I am not holding my breath for a place where I do not have to explain myself. I am just working on creating a space where the explanation is welcome.</p>
</blockquote>
<footer>Rocko Bulldagger, “The End of Genderqueer”, in <cite>Nobody Passes</cite>.</footer></figure>
<hr>
<figure><img src="http://i.imgur.com/nmeR65R.gif" alt="Minimalist, abstract vector animation with a warm palette on a cool grey background. Somewhat psychedelic; evocative of fluid dynamics." style="max-width: 100%">
<figcaption>Source: Tumblr / <a href="http://featherfurl.tumblr.com/post/112928948191/threads" rel="nofollow">featherfurl</a></figcaption></figure>
<hr>
<p>Patrick Kalzumeus on <a href="http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/04/20/building-highly-reliable-websites-for-small-companies/" rel="nofollow">process and system failures</a>:</p>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">
<p>You know what causes 99% of problems with cars? Moving parts.</p>
<p>It is astronomically more likely for something which moves to fail than something which doesn’t: it is subject to friction, wear, foreign particles, and a thousand other sources of failure. By comparison, all the chassis of the car has to do is not decompose into its constituent atoms, and since it hasn’t done that until now it is a good bet that today will not be the day it picks to do so.</p>
</blockquote>
<footer>Patrick Kalzumeus</footer>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>During his tenure at Valve, current Greek economic minister Yanis Varoufakis detailed his own <a href="http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or-what-do-we-need-corporations-for-and-how-does-valves-management-structure-fit-into-todays-corporate-world/" rel="nofollow">theory of the firm</a>.</p>
<p>Key thesis: "[Firms/companies] are the last remaining vestiges of pre-capitalist organisation within... capitalism." Co-ordination and resource allocation within firms doesn't hinge on price signals or supply/demand the way that co-ordination in ideal markets does. (Things typically get done via autocracy/hierarchy; in Valve's case things are much more employee-driven.)</p>
<p>Of course, that's not to say you can't use price incentives as <em>part</em> of a firm's internal structure. Stokley + Grimes's <a href="http://research.google.com/pubs/pub35115.html" rel="nofollow"><em>Using a Market Economy to Provision Compute Resources Across Planet-wide Clusters</em></a> (2009) springs to mind (for all the obvious reasons). But even so, most internal markets of this sort are strictly insulated from the outside world, with information flow and arbitrage opportunities limited to <em>within</em> the system. So at first blush I'd say there's definitely something to Varoufakis's account.</p>
<hr>
<p>Maciej Cegłowski describes his <a href="http://idlewords.com/2013/12/pursuing_the_platypus.htm" rel="nofollow">visit to Queensland, Australia</a> with a sardonic wit I'd usually expect from Aussie locals. Gems include:</p>
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<blockquote class="pretty">
<p>The platypus is an animal that looks like it was designed in a pub, by a committee, the night before it was due.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="pretty">
<p>No one can touch Australians when it comes to stretching a thimbleful of local history into hundreds of board-feet of laminated prose.</p>
</blockquote>
</figure>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-38890137832674016142015-07-01T20:45:00.000+10:002015-07-01T20:45:29.150+10:00Creative Mysticism and “Don't Hug Me I'm Scared”<p>I am a little in love with <em>Don't Hug Me I'm Scared</em>, 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.</p>
<p>DHMIS and its sequels sit within the genre of <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SubvertedKidsShow" rel="nofollow">subverted kids' show</a>: 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.</p>
<p>Let's take DHMIS at face value: as <em>educational</em>, or at least as a work <em>responding</em> to educational shows. Quoth the creators on their Kickstarter pitch:</p>
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<blockquote class="pretty">
<p>Don't Hug Me I'm Scared is a show about puppets learning stuff.</p>
</blockquote>
<footer><a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1127979050/dont-hug-me-im-scared-the-series/description">DHMIS series Kickstarter pitch</a></footer>
</figure>
<p>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.</p>
<p>It's not a huge leap to say that
The teacher-student "dialogue" in DHMIS mirrors that between <em>society</em> and the individual. </p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://twitter.com/japelling/status/434274094855753728" rel="nofollow">paper</a>). The subject: creativity.</p>
<p>Lesson summary: creativity is <em>bad news</em>.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9C_HReR_McQ" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<figcaption><cite>Don't Hug Me I'm Scared</cite>, Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling, 2011.</figcaption>
</figure>
<h3>Creativity as a black box</h3>
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<blockquote class="pretty">
<p>— How do you get the ideas?</p>
<p>— I just try to think creatively.</p>
</blockquote>
</figure>
<p>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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_box" rel="nofollow">black box</a> so far as monolithic organisations are concerned.</p>
<p>When Notebook says "I just try to think creatively", she effectively writes off the process of creativity as an inscrutable, atomic thing. She <em>could</em> 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 <em>partial</em> 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.</p>
<p>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 <em>platitudes</em>. They pattern match to some standard vague picture of what creativity is, but they don't actually offer any actionable advice.</p>
<p>(Compare to similar after-school special messages: "The power was inside you all along." "Real love prevails." Even when such platitudes <em>do</em> provide an account of something real, they do so in an entirely opaque way.)</p>
<a name='more'></a>
<h3>A world of finite possibility</h3>
<p>In <a href="http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/01/06/the-gollum-effect/" rel="nofollow">The Gollum Effect</a>, Venkatesh Rao defines <em>combinatorial consumption</em> to describe the limited ways in which we are allowed to interact, as consumers, with content producers.</p>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">
<p>[Our] potentially infinite range of... behaviors [are] reduced to paint-by-numbers consumption. Our lives are about choosing within the confines of a giant macro version of the Starbucks drink-construction decision tree.</p>
</blockquote>
</figure>
<p>Structure isn't anathema to creativity, but the kind of structure that society runs on is. We've inherited a civilisation whose lifeblood is checkboxes on standardised forms and fungible commodities, and so naturally we fall into the habit of thinking of creative expression as falling into a neat taxonomy. Here are the performing arts, here are the fine arts; here are things that hang on museum walls with accompanying placards containing neat, satisfying one-paragraph statements of intent. </p>
<p>The problem isn't that "creativity" is a square peg forced into a round hole; the problem is the expectation that once you've tried the round, square, triangular and star-shaped hole, you'll have fit your peg into <em>something</em>.</p>
<p>Hence Notebook's declaration that "green is not a creative colour". It's not simply that green is a metonym for nature and organic, unpredictable creation... though certainly there's something to the implication about spiritual communing-with-nature and/or environmentalism as restricted forms of thought. </p>
<p>No, green simply was never on the menu to begin with:</p>
<figure><img src="http://i.imgur.com/geRMJuw.gif" alt="Choose your favourite colour out of any of these five options." style="width: 100%"><figcaption>Choose your favourite colour out of any of these five options.<br/>Still from <cite>Don't Hug Me I'm Scared</cite>.</figure></figure>
<p>Behold!: the instructions for arranging sticks into colours. Notebook's colour wheel offers five possible options: blue, yellow, red, brown, and peach. That was the yellow puppet's mistake: he failed to follow the rules of creativity; he was creative in the <em>wrong way</em>. He was told to think outside the box and made the mistake of interpreting that literally, rather than what Notebook really meant: "think inside this <em>different</em> box!".</p>
<p>Again and again we're shown that Notebook's conception of 'creativity' is incredibly restrictive. The puppets <em>succeed</em> in her estimation when they're finding shapes in the clouds: their voices in unison, their interpretations identical, their imaginations spurred by very deliberate prompts on her part. They <em>fail</em> if they go off script, painting a picture without her explicit prompting.</p>
<p>Any half decent self-perpetuating system of ideas needs to keep people thinking inside <em>some</em> box, preferably one it has a good handle on. Actual, unbounded creativity has the potential to be destructive. Yes, it sometimes means tags on fences or playing with one's food. But unchecked creativity can also turn into paradigm shifts, philosophical revolutions, better ideas -- all threats to the dominant memeplex, best avoided if possible.</p>
<p>This is a large part of why institutional creativity, be it corporate team-building exercises or primary school classrooms, is what it is. It lets people channel their creative energies within a <em>circumscribed safe space</em>. And it's to our detriment. Exploring a playground can be fun, but exploring uncharted territory can be <em>meaningful</em>. If the latter option is closed to us as individuals, we collectively lose out.</p>
<figure><img src="http://i.imgur.com/PvY8M1g.gif" alt='"I use my hair to express myself."' style="width: 100%"><figcaption>"I use my hair to express myself." <cite>Ibid.</cite></figcaption></figure>
<p>Rigid, <em>implicit</em> constraints is the name of the game here. Nobody ever says out <em>loud</em> that there are only five valid colours. That would call the illusion of creative freedom into question.</p>
<p>Notebook uses her hair to express herself, but what's left unsaid is that this is supposed to be the <em>archetype</em> of self-expression. (We all learn by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostensive_definition" rel="nofollow">ostension</a>; if you only ever show a child examples of self-expression involving clothing and surface appearances then that's the mental model they'll form.) It's part of a lifetime of subtle hints that any drive for self-expression can be, should be, channelled into this form.</p>
<p>It's not meant as a lie, either. Spend long enough in the system and it's easy enough to believe that <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/" rel="nofollow">pieces of flair</a> are a reliable proxy for creativity and individuality.</p>
<h3>Type errors</h3>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">
<p>What's your favourite idea? Mine is being creative.</p>
</blockquote>
</figure>
<p>What do we make of the first spoken words in the song? "Being creative" is an idea in only the loosest interpretations of the word "idea". They're closely related concepts, but the way they're conflated is unmistakeably absurd.</p>
<p>"<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake" rel="nofollow">Category mistakes</a>", roughly speaking, are the linguistic act of describing something in a way that's absurdly inapplicable. When we ask with genuine literalness how tall love is, or say that our shoelaces are asleep, we are committing a category error. This is different to metaphor: "my computer is angry with me" isn't a category error if it's not meant literally.</p>
<p>(My programming background means that "type error" springs to mind; both phrases have similar connotations.)</p>
<p>Describing "creativity" as a "favourite idea" is <em>essentially</em> committing a type error. So too is "collect some leaves and sticks, and arrange them into your favourite colours". </p>
<p>I say "essentially": to the former, there is such a thing as the "idea of creativity"; to the latter, arranging sticks into words is certainly a perfectly doable thing.
But it's still so very, very wrong. The way in which Notebook describes creativity as an <em>idea</em> conflates the relationship between process and product, blends them into an inscrutable hole. And the leaves-and-sticks exercise suggests that the English word "blue", that assortment of letters, is itself a suitable substitute for the colour blue.</p>
<p>Just as <a href="http://www.buddha101.com/p_path.htm" rel="nofollow">the finger pointing to the moon</a> is not the moon, the words for colours are not the colours themselves. It's a strange exercise -- no more so than many real-world classroom activities, but then again, maybe that's the point. <a href="http://blog.openendings.net/2015/01/what-is-truth-they-said-what-is-meaning.html" rel="nofollow">Mistaking words with their extensions</a> (fingers with moons) is an exceedingly common form of category mistake. It may well be <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_inside/" rel="nofollow">intrinsic to human experience</a>.</p>
<p>All these type errors and category conflations lead, eventually, to a kind of naive <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monism" rel="nofollow">monism</a> that treats everything related to creative expression as interchangeable. Colours are letterforms; the creative process is the creative product... if you truly buy into the fungibility of the creative process, then of course you're going to <a href="https://helenperrismusic.com/the-musician-vs-myer-or-why-i-wont-play-for-exposure/" rel="nofollow">undervalue art</a> and decide that <a href="http://www.27bslash6.com/brochure.html" rel="nofollow">your amateur work is as good as any veteran craftsperson's</a>.</p>
<p>Granted, overly restrictive categorisations can stifle creativity, as we've discussed above. But false attitudes of monism and fungibility aren't transcending categorisations, they're <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/mm/the_fallacy_of_gray/" rel="nofollow">squeezing everything into <em>one</em> box</a>. This does creativity (and all of us who benefit from its artful exercise) no favours.</p>
<h3>On the "Disney acid sequence"</h3>
<p>Yes, the lightning and the nightmarish shaking and screaming is how <em>Don't Hug Me I'm Scared</em> fulfils its mandate as a subverted kids' show. It makes excellent use of the uncanny valley with the costume swaps (a technique repeated later in <em>DHMIS 4</em>). The cacophony of the discordant violins builds calculatedly, inducing an almost <em>physical</em> discomfort response in the viewer.
But why the <em>specific</em> grotesque/frightening images that the puppets encounter when they let their imaginations roll free? And more importantly, what is it about this <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DisneyAcidSequence" rel="nofollow">Disney acid sequence</a> that precipitates Notebook's change of heart and memorable final line?</p>
<p>Notebook's reaction to the nightmare sequence suggests an interpretation: it <em>represents the dangers of thinking outside of the box</em>. (...from her point of view, of course.) This is the section where the narrative framing is <em>least</em> in her control.</p>
<p>Consider:</p>
<ul><li>The puppets clap with excitement as they cut a cake, revealing innards and gore inside. An allusion to the meat industry, perhaps? The smooth exterior of the cake compared to its contents suggests a more general relationship too, that between the pristine surfaces of our consumer goods, and the suffering and other 'unsightly' things that went into their production.</li><li>The "costume change" -- switching to human actors for the yellow and green puppets during their dancing, is deliberately ungainly and awkward, a deviation from the classical kids'-show visual appeal of the puppets into something more unsanitised and visibly imperfect.</li><li>The green puppet writes "DEATH" and smears skulls and crossbones across the page. The red puppet takes a very real heart and covers it with glitter. There is an acknowledgement of the grotesque here, and further still, a willingness to engage with it, to incorporate it into art. If the abject is always kept hidden away then there is something truly radical about playing with it and allowing it to become part of a thing of beauty.</li></ul><p>From Notebook's point of view, this is the moral of the story: free association and unconstrained creativity is <em>horrible</em>; it's discomfiting; it's to be avoided wherever possible. Stick to naming pictures in the clouds, because if you go off the beaten track you may not like what you see.</p>
<p>(And really, what could be worse than not liking what you see?)</p>
<p>I would posit that the <em>authorial</em> message here is quite different to Notebook's. Yes, the nightmare sequence is unsettling. But it's not intrinsically depicting the puppets doing anything wrong or bad; most of the creepiness is in the framing. And like most shocking pieces of media, one can become desensitised to it, feeling less fear or revulsion on subsequent views. Perhaps the same could be said for the off-the-wall thinking that the sequence represents: it's confronting, but most of that comes from the initial novelty and surprise. There's much more to see once you learn to suppress the flinch.</p>
<p>Of course, that's assuming we'd <em>want</em> to engage with it. Notebook may be authoritarian in warning us away from these forms of thinking/expression, but she panders to a very human desire to avoid negative stimuli. It only takes a shift in mood to go from siding against her to with her.</p>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">
<p>...Let's all agree to never be creative again.</p>
</blockquote>
</figure>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-23942186838073394812015-06-19T10:50:00.001+10:002015-06-19T11:41:03.695+10:00Links and quotes, April 2015<p>From <em>The New York Times</em> comes this explainer on <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/29/science/to-divide-the-rent-start-with-a-triangle.html">the mathematics of fair division</a>. Highlights include an interactive visualisation of <a href="http://nrich.maths.org/1383">Sperner's lemma</a> and a shout-out to the not-for-profit app <a href="http://www.spliddit.org/">Spliddit</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>In an observational study, The University of Texas at Austin gave a group piano majors a <a href="https://youtu.be/4MzZs6RD5pE?t=54s">Shostakovich passage</a> to learn and perform a day later. They found that the <em>amount</em> of time spent practicing the passage didn't have much bearing on mastery. <a href="http://www.creativitypost.com/psychology/8_things_top_practicers_do_differently">What <em>did</em> distinguish the top performers</a> was <strong>how they handled their mistakes</strong>. 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.</p>
<hr>
<p>On the pros and cons of trigger warnings as standard classroom practice: "<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/trigger-warnings/"><em>oh god oh god I want to be dead I want to be dead</em> is just not a good mindset to be in when you’re trying to grasp the nuances of Derrida.</a>"</p>
<hr>
<figure><a href="https://vimeo.com/95575113"><img style="max-width: 100%" src="http://i.imgur.com/QF0Surq.png" alt="Still image of a cresting wave, backlit against the sun, from Ray Collins's "Sea Stills"."></a><figcaption><a href="https://vimeo.com/95575113"><em>Sea Stills</em></a>: Photographer Ray Collins captures giant waves in otherworldly moments.</figcaption></figure>
<a name='more'></a>
<hr>
<p>"<a href="http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/11/07/ux-and-the-civilizing-process/">UX is like etiquette</a>," writes Kevin Simler. "Both are the study and practice of optimal interactions." He riffs on this metaphor to draw an interesting picture of "personhood" as an <em>abstraction</em> layer. Reality comprises <a href="http://www.mediumdifficulty.com/2012/06/05/gotcha-pokemon-and-the-control-of-abject-bodies/">abject flesh and blood</a>; reality <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/modularity-mind/">belies the notion of discrete entityhood</a>. All of this must be encapsulated (in the software engineering sense) to let society function frictionlessly.</p><p>In an earlier piece, Simler posits that consciousness (in its many modes) is <a href="http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/07/01/consciousness-an-outside-view/">externally imposed</a>; a byproduct of social interaction. </p>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">
<p>"Consciousness is contagious...
We are all, constantly, ‘catching’ states of consciousness from, and transmitting them to, the people around us. When we drink, we urge others to drink with us. When we yawn, our neighbors do too. When we watch sports, we get caught up in each
other’s excitement. When someone is sad, we get sad too."</p></blockquote>
<footer>Kevin Simler, <a href="http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/07/01/consciousness-an-outside-view/"><cite>Consciousness: An Outside View</cite></a></footer></figure>
<hr>
<p><a href="http://www.applecidermage.com/2014/10/31/writing-in-the-margins-bayonetta-2-sex-criticism-and-power-dynamics/">Apple Cider</a> tackles the "sex positivity/negativity" debate in her <em>Bayonetta 2</em> review, noting that despite the suggestive names and the frequent conflicts, both philosophies, on their best days, work towards the same goal. "If sex positivity in feminism is embracing women’s agency and sexual empowerment, then sex negativity is critiquing the structures that make enacting that agency and empowerment an issue."
</p><p>Meanwhile, on <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/03/11/sexual-constraint-not-sex-negativity/">Thing of Things</a>, Ozy Frantz recasts the dichotomy/spectrum in a different direction, explaining and defusing the philosophical clash. Ze writes: "the fundamental distinction is [sexual constraint versus sexual freedom:] between people who think that someone other than you gets input into your sex life, and people who think that only you get input."</p>
<hr>
<p>C4SS paraphrasing Susan Brownmiller:</p>
<figure><blockquote class="pretty">
<p>The practice of rape by some men functions to give all men a position of power over women.</p>
</blockquote><footer><a href="http://c4ss.org/content/11091"><cite>Women and the Invisible Fist</cite></a></footer></figure>
<hr>
<p>Daniel Fincke discusses that common objection to consent culture advocacy: "it would kill the mood!". He <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/camelswithhammers/2013/04/hot-passionate-rational-sex/">ties this to the false dichotomy of heart versus head</a>, wherein romance and sex must happen naturally and mystically, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0e7V2hzqI0">unadulterated</a> by rational thought.</p><p>This distinction, of course, is nonsense.</p>
<figure><blockquote class="pretty">
<p>What gets built into our attitudes are the questionable assumptions that all true <em>love</em> and <em>good</em> sex comes “naturally” where “naturally” means without any active work or obstacles to overcome along the way. We have to passively <em>fall</em> into love and be <em>overcome</em> by sexual desires and orgasms. We cannot think our way there.
With these sorts of crummy attitudes, many people find the often inevitable challenges to work on their love relationship to be a sign that the relationship is irreparably flawed... supposedly all this reality disrupts fantasy, all thinking breaks the spell of illusion, all this active choosing means not passively being overwhelmed.</p></blockquote></figure>
<hr>
<figure><img style="max-width: 100%" src="http://i.imgur.com/z1sANUa.png" alt="Drawing of a disgruntled Jigglypuff Pokemon wearing a sign that reads, "I sing my lullaby to put people to sleep in the cold harsh winter storms and see if they could wake up again."">
<figcaption>(<a href="https://www.weasyl.com/submission/667346/pokemon-shaming-jiggly-puff">source</a>)</figcaption></figure>
<hr>
<p>It is 1879. Manufactured food is still in its infancy. Con artist "Chevalier" Alfred Paraf is <a href="http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/10/the-appearance-of-being-earnest">tried in court for making margarine</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>Benjamin Gabriel on amnesiac game protagonists:</p>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">
<p> The assumption, which is never, ever acknowledged, because it sounds too similar to what we know to be Bad Writing, is that a video game's protagonist is merely an object among objects, a cipher for the player to control, with no internal life of her own.</p>
<p> Because video games are an interactive form, and because the narrative arc tends to rely on making the player fully identify with the protagonist, a video game's protagonist cannot have their own robust interior life, which would only get in the way of the player's identification with them. The most obvious way this is done is with the amnesiac protagonist. This trope is so common precisely because it is such an elegant solution to the demands of video games, which need somehow to have a character who is the center of the story and yet is totally devoid of interiority; the amnesiac that we control is precisely that, an individual with a history that we can discover, but no memory.</p></blockquote>
<footer>Benjamin Gabriel, <a href="http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2012/12/silent_hill_rev.shtml">review for <cite>Silent Hill: Revelation 3D</cite></a></footer></figure>
<hr>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">
<p> I used to be afraid even to be seen clothed at the gym because I felt like a weakling. I would change the pin on the weight machine before leaving it to the next person, suggesting I’d lifted at least twenty to forty pounds more weight than I actually had. This is like parking a few blocks from your host’s house on Rosh Hashanah. It is like a female-to-male transsexual raising the toilet seat after he’s peed sitting down. Look, God: No car. No seat. A hundred and fifty pounds!</p>
<p> I kept this weight lifting scheme up until I saw the reaction of one kid who got on the machine after me. In his eyes, I read: “Don’t tell me that you, a short, husky kid with concave pecs, actually lifted 150 pounds?” He moved the plug to half that amount for his own use. I realized that, in acting out of my own fear of what others thought of me, I had intimidated someone else. That snapped me out of my solipsism and woke me up to the reality that I was capable of inflicting the same intimidation on other people. How stupid and pointless it is — a roomful of people with the intelligence, pluck and determination to get ourselves to a gym to pursue our own health and fitness, and we’re all terrified of each other.</p></blockquote>
<footer>Tucker Lieberman, “Hat”, in <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/138215.Nobody_Passes"><cite>Nobody Passes</cite></a>, p252</footer></figure>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-67932730512910089542015-06-16T10:14:00.001+10:002015-06-16T10:14:40.332+10:00Bash completion of aliased commands, revisited<script src="http://www.openendings.net/js/sh/shBrushBash.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<p>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.</p>
<p>A quick web search throws up an old <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=733397" rel="nofollow">script</a> 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.</p><p>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:</p>
<p><code>$COMP_POINT: substring expression < 0</code></p>
<p>The problem: the script modifies two of the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Bash-Variables" rel="nofollow">variables made available</a> to Bash completion (<code>COMP_CWORD</code> and <code>COMP_WORDS</code>), but misses others. With a little hackery we can modify that script to alter the other variables, <code>COMP_LINE</code> and <code>COMP_POINT</code>.</p>
<pre class="brush: bash">
# 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"
}</pre>
<p>Then usage proceeds as before:</p>
<pre class="brush: bash">
alias sdr='screen -d -r'
make-completion-wrapper _screen _sdr screen -d -r
complete -F _sdr sdr</pre>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-75150854724731422472015-05-27T22:37:00.000+10:002015-05-27T22:37:26.735+10:00Links and quotes, March 2015The "March" in the title is purely decorative. (Or: that's when I <em>read</em> them.)
<hr/>
<p>(CW: Homestuck) What do <em>Magic: the Gathering</em>'s five colours, <em>Pacific Rim</em>'s drift compatibility, and the Houses of Hogwarts <a href="http://stormingtheivorytower.blogspot.com/2014/07/hyperflexible-mythology-classpects.html">have in common</a>? Yes, they're powerful in-universe metaphorical devices that connect character arcs to physical things, Sam Keeper of <em>Storming the Ivory Tower</em> writes. But more importantly, they're <strong>both structured and hyperflexible</strong>. They're given well defined rules and categorisations but aren't overly prescriptive. They're <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TitleDrop">open-ended</a> but not <em>too</em> open. This makes them amazing hooks for fanworks and remixes.</p>
<hr/>
<p>Philip Sandifer's <a href="http://www.philipsandifer.com/2015/02/a-mild-curiosity-in-junkyard-silence-in.html"><em>A Mild Curiosity in a Junkyard</em></a> is an impressive <em>tour de force</em> work spanning the fifty-plus years of <em>Doctor Who</em>'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.</p>
<hr/>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">
<p>Melissa Thomasson says that what we have combines <strong>the worst of the market and the worst of government</strong>.
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 <strong>the accidental mixture that we have today: a really expensive system that doesn't cover us all</strong>.
</blockquote>
<footer><cite>This American Life</cite>, episode 392, <a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/392/someone-elses-money">“Someone Else’s Money”</a>]</footer>
</figure>
<hr/>
<figure><img src="http://i.imgur.com/hr3lsuS.jpg" alt="3D rendering of a viscous black liquid suspended inside the walls of a spiralling torus. A few lone droplets hover, perfectly spherical, in the center of the torus's ring." style="max-width: 100%">
<figcaption>Joey Camacho of <a href="http://www.rawandrendered.com/"><em>Raw & Rendered</em></a> has a very impressive portfolio. The above image is taken from his <em>Progress Before Perfection</em> collection.</figcaption></figure>
<hr/>
<p>Yanis Varoufakis (formerly, "that economist who did cool things at Valve", currently, "that economist who's Greece's finance minister"), explains <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/18/yanis-varoufakis-how-i-became-an-erratic-marxist">the influence of Marxist theory on his economic work over the years</a>. "Even my non-Marxist economics was guided by a mindset influenced by Marx, he writes." His take on Marx's work is interesting, and <em>definitely</em> 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 <em>inefficient</em> even on its own terms, that it wastes <em>everything</em>, of value or otherwise.</p>
<a name='more'></a>
<hr/>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">
<p>Scholars studying the evolution of religious doctrines have learned that <strong>important ideas of major religions have been introduced in response to the political requirements of some historical situation</strong> — even though Jesus received a Roman punishment (crucifixion), it would not have been a bright idea, in a Rome-dominated world, to pinpoint the Romans as responsible, and the problem was resolved by finding a way to cast blame on the Jews (preparing the way for centuries of prejudice and hostility).
</blockquote>
<footer><a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/15/the-case-for-soft-atheism/">Philip Kitcher</a></p></footer>
</figure>
<hr/>
<p>Mainstream video games idealise sex in a way that removes sex itself from the question, writes <a href="http://big-tall-words.com/2015/02/06/politics-bodies-and-videogames/">Mark Filipowich</a>. They distance the player from bodily reality; they dehumanise the interaction, reducing a base human experience to an abstracted reward function. "Dehumanizing bodies might make them less gross, but it detaches them from human experience."</p>
<p>Elsewhere, writing for <em>Medium Difficulty</em>, Filopowich explores <a href="http://www.mediumdifficulty.com/2013/09/21/tighten-up-the-narrative-in-level-3-the-grammar-of-videogames/">the inextricable link between mechanic and affect</a>. "As admittedly convenient as the gameplay-narrative binary can be, it’s ultimately a false one because, <strong>upon close enough inspection, the ludo- and the narrative bleed into one another.</strong>"</p>
<hr/>
<p>Chana Messinger challenges <em>The Righteous Mind</em>'s claim that, compared to their conservative counterparts, left-wing/progressive folks don't factor intuitions like 'purity' or 'loyalty' into their moral judgements to nearly the same extent as 'fairness' or 'compassion'. Instead, Messinger describes <a href="https://themerelyreal.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/liberal-purity/">how 'purity culture' manifests within progressive-leaning communities</a>: comparably but in different contexts to its conservative-leaning communities counterpart.</p>
<hr/>
<figure><img src="http://i.imgur.com/D7XV4Sf.jpg" alt="Illustrated limerick: There was an old person from Dallas / Whose comportment was coloured by malice / When we tried to take naps, he would sit in our laps / And complain of a pain in his phallus" style="max-width: 100%" width="400">
<figcaption>Page from <cite>Illustrated Limericks</cite> by Anthony Madrid, illustrated by Mark Fletcher. (<a href="http://bostonreview.net/poetry/anthony-madrid-mark-fletcher-adam-fitzgerald-five-limericks">source</a>)</figcaption></figure>
<hr/>
<p><a href="http://www.meltingasphalt.com/the-economics-of-social-status/">Social status</a>, writes Kevin Simler, occupies an economy of its own parallel to the fiat one. Status is transacted in exchange for goods or favours, it can be stored for later use, it is zero-sum. The metaphor is inexact but tight enough to reveal some useful analogues, for example how requests for favours, underneath the "politeness/decorum" pidgin, behave like minor contract negotiations.</p>
<hr/>
<p>Noel Murray writes that <a href="https://thedissolve.com/news/1426-op-ed-ban-the-backstory/">overattachment to backstories and character sheets</a> can ruin a story when it comes at the expense of <em>forward</em>-facing character development. (<strong>Did you mean?</strong>: art films.)</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-13174009981532054722015-05-23T09:53:00.005+10:002015-05-23T09:57:37.304+10:00Mad Max: Fury Road as worship of classical physics<figure>
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/XaJaGQj.jpg" alt="Three women gaze with concern out of a car, binoculars and telescopes in hand." style="max-width: 100%">
<figcaption>Still from <em>Mad Max: Fury Road</em> (2015).</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>Mad Max: Fury Road</em> 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 <em>physicality</em> plays into it all.</p>
<hr>
<p>Earlier this year, Venkatesh Rao (riffing on Penrose) described a <a href="http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/01/16/on-the-design-of-escaped-realities/">trichotomy</a> of ways reality and fiction give us affective experiences: <em>physical</em>, <em>social</em> and <em>mathematical</em>. Think Matthew Reilly vs. the Brontës vs. Agatha Christie; <em>Angry Birds</em> vs. <em>The Sims</em> vs. <em>Tetris</em>. (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.)</p>
<p>Action movies, as you'd expect, deliver most of their gratification through the physical. But it's not just these. <em>Interstellar</em>, 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 <em>The Hunt for Red October</em> is an ode to submarine piloting).</p>
<p>Similarly, <em>Mad Max: Fury Road</em> is a panegyric to the automobile, but its homage to physicality extends beyond that.</p>
<figure>
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/JSONWub.jpg" alt="Still from *Mad Max: Fury Road* (2015)." style="max-width: 100%">
<figcaption>War culture. <em>Ibid.</em></figcaption>
</figure>
<h3 id="conservation-of-energy">Conservation of energy</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Indeed, even <em>social</em> 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.</p>
<p>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 <em>is</em> currency.</p>
<h3 id="scarcity">Scarcity</h3>
<p>And if physical motion is currency in <em>Fury Road</em>, 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.</p>
<p><em>Fury Road</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<figure>
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/zqpul9y.jpg" alt="Still from *Mad Max: Fury Road* (2015)." style="max-width: 100%">
<figcaption><em>Ibid.</em></figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>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; <em>literal</em> masks and exoskeletons and cyborg symbolism; telescopes and rifle scopes as an extension of the body. It's <em>pervasive</em>. The physical is everywhere. That's what makes <em>Fury Road</em> so effective as an action movie -- everything about it is written in the same dynamic language of force and momentum that underlies the genre.</p>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-69632047484390502772015-05-13T22:16:00.001+10:002015-05-13T23:27:11.287+10:00What random feels like<p>In <a href="https://youtu.be/-4ixf5mV3Yc?t=18m25s" rel="nofollow">the pilot episode of <em>Numb3rs</em></a>, 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."</p>
<p>Whether it's nature or nurture, we're <em>really bad</em> at knowing 'random' when we see it. This is what lets Eppes solve the case-of-the-week. This is why the <em>Fire Emblem</em> games <a href="http://old.serenesforest.net/general/truehit.html" rel="nofollow">badly underexaggerate</a> their <a href="http://thephilosogamer.blogspot.com/2015/02/side-quest-5-probability-in-fire-emblem.html" rel="nofollow">probabilities</a> of peons hitting other peons -- because it takes 80% real odds for something to <em>feel</em> like 70% certainty.</p>
<figure>
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/uVX3xgn.gif" alt="Battle animation from *Fire Emblem: Sword of Seals*.">
<figcaption>"If a unit has a 15% displayed chance... their <em>actual</em> 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%." <br/>Screenshot: <a href="http://lparchive.org/Fire-Emblem-Sword-of-Seals/Update%2028/" rel="nofollow">lparchive.org</a>.</figcaption>
</figure>
<h3>TagTime</h3>
<p>I recently installed <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=bsoule.tagtime" rel="nofollow"><em>TagTime</em> for Android</a>, a barebones app that randomly polls you every forty-five minutes on average<sup>1</sup> to ask you what you're doing at that exact moment. It's a completely random sample of your day.</p>
<p>(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. [<a href="http://i.imgur.com/dBabCwV.png" rel="nofollow">Image link</a>])</p>
<p>The thing about the 'random sample' part: it's really random. (Specifically, it's a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_process" rel="nofollow">Poisson process</a>). The key part here is that it's totally <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorylessness" rel="nofollow">memoryless</a> -- 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 <em>any</em> given moment, minute to minute, your odds of getting pinged are exactly the same.</p>
<p>As I mentioned, this <em>really</em> doesn't feel like how we expect random distributions to behave.</p>
<figure><img src="http://i.imgur.com/PkiZE9q.png" alt="Google play review: "Randomizer is terrible I left the frequency at 45 minutes, but the actual average is about half that. Not sure what kind randomizer you're using, but it doesn't work well. EDIT: After running this for about a day, I'm uninstalling this app. It didn't ping me for 6 straight hours, now it's pinging every 5-10 minutes. This is worthless.""></figure>
<p>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 <em>immediately</em> get pinged asking what I'm up to<sup>2</sup>. There's no predictability to it.</p>
<p>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 <em>feels</em> like. It's strange.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>It may be obvious on paper, but it feels a lot stranger in the real world when you first really notice it.</p>
<p>That seems like a good lesson to internalise.</p>
<hr>
<div class="references"><p><b>Footnotes:</b>
<p><sup>1</sup> For a user-defined value of forty-five.</p>
<p><sup>2</sup> In these cases I'd still say "I was on Facebook". Even if it doesn't feel fair, on <em>average</em>, over the course of weeks, the pings will cover a representative sample of your time.</p>
<p>On a similar note, a lot of the <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/01/google_people_operations_the_secrets_of_the_world_s_most_scientific_human.html" rel="nofollow">employee surveys</a> 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.</p></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-79279516516573966172015-05-01T21:07:00.000+10:002015-05-01T21:07:16.755+10:00“Hostile territory” (Unspeakable Things)<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">
Most of the cultural narrative around mental health right now revolves around gender, with scientists and social theorists trying to work out whether it’s men or women who are more distressed, and whose fault that might be. Precisely who is more fucked up, boys or girls, has never been conclusively decided, but the fact that we insist on trying to work it out reveals a truth: <b>there is something about gender right now that is deeply troubling, on an intimate level that is rarely discussed</b>. There is something about the experience of being a woman or being a man, or of trying to be a woman or trying to be a man in the twenty-first century that many people find <b>profoundly distressing</b> in a way that they find difficult to speak about even in those few spaces where they are allowed to.
</blockquote>
<footer>Laurie Penny, <cite>Unspeakable Things</cite>, Introduction.</footer>
</figure>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">
The truth is that there is nothing ‘natural’ about what it means to be a man or a woman today. Gender identity is performed, and it is performed for profit, whether social, financial or personal. That performance is an <b>adaptive strategy</b> for dealing with overwhelmingly <b>hostile territory</b>. Now we need to adapt again. And <b>that’s what feminism is: adaptation. Evolution.</b>
</blockquote>
<footer>Ibid.</footer>
</figure>
(Boldface emphasis, fangirling, etc., mine.)Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-88943065924079188142015-04-02T21:11:00.000+11:002015-04-02T21:11:18.876+11:00Worth a thousand words: captioning and editorial subjectivity<p><b>(CW: literary prescriptivism, for some definition of ‘literary’)</b></p>
<p>Adding dry captions(*) to incidental images on Facebook/Tumblr/etc. posts (or: alt text to images on web pages) is as close to a definite <em>ceterus paribus</em> improvement as I can think of. Readers using screenreading software or its accessibility-oriented ilk to browse the web are able to read [sic] those captions, aiding their consumption of the text. For “typical” readers (i.e. those without visual impairments, browsing the web without additional software assistance) the additional text hardly poses a nuisance — in the case of alt text, they don’t even engage with it unless they specifically go looking for it, whilst <a href="http://www.gdbasics.com/html/hierarchy/hierarchy.html">suitably demarcated</a> image captions are easy to skim past.</p>
<p>A good caption is also generally a <em>good</em> inferential bridge, conveying most of the context the image provides. Sure, a text description of an image might not produce the <em>exact same</em> mental-emotional experience (“affect”, I believe the kids are calling it) as the image itself, but if “same mental-emotional experience” were an end goal we’d be done for anyway given it’s a <em>subjective</em> experience.</p>
<figure>
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/XzgCXMT.png" width=400>
<figcaption>
<p>A screenshot of a facebook link to an article titled ‘10 Trans Women in Love’, with the caption:
<q>Image of a Korean man and woman (Andy Marra and Drew Shives), who are a couple. They are both facing the camera. The woman is resting her chin on the man's shoulder. They're both smiling, happily.</q></p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Take, for instance, the screenshot above. The caption swiftly communicates the most important emotional aspects of the image, both the implicit (it’s a couple; they’re happy) and the explicit (they are facing the camera; her chin rests on his shoulder). This provides great insight into the ‘value add’ that the image provides — it’s plenty to go on whether you’re making sense of someone else’s comment on the image (“they are the cutest thing” / “I love their expressions”), or whether you’re just interested in how it complements the piece.</p>
<figure>
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/SZTbfAo.png" width=400>
<figcaption>
<p>A screenshot of an image in a blog post, captioned: “Photo shows a chain-link fence against a blue sky. One of the sections of the fence has been removed, a hammock strung across the posts, and a person lays relaxing in the hammock.”</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<a name='more'></a>
<p>I’m particularly fond of the above example from a <a href="https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-politics-of-trending"><em>Model View Culture</em> article</a>. It sits at a little over thirty words, and directs our attention to the key ‘action’ in the image (the placement of the hammock; the person lying in it). You could put that description into an art brief and the resulting work would convey a similar mood.</p>
<p>I interpret captioning as far more an <em>art</em> than a mechanistic process. It exists to aid/augment/alter the subjective experience of a reader, and so it is a task informed by subjective understandings. And like any art intended to convey meaning to an audience, it had best be done with that communication in mind.</p>
<p>One important problem of describing the salient features of an image is that it <b>necessarily invites editorial interpretation</b> about what those salient features <em>are</em>. Do you talk about the lighting? Do you describe clothing on humans pictured? Do you describe relative position of objects in the scene? Does it matter what kind of hair that person has?</p>
<figure>
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/Lchix5y.png" width=400>
<figcaption>
<p>A screenshot of a facebook link to an article titled ‘Level up your Allyship’, with the caption:
“Image of a black background with "BE AN ALLY" written in white text in capital letter. "How to" is written above it in red, with an arrow pointing, placing it in front of "be an ally". There is a red X, crossing out the "n" in "an". with "(better)" being inserted between "a" and "ally".”</p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I might have described the above image as “the phrase ‘be an ally’ is modified to instead read ‘how to be a better ally’”; the description that was actually used is more verbose and contains more information. Neither of these are <em>a priori</em> better! They reflect different approaches to the question of “what is this image about?”, and insofar as there is no one true way of understanding the image, neither is there a one true way of explaining it.</p>
<p>(I must stress, however, that adding more information to something does not always <em>ceterus paribus</em> improve understanding! Three words: <em>bad Powerpoint presentations</em>. Indiscriminately providing more data overloads the limited working memory of an audience. And in particular, the above example <em>buries the lede</em>, rendering it impossible to ‘understand’ the caption without trying to interpret the whole thing at once. As an aid in understanding it causes unnecessary work for the person relying on it.)</p>
<p>Economical use of attention, legibility, clear hierarchical communication of ideas — these are not always the most important goals of a piece of writing, but for captioning they’re more important than usual.</p>
<figure>
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/LDsjpqe.png" width=400>
<figcaption>
<p>A screenshot of a facebook link to an article titled ‘Lighten Up’, with the caption:
<q>A close up painting of a forehead, facing slightly to our right. The person has black hair, black eyebrows, and is wearing green rimmed glasses. Their forehead under the light is a medium shade of brown with the hex color code "78616a". The shaded part of their right (our left) forehead is a darker brown with the hex color code "625563". The darkest brown is just below the top rim of their glasses, between their right eye and brow, and has the hex color code "4e444f".</q></p>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Closely related to the problem of captioners interpreting <em>what features are important</em> is <em>captioners interpreting what those features are</em>. Think emotion and affect. Is the mood dark or hopeful? Do those colours contrast or complement? Do you describe the woman’s face as pensive, sad, bored? Often by this point we enter firmly into the territory of subjective interpretation — one viewer’s mysterious might be another’s bored. <em>This subjectivity is unavoidable</em> if you want to communicate efficiently.</p>
<p>(What do I mean here by <em>efficiently</em>? Well, one way to avoid subjective interpretation of facial expressions would be to mechanically list the exact placement of each of the creases on a subject’s face; which of zir tendons are expanded or contracted; the exact on-screen angle at which zir hair shadows zir eyes. Take this as an extensional definition of <em>inefficient</em> captioning. The viewer is made to do far too much work to understand. You may as well give them the RGB values of every pixel of the image.)</p>
<p>Of course, ‘subjective’ means something very different when you’re the writer or subeditor who curated the image in the first place. In that case, if you picked that particular photo of orphans because it had “warm morning light”, there’s less sense of ‘mismatch’ from adding your own description of the photo, even if you’re still biasing the audience’s interpretations.</p>
<p>However, this is rarely the case on social media (e.g. Facebook or Tumblr reshares), where image thumbnails are often assigned to the linked essays/posts by their respective writers, but it is the resharer who finds themselves attempting to caption the image, without access to the intent of the original curator. They’re forced to make the judgement call: how is the image supposed to complement the piece? <em>What does it represent?</em></p>
<p>I’ll close with an open question: do styles (“schools”?) of captioning vary in predictable ways between different electronic media? Are there organic “dialects” which on average differentiate between captions from different networks, the same way that top-down style guides create a difference between captions on The Guardian versus Wikipedia?</p>
<hr/>
<div class="references">
<p>(*) There are certainly other ways to use captions, alt text, etc., as their own separate <em>part</em> of a text rather than as explanation — think webcomic alt text, cracked.com captions, etc. These tend to deliberately <em>reframe</em> the interpretation of an image for those who can already form an initial impression of it, providing humour or irony or insight. There’s an interesting discussion as to whether it’s possible in principle to recapture the peculiar affect of an image-text juxtaposition with text alone, but that’s a whole other discussion. In this post I’m solely concerned with functional, <em>descriptive</em> captions.</p>
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-1780411851449224632015-03-25T15:35:00.000+11:002015-03-25T15:36:31.086+11:00Thoughts on Jupiter Ascending<p>A friend and I were excited to see <em>Jupiter Ascending</em> after hearing <em>The Daily Dot</em> <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/geek/jupiter-ascending-female-audience/">describe</a> it as “the precise gender-flipped equivalent of all those movies where some weak-chinned rando turns out to be the Chosen One, defeats a supervillain despite having no real personality or skills, and gets rewarded with a kiss from Megan Fox”.</p>
<figure>
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7utptHG70ec/VRI6NeGyXdI/AAAAAAAAKyI/vg3FtRZPHHM/s1600/ja-09751r.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7utptHG70ec/VRI6NeGyXdI/AAAAAAAAKyI/vg3FtRZPHHM/s500/ja-09751r.jpg" /></a>
<figcaption>Channing Tatum and Mila Kunis almost succeeding at sexual tension in <em>Jupiter Ascending</em> (2015).</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The description was pretty much on point. To borrow David Prokopetz’s <a href="http://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/111276205767/i-think-what-bothers-me-the-most-about-a-lot-of">turn of phrase</a>, “it’s not meant to be a Chosen Hero story; it’s meant to be a Secret Princess story”. The following notes are influenced by that interpretation.</p>
<hr/>
<p><b>The film is tightly constructed</b>, with the sort of economy of dialogue which suggests the screenplay went through dozens of revisions before it ever saw pen and paper. (My closest frame of reference is Nolan’s <em>Inception</em>, which I heard was a pet project which took a decade or so realise. I have no idea whether this is the case for <em>Jupiter Ascending</em> and would rather not look it up and spoil the mystery for myself.)</p>
<p>The autobiographical opening minutes meld sharp writing and cinematography to intimately contextualise of protagonist Jupiter’s relationship to her mother. The following scene, the first and only one to show all three Abrasax siblings together, exemplifies show-don’t-tell, hinting at the complicated relationships between the siblings while establishing the “delicate polity” style of the film’s plot, and doing so entirely by implication. By the time we’re introduced to present-day Jupiter we’re barely eight minutes into the film and neither the pacing nor the narrative deftness drop from thereon out.</p>
<p>A friend of mine later remarked to me that “nary a wasted scene” is a little too strong a description. The bees, for example, constitute a Chekov’s gun that’s fired into somebody’s foot a couple of scenes after its introduction, thrown in mostly for trailer-bait CGI spectacle (there are plenty of other ways to establish “you’re a wizard, Jupiter”). On the whole, though, I remain impressed by the film’s ability to <em>keep moving forward</em> with every shot.</p>
<figure>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6uBb_w_jQL0/VRI6a7iIXfI/AAAAAAAAKyQ/nEA3PWPQHqE/s1600/jupiter-ascending-eddie-redmayne-tuppence-middleton-and-douglas-booth.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6uBb_w_jQL0/VRI6a7iIXfI/AAAAAAAAKyQ/nEA3PWPQHqE/s500/jupiter-ascending-eddie-redmayne-tuppence-middleton-and-douglas-booth.jpg" /></a>
<figcaption>The Abrasax siblings, ibid. Eddie Redmayne’s performance as the anemic, serpentine Balem Abrasax (leftmost) removes what little chance I had left of taking <em>The Theory of Everything</em> seriously. </figcaption>
</figure>
<hr/>
<p><b>The political stage is proven strictly more important than action hero physics</b>, contra many thrillers which mix both elements. Deutoragonist Caine (Tatum) spends the entire movie out of his element, a creature of war clearly ill-at-ease in the bureaucratic and political minefields he escorts Jupiter (Kunis) through.</p>
<p>Notably, even though Caine wins his fair share of battles through martial prowess, he never wins Jupiter’s for her. To be sure, his role is more than mere “dumb muscle” — he functions as messenger, as critical distraction, as leverage and as table-turner. But never does he “finish off” a primary antagonist. His direct influence is limited to the ancillary mooks surrounding the villains and the scenery he explodes his way through. <em>Jupiter Ascending</em> is explicitly constructed around the notion that the pen — in the form of contracts, inheritances, alliances, deceptions — is mightier, that war and physical violence are a mere <em>complement</em> to words, not an alternative.</p>
<a name='more'></a>
<hr/>
<p>Let’s talk <b>female agency</b>! Which, honestly, is overemphasised as a metric of ‘progressiveness’ in storytelling, leading to some <a href="http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/04/whats_wrong_with_the_hunger_ga_1.html">truly interesting conclusions</a> if you take it too seriously. It’s as myopic/decontextualised as using the Bechdel test as a <em>comparative</em> measure.</p>
<p>Anyway, I digress.</p>
<p>To some extent, Jupiter <em>is</em> whirlwind dragged around by external circumstances and choices that follow directly from the nature of her character. Her engagement to Titus, for instance, follows entirely from his machinations to get her talking to him alone, followed by a decision she makes that is utterly the most sensible option based on the (false) information she has at the time. (“Is that kind of choice <em>really</em> agency / not agency?” Who cares? Classification absent an understanding of context <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/nm/disguised_queries/">intrinsically misses the point</a>.)</p>
<p>To an extent, this combination of factors — internal-inevitable and externally-mediated — is part and parcel of the medium. You can certainly have characters face complex, emotionally difficult decisions in the context of a two-hour film, but you need to lay a <em>lot</em> of groundwork to communicate the complexity in that short space of time. Indeed, Jupiter’s most significant choice in the last act of the film is incredibly <em>complex</em>.</p>
<p>Faced with a choice between the abstract notion of Earth versus the welfare of her family and loved ones (only a shade removed from a “head versus heart” dilemma), Kunis delivers the most solid part of her performance as she casts her ballot.</p>
<p>(I was also <em>hugely</em> impressed that the way the problem and its resolution are phrased goes against the common narrative moral of self-sacrifice as the most meaningful form of sacrifice.)</p>
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<figure>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Jy8owOrWVLs/VRI6rQ0RtVI/AAAAAAAAKyY/Z1iD-4lDCgs/s1600/b99440776z.1_20150212102627_000_g4n9u180.1-0.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Jy8owOrWVLs/VRI6rQ0RtVI/AAAAAAAAKyY/Z1iD-4lDCgs/s400/b99440776z.1_20150212102627_000_g4n9u180.1-0.jpg" /></a>
<figcaption>Gravity boots; your argument is invalid. Ibid.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Note how <b>the choice of gravity boots as Caine’s mode of transportation</b> centers the focus on his martial utility as one of brute strength, rather than, say, ability to shoot a gun. The camera freeze frames on his muscles in dynamic motion; the script constantly pushes him into one-on-one physical combat wherever it makes sense to do so. And perhaps most noticeably, Caine and Jupiter’s climactic escape from Jupiter in the final act becomes a feat of pure physical exertion.</p>
<p>This, moreso than the brooding werewolf trope, characterizes the idealized masculinity the film pushes. In a Secret Princess narrative, the bodyguard character is <em>exactly</em> a symbol of physical power, the abstracted knight-errant notion of masculinity, the protagonist’s <em>champion</em>. This is in large part why we have the fish-out-of-water subtheme (not to mention wolf-without-a-pack) for Caine: the queen-and-champion trope the film aims for <em>calls</em> for a dualistic assignment of strengths and weaknesses to the two characters, exactly complementing each other’s shortfalls. He does brute strength, she does shrewd judgement calls, they lean picturesquely into each other’s arms, curtains.</p>
<p>Yes, it’s very <em>yin-yang</em> binarist; yes, it’s reinforcing an existing set of notions about what masculinity/femininity mean. That’s a very legitimate criticism of the film (and the type of narrative it’s trying to tell). I suspect that if the realm of mainstream sci-fi / action / thriller movies becomes more saturated by this trope, I’ll be more concerned. In <em>today’s</em> environment, though, the way <em>Jupiter Ascending</em> presents idealized masculinity and femininity is significantly less toxic than the way, say, <em>Kingsman</em> does.</p>
<p>(I enjoyed every minute of Kingsman. Well, most minutes. It’s an <em>awful</em> movie but that’s affect for you.)</p>
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<p><b>The soundtrack was brilliant</b>, harkening back to the orchestral sci-fi tradition of Star Wars. Of course, being another Wachowskis project, <em>The Matrix</em> trilogy is perhaps the more obvious comparison, and there was certainly no shortage of sweeping choral cadences and occasional jumps into unusual time signatures.</p>
<p>I was surprised to learn that Michael Giacchino (<em>The Incredibles, Up</em>) was responsible for the bombastic score, but I’ve only ever really known him via his TV work (<em>Alias</em>, <em>Lost</em>) which has been heavier in leitmotif and emotional subtlety… I imagine if I ever get around to watching the most recent <em>Star Trek</em> films I’ll discover a very similar style from him.</p>
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<p>Related reading: Cora Buhlert’s <a href="http://corabuhlert.com/2015/03/07/the-disparate-reviews-of-jupiter-ascending/"><em>The disparate reviews of Jupiter Ascending</em></a> discusses the film within the larger context of mainstream media and/or critique.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-73647827493717300252015-03-23T21:47:00.002+11:002015-03-23T21:48:59.775+11:00Links and quotes, February 2015<p>Yes, “February”. Shh.
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Chana Messinger <a href="http://themerelyreal.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/foxes-and-hedgehogs/">considers</a> the dichotomy of moderate versus radical strains of ideologies in terms of diverse versus hyperfocused worldviews.
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<blockquote class="pretty">
Radicals care very very much about their given causes. And at least part of the reason why, I think, is that their deep stories, their overarching narratives, are not and cannot be value neutral. A non-radical may consider Larry Summers’s comments about women sexist, but not feel compelled to take action as a result. A radical cannot. Seeing sexism in every part of society: law, politics, employment, family, and more, and acknowledging its virulent harm demands a fight to end it. Same with racism, and presumably, the same with sin.</blockquote>
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<p>Empiricism versus deontology, if you will. (Ever notice how pure deontology always ends up at odds with other philosophical approaches? Almost as if it has some kind of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnTdopLyvbY">zero-tolerance rule</a> going on.)
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<p>The Mohists preached Universal Love and the end of war. And in practice? They <a href="http://www.tor.com/blogs/2015/02/let-me-tell-you-a-little-bit-about-the-mohists">sought to make war impossible</a>: developing sophisticated military strategy and defensive siege warfare tactics and deploying it against the aggressors in any battle to even out the odds. Truth mightn’t be stranger than fiction, but it sure gets away with more suspension of disbelief.</p>
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<figure>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9Q_-l2GJ1is/VQ_OUllidhI/AAAAAAAAKxc/zAOAM1AyHRQ/s1600/T4A5153_1200px.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9Q_-l2GJ1is/VQ_OUllidhI/AAAAAAAAKxc/zAOAM1AyHRQ/s500/T4A5153_1200px.jpg" /></a>
<figcaption><a href="http://www.kolenik.com/">Robert Kolenik’s</a> design for a kitchen countertop automatically lifts up to give easy access to the aquarium underneath. “Aquarium?” Aquarium.</figcaption>
</figure>
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<p>Within a couple of days of one another, Cory Doctorow and Scott Alexander both deconstruct-by-analogy the “individual decision” vs. “herd immunity” aspect of anti-vax arguments, in strikingly different ways. <a href="http://boingboing.net/2015/02/08/having-the-brakes-removed-from.html">Doctorow’s piece </a>plays it straight, running a <em>reductio ad absurdum</em> (“The government wants to force you to have brakes [on your car], but brakes or no brakes is a personal decision”).</p>
<p>Alexander’s piece is <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/06/everything-not-obligatory-is-forbidden/">a little weirder</a>, reapplying the same moral argument in a way that bends intuition (“Super-enhancing your kids isn’t a “personal choice”. It’s your basic duty as a parent and a responsible human being”). The question, of course, is <a href="http://blog.openendings.net/2015/02/in-praise-of-counterfactuals.html">what does the perceived contradiction tell us</a>? Is it an eye-opening modus ponens, an anti-vax modus tollens... or is there a subtlety to the inner workings of the “herd immunity” concept that’s being drawn out here?</p>
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<p>A couple of fandom-specific analyses from <cite>Storming the Ivory Tower</cite>:
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<blockquote class="pretty">
Homestuck [is] a successful tech demo: it shows not just what you can do but why the new tech is useful and powerful. It's not just showing off a bunch of disconnected mechanisms, it's showing why we, as creators, might be interested in utilizing similar techniques, and why we, as consumers, should get excited about where the comic is headed.”
</blockquote>
<footer><a href="http://stormingtheivorytower.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/sa6a6i1-homestuck-vs-tech-demos-or-how.html"><cite>Homestuck vs Tech Demos, or How To Write Hypercomics Like A Boss</cite></a></footer>
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<blockquote class="pretty">“Ward as the Lone White Male Antihero would, in many stories, get a free pass to determine his own morality. The narrative and theme would warp around him to make his actions and judgements correct, often at the cost of the actions and judgements of female characters. In Agents of SHIELD that logic is turned on its head, and the whole dynamic is revealed to be chauvinistic, patronizing, and ultimately subtly fascistic.”</blockquote>
<footer><a href="http://stormingtheivorytower.blogspot.com.au/2014/05/everybody-hates-grant-ward-woobie.html"><cite>Everybody Hates Grant Ward: Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds</cite></a></footer></figure>
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<p>“My sexuality was dead, because I had killed it.”</p>
<p>Libby Anne talks about her experience with <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2011/11/the-purity-culture-and-sexual-dysfunction.html"><em>The Purity Culture and Sexual Dysfunction</em></a>, and the story of her long process of deprogramming herself from a lifetime of carefully trained distaste for sex. The picture it paints isn’t pleasant, and points to a broader theme of how cultural norms (in <em>any</em> subculture, not just “the mainstream”) can be powerful enough to override individual agency and people’s ability to express/experience who they are.</p>
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<figure>
<a href="https://nationalpostcom.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/fo0505_nuclearweaponsw25001.gif" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yeU9ah-GY0A/VQ_PbO1WJKI/AAAAAAAAKxw/cUAE_SJXvwo/s1600/weapons_preview.png" width="300" /></a>
<figcaption>Want to play a game of Global Thermonuclear War? The National Post <a href="https://nationalpostcom.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/fo0505_nuclearweaponsw25001.gif">illustrates</a> the arsenals the governments of the world have on a hair trigger.</figcaption>
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<p>Nick Szabo’s <a href="http://szabo.best.vwh.net/synch.html"><em>A Measure of Sacrifice</em></a> is an amazing tour de force on the coeval development of timekeeping technology (especially big church clock towers and their bells), public common knowledge, and economic sophistication. (To whet your taste: the <em>hourly wage</em> can only be implemented in the presence of clocks employees trust not to have been tampered with. It shields employees from market fluctuations, in return for a fixed sacrifice of their time to their employers.)</p>
<p>I absolutely cannot do this piece justice in a one paragraph summary. Read it; you won’t regret it.</p>
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Meredith Patterson talks activism, the IO monad, and why sometimes you have to poke things with sticks:
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<blockquote class="pretty">I’m in favour of not being shot. But I’m also in favour of change I can see, not merely change I can believe in. If that means poking the status quo with a stick to see what it does, I’m more inclined to do that than not. And if it responds, I’m just as inclined to do it again, like that XKCD comic with the electric shock button. Maybe I find out a little more about how it works. Maybe I find out a way it breaks. Either way, I’ve learned more about it than I knew before. And, crucially, I never would have found out if I hadn’t picked up that stick.</blockquote>
<footer>Meredith Patterson, <a href="http://maradydd.livejournal.com/528043.html"><cite>Nearly everything that matters is a side effect</cite></a></footer>
</figure>
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<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">Russia’s growing authoritarianism should not distract from the remarkable progress in the postcommunist region as a whole. Twenty-five years ago, the countries of the Eastern bloc represented an alternative civilization. To imagine them quickly converging with the global mainstream required a certain chutzpah. Yet that is exactly what they have done.</blockquote>
<footer>Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman, <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/142200/andrei-shleifer-and-daniel-treisman/normal-countries"><cite>Normal Countries</cite></a></footer>
</figure>
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<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">Anthropologists of note have demonstrated that the evidence points to another evolutionary process that yielded money. One that was based not on money’s utility as a lubricant of trade but, rather, as a unit of accounting for debt!... Indeed, everyday use of coins as a means of exchange was not witnessed for several thousands of years after it was used to record debt obligations.</blockquote>
<footer>Yanis Varoufakis, (<a href="http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/to-truck-barter-and-exchange-on-the-nature-of-valves-social-economies/">link</a>)</footer>
</figure>
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<p>“Most of the valuable things you interact with every day are not money.” Meredith Patterson talks about <a href="http://maradydd.livejournal.com/530110.html">tabloid/clickbait journalism and the “Internet outrage machine”</a> from a game theoretic (and/or: economic) perspective.</p>
<blockquote class="pretty">The Guardian has a lot of strong content, much of it having to do with surveillance and geopolitics. Unfortunately, there's yellow journalism to be found in that domain on their pages as well, and distinguishing one from the other is still an exercise for the reader. [Call] the options above… Cooperate and Defect.</blockquote>
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<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">
<p>If you’re a socially aware producer, there’s always this tension between “What do I want to sell?” and “What will the audience buy?”...</p>
<p>Is it better to have a noble vision that no one but you gets to see? Or is it better to have a slightly-massaged version of that vision that’s still going to push the envelope, but also appeal to enough folks that you can make buck? Choose carefully, because there’s not actually a correct answer here.</p>
</blockquote>
<footer>Ferrett Steinmetz, (<a href="http://www.theferrett.com/ferrettworks/2015/01/you-can-break-new-ground-you-might-not-make-money/">link</a>)</footer>
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<p>And to cap, two quotes from Ozy Frantz. Firstly, an analogy regarding feminism, nerd stigma, and “outside advice” in activism:</p>
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<blockquote class="pretty"><p>Imagine an anti-feminist going on about toxicity and bullying within social justice culture. You may agree with them that social justice culture is often toxic and bullying; you may agree with every example they choose and criticism they make. However, you probably have the sneaking suspicion that the anti-feminist is not actually motivated by a pure and selfless desire to help the feminist movement be the best that it can be...</p>
<p>Similarly, in my experience, non-nerd feminists often seem to be have values that I, personally, find repugnant, such as “omg isn’t it creepy when an ugly person dares to express sexual desire? Ew! Gross!”, and that their critiques of nerd culture– even the critiques I think are accurate– are a tool to advance said values. And, in practice, non-nerd feminists have this disturbing tendency to go on about fat ugly autistic neckbeards who have mental health issues and live in their parents’ basement and act like Sheldon Cooper.</p></blockquote>
<footer>Ozy Frantz, (<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/02/01/in-which-ozy-despite-not-being-a-scott-a-adopts-their-habit-of-long-blog-posts-concerning-feminism-and-nerds/">link</a>)</footer>
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<p>Secondly, a thought on the epistemic/instrumental dangers of unified activist language:
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<blockquote class="pretty">The “privilege” concept... creates the unstated assumption that all social justice problems are, on a fundamental level, the same problem. Which is stupid. Racism is probably the result of our brains’ natural tendency to see people who don’t look like us as The Other; classism is probably a side effect of a capitalist economy; homophobia is basically a vast cultural squick with a religious patina. (Yes, these are vastly oversimplified.) Why would you assume that you can use the same tactics to get rid of things with different causes?</blockquote>
<footer>Ozy Frantz, (<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/02/04/the-mistaken-idea-that-feminists-have-any-idea-what-were-doing/">link</a>)</footer>
</figure>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-23160092465637210692015-02-24T10:22:00.002+11:002015-02-24T10:22:26.540+11:00Division [review]<p>Lee S. Hawke’s short story anthology <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24626135-division"><cite>Division</cite></a> is subtitled “a collection of science fiction fairytales”, and I’ll admit I wonder about that. To me, fairy tales epitomise oral storytelling tradition, trading in archetypical characters and grand, good versus evil dramas. This is not so much a failing as a characteristic of the medium: simple, powerful imagery is memorable, and thus it is this that survives generations of retelling. <cite>Division</cite>, on the other hand, exemplifies written word storytelling. Its characters are deep and recognisably human, its thematic explorations nuanced enough to defy Aesopian one-liners. As Hawke puts it, it’s “not Cinderella in Space”, it’s fiction which only resembles fairy tales insofar as it compels the reader to experience childlike wonder, insofar as the themes are timeless, which could be said of many a great work of fiction. It’s firmly a creature of its own medium, and it’s all the better for it.</p>
<p><cite>The Soldier</cite> sets the tone for the the anthology, grim but hopeful, speculative in its setting but timeless in its themes. The enemies of this way are pestilence, disease; the eponymous soldiers, people blessed with supercharged immune systems that might hold the key to developing cures. Hawke takes this clinical presence and grounds it in the personal, the protagonist's torture as his body is razed as a battlefield bringing home the direness of this war far better than any bombastic, globe-spanning treatment of the same could.</p>
<figure><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-74S9o50O-Cc/VOuzIiM0CFI/AAAAAAAAKdI/MdBtaRL93Gk/s320/24626135.jpg" />
<figcaption>Cover art, <cite>Division</cite>, Lee S. Hawke (2015). Blind Mirror Publishing.</figure>
<p><cite>Please Connect</cite> asks us what first love means, absent the social narratives that colour our perceptions of what romance and attraction “are” or “should be”. The protagonist, conditioned by a society that has obsoleted face-to-face interaction, sees even his sanitised courtship with an anthropological eye that Hawke impossibly transmutes into a warmer parlance. There is a raw eroticism in the language here, drawn from where it has always lain: in the quickening of a pulse, in the wetness of a breath.</p>
<p><cite>Dissimilation</cite> and <cite>The Grey Wall</cite> both hark upon the themes of unreality and altered perception (the former with its <cite>Inception</cite>-like layerings of non-worlds; the latter with an expressly unreliable narrator whose doublethink allows Hawke a novel angle on magical realism). Both these stories ask something about when and how it is better to live within fantasy than reality, the question left deliberately ambiguous despite the characters’ own certainty. Meanwhile, <cite>Lemuria</cite> is set in the midst of an apocalyptic alien invasion where anyone who sees the monsters, dies, an incursion into psychological horror that is overshadowed by a late-game twist which all too briefly asks us what rated we would rather endure than death.</p>
<p><cite>Beauty</cite> is perhaps the most explicitly political of the lot, a disillusioned neo-“plastic surgeon” ruminating on the homogeneity of his work:</p>
<figure><blockquote class="pretty">He’d been a young girl then, and he still remembered the first advertisements. <em>Transcend age. Transcend race. Transcend gender.</em> But since he’d stepped out of medical school, all he’d ever done was fulfil the same three basic templates, again and again and again. The possibility of infinite variation had led only to convergence.</blockquote></figure>
<p>It’s a powerful meditation on the moral dangers of fashions, and on the beauty of the different and of individual expression.</p>
<p>The final story, <cite>Division</cite>, is about two women's grief following the death of their daughter. It's told through the eyes of one mother, Diyani, a passionate mechanic whose affinity is for her work, not people. Her heartbreak is raw on the page, her anger twisting her away from the world and, especially, her partner, the physical space of their shared bed reifying the deterioration of their relationship.</p>
<p>When the healing finally begins, it's faltering and unsure, the stuff of human beings, not fairy tales. Yet it feels like a burden being lifted, all the same. There <cite>Division</cite> closes, metaphor, story, and anthology: peering into what it is that makes us human, and in spite (because?) of all our faults, still finding magic.</p>
<div class="references"><p><em>(Disclaimer: this review was written based on a review copy provided by the author.)</em></p></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-12324881897028520022015-02-11T22:15:00.000+11:002015-02-11T22:17:31.206+11:00In praise of counterfactuals<p>“Look, just, say for the sake of argument that anthropogenic <em>climate change is real</em>,” he says. “Would you support government spending to combat it then?”</p>
<p>There’s the temptation, of course, to reply that the question is nonsense because Andrew Wakefield <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/2015/02/20/andrew-wakefield-father-anti-vaccine-movement-sticks-his-story-305836.html">proved in 1998</a> that the planet is actually <em>cooling</em> by two degrees every year; hell, he <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/466856">published a paper</a> and everything. But once you’ve done that (as is probably best with trolls like this fellow you’re arguing with), there’s <em>personal</em> value in taking the question seriously.</p>
<p>It’s a yes-or-no question, admitting two obvious strains of answer: “Even if it were so, that wouldn’t change anything”, and “Well in <em>that</em> case of <em>course</em> things would be different”. Those, by themselves, are boring, a pre-packaged answer recited in two seconds.</p>
<p>The <em>exciting</em> part is getting to ask <em>Why?</em>.</p>
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<figure>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4WNB6KplS2g/VNs4aMuXrOI/AAAAAAAAKaY/aplB-zqYbEA/s1600/frozen_earth_by_kevron2001-d4r5yf9.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4WNB6KplS2g/VNs4aMuXrOI/AAAAAAAAKaY/aplB-zqYbEA/s400/frozen_earth_by_kevron2001-d4r5yf9.jpg" /></a>
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Credit: kevron2001 / <a href="http://kevron2001.deviantart.com/art/Frozen-Earth-287492229">deviantArt</a>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I sat down to write a blog post about the ethics/pragmatics of particular kinds of rhetoric. (Implicit versus explicit universal quantifiers, if you care. It’s beside the point, because as I’m going to reveal below, I got sidetracked.)</p>
<p>I got sidetracked.</p>
<p>The post was going to open with “For the purposes of this post, I’m going to start from the assumption that <em>X</em> is inappropriate in context <em>Y</em>”, hedging this point specifically because “<em>X</em> is inappropriate in context <em>Y</em>” is <em>contentious</em>, but it’s awfully impractical to prepend “and so <em>assuming</em> so-and-so...” to the beginning of every sentence so, ugh, why not get it over with.</p>
<p>It’s a little like picking a scientific paradigm, an article of faith, an axiom system. You want to make a point <em>in a context</em>. It’s hardly unusual; the vast majority of arguments are built upon <em>some</em> kind of premise.</p>
<p>Picking your premises is like picking a scientific paradigm in the sense of Lakatos: your argument exists within a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Lakatos#Research_programmes">programme</a> of thinkers building a shared body of understanding in the context of a socially agreed collection of base assumptions. “Phlogiston explains everything.” “Electrons orbit nuclei like planets around stars.” “Central planning produces better results than markets.” “Markets produce better results than central planning.” “Gender is performative.” “Improving the plight of <em>our</em> country’s poor is more important than other countries’.” You take your base beliefs and you do important work with others who share them.</p>
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<p>Picking your premises is an article of faith: it’s an inferential gap, an uncrossable divide. If you say “Given that morality is relative...” you’ve lost the attention/credulity of the moral realists in the room. They don’t have to accept any argument that extends from premises they don’t believe. <em>This is true even if the premises are proveably right or wrong!</em> Proof is social, proof is contextual.</p>
<p><em>Those</em> people probably think they’re provably correct, too.</p>
<p>(Human beliefs are not closed under logical implication, and not necessarily consistent. Imagine how redundant most STEM education would be if it were otherwise.)</p>
<p>But most interestingly, yes, picking your premises is like picking an ‘axiom system’. And where <em>this</em> particular analogy shines is that sometimes there’s a huge boon to playing around with the implications of an axiom system you don’t necessarily believe.</p>
<p>Philosophical arguments and mathematical proofs may ofttimes differ in surface syntax, but they’re both very much about exploring the connection between ideas and concepts. A lecturer can hand me an assignment with “Assume that \(P = NP\)” at the top of one question and “Assume that \(P \neq NP\)” on the next. There’s a good chance that one of these is true. (A <em>good</em> chance, from where I’m sitting, not a certainty. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_hypothesis">Fuck your law of excluded middle, here’s </a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_hypothesis"><em>my</em></a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_hypothesis"> middle</a>.) <em>Certainly</em> one of these is false. But there is still value in both these questions.</p>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QFgnPDmpXVs/VNs5MUNPb7I/AAAAAAAAKag/UtfTyZqpq-Y/s1600/elementary_202_02.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QFgnPDmpXVs/VNs5MUNPb7I/AAAAAAAAKag/UtfTyZqpq-Y/s400/elementary_202_02.jpg" /></a>
<figcaption>Still from <cite>Elementary</cite>, 2x02, <q>Solve for X</q>. CBS, 2013.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Exploring the consequences of falsehoods (let alone merely <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything">things you’re not one hundred percent certain about</a>) is a way of understanding the ways in which you are tied to the contingent and the ways in which you aren’t.</p>
<p>If your grandmother’s ghost <em>wasn’t</em> literally real and you’d really just been imagining her scratching on the windows at night, <em>some</em> things would change. You wouldn’t salt your windowsills before going to bed, for instance. But other things wouldn’t change. You still wouldn’t throw rubbish on her grave. Some of your behaviours and beliefs depend on whether or not you think that ghost is real or just branches making noise, and the counterfactual gives you the ability to play with those beliefs in a safe hypothetical context.</p>
<hr/>
<p>I’m just starting to browse through <a href="http://luminousalicorn.tumblr.com/ausj">Alicorn’s social justice AUs</a> (<a href="http://luminousalicorn.tumblr.com/tagged/au-social-justice-series">tag</a>).</p>
<p>In one note, she speaks of the project not as direct analogies that can be verbatim exported to the real world (as happens when soapboxes and fiction <a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Fcuriosityquills.com%2Flimyaael%2Fmessage-fantasy%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHreDSS-W39HLK_EoZU3_chDG2tzw">mix poorly</a>) but rather a context in which one can more readily step away from their object-level beliefs to examine the language and the meta-concerns:</p>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">Most of [these AUs] are just “Have a look at this rhetoric when it’s about something that isn’t real, so you can look directly at it without being distracted by its personal relevance to you, your friends, and your political battles.”</blockquote>
<footer>Alicorn (<a href="http://luminousalicorn.tumblr.com/post/109926913325/what-about-the-other-social-justice-aus-what-are">link</a>)</footer>
</figure>
<p>You best see the threads binding your beliefs when you start moving them around a bit. Like (good) science fiction, or even fiction in general, stepping a hair’s breadth away from reality can be enough to grant you a whole new perspective.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-5966038946958776692015-01-30T13:46:00.001+11:002015-01-30T13:47:21.897+11:00Links and quotes, January 2015<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">Status is more <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal%20scale">ordinal</a> than <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal%20scale">cardinal</a>. (The common distinction in our language emphasizes that money is not status: ’arriviste’, ‘kip’, ‘nouveau riche’/‘new money’, ‘parvenu’, ‘social climber’, ‘upstart’, etc. One can try to buy status by donations to institutions frequented by the rich, but it will <a href="http://www.gwern.net/Charity%20is%20not%20about%20helping#fn11">cost a bundle</a>.)</blockquote>
<footer>gwern (<a href="http://www.gwern.net/The%20Melancholy%20of%20Subculture%20Society">link</a>)</footer>
</figure>
<hr/>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">
<a href="http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/11/05/dont-surround-yourself-with-smarter-people/">Don’t surround yourself with smarter people.</a> Surround yourself with <em>differently free</em> people.
</blockquote>
<footer>Venkatesh Rao, (<a href="http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/11/05/dont-surround-yourself-with-smarter-people/">link</a>)</footer>
</figure>
<p>Here Venkatesh Rao expounds upon James Carse’s concept of the “finite game”, loosely described as a <em>type</em> of worldview (but not a specific one) in which one’s purpose is shaped by some well-defined finitistic measure(s) of success — e.g. wealth, professional identity, or the strength of one’s friendship. Casting the universe as a finite game is natural to our way of thinking: in Rao’s words, “explicit finite games make the world a legible place.”</p>
<p>From within this worldview, one is “constantly focused on improving [one’s] position, capabilities and odds of winning. You are always evaluating strategies, and making up clever lines of attack or defense.” This culminates in the notion of <em>score-keeping</em>, the process of becoming <em>invested</em> in some measure of success.</p>
<p>It’s in the <em>incommensurability</em> of different finite games that Rao sees the opportunity for growth. People playing different games (i.e. “differently free” people) are impossible to perfectly predict within a mental model limited by the game you’re in. “When the other person appears to value something that doesn’t even <em>register</em> with you, for a moment, that thing turns into a <em>non sequitur</em>.” It’s in those moments that one gains the opportunity to reflect upon the box they live within from without.</p>
<hr/>
<figure>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WDcASIIDzDo/VMrunU8HcYI/AAAAAAAAKXc/F9SEFPj6fmc/s1600/tumblr_nhjd74Efwg1r9rffqo1_1280.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WDcASIIDzDo/VMrunU8HcYI/AAAAAAAAKXc/F9SEFPj6fmc/s520/tumblr_nhjd74Efwg1r9rffqo1_1280.jpg" /></a>
<figcaption>
Donna Trope explores the artifices of the beauty industry in <cite>Mask Layer</cite>.<br/>(<a href="http://fashioncow.com/2015/01/samantha-gradoville-holly-rose-emery-mask-layer-donna-trope-influence/">source</a> / <b>CW: frontal nudity</b>)
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr/>
<p>It took me <em>how</em> many years of *nix use to wonder <a href="http://superuser.com/questions/173165/what-does-the-rc-in-bashrc-etc-mean">what the ‘rc’ in ‘bashrc’/‘vimrc’/etc. stands for</a>? For shame.</p>
<hr/>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">Thinking that all individuals pursue "selfish" interest is equivalent to assuming that all random variables have zero covariance.</blockquote>
<footer>Nassim Nicholas Taleb</footer>
</figure>
<hr/>
<p>The oft-contentious conflation of ‘trans’ with ‘trans*’ is a legacy of a <em>deliberate strategic approach</em> adopted by transgender activists during the 90s, writes Julia Serano. She explores this theme — the construction of political terms to serve particular pragmatic purposes — in her <a href="http://juliaserano.blogspot.com.au/2014/10/cissexism-and-cis-privilege-revisited.html">essay on the “cissexism” concept</a>, exploring how the collective forgetting of such reasons often causes concepts (like the cis/trans distinction) to read (and ofttimes serve!) as counterproductive, problematic, dangerous.</p>
<p>Serano introduces ‘gender conventional’ / ‘gender unconventional’ / ‘gender transgressive’ as an alternative model of perceived social legitimacy, which one might simplistically summarise as having society celebrate/tolerate/condemn one’s gender expression, respectively. (She distinguishes the latter two as bending vs. breaking the “rules” of gender.)</p>
<p>Reading this essay I was particularly struck by her instrumentalist approach to language (as opposed to the deontological morasses that often characterise linguistic prescriptivism). Consider her caveat that “both [cis/trans and gender conventional/unconventional/transgressive] are simply models… limited in [their] explanatory powers... more useful in certain situations or contexts but not others”. This serves as an important reminder in contrast to both ‘linguistic realism’ (e.g. “the concept of ‘cissexism’ simply <em>is</em>; the distinction meaningfully exists in the territory, not just the map”) <em>and</em> the prescriptive notion that concepts should be evaluated based on the most harm they could possibly cause (e.g. “the concept of ‘cissexism’ potentially reifies the Other-ing of trans folk; therefore the term is <em>problematic</em>; therefore it should be avoided”).</p>
<hr/>
<p>While performing intelligence tests on rhesus monkeys, Harry Harlow noticed infant monkeys becoming emotionally attached to the cloth towels on the floors of their cages. <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/03/21/monkey_love/?page=full">What followed</a> was a cruel scientific career, built upon experiments dancing at the very edge of how comfort and familial love are constructed in the simian brain.</p>
<p>“There is only the dark side of touch,” Lauren Slater writes of Harlow’s work, “...which is that mothers can kill us even as they hold us.”</p>
<a name='more'></a>
<hr/>
<p>Yvain imputes much of the discourse about ‘legitimacy’ of mental illnesses to a generally accepted “<a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_questions_about/">deontologist libertarian model of blame</a>” [‘libertarian’ in the sense of free will, not free markets]. Within this model, people have intrinsic goodness/badness which generally leads them to make good/bad decisions. ‘Disease’ complicates the matter: without taking into account diseases which impact on “free will”, we are “at risk of either blaming people for things they don't deserve, or else letting them off the hook when they commit a sin, both of which, to libertarian deontologists, would be terrible things.”</p>
<hr/>
<p>(CW: maths) The fruit-counting example in section 5 of these <a href="http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/fall05/ln11.pdf">generating function lecture notes</a> is contrived, granted (see how they’re sneakily encoding two natural numbers in their banana/orange and apple/pear constraints?), but <em>damn</em> if that isn’t a beautiful “order out of chaos” moment.</p>
<hr/>
<p>In late 2013, an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report described anthropogenic climate change as “unequivocal”. Yet the media reported almost the opposite, with a narrative about a great global warming “slowdown” or “pause” filling the airwaves. Mother Jones tracks the story of <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/09/global-warming-pause-ipcc">how the IPCC tried (and failed) to get the right message out</a>.</p>
<hr/>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">
<p>Much of the superhero genre, in fact, is devoted to the fantasy that we don't need to wait for technological marvels, but can experience them right here, right now. More, we can do so, magically, without the comfy old familiar world we know changing that much at all.</p>
<p>Tony Stark invents new magical energy sources three times before breakfast, but he uses them mostly to punch Thunder-Gods in the head, rather than, say, to completely transform the world's technology and economy. Aliens land on earth, and rather than conquering England with H. G. Wells or forming an utterly new human race through tentacle-sex gene splicing a la Octavia Butler, they perform minor acts of altruism while taking their shirts off to reveal the pecs of Henry Cavill. Superheroes are sci-fi wonders without consequences, the future resolutely flattened by today.</p>
</blockquote>
<footer>Noah Berlatsky, (<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/12/the-new-star-wars-isnt-really-new/383426/">link</a>)</footer>
</figure>
<hr/>
<figure>
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YvsESSI47Q0/VMrv_k8zRNI/AAAAAAAAKXo/ahZHC26bcKk/s1600/19e1a9067375e170a4b30496105bd44a55cd841e_2048.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YvsESSI47Q0/VMrv_k8zRNI/AAAAAAAAKXo/ahZHC26bcKk/s640/19e1a9067375e170a4b30496105bd44a55cd841e_2048.jpg" /></a>
<figcaption>Photo: Roger Stonehouse, (<a href="http://rogerroger.tumblr.com/post/72978100972/the-road-to-the-amber-fort-was-full-of-elephant">source</a>)</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr/>
<p>On modelling consent culture, Cliff Pervocracy <a href="http://pervocracy.blogspot.com/2012/09/models-of-sex.html">writes</a>: “Personally, I tend toward almost a utilitarian model of sex, in which the goal is to work together to attain the greatest net pleasure.”</p>
<hr/>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">My poetry is actually weakened by my coding style. And there are certain poetic devices that I have a lot of trouble with using, that I have to deliberately try to force myself to use because they would make for bad coding style. Rhetorical questions, repetition, rhyme, convoluted syntax. It’s so important in poetry to be able to surprise the reader, and in coding you can surprise the reader for good effect but you want to do it through new clarity and new concision. In poetry, the range of emotions you want to give the reader—it’s so much wider than that.</blockquote>
<footer>Nina Kang, (<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/working/2014/12/google_software_engineer_nina_kang_talks_about_the_differences_between_writing.html">link</a>)</footer>
</figure>
<hr/>
<figure>
<blockquote>Few Americans want the state to police their bedrooms, but 93% think adultery is morally wrong, a recent CNN poll found. That view has stiffened over the past few decades, even as attitudes to homosexuality have softened dramatically (see chart). This may be because, since the liberalising 1960s, Americans now know more about the real-world consequences of both. Many grow up at ease with gay friends but upset by their parents’ divorces.</blockquote>
<footer><cite>The Economist</cite>, (<a href="http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600999-time-check-motel-new-hampshire-love-free-or-die">link</a>)</footer>
</figure>
<hr/>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">Smart bullies are driven by their desire to have their bullying make them more popular, to get the rest of the world pointing and laughing with them. In a <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/">Blue Tribe</a> bubble, shouting “FAGGOT” at gay people is no longer a good way to do that. The smart bullies in these circles have long since stopped shouting at gays – not because they’ve become any nicer, but because that’s no longer the best way to keep their audience laughing along with them.</blockquote>
<footer>Scott Alexander, <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/13/evil-is-anti-inductive/"><cite>The Influenza of Evil</cite></a></footer>
</figure>
<hr/>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">
<p>[<cite>The Hobbit</cite> trilogy] has no interest in "battles" as such. It is interested in single combats, for which war, howsoever meager the causus belli, provides the opportunity. This individuation of war is part and parcel of the "defining" nature of these films taken together. They cannot, it turns out, think the collective at all; they can only think the individual—the fan favorite, the key prop, the singular...</p>
<p>...Jackson thinks in Romantic and post-Romantic terms, of tragic-heroic heroes and heroines; his vision is fundamentally Byronic and Gothic. Tolkien, though, is a deeply pre-Romantic writer, who thinks in terms of communities, peoples, languages and the idioms of human congregation. These are his great themes, and his evils are things (like the Ring) that cut the individual off from human community.</p>
</blockquote>
<footer>Adam Roberts, <a href="http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2015/01/the_hobbit_the_.shtml">review of <cite>The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies</cite></a></footer>
</figure>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-52506733999957781042015-01-15T22:03:00.001+11:002015-01-17T18:18:55.806+11:00Parsing a giant list of quotes<script src='http://www.openendings.net/js/sh/shBrushPython.js' type='text/javascript'></script>
<p>In early 2011, around the time I moved to Sydney, I began to collect interesting quotes I encountered in books, web articles and elsewhere. By ‘interesting’ I really do mean any sense of the term, like interesting factual tidbits, artful prose, or cute proverb-esque one-liners.</p>
<p>This has kept up since then — <a href="https:/www.instapaper.com/">Instapaper</a> helps — and as of writing I have a little over 1500 entries sitting in one horrendously large (read: three-hundred page) Google Doc.</p>
<figure>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-I67lrAylpQQ/VLec6pg28sI/AAAAAAAAKVg/PfNqH7YGGaw/s1600/image02.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-I67lrAylpQQ/VLec6pg28sI/AAAAAAAAKVg/PfNqH7YGGaw/s500/image02.png" /></a>
<figcaption>The bottom [oldest] part of my giant quotes list.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I realised late last year that this Google-Docs-based system, while convenient to quickly add new quotes to, wasn’t particularly useful for retrieval, let alone browsing. It takes nearly 1G of RAM to have the entire thing open in my browser, and editing operations are slow; it’s just not the use case Docs is designed for. Furthermore, for a while now I’ve been wanting to tag quotes (making it easier to hunt for, say, poems, or quotes about economics), and the additional clutter that would add to my current system makes it untenable.</p>
<p>There’s the question of <em>how</em> to store this information instead (a different web app? a SQL database?), but I figured I’d start by making sure I could easily extract all of this data without having to retype all three hundred pages of it by hand. Fortunately, Docs offers an option to download the whole thing, which immediately offers the option of doing some programmatic parsing.</p>
<p>Of course, this is still in a pretty messy state:</p>
<figure>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Yx7n6Q-U8U0/VLedG9Lc5vI/AAAAAAAAKVo/dV3U0Zb7oPs/s1600/image01.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Yx7n6Q-U8U0/VLedG9Lc5vI/AAAAAAAAKVo/dV3U0Zb7oPs/s500/image01.png" /></a>
<figcaption>The exported HTML from Google Docs.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The first problem: the exported Doc uses stylesheets to italicise and embolden text. I want to preserve these (italics are usually actual author emphasis in the original; bold, my own highlighting), but I can’t hard-code which CSS classes correspond to which, since the way Docs names the CSS classes is unpredictable and varies depending on document contents.</p>
<a name='more'></a>
<p>My script uses <a href="http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/">BeautifulSoup</a> to parse the HTML and <a href="http://cthedot.de/cssutils/">cssutils</a> to pull out the CSS definitions:</p>
<pre class="brush: py">
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import cssutils
soup = BeautifulSoup(sys.stdin)
emTags = []
bTags = []
for s in soup.find_all('style'):
for rule in cssutils.parseString(s.get_text()):
if rule.style.getProperty('font-style') and \
rule.style.getProperty('font-style').value == 'italic':
emTags.append(re.sub("^\.", "", rule.selectorText))
if rule.style.getProperty('font-weight') and \
rule.style.getProperty('font-weight').value == 'bold':
bTags.append(re.sub("^\.", "", rule.selectorText))
s.decompose()
</pre>
<p>…at which point it can then manually apply those rules to produce <tt><b></tt> and <tt><em></tt> tags:</p>
<pre class="brush: py">
for span in soup.find_all('span'):
if 'class' in span.attrs and span.string:
if filter(lambda x: x in span['class'], emTags):
span.string.wrap(soup.new_tag('em'))
if filter(lambda x: x in span['class'], bTags):
span.string.wrap(soup.new_tag('b'))
span.unwrap()
</pre>
<p>Some quotes contain links; many, I’ve added source links to at the bottom. Google Docs exports the links as Google.com redirects (presumably for nefarious tracking), so that a URL that was originally “<tt>http://edge.org/responses/whats-your-law</tt>” now becomes the considerably uglier “<tt>http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fedge.org%2Fresponses%2Fwhats-your-law&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGTr8xkrcybZRSsCPqNu17dyQgexA</tt>”.</p>
<pre class="brush: py">
from urlparse import urlparse, parse_qs
for a in soup.find_all('a'):
del a['class']
if a['href'].startswith('http://www.google.com/url?') \
or a['href'].startswith('https://www.google.com/url?'):
params = parse_qs(urlparse(a['href']).query)
if 'q' not in params:
warning('q not in params: %s' % params)
continue
if len(params['q']) != 1:
warning('len(params[''q'']) != 1: %s' % params['q'])
continue
url = params['q'][0]
a['href'] = url
</pre>
<p>After these modifications, the HTML looks a lot more sensible. It’s a simple enough matter to split the quotes up, and to verify that each quote is a collection of paragraphs followed by an <em>attribution</em>: a single line delimited by square brackets.</p>
<p>Making sense of the attributions is a little trickier.</p>
<p>A couple of actual examples:</p>
<ul class="c8 lst-kix_hpaewt6x69ce-0 start"><li class="c2 c5">[veronica d, commenting on <a href="http://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/11/25/trans-positive-gender-abolitionism-is-totally-possible-yes-it-is/">http://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/11/25/trans-positive-gender-abolitionism-is-totally-possible-yes-it-is/</a>]</li><li class="c2 c5">[Mike Rugnetta, <em>Do We Need a Better Archive of the Internet?</em>, <em>PBS Idea Channel</em>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoH3dlKZ-A0">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoH3dlKZ-A0</a>]</li><li class="c2 c5">[<a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FInstanceOfClass%2Fstatus%2F425360337827663873&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNEbC8xaJ4hwL4hUlAQaQpgVHULxzQ">https://twitter.com/InstanceOfClass/status/425360337827663873</a>]</li><li class="c2 c5">[Albus Dumbledore, in J.K. Rowling’s <em>Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince</em>]</li><li class="c2 c5">[Warren Buffett, <a href="http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/2013ar/2013ar.pdf">Berkshire Hathaway 2013 Annual Report</a>]</li><li class="c2 c5">[Tony Abbott, quoted in <a href="http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2013/july/1372600800/waleed-aly/inside-tony-abbotts-mind">http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2013/july/1372600800/waleed-aly/inside-tony-abbotts-mind</a>]</li><li class="c2 c5">[Guru Laghima, in <em>The Legend of Korra</em>]</li><li class="c2 c5">[John Reynolds, <em>Types, Abstraction and Parametric Polymorphism</em>]</li></ul><p>They’re in a <em>semi</em>-consistent format: usually an author name, usually with a link and/or title. But there’s all sorts of other bits and pieces of data alongside there. Notice the phrasing that implies Albus Dumbledore is a <em>character</em>, not a writer. Notice the ‘<em>episode name</em>, <em>series name</em>’ format for the Idea Channel link.</p>
<p>There’s lots of contextual data here which I wouldn’t want an automated extractor to lose track of. This isn’t going to be as easy as splitting the string by occurrences of <span style="whitespace: pre">“<tt>,</tt> ”</span>. (Hell, that split isn’t even <em>correct</em>; just look at the Reynolds attribution, with a comma in the paper title.)</p>
<p>Fortunately, there’s still enough structure for my script to tackle programmatically. The structure is too complicated to just regexp through, but it is in fact <em>exactly</em> a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar">CFG</a>. It then just becomes a matter of defining appropriate tokens for a lexer:</p>
<pre class="brush: py">
import ply.lex as lex
def t_PAGENUM(t):
r'\ ?p\d+(\-\d+)?'
return t
def t_URL(t):
r'http[s]?://(?:[a-zA-Z]|[0-9]|[$\-/_@.&+#~\?=;]|(?:%[0-9a-fA-F][0-9a-fA-F]))+'
return t
[...]
</pre>
<p>...and then constructing the ugliest context-free grammar I’ve ever had the dishonour of writing:</p>
<pre class="brush: py">
fragmentlist : fragmentlist COMMA fragment
fragmentlist : fragment
fragment : TEXT_IN PLAINTEXT APOSTROPHE_S citation
fragment : TEXT_IN citation
fragment : TEXT_QUOTED_IN citation
fragment : TEXT_COMMENTING_ON citation
fragment : citation
fragment : PLAINTEXT plaintext_suffix
fragment : OPEN_SINGLE_QUOTE PLAINTEXT CLOSE_SINGLE_QUOTE
fragment : PAGENUM
fragment : EPISODE
fragment : CHAPTER
fragment : DATE
plaintext_suffix :
plaintext_suffix : PLAINTEXT plaintext_suffix
plaintext_suffix : APOSTROPHE_S plaintext_suffix
plaintext_suffix : OPEN_SINGLE_QUOTE plaintext_maybe_comma CLOSE_SINGLE_QUOTE plaintext_suffix
| OPEN_QUOTE plaintext_maybe_comma CLOSE_QUOTE plaintext_suffix
plaintext_maybe_comma : plaintext_suffix
plaintext_maybe_comma : plaintext_suffix COMMA plaintext_maybe_comma
citation : link
citation : URL
citation : nonlinkcitation
nonlinkcitation : OPEN_QUOTE plaintext_maybe_comma CLOSE_QUOTE
| GENERIC_QUOTE plaintext_maybe_comma GENERIC_QUOTE
nonlinkcitation : TAG_BEGIN EM TAG_END plaintext_maybe_comma TAG_BEGIN SLASH EM TAG_END
link : TAG_BEGIN A HREF EQUALS QUOTE URL QUOTE TAG_END URL TAG_BEGIN SLASH A TAG_END
link : TAG_BEGIN A HREF EQUALS QUOTE URL QUOTE TAG_END PLAINTEXT TAG_BEGIN SLASH A TAG_END
link : TAG_BEGIN A HREF EQUALS QUOTE URL QUOTE TAG_END nonlinkcitation TAG_BEGIN SLASH A TAG_END
l
</pre>
<p>Running this through a YACC-like parser and doing a little postprocessing is enough to extract all the information in a structured way:</p>
<figure>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6QK7pq0k6ck/VLedTHfYZDI/AAAAAAAAKVw/Vh7jhGKl3wY/s1600/image00.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6QK7pq0k6ck/VLedTHfYZDI/AAAAAAAAKVw/Vh7jhGKl3wY/s400/image00.png" /></a>
<figcaption>Parsed attribution strings as Python <tt>dict</tt>s</figcaption>
</figure>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-77412148294786395342015-01-08T14:48:00.000+11:002015-01-08T14:48:53.275+11:00“What is truth?”, they said. “What is meaning?”<p>Remember:</p>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">
Finally, they came to the granite. “This is alive,” Leavitt said. “It is living, breathing, walking, and talking. Only we cannot see it, because it is happening too slowly. Rock has a lifespan of three billion years. We have a lifespan of sixty or seventy years. We cannot see what is happening to this rock for the same reason that we cannot make out the tune on a record being played at the rate of one revolution every century. And the rock, for its part, is not even aware of our existence because we are alive for only a brief instant of its lifespan. To it, we are like flashes in the dark.”</blockquote>
<footer><cite>The Andromeda Strain</cite>, Michael Crichton, 1969.</p>
</figure>
<p>If, like in my year 7 science class, we take “alive” to mean “responsive to stimuli, converting one form of energy to another, self-reproducing”, then technically, yes, anything from fire to organised religion is exactly alive.</p>
<p>If we take “murder” to include <a class="c3" href="http://www.legislation.act.gov.au/a/1900-40/current/pdf/1900-40.pdf">intentionally causing the death</a> of a specific person, then technically, yes euthanasia is murder, and so is capital punishment, and so is failing to give kidney transfusions to that world-class <a class="c3" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion">violinist</a> who turned up in your sitting room.</p>
<p>(And, of course, if we take “people” to mean featherless bipeds, then human foetuses and kangaroos are people, and abortion is murder, and meat is murder. If we take “people” to be those displaying certain kinds of cognitive activity, then perhaps some squids have more personhood than some coma patients.)</p>
<p>If we take “benevolent sexism” to include systemically supported behaviours reifying the notion that people of a <em>specific</em> gender ought to be protected and supported in doing perfectly everyday things, then yes, unsolicitedly (and disproportionately) offering to help women lift heavy objects, not to mention a constant refrain of “let me get that for you”, absolutely counts, as does implementing affirmative action programmes at your company or institution.</p>
<p>(Patch the leak in an ‘objective’ definition by adding mental state — say <em>mens rea</em> or the recipient’s reaction towards the behaviour — and instead you have a term you can never be sure whether to apply. Though, judging by the state of how society deals with <em>those</em> kinds of definitions, someone would probably argue that a prolonged three week courtroom drama consisting entirely of character assassination is a <em>direct conduit</em> to this kind of truth.)</p>
<p>If we take “true” to mean “having supporting empirical evidence”, then perhaps the Riemann hypothesis is true.</p>
<p>If we take “real” to mean something you can run your fingers across, something you can see or taste or hear, then of course a supernatural God isn’t real, nor is love, nor is the number seven, nor is <a class="c3" href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/analytic/">analytic philosophy</a>.</p>
<p>So what?</p>
<p>None of these conclusions mean anything about the world. They’re just… facts about whether a definition applies to a concept. The pronouncements are as <em>a priori</em> as anything and would be just as true if it were the crown philosoraptor prince-queens of bizzaro!Earth (where our world is naught but an amusing thirdbedtime story) discussing whether the fictional humans’ concept of ‘real’ applies to the fictional humans’ concept of ‘love’ or to ‘electrons’ at the ‘Planck scale’. Hell, maybe bizzaro!electrons are human!real; maybe not.</p>
<p><a class="c3" href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/">Definitions of words aren’t wrong or right</a>; they’re merely… relevant or irrelevant, accepted or unaccepted, intuitive or unintuitive, clarifying or misleading, practical or impractical. These are all subjective judgements, dependent on the people using them, their speech community, the context of the dialogue, <em>everything</em>.</p>
<p>Never forget that words are a social construct (nor that ‘social construct’ is words).</p>
<p>The intuition that murder is bad isn’t <em>wrong</em>, it’s just incomplete. It’s a heuristic. The ‘bad kind of murder’ is as ineffable as ‘bad’, tied as it is to our individual intuitions and learnt beliefs about morality, about what kind of deaths cause <em>that</em> emotional reaction. We get a long way tying that concept to a word, and tying the neat technical definition of “wilfully ending another person’s life” to a word, and pretending that the word isn’t there, that the thread connecting our definition to that thing we truly want to talk about is uninterrupted Platonic truth.</p>
<p>(And that’s the thing. Most of the time it almost <em>is</em>. Strip away the corner cases, the strange examples that send people spiralling into definitional arguments, the rough edges where my intuition about right and wrong and pleasant and unpleasant doesn’t line up with yours quite the way society wants us to pretend it does… and the problem is gone. If only that were possible.)</p>
<p>Words are all sorts of wonderful things. They’re labels. They’re semantic compression optimised for the human brain. They’re strings of phonemes glowing with the potential for rhyme, meter, rhythm, and assonance. They’re shortcuts to elicit emotional reactions. They’re carrier pigeons that can escape the walls of one person’s subjective experience and pass a little something along to another’s. They’re symbols, and in some sense symbols are all we have to make meaning with.</p>
<p>But words... they aren’t real. Not until we say they are.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-53526686144022351722014-12-03T22:14:00.000+11:002014-12-03T22:28:10.977+11:00“Mummy, why is lying wrong?”<p>“Mummy, why is lying wrong?”</p>
<p>“When you lie to people, you hurt their feelings. It’s bad to hurt people’s feelings.”</p>
<hr/>
<p>“Mummy, why is lying wrong?”</p>
<p>“Do you remember the story of the little shepherd, who cried ‘wolf!’ when there were no wolves to find, and whose word nobody trusted for all their lies and mischief? If you were to lie too much, my child, then people would not believe you when you had something important to say.</p>
<p>“The trust of others is a precious commodity, child, and you mustn’t squander it without good reason. Be truthful, and your truth may always be heard.”</p>
<figure>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SUOF504undE/VH7wL2-hM6I/AAAAAAAAKJo/ex5ZJDM6Cos/s1600/Boycriedwolfbarlow.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SUOF504undE/VH7wL2-hM6I/AAAAAAAAKJo/ex5ZJDM6Cos/s320/Boycriedwolfbarlow.jpg" /></a>
<figcaption>
Francis Barlow's illustration of <cite>The Boy Who Cried Wolf</cite>. Via <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Cried_Wolf#mediaviewer/File:Boycriedwolfbarlow.jpg">Wikipedia</a>.
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr/>
<p>“Mummy, why is lying wrong?”</p>
<p>“Lying isn’t always wrong, my child!</p>
<p>“When your teacher asks you how you are, what do you say? You say, ‘I’m fine, thank you, and how are you?’. You say that even if you aren’t fine. Because you’re supposed to lie. That lie is just part of the rules for how we talk to each other!</p>
<p>“When you ask me about the tooth fairy, Mummy lies and pretends it’s a real thing. Even though it isn’t! I do it because it makes you excited about losing your tooth instead of scared. That lie makes you happy instead of thinking about the pain!</p>
<p>“When the mayor says he won’t take money away from the library, he’s lying because he needs to get reelected. That lie is just part of his job. If he didn’t lie, he would be replaced by someone who was a better liar! Wouldn’t that be funny?</p>
<p>“When I tell you that lying is wrong, that’s a lie too. And I tell you that lie to make my life easier.”</p>
<hr/>
<p>“Mummy, why is lying wrong?”</p>
<p>“It’s okay for <em>you</em> to lie. Just make sure nobody else does.”</p>
<hr/>
<p>“Mummy, why is lying wrong?”</p>
<p>“When you’re all grown up, my child, you’ll understand that you should never set rules that contradict themselves. Imagine the opposite rule. Imagine if everybody was allowed to lie whenever they wanted! Then there would hardly be such a notion as truth for us to define lying by! ‘Lying is okay’ contradicts itself; it would be a <em>terrible</em> universal rule.</p>
<p>“Therefore, lying is wrong.”</p>
<hr/>
<p>“Mummy, why is lying wrong?”</p>
<p>“I’m not your mother.”</p>
<p>“...Mummy?”</p>
<p>“I’m not even real.”</p>
<hr/>
<p>“Mummy, why is lying wrong?”</p>
<p>“Imagine all the happiness belonging to all the people in the whole world, my child. When two people become friends, there is even more happiness in all. When you scrape your knee, you are hurt and there is less.</p>
<p>“Lying may beget you a little happiness, but at the cost of others’. For when your friends find out they were lied to, or when the consequences of that lie affect them, they will lose double the happiness you gained. And there will be less happiness in the whole world to go around!</p>
<p>“We must all always endeavour to make there be more happiness, more Good. And so we mustn’t tell lies, lest we take happiness away from the world.”</p>
<hr/>
<p>“Mummy, why is lying wrong?”</p>
<p>“All acts are wrong, my child. No choice you make will ever be pure, without consequences. ‘Lying is wrong’ does not mean ‘don’t lie’. It means ‘lie, but lie knowing the costs’.”</p>
<hr/>
<p>“Mummy, why is lying wrong?”</p>
<p>“The same reason all wrong things are wrong — they cost us the beauty and harmony that the world has given us. Stealing your little cousin’s toy is wrong because it takes away the beauty of childhood innocence. Shining your magnifying glass on the ants is wrong because it takes away the beauty of their lives and the wonderful natural order that they are a part of.</p>
<p>“Lying takes away the beauty of people sharing ideas with each other.”</p>
<hr/>
<p>“Mummy, why is lying wrong?”</p>
<p>“Your Mummy feels an awful feeling in the pit of her stomach when people lie. That feeling is a visceral reaction of disgust, and those are what help us tell right from wrong.</p>
<p>“Other things disgust Mummy too. People shouting at each other and hurting each other’s feelings. Blood. Homophobia. Interracial marriage. Postmodern art. Videos of childbirth. Vulgar words. By trusting my intuition I learn that these, too, are wrong.</p>
<p>“In time I will help you learn what to be disgusted by. Until then, just know that lying is wrong.”</p>
<hr/>
<p>“Mummy, why is lying wrong?”</p>
<p>“Did you know that, once upon a time, there were two clans, the Diamond Clan and the Zephyr Clan? The clans were separated by a great valley, but they were very similar. They lied sometimes, they stole from each other sometimes, they used their fists instead of their words sometimes.</p>
<p>“Life was not too bad in these clans, but people always had to pay extra attention to guarding their precious things, to telling truth from lies. Every time you wanted to buy a loaf of bread from someone, you would have to check extra carefully to make sure that they hadn’t hollowed it out, and they would have to check that your gold pieces weren’t fool’s gold. Imagine how difficult it would have been to go to the shops!</p>
<p>“One day, the Great Philosophers of the Zephyr Clan gathered all the clanspeople together. They announced a grand rule that everyone would have to follow: tell the truth, or you will be in trouble. Do not steal, or you will be in trouble.”</p>
<p>“At first, people did not like the rules. Why should anyone else tell them when they were allowed to lie, or when they were allowed to take things? And, in truth, people never quite ended up liking those rules. But a strange thing happened. The people of the Zephyr clan became more productive. They knew that their neighbours wouldn’t steal from them, so they could spend more time working their fields. They trusted other people to pay them at the end of the day for building their roads, and were trusted in turn. They could work together, they could work for each other, they could do so many things they couldn’t have before.</p>
<p>“And it so happened that the Zephyr clan grew and prospered, while the Diamond clan did not.</p>
<p>“Lying, child, became ‘wrong’ for the Zephyr clanspeople when they decided it was wrong. But they gained something different instead. They traded their freedom to lie and to take what they found, for different kinds of freedom built upon trust or property or whatever else.</p>
<p>“And to this day, their descendants tell people, ‘don’t lie’.”</p>
<hr/>
<p>“Mummy, why is lying wrong?”</p>
<p>“Because it is.”</p>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-78920076721013172282014-11-24T14:08:00.000+11:002014-11-24T14:26:00.706+11:00Redundant code<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">
<p>Legislation is like source code. It is evolved, not designed. The newer documents look ok, but it's only a matter of time before related laws get spread out over several libraries and packages, and patches and new features are often tacked on messily. They're always overdue for re-formatting, but no one wants to do the work, and there's always something more pressing. There's never enough testing or proofreading, and a lot of things have to get tested in production when they go through federal courts.
<p>Given this, when I see:
<p><pre>import marriage
import civilunion</pre>
<p>...I get an urge to push the code review button. I hate maintaining duplicate code.
</blockquote>
<footer><a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/100077687035315597270" target="_blank">Squish Ramsay</a>, personal communication, 2014.</footer>
</figure>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-42930431504481993552014-11-04T22:12:00.001+11:002014-11-04T22:12:29.635+11:00Don't worry, everything is terrible<p><em>(CW: suicide, mental illness, arbitrary dichotomies)</em></p>
<p>Say that you want to advise a friend against a course of action you believe to be against their best interests — punching their boss, running away from home, <em>not</em> running away from home, staying in a loveless relationship, etc. Usually this will be a case where from their viewpoint, the ‘unwise’ decision seems like the better one (or at least comparably good), whereas from your viewpoint the ‘unwise’ decision is obviously worse.</p>
<p>(Your judgement may not necessarily be <em>right</em>, either, but let’s simplify things by making that assumption and removing the ethical questions related to bad or paternalistically ignorant advice. This tends to restrict us to cases where you both have similar knowledge of the situation, and where being removed from the situation is an advantage. Of course, impartiality doesn’t always mean better decisions! Hence ‘assumption’.)</p>
<p>There are two broad classes of counsel you can provide: positive or negative.</p>
<p>The <em>positive</em> class involves suggesting to your friend that they’re undervaluing the ‘wise’ option(s) — their boss isn’t really <em>that</em> insufferable after all, they’ll feel so much better after they let this relationship go, they’ll win that prize if they keep training hard enough.</p>
<p>Conversely, the <em>negative</em> class of counsel involves suggesting to your friend that they’re overvaluing their ‘unwise’ option(s) — if they punch their boss they’ll go to jail, if they stay with their partner they’ll just continue to fight, if they give up training they’ll have let down everyone who was supporting them.</p>
<p>It’s pretty clear that, from a well-being perspective, telling your friend that “it’s better than you think” is <em>strictly kinder</em> than “it’s worse than you think”. In a case where both options feel unappealing to them (and why else would they be struggling with the decision?) then the former alleviates stress where the latter adds to it. Nobody emotionally benefits from having it affirmed to them that all their options are terrible.</p>
<figure>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zY6W3mZ8s9I/VFi0J35N4dI/AAAAAAAAKGc/1naR3rPzdUA/s1600/8178012239_2a1bd261ca_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zY6W3mZ8s9I/VFi0J35N4dI/AAAAAAAAKGc/1naR3rPzdUA/s500/8178012239_2a1bd261ca_o.jpg" /></a>
<figcaption>
Credit: goldilockphotography / <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/goldilockphotography/8178012239">flickr</a>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is perhaps (especially?) pertinent in the case of endogenous (internally caused) thought patterns: think binge-eating compulsions or suicidal ideation. There <em>is</em> a reason that you’re not supposed to say “think of how sad everyone would be if you died”, and it’s probably related to the fact that it <em>doesn’t make things better</em>. Suicide attempt survivors fished out of rivers never tell the cameras, years later, about how, as their life flashed before their eyes, they realised how <em>little</em> they had to <em>die</em> for.</p>
<p>This suggests a rule of thumb: if you want to dissuade someone you care about from a course of action, <em>frame it positively</em>. Negative framing might achieve the desired results, but it won’t help with the underlying distress.</p>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-38045905103720679302014-10-22T21:41:00.002+11:002014-11-05T09:06:09.195+11:00Two (sound) axiom systems for linear temporal logic<p><em>(CW: mathematical logic.)</em>
<p>Current mood: looking up <em>proof-theoretic</em> treatments of linear temporal logic. (The LTL I encountered in university, primarily in concurrency-related courses, was approached model-theoretically and didn't describe how to prove program properties outside of brute force.)
<p>Alas, it turns out that there are no finitistic (i.e. having decidable axioms) axiomatisations of LTL in general [Sz86]. (This should not be surprising, given that the model-theoretic definition of LTL relies upon the structure of the natural numbers, and hence that we encroach upon Gödelian territory.) It's unclear from my initial research whether this incompleteness result extends to the more restricted case of <em>Boolean/propositional</em> LTL with finite state.
<p>In this post I consider two attempts to axiomatise the <q>most important</q> properties of LTL in a way conducive to proving simple program properties, and show that despite their similar structure, one is a strict logical consequence of the other.
<a name='more'></a>
<hr/>
<p>Consider the usual Boolean propositional logic augmented with two modal operators \(\Box\) (<q>always / from now on</q>) and \(\bigcirc\) (<q>next / tomorrow</q>), where \(\Box\) behaves like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_logic#Axiomatic_systems">a reflexive normal modal logic</a>, i.e.:
<ul>
<li><b>Tautologies are \(\Box\) true</b>: if \(\vDash P\) then \(\vDash \Box P\)</li>
<li><b>\(\Box\) is distributive</b>: \(\Box (P \rightarrow Q) \rightarrow (\Box P \rightarrow \Box Q)\)</li>
<li><b>\(\Box\) is reflective</b>: \(\Box P \rightarrow P\)</li>
</ul>
<p>Additionally, assume the following axioms:
<ul>
<li><b>\(\bigcirc\) distributes over \(\land, \lor, \lnot\)</b>: \(\bigcirc (P \land Q) \leftrightarrow \bigcirc P \land \bigcirc Q\), etc.</li>
<li><b>\(\Box\) and \(\bigcirc\) commute</b>: \(\Box \bigcirc P \leftrightarrow \bigcirc \Box P\).
<p>(This corresponds to the equivalence between <q>From now on, the following day, \(P\)</q> and <q>From tomorrow on, \(P\)</q>.)</li>
</ul>
<p>Now, consider the following pairs of axioms, both of which aim to capture the sequential intuition of LTL:
\[\begin{align}
\Box P & \rightarrow (P \land \Box \bigcirc P) \tag{X1}
\\ (P \land \Box \bigcirc P) & \rightarrow \Box P \tag{X2}
\\
\\ \Box P & \rightarrow \Box \bigcirc P \tag{Y1}
\\ \Box (P \rightarrow \bigcirc P) & \rightarrow (P \rightarrow \Box P) \tag{Y2}
\end{align}\]
<p>\(X1\) and \(X2\) collectively state that <q>from now on</q> is equivalent to <q>today <em>and</em> from tomorrow on</q>.
<p>\(Y1\) is a weakening axiom asserting that <q>from now on</q> implies <q>from tomorrow on</q>.
\(Y2\) is what [Fi02] describes as the <em>induction axiom</em> for linear temporal logics: if it's true today and it never stops being true overnight, it's always true.
<p><b>Claim:</b> \(X1, X2\) is strictly weaker than \(Y1, Y2\).
<p><div class="box proof">
<p><b>Proof:</b> \(X1\) and \(Y1\) are clearly equivalent (given reflectivity of \(\Box\)).
<p>\(Y1, Y2 \vDash X2\): Assume \(P, \Box \bigcirc P\); then \(\Box (P \rightarrow \bigcirc P)\) by conditional introduction + distributivity of \(\Box\) over \(\land\). The result follows from \(Y2\).
<p><q>strictly</q> (sketch): Consider (degenerate) interpretations where \(\bigcirc\) is the identity modal operator. (I.e. \(\bigcirc P \leftrightarrow P\).) These satisfy \(X1, X2\) trivially. But \(Y2\), which is equivalent to \(P \rightarrow \Box P\), doesn't follow.
</div>
<p><div class="references"><p><b>References</b>:
<p>[Fi02] Fisher, M. (2002). <cite>An Introduction to Practical Formal Methods using Temporal Logic</cite>. Retrieved from <a href="http://cgi.csc.liv.ac.uk/~michael/TLBook/tl4-4up.pdf">http://cgi.csc.liv.ac.uk/~michael/TLBook/tl4-4up.pdf</a> 22/10/2014.
<br>[Sz86] Szalas, A. (1986). <cite>Concerning the semantic consequence relation in first-order temporal logic</cite>. <cite>Theoretical Computer Science, 47</cite>, 329-334.
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-65983707937124345692014-09-15T20:10:00.001+10:002014-10-05T10:47:51.665+11:00Ten books I remember<figure>
<img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yHeVjAHRM3o/VBa0IM5AvZI/AAAAAAAAJ7I/9pj3wj926gQ/s1600/5343717391_634ac19474_z.jpg" height="300" />
<figcaption>Credit: paulbailey / <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/paulbailey/5343717391/sizes/l">flickr</a></figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">
<p>
List 10 books that have stayed with [you] in some way, without thinking too hard about it. They don't have to be the 'right' books or great works of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way.
</p>
</blockquote>
</figure>
<p>...goes a meme that’s been doing the rounds on Facebook lately.</p>
<p>I wrote down the first ten I could think of. Then I shuffled them randomly so that I didn’t feel like I was playing favourites. These are those books.</p>
<hr/>
<h3><cite>The Last Samurai</cite>, Helen De Witt</h3>
<p>On the surface, De Witt’s 2000 novel is a coming-of-age story; a precocious young boy, raised by his equally gifted and eccentric mother, who finds a kind of independence as he seeks out his biological father. But <cite>The Last Samurai</cite> is so much more than that: it is about cross-generational bonds formed by intellectual kinship; autodidacts swimming in ponds far too small; it is about adventurers and explorers finding new roots in unknown lands; cinematic craft (the mother, Sibylla, raising the boy, Ludo, on Kurosawa’s 1954 <cite>Seven Samurai</cite>), and the art of storytelling; the loneliness of genius; the disjointed pace of parenthood (fragmented sentences and avant-garde paragraph breaks littering Sibylla’s narrative and suggesting an all-encompassing harried-mindedness); the semiotics of music; the ways in which even the very young look out for their elders.</p>
<p>I have read <cite>The Last Samurai</cite> only once. I intend to read it many times more. The prose is strange but mesmerising, and the themes speak to me on so many different levels that I get shivers just seeing the book lying patiently on my bedside table.</p>
<figure>
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/kQmZS1g.jpg?1?6797"/>
<figcaption>Still from <cite>Seven Samurai</cite> (七人の侍), 1954.</figcaption>
</figure>
<a name='more'></a>
<hr/>
<h3><cite>Airframe</cite>, Michael Crichton</h3>
<p>Growing up, Michael Crichton’s books were a guilty pleasure (and presumably not just for me, considering how many of them were lying around the house).</p>
<p>...well, “guilty pleasure” is a misnomer. Back at the tender age of thirteen I thought that Crichton, along with Agatha Christie, were the height of ‘grown-up’ literature.</p>
<p><cite>Airframe</cite> displays a guarded cynicism about the rise of <cite>Sixty Minutes</cite> style yellow journalism, the human factor in globalisation, as well as giant corporations <em>and</em> unions alike. (“Cynicism” aptly describes most of Crichton’s oeuvre: in the unabashedly climate-change-denialist <cite>State of Fear</cite> he describes climate science as the manufacturings of the "politico-legal-media complex" (“complex” in the sense of “military-industrial complex”); and if <cite>Jurassic Park</cite> isn’t a cautionary tale about techno-capitalism then I’m not sure <em>what</em> is.)</p>
<p>The thing that really stuck with me about this novel through my teenage years was the subplot involving protagonist Casey Singleton’s protracted standoff with current affairs producer Malone. The attention paid to little details about the media machine (from big-picture “scripting” of news stories down to how to fold one’s hands during an interview) was an eye opener.</p>
<hr/>
<h3><cite>Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance</cite>, Robert Pirsig</h3>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">It’s just Chris and me and the forest and the rain. No books can guide us anymore.</blockquote>
</figure>
<p>I read this recently and I’ve been <a href="http://blog.openendings.net/2014/08/mountains-should-be-climbed-with-as.html">quoting</a> <a href="http://blog.openendings.net/2014/07/ingratitude.html">from it</a> recently too, so I’ll leave this entry brief: this book is both an excellent meditative foray into philosophy (especially idealism vs. realism) <em>and</em> an excellent philosophy-of-science oriented guide to motorcycle maintenance. The protagonist’s journey across the American countryside with his son reflects and contrasts with these ongoing meditations (“chautauquas”, if you will) in myriad ways.</p>
<figure>
<img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-C2kz5JI2lcw/VBa5h5u7EdI/AAAAAAAAJ7s/WfujvT5ewys/s300/robertpirsig-mbike.jpg" />
<figcaption>Author Robert Pirsig and his son, 1968.</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr/>
<h3><cite>Amaryllis Night and Day</cite>, Russell Hoban</h3>
<p>When I lend this book to friends, I often tell them that the prose lifts off the page the same way that food melts in one's mouth. It is an effortless and immensely enjoyable experience.
<p><cite>Amaryllis Night and Day</cite> is that rare example of Western magical realism done right. It’s a romance story about two people who meet in each other’s dreams. The liminal barrier between sleeping and waking is preserved within the plot, but Hoban’s use of words and metaphors seems to dissolve it for the reader. Everything seems slightly unreal; thus, everything seems real.</p>
<p>The character arcs themselves are nothing out of the ordinary for the romance genre — the both narrator and their love interest have their own baggage to deal with, but the narrative never veers into Manic Pixie Dream Girl territory, nor does it fetishise the process of healing. The characters are just humans getting on with their lives, as humans do.</p>
<p>It’s a beautiful novel.</p>
<p>It’s also the book that taught me the word ‘callipygian’ so there’s that too.</p>
<hr/>
<h3><cite>The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal</cite>, Sean Dixon</h3>
<p>This is a difficult one to describe: a rite-of-passage story for an ensemble cast, tinged with an air of the fantastical and held steady by an understanding of the world’s little cruelties.</p>
<p>(A plot summary that says essentially nothing of note: at the behest of one of their number, the ladies of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women's Book Club read the Epic of Gilgamesh in its original cuneiform. Also of note: the novel’s original publication title, <em>The Girls Who Saw Everything</em>.)</p>
<p>What really affected me when I read this was Dixon’s attention to detail in developing the characters, all of them so very human with all the struggles and flaws that entails. I’m finding it very hard to describe this in terms of the plot itself — in many ways, the plot serves as a vehicle for character development and transformation.</p>
<p>(As a side note, flipping through the book again for the first time in a long while, a mild content warning for transphobia applies here: one of the characters is misgendered in her introduction within another character’s first person narration, and her subsequent development seems to carry a tinge of <a href="http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Trans-exclusionary_radical_feminism">TERF</a> fantasyland.)</p>
<figure>
<img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kWDhTPv7FyY/VBa4HkTYcTI/AAAAAAAAJ7k/JDAbTPzWpIM/s300/6316379.jpg" />
</figure>
<hr/>
<h3><cite>The Unbearable Lightness of Being</cite>, Milan Kundera</h3>
<p>Kundera’s 1984 novel was another recent read, recommended to me by a close friend. Like <cite>Zen…</cite>, it exists as both story and philosophical incursion in equal measures. The narrative is presented atemporally, snapshots of the same characters at different points in their intersecting lives. (Wikipedia <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unbearable_Lightness_of_Being">describes it</a> as ‘postmodern’; I’m not certain I’m ready yet to admit to having enjoyed postmodern literature.)</p>
<p>The author’s philosophical contemplation takes the form of character exploration. One memorable section, “A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words”, is a careful catalogue of the different meanings two lovers attribute to everyday words like “music” or “darkness” (and by implication, a catalogue of the ways in which they are fundamentally incompatible).</p>
<figure>
<blockquote class="pretty">
<p>No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, in Hitler’s time, in Stalin’s time, through all occupations. When [Sabina] felt low, she would get into the car, leave Prague far behind, and walk through one or another of the country cemeteries she loved so well. Against a backdrop of blue hills, they were as beautiful as a lullaby.</p>
<p>For Franz a cemetery was an ugly dump of stones and bones.</p>
</blockquote>
</figure>
<p>There are erotic and romantic elements within <cite>Unbearable Lightness</cite>, but the eroticism and romance exist as a foil upon which to elucidate the characters, never quite for their own sake.</p>
<p>The particular <em>kind</em> of erotic elements on display are particularly interesting, though. There is a strong sense of power play and hidden personalities here. To whit: “He would never command her, as Tomas had, to lay the mirror on the floor and walk back and forth on it naked... [But] there are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.”</p>
<p>Obvious BDSM connotations aside, it’s interesting to see how this interplays with the ways in which the characters perceive themselves, and the continuity of their private selves with their public.</p>
<hr/>
<h3><cite>Representing and Intervening</cite>, Ian Hacking</h3>
<p>My epistemology is unabashedly <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_realism">scientific realist</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism">reductionist</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)">naturalist</a>, and everything else you would expect to go with those. I was assigned <em>Representing and Intervening</em> as a text in second-year philosophy, and it just… clicked.</p>
<p>After a thorough survey of major developments in philosophy of science in the first half of the book, Hacking puts forward a version of experimental realism that is perhaps best summarised by an anecdote in which a friend told him of an experiment to try to detect quarks.</p>
<p>After being told the experimental setup, which included a niobium ball whose charge was gradually altered over time, Hacking asked his friend how exactly the charge was altered.</p>
<p>Replied the friend, “We spray it with positrons to increase the charge or with electrons to decrease the charge.”</p>
<figure>
<img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-c-1nX74zCoA/VBa2xkFhqNI/AAAAAAAAJ7c/OHdZqN8ztks/s400/7120341617_3c1964f3e6_z.jpg" />
<figcaption><cite>Electron Gun in Magnetic Field VI</cite>.
<br/>Credit: legoman_86 / <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/samdejong/7120341617/in/set-72157629711764011">flickr</a></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It was at this point, Hacking continues, that he realised the theory of positrons and electrons had advanced to the point where there were “standard emitters with which we can spray [them]... we understand the effects, we understand the causes, and we use them to find out something else”. <em>If you can spray them, then they are real</em>, the tagline goes, and Hacking goes on to elaborate on a form of experimental realism where entities can be said (for all intents and purposes) to be real if we understand them so well as to use them as <em>tools</em> in experiments.</p>
<p>One may perhaps read this as a considerably more restrictive “if and only if”, which introduces certain questions about observable but non-manipulable phenomena (macroevolution, anyone?), but I personally never got this impression.</p>
<p>It’s not a watertight presentation (as if anything in philosophy could ever be considered by a consensus to be ‘watertight’), but it’s compelling and well-grounded, certainly more so than the other major naturalist text I was assigned during undergrad (Kornblith’s <cite>Inductive inference and its natural ground</cite>, which, while clearly getting somewhere with its concept of “homeostatic property clusters”, <em>really</em> needed something more atemporal than “homeostatic” to go with.)</p>
<p>Philosophy interlude over; carry on, everyone.</p>
<hr/>
<h3><cite>The Red Queen</cite>, Matt Ridley</h3>
<p>(Let’s get this out of the way: <em>evolutionary biology is descriptive, not normative.</em> If someone’s moral philosophy says that “X evolved to do Y” implies “X should do Y”, that’s a problem <em>with their moral philosophy</em>, not with the ontological status of “X evolved to do Y”.)</p>
<p>I find sexual selection one of the most counterintuitive bits of evolutionary biology (not least because it exemplifies the difference between relative and absolute fitness), and <em>The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature</em> is a primer and literature review delving into exactly this topic.</p>
<p>Topics covered include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Why does sexual reproduction even exist in the first place?</li>
<li>Why do gametes come in multiple sexes? (Why didn’t all gametes evolve to be compatible with all others?)</li>
<li>Why are birds so fond of adultery?</li>
</ul>
<p>The title is an allusion to sexual selection “arms races” via <cite>Alice Through the Looking Glass</cite>: the Red Queen running as fast as she can but never getting anywhere. (“<a href="http://urila.tripod.com/Alice.htm">It takes all the running you can do</a>, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”) Similarly, the rapid evolution of predator-attracting plumages on peacocks or fat-assisted hip-to-waist ratios on humans: particular genes competing with one another to evaluate or fake signals of mating potential, quickly spiralling into an inescapable feedback loop, completely oblivious to forces of natural selection.</p>
<figure>
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/WtW0ZS5.jpg" height="300">
<figcaption>Illustration for <cite>Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There</cite> (1871) by John Tenniel.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I really enjoyed the presentation of the material. Ridley is an adept science writer, couching citations and detailed mechanics in enough emotional context that the neophyte reader never finds themselves disengaging.</p>
<hr/>
<h3><cite>Exceptionally Gifted Children</cite>, Miraca Gross</h3>
<p>More non-fiction! (I swear the list really did get shuffled with these three clumped together.)</p>
<p><cite>Exceptionally Gifted Children</cite> is based on the author’s longitudinal study of several dozen IQ 160+ (read: 4 standard deviations or more) children growing up in Australia in the eighties. Gross presents fifteen of the children in the study, and tracks the various pitfalls and uplifts in their upbringing, grouping by topics — their toddler years; their hobbies and reading interests; their academic track records. Frequent reference and introduction is made to the supporting literature in this field, though Gross’s study is the first of its kind.</p>
<p>There are incredible difficulties involved in raising children like this. The culture is not positively predisposed to them (or, often, their parents). Some of the students live up to their purported potential. Others crash and burn.</p>
<p>The toxicity of outcome-‘egalitarian’ school environments makes a big difference here.</p>
<p>Psuedonyms are used, but it’s not difficult to spot, say, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao">Terry Tao</a> in the mix, and I suspect that had I more familiarity with Australian intellectuals in their early thirties I would recognise a couple of the others too.</p>
<p>Gross comes out strongly in favour of acceleration over half-baked enrichment solutions for the exceptionally gifted, though the narrative she presents sugarcoats the decision somewhat: despite the selective anecdotes, kids who are accelerated through school don’t necessarily have picturebook-perfect childhoods, even if that <em>is</em> the best decision they can hope for. As a persuasive piece, <cite>Exceptionally Gifted Children</cite> works well (especially considering that Gross is writing from within a “tall poppy” culture in 90s, and to some extent contemporary, Australia); as an objective one, slightly less so.</p>
<p>This one was an important part of my adolescence for reasons this margin is too small to contain.</p>
<hr/>
<h3><cite>Sum</cite>, David Eagleman</h3>
<p><a href="http://www.davideagleman.com/descent.html">Read this first</a>.</p>
<p>Every story in this anthology talks about a different potential afterlife. Eagleman’s trade is neuroscience, and this shows in the particular problems of consciousness and identity he interests himself in. What if the afterlife only has the thousand or so people you met during your life? What if God created microbes in Its own image and sees you only as phenomena beyond Its control?</p>
<p>Eagleman’s style is laconic and simple: it is the ideas that matter here, not linguistic acrobatics.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8752245206957521665.post-27816743623080450862014-08-27T22:09:00.001+10:002014-08-27T22:13:08.882+10:00Accumulators in Haskell<p><em>(CW: coding exercise/study with zero higher purpose.)</em>
<p>In Paul Graham's 2002 essay, <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html"><cite>Revenge of the Nerds</cite></a>, Graham suggests one metric for the expressive power of a programming language: the ease of writing an accumulator.
<blockquote>[An accumulator is] a function that takes a number n, and returns a function that takes another number i and returns n incremented by i.</blockquote>
<p>For example:
<pre class="brush: cpp">
x = accumulator(7);
x(1); // 8
x(3); // 11
y = accumulator(-1);
y(1); // 0
</pre>
<p>In the parlance of OOP, an accumulator is a <tt>NumberIncrementerFactory</tt>. In the parlance of programming language theory, an accumulator produces a canonical example of a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_programming)">closure</a>: a function together with a stateful external environment.
<p>Graham uses the relative difficulty of writing accumulators in various languages to demonstrate the elegance/clumsiness of writing non-trivial code in them. (Of course, along with any notion of a metric comes <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law">Goodhart's law</a>: a metric stops measuring anything useful if people start treating it as a target. If there are joke languages <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090602074545/http://www.cliff.biffle.org/esoterica/hq9plus.html">purpose-built to make writing quines easy</a>, you can bet someone's written a language where there are accumulators as a language primitive.)
<a name='more'></a>
<p>For the hell of it, I decided to write one in Haskell. This was a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understatement">bad idea</a> — while implicit closures are the <em>sine qua non</em> of many functional programs under the hood, state is most certainly not.
<p>To maintain implicit state we need to be working under some monad; I picked the <tt>IO</tt> monad as it was the most natural fit for declaring new persistent <q>variables</q> (courtesy of the <tt>IORef</tt> library). (A <tt>State</tt> monad wouldn't have worked as the outer layer, since running an accumulator <em>changes</em> the state space that the program is storing.)
<p>Thus our example from above translates like so:
<pre class="brush: hs">
import Accumulator
main = do
foo <- accumulator 7
foo 1 >>= print -- 8
foo 3 >>= print -- 11
bar <- accumulator (-1)
bar 1 >>= print -- 0
</pre>
<p>...while our implementation begins with the following preamble:
<pre class="brush: hs">
module Accumulator (accumulator) where
import Data.IORef
accumulator :: (Num a) => a -> IO (a -> IO a)
</pre>
<p>(N.B. <q><tt>(Num a) =></tt></q> approximately means <q>for any type <tt>a</tt> for which addition is defined</q>. If we didn't want polymorphism [which Graham stipulates as a requirement], we could have just used <tt>Int -> IO (Int -> IO Int)</tt>.)
<p>A quick sanity check of the type signature: the accumulator takes a number and <q>creates</q> (i.e. returns from the <tt>IO</tt> monad) something capable of taking numbers and creating new numbers based on them. That sounds like the interface we want. (See further below for an example of another plausible looking type signature that <em>doesn't</em> work.)
<p>From there we fill in the implementation:
<pre class="brush: hs">
accumulator init = do
x <- newIORef init
return $ \i -> do
modifyIORef x (+i)
readIORef x
</pre>
<p>
The code runs and outputs the expected values. Further internet searching reveals that Malcolm Wallace and Tom Pledger already wrote <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/accgen.html">this exact code</a> back when the essay originally came out. So, on the one hand, this was probably a waste of time; on the other hand, it's always good to try it oneself, right?
<h3>Were the nested IOs necessary?</h3>
<p>Let's look at that type signature again (substituting <tt>a</tt> with <tt>Int</tt> for readability's sake):
Int -> IO (Int -> IO Int)
<p>Do we really need to have an IO function returned by an IO function? Wouldn't it be fewer layers and simpler to have a type signature more like this?:
<pre class="brush: hs">
accumulator :: Int -> Int -> IO Int
main = do
let foo = accumulator 7
foo 1 >>= print -- 8
foo 3 >>= print -- 11
let bar = accumulator (-1)
bar 1 >>= print -- 0
</pre>
Sadly this is logically unsound. Imagine such an implementation existed. Then consider the following two programs:
<pre class="brush: hs">
main = do
let foo = accumulator 0
let bar = accumulator 0
foo 1 >>= print -- 1
bar 1 >>= print -- 1
</pre>
<pre class="brush: hs">
main = do
let foo = accumulator 0
let bar = accumulator 0
foo 1 >>= print -- 1
foo 1 >>= print -- 2
</pre>
<p>But then since <tt>foo</tt> is exactly equal to <tt>bar</tt>, the two programs should behave identically! So nothing with this type signature can behave like an accumulator.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243093655944184523noreply@blogger.com1