In an observational study, The University of Texas at Austin gave a group piano majors a Shostakovich passage to learn and perform a day later. They found that the amount of time spent practicing the passage didn't have much bearing on mastery. What did distinguish the top performers was how they handled their mistakes. The best ones took pains to individually locate and correct errors, addressed them immediately when they arose, and strategically slowed the piece down to address problem areas.
The "March" in the title is purely decorative. (Or: that's when I read them.)
(CW: Homestuck) What do Magic: the Gathering's five colours, Pacific Rim's drift compatibility, and the Houses of Hogwarts have in common? Yes, they're powerful in-universe metaphorical devices that connect character arcs to physical things, Sam Keeper of Storming the Ivory Tower writes. But more importantly, they're both structured and hyperflexible. They're given well defined rules and categorisations but aren't overly prescriptive. They're open-ended but not too open. This makes them amazing hooks for fanworks and remixes.
Philip Sandifer's A Mild Curiosity in a Junkyard is an impressive tour de force work spanning the fifty-plus years of Doctor Who's run, and its place in the greater historical and social context. Highlights include the flippant creation of central parts of the show's mythos (regenerations, Gallifrey, etc.), Hartnell's retirement as marked on-screen symbolism of end of the show's early "noble savage" era, Tom Baker's spiral into egotistic "one man show" self-centeredness, the voluminous official tie-in books produced in the 90s and 00s that later turned into some of the best post-revival scripts... It goes on and on and it's utterly fascinating.
Melissa Thomasson says that what we have combines the worst of the market and the worst of government.
Markets are usually really good at controlling costs... Government can be good at... ensuring universal access... For Melissa Thomasson, she says that either extreme, a competitive market system where consumers know what price they're paying, what they're getting, which would probably drive the price of health care down, or a government run system, which would cover everyone would be better than the accidental mixture that we have today: a really expensive system that doesn't cover us all.
Joey Camacho of Raw & Rendered has a very impressive portfolio. The above image is taken from his Progress Before Perfection collection.
Yanis Varoufakis (formerly, "that economist who did cool things at Valve", currently, "that economist who's Greece's finance minister"), explains the influence of Marxist theory on his economic work over the years. "Even my non-Marxist economics was guided by a mindset influenced by Marx, he writes." His take on Marx's work is interesting, and definitely not what I would describe as 'socialist' -- indeed, he laments that a lot of the political discourse on the subject centres on fairness and justice ("bequeathing the concept of freedom to the neoliberals") rather than a greater, causal underlying problem: that capitalism as it functions is inefficient even on its own terms, that it wastes everything, of value or otherwise.
In the pilot episode of Numb3rs, CalSci professor Charlie Eppes (David Krumholtz) describes how people confuse randomness with uniformity. "You've distributed yourselves at equal intervals, while true random patterns will include clusters... [Simulating randomness] is pretty difficult."
Whether it's nature or nurture, we're really bad at knowing 'random' when we see it. This is what lets Eppes solve the case-of-the-week. This is why the Fire Emblem games badly underexaggerate their probabilities of peons hitting other peons -- because it takes 80% real odds for something to feel like 70% certainty.
"If a unit has a 15% displayed chance... their actual odds of hitting are a paltry 4.65%... if a unit has an 85% displayed hit chance [it's] actually a more reliable 95.65%." Screenshot: lparchive.org.
TagTime
I recently installed TagTime for Android, a barebones app that randomly polls you every forty-five minutes on average1 to ask you what you're doing at that exact moment. It's a completely random sample of your day.
(The results are distressing. Over the last four days, approximately 1 in every 8 pings has occurred while I was on Facebook, i.e. three hours a day, give or take a generous error term. [Image link])
The thing about the 'random sample' part: it's really random. (Specifically, it's a Poisson process). The key part here is that it's totally memoryless -- you can't say "it's been nearly forty-five minutes so I'm going to do something productive now so I can write that down when the app next pings me". Nor can you say "Well, it just pinged me a second ago, so it's safe to hop onto Twitter for a few minutes". There's no gaming it (and thus no need to worry about gaming it). At any given moment, minute to minute, your odds of getting pinged are exactly the same.
As I mentioned, this really doesn't feel like how we expect random distributions to behave.
The reviewer in the above image, in addition to not understanding probability, gives a fairly good description of what having the app switched on feels like. Sometimes you'll get a ping from it three times in two minutes. Sometimes you'll watch an entire movie without it going off. A lot of the time it feels like I'll do a solid hour of work and then open Facebook for a minute and then immediately get pinged asking what I'm up to2. There's no predictability to it.
At any given minute, there's about a 2% chance of the app pinging me. Thus I've started to learn what "a 2% chance" really feels like. It's strange.
A 2% chance feels small but not that small. It sounds like nothing but it still manages to happen anyway, once or maybe twice an hour (and every now and then, five times).
There's perhaps a larger note about probability (fine, about independent probabilities) here: the odds of getting pinged during a given second are less than one in a thousand. And so on, and so forth. One in a thousand, one in a million... those odds may be small, but sometimes, over once an hour, even, things that unlikely still do happen.
It may be obvious on paper, but it feels a lot stranger in the real world when you first really notice it.
That seems like a good lesson to internalise.
Footnotes:
1 For a user-defined value of forty-five.
2 In these cases I'd still say "I was on Facebook". Even if it doesn't feel fair, on average, over the course of weeks, the pings will cover a representative sample of your time.
On a similar note, a lot of the employee surveys at work come with instructions to answer the question about how you're feeling that very day, even if you're having an unusually up or down week. Across the whole sample, they assure us, a genuine picture of "typical" will appear.
Lanchester's Laws are a handful of mathematical formulae describing armed combat between two forces. I'll talk about their derivation for a little bit, then move on to dodgeball (duh).
Ranged combat
(Age of Empires III, Ensemble Studios, 2005)
Two armies of foes face one another. One is armed with rifles; the other with crossbows. Which army prevails?
Let's call the size of the respective armies \(x\) and \(y\), and call their soldiers' lethality \(\alpha\) and \(\beta\) respectively. (The lethality of a soldier is the number of enemy soldiers they can strike down per unit time.)
I stumbled across this beautiful ohrwurm the other day:
(Context: I've never played the game, though I've watched people play it.)
Listen to that. Just sit back and listen to that majestic thing for a few minutes.
The light-hearted meandering across the piano. The upbeat mood in a minor mode. The bouncing tuba, supported on the offbeats. (Bouncing 4-beat tuba is instant shorthand for adorably unsubtle. It's the sort of musical trope you'd use to depict a litter of baby hippos trying to bake a cake, filling the room with billowing clouds of flour.)
The annual SIGGRAPH conference is one of the most notable technical gatherings for industries like motion pictures and video gaming.
And this preview video for this year's July conference was too cool not to share:
Here's a couple of things that look exciting:
A Material Point Method for Snow Simulation — Because when was the last time you saw snow that realistic in a video game? (No, cutscenes don't count.)
Make it Stand: Balancing Shapes for 3D Fabrication — If you own a 3D printer or have ever used Shapeways et al., I think this speaks for itself. Look at the tiny surface areas those things are resting on! Look at them! o_O
Scalable Real-time Volumetric Surface Reconstruction — Okay so mostly I'm impressed by the technical challenge the researchers must have overcome here. If I understand the abstract correctly, that's realistic 3D modelling from a single 2D video feed.
