Ecce Sigum

Author: John Winkelman

  • Frames of Reference

    I was rearranging my bookshelves today and came across one of my old college texts, a small novel called Flatland. The story takes place in a two-dimensional world, told from the point of view of A Square. At one point A Square is visited by an extra-dimensional visitor: a sphere. The sphere takes A Square on a tour of the dimensions, from 0 up through 3, and maybe even 4. I forget; I last read the book almost ten years ago.

    One concept which I still find fascinating is one of the incidentals to extra-planar travel (as described in Flatland) — namely, that from the point of view of dimension n+1 , an observer can see into the middle of a solid which resides in dimension n . Consider: from the point of view of the 3-dimension world in which we exist while traveling through 4d space, we can see into the middle of a 1d (line) or a 2d (plane) object. A square, seen from within it’s own dimension, is a line. A line, seen from within its own dimension, is a point. And a point(0d) is the only thing which exists within its own frame of reference.

    So an observer in 4d space would be able to see into the middle of a 3d object. This intuitively makes sense. Assuming time to be the fourth dimension, pick a point at a particular location in space and time, and watch: When a 3d solid intersects that point, the part of that solid which occupies that point will be visible.

    And, as these thing go, I have been reading more on memetics, and the points of view of the inhabitants of Flatland, when encountering an occupant of Sphereland , correspond with a concept I studied briefly in college — memetic engulfment .

    Memetic engulfment is that which happens when you get so caught up in your your self-reinforcing world-view that you forget that what you see and experience is not the entire world. I studied this in the context of The University, and the idea that the what was taught — the experiences and information imparted to students — was becoming more and more removed from what was actually necessary for existing in “the real world”. The University Meme slowly crowds out the rest of the world.

    But all of that was a long time ago, and now I wonder if, given the appropriate metaphors and practices, a person could perceive, with 3d sensory apparatus, the 4d world from the point of view of a 5d frame of reference. In other words, perceive the flow of time, from outside the flow of time…

    And if you managed it, how would you get back?

  • Small Machines

    Busy as hell. I made something which might eventually be a piston .

  • Sleep…

    The past week has been the week from hell, and the week ain’t over yet. On a positive note, I am not dead yet. On another positive note, I made another mouse trailer .

  • Epitaph

    Alas, the world has lost another saint. Chuck Jones, animator extraordinaire, responsible for Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, and the rest of that gang, passed away on Friday at the age of 89. Chuck made me laugh when there was little to laugh at, from the age of four up until… Hell, he still makes me laugh.

    Last May we lost Douglas Adams. We are losing our jesters, the ones who point out the nakedness of our emperors. We have beadles, sycophants, and village idiots beyond number, but the jester is an endangered species. I take solace in knowing that our current village idiot, the one who is happily groin-kicking the rest of the world, is pissing off enough intelligent people that a new crop of jesters will undoubtedly arise, just in time to make us laugh through the next world war.

    On Thursday/Friday I pulled my first 24-hour work shift. Thursday 7:00 am to 5:30 pm, then back at 9:00 pm to 12:00 noon on Friday. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but I don’t want to do that again, any time soon.

  • A Small World Experience

    Today I took advantage of a gift certificate and went to the local bookstore for my weekly fix. I picked up a couple of collections of Roger Zelazny’s short stories, and a copy of Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin .

    This particular edition was translated by Douglas Hofstadter. As I was checking out, the clerk froze for a moment, then spun Eugene Onegin around and said “Why this edition of this book?” I mentioned my recent Hofstadter spree, and the clerk — who spoke with a very slight accent which might have been French — said he had helped with the translation, and had worked with Hofstadter on one of his other books, Le Ton Beau De Marot : In Praise of the Music of Language.

    So now I am only one degree of separation from Hofstadter. Well, one degree and about ten thousand IQ points…

    If you look to the right you will see a link to a page where I have collected all of the book references which I post on this site. I expect to have reviews up soon.

  • Love and Death

    I heard an interesting statistic today: historically, more people die on February 14 than on any other day. Apparently this is a trend which has been going on for some time across the entire world. Maybe, if I feel motivated, I will look up some statistics.

    It took a few days, but I have added destructive capabilities to my tank. You can find it here . Once again, arrow keys move the thing, mouse controls aiming and firing. It weighs in at a whopping 4k.

    I have not forgotten about my artificial evolution experiments; they have, of necessity, been set aside in favor of learning more about Flash. Work has been taking up a lot of my time, too.

    A word about the current sidebar: Is it a construct known as a Magic Square. It reads the same in all four directions. It is an interesting pattern puzzle to come up with other phrases which work as a magic square, while making sense, linguistically and grammatically. Numerical magic squares contain number grids which, when added together in rows or columns, always result in the same number. If I feel motivated I may post a couple in a few days.

    I’m just not feeling very motivated right now.

    Happy freakin’ Valentines Day.

  • Engine

    Just to prove that Flash is great for making 80’s style arcade games, here is a little thing I whipped up in about an hour this evening. Use the arrow keys to move, and the mouse to aim. If the arrow keys don’t do anything, click on the window to bring it into focus. I will add destructive ability when I figure out how to attach a #%*)%*#%# click event to the root level of a Flash movie.

  • Programming is Kewl

    I have another link to add to the Big Brains section of the links page: Math World. This is an amazing mathematical resource, with close to a thousand interactive Java applet examples created using the Mathematica engine, created by Stephen Wolfram , whose brain is staggeringly huge.

    And on a lighter note, I recently came across the Tao of Programming . It is meant to be a satire site, I suppose, but reading through it, a lot of this (surprisingly apt) re-interpretation of the Tao Te Ching rang true for me. Your day will be better for the experience.

  • Tools of the Trade

    Flash is sucking my time away faster than prime time television. No time to read, no time for fun stuff. Not that Flash isn’t fun.

    I have a few development links for you, my three readers. First is this page , which has some extremely good tips for optimizing Javascript performance. It also includes benchmarks which show that the techniques actually do work.

    Next is a Java development environment called NetBeans which is aimed at web developers. You will need the Java SDK in order to install NetBeans.

    In other news, I have been listening to a great German band called Corvus Corax. Medieval music with bagpipes, with a distinct dark-ages feel, coupled with an overtone of punk. Good angry programming music. The problem is, the CDs appear to be nigh impossible to get here in the US. This is not really a problem as long as Audio Galaxy is around, but they are good enough that I want to have their music on CD. Original CD. Not burned copies.

  • Generative Poetry

    Had a long, interesting conversation with Scott today, regarding the problems inherent in duplicating the creative process. He is building an application which, he hopes, will be able to write poetry based on an understanding of the concepts behind language. I cannot imagine a more difficult task than to teach a computer to ‘think’ in metaphors. There is so much we don’t understand about our own thought processes when it comes to recognition and cognition, that modeling such behavior can easily devolve into educated guesswork. Questions come up; hard questions, like: What does it mean to ‘perceive’? To ‘conceive’? To ‘recognize’?

    Isaac Asimov once stated that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. Borrowing this idea, could it be said that any sufficiently complex pattern of behavior would be indistinguishable from intelligence? Computers do not ACT. They await input, in whatever form it may be, and then do what they are told to do with that input. They do not autonomously decide what to do with unfamiliar data. They can search for patterns which match patterns of familiar data, but they will not search for patterns which we have not told them to search for. It goes back to my comment regarding Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies : a computer will not try to creatively figure out a problem. It does not care that {1,4,9,16,25} is a series of perfect squares. It will spend eternity trying to untie the knot where Alexander would simply cut it with his sword.

    The questions about intelligence which arise from this train of thought tend toward the unsettling. Is there such a thing as action, or is there only re-action? Is human behavior a reaction to a profoundly complex set of behaviors, or, in being self-aware, do we transcend re-action to the point that we behave autonomously?

    Throwing in the question of free will vs. predestination complicates the process of teaching a computer to recognize poetry. But without teaching a computer to think symbolically, the best machine-written poem will, in reality, be the result of complex pattern-matching.

    My project is, for the near future, much less complex than Scott’s. I am building a machine to model evolution and genetic drift. Ultimately I plan to explore the question of emergent behavior and hive-mind patterns. I say ‘less complex’ because the a-life I work with does not need to think; it only needs to re-act.