Enthusiasms

ToonHole.

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 13:02:30 +0100

My favorite deep, elegant and beautiful explanation.

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:41:05 +0100

Few things truly blow my mind. It’s not that I’m so intelligent and perceptive that any surprising fact seems unsurprising to me: it’s more that I like to reserve hyperbole for special occasions, and not every mildly surprising fact is a special occasion. One thing that truly blows my mind, though, is math. Not math in general, but the orgasmic parade of mindblowing facts and theories that exist within it. I’m meta-mindblown by the sheer amount of mind-blowing that goes on in mathematics. It’s such a shame that this isn’t in mathematics education: instead, math is taught variously as a practical, but boring toolkit, or as a series of highly theoretical, but uninteresting abstractions. The real joy of math is nowhere to be found in mandatory schooling anywhere in the world, as far as I know.

I feel confident that this is not simply frustration of a burnout—I don’t have any mathematical education beyond high school and scattered outside reading—because many professional mathematicians have lamented the same thing. However, clearly the solution to this problem isn’t obvious. In the 1960s, there was an attempt to bring this abstract but interesting stuff into elementary math education. It was called New Math, and it was an abject failure.

A while ago I linked to Edge’s question for 2012: what is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation? I didn’t really consider the question myself, content to revel in the explanations of others smarter than me. But then today, I stumbled on a link, and suddenly it hit me. My favorite explanation that is both deep, elegant and beautiful is Georg Cantor’s infinite set theory in general, and his diagonal argument in particular.

* * *

Representing a wide range of real numbers in finite space is tricky business. Computers use floating point numbers, which behave like real numbers in most ways, but sometimes lead to surprising results. Around zero, not all numbers are representable, and some are only representable in a special form that sacrifices precision and processing speed: the denormalized floating-point numbers.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that not all real numbers in a given range can be represented in finite space. That’s because between any two reals, or indeed any two rational numbers, there’s infinitely many more. When we start talking about infinite sets, we’ve abstracted so far away from the puny origins of numbers used for counting that our intuitions break apart.

I keep returning to this self-contained little crash course in infinite set theory. It’s really quite readable and assumes no prior knowledge of set theory, but the learning curve is steep. It’s also a guaranteed mind-blower. For a little ape brain used to counting things one by one, the idea of a set of numbers that can’t be counted is pretty hard to grasp in itself. But it gets better, or perhaps worse: there are no more rational numbers than there are natural numbers, even though the natural numbers are clearly a subset of the rationals.

Georg Cantor is the founder of set theory. Cantor’s big insight was that when comparing the sizes of groups, counting isn’t the essential thing. When we want to know if we have more apples than oranges, or if Scrooge McDuck has more money than the bum on the street corner, we count them separately and arrive at neat numbers that we can compare in the usual way. But this clearly doesn’t work on infinite sets. However, there is another way to go about this. We could put the apples in one bag and the oranges in another, and then keep making pairs, one from each bag, and then see which bag empties first. This notion of one-to-one correspondence does generalize to uncountable sets, and it forms the basis of Cantor’s extension of the concept of size to infinite sets: cardinality. Two sets have the same cardinality (which reduces to “size” in finite sets) when they can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with each other.

There is some recent evidence that correspondence, or matching things up with each other to estimate magnitude, is a more basic cognitive strategy for humans than is counting. The widely studied Pirahã tribe of the Amazon appear not to have any words to express exact quantities, not even “one.” However, as experiment has shown, they perform well on one-to-one matching tasks. This also refutes, or at least strongly suggests the falsehood of previous claims that the Pirahã’s lack of words for number has left them completely without the concept of exact quantity. Of course, Cantor died long before the Pirahã came to scientific attention.

Cantor demonstrates a clever way to put the rationals in a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers, thus showing that in an important sense—perhaps the only sense that makes sense—they are of equal magnitude. From this result, we may be tempted to think that all infinite sets are the same cardinality. But this is a mistake. The crash course states it succinctly: “infinity is not synonymous with ‘totality’, a clarification which alone dispells many of the ancient conundrums and paradoxes surrounding the infinite.” Cantor has an ingenious method called the diagonal argument that shows that you cannot put the real numbers in a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers, and thus that the reals have a larger cardinality.

It’s a proof by negative. Assume we have some pairing of each real number to each natural number. Express the real numbers as infinite decimal expansions. Put them in a table, so that the naturals (1, 2, 3, …) run in the left column, and the corresponding real numbers in the right column. Then start with the first digit of the first real, and change that. Walk diagonally down to the second digit of the second real, and change that. Continue diagonally down through all the real numbers. Here is an illustration from Wikipedia:

The resulting infinite string of digits is demonstrably not in the list, since it differs from the first real in the first digit, from the second real in the second, and so on. Thus the real cannot be in the list, and the one-to-one correspondence can’t be complete. Therefore, the infinity of real numbers is larger than the infinity of natural numbers. Quod erat demonstrandum.

* * *

The most mindblowing sciences are those that are in some sense foundational. There is physics, which explains the most fundamental nature of reality. There is math (and some technical philosophy), which explains the most fundamental nature of rational thought. There’s the cross-section of neurology and psychology, which explains the most fundamental nature of subjective experience. And finally, there’s linguistics, which explains the most fundamental nature of human communication. (Which is to say, they all attempt to explain these things.) Everything else in some way builds on these, and while there’s plenty of interesting stuff in other sciences, there’s nothing quite like turning the basic elements of reality and of experiencing reality as a human being upside-down, or blowing to pieces our most cherished intuitions about the world. Or, for that matter, trying on for size entirely novel categories of thought.

I have a natural attraction to explanations and stories. All my interests beyond those that are purely emotional and physical (martial arts, sex) in some way reduce to stories and explanations. They are what I want to do with my life, in some sense or fashion. Fundamental explanations are especially attractive, since they tend to be the deepest, most elegant and beautiful. It makes me wonder, why didn’t I go into science? It’s still not too late: why don’t I? But then I remember my attraction to smaller stories that aren’t particularly deep or elegant, but are frequently beautiful: the human stories that are best told in literature and in photographs and films. And it saddens me that it seems impossible for me to seriously pursue both kinds.

Sentences about Photography

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:29:30 +0100

Photography is easy. Good photography is hard.

Photographs can be true.

Photographs are made, not taken as if by force.

Photography is about consistency. Consistency is talent, and talent is hard work.

Photographs say things that cannot be said in words.

Photographs and words are not enemies.

Photography is light. Photons, not electrons, are the elementary parts of photographs.

Photographs are enough.

Outside my house, bridging the entire sky like a vaulted...

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:10:02 +0100

Outside my house, bridging the entire sky like a vaulted ceiling. When I was little, someone told me you could wave at the aurora, and it would wave back. But one must never wave anything white, because then it might come and take you. A curious thing, this hatred of white: perhaps the reasoning goes, the emerald lord of the skies does not like to be reminded that when he’s not around, others rule the heavens.

Visual research for a railroad/mining project I want to do....

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 01:37:55 +0100

Visual research for a railroad/mining project I want to do. Hanging Rock, foot of Echo Canyon, 1869, by Andrew J. Russell, from The Great West illustrated in a series of photographic views across the Continent: Union Pacific Railroad, photographical illustrations.

Look At All These Links. Week 6.

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 03:33:10 +0100

This is the latest edition of an irregularly scheduled roundup.

The weirdness that is North Korea: Orion Choco-Pie is a popular South Korean snack food. Kaesong is an industrial park just on the North Korean side of the border where North Koreans work for South Korean companies. What happens when you put these two together? A black market. When it’s one of the few foreign commodities around, and workers can double their monthly salary by selling just six of their allotted daily “morale-boosting” snacks, sweet capitalism goes like, well, hot cakes on the black market. But Kim Jong-il appears to have mandated a crackdown before he keeled over. For more weirdness, see also: Tracking Pyongyang.

East Asian age reckoning, used primarily in Korea, counts newborns as one and adds another year not with the passing of a birthday, but with the passing of a lunar year. Thus a baby born on a strategic (or maybe not) date may be two years one day after birth.

You may be familiar with the old Norse system of age reckoning, often used to cheaply evoke viking times: age as counted in the number of winters one has survived. Should you have any interest in such matters, I wrote a thing about martial arts in the viking era a while ago. Features holmgang, Icelandic folk wrestling, berserk-going and flyting.

Have a nice book, video presentations of photobooks.

If you’ve never heard of it, rest assured, you will hear about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon again. Soon. This despite its lack of a Wikipedia page.

Drowning doesn’t look like drowning. The instinctive drowning response looks remarkably calm to the untrained eye, quite unlike the dramatic thrashing about as seen on tv.

Why in-person socializing is a mandatory to-do item. Should be obvious, but the point is worth repeating. Includes a nice tidbit about a study showing that the most widely-cited scientific papers are almost always written by people who work right next to each other.

Breaking Bad as SNES RPG.

The average font. Creating an average font that isn’t just a blurry mess is actually an interesting theoretical problem. I wish the technical discussion was more thorough.

Iran worried US might be building 8500th nuclear weapon. “Iranian intelligence experts also warned of the very real, and very frightening, possibility of the U.S. providing weapons and resources to a rogue third-party state such as Israel.”

Hex Fiend, a free hex editor for Mac.

What’s the base rate of Kant? How often do we encounter a figure with the influence of a Kant, and why have there been none in a century? The question could be asked of many fields, and the question becomes whether or not it is a subjective or an objective phenomenon: are there objective factors, such as the increasing specialization of fields and subfields, that make such wide-ranging influence impossible, or are we just too far removed from the past and too close to the present to see them both clearly? Is there, perhaps, a Kant or a Darwin working right now, whose influence will not be evident until a hundred years hence?

By Ragnar Axelsson. There’s a decent BBC documentary about...

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 04:03:00 +0100

By Ragnar Axelsson. There’s a decent BBC documentary about him and his work documenting disappearing lifestyles in Greenland and Iceland.

Where There's No I

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:48:17 +0100

We live in the age of narcissism. I don’t believe for one second that this generation is substantially worse than the one before, or the five hundred before that. The young were immoral and lazy and unwise when Socrates walked the streets of Athens, and they are no different now. As were the old. But this generation has developed the technology to perfectly express the same narcissism our parents and our ancient forebears carried.

Nevertheless, in this age of narcissism, there exists an opposite impulse. Matt Webb quotes Borges: “All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.” In another story, Borges writes: “I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.” There is a saying, everyone’s favorite word is their own name, and there’s some truth to that. But isn’t there something exhilarating about Borges’s statement, too?

There is no actor, there is only the act. All men are every man, and every man is all men. It is the ultimate denial of narcissism: there is no ego. Much has been said about the so-called online disinhibition effect. When online and anonymous, we act differently, and frequently malevolently. But couldn’t this be a healthy antidote to the narcissism of social networks? Many people claim that anonymity is simply an easy way for people to act like assholes with no consequences. But I think part of it, at least for some people, is also a healthy impulse that is opposed to the egoistic drive.

I don’t know if there are any other animals that have such contradictory instincts: are there any creatures as fiercely individualistic, and at the same as fiercely social as humans? And while we celebrate our own egos, while we prop up celebrity mega-egos and build technologies designed for the generation of ego-worship, shouldn’t we also be celebrating this contrary impulse? Both individualism and collectivism can be ugly, but both can also be beautiful. It would be a beautiful thing if we could have arenas for the expression of both. When I get tired of fapping to the magnificence of my own ego, can’t I have somewhere to go where I can get lost in the masses, where I am everyone and everyone me?

This is one of the reasons I’m such a big proponent of anonymity, which seems to be evolving into public enemy number one. Governments want to kill anonymity so they can keep tabs on us. Companies want to kill anonymity so they can make money off us. Individuals want to kill anonymity so they can worship and be worshipped. I want to preserve anonymity so there can be a place where there is no I.

“You know what capitalism is? Getting fucked!”...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:42:36 +0100

“You know what capitalism is? Getting fucked!” — Scarface (1983).

Cyberdérive

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:32:00 +0100

No one surfs the web anymore. Increasingly, we get everything we want from an endless stream provided by a small selection of websites: Reddit, Google, Tumblr, Facebook, Wikipedia and Amazon would be my list. Those six sites probably constitute a frightening percentage of my web browsing, and most of the content that originates on other sites can be consumed through them—or will be consumable through them in the future.

Evgeny Morozov points this out in The death of the cyberflâneur. He might have a book out about “The Dark Side of Internet Freedom”, but he’s right. Morozov compares the early web with 19th century Paris, where flâneurs would stroll the streets aimlessly for the simple pleasure of seeing where one ended up and taking in the sights and sounds that presented themselves. This was how we experienced the early web, but, just like modernism made Paris less friendly to the flâneur, so Facebook and Google and the “app paradigm” and frictionless sharing make the internet less conducive to “cyberflânerie”:

This is the very stance that is killing cyberflânerie: the whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know what he cares about. As the German writer Franz Hessel, an occasional collaborator with Walter Benjamin, put it, “in order to engage in flânerie, one must not have anything too definite in mind.” Compared with Facebook’s highly deterministic universe, even Microsoft’s unimaginative slogan from the 1990s — “Where do you want to go today?” — sounds excitingly subversive. Who asks that silly question in the age of Facebook?

But the author fails to point out that the tradition of aimless strolling for its own sake didn’t die out in Paris. It was briefly resurrected in the 1950s as the dérive: “… an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, where an individual travels where the subtle aesthetic contours of the surrounding architecture and geography subconsciously direct them with the ultimate goal of encountering an entirely new and authentic experience.” The dérive was invented precisely because human experience—in this case, the experience of living in a real-world city—was becoming increasingly limited to a small set of locales. Here’s Guy Debord:

In his study Paris et l’agglomération parisienne (Bibliothèque de Sociologie Contemporaine, P.U.F., 1952) Chombart de Lauwe notes that “an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it.” In the same work, in order to illustrate “the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives … within a geographical area whose radius is extremely small,” he diagrams all the movements made in the space of one year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement. Her itinerary forms a small triangle with no significant deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of Political Sciences, her residence and that of her piano teacher.

The real web in which each individual “lives” is becoming increasingly narrow. Perhaps what we need is a ressurection of the dérive: occasionally setting aside time to drift aimlessly along the psychogeographical contours of the landscape in order to more fully experience everything it has to offer.

Alternatively, we could all get off our asses and leave the internet. But that’s not going to happen, so how about the next best thing?

Literature as Freedom

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:04:00 +0100

Norwegian author Stig Sæterbakken recently took his own life. Apart from a couple essays, I’ve never read anything he’s written. Judging by the literati’s response to his death, that was probably an oversight on my part. It feels vaguely shameful to discover an author because of their death: the fact that it takes losing someone to appreciate them says that given different circumstances, you would never have taken note at all.

Anyway, here’s an excerpt from an essay Sæterbakken wrote called Everything Could Have Been Different. The thrust of the essay is that literature is an existential matter: it shows us ways the world could have been different. And with this realization comes freedom, but the kind of scary freedom that also opens up the possibility of failure. My translation:

I still ask myself, sometimes, why looking at photographs of my parents in their youth always brought with it disgust. Was this disgust brought on solely by the reminder and confirmation of a life before my own? Or was it more specifically connected with the carefree manner and the joy these pictures always bore witness to, and which in no way corresponded with the people I knew as “mother” and “father”, as if it was a strange couple standing there, a strange woman and a strange man, who only years later would undergo the complete transformation of personality that must necessarily have taken place to bring them to where they were now, here, with me, like a safe fort surrounding me, not happy and joking around, but serious, strict and compassionate, sighing vaguely under the load of time and responsibility? (…)

Maybe it’s the inarguable conclusion you need to draw at some point growing up as an oversensitive child, that most of the fun and parties that enrich an adult human life more or less happened BEFORE THEY HAD YOU, or in other and harder words: that everything they are given to see as the content and meaning of life after your arrival on Earth is just a lousy afterparty. (…)

These pictures broke something. A rift was created in my until then prostrate devotion to authority: the thought that the way things appear to me, that’s not necessarily the way they are after all. In other words: the appearance of things and people doesn’t necessarily cover their complete and full identity. And the same thought, taken a little further: things don’t necessarily need to be the way they are. And further: the way things are is random!

A connection to the enduring order was broken. And I was terrified. Why? Because—I didn’t get it then, but I get it now—I had been liberated. I had been liberated from what was enduring, what I thought was determined by nature, unchangeable, unwavering. I was liberated by being shown the possibility of a different world, a different life, a different way to be present as an adult human, a radically different edition of Helge Sæterbakken and Ingjerd Sæterbakken, née Olsen, than the one mother and father had pretended was the only one, an aspect of my parents’ needs in life hidden by their parenting and child-rearing duties, a shady, cheerful and dangerous backyard somewhere inside the main building of deprivation. I’d thought, until then, that I lived in the best of all possible worlds. No, more than that. I thought I lived in the only possible world. (…)

I was terrified. Because freedom is always scary. Freedom that isn’t scary, that precludes the possibility of failure, expulsion and loneliness, is no freedom, it’s only a freedom that has never been threatened, that we have never been denied the enjoyment of, said in another way: a freedom we take for granted, said in a third way: no freedom. (…)

Reading is like drinking. Something unravels. An anchor slips. Thus we’re reunited with childhood’s shock and anguish at being liberated from the apparent order of things, and realize, once again, that what we submit to is frail, that it’s a political and social and psychological system among many possible political and social and psychological systems.

The disturbing message of literature is that everything could be different. That’s why it doesn’t matter where the author gets his material from. Growing up persecuted under Ceausescu’s terror regime in Romania or thirty uneventful years in two rooms and a kitchen in Oslo, both are equally rich as starting points for writing: the deciding factor is the author’s ability to transform that experience into language, that is to say: making language itself an experience, touching the outer edges of the humanly possible. (…)

The cupboard [where I found the old photos of my parents] introduced me to the most radical thought of all: everything could have been done differently. What is law could have been crime. What is true could have been lies. What is society could have been chaos. What is society probably is chaos, only hidden under a lid.

Writing, to me, is making use of the terrifying freedom the cupboard gave me. To thus attempt to carefully close in on the fragility of the enduring order of things.

Controversially, Sæterbakken invited holocaust denier David Irving to a literature festival whose theme was “Truth”. What is true could have been lies. What is law could have been crime.

What is a long life could have been a tragically short one. A tragically short life could have been long.

Close-ups of planet believed to harbor intelligent life.

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:34:59 +0100

Close-ups of planet believed to harbor intelligent life.

A Thousand Small Blows

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 03:59:00 +0100

The New York Times recently published an essay about overzealous use of the Asperger’s diagnosis, and the detrimental effects getting the wrong label stuck on you can have.

I was professionally diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome as a child. I do not believe I am anywhere on the autistic spectrum. Many people profess their relief at being given a diagnosis. For me, receiving a diagnosis felt like being punched in the fucking face. Repeatedly.

This is one of the longer posts I’ve written on this blog, and possibly the most personal. Take from it what you will, or ignore it if you so choose.

The Setup

The background for my diagnosis was bullying. In a perfect world, the bullies would be the ones referred for psychiatric evaluation. But I was the victim. It infuriates me to hear people talk about bullying as if it were some sort of childhood rite of passage that everyone experiences. Everyone gets teased, but teasing isn’t bullying. In my experience, every school has one or two kids who get singled out, maybe more if it’s a large school. These kids are the ones the resident bullies pick out, for whatever reason, and they are the ones who are subjected to almost continual physical and emotional torment. For years. I was the chosen one in my elementary and middle school.

I don’t know why I was chosen. I was quiet, introverted, and not naturally one to draw any attention to myself. I wasn’t obviously dysfunctional, and I had no physical defects that obviously presented themselves as targets for peer ridicule. Of course, once you do get chosen to play the role of victim, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. You get bullied because you’re the victim, you’re the victim because you get bullied. It didn’t help that I would get incredibly angry. I don’t believe I really have any anger issues. In adulthood, years after leaving an environment of emotional and physical abuse, of being made to feel like your only value is as a toy that can be tormented for the sadistic pleasure of others, I don’t anger easily, and would classify myself as a rather calm person. But faced with daily taunts, threats, getting beat up, spit on, ignored, excluded, having all sorts of slurs thrown after you—and through clever manipulation on the part of my tormentors usually getting in trouble for any altercations that resulted—I was violent, I was loud, and I was destructive.

I don’t think my response to bullying was in any way evidence of my abnormal psychology. Fight or flight is a basic human instinct. Cuss or cry. Explode or implode. When faced with a situation that inflicts extreme emotional pain, I could either curl into the fetal position and be sad, or I could get angry. I have cried a lot, but I have also fought a lot. I never backed out of a fight, which is idiotic, since I was a skinny kid and everyone was bigger than me. I usually got beat up, if I didn’t get off the first punch; many bullies are also cowards who can’t take the pain they like to dish out. The supposedly mature response to a bullying situation would be to let the adults sort it out, but when all the adults in your life prove to be completely unable to solve the problem, and frequently put the blame on you, what is a child to do? Vigilante justice can happen because someone’s an ass, or it can happen because the official channels for administering justice fail completely both at rectifying the situation and at dealing out appropriate punishment to the perpetrators.

I’m not advocating vigilantism. I’m not saying violence is the answer to anything. But I believe my response was well within the range of normal human psychology when faced with a dysfunctional and abusive environment. Extreme situations breed extreme action. Of course, my actions were only extreme for a middle schooler. All I ever did was get in a few fights with my peers, yell and scream and insult and possibly do minor damage to school property. I didn’t become a school shooter, I didn’t start bombing hospitals or office buildings, and obviously I don’t condone such actions. But I think I can understand the impulse, if I’m right in the assumption that they’re fueled by the same kind of righteous anger I experienced—and I suspect people never placed in such a situation can never fully understand it.

Emotional logic doesn’t operate on rational principles. I don’t pretend that being the victim of severe and prolonged bullying is anything like living in poverty under a repressive regime, or being raped, or persecuted for your skin color. But suffering is a subjective phenomenon, and I truly believe bullying can be as traumatizing to a child as more generally recognized forms of abuse, and scientists are starting to see evidence of that in bullied brains. And if it’s true that it can be as traumatizing, then surely it makes sense that bullied children would react as extremely—within the parameters of their existence—as some victims of other kinds of abuse do, according to the parameters of theirs. Which is to say that I refuse to see what would in analogous situations be seen as dysfunctional, but normal mechanisms for coping with extreme stress as evidence of cognitive abnormality.

The Diagnosis

Getting a professional diagnosis is a drawn-out, complicated affair. At least it was for me. I sat down with so many experts, I had so many interviews and tests with weird strangers. I might have been nine or ten when it started. My parents told me that all this was so that I would get help with my bullying problem, that is, the problem of other people bullying me. No one ever let on that I was being given a psychological evaluation. Finally, at the end of it, I was sat down with my mother, my father, and one of the experts I had talked to, and told that I “had something called Asperger’s syndrome”, a condition which led to social difficulties. What I heard was: there’s something wrong with you. They tried to assure me that there was nothing wrong with me, but they couldn’t mask the fact that that’s generally what a psychological diagnosis means.

It’s hard to articulate how crushing this verdict was. I’m struggling to find an appropriate metaphor. Maybe it’s like going to a support center for rape victims and getting told you shouldn’t have worn such sexy clothes. Maybe it’s like getting jumped by a gang and robbed, and while you’re lying there beaten and bloody, someone walks by and offers a hand—but as soon as you take it, they punch you in the face. I don’t know. Neither scenario has ever happened to me. Empathy is a useful fiction, but a fiction nonetheless: we can never know what it’s really like to be in another’s shoes. Unless we have experienced a similar situation, we can never understand what someone else is feeling, and even then our imaginary picture of their suffering or their joy is a poor simulacrum at best. I don’t know how to properly convey the emotion I felt then, and the anger I feel now recalling it, but suffice it to say I felt betrayed by the people I loved the most, and I was both incredibly sad and incredibly disappointed.

I’ve tried to forgive my parents. I come from a loving home, two great parents, and I know they had the best of intentions. They wanted to help me. I know this rationally. But the way this situation was handled, the way I was told I’d get help because people were mean to me, and then I ended up getting what felt like the blame—emotionally, it’s hard to accept. I bear no grudges, at least rationally, and I don’t think much about it, but every time I recall that moment, I get angry.

In truth, my parents wanted to help me, but couldn’t. My mom’s advice for dealing with bullying was to ignore it, and it would go away. I suppose the thought is that bullies get off on emotional reaction and by providing none, you take away the incentive. But, apart from the fact that it is both impossible to sustain a poker face when you’re a child and hurting, and the fact that this strategy never worked for me, this is incredibly condescending advice. Not deliberately, but condescending nonetheless. No adult would ever give this advice to a fellow adult. Stuck in an abusive relationship? Suck it up, and it will go away. Got robbed at knifepoint? Ignore it, move on, and it’ll be all right. Your boss at work beat you up because he didn’t like your tie? Maybe a laissez-faire approach will solve that for ya. No fucking way. When put like that, it sounds preposterous, which makes it even more incredible that it seems like common advice given to children, who are vulnerable in ways that adults are not.

The Disconnect

Apart from the problematic situation that resulted in my diagnosis, I never felt at home with it in the way that many who are diagnosed do. “Aspie culture” is not, and never felt like home to me. At first, I refused to hear or read anything about Asperger’s. Since then, I’ve more than made up for it, spending countless hours reading the scientific literature, the diagnostic criteria, fictional representations of the disorder, and online aspie forums. I’ve only become more convinced that it doesn’t fit. I tried unsuccessfully to get some clarification from the people who diagnosed me, the experts. Finally, I was told that the man responsible for my diagnosis had died. I guess I will never get anyone to explain the reasoning for the original diagnosis. The diagnosis was set by professionals after many interviews and tests, so I don’t think it was done hastily or sloppily, but there is still a margin of error.

I was introverted and awkward, but not debilitatingly so. I had unusual interests, but I’m not fucking Rain Man, and I always knew my interests could be seen as odd, and so never let them dominate my conversations. I do not exhibit the motor clumsiness often associated with Asperger’s, nor the inability to understand abstract language, nor the lack of theory of mind. Nor can I be seen doing the repetitive, self-stimulating behaviors or “stims”—rocking back and forth, say—often seen in autists. I did not fail to develop age-appropriate relationships with peers, since I did have real friends (friends who couldn’t or wouldn’t protect me from bullies, sadly). Ironically, my loner years of few friends and time spent mostly staring at computer screens rather than human faces happened in my teens, years after I was diagnosed.

The possibility that the child psychologists overlooked was that the dysfunction lay not with me, but with my environment. Perhaps I was justifiably angry because I was constantly tormented, and perhaps I was having trouble getting accepted by some of my peers because those peers had decided not to accept me. When I was a teenage loner—a fact that the psychologists couldn’t have known, since they diagnosed me when I was ten or eleven—it might not just be because I was odd, but also because I lived in a small town of five thousand people. In such a small community, there is no such thing as an alternative scene or a subculture. If you don’t fit in with the majority, you don’t fit in, period. And you won’t fit in with the majority if you don’t share their narrow band of preoccupations and interests. If I’d lived in a proper city, maybe I’d have fallen in with some subculture or other, and experienced some acceptance there. That acceptance, in turn, would allow me to gain the same social experience my peers who shared the majority interests got—which in turn make them more well-adjusted to this day.

Since I didn’t fit in with the majority, and there was no minority group to speak of, I turned to the internet. I had no trouble fitting in with on the internet, joining various sites centered around things that interested me. (The only places I didn’t fit in online were the aspie forums.) But the internet is a poor substitute for face-to-face, real human connections. I’ve made plenty of online buddies over the years, but I never had the means or opportunity to meet them in real life and form real-life friendships with them. (When I was fourteen, my greatest regret was not being able to go to a convention for Lord of the Rings fans, organized and attended by people I’d made good online friends with. My parents were justifiably concerned about sending a fourteen-year-old across the country alone to meet strangers, but on the other hand, if I’d gained some real friends there maybe many of my teenage sorrows would have been avoided.)

Maybe I succeeded online where I failed offline because I’m an aspie, and aspies do well in environments where they don’t need to read facial expressions and nonverbal cues. Or maybe I did well there not because I have abnormal neurology, but because I could bond with people over shared interests, and the reason I failed offline was there was no one anywhere near me who did share my interests.

The Salvation?

In the working draft of the DSM-V, the coming update to the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, Asperger’s has been rolled into the autism diagnosis, and many who are currently diagnosed with Asperger’s will not meet the new definition of autism spectrum disorder. I don’t know if it’s a good idea. Many diagnosees are concerned about losing legal rights to the help they need, and their concern is justified. But there needs to be a balance between false positives and false negatives. Both will always occur, but currently, the definition is biased to prevent false negatives. It has no provisions for preventing false positives, that is, diagnosing people who aren’t really autistic with autistic spectrum disorders. Perhaps people who are legitimately diagnosed have trouble seeing that, while false negatives are harmful, so are false positives.

Since I live in Europe, I wasn’t diagnosed using the DSM criteria. I was diagnosed with the World Health Organization’s manual, the current version of which is the ICD-10. I expect the next revision of the ICD to follow if the DSM rolls Asperger’s into autism. And personally, if my diagnosis ceases to exist, if the very condition I supposedly have will lose all official recognition, I will be relieved. Tremendously so.

The New York Times essay touches on this: when a professional diagnoses you with a pervasive, life-long and incurable condition that puts a ceiling on your expected success in the social arena, it’s a self-fulfilling prophesy. Even if you consciously reject the diagnosis, it’s really hard to get rid of that little voice in the back of your head saying: You will never have the social life you desire. You will never achieve in life the things you want to achieve, and as a result, you will never be truly happy. Is it any wonder I was at times depressed and thought about suicide?

Between the bullying and the professional labeling, I have a set of bad neurotic habits—a constant second-guessing of own actions, a fear that any time I pick up a nonverbal cue I must surely be mistaken, a hesitance to ever take charge in a social situation for fear of the potential fallout—that I still struggle with. It would be immature and unfair to blame any and all problems in my adult life on a problematic childhood caused by the bad actions of other people. I don’t. But neither can I ignore the impact those formative years had on my developing brain. I often think about where I’d be today if I’d never been bullied, but had an accepting peer group all childhood and all adolescence. I probably would have never been diagnosed, and I probably would be in a better place than I am now.

For purely selfish reasons, I’d like for Asperger’s to go away. So that I can go the places I want to go, unburdened by a troubled past.

GIF: A Technical History

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:26:48 +0100

From a technical standpoint, the success of the lowly GIF is a mystery. Both as an image format and as a video/animation format, it’s vastly inferior to the alternatives. It only supports 256 colors; its compression is inefficient; it doesn’t support sound; the last specification was published more than twenty years ago. Yet it’s still thriving. The reason, of course, is convenience: on the web, the GIF, and especially the animated GIF, is the only video format that runs everywhere, runs automatically, and loops. These characteristics serve to make the GIF a potent vector for memes. But the story of how we got here is really the story of the internet growing up, and for that reason, it’s worth spending a few words on. Maybe even a lot of words, more words than most file formats deserve.

I’m going to attempt the impossible: to tell an engaging story accessible to relative laymen using a hex editor (a program for manually editing binary files). The above is the binary content of a very simple test GIF I made in order to better understand the GIF specification. Here it is, if you want to play along at home: . I’ll walk you through each part of the file, and explain each part as it pertains to the history of the GIF.

GIF89a

The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) was invented by CompuServe in 1987. The eighties were really the wild west days of the internet. The web had yet to be invented, and the internet had yet to go mainstream. At the start of the decade, there was no such thing as a single internet. Instead, there were a bunch of different computer networks that gradually grew together to form one. CompuServe ran one of these networks.

CompuServe was founded in 1969. These were the days when computers were so large and expensive that regular companies couldn’t afford one, so they rented computing time from a timesharing company. Compuserve was one such company, and they built a dial-up network to support their business. In 1979, they became the first to provide an online service to regular consumers. This was not the internet: it was a self-contained network, unconnected to the various other computer networks at the time. Downloading files from this network—which would be connected to the general internet in the late 80s—was the purpose GIF was designed for. The first GIF standard was released in 1987, and the second in July, 1989. The GIF file format has remained unchanged since then. The web hadn’t been invented yet.

GIF files weren’t intended to store animations. Unlike other image formats, however, GIF files were designed to hold more than one image. This had more to do with eliminating redundant information that was shared across files than with sequences of moving images. Online connections weren’t fast in 1987. Here’s what the 1989 standard has to say:

A GIF Data Stream is a sequence of protocol blocks and sub-blocks representing a collection of graphics. In general, the graphics in a Data Stream are assumed to be related to some degree, and to share some control information; it is recommended that encoders attempt to group together related graphics in order to minimize hardware changes during processing and to minimize control information overhead.

The updated standard published in 1989 introduced two crucial features on the way to the animated GIF we all know and love. One was delays between one image and the next. There was no explicit mention of animation in the standard:

Delay Time - If not 0, this field specifies the number of hundredths (1/100) of a second to wait before continuing with the processing of the Data Stream.

The other new feature was Application Extension Blocks, which allow for information to be encoded into GIF files that tells a specific application to process the file in a specific way. (Other applications will ignore this info.) Note that the standard actually discourages developers from using Application Extension Blocks, and instead recommends that they embed the GIF format in their own file formats:

As an embedded protocol, GIF may be part of larger application protocols, within which GIF is used to render graphics. (…) This approach is recommended in favor of using Application Extensions, which become overhead for all other applications that do not process them.

04 00 04 00

This part defines the size of what the GIF standard calls the “Logical Screen”. This is the overall size of the image (here 4x4 pixels, each dimension stored as a 16-bit integer). Note, however, that each image in the file need not have the same dimensions as the “logical screen”. As long as the image fits within the logical screen, it can be smaller, and indeed, each image within a GIF file must specify an offset of the logical screen. (If you have a GIF where the content is surrounded on all sides by one solid color, you can use this feature to optimize the file.)

FF FF FF 00 00 00

After some flags, we come to another well-known feature of GIFs: the color table. As you probably know, GIFs can only store 256 different colors. This makes it ill-suited for true-color photographs. These 256 colors, however, can be chosen from a palette of millions. It’s just that out of those millions of colors, each image in the GIF can only use 256. The color table stores the color values for each of these 256 colors, and then the rest of the file simply specifies where in the table each pixel’s color is located. This GIF file has the simplest possible palette: only two colors, pure white (FF FF FF) and pure black (00 00 00). GIF was an improvement over CompuServe’s older file format, which only supported black and white.

!NETSCAPE2.0

This is where things start to get interesting. In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee opened the web to the public. Although there were others, the first great web browser was called Mosaic. Mosaic evolved into the second great browser, and the one that went head-to-head with Internet Explorer during the Browser Wars of the nineties: Netscape Navigator. (The Netscape codebase later evolved into Mozilla Firefox. Netscape lost the war with Internet Explorer, but IE lost the war to Firefox. The Mosaic line won in the end. But I digress.)

In the early days, there was no way to embed an image into an HTML page. While working on Mosaic, Marc Andreessen came up with the tag. You can read more about this here. When Andreessen announced the tag in February, 1993, his was far from the only proposed way to embed images into web pages. Many people disagreed with his proposal. Some proposed alternative tags. Others wanted a general solution to embedding other media into web pages. Why create a dedicated image tag, when this would surely lead to dedicated video tags, audio tags, and so on? Why not create a general solution that could embed all sorts of media, including images, video, audio, and novel future media?

This was another important moment that led to the ubiquity of animated GIFs. Andreessen and the other pioneers could have devised a way to embed general media into web pages in 1993. If they had, then we wouldn’t have had to wait so long for non-GIF video formats to work everywhere. But Andreessen’s proposal won out, and so the GIF, the video file format that masquerades as still image, became the only way to display moving images on the web everywhere you can display stills. Why did Andreessen win? Because he happened to be the developer of a popular web browser, and he shipped code that worked. Once worked in Mosaic, it soon spread and became ubiquitous. The img tag started showing up in HTML standards after the web browsers had standardized on it.

Then, finally, we get to Netscape 2.0. Peek inside a GIF file sometime: every animated GIF contains a reference to Netscape Navigator 2.0, a browser that has been obsolete for fifteen years. Netscape 2 introduced a slew of new features: embedded Java, JavaScript, frames. And animated GIFs. Netscape 2.0, you see, defined one of those Application Extension Blocks. What the Extension Block does is basically say that the browser should loop through each image within the GIF file. Although other people had come up with the idea of using the multi-image feature of GIF to make animations, interest in animated GIFs didn’t explode until Netscape made the feature available to website owners everywhere.

Remember this little fellow, one of the first animated GIFs to truly go viral?

21 F9 04 04 64 00 00 00 2C

Finally, we’re closing in on the actual image in my sample GIF. The sequence that starts with an exclamation point (0x21 in hex) is a control block that has metadata for the image data to come.

The highlighted section in the screenshot says that the browser should wait one-hundred 1/00ths of a second (i.e., one whole second) after rendering the first frame before rendering the next. After the comma comes the first image frame.

02 04 8C 8F 19 05 00

The tiny bits here are the actual pixel data. Everything else is metadata. Of course, I deliberately made this file very small in order for it to be instructive. In a real file, which would be much larger than 4x4 pixels, data will outweigh metadata. The pixel data, as mentioned, consists of a series of bytes, each of which represents one pixel by telling a decoder where in the color table to look for the right color value. Only, it’s not so simple. As you can see, there are only seven bytes to describe sixteen pixels, and each pixel is supposed to be described by one byte. This is because the lossless Lempel-Ziv-Welch compression algorithm is used to reduce file sizes.

When CompuServe developed GIF in 1987, LZW compression was a commonly used technique, and CompuServe found it natural to use it for GIF. Unbeknownst to CompuServe, however, a patent on the LZW technique had been already been granted to Unisys. For years, Unisys chose to ignore people using it in software, rather staking their claim against manufacturers implementing the algorithm in hardware. In late 1994, Unisys suddenly decided to start pursuing software implementations, and CompuServe in particular. Predictably, there was outrage. The whole debacle ended with a deal where people who wrote software that processed GIF files would have to pay royalties to UniSys, while end users were free to use GIF as they pleased. In order to develop a completely free and open alternative to GIF, a working group sat down and eventually came up with PNG.

The LZW patents expired in 2004, and since then, GIF has been completely free.

3B, or ;

The semicolon indicates the end of a GIF file, and the end of this discussion. I said that I find this story interesting and instructive, and I stand by that. I fully understand that some may consider this too long and too technical, but the technical aspects tie in to many of the most important events and trends in internet history.

Here’s an interesting graph. I don’t know of any way to reliably quantify the public interest in GIFs, but we can make an estimate using Google trend data. Although it feels like GIFs (especially the animated variety) are everywhere, people certainly are googling less for them than they were before. I suspect that while meme gifs are common on blogs and forums, the many other uses for the file format are slowly being phased out. The GIF is really only suitable for small pictures with a very limited color palette. Due to historical accident, it has seen more widely use than its technical qualities would indicate. Now, finally, twenty-plus years after the GIF was invented, we’re seeing widespread support and adoption of alternatives. PNGs, JPEGs and HTML5’s are making the old uses for the GIF obsolete. What we are left with is the GIF as a lowest common denominator. Not unlike the memes it’s being paired with.

If you’re technically inclined, and if the above mass of words wasn’t enough for you, you might want to read the GIF specification. Be prepared to muck around alt-tabbing between binary files and your browser window for a while before it starts making sense. The specification also details other, little-used (and little-supported) features of the file format, such as waiting for user input before proceeding with an animation, and rendering plain text stored in the file (not in the rasterized image data).

Scientists seem prone to a peculiar anger deﬁciency.

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:27:51 +0100

Scientists seem prone to a peculiar anger deﬁciency.:

Scott Aaronson on academic publishing:

I have an ingenious idea for a company. My company will be in the business of selling computer games. But, unlike other computer game companies, mine will never have to hire a single programmer, game designer, or graphic artist. Instead I’ll simply ﬁnd people who know how to make games, and ask them to donate their games to me. Naturally, anyone generous enough to donate a game will immediately relinquish all further rights to it. From then on, I alone will be the copyright-holder, distributor, and collector of royalties. This is not to say, however, that I’ll provide no “value-added.” My company will be the one that packages the games in 25-cent cardboard boxes, then resells the boxes for up to $300 apiece.

But why would developers donate their games to me? Because they’ll need my seal of approval. I’ll convince developers that, if a game isn’t distributed by my company, then the game doesn’t “count”—indeed, barely even exists—and all their labor on it has been in vain.

Admittedly, for the scheme to work, my seal of approval will have to mean something. So before putting it on a game, I’ll ﬁrst send the game out to a team of experts who will test it, debug it, and recommend changes. But will I pay the experts for that service? Not at all: as the ﬁnal cherry atop my chutzpah sundae, I’ll tell the experts that it’s their professional duty to evaluate, test, and debug my games for free!

On reﬂection, perhaps no game developer would be gullible enough to fall for my scheme. I need a community that has a higher tolerance for the ridiculous—a community that, even after my operation is unmasked, will study it and hold meetings, but not “rush to judgment” by dissociating itself from me. But who on Earth could possibly be so paralyzed by indecision, so averse to change, so immune to common sense?

I’ve got it: academics!

Inglourious Basterds (2009).

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 01:19:10 +0100

Inglourious Basterds (2009).

Boxers (1818), an early lithograph by Théodore Gericault and...

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 17:29:18 +0100

Boxers (1818), an early lithograph by Théodore Gericault and held at the Met, is generally acknowledged to be inspired by the 1810 fight between Tom Molineaux and Tom Cribb. Brian Phillips tells the story of how Molineaux, a black American who may have been a freed slave, came to England to challenge Cribb, the champion of the national pastime, boxing. It’s a sad, but great story:

It was the greatest fight of its era. But its significance went beyond that. Even at the time, it seemed to be about more than boxing, more than sport itself. More than anything, the contest between a white English champion and a black American upstart seemed to be about an urgent question of identity: whether character could be determined in the boxing ring, whether sport could confirm a set of virtues by which a nation defined itself.

The fight cemented a set of stock characters — the fast-talking, ultra-talented, self-destructive black athlete; the Great White Hope; the canny coach who’s half devoted to his pupil and half exploiting him — that have echoed down the centuries. In fact, so much about the fight feels familiar today, from the role of race to the role of the media, that if you had to name a date, you could make a good case that December 10, 1810, was the moment sport as we know it began.

Someone left half a coconut in the snow.

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 23:55:15 +0100

Someone left half a coconut in the snow.

1024 kb gifs, guys. (I’m late.)

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 21:14:37 +0100

1024 kb gifs, guys. (I’m late.)

August, I think.

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 05:27:10 +0100

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

August, I think.