Last week, the world quietly saw the 150th anniversary of the birth of French filmmaker and illusionist pioneer George Méliès. A short list of the techniques he either personally pioneered or for which he was an early adopter:

Stop trick / substitution
Multiple exposures
Time lapse photography
Dissolves
Hand coloring
Forced perspective

Sadly, because of the hand-coloring technique used and the 16 fps film rate, too few of us get to know the way the works really looked. Poor copies of copies are run at the wrong speed (25 fps), producing a jerky, comical fast-forward effect the filmmaker never intended, and without the lush, painterly color palette they deserve. (That means the YouTube videos here should be viewed as reference, not a real indication of the work.)

But make no mistake: by introducing many of these techniques, Méliès is to many modern filmmakers a profound figure, and what was once seemingly dated or quaint is now increasingly inspirational in an age again comfortable with exploring fantasy and imaging technique.

He could, without any real hyperbola, be called the father of sci-fi/fantasy cinema, or more broadly, cinematic special effects. A master of in-camera effects, his imaginative, baroque style has a mirror in the modern experimentation with tech like Kinect and 3D, with hackers and visualists and VJs who again embrace the evocative illusion and sensational sensory effect.

Via @scifilondon on Twitter. Happy (belated) birthday.

Eric Weiner reflects on the state of religion as the Christmas holiday approaches. In a New York Times article, he observes that there is are a number of people who prefer not to affiliate with any formal religious system but who find that abandoning God altogether isn’t attractive. He calls this group “the Nones.” These are people who fall somewhere between “True Believers” on one side and “Angry Atheists” on the other and who seek to know more about faith.

And this group is growing, says Weiner. “We are the Nones, the roughly 12 percent of people who say they have no religious affiliation at all….Apparently, a growing number of Americans are running from organized religion, but by no means running from God. On average 93 percent of those surveyed say they believe in God or a higher power; this holds true for most Nones — just 7 percent of whom describe themselves as atheists, according to a survey by Trinity College.”

This is a trend I’ve written a bit about and I think the numbers will continue to shift. While I don’t agree that we need yet another religious guru that will help us out of the morass, I do appreciate Weiner’s call for conversation. There seems to be a strong desire to have meaningful discussions about faith and “break the spell” as Daniel Dennett puts it. I think that’s a great idea.

I have Harry Frankfurt’s entertaining tome On Bullshit on my coffee table in my study. I crack it open anytime I get frustrated by the worst of the public discourse we’re subject to each day. As we enter the heat of the political season in the United States this next year, I’m sure I’ll wear the book out. It rarely occurs to me that the philosophy that is the subject of the book may be thought by many to be itself bullshit. But that’s certainly true.
I’ve written on this topic and I know philosophers wrestle with this constantly with students, humanities departments, and the general public. In a conversation I had with Peter Boghossian recently, he opined that philosophy tends to be disconnected from reality and so much of it is, well, bullshit. I haven’t found anything of the sort to be true and have found philosophy to be an intellectual redeemer of sorts. Plato’s allegory of the cave, if it rings true for anyone, certainly was a cacophony of bells for me. But the “reality” of the situation is that philosophy does run afoul for many people that dabble in it (which is why philosophers spend time telling everyone how important philosophy is).
In a short article for the Wessex Scene, Jack Maden attempts to unpack the reasons why. He appears to see the value of philosophy but says that it’s probably only possible to garner this awareness if you spend time philosophizing. He observes that culturally, the west has gotten too busy to really do philosophy well. Sure, the subject is inaccessible. But so are lots of subjects until you spend some time with them.
Perhaps the problem lies in the accessibility of the subject. Indeed, if one were to read of Berkeley’s conclusions – that minds and their ideas are the only things in existence – without having first read his preceding arguments, one may perhaps be a little more justified in throwing the term ‘bullshit’ around….To find intrigue in philosophy, as the great thinkers above found it, one must only look inward. Indeed, the only introductory handbook necessary to us is available in all places and at all times: the mind.
I think his guidance in his article is good. When we start wondering about the world and ask questions about our most basic assumptions, philosophy lights up. It becomes relevant because we find that we can’t begin to tackle those questions until we philosophize.

By Danny Fisher

“84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha,” the Tibetan canonical translation project headed up by Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, has announced the 84000 Reading Room — a project of the organization, in collaboration with the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC). [More, with preview video and info on how to donate to the project, after the jump.]
As 84000 explains on its website, “Based on state of the art interactive web technologies, the Reading Room will present translations of the Words of the Buddha in a clear, beautiful, and
easy to read format. Users who want to read offline can download the translation in PDF format, or share the translation with friends, colleagues or others. Whatever the format, the translation will maintain the beauty it has in the Reading Room, thereby preserving the intent and meaning of the translation.” The Reading Room will also feature Tibetan, Sanskrit, and English glossaries and a subject classification system for the convenience of readers.

You can find out more at http://84000.co/translations/reading-room/. In addition, you can read my interview with Sarah Wilkinson, one of the 84000 Project’s American Ambassadors, at Shambhala Sun Space.

Watch a video preview of how the Reading Room works here.

Click here to donate to the project.

And the meaning of the recently-broken metric TSP approximation ratio

Andrew Stothers wrote in 2007 a first-year qualifying report for the University of Edinburgh PhD programme. In only eleven pages he presented the parts of the famous paper by Don Coppersmith and Shmuel Winograd (CW) that do enough to obtain for the exponent of matrix multiplication. In a few more pages he surveyed recent work on sufficient conditions for . Page 15, the last except for references, laid out “Possible Directions for Future Work” in five sentences, the fifth being:

Finally, it will also be possible to investigate bilinear algorithms further and use more complex means to determine whether or not “better” algorithms exist for matrix multiplication.

Today we wish to explain what means, why lower is always “better,” why we feel our field is better for the great efforts expended by Stothers and Virginia Vassilevska Williams, and why it is better when intellectual values guide our judgment. We also wish to defend ourselves and others for calling the results “breakthroughs,” comparing and contrasting to recent advances on algorithms for the Traveling Salesman Problem.

I (Ken) wrote a similar first-year qualifier in summer 1982 after my first year at Oxford—they are a staple of leading British universities. Like Andrew’s it was not obligated to have original research, just to demonstrate understanding and capability. One item found its way into a conference paper, but my 1986 dissertation ranged into various other topics.

What distinguishes Andrew’s Nov. 2010 dissertation is its singular focus on accomplishing the objective of his proposal. And doing it. The resulting paper with his advisor Sandy Davie has recently been submitted. Meanwhile in North America, Virginia had been thinking about the same problem since 2005. It may not be true as asserted here that “hundreds of people tried to improve” it after 1987, but we’ll guess about as many people thought about it. It’s enough to note that many researchers felt it worthy of pursuit, including Andrew’s advisor, and that progress took large concerted effort. The nature of this effort—including the use of computers—may be an important harbinger for science by itself.

What Does ω Mean?

The definition of is the infimum of all such that matrix multiplication has an algorithm that runs in time . This is in a classical model of computation where addition and multiplication of scalars have unit cost. Note that there might not be an algorithm that runs in time itself— may properly be a limit even if it turns out to have the least possible value 2. Currently all we know is that from Virginia’s work.

As many have noted, does not have immediate practical relevance because there is evidently a tradeoff with the constant hiding under the in . The tradeoff is so far steep enough that apparently only Volker Strassen’s relatively simple algorithm achieving an exponent of has wide use. So why do we care about values of less than that?

One of the central questions in physics is, why do the fundamental constants of nature have the values they do? The desire for why, in the face of evidence that the values could be arbitrary, has aroused such passion that string theorist David Gross channeled Winston Churchill in exhorting young physicists to “never, never, never give up.”

Now in mathematics it may seem nonsensical to ask, why do numbers like and have the values they do? But with , we are in a sense closer to physics: understanding it is akin to discovering a natural law, at least a law of information. And quantum mechanics has if anything magnified William Hamilton’s vision approaching 200 years ago that Nature computes with matrices, yes large ones. It is possible that detracts from a better statement of important laws, but knowing better brings us closer to them all the same.

Barriers and Breakthroughs

Hence also the interest in whether takes a value with known meaning, such as or (both falsified) or , or as some have mused, or , or as some have argued more likely for exponents, a logarithm of some higher and simpler number. Strassen himself has often stated his belief that is strictly greater than . If it has a value not previously seen in mathematics, then we could hope to discover new mathematical regularities as well; if it has a known value, then this may yield some more explanation about algorithms.

The value seemed a natural possible barrier, but the time interval from to in 1981–82 was very short. By contrast the “CW” bound of was not a natural-seeming number, but it withstood attempts to scale it for 23 years, including a year’s work from each of Virginia and Andrew. Reasons of intellectual judgment, expanded below, we feel are enough to justify calling their final results a “breakthrough.” But we offer a recent concrete case for comparison first.

The Salesman Always Rings 1.5

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) seeks the shortest route to visit each of a given set of sites, coming back in a ring to the starting site. When the sites are in real space and “shortest” refers to Euclidean distance, finding the length of the absolute shortest route remains -hard even in the plane, as discussed here. However, Nicos Christofides in 1976 found a polynomial-time algorithm that finds a tour guaranteed to have total length at most . The method and proof apply to various other cases where the distances between sites obey inequalities that define some kind of metric, with the same bound.

This stood as a barrier for most of these cases, until this year. Shayan Oveis Gharan, Amit Saberi, and Mohit Singh (OSS) broke it for a wide subclass of these problems. Well they “broke” it by achieving a guaranteed ratio to the optimum of

Actually their original paper did not give a value—it merely proved the existence of an giving . The estimate for the magnitude of their breakthrough was supplied later.

Improvements and Predictions

It must be said that the OSS paper and its predecessor introduced techniques that were more novel to the problem than is evident for the new matrix-multiplication papers, and the predecessor won the SODA 2010 “Best Paper” award. However, a referee could have wondered, why bother moving heaven and earth in a restricted case to demonstrate an increment a thousand times smaller than “nano”? Indeed the version of OSS linked above still ends with “” on page 65.

What happened is that the change attracted interest on several continents, and the people in Europe who made a bankable improvement are not even in the euro zone. First Tobias Mömke and Ola Svensson of KTH in Stockholm obtained by using matchings in place of the more-complicated ingredients of OSS, also in time for FOCS 2011. Then Marcin Mucha of the University of Warsaw improved their analysis to obtain

It is noted by all that an even older paper by Michael Held and Richard Karp from 1970 had set a believable target for provable improvements of Christofides’ bound, namely a conjectured ratio of from linear programming relaxations. However, also has dueling conjectures, some supporting a believable target of . The real point of comparison with TSP is that suddenly there was progress on a barrier that had stood for much of the age of the field, and this attracted others to try for more.

We note that Markus Bläser has contended in a comment that the extension of CW used by both new papers has limitations, and we infer that some other experts concur. However, the paper by Vassilevska Williams in particular has two new ingredients: a framework for managing any tensor power as a base algorithm, and a computer implementation of the framework. She also employed an insight of Stothers to simplify the analysis. Though we can imagine a geometrical insight that higher powers bring returns that “shrink geometrically,” can we really constrain the likelihood that pursuing them might dislodge a different insight that changes the whole game? Is there a limitation theorem here? All we know is that the game has changed, and perhaps the game is afoot.

Worth and Values

The last issue we wish to raise is the reliability of judging the worth of past achievement by present assessment of what it may or may not lead to in the future. We have posted several times on surprises and the difficulty of predicting or guessing how things will go. Of course impetus into the future is necessarily part of claiming something now a “breakthrough.”

However, if we seek a reliable and consistent standard of judging worth, we should use a value that the community has understood for many years: intellectual substance and effort. This value, plus the simple salience of the goal, led our principals to invest the years of work in the first place. Depth of thinking is our gold standard, while applicability is our paper currency. The improvements of and on paper for amid other issues may be a poor return now, but the new computer-assisted vein to mine may parlay true value later.

Dick and I hope this explains why fundamental effort and easily-stated achievement, on a fundamental problem after nearly a quarter-century of stasis, elicited the reaction it has. We agree with, and have tried to extend, Timothy Gowers’ comments here. As for how these values can be invested, only time will be the teller.

Open Problems

Can we be more open about the value of pursuing problems?

What is ?

Suppose we know something special about two matrices and to be multiplied, something not so obvious like their being sparse. Suppose in particular that we have a tiny circuit that for any outputs the value , and similarly for , where those values come from a fixed finite set. Or suppose we know that and/or preserve a similar succinctness property from argument vectors to values—which[…]

3D developers had real reason to be thankful last week, on the occasion of American Thanksgiving.

Doom 3, after some wrangling, was set free with a GNU GPL open source license. The game data itself isn’t free, covered by the existing proprietary EULA, but you get all the logic and rendering of the game on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

While the game dates to 2004, the visual engine remains nothing to sneeze at, capable of some impressive capabilities. And the way the engine and game themselves behave are compelling studies, too. In a world in which software is disposable, abandoned, and forgotten, it promises to enable the game and engine to live on, and serve as a model for artists and developers.

The only bad news is that John Carmack’s innovative shadow volume technique is omitted.

I’d love to see people make new, creative work from the experience. Even just looking through the code, for programmers with ample skill, could be an enlightening experience.

https://github.com/TTimo/doom3.gpl

More coverage: Doom 3 Is Open Sourced [OMG Ubuntu]

(And yes, I’m a bit behind. Just think – you’ve lost days decoding the entire Doom 3 code base. So get on it, already!)

Beating Coppersmith-Winograd

Virginia Vassilevska Williams is a theoretical computer scientist who has worked on a number of problems, including a very neat question about cheating in the setup of tournaments, and a bunch of novel papers exemplified by this one on graph and matrix problems with runtime exponents of that have long been begging to be improved.

Today Ken and I want to discuss her latest breakthrough in improving our understanding of the matrix multiplication problem.

Of course Volker Strassen first showed in his famous paper in 1969 that the obvious cubic algorithm was suboptimal. Ever since then progress has been measured with one parameter : if your algorithm runs in time , then you are known by this one number. Strassen got , and the race was off. A long series of improvements started to happen, which for a while seemed to be stuck above . Then, Don Coppersmith and Shmuel Winograd (CW) got and everything changed. After a contribution by Strassen himself, CW finally obtained in 1987, with full details here. This has been the best known for decades.

This has all changed now. Virginia has proved that she can beat the “barrier” of CW and get a new lower value for . Currently her paper gives , an improvement of “only” , but there is promise of more. This is also another case of proofs coming in twos, as a theorem in PhD thesis work by Andrew Stothers was circulated to some in June 2010 but not very widely. All this is extremely exciting, and is one of the best results proved in years in all of theory. While these algorithms are unlikely to be usable in practice, they help shed light on one of the basic questions of complexity theory: how fast can we multiply matrices? What could be more fundamental than that?

The Basic Idea

Matrix multiplication is bi-linear: the formula for the entry of is . The first step in simplifying the problem is to make it more complicated: Let us have indicator variables and compute instead the tri-linear form

This is a special case of a general tri-linear form

where and we have re-mapped the indices. It looks like we have made order-of work for ourselves. The key, however, is to try to fit a representation of the form:

where . The point is, suppose we can compute these products in total time . Then we can compute (the coefficients for) all the desired entries

in steps. Thus what we have are separate handles on the time for the products and the time for the . The way to manage and balance these times involves recursion.

The Basis Idea

The recursion idea is nice to picture for matrices, though its implementation for the way we have unrolled matrices into vectors is not so nice. Picture and as each being matrices. We can regard instead as a matrix of four matrices , and do the same for . Then the product can be written via products , and we can picture ourselves recursing on these products.

The reason why the vector case does not look so nice is that the tri-linear form is so general—indeed we cannot expect to fit a general tri-linear form into a small number of products . What CW did, building on work by Arnold Schönhage, is relax the tri-linear form by introducing more than -many variables, supplying appropriate coefficients to set up the recursion, and most of all framing a strategy for setting variables to zero so that three goals are met: the recursion is furthered, the values of “” at each level stay relatively small, and the matrix product can be extracted from the variables left over. This involved a hashing scheme which used subsets of integers that are free of arithmetical progressions.

The final step by CW was to choose a starting algorithm for the basis case of the recursion. They devised one and got . Then they noticed that if they bumped up the base case by manually expanding their algorithm to an handling the next-higher case, they got a better analysis and their famous result . By their way of thinking, bumping the basis up once more to was the way to do better, but they left analyzing this as a problem. Others attempted the analysis and…found it gave worse not better results. So , actually , stood.

The insight for breaking through was to make a bigger jump in the basis. Vassilevska Williams was actually anticipated in this without her knowledge by Andrew Stothers, in his 2010 PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh. Stothers used and showed this method capable of achieving , though there has been some doubt in whether all details were worked out. Vassilevska Williams, however, used and brought some powerful computing software to bear on a more-extensive framework for the plan. It is not clear whether there is anything necessary about jumping by a power of —in any event her program and framework work for any exponent.

The Proof

We cannot yet really give a good summary of the proof—further details are in her paper. One quick observation about her work is in order. She used the CW method, but extended it into a general schema can be used to find good matrix product algorithms, perhaps even better than the one in the paper. The algorithms themselves can be generated and examined, but as usual the task of analyzing them is very hard. The brilliant insight that she has is this task can be laid out automatically by a certain computer program. This allows her to do the analysis where previous others failed.

For example here is a sample of the overview of her main program, in pseudo-code:

The details are not as important as the fact that this program allows one to work on much larger schemas than anyone could previously.

What Does the Bound Mean?

Note that she has improved the bound of Stothers by . For what threshold value of does an additive improvement of in the exponent halve the running time? The answer is , which in this case is . This value is far above the Bekenstein Bound for the number of particles that could be fit into a volume the size of the observable universe without collapsing it into a black hole. In this sense the algorithm itself is even beyond galactic.

The meaning instead comes from this question: Is there a fundamental reason why could settle at a value strictly greater than ? Note that is not taken to mean the existence of a quadratic-time algorithm, but rather that for all there are algorithms that achieve time . There was some reason to think could be a natural barrier, but it was breached. Perhaps , since this is connected to the golden ratio? Her paper notes a recent draft by Noga Alon, Amir Shpilka, and Christopher Umans that speaks somewhat against the optimism shared by many that .

Open Problems

Can the current bounds be improved by more computer computations? Are we about to see the solution to this classic question? Or will it be struggling over increments of ?

In any event congratulate Virginia—and Andrew—for their brilliant work.

Update: Markus Bläser, who externally reviewed Stothers’ thesis, has contributed an important comment on the blog of Scott Aaronson here. It evaluates the significance of the work in-context, and also removes the doubt going back to 2010 that was expressed here.

A couple of months ago, nu-metal stalwarts Korn made a lot of people feel afraid for the future when they released “Get Up!,” a collaboration with brostep avatar Skrillex. Their new album The Path Of Totality is said to be packed with such big-room bassbin experiments. But to hear Korn frontman Jonathan Davis tell it, Korn basically invented brostep.

Talking to Billboard, Davis says, “We were dubstep before there was dubstep. Tempos at 140 with half-time drums, huge bassed-out riffs. We used to bring out 120 subwoofers and line them across the whole front of the stage, 60 subs per side. We were all about the bass.” It’s true! Korn was all about the bass! Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Kode9!

Davis also takes a moment to paint a ghastly image of what Korn shows look like now: “It’s really cool to see glow sticks at the show, to see dance music culture infiltrating and becoming one with the metal community. At the last show, there was one mosh pit where they were moshing, and another with kids doing glow stick tricks. They were taking turns and shit. I think we’ve opened up a new style that both sides are happy with.” Let’s see if we can get some Twilight obsessives in there too, and just call it a day.

The Path Of Totality is out 12/2 on Roadrunner. Weirdly, there’s another newish metal album out now called Path Of Totality, and that one is totally good. And now let’s all mentally prepare ourselves for the moment when Staind take credit for chillwave.

As NME points out, internet punching bag Lana Del Rey recently let her album title slip when she was doing an interview with the French TV show Taratata. The singer’s Interscope debut, due next year, will be called Born 2 Die, which means that this is now the title track. (Also, Taratata would be a pretty good Lana Del Rey album title.)

As Pitchfork points out, Del Rey also recently told the British newspaper The Sun that she’s working on a “Born 2 Die” video and that it’ll have a tiger in it. “Tigers don’t come cheap,” she notes. Obviously, this is awesome news, and it hopefully means that she’s drawing inspiration from Nas’s “Hate Me Now” video. She also says, “It’s a controversial video.” Uh, Lana? You can’t just call something “controversial” when nobody’s actually seen it. That’s so lame! That’s how people end up making pieces of rote provocation like, um, Nas’s “Hate Me Now” video.

Gucci this, Fendi that. What you expect, yo?

What happens when projection mapping and stop motion come together and make sweet, visualist love?

Watch “Suburbia,” the charming, percussive music video, populated by mysterious birds and aquatic dino skeletons, to find out. The ingredients: VJ app Vidvox VDMX plus easy Mac map-anything tool MadMapper.

Robert Jarvis explains how he did the video for band Virtual Proximity:

It’s all projection mapping captured one frame at a time and then animated. The process quickly became tedious – after an hour or so setting up a shot there was another hour of *click* move one frame forward *clack* take a photo. I teased out a way to automated the whole process using a square wave LFO in VDMX to automatically click each frame forwards in the time it would take for my cameras
intervalometer to tick over. The animation process then became almost hands free.

He has also produced a video showing the process:

The ‘making of’ vid features still more music — “1983″ by 1.1 Immerman. http://immermann.bandcamp.com/

More:

“Suburbia”, from the album Virtual Proximity 2 by James Annesley
http://http://jamesannesley.bandcamp.com/album/virtual-proximity-2

Animation by Robert Jarvis
http://zealousy.com

New Statler images have been made available. These new images contain some significant changes since the last release. More details about the changes can be read at http://corenominal.org/2011/11/26/updated-crunchbang-statler-images/

The new images can be downloaded here: http://crunchbang.org/download/

If you would like to discuss the changes, please see this forum thread.

Webcaster Tim Pool of "The Other 99."

In recent weeks, one source of live news coverage for the Occupy Wall Street movement stood out above all others. Not a cable news network, not a newspaper, but a 25-year-old guy named Tim Pool. He packs a smartphone with unlimited data, a copy of Ustream's mobile video streaming app, and a battery pack to keep it all going — which he has for 21 hours straight, on big news days. Soon, Tim and team plan to have have their own hacker-made flying camera-drones, to provide aerial footage TV news chopppers can't. The guerrilla web stream "The Other 99" has reached more than 2 million unique viewers over the last two months, and become a source of eyes on the ground unmatched by big media. The project runs solely on donations. Is The Other 99's webcast the start of a new news normal, and could Pool be one of many DIY backpack broadcasters to come? I tracked him down in New York between streams to find out what he thinks, and how and why he does what he does. — XJ

Xeni Jardin: Break down your current gear setup for us, would you?

Tim Pool: The backpack I use is just a regular backpack. My gear is a Samsung GALAXY S II (on Sprint, because they offer unlimited data) and an Energizer XPAL 18000, and I literally slide the external battery into my back pocket and I plug my phone into it. That’s pretty much it.

Xeni Jardin: And that equipment was purchased for you with donations?

Tim Pool: The Energizer battery, yes. The cellphone is just my cellphone.

Tim Pool's gear kit for the "The Other 99" web stream. Yup. That's all.

Xeni Jardin: Where are you from?

Tim Pool: Chicago. I came up to New York on the fourth day of the Occupation, up from Newport News, VA. I had been staying there with my brother, working with friends to create a community skate park and producing videos to show how to do some of my favorite skateboard tricks.

Xeni Jardin: And what inspired you to come up to OWS?

Tim Pool: I knew about Occupy Wall Street a little bit before it happened. The financial sector problems happening in this country, government corruption and collusion with big corporations, all of that concerned me. So this spoke to me. When I first heard about it, I was skeptical that people wouldn’t actually stand their ground. I'd become jaded over the years as an activist and nonprofit volunteer, and didn't have much hope.

But then, I saw this video of police brutality at Occupy Wall Street. The officers were arresting a man, and they grabbed him by his ankles and started dragging him by his hands. When they let go, you could see that his hands were bleeding. That really riled me up.

So I thought, these people have been sleeping in the park, they are serious, and I have to be down there and support them.

Xeni Jardin: So you took the Chinatown bus from Virginia up to New York, and then what?

Tim Pool: When I first arrived I thought: I know can add something to this, but it was extremely difficult to adapt. It's a problem a lot of people have with Occupy Wall Street, if you don’t understand it, it appears to not be focused. But really, the Occupy Movement is just trying to create a new system because the old one is broken.

It was difficult to integrate myself into all of this, and I didn’t fully understand what they were fighting for, because there were so many different things to fight for.

After a while I realized, maybe the best thing to do is document this as truthfully as possible so we could have just transparency. I felt like an independent media outlet that was external -- not exactly a part of the movement, but not part of a corporate machine bound by the typical rules of the TV business, either. That way I wouldn’t have an internal or external bias, I could sort of float in between and tell the story from my point of view.

Xeni Jardin: You mentioned you had done nonprofit work before. Tell me a little bit more about that? Were you a political activist? What was it that you were doing before, and were you doing video?

Tim Pool: Not video. The extent of my video just involves skateboarding tricks and pointing a camera at my friends. But I did fundraising, street canvassing for Greenpeace, and Environment America. And then I have also been on a few actions with the World Can't Wait, and just anti-war protests and things like that.

Xeni Jardin: What was it like when you arrived in New York?

Tim Pool: I got there really late at night, on September 21st. I got off the bus in Chinatown. I had never been to New York before, had no idea where I was, and I just walked up to the first person I saw and said, "I am looking for Liberty and Broadway." They pointed me in the right direction, and I started walking.

It was really incredible when I first arrived, because there was really nothing there. The food section, the kitchen? Just a few bowls covered with plastic wrap. There was some torn carpet that people were sleeping on. And when I arrived I just laid down on a torn piece of carpet, covered myself with some plastic to protect against the rain, and it was just incredible. I was like, hey, this place is occupied, and I am in it.

Xeni Jardin: And then what was the morning like? Did you bring your gear with you, were you thinking already about video?

Tim Pool: No, I just had a backpack full of clothes, and I was floating around trying to figure out where I would fit in. I met Henry James Ferry later that day, and he was uploading a video. Henry had started a media fund to raise money, and he was actually buying a lot of supplies for the people on the park. And then a day or two later he said, I think I want to fund some independent journalists, people are donating this money to me, and we need to be able to tell the story, because the news isn’t going to do it.

The action really started on day eight. I had a cellphone and I was using Twitter, and that was when we saw the pepper-spraying of the protestors by Officer Bologna. Henry was the one who actually uploaded that footage and got that out there.

When that video took off, within three days it had over a million hits. Henry got me a computer and said, let's do this, let’s use this computer, and let’s do a blog, we will set up a WordPress or something. How can we do this? He was also doing a bit of political theater—"The Conversation with the 1%," where he set up a little coffee table and two chairs and he would invite people from the 1% of society to come down and just have an open debate.

I told him, I am pretty good with computers, I could probably set up a live channel for you, what do you think? And he was like, yeah, yeah, let’s do it.

So I looked at the two main programs that people seemed to be using; Livestream and Ustream. I chose Ustream, because they had the mobile app, so I could shoot and broadcast just with my cellphone.

We had originally planned to webcast scheduled events, where people would tune
in and watch the political theater, but all of a sudden, this police action started to explode.

I just instinctively turned my phone on and went live, and we had seven or ten viewers who tuned in, just by hearing about it on Twitter.

We did the Times Square March, and we had about 200 viewers simultaneously. Then, 700. And I had a big old smile on my face like, "Wow, this is working, we are doing something good." We actually had over 5,000 people look at our channel to see what was going on and 700 stuck with us for the most part.

There were some other live broadcasts after that. I ended up doing the Oakland Solidarity March, that day. I was with Henry, but we got separated. Until that point Henry had been the one communicating as a correspondent, and I was just the cameraman. But when the action really heated up that night, about 2,000 people were marching down the street, they took over Broadway, they had taken the orange "kettling" net away from the police, and I was on my own. So I took over the narration. And we hit over 2,000 simultaneous viewers that night, and had about 25,000 unique hits.

Then, the real action happened that Tuesday during the NYPD eviction of OWS at Zuccotti Park. I couldn't get into the park. I had been at the Spokes Council Meeting, which was off-site. I just turned the phone on and said, I have got to do this. It was just instinct. I really didn’t have a plan, but I had my phone plugged into my external battery.

And I guess because the police had taken everyone by surprise, the other live stream teams didn't have a chance to charge their batteries. I was the only one streaming. If you wanted to know what was happening that night, you pretty much had to go through my stream. Global Revolution put my broadcast on their channel, because I was the only source, and I quickly went from 50 people to 5,000, then 6,000, and then we actually hit 12,000 simultaneous viewers that day.

We never knew what was going to happen next that day. There was something new happening every minute. I kept broadcasting throughout the entire day with the support of a friend who let me use his MacBook to get a charge into my cellphone, because I was down to about 3% at one point. Then, a few people pitched in and bought me the XPAL 18K batteries to keep me going.

I finished that day after 21 hours of handling a live broadcast with narration, but I didn't really realize what I had done. I was just sort of, hey, whatever, I am doing a live broadcast. But by end of the day I was on the front page of time.com, and I'd been put out by Al Jazeera.

Honestly, there were so many different outlets that had taken my stream as a primary source. It was just -- yeah, I didn’t realize the impact of what had happened.

The really big event was that Thursday for the #N17 action. We peaked out with 31,000 simultaneous viewers and a total of 737,000 unique viewers for the broadcast, within the span of about 12 hours.

Xeni Jardin: Why are you doing this?

Tim P[…]

How did we get from command line to computer interfaces we know today? PlosBlogs’s NeuroTribes offers an insight into the sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist who’s high-school friend Andy Hertzfeld, the lead software architect for the Macintosh operating system, offered a job to design fonts for the Mac.

Inspired by the collaborative intelligence of her fellow software designers, Kare stayed on at Apple to craft the navigational elements for Mac’s GUI. Because an application for designing icons on screen hadn’t been coded yet, she went to the University Art supply store in Palo Alto and picked up a $2.50 sketchbook so she could begin playing around with forms and ideas. In the pages of this sketchbook, which hardly anyone but Kare has seen before now*, she created the casual prototypes of a new, radically user-friendly face of computing — each square of graph paper representing a pixel on the screen.

Continue reading.... The Sketchbook of Susan Kare [News]

The k-server problem: some progress, still wide open

Aleksander Mądry gave a stellar talk at our ARC Theory Day a week ago Friday. He is an expert on algorithmic graph theory, among other areas of theory. Already he has multiple best-paper awards, including the paper of this talk from FOCS 2011, and I expect he will get more in the future. This is good going considering that basic LaTeX systems lack a macro for the Polish ogonek diacritic in his name—Ken installed a special package called tipa to get it while editing this post.

Today I would like to talk about his result and the open questions that remain.

He with Nikhil Bansal, Niv Buchbinder, and Seffi Naor (BBMN) have made a recent important contribution to our understanding of the complexity of on-line algorithms. Aleksander’s talk was wonderful and explained what is known, their new result, and what still remains to be done. As he said:

One of the remaining open questions is really annoying—it should be solved—but it continues to resist attacks.

Before I discuss their result I would like to thank the Theory Day organizers Prasad Tetali and Prasad Raghavendra. It was held on the magical day 11/11/11, which does not happen that often, and in fact Mądry’s talk spanned 11:11:11am. Ken wore a red shirt in Buffalo but could not find the WW I remembrance poppy pin he acquired during his sabbatical in Canada. The full scorecard of talks and titles was:

Thomas Dueholm Hansen: Subexponential lower bounds for randomized pivoting rules for the simplex algorithm.

Aleksander Mądry: Online algorithms and the k-server conjecture.

Mohit Singh: A Randomized Rounding Approach for Symmetric TSP.

Ryan Williams: Algorithms for Circuits and Circuits for Algorithms.

The Problem

The problem he spoke about is the now classic on-line server problem. The simplest case is the problem of managing a computer $. Note that this is the way to tell a theory talk on computer caches from an architecture talk on computer caches—in architecture often $ is used to denote a cache. Perhaps this is changing, given the current economic turmoil, perhaps not.

The key is that there are pages in the cache and total pages. Each time a page is requested, if it is not in the cache the task is to decide which page to “evict” from the cache. If the strategy is deterministic, then as Danny Sleator and Bob Tarjan proved back in 1985, the best strategy is only -competitive. This means that the best deterministic strategy could be as bad as times the best off-line strategy which is allowed to see all the page requests at once.

Randomization comes to the rescue. If the strategy for eviction can be random, then it is known that an on-line random strategy exists that is competitive. This is due to Amos Fiat, Dick Karp, Mike Luby, Lyle McGeoch, Danny Sleator, and Neal Young in 1991.

The paging problem is just a special case of the general -server problem. In the general case the simple cache mechanism is replaced by one based on an arbitrary finite metric space. The servers at any step are located somewhere on the points of the metric space. The requests are to “serve” a point in the space: a server must move to that point, and it incurs a cost of the distance in the metric.

In the 1990′s this problem was very “hot,” and there was a stream of results that tried to get good deterministic server strategies. The first results were exponential in but independent of : recall there are servers and the space has points. Finally—in a famous paper—Elias Koutsoupias and Christos Papadimitriou 1994 showed that there is a strategy achieving , which remains today the best known result.

The BBMN Result

The new result is:

Theorem 1 There exists an -competitive on-line strategy for the -server problem.

This is a great improvement, but it also changes the rules. It is great since the competitiveness bound is poly-log in . However, all the previous results we discussed had competitiveness bounds that did not depend on the size of the metric space, . Their result does.

See their paper for the proof. The key idea is that they: Reduce the -server problem over arbitrary metric to a (more difficult) problem over a very simple metric The very simple metric is a type of tree-like metric. The proof relies on the fact that any metric space on points can be well approximated by such a metric space. The cost of the approximation grows roughly as , so it is not surprising that their theorem has factors of in the competitiveness bound.

Open Problems

The -server problem has the following bounds and gaps in those bounds:

If the strategy is deterministic it must take and can be done in . There is a small, but annoying gap of two here. Which is correct?

If the strategy is randomized it must take . There is a huge and annoying gap to the known upper bounds here. There is no known strategy for even the simple case of the real line that is randomized but beats linear in . What is going on?
Finally, are the polylog factors of in their result necessary? In particular can one get rid of the dependence on altogether?

[fixed typo in Fiat et al. to O(log k)]

From top: TouchDesigner powering the Plastikman show, Steve Mason’s Chapichapo.
If you’ve been watching big-league visuals lately, things that made your eyeballs roll out into the crowd, odds are TouchDesigner might have been some of the software in use. The tool, established in years of use but perhaps little known outside a few select circles, has been making waves lately in some very nice shows. Even its interface is dazzling (and, indeed, figures directly in shows by the likes of Berlin label Raster Noton), flying through endlessly-zoomable graphical patching interfaces.

One obstacle has stood in TouchDesigner’s way: accessibility. That Hollywood-sexy interface might leave average musicians and visualists wondering how this would work for them. And a prohibitively high cost for a commercial user kept a lot of would-be users out of the club.

The uninterestingly-named TouchDesigner 077 Gold represents lots of iterative progress on this tool. But with this release, hidden behind that innocuous version number, comes some news that could make TouchDesigner a bigger deal. Sync tools for Ableton Live, developed for the innovative show for Richie Hawtin (more on that soon), bring musical integration. TouchPlayer means you can distribute your creations for other users who don’t have the software. You can add the Player to the three-year-old “Free Thinking Environment.” While a common complaint about TouchDesigner has been cost, the FTE edition brings pricing within reach of mere mortals – non-commercial use is even free.

As new to this edition is an integrated mapping tool, for three-dimensional projection mapping. And tutorials make it easier to learn, atop the nice, out-of-the-box Live integration for Max for Live users.

Here’s what’s new. TouchDesigner 077 adds:

TouchPlayer, a perform-only player that lets anyone run your software free (provided they use it non-commercially – too bad it’s not just no-strings-attached). It’s included with the software.
TouchDesigner Ableton Live Sync Environment passes loops, controllers, MIDI, and timing data from Live over to TouchDesigner. I saw this in action both backstage and front-of-house with Richie Hawtin, in the Plastikman show designed by Jarrett Smith and operated by Bryant Place, and … wow. More on this soon. The one catch, as with a lot of Live extension – you need Max for Live, too.
Cineform (not to be confused with the ancient Cinepak) is a high-quality decode used in film that strikes a nice balance between image and size on new Intel processors.
HD-SDI input and output with NVIDIA’s capture cards.
New tools for displaying stats, working with multitouch and audio, and playing, managing, and blending movies.

With the help of Max for Live, the new Sync Environment eases parameter communication from Live to TouchDesigner, for mapping musical events to visuals.
Full details in the ongoing release note log.

Now about that “FTE” edition?

If you’re using the work non-commercially (“not receiving money or compensation”), FTE is absolutely free to use. (I’m assuming a couple of drink tickets don’t qualify as commercial use.) Resolution is limited to 1280×1280.

Of course, we like getting paid, so in that case, there’s now an edition of TouchDesigner that might pay for itself more quickly. US$599 buys you the ability to use the software commercially, adds GPU-based, real-time movie encoding in H.264, unlimited resolutions, extra operators and power features, and more.

As before, you do need to shell out considerably more cash for everything: the “Pro” edition is US$2200. That gets you direct support (not just forum support), animation sequencing, and other features.

FTE edition information
Comparison of editions, features, and pricing

Lastly, Kantan Mapper is a system for mapping and masking. It’s very, very similar in design to MadMapper – though, in its defense, there’s kind of a common set of features you want for mapping projections. But Kantan is also integrated directly in TouchDesigner; MadMapper uses the Syphon framework to pipe textures from other apps. (The latter gives you more flexibility, the former more tight integration.)

Lots of details on how it all works:
Kantan Mapper

For one example of TouchDesigner in action – here in an interactive installation rather than a performance – check out Obscura Digital’s work for Facebook’s F8 conference:

And lastly, if you’re ready to learn to use all of this, the folks at developer Derivative have organized all the how-to information into a series of tutorial videos on the wiki:
Category:Tutorials

Among the topics: using an iPhone, tilt shift effects, understanding the operators and sequencing, text, audio spectra, and, of course, how to get up and running in five minutes.

Where to go:
http://www.derivative.ca/

In the latest example of what people are doing with open source Kinect tools and movement, PRICKIMAGE sends a performance that works with the Windows-based vvvv. It’s still a work in process / proof of concept, but I’m really enjoying seeing experiments with this technology. There’s definite potential to be explored. The artists write:

I follow CDM and find it inspiring & informative
Can I share a project with that we are developing quickly
Video sample below is the 1st test promo

This is what we plan next…
A 10-15 minute performance will use the Musion Eyeliner system to conjure magical effects with a performer who will dance and sing live,
live illustration and interactive graphics & audio, powered by vvvv (a multipurpose toolkit) within a simple fantasy narrative. Our theme is
metamorphosis and transition, within which we will play with effects of dramatic transformation visually referencing children’s fiction,
early cinematic and pre-cinematic effects, and animated worlds.

More:

creative direction: PRICKIMAGE
vvvv: SAPOLAB
performer: MC Gaff E
illustration: Martin Wollerstam
event: WetYourSelf!
music: App “Feel Like Dancing”

prickimage.com
sapolab.com
wollerstam.com
wetyourself.co.uk

It’s a multi-national effort, this, but I see at least one person at the STRP Festival later this month in Eindhoven, NL. I’m there presenting on the 25th, if anyone else is around!

Peter Boghossian believes Creationism is a verifiable fiction. While that’s not necessarily an odd or even uncommon belief, he also believes its his job as a philosophy professor to teach that to his philosophy students. His argument is that philosophy professors have an academic (and perhaps moral) responsibility to teach students what he believes is the truth even if it makes them uncomfortable.  When it comes to creationism, the truth has been established: “Both the process that allows one to arrive at Creationist conclusions, and the conclusions themselves, are completely divorced from reality.” Boghossian uses his stance on Creationism in the classroom as an example to make a broader, and perhaps more controversial, point.
In a recent article for Inside Higher Ed professor Boghossian of Portland State University (Oregon) sketches his position that professors should have a primary goal of changing students beliefs if those beliefs are false and seek to replace those beliefs with true ones. He asks, “Should professors attempt to change students’ beliefs by consistently challenging false beliefs with facts?” On the surface, an affirmative answer to this question seems obvious. What professor would want his students to walk out of his or her class with clearly false information when he or she has the power to set the record straight. “I believe our role as educators should be to teach students not just factual data, but the importance of critically examining beliefs by exposing them to facts, and then revising cherished notions when confronted with reliable but discomforting evidence.”
Some of his colleagues disagree. They argue that the role of a professor is to provide students with data and reasoning skills so they can make the appropriate conclusions on their own. Professor Boghossian counters that this approach is not only misguided but could be dangerous. He offers a couple of analogies to help make his point. Mathematicians don’t teach their students that the plus sign could be used to add two numbers and if a student disagreed, she should send her on her merry way pleased that she drew her own conclusions on the matter.
Similarly if a civil engineering professor taught his students that in general steel is superior to balsa wood as a building material for constructing bridges but that the student should draw his own conclusion about the matter, he would be at the very least negligent and more accurately incompetent. In these disciplines, part of the essential role of the professor is to teach facts and to disabuse students of false ideas. He writes, “The primary goal of every academic should be to bring students’ beliefs into lawful alignment with reality.” I am in agreement with professor Boghossian on this point. Sort of. The problem is that our access to the truth about what is real is, many times, unclear and beyond our reach.
Philosophy and access to truth
In this article, I think professor Boghossian paints a far too simplistic picture of both the educational process and the process of knowing in general. Access to truth comes in degrees and isn’t an either/or (either one has it or one doesn’t) enterprise. It seems fairly obvious that there are many academic disciplines that ought to focus on disseminating factual information where professors should work to ensure their students’ beliefs align with those facts. But the nature of these disciplines is such that the facts about the subject matter (or at least large portions of the subject matter) either is widely established or relatively unambiguous. Low-level math and introductory logic may be examples as are certain types of civil engineering, parts of physics, and even some parts of music and literary theory. But not all knowledge domains are like this. There are a many disciplines and sub-disciplines that are fraught with ambiguity, competing theories, insufficient data, difficult problems, and lack of proof that defies drawing certain conclusions.
Is the Mona Lisa beautiful? Is string theory (in any of its many variants) correct? Is the punctuated equilibrium theory of evolution true? There are certainly good arguments that warrant a “yes” vote for each of these questions. But there are equally strong arguments such that a “no” or “I don’t know” vote is just as warranted. What is a professor to do in these situations?
The scenario is exacerbated when it comes to philosophy. Non-professionals tend to have the opinion that philosophy makes little to no progress, isn’t testable or subject to disconfirmation, is esoteric and impractical, and in short, is little more than a bunch of opinions where each philosopher’s view on a topic is no better or worse than any other philosopher. Many of the problems philosophers tackle are very opaque and extremely challenging and that can foster views like the one above. While I don’t believe the caricature is at all accurate, I do think the complexity and ambiguity of philosophical topics should foster a deep epistemic humility and tentativeness when it comes to making certain claims about the truth of a great many topics.
This doesn’t mean that philosophy professors shouldn’t make truth claims. We do and should. But it does mean, I think, that philosophy education should emphasize method, analytical thinking skills, frameworks, and history with the goal of providing students with the tools they need to think about disparate viewpoints and to provide them with the means to think more deeply on their own. There are topics in philosophy that do warrant a clear statement of truth. But in most cases, philosophy professors would do well to introduce or postscript their lessons with, “this is what I and others believe and here’s why but you should look at all sides of this issue and draw conclusions based on a rigorous analysis of the topic.” This isn’t a vice of the discipline but one of its many virtues.
Censure or virtue?
According to OregonLive.com (an online magazine associated with The Oregonian), professor Boghossian will be giving a lecture in which he “will argue that faith-based beliefs are a ‘cognitive sickness’ that have been turned into a moral virtue and that -- like racist beliefs -- they should be given no countenance in the classroom.” There are many taking a similar approach and some of the criticisms they’re leveling are warranted. But on any honest read, the issues in philosophy of religion are complex and to conclude that the views of religious believers have no place in the classroom (I’ll even limit this to the philosophy classroom) seems out of bounds. The issues I encounter in the classroom more often than not are ones having to do with poor method or immaturity and not necessarily content (many times have I received comments similar to the one Boghossian read on his student’s final). Both believing and non-believing students often make assertions that they think should be taken as an argument or argue poorly and take any critical assessment of their argument as an “attack on faith” or “evidence of the disenfranchisement of atheism.” But these are exactly the types of issues philosophy is great at addressing and a discussion of faith (or lack thereof) can be a great catalyst for addressing these methodological problems.
This does raise another interesting question: are there any topics that should be “given no countenance in the classroom”? Again, this is complex though my first inclination is that there isn’t. Topics like racism and abortion and gender issues, while “hot button” topics, can foster a tremendous amount of learning and all are philosophically interesting. I’ll also add that there is a difference between a discussion about racism and a student (or professor) making racist remarks or using racism as a weapon against the classroom and learning environment. This is a much different problem but one that won’t be solved by censure. I hope that’s not what professor Boghossian is suggesting.
**Update (12/8/2011)
There has been some interesting dialogue in the blogosphere on professor Boghossian’s article.
Greg Linster published this article generally agreeing with Peter’s position. That generated a fairly heated response from Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger. Greg then wrote a rejoinder to Sanger’s post.

Today on its Facebook page, Spirit Rock Meditation Center (Woodacre, California) posted this image, with the following caption: “This is the procession of monks and nuns walking side by side at Spirit Rock on Monday, October 17 as they went to the upper Retreat Hall for the full ordination of three new bhikkhunis, including Sisters Anandabodhi, Santacitta and Nimmala. Venerable Tathaaloka Theri served as the ordination preceptor for this historic occasion.”

Visit Spirit Rock’s website here.

O.G. boingboing-core South African rap duo Die Antwoord — 2010′s “hahahaha jk” archetypes, for those with short ‘net memories — are coming back with a new release, proving at the very least they are serious enough of a rap & rave outfit to proffer a new release. SPIN recaps a listening session of Ninja and Yo-Landi’s forthcoming full-length, Tensions, pegging it “freakier” and “more absurd” and “smart” and “culturally relevant.” Earlier this year, the band lost its DJ, Leon Botha, at the age of 26. The album title begins to speak for itself, doesn’t it.

Anyway, if you can’t wait until next year to see Die Antwoord, just get down to Occupy Wall St. Easy.

[Photo by Amrit Singh @ Coachella 2010]

Jason Segel’s rebooted Muppets movie is coming out soon, and a few indie-universe types have cameos on the soundtrack album. Bret McKenzie, one half of Flight Of The Concords, wrote four new songs for the movie. One of them is called “Life’s A Happy Song,” and it features vocals from Feist and Mickey Rooney, which is a pretty weird pairing. And the movie’s version of “The Muppet Show Theme” features vocals from Joanna Newsom, who is probably at least a quarter Muppet herself. Andrew Bird also has a song called “Whistling Caruso” on the album. The soundtrack also features various Muppets covering songs like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Forget You,” which should be… something. We’ve got the tracklist below.Read More...

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has updated its entry for necessary and sufficient conditions. it was revised by Andrew Brennan (Latrobe University). I have found these two ideas to be among the most powerful devices in philosophy for framing questions and clarifying ideas.
Put simply, a necessary condition is a condition that must be true for some other thing to be true. For example suppose you’re decorating for Halloween and decide you want a jack-o-lantern to decorate your entryway. In order to do this—in order meet the condition of “having a jack-o-lantern” (on the ordinary meaning of “jack-o-lantern”)—you must have a pumpkin to carve. So having a pumpkin is a necessary condition for having a jack-o-lantern.
Is having a pumpkin a necessary condition for decorating for Halloween? Probably not because there are other ways you can decorate for Halloween. But having a pumpkin may be a sufficient condition. That is, if you have a pumpkin and you’re a minimalist regarding your Halloween festivities, that single pumpkin may be enough to call your home “decorated.” In other words, the pumpkin is sufficient for meeting the condition of having your house decorated.
These concepts can be used to clarify just about anything—hopefully things much more weighty than decorations. For example, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be considered a morally valuable human person? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for reasonable belief in God? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge?
Applying these concepts to the things you care about is sort of like owing a label maker: once you get going, it’s hard to stop.

For reasons presumably unrelated to Michael Stipe’s dick flicks, R.E.M. “>announced their breakup today. And while we can argue all day about their past decade-plus of output, very few bands — maybe no bands at all — have had a greater impact on the last few generations of independent rock music than R.E.M. have. Without them, the music world would be in a vastly different place today. Respect is due.
Read More...

A couple of years ago, I told you about Foldit, a computer game that harnesses the power of human putzing to help scientists unravel the mysteries of protein structure. There's a new research paper out that uses results from Foldit as a basis for a new proposed structure of a key protein in a virus that is a relative of HIV.

As important as proteins are, we know relatively little about how and why these complex chains of amino acids fold and twist the way they do and how that structure relates to function. Foldit takes advantage of the fact that, given the right rules, people can come up with possible, plausible protein structures far faster than a computer program can factor out all the possible permutations. And that's why Foldit players—citizen scientists of a sort—were so useful in this case. Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science explains:

They discovered the structure of a protein belonging to the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (M-PMV), a close relative of HIV that causes AIDS in monkeys.
These viruses create many of their proteins in one big block. They need to be cut apart, and the viruses use a scissor enzyme –a protease – to do that. Many scientists are trying to find drugs that disable the proteases. If they don’t work, the virus is hobbled – it’s like a mechanic that cannot remove any of her tools from their box.

To disable M-PMV’s protease, we need to know exactly what it looks like. Like real scissors, the proteases come in two halves that need to lock together in order to work. If we knew where the halves joined together, we could create drugs that prevent them from uniting. But until now, scientists have only been able to discern the structure of the two halves together. They have spent more than ten years trying to solve structure of a single isolated half, without any success.

The Foldit players had no such problems. They came up with several answers, one of which was almost close to perfect. In a few days, Khatib had refined their solution to deduce the protein’s final structure, and he has already spotted features that could make attractive targets for new drugs.

“This is the first instance that we are aware of in which online gamers solved a longstanding scientific problem,” writes Khatib. “These results indi­cate the potential for integrating video games into the real-world scientific process: the ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems.”

A description of what is and is not an instance of the ad hominem argument. Apparently this has been around for a while and has been discussed at length. I’m not sure all the examples the author cites as ad hominems are ad hominems (for example, B’s reply, “Yet another ad hominem argument. Ignore this one, folks.” isn’t really attacking A but is attempting to divert the attention from the actual argument A is making and so might be more of a straw man argument (or perhaps an ignoratio elenchi)). But in general, the author’s point is a good one. An ad hominem ignores the actual argument being made and attempts to undermine the conclusion of the argument by attacking the person.
Thanks to Andrew Smith for the pointer.

Online in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, an interesting article by Edouard Machery and Kara Cohen: “An Evidence-Based Study of the Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences” (doi: 10.1093/bjps/axr029) available here. Here is how Machery describes the article (at the blog It is Only a Theory):

"Philosophers of biology often have a very dim view of evolutionary psychology, and evolutionary-psychology bashing has been a successful cottage industry. I have been unimpressed by many of these criticisms, in part because of the feeling that the critics of evolutionary psychology were very poorly informed about what evolutionary psychology was. Imo, many of them simply have no serious acquaintance with the field they are criticizing. But, so far, my reaction was just that: an opinion, a feeling. Not anymore. 

In a forthcoming article, Kara Cohen and I have provided support for this impression. using a new tool: quantitative citation analysis. We show that the usual, very negative characterization of evolutionary psychology is largely mistaken, and that philosophers of biology have been fighting a strawman. It is also noteworthy that quantitative citation analysis could be particularly useful for philosophers of science who want to add quantitative tools to their toolbox."

Presented at the close of a Philosophy seminar given by Professor Paul Eisenberg, to the Department of Philosophy, Indiana University, in the (northern) autumn of 1969.

Thanks to Tedla Woldeyohannes for the link.

Earlier this year, the art-pop queen Kate Bush released Director’s Cut, an album of reworkings of her older tracks. And in a couple of months, Bush will release her second album of 2011, and this one will be all new songs. The album is called 50 Words For Snow, and though it’s only seven tracks long, it still lasts about 65 minutes. It’s her first album of original material since the 2005 double album Aerial. We’ve got the tracklist for 50 Words For Snow below.Read More...