Herschel on iron

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This is a beautiful passage by mathematician, astronomer, chemist, botanist and inventor John Herschel in his A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831), about the need for precision and clarity in scientific writing:

For example, the words – square, circle, a hundred etc convey to the mind notions so complete in themselves, and so distinct from everything else, that we are sure when we use them we know the whole of our own meaning. It is widely different with words expressing natural objects and mixed relations.

Take, for instance, IRON. Different persons attach very different ideas to this word. One who has never heard of magnetism has a widely different notion of IRON from one in the contrary predicament. The vulgar, who regard this metal as incombustible, and the chemist, who sees it burn with the utmost fury, and who has other reasons for regarding it as one of the most combustible bodies in nature;- the poet, who uses it as an emblem of rigidity; and the smith and the engineer, in whose hands it is plastic, and moulded like wax into every form;-the jailer, who prizes it as an obstruction, and the electrician who sees in it only a channel of open communication by which – that most impassable of objects – air may be traversed by his imprisoned fluid, have all different, and all imperfect, notions of the same word.

The meaning of such a term is like a rainbow-everybody sees a different one, and all maintain it to be the same.

Bruce Sterling on the New Aesthetic

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Bruce Sterling on ‘the New Aesthetic,’ the nascent, swirling, London art-nerd movement that’s making stuff that sort-of brings the digital and physical worlds together. Stuff - kinda - like - these. Robots, machine-readable vision, Twitter bots; sitting at the interface between the humanistic and the mainframe.

Does it make any sense? Will it have any kind of lasting influence? Lord knows, but I really like Sterling’s views here (highlighting my own):

However, this is a pressing New Aesthetic problem, maybe the core problem at the root there. The bandwidth is available, the images are there, and the robots and digital devices get plenty of look-in. Where did the people go? Where is the aura, where is the credibility? Are robots with cameras supposed to have our credibility for us? They don’t.

We’re not going to be able to gloss over this gaping vacuity by “making the machines our friends.” Because they’re not our friends. Machines are never our friends, even if they’re intimates in our purses and pockets eighteen hours a day. They may very well be our algorithmic investors, but they’re certainly not our art critics, because at that, they suck even worse than they do at running our economy.

If machine vision was our pal, then we wouldn’t need James Bridle [one of the New Aesthetic's main communicators] to assert that for us. We’d have a Bridlebot, a Googleized visual search-engine that could generate as much aesthetics as we want.

That won’t happen. Why not? Because it is impossible. It’s as impossible as Artificial Intelligence, which is a failed twentieth-century research campaign, reduced to a sci-fi conceit. That’s why the “New Aesthetic” isn’t about “robot vision” from “digital devices,” even when it claims that, as a rhetorical gesture to grant itself some aura.

Beating Goliath

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Three years ago, The New Yorker published an article by Malcolm Gladwell called How David Beats Goliath, in which he traced the ways in which underdogs often manage to best their competitors.

His entertaining thesis, told in his typically layered and smartly paced manner, centres on the idea that underdogs, with nothing to lose, can break the rules and in doing so transform the terms of engagement in their favour. There’s David, facing Goliath not with a sword but a sling. There’s Lawrence of Arabia, not attacking the Ottomans directly but the railway that served them. And there’s a girls basketball team, which played aggressively to counter its lower skill levels.

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Magic is a cold, cognitive experiment in perception

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Magic is an art, as capable of beauty as music, painting or poetry. But the core of every trick is a cold, cognitive experiment in perception: Does the trick fool the audience?

Brilliant psycho-entertainment theory from Teller, of increasingly legendary magician twosome Penn & Teller.

Points include the following, which come together in an explanation of how a single trick works:

Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest.

Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself. When a magician lets you notice something on your own, his lie becomes impenetrable.

If you are given a choice, you believe you have acted freely.

Serendipity and Pyrex

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Here’s a thing, courtesy the excellent Now I Know newsletter. Corning’s sale of Pyrex to World Kitchen in 1998 had profound effects on crack cocaine production.

That’s because Pyrex used to be made using borosilicate glass, which does not shatter when being subjected to the sudden changes of temperature you get when you splash water on a jug you’ve just taken out of the oven. When World Kitchen took over it started to make Pyrex products for the US market out of tempered soda-lime glass, which is more susceptible to, essentially, exploding in such circumstances.

My fascination with this is partly down to the fact I’ve been watching Breaking Bad, but anyway – part of crack cocaine production requires sudden cooling, which shop-bought Pyrex used to handle just fine. But the new type definitely did not, meaning vital equipment suddenly became hard to find.

The result was an increase in theft of lab equipment from laboratories. Chaos, eh?

Tactics

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Advance Wars

Around 10 years ago I went on holiday to Morocco with a friend called Dave. We stayed in Marrakesh and went up into the Atlas mountains, where I’ve never been so cold and so hot in a single day. Towards the end of the holiday we visited Essaouira, a coastal holiday town. It was October – the sun was hot, but the wind, coming off the sea, was strong and sharply cold. Looking for something to do one afternoon we found ourselves taking shelter at a cafe in a sunny square.

Dave loves chess and go. I don’t know go, and I’ve never played chess with him. To be honest I don’t want to. Apart from being afraid of how good he is – and he’s really good – the thought of playing fills me with panic. With my pieces all laid out at the start, I’m frozen by the thought of all the intense thinking that lies ahead, the possibilities and patterns I’ll fail to see, the profound complexity. But strangely, I love turn-based strategy videogames. And I really love GBA Advance Wars.

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iBooks resolution

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An update to last week’s ding-dong over Apple’s EULA for iBooks Author, which suggested that it would not allow you to publish elsewhere the content of a book you’d published through the software – Apple’s updated the EULA to say that it only extends to the file iBooks Author generates, not the content itself, over which you retain all rights. Hooray.

In awe of David Carr

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Having watched the documentary Page One: A Year Inside The New York Times, I am now totally in awe of the newspaper’s media and culture columnist, David Carr.

There’s an incredible scene where Carr is interviewing the heads of Vice magazine for an article on how Vice is diversifying its output in the face of the rising power of the internet. The team has recently made The Vice Guide to Liberia, a video that presents fighters claiming that they kill children and drink their blood before battle and a beach littered with human crap.

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Considering ethics

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Ethics in videogames is a big, scary topic. Ethics? I mean the ways designers are using compulsion to entertain players and also to extract time and money from them.

It’s a pity, then, that the level of discussion around videogame ethics is so poor.

Like this article, for instance. Written by iOS developer Benjamin Jackson for The Atlantic, which really should know better, it’s a very compromised piece.

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