Category: Uncategorized

Impossible maps

– In which Dorn ponders games and other fictions, the Real World, and the mapping of one to the other.

The Bellman’s Map, from The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll. Rendering by Sharon Daniel (http://people.duke.edu/~ng46/topics/lewis-carroll.htm)

Just as Lona learned about Bitlife from her granddaughters (see her post), I learned something about current videogame culture from my grand­daughters when they last visited us. They showed me how to play Pokémon Go. In the game, you wander around in the Real World, and you look for Poké-monsters. They’re invisible to the naked eye, so you use a special detector that visualizes them.

The “detector” is just an app on your smart phone, that uses the phone’s GPS to compare your location with a database of where the Pokémon are, and if one happens to be where your phone is pointing, it superimposes the image of the Poké-monster onto the image of your surroundings generated by the phone’s camera, thus:

A photo of a pokemon cartoon fish superimposed on a camera shot of a sidewalk

It sounds to me like the creators of this game successfully mapped their Pokémon population data onto a map of the Real World at what is effectively a 1:1 scale.

There’s a lot going on in Pokémon Go, but the idea of a map with a 1:1 scale is what really caught my imagination. A life-size map, rendered at one mile to the mile, is the basis for apps and augmented reality glasses, but would have made almost no sense before digital data visualization was a thing. Lewis Carroll spoofed the whole idea of a 1:1 map in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.

Mein Herr looked so thoroughly bewildered that I thought it best to change the subject. “What a useful thing a pocket-map is!” I remarked. “That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?” “About six inches to the mile.” “Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!” “Have you used it much?” I enquired. “It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.
source: Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893)
(http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48795 )

Lewis Carroll has another map spoof that I like even better, in his classic epic poem, The Hunting of the Snark. The subject map (reproduced above) was procured by the captain to aid in their hunting expedition.

He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand. "What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?" So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply "They are merely conventional signs! "Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes! But we've got our brave Captain to thank: (So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best-- A perfect and absolute blank!"
Lewis Carroll – The Hunting of the Snark (1874-76) (http://people.duke.edu/~ng46/topics/lewis-carroll.htm)

If you’ve never heard Boris Karloff’s narration of The Hunting of the Snark in his very best Grinch voice, you really should. You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhcE3zc7V-8

I’ll end by mentioning a couple of books that I liked, whose stories depend in part on their weird, maybe unmappable, topography.

The city & the city by China Miéville (2009) is a wonderful murder mystery that takes place in the the twin cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, somewhere on an unnamed coastline in Eastern Europe. The two cities resemble West and East Berlin economically and politically, but they co-exist in exactly the same location.

This isn’t parallel-universe science fiction, it’s political fiction: the only reason the two very distinct cities can be at the same place at the same time is that their respective citizens agree (under some duress) to believe that they do. Pockets of one city abut pockets of the other, with many places “cross-hatched” so the area is simultaneously in both cities. It’s a great story that I heartily recommend, and I would love to see a map of the twin cities and their fractal shared border.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (2010) reads like a historical adventure-romance of Napoleonic England, except that England has a long and now-dormant history of interactions with the land of fairies, that seems to be exploding into life again as the story progresses. I love the way the entire novel is peppered with footnotes and references to magical textbooks that manage to sound both officious and not quite sane at the same time.

The fairy lands can be reached from England on “fairy roads” that pop up at random throughout the countryside. I imagine a map of the setting of this story would have two planes, one (Faerie) hovering over the other (England). Occasionally gravity wells would form in the upper plane and spiral down to England like tornadoes, and terminate in a new fairy road. That’s how I visualize it anyway!

Thanks,
Dorn
6/29/19

Plein Air

So I have been painting more. My successful artist friend says he paints every single day! His work is quite beautiful so I presume a side benefit is ‘practice makes perfect’, but I’m afraid right now I’m motivated because it gives me something enjoyable to do. I like being outside and I like walking my dog. So my methodology is often to walk the dog while carrying my travel easel and to pause when I see something interesting to paint and then paint it. There is some necessity to work fast because the light will change too much if you don’t. That works for my dog. There is a special term in French for this painting outside activity: Plein Air. This landscape of a farm road was painted earlier this week.

Stand Up for Yourself

While sorting out my post workforce life, in the first couple of weeks I felt like something was off. I now think one of my problems was that I wasn’t standing enough. At work I had made a standing desk out of a tray table and at home, I didn’t think to replicate it at first. It was about four years ago that a facebook friend posted about loving her standing desk. “Hmmmmm, that might be worth trying”, I thought, since she was really raving about it. By coincidence, there was an empty paper box in the hallway on my next day going into the office and I was able to test out the concept on the cheap by putting my keyboard and monitor on the box. I have to say it took a while to get used to. My legs were sore at first but I became accustomed to standing within a few weeks. I also had the problem of leaning my thighs on the desk rim that I had to overcome – lest they acquire a permanent ridge! Once the concept was proven I was able to upgrade by getting approval to order a $32 tray table.

Once I identified this problem, I just needed to fix my desk at home. I was able to do this with just a couple of stools, one for the monitor and one for the keyboard. My low budget set up is shown below.  These days, back at my old office, every new workstation is automatically a desk which easily converts from sitting to standing, because even the government is realizing the benefits of a healthier workforce. The proven benefits of a standing desk are that it will reduce the risk of diabetes, heart disease, early death (Um, OK, maybe we in the third age are immune to that one!), weight gain and obesity. They have been proven to reduce back pain as well. If you want to avoid being too sedentary, it’s easy – consider standing up for yourself!

Bitlife, part 2

– In which Dorn riffs on Lona’s recent “Bitlife” blog post.

I thought I’d take a break from parallel blog play, and try to continue (sort of) the theme of Bitlife that Lona’s post so elegantly contrasted with being In the Real World (IRL). Thinking about a game that simulates the Real World reminded me of a game we played as kids, one we invented for ourselves, which set that simulation on its head: we in the Real World simulated a board game. We had this huge pair of wooden dice and we decided our basement was a similarly expanded game board. We were the game pieces, and we had to scramble over the game “squares”: chairs, tables, boxes, TV sets. (I have no idea why we had those huge wooden dice. At the time I perhaps thought it was just de rigueur 1960’s home decor. They were probably made of Norwegian Wood.)

Playing the game (which we called “Game“) felt something like I imagine participating in a Human Chessboard feels, but our game was much simpler, maybe about equivalent in complexity to a Human Candyland. One had to move the required number of squares and race to the end. One couldn’t use the basement floor, not because it was forbidden or boiling lava or anything, but simply because, just like in the Candyland universe, moving game pieces outside the squares had no meaning.

(Human chessboards have been played on for centuries and can be found all over the world. The picture below from Wikipedia shows human chess at the World Bodypainting Festival in Pörtschach am Wörthersee, Austria.)

Photo by JIP – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41470182

So we have board games that simulate being IRW (Hasbro’s classic Game of Life is an example), and IRW activities that simulate board games, like human chess and our Game. Bitlife is a computer app that simulates being IRW–I wondered if there were IRW activities that could simulate a computer app?

I thought of one almost immediately. Given that smart phones actually have an app that allows them to act as a telephone, maybe that old party game Telephone counts? But since Telephone actually predates computer apps (and computers, and maybe even telephones), that feels like a cheat. Instead, how about an IRW activity that simulates a simple digital adding machine?

I thought of a human digital adding machine “game”. I don’t know if I am inventing it myself. I have never heard of it, but that might just be because it’s no fun. It sounds awfully math-geeky, even to me. In a pathetic attempt to make it sound more fun, you could mentally replace the word “ball” where-ever I use it below with “bottle of beer”.

Human chess can be understood by learning the moves that chess pieces can make on a chess board, and then letting people take the places of the pieces and move by the same rules. My human digital adding machine can be understood (I hope) in the same way.

The humans playing Adding Machine all stand in a line. Each human might receive a ball during the game from another human. If a human ever receives a second ball, he or she must give one ball to the person to his or her left, and throw the other ball away.

Another human plays the adding machine User. He or she inputs the numbers to be added by handing out balls to the people playing the Adding Machine components. At the end of the process, the User gets the answer to the arithmetic problem by seeing by who is left holding a ball, and who is empty-handed.

Photo of a wooden adding machine
Source: https://woodgears.ca/marbleadd/

Here is the machine that these humans are simulating. Marbles fall down tracks, and the humans (except the User) correspond to the little wobbly wooden switches that cause marbles to fall to the left (passed on to another switch/human) or to the right (thrown away). The wooden switches and humans each have a value, from right to left 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc., and the arithmetic performed is in binary, just like most computers. Watch this video to see the adding machine in action.

Can you imagine a line people standing in a row passing balls back and forth, and then the User checking to see what answer they came up with? Does it help to imagine them half-naked and covered in body paint?

This whole idea of an addition problem being solved by a group of people who don’t know what the problem is, and don’t even need to know how to add, or speak the language of the User, reminds me of a delightful conceit found in the Pulitzer prize-winning book Gödel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

In the book, Hofstadter explores many wonderful and fantastical concepts, including conversations that are held with a sentient ant colony. The ants aren’t sentient, but the way they move and interact with each other reveals an overarching organization, and even intelligence. Here’s an excerpt (Aunt Hillary is the name of the ant colony). It’s long (as is the book), but if it grabs your imagination, give the book a try! Thanks!

Anteater: Silly fellow! That's not the way it happens. Ant colonies don't converse out loud, but in writing. You know how ants form trails leading them hither and thither? Achilles: Oh, yes-usually straight through the kitchen sink and into my peach jam. Anteater: Actually, some trails contain information in coded form. If you know the system, you can read what they're saying just like a book. Achilles: Remarkable. And can you communicate back to them? Anteater: Without any trouble at all. That's how Aunt Hillary and I have conversations for hours. I take a stick and draw trails in the moist ground, and watch the ants follow my trails. Presently, a new trail starts getting formed somewhere. I greatly enjoy watching trails develop. As they are forming, I anticipate how they will continue (and more often I am wrong than right). When the trail is completed, I know what Aunt Hillary is thinking, and I in turn make my reply. Achilles: There must be some amazingly smart ants in that colony, I'll say that. Anteater: I think you are still having some difficulty realizing the difference in levels here. Just as you would never confuse an individual tree with a forest, so here you must not take an ant for the colony. You see, all the ants in Aunt Hillary are as dumb as can be. They couldn't converse to save their little thoraxes! Achilles: Well then, where does the ability to converse come from? It must reside somewhere inside the colony! I don't understand how the ants can all be unintelligent, if Aunt Hillary can entertain you for hours with witty banter. Tortoise: It seems to me that the situation is not unlike the composition of a human brain out of neurons. Certainly no one would insist that individual brain cells have to be intelligent beings on their own, in order to explain the fact that a person can have an intelligent conversation.

– Dorn
6/26/19

Bitlife

Everytime I spend time with my grandkids I learn something about popular culture. Apparently the latest craze is a text only game called Bitlife. Bitlife is everything you do in real life (IRL) but it is compressed into about half an hour!

“I’m walking my dog”, says Julia. I already walked my dog this morning IRL, I’m thinking.

“I have six grandchildren,” she says. Hmmmm, IRL I only have five.

“Do you talk about your lives with your friends”, I ask.

“My friend had to kill her father because he was a pedaphile”, says Julia.

Yikes!

They are begging me to play but as a person of the third age I feel like it’s just IRL. Most of it seems to be ‘been there, done that’ territory (except for the pedaphile father!), but they find it fun. When they scream out that they are getting a car, I say, “I have a car”.  At first I thought that there was some altruism build into the game because I heard things like “I’m helping my grandson pay for college”, but then I hear Willow talk about having a life of crime next time she played so I’m not sure.

“I’m 104!!!”

Maybe there is something to it. Willow insists that I help her play out her life of crime next round so I will ‘improve our relationship’, as Bitlife calls it, by joining in. I hope nobody gets hurt!!!