attention Fake Steve Jobs, you owe me a new Starbucks. This made me snort my venti sugarfree gingerbread latte:
Al Gore meets Klingon ambassador
Well it was a momentous occasion as Al was lauded by the United Federation of Planets for his work to save planet Earth. He’s shown here with the Klingon ambassador Lord Koloth.
If only it were true.
If you’ve seen the Planet Earth series on DVD (or even better, high-definition DVD) then you’ll recall the astounding footage of a great white shark hunting seals for food, leaping out of the water like a leviathan and twisting in midair while it lunges towards its prey. Now you don’t need the DVD – check out this astounding hi-speed photography of a great white hunt. These pictures are simply awesome. In the original sense of the word.
Surfer dude comes up with the Theory of Everything?
An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.
[…]
Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.
Although the work of 39 year old Garrett Lisi still has a way to go to convince the establishment, let alone match the achievements of Albert Einstein, the two do have one thing in common: Einstein also began his great adventure in theoretical physics while outside the mainstream scientific establishment, working as a patent officer, though failed to achieve the Holy Grail, an overarching explanation to unite all the particles and forces of the cosmos.
Intriguingly, the theory apparently has something to do with “E8“, an 8-dimensional mathematical shape with 248 points that pops up in theoretical physics and in nature. So, the universe might well look like this, in a sense:
There’s a lot more information about E8 at the American Institute of Math – including some clever marketing text describing E8’s mysteries as containing more information that the human genome, and the calculations delving into its nature being the size of Manhattan if written out in tiny print on paper.
Earlier, I mused about whether the inherent limit on human interaction group size would apply to online social networks or not. That limit is called “Dunbar’s Number” and is estimated to be ~150, based on observations of social networks among primates and then extrapolating to humans taking increased brainpower into consideration. An intriguing piece in the WSJ asks whether online social networks are still bound by Dunbar’s number or whether technological innovation might permit us to exceed it:
But there is reason to believe that the social-networking sites will enable their users to burst past Dunbar’s number for friends, just as humans have developed and harnessed technology to surpass their physical limits on speed, strength and the ability to process information.
Robin Dunbar, an Oxford anthropologist whose 1993 research gave rise to the magical count of 150, doesn’t use social-networking sites himself. But he says they could “in principle” allow users to push past the limit. “It’s perfectly possible that the technology will increase your memory capacity,” he says.The question is whether those who keep ties to hundreds of people do so to the detriment of their closest relationships — defined by Prof. Dunbar as those formed with people you turn to when in severe distress.
The problem here is the definition of the word “relationship”. Dunbar’s definition of “closest” is just one of many possible ones, and the various definitions might well overlap. But does that mean that business relationships are excluded from Dunbar’s limit? If so, then you might expect to see many more contacts on LinkedIn, which caters to a business networking model, than on Facebook which is primarily stalker heaven. LinkedIn is approaching critical mass in terms of network effect; RWW found over 80% of their business contacts already using it, for example.
There are surely other models one could employ to map relationships: blogrolls, chat client lists, twitter fans/friends, etc. I think any one of these – or a weighted combination of all of them – would be good data sets to see whether Dunbar’s number truly holds online or not.
If not for the fact that Steven den Beste is already a founding member, I’d label Mark the SDB of the Otakusphere. He’s got another long, deeply insightful essay up, about strategies of choice. The idea is to look critically at Barry Schwartz’s idea of a “paradox of choice” (ie the concept that too much choice is detrimental). A book by Chris Anderson, The Long Tail, devotes some space to analyzing whether the paradox truly exists and whether or not there is a “paradise of choice” instead. Mark deftly summarizes the arguments and lays out his own analysis. Go take a look.
I think that there is some legitimacy to the idea that the paradox of choice represents a limitation of the medium rather than anything inherently wrong with too much choice in the abstract. However, we humans are probably wired for some optimal N in decision-making; an example is that N ~ 100 when it comes to our social circle (I wonder if anyone has explored that using Facebook or LinkedIn as a dataset?). As a strategy, “satisficing” (defining your desired parameters and then choosing the first candidate that meets them rather than trying to find the “best”) is probably the most robust in the long run. The concept is well-described in the aphorism, “perfection is the enemy of the good” and from political candidates to digital cameras, it’s pretty much the only way to make a meaningful choice rather than be ensnared in perpetual indecision.
Philosophically speaking, should there be less choice? Like Mark, I am leery of mandating it to be so, but the question of whether there should be less choice to increase “optimal-ness” (in the abstract sense) is an intriguing one. Is it true, for example, that someone who buys a product where there is relatively less choice (ie, a gaming console) is happier with their choice than someone who buys a product where there is far more choice (like a phone) ? Politics is a natural counterexample; almost no one seems happy with their choice, despite it usually being binary (for all practical purposes). One can then postulate an “optimal” N about which happiness is maximized. But here again I think that too much N is preferable to not enough N, because then at least you have the satisficing strategy to fall back on, whereas there is no such mechanism at the low end.
There’s a story arc in progress at XKCD (part 1, part 2, part 3) which reminded me of Steven’s post from last week. In a nutshell, the stay at home mom next door is actually a super hacker. Thus she combines the archetypes of otaku dream girl (ODG) and MILF1 into one. Her daughter was trained like Samurai Jack in the sacred arts at teh feet of all the masters and has become the greatest hacker of our generation. Here’s a panel from Part 2:
The funny thing about the ODG is that no analogue exists on the opposite side of the gender aisle. Is there an ODB (boy), of whom all otaku girls dream? In my experience, most of my even moderately geeky women friends preferred men completely outside their archetype. Otaku women tend to reserve otaku men for friends, not mates. There are of course exceptions to this rule, but the trend seems (anecdotally) solid.
the other random observation I have is that the general geek category has its own sub-taxonomy. XKCD is clearly a “hacker” comic, whereas Haibane.info is more solidly in the “otaku” camp. I’d classify Shamus as a Gamer, and there are also the Fantasy and Scifi camps (each with their own subgenres). But we are all united by the ur-label “geek”, and all of us dabble in the other genres. Maybe XKCD will notice this post linkback and do a comic on it.
[1]No linky. If you dunno what this is, google it. Haibane.info is a kawaii-safe zone. Unrelated, anyone know a sexy plugin for footnotes? Now I’ve got Drupal envy.
that’s a space craft!
via Eric Berger is this classic video about how to turn a sphere inside out. In the process they cover all sorts of topics from basic topology. It’s 20 minutes long, but utterly fascinating if you’re a math geek.
Steven has, unsurprisingly, an insightful take on what would ordinarily be a trite topic. My only comment is that you never see what happens after the guy gets the otaku dream girl, in anime or for that matter in any genre. That’s where the real challenge, and the reward lies. In a large sense the market for otaku dream girls is driven by the adolescent audience’s inability to look past the first goal; even though on a temporal basis, that goal is only the first and (hopefully) briefest stage of a very long journey.
And to get an idea of how long that journey can be, emotionally speaking, let us heed the wisdom of aged Sophocles, as quoted in Plato’s Republic: “most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master. ”
I do my Very Serious Analysis elsewhere, so permit me this flight of levity on what would normally be a Very Serious Topic. I just love the headline on this story:
Battle at Pakistan Cleric’s Stronghold
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Oct. 26 — Pakistani security forces exchanged heavy gunfire with militants at the sprawling seminary of an increasingly powerful extremist cleric in the troubled North-West Frontier Province today, according to regional police officials.
Is it just me or does this evoke images of a D&D campaign? My “DM-mode” is already fired up:
A desolate series of hills rises above your party. Sprawling across their barren shoulders rises the great Keep, a seminary where the dark cleric Fazlullah amasses his army of minions. The grizzled veterans in the town of Kabal, largest in the northwest realm of Swat, spoke fearfully of angering the cleric, having borne witness to his whims and fancies – including many of their daughters, for his appetites, and their sons, for his troops. Your task is to penetrate the Keep and retrieve the Book of Mustafa, a powerful tome which the evil cleric has used to further his own ambitions at the expense of the good folkspeople of Swat, and beyond.
Two things occur to me. One, where’s the market for adventurers? If this really was a D&D world you can bet that dark clerics like Fazlullah would be attracting greedy bands of loot-obsessed PCs left and right. Don’t we have an analouge of high-level single-classed fighters in our world? (we certainly have rogues.)
Two, I wonder if there isn’t enough material in the real world campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq to provide adequate fodder for a “DM of the Rings” style parody. Now that would be just be the awesomest.
