This image from The Cosmic Background Imager may be the closest we can get to visualizing the beginning of the universe. This is the fine structure of an explosion the size of the universe, as it begins to change from a state of raw featureless high-energy plasma into lumpy areas of matter and space. This is the transitional state between everything being all one thing, into everything being a bunch of little things.
Author: Charles
Powerpoint Syndrome
I don’t usually read over someone’s shoulder, but on a cross country flight a few months ago, I couldn’t help myself. The fellow next to me was reading the Wall Street Journal, there was an article about how Powerpoint and its bullet point system was affecting corporate communications. Business analysts agreed that Powerpoint was only good for presenting simple ideas in a linear fashion, people tended to dumb down their ideas to fit the Powerpoint format. The article asserted that Scott McNealy hated this effect so much that he banished Powerpoint from all Sun corporate offices. Having written a few complex multimedia presentations with fancy branching, I had to completely agree with the article. Powerpoint is a straightjacket for the mind, the structures determine how and what you can say. I never really understood this until I worked at a huge corporation that lived and breathed in Powerpoint. People spent their whole days emailing each other about what to put in their Powerpoint presentations. I asked one of their managers to make a simple decision about what color to make their website logo, she went in her office and came back in about an hour with about 5 pages of Powerpoint color printouts of color combinations, they held a quick meeting and everyone voted on them. Powerpoint presentations are an embodiment of a formal managerial hierarchy.
Even the structure of the typical outline is a eurocentric idea, it is basically unheard of in some Asian cultures. I work with exchange students from Japan, the hardest thing they have to learn is how to write papers in English. It’s hard for them because they have no idea of how to make an outline. HTML does a pretty good job at outlines, I’ll do a representative example of an outline for a story.
- Introduction
- State the Main Thesis
- Main Body
- Supporting Points
- Each point supports the following point
- Each point is a link in the chain of argument
- The chain of logic will lead inevitably to the Conclusion
- Conclusion
- Restate Main Thesis as a conclusion
This structure makes absolutely no sense to the students from Japan that I’ve encountered. They were trained in a system called "kishotenketsu" that is an entirely different structure for stories. In this system, the supporting points loop around the main point without creating a linear argument. The points are intended to only obliquely reference the main point, it is up to the reader to infer how this relates to the main thesis. There is no firm conclusion, only an ambiguous ending that may point to several possible outcomes. Again, it is up to the reader to form their own conclusion. Perhaps the best example of kishotenketsu is the movie "Rashomon." The movie explains a crime from the point of view of 4 different people, each of them claim to have committed the crime. We see the crime repeated 4 times with subtle variations, in the end there is no clear indication of who really is the criminal, the viewer must decide.
The kishotenketsu structure is so predominant in the minds of Japanese students that it is really hard for them to come out and make a straightforward argument in a term paper. Japanese textual styles are quite indirect, they must lead but not push the reader towards the point. It takes a lot of effort for these students to learn new structures, but I always admonish them, that’s the whole point of learning foreign languages, so you can learn to think in new ways.
I sometimes show these students an old standard journalistic technique, "pyramid style." It’s much more practically oriented so they catch on to it immediately. The first paragraph of the story, the "lead," must have all the important facts, who what when where why how. The facts are presented in the order of importance, with no conclusion at all. This style is primarily intended for the convenience of editors, who can lop off a few paragraphs at the end and not lose anything important.
There are many other valid structures for stories and libraries of stories. The reason I’m describing these in detail is because I’m fed up with Radio ‘s outline-centric structure. It is amazing how much Dave can blather about how his awesome algorithms are changing the world, but it is clear that he’s oblivious to what he’s really doing. There are professional writers, editors, linguists, and librarians who have studied these ideas for decades, but Dave has no use for them, he’s too busy trying to change the web to reflect his own scattered thinking processes. There is an old hacker saying, "the Street finds its own uses for things." The "semantic web" will not be created by coders like Dave, it might happen with his tools, but certainly not in the way that he designed it to work. The world has moved on since Dave wrote his first outliner, but he has not.
I Love my Periodontist
I hate dentists, but I love my periodontist. I went in today for a checkup, and as usual, we chatted about biomechanics. I have problems with TMJ syndrome, if my bite isn’t perfectly aligned down to a few microns, I get horrible migraines. My periodontist also had TMJ problems, so he studied the treatments and is quite an expert in the subject. It’s kind of odd since he’s a periodontist, usually orthodontists do this kind of work. But I’m lucky to have him, he only works part time and teaches at the local dental college, which is considered the best in the US. I’m getting the best dental care in the world, and it’s even cheap enough that I can afford it.
But the main reason I love my periodontist is that he understands why I hate dentists. I ended up with him to repair the damage done to my bite by overly aggressive, clumsy work by a dentist that I refer to as "Dr. Hamfist." After hearing continual complaints about Dr. Hamfist’s rough treatment from other patients, my periodontist actually went over to his office and chewed him out! I guess dentists are so used to inflicting pain, they don’t realize when they’re causing needless pain from their own rough handling. It must be pretty unusual for a dentist to complain directly to another dentist, on behalf of the patients who are complaining about him. I asked him about his confrontation with Dr. Hamfist, he got really riled up and told me, "people like that give dentistry a bad name!"
So today I’m in the chair, the exam showed no particular problems, but I’d confessed to the hygienist that I had been slacking off and only brushing 4 or 5 times a week and flossing maybe 2 or 3 times a week. Then later on, as she’s starting to polish my teeth and I’m pinned there helpless with the pneumatic polisher in my mouth, she starts grilling me. "You know you’re lucky, don’t you? We have patients who could brush and floss 3 times a day and never have as good teeth and gums as you do. But you know your luck is going to run out!" To which I could only respond "aaah ah aahh ah." I like my dental hygienist too, she makes me laugh.
BlogTV: The Old Man and the War Against The Trees
Japanese society is formalized in many respects, the Japanese language has many ritualized aspects that shape every social interaction. A complex system of “keigo” (respect language) is used in every spoken interaction, and this confrontation between a cranky old man and Tokyo city officials is a perfect example. Even a direct confrontation must be done in the most indirect, nonoffensive manner. The old man speaks gruffly in rough abusive words like “bakatare” (asshole) while the officials are always polite, bowing and saying “shitsurei itashimasu” (pardon my rudeness) even after the old man throws one of them in front of a car.
This old man is furious because because leaves fall on his house and in his gutters and he has to sweep them from his genkan. The genkan is an area inside the front door of every home, where you must take your shoes off and “ascend” into the house. Even though these trees are by a stream across the street, he decides to cut the problem off at its source. He has been sawing limbs off the trees since last autumn, and the city officials are trying to get him to stop it. All along the stream, there is a majestic row of greenery, except in a zone of sickly, gnarled trees for about a block around his house.
Now it is spring, and time for a followup. New damage to the trees is clearly visible, massive limbs have been sawed off, leaving ragged stumps poking in the air. The TV crew asks the old man what he’s doing and he boasts that he’s going to kill the trees and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop him. I wonder how much of this story would have happened without the camera crew egging him on. The old man calls up to tell the City off, with the cameras watching. The City officials know that he’s been cutting down branches, he says there are no lower branches left, so now he’s just going to kill the trees outright. He speaks a guttural “rachaakane-ya,” a corruption of “rachi ga akanai” which is an idiom for “the gate is closed,” he is declaring an end to negotiations. The city official responds with about the politest keigo you can use for a prohibition, “kono toki moshiagemashita you ni.. ano.. katte ni o-kiri ni naru you na koto wa narazu.” Keigo expressions do not translate well, but literally, it says, “at this time, we have humbly told you things such as.. umm.. doing such things as cutting whatever you want, don’t do that.” The old man explodes and starts yelling, “yarimasu! bakayarou!” (I’m going to do it! Asshole!)
Now with extra courage from the TV camera behind him, he goes over and takes a little hand axe over and starts chopping the bark all around the circumference of the tree so it will dry up and die. Soon a delegation from the City shows up to try to get the guy to stop vandalizing the trees. The obsequious official gets nowhere with his polite approach, the old man threatens to punch him. To defuse the situation, an even more polite woman says, “shokubutsu wo sonshou suru koto wa kinjirarete orimasu node, sore wa shinai you ni onegai itashimasu.” Another extremely indirect prohibition, “things such as cutting of trees are humbly prohibited, we beg your indulgence to not do things like that.” She’s practically begging him not to hurt the trees. He shoves his nose right in her face and starts howling, “nan datte?! ningen wa ii no ka dou natte mo.” (What did you say? The People are always right, no matter what). So he gets mad and throws them out into the street, tossing one of them right in front of an oncoming car. The old man retreats into his yard and closes the gate, literally the “gate is closed” to the City officials. They bow and walk off. The officials explain in the politest possible way that this guy has been warned before, and now he is in a heap of trouble. The video ends with the guy wistfully looking up into the canopy of green leaves, he obviously has only one thought: how long until this tree is dead? Even with the denuded trees, this is a shady and peaceful spot to rest alongside a river, a rare enough thing in Tokyo to make it worth preserving. But the old man can only see one thing, a living garbage factory with only one purpose: to foul his genkan. But even if he kills the trees, the dead leaves will still end up in his genkan.
Postscript: I had presumed that this old man was shown on TV to ridicule the extremeness of his views, but alas, it appears that this is more common than I had suspected. I have been informed that the cutting of trees to remove autumn litter is a subject in Alex Kerr’s new book Dogs and Demons. Apparently it is a fairly widespread practice to cut the limbs off trees just before the leaves fall, the trees gradually become top-heavy and stunted. Through anti-environmental acts like this, Kerr argues Japan is at war against nature and itself.
Face Recognition
I have been producing a series of small artworks for almost 25 years, it is my longest single lifetime art project. In random places everywhere I go, in oil paint, spray paint, crayon, chalk, or even a with a rock, I’ve inscribed this image.
Perceptual psychologists can measure an emotional respose to viewing an image by measuring the amount of dilation of the pupils. One of the strongest emotional responses comes from viewing a face. While researching this effect, it was discovered that the eyes were the primary trigger for facial recognition, and even viewing of two dots will trigger the brain’s facial recognition system. The mind will engage with the task of trying to interpret the dots as eyes, and will exhibit the same emotional response as if viewing a real face.
Ever since I heard of this research, I’ve been placing dots in unusual places. Any two dots will do, I usually make them approximately life size, but that doesn’t matter, the effect is the same. I call it a subliminal artwork, it’s intended to give people a creepy feeling they’re being watched. I especially like to put them in places near the ceiling where nobody is likely to paint over them.
I noticed one of my neighbors, Bob Zoell, totally stole my idea and did a huge exhibit of “dot paintings” for the ACE Gallery in LA. He did the two dots, but about 40 feet tall on ugly turquoise backgrounds. There are a few other people who know of my dots project, so I want to make one thing perfectly clear: I have never collaborated with anyone nor have I ever incited anyone to draw two dots, not in any manner or medium.
Update, June 2014: More than a decade later, I felt I should explain that last sentence. It was a sly reference to Lucas Helder, the “Smiley Face Bomber.” Helder drove across Iowa planting pipe bombs in mailboxes, some of them were within a few miles of my home. I decided to make vague disclaimer that the two “eyes” he made on the map had nothing to do with me. Note that the map dates are incorrect, Helder was not arrested on May 18, he was arrested on May 7, two days before I wrote this post.
Experiments in Art and Technology: 1968
I recently learned that Rumsfeld is a former RAND associate, it reminded me of an old Art History document I read. Back around 1968, a group of artists banded together for a project called Experiments in Art and Technology. Some of the more famous products were performance artworks by Claes Oldenberg. My particular favorite EAT artwork is a piece of art glass produced by Corning Glass, it’s in the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago, it was produced in the same way as laminated windows for the Apollo spacecraft.
But my favorite experiment was at RAND. A noted conceptual artist (I wish I could remember who, probably Baldessari or someone like that) was paired with RAND and given an office in their building. He received permission to distribute a questionnaire to all employees, on RAND letterhead. It was a two page form, page 1 had a terse statement introducing the artist and the EAT Project, and instructions to fill out the questionnaire on page 2 and return it to him via interoffice mail. Page 2 merely said "please fill out your answers in the space provided" atop a blank page.
It should come as no surprise that the artist was escorted off RAND premises and asked never to return.
Bloghard
It appears there is a certain blog blowhard who sits around all day thinking how he would handle things if he were the New York Times. Too bad he’s not thinking in more practical terms, about how a New York Times delivery boy would handle things. Someone needs to spend less time fantasizing they are Arthur Sulzberger or William Randolph Hearst and spend more time worrying about why nobody got their newspapers last week.
I don’t know what someone could be thinking when they make pronouncements to customers that they should not fight battles they cannot win. If customers have to battle for the mere recognition that a bug exists, let alone a solution, this is not a good sign. Especially if the developer says you can’t win. Some developers would cut off their nose to spite their face.
The Moment After Glory
White pear trees in my yard are blooming, the trees are covered with bright white blossoms and are a local landmark. Under the trees, a slow white cascade of petals drifts to the ground. Occasionally a bird slashes through the branches and leaves a trail of falling petals in its wake.
The Japanese have a term for this, "the Moment After Glory." This moment is considered the most beautiful moment, the moment just after the blooms have reached their peak and begin to decay. In that moment we reach a wistful state of recognition of the impermanence of things. The first bloom attracts us by its beauty, but the falling petals remind us that all glory is ephemeral.
Unsharp Mask
The most inscrutable feature of Photoshop has got to be the unsharp mask filter. I’ve worked hard to study it and understand its functions, and I’ve tried to explain it to people and they positively do not understand. And probably that’s because I still do not fully understand it. It’s only natural, it’s a horribly complex trick cooked up by darkroom geeks that think in layers of film. I always tell people it’s not unsharp mask, it’s mask unsharp. You are doing a blur and then masking the unsharp pixels. Subtract that mask layer back out of the image, and you’ve done a very complex image transform, it heightens contrast only along the edges and tonal transitions that are most suceptible to degradation from blur. It sharpens and increases contrast only where it is needed. That’s what confuses people, they think it’s an unsharp mask, so it unsharpens. Like I said, you’re masking out the unsharp.
Here’s a footnote I ran across in a new Japanese design magazine. This is absolutely the most dense and descriptive explanation of unsharp mask I’ve ever seen, and to add to the density, it’s full of difficult jargon expressed in kanji. But the curves tell the story (I’ll help a bit).
The left image is a black dot that has been blurred, it’s a regular old Gaussian blur. You see the greyscale curve underneath. The amount of Gaussian blur is the radius you see in the PS filter settings, it’s the radius of the blur effect. Now look a the image on the right. All those pixels that were blurred are now represented by the white ring, that is the mask. You can see the mask curve, it changes almost nothing in the midtones of the curve, but is amplified only along the transitional tones of the curve that changed during the blur. You get more contrast without messing up the midtone relationships in the image. There are horizontal clipping levels drawn across the top and bottom of the mask curve that clip the masked tones back into the same levels as the original curve. It’s a very strange image transfer function, I’ve seen this function explained with calculus using derivatives and integration, and my head just about exploded.
This math is a reproduction of an old analog process. Photographers used to make negative masks by contact printing the negative onto a new sheet of film. Direct contact between the neg and film makes a sharp mask. But if you put a clear sheet of acetate between the neg and the film, the gap will make the contact print blurred. The more sheets of film, the thicker the gap, the more blur is produced. The exposed and developed film is the unsharp mask. Sandwich it with the original negative, put the sandwich in an enlarger and print it, the final print is unsharp masked. It was a difficult process because you had to keep the layers precisely aligned in registration. It’s hard to keep little pieces of film aligned perfectly. Now you can do it with the poke of a button.
I’m still translating and pondering some details, but I learned a few tricks from that demo already. I even did a nice unsharp mask to this image, it held the tiny kanji pretty well, it’s about the best I’ve ever done. Japanese design magazines are just crammed with these great tips, this Fair Use sample is just a footnote.
Thank Kami-sama for Seven Eleven
My brother asked me if they had convenience stores in Japan like 7-11. Yes they do, and they are Nirvana.
Back when I was a student in Japan, I stayed at a small temple way out in the country, the host family was on the edge of the poverty line. I was starving to death, there was never enough food. And what food there was, was always the same: squid. I remember eating squid breakfast lunch and dinner, sometimes 5 or 6 meals in a row. Last night’s leftover squid was there on my plate for breakfast. Squid sashimi, broiled, baked, stuffed, shredded, dehydrated, I’ve consumed about every single edible product you can make out of squid. I love squid, and it is the local specialty, it was at peak season and cheap, but you can only eat so much squid. Over the course of a few weeks, I lost about 30 pounds.
So at every opportunity, on my 45 minute walks to and from school, I would search for other sources of food. Alas, that route mostly took me through the fishmarket, where the specialty was fresh squid. The best things I could find were some horrible vending machines near the train station selling hot canned coffee, Pocky, etc. I even considered eating a colorless food supplement gel bar called "Calorie-Mate" but I was never desperate enough to try it. I used to take different routes every day trying to find a decent place to eat breakfast or even a good vending machine. And then early one morning I was walking along a route I’d been before, and hey, I never noticed there was a 7-11 here, and I was just down this road yesterday! So I walked right up, the automatic door swept open, and I walked right in.
And I was right, there was no 7-11 here yesterday. Yesterday it was a cinder block shell, today it is a fully equipped 7-11 store with a sign up on top, everything in place and fully stocked. I walked in and abruptly landed right in the middle of the new boss giving the grand opening speech to his 5 employees, all assembled in a line wearing their 7-11 uniforms. Everything came to a halt. Ooops. With a few bows and a little "gomen" they understood I was not a crazy gaijin and could understand their language. The boss bowed and said he was sorry but they were not open yet, please come back tomorrow. I very politely said I was sorry to trouble them and I would come back. Darn it, no breakfast today. But from that day on, I was a regular customer. Finally I had something besides squid to eat.
I told that story to my brother, and he said I should have given them a US $1 bill and told them of the tradition of framing the first dollar a company earns and hanging it near the cash register. Then the Japanese store’s little talisman would be a US Greenback. I laughed and wished I’d thought of that. And then I realized, I didn’t have any US money at the time.