Author: admin

Every time I get ready to fly to somewhere on the other side of the world, I think of the people in the Flat Earth Society. I realize that some people join such societies out of a sense of irony.

But apparently there are people who really believe the Earth is flat, just as there are people who believe that the Beatles are a vast conspiracy, or that the brain of our Republican candidate for president is not crumbling into red dust before our eyes.

I wonder what those people think when they get on a plane and fly half way around the world. Or maybe you could never get them on that plane in the first place, for fear that they might fly over the edge and be lost forever.

Suppose everybody could turn a dial up or down to modulate their mood, the way we can turn the temperature up or down on a thermostat. Would this be a good thing or a bad thing?

On the one hand, it would probably wipe out the entire market for certain dangerous and harmful drugs. And that would not only make people healthier, but would save lives.

On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t be such a good thing if everyone were in a great mood all the time. Sure we would feel great, but we might no longer feel inclined to work through and tackle real problems.

So the good scenario is that the world of people might be a more cheerful and perhaps kinder place. The bad scenario is that everything might go to hell and we wouldn’t even notice or care.

On the balance, maybe there are advantages to sometimes feeling miserable.

I have been using my noise function for more than four decades. For most of that time I thought of it as a tool for computer graphics. I’ve used it to create natural looking textures and shapes, to create realistic snow and fog, to make animated character movement appear more natural, or just to blow wind through the leaves in simulated trees.

But more recently I have been using it in quite a different way. As I implement various image analysis algorithms, I find that coherent noise is a very good stand-in for real-world data.

The danger with many analytic algorithms is that your approach might work really great with clean data that you cook up in the lab, yet fall apart when presented with the messiness of the real world.

By adding noise to my test data, I am able to shake things up, and make things more difficult for my algorithms. The result is that my code ends up being more robust and less prone to failure.

It’s kind of like what happens when you get a vaccine shot. Whenever you are exposed to a little bit of something that can harm you, your body starts to develop defenses.

I guess you could say that whatever doesn’t kill your algorithm makes it stronger.

It’s nice to see some good news showing up on the national stage these days. For a while I had been dreading the morning newspaper.

I am hoping that today this is just the beginning of a dignified Walz to the Whitehouse, and more sensible times ahead for everyone. Is that too much to ask for?

I really loved the definitions provided yesterday to my non-existent words, which was apparently done with the assistance of ChatGPT. What fascinates me is how easy I found it to fit those new-words-with-definitions into meaningful sentences.

I wonder whether this might be a way to write a new kind of story. First come up with new words that do not yet exist. Then ask for definitions from generative A.I. — which is, after all, just a big recombination machine for what has already been thought of by actual humans.

Finally, use those definitions as kernel thoughts from which to build a story, or even an entire fictional universe. At first readers might need to refer to a lexicon to follow the plot.

On the other hand, I remember the first time I read Jabberwocky when I was a kid. Many words were unfamiliar, but I knew exactly what was going on.

I often do the Spelling Bee puzzle in the New York Times. It’s nice way to exercise my brain, while pleasantly filling the time when I’m waiting for this or that.

When you do a puzzle like that, which requires you to find words, you quickly realize how many perfectly plausible words don’t exist. Many combinations of letters follow all of the proper rules of spelling, but they simply aren’t in the language.

I just today’s puzzle, for example, I came up with brini, intort, thiron and hibortion, all of them perfectly pleasant sounding, and none of them in the dictionary.

I wonder whether we could create a dictionary of alternate words. We could probably make it happen if we all worked together.

People could suggest meanings for various alternate words and then we could all vote on the most popular meaning. If nothing else it would be a fun activity.

As far as I know, there is no name for such a project. Maybe we should come up with a word for it.

I spent the last week hanging out with old friends at the ACM/Siggraph conference, seeing technical papers, and generally immersing myself. And I started to better understand the nature of the bond that we computer graphics people share with one another.

We are people who have a passion for math, and also a passion for art and visual expression. And we recognize other people who share those two passions, which in our minds are inextricably linked.

We don’t necessarily love computers — they are just a means to an end. The computers are basically plumbing. You don’t love your house because it has plumbing, but you definitely want it to have working sinks and toilets.

There is a particular kind of shared language that people have when they love both math and visual expression, and are excited about creating things that embody both of those loves. Siggraph is the best place to find those people, and to start a wonderful conversation with them.

For me, some of those wonderful conversations have now been going on for decades.

I admit that can be hard to focus the delightful ideas that I encountered at Siggraph. Alas, on the national stage an old jackass is trying to start a race war.

I wonder who he is going to go after next. The Italians? The Irish? Probably not the Germans.

I wouldn’t put it past him to start attacking left handed people, if he thought it would inflame his base. After all, most people who would vote for him are right handed. And that may be as near to logical thinking as we are going to get from this moron.

In any case, I will try to put this ugliness out of my mind and circle back tomorrow to discussing the wonderful things I saw at Siggraph.

Siggraph just ended, and now my head is full of a million ideas. I need some time to digest.

I am sure it will all make sense in another day or two. Now I need to get some sleep.

Continuing from yesterday.

The other side of the coin is that What you get for all of this limitless power is not at all the same thing as what you get by doing it the old-fashioned way.

There is no actual human intelligence inside that magic box. Yes, it can endlessly reconstitute human knowledge and know-how, but it does so with zero judgment.

This is all perfectly fine when simulating tornadoes. But it’s something else altogether when simulating a person that you would like to get help from.

In the latter case, you get what you pay for. Free advice from a realistic but judgment-free bot is one thing. The actual thoughts of a caring human being are another thing entirely.