Crunch time

Tomorrow evening is the department-wide demo show here. Tonight I am working late at the University on my own projects, and I am aware that all around me, groups of students are hard at work, preparing their projects for the big event.

They have gathered with calm intensity all about the lab, descending like flocks of birds onto every available meeting and conference room, fiddling with code and with Kinects, making final adjustments to their demos.

Discarded coats are flung across empty chairs, and boxes of half-eaten pizza lie scattered upon lab tables, as young men and women stare at their computers with rapt and unwavering focus, speaking to each other in hushed tones as they lean in, gazing first into one laptop screen and then another.

I am sure these students are far too immersed in their process to stop and wonder how all of this might appear to an outside observer.

I, for one, think it is one of the most beautiful sights in all the world.

Seven eighth notes and a rest

The other day I tried an experiment. I took the rhythmic phrase “Romeo and Juliet” and created a stream-of-consciousness poem out of it right then and there — more or less trying to write a poem the way Jackson Pollock painted a picture.

Mostly I was drawn to the rhythm of the phrase “Romeo and Juliet” with its seven syllables, accents on the first and fifth — seven eighth notes and a rest in 2/4 time.

The rhythm inspired me to go for a beat vibe, but I wasn’t really satisfied with the result. It’s hard to do justice to an epic tale in just a few verses. Imagine Tolkien trying to squeeze his famous saga down to a few lines: “Frodo was short. He had a ring. Gandalf wore a hat.”

See what I mean? It lacks a certain something.

Yet that rhythmic phrase “Romeo and Juliet” with its wonderfully musical cadence has been rolling insistently around in my head; I can feel it working overtime somewhere in the back of my brain. It may just burst out again one of these days.

Quantitative reasoning

I’m sure Edward Tufte spends fully 50% of his time patiently explaining to people that the ingenious graphical map elucidating Napoleon’s march on Russia and its ill-fated aftermath were, in fact, the work of Charles Joseph Minard (1781-1870), not Edward Tufte himself, despite the inexplicable fact that Minard’s map appears as the most common result in a Google image search for “Tufte”.

 

(click to see larger image)

But does anybody listen? No.

So we end up living in an unfair world in which Tufte becomes widely mis-credited with Minard’s brilliant creation, in spite of the unceasing and commendable self-effacement with which Mr. Tufte himself no doubt tries to explain these facts to anyone who will listen.

Yet if one individual is to be credited with bringing the visual display of quantitative information into modern consciousness, it is surely the writer, director, comedienne and actor Elaine May, who popularized the essential concepts back in 1967, as you can see in the following succinct yet powerful demonstration:

 

(click to play video)

Star crossed blues

Romeo and Juliet
Spilled out on the summer street
Full of crazy karmic heat
Out for love and fun

Montague and Capulet
Ripping up the rules, they spent
All the summer full hell bent
Blazing like the Sun

Death rolled up and stole their breath
The streets are mad with lost desire
All scattered ashes from the fire
But nothing’s as it seems

Those clever kids, they cheated Death
For Romeo and Juliet
Will live forever, you can bet,
If only in our dreams

Babes in Arms meet the Zombie Apocalypse

I was trying to explain computer game culture to somebody today. I mean, in particular, the culture of people who make computer games.

When you visit a leading computer game production company, be it Valve Software or Bungie Games, you find a very specific aesthetic at work. One part of it is a gung-ho spirit, very much like the idea behind the 1939 MGM film Babes in Arms, in which the intrepid young Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney put on a show in a barn, pulling it off on a shoe-string through sheer guts and talent, improvising their way to immortality.

Except that it’s all mixed with an aesthetic out of Aliens (or, to be more precise, out of Id Software’s Doom). In the land of game production, the barn has already been overrun and firebombed by alien fiends from another dimension, the world itself now lies in sad smoking ruins, and creative genius thrives in the gutted warehouses, abandoned factories and broken detritus of a lost civilization.

Game studios are carefully dressed up to look like Dresden after the bombing, all burnt out and stripped down to bare concrete and rough steel beams, huge hollowed out cavernous spaces where game designers cluster their little cubicles like lone outposts bravely defending humanity’s last hope against the encroaching zombie horde.

The net effect is an eerie combination of gung-ho post-WWII optimism and surreal post-apocalyptic alienation. “Hey kids, my dad has a barn … let’s put on a show! Except we can’t ask for permission ’cause, um, my dad’s now a flesh eating zombie.”

Who could ask for a more inspiring work environment?

Thinking outside of the box

Yesterday, by coincidence, both Dave Brubeck and Oscar Niemeyer passed away. Two men in different fields, living on different continents, one American, the other Brazilian. And yet in my mind they were powerfully connected.

Brubeck was continually pushing the boundaries of what is possible in music. He took his influences from everything and everywhere, and used them to push ideas that were well beyond anything else that was happening at the time.

Perhaps his most famous musical intervention into the culture, among many, was his successful attack upon the ugly squat-shaped tower of the 4/4 time signature, that boring edifice which underlies western classical music, rock and roll, dance, blues, rap, really our entire metrical culture — an insistent thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-thumpa rhythm that dulls our senses and our lives, and beats us day after day into submission.

After a visit to the Middle East and India, Brubeck was exposed to other possibilities, leading his quartet to compose Take Five (which uses 5/4 time) and Blue Rondo A La Turk (in 9/8 time). Take Five has become one of the most often played and beloved pieces in the Western musical cannon, in direct defiance of the confining boxy square of 4/4 time.

Similarly, Oscar Neimeyer’s entire career as an architect was a full frontal assault on a similar boring mainstay of architecture — the building as squared off box. All over the world he replaced the tyranny of right angled boxes by domes, curves, spirals, undulating enclosures, soaring winglike structures, and dreams of ecstatic flight made concrete flesh.

It is not surprising that his career temporarily came to a halt when Brazil was taken over by a military dictatorship. Like Woody Guthrie (a man who shared many of Neimeyer’s political ideals), whose guitar bore the inscription “This machine kills fascists”, Neimeyer understood that there are many kinds of boxes, and that the ones most dangerous to freedom are those that the eye cannot even see.

Two brilliant men, two continents, who shared a profound idea — that truth comes in many shapes, and beauty is often found outside of the box.

Song at the end of the world

I heard the world is coming to an end
According to the Mayans, it’s quite soon
    Oh why would they want to end us?
    You’d think that they could lend us
Another several months, at least ’till June

I heard the planet’s going up in smoke
According to the Web, the end is near
    Guess it’s time to heave a sigh
    And to say your last goodbye
For the Web is never wrong, or so I hear

Soon, when this is over and you’re dead
You’ll be sorry you ignored that Mayan curse
    But do not give in to the blues
    For there’s one piece of good news:
I won’t be around to write another verse!

🙂

Steer like a bicycle, race like a car

Today I did something I should have done years ago. I’ve had all the pieces for quite a while, but I had never quite gotten around to putting them together. Now I wonder why I didn’t do it sooner. I’m sure you’ve had the same feeling.

When I develop my little computer graphic programs (like the gear example from yesterday), there is generally a trade-off: Either I can approach them in a way in which everything runs super fast (the “compiled” approach) but making changes is slow and clunky, or I can approach them in a way that runs a lot slower (the “interpreted” approach) but changes to the program show up pretty much instantaneously.

If you think about it, this is a difficult trade-off to navigate. If everything runs really fast, you can create far more exciting and interesting things. But you find it too slow or awkward to make little tweaks and changes, then it becomes hard to perfect your design.

It’s kind of like the difference between driving a big automobile and riding a bicycle. The car is powerful and fast, but the bike is far more maneuverable.

Today I figured out a way to make selected parts of my Java programs act like a bicycle while I’m tweaking them, but then like a big car when I am ready to put them out into the world. This means that I can make super fast design iterations, and still end up with something fast and powerful when I’m all done.

This makes me very happy.

The beauty of mechanisms

There is a research project here at NYU for which I am planning to build a little custom-made robotic mechanism. One of the key components of this mechanism is a “worm drive”. Worm drives, which you may have seen in toy cars, are useful when you want an easy and compact way to gear down the rapid rotation of an electric motor into a rotation that is a lot slower but more powerful.

The general idea is to attach a threaded screw to the shaft of your motor. As the motor rapidly turns, the threads of the screw (being helical), seem to gradually drift up or down the shaft. This drift can be used to transfer power from the rapidly spinning motor to a slowly turning gear.

This weekend I used my little home-brew software modeler/renderer to make a 3D computer graphic mock-up of one of these things. I spent way too much time on it, partly just because it was fun, and partly because I ended up being quite taken by the sheer aesthetic beauty of this mechanism.

If you click on the image below you will see an interactive Java applet that shows a worm drive in action. The applet also will also let you zoom in for a close-up:



 
Individually, the two parts of the drive are rigid, yet the effect when they move together is surprisingly sensual. There is something strikingly intimate about this dance between two very different yet perfectly synchronized shapes. You could say they were meant for each other.

All in one place

I remember from previous longer things I have written within these pages that people have requested “the whole thing at once”. So I have now compiled the thirty posts that constitute “A Nose for Danger” into a single conveniently sequential read.

The daily breaks in the original telling have been marked in the form of thin horizontal lines. You can think of these as virtual pages. Each such page actually counts off a day of my life during the month of November 2012. This nod to temporal authenticity may or may not be relevant to your reading experience, but there it is.

I understand that many people who participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) revise their creation after they have recovered from that initial insane monthlong rush to produce a book-length cornucopia of words. It is not clear to me that there is anything in this particular novel that I would wish to revise.

So here it is, as original written: A Nose for Danger (a novel).