Meatspace and a whole host of other terms deserve more attention from linguists and folklorists. Here’s another one:
Adds hash tags support to Gherkin and Cucumber through monkey patching.
Monkey patching? Found here.
Rear Window Timelapse.. Jeff Desom has not only compressed the film into two minutes, but he has also set everything in the constant frame of the view from the window: really, just watch the first fifteen seconds to see what he does here. It’s brilliant.
What Academic Work Looks Like
As a recent post in the Chronicle of Higher Education observes, the cultural forces arrayed against creative/knowledge work in the academy have grown as university administrations themselves have increasingly become staffed not by academics who have either chosen to go into administration or those taking their turn in administration but by a group of professional managers who, well, think more like managers in other arenas than they do the faculty whom they are supposed to support. (This is assuming that the fundamental mission of higher education remains the creation of new knowledge and the distribution of knowledge both old and new, but it could also be that the mission is really now more something like accreditation and certification of a number of abstracted variables that somehow represent this process.) The result is that the work of knowledge creation especially is hard to make visible, as programmers and writers and artists and knowledge workers the world over can attest. Here’s how Rob Jenkins puts it:
Again, the problem is that none of this is visible to bureaucrats, politicians, chamber-of-commerce types, and even college administrators who haven’t actually been professors themselves (which, unfortunately, constitutes a large and rapidly growing group). As those of us who have served in management capacities know very well, administration is a kind of work that looks a lot more like work, with regular “business hours,” clearly-defined tasks, and easily-measured objectives. When you’ve been at it for a while, even if you were a professor in another life, it’s easy to forget that there are other types of work.1
While it’s meant to be funny, a series of scenes from The Big Bang Theory actually do capture the nature of intellectual productivity quite well: sometimes it really does involve a lot of staring at a whiteboard.
Stamen Design has made it possible to produce a dynamic map using Open Street maps data with water color effects. The site is under a heavy load right now, thanks to picking up a lot of links in the blogosphere, no doubt, but it’s definitely worth taking a look at later.
The King’s Gambit has been solved. According to ChessBase:
Fifty years ago Bobby Fischer published a famous article, “A Bust to the King’s Gambit”, in which he claimed to have refuted this formerly popular opening. Now chess programmer IM Vasik Rajlich has actually done it, with technical means. 3000 processor cores, running for over four months, exhaustively analysed all lines that follow after 1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4 and came to some extraordinary conclusions.
Rajlich’s response to the question of solving a chess gambit is fascinating:
1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4. We now know the exact outcome of this position, assuming perfect play, of course. I know your next question, so I am going to pre-empt it: there is only one move that draws for White, and that is, somewhat surprisingly, 3.Be2. Every other move loses by force.
CB: How can you have worked that out, aren’t there gazillions of possible continuations?
Actually much more than “gazillions” – something in the order of 10^100, which is vastly more than the number of elementary particles in the universe. Obviously we could not go through all of them – nobody and nothing will ever be able to do that. But: you do not have to check every continuation. It’s similar to Alpha-Beta, which looks at a very small subset of possible moves but delivers a result that is identical to what you would get if you looked at every single move, down to the specified depth.
CB: But Alpha-Beta reduces the search to about the square root of the total number of moves. The square root of 10^100, however…
Yes, I know. But think about it: you do not need to search every variation to mate. We only need to search a tiny fraction of the overall space. Whenever Rybka evaluates a position with a score of +/– 5.12 we don’t need to search any further, we have our proof that in the continuation there is going to be a win or loss, and there is a forced mate somewhere deep down in the tree. We tested a random sampling of positions of varying levels of difficulty that were evaluated at above 5.12, and we never saw a solution fail. So it is safe to use this assumption generally in the search.
This notion of a “problem space” or a “solution space” is something worth exploring more, both for what it might do for humanities research but also for possible research into as a phenomenon itself.
Open Book Publishers. Someone from the Open Access publishing Zotero group sent me an invite and then sent me a link to this site. Interesting. I have to assume that Jason Jackson knows about this, but I’ll drop him a note anyway.
Check out this example of Paul Graham composing “Startups in 13 Sentences.”. You can pause, fast forward, rewind. Stypi was built for real-time editing with multiple users but it also lets you play back your typing and editing later so that you can “see” the nature of the composition. It’s like the iOS Brushes app for Words. On your computer.
The difference between digital and paper? About eight pounds. Craig Mod reflected on his time spend working on Flipboard for iPhone and felt its traces in bits left a lot to be desired:
The more the entirety of the creation process lives in bits, the less solid the things we’re creating feel in our minds.[3] Put in more concrete terms: a folder with one item looks just like a folder with a billion items. Feels just like a folder with a billion items. And even then, when open, with most of our current interfaces, we see at best only a screenful of information, a handful of items at a time.
And so he decided to print a collection of images and commit messages out and bind them into a book. Lovely book. Lovely idea.
Digital Storytelling means a lot of things to a lot of people. As I begin to think about the course I am planning to teach in Fall 2012 on Games and Storytelling, I am going to need to figure out what I mean by it.
Here’s the working description:
Games have long enjoyed a place in human culture and have thus also enjoyed the attention of storytellers and writers. In this course we will move from looking at certain historical forms of games to representations of games and game-playing in both traditional literary texts, like Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, as well as non-traditional texts, like the science fiction novels Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game or Iain M. Banks’ The Player of Games. We will then examine how game playing and storytelling intersect, as in Italo Calvino’s use of a card game as a narrative device in The Castle of Crossed Destinies. But we do not restrict ourselves to conventional forms of literature: we examine the narratives of today’s games, many of which come with “back stories” in order for the game to be played correctly and are, they claim, forms of interactive storytelling. (We will have to answer the question of what it means to tell a story in such a way.) Along the way we will have occasion not only to play some games as well as create some games, with the latter being a possible course project. In order to do so, we will take some time throughout the course to examine relevant theories about storytelling and about games.
Infinite Copyright Is Killing Culture. This is one of those one chart tells a very compelling story posts. And the interesting bit is that the chart is based on Amazon sales. In brief: books in the public domain sell well.
Minard’s “Napoleon’s March to Moscow”
A classic in visualization studies. One of the first images in Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence that really catches, and holds, your imagination.
→ Some physicists analyzed 10,000,000 words from 200 years and now understand linguistic evolution. According to my linguist colleagues, this happens every few years. The answer is always the same: when you reduce things enough, you can make all kinds of claims. The Language Log has more.
→ Alan Lomax’s Massive Archive Goes Online. Absolutely tremendous news and a tremendous boon to folklorists and the public everywhere.
Here’s the direct link to the Cultural Equity site.
→ MAKE: Joey Hudy Goes to Washington. A great video in which the President of the United States shows a bit of humanity: he sees a marshmallow cannon and wants to shoot it. Inside the White House. With the Secret Service there. And he and the eighth grader do. And then they track down the marshmallow.
→ The Chinese are interested in our vendetta against the Asian carp. In brief, the carp is an escaped import, like the water hydrangea and the nutria rat (both Louisiana examples). Brought here to do one job in one environment, it has escaped that environment and now does what life does: find niches where it succeeds. Unfortunately, it seems better suited to some niches than native species, and it’s throwing off eco-systems. A national-level response has evolved, which is when Chinese netizens became interested.