12.04.09
When I first saw you, I knew that you had a flame in your heart… and were an awesome music video
My top ten for 2009:
Daniel, Bat for Lashes
- Completely messed up video.
Give It Up, Datarock
- Sure, I’m a huge Datarock fan already (hunt down a copy of them doing a cover of Mongoloid).
Papillon, Editors
- It’s people running. I don’t get it… but it’s people running!
Fonz, Eugene McGuinness
- Old concept, but fun.
Drumming Song, Florence and the Machine
- Another creepy one.
Would that I had space for No You Girls, Franz Ferdinand.
Who am I kidding? We all know that Empire of the Sun will win.
Fie on them.
You ask me to enter, then you make me crawl… but the main characters have mismatched power levels
The Sorting Algorithm of Evil is an often criticised concept. Oh, shock. All the easy villains were in the first series, and now — mystery of mysteries — the real villains have shown up. And now the all-powerful puppet masters controlling the real villains have shown up. And now the intergalactic queens of the universe who hired the all-powerful puppet masters controlling the real villains have shown up…
But it exists for a reason.
Shows where one side clearly out matches the other have a habit of being dull unless you can put on your suspenders of disbelief quickly enough. Matches between Awesome Hero and weakling bad dude (see: Batman versus the street gangs) seem like petty bullying. Matches between Awesome Villian and weakling heroes (see: Star Trek: First Contact) seem wildly implausible when they end.
A worse example of the latter were several of the recent season finales of Doctor Who. The Master is completely wiping the floor with everybody, so the Doctor is granted magical powers by the psychic satellites. Davros has stolen the Earth to make a planetary weapon out of planets, so the Doctor learns how to control his regeneration so he can create a clone and a human-Time Lord hybrid clone… or something.
Good drama requires evenly matched combatants, and it’s poor writing if one of the combatants quickly level grinds in order to get a massive advantage over the other.
Enter: Jedi.
I’ve tried to sit through the ‘Prequels’ and I just really don’t understand why the Jedi don’t do the same thing I do when I’m messing with the Force in the video games: pick up something using the Force, smack everybody else with it.
I’m absolutely horrible with my Force powers. In The Force Unleashed, I roamed around Kashyyyk smashing Wookiees with bits of their own temple. Cultural sensitivity, yo.
They’ve got the whole damn Force there and they’re still all ‘Oh, we’re going to spend three weeks battling incompetent ‘droids.’ The obvious enemy would be the Sith, but far too much narrative baggage had been piled on, so it wasn’t possible (sort of) for more than two Sith to exist at a time.
So a less obvious enemy would be the Dark Jedi. Aayla Secura had already been one. If George Lucas was going for the whole ‘It’s just like the end of the Roman Republic!’, then it would have been wonderful to see the Jedi completely reimagined from the original three as being a group at war with themselves (like the Romans were). Instead of being a group of hippy wizards (as they’re presented through Obi Wan and Yoda), they were deeply divided. The Sith exploit that and bring down the Republic. Awesome trilogy. Rounds of applause. No Jar Jar Binks.
Dragonball GT had a similar problem. In order to keep inventing new plots, moronic things had to happen to the most powerful characters (mostly Goku). It would have been much more interesting to see them all start battling each other (which they sort of did with the Baby Saga).
I feel like I’m being a little bit unfair here. The problem is not new and it’s a frequent hurdle for a lot of fiction.
Take, for example, The Iliad.
On the one side, you have the whole Greek world. They’re wealthy and powerful. They have Athena and Poseidon on their side (mostly), along with most of the pantheon at some point or other. They have an immortal on the field (Achilles).
Then you have Troy.
Troy is rather crap. It’s an out-of-the-way nowhere land and only has minor gods fighting on their side (except for, notably, Apollo and Artermis). They have magic walls (built by gods), but they’re mostly crapola. They only hold out for as long as they do because the Greeks keep pissing off the gods.
This isn’t a match up. The drama is only sustained by repeated instances of ‘And then Domestos, son of Toilet Duck, urinated on the sacred mound of a goddess, who complained to Zeus, who extended the plot by two years.’
It would be nice if we could somehow overcome the mismatching problems in fiction.
11.30.09
It’s too late to ‘pologise… and for another sequel
There’s a reason why Angel only lasted five seasons. David Boreanaz — rapidly approaching forty-years fat — was playing a supposedly ageless vampire. Where once he had been able to pretend to be in his mid-twenties (helped by a late-twenties Sarah Michelle Gellar playing a 16-year old), it was rapidly approaching the time he should drop the fantasy and start acting his own age.
Character derailment had also set in. Wesley had gone through as much character development as he possibly could without building a coccoon and emerging as a villainous insect woman. Fred had gone from librarian-hot to some interdimensional blue chick.
And there really wasn’t anywhere for the plot to go.
Red Dwarf ran out of plot somewhere near the very end of the last episode of the second season. I remember it well. Proper Holly was there, as was the real Kochanski. It was all very lovely.
But they tried to squeeze another season out of it… and nearly got away with it.
And so they tried for a fourth… then a fifth… then a sixth. That ended with a giant explosion and we thought it was all over.
There was good stuff in those seasons — Mr Flibble, for example — but, on the whole, everybody agrees that it was pretty weak. One of the creators left and Chris Barrie went off to star in a film with Angelina Jolie.
And then they lurched some more life into it for a seventh season. The Chris Barrie episodes were gold, but — as if to tell fans that they could not be rewarded with a watchable show for nothing — they added a horrible new Kochanski.
But it thundered on, reaching all-new low points with Cat teaching the Blue Midgets to dance. Yeah.
Nine years on and they’ve released another installment. All of the actors look super old because they are all super old. Part of me thinks that this has been the best installment in quite a while, but another part wonders why they’re making new Red Dwarf. Because it’s easy? Because it’s going to make everybody swags of cash? Because we get to hear Sophie Winkleman use that wonderful accent for an hour or two?
That last reason alone is reason enough to make new Red Dwarf.
Okay, so my complaints are largely academic: the show seems tired and it feels like something we’ve already done time and time again. On the other hand, it’s a lot of fun. It’s not taking things too seriously.
Aha. I’ve got it. This seems more like a tribute to Red Dwarf than an installment (sort of like Doctor Who and The Curse of Fatal Death). There’s nothing wrong with that — mind! — but it just seems like a bit of a pointless thing to do.
11.28.09
A fake Jamaican took every last dime with a scam. It was worth it just to learn some sleight-of-hand… though I could have just understood the scam with maths
While listening to the Liberal Party of Australia disintegrate under the weight of a ‘leader’ who hasn’t read Machiavelli and a bunch of old white guys who think that they were elected for their scientific opinion, I began to think about Simpson’s Paradox.
It’s pretty cool. Take the 1998 Federal Election. The Howard Government had a twelve seat majority in the Lower House (so more than 50% of the seats) but only got 49.02% of the two-party preferred vote (so less than 50% of the votes).
It’s easy to see why this might happen. Imagine two political parties — the Optimes and the Populares — are attempting to be elected into a parliament with only twenty seats. For each seat, there are one hundred voters who are all very good people and do not lodge invalid votes.
Imagine that the Populares win their seats with 100% of the vote for those seats (that is, for each Populares Party seat in the parliament, 100 votes were lodged for the Populares Party). Also imagine that the Optimes Party only win their seats by one vote (that is, for each Optimes Party seat in the parliament, 51 votes were lodged for the Optimes Party and 49 were lodged for the Populares Party).
After a gruelling televised broadcast probably involving Koshie and some sort of Eureka Tower of Power, the Optimes Party gains eleven seats of the twenty and so forms government.
There were 2,000 votes cast in this election (20 x 100). The Populares Party scored 1,439 of them (9 x 100 + 11 x 49).
That’s 71.95% of the total vote and yet they won’t form government. Yay, democracy! Let’s spread it across the Middle East!
When we add more parties to the mix (as we end up doing in the Senate due to the extremely nonsensical process by which we ‘elect’ senators), we can end up with situations where a person who has the support of fewer than 10% of the votes in their district can block the plans and designs of parties with greater support.
In the last election, it was a Ruddslide in favour of the ALP. This included their plan for an ETS. The ALP attempts to bring an ETS into fruition. Minor parties who do not have the broader support of the voting public block it. Yay, democracy! Let’s spread it to the Middle East!
Sure, the ETS is probably a bad idea. Its reasoning seems to run along the lines of ‘We need to do something; this is something; ergo, let’s do this.’ This post is not attempting to justify the ETS — and I’m rather against attempting to use market mechanisms to deal with pollution — but it does show that we have somehow transformed ‘Democracy: it’s the rule of the people’ into ‘Democracy: it’s the rule of whoever won an arbitrary game with no necessary connexion to the needs or desires of the population.’
Through despair and hope, through faith and love, till we find our place on the path unwinding… of the circle of memes
In the good old days of The Internet (beta version), a rather awesome comic appeared: www.xkcd.com
Alas — as is the case with many awesome things — Badass Decay set in and the comic has been dwindling in awesomeness. A few too many ‘It’s funny because I’m a guy being passive aggressive to this girl’, ‘It’s funny because my author self-insert is socially awkward around women’ and ‘It’s funny because it’s a reference to Firefly‘ comics have meant that I don’t read it as often as I did.
From the ashes of the once awesome comic rose an even more awesome blog: www.xkcdexplained.com
Where the Johnny-come-latelies of the internet are forcing themselves to laugh at the recent XKCD strips (because if you don’t laugh, you didn’t get it and it’s incredibly important that you get it), XKCDexplained shows that it’s not really that funny, even if you did get it.
That alone isn’t enough for the title of Awesome. Oh, no. No, no. You’ve got to be a Rocketman. Rocketman! Burning out his fuel out here. Alone!
What makes XKCDexplained awesome is that it managed to get a bunch of highly strung XKCD fans to completely lose their shit. Behold! www.xkcdexplainedexplained.com
Here’s a rather representative example of its content:
The author of this explanation has a curious definition of the word “hilarity.” It appears that his personal definition is something along the lines of: “uninteresting (though slightly horrifying) inside joke.”
NOTE: Based on a sample size of eight people, it’s been my experience that physicists are really awesome people. Therefore, it’s fair to assume that none of them would ever actually say the above-mentioned things, unless they were saying them so someone who was a huge douche. In other words, physicists do not have Asperger’s.
Yeah… You sure showed them, Jocelyn!
And, because this is the internet, where would we be without: www.xkcdexplainedexplainedexplained.com? Probably having sex with extremely attractive people, that’s where.
11.22.09
I tremble. They’re going to eat me alive if I stumble… or use some Wikipedia-inspired ‘fallacy’
Formal logic is awesome. Since Frege in the late 1800s, logic has really got its big boy boots on and has gone off into weird and magical worlds which more name-droppy bloggers would name.
Formal logic (by and large) is concerned with truth-preservation. If A is true and B is true, the conclusion, C, must be true. There is no consistent interpretation of A, B, and C such that, if A and B are true, C is false. And so for the past hundred and umpteen years, logicians have tried to work out ways of better preserving truth (which is awesome: they make Truth Jam and Nintendo will soon release Truth Jam Sessions on the DS).
Informal logic (by and large) is concerned with justification. Nevermind if A is true; are you justified in believing A? It might be true that there is a many-headed monster eating children in the park (hooray!), but I might not be justified in believing that there is a many-headed monster eating children in the park until certain conditions have been met. These ‘certain conditions’ are going to be based on socially constructed rules, and you’ve probably all heard of them: ‘Ad hominem’, ‘Ad populum’, ‘Tu quoque’, and other such pretentious Latin terms tend to refer to these rules.
The problem, as I hinted earlier, is that these are now about justification and not about truth. Truth is easy in comparison. Something either is true or something is false. Justification, on the other hand, is significantly murkier.
It is either true or false that you believe that it is too warm. While your interpretation of ‘too warm’ is subjective, it is objectively the case that you either hold the belief or that you do not. If you tell me that you think it’s too warm, I’m justified in believing that you hold the belief that it’s too warm. You might be lying, of course, so it might be a false belief. This shouldn’t worry us: there are going to be times when you’re justified in believing something which turns out to be false (and we do it a lot in real life).
Was I really justified in believing that you are too warm? As the Internet will tell you, the truth of a proposition has no relation to the author of the proposition [for those of you who are concerned about the above example (probably Erik and Lane) in relation to where this ramble has gone: remove the pronouns and replace them with names - the problem remains]. When it comes to statements about your mental world, you have an authority which no other person can trump. Therefore, while the truth of a proposition has no relation to the author of the proposition, you are justified in believing that somebody is warm if they tell you that they are warm, even if this is listed on the internet as some sort of fallacy.
Which brings me rather nicely to my point. These ‘fallacies’ aren’t hard and fast rules. Indeed, they aren’t really rules at all. They’re shorthand for a much more complex process: reasoning about reasoning. The ‘Ad hominem’ is not a fallacy, but we can understand that, in general, the advocate of a proposition might be considered insufficient by a great many people for justifying a belief in some proposition.
This shouldn’t shock us. De Morgan’s Laws, for example, are usually memorised by every logic student, but — when it comes down to it — they’re just shorthand for understanding the mechanics of the operators. If you understand how the operators work, you don’t really need to remember de Morgan’s Laws.
Similarly, if you understand how reasoning works and you can formulate arguments about what kind of reasons are good reasons, you don’t need to memorise a painful list of so-called ‘fallacies’ (I say ’so-called’ because a rather obscene number of ‘fallacies’ originate on Wikipedia. Trufax: several websites mirror Wikipedia and a larger number cite Wikipedia — grumble. Thus, the pages on Wikipedia regarding most folk-philosophy topics — such as informal logic, &c. — become ‘encyclopaedic’ by rapidly replicating through the blogosphere and mirror-pages, racking up the hit count for the Googlewhackers. This is considered ‘cool’ by Wikinerds and they are wrong).
In summary, truth and justification are not the same thing: you might not be justified in believing a true proposition or you might be justified in believing a false proposition. While informal logic is interested in justified beliefs (because it is interested in how people reason), formal logic is interested in truth preservation (because it’s awesome). As informal logic is interested in how people reason, so-called ‘fallacies’ are going to be culturally relative (what’s considered justified to one person might not be considered justified to another — consider the sentence ‘I ate the beef because beef is delicious’ being analysed by a vegan and a non-vegan). Instead of worrying about these informal fallacies, we should worry about the reasoning process itself instead of reducing justification to a rather dreary, rule-based game.
11.20.09
On her ship, tied to the mast, to distant lands, takes both my hands, never a frown with golden brown… unless it’s 39 degrees, in which case I’ll sulk
Holy hells, it’s freaking warm.
Which makes me think of the ice planet, Hoth. Mmmmmm… I’d sure like to be there with all that ice, tauntauns, tauntaun sleeping bags, rebel scum, and wampas.
For the life of me, I’ve never been able to work out Hoth. Sure, it’s science fiction and, sure, George Lucas was more interested in creepy, creepy incest and inter-generational sex, but at some point somebody must have looked at Hoth and thought: the ecology is all wonky.
Wampas eat tauntauns and Jedi. This is understandable and perfectly plausible.
But what the hell do the tauntauns eat? The planet is a giant snowball (mmmmm… giant snowball planet). Unless they’re eating ice and somehow converting that into energy (some of you French scientists might be thinking cold fusion, but then Luke would have got nasty radiation burn when he huddled in the guts of a tauntaun).
The Expanded Universe says that there’s lichen fields. Lichen fields on a snowball planet? You’re a crazy person.
It’s times like these that I think of the feral camels in the Australian outback. Camels were brought to Australia to help bored Englishmen adventurate across the desert. Some of them got loose and they started several colonies. The end result is a damaged ecosystem as the camels run wild.
If you were going to set up a base on an ice planet, it only makes sense that you’d bring along some tauntauns from another planet with a more diverse ecosystem. Tauntauns probably eat some plant which has grown fond of extremely cold weather. You never know. It’s space. Anything can happen (except planets which are completely iced over and which have tauntauns and wampas. That certainly can’t happen – hence the length of this post).
Concerned that some tauntauns might escape, they also brought along some wampas to keep the population in check.
‘But Mark!’ I hear you cry from the future, ‘If the planet is incapable of supporting tauntauns, why would you need a carnivore to keep the population in check?’
Foolishly, you’ve ignored the possibility of tauntauns cannibalising each other.
…
…
Okay, the heat’s finally got to me.
11.18.09
Your heart’s beating at another door. I’m a damn fool to ask for more… in funding for the Olympics
Yeah, you never thought you’d see Jimmy Nail lyrics ever again, did you?
Australia sure likes its sport, doesn’t it? Mind! I don’t mean that Australia likes playing its sports. No, no. We still have tubby kids, after all.
In order to show how much we love our sport, we spend a miniature fortune each year on the sports industry.
Wait… by ‘We’, I of course mean ‘The Federal Government’. And by ‘a miniature fortune’, I mean ‘a miniature fortune of tax-payer funds’.
The history of funding sports in Australia is long and sordid. There’s a rather famous story of the Minister who decided that we were wasting funds on the sports industry and so — correctly — reduced funding… only for his opposition to paint him (succesfully) as the horrible Minister that was trying to destroy Australia’s reputation as an elite sporting country.
A review of federal funding for sports was commissioned, called the Crawford Review. It contains such gems as:
‘The Panel believes that these matters need to be addressed if:
- Australia is to continue to be successful at the elite level.
- All Australians are able to participate in their sport(s) of choice.
- The health and wellbeing of our population is improved.
The Panel believes that if the right structure and governance is put in place, there is every chance for a successful future for Australian sport. Without the right structure and governance, success will not result.‘ — Crawford Report [Source]
So what is the right structure and governance? Two bodies – one for policy (Australian Sports Commission) and one for service delivery (Australian Institutes of Sport). Everybody knows that programmes work best when you split the service delivery from the policies governing the service delivery. It sort of shows that the people writing the report were part of the sports industry and not, y’know, people who generally think about governance and policy.
In even funnier recommendations:
‘Australia’s high-performance sport system should be based on the principle that elite programs be delivered at optimal locations—and the system must facilitate the engagement of other providers such as universities and private organisations where appropriate.‘ — Crawford Report [Source]
It’s almost Yes, Prime Ministerish. Where should all the military officers be stationed? Right near Harrods. It’s the principle that the elite should be in the optimal locations, after all.
The Australian Olympic Committee aren’t happy with it, mostly because it means less money going directly to them. Their complaint is that less funding will mean less medals. It is a curious feature of our Olympics coverage that we don’t calculate how much each medal costs the federal government. When we’ve got crippled education, health, and emergency systems, exactly how much money can be justified in pouring into Olympic medals?
At the end of the day, there are votes to be lost if funding is diverted from sports to infrastructure and so no goverment will ever divert funding from sports to infrastructure.
Go, democracy!
Come and dance with me, Michael… and help me shift this furniture
I have removalists arriving tomorrow. I don’t know when they will arrive.
It’s times like these that I think about the Cable Guy Paradox by Hajek.
Imagine that you’re like me and you’ve called a removalist (or – in the original – a guy to come and fix your cable television). They’ve told you that they will, with 100% certainty, be at your place between 9am and 3pm. So there are three hours in which they could arrive before noon and three hours in which they could arrive after noon. If you ignore the chance that the removalist will arrive at exactly noon, there is a 50% chance that she will arrive in the morning and an equal chance that she will arrive in the afternoon.
Your housemate decides to have a bit of a wager with you as to when the removalist will arrive: morning or afternoon?
‘[W]e may put the reasoning in terms of a plausible diachronic rationality principle somewhat in the spirit of van Fraassen’s ‘Reflection Principle’ (1984 and 1995). The idea is that you should not knowingly frustrate a rational future self of yours. I will call it the ‘Avoid Certain Frustration Principle’:
Suppose you now have a choice between two options. You should not choose one of these options if you are certain that a rational future self of yours will prefer that you had chosen the other one—unless both your options have this property.‘ — Hajek [Source]
So we’re placing this bet and we’re trying to avoid certain frustration. If we are to place our bet on the removalist arriving in the morning, for each second that passses, the odds increase that the removalist will arrive in the afternoon.
For example, if the removalist has not arrived by 10am, then there are only two morning hours left, but three afternoon hours left.
‘The choice to bet on the morning interval falls squarely under the purview of the Avoid Certain Frustration Principle. It is thus ruled out. Rationality, then, requires you to bet on the afternoon interval (the only choice that is not so ruled out). This is paradoxical, because your initial reasoning that there is nothing to favour one interval over the other seemed impeccable.‘ — Hajek [ibid.]
If you’ve got a 50-50 chance of being correct, it doesn’t matter which you choose because you’ve got equal chance of being correct. And yet, here we are, knowing that, in the future, these even odds will change predictably against us if we choose the morning bet.
Isn’t that cool? Yes, yes it is.
Interestingly (perhaps worryingly), Hajek thinks that the Avoid Certain Frustration Principle should be challenged.
‘Sometimes it is rational to knowingly act against your rationally-formed future preferences, even when you know exactly how to avoid doing so.‘ — Hajek [ibid.]
Over on his blog, Consequentially.org, Greg Restall says:
‘Hájek uses this example to motivate a rejection and revision of the Avoid Certain Frustration Principle. I think that rejecting this principle seems sound, but I don’t think that this example shows it. Here’s why:
I don’t think that in this case I am certain to be frustrated. For I’m not certain that there is, in fact, an interval of time where I will regret making the bet. First, the bet might be cancelled for some reason – the guy might arrive early, contrary to his promise. More interestingly, we might decide to go out and leave someone else to mind the house, only to return after 4pm. In that case, at any time after 8am, I don’t know that the guy hasn’t arrived, so I don’t have the same grounds for regret. So, I’m not certain that I’ll have my regret.‘ — Restall [Source]
For me, it seems that Restall bypasses the point. The point is that you’re given 50-50 odds and yet know that these odds are going to shift against you. Within the context of just the bet, these odds are going to change.
Imagine that you’re sitting an introduction to probability class. You’re asked the question: ‘You’ve got a six-sided fair dice and you roll it. What are the odds that you’ll roll a 6.’ The correct answer is not: ‘Well, it would be one in six but it’s slightly less because you’re not accounting for your pet dog eating the dice when you roll it, or the Large Hadron Collider creates a miniature black hole which swallows your dice, or… &c., &c., &c.’
Sure, you’re correct that these are all possible but they’re not really relevant to the problem at hand. Restall’s objection can be easily bypassed with the following.
‘There is 100% certaintly event S will happen between time t0 and time t1. Time t0.5 is directly between t0 and t1. P(S occurs after t0.5) = 0.5. If S has not happened by any time after t0, P(S occurs after to.5) increase.’
The Avoid Certain Frustration Principle still holds but worries about being mugged and the like no longer apply.
It is interesting that both Hajek and Restall suggest rejecting the ACF Principle and not rejecting the unstated Principle of Making Decisions Based Exclusively on Probability. As we know that the probability will change, we should ignore the odds and go with our rational deliberations. Probability is only one tool in our reasoning toolkit. Just as you don’t use a screwdriver to chop down the mightiest oak in the forest, you wouldn’t exclusively use probability to decide how you’ll place your bet.
Don’t get me wrong. That’s really, really weird. The origins of probability go back to when mathematicians would rip off people in ye ancient pubs by keeping the odds in their (the mathematicians’) favour. To say that there is a class of gamble which doesn’t come down to probability is a bit disturbing.
11.15.09
Hey, you’ve got to hide your love away… and all of the plot holes.
I’m a bad person. I absolutely loathe The Matrix. While apathetic distaste of the sequels is a sure sign that your eyes are still working and that you’re completely sane, I even hate the first one (the popular one that made everybody think that they understood Descartes — even though the brain in the vat was Putnam’s idea, but whatever).
But let us not speak of that first one, and turn our attention to the third one (which was on telebox this evening).
Ignore the heavy handed Jesus imagery. Ignore the super annoying characters whom you could easily wipe out if given a million death drones. Ignore the dialogue which treats the audience as if they’re a bunch of stoner, undergrad Continental philosophy students (oh, wait…).
Why the McFlying Freak does Keanu Reeves have magical powers in the real world? Isn’t the whole point that he has some sort of superbrain (Keanu’s Super Brain is the most wildly improbable aspect of the first movie) which allows him to do ‘Woah’ superman moves in the virtual world? Isn’t he just a grown up version of Digimon?
When did he get the ability to make robot death machines explode with his mind? When did that happen? He seems to get a new superpower each movie; in number 2, he develops the ability to revive the dead (causing Trinity to spend the next movie as a zombie — a sharp change from the praying mantis she was portraying in the first two movies).
Oh, and if Keanu’s Super Brain was the most wildly improbable aspect of the first movie, then Keanu Rejecting Monica Bellucci because he really likes the aforementioned praying mantis was the most wildly improbable aspect of the second movie. On sober reflexion, it was the most improbable aspect of all of the movies.
So, yes. When did he get superpowers in the real world?
