Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.
…And You Will Know Us by the Shape of Thames
Pete from Trulia sent me and Eric a copy of Simon Foxell's Mapping London, and I've been poring over its pages for the last couple of days.
Visually, my favourite map is definitely the one entitled "Social and Functional Analysis", which has a beautiful cellular structure:
But lest I get too involved with the aesthetics or content of any one particular map, or the print quality of the book, or the sheer Londonness of the thing, there's also the "Fetish Map of London", whose description warns:
[Chris] Kenny draws attention to the way that maps can become fetishised objects, by creating links between Kongo fetish figures—with their nailed in 'pledges' or 'commitments'—and the pins in a wall map. His map of London is covered in such pins, tacks and nails to the point of rendering it almost unitelligible.
Normally that reference would be enough to keep me quiet, except I'm delighted to find that I'm mentioned in the book, on page 137 for my Travel Time Tube Map. Sadly the link is a little muddled (pointing people to del.icio.us instead of here) but I hope that can be corrected in future editions.
That aside, the book is of a very high quality and full of historical and contemporary mapping gems from all kinds of sources, including many that I can't find anywhere online (who says print is dead?). I've taken a few snaps of my favourites so you can get an idea of what's in store if you buy a copy, and I can definitely recommend that you do.
I'd been saving this title for a potential Pecha Kucha presentation, covering 20 different maps of London, but it doesn't look like happening any time soon. Meanwhile, maps of London are on my mind: watch this space for some new ones coming soon!
Find Me In Dead Tree: AD and Google Maps Hacks
The latest issue of Architectural Design is available now, entitled Manmade Modular Megastructures and edited by Jonathan Schwinge and my colleague Ian Abley. It contains an article Interchange Now by Robert Stewart from YRM on the modularisation of megastructural transport projects, which features a small preview of some of my simulation work.
Also in dead tree format, Google Maps Hacks by Schuyler Erle and Rich Gibson is out now, and features a write-up of the Google Maps GPX Viewer which Steve and I made last summer. Fans of the viewer might like to play with the full-screen one I made here, but there are more exciting animated Google Maps GPX Viewers out there now if you're looking at it for serious use.
Fearlessness
As my Christmas break comes to an end, I'm catching up on some recommended reading. I've picked up a copy of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, and I'm glad I did.
In the small amount of teaching I've been doing over at The Bartlett's MSc Adaptive Architecture and Computation, I've emphasised the need for programmers to be fearless symbol manipulators, fearless text editors - much as students well-schooled in calculus become fearless with algebra and equations, and students well-schooled in drawing become fearless sketchers and draftsmen. Once you're literate in coding constructs (variables, loops, conditionals, data structures, etc.) they become a framework on which you can hang your ideas - the real work if you will.
Neal Stephenson's Isaac Newton is a parametric modeller, a master of bottom up systems. He doesn't care for constructing geometries where he can generate them. Furthermore, his discoveries are powered by his effortless, fearless manipulation of algebra:
"In explaining why those curves were as they were, the Fellows of Cambridge would instictively use Euclid's geometry: the earth is a sphere. Its orbit around the sun is an ellipse - you get an ellipse by constructing a vast imaginary cone in space and then cutting through it with an imaginary plane; the intersection of the cone and the plane is an ellipse. Beginning with these primitive objects (viz. the tiny sphere revolving around the place where the gigantic cone was cut by the imaginary plane), these geometers would add on more spheres, cones, planes, lines, and other elements - so many that if you could look up and see 'em, the heavens would turn nearly black with them - until at last they had found a way to account for the curves that Newton had drawn on the wall. Along the way, every step would be verified by applying one or the other of the rules that Euclid had proved to be true, two thousand years ago, in Alexandria, where everyone had been a genius.Isaac hadn't studied Euclid that much, and hadn't cared enough to study him well. If he wanted to work with a curve he would instinctively write it down, not as an intersection of planes and cones, but as a series of numbers and letters: an algebraic expression. That only worked if there was a language, or at least an alphabet, that had the power of expressing shapes without literally depicting them, a problem that Monsieur Descartes had lately solved by (first) conceiving of curves, lines, et cetera, as being collections of individual points and (then) devising a way to express a point by giving its coordinates - two numbers, or letters representing numbers, or (best of all) algebraic expressions that could in principle be evaluated to generate numbers. This translated all geometry to a new language with its own set of rules: algebra. The construction of equations was an exercise in translation. By following those rules, one could create new statements that were true, without even having to think about what the symbols referred to in any physical universe. It was this seemingly occult power that scared the hell out of some Puritans at the time, and it even seemed to scare Isaac a bit."
-- Neal Stephenson, Daniel Aboard Minerva, Quicksilver Book One pages 97-98.
Great stuff. Back to the book...
Simulation for the Social Scientist
I'm reading Simulation for the Social Scientist. Notes to follow.
On The Internet: A Social-Software-centric Summary
(This is a re-post of my earlier Everything2 review)
"For Kierkegaard, a world-wide electronic agora is an oxymoron ... [he] allows us to see it is not an agora at all, but a nowhere place for anonymous nowhere people. As such, it is dangerously distopian"
On The Internet by Hubert Dreyfus is a short but stimulating philosophy book addressing the implications the internet has on our current and future life-styles. In the book, Dreyfus argues that when people are disembodied and detached from a point of interaction, as web-surfers are in virtual communities, they cannot perform as effectively as their embodied and situated counterparts can in an equivalent real world scenario. In essence, he tries to show that, "if our body goes, so does relevance, skill, reality, and meaning". On a widely sourced tour through relevant parts of modern philosophy, the book covers the effects that world-wide interconnectedness is having on topics including politics, remote prescence, distance learning and document retrieval.
The book begins with an eye-opening account of research into the effects of spending time on line. In more than one study (see here and here), researchers have found that time online increasingly comes at the expense of time with family and friends, and often brings with it a sense of despair and loneliness.
Chapter one (The Hype about Hyperlinks) covers document retrieval on the web, including a Wittgensteinian analysis of Data vs. Document, and an explanation of the fallacy of abundancy (or: how Google manages to look good simply because returning a small fraction of billions of documents is normally satisfactory). There is also some discussion on the failures of Artificial Intelligence (harking back to Dreyfus's best-known work, What Computers Still Can't Do). Dreyfus still has little time for so-called common sense databases such as Cyc. Of prime importance in this chapter, though, is the assertion that a loss of embodiment leads to a failure to recognise the relevance of things in the world.
Chapter two (How Far is Distance Learning from Education?) leaps into a critique of distance learning, discussing what it means to be expert in a domain (chess being one example, teaching itself being another). The key point here is that it matters to matter. If things don't matter to you - if you don't feel wins and losses in "the pit of your stomach" and "the seat of your pants" - you will never make the transition from novice to expert. Dreyfus also places emphasis on apprenticeship and imitation as key to progression. In other words, without being truly immersed in what we are doing we cannot achieve our full potential.
Chapter three (Disembodied Telepresence and the Remoteness of the Real) deals mainly with telepresence and how technological advances in virtual reality and remote action/perception will always be lacking the critical involvement we get for free from our bodies. Dreyfus emphasises risk and challenge as being fundamental to presence, and lacking in telepresence. It's not all criticism though, since he acknowledges the benefits to his students of webcasting his lectures and providing audio recordings for revision purposes. An embodied presence is essential however, and to Dreyfus these technologies seem best summed up as better than nothing.
In chapter four (Nihilism on the Information Highway: Anonymity vs. Commitment in the Present Age) Dreyfus introduces the writings of Kierkegaard and from here on, it gets pretty heavy. Kierkegaard wrote in the late 19th century of the levelling effect that the press and coffee shop discussion (or the public sphere) had on the general public. He wrote of the seemingly inevitable despair following any degree of commitment to expanding one's knowledge outside of areas upon which one has a complete grounding. Dreyfus sees the internet as the ultimate extension of that which Kierkegaard feared most, concluding that the internet is where,
"anonymous electronic kibitzers from all over the world, who risk nothing, come together to announce and defend their opinions"
In other words, anonymity and lack of commitment leads to an electronic nihilism, to a life without meaning.
It is back to the notion of risk, along with relevance and commitment, that Dreyfus comes in the conclusion of the book. He rescues himself from committing to a complete damnation of the internet by summarising the short-comings outlined in the previous chapters such that they stand as a warning not to place too much faith in the powers of the web. Surprisingly, nothing is really made of the differences between books and the internet. It's not clear why reading the book is acceptable, whilst internet-based learning is flawed. I can only assume it's another case of better than nothing. The main conclusion seems to be that there is still potential for the web to be put to good use, but not in the ways that people intuitively expect, and we aren't there yet.
I've had On The Internet for a while, but prompted by this Penny Arcade strip (via plasticbag) I thought my Everything2 review of it could do with wider exposure in the context of other online communities.
Interestingly enough, I haven't really had to edit my concluding remarks about what Dreyfus's findings mean for Everything2, in order to make them relevant for the weblogs and social software in general.
So what does all this mean for Everything2 Online Communities?
Clearly, much of this book has a bearing on how we view this place. Not least because many of us are exactly the sort of "anonymous electronic kibitzers" Dreyfus is bemoaning. Appropriately enough, in 2003 the standard answer to "where can I find...?" is "on the internet". But can you really find Everything on the internet?
It's clear that those who stick around here find something, but is Dreyfus right? Is it at the expense of contact with the real world? Does the experience lack risk, relevance and commitment? Are we disembodied to the point where any and all knowledge is free territory, but expertise and true skill are destined to be lost art-forms? Have we really got to a nihilistic state, where nothing is worth dying for (and consequently, nothing is worth living for)? It's not so clear...
Based on the web's short-comings outlined in the book, my advice would be to keep on mentoring, keep on chatting, keep on specialising and (possibly most important of all) keep on gathering.
Agents, Behaviour, Emergence and Embodiment
Here are my online references from a lecture I gave today at UCL.
- Wikipedia on AI, includes a paragraph on "neats" and "scruffies".
- Desire-lines & Emergent paths: a light-hearted presentation of a predictive model / apparently it wasn't Berkeley, Irvine, or the Oregon Experiment who tried to use it... has anyone actually tried it?
- Craig Reynolds' boids / Steering Behaviours (the individual steering behaviour examples are essential viewing) / an HP labs tech report on not evolving collective behaviour for fish / well explained pseudocode for boids / my quick 2D processing implementation of the pseudocode (commented code and 3D version available on request).
- Pedestrian Simulation: Alasdair Turner's EVAS agents / my post on the MSc VE weblog about a pedestrian sim project in the Alps / Crowd Dynamics (the design is terrible, but click main menu and scroll down to the "Myriad" section).
- Brandeis's DEMO lab: The Golem Project / Evolutionary Design / Evolution of Buildable Objects (LEGO)
- Stigmergy: a good academic intro (pdf, HTML summary here) / Dan Ladley's termite constructions.
- Karl Sims: evolved creatures / the "blockies" MPEG / a retrospective.
- The books I mentioned, all very accessible: Valentino Braitenberg's Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology / Mitchel Resnick's Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams / Steven Johnson's Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software.
- The software/libraries I mentioned: steering behaviours work has spun off into a free open source library called Open Steer / Breve is a 3D environment for the simulation of decentralized systems and artificial life / Framsticks doesn't require programming knowledge / there is a demo of BEAST at David Gordon's homepage.
This will all be assimilated into my del.icio.us page shortly.
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