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Obamapocalypse, and other curious and interesting things
Ahahaha. In 2012, as the Mayan Long Count comes to an end, the Prez leads America into The Singularity. Wearing bunny slippers. A little comic by Dan Goldman.
(Ancient, powerful witch Thessaly in the Sandman comic wore bunny slippers for a whole story arc as well, so for me they've come to symbolise being so damn competent that it becomes irrelevant whether or not you're wearing the right clothes to project an image of power. Which kind of works here as well.)
As is typical of me, I started a slightly more considered post about the inauguration but didn't finish it. Perhaps I'll get a chance later on.
Blue Monday hit us hard. It's been a bit grim around these parts. But here are some more things found on the web - mostly science-flavoured if not actually scientific - which have brightened things up:
Science Tattoos. Some of these are really beautiful - I love the carbon atom, and this diagram of the spread of an epidemic, and subatomic doodling. I wanted a tattoo for ages and never settled on a design, but these make me think I want one of a stylised, ambiguous image poised halfway between a diagram of an atom and a map of a solar system. Zoom in, zoom out.
An animated video on how to imagine ten dimensions. I saw this ages ago after![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
squiddity told me about it, one night after Planet Angel (that was an interesting night during which I also heard about surreal numbers, but sadly when I looked them up I understood them not at all. I'm glad surreal numbers exist, though). But it just popped up again on my twitter feed. I don't know how well-founded it is but it's certainly fun.
Viaundyingking, a graph showing which language people around the world refer to when they don't understand something, along the lines of "it's all Greek to me". Apparently lots of languages express incomprehension by saying "sounds like Chinese", but the Chinese say it sounds like "the Heavenly Script".
The discussion on the post is full of interesting comments too. Some Germans say "it's all Bohemian villages to me", which I can relate to - Czech is such a crazy pile-up of consonants. People wade in to wave the Esperanto flag and get told off. It's fun, in a quite geeky way.
And something not web-ephemera, though you can see pages from it at the author's website (I recommend you do. They are gorgeous): last night I got lost for hours in a graphic novel called The Arrival, by Shaun Tan, which Dan found in the library. It's a wordless story about an immigrant leaving his oppressive homeland to come to a strange new culture full of bizarre animals, peculiar mechanical devices and beautiful, incomprehensible script. It's full of fantastical invented things, and sometimes putting fantasy elements in a story about real-world issues can undermine it and make it seem like the author is making light of said issues, but in this story it really works because by creating an imaginary culture he makes us experience the immigrant's culture shock. I read it while listening to Ulrich Schnauss's dreamlike shoegaze electronica, which was just perfect. I wanted it to go on forever, and also to be able to draw better myself, and choked up a bit thinking about taking risks and new beginnings and such idealistic stuff. It is, in summary, Rather Good.
Hey, the sun's out and it's nearly the weekend. I'm coming down to London for Black Plastic tomorrow, rah! Rather looking forward to dancing to discrete songs with words, like I always used to. See you there?
(Ancient, powerful witch Thessaly in the Sandman comic wore bunny slippers for a whole story arc as well, so for me they've come to symbolise being so damn competent that it becomes irrelevant whether or not you're wearing the right clothes to project an image of power. Which kind of works here as well.)
As is typical of me, I started a slightly more considered post about the inauguration but didn't finish it. Perhaps I'll get a chance later on.
Blue Monday hit us hard. It's been a bit grim around these parts. But here are some more things found on the web - mostly science-flavoured if not actually scientific - which have brightened things up:
Science Tattoos. Some of these are really beautiful - I love the carbon atom, and this diagram of the spread of an epidemic, and subatomic doodling. I wanted a tattoo for ages and never settled on a design, but these make me think I want one of a stylised, ambiguous image poised halfway between a diagram of an atom and a map of a solar system. Zoom in, zoom out.
An animated video on how to imagine ten dimensions. I saw this ages ago after
squiddity told me about it, one night after Planet Angel (that was an interesting night during which I also heard about surreal numbers, but sadly when I looked them up I understood them not at all. I'm glad surreal numbers exist, though). But it just popped up again on my twitter feed. I don't know how well-founded it is but it's certainly fun. Via
undyingking, a graph showing which language people around the world refer to when they don't understand something, along the lines of "it's all Greek to me". Apparently lots of languages express incomprehension by saying "sounds like Chinese", but the Chinese say it sounds like "the Heavenly Script". The discussion on the post is full of interesting comments too. Some Germans say "it's all Bohemian villages to me", which I can relate to - Czech is such a crazy pile-up of consonants. People wade in to wave the Esperanto flag and get told off. It's fun, in a quite geeky way.
And something not web-ephemera, though you can see pages from it at the author's website (I recommend you do. They are gorgeous): last night I got lost for hours in a graphic novel called The Arrival, by Shaun Tan, which Dan found in the library. It's a wordless story about an immigrant leaving his oppressive homeland to come to a strange new culture full of bizarre animals, peculiar mechanical devices and beautiful, incomprehensible script. It's full of fantastical invented things, and sometimes putting fantasy elements in a story about real-world issues can undermine it and make it seem like the author is making light of said issues, but in this story it really works because by creating an imaginary culture he makes us experience the immigrant's culture shock. I read it while listening to Ulrich Schnauss's dreamlike shoegaze electronica, which was just perfect. I wanted it to go on forever, and also to be able to draw better myself, and choked up a bit thinking about taking risks and new beginnings and such idealistic stuff. It is, in summary, Rather Good.
Hey, the sun's out and it's nearly the weekend. I'm coming down to London for Black Plastic tomorrow, rah! Rather looking forward to dancing to discrete songs with words, like I always used to. See you there?
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No BP for me this month - I'm in Cornwall.
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(And here's my LHC icon FTW)
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Chess is a game. But if we sit down to play Chess and I make a move, then the result is in some sense a new game. We could have set up the board that way originally (like a Chess problem in a newspaper) but chose not to in the interests of fairness.
This observation lets us develop a notation for games where we can write any game like this: [L,R]. Here the set L is the set of all states (that is to say other games) which can result from the player on the left making a move, whilst R is the corresponding set available to the player on the right. (In a real game of Chess after I had moved it would be your turn, but clearly it makes sense to imagine a game of Chess where White still plays first but the board is not in the traditional starting position.)
What would happen if we gave a player two games of Chess to play but told them they could only make a move in one (and the same for their opponent)? Each turn they would need to determine the value of moving on each board.
Once you start looking at a wide variety of different games, it turns out that this idea of assigning a value to a game has interesting properties. Some games have an obvious value. For example, we could play a game called "Take the point!" where whoever plays first gets a point. Pretty easy to assess! Some games have values which are much harder to find.
Where it all gets interesting is when you start doing sums with games. So in our "two games of Chess" example above, what we have really done is to add the games! And as you look deeper into the possible values of different types of games, something interesting turns up. There are some kinds of games, it turns out, which have values which can be compared to numbers, but don't actually correspond to anything we've seen before. So stuff like (informally) "a number that is smaller than all the numbers that are bigger than zero".
Very approximately, these weird possible game values that turn up are the Surreal Numbers! (More precisely, there are some other values which turn up that aren't numbers at all, Surreal or otherwise.)
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So is the value of a game basically how worth your while it is to make a move in it? Measured by how many options or possibilities your move will open up for you? (I imagine if in one of the two chess games you were nearly beaten and your options were closing down, but the odds were more even in the other one, that other one would be more valuable to move in?) Or am I taking it too literally?
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You're thinking along the right lines...
Measured by how many options or possibilities your move will open up for you?
No, typically not. Because "possibilities" is a word belonging to the language of imprecise play such as we find in the real world. Mathematically speaking a game like Chess is won (or lost, or drawn) right from the first move if players alternate. So the value of a game is all about the consequences of taking different numbers of moves before your opponent plays again.
So why did I pick Chess? Because it has no random elements. But in fact games which are mathematically interesting tend not to get played much in real life. If you want to go just slightly further down the rabbithole, a good game to take a quick look at is Hackenbush.
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shaun tan's books are incredible, i've got the lost thing and the red tree, both of which are visually stunning and have ace stories. funny, just last night i was looking at the lost things and thinking i should find some more - now i know which one to get!
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I'll be after those two books next!
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Although for some reason, whenever I say his name I feel compelled to add "... and his radioactive mouse".
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it's the singularity, stupid
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Are you coming tubewalking first?
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