The recent New Yorker piece on Will Wright is a thorough profile of the game designer, but also functions as a bibliography of sorts for the games he's created over the past 20 years. Bibliographies are something normally reserved for books, but Wright draws much of the inspiration for his games from articles, books, papers, and other games that a list of further reading/playing in the instruction booklet for SimCity wouldn't feel out of place. Because I like utilizing bibliographies -- they allow you to get into the head of an author and see how they sampled & remixed the original ideas to create something new -- I've created one for Will Wright. Sources are grouped by game; general influences are listed seperately.
SimCity
The Game of Life, John Conway.
Montessori school. "It's all about learning on your terms, rather than a teacher explaining stuff to you. SimCity comes right out of Montessori -- if you give people this model for building cities, they will abstract from it principles of urban design."
Urban Dynamics - Jay Wright Forrester. "This study of urban dynamics was undertaken principally because of discoveries made in modeling the growth process of corporations. It has become clear that complex systems are counterintuitive. That is, they give indications that suggest corrective action which will often be ineffective or even adverse in its results. Very often one finds that the policies that have been adopted for correcting a difficulty are actually intensifying it rather than producing a solution."
World Dynamics - Jay Wright Forrester.
The Sims
A Pattern Language - Christopher Alexander. "By understanding recurrent design problems in our environment, readers can identify extant patterns in their own design projects and use these patterns to create a language of their own. Extraordinarily thorough, coherent, and accessible, this book has become a bible for homebuilders, contractors, and developers who care about creating healthy, high-level design."
A Theory of Human Motivation - Abraham Maslow. Paper on human behavior and motivation.
Maps of the Mind - Charles Hampden-Turner.
Other Sim Games
Gaia hypothesis - James Lovelock. "The Gaia hypothesis is an ecological theory that proposes that the living matter of planet Earth functions like a single organism."
The Ants - E.O. Wilson. "This is the definitive scientific study of one of the most diverse animal groups on earth; pretty well everything that is known about ants is in this massive work."
Spore
Powers of Ten - Charles and Ray Eames. "The film starts on a picnic blanket in Chicago and zooms out 10x every 10 seconds until the entire universe (more or less) is visible. And then they zoom all the way back down into the nucleus of an atom. A timeless classic."
Drake Equation - Frank Drake. "Dr. Frank Drake conceived a means to mathematically estimate the number of worlds that might harbor beings with technology sufficient to communicate across the vast gulfs of interstellar space."
SETI. "The mission of the SETI Institute is to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe."
2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick.
Panspermia - Freeman Dyson. "This approach was directly inspired by Freeman Dyson's notion of Panspermia - the idea that life on earth may have been seeded via meteors carrying microscopic "spores" of life from other planets. (Dyson's concept is also the origin of the game's title.)"
The Life of the Cosmos - Lee Smolin. "[Smolin's] theory of cosmic evolution by the natural selection of black-hole universes makes what we can experience into an infinitesimal, yet crucial, part of an ever-larger whole."
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle - John Barrow, Frank Tipler, and John Wheeler. "Is there any connection between the vastness of the universes of stars and galaxies and the existence of life on a small planet out in the suburbs of the Milky Way?"
The demoscene. "The demoscene was originally limited by the hardware and storage capabilities of their target machines (16/32 bit micros such as the Atari and the Amiga ran on floppy disks), they developed intricate algorithms to produce large amounts of content from very little initial data."
General influences
PanzerBlitz - Avalon Hill. "PanzerBlitz is a tactical-scale board wargame of tank, artillery, and infantry combat set in the Eastern Front of the Second World War."
Super Mario Bros. - Shigeru Miyamoto. "[SMB] encouraged exploration for its own sake; in this regard, it was less like a competitive game than a 'software toy' -- a concept that influenced Will Wright's notion of possibility space. 'The breadth and the scope of the game really blew me away,' Wright told me. 'It was made out of these simple elements, and it worked according to simple rules, but it added up to this very complex design."
Go. "[Go] is a strategic, zero-sum, deterministic board game of perfect information."
--
Sources: Game Master, The Long Zoom, Master of the Universe, Interview: Suzuki and Wright, Spore entry at Wikipedia, Will Wright entry at SporeWiki, Will Wright Interview.
Update: This interview with Wright at Game Studies contains a list of references from the conversation, many of which have influenced Wright's body of work. (thx, phil)
Since my internet access has been somewhat spotty at the conference (I'm trying to pay attention and power is hard to come by here so the laptop is closed most of the time), I'm going to do rolling wrap-ups as I go, skipping around and filling in the blanks when I can. Here we go, soundbite-style:
Alex Steffen: Cars equipped with displays that show gas mileage, when compared to cars without the mileage display, get better gas mileage. That little bit of knowledge helps the driver drive more economically. More visible energy meter displays in the home have a similar effect...people use less energy when they're often reminded of how much energy they use. (Perhaps Personal Kyoto could help here as well.) At dinner, we discussed parallels between that and eating. Weighing yourself daily or keep track of everything you eat, and you'll find yourself eating less. In the same way, using a program like Quicken to track your finances might compel you to spend less, at least in areas of your life where you may be spending too much.
Bruce Sterling is the Jesse Jackson of technology. He has this cadence that he gets into, neologism after neologism, stopping just short of suggesting a new word for neologism. Wonderful to experience in person. Perhaps not as upbeat as the Reverend, though.
Bruce also related a story told to him by an engineering professor friend of his. The prof split his class into two groups. The first group, the John Henrys, had to study and learn exclusively from materials available at the library...no internet allowed. The second group, the Baby Hueys, could use only the internet for research and learning...no primary source lookups at the library. After a few weeks, he had to stop this experiment because the John Henrys were lagging so far behind the Baby Hueys that it is was unfair to continue.
Kevin Kelly noted that the web currently has 1 trillion links, 1 quintillion transistors, and 20 exabytes of memory. A single human brain has 1 trillion synapses (links), 1 quintillion neurons (transistors of sorts), and 20 exabytes of memory.
Kelly also said that technology has its own agenda and went on to list what it is that technology might want. One of the things was clean water. You need clean water for industrial manufacturing...so water cleanliness is going to be a big deal in China. In a later talk, Thomas Friedman said, "China needs to go green."
Hasan Elahi, during his ordeal being mistaken for -- what's the term these days? -- an enemy combatant, learned that language translates easier than culture. That is, you can learn how to speak a language fluently way easier than to have the cultural fluency necessary to convince someone you're a native. In his interrogations, Hasan liberally sprinkled pop culture references in his answers to questions posed by the FBI to help convince them that he was a native. Workers at call centers in India for American companies are not only taught to speak English with an American accent, they also receive training in American geography, history, and pop culture so as to better fool/serve American callers.
"The best laid plans of mice and men turn into a nonlinear system." -- Will Wright, with apologies to Robert Burns.
Speaking of Wright, a couple of Spore trivia bits. The data for a creature in Spore takes up just 3K of memory. And entire world: just 80K. And these worlds are amazingly complex.
Brian Eno: With large groups of people, the sense of shame and the sense of honor that keeps the members of small groups from misbehaving breaks down. The challenge for larger groups is to find ways of making honor and shame matter in a similar respect.
Stewart Brand: "We are terraforming the earth anyway, we might as well do it right." Stewart also noted that cities are very effective population sinks. When people move to cities, the birthrate drops to the replacement rate (2.1 children per family) and keeps on dropping. Combine that with the fact that by early next year, more people in the world will live in cities than in rural areas, and at some point in the next hundred years, the earth's population will start to fall.
Onstage at PopTech just now, Brian Eno said that a musical piece by Steven Reich had a huge influence on how he thought about art. He said that Reich's piece showed him that:
1. You don't need much.
2. The composer's role is to set up a system and then let it go.
3. The true composer is actually in the listener's brain.
I'd never heard of Reich, but the name sounded familiar when Eno mentioned it. I realized I'd seen it yesterday when reading about Cory Arcangel's show at Team Gallery in reference to his piece, Sweet 16:
Cory applied American avant-garde composer Steven Reich's concept of phasing to the guitar intro of Guns and Roses' track Sweet Child O'Mine. Rather than use instruments, Cory took the same two clips from the song's music video and shortened one clip by a single note. As the videos loop, the two intros grow farther apart until they are back in sync.
He's veered away from video games, but Cory's new work is looking really interesting these days.
NY Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff on the legacy of Jane Jacobs and why her views on cities aren't universally applicable:
The activists of Ms. Jacobs's generation may have saved SoHo from Mr. Moses' bulldozers, but they could not stop it from becoming an open-air mall. The old buildings are still there, the streets are once again paved in cobblestone, but the rich mix of manufacturers, artists and gallery owners has been replaced by homogenous crowds of lemming-like shoppers. Nothing is produced there any more. It is a corner of the city that is nearly as soulless, in its way, as the superblocks that Ms. Jacobs so reviled.
But I have a hard time believing -- as Mr. Ouroussoff does -- that:
...on an urban island packed with visual noise, the plaza at Lincoln Center -- or even at the old World Trade Center -- can be a welcome contrast in scale, a moment of haunting silence amid the chaos. Similarly, the shimmering glass towers that frame lower Park Avenue are awe-inspiring precisely because they offer a sharp contrast to the quiet tree-lined streets of the Upper East Side.
Surely we can devise better ways of introducing contrasts in scale into our cities than building Lincoln Centers.
Ouroussoff's article includes a companion audio slideshow of him talking about Jacobs and also of West Village residents sharing their views on their neighborhood that Jacbos lived in and wrote about long ago.
Jane Jacobs died this morning at age 89. I can't begin to express how much her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities has influenced and enhanced my understanding and enjoyment of living with other people in groups large and small. Sad, sad news. (thx, todd)
One of my favorite things to do in new cities is to observe how the traffic works. Traffic in each place has a different feel to it that depends on the culture, physical space, population density, legal situation, and modes of transportation available (and unavailable).
Everyone drives in LA and Minneapolis, even if you're only going a few blocks. In San francisco, pedestrians rule the streets...if a pedestrian steps out into the crosswalk, traffic immediately stops and will stay stopped as long as people are crossing, even if that means the cars are going nowhere, which is great if you're walking and maddening if you're driving. In many cities, both in the US and Europe, people will not cross in a crosswalk against the light and will never jaywalk. In many European cities, city streets are narrow and filled with pedestrians, slowing car traffic[1]. US cities are starting to build bike lanes on their streets, following the example of some European cities.
In NYC, cars and pedestrians take turns, depending on who has the right-of-way and the opportunity, with the latter often trumping the former. Cabs comprise much of the traffic and lanes are often a suggestion rather than a rule, more than in other US cities. With few designated bike lanes, cycling can be dangerous in the fast, heavy traffic of Manhattan. So too can cyclers be dangerous; bike messengers will speed right through busy crosswalks with nothing but a whistle to warn you.
In Bangkok, traffic is aggressive, hostile even. If a driver needs a space, he just moves over, no matter if another car is there or not. Being a pedestrian is a dangerous proposition here; traffic will often not stop if you step out into a crosswalk and it's impossible to cross in some places without the aid of a stoplight or overpass (both of which are rare). More than any other place I've been, I didn't like how the traffic worked in Bangkok, either on foot or in a car.
Traffic in Saigon reminds me a bit of that in Beijing when I visited there in 1996. Lots of communication goes on in traffic here and it makes it flow fairly well. Cars honk to let people know they're coming over, to warn people they shouldn't pull in, motorbikes honk when they need to cross traffic, and cars & motorbikes honk at pedestrians when it's unsafe for them to cross. Traffic moves slow to accommodate cars, the legions of motorbikes (the primary mode of transportation here), and pedestrians all at the same time.[2] Crossing the street involves stepping out, walking slowly, and letting the traffic flow around you. Drivers merging into traffic often don't even look before pulling out; they know the traffic will flow around them. The system requires a lot of trust, but the slow speed and amount of communication make it manageable.[3]
[1] This is the principle behind traffic calming.
[2] That traffic calming business again.
[3] Not that it's not scary as hell too. American pedestrians are taught to fear cars (don't play in the street, look both ways before crossing the street, watch out for drunk drivers) and trusting them to avoid you while you're basically the frog in Frogger...well, it takes a little getting used to.
Ok, one last wrap-up post about Hong Kong and then we're focusing on the matter at hand in Bangkok (short summary: having a great time so far here). So, three things I really liked about/in Hong Kong and then some miscellaneous stuff.
1. Octopus cards. I really can't say enough about how cool these cards are. Wikipedia provides a quickie definition: "The Octopus card is a rechargeable contactless stored value smart card used for electronic payment in online or offline systems in Hong Kong." It's a pay-as-you go stored value card...you put $100 bucks on it and "recharge" the card when it's empty (or when it's even more than empty...as long as your balance is positive when you use it, you can go into a HK$35 deficit, which you pay when you recharge the card). You can use it on pratically any public transportation in the city: buses, trains, MTR, trams, ferries, etc. It works with vending machines, at 7-Eleven, McDonald's, Starbucks, and the supermarket. You don't need to take it out of your wallet or purse to use it, just hold it near the sensor. Your card is not tied to your identity...there's no PIN, you can pay cash, they don't need to know your credit card number, SS#, or anything like that. They even make watches and mobile phones that have Octopus built it, so your phone (or watch) becomes your wallet. Mayor Bloomberg, if you're listening, NYC needs this.
2. The on-train maps for the MTR. Here's a (sort of blurry) photo (taken with my cameraphone):
The current stop blinks red -- in this case, Tsim Sha Tsui (blinking not shown, obviously) -- with the subsequent stops lit in red. If the next stop connects to another line, that line blinks as well. A small green arrow indicates which direction you're traveling and there's an indictor (not shown) which lights up either "exit this side" or "exit other side" depending which way the doors are going to open. Great design.
3. Muji! We located one in Langham Place (an uber-story mall) in Mong Kok (for reference, the store in Silvercord in TST listed on their site has closed). Muji is kind of hard to describe if you've never been to one of their stores before (and if you live in the US, you probably haven't because they're aren't any, aside from a small outpost in the MoMA Store). Adam (see previous link) roughly translates the name as "No Brand, Good Product", so you can see why I like it so much. They sell a wide variety of products (take a look at their Japanese-only online store for an idea of what they carry); at the Monk Kok store, they had snacks & drinks, some furniture (made out of sturdy cardboard), their signature pens and notebooks (a display of the former was completely surrounded by a moat of teenaged girls, so much so that I didn't get a chance to test any of the super-thin pens), some clothes (including some great pants that they didn't have in anything approaching my size), dishes, cosmetics, bath products, and containers of all shapes, sizes, and uses. I wanted one of everything, but settled for a couple of shirts (with absolutely no logos or markings, inside or out, to indictate that they are Muji products).
m1. Big Buddha, worth the trip. It'll better when the tram from Tung Chung and back is built, although then you'll miss the boat ride (fun) and the bus ride (harrowing at times).
m2. The Peak Tram. Touristy, but also worth the trip. The weird/ugly anvil-shaped building at the top is currently under construction, so the views will be much better when its finished. Go at night for the best view.
m3. The view from the waterfront in Kowloon of the Hong Kong skyline at night is one of the best in the world.
m4. Speaking of, Hong Kong is a night-time city. All the buildings are lit up, there's a nightly light show at 8pm (think Laser Floyd without the music), and buildings that appear monolithic in the daytime transform at night, either by disappearing into the darkness while leaving a graceful trace of their outline or acting as huge screens for projected light shows. Reminded me of Vegas in this respect.
m5. We had tea in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel (go for the view, it's incredible) and the live band played the theme song from The Lord of the Rings. I tried to get a recording of it with my phone (iPod was back in our hotel room), but it didn't turn out so well. Very weird; we were cracking up and expecting the theme from Superman or even 3's Company to follow.
m6. Oh, I'm sure there's more, so I'll add it here as I think of stuff.
When you read up on Hong Kong prior to visiting, most guides make mention of the different levels of the city. Physical levels, that is.[1] The city proper is built on a hill and there are so many tall buildings that you quickly lose interest in counting all of them; imagine Nob Hill in San Francisco, except with skyscrapers. The famous escalator cuts through the city up the hill; the change in elevation over its short span is impressive, especially when you get to the top and realize you're actually only a few horizontal blocks from where you started.
Much of the HK's retail and dining is vertically oriented; there's just not enough storefront real estate to contain it all. You'll typically find restaurants on the 3rd or 4th floor of buildings and 3- to 6-level malls jammed with retail stores are everywhere; the Muji we went to was on level 7 of Langham Place. Skyways connect buildings together -- as do subways -- so much of the foot traffic in some areas isn't even on the street level. Cars and buses (with two levels) zoom on highways passing over city streets and other highways, past the midlevels of buildings just a block or two away and down the hill. As a pedestrian, you can find yourself staring up at a 50-story building in front of you and then turning slightly to peer into the 15th floor of a building 2-3 blocks away. It's a disorienting sensation, being on the ground level and the 15th floor at the same time, as if the fabric of space had folded back onto itself. Many people aren't used to negotiating cities so intensively 3-D, particularly when all the maps reinforce the Flatlandness of the city grid.
[1] Well, not entirely physical. There are economic levels for one; the woman selling eggs on the street for a couple of HK$ each while tourists shop for Prada and Burberry only blocks away. You've got British culture over Chinese culture...and then Chinese culture layering back over that since the handover in 1997. You've got different levels of authenticity, from the fake electronics & handbags to the real Chanel cosmetics & Swarovski crystal, from the more touristy, mediated experiences to the hidden corners of real Hong Kong.
The streets of Hong Kong can be a hectic place, but one of the first things you notice is that the pedestrian street crossing signals have a very clear audio signal (one would assume, for the blind and/or very nearsighted). Some American signals has audio as well, but very few, they're not very loud, and they generally kind of lacking. Anyway, I made an audio recording of the signals (30 sec, 240 KB mp3). The sound is kind of blown out (it's my first experiment with the iTalk) and the signal doesn't sound that loud IRL, but you get the gist.
In reaction to some ads of questionable value being placed on some of O'Reilly's sites (response from Tim O'Reilly), Greg Yardley has written a thoughtful piece on selling PageRank called I am not responsible for making Google better:
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and the other big search engine companies aren't public utilities - they're money-making, for-profit enterprises. It's time to stop thinking of search engines as a common resource to be nurtured, and start thinking of them as just another business to compete with or cooperate with as best suits your individual needs.
I love the idea that after more than 10 years of serious corporate interest in the Web that it's still up to all of us and our individual decisions. The search engines in particular are based on our collective action; they watch and record the trails left as we scatter the Web with our thoughts, commerce, conversations, and connections.
Me? I tend to think I need Google to be as good a search engine as it can be and if I can help in some small way, I'm going to. As corny as it sounds, I tend to think of the sites I frequent as my neighborhood. If the barista at Starbucks is sick for a day, I'm not going to jump behind the counter and start making lattes, but if there's a bit of litter on the stoop of the restaurant on the corner, I might stop to pick it up. Or if I see some punk slipping a candy bar into his pocket at the deli, I may alert the owner because, well, why should I be paying for that guy's free candy bar every time I stop in for a soda?
Sure those small actions help those particular businesses, but they also benefit the neighborhood as a whole and, more importantly, the neighborhood residents. If I were the owner of a business like O'Reilly Media, I'd be concerned about making Google or Yahoo less useful because that would make it harder for my employees and customers to find what they're looking for (including, perhaps, O'Reilly products and services). As Greg said, the Web is still largely what we make of it, so why not make it a good Web?
Two people got standing ovations for their presentations at GEL. The first was Barry Schwartz for his talk on The Paradox of Choice. The second person, who gave the most fascinating presentation I've seen at a conference in a long time, was inventor/artist/mad scientist Theo Jansen. For the past fifteen years, Jansen has been creating (growing?) "beach animals" made from commonly available tools like plastic tubing, cardboard boxes, plastic bottles, hose, tape, and all sorts of other stuff. Wired News did a pretty good article on Jansen earlier this year:
Jansen is evolving an entirely new line of animals: immense multi-legged walking critters designed to roam the Dutch coastline, feeding on gusts of wind. Over the years, successive generations of his creatures have evolved into increasingly complex animals that walk by flapping wings in response to the wind, discerning obstacles in their path through feelers and even hammering themselves into the sand on sensing an approaching storm.
It's hard to know where to begin in talking about what's so cool about Jansen's beach animals. They're evolved for one thing; he worked out the optimal 11-piece leg using evolutionary algorithms on a computer but now prefers to race his animals on the beach and "breed" the most successful ones together, taking the best bits from each to make their offspring better. His animals have legs, muscles (pneumatic pistons within the plastic tubing), stomachs (plastic bottles for storing air), and nerves (collections of on/off values that work pretty much like logic gates).
And watching the videos that Jansen showed...his animals were so organic and lifelike as they moved under their own power across the beach. He's got a few of the videos on his site, but for some reason, the best ones he showed at GEL are not among them. To see evolution happening like this, a clumsy, imprecise process of trial and error that nonetheless produces beautiful and organic results, it was a real treat.
As much as I love the High Line (some photos from my excursion last year), I share David's concerns that the development of it will not turn out so well:
The problem is that linear parks don't really ever function as parks, a place to hang around and enjoy nature, they are often built (like the highline) in a place that does not lend itself to mature planet growth and the spaces themselves are not 'static' - in short they become expensive, fancy, shrub lined, bike lanes.
The double whammy for the Highline project is that it is a raised linear park, with all of the problems that separating pedestrian flow from the ground produced in large urbanism projects in the 50's and 60's.
The really unfortunate thing about it is that the High Line is really cool and I would love to see it developed into something great. Walking along it, you get a unique view of Manhattan, both literally and figuratively. And from below, it just looks cool, especially when you catch people up there looking down on you. I think of the High Line as a bit like TiVo was a few years ago...difficult to explain to people who had never seen it, hard to understand why you'd ever need such a thing if you'd never used it, but once you'd used it for more than 10 minutes, it's hard to imagine how you ever did without it. And so it is with the High Line; it's hard to understand the appeal unless you've been up there. But as David notes, the linearity and elevation may make it difficult for many to find their way up there and discover that for themselves.
Amen to Kurt Anderson's comments about the ridiculous proposal to plop a huge stadium for the Jets on the West Side of Manhattan:
When I asked the Planning Department's spokesperson why the city needs a stadium for the Jets on that spot, she said it was "essential to jump-start development" in the neighborhood. Really? Essential? Right on the Hudson, immediately north of the successfully renovated Starrett-Lehigh office building and a thriving art neighborhood and Chelsea Piers? "There's a hole there," she said, referring to the MTA yards over which the stadium would be built. Holes can be filled in lots of other ways when they're adjacent to living urban tissue, albeit not as quickly. Well, she said, the stadium--that is, the New York Sports and Convention Center--is the best option on the table.
With the stadium, what they're doing is replacing one hole with another higher priced hole (with football!). But what's the alternative?
But why not, as the transmogrified High Line helps propagate the Tribecafication of the adjacent blocks, imagine a tightly woven extension of the southern and eastern neighborhoods into the rail-yards site? Why not build apartments and hotels and theaters, a better, funkier Battery Park City? Or a big park? Or the second Guggenheim Museum? Or a campus for New School University? Why can't this city assemble a brilliant team of designers and entrepreneurs to dream up a thrilling new piece of New York--people with as much visionary gusto as, say, the man who started a new kind of digital data and news company a quarter-century ago? It wouldn't be finished in five years, because creating great new places that people are eager to visit and live in is not easy or fast. But wouldn't it be better to be driven by the ambition to create a 21st-century Rockefeller Center than by a deadline to hold the 2010 Super Bowl and a 2012 torch-lighting ceremony?
Putting that stadium where they want to put it seems to me like sticking one of those huge outdoor gas grills in the middle of your bathroom. However yummy the food that's made with it, that grill isn't going to turn my bathroom into a kitchen and is only going to interfere with the proper operation of the bathroom (my dream of cooking a meal while showering as a time-saving technique notwithstanding). Like Anderson, I'll be pulling for some other city to win the 2012 Olympic Games this summer. Anything to get another chunk of New York City breathing comfortably again.
Katamari Damacy is the game du jour among my circle of friends and, well, everywhere it seems like. There are KD handmade knit hats, costumes, reenactments in Playdoh, paper figures,
iPod socks, homemade plush dolls, and lots of photos on Flickr.
I finally got the chance to play it the other day at my friend David's house. The game play is fairly simple. You use the two analog joysticks on the controller -- KD is for PS/2 only -- to steer a sticky ball (the katamari) around the game board (usually a house or a town), picking up objects as you go. As your ball accrues more and more things, it gets bigger and you're able to pick up larger objects. The goal on each board is to get your ball bigger than a certain diameter within the allotted time period. After you get the controls down (it's a bit like operating a backhoe), it's the simplest game in the world to play. Lots of fun too.
As we played, we talked about the game and why it's inspired so much devotion in its fans. My favorite aspect of the game is the crazy storyline. The sarcastic King of All Cosmos, the faux Japenglish translations...the game dialogue is hilarious. Games tend to take themselves too seriously these days; Katamari Damacy doesn't. I also liked the telescoping sense of scale as your katamari grows larger. Smaller objects disappear from view and if you get really big, you dwarf houses, towns, and can eventually start picking up entire islands. Reminded me of Charles and Ray Eames' Powers of Ten film...the scale may change, but the basic structure remains. David said he likes the collecting aspect of the game. He's a compulsive collector of things and the game ties right into that for him.
But as we kept talking and I watched David play for the first time after I got stuck at level 5 or 6, I realized what I didn't like about the game and what keeps it from being really fantastic. Whimsical storyline aside, Katamari Damacy is essentially a 3-D version of Pac-Man and possesses a similar level of complexity (when compared to Grand Theft Auto or a MMORPG). You move around a maze, eating things, and occasionally getting power-ups (i.e. growing larger) so that you can eat things you couldn't eat before.
And like Pac-Man, there are patterns. On repeat plays, the boards are the same, objects always appear in the same spots, and once you learn the correct way to go, it's pretty easy to clear each board in the same general manner you did the last time. In the end, there's very little that's complex or open-ended about the game play, which is going to limit its repeatability for many. It wouldn't be too difficult to add some complexity to the game without making it any more difficult to play at a novice level (making it a bit like chess -- easy to play, tough to play well, and nearly impossible to master). The basic rolling-around game play and the kookiness of the story make Katamari Damacy great fun, but I'm hoping KD 2 ups the ante complexity-wise so it's still as maddening and crack-like at play #200 as it was a play #1.
I'll write more in-depth about a few of the speakers here, but for now, here are some soundbites (my comments in brackets):
- Andrew Zolli: All societies have an image of the future. Those that have optimistic images have better outcomes than those with pessimistic images. [The US right now seems optimistic overall, but getting a bit more pessimistic. At PopTech this year and last, about 1/2 the speakers said during their talks something to the effect of "we're screwed".]
- Malcolm Gladwell talking about a chapter from Blink:
One of the many ways in which asking someone what they think isn't necessarily the best way to find out what they want: people move away from the more sophisticated idea and they go for the simpler choice because they don't have the necessary "vocabulary" to explain their real feelings. [You may prefer The Hours to Goldeneye, but when asked to justify that choice, you may find yourself favoring the Bond flick more than you would if you didn't have to justify it.]
- Frans de Waal studies primate behavior to gain insight into human behavior. One of his findings: aggression does not disperse, it brings primates together more often than normal. [Destruction is creative. Creativity is destructive. Or something.]
- Bruce Mau: Not all countries have embraced democracy, but most have embraced traffic (individual transportation). [There are many different ways in which openness can be introduced into a culture.]
- Thomas Barnett: China is 30% Marxist Communist, 70% The Sopranos.
- Phillip Longman: Secular societies that cannot reproduce will be replaced by fundamentalist countries where children are an economic asset and a gift from God. And in Brazil, television viewing time predicts birth rate...the more TV a woman watches, the less likely she is to have children.
Salon recently ran an article on the relatively new school of thought about traffic management called second generation traffic calming. It involves improving traffic flow by incorporating, under certain circumstances, automobile traffic back into the flow of other human activities:
Rejecting the idea of separating people from vehicular traffic, it's a concept that privileges multiplicity over homogeneity, disorder over order, and intrigue over certainty. In practice, it's about dismantling barriers: between the road and the sidewalk, between cars, pedestrians and cyclists and, most controversially, between moving vehicles and children at play.
The idea, borrowed in part from behavioral psychology and evolutionary biology disciplines, is that traffic will become safer and move more smoothly if drivers are forced to pay more attention to their driving and be on autopilot less:
Reversing decades of conventional wisdom on traffic engineering, Hamilton-Baillie argues that the key to improving both safety and vehicular capacity is to remove traffic lights and other controls, such as stop signs and the white and yellow lines dividing streets into lanes. Without any clear right-of-way, he says, motorists are forced to slow down to safer speeds, make eye contact with pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, and decide among themselves when it is safe to proceed.
At the beginning of the article, the author observes traffic working like this in China:
It's rush hour, and I am standing at the corner of Zhuhui and Renmin Road, a four-lane intersection in Suzhou, China. Ignoring the red light, a couple of taxis and a dozen bicycles are headed straight for a huge mass of cyclists, cars, pedicabs and mopeds that are turning left in front of me. Cringing, I anticipate a collision. Like a flock of migrating birds, however, the mass changes formation. A space opens up, the taxis and bicycles move in, and hundreds of commuters continue down the street, unperturbed and fatality free.
In Suzhou, the traffic rules are simple. "There are no rules," as one local told me. A city of 2.2 million people, Suzhou has 500,000 cars and 900,000 bicycles, not to mention hundreds of pedicabs, mopeds and assorted, quainter forms of transportation. Drivers of all modes pay little attention to the few traffic signals and weave wildly from one side of the street to another. Defying survival instincts, pedestrians have to barge between oncoming cars to cross the roads.
But here's the catch: During the 10 days I spent in Suzhou last fall, I didn't see a single accident. Really, not a single one. Nor was there any of the road rage one might expect given the anarchy that passes for traffic policy. And despite the obvious advantages that accrue to cars because of their size, no single transportation mode dominates the streets.
When I was in Bejing a few years ago, I observed the same thing. Traffic was an amazing thing to watch there. One day as we toured a temple a few stories off the ground, my dad and I broke away from the rest of the group to watch traffic on the 5 or 6-way intersection below us for several minutes. It was a marvel of self-organizing behavior, with buses, pedicabs, pedestrians, cyclists, taxis, cars, and motorcycles forming temporary lanes of traffic that would weaken and yield to newly formed lanes of flow.
I've observed this phenomenon in NYC as well, especially in dense areas of Manhattan like Midtown. People are always in the street, crossing against the light or jaywalking across even busy avenues or through stopped traffic. Cyclists run red lights, charge through busy crosswalks, and barrel down one-way streets the wrong way. Everyone pays a lot of attention to what they're doing, regardless of what the signs say or where the crosswalk is marked. And for the most part, it seems to work. New York City has a relatively low pedestrian fatality rate, about half that of the city with the highest rate, a remarkable fact considering the pedestrian density involved and how fast traffic moves in Manhattan sometimes (I saw a cab zipping down 5th Avenue this afternoon doing at least 50 mph, slaloming through jaywalkers as he went).
Eyebeam has launched their latest project, ForwardTrack. It's a system for diseminating petitions that not only keeps track of who supports the petition, but how that support has developed. The description from the site:
ForwardTrack is a new system created by Eyebeam R&D designed to promote on-line activism. The system tracks and maps the diffusion of email forwards, political calls-to-action, and petitions. Our goal is to help people understand decentralized networks and see the power of "6 degrees of separation." ForwardTrack technology helps prove that one person can make a difference.
It'll be interesting to see if petitions are more viral when people can see exactly how they've made a difference in spreading the message. The first project they've set up is Tom's Petition, an effort to renew the national Assault Weapons Ban which automatically expires at the end of the summer. If you'd be interested in signing this petition (or in seeing a neat map detailing how I got signed up and how many people I've signed up), you can go to my Personal Petition Page and enter your name, zip, and email address to get the petition sent to you. When you forward that email back to Tom, I'll get credit for introducing you to the petition. You can forward the petition to friends, family, etc. and, if you've got a Web site, also point people toward your Personal Petition Page.
Jane Jacobs, when asked about the potential negative effects of computers on communities and neighborhoods, replied that the opposite may be true; that navigating the Web shows people how networks function and how to think in a more non-linear fashion:
[There is] a very persuasive argument that the computer, in the form of things like the World Wide Web and the Internet, is actually [giving] people firsthand experience with use of a Web and making virtual changes in a Web-like way. This is not real. But after all, quirks and quarks and atoms are not real, for all we know. But thinking of them, picturing them and seeing the world with these things, really illuminates our understanding. It may be untruthful and it may be wrong, but usually, each of these things gets a little nearer the truth. So this Web-thinking in the place of the mechanical, cause/effect kind of thinking is certainly closer to the truth. The use of the computer [may be] indispensable to this, both for the complications we have to understand and have begun to understand and also because of a different notion this gives people. You know it's always been available to people that they be hermits. But think of how few of them have been. So, no, I don't think the human race will suddenly be smitten with an overwhelming urge to become hermits because of a new machine.
I'm on a bit of a Jacobs kick right now, reading Dark Age Ahead and poking around online for essays and interviews I've missed.
Designs for Working, a New Yorker acticle by Malcolm Gladwell from a few years ago, draws parallels between good office design and the ideas in Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities:
The task of the office, then, is to invite a particular kind of social interaction--the casual, nonthreatening encounter that makes it easy for relative strangers to talk to each other. Offices need the sort of social milieu that Jane Jacobs found on the sidewalks of the West Village. "It is possible in a city street neighborhood to know all kinds of people without unwelcome entanglements, without boredom, necessity for excuses, explanations, fears of giving offense, embarrassments respecting impositions or commitments, and all such paraphernalia of obligations which can accompany less limited relationships," Jacobs wrote. If you substitute "office" for "city street neighborhood," that sentence becomes the perfect statement of what the modern employer wants from the workplace.
Jacobs' book is pretty much a must-read for anyone constructing environments for social interaction (cities, offices, software, restaurants, libraries, etc.).
Sam Arbesman has written up an initial analysis (PDF file) of the results of the Memespread Project. In discussing the spread of memes, it's common practice to utilize familiar biological terms: viral, epidemic, contagious, incubation, etc. My favorite quote of the article along those lines is "Jason Kottke is an informational equivalent of Typhoid Mary". Heh. But in this case, MetaFilter turned out more Mary than I:
What seemed most interesting is that the largest spike occurred 10 hours into the experiment, and was due to the website MetaFilter (http://www.metafilter.com). The spread of the meme to this collaborative blog seemed to help give the epidemic another wave of spreading (as can be seen in Figure 5 and Figure 1).
Because of its greater traffic, MeFi exposed more people to the meme than did kottke.org. And I suspect that due to the different audiences of the two sites, the meme was probably also more virulent among MeFi readers than kottke.org readers; that is, MeFi readers were more likely to infect others with the meme than were those of kottke.org.
It would be interesting to run this experiment again under slightly different conditions. Maybe seed a bigger node in the network (MeFi instead of kottke.org). Or seed 50 sites at the same time, each with a different meme marked with a distinct tracking code (e.g. www.example.com/?id=47) and see how each one spreads. Maybe the memes could be mutable; creating a new strain would be as easy as adding a couple digits to the tracking ID.
John Brockman has asked his Edgy band of scientists, futurists, writers, and philosophers about "some bit of wisdom, some rule of nature, some law-like pattern, either grand or small, that you've noticed in the universe that might as well be named after you", like those of Newton, Moore, or Murphy. Here are the results.
The more general of such laws are the most interesting because they can enrich our understanding of diverse subject areas and can be very instructive in how they fail. I think maybe this is what Alan Alda was getting at with his First and Second Laws of Laws:
1. All laws are local.
2. A law does not know how local it is.
Here's a few of my other favorite laws from the list, general and not:
Pimm's First Law: No language spoken by fewer than 100,000 people survives contact with the outside world, while no language spoken by more than one million people can be eliminated by such contact.
Gopnik's Gender Curves: The male curve is an abrupt rise followed by an equally abrupt fall. The female curve is a slow rise to an extended asymptote. The areas under the curves are roughly equal. These curves apply to all activities at all time scales (e.g. attention to TV programs, romantic love, career scientific productivity). (see the graphs)
Morgan's Second Law: To a first approximation all appointments are canceled.
Pöppel's Universal: We take life 3 seconds at a time. Human experience and behaviour is characterized by temporal segmentation. Successive segments or "time windows" have a duration of approx. 3 seconds.
Brand's Pace Law: In haste, mistakes cascade. With deliberation, mistakes instruct.
Kai's Example Dilemma: A good analogy is like a diagonal frog.
Rushkoff's Law: A religion will increase in social value until a majority of its members actually believe in it--at which point the social damage it causes will increase exponentially as long as it is in existence.
Humphrey's Law of the Efficacy of Prayer: In a dangerous world there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not.
Minksy's Second Law: Don't just do something. Stand there.
Sterling's Corollary to Clarke's Law: Any sufficiently advanced garbage is indistinguishable from magic.
This Craigslist job posting (via Anil) describes a new initiative within Google called Googlettes:
What is a Googlette? It's a new business inside of Google that is just getting started – the start-up within the start-up. We're looking for an experienced, entrepreneurial manager capable of offering direction to a team of PMs working on a wide array of Googlettes. You will define Google's innovation engine and grow the leaders of our next generation of businesses.
From the description, it looks like Google is building a little Skunkworks to generate business ideas and leaders internally instead of relying so heavily on outside hires and ideas. Which is a fine idea.
But when I first read the description, I thought they might be doing something else that is potentially more interesting. Instead of generating ideas and people for internal use, what if they're incubating start-ups to spin off into companies of their own? Fast forward five years and instead of being a big huge company, Google is a big huge company at the center of a network of 10-20 large to medium-sized companies with similar goals, values, and business practices. Most of these spin-offs would be engaged in businesses similiar (and probably complementary) to each other and the Google Mother Ship, some of them maybe even directly competing with each other.
With the right balance of mutual effort and competition, the Google collective would be a formidable adversary for its competition -- a team of companies against single companies -- and would at the same time create an open business environment (say, the opposite of the current business environment in film, music, television, and radio) where competition creates more opportunities, value for customers, jobs, business, and innovation for everyone in that environment.
Again, I don't think that's Google's plan, but maybe it should be.
Players of The Sims are creating narratives and movies using Sims characters as actors and the software's album feature as a recording media:
Players "go to a lot of trouble to get the Sims to do things they don't want to do," Wright says, explaining that players must keep their would-be actors fed, clean, rested and happy before they will even consider playing their parts. "So in that sense, it's almost like they're a director.... It's almost like a real movie shoot."
Asked about that, Service laughed and agreed. "I suspect real people would be easier to direct," she said. "There is nothing like trying to get two Sims to kiss when they are both not in the mood. Actors would at least pretend."
If you look at the highest-rated and most-viewed albums on The Sims Exchange, they'll all of the movie/narrative variety. This account of a lawn gnome's revenge is a favorite.
This reminds me of Jim Monroe's My Trip to Liberty City, a home movie-esque account of a Canadian man's visit to Liberty City in the game Grand Theft Auto.
I missed Julian Dibbell's The Unreal Estate Boom in Wired last November (I was in Frizzance), but I recently rectified that oversight. Too many interesting bits in the article about virtual spaces and economies to exhaustively list here, so here's a short one:
"The minute you hardwire constraints into a virtual world, an economy emerges," explains Castronova, the Adam Smith of EverQuest. "One-trillionth of a second later, that economy starts interacting with ours."
Some thoughts:
1. I'm not sure if that's always true. Slashdot has an economy (with karma as currency) but as far as I know, no one is selling their karma to less karma-rich folks. But, it's close enough.
2. Back when ICQ was still popular, people sold low ICQ numbers on eBay. #163896 went for $41.
3. When MetaFilter was inundated with new users, Matt throttled new user signups to 15 people a day. But he also let in anyone who donated $5 toward server upkeep and bandwidth. Many people joined this way.
4. And just in case you didn't think they were smart, the folks at Ludicorp recognize that virtual economies & real world economies are tightly coupled in the way that Mr. Castronova describes above. Expect The Game Neverending to let people play extensively with the intersection of the virtual and real world economies.
ps. Julian Dibbell is keeping a weblog called Play Money in which he's documenting his attempt to make real money in the virtual world of Ultima Online.
Network Effects: Use of the Internet in the Chinese Rave Scene describes how Chinese music promoters and DJs are using the Internet to download & share music, read foreign music-related media, plan events, and generally share knowledge about their interests & craft, despite the Great Firewall of China:
I began to see a number of distinct effects of the rapid increase in Net usage on the nascent Chinese club scene: local DJs and producers were using the Internet to obtain new tools for producing and distributing their own music; websites were springing up to inform users about new developments in the Chinese scene and provide new opportunities for participants to communicate with one another; and music makers and clubbers alike were using the Net to learn about and obtain new music from both domestic and international artists.
and
Some Chinese DJs even use music downloaded from the Net in their live sets, making their own compilations of MP3 files of music from China and abroad and recording them on CDRs; I have observed DJs at some of the largest clubs in Shanghai and Guangzhou using these CDRs in the DJ booth. Among some in the Chinese underground hiphop scene, only tracks which have been downloaded are considered truly "underground" and thus valuable, while any music which is available for purchase in physical form is seen as being tainted by commerciality to some degree.
When I was in Beijing in 1996, I observed several people handing out club flyers around hotels and in the more hip/affluent parts of the city. They were particularly keen about giving flyers to anyone who looked like a tourist.
Ten years ago, Michael Hauben wrote The Net and Netizens: The Impact the Net has on People's Lives. It begins:
Welcome to the 21st Century. You are a Netizen (Net Citizen), and you exist as a citizen of the world thanks to the global connectivity that the Net makes possible. You consider everyone as your compatriot. You physically live in one country but you are in contact with much of the world via the global computer network. Virtually you live next door to every other single netizen in the world. Geographical separation is replaced by existence in the same virtual space.
That simple description of netizenship has held up fairly well, although living in the petri dish for the last 10 years has revealed unforseen structure in Hauben's homogeneous "virtual space". I may inhabit cyberspace along with everyone else, but my neighborhood is determined by my social network(s). I can direct my computer to get information from a web site in Finland, but that doesn't make the owner of that site my next door neighbor.
Hauben based his musings on a paper by J.C.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor called The Computer as a Communication Device which is worth a read as well.
Here are some lists of the top weblogs (as determined by counting inbound links):
Technorati Top 100
Daypop Top Weblogs
Myelin Blogging Ecosystem
TTLB Blogosphere Ecosystem
Most Watched Blogs @ blo.gs**
Blogrolling.com Top Links**
** These two lists are not like the others and the discussion below may not apply. (Or maybe it does.)
They are all different. Why? Because each is describing a small part of the network as a whole -- with the possible exception of Technorati because its sampling size is relatively large -- much like Saxe's blind men trying to describe an elephant.
How did these lists -- which ostensively are trying to measure the same thing -- get so dissimilar? To add weblogs into the system, each probably started with small list of weblogs to seed the system, picking up other weblogs as each was scraped. That initial seed list pretty much determines how each map of the network is going to look. If you start with Scripting News and look at what it is linking to and what those sites are linking to (i.e. the two degrees of Scripting News), the popularity of SN is going to skew higher than its actual popularity because sites that SN links to are likely to link back to it.
So, my hypothesis is that because of the skew introduced by the initial conditions and the small sample sizes, all of these lists (except maybe Technorati) are pretty inaccurate. It's like the network effect squared or something -- the rich seem disproportionally richer because the network is being measured from their perspective (perhaps making this weblogs & power law business more pronounced than it actually is) -- but I can't get my head around it.
So here's my question for you. How do you construct a fairly accurate map of a network (the weblog universe in this case) with a sample size much smaller than the total number of nodes (weblogs)? Is it even possible? A random sampling would work, but how do you tell your spider to go find a random node when it can only find nodes though links from other nodes?
(I didn't have time to do 2000 words on this, so it's a little incomplete and thrown together, more of a starting point for a discussion than a statement of what I actually believe. I could be wrong about all this, but it seems like there's something interesting here.)
A couple of notable developments in the whole power laws and weblog discussion. Steven Johnson states that, ok, the distribution of influence in the weblog world follows a power law...now what? If we as participants in that network don't want things to work that way, is there anything we can do about it?
Prompted by all the power law talk, David Sifry is now using non-linear equations to determine recent interesting weblogs and recent interesting newcomers for Technorati. The idea is that the distribution of weblogs is non-linear (the power law curve isn't a straight line), so why not use non-linear equations to level the playing field a little.
What David is doing is actually why I graphed the Technorati data in the first place. I was trying to figure out how you could make the interesting blogs list not favor the top-linked sites all the time (200 new sites linking to Movable Type is not interesting considering it already has 6000 sites linking to it).
Here's an email I sent David a couple of days ago:
"I started thinking about [the graph of the data] in relation to the Interesting Recent Blogs list and how it could be made more useful. Because it's the biggest, Google is always going to be at the top of the list, and some little weblog with 4 new posts (out of a total of 6) is never going to get anywhere near the top. I was thinking that by analyzing the distribution of the links, you could introduce a adjustment factor based on the rank of the site relative to the #1 site. The problem is, I can't remember enough of my college math to get from the power law equation to this magical adjustment factor. You might have better luck."
The idea is that instead of using a quadratic or cubic equation that kinda fits the data, you use a power law equation generated by the data itself to exactly fit the data (or nearly so). The power law equation I derived using the limited sample of the top 100 list is:
y = 5989.8x^(-0.8309)
where y is the # of inbound blogs and x is the rank of the site. I plotted the top 100 data again and tried to fit three curves to it:
The dotted blue line is a linear equation, the dashed red line is a quadratic equation, and the solid black line is the aforementioned power law equation. As you can see, the linear and quadratic equations fit the data poorly. The R-squared for the linear equation is 0.31, 0.55 for the quadratic, and 0.99 for the power law equation. So the quadratic is an improvement over the linear equation, but neither compare to the excellent fit of the power law and the excellent results that would follow from using it for Technorati's interesting recent blogs lists.
Many systems and phenomena are distributed according to a power law distribution. A power law applies to a system when large is rare and small is common. The distribution of individual wealth is a good example of this: there are a very few rich men and lots & lots of poor folks. A familiar way to think about power laws is the 80/20 rule: 80% of the wealth is controlled by 20% of the population.
It's been shown that the distribution of links on the web scales according to a power law, so it comes as no surprise that the distribution of links to weblogs does as well. Taking the top 100 most linked to weblogs on Technorati as a data set (specifically from 1/24/03), I used Excel to plot and fit a curve to the data:
The data conforms quite well to a power law curve. The R-squared value, a measure of how well the curve fits the data (1.0 is a perfect fit), is 0.9918. I ran a similar analysis of the distribution of the top 200 inbound referers to kottke.org and observed a fit of the data to a power law curve (R-squared = ~0.95). Clay Shirky showed that the distribution of the number of outbound links in the LiveJournal community follows a power law. Paul Hammond has observed a similar pattern with his outgoing links.**
This NEC study reveals that the deviation of a set of data from the power law correlates to how much competition is present in the system. The better the fit, the more competitive the environment is. Again, no surprise that the system of weblogs is a highly competitive one.
But what are weblogs competing for? Matt Webb posits that power laws arise due to scarcity. Links themselves can't be scarce (a page can have as many links as it can hold without running out), but they are a measure of something that is: people.
More specifically, the time that people have for visiting sites and linking to sites is limited. Mary only has so much time for visiting weblogs; if she goes to BoingBoing, she doesn't have time for MetaFilter. Some visitors are linkers and they link what they visit. Similarly, linkers have only so much time for linking. Sam can link to 20 sites about airplanes, but he can't link to 5000. The scarcity of people's time results in the distribution of links that can be described using power laws.
** Other places you *might* find power laws in the weblog world if you took the time to look: Daypop Top 40, Blogdex top links, the Blogging Ecosystem (in both "most linked" and "most prolific linkers" data sets), average # of posts per weblog, average # of words per post, average # of smileys per post, # of visitors per weblog, # of comments per post per weblog, and so on...
Further reading on weblogs, power laws, small worlds, the 80/20 rule, the rich get richer phenomena, Zipf's Law, Pareto's Law, etc.:
Small worlds & LiveJournal (Matt Webb)
Like bloggers link like bloggers (Steve Himmer)
The weblog them, the weblog us (Tom Coates)
Internet Navigators Think Small (MSNBC)
Scarcity and power laws (Matt Webb)
Ecosystems, Power Laws, Counters (N.Z. Bear)
Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality (Clay Shirky)
Small Worlds (Duncan Watts)
Linked: The New Science of Networks (Albert-László Barabási)
Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks (Mark Buchanan)
Ubiquity: The Science of History, or Why the World Is Simpler Than We Think (Mark Buchanan)
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age
Walking around NYC the last three weeks, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jane Jacobs) has been on my mind. In it, Jacobs describes what makes cities either vital & happening or dead & boring.
A key feature of some vital neighborhoods is short blocks. People utilize short blocks more frequently, all the restaurants, bars, & stores are located there (as well as some residences), and they just feel more alive. Really interesting things happen when blocks are very short and intersect in ungrid-like ways (like Broadway & 7th meeting at Times Square or all the odd angles in the West Village). Long blocks, at least in NYC, seem to be largely residential and unhappening, frequently feeling dead or even unsafe from a lack of pedestrian traffic.
According to this analysis of movie ratings (with neat graphs!), short films, film noir, and documentaries have the highest ratings on IMDB. At the bottom of the barrel are horror, sci-fi, action, and thillers. With minor exceptions, film ratings appear to be inversely proportional to box office earnings.
(BTW, that analysis is courtesy of Lada Adamic, who makes an appearance in Linked: The New Science of Networks (1st chapter) by Barabási.)
A one-paragraph explanation of how a computer works from Danny Hillis's The Pattern on the Stone (which you should read if you're interested in how computers work but don't really know):
"The work performed by the computer is specified by a program, which is written in a programming language. This language is converted to sequences of machine-language instructions by interpreters or compilers, via a predefined set of subroutines called the operating system. The instructions, which are stored in the memory of the computer, define the operations to be performed on data, which are also stored in the computer's memory. A finite-state machine fetches and executes these instructions. The instructions as well as the data are represented by patterns of bits. Both the finite-state machine and the memory are built of storage registers and Boolean logic blocks, and the latter are based on simple logical functions, such as And, Or, and Invert. These logical functions are implemented by switches, which are set up either in series or in parallel, and these switches control a physical substance, such as water or electricity, which is used to send one of two possible signals from one switch to another: 1 or 0. This is the hierarchy of abstraction that makes computers work."
Reading Hillis's explanation reminds me of Ray and Charles Eames's classic Powers of Ten film. In the same way that the computer is able to function by abstracting levels of functionality, expanding or limiting our view of the universe helps us understand it better, dealing with it at different scales rather than all at once (you don't get very far in describing the our solar system in terms of individual subatomic particles).
Kurt Andersen talks with Steven Johnson about emergence (and Emergence) on a radio show that also includes pieces about Jane Jacobs and Brian Eno. (via bbj)
Rebecca Mead strikes again with Shopping Rebellion in this week's New Yorker. Her description & analysis of Japan's fashion culture reminds me generally of several other threads floating about in the popular ether: mp3 ripping/trading, the weblog circle jerk, Web-enabled hypercollection, DVRs, the idea of a creative commons, the death of scarcity. The mantra of the moment seems to be "rip, mix, burn, consume, repeat, faster!" It's always been like this, but technology and our cultural evolution has shortened the lifecycle of the process so that the time from "rip" to "repeat" is a few minutes or hours instead of a few weeks or months, meaning that sometimes we can't tell why we're laughing at something anymore.
The folks at O'Reilly Network talk with Steven Johnson on "Emergence" (who will be keynoting at the Emerging Technology Conference this spring). Since reading it last fall, I keep coming back to the ideas presented in the book in the context of weblogs.
Take the universe of weblogs as a complex system. What, if anything, is "emerging" out of that system? One possible answer is that the collective act of weblogging is producing a basic form of journalism, which you might call "bottom-up journalism" or "peer-to-peer journalism".
It works like this: individual webloggers, each acting in their own self-interest (the "simple-minded component parts" Johnson refers to), post bits of information to their weblogs.
Then the feedback loop starts. Readers and other webloggers take those initial bits of information, rework them, and feed them back into the system in the form of weblog posts, email feedback, or comments on individual weblog posts. Rinse. Repeat.
At the end of the line, in some instances, you eventually get a story that has been collectively edited by the system. Repeat this process millions of times a month with hundreds of thousands of participants, and you'll get a few such stories a month.
In the end, at this stage in its development, it's difficult to say whether the network of weblogs is emergent or not. Is the whole smarter than the sum of its parts? Is some higher level of structure or intelligence coming out of these 500,000 monkeys at their typewriters?
On the specific question of journalism, is the weblog network efficient at journalism? Probably not right now, but maybe that's not the point. I have a hunch that weblogs are not "for journalism", in the same way that the Internet is not "for business", but that they will have an important role to play in the informal movement, filtering, dissemination, and refining of information.
What are your thoughts?
Is human evolution finally over? The argument here is that evolution is not a huge driving force in the development of humans anymore because of globalization, the quickening pace of man's control over his own evolution (as opposed to the slow pace of natural evolution), and the fact that no one in the West dies "naturally" anymore (evolution thrives on the death of the "weak" and the survival of the "strong"). It's a fascinating theory, but I suspect that it'll prove false. Funny thing about nature...it almost always wins.
Exploring Emergence (mit Java!): "In this [active] essay, we will explore the idea of emergence. We will examine how objects and patterns can arise from simple interactions in ways that are surprising and counter-intuitive. We will present examples with simple squares that turn on and off, but the underlying ideas will provide you with a new perspective for thinking about many phenomena in the everyday world." via MeFi.
Terrorism, Nonlinearity & Complex Adaptive Systems: "The events on 11 Sep 2001 were a tragic, but decisive, reminder of the emergence of a formidable new kind of 'enemy' in the world; an enemy that is widely dispersed, decentralized and whose many destructive parts are autonomous, mobile, and highly adaptive. The need for developing new complex systems theory inspired analytical tools and models for understanding the dynamics of this threat (and for providing insights into how to combat it) has never been greater."
While I'm on the topic of traffic flow, there's some yummy content on this site: Physics for Bored Commuters. Mr. Beaty confirms some of my suspicions about how to make traffic run more smoothly, most notably the idea of leaving a large space in front of your vehicle for merging traffic. Beaty also links to a slick Java applet that simulates a small area of in-town stoplight traffic that you can manipulate. (thanks Aaron and Peter)
One thing that he didn't mention is the proper speed of a merging car. In order to merge successfully into moderate-to-heavy traffic, you need to be moving at least as fast as said traffic. Failure to do so results in a traffic pileup both on the on-ramp and on the highway.
I don't quite know why, but I'm pretty interested in how traffic moves on the freeway. The Washington Post had a nice article yesterday on the attempts to model traffic flow using physics and computers and such. When I drive on the freeway, I like to observe the flow of traffic...I guess you could call it a small hobby of mine. It never ceases to amaze me when I see a car speed past me only to pass the same car in the slow lane miles down the road. Slow and steady wins the race? Or nobody wins the race?
Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control is a great movie. I'm really not going to say anymore than that because others have said it better elsewhere. I'd like to watch it about 3 or 4 more times to get the full impact of it. The music was great too...and there's a soundtrack!
