Thursday, December 06, 2007
Human History in 10 points
Human History
Alan Charles Kors [link]
George H. Walker Endowed Term Professor of History
* First, tribes: tough life.
* The defaults beyond the intimate tribe were violence, aversion to difference, and slavery. Superstition: everywhere.
* Culture overcomes them partially.
* Rainfall agriculture, which allows loners.
* Irrigation agriculture, which favors community.
* Division of labor plus exchange in trade bring mutual cooperation, even outside the tribe.
* The impulse is always there, though: "Kill or enslave the outsider."
* Gradual science from Athens' compact with reason.
* Division of labor, trade, the mastery of knowledge, plus time brought surplus, sometimes a peaceful extended order and, rules diversely evolved and, the cooperation of strangers - always warring against the fierce defaults of tribalism, violence, and ignorance.
* No one who teaches you knows what will happen.
Alan Charles Kors [link]
George H. Walker Endowed Term Professor of History
* First, tribes: tough life.
* The defaults beyond the intimate tribe were violence, aversion to difference, and slavery. Superstition: everywhere.
* Culture overcomes them partially.
* Rainfall agriculture, which allows loners.
* Irrigation agriculture, which favors community.
* Division of labor plus exchange in trade bring mutual cooperation, even outside the tribe.
* The impulse is always there, though: "Kill or enslave the outsider."
* Gradual science from Athens' compact with reason.
* Division of labor, trade, the mastery of knowledge, plus time brought surplus, sometimes a peaceful extended order and, rules diversely evolved and, the cooperation of strangers - always warring against the fierce defaults of tribalism, violence, and ignorance.
* No one who teaches you knows what will happen.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
memories replayed 7 times faster
Memories processed seven times faster than reality
Scientists have show that when rats sleep, they play back memories as much as seven times faster than the events really transpired. The research, conducted at the University of Arizona, may shed light on how memories are processed. From a University of Arizona press release:
Memory stores patterns of activity in modular form in the brain’s cortex. Different modules in the cortex process different kinds of information – sounds, sights, tastes, smells, etc. The cortex sends these networks of activity to a region called the hippocampus. The hippocampus then creates and assigns a tag, a kind of temporary bar code, that is unique to every memory and sends that signal back to the cortex.Link
Each module in the cortex uses the tag to retrieve its own part of the activity. A memory of having lunch, for example, would involve a number of modules, each of which might record where the diner sat, what was served, the noise level in the restaurant or the financial transaction to pay for the meal.
But while an actual dining experience might have taken up an hour of actual time, replaying the memory of it would only take 8 to 10 minutes. The reason, (professor Bruce) McNaughton said, is that the speed of the consolidation process isn’t constrained by the real world physical laws that regulate activity in time and space.
The brain uses this biological trick because there is no way for all of its neurons to connect with and interact with every other neuron. It is still an expensive task for the hippocampus to make all of those connections. The retrieval tags the hippocampus generates are only temporary until the cortex can carry a given memory on its own.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
empathy & agency
Snips from game designer Will Wright's keynote at the SXSW festival [link]
Stories are about empathy, and games are about agency. I’m causing what’s going on on screen. Can I do this? Can I accomplish this? These models are cognitive technology. They’re the original educational technology. They involve abstracting the world. Both of these respond to being stuck in time, but we wanna move experiences outside time.
...Story causes a chain and conveys it to a viewer... a story’s all about the chain of events, very linear, unchanging, you’ve all seen the same version of Star Wars.
But games are very open ended. Also, movies are primarily visual. Games are primarily interactive. So when we take away the control from a player, we’re taking away the most important thing from them. It’s like going to the movies and showing a blank screen.
...
With linear stories you want to start amplifying. In Star Wars, it all comes down to these two possibilities – the rebels are crushed, or the Death Star blows up. One of the fundamental things I’ve found as an interactive storyteller is that in linear stories the director knows the future. He or she knows the minor details that are important to present to you. But we [interactive storytellers] don’t know those things. Ours are chaotic systems. Very minor initial conditions can lead to wide-ranging end conditions.
In a linear drama you can show the causal chain; in interactive drama you can’t so much. We’re playing with it in movies in interesting ways: interesting sub-plots (Magnolia); one of the things that keeps your interest is your wondering how these back stories are going to come together. This is a common thing that people do with causal change. Timecode is another version of this. It's parallel multi-threaded storytelling.
...
Interactive is riding this generational wave. It’s a cultural overtake process. There’s a lot of people who’ve spent a lot of time with linear, but this whole generation is coming up… who are more comfortable in interactive. Games are being thought of as a tool for self expression, like a hobby but also like a tool.
...You can take any human technology and take it as a new extension of our body. Telescopes extend our eyes, cars our legs, telephones our voice. Computers do a lot of these things but the most important thing is that they extend our imagination.
This is a very powerful thing, an amplifier for imagination.
Friday, January 26, 2007
In My Language
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc
Sunday, May 28, 2006
A Short History of Color Systems
From a web site, Bilbliodyssey, comes the Colour Museum’s short history of color systems in art and science.
Thursday, March 23, 2006
2020 Computing: The creativity machine
Article by Vernor Vinge on the future direction of collaborative technology:
"How can we prepare for such a future? Perhaps that is the most important research project for our creativity machine. We need to exploit the growing sensor/effector layer to make the world itself a real-time database. In the social, human layers of the Internet, we need to devise and experiment with large-scale architectures for collaboration. We need linguists and artificial-intelligence researchers to extend the capabilities of search engines and social networks to produce services that can bridge barriers created by technical jargon and forge links between unrelated specialties, bringing research groups with complementary problems and solutions together — even when those groups have not noticed the possibility of collaboration. In the end, computers plus networks plus people add up to something significantly greater than the parts. The ensemble eventually grows beyond human creativity. To become what? We can't know until we get there."
"How can we prepare for such a future? Perhaps that is the most important research project for our creativity machine. We need to exploit the growing sensor/effector layer to make the world itself a real-time database. In the social, human layers of the Internet, we need to devise and experiment with large-scale architectures for collaboration. We need linguists and artificial-intelligence researchers to extend the capabilities of search engines and social networks to produce services that can bridge barriers created by technical jargon and forge links between unrelated specialties, bringing research groups with complementary problems and solutions together — even when those groups have not noticed the possibility of collaboration. In the end, computers plus networks plus people add up to something significantly greater than the parts. The ensemble eventually grows beyond human creativity. To become what? We can't know until we get there."
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
start
First zoaria entry
