Films and movies – Page 11 – a sibilant intake of breath

David Mitchell on climate change

A couple of years ago, the issue of the consequences of climate change being very depressing came up here, given how dealing with the problem means giving up some excellent things, like being able to visit China or Hawaii on a whim and being able to concentrate our scientific efforts on neat things like space travel.

More recently, David Mitchell (of Mitchell and Webb) produced a funny video with a similar message:

David discusses why tackling climate change is always presented to us by people who either tell us off or patronisingly try to convince us that tackling it is “cool” or “fun”, when actually it’s just something we have to do, because of facts.

I don’t entirely agree with him – since I do see moving to renewable forms of energy as an opportunity. That said, I do like the delivery of his message.

Agora

I saw Agora yesterday, and found very little in it that was redeeming. The film depicts the mathematical work of Hypatia, set against a background of religious violence between pagans, Christians, and Jews. The great majority of the film consisted of angry young male religious fanatics, killing another for reasons that were never very well established. All the dialog was excessively melodramatic and unconvincing, and the motivations of all the characters remained obscure.

Given the span of time and the number of characters included in the film, it feels a bit as though they took a trilogy worth of material and crammed it into one film by removing everything that wasn’t a critical plot point. Imagine The Lord of The Rings compressed into two hours by removing everything except key plot points; this film has that kind of pacing. As a result, the film feels like a series of climaxes with no lead-up to give them context or follow-through to show their consequences.

The mathematical sub-plot contrasted aesthetically with all the background violence, but also felt unconvincing and unnatural. Rather than being given any appreciation for why people care so much about the mathematical questions, or what solving them might mean, we are treated to an epistemology reminiscent of Dead Poets Society or an episode of House: all sound bites and sudden insights, with little sense of what makes the knowledge significant.

Not recommended.

Khan Academy

Khan Academy is a collection of over 1,400 miniature lectures, delivered by one man via YouTube. They cover topics that range widely, in disciplines including mathematics, chemistry, biology, statistics, history, finance, and physics.

From the twenty or so I have tried, they seem to be quite accessible, at least for those with a basic grounding in mathematics. I had never covered matrices in high school or university math, but the videos in the linear algebra collection have left me with what feels like an adequate theoretical awareness of what they are, why they are useful, and how they fit into mathematics more broadly.

The whole collection is worth a look.

The problem with 3D everything

The 3D craze in all forms of entertainment has spread to the extent that the swag bags for journalists at Toronto’s G8/G20 summit include an iPhone cover designed to let you view 3D media. 3D is all the rage for movies and games, as consumers flock to something novel and seemingly high-tech and entertainment companies sense an excuse to boost ticket prices and (for now) offer something that pirated media does not.

I have one big problem with all of this: while it is easy enough to exploit binocular vision to produce the illusion of three dimensions on a flat screen, doing so doesn’t really take into account how people see. The effect works because of how our brain interprets parallax – the situation in which the perspective on a scene differs slightly when the viewpoint used changes. This is a problem for many point-and-shoot cameras, with viewfinders offset from the lens; you can compose a photo nicely as viewed through the former, only to discover that it doesn’t look so great when viewed through the latter. It also applies to the different perspectives offered by your two eyes. Your brain uses the differences between the two views as one source of information about how far away things are, feeding into our overall awareness about the three-dimensionality of the world.

Parallax is one important way in which our brains make sense of a three-dimensional world. Others include geometric cues, like how parallel lines seem to converge as they approach the horizon. Exploiting these sorts of cues allows artists to make works that seem to have depth. It is also one way in which optical illusions can be created. It is one reason why the very cool hollow face illusion works. Indeed, that particular illusion only works when seen without the benefit of binocular vision, which allows our brains to figure out that we are in danger of being tricked by geometry.

The trouble with 3D is what happens when our eyes go beyond perceiving a scene and into responding to it: specifically, by refocusing. When we see a rhino charging at us, the muscles around our eyes change the shape of our lenses so as to keep the beast in focus. Our eyes also turn inward, toward our noses. Unfortunately, when we are just looking at a false 3D image of a rhino, the re-focusing is not necessary. After all, we are still really looking at the same flat screen. This may explain why watching 3D movies is nauseating for some people; more worrisomely, it could cause people to learn to see in unnatural ways, in a manner that extends beyond the movie theatre experience.

This is not a problem that can be overcome, so long as our chosen mode of producing faux-three-dimensional images relies upon information displayed on flat panels. How important it ultimately will be, I can’t really comment on. Still, it is worth knowing that the exciting 3D experience consumers are being promised is premised on a limited understanding of how people really see moving images.

Anne Boleyn on The Tudors

I think the casting people for the television show The Tudors managed to exploit human psychology in a couple of clever ways, in casting Natalie Dormer as Anne Boleyn. Specifically, I think they took advantage of the way in which increasing familiarity with someone makes them more attractive, as well as how seeing other people be attracted to someone makes them more attractive to you.

When I first saw her, she struck me as very distinctive but not especially beautiful. After a few episodes, and the operation of those psychological factors, she both seemed extremely attractive and quite distinct from the large cast of very attractive but less individually distinguishable female characters on the show.

Now, if only Zip.ca would send me fewer scratched, unplayable discs!

HDstarcraft and HuskyStarcraft – viral marketing?

Blizzard’s Starcraft must surely be one of the most enduring computer games of all time. It came out when I was in high school, but is still actively played by a large number of people, especially in South Korea. There are even professional matches and tournaments.

Now, Blizzard is in the middle of a long beta release of Starcraft II. I think the key purpose is to balance the three races, so that good players will be approximately equally likely to use all three. The balancing is subtle and detailed: involving everything from the cost and time required for weapons upgrades to the potentially useful hexagonal grid projected by Protoss pylons, which could aid accurate placement of buildings.

Throughout the beta, there have been two internet personalities releasing high-resolution narrated replays of high level matches: HDstarcraft and HuskyStarcraft. They had one sponsored tournament, but generally don’t seem to advertise for anybody. That, combined with the relative professionalism of their operation and the sheer amount of time they are putting into it makes me wonder if they might be part of a viral marketing campaign run by Blizzard, designed to build anticipation for the forthcoming game.

This is pure speculation on my part but if it is true, it is a clever move on Blizzard’s part. The number of people watching each screencast has been rising steadily, and is now consistently over 100,000. The people watching may end up as some of the most active members of the eventual Starcraft II community, after commercial release. Even if Blizzard has nothing to do with these replays, I think undertaking such an extensive beta release (with more than 13 patches already) shows a good amount of respect for their customers, for whom the issue of balance will eventually be very important.

[Update: 14 December 2010] I no longer think it is at all likely that HD and Husky are part of a viral marketing campaign. Still, it would have been a pretty good idea on the part of Blizzard. I have definitely enjoyed their videos, and they contributed to my desire to buy and play Starcraft II.

State of the climate video

Last night, I gave a short talk outlining my current thinking on climate change.

I am interested to know which things people think I am wrong about. Also, about which things seemed to be effectively expressed, and which poorly expressed.

An improved version may be worthy of being recorded in a more aesthetically appealing manner.

Psychological dualism

There is a distinction drawn in theories about the human mind between ‘monist’ and ‘dualist’ understandings of how it works. Dualists, like Descartes, see the mind as essentially separate from the body. Monists believe that “the mind is what the brain does,” and that there is no distinction between the two.

The position of the two views in society is an odd one, as an excellent Paul Bloom lecture discusses. We can readily understand situations that presume dualism: the continued life of the soul after death, the idea that the mind of one person could be transferred into another person or animal, etc.

Hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, Homer described the fate of the companions of Odysseus who were transformed by a witch into pigs. Actually, that’s not quite right. She didn’t turn them into pigs. She did something worse. She stuck them in the bodies of pigs. They had the head and voice and bristles and body of swine but their minds remained unchanged as before, so they were penned there weeping. And we are invited to imagine the fate of again finding ourselves in the bodies of other creatures and, if you can imagine this, this is because you are imagining what you are as separate from the body that you reside in.

Clearly, we are able to imagine minds that would remain essentially unchanged, even when altered into a radically different physical form.

At the same time at dualism seems to make intuitive sense to people, all the physical evidence we have is on the side of a monist view, in which ‘mind’ arises from the physical properties of body:

Somebody who hold a–held a dualist view that said that what we do and what we decide and what we think and what we want are all have nothing to do with the physical world, would be embarrassed by the fact that the brain seems to correspond in intricate and elaborate ways to our mental life.

…

Somebody with a severe and profound loss of mental faculties–the deficit will be shown correspondingly in her brain. Studies using imaging techniques like CAT scans, PET, and fMRI, illustrate that different parts of the brain are active during different parts of mental life. For instance, the difference between seeing words, hearing words, reading words and generating words can correspond to different aspects of what part of your brain is active. To some extent, if we put you in an fMRI scanner and observed what you’re doing in real time, by looking at the activity patterns in your brain we can tell whether you are thinking about music or thinking about sex. To some extent we can tell whether you’re solving a moral dilemma versus something else. And this is no surprise if what we are is the workings of our physical brains, but it is extremely difficult to explain if one is a dualist.

The lecture includes many other examples showing why monism and the world as we observe it seem to mesh.

To me, the importance of this seems to go beyond settling scientific and/or metaphysical questions. It certainly seems plausible that beings that intuitively perceive themselves as essentially independent from physical reality will develop high-level theories about the world that take that into account, in areas as diverse as their religious, political, and moral views. By the same token, if one view really is far more defensible than the other, on the basis of observations and experiments we perform, that quite possibly has moral and political implications. It is all quite interesting, in any case, and I recommend that people consider watching the lecture series. The videos, transcripts, and slides are all available for free online.

Irony in The Wire

Without revealing anything about the major plot developments in this excellent series, I can comment on one thing I realized about The Wire overall, as I was watching the final season. Within the show, it can be broadly said that there are two sorts of police officers – those that are happy to function within the system as it exists and those who aspire to do things differently. The former recognize the political necessity of ‘cracking down on crime,’ no matter how pointless that may be in its ultimate consequences. As such, when some politician needs improved crime statistics, they will happily go round people up for minor offenses and otherwise fudge the numbers until they seem to reflect the promised improvement.

The other set of police officers want to build up comprehensive cases against the leaders of the drug gangs, securing prosecutions against them using surveillance and human intelligence. They see the efforts made to fudge statistics as deeply wasteful. The irony is that their ‘real police work’ actually causes far graver consequences. Every time they remove someone from the top of the pyramid, it generates a bloody contest for dominance among the other high-level agents. The police therefore keep themselves well occupied with murders. Similarly, when people who are imprisoned are eventually released, they are liable to create conflicts. It’s not for nothing that the drug dealers in the show refer to their interactions with the police and with one another as ‘The Game.’

In the end, then, neither form of policing really accomplishes anything overly meaningful. The shoddy policework maintains a churn of people being brought up on minor charges, keeps police officers busy, and helps politicians convince voters they are doing a decent job. The professional policework, meanwhile, helps perpetuate the large-scale violence between and within drug organizations.

Given the degree of realism in the show, it does not seem inconceivable that dynamics of this sort operate in the real world, at least in those places that continue to see prohibition as the proper response to the problem of illicit drugs. As I have expressed here before, that seems a wrongheaded approach to me. It would be far better to undercut the violence of the drug trade by making it legal and controlled, akin to alcohol and tobacco, while simultaneously treating drug addiction as an illness requiring treatment and not a crime requiring deterrence and punishment.

Ocean acidification video

Ocean acidification is one of the least appreciated elements of climate change. As the atmosphere fills with carbon dioxide, some of it dissolves into the oceans. That, in turn, makes the water more acidic. This could become a major threat to organisms that depend on being about to draw calcium from the water to make exoskeletons, such as corals and shelled creatures like crabs, lobsters, sea urchins, and shrimp. The latest research from the Carnegie Institution suggests that the world’s coral reefs will begin to disintegrate before the end of the century, if we keep releasing greenhouse gas pollutants at this rate.

Over at A Few Things Ill Considered, there is a link to a good twenty-minute video explaining the problem.

The only way to keep the oceans from getting ever-more acidic is to stop using the atmosphere as a dump for carbon dioxide pollution. The most important means of limiting that is to stop burning coal, as well as unconventional oil and gas.

While the consequences of acidification for corals may be sad, and may offend our aesthetics, it is worth remembering that all life on the planet depends indirectly on ocean life for survival. We cannot know in advance what consequences there will be for humanity, if we continue to use the atmosphere as a dump and turn the oceans to acid.