Hear, hear. As someone who picked up a 360 this past holiday largely on the basis of Live Arcade (okay, and the $100 rebate I got), I'd love to get more classic board-gamey stuff on the system. The impending release of Settlers of Catan is a great sign, but it'd be good to get a lot more breadth in that particular marketplace, too -- and Scrabble would be a perfect place to start.
Firstly, let me say that I was singularly underwhelmed by the Sony conference -- it was too long, dragged, and nobody involved was a terribly good speaker. That said, there are a handful of points being made about the 'crippled' PS3 that need some clarification:
Yes, the smaller box won't have HDMI. That doesn't mean it won't have HD. The fact sheet doesn't specify the non-HDMI formats with any precision, but it does specifically say 'DIGITAL OUT' for both versions, and it's also explicit about the A/V output supporting everything up to 1080p in both versions. While there certainly aren't many displays that could support 1080p over component, there aren't that many displays right now that can support 1080p in any form, and I suspect that even a couple of years from now at best most people with HD will have 720p sets. It's something to be annoyed about, certainly, but this hardly feels like OMG SONY IS DEAD stuff.
There's nothing out there about the minspec box not supporting memory cards. For that matter, there's nothing out there that says that the beefy box will support memory cards. What the spec says is that the larger box will (and the smaller box won't) support Memory Stick -- i.e., the flash memory format Sony backs for most of their products. (For the record, they say the larger box will also support SD and Compact Flash). However, both boxes offer USB2.0 support, and from the way that both USB and the other media formats are grouped together under the heading of I/O, it suggests that USB flash drives may be used as a 'memory card' equivalent for both versions of the box, with the bigger version also offering support for the various media formats... almost certainly as a way for people of viewing photos/video off of their digicams etc, the way that some DVD players are starting to come with slots for such now.
802.11 support -- yeah, this is a pain in the ass. But the flip side is, none of the current consoles (including the XBox 360) supports it either -- that's not a crippling of the small box, that seems like a legitimately added feature on the large one. If you're a gamer and you want to wirelessly connect your low-end PS3 to your network, you can easily enough plug it in to the same damn WAP+hub that your XBox and your 360 (and maybe even your PS2) are already plugged in to.
Yeah, the cheaper box is weaker -- there's no question about that. But unlike the 360, none of those differences has any impact on the way games are designed for the system; I can tell you that designers would love to rely on the 360's hard drive, but the existence of a low-end system without one makes that explicitly against Microsoft's rules. That assurance by itself gives Sony a legitmate boost.
Despite the eagerness to imply that this is something roaming the net randomly looking for computers to infect, it's pretty much your run-of-the-mill e-mail worm that actively requires opening an executable (.scr) attachment to infect a system. Under normal circumstances (i.e., without the free opportunity to bash Microsoft attached), how many IT pros would say that anyone opening a random attachment e-mailed to them deserved what they got?
McAfee rates this one as low-risk for both home and corporate users.
AFAICT this is as run-of-the-mill as virus threats get, and I'm grateful that MS is maintaining a level of software discipline and not jumping all over themselves to instantly respond to every stupid little worm that crosses the net. I'd much rather see meaningful updates once a month than frantic, possibly-buggy scramble fixes three times a week.
If it turns out that they sold 77 original copies of these games (with the service of convenient HD bundling) for roughly $2-$3 per game ($265, minus the cost of a hard drive and the mod chip itself), then they're just wantonly stupid, not to mention in the red to the tune of $2000 or so on that sale. I'm going to stick with the 'pirated' explanation on this one.
I'm willing to believe that Java allocation/deallocation, in bulk, is better than C++ when amortized over the course of an entire application. The problem is the lack of control; while this is no longer an issue in most parts of the development world, for real-time applications -- and gaming in particular -- performance has to be good from start to finish; taking a time hit to free up memory is fine when you do it yourself at the end of a level, but not so cheerful when it happens automatically in the middle of your boss fight. This isn't a fatal flaw (my current side programming project is a Java-based game), but it's an inherent aspect of the language that severely hampers its applicability to some programming jobs.
This principle only works for larger companies that own their own facilities. For most small- (and even many medium-) businesses, all of the facilities you've mentioned are outside their immediate control, and their presence (or absence) has no bearing whatsoever on the basic health of the company.
The article has no discussion of truly modern encryption schemes (their description stops at RSA/PGP and they don't even go into any details); it has no discussion of why modern schemes are considered more secure than DES, no discussion of what might make them less secure (i.e., no mention of factoring/discrete logs as the root 'hard problems' behind current crypto) and no discussion of what's on the horizon in terms of things like quantum cryptography.
On the other hand, it does go into cheerful detail on why IBM's Exciting New Coprocessor (r) is the right solution for your enterprise encryption needs!
I know IBM are the 'Good Guys' and all, but that doesn't make advertising for them (especially in the form of a front-page slashdot article) any more palatable than advertising for anyone else...
I think doing it interactively is new -- and quite a feat; it's very difficult to do this correctly with traditional polygon rasterization algorithms, I suspect they may be tesselating their meshes very finely and running a sort of highly-specialized vertex shader to transform them.
Doing it non-interactively, though, is even older than you suggest -- a group at CMU headed by Dr. Ping-Kang Hsiung was doing this back in 1990. (Caveat: I was one of his assistants.:-) They produced a couple of videos for NHK and something for CNN's weekly science magazine, but unfortunately I don't think any of them are available online.
I doubt it was a matter of forgetting; it's much more likely that they decided including the frequency shift would detract from the simulation. Visible light covers a comparatively narrow spectrum, from 700 to 400nm, and at the velocities they're covering any visible-light emissions would have shifted completely out of that band; at a fairly modest velocity like v=.8c, the doppler effect already produces a frequency shift of 3x, carrying a 400nm wavelength all the way up to 1200nm. I put together a good chunk of the doppler-shift portion of Dr. Ping-Kang Hsiung's simulation of these visual effects back in the early 90s (though I'm not among that paper's authors), and getting it to look interesting was far and away the most difficult part of the simulation.
Actually, those 'colored pencils' get hired all the time; they get hired by Microsoft, and they get hired away from Microsoft. (And hired away from Google by Yahoo, and hired away from eBay by Amazon, and... etc, etc.) That you don't hear about it isn't a sign that it isn't happening; all it means is that they're not the sort of people that get press releases issued about them.
...but it's old hat now. Seriously, we're actually coming up on the 30th anniversary of the Haken-Appel proof of the four-color theorem, the FSG classification has been around for quite a while now, and from my perspective most of the people fretting about the nature of proof these days are philosophers, not mathematicians. Most of the serious (and many of the amateur) mathematicians I know consider the computer an essential part of their toolbox; Mathematica never accidentally flips a sign while it's going through two pages of calculations for you. There are even journals devoted to computer-aided mathematical exploration: Experimental Mathematics is more than a decade old now.
While what you've proven isn't the four-color theorem (as another poster noted), you have shown a piece of another mathematical problem, Kurtatowski's theorem; the complete graph on five nodes (i.e., a graph of five nodes where each one is linked to every other) can't be drawn in the plane. The rest of the theorem says essentially that the six-node graph where each node in one group of three nodes is connected to each of the three nodes in the other group (known as 'K(3,3)') also can't be drawn in the plane (this is sometimes called the 'Utility Problem' -- try to connect 3 utilities to 3 houses without crossing lines), and furthermore any graph that can't be drawn in the plane has a piece that 'looks like' one of these two graphs, in a mathematically formalizable sense.
However, the fact that there are some truths that are literally inaccessible from the postulates certainly suggests that there may be others that are accessible only by a very large number of steps, effectively requiring computers. I wonder if anybody has ever attempted to prove this?
Yes; in fact, this is true for even very simple logical systems. Presburger Arithmetic (the theory of integers with addition but no multiplication) has theorems that can only be decided in double-exponential time -- i.e., O(2^2^(kn)), where n is the length of the theorem in question. Here's Wikipedia's page on it.
A quick note on the desktop vs. embedded compiler issue, since nobody seems to have touched on that: in my experience it makes virtually no difference. An embedded application is more likely to use some judicious hand-tuned assembly when needed for speed, but compiler optimizations are generally comparable between the two platform categories -- not surprising, since many if not most embedded compilers are derivatives of GCC and have the same optimization core anyway.
...be aware that the linked-to NPR story says nothing about the Barrons being 'the first' or any such nonsense; it only calls them 'pioneers', which seems a fair claim. They do say that Forbidden Planet was the first major motion picture with an all-electronic score, which is a more plausible and defensible claim, but the line about the Barrons being first is strictly the submitter's and not NPR's.
Caveat: how I browse my images may not be how other people browse their images. That said, with about a day's worth of use I've found Picasa surprisingly annoying, to the point where I'll likely be uninstalling it from my PC soon. My biggest gripes:
As several people have pointed out, it's highly indiscriminate. You can tell it what folders you do and don't want it indexing, but doing this is an awkward process, and setting up anything but their defaults (i.e., basically index 'My Pictures' or index everything) will take too much doing for anyone with a heavily-populated system. It might be okay for indexing photos on your grandparents' machine, but it probably won't be okay for the stereotypical/. reader's (Windows) computer.
Nonstandard interface. It looks to me like they're shooting for an OSX look and feel, which is all well and good but just comes out looking goofy under Windows. The right-side scroll bar is a particularly egregious example, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the traditional, predictable Windows look and feel.
It's an image cataloguer; it's not an image viewer, which seems a strange distinction to make, especially for an application that lets you view images. There's no 'Browse with Picasa' option for folders from Windows Explorer, and no means of associating Picasa as a viewer for image file types, so you're stuck with using the 'Picasa Explorer' (which offers no treeview, for instance, just a flat look at all your image folders) as your browser.
I understand and appreciate that the image editor isn't meant to be very full-featured, just a basic picture tuner; but there are still some bizarre omissions, most notably the lack of any available resize option (that I could find).
I don't doubt that there are people who will find Picasa a godsend, but it does virtually nothing I want to do, and everything it does do it takes a clunky approach to. It gets in the way far too often for me to ever imagine it as a power-user app.
I'm not convinced that Rubik's Cube is that much of a classic. It's a fine mathematical puzzle, but given that it doesn't even have as much replay value as the 'traffic jam' puzzles, I think it still fits into the 'fad' category. What you're seeing this year isn't the sign of a classic, it's the sign of a fad rebound.
Logic puzzles taken as a whole (the cube, traffic jams, burr puzzles, etc.) are a classic category, but for most of them the replay value is low. You're better off finding something that serves as art after you're done with it as a puzzle.
While I doubt that he would have been involved in the film's production, everyone involved in the movie wanted to get him a cameo in the movie (presumably not unlike the one he had in Smallville). From what I've seen in the last few days there's still some talk of doing it, through the magic of computer editing -- make of that what you will.
...as others pointed out, this is simply the method of power series, and it's even a pretty clumsy way of getting at that power series (why generate a differential equation when you can plug power series coefficients into the original equation itself?)
What I'm surprised at, though, is that nobody's pointed out the most obvious problems with this scheme:
Your polynomial has (up to) n roots; this approach converges, maybe, to one of them. Which one do you get, and how do you get the others?
For that matter, some chunk of those n roots may be complex; but all the maths in his article are real. How do you solve, say, x^6+1 = 0?
The change in radius of convergence at the end of his post is a little dicey too, at least as I'm reading it, but I could be misreading. Still, I'm frankly stunned. Worthy of a press release? If I'd turned this in as a school assignment it wouldn't even have been worth an A!
From Article 815411, Heap Algorithm Update for Atypically Large Heap Requests:
Windows XP SP1 and Windows Server 2003 contain a general purpose, well understood memory / heap algorithm that delivers fast performance for memory requests made from a broad spectrum of Windows programs. The performance of the algorithm in Windows has been evaluated with many industry benchmarks and by careful analysis of typical end-user operations. As with any general purpose algorithm, an atypical sequence of requests can be tailored. In this instance, the algorithm does not perform optimally. However, because such a sequence is not found in typical Windows programs or the system, you do not have to change the heap algorithm. Changing the heap algorithm does not provide for an improvement in system performance for most users and programs.
This hotfix provides a workaround in the heap algorithm to better handle a particular atypical and uncommon sequence of heap requests. The atypical request pattern was found in a custom-built program that does not bear much resemblance to the vast majority of other Windows programs in existence. The scope and the size of this hotfix is narrowly defined for this one particular program and the workaround has no benefit for the majority of programs or overall system performance.
I'd love to see the series of annoyed e-mails between the developer and the QA team that lead to this 'bugfix'...
While I appreciate the urge to free orphaned works, I'm not entirely comfortable with the approach suggested by this case, either; in particular, the authors suggest a 'nominal' fee and a manditory registration process for copyrighting works. A $1 or $5 fee might not sound like much, but a $50 or $100 fee is equally plausible (consider patent and trademark fees!) and would make it difficult for small-market creators (e.g. photographers) to protect their works.
What's more, even a $1 fee -- or a no-fee registration process -- can be unduly burdensome: imagine creating, for instance, a Half-Life 2 FAQ for the web and posting it up on Usenet. Under their proposed system as I read it, unless you go to the trouble of filling out the copyright registration for your FAQ there would be nothing to prevent a company like Brady Games from coming along and publishing your FAQ unattributed in their Official Half-Life 2 Guide(tm). For large works like a FAQ it may be reasonable to perform registration, but do you really want to have to go to the trouble to make sure that every Usenet and Slashdot post you make won't be reprinted for profit by someone else?
It's worth remembering that "copyright" refers not just to consumers' rights but also to creators' -- the right to say who can copy your original material and for what purposes. These are your rights too.
Mea culpa, I saw the '0kb source' in the updated version and assumed that meant it was no longer available. Mod parent down for idiocy on my part, please.:-)
With the author having withdrawn the twin primes paper in the wake of the discovered flaw, arXiv no longer has the original up so we can see what went wrong. Does anyone have a mirror?
Scott McCloud covered this one too; the more iconic a human figure is, the easier it is for the reader/viewer to identify with it. Conversely, it's possible to anthropomorphize even the most iconic images; the standout example that he gives in his book is an electrical socket that (in the right context) still clearly identifies as a face. If you're interested in the design aspects of this, check out Understanding Comics for more details.
Slashdot Mirror
Hear, hear. As someone who picked up a 360 this past holiday largely on the basis of Live Arcade (okay, and the $100 rebate I got), I'd love to get more classic board-gamey stuff on the system. The impending release of Settlers of Catan is a great sign, but it'd be good to get a lot more breadth in that particular marketplace, too -- and Scrabble would be a perfect place to start.
- Yes, the smaller box won't have HDMI. That doesn't mean it won't have HD. The fact sheet doesn't specify the non-HDMI formats with any precision, but it does specifically say 'DIGITAL OUT' for both versions, and it's also explicit about the A/V output supporting everything up to 1080p in both versions. While there certainly aren't many displays that could support 1080p over component, there aren't that many displays right now that can support 1080p in any form, and I suspect that even a couple of years from now at best most people with HD will have 720p sets. It's something to be annoyed about, certainly, but this hardly feels like OMG SONY IS DEAD stuff.
- There's nothing out there about the minspec box not supporting memory cards. For that matter, there's nothing out there that says that the beefy box will support memory cards. What the spec says is that the larger box will (and the smaller box won't) support Memory Stick -- i.e., the flash memory format Sony backs for most of their products. (For the record, they say the larger box will also support SD and Compact Flash). However, both boxes offer USB2.0 support, and from the way that both USB and the other media formats are grouped together under the heading of I/O, it suggests that USB flash drives may be used as a 'memory card' equivalent for both versions of the box, with the bigger version also offering support for the various media formats... almost certainly as a way for people of viewing photos/video off of their digicams etc, the way that some DVD players are starting to come with slots for such now.
- 802.11 support -- yeah, this is a pain in the ass. But the flip side is, none of the current consoles (including the XBox 360) supports it either -- that's not a crippling of the small box, that seems like a legitimately added feature on the large one. If you're a gamer and you want to wirelessly connect your low-end PS3 to your network, you can easily enough plug it in to the same damn WAP+hub that your XBox and your 360 (and maybe even your PS2) are already plugged in to.
Yeah, the cheaper box is weaker -- there's no question about that. But unlike the 360, none of those differences has any impact on the way games are designed for the system; I can tell you that designers would love to rely on the 360's hard drive, but the existence of a low-end system without one makes that explicitly against Microsoft's rules. That assurance by itself gives Sony a legitmate boost.AFAICT this is as run-of-the-mill as virus threats get, and I'm grateful that MS is maintaining a level of software discipline and not jumping all over themselves to instantly respond to every stupid little worm that crosses the net. I'd much rather see meaningful updates once a month than frantic, possibly-buggy scramble fixes three times a week.
If it turns out that they sold 77 original copies of these games (with the service of convenient HD bundling) for roughly $2-$3 per game ($265, minus the cost of a hard drive and the mod chip itself), then they're just wantonly stupid, not to mention in the red to the tune of $2000 or so on that sale. I'm going to stick with the 'pirated' explanation on this one.
I'm willing to believe that Java allocation/deallocation, in bulk, is better than C++ when amortized over the course of an entire application. The problem is the lack of control; while this is no longer an issue in most parts of the development world, for real-time applications -- and gaming in particular -- performance has to be good from start to finish; taking a time hit to free up memory is fine when you do it yourself at the end of a level, but not so cheerful when it happens automatically in the middle of your boss fight. This isn't a fatal flaw (my current side programming project is a Java-based game), but it's an inherent aspect of the language that severely hampers its applicability to some programming jobs.
This principle only works for larger companies that own their own facilities. For most small- (and even many medium-) businesses, all of the facilities you've mentioned are outside their immediate control, and their presence (or absence) has no bearing whatsoever on the basic health of the company.
The article has no discussion of truly modern encryption schemes (their description stops at RSA/PGP and they don't even go into any details); it has no discussion of why modern schemes are considered more secure than DES, no discussion of what might make them less secure (i.e., no mention of factoring/discrete logs as the root 'hard problems' behind current crypto) and no discussion of what's on the horizon in terms of things like quantum cryptography.
On the other hand, it does go into cheerful detail on why IBM's Exciting New Coprocessor (r) is the right solution for your enterprise encryption needs!
I know IBM are the 'Good Guys' and all, but that doesn't make advertising for them (especially in the form of a front-page slashdot article) any more palatable than advertising for anyone else...
I think doing it interactively is new -- and quite a feat; it's very difficult to do this correctly with traditional polygon rasterization algorithms, I suspect they may be tesselating their meshes very finely and running a sort of highly-specialized vertex shader to transform them. Doing it non-interactively, though, is even older than you suggest -- a group at CMU headed by Dr. Ping-Kang Hsiung was doing this back in 1990. (Caveat: I was one of his assistants. :-) They produced a couple of videos for NHK and something for CNN's weekly science magazine, but unfortunately I don't think any of them are available online.
I doubt it was a matter of forgetting; it's much more likely that they decided including the frequency shift would detract from the simulation. Visible light covers a comparatively narrow spectrum, from 700 to 400nm, and at the velocities they're covering any visible-light emissions would have shifted completely out of that band; at a fairly modest velocity like v=.8c, the doppler effect already produces a frequency shift of 3x, carrying a 400nm wavelength all the way up to 1200nm. I put together a good chunk of the doppler-shift portion of Dr. Ping-Kang Hsiung's simulation of these visual effects back in the early 90s (though I'm not among that paper's authors), and getting it to look interesting was far and away the most difficult part of the simulation.
Actually, those 'colored pencils' get hired all the time; they get hired by Microsoft, and they get hired away from Microsoft. (And hired away from Google by Yahoo, and hired away from eBay by Amazon, and... etc, etc.) That you don't hear about it isn't a sign that it isn't happening; all it means is that they're not the sort of people that get press releases issued about them.
...but it's old hat now. Seriously, we're actually coming up on the 30th anniversary of the Haken-Appel proof of the four-color theorem, the FSG classification has been around for quite a while now, and from my perspective most of the people fretting about the nature of proof these days are philosophers, not mathematicians. Most of the serious (and many of the amateur) mathematicians I know consider the computer an essential part of their toolbox; Mathematica never accidentally flips a sign while it's going through two pages of calculations for you. There are even journals devoted to computer-aided mathematical exploration: Experimental Mathematics is more than a decade old now.
While what you've proven isn't the four-color theorem (as another poster noted), you have shown a piece of another mathematical problem, Kurtatowski's theorem; the complete graph on five nodes (i.e., a graph of five nodes where each one is linked to every other) can't be drawn in the plane. The rest of the theorem says essentially that the six-node graph where each node in one group of three nodes is connected to each of the three nodes in the other group (known as 'K(3,3)') also can't be drawn in the plane (this is sometimes called the 'Utility Problem' -- try to connect 3 utilities to 3 houses without crossing lines), and furthermore any graph that can't be drawn in the plane has a piece that 'looks like' one of these two graphs, in a mathematically formalizable sense.
A quick note on the desktop vs. embedded compiler issue, since nobody seems to have touched on that: in my experience it makes virtually no difference. An embedded application is more likely to use some judicious hand-tuned assembly when needed for speed, but compiler optimizations are generally comparable between the two platform categories -- not surprising, since many if not most embedded compilers are derivatives of GCC and have the same optimization core anyway.
...be aware that the linked-to NPR story says nothing about the Barrons being 'the first' or any such nonsense; it only calls them 'pioneers', which seems a fair claim. They do say that Forbidden Planet was the first major motion picture with an all-electronic score, which is a more plausible and defensible claim, but the line about the Barrons being first is strictly the submitter's and not NPR's.
- As several people have pointed out, it's highly indiscriminate. You can tell it what folders you do and don't want it indexing, but doing this is an awkward process, and setting up anything but their defaults (i.e., basically index 'My Pictures' or index everything) will take too much doing for anyone with a heavily-populated system. It might be okay for indexing photos on your grandparents' machine, but it probably won't be okay for the stereotypical
/. reader's (Windows) computer.
- Nonstandard interface. It looks to me like they're shooting for an OSX look and feel, which is all well and good but just comes out looking goofy under Windows. The right-side scroll bar is a particularly egregious example, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the traditional, predictable Windows look and feel.
- It's an image cataloguer; it's not an image viewer, which seems a strange distinction to make, especially for an application that lets you view images. There's no 'Browse with Picasa' option for folders from Windows Explorer, and no means of associating Picasa as a viewer for image file types, so you're stuck with using the 'Picasa Explorer' (which offers no treeview, for instance, just a flat look at all your image folders) as your browser.
- I understand and appreciate that the image editor isn't meant to be very full-featured, just a basic picture tuner; but there are still some bizarre omissions, most notably the lack of any available resize option (that I could find).
I don't doubt that there are people who will find Picasa a godsend, but it does virtually nothing I want to do, and everything it does do it takes a clunky approach to. It gets in the way far too often for me to ever imagine it as a power-user app.I'm not convinced that Rubik's Cube is that much of a classic. It's a fine mathematical puzzle, but given that it doesn't even have as much replay value as the 'traffic jam' puzzles, I think it still fits into the 'fad' category. What you're seeing this year isn't the sign of a classic, it's the sign of a fad rebound. Logic puzzles taken as a whole (the cube, traffic jams, burr puzzles, etc.) are a classic category, but for most of them the replay value is low. You're better off finding something that serves as art after you're done with it as a puzzle.
While I doubt that he would have been involved in the film's production, everyone involved in the movie wanted to get him a cameo in the movie (presumably not unlike the one he had in Smallville). From what I've seen in the last few days there's still some talk of doing it, through the magic of computer editing -- make of that what you will.
What I'm surprised at, though, is that nobody's pointed out the most obvious problems with this scheme:
- Your polynomial has (up to) n roots; this approach converges, maybe, to one of them. Which one do you get, and how do you get the others?
- For that matter, some chunk of those n roots may be complex; but all the maths in his article are real. How do you solve, say, x^6+1 = 0?
The change in radius of convergence at the end of his post is a little dicey too, at least as I'm reading it, but I could be misreading. Still, I'm frankly stunned. Worthy of a press release? If I'd turned this in as a school assignment it wouldn't even have been worth an A!What's more, even a $1 fee -- or a no-fee registration process -- can be unduly burdensome: imagine creating, for instance, a Half-Life 2 FAQ for the web and posting it up on Usenet. Under their proposed system as I read it, unless you go to the trouble of filling out the copyright registration for your FAQ there would be nothing to prevent a company like Brady Games from coming along and publishing your FAQ unattributed in their Official Half-Life 2 Guide(tm). For large works like a FAQ it may be reasonable to perform registration, but do you really want to have to go to the trouble to make sure that every Usenet and Slashdot post you make won't be reprinted for profit by someone else?
It's worth remembering that "copyright" refers not just to consumers' rights but also to creators' -- the right to say who can copy your original material and for what purposes. These are your rights too.
Mea culpa, I saw the '0kb source' in the updated version and assumed that meant it was no longer available. Mod parent down for idiocy on my part, please. :-)
With the author having withdrawn the twin primes paper in the wake of the discovered flaw, arXiv no longer has the original up so we can see what went wrong. Does anyone have a mirror?
Scott McCloud covered this one too; the more iconic a human figure is, the easier it is for the reader/viewer to identify with it. Conversely, it's possible to anthropomorphize even the most iconic images; the standout example that he gives in his book is an electrical socket that (in the right context) still clearly identifies as a face. If you're interested in the design aspects of this, check out Understanding Comics for more details.