Is this the best use of your communication time?
on
Ask Neal Stephenson
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
First off, I want to thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions for the slashdot crowd. Most of us know from reading your web page that you take your time very seriously, and rarely respond directly to inquiries from fans.
That being said, is this the best way to intelligently interact with your fans? In other words, do you believe that the slashdot moderation system, with which I'll assume you are familiar, truly pushes up the most interesting questions to the fore? Can you imagine an alternative way for a celebrity to engage in profound discourse with his fans in this many-to-one relationship?
I find that editing text files is usually faster, though, than going through all the windows hoops.
No way. I had a presentation a few weeks ago and I brought my Linux laptop with my LATEX presentation. I plugged it into the projector and realized that it required a minimum of 640 x 800 or whatever, and I was running something much larger. So instead of Right-clicking the desktop and clicking the Settings tab (that's all there is to it in Windows), I had to su to root, run Xconfigurator, remember my monitor settings, restart the computer, and retry the whole thing. Luckily it worked, but my presentation started 15 minutes late. Yes, my fault perhaps, but still it wouldn't have happened with Windows.
This is one the biggest problems with Linux distros - does anyone know a distro that gets around it? If not, this should be a big priority for future releases. Dynamic display settings!
Yes, but this is where the field of social choice begins, not ends. Given that the Arrow impossibility thoerem is true, how do we choose a voting method that satisfies the properties we find most important? For example, do we value manipulability over efficiency? The interesting academic question here is: which flawed voting method do we choose? And all results show that the plurality vote is one of the worst ones.
Man, this issue has been at the forefront of my mind for over a year now, after reading Saari's 2002 book "Chaotic Elections" and doing some other research on the issue. The most difficult part of this issue is convincing non-scientists that there are major problems with plurality vote, such as:
It encourages strategic voting. This is a very bad thing. It means that voters are willing not to vote for their favorite choice because they are strategically trying to manipulate the elections. Example: all those radical liberals out there who voted for Gore because they would be throwing their vote away with Nader (and similarly with Brown/Bush). IRV is still mathematically strategically manipulable, but much less so.
It often does not elect the candidate representing the will of the people (when there are 3 or more candidates). E.g. Jesse Ventura was liked the best by a minority of the Minnesota population and the least by a majority. However, that minority outweighed the minorities of the other two candidates and he won (the amount of uproar should have indicated a problem).
A clearer example with this problem: you have three students and their report cards from school.
Student A: A, A, A, D, F.
Student B: A, A, B, B, B.
Student C: A, A, C, B, B.
Which student do you think should be ranked first in his class of 3? Well, plurality vote picks student A - is this fair?
The same goes for Florida. Polls have shown that a large percentage of Nader voters would've picked Gore second and Bush last. Hence, with IRV Gore would have easily picked up the vote and Nader voters wouldn't considered spoil voters.
Plurality encourages, nay, enforces the status quo and the two party system . You are told that voting for a third, perhaps more radical, party is throwing your vote away. So most people vote Dem. or Rep. and the problems some have with this country will never change.
>Much of the family guy humor revolves around >flashbacks (something the simpsons hasn't done >yet)
Are you kidding? Simpsons has been doing this for years, just not at the alarming rate of Family Guy (e.g. "Hey Peter, have you seen [flashback] the oranges? [flashback] I need them to make dinner. [flashback]).
Let's hope that the writers of the feature films are those that wrote during the Golden Age of The Simpsons (Seasons 3 - 7 give or take). Honestly, if the style and quality of the movie is at all similar to the show in the past few years, I'm not sure I'd be able to sit through the whole thing. Even the writers and producers admit on the Season 2 DVD commentary tracks that Simpsons today is a little bit more low brow, hyperactive and random, and with a lot less character and plot.
Maybe some of you like this Family Guy-like style, but I think it has degraded an amazingly intelligent funny show to just an occasional funny show (I won't be a jerk and try to state that it's not funny anymore). Nevertheless, I hope the producers and writers consider these films more seriously than the show as it now stands, as I would love a great Simpsons movie. Otherwise, I'll just have to stick with Futurama (almost as good as the Simpsons when they were great, but not quite).
I've been meaning to get this on Slashdot for some time now, but I worked on a much more powerful version of such glasses over a year ago at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge, MA, with Researcher William Y. Yerazunis. Here's the technical report if you'd like to see it. We also filed a few patents way back then as well, so I wonder if this work infringes on our own.
We can actually hide secret images within any image or animation you'd like, not just an obvious blank screen. We also designed a cryptographically secure version which isn't cracked by simply having another pair of special glasses (you also need the private key). Check out the paper, it has some image examples (there might be a few technical errors in it that we later fixed but wasn't updated in the paper. I'm not at MERL anymore, so I haven't bothered checking really).
Also, we made a video demo for the conference which our technical report was accepted in paper form (at OzCHI2001). I have that video, and can digitize it if there's enough demand. By the way, while I was testing the glasses, I actually used They Live screenshots so that one could simulate Rowdy Roddy Piper's shock upon seeing the billboards and aliens. Also, we referenced John Carpenter in our paper.
Yawn, this AFX face thing is old news. I heard about it months ago and it's been fairly common knowledge among AFX fans for awhile now. Oh, well.
However, I've been looking for other songs with odd spectrographs. The most recent contender has been the track "A is to B as B is to C" on geogaddi, the most recent Boards of Canada LP. Nothing as obvious as a face, but it has some strange effects, plus something apparently hidden in the high frequencies (at around 15000Hz, if I remember correctly). Anyone have any idea what this is? (You can view an image of the spectrograph here).
They put it up last year... I think in November. It was up for quite awhile but they took it down now that the album is officially released. In any case, the mp3s are everywhere.
We also applied some game theory to the game 301 and to a game we invented called 30-Block, which you can read about here. We can solve 301 fairly easily, but 30-Block turns out to be quite intractable.
The more interesting part of this paper discusses probability models we use to predict where players will hit based on where they aim. It's interesting: if you are a perfect player, you have the highest expected value when aiming for Triple-20 (obviously), but the worse you get, the best place to aim in the boards spirals inward until it gets to double bulls-eye (which minimizes how often you miss the board).
It actually does do this. If you look at this image, you'll see a box that says "Aim for Triple 20" in the bottom right corner. When playing 301, the computer calculates the best next move using a simple dynamic programming algorithm and displays it there (assuming perfect players -- we are working on a version that considers a player's probability distribution).
Also, "Final Fantasy" may be in competition for the first-ever Academy Award for a feature-length animated film, to be presented in March. Nominees are to be announced Feb. 12.
First of all, Beauty and the Beast was nominated for best picture in the early 90's, and it was a feature-length animated film. Second, if they are talking about winning best picture, does anyone really think that FF has a chance in hell? It won't even get nominated for anything aside from FX, maybe.
Really, Square Studios made a terrible movie. A terrible, terrible movie. Sure, it had some neat animation, but FX and looks can't carry an entire movie (e.g. Tarsem's The Cell). While audiences are often wowed by tricks and effects, they are truly looking for a good story and interesting characters (even if sometimes it seems like they are not, e.g. The Mummy).
I think it is important, when making a breakthrough film in FX, to couple the oohs and aahs with a damn good story (see Terminator 2, Toy Story, Star Wars, Titanic, etc.). For some reason Square Studios thought they could throw together a script with a boring, nonsensical plot, flat characters, and mediocre dialogue but that it wouldn't matter because the movie looked like one long cut scene from a Final Fantasy game. Well, I think we all knew even before we saw this movie and when we saw the trailer that it would fail in the end. Who would go see it except a few fanboys (and they spent soooo much money on it)?
I think it relates to the game industry as well. There are games out there that have revolutionary graphics, sound, and control but unless they are overall good games with a good story, no one will care in the end. Black and White had revolutionary AI, but I got bored playing fairly quickly. FF8 had revolutionary everything but was just plain not fun to play.
So my whole point is: I'm really glad that Square Studios is no more -- they don't deserve another chance at making a film, as their first indicates a lack of ability. And so they don't make the evolutionary cut and hopefully some new studio (maybe even influenced by Square's awesome animation) will pick up the ball and actually make a good animated movie with human leads. Here's to that.
One of Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft will leave the console market.
Unlikely.
Sony won't leave because they clearly have an edge on the market with their one year head start, large game library, and deals with Konami and Square for Metal Gear and Final Fantasy games.
Nintendo won't leave because they have done well enough so far and still have their best games in the works (the new Zelda game, new Metroid game, new Mario game, etc.).
Microsoft will perform the worst in the console market and probably should leave soonest, but they won't because Microsoft is stubborn and has the money to burn to try to make the XBox work. They will eventually leave, but not in 2002, unless they come up with a killer app somehow (though I still wouldn't want to play it given that their controllers have the poorest design I've ever seen).
perhaps it should watch an episode or two of _The Simpsons_
Not if you watch an episode or two from the last few seasons. I think it is pretty clear to all Simpsons fans that the last 3 or 4 seasons of The Simpsons show signs of aging. Compared to these recent seasons, Futurama is a far superior and funnier show. However, Futurama still does not surpass Simpsons during its height; i.e., seasons 4, 5, and 6 (maybe 3).
Then again, Futurama's very first season was about as funny as an above-average Simpsons season. So if it has a season 4 comparable to the Simpsons' season 4, we're in for a real treat.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, I want to thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions for the slashdot crowd. Most of us know from reading your web page that you take your time very seriously, and rarely respond directly to inquiries from fans.
That being said, is this the best way to intelligently interact with your fans? In other words, do you believe that the slashdot moderation system, with which I'll assume you are familiar, truly pushes up the most interesting questions to the fore? Can you imagine an alternative way for a celebrity to engage in profound discourse with his fans in this many-to-one relationship?
What non-science-fiction writers have influenced you the most?
What is your favorite novel, album, and movie in the 21st century?
Yeah, I overestimated. It's 17k per person, 4 people, so that's actually 68K. Whatever.
Why? They were redistributing copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder. Isn't this what we all wanted?
Speak for yourself.
Please please please can someone set this up?
I will give at least $10. Find 8000 more people like me and they're all set.
I find that editing text files is usually faster, though, than going through all the windows hoops.
No way. I had a presentation a few weeks ago and I brought my Linux laptop with my LATEX presentation. I plugged it into the projector and realized that it required a minimum of 640 x 800 or whatever, and I was running something much larger. So instead of Right-clicking the desktop and clicking the Settings tab (that's all there is to it in Windows), I had to su to root, run Xconfigurator, remember my monitor settings, restart the computer, and retry the whole thing. Luckily it worked, but my presentation started 15 minutes late. Yes, my fault perhaps, but still it wouldn't have happened with Windows.
This is one the biggest problems with Linux distros - does anyone know a distro that gets around it? If not, this should be a big priority for future releases. Dynamic display settings!
Yes, but this is where the field of social choice begins, not ends. Given that the Arrow impossibility thoerem is true, how do we choose a voting method that satisfies the properties we find most important? For example, do we value manipulability over efficiency? The interesting academic question here is: which flawed voting method do we choose? And all results show that the plurality vote is one of the worst ones.
- Student A: A, A, A, D, F.
- Student B: A, A, B, B, B.
- Student C: A, A, C, B, B.
Which student do you think should be ranked first in his class of 3? Well, plurality vote picks student A - is this fair?>Much of the family guy humor revolves around >flashbacks (something the simpsons hasn't done >yet)
Are you kidding? Simpsons has been doing this for years, just not at the alarming rate of Family Guy (e.g. "Hey Peter, have you seen [flashback] the oranges? [flashback] I need them to make dinner. [flashback]).
1) A Simpsons movie is unlikely to run 2 hours. Most animated films (excepting Miyazaki) run about 90 minutes.
2) There are around 22 episodes in a standard Simpsons season.
Let's hope that the writers of the feature films are those that wrote during the Golden Age of The Simpsons (Seasons 3 - 7 give or take). Honestly, if the style and quality of the movie is at all similar to the show in the past few years, I'm not sure I'd be able to sit through the whole thing. Even the writers and producers admit on the Season 2 DVD commentary tracks that Simpsons today is a little bit more low brow, hyperactive and random, and with a lot less character and plot.
Maybe some of you like this Family Guy-like style, but I think it has degraded an amazingly intelligent funny show to just an occasional funny show (I won't be a jerk and try to state that it's not funny anymore). Nevertheless, I hope the producers and writers consider these films more seriously than the show as it now stands, as I would love a great Simpsons movie. Otherwise, I'll just have to stick with Futurama (almost as good as the Simpsons when they were great, but not quite).
I've been meaning to get this on Slashdot for some time now, but I worked on a much more powerful version of such glasses over a year ago at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge, MA, with Researcher William Y. Yerazunis. Here's the technical report if you'd like to see it. We also filed a few patents way back then as well, so I wonder if this work infringes on our own.
We can actually hide secret images within any image or animation you'd like, not just an obvious blank screen. We also designed a cryptographically secure version which isn't cracked by simply having another pair of special glasses (you also need the private key). Check out the paper, it has some image examples (there might be a few technical errors in it that we later fixed but wasn't updated in the paper. I'm not at MERL anymore, so I haven't bothered checking really).
Also, we made a video demo for the conference which our technical report was accepted in paper form (at OzCHI2001). I have that video, and can digitize it if there's enough demand. By the way, while I was testing the glasses, I actually used They Live screenshots so that one could simulate Rowdy Roddy Piper's shock upon seeing the billboards and aliens. Also, we referenced John Carpenter in our paper.
I'll be in a plane over the Atlantic during the height of the showers... does that mean I'll get a kick-ass view?
what's your favorite pun?
Yawn, this AFX face thing is old news. I heard about it months ago and it's been fairly common knowledge among AFX fans for awhile now. Oh, well.
However, I've been looking for other songs with odd spectrographs. The most recent contender has been the track "A is to B as B is to C" on geogaddi, the most recent Boards of Canada LP. Nothing as obvious as a face, but it has some strange effects, plus something apparently hidden in the high frequencies (at around 15000Hz, if I remember correctly). Anyone have any idea what this is? (You can view an image of the spectrograph here).
They put it up last year... I think in November. It was up for quite awhile but they took it down now that the album is officially released. In any case, the mp3s are everywhere.
Who doesn't?
We also applied some game theory to the game 301 and to a game we invented called 30-Block, which you can read about here. We can solve 301 fairly easily, but 30-Block turns out to be quite intractable.
The more interesting part of this paper discusses probability models we use to predict where players will hit based on where they aim. It's interesting: if you are a perfect player, you have the highest expected value when aiming for Triple-20 (obviously), but the worse you get, the best place to aim in the boards spirals inward until it gets to double bulls-eye (which minimizes how often you miss the board).
It actually does do this. If you look at this image, you'll see a box that says "Aim for Triple 20" in the bottom right corner. When playing 301, the computer calculates the best next move using a simple dynamic programming algorithm and displays it there (assuming perfect players -- we are working on a version that considers a player's probability distribution).
Oh, right, I remember now. OK, but it still won't win this new category either. That will go to either Shrek or Monsters, Inc.
Also, "Final Fantasy" may be in competition for the first-ever Academy Award for a feature-length animated film, to be presented in March. Nominees are to be announced Feb. 12.
First of all, Beauty and the Beast was nominated for best picture in the early 90's, and it was a feature-length animated film. Second, if they are talking about winning best picture, does anyone really think that FF has a chance in hell? It won't even get nominated for anything aside from FX, maybe.
Really, Square Studios made a terrible movie. A terrible, terrible movie. Sure, it had some neat animation, but FX and looks can't carry an entire movie (e.g. Tarsem's The Cell). While audiences are often wowed by tricks and effects, they are truly looking for a good story and interesting characters (even if sometimes it seems like they are not, e.g. The Mummy).
I think it is important, when making a breakthrough film in FX, to couple the oohs and aahs with a damn good story (see Terminator 2, Toy Story, Star Wars, Titanic, etc.). For some reason Square Studios thought they could throw together a script with a boring, nonsensical plot, flat characters, and mediocre dialogue but that it wouldn't matter because the movie looked like one long cut scene from a Final Fantasy game. Well, I think we all knew even before we saw this movie and when we saw the trailer that it would fail in the end. Who would go see it except a few fanboys (and they spent soooo much money on it)?
I think it relates to the game industry as well. There are games out there that have revolutionary graphics, sound, and control but unless they are overall good games with a good story, no one will care in the end. Black and White had revolutionary AI, but I got bored playing fairly quickly. FF8 had revolutionary everything but was just plain not fun to play.
So my whole point is: I'm really glad that Square Studios is no more -- they don't deserve another chance at making a film, as their first indicates a lack of ability. And so they don't make the evolutionary cut and hopefully some new studio (maybe even influenced by Square's awesome animation) will pick up the ball and actually make a good animated movie with human leads. Here's to that.
One of Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft will leave the console market.
Unlikely.
Sony won't leave because they clearly have an edge on the market with their one year head start, large game library, and deals with Konami and Square for Metal Gear and Final Fantasy games.
Nintendo won't leave because they have done well enough so far and still have their best games in the works (the new Zelda game, new Metroid game, new Mario game, etc.).
Microsoft will perform the worst in the console market and probably should leave soonest, but they won't because Microsoft is stubborn and has the money to burn to try to make the XBox work. They will eventually leave, but not in 2002, unless they come up with a killer app somehow (though I still wouldn't want to play it given that their controllers have the poorest design I've ever seen).
And anyway, the phrase originally comes from Shakespeare's The Tempest:
"Oh brave new world, that has such people in it."
perhaps it should watch an episode or two of _The Simpsons_
Not if you watch an episode or two from the last few seasons. I think it is pretty clear to all Simpsons fans that the last 3 or 4 seasons of The Simpsons show signs of aging. Compared to these recent seasons, Futurama is a far superior and funnier show. However, Futurama still does not surpass Simpsons during its height; i.e., seasons 4, 5, and 6 (maybe 3).
Then again, Futurama's very first season was about as funny as an above-average Simpsons season. So if it has a season 4 comparable to the Simpsons' season 4, we're in for a real treat.