Listen to those residuals

This is Jessica. Speaking of data sonification (or sensification), Hyeok, Yea Seul Kim, and I write

Data sonification-mapping data variables to auditory variables, such as pitch or volume-is used for data accessibility, scientific exploration, and data-driven art (e.g., museum exhibitions) among others. While a substantial amount of research has been made on effective and intuitive sonification design, software support is not commensurate, limiting researchers from fully exploring its capabilities. We contribute Erie, a declarative grammar for data sonification, that enables abstractly expressing auditory mappings. Erie supports specifying extensible tone designs (e.g., periodic wave, sampling, frequency/amplitude modulation synthesizers), various encoding channels, auditory legends, and composition options like sequencing and overlaying. Using standard Web Audio and Web Speech APIs, we provide an Erie compiler for web environments. We demonstrate the expressiveness and feasibility of Erie by replicating research prototypes presented by prior work and provide a sonification design gallery. We discuss future steps to extend Erie toward other audio computing environments and support interactive data sonification.

Have you ever wanted to listen to your model fit? I haven’t, but I think it’s worth exploring how one would do so effectively, either for purposes of making data representations accessible to blind and visual impaired users, or for other purposes like data journalism or creating “immersive” experiences of data like you might find in museums.

But turns out it’s really hard to create data sonifications with existing tools! You have to learn low-level audio programming and use multiple tools to do things like combine several sonifications into a single design. Other tools only offer the ability to make sonifications corresponding to a narrow range of chart types, perhaps as a result of a bias toward thinking about sonifications only from the perspective of how they map to existing visualizations.

Hyeok noticed some of these issues and decided to do something about it. Erie provides a flexible specification format where you can define a sonification design in terms of tone (the overall quality of a sound) and encodings (mappings from data variables to auditory features). You can compose more complex sonifications by repeating, sequencing, and overlaying sonifications, and it interfaces with standard web audio APIs. 

Documentation on how to install and use Erie is here. There’s also an online editor you can use to try out the grammar. But first I recommend playing some of the examples, which include some simple charts and recreations of data journalism examples. My favorites are the residuals from a poorly fit model and a better fitting one. Especially if you play just the data series of these back to back, the better fit should sound more consistent and slightly more harmonious.

This was really Hyeok’s vision; I can’t claim to have contributed very much to this work. But it was interesting to watch it come together. During our meetings about the project, it was initially very unfamiliar to me, trying to interpret audio variables like pitch as carrying information about data values, and I can’t really say it’s gotten easier. I guess this gets at how hard it is to make data easily consumable in a serial format like audio, at least for users who are accustomed to all the benefits of parallel visual processing. 

God is in every leaf of every tree—comic book movies edition.

Mark Evanier writes:

Martin Scorsese has directed some of the best movies ever made and most of them convey some powerful message with skill and depth. So it’s odd that when he complains about “comic book movies” and says they’re a danger to the whole concept of cinema, I have no idea what the f-word he’s saying. . . .

Mr. Scorsese is acting like “comic book movies” are some new thing. Just to take a some-time-ago decade at random, the highest grossing movie of 1980 was Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back. The highest-grossing movie of 1981 was Superman II. The highest of 1982 was E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and the highest-grossing movies of the following years were Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Batman.

I dunno about you but I’d call most of those “comic book movies.” And now here we have Scorsese saying of the current flock, “The danger there is what it’s doing to our culture…because there are going to be generations now that think movies are only those — that’s what movies are.” . . .

This seems like a statistical problem, and I imagine some people have studied this more carefully. Evanier seems to be arguing that comic book movies are no bigger of a thing now than they were forty years ago. There must be some systematic analysis of movie genres over time that could address this question.

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Artificial intelligence and aesthetic judgment

This is Jessica. In a new essay reflecting on how we get tempted to aestheticize generative AI, Ari Holtzman, Andrew, and I write: 

Generative AIs produce creative outputs in the style of human expression. We argue that encounters with the outputs of modern generative AI models are mediated by the same kinds of aesthetic judgments that organize our interactions with artwork. The interpretation procedure we use on art we find in museums is not an innate human faculty, but one developed over history by disciplines such as art history and art criticism to fulfill certain social functions. This gives us pause when considering our reactions to generative AI, how we should approach this new medium, and why generative AI seems to incite so much fear about the future. We naturally inherit a conundrum of causal inference from the history of art: a work can be read as a symptom of the cultural conditions that influenced its creation while simultaneously being framed as a timeless, seemingly acausal distillation of an eternal human condition. In this essay, we focus on an unresolved tension when we bring this dilemma to bear in the context of generative AI: are we looking for proof that generated media reflects something about the conditions that created it or some eternal human essence? Are current modes of interpretation sufficient for this task? Historically, new forms of art have changed how art is interpreted, with such influence used as evidence that a work of art has touched some essential human truth. As generative AI influences contemporary aesthetic judgment we outline some of the pitfalls and traps in attempting to scrutinize what AI generated media “means.”

I’ve worked on a lot of articles in the past year or so, but this one is probably the most out-of-character. We are not exactly humanities scholars. And yet, I think there is some truth to the analogies we are making. Everywhere we seem to be witnessing the same sort of beauty contest, where some interaction with ChatGPT or another generative model is held up for scrutiny, and the conclusion drawn that it lacks a certain emergent “je ne sais quoi” that human creative expressions  like great works of art achieve. We approach our interactions as though they have the same kind of heightened status as going to a museum, where it’s up to us to peer into the work to cultivate the right perspective on the significance of what we are seeing, and try to anticipate the future trajectory of the universal principle behind it.   

At the same time, we postulate all sorts of causal relationships where conditions under which the model is created are thought to leave traces in the outputs – from technical details about the training process to the values of the organizations that give us the latest models  – just like we analyze the hell out of what a work of art says about the culture that created it. And so we end up in a position where we can only recognize what we’re looking for when we see it, but what we are looking for can only be identified by what is lacking. Meanwhile, the artifacts that we judge can be read as a signal of anything and everything at once.

If this sounds counterproductive (because it is), it’s worth considering why these kinds of contradictory modes of reading objects have arisen in the past over the history of art: to keep fears at bay. By making our judgments as spectators seem essential to understanding the current moment, we gain a feeling of control.  

And so, despite these contradictions, we see our appraisals of model outputs in the the current moment as correct and arising from some innate ability we have to recognize human intelligence. But aesthetic judgments have never been fixed – they have always evolved along with innovations in our ability to represent the world, whether through painting or photography or contemporary art. And so we should expect that with judgments of generative AI as well. We conclude by considering how the idea of taste and aesthetic judgment might continue to shape our interactions with generative model outputs, from “wireheading” to generative AI as a kind of art historical tool we can turn toward taste itself.

Recent book reviews

Colorado Train, by Inker: Grim. Stephen King’s The Body minus the nostalgia. Drawings and story complemented each other.

Les Insulaires, by Garnier: First novel I’ve ever read in a foreign language. It took awhile, but I could follow it. Clear and direct style. The characters seemed real, if not so interesting. The book as a whole reminded me of one of those French noir thrillers from the 1950s. Everything was kind of low-key and low-budget: the murder was low-budget, the mystery was low-budget, the retribution was low-budget. The funny thing is that in a novel, special effects are free: you can throw in as many explosions as you wan. But he didn’t. I’m not saying the book would’ve been better with more action; it was just funny to read such a low-budget writing style.

Retour à Liverpool, by Bourhis and Solé: Great drawing, great dialogue, seemed real. Thumbs up.

Numéro Deux, by Foenkinos: Excellent hook, convincing characters, rendered in a flat, easy-to-read style. Pleasantly bittersweet.

The Committed, by Nguyen: Just amazing, as was its predecessor.

Chanson Douce, by Slimani: I’d heard about this one . . . She did it well. I was expecting some kind of grand revelation or plot twist, but it didn’t happen that way. Sensitively done, this one was very convincing too.

The Expats, by Pavone: Super clunky, especially at the beginning, also the main characters were not appealing at all, not even in a faded Richard Burton kind of way. Also it was bugging me that the action’s all in Europe and everyone’s getting in a car all the time, not once hopping on a bike or a train. Still, I read all the way through to see what happened next, and then I read the sequel, which also was clunky with two-dimensional characters but I wanted to keep going.

The Plot, by Korelitz: I enjoyed it most of the way but at the end the plot did not live up to the build-up, and I left annoyed at Steven King and the others who’d blurbed it.

Largo Winch, by Van Hamme and Francq: The original “Eastern” (selon wikipedia, “business-thriller”). Lots of fun. I went through them pretty fast until tome 15, when the formula started to get boring. The first 10 or so were great, though.

L’Arabe du Futur, by Sattouf: What can I say? It lives up to the hype. Tome 6 brings us up to the present day. The drawings are simple yet amazingly expressive, and the writing is great too.

Le Jeune Acteur, by Sattouf: This one was good too!

Il Faut Flinguer Ramirez, by Petrimaux: Just amazing. He creates an entire world. This guy is the Spielberg of comics—I’ve never seen anything else like it. Along with the rest of the world, I’m now waiting for tome 3.

Lake Success, by Shteyngart: Remake of Bonfire of the Vanities—clearly an intentional remake too, given that he has a scene in Richmond and does this funny thing where the Wasps are the exotic characters. Very readable and amusing but didn’t entirely convince me, as I’d seen that sentimental rich guy character before.

Dernier Meurtre Avant la Fin du Monde, by Winters: Actually a U.S. book, just happened to find it in translation in the library here. The Paris libraries are just a zillion times better than what we have in New York. I guess 50 years of close-to-zero budgets have taken their toll. Anyway, this one was ok . . . I’m not quite sure what to say. It had a great premise and carried it out well, the characters were generic but not implausible, the scenes and the minor characters were all well done . . . but I thought Underground Airlines was much better.

A Little Book About a Big Memory, by Luria: This is another one I read in French; in this case the original was in Russian. A classic, and fun to read. Lots of cool details.

Bourneville, by Coe: Did not disappoint. Funny, thought-provoking, emotionally moving, the whole deal. I think he’s my favorite living author. The whole thing kinda makes me want to be English. OK, not really. But kinda.

All the Devils are Here, by Seabrook: In the Luc Sante “cult classic” genre. Worth reading. It’s funny how this sort of writing is standard in pop songs nowadays but so rarely appears in nonfiction literature. I’m thinking we should write Crimes Against Data in this sort of allusive, mysterious style.

Stoner, by Williams: I already reviewed this one. It came highly recommended and it lived up to the hype. I didn’t think it was “perfect” (as it was annoyingly blurbed), but a novel doesn’t have to be perfect. I got a lot out of it.

Crédit Illimité, by Rey: Another fun one with a great hook. A middle-aged loser is hired by his wealthy industrialist father to fire a bunch of people at his company. At first I thought it was going to be a nihilistic “romp,” but, no, there was more to it than that. It’s interesting reading these books, in part because I have no idea what they’re going to be like. I’ve never heard of these authors, I can’t tell from the cover, or the summary on the back, or even from reading a few pages. It’s all new to me!

Le Petit Astronaute, by Eid: Sad story, beautiful colors. This is the only BD that I can think of where the coloring was the defining characteristic.

Cherchez Charlie, by Moynot: Lots of fun from the first page onward. Now that it’s over, I remember just about nothing of the story, but I had a great time while I was reading it.

Mojo Hand, by Arnoud Floc’h: Good story, quirky drawing style, interesting theme connected to blues music.

Le Ministre & La Joconde, by Bourhis, Bourgeron, and Tanquerelle: Fun drawings, fun story. In the style of Haramabat’s Operation Copperhead and Le Detection Club. Not as good as those, but I’d still recommend it.

Les Animaux Dénaturés, by Bruller, Vercors, and Falzon: Interesting philosophical story, with drawings that are just wonderful and also fit in well with the content. A unique book.

Asphalt Blues, by Salaüin: Kinda like a Hollywood futuristic action movie. Well done. I don’t have a strong memory of the book now, but it worked while I was reading it.

Michigan, by Frey and Varela: Pleasant story, clear-line-style drawing. A little piece of social history.

La Page Blanche, by Boulet and Bagieu: After seeing the movie, I wanted to read the BD it was based on. I wouldn’t have picked it out otherwise—I don’t really like the drawing style—but the story was compelling. I’m glad I read it.

The BBC, by Hendy: No tricks here, this is a straight-up history of the British Broadcasting Corporation. It has these amazing blurbs and the topic interested me, so I picked it up. The back-cover blurb mentions The Morecombe and Wise Show, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, EastEnders, Dr. Who, and Desert Island Discs. And this brings me to my disappointment, which is that, with the exception of EastEnders, the book doesn’t really talk about any of these at all! I went to the index: Morecombe and Wise is not listed at all, Monty Python is not listed at all, Doctor Who gets two listings which turns out to be one paragraph and a brief mention elsewhere, and Desert Island Discs is . . . you guessed it, not listed at all! What the book was filled with was politics. That’s fine—I’m a political scientist, I read politics books for fun sometimes—; still, it was disappointing to see nothing about Monty Python at all, not even from a social history angle. And George Orwell . . . he wasn’t there either! How can you write a whole 600-page book about the BBC and not mention Orwell even once??

Merel, by Lodewick: Small-town Belgium slice of life. Drawings have a bit of a claymation feel.

Contrapaso, by Teresa Valero: Spain 1956. Scary stuff. Beautiful drawing and coloring. Very much like a movie.

Tuskeegee Ghost, by Von Eckartsberg and Dauger: I was at the Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée and saw a cool poster they were selling at the gift shop. I asked the storekeepers what album the scene was from, and after some phone calls they figured it out . . . it’s the image on the top part of page 14 of this book. I really like the drawings of this one. The story is fine too, but it’s the art that sold me. It reminds me of something but I can’t remember what.

Les Amants d’Hérouville, by Le Quellec and Ronzeau: True story, sad but kinda sweet too.

Previous BD reviews here. And I guess you can find some previous book reviews in the Literature category of the blog.

“The hat”: A single shape that can tile the plane aperiodically but not periodically.

Z in comments points to a new discovery by David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss, who write:

An aperiodic monotile . . . is a shape that tiles the plane, but never periodically. In this paper we present the first true aperiodic monotile, a shape that forces aperiodicity through geometry alone, with no additional constraints applied via matching conditions. We prove that this shape, a polykite that we call “the hat”, must assemble into tilings based on a substitution system.

All I can say is . . . wow. (That is, assuming the result is correct. I have no reason to think it’s not; I just haven’t tried to check it myself.)

First off, this is just amazing. Even more amazing is that I had no idea that this was even an open problem. I’d seen the Penrose two-shape tiling pattern years ago and loved it so much that I painted a tabletop with it (and send a photo of the table to Penrose himself, who replied with a nice little note, which unfortunately I lost some years ago, or I’d reproduce it here), and it never even occurred to me to ask whether an aperiodic monotile was possible.

This is the biggest news of 2023 so far (again, conditional on the result being correct), and I doubt anything bigger will happen between now and the end of December.

OK, there’s one possibility . . .

Penrose did it with 2 unique tiles, Smith et al. just needed 1, . . . The next frontier in aperiodic tiling is to do it with 0. Whoever gets there will be the real genius.

P.S. Michael in comments points out that the Smith et al. pattern includes mirrored tiles. So let’s call it 1.5. Is there a theorem that you can’t do it with just 1 tile with no mirroring?

Our Bayesian predictions for the Oscars . . . using Stan!

Ahhhh, just kidding. Didn’t really do it.

We did see Tar and The Fabelmans and liked them both. Actually liked The Fablemans better, so that would be my vote. Yeah, yeah, laugh at me all you want. What can I say . . . I never claimed to be cool. Anyway, Fabelmans was great, also the Academy still owes Spielberg a couple Oscars for Jaws. For further proof of my non-coolness, my favorite band is REM. I saw them perform in 1987 which might count for something until you hear that my friends dragged me there and I didn’t really enjoy the concert very much. On the drive back, I remarked that I probably would’ve liked it more had I listened to their albums ahead of time, and my friend who was the big REM fan was . . . not “disgusted” exactly, but he thought it was a weird thing to say.

For further discussion of the “would’ve liked it had I heard it a few times before” thing, see these two recent posts:

Why do we prefer familiarity in music and surprise in stories?

How Music Works by David Byrne, and Sweet Anticipation by David Huron

Beyond pulling for The Fabelmans, I got nothing for you on the Oscars.

The real reason I’m posting is that Joshua Brooks asked me to post something on this article, A Deep Breakdown Of The NBA MVP Debate, by Mike O’Connor. I agree with Brooks, it’s an interesting article.

O’Connor first writes a bit about the patterns of award-giving:

As Nikola Jokic closes in on what is very likely to become a 3-peat . . . one interesting dynamic that has made his case possible this season is the demise of the phenomenon known as voter fatigue. Once an understood, but hardly-considered pattern in these types of awards, numerous media members have made a point this year to mention how silly it would be if Jokic doesn’t win the award on the basis of having already won two in a row.

I’ll get to the validity of voter fatigue in a second, but one thing that is indisputable is that The War on Voter Fatigue is brand-spanking new. It may have been boiling for a while, but it hit a consensus right now, with Nikola Jokic. Comb through the past several years alone and you will find numerous examples of obvious voter fatigue.

After winning back to back MVPs in 2015 and 2016, Steph Curry played 79 games, put up unbelievable numbers, and led his team to 67 wins in 2017, and yet he finished sixth (!) behind Isaiah Thomas and four others in MVP voting that season. . . . After winning his second straight MVP in 2020, Antetokounmpo was essentially the exact same player in 2021 as he was in the two previous years, yet was a distant fourth in MVP voting behind Steph Curry and Joel Embiid (and Jokic, obviously), and multiple media members made it a point to mention that his lack of success in the playoffs in the previous two seasons made his case a bit weaker in 2021 – the (lack of) parallels there to Jokic are obvious. . . . the history of the NBA MVP is very clear: you win an MVP, it gets harder for you to win the following year. You win two MVPs in a row, and it’s almost freaking impossible to win three. Hence, why Jordan, Kareem, LeBron, etc. never won three straight. . . .

Those elements seem to have been cast off as silly, irrational considerations, but I would argue that that’s not a fair critique. Voter fatigue is not a mortal sin. It’s what allows us to shine the spotlight on players who ascended and/or defined the storyline of that NBA season as opposed to just re-stamping the best player. Without voter fatigue, there would probably only be somewhere around 15 players to ever win an MVP, and in my very humble opinion, that’s a boring way to tell the story of the NBA.

This reminds me of Bill James’s discussions of who gets into the baseball Hall of Fame, where he kind of reverse-engineers voters’ implicit decision rules to figure out what it takes to get the honor. (Also, James likes Pete Rose and can’t stand Joe Jackson; I can’t tell how much of that is James’s own feelings and how much is him reacting to attitudes of others.)

O’Connor then moves on to the merits of the case. Mostly he’s disparaging some stats where Jokic excels, and arguing that basketball discussion is degraded by people viewing these stats as some sort of higher truth. He doesn’t really compare Jokic to other MVP candidates, except to say:

And the irony is, this season is about Jokic! If we’re abolishing voter fatigue, his case this season is pretty unassailable. He’s likely been the best player in the league, and is on the best team in his conference. He has dominated the storylines all season long. Embiid is coming on strong of late, but if the season ended today, Jokic’s case is better in a vacuum . . .

I don’t follow basketball at all so I can’t comment on this except to say I appreciate that O’Connor is willing to say this, even though it’s not in support of his main argument criticizing certain stats and stat-worship. Real life is complicated, but in journalism and, for that matter, in science, there’s often a push to present an argument as if all the evidence goes in the same direction.

Anyway, here’s O’Connor on his main point:

If you work in NBA media, it’s likely that you love basketball to the point that you would identify as a basketball nerd. And in Nikola Jokic, there is absolutely no player in the history of basketball who better exemplifies the ethos of the basketball nerd. . . . Jokic’s passing makes the basketball nerds blush far more so than Giannis’ dunks or Embiid’s footwork. . . .For those who are unaware, Nikola Jokic generally grades out unbelievably well in advanced stats such as RAPTOR, BPM, VORP, etc. – some of these stats evaluate him as being better than prime LeBron or prime Jordan.

While most voters know to take them with a grain of salt, you will hear the majority of them at least make reference to them when outlining their case for Jokic. And ultimately, the appeal of all-in-one advanced stats is that they offer the comfort of being able to provide some sort of calculated, tangible proof for your position; without them, we would be forced to rely more upon our own internal evaluations of each player . . .

I [O’Connor] ultimately believe that most of these stats are transparently absurd, both in their formulation and in the results that they produce, and the fact that they play any role at all in the MVP discussion – deciding players’ legacies – is a travesty, and if we were to thoroughly dig into them, most would agree.

Let’s start on the surface, before digging into how they’re made. If I were to put out my own personal, subjective rankings of the top 50 NBA players, and they mirrored the rankings of FiveThirtyEight’s RAPTOR, I would be laughed at and called the single dumbest pundit on NBA Twitter. In the top 50 alone – which should be far and away the easiest group to rank – there are many comically out of place players.

Alex Caruso is 12th. Delon Wright is 18th. Josh Okogie and Derrick White are tied for 20th. Isaiah Joe is 32nd. Alec Burks is 41st. Austin Reaves and John Konchar are tied for 48th. I’m sure many people will call this cherry picking, but if 15-20% of the rankings that your metric spits out are obvious bullshit (spoiler: it’s more than 15-20%), then dare I say, your metric is not very good and should not receive widespread credence from NBA media members.

The first litmus test for these stats should always be common sense. If they directly conflict with common sense, it’s fine to disregard them.

I agree! Not on the basketball details, where I have no idea, but on the general point. Here are a few relevant posts from a few years ago, making the point that an index is just an index, and to understand it you should (a) look at what goes into it, and (b) look hard at cases where the index gives results that violate our general understanding:

Another Human Development Index for U.S. states

About that claim in the Monkey Cage that North Korea had “moderate” electoral integrity . . .

Bill James does model checking

“Who’s bigger”—the new book that ranks every human on Wikipedia—is more like Bill Simmons than Bill James

Bill Simmons is an entertaining writer and a thoughtful guy, but in the above context, being “more like Bill Simmons” was not intended as a compliment.

O’Connor continues:

Where these metrics are particularly bad is on the defensive end. RAPTOR, for example, has Jokic rated as the 3rd best defensive player in the NBA. That’s right – this guy is the 3rd best defensive basketball player alive.

Selected video isn’t quite rigorous evidence, but, yeah, it’s pretty funny seeing all those clips of Jokic just standing there while guys go around him and put the ball right in the hoop.

O’Connor elaborates:

If you are going to sell me on the idea that Jokic is the second best defender in the NBA or anything close to it, you are going to have to present me with some novel information – something that I hadn’t been picking up on. The idea that this can be the basis of a case for a player being a DPOY-level defender is insane.

RAPTOR very obviously overvalues rebounding (which, by the way, one could argue is a separate phase of the game from defense – you can be a great defender and bad rebounder, and vice versa). It also isn’t an ironclad argument to say that a center defending a high volume of shot attempts is a good thing; there are obviously a considerable number of shots that guards may be willing to attempt at the rim versus Jokic, that they wouldn’t against, say Embiid or Rudy Gobert.

Ultimately, I think it has more to do with scheme than anything else, but this entire discussion underscores the point I’m trying to make: all of these metrics are built based upon how some person thinks several more basic stats should be weighted, and those considerations are highly debatable.

There’s more, but I’ll stop here. I’ll remind you he actually says he thinks Jokic is the most valuable player this year. The statistical arguments are still interesting, as are the meta-statistical arguments about “the degree to which these metrics impact perception.”

“Several artists have torn, burned, ripped and cut their artwork over the course of their careers. it is still possible for them to do it, but they will be able to preserve their artwork permanently on the blockchain.”

I’m tinguely all over from having received this exclusive 5D invitation, and I just have to share it with all of you!

It’s a combination of art museum and shredder that’s eerily reminiscent of the Shreddergate exhibit at the Museum of Scholarly Misconduct.

Here’s the story:

You Are Invited: Media Event During Art Basel Week in Miami

Live demonstration of groundbreaking new NFT technology by the engineers, alongside some of Miami’s leading artists.

Two dates for the live presentations for the media:

  • Thursday, Dec. 1 at 3:00 p.m.
  • Friday, Dec. 2 at 3:00 p.m.

At the Center for Visual Communication in Wynwood, 541 NW 27th Street in Miami.

* * * Media RSVP is required at: https://www.eventbrite.com/**

This is a private event for the news media, by invitation only, and is not open to the public.

This media event will be presented at the location of the new exhibition “The Miami Creative Movement” featuring 15 of Miami’s leading artists.

Media Contacts: ** & ** 305-**-** **@**.com

– This will be the official launch of the new ** Machine, the first hardware-software architecture that creates a very detailed digital map of an artwork using a novel ultra-detailed 5D scanning technology.

– They will transform physical artworks into NFTs in real time for the audience, via this new hardware device they invented.

– The sublimated artworks will be uploaded to the blockchain live, in real-time, and will be showcased in an immersive VR environment at the event.

– After the scanning is completed, a laser-shredder “sublimates” the object, erasing the physical artwork and minting a new NFT directly on the blockchain.

The technology’s creator — ** — hails this as: “The first NFT-based technology that will allow artists and collectors to preserve works of art indefinitely in digital form, simply and without loss of information. Provenance is indisputable and traceable back to the original work of art to every brushstroke and minutiae detail.”

“As this new hardware revolutionizes art conservation around the world and attracts many artists to Web3, it also adds legitimacy to real world art on blockchains, enabling them to be traded.”

LIVE EVENT FOR THE MEDIA DURING ART BASEL WEEK IN MIAMI:

** Presents a Technology That Could Revolutionize NFTs and the World of Physical Art Forms

** – an Argentinian team of blockchain experts, technologists and artists, announces the official launch of the ** Machine, the first hardware-software architecture that creates a very detailed digital map of an artwork, using a novel ultra-detailed 5D scanning technology.

After the scanning is completed, a laser-shredder “sublimates” the object, erasing the physical artwork and minting a new NFT directly on the blockchain.

The technology’s creator hails this as the first NFT-based technology that will allow artists and collectors to preserve works of art indefinitely in digital form, simply and without loss of information.

The new artwork transcends the physical work into the blockchain as a unique NFT that can be referenced to the original sublimated artwork, and to which provenance is indisputable and traceable back to the original work of art to every brushstroke and minutiae detail.

Several artists have torn, burned, ripped and cut their artwork over the course of their careers. It is still possible for them to do it, but they will be able to preserve their artwork permanently on the blockchain.

As the hardware revolutionizes art conservation around the world and attracts many artists to Web3, it also adds legitimacy to real world art on blockchains, enabling them to be traded.

Artists who “burn” their paintings with the ** technology will get 85% of the revenue obtained from the newly created NFT and its addition to the most popular NFT marketplaces.

The artist ** completing the process of physical destruction of his painting

This process of creative destruction will be showcased for the news media during the week of Art Basel Miami at the Center for Visual Communication in Miami’s Wynwood Arts District.

There will be a live demonstration for members of the press and the sublimated artworks uploaded to the blockchain will be showcased in the art gallery in an immerse VR environment.

Argentina-based ** is a Web3 and Metaverse company dedicated to transferring the value of art to the digital world. The company was co-founded by **, **and **.

**’s first product is the ** Machine, a technology that scans and laser cuts physical artworks to produce NFTs. Read more at **.

You Are Invited: Media Event During Art Basel Week in Miami

Live demonstration of groundbreaking new NFT technology by the engineers, alongside some of Miami’s leading artists.

Two dates for the live presentations for the media:

  • Thursday, Dec. 1 at 3:00 p.m.
  • Friday, Dec. 2 at 3:00 p.m.

At the Center for Visual Communication in Wynwood, 541 NW 27th Street in Miami.

* * * Media RSVP is required at: https://www.eventbrite.com/**

This is a private event for the news media, by invitation only, and is not open to the public.

This media event will be presented at the location of the new exhibition “The Miami Creative Movement” featuring 15 of Miami’s leading artists.

Media Contacts: ** & ** 305-***-**** **@**.com

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“This is a private event for the news media, by invitation only, and is not open to the public.” . . . . wow, this makes me feel so important! There’s so much juicy stuff here, from the “5D scanning technology” onward. “This process of creative destruction” indeed. I’m assuming that anyone who showed up to this event was escorted there in a shiny new Hyperloop vehicle directly from their WeWork shared space. Unicorns all around!

But what’s with the “laser shredder”? Wouldn’t it be enough just to crumple up the original artwork and throw it in the trash?

It’s always fun to be on the inside of “a private event for the news media, by invitation only,” even if it’s not quite as impressive as the exclusive “non-transferable” invitation to hang out with Grover Norquist, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and a rabbi for a mere $16,846.

.

Tom Lehrer puts himself in the public domain—and here, for a limited time, are all his songs. (Really.)

Paul Alper points to this site and writes:

Most of the material is familiar but some are far more obscure. Lehrer will be 95 on April 9, 2023. And, draw whatever conclusions you feel like, his near-contemporary, Kissinger, will be 99 on May 27, 2023. Lehrer denies that he ever claimed, “Political satire died when Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” Assuming each is still coherent, what would they talk about? Same goes for Woody Allen and the Dalai Lama who are but 4-5 months apart.

This site is amazing: it has lyrics for 96 songs and music for a lot of these.

Also this:

“I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs.” How cool is that?

It says the site will be shut down soon so you might want to go check it out already.

Maybe Henry, Woody, and Dalai will jump on the open-source train next.

The more I thought about them, the less they seemed to be negative things, but appeared in the scenes as something completely new and productive

This is Jessica. My sabbatical year, which most recently had me in Berkeley CA,  is coming to an end. For the second time since August I was passing through Iowa. Here it is on the way out to California from Chicago and on the way back.

A park in Iowa in AugustA part in Iowa in November

If you squint (like, really really squint), you can see a bald eagle overhead in the second picture.

One association that Iowa always brings to mind for me is that Arthur Russell, the musician, grew up there. I have been a fan of Russell’s music for years, but somehow had missed Iowa Dream, released in 2019 (Russell died of AIDS in 1992, and most of his music has been released posthumously). So I listened to it while we were driving last week. 

Much of Iowa Dream is Russell doing acoustic and lofi music, which can be surprising if you’ve only heard his more heavily produced disco or minimalist pop. One song, called Barefoot in New York, is sort of an oddball track even amidst the genre blending that is typical of Russell. It’s probably not for everyone, but as soon as I heard it I wanted to experience it again. 

NPR called it “newfound city chaos” because Russell wrote it shortly after moving to New York, but there’s also something about the rhythm and minutae of the lyrics that kind of reminds me of research. The lyrics are tedious, but things keep moving like you’re headed towards something. The speech impediment evokes getting stuck at times and having to explore one’s way around the obstruction. Sometimes things get clear and the speaker concludes something. Then back to the details that may or may not add up to something important. There’s an audience of backup voices who are taking the speaker seriously and repeating bits of it, regardless of how inconsequential. There’s a sense of bumbling yet at the same time iterating repeatedly on something that may have started rough but becomes more refined. 

Then there’s this part:

I really wanted to show somehow how things deteriorate

Or how one bad thing leads to another

At first, there were plenty of things to point to

Lots of people, places, things, ideas

Turning to shit everywhere

I could describe these instances

But the more I thought about them

The less they seemed to be negative things

But appeared in the scenes as something completely new and productive

And I couldn’t talk about them in the same way

But I knew it was true that there really are

Dangerous crises

Occurring in many different places

But I was blind to them then

Once it was easy to find something to deplore

But now it’s even worse than before

I really like these lyrics, in part because they make me uncomfortable. On the one hand, the idea of wanting to criticize something, but losing the momentum as things become harder to dismiss closer up, seems opposite of how many realizations happen in research, where a few people start to notice problems with some conventional approach and then it becomes hard to let them go. The replication crisis is an obvious example, but this sort of thing happens all the time. In my own research, I’ve been in a phase where I’m finding it hard to unsee certain aspects of how problems are underspecified in my field, so some part of me can’t relate to everything seeming new and productive. 

But at the same time the idea of being won over by what is truly novel feels familiar when I think about the role of novelty in defining good research. I imagine this is true in all fields to some extent, but especially in computer science, there’s a constant tension around how important novelty is in determining what is worthy of attention. 

Sometimes novelty coincides with fundamentally new capabilities in a way that’s hard to ignore. The reference to potentially “dangerous crises” brings to mind the current cultural moment we’re having with massive deep learning models for images and text. For anyone coming from a more classical stats background, it can seem easy to want to dismiss throwing huge amounts of unlabeled data at too-massive-and-ensembled-to-analyze models as a serious endeavor… how does one hand off a model for deployment if they can’t explain what it’s doing? How do we ensure it’s not learning spurious cues, or generating mostly racist or sexist garbage? But the performance improvements of deep neural nets on some tasks in the last 5 to 10 years is hard to ignore, and phenomena like how deep nets can perfectly interpolate the training data but still not overfit, or learn intermediate representations that align with ground truth even when fed bad labels, makes it hard to imagine dismissing them as a waste of our collective time. Other areas, like visualization, or databases, start to seem quaint and traditional. And then there’s quantum computing, where the consensus in CS departments seems to be that we’re going all in regardless of how many years it may still be until its broadly usable. Because who doesn’t like trying to get their head around entanglement? It’s all so exotic and different.

I think many people gravitate to computer science precisely because of the emphasis on newness and creating things, which can be refreshing compared to fields where the modal contribution it to analyze rather than invent. We aren’t chained to the past the way many other fields seem to be. It can also be easier to do research in such an environment, because there’s less worry about treading on ground that’s already been covered.

But there’s been pushback about requiring reviewers to explicitly factor novelty into their judgments about research importance or quality, like by including a seperate ranking for “originality” in a review form like we do in some visualization venues. It does seem obvious that including statements like “We are first to …” in the introduction of our papers as if this entitles us to publication doesn’t really make the work better. In fact, often the statements are wrong, at least in some areas of CS research where there’s a myopic tendency to forget about all but the classic papers and what you saw get presented in the last couple years. And I always cringe a little when I see simplistic motiations in research papers like, no one has ever has looked at this exact combination (of visualization, form of analysis etc) yet. As if we are absolved of having to consider the importance of a problem in the world when we decide what to work on.

The question would seem to be how being oriented toward appreciating certain kinds of novelty, like an ability to do something we couldn’t do before, affects the kinds of questions we ask, and how deep we go in any given direction over the longer term. Novelty can come from looking at old things in new ways, for example developing models or abstractions that relate previous approaches or results. But these examples don’t always evoke novelty in the same way that examples of striking out in brand new directions do, like asking about augmented reality, or multiple devices, or fairness, or accessibility, in an area where previously we didn’t think about those concerns much.

If a problem is suddenly realized to be important, and the general consensus is that ignoring it before was a major oversight, then its hard to argue we should not set out to study the new thing. But a challenge is that if we are always pursuing some new direction, we get islands of topics that are hard to relate to one another. It’s useful for building careers, I guess, to be able to relatively easily invent a new problem or topic and study it in a few papers then move on. And I think it’s easy to feel like progress is being made when you look around at all the new things being explored. There’s a temptation I think to assume that  it will all “work itself out” if we explore all the shiny new things that catch our eye, because those that are actually important will in the end get the most attention. 

But beyond not being to easily relate topics to one another, a problem with expanding, at all times, in all directions at once, would seem to be that no particular endeavor is likely to be robust, because there’s always an excitement about moving to the next new thing rather than refining the old one. Maybe all the trendy new things distract from foundational problems, like a lack of theory to motivate advances in many areas, or sloppy use of statistics. The perception of originality and creativity certainly seem better at inspiring people than obsessing over being correct.

Barefoot in NY ends with a line about how, after having asked whether it was in “our best interest” to present this particular type of music, the narrator went ahead and did it, “and now, it’s even worse than before.” It’s not clear what’s worse than before, but it captures the sort of committment to rapid exploration, even if we’re not yet sure how important the new things are, that causes this tension. 

Hey! Here’s a surprisingly fascinating discussion of copyright of transformed images!

I don’t usually just link to stuff on our blogroll—after all, you can just go there and check things out whenever you want—but this post by Chris Gavaler was really interesting so I wanted to share it with you.

It features:

Lynne Goldsmith
Prince
Andy Warhol
the U.S. Supreme Court
Marilyn Monroe
Eugene Korman
somebody named Soglin
Barack Obama
Mannie Garcia
Shepard Fairey
Miles Davis
Jay Maisel
Andy Baio
swipers in comics
Pablo Picasso
Angela Corey
Rick Wilson
George Zimmerman

Interesting and thoughtful, with lots of pictures.

OK, I know you were all waiting for this one: My review of the 1995 album, Saturday Morning: Cartoons’ Greatest Hits

It all started last month when I was talking with my social media consultant about planning our next Greatest Seminar Speaker competition. We were going through a few possible categories—I’m actually forgetting most of these, but I’m sure my consultant has them written down somewhere—; in any case I do remember that we only had 6 or 7 out of the necessary 8 categories, and in the back of my mind I was trying to think of one or two more.

Then today I was working on an article on equivalent sample size for Bayesian prior distributions—it’s funny, there are a bunch of articles on the topic, all of which include people who I know personally: Peter Mueller, Rob Trangucci, Xiao-Li Meng, and Sebastian Weber. This is not one article, it’s 4 different articles, each of which includes a friend, and none of which I’d heard about until my colleagues and I started looking into the topic. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there; the relevance of this particular digression is that one of the other references in the paper is to the statistician I. J. Good (his “device of imaginary results”), and that got me thinking of famous people who are known by their initials: A. J. Foyt, J. K. Rowling, J. R. R. Tolkien, E. Nesbit, T. S. Eliot (alternatively, he could go into the always-crowded “bigots” category), etc. I was trying to come up with a good set of 8 of these people, and the name “H. R. Pufnstuf” jumped into my head.

Just to be clear, we can’t use H. R. Pufnstuf in the Greatest Seminar Speaker competition as he’s not a real person. H. R. Pufnstuf, as anyone who happens to be exactly my age and grew up in the United States and watched too much TV—ummmm, I guess that would be just about everyone my age who grew up in the U.S.—was a Saturday morning cartoon—actually, it was not a cartoon; according to Wikipedia, it was a “live-action, life-sized-puppet program.” Like any other kid, I much preferred cartoons to live-action anything, but given the options on TV, we watched whatever was on in those long weekend hours.

Anyway, thinking about that show brought to mind that infectious earworm of its theme song: “H. R. Pufnstuf, can’t do a little cause he can’t do enough.” What can that possibly mean, I always thought? Can’t do a little cause he can’t do enough?? I still have no idea.

It’s been often noted that The Jetsons have had an outsized influence on popular memory given that it was only on the air for one season (later forgettable reboots notwithstanding). H. R. Pufnstuf, also airing for only one season, had a much smaller cultural foonote. But I remember it! Maybe not so well as its hat-themed sister show, Lidsville, or The Houndcats, which I absolutely loved for its elaborate plots (I’d never seen an actual episode of Mission Impossible and had no idea that this was what The Houndcats was ripping off), but that theme song . . . I’m still humming it in my head, at least when my brain’s not being occupied by the even more memorable Banana Splits theme song, which has the extra benefit of being associated with that unforgettable water slide image.

I looked up Pufnstuf on the internet . . . The internet has lots of issues, but one thing it’s good at is providing detail on classic and not-so-classic TV shows. I really have no need at all for my yellowed copy of “Total Television: A Comprehensive Guide to Programming from 1948 to the Present.”

Anyway, this internet search led me to the album, Saturday Morning: Cartoons’ Greatest Hits, which appeared in 1996 and features various somewhat-gritty boomer and x-er rockers such as Liz Phair, Butthole Surfers, Violent Femmes, etc., covering cartoon classics—and also the theme from H. R. Pufnstuf, even though it’s not actually a cartoon. Truth in labeling, people! None of the tracks are by R.E.M., which is too bad cos their covers are great, but of course I respect them more for not being on this kind of crappy concept album that I love so much.

I recently learned that all the music you could ever want to hear is available for free on the internet, so I went over to Youtube and found the album! I kinda wanted to hear it, but maybe I just wanted to “own it” (as the oldies would say about recorded music); to actually listen to all 19 songs sounds like a bit much. Fortunately, I can listen to music in the background while I work or whatever.

Now it’s time for bed, but tomorrow, or when I next have a chance, I’ll listen to all 19 songs in order and report it all to you. I’ve also heard that music criticism is dead, so you can be glad to hear that I’m being paid $0 for this particular post.

OK, tomorrow has come. I just listened to the first song: the Banana Splits theme performed by Liz Phair. It was terrible. “Tra la la” over and over and over and over again. With guitar feedback in the background. I want those three minutes back. Now I’m on the second one: Sponge performing Speed Racer. We have a Speed Racer principle here at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science—but I don’t like this song either. I’m starting to think that theme songs for kids’ TV shows don’t have enough going on to support three-minute songs.

The third track is Mary Lou Lord performing Sugar Sugar. It’s pretty boring too but at least it sounds good. I don’t really feel listening to the end of this one, but at least it’s not actively unpleasant.

Now it’s been 2:19 out of 3:54 (almost 4 minutes—what were they thinking??) and I’m jumping to the next track, Matthew Sweet singing the Scooby Doo theme. Hey! This one isn’t half bad. OK, maybe it’s half bad, but that’s still better than anything that’s come along so far. . . . OK, 1:28 gone and it’s repeating itself. Couldn’t they just have made each of these tracks a minute long? No way the themes were so long on the actual TV shows. I get that these long-form covers would be fun as anything in a live performance by a band, but, on record . . . forget it! On the plus side, hey! Matthew Sweet’s band is jammin! Why not, I guess. Next up, Juliana Hatfield and Tanya Donelly perform Josie and The Pussycats. Not bad, it’s got a beat. But no way am I gonna listen to every song on this album. I’m jumping a few tracks to the Ramones performing Spider Man. Sounds like every other Ramones song I’ve ever heard. . . . Time to quickly go through a few more, and now we’re a Dig performing the Fat Albert Theme. With the whole Cosby thing, Fat Albert now has this dangerous vibe which makes the song kinda fascinating in retrospect. Boring and unmusical, but fascinating. And now I’ll skip a few more to get to the Murmurs’ take on H. R. Pufnstuf. In classic TV-theme style, it tells the story of the show. Not bad—actually this is my favorite song on the album! Still kinda boring to hear 3:20 worth, but I’ll take it. My quick summary: they should redo this collection, doing each song in 1 minute instead of 3 or 4. Or maybe the solution is at the other end of the equation: the listener should get drunk or stoned before putting this record on.

OK, my job here is done.

P.S. On that webpage for Saturday Morning: Cartoons’ Greatest Hits is a link to the record’s producer, Ralph Sall. Following that link leads to a page on his album, “The Art of McCartney,” described as follows by Wikipedia: “The 42-song set, which covers McCartney’s solo work and work with the Beatles and Wings, features a wide range of artists such as Barry Gibb, Brian Wilson, Jeff Lynne, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Alice Cooper, Smokey Robinson, and Kiss.” Barry Gibb covering “When I’m Sixty-Four”—how fun is that? And another quick search reveals there’s a copy at the local library! So I can check it out, save it on the ipod, and listen to it on my bike while dodging the cars. That’s much better than listening to the songs on youtube. But I won’t review it for you, as I don’t think anything interesting is left to be said regarding classic Paul McCartney songs.

P.P.S. If you want to read an unlimited number of music reviews, all by the same guy, check this out. Dude hits the rock-criticism jackpot by writing interestingly with opinions that are occasionally unexpected enough that you’ll want to keep reading, and of course the air of 100% super-certainty that we’ve come to expect from the genre. It’s never, “I like this album” or “I hate this album”; it’s always “This album rules” or “This album sucks.” Like all rock critics, he doesn’t have tastes, he has absolute knowledge.

Some things, like cubes, tetrahedrons, and Venn diagrams, seem so simple and natural that it’s kind of a surprise when you learn that their supply is very limited.

ser-venn-ity.png

I know I’ve read somewhere about the challenge of Venn diagrams with 4 or more circles, but I can’t remember the place. It seems like a natural for John Cook but I couldn’t find it on his blog, so I’ll just put it here.

Venn diagrams are misleading, in the sense that they work for n = 1, 2, and 3, but not for n > 3.

n = 1: A Venn diagram is just a circle. There are 2^1 options: in or out.

n = 2: A Venn diagram is two overlapping circles, with 2^2 options: A & B, not-A & B, A & not-B, not-A & not-B.

n = 3: Again, it works just fine. The 3 circles overlap and divide the plane into 8 regions.

n = 4: Venn FAIL. Throw down 4 overlapping circles and you don’t get 16 regions. You can do it with ellipses (here’s an example I found from a quick google) but it doesn’t have the pleasing symmetry of the classic three-circle Venn, and it takes some care both to draw and to interpret.

n = 5: There’s a pretty version here but it’s no longer made out of circles.

n > 5: Not much going on here. You can find examples like this which miss the point by not including all subsets, or examples like this which look kinda goofy.

The challenge here, I think, is that we have the intuition that if something works for n = 1, 2, and 3, that it will work for general n. For the symmetric Venn diagram on the plane, though, no, it doesn’t work.

Here’s an analogy: We all know about cubes. If at some point you see a tetrahedron and a dodecahedron, it would be natural to think that there are infinitely many regular polyhedra, just as there are infinitely many regular polygons. But, no, there are only 5 regular polyhedra.

Some things, like cubes, tetrahedrons, and Venn diagrams, seem so simple and natural that it’s kind of a surprise when you learn that their supply is very limited.

What rule did Louis Menand use to select what went into book on U.S. “cold war” culture of 1945-1965?

I’m a big fan of Louis Menand (see also here), so when his new book, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, came out, I immediately bought and read it. It had lots of interesting stories and thought-provoking ideas.

For example, on page 334:

On page 450:

That whole quote is great, especially the “surprising to outsiders” bit. Everyone thinks we’re poofs, but we’re not! Really!! A bunch of lumberjacks, they are.

On pages 466-467, Menand refers to a theory of poetry promulgated in the 1940s:

. . . the idea that all poems worth studying display certain formal features, specifically, paradox, irony, and ambiguity—devices that multiply and complicate meaning.

Oooohh, I hate that attitude! OK, don’t get me wrong: I have no problem with paradox, irony, and ambiguity—they’re great. But the idea that a poem has to be confusing, some sort of puzzle that needs to be decoded . . . that’s this crap they fed us in high school, where the literary heroes were T. S. Eliot and William Faulkner. Did they ever give us poems by, say, Frost or Auden—poems with art and ambiguity but also some clarity? No! I guess if we want some poetry that isn’t a pure puzzle, we can just listen to pop songs. Anyway, I’m not blaming Menand for this—he’s describing a real cultural trend—it’s just a trend that annoys me.

Wow. That cookbook story is great. This story alone justifies the price of the book. I mean it! I’m gonna assign this exercise to my students next year. Not with a cookbook, I guess, but otherwise the same.

Then there’s this quote from pages 617-618. It comes from culture hero William Faulkner in 1956:

“But I [Faulkner] don’t like enforced integration any more than I like enforced segregation. If I had to choose between the United States government and Mississippi, then I’ll choose Mississippi . . . As long as there’s a middle road, all right, I’ll be on it. But if it came to fighting I’d fight for Mississippi against the Unites States even if it meant going out on the streets and shooting Negroes. After all, I’m not going to shoot Mississippians.”

I have no idea how he’d be able to tell whether the “Negroes” he’s shooting are themselves Mississippians. It’s not like people go around wearing uniforms telling you what state they’re from! Menand continues, “Faulkner tried to retract [these words], hinting that he had been drunk.” But that’s even worse, no, to have a drunk guy going around shooting people?

From page 680, on movie critic Pauline Kael:

Kael’s contention that serious movies should meet the same standard as pulp—that they should be entertaining—turned out to be an extremely useful and widely adopted critical principle. . . .

This sounds reasonable, and I don’t exactly disagree, but it reminds me of the discussion we had last year on the norm of entertainment:

It seems that we demand entertainment in some media but not others. We expect movies to be entertaining, and if they’re not, we’re annoyed. Even documentaries are supposed to be well paced. If not, they’ll be criticized as being boring, or “preachy,” or whatever. Most TV is expected to entertain also, except for certain special events such as official speeches, rocket launches, and Super Bowls, which it’s considered ok to watch out of ritual obligation.

Novels and plays, we usually expect to entertain us, with some exceptions. I might read Moby Dick because it’s thought provoking and has brilliant passages. It’s not entertaining, exactly, but reading it can be satisfying. We don’t always expect dinner to be entertaining either, but we do what it takes to fill us up.

What about textbooks and nonfiction books? Some of these are entertaining. In Regression and Other Stories, we try to amuse. The classic textbook Numerical Methods That Work is a flat-out fun read. Some scholarly works for the general public are highly readable. I’m thinking of The Origins of the Second World War. Hey, here’s a whole list of entertaining nonfiction books I’ve read. Entertaining is great, if you can have it. But I’ve read lots of completely unentertaining books that were great because they had important information. That would describe most of my textbooks, as well as various nonfiction books. If a textbooks entertaining, that’s lagniappe.

And then there are research articles. There are entertaining research papers out there—I’ve written a few, myself!—but most of the time we don’t expect journal articles to be entertaining. Indeed, there are times when we would feel that any effort made by an author to be entertaining is effort wasted, if it could be spent on content itself.

Menand’s book is pretty entertaining. I usually like it when a nonfiction book is entertaining.

What’s entertaining for one person can be boring for another. My impression is that the usual pattern for nonfiction “trade books” is to just have one idea and bang on it over and over. But I like my books to be more overstuffed. One thing I enjoyed about Freakonomics was that it had lots of ideas, and lots of ideas per page. Menand’s book is nothing like Freakonomics, but it also is just bursting with interesting, immutable stories and thought-provoking ideas.

Who’s in?

Menand’s book is structured as a series of mini-histories and mini-biographies. The topics are not the usual historical subjects of war, politics, and big business; instead he focuses on culture.

The question I want to ask is, how did he decide what to put in and what to leave out?

Here’s the list of cultural figures who Menand writes about. I’ve put an asterisk next to the people who get particularly long descriptions:

George Kennan*
Hans Morgenthau
George Orwell
James Burnham
C. Wright Mills
Jean-Paul Sartre*
Simone de Beauvoir
Maurice-Edgar Coindreau
Hannah Arendt*
David Riesman
Clement Greenberg
Peggy Guggenheim
Jackson Pollock
Harold Rosenberg
Lionel Trilling*
Allen Ginsberg
Claude Levi-Strauss*
Roland Barthes
Robert Rauschenberg
Josef Albers
John Cage*
Merce Cunningham
Jasper Johns
Leo Castelli
Elvis Presley
The Beatles*
Jann Wenner
Isaiah Berlin*
Barney Rosset
James Baldwin*
Aime Cesaire
Frantz Fanon
Richard Wright
Eduardo Paolozzi
Richard Hamilton
T. S. Eliot
Cleanth Brooks
Northrop Frye
Jack Kerouac
Charles Olson
Paul de Man
Jacques Derrida
Andy Warhol*
Marcel Duchamp
Fredric Wertham
Betty Friedan
Susan Sontag*
Jack Smith
Charlotte Moorman
Norman Mailer
Martin Luther King
Ralph Ellison
Francois Truffaut
Jean-Luc Godard
Pauline Kael
Tom Hayden
Mario Savio

Who’s out?

And here’s a (partial) list of people and topics who are mentioned in passing or not at all:

John Maynard Keynes, John Kenneth Galbraith, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman
Shirley Jackson, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick
James Thurber, A. J. Liebling, Tom Wolfe, John Cheever, John O’Hara, John Updike, Saul Bellow
Malcolm Muggeridge, Anthony West, Gore Vidal, Mary McCarthy
Alfred Hitchcock
W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien
Comic books and children’s books
Religion as culture (Reinhold Neibuhr, Billy Graham, Cardinal Spellman, etc.)
Military culture
Sports as culture (Jackie Robinson, Pete Rozelle, Bear Bryant, etc.)
Science, medicine, psychiatry (B. F. Skinner, the Salk/Sabin story, Linus Pauling, etc.)
Radio, TV, pop culture (Jack Benny, Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, TV and movie Westerns, etc.)
Herman Kahn (the low-rent John von Neumann), actual von Neumann, Oppenheimer, Teller
Dr. Strangelove, Catch 22
Daniel Bell, Raymond Aron
Vladimir Nabokov, Ayn Rand
Ian Fleming, John Le Carre, Alger Hiss, Whitaker Chambers, Rosenbergs

In compiling this mini-list, I’m purposely excluding straight-up political news figures (JFK, Truman, Eisenhower, McCarthy, Nixon, etc.) as well as social and business stories without direct cultural connections (department stores, shopping malls, the rise of the suburbs, the postwar boom in factory production followed by decades of decline, etc.).

I’m not saying my list is better than Menand’s or worse. It’s just different. Menand is a literature professor so he includes some now-obscure literature professors such as Lionel Trilling, Cleanth Brooks, and Paul de Man. If I was going to talk about critics, I’d be more interested in hearing about some on the more journalistic side, such as Malcolm Muggeridge, Anthony West, and Gore Vidal. Or take Mary McCarthy if you want someone with more of an intellectual bent. I find these authors to be much more interesting today than Trilling or the rest of that gang. When it comes to literature, rather than literary criticism, Menand focuses on some politically engaged writers such as Sontag, Baldwin, Mailer, and Wright—I guess that’s a choice on his part to not talk about social novelists and storytellers such as Bellow, Updike, Cheever, and O’Hara, or postwar literary journalists such as Thurber, Liebling, and Wolfe. I have my own biases, as I find the authors on my list to be more readable and interesting than those on Menand’s list. He’s choosing them based on social importance, though, or, more precisely, something about how they illustrate some point about the postwar intellectual climate, and I get that—but, to me, so much of the postwar intellectual climate is characterized by literary journalism and, ummm, I guess I’d call it upper-middlebrow literature, that I’m surprised he doesn’t get to any of that. Norman Mailer, sure, he was in the news magazines a lot, but as literature he’s no James Jones and for social relevance he’s no Joseph Heller. And then there’s genre literature. I’d argue that science fiction was an important component of Cold War culture, with authors such as Shirley Jackson (horror), Robert Heinlein (techno-optimism), and Philip K. Dick (paranoia) representing three poles of this discourse. You could start with the biographies by Ruth Franklin and Alec Nevala-Lee. Again, Menand is free to write about what interests him. To me, Shirley Jackson and Robert Heinlein are about a million times more interesting than John Cage and Lionel Trilling, but, sure, tastes differ. Beyond any personal preferences in what we like to read or look at or talk about, I just feel there’s something parochial and narrow about Menand’s focus. Menand is such a clear thinker and such a great writer that he kinda makes it work, but I’m left wishing he’d placed his focus on some more interesting subjects.

Which reminds me that there’s this whole huge chunk of Cold War culture that doesn’t come up in Menand’s book at all, which is the nexus of military culture, anti-communism, and the whole duck-and-cover fear of an impending World War 3. A chapter or more could’ve been devoted to influential and creative cold war artifacts such as Dr. Strangelove and Catch 22; cold war intellectuals and scientists such as Neumann, Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and that figure of fun Herman Kahn; along with Cold War intellectuals such as Daniel Bell and Raymond Aron and emigre novelists such as Nabokov and Rand. If you’re gonna do Art and Thought in the Cold War, all these fit right in. At a more headlines-and-pop-culture level, you have famous spies and communists such as Hiss, Chambers, Rosenbergs, along with culturally significant spy novelists Fleming and Le Carre. Or you can just go to pop culture more generally. Why have Elvis, The Beatles, and a mini-history of the recording industry, but not the birth of commercial TV, the popularity of the Western in TV and movies, Bugs Bunny cartoons, etc.? Why give so much detail about the changing obscenity laws in book publishing and not, for example, an in-depth story about the use of the laugh track in sitcoms?

To go in a slightly different direction, consider some other major aspects of Cold War culture that Menand didn’t mention at all: science, religion, economics, and sports. I’m thinking here not just of various inspiring and scary stories (amazing scientific and technological breakthroughs such as vaccines, moon landings, and nuclear power; the spread and change of various religious denominations; decades of full employment and economic growth; and athletic feats such as the four-minute-mile), but also about the characters in these stories (Salk and Sabin, Cardinal Spellman and Billy Graham, Galbraith and Friedman, Jackie Robinson, etc.), all of whom to my mind are more interesting than Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, and the like, in their accomplishments and also their relevance to art and thought in the Cold War. The Apollo program, the Gross National Product, the NFL: these were part of the American identity that developed after the war.

Again, I’m not saying Menand did anything wrong by including what he did in his book; I assume he’s genuinely more interested in Jasper Johns than in Philip K. Dick. Let me just say that I think his book, even while being filled with great stuff, is missing the bigger picture.

Maybe it’s just a packaging thing; if instead of being presented as a single coherent work, the book had been structured as a set of essays, I think I’d’ve had no problem. When a critic releases a collection of essays and reviews, we don’t expect anything comprehensive, we just to read some good stuff. The only truly comprehensive book of essays and reviews I can think of is the collected essays of V. S. Pritchett. Anthony West had a good range too, and I remain annoyed that there is no book of his collected essays, but I’m sure there are some gaps. I guess I would’ve been happier had Menand gone the collection-of-reviews route, but that kind of book may be close to unpublishable today. I’m happy with what he did produce, and I wonder if he has any response to the question at the top of this post, other than that he wrote about a bunch of people who happened to interest him.

How Music Works by David Byrne, and Sweet Anticipation by David Huron

1. Byrne

The other day I shared a passage from the book, How Music Works, by David Byrne, which motivated a long discussion about why we prefer familiarity in music and surprise in stories. I enjoyed Byrne’s book a lot—actually, it was much better than I’d anticipated, partly because I’d read other books on how music works and I’d been disappointed, partly because Byrne is a celebrity and his book had all these glowing endorsements, which gets me suspicious. It’s published by McSweeney’s, for chrissake, and even though McSweeney’s is wonderful—as far as I’m concerned, their entire existence through the end of time is justified by publishing Jim Stallard’s article, “No justice, no foul”—but, still, they’re so insufferably smug . . . so I didn’t want to like this book by Byrne, but I did.

Here’s one bit:

I [Byrne] was beginning to see that theatricality wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It was part of life in much of the world, and not necessarily phony either. I guess I was primed to receive this new way of looking at performance, but I quickly absorbed that it was all right to make a show that didn’t pretend to be “natural.” . . . I decided that maybe it was OK to wear costumes and put on a show. It didn’t imply insincerity at all; in fact, this kind of practice performance was all around, if one only looked at it.

And another:

That sounds really cool! I want to figure out how to adapt this to create a student-participation activity for a statistics class.

And:

Academic talks are like that!

And here are some thought-provoking lines:

Making music is like constructing a machine whose function is to dredge up emotions in performer and listener alike. Some people . . . would prefer to see music as an expression of emotion rather than a generator of it, to believe in the artist as someone with something to say. I’m beginning to think of the artist as someone who is adept at making devices that tap into our shared psychological makeup and that trigger the deeply moving parts we have in common. . . .

The online magazine Pitchfork once wrote that I would collaborate with anyone for a bag of Doritos. This wasn’t intended as a complement—though, to be honest, it’s not that far from the truth. Contrary to their insinuation, I am fairly picky about who I collaborate with, but I am also willing to work with people you might not expect me to. . . .

The unwritten rule in these remote collaborations [here, he’s talking about a project he did with Brian Eno] is, for me, “Leave the other person’s stuff alone as much as you possibly can.” You work with what you’re given . . . Accepting that half of the creative decision making has already been done has the effect of bypassing a lot of endless branching . . . I didn’t ever have to think about what direction to take musically—that train had already left the station, and my job was to see where it wanted to go . . .

[In another project] I was partly helped by a “rule” in theater that the author (or songwriter) has absolute say—his or her words can’t be changed. The text is considered sacred. So I knew that if I tried a suggestion and hated it, I could always demand, in the nicest possible way, that the song be returned to its original condition. This implicit power gave me a kind of freedom. I could be flexible and accommodating to all the suggestions, and I could try things I wasn’t sure of, that I maybe even had doubts about, knowing that they weren’t going to be set in stone. Instead of making me conservative, my hidden power encouraged me to take risks.

Byrne writes about creativity and how he tries to “turn off the internal censor”:

Sometimes sitting at a desk trying to do this doesn’t work. I never have writer’s block, but sometimes things do slow down. My conscious mind might be thinking too much—and at this point, one wants surprises and weirdness from the depths. Some techniques help in that regard. For instance, I’ll carry a small micro recorder and go jogging on the West Side, recording phrases that match the song’s meter as they occur to me. On the rare occasions when I’m driving a car, I can do the same thing . . . Basically anything that occupies part of the conscious mind and distracts it works. The idea is to allow the chthonic material freedom it needs to gurgle up. To distract the gatekeepers.

I know what he means! I can get all stuck but then I hope on the bike to go somewhere and I fill up with thoughts, so much so that I need to stop and scrawl them in my boekje before I forget them all. The hard part is to go back later and work things out more systematically. Also, I like Byrne in part because he rides a bike and has lines like, “Hoving did ride a bike, so he can’t have been all about fancy art.”

And this:

Canadian composer and music teacher R. Murray Schafer originated the concept of the soundscape. . . . Schafer’s pedagogy begins with trying to create awareness, to help students hear their sonic environment:

What was the last sound you heard before I clapped my hands?
What was the highest sound you heard in the past ten minutes? What was the loudest? How many airplanes have you heard today?
What was the most interesting sound you heard this morning?
Make a collection of disappearing or lost sounds, sounds that formed part of the sonic environment but can no longer be heard today.

I like this. It reminds me of statistics diaries. The specificity of these questions could help get the ball rolling.

Byrne writes:

[Marshall McLuhan] claims that in a visual universe one begins to think in a linear fashion, one thing following another along a timeline, rather than everything existing right now, everywhere, in the moment. . . .

Hmmmm . . . that seems like the opposite of what’s happening! It’s sound that comes in a time sequence. A visual image is all there at once.

Byrne asks:

Why is it that Satie’s compositions, Brian Eno’s ambient music, or the minimal spaced-out work of Morton Feldman all seem fairly cool, while Muzak is deemed abhorrent? Is it simply because Muzak alters songs that are already familiar to everyone? I think it’s something else. The problem is that this music is intended to dull your awareness, like being force-fed tranquilizers.

Actually, I think Muzak’s use of very familiar songs is of the things that makes it so annoying; see discussion in my post from a couple years ago, “The revelation came while hearing a background music version of Iron Butterfly’s ‘In A Gadda Da Vida’ at a Mr. Steak restaurant in Colorado.”

2. Huron

My post motivated by Byrne got lots of interesting comments, including this one from RulerFrank:

I have exactly the book for you! It’s called “Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation” by David Huron. To quote the Goodreads blurb:

Huron proposes that emotions evoked by expectation involve five functionally distinct response systems: reaction responses (which engage defensive reflexes); tension responses (where uncertainty leads to stress); prediction responses (which reward accurate prediction); imagination responses (which facilitate deferred gratification); and appraisal responses (which occur after conscious thought is engaged). For real-world events, these five response systems typically produce a complex mixture of feelings.

Or in other words, the key to resolving your paradox is that there are different types of “expectation”.

I have read the book in its entirety and couldn’t recommend it enough. One of the best books that I’ve ever read.

I was motivated by this recommendation to get a copy of Huron’s book from the same source that supplied Byrne’s: that’s right, the local public library.

Sweet Anticipation is excellent, lots of amazing (to me) and sensible ideas. Like many nonfiction books I’ve read nowadays, though, about 1/3 of the way through it starts to get boring and repetitive. Ironic, huh? given the subject of the book. In contrast, David Byrne’s book, though much more shallow, is more readable and interesting all the way through. I wish Huron had an editor. Every time I encountered the phrase, “Notice that,” I wanted to scream. Overall, though, it’s a wonderful book, and I really admire how he kept all that technical musical detail while still making it followable by someone like me who can’t read music and doesn’t know the chords etc.

“Data Knitualization: An Exploration of Knitting as a Visualization Medium”

Amy Cohen points us to this fun article by Noeska Smit. Here’s the description of the above-pictured fuzzy heart model:

The last sample I [Smit] knit is a simplified 3D anatomical heart (see Figure 4) in a wool-nylon blend (Garnstudio DROPS Big Fabel), based on a free pattern by Kristin Ledgett. She has created a knitting pattern that is knit in a combination of in the round and flat knitting techniques. This allows the entire heart to be knit in one piece, with only minimal sewing where the vessels split, visible in Figure 4b. The heart is filled with soft stuffing material while it is knit.

This sample is a proof of concept for how hand knitting can be used to represent complex 3D structures. While this sample is not anatomically correct, it demonstrates how the softness and flexibility of the stuffed knit allow for complex 3D shapes to be created using only basic knitting techniques. As the vessels are not sewn down, this particular model can be ‘unknotted’ and put back together freely. This sample only requires basic knitting knowledge on how to cast on, knit, purl, increase and decrease stitches, and bind off. The combination of the soft stuffing with the fuzzy knitted material gives an almost cartoon-like impression, in stark contrast to how disembodied human hearts typically appear in the real world. In a way, this makes a medical concept where a realistic representation can elicit a strong negative response more approachable. Perhaps it is similar to how surgical images can be made more palatable by using color manipulation and stylization.

What can I say? I love this sort of thing.

P.S. More here: “‘Knitting Is Coding’ and Yarn Is Programmable in This Physics Lab”

“Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age”

A commenter points to a analysis by Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels, “Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age.” Anderson and Daniels write:

We Googled our way to 8,000 screenplays and matched each character’s lines to an actor. From there, we compiled the number of words spoken by male and female characters across roughly 2,000 films, arguably the largest undertaking of script analysis, ever.

They did this in 2016 so I’m guessing that there have been larger script analyses since then.

Inequality in cinematic representation can happen without any individual people doing anything wrong. For example, the above graphs show results from Disney movies. Lots of Disney movies are based on existing popular stories in which men play more active roles than women. I’m glad that Glengarry Glen Ross got made, even though it’s a 100% sausage fest. And some popular movie genres include crime movies and westerns. Most criminals are men, most cowboys were men. This in turn doesn’t mean there’s zero bias—for example, someone has to decide to make one more western rather than a movie about women friends.

Change is possible. For example, the TV show The Americans was a spy drama, but it had lots of strong female characters. I’m guessing this was somewhat ahistorical—I doubt there were so many female spies in the 1980s, and those who were around probably weren’t knocking guys down with karate kicks—but, hey, the whole thing’s a fantasy. It’s not like it would be realistic for male characters to be getting into fights and gun battles each week. Similarly, there’s no reason Superman, Batman, etc. couldn’t be female—it’s not like they’re real people anyway.

Here are the summaries from all the top 2500 box office hits:

(I was curious what was at 50/50 so I scrolled there and found The Wizard of Oz.)

And this won’t be a surprise:

Not news, but interesting to see this sort of thing in numbers.