This one's from Google Labs, as it turns out, though the radio piece I heard had it coming from Harvard. According to the site itself, it's the product of "a team spanning the Cultural Observatory, Harvard, Encyclopaedia Britannica, the American Heritage Dictionary, and Google*."
So what is it? It's culturomics. What's that, you may ask?
There's a bit of hype, mostly in the press, about opening up a "new field", but the web site is simply a tool to mine the Google Books corpus for trends in word frequency.
OK, maybe that doesn't sound overly exciting, but try it. I'll be here when you get back. [Looks like there's not much at that link anymore. I think this eventually was supplanted by or morphed into ngrams, which is still alive and well -- D.H. Dec 2015]
Time permitting, I'll probably have a bit more to say about the word-mining itself on the other blog.
* As usual, I don't know any more about the Google end of it than you do [and I still don't -- D.H. Dec 2015] and if I did I would recuse myself. It does fit pretty squarely with Google's mission "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful," though it's not clear how useful the site might be to the non-specialist.
Showing posts with label timesinks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label timesinks. Show all posts
Friday, December 17, 2010
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Falling into the web
I don't even remember exactly how it happened, except that I happened to follow a link from Wikipedia, but I managed to end up entangled in TV Tropes. Apparently I'm not alone.
If you haven't visited it already, be warned: This is one of the more potent timesinks out there. Thinly masquerading as a collection of motifs and plot devices from television, it's really a compendium of archetypes from all sorts of fiction, clearly and wittily explicated and extensively cross-linked. The piece on William Shatner alone is worth the price of admission, as is the Evil Overlord List. Think Joseph Campbell meets Wikipedia meets Remote Control.
Somewhere around the Space Whale Aesop, the obvious occurred to me: It's the extensive cross-linking, that is, the webbiness of the site, that makes it so addictive (that, and there dependably being something worth reading at the other end of the link). A little bit later (Fridge Logic?) it occurred to me that really webby sites like TV tropes are relatively rare. Yes, most blogs include links, but mostly external links. Even Wikipedia isn't as densely linked as TV Tropes (or at least it doesn't feel like it).
In fact, I find a large part of my web experience consists either of directly visiting a favorite site, or doing a search and then following a small number of links to what I'm looking for. Most of the time, I'm using the web to find some particular piece of information, not to browse at random. Nothing wrong with browsing at random -- it's just not my main mode.
As essential as links are to the web, they may not be its most essential feature. If links went away tomorrow and individual sites were flattened into giant, unwieldy documents, it would still be possible to find useful information via your favorite search engine. If search engines went away instead, no one would be able to find much of anything. Furthermore, if search engines had never existed, sites would be much less richly linked than they are now, because authors would have been less able to find good links. Searchability supports links at least as much as the other way round.
In short, search engines may well be more important than links, except when it comes to a particular digressive mode of chasing links to see where they go [But then, I would say that after a few months at Google, wouldn't I? -- D.H. Dec 2015].
If you haven't visited it already, be warned: This is one of the more potent timesinks out there. Thinly masquerading as a collection of motifs and plot devices from television, it's really a compendium of archetypes from all sorts of fiction, clearly and wittily explicated and extensively cross-linked. The piece on William Shatner alone is worth the price of admission, as is the Evil Overlord List. Think Joseph Campbell meets Wikipedia meets Remote Control.
Somewhere around the Space Whale Aesop, the obvious occurred to me: It's the extensive cross-linking, that is, the webbiness of the site, that makes it so addictive (that, and there dependably being something worth reading at the other end of the link). A little bit later (Fridge Logic?) it occurred to me that really webby sites like TV tropes are relatively rare. Yes, most blogs include links, but mostly external links. Even Wikipedia isn't as densely linked as TV Tropes (or at least it doesn't feel like it).
In fact, I find a large part of my web experience consists either of directly visiting a favorite site, or doing a search and then following a small number of links to what I'm looking for. Most of the time, I'm using the web to find some particular piece of information, not to browse at random. Nothing wrong with browsing at random -- it's just not my main mode.
As essential as links are to the web, they may not be its most essential feature. If links went away tomorrow and individual sites were flattened into giant, unwieldy documents, it would still be possible to find useful information via your favorite search engine. If search engines went away instead, no one would be able to find much of anything. Furthermore, if search engines had never existed, sites would be much less richly linked than they are now, because authors would have been less able to find good links. Searchability supports links at least as much as the other way round.
In short, search engines may well be more important than links, except when it comes to a particular digressive mode of chasing links to see where they go [But then, I would say that after a few months at Google, wouldn't I? -- D.H. Dec 2015].
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Monday, October 29, 2007
Movie review, game review
While I'm on the VR theme ...
The other day I went to see Nightmare Before Christmas 3D. With its stop-motion animation, the original Tim Burton production of Nightmare might seem the perfect choice for a 3D adaptation. In fact, the 3D "remastering" added surprisingly little. Some in my party found it downright disappointing, having hoped for more dramatic 3D effects (which, IMHO, would have spoiled it). The high point for me wasn't the 3D, or even getting another look at director Henry Selick's visual inventiveness, but realizing what a fine score Danny Elfman had produced.
Don't get me wrong. Nightmare is a classic whichever way you look at it. But when the most notable feature of a 3D movie is the score, something is at least a little out of whack.
My experience with other 3D shows is similar (except for the Tim Burton/Elfman angle). Polarizing glasses are a great improvement over the classic red-green (both have been around for a while), but overall 3D just doesn't add that much.
There's a pretty likely explanation for this: We don't actually see in 3D. We do make use of the extra information from having a slightly offset pair of images to work with, but in a pinch we can make do with one. The image we construct either way isn't a full 3D rendering, but more of a "2.5D" schematic in which we are mainly concerned with things like what's in front of what, which way and how fast things are moving, and roughly how big and how far away things are.
The eye, that is, the massively complex machinery behind the eyes, can be fooled in any number of ways because of the assumptions it makes to construct that internal image. For example, it can be convinced that a flat canvas with paint on it is a three-dimensional space, or that a series of images quickly projected on a screen is a collection of objects moving in space.
That first illusion -- that a painting is the scene it represents -- is the big step. The rest is just refinement. That's why they called them "moving pictures". In all cases, the realism comes not from the fidelity of the image we present, but what the brain fills in. Which leads me to the game review.
With the very big caveat that my serious compugaming days are many years behind me, my nod for most immersive VR experience goes to .... NetHack. Yep, that one you might have seen somewhere with the ASCII-art rectangles connected with lines of
Later versions got a bit baroque for my taste. Your mileage may vary, but somewhere along the line was a nearly perfectly-balanced concoction. What made the experience rich was the way the consequences were all worked out. If you tried something, you got a result that made sense, but not always the one you expected or wanted.
For example, there was the wand of polymorph. In the predecessor game Rogue, you could use one in desperation to try to zap the monster attacking you into something less deadly (a decent try against a xorn or umber hulk, not so good against a bat). In NetHack, you could still do that, but you could also zap a pile of rocks and sometimes get gems. You could zap anything and unless there was a good reason, it would change. Sometimes for the better, often not.
Much of the fun came from identifying all the magic items you came across. Every once in a while you might find a scroll of identify, but mostly you just had to try stuff and hope for the best. What does this wand do? I'll just zap it at that wall ...
That's not to mention the various ways of looting shops, or surviving the nearly-unsurvivable, or discovering what seemingly useless items did (why would I want to make the monster I'm fighting invisible?) or trying things like reading a scroll while confused.
It appears NetHack is still being actively developed. You hear maniacal laughter in the distance ...
The other day I went to see Nightmare Before Christmas 3D. With its stop-motion animation, the original Tim Burton production of Nightmare might seem the perfect choice for a 3D adaptation. In fact, the 3D "remastering" added surprisingly little. Some in my party found it downright disappointing, having hoped for more dramatic 3D effects (which, IMHO, would have spoiled it). The high point for me wasn't the 3D, or even getting another look at director Henry Selick's visual inventiveness, but realizing what a fine score Danny Elfman had produced.
Don't get me wrong. Nightmare is a classic whichever way you look at it. But when the most notable feature of a 3D movie is the score, something is at least a little out of whack.
My experience with other 3D shows is similar (except for the Tim Burton/Elfman angle). Polarizing glasses are a great improvement over the classic red-green (both have been around for a while), but overall 3D just doesn't add that much.
There's a pretty likely explanation for this: We don't actually see in 3D. We do make use of the extra information from having a slightly offset pair of images to work with, but in a pinch we can make do with one. The image we construct either way isn't a full 3D rendering, but more of a "2.5D" schematic in which we are mainly concerned with things like what's in front of what, which way and how fast things are moving, and roughly how big and how far away things are.
The eye, that is, the massively complex machinery behind the eyes, can be fooled in any number of ways because of the assumptions it makes to construct that internal image. For example, it can be convinced that a flat canvas with paint on it is a three-dimensional space, or that a series of images quickly projected on a screen is a collection of objects moving in space.
That first illusion -- that a painting is the scene it represents -- is the big step. The rest is just refinement. That's why they called them "moving pictures". In all cases, the realism comes not from the fidelity of the image we present, but what the brain fills in. Which leads me to the game review.
With the very big caveat that my serious compugaming days are many years behind me, my nod for most immersive VR experience goes to .... NetHack. Yep, that one you might have seen somewhere with the ASCII-art rectangles connected with lines of
#'s and an @ and a (usually) faithful d battling their way along.Later versions got a bit baroque for my taste. Your mileage may vary, but somewhere along the line was a nearly perfectly-balanced concoction. What made the experience rich was the way the consequences were all worked out. If you tried something, you got a result that made sense, but not always the one you expected or wanted.
For example, there was the wand of polymorph. In the predecessor game Rogue, you could use one in desperation to try to zap the monster attacking you into something less deadly (a decent try against a xorn or umber hulk, not so good against a bat). In NetHack, you could still do that, but you could also zap a pile of rocks and sometimes get gems. You could zap anything and unless there was a good reason, it would change. Sometimes for the better, often not.
Much of the fun came from identifying all the magic items you came across. Every once in a while you might find a scroll of identify, but mostly you just had to try stuff and hope for the best. What does this wand do? I'll just zap it at that wall ...
The lightning bolt bounces ... the lightning bolt hits you ... you die ... OK, next time I'll try zapping it at an angle ... Now what does this potion do?That's not to mention the various ways of looting shops, or surviving the nearly-unsurvivable, or discovering what seemingly useless items did (why would I want to make the monster I'm fighting invisible?) or trying things like reading a scroll while confused.
It appears NetHack is still being actively developed. You hear maniacal laughter in the distance ...
Friday, September 21, 2007
They're right. This is absolutely fascinating.
Blogger just put up Blogger Play [Now, alas, defunct], a feed of all the photographs people are uploading to their blogs.
Flickr has had a similar feature for a while now, but not as a slide show. Watching the pictures flow by has a completely different feel. I won't even try to summarize or describe it here. Just chase the link (and prepare to lose a chunk of time).
Flickr has had a similar feature for a while now, but not as a slide show. Watching the pictures flow by has a completely different feel. I won't even try to summarize or describe it here. Just chase the link (and prepare to lose a chunk of time).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
