06.19.08

Links, lanks, lunks

Posted in art, biology, design, evolution, fun, internet, science at 7:29 pm by nogre

Interaction Design, Etc.

Science, Etc.

Aesthetics, Etc.

I’ll be gone for a week visiting my bro in the Southwest… at least y’all will have something to do in my absence.

 

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06.11.08

Video Game Design 3: Golf Practice

Posted in Wii, design, fun, technology at 10:43 pm by nogre

The Wii has a lot of potential as a golf simulator/ practice program. With the introduction of the Wii balance board the opportunity for using weight distribution has become a real factor, and, though I know nearly nothing about golf, balance and weight distribution during a club swing has to be critical.

Now using the balance board to monitor weight distribution is somewhat obvious. However, very accurate motion sensing from the controller would also be required to really pinpoint the motion of the swing. By some pretty basic reasoning about cost and manufacturing I heard once, it is fair to say that Nintendo is providing middle of the road accelerometers- they are good, but there is still a lot of noise (inaccurate random data) to be dealt with. Lots of noise means that a lot of processing of the data from the motion sensors is required to get a clear picture of what is going on, and if lots of processing occurs, then the nuances of the motion are also getting smoothed over. My solution is to connect the nunchuck controller to the main controller in a rigid way.

Connected Controllers
A mockup of the connected remote and nunchuck in the
shape of a traditional controller.

The nunchuck controller is incredibly light and would add almost no bulk to the main controller, while doubling the number of accelerometers. With double the accelerometers, a clearer picture of the motion would be provided.

Secondly, to get a more complete picture of the orientation of the Wii controllers, the sensor bar which is normally placed near the television should be placed on the floor where the golf ball ought to be. With the sensor bar on the floor where the golf ball should be the controllers would be able to pick up the location of the sensor bar and provide non-inertial data about its velocity. As the controllers swing past the sensor bar, the location of the infrared lights would act as fixed points with which to measure velocity.

A picture of someone on a Wii balance board with
the sensor bar on the floor.

All on-screen menu navigation can be done in the traditional way by using the directional keys; pointer-enabled functions are nice but unnecessary for this sort of game. Moving the sensor bar around the room would be a clever way to also have a swing trainer for baseball.

 

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05.29.08

Monty Hall Update

Posted in Idependence Friendly logic, logic, philosophy, science at 11:41 am by nogre

I wrote out an example playing of the Monty Hall Problem in Independence Friendly Logic as a game of incomplete information and appended it to my post here.

I also left an extended comment on Dependence Logic vs. Independence Friendly Logic about some of the tribulations encountered as a non-academic trying to get my grubby little hands on obscure logic papers.

 

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05.24.08

Demise, the Fallen and Annihilation

Posted in Heidegger, metaphysics, ontology, philosophy at 10:05 am by nogre

In Being and Time Heidegger makes a distinction between death and demise: death is the ending of Da-sein, or Being, and demise is physical perishing. I think this is a good distinction and since I break up ontology into 3 sorts of things - commitments, objects & descriptions - I will have three ways to die:

  1. Fallen: the perishing of all commitments of a living person.
  2. Demise: the perishing of physical attributes of a living person (traditional death).
  3. Annihilation: the perishing of all descriptions that a person has made.

Now Heidegger’s use of death was meant to be a fundamental orientation that Da-sein ‘has’ towards its own end (Those are his quotes around has, not mine- see p. 247 of B&T, p. 229 of Stambaugh) and demise was as above. Hence death and demise are somewhat separate because demise is the physical end and death is the way we are oriented to the end of being.

My view is that demise is one kind, a subset, of overall metaphysical death. I am less concerned here with the existential questions about death (though these are important) and more concerned with the ontological relationship between demise and other sorts of perishing. What follows is the insight separating overall metaphysical death from the three particular ways of perishing.

I’m using fallen in a (only somewhat) technical sense to mean the loss of all commitments. If you lose all capability to have commitments, then you have fallen, almost as in ‘fallen off the map.’ “Gone” is similar- you may not be physically dead, but if you are gone (e.g. to some foreign place never to return) you are dead to those with whom you had made commitments. Comatose, but without physical symptoms, is another example. You’re body may still live and for all anyone knows your mind may be as sharp as ever, but you are incapable of keeping commitments and are therefore ‘dead to the world’.

Demise is death as is traditionally defined: when you have met your demise your body is destroyed. Of course there may be some afterlife in which you may keep your commitments (think Ghost, the movie) or your descriptions of the world may continue (Plato will live forever through his writings - I wonder if someone, somewhere is discussing Plato at every instant of every day), but you’re physically dead as a doorknob after your demise.

Annihilation is the destruction of a person’s descriptions of the world. Describing things is perhaps the most basic of human accomplishments - we reward babies (and philosophers) handsomely for accurate descriptions - and if this is taken away from a person, then that person will not have even achieved the simplest of human accomplishments. Annihilating someone is making the world forget that he or she is a person: it is to become nameless. Perhaps the way to think of it is as in Kafka’s Metamorphosis: Gregor is changed into a vermin/bug that has a working body and (for a while) can fulfill some commitments, but eventually is unable to communicate how his/its world has changed. At this point any future that Gregor had has been annihilated: the thing he became could continue living, but its life would bear no resemblance to what was formerly Gregor. If all evidence of Gregor’s history was erased, even if the thing he turned into still lived, then Gregor would be completely annihilated.

So to completely metaphysically die, you need to be dead (traditional), gone and forgotten.

 

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05.20.08

What is philosophy?

Posted in ontology, philosophy at 11:08 am by nogre

The question of what philosophy is always made me squirm. People would ask me what I do, I’d tell them, and then they would ask me what it exactly was that I do. But now I have a answer.

A while back I heard a quote attributed to Russell that went roughly:

Philosophy starts out with propositions that everyone would accept as true, and then ends up with propositions that no one would accept as true.

I thought this made philosophers sound like jerks, but there was something to it: we do end up in weird places for some reason. Here’s why:

Writing philosophy is like writing an instruction manual. You have some act or object or situation that you want to explain because it is hard to use or complicated or dangerous for some reason. So you set out to make a manual for the thing, starting from the most obvious and basic features. Now if you don’t know the thing perfectly, in and out, you end up having bad instructions, regardless of where you started. Then when you try to do something, or understand your object, when you follow the instructions you become hopelessly lost. Both your instructions and whatever the instructions were for are completely inscrutable. But if the instructions are good, then you can do things that were impossible for you to do before hand (program you VCR (or DVR), explain why mathematics is incomplete, that sort of thing). Philosophy is an attempt at writing instruction manuals for confusing things.

This answers the ontological questions of

  1. Whether or not philosophy is true: it is true if it accurately describes the phenomenon it is attempting to explain. However, since many times we are in the position of not knowing the phenomenon in question, philosophy is often of indeterminate truth.
  2. Why philosophy is inherently obscure: who ever reads the manual? (I do by the way)
  3. How best to characterize the strange layouts of philosophical treatises, a la manuals: the beginning is packed with warnings about what is wrong and and dangerous, then basic, most common functions are listed and the interesting and difficult features are buried in jargon somewhere towards the end.
  4. What are thought experiments: Thought experiments are to philosophy as visual aids/examples are to instruction manuals. They are not needed, but when you can connect the instructions to the actual objects you’re working with, everything becomes easier.

I’m sure this is somewhat silly but when someone presses me on what philosophy is, I’m telling them it’s pretty much writing instruction manuals for confusing stuff.

 

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05.13.08

linkeridoodah, linkeriday

Posted in fun, internet at 11:17 am by nogre

I found my animal of the month, so it’s time to post some links!

Animal of the Month: Tamandua (30s)

The Killing Machine:

  • “Partly inspired by Franz Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’ and partly by the American system of capital punishment as well as the current political situation, the piece is an ironic approach to killing and torture machines. A moving megaphone speaker encircles an electric dental chair. The chair is covered in pink fun fur…” [via]

Kaibo Zonshinzu anatomy scrolls (1819):

  • I once worked for a pathology department, and my job required that I go to the morgue on a regular basis (multiple times a day). The human body is completely awesome. These pics are a little gruesome, but then again, so are we.

Speaking of being completely awesome:

  • Five-year-old inventor comes up with a better broom. (At 5 I invented the bag-o-bags: a bag that contained other bags, so that you would have lots of bags. It was a homework assignment in kindergarten. I recall being pissed because I didn’t think it was fair that at 5 we should be asked to know enough to solve anything. My parents still tease me about it till this day.)
  • Discovery Channel’s new ad: I Love the World (1:01) [via]

Some fun from CScout Japan:

[as an aside, see this, which came out of building this post.]

Last but not least:

 

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04.26.08

Dependence Logic vs. Independence Friendly Logic

Posted in Idependence Friendly logic, Relativity, logic, philosophy at 2:59 pm by nogre

I picked up Dependence Logic: A New Approach to Independence Friendly Logic by Jouko Väänänen. I figure I’ll write up a review when I am finished with the book, but there is one chief difference between Dependence Logic and Independence Friendly Logic that needs to be mentioned.

On pages 44-47 when describing the difference between Dependence Logic and Independence Friendly Logic Väänänen says,

The backslashed quantifier,

∃xn\{xi0,…,xim-1}φ,

introduced in ref. [20], with the intuitive meaning:

“there exists xn, depending only on xi0,…,xim-1, such that φ,”

…

The slashed quantifier,

∃xn/{xi0,…,xim-1}φ,

used in ref. [21] has the following intuitive meaning:

“there exists xn, independently of xi0,…,xim-1, such that φ,”

which we take to mean

“there exists xn, depending only on variables other than xi0,…,xim-1, such that φ,”

The backslashed quantifier notation is part of what Väänänen calls ‘Dependence Friendly Logic’, and is equivalent to the ‘Dependence Logic’ that the rest of the book expounds. This backslash notation makes the difference between Dependence (Friendly) Logic and Independence Friendly Logic clear by showing that the former logic takes the notion of dependence to be fundamental whereas the latter takes independence to be fundamental. Väänänen takes this to be an advantage because he says that Dependence Logic avoids making

one ha[ve] to decide whether “other variable” refers to other variables actually appearing in a formula φ, or to other variables in the domain…

However, this treatment misses an important philosophical differences between Independence Friendly Logic and Dependence Logic. Dependence Logic is fundamentally based upon Wilfrid Hodges work, ‘Compositional Semantics for a language of imperfect information’ in Logic Journal of the IGPL (5:4 1997) 539-563, in which Hodges lays out a compositional semantics for languages such as Independence Friendly Logic using sets of assignments instead of individual assignments to determine satisfaction (T or F). Väänänen infers that Independence Friendly logic is just a bit unruly when it comes to specifying variables because he is working within a system that assumes sets of assignments are a useful and unproblematic way to determine satisfaction.

However the unseen problem of using sets of assignments is that something is added by assuming the domain is a set. For example, let’s take try to define a location and take the set of all the points in the universe. However, we immediately run into relativity: All locations are defined relative to each other and the people trying to figure out where things are, i.e. There is no predetermined set of all the points in the universe. The issue is that the domain of potential assignments, the objects in the universe, may be dependent upon the person or people using them (the players of the semantic game in this case). If the domain is dependent upon the players, the set cannot be constructed until after the players have begun the game. Therefore, if we postulate that the domain is a set at the outset then the players know something about the game that they are playing, namely that it does not depend upon them because it was predetermined.

Following this line of thought it seems possible to constructed a game in which the domain {Abelard, Eloise} is such that Abelard and Eloise are the actual people playing the game and the formula is ‘Someone x lost the game by instantiating this formula’ such that whoever instantiated that formula would win the game according to the rules. But then the formula would not be satisfied, so that player would have lost, but then it would be satisfied, a paradox. It is easy enough to declare that the domain must be independent of the players, but again this signals something about the game being played to the players before the formula to be is revealed.

Lastly there is something to be said about using logic to represent natural language here too: if you consider the set of all possible responses to some question, you are not ever considering all possible responses, but all the possible responses you can think of at that time. Therefore if we are using game semantics and imperfect information to represent natural language, then it is a mistake to predetermine the domain of all possible responses separate from the people involved. Again, the domain being linked to the people involved is at odds with the domain being a predetermined set.

Long story short, there is a very good reason for not always using sets of assignments to determine satisfaction. Depending on the situation, a set may offer non-trivial information about a game or misconstrue the game being played. Independence Friendly logic makes no assumptions about the type of game being played and is therefore of greater scope than logics that are based upon Hodges work. Of course one is free to use sets of assignments to determine satisfaction and derive set-theoretic results, but the compositionality gained comes at the price of limiting the types of games that can be played.

 

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04.12.08

Links, to appease the Gods of Blogs

Posted in fun, internet at 6:57 pm by nogre

I offer this links post as a sacrifice to the… oh I have no idea why I do this.

  • Animal of the Month - Elephant (8:28):

 

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04.09.08

Video Game Design 2: Marionette Theater

Posted in Wii, design, fun, games, products at 5:45 pm by nogre

Apropos my first post on video game design, I have thought up a new “game” for the Wii. It is a marionette theater simulator: you would get to create virtual marionettes, with customizable bodies and outfits (Mii integration if possible, lots of different clothing options), and levels would include performing different scenes from plays or entire plays. The accelerometers of the Wii controllers would function as the strings on the virtual marionettes. As you tilt the controllers different ’strings’ would get pulled or slackened moving the different parts of the marionette’s body.

Interactive audio effects would be crucial: recorded voice acting for characters, dynamic background music and sound effects (e.g. when a marionette hits a wall, a thud could be made), with karaoke-style text of the characters’ lines scrolling across the screen, as an option (voice recognition, if possible). A scene/play creation mode would allow players access to creating their own sets, characters, and lines, giving the game infinite replay value (online sharing of new sets, characters, etc., and entire plays, if possible). Buttons could trigger effects on stage, change the motion control to different characters, have the marionettes pick objects up, change camera angle, etc.

If saving a marionette performance and text-to-voice is included (with user-defined manipulations - angry, soft, loud, etc.) a playwright could produce his or her play on the Wii and immediately distribute its virtual staging. This could be done by recording the output of the Wii, but if the Wii could upload and download complete performances, it would become an artistic platform.

A good puppet show is something amazing. Check out these scenes from Being John Malkovich done by Phil Huber:

 

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04.07.08

David Schrader on WNYC: The Brian Lehrer Show

Posted in internet, philosophy at 2:42 pm by nogre

or click here:
The Brian Lehrer Show: Heavy Thinking (April 07, 2008)

 

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