TVoT (Television of Things)

Here is a feature of television-related items, and unlike the Internet of Things (IoT), these things has little hype behind them.

A few weeks ago (Novermber 22nd) was the 30th Anniversary of the Max Headroom intrusion on two Chicago television stations. The first intrusion was on WGN (Channel 9). A second intrusion occurred later that evening on WTTW (Channel 11). The original pirate broadcaster was never identified, and subsequent intrusions did not occur.

Shortwave radio carries a television signal! The high-pitched bleeps and buzzes in the background of a short-wave broadcast are actually data streams. Some of these sub-channels carry a series of images rendered at a low frame-rate, which produces a television broadcast of sequentially-scanned still images. This protocol is called slow-scan television (or SSTV) [1], and has its roots in the ham radio community. Modern uses include sending images to earth from the International Space Station [2]. 

If you don't know about mechanical television technology, it's your time to learn. Precursor to the much better-known electronic television, a number of early technologies enabled the reproduction of images by producing horizontal lines within a given image at a certain rate. The higher the scan rate, the faster individual images could be rendered, and the faster new images could replace the complete ones already rendered. Obtaining a higher scan rate meant that the images were more recognizable as a "moving" sequence. 

By and large, mechanical generation was not commercially successful. Scan rates that would enable high-resolution images were never achieved. The Nipkow disc (invented in 1884) enabled animations based on a sequence of images on a rotating disc visualized using a light source and a Selenium element. The Baird televisor (developed during the 1920s) improved upon the Nipkow disc by transmitting the sequential images using a carrier signal. Like SSTV, there are limited uses for these technologies in the 21rst century, which include Steampunk-themed maker projects, digital light processing, and laser lighting displays (the latter two applications have relied upon significant technical advancements).


Lastly, there was an excellent recent episode of the Function podcast (hosted by Anil Dash) on the history of animated gifs. While it is now a 30-year old technology, animated gif are still an efficient way to present sequential movement and simple animation on the web. While animated gifs have been discussed on this blog in the past, the podcast discussion did mention that the first gif was 1987. So here is an image of the first gif (a flying plane) created by Steve Wilhite [3].

NOTES:
[1] A collection of readings can be found at the National Association for Amateur Radio website.

[2] Trapp C. (2017). Space Technology and Audio Tape to Store Art. Hackaday, December 14. SSTV signals commonly relay images to earth from the space station.

[3] Buck, S. (2012). History of GIFs. Mashable blog, October 19.

What is MS Fool for $1000, Alex?

Want more Jeopardy! answers in question form? Check out the J! archive.

There is a recurring insider reference among Very Serious Computer Users regarding using Microsoft products to perform sophisticated computational tasks [1]. While most people tend to think of these programs as not computationally sophisticated, programs such as Excel [2], PowerPoint [3], and even MS Paint can do some pretty powerful computing. One such example are 3-D Models enabled by object/shape manipulation in PowerPoint and Paint.

Around every April 1, Carnegie Mellon University students participate in an annual tongue-in-cheek conference (sponsored by the satirical Association for Computational Heresy) called SIGBOVIK (Special Interest Group on Harry Questionable Bovik). Not sure what where Harry Q. Bovik got his credentials, but if you enjoy the Ig Nobel Awards, this should be right up your alley.

SIGBOVIK often features highly interesting quasi-research [4] projects based on the aforementioned Microsoft program suite. But there are other groups creating programs and computational artifacts because they can. Here are a few examples of this collected from around the web:

1) Using MS Paint to create high-quality works of art, courtesy of Hal Lasko and "The Pixel Painter".

2) Tom Wildenhain's SIGBOVIK 2017 lecture on Turing-complete Power Point.

The (non-) Turing Completeness of PowerPoint. One of many computational artifacts that are Turing incomplete. COURTESY: Tom Wildenhain YouTube channel and HackerNoon.

3) Try out this version of Doom programmed in Excel, courtesy of Gamasutra. The game program runs on a series of equations that requires VBA to run. There are several files you need to download, and the blogpost goes through the full set of challenges.

Rasterized Graphics with Underlying Linear Equations [5]. Examples from the Excel Art Series. ARTIST: Oleksiy Say

4) The final example returns us to SIGBOVIK (2016), where David Fouhey and Daniel Maturana bring us ExcelNet. This is an architecture for Deep Learning in Excel, and has gone through the paces of the Kaggle MNIST competition. Another example features Blake West and his implementation of a deep learning architecture in Google Sheets.

NOTES:
[1] This is similar to advertising membership in the cult of LaTeX, touched upon in this discussion of LaTeX fetishes.

[2] the first spreadsheet (Autoplan) was developed in the form of a scripting language, which is a more general version of more formal programming languages (e.g. Java versus Javascript).

[3] presentation software can be pretty diverse. But is any of it Turing Complete (TC)? If you work out your design process using Wang Dominoes, then perhaps TC-ness can be realized.

Example of a Wang tile.

[4] definition of quasi-research: research projects that do not produce useful results directly, but often as a side-effects of the research process itself.

[5] by combining the world of image rasterization with interlinked linear equations, there are some exciting (but conceptually and technlogically undeveloped) opportunities in this space.

Fault-tolerant Christmas Trees (not the live kind)

It's an interconnected Christmas scene, but that's not a Christmas Tree! (?) COURTESY: Andrew P. Wheeler.

This year's holiday season post brings a bit of graph-theoretic cheer. That's right, there is a type of network called a Christmas tree [1,2]! It is a class of fault-tolerant Hamiltonian graph [2,3]. So far, Christmas trees have been applied to computer and communications networks, but may be found to have a wider range of applications, particularly as we move into the New Year.

An example of a Christmas Tree directed graph as shown in [2]. The top two graphs are slim trees of order 3 (left) and 4 (right). A Christmas tree (bottom) includes selected long-range connections (longer than the immediate connection to mother, daughter, or sister nodes).

This tree could have used a bit more fault-tolerance!

NOTES:
[1] Hsu, L-H and Lin, C-K (2008). Graph Theory and Interconnection Networks. CRC Press, New York.

[2] Hung, C-N, Hsu, L-H, and Sung, T-Y (1999). Christmas tree: A versatile 1-fault-tolerant design for token rings. Information Processing Letters, 72(1–2), 55-63.

[3] Wang, J-J, Hung, C-N, Tan, J.J-N, Hsu, L-H, and Sung, T-Y (2000). Construction schemes for fault-tolerant Hamiltonian graphs. Networks, 35(3), 233-245.

Slate and the Solitary Ethnographic Diagram

While his style and message does not resonate with me at all, I've always thought that Donald Trump's speeches were highly-structured rhetoric. He seems to be using a form of intersubjective signaling [1] understood by a number of constituencies as communicating their values in an authentic manner. Specifically, the speeches have a sentence structure and cadence that can be differentiated from the literalism of contemporary mainstream society or more traditional forms of doublespeak ubiquitous in American politics.

This is why the most recent challenge from Slate Magazine was too good to pass up. The challenge (which has the feel of a Will Shortz challenge): diagram a passage from a Donald Trump speech given on July 21 in Sun City, South Carolina. The passage is as follows:

"Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you’re a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us"

Okay, here you go -- an ethnographic-style diagram [2] based on one man, but perhaps instructive of an entire American subculture (click to enlarge). The diagram focuses on the relationship between John and Donald Trump (context-specific braintrust) and a specific worldview of power wielded through nuclear weapons, financial ability, and persuasion.

NOTES:

[1] In this case, intersubjective signaling could be used as a mechanism to reinforce group cohesion, particularly when the group's belief structure is defined by epistemic closure.

[2] Perceived lack of agency shown as red arcs terminated with a dot.

The Data of Stories, Recent Developments

The following features are cross-posted on Tumbld Thoughts. The first featuee is a nice set of resources on the shape of stories. The first one is a lecture (video) by Kurt Vonnegut [1], circa 1985 on the qualitative shape of various narratives.

An Infographic [2] can also be used to show Vonnegut’s story shapes in more detail. As we can see, there are a limited number of story motifs (the function), each with an associated emotional state (the amplitude of the function). In Vonnegut's formulation, these functions are largely qualitative, with no clear statistical validity.

A new paper [3] on the computational study of storytelling makes a more quantitative attempt to characterize the shape and statistics of Vonnegut's functions using a large dataset (over 1700 narratives from Project Gutenberg) and data mining techniques to quantitatively uncover these patterns.

The two images above are from Figures 2 (an illustration with Harry Potter) and 4 (the full Support Vector Machine -- SVM -- Analysis) in [3], respectively.

Tangentially, we also have a dataset that describes the career of Robert DeNiro. In fact, we can characterize the self-imposed timelessness of Robert DeNiro in two images [4, 5]. Taken together, these images suggests there are actually two points in time (July 1999 and August 2002) at which Robert DeNiro stopped caring [4].

NOTES:
[1] Kurt Vonnegut on the shape of stories, YouTube.

[2] Infographic by mayaeilam, visual.ly.

[3] Reagan, A.J., Mitchell, L., Kiley, D., Danforth, C.M., and Dodds, P.S. The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes. arXiv, 1606. 07772 (2016).

[4] SOURCE: Reddit’s dataisbeautiful

[5] Heisler, Y.   Nine ancient and abandoned websites from the 1990s that are still up and running. BGR, July 24, 2015.

Stardates and Interdigitated Rabbits

Today's Google Doodle animation is in honor of leap year in the Gregorian Calendar. As you can see from the images below, legend has it that rabbit #29 jumps in between rabbits #28 and #1 without disturbing their sleep. Whether any of these cartoon rabbits are related to Inspector #5 is not clear. 

A bit more seriously (but still in the realm of fiction) is the art and science of timekeeping. The leap year, occurring once every four years, is actually a transannual correction on the 365 day year. As it actually takes 365.25 days for the Earth to make a single orbit around the Sun, the Gregorian calendar falls short. In fact, there has yet to be a calendar created that perfectly captures the length of a solar year. This brings us to a potential candidate, the well-known Stardate.

However, despite stardates being the primary mode of timekeeping in a fictional interstellar civilization, they are surprisingly fluid from one part of the galaxy to the next, and from one series to the next. But you can download a more stable version for your own computer, as the concept of a stardate is based on a standard mathematical model.

Regardless of the inconsistencies in  the Stardate system, time travel occurred a number of times in the Star Trek franchise. As this is the 50th anniversary of the first season of Star Trek: TOS, it's a good time to look at instances of time travel in the Trek franchise:

Ex Astris Scientia, Time Travel in the Abramsverse

Memory Alpha Wiki, Temporal mechanics

io9 Blog, Six Theories Of Time Travel In Star Trek

Time travel tech, Trek style. COURTESY: ArsTechnica and Paramount Pictures.

Newtonmas meets Festivus

A series of Easter eggs for your holiday season! Since December 23rd is Festivus and December 25th is Isaac Newton's birthday (Newtonmas), it makes sense to combine the two into a discussion about the physics of pole balancing.

Inverted pendulum in dynamic equilibrium? Festivus pole. Next up, the airing of grievances!

Newtonmas poster (with fractals). The physics of planetary precession is why we celebrate today! COURTESY: Felix Andrews.

The pole balancing problem, also called the inverted pendulum, is a classic model system in the application of reinforcement learning (a form of supervised learning). The problem requires the supervisor to keep a pole banaced while the base moves back and forth along a one-dimensional plane. This should keep eveyone at the Festivus party busy until the airing of grievances! 

An example of balancing an inverted pendulum (e.g. pole) on a cart. COURTESY: MIT Signals and Systems course, Lecture 26.

Many applications of the inverted pendulum involve balancing the inverted pendulum on a cart [1]. The application of reinforcement learning is often (but not necessarily) used to drive the controller, or where to move the cart in response to inertial forces generated by the free-swinging pole. Using the cart as the base of support, motion of the pole is translated along a single degree of freedom. You may recall the last Synthetic Daisies post in which we discussed holonomic motion. The dynamic equilibrium exhibited by the inverted pendulum is a linear version of those physics.

A demonstration of the first-order Lagrangian used in pendulum mechanics can be found in this video, COURTESY: PhysicsHelps YouTube channel.

The description of this sometimes chaotic [2] motion can be described using Lagrangian mechanics, which is a more refined form of Newton's equation of motion [3]. Yet the policy required to maintain balance of the pole can be rather simple, largely involving first-order, closed-loop feedback and and an iterative function. Hence, Newtonmas is really a celebration of the physical processes that govern our holiday adventures. Happy Newtonmas to all, and to all a good (well-controlled) system!

Inverted pendular mechanics, simulated and visualized in Python. COURTESY: "An Introduction to Numerical Modeling II", Adam Dempsey.

NOTES:

[1] there are many demonstrations of this (class projects, hobbyists) on YouTube. This is also a classic benchmark for control systems design.

[2] the identification of chaos in an inverted pendulum (particularly when we move to the double pendulum case) stems from the Lagrangian representation. For more, please see the following references: 

a) Kim, S-Y. and Hu, B.   Bifurcations and transitions to chaos in an inverted pendulum. Physical Review E, 58(3), 3028-3035 (1998).

b) Duchesne, B., Fischer, C.W., Gray C.G., Jeffrey, K.R.   Chaos in the motion of an inverted pendulum: an undergraduate laboratory experiment. American Journal of Physics, 59(11), 987-992 (1991).

[3] some practical pointers to the difference between Newtonian and Lagrangian physics can be found on the Physics StackExchange here and here,

George Boole: 11001000

Today's Google Doodle is a real Boole Doodle, centuries of two. Said three times fast, of course. Here are blogposts by Stephen Wolfram and Mike James at I Programmer with more on its broader significance. The why of the blogpost title can be found here.

Arriving at October 21, 2015...... and beyond

Last year I marked the date, and this year it became a "thing" (at east on the internet). So here are a few links to celebrate the famous date from the "Back to the Future" trilogy.

Billings, L.   Time Travel Simulation Resolves "Grandfather Paradox". Scientific American, September 2 (2015).

"What 'Back to the Future, Part II' Got Wrong (and right)", from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

"The Physics of Back to the Future" from Ethan Siegel at Starts with a Bang blog.

A welcome to the future, from Doc Brown himself:

COURTESY: Universal Studios.

And now..... a bit farther into the future...... The Economics of Star Trek, which is a really active area of internet scholarship:

Transcript of the recent New York ComicCon panel on Trekonomics.

Podcast on the "Economics of Star Trek", courtesy of FW: Thinking.

A few other takes on the Star Trek economy from Noahpinion, Joseph Dickerson, and Slate.

In the future, Spock is on the money. COURTESY: Rick Webb, The Economics of Star Trek: the proto-post scarcity economy.

Slipping Down the Fluid Slope of Ethical Integrity

This post will focus in on the slippery slope of research ethics, particularly the consequences of strange things happening in the course of pursuing one's best intentions. Cheeky images and puns will help to accentuate the story.

I have been leery of the start-up Uber ever since I heard stories about their varied ethical breaches [1], but now I'm even more deeply skeptical. Uber is showing exactly what can be accomplished when the "technically not illegal" ethos runs amok. Apparently, the ridesharing service entered into a research partnership with Carnegie Mellon, only to poach massive amounts of staff at-will [2]. As I understand it, the reason for this is largely superfluous. Uber wanted to possess expertise in Artificial Intelligence and automation, but did not want to go through an intermediary. Generally speaking, academic-private sector partnerships are not supposed to work like patent troll litigation. But Uber is a wildly-successful startup, so some non-zero percentage of the population are sure to overlook the ethical lapses.

Not illegal, not illegal....the Uber business model? REFERENCE: Family Guy.

Another example of the ethical slippery slope comes from the open-access journal troll and Alan Sokal wannabe John Bohannon. As a feature writer for the journal Science, he once did an updated version of the Sokal hoax where nonsensical papers were sent to a large number of open-access journals. The catch is that some of the journals published the articles for little more than a publication fee (and minimum editorial oversight) [3]. More recently, a new hoax involved an intentionally shady study that touted the health benefits of chocolate [4]. The thing is, the popular press picked up on the paper before it could be retracted. Awesomely delicious stuff (pun intended). The chocolate study has ignited a debate in the world of internet opinion, both in support and as criticism. Aside from the rhetorical point that provocative results can often result from p-value hacking [6], the most obvious problem is that you are intentionally drawing questionable conclusions and having them published. Even though an important point is made, the purposeful dissemination of false findings can lead to serious unintended consequence [7]. In any case, I suppose if the pages of Science ever see a high-profile paper retraction [8], Bohannon's team will get right on the case.

The iffy ethics of sting operations against questionable peer-review processes and journalistic hype machines. REFERENCE: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

NOTES:
[1] Newton, C.   This is Uber's playbook for sabotaging Lyft. The Verge, August 26 (2014).

[2] Lowensohn, J.   Uber gutted Carnegie Mellon's top robotics lab to build self-driving cars. The Verge May 19 (2015).

[3] Alicea, B.   Fireside Science: the Consensus-Novelty Dampening. Synthetic Daisies blog, October 22 (2013).

[4] Bastian, H.   Tricked: the ethical slipperiness of hoaxes. Absolutely Maybe blog, May 31 (2015).

[5] Gelman, A.   John Bohannon’s chocolate-and-weight-loss hoax study actually understates the problems with standard p-value scientific practice. Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog, May 29 (2015).

[6] Kassel, M.   John Bohannon's Chocolate Hoax and the Spread of Misinformation. Observer.com, June 6 (2015).

[7] Data “were destroyed due to privacy/confidentiality requirements,” says co-author of retracted gay canvassing study. Retraction Watch blog (2015).

Scientific Bytes and Pieces, May 2015

Bytes and Pieces is a collection of links and essays recently enncountered from across the internet, consisting mainly of scientific essays and applications.


Asterank: A web-based interface which visualizes all of the asteroids in our solar system and ranks them according to economic utility (e.g. asteroid mining). Thus, Asterank combines physical science with an optimistic futurism. See the associated Github repository for technical details.

Screenshot of Asterank Interface.

The Scientific Method is an Idea Ready for Retirement. Despite the provocative stance, this is indeed the view of one systems-level thinker (Melanie Swan) who argues against the power of reductionist hypothesis-testing in a high-throughput, multivariate world.


Writing at Nautil.us blog, Sam Arbesman brings us a tour of "robust yet fragile" systems. This essay explores the consequences and by-products of kludgeiness in complex systems. The "crawling horrors" that Arbesman refers to are small-scale errors that cause failures in systems that are otherwise error-tolerant.

Making Espresso In (Outer) Space. An Italian coffee company (LavAzza) is behind an effort to make Espressos in space (e.g. zero-gravity conditions on the ISS). Looks like a challenge to both make and drink enjoyably, although without gravity one does not have much of a choice. Next up on the exotic coffee wishlist: leveraging quantum foam to make yoctolattes.

The glamour and impracticality of old-fashioned space coffee.

Preparing a cup (or rather a pouch).

Not quite as advertised, but she will enjoy it!

Via Singularity Hub, we learn of Second Life founder Philip Rosedale's latest efforts: to build a virtual metaverse at the scale of planetary communities. The proposed platform (High Fidelity) would be an open-source virtual reality-based social network with a variety of potential uses. A planetary-scale metaverse will require large-scale, coordinated, three-dimensional computing resources, which means that this vision should be quite the technical challenge to realize.

High Fidelity wants you! As a technical expert and eventually a user, but still...

Earth Day 2015 Links

Happy Earth Day 2015, by way of Google's Doodle series.

Here are some Earth Day Doodles of years past. And here is an op-ed piece on how the transition from fossil fuels is closer than the pundits believe. Then, enjoy the pale blue dot.

Earth from a slightly different perspective. You are somewhere in "there". COURTESY: Planetary society.

Darwin Day Short

He did it all for the finches (and their beaks).

Here's wishing everyone a Happy Darwin Day for 2015 (Darwin's 206th posthumous birthday)! Here is a short pictoral profile. And check out the hashtag #darwinday on Tumblr for more features and events. And, as a bonus, here is a new paper in Nature [1] that uses genome resequencing to better understand the adaptive variation in finch beaks.

Young Darwin

Middle-aged Darwin

Old Man Darwin

NOTES:

[1] Lamichhaney, S.     Evolution of Darwin’s finches and their beaks revealed by genome sequencing. Nature, doi:10.1038/nature14181 (2015).

The Flow of Time, Science, and Archives

Here are a few milestones and interesting items to report for the New Year:

2014 was a good year for both space science and science in general. It's safe to say that the biggest story in science for 2014 was the successful landing of a probe (the Philae lander) on the surface of a comet (67p) by the European Space Agency. But the year was also not without dissapointments. Overall, many breakthrough findings and excellent papers occured in a number of fields. In the years ahead, it will be interesting to see what kinds of advances are made in 2015 from emerging work done during 2014.

If you are tired of celebrating another New Year according to the Gregorian calendar, here is an article from Futurity to make you consider an alternative. While the focus in this article is on the Hanke-Henry Permenant Calendar, there indeed is more than one way of dividing up the time it takes our planet to make a complete revolution around the Sun. This may or may not include calendars from other cultures, of course.

First milestone: The 24-year-old preprint server [1] arXiv published its one millionth (10^6th) paper on December 29, just in time for the new year. Despite being around for a quarter century, arXiv has become the template for an open access publishing revolution. Originally founded by Paul Ginsparg in 1991 [2], the bulk of the million paper total reflects impressive growth in the past several years.

The lifespan of the arXiv in terms of growth over time and abundance of articles by field. COURTESY: arXiv and [2].

Second milestone: By the end of Monday, January 5th, Synthetic Daisies will have reached 120,000 readers. Much like the arXiv, the bulk of this growth has occured in the last few years. The blog was started in December, 2008, so I also wish the blog a Happy 6th Birthday [3].

NOTES:
[1] Tomaiuolo, N.G. and Packer, J.G.   Pushing the Envelope of Electronic Scholarly Publishing. Searcher, 8(9), October (2000).

[2] Ginsparg, P.   arXiv at 20. Nature, 476, 145-147 (2011).

[3] Is this actually possible, or is it more like worshipping a fetish? I guess for purposes of good form, I should create an avatar that represents "the blog".

What Kind of Jurassic World Do We Live In?

Free-association and creative license at geologic timescales......

In a world where Gondwana has not yet fully drifted apart.....

COURTESY: Australian Museum.

And features a long-suffering movie idea that will probably end up being mediocre.....

Here is the "Jurassic World" trailer. COURTESY: Universal Pictures.

Satire still exists! Sort of.

A cynical take on the whole Jurassic World enterprise. COURTESY: xkcd.