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Things 2025 Q2: Constraints, Polarised light, Kuleshov, Infohazards

Artists vs. Constraints

The medium of any given art form creates restraints or encourages certain properties in the art itself.

For example, movies and theatrical productions are somewhat constrained in duration by the capacity of the human bladder. Paintings tend to be painted at certain scales that are easier to perceive, to distribute, and to display. Writers paid for serialised content (such as Charles Dickens or people writing for a long-running TV series) can often see better financial returns if they can find a way to spin the story out for longer.

Here are three examples of this I find particularly pointed.

1 – Tintin

The Tintin comics were originally serialised in a newspaper supplement one page at a time. To entice people to purchase the next newspaper, it helps if there’s a cliffhanger of some sort at the end of each page. I found it very hard to read a collected Tintin comic in full once I spotted this pattern, because it turns out just about every single page contrives a cliffhanger, sometimes in a very silly way.

Two classic end-of-page cliffhangers
Two of the milder end-of-page cliffhangers
Example of a decoy end-of-page cliffhanger

2 – Lubalin internet drama

Lubalin is a musician who (among other things) sets internet drama to music – that is, he takes slightly deranged exchanges (typos and all), and arranges them to music. Execution is everything, so check out part 1 as an example:

You can check out the rest in the series here.

The constraint here is that the current dominant algorithms really like 1-minute videos (specifically TikTok and Youtube shorts). In a ‘making-of’ video you can see the edited highlights of Lubalin constructing one of these songs. The notable moment comes at 8m 42s (link to that timestamp) when he plays what he has developed in full and is horrified to find it is quite a bit longer than a minute! So he has to adapt.

Noooo!! It’s like… double the length!

You get to see the constraint impact the art directly – and I think you can see how it slightly helps, but also slightly hinders. (You can skip to the final 1m song here)

3 – Calvin and Hobbes

Finally, Bill Watterson’s comic ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ was syndicated to newspapers between 1985 and 1995. The constraints on the Sunday supplement colour format were particularly harsh: panels 1 and 2 had to be optional (as they are sometimes dropped for space), and there had to be panel breaks in certain places so the comic could be reconfigured as necessary to fit a full, third or quarter-page format.

Panel breaks must fall where specified (but you can have more). Panels 1 and 2 must be optional. Sheesh!

Eventually the strip grew popular enough that Watterson was able to mandate a single full-page format – which is still a constraint! – with some excellent results. Check the 25 examples here to see the range possible (note, just the ones in colour are the ones where these specific rules apply or were eventually avoided).

What do we conclude from this?

I like the two opposite reactions one can have:
– Take something wildly inappropriate for the constraints of the medium and try to cram it in anyway.
– When you can, question those constraints and see what you can achieve if you break some of them.

Perceiving Polarised Light with Haidinger’s brushes

This is incredible to me: it’s actually possible to perceive polarised light with your very own human eyes! Find an area of pure white on a polarised LCD screen (very likely whatever you are reading this on), then tilt your head from side to side. Faint bow-tie shaped areas of yellow (and apparently blue, but not for me?) will briefly be dimly visible as you tilt your head, caused by polarised light. Read more here:

https://theconversation.com/polarised-light-and-the-super-sense-you-didnt-know-you-had-44032

An advert where a bear directs a film

This is one of those adverts where the creative agency has so much fun with the execution that the purpose of the ad seems a bit of an afterthought. I love it!

This thing is 13 years old now and I keep going back to it every few years so I’m giving it official Thing status:

Bonus bear content via Clare:

Wildheart Animal Sanctuary on the Isle of Wight recently rescued two bears that had grown up knowing only cages and concrete – article here. They raised the funds for a purpose-built large natural enclosure. The bears arrived recently and have been exploring their new home. You can try to spot the bears via one of the live-streamed cameras, or watch them explore their new habitat in recent videos such as this one.

The Kuleshov Effect (via Josie)

Terse description from Wikipedia:

“The Kuleshov effect is a film editing (montage) effect demonstrated by Russian film-maker Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s and 1920s. It is a mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation.”

When moving pictures first became possible, it was not obvious that a ‘cut’ would be something a viewer would accept, and early movies were often presented with very few cuts following the established art form of the play.

It turns out several dramatic things happen in the human mind with a cut:
1) An instant change in perspective is … just completely acceptable!
2) Much like Grice’s maxim of relation in language, we assume a cut within a scene has meaning – for example, if we see a character notice something off-screen, then cut to a thing, we assume they are looking at that thing. The mild version of the Kuleshov effect.
3) Building on top of the above point, the full surprise of the Kuleshov effect is that we may even overinterpret the images either side of an edit to have them make more sense!

You get essentially the same effect in comics or any sequence of panels, for example just putting these two images together implies they are related, and our mind invents a story:

You can also see the same effect distilled in GIF form:

You also get a version of this when giving a slide presentation – you can accompany some text or spoken word with an illustration, and the mind of the viewer will automatically interpret them together. This is why a presentation can be improved even with some barely relevant images!

Beyond that, I think there are even weirder effects somehow going on that relate to how we process movies:
4) Non-linear editing, in which edits go forward and back in time (such as Memento, The Prestige, Speed Racer) are also fully comprehensible, if handled carefully
5) Non-diegetic music (music that is not happening in the scene, e.g. the sound of a John Williams score in a space battle) weirdly doesn’t seem weird

One of my favourite examples of this: from pure sound design and Kuleshov effect, Rian Johnson conveyed Rey and Kylo communicating with one another across space in The Last Jedi with nothing more than an edit.

Another corollary is that you can splice new footage into old, and if you take advantage of how we interpret edits, you can recontextualise the old footage to make it seem as if, for example, Star Wars characters are drinking Cristal Beer.

Anti-basilisks

Before we begin, some necessary context: an “infohazard” is information that could harm people if known. There are many tweaks, shades and nuances to this; you can find ‘fun’ examples over at the SCP Foundation (their wiki page on the topic; search for SCP entries tagged as infohazard here), or this very enticing trailhead I have not followed at Lesswrong: “a typology of infohazards”.

Below I’m going to describe something that some consider to be an infohazard, or just dangerously adjacent to one. I will go on to explain why actually I don’t think it is (although the adjacency remains possible). This is the last Thing in the post, so if that freaks you out you can just stop now!

I will give you some space to do so.

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I’m referring to Roko’s basilisk, which is nicely summarised on Wikipedia. It’s a theoretical superintelligent AI that we could build which would “punish anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development, in order to incentivize said advancement”.

So, you see the problem. It’s clearly a very stupid thing to build, but now you know about it, so you can infer that other people know about it, which means that some of them might eventually have the means and motivation to build it, which in turn maybe means you should help them do that to avoid this ‘punishment’ – probably at minimum by telling more people about it!

The first version I encountered contained the threat that even if this basilisk does not come about until long after I’m dead, nonetheless it would review history and then simulate the minds of the non-contributors in order to punish them. At first I felt no concern about what may happen to some theoretical simulated me, but I suppose the real threat is that the ‘me’ right now might actually be the simulation it is running rather than the original me, and as such I am not safe!

So, maybe if you squint hard you should worry about this a bit, but my counter is that if such a thing is possible, many other similar things are possible that could easily cancel this out.

The anti-Roko’s-basilisk

A superintelligent AI that destroys any instance of Roko’s basilisk it can find, and will reward (or retroactively simulate rewarding) anyone who helps bring it about.

The double anti-Roko’s-basilisk

It’s like the anti-Roko’s-basilisk but it also specifically rewards anyone that would be punished by a Roko’s basilisk twice over (perhaps by simulating two instances of them having a great time), and anyone who helps build it three times over. So you should definitely build this one, and even if you don’t, maybe other people will, and it more than cancels out the antics of Roko’s basilisk.

At this point I think it’s pretty clear we’re just inventing imaginary monsters having imaginary fights, making the whole thing seem quite childish and inconsequential, and certainly not motivating enough to start worrying about making or not making any such things.

Anyway, just to keep things sufficiently spooky, let’s talk about adjacency.

LessWrong was founded by Eliezer Yudkowsky, and when LessWrong user Roko posted the original formulation of the basilisk, Yudkowsky gave an uncharacteristically blunt response and banned the topic for 5 years (as recounted in the Wikipedia article). It did look like a bit of an overreaction, but as that article goes on to recount, he later explained (or post-rationalised) his reaction, most notably with this:

“The problem was that Roko’s post seemed near in idea-space to a large class of potential hazards, all of which, regardless of their plausibility, had the property that they presented no potential benefit to anyone.”

I find that idea quite compelling. It’s very hard to know how large this hazardous part of idea-space is, but it seems like it could be non-zero. I can imagine using the basilisk concept as a springboard into conceiving the most hazardous ideas possible, but at this time I am choosing not to do that, because there really is no potential benefit to anyone.

What about the opposite… the infobeneficial? Well, hopefully that’s everything else you find in Things, at least to some extent.

  • Transmission ends
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Things July 2017: Archive Adventures – part 1

In November, Things will be 10 years old. Since the beginning, I’ve collected an archive of interesting things, and at various intervals then created Things out of that archive. I tend to collect slightly more things than I publish, so the archive has grown. Rather than cull it, I’m going to just put them all out in two big catch-up editions. In this edition: Stories, Technology, Imagery, and all the Puzzles. This is going to be intense!

This Just In

Before I get to the archive, a couple of recent things.

Damien Henry’s video for Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” makes excellent use of machine learning for art. Using video shot from a moving train, an algorithm learns how to predict what the next frame will look like. Every 20s into the video the amount of learning used increases. The result is fascinating, and perfectly complements the music. You can skip through the video to get an idea of the effect, but it’s best played in full!

There is an awkward vein of humour in which comedians interview (often) unsuspecting subject-matter experts in a non-serious manner (Philomena Cunk interviewing Brian Cox is one I don’t mind so much). Superficially, Werner Herzog sometimes takes a similar approach in his documentaries (noted in Things 118 in 2012, “Please describe an encounter with a squirrel”), but there is a hidden earnestness behind his questions. If you’ve never seen any of his documentaries, this excellent short clip on penguins shows you what you’re missing.

Stories

I think via Richard L, here’s an interesting piece on Plots not involving conflict.

In some stories/fables/myths the inciting incident or key point of drama is a character attempting to do something different to normal. In old stories, the character often fails and is punished, the moral being “know your place” (for example, the crow that tries to sing and in so doing drops a piece of cheese). In more modern stories, the character often succeeds and is rewarded. Is that generalisation true though? And what does it mean? I was going to collect examples of each and try to see a pattern, but never ended up doing that, so I’ll just leave it here as an unfinished thought.

The Cosmology of Serialised Television is an essay by David Auerbach which categorises long-running TV fiction by cosmological universe types: Steady State, Expansionary, Big Crunch. I didn’t find it particularly useful in terms of identifying solutions to the intrinsic storytelling problems of the medium, or even uncovering hidden gems (just the expected “Everything is terrible except for The Wire and Babylon 5“).

Still, it’s a lot of fun to read and nod along to, with some great terse summaries along the way, for example:

“So comics evolved by directing creative effort away from any moments of quality and toward large-scale creative bankruptcy”

See Maris Wicks’ 16-panel summary of Kitty Pride’s relationship with Colossus (penultimate comic in this post [dead link, try here – T.M. 7/4/21]) for a great example of this.

Choose Your Own Adventure

One of my favourite kind of stories is any subversion of the “Choose your own adventure” format. Previously on Things I’ve linked to Luke Surl’s perfectly terse ‘Free Will‘ page. As an implied CYOA, this previously-linked Beaver and Steve comic also remains a classic.

The “Prog 2012” issue of 2000AD featured a story called “Choose your own Xmas”, and subverts the format while also shattering the 4th wall. It’s completely brilliant but isn’t online so you’ll just have to trust me and buy or borrow it.

Viviane Schwarz also subverted the format beautifully to convey what it’s like to suffer from anxiety.

Working within the extraordinarily tight constraints of having a fixed panel and art layout, Ryan North still found a way to make a CYOA version of Dinosaur Comics.

Save The Date (recommended to me by Tarim and Richard L, available for free on Windows, Mac or Linux) leverages the Ren’Py ‘visual novel’ engine in a rather clever way, and if you’re interested in games and storytelling, have 30-60 minutes to spare, and can tolerate an apparently high rate of failure, you should give it a go. It could perhaps have delivered its message more elegantly at the “end”.

Also via Richard L, Trapped In Time (pdf) is a nice twist on the traditional choose-your-own-adventure format that leverages the format in a few interesting ways I’ve not seen before, and actually works very well as a pdf!

And I should mention this just in – browser-based interactive time travel fiction, One Night in Skegness, by Matheson Marcault (Holly Gramazio and Sophie Sampson). More time travel, but in a more relaxed way.

Technology

Perhaps surprisingly, a link about technology that sat in my backlog for 5 years has become more interesting with age. John B recommended the article, in which Alexis Madrigal laments that (in 2012), internet startups are just retreading the same ground and no longer promise to revolutionise our lives. John also pointed out the comment below the article by Urgelt (comment link doesn’t seem to work, wait for comments to load, which they often don’t, then find ‘Urgelt’ in the page). Urgelt more precisely categorises startups into those that grow the economy vs those that just take market share from existing businesses, and the issue is that most startups are falling into the latter category.

Both make a very interesting read 5 years further on, leading one to ask: has anything changed since then? Two trends jump to mind.

The Gig-economy-style startups (Uber, Deliveroo, AirBnB) suggest major changes, but might not actually scale. Uber charges around half of the true cost, subsidising the rest in a bid to achieve market dominance when driverless cars arrive; Deliveroo similarly rides an unsustainable cost/charge balance for much the same reason; only AirBnB arguably doesn’t fit into this category as the market sets the price.

Crowdfunding seems to be a more impressive development. In 2012, Kickstarter was just turning the corner, and Patreon is now in the ascendancy. From artists/game-makers that I follow, these services genuinely seem to be creating viable revenue-streams that were not previously available, to the benefit of culture in general. For example, Captain Disillusion (referenced in Things March 2015 and Things 17) was never mass-market enough for ad-revenue to be viable, but now raises sufficient money from Patreon to work on his videos pretty much full time.

In more “modern life is terrible” news, here’s an article from Cracked in late 2013 that is really just an enjoyably angry and sarcastic rant about clickbait content-farming. I remember at the time thinking that, if nothing else, the clickbait headline style would have to change as humans will fall for anything once, or maybe a hundred times, but eventually will develop a sort of semiotic herd-immunity to these well-dressed empty promises. Four years on… have things changed? Well, if nothing else, Facebook is at least attempting to deprioritise these sorts of headlines; more specifically, headlines that withhold key information, and headlines that senselessly exaggerate the content.

Imagery and Comics

Wondermark on the thought-experiment of money having a continuity rather than just being an abstract quantity of value. Wet owls. Inopportunely placed stickers [Dead :\ – T.M. 4/7/21]. Bikes recreated (digitally) from drawings. The Door to Hell [Gone, try here – T.M. 4/7/21]  “They set the hole on fire, expecting it to burn itself out of fuel in a few days. Now, some 42 years later, it is still burning”.

Puzzles/Questions

Collecting all unused puzzles here is probably too intense, but I quite like that about it, so I’m doing it anyway.

1) 2D News

Sci/tech news is often quite one-dimensional, revealing a single scientific discovery or technological advancement at a time. As a thought-experiment, try combining two or more such stories from the past year into something amazing. For example, advances in drone technology + advances in ‘invisibility cloaks’ = army of invisible drones. Finding loads of other planets + anything = awesome.

2) Put Put boat

A toy Put Put boat has an amazingly simple heat engine, which you may recognise from the film Ponyo. A candle heats a small boiler; some water in the boiler vaporises but cannot escape, generating pressure that pushes the remaining water out a pipe. The momentum of the water keeps it pushing out, leaving the inside of the boiler with low air pressure. As a result, water then rushes back in, and the process repeats. Water thus repeatedly enters and exits a pipe pointed out the back of the boat, which then travels forward in a halting manner. The puzzle is this: why does the boat actually move forward, instead of just moving back and forth, given water is just going in and out?

3) Bernoulli vs the Train Window

In a similar vein to the Put Put boat, we have the Bernoulli train window problem. Bernoulli’s principle roughly states that faster moving air acts as if it has lower pressure. The classic demonstration is to hold a piece of A4 paper by one end in front of your chin so it droops downwards away from you; by blowing over the top, the pressure is reduced, and the piece of paper rises up due to the higher pressure underneath it.

A similar effect could be seen in an old-fashioned push-to-close narrow train window. If such a window was open and the train entered a tunnel, the window would slam shut. Or, would a shut one blow open? Depending on whether you take the perspective of the tunnel or the train, the faster moving air is on one side of the window or it is on the other. So which way does the window go?

4) Catbird seat

The Catbird seat is one of those puzzles I like because you can solve it with drawings and trigonometry, and then you can solve it better with simpler drawings and simpler trigonometry, and then you wonder if you can solve it in some kind of purely intuitive manner.

5) Shape of a Harp

When plucked, a longer taut string makes a deeper note. A harp has progressively longer strings to cover a range of notes. However, even though the interval between each note is the same, the length of the strings does not change linearly, or even following a simple curve, but rather an S-curve. Why is that? I thought this question might have a nice intuitive solution that could be reached by reason rather than by physics, but the answer is a bit more disatisfying, so this question remained in my backlog unasked. If you don’t want to figure it out (and my personal opinion is it’s not that interesting to do so), you can read about it here, although you’ll need the internet archive page for the harp citation.


Not a harp, but the principle is the same

– Transmission finally ends

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Things 133: Overreacting, audio history of sampling, internet vs time, meta-meta-analysis

Comics – Overreacting

Jemma Salume has an excellent series of comics about overreacting to things (and also learning to cook, and dating). They’re compact and hyperbolic, which is how I like my comics, and also how I like my toy universe model geometries, hahaha.

Music – Raiding the 20th Century
This remains my favourite mix, and with the ten-year anniversary upon us I was surprised to realise I had never put it in Things.

In 2004, DJ Food (aka Strictly Kev) made a 40-minute mix for XFM chronicling the history of ‘cut-up’ (essentially sample-based) music which he called ‘Raiding the 20th Century’. Shortly afterwards he read Paul Morley’s book ‘Words and Music’ which did much the same thing and covered much of the same material. Paul Morley also coined the phrase ‘Raiding the 20th Century’ twenty years earlier. Taking note of this big flashing fate-arrow, they got together, recorded Paul reading key parts of the book, and created a new hour-long mix of the material.

The mp3 is available over on archive.org, the track listing is here, and you can go ahead and listen to it right here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GO5W6FRZPM

It’s about 20 minutes before the ‘history’ really starts, and while Morley’s commentary then explains and introduces many of the tracks and samples, many more are used without comment. Over the years, as I learn more about music history, more and more of them are making sense, which is very satisfying. As one of the samples used states: “every time you listen to this recording, something will happen.”

Links – Time and the Internet
As we build up an ever larger historical archive of material online, the date something was originally published becomes more important, and something we’ll need to become more aware of (assuming we avoid internet decay).

I like the approach of the BBC, which appears to maintain the CMS that articles originally appeared in (for example, this report from September 11th 2001, or the Mammal-of-the-month November 2002). That’s still not quite enough to avoid the confusion that may arise from incautious Googling for events that recur. Also, try to work out when this was written.

Anyway, if you would prefer a cogent discussion of the topic rather than a selection of semi-random BBC links, then I highly recommend Joanne McNeil’s piece on the subject here, in which she says things much more precisely than I have been, like this:

“Digital content appears with minimal visual language distinguishing yesterday from tomorrow and today. Now habits have emerged in which we communicate with the past and even mistake it for the present.”

(Also, see this Cat and Girl comic).

Video – Brett Domino
Looking through previous editions of Things, I was surprised to find I’d never featured Brett Domino, who does a range of silly-but-clever, bad-but-good things with music. I think the most impressive is his medley of the top 10 pop songs at the time he hit 10,000 Twitter followers, which culminates in a surprisingly effective montage finale:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgYOiWt3qpo

Link – Scientific truth, researcher bias, and parapsychology
In a meta-analysis, the results of many similar experiments are analysed together in order to gain statistical power and shed more light on subtle phenomena. For example, if it’s a very small effect, some experiments won’t yield any results, perhaps causing us to question the experiments that do find an effect; by considering all these experiments together, we can better assess if we’re seeing Type I or Type II errors. Also, if you suspect the result may only come about due to sloppy methodology, you can see if there is a correlation between how ‘rigorous’ a study is and the size of any effect that it finds – if more rigorous studies come up with smaller effects, that’s quite suggestive.

Years ago I read about a meta-analysis of research into psychic abilities, and the results were not clear-cut one way or the other, despite taking a comprehensive overview of the relevant studies. I thought that was very interesting, because it suggested that either psychic abilities were real, or the scientific method wasn’t as infalliable as I had thought (or both).

Many more studies have been performed since, and this problem does not seem to go away. A strong clue seems to be the experimenter’s bias effect: a researcher who believes that an experiment will yield a certain outcome is more likely to end up getting that outcome, even if they are not intentionally manipulating the experiment to that end.

Of course, experimenter’s bias is quite a tricky and small effect to prove, so what you need to do is a meta-analysis across the various studies into it. But when different people conduct this meta-analysis, they reach different conclusions: some find the experimenter’s bias effect exists, and some find it doesn’t!

If you’ve been following closely to this point, you can guess the logical next step: we need a meta-meta-analysis of the experimenter’s bias meta-analyses, to see if meta-experimenters that believe the experimenter’s bias effect exists were more likely to find exactly that result in their meta-analysis! Brilliantly, and also alarmingly, this meta-meta-analysis was conducted and concluded that, yes, that’s exactly what happens: there is indeed a meta-experimenter’s bias effect. So the question now is… does the experimenter’s bias effect actually exist?

I found all this out from a brilliant essay by Scott Alexander, which includes all the juicy references and finishes with an amusingly modified Star Wars quote, so is pretty much perfect.

Puzzle – Sequel Naming
For some media, major new updates are numbered: movies (Iron Man 3), TV series (Game of Thrones Season 4), video games (Call of Duty 4) are obvious, but it’s also dominant in operating systems (Windows 8), Consoles/phones (Playstation 4, Samsung Galaxy S4) and even classical music (Bach’s Cantata No. 140),

Other things don’t seem to work that way, notably books (A Clash of Kings, rather than A Game of Thrones 2) and albums (Björk – Post, rather than Debut 2), but also theatrical productions (admittedly much rarer, but it’s Love Never Dies, rather than Phantom of the Opera 2)

(Of course, sometimes people mix their strategies with hilarious results: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2, BT Infinity 2, Xbox “One”)

The contrast is most stark in TV series versus books. So the question is this: why do we have Game of Thrones Season 2 on TV, but A Clash of Kings in book form?

Tim Mannveille tweets as @metatim, and previously worried about old things disappearing from the internet