My wife likes to make fun of my spatial reasoning skills. She’s an intern architect and a master closet packer, able to maximize the use of space in any situation. In contrast, whenever I try to imagine any but the simplest, most static of three-dimensional spaces, my brain starts moving very, very slowly. I mostly navigate the world by thinking about space in either the plan or elevation view.
As a kid, I always failed those tests where you had to imagine rotating a solid object and then pick it out from a list of similar solids. I never solved my Rubik’s cube, despite wasting man-months of my life in the attempt.
My condition couldn’t have been helped by the amount of time I spent racing around in the two-dimensional Nintendo dungeons of my formative years.
I’ve grown comfortable with the 3D interfaces that have become standard console game fare in the last decade or so. But it was not an easy transition. I remember one nauseous dream that consisted of being trapped in a sped-up Super Mario 64 level. I gave up after less than an hour of playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, declaring that no 3D Zelda could ever be as good as 2D A Link to the Past (now that I think about it, I’m not sure that this prediction was actually wrong).
But why stop with straightforward three-dimensional gameplay? One of the great things about virtual worlds is the possibility of bending even our most basic physical rules. Super Paper Mario for the Wii, and more recently the indy game Fez, have experimented with gameplay where the same virtual space can be 3D one minute, 2D the next, as if your in-game persona were the sphere from Abbott’s Flatland. One of last year’s biggest sleeper hits, Portal, throws you into a world where you can create wormholes that flatten distances and bend gravity around corners. 4D Tetris, anyone?
I’m in no position to review these games, since I haven’t played any of them. If I did, I think I would have smoke coming out of my ears. But I’m interested to see if games like this catch on, and what advances in science and mathematics might come from a generation that grew up playing them.
There’s been quite a bit of evidence that video games can teach the brain new tricks. Will the kids of tomorrow be as comfortable working in Hilbert space as the rest of us are on a Cartesian graph? Quantum mechanics, cosmology, systems analysis, topology, and game theory, among countless others, are fields that could benefit from minds that are natively hyperdimensional.
Then again, all those hours with the Rubik’s cube didn’t teach me anything.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Monday, February 18, 2008
New issue of Information, Communication & Society
I’m trying to familiarize myself with the world of STS journals. Information, Communication & Society 11:1 is out, with a few articles that seem interesting:
In “Software defaults as de facto regulation”, Rajiv Shah and Christian Sandvig argue that software defaults may be seen as imposing something like the rule of law upon non-technical users who lack the sophistication to change them. Security and privacy experts must therefore recognize the ineffectiveness of recommendations that target the end-user.
In “Effects of Internet use and social resources on changes in depression”, Bessière et al. study how various types of Internet use affect depression sufferers. The not-too-surprising results: using the Internet for communicating with loved ones is more likely to improve your depression than using it for solitary web surfing.
David Beer looks at the personal MP3 player and its transformative effects on personal and social music experiences in “The iconic interface and the veneer of simplicity”.
Unfortunately, I can't get at any of these through my soon-to-expire university library proxy. Your mileage may vary. Beer’s article in particular, I think, may have me hoofing it down to D.H. Hill for the dead tree version.
In “Software defaults as de facto regulation”, Rajiv Shah and Christian Sandvig argue that software defaults may be seen as imposing something like the rule of law upon non-technical users who lack the sophistication to change them. Security and privacy experts must therefore recognize the ineffectiveness of recommendations that target the end-user.
In “Effects of Internet use and social resources on changes in depression”, Bessière et al. study how various types of Internet use affect depression sufferers. The not-too-surprising results: using the Internet for communicating with loved ones is more likely to improve your depression than using it for solitary web surfing.
David Beer looks at the personal MP3 player and its transformative effects on personal and social music experiences in “The iconic interface and the veneer of simplicity”.
Unfortunately, I can't get at any of these through my soon-to-expire university library proxy. Your mileage may vary. Beer’s article in particular, I think, may have me hoofing it down to D.H. Hill for the dead tree version.
Friday, February 1, 2008
Reflections on a haircut
When I arrived at the philosophy program at Boston College, I noticed that an unusual number of men associated with the department—both graduate students and professors—groomed themselves in one of two distinct styles, both of which struck me as somehow more “philosophical.”
The first was to allow one’s beard to grow long and unkempt. Unlike the unkempt beards I had seen on undergraduates at NCSU, this was not a token of laziness or disregard for one’s personal appearance. The individuals wearing beards were otherwise impeccably well-groomed, and oftentimes found in class wearing suits. I came to call this look “The Socrates.”
The second look was to be completely clean-shaven, and wear one’s hair gelled back and up, in order to create the illusion that one’s head was several inches taller than it really was. I called this “The Derrida.” My hair was kind of already going in that direction, and I thought it looked like a good, modern look for a man in a philosophy program, so this is the style I adopted.
(After finishing up at BC, I wore my hair down with a loose part for several months. I never really liked it, so I’m back to The Derrida, or the “Wall Street hair” as one of my coworkers calls it.)
Having formulated these observations, I recently enjoyed reading Barthes’ “The Iconography of the Abbé Pierre” in his Mythologies collection:
What does all this have to do with technology? Consider the industrial design explosion of the last decade. There are quite a lot of individuals who find it all a lot of fuss with no substance. If your box works well, who cares what it looks like? These are the folks who would never buy an iPod, because you would have to be an idiot to shell out for one when you can get a player that has more storage space for less.
But the market disagrees with the theory that an iPod is worth less than a SanDisk. The iPod signals to others, among other things, an appreciation for Apple products, for fashion, and for modern design. Your choice of mp3 player may not play a role in determining your identity, but it does play a considerable role in communicating your identity. It has value, in short, as a Barthesian myth.
If you need confirmation of this theory, just count how many times in a day your friends and coworkers emote—either in disgust or appreciation—at the personal appearances, affections, and possessions of people they don’t know, or know only marginally. The things we surround ourselves with have utility not merely in pursuing our individual tele, but in pursuing our goals as social actors, as well. This is common sense, but too often disappears from discussions of an artifact’s utility as such.
The first was to allow one’s beard to grow long and unkempt. Unlike the unkempt beards I had seen on undergraduates at NCSU, this was not a token of laziness or disregard for one’s personal appearance. The individuals wearing beards were otherwise impeccably well-groomed, and oftentimes found in class wearing suits. I came to call this look “The Socrates.”
The second look was to be completely clean-shaven, and wear one’s hair gelled back and up, in order to create the illusion that one’s head was several inches taller than it really was. I called this “The Derrida.” My hair was kind of already going in that direction, and I thought it looked like a good, modern look for a man in a philosophy program, so this is the style I adopted.
(After finishing up at BC, I wore my hair down with a loose part for several months. I never really liked it, so I’m back to The Derrida, or the “Wall Street hair” as one of my coworkers calls it.)
Having formulated these observations, I recently enjoyed reading Barthes’ “The Iconography of the Abbé Pierre” in his Mythologies collection:
The Abbé Pierre’s haircut, obviously devised so as to reach a neutral equilibrium between short hair (an indispensable convention if one does not want to be noticed) and unkempt hair (a state suitable to express contempt for other conventions), thus becomes the capillary archetype of saintliness...
For among priests, it is no due to chance whether one is bearded or not; beards are chiefly the attribute of missionaries or Capuchins, they cannot but signify apostleship and poverty... Shaven priests are supposed to be more temporal, bearded ones more evangelical...Barthes worries about the overconsumption of these signs, in place of true justice and charity. I think this is a legitimate concern. But I have also noticed that in our socially constructed world, truth must come with a little bit of rhetoric in order to find a foothold.
What does all this have to do with technology? Consider the industrial design explosion of the last decade. There are quite a lot of individuals who find it all a lot of fuss with no substance. If your box works well, who cares what it looks like? These are the folks who would never buy an iPod, because you would have to be an idiot to shell out for one when you can get a player that has more storage space for less.
But the market disagrees with the theory that an iPod is worth less than a SanDisk. The iPod signals to others, among other things, an appreciation for Apple products, for fashion, and for modern design. Your choice of mp3 player may not play a role in determining your identity, but it does play a considerable role in communicating your identity. It has value, in short, as a Barthesian myth.
If you need confirmation of this theory, just count how many times in a day your friends and coworkers emote—either in disgust or appreciation—at the personal appearances, affections, and possessions of people they don’t know, or know only marginally. The things we surround ourselves with have utility not merely in pursuing our individual tele, but in pursuing our goals as social actors, as well. This is common sense, but too often disappears from discussions of an artifact’s utility as such.
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