Author: gulley

Recently I watched the movie Touching the Void the story of two British climbers who have a really wretched experience climbing a mountain in the Andes. A friend of mine, who is a climber, had told me that this was the climbing movie that gets climbing right. This statement intrigued me, because climbing is a technical skill and it’s easy to screw up the movie about a technical topic.

If you are directing a movie in which much of the dialogue is built on a complex understanding between skilled professionals, you have a real problem. You have to find a way to explain to your audience what’s going on without damaging the scene. You see different approaches to solving this problem. Sometimes, a naive character is introduced so that one of the professionals can explain the technical details. More often, though, the director simply chooses to have two skilled professionals address each other using explicit elementary language that would never occur in real life.

This kind of thing often shows up in movies about pilots. Consider: you are a pilot, and your plane is about to crash into a mountain. What do you say? On the one hand, anyone dealing with a plummeting airplane is, at some level, scared. On the other hand, pilots are trained to deal with terrifying situations. They have years of experience all built around the idea of emotionless, concentrated problem-solving right to the bitter end. No matter how much a director wants it said, a pilot will NEVER EVER look at another pilot and say “I’m so scared.”

It’s the same with climbers. So much goes unsaid. In real life you get “Hmmph” instead of “Hey Joe, don’t drop that rope, okay? ‘Cause if you do I’m going to drop 3000 feet onto those pointed rocks down there.” How can a director communicate what’s not being said? In “Touching the Void” the director approaches the movie almost entirely as a documentary. You see nearly silent actors on the mountain against a narration by the original real-life protagonists. It’s a powerful combination. It surfaces the hidden dialogue and also solves the second problem of movies about technical topics. If you let the geeks make movies about geeks, they will put the correct technical details into a movie devoid of any emotional spark. Making a movie like this is a balancing act, but sure enough, “Touching the Void” gets it right.

What is the illuminating but hidden dialogue that follows you around throughout the day? Maybe something like this: “Hey Joe, if you knew you were taking the last of the coffee, then why didn’t you make more for the rest of us? Now I have to throw you over a 3000 foot cliff onto those pointed rocks down there. Asshole.”

Twice a year, I help run a MATLAB programming contest in which contestants try to write the fastest code to solve a math puzzle, using a resource any work done by previously submitted entries. In other words, you’re welcome to steal from those who came before you. It’s a free intellectual property open source barbecue. It works surprisingly well and results in seriously optimized code. So the first question I get when I explain it to people is this: can’t we apply this technique to some useful real world problem? But here’s the thing: the programming contest has a great advantage in its unambiguous figure of merit. If you can make the code run faster, that’s all I need to know, and I only need a clock to figure that out.

Suppose you wanted to make a similar contest to write a great poem. You’re immediately faced with a big problem: There’s no automatic poem analyzer. Who gets to judge whether or not your poem is better than the current leader’s? The Wikipedia approach comes close to programming contest idea here, in that lots of people are busy making improvements (or changes at any rate) to the same “code” or Wikipedia entry. But you can’t make a running report of the “goodness” of the article over time. It may get longer, but is it getting better? That’s a matter of opinion.

Into this space comes an interesting startup called Helium. They solve the problem of quantitative evaluation by letting members vote. So the same topic (say “How to find the best mortgage rate”) may have multiple articles, but only one of them will be voted number one. The lowest rated article for the mortgage question was this: “go to http://www.google.com and write down How can I get the best rate on a mortgage? you will get the best rate.” Good advice, but wouldn’t it be cool if the top rated result was this very page?

I think there’s still an optimal mix of Wikipedia and Helium that doesn’t exist yet, but we’re getting closer. (Helium spotted on Techcrunch)

My friend Steve is not only an image processing wizard with a book title under his belt, he’s also a chess player. He is modest about his mad chess skillz, but he has done something unquestionably useful for the chess community in creating a nifty chess diagram widget. Written in PHP, it lets you use a standard chess notation to draw images of games easily. For instance, if you write

rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR

you get a picture like this:

Venturing farther afield, Steve’s little chess board also lets you indulge in fanciful tactical positions. For instance, can Black be expected to win this game?

Or how about this one: a cautious Black has just castled on his king side, and White has retorted with some ugly, aggressive posturing of his pawns. Now, Black to mate in 4. Do you see it?

Believe it or not, this example is from a real match, the famous Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld vs. Kerry match (2004). Also known as the Guantanamo opening (or, less frequently, the “Hanging Chad”), Black narrowly escapes disaster by buying assorted hardware from the Supreme Court. The debt thereby incurred was simply levied on the audience. Brilliant!

Finally, if you are a fan of M.C. Escher, you’ll enjoy reading about Steve’s chess problem epiphany:
Unexpected chess problem at my office.

Don’t forget to vote!

I’m being hammered by a new round of comment spam, and this one is really baffling. It’s well coordinated, coming in tightly packed bursts from all points of the compass. No IP blocking can stop it, and the strange thing is, there’s no text to it. Just a few random letters in each comment along with a plausible sounding name. What are they selling? What is their motivation? Each new invasion of spam has puzzled me at a different level. Just when I became hardened to the fact that of course unscrupulous advertisers could never be stopped, I get bowled over by a new phenomenon: absolutely pointless site-clogging random spam. It’s as if someone is practicing for a denial-of-service attack. At some point, I will need to use those funny picture queries to stop the noise. Sigh.

Roy sent me this one: a radio-controlled airplane with a difference. Here is a guy who modified his model plane to include not just a camera but a wireless video link so he can see what the plane sees as he flies. If you’ve ever tried to fly a model airplane, you know that it can be tricky to work how the plane is oriented. A video camera helps solve this problem, plus it gives you the opportunity to be a neighborhood voyeur, though not a terribly subtle one. So far this is the kind of thing that the military puts to use over Iraq, but this guy does one better: he puts the video camera on gimbals and matches the camera to the orientation of his head. Then, with the video display mounted on a special helmet, he gets the complete sensation of sitting in a tiny airplane, now looking left, now looking right. Sure looks like fun. Look closely and you’ll see he even painted tiny instruments in the model cockpit.

Improved technology is having a big impact on the world of model airplanes. These days, people can do insane aerobatics at an indoor basketball court with their radio-controlled airplanes.

And as long as we’re on aircraft-themed videos, here’s one of my favorites, this time with great big airplanes. This is an F-18 pilot taking his plane through its paces, but the very best part is the beginning. The action of the catapult has been perfectly timed to match the first chords of Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride.” Turn up the volume!

Watch this if you’ve ever wondered why fighter pilots are saddled with such monstrous egos. If you got to do that for a living, I don’t know how you’d avoid it.

This short video is making the rounds, but it really is a terrific film.

When we see the glamorous beauty portrayed in ads and movies, it’s easy to forget what a construction it is. This industrial beauty is a thing built by many skilled artisans across a significant period of time. As long as we recognize this fact, we don’t have to fall into the trap of identifying it overmuch with the person underneath, the matrix on which it was constructed. It reminds me of those outrageous flower-covered floats on the Tournament of Roses Parade. We can admire the craft of it while acknowledging that it is wholly artificial.

There is an interesting parallel with the makeup required for movies in which the characters are grotesque or monstrous. There are plenty of articles about how this or that actor had to sit for four hours of makeup before each shoot as rubbery tentacles and prosthetic cheekbones were glued into place. It’s understood that ugliness is a movie-industry construct. But when it comes to beauty, we prefer to believe the fiction. How disappointing it is to learn that the man who plays Romeo isn’t really in love with the woman who plays Juliet.