maximumkate
Joined Sep 2015
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maximumkate's rating
Conway's Game of Life is a simulation of cellular life.
Imagine a cell represented as a square or pixel on a grid, and further imagine that the cell has eight potential neighbors surrounding it.
There are three rules by which the cell dies/disappears, or reproduces in an adjacent cell:
1. Any live cell with two or three live neighbors survives.
2. Any dead cell with three live neighbors becomes a live cell.
3. All other live cells die in the next generation. Similarly, all other dead cells stay dead.
From these simple rules, incredibly complex arrays of cell colonies emerge over multiple generations, from stable, static colonies, to kinetic ones, to ones which die out completely. People have modeled simple mathematical calculators using cells populated just-so. The complexity which emerges from this half-century old program/game is thought-provoking and compelling to this day.
There are free implementations of Conway's Game of Life for nearly every platform in existence - almost certainly there is at least one for the device you are reading this on. I urge you to seek one out.
The lead character in the movie begins to notice unexpectedly complex patterns emerging from similar simple algorithms he uses to create visual displays for a techno band.
He begins to wonder how his simple algorithms are generating unexpected complexity.
He becomes fixated on the idea that the universe itself may simply be a gazillion-generations old simulation based on equally simplistic rules - a kind of algorithmic grand unification theory. His fixation leads to obsession.
The people around him think he is nuts.
And that's the basis of the story in Digital Physics.
There's a psychedelic sequence in this that is one for the ages.
Computer nerds, physics nerds, retrocomputing nerds, math nerds, psychonauts, and nerds generally, ought to appreciate this clever, delightful little film.
I guarantee it is probably smarter than whatever you watched last.
And hey, a barely-disguised 80's era fish tank Mac is at the center of the action. And who doesn't dig that?
I enjoyed this quite a bit. What a pleasant surprise!
Imagine a cell represented as a square or pixel on a grid, and further imagine that the cell has eight potential neighbors surrounding it.
There are three rules by which the cell dies/disappears, or reproduces in an adjacent cell:
1. Any live cell with two or three live neighbors survives.
2. Any dead cell with three live neighbors becomes a live cell.
3. All other live cells die in the next generation. Similarly, all other dead cells stay dead.
From these simple rules, incredibly complex arrays of cell colonies emerge over multiple generations, from stable, static colonies, to kinetic ones, to ones which die out completely. People have modeled simple mathematical calculators using cells populated just-so. The complexity which emerges from this half-century old program/game is thought-provoking and compelling to this day.
There are free implementations of Conway's Game of Life for nearly every platform in existence - almost certainly there is at least one for the device you are reading this on. I urge you to seek one out.
The lead character in the movie begins to notice unexpectedly complex patterns emerging from similar simple algorithms he uses to create visual displays for a techno band.
He begins to wonder how his simple algorithms are generating unexpected complexity.
He becomes fixated on the idea that the universe itself may simply be a gazillion-generations old simulation based on equally simplistic rules - a kind of algorithmic grand unification theory. His fixation leads to obsession.
The people around him think he is nuts.
And that's the basis of the story in Digital Physics.
There's a psychedelic sequence in this that is one for the ages.
Computer nerds, physics nerds, retrocomputing nerds, math nerds, psychonauts, and nerds generally, ought to appreciate this clever, delightful little film.
I guarantee it is probably smarter than whatever you watched last.
And hey, a barely-disguised 80's era fish tank Mac is at the center of the action. And who doesn't dig that?
I enjoyed this quite a bit. What a pleasant surprise!
This is a strange documentary. I hadn't read the description and expected some kind of breezy documentary about memes, but this film posits that memes are actually employed as sigils and hypersigils in the context of chaos magick, and so things are dark right from the outset.
I'm not sure I fully buy the central premise of the documentary. I don't really know the extent to which these online communities had an impact on the 2016 election, which was, as far as I can tell, a reaction to the Obama presidency and social progress moving at a clip which terrified a lot of people.
Even assessing the alt-right as a whole, I don't know how it breaks down between edgy 4chan trolls vs. Garden variety working class bigots, who may not have any connection with meme warfare or care much about the Internet.
Still, there is something unsettling here. I was surprised the documentary didn't discuss Edward Bernays and the way similar systems of manipulation have been employed in the context of business and capitalism (e.g., advertising). The concept of manipulating people in this way is not new; the particular spin it takes in online forums, and especially the people trafficking in these techniques is, perhaps, unique to the modern age.
And more to the point, as to criticisms of this documentary, this central point is missed: whether something is hokum or not has depressingly little connection to its efficaciousness: there are endless examples of human history of complete insanity and ludicrous lies having a cratering impact.
I have been genuinely surprised the degree to which these online cults have been attractive to people. And there seems to be little correlation between the stupidity of the worldviews they're selling and the IQ of the people who buy into them, which is to say, there are a lot of very intelligent people buying into some very stupid, harmful ideas.
Which, perhaps, speaks to a conversation we haven't had which is long overdue: intelligence -- that is, IQ -- and wisdom, are not the same things.
Grain of salt and all, but I find it hard to dismiss the central idea here entirely,
The most interesting thing here is the assertion that the power lies with the collective (vs. Individualist) expression of this technique, and especially the idea that the alt-right seems to have out-collective'd the left, somehow.
I would not have bet on this 20 years ago, but a whole lot of demented ideological pathologies have switched places in those decades, and the Internet may well have something -- maybe a lot -- to do with it.
That this is a form of mass insanity is a mundane and obvious conclusion. If you believe insanity is doomed to failure, you're not going to see much point here. If you believe in the power of mass insanity to disrupt, subvert, and destroy -- and I certainly do -- this is a far more disconcerting documentary.
I'm not sure I fully buy the central premise of the documentary. I don't really know the extent to which these online communities had an impact on the 2016 election, which was, as far as I can tell, a reaction to the Obama presidency and social progress moving at a clip which terrified a lot of people.
Even assessing the alt-right as a whole, I don't know how it breaks down between edgy 4chan trolls vs. Garden variety working class bigots, who may not have any connection with meme warfare or care much about the Internet.
Still, there is something unsettling here. I was surprised the documentary didn't discuss Edward Bernays and the way similar systems of manipulation have been employed in the context of business and capitalism (e.g., advertising). The concept of manipulating people in this way is not new; the particular spin it takes in online forums, and especially the people trafficking in these techniques is, perhaps, unique to the modern age.
And more to the point, as to criticisms of this documentary, this central point is missed: whether something is hokum or not has depressingly little connection to its efficaciousness: there are endless examples of human history of complete insanity and ludicrous lies having a cratering impact.
I have been genuinely surprised the degree to which these online cults have been attractive to people. And there seems to be little correlation between the stupidity of the worldviews they're selling and the IQ of the people who buy into them, which is to say, there are a lot of very intelligent people buying into some very stupid, harmful ideas.
Which, perhaps, speaks to a conversation we haven't had which is long overdue: intelligence -- that is, IQ -- and wisdom, are not the same things.
Grain of salt and all, but I find it hard to dismiss the central idea here entirely,
The most interesting thing here is the assertion that the power lies with the collective (vs. Individualist) expression of this technique, and especially the idea that the alt-right seems to have out-collective'd the left, somehow.
I would not have bet on this 20 years ago, but a whole lot of demented ideological pathologies have switched places in those decades, and the Internet may well have something -- maybe a lot -- to do with it.
That this is a form of mass insanity is a mundane and obvious conclusion. If you believe insanity is doomed to failure, you're not going to see much point here. If you believe in the power of mass insanity to disrupt, subvert, and destroy -- and I certainly do -- this is a far more disconcerting documentary.