Tags: theory

The Tyranny of Now — The New Atlantis

I’m not a fan of Nicholas Carr and his moral panics, but this is an excellent dive into some historical media theory.

What Innis saw is that some media are particularly good at transporting information across space, while others are particularly good at transporting it through time. Some are space-biased while others are time-biased. Each medium’s temporal or spatial emphasis stems from its material qualities. Time-biased media tend to be heavy and durable. They last a long time, but they are not easy to move around. Think of a gravestone carved out of granite or marble. Its message can remain legible for centuries, but only those who visit the cemetery are able to read it. Space-biased media tend to be lightweight and portable. They’re easy to carry, but they decay or degrade quickly. Think of a newspaper printed on cheap, thin stock. It can be distributed in the morning to a large, widely dispersed readership, but by evening it’s in the trash.

Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies – Baldur Bjarnason

This extract from Baldur’s new book is particularly timely in light of the twipocalypse.

Color and Contrast.com

A lovely website (or web book?) dedicated entirely to colour contrast, complete with interactive illustrative widgets.

A comprehensive guide for exploring and learning about the theory, science, and perception of color and contrast.

How Claude Shannon’s Information Theory Invented the Future | Quanta Magazine

Shannon is not exactly a household name. He never won a Nobel Prize, and he wasn’t a celebrity like Albert Einstein or Richard Feynman, either before or after his death in 2001. But more than 70 years ago, in a single groundbreaking paper, he laid the foundation for the entire communication infrastructure underlying the modern information age.

Complexity Explained

Emergence and complex systems, explained with interactive diagrams.

Hidden Heroines of Chaos: Ellen Fetter and Margaret Hamilton | Quanta Magazine

Before leading the software project that put men on the moon, Margaret Hamilton worked on the equations that led to chaos theory, followed by Mount Holyoke graduate, Ellen Fetter.

I Played Fortnite and Figured Out the Universe - The Atlantic

Robin Sloan smushes the video game Fortnite Battle Royale together with Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem trilogy and produces a perfect example of game theory, cooperation, and the prisoner’s dilemma.

Based on my experiments in the laboratory of Fortnite, I think Liu Cixin is wrong. Or at least, he’s not entirely right. Fortnite is more Dark Forest theory than not, and maybe that’s true of the universe, too. But sometimes, we have a lever against the vise of game theory, and in this case, it is a single bit of communication. I mean “bit” in the programmer’s sense: a flag with a designated meaning. Nothing more. My heart emote didn’t make Fortnite cuddly and collaborative, but it did allow me to communicate: “Hold up. Let’s do this a different way.”

The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds

The latest explainer/game from Nicky Case is an absolutely brilliant interactive piece on small world networks.

V6: Color | Rob Weychert

Go deep, deep down the rabbit hole of Rob’s brain in all its colourful glory. Seriously, this is simultaneously a great write-up of how he came up with his site’s lovely colour scheme(s), and it’s a terrific primer on colour theory and why the HSL value in CSS is so, so wonderful!

How many dimensions are there, and what do they do to reality? | Aeon Essays

In this terrific essay by Marina Benjamin on the scientific and mathematical quest for ever-more dimensions, she offers this lovely insight into the mind-altering effects that the art of Giotto and Uccello must’ve had on their medieval audience:

By consciously exploring geometric principles, these painters gradually learned how to construct images of objects in three-dimensional space. In the process, they reprogrammed European minds to see space in a Euclidean fashion.

In a very literal fashion, perspectival representation was a form of virtual reality that, like today’s VR games, aimed to give viewers the illusion that they had been transported into geometrically coherent and psychologically convincing other worlds.

Explorable Explanations

A collection of interactive lessons—games that teach—featuring the work of Bret Victor, Nicky Case, and more (the site is put together by Nicky Case).

Trolleys, veils and prisoners: the case for accessibility from philosophical ethics

The transcript of a presentation on the intersection of ethics and accessibility.

A Man in a Hurry: Claude Shannon’s New York Years - IEEE Spectrum

Of course, information existed before Shannon, just as objects had inertia before Newton. But before Shannon, there was precious little sense of information as an idea, a measurable quantity, an object fitted out for hard science. Before Shannon, information was a telegram, a photograph, a paragraph, a song. After Shannon, information was entirely abstracted into bits. The sender no longer mattered, the intent no longer mattered, the medium no longer mattered, not even the meaning mattered: A phone conversation, a snatch of Morse telegraphy, a page from a detective novel were all brought under a common code. Just as geometers subjected a circle in the sand and the disk of the sun to the same laws, and as physicists subjected the sway of a pendulum and the orbits of the planets to the same laws, Claude Shannon made our world possible by getting at the essence of information.

The Evolution of Trust

Such a great primer on game theory—well worth half an hour of your time.

Programming Design Systems

This is a really intriguing book that combines design theory and programming—learn about contrast, colour, and shapes, with each lesson supported by code examples.

It’s still a work in progress but the whole thing is online for free. Yay for web books!

The Man Who Turned Paper Into Pixels on Vimeo

A short film about Claude Shannon and Information Theory — not exactly as in-depth as James Gleick’s The Information, but it does a nice job of encapsulating the fundamental idea.

The Pixar Theory by Jon Negroni

I like this theory!

Weak Ties, Twitter and Revolution | Wired Science | Wired.com

Responding to Malcolm Gladwell's recent piece in the New Yorker, Jonah Lehrer argues that the strength of weak ties *does* extend to social activism.

Web science a new frontier - Find Events - The Royal Society

This looks like being a thoroughly excellent event at The Royal Society, featuring Tim Berners-Lee and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.

Six Degrees of Black Sabbath #6dobs

An extremely addictive bit of fun with small world network theory as applied to music.