Demolition

John Winkelman

My place of employment is located in the Wolverine Brassworks building which, once upon a time, was a brassworks. Next to it is a foundry. They share an adjoining wall.

The foundry was still in operation when we moved our offices into the brassworks building three years ago. Sometime since then, it closed down. I imagine it had been in operation for some decades. And, being a foundry, I imagine most of it ha dnot had a thorough cleaning in that time.

This morning, a crew began demolishing the old foundry to make way for one half of a two-building, 20-story-tall hotel.

There were two pieces of machinery slowly crushing the building, looking much like dinosaurs foraging in a blue stone swamp. The smaller of the two machines had a thing like an enormous pair of bolt-cutters which it was using to tear apart the interior walls of the building.

demolishing-1

The larger of the two had an attachment like the claws of an eagle or owl, and it was using this appendage to grab huge chunks of building and pile them for (supposedly) some other machine to load into a dump truck.

demolishing-2

They started when we were in our Monday morning meeting. The first thing we saw was a sudden scattering of bricks, then a dinosaur-like head with a mouth-full of bricks looking for a place to spit them out.

Over the course of the day I began to notice a funny taste in the air, like standing on a road which has too much road-salt. And things around the office began to feel decidedly gritty. Given that the destruction caused huge plumes of black soot to cover the area, I can only assume that I have in me right now an assortment of chemicals which would make Union Carbide file for mining rights to my lungs.

And so it goes.

Building a Better Timeline

John Winkelman

I’m a programmer. And I like working in Flash. The timeline is an integral part of Flash, and I hate it. I don’t like touching anything in the development environment, ever.

So I wrote one in Actionscript. It was surprisingly simple.

 // this goes in an external actionscript file
 var frameCounter = 0;
 // position in the timeline
 var loopSize = 200;
 // length of the timeline
 this.onEnterFrame = function() {
 switch(frameCounter) {
 case 1: // something which happens on frame 1
 break;
 case 9: // something which happens on frame 9
 break;
 case 42: // something which happens on frame 42
 break;
 }
 frameCounter = (frameCounter+1) % loopSize;
 }

…and that is all there is to it. The only frames I have to worry about are the ones in which something actually happens. No filler necessary. No more digging through dozens of layers spread across hundreds of frames for a mis-typed variable.

And I did it myyyyyyyy wayyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!

Notes on Artificial Life

John Winkelman

To model artificial evolution chromosome for chromosome is impossible. We would have to have an operating system create random strings of digits and try to run them all, and then build upon the successes; e.g. those strings which will perform some function within that hardware.

Instead it is more useful to begin the modeling at a level of sophistication where the beings’ interaction with the environment is obvious – when the being is mobile. Mobility is perhaps the fundamental interaction with the environment; the key word there being “interaction”. Awareness of the environment is tricky, as it assumes a certain level of self-awareness: “I am not that within which I exist.” Interaction and awareness are not quite the same thing.

Interaction begins when there is more than one autonomous being with an environment: There is a thing here which is demonstrably not “I”.

Therefore, in modeling interaction, there seems at the moment to be three levels: awareness, recognition, and reaction.

Awareness: there is a thing here which is not-me
Recognition: that thing is of type “X”
Reaction: X is friend/foe/food

…and perhaps there is some resonance between recognition and reaction.

This begs the question: is existence a pre-requisite for awareness? Is the chain:

Existence – awareness – recognition – reaction?

The answer seems to be “yes”, for (in the realm of AI/ALife) a thing must exist before it can be made aware of any other thing. And it must be aware of a thing for it to recognize that thing. And it must recognize a thing before it can react to that thing.

And here we must make a distinction reflex action and re-action. The action of X is its existence/proximity, and it is to that which I am re-acting.

In modeling an entity we can approximate Awareness with a simple distance calculation: You are this close to me, therefore I am aware of you.

Recognition requires a more refined set of senses, say, sight/smell/hearing. This can be another distance calculation, or combine distance with (say) sight in a particular direction.

Using this as a beginning allows us to add a great many modifiers onto the base behavior:

  • fight/flight
  • arbitrary reaction to different Xs
  • different senses
  • – some senses broadcast (sight) – active
  • – some senses receive (smell) – reactive
  • reflex (pre-recognition) actions at different levels

This brings up another question: Does a thing actively broadcast its existence or do other things become passively aware of its existence?

Could be some of both; call it “signalling”.
Active: noise, colors
Passive: smell, body heat

…all of which allows different senses to react to different stimuli at different levels. It also suggests a slight change to the structure of awareness:

Exist — ?
Awareness — Reflex
Recognition — Reaction

This is a good starting point; the rest is just code.

Directions

John Winkelman

The following is the short list of search strings which have brought visitors to my site so far this month:

flash experiments
ecce signum
project gutenberg xml
amazing flash experiment
gutenberg xml
memoirs of a madman etext
tom sawyer gutenberg
william t. vollmann interview 2004
build a flash top-down game
carp through the ice
cellular automata in flash
cellular automoton
diary of a madman gogol etext
duplicate dynamically createemptymovieclip
flash experiments.
flash fractal
flash programming experiment
gutenberg project xml
isometric tracking flash
load dynamic jpegs before movie starts how

I suppose that by posting the search strings which bring people to my site on my site, I will set up an infinitely recursive loop which will suck the entire internet into Google.

Woo Hoo! Three day weekend!

Aargh

John Winkelman

Got to Kendall but the internet was broken, so my students got the evening off.

No, that isn’t entirely true. The internet was fine, but the IT monkeys up in Big Rapids let a virus through their fish-net of a firewall, and somehow that took down our connection here in Grand Rapids. Nothing the local IT folk could do about it.

And this after I spent hours (hours!) putting together an assignment which would have transformed all fourteen of my students into web developers the likes of which the world has seldom seen!

As the Russians say, i tak cebya .

So in order to maintain some semblance of a productive evening I downloaded and installed noeGNUd , which is nothing less than an isometric/3d interface for NetHack!!!

Yes, I know… NetHack can only truly be appreciated in the original Klingon ASCII. Yarbles to that, says I! Great Bolshy Yarblockoes! Someone went through the trouble to do this fantastic thing and make it available to the public, absolutely for free! And even put together a Windows port , which works fantastically!

And so, to bed.

Red Molly

John Winkelman

“Oh,” says Red Molly to James, “That’s a fine motorbike.
A girl could feel special on any such like”
Says James to Red Molly, “My hat’s off to you
It’s a Vincent Black Lightning, 1952.
And I’ve seen you at the corners and cafes it seems
Red hair and black leather, my favourite colour scheme.”
And he pulled her on behind and down to Boxhill they did ride

“Oh,” says James to Red Molly, “Here’s a ring for your right hand
But I’ll tell you in earnest I’m a dangerous man.
For I’ve fought with the law since I was seventeen,
I robbed many a man to get my Vincent machine.
Now I’m 21 years, I might make 22
And I don’t mind dying, but for the love of you.
And if fate should break my stride
Then I’ll give you my Vincent to ride.”

“Come down, come down, Red Molly,” called Sergeant McRae
“For they’ve taken young James Adie for armed robbery.
Shotgun blast hit his chest, left nothing inside.
Oh come down, Red Molly to his dying bedside.”
When she came to the hospital, there wasn’t much left
He was running out of road, he was running out of breath
But he smiled to see her cry
He said, “I’ll give you my Vincent to ride.”

Says James, “In my opinion, there’s nothing in this world
Beats a ’52 Vincent and a red headed girl.
Now Nortons and Indians and Greeves won’t do,
Ah, they don’t have a soul like a Vincent 52.”
Oh he reached for her hand and he slipped her the keys
Said, “I’ve got no further use for these.
I see angels on Ariels in leather and chrome,
Swooping down from heaven to carry me home.”
And he gave her one last kiss and died
And he gave her his Vincent to ride.

Richard Thompson
1952 Vincent Black Lightning

The End of The Beginning

John Winkelman

I just finished volume I of Rising Up and Rising Down, and I am now about 50 pages into volume II, which is the first volume of Justifications, i.e. when it is permissible to use violence.

The first section is “Defense of Honor”. In it Vollmann divides the idea of honor into two cross-referenced groups of two: Inner honor – the way a person holds his actions in relation to his conscience; outer honor – the way a person is perceived; individual honor – or honor as a person, and collective honor – honor as part of a greater whole or group.

I am not far beyond these definitions, but already Vollmann has quite an impressive list of players: Joan of Arc, Napoleon, the Afghans, rape victims, the families of rape victims, Yukio Mishima, the Samurai, Japanese twentysomethings, Martin Luther King, the Light brigade, King Xerxes and the Spartans at Thermopylae… the list goes on. In each case, he examines the violence committed and then compares the act to the justification given for the act and asks “Was this truly justified, or merely apologized for?”

Needless to say, this is an uncomfortable book to dig through. Vollmann writes beautifully, but the topic is, ultimately, so very ugly.

Carpe Carp

John Winkelman

The sides of the river below the dam are mostly lined with ice, except where turbulence keeps the water too angry to freeze. In some places the ice stands out more than ten feet from the bank (or wall, where development encroaches too closely). And in the midst of some of these sheets of ice are areas of open water. Some are caused by oddities in the bed of the river. Some by being insulated by heavy snowfall. Some are broken open by enterprising-yet-bored programmers. And some are caused by chemical-laden runoff from the nearby parking lots.

It was in one of the latter type that Scott and I found a carp. Nothing unusual in and of itself; the river is silty and slimy and therefore ideal for carp. But the ice surrounding the pool in question extends to the bed of the river, so the carp could not have swum here, and if it had been here before, we would certainly have noticed.

Then we noticed an odd track along the wall next to the river, as if something had been…dragged. No footprints, however; just the drag marks, extending from fifty feet or more down-river. And little clumps of snow which could have been kicked down from the walkway ten feet over our heads. Having been raised on the Hardy Boys, we immediately solved the mystery: someone, fishing from the walkway, had hooked the carp and, being unable to reel the carp up through twenty feet or more of open air, had brought the thing to land and walked it up to where the river bank was accessable from above. Then this brave sportsman had un-hooked the carp and thrown it in this pool.

Could have been worse, I suppose. He could have left it on the ice to form another carp-cicle for Scott and I to throw at one another.

For a few minutes, we contemplated this carp:

“What do you think”

“Dunno. Looks like a great place to be a carp.”

“Yeah, but it might freeze. Water isn’t deep enough to cover it.”

“Won’t freeze. The salt in the run-off will stop it.”

“Probably kill it too.”

“Takes a lot to kill a carp.”

“Yeah, but that road salt’s some nasty shit.”

“Yup.”

“Yup.”

So we decided to rescue the thing. I got the honors and Scott got the camera.

First I poked the carp with my finger. It didn’t do anything. Probably worn out from being dragged through the snow, and most certainly stoned out of its head from the parking-lot effluvium. Reassured, I very gently grabbed it around the middle, avoiding the dorsal spines, and lifted it out of the water. At that moment Scott’s foot broke through the ice and startled the carp, which immediately panicked (to the extent that a carp can panic) and flipped out of my hand and raced back and forth in the meter-square pool which was its toxic little world.

Perhaps it was having flash-backs.

After it calmed down I got it in a better grip, lifted it, and [And here I want to throw in an interjection: I do not recommend ever handling a carp bare-handed. Fish keep themselves aquadynamic, insulated and vermin-free by producing slime which coats them, and carp produce more than most fish. Coupled with the fact that a carp is basically an aquatic rat or seagull, and that the Grand River is not the freshest body of water in the Northern hemisphere, and I had a handful of “ecch yuck bleargh gack phew O God my hands!” -jw] carried it the ten feet to open water and gently set it down.

Apparently it had forgotten that it had ever lived anywhere else, so it wasn’t until my own foot broke through some ice that it panicked and swam away.

I would like to think that I have burned off some bad karma, and that I will not now return in some future incarnation as a carp which gets dragged through the snow, pickled by road salt, and rudely manhandled before I am returned to my hearth and home.

So that, O my readers, is the story behind todays photo in the River Project.

Suffering for Art

John Winkelman

Yesterday I forgot to bring my camera with me to work, so after the evening Kendall class I drove to the Fulton Street bridge over the Grand River and took a few low-light photos.

The way my camera (Olympus D-510) works is, if I shut of the flash and the ambient light is insufficient for a normal photo, the camera leaves the shutter open for longer than usual. This has two effects: more light hits the sensor, and I have to hold veeerrrrryyy still to avoid blurring the shot. Usually I just brace the camera on something.

Last night was abominably cold. I got out of my car and immediately my nose began to run. I braced the camera on the metal railing on the bridge, and as I was lining up my shot, eye to the viewfinder, I touched the tip of my nose to the rail.

Anyone who has ever licked a flagpole in the middle of winter can appreciate my situation.

There is no visible damage, but today the end of my nose feels sore and raw. So I hope you are enjoying all of those photos. They sure don’t come easy.