Orange Orange (category:rambling)

[East Coast Beach, Barbados from Infrared]

I went home two weeks ago for winter break with half my suitcase full of books. They had been acquired over the course of the semester, from various stores, friends, and libraries, but all had the dubious distinction of being interesting enough to obtain but not to finish.

Not surprisingly, top of the list were course readings. Quantum mechanics for Chemistry. Intro to the Theory of Computation. Justice. The last two were actually interesting, and would make good reading if you were locked up with nothing else to do.

Speaking of locked up, I did manage to pick up a copy of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, a non-fictional (and yet finely wrought) account of a quadruple murder in Kansas in the late 60’s. This–along with the other books on my list, Age of Iron by Coetzee, Four Screenplays by Ingmar Bergman, and Watchmen, the graphic novel by Alan Moore about washed-up, depressed, and depressing superheroes–is probably the most pessimistic and misanthropic mélange possible I could have assembled for my exhausted, overworked, and already seasonal-affective-disorder-addled self. Did I mention I went home to Maine for break?

Conclusion: don’t read Watchmen, and ignore the misguided editors at TIME who dubbed it one of the “top 100 novels” of all time. Do read In Cold Blood, regardless of how depressing it sounds, and watch the movie Capote afterward. Oh, and read it during the summer.

I like anime. Didn’t used to, but now I do. Before you stop being — or rule out the possibility of becoming — friends with me, let me explain why.

Actually, I can’t explain why. Any evocation of the, er, evocativeness of anime I could muster up would sound very lame. Just see this list of movies instead. Do it in this order, and you’ll be sort of recreating my life. The recent, anime-watching parts of it at least. And who doesn’t want to live my life? I almost wish I had a second one. Right now.

Start with Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. See it with a little sibling or a sweetheart. It’s not exactly romantic, but magical for sure. Like a Disney movie, but less annoying singing and more awesome Japanese weirdness. The same weirdness (only it’s different now–philosophical, sci-fi, and weirder) pervades Ghost in the Shell. Don’t watch this with a sweetheart. Invite your Buddhism-obsessed, sexually frustrated, Descartian friend over instead. Or you know, your inner friend.

Then prepare to be astounded by the originality, intricacy, and audacity of Death Note. This is a TV series, but it won’t take too long to finish, since the episodes are 20 minutes each. After that, relax, and invite back your friend (the real one) for another Miyazaki classic, My Neighbor Totoro. Then put on some nice 80’s clothes and do a dance routine to the Totoro song.

Now watch The Animatrix. (You might want to see The Matrix first.) There are 9 short films in total–you can watch them all in order or just the last three. The seventh one, “Beyond”, is the least violent and most interesting, almost as if Miyazaki directed it himself.

Finally, if you want to see what Japanese middle-schoolers watch, check out Cowboy Bebop. Otherwise, save some time and spend it on another Miyazaki film instead, perhaps Howl’s Moving Castle. By the way, if you haven’t noticed, this post is really just about how much I love Miyazaki’s films.

It’s because I’ve been practically living in the darkroom. After a 7-hour session yesterday of developing film and making prints of an impromptu portrait session of my roommates, I’ve put a few more scans up on Flickr.

This is my friend CJ. I did my best to impose an aura of existential despair on her. You can’t tell from looking at the picture, but the darkness of the collective unconscious (er, black blackground) is actually a blue fleece blanket which I thumbtacked to the wall behind. There are some hanging edges, and a label that says “L.L. Bean,” which I’ve cropped out of the frame.

Lucas (thumbnail on the far right) and Pedro also gave their best shot at an expression “purged of all mirthful expression,” which I admit was not the most straightforward instruction to have given to my hapless roommates / portrait models. Thankfully they knew what I was going for, and I’m pleased with the results.

I’m hoping this shot inspires CJ to become a character in a Japanese No drama.

[via Legion]

Thanks to Garrett over at the new(-ish) Harvardian-run blog Legion for pointing out this seriously awesome use of Flickr and image-matching algorithms. The tool lets you search Flickr for photos that are predominantly one color, or a small palette of colors. The most beautiful results come from clicking just one or two colors–the individual pictures might not necessarily be spectacular, but seeing them all arranged on one page is magical, as the screenshot above might attest.

This reminds me of 80 million tiny images, a project at the MIT media lab. Only instead of sophisticated image-matching algorithms (a specialty of Idée Inc., the developers of the Multicolr app) the MIT researchers devote their computational resources to creating a map of semantic relationships between words. Basically, they pick thousands of English words and put them in a grid so that adjacent words have similar meanings. Then they fill the grid with thumbnails that represent the averages of the topmost hits on Google images when the word in a grid element is searched. The resulting color mosaic is pretty awe-inspiring, and has some interesting patterns. (I rambled quite a bit about this already.)

It’s interesting that while the theory of image processing can get pretty involved, successful commercial applications on these algorithms tend to be built around simple, elegant ideas that get refined progressively (think Google PageRank). For example, procedures for color-matching (among other visual parameters, like shape and texture) have been around forever, but only now are we seeing companies with the resources and design sensibilities to parlay this into useful and attractive products like the one above. I think what’s new is the access we now have to the huge datasets available on online image banks like Flickr or professional photo services, and the broadband infrastructure to be crawling these databases so extensively.

This is a cool example of the fact that, while technological improvements in computing and networking are necessarily quantitative (increased data-storage and bandwidth, with the overhaul in architecture once in a while), second-order changes in how we use that technology continue to be qualitative, dramatic, and mind-boggling. It doesn’t matter that we’re using image-processing concepts that computer scientists gave us 20 years ago–the fact that such a simple idea can be put through enough hours of seemingly inelegant number-crunching to produce something like the above is itself a profound and novel achievement. </gushing at the incomprehensible greatness of computers>

1. A writeup about Starcraft and the community portal SC2GG.com in Escapist Magazine, a gaming/digital culture e-publication. The author identifies himself as an English-speaking, American-born Chinese “artist’s soul living in an engineer’s mind.” Which probably explains why his article seems to accomplish what I tried to do earlier on this blog. At one point, the author even lapses into describing my life (creepy, right?):

After cooking my dinner (usually pasta or rice), I would load one of Klazart’s, diggity’s or moletrap’s StarCraft videos. Here I was: tired after a long day, my room a mess, nursing a bowl of carbohydrates with Zerg versus Protoss on my computer screen. Weeks earlier, two Korean teenagers competed furiously in a televised match 7,000 miles away. An Indian-born Irishman and two Californians watched the raw video, ignored the Korean announcers and provided their own analysis of each game.

2. A gamer explains why Starcraft ought to be considered an Olympic sport. I say why not, especially since Starcraft requires just as much skill as chess? Oh wait…

3. My friend CJ’s post on some firsthand experiences attending pro Starcraft competitions in Korea.