Scottunder

Prisoner's Dilemma gamed

This is a remarkable six minutes, thre final round of a British game show, "Golden Balls." Please watch before reading my comments below:

So, I found this on Boing Boing, which led to a blog post with some astute comments by Bruce Schneier and his followers, but I'll just sum up my own quick take on this usurping of the classic Prisoner's Dilemma.

1. Nick's confidence helps "sell" his choice to Ibrahim. Nick is not swayed by Ibrahim's appeal to reason or honor, or to his complete confusion and despair. Nick says what he will do and leaves no doubt that he will do it: he says he will STEAL and split the money after the show; Ibrahim has no choice but to take him at his word about the former and guess about the latter.

2. Ibrahim's choice is now whether to believe Nick, choose SPLIT, and hope Nick sticks to his promise to split the funds after the show, or to spite Nick, choose STEAL, and assume they both end up with nothing. Nick seems entirely resigned to this possibility.

3. Nick's choice of SPLIT is absolutely brilliant. If Ibrahim chooses SPLIT, which Nick is clearly confident is Ibrahim's only rational choice, then trust is restored and the money is split. But, if Ibrahim chooses STEAL (and thus gets all the money), he would have little honorable choice but to do what Nick proposed anyway: split the money after the show. (That's not 100%, but especially given what Ibrahim said about honor, it's seems overwhelmingly likely that Ibrahim would do that.)

4. As someone on Bruce Scheier's blog said, Nick is essentially saying "I don't trust you; you must trust me or lose all."

5. It's unclear if this would ever work again. 

Charles Irwin Weiner, 1931-2012

My father-in-law Charlie Weiner died on Saturday. He was 80, and having an extended stay in the village of Eyeries, Ireland with his wife, JoAnn Hughes.

Charlie was a remarkable guy, and I'm deeply sad that I won't get to spend more time with him. We only met in 2007, a few months after I met his daughter, Susan Weiner. I liked him immediately – he was funny, and engaging, and a great person to have a conversation with, because he loved to hear and share stories.

Here are some stories I heard him tell about himself and believe I remembered correctly:

He grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. In 1946, he hit the road to explore the South with a friend. Among his better documented stories is his encounter with Fiddlin' Bill Hensley, an old-time musician he searched out who lived in a ramshackle cabin near Asheville, North Carolina. This was the beginning of a lifelong obsession with music, and Charlie's music experiences ranged from New York jazz clubs to Gullah singers in the Georgia Sea Islands. He had a great ear and memory for melody – at 80, he could still sing Japanese songs he'd learned in Tokyo during his brief military career in the '50s.

In the late '40s he rode the rails and played songs with Woody Guthrie, who gave him one of his hand-drawn, mimeographed songbooks. He attended get-togethers at Pete Seeger's Greenwich Village home, and was present the night Lee Hays brought over his friend Ronnie Gilbert and the Weavers were born. Charlie acted as impromptu security for Paul Robeson and other musicians as the 1949 civil rights and music festival in Peekskill, New York deteriorated into a racist and anti-Semitic riot. 

His mother was a socialist who ran for office in New York, and Charlie remained a staunch supporter of those ideals his entire life. He distrusted and questioned authority, and always fought for basic human rights. In the '50s, he spent time in auto plants in Ohio, working on the line but secretly organizing for the union. He took part in civil rights marches in New York and Washington DC, and Susan got to see Martin Luther King when she was a young girl. He worked on campaigns for Henry Wallace, Eugene McCarthy, and George McGovern. 

He met his first wife, Shirley Marks, in Cleveland, and they brought forth Susan Weiner, my wife. Their marriage didn't last, but he and Shirley remained cordial friends until the end.

Charlie entered college at Case Institute of Technology, eventually earning a PhD in the History of Science and Technology in 1965, the subject that became the focus of the rest of his life. From 1965 to 1974 he was director of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics in New York, where he applied his earlier interests in talking to people and recording the results. In 1970, he used a Guggenheim Fellowship to move his family to Copenhagen so he could document the life of Niels Bohr, and many of his oral histories, films, and papers can be found online in AIP's Niels Bohr Library.

In 1975, he joined MIT as professor of History of Science and Technology, and was founding director of the MIT Oral History Program until 1986. He was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and, in 2002, he was named the Arthur Miller Lecturer on Science and Ethics at MIT.

His work collecting interviews, letters, and other papers resulted in four books: Exploring the History of Nuclear Physics, History of Twentieth Century Physics, The Legacy of George Ellery Hale (with Helen Wright and Joan Warnow), and Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections (with Alice Kimball Smith). This doesn't include the many interviews with prominent scientists Charlie made available to others. Notably, his interviews with Richard Feynman – the first time the famous physicist had agreed to discuss his work – were quoted and credited in James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman.

Sadly, his magnum opus, on which he worked for over twenty years, will remain incomplete. It was to be a book on (quoting his MIT page) “the history of social responsibility in science from the atomic bomb to contemporary genetic engineering. It uses archival and oral history materials to document scientists' complicity in and resistance to nuclear and biological weapons, their connections with citizens' groups affected by environmental toxins and by fallout from nuclear testing, and anticipatory concerns about ethical limits to human genetic manipulation.” 

Charlie never left behind his great love of music. Though he lived in Cape Cod with JoAnn, his wife and partner of many years, he kept a Greenwich Village apartment so he could see live jazz in the many clubs where he was well known to everyone from the owners and staff to musicians. Among his close friends, he counted guitarist Jim Hall (who gave him guitar lessons), trombonist Roswell Rudd, and pianist Bruce Barth, but the many, many people Charlie loved and who loved him back may be numberless. 

===

In February 2010, Susan and I came to Cape Cod, because Charlie had landed in the hospital with congestive heart failure (which continued to plague him for the next two years). It was not entirely a sad trip for us, as he was able to come home and he and JoAnn toasted our Valentine's Day engagement, which had occurred in the restaurant across from their home. By July, Charlie was healthy enough to come to California for Susan's birthday and he and JoAnn came to our wedding in October.

In December of 2010, Charlie and JoAnn had a long stay in Eyeries, a small village on the Beara Peninsula in southwest Ireland, so JoAnn could work on her art and Charlie could work on his book. Originally planned for three months, they had such a good time they extended their visit by another month. The people there welcomed them completely, and they made many friends. On their return home, Charlie played us recordings he made of community music sessions held in a nearby pub – a long and terribly sad song sung a cappella by an angelic-voiced young teen was a standout.

They returned to Ireland a year later. Despite misgivings about his health, Charlie was the biggest champion of the trip and refused to stay home. He looked forward to seeing his new friends and diving back into the book, where he'd done his most productive work in some time. After arriving in Eyeries, however, he never fully recovered his strength, and declined rapidly.

He is missed tremendously by all who knew him, and the idea that the world goes on without him – and his continuous, shameless puns – is hard to imagine. Sláinte and l'chaim, Charlie, we'll sing a song for you in loving memory.

UPDATE 1: Susan and I were just talking, and I remembered one of Charlie's most endearing, entertaining, and frustrating traits: his love of good food. I once came to Boston for business without Susan, before we were married. I said I would have a car and I wanted to drive down to the Cape to have lunch before my flight home. The first thing he asked was, "What do you want to eat?" Well, I don't know, we can figure it out when I get there. "No, I need to know. We'll figure out what you want, and then work backwards from there." (For the record, we ate at Sesuit Harbor in Dennis, a great, low-key place to get a lobster roll and sit next to the water that we returned to often.)

Eating out with Charlie meant enduring a ritual of joking banter with the waiter or waitress, who had to endure a pop quiz of their menu. "So, tell me, the sole -- is that sauteed in oil or just how is it prepared?" As much as he enjoyed finding new restaurants he loved sharing his favorites with his friends. 

UPDATE 2: Thanks to all the visitors who are leaving personal remembrances of Charlie. They mean a lot to his family, and help reveal a side of Charlie we didn't know directly. It is quite moving to hear the impact he had on others. Please encourage others!

MIT has published its official obituary. 

UPDATE 3: Will Thomas says kind things about this post and writes about oral history and the extent and importance of Charlie's work on the history of science blog Ether Wave Propaganda.

Special Exits

Overnight I read, in two sittings, Joyce Farmer's Special Exits. This is a graphic novel (or memoir, though the names are changed) about Farmer's father and stepmother who grow old together, deteriorate, and die. 

Sounds good?

Okay, maybe it doesn't. But it really is, and not in a heartwarming, sage-elders-teach-philosophy manner. It's honest, and revealing, and unromantic. It's messy. And it is unrelentingly real: this is how it is, or, at least, this is how it was for Joyce Farmer and even if the specifics vary, there is much here to help prepare all of us for the inevitable.

Joyce Farmer was a pioneering feminist cartoonist, and her pen-and-ink work has an old-school quality. There's none of the modern techniques of comic-making here, no varying frame sizes, nothing but story conveyed in a straightforward manner. And all of Farmer's characters and spaces have depth -- the furniture has cat hair, the garages are filled with boxes, and the humans are complex and frustrating. Here's a sample:

 

The Tiger

I've just finished as exciting a book as I've ever read, all the more remarkable because it's nonfiction: The Tiger by John Vaillant. Subtitled A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, it tells the story of a poacher killed in 1997 by a tiger near a remote village in extreme eastern Siberia, and of the tracker who must take action. 

Written with the careful unfolding of a detective story, it is filled with elements of an adventure yarn, a travel guide, and a history book. We learn about a wild region, the Primorye, and its people: some (like the Nanai) live off the forest in a way that hasn't changed for hundreds of years; others have been stranded since the fall of communism and live bleak existences, lightened only by sardonic humor and vodka. Poaching is common; China is relatively close, and has a large appetite for illegal tiger parts. Surprisingly, the tiger has its champions and protectors as well. 

Amur tigers -- also called Siberian tigers -- are remarkable and awe-inspiring animals, essentially unchanged for hundreds of millennia. As we learn in the book, they are excellent hunters, able to stalk their prey with an unmatched cunning and fierceness, and they are perfectly adapted physically to reign supreme in the "boreal jungle" of the taiga: 

To properly appreciate such an animal, it is most instructive to start at the beginning: picture the grossly muscled head of a pit bull and then imagine how it might look if the pit bull weighed a quarter of a ton. Add to this fangs the length of a finger backed up by rows of slicing teeth capable of cutting through the heaviest bone. Consider then the claws: a hybrid of meat hook and stiletto that can attain four inches along the outer curve, a length comparable to the talons of a velociraptor. Now, imagine the vehicle for all this: nine feet or more from nose to tail, and three and a half feet high at  the shoulder. Finally, emblazon this beast with a primordial calligraphy: black brushstrokes on a field of russet and cream, and wonder at our strange fortune to coexist with such a creature. (The tiger is, literally, tattooed: if you were to shave one bald, its stripes would still be visible, integral to its skin.) Able to swim for miles and kill an animal many times its size, the tiger also possesses the brute strength to drag an awkward, thousand-pound carcass through the forest for fifty or a hundred yards before consuming it.

Vaillant's writing is consistently vivid and compelling, his asides providing illuminating background that give the characters depth and context without overwhelming the central story or its thrilling conclusion. Vaillant's extensive research and interviews provides detailed recreations of places and events that allow us -- almost -- to enter the minds of the experienced woodsmen who eke out their rough years at the margins of a dense northern forest where temperatures often reach 40 below zero, and of the tigers with whom they maintain a careful and usually distant rapport. 

John Hunter and World Peace

Through a nice bit of serendipity a few weeks ago, I got to see an hour-long documentary, "World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements." It tells the story of John Hunter and the eight-week scenario experience he created, The World Peace Game. I was also able to meet John and work with him briefly a couple weeks later.

John has been teaching this game for over 35 years. His class is primarily a "gifted and talented" program for fourth-graders, but he has played it with other groups as well, up to high school grades. The World Peace Game is something like Risk, expanded and made more complex in a number of ways.

Instead of a game board, imagine four parallel Plexiglas sheets, each four-feet square, held apart by metal legs to form a cube. At table height, one sheet holds the outlines of fictional geographies, defining countries with model armies, vehicles, cities, and more. Above and below, the other sheets define space (with satellites), sky (with weather), and the world underground (with oil). 

After working with the kids in his class, John assigns roles, defining positions like prime minister of the world's richest country and the king of a much smaller one, a UN council and a team of arms dealers, a tribal leader and a weather god and -- in a masterstroke of invention -- a saboteur who acts as trickster, undermining progress and confusing play. 

The kids get dossiers and budgets, and John reveals a deck of cards containing random events like surprise attacks or natural disasters that give the kids a series of crises to solve. They must form alliances, make declarations, compromise on actions, unmask the saboteur, and achieve world peace. John said he's only had one group that "lost" in 35 years. 

The film shows the kids really working together and taking the lessons of negotiation and compromise to heart. John reads to them from Sun Tzu's The Art of War, and it's pretty amazing to see kids taking direction from -- and finding insights in -- a 2500-year-old military treatise. 

John's personal story is also revealed in the documentary: the son of a schoolteacher, John grew up in Virginia and was among the first to attend newly integrated schools. He studied Eastern philosophies while travelling in India, China, and Japan, and was particularly influenced by Gandhi and the idea of ahimsa. Returning to university, chance directed him to an experimental program in education, which led to the World Peace Game. He continues to teach, and this summer he has begun working with a set of students he hopes will take over the game in the future. 

The filmmaker, Chris Farina, is still working to fund this terrific film through a series of screenings. Contact him directly to arrange one and help spread the word. 

You can watch the trailer of the film on the website, and you can see John's TED Talk below. Both are worthwhile. 

(Photos copyright Will May)

Dark Matters

Perhaps taking a cue from the excellent RSA Animate videos, Dark Matters from PHD Comics is a six-minute video of a couple guys (apparently recorded at the playground or something) talking about dark matter and what physicists know and don't know.

 

Exit through the Gift Shop

The two best lines in the remarkable documentary Exit through the Gift Shop come near the end. Ostensibly about the street artist Bansky, the movie follows Thierry Guetta, an awkward vintage clothing store owner who first transforms into an obsessive videographer of L.A. street artists (including Shepard Fairey), and then becomes the artist Mr Brainwash, overnight becoming as successful as the artists he imitates.

Guetta's footage documents guerrilla artists as they create large and elaborate public artworks under cover of night while they dodge the police (or not). Later, we see these same artists' work become valuable commodities, as it moves from concrete walls on the street to hang on the walls in art galleries.

Much of their work repurposes and juxtaposes pop culture imagery and is thus (like the abstract expressionism in My Kid Could Paint That) highly imitatable. Thus, parts of this movie reinforce the idea that the art itself is less important than the story behind the art and the artist -- but Mr Brainwash's work, which has no history, still manages to sell for absurd prices to an art-buying public eager to catch (or invest in) the latest wave.

This presents a number of difficult questions: Does Guetta make art, or does it just look like art? What's the difference? Is Banksy (whose identity is not revealed) directing Guetta? Is the movie a hoax?

So, the two best lines are... well, I'll leave Banksy's excellent last line a mystery, but I'll repeat what his colleague Steve Lazarides says, since it's been widely quoted:

"I think the joke is on... I don’t know who the joke is on, really. I don’t even know if there is a joke."

Feltron 2010 Annual Report

Nicholas Felton is a talented New York-based graphic designer who, since 2005, has turned the mundane statistics of his year into a series of annual reports that are beautiful and entertaining.

This year, he memorialized his father using 4348 records, from the record of his father's birth in 1896 to a dentist appointment in 2010, including tickets, passports, calendars, and more. It's all presented in a thoughtful format that somehow makes the stoory of his life more remarkable. 

(found on Kottke.org)

My Kid Could Paint That

Watched a thought-provoking documentary on modern art, My Kid Could Paint That by Amir Bar-Lev.

The movie's narrative is pretty straightforward: a four-year-old girl in Binghamton, New York, Marla Olmstead, paints large and mature abstract expressionist paintings, and gets hailed as a genius. Media interest increases to a frenzy until an episode of 60 Minutes calls into question the authenticity of the work -- is the father involved? The parents adamantly deny it. It ends ambiguously, though it's clear the parents felt betrayed by Bar-Lev's editing choices and lack of unconditional support.

Bar-Lev has a privileged place, having started his documentary on the family before the allegations surfaced and having been accepted as a friend. The mother and father seem deeply sincere and surprised by the attention -- and the money -- but everything changes after the 60 Minutes pieces airs, and Bar-Lev turns skeptical. Bar-Lev reluctantly becomes a part of the film, as his motivations are as suspect as 60 Minutes's were.

The whole story plays into the common fear that modern art is a big scam, a hoax perpetrated by a conspiracy of snickering intellectuals and a duped audience who continue to see the emperor's new clothes. Finally, the "regular folk" seem to say, proof! I always said my kid could do that crap!

There was a period, shortly after I visited SFMOMA for the first time, when I felt the same way. I couldn't get it, and some of the pieces seemed extremely simple in concept and simple to make. Fortunately, I ran into a colleague who collected modern art (and later "dropped out" of the business world to attend art school). He gave me a great explanation that formed part of how I think about art now. I was happy to see, in the special features of the My Kid Could Paint That DVD, the NY Times art critic Michael Kimmelman touch on some of the same ideas I've been dragging around for many years now.

In addition to speaking about ideas like effort, insider status, intention, and other aspects, Kimmelman mentions story. Specifically, that some modern art is effective because of the backstory it carries. Thus, a single black dot on a white canvas might seem stupidly simplistic and something anyone could do, but if we know nothing of the artist's intention or body of work, then we miss a vital ingredient in the piece's story. Out of the context of this back-and-forth dialogue with the rest of the art world, your black dot is just a black dot, but the one in the gallery is (to use another analogy) like a fragment of a cellphone conversation overheard on the subway -- it's essentially meaningless without the rest of the story.

Are Marla Olmstead's paintings real? The best of them (like the 3'x3' "Asian Sun" seen here) seem to have a compositional intention that is (almost literally) larger than Marla could have done on her own -- her early technique involved her sitting directly on the canvas as it lay flat on a table. On the other hand, if she did do them alone and achieved that result unconsciously, is the art less real because if it? Because of her age, they have no context beyond our shared cultural recognition of expressionist paintings. Is the story behind the art more important?

Some of the most interesting scenes involved the people on the periphery. The primary gallery owner, a hyperrealist painter who gives his true opinion of abstract art in an unguarded moment; the buyers of "Ocean," agreeing to pay $20,000 for a work the wife is clearly ambivalent about before driving off in their ridiculous Hummer; and the original reporter who broke the story, regrets having done so, and who remains the most clear-headed person in the documentary.

It all reminded me of the questions raised in Errol Morris's series in the NY Times, "Bamboozling Ourselves," about Han van Meegeren, an extremely successful art forger who made "newly discovered Vermeers" that fooled many experts despite what appears to be their complete inferiority to the master's true work.

To be sure, the Van Meegeren story raises many, many questions. Among them: what makes a work of art great? Is it the signature of (or attribution to) an acknowledged master? Is it just a name? Or is it a name implying a provenance? With a photograph we may be interested in the photographer but also in what the photograph is of. With a painting this is often turned around, we may be interested in what the painting is of, but we are primarily interested in the question: who made it? Who held a brush to canvas and painted it? Whether it is the work of an acclaimed master like Vermeer or a duplicitous forger like Van Meegeren — we want to know more.

Today's ephemera: Little Red Wagon (1949)

The Little Red Wagon, illustrated by Clare McKinley. A Rand-McNally Book-Elf Junior, whatever that means, from 1949. I've put the whole book up, but my favorite pages are below.

I love these old children's books. The illustrations are so joyful. Yes, yes, everyone lives in an all-white world of picket fences and friendly grownups, and these two little parentless six-year-olds are apparently free to wander around the town, accosting toddlers and unescorted women. Still, bright and shiny happiness in a time before irony or zombies.

Random thought number one: the image of Mrs Porter (see below), with her bursting bag of groceries, visible celery, and imminent leash entanglement, reminded me (uncomfortably) of the celery and loose underwear illustrations of Art Frahm, especially, say, this one. Was Frahm inspired by The Little Red Wagon? Was he thinking, Ho ho, if only Mrs Porter's bloomers had fallen impossibly to her ankles?

Random thought number two: I looked up "Mason and Lang," the name of the delivery service in the book, but the only reference is to a historical novel from 1899, "Parson Kelly." I have no idea what it means.