![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.conversiondiary.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/7_quick_takes_sm1.jpg\" "\\"7_quick_takes_sm\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>\u2014 1 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n If you read no other Quick Take today, read this one and do me a tremendous favor. My housemate Alex (co-creator of those philosophy t-shirts<\/a>) has been nominated for \u201cBest Viral Song\/Video about DC<\/a>\u201d by Express Night Out. \u00a0Can you all pop over and vote for his \u201cThe Ballad of Pepco<\/a>\u201d under the DC Life tab?<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the background: Pepco is the utility company for the DC area, and it\u2019s terrible. \u00a0We had a lot of blackouts this summer, some of which went on for days with few progress updates. \u00a0So Alex wrote new lyrics to \u201cThe Ballad of Joe Hill\u201d to comfort us in our time of literal darkness. \u00a0Here\u2019s an excerpt:<\/p>\n I dreamed I saw Pepco last night Says I \u201cNo, you don\u2019t understand Says he \u201cYou\u2019re not upon our map; \u201cYou can\u2019t just leave us stranded here \u201cWell there\u2019s your fatal flaw,\u201d said he, \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 2 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019d feel really bad for the Quick Take that had to follow\u00a0that<\/em>, but, luckily,\u00a0The Atlantic<\/a><\/em> has an interview up with Randal Monroe<\/a> (the creator of xkcd<\/a>). \u00a0They end up talking about his new \u201cWhat if?<\/a>\u201d project, where every Tuesday he gives an illustrated answer to a weird physics problem (What if you pitched a baseball at close to the speed of light? \u00a0What if all the rain in a storm fell in one giant drop? etc).<\/p>\n Pardon me while I melt into a puddle of squee.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I like doing is finding the places in those questions where normal people \u2014 or, people who have less spare time than I do \u2014 think, \u201cThis is stupid,\u201d and stop. I think the really cool and compelling thing about math and physics is that it opens up entry to all these hypotheticals \u2014 or at least, it gives you the language to talk about them. But at the same time, if a scenario is completely disconnected from reality, it\u2019s not all that interesting. So I like the questions that come back around to something in real life.<\/p>\n And the great thing with this is that once someone asks me something good, I can\u2019t not figure out the answer, you know? I get really serious, and I\u2019ll drop whatever I\u2019m doing and work on that. One of the questions I recently answered was, \u201cWhat if, when it rains, the rain came down in one drop?\u201d And I was like, \u201cWell, how big would that drop be?\u201d I know a little bit about meteorology, and then, before I knew it, I had spent four hours working out the answer.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Shortly after I started my freshman year, I made three good friends when we all agreed to dress up a ninjas and attack Richard Stallman<\/a>\u00a0when he came to speak on campus. \u00a0In the picture on Wikipedia<\/a>, I\u2019m the ninja with upraised arms.<\/p>\n UPDATE:<\/strong> Nick drew my attention to another delightful Monroe interview<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 3 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n I feel obliged to let you know about all interesting Turing Test related stories I come across, so here\u2019s a heads up that a group of programmers managed to write NPCs for a video game that were as likely as real humans to be judged as humans<\/a>.<\/p>\n The complex gameplay and 3-D environments of \u201cUnreal Tournament 2004\u201d require that bots mimic humans in a number of ways, including moving around in 3-D space, engaging in chaotic combat against multiple opponents and reasoning about the best strategy at any given point in the game. Even displays of distinctively human irrational behavior can, in some cases, be emulated.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople tend to tenaciously pursue specific opponents without regard for optimality,\u201d said Schrum. \u201cWhen humans have a grudge, they\u2019ll chase after an enemy even when it\u2019s not in their interests. We can mimic that behavior.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/a>\u2014 4 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n Remember when I was blogging about Hanna Rosin and her \u201cthank goodness hookup culture saves women from the constraints of affection\u201d article<\/a>? \u00a0Well, Cowbirds in Love seems to have taken her argument delightfully far past it\u2019s natural conclusion<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 5 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n Alyssa Rosenberg has an excellent post up\u00a0comparing\u00a0Ms Magazine\u2019s\u00a0original\u00a0cover with this week\u2019s 40th anniversary cover<\/a> (both of which feature Wonder Woman). \u00a0Here\u2019s her read on the original:<\/p>\n The billboard calls for \u201cPeace & Justice In \u201972,\u201d rather than making specific feminist demands. She\u2019s in a landscape where the war in Vietnam and the blasted landscape it\u2019s produced are in danger of intruding on the American main street, and Wonder Woman rushes to catch a war plane before it crashes, perhaps into that schoolbus. In this reading, feminism is part of a much larger left movement, but the implication is also that it has a larger role to play. The cover lines may be about paid housework and body hair, but Wonder Woman, as the personification of feminism, is solving not just any problems she might have as a super-powered lady, but the problems of everyone else. This was a time when people still talked about misogyny as a root cause of war, something that seems awfully distant from our mainstream political discourse now.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now that I\u2019m following Escher Girls<\/a>, the first thing I thought when I saw the new drawing was \u201cWonder Woman\u2019s breasts are larger, her hair is straightened, and her expression is more blankly pretty. \u00a0Grump!\u201d<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 6 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n But if you want to kvetch about media representation of comic book heroes that sell\u00a0everyone<\/em> short, you\u2019ll probably like David Denby\u2019s \u201cHas Hollywood Murdered the Movies<\/a>\u201d in\u00a0The New Republic<\/em>.<\/p>\n [S]patial integrity is just about gone from big movies. What Wyler and his editors did\u2014matching body movement from one shot to the next\u2014is rarely attempted now. Hardly anyone thinks it important. The most common method of editing in big movies now is to lay one furiously active shot on top of another, and often with only a general relation in space or body movement between the two. The continuous whirl of movement distracts us from noticing the uncertain or slovenly fit between shots. The camera moves, the actors move: in Moulin Rouge, the camera swings wildly over masses of men in the nightclub, Nicole Kidman flings herself around her boudoir like a rag doll. The digital fight at the end of The Avengers takes place in a completely artificial environment, a vacuum in which gravity has been abandoned; continuity is not even an issue. If the constant buffoonishness of action in all sorts of big movies leaves one both over-stimulated and unsatisfied\u2014cheated without knowing why\u2014then part of the reason is that the terrain hasn\u2019t been sewn together. You have been deprived of that loving inner possession of the movie that causes you to play it over and over in your head.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Auughh! This! I hate seeing an action movie and not being able to understand the logic of fights. \u00a0I couldn\u2019t see what Batman was doing\u00a0better<\/em> the second time he fought Bane and Denby\u2019s right that there was no sense of how well the Avengers were doing\u00a0strategically<\/em> for most of the battle, just a bunch of set pieces.<\/p>\n This is why I\u2019m really worried for the\u00a0Ender\u2019s Game<\/em> movie<\/a>. \u00a0Those fight\u2019s are\u00a0fast<\/em> in the books, but the narration means they don\u2019t enfold in real time and we get a chance to understand how clever Ender and Bean are. \u00a0I\u2019m really worried the movie won\u2019t be able to give us that sense of awe.<\/p>\n For all that the Robert Downey Jr Sherlock Holmes movies are\u00a0awful<\/em>, they did a nice job with the fight scenes.<\/p>\nhttp:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=i2ILcVJQqFI&t=1m7s<\/a>\n To paraphrase Peggy Noonan: the most moving part of a fight is its logic.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 7 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n So since we were talking about\u00a0Ender\u2019s Game<\/em>, let\u2019s close out the week with a link about gifted children and problematic ways of assessing them. \u00a0 Swarthmore professor Timothy Burke, inspired by the Stuyvesant cheating scandal<\/a>, set out three possible solutions<\/a> to the problem he defines as follows:<\/p>\n The NYT article suggests that skilled, systematic cheaters often rationalize their behavior by arguing either that everyone does it (which Hayes would argue is a structural inevitability in social hierarchies that justify stratification via meritocratic distinction) or that cheating is the only way to temporarily distinguish oneself amid uniform excellence, and when you\u2019re done with the test, the class, the moment, you will have earned your place in a college or a job and can prove your genuine merit. As Hayes notes, that moment never comes, the cheater is never at rest, at home, able to show their true quality independent of silly tests and bullshit obstacles. The whole of life becomes a bullshit obstacle, and the search for the edge, the advantage, the trick becomes perpetual. Which doesn\u2019t just hollow out the person, it contributes to the entire socioeconomic system dropping into an ever-accelerating pursuit of short-term gain at the cost of long-term sustainability.<\/p>\n The first problem with narrowly setting out to foil cheaters is that if students or employees no longer believe that tests measure anything important, simple anti-cheating techniques become another petty annoyance\u2013particularly if they think that the testers or bosses are using tests as a crude rationing device or screening mechanism, a way to avoid grappling with difficult or nuanced evaluations. Simple tricks are equally simply defeated, and each one of them just increases the sense that testing is a sadistic and cynical exercise.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nDriving down my street.
\n\u201cThank God!\u201d said I, \u201cOur power\u2019s down.\u201d
\n\u201cIt never died,\u201d said he\u2026
\n\u201cIt never died,\u201d said he.<\/p>\n
\nThe lights have all gone out!
\nThe food\u2019s now bad. We\u2019re going mad
\nFrom heat without a doubt\u2026
\nFrom heat without a doubt.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nThe grid shows you\u2019re just fine.\u201d
\nSays I \u201cBut look out on our street.
\nThere\u2019s a down-ed power line\u2026
\nThere\u2019s a down-ed power line.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nWith no good end in sight!
\nDidn\u2019t you prep and plan for this \u2013
\nFor setting things a-right\u2026
\nFor setting things a-right?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\u201cNow let me put you wise.
\nWe\u2019re such a bad utility, yet
\nYou assume we\u2019re organized\u2026
\nYou assume we\u2019re organized?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/a><\/p>\n