In polar coords, with integration limits:

All the past posts, as well as many future ones to come, can now be found at http://jueseph.com/blog.

One in the morning isn’t always the best time to embark on programming projects of indeterminate length and scope. I learned that last night when, after having spent most of the afternoon and evening on a take-home midterm for my visualization class, I was beset with the dilemma of the extra credit problem. “Design your own poetry visualization,” along the lines of Poetry on the Road. This is a series of graphic designs commissioned each year by the Internationales Literaturfestival Bremen, designed by a team of professional graphic artists led by Boris Müller. The two things that immediately struck me about these graphics were 1) their juxtaposition of visual complexity and conceptual simplicity, and 2) their obvious requirement of a vastly greater number of hours — and sheer programming virtuosity — than the 24 hour maximum allotted for my midterm.

I must’ve been struck with temporary amnesia, or just had an acute attack of masochism, because I promptly forgot about the 3 problem sets that I had been saving up my sleep-hours for later in the week, and proceeded to bang away at Processing (coolest programming language ever) for the next 3 hours. The result, humble by the standards of any legitimate computer artist — but hopefully not of my exam grader — is this, a grid of colored squares representing “The Wasteland” by T.S. Eliot. I chose the poem mainly because it was long enough to really show patterns in my algorithm, but not so long as to crash the program. (although I would like to run Paradise Lost or The Iliad through, just for kicks.)

The algorithm is a little boring, in the sense that the colors of the squares, each representing one word, are modulated only by two variables — the length of the word and its vertical position in the poem. I would much rather encode some sort of semantic information, like part of speech, word meaning, or even basic syntactical information (e.g. how the 2006 Poetry on the Road design connects words used in the same sentence by a curved line). Alas, it’s time to move on to the next item on the to-do list — running simulations of biological systems on Matlab. Yay science! Nay for my eyeballs!

(and while we’re on the topic of visualization, let me leave you with the following, unbelievably cool visualization. Scroll to the bottom, turn on the sound, and press play — you’ve never seen anything like this on your Windows Media Player or iTunes)

For a computer science assignment last week I wrote a program with a friend in Scheme that generates sentences using context-free grammar. By specifying a few basic rules for parts of speech and including a simple word list, you can get some remarkably coherent results — coherent, that is, in a strictly grammatical, minimalist sense. There’s actually no attention paid to the meaning of the words used, or to their relationship with each other, a consequence of the grammar being “context-free.” We had a few laughs using our program to generate bogus math proofs, but instead of puzzling you with a slew of inside jokes and insomnia-induced geekiness, I’ll point your way to a much more impressive — not to mention amusing — application of the same algorithm, this time used to generate an entire scientific paper. You can even put your own name down as an author! Here’s an example passage:

We question the need for digital-to-analog converters. It should be noted that we allow DHCP to harness homogeneous epistemologies without the evaluation of evolutionary programming [2], [12], [14]. Contrarily, the lookaside buffer might not be the panacea that end-users expected. However, this method is never considered confusing. Our approach turns the knowledge-base communication sledgehammer into a scalpel.
[Stribling et. al (PDF)]

Not too bad for randomly generated babble, is it? I recommend reading the rest of the article, although you might find it more amusing if you have a slight background in computer science. My favorite part of reading this is picking out the grammatical and structural elements that I’ve written into papers before, and have read countless times in other people’s writing. Cynics (i.e. Alan Sokal) might point out that despite this being completely unintelligible, it actually passes quite well for something that could be published.

Context-free EVERYTHING

Probably even cooler than the paper generator, though, is the same idea applied to digital art. Chris Coyne wrote a program, Context Free Design Grammar (CFDG), which will generate an image given a set of rules specifying shapes, colors, and structure. The cool thing here, again, is that the rules you need to write can be incredibly basic. Most of the complexity and beauty of the images comes from the nature of the algorithm, which is based on recursion and a sort of controlled randomness. Unlike fractals, which are specified almost completely by the math used in the algorithm, or like vector/3D rendered art, which are explicitly described by the artist, what is so fascinating to me about context-free art is the way it seems to strike a balance between user and algorithmic control.

When I first started to learn Chinese ink painting (which I later abandoned) one of the most frustrating things was how little of what I envisioned painting actually made it onto the paper. The ink would invariably bleed and scramble arbitrarily over the rice paper in all sorts of ugly blotches and patterns. Then, moving my brush to try and “control” the bleed only made things worse. Only much later did I realize that the point of painting wasn’t to impose your dominance over the randomness, but to let the randomness happen and try to predict it to achieve your artistic goal. Since much of what passes for “digital art” nowadays seems to be bent on enabling the artist to establish totalitarian control over the final product, it’s really cool to see the kind of creativity that CF art seems to offer. Make sure you check out some of the examples in the gallery (also linked to at the very top of this post)!

I love shopping week at the beginning of every semester, because it is a time of beautiful leisure and carefree distraction.

Okay, so I skip class for a couple days. But consider this–other, much more ambitious students will go to 20 classes that they don’t end up taking. And guess what? I also end up not taking those same 20 classes! I’ve effectively simulated Ivy-league-grade ambition by sitting in my room and surfing YouTube, and nobody is the wiser. A pareto-efficient transaction of sorts, between myself and The Man. (Maybe you question the correctness of my econ verbiage here. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I never sat in on any econ classes.)

Ah! But even without me once having to go outside, that perfect someone or something (but actually some thing) still strikes me like a thunderbolt between the eyes. Her name is CS171, and she is a course on visualization, never before offered by the computer science department here. The website drew me in and made my life–and beautiful graphs–flash before my eyes. The software dazzled me and motivated my inner nrrd. The examples in lecture inspired and moved me. (Watch that last clip from the beginning until at least 5:10 for full awe-inspiring effect.) All of it so compelling that I watched an entire first half of a lecture video without playing online Boggle at the same time. Or maybe that’s because the videos are broadcast live from the lecture and I can submit questions to the professor in REAL TIME via Skype.

I’ve found my soul-course-mate. All those years of computer geekdom abortively pursued amid an inescapable urge to create; those forays into drawing and music that fizzled as quickly as my aesthetic sense gave way to a deep realization of an empirical epistemology; science, with its untameable threads of abstraction that have floated at arms’ length beyond my mental grasp. Where the inner aesthete comes out to play with the code-monkey, and all rejoice in the data of the empiricist. This is where they all come together, in visualization.

What does this all mean? Should I quit biology? Medicine? Or maybe just that I should make more, cooler, graphs when I do research.

So it was, the week after finals ended, before the intersession fun kicked in and I was just sitting in my room, ready to decrease entropy with the input of some enthalpy.

I vacuumed, re-attached all my posters to the walls, put all the books and errant pieces of silverware back in their places. Then I attempted the most ambitious and dangerous undertaking of all, so much so, in fact, that I haven’t done it since the 2nd year of high school–I took out all my files and began reorganizing them.

Most people, I imagine, like to keep it simple. There’s a folder for your important documents, some for important receipts or tax forms, and maybe a few tabbed folders for academics and the like. I definitely start the same way, except when it comes to actually using the organizational infrastructure I’ve set up, my habits start to resemble those of a failed African state. Squandering capital doing time-consuming, largely useless things (yes, that was a link to this blog), inventing more complicated bureaucratic hoops so that papers continue to pile up on the floor out of boredom/incompetence, and yes, eventually it takes nothing less than a multinational effort to mop up the mess.

Which is why classes have now started, and there is still a big pile of folders and papers on the floor, slowly starting to accumulate dirt from the bottom of my shoe when I walk over it. Where I used to neatly file away a paper (albeit in a meaninglessly categorized folder, from which I am never able to find anything again), now I just toss it on the ground.

Oh, and I can’t stop listening to the Flaming Lips album.

Enough of that. The latest news, at least for the moment:

Finals ended. Backcountry skiing/winter hiking in White Mountains for a week. Outdoors, no computers, cold, fresh, sublime. Many blog-worthy thoughts. No amount of actual writing accomplished. Which leads me to…

Flickr photos have been updated, for the first time in years. Mostly mountains, a lot of rocks and snow, and a few fleeting glimpses of a beautiful European summer.

Obsession with webcomics continues. Besides my daily dose of computer-science-in-joke-riddled sentimentality (xkcd), I’ve been reading a new favorite (Questionable Content). Fewer stick figures, less philosophising. More jokes about sex.

Roommate blog back up, now under a new name. Mostly obscure in-jokes, with a smattering of strange insights and some ridiculous poetry. Most of it written by our freshman selves.

That’s it for the moment. Check out my del.icio.us links on the sidebar for more distractions.

In their inscriptions, older artists note their determined adherence to traditions of expression that go unappreciated in their present surroundings. Younger artists, who have lived and worked for most of their lives in transition between cultural spheres, exhibit a more detached, even ironic view of their place in the world. Past definitions of ethnic or geopolitical identity yield their influence to technology, art markets, and globalization. The customary division between two schools–Chinese and foreign–no longer holds.

The paintings are Chinese not just in the trivial sense of having been made by Chinese artists, but also in the way they make conspicuous use of Chinese artistic techniques, all the while displaying the distinctly non-traditional (read: Western) styles that have made their influence in post-Cultural Revolution China. Of course, whether the results are really a “redefinition” of traditional aesthetics is a matter of debate. All the paintings clearly combine Asian and Western influences, but not all of them use the combination as a way to achieve something novel or meaningful in itself.

A good example of the “globalized” Chinese painting was a still life of tofu in watercolor, which despite being a (more or less) Western medium has obvious parallels with Asian watercolor painting. I liked the painting because unlike many of the others in the collection, it did not consciously try to blend Western and Asian styles. Instead, the synthesis took place in the artist’s own life. I also liked the work because it shows, as the museum puts it, the Chinese “cultural obsession with food.”

Some of the most striking paintings played with the formal and technical possibilities of Chinese ink painting itself. These artists practiced the art as it was taught to them essentially unchanged for centuries, but then introduced elements they picked up from Western art such as perspective, abstraction, use of color, etc. I took a few pictures to put above.

The first thing that I thought when I saw these was how graphical the paintings look, almost as if they belonged as a wall decoration somewhere. Then I realized that I grew up with paintings like these on the walls of houses of family friends. Besides maintaining an uneasy tension between East and West, these paintings also seem to straddle the line between profound and decorative, high brow and kitsch. As a case in point, I googled one of the artists after coming home from the exhibit, and the first result took me to his booming poster merchandising operation of his art. I guess his mastery of Western techniques extends beyond just painting.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get pictures of some of the really innovative works, but if you’re in the Cambridge area, definitely head over to the Sackler and take a look for yourself.

Thanks to C.J. for sending me the following, incredibly cool link: 80 Million Tiny Images. It’s a mosaic of millions of online images corresponding to nouns in the English language, and the spatial arrangement of the images in the mosaic reflects their semantic relationship to each other–i.e. closer images represent words that are closer in meaning. From the page (which also contains a link to the research paper):

Each of the tiles in the mosaic is an arithmetic average of images relating to one of 53,463 nouns. The images for each word were obtained using Google’s Image Search and other engines. A total of 7,527,697 images were used, each tile being the average of 140 images. The average reveals the dominant visual characteristics of each word. For some, the average turns out to be a recognizable image; for others the average is a colored blob. The list of nouns was obtained from Wordnet, a database compiled by lexicographers which records the semantic relationship between words. Using this database, we extract a tree-structured semantic hierarchy which we use to arrange tiles within the poster. We tessellate the poster using the hierarchy so that the proximity of two tiles is given by their semantic distance.

The most interesting thing about the result is the remarkable degree of color agreement that they achieve. Despite the fact that each tile is the average of several photos of the same thing, the end result is often surprisingly recognizable, and close-by tiles tend to have the same color scheme. The overall mosaic, rather than appearing as a wash of meaningless color noise, has some fairly uniform blobs on it because of the semantic association of images. The one they give on the website (composed of 7.5 million images, it seems–not 8 million) almost looks like a hunched over figure of a person. I wonder what the full 80 million images put together looks like.

The real question is, when can I get this as a wall poster to put up in my room?

It’s unclear.

Maybe you want attention. Maybe you’re a world-class procrastinator. Maybe you have some horrible, life-threatening disease. Or maybe you’re just really, really passionate about the moral dilemma of doctor-assisted suicide.

Do you remember what’s going to be on the test tomorrow? Do you remember the last time you saw the sun? Do you remember what your girlfriend (ex-girlfriend, as the case may be) looks like? And yes, it’s cheating to check Facebook.

Get a grip! Put on a jacket and go outside. Smell that? That’s air. Go to the library, where you can study without distractions. Take out some paper. Jot down notes. Start writing:

NOTE TO SELF…