∞ zoom

I spent the weekend cooking up an L-system renderer in Processing that zooms into the fractal indefinitely. L-systems are defined by recursive re-write rules, so to zoom simply apply the re-write rule to visible edges, zoom in, and discard off-screen edges. The actual depth of re-write is limited and elements are selected for re-write pseudo-randomly, which creates additional fractal clustering effects.

The project, including the full-screen builds for osx/windows/linux, can be downloaded from Sourceforge. The applet version is available here.

Staring at this animation causes the motion perception fatigue(adaptation) effect. After looking at an expanding field for a long time, your motion detecting neurons give up and stop firing. When you look away at something that is not moving, you see opposite, inward motion. I find that effect can be exaggerated by sleep deprivation and stimulants like coffee.

Doubly interesting is that, after staring at this animation almost non-stop for 24 hours, the still screen-shot above to me appears to contract, even though my motion perception is normal for other objects. This would cancel out any perceived expansion from the actual animation. I wonder if this is a learned prior on the behavior of the "zoom" applet: my brain expects the patterns to expand, and adjusts motion detection to match.

Triply interesting is that, after staring at the still screenshot, which I perceive as contracting, I get an opposite motion fatigue effect : for a split second after looking away, I see expanding motion. This might indicate that the illusory expansion shares an adaptation mechanism with real motion.

update : It appears that the motion blur trails are related to the long-lasting illusory aftereffect. Additionally, the illusory motion is only perceived during saccade, which shares some similarities with other optical illusions. Does anyone else experience illusory motion with the above still ? Could this be related to some mechanisms of adjust motion perception during saccades, which are fast and themselves cause motion-blur on the retina ?

There might be something slightly off with my visual system, but complex and long lasting adaptation effects are well documented for other visual stimuli.

Risky Business

Twelve deep thinkers over at The Edge have a series on risk after the Fukushima disaster. I won’t try and reproduce the complexity and subtlety of their arguments, but risk and risk management are at the heart of what the Prevail Project is about. How can we think about risk in a domain of technological uncertainty? What does risk actually mean?

Risk is modern concept, compared with the ancient and universal idea of danger. Dangers are immediate and apparent; a fire, a cougar, angering the spirits. Risk is danger that has been tamed by statistics; this heater has a 0.001% of igniting over the course of its lifespan, there are cougars in the woods, and so on. Risk owes its origins to the insurance industry, and Lloyd’s of London, which was founded to protect merchant-bankers against the dangers of sea travel. While any individual ship might sink, on average, most ships would complete their voyages, so investors could band together to prevent a run of bad luck from impoverishing any single member of the group.

This kind of risk is simple and easy to understand. It is what mathematicians refer to as linear: a change in the inputs, like the season, correlates directly to an outcome, like the number of storms, and the number of ship sunk. The problem is that this idea of risk has been expanded to cover complex systems, with many inter-related parts. As complexity goes up, comprehensibility goes down, and risks expand in complicated ways. Modern society is “tightly coupled”, a concept developed by Charles Perrow in his book Normal Accidents. Parts are linked in non-obvious ways by technology, ecology, culture, and economics, and failure in a single component can rapidly propagate through the system.

The 2007 financial crisis is a perfect example of a normal accident caused by tight coupling. Financiers realized that while housing prices fluctuate, they are usually stable on a national basis, and so developed collateralized debt obligations based on ‘slices’ of the housing market nation-wide, which were rated at highly secure investments. When the housing bubble collapsed, an event not accounted for in their models, trillions of dollars in investments lost all certain value. Paralysis spread throughout the financial system, lead to a major recession. While this potted history is certainly incomplete, normal accidents are the defining feature of the times. The 2009 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and the Fukushima meltdown are both due to events which were not accounted for in statistical models of risk, but which in hindsight appear inevitable over a long enough timescale.

Statistics and scientific risk assessment are based on history, but the world is changing, and the past is no longer a valid guide to the future. Thousand year weather events are more and more frequent, while new technologies are reshaping the fundamental infrastructure of society. When the probabilities and the consequences of an accident are entirely unknowable, how can we manage risk?

One option is the precautionary principle, which says that until a product or process is proven entirely safe, it is assumed to be dangerous. The problem with the precautionary principle is that it is different in degree, not in kind. It demands extremely high probabilities of safety, but doesn’t solve the problem of tight coupling. Another solution is basing everything off of the worst possible case: what happens if the reactor explodes, or money turns into fairy gold. System which can fail in dangerous, expensive ways, are inherently unsafe and should be chosen in favor that have more local consequences. This solution has the twin problem of demarcating realistic vs fantastic risk, after all, Rube Goldberg scenarios starting with a misplaced banana peel might leads to the end of the world. The second problem is that this discounts ordinary, everyday risk. Driving is far more dangerous per passenger-mile than air travel, yet people are much more afraid of plane crashes. A framework based on worst-case scenarios leads to paralysis, because everything might have bad consequences, and prevents us from rationally analyzing risk. The end state of the worst-case scenarios is being afraid to leave the house because you might get hit by a bus.

So the ancient idea of danger no longer holds, because we can’t know that is dangerous anymore, and mere fear of the unknown cannot stand against the impulse to understand and transform through science and technology. Risk has been domesticated in error; a society built on risk continually gambles with its future.

The solution involved decoupling, building cut-outs into complex systems so they can be stopped in an orderly manner when they begin to fail, and decentralizing powerful, large-scale infrastructure. Every object in the world is bound together in the technological and economic network that we call the global economy. We cannot assume that it will function the way it has forever, rather we should trace objects back to their origins, locate the single points of failure, the places where large numbers of threads come together, and develop alternative paths around those failure points. Normal accidents are a fact of life, but there is no reason why they have to bring down people thousands of miles away from their point of origin

Bits of Intellectual Property II

I was reading "What Color are the Bits?", an in depth discussion of the interplay between information theory and copyright law. I like this discussion, with one exception.

The authors reference an interesting thought experiment. If I take a copyrighted file, x-or it with a public domain file to produce gibberish, is that gibberish still copyrighted? Their argument is that a Lawyer would say "yes of course, those bits still came from someones intellectual property", and a computer scientist would say "no, now its just nonsense".

Why the confusion ?

These two differing opinions arise because each party is considering different pieces of information. When we scramble the bits of a copyrighted file, we might render the file itself meaningless. However, not all the information is contained within the file. We must also consider the information needed to de-code the file. The scrambled file, along with the string "This file can be decoded by x-oring it with the file found at www.foo.bar/baz57", constitutes an encoding of the original, copyrighted work. Without the knowledge of how to decode the x-ored file, it appears to be gibberish. However, with just a few more bits we can reconstruct the original copyrighted work.

This may sound familiar. The x-or example is really an example of encryption. In this case, the decryption password is a reference to the public-domain file that can be used to recover the original copyrighted work. I believe common sense dictates that encrypting a copyrighted work does not strip it of its copyrighted status, although the bits (encoding) may change significantly. The Lawyers are correct, provided that the decryption scheme is distributed in a way that can be associated with the x-ored file.

This logic also applies to the illegal numbers. These are numbers which, if represented in binary, correspond to information that it is illegal to posses. People, myself included, have gotten terribly excited about this. How can a number be illegal ? This must mean our entire legal system is bankrupt.

No. These numbers are only illegal if you know how to use them.

For instance, this prime is perfectly innocuous, unless, of course, you mention that "it unzips via the gzip algorithm into the c source for a program that breaks DVD encryption". That last piece of information is crucial. It is, in fact, the ( number, how_to_use ) pair that is in violation. Neither on its own has any meaning.

We do not consume, directly, series of zeros and ones from our computers. To ascribe meaning to these sequences of bits, we define procedures for turning these bits into something more familiar. For example, the ASCII standard defines how to turn a sequence of 8-bit chunks into the text you're reading now. The mp3 codex defines how to turn a series of bits into an audible sound file. Information is always paired with a decoding algorithm to convert it into something meaningful to humans. This concept captured by file extensions : we, or at least our computers, know to interpret 'foo.mp3' differently from 'foo.txt' or 'foo.doc'. All of these tricks to disguise copyrighted or illegal information are just clever re-encoding.

Since it is impossible to outlaw sequences of bits, it follows that to stop distribution of copyrighted or illegal information, you must simply dissociated the (information,encoding) pair. Both the information and the encoding scheme have legitimate uses on their own, but together they represent the infringing file. Some legal definitions more true to information theory might look like :

"An (information,encoding) pair A is considered to infringe upon an existing copyrighted (information,encoding) pair B if and only if the decoding of A would be considered infringing on the decoding of B."

and

"For a given illegal or copyrighted (information,encoding), it is unlawful to distribute (information) and (encoding) in such a way that through expressed or implied means, the (information,encoding) pair can be reconstructed".

I'm not sure what the implications of this are, if any.

Limitless Review

The potential implications of human enhancement is one of the main reasons why I’m at CSPO, so I was excited and a little worried when the trailer for Limitless appeared. Would Hollywood do justice to the topic, or would they make yet another trite cautionary tale?

Limitless follows one Eddie Morra, a hapless failure at the age of 35, unable to write, living in a squalid Chinatown walk-up, and recently broken up. A chance encounter with his ex-brother-in-law introduces Eddie to NZT, a drug which improves intelligence. From there, he is catapulted into a whirlwind of conspiracies and violence as he tries to stay one step ahead of his own mistakes.

The theme of the movie come out most clearly in two dialogs, one with Robert De Niro’s financier, who says “Your powers are a gift, they are not earned, and you are careless with your powers.” The second comes from Eddie’s girlfriend, when she finds out that his remarkable transformation in the past few months is due to NZT, “How do I know what’s you, and what’s the drug?” These are two common critiques of human enhancement, and psychopharmaceuticals in general; that they are a false path to knowledge which should be gained through hard work, and that they alter people in ways that damage their humanity. Neither of these critiques is particularly valid. Even when pressed, bioconservatives cannot specify what it is about human beings that enhancement threatens. Francis Fukuyama takes an entire book to weakly claim the existence of his ‘Factor X’ that defines humanity, to give one example.

This is not the position I hold to. Rather than try and defend a non-existent line between treatment and enhancement, it is better to note that human beings are continually enhancing their abilities through education and technology. We invent cars to extend our legs, books to extend our minds, and teach our children so they can benefit from our mistakes. Rather than view enhancement as a danger in and of itself, it is better to analyze the features of a particular enhancement for its risks.

By that metric, Limitless’s NZT would obviously fail. It is addictive, and leads to brain damage and death. The effects of NZT, increased alertness, pattern recognition, and focus, are certainly impressive, and impressively conveyed through camera effects in the film, but are by no means worth risking serious health problems. But let’s assume the health problems of NZT are solved, which they seem to be by the end of the film. Beyond its effects on intelligence, does NZT have any effect on morality?

Eddie Morra is not a bad person, but he’s not a particularly good person either, and his plan could be described as “1) Get rich, 2) Get powerful, 3) ???”. He’s a likeable enough jerk, with enough charisma to counteract his complete lack of actual values or goals beyond immediate pleasure. In that, the continued short-sightedness of Eddie’s planning throughout the movie is a commentary on America, and how best and brightest go into finance, law, and politics rather than the practical arts. The Russian loan-shark is a terrifying figure on NZT, but he was already a criminal psychopath. What a good person, not under duress, would do with their new powers is unknown.

NZT does certainly inspire a kind of paranoid egomania. Those who can survive the effects of the drug make one of their first priorities stamping out everyone else who might be using it, or who might pose a threat to their own wealth and power. Eddie Morra is not the first, and certainly not the last, of a series of chemically enhanced wunderkinds who shake the world of Limitless. This point is one the film makes effectively; it is the secrecy and limited access surrounding NZT that cognitive enhancement so dangerous. But would a more open system of enhancement lead to a better world, or deeper and deeper levels of Machiavellian scheming? That question remains unanswered.

Cognitive enhancement is not good or bad, but it is powerful, and like all instruments of power, it should be introduced with careful consideration. Information is not knowledge, and it certainly isn’t the wisdom to know what should aim for in life. But compared to who already populates the halls of power: the ambitious, the deceptive, and those who measure lives in dollars, is Eddie Morra so much worse? He gets everything he wants, and he doesn’t even have to drink much blood to do it.

(And a note for my friends who criticize the scientific accuracy of NZT: “It lets you access 100% of your brain.” That claim is made only by a completely unreliable drug dealer who lied five second previously. The only scene that makes no sense whatsoever is the one where… well, I won’t spoil it.)