2019 Archives

Berlin 8:00 a.m.

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This explorable features an agent based model for road traffic and congestion. The model captures a phenomenon that most of us have witnessed on highways: phantom traffic jams, also known as traffic shocks or ghost jams. These are spontaneously emergent congested segments that move slowly and oppositely to the traffic. The explorable illustrates that phantom jams are more likely to occur if the variability in car speeds is higher:

So, if say 90% of the cars try moving at 120 km/h and 10 percent at 150 km/h, everyone might end up going 80 km/h on average. Whereas if everyone travelled at about 120 km/h no reduction of collective traffic flow occurs.

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Dirk Brockmann (Complexity Explorables)

This is the best demonstration I’ve ever seen of the creation of phantom traffic jams. Playing with the (interactive) model, you can set up scenarios and watch how they affect traffic throughput. When everybody drives at 120km/h, everything’s fine. But when everybody drives at between 120km/h and 150km/h, traffic jams occur which result in everybody having to slow down to less than 120km/h!

This counterintuitive fact is hard to explain to people, but this interactive model makes it perhaps a little bit easier.

(There are, of course, other – more human – factors that result in an increased frequency of phantom traffic jams, but mathematicians are rarely concerned with what happens in the real world!)

Go play with the interactive.

How to Draw a Horse

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Emma Hunsinger (The New Yorker)

Fabulous comic.

I’ll just keep drawing horses.

The last Soviet citizen: The cosmonaut who was left behind in space – Russia Beyond

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Sergei Krikalev was in space when the Soviet Union collapsed. Unable to come home, he wound up spending two times longer than originally planned in orbit. They simply refused to bring him back.

While tanks were rolling through Moscow’s Red Square, people built barricades on bridges, Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union went the way of history, Sergei Krikalev was in space. 350 km away from Earth, the Mir space station was his temporary home.

He was nicknamed “the last citizen of the USSR.” When the Soviet Union broke apart into 15 separate states in 1991, Krikalev was told that he could not return home because the country that had promised to bring him back home no longer existed.

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Yekaterina Sinelschikova (Russia Beyond)

Reducing motion with the picture element

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I was just talking with Dave about the accessibility of moving images on the web, and he said:

hm… I wonder if you could use picture + prefers-reduced-motion?

He then sends the following code:
<picture>
  <source srcset="no-motion.jpg" media="(prefers-reduced-motion: reduce)"></source> 
  <img srcset="animated.gif alt="brick wall"/>
</picture>
I copied the code, dropped it into a post of mine, created a static image of an animated GIF, and turned on the “reduce motion” preference (System Preferences > Accessibility > Display). And then BOOM. Just worked. In real time!

…
Brad Frost

I added reduced-motion support to DanQ.me earlier this year, but I only bothered to pay attention to the animated parts of the layout and design itself (the “bounce” on the menus and the cutesy motion of the logo, for example) and considered the (few) GIF animations and the like that I’ve added to be out-of-scope. But this approach is really quite simple and elegant, and I’ll bear it in mind if I ever have need of such a thing!

Goat LARP

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…

Goats are the main characters. You are the supporting cast.

This game is about running mind-blowing live action experiences for goats. You will act as director and storyteller, transporting the goats to an unforgettable dream world of mystery and magic, etc etc.

Goat Larp is one part larp, one part hangout-with-animals-and-take-silly-pictures. In some ways, we are roleplaying that this is a larp.

The Goat Larp Rulebook

Rule number 1 through 100 is BE NICE TO THE GOATS.

Your Character

Show up at the farm dressed as any character you want. You could be an elf, a steampunk, the mayor of space, Hulk Hogan, Darth Vader, whatever.

Your character has no knowledge of how you got to this mystical goat farm, but you can sense that these goats are IMPORTANT. They need to be entertained. You need to run a larp for them.

Goat Activity Cards

There will be a stack of Goat Activity Cards. They are suggestions for activities you can do with the goats. For example:

One goat plays as Frodo, another will be Sauron. Use lawn posts to mark off an area representing Mount Doom. If Frodo visits Mount Doom before Sauron touches him, the world is saved. If Sauron touches Frodo, all is lost.

Another example:

President Goat’s cabinet must advise them on an important decision. The fate of the world is in this goat’s hands. One post is labeled “World Peace”, another post is labeled “Nuke Everything”. If President Goat bumps into a post, their decision is made.

Both teams may try to persuade the goats using any (safe) means they can come up. You are encouraged to ham it up, over-act, and monologue about what’s going on. This gives the goats a nice, immersive experience.

You may also come up with your own quests. In fact, you should, because most of the stuff we’re writing is garbage.

You can read more ideas for Goat Activities here.

…

Goat LARP

Oh, I thought: it’s LARPing but with goats. You know, like Goat Yoga is yoga but with goats. Okay, fair enough: whatever floats your goat…

…but no, I was wrong. This isn’t so much LARPing with goats as LARPing for goats. As in: the goats are the player chatacters; any humans that happen to come along are mobs there for the entertainment of the goats.

The Internet remains a strange and wonderful window into a strange and wonderful world.

Note #14005

Elderflower season is here once again and the eldest and I are kicking off our elderflower cordial production line!

Dan Q found GC6102Y Minecrafty 3 – Zombie

This checkin to GC6102Y Minecrafty 3 - Zombie reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Found via quick diversion from my expedition to the 2019-05-27 51 -1 geohashpoint nearby. I don’t often find myself on this side of the city and I was pleased to find a good-sized and well maintained geocache here, in a park I’d never visited! Initially I took 6 the wrong path and had to double back but soon knew where to look. TFTC, SL.

Geohashing expedition 2019-05-27 51 -1

This checkin to geohash 2019-05-27 51 -1 reflects a geohashing expedition. See more of Dan's hash logs.

Location

Hashpoint appears to be at the very end of Bleache Place, a suburban cul-de-sac in South-East Oxford. Looks very close to, but not on, the driveway of number 15. Possibly a convenient nearby lamp post for possibly attaching a “the Internet was here” sign?

Participants

Dan Q

Plans

(So long as he can get enough of his coursework done to justify taking a break), Dan Q plans to cycle out to the hashpoint at some point during the day.

Expedition

14:55 – okay, I’ve not finished as much of my coursework as I’d hoped, but I’ve finished enough that I can afford to take a break of a couple of hours to cycle out to the hashpoint, do a silly grin, put up a “The internet was here!” sign, and whatnot. Here we go!

15:58 – Success! Photos, tracklog, and details to follow. I’ve put a sign up so I wanted to put a message here for anybody who happens to see it and visit this page before I get home and finish writing-up!

Came home via geocache GC6102Y, safely home by 17:15 and back to studying!

Tracklog

Download tracklog

Photos

Caverna Do Dragão

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Renault Brazil (YouTube)

Remember that 80s TV show Dungeons & Dragons?

It turns out that Renault’s target customer base in Brazil do, too. Presumably it was a way bigger deal over there than it was here, because this new car ad feels like it could genuinely be a trailer for a live-action reboot of the series. And now I want to watch it.

(I do have some questions, though. Like: Diana was only 14 years old when she and her friends were transported to the Realm of Dungeons and Dragons… so when did she learn to drive? Am I supposed to believe that she just rolled a natural 20 on that driving check? And where does Sheila go when she turns invisible so that Bobby doesn’t end up sitting on her transparent-lap? And how does the car’s navigation computer work: are we to believe that there’s a GNSS network in the skies above the Realm? The Internet must know!)

The man who made Einstein world-famous

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It is hard to imagine a time when Albert Einstein’s name was not recognised around the world.

But even after he finished his theory of relativity in 1915, he was nearly unknown outside Germany – until British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington became involved.

Einstein’s ideas were trapped by the blockades of the Great War, and even more by the vicious nationalism that made “enemy” science unwelcome in the UK.

But Einstein, a socialist, and Eddington, a Quaker, both believed that science should transcend the divisions of the war.

It was their partnership that allowed relativity to leap the trenches and make Einstein one of the most famous people on the globe.

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Matthew Stanley (BBC News)

I hadn’t heard this story before, and it’s well-worth a read.

I Don’t Watch YouTube (Like You Watch YouTube)

I was watching a recent YouTube video by Derek Muller (Veritasium), My Video Went Viral. Here’s Why, and I came to a realisation: I don’t watch YouTube like most people – probably including you! – watch YouTube. And as a result, my perspective on what YouTube is and does is fundamentally biased from the way that others probably think about it.

The Veritasium video My Video Went Viral. Here’s Why is really good and you should definitely watch at least 7 minutes of it in order to influence the algorithm.

The magic moment came for me when his video explained that the “subscribe” button doesn’t do what I’d assumed it does. I’m probably not alone in my assumptions: I’ll bet that people who use the “subscribe” button as YouTube intend don’t all realise that it works the way that it does.

Like many, I’d assumed the “subscribe” buttons says “I want to know about everything this creator publishes”. But that’s not what actually happens. YouTube wrangles your subscription list and (especially) your recommendations based on their own metrics using an opaque algorithm. I knew, of course, that they used such a thing to manage the list of recommended next-watches… but I didn’t realise how big an influence it was having on the way that most YouTube users choose what they’ll watch!

YouTube’s metrics for “what to show to you” is, of course, biased by your subscriptions. But it’s also biased by what’s “trending” (which in turn is based on watch time and click-through-rate), what people-who-watch-the-things-you-watch watch, subscription commonalities, regional trends, what your contacts are interested in, and… who knows what else! AAA YouTubers try to “game” it, but the goalposts are moving. And the struggle to stay on-top, especially after a fluke viral hit, leads to the application of increasingly desperate and clickbaity measures.

This is a battle to which I’ve been mostly oblivious, until now, because I don’t watch YouTube like you watch YouTube.

Tom Scott produced an underappreciated sci-fi short last year describing a theoretical AI which, in 2028, caused problems as a result of its single-minded focus. What we’re seeing in YouTube right now is a simpler example, but illustrates the problem well: optimising YouTube’s algorithm for any factor or combination of factors other than a user’s stated preference (subscriptions) will necessarily result in the promotion of videos to a user other than, and at the expense of, the ones by creators that they’ve subscribed to. And there are so many things that YouTube could use as influencing factors. Off the top of my head, there’s:

Number of views
Number of likes
Ratio of likes to dislikes
Number of tracked shares
Number of saves
Length of view
Click-through rate on advertisements
Recency
Subscriber count
Subscriber engagement
Popularity amongst your friends
Popularity amongst your demographic
Click-through-ratio
Etc., etc., etc.

Veritasium videos in my RSS reader — A Veritasium video I haven’t watched yet? Thanks, RSS reader.

But this is all alien to me. Why? Well: here’s how I use YouTube:

Subscription: I subscribe to creators via RSS. My RSS reader doesn’t implement YouTube’s algorithm, of course, so it just gives me exactly what I subscribe to – no more, no less.It’s not perfect (for example, it pisses me off every time it tells me about an upcoming “premiere”, a YouTube feature I don’t care about even a little), but apart from that it’s great! If I’m on-the-move and can’t watch something as long as involved TheraminTrees‘ latest deep-thinker, my RSS reader remembers so I can watch it later at my convenience. I can have National Geographic‘s videos “expire” if I don’t watch them within a week but Dr. Doe‘s wait for me forever. And I can implement my own filters if a feed isn’t showing exactly what I’m looking for (like I did to strip the sport section from BBC News’ RSS feed). I’m in control.
Discovery: I don’t rely on YouTube’s algorithm to find me new content. I don’t mind being a day or two behind on what’s trending: I’m not sure I care at all? I’m far more-interested in recommendations curated by a human. If I discover and subscribe to a channel on YouTube, it was usually (a) mentioned by another YouTuber or (b) linked from a blog or community blog. I’m receiving recommendations from people I already respect, and they have a way higher hit-rate than YouTube’s recommendations.(I also sometimes discover content because it’s exactly what I searched for, e.g. I’m looking for that tutorial on how to install a fiddly damn kiddy seat into the car, but this is unlikely to result in a subscription.)

This isn’t yet-another-argument that you should use RSS because it’s awesome. (Okay, so it is. RSS isn’t dead, and its killer feature is that its users get to choose how it works. But there’s more I want to say.)

What I wanted to share was this reminder, for me, that the way you use a technology can totally blind you to the way others use it. I had no idea that many YouTube creators and some YouTube subscribers felt increasingly like they were fighting YouTube’s algorithms, whose goals are different from their own, to get what they want. Now I can see it everywhere! Why do schmoyoho always encourage me to press the notification bell and not just the subscribe button? Because for a typical YouTube user, that’s the only way that they can be sure that their latest content will be seen!

Of course, the business needs of YouTube mean that we’re not likely to see any change from them. So until either we have mainstream content-curating AIs that answer to their human owners rather than to commercial networks (robot butler, anybody?) or else the video fediverse catches on – and I don’t know which of those two are least-likely! – I guess I’ll stick to my algorithm-lite subscription model for YouTube.

But at least now I’ll have a better understanding of why some of the channels I follow are changing the way they produce and market their content…

Going Critical

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If you’ve spent any time thinking about complex systems, you surely understand the importance of networks.

Networks rule our world. From the chemical reaction pathways inside a cell, to the web of relationships in an ecosystem, to the trade and political networks that shape the course of history.

Or consider this very post you’re reading. You probably found it on a social network, downloaded it from a computer network, and are currently deciphering it with your neural network.

But as much as I’ve thought about networks over the years, I didn’t appreciate (until very recently) the importance of simple diffusion.

This is our topic for today: the way things move and spread, somewhat chaotically, across a network. Some examples to whet the appetite:

Infectious diseases jumping from host to host within a population

Memes spreading across a follower graph on social media

A wildfire breaking out across a landscape

Ideas and practices diffusing through a culture

Neutrons cascading through a hunk of enriched uranium

A quick note about form.

Unlike all my previous work, this essay is interactive. There will be sliders to pull, buttons to push, and things that dance around on the screen. I’m pretty excited about this, and I hope you are too.

So let’s get to it. Our first order of business is to develop a visual vocabulary for diffusion across networks.

A simple model

I’m sure you all know the basics of a network, i.e., nodes + edges.

To study diffusion, the only thing we need to add is labeling certain nodes as active. Or, as the epidemiologists like to say, infected:

This activation or infection is what will be diffusing across the network. It spreads from node to node according to rules we’ll develop below.

Now, real-world networks are typically far bigger than this simple 7-node network. They’re also far messier. But in order to simplify — we’re building a toy model here — we’re going to look at grid or lattice networks throughout this post.

(What a grid lacks in realism, it makes up for in being easy to draw ;)

Except where otherwise specified, the nodes in our grid will have 4 neighbors, like so:

And we should imagine that these grids extend out infinitely in all directions. In other words, we’re not interested in behavior that happens only at the edges of the network, or as a result of small populations.

Given that grid networks are so regular, we can simplify by drawing them as pixel grids. These two images represent the same network, for example:

Alright, let’s get interactive.

…

Kevin Simler

Fabulous (interactive! – click through for the full thing to see for yourself) exploration of network interactions with applications for understanding epidemics, memes, science, fashion, and much more. Plus Kevin’s made the whole thing CC0 so everybody can share and make use of his work. Treat as a longread with some opportunities to play as you go along.

Danny Daycare

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Danny MacAskill (YouTube)

“Have you had a good wee day out?”

This isn’t how I behave when I’m out cycling with one of our little ‘uns in tow. But sometimes, just sometimes, when I see a solid-looking jump… I wish it could be. Honestly: our eldest would be well up for this! (And would probably be quite disappointed to sit around until the end where they reveal that, obviously, they swapped the small child for a doll for many of the shots.)

Cat Salesman (Sioux Falls Area Humane Society)

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Hill’s Pet Nutrition (YouTube)

“We got all kinds of funny looking cats.” Lost it.

Accessibility Resources

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As it’s Global Accessibility Awareness, I’m sharing a list of accessibility resources that I regularly refer to. Happy reading, watching and listening!

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Beverley Newing

A fabulously-useful concise list of some of the hottest articles, books, and webinars on accessibility in web development; saved for my later convenience.