December 12, 2023

s16e21: What We Predict; Rods for Looking at God; Tactical Auditorium

0.0 Context Setting

It’s Tuesday, 12 December, 2023 in Portland, Oregon, where it is the afternoon and so dark.

I’ve been on vacation for about three weeks! I had intended on writing a season finale episode before I went away but, well, “plans”.

If this particular episode doesn’t end up being the season finale (of which I’ll know by the time I finish writing it), then I’m going to just assume this season will end sometime next week, then we’ll pick up the next season in the new year.

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1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

Only a few short things, my brain is shot thanks to the 16 hours of jet lag I’m working through plus gestures at the world.

1.1 What We Predict

Here’s a few threads tying together:

1. For the last few years my favorite Neuroscience Theory of Everything has been predictive processing, of which Andy Clarke’s Surfing Uncertainty¹ is a pretty good introduction/overview/definitive accessible text.
2. Predictive processing itself ties together concepts embodiment and grasps towards a theory of consciousness.
3. This game, The Finals, just came out, and there was a super interesting not-quite-a-bug in it! People thought that they were moving more slowly than in the open beta, but the developers were all “nuh-uh, we haven’t changed anything at all in the movement system’s code”. But there was a change: in the animation and sound. So to be clear, not in the actual movement but in the presentation of movement².
4. Something similar has happened before in videogames: a whole bunch of players were super pissed off because out of two identical guns, they thought one was performing better than the other even though the code for both was the same. What was different? The sound for one was punchier³, ⁴.
5. This is super interesting! I wonder how videogames are used to test cognitive psychology theories, and not just “a videogame like thing”, I mean “an actual videogame in production, with stupidly large n”, and yes, All That Ethics Shit.

1.2 Rods for Looking at God

Very, very short this one. I knew about Hubble’s gyros for learning orientation and its flywheels for correcting orientation and maneuvering, I did not know about its four eight-foot long iron rods -- magnetic torquers -- that can be used to push off the Earth’s magnetic field⁵.

1.3 Tactical Auditorium

For a long time I’ve been interested in user interfaces as portrayed in film and tv. That particular type of motion graphics design even has a name now, FUI -- film user interface design. Top Gun: Maverick happened to be on seatback video, I happened to have sprung for in-flight internet, and before you know it, here’s me reading Gmunk’s writeup of their work on Top Gun: Maverick⁶.

Part of why this is even more interesting now than 15+ years ago is that everyone’s pretty upfront that these film user interfaces are not supposed to be realistic at all. They are in service of the story, plus they need to be legible, all that jazz, so you now get writeups that acknowlege all of this. This shows up in the Maverick writeup in recognition that dot matrix displays look cool, but they’re no way at all how telemetry might get implemented in real life⁷. (For that, there’s the SpaceX stuff that you can see when they show Mission Control, which runs in IIRC a bunch of in-browser React (even in the crew capsule!) and has, in turn, thanks to its leader, been influenced by “what looks cool”)

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OK, that’s it. How have you been? It’s cold here!

Best,

Dan

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