Posts Tagged ‘play’
“Life is more fun if you play games”*…
David Freidman ponders scientific satire…
I first encountered the scientific paper simply titled “Strapless Evening Gowns” four years ago, when I was flipping through a collection of magazines that once belonged to the cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener.
Among his magazines was the May 1960 issue of Voo Doo magazine, which was MIT’s “only intentionally humorous campus publication” going all the way back to 1919.
I got a chuckle out of this article, which attempted to semi-seriously analyze what exactly keeps a strapless dress from falling down:
Scientists have a long history of amusing themselves with humor. In addition to Voo Doo, other science humor magazines include the Annals of Improbable Research, the Journal of Irreproducible Results, and the Worm Runner’s Digest which included both satirical and serious scientific papers, much to the confusion of their readers – a problem eventually solved by printing the satirical articles upside down.
And then there are the quasi-serious scientific studies meant to be amusing, such as this study on the effectiveness of tin foil hats in protecting you from government surveillance (spoiler: tin foil hats can actually amplify certain radio frequencies, so the authors speculate that the government has been behind promotion of tin foil hats all along).
And back in 1974, the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis published a paper by clinical psychologist Dennis Upper called “The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment Of A Case Of Writer’s Block” [pictured at the top]. And lest you question the veracity of the author’s finding, I should note that the author’s failure to treat his writer’s block has been successfully replicated…
Read on for more on the engineering of the formal dress, both the social (largely sexist) context and the (interestingly meaninful) scientific content– and the art it has inspired: “Science And The Strapless Evening Gown” from @ironicsans.com.
More seriously: “a Nature analysis signals the beginnings of a US science brain drain“: “Researchers in the United States are seeking career opportunities abroad as President Donald Trump’s administration slashes science funding and workforce numbers, finds an analysis of Nature’s jobs-board data…”
* Roald Dahl
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As we play, we might recall that it was on this date in 1961 that Robert Noyce was issued patent number 2981877 for his “semiconductor device-and-lead structure,” the first patent for what would come to be known as the integrated circuit. In fact another engineer, Jack Kilby, had separately and essentially simultaneously developed the same technology. Ineligible (as a new Texas Instruments empoyee) for a vacation over the summer of 1959, he gave himself the “assignment” of creating “a body of semiconductor material … wherein all the components of the electronic circuit are completely integrated.”
Kilby’s design was rooted in germanium; Noyce’s in silicon and had filed a few months earlier than Noyce. But Kilby’s invention was not a true monolithic integrated circuit chip since it had external gold-wire connections, which would have made it difficult to mass-produce– an obstacle Noyce overcame. Still, Kilby’s contribution was recognized in 2000 when he was Awarded the Nobel Prize– in which Noyce, who had died in 1990, did not share.
“Man’s most serious activity is play”*…
Until the mid-20th century, the “playing fields” on board games tended to be composed of squares; then hexagons emerged. Jon-Paul Dyson explains why…
A board game begins with the board. But how is that board divided up? Often the simplest unit of division is a square. Consider the 64 squares of a chess board, or the 92 squares on a Stratego board. In each case, players take control of a square which exists in relation to other spaces around it, especially if they share adjoining borders. The design of these game boards affords or encourages certain types of movement, usually horizontally or vertically (in four directions) or in some cases diagonally in eight directions (as with the bishop in chess).
And yet there exists a problem with this sort of layout in any game that allows freedom of movement, because the connection between these squares is uneven. Although squares share a long border horizontally and vertically, they do not share such a border on the diagonal connections. In a game like chess, where you physically pick up a piece to move it, this is not much of an issue. But as simulation board games began to develop after World War II, this proved more problematic. Many of these games involved sliding pieces (or cardboard tiles that were frustrating to pick up) from square to square, like army units occupying territory. For these situations, hexagonal spaces that provided equal movement in six directions, produced a better solution.
As is true throughout the history of innovation, whenever there is a problem, it usually turns out that multiple people arrive at similar inventive solutions. That was the case with the development of the hex as a basic unit of division in board games.
Piet Hein [see here], a Danish polymath, who was a quantum physicist as well as a designer, poet, and puzzle and game inventor, came up with the idea in 1942 for a game in which players competed to create connected lines across a game board made up of hexagonal spaces. Thus he might be credited as the father of hex. Yet in the late 1940s, American mathematician John Nash (the subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind) independently invented a similar game at Princeton that also used hex tiles [though we should note that it was a variation on the Shannon switching game, created by Claude Shannon sometime before 1951]. In 1952, Parker Brothers released a version of the game which they called Hex.
This was a time of post-war prosperity when people increasingly had the discretionary income to buy board games, but it was also a period when the United States and the Soviet Union, allies during the war, had become bitter rivals locked in a Cold War. Rather than downsizing after the victory over Germany and Japan, the American military complex shifted from fighting the Axis powers to planning for a major conflict with the Soviet Union and engaging in a series of smaller wars such as that fought in Korea. To help plan American strategy, the Army Air Force and the Douglas Aircraft Company created the Rand Corporation, a think tank that made significant contributions to American policy and computing.
One of the projects the Rand Corporation focused on was modeling conflict through the use of war games. To that end Alexander Mood, a staff member at the Rand Corporation, introduced a honeycombed, hex-shaped board that allowed pieces to move in six directions rather than just four. John Nash was at the Rand Corporation and, in a 1952 paper he coauthored entitled “Some War Games,” he and coauthor R. M. Thrall described using this hex-based system for ground and air games.
It was another game creator, however, who took this development and made the most significant contribution to the development of hex-based games: Charles S. Roberts. Roberts was an army veteran who in 1954 published Tactics, a military simulation board game that is often credited as the first modern wargame. Roberts then founded the game company Avalon Hill, and his games and their innovative simulation of battlefield odds drew the attention of the Rand Corporation because his Combat Results Table for determining the outcome of battles mirrored systems they had developed. The Rand Corporation invited Roberts to visit, and supposedly while he was there he noticed their use of hex-based boards.
Recognizing the superiority of a hex-based system for simulating movement, Roberts began using it in game design in 1961. That year was the centennial of the American Civil War, and so there was a demand for historical simulations. Roberts redesigned his recently released game Gettysburg with the new hex pattern. The Strong owns copies of Gettysburg belonging to Roberts, both in the older square format and in the revised hex version. He also used it for the Avalon Hill game Chancellorsville, another Civil War simulation. Soon the hex system became commonplace in a high proportion of wargames, as well as in more mainstream games such as the 1969 release Psyche-Paths.
Since then, hex board layouts have been used in a wide variety of games. Settlers of Catan is perhaps the most famous example, but plenty of others exist including the spaces in the game Hero Scape. Even video games will often use the hex layout, not only in wargames but in titles such as in Sid Meier’s Civilization V…
“Hex Marks the Spot,” from @jpdysonplay and @museumofplay.
* George Santayana
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As we make our moves, we might send playful birthday greetings to Seymour Papert; he was born on this date in 1928. Trained as a mathematician, Papert was a pioneer of computer science, and in particular, artificial intelligence. He created the Epistemology and Learning Research Group at the MIT Architecture Machine Group (which later became the MIT Media Lab); he directed MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; he authored the hugely-influential LOGO computer language; and he was a principal of the One Laptop Per Child Program. Called by Marvin Minsky “the greatest living mathematics educator,” Papert won a Guggenheim fellowship (1980), a Marconi International fellowship (1981), the Software Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award (1994), and the Smithsonian Award (1997).
A champion of fun and games in learning, Papert was the brain behind Lego Mindstorms.
“Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts”*…
Julius Caesar, who was deified by the Roman Senate this week in 42 BCE
At least, most of mankind. Anna Della Subin on men turned divine…
In the beginning, it was the serpent who first proposed that mankind might become divine. Ye shall be as gods, he advised, as the fruit waited…
The idea that a man might turn divine, even without intending or willing it, was to ancient Greece a natural and perfectly rational occurrence. Traffic flowed between earth and the dwelling place of the gods in the sky. In his Theogony, the poet Hesiod sang of the births of gods in a genealogy often crossed with that of humans. He told of mortals who became daemons, or deific spirits; of the half-gods, born of mixed parentage; of the man-gods, or heroes, venerated for their deeds. The theorist Euhemerus claimed he found, on a desert island, a golden pillar inscribed with the birth and death dates of the immortal Olympians. According to his hypothesis, all gods were originally men who had once lived on earth, yet their roots did not impinge upon their cosmic authority, nor make them any less divine. The ranks of the gods swelled with warriors and thinkers, from the Spartan general Lysander to the materialist philosopher Epicurus, deified after his death. In his Parallel Lives, the biographer Plutarch recorded that someone among the older, established gods was evidently displeased by the newcomer, Demetrius. A whirlwind tore apart Demetrius’s robe, severe frost disrupted his procession, and tendrils of hemlock, unusual in the region, sprouted up around the man’s altars, menacingly encircling them.
In ancient Rome, the borders between heaven and earth fell under Senate control, as deification by official decree became a way to legitimize political power. Building upon Greek traditions of apotheosis, the Romans added a new preoccupation with protocol, the rites and rituals that could effect a divine status change. For his conquests, Julius Caesar was divinized, while still alive, by a series of Senate measures that bestowed upon him rights as a living god, including a state temple and license to wear Jupiter’s purple cloak. Yet if it seemed like a gift of absolute power, it was also a way of checking it, as Caesar knew. One could constrain a powerful man by turning him into a god: in divinizing Julius, the Senate also laid down what the virtues and characteristics of a god should be…
The century that reset time began with a man perhaps inadvertently turned divine. It is hard to see him, for the earliest gospels were composed decades after his death at Golgotha, and the light only reaches so far into the dark tombs of the past. The scholars who search for the man-in-history find him embedded in the politics of his day: a Jewish dissident preacher who posed a radical challenge to the gods and governors of Rome. They find him by the banks of the Jordan with John the Baptist. He practices the rite of baptism as liberation, from sin and from the bondage of the empire that occupied Jerusalem…
In the decades after the crucifixion, just as the gospels were being composed and circulated, the apotheosis of Roman emperors had become so routine that Vespasian, as he lay on his deathbed in 79 CE, could quip, ‘Oh dear, I think I’m becoming a god.’…
In 325 CE, the emperor Constantine gathered together two thousand bishops at the Council of Nicaea to officially define the nature of Jesus’s divinity for the first time. Against those who maintained he had been created by God as a son, perfect but still to some extent human, the bishops pronounced Jesus as Word Incarnate on earth, equal to and made of the same substance as God the Father, whatever it may be. Other notions of Jesus’s essence were branded as heresies and suppressed, and gospels deemed unorthodox were destroyed. Through the mandates of the Nicene Creed, the idea of divinity itself became severed from its old proximities to ordinary mortal life. In the work of theologians such as Augustine, who shaped Christian orthodoxy for centuries to come, the chasm between humankind and divinity grew ever more impassable.
Though mystics might strive for union with the godhead, veiled in metaphors, the idea that a man could transform into an actual deity became absurd. God is absolutely different from us, the theologians maintained; the line between Creator and His creation clearly drawn.
Eminently worth reading in full: “First Rites,” a fascinating excerpt from Accidental Gods, by @annadella in @GrantaMag.
* Plotinus
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As we delve into the divine, we might recall that it was on this date in 1953 that Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered in Paris. The English-language version premiered in London in 1955. In a poll conducted by the British Royal National Theatre in 1998/99, it was voted the “most significant English-language play of the 20th century.”
Waiting for Godot, Theatre de Babylone–the first performance (source)
“Toys are intriguing… they represent one way that society socializes its young”*…
And, as Greg Daugherty explains, that process was accelerated in the second half of the last century…
World War II gave rise to countless innovations that would change American life for decades to come—from the rugged Jeep, to mass-produced penicillin, to the terrifying atomic bomb. But, ironically enough, few U.S. industries were more profoundly affected by the war than the toy business.
Not only were toy and game designers and makers able to take advantage of the latest scientific advances, such as colorful and inexpensive plastics; they also benefited from two other post-war trends. The baby boom—more than 76 million kids born between 1946 and 1964—offered them record numbers of potential customers. And television, little more than a novelty before the war, soon made it possible to demonstrate the latest playthings to millions of kids at a time. Little wonder that toy sales grew from $84 million in 1940 to $900 million by 1953 and into the billions of dollars in by the early 1960s…
The ascendance of plastics and television forever changed an industry– and our culture: “How Toys Changed After World War II,” from @GregDaugherty1 in @HISTORY.
Mr. McGuire : I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin : Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire : Are you listening?
Benjamin : Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire : Plastics.
Benjamin : Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire : There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?
From The Graduate, written by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry (from the novel by Charles Webb); directed by Mike Nichols
* David Levinthal (a photographer whose work centers toys)
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As we play, we might note that today is the celebration of the 2022 inductees into the Toy Hall of Fame at the Strong National Museum of Play… two of the three honorees are plastic toys heavily advertised on television in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment”*…
We’ve all heard it before: There’s no time like the present. Broadly speaking, of course, it means to “seize the opportunity right now,” or maybe in my case, to avoid procrastinating. From a psychological perspective, this makes a lot of sense. As humans we experience time “passing,” and there is a special quality to the present moment. Hypnosis and dreams aside, there is no way to directly experience either the past or the future in the same way we experience the present. But is the aphorism true? Does modern physics actually tell us that there’s no time like the present?
Our best current physical theory of space and time is general relativity. Prior to Einstein’s revolution over a century ago, physics considered time to be an “external parameter”—an independent, fundamental feature of reality not influenced by any other factor in the universe. Whether or not the passage of time is real or illusory (this is an age-old philosophical debate that predates Einstein and is indeed not settled by his theory), we now know that time intervals are not external or universally determined. Time is an internal component of a physical system, a dimension intertwined with three spatial dimensions. Taken together, this is “spacetime,” and is influenced by varying factors and is influenced by varying factors, including speed (relative to other observers or systems) and gravitational forces. Because the theory of relativity posits the constancy of the speed of light for all observers (even if they are moving relative to each other), spacetime itself must dilate and the concept of a time interval becomes elastic.
As a result, there is no universal notion of the present that applies equally to all observers. What looks present to me could just as easily be in someone else’s future, and in a third person’s past. Simultaneity is relative…
Think there’s no time like the present? As Mark Shumelda suggests, modern physics begs to differ: “Actually, There Is a Time Like the Present.”
* Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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As we cogitate on carpe diem, we might send playful birthday greetings to Johan Huizinga; he was born on this date in 1872. A Dutch historian and one of the founders of modern cultural history, he is probably best remembered for his 1938 book Homo Ludens, in which he argues for the importance of the play element of culture and society, suggesting that play is primary to and a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of the generation of culture.
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