A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright.
Level Up: Exploring the Artistic Side of Video Game Design
“3.32 billion people; $1.39 billion dollars; 300 million copies, 5 million titles (or 800,000, depending on how you count).
These are some recent statistics about the video game industry. They refer to the estimated number of players, the global box-office receipts of the Super Mario Bros movie in 2023 (bested only by Barbie), the number of Minecraft copies sold, and the number of games in existence, where the higher number counts the multiple versions available on different platforms.
Its artistic merits are now mostly acknowledged.”
Dark Matter
“After his exhibit closed, the postcards took over Frank’s life. Hundreds poured into his mailbox, week after week. He decided to create a website, PostSecret, where every Sunday he uploaded images of postcards he’d received in the mail.
The website is a simple, ad-free blog with a black background, the 4x6 rectangular confessions emerging from the darkness like faces illuminated around a campfire. Frank is careful to keep himself out of the project—he thinks of the anonymous postcard writers as the project’s authors—so there’s no commentary. Yet curation is what makes PostSecret art. There’s a dream logic to the postcards’ sequence, like walking through a surrealist painting, from light to dark to absurd to profound.”
Topologists Tackle the Trouble With Poll Placement
“In Georgia’s 2020 gubernatorial election, some voters in Atlanta waited over 10 hours to cast a ballot. One reason for the long lines was that almost 10% of Georgia’s polling sites had closed over the preceding seven years, despite an influx of about 2 million voters. These closures were disproportionately concentrated in predominantly Black areas that tended to vote Democratic.
But pinpointing the locations of “voting deserts” isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. Sometimes a lack of capacity is reflected in long waits at the polls, but other times the problem is the distance to the nearest polling place. Combining these factors in a systematic way is tricky.
In a paper due to be published this summer in the journal SIAM Review, Mason Porter, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his students used tools from topology to do just that.”
How Cheap Light Transformed Civilization
“For nearly all of human history, fire was our only source of artificial light. Difficult to make and challenging to safeguard from wind and rain, fire was our first window into the darkness of night. Fire and the artificial light and radiant warmth it produced changed everything and helped catapult humans toward the modern age.”
The Call of the Weird
“Supernormal experiences were a delicate question in the late 19th century, especially when they bore on such wobbly tenets of Christianity as immortality. Educated elites increasingly wished to strip religion of its supernatural excrescences and make it a sound pillar of society. The development of both anthropology and psychiatry encouraged them to explain away unearthly visions, ghosts or demons as relics of primitive thought or symptoms of mental illness. Yet the reductionism of these new disciplines was as brittle as it was ambitious, and Lang became their ardent critic. Like the SPR, whose president he later became, he sought evidence to challenge or at least stretch scientific naturalism’s pinched vision of reality. In a voluminous grimoire of ghost stories he published in 1897, he confessed that he was in a ‘balance of doubt’ about their truth. John Sloan’s new biography of Lang explores his attempts to frame and hold that balance. It reconstructs the development of a professional gadfly, who skipped across the hardening boundaries of literature, anthropology and history to insist on the strange origins of religion.”
20 Years of Gmail
“When Gmail launched with a goofy press release 20 years ago today, many assumed it was a hoax. The service promised a gargantuan 1 gigabyte of storage, an excessive quantity in an era of 15-megabyte inboxes. It claimed to be completely free at a time when many inboxes were paid. And then there was the date: the service was announced on April Fools’ Day, portending some kind of prank.
But soon, invites to Gmail’s very real beta started going out — and they became a must-have for a certain kind of in-the-know tech fan. At my nerdy high school, having one was your fastest ticket to the cool kids’ table. I remember trying to track one down for myself. I didn’t know whether I actually needed Gmail, just that all my classmates said Gmail would change my life forever.”
Models All the Way Down
“If you want to make a really big AI model — the kind that can generate images or do your homework, or build this website, or fake a moon landing — you start by finding a really big training set.
Images and words, harvested by the billions from the internet, material to build the world that your AI model will reflect back to you.
What this training set contains is extremely important. More than any other thing, it will influence what your model can do and how well it does it.”