Death, but not by thin air

For many years, the most lucrative commercial guiding operation on Mt. Everest has been a company called Himalayan Experience, or Himex, which is owned by a New Zealand mountaineer named Russell Brice. In the spring of 2012, more than a month into the climbing season, he became increasingly worried about a bulge of glacial ice three hundred yards wide that was frozen tenuously to Everest’s West Shoulder, hanging like a massive sword of Damocles directly over the main route up the Nepal side of the mountain. Brice’s clients (“members,” in the parlance of Himalayan mountaineering), Western guides, and Sherpas repeatedly had to climb beneath the threatening ice bulge as they moved up and down the mountain to acclimatize and establish a series of higher camps necessary for their summit assault. One day, Brice timed how long it took his head guide, Adrian Ballinger (“who is incredibly fast,” he wrote in the blog post excerpted below), to climb through the most hazardous terrain:

It took him 22 min from the beginning to the end of the danger zone. For the Sherpas carrying a heavy load it took 30 min and most of our members took between 45 min and one hour to walk underneath this dangerous cliff. In my opinion, this is far too long to be exposed to such a danger and when I see around 50 people moving underneath the cliff at one time, it scares me.

Adding to Brice’s concern, some of his most experienced Sherpas, ordinarily exceedingly stoical men, approached him to say that the conditions on the mountain made them fear for their lives. One of them actually broke down in tears as he confessed this. So on May 7, 2012, Brice made an announcement that shocked most of the thousand people camped at the base of Everest: he was pulling all his guides, members, and Sherpas off the mountain, packing up their tents and equipment, and heading home. He was widely criticized for this decision in 2012, and not just by clients who were forced to abandon their dreams of climbing the world’s highest mountain without receiving a refund for the forty-three thousand euros they had paid him in advance. Many of the other expedition leaders also thought Brice was wildly overreacting. The reputation of Himex took a major hit.

After what happened last Friday, though, it’s hard to argue with Brice’s call.
 

Jon Krakauer on the last week's climbing accident on Mt. Everest, the worst in its history.

I did not realize just how much the dangers of climbing Everest have shifted since Krakauer wrote the riveting Into Thin Air. The danger of the thin air has been lessened for Western climbers.

Western climbers now use bottled oxygen much more liberally than they did in the past; many Western climbers now prophylactically dose themselves with dexamethasone, a powerful steroid, when they ascend above twenty-two thousand feet, which has proven to be an effective strategy for minimizing the risk of contracting high-altitude cerebral edema (HACE) and high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), potentially fatal ailments that are common on Everest...
 

It wasn't thin air that caused last week's tragedy. In fact it was quite the opposite: water in its solid state, “an overhanging wedge of ice the size of a Beverly Hills mansion.”

I enjoy tests of endurance, and I don't mind long bouts of physical discomfort and pain, but I've never had any urge to combine it with the roll of the dice with Death that seems to be climbing mountains like Everest and K2.

The hidden value of the NBA steal

This post by Benjamin Morris at FiveThirtyEight was one of the more interesting pieces at that site so far.

In fact, if you had to pick one statistic from the common box score to tell you as much as possible about whether a player helps or hurts his team, it isn’t how many points he scores. Nor how many rebounds he grabs. Nor how many assists he dishes out.

It’s how many steals he gets.

...

Steals have considerable intrinsic value. Not only do they kill an opponent’s possession, but a team’s ensuing possession — the one that started with the steal — often leads to fast-break scoring opportunities. But though this explains how a steal can be more valuable than a two-point basket, it doesn’t come close to explaining how we get from that to nine points.

I’ve heard a lot of different theories about how steals can be so much more predictively valuable than they seem: Steals “cost” less than other stats,7 or players who get more steals might also play better defense, or maybe steals are just a product of, as pundits like to call it, high basketball IQ. These are all worth considering and may be true to various degrees, but I think there’s a subtler — yet extremely important — explanation.

Think about all that occurs in a basketball game — no matter who is playing, there will be plenty of points, rebounds and assists to go around. But some things only happen because somebody makes them happen. If you replaced a player with someone less skilled at that particular thing, it wouldn’t just go to somebody else. It wouldn’t occur at all. Steals are disproportionately those kinds of things.
 

I haven't visited FiveThirtyEight as regularly as I thought I would. To some extent it feels a bit like a solution still in search of a problem. That is, analytic rigor with data is great, but it felt more essential as an antidote to hysteria during the elections. When it doesn't feel like you're sick, taking medicine regularly isn't as appealing.

It's still early, though. If nothing else they must certainly be analyzing the data on their traffic and engagement carefully. I personally would love to see more voice from their writers (that need not be mutually exclusive with analytical rigor) and a higher incidence of longer pieces.

We should take Skynet seriously

Looking further ahead, there are no fundamental limits to what can be achieved: there is no physical law precluding particles from being organized in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains. An explosive transition is possible, although it may play out differently than in the movie: as Irving Good realized in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vinge called a "singularity" and Johnny Depp's movie character calls "transcendence." One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.

So, facing possible futures of incalculable benefits and risks, the experts are surely doing everything possible to ensure the best outcome, right? Wrong. If a superior alien civilization sent us a text message saying, "We'll arrive in a few decades," would we just reply, "OK, call us when you get here -- we'll leave the lights on"? Probably not -- but this is more or less what is happening with AI. Although we are facing potentially the best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity, little serious research is devoted to these issues outside small non-profit institutes such as the Cambridge Center for Existential Risk, the Future of Humanity Institute, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and the Future of Life Institute. All of us -- not only scientists, industrialists and generals -- should ask ourselves what can we do now to improve the chances of reaping the benefits and avoiding the risks.
 

Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark, Stuart Russell, and Frank Wilczek with a warning about what lies at the end of an extrapolation of artificial intelligence.

New Girl Talk album

Girl Talk's new album Broken Ankles, a collab with the rapper Freeway, can be downloaded at DatPiff.

An early review from Stereogum:

Free always sounded too frantic to really be having fun. And party music is all Girl Talk does. So how was this going to work?

Really well, it turns out! At six tracks, Broken Ankles lasts just under half an hour, which turns out to be just the right amount of time for both of these guys, whose respective styles can wear thin at album length. And Gillis tweaks his style just enough to bring Freeway into his world without forcing Free to become an entirely different sort of rapper. Gillis certainly piles on the samples on Broken Ankles, as you can see from this partial list of artists sampled. But the whole shock-of-recognition thing that drives his solo work is way less of a factor here; if you can pick out the Add (N) To X or Iannis Xenakis samples, go ahead and award yourself a best-listener medal. Instead, he’s taken these pieces of music and crafted them into actual songs, slowing his sound down to midtempo and stripping it back enough that it won’t get in Free’s way without really losing intensity. On a track like “I Can Hear Sweat,” there’s a ton going on: Busy drums, Nine Inch Nails synth riff, buzzing bass, great little sonar blips on the hook. But all that activity never becomes the center of attention, except maybe on the non-rapped chorus. It’s a cluttered but effective rap beat, and it never distracts from Jadakiss’s absolutely cold-blooded guest verse or from the oddly endearing and goofy moment where Free says something about “reading books by Tom Sawyer.”

Under the Skin

Two movies from the Toronto Film Festival last year really stuck in my memory. One was Gravity for its almost minimalist, allegorical story structure. Everyone leaving the theater after the premiere knew it would be a huge hit; it was accessible and recalled what movies on the big screen can do that no other medium can match. In the moment, I thought it had a very good chance to be the next Best Picture winner (which went to another movie that played the festival, 12 Years a Slave, which I couldn't get a ticket for).

However, while I enjoyed Gravity, I was haunted by Under the Skin. It was the final movie I saw at the festival, and it's the type of movie that stuns you at a film festival because a catalog description can't really do it justice; so much of its effect comes not from plot but from the cinematography, score, editing, and other elements unique to film. The hook that got me to pick the movie out of the catalog was not Scarlett Johansson as the lead, though I enjoyed her work in Ghost World and Lost in Translation, but the director, Jonathan Glazer.

As a film director, Glazer isn't prolific. Most of his output has been music videos (e.g. the music video for Karma Police by Radiohead) and commercials. Until Under the Skin, he had directed just two narrative films, Sexy Beast and Birth, and the latter came out ten years ago. Birth, in particular, had a sequence that had such beautiful, seamless melding of music and onscreen action that I analyzed it as a dance.

I said the movie couldn't be understood from its plot description, but some exposition is helpful for understanding why the movie's formal elements are so successful.

[MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD. Though the plot of the movie can't being to describe the sensation of watching it (imagine describing the plot of 2001), if you plan to see the movie, I recommend reading as little about the movie as possible]

Johansson plays an alien wearing the body of a human. In the most fascinating performance of her career, Johansson deadens all evidence of recognizable inner life both in her facial expression and physical movements. As the movie progresses, Johansson starts to let a few recognizable glimmers of humanity emerge, clueing us in to the alien's growing sympathy for the human subject.

Part of the horror of the movie comes in a mixture of some secret live footage mixed into the movie. To capture scenes of the alien seducing human men, Glazer put Johansson in a wig and behind the wheel of a truck and had her drive around Glasgow picking up strange men off the street. Glazer hid in the back of the truck listening to the audio being captured through a hidden mic while concealed cameras captured the interaction.

One could argue that if aliens came to Earth in the form of Scarlett Johansson in bright red lipstick, we'd likely be done for (well, at least the straight men in the world), but Glazer and cinematographer Daniel Landin manage to render the seduction scenes terrifying. The moments in the truck were shot from concealed cameras that couldn't be moved, and the odd and fixed camera angles are different enough from the conventional Hollywood camera angles used to film conversations in automobiles that we feel we're watching found documentary footage. The subsequent seductions take place in a seemingly black void, choreographed like some avant garde dance performance. If it's possible to make Scarlett Johansson disrobing seem nonerotic, Glazer and team come as close as one could imagine.

Much of the movie's cinematography sits in strange space between a video or documentary look and something more cinematic. Most of the lighting is natural, and many scenes are dark, even murky. To be able to shoot undetected, and with maximum freedom of movement for the actors, the cinematographer worked with a London studio to develop a custom camera that was used to shoot some of the movie's scenes. The unique look is both familiar yet unique, contributing to the movie's otherworldly feel.

The score by Mica Levi is a masterpiece. You can hear snippets from it in the trailer. It's the perfect music for the next time you plan to host an Eyes Wide Shut inspired orgy. When the score isn't playing the movie is largely dialogue-free, almost like a silent movie or a voiceover-free documentary like Leviathan. At times it evokes Ligeti, but like the other elements of the movie it is like nothing else I've heard before. 

Under the Skin is a masterpiece, but plenty walked out of the Toronto premiere befuddled or disturbed. It's not a conventional narrative, it unfolds at its own pace and cares little for evoking any familiar human emotions, so seriously does it take its mission of showing us our world through alien eyes. On that point it succeeds, too well for some people I spoke to afterwards. More than any movie I can recall, it clinically observes and presents so many of the oddities of humanity—desire, compassion, lust, and death—and its success is in making us see them for their bizarre and wondrous qualities.