Economics of dystopian landscapes

In the budget of a video game or a movie, writing is a very small wedge of the pie. The money all goes into other wedges. In both games and movies the production of visuals is very expensive, and the people responsible for creating those visuals hold sway in proportion to their share of the budget.

I hope I won’t come off as unduly cynical if I say that such people (or, barring that, their paymasters) are looking for the biggest possible bang for the buck. And it is much easier and cheaper to take the existing visual environment and degrade it than it is to create a new vision of the future from whole cloth. That’s why New York keeps getting destroyed in movies: it’s relatively easy to take an iconic structure like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty and knock it over than it is to design a future environment from scratch. A few weeks ago I think I actually groaned out loud when I was watching OBLIVION and saw the wrecked Statue of Liberty sticking out of the ground. The same movie makes repeated use of a degraded version of the Empire State Building’s observation deck. If you view that in strictly economic terms–which is how studio executives think–this is an example of leveraging a set of expensive and carefully thought-out design decisions that were made in 1930 by the ESB’s architects and using them to create a compelling visual environment, for minimal budget, of a future world.
 

From an interview with Neal Stephenson.

That's an interesting theory about why futuristic landscapes in sci-fi movies are so often degraded versions of existing landscapes, but I'm skeptical. It seems just as likely to me that showing the wreckage of a recognizable landmark like the Statue of Liberty gives the audience a faux-realistic through line from the contemporary age to the date the movie is set in. The aging of the shared cultural landmark serves as a form of visual carbon dating, removing the need to rely on showing a specific year in a text preamble or overlay.

Any visual effects folks out there who know if Stephenson's theory is true, feel free to leave a comment.

Piketty and his critics

Nate Silver explains why we should be skeptical of both Piketty and his skeptics.

Piketty’s data sets are very detailed, and they aggregate data from many original sources. For instance, the data Piketty and the economist Gabriel Zucman compiled on wealth inequality in the United Kingdom for their paper “Capital is Back: Wealth-Income Ratios in Rich Countries, 1700-2010″ contains about 220 data series for the U.K. alone which are hard-coded into their spreadsheet. These data series are compiled from a wide array of original sources, which are reasonably well documented in the spreadsheet.

This type of data-collection exercise — many different data series over many different years, compiled from many countries and many sources — offers many opportunities for error. Part of the reason Piketty’s efforts are potentially valuable is because data on wealth inequality is lacking. But that also means his numbers will not have received as much scrutiny as other data sets.

...

What error rate is acceptable? The right answer is probably not “zero.” If researchers kept scrubbing data until it were perfect, they’d never have time for analysis. There comes a point of diminishing returns; that Hack Wilson had 191 RBIs during the 1930 season rather than 190 ought not have a material impact on any analysis of baseball player performance. At other times, entire articles or analyses or theories or paradigms are developed on the basis of deeply flawed data.

I don’t know where Piketty sits on this spectrum. However, I think Giles (and some of the commentary surrounding his work) could do a better job of describing Piketty’s error rate relative to the overall volume of data that was examined. If Giles scrutinized all of Piketty’s data and found a handful of errors, that would be very different from taking a small subsample of that data and finding it rife with mistakes.
 

It's striking how much discussion of Piketty's book has happened already. As Silver notes, this is peer review happening live and in the open.

That makes the book itself, which sits in my Kindle, already somewhat dated. I'd love for the Kindle or some other ebook service to evolve to be a platform for living books. You could see the original text, but the book itself would accumulate references and edits and notes from both the author and readers.

When I think of books as a social platform, I don't think of Goodreads, I think of living texts. That would be truly exciting, and the first book platform to support that would achieve some serious network effects. It's odd that in the age of the ever-living web page that our e-books are still so static and rigid in form. I'm still not sure why I can't leave notes on passages in books for friends and followers to discover when they open the text in their e-reader.

Harmless Harvest Coconut Water

I never cared much for coconut water, but then one day some friends had me try some Harmless Harvest 100% Raw Coconut Water. It was like drinking from a raw coconut, which, it turns out, is not too far from the truth.

The flavor, aroma, and nutrition found in the liquid inside young green coconuts, known as coconut water, is contained within volatile compounds. As in all raw ingredients, these delicate compounds are significantly altered when heated. With heat pasteurized coconut waters lining the shelves, we reinvented the supply chain to maintain the integrity from freshly cracked nut to freshly cracked bottle. We source unique 100% organic coconuts with a distinctly sweet and nutty flavor, and grown using traditional organic farming methods. We protect that flavor through a cutting-edge, proprietary manufacturing systems including straight coconut-to-bottle bottling and high pressure processing. The best ingredients should be enjoyed just as nature grew them.
 

I'm no doctor, so I don't know if all the health benefits of coconut water are real, but this Harmless Harvest stuff tastes damn good. Costco now carries four-packs, and I grabbed one my last visit. Even at Costco, it's not cheap at about $4 a bottle, but since I don't drink coffee, it's my temporary substitute indulgence.



High Dynamic Range Imaging

4K TVs don't excite me much, you really have to be sitting close to notice much difference, but Dolby's High Dynamic Range Imaging technology, which they call Dolby Vision and which they demoed at CES 2014, sounds amazing. To understand why, I turn it over to the folks at Dolby:

At Dolby, we wanted to find out what the right amount of light was for a display like a television. So we built a super-expensive, super-powerful, liquid-cooled TV that could display incredibly bright images. We brought people in to see our super TV and asked them how bright they liked it.

Here’s what we found: 90 percent of the viewers in our study preferred a TV that went as bright as 20,000 nits. (A nit is a measure of brightness. For reference, a 100-watt incandescent lightbulb puts out about 18,000 nits.)

You may be thinking, “Wow, I don’t want to look at a TV that bright. Looking at a 100-watt bulb would hurt my eyes!” And you’d be right if the TV was displaying a full-screen, pure-white image. That would be uncomfortable.

But real TV images, like scenes in the real world, include a mixture of dark and light. Only small parts of real-world scenes are very bright, and we have no problem looking at them. In fact, one of the secrets to producing TV images that look like real life is having that mix of true brights and darks.

If viewers want images of as much 20,000 nits, guess what the industry standard is for the brightness of current TV images. (Go ahead, we’ll wait.)

If your guess is more than 100 nits, you’re wrong. It’s true—most viewers want TV images that are 200 times brighter than today’s industry standard.

Does that difference really matter? You bet it does. Today’s TVs simply can’t match the depth and detail of a display that can produce far brighter images. And conventional TVs can’t recreate all the colors found in the world around us. It’s a classic case of “you don’t know what you’re missing until you see it.” When you experience a display with much higher brightness, you never want to go back to a conventional display.

This is just a JPG being viewed on a computer screen, but it gives a rough sense of the potential difference in contrast and color fidelity that is possible with higher dynamic range displays.