These are some of the songs I invariably sing when in the carpool lane. Sometimes I fantasize about properly making an entire album of carpool lane songs and then touring the country as a carpool lane rock star, but for today I decided to settle for making rough recordings of a few.
The first, the original carpool lane song:
It’s easy to make up lyrics to the above song indefinitely, but sometimes I want to mix it up.
Lyrics:
Oh, you know that I like diamonds,
but you don’t have to buy me a ring, no no,
just take me in the carpool lane,
and I’ll have everything.
And I don’t need a fancy car, no no,
just as long as it’s built for two, so you,
can take me in the carpool lane,
that’s what I want to do.
Yeah, I just want to have a simple life
Without any traffic or this honking and hubbub and lanes closed slow rolling rubber necking braking
No I don’t need a fancy vacation,
no, I’m happy to travel nearby, so I
can take you in the carpool lane,
and you can take me in the carpool lane,
yeah, we’ll both be in the carpool lane,
and baby, that’s all I need.
—
Just before entering the carpool lane, I like to burst into the chorus of this one, which someday I’d like to record properly with a full band behind it:
Lyrics:
Life’s too short for the slow lane,
so let’s take the fast lane.
It’s better when we’re together,
You don’t have to be alone.
I know you like your independence,
Wanna control the situation,
But you’re just lettin’ all the other people in your way,
so baby get inside my car.
’cause I know just where to go,
I know just where to go,
Come on, sugar baby, don’t you see
those magical letters H-O-V
I wanna HOV it baby, with you.
I’m goin’ faster than you’re used to,
but just relax and let me drive you.
Baby you know I’m gonna keep you safe
So don’t be scared.
Don’t gotta worry ’bout the others,
It’s more fun when we’re together.
You know I want a high occupancy vehicle,
so baby get inside my car.
’cause I know just where to go,
yeah, I know just where to go, oh, oh,
Come on, sugar baby, don’t you see
those magical letters H-O-V
I wanna HOV it baby.
We’re gonna fly down the highway
we’re goin’ faster, than the rest are
and we’ll arrive at the same time
we’ll be together, when we get there.
Oh, oh, oh, oh…
—
Maybe someday I’ll share some of my Loading Bar songs.
Short version: earlier this year it became clear to me that virtual reality is now the near future of everything, so I found the best people (Andrea Hawksley and Emily Eifler) and we started a project called eleVR, where we do stuff like create an open source web video player compatible with the Oculus, produce the first VR vlog (for, not about, virtual reality), and figure out how to film and produce stereo spherical video, sharing our findings on our blog the entire way.
Long version: I’m somewhat involved with the game dev community, and at the beginning of the year I started to encounter game after game being developed for the Oculus rift. VR gaming in the Oculus was clunky, low-res, and unconvincing to me, but I did come away certain that VR was the future, not because the Oculus headset itself was all that impressive, but because of the passion of the many developers putting so much time into creating content for it.
It’s games that sell gaming platforms, and VR was getting the games. All those kickstarter backers were fully invested, making new sorts of experiences that the gaming genre desperately needs. VR hardware will get better, and better, and suddenly I looked at the limited little rectangle of my videos and saw something soon to be archaic, an arbitrary shape chosen by technological convenience rather than anything fundamentally meaningful to the human experience, and I saw VR as the platform for video, for social media, for the entire internet.
I’m not going to wait around until my medium is dead, then jump onto other people’s platforms after they’ve already made the rules. I decided to get in right away and create a VR video culture that is open, diverse, and in the hands of individual creators, just as the Oculus got its start as an open platform in the hands of independent game developers. I saw two possible futures: one where people sit around detached from the world all day every day, absorbed in vacuous AAA games and websites designed to addict you with algorithmic perfection, and then the other future, where virtual reality is developed and controlled by real people, the ultimate personal tool for communication and self-expression. In this second future, sure the addictive AAA experiences exist, but it is not only huge corporations that have control over the virtual world.
That was what I was thinking about before Facebook bought Oculus. Now that the creators of the rift no longer have ultimate control over how open it stays, I’m all the more determined to do what I can to make the virtual world be our world, created and experienced by anyone who wants. Hence the creative commons videos, tech posts, and open source video player.
eleVR is a project of the Communications Design Group, a research group supported by SAP, which means I get to spend lots of time having fun researching how to do VR video and sharing it all on eleVR in addition to making my usual videos. It’s pretty awesome having a job that lets you work on so many different things and then give it all away for free, unlike all the VR-related startups and kickstarters that have to worry about making money and having an actual product if they want to be able to do stuff, so I’m really lucky I can do this.
And the questions that come up in VR video research are surprisingly in line with some of my favourite things in math. In VR video, we have to deal with spherical projections, vector fields (see my post on the hairy ball theorem), and quaternions, and just wait until we get to the spherical audio stuff… so much fun!
Nothing ever gets done if you wait for ideal circumstances. In the first infinity video, I had 20 minutes of time in our very professional sound booth before my office mate needed to use the booth and mic. When it comes to great audio, it’s hard to beat couch-cushion-fort-under-a-desk, so that is an example of ideal circumstances.
Sometimes there’s no time for building professional pillow forts because you have to record in a big echoey room in time to make your flight and then edit audio on a plane with your arms all crunched up like a t-rex to use the keyboard of your laptop that’s half-shut because the person in front of you had the audacity to lean their seat back. Not quite ideal, but still good enough for getting things done, and not exactly an uncommon occurrence.
There is a third video on infinities half-scripted, so we’ll see how that goes.
Natural numbers (1, 2, 3…)
Integers (…-3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2…)
Rationals (1, 1/2, 2/1, 2/3, 3/2, 3/4, 4/3…)
Algebraic (sqrt 2, golden ratio, anything you can get with algebra)
Transcendental (real numbers you can’t get using any finite amount of algebra, like pi and e)
Reals (all possible infinite sequences of digits 0.123456789101112131415…, includes all of the above)
Imaginary (reals times i, where i^2=-1) Complex (one part real, one part “imaginary,” a consistent, commutative, associative, 2-dimensional number system) Dual numbers (instead of imagining a number where i^2=-1, make up a number where ε^2=0 and use that) Quaternions (make up numbers that square to -1, but are different from each other. i^2=j^2=k^2=ijk=-1. 4d, noncommutative.) Octonions (make up even more numbers, 8d, noncommutative and nonassociative.) Split-complex (imagine if i^2=+1, but i isn’t 1) Split-quaternions Split-octonions Bicomplex number, or tessarine Hypercomplex (category that describes/includes all complexy number systems that extend the reals)
Also see combinatorial game theory, which extends the surreal numbers to get numberlike but not-quite-number values such as “star.” Star gets confused with zero, in a mathematical definition of confusion, but it is not actually zero.
You can also write real numbers in other bases, including negative bases, irrational bases, and even complex bases.
This is the third in a series of “Crazy Snail” videos, after a quick snail video throwing some footage together, and then what was supposed to be a quick video throwing more footage together but accidentally turned into something more.
I had the concept for this one not long after I finished Crazy Snail 2, and recorded a mock-up of the beginning of the song. I got stuck at the point that I needed a violin, and figured I’d get one eventually, so it sat. For a year.
I’m finally moving out of my snail-infested apartment, so I figured now was the time. I had the bright idea that an electric violin would let me record without worrying about both making and recording noise in my thin-walled apartment. Maybe I could actually record something without my upstairs neighbor turning up his music to unbearable levels in noise-revenge!
I hunted outside for a snail and found one hidden in the leaves within minutes. Filming snail footage takes patience and improvisation and snail knowledge. You can drip water on a sleeping snail to convince it that it might be a good time to check out what’s up in the world, but besides that, one cannot coerce a snail into doing much of anything. All you can do is follow it along and take advantage of the individual snail’s personality.
And snails do have personalities. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my years of snail filming experience, it’s that snails are individuals. They behave in different, and recognisable, ways. I would have thought they’d be rather algorithmic, so this surprised me.
Luckily this snail was nothing like the snail the song’s about, and took to the viola scroll quite happily. The way it arched and swayed while I was playing! The way it happily curled up to sleep when I was done, right at the top! How it perched on a tuning peg and regarded its spiral companion… I wonder if the scroll triggered familiarity in its snail mind?
I knew I had some great footage. Now time to produce the song!
It turned out the cheap electric violin I got for this makes more extra noise than any amount of neighbors and leafblowers ever could, but it was too late to turn back now, so I went ahead and used my trusty old viola. Heavy, loud, and has survived past video abuse (see What Is Up With Noises). Had to change up the composition a lot, from high tiny delicate life to dark and low and slow, and of course as soon as I start recording, my neighbor turns up the beats.
Ah well, so much for production quality. You can hear the distant pulse of pumping bass in a bunch of my videos, and hopefully this will be the last, what with the new place and all. In the end, with the many tracks overlaid with echo it evens out to a low distant thunder that I kind of like, which makes me wish that I had bothered a little more with production quality in other aspects. Oh well.
And none of those things are the things people care or ask about after watching the video. They want to know about EMOTIONS. Well! I’d meant to capture an infinite curled-up moment of a particular feeling, including the odd self-aware beauty of feeling that feeling. That stuff is in a snail video because the snail is the perfect metaphor, literally curling up in its delicate spiral shell, an ugly distasteful thing portrayed in all its first-person beauty.
Comprehensive info. Time is of the essence, so forgive my inevitable errors.
For those like me who communicate through high-bandwidth media, the FCC’s proposal would be particularly silencing. Better to delay the video I was working on and make this one, rather than do nothing and possibly see all future vihart videos delayed.
A very different sort of video for me. An enjoyable challenge.
Script with embedded links, general links at end:
So say your local mail delivery truck stops in front of your house, which is good because two days ago you ordered two different books with two-day shipping, sent out at the same time from similar locations, and you’re pretty excited for them both.
The delivery driver picks up your two packages and starts reading the labels. One is from a small independent book store they’ve never heard of, the other is from a large chain they’ve already delivered like 20 packages from today.
Instead of just dropping them both off, the driver makes a phone call to the big book seller and says: “Hey, I sure deliver a lot of your packages.” The company replies: “Yes, our customers really like our stuff.” The driver says: “I’m pretty sure your packages take up, like, 30% of the space in my truck. We’re gonna need to hire more trucks if you keep this up.” the company says: “Wow, you must be so happy that our customers are paying you to deliver so many packages from us that you can expand your business!” And the driver’s like: “right, look, I’m thinking I don’t want to carry more than one package all the way to this customer’s door, and there’s this other package from another address for them so I might just deliver that one.
And the big company is like: “what? That customer paid for two day shipping from you, you can’t just decide not to deliver it, what, because we give you too much business?”
The driver says “relax, I’ll deliver it eventually, just might take a while. Unless of course you’d like to help us out, just a little extra shipping fee and we’ll deliver your book on time”
As the customer waiting for your books, what do you think you and the book company should do? Report the driver? No way what they’re doing is legal. So you report them, but it turns out their lobbyists have convinced the government that what they’re doing is ok. No, it’s not just ok, it’s innovation! Fine, maybe you can do capitalism to it. The big book chain starts using another delivery company, one that appreciates the amount of business they’re getting from those deliveries, and of course you’d rather pay for shipping from a company that actually follows through on their promises, and new businesses grow, hooray!
That’s how it should work, which is why a lot of people think that’s how it does work.
So say you have a one-hundred dollar a month contract with Comcast to deliver to you whatever data you order at a certain speed, and you order data from Netflix, and Netflix sends the data your way. But just before it gets to your house it has to go through cables Comcast owns, and Comcast says, “Wow, Netflix, you give us so much business, pay us money or we’ll slow down your site until it’s frustratingly unusable.” Netflix should be able to say “Yeah, no thanks, first of all you’re going to lose customers if you don’t give them the service they’re paying for, and second, why wouldn’t you want to lay down more cable and expand your business? Wouldn’t that make you more money?”
It would make so much sense if Comcast’s reply was, “Gee, Netflix, you’re right! We don’t want to lose customers, we want to lay more, bigger, cable, expand our business, and make more money!”
But, as anyone who pays for their own internet and has tried comparison shopping knows, that’s not how it works. Comcast can reply, “First of all, we’re not gonna lose customers. What can they do, move somewhere else, that has cables laid down by one of our very good friends? Second of all, we don’t need the business from delivering your content, we can already charge as much as we want. Look, this sucker is paying almost a hundred bucks a month for 10 megabytes a second on a good day. third, Netflix competes with our own video content; if Netflix is unwatchably slow and people leave to watch Cable TV, which we’ve conveniently packaged in with their internet service, that’s a win-win, and both wins are for us. Fourth, when your site doesn’t load it may be our fault, but the customer doesn’t see us artificially restricting the data they ordered, they see you being slow. So pay up.”
And Netflix did. This already happened.
Truth is, there’s a lot of homes and businesses where the local internet service provider has a monopoly. Capitalism does not work when monopolies block the way between producers and consumers. That’s not rhetoric, it’s math. Capitalism doesn’t work when it’s impossible for a new business to emerge in a market. Look how much trouble Google is having with Google Fiber, and they’re Google. In many parts of the US there’s a good chance that Comcast is your only option. You’ll pay for internet because you need internet, but you’ll be paying 3 times as much as people are paying for internet in Seoul or Tokyo, for service that’s 10 times slower. We’re being artificially held back, on purpose.
When you order a book, the delivery truck drives on their own driveways, public roads, toll roads, the private lane that goes to the book store’s warehouse, all the way to the street outside your house and then:
In this allegory, you pay Comcast to hire a company to make and maintain a driveway, so that the Comcast trucks can get from the road to your house, and because they built the driveway, only their trucks are allowed to use it. If you lived in Tokyo, you’d have a nice wide perfectly-paved road, but comcast made you a little dirt road full of pot holes. You’d like comcast to fix it, or to hire someone else to, but there’s no one else to hire, so instead of fixing it Comcast charges you even more and still doesn’t fix it.
Here’s the officially proposed rule the FCC is considering: internet service providers must offer some amount of access to all legal internet things, but they can offer a “fast lane” to certain content providers. This sounds like maybe Comcast and Netflix collaborate to put in a special cable all the way from Netflix right to your home to get superfast Netflix service, but that’s not what this fast lane is. It’s not even a nice new paved driveway. The “fast lane” means that comcast puts a gate at the front of your driveway.
The netflix trucks are allowed in right away because they paid off the gatekeeper. You invite your friend over, and your friend has to wait outside the gate for a while, even when no one else is using your driveway.
If you want to watch netflix right now, yes, you should be able to prioritize netflix’s data and slow everything else down. But if after that you want to torrent the latest vihart video, there’s no technical reason you shouldn’t be able to put that in the “fast lane”. You’re not paying your ISP for content, you’re paying them to deliver the content you choose.
Except they decided maybe they do want to control what content you can choose, and the FCC’s proposed rule would make that officially ok. Which is a huge reversal in the FCC’s position that happened when Tom Wheeler, a former cable lobbyist, became chairman.
In 2004, the FCC basically said, “Hey, ISPs, we made some network neutrality rules for you, yay for open internet!” And then Comcast started throttling bittorrent, which was against those rules. There was a court case that Comcast won, with the argument that the FCC couldn’t legally enforce those rules because they weren’t official enough. So the FCC created the Open Internet Order of 2010 and voted on it and passed it and finally, net neutrality had real offical rules! And Verizon took the FCC to court and was like, “Are you sure these rules are for us? Because, they look a lot like the rules for common carriers, and we’re not common carriers, so we’re thinking the rules don’t apply to us.”
And Verizon won. So if the FCC can’t enforce their own rules because ISPs aren’t classified as common carriers, a lot of people think the FCC’s next move should be to classify ISPs as common carriers.
Basically, a common carrier can’t discriminate among the things they carry. Airlines and Telephone Companies are common carriers, so Apple can’t pay Virgin America to not let any Microsoft employees on their flights; T-Mobile can’t purposely drop your call while you’re trying to order a pizza if Domino’s won’t pay them a cut of the order.
Up ’til recently, ISPs have been acting like common carriers. They built their businesses on customers’ expectations that they were common carriers, like other telecommunication services, and with the benefit of the legal protection given to telecommunication services, such as not being liable for the content that moves through their cables. In 1998 the Digital Millenium Copyright Act thing happened, which gave ISPs more protection from liability for their user’s actions, still back when ISPs acted as if they were common carriers. Right now ISPs control content without being liable for that content.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 helped ISPs become big and powerful, they merged and formed monopolies, and then they decided it was in their best interest not to be considered a “telecommunications service,” but an “information service,” which would be less regulated, and also have fewer protections, but since they were now protected by the DMCA that wasn’t a problem. There were a bunch of hearings. They won, they lost, and then in 2005 they managed to convince 6 out of 9 judges that even though the internet is a telecommunications service, they also do other things, and the Telecommunications Act that would have classified them as a common carrier telecommunications service does not clearly state that they have to be classified that way even if they also do other things.
Many net neutrality activists are asking you to call your representative and sign petitions and make an official comment to the FCC that the current “fast-lane” plan is not net-neutrality, and that the FCC should instead hold strong to its original plan of treating ISPs like common carriers by actually designating broadband internet as a title II common carrier telecommunication service. If you’re going to make that call or official comment I want you to make it with full confidence that it is right and fair, because it’s not legal to classify corporate entities as being whatever you want just because “yay internet.”
And the internet has other problems besides net neutrality. There’s only a handful of ISPs, they’re huge and powerful with huge powerful lobbyists, many of which are now FCC employees, they have local monopolies, they work for each others’ benefit instead of as competitors, and there’s no way for a new competitor to enter their market. Making them common carriers will limit the damage they can do but it won’t make them any less of a cartel.
Comcast is trying to get approval to buy Time Warner Cable and it’s completely nuts that the FCC is even considering it. We have antitrust laws because it’s one of those beautiful mathematical inevitabilities that without intervention, monopolies will form. If you think stopping the biggest ISP from merging with the second-biggest ISP is what antitrust laws were made for, please speak out against this merger and mergers like them.
Links included for doing stuff and learning more. You can call, tweet, or email Tom Wheeler and the other FCC commissioners and tell them what you think about net neutrality, the merger, concern over having so many previous cable lobbyists now working for the FCC, whatever it is you care about. You can ask your local representative in government to do what they can, you can sign petitions, and you can make an official comment on any FCC proceeding on the FCC website, which very few people bother to do because 1. most of the momentum around “saving the internet” is built up around signing up for 3rd party websites and mailing lists or retweeting and upvoting infographics and articles, and 2. For it to be a real official comment, you have to publicly give your real name and address, which might put you off if you’re not absolutely sure you’re doing the right thing.
I hope this video makes things clearer for you.
Politicians love when you personally contact them! It is a fact. If you’re not in the US, make sure your local government considers this state of affairs an embarrassment for the US, not something to model your own rules on.
I order a lot of stuff online. In the past week I’ve ordered socks, postage stamps, 4 small glockenspiels and a new hammock for the office, among other things.
This means boxes, lots of boxes. I’ve got a process for breaking them down that is easy and doesn’t add strain to my hands after a day of typing and musicking. It involves using my feet instead.
My second secret channel is where I often share life tips such as how to squeeze toothpaste or press microwave buttons, and I’ve always thought box breaking might be fun to share as well. A couple months ago I was sick and kind of trapped in my apartment living via delivery, and with the boxes building up and not trusting my sickybrain to do more important work I wrote and recorded a script (you can hear my sickyvoice in it).
Then, I let the boxes build up.
And up…
Until finally I filmed the video about a month later, and returned my apartment to its box-free state, and edited and posted it a bit after that. Living with that growing pile of boxes was the hardest part of making this video.
The first minute-and-a-half are carefully written and edited. Then, instead of ending the video, the last piece of footage simply continues unedited for almost 11 minutes, until I turn the camera off.
I did this for a few reasons. First, might as well. The footage was already filmed and people can exercise their free choice to stop watching. Then, I figured some tiny percentage of people might actually want to see more examples of how to break boxes, or like the noise, or appreciate the excuse for a moment to relax and listen to ambient sounds before clicking back into the bright flashing whirl of the internet.
Mostly, I liked the contrast. Narration of a carefully-written and carefully-acted script over carefully-edited video, then the uneasy continuance of something clearly other, something unformed and unintentional, perhaps capturing the uncomfortable feeling of seeing someone who thinks they’ve already turned the camera off.
I’d like to explore that idea further, because looking at the comments I was clearly unsuccessful. I am surprised at the number of people who watch, or think they are supposed to watch, or that I want them to watch, the entire video, that the uncut continued footage is actually the substance of the video, rather than empty packaging.
There’s subtler meanings to the substance of the video itself that I won’t go into, but everyone seems focused on the box– after all, it’s the bigger and more easily-defined object!
I hadn’t planned to post here about this quick experiment of a video, but like many experiments with unexpected results I have more to say than I thought I would.
Speaking of unexpectedly interesting experiments, the latest microwave counting video has guest cinematographic rotation technician Henry Reich (who makes MinutePhysics). In retrospect it should have been no surprise that we would work so well together counting down with a microwave because we’ve done a fair amount of musical improvisation together, but it’s still fun to see how those skills transfer over. For me, at least. Watching, as always, is entirely optional.
Today I was reminded of a piece of “interactive art code” I’d created a couple years ago as a proof-of-concept of what could be done with Khan Academy’s CS platform.
The code and compiled result are shown side by side, so you can edit while seeing the result in real time. Editing is easy: click on a blue number and it turns into a slider, so you can try changing the variable “blowing_shifting_speed_of_change” from 10 to 0 or -129, stuff like that. Only this time, instead of editing this as part of learning to program, edit these numbers to participate in a piece of interactive art.
You can save your result on the Khan Academy platform if you want (no signup necessary), as well as whatever you might choose to program (though I warn you that the way it is computed in real time does not always reflect what will happen if the code is run from the beginning, especially for cases like turning a speed to 0 when the thing moving has already moved). Variations of programs are linked to the original, which is how I re-found some of the earlier stuff I’d made that day that led to the above result.
I didn’t have any experience programming in javascript, but I do understand cardioids and circle summing, which made the above example a great jumping-off point for me. Watching the thing change in real-time as I messed around with it was fun, so the obvious next step was to animate that action. I learned how to animate and came up with Drowning Bloom.
The embeddable player runs slow when more than one are animating at once, so I just made a slight variation with an integrated pause button of sorts:
One thing led to another and soon I had a simple animation I called Lost Memories of Desert Sand, and couldn’t stop staring. Here’s where I thought I was on to something, that there’s real power in the artsy interpretation of a simple piece of sum-of-circle code.
Thinking about code as an art form, I realized I wanted to write Art Code, that I wanted the code itself, and not just the resulting pretty image, to be the essential part of the art piece. I wanted writing code, editing code, changing code, to be part of the art. Not in a “coding is art” kind of way, but in an “interactive art code” kind of way. And thus Lost Memories of Desert Sand got a bunch of new variable names, ordering, and piles of comments, resulting in Lost Memories.
It is appropriate to the name of the piece that I’d forgotten it for so long, just one more quick project lost immediately afterward, then found years later, thinking “hey, that was pretty good, I should probably get that down on a blog before it’s forgotten forever.”
I think interactive art code is a genre worth pursuing, ideally by someone who knows or wants to learn javascript, which maybe is you? (If you make something, tweet it @vihartvihart)
My past self also managed to surprise me with this one: “Oops“.
It’s 3/14, beloved math holiday to many, and I’m here to be your grinch.
This year I rant about why Pi is not special, not infinite, and relatively boring. I mean, it’s nice, I guess, if you’re into that, but there’s so many more interesting parts of mathematics!
A new video, about an afternoon taking a break from math to bake with friends. No math allowed! Right?
Gonna talk about the process of creating this video, but first, the people.
Gwen Fisher is a mathematical artist whose work I’ve known for many years. Every time it’s something new: a new technique for creating woven beadwork (along with a math paper that generalizes the technique), or new fractal beadwork (along with a theory of what path the thread needs to take), and years ago when I posted about some beadwork hyperbolic planes I made, Gwen was the first to send me an email saying she’d tried my instructions, and then followed up with some new hyperbolic variations of her own that were well beyond anything I had the skill to create. After that, we finally ran into each other at one conference, and then another conference, and then I found out I’d just moved 10 minutes from her house, and the rest is history!
When Gwen introduced me to her sister Ruth I was surprised to find I was already a fan of her work as well: she was the Ruth in Sweets by Ruth! I like my coffee to taste like coffee and my chocolate to taste like chocolate, the perfect combo of which I’d found in Ruth’s brownies at Red Rock Coffee (please don’t stalk me), so I thought it a fairly strange coincidence. When we pitched the idea of making mathematical gingerbread shapes to her, she knew exactly what we needed: a sturdy dough that wouldn’t change shape too much while baking, while still being delicious, and would we like it to come in a number of bright happy colors that would suit themselves to being filmed? Yes, yes we would! And besides all those perks, switching from the gingerbread idea to shortbread allowed the most amazing edible pun.
I can’t remember when I first met Andrea Hawksley. She’s another person where I came into contact with her or her work many years ago, and have done so again repeatedly until it reached a tipping point. It could have been 6 years ago at MIT in the context of mathematical origami or computational geometry, or maybe it was at one of her mathematical dance workshops, or when I read one of her papers. I knew we were destined to be friends a couple years ago at a recreational math conference when I saw her casually and informally leading a group of people in cutting slits in extra conference flyers and slotting them together with icosahedral symmetry. That’s when I found out I’d moved not far from her as well!
I make mathematical art for a living, but I also like to do it for fun, and in the past couple years I’ve met up with Gwen, Andrea, and sometimes others, to have fun figuring out new technique for creating new math art, or see a visiting colleague’s latest work, or, in this case, to try out some mathematical baking. Except I had a new camera to try out, so I finally broke the casual just-for-funness by filming for a video.
That was over a month ago, and I’ve been working on this video since! Well, along with other things. But this video presented a lot of new challenges for me.
First, I usually start with a complete concept for a video, spend weeks on the script, then film and edit to that script. Many vloggers are extremely good at filming hours of footage of unpredictable things as they happen, then remembering and pulling out good moments to turn into a coherent story, perhaps framed and pulled together by footage of themselves talking face-on to a camera.
Sorting through hours of footage and pulling out anything resembling a story is not a skill I have developed, and if making this video taught me nothing else it is greater respect for those who do so on a weekly basis. I pulled out the best footage and sound clips I’d managed to get (working with a new camera, some stuff came out horribly), re-arranged events to follow more of an arc from less-mathy to more-mathy, and ended up with an edit that had no story and would only really be fun to watch for people who recognize an aperiodic tiling or truncated icosahedron when they see one. So I did what I do best: I created a story and wrote a script.
This is a trick taken from vloggers. Narrate about your day, cutting in actual footage of it. But I don’t “vlog,” my story was invented, and I wasn’t especially interested in following the standard format of talking to a camera. Could I do the frame story in my second-person notebook style? The notebook makes things personal, hands-on, as if you could be drawing this stuff yourself. It’s badly-drawn visual representations of things, not the things themselves, letting your imagination do the work. Would it make any sense to try to integrate that with real footage of real things?
Doing it in standard vlog style, except replacing talking-head with notebook, turned out much too jarring. I needed something more natural, something that helps your brain make the connections between what’s going on in notebook world and real world. Thus, I decided to try out real footage overlaid and framed by notebook-happenings. Then, there’s notebook footage, real footage, vocal narration, and real dialogue, and if I wanted to sometimes do fake narration over real footage, I had to make it super clear what was narration and what was real time, clear yet not jarring. For this reason, whenever there’s a switch from narration to real-world sound, there’s usually a cut from notebook to footage, or from footage to notebook. Sometimes real footage is paired with narration, so when switching back to the actual sound I can cut to footage-in-notebook view, which gives your brain all the cues it needs to make the transition seem right. Then, real-life and notebook-land is brought even closer together by sometimes popping up a quick notebook person to say something that’s clearly being said by a real person in the real footage, and it happens so quick that you don’t have time to worry whether it’s a transition to a different thing before you know it’s not.
All this was done carefully and consciously, so you can imagine why it took me a month!
Then, there’s the sound itself. I’d been worried about how the narration and natural sounds would work together, but as soon as I tried layering some stuff I realized I’d had a stroke of luck: my new camera records sound in 5.1, which turned out to be perfect, because it makes it really clear what is narration (mono, artificial) and what is from the footage (all around, like in real life). I knew I could take advantage of this, layering real noises on top of narration without the listener having any trouble keeping track of which is which. Still, the initial introduction of real-sound after narration was a bit jarring, and so I introduced the real noises by purposely mingling them with the narration, fake narration-me yelling about the broken color symmetry along with real-me, which connected the two sound stories right at the beginning and makes all the natural sound make sense and feel connected later.
Maybe you can see why one of my pet peeves is when people say I am naturally great at video editing and have some genius talent, which is both untrue and denies the hard work I put in. The truth is that I spend a lot of time identifying problems (lack of story, inaccessible to non-mathy people), studying what other people have done to fix them (frame story, narrating over footage), trying those things out and identifying problems with that (frame story is in wrong style, now add in rough transitions, things are worse than before), then trying out fixes for that (connect frame story to real footage by every means I can think of: overlay video, overlay sound, switch so quickly you don’t even notice), see what works, iterate. Even after years of doing this for a living, sometimes it still takes me a month to figure out a new problem.
Hopefully what you notice in the end is not the editing at all but the actual things we were making and the awesomeness of the people with whom I had the pleasure of making edible mathematical art. A lot of the frame story is made up (we went in with the full intention of making mathematical cookies, but that’s not a story, and is hard to sympathize with if you’re “not a math person”). The ending, however, is mostly true: after hours of patience, Walter took his chance to gobble up some of our best work.
