Opinion
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SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2016 mst.daydesk@gmail.com
TRUMP’S..
THE POETIC JUSTICE AND IRONY OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVE DETECTION
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tech sector, is in high-priced coastal metro areas that overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Clinton. The presidentelect is not stopping by their offices on his “thank you” tour. But it’s not too late to earn his gratitude. Profit margins are historically elevated, and a good deal of knowledge work, while perhaps needing some level of urban scale to find suitable pools of talent, could be done in places like Scranton, Pennsylvania, or Gary, Indiana, just as easily as it’s done in San Francisco or Seattle. Corporate America might decide that accepting somewhat lower profit margins to create less-profitable jobs in key Trump regions might appease the Trump administration, and would give them leverage with Trump on future issues. How sustainable would this sort of thing be? A cynic would say that at the end of the Trump administration, corporate America would go back to the way things were before and would eliminate any excess jobs (if indeed any were ever created to placate Trump), restoring profit margins to their more elevated level. Except that future candidates from both parties might be expected to pledge they would continue Trump’s pressure campaign in order to prevent jobs from disappearing. It’s a new style of economic stimulus, and it may not go away when Trump does. His legacy for the executive branch may be “tweet loudly and carry a big stick.” Bloomberg
1898:... From B1 want medals and there are men who want to return). This is a succinct characterization of Cerezo, whose pride renders him unwilling to surrender, and Carlos, who wants to stop fighting a war that has ended and that no longer has meaning. There are at least two Filipinos in the cast, Alexandra Masangkay, who plays Teresa, “an indigenous woman,” and the versatile Raymond Bagatsing as Comandante Luna. Film critic Jonathan Hopper, who reviewed “1898” for the Hollywood Reporter, says it “offers little that’s new but is still about as close as Spanish cinema has come of late to anything approaching epic cinema. Though its subject matter and general focus are utterly Spanish, its purely cinematic qualities makes it deserving of offshore exposure.” Hopper goes on to praise the acting skills of the cast, while lamenting that the story is stereotypical and clichéd. His bottom line: “Spectacular and striking, but none too subtle.” However, Miguel Juan Payan, writing for accionsine.es, has a deeper appreciation for the film and its impact. He says, “The important thing is that behind the shots, the races, the attacks, and the deaths, there are people, characters well-drawn in the script” that between the actors’ and director’s efforts “translate into moments of good cinema.” What the film lacks in the subtlety that Hopper seeks, it makes up for in its grand visuals, ambitious scope, and finely-wrought characterization. As Payan points out, the “shades in each character” and the “epic planes of the film and the action of the same” remind him of Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam in Apocalypse Now and Oliver Stone’s Vietnam in Platoon; which, he explains, is “logical because, were not the Philippines for Spain what years later would be Indochina for France or Vietnam for the United States?” Payan’s bottom line: “Highly recommended. Among the best Spanish cinema that has been released this year, and that’s saying a lot because we had a good movie crop here in 2016.” The film trailer can be viewed on the internet, and I confess it got me excited. The visuals are beautiful—the film was shot in the Canary Islands and Equatorial Guinea—and the acting that I could see in the trailer seems sincere and honest. My enjoyment of film is simple: filmmaking is storytelling, and any missteps in accuracy and production can be forgiven if the narrative touches the heart and mind, and evokes emotion or stimulates thought. There is much praise on the internet for the high quality of the script and the dialogue, and if it tells a good story, then it’s worth watching. The film is of much interest for Filipinos, because this is a look at how Spaniards understand and construct their past as colonizers of the Philippines. Heneral Luna is our own examination of the same time period. It’s time to find out how the other side has come to terms, if at all, with this historical event that has had enormous repercussions on our society and psyche as a people. Dr. Ortuoste is a California-based writer. Follow her on Facebook: Jenny Ortuoste, Twitter: @jennyortuoste, Instagram: @jensdecember
By Pecier Decierdo THIS is a story about ripples, of light and in space and time. This also is a story about one of the most poetic turns of events in the history of science. In the early years of the 1800s, Thomas Young performed a series of experiments that showed light is a wave. Young did this by showing that underwent interference, which is what happens when different waves meet each other and occupy the same place at the same time. The result of Young’s experiments led to the following question: what was light a wave of? Water waves are waves in water. Seismic waves are waves in the ground that spread from the origin of an earthquake. Sound, meanwhile, is a wave in air. Waves seem to require a medium, stuff through which to travel. What stuff did light travel through? This stuff came to be called the “luminiferous aether.” If it existed, it had to fill all of outer space to allow light to travel between stars and planets. It also had to be extremely thin because the planets had to move through it as if unobstructed. It was also very difficult to detect, so scientists tried to devise different ways of detecting it indirectly. Throughout the 1880s,
physicists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley devised a series of experiments to measure the speed of the “aether wind.” This “wind” would be a result of the Earth moving through the aether in the same way a moving car would experience a “wind” when moving through air, even when the air is not moving relative to the ground. At the heart of Michelson and Morley’s setup were two beams of the same length. They put the beams at right angles so that they formed an L shape. Then they placed mirrors at the end of each beam. Light was sent up each beam, and the mirrors at the end would reflect the light back. If light in one beam moved in the same direction as the aether wind, it was expected to move faster. This is similar to sound traveling faster along the direction of a wind. If the light happened to move against the aether wind, it was expected to move slower. (Try to scream at someone who is upwind of you.) This difference in the time it takes for light to go to and fro the beams will result in wave interference when they meet again at the corner of the L shape. That’s why the L-shaped setup was called an interferometer. Michelson and Morley did not find any interference. They
measured again and again, in different times of the year. They checked their setups. Other physicists copied their setup and ran the same experiment. The same results: no interference. They couldn’t measure the speed of the aether wind. Many proposals were put forward to explain this most famous negative result. The one that turned out to be true was put forward by a young Swiss patent clerk. Doing physics in his spare time, the clerk proposed the following: there was no aether wind because there was no aether. Light did not need a medium. That sounded simple enough, except that for the proposal to make sense, the patent clerk had to revise our view of space and time. In fact, there was no longer any space and time, there was only spacetime. The clerk’s name was Albert Einstein. In the decade that followed, Einstein’s project of revising our view of spacetime culminated in his theory of general relativity, our best theory to explain the behavior of the cosmos. As radical as it was, Einstein’s theory passed all the tests given to it with flying colors. All except one. Einstein predicted that spacetime itself could ripple and form waves. This effect, called gravitational waves, eluded the detection of scientists for a century.
Almost exactly a century. About a hundred years after they were predicted, gravitational waves were finally detected last year and their detection was announced this year. Now for the poetic justice. The experimental setup scientists used to detect gravitational waves? An interferometer. That’s right. The same setup that spurred Einstein’s scientific revolution was the very setup that gave him his final vindication. Scientists at the Large Interferometer GravitationalWave Observatory (LIGO)—a gargantuan version of Michelson and Morley’s experimental setup —detected gravitational waves using interference of light. These interferences were created when one beam of the L-shaped setup became longer or shorter as a result of a passing gravitational wave. But did I speak too soon? The latest data gathered using LIGO seem to suggest that the gravitational waves detected from spiraling black holes might actually carry signals that suggest a breakdown in the theory near the edge of the black holes. If this result holds, you can add irony to poetic justice. Decierdo is resident astronomer and physicist for The Mind Museum.
WHY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WON’T DISPLACE HUMAN ARTISTS By Leonid Bershidsky THIS year’s news about what artificial intelligence can do in the arts has been both exciting and scary. Neural networks have learned to paint like masters and compose sophisticated music. Those of us in creative endeavors might be as endangered by technological advances as blue-collar workers are often said to be—though we are protected by certain limitations that technology is never likely to overcome. Last summer, a team of Russian developers released Prisma, a mobile app based on the work of some German artificial intelligence researchers. The neural network behind it could redraw an image using techniques it had learned from studying the oeuvre of a number of painters, including Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch. The end product was impressive: Prisma could reproduce brushstrokes and palettes, using only a photo for guidance, almost the way a human painter could have. This month, Gaetan Hadjeres and Francois Pachet from the Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Paris published a paper about an artificial intelligence model called DeepBach, which can compose polyphonic chorales even professional musicians can mistake for the work of Johann Sebastian Bach. The chorale is a rather formulaic piece of Lutheran church music that usually reharmonizes a well-known melody. Bach composed hundreds, so there’s plenty of material for a neural network to learn. Musicians who listened to Bach and DeepBach music were more likely to correctly attribute the great composer’s work than the machine’s, but about 40 percent of them misidentified DeepBach chorales as works composed in 18th century Leipzig—even though the machine didn’t plagiarize Bach but produced genuinely new work. The researchers wrote: Despite some compositional errors like parallel octaves, the musical analysis reveals that the DeepBach compositions reproduce typical Bach-like patterns, from characteristic cadences to the expressive use of nonchord tones. The success of DeepBach follows work by the same team that produced a surprisingly hummable pop song in the style of The Beatles, and a separate effort by a team at Google in which an artificial neural network composed jingle-like piano pieces. Computers, of course, have generated music before, but these recent experiments are different because the machines aren’t programmed to perform specific tasks—they learn from big datasets to create music without further human
Gustav Klim’s The Kiss input. Models like DeepBach also allow human intervention, or, rather, collaboration. Machines also have been getting better at producing literary work. This year, an AI-written novel passed the first round of a Japanese fiction competition.
Obviously, these creative efforts are, at this point, somewhat short of stunning—but only if one considers their origin. Unlike most overhyped human creations, these only represent the first steps for a technology that most of us only know for its frustrating and often hilarious implementations
in the digital assistants on our mobile phones: Siri, Google Assistant and Cortana. Researchers are working to overcome a number of practical problems: The need for huge amounts of data to train the algorithms, the narrow specialization of the neural networks (a chess-playing one can’t write music, for example), the logical errors the networks make when discerning and interpreting patterns. Given more time and effort, these will probably be solved, at least to a degree that makes consumer applications of the algorithms widespread. There is, however, one boundary that no research team has approached and that, I suspect, will forever protect creative professions from displacement. It’s a problem described in David Hume’s “A Treatise of Human Nature,” published when Bach was still alive: “Even after the observation of the frequent or constant conjunction of objects, we have no reason to draw any inference concerning any object beyond those of which we have had experience.” It’s possible to teach a machine Van Gogh’s painting technique, but only if it already exists. An algorithm can write chorales like Bach because it can “study” Bach. Even when the work produced by AI is less specifically derivative than it is today—say, when the algorithms learn to combine various techniques they learn in an intelligent manner—they will never rise above previous work because the way they work is based on experience. They are constrained by Hume’s piece of wisdom. The one way in which we’re radically different from machines is in our ability to step into the unknown, to do things that have never been done before with paint, form, sound and the written word. Most of the rewards to creative professionals today accrue to that ability, not to skill or the extensive knowledge of predecessors’ work. Even a derivative work of art needs to be derivative in groundbreaking ways to be appreciated. It works this way because that’s how the infrastructure—critics, publishers, curators, performers—is set up. One could imagine work produced by machines getting some appreciation, but ultimately, we appreciate art through extremely human social mechanisms. Humans will take care of their own, and they’ll continue to prize originality. Human creators will probably use AI for narrow tasks, training it on specific datasets to write dialogue, orchestrate music or produce variations to make a print more unique. But they won’t be displaced as long as they have the courage to do new things. Bloomberg