With the onset of summer (and the beautiful weather we have been having in Washington), dinners on the back patio have become de rigueur. In the evenings, the neighborhood (and especially the patio) lights up with fireflies, offering a magical transition from summer day to summer night. This story in the New York Times about firflies seemed apropos for the season.
Blink Twice if You Like Me
By CARL ZIMMER
Published: June 29, 2009
LINCOLN, Mass. — Sara Lewis is fluent in firefly. On this night she walks through a farm field in eastern Massachusetts, watching the first fireflies of the evening rise into the air and begin to blink on and off. Dr. Lewis, an evolutionary ecologist at Tufts University, points out six species in this meadow, each with its own pattern of flashes.
Along one edge of the meadow are Photinus greeni, with double pulses separated by three seconds of darkness. Near a stream are Photinus ignitus, with a five-second delay between single pulses. And near a forest are Pyractomena angulata, which make Dr. Lewis’s favorite flash pattern. “It’s like a flickering orange rain,” she said.
The fireflies flashing in the air are all males. Down in the grass, Dr. Lewis points out, females are sitting and observing. They look for flash patterns of males of their own species, and sometimes they respond with a single flash of their own, always at a precise interval after the male’s. Dr. Lewis takes out a penlight and clicks it twice, in perfect Photinus greeni. A female Photinus greeni flashes back.
“Most people don’t realize there’s this call and response going on,” Dr. Lewis said. “But it’s very, very easy to talk to fireflies.”
For Dr. Lewis, this meadow is the stage for an invertebrate melodrama, full of passion and yearning, of courtship duets and competitions for affection, of cruel deception and gruesome death. For the past 16 years, Dr. Lewis has been coming to this field to decipher the evolutionary forces at play in this production, as fireflies have struggled to survive and spread their genes to the next generation.
It was on a night much like this one in 1980 when Dr. Lewis first came under the spell of fireflies. She was in graduate school at Duke University, studying coral reef fish. Waiting for a grant to come through for a trip to Belize, she did not have much else to do but sit in her backyard in North Carolina.
“Every evening there was this incredible display of fireflies,” Dr. Lewis said. She eventually started to explore the yard, inspecting the males and females. “What really struck me was that in this one-acre area there were hundreds of males and I could only find two or three females,” she said. “I thought, ‘Man, this is so intense.’ ”
When a lot of males are competing for the chance to mate with females, a species experiences a special kind of evolution. If males have certain traits that make them attractive to females, they will mate more than other males. And that preference may mean that those attractive males can pass down their traits to the next generation. Over thousands of generations, the entire species may be transformed.
Charles Darwin described this process, which he called sexual selection, in 1871, using male displays of antlers and feathers as examples. He did not mention fireflies. In fact, fireflies remained fairly mysterious for another century. It was not until the 1960s that James Lloyd, a University of Florida biologist, deciphered the call and response of several species of North American firefly.
Dr. Lewis, realizing that other firefly mysteries remained to be solved, switched to fireflies from fish in 1984, when she became a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard. She taught herself Dr. Lloyd’s firefly code and then began to investigate firefly mating habits. North American fireflies spend two years underground as larvae, then spend the final two weeks of their lives as adults, flashing, mating and laying eggs. When Dr. Lewis started studying fireflies, scientists could not say whether the females mated once and then laid all their eggs, or mated with many males. “Nobody knew what happened after the lights went out,” Dr. Lewis said.
She searched for mating fireflies in the evening, marked their locations with surveyor’s flags and then revisited them every half-hour through the night. They were still mating at dawn.
“It was cool to watch the sun rise and see the couples breaking up and the females crawling down the grass to lay their eggs,” Dr. Lewis said.
Many Americans are familiar with the kinds of fireflies Dr. Lewis studies, but they represent only a tiny fraction of the 2,000 species worldwide. And there is enormous variation in these insects. “There are some species that produce flashes when they’re adults, and there are some that simply glow as adults,” Dr. Lewis said. “Then there are a whole bunch of species where the adults don’t produce any light at all.”
In recent years scientists have analyzed the DNA of fireflies to figure out how their light has evolved. The common ancestor of today’s fireflies probably produced light only when they were larvae. All firefly larvae still glow today, as a warning to would-be predators. The larvae produce bitter chemicals that make them an unpleasant meal.
As adults, the earliest fireflies probably communicated with chemical signals, the way some firefly species do today. Only much later did some firefly species gain through evolution the ability to make light as adults. Instead of a warning, the light became a mating call. (An enzyme in the firefly’s tail drives a chemical reaction that makes light.)
The more Dr. Lewis watched firefly courtship, the clearer it became that the females were carefully choosing mates. They start dialogues with up to 10 males in a single evening and can keep several conversations going at once. But a female mates with only one male, typically the one she has responded to the most.
Dr. Lewis wondered if the female fireflies were picking their mates based on variations in the flashes of the males. To test that possibility, she took female fireflies to her lab, where she has computer-controlled light systems that can mimic firefly flashes. “You can play back specific signals to females and see what they respond to,” Dr. Lewis said.
The female fireflies turned out to be remarkably picky. In many cases, a male flash got no response at all. In some species, females preferred faster pulse rates. In others, the females preferred males that made long-lasting pulses.
If females preferred some flashes over others, Dr. Lewis wondered why those preferences had evolved in the first place. One possible explanation was that the signals gave female fireflies a valuable clue about the males. Somehow, mating with males with certain flash patterns allowed females to produce more offspring, which would inherit their preference.
It is possible that females use flashes to figure out which males can offer the best gifts. In many invertebrate species, the males provide females with food to help nourish their eggs. Dr. Lewis and her colleagues discovered that fireflies also made these so-called nuptial gifts — packages of protein they inject with their sperm.
Dr. Lewis is not sure why she and her colleagues were the first to find them. The gifts form coils that can take up a lot of space in a male firefly’s abdomen. “They’re incredibly beautiful,” she said.
Receiving nuptial gifts, Dr. Lewis and her colleagues have shown, can make a huge difference in the reproductive success of a female firefly. “It just about doubles the number of eggs a female can lay in her lifetime,” she said. One reason the effect is so big is that fireflies do not eat during their two-week adulthood. A slowly starving female can use a nuptial gift to build more eggs.
In at least some species, females may use flashes to pick out males with the biggest gifts. Dr. Lewis has tested this hypothesis in two species; in one, males with conspicuous flashes have bigger gifts. In another species, she found no link.
“In some cases they could be honest signals, and in some cases they could be deceptive signals,” Dr. Lewis said.
Deception may, in fact, evolve very easily among fireflies. It turns out that a male firefly does not need to burn many extra calories to make flashes. “It takes some energy, but it’s tiny. It’s less costly for a male than flying around,” Dr. Lewis said.
If making light is so cheap for males, it seems odd that they have not all evolved to be more attractive to females. “What is it that keeps their flashes from getting longer and longer or faster and faster?” Dr. Lewis asked.
Scanning the meadow, she grabbed her insect net and ran after a fast-flying firefly with a triple flash. She caught an animal that may offer the answer to her question. Dr. Lewis dropped the insect into a tube and switched on a headlamp to show her catch. Called Photuris, it is a firefly that eats other fireflies.
“They are really nasty predators,” Dr. Lewis said. Photuris fireflies sometimes stage aerial assaults, picking out other species by their flashes and swooping down to attack. In other cases, they sit on a blade of grass, responding to male fireflies with deceptive flashes. When the males approach, Photuris grabs them.
“They pounce, they bite, they suck blood — all the gory stuff,” Dr. Lewis said. She has found that each Photuris can eat several fireflies in a night. Photuris kills other fireflies only to retrieve bad-tasting chemicals from their bodies, which it uses to protect itself from predators.
To study how Photuris predation affects its firefly prey, Dr. Lewis and her colleagues built sticky traps equipped with lights that mimicked courtship signals of Photuris’s victims. The scientists found that Photuris was more likely to attack when flash rates were faster. In other words, conspicuous flashes — the ones females prefer — also make males more likely to be killed.
“At least where Photuris predators are around,” Dr. Lewis said, “there’s going to be a strong selection for less conspicuous flashes.”
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
Sonic Boom
Ronald Dejarnett is the U.S. Navy sonar technician that snapped this pic of an F-22 going boom boom over the Gulf of Alaska.
Via Geekologie - Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Modern Day Propaganda
These awesome Web themed WWII-style Propaganda Posters, by Brian Moore have been all over the intertubes recently.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Lego Sushi
"Oh boy mom! I'm super psyched to make nigiri out of Legos! This is way better than that pirate ship set."
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Monday, June 22, 2009
Buffy Wins
So I've never read Twilight. I've never seen Twilight. I don't care about Twilight. All I know is that when it comes to vampires, Buffy wins. Always. Every time.
I highly doubt this mashup will convince every Twilight fan (90% tweens, 5% Women of all ages, 5% fat guys living in basements [we know our own]) to go back and watch the entire Buffy series to know what love and angst and vampires are all about. But it should.
Update: So fans are going all Sharks and Jets on this video. They seem ready to rumble. I thought this was a god quote:
Jezebel’s hortense thanks MacIntosh for showing that “Edward Cullen’s creepiness too often gets a pass from those who brush aside his controlling, stalkerish ways as the signs of ‘true love.’” Slate’s Nina Shen Rastogi also commends the effort, noting that Buffy “knows from ridiculously good-looking, brooding vampire honeys. So when she tells you that stalking maketh not a courtship, you should listen to her.”
Sunday, June 21, 2009
LED Sheep Herding
Thanks to LC for passing this on.
Wow. New Zealand's slogan must be, "It's beautiful here, but boy, do we have too much time on our hands or what?"
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Fight to death? But this is a canteen, I work here!
An animation of comedian Eddie Izzard talking about his idea of the 'Death Star Canteen'.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Norm McDonald
I'm so glad to see this dude on TV again. It's been awhile. He seriously cracks me up. Dirty Work was definitely one of my favorite movies and I lost it when he was doing Weekend Update.
Helen Hates animals
This hilarious exchange is from 27b/6: 
If I had a large backyard, I would probably have about a thousand dogs but as my apartment is very small, I cannot have any due to both the Strata agreement and the fact that they would need to be taken for walks every day and I am too lazy for that. There is a park across the road from us but the last time I went there I was offered money to provide a sexual act which was kind of flattering but I declined and told them that I was late for a meeting which was a lie as I think I just played Unreal Tournament the rest of that day.
I did have a goldfish named (posthumously) Stinky who lived in a vase with a plant. When he died I figured it would be nice to leave him there so that his body would break down and fertilise the plant but after a few weeks the smell was so bad I could not enter the apartment without a towel wrapped around my face. My first thought was to take him to work and hide him in my Bosses car but out of respect Seb and I gave him a vikings funeral instead.
If I had a large backyard, I would probably have about a thousand dogs but as my apartment is very small, I cannot have any due to both the Strata agreement and the fact that they would need to be taken for walks every day and I am too lazy for that. There is a park across the road from us but the last time I went there I was offered money to provide a sexual act which was kind of flattering but I declined and told them that I was late for a meeting which was a lie as I think I just played Unreal Tournament the rest of that day.
I did have a goldfish named (posthumously) Stinky who lived in a vase with a plant. When he died I figured it would be nice to leave him there so that his body would break down and fertilise the plant but after a few weeks the smell was so bad I could not enter the apartment without a towel wrapped around my face. My first thought was to take him to work and hide him in my Bosses car but out of respect Seb and I gave him a vikings funeral instead.
From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 21 May 2009 10.16am
To: Helen Bailey
Subject: Pets in the building
Dear Helen,
Thankyou for your letter concerning pets in my apartment. I understand that having dogs in the apartment is a violation of the agreement due to the comfort and wellbeing of my neighbours and I am currently soundproofing my apartment with egg cartons as I realise my dogs can cause quite a bit of noise. Especially during feeding time when I release live rabbits.
Regards, David.
From: Helen Bailey
Date: Thursday 21 May 2009 11.18am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Pets in the building
Hello David
I have received your email and wish to remind you that the strata agreement states that no animals are allowed in the building regardless of if your apartment is soundproof. How many dogs do you have at the premises?
Helen
From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 21 May 2009 1.52pm
To: Helen Bailey
Subject: Re: Re: Pets in the building
Dear Helen,
Currently I only have eight dogs but one is expecting puppies and I am very excited by this. I am hoping for a litter of at least ten as this is the number required to participate in dog sled racing. I have read every Jack London novel in preparation and have constructed my own sled from timber I borrowed from the construction site across the road during the night. I have devised a plan which I feel will ensure me taking first place in the next national dog sled championships. For the first year of the puppies life I intend to say the word mush then chase them violently around the apartment while yelling and hitting saucepan lids together. I have estimated that the soundproofing of my apartment should block out at least sixty percent of the noise and the dogs will learn to associate the word mush with great fear so when I yell it on race day, the panic and released adrenaline will spur them on to being winners. I am so confident of this being a foolproof plan that I intend to sell all my furniture the day before the race and bet the proceeds on coming first place.
Regards, David.
From: Helen Bailey
Date: Friday 22 May 2009 9.43am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Pets in the building
David, I am unsure what to make of your email. Do you have pets in the apartment or not?
Helen
From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 22 May 2009 11.27am
To: Helen Bailey
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Pets in the building
Dear Helen,
No. I have a goldfish but due to the air conditioner in my apartment being stuck on a constant two degrees celcius, the water in its bowl is iced over and he has not moved for a while so I do not think he is capable of disturbing the neighbours. The ducks in the bathroom are not mine. The noise which my neighbours possibly mistook for a dog in the apartment is just the looping tape I have of dogs barking which I play at high volume while I am at work to deter potential burglars from breaking in and stealing my tupperware. I need it to keep food fresh. Once I ate leftover chinese that had been kept in an unsealed container and I experienced complete awareness. The next night I tried eating it again but only experienced chest pains and diarrhoea.
Regards, David.
From: Helen Bailey
Date: Friday 22 May 2009 1.46pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Pets in the building
Hello David
You cannot play sounds of dogs or any noise at a volume that disturbs others. I am sure you can appreciate that these rules are for the benefit of all residents of the building. Fish are fine. You cannot have ducks in the apartment though. If it was small birds that would be ok.
Helen
From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 22 May 2009 2.18pm
To: Helen Bailey
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Pets in the building
Dear Helen,
They are very small ducks.
Regards, David.
From: Helen Bailey
Date: Friday 22 May 2009 4.06pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Pets in the building
David, under section 4 of the strata residency agreement it states that you cannot have pets. You agreed to these rules when you signed the forms. These rules are set out to benefit everyone in the building including yourself. Do you have a telephone number I can call you on to discuss?
Helen
From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 22 May 2009 5.02pm
To: Helen Bailey
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Pets in the building
Dear Helen,
The ducks will no doubt be flying south for the winter soon so it will not be an issue. It is probably for the best as they are not getting along very well with my seventeen cats anyway. .
Regards, David.
From: Helen Bailey
Date: Monday 25 May 2009 9.22am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Pets in the building
David, I am just going to write on the forms that we have investigated and you do not have any pets.
Helen
Date: Thursday 21 May 2009 10.16am
To: Helen Bailey
Subject: Pets in the building
Dear Helen,
Thankyou for your letter concerning pets in my apartment. I understand that having dogs in the apartment is a violation of the agreement due to the comfort and wellbeing of my neighbours and I am currently soundproofing my apartment with egg cartons as I realise my dogs can cause quite a bit of noise. Especially during feeding time when I release live rabbits.
Regards, David.
From: Helen Bailey
Date: Thursday 21 May 2009 11.18am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Pets in the building
Hello David
I have received your email and wish to remind you that the strata agreement states that no animals are allowed in the building regardless of if your apartment is soundproof. How many dogs do you have at the premises?
Helen
From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 21 May 2009 1.52pm
To: Helen Bailey
Subject: Re: Re: Pets in the building
Dear Helen,
Currently I only have eight dogs but one is expecting puppies and I am very excited by this. I am hoping for a litter of at least ten as this is the number required to participate in dog sled racing. I have read every Jack London novel in preparation and have constructed my own sled from timber I borrowed from the construction site across the road during the night. I have devised a plan which I feel will ensure me taking first place in the next national dog sled championships. For the first year of the puppies life I intend to say the word mush then chase them violently around the apartment while yelling and hitting saucepan lids together. I have estimated that the soundproofing of my apartment should block out at least sixty percent of the noise and the dogs will learn to associate the word mush with great fear so when I yell it on race day, the panic and released adrenaline will spur them on to being winners. I am so confident of this being a foolproof plan that I intend to sell all my furniture the day before the race and bet the proceeds on coming first place.
Regards, David.
From: Helen Bailey
Date: Friday 22 May 2009 9.43am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Pets in the building
David, I am unsure what to make of your email. Do you have pets in the apartment or not?
Helen
From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 22 May 2009 11.27am
To: Helen Bailey
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Pets in the building
Dear Helen,
No. I have a goldfish but due to the air conditioner in my apartment being stuck on a constant two degrees celcius, the water in its bowl is iced over and he has not moved for a while so I do not think he is capable of disturbing the neighbours. The ducks in the bathroom are not mine. The noise which my neighbours possibly mistook for a dog in the apartment is just the looping tape I have of dogs barking which I play at high volume while I am at work to deter potential burglars from breaking in and stealing my tupperware. I need it to keep food fresh. Once I ate leftover chinese that had been kept in an unsealed container and I experienced complete awareness. The next night I tried eating it again but only experienced chest pains and diarrhoea.
Regards, David.
From: Helen Bailey
Date: Friday 22 May 2009 1.46pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Pets in the building
Hello David
You cannot play sounds of dogs or any noise at a volume that disturbs others. I am sure you can appreciate that these rules are for the benefit of all residents of the building. Fish are fine. You cannot have ducks in the apartment though. If it was small birds that would be ok.
Helen
From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 22 May 2009 2.18pm
To: Helen Bailey
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Pets in the building
Dear Helen,
They are very small ducks.
Regards, David.
From: Helen Bailey
Date: Friday 22 May 2009 4.06pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Pets in the building
David, under section 4 of the strata residency agreement it states that you cannot have pets. You agreed to these rules when you signed the forms. These rules are set out to benefit everyone in the building including yourself. Do you have a telephone number I can call you on to discuss?
Helen
From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 22 May 2009 5.02pm
To: Helen Bailey
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Pets in the building
Dear Helen,
The ducks will no doubt be flying south for the winter soon so it will not be an issue. It is probably for the best as they are not getting along very well with my seventeen cats anyway. .
Regards, David.
From: Helen Bailey
Date: Monday 25 May 2009 9.22am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Pets in the building
David, I am just going to write on the forms that we have investigated and you do not have any pets.
Helen
Monday, June 15, 2009
White Roofs
I have been reading about the idea of whitening roofs a lot lately, here, here and most importantly in this article from the Telegraph.
A recent scientific paper suggests that lightening roofs and paved areas in urban areas around the globe would have such a strong cooling effect that it would be like taking every car in the world off the road for 19 years. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, has firmly gotten behind the idea (see that Telegraph article) and even suggests the Government regulates a full on transition.
From Infrastructurist:
By reflecting back huge quantities of sunlight that is now absorbed by dark surfaces, whitening our roofs and roads could offset 44 billion tons of carbon emission, calculates Arthur Rosenfeld of the California Energy Commission and two colleagues. It may be one of the cheapest and most effective ways humanity can seriously address global warming in the near term.
Whitening our roofs and roads would also cut demand for air conditioning by as much as 15 percent on the hottest days of summer, which would also have the benefit of making our electrical grid more stable.
The best thing is, it wouldn't even cost anything more to BEGIN to use white over black for roofing. And with all the money being thrown around these days, it wouldn't be a terrible idea if some of it went to incentives for people to paint their roofs white. The Greeks (and lots of other peoples who live in hot climates) have been cooling their homes by using white materials for many years.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Disturbing Japanese Video of Electric Shocks to the Face
upper left: Muryo Honma upper right:Setsuya Kurotaki, lower left: Motoi Ishibashi lower right: Seiichi Saito Daito Manabe
America's Folk-Parody Competition
Not sure if it's a fight to the death or not. Probably not.
Jonathan Coulton: Best known for nothing. He is hilarious. I saw him once in Portland troubadoring for John Hodgman.
Vs.
Flight Of The Conchords: This duo from New Zealand is best known for their hilarious self-referential HBO show. And one of them from Outback commercials.
Jonathan Coulton: Best known for nothing. He is hilarious. I saw him once in Portland troubadoring for John Hodgman.
Vs.
Flight Of The Conchords: This duo from New Zealand is best known for their hilarious self-referential HBO show. And one of them from Outback commercials.
The Future of the GOP
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Meghan McCain | ||||
| ||||
This is a bit old now, but nonetheless is quite telling. As the Republican party remakes itself for the 21st century, it's going to be voices like this that lead the next "Reagan Revolution." In fact, I bet lots of people of my generation will recognize people they know in Megan McCain. They might not be your best friend, but clearly there is something recognizable there. When Stephen Colbert has trouble mocking you, (and really, how awkward is this interview???) then I think you are probably on the right track.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Friday, June 12, 2009
Pushing the Boundaries of the Music Video
http://soytuaire.labuat.com/
Wow. What a video. Click that link right now. Seriously. Immediately. This is the first thing to make me gasp in awhile.
From VSL.
A Spanish group called Labuat has created one of the most beautiful music videos we’ve ever seen. And the best thing is, it’s interactive.
As the song — “Soy Tu Aire” (“I’m Your Air”) — kicks off, a line of black ink moves across the screen: You can send it up, down, back, and forth, or swirl it into circles. The line grows thicker along the way and splatters into several shapes: butterflies, red lips, birds. The immersive experience will make you feel like a maestro.
This is one of two amazing videos I have seen lately that are pressing the art form in new directions. Here is the other:
http://www.mtvmusic.com/artist/coldwarkids.jhtml
Also from VSL:
A great new video by Fullerton, California’s Cold War Kids lets you play director, producer, roadie, and puppet master.
The three-minute clip begins with the band members’ walking on-screen. Each grabs an instrument and begins to play. And the rest is up to you: Click the overhead color bars to change their instruments, or click on musicians to silence them entirely. There are a number of permutations; for maximum pleasure, start with one isolated instrument and follow it through as you keep adding layers. No matter how you play it, every iteration sounds great.
Economics Proves No One Can Beat Batman
From today's BoingBoing. I find it amazing there is a blog called Ecocomics (where comics meet the dismal science) and that I didn't know about this before hand.
ShadowBanker, a comics-oriented econoblogger examines the economic rationality of the Batman villains depicted in Jeph Loeb comics like The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, which show the colorful villains acting in unlikely concert. From Batman Villains and Cooperation: A Utility Analysis:
For not killing Batman, we can obviously assign the Joker a utility of 0.
For capturing Batman on his own, let's assign the Joker a utility of 10.
For capturing Batman with the help of x other villains, the utility would be 10/x.
The last one is sort of tricky. This means that if the Joker cooperates with one other villain (say Two-Face) and together they manage to kill Batman, then the utility for each would be 5. In effect, this means that the villains "split" the utility of 10...
Now, let's assign the probabilities. I'm going to assume that each Batman rogue has a 2% chance of killing Batman alone (and this is being very, very generous and neglecting the individual skills of each rogue for simplicity). You would then think that adding villains to the scheme would increase the probability of killing Batman by 2% with each new rogue. Except, this ignores the economics law of diminishing returns, which states that as you increase the factors of production, the marginal benefit of those factors decreases. Usually, this applies to outcomes which are continuous (such as production of goods) rather than binary (to kill or not to kill Batman), but we can apply diminishing returns in this case to the probabilities. The theory is that as you add villains, working together will prove more difficult and planning more arduous. Therefore, the probability of getting Batman will increase, but by a marginally smaller amount with each villain added.
Thinking of probability as output, let's assume that in each state,
p = 2*y^0.9, where
p = probability of killing batman and
y = number of villains involved in the scheme.
From Should Batman Villains Betray Each Other? (Analysis using the Prisoner's Dilemma):
This situation is a nice example of the Prisoner's Dilemma. So, let's do a really quick summation of this two-player (Two-Face, Mr. Freeze), two-choice (Cooperate, Betray) game in Batman terms to show that it would actually make sense for the two of them to continue to cooperate, even though neither will. We must again assign some utilities for each player. I have done so, as the following normal-form game matrix represents:
Mr. Freeze -->> Cooperate Betray
Two-Face ↓
Cooperate (5,5) (0,10)
Betray (10,0) (3,3)
In this matrix, Two-Face is the player on the left and Mr. Freeze is the player on the top. Each has the choice of either cooperating after capturing Batman or of betraying the other. In each cell, the numbers represent the utilities awarded to the respective players given their choice of action.
ShadowBanker, a comics-oriented econoblogger examines the economic rationality of the Batman villains depicted in Jeph Loeb comics like The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, which show the colorful villains acting in unlikely concert. From Batman Villains and Cooperation: A Utility Analysis:
For not killing Batman, we can obviously assign the Joker a utility of 0.
For capturing Batman on his own, let's assign the Joker a utility of 10.
For capturing Batman with the help of x other villains, the utility would be 10/x.
The last one is sort of tricky. This means that if the Joker cooperates with one other villain (say Two-Face) and together they manage to kill Batman, then the utility for each would be 5. In effect, this means that the villains "split" the utility of 10...
Now, let's assign the probabilities. I'm going to assume that each Batman rogue has a 2% chance of killing Batman alone (and this is being very, very generous and neglecting the individual skills of each rogue for simplicity). You would then think that adding villains to the scheme would increase the probability of killing Batman by 2% with each new rogue. Except, this ignores the economics law of diminishing returns, which states that as you increase the factors of production, the marginal benefit of those factors decreases. Usually, this applies to outcomes which are continuous (such as production of goods) rather than binary (to kill or not to kill Batman), but we can apply diminishing returns in this case to the probabilities. The theory is that as you add villains, working together will prove more difficult and planning more arduous. Therefore, the probability of getting Batman will increase, but by a marginally smaller amount with each villain added.
Thinking of probability as output, let's assume that in each state,
p = 2*y^0.9, where
p = probability of killing batman and
y = number of villains involved in the scheme.
From Should Batman Villains Betray Each Other? (Analysis using the Prisoner's Dilemma):
This situation is a nice example of the Prisoner's Dilemma. So, let's do a really quick summation of this two-player (Two-Face, Mr. Freeze), two-choice (Cooperate, Betray) game in Batman terms to show that it would actually make sense for the two of them to continue to cooperate, even though neither will. We must again assign some utilities for each player. I have done so, as the following normal-form game matrix represents:
Mr. Freeze -->> Cooperate Betray
Two-Face ↓
Cooperate (5,5) (0,10)
Betray (10,0) (3,3)
In this matrix, Two-Face is the player on the left and Mr. Freeze is the player on the top. Each has the choice of either cooperating after capturing Batman or of betraying the other. In each cell, the numbers represent the utilities awarded to the respective players given their choice of action.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Monday, June 8, 2009
My weekend
Was not very much like this.
Except I was actually in Tennessee.
It was a lot more like this.
Awesome drive home via Shenandoah with LL. Truly, it was a good ole' time.
Except I was actually in Tennessee.
It was a lot more like this.
Awesome drive home via Shenandoah with LL. Truly, it was a good ole' time.
Friday, June 5, 2009
Thursday, June 4, 2009
R.I.P. David Carradine
Sad news — David Carradine, star of Kung Fu and Kill Bill, was found dead in a Thai hotel room. He was 73. The official word at this time is that Carradine died of natural causes, although it’s also being suggested that he may have taken his own life.
Custom Sonogram Cufflinks
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From Boing Boing: These custom sonogram cufflinks let you show off photos of your little bun-in-oven as you go about your daily round in French cuffs.
Kewl.
Antilibraries
Via Kottke
From the introduction of part one of The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with "Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?" and the others -- a very small minority -- who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
Presumably Eco's two groups of visitors -- the librarians and antilibrarians -- annihilate each other when in close proximity.
From the introduction of part one of The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with "Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?" and the others -- a very small minority -- who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
Presumably Eco's two groups of visitors -- the librarians and antilibrarians -- annihilate each other when in close proximity.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Live Blogging Something I'm Looking Forward To.
New Frontier for Goodmania. MT and I are going to live blog critique a video I found via Buzzfeed of a baby reacting to the “Where the Wild Things Are” Trailer I'm pretty psyched myself about this film, which is directed by Spike Jonez and has Catherine Keener, Mark Ruffalo in it, as well as James Gandolfini and Forest Whittaker lending voices.
00:05 Why does that baby have a bandaid? his parents beat him? Major head trauma?
00:34 That baby has a mullet! Why would his parents do that to him?
00:40 This movie is going to be so awesome.
00:57 That baby looks comatose. That shouldn't go in, it's not funny. MT was just stating a fact.
01:05 Are they riding Obama's coat tails?
We trailed off, cause we became a bit enthralled with the movie and the baby. Can't wait til October.
Trailer Reaction from We Love You So on Vimeo.
00:05 Why does that baby have a bandaid? his parents beat him? Major head trauma?
00:34 That baby has a mullet! Why would his parents do that to him?
00:40 This movie is going to be so awesome.
00:57 That baby looks comatose. That shouldn't go in, it's not funny. MT was just stating a fact.
01:05 Are they riding Obama's coat tails?
We trailed off, cause we became a bit enthralled with the movie and the baby. Can't wait til October.
Han Solo, P.I.
Seems like its mashup week this week. Here is a great mashup along with a scene by scene comparison of the original Magnum, P.I. opening with the mashup. As a total aside, 1) I loved Magnum P.I. and Tom Selleck 2) I loves me some Star Wars (duh) and 3) My favorite DC bar has some pirated tv station that shows Magnum P.I. and other great 80's shows (like the A-team) that flicker in and out depending on how screwed up their black box is. Sweet.
(Via Buzzfeed)
The Mashup
The Side-By-Side
(Via Buzzfeed)
The Mashup
The Side-By-Side
Where is my TI-81?
I loved playing snake on my graphing calculator.
Via BoingBoing
Nokia's Get Out and Play campaign is that rare beast: a marketing-driven viral Flash/video thinggum that's actually clever and wonderful! It's an implementation of classic Nokia games (Snake, Breakout) as stop-motion-animation 2.5D playable games and videos, made using people. To play the Breakout game, click through below, then watch the video, then play away!
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
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