No Bears (movie review)

I rented No Bears and Border Café together, from Movie Madness, and have a plan to continue drawing DVDs from the Iranian shelf. That section of the video rental store is indeed sorted by nationality, and alphabetically within that. Other sections of the store sort by Hollywood Director, or categorize into Horror vs. British vs. legacy television. 

We're lucky to have such a facility, with over 80K titles, as a part of our neighborhood.

I watched No Bears second, and didn't realize until viewing the special features that the director was also the protagonist, and his predicament in the film is similar to his predicament in real life: he's in trouble with the government and not supposed to escape to a foreign country.

The film has an ingenious twist, which I'm suggesting you can know about without spoiling the viewing experience, as the paradox, if we might call it that, never fully resolves. The split between reality and filmed reality is the issue. When we posit what we're viewing is reality, as if the camera wasn't there, then by that very same token it's not reality, because we're viewing it, so there's a camera.

The documentary genre will sometimes up the honesty by bringing the crew and camera into the filming, whereas those feature films suggesting we suspend disbelief will offer a "making of" as a feature, acknowledging the artistry behind the projected illusion. A "making of" is akin to going backstage to meet with actors out of character, resuming their native personae.

What this film does is lull the viewer into thinking we're in "omniscient camera" mode, only to have that assumption pushed aside when the opening scene turns out to be a take in a movie, which our protagonist is attempting to direct remotely, from the other side of the Iran-Turkey border. 

But then in another twist we find out the acting couple is indeed attempting to obtain black market passports for a one way trip to Europe, but that going together is problematic.

At this point, with the camera's loss of omniscience and invisibility, our sense of the director's innocence decreases as his participation in his own film's drama brings out the manipulative character of film directing. He might be getting people in trouble, making their lives worse? 

As a man from the city, educated, with money, and with a fancy car, he is treated with respect and politeness. He gets people to do things on his behalf that might be more in his self interest than theirs.

The director is addicted to making movies, even if that means turning his own life into film. Is this passion constructive or destructive? Would we in the audience have such a useful and penetrating view of traditional Iranian village life, without his guidance?  We know the film is ultimately fictional and therefore harmless. Why would the Iranian government persecute a guy who is making Iranian filmmaking famous? A deep question.

I see why the movie won awards and plan to see some others by this same director, Jafa Panahi.

Border Café (movie review)

:: visitor center; Asylum City ::

I just saw Border Café, originally Cafe Transit, you can see why I'd be into it: Trucker Exchange Program. The movie is set around a little roadside cafe in the hinterlands bordering Turkey, Syria and Iran. We have a Russian homeless teen hoping to reach Italy, and a lonely Greek seeking his missing wife.

I could see screening this for the elite early birds wanting to get those initial anthropology requirements out of the way. The movie is all aboard borders and social customs and the ethics around women working, but with few compunctions about child labor.

We should remember that not long before the Roaring 20s, women in the North American states had few opportunities outside the home. Jealous men kept them "protected" as prize possessions, as trophies. Then came the two world wars and an ongoing labor shortage. 

Not only did women come into the office, they started operating heavy equipment, more like Sigourney Weaver in the Aliens movies.

The Trucker Exchange Program is not about "in your face" challenging everyone's cultural norms in a disruptive manner.  That's happening anyway, through TV, radio, and streaming. 

Some parts of the globe are already comfortable with female drivers. Others might accept a long hauler married couple. 

The movie is about the thermodynamics of gossip, and what spreads. If there's nothing scandalous happening, how is it clickbait?  Ordinary news tends to be relatively dry, an acquired taste.

The movie is also about cuisine. 

The female principal is obviously a genius cook and what brings in the truckers in droves is her excellent homemade food. She has a profession, a calling. The males around her have a hard time handling the idea that a woman could have any profession outside of homemaker. Somehow someone's honor is at stake.

My point is: it wasn't that long ago before only "loose women" (of the kind you'd meet in bars) could have any profession and then they all seemed to have the same one. Margaret Fuller helped women break into journalism, starting with cultural columns, then branching out into hard news.

Traveling to far off lands may be like going back in time, which in turn means that, coming the other way, is like going forward in time. 

But let's not forget about going sideways. 

Sometimes culture shock doesn't come in the form of a time shift, as what alters is not the time but the space, the vibe, the atmospherics. Said vibes tend to be timeless a lot of the time, archetypal.

Speculative Prehistory: the Naga Story

I understand how a reader might pick up Critical Path and experience some disillusionment upon encountering the Naga Story. Even if the Genesis Story has little basis in science, perhaps with the exception of the flood (talking about the Black Sea filling up suddenly), how are we to take a migration story that begins in the South Pacific and comes westward to Europe and beyond? Why replace one incredible story with another one?

A lot depends on how we define “humanity” as one could say we’re still on a Planet of the Apes with simple reclassification. The “homo” branch of the ape family exemplifies tool use, and we already have ape and monkey branches that don’t and/or can’t interbreed, so let’s make the so-called sapiens more of those, another breed of ape, why not? It seems like a demotion of sorts as we're saying "humanity is yet to come".

Then comes the paradisiacal Eden-like experience of growing up in Polynesia, with just the right mix of stimuli, and at last, true humanity is upon the scene. A new ideal is achieved. Where this new spirit comes from is only tunable metaphorically: from the stars, as a transmission. That's in keeping with intelligence being metaphysical (weightless).

This humanity is spread by both land- and sea-based branching vectors, and provides actual human (pueblo) status to the sapien branch of the apes. We get the rice paddy economies following river beds towards higher mountains. We get the discovering of metals and their alloys. We get our planetary species civilization, spreading from Southeast Asia to India, Africa, Europe, the Americas, or directly to the Americas going around the other way.

In other words, we imbue the circumnavigating Polynesians with our identity as actual humans, in the process of becoming even more humane, while mixing it up with other animal stock in some cases, harnessing and riding them and/or domesticating and husbanding them. A third class of human took to the sea, depending on wind power more than animal power.

With industrialization came more “energy slaves” per capita, meaning humans were served by more and more horsepower not expressed through living animals but through mechanical devices.

A hint about this reading comes from those passages wherein Bucky warns us about boxing and/or overspecialization. When we bash one another in brutish fashion, de-geniusing ourselves, we regress (revert) to our more ape-like substrate. Our humanity evaporates from the Zeitgeist when we march towards oblivion.

This may all sound well and good but what about Polynesians having affinity with dolphins and whales more than apes? Why say humanity has more in common with these indigenous ocean goers than with the landlubber tool users? And yes, some apes are more aquatic than others.

First of all, that’s not actually the claim. Interest in dolphins and whales was developing over Fuller’s lifetime, with a strong emphasis on their safekeeping and preservation. Dr. Lilly even tried to open a communication channel with the dolphins, with a little help from his three-letter friend LSD. 

Critical Path was reflective of its own period in history in speculating about a humanity-dolphin hybrid (so-called mermaids). This might have happened on other worlds.

Seeing a shared humanity in these ocean-going mammals is probably more predictive of the future than a key to past evolutionary biology on Spaceship Earth. 

Humans have the capacity to build out under water, as well as over water. Given the percent of the planetary surface that’s oceanic, humans will likely colonize a lot more of the oceanic ecosystem before they ever get to Mars, perhaps modifying themselves genetically in the process.

Detachment

If you prompt me to talk about Buddhism vs Christianity, I might bring up that much misunderstood word, used by translators, "detachment", and link it that to that troublesome Jesus meme "hate the world".

The depth psychology here is "the world" is indistinguishable from one's experience of it, except that "one's experience" is objectively subject to change more adeptly ("on a dime") than "the world" is, given the latter is macrocosmic and therefore suffers from more inertia.

"Hate the world" means leaning to cultivate dispassion and what in science we call "a sense of objectivity" to where you're less invested in your current ego beliefs. You're potentially more open minded, which is where God's grace comes in, with the epiphanies and revelations.

The anthropologist, plunked down in some setting, is a trained observer, including of her or his own thoughts and reactions. We learn about cultures from their interactions. But the observer is not so in love with her or his own culture to want to step in and intervene, as some kind of missionary. The anthropologist is there to live and learn, not to judge, not to be a jerk (as in "knee-jerk reflex machine").

To cultivate dispassion, to become more open, is to become less bot-like, less programmed, less predictable in one's reactions. Which doesn't mean a personality is morphing on every front. On the contrary, as Bucky would put it (paraphrase): the metaphysical aspect settles down, even as one's appreciation for the complexity of it all continues to skyrocket.

Planet Palestine

I've been pretty consistent in coming down on the side of freedom of movement, probably because my school of thought sees the individual-to-planet relationship as initially, by default, open, in the sense of unconstrained. 

Institutions may clamp down on your freedoms as a tourist and/or planetary explorer, however we struggle to keep tourism a reality, without depending so much on the militaries for this purpose.

As a USA citizen with a passport, I've enjoyed relatively unfettered access to many parts of the globe, a freedom I'm well aware not so many enjoy, because they're not carrying the right travel credentials and have no clear path towards getting such credentials.

Cascadian Synergetics

ChatBot Chatting

King N-dimeus of Hilbert Space

Prompt:  Explain AI image generation in terms of moving through Hilbert space to a particular position.

Answer:

Explaining AI image generation in terms of moving through Hilbert space involves understanding how these models navigate complex mathematical spaces to create images. Here's a simplified explanation:

Introduction to Hilbert Space

A Hilbert space is a mathematical concept that extends the idea of Euclidean space to infinite dimensions, allowing for the representation of complex data structures like images. It is equipped with an inner product operation, enabling the definition of lengths and angles, which is crucial for analyzing and manipulating data within this space[8].

AI Image Generation Basics

AI image generators, such as those using **diffusion models**, create images by iteratively refining a noise signal until it converges to a desired image. This process involves moving through a latent space, which can be thought of as a subset of a Hilbert space, where each point corresponds to a specific image representation[1][4].

Moving Through Hilbert Space

In the context of AI image generation, moving through Hilbert space can be metaphorically understood as navigating through this vast, multidimensional space to reach a specific point that corresponds to the desired image. Here’s how it works:

1. Initialization: The process starts with a random noise vector in the latent space, which is analogous to a point in Hilbert space. This noise vector represents the initial state of the image generation process[1].

2. Guidance Signal: A guidance signal, such as a text prompt, is used to condition the generation process. This signal acts as a direction or a target in the Hilbert space, guiding the model towards the desired image characteristics[1].

3. Diffusion Process: The model iteratively refines the noise vector through a diffusion process, which involves a series of transformations that progressively move the vector closer to the target point in the latent space. Each step in the diffusion process can be seen as a movement in the Hilbert space towards the desired image representation[1][3].

4. Convergence: As the diffusion process continues, the vector converges to a specific point in the latent space, which corresponds to the final generated image. This point represents the culmination of the journey through Hilbert space, where the model has successfully mapped the input prompt to a visual representation[1].

Challenges and Opportunities

Navigating Hilbert space for image generation poses challenges such as managing high-dimensional data and ensuring interpretability of the learned representations. However, it also offers opportunities for creating diverse and realistic images by leveraging the vast potential of these mathematical spaces[5][9].

In summary, AI image generation can be viewed as a process of moving through a complex Hilbert space to reach a specific point that represents the desired image. This involves navigating through a multidimensional space guided by a conditioning signal until convergence to the target image representation.

Citations:

[1] https://sii.pl/blog/en/a-brief-history-of-ai-powered-image-generation/

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/faster-image-classification-generation-using-hilbert-curves-n-

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFztPP9qPRc

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1ae55p0/technical_ai_image_generators_draw_from_an/

[5] https://www.easiio.com/neural-network-hilbert-space/

[6] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666675821001041

[7] https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2023/file/76c6f9f2475b275b92d03a83ea270af4-Paper-Conference.pdf

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_space

[9] https://www.altexsoft.com/blog/ai-image-generation/