Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Did you hear something?"
¤ Usage: *cats crash through the room engaged in noisy mortal combat*
Flux: "Did you hear something?"
Malaya: "Nope."
¤ Synonyms: N/A
¤ Notes: This one is a little game Malaya and I play where in one of the cats makes a loud or pathetic noise, and I ask if she heard it, and she says no.  Dusty used to be the cause of this, with his frequently yowling or noisy/clumsy TV-mounting attempts, but now that we have two cats who frequently chase each other around and make a lot of noise doing it, the saying is more all purpose.

Over the months it's become ritualized to the point that any time we hear any loud, interrupting noise, at home or elsewhere, I can say, "Did you..." and she'll immediately reply, "Nope." -- January 14, 2004

I wrote it, I saved it, and then I somehow forgot entirely about uploading it.  Sometimes I'll notice a day later that I didn't upload the index page, but that I did upload the version of the page in the daily archives.  Yesterday I managed to miss the whole thing. Bonus points for me. Sort of.

Anyway, it's up now and can be viewed here, if you missed it.  I thought the long news item essay thing about the MoveOn awards and the hatred being directed at Margaret Cho made for some pretty good reading, personally.

Today I've got a reader mail, a couple of news items, and then a longer discussion about robotics and human-simulation in film, and what it says about human nature and psychology.  Still no new photo pages; next week, with any luck, though I'm trying to get back into a fiction writing mode, mostly for the long term benefits.

This mail came in earlier this week, in reply to some of my playoff football-related comments on Monday.

I noticed your comments about the kc-indy game.

I dont think it's a bad sign at all that you score 38 points and you only win by 7. If I'm not mistaken, KC/Indy ranked 1/2 in points scored this year. Only the absolute elite defenses could stop them, they shredded average defenses and even somewhat above-average defenses.

You're damn right about Favre throwing the worst pass ever. I think he just got disorientated somehow and thought he was throwing it out of bounds.

I think NE will be able to stop Indy, and I'll take Philly over Carolina although that's like saying which character is better, a elemental druid or a daggermancer?

Brian

I don't have much to add to this, despite saving it until today, when I can, in theory, talk about the upcoming NFL playoff games.  After all, there's nothing of more interest to my many foreign readers than paragraph after paragraph about the inner vagaries of a violent and complicated team sport that enjoys zero popularity outside of the US.

So the huge offense Colts are playing the good defense/low offense Patriots. The Colts have been damn near perfect the first two weeks of the post-season, racking up huge point totals while playing two virtually flawless offensive games.  I don't think New England would be able to stay with them indoors, but that's why you play the 16 regular season games and win all you can; for home field advantage in the playoffs. And NE went 14-2, and they're playing at home, and their home is Foxboro, Mass. Which means that this may be the determining factor. It's supposed to be 32-16º on Sunday, with a 30% chance of snow. The problem for the Patriots is that they are primarily a passing finesse team as well, so while bad weather would probably slow down the Colts, it will slow them down also.

The Patriots are home and favored, but not by much, and I'm personally hoping the game goes like last week's Indy vs. KC game; tons of scoring, since I don't care who wins so I should at least hope for a fun game to watch. I guess I hope Indy wins, so we can see their super offense in good weather in the SuperBowl, as they score all over Philly or Carolina, but I'll root for whoever seems to want it more on Sunday.

Indy 24, NE 20.

As for the other game, I really don't care about that one.  Philly fans are fun to root against, so it would be fun to see them crying in their $8 cups of beer if they lost badly at home.  Plus no one alive knows or cares anything about Carolina, so it would be funny to see them make it to the SuperBowl. Plus they have some actual talent on their team other than at quarterback, so they might make the Superbowl competitive.

On the other hand, I have to echo Malaya from last week, when she told me, "I just want the Eagles to keep winning to fuck with Rush Limbaugh."

Just picture him, flopped on his recliner at home on Sunday, watching the sport he so loves and that he so briefly had a chance to opinionate about on ESPN, sobbing tears of bitterness and hatred into his Slim Fast shake, those last few bottles of Oxycontin he has squirreled away in the toilet tank calling him, promising blissful relief from the crushing, soul-breaking pain that is his life...

How can you not root for the Eagles, and for Donovan McNabb, given Rush's past comments and the history of black QBs in the NFL?

Still, the Eagles suck and Carolina probably isn't going to give the game away like the Packers did last week.

Carolina 31, Philly 14

¤ The corporate ownership of the Bush government continues to bring shame upon us all, especially in the field of science and technology.  Past disgraces have included the stripping of environmental regulations, editing reports to remove information about global warming, fighting all forms of energy production other than the short-sighted consumption of fossil fuels, banning funding for family planning that includes abortion information, and so on.  But this one today might be the stupidest yet.

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is challenging a World Health Organization report that outlines steps for nations to take to reduce obesity.

In a letter to the United Nations agency that is meeting next week, Health and Human Services official William Steiger questioned the organization's findings, said they were based on faulty science, and called for changes to the report.

The WHO report recommends eating more fruits and vegetables and limiting fats and salt. It also suggests governments limit food advertising aimed at children and encourage their citizens to eat healthier foods. Taxes and subsidies could be used to reduce the price of healthy food and make them more attractive to consumers, the report said.

The International Obesity Task Force estimates that 300 million people worldwide are obese and 750 million more are overweight, including 22 million children under age 5.

Steiger said in his letter that the WHO report did not adequately address an individual's responsibility to balance one's diet with one's physical activities, and objected to singling out specific types of foods, such as those high in fat and sugar.

"The (U.S. government) favors dietary guidance that focuses on the total diet, promotes the view that all foods can be part of a healthy and balanced diet, and supports personal responsibility to choose a diet conducive to individual energy balance, weight control and health," wrote Steiger, special assistant for international affairs at Health and Human Services.

What's next?  Are they going to object to world health recommendations to avoid smoking, since after all, cigarettes are damn tasty, and if you only smoke a few a day don't do any real harm?

There's a longer article about on the UK Guardian site, with some better quotage:

Kaare Norum, a professor at Oslo University who headed the group of scientists advising the WHO on diet and health, said: "I think it is tragic that the US is opposing this because the problem is very, very serious in the US. I think it is the multinational companies who are mainly behind this attack on the science."

Food industry trade groups including the Sugar Association and the Grocery Manufacturers Association disputed the links between certain food types and obesity and disease in their response to the report during the consultation period and said anything could be eaten as part of a balanced diet.

Commercial Alert, a US-based non-profit organisation, condemned the US government for attempting to "head off" the WHO initiative.

Gary Ruskin, its executive director said: "The Bush administration is putting the interests of the junk food industry ahead of the health of people - including children - on a global scale. The administration's arguments border on the ludicrous. Does anyone outside the administration and the junk food industry truly doubt that the consumption and marketing of high-calorie junk food plays a role in obesity and other chronic diseases? Why would this administration - or any administration - invoke the moral authority of the United States on behalf of the junk food and the obesity lobby?

Okay, wait. A scientist not employed by Bush or friends actually thinks the US has "moral authority?"

But seriously, to reference my above analogy again; doesn't this sound like cigarette company scientists in the 70's and 80's, when they were still fighting to convince people that cigs were healthy?

¤ Best news story ever.

Students won't be hearing cries of "sinners" and "whores" from Penn's most notorious preacher anytime soon. A jury convicted campus fixture "Brother Stephen" on Wednesday to a minimum of three years in jail for the charge of soliciting sex from a teenage boy, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Also known as the Reverend Craig Stephen White, the well-known preacher often denounced homosexuality and allegedly harassed students on the University's campus with his megaphone and Bible. A 12-person jury deliberated for 3 1/2 hours before finding White guilty of the sex solicitation charge and other related offenses, according to the Inquirer.

The article in the Philly Inquirer is a bit more comprehensive, and doesn't make errors like this one.  Only a judge imposes sentences; the jury just determines guilt or innocence.  But the guy is looking at 3 years minimum on the most serious charge, so it looks like he'll be going away for a while if this isn't overturned on appeal.  I have to admit that it might be since the only evidence is apparently the word of the 14 y/o boy.  The preacher man admits that he asked the kid for directions and then that he came back five minutes later to ask him again, but he says it was innocent questions about a movie while the kid says he asked for directions to a porno shop, and then returned to ask for oral.

However, 12 jurors believed the kid and found the guy guilty, and they heard more about the case than any of us did, so we have to go with their opinion foremost.

I'm trying not to let my "please God let him be guilty and get AIDS in prison" reaction to any loudspeaker-raving asshole taint my evaluation of the merits of the case.  But it's hard.  The closing line from the Inquirer article pretty well sums up the quality of man he was:

Anyway, this time there are several mails asking about Gollum/Andy Serkis being nominated for acting awards based on his performance in LotR:RotK or TTT.  Ebert's answer is interesting, but primarily for the digression he indulges in.

Serkis not only voiced Gollum, but did the physical acting that became the basis for the animated creature -- who was certainly one of the most fascinating and convincing characters in the movie. But animation and robot theorists talk about a strange phenomenon that happens when artificial characters begin to seem "too real." This is the Uncanny Valley Effect, named in 1978 by the Japanese robot scientist Masahiro Mori.

According to a New Yorker article by John Seabrook, "Mori tested people's emotional responses to a wide variety of robots, from non-humanoid to completely humanoid. He found that the human tendency to empathize with machines increases as the robot becomes more human. But at a certain point, when the robot becomes too human, the emotional sympathy abruptly ceases, and revulsion takes its place. People began to notice not the charmingly human characteristics of the robot but the creepy zombielike differences." A definition on the Word Spy Web site gives more examples.

It is possible that the rejection of the sci-fi movie "Final Fantasy," which used computer animation to create "real characters," was caused because it fell into the Uncanny Valley. The genius of Gollum is that it seems like a convincingly real creature -- but not one we have ever seen before, so that its realism does not seem creepy except in the ordinary way. If Serkis brought Gollum to life, other artists fine-tuned the balance with the Uncanny Valley. So this is something other than a conventional performance, and should not compete against characters of a different nature. Perhaps a new category is called for? Beyond the Oscar of the Uncanniest Valley?

I don't really agree with him on Gollum being in some other "best CG character" type of category, but that's not what I wanted to talk about.  What I found interesting was the concept he broaches, that robots become more and more charming until they cross some "too-close to human" line and then are suddenly seen as creepy and artificial. It's an interesting concept though, and I'd like to see data from tests on this subject.

I can't find the article online anywhere, but the entry for "uncannyvalley" on the WordSpy site can be seen here.  They have a slightly longer quote from the article:

Early in their collaboration, in the spring of 2002, Winston and Breazeal selected a name: Leonardo, "because this creature represents the ideal collaboration of art and science—an artist and a scientist working together to create something real," Winston said. Then, in Los Angeles, Winston went to work on Leo's body and face. One of the few guidelines from Breazeal was that Leo not look too human, lest he fall into the "uncanny valley," a concept formulated by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist.

Mori tested people's emotional responses to a wide variety of robots, from non-humanoid to completely humanoid. He found that the human tendency to empathize with machines increases as the robot becomes more human. But at a certain point, when the robot becomes too human, the emotional sympathy abruptly ceases, and revulsion takes its place. People began to notice not the charmingly human characteristics of the robot but the creepy zombielike differences.
—John Seabrook, "It came from Hollywood," The New Yorker, December 1, 2003

They have another quote on the subject as well:

People generally relate better to animated figures that are distinctly outlandish than those that begin to approach the ideal. This is a phenomenon known to robotics researchers as "the uncanny valley"—that point where a robot is so close to lifelike yet still so short of ideal that people become focused on its imperfections.

"That's where every neuron is focused on what's wrong with the robot, on how its motion is not quite right," said Bruce Blumberg, head of the synthetic character program at the MIT Media Lab. "The uncanny valley is a very bad place to be."
—Michael A. Hiltzik, "Synthetic Actors Guild," Los Angeles Times, May 8, 2001

So how about this concept? Malaya rejected it out of hand when I mentioned it to her, along with the Final Fantasy example, but after reading the actual definition page, she's come around to maybe agree with it. It was mostly Ebert's Final Fantasy example that put her off of it, since she actually saw that film, and knows how bad it was, so any concept that people rejected it since it looked weird doesn't fly very far with her.  It's not like everyone rejected Gigli because of some theory about people rejecting movies with titles that had more than 1 but fewer than 3 G's in them.

I'm not sure why Ebert chose that example anyway, unless it was something he'd been long thinking about. Final Fantasy was a pretty forgettable box office bomb; a movie I hadn't thought of in years.  I was interested in it pre-release, based on the hype about the realistic CG and huge budget, but the trailers were boring and the reviews were death, which was enough to keep me away.

So I checked Ebert's review to see what he'd said about the look of things, and here we see the start of the solution.  He loved the movie, gave it a 3.5 stars, and raved about the enjoyable look of it.

In reviewing a movie like this, I am torn between its craft elements and its story. The story is nuts-and-bolts space opera, without the intelligence and daring of, say, Steven Spielberg's ''A.I.'' But the look of the film is revolutionary. ''Final Fantasy'' is a technical milestone, like the first talkies or 3-D movies. You want to see it whether you care about aliens or space cannons. It exists in a category of its own, the first citizen of the new world of cyberfilm.

So since Ebert liked it and thought it was revolutionary, he must be forever wondering why no one else liked it and why it didn't make any money.  Hence this "uncanny valley" definition comes in, and seems to fill that hole.  Wondering just what other critics thought, I checked the Rotten Tomatoes page, and surprise surprise, one of the first quoted major critic reviews is from Salon, and it backs up Ebert's uncanny valley concept perfectly.

But after you're done marveling at the characters' semirealistic way of moving and the freckles and minor imperfections that dot their skin (Dr. Sid boasts a prodigious number of liver spots -- get that guy some Porcelana!), it's all too easy to get hung up on the things that make them seem clumsy and awkward. When they speak -- the characters get some primo "Pearl Harbor"-style dialogue along the lines of "There is a war going on. No one is young anymore" -- their mouths just can't wrap themselves around the words. They look at each other and their gazes don't quite meet -- there's something a little blank, even slightly cross-eyed, about them. Their movements are generally smooth, but there's also something creepily artificial about them: They're a little like an ubermodern cross between traditional Japanimation and the old Thunderbirds puppets -- kind of close to real, but ultimately just high-tech marionettes.

So this critic at least fell deep into the uncanny valley.

Having read quite a few LotR:RotK reviews, and all of the negative ones (online) I didn't see anyone who said this about Gollum, at least not to the point that it ruined the movie for them.  I did see some bitching about him in TTT, and lots of bitching about the way the Ents looked.  For me at least, the Ents looked perfectly real.  I mean they were talking trees; how are they supposed to look?  Gollum is a bigger stretch, since he's humanoid, basically a mutated hobbit, so you can sort of relate how he looks to how the hobbits could/should look if they were mutated.  And by that metric he's not quite perfect; I thought his head was too big and his eyes much too large, like how had his eye sockets swelled so much?  But he was good enough in every other way; movement, character interaction, voice, lip synch, etc, that the overall effect was convincing enough.

There are lots of other recent movies we can consider. The Matrix 2 and 3 for instance, but especially #2 with the big brawl featuring Neo vs. 100 Agent Smiths.  It was almost entirely CG, with Neo's character and the Agents all basically a video game.  And I think that worked against the film; it was realistic, but not quite realistic enough.  It never felt like a really urgent fight, just a huge spectacle.  Compare it to the bloody fight in the subway in the Matrix 1, where there was no CG at all, other than some of the special effects and superfast punching speed stuff.  That fight worked very well, since it had weight and pain and felt real.  When they got hit you could feel the impact.  Not so for the rubbery, bouncing Neo and 100 Smiths in the Matrix 2 playground battle.

Another example is Spider-Man. It was very popular, but I found the movie pretty mediocre (I've never seen it again since the theaters.) and thought the action scenes, especially ones of Spidey swinging around the city, were very fake.  He was like a rubber ball or a plastic toy or a video game prop; moving far too quickly and weightlessly to look realistic, and that stuff really took me out of the movie.  They did a better job in Matrix 2 of making the Neo and the Smiths seem to have weight and gravity, but it still looked essentially fake, too fast, too bouncy, too many camera spins.

The Hulk had a ton of CG, but it was pretty universally disliked.  They spent so much time and money and effort on the big green guy, but he never looked even remotely human to me, and all I've ever seen are the previews and the trailer.  Malaya saw the movie and said it was just awful; so fake that you never had any human empathy for the Hulk at all, since he was just this big bouncing steroidal Gumby thing.

Going back a few years, the next example is, inevitably, Jar Jar, who is perhaps the most hated movie character of all time, CG or other. He was famously CG at the time, and revolutionary, but I don't recall much of the dislike for him being based on his appearance and artificial nature.  He was just loathsome, annoying, and a walking minstrel show.  I didn't see Episode 1 in theaters, put off by all of the hype and then the bad reviews, so my first viewing of it was when my dad taped it off of HBO.  By that time I'd read all about it and the Jar Jar flack, and watched it looking to see the racist aspects of him.  I didn't think there was much to that, until the very end of the movie after the ridiculous battle with the walking desk lamps, when the Gungan parade high-stepped it into town, looking like an exaggerated caricature of the black college bands you mostly see on halftime shows.  At that point all of Jar Jar's "meesa"'s started to sound a lot like, "massah"'s, and yeah, it seemed pretty racist.  Or if not racist, at least trading on the old stereotype of black performers.  Whether or not that was intentional by Lucas and his animators is open to debate, but I don't think the uncanny resemblance is less than clear at this point.

The minstrel show aspects of Jar Jar and his peoples aside, he was just horrid.  Annoying, slapstickish, and painful to watch.  I don't think that was due to his animated nature though.  It was due to the awful writing that made him such an annoying character.  Annoying to adults, at least.

I've often heard that kids liked or loved Jar Jar, or didn't see anything wrong or weird about him.  He wasn't a glaring, non-serious note in an otherwise sporadically-watchable film to them.  Just for adults.  Which lead Malaya to wonder if the uncanny valley thing applies to kids, or just to adults.  I don't think it's been studied, but kids are far more accepting of oddities in appearance or behavior than adults are, so they'd probably have less issue with it.  After all, how many movies have a weird monster that adults hate but that kids accept?  Frankenstein's escaped monster meets the young girl and finds a friend, or ET hides with the kids, for example.

You can also look at modern animation. Most adults find a lot of it "ugly," while kids love it.  I've always liked cartoons of every type, yet I can't sit through the movie trailer for any Rugrats movie without marveling at how intentionally unattractive the animation is.  It's painful to my eyes. As are the few brief moments I've ever seen of Spongebob Squarepants.  They're just ugly; it's a purely aesthetic judgment that has nothing to do with the writing or plot or character (which I've never seen enough of to form an opinion of).

On the other hand, Ren and Stimpy was the first cartoon I know of to use ugly and hyper-realistic drawings of gross things, and I grew to like that one.  I didn't find it entertaining or funny or enjoyable when they'd go from the normal look of the cartoon to some super close up of a huge hair pustule on Stimpy's ass, but it didn't make me want to turn the show off, at least not once I grew to expect it.

And I'm sure I'd soon grow to not mind the ugly animation of Rugrats or Spongebob, if I could tolerate the plot/writing long enough for that to happen. It's just an odd choice to draw a whole cartoon in such an ugly style, when the animators could, in theory, make it look more conventional.  And perhaps less popular, since the art work style wouldn't stand out so immediately to everyone.  The adult analogy I think of is Ted Rall's work, since he draws in a very ugly, rough style that's immediately recognizable.  However since he draws nasty political cartoons, the ugly artwork style works for him and seems appropriate.

This has gone far afield, in the best Fluxblog style, and I'm not sure if I have any overall point.  Probably not. I do find the uncanny valley concept interesting though, and I'm sure I'll carry that with me as I see upcoming films with CG characters. However I don't think I've ever rejected a nearly-human CG character since they were nearly, but not quite, human.  Perhaps as the technology continues to advance we'll get some more examples that will really show us which side of the uncanny valley line we come down on.

At this point the best example probably is Final Fantasy, since that's about the only movie to have CG characters who were supposed to pass for human. Gollum was close, but obviously mutated and weird looking, Jar Jar was not at all human, the Hulk was huge and green, Roger Rabbit was a cartoon, Yoda (in Episode 2) was small and green, etc. We'll have to see how it goes with a CG character who is virtually human in appearance... Of course the question there is, "Why?"  Why spend the money and time and trouble to make a CG character look like a human when you could just use a real human actor in the first place, and enhance him, or put makeup on him, or whatever?  At this point, man in suit is still the best option for realism, even if it's man in suit spiffed up with some CG on top.

But as the technology advances, who knows?

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