Micro ART Review

If a male is an electron, then electrons repel each other, but together they perform work in the form of electricity. If women are protons then women form nuclear bonds with other women and couples. Couples are neutrons, which are the combination of an electron plus a proton plus an antineutrino. An antineutrino is therefore love.

The half life of a neutron is the amount of time a couple remains together or until at least one half of the partners becomes disaffect and the relationship deteriorates. Unconditional love is a neutron with an infinite half life. A mother and a son also form a neutron.

Beta decay is the decay of a neutron into a proton and an electron. When a boy reaches puberty he tends to go his own way and the bond with his mother weakens.

Girlfriends form nuclear bonds. A mother daughter pair forms a nuclear bond.

The Oedipus story can be modeled in this way. The father feels threatened by his son. A prophesy claims that the son will displace the father, so the father sends the son away to his death. Oedipus does not die, but is adopted, grows up, leaves home, and meets his biological father on the road, where he slays him. In time he marries his mother.

A neutron is formed by one and only one pair of an electron and a proton. The idea is sound, but in real life the parent's intimate relationship resumes once the kids are asleep in bed. Instead of all or nothing, the mother/wife has two roles.

Another Greek myth is that of Odysseus, who goes off to the Trojan War leaving his wife Penelope and young son Telemachus. The war lasts ten years, and is recounted in Homer's Iliad. It took him another ten years to get home as recounted in Homer's Odyssey. By then Telemachus was twenty. When Odysseus returns he fights and kills Penelope’s suitors. Other stories say that Odysseus and Penelope have another son, and Odysseus leaves home again. As a corollary to the Oedipus complex, I offer the Penelope complex where the birth of a son displaces the husband in his relationship with his wife, and drives him away.

I define a neutron relationship, as an intimate relationship between a man and a woman. A hydrogen atom also contains an electron and a proton, but they are not as strongly bound as they are in a neutron. Statistics show that half of all hydrogen atoms end in ionization, i.e. half of all marriages end in divorce.

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Atomic Relationship Theory

How do you describe a picture to a blind person? Searching for common ground and struggling to communicate through analogies must suffice. Imagine that someday we encounter an advanced alien race like the Asgard from the SciFi Channel series Stargate SG-1. This technologically advanced race reproduces through cloning. They fully comprehend mathematics, physics, chemistry, and electronics; but they fail to fathom, on any basis whatsoever, human relationships.


You independently decide you’ll attempt to bridge this communication gap. Your breakthrough comes when you consider subatomic particles, the constituents of matter. Electrons are small and mobile like male sperm. Protons are more massive like female ova, and protons are located in the atomic nucleus like a social unit. Not only do you find this analogy intriguing. In fact, it proves compelling and you’ve discovered a profound paradigm for understanding human relationships.

So you create cross reference dictionaries between physics and human relationships, based upon subatomic particles. In addition, you craft an algebraic notation, employing logical operations from mathematics, to encode the dynamics of human relationships on a micro scale. Furthermore, you develop cross reference dictionaries between chemistry and human relationships, based upon atomic elements and molecular bonds, to describe human social units on a macro scale, while producing cross reference dictionaries between electronics and human relationships to cover workplace interactions. As an extension you discover analogies to successfully explain the dynamics of more complex human relationships involving belief systems.

Your efforts exceed all expectations. Truth is more elusive than a needle in a haystack; since both the needle and the haystack are invisible, where truth’s concerned. However; once you’ve grasped the truth it’s generally quite simple, and powerful beyond belief. Ascending to the peak of a mountaintop, your perspective becomes unobstructed in all directions. This view is truly awesome. Let’s ask our friends to come join us. Shall we?

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Office Politics

My apology caught her by surprise. After a couple of weeks consulting for a company, I suggested a redesign of their entire software product line; unifying their various data formats to make the data interchangeable between all their products. A woman was head of customer service. She resisted my idea saying that their customers liked the products the way they were.

That night I pondered how to reason with her. Instead I remembered reading a book in high school. The book was “On Aggression” by Konrad Lorenz. I realized this woman was acting territorially. She was defending what was familiar territory to her. I was new. I was telling them to change, but I had merit on my side. To me it was obvious. I had an outsider’s perspective with no vested interests. The book I read also covered dominance and submission in animal behavior.

Next morning I walked into her office. I intentionally met her on her own turf. Her body language reacted defensively. I said, “I apologize.” I told her that I needed her input on satisfying customer needs. Her body language changed to cooperation. She said she had thought about my proposal and agreed that it made sense. I won without a battle, because I realized the real argument was not about the merits of my proposal but about territory. I figuratively groveled before her and surrendered all claims on her territory, and she conceded technical superiority to me. It was a win-win bloodless coup, and I gained an ally that day, by simply demonstrating respect.

Many arguments derive from misunderstandings not just conflicting opinions or values. Partnerships that don’t share common values are probably doomed. In this particular incident common ground was achieved; but it’s not always that simple, or even possible in many cases. Emotional detachment is a male trait. I looked at the problem in technical terms. Women don't tend to approach life the same way. Recognizing this gender difference was the key to overcoming a major obstacle in our working relationship.

Do You See What I See?

During the pioneering years of computer animation, I worked on the Disney feature film TRON, which was released in 1982. At the time I was employed by the Movie Group at Information International, Inc. and had responsibility for debugging and enhancing the software for image rendering and for a custom version of a film recorder that the company manufactured. Craig Reynolds wrote and maintained the animation software. Larry Malone wrote a smooth surface modeling program that he used to create the Solar Sailor object, and a separate interactive program for registering computer generated backgrounds with live action scenes.

Between the three of us we divvied up the majority of the animation for those scenes assigned to our company, which occurred during the latter half of the movie. Craig animated scenes with the Solar Sailor, Larry animated scenes with Sark’s Carrier, and I animated scenes with the Master Control Program (MCP). Mal McMillan had animated some preproduction tests, before I arrived in the Movie Group. Art Durinski, our resident artist, created the majority of objects we used. Art digitized our objects from plans he drew on paper, similar to blueprints, which were based upon concept art created for TRON by Syd Mead, Peter Lloyd, and Jean Giraud.

Jeremy Schwartz, who made high resolution, still frames for backgrounds, also managed to animate a few scenes while creating the building objects for his scenes. Jeremy’s scenes are the only computer generated scenes in the movie where you’ll actually see any shadows being cast. James Rapley maintained our hardware, a “state of the art dinosaur,” the Foonly F1. Our Creative Director, Richard Taylor, managed the Movie Group and also served as co-supervisor of Visual Effects for TRON, spending most of his time away at Disney throughout the duration of production.

Richard had a laissez-faire management style. He brought together people with talent and initiative. Richard said, “Reality is the most widely held fantasy.” He felt that the commercial marketplace of today for graphic artists is the equivalent of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages for artists of that era. After TRON he told me, “There are two kinds of art directors. When you give the first kind what they ask, they’re satisfied. But the second kind uses that as a starting point to begin changing things.”

The Movie Group operated like an ecosystem where everyone found his ecological niche. To maximize usage of Foonly, Craig, Larry, and I worked three different shifts. I started at four in the morning, Craig came in at ten, and Larry followed in the evening. Technology in that era was less reliable than it is today. Foonly couldn’t run a week straight without crashing. It was Art’s original idea to get babysitters for Foonly to prevent crashes during the night from delaying our production schedule, but his suggestion had fallen on deaf ears.

One morning I came in and found Foonly idle. My shot had been stopped, but not restarted. I was incensed, so I wrote some flame mail, before the day of email, and posted it on the partition next to the desk of Lynn Wilkinson, our production assistant. That was my Cambrian explosion moment. In the flame mail I wrote about my frustration that my shot was not restarted and brought up Art’s suggestion about babysitters. Richard read my note and Art’s nighttime babysitter idea was put into action almost immediately with two of Art’s students from UCLA, Kathy Fisken and John Howard, and a young woman from Disney administration who volunteered, Rosalyn Fischer.

Over a period of about one year laboring on TRON, I completed my scene assignments first in the Movie Group. Then I was assigned scenes that were behind schedule from another company, MAGI. The transferred scenes were of high computational complexity as conceived, and took on the order of ten hours a frame for MAGI’s system to compute. When it comes to image rendering, our polygonal based approach was orders of magnitude faster than MAGI’s solid modeling approach. Conversely, solid modeling is orders of magnitude faster to create complex, mathematically definable objects than our polygonal system. Nevertheless, toward the end of production we had the advantage in putting scenes onto film, which is what counted at that point.

After completing all my assigned scenes, I felt rejuvenated. My stress level dissipated, and I got playful. I negotiated technical changes to the scenes catering to the strengths of our polygonal approach. One scene in particular, I thought, was ideal for embedding Mickey Mouse in the background. So I asked Art to make an object to support this whim of mine. Art responded favorably to the idea, but claimed he couldn’t draw Mickey Mouse. So I drew the plans and Art digitized the object.

The drawing caught the attention of my coworkers. Craig complained that he didn’t think it was right for people to do whatever they wanted. He felt strongly that it was the director’s movie and that he should have complete control. According to Craig, I shouldn’t be allowed to do what I was doing. In all fairness to Craig, he was under a lot of pressure. Not only hadn’t he finished his scenes yet, but he was under a deadline to publish his inaugural paper on his Lisp based animation software, and make a photo which eventually made the cover of the conference proceedings. Years later Craig pioneered the simulation of flocking behavior in computer animation and in artificial life circles.

At the time, I showed Richard my drawing and informed him of my scheme. He consented with one caveat: that no more than twenty percent of the audience caught on. He suggested that Mickey Mouse be oriented at an obscure angle to avoid appearing obvious. I set up the scene in accordance with his wishes. For every scene, our animation was supervised by a traditional animator. For most of my scenes with the MCP I worked with Jerry Rees, but for this scene Bill Kroyer served as my co-conspirator. Bill jettisoned the glancing angle idea straight away. He wanted Mickey Mouse to get noticed. So that’s the way I animated and filmed the scene. When completed days later, the exposed film went into the can and was sent to the lab for processing.

Motion picture film is developed at night. It’s screened the next day in a critical, peer review, group session called “Dailies.” The objective of Dailies is to catch mistakes as soon as possible. I’ve attended a few Dailies myself. Once I caught a continuity error. When the realization struck me, I blurted out, “The background’s not moving.” The scene had live action matted over one of Jeremy’s background stills, done by the traditional cell animation approach at Disney. I had finished the scenes just preceding this scene in question. In my scenes, new scenes I had gotten from MAGI, the background transitioned from static to moving. It was supposed to be moving, but the background was static in the scene being screened in Dailies. Richard, who usually supervised Dailies, checked the scene log and verified my claim. The scene needed to be redone with the correction - a moving background.

Another time Jeremy blurted out, “It worked!” when one of his background still scenes was shown. In it the actors were filmed jumping around on a black stage with marks that Jeremy had provided. It was supposed to be dangerous terrain, where one misstep was fatal. When the live action and background stills were matted together, it came off without a hitch. We were all surprised, but none more so than Jeremy.

I did not attend Dailies for my Mickey Mouse scene. Richard told me how it went later. Everybody focused on catching mistakes but overlooked Mickey Mouse, hidden in plain sight via a little misdirection. During Dailies the film for a scene is spliced head to tail in a closed loop, which is projected repeatedly on a big screen over and over again. Disney animators have a saying, “If you do everything right nobody notices, but when you do something wrong everybody notices.” I did everything right. Nobody noticed Mickey Mouse’s cameo in TRON.

Richard knew it was my scene so he tested those in attendance during Dailies, “What’s wrong with this scene?” Everybody in the screening room then knew that something was wrong, but nobody caught the slightest error. “Come on people. What’s wrong with this scene?” Silence. Everybody was afflicted by selective blindness. Zero percent caught on. The guest appearance of Mickey Mouse passed completely undetected under professional scrutiny until Richard clued them in, “There’s Mickey Mouse.” Then all at once, like a miracle, the blind could see.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Mickey
http://www.hiddenmickeys.org/Movies/Tron.html
http://www.eeggs.com/items/2351.html

Gistmass Ontological Domain

A comparative analysis of paradigms, from ancient through modern sources, reveals a unified, ubiquitous pattern underlying reality. At the core of existence, one elemental set of building blocks appears pervasive, and research indicates that many generations have interpreted and transcribed this primordial structure into transformative, progressive, cultural contexts.

A paradigm, in its own terms, explains or describes aspects of common experience from a unique perspective - like trying to reconstruct a statue from a collection of blurry snapshots. How many photographs, or video segments, are adequate to fully capture a family vacation, a day in the news, the year in review, a lifetime of memories, or a person’s character? Absolute truth may ultimately prove elusive. Increasing detail amounts to overload at the expense of general comprehension. Paradigms help us recognize the universal in the wild.

A collection of pictures taken from various viewpoints increases the recorded detail of a statue, like the opinion of a jury. By comparing and combining multiple paradigms, a universal pattern emerges through reinforced similarities, lending fresh insights into the big picture, into ourselves, and into the fabric of existence. These sources arise from diverse fields of study, and cover disciplines in human nature and in the nature of reality.

As children we learn language. We notice patterns. Regularities get reinforced. As we master patterns of speech, our communication skills grow and our understanding improves. Common ground gets established, and we learn to express our needs with greater eloquence and efficiency.

Paradigms facilitate our ability to communicate novel concepts and develop mutual understanding. Gistmass Ontological Domain supplies the framework that not only governs the universe but ourselves as well.

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