Posts
As a hydrogen ion bond, a mother-in-law turns any neutral social unit into an acid.
More Atomic Relationship Theory
Mortgage Crisis Solution
13 years ago
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
“We Believe in the Real Numbers”
On my first day of college, my honors calculus professor, Galen Shorack, strode into the classroom, picked up a piece of chalk, and wrote on the blackboard, “We believe in the real numbers.” His message integrated profound insights. Mathematics resides in the realm of metaphysics. Mathematics is a belief system built upon discovery, upon revelation, not invention or manufacture. The fruits of mathematical labor are verified by agreement with real world facts, but in and of themselves the manipulation of numbers and symbols are representational, not real.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
What I Saw on the Moon
The way people use language communicates hidden meaning. I found English composition class, in junior high school, an enlightening experience. Everybody penned the same introductory topic, “How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” with pathetic results. My classmates couldn’t stick two coherent thoughts together in one complete sentence. Superglue hadn’t been invented yet. So each I-did-this, I-did-that list lacked structure, cohesion, or interest.
What happened outside of my classmates bore greater interest than what happened within them. This trend held true through my tenth year high school reunion and beyond. Results of a decade milestone survey were published alongside pictures of attendees. By then superglue had been invented, but to no avail. Eventually organizers caught on, because the writing prerequisite was dropped from future reunions to the relief of many. I was always an exception. On an unrelated occasion, while I helped my eldest sister move, Mary’s husband Steve said to me, “When taking something heavy, put something light on top.” He could have been describing the writing style I tried to cultivate from the beginning: deep and entertaining.
The youngest of four siblings, by the time I was born my eldest sister and brother had mastered sarcasm. So from the get go I had to understand hidden meanings to learn language. For example, on my eighteenth birthday the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified. That tells you something about me, but only indirectly. My first insight in writing compelling compositions was a knack for identifying lousy sentences. To unblock my muse, I struggled to fashion catchy beginnings. I modeled my compositions on stories with surprise endings, not lists, and I loathed lists of boring sentences.
Our composition teacher made overtures to inspire her students. She granted us personal choice from five new titles to spark each assignment. Typically one and only one title ever appealed to me. “What I Saw on the Moon” remains the only topic I retain as a distinct memory. Since at that time nobody had yet been to the moon, I contrived a story wrapper introducing a relative of mine, from the future, who communicated through me what he saw on the moon. Then in my conclusion I woke up, as if from a dream.
In-between, I described a creature. My brother authored the description and deserves full credit. His curiosity overcame him during a writing break at dinnertime. He read my incomplete story up to the point where the creature appeared. Following my brother’s suggestion, the creature “pranced about like an elephant stuck in a refrigerator.” You might think this tells a whole lot more about my brother than the creature, but I’d wager you couldn’t be too sure. My brother was an avid viewer of the Steve Allen Show. With audience participation, the TV host often constructed what we now call Mad Libs, although I prefer to call them Allenisms, which rhymes with Aneurysms. That’s as far as I’ll go in trying to explain my brother.
But notice the description. The creature “pranced about like an elephant stuck in a refrigerator.” It does nothing to convey the creature’s appearance; rather it describes its behavior. So from the creature’s description you can’t picture it. Surprise! In fact it’s incomprehensible, which is the point. After all, what’d you expect to see on the moon? At face value, no pattern exists in the choice of words. This is the random nature of Allenisms. But order does exist in the parts of speech, which is the structural integrity underlying Allenisms. What an Allenism is missing is any sensible context connecting the choice of words. It’s the random words that stand out, attracting attention initially, and subsequently for those totally lacking in mental discipline.
Throwing away the words and filling in the blanks, consistent with the surrounding context, reveals the hidden meaning disguised by Allenisms. Communication is the art of synchronizing thoughts and emotions with other people in a common context. But often the context isn’t understood, so miscommunication occurs. The allure of Allenisms is that they return us to the state of childhood, when parents purposely spelled words out loud to communicate in code what wasn’t meant for children’s enquiring minds. Even to adults, Allenisms sometimes sound suggestive and appeal to our sense of adult content, a nearly lost art of growing up.
People spell the word “cookie” in front of their dogs to avoid the conditioned Pavlovian response. Dogs don’t understand context, and I haven’t yet met a dog that could spell. Persuasion is the art of discovering what means “cookie” to other people, then embedding it inside self-serving contexts. As Napoleon Bonaparte phrased it, “You can get a man to do practically anything for a small piece of colored ribbon.”
Allenisms are related to idiomatic expressions, which exist within shared linguistic and cultural contexts, e.g. like a fish out of water, like a cat on a hot tin roof. These examples describe distressing circumstances. Useful as shortcuts, they communicate feelings of frustration, a condition often hard to express in words. In a sense they’re euphemisms, strange yet familiar stand-ins for difficult emotions. Cross breeding idiomatic expressions might produce Allenisms, of a sort, e.g. like a fish on a hot tin roof, like a cat out of water. But Allenisms must be incomprehensible and without discernible context, the placeholders of hidden meaning. Valid contexts differentiate idiomatic expressions from Allenisms. One way to mentally bridge this gap is to rediscover a lost context, e.g. my classmates adopted the status quo of conformity and avoidance like a cat out of water, whereas I was driven by a thirst for emergence and immersion like a fish on a hot tin roof.
Likewise, the creature’s description exhibits a context, albeit a private one. In my youth, elephant jokes were the rage. “How can you tell if an elephant has been in your refrigerator?” “By the footprints in the butter.” So a creature “prancing about like an elephant stuck in a refrigerator” isn’t devoid of cultural significance, no matter how many raw impressions to the contrary. However, the creature’s description does contain ambiguities that confuse context, presenting a litmus test to readers. It’s not apparent whether the refrigerator prances about of its own volition, or whether some cause and effect relationship on the part of the elephant is responsible for this observed behavior.
What is apparent is that this frustrating configuration inhibits both the refrigerator and the elephant from becoming self-actualized. Some would blame the elephant for inhibiting the refrigerator, contradicting those who would blame the refrigerator for inhibiting the elephant, while still others would seek to analyze how the elephant got stuck in the refrigerator in the first place before fixing blame. Blame stems from exclusionary, cause and effect worldviews which I reject on rationally supportable grounds. A systems perspective serves my muse better. It requires that I try to wrap my mind around the whole problem space, while striving to see the big picture on the Tao to transcendence – not an easy task by any standard.
One way to make sense of the creature’s description is to think of the whole exercise as participating in the child’s game of telephone. Although it’s a given that the initial message is understandable, after passing through relays, the translation coming out the other end is distorted beyond recognition, with the original meaning being lost. But can its true meaning ever be reconstructed? In hindsight, I think it can. My past self’s future relative is the source of the creature’s description. Who is he? The straightforward evidence appears in the title, “What I Saw on the Moon.” Therefore, in a relativistic sense, my past self’s future relative is me in the present. My brother is my relative; and I am my brother’s relative, which accounts for my past self’s confusion.
The Apollo moon landings commenced when I was in high school. I watched them live on TV. The final moon mission concluded during my college years. I was surprised to hear rumors that the moon landings were faked, supposedly enacted on a secret sound stage someplace on earth. Even today students argue the flag was waving in the breeze. In a real vacuum on the moon, of course, it couldn’t. So, as the conspiracy theory goes, the whole thing must’ve been special effects. Therefore, according to doubters, it didn’t really happen.
I worked in Hollywood doing visual effects in the 1980s, and we didn’t have the technology to fake the moon landings then. High speed cameras would have been required to get the slow motion look of lower gravity. Back then this could only have been done with film, passing film through the camera faster than normal. But film to video transfer looks different than straight video, and the moon landings were broadcast in video. I’m convinced American ingenuity planted the flag on the moon. As for the waving of the flag, a pendulum will sustain its motion longer in a vacuum. It was just vibrations not wind. From my perspective, NASA’s Apollo missions accomplished their goal: to land men on the moon and bring them back safely.
Non parallel shadows
Fill light in shadows
Moon boot print
Waving flag
Walking in Moon gravity
So how does my story end? Wake up. This isn’t a dream. The mysterious creature resides here on Earth, not on the Moon. The elephant is the symbol of the Republican Party, political puppet of wealthy special interests. Plutocracy and Capitalism are relics of Feudalism. The elephant is trapped in a class struggle, where no resolution will transform the sealed refrigerator into a coffin. To transcend this class struggle we must look at the creature from another perspective.
Here the refrigerator signifies a box, where brainstorming an exit strategy requires thinking outside the box. However, elephants learn to obey human masters. Shackled to a stake in the ground, a baby elephant learns to surrender all attempts at escape, because no amount of exertion can break free from the shackle, but circumstances change when a baby grows into an adult. In the new context, an adult elephant could easily pull up the stake and gain freedom, but the adult never questions the lesson learned as a baby. An elephant never forgets, despite the fact that insight could liberate the elephant from bondage. As imagined, I saw the whole spectacle from a distant time and place. Hence, novel insights expose hidden meanings and opportunities.
What happened outside of my classmates bore greater interest than what happened within them. This trend held true through my tenth year high school reunion and beyond. Results of a decade milestone survey were published alongside pictures of attendees. By then superglue had been invented, but to no avail. Eventually organizers caught on, because the writing prerequisite was dropped from future reunions to the relief of many. I was always an exception. On an unrelated occasion, while I helped my eldest sister move, Mary’s husband Steve said to me, “When taking something heavy, put something light on top.” He could have been describing the writing style I tried to cultivate from the beginning: deep and entertaining.
The youngest of four siblings, by the time I was born my eldest sister and brother had mastered sarcasm. So from the get go I had to understand hidden meanings to learn language. For example, on my eighteenth birthday the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified. That tells you something about me, but only indirectly. My first insight in writing compelling compositions was a knack for identifying lousy sentences. To unblock my muse, I struggled to fashion catchy beginnings. I modeled my compositions on stories with surprise endings, not lists, and I loathed lists of boring sentences.
Our composition teacher made overtures to inspire her students. She granted us personal choice from five new titles to spark each assignment. Typically one and only one title ever appealed to me. “What I Saw on the Moon” remains the only topic I retain as a distinct memory. Since at that time nobody had yet been to the moon, I contrived a story wrapper introducing a relative of mine, from the future, who communicated through me what he saw on the moon. Then in my conclusion I woke up, as if from a dream.
In-between, I described a creature. My brother authored the description and deserves full credit. His curiosity overcame him during a writing break at dinnertime. He read my incomplete story up to the point where the creature appeared. Following my brother’s suggestion, the creature “pranced about like an elephant stuck in a refrigerator.” You might think this tells a whole lot more about my brother than the creature, but I’d wager you couldn’t be too sure. My brother was an avid viewer of the Steve Allen Show. With audience participation, the TV host often constructed what we now call Mad Libs, although I prefer to call them Allenisms, which rhymes with Aneurysms. That’s as far as I’ll go in trying to explain my brother.
But notice the description. The creature “pranced about like an elephant stuck in a refrigerator.” It does nothing to convey the creature’s appearance; rather it describes its behavior. So from the creature’s description you can’t picture it. Surprise! In fact it’s incomprehensible, which is the point. After all, what’d you expect to see on the moon? At face value, no pattern exists in the choice of words. This is the random nature of Allenisms. But order does exist in the parts of speech, which is the structural integrity underlying Allenisms. What an Allenism is missing is any sensible context connecting the choice of words. It’s the random words that stand out, attracting attention initially, and subsequently for those totally lacking in mental discipline.
Throwing away the words and filling in the blanks, consistent with the surrounding context, reveals the hidden meaning disguised by Allenisms. Communication is the art of synchronizing thoughts and emotions with other people in a common context. But often the context isn’t understood, so miscommunication occurs. The allure of Allenisms is that they return us to the state of childhood, when parents purposely spelled words out loud to communicate in code what wasn’t meant for children’s enquiring minds. Even to adults, Allenisms sometimes sound suggestive and appeal to our sense of adult content, a nearly lost art of growing up.
People spell the word “cookie” in front of their dogs to avoid the conditioned Pavlovian response. Dogs don’t understand context, and I haven’t yet met a dog that could spell. Persuasion is the art of discovering what means “cookie” to other people, then embedding it inside self-serving contexts. As Napoleon Bonaparte phrased it, “You can get a man to do practically anything for a small piece of colored ribbon.”
Allenisms are related to idiomatic expressions, which exist within shared linguistic and cultural contexts, e.g. like a fish out of water, like a cat on a hot tin roof. These examples describe distressing circumstances. Useful as shortcuts, they communicate feelings of frustration, a condition often hard to express in words. In a sense they’re euphemisms, strange yet familiar stand-ins for difficult emotions. Cross breeding idiomatic expressions might produce Allenisms, of a sort, e.g. like a fish on a hot tin roof, like a cat out of water. But Allenisms must be incomprehensible and without discernible context, the placeholders of hidden meaning. Valid contexts differentiate idiomatic expressions from Allenisms. One way to mentally bridge this gap is to rediscover a lost context, e.g. my classmates adopted the status quo of conformity and avoidance like a cat out of water, whereas I was driven by a thirst for emergence and immersion like a fish on a hot tin roof.
Likewise, the creature’s description exhibits a context, albeit a private one. In my youth, elephant jokes were the rage. “How can you tell if an elephant has been in your refrigerator?” “By the footprints in the butter.” So a creature “prancing about like an elephant stuck in a refrigerator” isn’t devoid of cultural significance, no matter how many raw impressions to the contrary. However, the creature’s description does contain ambiguities that confuse context, presenting a litmus test to readers. It’s not apparent whether the refrigerator prances about of its own volition, or whether some cause and effect relationship on the part of the elephant is responsible for this observed behavior.
What is apparent is that this frustrating configuration inhibits both the refrigerator and the elephant from becoming self-actualized. Some would blame the elephant for inhibiting the refrigerator, contradicting those who would blame the refrigerator for inhibiting the elephant, while still others would seek to analyze how the elephant got stuck in the refrigerator in the first place before fixing blame. Blame stems from exclusionary, cause and effect worldviews which I reject on rationally supportable grounds. A systems perspective serves my muse better. It requires that I try to wrap my mind around the whole problem space, while striving to see the big picture on the Tao to transcendence – not an easy task by any standard.
One way to make sense of the creature’s description is to think of the whole exercise as participating in the child’s game of telephone. Although it’s a given that the initial message is understandable, after passing through relays, the translation coming out the other end is distorted beyond recognition, with the original meaning being lost. But can its true meaning ever be reconstructed? In hindsight, I think it can. My past self’s future relative is the source of the creature’s description. Who is he? The straightforward evidence appears in the title, “What I Saw on the Moon.” Therefore, in a relativistic sense, my past self’s future relative is me in the present. My brother is my relative; and I am my brother’s relative, which accounts for my past self’s confusion.
The Apollo moon landings commenced when I was in high school. I watched them live on TV. The final moon mission concluded during my college years. I was surprised to hear rumors that the moon landings were faked, supposedly enacted on a secret sound stage someplace on earth. Even today students argue the flag was waving in the breeze. In a real vacuum on the moon, of course, it couldn’t. So, as the conspiracy theory goes, the whole thing must’ve been special effects. Therefore, according to doubters, it didn’t really happen.
I worked in Hollywood doing visual effects in the 1980s, and we didn’t have the technology to fake the moon landings then. High speed cameras would have been required to get the slow motion look of lower gravity. Back then this could only have been done with film, passing film through the camera faster than normal. But film to video transfer looks different than straight video, and the moon landings were broadcast in video. I’m convinced American ingenuity planted the flag on the moon. As for the waving of the flag, a pendulum will sustain its motion longer in a vacuum. It was just vibrations not wind. From my perspective, NASA’s Apollo missions accomplished their goal: to land men on the moon and bring them back safely.
Mythbusters Moon Myths
So how does my story end? Wake up. This isn’t a dream. The mysterious creature resides here on Earth, not on the Moon. The elephant is the symbol of the Republican Party, political puppet of wealthy special interests. Plutocracy and Capitalism are relics of Feudalism. The elephant is trapped in a class struggle, where no resolution will transform the sealed refrigerator into a coffin. To transcend this class struggle we must look at the creature from another perspective.
Here the refrigerator signifies a box, where brainstorming an exit strategy requires thinking outside the box. However, elephants learn to obey human masters. Shackled to a stake in the ground, a baby elephant learns to surrender all attempts at escape, because no amount of exertion can break free from the shackle, but circumstances change when a baby grows into an adult. In the new context, an adult elephant could easily pull up the stake and gain freedom, but the adult never questions the lesson learned as a baby. An elephant never forgets, despite the fact that insight could liberate the elephant from bondage. As imagined, I saw the whole spectacle from a distant time and place. Hence, novel insights expose hidden meanings and opportunities.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
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.
More Atomic Relationship Theory
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.
More Atomic Relationship Theory
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
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?
More Atomic Relationship Theory
Saturday, March 17, 2007
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.
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.
Monday, February 19, 2007
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
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
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