[-empyre-] more about that medical breakthrough

[Jim Andrews <jim@vispo.com>]

LANGRAMS

Now about that medical breakthrough. http://vispo.com/dynanio was commissioned by the Hokum
School of Neurology, in collaboration with the Bunktown Computational Linguistics dept in an
effort to animate the processing of linguistic information along the synapses. What you will see
is the (silent) inside of a person's language buses as they process language through the
corridors of involuntary(?) cerebration. This ultra microscopic view reveals that--wouldn't you
know it--the inside of an English-writing person does indeed contain lettristic
symbols--sometimes letters, sometimes sets of letters. These are learned structures that
literally form in the brain. Further, they are drag and droppable, as was previously proclaimed
by some but refuted (improperly) as inelegant ('god does not play at drag and drop
programming'). In some cases, the animation apparently changes, via user interaction, into a
depiction of their own processing of language at the moment. This can be achieved either by
singing while experiencing the piece, turning off the lights and going full screen, or by
special drugs.

The philosophy of this simulation is 'create destroy exit'. Prps more like 'create create create
create drag drag drag destroy destroy create...exit'.

Click 'create' to add to the brain bandwidth (max 100).

Click 'destroy' to surrender a braincell.

Click 'exit' to enter/release the void.

Drag those thoughts (suspected to be the psychic remnant of words after their decomposition in
brain acid) around into patterns, and rapid click 'create' to create a 'theory'. A theory is
presumed to be an agglomeration of such entities. Beware. Theories that are too thick may cause
temporary blockage of the language buses.

It is somewhat embarrassing to note that the langram at http://vispo.com/dynanio was actually
recorded from the village idiot. He seems to have a one track mind though we noted that creating
lots of throughput and arranging the language processing in space did create the illusion of
some intelligence. That's what he did, anyway, and hummed along with it though it is without
audio.

If you have any langrams of your own, send them to me and we'll try it out with 1 or more than
one, if you like, and you can see your own neuro linguistic processing patterns.

The animation and interactivity were done in Director, using an imported Flash animation. Each
animation is part of a (language) window that is dynamically created by puppeting channels of
the Score or timeline. This represents further subversion of the movie paradigm toward
multi-perspectival windowing of the many facets of the soul. Is memory better handled by
Director via such dynamic memory allocation (as opposed to drag and drop creation and,
consequently, automatic cerebral garbage collection)? Here we have 100 instances of a Flash
animation onscreen at once (for click-happy thinkers), and that could be increased without
effort to about 450 (given max 1000 instantiated in any frame) but it's rumored it would cause
silicon cerebral hemmorage, so we won't go there for the time. As it is, proceed with caution in
thought creation; your limit will be determined primarily by the amount of available RAM and the
speed and memory of your video card. Of course, let me know if it kills you--apologies in
advance. I have tested it on my PC with 256 mb of RAM in Netscape 7.02 and IE 6 using my 32 mb
video card, along with special drugs and, as I give myself a body check (go Canucks go!) I seem
to be mostly all here.

Dynamic window/element/thought creation/destruction will be a new feature in Windows For
Shockwave 4.0. The langram device was created initially to test that new code.

ja