#humans are animals so this is redundant but its a good representation of how it feels to me

[nyanto5]

(original post)

#art #this is just a digtially painted collage for the background but the fries and deer are me #humans are animals so this is redundant but its a good representation of how it feels to me #4rt by m3

[ettawritesnstudies]

No Longer Canon

Stealing this as an open tag from @quilloftheclouds because I thought it would be fun to talk about some of the changes I’ve made to Laoche over the years! This book has grown so much alongside me and its almost funny to look back at what I once had now haha

Storge

Enne and Grace didn’t exist in the earlier drafts of the book, or they were Luca’s baby sisters with no powers and no bearing on the plot.

Lyss was going by the name Lady Elize and had a whole secret identity subplot that got overly convoluted and cut

In one REALLY early draft, Acheran was a merman

There used to be two important magical artifacts - a Staff and an amulet. I ditched the amulet along with the ocean-mermaid setting but might save it for Laoche

Continued below the cut because this got LONG lol.

Luca’s magic manifested when their house burnt down. That’s stayed canon. In the current draft, he has magic scars. In an earlier draft, he lost his arm, and met Acheran trying to steal a charm to animate a prosthetic he built out of junk.

Originally, Enne also lost her sight in that fire, but after reading up on Blind representation, I decided it would be better if she was blind from birth. This functionally changes nothing in the story but it is briefly distinguished on page.

The Laine family had a grandmother who died in the arena, but I realized this was fridging and a sore start to the book, so I wrote her role out of the story

In the course of designing the avians I was basing my calculations for wingspan based off humans riding hangliders. One early design for the species had 25 ft wings that were double-jointed to fold up, and they were all under four feet tall.

Acheran has a character arc now lol

Grace died in the last draft

Keenan (one of the castle guards) has been promoted from background character to a POV character

I have rewritten the entire middle of the plot to give the family more “down time” in the Avian city, rather than the plot careening headlong from one crisis to another.

Esil’s backstory has flip-flopped several times between becoming an anarchist as a lost runaway child who grew up and was groomed by Mechat, to being an adult who was exiled for murder.

The anarchists have personalities now

I really hated my old guidance counselor so I wrote her in as a minor villain to specifically kill off. She got written out for being redundant and more annoying than she was worth.

I think I rewrote the Arena aftermath scene 6 times by now and I have to do it again RIP

This used to be a book about fae where the fae had magic and ruled the humans, which was replaced by the Atilan/Debilan split

Laoche

Madelyn used to be trapped in a book. She was a sentient illustration living on the page because the villain stuck her there using magic.

I changed that to she’s not a book, but she’s trapped in a library, which was changed to “she’s trapped in an underground time-dilation ruin in the wastes of ren but she grew up in a library after being adopted by the local ward.”

Madelyn used to be a water fae who couldn’t do water magic but was really good at illusions for some reason

Alric used to be a very cliche “evil old wizard with robes and a long beard and a pointy hat who goes muahahaha in his evil wizard tower and takes over the kingdom for pure evil reasons that are never once explained.” Now he’s an anti-hero stressed out college student who’s forced to choose the lesser of two evils during an extenuation situation and gets a redemption arc

When (old evil wizard alric) overthrew the royal family, Stephan got thrown in the dungeon, and Madelyn escaped with a baby Seth, who she gave to a farmer family to raise before she got trapped in the book. Seth grew up as the Ordinary Farm Boy Of Destiny Chosen One like luke skywalker

The book-girl thing also artificially made Madelyn look like 20 years younger than she actually is which is how I justified a romance arc with her and Seth sdlfkjsdfljk. Very glad I ditched that

I had tree-people play a role in the pantheon of religion at one point and completely ditched that.

Raiden is an Avian now

We have mermaids now.

And a magic system! There’s an actual magic system now and not just “what 12-year-old Etta thought was cool!”

Weswin exists and has a character arc

The politics of Arga are COMPLETELY different

When Alric overthrew the king he broke some sacred magical pact and created a border of impossible to cross deserts around the country, almost like a self-imposed seige so everyone was starving and he needed flying creatures to get over the barrier, which is why I created the avians in the first place

That’s GONE

And there’s a TON of cool new monsters and worldbuilding as icing on the cake but this is long enough as it is so that’s a post for another day

#the laoche chronicles #storge #no longer canon tag #this turned into a stream of conciousness ramble but I can't be mad about it #have fun

[pighelium92]

Understanding The Distinctions In Between A Will And A Trust Fund

Living Wills And Also Development Directives For Medical Choices

Content

If You Don'T Intend To Utilize A Lawyer

Sign Your Will In Front Of Witnesses.

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When Should You Obtain Lawful Advice To Compose Your Will?

Full An Estate Tax Form.

Making Use Of A Lawyer To Write Your Will

What Is Probate?

What To Anticipate From Your Lawyer

If You Don'T Intend To Use A Solicitor

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Using A Lawyer To Create Your Will

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Is libertarian free will?

Metaphysical libertarianism is one philosophical view point under that of incompatibilism. Libertarianism holds onto a concept of free will that requires the agent to be able to take more than one possible course of action under a given set of circumstances.

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#Making a will #Will writing services #How to make a will #Fixed Fee Will Writing #Online Will Writing #Will Aid #Will Writing Specialist #will template #how to write a simple will #will writing services near me #legal will #online will #family will #simple will #how to end a will

[fullmetalirin]

FMA Brotherhood: Episode 19

FMA Brotherhood Episode 19: "Death of the Undying"

Kain Fuery manages to save Hawkeye, with Mustang coming to defeat Gluttony. Alphonse meets up with the group and they pursue Barry, who chases his body into the depths of the third laboratory. The group splits into two teams. Mustang and Havoc are ambushed by Lust, resulting in both men being grievously wounded and left for dead. Lust then confronts Barry, slicing him to pieces. Hawkeye, believing Mustang to be dead, desperately shoots Lust repeatedly with minimal effect. Before Lust can kill Hawkeye, Mustang appears, having cauterized his wounds, he repeatedly incinerates Lust until her philosopher's stone is depleted. No longer able to regenerate, she crumbles to ash. Barry's soul survives, but his blood seal is scratched out by his human body, which kills both of them. Edward returns to Resembool and heads toward the Rockbell residence where he sees his father Van Hohenheim at the grave of his mother Trisha Elric.

Mustang flashes back to Hughes' death when Riza doesn't respond and freaks out.

Then we cut back to Ling expositing. Oh joy.

Gluttony is strangling Riza. She's emptied her clip into his head but he's not dying. It's pretty gruesome, we see his wrecked eyeball. She empties another clip and pushes him back a little, but they're out of ammo again. For some reason, they just stand there like idiots instead of running. Fortunately, Mustang steps out of his teleporter and uses magic to generate force out of nothing to throw Gluttony out the window.

Riza yells at Mustang for saving her because lolwomen. Later she does thank him and then he's the one telling her to keep in professional, because women are just crazy nagging hags who don't say what they mean and need strong manly men to keep their heads in the game.

I really don't like the cracked-skin effect on the homunculi. It looks so fake, like a low-res CGI model.

How did Alphonse know where they were? Did Ling tell him?

Al informs them about homunculi's powers. Despite this they're going to continue to waste all their ammo shooting Lust later, because they're idiots.

Mustang uses Barry's rampage as an excuse to investigate the laboratory, which is clever. Barry doesn't kill anyone because serial killers are such polite people. Al has cartoon face during this, which I guess is appropriate since he really doesn't fit in here.

Lust shows up and Havoc gets distracted by her jiggle physics when he looks at her tattoo. As Tumblr helpfully explained to me, this is actually groundbreaking feminist representation because while it looks indistinguishable from normal anime objectification see it's actually making fun of Havoc for being a pervert and no, Tumblr, it's pandering. Perv pandering doesn't stop being perv pandering just because a woman drew it. But okay, sure, it's not that bad by the very, very low standards of anime, so maybe I can put up with it as long as it doesn't…

…do… that.

Guys, this is not making fun of perverts. Havoc is a hero and Lust is a villain. This is letting perverts be in on the joke. Tumblr, please for the love of God shut up about Brotherhood being so tasteful in its depiction of boobs, because it's not.

Anyway. Lust taunts Mustang about Hughes' death and then… looks actually pained when he shoots her (where Gluttony barely flinched). Why did she do that if bullets actually hurt her.

There is some gross banter about getting Lust on her knees. I'm sure this has also, through some strange Tumblr alchemy, been transformed into groundbreaking feminism.

Then Lust shows off her Philosopher's Stone because the author needed a way for the characters to learn a homunculus' weakness and couldn't think of a way to do it that didn't involve handing Lust the idiot ball. I've heard this is slightly less stupid in the manga and she only does this after Havoc gets injured, is that true?

Like I said before, this reveal utterly baffles me. So after all that buildup, the homunculi are just... monsters powered by magic. That’s so boring. They can no longer be used to ask questions about personhood and humanity -- I mean, maybe they could if the show actually committed to them being alien and different, but it doesn’t. What this comes down to is just that Philosopher’s Stones and rulebreaking magic is cool, so the homunculi have them so they can be cool boss monsters. Except they’re not cool. In OG, they were puzzles that required special knowledge and preparation to defeat; that’s cool. In Brotherhood, as we’re going to see, you beat the homunculi by just punching them in the face until the author decides they’ve run out of HP. They’re just damage sponges. And just as I revile damage sponges in video games, I revile them in TV shows too. Characters just throwing the same attacks at each other for five episodes is not interesting.

I also hate that this means Philosopher’s Stones are absolutely everywhere in this continuity instead of something actually special, a theme that will continue.

Lust says homunculi still have human feelings. Wow, what a dumb idea that no one would ever want to read about. It sure is a good thing Brotherhood decided to completely forget about this and just make homunculi boring boss monsters, huh?

Then, despite Lust using her claws as instant-kill ranged attacks in every prior fight scene, she now switches to sloppy, easily-dodged melee swipes, because Lust is really hogging the idiot ball today.

Mustang says he can decompose the water into hydrogen and oxygen to create an explosion even with wet gloves. This is totally inconsistent with what we're previously told, which is that creating oxygen is the easy part for him. He shouldn't need a spark to manipulate the air content, that should be a separate thing. This just seems like the author showing off a trick she remembered from chemistry class. It sure would be interesting if alchemy actually worked like this all the time, but Mustang never needs to do anything like this elsewhere.

Then despite having just been told that homunculi don't die when they are killed they walk right back into the room, because the idiot ball's really getting around today.

Cartoon when Mustang complains about being treated like a match. Because a climactic battle is definitely the time for that.

Then Lust FINALLY uses her spear-claws and stabs Havoc through the spine which, in a rare appearance of consequences, actually does paralyze him until the epilogue when Dr. Deus ex Machina heals him because consequences are for losers. I'm also a bit unclear on how she severed his spine without also severing his aorta.

Mustang realizes he can use Lust's Philosopher's Stone to heal Havoc and rips it out of Lust's chest. Lust screams in agony, implying this does actually hurt her, so again, why did she show it to him?

Lust's body disintegrates, but she's able to reform around the Stone. It's really gruesome. Somehow this does not crush Mustang's hand in the process, but she does finally stab him… nonfatally, because she's got the idiot ball again.

Bradley shows up outside.

Lust says Mustang was a candidate for sacrifice but she's killing him anyway. Uh, did she run this by the others? She then leaves him for dead instead of finishing him off because the idiot ball is strong this episode.

We then catch up to Barry, who tells us souls reject incompatible bodies. Al freaks out at this, but fortunately this will never matter for him.

Lust shows up to whine about how she has to kill Al. No, you don't. Just leave. You control the government. Bradley can give you another hideout at a moment's notice. The most important thing hiding here was you, and you just blabbed all your secrets anyway. Just cut your losses. You idiot.

Lust once again taunts someone into shooting her and once again staggers and screams in pain, because the idiot ball's terminal now. Shouldn't she also know she's running out of lives and this is maybe not the best idea right now?

Al vows to protect Riza because he’s tired of watching people die. It’s a nice moment that also happens way, way too early in his character arc. I like Al as the childish, out-of-his-depth foil to Ed’s easy confidence. This moment works better as a climactic ending reversal than as an offhand detail a third of the way through the story. If he’s just another noble heroic alchemist, he’s redundant with all the others we already have.

Meanwhile, Riza is hysterical and ineffective because she's a woman in a shonen anime.

You know, more seriously, I would like to point out that giving a female character awesome gun skills doesn't actually mean anything in a story about how non-guns are really awesome. We see a lot of great gunplay from Riza, but it's always alchemy that actually saves the day and gets all the focus. It's moving the goalposts. Sure, we'll give the woman a cool skill… that we will then choose to make useless in the context of the story. It's such tedious faux-feminism, going through the motions so you can say, technically, that you have a "strong female character" without actually doing anything to respect them or integrate them into the narrative. For every "strong female character" in Brotherhood, there's a male character who's stronger. Women are still, fundamentally, supporting characters – they're awesome because part of the male fantasy is an awesome support staff, but the boys get to be more awesome and the boys get to be who the story's actually about.

I really want us to start being more critical of representation like this. Treating strong female characters like a list of checkboxes is so totally wrongheaded. Characters don't exist in a vacuum. A skill that's impressive in one narrative or one power level may be completely meaningless in another. We need to look at characters within the context of the narrative they inhabit, relative to other characters and the framing of the work.

To prove my point, our resident Gary Stu has just appeared to show Riza up and beat the boss fight literally without moving a single step.

BUT TELL ME AGAIN HOW THIS SERIES IS GOD’S GIFT TO FEMINISM.

Mustang is using Havoc's lighter for a starter, despite explicitly establishing that it was busted earlier.

Mustang fireballs her again.

He also drew a perfect transmutation circle in his own blood and perfectly cauterized his internal bleeding despite explicitly saying he doesn't know medical alchemy. Now that his jacket's opened, we also get to see he's been hiding a Superman physique this whole time. You could put this in a parody of male power fantasies and I'd say it was too unbelievable.

Mustang fireballs her again. We get a gruesome close-up shot of her skin burning off.

Mustang fireballs her again.

Mustang decides he can kill this regenerator monster powered by the thing that supposedly has infinite energy by just killing her enough times, because he's read the script.

Mustang fireballs her again.

We get a closeup of her Philosopher's Stone, and coincidentally also a closeup of her tits.

Mustang fireballs her again.

And again.

I'd like to point out that every single one of these fireballs is ENORMOUS. Alphonse has to create a stone wall to hide behind so Riza isn't charbroiled too. We can see the entire room lighting up. I'd also like to point out this is in a SEALED UNDERGROUND ROOM, and FIRE REQUIRES OXYGEN. OXYGEN IS NOT INFINITE. If he lights the whole room on fire, he is DONE. HE USED UP ALL THE OXYGEN IN THE ROOM. HE CANNOT KEEP SPAMMING FIREBALLS. And I don't care what fanwank you can pull out to justify this, because the bottom line is that someone winning a fight by endlessly spamming the same move is terrible writing. This is not a climactic boss fight, this is just the Gary Stu showing off how awesome he is.

And through all of this Lust has done absolutely nothing except writhe and scream in agony, because Mustang is a Gary Stu therefore fire stunlocks everything. Only at the very end does she actually try to attack him, remembering she can spear people through the brain just in time for him to kill her while her spear is INCHES away from his face, because he's very awesome.

Also, HOW IS HE NOT BURNING HIMSELF HERE. HOW. HIS ARM IS IN THE EXPLOSION. HOW.

Meanwhile, Lust can still talk but somehow not extend her spear one more inch. Her Philosopher's Stone disintegrates, so the woman has nobly died to teach us that you can kill homunculi by just hitting them until they run out of HP, because that's so interesting.

And then Mustang collapses from his wound now that it no longer matters, invoking the very important power of the Not-Sue: see, he did all that while he really was one step away from death, that totally makes him less sueish and not more!

Mustang ignores Riza to praise Al for protecting her.

Bradley, our other resident Gary Stu, is revealed to have been watching the whole thing. He for some reason does not kill Mustang, thus establishing who has the greater Sue power.

Winry is sulking and hoping the man comes back safe because that's her purpose in life.

Then we end with more Barry, because we really needed that. His body is somehow still not dead, and erases the seal on the one part of the armor that stayed intact, killing them both. What was the point of this?

Then the show remembers Ed is supposed to be the protagonist. We cut to him for five seconds to discover Hoenheim has conveniently returned to Resembool at the same time as him.

Conclusion

A lot of people tell me that OG was misogynist garbage and Brotherhood is super progressive.

I don't know what anime they watched, but I just saw the sole female antagonist – and let's take a moment to reflect on the fact the sole female antagonist is Lust – die a gruesome, disgusting, sexualized death less than a third of the way through the story because she was too busy flashing her tits to actually fight, for no other reason than to show how awesome a dude is.

This is my breaking point. There is no coming back from this. I don't care how awesome Olivier is. Anyone who recommends this show as full of ~great female characters~ without thinking this content deserved even the teensiest of caveats is not anyone whose judgment I trust.

And sure, let's be real here, I watch anime, I'm willing to put up with some misogynist crap if there's something else worth my time. But this has established, very definitively, that there absolutely will not be anything worth my time. Lust, as we will see when we continue with OG, was an incredibly important and complex character in the original anime, absolutely crucial to the narrative of the homunculi and many of the things I loved about the story. And this is what Brotherhood does with her.

And that's not even the only awful thing about this episode! Ed wasn't in it at all! Mustang's takeover of the narrative is complete. He's the one who got to solve the mystery, fight the villain, and save the day, pretty much singlehandedly. And I'm sorry, but even if he wasn't an insufferable Gary Stu, Mustang just doesn't interest me as a character as much as Ed. I like him as a deuteragonist to Ed's protagonist, not the other way around. So no. This episode really hammers in that there is absolutely nothing here for me.

But lucky you, I read a plot summary of all the episodes after this, and I know the very next one is something I want to complain about too! So we'll keep going for one more episode. One last nail in the coffin.

#fullmetal alchemist #fma #fullmetal alchemist brotherhood #fma 2003 #liveblog

[johnfmyles]

Nabokov: Lively Objects

Nabokov’s lively objects After a time Nabokov’s supercilious tone wearied me and in the later novels, especially Ada the tone is pretty egotistical. The early novels, though, are marked by a quirky stylistic trope of animated objects which Nabokov used intriguingly in order to confront the reader’s experience of literary metaphor. Essentially, Nabokov pursues an original, highly individualistic, phenomenology of objects that makes the reader re-vision the world as a result of this defamiliarization.

In Nabokov’s first novel, Mary, this characteristic is not much in evidence, but in the majority of Nabokov’s novels up to The Gift (in which it reaches its apogee, a novel itself much centred on a number of questions of style and language) and The real Life of Sebastian Knight, and in the short stories of this period, destabilizing objects is a regular concern. Nabokov’s essay ‘Man and Things’ (1928) sets out his thinking on this topic. In it he takes a kind of Berkeleyan viewpoint in which it is not the object itself that exists for the viewer but only what our perception makes of it. ‘A thing, a thing made by someone, does not exist in itself’ (69) he states, but is ‘dependent upon who looks on it’. Things thus ‘bring to mind’ images which are the material of thought, of representation (he regularly criticized James Joyce for his over-estimation of the verbal-linguistic in the constitution of human thought or experience). Nabokov sees us as ‘lending things our feelings’ – which he calls ‘anthropomorphic ardour’ (72). He even goes as far to argue that things die when we ‘neglect’ them, and we often mourn them when we have done so (73).

In Invitation to a Beheading the central character Cincinnatus is shown to be surrounded by a ‘false logic of things’, chimera, objects that are animated by others, by the agents of the state who are working to subjectify him. In his experience we see him feeling a ‘general instability, …a certain flaw in all visible matter’, even if the ‘objects still observed an outward propriety’ (172). In this Orwellian and Kafkaesque world there is a moral concern to address the political status of objects and to confront the issue of who or what is doing the primary seeing and defining along with the phenomenological status of everyday objects.

This concern is also prominent is many of the interviews and essays Nabokov made concerned with questions of his style. In his fragment-essays ‘The creative writer’ and ‘style’ (both circa. 1941) he shows a concern to ‘dislocate the given world’ (189), to make the reader see the ‘whatness of things’ (187), to ‘move objects from their usual series’ (198), and to bring things out of the domain of habitual modes of experience (188)  (in this he shows an affinity for Proust). This concern is particularly marked in Look at the Harlequins with its performative ‘look’ in its title and where the aim is ‘to make iniquity absurd’ (197).

But Nabokov consciously rejected the type of politically-committed literature of writers like Sartre and Camus, the Soviet novelist-ideologues of the Stalinist era such as Sholokhov, or even novelists like Pasternak who were critical of the regime. Mostly, when objects crop up in his novels they do so apolitically, defamiliarizing, to ‘reveal the most elementary things in their unique lustre’ (Think, Write, Speak 132). The aim is to redefine domestic objects in their particularity, to give them a kind of agency, like the mirror ‘that had plenty of work to do’ in Laughter in the Dark (37). In Despair, Nabokov’s Doestoyevskian novel about a Hermann Hermann and his double, Hermann laments the ‘sick mirror’ he has created of himself, the mirror representing an outside, perhaps narcissistic, view of himself that he has fallen for when he stumbles on his double. Hermann believes that having a double might allow him to escape the confines of the self he has created, that by killing his live reflection he can achieve freedom, to re-imagine himself. Hermann has an ‘eye to eye monologue’ with his double, but he is put into a critical light when Nabokov shows that in seeing just the outside of things, people as much and as like objects, Hermann is on a faltering path of redundant defamiliarization:

I cannot recollect now if the ‘monologue’ was a slip or a joke. The thing is typed out on good, eggshell blue notepaper with a frigate for watermark: but it is now sadly creased and soiled at the corners; vague imprints of his fingers, perhaps. Thus it would seem that I were the receiver – not the sender. (45)

Hermann is attempting to create a world of dead things that lack their own animation. It is also, in writing, what Nabokov sees as going on in the ‘cooperatives of words’ in tired metaphors or, historically, the way objects from earlier periods become obsolescent because the generation that animated them has dissipated (338).

The Gift serves as the apogee of Nabokov’s concern with reanimating things. In fact, the ‘Gift’ in the novel is the ability ‘to go beyond the surface of things’ (326). This is contrasted to the positivist scientific idea of objects, be they human, social or natural. In this novel Nabokov directly criticises cold German systematizing philosophical materialists like Feuerbach and Hegel. Fyodor, the protagonist artist sees ‘things like words as [having] their cases’ but commonly-understood dictionary-syntactical confinement of meaning ‘must be displaced’ (236-7) by a poetical imagination built upon ‘chance and emotion’ (198).

At one point around half-way through the novel, there is a sudden shift in the syntax and style (approximately 173 of the Penguin edition) when Nabokov’s metaphors and his characterization of objects becomes somewhat tired, predictable, conventional – a blond woman is described woodenly as ‘buxom’ and ‘whose soul was more like that of a replica of her apartment’ (186). A little further on, Herzen (whom Nabokov associates with Russian revolutionary materialists) is described as a writer producing ‘false glib glitter’ (198). And the café in which Fyodor meets Zina is described in a kind of dead prose as ‘an empty little café where the counter was painted in indigo colour and where dark blue gnomelike (the dull imprecise simile here underlined by merging with its marker – ‘like’) lamps…’. Such prose contrasts with the earlier part of the novel in which a sustained defamiliarization of the object world is evident. In particular, Nabokov sees natural phenomena, such as ‘the bent shadow of a poplar sitting there’ (51); a ‘young chestnut tree [is] unable to walk alone’ (57) and ‘dun birches…stood around blankly with all their attention turned inside themselves’. This latter instance continues to note ‘a little man was tossing a stick into the water at the request of his dog’ (45); and rain ‘loses the ability to make any sound’ (75).

Early on in Despair Hermann Hermann recounts the walk he took that led him to meet his doppelganger, Felix:

I trod upon soft sticky soil: dandelions trembled in the wind and a shoe with a hole in it was basking in the sunshine under a fence. (3)

The reader is struck by this shoe, abandoned, an object which has lost its pair and its ‘use-value’ but is still seen as being alive, animated by the verb ‘basking’. The reader is, simultaneously, aware of the subtle contrast in the metaphoric language by the more conventional attribution of ‘trembling’ to a plant like a dandelion eddying in the breeze. This is juxtaposition in Nabokov’s earlier work of conventional and animated metaphors is a regular one. It is Nabokov’s way of disturbing the reader’s literary sensibilities, to make them experience the ‘Gift’ of undermining cliched writing passing itself off as literature. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight this occurs regularly, thus we find ‘letters resent being unfolded’ (34), the author is described as ‘budding’ (46). Bookshelves are ‘densely peopled’ which seems conventional, in contrast to the following sentence in which a writing desk ‘looked sullen and distant’ (30). A reflection is seen, commonly, as ‘live’ but is quickly followed with the attribution of a window as being ��sick’ (51)

That shoe basking and yet useless in the human world seems to be part-way back to returning to nature, which means in Nabokov’s world to have lost its conventional meaning, that it can now only appeal to us to re-view it, reexperience its thingliness before it is lost to us. The idea of ‘thingliness’ reminds me of Derrida’s articles on Van Gogh’s boots and what Heidegger made of them in his ‘Origin of the work of Art’. Derrida, like Nabokov, was concerned with how Van Gogh’s boots were non-functioning, and, as the shoe in Despair is subject to the novelist’s revisioning, revivifying, so in Van Gogh the boots become reviewed, become the (a) ‘subject’ in painting (301). Derrida partly is concerned with literary comparisons to the painterly, suggesting that Van Gogh’s boots have a figurative value comparable to metonymy or synecdoche (302). But his main concern is how things are ‘brought into the nameable’ (306) in painting, literature, in the artistic generation of cultural value.

Things like boots become nameable when they are disturbed from their (back)ground, related in the Aristotelian concept of an originary state hypokeimenon (305). In paintings like Van Gogh’s boots this revisioning process occurs or, in literature like Nabokov’s there is a detaching and estrangement of the objects of the natural world or shoes and other domestic(ated) objects. Nabokov’s Gift, like Van Gogh’s, is to bring objects out of their expected gaze, their ground, and into revision-ing. Derrida categorizes this more generally as disturbing objects’ ‘substantia’: the thing no longer has the figure or value of ‘an underneath’ (308). Nabokov’s early novels  thus sensitize us to the presence of things, to reexperience them by the activating light of his literary imagination.

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Raya and The Last Dragon Review: The Best Disney Princess Movie Since Mulan

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If Raya and the Last Dragon proves anything, it’s that Disney is trying to tell a more modern “Disney Princess” story with their latest animated effort. Commercially, Disney’s transition into the 21st century has been a smooth one. While the shuttering of Disney theme parks in the last year due to the pandemic has cost the billions-dollar conglomerate money, Disney has many, many revenue streams, and the Disney brand remains strong. And much of that brand still relies on the studio’s signature Disney Princess movies, which have not had as seamless a narrative transition into modern storytelling as many fans might have hoped.

Rigidly faithful live-action adaptations of the animated classics that millennials grew up with are now recognized for their narrow romantic messaging, and the often racist, colonialist world-building that’s used to prop up this type of storytelling. Meanwhile Walt Disney Animation Studios has attempted to complicate and modernize the Disney Princess template in interesting ways, but they’ve never quite nailed it narratively.

Frozen was a step in the right direction with its emphasis on sisterly love, but it couldn’t resist shoehorning a thematically superfluous romance into its plot with the Kristoff character. Moana, which features Disney’s first Polynesian heroine, makes great strides in giving viewers a more authentic representation of a non-European culture, but still makes some classic colonialist mistakes—blindspots that will always surface when the chief creative forces behind a film are appropriating a culture or cultures they are paid to understand—that keep its fresh setting from truly shining.

Disney is working to tell more modern stories not because it is good for our culture and world (though individuals involved in the production of Disney films might be motivated by this value), but because there is money to be made in telling new stories that give us fresh, feminist takes on the many cultures that influence the melting pot (or salad bowl) that is modern America and the territories of the larger global box office. Raya and the Last Dragon, which will be in theaters and available via Disney+ Premier Access on March 5, makes headway from both the thematic surplus of Frozen and the cultural appropriation of Moana. In doing so, it gives us the best, post-Renaissance “Disney Princess” story yet.

Raya lives in a fictional land once known as Kumandra, a place where humans and dragons co-existed in harmony. Five hundred years before the start of our story, monsters known as the Druun came to Kumandra, turning both people and dragons to stone. Dragons sacrificed themselves to save humanity, but fear and paranoia tore Kumandra apart into five distinct lands, each named after a different part of the dragon: Heart, Tail, Spine, Talon, and Fang. Raya lives in Heart, where her family has tasked itself with guarding the Dragon Gem, the MacGuffin that the last dragon used to save the world a half-millennia prior. When the Dragon Gem is broken and the Druun return, Raya sets out to find the mythical last dragon, Sisu, and to fix the world.

We are told that this story takes place long ago, but Raya’s vibrant world is already well-lived in when we come to it. The societies of Kumandra are different from both the European castles of Beauty and the Beast or Frozen, and the more rural aesthetic of Pocahontas or Moana. Pushing back against the false binary of the “civilized” city and the indigenous wilderness of other Disney Princess movies, the world of Raya is both urban and organic.

The filmmakers traveled throughout Southeast Asia to do research for the film, and it shows. Visually, Raya’s Heart homeland looks like Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, a vestige of the mighty Khmer empire. A trip to Talon reveals a merchant town seemingly in perpetual night market mode. It’s a Disney-fied version of the Banana Pancake Trail more than a specific cultural vision, but that doesn’t totally undercut the excitement the fresh Disney Princess setting infuses into its narrative.

The world of Raya and The Last Dragon is both teeming and accessible at the same time, suggestive of a richness and depth that welcomes rather than intimidates. It is more reminiscent of Avatar: The Last Airbender than anything Disney has done before.

To be clear, like Avatar before it, Raya and The Last Dragon is still very much an American story. While the setting may be a fictionalized world inspired by Southeast Asian cultures, Raya‘s premise is classic Hollywood: Raya suffers a familial tragedy and then must set out on her own quest to save the world. Raya brings that storytelling structure into the 21st century by eschewing the traditional trappings of romance or personal glory (which can be done in modern, interesting ways, but, given the redundancy of those stories needs to be worked harder toward), and leaning into themes of healing, forgiveness, and community. The biggest stakes here aren’t about securing a love or marriage—which, at least in Western media, has inextricable ties to the consolidation of privilege and power—but rather the (figurative) soul of humanity.

While Raya is, broadly speaking, a princess (her father Chief Benja is the leader of Kumandra’s Heart land), Raya’s quest to collect all of the pieces of the Dragon Gem is explicitly depicted to be about a fair redistribution of power and resources. The Druun are simple monsters, yes, but they are also effective stand-ins for the much more intangible forces that threaten our present and future: namely climate change and the devastating conflict that arises from the instability it creates. In Raya, our heroine’s mission is never about regaining or consolidating power. It’s about healing a community and, with it, the natural world—two necessary pieces of the same solution.

Raya and the Last Dragon has a diverse team behind its story. Written by Vietnamese-American playwright Qui Nguyen (Dispatches From Elsewhere, The Society) and Malaysian-born American Adele Lim (Crazy Rich Asians), the movie was co-directed by American filmmaker (and Moana co-director) Don Hall and by Mexican-American filmmaker Carlos López Estrada (Blindspotting). Thai artist Fawn Veerasunthorn served as the Head of Story for the film. It’s hard to imagine a predominantly white creative team telling this same story with anywhere close to the same success.

Lim (along with with co-writer Nguyen) brings the same character-driven humor she displayed in the Crazy Rich Asians script, giving Raya some laugh out loud funny moments for both kids and adults. Much of the American audience’s previous experience with Southeast Asian settings will no doubt be from the mostly masculine-coded aesthetic of action movie set-pieces or martial arts films that made their way to the United States. In Raya and the Last Dragon, we get both action set-pieces and martial arts showdowns… but they can also be pretty. That feels new.

The film has been criticized for its lack of Southeast Asian representation in its cast, which mostly features voice actors of East Asian descent. This kind of blanket, pan-regional representation is common in Hollywood, which tends to conflate communities of color based on a perceived shared distance to whiteness rather than any similarities their cultures may or may not have to one another. This is also true for Raya and the Last Dragon, which drew from the cultures of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Myanmar, and Malaysia to tell its story. Southeast Asia has a population of over 670 million, which makes up more than 8.5 percent of the global population. It is a region with diverse and distinct cultures, and Raya and the Last Dragon‘s attempt to conflate them all into one world and call it fictional is problematic and will most likely undercut the emotional effectiveness of the story for some viewers.

While Raya‘s world may feel fresh and vibrant to many viewers, it’s the film’s character work that truly shines. The Disney Princess movie has not one, but three female characters at the heart of its film: Raya (Kelly Marie Tran), antagonist Namaari (Gemma Chan), and dragon Sisu (Awkwafina, with her signature blend of goofiness and heart). They all have complex relationships with themselves and one another, even when on different sides of the race for the Dragon Gem. The girl trifecta is rounded out by a solid supporting cast filled with subversive and fun character types that twist the plot and complicate the world in unexpected ways, including Raya’s adorable and visually clever pet pill bug companion Tuk Tuk (Alan Tudyk).

Read more

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How Raya and the Last Dragon Became the First Disney Movie Made at Home

By David Crow

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Raya and the Last Dragon Finds Magic in Southeast Asian Tradition

By David Crow

In a culture where more people than ever have a platform to voice their criticisms of mainstream stories, there is no such thing as a non-problematic fave. Raya and the Last Dragon will no doubt have its critics, and many of them will have valid criticisms. As viewers, we all have our narrative priorities—the aspects of storytelling that will pull us out of a story if done poorly, and the narrative elements that we prioritize so highly we will forgive a story its faults when done well.

For me, Raya and The Last Dragon is the most exciting Disney Princess story since Mulan. It gives us fiercely kind and incredibly flawed characters who care about healing a broken world and a setting that recognizes there is beauty and value outside of European castle towns. It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s something incredibly special that feels like a step forward for the Disney Princess canon.

Raya and the Last Dragon is available to watch on Disney+ beginning on March 5.

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The Desperate Quest for Genomic Compression Algorithms

Unless researchers solve the looming data storage problem, biomedical science could stagnate

Illustration: Greg Mably

Have you had your genome sequenced yet? Millions of people around the world already have, and by 2025 that number could reach a billion.

The more genomics data that researchers acquire, the better the prospects for personal and public health. Already, prenatal DNA tests screen for developmental abnormalities. Soon, patients will have their blood sequenced to spot any nonhuman DNA that might signal an infectious disease. In the future, someone dealing with cancer will be able to track the progression of the disease by having the DNA and RNA of single cells from multiple tissues sequenced daily.

And DNA sequencing of entire populations will give us a more complete picture of society-wide health. That’s the ambition of the United Kingdom’s Biobank, which aims to sequence the genomes of 500,000 volunteers and follow them for decades. Already, population-wide genome studies are routinely used to identify mutations that correlate with specific diseases. And regular sequencing of organisms in the air, soil, and water will help track epidemics, food pathogens, toxins, and much more.

This vision will require an almost unimaginable amount of data to be stored and analyzed. Typically, a DNA sequencing machine that’s processing the entire genome of a human will generate tens to hundreds of gigabytes of data. When stored, the cumulative data of millions of genomes will occupy dozens of exabytes.

And that’s just the beginning. Scientists, physicians, and others who find genomic data useful aren’t going to stop at sequencing each individual just once [PDF]—in the same individual, they’ll want to sequence multiple cells in multiple tissues repeatedly over time. They’ll also want to sequence the DNA of other animals, plants, microorganisms, and entire ecosystems as the speed of sequencing increases and its cost falls—it’s just US $1,000 per human genome now and rapidly dropping. And the emergence of new applications—and even new industries—will compel even more sequencing.

While it’s hard to anticipate all the future benefits of genomic data, we can already see one unavoidable challenge: the nearly inconceivable amount of digital storage involved. At present the cost of storing genomic data is still just a small part of a lab’s overall budget. But that cost is growing dramatically, far outpacing the decline in the price of storage hardware. Within the next five years, the cost of storing the genomes of billions of humans, animals, plants, and microorganisms will easily hit billions of dollars per year. And this data will need to be retained for decades, if not longer.

Compressing the data obviously helps. Bioinformatics experts already use standard compression tools like gzip to shrink the size of a file by up to a factor of 20. Some researchers also use more specialized compression tools that are optimized for genomic data, but none of these tools have seen wide adoption. The two of us do research on data compression algorithms, and we think it’s time to come up with a new compression scheme—one that’s vastly more efficient, faster, and better tailored to work with the unique characteristics of genomic data. Just as special-purpose video and audio compression is essential to streaming services like YouTube and Netflix, so will targeted genomic data compression be necessary to reap the benefits of the genomic data explosion.

  Source: Stephens ZD, Lee SY, Faghri F, Campbell RH, Zhai C, Efron MJ, et al., 2015, PLoS Biol 13(7)

Growth of Human Genome Sequencing: Since the first publication of a draft human genome sequence in 2001, there’s been a dramatic increase in the pace of growth of both the number of genomes sequenced and the sequencing capacity. The numbers after 2015 represent three possible projected growth curves.

Before we explain how genomic data could be better compressed, let’s take a closer look at the data itself. “Genome” here refers to the sequence of four base nucleotides—adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine—that compose the familiar A, C, G, T alphabet of DNA. These nucleotides occur in the chains of A-T and C-G pairs that make up the 23 pairs of chromosomes in a human genome. These chromosomes encompass some 6 billion nucleotides in most human cells and include coding genes, noncoding elements (such as the telomeres at the ends of chromosomes), regulatory elements, and mitochondrial DNA. DNA sequencing machines like those from Illumina, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, and Pacific Biosciences are able to automatically sequence a human genome from a DNA sample in hours.

These commercial DNA sequencers don’t produce a single genome-long string of ACGTs but rather a large collection of substrings, or “reads.” The reads partially overlap each other, requiring sequence-assembly software to reconstruct the full genome from them. Typically, when whole-genome sequencing is performed, each piece of the genome appears in no more than about 100 reads.

Depending on the sequencing technology used, a read can vary in length from about 100 to 100,000 base pairs, and the total number of reads varies from millions to tens of billions. Short reads can turn up single base-pair mutations, while longer reads are better for detecting complicated variations like deletions or insertions of thousands of base pairs.

DNA sequencing is a noisy process, and it’s common for reads to contain errors. And so, besides the string of ACGT nucleotides, each read includes a quality score indicating the sequencing machine’s confidence in each DNA nucleotide. Sequencers express their quality scores as logarithms of error probabilities. The algorithms they use to do so are proprietary but can be checked after the fact. If a quality score is 20—corresponding to an error probability of 1 percent—a user can confirm that about 1 percent of the base pairs were incorrect in a known DNA sequence. Programs that use these files rely on quality scores to distinguish a sequencing error from, say, a mutation. A true mutation would show a higher average quality score—that is, a lower probability of error—than a sequencing error would.

The sequencer pastes together the strings and the quality scores, along with some other metadata, read by read, to form what is called a FASTQ file. A FASTQ file for an entire genome typically contains dozens to hundreds of gigabytes.

The files are also very redundant, which stems from the fact that any two human genomes are nearly identical. On average, they differ in about one nucleotide per 1,000, and it’s typically these genetic differences that are of interest. Some DNA sequencing targets specific areas of difference—for example, DNA-genotyping applications like 23andMe look only for specific variations, while DNA profiling in criminal investigations looks for variations in the number of repetitions of certain markers.

But you need to sequence the whole genome if you don’t know where the interesting stuff lies—when you’re trying to diagnose a disease of unknown genetic origin, say—and that means acquiring much larger quantities of sequencing data.

The repetition in sequencing data also comes from reading the same portions of the genome multiple times to weed out errors. Sometimes a single sample contains multiple variations of a sequence, so you’ll want to sequence it repeatedly to catch those variations. Let’s say you’re trying to detect a few cancer cells in a tissue sample or traces of fetal DNA in a pregnant woman’s blood. That may mean sequencing each DNA base pair many times, often more than 100, to distinguish the rare variations from the more common ones and also the real differences from the sequencing errors.

  Read and Reference: A DNA “read” [top string] approximately matches a portion of the reference human genome [bottom]. Insertions, deletions, and substitutions (due either to mutations or to noise in the DNA sequencing process) result in an imperfect match. To encode a read, we can state its starting position in the reference genome and describe any variations.

By now, you should have a better appreciation of why DNA sequencing generates so much redundant data. This redundancy, it turns out, is ideal for data compression. Rather than storing multiple copies of the same chunk of genomic data, you can store just one copy.

To compress genomic data, you could first divide each DNA sequence read into smaller chunks, and then assign each chunk a numerical index. Eventually, the sum total of indexes constitutes a dictionary, in which each entry isn’t a word but a short sequence of DNA base pairs.

Text compressors work this way. For example, GitHub hosts a widely used list of words that people can use to assign each word its own numerical index. So to encode a passage of text into binary, you’d replace each word with its numerical index—the list on GitHub assigns the number 64,872 to the word compression—which you’d then render in binary format. To compress the binary representation, you could sort the dictionary by word usage frequency instead of alphabetical order, so that more common words get smaller numbers and therefore take fewer bits to encode.

Another common strategy— the Lempel-Ziv family of algorithms—builds up a dictionary of progressively longer phrases rather than single words. For example, if your text often contains the word genomic followed by data, a single numerical index would be assigned to the phrase genomic data.

Many general-purpose compression tools such as gzip, bzip2, Facebook’s Zstandard, and Google’s Brotli use both of these approaches. But while these tools are good for compressing generic text, special-purpose compressors built to exploit patterns in certain kinds of data can dramatically outperform them.

Consider the case of streaming video. A single frame of a video and the direction of its motion enable video compression software to predict the next frame, so the compressed file won’t include the data for every pixel of every frame. Moreover, the viewer can tolerate some barely perceptible loss of video information or distortion, which isn’t the case with text-based data. To take advantage of that fact, an international consortium spent years developing the H.264 video compression standard (now used by Blu-ray Disc, YouTube, the iTunes store, Adobe Flash Player, and Microsoft’s Silverlight, among many others).

Researchers have likewise been devising special-purpose tools for compressing genomic data, with new ones popping up in the academic literature about once a month. Many use what’s called reference-based compression, which starts with one human genome sequence as its reference. Any short human DNA sequence—that is, one made up of 100 base pairs or less—is likely to appear somewhere in that reference, albeit with sequencing errors and mutations. So instead of listing all the base pairs in a string of 100, a specialized compressor notes only where the string starts within the reference (for example, “1,000th base pair in chromosome 5”) and describes any deviations from the reference sequence (for example, “delete the 10th base pair”). The reference-based approach requires the user to have a copy of the reference human genome, about 1 gigabyte in size, in addition to the compressor software.

As mentioned, FASTQ files contain not just DNA sequences but also quality scores indicating potential errors. Unfortunately, reference-based compression can’t be used to compress FASTQ quality scores because there is no reference sequence for quality scores. Instead, these tools look at patterns in the quality scores—that a low-quality score is likely to be followed by another low-quality score, for example, or that quality scores tend to be higher at the beginning of a DNA read than toward the end. Just as numbering all words in order of decreasing usage frequency lets us compress text, numbering the set of possible quality scores in the order of their predicted likelihood lets us compress this data. Instead of storing and compressing low-quality data, researchers sometimes discard it, but the data compression program might not be able to decide exactly which data to discard or what the threshold for “low quality” is.

Source: Dmitri S. Pavlichin, Tsachy Weissman, and Golan Yona, 2013, Bioinformatics

Double Power Law: Distances between adjacent DNA mutations within a single genome follow a “double power law” probability distribution. At around 1,000 DNA base pairs, the slope changes from about –1/4 to about –3 on a plot that uses logarithmic scales on both axes. Understanding this distribution could lead to better compression algorithms.

These new compressors are a good start, but they’re far from perfect. As our understanding of the data evolves, so will our ability to compress the data. Data compression forces us to look for nonobvious patterns and redundancies in the data; when we reach the point of compressing the data deeply, we’ll know that we finally understand it. A genomic data compressor that factors in subtle patterns in the data will result in smaller file sizes and reduced storage costs.

In our own research at Stanford University, we’ve made one potentially useful observation: The distance along the genome between consecutive DNA variations follows a “double power law” distribution. You may be familiar with the concept of the “power law” distribution, in which the probability of an outcome is proportional to the inverse magnitude of that outcome, possibly raised to some power. City populations typically follow this distribution: There are about half as many cities with 2 million people as there are cities with 1 million people. This law can also apply to a country’s distribution of wealth, where 20 percent of the population holds 80 percent of the wealth.

A double power law consists of two different power laws operating on the same type of data but covering different ranges. For example, an 80/20 rule could apply to the lower half of a population by wealth, while a 90/10 rule applies to the upper half. Double power laws can be used to describe the distribution of the number of friends on Facebook, durations of phone calls, and file sizes on a hard drive.

And it turns out that a histogram plot of the distance between adjacent genetic variations, measured in DNA base pairs, looks like a double power law, with the crossover point between the two power laws happening at around 1,000 DNA base pairs [see graph, “Double Power Law”]. It’s an open question as to what evolutionary process created this distribution, but its existence could potentially enable improved compression. One of Claude Shannon’s foundational achievements in information theory states that data can’t be compressed below the Shannon entropy—a measure of randomness—of its distribution. A double power law distribution turns out to be less random—that is, it has lower entropy—than a model that assumes each location in the genome is equally likely to contain a variation. We are excited by this discovery—both as an intriguing biological phenomenon and as a hint that greater compression savings lie untapped.

Sorting: Arranging DNA substrings, or “reads,” in alphabetical order results in similar reads being placed near one another, reducing the number of differences between adjacent reads, and thus reducing the space to compress the reads.

The genomic data compressors in use today are lossless—that is, they allow you to recover the uncompressed file bit for bit, exactly as it was before compression. But there’s a case for allowing some amount of loss, not in the DNA sequences but in the quality scores denoting the sequencer’s confidence in the data. While there are only four DNA nucleotides (A,C,G,T), there are typically about 40 possible quality scores, so most of the bits in a lossless compressed FASTQ file make up the quality score rather than the DNA sequences. This amount of precision is wasteful, as applications that use genomic data tend to ignore small variations in quality scores or may discard the quality scores entirely. Indeed, performance on some tasks, like finding variations between two genomes, actually improves when the quality scores are compressed in a lossy way, because lossy compression smooths out irrelevant variations among the quality scores, effectively removing noise from the data.

We can also save on storage space by discarding other pieces of genomic sequencing information. The exact order in which DNA reads appear in a FASTQ file is often unimportant for subsequent analysis: You could, in many cases, such as when identifying genetic variations, shuffle the reads in a random order and expect nearly the same output. So you could sort the DNA reads alphabetically, and then exploit the fact that sorted lists can be compressed more than unsorted ones. The analogous case in text compression would be to sort a list of words and state the distance between adjacent words. The words decompressed and decompresses, for example, are adjacent in the dictionary, and their last letters (d and s) are 15 letters apart in the alphabet, so you can encode the entire second word with just the integer 15.

As an example of how this method works on DNA, let’s sort the sequences ACGAAA, ACGAAG, and ACGAAT alphabetically. The first five letters are all the same, so we’re interested only in the differences between the sixth letters. The second sequence is then encoded as the integer 2 (because the last letter, G, is two letters after A in the nucleotide alphabet ACGT), and the third sequence is encoded as a 1 (because its last letter, T, is one letter after G). This approach could result in a twofold or greater savings relative to storing the DNA reads in their original order.

Of course, the compression ratio is just one measure of a compression tool’s capabilities. Speed is another factor. Some special-purpose FASTQ compressors run in parallel, saving time over a single-CPU implementation; others exploit GPU and field-programmable gate array processors, hardware that’s more commonly used to accelerate video processing and machine learning. Another useful feature is being able to search compressed data. You don’t want to have to decompress an entire file in order to do a quick search for occurrences of a particular DNA sequence within it.

While a lot of genomic compression options are emerging, what’s needed now is standardization. Just as video compression technology couldn’t take off until a good portion of the industry agreed to a standard, genomic compression technology will have to move toward one standard—or at least a small set of standards.

Fortunately, work on a compression standard for genomic sequencing data has begun. The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG)—the same body that developed the MP3 audio format and several popular video formats—has for several years been developing a standard for compressed genomic data, an effort named MPEG-G. The specification is expected to be completed late this year. This standard will evolve as the technology improves, in the same way that video compression standards have been doing.

The pace at which we develop efficient, sound, and standardized genomic data compression is simply a matter of economics. As the amount of stored data skyrockets, and the cost of storage becomes onerous, reducing the cost will propel the industry toward better compression methods.

Right now, genomic research may be on the cusp of reaping unexpected benefits as the total amount of sequence data accumulates; today, the field is approximately where artificial intelligence was a mere decade ago. The recent dramatic advances in AI have been driven in large part by the availability of vast data sets; deep-learning algorithms that performed poorly on moderate amounts of data became powerful when used with massive sets. Genomic researchers have started applying deep learning to their data, but they’ll likely have to wait for a critical mass of genomic information to accumulate before realizing similar gains. One thing is clear, though: They won’t get there without major advances in genomic data compression technology. n

This article appears in the September 2018 print issue as “The Quest To Save Genomics.”

HBO’s Data Compression Stars

Photo: Tekla Perry

For fans of the HBO television show “Silicon Valley,” the name “Weissman” and “data compression technology” go together like Heinz and ketchup. The show has prominently featured the Weissman Score, a metric that rates the power of a compression algorithm.

Stanford professor of electrical engineering Tsachy Weissman [right] helped create that metric for the show, which premiered in 2014. Although the algorithm was made for TV, academics in the real world picked up on it.

The creators of “Silicon Valley” tapped Weissman as they were developing the first season and casting about for a technology to feature. They had settled on a universal compression algorithm, but they needed an expert to come up with the specifics of a technology that would be plausible but not possible today. They reached out to Weissman, and he laid out what he calls the holy grail of the compression world: a form of powerful and efficient lossless compression that can work on any type of data and is searchable.

That worked out nicely for the show, but given that such a compression scheme won’t exist in the real world anytime soon, Weissman continues to pursue his research. Most recently, his work has focused on genomic compression algorithms, which he and Dmitri Pavlichin [left], a Stanford postdoctoral fellow, describe in the article above.

Incidentally, Pavlichin took over Weissman’s original gig on “Silicon Valley” in 2017, coming up with plausible technology for season 4. He contributed sketches of whiteboards and technical documents and edited snippets of dialogue. A favorite moment of his came when the show’s characters attempt to move their server to the Stanford campus and give a shout-out to Sherlock, a computing cluster that Pavlichin uses daily.

Recently, the show’s fictional startup pivoted from compression technology to decentralizing the Internet. But the Weissman Score has already earned its place in tech history.

—Tekla S. Perry

The Desperate Quest for Genomic Compression Algorithms syndicated from https://jiohowweb.blogspot.com