What neurons tell us about the 'hipster effect' when contrarians look the same
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The initial transient is still technically an "oscillation" in the sense it is described by the same mathematics, even though it's a one-off.
It's interesting that the article was written in 2008, at which point hipsters were already ripe for critique, but we're still talking about them. There may be more microbrews and less PBR, more thick-rimmed glasses and fewer keffiyehs, more discussion of Kanye West than indie rock -- but it still is distinctly "hipster." Maybe a subculture based on cooption and ironic detachment is particularly well suited to evolve with changing environmental conditions.
Another possible reason for its staying power is that other subcultures have typically made a person look increasingly ridiculous / marginalized / unemployable as they aged (goth, punk, gangster rap, rave), whereas hipster style trends play it relatively safe.
You're watching segregation happen. Try different values of N. Even with N=8, meaning nobody moves unless every neighbor is the opposite color, you'll still get a mostly segregated world.
AdBusters has a great article on this: Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html
Most likely, the grave tone is intended to be ironic. The article adopts the perennial complaint that "the new generation is the worst generation." But Adbusters has a hipster readership, and magazine targeting their fan base is ironic. Hipsters thrive on irony.
The article even describes a woman who fits every hipster cliché, including being critical other hipsters and refusing to self-identify as a hipster, and the magazine/article does exactly the same. Oh, the irony. Finally, a Google image search of the author reveals a young mustachioed man who is, to judge a book by its cover, himself a hipster.
The point of applied mathematics is to understand if the same driving forces which cause clothing trends also govern other human behaviors, and to extract out these commonalities (or what is "really important" about the events) to study in the abstract, as a mechanism free of context, so we can enhance our ability to understand these situations (as well as other situations with similar behaviors) and make accurate predictions of the future.
That's the very basis of applied mathematics.
Nor should fashion be discounted as a trivial human endeavor: it acts in several capacities, from providing some safety from the elements to appealing to our sense of aesthetics to behaving as social signaling mechanism. Understanding how humans deal with the confluence of these competing forces is hardly a trivial area of research in to human behavior.
I'm curious, what exactly you're intending with a clearly out of context quote, seemingly trying to slight the study of fashion with it.
Of course, in this case, it also has an immediate application in neuroscience, which is useful in a visceral sort of way that's easier to appreciate.
That's a lot of families suddenly being fed and clothed so other people can exercise their compulsive need to belong to a group.
I don't think the delays in real life fashion cycles are what is causing lookalikes, I think people do try to conform to fit a certain subculture. Con-conformist hipsters are a rare breed, as it takes lot a of effort and style savvy. Always happy to see one!
X can be hipsters, goths, British bankers, Roman Catholic parents from Versailles, programmers living in San Francisco, ...
I suppose if an enterprising performer designed a character-type clown based on a caricature of hipsters, they might all look like that particular clown, but I don't think it's fair to slight a profession that encourages authentic individuality in that way.
It's not based on looks, but certain thought patterns that often lead to certain looks.
But seriously, there's a lot of math in programming that we wouldn't even consider to be "math" in the general sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belousov%E2%80%93Zhabotinsky_r...
The essence of a cellular automata rule that exhibits BZ reactions is:
There are two forces at work playing off against each other: stimulation and inhibition. Stimulation is implemented by observing your local surrounding neighbors. Inhibition is implemented by a delay. The result is beautiful spiraling oscillations!
A cell can be stimulated or quiescent (one bit). And it has a timer to remember how long ago it was stimulated (typically another bit). When it's quiescent, and the stimulation condition is true, it becomes stimulated, and sets the timer. In subsequent steps, it finishes being stimulated, then the timer expires, and it can't be stimulated again until the timer expires.
The stimulation condition is usually a counting rule, like Life: it sums the number of stimulated neighbors, and then uses that to index into a look-up table to decide its next state.
The effect is that waves of stimulation spread out throughout the medium, and the wave's leading edge propagates into areas that are not stimulated, until it hits another wave, and they cancel each other out or reflect waves in other directions.
The trailing edge of the wave is caused by the inhibition, and consists of cells that have just been stimulated and won't be stimulated again immediately -- that way the wave spreads in one direction instead of all directions at once.
By changing the stimulation condition, you can generate different shapes of waves, which usually develop into interlocking spirals forming around stable nucleation patterns.
One metaphor for how this rule works is to the worm-like animals in a coral reef, who come out of their shells to feed, then pull back inside their shells when tickled by adjacent worms pulling back, only to come back out after a short time. That's why this particular CA rule is called "WORMS" (in Toffoli and Margolus's "Cellular Automata Machines" book).
Here's some JavaScript code that implements three kind of worms, with three different kinds of stimulus conditions (alarms), which I call "Yuppy Worms", "Hipster Worms" and "Bohemian Worms":
https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM...
The "Yuppy Worms" are all uptight, geometrical and diagonal. The "Hipster Worms" are more relaxed and rounded. And the "Bohemian Worms" are all rough and fuzzy and organic.
// The personality is a key into the dict of alarm arrays,
// which are indexed by the count of excited neighbors,
// and contain 1 if the cell should be excited or 0 if
// not.
var alarms = {
// This results in spirals with tight straight diagonal diamonds.
yuppie: [0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1],
// This results in spirals with loose smooth rounded diamonds.
hipster: [0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1],
// This results in spirals with looser rustic fuzzy spirals.
// That is due to the anneal-like discontinuity in the alarm table.
bohemian: [0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1]
}[personality];
Click the gray rectangle in the upper left corner.
Click "Rules" on the bar.
Select "Eco Heat" from the "Rule" menu.
Click and drag in the cells to draw!
Use the mouse wheel or drag two fingers up and down the trackpad to add and subtract heat from the system. (You might tweak "Rules" / "Frob Scale" towards zero to make it less sensitive.)
The "ANNEAL" rule running in one plane defines where land and water are, and the land and water areas quickly congeal into continents and oceans like the spots on a cow.
The "BRAIN" rule runs in the water.
The 1's complement of the LIFE rule ("DEATH") runs on land.
They interact along the shores, stimulating each other where they meet.
The higher 5 bit planes are running a heat diffusion, which the ANNEAL, BRAIN and DEATH rules inject heat into.
So it's like the little organisms generate pollution that diffuses into the environment!
Play around with "Rules" / "Frob Target" to continuously add or subtract heat (pollution) from the environment.
Look at the histogram below and see if you can adjust it to get an equilibrium.
Once the pollution rises (or lowers) to a certain level in a cell, it wraps around to zero and kills any organism in that cell, and toggles between land and water, which can cause some interesting phase transitions and disasters of biblical proportions!
Oh, and you can click in the histogram to set the cell drawing value!
Click the gray rectangle in the upper left corner.
Click "Rules" on the bar.
Select "Moore Yuppie Worms", "Moore Hipster Worms" or "Moore Bohemian Worms" from the "Rule" menu.
Click and drag in the cells to draw!
If the flashing is driving you insane:
Click "Simulation" on the bar.
Drag the "Steps per Frame" slider to 7.
The "Worms" rules have a 7 step cycle, so showing every 7th frame stop the stroboscopic effect. But when you draw on every 7th frame you don't get as many edges for it to chew on, so scribble around to get the spirals started and get the feel for the system, before you switch to 7 steps per frame.
Click in the left side of the bar (where the original gray square was) to close the interface to play.