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Most of the transcript of the video is on the main page (http://miegakure.com/ http://miegakure.com/), along with illustrative images and gifs. They evoke how

Most of the transcript of the video is on the main page (http://miegakure.com/ http://miegakure.com/), along with illustrative images and gifs. They evoke how their inspiration was flatland, which when I read it I found strikingly unimaginative. To explain, the characters are 2D objects; the book describes some of the problems these beings encounter, but doesn't really solve them, so the described society doesn't really hold up. One instance is that their field of vision is just a line with a dimension for color, so you need to see a form move into space to understand what it is (maybe I'm wrong, but I think the author does not say clearly that points do bear some 'depth' and 'texture' information, otherwise this wouldn't work). But there are creative ways to solve these problems: for example the beings could 'see' using a bat-like interpretations of echoes to get a sense of the space around them (we see in 3D, not in 2D). Life under different constraints ends up having different features than us humans. So in a sense, it is a bit like somebody who would stumble upon a mathematical paradox (say, the barber's one) and would just deduce 'how funny are words and numbers' (well, a bit like Lewis Caroll).

arijun 11y ago
I think the real cleverness of that book is the comparison of 2D creatures to 3D, and use that to guide our otherwise non-existent intuition of what 4D space would look like. I could imagine one thinking of that analogue before reading the book, making it seem less novel. But you have to remember that we've lived in a society that's had that book for nearly 150 years, so it would not be surprising if some of the ideas from the book became a mainstream meme.
- logicrook 11y ago
  But Erewhon came in 1872, and contained many ideas that are still very strong (emergent life, creation of the technological system and clash with the ancient order (Church))... It's a bit like the 'Seinfeld is unfunny' trope; even at the time, some people found it unfunny. It does not mean that this effect does not play a role, but you seldom hear "well, Copernicus is such a greaaat guy for discovering that the Earth revolves around the Sun", while it does suffer from it. And I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks had devised such stories illustrating some mathematical concepts; it's just that more than 150 years ago, the audience for 'geeky stories' was not so big, as well as the potential writers for such stories weren't so numerous (although Gauss seems a bit cheeky on his portrait). HN just wasn't there.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  Super Paper Mario does much the same when Paper Mario acquires the limited ability to rotate and move in a third spatial dimension as a 2-dimensional character. Fez is similar. We don't yet have a graphic game that makes a fourth spatial dimension more intuitive, but I do recall playing text adventures that had very limited 4-d interaction. The white cubes in Spellbreaker were all hyperfaces of a hypercube, after all.

arijun 11y ago

I think the real cleverness of that book is the comparison of 2D creatures to 3D, and use that to guide our otherwise non-existent intuition of what 4D space would look like. I could imagine one thinking of that analogue before reading the book, making it seem less novel. But you have to remember that we've lived in a society that's had that book for nearly 150 years, so it would not be surprising if some of the ideas from the book became a mainstream meme.

logicrook 11y ago
But Erewhon came in 1872, and contained many ideas that are still very strong (emergent life, creation of the technological system and clash with the ancient order (Church))... It's a bit like the 'Seinfeld is unfunny' trope; even at the time, some people found it unfunny. It does not mean that this effect does not play a role, but you seldom hear "well, Copernicus is such a greaaat guy for discovering that the Earth revolves around the Sun", while it does suffer from it. And I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks had devised such stories illustrating some mathematical concepts; it's just that more than 150 years ago, the audience for 'geeky stories' was not so big, as well as the potential writers for such stories weren't so numerous (although Gauss seems a bit cheeky on his portrait). HN just wasn't there.
logfromblammo 11y ago
Super Paper Mario does much the same when Paper Mario acquires the limited ability to rotate and move in a third spatial dimension as a 2-dimensional character. Fez is similar. We don't yet have a graphic game that makes a fourth spatial dimension more intuitive, but I do recall playing text adventures that had very limited 4-d interaction. The white cubes in Spellbreaker were all hyperfaces of a hypercube, after all.