Fibonacci and his Magic Numbers - OpenMind

Leonardo Bigollo (Leonardo Pisano or de Pisa) was a mathematician who lived in Italy between the 12th and 13th century (1170-1240) and who turned to turn his back on the Roman numerals system that prevailed at that time. He has been known throughout history by his nickname: Fibonacci, a derivative of adding the words fillius + bonnacci which, in Latin and Italian mean something along the lines of "son of the well intended". Apparently, Fibonacci's father (Guglielmo) was a good person, as well as being a trader, travelling through North Africa. It was there that his son Leonardo discovered the magic of Arabic numbers.

Drawing of Fibonacci /Image: wikimedia

The Hindu Arabic system traveled from India to Persia and then on to the Middle East and Northern Africa, from where it jumped to Europe thanks to, among other mathematicians, Fibonacci. The Pisan's idea of using Arabic numbers included the possibility of working with whole numbers or fractions, dividing a number into prime factors, square roots, etc. It wasn't easy to adopt this system despite its numerous advantages. The Crusades against Islam that were ongoing at the time placed anything labeled as "Arabic" under suspicion.Arabic numbers were even banned in the city of Florence in 1299 on the grounds that "they were easier to falsify than Roman numerals".
Thanks to his father's job, Fibonacci had the opportunity to meet the great mathematicians that were outside the Eastern bubble (Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Greece, etc.) during long journeys through different countries in the Arabic world and the Mediterranean. He later returned to Italy, and when he was 32, he published the book Liber abaci (1202), which explained the importance of the Arabic numbering systems and he applied it to different everyday situations in the trade world to prove that it was more practical than the Roman numeral system: foreign exchange, commercial accounting, converting weights and measurements, etc. A quarter of a century later (1227), he published a second edition of the same book, extended and rewritten, that has become the reference version of "Liber abaci", as there are no copies of the first handwritten edition from 1202.
Federico II de Hohenstaufen (1194-1250) was the Holy Roman Emperor when he learned about the work of Fibonacci thanks to the correspondence that the mathematician maintained after returning to Italy with certain members of his court, including Michael Scotus, an astrology admired by the Pisan and to whom he dedicated the second edition of his most famous book. Johannes of Palermo also formed part of the Court and  challenged Fibonacci with a mathematical problem that would give him a place in history forever.

The rabbits problem

A man put two rabbits in an area surrounded by a wall on all sides.  How many pairs of rabbits can be produced from this pair in one year, if every month each pair breeds a new pair which reproduce after the second month?

Fibonacci accepted the challenge and resolved the problem, publishing the solution in a paper entitled "Flos" (1225). He developed a numeric series that will be passed down throughout history as the Fibonacci series. This succession of numbers starts with 0 and 1, and from there on, each element or Fibonacci number is the sum of the previous two. And that's how Leonardo represented the reproductive problem of the rabbits which, although it is an artificial model in the case of these animals (since biologically speaking, it's not strictly true), it fits in perfectly with the reproductive model of bees. Only the queen reproduces in a beehive: she's the only one that lays eggs.

• If they are fertilized, worker bees are born (females). With 50% of the genetics provided by the mother (the queen) and the other 50 by the father (the drone).
• The drones or male bees are produced from unfertilized eggs. Therefore, female worker bees have two parents and drones have one. 100% of their genetic information is provided by the mother.

Schema simulating the genealogical tree of bees / Image: Canada's SchoolNet

Bees are not the only exception, and these numbers are behind many different phenomenon of nature: the arrangement of flower petals, the formation of hurricanes, etc. How is this possible? Are they a magical combination, the "abracadabra" of mathematics? The mystery behind this succession of numbers that seems to be written in the mathematical foundations that surround us (at least in many of things that exist around us) have fascinated experts from many fields of science for centuries, and there are even publications specialized in finding new fields related with it.

From medieval mathematics to the "divine proportion"

But how much "magic" is there in the famous Fibonacci series? To what point was the Pisan the exclusive discoverer of these numbers and the proportions that give rise to the relationship between them? History has left clues about previous references to the formula, as is the case of various Indian mathematicians: Gopala (1135) and Hemachandra (1150), who had already mentioned it in their documents several decades before Fibonacci was born. Even several centuries later, Kepler (1571-1630) continued to be fascinated with the research into this series and, centuries later, developed the concept that would go down in history as "the divine proportion" in his book "Strena Seu de Nive Sexangula" (1611).
Kepler rediscovered the sequence using the proportion that existed between the consecutive terms in the series. 2 is to 3 what 3 is to 5 and what 5 is to 8 and so on with all the elements. Therefore, there is a proportion (divine proportion or golden ratio) which is constantly maintained when dividing any of the numbers by their predecessor in the series. This proportion is represented by the number phi (in honor of the Greek sculptor Fidias, and not Fibonacci): φ = 1.618.
In his book "Strena Seu de Nive Sexangula" (1611), Kepler defined the importance of this proportion which, according to him, developed in a similar way in the reproductive process, which managed to perpetuate him. Kepler's idea about a biological auto-replication process marked by the Fibonacci sequence was ignored by biologists until not long ago, when Phyllotaxis -the arrangement of leaves on a stalk- was scientifically consolidated.

Statue of Fibonacci in the cemetery of the city of Pisa (Italy) / Image: courtesy of Holoweb.

However it came about, the discovery of the numerical series that gave rise to divine proportion was enough to give Fibonacci immortality in time and in the memory of mathematicians. In the 19th century, a statue was erected in his honor in Pisa, which can be visited today in the city's cemetery, in the Piazza dei Miracoli. There isn't much information about the end of his life, although there is a decree by which the Republic of Pisa granted Leonardo a lifetime salary in 1240 in recognition of his service to the city as an accounting advisor.

Dory Gascueña for OpenMind
@dorygascu

Evernote helps you remember everything and get organized effortlessly. Download Evernote.

Israel founded by 'most successful terrorist campaign in history', says Richard Falk

Controversial Cork conference told Zionist leadership escalated violence around the world

The Israeli flag raised in 1948, the year the country was founded

Israel's foundation has been called the "most successful terrorist campaign in history", by an author with a history of being accused of promoting antisemitism.

Richard Falk today made the keynote speech at a conference debating the right of Israel to exist when he accused the Zionist leadership of escalating a campaign of violence around the world.
 Mr Falk, who recently authored a rejected UN report that attempted to label Israel an "apartheid state", also claimed Western "guilt" over the Holocaust allowed the state to come into existence in 1948.

The Jewish-born academic also claimed Zionist leaders had been duplicitous, hiding their extreme views from the general public.

Mr Faulk told gathering at Cork City Hall, in Ireland, that the initial campaign to establish a Jewish state had been one of "colonialism".

But that changed and became a "terrorist" campaign that spread beyond the borders of then Palestine and included "threats of letter bombs against Churchill, Attlee and others", he said.
Mr Falk added that Israel had been given "moral justification" because of the Holocaust.
"Liberal democracies felt guilt and it was easy to soothe their consciousness by encouraging and accepting the state of Israel."

He said the "terrorist" campaign has "started the 70-year period of Palestinian suffering."
Mr Falk claimed his recent UN report had been attacked by people who "have not read it" but who objected to the word "apartheid".

Later Dr Ghada Karmi told around 150 participants at the conference, including academics from across Europe and the States, that "the Jews were an unwanted and unpopular people" who were "offloaded" on the Palestinian state.

 The University of Exeter lecturer said:"Jews were not wanted in Europe or the US. "
 In an opening speech Oren Ben-Dor, one of the organisers of the event, said: "We should be using international law as a tool for justice and peace - in that order".

Evernote helps you remember everything and get organized effortlessly. Download Evernote.

In Sweden, Hundreds Of Refugee Children Gave Up On Life

4:01 PM ET

Susan Brink

Two refugee children who show the symptoms of uppgivenhetssyndrom, or resignation syndrome. Magnus Wennman for The New Yorker 

The Swedish word uppgivenhetssyndrom sounds like what it is: a syndrome in which kids have given up on life. That's what several hundred children and adolescents have done — literally checked out of the world for months or years. They go to bed and don't get up. They're unable to move, eat, drink, speak or respond. All of the victims of the disorder, sometimes called resignation syndrome, have been youngsters seeking asylum after a traumatic migration, mostly from former Soviet and Yugoslav states. And all of them live in Sweden.

Rachel Aviv, a staff writer at The New Yorker, described these children in the April 3, 2017, article "The Trauma of Facing Deportation."

The children go into these comalike states when their families are notified that they will be deported. The only known cure is for their families to receive residency permits allowing them to stay in Sweden. It's not a sudden, magical reawakening when family members read the approved residency permit in the nonresponsive child's presence. Somehow, the information gets through. While there are no long-term follow-up studies, Aviv says, over a period of days, weeks, sometimes a few months, the child begins to eat, move, react and come back to the world. Goats & Soda talked with Aviv about the story.

The story is shocking. It reads like one of those ancient fairy tales where terrible things happen to innocent children. Were you initially skeptical that this was a real disorder?
I first read about it in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. Because I was reading about it in an academic article, I didn't think to doubt it. But when I met the two girls I wrote about, it felt very strange. There was a sense of unreality. There was a disconnect between how young and healthy, even beautiful, they looked. They looked like they were sleeping. It was a sickening feeling to know that they were in that position for years. People make comparisons to bears hibernating. But humans don't hibernate. It felt surreal.

The two sisters you wrote about were Roma, from Kosovo. The older sister lost her ability to walk within 24 hours of the family's application for residency being turned down. Her younger sister is also "bedridden and unresponsive."
They were lying in bed. Their doctors were manipulating their bodies, and the girls did not show any signs that they were aware that there were people around them. When I met them, one of the girls had been in that state for two years, the other one only for a few months. When the doctor shined a flashlight on the girls' eyes, the one who had been sick the longest, she just sort of stared directly at the doctor as if she didn't even notice that someone was opening her eyelid.
I met a boy that I didn't write about. He lived in a hotel. He and his mother had received a residency permit already. He had been apathetic for about two years [while the family waited and worried that they would be deported]. Even though his family had received the residency permit about three months before, the only progress he had made was to open his eyes. He was sitting up, but he could not hold his head up on his own. We'd be talking — his family, his doctors — and suddenly I'd remember that he was in the room. It was almost as if there was a mannequin in the room that I kept forgetting about. He didn't seem to be there mentally. That was concerning. He should have been recovering by then. His doctors were hopeful that he'd get better, but there have been almost no follow-up studies about what happens to these children.

You did write extensively about Georgi from the Russian province of North Ossetia, who went to bed and stayed there when his family's permit was denied in 2015. "In late May, 2016, Georgi's family received another letter from the Migration Board. Their neighbor Ellina Zapolskaia translated it. 'The Migration Board finds no reason to question what is stated about Georgi's health,' she read out loud. 'He is therefore considered to be in need of a safe and stable environment and living conditions in order to recuperate.' " What was his recovery like?
I would never have known that he was sick. He looked and acted completely normal. But even with complete recovery, some of these children have missed two years of their lives, and that's a big deal.

Is it possible that the children who went into these comalike states knew of the syndrome? And if so, might they have been unintentionally showing symptoms as a way of saving their families from deportation?
I think everyone acknowledges that there's a degree of psychological contagion. Georgi had a family friend with the condition; the two sisters had a cousin; and the boy in the hotel saw at least three other children in the hotel with the syndrome. It's a little like the way anorexia emerged in the U.S. at a moment in time when people were preoccupied with body image and the media were emphasizing thinness. The illness borrows from the culture, and suddenly you have all these people who are starving themselves and doctors began diagnosing anorexia. It's hard to pinpoint what the mechanism would be for children to develop resignation syndrome. It seems to have become a culturally permissible way of expressing one's despair.

There was a government report that came out in 2006. The report posed a theory that the children, many of them Roma, came from holistic cultures, without a clear boundary between the individual self and the family. The children were sacrificing themselves for their families. They take on a martyr role. And, in fact, the illness does allow the family to stay. [Sweden's Migration Board has decided that families of uppgivenhetssyndrom children will be granted residency permits.]

Immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers all over the world suffer. Has this happened anywhere else?
I've not heard of children with these symptoms anywhere else. I have no doubt that children from Syria, for example, are experiencing fears and traumatic reactions, but there is no evidence that they are slipping into this syndrome. There was a slang term, muselmann, referring to captives in concentration camps in World War II. They were people who decided to stop trying, to just sort of give up. Once you realize that nothing you do will change your situation, you give up and become passive. But that wasn't quite the same thing.

Why is this happening to children in Sweden?
Yes, why Sweden? Refugees there are among the best treated in the world. There's a national conversation about refugees; people are consumed about how best to treat people seeking asylum. People feel a lot of guilt about whether the country is living up to its humanitarian ideals and doing enough.
So doctors are primed to think about how social conditions can affect health. And I think culture shapes the way we express our despair. Once a particular set of symptoms becomes sanctioned as a way of showing suffering, it becomes more common.
One thing I admired in Sweden was the way these children galvanized the national conversation. The government was concerned, the media were concerned and politicians were concerned. At so many levels, there was so much conversation about symptoms of children seeking asylum.
Susan Brink is a freelance writer who covers health and medicine. She is the author of The Fourth Trimester, and co-author of A Change of Heart.

Evernote helps you remember everything and get organized effortlessly. Download Evernote.

Rapper Dessa Darling's Musical Sweet Spot

Dec 6, 2016

Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear this interview. 
Minneapolis-based rapper, singer and writer, Maggie Wander — who is known as Dessa Darling to the world — got her start in spoken word poetry when she was studying philosophy as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota.
She soon joined the hip-hop scene and found her way to the rap collective, Doomtree, and would later become the CEO of their independent record label.
Dessa now has three full-length albums and has published two books of poetry. She talks with The Takeaway about her latest single, "Quinine," and says when it comes to her work, "the sweet spot lives between beauty, anger and tenderness."

Evernote helps you remember everything and get organized effortlessly. Download Evernote.

Black Italian boxer’s erased history resurfaces in new documentary

Leone Jacovacci was a Congo-born African-Italian boxer who shook up the sport after his 1928 European middleweight title win over the heavily favored (by fascist leaders) white Italian boxer, Mario Bosisio. Enraged by Jacovacci's achievement, Mussolini ordered his win—which signified the delegitimization of racist claims of inferiority held by the Fascists—to be erased from the record books. But a new documentary, "The Duce's Boxer", produced by Istituto Luce recently brought Jacovacci's forgotten history to the surface last Tuesday when the film premiered in 25 Italian cities for U.N. International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Luce is in talks to bring the film to an international audience.

By Erin White*, AFROPUNK contirbutor

Il Pugile del Duce - TRAILER - from Produzione Light on Vimeo.

*Erin White is an Atlanta-based writer and AFROPUNK's editorial and social media assistant. You can follow her on Tumblr or friend her on Facebook. Have a pitch or an inquiry? Shoot her an email at erin@afropunk.com.

Evernote helps you remember everything and get organized effortlessly. Download Evernote.

GO JACK GO!!!

1976 Mini Documentary Looks At NYC Graffiti

Video: 1976 Mini Documentary Looks At NYC Graffiti

BY JEN CARLSON IN ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT ON JUN 29, 2015 9:46 AM

The 1970s were one of NYC's toughest decades—and in the background of all the crime, the NYPD corruption, and the urban decay, was a growing graffiti scene.

In the below 25 minute mini-doc, created for British Television in 1976, you'll meet some of the young kids who tagged the city (and its subways, statues, monuments) with markers and spraypaint back then. Not all young people were looking to spread their name around, however—one tells the BBC, "I think it's really foolishness.. people have nothing better to do, so they go write on the walls. They should take them home. Write on your walls at home. It makes the city look very stupid."

Check Out This Unearthed 1970s NYC Graffiti Documentary

New York Graffiti Experience ©1976 lawless productions
renewed @2014 lawless productions
Produced and Directed by fenton lawless
Produced by Justine DiIanni
Director of Photography Andrew Aaron
Music by Jerry Friedman and fenton lawless

Film footage of New York during the graffiti-covered 1970s never gets old (literally, because pretty much all of it lives on YouTube now, and YouTube will never die). And now, a rarely-seen independent film by actor, musician, and photographer Fenton Lawless has resurfaced, thanks to some diligent sleuthing by Mass Appeal.

Shot on grainy film stock all across the city, Lawless's 16-minute New York Graffiti Experience offers a look back at the work of some of the true originators of our local tagging scene. On empty walls, storefronts, and subway cars, works by Mico, Checker 170, Phase 2, Blade, Billy 167, and many more are clearly visible. Most importantly, the film features an interview with CLIFF 3YB, the early king of New York's entire graffiti scene. These are the early handstyles that inspired spray can artists all across the globe. Lawless explained his motivation for capturing the ethereal, illicit works in MA's interview:

In 1975 my girlfriend and were talking one night. We were very interested in graffiti, so I said “Why don’t we shoot some slides and put it to my music and will send it to the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts)? At the time they were giving grants. We went out with a 35mm Leica and then we scouted the city and we shot what we could, put it together with my music and we created a slideshow and an oral presentation. They jumped all over it, and we traveled from different cities putting on this graffiti art show.

So then I got the idea, why don’t I make a documentary about it, which I did. I went out and found my 17-year-old cameraman Andy Aaron, who now works for George Lucas. We basically retraced our steps from where we did the slideshow and put it all together. There are two versions of the film the educational version which is the one that’s on Vimeo and YouTube right now and I have more of a street version.

The Most Efficient Way to Destroy the Universe – False Vacuum

Ang Lee Has Made the Most Realistic-Looking Movie Ever. It’s Unwatchable. (Not true)

Why do I hate critics, this is why...

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk shows the promise and failure of high-frame-rate cinema.

By Daniel Engber

Joe Alwyn as Billy Lynn in Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Sony Pictures

Ang Lee, the three-time Oscar-winning film director, did his best to lower expectations. "It's kind of an experimental movie," he said at the Friday night premiere of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk at the New York Film Festival. His latest project, a $40 million drama starring Kristen Stewart, Steve Martin, and Vin Diesel, is the first ever to be shot in super-high-resolution 3-D at 120 frames per second. Lee knew its novel look—unrelenting clarity, abundant blooms of fine detail—might come off as more disturbing than impressive. "This is not just a new technology, but a new habit in watching movies," he warned the crowd. "I hope you keep an open mind."

Daniel Engber is a columnist for Slate.

This was, perhaps, too much to ask. From the film's opening image—Billy Lynn in bed, looking like a 3-D printout of a human being with a hangover—I could feel the spring-loaded trapdoors of my mind snapping shut. The scene looked queer, uncinematic, like a theater sketch acted out in virtual reality. Others in the audience also found themselves distracted or unnerved by the movie's high-res format. "I'm sorry. I tried to keep an open mind," tweeted film critic Bilge Ebiri after the screening. "But High Frame Rate is a fucking crime against cinema."

Ang Lee is not the first director to stand accused of this particular crime. In 2012, Peter Jackson released the first of his Hobbit films in 48 frames-per-second format—not nearly as souped-up as Billy Lynn's 120 fps, but still twice the standard 24 fps. Then, as now, critics were dismissive of the high-frame-rate (HFR) effect. It looked like a teleplay, they said, or tatty summer-stock. When Jackson used the format for his second and third Hobbit films, he added lens filters and post-production work to relax and blur the imagery, hoping it wouldn't look so painfully precise.

A few of us were inclined to take a softer view of his experiment. (I rated Jackson's foray a stumbling success.) It was easy to imagine, back then, that The Hobbit simply suffered from a mismatch between frame rate and genre. Maybe the HFR would have been compelling had its razor clarity not carved away the artifice of Middle Earth, exposing the corny sets and props. Perhaps the format would be better-suited to a movie in a more steely, realist mode—one in which the sharpness added authenticity instead of making things look artificial. Now we have just such a film, an understated depiction of a young soldier with traumatic memories of his deployment in Iraq.* And yet, high-frame-rate cinema still looks unnatural and off-putting.

For a certain kind of cinematic futurist—a guy like Peter Jackson, Ang Lee, or James Cameron (who plans to use HFR for his Avatar sequels)—this rejection of fantastic, futuristic technology seems bizarre. High-frame-rate cinema isn't meant to be a gimmick, something pasted on for added thrills. It's supposed to be a cleaner and more honest record of the action in a scene, with the ugly artifacts of motion blur removed. As the press notes for Billy Lynn point out, by shooting in the unprecedented HFR/4K/3-D format, Lee's production stored 40 times more data than a standard film: five times as many frames per second, four times as many pixels in each frame, and then everything doubled for 3-D. How could all this extra information fail to make the movie better?

For decades now, forward-looking filmmakers have tried to prove that when it comes to frame rates, more is really more. Douglas Trumbull, who did the visual effects for 2001 and Blade Runner, has advocated for higher frame rates since the 1970s. By eliminating flicker, he argued all those years ago, filmmakers could produce a smoother picture—a sort of "liquid realism" that would be more affecting and engaging. According to an essay on high-frame-rate cinema by film scholar Julie Turnock of the University of Illinois, Trumbull tested out his theory by measuring the brain waves, pulse, and skin conductance of people as they watched movies with different frame rates. All three measures would increase, he claimed, as he raised the rate to 60 fps.

In the past few years, visual psychologists have taken up this line of research, confirming time and again that Trumbull had it right: Higher frame rates do produce more compelling imagery, at least insofar as one can measure such things in the lab. (Trumbull, for his part, is still working on HFR at his farm in rural Massachusetts.) A Japanese researcher, who published his work several months before the release of The Hobbit, found that people were better at perceiving depth cues in high-frame-rate 3-D films, where the moving images appeared more "natural." Two years later, a team of Canadian researchers published an experiment in which they showed 3-D movies to volunteers at different frame rates, then asked them to rate the movies' quality on a scale of 1 to 100. The HFR videos got the highest ratings by far, scoring 55 percent higher than standard clips.

The most effective scenes in Billy Lynn are the ones that seem the least movielike.

These two studies, and several others like them, show that people think HFR clips are pretty snazzy. But they don't have much to say about whether anyone actually prefers them. (An experimental subject might conclude, for example, that HFR is at once "natural," "high quality" and "a fucking crime against cinema.") Another vision researcher, Laurie Wilcox of York University, has recently addressed the latter question. In her study, titled "Evidence that Viewers Prefer Higher Frame-Rate Film," viewers rated short movies on four technical attributes (realism, clarity, depth quality, and smoothness of motion) as well as on their overall likability. On every measure, including the all-important last one, her subjects said the HFR clips were superior. That preference has been remarkably consistent across her work, she says, and it applies to both 2-D and 3-D content.

In other words, HFR appears to be the New Coke of cinema—a product people claim to love in taste tests but which no one enjoys in real-world settings. This disparity—what one group of sociologists calls "The Hobbit hyperreality paradox"—has no simple explanation. If HFR looks so damn good, then why don't we like it in the theater?

It could be that the lab tests, in which people watch very short video clips, don't get at how it feels to watch a full-length film. In the same way a soda "sip test" won't tell you all that much about a person's taste in soft drinks, a movie "clip test" might not predict her feelings at the multiplex. Maybe all the extra information you get from HFR goes down smoothly in small doses, while over time its richness overwhelms the senses. My own experience suggests the opposite: At screenings of both The Hobbit and Billy Lynn, the freaky newness of the format proved least palatable at the start, with the off-notes fading as the film went on. (Though they never really went away.)

Perhaps the scaffolding of Hollywood cinema is more to blame. Film clips used in high-frame-rate lab research tend to be artless and straightforward—documentary shots of trees or abstract animations. The frame rate could be a turnoff only when it's mixed with the grammar used for telling stories on the screen. Montages, tilts, and focus pulls provide a structure for a movie; they work like punctuation marks on a printed page, barely noticed guides for your attention. In Billy Lynn, the HFR makes those guides pop out. Panning shots no longer blur the background with their motion; cuts seem extra jagged. As a viewer, it felt like reading a book in which all the commas and periods had been put in bold and underlined.

Or maybe the issue is the content rather than the structure. The sets and props in Billy Lynn are as troublesome as they were for The Hobbit, though for opposite reasons. In Jackson's film, Gandalf's staff and Thorin's axe looked too fake, like low-end gear for LARPing. In Billy Lynn, a film that's set for the most part inside a football stadium, the props at times seemed too real. When Billy's unit gets invited to a lush buffet inside the owner's box, the limpid, high-res food—glistening kielbasas, ripe chunks of cantaloupe—disrupts and dominates the scene. You can't take your eyes off of those kielbasas! The actors, too, are more exposed in HFR. Just as high-definition cameras revealed the use of heavy powder and foundation, so do higher frame-rates spotlight an actor's put-on smile. I couldn't tell if the performances in Billy Lynn were wooden, or if they'd been made to look that way when viewed at finer grain.

In the early 1980s, Trumbull suggested the changeover to high-frame-rate cinema would be so significant as to require the development of new techniques of filmmaking. Directors would have to play scenes differently, he said, with over-the-shoulder shots minimized and "the angles, the timing, and the looks of the characters" adapted to suit the new format. Peter Jackson made no such effort, as far as I could tell. In Billy Lynn, though, Ang Lee does try to adapt to the new medium. He lets the camera linger in Billy's point of view, with other characters talking straight into the lens. It's a nod to the first-person shooter, a mode of digital entertainment where higher frame rates—60 fps, to be specific—have become de rigueur.

But the reference to videogames only makes the weirdness problem worse. We're used to seeing films at 24 fps; we're used to watching telecasts at 30 fps; we're used to playing Call of Duty at 60 fps. These distinctions are mostly accidents of history, yet they've come to stand in for a hierarchy of artistic production. As Julie Turnock points out in her essay, not all forms of moving pictures have the same prestige; some are deemed more sophisticated than the others. So a movie shot in HFR suffers from its likeness to less vaunted forms of entertainment: soap operas, sporting events, video games. For all its clarity and definition, high-frame-rate cinema comes off as déclassé.In the end, what's most troubling about HFR is not the way it looks—I mean, come on, it looks fantastic—but what that look connotes. And Billy Lynn connotes, more than anything else, a high-end game.

Indeed, the most effective scenes in Billy Lynn—I mean, the ones that look the best in superdeluxe HFR/4K/3-D—are those that seem the least movielike. First, a glimpse of action on the football field, just enough to advertise the format for showing live sports events. (Trust me, high-frame-rate 3-D sports will be extraordinary.) Second, Billy tussling, Call of Duty–style, with a soldier in a broken sewage pipe, hinting at a brighter future for virtual reality.

Most exciting is the way Lee modulates the frame rate from one scene to the next. At certain points he revs the footage up to 120 fps, while at others the movie slides toward more familiar speeds. Lee saves the most intense, hyperreal effects for Billy's wartime flashbacks, where the format works to sharpen the emotion. These are Billy's post-traumatic visions, the result of too much information stored inside his head, and the movie shows them as they seem to him—overly graphic, drenched in violent clarity, bleeding out minutiae. If there's any future for HFR in Hollywood, this must be it—not as a hardware upgrade on the endless path to total cinema, but as a tool that can be torqued to fill a need.

And after we buy those new TVs we turn OFF the motion smoothing as soon as possible so that movies don't all look like soap operas.  More.

As of now, only two theaters in the country are scheduled to project Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk in its native 120 fps. Even there it won't do much to advance the cause of its technology—it just looks and feels too different from every other movie we've seen in the multiplex. But Ang Lee is right: The aversion to HFR has as much to do with habit as aesthetics, and habits change more quickly than we think. In recent years we've seen a wholesale shift from celluloid to video, and a 3-D fad that never went away. Frame-rate standards, too, are starting to evolve. We now shoot TV shows at 24 fps to make them look more like movies, and we buy TVs that "motion smooth" our movies up to 120 fps. Will HFR/4K/3-D ever go mainstream? Our next chance to evaluate the format may not come until Christmas of next year, when Avatar 2 is scheduled for release. In the meantime, I'll try to keep an open mind.

*Correction, Oct. 21, 2016: This article originally misidentified the title character in Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk as a Marine. He is a soldier. (Return.)

Evernote helps you remember everything and get organized effortlessly. Download Evernote.