Slate has one of their News Graph videos up profiling a Larry King interview with the newly freed Jack Kevorkian. It's short and somewhat interesting: they have doctors responding to his comments and they've grouped the results by averred religion (Catholic/Protestant/Jew). The first notable thing is that the Jews are with him immediately, but pretty much as soon as he opens his mouth their support drops off. Then it drops way off when he makes sweeping claims about how all doctors except him have sold off their principles to the government in order to practice (strange how people don't like it when you debase them and everything they stand for), and he loses everybody with the inevitable comparison of self to Rosa Parks (Sarah Vowell and Aaron Sorkin have dealt with that particular bit of self-aggrandizement pretty well).
Kevorkian's touchstone, euthanasia--like stem cell research and other so-called Culture of Life topics--is an issue that doesn't really make sense outside of the broad context of humanity. There aren't any parseable arguments against it on the human level that I've ever heard; instead it's a slippery-slope-based uneasiness that this is the first step on the way to a universe where Michael York hunts you down like a dog after you turn 30. If what we as a whole are really discussing is our future as a species, the debate makes rather more sense. One person being afraid that if we allow euthanasia that ones children will force one into assisted suicide because one has become old and useless probably doesn't constitute a legitimate fear. A population with a collective unconscious fear, on the other hand, that a new offshoot of humanity will emerge that has little to no use for the old one and that this in turn will redefine the value of the life of the old species and the reasonable basis for its euthanasia--it's much farther into the realm of speculative fiction, but it's a much more sensical argument to parse.
If this blog were famous for, you know, anything at all, it might be because it previously lumped together George W. Bush and the Unibomber as members of a collective effort to make our species think about the future it's rushing headlong into. Ted Kaczynski, as you will recall from earlier in this blog, was fucking insane, and the "Culture" of "Life", seeing as how it selectively doesn't include poverty, access to health care, starting wars, or capital punishment, just isn't a useful frame for understanding the arguments it supposedly makes. If, on the other hand, we are all talking about the future of the species and the future of a species that might supplant it, I might be interested in what they have to say.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Monday, June 04, 2007
Secret, The
Someday I'm going to write a book like The Secret, and yet utterly, utterly unlike The Secret. I'd like to title it something like, Dude, Stop Being Such A Dumbass, but I don't think it would sell very well. Instead it'll probably end up being something like, Yes, I Know The World Is A Complex And Deeply, Deeply Fucked Up Place, But Everything You Think You Know About It Is Still Wrong: Or, The Whale.
I like to think that pop self-help books like The Secret and their vast popularity herald the end of Post-Modernism. The twentieth century watched a line that started at Einstein, ran through Heisenberg and Schrödinger, that connected to Gödel and Derrida, and (I hope) will emphatically end with people writing books that claim that since the cat in the box is neither alive nor dead until you open the lid, it is scientifically proven that if you want a iPhone-enabled BMW enough, all you have to do is imagine having it really, really hard, and it will be yours (What? You did that and didn't end up with a BMW? Obviously you weren't doing it right).
The model in which all frames of reference are equally valid, in which the same thing observed in a wave-like way acts like a wave and in a particle-like way acts like a particle, in which the Author is "Dead" and only the Response of the Reader matters has been an incredibly productive and enlightening one. But we as a population took it about as far as it would go some decades ago, and as this model mildews, we have to live with things like String Theory (now celebrating 30 years without a successful experimental result!) and an actual government running an actual country that thinks that through faith it shapes its own reality, and that the only reason its policies are failing is because its critics really, really want them to (critics who, obviously, must have mystical Quantum-Physical powers that they acquired by reading The Secret).
I'm all about the fuzziness of the universe myself, but I'm also all about the fact that only a complete idiot would argue that a depot leaving the train is just as valid a view as the train leaving the depot. A model that implies the existence of alive/dead cats in our universe, while it is the absolute most successful and useful scientific theory ever devised, has at least one glaring, obvious problem: we do not observe alive/dead cats in our universe. Mrs. Transient Gadfly assures me that while this property of the observer affecting the observed is true about absolutely everything else in any discipline, it is just not friggin' true of friggin' cats. And this is the sort of thing about which Mrs. Transient Gadfly is always right. So I hope that The Secret is some kind of signpost at the end of some kind of road, because it's time for a new model.
I like to think that pop self-help books like The Secret and their vast popularity herald the end of Post-Modernism. The twentieth century watched a line that started at Einstein, ran through Heisenberg and Schrödinger, that connected to Gödel and Derrida, and (I hope) will emphatically end with people writing books that claim that since the cat in the box is neither alive nor dead until you open the lid, it is scientifically proven that if you want a iPhone-enabled BMW enough, all you have to do is imagine having it really, really hard, and it will be yours (What? You did that and didn't end up with a BMW? Obviously you weren't doing it right).
The model in which all frames of reference are equally valid, in which the same thing observed in a wave-like way acts like a wave and in a particle-like way acts like a particle, in which the Author is "Dead" and only the Response of the Reader matters has been an incredibly productive and enlightening one. But we as a population took it about as far as it would go some decades ago, and as this model mildews, we have to live with things like String Theory (now celebrating 30 years without a successful experimental result!) and an actual government running an actual country that thinks that through faith it shapes its own reality, and that the only reason its policies are failing is because its critics really, really want them to (critics who, obviously, must have mystical Quantum-Physical powers that they acquired by reading The Secret).
I'm all about the fuzziness of the universe myself, but I'm also all about the fact that only a complete idiot would argue that a depot leaving the train is just as valid a view as the train leaving the depot. A model that implies the existence of alive/dead cats in our universe, while it is the absolute most successful and useful scientific theory ever devised, has at least one glaring, obvious problem: we do not observe alive/dead cats in our universe. Mrs. Transient Gadfly assures me that while this property of the observer affecting the observed is true about absolutely everything else in any discipline, it is just not friggin' true of friggin' cats. And this is the sort of thing about which Mrs. Transient Gadfly is always right. So I hope that The Secret is some kind of signpost at the end of some kind of road, because it's time for a new model.
Friday, June 01, 2007
OaO Presents: The Music Capsule™
The world of music is changing in fashions both rapid and alarming, being fed by two trends. First, the music itself is, for all practical purposes, free. Second, anyone can create a high-quality recording in their home and immediately make it available to anyone else in the world. There are figuratively ten million musical monkeys out there typing on ten million musical typewriters. 99.999% of it is, predictably, noise. But some of those monkeys are producing Shakespeare that, right now, almost nobody can hear through the cacophony.
Music labels are, as you might imagine, appropriately terrified of this brave new world. I share the fervent hope of many that they'll all sink slowly and painfully into irrelevance, but they probably won't. The "problem" of music on the internet could be solved tomorrow--make all music downloads free, and in return for the right to host that music and advertise (or whatever) along side of it, have websites pay into a fund that is distributed to the artists based on what percentage of downloads their music constitutes (this is exactly what happens today with radio airplay, except revenue distribution is determined by survey, whereas online you could get an exact count. People could certainly create spam-like bots to download their own songs repeatedly to make their music seem more popular than it was, but this is the kind of thing that can be easily detected by statistical fraud analysis. The e-tail giant I work for, for instance, is quite excellent at that sort of thing). The reason this hasn't happened already is that it would make record labels utterly irrelevant.
As with all rich and powerful cartels throughout history, the RIAA as a whole will hang on and use its power as long as it can, suing children and old ladies for pirating music, before finally collapsing and dying. The smart labels, on the other hand, will realize that there is still tons of money to be made in the painstaking process of filtering out the Shakespeares from the screaming cacophonous monkeys, therein finding entirely new streams of revenue and power and giving birth to a new cartel.
I, for one, have decided not to wait. In addition to posting my own songs as I decide they're ready for public consumption, I've started posting songs by other artists who have thrown their art into the current mass music (literal!) free-for-all. Our first artist appearing in the capsule at left is JulianC (I'm guessing it's meant to be pronounced, "JU-lee-ence"), a drumloop-crazed electric guitarist whose concoction I quite enjoyed upon hearing it on MacIdol. As with my own music, I hope you will give it a listen, and if you like it, I hope you'll share it with friends, and so on, and maybe the world will somehow change for the better. If you don't like it, you can, you know, shut up about it.
Music labels are, as you might imagine, appropriately terrified of this brave new world. I share the fervent hope of many that they'll all sink slowly and painfully into irrelevance, but they probably won't. The "problem" of music on the internet could be solved tomorrow--make all music downloads free, and in return for the right to host that music and advertise (or whatever) along side of it, have websites pay into a fund that is distributed to the artists based on what percentage of downloads their music constitutes (this is exactly what happens today with radio airplay, except revenue distribution is determined by survey, whereas online you could get an exact count. People could certainly create spam-like bots to download their own songs repeatedly to make their music seem more popular than it was, but this is the kind of thing that can be easily detected by statistical fraud analysis. The e-tail giant I work for, for instance, is quite excellent at that sort of thing). The reason this hasn't happened already is that it would make record labels utterly irrelevant.
As with all rich and powerful cartels throughout history, the RIAA as a whole will hang on and use its power as long as it can, suing children and old ladies for pirating music, before finally collapsing and dying. The smart labels, on the other hand, will realize that there is still tons of money to be made in the painstaking process of filtering out the Shakespeares from the screaming cacophonous monkeys, therein finding entirely new streams of revenue and power and giving birth to a new cartel.
I, for one, have decided not to wait. In addition to posting my own songs as I decide they're ready for public consumption, I've started posting songs by other artists who have thrown their art into the current mass music (literal!) free-for-all. Our first artist appearing in the capsule at left is JulianC (I'm guessing it's meant to be pronounced, "JU-lee-ence"), a drumloop-crazed electric guitarist whose concoction I quite enjoyed upon hearing it on MacIdol. As with my own music, I hope you will give it a listen, and if you like it, I hope you'll share it with friends, and so on, and maybe the world will somehow change for the better. If you don't like it, you can, you know, shut up about it.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Persistence of Memory
My nephew lives with my sister and brother-in-law four houses down. He's one and a half, and his vocabulary that I've heard so far consists of two one-syllable words—one of which sounds like "dog" and one of which sounds like "car"—and two two-syllable words, "mama" and "uh-pah." This last one can variously mean "iPod," "apricot," or "Uncle Paul."
I am mowing the lawn on Memorial Day. Down the street, Sister, Brother-In-Law, and Nephew are in the front yard, putting up a new fence. Look Nephew, says Sister, there is Uncle Paul. She points at me. Nephew turns and looks and sees Uncle Paul, far away down the street. Uncle Paul sees Sister and Nephew and waves. Nephew, for whom it is a very new thing, waves back at Uncle Paul, who is far away.
Uncle Paul thinks, Nephew is but one and a half—what if this is the first memory of me that Nephew retains? What if this picture—Uncle Paul is a person who is down the street and waves, is his developmental and foundational picture of me? What if every subsequent memory he has of me is built on top of this Ur-memory, so that no matter what experiences he has of me the rest of our lives, when he calls up the mental model of me from his brain, the most fundamental, inescapable, primordial part of it will be this one, first, experience? There is Uncle Paul. Uncle Paul is far away.
I am mowing the lawn on Memorial Day. Down the street, Sister, Brother-In-Law, and Nephew are in the front yard, putting up a new fence. Look Nephew, says Sister, there is Uncle Paul. She points at me. Nephew turns and looks and sees Uncle Paul, far away down the street. Uncle Paul sees Sister and Nephew and waves. Nephew, for whom it is a very new thing, waves back at Uncle Paul, who is far away.
Uncle Paul thinks, Nephew is but one and a half—what if this is the first memory of me that Nephew retains? What if this picture—Uncle Paul is a person who is down the street and waves, is his developmental and foundational picture of me? What if every subsequent memory he has of me is built on top of this Ur-memory, so that no matter what experiences he has of me the rest of our lives, when he calls up the mental model of me from his brain, the most fundamental, inescapable, primordial part of it will be this one, first, experience? There is Uncle Paul. Uncle Paul is far away.
Friday, May 25, 2007
It's My Birthday Too, Yeah
There's nothing particularly noteworthy about turning 34, save that I can now say that I outlived Jesus (in your face, Jesus). There's not even any interesting numerology. Two years ago when I turned 25 on 5/25/2005, now that was cool. But it's pretty much downhill from there.
In the year after turning 16 my brain underwent one more set of (I assume developmental) changes, and then after that it just stopped, such that today I still feel like a teenager, it's just that I hold a job and own a house and walk around in a 34 year-old's body. At some point after that I realized why people get so freaked out turning 30, then turning 40, and so on. The internal them stops getting older while their outside face, and the outside world, just keeps on keeping on.
It's the little secret of the world, that it's entirely populated and run by 16 year olds; 16 year olds who are still caught up with who likes whom, who's popular and who isn't; we hurt and do hurt to each other like 16 year olds. It looks different, sure, but it's only because we don't have those faces any longer.
In the year after turning 16 my brain underwent one more set of (I assume developmental) changes, and then after that it just stopped, such that today I still feel like a teenager, it's just that I hold a job and own a house and walk around in a 34 year-old's body. At some point after that I realized why people get so freaked out turning 30, then turning 40, and so on. The internal them stops getting older while their outside face, and the outside world, just keeps on keeping on.
It's the little secret of the world, that it's entirely populated and run by 16 year olds; 16 year olds who are still caught up with who likes whom, who's popular and who isn't; we hurt and do hurt to each other like 16 year olds. It looks different, sure, but it's only because we don't have those faces any longer.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Further Thoughts on Joss Freaking Whedon
I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I’m sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they’re also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they’ve also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.” (Source linked below)
Regular readers know that we here at OaO espouse a view of our biological and conscious selves that states that we have at the core a brain like any animal, a very intricate and complex stimulus-response machine, but that we also possess a highly evolved ability to post-hoc narrate that stimulus and response; id est you respond to your surroundings and situations in some way and then, some number of microseconds later, you make up a story about why you responded that way. Sometimes that story models the actions of stimulus and response quite well (I decide to go down to the cafeteria and eat french fries because I'm hungry and the guy in the office next door has french fries and they smell yummy...mmm...french fries), and sometimes it really, really doesn't.
Humans, in the words of Neal Stephenson, are stupendous badasses. But an inescapable fact of our evolution from carbon chain to stupendous badass is that we got here by being unimaginable bastards. Nature, red in tooth and claw, did things we probably don't want to hear about in order for our genes to make it to this point. Somewhere along the line a particular strain of genes thought it might try cooperating with other gene pools instead of brutally trying to wipe them out and see how that worked out, and lo and behold it worked out pretty well. But we're still animals, and the cutthroat bastardry that got us here remains in our genes.
Say you're a male of a mammalian species, and you one day realize that the only way that your genes are going to survive is to impregnate a female and make sure that the resulting offspring survives long enough to reproduce. Then you realize that, as far as reproduction is concerned, your role as a male begins and ends at fire-and-forget (God, I love that metaphor). The gears and wheels turn in your animal brain some more and you realize, "holy crap, after she's impregnated she could just go off and take my offspring and I'd never know what happened to it. Or worse, she could go off and get impregnated by somebody else at the same time and I'd end up protecting somebody else's genes. I have almost no control over this process. This simply won't do." And Bam! You've got womb envy. The terror of not having control over the most basic needs of your genes causes the red-in-truth-and-claw part of your brain to kick in--it sees that the female of the species is generally smaller and weaker and can be physically controlled and decides that anything it needs to do to re-assert that control must be done.
When this mammal is also human and is well practiced in post-hoc explanations for its behavior it feels, you know, a little bit awkward about just exerting brutal control over half the members of our species, so we need to come up with a narrative about why that's okay. Sometimes...actually, pretty much all the time...we wind up with religious dogma. We couch our unimaginable bastardry in some story about how it's written in a Very Important Book that someone somewhere said it brings dishonor to our family when a woman has sex with the wrong person, and therefore she must be killed (or when the religion stops working, we couch our bastardry in made up science that purports to prove what the purveyors of that science already take as a given).
I believe and hope that the tide that made individual bastardry a successful evolutionary strategy has long since turned, and that cooperation amongst a widely diverse gene pool is replacing it as the best strategy for long term survival. It's only that these things happen on a much longer time scale than any human will witness that forces us to continue to endure the unimaginable bastardry that we do to each other. And it's the fact that we exist in such an in-between state that we live with such twisted justifications for that bastardry as "Honor Killings."
I wish we'd evolve just a little quicker, though.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Monday Marginalia
First off, sorry about the mess. I realize my blog looks like complete ass right now, and would be an embarrassment even if I weren't someone who BUILDS USER INTERFACES FOR A LIVING, but...uh...nope, no, I got nothin'. It's bad. I will fix it soon.
UPDATE: I'm not convinced that this is much better, but I couldn't stand looking at it the way it was any longer. More changes sure to come./UPDATE
Second, the latest result of my cleanup work from my RPM Challenge album appears top left. It's your standard 80's New Wave rock song critiquing String Theory due to its untimeliness, and continues to herald my inexorable march away from alt-folkiness towards I have no earthly idea what.
On the topic of the RPM Challenge, apparently some fellow musician contacted Starbucks and got them interested in an Hear Music compilation of RPM artists, and I got an email this weekend that I was "nominated" (for some very loose definition of the term) to have a song on the/an album. This, as with all things that are both musical and make money, seems very very iffy to me, but who the hell knows.
Speaking of things in email this weekend, I also got a note from my old college friend Layne, to whom I hadn't spoken in years, and who now seems to be a food and travel writer living in Buenos Aires. This is, by far, the coolest thing that anybody I know is doing with their lives, so for starters I've added her blog Go Where the Taxista Takes You to the HBC. Read it and live vicariously.
UPDATE: I'm not convinced that this is much better, but I couldn't stand looking at it the way it was any longer. More changes sure to come./UPDATE
Second, the latest result of my cleanup work from my RPM Challenge album appears top left. It's your standard 80's New Wave rock song critiquing String Theory due to its untimeliness, and continues to herald my inexorable march away from alt-folkiness towards I have no earthly idea what.
On the topic of the RPM Challenge, apparently some fellow musician contacted Starbucks and got them interested in an Hear Music compilation of RPM artists, and I got an email this weekend that I was "nominated" (for some very loose definition of the term) to have a song on the/an album. This, as with all things that are both musical and make money, seems very very iffy to me, but who the hell knows.
Speaking of things in email this weekend, I also got a note from my old college friend Layne, to whom I hadn't spoken in years, and who now seems to be a food and travel writer living in Buenos Aires. This is, by far, the coolest thing that anybody I know is doing with their lives, so for starters I've added her blog Go Where the Taxista Takes You to the HBC. Read it and live vicariously.
Friday, May 18, 2007
You Just Get More
Any old amateur blogger can reprint for you some funny and ironic political quote that, by the time it appears, everyone has already seen on account of they, too, watch The Daily Show (you dumbshit). But here at The Odds Are One™, we give you more. We'll actually delve into the quote, go the extra mile, give you that extra insight that you just can't get anywhere else. We can offer this unique service because we sit around reading our own damn blog while we eat dinner--that's just how pathetic we are. Or else it's because of how much we care about you, the loyal reader. I'm sure it's one or the other.
Anyway we here at the Odds Are One™ are reading the A.G. quote below and it's suddenly struck us, why would he say that? I mean, that's really weird. That's like, mental short-circuit weird. It's Meta-Freudian-Slip reverse syllogism weird. Let us go over what we know: Gonzales is an intelligent man, and quite possibly in some metaphorical and/or non-metaphorical sense, Gonzales has sold his soul to a neo-religious ideology that, as most of them do, tells itself that its actions are for the good of the many when they are in fact good for the needs of only a very few. I'll come back to that in a moment, but one other thing we should take as an a priori is that Gonzales is in fact cognizant of the fact that the attorney firings are in the news and that he is aware that he's there in the House testifying about it.
Here's what I'm coming up with:
The Slip seems pretty straightforward: he's been rigorously coached, or coached himself, to repeat that there was absolutely nothing improper about the attorney firings. But he clearly also knows it isn't remotely true. His cheatin' heart will tell on him. His conscious mind isn't going to let anything slip through his mouth that betrays this fact, but his subconscious is just dying to let it out, and subconscious outwits the conscious by constructing a reverse logical syllogism that Alberto's forebrain can't quite parse in time to intercept the FTP packet his cranial nerves have sent to his mouth. "If there were a crime present the press would be reporting on it. So clearly there is no crime here, because if there were...oh...crap."
At the same time, this seems to clearly pinpoint his own internal ethical compass. Imagine the logistical nightmare that you'd have to engage with in your moral center in order to be where Gonzales is: "Sure, I'm an intelligent man and I've done a lot of things you wouldn't have liked to have done in the name of the ideology but I was doing it for the benefit of the party by getting more members of that party elected to office, which I owe to the party because people before me did what they had to do to get me where I am so I can...do a lot of things I wouldn't have liked to have done...wait a minute, wasn't I just here?"
So he knows that he's doing something wrong here, but he tells himself it's not really wrong. If it were really morally wrong to fire attorneys for partisan gain/lie in front of Congress/Start A War That We Know To Be Wrong But Is For The Greater Good And Will Stabilize The Source Of Our Energy Needs For The Next Century Or Two And Will Hold Those Interests For Our Children And Our Children's Children So They Can Live In Peace And Security Even If The Rest Of The World Goes To Hell On Account Of Fuck Them...*ahem*, if doing any of that were really wrong, the Freedom of The Press, the great protector that is our Fourth Estate, would come to our rescue and report the truth, and the people would rise up against them. I'd aver he thinks this because he is a child of Watergate, but I'm just guessing. This must be the specific form his own personal cognitive dissonance is taking right at the moment he's speaking (or maybe this is just what's on his mind this month, or, you know, this career). "If what I am doing were wrong, the press would be reporting it and people would be demanding answers, but what I'm doing is not wrong and I know this because...crap...here I am again." In one sentence he's given you a perfect zen koan for his own personal mental state.
Anyway we here at the Odds Are One™ are reading the A.G. quote below and it's suddenly struck us, why would he say that? I mean, that's really weird. That's like, mental short-circuit weird. It's Meta-Freudian-Slip reverse syllogism weird. Let us go over what we know: Gonzales is an intelligent man, and quite possibly in some metaphorical and/or non-metaphorical sense, Gonzales has sold his soul to a neo-religious ideology that, as most of them do, tells itself that its actions are for the good of the many when they are in fact good for the needs of only a very few. I'll come back to that in a moment, but one other thing we should take as an a priori is that Gonzales is in fact cognizant of the fact that the attorney firings are in the news and that he is aware that he's there in the House testifying about it.
Here's what I'm coming up with:
The Slip seems pretty straightforward: he's been rigorously coached, or coached himself, to repeat that there was absolutely nothing improper about the attorney firings. But he clearly also knows it isn't remotely true. His cheatin' heart will tell on him. His conscious mind isn't going to let anything slip through his mouth that betrays this fact, but his subconscious is just dying to let it out, and subconscious outwits the conscious by constructing a reverse logical syllogism that Alberto's forebrain can't quite parse in time to intercept the FTP packet his cranial nerves have sent to his mouth. "If there were a crime present the press would be reporting on it. So clearly there is no crime here, because if there were...oh...crap."
At the same time, this seems to clearly pinpoint his own internal ethical compass. Imagine the logistical nightmare that you'd have to engage with in your moral center in order to be where Gonzales is: "Sure, I'm an intelligent man and I've done a lot of things you wouldn't have liked to have done in the name of the ideology but I was doing it for the benefit of the party by getting more members of that party elected to office, which I owe to the party because people before me did what they had to do to get me where I am so I can...do a lot of things I wouldn't have liked to have done...wait a minute, wasn't I just here?"
So he knows that he's doing something wrong here, but he tells himself it's not really wrong. If it were really morally wrong to fire attorneys for partisan gain/lie in front of Congress/Start A War That We Know To Be Wrong But Is For The Greater Good And Will Stabilize The Source Of Our Energy Needs For The Next Century Or Two And Will Hold Those Interests For Our Children And Our Children's Children So They Can Live In Peace And Security Even If The Rest Of The World Goes To Hell On Account Of Fuck Them...*ahem*, if doing any of that were really wrong, the Freedom of The Press, the great protector that is our Fourth Estate, would come to our rescue and report the truth, and the people would rise up against them. I'd aver he thinks this because he is a child of Watergate, but I'm just guessing. This must be the specific form his own personal cognitive dissonance is taking right at the moment he's speaking (or maybe this is just what's on his mind this month, or, you know, this career). "If what I am doing were wrong, the press would be reporting it and people would be demanding answers, but what I'm doing is not wrong and I know this because...crap...here I am again." In one sentence he's given you a perfect zen koan for his own personal mental state.
If in fact someone -- if a career investigator or prosecutors felt that we were making decisions for political reasons to interfere with a case, you'd probably hear about it.Yeah, Al. You'd probably hear about it.
OaO Presents: They Actually Said That™*
And it would be pretty darn difficult, if not impossible, to make a decision for political reasons and expect to get away with it. If in fact someone -- if a career investigator or prosecutors felt that we were making decisions for political reasons to interfere with a case, you'd probably hear about it. We'd probably read about it in the papers.
-Alberto Gonzales, testifying in the House Of Representatives on May 10th. Transcript
*"They Actually Said That" is an utterly non-trademarked catchphrase about which The Odds Are One apparently harbors some feeble hope that...something...oh, fuck it.
Truth
Ah, you, writer of XKCD, with your minimalist line drawings and your nerdish, nerdish hilarity. How polished your humor, yet how jejeune your philosophy. Fear not, you too shall soon learn the precariousness of trying to model The Truth.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Pitch To Contact
The Seattle Mariners went into spring training this past March with a new mantra from their pitching coaches: "Pitch to contact." They apparently had t-shirts made up, which, in case you were never in Glee Club in college and don't know this, is completely cheesy. The antithetical philosophy would be to try and strike out every batter a pitcher faces, and this indeed has some drawbacks--trying to strike a batter out in baseball will generally require more pitches, whereas if the batter puts the ball in play, he could conceivably get himself out with one pitch. Moreover, a strikeout pitcher might try to throw more finesse pitches that are harder to locate, and end up walking a lot of batsmen, which puts him in trouble in an inning, and forces him to throw a lot of so-called "stress pitches." A pitcher who racks up higher pitch counts will get tired sooner in the game, and so on and so forth.
There's also (seemingly) a statistical basis for this philosophy, too. Statistical analysis has shown that once a batter has put a pitched ball in play, the pitcher has little to no control over whether it becomes a hit or not. There's a statistic called Batting Average on Balls In Play which measures how successful batters are at reaching base safely once they've hit a pitch (assuming that it doesn't go over the fence for a home run, in which case there's usually nothing the defense can do). This number tends to sit in a range centering around about 30%, but has very little correlation from pitcher to pitcher and year to year--if a pitcher has a .280 BABIP one year, it's as likely to be .330 as .280 the next season (knuckleballer pitchers, such as Boston Red Sock Tim Wakefield, tend to be the exception to this rule of seasonal correlation, but that's another story). Sometimes a ground ball gets through the infield for a single and sometimes the shortstop gets it for an easy out, and this outcome has little to do with the pitcher and a lot to do with a) how much ground the defense behind him covers, and b) luck . So if a coaching staff knew (or thought) they had a good defensive team, pitching to contact would appear to make a lot of sense.
The Mariners apparently have a lot of written or unwritten philosophies like this. They coach their hitters to be aggressive, and look for a good pitch to hit early in the count. They also toyed, more last season than this, with being aggressive once they got on base, trying to go from first to third on a single, for instance.
In tonight's game, in the top of the first inning, Vladimir Guerrero came to bat against Mariner pitcher Jarrod Washburn with a runner on first base. Here is the book on pitching to Vladimir Guerrero: Under no circumstances should you pitch to Vladimir Guerrero. He can hit pretty much any pitch anywhere near the plate and hit it very hard. He is an extremely good hitter. If you were to, for some reason, ignore this information, and throw him hittable pitches, he would hit them. Hard. Pitching to contact against Vladimir Guerrero is a bad idea. It is bad. Bad. Bad bad bad. A better strategy would be to throw unhittable pitches far out of the strike zone and hope he swings at them or just walk him than, rather let him beat you with his bat. Vladimir Guerrero took the very hittable pitch he was thrown and deposited it into the left field bullpen for a home run. Later in the game he came to bat with another runner on and doubled, Mariner pitchers apparently being unable to parse blatant object lessons.
Jarrod Washburn was doing pretty well so far this season: he'd managed to win more games than he lost while sporting a very good earned run average for the most part by throwing strikes and letting hitters get themselves out. By coincidence, Jarrod Washburn had also been facing some baseball teams with pretty poor lineups. But throwing hittable pitches to batters who are good at hitting hittable pitches is highly likely to eventually result in bad outcomes. Similarly, when the Mariners tried to always take that extra base, it worked some of the time, and some of the time the ball wasn't hit far enough or they were facing a team with canon-armed outfielders and they just ran themselves into outs. As for their "aggressive" approach to hitting, when the Mariners face pitchers who tend to throw strikes early in the count, they tend to do pretty well. When they face pitchers who aren't as good, who have trouble hitting the strike zone with regularity, they tend to do poorly--they frequently get absolutely stymied by pitchers who have just come up from AAA, going up hacking at the first pitch that looks hittable instead of letting the pitcher get himself into trouble by walking batters and running up his pitch count...sounds a little bit familiar, doesn't it? Seems like there's some sort of object lesson there.
There's also (seemingly) a statistical basis for this philosophy, too. Statistical analysis has shown that once a batter has put a pitched ball in play, the pitcher has little to no control over whether it becomes a hit or not. There's a statistic called Batting Average on Balls In Play which measures how successful batters are at reaching base safely once they've hit a pitch (assuming that it doesn't go over the fence for a home run, in which case there's usually nothing the defense can do). This number tends to sit in a range centering around about 30%, but has very little correlation from pitcher to pitcher and year to year--if a pitcher has a .280 BABIP one year, it's as likely to be .330 as .280 the next season (knuckleballer pitchers, such as Boston Red Sock Tim Wakefield, tend to be the exception to this rule of seasonal correlation, but that's another story). Sometimes a ground ball gets through the infield for a single and sometimes the shortstop gets it for an easy out, and this outcome has little to do with the pitcher and a lot to do with a) how much ground the defense behind him covers, and b) luck . So if a coaching staff knew (or thought) they had a good defensive team, pitching to contact would appear to make a lot of sense.
The Mariners apparently have a lot of written or unwritten philosophies like this. They coach their hitters to be aggressive, and look for a good pitch to hit early in the count. They also toyed, more last season than this, with being aggressive once they got on base, trying to go from first to third on a single, for instance.
In tonight's game, in the top of the first inning, Vladimir Guerrero came to bat against Mariner pitcher Jarrod Washburn with a runner on first base. Here is the book on pitching to Vladimir Guerrero: Under no circumstances should you pitch to Vladimir Guerrero. He can hit pretty much any pitch anywhere near the plate and hit it very hard. He is an extremely good hitter. If you were to, for some reason, ignore this information, and throw him hittable pitches, he would hit them. Hard. Pitching to contact against Vladimir Guerrero is a bad idea. It is bad. Bad. Bad bad bad. A better strategy would be to throw unhittable pitches far out of the strike zone and hope he swings at them or just walk him than, rather let him beat you with his bat. Vladimir Guerrero took the very hittable pitch he was thrown and deposited it into the left field bullpen for a home run. Later in the game he came to bat with another runner on and doubled, Mariner pitchers apparently being unable to parse blatant object lessons.
Jarrod Washburn was doing pretty well so far this season: he'd managed to win more games than he lost while sporting a very good earned run average for the most part by throwing strikes and letting hitters get themselves out. By coincidence, Jarrod Washburn had also been facing some baseball teams with pretty poor lineups. But throwing hittable pitches to batters who are good at hitting hittable pitches is highly likely to eventually result in bad outcomes. Similarly, when the Mariners tried to always take that extra base, it worked some of the time, and some of the time the ball wasn't hit far enough or they were facing a team with canon-armed outfielders and they just ran themselves into outs. As for their "aggressive" approach to hitting, when the Mariners face pitchers who tend to throw strikes early in the count, they tend to do pretty well. When they face pitchers who aren't as good, who have trouble hitting the strike zone with regularity, they tend to do poorly--they frequently get absolutely stymied by pitchers who have just come up from AAA, going up hacking at the first pitch that looks hittable instead of letting the pitcher get himself into trouble by walking batters and running up his pitch count...sounds a little bit familiar, doesn't it? Seems like there's some sort of object lesson there.
You Knew (Him) Better The First Time You Met Him
You knew him better the first time you met him.
The first sight of his face and you recognized him instantly.
And when you first heard it, the sound and timbre of his voice,
Though not exactly what you expected,
Was exactly what you expected.
But then you meet a lot of people, and there isn't space in your brain
To store that first image of everyone
(and anyhow you could never have held onto that one perfect moment of knowing).
So to save space you took the aspects of him
That were sort of like the aspects of all the other people you meet
(who themselves weren't quite like that either),
And made yourself a model of him to hold on to.
The next time you saw him, you noticed he had a crooked tooth,
And that the cut of his hair didn't quite match the person you had modeled,
(and maybe he laughed a little too loudly and awkwardly).
And you thought, "oh, well he doesn't quite fit into my model of him,"
But you needed the model in order to hold on to him (and everyone else),
And so the thought became, "Oh, well. He doesn't quite fit."
And that would have been that,
Except
That years went by
And you were lucky enough to forget him.
And that next time your old model was long since lost
And you had again that one perfect instant of recognition,
The one you couldn't hold on to,
That you held on to just a little bit longer this time,
Long enough to realize that you knew him better the first time you met him.
The first sight of his face and you recognized him instantly.
And when you first heard it, the sound and timbre of his voice,
Though not exactly what you expected,
Was exactly what you expected.
But then you meet a lot of people, and there isn't space in your brain
To store that first image of everyone
(and anyhow you could never have held onto that one perfect moment of knowing).
So to save space you took the aspects of him
That were sort of like the aspects of all the other people you meet
(who themselves weren't quite like that either),
And made yourself a model of him to hold on to.
The next time you saw him, you noticed he had a crooked tooth,
And that the cut of his hair didn't quite match the person you had modeled,
(and maybe he laughed a little too loudly and awkwardly).
And you thought, "oh, well he doesn't quite fit into my model of him,"
But you needed the model in order to hold on to him (and everyone else),
And so the thought became, "Oh, well. He doesn't quite fit."
And that would have been that,
Except
That years went by
And you were lucky enough to forget him.
And that next time your old model was long since lost
And you had again that one perfect instant of recognition,
The one you couldn't hold on to,
That you held on to just a little bit longer this time,
Long enough to realize that you knew him better the first time you met him.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Flight
I took a flight home; it was yesterday, across the country East to West, brief stopover in Denver. They show this "The Amalgamated Air Freight and Passenger Network" on the little view screens in addition to, or in lieu of on shorter flights, the movie (for a definition of "Amalgamated Air Freight and Passenger" that's approximately equivalent to, "an airline I flew yesterday that I don't feel like naming"). Within this particular collection of programs, they were showing a small collection of truly bizarre 30-second commercials you'd never see on television. You've seen them on flights: The International Organization of Gemologists. Tourism Greece. Time Share Villas in Place You Have Never Been But Looks Kind Of Chic And Old World. And one for the C.I.A. I'm watching this particular ad, and I'm thinking, "Why, now that you mention it, yes...I am a patriotic American and I do want to serve my country in the clandestine services...no...wait a minute..."
Something happens to you when you fly. This American Life once did a show about how people cried at incredibly trite movies they saw on airplanes. A recent article in Slate examined the types of things that get sold in the Skymall and tied it in with some twinge in the ancient corners of the evolutionary brain:
In addition to crying at stupid things, thinking while flying makes me believe insane things are possible, such as if I could just figure out how to make myself blog every day, that I could grow an audience that wanted to read my musings on music, technology, and philosophy. It makes me think how I started posting songs on MacIdol, and 500 people I've never even met listened to them, and some of them even seemed to like them, and how I quite enjoyed that. I thought, what if I could get 5000 people to listen? If that, what if I could get 50,000? Like I said, crazy shit.
Next: Crazy Shit!
Something happens to you when you fly. This American Life once did a show about how people cried at incredibly trite movies they saw on airplanes. A recent article in Slate examined the types of things that get sold in the Skymall and tied it in with some twinge in the ancient corners of the evolutionary brain:
[O]ne is aware of how absurd it is to be suspended eight miles high in a metal container, only some poorly understood laws of physics keeping you from plunging abruptly to certain death. In some still-not-entirely assimilated region of the limbic brain, one's time is about to run out every second, thus the attraction of all those devices that somehow contain time, tame time, break time down into tiny dials within dials....This totally happens to me. I don't know if it's the lessons of the world learned by my ancient ancestors of pre-history that makes me suddenly inspired by a call to duty from the C.I.A. when, in fact, I loathe the C.I.A. and everything it stands for, I have been the least patriotic person in America ever since the word "patriotic" was redefined to mean, "agrees with the policies of George W. Bush," and the first two things I think are wrong with the world are 1) Capitalism, and, 2) The C.I.A. Clearly the spooks have done extensive market research to determine where best to place their ads, because if I am suggestible to the siren song of covert ops at 35,000 feet, then everyone is.
In addition to crying at stupid things, thinking while flying makes me believe insane things are possible, such as if I could just figure out how to make myself blog every day, that I could grow an audience that wanted to read my musings on music, technology, and philosophy. It makes me think how I started posting songs on MacIdol, and 500 people I've never even met listened to them, and some of them even seemed to like them, and how I quite enjoyed that. I thought, what if I could get 5000 people to listen? If that, what if I could get 50,000? Like I said, crazy shit.
Next: Crazy Shit!
OaO Vocabularity Of The Day™*
Godwin's Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
*"Vocabularity Of The Day" is not actually trademarked in any way.
*"Vocabularity Of The Day" is not actually trademarked in any way.
far and away
this is going to sound stupid, but air travel is pretty medieval. not literally of course. literally, if you'd told someone in the middle ages that soon enough people would get into huge phallic metal boxes with wings and 200 plus other people and thus be able to travel 3000 miles in a mere eleven hours, that middle ages person would have been mighty impressed.
but this is the future as t.g. pointed out sunday when we were video chatting with our six week old nephew for whom that will be totally normal. so the yelled at by crazy woman in security, ban on drinking water nevermind hand lotion nevermind cup of yogurt, take everything out of your bag, disrobe entirely, not making anyone feel or be safer fiasco that is the airport, followed by the very teeny spaces, we are going to charge you fifty bucks for that exit row, we are going to feed you six mini pretzels in five hours, and please don't even fantasize about being able to pick up that pencil you just dropped because it ain't gonna happen that is flying, followed by the waiting for an hour after just to find out that they didn't bring your luggage then waiting in line to tell them about how they didn't bring your luggage then being promised it will be there by 3:00 the next day then 5:00 then 6:30, nevermind your dinner reservations, and no one ever saying wow we're sorry we lost your luggage, well that's crap travel. medieval. our children (or maybe theirs or maybe theirs) will consider these tales with the horror with which i regard lack of indoor plumbing, no central heat, and most aspects of medieval life.
in the vast expanse of human history, this tale of woe is going to be our hallmark i think. our lives are marked in so many ways by being so far away from so many of the people we love so much. can you imagine that that wouldn't be totally formative? so many of the people we love are somewhere else all the time! how can we survive with so much love somewhere else? in the middle ages, very few people had this problem because they didn't love people far away. folks mostly stayed put and loved people nearby. soon enough we'll have, i don't know, bullet trains, teleportation, a pod system...something. how far from video chatting can that possibly be? so really, it's only this time and this place -- this blip -- with all this far away love. and it's unacceptable to me. un-ac-ceptable. physicists: no one even cares about string theory. where's the teleporting?
meantime, some of you -- and you know who you are -- really need to move to seattle. or invent teleportation. or buy an iteleporter. or an ipodsystem. but not that kind.
--mtg
but this is the future as t.g. pointed out sunday when we were video chatting with our six week old nephew for whom that will be totally normal. so the yelled at by crazy woman in security, ban on drinking water nevermind hand lotion nevermind cup of yogurt, take everything out of your bag, disrobe entirely, not making anyone feel or be safer fiasco that is the airport, followed by the very teeny spaces, we are going to charge you fifty bucks for that exit row, we are going to feed you six mini pretzels in five hours, and please don't even fantasize about being able to pick up that pencil you just dropped because it ain't gonna happen that is flying, followed by the waiting for an hour after just to find out that they didn't bring your luggage then waiting in line to tell them about how they didn't bring your luggage then being promised it will be there by 3:00 the next day then 5:00 then 6:30, nevermind your dinner reservations, and no one ever saying wow we're sorry we lost your luggage, well that's crap travel. medieval. our children (or maybe theirs or maybe theirs) will consider these tales with the horror with which i regard lack of indoor plumbing, no central heat, and most aspects of medieval life.
in the vast expanse of human history, this tale of woe is going to be our hallmark i think. our lives are marked in so many ways by being so far away from so many of the people we love so much. can you imagine that that wouldn't be totally formative? so many of the people we love are somewhere else all the time! how can we survive with so much love somewhere else? in the middle ages, very few people had this problem because they didn't love people far away. folks mostly stayed put and loved people nearby. soon enough we'll have, i don't know, bullet trains, teleportation, a pod system...something. how far from video chatting can that possibly be? so really, it's only this time and this place -- this blip -- with all this far away love. and it's unacceptable to me. un-ac-ceptable. physicists: no one even cares about string theory. where's the teleporting?
meantime, some of you -- and you know who you are -- really need to move to seattle. or invent teleportation. or buy an iteleporter. or an ipodsystem. but not that kind.
--mtg
Monday, May 07, 2007
Super Pop-tastic
"Albert Einstein," my father-in-law is fond of saying, "Would have given his left nut for a pocket calculator that could add, subtract, multiply, divide, and take square roots." Forced into using pencil, paper, and a slide rule, the technologically penurious fellow could only manage to, you know, utterly revolutionize physics. On the other side of the coin, I have a pocket calculator that possesses somewhat more computing power than the guidance system that landed the lunar module in the Sea of Tranquility, and yet it hasn't enabled me to revolutionize physics. As you might guess, I miss a lot of the points that my father-in-law tries to make.
In this case, though, I believe that the point he's trying to make is something like, "Technology, dude. Holy. Living. Crap." This struck me a couple of days back while using a piece of software that the Apple Computer Corporation gives away for free when you buy one of their computers, merely the raw editing capabilities of which Phil Spector would have given his left nut for in 1965 (insert current-events-related Phil Spector joke here. Myself, I've nothing). In spite of the fact that my profession and my main hobby are pretty heavily tied up in it, I'm not usually one to get moony over technology. But I never stop being amazed at the fact that I live in a time in which there exists a common household appliance into which one can plug ones guitar and, some time later, a finished album pops out.
Garageband won't make me the Beatles, but then the Beatles couldn't create a symphony orchestra and an "ahh" singing choir, mix them together under a song they'd already recorded, have a drifting pan from left to right and then flange the whole thing...okay, fine, they could and did do that. But they couldn't do it in their basement. My point is this: fuck the fucking Beatles. Also that there's a new song up. As you were.
Next: Technology: Do you own enough?
In this case, though, I believe that the point he's trying to make is something like, "Technology, dude. Holy. Living. Crap." This struck me a couple of days back while using a piece of software that the Apple Computer Corporation gives away for free when you buy one of their computers, merely the raw editing capabilities of which Phil Spector would have given his left nut for in 1965 (insert current-events-related Phil Spector joke here. Myself, I've nothing). In spite of the fact that my profession and my main hobby are pretty heavily tied up in it, I'm not usually one to get moony over technology. But I never stop being amazed at the fact that I live in a time in which there exists a common household appliance into which one can plug ones guitar and, some time later, a finished album pops out.
Garageband won't make me the Beatles, but then the Beatles couldn't create a symphony orchestra and an "ahh" singing choir, mix them together under a song they'd already recorded, have a drifting pan from left to right and then flange the whole thing...okay, fine, they could and did do that. But they couldn't do it in their basement. My point is this: fuck the fucking Beatles. Also that there's a new song up. As you were.
Next: Technology: Do you own enough?
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Axiom of Choice
My first website, something like "http://math.wisc.edu/~mariz/", hosted a little set of puzzles called "The Math For Poets" page. It had graphics drawn in pencil and scanned in, and one of those moire-ish blue repeating backgrounds that was popular in 1996. Between the VAX server that hosted it and the general bandwidth of the universe back then, you would be lucky if it only took a minute for a page to load. How sweet and innocent we were then.
One of the exhibits on the Math For Poets site was about the Axiom Of Choice, presenting Bertrand Russel's explication thereof in puzzle form. It went (not really at all) as follows:
You are born on earth and live to a ripe old age but along the way choose the wrong religion and end up in hell (sorry about that). You are assigned to the Lord High Asmodai's Scrum team, and he resources you to the "Sock Sorting" line from the task list. He takes you to a room where there are infinity pairs of socks. He says to you, "We need to designate a new collection of socks, and this collection must contain exactly one sock from each pair in this room." He then gives you a collection of supertask performing daemons and instructs you that all you have to do is tell them which sock to take from each pair and they will create the new set of socks. "Huh, that doesn't seem so bad," you think. You go to the first pair of socks and point to one of the socks, and the daemons instantly grab it and pull it into the new pile. Then you go to the second pair and point to a sock, and instantly the daemons grab it. Then you go to the third pair, then the fourth pair, then the fifth, then you note again that there are infinity pairs of socks, and a sinking realization begins to claw at you. You refer back to the task list and note that the "Sock Sorting" line item has been budgeted at "infinity man-hours". You become desperate. In an effort to halve the development time, you try pointing to socks from two different pairs at once. While the daemons are able to add the socks from two piles to the new pile exactly as fast as they can add one (that is, instantly), you soon realize that infinity man-hours divided by two is still infinity man-hours. Lying on the floor and pointing to socks with your feet and hands at the same time has the same, null, effect. Even the Agile Business Methodology cannot help you. You go to your Stand-Up Meeting every morning, reporting that yesterday you sorted socks, today you will be sorting socks, there are no blocking issues, and your Scrum task has infinity hours remaining. This is how you spend eternity.
I, being a godless heathen, also wind up in hell where I am assigned to your Scrum team. The Lord High Asmodai, or "The Big L.H." as I like to call him, assigns me the "Shoe Sorting" line item from the task list. I note with trepidation that it, too, is budgeted for infinity man-hours. And indeed, my task is virtually the same. I am assigned a set of supertask-performing daemons and am told that I must create a new collection of shoes by selecting a shoe from each one of infinity pairs of shoes. Immediately I am broken and devoid of all hope, for I have seen you at Scrum each morning, reporting that your progress on the Sock Sorting task has gone from infinity hours to infinity hours, suffering the humiliation as Big L.H. publicly berates you for your lack of progress and threatens to stick you with a "Not Achieving" rating for the next review period. I walk into my room filed with infinity pairs of shoes, my supertask daemons in tow. I stare at the infinity pairs of shoes. The daemons hover nearby, awaiting their first instruction. Then, suddenly a thought occurs to me. I turn to the daemons. "Create a new pile of shoes," I say, "by taking the left shoe from each pair." In a flash of supertasking, the daemons create a new pile made up of infinity left shoes, and my once seemingly Sisyphean task is instantly completed. The Scrum burn-down chart drops below the red line for the first time in thirteen billion years. The Lord High tells me he likes my bias for action and my ability to self-manage to project actualization. Then we do lunch.
Next: What the hell was that all about?
One of the exhibits on the Math For Poets site was about the Axiom Of Choice, presenting Bertrand Russel's explication thereof in puzzle form. It went (not really at all) as follows:
You are born on earth and live to a ripe old age but along the way choose the wrong religion and end up in hell (sorry about that). You are assigned to the Lord High Asmodai's Scrum team, and he resources you to the "Sock Sorting" line from the task list. He takes you to a room where there are infinity pairs of socks. He says to you, "We need to designate a new collection of socks, and this collection must contain exactly one sock from each pair in this room." He then gives you a collection of supertask performing daemons and instructs you that all you have to do is tell them which sock to take from each pair and they will create the new set of socks. "Huh, that doesn't seem so bad," you think. You go to the first pair of socks and point to one of the socks, and the daemons instantly grab it and pull it into the new pile. Then you go to the second pair and point to a sock, and instantly the daemons grab it. Then you go to the third pair, then the fourth pair, then the fifth, then you note again that there are infinity pairs of socks, and a sinking realization begins to claw at you. You refer back to the task list and note that the "Sock Sorting" line item has been budgeted at "infinity man-hours". You become desperate. In an effort to halve the development time, you try pointing to socks from two different pairs at once. While the daemons are able to add the socks from two piles to the new pile exactly as fast as they can add one (that is, instantly), you soon realize that infinity man-hours divided by two is still infinity man-hours. Lying on the floor and pointing to socks with your feet and hands at the same time has the same, null, effect. Even the Agile Business Methodology cannot help you. You go to your Stand-Up Meeting every morning, reporting that yesterday you sorted socks, today you will be sorting socks, there are no blocking issues, and your Scrum task has infinity hours remaining. This is how you spend eternity.
I, being a godless heathen, also wind up in hell where I am assigned to your Scrum team. The Lord High Asmodai, or "The Big L.H." as I like to call him, assigns me the "Shoe Sorting" line item from the task list. I note with trepidation that it, too, is budgeted for infinity man-hours. And indeed, my task is virtually the same. I am assigned a set of supertask-performing daemons and am told that I must create a new collection of shoes by selecting a shoe from each one of infinity pairs of shoes. Immediately I am broken and devoid of all hope, for I have seen you at Scrum each morning, reporting that your progress on the Sock Sorting task has gone from infinity hours to infinity hours, suffering the humiliation as Big L.H. publicly berates you for your lack of progress and threatens to stick you with a "Not Achieving" rating for the next review period. I walk into my room filed with infinity pairs of shoes, my supertask daemons in tow. I stare at the infinity pairs of shoes. The daemons hover nearby, awaiting their first instruction. Then, suddenly a thought occurs to me. I turn to the daemons. "Create a new pile of shoes," I say, "by taking the left shoe from each pair." In a flash of supertasking, the daemons create a new pile made up of infinity left shoes, and my once seemingly Sisyphean task is instantly completed. The Scrum burn-down chart drops below the red line for the first time in thirteen billion years. The Lord High tells me he likes my bias for action and my ability to self-manage to project actualization. Then we do lunch.
Next: What the hell was that all about?
Monday, April 30, 2007
Jon Stewart is my hero, too
Echoing Mita, I'd like to say that there are few people who understand what's actually going on in this country today as well as Jon Stewart does.
(The transcript of the Bill Moyers interview)
Next: Whatever it is that comes next!
JON STEWART: And by the way, that was all just — that was a game, and he knew it, and the guys on the committee knew it. And for the President to come out after that and say, "Everything I saw there gave me more confidence in him," that solidified my notion that, "Oh, it's because what he expected of Gonzalez was" it's sort of like, do you remember in GOODFELLAS? When Henry Hill got arrested for the first time and Robert DeNiro met him at the courthouse and Henry Hill was really upset, 'cause he thought Robert DeNiro would be really mad at him. And DeNiro comes up to him and he gives him a $100 and he goes, "You got pinched. We all get pinched, but you did it right, you didn't say nothing."
BILL MOYERS: Gonzales said nothing.
JON STEWART: Right. And "you went up there and said nothing. You gave them no legal recourse against you, and you made yourself a smart man, a self-made man look like an utter pinhead on national television, and you did it for me."
(The transcript of the Bill Moyers interview)
Next: Whatever it is that comes next!
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Gap
My last book read was David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, which I completed whilst the Gadflies were on vacation a few weeks ago. Mitchell comes highly recommended from mtg these days, and BSG is certainly one of the best books I've read in quite a while. mtg, as everyone now knows, is a teacher and scholar of English, and her recommendation of this book came with a heavy emphasis on the brilliance of the author's use of language, which she mentioned roughly every other second while she was reading it.
I read the entire book and it did not once strike me that the language was beautiful. What struck me was that the book was awesome. All I noticed about the language it was written in was that it matched the narrator (who is a 13-year-old boy growing up in England in the early 80's). Anyway, I wasn't reading the language, I was reading the book.
These days I'm listening to the Shins' new album. It's brilliant--but much the way mtg reads a book through the language, I'm not really listening to the songs. I'm listening to the instrumentation: Fender panned right doubled with a synthesized marimba playing a simple scale, the bleed of the snare across drum mics, vocals with a vocoder effect, Leslie wheel and heavy compression on another guitar (Gibson?) doing arpeggios panned left, etc. In the same way that one can't look at a printed word without, microseconds later, reading it, and microseconds after that having Wernicke's Area translate it into meaning, I can't just hear a song as a song anymore. I miss this sometimes.
I've started going back and remixing the album I did in the month of February, and the first track appears at the top of the list to the left. For the n of you who end up hearing both versions (where n is an integer approximately equal to 4), you'll probably notice that the crunchy guitar sound has been replaced by a sort of dry echoy guitar, kind of an old-timey sound (it's spring reverb for those of you...uh...never mind. It's spring reverb, Sam), and that you can hear the vocals better. To me it sounds like a completely different song, except that to me it didn't really ever sound like a song at all, just a collection of instruments playing. I kind of have to take it on faith that there's a song in there.
Next: More "songs"!
I read the entire book and it did not once strike me that the language was beautiful. What struck me was that the book was awesome. All I noticed about the language it was written in was that it matched the narrator (who is a 13-year-old boy growing up in England in the early 80's). Anyway, I wasn't reading the language, I was reading the book.
These days I'm listening to the Shins' new album. It's brilliant--but much the way mtg reads a book through the language, I'm not really listening to the songs. I'm listening to the instrumentation: Fender panned right doubled with a synthesized marimba playing a simple scale, the bleed of the snare across drum mics, vocals with a vocoder effect, Leslie wheel and heavy compression on another guitar (Gibson?) doing arpeggios panned left, etc. In the same way that one can't look at a printed word without, microseconds later, reading it, and microseconds after that having Wernicke's Area translate it into meaning, I can't just hear a song as a song anymore. I miss this sometimes.
I've started going back and remixing the album I did in the month of February, and the first track appears at the top of the list to the left. For the n of you who end up hearing both versions (where n is an integer approximately equal to 4), you'll probably notice that the crunchy guitar sound has been replaced by a sort of dry echoy guitar, kind of an old-timey sound (it's spring reverb for those of you...uh...never mind. It's spring reverb, Sam), and that you can hear the vocals better. To me it sounds like a completely different song, except that to me it didn't really ever sound like a song at all, just a collection of instruments playing. I kind of have to take it on faith that there's a song in there.
Next: More "songs"!
Friday, March 30, 2007
Season Preview
With baseball season nigh, it's again time for some baseball blogging. Here are a couple of notes from the baseball offseason wire this past winter.
If you follow the Mariners at all (hi, Greg) you know that the trades listed above were widely reviled in the online Mariner fan community. The problem wasn't so much that they were terribly lopsided trades (they were), but that these trades revealed a fundamental difference between the business philosophy of Mariner management and that of sane people.
In the Mariners' division, the American League West, is a baseball team called the Oakland Athletics. Since 2000, the Athletics have finished first, second, first, first, second, second, and first in their division, and made the playoffs five out of seven seasons. In every one of these seasons they had a payroll that was roughly half that of the Seattle Mariners, and in the bottom half of payrolls across baseball. The Mariners, after making the playoffs in 2000 and 2001, have finished second, second, fourth, fourth, and fourth in the division. In business speak (and I am paraphrasing the words of another Mariner blogger), the Mariners have a competitor who year after year puts out a (frequently vastly) superior product at half the cost.
The way that the Athletics do this is a mystery to absolutely no one. Michael Lewis wrote a very popular book about it. This book rubbed a lot of people in baseball the wrong way because, in short, they thought it threatened their jobs. The baseball blog linked above is an excellent analysis of Moneyball as it relates to the Mariners vis-à-vis the Athletics, so I won't do that here.
If some things go right for the Mariners this season--if Felix Hernandez develops into an ace, Raul Ibañez keeps hitting, Adrian Beltré hits a little more, and the bullpen isn't quite as terrible as it looks like it might be--the Mariners could contend for a division title. However, if pretty much any one of those things doesn't happen or any starter gets injured, the Mariners are looking at finishing fourth out of four for the fourth year in a row. The problem with that is that the M's are sporting a payroll of $111 million, which is third highest in baseball behind the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox (both of whom, while prognosticators are universally picking the M's to finish last in their division, are expected to make the playoffs). What the Mariners did this offseason was to trade away young, cheap, actually or potentially good players for old, expensive, mediocre veterans who were once good (well, Horacio Ramirez was never good, so I don't know what they were thinking there). The Mariners have the third highest payroll in baseball and they're going to break camp with Rey Ordoñez on their roster, a player who's been out of baseball for two years, and proved over the course of over 3000 at bats that he simply can't hit Major League pitching. $111 million dollars ought to buy one hell of a baseball team, but the Mariners have taken it and bought a baseball team that will have to be lucky not to finish last in their division.
Next: More Frequent Blogging!
December 7, 2006
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. (AP) -- The Atlanta Braves swapped a starting pitcher for bullpen help Thursday, sending oft-injured lefty Horacio Ramirez to the Seattle Mariners for reliever Rafael Soriano.
December 13, 2006
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Second baseman Jose Vidro would be sent to the Seattle Mariners by the Washington Nationals for two prospects in a tentative trade that is pending physicals for all players involved, a person with knowledge of the deal told The Associated Press on Wednesday night.
If you follow the Mariners at all (hi, Greg) you know that the trades listed above were widely reviled in the online Mariner fan community. The problem wasn't so much that they were terribly lopsided trades (they were), but that these trades revealed a fundamental difference between the business philosophy of Mariner management and that of sane people.
In the Mariners' division, the American League West, is a baseball team called the Oakland Athletics. Since 2000, the Athletics have finished first, second, first, first, second, second, and first in their division, and made the playoffs five out of seven seasons. In every one of these seasons they had a payroll that was roughly half that of the Seattle Mariners, and in the bottom half of payrolls across baseball. The Mariners, after making the playoffs in 2000 and 2001, have finished second, second, fourth, fourth, and fourth in the division. In business speak (and I am paraphrasing the words of another Mariner blogger), the Mariners have a competitor who year after year puts out a (frequently vastly) superior product at half the cost.
The way that the Athletics do this is a mystery to absolutely no one. Michael Lewis wrote a very popular book about it. This book rubbed a lot of people in baseball the wrong way because, in short, they thought it threatened their jobs. The baseball blog linked above is an excellent analysis of Moneyball as it relates to the Mariners vis-à-vis the Athletics, so I won't do that here.
If some things go right for the Mariners this season--if Felix Hernandez develops into an ace, Raul Ibañez keeps hitting, Adrian Beltré hits a little more, and the bullpen isn't quite as terrible as it looks like it might be--the Mariners could contend for a division title. However, if pretty much any one of those things doesn't happen or any starter gets injured, the Mariners are looking at finishing fourth out of four for the fourth year in a row. The problem with that is that the M's are sporting a payroll of $111 million, which is third highest in baseball behind the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox (both of whom, while prognosticators are universally picking the M's to finish last in their division, are expected to make the playoffs). What the Mariners did this offseason was to trade away young, cheap, actually or potentially good players for old, expensive, mediocre veterans who were once good (well, Horacio Ramirez was never good, so I don't know what they were thinking there). The Mariners have the third highest payroll in baseball and they're going to break camp with Rey Ordoñez on their roster, a player who's been out of baseball for two years, and proved over the course of over 3000 at bats that he simply can't hit Major League pitching. $111 million dollars ought to buy one hell of a baseball team, but the Mariners have taken it and bought a baseball team that will have to be lucky not to finish last in their division.
Next: More Frequent Blogging!
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Variable Interpolation
Latest thing posted in the kitchen at work (above the coffee maker, asking people to make coffee if they take the last cup). Hilarious only to people as dorky as I:
Next: Humor for the masses!
Oh no! Only half a cup! Who did this to me? WTF? Life sucks!!! Why $DEITY Why?
Next: Humor for the masses!
Monday, March 05, 2007
be minus
teaching is a very very great job. very very great. however...
the problems with grading are myriad and insurmountable.
here is a brief list:
1) i suck at it. it takes me forever. then i feel guilty about how it takes me forever and how i suck at it and how if only i were better/smarter/cleverer/more focused/more efficient/of greater will, well surely it would take me only a third the time.
2) if ever it doesn't take that much time, i feel guilty about how it doesn't take that much time, and if i really cared, i'd spend more time at it.
3) this never happens.
4) if i don't feel guilty about its taking too much time and i don't feel guilty about its taking too little time, i feel guilty about the evidence it offers. clearly, i am not a very good teacher. if i were, my students would write better papers. at the least, they would do the things we spend hours and hours in class and in my office chatting about the relative wisdom of their doing. such as employing commas. or support for their arguments. grading is like those horrible exaggerated claims about sororities where they make you take off all your clothes and then they circle the places you need to lose weight. it is like being naked and someone circling the parts of me that are no good -- the part that taught about introductions and conclusions, the part that talked about integrating quotations, the part that offhandedly mentioned proofreading when clearly that part needed at least half a class session.
5) it does no good. it doesn't help people learn. it just upsets them.
6) seriously, the lowest possible grade one can reasonably give to a paper that isn't a total disaster is a B-. and i give lower grades than that. and then they freak out and scream and cry and get mad and sad and upset. and i do not like conflict. a C+ is not an ever so slightly above average paper. it is a pretty poor paper. then i feel guilty about grade inflation. then i spend an hour making margin notes and filling out a rubric and making lengthy end comments with praise as well as gentle suggestions. then i invite them to come chat with me about their grades in my office. then i feel guilty about how much time it takes. see #1.
7) all that said, there is really no way to communicate about writing in writing. ironic. at our favorite restaurant where, the other night, we were ordering cheese based on descriptions such as "earthy," "smooth," "balanced," and "barnyard" (by which they mean "smelly"), we were remarking to the waiter about how odd those descriptors are, and he said cheese is even harder to describe than wine. know what's harder yet to describe? why B papers aren't A papers. do students think, "hey, i got a B. B means good."? no. they think, "this paper is good, so why the hell isn't it an A?" one therefore needs must spend a lot of time answering this very question rather than going out to dinner for smelly cheese.
8) it is boring.
9) it is cold. especially when your husband turns off the heat so he can record music without also recording the blower.
10) oh the many many many other things i could be doing with my time which would be more productive or more fun or more entertaining.
11) blogging, however, is not one. i am so totally procrastinating right now. odds are, well, one that you can guess what i should be doing instead.
-- mtg (obviously)
the problems with grading are myriad and insurmountable.
here is a brief list:
1) i suck at it. it takes me forever. then i feel guilty about how it takes me forever and how i suck at it and how if only i were better/smarter/cleverer/more focused/more efficient/of greater will, well surely it would take me only a third the time.
2) if ever it doesn't take that much time, i feel guilty about how it doesn't take that much time, and if i really cared, i'd spend more time at it.
3) this never happens.
4) if i don't feel guilty about its taking too much time and i don't feel guilty about its taking too little time, i feel guilty about the evidence it offers. clearly, i am not a very good teacher. if i were, my students would write better papers. at the least, they would do the things we spend hours and hours in class and in my office chatting about the relative wisdom of their doing. such as employing commas. or support for their arguments. grading is like those horrible exaggerated claims about sororities where they make you take off all your clothes and then they circle the places you need to lose weight. it is like being naked and someone circling the parts of me that are no good -- the part that taught about introductions and conclusions, the part that talked about integrating quotations, the part that offhandedly mentioned proofreading when clearly that part needed at least half a class session.
5) it does no good. it doesn't help people learn. it just upsets them.
6) seriously, the lowest possible grade one can reasonably give to a paper that isn't a total disaster is a B-. and i give lower grades than that. and then they freak out and scream and cry and get mad and sad and upset. and i do not like conflict. a C+ is not an ever so slightly above average paper. it is a pretty poor paper. then i feel guilty about grade inflation. then i spend an hour making margin notes and filling out a rubric and making lengthy end comments with praise as well as gentle suggestions. then i invite them to come chat with me about their grades in my office. then i feel guilty about how much time it takes. see #1.
7) all that said, there is really no way to communicate about writing in writing. ironic. at our favorite restaurant where, the other night, we were ordering cheese based on descriptions such as "earthy," "smooth," "balanced," and "barnyard" (by which they mean "smelly"), we were remarking to the waiter about how odd those descriptors are, and he said cheese is even harder to describe than wine. know what's harder yet to describe? why B papers aren't A papers. do students think, "hey, i got a B. B means good."? no. they think, "this paper is good, so why the hell isn't it an A?" one therefore needs must spend a lot of time answering this very question rather than going out to dinner for smelly cheese.
8) it is boring.
9) it is cold. especially when your husband turns off the heat so he can record music without also recording the blower.
10) oh the many many many other things i could be doing with my time which would be more productive or more fun or more entertaining.
11) blogging, however, is not one. i am so totally procrastinating right now. odds are, well, one that you can guess what i should be doing instead.
-- mtg (obviously)
The L.P.
As roughly half of you know, I spent much of my free time in February engaging in the RPM Challenge, which is the musical equivalent of National Write A Novel month. Thursday last being the deadline for having the thing postmarked, I burned the 11 songs I recorded in the month in their somewhat raw state, mocked up some liner notes, and dumped the thing in the mail.
I was working off a couple of themes for this project: it's a collection of songs, under my new Nom D'Art The Calculus Affair, that don't really fit my usual musical idiom (for the, you know, four of you out there who know what my usual musical idiom is), and it's also a musical tribute to a guitar: a 1955-ish hollow-body Gibson that I purchased a couple of years ago from Fronesis Père. I also played drums for the first time, which is a) harder than you think it's going to be, and b) way fun.
The official release party for RPM Challenge albums is March 30th, in a variety of locations, and at that time they'll stream all the albums from their website. I, on the other hand, have released the thing, mistakes and rushed mixing and all, here, with cover art/liner notes here. If you're in a singles frame of mind, people so far seem to be liking these:
Alexandr (You Forgot To Be In Time)
The Man Who Used To Hunt Cougars For Bounty
(long song titles are all the rage these days, I hear). I plan to eventually revisit and clean up the songs and post them to my site on MacIdol.com (which is semi-officially how I release music these days), but who knows when that will ever happen. One other small piece of musical news from Calculus Affair central is that Men Of Luggage, the song I posted here a couple of months back, is to be featured on a compilation put out by these folks, an organization that supports Heifer International (a favorite charity of the Gadflies) via music. I have no idea how certain this album is to ever appear in stores near you, but you'll hear about it here first if and when it does. In the meantime, a somewhat improved mix of the song appears from the speaker button on the MacIdol page linked above.
Next: Self-aggrandizement, but less blatant!
I was working off a couple of themes for this project: it's a collection of songs, under my new Nom D'Art The Calculus Affair, that don't really fit my usual musical idiom (for the, you know, four of you out there who know what my usual musical idiom is), and it's also a musical tribute to a guitar: a 1955-ish hollow-body Gibson that I purchased a couple of years ago from Fronesis Père. I also played drums for the first time, which is a) harder than you think it's going to be, and b) way fun.
The official release party for RPM Challenge albums is March 30th, in a variety of locations, and at that time they'll stream all the albums from their website. I, on the other hand, have released the thing, mistakes and rushed mixing and all, here, with cover art/liner notes here. If you're in a singles frame of mind, people so far seem to be liking these:
Alexandr (You Forgot To Be In Time)
The Man Who Used To Hunt Cougars For Bounty
(long song titles are all the rage these days, I hear). I plan to eventually revisit and clean up the songs and post them to my site on MacIdol.com (which is semi-officially how I release music these days), but who knows when that will ever happen. One other small piece of musical news from Calculus Affair central is that Men Of Luggage, the song I posted here a couple of months back, is to be featured on a compilation put out by these folks, an organization that supports Heifer International (a favorite charity of the Gadflies) via music. I have no idea how certain this album is to ever appear in stores near you, but you'll hear about it here first if and when it does. In the meantime, a somewhat improved mix of the song appears from the speaker button on the MacIdol page linked above.
Next: Self-aggrandizement, but less blatant!
Saturday, February 10, 2007
The Browser is the Web Service
Hard to imagine, I know, but there are actually other companies working on web services besides the Seattle-based e-commerce giant for which I work. And, in a violent betrayal of all business sense, today I'm hyping one of them: Yahoo! Pipes. The internets, as we all know, are not a dump truck. They are a series of tubes, and Pipes allows you to connect those tubes in whatever ways you might wish. Then it allows you to sort, edit, filter, &cetera them, and finally publish the results. What causes it to pretty much kick the ass of the web service world to this point is this: you don't have to be a software developer to use it. It's got a nifty little drag and drop UI; you type RSS URLs into text boxes, and connect those boxes into other boxes which perform operations like match text in entries or sort those entries by publication date. Here, for instance, is the UI for the blog aggregator I constructed. And the published results are here: The Hermeneutic Blog Circle Aggregator.
This is an unusually short post for me, so as an added bonus, here is an aggregated list of alternate titles I considered for this post:
This is an unusually short post for me, so as an added bonus, here is an aggregated list of alternate titles I considered for this post:
- The Web is The Service
- The RSS Feed is The Message
- The Tubes Are The Dump Truck
- The Not Buffy is The Veronica Mars
- The Blog is The Unblog
- La Ceci N'est Pas Une Pipe est Une Pipe
- The Stoat is The Potato
- The This List is The Thing That Is Not That Funny
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Chinese Panic Room
I seem to be writing what is largely a philosophy blog these days. This is problematic insofar as I have read nearly no philosophy in my life. The list pretty much begins and ends with Plato. As such, I tend to run roughshod over concepts and thought experiments that other people have already written, published, and forgotten about; I instead remain blissfully ignorant of the intellectual plagarism I may or may not be committing. I plan to solve this problem by majoring in Philosophy in my next life, though that will of course create several other problems, such how I'm going to feed myself in that life (That was not a dig at Sam. I was taking the piss out of Socrates there. Ha ha Socrates. You've totally been punked). Fortunately, I am friends with people who have read Philosophy, and they, intentionally or un-, draw my attention to books, ideas, or thought experiments that I have never otherwise heard of. Here is the most recent example; Periapse's comment (What? You haven't read it yet? Sadly, we can now no longer be friends) led me to Searle's thought experiment The Chinese Room, about which I will blog, starting now.
The Chinese Room is an argument that humans are not merely computational machines; it posits that a computer can act human (pass the Turing Test, in AI-speak) without either being conscious or having an understanding of meaning in a human-like way. It goes like this: there's a room with a computer terminal on the outside. The terminal is capable of carrying on a conversation in Chinese, such that a Chinese speaker can walk up to it, start typing, and the terminal will be able to carry on a conversation in Chinese with that person. The Chinese speaker thinks, "Aha! An artificially intelligent computer that speaks Chinese! How amazing!" Unbeknownst to the speaker, however, is that inside the room is Searle, sitting at another terminal with an elaborate rulebook in his hand. When someone comes up to the terminal and starts typing, he consults his rulebook, and types back whatever it tells him. He doesn't speak Chinese or understand what he's typing, nor does the rulebook define anything for him--he just types back the symbols that correspond to the symbols he receives, thereby carrying on a perfect conversation without ever understanding what he's saying.
It so happens that after college I won a Parshull-Dimm scholarship and went to the remote island chain of Chai-Neesrüm to study an isolated tribe of Pacific Islanders. The Chais and the Neesrüms are unique in that they communicate with very subtle changes in their facial expressions, the same type you make unconsciously while speaking--raising the brow, flexing the jaw muscles, softening the eyes, and so on. In the process of doing this, they make sounds with their vocal chords, but this is completely superfluous to their communication with each other, and they're only dimly aware that they do it--it's just a strange byproduct of their facial movements, and for some reason they can't seem to stop doing it. What I discovered as soon as I arrived in Chai-Neesrüm is that the sounds they make perfectly resemble spoken English. I stepped off the plane and the matriarch of the village came up to me, and while subtly lowering her eyes and shifting her chin to the left, voiced a series of sounds which sounded identical to the English phrase, "Dude! You rock like Slayer!" I said, "Uh...Thanks!" but of course without realizing it raised my eyebrow and turned the corners of my mouth upwards. This, of course, meant something totally different to her than it did to me, and...let's just say that I spent the next three months thinking that we were discussing Star Trek, The Next Generation, while they thought I was giving them an incredibly detailed, narrative-driven recipe for Gazpacho. Needless to say, the Parshull-Dimm committee absolutely ate up my report and the subsequent fame in anthropological circles has sustained me to this day.
Being that, to review, I've read only the Philosophical equivalent of Fun With Dick And Jane, I'm sure somebody has made the critique of The Chinese Room that I'm about to make--just because it's not on the Wiki doesn't mean somebody hasn't written, published, and forgotten about it already. But here it is anyway: Searle, in this case the person sitting inside the Chinese Room doing the translation, is a conscious, Strongly (un-)Artificially Intelligent entity. The Chinese Room doesn't prove that he isn't, it proves that this intelligence doesn't derive from its ability (or lack of ability) to understand written Chinese. Humans, as it happens, do all manner of tasks to which we don't attach, or don't agree on, special imbued meaning. We respond to light, pain, pressure, sound and/or temperature in extremely elaborate and varied ways. We respond to food by breaking it down and digesting it. We respond to air by taking it into our bodies, absorbing the oxygen in it, replacing it with carbon dioxide, and expelling it again. The shared meaning or lack thereof of these acts do not define the strong AI we happen to also possess. I wrote the above example mostly to amuse people who otherwise have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about at this point, but also to hopefully make this idea a little more clear. Each side in the Chai-Neesrüm dialog could reasonably conclude that the other was a fluent speaker of his or her dialect, but the entire time neither party understood the meaning the other was taking from the "conversation." Each side instead interpreted the byproducts of the other's communication--byproducts which we could reasonably conclude were entirely mechanical, entirely unconscious--as having meaning. You can argue all day about whether "meaning" is really "exchanged" in this conversation, but that's not the interesting point. The interesting point is both parties are still Strong AIs, and "meaning" and "understanding" have no bearing on this point.
This seems to me to have all sorts of interesting ramifications not just for AI but for our own non-artificial intelligence, especially as to where that intelligence "resides," so to speak. You're already completely confused, though, so I'll leave that until the next post.
Next: Confusion is nothing new!
The Chinese Room is an argument that humans are not merely computational machines; it posits that a computer can act human (pass the Turing Test, in AI-speak) without either being conscious or having an understanding of meaning in a human-like way. It goes like this: there's a room with a computer terminal on the outside. The terminal is capable of carrying on a conversation in Chinese, such that a Chinese speaker can walk up to it, start typing, and the terminal will be able to carry on a conversation in Chinese with that person. The Chinese speaker thinks, "Aha! An artificially intelligent computer that speaks Chinese! How amazing!" Unbeknownst to the speaker, however, is that inside the room is Searle, sitting at another terminal with an elaborate rulebook in his hand. When someone comes up to the terminal and starts typing, he consults his rulebook, and types back whatever it tells him. He doesn't speak Chinese or understand what he's typing, nor does the rulebook define anything for him--he just types back the symbols that correspond to the symbols he receives, thereby carrying on a perfect conversation without ever understanding what he's saying.
It so happens that after college I won a Parshull-Dimm scholarship and went to the remote island chain of Chai-Neesrüm to study an isolated tribe of Pacific Islanders. The Chais and the Neesrüms are unique in that they communicate with very subtle changes in their facial expressions, the same type you make unconsciously while speaking--raising the brow, flexing the jaw muscles, softening the eyes, and so on. In the process of doing this, they make sounds with their vocal chords, but this is completely superfluous to their communication with each other, and they're only dimly aware that they do it--it's just a strange byproduct of their facial movements, and for some reason they can't seem to stop doing it. What I discovered as soon as I arrived in Chai-Neesrüm is that the sounds they make perfectly resemble spoken English. I stepped off the plane and the matriarch of the village came up to me, and while subtly lowering her eyes and shifting her chin to the left, voiced a series of sounds which sounded identical to the English phrase, "Dude! You rock like Slayer!" I said, "Uh...Thanks!" but of course without realizing it raised my eyebrow and turned the corners of my mouth upwards. This, of course, meant something totally different to her than it did to me, and...let's just say that I spent the next three months thinking that we were discussing Star Trek, The Next Generation, while they thought I was giving them an incredibly detailed, narrative-driven recipe for Gazpacho. Needless to say, the Parshull-Dimm committee absolutely ate up my report and the subsequent fame in anthropological circles has sustained me to this day.
Being that, to review, I've read only the Philosophical equivalent of Fun With Dick And Jane, I'm sure somebody has made the critique of The Chinese Room that I'm about to make--just because it's not on the Wiki doesn't mean somebody hasn't written, published, and forgotten about it already. But here it is anyway: Searle, in this case the person sitting inside the Chinese Room doing the translation, is a conscious, Strongly (un-)Artificially Intelligent entity. The Chinese Room doesn't prove that he isn't, it proves that this intelligence doesn't derive from its ability (or lack of ability) to understand written Chinese. Humans, as it happens, do all manner of tasks to which we don't attach, or don't agree on, special imbued meaning. We respond to light, pain, pressure, sound and/or temperature in extremely elaborate and varied ways. We respond to food by breaking it down and digesting it. We respond to air by taking it into our bodies, absorbing the oxygen in it, replacing it with carbon dioxide, and expelling it again. The shared meaning or lack thereof of these acts do not define the strong AI we happen to also possess. I wrote the above example mostly to amuse people who otherwise have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about at this point, but also to hopefully make this idea a little more clear. Each side in the Chai-Neesrüm dialog could reasonably conclude that the other was a fluent speaker of his or her dialect, but the entire time neither party understood the meaning the other was taking from the "conversation." Each side instead interpreted the byproducts of the other's communication--byproducts which we could reasonably conclude were entirely mechanical, entirely unconscious--as having meaning. You can argue all day about whether "meaning" is really "exchanged" in this conversation, but that's not the interesting point. The interesting point is both parties are still Strong AIs, and "meaning" and "understanding" have no bearing on this point.
This seems to me to have all sorts of interesting ramifications not just for AI but for our own non-artificial intelligence, especially as to where that intelligence "resides," so to speak. You're already completely confused, though, so I'll leave that until the next post.
Next: Confusion is nothing new!
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Ghost in the Machine, Schmost in the Machine
I flagged this article in Slate, a discussion on consciousness with a Buddhist, a couple of months ago and then never blogged about it ("OaO: We may not be timely, but at least we're unreadably opaque"TM). Anyway, the interviewee argues for exploring the origins of consciousness outside of the actual physical workings of the brain, and attempts to identify methods for experimentally testing this hypothesis.
I come down pretty solidly on the side of consciousness being neither more nor less than the physical workings of the brain, if only because otherwise I'm pretty sure The First Law of Thermodynamics gets violated (though people lots smarter than I don't think this is a problem for Cartesian Dualism, so who knows). But it also struck me, reading the linked article above, that this proposition should be testable as well. If human consciousness derives from the firing of neurons and chemical signals sent back and forth between emitters and receptors, then what's so special about this particular collection of coordinated automata that consciousness derives from it? Shouldn't we therefore expect consciousnesses to arise from any, or at least other, sufficiently complex collection(s) of coordinated automata? Here's that question stated another way: is an anthill conscious?
I argue pretty much constantly that we, as conscious beings, have a somewhat over-inflated sense of what it actually means to be conscious (well, not you of course. I happen to know that you are extremely humble about your own consciousness. But other people. They're totally arrogant jackasses about it. They're all like, "Look at me, I'm all conscious and shit, blah blah me me blah"). The one sentence version: consciousness is the sum of 4 billion years of mistakes made by evolution, now available to you in a convenient, fast acting brain. As much agency as you give, e.g. a flower in "deciding" to use a bee to spread its genes is a much agency as you're giving yourself in your "decision" as to what to have for lunch today (fine, that was two sentences).
This view of consciousness makes you and I seem like zombies, and it's probably the most common classical argument for Cartesian Dualism. If all we are is that series of neural connections, then where does the meta- come from? How can it be that a rush of chemicals secreted from somewhere makes me feel bad? How is it that I can think about the way that I think? How did I just do that internal diagnostic to make sure I'm not a zombie (it came back negative, by the way. I am not a zombie)? Obviously I'm not going to be able to answer this point in a blog post, being that's it's an argument as old as humanity, but I do propose that it is a testable proposition, and that the answer to it is the same as the answer to the question, "is an anthill conscious?"
An anthill is a co-operating amalgam of automata, just like a brain. An individual ant is nigh literally as dumb as a post, but it can dig, look for food, and leave or follow a chemical trail. An anthill will respond to stimulus if you step on it or start having a picnic nearby. So the operative question is, how does the anthill feel? If you want to follow this proposition, "networks form consciousness," down the rabbit hole, there are all manner of other networks to consider: beehives, colonies of bacteria, actual computer networks, and of course humanity itself. Further down this rabbit hole is the idea that in addition to your own consciousness, you're the equivalent of a neuron in the network of the consciousness of collective humanity. Further still, well, how would you get a message out to that consciousness that you've become aware of your part in it? Further still...well, I start to get lost, myself.
Next: Further!
I come down pretty solidly on the side of consciousness being neither more nor less than the physical workings of the brain, if only because otherwise I'm pretty sure The First Law of Thermodynamics gets violated (though people lots smarter than I don't think this is a problem for Cartesian Dualism, so who knows). But it also struck me, reading the linked article above, that this proposition should be testable as well. If human consciousness derives from the firing of neurons and chemical signals sent back and forth between emitters and receptors, then what's so special about this particular collection of coordinated automata that consciousness derives from it? Shouldn't we therefore expect consciousnesses to arise from any, or at least other, sufficiently complex collection(s) of coordinated automata? Here's that question stated another way: is an anthill conscious?
I argue pretty much constantly that we, as conscious beings, have a somewhat over-inflated sense of what it actually means to be conscious (well, not you of course. I happen to know that you are extremely humble about your own consciousness. But other people. They're totally arrogant jackasses about it. They're all like, "Look at me, I'm all conscious and shit, blah blah me me blah"). The one sentence version: consciousness is the sum of 4 billion years of mistakes made by evolution, now available to you in a convenient, fast acting brain. As much agency as you give, e.g. a flower in "deciding" to use a bee to spread its genes is a much agency as you're giving yourself in your "decision" as to what to have for lunch today (fine, that was two sentences).
This view of consciousness makes you and I seem like zombies, and it's probably the most common classical argument for Cartesian Dualism. If all we are is that series of neural connections, then where does the meta- come from? How can it be that a rush of chemicals secreted from somewhere makes me feel bad? How is it that I can think about the way that I think? How did I just do that internal diagnostic to make sure I'm not a zombie (it came back negative, by the way. I am not a zombie)? Obviously I'm not going to be able to answer this point in a blog post, being that's it's an argument as old as humanity, but I do propose that it is a testable proposition, and that the answer to it is the same as the answer to the question, "is an anthill conscious?"
An anthill is a co-operating amalgam of automata, just like a brain. An individual ant is nigh literally as dumb as a post, but it can dig, look for food, and leave or follow a chemical trail. An anthill will respond to stimulus if you step on it or start having a picnic nearby. So the operative question is, how does the anthill feel? If you want to follow this proposition, "networks form consciousness," down the rabbit hole, there are all manner of other networks to consider: beehives, colonies of bacteria, actual computer networks, and of course humanity itself. Further down this rabbit hole is the idea that in addition to your own consciousness, you're the equivalent of a neuron in the network of the consciousness of collective humanity. Further still, well, how would you get a message out to that consciousness that you've become aware of your part in it? Further still...well, I start to get lost, myself.
Next: Further!
Thursday, January 11, 2007
The Market Is Open
I am pleased to announce the newest member of the Hermeneutic Blog Circle, Slouching Towards Agalmia. STA was opened by a former manager of mine now trading under the name Periapse, of whom I have previously blogged, and whom I have long hoped would start blogging. STA is to be manned, Freedom From Blog style, by multiple authors, one whom is...wait for it...me. Together, hopefully, we will help you make sense of the much.
Next: More is more!
Next: More is more!
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Constructing Logical Fallacies for Fun And Profit
The Anthropic Principle is about as Odds-Are-One-y as anything outside this blog gets. We observe that there is life in the universe, ergo the universe must have evolved such that it can support life. In the possible universes where this didn't happen, nobody is hanging around the coffee shop on the corner discussing such things (because of course in universes whose physical laws don't support life, they don't drink coffee. They drink Post-Galactic, Black Hole-Warmed Plasma Beverage. Duh). You might conclude that this is the logical end of the line: there is no point in futher discussing the meaning of us being here versus being not here, because in only one of those cases can there be any discussion of any kind (this is certainly the viewpoint held and frequently advocated by those of us here at OaO). But there are still interesting questions one could ask about what We being Here Now might signify.
If Earth were the only planet one were aware of, one might reasonably wonder what the odds were that this one planet happened to exist at a particular distance from a middle-aged Type-G star such that water could exist in liquid form (yes, I know the odds of this are one, as it has already happened. Be with me in this other, non-OaO place for a second...). This being the popular scientific view for most of the history of man, a reasonable scholar operating under these a prioris might have looked at them and made this seemingly entirely logical inference: "I can think of two explanations for the existence of this planet which can support life. Either it was blind luck or it's the action of an unseen demiurge. The former is incredibly unlikely, therefore by strict laws of probability, it has to be the latter."
Actually, there was a third explanation: the universe is filled with an astronomically large number of stars, an astronomically large number of planets, and has been around for 13.7 billion years or so, so the appearance of at least one planet that has liquid water is not that surprising. The more perceptive among you will notice that the above argument looks an awful lot like an application of Occam's Razor. You might therefore conclude that the flaw in its reasoning is that there was at least one possible explanation our scholar didn't think of. But this is not why the argument is flawed.
We can summarize the logic behind the inference above like this:
As I've learned from The Trouble With Physics, this is of interest to current scientific thinking because they're now asking the same question about the universe. Given that we only observe one universe, it seems rather unlikely that it would be one with physical laws that allowed the formation of stars, galaxies, and planets. Having been fooled the first time around, the popular conclusion is that therefore there must be a multitude of 'verses, all with different physical laws, that can't be detected by current means. It's a good metaphor for the Earth being just one of many planets. But that's the only argument in its favor: again, the argument for it falls into the the same logical hole--the seeming incredible unlikelihood of the only universe we observe supporting intelligent life does not create any likelihood of many unseen others. There's no logical inference that would say that it does.
Next: The Fun and Profit part!
If Earth were the only planet one were aware of, one might reasonably wonder what the odds were that this one planet happened to exist at a particular distance from a middle-aged Type-G star such that water could exist in liquid form (yes, I know the odds of this are one, as it has already happened. Be with me in this other, non-OaO place for a second...). This being the popular scientific view for most of the history of man, a reasonable scholar operating under these a prioris might have looked at them and made this seemingly entirely logical inference: "I can think of two explanations for the existence of this planet which can support life. Either it was blind luck or it's the action of an unseen demiurge. The former is incredibly unlikely, therefore by strict laws of probability, it has to be the latter."
Actually, there was a third explanation: the universe is filled with an astronomically large number of stars, an astronomically large number of planets, and has been around for 13.7 billion years or so, so the appearance of at least one planet that has liquid water is not that surprising. The more perceptive among you will notice that the above argument looks an awful lot like an application of Occam's Razor. You might therefore conclude that the flaw in its reasoning is that there was at least one possible explanation our scholar didn't think of. But this is not why the argument is flawed.
We can summarize the logic behind the inference above like this:
- I observe phenomenon X.
- Phenomenon X has two possible explanations: E1, which has probability P1 of occurring, and E2 which has probability P2 of occurring.
- P1 is much lower than P2, therefore E2 is the more likely explanation for X.
As I've learned from The Trouble With Physics, this is of interest to current scientific thinking because they're now asking the same question about the universe. Given that we only observe one universe, it seems rather unlikely that it would be one with physical laws that allowed the formation of stars, galaxies, and planets. Having been fooled the first time around, the popular conclusion is that therefore there must be a multitude of 'verses, all with different physical laws, that can't be detected by current means. It's a good metaphor for the Earth being just one of many planets. But that's the only argument in its favor: again, the argument for it falls into the the same logical hole--the seeming incredible unlikelihood of the only universe we observe supporting intelligent life does not create any likelihood of many unseen others. There's no logical inference that would say that it does.
Next: The Fun and Profit part!
Friday, December 15, 2006
The Single
A couple of months back Salon held a song contest from their music blog. Thinking there would never be a better demographic upon which to inflict my music than Salon readers, I took Mrs. Transient Gadfly's favorite song of mine and produced the living crap out of it. I was, at the time I entered it, quite proud of my creation and full of, you know, whatever it is that people who are rock stars in their own minds are full of. Then the contest actually happened, and I neither made the finals, nor the honorable mentions, nor was there any acknowledgment that I existed on the earth or produced music from its surface--and, to make the implied rejection all the more clear, Salon featured some fairly terrible songs along the way (most of them were great, but some of them really weren't). It turned out I had produced a song that was, as far as the music bloggers at Salon were concerned, neither particularly good, nor particularly bad, nor in any way notable. It was apparently just not worthy of mention.
I understand being a professional musician to be an incredibly hard, crappy way to make your living--record labels want to screw you, promoters don't want to pay you, you live in hotel rooms, generally don't make very much money (with, obviously, a handful of very famous exceptions), and have to live in the perpetual hope that the next song or next album is going to be the one that puts you over the top. That doesn't mean I haven't lived my entire adolescent-to-adult life secretly longing to be one. It just means that I haven't ever gone after it with any amount of fervor that I couldn't later dismiss with a shrug of the shoulders saying, "oh well, I didn't really want that anyway."
I did kind of want it. A little bit.
Men Of Luggage (4:12)
(if this link doesn't work for you, try our Artist's Page on MacIdol.com)
Next: Man's inhumanity to Man!
I understand being a professional musician to be an incredibly hard, crappy way to make your living--record labels want to screw you, promoters don't want to pay you, you live in hotel rooms, generally don't make very much money (with, obviously, a handful of very famous exceptions), and have to live in the perpetual hope that the next song or next album is going to be the one that puts you over the top. That doesn't mean I haven't lived my entire adolescent-to-adult life secretly longing to be one. It just means that I haven't ever gone after it with any amount of fervor that I couldn't later dismiss with a shrug of the shoulders saying, "oh well, I didn't really want that anyway."
I did kind of want it. A little bit.
Men Of Luggage (4:12)
(if this link doesn't work for you, try our Artist's Page on MacIdol.com)
Next: Man's inhumanity to Man!
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
A Brief Missive
Dear Jim Rutz,
Eating Soy did not make you gay. You're. Just. Gay. Totally, totally, gay.
Regards,
T.G.
(with a nod to broadsheet).
Next: An exposé on textured vegetable protein!
Eating Soy did not make you gay. You're. Just. Gay. Totally, totally, gay.
Regards,
T.G.
(with a nod to broadsheet).
Next: An exposé on textured vegetable protein!
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Applied Mathematics
A good article in about the perils of mass-screenings (for security, disease, etc.) appears in Slate today. It points out the proverbial sharpness of the other edge of the Sword of Inference (please don't strain yourself going after that metaphor. It's not worth it). There are perils trying to make discrete inferences based on larger trends and there are perils trying to apply a trend as a discrete principle to large sets of data.
I took one applied math course in college, and in it I learned a bunch of things I have never since applied to anything, anywhere, ever. I really liked the professor, though; his name was Dr. Elderkin and he had these enormous hands that he would flap open and closed while he was lecturing, creating gale force winds that blew chalk dust around the room. Mrs. T.G. recently pointed out that I do this myself sometimes, so apparently the habit had quite an effect on me.
One of the useful things I learned from Dr. Elderkin is why screening for, e.g., diseases across populations is counter-productive and makes for bad social policy. Here's an example of the painfully stretched metaphor I tried to construct above.
Next: inference vis à vis implication!
I took one applied math course in college, and in it I learned a bunch of things I have never since applied to anything, anywhere, ever. I really liked the professor, though; his name was Dr. Elderkin and he had these enormous hands that he would flap open and closed while he was lecturing, creating gale force winds that blew chalk dust around the room. Mrs. T.G. recently pointed out that I do this myself sometimes, so apparently the habit had quite an effect on me.
One of the useful things I learned from Dr. Elderkin is why screening for, e.g., diseases across populations is counter-productive and makes for bad social policy. Here's an example of the painfully stretched metaphor I tried to construct above.
- Say the test for HIV antibodies in the blood test correctly identifies the presence of the antibodies 99% of the time, and 99% of the time it will correctly tell an uninfected person that he or she is not infected. Let's further guess that one million people in the US are infected with HIV (I'm making all these numbers up, but they're reasonably close to the actual numbers).
- We test all adults--say, 100 million people, for HIV, and again we'll estimate that 1 million people are actually HIV positive.
- The test is 99% effective, so (.99 * 1,000,000 = ) 990,000 HIV positive people learn that they are HIV positive. But it also gives a false positive 1% of the time, so of the remaining population, (.01 * 99,000,000 = ) 990,000 are given false positive diagnoses. That's 1,980,000 positive results, half of which are wrong.
- Your HIV test, which is quite accurate for the individual, turns out to be only 50% accurate across an entire population.
Next: inference vis à vis implication!
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
This Post Is Not About Veronica Mars
Here is something about which the only response I can muster is: holy, holy God, there are stupid people in the world, and they're all apparently in government. The Missouri State legislature decreed that the reason we have a problem with illegal immigrants coming and working in the US is that we have aborted some 80,000 potential Missourians. Apparently right now these potential humans would be in their working prime, eager to snap up those positions in abbatoirs and rendering plants that pay three dollars an hour with no health insurance. In addition, unlike those foreign illegals, these red-blooded Hypothetical Americans would be patriotic and not demand services of any kind for themselves or their myriad hypothetical children.
If the a prioris of the conservatives on the panel that produced this report (the panel had ten Republicans, all of whom signed the report, and six Democrats who a) didn't, and b) were apparently extremely embarrassed about its conclusions) weren't transparent enough (Abortion is bad! Illegal immigration is bad! If only there were some way we could unify the two...), they also managed to throw in there that "liberal social welfare policies" are to blame for Americans in general not working, and that all income taxes should be abolished in favor of sales taxes. Missouri: Punishing the Poor for Being Poor Since 1821.
I really can't, you know, possibly address all the flawed social policy here. Nor could I possibly ever cover all the fallacious logic that this one piece of policy analysis manages to stir up. And realistically I don't expect everyone to be able to root out flaws when trying to construct arguments that attempt to assign cause to observed phenomena by positing historical counter-factuals--those arguments are difficult at best. But Mother of God, who on Earth could possibly think that the source of America's social ills is that IT DOESN'T HAVE ENOUGH POOR PEOPLE?
</rant>
Next: Veronica Mars: The Nancy Drew of historical counter-factuals?
If the a prioris of the conservatives on the panel that produced this report (the panel had ten Republicans, all of whom signed the report, and six Democrats who a) didn't, and b) were apparently extremely embarrassed about its conclusions) weren't transparent enough (Abortion is bad! Illegal immigration is bad! If only there were some way we could unify the two...), they also managed to throw in there that "liberal social welfare policies" are to blame for Americans in general not working, and that all income taxes should be abolished in favor of sales taxes. Missouri: Punishing the Poor for Being Poor Since 1821.
I really can't, you know, possibly address all the flawed social policy here. Nor could I possibly ever cover all the fallacious logic that this one piece of policy analysis manages to stir up. And realistically I don't expect everyone to be able to root out flaws when trying to construct arguments that attempt to assign cause to observed phenomena by positing historical counter-factuals--those arguments are difficult at best. But Mother of God, who on Earth could possibly think that the source of America's social ills is that IT DOESN'T HAVE ENOUGH POOR PEOPLE?
</rant>
Next: Veronica Mars: The Nancy Drew of historical counter-factuals?
Sunday, November 12, 2006
The Ur Web 2.0 Post
In the comments of Tarn's blog, Dan asks apropos of nearly nothing, what Amazon EC2 is. While on the one hand, I'm slightly stunned that anybody outside a very small collective of developers has heard of Amazon EC2, Dan also says that he doesn't really understand what I talk about when I talk about Web Services. This is always true of everything I write about. But I'll try again anyway.
Most of the populace that throws around the term "Web 2.0" tends to mean things like YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, and Blogger--things where the content is user-generated. This ilk of websites, while being "new" in some sense, has never struck me as a particular innovation in and of themselves (though the technology that runs them, in many cases, is). To me, Web 2.0 is the process of opening up the platforms on which the web is built, so that the software that powers applications that have heretofore only existed in the browser can be used everywhere--the desktop, your mobile devices, your television, and so on.
When I explain what a web service is at parties, I use the following example. If you, a person, want to know some piece of information about any book out there, you'd go to your browser and surf to Amazon.com and look it up. There you'll find the cover image, all the bibliographic information, some reviews, etc. Now say you're a computer program and you want that same information about a book (because, e.g., you're a library program and you want to be able to display information about a book when somebody scans the barcode). You, alas, do not know how to use a web browser. You could be programmed to read web pages, but web pages come in all sorts of formats and change all the time, and computer programs have to be taught to read each one individually, because they're just that stupid sometimes. So web services are like web pages for software applications--sets of functions that they can call in order to get information that will be returned in a format that they, the software applications, will understand. In the example I just gave, the web service would have a function that, when you send it a book's ISBN, returns a formatted set of information about that book, with its title, author, number of pages, and so on, in a format that the software has been programmed to understand.
Amazon has a free web service called ECS that does exactly what I've just described, as well as many other things. You can sign up for it (and encounter some of my handiwork) here. Then you too could write software applications that are web-integrated and feature-rich and blah blah blah Web 2.0 blah. You are, in fact, using web services all the time--most of the widgets in OSX Dashboard, for instance, make web service calls to get their information. iTunes, when you pop in a CD, is querying a webservice to figure out what album it is so that it can populate the album information.
The nice thing about web services is that they allow you (for a definition of the word "you" that involves "you" being a "software developer") to use the software that Amazon wrote in more ways than just browsing their web site. ECS, for instance, allows you to use their shopping cart software, so that if you're running your own e-commerce website, you can use Amazon's shopping cart instead of writing your own (if written by a more business-oriented person, that sentence would have contained the word "leverage," and probably "synergy," and "core competencies," but I would have had to shoot myself in the head afterwards). The point is, Amazon sells things. They started out with books, then music, then pretty much everything that was a thing, and now they're selling (or in some cases, just giving away) the use of the software that they wrote to sell those things in the first place.
Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 are the next phase of that: selling something that Amazon has in excess most of the year (hard drive space and server time--Amazon has to have enough hardware on hand to run the website at Christmas when we get vastly more traffic, but the rest of the time these servers are just sitting around). EC2 (or "Elastic Compute Cloud"--which, by the way, was called "Amazon Execution Service" at first, until someone finally noticed that the name was liable to give people the wrong idea about what the product did) allows you to create computer jobs (e.g. you need to render some massive 3-D images, or sift through a mass of data from SETI looking for patterns) and rent time on Amazon servers to perform them, which means you don't have to buy and maintain your own server. And like S3 (which, to review, is a virtual harddrive), it's also a web service, so you can do this from a computer program. Which in turn means you could, e.g., run a website that renders massive 3-D images or analyzes SETI data, host the actual website on your tiny slow machine in your basement, and farm out all the labor and storage out to Amazon, thereby changing the world. Or at least that's the way it looked on paper.
Most of the populace that throws around the term "Web 2.0" tends to mean things like YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, and Blogger--things where the content is user-generated. This ilk of websites, while being "new" in some sense, has never struck me as a particular innovation in and of themselves (though the technology that runs them, in many cases, is). To me, Web 2.0 is the process of opening up the platforms on which the web is built, so that the software that powers applications that have heretofore only existed in the browser can be used everywhere--the desktop, your mobile devices, your television, and so on.
When I explain what a web service is at parties, I use the following example. If you, a person, want to know some piece of information about any book out there, you'd go to your browser and surf to Amazon.com and look it up. There you'll find the cover image, all the bibliographic information, some reviews, etc. Now say you're a computer program and you want that same information about a book (because, e.g., you're a library program and you want to be able to display information about a book when somebody scans the barcode). You, alas, do not know how to use a web browser. You could be programmed to read web pages, but web pages come in all sorts of formats and change all the time, and computer programs have to be taught to read each one individually, because they're just that stupid sometimes. So web services are like web pages for software applications--sets of functions that they can call in order to get information that will be returned in a format that they, the software applications, will understand. In the example I just gave, the web service would have a function that, when you send it a book's ISBN, returns a formatted set of information about that book, with its title, author, number of pages, and so on, in a format that the software has been programmed to understand.
Amazon has a free web service called ECS that does exactly what I've just described, as well as many other things. You can sign up for it (and encounter some of my handiwork) here. Then you too could write software applications that are web-integrated and feature-rich and blah blah blah Web 2.0 blah. You are, in fact, using web services all the time--most of the widgets in OSX Dashboard, for instance, make web service calls to get their information. iTunes, when you pop in a CD, is querying a webservice to figure out what album it is so that it can populate the album information.
The nice thing about web services is that they allow you (for a definition of the word "you" that involves "you" being a "software developer") to use the software that Amazon wrote in more ways than just browsing their web site. ECS, for instance, allows you to use their shopping cart software, so that if you're running your own e-commerce website, you can use Amazon's shopping cart instead of writing your own (if written by a more business-oriented person, that sentence would have contained the word "leverage," and probably "synergy," and "core competencies," but I would have had to shoot myself in the head afterwards). The point is, Amazon sells things. They started out with books, then music, then pretty much everything that was a thing, and now they're selling (or in some cases, just giving away) the use of the software that they wrote to sell those things in the first place.
Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 are the next phase of that: selling something that Amazon has in excess most of the year (hard drive space and server time--Amazon has to have enough hardware on hand to run the website at Christmas when we get vastly more traffic, but the rest of the time these servers are just sitting around). EC2 (or "Elastic Compute Cloud"--which, by the way, was called "Amazon Execution Service" at first, until someone finally noticed that the name was liable to give people the wrong idea about what the product did) allows you to create computer jobs (e.g. you need to render some massive 3-D images, or sift through a mass of data from SETI looking for patterns) and rent time on Amazon servers to perform them, which means you don't have to buy and maintain your own server. And like S3 (which, to review, is a virtual harddrive), it's also a web service, so you can do this from a computer program. Which in turn means you could, e.g., run a website that renders massive 3-D images or analyzes SETI data, host the actual website on your tiny slow machine in your basement, and farm out all the labor and storage out to Amazon, thereby changing the world. Or at least that's the way it looked on paper.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
We Used To Be Friends (A Long Time Ago)
Tarn alerted me to the possibility that there might, out there in the universe, be a dashboard widget that would allow me to post to The Odds Are One from OSX Dashboard. And indeed, such a widget exists. Here I am, using it. And lo, the world is made new. Surely this is the technological advance that will foment my creative breakthrough, allowing me the freedom to blog every day, to dash off some brilliant paragraph or two just before I head off to bed. Surely the only thing that was standing in the way betwixt me and Great Art was better UI.
What with the Forces of Evil having been (temporarily) defeated yesternight, The Gadflies have, this night, gone out for a celebratory evening involving sushi and lots of alcohol with our compatriot Mita. Somewhere last evening, after the votes were cast but while the Webb/Allen election was still in doubt (it's been called for Webb as of this writing. For the leftist radicals that live in the Gadfly household, Webb is absolutely nothing to write home about, but being that he's Number 51, for tonight he's one of us. In summation: hurrah!), I conceived of an OaO post about cause, wherein I would talk about how pundits would, in the future, attribute some manner of cause to Webb's or Allen's defeat. In the event of the latter, of course, they'd talk about his "Macaca Moment," and how this brought into stark relief the fact that George Allen is a fucking lunatic. If he had won (which he didn't. I'm quoting myself here: "Hurrah!"), somehow, that factor would no longer achieve the golden label of "Cause." This in spite of the fact that it would have influenced the exact same number of votes (in review, all votes have already been cast in this post-hoc estimation of voter intent)--in that case they'd be talking about how Webb's overt sexism and failure to articulate a position other than one of anti-party-in-power weren't enough for him to take the crown. The thing is, we exist in a state of superposition of Webb/Allen election. It happens that Webb has 7200 more votes out of 4 million or so, and so he takes office, but as with the Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, somebody has to take office despite the fact that nobody won. So suddenly, and for the rest of time, "Macaca" becomes a political cliche for that moment of political implosion, in spite of the fact that Allen ended the race in a virtual tie with the bass-ackwards anti-feminist ex-Republican running against him. Narrative is funny that way.
There are so many problems here that I can't even being to describe them. One, the Blogger Dashboard widget doesn't have a scrollbar, so instead of taking the hint that I had to write shorter posts, I posted this and am editing it in a browser. Second, I just blogged about the thing I meta-didn't-blog-about. But the real problem here, in true Chambersian form (I'd have a better href for you there, but I'm too drunk right now), is that I have already blogged this post 10,000 times in 10,000 different ways, and you read it and understood it the first time, and indeed recognized the phenomenon of Odds-Are-Oneness in whatever discipline you came from already, and were already going to subconsciously apply the principle every time you read about politics and "Macaca Moments" for the rest of your life. Yet I just wrote this post anyway. So what the hell am I doing?
What with the Forces of Evil having been (temporarily) defeated yesternight, The Gadflies have, this night, gone out for a celebratory evening involving sushi and lots of alcohol with our compatriot Mita. Somewhere last evening, after the votes were cast but while the Webb/Allen election was still in doubt (it's been called for Webb as of this writing. For the leftist radicals that live in the Gadfly household, Webb is absolutely nothing to write home about, but being that he's Number 51, for tonight he's one of us. In summation: hurrah!), I conceived of an OaO post about cause, wherein I would talk about how pundits would, in the future, attribute some manner of cause to Webb's or Allen's defeat. In the event of the latter, of course, they'd talk about his "Macaca Moment," and how this brought into stark relief the fact that George Allen is a fucking lunatic. If he had won (which he didn't. I'm quoting myself here: "Hurrah!"), somehow, that factor would no longer achieve the golden label of "Cause." This in spite of the fact that it would have influenced the exact same number of votes (in review, all votes have already been cast in this post-hoc estimation of voter intent)--in that case they'd be talking about how Webb's overt sexism and failure to articulate a position other than one of anti-party-in-power weren't enough for him to take the crown. The thing is, we exist in a state of superposition of Webb/Allen election. It happens that Webb has 7200 more votes out of 4 million or so, and so he takes office, but as with the Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, somebody has to take office despite the fact that nobody won. So suddenly, and for the rest of time, "Macaca" becomes a political cliche for that moment of political implosion, in spite of the fact that Allen ended the race in a virtual tie with the bass-ackwards anti-feminist ex-Republican running against him. Narrative is funny that way.
There are so many problems here that I can't even being to describe them. One, the Blogger Dashboard widget doesn't have a scrollbar, so instead of taking the hint that I had to write shorter posts, I posted this and am editing it in a browser. Second, I just blogged about the thing I meta-didn't-blog-about. But the real problem here, in true Chambersian form (I'd have a better href for you there, but I'm too drunk right now), is that I have already blogged this post 10,000 times in 10,000 different ways, and you read it and understood it the first time, and indeed recognized the phenomenon of Odds-Are-Oneness in whatever discipline you came from already, and were already going to subconsciously apply the principle every time you read about politics and "Macaca Moments" for the rest of your life. Yet I just wrote this post anyway. So what the hell am I doing?
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
The State Machine
Dorky engineer joke of the day (from a cartoon on a co-worker's office door):
(L., who has not followed a single thing I have written so far, has just keyed in to the word "teleported." She is very interested in somebody inventing teleportation).
So does this mean that we're actually living in a universe constructed like an early-80's version of Flight Simulator? Are we experiencing a reality in which a few instants of processor time are taken to render each frame, with each frame only slightly different from the last? Is it only the (seemingly trivial!) fact that these instants go by about a billion-trillion-trillion times too quickly for us to detect that makes us believe that we're experiencing reality as a continuous stream of events rather than a series of pictures?
To further abuse the computer metaphor, the universe seems an awful lot like it has a maximum processor speed--it has an absolute upper limit (the speed of light) at which information can be delivered, and it seems to have an absolute lower limit on its resolution. I don't know if this is a particularly good metaphor, though, or if it is, what it might signify.
Next: Nobody understood the Flight Simulator reference, did they?
One more thing I wanted to call out from the post on String Theory a couple of weeks ago was another upshot of the existence of Planck's Constant: the existence of a smallest measurable unit of time. This means if you are, say, tracking the path of a photon (which I myself was doing just the other day), the best you'll ever be able to do is take a series of "snapshots" of the movement of that photon (to say nothing of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which implies that you won't be able to get an accurate position without upsetting the velocity). I previously argued that for quantities theoretically smaller than those derived from Planck's constant, there is no reality--at least not as we understand it. If I were to look at the snapshots, I could try to infer to motion that was taking place "in between" each snapshot--I could see the particle in one place in one picture and in another place in the next. But the Heisenberg Principle implies that I'd never be able to know for sure, and the 20th century interpretation of this is that there simply isn't an answer. The particle may as well have teleported from one place to the next.
- Person: Make me a sandwich.
- Other Person: What? Make it yourself.
- Person: sudo Make me a sandwich.
- Other Person: Okay.
(L., who has not followed a single thing I have written so far, has just keyed in to the word "teleported." She is very interested in somebody inventing teleportation).
So does this mean that we're actually living in a universe constructed like an early-80's version of Flight Simulator? Are we experiencing a reality in which a few instants of processor time are taken to render each frame, with each frame only slightly different from the last? Is it only the (seemingly trivial!) fact that these instants go by about a billion-trillion-trillion times too quickly for us to detect that makes us believe that we're experiencing reality as a continuous stream of events rather than a series of pictures?
To further abuse the computer metaphor, the universe seems an awful lot like it has a maximum processor speed--it has an absolute upper limit (the speed of light) at which information can be delivered, and it seems to have an absolute lower limit on its resolution. I don't know if this is a particularly good metaphor, though, or if it is, what it might signify.
Next: Nobody understood the Flight Simulator reference, did they?
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Begetting Too
Men of Luggage, check your coats, sit down and stay awhile,
Loosen your ties. Enough rope to hang yourselves
Is waiting on the nightstand when you're picking up the phone.
I thought at least you would have figured out by now
That same mistake that you'll make over and over again
In your lives. You're burying the past, then just digging up the graves.
Don't blame yourself, I know you'd fight it if you could.
You're making up the rivals who are knocking down your door,
Don't hang around, they might be coming back for blood.
That same mistake that you'll make over and over again,
That same heartbreak that you'll make over and over again.
So travel light.
And you're wearing The Coat That Isn't Keeping Out The Cold,
And you carry that torch for yourself.
And I warn you the flame might just burn you at the touch,
But you don't want to hear about it all that much.
So travel light.
Men of Luggage turn around, try to retrace your steps
I do not think they will be coming back for you.
Men of Luggage it's okay, it's hard to live this life.
In your shoes I don't know what I would do,
So travel light.
Next: Context! (No, just kidding, no context.)
Friday, October 06, 2006
Seven Minutes in Heaven
(No, just kidding. It's about Physics again).
The discovery that launched the century-plus-long miasma of chaos and discovery in which Physics now finds itself was Max Planck's discovery in 1900 that energy comes only in discrete quantities, the eponymous quanta of Quantum Physics. At last count, the satchets of energy came in 6.6260693 (+/- .0000011) x 10 -34 Joule-second-sized pieces, so they're not, you know, big or anything.
The fact that energy comes in packets necessarily creates other smallest measurable units--e.g. the Planck Length, which is the smallest distance that can be measured (1.62 x 10-35 meters), or the Planck Time, which is how long it takes a light photon to traverse that distance (5.39121 × 10-44 seconds). You can see the rest here (no, don't really click there. You aren't actually interested). The existence of the Planck Time is of particular befuddlement to the physicists who are trying to figure out how our universe started. They have a pretty good idea of everything that happened starting from 5.39121 × 10-44 seconds--elementary particles were formed; galaxies, stars, planets coalesced; THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT; your first kiss playing "Seven Minutes in Heaven" at Tana Barton's house in the 7th grade; they know all of that stuff. But from time 0 to 5.39121 × 10-44 seconds, before the forces of nature and elementary particles formed, that stuff's a theoretical mystery.
For those of you whose eyes glazed over in that last paragraph, here it is in handy chart form:
What I like about String Theory (which I mentioned last time and is the point of this entry--bet you didn't see that coming) is that it agrees with the Hindus and the Buddhists that the universe is vibrating. What bugs me about it is the same thing that probably bugs most people about it--it has thusfar failed not only to make any testable predictions about the nature of the universe, but any predictions it could have made so far would never be testable, for (very, very roughly) the reasons I list above. The strings of String Theory are supposed to be Planck-length one-dimensional objects. To form all the particles and forces that are so far known, they would have to have eleven or twelve or thirteen dimensions in which to symmetrically vibrate.
There could well exist a dimension or twelve too small to be observed--I'm all about all the extra dimensions, myself. What really bugs me about String Theory is that at the Planck length and smaller, there is no is. What we learned from the first part of 20th Century Physics is that if nobody observes something, its properties...aren't. Light is both a particle and wave until somebody forces it into one or the other identity. Entwined particles have no spin until you observe the one or the other, and then they both have complementary spin. You could never observe a Planck-length string--to make such an observation you'd have to energize a photon so much that it would create tiny black hole in the location you were trying to observe. So as far as I'm concerned the universe is actually made up of myriad stoats of Planck-length size, all shrieking their stoaty cries at various frequencies and timbres, each shriek determining whether that stoat forms a neutrino, graviton, or gauge boson. It happens, by remarkable coincidence, that my Super-Stoat Theory of the universe uses the exact same equations for the cries of my tiny, tiny stoats that String Theory uses for the n-dimensional symmetric vibrations of their tiny, tiny strings. But my theory involves infinity percent more stoats than does String Theory, thus making it superior. And there endeth the lesson.
Next: Somewhat more useful lessons!
The discovery that launched the century-plus-long miasma of chaos and discovery in which Physics now finds itself was Max Planck's discovery in 1900 that energy comes only in discrete quantities, the eponymous quanta of Quantum Physics. At last count, the satchets of energy came in 6.6260693 (+/- .0000011) x 10 -34 Joule-second-sized pieces, so they're not, you know, big or anything.
The fact that energy comes in packets necessarily creates other smallest measurable units--e.g. the Planck Length, which is the smallest distance that can be measured (1.62 x 10-35 meters), or the Planck Time, which is how long it takes a light photon to traverse that distance (5.39121 × 10-44 seconds). You can see the rest here (no, don't really click there. You aren't actually interested). The existence of the Planck Time is of particular befuddlement to the physicists who are trying to figure out how our universe started. They have a pretty good idea of everything that happened starting from 5.39121 × 10-44 seconds--elementary particles were formed; galaxies, stars, planets coalesced; THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT; your first kiss playing "Seven Minutes in Heaven" at Tana Barton's house in the 7th grade; they know all of that stuff. But from time 0 to 5.39121 × 10-44 seconds, before the forces of nature and elementary particles formed, that stuff's a theoretical mystery.
For those of you whose eyes glazed over in that last paragraph, here it is in handy chart form:
Time Things Known 5.39121 × 10-44 - now Stuff 0 - 5.39121 × 10-44 Fuck all
What I like about String Theory (which I mentioned last time and is the point of this entry--bet you didn't see that coming) is that it agrees with the Hindus and the Buddhists that the universe is vibrating. What bugs me about it is the same thing that probably bugs most people about it--it has thusfar failed not only to make any testable predictions about the nature of the universe, but any predictions it could have made so far would never be testable, for (very, very roughly) the reasons I list above. The strings of String Theory are supposed to be Planck-length one-dimensional objects. To form all the particles and forces that are so far known, they would have to have eleven or twelve or thirteen dimensions in which to symmetrically vibrate.
There could well exist a dimension or twelve too small to be observed--I'm all about all the extra dimensions, myself. What really bugs me about String Theory is that at the Planck length and smaller, there is no is. What we learned from the first part of 20th Century Physics is that if nobody observes something, its properties...aren't. Light is both a particle and wave until somebody forces it into one or the other identity. Entwined particles have no spin until you observe the one or the other, and then they both have complementary spin. You could never observe a Planck-length string--to make such an observation you'd have to energize a photon so much that it would create tiny black hole in the location you were trying to observe. So as far as I'm concerned the universe is actually made up of myriad stoats of Planck-length size, all shrieking their stoaty cries at various frequencies and timbres, each shriek determining whether that stoat forms a neutrino, graviton, or gauge boson. It happens, by remarkable coincidence, that my Super-Stoat Theory of the universe uses the exact same equations for the cries of my tiny, tiny stoats that String Theory uses for the n-dimensional symmetric vibrations of their tiny, tiny strings. But my theory involves infinity percent more stoats than does String Theory, thus making it superior. And there endeth the lesson.
Next: Somewhat more useful lessons!
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