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:

• 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

Next: The Noun is the Other, At First Seemingly Unrelated Noun!

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!

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!

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!

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:

• 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.

First, note that this is not Occam's Razor, which (very roughly) states that a simpler explanation for an observed phenomenon is more likely than a complex one. More to the point, there is no law of logic or mathematics that states this. It's a completely fallacious construction. Here at OaO, we say it this way: once the phenomenon has been observed, any odds go out the window.

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!

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!

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!

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.

• 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.

In actuality, the HIV test is only something like 96% accurate, so the results aren't even going to be as accurate as my example. Moral of the story? Applied math: not generally applicable.

Next: inference vis à vis implication!

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?

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.

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?

The State Machine

Dorky engineer joke of the day (from a cartoon on a co-worker's office door):

• Person: Make me a sandwich.
• Other Person: What? Make it yourself.
• Person: sudo Make me a sandwich.
• Other Person: Okay.

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.

(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?

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.)

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:

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!

Where Am I?

Some things about which I didn't blog the last two months:

• George W. found a post-hoc rationalization as to why he opposed stem cell research. He apparently thinks taxpayers shouldn't have to fund something to which they might object. Unfortunately, my computer ran into a deadlock created by intense irony as I was blogging, and I lost the entire post.


• There was this article about a book which claims that String Theory is bunk (a belief to which I subscribe). It contains this musing:

  Modern physics is troubled by the anthropocentric character of the universe. For instance, had gravity been only a teensy bit stronger or weaker, planets and stars could not have formed. So, does the fortuitous value of gravity for planets and stars show that a higher power is manipulating physical law?

  But you read this blog (or at least you, you know, used to), so you are not troubled by such metaphysical questions. So I didn't blog about that either


• Mita's ode to blueberries. It is undoubtedly the finest fruit-related blogging yet.


• An existential crisis of indeterminate nature which caused me to think about taking a year off before entering the clinical phase of my acupuncture training. I'm still mulling that one over, so I didn't blog about that


• Freedom From Blog continued to rock my butt.


• The word "compromise" apparently means something entirely different than I thought it did. As I am apparently naïve about the ways of language and meaning, I didn't blog about that.

Those are just the things I can think of right now. This morning I decided that it was high time the first line of this blog stopped remarking about the fucking insanity of the Unabomber. So there we are.

Next: Back on topic!

Forbidden Blog Post #1

Ted Kaczynski was totally fucking insane.

This is not a marginal proposition, I admit. He was also, as it happens, totally brilliant. My brief, painful stint as a math graduate student happened to be the year that Kaczynski's manifesto was published in the New York Times; when he was subsequently captured, his c.v. was circulated around my department. Though he had suddenly retired from his post at Berkeley in 1967, his work as a grad student and a professor before that had been, strictly mathematically speaking, rather notable.

The next time I encountered the idea that Kaczynski was a brilliant man who had just snapped was reading an article published in Wired Magazine in 2000. It contained this quote from Kaczynski's manifesto:

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines....On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained....Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity....Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race....Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.

Bill Joy, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems, proposed in that article that man (in his current, mostly biological form) was superfluous to the future in which Post-Humans were likely to arise.

This same idea popped back into my immediate consciousness when I was writing about Technological Singularities a couple of weeks ago. Lost in the fact that Ted Kaczynski was a psychotic murderer is the fact that, while there's no such thing as consensus on the matter, a lot of people who think about the future tend to think it will look not unlike the picture Kaczynski was drawing. At some point the future Unabomber must have hit a realization of the future and what it would be like for our species that was so exquisite in its horror that it pushed him over the edge, making him decide that any action taken to prevent it was justified.

I thought of this again this week as our president, Mr. Binary Opposition himself, issued the first (and most likely only) veto of his presidency in banning government funding of stem cell research. George W. clearly has no idea why he actually opposes stem cell research--it's impossible to parse a logical argument out of his rationale--but this is a rare case where I actually feel some sympathy for the guy. He's already lost this fight--it was lost when man emerged from the muck with big brains and opposable thumbs. Man will rush forward in His evolution as a species regardless of vetoes or pipe bombs, because that is what He does. A lot of good can be done for a lot of people who are currently suffering a lot of pain via research with stem cells, and the Right Wing Conservative Christian valuation of hypothetical blastocysts over actual living, suffering people who live in the world is a bizarre, twisted, and anti-human view of the world. But at the same time, this is one more step along the path of re-engineering the selves that humans will be in the future. Sometimes it seems like it might be a good idea to stop and think about that path, because the potential of it has scared the living crap out of a lot of very smart people.

Next: More of the Forbidden!

On Blogging

The Pew study on bloggers is out, and I have to say I find it particularly...un...illuminating. It turns out half of American bloggers...are. Men. The median age is 30. 99% of everybody writes some sort of vaguely personal narrative that only their friends read. Check. Check. And check.

Some time ago whilst I was having one of those spruce-up-the-blog moments, I decided that OaO is a philosophy blog, and went to some blog-cataloging sites and entered it as such. Every now and then, according to the site meter graphically represented at the right, somebody clicks through one of these links and arrives here (begging the question, who has a philosophical question that can only be answered by surfing through blogs?). This, along with the occassional click-through I get from folks who find me because I'm listed as an Amazon employee in the blog kept by the Amazon Web Services evangelist (which, yes, is his actual job title), is the only time anybody that I don't know (where "know" appears in pomo-indicative italics because these days it extends to people I have neither actually met nor conversed with directly. Love this modern age in which we live. No, really. Do it. DO IT!) happens by The Odds Are One.

Sometimes I think I should actually blog about, you know, something, because blogging seems to violate all rules of narrative. Or flow. Or something. Sometimes I think I'm getting there. But I never quite do.

Next: Philosophy!
Tags: I have programatically discovered that tags are drawing approximately 0% of my blog traffic!

The Forbidden Blog

I thought I'd continue the meme of writing about bat-shit insane dreams started (most recently) by Mita a few days back (her blog, This Particular Web, quietly joined the Hermeneutic Blog Circle a couple of weeks ago, so this will serve as an overdue welcome. If you haven't read her post about talking dumpsters, you haven't...read...it. Or lived. Or something). Some time early this morning I had a dream that seems blog-worthy in its out-there-ness.

Jos shows up in my dreams from time to time, in a very Six Feet Under kind of way. I had one dream a couple of months ago where I was hiking in Swansea and had become lost. I stopped to look at some kind of map that was there at the side of the road, and I heard someone from behind me say, "Lost, Pablo?" (Pablo being what he used to call me), I turned around and it was he. He walked me down the hill and, before leaving me on some kind of Swansea public beach, told me a bunch of things which at the time seemed very important, but which I couldn't of course remember when I woke up. Thus, when he showed up in my dream last night I tried very hard to pay attention to what he was saying.

So, the dream: I'm in Pacific Place, which is a shopping mall in downtown Seattle, and somebody who looks like Jos comes off the down escalator. I walk up to him and at first I'm not sure it looks quite like him; "Jos?" I say, "is that you?" The person says something to the effect of, "No, but hold on a minute," and I look at him again and now he definitely looks like Jos. We start to walk towards some store and I'm trying to pay close attention to what he's saying, but the only thing I can remember now is this snippet of conversation:

Jos: Listen, Pablo, you have to stop what you're doing. You're going to destroy humanity.
Me: What, you mean with the things I am blogging about?
Jos: Yes.

This dream ends when Jos hands me a pipe containing what he explains are the dregs of things smoked by the people on his side (the implication being that the actual substances themselves would be way too much for the living) (please hold your snickering until the end, thank you very much). I partake of his mysterious herbs and immediately wake up. End of dream.

I'll leave the commentary to you. Two things are clear, though:

a) I seem to have failed to take his advice, and
b) You are now reading The Forbidden Blog.

You have been warned.

Next: Commentary!
Tags: Dreams

The Event Horizon of Time

Emery drew my attention to this Wiki article about (the) Technological Singularity--an imagined point in the (relatively near) future where the technology of man starts to advance so far, so fast, that all current prognostications of the future beyond it are utterly useless. Since we've lately been talking about paradigm shifts (a concept closely linked) and humanity's certain doom that lies just around the next corner (okay, not the next corner...but definitely the corner after that....), I thought it merited a paragraph or seven of rumination.

The Technological Singularity purports to be the point at which the first posthumans appear, at which point human progress takes off so incredibly rapidly that our current paradigms of being and progress become worthless, such that we can't "see" beyond it. In this sense it's like a black hole singularity, so dense that no information of any kind can escape (well, except for tiny little bit of radiation from the edge of event horizon that's able to escape by using the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Thank you, Stephen Hawking)--only instead of space from whence no information can escape, it's time.

Okay, fine, we're all already cyborgs; it's the freaking future, of course no information is escaping it; we've already seen this sort of thing in Terminator 2: Judgment Day--not that these aren't interesting critiques, but you don't read OaO to get critiques you can read elsewhere (you read OaO because you went to college with me, are one of my parents, are married to me, don't own an iPod, or because you're lost. Doy). I, too, think the AI future is relatively near at hand (no, really this time), if only because in the last ten years or so we've discovered that conscious intelligence acts lot less like a computer program (platform + set of instructions) and more like an anthill (a collection of individually "mindless" actors working in concert). It does seem, however, like the Technological Singularity is remarkably Humanity-Right-Now-Centric. If one acknowledges that the folks of the 19th century couldn't possibly imagine what was going to happen once we got computers, and the pre-writing tribes of man couldn't envision a life post-printing-press, one has gotta recognize that Technological Singularities are happening all the freaking time.

The metaphor of the black hole is another possible explanation of why the future holding certain doom for humanity seems to be such a pervasive meme. The idea that it too is an incredibly dense singularity from which no information can emerge goes a long way towards explaining why we as a population might happen to feel such visceral dread about our prospects in it.

What's also interesting in the Wiki article is the charting of the general acceleration of Man, His major advances, and His technology. The evolutionary leaps are happening fast and furious now; the things that took years today will take nanoseconds in the future, at least if this graph is any indication. My favorite koan on this topic goes like this: imagine the technology of, say, the Athenians versus the Romans a thousand years later. Unless you're an historian, you probably think of them as pretty similar in their technology. The Romans were, in fact, much more advanced--they had plumbing, aqueducts, and a radically advanced military, but compared to nuclear power and several million transistors on a chip less than an inch square, there's not that much technological difference between the two civilizations in the mind of the average person of today. Now think of the person two thousand years hence (or only two hundred?) whose technology is so advanced that he or she very roughly equates the technology of the present day with the technology of 1000 A.D. Can't imagine that? Me neither.

Next: That was only five paragraphs!
Tags: Technological Singularity, Paradigm Shifts

The Network is the Computer

A little bit of semi-dismissive hype for the emerging Browser-Based OS'es appears in Slate this week. The author's major objection--users won't want to store their data on remote servers because they won't trust it--I find to be half irrelevant (as we maintain here at OaO, there are two types of data in the world: encrypted and world-readable) and half mutable (trust in product x equals good experience plus time). My current objection to the OS-in-a-browser (Slate reviews YouOS, I've also checked out Goowy) is that, on the client side, it is slower than dirt and keeps hanging my browser. At least for the time being this undermines the mythical touchstone of the (also, thus far mythical) Google PC--it'll be fast because it's running on the servers at Google. If the applications, written mostly in JavaScript and connecting over a DSL or even T1 pipe, can't keep up, it doesn't really matter how fast the underlying servers are.

I expect this problem to get solved in some meaningful way, because I too think the concept of the browser OS is just too freaking yummy. Being able to work on "your" desktop anywhere you can find a browser, much like the advent of web-based email ten years ago, has a lot of appeal; the current OS-specific attempts to allow you to work on your desktop machine remotely are slow, cumbersome, and prone to rather enormous security holes. Also, worrying about the amount of hard-drive space you need and backing up your own data against a crash is an enormous pain and off-shoring that problem to Google or YouOS seems...better. On the other hand, the Thin Client machine has supposedly been coming soon to a home near you for a long time, and we've yet to see it. This revolution, like the coming Web Service/Web 2.0 insurgency I keep heralding, still requires some technology changes. I'm not sure if it's necessarily a super-fast broadband connection in every home so much as something small that changes the perspective of the multitudes out there. Today 90% of the computer users out there think of their computer as a machine that runs Windows, and Windows in turn runs things on their computer. So what has to happen to make users think of a computer as something that runs a browser instead? And would this be a thing good or bad?

Next: Dirt! Is it really that slow?
Tags: Google OS, YouOS, Goowy