I'm it

Tagged by Sadia


HAVE YOU EVER…

nb. Orange = Done (My comments in brackets)

01. Bought a round of drinks in a bar
02. Swam with dolphins in the ocean (Mexico. I think they were Porpoise)
03. Climbed a mountain
04. Drove a Ferrari
05. Visited the Great Pyramids
06. Held a tarantula
07. Taken a bath with someone in candlelight
08. Said “I love you” and meant it
09. Hugged a tree
10. Played elastic (not really sure what that is, but yes)
11. Been to Paris
12. Watched a storm on the sea
13. Stayed up all night to watch the sun rise
14. Seen the aurora borealis
15. Been to a large sporting event (Grey Cup, World Series Final, Canada Cup, Stanley Cup)
16. Climbed the steps of the St. Joseph’s Oratory
17. Grown and eaten your own vegetables
18. Touched an iceberg (drank iceberg bottled water)
19. Slept under the stars (and the stairs)
20. Changed a baby’s diaper
21. Traveled in a hot air balloon
22. Seen shooting stars
23. Gotten drunk on champagne (maybe a little tipsy)
24. Given more than you could to charity
25. Observed the night through a telescope
26. Participated in a world record event (Completed the longest ever meme tag!)
27. Had a food fight
28. Bet on a winning horse
29. Asked directions from a stranger (despite my manliness)
30. Had a snowball fight
31. Yelled as loud as you could
32. Carried a lamb
33. Seen a total eclipse
34. Climbed a sand dune
35. Run over an animal with your car (you mean accidentally right?)
36. Danced like a crazy person with no regard to who might be watching
37. Adopted an accent for a whole day
38. Felt truly happy, even in a short moment
39. Had two hard disks on your computer
40. Taken care of someone drunk (Got him home alive and he still told his parents that I got the booze for everyone)
41. Danced with a stranger
42. Whale-watched in the ocean
43. Stolen a street sign
44. Back-packed across Canada
45. Taken a road trip (Across Canada)
46. Rock-climbed outdoors
47. Sung a ballad on the beach at midnight
48. Gone paragliding
49. Been to Ireland
50. Had a broken heart for much longer than you were with someone.
51. Sat at a table at a restaurant with strangers and eaten with them.
52. Been to Japan
53. Milked a cow
54. Organized your CD’s alphabetically.
55. Pretended to be a superhero/ine
56. Sang karaoke
57. Spent all day in bed (lost count)
58. Played football
59. Scuba-dived (1 lesson in a resort in Mediterranean Turkey)
60. Kissed in the rain
61. Played in the mud
62. Played in the rain
63. Been in an open-air theatre (that's Amphitheatre, you cretin)
64. Been to the Great Wall of China
65. Started your own business (half a dozen times)
66. Fallen in love without suffering from a broken heart
67. Visited ancient monuments
68. Taken a martial arts class (Judo, Muy Thai, Jeet Kune Do)
69. Played XBox for 6 hours straight (Space Invaders or Tetris maybe)
70. Been married
71. Been in a movie (Stunt Work on Cinderella Man with Russell Crowe in the training scenes)
72. Organized a surprise party
73. Been divorced
74. Fasted for 5 days
75. Made cookies from a package mix
76. Won first prize in a costume contest
77. Driven a gondola in Venice (passenger?)
78. Have been tattooed (can't commit to something that permanent)
79. Canoed or kayaked
80. Been interviewed on TV (Various talk shows about emerging technologies)
81. Gotten flowers for no particular reason
82. Been in a play
83. Been to Las Vegas (left town with $300 more than I arrived with)
84. Recorded music
85. Eaten shark
86. Kissed on a first date
87. Been to Thailand
88. Bought a house
89. Buried one of your parents (In the sand at the beach?)
90. Been on a cruise
91. Spoken more than one language fluently (3 fluently, 4 more in varying levels of proficiency)
92. Raised children
93. Followed your favourite singer on tour
94. Cycled in a foreign country
95. Moved to a new city for a new life
96. Eaten ants (only accidentally)
97. Walked on the Golden Gate Bridge
98. Sang at the top of your lungs in the car without a care as to who might be watching
99. Had plastic surgery
100. Survived an accident you statistically shouldn’t have (Rollover on QEW when I was a teenager, my Renault was crushed to less than half its height)
101. Written articles for a large publication (Depending on what you mean by large. Does this blog count?)
102. Lost 40 pounds (Only if I had a leg amputated)
103. Helped an unconscious person (On Valentines Day years ago at a chic restaurant a woman passed out beside me. [not my date])
104. Piloted a plane
105. Touched a live (manta) ray
106. Broken someone’s heart
107. Helped birth an animal
108. Won money in a TV game show (My team won many times on Reach for the Top but no money changed hands.)
109. Broken a bone (collarbone, 6 out of 10 digits, some more than once.)
110. Pierced another part of your body other than your ears
111. Handled a revolver or firearm (Only in a celebration)
112. Eaten mushrooms you collected yourself
113. Ridden a horse (a pathetic broken horse at a parking lot carnival)
114. Undergone a major operation (Does ACL reconstruction count?)
115. Had a pet snake
116. Slept for more than 30 hours straight (A wise man told me that we sleep our whole lives through)
117. Been to all the continents of the world
118. Been on a canoe trip for more than 2 days
119. Eaten kangaroo
120. Eaten sushi (I try to avoid the raw ones)
121. Had your picture in the newspaper
122. Changed the opinion of someone with regards to something you’ve felt strongly about
123. Gone back to school (I got accepted to LLM Law School last year but didn't go. I may go back to finish my PhD next year)
124. Parachuted
125. Worn a snake
126. Built your PC from different parts
127. Sold something you created to someone you don’t know
128. Dyed your hair
129. Shaved your head
130. Saved someone’s life (metaphorically perhaps)

I will spare any further victims and stop the tagging here.

[Edit] I'm told I have to tag others so I tag Lisa and Amy

Philosopher Kings

How do we encourage capable people to pursue a life in politics so we don't end up with the idiots that seem to be currently in charge of this world? My nephew is taking a first year course in Philosophy. They are studying The Republic by Plato. In this dialogue Plato describes a system in which children are generally educated until they are 18 years old at which time they are sent to 2 years of intense physical training not unlike a military stint. At this point the best are chosen to study 10 years of Mathematics and the best once again are chosen to study 5 years of dialectic. The best performers yet again are chosen to embark on a 15 year apprenticeship in managing within the political sphere. Those who successfully complete this long journey become the Philosopher Kings and are the ones who then become The Deciders.

Surely there's got to be an easier way. Maybe if we just stopped sifting through every speck of garbage in the past lives of anyone foolish enough to run for office, then maybe more reasonable people would not be afraid to run for office. It's not that the idiots in charge don't have skeletons in their closets it's just that they're idiots so they assume that they'll be able to get away with it.

America seems to have some kind of an allergy to intelligent leaders. Jimmy Carter, John Kerry and Al Gore have all been victims of being perceived to be too smart. As if being smart implied being effete, weak or heaven forbid being French. People seem more comfortable voting for the likes of a Reagan or Dubya because somehow it seems right that the person in charge of the most powerful machine on Earth shouldn't be any more intelligent than the guy who cuts your hair. Bill Clinton was highly intelligent but was able to cleverly hide it with his "aw shucks, I'm just poor folk from Arkansas" shtick.

The average parliamentarian in Canada is not that much more enlightened but it was refreshing to see who ended up on the last ballot of the recent Liberal Party Leadership Convention. We had a PhD Journalist and Political Science Professor from Harvard by way of Oxford going against a PhD Political Science Professor from Quebec against a Rhodes Scholar with degrees in Arts, Law and Philosophy.

It's equally refreshing to see someone like Barack Obama running for President in 2008. He's already hamstrung with the impression that he's an intelligent guy and opponents will surely somehow try to use this against him. It's still too early to tell what this guy's really like but his smarts combined with having experimented with recreational drugs will likely not be the last of an arsenal ready to be levied against him once all of his historical trash has been picked through and analyzed.

Flowers, Music, Poetry

Flowers

If I were a painter
I would draw you the sun
shine it over meadows
and grow you painted sunflowers.

Music

If I were a singer
I'd sing to you about light
fill the silence with sounds
to compose a harmony of hearts.

Poetry

If I were a writer
I'd write for you
these letters of love.


------------
To those in love, have fun celebrating Valentines Day.
To those who are single, may you and your hand of choice have a lovely evening also.

Series of Tubes

Be very afraid. This guy is in charge of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation - the body that oversees the regulation of the Internets. Besides engendering a concern for Net Neutrality it just boggles the mind how people like this can rise to such heights. We've got to do something about encouraging capable people to seek political office again. The Stupid White Men have got to go.

Now watch this DJ remix.

Billions and Billions

"We live on a mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam."

Carl Sagan 1994

It has been ten years since Carl Sagan died. We could use someone like him today. Richard Dawkins is brilliant but he rubs some people the wrong way. Sagan was very persuasive without being condescending. As a child, watching the Cosmos series on PBS changed my life. I've got the DVD box set so when I have a free weekend I'll watch the whole thing again.

Since today was Darwin's birthday I've provided below a segment on evolution. Please pass this on to someone in the Kansas Board of Education.

Elderly Divorce

Very elderly couples when asked why they waited until they were in some cases over 100 years old to divorce, most commonly respond with "we were waiting for the kids to die".

Music for the Paranoid Schizophrenic

I came across this music by Brainsaw while browsing archive.org. If you don't know about archive.org you should definitely check it out. It is the place for public domain content. It is also home to the Wayback Machine which allows you to see how a web page looked on a given day as far back as 1996.

Treadmill

my body

made hard by motion

by time made dust

M.I.A. Bird Flu

This is one of the coolest songs I've heard in a while. M.I.A. is the daughter of a Sri Lankan revolutionary by way of London. She just released Bird Flu a few days ago.

De-Lurking the 95

When I used to run a technology company I became aware of the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule. Roughly 20% of our customers accounted for 80% of our sales. I have met business people who take this to be a high principle of metaphysics on par with the Yin/Yang Principle.

In the general spirit of the times we are experiencing an accelerated rate of change in these participation inequalities. Computer programmers have noticed that there is a 90/10 rule in which 90% of the time required to execute a program is taken up by about 10% of the code. A more exaggerated ratio is exemplified by Wikipedia of which 99.8% is written by 0.2% of its users.

Most bloggers have access to visitor tracking data so they can see how many visitors they've had on a particular day and from which part of the world their readers are accessing their blogs. I have some regular readers that occasionally leave comments but I have many more who never do. It is said that 95% of blog readers are so-called lurkers. These people read but never leave comments. Nearly 5% of blog readers occasionally leave comments and 0.1% of blog readers regularly leave comments.

I regularly read several blogs and I occasionally leave comments on a few of them. One of the bloggers I read asked why she had so many readers who never left comments. She wondered if they had a hatecrush on her and encouraged them to respond. The result was that many more of her readers left a comment. I'd like to do the same. So to those readers from Brooklyn and Barcelona, Melbourne and Mimico as well as all of you readers in Toronto I encourage you to de-lurk and let me know what you're thinking even if it's to tell me why you don't usually leave a comment.

Shalom Robot

It was sometime in January of 1921 that a Czech playwright named Karel Capek presented R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). His brother helped him coin the word Robot from the Czech word for drudgery or servitude. The story is about a woman who goes to Rossum's Robot factory on a mission to liberate Robots who are manufactured to have all of the features of a human except (they believe) a soul. It ends badly for humanity as the Robots revolt and exterminate every human except one. Many of these usual themes would come to be explored within thousands of subsequent works of fiction.

About a hundred years before the premiere of Capek's play Mary Shelley (age 19) was vacationing with friends when she was challenged in a contest to write the scariest story amongst those staying at Lord Byron's villa in Switzerland. Rising to the challenge she wrote a book about Dr. Frankenstein who creates a living being out of non-living parts. This story also ends badly as the creature kills several people before killing himself.

Go back even further but remain in the same general area of Central Europe and you will come across the story of Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague, a 16th century Rabbi who it was said created a Golem to protect the Prague Ghetto from anti-semitic attacks. That word comes from the Hebrew gelem which means raw material. A Golem is a living being created from entirely non-living material. They are said to have all the features of a human except for the gift of language which if they had it would be evidence of a soul. The good Rabbi's Golem also gets out of control and goes on a killing spree. It is said that this very Golem still rests in the store room of a Synagogue in Prague and even killed a Nazi officer during WWII.

It seems that the Golem story is featured in many classic tales told in Czech culture and Mary Shelley would likely have absorbed these. It seems that Frankenstein was the former name of a city in Silesia and it has also been argued that on their way to their Switzerland vacation with Lord Byron the Shelley's stayed briefly at Castle Frankenstein where a notorious alchemist is said to have experimented with human bodies.

Gustav Meyrink wrote a novel called Der Golem in 1915 which inspired several movies including The Golem: How He Came Into the World in 1920, the same year in which Capek wrote his play. It seems clear that the story of Frankenstein owes a great deal to the Golem story. It seems equally clear that one cannot have a full understanding of Capek's Robot story without acknowledging the influence of the Golem myth which had been prevalent within the cultures of Central Europe, particularly in Czech culture.

---
Side note: Another participant in Lord Byron's scary tale challenge was his doctor John Polidori who wrote that week The Vampyre which spawned a whole other genre.

Robot Insurance

Hardware / Meatware Problem

Derek Finkle has written about a young man who may have been wrongly convicted of murder. The Crown Prosecutors are asking the courts to force him to turn over his research notes and recordings. There are of course many points to be made about freedom of the press and expression but I want to pursue a technological question.

They are not asking him to reveal the contents of his brain, only the contents of his external recording and storage devices. We seem to make a natural distinction between memory stored in our brains and memory stored externally on devices like notepads or digital recorders. I suppose if this reporter had an eidetic memory and didn't require notes or recordings, then he would not be in this situation. What if he had a handicap and relied on external memory devices to remember most things? Would there be some line drawn between what he would be asked to hand over to the Crown?

There is no basis to punish anyone for thought crimes in our social or legal system but there are precedents in which written or otherwise recorded thoughts are employed as linchpins in court cases. It seems that you are allowed to think what you want internally as long as you don't make any record of it that could be externally accessible. This has worked so far but upcoming technological developments will likely bring us to question this approach.

External devices have always been used to augment our mental faculties. But the line between internal and external may soon be blurred. Those handicapped by brain injuries are beginning to make use of devices that interface with the brain in a much more immediate way than the interface between your brain and your notepad, laptop or digital recording device. These hardware devices are being more frequently attached to the physical human hardware (meatware?) and achieving what can only be called cyborg technologies.

The current trend is towards the even further externalization of memory storage and this is exemplified by the services offered by some internet companies to augment your computer's data storage on their servers. So we might see something like Google Personal Memory Storage Service. This will successfully connect you wirelessly to a vast external memory augmentation for your brain but who wants to suddenly forget what they were thinking about when they enter a subway station? Sooner or later you will undoubtedly be able to buy a plug-and-play device that will augment your own mental faculties. When this becomes common there will be some interesting discussion about what then becomes considered the private realm of thoughts versus the more legally accessible externalized recordings of those thoughts. Where is the distinction to be made?

Are Finkle's notes and recordings different from his memories because they are externally stored? Well cyborg technologies will internalize these. Are they different because they reside in a device and not in meatware? These implanted devices may use distributed storage processes that will make it impossible to say in which matrix of neurons these recordings are stored. Parts of your thoughts and memories will be stored in your meatware and parts in the hardware. Without the constituent parts working together there will be no thought or memory to display.

Even if you could somehow distinguish between memories in the hardware and memories in the meatware, these internalized devices will cease to be made of metal and plastic at all. They will eventually come to be made of biological material custom built by being grown inside your own body. This will be a welcome development since it will make it more difficult for spammers to hack into our thoughts and compel us to buy advanced versions of erectile dysfunction pills.

It's probably too soon for legislation but maybe it's time we started thinking more about these things.

Leaving Krypton

Immigrants in North America are more successful than the native-born as they make up a disproportionate percentage of the entrepreneurs who drive economic progress and innovation. This has historically been the case despite the inherent disadvantages that one faces by uprooting and starting over in a strange land with little or no assets at all.

By the time they arrived in America, the Jews of Europe were the victims of oppression and forced immigration over many centuries. When they arrived on this side of the ocean they found that the environment was relatively more tolerant to them. Like the Asian, African and Middle Eastern refugees that followed, one of the reasons that their new surroundings allowed them to thrive was because they no longer had to deal with the burdening oppressions that weighed on them. Opportunities increase when you're not being hunted down.

It's like walking around with ankle and wrist weights for most of your life and then having them removed and being issued wings in their place. Superman would have been an average Schmoe on Krypton but becomes a superhero on Earth. This plays out in various other ecosystems. The lowly Zebra Mussel from Russia hitches a ride in the ballast of freighter ships and finds himself in the land of plenty that is the Great Lakes. Those purple flowers that you may see by the side of the road also made the trip over on those ships and now these are considered invasive species because they have been so successful.

Those opposed to immigration often use language that only barely seems to be metaphorically talking about invasive species. Sometimes even invasive species are used for good. The Canadian Wolf was introduced into Yellowstone Park to help bring a balance to that ecosystem. Without a successful predator most of the native species were overeating, overpopulating and threatening the environment. But immigrants don't eat the natives like Wolves do, nor do they consume all the food like the Zebra Mussel leaving none for the locals, nor do they suck up all the marsh water like the Purple Loosestrife, leaving none for the less thirsty vegetation.

A human ecosystem can demonstrate the successful innovation and economic activities of individuals that will leave everyone in the ecosystem better off. This is at the heart of capitalist economic theory. If the proper parameters are in place then the rising tide is supposed to lift all ships. This largely works as long as we don't allow undue exploitation and lose sight of why we want to increase wealth in the first place: To raise the tide for all, not to drown the weak swimmers.

Happy Days

Growing up in the 70's and 80's we used to watch a TV show called Happy Days that was about a group of high school students in the 50's. We considered the fifties to be some ancient time in the past barely accessible within the memories of the really old people who may still have been alive. The music seemed ancient and quaint. The fashions were preposterous, silly and so alien that some of the girls used to dress up as a "fiftie's girl" for Halloween, much like one might dress up as a renaissance courtesan (which are really stupid choices for Halloween costumes since neither of them is scary).

In retrospect the Happy Day's setting only preceded us by about twenty years. I went to high school in the eighties which is now about twenty years ago. The kids today must think of the eighties as some magical ancient time when people dressed liked idiots and listened to really lame music. Do they look through my high school yearbooks when considering Halloween costumes?

Punk Not Dead Yet

Here's a bizarre realization for me: Punk was born about 30 years ago! I ran into a kid in a Starbucks last week wearing a Forgotten Rebels t-shirt. I chatted him up about it, telling him that I knew the guys in that band from Hamilton all those years ago. I guess it would have been like someone coming up to me when I was in high school and telling me that they knew Chuck Berry. I would have had a polite exchange with him while thinking "good for you gramps".

Someone has made a film about Punk's 30th birthday.

iPhone is Totally Book

T9 predictive texting is used on many cell phones. You enter all of your text using 9 keys. When one tries to enter "cool" the word "book" could also come up since it uses the same "2265" keystrokes to enter. So some kids have started to use the word "book" as a laudatory descriptive with phrases like "man, straight up, that iPhone is totally book".

Which brings me to wonder why we often have such a fetishistic relationship with our devices. It seems to me that a successful piece of technology should be invisible or at least transparent. When you watch TV it quickly becomes transparent and you cease to notice the device at all. Instead you are immersed in the world that is being displayed. A phone is usually like that also. Unless you've got it perched on your shoulders and you're getting a kink in your neck or the sound or heat is hurting your ear, you don't really notice it. It remains transparent unless something goes wrong with it.

People go ga-ga over a new flashy device like the iPhone but the enthusiasm will be short-lived if its usability doesn't deliver. It will be a truly successful technology when you cease to notice it. Instead of thinking "wow I'm engaging with this really book device by using only my fingers" you should be thinking about the conversation you're having in a chat session or the information you're viewing on the screen, or the movie world that you've entered by launching a video.

Perhaps the reason that we get so excited is because we intuitively sense that the iPhone's combination of features and abilities will allow us to attain a greater transparency and ease of use. Like any successful technology it should have the fluency of a second language that arises when you no longer have to concentrate on the grammar and can begin to truly express yourself.

But the iPhone user won't require predictive texting. You'll be able to type on a full qwerty keyboard and as a result you probably won't discover any book new usages.

Philosophy, Powerpoint, Free Association

Le Grand Content

Jeff Buckley - Documentary

In 1994 I finally caved in and bought a CD player so that I could play Jeff Buckley's Grace album at home.

Apple Resurrects The Newton

In 1993 I came across a new product from Apple Computer called The Newton. It captured my imagination. The next year I had left grad school and formed a company that focused on the new technology. I gave six years of my life to that project and had a wild ride. During those years I would either go to Macworld exhibitions or follow them remotely to see what new products were being launched.

The Newton continued to improve until Apple released their final version the MP2100 in 1997. It was starting to approach the potential I had envisioned for a mobile communication device. It was years ahead of its time and it took many years for others to approach it's innovations. But it all ended badly for Newton when Steve Jobs came back to Apple and decided to trash anything that was invented while he was serving the banishment imposed on him by John Sculley. Rumours persisted for years that Apple would bring back the Newton but it never materialized... until yesterday.

So yesterday morning I followed Jobs' keynote from San Francisco where he was expected to announce the new iPhone. It has already caused quite a stir, appearing on the front page of many newspapers including the Globe and Mail that was delivered to my door this morning. This slim and sexy iPod/computer/communicator (which may be renamed soon) is really a device that materializes many of the promises made years ago by the Newton.

What Steve Jobs taketh away, Steve Jobs giveth again.

War on Pollution

It is a proven fact that diet or workout regimens are more effective when tackled with a friend. The camaraderie goes a long way towards alleviating the pain. The war on your fat ass is more easily won when we're all in it together.

We seem to declare war on everything else why not pollution. Our leaders tell us that there is no way we can meet our Kyoto targets by 2012 but I say that anything is possible if everyone gets behind a cause. There needs to be inspirational leadership that can convince the people that some sacrifice is needed and that together we can win. Remember those scrap metal drives during WWII? It seems easy enough to convince people to support illegitimate and wholly fabricated causes so it shouldn't be too difficult when the cause is based on fact and real necessity.

Hispanic Cinema Festival at the Megaplex

Recently Viewed films all coincidentally made by Mexican or Spanish directors.

Babel
I generally like non-linear films. One complaint is that this one never seems to let up on the intensity.

Children of Men
I'm a big fan of dystopian cinema. This film is also intense but with better variation of tone. I like Clive Owen's misanthropy.

Volver
Perhaps a little schmaltzy. I was however surprised to find that Penelope Cruz is not nearly as irritating in her native language.

Pan's Labrynth
A gory adult fairy tale. I can see how some people will consider this an excellent film... if you like that kind of stuff.

Language Bytes

Mcdonald's Encouraging Littering? "Put litter in its place" is printed on Mcdonald's packaging. But crumpled paper is litter if it is found on the sidewalk and it is garbage if found in a bin.

Dead Slow Children Playing These words were posted on a sign in my neighbourhood when I was kid. Sure, my friends and I weren't that bright, but come on!

Farken Icehole Motherfarkers There was a movie called Johnny Dangerously which featured an immigrant mobster who shouted malaprop obscenities. This comic innovation allowed us children to watch a movie in which swearing occurred. I understand that Battlestar Gallactica also uses Fark in the same way. But if everyone started to use it like a profanity would they not have to begin bleeping it?

Escalation of Violence in the Middle East

Forgiveness is not some abstract metaphysical precept. It is a practical necessity. An eye for an eye ensures that we all go blind.

Thanks Bill Gates, for Inventing the Computer

Ask people who invented the light bulb and most will reply with the name of Thomas Edison. It has been forgotten that Edison actually made a living buying patents from other inventors. The gas bulb / carbon filament design was invented by Canadians and sold to Edison who commercialized it. There were also electric light bulbs being designed with varying degrees of success by dozens of other people over a century before Edison even came on the scene.

Many people and most Americans think that Henry Ford invented the car. Not even close. He fought for 8 years all the way to the supreme court to avoid paying royalties on a patent owned by George Selden. There are dozens of automakers of note before Ford but his innovations in mass production techniques helped him to sell millions of cars.

Guglielmo Marconi's reputation has coasted for decades on the adulation for being the person who invented Radio but only now Nikola Tesla and others are starting to get their due in popular culture.

Through self-promotion, guile, or sheer momentum, combined with a popular laziness for historical understanding, the people who eventually win over a technology market often come to be considered the inventors of that technology. So it is not that surprising for me to have had been engaged in conversations in which Bill Gates was praised for inventing separately the computer as well as the internet.

I'm hoping this one won't stick. Perhaps the very nature of computing technology will preclude this. One of the benefits of this technology is that it allows for dissenting opinions to be aired and permanent records to be kept. One need only search the internets to find that Bill Gates did not, I repeat did not invent the computer. This technology also gives hope to the legacies of the thousands of forgotten pioneers who's reputations were overshadowed by more entrepreneurial self-promoters like Edison, Ford, Marconi and Gates.

Johnny Has 2 Mommies... and 1 Daddy.

The Ontario Court of Appeals has ruled in effect that a child has three parents. The lesbian couple raising the child as well as the biological father have been given full legal standing as parents in a case decided this week.

While reading some of the comments left by the readers of a Canadian news source I began to see a pattern that I've noticed before. Some readers welcomed the tolerant position taken by the court while some others criticized it and wondered when people would be allowed to marry their pets. I noticed during this debate and the recent gay marriage debates from last year that the people that oppose such decisions seem to have inferior writing skills compared to those who supported them. Below is an example of an opposition viewpoint:

To all the fools that keep saying that gays should allow to marry and that it does not affect me. You are now a witness to the actual agenda that the gay community has had all along. Let's let them think that this marriage game is tame and it doesn't 'hurt anybody'. You myopic stupid people. This is a slow death to the real family which is the agenda of the so called a 'gay lifestyle that is normal'. This is the hidden agenda of the gay community. To indoctrinate and argue on an economic front that this makes sense. I guess they forget about the vulnerable children that don't have a say in the matter. You better reinforce the psychological network because this society will need it in the future. Being all screwed up due to the 'normal lifestyles.'
God help us all.
Tony

It is muddled and badly written. When I start reading something like this I can't help but eventually hear it spoken in the distinct dialect of a stereotypical caveman on a bad TV show. The tolerant seem to be much better writers than intolerants. I wonder why that is.

Privacy? What's that?

Police have installed dozens of new cameras on a busy shopping street in downtown Toronto. People are complaining about the erosion of their privacy. Here a some things to consider:

When you're shopping in a mall you are never usually out of the view of a camera.

Your blog details your personal views on sex, drugs and rock and roll.

Your friend's myspace account probably has photos of you having sex on drugs at a rock and roll concert.

A man takes his last breath before his neck is snapped and someone captures the video on a cell phone and distributes it worldwide in minutes.

It's too late. There's no privacy left to erode.

Death of Decorum

It has been repeated by many that Saddam Hussein got more respect than he gave his victims. That may be true but it's no excuse. Not enough respect was given to the principles of due process and the rule of law. We had an opportunity with the strongest possible example to demonstrate that the rule of law applies to all. We had a lynch mob instead.

Superhero Personality Test

Your results:
You are The Flash

The Flash 65% Spider-Man 60% Hulk 60% Superman 55% Green Lantern 50% Wonder Woman 45% Supergirl 45% Robin 40% Catwoman 30% Iron Man 30% Batman 25%

Fast, athletic and flirtatious.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

Soylent Green

I remember when I was first told where milk came from. I didn't have any of it for about a week until I realized that in order to be consistent I would also have to give up ice cream. If you think more than a little about many of the foods we eat you could easily find a way to talk yourself out of it. Similarly, but with even greater ease your hunger will talk you out of your abstinence. It is a delicate game we play with ourselves, a deliberate self-delusion that is often aided and abetted by language.

If we called that white liquid by the name of bovine lactose or even cow's milk then the connection would be more readily apparent so we call it just milk instead. If you're sitting down for breakfast you may have in front of you chicken embryos, pig's ass, as well as tubular intestines and snouts (eggs, bacon and sausage) but describing it as such could be problematic. While eating turkey dinner over the holidays I realized that the gravy added a lot of flavour to the meat and mashed potatoes. But it might surprise some people to consider that gravy is made mostly out of the blood that drains from the cooking meat which then mixes in with the melting fat.

I'm guessing that people from the city are more adept at playing this game of self-delusion since we may live and die among the towers without ever seeing where food really comes from. We frown upon people who go out into the woods, stalk and shoot an animal to later dismember and eat it. But in that case at least the animal has a fighting chance, which is more than can be said for that chicken or cow born and raised in a factory farm only to be later killed and dismembered for our eating pleasure.

Despite what I have just written and how disgusting it all sounds, I still eat meat. We live without admitting that life is at its base a messy and visceral affair that retains all of the disgusting ancient caveman products and processes which we have cleverly removed from sight through the alienation of automation and removed from mind through the palatable renaming of those products and processes.

Sometime after discovering the back-story on milk I was told of the connection between what goes in my mouth and what comes out at the other end. I didn't eat for all of about six hours until my hunger got the best of me. And if you don't know what Soylent Green is made of, here's news that they're now making something else from this abundant renewable resource.

Abide the Chains that Bind

A mutt snuggles up to a little girl looking for attention and she rewards him with a thorough rubbing behind the ears. This girl confides in her friend at school about how mean her dad is to her and her friend hugs her and tells her not to worry since she'll be old enough to leave home soon. This sage of a friend doesn't reveal just how mean her own father is to her, she only tells her teacher who promises to help and tells the girl that it's not her fault. This teacher cries on my shoulder and I tell her I love her. I seem to be at the end of this emotional food chain.

Backwards Incompatible

We're driving faster and faster into the future, trying to steer by using only the rear-view mirror.

- Marshall McLuhan

Skeumorph (Skeuomorph)

Nearly every funeral hearse that you see has a landau roof. In fact some of the ugliest cars also have landau roofs. It's that leathery looking back part of the roof that makes the car look like it's a convertible without actually being a convertible. It is a design element that is left over from horse drawn carriages. Those ancient buggies would often have ribbed covers that could be pulled up or down depending on the weather. Auto marketers needed to sell to people who might have been uneasy with the horseless carriage so they cleverly conspired to keep some design elements from the old carriage, like the landau roof, so the old guy could feel at ease in his high-tech contraption.

The landau roof is an example of a skeumorph - a design feature left over from the past with all of the visual markers intact but with the functionally mostly or completely missing. One example would be the instances of Greek or Roman pillars one finds in front of those giant houses in the suburbs that are built by people who prove over and over again that money simply cannot buy taste. Denim jeans have fake rivets reflecting construction methods before the development of modern textile manufacturing processes.

With the hyper-acceleration of the rate of change we don't have to go very far back to see an example of a skeumorph. The Microsoft Zune was designed with a prominent circle on the lower half of the face of the device. It looks like a scroll-wheel but it isn't. It is actually a constellation of buttons laid out in a circle with the only possible purpose being to make it look just like an Apple iPod.

Let me know if you come across other examples.

Gift Ideas

If you're wondering what to buy me for Christmas, don't even consider gift certificates. It's like giving currency as a gift but the currency of some limited geographic use like the Slovenian tolar. I'm sure Slovenia is a lovely place and they may have wonderful things I may consider buying for myself but why do you want to limit me to shopping only in Slovenia?

Advertised lately are gift certificates for a collection of various stores or restaurants under a larger corporate umbrella or gift certificates that can be redeemed at any store inside a particular mall. Again, why limit me?

If you insist on giving a gift certificate then consider giving the most useful gift certificate ever invented: Cash. It's accepted in every establishment at the mall, in every restaurant, by any street vendor and if it's US cash it's probably accepted also in Slovenia.

Black or White

Fundamentalism is:

the fear of grey.

I'd like to thank...

I just opened my reader and found the following message:

"You" have been named as Time Magazine's Person of the Year.

I just want to thank all of you. It could not have been done without each and every one of "You".

I guess no one bothered to tell Chrysler because they are running an ad on Time.com that reads "You might not be Time Person of the Year. But you can drive like you are."

Speaking of Punk

I never really bought into the CD craze. I went straight from vinyl to MP3. I've recently been downloading some of the music that I own only on vinyl. These are some of the bands that made my teen years bearable.

The Clash - Arguably the best Rock and Roll band of all time. Probably their worst album was their most famous album.

Crass - Even if they never heard any of their music the album covers were enough to scare decent folk.

Stiff Little Fingers - This was the music I played on my car's cassette deck on my first date with Cathy. We're still very close, so it must have impressed her. I just downloaded All The Best of Stiff Little Fingers and was dismayed to find that their subsequent albums were really quite lame.

The Stranglers - Everyone talks about how these guys were the progenitors of Punk but you might appreciate them more for their later work which is probably some of the better examples of New Wave.

The Ramones - I bought my first drum kit for $100 from a guy who lived right beside the Dofasco Steel Factory. The shit had been played out of it and the worn-out skin on the floor tom had "The Ramones" scribbled on it in ink. Many years later I would see them live at RPM. For several days I feared that I had permanently lost my hearing.

Forgotten Rebels - This was a local band that shocked me with lyrics like "Elvis is dead. The big fat goof is dead, dead, dead" and song titles like "Bomb the Boats and Feed the Fish."

Dead Kennedys - Exhilaratingly fast west coast speed punk. I only played songs like Nazi Punks, Fuck Off when my parents weren't home. I remember showing the Frankenchrist album to Mr. Roper, the straightest laced Vice Principal you could imagine. He politely viewed the banned Giger poster that came with the album and mused that the name must be a comment that America hasn't been the same since the Kennedy assassinations.

Punk was for many a reaction to the numbing banality of Disco. Although it's pretty funny now.

Time Travel Tourism

You are asked to choose some time in the past to which you will travel. It could be a thousand years ago, a hundred years ago or last week. When you get there you will create a new timeline so that everything after that point will begin to play out as it would have with the addition of your influence. You might want to pick a time far enough in the past so that people don't recognize you. You could use your future knowledge to gain power, wealth or lost love but act fast since the stock market won't behave exactly the same way it did the first time around since you the butterfly will be emanating hurricanes of change from your minutest actions.

Strapped in, the machine turned on.
They disappeared.

To the past of their choosing?
No way to know for certain.

Their new timelines would have no effect on ours.

Flux

"The only thing constant is change itself."

- Heraclitus (535-475 BC)


"The 20th century is the century in which change changed."

- Marshal McLuhan (1911-1980)

Free Media

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"
-- David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.

New technologies are often described by way of a metaphor or an extension of existing technologies. The automobile was initially called a "horseless carriage" and rightfully so. It performed the exact function of the carriage which was to carry people from point to point and the carriage makers soon went out of business.

The radio to some extent performed the same function as the music box. It could play music but did so wirelessly at a distance. So by seeing it as a music box one could wonder how one would collect revenue by sending out music to nobody in particular. At best, it could be used for public service or education but how could you make money from it? It soon became clear that commercially the radio was more within the paradigm of the newspaper. They both deliver content which may or may not be freely distributed but the real revenue is made from selling advertising.

Early television was described by some as an educational tool and thought destined to be an electronic teacher of the future. The metaphor could be apt but it was a little misguided commercially. Commercially it has more in common with print and radio since it came also to make money by selling advertising.

When the internet came to be noticed by people who didn't even wear pocket protectors it was also hailed as an educational tool that would aid in the teaching of the masses. But once again the commercial paradigm started by print media, continued by radio and expanded by television seems to be the most efficient way to make money from the internet. Google has proven that gobs of money can be made on the internet by selling or facilitating the selling of advertising which has been modified in clever ways to fit the new medium.

Of course radio, television and the internet have all been used successfully to educate the masses but the commercial exploitation of the media has been largely through the selling and placement of advertising. But is there another way? People still pay to buy newspapers (less and less it seems). Satellite radio and cable TV are proving that people will pay subscription fees for premium content distributed to their home or car. What we haven't seen yet are any large-scale successes of subscription based businesses on the Internet.

Is this just a temporary lag before the commercialization of the internet matures? Or is the nature of the Internet different in any significant way? A new generation of kids are growing up thinking it is quite natural to get content for free while at the same time eschewing any attempts to be advertised to. Commercially this tension seems untenable since it seems that someone's got to pay for the ride. You will either accept to be interrupted by advertising or you will pay for the privilege of bypassing it.

But even as I write this "message sent to nobody in particular" there are ads on this blog and some bloggers are trying to extract subscription fees from readers. We continue in the spirit of blogging to produce content by ourselves for ourselves and because of the diminishing costs of the technology there is a chance that we may be able to keep it mostly free.

When Friends Go Wrong

As a young boy growing up on the other side of the fence and watching a lot of American television I grew up with the understanding that Americans were the good guys and that their enemies were evil. When The Clash came out with a killer triple album called Sandanista I started to pay attention to Nicaragua and learned of the treatment given to them by the Reagan government. My teenage years were spent mostly disliking all that America stood for. I hated Disney's saccharine sweetness, refusing to watch anything they produced and I would have more successfully boycotted Coca Cola if I wasn't so addicted to it.

The charms of Clinton won me over and I realized that America could be a force for good. I also got into business and had the opportunity to work with many Americans whom I found to be mostly decent and amiable. They didn't seem to be sporting any discernible horns on their foreheads. I came to respect their work ethic, their integrity and their innovative nature.

I think a lot of Canadians have had similar experiences and consider Americans to be our closest friends. We were somewhat surprised when you elected Dubya. It didn't seem like a smart choice for such a nation of smart and decent people. But we all have friends who have made some bad choices. The important thing is that they learn from their mistakes. What completely puzzled us is why on earth you would vote him in again for a second term when he was so clearly incompetent, incorrigible and disingenuous. Here was reason to worry again. Well I'm glad that our friends to the south are finally starting to see what's what. In the words of that great orator: "Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, uh, uh, uh... won't get fooled again."

Meanwhile the spirit of Punk lives on below:

Name That Species

For some unknown reason I was reading a description of Species 8472. This was the species of aliens on Star Trek Voyager that came from another dimension and were so advanced that not even the Borg could resist them (it's futile, they should know).

In the descriptive overview it was written that Species 8472 was only the name given to them by the Borg (not this Borg). Their actual name is unknown." I was a little stumped by this. Does anything have an "actual name" outside of what they are called? If the Borg call them that and we call them that, then that's their name. I suppose if we could figure out what they called themselves then there might be a case made to favour the self-naming of the group. But we don't even allow that respect to the people of a certain Scandinavian country by the name of Finland because in Finland their country is called Suomi (I know because I saw it on their hockey sweaters).

This approach to thinking of things as having real names is a little too Platonist for me. It's like saying that raccoons have an "actual name" apart from what we call them in our various languages? Maybe that would be what the raccoons call themselves?

Which brings me to another question about naming. We sometimes name things or animals based on the sounds they make. This is perhaps the simplest method of nomenclature. A child may call a dog "woof woof" or say "meow" when pointing to the cat. A car may be referred to as "doo doot" for the sound of the horn or "vroom vroom" for the sound of the engine. So if raccoons were to come up with a name for us humans what would they call us? It seems clear to me that they would call us raccoon because that is usually what they hear us say when they come across a human. If I am walking with a friend and we see a raccoon one or both of us will say something like "look, raccoon" or "there's a raccoon" or "wow a raccoon" or "shh, raccoon. The point is that whenever those masked bandits see us they hear us make the sound "raccoon". That is the sound they most associate with us humans and that is what they would likely call us if asked to name those curious bipedal creatures that leave food for them every night in large covered plastic bowls.

Compelling Silliness

The Avalanches - Frontier Psychiatrist (2000)

This was probably inspired by Steinski. Listen to The Motorcade Sped On (1983).

Passages From An Unfinished Novel

After some squirming she rolls over and sits spread atop, knees bent, facing Ziggy's shuttered visage.

Coursing in circles around the accelerator the streams of billions rush past each other. Occasionally and rarely an electron slams directly into a positron. The resulting explosion while invisible to the naked eye is nevertheless a display of spectacular pyrotechnics. The aim of this collision is to create new particles hitherto unseen. The art is only incidental.

Loudly - "Ohh Ziggy"

Whispered - "Ohh God"

Exultations, visceral and archetypal. Exaltations, one and universal. The silence that follows will soon be punctured when Susan looks over to the clock on the night table and registers in order the digits 8, 1, and 4.

"Oh shit, I'm gonna be late again. I can't be late again. Fuck."

Machinations, Minds and Machines

Both my Mac and PC were down the last couple of days. Since I had been writing so much about machine intelligence I wondered if they were conspiring and rising up against me.

A computer was the title given to a person who worked with numbers. The machine that replaced him took from him not only his livelihood but ignominiously also his name. A machine can be defined phenomenologically as anything which enacts some dispensation of energy. Anything that does anything is a machine. But the mêchanê (μηχανῆς) as known to the ancient Greeks was a type of crane device that was used to lift up and bring the Gods flying onto the stage. This is where we get the Latin Deus ex Machina or literally "God from the Machine" that swoops into a dramatic play and out of the blue is able to solve a hopeless situation.

My favourite example of Deus ex Machina recently is in the film Adaptation written by Charlie Kaufman. The film is about the writing of the very film we watch. After becoming completely stuck the hero screenwriter goes to a Robert McKee seminar and in epiphany all of his problems are solved. Later over a drink McKee harshly warns him not to dare employing a Deus ex Machina in his script. A clever example of the very device raising a warning about itself.

The word machine has come to be used in various ways. The cross in Christian Liturgy has been described as the "theatre machine" of Jesus. Early motor vehicles were simply called "machines" as they are still called machina in Italian and other Romance languages. In this century a brilliant thinker envisioned something called a Turing Machine which directly lead to the creation of what we know as the computer.

In present day English we seem to use the word machine in the sense of something that is used to carry out some work. Despite the fact that the human mind comfortably falls within the definition of a machine in the most basic sense, it is meant as an antithesis to the human. The machine is thought to be something unthinking. The idea of machine seems to imply an absence of agency altogether. In other words, the machine is said to have no will. It is simply designed or programmed to act.

The computer (the human who worked with numbers) was replaced by a machine (the computer who works with numbers). We now ask if the human mind is really just a machine and also whether a machine can have human intelligence. If human intelligence is a complex machine that can be replicated by the "computer" should we fear that such a device designed to carry out work can replace us not just in the mundane number-crunching professions but replace human intelligence in some wholesale fashion? Should we be concerned that these innocuously named devices could devise some such machinations?

There are some who predict that the increasing complexity and processing power of computers will allow them to reach a stage in which a single processor will be more powerful than all of human thinking capacity combined. Millions of such processors networked or combined in some parallel fashion would create the power and intelligence of some entity that would undoubtedly be described by some as a god or God. Turning Nietzsche on his head, after killing God we will give birth to him in the near future by using the computer as the theatre machine of resurrection. Will this be the god from the machine that comes out of the blue to solve all of our problems and will this Deus ex Machina be kind and helpful enough to raise any warnings about itself?

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Pizza, Chinese, or Schnitzel?

This entry is really my overlarge comment to this post here which was inspired my post here and is really a constellation of more questions of course than answers.

I agree that people like Kurzweil seem to be missing something when it comes to characterizing human intelligence as some conglomeration of brute computational powers. Still, at the risk of sounding more like a behaviourist than a functionalist I find myself wondering about some questions.

How do we know that another human is conscious and possesses real understanding? We do seem to take it for granted. I wonder if some people that I have met would pass a Turing test. Well, one way to gauge that would be to ask them. So if there came about some future controversy if a particular robot was indeed possessing of real intelligence then we could ask it directly. This doesn't really help us because it could be programmed to answer in ways that appear functionally to actually possess intelligence and consciousness.

In much the same way a psychopath is very good at mimicking moral and ethical behaviour even if they can't begin to understand it's meaning. But something eventually gives away the psychopath (like killing and eating the brain of a hitchhiker). But if nothing gives away the robot's virtual consciousness as being different from ours then why should we begrudge its claim. So another question arises: If they can fool everyone can they fool themselves? - Like Deckard in Bladerunner who doesn't know that he is a replicant.

In Searle's Chinese Room experiment a comprehensive collection of tables and maps describing the relationships of symbols to each other are available to Searle. With these he can produce an impression to an interlocutor that Searle actually understands Chinese while he really does not. These tables and maps are of course external and peripheral but what if they were internally accessed by Searle in some way that he came to be able to use them without knowing on the surface how he was using them. I think someone like Kurzweil could imagine some form of downloadable tables and maps that could be internalized so that the speaker could speak Chinese without actually understanding how they are able to speak Chinese. Which leads to another question: Does my friend Mr. Fung know "how" he speaks Chinese?

Deep Blue doesn't really understand chess and software doesn't know from pizza and this is because they lack something that the German Philosopher Heidegger called "Care". The human being's comportment to the world and its intelligence is informed by this "care" or "concern" ("sorge" in German). In order to allow a robot to achieve human-like understanding they need to have something at stake it seems. We could supply this only by ensuring that they have a vulnerable body, mortality, social history, encumbrances, risks etc. along with desires and fears in the service of self-transparent as well as deep hidden motivations. But by giving it all of those features (some would say weaknesses) what you are really designing here is a human being made with human parts and human histories and that's not really a robot. Perhaps developments in biotechnological computing will create biological robots that cannot be denied to possess human-like understanding on the grounds that they lack care, because they will also possess it.

While I hold onto the notion that human intelligence is something special and cannot be recreated simply with processing power I wonder if that will become moot when we begin to add cyborg peripherals that become deeply internalized and when the human body can be manipulated and altered through genetic nano-technology to the point of busting open the categories so that the limits and differentiations between robot and human become blurred. We may then have greatly more numerous categories of intelligence to contend with.

Recent Viewings

The History Boys - A British stage play adapted to film featuring the entire original cast. A very charming, dialogue-rich treat. What Dead Poet's Society could have been if it didn't suck.

Fog of War - Documentary in which Robert McNamara candidly discusses his role in the Vietnam War in his capacity as Secretary of Defense. Clearly still very bright as an octogenarian, McNamara can even be characterized as sympathetic while calmly discussing the horrors of war.

What The Bleep Do We Know - Mysticism meets quantum mechanics. It starts out harmlessly enough but quickly degenerates into one of the most irritating movies I've seen in years.

Dawn of the Dead (2004) - I watched it because Sarah Polley (girl from my hood) was in it. It was better than I expected. Paying homage to George Romero's 1978 version and the movie that started it all, Night of the Living Dead. Another zombie movie I liked was 28 Days Later.

Shaun Of The Dead - A British send-up of the zombie genre. Stupid, childish and a hoot to watch.

Taste of Cherry - Hollywood anti-matter. Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami's mesmerizing and quiet little film about a guy driving around Tehran looking for someone to bury him. It's like watching a painting dry. Roger Ebert hated it.

Cache - French film by Michael Haneke which starts and ends with long static video sequences in which nothing happens. Another one which leaves room for much debate about just exactly what the movie is about.

Stranger Than Fiction - Not quite Charlie Kaufman and not quite Spike Jonze. A digestible cookie of a movie.

Ghost in the Machine

Despite the considerable efforts to build a machine with artificial intelligence there has been little real success. Fifty years ago Turing elaborated a test that could be performed on a machine (robot/computer/software) that would determine if they possessed human-like intelligence. Ray Kurzweil recently predicted that a computer will have the raw computing capacity of the human brain by the year 2020 and that of the entirety of collective humanity by the year 2050. There are many detractors that consider that to be overly optimistic and yet others who doubt any machine will ever achieve human-like intelligence.

In 1770 a clever showman toured Europe with a machine he had built called The Turk. This exotic looking Ottoman automaton took on all challengers and was able to beat nearly anyone at chess. It was revealed many decades later that inside the machine was hidden a compact human chess master who was covertly controlling the machine and beating his opponents with apparent ease. Instead of Intel Inside, the logo on the side of the machine should have read Human Inside.

Chess playing computers have come a long way since then. The machine Deep Blue is now the best chess player in the world having beaten Gary Kasparov a few years ago. It can compute staggeringly large numbers of possible outcomes to decide on its next move, eventually wearing its human opponent down with its sheer number-crunching capabilities. Machines are really great at doing such calculation intensive tasks. Banks, insurance companies and other large organizations were the first to use artificial intelligence to do such work in a fraction of the time required to do the job by the Bob Cratchits of the world.

Recent advances in computing power have closely followed Moore's Law and attained efficient number-crunching capabilities approaching petaFLOP speeds. So one would guess that there were nothing left that a machine wouldn't be able to compute better than a human. What about looking at a picture and determining whether anyone in that picture is eating pizza? This is an example of a task that artificial intelligence has a real hard time doing. Any child could pull it off and so could several clever gorillas and orangutans.

So what are you to do if your company needs to sort through thousands of pictures to find pictures of people eating pizza? Artificial intelligence doesn't seem to be up to the challenge so what is required is artificial artificial intelligence or human intelligence. Just like that touring renaissance chess machine the computer requires the assistance of Human Inside architecture. So Amazon is making such a service available and they have cleverly called it the Mechanical Turk. If you've got a few spare cycles you can sign up and take on such simple work and be paid for it at the rate of a few cents per task.

Human intelligence is the new artificial intelligence.

Would You Like Fries With That Salt?

Why do they have salt packets in fast-food hamburger restaurants?

How addicted would you have to be to add salt to something that is already covered with salt and accompanied by your choice of ketchup, pickles, mustard, relish, mayo etc?

Rule of Law

There are cases that can test our respect for the rule of law, but these offer the best opportunity for us also to strengthen it.

Four out of five vigilantes were convicted in New Brunswick this week for setting ablaze the house of a suspected drug dealer who it was said was making life in the town very unpleasant.

Saddam Hussein's trial is described as being "flawed and unsound" by Human Rights Watch as they call for it to be overturned and retried.

In the first case the common public reaction might be to lionize the defendants and to advocate leniency for them. In the second case the the common reaction would be to vilify the defendant and conveniently overlook the possibility that an unfair trial may have taken place.

At odds is the personal realm versus the abstract realm. Crimes are real and personal whereas laws are abstract and impersonal. Original and primitive justice is much more of the immediate, real and personal variety. If one feels that they have been impeded or wronged they lash out and penalize the perpetrator of the perceived crime. Caveman A's food is taken from him by Caveman B so the aggrieved clubs the thief over the head (assuming the power structure doesn't favour Caveman B so that Caveman A will suffer even bigger lumps). What is the great innovation of the Rule of Law is that retaliatory action and punishment is taken out of the personal and immediate realm and put in the hands of impersonal and sober Justice who is said to be blind.

What is liberating and democratic about the experiment is that all members of a group agree to be bound within it. Just because Caveman B is the son of the Shaman doesn't exclude him from the the consequences of his actions within the prescribed legal framework. The weakest in the group is protected from being abused by the most powerful. The side-effect of this is that even the most villainous is also promised a guarantee of due process.

The vigilante, even if he is supported by the masses to have acted correctly must be subject to the law. Sometimes masses are moved by cynically spread rumours and can be manipulated to act on unfounded suspicions. "I hear Martha is a witch. I saw her riding a broom last week. Something should be done about that woman." I'm sure those who lynched young black men for looking at white women the wrong way were convinced they were right. But we clearly can't trust vindictive personal rage to be the arbiter of right and wrong.

The evil dictator, even if he would probably have his eyes personally plucked out by the families of those that he killed, must be given a fair trial. It can only be this way if we want to continue to enjoy the liberating and democratizing power of the rule of law. Any abuse of it weakens it strength and could fail us when we need it most. For the law to continue to work for us, we must continue to work for it.

Some might laugh or scoff at the insistence that Saddam should receive a fair trial. But this is a great opportunity to show our western respect for the law. If he is clearly guilty, then he will get what is coming to him. We don't need to subvert our principles to hasten the process. So we should give him a fair trial but likewise a fair trial should also be afforded to those Western leaders who chose to flout the prevailing international laws to engage in vigilante military action.

Just because Caveman B is the head of a large and powerful nation doesn't give him the right to circumvent the law. Especially since the very founding of that powerful nation is based on these principles as they have been so admirably put forth by the framers of a really fine work of constitution. The job of Caveman B is to protect and uphold that constitution. Even he is culpable and open to prosecution if he decides to contravene it.

This reminds me of an infamous event in an American Presidential debate. Michael Dukakis who is against capital punishment was asked what he would say if his wife Kitty were raped and murdered. Would he not then want capital punishment to be meted out to the perpetrator? His response was: "No, I don't, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life". He gave the right and consistent theoretical answer but it cost him dearly in the polls. What he should have said was that he probably would in that instance want to tear into the killer with his bare hands. Then adding that even if he felt he was right in the personal realm of immediate rage and retribution, he would have been wrong in the abstract realm of the law. That abstract and impersonal quality of the rule of law is worth upholding and even the most powerful should be held accountable to it.

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Outsourcing

The future of customer service.

Ode to Honey

eucalyptus honey

one taste won't do

koala, hungry for you

ENTP

About 15 years ago while an undergrad I took a personality test with a group of people chosen to work together. The MBTI test resulted in each one of us being told we were one of sixteen different personality types represented by four letters. I just took a shorter version of the test and it seems I haven't really changed.

Characteristics

At their best people with ENTP preferences constantly scan the environment for opportunities and possibilities. They see patterns and connections not obvious to others and at times seem to be able to see into the future. They are adept at generating conceptual possibilities and then analysing them strategically. ENTPs are good at understanding how systems work and are enterprising and resourceful in manoeuvring within them to achieve their ends.

1. ENTPs are enthusiastic innovators. Their world is full of possibilites, interesting concepts and exciting challenges. They are stimulated by difficulties, quickly devising creative responses and plunging into activity, trusting their ability to improvise. They use their Intuition primarily externally and enjoy excercising ingenuity in the world. ENTPs are are likely to be:

• Creative, imaginative and clever
• Theoretical, conceptual and curious

ENTPs use their Thinking primarily internally to analyse situations and their own indeas and to plan. They admire competence, intelligence, precision and efficiency. ENTPs are usually:

• Analytical, logical, rational and objective
• Assertive and questioning

ENTPs are enterprising, resourceful, active and energetic. They respond to challenging problems by creating complex and global solutions. They are usually adept at "reading" other people, seeing how to motivate them and assuming leadership. They can do almost anything that captures their interest.

See Forer Effect.

Pedagogy

Teach not what to think but how to think.

Nominally Connected

Barot is a terrorist.

Borat is a terror.

Sacha Baron-Cohen is Borat.

Simon Baron-Cohen is his cousin.

Language is the House of Being

I submitted a comment today to one of the blogs that I read regularly. It is written by a young linguist and so the subject matter was words, specifically how their meanings can change in popular usage, sometimes to the extent of coming to mean the exact opposite. As I was writing the comment, it happened to me again. Sometimes when I pay too close attention to a word I start to get this strange feeling that the word begins to slip away from me, lose it's meaning and become something very strange and incomprehensible. A short word like "and" if stared at for a while starts to look odd and I begin to wonder if I'm even spelling it correctly. The more common and everyday the word, the more likely this bizarre confusion can result for me. I thought about going into Linguistics but was freaked out by the possibility that I would one day become a blathering idiot unable to understand simple speech.

You might know what I mean if you have ever started thinking about an everyday activity while you're engaged in that very activity. If you really pay attention to the way you walk as you are walking you can become very confused and possibly trip. This, I think explains the awkward person's gait. He or she may simply be too conscious of the way in which they are being perceived. The really cool person is someone who seems not to care what you think when they walk past.

For heaven's sake don't even try thinking about chewing while you eat, you are likely to bite your tongue or the inside of your cheek. Likewise, a really smooth series of hammering strokes can be interrupted by thinking about hammering thereby causing you to bang your thumb. I think words are like that, in that they are the most common everyday tool that we use and speaking and reading are the most common of everyday activities. If you stop and scrutinize the tool or activity while engaged with that tool or activity then estrangement results from that tool or activity. The more intimate and everyday that tool or activity the more freaked-out you could be if you ever stop to look at it really closely. It is our nature to take such things for granted. Look very closely at a fork or a doorknob and you might get that feeling I'm describing.

Martin Heidegger touches on this in Being and Time. The meaning of being is derived through the series of interconnected relations of other beings-in-the-world. The human being which he called Da-sein relies on a dependency between Dasein and the world. You can be in a state of un-reflecting everydayness until you stop and make a separation between you and other beings. The hammer, the fork, the doorknob, you and the word function within a field of experience that constitutes existence until you choose to atomize or make discreet this existence into parts that are set off against each other as distinct beings.

Words and World.

Apropos

I recently added Google text ads on this site more out of curiosity than greed. The ads are not placed randomly. Software analyzes the content of the page and chooses appropriate ads that should in theory be on the top of mind for the readers. It has been fun to see which ads appear on this site.

A recent post of mine was titled Football Coaches are Running the World. Soon after, ads started to appear for sport psychology and coaching manuals. A little while ago I had written about matters scientific and immediately started to see ads for laboratory and optical equipment. A friend of mine told me that she had clicked on a couple of those ads. For days and days after it seemed that there were nothing but optical ads. It seems that clicked ads reflect a successful placement so more ads like it are immediately funneled in.

I did a search for a book written by an old professor of mine called Hegel's Ladder. I found a book review page and was very much amused by the ads on that page. Six out of the eight ads were for ladder hardware products. Software just ain't that smart yet.

Office Space Recut

Office Space

Recut as a thriller. LOL
I actually did laugh out loud.

You can find other versions here:
Crime Thriller
Drama

Atheism Rebranded

Lately I have begun to wonder if the apparent rise in religiosity has been but a chimera. At first one begins to speculate possible reasons for it's growth. Perhaps it is a response to this rapidly changing world in which people feel more insecure and as a result find solace and meaning in that which gives them stability and comfort. Maybe it's a conspiracy of the powers that be to mollify the masses making them easier to sway through their media maelstrom.

I have mostly given up on the idea of Progress (with a capitol P). I identify less with Hegel and more with Nietzsche on that matter so it shouldn't be surprising to find that we as a species can easily revert to supernaturalism. There is no guarantee that we will continue to develop our understanding in a progressive manner. The forces of will, politics, domination and exploitation may find their paths smoothed by a population that believes and obstructed by a population of unbelievers.

Still, I can't help but come back to that notion of progress. One could consider that the recent and fervent rise in fundamentalism is really just a last gasp of that world-view as it inevitably comes to its conclusion. There is a dialectical framework that is attributed to Hegel (you could say it should be to Kant or Fichte). It is the notion of the triad wherein an idea or thesis brings about its opposition or antithesis and finally leads to a truer understanding or synthesis.

I'm not sure about the synthesis part but this could be an instructive way to view the forces at work here. Atheism is the thesis that has brought about a strong reaction of its antithesis manifested in fundamentalism. These are processes that could take decades or centuries to unfold. One could say that the Enlightenment was really the thesis of naturalism and that it has been waging war with it's antithesis of supernaturalism ever since. I would say that the paradigm is more like a pendulum than a triad. It swings to one extreme, then the other, then back again. We have been lately at the supernatural end of that sway but it is heartening to see signs that we may have already reached that pinnacle and are about to make our way back the other way.

One sees it in the books, documentaries, and even blogs that have taken up the cause. In a clever marketing move, some of the people driving this cause have taken a play from another group ostracized by the religious establishment; the gay community. That community took a positive descriptive and used it to refer to themselves. The word gay is upbeat and doesn't stand in opposition to anything except maybe the word unhappy. The word atheism on the other hand is a negative descriptor and stands strictly in opposition to something, namely theism. So atheism or naturalism has been rebranded as Bright.

But a pendulum eventually comes to rest at a balance. It will have to arrive at a balance I believe and not at one side or the other. There have been attempts to carve out this space lately. People like Deepak Chopra and the makers of What The Bleep Do We Know have tried to reconcile science and religiosity but judging by their efforts we have a long, long way to go. The motivation to understand is at the heart of both sides of the pendulum's sway and that is what should not be overlooked.

Atheism

In grade 7 my friend David and I had a clandestine conversation about religion in the school library one afternoon. After some diplomatically chosen lines of discussion I realized that I was not alone in thinking that all this talk about God and heaven seemed quite silly. A huge weight was lifted off my chest as I was finally able to talk openly with someone who shared my skepticism. I guess coming out must feel a little like that. I went home thinking that I had just made a new best friend with whom I could be open and honest.

The next time we were in school together David seemed to avoid me all day long. He seemed estranged and nervous when I finally caught up with him. Standing across from me, the first words out of his mouth were something to the effect of "you're wrong you know, Jesus Christ died for our sins". Awestruck, I stood in silence and listened, feeling like that woman in the last scene of that new movie I had just viewed, when she calls out to Donald Sutherland's character only to find that her last friend and only lifeline has become "one of them".

Disappointed and crushed, I politely mumbled something and walked away. We were never really friends after that. By the time I had made it to high school I threw off any pretense of diplomacy and started a campaign to promote Atheism to anyone who would listen. Being fully out, I wasn't shy about it and my zealot's drive to convert carried through into University. My naive faith in progress lead me to believe that people would eventually see the truth if it was persuasively laid bare and that our societies at large would eventually shrug off these ancient superstitions and become more and more atheistic.

I've had a hard time reconciling this expectation with what has been seemingly happening over the last decade or so. Judging by the triumphs of the Religious Right in America, the rise of Islamic Fundamentalism, and the ever deepening quagmire of the religious dispute between the Jews in Israel and the Arabs around them, we don't seem to be progressing at all or one has to go further and throw out the notion of progress altogether.

I've been largely in exile from this conversation for more than a decade, wandering the desert, waiting for a sign.

Conversations I had at Starbucks Tonight

The B'nai Mitzvah, Confirmation and Sünnet:
Putting aside the religious justifications, each of these have traditionally been performed as the young child is about to enter adulthood. Maybe in the ancient past, but do we really consider the entering of puberty to be the onset of adulthood? It may be argued that adulthood is increasingly delayed until reaching well into the 20's or 30's if it is ever reached at all.

Teachers that I know tell me that girls are almost always the brightest students in their classrooms, even excelling in the traditionally male domain of mathematics. While the boys have been spending their days playing video games and raving about Jackass The Movie, the girls have left them behind and are beginning to realize that they don't need men to complete them. This spells trouble for us guys. If we're not careful, these developments along with the current advancements in reproductive technologies may eventually make us obsolete.

I am more likely to dance in front of complete strangers than friends or family. I don't know exactly why.

Twins within the womb compete for resources. What determines success? Location, Location, Location.

Fibonacci Numbers are still amazing.