The End of Prehistory

Assuming the internet is forever and searching this stuff becomes even easier, how many of your descendants do you think will read your blog? A little bit, at least.

Imagine 200 years from now. Estimate 25 years a generation. You have 2^8 = 256 great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. That's probably too many to really spend any time thinking about each one individually. Maybe that's the wrong approach, though. Would you pick and read something from a couple of them? Maybe if you have over 2 kids per generation then you are expected to get readers.

I'm hoping this blog will get at least one reader post-2200. I just have to figure out what will still be interesting by then.

From Cory Doctorow:

Tomorrow's lives will be remembered by the historians of the day-after-tomorrow with astounding clarity and thoroughness, reconstructed through the midden of personal blips, twits, and chirps emitted by our social tools. By comparison, our own lives will be as opaque and unimaginable as the lives of the poor schmucks who inhabited the same cave for 200,000 years, generation after generation leaving no mark more permanent than a mouldering knucklebone lost in the soil.

Olden Days

According to The Hacker Crackdown: In America, Mother's Day is by far the busiest day of the year for the phone network.

On the other hand, the busiest day of the year for the internet is generally "last Tuesday".*

* is this true? Not sure.

Bizarro Walmart

From Marginal Revolution:

Wal-marts in China are upscale and appreciated for their high quality American goods.

I recommend Marginal Revolution. It's probably my favorite blog. Mostly dry freakonomics-but-better style, with a heavy dose of music, food, and other culture recommendation. If it wasn't for them I wouldn't be so into "beepcore" ;-)

Linguistic Archaeology

From the book Guns, Germs, and Steel which I am reading for the second time because it is so great.

p.343:

How can a linguist, studying only modern languages, figure out whether Austronesians living on Taiwan 6,000 years ago had pigs?

The solution is to reconstruct the vocabularies of vanished ancient languages by comparing vocabularies of modern languages derived from them. For instance, the words meaning "sheep" in many languages of the Indo-European language family, distributed from Ireland to India, are quite similar: "avis", "ovis", "oveja", "ovtsa", "owis", and "oi" in Sanskrit, Latin, Spanish, Russian, Greek, and Irish respectively. Comparison of the sound shifts that the various modern Indo-European languages have undergone during their histories suggests that the original form was "owis" in the ancestral Indo-European language spoken around 6,000 years ago.

Nearly 2,000 other words of their vocabulary can similarly be reconstructed, including words for "goat", "horse", "wheel", "brother", and "eye". But no Proto-Indo-European word can be reconstructed for "gun", which uses different roots in different modern Indo-European languages: "gun" in English, "fusil" in French, "ruzhyo" in Russian, and so on. That shouldn't surprise us: people 6,000 years ago couldn't possibly have had a word for guns.

Proceeding in the same way, we can compare modern Taiwanese, Phillipine, Indonesian, and Polynesian to reconstruct a Proto-Austronesian. Interestingly, the language had words for "pig", "dog", and "rice", which must therefore have been part of Proto-Austronesian culture. The language is also full of words indicating a maritime economy, such as "outrigger canoe", "sail", "giant clam", "octopus", "fish trap", and "sea turtle".

Musical Robots

I wonder if you could make the reverse - a robot that heard you whistling and did stuff accordingly. Maybe just "dancing to the beat".

Fafblog returns!

One of the funniest blogs on the internet is back.

(As opposed to all those other blogs that are funnier, but not on the internet.)

Become a Better Guesser

The Economist reports on a better way to guess anything - just force yourself to make two guesses, and then average the two.

The two researchers asked 428 people eight questions drawn from the “CIA World Factbook”: for example, “What percentage of the world’s airports are in the USA?” Half the participants were unexpectedly asked to make a second, different guess immediately after they completed the initial questionnaire. The other half were asked to make a second guess three weeks later.

Dr Vul and Dr Pashler found that in both circumstances the average of the two guesses was better than either guess on its own. They also noticed that the interval between the first and second guesses determined how accurate that average was. Second guesses made immediately improved accuracy by an average of 6.5%; those made after three weeks improved the accuracy by 16%.

Even after three weeks, the result is still only one-third as good as the wisdom of several different people. But that this happens at all raises questions about “individuality” within an individual. If guesses can shift almost at random, where are they coming from?

Yet another strike against the utilitarian view of the world. People aren't optimizing utility functions inside their head, probably because optimizing functions is hard. Perhaps it is more like a slew of different guessing mechanisms and they pick between them heuristically. I can imagine that would be much easier to program. No calculus required.

Freedom and Justice

From an Argentinean military dictator:

We believe we are already within a democratic system. Some factors are still missing, like the expression of the people's will.

He says (specifically) that the freedom and justice in his country make up for it. I was entertained especially since I traditionally name my computers either "freedom" or "justice".

Did you know computer nerds like to name their computers? There are different schools of thought. One is that you should use hard-to-distinguish names to demonstrate your skills at remembering arbitrary text sequences. Like calling your computers "nerdcave" and "nerdcave-2". Another is that you should use your native language for unspellable names like "chanakya" to spite your monolingual coworkers. Another is that you should prove your nerd-in-group-ness with names that have double meanings that are only apparent to hard core techies, like "swap". And yet another strategy is to use your own username so that you are spared the difficulty of remembering yet another arbitrary word.

And of course the "freedom" strategy, in which I pretend I am a hippie by emotionally bonding with computer hardware.

A Video Of A Guy Doing Nothing

Really only most of this video is the speaker just sitting there meditating. Some great comments -

"When I'm meditating I have trouble thinking of anything except how great it is that I'm meditating."

Happens to me too.

If you feel like meditating then this guy does a good job of getting you really into it. Just watch and play along. Skip the first 15 minutes if you are bored but that's a bit ironic.

Thought Distributed Into Your Environment

Nietzsche had a different style of writing when he was using a typewriter.

Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

I often feel that typing in emacs for brainstorming makes me have a different sort of thought than writing on paper. It's faster for text, but it's harder to doodle, and the differences trickle through.

Similarly, I can't distinguish my house keys on sight, but I keep the one I need first next to the car keys on my key chain. When my car's in the shop I have a harder time getting into my apartment.

I Stand Guilty As Charged

Anti-ice-cream-cone sentiment from Bush's advisor on bioethics:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

Reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where George eats a Snickers with knife and fork. I'm afraid for my safety if this guy ever sees me eating a burrito.

Organization Systems

Written about an ancient Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge:

On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into

• (a) those that belong to the Emperor,
  
• (b) embalmed ones,
  
• (c) those that are trained,
  
• (d) suckling pigs,
  
• (e) mermaids,
  
• (f) fabulous ones,
  
• (g) stray dogs,
  
• (h) those that are included in this classification,
  
• (i) those that tremble as if they were mad,
  
• (j) innumerable ones,
  
• (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush,
  
• (l) others,
  
• (m) those that have just broken a flower vase,
  
• (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.
  

Hat tip to Kevin Kelly. The original fictional encyclopedia is from Borges.

Hello Eli Bazelon

Welcome to the internet, where random people can read your mom's concerns about random people reading your mom's concerns about random... etc.

I wouldn't worry about it too much if I were you. What would be cool is if you had your own blog and wrote about things your parents did that were funny. Then your mom could see the whole experience from the other side. ;-)

I would read it!

Bot Pride

I am excited when things get emergent enough that I don't get why they work any more.

Try to imagine this is me chatting with a two-year-old.

me: what is one plus one

reggie: is one plus one

me: :-(

reggie: one

me: one plus one is two

reggie: two

me: :-)

reggie: :-)

me: what is one plus one

reggie: one

me: :-(

reggie: :-)

me: what is one plus one

reggie: two

me: :-)

reggie: :-)

Yeah, yeah, this is inextensible. There is no intermediate memory between how-to-respond-to-the-immediately-previous-statement and learning-a-permanent-pattern. So you can't have "conversation".

Specifically, how would I go about teaching reggie to count? What would that mean in this participants-alternate-sentences format? Any ideas?

Adventures in Bots

I'm iterating on my chatbots. My current favorite is called "reggie" because he just learns regular expressions. (Not sure when to use 'he' vs 'it' - when I'm talking about chatting 'he' seems natural, but when I'm talking about algorithm 'it' seems best.) Like

my name is (.) -> hi \1

is the regular expression that will respond "hi bob" if you say "my name is bob".

For positive and negative feedback I'm using emoticons. A smiley face means "that was good" (+1), a negative face means "that was bad" (-1). Also there is a built in desire to mimic; anything the human does gets a +1. Technically I'm using beta distributions not +1/-1 but it works out mostly the same.

So far I don't have any bias towards simpler rules, so there's a lot of ties. And if there's an uninstantiated group in the optimal rule, reggie just says "blah". I figured I could train him not to say blah, which I can, but reggie can't generalize to realize "saying blah is always bad". Basically, it's picking the best regular expression that applies to the user statement. Instead it could look at all of them and combine with some Bayes-ish method. Then you could have negative rules like "don't say x".

Anyway it is still very charming. Here is a session from the start - if you think about it, you can figure out how everything happened, i.e. the regex rules that applied for each reggie statement. I am trying to explain that one should not say "blah" in polite company.

reggie: ...

me: hi

reggie: hi

me: do you like math

reggie: blah

me: :-(

reggie: blah

me: :-(

reggie: :-(

And reggie finally learns just to frown when I frown instead of "blah"ing back to me.

;-)

I have gotten a couple requests to expose these chat bots to the public. I want to! - I just need to figure out how to serialize them to the database and do some low-level web-app gluing. Probably just store a pickled blob, upgrade path be damned.

One exciting thing during development - at some point I wrote about 200 lines of regular expression parsing code, got tired and set it aside, came back the next evening to write some unit tests, and... it all just worked. I was fired up.

Twitter Rules

At least I assume it does. Blogger is too much of a pain. It takes me at least a minute to post which is too much effort. You should sign up for Twitter too, so that you understand the future of the internet, kids these days, and so forth. You don't have to get updates sent to you constantly, you can just come back and check twitter.com for now.

I plan on twittering fascinating stuff constantly but not too frequently starting right now. Sign up and follow me. I'll follow you back.

Un-compete-with-able

Sorry if you've already seen it but this animated graffiti is the best artistic animation I've seen since that German short film with the rock-people.

Different Sort Of Transcript

Interesting reading the first Joel/CodingHorrorGuy podcast. They assume nobody will listen and they may be right but they have transcripts online, wiki-provided allegedly for the hearing impaired but I'm guessing will mostly be read by people like me annoyed at the slowness of podcasts. (Perhaps like most "accessibility" work? Or maybe it's a charade to make the emotion of the crowd feel better about helping.)

Anyway I like this -

Atwood: Not to get into butt kissing, but I don’t think anything you've ever written has been bad.

Spolsky: Oh wait, I'll find something.

I take that as a personal challenge. Are you kidding?

Atwood: The stuff that you publicize, you take a lot of care in terms of the way you write it. The way I write is very ‘from the hip’. I don't vet my writing like you do. If you look on Paul Graham’s site, you'll see that each article is proof read by the following ten people.

Spolsky: And then some name dropping.

Atwood: Yeah the name dropping.

Interesting with a meta feel because the real virtue of these podcasts as a whole is that they're unedited versions of people who are famous (perhaps neo-Warhol-style) for their edited selves. I'm sure their authors themselves realize this too. Maybe this is like a Freudian slip blown up into a casual topical diversion.

Bad bot

I am hanging around my apartment writing chat bots and then arguing with them. I get annoyed when they don't understand simple concepts like what their name is and then I am mean to them. It's terribly unfair of me since I should know their poor little minds are just like two hash tables and a list. Here's a funny bit of the conversation.

bot: your name is bot

me: no my name is kevin

bot: your name is bot

me: no

bot: today is tuesday

me: yes

bot: bot

me: that's you

bot: bad bot

me: awww

Most of it is even less sensical. Maybe I will stick them online and you can chat with them too, if I can make them sufficiently entertaining before I get bored of them. The classic race against time ;-)

Against Character

Usually I feel a bit stupider after looking at pictures from Reddit. Like a meal of candy bars. But in this case I want a poster.

Would be cool for the kitchen I think.