Fun Robot Facts

(There are real robot facts available here. This page is just lame jokes)

The movie "The Terminator" is actually a modern day remake of "Old Yeller".

Speaking of movies, did you know that the original ending to "The Matrix" trilogy was just two hours of robots beating up Keanu Reeves, with no dialog? In retrospect, they should have stuck with that.

Education

The Senate confirmation hearings for a Supreme Court Justice play an important role in a new Justice's education: they underscore, for the good of the nation, the fact that Congress is chock full of idiots and assholes who like nothing better than to hear their own voices. They divide the world neatly into good guys, to be supported at all cost (but tested rigorously for ideological purity!) and bad guys, to be torn down at all costs.

This is important, because otherwise Supreme Court Justices might be tempted to respect Congress, to consider Congressional approval a thing of consequence, not to be overturned lightly. Thank goodness the Senate takes the time and effort to disabuse any crazy ideas of Congressional competence or good faith before those assumptions might do damage!

Repeat after me: the title "Doctor" does not make me a physician

So, I preordered Tyler Cowen's new book, and started reading it last night. The basic principle of the book, as I see it, is that the cognitive methods of autistic people make them well-suited to the emerging information economy. It's an interesting idea, and I can see the point he's making, and also the point (made by others) that autism is not an on-off thing, but rather a spectrum. But he enthuses a little too much, it seems to me - autistics, to his mind, seem to not merely be "not disabled" but practically ubermensch, the cognitive giants on whose shoulders the future will rest.

But it's his own self-identification with them leaves a sour taste for me. How would you react to someone who said to you,
"Hi, I spend all day every day sitting down. My chair has wheels on it. I have therefore diagnosed myself as paraplegic. Although I am a popular author and tenured professor, presumably with decent health care and income, I have not had an actual medical professional confirm my self-diagnosis. Having invested so much time and energy into researching and enthusing about paraplegia, it would be a shame to turn out to not be paraplegic. Did you know, lots of people through history were probably secretly paraplegics? (For example: There are lots of pictures of Jesus being carried around by other, bigger people or propped up on inanimate objects so that he didn't have to use his feet. Seems conclusive to me.) And now I'm going to tell you, as a paraplegic myself, that life as a paraplegic is not nearly as bad as everyone thinks. For one thing, we can walk."

OK, maybe I'm laying it on a bit thick. He's done his homework, and Temple Grandin apparently was happy with the book. And it is honestly an interesting read. But seriously, the first dozen or so pages would have been immensely improved by the line, "I consulted a medical professional, who confirmed the diagnosis of Asperger's." Instead, his narrative sounds like someone suggested he might have it, he researched it, and thought it was awesome.

Anyway, still reading (it really is a good book, snark aside, and his actual research-based points on the nature of autism and Asperger's are important and interesting) so I'll have to post later once I have something more concretely positive to say.

See???

Proof by cartoonist! (Or if that's not sufficient, proof by dinosaur)

Time Travel, Cont. Or: Maybe they just suck too.

I had a conversation with a friend this afternoon on the same theme as earlier, but with a twist. A similar challenge came up, essentially, "We know that either there is no time travel, (or else the time travel thing does cause time-line splits or other shenanigans) because Hitler was not assassinated, strangled as a baby, taught pacifism, etc."

I think, though that this still isn't counter-proof. After all, how many people today would go back in time to assassinate Napoleon Bonaparte, Genghis Khan, or Oliver Cromwell? Sure, they were bad guys, but traveling back in time to kill them just seems somehow excessive at this remove.
And as bad as they were, each in their own way helped pave the way for the world we're living in now. It won't take that much time until people think of Adolf Hitler as just another jerk.

I-eighteen-n

Any of you resistentialists out there have much experience with internationalization? It looks like I'm the point man for it for our next software release, and I wouldn't mind chatting with someone who's done it before. (No right-to-left translations, thankfully, but we are adding Chinese and Japanese language versions)

Or maybe we just suck

I recently read Michio Kaku's "Physics of the Impossible" - quite a good book, I highly recommend it. One of the sections was on time travel, and he repeated Stephen Hawking's observation that if time travel were ever to be possible, then why aren't we awash in time-traveling tourists now?

This is sort of taken for granted in this book, as elsewhere. And yet I cannot help but think that there are some assumptions there that ought not go unchallenged. It seems to me that there's a limitation on how long anything in the present day is going to be interesting to people in the future. There's really very little going on - it all seems important to us now, but in fifty years people will probably be mostly interested in a relative handful of things. In a hundred years, it seems to me that maybe only a few dedicated historians would come here, maybe to watch Obama's inauguration in person.

But it seems more likely to me that it'll take several hundred years, or thousands of years, to develop a working time machine. Who knows how long it would take to make the technology available to more than a lucky few. It took fifty years for low-orbital space travel to become available to a half dozen wealthy tourists, who had to train hard on the ground, then keep out of the way during a short mission. Who are their equivalents, I wonder, who are also more keenly interested in events of 1000 years ago than 2000 years ago, or 500? Why come back to the early 21st Century when there were such interesting things happening in Rennaisance Italy or in Roman-occupied Judea? (After all, a time machine, a camcorder, and an Aramaic-to-Chinese dictionary could clear up more than a few obnoxious arguments)

Let's face it, we're boring, and that's a strike against us. Speaking from a tourism point of view, we're the temporal equivalent of Ohio. Sure, we've got Obama's inauguration and the Iranian election, but in the thousand-year view of things they don't even amount to that huge ball of yarn.

On top of that, we're watching for time travelers. Or at least, we've managed to build ourselves a neat little surveillance society with lots of cell phone cameras, the concept of time traveling tourists, and "healthy" doses of novelty-seeking and paranoia.

Finally, it takes a special kind of mind to see today's successful experiments with visible-light invisibility and other negative-optics shenanigans, hypothesize a future civilization capable of time travel as a leisure activity... and still think that we'd actually be able to tell when the handful of bored tourists actually does show up.

Web surfing

Man, talk about the perfect conditions for a morning spent websurfing: all my officemates are working in different locations, it's a gray/rainy day, and I'm waiting on an email so that I can do my own work. I just realized that I'm surfing out of boredom when I found myself typing in the URL... of the page I was on. There are times when I wish I didn't need Internet access to do what I do -- I'm so much more productive without it.

The one thing...

... about introductory violin lessons is, you get the weirdest songs stuck in your head.

Taking Back What's Lost

A long time ago, I used to do lots of creative things, mostly as a teenager. I used to write, I used to act, I used to sing. I once directed a public performance of a play I wrote. Before all that, I used to draw, and I played instruments, the saxophone and the violin. I was good at some of it, and bad at, well, most of it. Either way, these are things that I have mostly lost. College left me without a lot of free time or energy, and grad school had all that plus the "feature" of making writing into an abominable chore instead of something I enjoyed. My creative output today is mostly in the software I write, or in blog posts, or in sandbox-style video games like Dwarf Fortress.

I've decided to try to reverse course a bit. I've done a bit of writing (nothing terrific so far), and I'm taking violin lessons again. It's funny how much muscle memory remains after almost twenty years. I've put a fair chunk of money into it - like with the gym, I find that being able to say, "I've paid for it, I might as well put it to use" is a remarkably good motivator. So for now I get to spend a half hour or so per day (about all my wrists can stand) making the cats flee, but I really do feel like I'm picking it up quickly this time around. Being able to still (sort of) read music helps a lot, as does having the cash to pick up things I need (shoulder rests, rosin, tuners, etc) without having to think too hard about it.

This all makes me wonder. If expenditure is a motivation for me such that I really am going to the gym regularly and practicing an instrument regularly, how on earth do I motivate myself to write more?

Iran

I'm a bit perplexed by the reactions from a lot of people whose blogs I read, or on my Facebook friends page. They seem utterly, absolutely convinced that the Iranian election was stolen, and as far as I can tell, based on absolutely zero knowledge. Yes, the guy everyone wanted to win is alleging irregularities, and sure the Ayatollah is acting defensive. Ahmadinejad is certainly following the first rule of avoiding a coup detat (To wit, "Don't leave the country")

But let's look at this clear-eyed here. Sometimes the good guys (or less-bad) really do lose fairly. Is there really much evidence that Ahmadinejad doesn't have the support of 63% of the population? Mousavi's a good guy, and it sounds like he ran a very smart, very technically sophisticated campaign - just like Howard Dean. And it's the technical sophistication that makes me suspicious: Iran is not a technically sophisticated country, much of it is dirt-poor. It's not unreasonable to think that he simply didn't have access to large swathes of the population, swathes that Ahmadinejad spent the last four years busily bribing and pandering to with his "death to Israel" crap: and don't think for a minute that that doesn't play well back home. The English-speaking blogging Iranians may not like it, but they're a teeny, tiny minority in that country - and reading what they say, I get the feeling that it's more embarrassment over delivery than content.

Meanwhile, believing that this 63% win is a deliberate move requires one to simultaneously believe that Ahmadinejad is simultaneously a political genius and a dribbling moron. (Wile E. Coyote: Super Genius) Seriously: you're positing that he has the brass balls and political skill to manage a freaking 13+% cheat AND be dumb enough to think that that would fly? But more than that, this isn't Diebold bit-flipping here, this is pretty low-tech voting: you know, secure. You need organization to cheat a vote like that, boots on the ground and a lot of people willing (or eager) to look the other way. In order to believe that he could do such a thing, you have to believe that a large part of the country is too backwater and uneducated to prevent it... and yet not backwater and uneducated enough to actually vote for him in the first place? I don't buy it.

The way I see it, most of the country is poor and uneducated, which is exactly the way the Ayatollah likes them. They've been bribed and pandered to for years, came to identify with the guy. On top of that, it looks like Mousavi pulled an Al Gore: he let it be clear that he considers Ahmadinejad to be a stupid hick, and that just didn't play well with all the folks who thought he was just plain old folk.

Now, I'm not saying that old Ahmadinejad didn't try to pad the numbers. But given all this, what's more likely: that he padded and cheated 5-6% extra and got surprised by doing better than he expected, or knew he was going down, and bilked em for more than 13%, probably much more?

Nah. As far as I can tell, the primary basis that we Americans have for decrying this election as a sham is the refusal to believe that Ahmadinejad can win a fair election. It reflects well on you all to think that highly of humanity, but you've seen the kind of assholes who can win legitimate votes even in Western countries.

Now, that's not to say that I wouldn't like to see how far Mousavi can run with this, maybe even bring down Khameini. But let's not kid ourselves that he's a virtuous aggrieved party: plenty of good has been done by sore losers, after all.

Edit:
I should admit that there are (at least) two scenarios that brush aside my objections:
First, if Khameini set up the vote-rigging but handed over the operation to Ahmadinejad, that would be a whole new ballgame. In that case, he doesn't have to be brilliant to have the machine, and he can easily be dumb enough to misuse it, thinking that 63% is totally reasonable. That would explain Khameini's performance: first seizing the moment so as to try to bulldoze his way through it and treat it as a fait accompli, then (potentially) stepping back and realizing that Ahmadinejad had either a) been a total idiot in a way that did not bode well, or (more intriguingly) b) been more reckless than stupid and had double-crossed him and grabbed for power. After all, Khameini can't just admit to being party to this and so HAS to do everything he can to make it stick, but at the same time a 63% majority gives Ahmadinejad unprecedented clout in his new government. It's an interesting idea, and I admit that I'm fascinated by the possibility that Ahmadinejad may have just made Khameini his bitch, but I still don't think it likely, and that level of recklessness really doesn't square with Ahmadinejad working alone.

Second, this could be a combination of multiple attempts to rig the vote such that the right hand didn't know what the left was doing, and possibly also combined with an unexpectedly strong showing in the vote. End result: a series of supposedly easily-covered boosts (possibly intended just to force a runoff) turns into an obvious error. Occam is shaking his head gravely as I type this.

Three-minute hate

I think I may finally have gotten the hang of Perl's regular expressions, at least to the point that I'm able to bang out some basic logreaders pretty quickly. We still hates them, precious, but I have to admit that it was the right approach: I was sorely tempted to use some manner of incremental tokenizing to grab chunks of the log piece by piece, and use nested if statements to deal with different formats, and... yeah, it sounds even worse when I write it out like that.

One of the big conceptual problems I have with regular expressions in general is that they nearly always result in write-only code. Sure, it can be commented, but in practice nobody ever does. Worse, once you get reasonably good with them, all of a sudden you're the go-to guy for regex (This is not as bad as, say, database expertise, but still) Yeesh.