Signal to noise

So much to write about, so little time. Just idly looking at DSLR cameras, which are surprisingly...

Fri, 01 May 2009 02:11:58 -0400

So much to write about, so little time.

Just idly looking at DSLR cameras, which are surprisingly affordable these days. You know what would be totally sweet? HDR photography of urban landscapes. Infrastructure, power lines, highways interchanges… skyscrapers living up to their names, reaching for the sky…

a thirsty plantleaves droopingthen watered-a trembling leafslowly risingto catch the last lightof...

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 17:29:24 -0500

a thirsty plant
leaves drooping
then watered-

a trembling leaf
slowly rising
to catch the last light
of the setting sun

Haven’t been updating this much, was busy for a while, then got sick for a whole week, now...

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:55:36 -0500

Haven’t been updating this much, was busy for a while, then got sick for a whole week, now busy again >_>;

I’ve been thinking I want to use this blog for other things. Before I was using it for “finished thoughts” that had a natural stopping point to post them up in completion. But lately I’ve been thinking about things, and updating them with every new piece of information, and there’s no natural stopping point.

So I am thinking about just writing about what I’m thinking about instead- be a little more disorganized, but maybe a little more interesting.

Also lately i’ve been trying to keep a microblog on twitter, so you might just rss feed that instead: https://twitter.com/tachikomarobot (I already twitted today on it, so I won’t write about it here. Advice about wed. would be appreciated though.)

I’ve been reading a lot, updating my book lists, but haven’t really gotten to update my goodreads account yet. Argh, so many books, so little time.

Prosecution Baffled by Pirate Bay’s Anarchic Structure | Threat Level from Wired.com Man,...

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 15:44:39 -0500

Prosecution Baffled by Pirate Bay’s Anarchic Structure | Threat Level from Wired.com

Man, that’s really kind of hilarious. I never thought about it, but these non-hierarchical ways of running things so common with internet groups is really kinda rare in the real world.

The Science Creative Quarterly

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 22:08:35 -0500

The Science Creative Quarterly:

Just discovered: short, entertaining stories and such all themed around science. I just started going through the archives, but so far good stuff.

"At many sites, workers have begun to name their robots, complete with “Hello, My Name..."

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 23:31:08 -0500

“

At many sites, workers have begun to name their robots, complete with “Hello, My Name Is” name tags. From there, it’s only a short step to playing fetch with your robot.

“One of our customers calls those name tags tattoos, and the robots are adopted by employees,” said Mitch Rosenberg, Kiva Systems’ VP of Marketing. “Your robot sends you a card on your birthday — this is a corporate sponsored thing, so I asked the management why they let them do it. They said, ‘We do it because the employees get a lot of joy, a lot of happiness out of anthropomorphizing the robots and turning them into pets.’”

”

- Autonomous Robots Invade Retail Warehouses | Wired Science from Wired.com (Quote out of context for your enjoyment. XD)

The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids -- New York Magazine

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 14:19:00 -0500

The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids -- New York Magazine:

Interesting article. (Also, insert snarky comment on how rare it is for Educational theory/psychology studies to get actual results that stand up to scrutiny.)

After the Long Goodbye

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:43:52 -0500

I finally read my copy of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, After the Long Goodbye and fell in love with Ghost in the Shell all over again.

Technically the book is set as a prequel to the movie GITS2: Innocence, and yet the novel stands on it’s own- not just as a Ghost in the Shell story, but also as a science fiction novel. I enjoyed the movie, as flawed as it was, but ultimately the book outshines the movie, so much more. Definitely at least in part because it was written by the Japanese equivalent of a multiple Hugo-award winning author. (The Japanese Hugo= Seiun awards)

I was glad to see that the book is centered around Batou, who I’ve always considered to be one of the most compelling characters in the GITS universe. (the movies, the TV series and the manga) In a lot of ways his character has more depth than the rest of the team, including even the Major, Motoko Kusanagi. (imho)

It’s hard for me to put my finger on it exactly why this is. On the face of it, it seems like Batou ought to be a very simple character, a mechanized man who’s entry might as well be right next to “cyborg” in the dictionary. But unlike some of the others, who could are almost defined by their role in the anti-terrorist organization- Batou is different.

Batou is a man who recognizes his unimportance in the universe, and yet accepts this with good humor and wit. He knows his role in things, in the organization, in the country, in the world- sometimes it’s almost like he can see the world coming down around him, he can see the seams, and yet he takes this as a matter of fact and accepts this casually.

(There’s more to it than that, but like I said, I can’t really put my finger on it…)

My other favorite character, (who also appears briefly in the book) is Togusa. His appeal is much more easy to explain- what’s not to like about the young former police detective, considered a top detective in his old line of work, but always the rookie in his new one? A person who’s near completely human, an unusual person who appreciates the value of intuition in a time where such values are considered almost anachronistic- and yet he manages to hold on to them to great success. (Of note he particularly shines in the first season of the TV series. It’s an incredible arc and I highly recommend it.)

All in all, it was an amazing read.

Google search results for “KH(Ax)N” for x=1 to 100...

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:42:00 -0500

Google search results for “KH(Ax)N” for x=1 to 100 (via flashman)

Catch-up week: Optimistic futures

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:15:00 -0500

“…The very notion of a “historic” future is one which most Americans are apt to find uncomfortable. We are naturally sympathetic to ideas which stress the plasticity and promise, the openness of the future, and impatient with views which emphasize the “fated” aspect of human affairs. We strive to see in the challenges which beset us not obstacles but opportunities. In a word, we are an optimistic people.”

Oddly enough, this passage coincides neatly with my recent reading of “the Blank Slate” essay by Steven Pinker. One thing that struck me while reading it, was the almost out-of-hand dismissal by the public, of genetics as having any role whatsoever in a person’s individuality and life simply because to them, genetics seemed too fated. The preferred view, that similarly stresses the “plasticity and promise” of the future, would of course, be the ever-popular “Blank Slate” theory which regards children as empty minds waiting to be filled. (Note to world: referring to the theory by its latin name doesn’t give it any more merit than it deserves. Also: more in depth on Pinker later.)

This optimistic attitude about the future also seems oddly topical with Obama on the eve of his appointment to office. Already there is beginning to be a curious rewriting of history, as a narrative placing Bush and his failures in office as paving the road for hope and change in 2009, and similarly painting Obama as the natural cumulation of the decades of the civil rights movement. (While I can sympathize with all the optimism- for goodness sake’s, the guy’s just getting his new office tomorrow. It will be some time before we see how it all turns out.)

“When this [optimism] is called to our attention, we tend to conceive of our traditional optimism as a personal philosophy- as a character trait which sets our aspirations above the horizons of private circumstance. Thus we overlook something which is much more fundamental. […] Optimism is grounded in the faith that the historic environment, as it comes into being, will prove to be benign and congenial- or at least neutral to our private efforts. This is so unpresuming an assumption that it comes as something of a shock to recognize that over most of human history it has been untenable.”

“…over by far, the greater part of man’s existence the importance of the future assumed a much smaller proportion than it does in our day. Indeed, until a few centuries ago in the West, and until relatively recent times in the East, it was the past and not the future which was the dominant orientation to historic times. Modern man, who typically sets his life goals in what is to come [emphasis mine], displays an attitudes quite the converse of earlier days. Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, the vast Asiatic civilizations, even the Renaissance, did not look ahead for the ideals and inspirations of their existence, but sought them in their origins, in their ancient glories, their fabled heroes, their pristine virtues real or fancied. Unlike modern man, who dreams of the world he will make, pre-modern man dreamed of the world he left.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

More on Historic Optimism as a recent attitude

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:39:00 -0500

“Like a Greek frieze, such a future was organized around the heroic exploits of great men, but these exploits, while their outcome was ever in doubt, did not constitute an essential departure from the past. Kings succeeded kings, empires followed empires, but so far as the perception of contemporaries was concerned, “history” was a succession of changes whose main attribute was their violence, not their aggregate evolution. […] To come to grips with such a capricious but withal monotonous future, the ancients turned to the factor which was common in all its permutations. This was the factor of human motivation and especially of heroic motivation. Thus it was envy and loyalty, love and hate, power and submissiveness- in short the primordium of human nature- which were thought to contain the impelling force of events.

I think you can especially notice this attitude in past classic writings, such as the works of Shakespeare and writings of Machiavelli, which both tend to oversimplify events as being driven solely by human emotion and personality, with very little role left for the complexities of the sort of large-scale forces that drive history. (You could say their worldview has the flaws in human nature taking the center stage as it were. xd)

What was so egregariously lacking in this estimate of the future was the idea of social movement, of aggregate betterment, of progress. It is astonishing when we look back upon the infinitely painful panorama of past history to find this idea is totally absent as a popular sentiment. Pre-modern man could console himself for the harsh realities of existence in his visions of heaven, he could gratefully accept the social reforms handed down from time to time by his compassionate masters, he could indulge in sporadic and short-lived outbreaks of dispair. What he could not bring himself to believe was that heaven might be sought on earth, that reform might proceed from his own aspirations, that despair could give way to determination.”

“…what lacked were requisites of a much more mundane kind. First there was [needed] the power to alter a man’s subservience before nature to a mastery of it. Second, there was required a belief in the legitimacy in the idea of human betterment. And last there was a missing framework of social institutions which would combine power and hope, and which would then permit this fruitful combination to achieve its own spontaneous growth.”

Or in other words, ancient history moved so slowly, it seemed to only change in the most superficial of ways, kings replaced by kings, crop failure one year, disease the next. (Truely a bleak life…) The other part of it, is that in the modern day we have the present to provide us with contrast and significance to the pasts of history, and without that present, it would have been difficult for ancient historians to see things in their eventual context.

Sometimes it seems to me that history and the pace of change is like a glacier-paced conveyer belt. It moves so slowly, that moment to moment, month to month it seems like it’s not moving at all. Until the change, which had been building unseen to that moment, shifts into events like a catastrophic earthquake. You look backwards and you can see the changes accumulating, and hindsight can even fool you into thinking that everything was building up solely to this moment you are now living. But it was always there, and if you look carefully, you can see things moving, shifting, going back and forth like the tide.

The Pace of Change Today

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:44:00 -0500

All and all, it’s a very interesting reminder and in contrast to today, where we often take change and progress for granted. I’m reminded how Moore’s law was never really just about computing power, to many it represents the inevitable pace of technology. Ultimately though, I think that people forget that Moore’s law is just an observation, and not a predictor. (Ie. Kurtzweil’s inevitable technological singularity) I believe Moore’s law was just a tangent to a curve at that point in time, and as we go farther away from that time, the less the tangent will fit with observation. Already the pace is slowing from the original double every two years, and any reasonable understanding would tell us that there is a natural limit to the capacity of materials, it cannot double for much longer, in my opinion.

Although progress in many fields continues, I wonder if the current quick pace of scientific and technological progress we felt is actually slowing and stablizing, far from speeding up exponentially. Looking backwards to the prizes awarded for the top discoveries and achievements in Science this past century, it nearly seems like there was this huge rush mid-century, the new foundations of Quantum Physics and new conceptual understandings in biology, medicine etc, that were ripe to be extended and applied along their natural lines. And now that the rush is mostly over, the pace carries on, but slower. Maybe it’s the rising cost of research and the recession. Maybe it’s just the limit of our current understanding and our idealogical foundations need to be shored and improved before we can build bigger and better things on top of them. Maybe the days when we could explore science with half-baked guesses and still garner results is over, and research will need to become more targeted and focused…

Even technology seems to have slowed some what. In the mid-90’s we got the Internet. But yet it changes slower than you’d think an immediately responding, fluid system ought to change: in the recent years has seen the rise of Web 2.0, which offered more user-driven content and in this year was the rise of services like Twitter and Tumblr(xd) that allow the internet to be even more of what it is already: even more immediate and relevant. But compared to the years before, the gains in recent years are only a modest improvement compared to the heady, early days of the internet.

A thought: Why do so many newspapers and periodicals present science as a series of amazing...

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:51:43 -0500

A thought: Why do so many newspapers and periodicals present science as a series of amazing breakthroughs, when it’s just not like that? It’s a little weird to see results of experiments conducted over years, being presented as singular, fantastical and often assigned more significance than they actually have. (I’d guess an odd mix of journalism and old-fashioned ideas in the public mind about how science works, myself…)

(Also I’m still seriously backlogged in posts, i’ll probably catch up next week)

"The “great crisis” in neuropsychology, as Oliver Sacks’s Russian mentor saw it,..."

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:14:06 -0500

“The “great crisis” in neuropsychology, as Oliver Sacks’s Russian mentor saw it, was reconciling two modes of scientific observation. One reduces complex phenomenon to their constituent parts- the way neurology had narrowed its focus from the observation of behavior to specific areas in the brain and then to individual neurons- which [his mentor] paralleled with the evolution of chemistry, from the study of gross matter to the study of compounds, to the study of individual atoms and elements. The other mode relies on the description of phenomena and intuition to comprehend the interactivity of whole systems. Either one, he argued, was inadequate without the other.””

- The Fully Immersive Mind of Oliver Sacks (Essay, Best American Science Writing 2003)

An interesting little tidbit

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:05:00 -0500

“Paul Baran’s original conception of a failure-resistant communications system- the blueprint for the Internet- was inspired by conversations with the neurobiologist Warren McCulloch, in which he described the [remarkable] ability of synaptic networks in brain-injured patients to route around damaged tissue.”

swissmiss: Top 10 Countries by Robot Density

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 01:38:50 -0500

swissmiss: Top 10 Countries by Robot Density

thingpart by joey alison sayers

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:30:56 -0500

thingpart by joey alison sayers

11th Doctor Announced

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 01:33:10 -0500

I’m still in the middle of updating my blog with retroposts (there’s one I wrote a couple days ago, backdated to Dec 17th (when I was thinking about it) and then some others in the works.)

But I just had to interrupt things to say: Wow! the 11th Doctor was announced! I know I don’t talk about it enough (if only because I know the rest of my family other than my sister just aren’t that interested) but Doctor Who is far and away my favorite TV series. It’s certainly got a lot of high quality competition- I love Life on Mars to pieces, I’ve got a soft spot for Stargate, I love the writing and drama of Battlestar Galactica, and I enjoy Firefly and other shows as well. (Why yes, I do love my science fiction television :ppp )

But Doctor Who is the show that speaks to my heart, I know I’ll forever be a fan of it, down the years I’ll still be watching the inevitable spin-offs and reading the mediocre written tie-in novels just to get a little taste of what drew me to the show in the first place. I nearly wish I could say I had grown up with this show, or even just say I discovered it earlier than this summer (impossible!), to explain how much this show means to me. But I guess that’s just how it goes, you don’t get to pick when you get introduced to things.

I started loving this show when I started watching the new Doctor Who in season 3 (remarkably different from the cheesier, campier early Who- kinda like Star Trek:TOS vs. TNG). And I thought the next season was, well, Fantastic! And now to see Tennant leave (he’ll always be the Doctor as far as I’m concerned!) is just so….. this mix of apprehension and uncertainty. I think it would naturally follow any casting change for any classic, enduring role: you really want to hope that it’ll all be for the best, but at the same time you worry that it’ll never really be quite the same either.

Which pretty much sums up how I feel about this new unknown actor Matt Smith- a guy whose professional roles can pretty much be numbered on one hand. I want to hope that this guy has some sort of amazing talent that we just haven’t seen yet, that Moffat can see something in him that we can’t. But so far he doesn’t really strike me as the Doctor (only from a couple interviews, to be fair).

I already thought that Tennant was a bit pushing it, playing this 900+ year old immortal traveler- sure Tennant’s 37, but he’s got a very youthful appearance. And this new guy to play his successor, Matt Smith, looks even younger- he’s only 26! If anything, he seems more qualified to be another traveling companion than the Doctor.

I called my silly sis about it as soon as I heard the news, and we agreed maybe Moffat just wants to take the show into new territory- after all, with the latest season being one of the best ever, the show’s got the standing and budget to have their pick of the best actors. Maybe Moffat just wants to try something different, make his own mark on this show that has continued for 28 seasons, and seen plenty of it’s share of upsets- a show that’s constantly innovating itself with new directions.

The New Year has just started, and already 2009 is looking like a year of changes… hopefully for the better….!

(*Favorite TV show doesn’t include anime: that would be like comparing apples and oranges. As the saying goes. I still think they’re actually pretty similar, both being fruits and all.

*The Star Trek:TOS vs TNG comparison is actually pretty apt: RTD literally took a old, campy scifi show and turned it into a quality show now enjoyed all over the world. Yay~)

Happy New Year Everyone!

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:23:27 -0500

Happy New Year Everyone!

The Future as History

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 19:05:00 -0500

The central idea of The Future of History is a simple one: that the near future, as a continuation of the recent past and being driven by the same continuing forces implies, in a loose way, that the near future has already happened.

The way I would put it myself is that predicting the future is a bit like predicting the weather- on one hand it is certainly chaotic, unpredictable and small events can exert themselves at key times to great effect. (Even a 90% chance of snow can result in no snow) But most times, there is no surprise- we can see the forces coming, going, shifting, and can guess where they may lead in the future. (Large forces, from the cyclical pace of the seasons, small ones, like the movements of storm clouds and masses of air.)

Although a complete understanding of the near future is probably impossible (at least for now), at the same time I still think there is much merit to the idea. Tracing the outlines of current trends and forces and extending them into the future, would give a rough view of what we could expect in the days ahead, and even the crudest, macroscopic outlook of the present would enrich our understanding of the future. And while there is always chaotic messiness that is difficult to predict, such messiness rarely eclipses the larger, dominating trends of the times.

(Aside, one wonders whether there had been even just a small amount of this foresight, whether the recent financial crisis could have been even the slightest bit lessened…)