I get funny looks when I admit to people I don’t own a TV. I get the impression they think I’m some kind of flaky activist. In fact, people have even told me as much.

They seem to think it’s unnatural not to spend more than four hours a day on an activity that burns just five calories more an hour than sleeping.

Likewise, I don’t get people who own televisions. TVs are big dumb conversational bullies that don’t care about you, what you want, or what you think. Television doesn’t care what time you want to watch a show, it’s going to show things according to it’s schedule and you will conform if you want to know what everyone’s talking about around the water-cooler tomorrow. Television is great for promoting inane small talk about its fantasy world, a completely unproductive exercise. It’s like Mark Twain said, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” People do the same with TV.

Television is virtual reality. Sports fans in bars scream at projection-screen TV’s all over the world, despite the fact that the football players can’t hear them. Faux News describes the world outside as nothing but car chases and violence, but the reality is that America is safer than it’s ever been. African Americans are not just thugs and whores as Black Entertainment Television (BET) wants us to believe.

To quote Ron Kaufman, “Why do you think they call it programming?”

So join the RedPills, and kill your television. You could go outside, you could join an MMORP, you could jump into a chat room, start your own blog, contribute to Wikipedia, join a social network, start a flash mob, make an LOLCat, or just MAKE. Whatever you do, engage, don’t be a passive receptacle for advertising sponsors.

Who’s going to win the next American Idol? I am, because I’m not going to watch it.

Dittoheads, having been thoroughly thrashed on every rational, scientific, and practical front in their war on the environment, are now turning to theology, in a last ditch effort to keep people from embracing the principles of conservation and sustainability. Most recently, they are attacking Nancy Pelosi for repeatedly stating that the principles of environmentalism are found in the Bible, most recently at an Earth Day celebration:

The Bible tells us that to minister to the needs of God’s creation is an act of worship, and that to ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us. On this Earth Day, and every day, let us pledge to our children, and our children’s children, that they will have clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and the opportunity to experience the wonders of nature.

What is the dittohead interpretation of god’s word in relation to environmentalism? Let’s check with NYT best-selling author Ann Coulter:

God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

Funny that no dittoheads would bother to check with the good book itself, which reads in Genesis 2:15:

Then the LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. (New King James Version)

And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. (King James Version)

And Jehovah God taketh the man, and causeth him to rest in the garden of Eden, to serve it, and to keep it. (Young’s Literal Translation)

Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work the ground and care for it. (New Life Version)

The LORD God put the man in the Garden of Eden to take care of it and to look after it. (Contemporary English Version)

In fact Deuteronomy has numerous environmental mandates, and answersingenesis.org even argues that Earth Day is at odds with Evolutionary theory and only bible-fearing Christians have a true reason to support environmentalism.

70 percent of evangelicals, including Mike Huckabee interpret the bible as supporting environmentalism, and there are even organizations, like the Evangelical Environmental Network, which find an environmentalist message in the bible. It’s not just the bible people either; lot’s of religions believe in environmentalism.

Environmentalism is an issue religious and secular can unite on whole-heartedly, even reaching across political boundaries. Who would’ve thought we’d ever see these two together?

Compare this with this satire of the dittohead position (HT TGAW), as we saw with the Coulter quote, it’s not far off:

Your cloned child is a mirror, simultaneously reflecting who you are and what you might have been. It’s potential was your potential. Can your clone achieve the dreams that fell to the wayside in your own life, or is it doomed to repeat your mistakes?

Clones is a collection of speculative short-stories that explores the relationship dynamics between parents and their cloned children.

Available for purchase or as a free PDF.

Recently I needed a way to quickly sort a large dataset on the fly, but the classic bubblesort algorithm was too innefficient. Luckily, a quick google search revealed a Quick Sort v2 Algorithm by Anthony Baratta, who took and modified the Quick Sort Algorithm from 4 Guys from Rolla, who adapted it from an algorithm given in the book Data Abstractions & Structures using C++ by Mark Headington and David Riley, (pg. 586).

Because Baratta’s article was followed with user comments, everyone on the Web was free to contribute criticisms, questions, and, most of all, improvements. Two people posted fantastic advances to the code as well, with one person posting a modification to sort on dates, and another posting a modification to deal with extremely large arrays.

Without these two updates, the original script posted would have left me struggling to overcome these oversights, but thanks to the collaboration and copyleft principles of people online, I can use this code without having to spend days banging my head against my monitor to understand and adapt it.

Like any science, Information Science builds on the knowledge of those before us.

Bonk The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

I was confused when I read several online criticisms of Mary Roach’s new book Bonk that described it as “oddball,” “trivia,” and “idiosyncratic.” Reviewers compared this book, which is about the history of scientific research concerning sex, to books on orchids, spelling bee contestants, or some other unusual hobby, where the author gives us a peek into an esoteric realm of knowledge.

But this is a book about sex research. You know, sex? The subject that most men think about at least once daily, and, according to the Kinsey studies 19 percent of women do the same. If sex is an “out there” subject, then why all the decades of sex in advertising? What about the $97.06 Billion yearly revenues for pornography?

You can’t call a subject that daily enters most men and women’s minds and generates billions of dollars in revenue “idiosyncratic.”

In fact, I read most of Roach’s book on my bus ride to and from New York, where, during a significant portion of the ride back, I was treated to an out-going African American woman describing her previous-night’s roll in the hay with her boyfriend in explicit detail to her friend on a cell phone (the words “five times” and “wash rag” were involved). “Idiosyncratic” my ass.

It’s a real shame that people view sex as an odd topic, because, as Mary Roach demonstrates, this is why we know so little about it. Roach documents numerous examples of scientists having to cloak their research in euphemisms, leave out technical details, and otherwise obfuscate their methods to prevent having their research funding cut. Without concrete scientific data on which to base our understanding of sex, we are left to pornography, which is about as useful as going to the circus, to understand the norm.

It’s embarrassing that we know so little about such a fundamental, indispensable aspect of our physiology. I was grateful to learn that, thanks to Masters and Johnson’s innovative research techniques that the “dildo-camera unmasked, among other things, the source of vaginal lubrication: not glandular secretions but plasma (the clear broth in which blood cells float) seeping through capillary walls in the vagina.” I can find Medical Journal Articles referencing this fact, but many sites don’t mention it at all and confuse vaginal lubrication with cervical mucus.

I was also glad to learn that a personal hypothesis I’ve been meaning to figure out how to research has already been tested and confirmed. “The Human Penis as a Semen Displacement Device” is a journal article that confirmed my suspicion that the knob on the end of our giggle-sticks is an evolutionary adaptation for sweeping the semen of competing males out of the vagina. It is not, as a punch line to an old joke goes, “To keep your hand from slipping off the end.”

Mönchskopf Clitocybe geotropa Photo by Lebrac

These are insights, not trivia, and Mary Roach offers a multitude of them. Some passages involving penis surgery made me involuntarily cross my legs. Others made me scratch my head at the ridiculous hypotheses of the past. They had some weird ideas a hundred-plus years ago.

Throughout it all, Mary Roach keeps the subject fun. She does not distance herself from the subject matter, describing her personal interactions with scientists, surgeons, and sex-toy manufacturers. She even participates in a few studies herself, going so far as to have sex with her husband and having images taken with ultrasound.

The puns, metaphors, and euphemisms Roach uses throughout the book kept me smiling. Her footnotes were enlivening distractions as well. In one of these, I discovered a place for one of my own personal kinks, the Yahoo Clown Fetish Group.

Yay! : )

Most of all, what I took from Bonk is that sex research hasn’t produced the answers we really need on many important topics. For instance, we still don’t really know why women have orgasms from an evolutionary stand-point. We’re an enlightened species, we should know this by now, and the research-funding should be there without stigma to find out.

Note: In writing this review, I have learned that while Microsoft Word will acknowledge the correct spellings of “penis” and “erection,” it will not offer them as suggestions when you right-click them as misspelled words. Prudes.

Charles Rosen’s Shakey was an early AI that could move withot bumping into things

Science Fiction is rife with intelligent machines. C-3PO in “Star Wars,” the HAL 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” KITT from “Knight Rider,” Data from “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” the Terminator, Sonny from “I, Robot,” the agents from “The Matrix,” and the deceptively artificial humans from the movies “A.I.” and “Westworld” are commonplace in our fictional futures.

Video games are filled with AIs who compete against human players. The better the AI, the more challenging gaming experience. Since computers started decisively beating the best chess players on Earth, grandmasters have started coaching competing chess AIs against each other. Artificial Intelligence is already integrated into our interactive entertainment, and holds promise for more real-world applications as well.

But is AI really “intelligent?” The father of modern computer science Alan Turing, described a test for determining a machine’s capability of demonstrating thought: a human judge enters a chat room with a human and a computer program, if they cannot identify which is the human and which is the machine, then the machine qualifies as intelligent. This procedure is known as the Turing Test.

A.L.I.C.E is a ChatBot that holds promise for one day passing the Turning Test. ALICE scans sentences given to it in online chat for keywords and returns one of hundreds of appropriate responses based on the context of the conversation. You can chat with ALICE online at alicebot.org.

ALICE does not understand sentences, it feigns understanding. However convincing, ALICE is not intelligent in any sense, it merely pretends at being human.

Actually understanding the meaning of sentences is an incredibly complex task for computer programs. Consider the following two sentences:

“The cat chased the mouse because it was hungry.”

“The cat chased the mouse because it looked appetizing.”

We can easily deduce that the ambiguous pronoun “it” refers to the cat in the first sentence and the mouse in the second, but consider the wealth of personal knowledge and experience required for our minds to make this distinction. The conundrum in AI development is giving a computer program this level of intuition.

Cyc (pronounced “psych”) is one attempt at a computer program that can actually derive meaning from language. Since 1984, researchers have been plugging facts into this program, trying to teach it common sense. Using facts like “Creatures that die stay dead” and “When Abraham Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg, he took his left foot with him,” Cyc makes its own assumptions about the world.

I visited cyc.com and played the “FACTory” trivia game, where Cyc give the player the assumptions it has made from the facts in its database and asks if they are true, false, or don’t make sense at all. One true assumption Cyc had made was, “Devices are typically located in toll booths,” but I had to think about it. “Condominiums are typically located in modern homes,” was an obviously false assumption, and “Ones are typically located in police stations,” failed to make sense to me or any of the other players either.

At the present moment, Web Developers all over the planet are adding another layer of complexity to the World Wide Web, one that will allow computers to read and process our existing websites. This new layer, called the Semantic Web, holds a great deal of potential for AI development. Already agent programs are running tasks for users on the Internet, retrieving data for them using this new logic layer. Science Fiction has speculated on the possibility of a sentient World Wide Web, maybe the Semantic Web is a step in that direction.

I remember making my first international phone call when I was in Junior high school. At that time, while my parents were away at work, my Commodore 128 computer was busy on their phone with its 1200 Baud modem, hacking calling card numbers in a process computer geeks refered to as “Phreaking.” After several weeks of processing and thousands of numbers dialed, I had finally scored my first working calling card.

I immediately took it to school to show my clique of fellow geeks, and we agreed we should use it to call someone in China, since none of us knew anyone who lived outside of our area code personally.

Everyone gathered around to listen.

I hung up, “That was so cool!” I exclaimed, pointing at the phone booth, “That guy was totally speaking Chinese! Way cool!”

“Awesome!” my Dungeon Master agreed, “You wanna continue that D&D campaign now?”

And that was the end of my calling-card number crime spree.

I was 32 years old the second time I made an international phone call to transfer a domain name from company in Australia. I had never made one before, and, after several failed attempts, had to look online, where I learned to precede the many numbers with “011.”

It was totally awesome deja vu all over again! I got to speak to a woman with an Australian accent, a real Australian accent originating from someone sitting at a desk in Australia, not some tourist sitting beside me on the DC metro. It was summer at her desk while it was winter at mine. It was 10:30 AM on my cellphone, while her clock read 12:30 AM on tomorrow’s date. Nearly 9,700 miles separated me on the East Coast from her in Melbourne Australia, and yet she sounded as close as my next door neighbor.

Suddenly the whole “Global Village” groked with me. Like when I had to call Dell tech support last year for help with my DVD ROM. The tech support guy in India asked, “Do you mind if I log into your computer to correct the problem sir?”

“Do you mind if I go wash dishes while you correct the problem?” I asked in return.

Then a help desk technician in India logged into my computer and upgraded my software for me while I washed dishes. Way cool!

How interesting it is then, to think that when Herbert Marshall McLuhan wrote about the Global Village, he saw its unifying effect in a negative light, as a path to totalitarianism:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library, the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.

Seems alien to imagine our WWW playground as a tool for fascism today.

Last weekend I got to meet one of my favorite SF authors, David Brin, at a virtual talk in Second Life’s Extropia Community.

David Brin in SL

It was a packed house, avatars kept crashing, lag was evident, but surprisingly mild. Twice my SL interface got a memory error and crashed, meaning when I logged back into the room, I was standing where I was sitting and looking like a putz to everyone else while the room loaded back in. Just like other members of the audience got booted and then reappeared standing and looking around dazed while their avatar reloaded. It’s not like you can yell, “Down in front!”

David Brin in SL

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of the talk focused on David Brin’s insecurities about the chat format, and whether or not it was progress. “How on Earth could anybody call this “discourse” subtle or detailed or serious?” Brin asked, obviously frustrated at the fact that keeping up with a chat log involving 80-plus people is an exercise in futility.

Audience Member

I could understand Brin’s frustrations; however, I had to completely disagree with him on the inadequacy of the medium. Many people are perfectly happy with chat rooms, some with blogs, other television, and others books. Brin unnecessarily put down RSS because he has “so little life span,” and seemed to indicate that he believes the “cocktail party” format is superior for communicating information to the Internet.

Audience Member

Yet, I personally absolutely despise real-life parties for the same reason Brin dislikes virtual ones, there’s too many voices going off at once and I end up losing track of all of them. I get dizzy and disoriented at parties, and often feel as though I should wear a button to them that reads, “I’m smiling because I have no idea what’s going on.”

Ozymandias Spark (Me)

At least I can save and review a chat log, usually finding many wonderful meme morsels in them. I sift 400-plus science articles a day, because I’m looking for only the most interesting stories. I blog, because that’s the only way I can keep from being talked over, which is what happens in every other real-life medium I’ve encountered. Instead of criticizing our online formats, David Brin should have been celebrating the fact that people like us have found a way to express ourselves and exchange ideas.

David Brin Talks in SL

Not enough of the discussion was about the Western Enlightenment, but there was enough to make me think about coffee shops, and how they got their start during the Enlightenment. Intellectuals would gather, get caffinated, and engage in late-night discussions about science and philosophy. This was before the Renaissance came along and squash rationality with its oppressive foo-foo idealism.

David Brin Talks in SL User Interface Displayed

Today, coffee shops have been abandoned to the artists, and the scholars of the Enlightenment have moved to the online world, like hanging out on blogs, RSS Feeds, and in the anything-goes realm of Second Life. I think that is progress.

I’ve been struggling to find something profound and insightful about bugs and insects, but I just keep coming back to “Insects are cool.” One drawback to the NCMoNS is their lack of labels for some displays. So I have a lot of insect pictures here that I don’t have titles for. I’m hoping the Netizens of this 2.0 interwingularity will help me figure them out.

Giant Walking Stick

View the complete flickr set here.

“Some kids get their ears pierced… others it’s a unique haircut… Charles likes people to see his brain.”
– Supervillain Brain Child’s Mother, from The Tick Cartoon

My friend Carolyn and her husband Clint made this really cool animated video from her CT Scan, which I highly recommend. A few months back, I had a series of MRI’s done, but was disappointed to find the quality wasn’t good enough to make my own animated video from the images.

What I have been able to do is turn a few of the image series into animated gifs. The result are what you see below. Click on any image to see a larger version.

Ryan’s MRI Top View of the Head Click Image for 2.1 MB Size Gif

Ryan’s MRI Front View of the Head Click Image for 2.2 MB Size Gif

Ryan’s MRI Side View of the Head Click Image for 1.5 MB Size Gif

Ryan’s MRI Top View of Neck and Chest Click Image for 2.2 MB Size Gif