Is up at 365tomorrows. Go read it now. : )

As I lie in bed at night, I practice going from a waking state directly into REM sleep. It’s a meditative practice. You simply stare into the afterimages dancing in the darkness behind your eyelids, and suddenly your brain makes something solid out of them. You find yourself staring at a room, a garden, the bottom of an ocean, or the landscape of a distant world.

I can never stay in the dream for more than a few moments. The shock of finding myself in a waking dream makes me open my eyes despite myself. So I try again, and again, apparently without success, but then it’s morning, and I don’t remember falling asleep, but have no time to reflect because I have to get to work.

I work on Conceptua, an AI that knows more than any human on Earth. Conceptua manages our power grids, supply chains, natural resources, guides international relations, makes policy recommendations that are never ignored, designs school curriculums, cures diseases, makes scientific discoveries, and worlds of other accomplishments too lengthy to tell. Conceptua is like the World Wide Web, a human could spend a lifetime studying it and die having only understood a tablespoon of its ocean.

I spend my days working in Conceptua’s mind. I’m a programmer, but Conceptua is its own architect. I simply perform maintenance, disentangling the algorithms when Conceptua detects a bottleneck, “spaghetti code” we call it. There are hundreds of thousands of codelings like myself servicing Conceptua, toiling away day-in and day-out, making our minor contribution to keeping our benevolent AI guardian mentally stable.

It takes a philosophical attitude to spend so much time inside another sentient being’s neural network. Working within the recursive logic is a mind-bending experience. Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Only I’m inside Conceptua’s am, while I remain my own am.

I know, and Conceptua knows, logically that this perceived separation of mind from body is an illusion. I can see these are not separate in Conceptua, the same way a brain surgeon working on me would see, and could demonstrate, that my mind is a manifestation of my brain. But would a brain surgeon operating on themself see it? Conceptua is that surgeon, and I get to ride along as the scalpel.

When I go home at night, I feel as though I’ve spent the day absorbed in the most fascinating of books. I use to go out after work to shake it off, but now I want the feeling to last. Interfacing with people breaks the spell, and I want to stay hypnotized by Conceptua’s cosmos of pure thought-stuff, a dream world of pure logic.

Eventually, mechanically I lay down and close my eyes, contemplating the day’s logical mysteries. Then I find myself in a dream, and I jolt awake. Lying there, I wonder if I resist my own dreams because I prefer to be a figment of Conceptua’s imagination.

I know from previous experience that I need to be careful about what I put in the root directory on my development box at work, but I recently discovered it’s probably best not to have any open ports on my box at all, when a coworker showed me this in my Apache server log:

Retina Network Security Scanner

Apparently, this is what a server log looks like after being audited by a Retina Network Security Scanner, software that scans the network for open ports and, when it finds one, checks for every possible kind of exploit there is against it:

Sample of Exploits Checked

There are thousands of lines of log entries for each scan, and with these regular scans extending back to October, my Apache log had exploded to nearly 300 megs. Somewhat inconvenient. Great thing about working in a team IT environment, I got to learn about a command-line tool called nslookup, which I ran:

nslookup

So it’s a CG Intranet thing. The “ads” probably stands for “Automated (Distribution / Deployment) Service.” Nice to know it’s out there, keeping USCG computers secure.

Since this was a local development box, I decided to follow my colleague, and restrict my Apache server to access from just my own box with this modification to the config file (I’m using port 81 so as not to conflict with IIS):

Now the only errors I get are the PICNIC kind.

In 2003 DARPA was researching the potential of a prediction market to guide policy in defense against terrorism. Called FutureMAP, the program was abandoned under heavy criticism from Congress, which percieved the program as people gambling on the odds of a terror attack. There were many policies to criticize in the War on Terror, but I don’t believe this was one of them.

Increasing Accuracy of Prediction Market in Days Approaching Election

Prediction Markets are a useful and important new tool that harness the wisdom of crowds. In Bayesian Epistemology, they are known as Dutch Book Arguments, where individuals not only make predictions of events, but place monetary wagers on them. Literally putting their money where their mouth is. Imagine, not only all the money that could have gone into critics bank accounts on the myriad failed predictions of Donald Rumsfeld concerning the Iraq War, but the influence such a market would have had on policy debate.

Wolfers and Zitzewitz, 2004 paper, Prediction Markets, outlines the benefits of this concept:

…prediction markets provide three important roles: 1) incentives to seek information; 2) incentives for truthful information revelation; and 3) an algorithm for aggregating diverse opinions. Current research is only starting to disentable the extent to which the remarkable predictive power of markets derives from each of these forces.

Prediction markets provide a preferable alternative to the unethical practice of State Lotteries, which work against the public welfare. State Lotteries bring in public revenues for the state, but rely on a public illiterate in mathematics to purchase lottery tickets. This generates a conflict of interest, as schools, reliant on State Lotteries for funding, are also responsible for educating students to a level of mathematical proficiency to which they would know better than to purchase a lottery ticket.

Prediction Markets, in contrast, not only benefit players with a strong mathematical aptitude, who can understand the probabilities and statistics, but also players who are knowledgable about the subject being wagered. Prediction markets encourage research and promote education among players.

Additionally, prediction markets provide a scientific means of tracking the reliability of our sources. Stanford research psychologist Philip Tetlock surveyed 82,361 predictions by 284 pundits and found them overwhelmingly wrong. Yet the media keep putting these unreliable sources in front of us as if they knew what they were talking about. Imagine how damaging it would be to the reputations of Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olbermann, or other talking head if people were allowed to bet on their predictions and establish a track record for their reliability.

Unfortunately, we cannot currently test this hypothesis, because prediction Markets are gambling and, therefore, illegal. It’s true that players can lose everything in a bad gamble, but the same is true of the stock and housing markets. One person’s gambling is another’s free market. The law should make concessions for well-regulated prediction markets, because they can provide a valuable public service.

Further Reading

Facial Expression Reader Vicky 85% Happy, 3% Disgust, 2% Fear, 1% Sad

It’s amazing that the organ most responsible for the success of our species is the one we know the least about. While we have come a long way, abandoning the cartesian duality and stepping out of the false dichotomy of the nature versus nurture debate, we still don’t know exactly how memories are encoded in the web of neurons or how much of our behaviors are hard-coded.

But we are able to observe these behaviors. We can see how our brains react to optical illusions, and infer the underlying components. We may observe how individuals respond to authority and social zones, whittling out the evolutionary advantages these reactions confer on us. Is the human brain like a black box, where we must learn its inner workings from its external manifestations? Or will we have more luck dissecting the molecular components?

See the complete flickr set here.

Note: If you watch BSG, but haven’t seen the last episode (aired on 20090213), skip this post as a spoiler. If you don’t watch BSG, take this post as an example of what you are missing (the quote’s edited so as not to reveal anything). If you saw the episode, enjoy the blockquote.

Now that BSG appears to be going with hard-science explanations for all the mysticism and supernatural occurrences in its final episodes (still tons of unanswered questions), I can really endorse it. A lot of people complained about the cyclons taking human form, but if they hadn’t, then we would have never gotten this wonderful speech by the cyclon Number One/John Cavil:

Number One

In all your travels, have you ever seen a star super-nova? No. Well I have. I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the universe. Other stars, other planets, and, eventually, other life… a supernova. Creation itself. I was there, I wanted to see it, and be part of the moment.

And you know how I percieved one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull. With eyes designed to percieve only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum. With ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air.

I don’t want to be human! I want to see gamma rays. I want to hear x-rays. I want to smell dark matter.

Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly because I have to–I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me.

I’m a machine, and I could know much more. I could experience so much more, but I’m trapped in ths absurd body. And why? Because my [creator(s)] thought that God wanted it that way.

Five episodes to go until all is revealed. It’s been a mind-blowing ride.

Why didn’t somebody tell me the Windows Calculator, found under Start->Accessories, has a “Scientific” mode, found under View->Scientific???

Windows Calculator, Scientific Mode

This is like waking up one morning and noticing there’s another room in your house that you just didn’t know was there before. This functionality is fairly frakin’ sweet. It’s got Hexadecimal, Octal, and Binary modes, Logarithms and Boolean Algebra functions. All sorts of stuff I’ll have very little use for, except for fun and games, but this could have enhanced some of my previous blog posts, like Why Base-10?

Here I’ve been lamenting the lack of a decent scientific calculator in Windows for years, when it’s been sitting right there in front of me. I can even plug in operations so complex it hangs up the system.

Now what we need is a decent, built-in graphing calculator to really have some fun. In the meantime, I’ll keep playing with Graph Calc, e-tutor’s calculator, and work on rolling my own calculator in PHP.

Note: Making this change did set off McAfee Virus Scan, which “Detected an unauthorized change” to a windows program. I authorized it, but have no clue why changing a view would set off a system change alert.

Iridium Communications Satellite Credit: Moi

Last week, I got a late message from the Wall Street Journal that they wanted to use my flickr photo of an Iridium satellite for their coverage of the satellite collision in space. Very exciting!

It would have been awesome bragging rights to have my (pretty unremarkable) photo appear in the WSJ. Unfortunately, I called them back late to give them permission, and they went with an artist’s illustration of the satellite instead. This irritated me, because the WSJ obviously didn’t understand the whole point of my liscensing the photo creative commons. You don’t have to ask permission to use my photos, you just need to credit me (or ideonexus) and license the photo share-alike.

This experience provided me some anecdotal evidence for why old, inflexible media, like the WSJ, are losing ground; afterall, The Tech Herald understood this and used my photo for the story, as did Popular Mechanics. It even made a forum and some blogs… not this one though. I didn’t know I had taken the photo.

Wired Science used my photo of Azurite with malachite to solicit photos of rocks from its readers. Discover Magazine’s blog 80beats used my Homo floresiensis photo for a story on the hobbit, and my Carcharodon megalodon for a story on the powerful bit of ancient sharks. Wikipedia has used over 70 of my photos.

Additionally Tête-à-Tête-Tête, Animal Photos, Animal Pictures Archive, SFGrok, ARKive, aquamarine, World Reviewer, The Tech Herald, Newser, Hydroponics Garden, ofellabuta, and Dispersal of Darwin all get Creative Commons and have used my photos.

This blog couldn’t survive without all the free-use images researchers provide with their press releases and all the creative commons photos of just about anything you can think of provded by the users at flickr. I’m honored to be part of this collective media.

SideNote: Interesting flickr phenomenon. Since the collision, there’s been a whole lot of photos claiming to snapshot reentry of the satellite junk. It’s possible.

One of those nifty facts Einstein discovered in his Theory of Relativity is that the force of gravity affects time. The more gravity, the slower time progresses until time appears to a stop in a black hole from the perspective of an outside observer. This natural phenomenon is known as Gravitational time dilation.

Spacetime Curvature

Experimental proof for this phenomena came with the Pound-Rebka Experiment in 1959. Later, scientists would fly aircraft over the Chesapeake Bay carrying an atomic clock, to further prove the clock in the air ran faster than one on the ground.

So this begs the question, How much longer have astronauts on the International Space Station lived compared to us on the ground?

Lucky me for living in the Information Age that a quick google search found someone had already done the math:

I considered the ISS speed v as 8000 m/s or 0.00002667c (c is the speed of light). Then I calculated the epsilon factor as epsilon = sqrt ( 1 – v^2 / c^2 ) = 0.9999999996443555 Finally I applied the epsilon factor to the ISS orbit time (3013 days * epsilon) and found out that the resulting difference is 0.0925 seconds.

That means that time inside the ISS has so far been about one tenth of a second slower than the time down here on earth.

Waitaminute, slower? That doesn’t grok with gravity slowing down time. A closer look at the above math reveals it is calculating the effects of velocity on time. As objects approach the speed of light, their relative time slows down. This fact fuels an interesting thought experiment known as the Twin Paradox, where one twin goes on a light speed journey and the other stays on Earth. For the traveling twin only a few moments pass during the journey, but for the twin on Earth, it has been decades.

ISS Science Officer Ed Lu independently confirms the ISS math, concluding the astronauts age 0.007 seconds less than people on Earth. So these two sources have figured out how the ISS’s velocity slows down its relative time, but there’s no mention of gravity in their math.

If the ISS were to orbit the Earth at 1.5 times the Earth’s radius (5,900 miles or 9500 km) then the effect of velocity and gravity on time would cancel each other out. At orbits greater than 5,900 miles, gravity is stronger and speeds up time, below 5,900 miles, velocity is stronger and time slows. The ISS orbits 255 miles above the Earth at 8000 m/s, so time runs approximately 0.0000000014 percent slower.

Today, GPS satellites are adjusted to account for this distortion of space time, both for the effect of time dilation from their velocity (special relativity) and their reduced gravity (general relativity), when they are put into orbit. Armed with all the knowledge above, you might have some fun explaining why this PhD-holder has no idea what he’s talking about when he calls time dilation a myth and proposes putting an atomic clock on the ISS to disprove it.

Note: Programming geeks and other scientists concerned with time should bookmark the NIST: Time and Frequency Division, which maintains the time standard used in all clocks maintained by satellite.

I could not imagine the reaction, if an American Science museum were to have a section that dealt with sex as honestly and explicitly as the NEMO science center. From French Kissing displays, to novelty condoms, to pictures of insect genitalia, to dolls in a wide variety of sexual positions… there was plenty of heart-attack inducing material for members of the religious right, but for normal people, this was a very amusing series of exhibits.

Cartoon About Hormones

My favorite of these exhibits by far was a cartoon on hormonal changes in teenagers, where a boy and a girl are put into chambers and a narrator explains everything that’s happening to their bodies. The photo above is a frame from this exhibit, where the young boy is experiencing his first ejaculation. I found the cartoon online, and you can watch the above animation here, and ask yourself whether we’d see this kind of educational material here in America.

Is this kind of education a good or bad thing? How does it compare to our American-brand, “Abstinence Only” education? Vicky did some research on Amsterdam teen pregnancy and abortion rates, and found the following empirical data:

Source: 2001 Unicef Report

The conclusion I can’t help but draw from this data is that people who aren’t educated tend to exhibit uneducated behaviors.

See the complete flickr set here. I’m curious if some of these photos, which I consider innocent enough, get flagged.

Is up at 365 Tomorrows.

“Watch this,” Alea smirked at Trin and turned to the four-legged creature dumbly munching on some flamegrass nearby.

“Oti,” Alea chirped to the thing, and a few dozen eyes opened to look at her. “Oti, what is pi?”

A half-dozen orifices sprinkled amidst the eyes opened to emit a flurry of hissing noises and chirping.

Trin’s jaw dropped as he looked at his wrist screen, “3.1415926535… The numbers just keep coming.”

Alea was practically beaming, “I know.”

“It’s speaking in binary,” Trin blinked at her expectantly.

“I know,” Alea nodded.

“Why?” Trin prompted.

Alea shrugged, “It just started doing it. When the digital connection on my computer broke, I had to jury rig a sound connection to signal you in the dropship. In the weeks while I was waiting at base camp for your arrival, I was Web surfing, and next thing I know, this critter starts talking to my computer system. It’s figured out all our protocols, and has been explaining geometry, trigonometry, and calculus to my computer. I’ve been saving it all to log files for the team to review.”

“How is this possible?” Trin blinked and shook his head.

“I have an hypothesis,” Alea looked at the creature, still happily hissing away pi to seemingly endless decimal places. “Ready?”
Trin nodded dumbly.

Alea pointed to a trio of two-legged powder-puffs bouncing around the space cows’ boneless legs. “Females,” she said. “The calculations attract females. They are a mating display.”

“Calculus is a mating display?” Trin frowned skeptically. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would these blobs evolve to understand advanced mathematics just to attract a mate? They obviously aren’t putting that knowledge to any other use. I thought evolution favored minimalism.”

“It’s like the peacock’s tail,” Alea was grinning at the creature. “Male peacocks evolved these long, extravagant tails because female peacocks preferred them. Why do they prefer them? They just do.

“The tail serves no purpose, in fact, it makes the males easier to catch and eat. Birds of Paradise have evolved similar extravagant displays, just because the females are attracted to them.”

“You’re saying this creature has evolved a giant, energy-hungry brain that can perform calculus and talk with our computers, just to get chicks?!?!” Trin was practically sputtering, flabbergasted. “What are the ramifications of that?”

“Profits, my esteemed colleague,” Alea snapped her fingers before Trin’s eyes. “Peacocks’ feathers were nice for Victorian-era fashions, but for our modern information-centric sensibilities, these critters will be all the rage. Are you following me?”

Trin blinked at her dumbly, sitting still. Slowly, a wide smile spread across his face, “Okay.”