I am also proud that we will have a professor of constitutional law as our president, who seems to understand the role of the president as the executive, who carries out and executes the will of the people, and is not “the decider,” as it were. It’s also nice to have a Vice President who understands he is not the leader of the senate. See, our country was founded by some excessively intelligent people who debated and theorized and figured out a system of democracy that is truly genius, with a balance of power and safeguards against tyranny. It’s only fitting that we should expect our president to share that understanding.

I believe Obama will be a good president. Indeed, our standing in the world has already improved, and that’s a good sign. Time will tell if he can live up to the expectations, but I have hope that someone who understands just how diverse and complex this country is can have a chance to bring it together to its full potential.

Anyway, here in Berkeley, the people rejoiced and danced in the streets (literally) with joy. It’s amazing to see Real Americans ™ happy and proud for their country again for all the right reasons.

]]> http://www.trisweb.com/archives/2008/11/06/election-night-in-berkeley-photo-essay/feed/ 1 http://www.trisweb.com/archives/2008/10/29/one-small-year-of-uptime/ http://www.trisweb.com/archives/2008/10/29/one-small-year-of-uptime/#comments Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:46:54 +0000 Tristan http://www.trisweb.com/?p=908 You know what that means? Uptime reports today this server has been running for exactly 1 year uninterrupted.

A small milestone, but a nice one nonetheless. Thanks to Slicehost for some seriously great hosting! Clearly, I have been 100% satisfied over the past year. They were recently bought by Rackspace, but I’m sure they’ll continue to have great service.

You may also notice the Mac OSXness. Well, I’ve been waiting for the next MacBook Pro upgrade, and since Apple released some new ones last month, I decided I’d pick one up, and here I am, the proud owner of a 15″ machined-aluminium shiny-screened MacBook Pro. I think I’ll write more on it later, but in short, angered reports of glossy screens stabbing eyeballs and blinding users have been greatly exaggerated. This thing rocks

A lot has happened in the past year, but the server kept on rockin through it all. Here’s hopin it lasts to 730!

Speaking of summer, it is, in fact, the first day of summer (woo!) – the summer solstice, and the longest day of the year. I actually almost woke up at 5:47am this morning just to watch the sunrise from the top of my building, but my awesome Ikea bed was way too comfortable. Sunset is at 8:34pm, making the day a good 14 hours and 47 minutes long. Sweet.

It’s also unnaturally hot here in the bay area – I can only imagine what it’s like further inland (sorry people from the central valley, I hope you have pools). It was 93 degrees here today, and it still feels like it. I went to the gym at lunch and worked up a sweat, and then stopped at the car wash just to feel the spray from the high pressure nozzle! Then after work I scrubbed my bathtub, cleaned my sink, and took a cold shower, just to cool down.

I’m not sure why I enjoy cleaning and organizing things, but I won’t question it too much, since I think it’s a good thing. It’s got to be something about being physically productive after spending all day being virtually productive. I mean, you can program all day and all you might have is something that goes a little bit faster than before, but scrub a grimy bathtub and man you can tell the difference! It feels good to get something real done in-between lines of code.

Aaaaand I’ll leave you with that thought. Besides cleaning bathtubs, what are y’all doing to beat the heat this summer?

This is not HDR in the traditional sense. Any guess what I did to it?

The mother hummingbird sitting in her nest. 2/1/07

Keep reading for over a dozen pictures, including one of a baby hummingbird learning how to fly. It’s priceless, don’t miss out on this one.

Mom again, this time protecting the eggs (2 of them) even in the rain! 2/10/07

The baby hummingbird chick is born! 3/1/07

Another picture of the newborn, now (about) three days old. Notice the second egg that never hatched. 3/3/07

The baby again (I think) now a week old. 3/8/07

The baby looking out from the nest. 3/9/07

An excellent shot of the chick, getting impatient to leave the nest! 3/10/07

The baby hummingbird sticking his neck out, almost ready to fly… 3/11/07

An empty nest! Where did (s)he go? 3/11/07

It’s learning how to fly! It wasn’t being very successful at this point, it mostly just flapped its wings and stayed on the leaf, but WOW. Isn’t this amazing? 3/11/07

Takin’ a break. Flying is hard work for a hummingbird! They have to beat their wings 20 times a second! 3/11/07

Closer clearer image like the previous one; he sat there for a long time. 3/11/07

The only picture I ever caught of both mom and baby together! She was just giving him a little encouragement… 3/11/07

Finally he started flapping, and flew over to the next branch! Yay! 3/11/07

After that, I didn’t grab any more pictures, but I do hear they’ve been hanging around, taking advantage of the hummingbird-feeder every once in a while.

Pretty amazing, isn’t it? Thanks for looking.

Unfortunately I didn’t have a better camera to record it, but my little Panasonic FX-01 didn’t do so bad! Some of the shots came out very sharp for such a little camera (thank you optical image stabilization!). Hopefully next time something like this happens I’ll have replaced my SLR.

Seriously, I thought everyone knew better than to use Internet Explorer these days. Get Firefox, Opera, Safari, anything else!

On the forums, Craig said “Wow. You really feel quite strongly about IE don’t you?” and this is my explanation why:

I do feel quite strongly about it, yes; as a programmer I’m appalled that other programmers made such a low quality product. It’s like people driving around a 10-year-old beat-up car that can only go 40 miles per hour, breaks down every ten minutes, doesn’t have a radio, and is put together with duct tape (coughCSS hackscough) when you could get a souped-up fire-orange Ferarri (FIREFOX) for FREE. Or a nice Honda Accord (Safari) or maybe a Toyota Camry (Opera), all for free, but no, people just keep on drivin the junker. I just don’t understand it, and it’s such a pain in the rear for web developers that I feel like speaking my mind about it sometimes, especially when I find another “new” bug. It’s just an unacceptable quality level. Even IE 7 doesn’t make it much better, so don’t bother, just use Firefox, Safari, Opera, whatever, anything but Internet Explorer.

So please, folks, if you’re using Internet Explorer, you are part of the problem. Go get a better browser right now.

This is how I watch the sky these days when I can’t get my own eyes above the buildings. It happens to be one of the best webcams I know of, situated in the perfect place.

Update: changed to a static image as of 2/18

I’m somewhere down there. Just a minute ago it was pouring rain, and a minute later the rain stopped and the sun came out under the clouds right over the golden gate and the whole bay area was shrouded in red. It happens once every few weeks, but it’s very cool when it does. It’s like the world is pointing a big red flashlight at everyone’s face saying, wake up! You’re alive, ain’t it great?

And no, I don’t always watch the sky on my computer screen. I do actually go outside every once in a while…

I guess it sounds like an ignorant viewpoint for a computer scientist to have. Intelligence is complex–or should it be just a very powerful computer with the right program? It seems to me like most people in the strong AI group think this way; that it’s just a lot of complicated parts needing independent solutions and some putting-together. This view is almost required to believe it can be done in the first place! I do believe it can be done–in fact, I believe the only way it can be done is the way it already has. We need to simulate the evolution of a strong AI and all its sources–essentially, us. I believe the evolutionary processes of an intelliegence–artificial or not–are as important as the end result.

This begins with recognizing the complexity of a human being’s intelligence. And I’m not even saying we’re that intelligent, but all of us, stupid or smart, are at least sentient. What is sentience exactly? It is by its very nature a combination of millions of complex things. Let’s use bullets:

• Our environment. Itself extremely complex, moreso perhaps than us. It includes:
• The natural world. Mountains, oceans, water, food, predators, prey, animals, plants, air, cold, hot, shelter.
• The man-made world. Cities, roads, buildings, etc.
• People. Society. Social interaction.
• Physics and science, “how things work.”
• Our physical bodies–also inherently complex.
• Hormones, chemical triggers, cravings.
• Physically manifested emotions, especially in social contact.
• The mind-body connection.
• Our perception of our own physical presence.
• Sensory input and response.
• Instinct
• Our minds.
• Memories, imagination
• Ideas and thoughts
• Connecting ideas with memories with thoughts and imagination.
• Connecting everything at once, almost automatically.
• Sensory perception
• Learning, especially from other people.
• Our evolution and genetic construction.
• DNA and its affect on all of the above.
• The environment, and its affect on DNA (evolution)
• Human effects on the environment through all of the above.

I have to say a little more about that last point–it’s not enough to say simply “evolution made us complex” — it made us extremely unimaginably incomprehensibly complex. We’ve probably got material in our genes that’s the way it is because some ancient squirrelly animal got eaten by a velociraptor. Our evolution was absolutely affected by the extinction of the dinosaurs and great climate changes. We’re entirely adapted harmoniously to our environment. We probably even have survival strategies dating back to some of the earliest mammals–if you ever doubt that, just think of fear and the kind of fright-or-flight response you immediately get.

See, this is how evolution works. It is the balance point in the middle of everything that simply allows life (I’m not trying to prove evolution here either; if you’re not with me this far, you might as well leave now).

We are a product of this incredible amazing process. This is life, this is intelligence, this is sentience. It’s not a computer program, it is the whole thing–not only us, but everything around us too, and every other us. It’s all one intelligence, and it would be different if any little thing went differently at any point in the last 4 billion years or thereabouts. We are the whole thing.

So talking about Artificial Intelligence in all these parts — of natural language processing, image recognition, even cognition and brain theory. It seems to me that no one gets it about the whole picture! Everything is important and you’ll never get a strong AI without understanding that!

I think it’s possible. What we need is a simulation of everything. But it can start simple, as simple as we did. With the beginning of the universe. Make some physical laws, design a universe program, get a computer that’s fast enough to simulate everything (for now at least, we can upgrade) and run the damn thing. It’s the only way to get everything.

No one wants to do that though, so we’ll keep focusing on the computer science problems behind it, and it might get us somewhere. It will not, though, get close to human intelligence without everything, quite literally. It will never think of crazy ideas while mowing the lawn without a lawn to mow (metaphorically speaking), and there’d be no lawn without, well, the rest of the world. Every little thing is part of it.

I believe it’s better to start with an understanding of these complex origins, and how important it is to our “program.” Perhaps a computer scientist with that realization could approach it from a different direction, and make it easier to bypass steps of evolution, or parts of the environment. Maybe cognitive scientists with a respect for complexity will figure out how to quickly evolve a brain in an appropriate system. Maybe multi-disciplinary biologists will think of a way to mimic the complexity of DNA. Historians will bring past human environments and societies to bear, Archaeologists will help with ancient physiologies and cultural clues, Sociologists will help us understand human interaction better, Writers past and present will provide content for an AI to learn, and Poets must help us understand our own humanity in this new context.

Every scientist must understand complexity in the 21st century. There is no other way. It is a shame, then, that we teach them so specifically when they should be trained as the worlds’ best generalists, with a special respect for complex systems. Science needs that now. It’s not just Intelligence that’s complex, but also our natural environment, our societies, our technologies, our weapons, our genetics; never was there a time in more dire need of scientists who understand this, nor in more danger from those who do not.

“To boot from the shadow of a broken mirror.”

Seriously now, tell me someone didn’t sneak that language in there. Or at least I’d think that if it wasn’t followed by “Please note that you may need to modify the Boot.ini file to do this.”

First, a little context. This morning, Facebook, the huge college-turned-global social networking site, released a new feature known as Feeds. Essentially, Feeds are a down-to-the-second record of everything you do on Facebook, whether it be adding a picture, adding a comment to someone’s profile, changing your profile, joining a group, even getting “in a relationship,” and Feeds are public for all of your friends to see. There’s even a “Master Feed” on everyone’s front page that shows you all of the news related to all of your friends’ accounts. That’s right, it shows you, all in one place, what everyone else did/is doing/wrote/thought about/uploaded/RSVP’d to/created/hooked up with/etc!

Now, astute readers of Slashdot immediately pointed out that all this information is already publicly available, and that all these facebook users just need to get used to the idea that anything on the internet is public, and if you don’t want it there, don’t put it there! As usual, this community of nerds is socially inept, so all their logic here can be discounted.

In fact, people do want their information public, because they put it there and the general concensus is that today’s college population is generally educated and not that stupid. They know it’s public, they know it’s there for all to see, and they do it anyway. There’s even tight restrictions on who can see what — only your trusted group of “friends” can even view your profile. The information being there in the first place is not the problem.

The problem started with Feeds, basically a form of data mining for this social network. They consolidate all the information about all the people you’re connected to in one convenient place, so you never miss a beat.

What the developers of Facebook fail to realize is that social relationships are built, to some degree, on many different levels of distance, and that each person’s “social network” is in fact an extremely complex thing in real life. There are people we only share certain information with, people we like to see on the weekends but not during the week, people we don’t ever want to know each other even if we know them separately because they would so violently oppose each other and make your own life way too complicated.

There are situations where complete and total information disclosure is not appropriate and never will be, and that fact is understood by all parties involved. It’s not that everyone is lying to everyone else, it’s simply that we cannot handle the kind of closeness required for complete trust with a group of 300 friends on the internet, many of whom we barely know.

In general, I think humans have perhaps four to six “slots” for that kind of close relationship. You’ve got two for your parents, one big one for a romantic partner, and two to four for close friends or siblings. When all those are filled (as I’m sure they have been for you at one time or another) it actually becomes difficult to remain close to each of them, and takes considerable effort. Any more closely held relationships and the others might begin to suffer. Why, then, should we be expected to have the same level of information disclosure with everyone we know? It makes our lives exponentially more complex, and it’s generally unwelcome, so we only dish out the info as needed.

Let’s look at this from a different angle. Communication. I like to think of “levels of directness” in communication, with face-to-face being the most direct, and a message in a bottle basically the least. Falling in-between are (in order from least to most) flyers and signs, blogging, letters, e-mail, instant messaging, telephone, and video phone.

As an excercise, think of all the people you’d be comfortable sending an e-mail to. Probably a lot. Hopefully everyone you know, and probably most anyone else as well. Now think of who you’d call on the telephone. That list probably got a lot smaller, down to only people you’ve talked to before, unless you need to conduct some outside business.

Now think of who you’d call on a video phone. My list for that is about 5 people long. I’d really rather not have video with everyone I call, and it’s only an advantage with the people close to me. Video phones didn’t die because too few people had them, they died because people only wanted a few people to have them!

So, back to facebook. Before we were being fed everyone’s information on our front page, our profiles were something like a telephone–kept at a distance. Someone had to do the work themselves to get the dirt–they couldn’t see our communication unless they made the effort to look for it, and if they accidentally came across something, fine, it was no big deal. In fact, there was some sense that if they made the effort to call, they deserved to be talked to. There was also some ettiquette that was easy to follow because nothing was forced: you could look for the dirt on someone, but if you did, it was your fault and you had some moral responsibility for your actions, a standard social protocol.

Now, facebook is a video phone, and everyone is forced to have one. Everyone sees everyone else and can’t avoid it. Actually, it’s more like a video phone with a 20×20 grid of faces on the front page, where you see all 400 of your friends and aquaintances on their little screen, half of them probably naked or something, and all looking scared and embarrassed. Then you remember, your every move is up on their screen too. And it’s forced. Everything is unavoidable. All moral responsibility falls away, and worse, in fact–you can’t even act ethically even if you tried–you can’t avoid the stuff you’re shown. By being a facebook member, you are now required to be a stalker, a gossip, and on public television 24/7.

Now do you understand Mark Zuckerberg? You can keep trying to push this, but if you keep the video phones on, people will simply turn them off and Facebook will cease to be a useful social tool, that’s all.

Or maybe you’re actually trying to force widespread unconditional honesty throughout the network? Shall we imagine a world where everyone knows everything about everyone else? Where no one can lie or withhold information, even when that’s completely appropriate, and even from those who would use it maliciously? That’s just not how society as we know it works, man.

My suggestion for improvement of these new features would be to drastically reduce the kind of information that’s shared, and to show personal changes and updates on profile page only. There has to be some barrier to direct contact–some distance–for it to continue to be the great tool that it has been.

I could see newly uploaded photos from friends, new aggregated “Notes” posts, and your own invites, messages, and notices (like it was before) on the front page, but nothing else really belongs there. Nothing else should be that direct. Similarly for the profile page, the record of every user’s actions simply should not include certain things. It really shouldn’t exist in the first place, because it’s not something most people want everyone else to know. If you think it’s still valuable, make it an option, default it to off.

They can still salvage their ship by making the features optional, but hey, it just might work the way it is. There could be a complete and total shift in the way social relationships work, you never know. Good luck with that.