Currently reading Storrs Hall’’s “Beyond AI”. I’m halfway and it’s a great book about Artificial Intelligence (= AI), a topic that should concern us all. I for one have nothing against AI, but I prefer to be intelligent myself. In short: my aim is nothing less then unlimited intellectual self-improvement, to pass beyond Von Neumann’s complexity barrier – the dividing line between problems that can be solved using traditional, reductionist methods and those that require a more intuitive, throw-it-up-and-see-what-sticks approach (Sam Williams)- and bootstrap myself sooner or later into a superintelligence.
A good place to start is “Cyborg 101: The Warrior’s Guide to the Blackboard Jungle“, an online book by Angus T.K. Wong. I mentioned this book earlier.
More challenging is Alex Ramonsky’s “I Changed my Mind – Intelligence Augmentation through Neurohacking“. The book describes Neuro-hacking as a conglomerate of techniques, chemicals, technology, psychology and biochemistry to
- Increase speed of learning and memory
- Adjust (=sav, search, delete, edit, cut & paste, refle, encrypt) memory
- Adjust (= refile, edit, erase, write, disable or enable) emotion
- Fixing bugs and erroneous programming
- Enhancing and controlling creativity, imagination, cognitive abilities
- Compensate for any minor damage or erroneous programming of the past
- Increase cognitive efficiency, memory and lifespan
- Protect against brainwashing (firewall) and
- Survive – live on earth with other humans to our mutual benefit.
That is, in fact, the transhumanists program and as I wrote on another place (in Dutch), I can only support that with all my heart.
Ramonsky’s program considers the brain as a computer that can – and should – be hacked. Hacking means to me: to unlock currently hidden functionality. To be honest: Ramonsky’s program is not for the weak-hearted and until now I myself have left out the chemicals in my personal training schedule. You can always reformat or replace your hard drive, or even buy a new computer when you mess-up, but your brain is irreplaceable.
Storrs Hall too thinks the brain is a computer:
The function of the brain is to output the right signals given the signals it inputs. (…)It’s a computer.
And what about the mind?
It’s the computation. It’s the process – the sequence of information and causation – that characterizes which outputs the brain will produce,given it’s inputs.
What about intelligence?
The main function of intelligence is to take a huge stream of information, such as provided by the sensory organs, and reduce it to a relatively small stream of abstracted interpretation that has high predictive value.
Many people will be horrified by the metaphor. What about free will? Free will is to a human being what random numbers are to a computer, to paraphrase Robert Heinlein (The Number of the Beast). You can see that as a limitation, but it also means that there are a lot of choices you can make. To me it seems that the ball is on my half of the playing-field, just the same as when I realized that it makes no sense to believe in God: I had to decide for my own what was right or wrong and only I could be held responsible for what I made of my life.
Let me quote Ramonsky again:
The first goal of intelligence’s development ís the creation of an autonomous (self-sufficient) person, dependent on nothing except their own selves by maturity. A free-range mind.
Does this block out emotion? Not at all, but
Emotion should be an ability we use to enhance life, not a drug to which we are addicted or a tornado that throws us here and there.
Is the brain modular? Or: has it Multiple Intelligences? This also concerns the (Autistic) Savant Syndrome
image from Time-special about the Brain, 2007
I think, with Oliver Sachs, that the mind is not just a collection of talents; a purely modular view of the mind removes the general quality, the personal centre, the Self. (Sachs abridged 
).
So, is the brain a computer?
Yes it is, but (until now) human beings are not robots.
In the beginning there was Gay Pride Day. Then there was Nerd/Geek Pride Day. Now, there is also an Autistic Pride Day.
Autism is “not a pathological condition or a disease, but a way of life that possesses a culture and history all its own”,
said Valerie Paradiz, who has Asperger’s syndrome, in The Guardian. She founded the School for Autistic Strength, Purpose and Independence in Education (Aspie) in New York State.
Of course there are some high-functioning autists, autistic savants like Kim Peek (who is actually not autistic), Daniel Tammet and Temple Grandin, but these people are the exceptions that prove the rule. Then – IMHO – there are a lot of people who’s behavior is too easily labelled as “Asperger” to be relieved of the responsibility of dealing with people who prefer realizing themselves in science, facts, computers, technology above socializing and gossiping.
The symptoms of autism can vary dramatically from child to child. While one child may be entirely unable to communicate, another may be able to recite entire Shakespearian plays. One child may be unable to add 3 + 4, another may be able to perform advanced calculus functions. In addition to autism, four other conditions fall under the header of Autistic Spectrum Disorders:
- Asperger syndrome – Children with this condition have some symptoms of autism, including poor social skills and a lack of empathy, but they have age-appropriate language skills and a normal or high IQ.
- Rett syndrome – This condition affects only 1 out of every 10,000 to 15,000 children, the vast majority of them girls. Those with Rett syndrome shy away from social contact. They may wring their hands and be unable to control the movement of their feet.
- Childhood Disintegrative Disorder (CDD) – This rare disorder affects only about two out of every 100,000 children with ASDs, most of them male. Children with CDD will develop normally until about age 3 or 4, then will suddenly and dramatically lose their motor, language and social skills.
- Pervasive Developmental Disorder – Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS) – This condition shares some of the same symptoms with autism (communication and social delays), but does not meet the full criteria for diagnosis.
– How Stuff Works
Autistic Pride Day? Be honest: of course it is not a defamation to be autistic, but OTOH it is not a great honour either.
Oliver Sacks wrote in his beautiful book “An Anthropologist on Mars” about autistic savant Stephen Wiltshire who has a prodigious memory for pictures and is known for his ability to draw a landscape after seeing it just once. On page 207-208 Sachs writes about a voyage by train he made with Stephen:
“I had the feeling that the whole visible world flowed through Stephen like a river, without making sense, without being appropriated, without becoming part of him in the least.(…)I found myself thinking of him as a sort of train himself, a perceptual missile, travelling through life, noting,recording, but never appropriating, a sort of transmitter of all that rushed past – but himself unchanged, unfed, by the experience”.
And then, on page 216, he concludes:
Normally there is a cohering and unifying power (Coleridge calls it an “esemplastic power”) that integrates all the seperate faculties of mind, integrates them, too, with our experiences and emotions, so that they take on a uniquely personal cast. It is this global, or integrating power that allows us to generalize and reflect, to develop subjectivity and a self-conscious self.
I like the TiddlyWiki concept. I have three TW’s in use on my thumb drive, one of them is the D3 for keeping track of my To-do lists; one is a personal notebook with all things about inspiration I collected from the internet and one TW is my personal notebook with all things I find and recycle on one of my websites.
I stumbled on two great new projects: the TW Glass; a beautiful design and the TW Project Manager.
Another, non-TW-project for capturing my thoughts is Basket Note Pads. Linux-only, just like TW works best on Firefox.
Learning how to code. I like the word “coding” more than “programming”; code is poetry
My first efforts were writing some lines of code in PHP. Now I’m learning LISP. Why? Because it is the granddaddy of computer languages. But there is more: I’m not finished yet learning PHP, and I am doing some very small projects – for learning purposes only – in the Mono development framework.
Yesterday I stumbled on Wagn, “Ruby on Rails, Wiki on Wheels”. This “Explore, Organize, Thrive” CMS seems to me the best application for a new project I am planning for my work. (Don’t ask…).
But…I need some knowledge of Ruby on Rails, as well as Git. Hm, that’s all rather arcane to me, but everything can be taught, so I picked up a book from the Public Library “Handboek Programmeren met Ruby en Rails” (in Dutch) by Ivo Balbaert and followed some online lessons at the Ruby Programming Language Website, that led me to another hands-on tutorial, written by why the lucky stiff, whoever that may be, but he describes himself as
…a fledgling freelance professor, one who will die young and make no lasting impression.
Rather modest, IMHO, because besides his beautiful website he also blessed the world with a funny book Why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby – completely free!
Okay, I downloaded the One-Click Installer and wrote my first line of Ruby; “Hello World”, or something like that. Let’s see if I’ll get Ruby rolling.
Yesterday I finished this book, that I bought two weeks ago just because of the word “geek” in the title and a little bit tempted by the funny cover. When I started reading, it reminded me of “Freakonomics”, but “Geekspeak” is more diverse in the choice of the topics.
The cover promises to learn you how life + mathematics = happiness. Maybe that’s true, but I was thinking of Rudy Ruckers’ axiom that mathematics is nothing more than an algorithm to transform given facts into new knowledge. That is exactly what Tattersall does in his book, and while doing it he shows how much better it is (and how much more fun it can be) to think about the world around us and use your brain instead of losing it while just watching television.
So, for example, in chapter 21 “Idiot Calculus – What can you work out while sitting in a deck chair” he calculates how many sand grains fit in a children’s sand bucket (16 million) and when the job is done he continues:
Well, that feels better. The sand bucket is now fully understood and presents no threat to your peace of mind. But there are many other things that can be calculated as you laze in your deck chair.
The next project is calculating the speed of an airplane and then, never a moment of dithering, what weight of electrons has been delivered from Britain’s power stations. All calculations done while sitting in your deck chair on the beach (there’s nothing wrong with that!) and without using your computer or WolframAlpha. At the end of the chapter he finishes with
It’s time to leave the beach for home. I do hope there’s nothing incalculable on the way.
That is Geek Speak! Not the would-be “g33ksp34k” but the real down-to-earth “according to my calculations…” approach to satisfy your curiosity, to find the answers, to explain the world, to know just for the satisfaction of knowing.
Of course there is more to explore.
I wish I’d had a teacher like Tattersall when I was @school and I wish every schoolboy (and -girl) to grow up with this great book.
Life is a well of delight; but where the rabble also drink, there all fountains are poisoned.
This quote from Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” applies to the current state of the internet. Internet is great, but the overload of blogs and microblogs pollute the web. The surplus value of the internet as a means to exchange information is undone by the trouble you have to take to wade through the swamp of second hand information to find a single bit of news.
Nascent, Nature’s Blog on web technology and science, has an article about which web 2.0 services scientists use, written by Euan Adie. The conclusion is:
- Almost a third of Friendfeed scientists have delicious bookmarks. Don’t discount non-academic bookmarking services as a source of paper metadata.
- A similar number use the share functionality in Google Reader.
- Despite rumors to the contrary not everybody is on Twitter.
- A surprising (to me) number of people are uploading and favouriting items on Slideshare.
Hmm, I almost never use my Friendfeed account, although it is the easiest way to share online (as you can read on their own website) So, I’ll give it a little more attention from now on. I’ve subscribed to some groups like life-scientists. Of course I hope to learn from others, but I also share information I found on the web. Quid quo pro. Another way of viewing my web 2.0-activities is my Public Plaxo Pulse Stream, but this shows less services than Friendfeed. You can see how much and where I share conveniently arranged in a pie chart at my Geek Chart page, but this covers only a few services: this blog, Digg, Stumble, YouTube, LastFM, Delicious, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter.
Yes, I’m on Twitter, but I still haven’t discovered what the hype is all about – except, of course, that it is all about exposing in public what you are up to. Somewhere in the world there must be some very interesting people, but usually those people are too concerned about doing their thing that they are not interested in launching their tweets into cyberspace. Proof me wrong; I still haven’t read one single tweet that changed my life – and I doubt if my own tweets are worth the trouble of writing (let alone: reading) them.
I like Delicious, although last year I transferred a lot of my bookmarks to Evernote. I think Evernote is a great tool for sharing information, but My Notebook at Evernote is not public. Another great service not mentioned in the Nascent article is Twine.
I think I’ll have to delve more into the possibilities of CiteULike, Connotea and Slideshare. I’ve seen some very interesting presentations on the Semantic Web. I wrote about that in an earlier post.
Virtualization is the method by which a “guest” operating system can run within another “host” operating system. The good thing is you can have the best of both worlds.
So I have a dual boot machine with Vista and Linux. But, like many other people, most of the time I use Windows, simply because Linux is difficult with music software; of course I installed the RT-kernel, but until now I didn’t succeed to get Jack working and talking with Rosegarden. Only LMMS works with the Linux RT kernel, but this derivation of Fl Studio isn’t half as good as Fl Studio. Besides: I see not much difference between my (OpenSuse 11.1) Linux installation and Windows.
While the musician in me still prefers Windows, the computer geek wants to learn how things work. As a car driver I’m not interested in what’s under the engine cowl; as a computer user I’m getting bored of clicking those stupid icons. In the beginning was the Command Line but I have never used a non-graphical environment. Now is the time to make up my programming skills. This is where virtualization is of great use. Sun’s VirtualBox lets me run Ubuntu, INX and even Minix3 without any risk under Windows Vista. Only TinHat refuses until now to run in the Virtual Box, but, of course, in the end it will have to obey me .
I use Ubuntu for coding (especially the Mono development framework). But for learning good old-fashioned command-lines INX is great. It is console only, without any graphical “X” windows. INX is intended as a tutorial and introduction to the command line, according to the release note. You can run INX as a live-CD, but when running it in your virtual box and you get stuck, you have the possibility of switching back to the host OS (Windows, that is) to look up what you have to do.
Hm…Too late I noticed that Nerdpride Day coincides with Towel Day. On this day, Geeks carry towels to honor Douglas Adams, the author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy who passed away 11 May 2001, at the age of 49. According to the third chapter of the Hitchhikers Guide a towel is the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Hence its symbolic role in this celebration.
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough. — Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Some Geeks celebrate Towel Day with a performance of the Japanese Algorithm March
I enjoyed reading The Hitchhikers Guide, not only for it’s geeky humor, but I didn’t celebrate Towel Day, I use a towel everyday.
At Slashdot was a small thread about Towel Day. There I found the following quote:
We don’t have to save the world. The world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about is whether or not the world we live in will be capable of sustaining us in it.
– Douglas Adams, Speech at The University of California
Wikiquote has even more quotes: there I found this one from Triumph of the Nerds, that brings us back to Nerdpride Day:
I think a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer.
My Google Geek Holiday Calender told me today is Nerdpride Day, or Geekpride Day. This day is celebrated on May 25 since 2006, celebrating the premiere of the first Star Wars movie in 1977.
The stereotypical nerd is intelligent but socially and physically awkward, according to Wikipedia. Hm, that doesn’t count for me (at least not all features!), but I’m not exactly a nerd. I feel comfortable when talking about the weather as well as about Linux, although talking about the weather makes me feel like playing a role in a sitcom.
In my daily life as a teacher I can observe every day that my pupils’ struggle for life is about wearing the right shoes or clothes, having the newest and most expensive cell phones, I pods and how cool it is to spend as little time as possible for school.
I have no problem with getting older, but now and then I wonder how life would have been for me if I had had access to computers and the internet when I was twelve. I bought and read as much books as I could afford then and didn’t worry about my mother’s complaints that I hadn’t any social life and wasn’t interested in girls – I knew there was nothing to worry about. I’m sure I would have spent all my time on reading RSS-feeds and hanging around on forums like Slashdot; I do that now as much as possilbe, but it is much more difficult to find the time – not nerdy enough to say “no” to family and friends (yes, I have some – I’m actually quite normal). So, I can only agree with the following quote:
My idea is to present an image to children that it is good to be intellectual, and not to care about the peer pressures to be anti-intellectual. I want every child to turn into a nerd – where that means someone who prefers studying and learning to competing for social dominance, which can unfortunately cause the downward spiral into social rejection.
— Gerald Sussman, quoted by Katie Hafner, The New York Times, 29 August 1993
Basic rights and responsibilities of nerds.
A manifesto was created to celebrate the first Nerd Pride Day which included the following list of basic rights and responsibilities of nerds.
Rights:
- The right to be even nerdier.
- The right to not leave your house.
- The right to not have a significant other and to be a virgin.
- The right to not like football or any other sport.
- The right to associate with other nerds.
- The right to have few friends (or none at all).
- The right to have all the nerdy friends that you want.
- The right to wear witty t-shirts
- The right to not be “in-style.”
- The right to be overweight and have poor eyesight.
- The right to show off your nerdiness.
- The right to make an attempt at being as nerdy as Morgana Summers, and the right to fail. (Topher Stumph came quite close, but he too, failed).
- The right to develop serious crushes on Randall Munroe, Shane Carruth & Bo Burnam, as opposed to say… James Franco. (See 11).
- The right to carry a Thesaurus with you at all times, as opposed to an iPhone. (See 11)
- The right to execute shameless self advertisement via the Wikipedia Geek Pride Day page. (See 11).
- The right to falsely assume the surnames Finkleton, Waldman, Stratzer and Krukemeyer.
- The right to take over the world.
Responsibilities:
- Be a nerd, no matter what.
- Try and be nerdier than anyone else.
- If there is a discussion about something nerdy, you must give your opinion.
- Save any and all nerdy things you have.
- Do everything you can to show off your nerdy stuff as though it were a “museum of nerdiness.”
- Don’t be a generalized nerd. You must specialize in something.
- Attend every nerdy movie on opening night and buy every nerdy book before anyone else.
- Wait in line on every opening night. If you can go in costume or at least with a related t-shirt, all the better.
- Don’t waste your time on anything not related to nerddom.
- Befriend any person or persons bearing any physical similarities to comic book or sci-fi figures.
- Try to take over the world!
Wolfram Alpha is a data-focused, computational search engine that pretends to make the world’s knowledge computable. Wolfram Alpha is a hybrid between Wikipedia and Google, for simple search queries. You can enter any date (e.g. a birth date), any town (e.g. a home town), any two stocks, any calculation, any math formula, any two first names, any food, any measurement, any chemical formula, any musical notes.
So I tried 42, which is, as we all know, the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Here are Alpha’s results. Not bad. Now I tried Enoch Root. Hm, here Google helped me better in the past.
Gina Trapani wrote a comprehensive article about Wolfram Alpha at LifeHacker. She sums up a decent list of trivia calculated by Wolfram Alpha’s computational knowledge engine, but I would be disappointed if this is all Wolfram Alpha has to offer.
If you find yourself using Wolfram Alpha more than Google or Wikipedia, there is a WolframAlpha Search Plugin for Firefox users. There is also a Wolfram Toolbar.
