If you must

...have a life-size R2-D2 replica sitting around the house (nerd!), at least it should have a working video-projector that beams out of it's radar eye.

Paper Robots

The b. in-law's new paper robot transformer Jetfire is up and it is tres chic. How cool is that? Cool enough not to bother with the obvious TF movie tie in one bit. That's how cool.

Barely Conscious

I was thinking about consciousness the other day. When I was ten I wanted to be a computer programmer. A particle physicist, architect, chef, or a sailboat designer were the other choices. So I worked a few paper routes and bought myself a Macintosh 512 and a C compiler. But I never advanced very far up the computer programmer evolutionary tree, for exactly the reason that Joel Spolsky gives in his guide to hiring programmers:

15 years of experience interviewing programmers has convinced me that the best programmers all have an easy aptitude for dealing with multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously. In programming, that means specifically that they have no problem with recursion (which involves holding in your head multiple levels of the call stack at the same time) or complex pointer-based algorithms (where the address of an object is sort of like an abstract representation of the object itself).

I’ve come to realize that understanding pointers in C is not a skill, it’s an aptitude. In first year computer science classes, there are always about 200 kids at the beginning of the semester, all of whom wrote complex adventure games in BASIC for their PCs when they were 4 years old. They are having a good ol’ time learning C or Pascal in college, until one day they professor introduces pointers, and suddenly, they don’t get it. They just don’t understand anything any more. 90% of the class goes off and becomes Political Science majors, then they tell their friends that there weren’t enough good looking members of the appropriate sex in their CompSci classes, that’s why they switched. For some reason most people seem to be born without the part of the brain that understands pointers. Pointers require a complex form of doubly-indirected thinking that some people just can’t do, and it’s pretty crucial to good programming. A lot of the “script jocks” who started programming by copying JavaScript snippets into their web pages and went on to learn Perl never learned about pointers, and they can never quite produce code of the quality you need.

That was me, except for the political science. I've taken a few more runs at programming in the last twenty years, but it's an aptitude I do not have. Most of my code nowadays are kludgey Matlab scripts for image processing, which work because the heavy lifting has been already done. If I needed to do something fancier I would hire someone. Using Joel's guide.

Anyway, I was interested in programming because of artificial intelligence, computer programming's quixotic quest. Although the real grail would be artificial consciousness. I don't have any insight into the matter, except that I really liked this bit from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon:

The most remarkable machine* at Station Hypo, however -- and the first coolest thing in Pearl Harbor -- is even deeper in the cloaca of the building. It is contained in something that might be likened to a bank vault if it weren't all wired up with explosives so that its contents can be vaporized in the event of a total Nip invasion.

This is the machine that Commander Schoen made, more than a year ago, for breaking the Nipponese cipher called Indigo. Apparently, as of the beginning of 1940, Schoen was a well-adjusted and mentally healthy young man into whose lap was dumped some great big long lists of numbers compiled from intercept stations around the Pacific (perhaps, Waterhouse thinks, Alpha, Bravo, etc.). These numbers were Nipponese messages that had been encrypted somehow -- circumstantial evidence suggested that it had been done by some kind of machine. But absolutely nothing was known about the machine: whether it used gears or rotary switches or plugboards, or some combination thereof, or some other kind of mechanism that hadn't even been thought of by white people yet; how many such mechanisms it did or didn't use; specific details of how it used them. All that could be said was that these numbers, which seemed completely random, had been transmitted, perhaps even incorrectly. Other than that, Schoen had nothing--nothing--to work on.

As of the middle of 1941, then, this machine existed in this vault here at Station Hypo. It existed because Schoen had built it. The machine perfectly decrypted every Indigo message that the intercept stations picked up, and was, therefore, necessarily an exact function duplication of the Nipponese Indigo code machine, though neither Schoen nor any other American had ever laid eyes on one. Schoen had built the thing simply by looking at those great big long lists of essentially random numbers, and using some process of induction to figure it out. Somewhere along the line he had become totally debilitated psychologically, and begun to suffer nervous breakdowns at the rate of about one every week or two.

As of the actual outbreak of the war with Nippon, Schoen is on disability, and taking lots of drugs. Waterhouse spends as much time with Schoen as he is allowed to, because he's pretty sure that whatever happened inside of Schoen's head, between when the lists of apparently random numbers were dumped into his lap and when he finished building his machine, is an example of a noncomputable process.

It may not also be such an example, but I liked the idea that there might be noncomputable thoughts. It rings of a spark of creation. Consequently there would be a limit to machine thought.

Also, sorry if that's an overlong quote, but then again, Stephenson likes to write long books.

Afro Samurai Soundtrack

The ultraviolent, 6-episode samurai steampunk blaxploitation anime Afro Samurai is, basically, okay.

The story is comic-book cliche, not unlike Kill Bill. In fact, there's probably a one to one mapping from the two sets of fans (it's surjective!) But they supposedly spent $1 million per episode on the artwork, and I would say it shows. The animation is cinema-quality Gonzo studio artwork all the way through. Samuel L. Jackson, Kelly Hu, and Ron Perlman star as voice talents. I suspect this is a vanity project for Samuel.

Set the story aside, though, and the best part of the whole endeavor is the Rza's soundtrack. It's probably his best work since Ghost Dog, featuring Gza, Big Daddy Kane, and Q-Tip, among others. Three tracks are on the website to sample, so take a listen.

Why?...Why was I programmed to feel pain?

Early tremors preceded the robot uprising. Small things, like robot-cake-spray-painter html errors, were missed, or even thought comical.

Machine Intended for Killing and Exploration