Fake Drugs

I can't tell if this is news or not, but it seems like Prince overdosed on fake drugs. It might be news because it seems like it was recently confirmed. It's not news because he isn't the first victim of the scourge of fake everything that has spread over our collective commercial enterprise.

The amount of fake things out there can be quite surprising at times. I was recently watching a documentary on Shenzen, one of the fastest growing cities in the world with a huge tech economy known for its innovation, as well as its shanzai, or counterfeit goods. And what I learned is that if you can name a thing, there is a fake version of it, and it might come from Shenzen, but it's definitely called shanzai.

There are some instances where it's hard to differentiate between fake and real, made evident by the fake board game - wait, yes apparently there is a fake board game crisis, but I'm talking about a real board game the purpose of which is to emphasize the ambiguous designation of a thing's realness (can't find a single reference to this online). A garbage can or a digital image of a garbage can that we all know as the Recycling Bin on our desktop. Sailor Moon or a person dressed up as Sailor Moon. See? When you live half in the real world and half in the virtual, it becomes hard to differentiate which one is the "real" one.

Clippy, the Microsoft digital assistant who was more annoying than helpful and totally dates me because half the people reading this (nobody reads this) are too young to remember, Clippy does not exist in the real world; Clippy is a bunch of lines of code and a two-dimensional pixel pattern. (I think I'm just a bunch of lines of genetic code and a 3-D molecule pattern.)

But this isn't the kind of real-fake distinction we're talking about here. This is instead about commercial products, particularly drugs, that can be counterfeited and passed off as the real thing, and if you get duped, you don't just feel stupid, you feel like you're going to die, because if you're a type 1 diabetic and take fake insulin, it's life-threatening. And this really happens, in America, and to anyone including celebrities and powerful politicians alike.

When you get a fake flash drive or a fake phone charger, you're pissed. When you get fake gasoline, you're pissed, but you also might be stranded, and that sucks. But when you get fake drugs, you're dead.

Up to this point I have posted ad infinitum about fake stuff from China, because of a genuine interest in the phenomenon, and because it's kind of funny. But this is when the fake-thing gets serious, and I don't mean to make a joke of it. The only thing I can think of as a way to get a handle on this is for us to get our own word, not fake or counterfeit or fraudulent or  forgery but something else that really fits this phenomenon. Oh, or is this the point when the world's two biggest laguages start to combine; there's already a word for it.

Post Script

Shanzai
Chinese style of innovation with a peasant mindset. I think in the US we call it bootleg, which sometimes has a derogatory connotation and sometimes not. I prefer the word ghettovative, which I just made up, but which has quite a positive connotation, because innovation is usually a good thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai

May I Use the Restroom

It happened in a park in Portland. Some woman follows an "outdoor bathroom" sign into the woods and instead of relieving herself, is surprised to find a creepster waiting for her. Nothing dangerous happens, the guy just stands there staring at her, and she goes back out into civilization to find an indoor bathroom, or a "bathroom" as we call it.

The first thing that comes to mind is - Do we really need a sign indicating an "outdoor bathroom?" Isn't the whole outdoors a big bathroom? Do you need a sign for that?

Next, it's not that hard to make a fake bathroom sign. In fact, I think it's harder to find someone who would read this sign and follow it than it is to make the sign.

That's not to take anything away from our national treasure, the bathroom sign. You think I'm being hyperbolic. A tiny fact that goes mostly unknown - the bathroom sign as we know it was created in the 1970's in Bloomfield NJ by a graphic designer named Roger Cook, of Cook and Shanosky, as part of a competition put forth by the Federal Transportation Administration in response to the rise in global air travel. (See the collection of symbols here at the Cooper Hewitt website.)

The FTA wanted people who don't speak English to be able to navigate the US once they arrived, so they started this competition via the American Institute of Graphic Arts to get a set of navigational signs that would make sense to everyone, sans language.

Cook won the competition and the rest was history. Also part of this was the No Smoking sign. Not sure which one is more popular. Yes, it came from somewhere, and this is where. This is good one the next time you're trying to out-obscure your social media followers.

I bring all this up to point out that there is such thing as a "real" bathroom sign and a fake one. Cook didn't win this competition for the idea of the images alone, although that was important too. There are lots of other things to consider in the value of a a graphic design, such as line thickness, spacing between lines, positive space, negative space, line style, whether they are solid or dashed or fuzzy or clean or edged with right angles or curves, and the list goes on.

We, the general public, don't notice these things. We only notice that something looks good or doesn't, but we can't tell why. Cook knew why, and how, and so his version of the restroom sign is the real version, and all others are fakes. There are no rules about copying this, however, because it was never owned by Cook; he made it for this competition, and when he won, he gave it over to the Feds, so we all own it, and can butcher it and hold no accountability.

Woman lured by 'creepy' fake bathroom signs in public park
Apr 2018, KMOV

Blurry Vision

It looks like the robot brains are beating the sensory prostheses. Telescopes and microscopes are way better at seeing than humans and our smartphones. But we may not need to put these advanced lenses in our phones or our future robots in order to make them superhuman. Instead, we need to fill them with fuzzier brains. 

Artificial intelligence may seem like a hyper-concise, over-literal, braniac, but not these days. The new generation of AI, known simply as deep learning, is the opposite of this. It is less like a calculator and more like a guess. (Although technically it's both). It favors approximation over concision.

Relative to us humans, however, its results are more concise than we could ever attain. A research group via UCLA has outfitted regular lenses found on a smartphone with a 3D-printed microscope attachment and an AI that makes a really good, phenomenally good guess at what it sees. Their invention gives us back an image of the same precision as a lab-grade microscope.

Their fuzzy AI brain "learns" how to see under high resolution by being fed both images taken with the regular smartphone, and with lab-grade microscopes. Using thousands of examples, the brain compares the one to the other, and eventually learns how we get from the one to the other - if I give you this crappy fuzzy image, how do you make it into that sharp-shaped product? It learns how to do that, using algorithms that we don't program (the brain programs itself).

It's only superficially ironic that the loose AI analogy of 'blurry vision' is used by these deep learning techniques to see in high res. The real story here is that we're using the brains, or the software, of our robots to liberate us from the hardware restrictions.


Deep learning transforms smartphone microscopes into laboratory-grade devices
Apr 2018, phys.org

Yair Rivenson et al. Deep Learning Enhanced Mobile-Phone Microscopy, ACS Photonics (2018). DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.8b00146
Provided by: University of California, Los Angeles

Reality Modification

For those who are interested in computational social thermodynamics, the discussion is getting interesting. There's a lot going on at the TED stage this year.

A guru of sorts for all things internet, Jaron Larnier has some opinions about the social implications of a highly-automated social ecosystem:

"In the beginning it was cute but as computers became more efficient and algorithms got better, it can no longer be called advertising any more - it has turned into behaviour modification." -BBC

Isn't all advertising a form of behavior modification? It tries to get you to buy something. In this case, we should not get confused by the two kinds of advertising going on when we use a service like Facebook or Google.

We are being shown things we can pay money to get, be they food-delivery or sneakers. These third-parties are advertising to us via a web service about their product. As much as this might modify our behavior, we don't see it as behavior modification until we go to buy the thing advertised. Then it's behavior modification. Before then, I'm not sure what to call it. Mind-control.

There is another kind of advertising, however, and it is the less obvious one. This is the advertising of the service via the service itself. This is the form of advertising that we don't even notice, and that's what makes it have that potential for doing bad things for society.

Any "free" web service must have built into it a system by which the users' behaviors are modified to increase the chance of their using the service again. If the purpose of a service is ostensibly to help people connect with each other, then guess what - that system is going to work to put you in the way of people most like you, because that's who you're more likely to connect with.

Over the large scale, this defeats the underlying nature of social networks that keeps a superentity like Facebook alive (because of one big web, we get a bunch of separate little webs). But on a small enough scale, it keeps you hooked up and tapped into the people you are most likey to interact with. It shows you pictures like the ones you've already liked, because you're more likely to like those. It tells you about people who think and talk like you, because you're more likely to like what they say if it's similar to what you already say, hence you use the program more. (Nowadays this is called an Echo Chamber or a Filter Bubble and it's become a pretty  common idea.)

Problem for us people is that this is not how society works. You can't only socialize with people like you. This is where the echo chamber or filter bubble comes from. The network gets chiseled finer and finer until it's basically a mirror of your self (although we should note, this is your outward self, the one that lives out there in society, not the inner self...but which self it the real one, I'm not here to dedice that). This is where, across much greater scales, polarization of a society comes from. Less grey area, less room for debate, more need for absolutes. And that means less reality, because reality is anything but absolute.

Back to the point Jaron Lanier was trying to make, maybe reality-modification is what we should be discussing here, not behavior modification.


Post Script:
Far out, I'm thinking we will eventually refuse to live in each other's worlds. We will be forced to run simulations of our own preferred realities and make them compete with each other for the primary shared reality. Kind of an idea like 'all news is fake news unless it's your news'. Ultimately, we're already doing this. Watch it unfold.

Notes:
Facebook and Google need ad-free options says Jaron Lanier

On The Reiteration of Pleasure

[a conversation between two creatures, one human and one from another world]

A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, [human], as if the pleasure were one thing and th ememory another. It's all one thing. [...] What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure. [...] The other is ony the beginning of it. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. But still we know very little about it. What it will be as I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in this world. Do they not teach you this? [...] And indeed, the poem is a good example.

For the most splendid line becomes fully splendid only by means of all the lines after it; if you went back to it you would find it less splendid than you thought. You would kill it. I mean in a poem. (p73)

Out of the Silent Planet
C.S.Lewis, 1965

image source:
Uroboros Engraving by Natale Bonifacio
Delle allvsioni, imprese, et emblemi del Sig. Principio Fabricii da Teramo sopra la vita, opere, et attioni di Gregorio XIII pontefice massimo (1588)

Neologos

Word of the day:
"Ansible"
Ursula K. LeGuin coined this word in her seminal work The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969.
It is a contraction of "answerable", but other scifi writers use it to call any device for instantaneous or at least faster-than-light communication.

It's also the name of a software for platform automation, which is drowning your LeGuin results.

The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. LeGuin, 1969