Self Replication

Faces From the Nightmare Machine

Let's for a moment take these two headlines:

A Virtual Playground Lets AI Practice Complex Tasks And Chores
Jun 2018, Futurism.org

MIT Researchers Send AI to Reddit To Make a Psychopath
Jun 2018, Reddit

One is about a virtual world where potential chorebot programs get trained to be better robots in the real world, and the other is about a program designed intentionally to be psychopathic by training it on the 'darkest parts of the web.'

One makes you think about a future where we all live in that virtual world, distributing our virtual selves to live many lives all at once, and then picking and choosing among the best ones. The other makes you think we can train those selves to be whatever we want, depending on the training material we give it. Oh, that is unless you weren't thinking about making a total virtual hell-prison to wrap people up into for eternal punishment. Or maybe you were just thinking "who the hell would ever do that on purpose?"

MIT researchers would do that on purpose, that's who. Their April Fool's joke this year was to make an intelligentity (IE?) with "chronic hallucinatory disorder."

Handstyle

Edbert Aquino's award-winning handwriting. (Andre Malok | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

I still wonder if the rise and climax of graffiti circa 2010 had anything to do with the death of handwriting. Also Twitter/SMS messaging and people getting text-based tattoos are happening at this time as well. I also think I can tell where you're from by your handwriting. But then I tried to look up some info right now on "handwriting accents," about which you can find some stuff, but the final verdict is that computers are making all of our handwriting look the same.

N.J. 9-year-old's award-winning handwriting will put your cursive to shame
May 2018, NJ.com

Drones and Dreams of the Future

958 drones create a 400-foot tall Time cover in lights instead of pixels

First it happened at the Olympics Opening Ceremony in Pyongyang, and then for the cover of TIME magazine. Drones are here, and we haven't even seen anything yet.

Let's take a walk down memory lane. An organization working on behalf of drone manufacturers try to influence all major journalism outfits to use the term "unmanned aerial vehicle" (UAV) instead of "drone" because America was making a bad name for drones by using them to kill civilians by mistake. (Obviously that didn't work.) Then at the 2010 Hackers on Planet Earth conference we learn how to jam drones to make them think they're flying forward when they're really speeding right into the ground (and then find out Iran has been doing this to US drones for a while already). Don't forget inmates getting contraband flown over the barbed-wire fence in the yard. Fast forward to people in Nordic countries combining snowboarding and kiteboarding to do droneboarding. And then comes the holy grail - synchronized drones.

As if the concept of a drone wasn't enough, you combine that sh** with a centralized brain that knows where every drone is and where it's going, and has a grand plan in its head about what they should all be doing together, and you get this - they can build bridges. They can make a computer monitor in the sky where the pixels are individual drones.

I had a dream a few years ago, you know how at times dreams can have this deep foreboding sense to them, like something ultimately omniscient is happening. I felt like I had really been transported to the future, seeing into a crystal ball. There were drones everywhere, everywhere. The further I looked to the horizon, the more I saw, all sizes, shapes, speeds, all doing different things. And there, just over the edge of my field of vision, like a flock of birds, I saw a scrolling ribbon of text, it was The Government (my dreams trying hard to create "omniscience") and they were talking to me via these drone-ribbon-text-messages-in-the-sky. Today as I write it, it doesn't sound too crazy, but at the time I was speechless, breathless, and scared, a feeling omniscience tends to elicit. I thought I was seeing the distant future. And yet, here we are.

Let's put things in perspective with some caveats from a paraglider photographer [based in NJ] who wrote an article on drones for TIME: "In the U.S., they can’t legally be flown over 400 ft. or out of the pilot’s line of sight, and their batteries are typically only good for about twenty minutes of flight time."

Notes

TIME's Drones Issue: Go Behind the Cover
May 2018, TIME

Drones Are Changing How We See the World
May 2018, Author, Paraglider and Photographer George Steinmetz for TIME

The True Limits of Believability

Not a bad problem to have. Robot voices have become so good that we can't tell they're robots anymore. But this is against our unspoken code of ethics; we as humans have to know when we're dealing with something that is indistinguishable from a human when it's not. (Unless it's a dating website of course.)

Notes

What happens when the robots sound too much like humans?
May 2018, phys.org

The assistant added pauses, "ums" and "mmm-hmms" to its speech in order to sound more human as it spoke with real employees at a hair salon and a restaurant.

Radiation Photography and Energy Art

Peter Shellenberger's Radiation Art comes without a hazard warning.

What we call light is really just one kind of energy, the "visible" kind. This means it's an energy that falls within a range the electrical nerve circuits of our eyebrains are receptive to. There's other kinds of light, like infrared and ultraviolet light; you've heard of those. There are other kinds of energy that we don't even call light, like sound, and like nuclear radiation.

We definitely can't see nuclear radiation, which is only one of the reasons it's scary. It will literally smash your DNA to pieces until you are a lump of inert molecules. Then again, because we humans are so good at extending our sensory appendages, we can make special "eyes" to see this stuff.

Here's this artist, Peter Shellenberger, who lets a piece of radiating material do its thing in a box for over a month, recording the whole process on camera. He's actually using Fiestaware with uranium oxide.

Aside, Fiestaware, besides being "the most collected brand of china in the United States" (NYTimes) is also well-known for being radioactive, although it isn't anymore; I mean the radioactive kind is no longer sold on the market (although it's obviously still available, which is how Mr. Shellenberger got it for his artwork). The red-orange glaze is made of uranium oxide. Anything made with that red-orange color, at that time (let's say 1940's-ish), is probably made with the same radioactive material.

In fact, as a former ceramicist and art teacher, I was taught to avoid all red glazes, but mostly for lead not radioactivity. Radioactive material is so locked down nowadays that you're not likely to come in contact with it (unless you're getting cancer treatment). Then again, it depends on where you buy it. I can tell you from firsthand experience using a lead detector crayon on a bunch of different dinnerware products - you better think twice and check for yourself before you use anything on a daily basis, especially if it's hot or acidic, and especially if you have kids (who are more susceptible to the negative effects of lead, or anything for that matter).

Cloudlabs helps us visualize cosmic energy.

Personally, I think this next one is way cooler. It's called informally a cloud chamber, and it is a way to show us all kinds of particles that are whizzing through the air around us. 

Here's a description of how it works from the youtube page:
A sealed glass container contains liquid alcohol at the top. Emanating alcohol vapors fill the whole volume of the container until they reach the bottom of the chamber maintained to a very cold temperature (-40°C).

Most of the vapour condenses on the glass surface creating a mist, but a small fraction of it stays in vapour form above the cold condenser. This creates a layer of unstable sursaturated vapour which can condense at any moment. When a charged particle crosses this vapor, it can knock electrons off the molecules forming ions. It causes the unstable alcohol vapor to condense around ions left behind by the travelling ionizing particle : the path of the particle in the matter is then revealed by a track composed of thousands droplets of alcohol.

Any charged particle is visible in a cloud chamber. The most common ones are alphas, electrons, positons, protons, nuclear charged fragment, muons (...). Theses particles come from natural cosmic and telluric background radiations or from close radioactive sources. They will all leave tracks of different shapes in the chamber, based on their charge, mass and speed. Electrons are the lightest particles and will be easily deflected by magnetic fields. Alphas and protons are much heavier and slower and will thus ionize more, causing denser track of droplets. Interactions of neutral particles like gamma rays or neutrons can be seen thanks to the charged particles they create in matter.

check out their lab here - cloudylabs.fr
check out the video here

Notes

Peter Shellenberger
Moberg Gallery, 2018

**Still can't find my blowdryer picture...anyone that knows of someone using an IR camera to capture blowdryer drawings on canvas, help me out.

Musicology Again

Lone Wolf is a one man band; he can do everything; too bad he's also not a woman

Science now says that  hit songs are sung by women and more danceable, although I'm not sure what that means. Also, despite this, sad songs have increased in the past 30 years. Granted, the research database was for 500,000 songs released in Britain 1985-2015. So at first glance, I wonder how much of the world's hip hop, which is the dominant musical form, comes from Britain.

And don't forget this - "A previous study covering 1980-2007 found that music lyrics have become more self-centred, with increased use of the words "me" and "I", fewer social words such as "we", and more anti-social ones such as "hate" and "kill"."

Notes

Happiness makes hit songs: study
May 2018, phys.org

Musical trends and predictability of success in contemporary songs on and off the top charts, Royal Society Open Science, doi

Other Posts About Music

More Musicological Synchronicity

Musical Memetics

Justify My Heart - The Readymade Mashup

On the Depths of Cultural Appropriation

An influential person from 1700's Sweden spent a lot of time in Turkey, got real into their meatballs, and brought them home to his otherwise culinary wasteland (jk) where they got immediately culturally appropriated into Swedish Meatballs.

Hundreds of years later, after America culturally appropriated the shit out of Sweden via IKEA, we all totally forgot about Turkey's meatballs, and gave Sweden all the credit. After all, why wouldn't the meatballs be theirs? They came up with the idea of assemmling furniture for f's sake. (Yes, I made 'assembling' look like a Swedish word on purpose.)

There was this thing happening in 2017-2018 where cultural identity became so fractured that we couldn't tell who was allowed to do what anymore. I think it's still happening.

When I go to a Black Panther movie, I'm not allowed to wear a dashiki unless I am from Africa; I mean unless my family is from Africa. Or unless I am white but adopted by parents of African heritage, in which case I identify as black (although since mostly nobody else identifies me that way because of the color of my skin it doesn't matter what I think).

Or unless my adopted child is from Africa which gives me right by association (I'm not even sure this counts). Unless you can't tell that I adopted my child from Africa because I didn't bring them with me to the movies because I was afraid people would think I culturally appropriated their kids.

What if you visited Africa and were given that dashiki from an artisan in the family with which you stayed while you lived there for three months building a school for the local community? Still no dashiki? What if you married the daughter of that artisan and had children with her? Still?

What if the movie was inspired, produced, promulgated and viewed (i.e. financially supported) by a culture other than the one being represented? Is Hollywood culture, or Superhero culture being inappropriately appropriated in this case? Or are these not cultures but only cultural byproducts, cultural artifacts?

Cultural artifacts are protected under intellectual property law, as long as they aren't fashion or fragrance (with the exception of Play-Doh, true, and maybe Vibrams but I doubt anyone is appropriating that...Crocs too). But these protections are held by individuals, not populations.

Dogon Couple, from the MET, NYC

Can an entire population own a cultural product, like Superman or the Iliad, or the Dogon Couple?

I am pretty sure it has to do with the unequal distribution of power and who is appropriating who. Anyone can rip off the Iliad because it is a cornerstone of Western culture, which is a cornerstone of Global culture (if there is such a thing).

And the main question is - how does Africa eventually take over the world if people aren't allowed to consume and participate in its culture?

Notes

'My whole life has been a lie': Sweden admits meatballs are Turkish
May 2018, The Guardian

Post Script

I had a dream once, and do still, that as the Arab world (or at least Saudi Arabia) begins to diversify its economy to incorporate entertainment, it begins to absorb hip hop artists from the West. The affinity between some hip hop artists who may be Muslim (more likely than country singer pop stars) and the uber-duper rich Saudis create a new class of global elite men and women of African heritage x America x Islam, who eventually take over the world in ways today's Western folks can't even imagine.

Post Post Script

In a way not much at all related, we wonder if this is really about identity theft-anxiety in the aftermath of a post-Equifax, post-Ashley Madison world where everyone has had their personal identity (not their cultural identity) stolen.

Also this, let's not forget.

Vision, Accuracy, and the Right Brain

In a TED talk I can't seem to forget, Iain McGilchrist, in RSA fashion, animates the two sides of ourselves. These are the two sides of our brains, the two hemispheres. I don't think I need to explain the Left Brain - Right Brain distinction on account of its general popularity. I will only say that this is not an absolute thing; it's a heuristic for understanding how our complicated heads run all that bugged out code up there.

The part of McGilchrist's talk I can't forget lies in his premonition that humans have been heading in the Left direction since as far back as we can remember, but it may soon be time for the pendulum to turn the other direction. It's hard to believe. We can't have megacities without the Left Brain. No spaceships, no biodomes, no nanofabricated body modifications.

Or can we? If you read about contemporary advances in artificial intelligence, you might be thinking that it's quite possible.

Much of the new things happening in this field (which are actually old ideas running on new hardware) are based on a pretty revolutionary paradigm.  I'm referring here to deep learning neural nets and more generally the idea of machine learning. This semantically refers to an approach to computing that uses a kind of brute force instead of a superintelligent program. It's kind of like a Wisdom of the Crowds thing plus computers; instead of one thousand guesses, there's 100 trillion guesses. (I say 'a kind of brute force' because in other instances, some would could the traditional method a brute force of computation.)

So the answer they come up with isn't exact, it's approximate. But when you have to query petabytes of data, you can no longer expect an exact answer.

Check out for example this new thing where scientists Frankenstein a neural net and a cell phone together to makeshift a microscope as powerful as one in a high grade laboratory. We no longer need to see every micropixel to get a clear picture of what we're looking at. Instead we teach an algorithm to see, and it does something that in theory is similar to what our brain does when we see. We make stuff up, we fill in the dots, we approximate. (In actuality, the algorithm is taught not how to see, but how to learn to see.)

We live in this post-truth world, right? Facts don't matter; belief matters. Being right is not as important as convincing people that you're right. That's a tangent. But we do live in a world of Big Data, so big we really don't know what to do with it all. We simply can't make computers powerful enough to handle all of it. But we have this new approach that can scale-up. It approximates, which is not what we're used to, but it does reach the scale of Big Data.

Have we reached this inflection point where our technology is starting to act more like our brain (the whole brain, not just the left side)? Is there where we find out, after hundreds of years (after the Enlightenment / Scientific Revolution) that absolute certainty is not the ultimate goal in all knowledge-gathering endeavors? Just speculating here, but it sure seems like we're headed for a future that looks more like a wet biological mess than a crystallized spreadsheet.

Notes

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

Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain, 2011
this is a TED talk based on his book

Bicameralism 
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976

Technicolor Vision

These are all examples of infrared landscape photography. There is a good series of the Congo by Richard Mosse.

Colorblindness has nothing to do with infrared vision; I just thought these pictures were awesome.

There is no cure for colorblindness. There are special tinted glasses that help, but now there are dyed contact lenses. This article explains it more directly than I can:

"...dyed with a non-toxic rhodamine derivative dye. This particular derivative of rhodamine was chosen as it is known for its ability to absorb certain wavelengths of light in the optical spectrum. Researchers found that the dye blocked the band that lies between the red and green wavelengths, which is perceived by two sets of corresponding optical cones simultaneously. The removal of this band through the dyed lens inhibited the simultaneous triggering of the cones designated for green and red wavelength bands, enabling better differentiation between red and green colours."

New development in contact lenses for red-green color blindness using simple dye
Apr 2018, phys.org

Tropical garden infrared landscape photography.

And surreal infrared landscape photography by David Keochkerian.

more nice pictures with no source credited

Ripe Not Hype

MCEscher envisions Dyson Spheres long before graphene.

Slowly but surely, the promise of the metamaterial graphene is being fulfilled.

MIT engineers have developed a continuous manufacturing process that produces long strips of high-quality graphene.

Meanwhile, check out Isaac Arthur's far out futurism videos for ideas on what to do with all that magical metamaterial.

Scalable manufacturing process spools out strips of graphene for use in ultrathin membranes.
Apr 2018, MIT News

When Robots Become Human

Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?

That's it folks - robots are already too human. Maybe it's not a bad problem to have. Wait, or is it that we are now too much like robots (you see that guy crossing the street without taking his eyes of his phone?).

Couple things I'd like to keep track of here. Amazon's digital assistant is now modeling proper behavior for kids in the form of (rewarding) please's and thank you's. She's too real, and if kids interact with a thing (still pushing the term intelligentity) that's a lot like a person, and yet treating it like a servant by barking orders or calling it mean names, then in 20 years we'll have a society of jerks running around.

I must admit, at the outset I was disappointed to see some friends of mine talk to Siri with complete and utter disrespect, calling her the most vile names in the book, and snapping orders at her like a sub-human degenerate dirtbag.

I was also disappointed to see the headlines after the civil servant robot in Washington DC fell ("jumped") into the fountain - they joked about it committing suicide, as if suicide was something we joke about. Apparently as long as it's a robot doing it, suicide is a joke. I get it; if it's not alive, then how can it kill itself.

But the problem here is that it no longer matters if the thing is "alive" or not. What matters is if it -seems- like a human. We feel bad when robots stuggle. Maybe you remember the Boston Dynamics fail videos? They elicit empathy in us.

We are about as social as a social creature can get. Everything we do is part of an intricate, complex, social web of meaning. And everything we do is recorded by those around us as a model of how to interact with others. When you throw your video game controller at the TV as an adult, your kid sees that and thinks that's how you're supposed to treat your stuff, including the people in your life. This may be microscopic, but it adds up. If we all treat very human-like robots like sub-humans, then we end up with a society of kids who grow up learning to treat each other like crap.

You want your kid to be a misogynist? Just treat your wife like crap. You want your kid to be a jerk in general? Just talk to Siri and Alexa and the ATM machine etc like they're sub-human and you'll give them a shining example of how to do it. You want a young person who feels bad about themselves and is considering suicide to think that life is a joke? Make fun of things that "committ suicide." And the more human these things are, the stronger the effect.

Robots have already become like humans. That was the point from the beginning. We see faces in trees for ****'s sake; we want our robots to be made in our own image. But if we're going to -make- them like humans, then we need to -treat- them like humans.


Post Script

Final question then - can we still talk trash about the weather? "Ew, it's gross out here," she says on a humid day. Maybe that's not a nice thing to say to the weather; maybe the weather has feelings too? Let's start with the robots and wait for geoengineering to make a robot out of our weather.


Notes

Amazon Alexa to reward kids who say: 'Please'
Apr 2018, BBC

The Touchy Task of Making Robots Seem Human - But Not Too Human
Jan 2017, WIRED

Robots Have Feelings Too aka In Other News Suicide Is Funny Again
Jul 2017, Network Address

To See You Staring Back At You (regarding the Uncanny Valley)
Jan 2017, Network Address

Boston Dynamics Robot Fail Videos
(you're not getting a link, search for yourself and you will be rewarded with a daily dose of empathy)

When Humans Caught Up With Evolution

I certainly didn't know this, but the spleen acts as a biological SCUBA tank during extended periods underwater.

There are some people from the southern Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia who evolved bigger spleens because they spend a lot of time diving deep underwater. They live on houseboats, rarely go on land, and spend 8 hours a day repeatedly diving underwater. They split from a very similar group of people nearby about 15,000 years ago - the one group stays on land and the other in the water. Their genes are very similar, except for this distinction, and so the spleen enlargement is correlated to this behavior/culture change.

This is a discovery worthy of reporting because most of the basic body plan that includes our organs is pretty similar across all humans, or so we thought.

We have this idea of a Human Genome being uniquely human, and as a thing we all share in common. (Or at least I do; maybe I just haven't been to 5th grade for a long time, kind of like people who don't realize that just about every star we can see in the night sky has planets revolving around it, a discovery of only the past few years.)

But there is this thing that happens about 10-15 thousand years ago, where human creativity (i.e. technological memes or cultural evolution) evolves faster than our genes. Diving in the ocean all day long doesn't by itself constitute a technological advance, but then again, this is at the 15,000 mark. 10,000 years ago, we see the genetic changes resulting from dairying practices. Because of this, some people continued to be able to digest milk into adulthood (not possible for other mammals).

The change in dairying practices must have relied on some techological change, but it's still hard to call this technology. Is agriculture a technological development? Animal husbandry? Because this is where 'drinking milk' comes from. Leaving the land to live on the water is not so much a technological advance as a group-behavior advance - cultural evolution we could call that. Memetic evolution some would call it.

The main idea here is that at some point around 10,000 years ago, humans began changing themselves faster than their environment changed them. When you hear Ray Kurzweil talk about the Singularity (a moment in our near future where humans learn to evolve ourselves at will), note that we have been evolving ourselves already for thousands of years.

Notes

Bajau people 'evolved bigger spleens' for free-diving
Apr 2018, BBC

Evolution of lactase persistence: an example of human niche construction
Philosophical Transactions B, 2011

Network Address:
Milk Does a Body
FurFuryl Mercapton, Abstract Foods, and Flavor Networks