In The Fractal Closet

Behold the Mandelbrot Set, a world-renowned image and a powerful symbol of infinity. The mathematical concept it illustrates is one of the most intuitive --it describes self-similarity-- and yet it remained unknown, even unbeckoned and unsought-after, until the advent of the modern computer. This dormant formula only came to life after iterations so numerous as to be considered infinite were the human hand the one computing. The computer showed us what a simple formula could do, if you scale it up. It shows us a behavior, not of things, but of space-time itself.

I wake up to the sound of rain, splattering. Then I wake up some more, and realize it's not rain.

It's coming from the ceiling. The plumbing. One hundred years of building and habitating and changing and changing has left me with an unfortunate design that is now leaking water from a ruptured pipe above the kitchen ceiling, and into my pantry closet.

Now I am fully awake, and fully out of bed, and pulling out all my things from the closet. I am transporting a 3x3' closet's worth of possessions to a 10x10' back room, and hastily.

The plumber has come and gone, and the handyman who repaired the closet. It's time to replace my things, to fill the closet again. But all I can do is stare at the sprawling piles of stuff, that was once compacted, compressed into a 3x3' closet. How did all this stuff possibly fit in that little closet. And it occurs to me -- this is fractals.

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We are all familiar with the general idea of fractals, the Mandelbrot set, the self-similarity, the LSD. But that intuitively recognizable feature is an outcome of an underlying objective. The reason a fractal looks the way it does is because of its space-filling behavior, which itself is a function of growth limited by space. In order to keep jamming more and more stuff into that space, you have to follow the fractal formula.

A better example of fractals is not a tie-dye t-shirt but the coast of England. If you were to measure the coastline of England with a one-mile long measuring stick, it would be a pretty vague approximation of the coastline, but with a defined length.

Then if you were to measure with a one-foot stick (which would be ironic), you would get a much better approximation, but also a much larger coastline, because now that your shorter imperial stick can reach into all the nooks and crannies, it makes the total length that much longer. In fact, the smaller your measuring stick, the longer the coastline.

By this reasoning, the length of the coastline is infinite. In other words, it is not a 1-D line at all. Yet neither is it 2-D. It is 1.456-D, or maybe 1.879-D; it is a fraction of a dimension.

When you fill a closet with things, it doesn't just happen all at once. Sure, you start by "filling" the closet. But over time, as you use the things and remove things, add more things, and rearrange, you are filling the space more and more. But you're not just filling it with things now, you're filling it with intelligence.

The more time goes by, and the more you use things, remove, add and rearrange, you are going to fill all the nooks and crannies of that 3-D space until it is no longer 3-D. It becomes a fraction of a dimension.

Then, when you take everything back out, you collapse the extra fraction that you helped to create. When the things come back into normal 3-D space, they seem bigger in aggregate, they seem to have gained size in the process. The closet is now sprawling across an entire room. That difference is fractals. (It's also because the 3-D closet is now spread across a 2-D floor; but that doesn't account for all of it's 'enlargement', as the same phenomenon is experienced with filling a box truck on moving day).

If we could extrapolate this to the 4th dimension, what would we be talking about? Or do I need to be on acid to have that conversation. Maybe an easier question would be -- what does the airtight Tetris block have that the jumbled pile of pieces does not? (Well, it doesn't have air, obviously.) But besides that, it's the entropy. The block is ordered, and the pile disordered. The pile is a random mess, and the block an intelligent artifact.

I hadn't thought of my catch-all pantry closet as an intelligent artifact, yet here it is, an entropy-reversing portal that uses intelligence to loop out of it's limited dimensions.

Post Script:
It is still hard to see the pantry closet as having something to do with intelligence. Try taking it out and putting it all back so it fits. Then you'll see how much "intelligence" went into its arrangement. The difference is that in its natural state, the closet possesses an accumulated intelligence. Over time, as you use all the things in the closet, your intelligent behavior leaves its residue on the things in it. It is a storage depot, not of things, but of an arrangement.

Post Post Script:
[I start looking up these deepdream images and I have to post them all.]

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[can't find source bc pinterest; thanks obama]

(Virtual Art) by Rein Bijlsma

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Deep Dream Burger by Matthias Hauser

Style Transfer, which is not the same as DeepDream, but does use neural nets, i.e., robot brains. Link.

For Real Though

aka Full Meta
I know this is old news, but we have to document these things for posterity -- The real President of the United States verifies the authenticity of his twitter account by calling it The Real [President of the United States].

Image source: The Real Seal
Effective March 15, 2012, the management of the REAL® Seal program was transferred from the United Dairy Industry Association to National Milk Producers Federation. This transfer is symbolic of the renewed purpose. From helping consumers discriminate real from fake cheese on pizza, the new purpose of Real dairy products distinguishes animal milk from soy, rice and nut milk. (But nobody wants to say nut milk.)

Empathic Intelligence and Digital Feelings

Making progress in the transition to cybernetic psycho-oppression, the Endocorporeal Datavore has released an ethical tribune to tame the wave of intelligentities at our doorstep.

In other words:
Google announces AI ethics panel
Mar 2019, BBC News
 
In a highly-cited thesis entitled Robots Should Be Slaves, Ms Bryson argued against the trend of treating robots like people.

"In humanising them," she wrote, "we not only further dehumanise real people, but also encourage poor human decision making in the allocation of resources and responsibility.
-Joanna Bryson

On the face of it, I think in the complete opposite direction. I think we need to be empathic to robots, because we already see them as people. Or to be more precise, we already personify them. Granted, it's the same as we do with a washing machine or even a car, but with robots it's different. We are making them in our own image, after all. We couldn't help that if we tried.

When that public service robot (DC?) fell into the pond, the articles joked that he offed himself on the first day on the job. Too stressful. How is that a good thing to model to those who look up to us, to poke fun at someone who has killed themselves. We know it's a robot, but kids don't know that. They don't know what anything means because we have to tell them first, to show them first. And if we treat things like crap, whether it's the washing machine or a pair of flip-flops, then they will treat things like crap too.

Not to mention, we're only a couple generations away from being robots ourselves. Prosthetic retinas, cochlear implants, pacemakers, exoskeletons. Did anyone not buy into the 'your cell phone is your exocortex' line by Jason Silva? We're already robots to some degree.

It is definitely good to hear what sounds to me like totally wrong and crazy talk, because this is an ethics panel, and you want to hear everything out there. We're still in such early phases of this, we want to shape the conversation to be as big as possible at this point. And I am pretty sure that Bryson's argument is one that needs to be digested at length, and not just from a small bite (she was chosen to be on this panel for a reason), so I look forward to getting more into it.

And while we're on the topic of empathic intelligence and robot feelings:
Britain's 'bullied' chatbots fight back
Mar 2019, BBC News

Service bots (chatbots) get abused. And I feel bad for them as I read this article.

Those who do research on these kinds of things say that humans are never-not going to test the boundaries. Like a child with their parent or a student and their teacher, we will always test the limits of another person. We do it to everyone in every relationship, but it's the asymmetrical ones where it's most evident (where one person has way more power than the other).

In the case of a chatbot, we also just want to test the believability. Sure they may have programmed this thing to help me return a defective dehumidifier, but did they program it to tell me to f*** off when I give it a hard time? How real is this thing?

Plum, a service chatbot who wants us to think xe's very real, is now programmed to respond: "I might be a robot but I have digital feelings. Please don't swear."

Digital. Feelings.

Misinformation Networks

Entire networks, vast, deep, and coordinated. Not to imply conspiracy theories; they aren't that coordinated. But they are big, and myriad.

A description of how one of these networks operates:

"The group was able to gain followers by setting up innocent-looking pages and groups. It later renamed them, and started posting politically-motivated content...including topics like immigration, free speech, racism, LGBT issues, far-right politics, issues between India and Pakistan, and religious beliefs including Islam and Christianity."
-BBC

"We're taking down these pages and accounts based on their behaviour, not the content they posted."
-Facebook via BBC

They call it "co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour". I don't recall hearing this as part of the story of digital surveillance in general, but it sounds like an improvement. (Well, there's articles dating back to Nov 2018 at least, where this term is used.) Behavior is data-rich, and makes Content look one-dimensional in contrast. Coordinated behavior is even more data-rich, because we're talking about the behavior of people in the context of other people.

-image source: MIT


Notes:
Facebook finds UK-based 'fake news' network
Mar 2019, BBC News

Quantum Futures

It's been a while since we saw "Wegman Reading Two Books". This is one of my favorite pictures ever; I thought it made sense here.

I'm reading about quantum computers on the commute home from work. It's not the computers I'm interested in, and it's not the quantum part either. I'm not a computer scientist, or a quantum scientist. But I do like to think about the future, and if anything says "future", it's quantum computers.

There's a strong theme running in these articles though, the kind of thing I look for in articles about technology. In this case, the problem with quantum computing is that it works so differently from a classical computer, that we kind of don't even know what to do with it.

When tasked with devising a test to evaluate the performance of a quantum computer, a moment is revealed:

"I quickly ran into trouble trying to figure out how to run these [scripts] on the D-Wave machine. You need a huge shift in the way you think about problems, and I am a very straightforward thinker."
-Chris Lee for Ars Technica, 2019

It's a casual statement in a casual popular science article, but it's the unassuming bits like this that may be revealed as prescient in years to come. Like in 1890, "Why the heck would you want to screw anything else besides a lightbulb into this electrical light bulb socket??"
It's true, stuff like washing machines would be plugged into the 'light socket' via a cord designed specifically for a light socket; the dual-pronged plug that we are used to, in the US at least, didn't come until much later, and required a drastic paradigm shift in order to see electricity as serving anything but electric light.

Back to quantum computers. Things like this, when the technology forces us to reshape not only our thinking and not only the answers, but more importantly the questions that we ask, and the way we ask, and then ultimately the things we want and the things we care about, are what Kuhn was writing about in his Structures of Scientific Revolution.

Notes:
D-Wave 2000Q hands-on - Steep learning curve for quantum computing
Mar 2019, Ars Technica

Post Script:
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas Kuhn, 1962

Science does not progress via linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic revolutions, also called "paradigm shifts" in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed.

Thomas Kuhn - the man who changed the way the world looked at science
John Naughton, The Guardian, 2012

Measles is the Winner by TKO

Measles is so powerful that after we defeated it with vaccines, it came back even stronger to infect our minds!

We might think of vaccines as a meta-defense, a meta-immune system, which could also be called Public Health or even just modern medicine. Measles has found a way to penetrate this defense.

The anti-vax meme is, perhaps, the first example of a disease making the transition from the biosphere to the noosphere, so that we now, in order to fight measles, we need to inoculate our minds in addition to our bodies. (A mental vaccine, that is.)

Via Dawkins' Selfish Gene, we don't get measles, measles gets us. And in 2018-2019, it's doing a damn good job.

Here's a few newsbits on the subject:

Antivaxxers turn to homeschooling to avoid protecting their kids’ health
July 2019, Ars Technica

Analyzing a Facebook-fueled anti-vaccination attack - 'It's not all about autism'
Mar 2019, phys.org

An analysis of Facebook profiles for people who posted anti-vaccination sentiments reveals four key subgroups that are interconnected by various themes. Credit: Elsevier

...anti-vaccination arguments are not "all about autism" and center on four distinct themes that can appeal to diverse audiences in four distinct subgroups:

• "trust," which emphasized suspicion of the scientific community and concerns about personal liberty;
• "alternatives," which focused on chemicals in vaccines and the use of homeopathic remedies instead of vaccination;
• "safety," which focused on perceived risks and concerns about vaccination being immoral; and
• "conspiracy," which suggested that the government and other entities hide information that this subgroup believes to be facts, including that the polio virus does not exist.

Beth L. Hoffman et al, It's not all about autism: The emerging landscape of anti-vaccination sentiment on Facebook, Vaccine (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2019.03.003


Facebook Takes Steps to Curb Sensational Health Claims
Molly Schuetz, Bloomberg, July 2, 2019

Deprioritizing sensationalist health posts that make misleading claims or tout “miracle cures,” and posts that use health-related claims to promote products or services, such as weight-loss pills.

On Deceptive Language:
April Fools hoax stories could offer clues to help identify 'fake news'
Mar 2019, phys.org

"April Fools hoaxes are very useful because they provide us with a verifiable body of deceptive texts that give us an opportunity to find out about the linguistic techniques used when an author writes something fictitious disguised as a factual account," said Edward Dearden from Lancaster University, and lead-author of the research. "By looking at the language used in April Fools and comparing them with fake news stories we can get a better picture of the kinds of language used by authors of disinformation."

The researchers found that April fools hoax stories, when compared to genuine news:

• Are generally shorter in length
• Use more unique words
• Use longer sentences
• Are easier to read
• Refer to vague events in the future
• Contain more references to the present
• Are less interested in past events
• Contain fewer proper nouns
• Use more first person pronouns

Fake news stories, when compared to genuine news:

• Are shorter in length
• Are easier to read
• Use simplistic language
• Contain fewer punctuation marks
• Contain more proper nouns
• Are generally less formal—use more first names such as 'Hillary' and contain more profanity and spelling mistakes
• Contain very few dates
• Use more first person pronouns

Post Script
Study busts myths about gossip
May 2019, phys.org

"There is a surprising dearth of information about who gossips and how, given public interest and opinion on the subject," said Megan Robbins, an assistant psychology professor who led the study along with Alexander Karan, a graduate student in her lab.

If you're going to look at gossip like an academic, remove the value judgment we assign to the word. Gossip, in the academic's view, is not bad. It's simply talking about someone who isn't present. That talk could be positive, neutral, or negative.

"With that definition, it would be hard to think of a person who never gossips because that would mean the only time they mention someone is in their presence," Robbins said. "They could never talk about a celebrity unless the celebrity was present for the conversation; they would only mention any detail about anyone else if they are present."

• Younger people engage in more negative gossip than older adults. There was no correlation with overall frequency of gossip when all three categories were combined.
• About 14 percent of participants' conversations were gossip, or just under an hour in 16 waking hours
• Almost three-fourths of gossip was neutral. Negative gossip (604 instances) was twice as prevalent as positive (376)
• Gossip overwhelmingly was about an acquaintance and not a celebrity, with a comparison of 3,292 samples vs. 369
• Extraverts gossip far more frequently than introverts, across all three types of gossip
• Women gossip more than men, but only in neutral, information-sharing, gossip
• Poorer, less education people don't gossip more than wealthier, better-educated people.

Fuhgeddaboutit

The Right to Be Forgotten was an interesting turn. Something tells me that Forgetting will be big business pretty soon. As we reach a point of data saturation, we're now trying to come up with ways to not have "absolute data".

Amazon digital assistant Alexa gets new skill: amnesia
May 2019, phys.org

Microsoft deletes massive face recognition database
Jun 2019, BBC News

Interesting idea - deleting an online database:

"You can't make a data set disappear," Adam Harvey from the Megapixels site told Engadget."Once you post it, and people download it, it exists on hard drives all over the world."


Post Script
Researchers erase fearful memories in mice
AAAS, Aug 2014