Thinking as a Profession

Glengarry Glen Beck, or David Mamet Jumps the Shark

2011-06-20T07:02:00.000-07:00

Christopher Hitchens reviews playwright David Mamet's latest non-fiction(?) book The Secret Knowledge, and it sounds pretty horrible.

So horrible, in fact, that it almost makes me wonder if its some sort of performance piece, whether Mamet, having not accomplished anything substantial in theater in decades is now desperately trying to be relevant by pretending to convert to radical conservatism. I can't be the only person who had this thought, but Hitchens doesn't seem to entertain the idea.

Whether it's earnest or art, either way, it's pretty sad.

Gamification

2011-03-30T06:44:00.000-07:00

I recently read Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken, a plea to change the world by making work and chores more like games.

In Slate, Heather Chaplin does a good job of pointing out why this is generally a lame idea.

What she misses is that there are legitimate reasons why people feel they're achieving less. These include the boring literal truths of jobs shipped overseas, stagnant wages, and a taxation system that benefits the rich and hurts the middle class and poor. You want to transform peoples' lives into games so they feel as if they're doing something worthwhile? Why not just shoot them up with drugs so they don't notice how miserable they are? You could argue that peasants in the Middle Ages were happy imagining that the more their lives sucked here on earth the faster they'd make it into heaven. I think they'd have been better off with enough to eat and some health care.

I think McGonigal wants to try to harness the powerful, short, positive feedback loops provided by games to make work seem less like work, but this idea ultimately has two big problems: it feels like we're being scammed, and it might just suck the fun out of all games.

On the first point, adding achievements, power-ups, and persona to school, work, and chores seems akin to pouring chocolate on lima beans. In her book, McGonigal gives examples of people who compete with each other to try to clean their own bathroom, because it's worth so many points in a virtual game. I don't buy it. This might work for the near term, but scrubbing the toilet sucks. I don't think thinking "Wow, this is going to level up my in-game rogue" while I scrub the toilet is going to make it that much more fun, especially in the long-term.

And to the second point, I think correlating game-like experiences with hum-drum tasks may take the sheen off of other games you play. Games are one escape from the necessary tedium of life. As McGonigal points out, they are highly-simplified abstractions of the more complex, messy aspects of the world. In a game, we generally have very clearly-defined goals, with a limited range of choices. And when those choices pay off, we get artificial rewards that stimulate the parts of our brains that are hardwired to respond to real-world rewards.

The move to try to meld the escapist simplicity of our video, board, and card games to the complex tedium of the real world is well-intentioned, but as Chaplin points out, horribly flawed.

RoboRally Review

2010-07-29T07:58:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, one of the first video games I played was called Robot Odyssey on my friend's Apple. You played the role of a human in an underground city or something, and you had 3 robots. You could go inside the robots and wire them up to carry out tasks autonomously, e.g. the robot might need to go into a room by itself, navigate the environment, retrieve an item, and exit the room to return to you. To do all this, you need to program the robot by going inside it and wiring up its insides. For example, you could wire the left bumper to the top thruster, so that when the robot bumps into a wall on the left side the of the room, its top thruster fires and it moves down.

I found the process of designing the autonomous behavior of the robot endlessly frustrating and fun, and I've been fascinated by the idea of designing a game in which the player composes a behavioral script for an agent. I think if it is done the right way, it could be very compelling, while also teaching or reinforcing critical thinking and very basic programming concepts.

I think when I mentioned this before, it was Kenny who mentioned the board game RoboRally as employing similar concepts.

So I finally ordered it last week and played my first game this week.

The game is somewhat similar to what I was envisioning. Each player has a robot that starts at a given position on a board (the setting is supposed to be a factory). There are conveyor belts (not actually moving parts, just indicated by arrows on the board), pits, repair stations, and flags. Each turn, each player draws some number of cards which indicate basic movements (e.g. move forward 2 spaces, turn left, back up 1 space, etc.). The player composes a series of movements out of these cards each round and places them face down in front of them. Players then turn their cards over one by one and execute the movements.

The "programming" in this case only consists of movement instructions, so there is not use of control statements or logical operators. In this sense, the analogy to programming is quite weak. Also, you only ever get one shot at a given "program". There is no iteration, which I think was one of the most compelling things about Robot Odyssey. You would wire up your bot, send it into a room, and see what it did. Often it would behave in ways you hadn't anticipated, and you'd then be able to make a couple of small changes and try again. There is no trying again with RoboRally. You end up where you end up at the end of a turn. You discard your old program and draw and compose a new one.

The game seems to require an awful lot of mental spatial manipulation, planning, and prediction. In this sense, it reminds me an awful lot of the Labyrinth board game by Ravensburger. So for teaching mental spatial skills, I think it's great. But programming? Not so much.

And a couple of other criticisms: The game is not very casual at all, so in that sense I don't see broad appeal, especially to younger kids. The game is quite complicated. There are elements that easily could have been left out (e.g. Option cards, which we never even got to in our first game) that would still retain the core experience. Also, the game is pretty brutal for making mistakes of any kind. If you accidentally navigate off the edge of the board (which is pretty easy to do while you are still learning the basics), you have to position the bot back at the starting point, you lose one of only 3 life tokens, you take two damage points (which reduced the number of cards you can draw each turn, AND you lose an option card. I mean, come on.

Another big disappointment was that there's a cool variety of different robot designs, and each robot has a name (e.g. "squash bot") and an individualized tracking card to place tokens on. I thought this signified that each robot had some kind of specialized skill or something to differentiate each one from another. But no, despite their idiosyncratic names and designs, they are all exactly the same in terms of game play.

Anyway, cool game, but in my opinion it's overly complicated, unnecessarily harsh on beginners, and doesn't really capture the core elements of algorithmic design (this isn't an inherent problem with the game, it's just that I was hoping it would flex programming skills more than mental movement and rotation).

Inception

2010-07-25T06:44:00.000-07:00

I can't say I was much impressed. The cast was strong, and the emotional arc of the story was good, but it was over-long and any semblance of verisimilitude to dreams or psychology was nonexistent.

The movie involves 'extractors', people who can enter other's dreams, apparently as a team, and extract valuable information, such as corporate secrets. One team member is known as an 'architect', who designs the dreams. One tactic is to include a vault where, as one character explains it, the subject is naturally inclined to put their secrets. Then the team just breaks into the vault. Huh?

Mild spoiler here: The trailers and movie posters all feature mazes. At one point when recruiting a team member, she is tested on whether or not she can construct a good maze. Is there a maze in the movie? Um, no. She makes one in a dream, but we never see it and other characters bypass it using air ducts because they're running out of time. Lame.

The movie's title comes from a technique in which, instead of stealing an idea, the team implants one. But because this is so difficult, it involves embedding a dream within a dream within a dream (that's 3 levels). Cause, you know, it's got to be buried way deep in the subconscious. I know, you're thinking "Whoa, dude! Three levels?" I'm reminded of the amp in Spinal Tap that goes to 11, or the dinner conversation about tornadoes in Twister where the subject of a category 5 hushes everyone into stunned silence.

Anyway, there's a team, they try to implant an idea in some dude's head. Once we get there, it's a fairly standard heist film. From the trailers I thought there would be some really mind-bending special effects, but there really wasn't much to wow. The dream imagery didn't look particularly dreamy. I had hopes for Inception, though I think it's virtually impossible to film dreams. They are an inherently first-person experience, and have a slippery morphing quality that you simply can't put on film. The thing about dreams is, they don't make sense when you wake up, but in the dream they do. But you can't show something nonsensical to an observer and have it appear normal. That's the catch-22. The director who has come the closest to capturing a real dream-like quality is David Lynch, and his movies are not particularly fun to watch.

Anyway, once we get into the target's head, the movie becomes a lot more watchable, but that first hour is fairly agonizing. There is a lot of silly exposition about how dreams and extraction work...virtually none of it making any sense. If someone else is in your dream, modifying the content, your 'projections' will grow increasingly hostile toward them. I guess since I've never knowingly had anyone invade my dreams, I can't confirm or deny this, but it sounds dumb. And how are these people supposed to get into each other's dreams? They hook themselves up to an intravenous hooka and bam, there they are. Is there some technology that facilitates this? Are they just psychic? Do the sedatives they use confer psychic ability? This is a pretty lame cop-out. Even the cheeseball 1984 movie Dreamscape, which was about psychically entering other's dreams, handled the subject with more credibility.

But in that film, a key gimmick was the old wives' tale that dying in a dream kills you in real life. They didn't really do that in Inception, but we did get this silly set of rules:

1) You can feel pain in a dream, even extreme pain, but it won't wake you up.
2) If you die in a dream, you wake up, unless...
3) If you are powerfully sedated and you die in a dream, you descend into another dream within a dream.
4) For each dream within a dream, time runs at an increasingly slower rate, so 10 minutes in your top-level dream might be 10 hours in your second-level dream.
5) Whatever is happening to you in the dream just above you affects the environment of the dream just below (e.g. if you are shaking in your level 2 dream, the whole world will shake in your level 3 dream, but apparently not below that).
6) A 'kick', or sudden jolt, at any level will pull you out of the next lower level, no matter how sedated you are.

I don't have too much of a problem with a movie making up it's own arbitrary, goofy-ass rules. I don't even mind too much if it spends a fair amount of screen time explaining them (though this movie spends too much). What I do mind is when a movie goes to all the trouble to cobble together a bunch of bullshit rules and teach them to you, then doesn't even stick to them.

At one point, a character dies at one level, so he is supposed to go down a level. Cobb (DiCaprio's character) and another character go after him, but when they do so, they're in Cobb's dream. How did the character who died go down into the dream of another character who wasn't dreaming yet? Shouldn't he have gone into his own dream?At another point a character that is heavily sedated kills herself. This should mean that she goes one level deeper. Instead she goes up in the dream hierarchy.

The movie not only violates its own rules, it seemingly revels in the inconsistencies. This is supposed to be 'mind-blowing'. Instead I found it a nonsensical mess. Which is a shame because the actors really do a great job, and the central relationships are interesting. Too bad it's all wrapped in a slather of absurd, poorly-conceived gobbledy-gook.

Lost: The Jacob/MIB Origin Episode

2010-05-12T09:07:00.000-07:00

****SPOILERS AHEAD****

I'm a pretty big fan of Lost. There are some quality dramas on TV these days, including Breaking Bad and Mad Men, but Lost has consistently been my favorite for the past 5 years.

I didn't think the writers would be able to pull off a very satisfying ending. They seem much more adept at generating mystery than explaining it. So I have steeled myself for the end run of the series, almost hoping that they wouldn't really explain much more, because that would be more satisfying than a bunch of crappy explanations.

Looks like so far I've generally been right. That is to say, I wasn't much impressed with last night's episode, the last regular episode before the 2-part finale. There is hope yet, but things aren't looking very good on the basis of this episode.

To recap: Jacob and the man in black (MIB, he still didn't get named this episode, unless I missed it), are actually brothers. They were born of a woman from a shipwreck who wandered into a hippy Allison Janney, just credited as "Mother". Mother delivers the twins and brains the real mother with a rock. Then she raises the two boys and one day shows them a cave emitting a bunch of light. It's the source, she tells them. Everybody's got a little light inside of them, but if this one ever goes out, everything ceases to exist. Okay.

As teens, their real mother appears to MIB, reveals herself as his true mother, and tells him about the rest of the world. So MIB confronts his fake mother and goes to live with a group of other people on the island, none of whom we ever actually meet.

Years later, MIB can't find the cave, but does figure a way he can supposedly leave the island by sticking a wooden wheel near a source of underground energy. Okay. Fake mother shows up to brain him, and either her or something else slaughters all the villagers. Okay.

Jacob reluctantly agrees to protect the cave of light by drinking some wine. We still don't know if this is what gives him his powers. MIB then kills Mother. Jacob gets mad at him and throws him into the cave of light, which Mother had said was "worse than dying". This apparently kills the MIBs regular body and transforms him into the smoke monster. MIB's and Mother's bodies are laid side by side in the cave for Jack and the others to find hundreds of years later. Okay.

Anyone else not particularly satisfied with this?

The characterization was pretty lame in this episode. And it still raises more questions than it answered:

Who is this Mother character?
Where did she come from?
What is this light source?
Where did Jacob's real mother come from? Was she brought to the island by Mother?
Why would MIB keep calling Mother "mother" when he knew she wasn't his real mother?
Why does the light source turn you into a smoke monster?

And so on and so forth. Lost has always tread a thin line between generating genuine mystery and just throwing head-scratching crap at the audience. For the most part it's done a great job of genuinely creating mystery, mostly because they've done a great job of creating compelling characters that you actually care about. But I have to say, they failed on this one. I didn't really give a crap about Jacob or his brother, and this episode didn't really answer any of the mysteries of the island, except by just throwing up more gobbledy-gook.

Maybe the finale will wrap things up in a nice little bundle, but I'm even more pessimistic now. We'll see in a couple of weeks.

Google Acquires 3D Desktop Interface Company BumpTop

2010-05-03T05:59:00.000-07:00

Here's the link, and a demo of the software:

A couple of thoughts...

One, it looks like a pretty cool touchscreen interface for tablets/desktop PCs, but I don't see how the 3D-ness really adds anything at all. Looks like the walls of the box are just being used like extensions of the desktop. The same functionality could easily be done (and is done in lots of OSs) without the 3D effect. When I read 3D, I thought of a fish tank environment where you could actually arrange and view things with X, Y, and Z coordinates, e.g. you could put things not just on the walls, but hang them in the space between the walls. That might be cluttered, but I thought maybe they'd found a cool way to handle it.

Another thought is that everything they demo is either file or photo manipulation. That's probably less than 5% of what I spend my time doing on a computing device. They don't show any text input or processing, browsing, search, or reading, which is probably over 95% of what I do on my machines. I could see how, augmented with very good voice input, this environment would be great for a tablet. Based on the demo alone I'm pretty skeptical about it being much of an OS enhancement, though I'm interested to see what Google might do with it.

Roger Ebert: Video Games Can Never Be Art

2010-05-02T07:05:00.001-07:00

I'm chiming in a little late on this one, Roger Ebert basically being all crotchety and elitist, refusing to include any video game into his refined definition of art.

Ebert discusses some of the various definitions and features of both art and games, and that's really where the whole issue lies. "Art" and "game" are very abstract, poorly-constrained concepts that often overlap very different conceptual space for different people. The issue probably just boils down to how liberal your definition of "art" is. Mine tends to be fairly liberal. I'd probably define art something along the lines of: The arrangement of elements by one or more agents in order to provoke thought and/or arouse emotion.

I think agency is important to the definition, because though accidental arrangements can often be beautiful, the very idea of art seems bound up in the notion of intent, and there is no intent to arouse awe in a volcano or provoke self-reflection in a sunset. And I think noting that some art is intended to make you think, while other art is intended to make you feel (and often great art does both) is important to a definition as well.

Ebert mostly seems to object to the idea of games (and not just video games) as art because you can win them, and because they have rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. But this is a weird objection. Every art form has elements that distinguish it from others.

Ebert says:

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome.

***

But we could play all day with definitions, and find exceptions to every one. For example, I tend to think of art as usually the creation of one artist. Yet a cathedral is the work of many, and is it not art? One could think of it as countless individual works of art unified by a common purpose. Is not a tribal dance an artwork, yet the collaboration of a community?

One could make the same objection about any art form that Ebert clearly considers true art:

One obvious different between a cathedral and art is that you can house hundreds/thousands of people in a cathedral. Cathedrals have doors, windows, spires, and holy people.

Try it with any form of art that Ebert clearly recognizes as true art: dancing, theater, literature, and of course film. You can clearly find stark differences between them that seemingly set them apart from the others. Some have clear function outside of their aesthetic appeal. Some are artifacts, while others are temporary performance. The thing to do, in order to have a consistent concept of what something means to be art is to identify the common features, not the differences.

And I tend to think that common core is a desire to evoke emotion and/or provoke thought by attempting to put things together in a way that nobody before has done. That to me is the essence of art.

So, under these fairly broad guidelines, of course video games are art.

Another issue is the distinction between good and bad art. Ebert skirts around it, but never really comes right out and says what he thinks on this point. My guess is that he considers even very bad films art (albeit bad art), while even the most gut-wrenching, thought-provoking video games are not art.

And I'm sorry, I just can't abide any opinion that considers Ernest Goes to Jail art, but doesn't acknowledge Myst as art.

Oh, and P.S. Learn how to fucking use hyperlinks, Roger. It's 2010.

Money and Motivation

2010-05-02T06:32:00.000-07:00

This PBS NewsHour piece supposedly explores the way in which modern science has changed the way we think about motivation in the workplace.

I think it's probably right in very broad strokes, here's the general thrust of the story:

DANIEL PINK: We tend to think that the way you get people to perform at a high level is, you reward what you want and punish what you don't want, carrot and stick. If you do this, then you get that.

That turns out, the science says, to be an extraordinarily effective way of motivating people for those routine tasks, simple, straightforward, where there's a right answer. They end up being a terrible form for motivating people to do creative conceptual tasks.

PAUL SOLMAN: How does the science show this?

DANIEL PINK: If you offer me a reward, $500 reward, you have my attention, absolutely. A contingent reward gets you to focus like this, narrow vision. If the answer is right in front of you, that's terrific. You race a lot faster. But if you have this kind of vision for a creative conceptual problem, you're going to blow it. You're not going to do anything good.

Okay, that makes some sense, although the primary example throughout the story is the classic problem-solving task of affixing a candle to a wall with only a book of matches and a box of tacks. The amount of the reward is contingent upon the amount of time taken, i.e., you solve it faster, you get more money. So time is a pretty big variable that goes unmentioned for the most part.

The results of the classic experiment mentioned were that people tended to solve the problem better and faster if offered less money. Okay. I don't know this literature, but did they do an untimed variant? For example, have two groups: one that's just told they will be paid a flat rate, say $20 for solving the problem, and another that is told they will get just $50 for solving the problem, but a bonus of $200 for more creative solutions. Neither group would have a time constraint. My prediction would be that the second group would solve the problem more often and more quickly than the first.

The theme of the piece is that in the modern workplace, creativity, problem solving, and more diffuse, less goal-driven thinking are all more important, and that we have to shed our traditional notions of motivating people with more money if we want them to be more creative and solve more interesting problems.

I think that's a crock. It feeds into the stereotype of the starving artist, but I don't think it meshes very well with reality.

The first place of business the story profiles is a computer sales firm. They say that just about every stat for the business went up after they eliminated sales commissions. Why? Because the lust for money was causing sales staff to lie in order to sell more stuff. When they eliminated bonuses, everybody was supposedly happier. Why? Because sales staff could now focus on "fostering long-term relationships with customers". Um, okay.

This bit smells very fishy to me. It plays like a chunk of a Michael Moore film in which we learn how awesome the Cuban healthcare system while conveniently ignoring the fact that it's situated in a police state.

I kept waiting for a salesperson to say "Yeah, there's less pressure, but damn, I do miss those fat commission checks around the holidays." None of that, of course. I kept waiting for them to mention some other motivators used in lieu of money, e.g. nice workplace conditions, but the story basically focuses on people's intrinsic desire to do good.

Anyway, then they interview a bunch of people who work on open-source projects and ask them why they do it. We get a lot of hippy, feel-good explanations about giving back to the world.

I think it would be interesting to study the science of human motivation. In general, though, I think the assertion that monetary rewards dampen creative thinking are bunk. I can see how that might be the case in a high-pressure, timed situation, but the world is filled with highly-successful creative people who were not so altruistic as to give away their creativity and problem-solving for free.

I'm not saying there aren't people who don't produce valuable things due to intrinsic motivations. Money isn't the only motivator, obviously. But this story doesn't do anything to dispel the idea that it is still an effective motivator for both routine and highly-creative tasks.

To Tablet or Not to Tablet

2010-04-03T06:47:00.000-07:00

The iPad goes on sale tomorrow, and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I have friends who develop for the platform, and I myself have an iPhone/iPad app in the works (should be ready within another 5 days or so). So in the interest of selling lots of apps, I hope they sell lots of iPads. On the other hand, I want Android to succeed, and I hope that Apple doesn't take up most of the oxygen in the room. I think the market for mobile computing is big enough for lots of guests, but still.

Anyway, I thought this perspective on the iPad by SF author Cory Doctorow was pretty interesting, if a little gross:

The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a "consumer," what William Gibson memorably described as "something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth... no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote."

I think Doctorow's beef with the device is that stuff it's absurdly easy to consume stuff (video, games, music, etc.), and not nearly as easy to produce stuff. I think he's generally wrong. YouTube is full of videos of people using their iPhones as musical instruments. It's not very easy to produce either written material or art, but there are also tons of text editors and paint apps for the device. The iPad will make such composition even easier, with a screen large enough to support a very large soft keyboard and other types of menus and palettes. Still, with its reliance for input almost completely based around the touchscreen, I see his point.

On a related note, my laptop is over 6 years old, so yesterday I invested in a brand new one. I looked at netbooks, but they were just too dinky, a lot of them running Windows 7 Starter, which is an absurdly crippled OS "designed" for only the most trivial use. You can only run 3 concurrent applications, and you can't even change the desktop background!

On the way to the store, I told my girlfriend that what I wanted in an ideal device, besides decent specs and a decent OS, were 3 things:

1) A nice size, between the tiny netbooks and a full-sized laptop.
2) The inclusion of an optical drive.
3) A touchscreen interface.

Well, two out of three ain't bad. I ended up getting the HP TouchSmart tm2. It's nearly exactly what I was looking for. The screen is nicely responsive to touch input. You can swivel it around and lay it flat so that it functions as a tablet, or you can use it like a traditional laptop. Apparently it's the second generation of this line from HP, and the previous models had optical drives, but had more technical issues, were louder, and had crappier battery life. The tm2 doesn't have a CD or DVD drive, but I can always get an external one...they're cheap. The reduced bulk is probably worth it anyway. And with a 12.1" screen it's a perfectly compact size, enough bigger than a netbook so that you don't feel horribly cramped.

Anyway, to tie this in with the iPad, what the HP device makes me feel is that I've got all the same input options I had before, but I've now also got the touchscreen, with either my fingers (it supports multitouch as well) or a stylus. The iPad, on the other hand, has taken input options away. It's done it in an elegant way, but I think Doctorow's main point still stands...the iPad is designed more for consuming and less for creating. I hope my new machine is the opposite...I think it is. But I need more time with it to really see how well it's going to work. In the meantime, it's pretty cool just touching the screen to launch applications, open menus, and generally navigate the Windows 7 environment.

Sam Harris on Morality

2010-03-28T08:48:00.000-07:00

Here's a fairly recent video of Sam Harris speaking at Google about a scientific basis for morality:

I'm down with the basic idea that we can approach morality from a reasoned, scientific viewpoint and develop a moral system that is better and more internally consistent than those offered by religion. But I still think Harris has it mostly wrong.

I summarized it pretty well on my old blog, here. Harris basically wants to use suffering and happiness as the standards by which to develop a scientific moral system. Here's the gist of why that's not a hot idea:

Happiness and suffering are feedback signals evolved to reinforce the type of behavior that leads to the propagation of genes into future generations. Things that produce a nice rush of neurotransmitters to the brain include earthly pleasures such as eating foods high in sugar and fat, and of course, sexual arousal. Pain is a punishment signal meant to direct an organism away from behaviors that have an adverse affect on genetic propagation, bodily injury being the most obvious. The release of the chemicals that give rise to the subjective experiences of happiness and suffering are old subcortical regions whose purpose is to crudely guide our behavior through reinforcement. Should we really be using them as the ultimate guide to what is good and what is bad?

I sympathize with Harris' motivation, but his implementation is horribly flawed.

Sherlock Holmes, or Where Did Movie Ushers Go?

2010-01-10T07:43:00.000-08:00

I went to see Sherlock Holmes yesterday. I liked the movie, but not the movie-going experience. More on the movie later. For now I have to get this rant off my chest.

Two things seriously fucked up my ability to enjoy the film fully. One, the film was out of focus. Not crazy blurry, but noticeably out of focus. I sat through a dark, blurred trailer of Iron Man 2, but for some reason thought maybe either the projectionist would notice or that the film was on a different reel. Nope, when the movie started, it was still out of focus. So I had to get up, walk all the way back to the front of the theater, and complain. About 5 minutes later the film was put into proper focus.

Of course, someone had brought two small children to this PG-13 film. One kid was probably about 1 1/2 to 2 years old, and it started squealing in the last 30-45 minutes of the film. The mother took the kid to the walkway area. I thought if the kid kept it up, they would do the sensible thing and go outside. But no, they stayed there through to the bitter end. It's uncomfortable to have to complain to a mother's face that her child is ruining a movie for you, and frankly I shouldn't be put in that position.

So movie-going has become such a crappy experience lately that I'm almost wondering if it's even worth it to go to theatrical releases. I don't think I'm being unreasonable here. If I'm going to pay $10 for a movie, I want the damn thing to be in focus and I want to enjoy it in a reasonable atmosphere. I don't expect audiences to be completely quiet, but I also don't expect wailing toddlers when the main character is explaining and intricate plan in hushed, heavy dialect.

Which leads me to the next point...when the hell did ushers completely disappear from theaters? There was a time not too long ago when you would see theater employees before a show started, occasionally stick their head in during films, and then be at the door when you leave. Now the only time you see them is when they clean the theater. If there's a problem, you have to walk all the way back up to the box office. It's probably a cost-cutting measure, but it's making movie-going shittier and shittier. How expensive is it to pay a teenager minimum wage to walk between 3 or 4 theaters and make sure the film looks okay and there isn't someone jabbering away at the top of their lungs on a cell phone or a crying baby?

Anyway...the film itself was very good, in spite of theater management and irresponsible parents. Kudos for effective use of slow motion (used to illustrate Holmes' mental planning).

They may have taken great liberties with the Holmes canon, but all the main tropes were there and this version was something that I'd never found Holmes stories or film to be: funny, action-packed, and enjoyable. The actual explanations of things were ridiculously complex and silly, but the film did something else incredibly right...it portrayed a skeptical, rational protagonist engaged in the search for the truth against an adversary who used the means of science as a mask for pretending to have supernatural powers and gain power by preying on others' superstitious tendencies.

That's pretty rare these days, so it deserves some extra praise (especially when drivel like Twilight is playing on the next screen over). Anyway, a very good film, nearly spoiled by a crappy environment. I'm looking forward to watching it again on DVD, in the peace of my own home.

Multiplayer Coop Games

2009-12-31T06:17:00.000-08:00

The new Super Mario Bros. game keeps making a bunch of Top 10 lists for 2009 (#3 on Wired's list and #2 on Gamasutra's).

I just have to reiterate: NO.

As a game that is billed as cooperatively multiplayer, this is one of the very worst-designed co-op games I've ever played. Characters occupy the same space and most levels contain surfaces or tunnels that only allow for a single character to stand on or squeeze through. Even if you are trying to help each other out, on any given level you are more likely to accidentally push a friendly character off a ledge to their death, steal their power-ups, or otherwise screw them up. I actually got a chance to play with 4 people over Christmas, and as I suspected, the result was even more hideous. Any time one character dies, as in single-player mode, the action pauses for half a second or so. If you are about to execute a jump that needs good timing (and virtually every jump in this game requires good timing), that little time jag will throw you off and, you guessed it, cause you to die.

Another fun-killer for co-op is the fact that the characters all look amazingly alike, so it is extremely easy to accidentally follow the wrong character for a second or two, thinking you are controlling them, while you are actually running your character into a pit of lava. Fun!

If inadvertent death and frustration are what you look for in a co-op game, then the new Super Mario Bros. is your cup of tea. Again, single-player mode or competitive mode most likely work much better, but some of us actually want to play alongside our friends.

If you want to play a game that actually implements co-op multiplayer in a good way, this year that game is Trine. It's a beautiful side-scrolling puzzle game with wonderful attention to detail. The art design is amazing, but the gameplay and puzzles are great too. In single-player mode you can toggle between three characters: a wizard, a thief, and a knight, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The wizard isn't just a magic version of an archer, he can create metal boxes and platforms and move physical objects. To complete any given level, you have to use all three characters' at various times.

And multiplayer is great. If you're playing with two people, the two of you can be any combination of the two characters (but not the same character). So if your friend is the wizard, you can toggle between the thief and the knight. If you are currently the thief, they can transform into either the wizard or the knight.

Characters have distinct looks, so they are not easily confused. And they do not occupy the same physical space, so they can stand on the same narrow platform without knocking each other off. Gameplay is designed so that the adding players enhances the experience. One of you can cover the other from attacking skeletons while the other makes a bridge to get across a chasm. You actually feel like you are accomplishing goals together, not getting in each other's way. This is the fundamental principle that the game designers on the new Super Mario Bros. forgot (or just ignored).

The only real drawback to Trine is the controller setup. It probably works great on a Playstation, but on the PC you need XBox compatible controllers for additional players. A networked version would have been great, too. But purely in terms of game design, Trine is a perfect example of how you do co-op multiplayer right. And the new Super Mario Bros. is exactly how to screw it up.

Avatar

2009-12-27T13:35:00.000-08:00

Finally got around to seeing Avatar on Christmas. My impressions were much in line with the reviews I'd read...pretty to look at with a silly story.

First, the visuals: It's easy these days to get jaded when it comes to special effects. They've just gotten so good. I don't think Avatar revolutionizes film making (as some of the more hyperbolic reviewers have proclaimed), but it does take things up a notch. I hadn't seen a modern 3D movie, and it was done extremely well. No gimmicky scenes to point out to you that you are in a 3D movie, just an extra element to add to the already great visuals. The effects were good enough to help me suspend disbelief and make me feel like I really was looking at an alien world.

The culture and language of the Na'vi, the biology of the various species on the planet, and the technology of the humans were all very well thought out. I liked the way the Na'vi had co-evolved with the various species on Pandora to allow them to interface directly with them (I had used a similar idea in a novel that never really got off the ground). The various species on Pandora were inventive and fun to watch. The human tech wasn't as creative, but looked believable and created an immersive experience.

Unfortunately, the story was not nearly as original or well thought-out. It was also moralizing and preachy. Humans have traveled all the way to Pandora to rape and exploit its natural resources, in particular a ridiculously named mineral called "unobtainium". We never learn why humans want this stuff, only that it is insanely valuable. Might it have made the military-industrial cardboard cutouts seem a bit more human and made the story a bit more interesting if this mineral were vital for continued human survival? For all we know, rich people back on Earth just like to make earrings out of the stuff.

As it is, the corporate stooge is a generic bad guy. The military commander is an over-the-top bad guy with claw marks on his head. And the only humans with an ounce of decency are the protagonist, one military defector, and a few scientists. I don't mind simple stories with clearly-marked good guys and bad guys. If you're going to do this, I'd suggest divorcing it from any sort of thinly-veiled, half-baked political preachiness. Just make the bad guy wear black and look ominous and want something simple like ruling the entire galaxy. Cameron, unfortunately, didn't do this...he so obviously wanted to make some sort of commentary on the modern state of things (the loony military dude even gives a paranoid rant where he says something like "We gotta protect ourselves by launching a preemptive strike"). The phrase "shock and awe" was also used. The corporate honcho says things like "We've built them schools, hospitals, and roads...what more do they want?" This is not subtlety. This is stupidity. Pandora is not the Middle East...if only it were.

The politics of the film frankly made me want to barf. If you're going to make a film that says something interesting about colonization and exploitation, then make that film. If you want to make a fun, awesome sci-fi adventure, don't beat me over the fucking skull with your infantile geo-political caricatures of reality.

Final verdict:

Direction, special effects, design: A
Story: F

Still, it's worth seeing.

Game Review: New Super Mario Bros. Wii

2009-12-14T08:45:00.000-08:00

The new Super Mario Brothers game for the Wii apparently just won Best Wii Game at the annual video game awards. This ought to be an indication of how crappy the selection of games is for the Wii.

I've played quite a few levels now with my girlfriend. We're always on the lookout for good coop games, because they just don't make that many, and the ones that are made generally aren't that good. We were excited when we heard the new Super Mario game would be cooperative, with up to 4 players. Man, were we set up for some disappointment.

First of all, if you're playing with Mario and Luigi, they can't occupy the same space, i.e., they bounce off each other and can push one another off ledges. This is not good. More often than not, you interfere with one another rather than helping each other. Often there are limited places to jump to survive, and one player almost inevitably prevents the other from making the jump or gets pushed off into oblivion themselves. Players can jump on top of each other to reach places they otherwise wouldn't be able to, but this doesn't really help because once one player gets up there, the other one is stuck below. So one player might get a bunch of goodies, like power ups and coins, while the other just got his face stepped on.

The game works much better if you're actually playing multiple players, but you're actually competing against one another. It does NOT function well as a cooperative game. It is much easier to fug up your co-player than it is to assist them in just about any aspect of the game.

A couple of very simple, but very large changes I would have made to the game design to make it, you know, actually cooperative, would be:

1) Overlapping players: Instead of bouncing off each other, you overlap one another. This might make it difficult to see your character if they're behind another one, but that would be a much more desirable tradeoff than trying to jump on a 1-inch ledge that's already occupied by your partner, only to either shove them off to death or bounce off their head to death yourself.

2) Tethers: This would make the game truly coop and a hell of a lot of fun. Have the characters tethered to one another with a flexible bungee cord. If they're both on the same screen, there is no effect. If one player either lags behind horizontally or vertically, the other player is able to pull them up to their current location. This should be extendable to 3 and 4 player as well. On vertically-scrolling levels, there is endless frustration when one player falls too far and dies, rather than simply falling to the last stable platform as they would in single-player. A simple tether system would alleviate this aggravation and make the game feel a lot more like people working as a team.

There are some neat little additions to the game. The ability to shoot snowballs and freeze opponents is a cool power-up. But the game feels mostly like an early 90's retro side-scroller. This is fine...but what's unforgiveable is billing this game as coop and then implementing it in such a horrible, thoughtless way. As the game is currently designed, it would be much more fun to take turns with a partner in single-player mode rather than playing with multiple players, which is, frankly, dumb-fuck stupid.

Nintendo gets a B+ for single-player mode and a big-ass F for coop.

Although one good thing might come out of it, and that's the implementation of a tether system in one of my own games, either a side scroller or perhaps a coop mountain climbing game.

Not the Greatest Evolution Book on Earth

2009-10-27T10:54:00.001-07:00

So I've been reading Richard Dawkins' new book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, and I have to say I'm underwhelmed.

I've got one main beef with the book, namely that Dawkins clearly states the purpose of the book in the Preface, and then does a poor job of following through. He starts out by mentioning a slew of his previous books before saying:

Looking back on those books, I realized that the evidence for evolution itself was nowhere explicitly set out, and that this was a serious gap that I needed to close.

Sounds good, right? Books like The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable are very good, but they explain the mechanisms of evolution and the conceptual issues of understanding how evolution works, such as seeing natural history through the lens of deep time and incremental change.

So what does Dawkins do, then? Well, he starts in on the conceptual problems of understanding evolution. Chapter 1 is devoted to the semantics of the word "theory" and how scientists use it as opposed to its everyday use. I thought, "Okay, fine...now in Chapter 2 he'll start hammering on about the evidence from the fossil record and molecular genetics". Nope.

Guess what he does in Chapter 2? He basically retreads the line of argumentation from On the Origin of Species. Namely, "Look at the powerful change and diversity brought about by artificial selection (i.e. selective breeding among domesticated plants and animals). Look at all the different breeds of dogs that all originated from a single species, the wolf." It's part of a strategy he calls "softening up" the reader to make the transition from buying into evolution by means of natural selection by realizing how powerful artificial selection is. It worked pretty well for Darwin, but he didn't have many alternative strategies to convince his readers. Genetics wasn't even been formalized or understood. There was very little of a fossil record, especially with regard to human ancestry.

But from a modern perspective, why start out by retreading a line of argumentation from 150 years ago, especially when you have giant mountains of hard evidence with which to convince the reader? It's very weak. If I were either a creationist or sitting on the fence, I would be utterly frustrated with the book by this point.

There's no need to "soften up" your readers. Hit them square between the damn eyes with the indisputable, incontrovertible evidence that all life on this planet shares a common ancestry. You can either fill in the conceptual arguments later, or better yet, refer them to your previous books.

Dawkins uses the analogy of the historical sciences, like evolution and geology, to the work of a detective coming on the scene of a crime. We have powerful evidence in the form of effects, from which we can solidly determine the causes, even though we weren't around when the actual event happened. We can determine very accurately how and how long it took the Grand Canyon to form based on an understanding of erosion and other physical processes, just as we can convict a murderer with a clear conscience based on overwhelming physical evidence (DNA at the scene, the bullet matching the suspect's gun, gunpowder patterns on the suspect's hands and arms, blood in their car and their house, and on and on). If the evidence is overwhelming, we have no problem confidently making the correct inference, even if we don't have an eyewitness or a confession.

The Dawkins needed to do, right out the gate, is present the damn evidence. Attempting to overcome the reader's conceptual hurdles to understanding the mechanisms of evolution makes Dawkins seem like he doesn't have a case and that he's stalling.

Chapter 1 needed to be a summary of the enormous amount of physical evidence we have from many branches of science that converge irrefutably on the fact that all life on this planet shares a common ancestry in a giant family tree that took billions of years to unfold. Talk about the overwhelming fossil evidence and the evidence from molecular genetics. And then work back from there. He probably gets to this later, but I'm afraid he probably loses a lot of the people he wants to convince very early on.

Staged Muslim Discrimination at the Czech Stop

2009-10-06T07:51:00.000-07:00

Here's a video clip from an ABC News report on discrimination against Muslims in America:

They say the majority of customers either supported or did nothing regarding the discrimination.

6 supported the discriminatory behavior
13 spoke out against the behavior
22 said and did nothing

I'm not sure how damning this is. First of all, it was staged at the Czech Stop in West, Texas, which is between Waco and Austin. I used to stop there all the time when I attended Baylor as an undergrad and would take trips home.

It's a gas station/bakery, and a lot of people just want to come in, pay for their gas, maybe buy a kolache, and get the hell out...not get embroiled in a fight for social justice.

I think the more telling figure is that over twice as many people complained as supported the behavior, and this is smack dab in the middle of Texas. The story could have spun the results a number of different ways, but I'm pretty damned encouraged by their little experiment.

Oh, and if you're ever driving along I-35 between Austin and Waco, you really should stop there. I recommend the Spicy Hot Chubbies. No, I'm not making that up.

Grocery Paradoxes

2009-09-20T10:13:00.000-07:00

The other day I was in a local Asian market here in Lafayette, and I came across this jar of seeds:

Are they really pumpkin seeds, and the picture is wrong? Or are they watermelon seeds, and the text is wrong? Or do they come from a strange land where watermelons are called "pumpkins"?

Dunno. I would have had to buy them to find out. They were copiously coated with some kind of red gunk. No thanks.

And then I noticed this in my local Albertson's:

The label for the aisle is "catsup":

But you know how many of the actual bottles of the stuff were named "catsup"? Absolutely zero.

Literature as a Source of Knowledge

2009-09-18T06:57:00.000-07:00

Jason Rosenhouse has an interesting post about whether or not fiction is a valid way of knowing something about the world.

Ultimately I agree with him (except for his ranking of Star Trek captains). Yes, literature contains truths about the human condition and about the world in general. Otherwise it would have a lot less value. But it also often contains falsehoods, or overgeneralizations.

Literature (and narrative media in general) can be extremely useful to help elucidate, proselytize, or reinforce existing beliefs. But I don't think it functions as a primary source of knowledge. A metaphor can help reinforce some aspects of how the world works. For example, one could tell a story about how white blood cells are the knights of the realm, ever vigilant in capturing and slaying unwanted intruders. Many things about the metaphor may ring true, and align well with the actual state of affairs. But we can't know how the immune system works from such stories. That takes painstaking investigation of the phenomenon itself.

Something in a work of fiction might "ring true", but there's no way to validate it within the framework of the story itself. You'd be surprised how many people overseas think that every American owns a gun from watching our movies. If I gleaned universal truths from Judd Apatow films, I'd live in a world where fat, unemployed stoner shlubs hooked up with super-hot TV personalities and lived happily ever after. How do I know the world does not work this way? By comparing the vision of the story with the actual state of affairs.

So I think it makes the most sense to view literature, and really all art, as a way of reframing truths to make them more interesting, accessible, etc., but ultimately not as a source of truth.

Noel Sharkey on AI

2009-09-01T18:40:00.001-07:00

I just came across this interview with Noel Sharkey (who I'd never heard of before I just came across this interview). Some of it is valid, but he says some pretty silly things.

Case in point, I thought this particular answer was the silliest:

Are we close to building a machine that can meaningfully be described as sentient?

I'm an empirical kind of guy, and there is just no evidence of an artificial toehold in sentience. It is often forgotten that the idea of mind or brain as computational is merely an assumption, not a truth. When I point this out to "believers" in the computational theory of mind, some of their arguments are almost religious. They say, "What else could there be? Do you think mind is supernatural?" But accepting mind as a physical entity does not tell us what kind of physical entity it is. It could be a physical system that cannot be recreated by a computer.

Okay, the computational theory of mind is not "merely an assumption". It is built on evidence, like any good theory. And it's not "religious" to ask for an alternative theory if someone says a particular theory is crap. If this guy doesn't think that the brain receives input from the environment and performs information processing on that input, then what is his alternative hypothesis?

And I'm not sure what he's talking about in that last sentence, either. Any physical system can be simulated computationally. The fidelity of the simulation is limited by the complexity of the model system and the computational resources available. If what we're interested in is the algorithm executed by the simulated hardware, we should be able to recreate the algorithms processed by the brain. In other words, no, a simulated rainstorm can't make you wet, but a simulated abacus can perform calculations just like a physical one, and a simulated chess player can kick your ass at chess. I don't know of a reasonable theoretical argument for why the function of the brain can't be emulated with a computer.

A reasonable answer to the question would have been: "Probably not, although there are no theoretical roadblocks to prevent it as an eventuality."

Attack of the Nutria...Plus, a Rainbow

2009-08-24T18:25:00.000-07:00

Laurie and I were out for a walk in a local park here in Lafayette this evening, and we brought some bread to feed the ducks. I'd seen nutria at this park before, but they'd never approached very close. They must be hungry, because we had a whole pack of them come up and beg for bread along with the ducks.

In case you don't know what a nutria is, here's the Wikipedia entry. They're basically big rats that live in the water.

So, I snapped a few actions shots with my G1. Enjoy.

Oh, and I found this picture on my phone that I'd forgotten about, when we had a rainbow a while back. Actually, there was a double rainbow, but it didn't show up in this pic:

District 9

2009-08-22T18:25:00.000-07:00

I went to see District 9 yesterday. The movie has enjoyed critical and financial success so far, and I guess my expectations were fairly high.

I can't exactly say that I enjoyed the movie, though. It was definitely an original mix of elements, though it borrowed heavily from a lot of SF source material. The plot, as many have pointed out, was similar to the movie/TV series Alien Nation. It also had influences from Cronenberg's version of The Fly, RoboCop, and others, especially the recent technique of making the unreal seem more real by employing a pseudo-documentary style, e.g. Blair Witch, and Cloverfield.

The film definitely kept you engaged. It was alternately grotesque and action-packed. But the acting was relatively poor; the plot was fragmentary and incomplete; and the characterization was pretty much 2D. The bad guys were a favorite villain of modern cinema, the multi-national corporation, and they're portrayed without even a hint of conscience. The middle-level bureaucrat at the center of the film seems to have a change of heart, literally and figuratively, but it was pretty heavy-handed, and when all was said and done, the film seemed more like a set-up for a sequel than a self-contained film.

The production values were great, though, and the aliens and their tech were interesting and well-developed. Strangely, though, a major scene from the trailer, where an alien is being interrogated about how his weapons work, was not in the film. Weird. The movie had a number of striking images, and was actually cringe-worthy in a lot of scenes. But great SF is about ideas, and even though there were parallels between the 'prawns', as the aliens are called, and other refugee populations, I didn't see their plight used as much more than a set-up for gross-outs and action. I'm not sure what the point was, and part of this was because the movie didn't really resolve anything.

I've heard people comparing the other smaller-budget SF movie that came out at the end of the summer, Moon. There are definitely parallels, especially the use of corporations as the bad guys. But Moon was a much more thoughtful picture, and was ultimately a much better film. Still, I'd marginally recommend District 9, if only because there are scenes that you simply won't see in any other movie.

Michael Ruse on the New Atheists

2009-08-14T15:03:00.000-07:00

Michael Ruse is a philosopher of biology at Florida State University, a self-avowed atheist, and is one of the people who thinks that religion and science work just fine nestled up against each other and that vocal atheism is bad for everybody.

Here's his latest, and it's pretty bad, through and through.

He starts out by trying to establish his cred, rather than actually getting on with his point. When he finally does start in with his actual case, three paragraphs in, here's how he starts:

Which brings me to the point of what I want to say. I find myself in a peculiar position. In the past few years, we have seen the rise and growth of a group that the public sphere has labeled the "new atheists" - people who are aggressively pro-science, especially pro-Darwinism, and violently anti-religion of all kinds, especially Christianity but happy to include Islam and the rest.

Lovely. Notice the word "violently". He already lost me right there. Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett are all peaceful, thoughtful individuals. It's not a good start to use such a word, even metaphorically. Just say "strongly" and avoid the loaded bullshit terminology.

Then he quickly notes the recent campaign by Sam Harris and others against Francis Collins being appointed to head the NIH:

Recently, it has been the newly appointed director of the NIH, Francis Collins, who has been incurring their hatred. Given the man's scientific and managerial credentials - completing the HGP under budget and under time for a start - this is deplorable, if understandable since Collins is a devout Christian.

Oh dear. Look, the case against Collins doesn't begin and end with the fact that he's a devout Christian. Here's Harris' thorough statement on Collins and the case for why he isn't a good choice for director of the NIH.

He then goes on to say that the level of philosophical argument and theological understanding that Richard Dawkins demonstrates in The God Delusion "would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course." But of course, he doesn't provide arguments against anything Dawkins says, or provide links to reviews or essays that do so.

Let's take a quick look at one of Dawkins' central arguments in his book. The Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit is summarized as follows:

1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.

2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.

3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a "crane" not a "skyhook," for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.

4. The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that – an illusion.

5. We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. This kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with.

6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.

What are the responses to this basic argument?

Dawkins writes about his attendance at a conference in Cambridge sponsored by the Templeton Foundation,where he challenged the theologians present to respond to the argument that a creator of a universe with such complexity would have to be complex and improbable. According to Dawkins, the strongest response was the objection that he was imposing a scientific epistemology on a question that lies beyond the realm of science. When theologians hold God to be simple, who is a scientist like Dawkins "to dictate to theologians that their God had to be complex?" Dawkins writes that he didn't get the impression that those employing this "evasive" defence were being "wilfully dishonest," but were "defining themselves into an epistemological Safe Zone where rational argument could not reach them because they had declared by fiat that it could not."

This is supposed to be a serious response? And Dawkins would fail a philosophy course?

Well how about from professional philosophers?

Both Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne raise the objection that God is not complex. Swinburne gives two reasons why a God that controls every particle can be simple. First, he writes that a person is not the same as his brain, and he points to split-brain experiments that he has discussed in his previous work, thus he argues that a simple entity like our self can control our brain, which is a very complex thing. Second, he argues that simplicity is a quality that is intrinsic to a hypothesis, and not related to its empirical consequences.

Plantinga writes "So first, according to classical theology, God is simple, not complex. More remarkable, perhaps, is that according to Dawkins' own definition of complexity, God is not complex. According to his definition (set out in The Blind Watchmaker), something is complex if it has parts that are "arranged in a way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance alone." But of course God is a spirit, not a material object at all, and hence has no parts. A fortiori (as philosophers like to say) God doesn't have parts arranged in ways unlikely to have arisen by chance. Therefore, given the definition of complexity Dawkins himself proposes, God is not complex."

You've got to be shitting me, right? A person is not the same as their brain. Okay. Then Swinburne argues that a simple thing like our self can control a complex thing like our brain? He sounds like a standard dualist, which hasn't been taken seriously for several hundred years. And that stuff about simplicity being a quality specific to a hypothesis sounds like gobbledygook.

I like Plantinga's response, though. At least it's funny. God is simply because only material things can be complex (I guess an algorithm can't be complex, right?), and god isn't made out of material parts. That's just sweet. Sure, you can claim whatever the hell you want about an imaginary entity. You can claim it's complex or simple, whatever the situation calls for...because you have absolutely zero evidence regarding its nature. This reminds me of how people make all sorts of claims about what god knows and what god feels and what god wants, and then simultaneously claim that he works in mysterious ways and that any aspect of his nature ultimately falls outside of the realm of scientific knowledge. Good stuff.

Anyway, there's more, but that's enough. You can go read it yourself if you're feeling masochistic.

Just one more thing about Ruse's article which is a particular nitpick. If you're writing on the internet, and you're talking about other stuff that is readily available on the internet, for fuck's sake, use hyperlinks. That's what they're there for.

Atheist for a Day

2009-08-14T09:16:00.000-07:00

Last week a group of over 300 atheists visited the Creation Museum in Kentucky. I had been following the story on PZ Myers' blog (here's his initial report).

But I hadn't seen this, which my sister pointed me to. A Christian went incognito with the group, to see what it was like to be perceived as an atheist.

He says the group he was with was the target of "hateful glances" and exaggerated amens. That doesn't sound that bad, actually. Still, he says he was ashamed of his fellow Christians. There's an ongoing discussion at his blog, if anybody's interested.

Roger Ebert, Knowing, Determinism, and Randomness

2009-08-07T08:22:00.000-07:00

I saw Knowing a while back and actually liked it, despite being pretty sure going in that it was going to suck.

Well, Roger Ebert thought the film was brilliant, which isn't that surprising, given that he gushed over Dark City, another SF film directed by Alex Proyas (I thought that one was kind of interesting, but also a bit silly).

Anyway, Ebert blogged about Knowing, and right off the bat he brings up one of the sillier moments of the film:

Is the universe deterministic, or random? Not the first question you'd expect to hear in a thriller, even a great one. But to hear this question posed soon after the opening sequence of "Knowing" gave me a particular thrill. Nicolas Cage plays Koestler, a professor of astrophysics at MIT, and as he toys with a model of the solar system, he asks that question of his students. Deterministic means that if you have a complete understanding of the laws of physics, you can predict with certainty everything that will happen after (for example) the universe is created in the Big Bang. Random means you can't predict anything. "What do you think?" a student asks Koestler, who says, "I think...shit just happens."

No, no, no, no, no.

Both the film and apparently Ebert are making a huge mistake here, confusing what we can know (epistemology) with the way things really are (ontology).

The limits of our ability to find out something about the world is directly relevant to us, and obviously important, but does not necessarily reflect the way things really are. Take a simple example: a machine holds a pair of fair dice in a shaker. Every thirty seconds, the machine shakes the dice, rolls them onto a felt surface, records the results, and scoops them back up again.

Are the actions of this system random or deterministic? That is, if before a particular roll of the dice, we knew their exact position, all the physical properties of the shaker, the algorithm the machine used, air pressure in the room, etc., would we be able to predict the outcome of the roll (e.g. 4-3). Sure we would. But that information is extremely difficult to come by, even in a small, controlled situation. Our knowledge about the outcome is limited by variables that are difficult to measure, so we use probability to describe what we can know about the outcome (e.g. there's a 1:6 chance of rolling a particular number on each die, and we can figure out distributions of outcomes when we roll both dice, and for successive trials).

So, we can't predict the outcome of this system, at least not to the precision of saying exactly what the outcome will be. We can approximate the outcome by saying which events are likelier than others. Does our knowledge about the system reflect the way the system actually is? Are the dice actually random? Of course not. They and the machine are behaving according to physical laws.

To recap: determinism does not equal predictability, and randomness does not equal unpredictability. Determinism means that what happens could not have happened any other way, whether we are able to predict it or not. Randomness means that there are things in the universe that behave probabilistically rather than behaving lawfully, e.g., a rock might sometimes drift up rather than fall in the presence of earth's gravity. If there are elements of the universe that are truly random, then it is truly impossible for us or anyone else to predict the outcomes of those systems, even in principle. But the definition of each term rests on the way things are, not our ability to measure them.

Demo of Relativia

2009-07-30T12:55:00.000-07:00

Here's a short video of my progress on my entry to the Android Developer Challenge II, a casual mobile puzzle role-playing game called Relativia:

The hard deadline is the end of August. I'm not sure how many more features I'm going to be able to get into the game by then, but we'll see. I just got most of the map stuff working this week using Philip's open-sourced code.

Is the World Hierarchical?

2009-07-27T17:02:00.000-07:00

I was chatting with a friend the other day about how we decide what things are and how we parse the world. I made the statement that the world is hierarchically-arranged, and my friend said that the world might not really be that way, but that I could be imposing that type of organization on it. It's certainly a strong possibility that my biases determine how I organize how I think about the world around me.

But I'll be damned if I can step outside of my frame of reference and conceive of another hypothetical way of looking at the world. We normally form concepts of things that exhibit spatial and temporal continuity. We treat a dog as a unified thing because there's stuff that makes up the dog that is close to itself in space and moves together across time. Same for chairs and glasses and pumpkins and even more abstract things. But it also seems obvious that however you slice and dice the world, whatever you call "things" are always going to be composed of constituent things. And those things are likewise composed of constituent things. A car is made of things like mufflers and wheels and axles, and those are made of smaller parts, and those are eventually made of atoms, and those are made of subatomic particles, and those are maybe made out of even smaller things.

I suppose you could have some sort of Buddhist view where there are no parts or subparts...that everything is just one big unified, interconnected thing. But I don't think you'll get very far in understanding how the world works if you don't partition it in some way and try to figure out how the parts work together to produce the phenomenon you want to understand. Hence the usefulness of reductionism.

And my guess is that if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, to make headway in understanding how the world works, they view it hierarchically, try to determine the best way to segment it into parts, and try to figure out how those parts work together. Maybe I'm just myopic, but I can't even conceive of another way in which they might go about understanding the world.

So I don't think I'm imposing some kind of structure on the world. I think the world really does have the structure and that our brains have evolved to learn to exploit that inherent structure in order to survive better.

Harry Potter and the Half-Comprehensible Script

2009-07-26T07:01:00.000-07:00

Went to see the newest Harry Potter film yesterday. Yikes, it was bad. I remember sort of liking the last one, even though I can't remember much about it. But this one was long, boring, goofy, and incomprehensible.

NOTE TO MOVIE-MAKERS: A film should not be a supplement to the book upon which it is based. It should be a stand-alone story.

A good percentage of the movie-goers will have read all the books, but for the rest of us, the experience is, how shall we say...less than pleasant.

Case in point: The opening scene of the movie. Three black smoke trails fly over London. Muggles look up in amazed confusion. The three trails fly into a back alley and magic world, nab somebody whose face isn't seen (there's a bag over his/her head), then fly back out, destroy a bridge (killing lots of Muggles), and flying off.

Boy, I can't wait to find out what the hell that was all about, I thought. Seemed like a pretty good opening. Only...it was never explained what the hell it was all about. After the movie was over, I asked my fellow movie-goers, all of whom had read the books. "Oh, those were minions of Valdemort kidnapping the wand-maker. There's some difference between Harry Potter's wand and Valdemort's wand that Valdemort can't figure out, so he wants to interrogate the wand-maker. That doesn't get explained until the last book." WTF? Now there is a scene where Harry, Ron, and Hermione are walking by the wand-maker's shop and they note that he's out of business, but so are 80% of the other businesses, so there's no reason for someone who hasn't read the books to make a connection.

How about this...for brevity and continuity's sake, put that scene in the next Harry Potter movie.

That's just an example from the first scene. It doesn't get much better from there. The movie is filled with lots and lots of silly teen romance stuff...a little of this goes a looooong way.

One of the appeals of Harry Potter is supposedly getting a sense of wonder at seeing things we've never seen. At this point, we've seen quidditch. We've seen floating candles in the cafeteria. We've seen nearly all the tropes there are to see, so the world just seems boring now. The only mythical beast we see this time is a giant spider, and it's dead.

So the movie is basically incomprehensible, full of silly teen romance stuff, and flat and boring.

Spoilers after the gap...

And, what part of the plot that did seem to fit together didn't make any damned sense.

If I were to summarize the main plot of the movie...Draco Malfoy is recruited by the bad guys to assassinate Dumbledore. Why, it's not said. Sure they hate Dumbledore because he's good and they're bad, but why now? Do they think he's getting too close to figuring out how to finally put away Valdemort? If so, that's pretty damned subtle, and this is supposed to be accessible to kids, isn't it?

Anyway, here's their plan, I guess: Get Draco to fix a broken vanishing cabinet in some storeroom of the school. Whether he brought the cabinet or it was already there is unclear. We see him putting in an apple, taking it out with a bite out of it, messing with birds, etc., but it's never clear that he's "fixing" it. Whatever. When it does finally work, it's supposed to be a path from another cabinet outside the school that let's in three of the bad guys. Why? Malfoy is supposed to kill Dumbledore, and if he fails, Snape has taken some super badass oath that he will do it himself. Why do we need all this bullshit with the cabinet? Are the three baddies just there for moral support?

Meanwhile, Harry and Dumbledore figure out that the reason Valdemort is so damned hard to get rid of is because he's divided his soul into 7 parts and hidden them in 7 objects, thereby making him invincible unless they're all destroyed. Okay. Dumbledore waves around a burned diary, which supposedly is one of the 7, and takes Harry to find another one, which they get, but which turns out to be a fake, swapped by some other mysterious figure. So the movie ends with Harry and friends dropping out of school to go look for the rest of these things, though how many are left is never said.

At this point, you could say, "Oh, you're not supposed to analyze the story that much, just enjoy all the cool fantasy stuff." Only, there isn't any.

So I'd tell you to avoid it for the stupid mess it is, but if you're a fan you're going to see it anyway, and the damned thing will still rake in truckloads of money. Sigh.

Narratives and Timelines

2009-07-24T18:19:00.000-07:00

On the way back from Texas, I started listening to The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb. I was a little put off by the cheesy title, but I gave it a chance, and it did a decent job of hooking me. I hadn't read any of Lamb's stuff before, but he's a good writer.

There's only one problem, and it's making me lose interest in the book, even though I'm now into the third disk on audio. And that's how he handles time.

I think flashbacks are fine if used sparingly, or if the bulk of a story is a flashback, but there's really not much to the narrative in the "present" of the story, e.g. an old man is recounting his life story to a journalist. But I think there are real problems with a narrative structure in which the reader is interested in the forward progression of the story in the "present", but keeps getting flung back into repeated, extended flashbacks.

That's the way this book is. The story is ostensibly about a high school teacher who taught at Columbine High School when the massacre took place. The story starts the Friday a few days before the massacre, but so far the bulk of the narrative has taken place in the past, relating the main character's marital problems, his attempt to befriend and rehabilitate a screwed-up female student, and in the section I'm currently on, we go all the way back to the main character's childhood for stories about his family's corn maze.

I remember reading Stephen King's Dark Tower series and like Wizard and Glass the least, mostly because the book was one giant flashback. I was interested in seeing forward progression in the present-day quest, not getting a bunch of back story. So I read it very impatiently. Several years later, when I read the series again, I enjoyed W&G a lot more, mostly because there wasn't the urgency of seeing how the main storyline played out.

In general I think this kind of structure is a mistake. There are clever ways to fill in backstory, which is important for any story. But the bulk of the narrative should take place in the time frame in which your primary story is set. Otherwise the reader feels like they're taking one step forward and three steps back. I can't think of a work where this kind of structure worked very well. If any of you can, please share.

Moon

2009-07-23T18:47:00.000-07:00

I just got back from visiting family in Texas, and while we were there I got to see the new movie Moon, which isn't showing here in Lafayette.

It's hard to talk about the film without spoiling plot elements, so I'll be nebulous above the poster pic and discuss the film with spoilers below it. Overall the movie is a very good sci-fi pic, which apparently is difficult to do since most of them end up sucking pretty hard.

From the preview, I thought the film would be a retread of a lot of previous films which explore the common themes of solitude, loneliness, and insanity in the isolation of space. The film did explore some of those ideas, and borrowed heavily from some venerable sci-fi source material, but it managed to make the mix original. Good art generally either makes you think or evokes some strong emotion. Moon does both of those, and does them well. My one complaint is that the ending feels rushed and slapped together, and not in proportion to the quality of the rest of the film. But all in all I give it a strong recommendation.

If you have already seen it, or don't care about spoilers, there's more below the poster.

As I said above, the film borrows pretty heavily from previous films, most notably Blade Runner, 2001, and the Alien series. There are clones with implanted memories who don't know they're clones with implanted memories. But Moon actually manages to make us care about the character(s), which is all to uncommon in SF with strong ideas.

The biggest plus in my book is the fact that the movie featured a near-human level AI that not only didn't turn out to be completely malfunctioning or evil, but managed to be developed into a full-blown character whose motivations were ever entirely made clear (like most good characters). Did he help the various Sams because that was a priority in his programming? Did he understand the ethical horror that the clones were being put through and actually feel compelled to help put an end to it? We don't know...and that's great. Of course, the bad guy was a big, evil energy corporation, but it was at least refreshing to see an AI treated with some level of complexity and actually developed as a character.

Now, the ending...why did the cleaners leave the dead same in the rover? What good was it going to do to knock out the jammer? Did that happen after the cleaners left? If not, wouldn't they just fix it? If so, wouldn't the corporation still be aware of it? And what exactly was the point...it seemed like the whole situation was exposed when the Sam clone made it back to Earth.

Another big issue was the life spans of the clones. It was strongly insinuated in the film that as a failsafe, the clones only had a lifespan of about three years. The Sam we start the film with starts to fall apart and get extremely sick, coughing and spewing up blood, losing teeth, etc. He sees video of previous Sams getting sick near the end of their contracts, losing hair, coughing, etc. It was never said directly in the film, but if that's the case, why didn't the older Sam warn the younger one that he only had 3 years to live?

Other questions...were the hallucinations at the beginning of his daughter Eve? If so, what brought them on? Was this some sort of signal from a previous Sam, or just a coincidence that he happened to be hallucinating about his daughter being grown up, even though he thought she was still an infant?

Anyway, a good film doesn't answer all it's questions...it takes some thinking about and ultimately has multiple interpretations. I just wish the thought and care that seemed to go into the rest of the film had been put into the ending, which really felt tacked on.

The Daily Show on the Anniversary of the Moon Landings

2009-07-21T07:08:00.000-07:00

Last night's The Daily Show opened with a segment about the 40th anniversary of the moon landings. As usual, the humor all centered around belittling the accomplishment. Jon Stewart said we spent billions of dollars and astronaut's lives to "hit a golf ball on the moon", ride around in a buggy, and leave it covered with junk like the guy in your neighborhood whose crap is all in his front yard.

Nice.

The implication is that the moon landings were a trivial waste of lives and money. Presumably the writers would be fine with us sitting here on earth in the year 2009 never having set foot on any other place in our solar system. How forward thinking of them.

To devalue the accomplishment of putting a living human being on the moon, safely returning them, and repeating the act, and not only to devalue it, but to sneer at it...well, frankly I think it's repulsive.

The moon landings were a highlight of human civilization, a testament to our curiosity and ingenuity.

So on behalf of everyone who worked so hard to make it happen, I'd just like to give a hearty "fuck you" to the writers of The Daily Show.

Why Should We Care About What Other People Believe?

2009-07-17T07:49:00.000-07:00

There's been a big dustup between atheist blogger PZ Myers and the authors of a new book called Unscientific America, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, which started around the time Myers posted his first comments about the book. At the core of the dispute is a philosophical difference about how scientists who are also atheists should speak and behave with regard to religious believers.

Mooney and Kirshenbaum apparently think that blogs like Pharyngula and books like The God Delusion harm the public perception of science and thus scientific literacy by alienating the general public by strongly linking atheism and science, while talking bad about religion. Myers obviously disagrees.

And check out some of the comments to this Daniel Dennett editorial in The Guardian. Commenters quickly label Dennett a "militant atheist", calling him "irritating" and "intolerant". The implication is that he should shut the hell up about his atheism and leave people to their own beliefs, whatever those might be.

But here's where I'll go ahead and agree with those who compare the proselytizing of religious folk with that of the atheists. It's perfectly understandable to try to change someone else's mind, as long as it's with words.

Time to assume each side's point of view for a little thought experiment...

If you were a devout religious adherent who believed fervently in a heaven and hell, and also believed that those that didn't believe as you would suffer an eternity of torment, what would be your most humane course of action? It would be negligent of you not to try to sway others to believe the same as you. So, if you care at all about the suffering of others, and you believe others will suffer forever if they don't accept your beliefs, the perfectly sensible course of action is to attempt to convert others to your belief system.

On the other side, let's say you're a skeptical unbeliever. Let's say you live in a society where the majority of people believe that three magical dragons created and control the universe. There are sacred books that detail the history of the dragons and their teachings, some of which seems a little outdated and have been used to justify pretty horrible acts, but others which seem to convey some nice messages about how to treat others. Now, one could argue that even though you think the dragon worship is unsupported by any reasonable standards of evidence or common sense, you should simply go about your business believing what you believe, while leaving others to their beliefs. But what if your society was a democratic republic, and every public official was a dragon worshiper? And public policy was decided on the basis of dragon worship? And what was taught in schools and where your tax money was allocated and decisions of foreign policy were all guided and influenced by belief in magic dragons?

The point here is that no one is an island. What I believe affects my neighbors and what they believe affects me. If you lived in a community that strongly believed in witchcraft and you happened to be an older woman who lived alone, and witches were being accused left and right and being burned alive in the town square, then of course you would care what your neighbors believed. This is an extreme example, but illustrates the basic concept. What others in your society believe affects you.

In this light, doesn't it make sense that an atheist would try to convince around them to be more skeptical and discerning regarding their beliefs?

And if the proponents of a particular religion do have a monopoly on the truth, then what do they have to fear from a book here or there that's critical of their beliefs? As far as the stance particular scientists take on religion, they should be able to say whatever they want. I understand strategic PR, but value it much less than I value the truth. And I believe the best way to get at the truth is to have an open marketplace of voices and ideas, all free to say what they will and let people think and sort out what the best ideas might be.

More Relativia Screenshots

2009-07-16T08:57:00.000-07:00

Still plugging away at my game entry for the Android Developer Challenge II. Here are a few more screen shots to show how things are proceeding.

This is the character creation screen. You enter a name and select one of four species and one of four classes (so there are 16 possible combinations). The stats vary depending on the species/class combination. I've hired an artist named Pat Marconett for the characters and backgrounds, and I'm really happy with how it's coming out.

This is the screen that prompts you when you're near a dungeon:

And here's what it looks like when you enter the dungeon. The little purple icon is you. You just tap on an adjacent chamber to enter and engage in combat with whatever lurks there.

I've run into a little setback that I'll discuss more fully after the competition is over. I'm still optimistic that the game will be ready by the end of August, which is the hard submission guideline.

But I'm also planning on entering a second app that's related but distinct from one of my previous apps. That's allowed by the guidelines, which Google just posted in full this week here.

Relativia Gameplay

2009-07-03T09:31:00.001-07:00

I'm working on a game for the Android Developer Challenge II. I've hired an artist to work on character, background, and item art. I've got the basics of the combat system worked out, and I thought I'd share a short video demonstrating how gameplay will work.

The player is on the left side, the enemy on the right. Each turn, a player can use one action (an attack or spell, if they have enough of the right kind of energy) and they may drop one token into the playing grid. The game is very much like Connect 4. If a player matches 3 or more in a row of a given token type: gems (square), mana (round), or skulls, those tokens are removed from the grid. If gems are matched, the player gets gem dust, which is used to purchase items in markets. If mana is matched, the player gets energy corresponding with that mana type (blue, orange, green, or purple). If skulls are matched, damage is done directly to one's opponent. Actions can either cause damage to one's opponent, heal the player, or have some other effect (like gaining an extra turn). A given battle ends when one player reaches zero health points.

I'd like to add in more polish, e.g. feedback events for matching, smoother animations, etc., but the deadline is about six weeks away and I'm rushing just to get the basics implemented. I'm optimistic about the progress, but a bit worried about getting it in good shape for the contest. We'll see how it goes.

Reductionism

2009-07-03T09:05:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I picked up Melanie Mitchell's new book Complexity: A Guided Tour. I had previously read her excellent primer for genetic algorithms, and this new book looked very interesting.

Though she's an excellent writer, I'm already a little disappointed in the book. For example, her first chapter is entitled What is Complexity?, and she then goes on to ignore the question and give lots of examples of complex systems. Chapter 7 is called Defining and Measuring Complexity, and would probably have been a better start to the book, since it actually attempts to lay out what the concept means and how it is difficult to find a consensus definition among people who study it.

But what made me even more disgruntled right off the bat is her assertion in the preface that reductionism is passe, or worse, dead:

But twentieth-century science was also marked by the demise of the reductionist dream. In spite of its great successes explaining the very large and very small, fundamental physics, and more generally, scientific reductionism, have been notably mute in explaining the complex phenomena closest to our human-scale concerns.

Now look...I'm a reductionist, and as far as I'm concerned, so is every other working scientist. That's why I get a bit peeved when I see reductionism mischaracterized as an outmoded approach that was good for studying classical problems, but a miserable failure for, you know, really complicated stuff.

Here's all reductionism is: Trying to understand a system by understanding its parts and how they work together. That's it. And guess what? That's a wholly sensible approach that works amazingly well.

Reductionism often gets propped up as a straw man and ridiculed for trying to understand a system at one scale in terms of parts at a much lower scale. For example, someone might say "It's ridiculous to try to understand an opera in terms of acoustical dynamics!" or "It's silly to try to explain the migratory patterns of birds in terms of subatomic particles!"

Hey, I agree! Such approaches are stupid. And that's not reductionism. And it doesn't work. The way reductionism bears fruit is by trying to understand a system in terms of its parts at the appropriate lower level of description. Richard Dawkins calls this hierarchical reductionism.

For example, if you want to explain how a car works, describing its function in terms of pistons and axles is going to yield far better results than describing its function at the level of atoms. If you skip too many levels of description between the parts and the whole, your explanation is simply going to suck.

Now, as a working scientist its often difficult to determine what the appropriate level of description of the parts needs to be. But what, exactly, is the alternative to such an approach? I've heard plenty of people knock their characterization of reductionism. But I have yet to hear a proposal for how you go about trying to understand a system without understanding how its elements interact. How do you "holistically" study or explain how a system works? Some of the early examples Mitchell gives of complex systems are ant colonies, human brains, and economic systems. She's correct that such systems composed of interacting elements can give rise to amazingly complex behavior. But I honestly don't see how we can go about trying to understand that behavior without examining the behavior of the constituent elements...which is reductionism.

I'm interested to read the rest of the book and see where it goes, but as far as I'm concerned she's already gotten off on the wrong foot.

Transformers 2 FAQ

2009-07-01T06:16:00.000-07:00

I haven't seen Transformers 2, and most likely won't. I enjoyed this FAQ of the film probably far more than I would enjoy watching the movie. I liked this bonus question in particular:

So it's not as bad as shitting your pants?
Marginally. I honestly had to make a pro and con list to figure it out.

The Hangover

2009-06-27T20:21:00.000-07:00

Went to see the movie The Hangover today. The movie-going experience was marred by a sold-out theater. The movie's been out for at least a couple of weeks, and we went at 2:30 in the afternoon, and I don't remember every going to a movie that sold out in Lafayette...what the hell? Anyway, there were a couple of particularly annoying audience member. One woman to my left howled and squealed in exaggerated laughter at everything that happened on-screen. I'm glad she was having a good time, but screeching at every phrase and gesture in the movie is a bit much. I think the woman was either drunk or had a chemical imbalance.

The second big annoyance was sitting right in front of me. It was one of those people that feels the need to say everything that happens to be going through her head at the time, which happens to be not a whole lot. Mostly it was just stating what was the on the screen. When the characters in the movie wake up and we see a chicken in their hotel room, the genius in front of me said "It's a chicken." Guess what she said when the tiger was on-screen? This went on pretty much through the whole movie.

Oh yeah, how was the movie? It was all right, but definitely not worth packing the cineplex in the middle of the afternoon. Mostly the humor went for the lowest common denominator and ended up hitting it. We got copious helpings of full-frontal male nudity, and ass, and pedophilia jokes, and vomiting. And you know, there's nothing funnier than a baby getting hit with a car door. That's not to say there weren't a few clever bits, but for the most part the humor was pitched at the level of your average 7th-grader. If you find an old man getting a physical check-up inherently funny, this is the movie for you. Apparently it was also the movie for a lot of other people, because like I said, the theater was packed and the howler monkey to my left wasn't the only one enjoying the show.

That's one thing I really miss about Japan. The audience members in movies were blissfully silent. Here, everyone treats a theater like their living room. I hope if there is a hell, there's a special place in it for the chick sitting in front of me today. And when she gets there, she'll probably be placed front and center so she can contribute to the suffering by saying stuff like "It's hot in here."

Windows 7 Sleep Nightmare

2009-06-21T17:45:00.000-07:00

So I went through the horrible ordeal of trying to build my own PC and having the motherboard fry out on me, so I ordered a pre-built system.

In my continuing hubris, I decided to install the Windows 7 stable release candidate, mostly because I heard it was very good, and that Vista sucks. So I got my new machine on Friday night and spent most of yesterday installing new software and configuring the machine to my liking. Until today, I'd been very pleased with Windows 7.

However, there was a small problem that turned into a very large one. My computer is in the same room that I sleep, so I like to have the monitor either power down or go to a blank screen saver when I'm not using it. Sounds easy enough, but no matter what settings I used, the monitor would never power off or go to a blank screen saver. I read some stuff in various forums saying this was a problem with Vista not filtering input from optical mice (basically it thinks you're still using the mouse, so never shuts off). There's a patch for Vista, but nothing so far that seems to work for Windows 7. Still not a big deal.

I did notice the "Sleep" function in the Start menu and thought that might be a good thing to use. I could put the PC to sleep and it would quickly reboot each morning. So I put it to sleep. And guess what, friends and neighbors? The motherfucker wouldn't wake up. I pushed the power button, and the keyboard would light up, but it acted like it was still sleeping. I powered it completely off and then back on. Same deal. I unplugged the machine and tried again...nada.

This was about 5 hours ago. I was pretty upset, because I didn't want to have to return any more hardware to NewEgg and get a new machine. I tried Gateway's customer service. That was a huge freaking mistake. Both their chat and phone reps told me that I had to register my machine before they could assist me. Sounds easy, right? After all, I've got my warranty, the serial number, the SNID, and shitloads of paperwork on the thing. I've even got a piece of paper in the box that says "Register your computer online at www.gateway.com/register. It's quick and easy." Yeah, okay. But when I tried to register online, it tells me that since I don't have a 20-digit serial number, I'll have to register either by phone or chat. Guess what the tech support reps told me? That I'd have to fax or mail a proof of purchase to Gateway and wait 48 hours for processing, then call them back. WTF?

I asked the rep on the phone exactly why I couldn't register right then with him...I had all the information. He said it was because the computer was manufactured in June of 2008 and because of the time period between being shipped to the retailer and the purchase, Gateway had a policy of requiring a proof of purchase. Huh? Does that make any sense whatsoever? It shouldn't matter what the gap between the manufacture and the purchase. All that should matter is that I have evidence that I purchased the machine, and that they give it to me upon purchase so that I can quickly and easily verify that I purchased it. This isn't a fucking box of cereal, people. So I'm not happy with them.

I was ready to call NewEgg and just replace the stupid machine, but their customer support isn't open on Sundays, so I decided to wait until tomorrow morning. In the meantime, I figured I'd research the problem a bit more.

Thankfully, I came across this Gizmodo post.

Win 7 Tip: Sleep/Hibernate Mode Is Buggy, May Incapacitate Your Machine

When I came home last night, I thought my previously healthy Windows 7 machine was dead. It was making a horrendous squeal and refused to reboot multiple times. Turns out it was asleep.

I'm not sure what kind of sleep it was in (I was only gone for 6 hours and I've left it alone for half a day before and it was fine), but a regular reboot refused to restart it. So I did that ten times in a row, before giving up. I had to pull out the power cable (it's a desktop) and let the motherboard's lights go off and battery drain out. After this, it was able to correctly boot up again to a "Resuming Windows" screen, which then didn't respond to any keyboard/mouse inputs, so I had to reset again.

It's not like previous the sleep mode in Windows versions worked perfectly, but the manufacturer usually tests it once or twice to make sure that it's compatible enough that you don't have to jump through crazy hoops to re-enable your system. So our hint is to disable sleep/hibernate/power save mode on your system, in case it's incompatible, for now to save yourself headaches later.

And yes, it's a beta, so we're hoping compatibility gets fixed by release time.

Now I had unplugged the machine, but only for a few seconds. I went ahead and unplugged the machine for about half an hour, then tried again. It did exactly what the post said, attempting to resume windows on the first reboot, stalling again, then properly booting on the second attempt.

Holy shit, people. What a noxious bug. It locks you utterly and completely out of your system. You can't boot into the BIOS. You can't boot from CD. You can't do shit because the system never properly shuts down and so stays forever in sleep mode.

That was scary, let me tell you. I would have been irritated by having to reinstall the operating system, but when you can't even do that, things are looking really bad. So now at least I know. I disabled all sleep functions in the power management settings, and I'll never manually use it again.

This when I was planning on writing a blog on the coolness of Windows 7. I was very pleased with it until then. It's fast and slick. I really like the way it handles the layout of screens, the toolbar, and the desktop view. But now I'm a little afraid of it. Mostly, I'm just glad I was able to boot back into my machine.

Back From Atlanta

2009-06-19T18:45:00.000-07:00

I'm back from the IJCNN in Atlanta, where I presented my paper "Sequential Hierarchical Recruitment Learning in a Network of Spiking Neurons". Sounds like a barrel of monkeys, don't it?

Even though I presented on the last day, attendance to the session on spiking neural networks was good. Eugene Izhikevich was in the audience, but didn't say or react much to the talks. Incidentally, his talk on large-scale brain models was very nice. I've been increasingly skeptical about the approach of trying to make enormous models when we have such little grasp of how small, local circuits in the brain work, but he made a very good case. I see the usefulness of large-scale models for studying global phenomena and simply have available a model of that magnitude to tweak and study. Hopefully the large-scale and small-scale models will one day be able to tie all the theory together in one, nice coherent bundle.

John Hopfield's talk was also a highlight. The theme was basically that you want to pick hardware that's best going to fit with the type of algorithm you need to run, and that evolution leads to such efficient coupling. Thus, if we want to try to understand the algorithms of the brain, we need to pay close attention to the type of operations that neurons carry out very well. His conclusion was that understanding the synchronous operations of populations of neurons is key to understanding how they learn and process information. I wholeheartedly agree. :)

Another highlight was a 3-hour tour of some neuroscience labs at Emory. I got to see live recordings from the network that controls the involuntary "swallowing" in crabs and lobsters. I got to see how they make brain slices from rats and mice (first you drug, then decapitate the animals, then you use a razor blade affixed in a machine that's moving back and forth very fast). Another group was studying a group of neurons in leeches which control their heartbeat. Another group was monitoring cells in awake, alert mice, studying how cells in their auditory cortex respond differently to sounds of mice pups depending on whether or not they have given birth to them. And yet another group was monitoring the activity of cells in a rat's hippocampus as it explored novel objects.

Just as with the Boston conference, I'm exhausted, though. Lots of information to assimilate, so time to fall into bed and sleep.

The IJCNN in Atlanta

2009-06-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

I'm current attending the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks in Atlanta. It's my first time at this particular conference. For any given conference, I typically expect 20-30% of the content to be relatively engaging and relevant to what I'm studying. In this case, that number is a bit lower. The plenary talks have been decent, but the sessions and posters haven't offered me much of interest. And since there's a serious engineering contingent here, some talks are simply slide after slide of equations, which I don't get much out of.

There's a talk this afternoon on large-scale brain simulations...hopefully that will be interesting. And then, I give a talk on Thursday morning. And Thursday evening there's a tour of "wet" neural labs at Emory, i.e. we're gonna tour labs where people work with real brains.

So more later...

Polyclef Blog

2009-06-13T09:39:00.000-07:00

A lot of indie software developers use their blog to promote their products and keep in touch with other devs and sometimes customers. I thought it would be a good idea to bifurcate this blog into my personal/school related stuff, which I'll keep here, and the Android/game development stuff, which is at a new blog here:

http://polyclefsoftware.blogspot.com/

Building Your Own PC Adventures

2009-06-13T09:33:00.001-07:00

So I put an end to the little adventure of trying to build my own PC. I don't think you're going to really save much (if any) money. You can boost your geek cred, but pre-built computers with great specs are cheap these days, and my experience was pretty much a nightmare.

A friend who said he would help me put it together was unable to get it to boot into BIOS, so we started swapping individual components (e.g. PSU, ram, video card, etc.) to try to isolate the problem. After swapping in my friend's PSU, the motherboard started to smoke. Nice, huh?

Having had enough, I called NewEgg customer service and told them the whole sordid story. They let me return all the parts and they paid for the shipping, as long as I ordered a pre-built system from them, which I did. Hopefully they'll issue a full refund on the returned parts upon receiving them and my new machine will work when I plug it in.

Anyway, I learned a valuable lesson. To whit...I am not a hardware dude. One of the advantages of human culture is the whole division of labor thing, and I'll let someone in a Taiwanese sweat shop who does it for 16 hours a day put my PC together for me, while I work on the software side of things.

Why You Should Not Try to Build Your Own PC: Part II

2009-06-09T21:20:00.000-07:00

Because when you finally get all the right parts and you put it together and turn it on, it just clicks, like the teeth of a dead man's skull clicking together in laughter at you.

My Favorite Games: Robot Odyssey

2009-06-09T07:40:00.000-07:00

A while back I picked up the book Game Design Workshop, which is quite good. One of the most interesting features of the book are interviews with professionals in the industry. Most of the time they ask them what their favorite games are, and it's interesting to hear their answers.

I thought I'd answer the question myself. Of course I love to play games...doesn't everyone? So it's no surprise that I've gotten sucked into developing them as a sideline.

Originally I planned to write a single blog talking about all of my favorite games, especially ones that have stuck in my mind over the years, ones that I've played for decades, ones that I don't play anymore but which had a big impact on my life. But that turned out to just be too damned long. So this is the first in a series of posts talking about my favorite games.

Here's the list:

Card/Board Games:
Bridge
Poker
Spades
Hearts
Crazy Eights
Dominoes
Life
Monopoly
Scrabble
Yahtzee
Chess
Go
Pente
Backgammon
Settlers of Catan
Citadels
Risk

Collectible Card Games:
Magic The Gathering

Video Games:
Pong
Adventure
Space Invaders
Robot Odyssey
World of Warcraft
Myst
Portal
Half-Life
Warcraft/Starcraft
Diablo
Peggle and Peggle Nights
Bookworm Adventures
Puzzle Quest
Zelda: Twilight Princess

Text-based computer games:
Zork I, II, and III
Enchanter, Sorcerer, and Spellbreaker
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Arcade Games:
Galaga
Xevious
Dig Dug
Asteroids
Tempest
Gyruss

Again, this isn't meant to be some comprehensive list of games. These are games that influenced me in some way. I'm not sure I'll get to all of them, but we'll see.

One particular video game that I'm going to inaugurate this series with is one that's stuck in my head for decades, and that's Robot Odyssey. The graphics were pretty bad, even for the time period (early 80's), and I didn't even own the game. I ended up pulling all-nighters with a friend of mine who owned the Apple II that ran it.

What makes this game so memorable? Well, the basic setup is that you are a person in an underground city and you're trying to get home. To do so, you have to solve a series of puzzles. The catch is that these puzzles most often have to be solved by programming the robots and having them solve the task. You did this by actually entering the robots and wiring up their various sensors and thrusters with logic circuits (you had a little toolbox of these). For example, you might wire the robot's right bumper to its bottom thruster, so that if it hits the right wall, it goes up. Puzzles usually involved having robots navigate simple maze configurations and get items for you. I may be making it sound dry, but it was amazingly fun and addictive.

The key element of the game is the ability to program robots, something very few games allow you to do. Games like Lemmings have a very crude form of this, where you can assign simple roles to agents, but it's much more limiting. Games that are fun as hell, but still make you think are extremely rare, and this was one of the best. There have been a few ports and similar games, though I haven't checked them out.

At some point I will definitely do my own take on the general concept. I think the idea of gently introducing programming and logic problems to kids is enormously important, and I found the experience of wiring up agents and then watching them act out my programs enormously fun, even when they didn't work (which was most of the time), and especially when they did unexpected things.

In my idea folder are plans for a game that abstracts away the computer/hardware/robot elements but leaves the core game play intact. My video game design uses cards as programming elements. The player assembles a sequence of cards that summon an agent (such as a magical bird, fish, or tiger) and determine its decision policies based on what it encounters in the environment (e.g., a given card might compel the animal to climb a tree if it comes near one). The effects of some cards might be dependent upon adjacent cards in the summoning deck, and others might be independent of order. But the basic idea is that players will solve puzzles by building programs to execute in simple environments in order to solve goals. Hopefully players will be programming, without even knowing that's what they're doing. :)

Anyway, Robot Odyssey has stuck in my head for 25 years, even though I played it less than a month on somebody else's machine. It's a great game, and a model for what a designer can achieve by not dumbing material down and trying to create an innovative experience.

Recap of My Android Market Experiences

2009-06-08T16:09:00.000-07:00

So I've been selling and releasing ad-supported apps on the Android market now for nearly 3 months. It's difficult to gauge success. I thought I wasn't really doing all that well, but it sounds like relative to all but the outliers in the iPhone market I'm doing pretty well. This iPhone developer is complaining about having a couple of apps in the top 100 in their respective category and still only pulling in about $20/day.

So here are some summary stats for reference.

I released my first paid app, ConcretePal, 83 days ago.
My average daily net income for that span is: $19.41
My average daily income from ads for that span is: $8.74
I've released 22 total apps: 14 paid and 8 free (6 of those are ad-supported demo versions of paid apps)

Here's a visual breakdown:

I thought I was going to do very well in the market when I released Spades for $2.99, it was the only one on the market, and it sold very well. But as you can see, that didn't last too long. Sales for a given app settle down to a pretty low baseline, so you constantly need to be releasing new apps if you want to keep the revenue stream coming.

So, I'm not getting rich, but it's nice supplemental income. And it sounds like it's comparable to iPhone apps that are doing reasonably well.

I hope the sales do stay up all right over the next couple of months. I'm not going to be able to release any new apps, since I'm working full-time on my game for the Android Developer Challenge II. It's coming along pretty well. I just hope I can get a decent working version ready for submission by August.

Soon I'll post some screen shots and concept art to give you an idea of where it's headed.

Building My Own PC

2009-06-04T07:27:00.001-07:00

So my old computer is just that...old. It's around 5 years old, which is friggin' ancient for a PC. The video card seems to be going out, so I decided to invest in a new machine, and after debating the pros and cons, I decided to order the parts and build my own.

So far it has not gone extremely well. One friend sent me this guide to assembling a mid-range (~$700) gaming rig, and another friend sent me this guide, for assembling a rig in the range of $800. When I went to order the parts, there were some on the first list that were sold out at the particular retailer. Instead of ordering from two different sites, I just thought I'd piece a system together by combining parts from both guides.

Now, I'm not a hardware guy, though I've mucked around inside PCs a little bit. Still, my knowledge base is pretty scant. I've had compatibility issues with parts before, but that usually arose from the age between them. I assumed that PC parts from the same generation would generally be compatible.

Well, this may seem obvious to anyone who knows anything about PC hardware, but motherboards are specific to certain processors. So one of those systems uses an AMD processor and the other an Intel. I ordered a motherboard that is only compatible with certain AMD processors and I ordered an Intel processor. Guess what? That doesn't work!

So now I get to order a new processor and wait for my new shipment. In the meantime, the return policy at NewEgg is a %15 "restocking fee", so I'd be out about $30 + shipping, which blows. So I listed the processor on Amazon, which, if it sells would actually let me break even.

Also, there was fun with the case. I ordered the Cooler Master RC-534 from the ExtremeTech guide, which it says comes "complete with 460W power supply unit". I found the very same model on NewEgg and ordered it. Guess what? No power supply! Yay! Apparently you can order this model with or without a power supply. That would have been good information to know. So I went to Best Buy last night to get raped on a crappy power supply because I wanted to get my system up and running. This was before I found out about the processor snafu. So since I had to order a new processor anyway, I went ahead and also ordered a much cheaper and much better power supply online. Now I get to return the crappy Best Buy PSU.

I thought I had done a decent amount of homework, but there were just some glaringly obvious things that someone with no hardware experience might completely overlook, unless they are explicitly told such things. I was expecting problems like parts fitting in the case or looking much farther ahead, getting the whole thing put together, turning it on, and having nothing happen. Fun and joy...I haven't even gotten that far yet.

I'm already wishing I had just built a pre-built system, though I am gaining valuable, if stunningly obvious experience.

More updates if I ever get the damn thing put together.

New Ad Strategy

2009-06-02T08:56:00.000-07:00

I'm trying a new strategy for serving ads in the free versions of my Android apps. Sales on Golf Solitaire slid way down after the first week, so I've released a free version using a "day pass" model, similar to the way Salon.com or some videos on Hulu work.

Basically, when you open the app for the first time, a dialog appears with an ad, explaining that you need to click on the ad to visit our sponsor's website. If you do that, then relaunch or reset the app, you can play the app ad-free for the next 24 hours. After that time period, you'll see the ad box again.

I decided to try this model because the old way I was serving up ads periodically throughout the game, and people were just closing the ad window more and more without visiting the ads. For the past two months, I'm serving between 150,000 and 250,000 ads per day, but only getting 100-200 click-throughs.

This strategy focuses on serving far fewer ads, but getting many more click-throughs. If the model works well with Golf Solitaire, I'll go ahead and apply it to Spades. I expect some complaints, but I think some users might actually prefer such a system. We'll see.

Implementing it was a pain, though. AdMob doesn't make it easy to detect whether one of their ads has been clicked, so I had to implement it in a pretty clumsy way to capture that an ad had been visited. I had asked for help in a couple of forums, but got no responses. Luckily I was able to figure it out on my own.

Updates on how well it works will be forthcoming.

Android Developer Challenge II

2009-06-02T08:16:00.000-07:00

While I did get a lot out of the Boston conference, I wish I'd been able to attend Google IO this year, a conference for developers which focused a lot this year on Android. They pulled an Oprah and gave all the attendees a model of the new HTC phone running Android, the HTC Magic.

They also announced the second Android Developer Challenge. The first phase of the contest lets users vote on the best apps, which make it to a final phase in which judges pick the winners. There are 10 categories (e.g. lifestyle, travel, etc.), and the top three in each category will win $100,000, $50,000, and $25,000 respectively. And the top three overall will win bonus money on top of the category prizes.

My plan for the summer had been to work on a couple of game ideas, including a word game, and continue producing small apps like medical and construction calculators. But the announcement of the ADC II has changed things. I'm going to try to develop an app to enter by the August deadline.

The project is ambitious, it's a mobile RPG with some really cool features. I don't really want to talk about it too much until it's close to release, but I think it's pretty innovative and will have a decent shot at least at making it into the finals. If I can pull it off. I'm going to have to outsource the music and art, and I may need help with the programming. I'm going to see what I can get done this month and take stock of where I am. There's no way I can implement a full version of the game, but I'm going to try to get a workable demo which includes all of the basic features, and hope that will be enough.

I'll report here periodically about my progress. Wish me luck!

Back From Boston

2009-06-02T08:06:00.000-07:00

I got back from Boston on Sunday, and it was a pretty exhausting, but interesting, conference. Neuroscience was probably the main influence, but I was kind of surprised to find many electrical engineers and a strong engineering focus to many of the talks and posters. For example, one of the plenary speakers was R. Stanley Williams from Hewlett Packard Laboratories speaking to us about the memristor.

Unfortunately, a lot of the content, while interesting, wasn't all that directly related to the focus of my current research. The most relevant talk was by James DiCarlo of MIT. He gave a talk about this work, which focuses on the hypothesis that temporal contiguity of visual stimuli is the key mechanism in forming invariant representations, an idea very much in line with the ideas in Jeff Hawkins' book. In 2005 they used an image swapping paradigm to demonstrate the effect in humans, and this most recent work uses cell recordings from monkeys using the same paradigm. I'll probably end up referencing this work in my dissertation.

I got to see some of the luminaries in the field, but by the third day I was pretty exhausted. They pretty much had a full schedule from 8:30 in the morning until 7 or 8 each night. I did get to see a bit of Boston on the last day, and I walked around the Boston University campus and visited Harvard Square.

All in all it was a very good trip and a solid conference.

Conferencing in Boston

2009-05-25T20:05:00.000-07:00

I'm off to Boston tomorrow for the International Conference on Cognitive and Neural Systems where I'm presenting a poster on my unsupervised sequence learning model. Conferences always tend to melt my brain. There's just too much information to take in in a short period of time. This one is supposed to be especially neurosciency, so it should be interesting. I'll blog about it either during or afterward.

And if I happen to have any spare time at all, I'll try to check out a bit of Boston.

PetBook Preview

2009-05-22T09:17:00.000-07:00

My newest app is just about ready for release. I'm just going to do a bit more testing and then release it Sunday evening. It's called PetBook, and it's an app for storing information and pictures associated with your pets. Here are a couple of screen shots:

You can store as many pets as you like, and for each pet, you can create a picture gallery from images taken with your phone's camera or downloaded from email or such sites as Flickr. The veterinary page let's you store contact information for the pet's vet, and includes a call button to phone the vet if a valid number has been stored. The vet page also includes editable lists for any medications the pet might be taking, along with dosages, and vaccines and their associated dates. The groomer page includes a groomer profile and one-touch calling, along with an editable appointment list.

There's a Notes feature for jotting down any miscellaneous information associated with the pet, and a feature to email all of a pet's profile information.

I debated spending more time to develop a weight tracker, but decided to just release it as is and add that feature in a future update. I'm planning on selling it at $2.99. My dog whistle app has sold steadily, and I think there's a good market for pet-related apps, but we'll see.

WolframAlpha

2009-05-18T20:17:00.000-07:00

I have eagerly been waiting for WolframAlpha, the uber-hyped knowledge engine (or whatever the hell it's supposed to be, rather than a search engine). I was keeping a relatively open mind, but figured it would probably suck. I was ready to be proved wrong, but from what I've messed with so far, I haven't been.

Here it is.

Have a spin yourself. First the good things, which are pretty sparse. It does pretty well with comparison, especially of geographic and temporal landmarks. It seems to aggregate information mostly from sources like the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia. I guess it's a little more efficient than opening up two browser windows and comparing two regions or cities side by side, but how often do I want to do that?

On the bad side, it's language parsing abilities simply blow. It can't handle clauses or changes in word order very well at all. I don't expect it to be able to elegantly parse natural language, but I expect it to be able to do as well as Ask Jeeves (which wasn't very well).

On some sample queries of things I'm personally interested in, it couldn't tell me how many Android users there are, or an estimate of how many iPhone users there were. It didn't know how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. If I just typed in "lafayette louisiana" it gave me some decent summary statistics, but if I asked it any specific questions about the area, e.g., how many restaurants are in lafayette, louisiana, it couldn't answer. I thought this was supposed to be a major feature of the engine, it's ability to derive information from sources that wasn't simply transparently available.

Ah well...what about math? It's great at that, right?

Well, I've been working a lot with a particular function which is used in engineering and neural modeling called the Naka-Rushton function. WolframAlpha hadn't heard of it. It also couldn't parse "logistic sigmoid" or "logsig". WTF?

Color me not impressed. Let me know when it gets to beta so I can see if it sucks any less.

Working With Images in Android

2009-05-18T20:04:00.000-07:00

In a lot of my previous apps, especially my games, I've had to work quite a bit with images. But most of the time these were images that I'd created, and which I could simply drop into a resources directory associated with the app and access easily. I did very early run into out of memory issues, which seem to be very common. I overcame these by scaling down my images. At first I tried to reduce the file size, but what really mattered was the number of pixels, not the file size.

Anyway, for my newest app I'm including a customizable photo gallery, so that within the app the user can add photos which they've either taken with the camera or downloaded onto their SD card, the G1's equivalent of a hard drive. This has turned out to be a royal pain in the ass, primarily because I've found it a chore to emulate the SD card and use with the the emulator in Eclipse. Actually, I found some decent resources for actually creating the virtual card...the Android SDK comes with a "make SD card" command-line tool. But I'll be damned if I could figure out how to create a directory structure on the disk image. None of the tools I had would let me mount the image, and I couldn't find any resources describing how to create a directory structure from the command line. I found a site where someone talked about how to do it in a Mac environment, but try as I might to figure it out for my Windows environment, it was turning out to be more trouble than it was worth. I could push images to the emulated card, but they would show up as broken links in my emulator's gallery, and my app couldn't access them.

So I ended up just coding and testing the gallery function on my hardware phone, which is much slower and troublesome than coding in the emulator, but hey, it worked. Now I've got a portion of my app where a user can create a custom gallery from the images on their SD card, adding, removing, and setting a profile pic if they want.

I'd be interested to know about the experiences of any Android devs who have worked with this aspect of development. It's been one of the more unpleasant things I've tried to build, but at least I've got it working.

I also ran into the good ol' out of memory errors, but was able to effectively deal with them. At least so far. I haven't really load tested the app with gobs of photos. I'm hoping it won't crash, even with dozens of photos, but we'll see.

Oh, and this app better do well. My sales have been sucking pretty hard recently, even though my last couple of apps are sitting with 5 star ratings.

The Android Market: A Publisher's Perspective

2009-05-15T07:02:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting interview with Android developer Matt Kronyak. When asked about the Android Market's distribution method, he hits the nail on the head:

I think everyone recognizes that the Market needs some work. An open market is certainly a more competative market and will really give small to medium sized developers a chance to compete on an even playing ground. In comparison to the iTunes store I would say the open market model for the Android Market has the potential to be more profitable and fair for small developers.

The main improvements I would like to see in the Android Market include more specific categories, better ways for users to find and filter apps, a better rating system, and a way for developers to respond to user comments.

Sometimes users will leave a comment and give a bad rating for situations that the developer could help them with if only they had some way of contacting or responding to that user. Facilitating communications between developers and users would be the biggest improvement the Market could have.

Yes...lawd yes. I will get comments like "Has a bug" which doesn't do any good for either me or that user or future users. I do appreciate when users email me comments...the more specific the better. I also put up a bulletin board on my website for this purpose (though no one has used it). Matt is right that we need increased facilitation of communication, through the market, between users and developers. It would make everybody's life better.

Here's what he says about the rating system:

The Rating/Feedback system is a really weak point for the market right now. Users can buy an app, leave a review and then get a refund. Their review stays even if they never use the app again. Its also not clear what version of an app a comment is refering to. In many cases we see old comments that people do not update reporting a problem that was fixed a long time ago. For paid apps I would like to see comments removed from users who don’t actually own the app (users who refunded).

Another problem with the Rating/Feedback system is that there is now ay for the developer to get in contact with the user or to respond to their comment. Some comments are simply false, while others may be because the user doesn’t understand how to use the app correctly. If the developer could contact the user to help them out I think everyone would be better served (the app would get a better rating, the user would get the help he needs and have a better experience, and the market will sell more apps).

I agree in general, but I don't agree with the specific suggestion of removing comments from people who have uninstalled the app. If a user has downloaded an app, tried it and didn't like it for legitimate reasons, that's useful information for other potential downloaders to have. What we do desperately need is some way for developers to address comments. For the iPhone, developers have a huge amount of space for the app description, in which they can address common questions and inaccurate comments. Android publishers, on the other hand, get 325 characters. Not words...characters.

Just to give you an idea, this paragraph contains 325 characters. That isn't a lot of space. Speaking of spaces, they count spaces as characters. Try explaining what an app does, what features it has, and what various updates have fixed/changed all in 325 characters or less. It's not just difficult. It's downright impossibl

I initially published a concrete calculator. It sold about 20 copies before I got a 1-star review from a user who said that the calculations were incorrect. Sales disappeared after that. And guess what? He was flat out full of shit. The app simply calculates the volume of a cuboid...it's length x width x height. It wasn't incorrect, but a single spurious comment from some dickhead stopped my middling sales in their tracks. This week, I simply repackaged the app with a different name, icon, and a couple of small UI improvements, but the same math. It's currently got 5 stars and is selling several a day.

Anyway, I really do hope that they're working on the way the market is formatted. As it grows, it's going to become more and more important to be able to sift through the thousands of apps and find good ones. I find it ironic that Google is having problems instituting a good system for sorting and searching apps. They did a great job with the recent OS update; hopefully they've got good people working on market improvements.

Android Update

2009-05-13T08:41:00.000-07:00

Golf Solitaire has been out for a couple of days now. It sold 8 copies the first day and 5 the second, which isn't stellar, but works just fine for me if it stays relatively steady for a while. I'm pricing it at $1.99, and have no plans to change the price in the foreseeable future. I think it's a solid, fun game and worth the two bucks. Plus, I put more work into it than any app before it. If sales slack off to fewer than 10/week, my plan is to then release a lite version, probably with the ability to only play the first two holes, and see if that leads to conversions. But I'll worry about that if/when it happens.

It turns out that with the upgrade to Cupcake, the market now requires the insertion of a piece of code in the app's manifest indicating its compatibility with different versions. It also turns out that if you had previously published an app without this code snippet, updating with the snippet bumps you to the top of the newest apps queue, which confers a nice advantage in terms of exposure. People tend to check out what's new, and if your app is out long enough, it soon gets buried under the heap of new content.

So I fixed a couple of small memory issues in my JoyBuzz and DogWhistle apps and rereleased them yesterday, bumping them up to the top of the list. DogWhistle had been selling 2-3 copies a day, but yesterday the bump got me 15 new sales. It's possible I should have waited a couple of months. The market will grow, and new Android phones are coming out, and Android is also opening in new countries. Most likely I'll keep Spades unupdated for a while and see if I can get a boost in the middle of the summer. A new analysis projects that the Android market will increase 900% by the end of this year, which some other analysts are saying is crazy...that 400-500% is more reasonable. Either of those numbers sound pretty good to me.

My ad revenue has leveled out between $5-10/day, but the sales from new/rereleased apps has bumped me back up to daily revenues of $20-30/day, which is nice. It's still not independent salary money, but it's nice supplemental income.

I've got a couple of conferences coming up, but I'm going to try to get at least one more app out the door before then. When I do, I'll report back on how things are going.

Star Trek: The Too-Much-Motion Picture

2009-05-12T20:44:00.000-07:00

I saw the new Star Trek today, and I liked it all right. I wasn't exactly blown away. The actors were pretty well-cast, but I honestly didn't think any of them had the charisma of the original cast. Chris Pine seemed like a bit of a lightweight and Zachary Quinto was okay as Spock, but not great. On the plus side, the movie was generally well-directed and was filled with enough action so that you didn't question the sillier parts too much. The worst part was the villain, a jilted Romulan space miner from the future who seemed completely dull-witted and flat. Spoilers beneath the pic.

We tried to talk out exactly what happened with the events surrounding the destruction of Romulus, but even with looking it up on Wikipedia, I still can't figure it out.

The nearest star to Romulus is going supernova (suddenly?) and Spock is dispatched from the Federation with some red goo that supposedly can stop it. He makes it there, but not in time, and Romulus is destroyed. Nero sees this and thinks...what exactly? That Spock was incompetent for being late? Or malicious? This is kind of like swearing vengeance on the paramedic who rushes through traffic to try to save your mom, but doesn't quite make it in time, so you kidnap his own mom and kill her in front of him. This just isn't a comprehensible motivation for a villain. It's just flat-out stupid. Khan's motivation was similar, but a heck of a lot more understandable, and he was far more menacing and seemed far more intelligent than Eric Bana's knuckle-headed, one-note bad guy.

I guess I'm with Roger Ebert, who gave it 2 1/2 stars. He didn't completely hate it, but found it a pretty substanceless bubble-gum action movie. The original Star Trek was about taking us places we've never been and showing us things we've never seen before. It didn't always do a great job, but dammit, it tried. This movie simply doesn't take us anyplace new. For all the talk of a reboot, it's sorely lacking in any kind of originality. That said, it steps us through the paces pretty well, and fast and flashy enough that we don't dwell on the fact that there's really very little there...at least until we get in the car and actually start thinking about it.

Plants vs. Zombies Review

2009-05-09T08:07:00.000-07:00

So I've been playing PopCap's new game Plants vs. Zombies. When I heard they were coming out with a new game called Plants vs. Zombies, I thought that sounded pretty cool. When I found out it was a real-time tower defense game, I was less enthused. I'm not a huge fan of the genre. But I downloaded the demo and liked it enough to purchase the full version. I'm pretty starved for new games since most new ones won't run on my old, creaky machine.

I'm glad I did. The game is pretty fun, and is chock full of variety. There are a ton of plant units: daytime flowers and nighttime mushrooms, units that fire in a line, others that catapult, others that boost firepower, etc., etc. There are lots of different types of zombies as well: armored, bungee-jumping, tunneling, etc.

The plot is loosely based on the idea that you're one of the last survivors of a zombie plague, protecting your house from waves of zombies. There are three main environments: your front lawn, your back yard (which has a pool), and your roof (which is slanted, so you need to use catapulting plants). The main campaign is pretty short, but there are gobs of mini-games and puzzles to offer replay value. Some are pretty banal (zombie whack-a-mole), but others are neat, such as the one where you actually play from the zombie side and eat all the target brains.

One feature that I initially thought was really cool but have become less enthused about is the Zen Garden, which allows you to grow money-producing plants which allow you to buy more upgrades. At first I thought once you tended the plants to a certain size and bought the garden-tending snail that collected coins for you that you could basically leave the garden up as a type of screen saver and generate money while you were away from your PC. But this isn't the case, or at least it's fairly limited. The snail falls asleep if you don't regularly poke him. You can feed him chocolate, which keeps him active for an hour, but that's not quite as cool as a feature that let's you build resources either overnight or while you're at work or school.

It has jogged my brain about including such a feature in a game of my own design, though. World of Warcraft famously had many player using bots to farm for gold and materials while they were away from their PCs. Players were banned and I'm sure Blizzard spent lots of time and resources trying to regulate such practices. But why not just integrate them into the gameplay? The idea of being able to generate resources while you're doing other things is inherently great. If you can make it into a screen-saver type of mini-function of a game, all the better. A garden or factory that produces materials for questing in a passive way seems really appealing. You put it on at night or during the day while you're away, and when you're ready to sit down and play, your inventory is full of materials to brew potions or craft weapons and armor.

Anyway, back to Plants vs. Zombies. The production values are up to PopCap's usual standards. It's a fun game, to be sure. I got it for $20 through their website, but I've heard it's half price through Steam. If they follow their usual pattern, they'll probably lower the price in a few months anyway. I'd recommend it if you're a fan of casual real-time play.

Android Income: How Low Can It Go?

2009-05-08T07:08:00.000-07:00

For the month of April I was consistently making around $20/day in combined ad and sales revenue. As I've mentioned, the way I'm serving up ads in my apps, as dialogs between hands, has apparently habituated people to ignore the ads more and click through less. I've slid down to around $10/day for the past 10 days or so. I'm serving up between 200,000 and 250,000 ads per day, but seeing smaller and smaller click-through rates. The lowest daily rate per thousand ads so far has been $0.02. I haven't seen a 1 cent day, though I'm morbidly curious to know if it can go to fractions of a cent.

In the meantime, I'm trying to be a bit more patient about the release of new apps. I'm holding Golf Solitaire and trying to test it a bit more, hoping to release a more polished product with fewer bugs. I broke my neck trying to get Spades out to be first to market, and that was probably a good idea, but I don't think there's a dire rush on this app. Plus, I'm going to try to release it either Sunday night or early Monday morning. I don't have hard data, but it looks to me as if those are the days when the fewest apps are released (which means the apps will stay in the New Content section longer), while usage is still quite high.

One interesting trend I notice in my ad stats is the number of ads served by day of the week. I serve many more ads on Mondays and Tuesdays, while the number steadily declines throughout the week. It's lowest on weekends, which seems to indicate that people are playing card games on their phones either when they're at work or home, and are probably filling up their leisure time on the weekends with other stuff. So I'm going to try launching my new game on Monday, assuming that all those bored people at work are looking for something new to play. We'll see if it makes a difference.

In terms of tracking usage, I came across Flurry, and analytics package for mobile apps. I downloaded it, but haven't put it in any of my apps yet. Those with ads give me some idea of usage patterns, though it would be nice to have more detailed information. I won't by trying it with my new game, though.

Android Update

2009-04-30T15:35:00.000-07:00

I've been busy with school and continuing Android app development on the side.

Since the last time I blogged, I released Hearts, a paid version and a free version with ads, and an app called Billable, which logs billable hours and lets you email a summary of the activity. Unfortunately, they've all pretty much been flops. I got early bad reviews on both sets of apps, and though the ratings have gone up since then, I think there's a huge influence of the first 1-3 reviewers on your app. Hearts is especially disappointing, since I think both the interface and the AI are better than Spades.

One big difference is that I was the first to publish a version of Spades on the Android Market, while there was already a version of Hearts there when I published mine. I think being first to market is a pretty big advantage.

Some good news is that Spades Free keeps chugging along, still at #3 in Card & Casino Games, with 32,432 downloads (Hearts Free, by comparison, has had 781). But unfortunately, the click rate on my ads keeps steadily declining. I was hoping it would level out at around 0.1% per day, but it just keeps on sliding. Yesterday was the first day I'd made less than $10 from combined ad and sales, which really stinks.

It will be interesting to see how the market changes as it expands, but right now it seems to be pretty difficult to do consistently well.

For my next few apps, I'm going to focus on trying to convert directly into sales, rather than relying on ad revenue, by releasing less functional versions for free and fully-functional paid versions. My next app is a game, a version of golf solitaire with a golf theme. A while back I played Fairway Solitaire, which is a great golf-themed version of golf solitaire. I highly recommend it; it's one of the best casual games I've played. I think the general idea is a lot of fun, so I did my own riff on it, massively scaled-down, of course.

Here are some screenies of my game:

It should be ready for release in another week or so. I'm probably going to release a free version that just let's you play 2 holes, and another that lets you play the full 18. We'll see how that works. I think it could be a popular app, but you never know.

Android Market Update

2009-04-10T09:24:00.001-07:00

Well, a lot has happened with my Android app development in the past couple of weeks. In the first few days of release, my paid Spades version ($2.99) was selling about 40 copies a day. That slacked off to 22 the 4th day, and then 15 the 5th. I had considered releasing a free version with ads, hoping that would bring in a little ad revenue, but mostly lead to conversions to the paid version (for people who find ads annoying). So about a week ago I released a free version with Admob ads displaying in dialog boxes between each hand.

Apparently people would rather click away an ad between each hand than pay a couple of bucks. Sales for the paid version flatlined to 0-2 sales per day after the release of the free version. The good news is that the free version has risen to #3 on the Most Popular Card and Casino games ranking, and #27 in games overall. As of today I've had 12,374 downloads of the game, with 10,464 active installs (84% retention rate). I'm averaging about 1,500 new installations per day.

Here are the Admob stats:

4/3 ads shown: 44,198 clicks: 239 ctr (click-through rate): 0.54%
4/4 ads shown: 76,896 clicks: 318 ctr: 0.41%
4/5 ads shown: 102,529 clicks: 343 ctr: 0.33%
4/6 ads shown: 126,582 clicks: 409 ctr: 0.32%
4/7 ads shown: 171,409 clicks: 509 ctr: 0.29%
4/8 ads shown: 177,829 clicks: 393 ctr: 0.22%
4/9 ads shown: 184,770 clicks: 409 ctr: 0.22%

For now, this is earning me about $20/day. Looking at the numbers, what it looks like is that the click-through rate is falling, probably due to people getting used to automatically dismissing the ad. It would be nice if the numbers continued to climb, so that even with low ctrs I'd still be able to generate a fair amount of ad revenue.

I'll probably be releasing Hearts next week, and I'm thinking of simultaneously releasing an ad version and a $0.99 version. There's already a Hearts app on the market for $1.99 (and the same company released Spades for $1.99 last week, which probably didn't help my paid app sales). I'm debating on whether or not to continue with Admob, or try Google Adsense. I figured out how to embed Adsense ads into my games using a webview. It displays as a banner either at the top or bottom of the screen, and is present at all times. I could have both forms of ads, but that would probably be overdoing it. Although, I haven't gotten a single complaint about the ads in Spades Free yet. I'll decide what to do when the app gets closer to being finished.

Wolfram's New Non-Search Search Engine

2009-04-10T07:28:00.000-07:00

Next month Stephen Wolfram is apparently going to launch WolframAlpha, which he says in a new blog post is not a search engine, but a new way to perform computations on existing information on the internet.

But what about all the actual knowledge that we as humans have accumulated?

A lot of it is now on the web—in billions of pages of text. And with search engines, we can very efficiently search for specific terms and phrases in that text.

But we can’t compute from that. And in effect, we can only answer questions that have been literally asked before. We can look things up, but we can’t figure anything new out.

So how can we deal with that? Well, some people have thought the way forward must be to somehow automatically understand the natural language that exists on the web. Perhaps getting the web semantically tagged to make that easier.

But armed with Mathematica and NKS I realized there’s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable.

Got that? Neither do I.

I am quite interested to see what sorts of answers this thing spits out. Like playing with AI chatbots, I'm sure it will be entertaining as a novelty, but I'm not holding my breath that it will figure out anything new that's not entirely trivial. If I want to know how to make a risotto, I Google "risotto" and find plenty of recipes. For this thing to come up with a new recipe, or a new method for doing something, like building a better mousetrap or folding proteins, it's going to have to have real-world context. This sounds like the old, old claims of AI just dressed up in new clothing. I stand by the claim that a disembodied computer can't meaningfully parse what a dog is purely on the basis of analyzing words and their relations to one another. To handle semantics, something can't just deal with symbols, it has to have access to representations of the referents of those symbols, in other words, sights, sounds, and other sensory input that makes up all the things that the word actually refers to.

Still, it will be fun asking this thing how to cure cancer and see what it comes up with.

Spades for Android

2009-03-27T10:42:00.000-07:00

I've gone from dipping my toes into Android app development to jumping completely in. Over the last week I've put a lot of work into my newest app, Spades. Here's a demo video of what the play looks like:

I tried to make the card design fun and readable. Instead of using individual pips for suits, I used large numbers, which makes them more readable on the small mobile screen. I also made custom Jack, Queen, and King pics out of the Android logo.

The interface design was interesting. I wanted to support play primarily in vertical mode, which seems the most comfortable and natural to me. That presents a difficulty, since the screen is only about four thumb-widths wide. I initially made a hotspot for each card in the player's hand, which divided that horizontal region into 13 equal slices. That just didn't work. Not enough space, and it was very difficult to grab the card you wanted. So I went with a simple magnification scheme. That lower space is divided into four equal parts. When the player clicks in one of the four regions, the four closest cards enlarge. If the player slides their thumb horizontally, they will select one of the four enlarged cards. If they move their thumb up over a particular card, they will pull it out of the hand, and they can then drop it in the center to play.

Right now there are no sounds or animations, which would add to the experience. I just want to get the first version to market, and then incrementally add in other features, including Blind Nil and hopefully eventually network play. The only thing I have left to do is program the partner and opponent AIs, and I'm not out to make them exceptional, just moderately competent. I should be releasing it in the next few days. As of this writing, there are no Spades or Hearts games on offer in the Android Market. I hope to be the first with both.

I'll update here with some sales stats after release.

Lessons Learned From a Week in the Android Market

2009-03-20T09:47:00.000-07:00

So spurred by the acquisition of a G1 Dev Phone and learning about the Android platform, I started developing my own apps. I've set up a website for my little enterprise, called Polyclef Software. Have a look and let me know what you think.

I released my first app, a simple tip calculator with a virtual number pad, a little over a week ago. I set the price at $0.99. So far no one has bought it. This could have something to do with the fact that there are a dozen other tip calculators already in the market, most of them free. Ah well.

Lesson #1: You're probably not going to make money off an app for which there are already many others just like it.

Since then I've released four more apps:

Where Am I? A simple app that pulls GPS data (latitude, longitude, altitude, bearing, and speed) and calculates your distance to the Prime Meridian and equator in km and mi (Price: free)
JoyBuzz A silly app with a big red virtual button. When you press it, your phone vibrates and it makes a buzzing sound (Price: free)
ConcretePal A simple calculator using the same virtual number pad as my tip calculator. You enter the dimensions of a slab to pour and it returns the volume in cubic feet and cubic yards, as well as estimating the number of either 60 lb. or 80 lb. bags of concrete you will need. (Price: $0.99)
DogWhistle An app that generates 5-second sounds at 7 different frequencies, most out of the range of human hearing, but within the range dogs can hear. (Price: $0.99)

Here are the stats so far:

Where Am I?
631 total
389 active installs (61%)

JoyBuzz
1607 total
974 active installs (60%)

ConcretePal
19 total
18 active installs (94%)

DogWhistle
4 total
3 active installs (75%)

I've actually got a bunch more numbers for DogWhistle, but the Google Developer Console hasn't updated them yet. I actually released the app last night. I had read about a popular app for the iPhone that was similar, and since I already had an app that generated sounds on the press of a button, I just swapped them out and put up the app. This was a mistake. I didn't extensively test the app, and as a result, I got an initial barrage of negative comments and cancellations of orders (Google gives you 24 hours to cancel your purchase of an app). So I reworked it, tested it a bit more, and re-released it today.

Lesson #2: Don't release apps impulsively. I was doubtful that the app would even have much interest, but I immediately got a flood of downloads. Which leads me to...

Lesson #3: Unique apps have much more potential for making money.

And another lesson...

Lesson #4: People will spend money for stuff related to their pets.

Now, back to the other paid app that's got sales, ConcretePal. So far this week I've sold 18 copies at 99 cents apiece. Google takes a cut of about 20%, so I'm going to see about $15 out of that. Not too bad for the first week. Although, yesterday I got a negative review from a user (which the developer can't respond to), which said that the calculations were wrong. The calculations are not wrong. This is a simple length x width x height, for frig's sake. The height is in inches, so I have to divide by 12, but the math is correct. I checked it several times, and checked the calculations against other on-line concrete calculators. Also, he said the bag estimates were too high. This may have some merit. Different on-line calculators and sites have slightly different estimates for bags per cubic foot of concrete, but I went with calculations with conservative estimates that take into consideration waste and spillage. I would think an overestimation would generally be better than an underestimation. Anyway, again, the market provides no way to directly address negative comments from users, which sucks. I had one other positive comment from a buyer of ConcretePal, and I hope this one dumb comment doesn't hurt the steady trickle of sales, but we'll see.

Lesson #5: You're stuck with what people say about your app.

I've also gotten several emails from people. Most of them have been about JoyBuzz. I'm kind of surprised it's gotten that many downloads. Some people want to be able to turn the vibrate feature off. Some people what another button that gives a "correct" ding. Who knows...I may throw those things in, but not right now. I basically wrote the app to learn how to make the phone vibrate and emit noise based on user input. Same with the GPS app, which I basically wrote to learn how to access the GPS information, in case I wanted to write a more complicated app that used the users location for some purpose.

Lesson #6: You can never tell what people might be interested in.

Anyway, my next app will be a card game. It's much more complicated than any of the apps I've done so far, so it will probably take another week or two. I'll post here about it when it's released.

The TMobile G1

2009-03-12T09:08:00.000-07:00

I recently got a TMobile G1 phone as a gift.

It's pretty darn cool. Like the IPhone, it features a touch screen interface, wireless internet access, GPS, and access to a market of free and paid applications you can run on it. Unlike the IPhone, the G1 also has a keyboard that's accessible if you slide the screen up. The phone runs Android, an open-source operating system based on Linux that runs apps written in Java.

I also downloaded the Android SDK and have been playing around with it a bit. My first app is a tip calculator called "TippinTime", which features an onscreen keyboard (for those who don't like the built-in keyboard), calculates the tip, total check, and split amounts for the tip and total.

Building an app with Android is pretty straightforward. The layout of onscreen elements like text fields and buttons is specified in an XML file. A Java file accesses the IDs of the elements in the XML file and let's you add functionality based on events like touching a button.

I plan on implementing a number of simple apps and trying to sell them for $0.99 a piece on the Android Market to see how that goes. An acquaintance recently put some simple apps for sale on the IPhone market and he's earned a few hundred bucks from it.

I'm especially interested in playing with the GPS capabilities. I was looking at an example today that let's you access the phone's GPS features and fetch features like latitude, longitude, altitude, speed, etc. There's an app for the IPhone called TrailGuru that graphs your progress while hiking or biking, gives you summary statistics, and let's you share them on a community website. I may work on a similar app for Android at some point.

I'm also intrigued by the barcode scanning functionality of the device. Here's a website that reviews two shopping apps that let you scan barcodes automatically with the camera built into the phone.

I downloaded a few apps to play around with them, and the scanning process itself works very well. Unfortunately, the database of current items is either incomplete or inaccurate for many products. For example, I scanned a box of Nabisco crackers as a test case.

One of the apps detected it as "The Best of Red Skelton" video.

Which is funny, but not all that useful. The apps did a good job of integrating with the web. I could scan a box of Cheerios and find the best deal if I wanted to buy them off the internet. But the most useful feature, comparing prices at local retailers, didn't work in any of the apps I tried, which kind of sucks. I'd like to be able to scan a box of cereal in my supermarket, and see what it costs in other stores in the area. Of course, this would mean that shopping would take approximately 100 times longer, since I'd be scanning just about everything in the store. But it would be cool, at least until the novelty wore off.

Bar codes are also on a ton of other things, from business cards in Japan to movie posters. Unfortunately, the hard part is building up the databases for reference. But I can already see the potential for this kind of technology, and it would be a lot of fun working on apps that exploit the bar code scanning capabilities of the phone.

I'm pretty impressed with the phone overall, but there are two big gripes with it. One, the battery life is pretty bad, especially when using some of the higher-end features. Also, the touch-screen interface is not very good. I put a screen protector on it, which I think has reduced its effectiveness, but even before then it wasn't working very well. I've seen some side-by-side comparisons with the IPhone, and I think in general the responsiveness of their touch interface is better. Although, the G1 does have a built-in keyboard, which does work pretty well. I'm not happy that there's no setting to adjust the touch-screen sensitivity, though. I'm not sure why...maybe it's very complicated.

Anyway, at some point I'm going to launch a simple website as a portal for the side projects (games and apps) I'm working on. I'll post a link here when it's up and running.

Why People Who Don't Understand Evolution Shouldn't Write Science Books

2009-03-03T07:19:00.001-08:00

Recently I started listening to Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa. It's about evolutionary psychology, a relatively new field which seeks to answer questions about human behavior under the assumption that there is a strong genetic component to behavior and that adaptive behaviors have evolved. So we can understand modern psychology by examining the conditions under which our ancestors evolved, namely a hunter-gatherer social unit, small in number (~30-40 individuals) living in savanna conditions.

There's some value in this approach, to be sure, and the book starts out all right, by discussing possible types of bias that people can fall into. Both involve confusing the way things are with the way things should be. The authors call these the naturalistic fallacy, in which people believe that because that's the way it is, that inherently makes it morally correct (e.g., nature is harsh and unforgiving so human societies should be harsh and unforgiving). The moralistic fallacy is the opposite, believing that things are the way you think they should be (e.g., all races and genders should be treated with equal respect and given equal rights, therefore there are no significant differences in measurable capacities such as intelligence or athletic ability between genders or races). But then the authors state blithely that they're not going to fall into either trap by simply not discussing the way things should be, but by sticking to the facts. Which is dumb. You don't have to explicitly talk about they way things should be to commit either fallacy. But hey, whatever. I let that slide and kept listening.

What made me press the eject button was the bit where they actually start talking about how evolution works. This snippet from an interview with Kanazawa basically restates the position from the book:

In fact, we’re not playing catch up; we’re stuck. For any evolutionary change to take place, the environment has to remain more or less constant for many generations, so that evolution can select the traits that are adaptive and eliminate those that are not. When the environment undergoes rapid change within the space of a generation or two, as it has been for the last couple of millennia, if not more, then evolution can’t happen because nature can’t determine which traits to select and which to eliminate. So they remain at a standstill. Our brain (and the rest of our body) are essentially frozen in time — stuck in the Stone Age.

That may sound reasonable on the surface. The problem is, it's flat out wrong. It's utterly, horribly, unmistakably wrong.

First of all, evolution in the strictest biological sense simply means change. Specifically it's a change in the makeup of the gene pool of an interbreeding population over time. Natural selection is just one way in which the number and types of genes in a population can change. It's a powerful mechanism, no doubt, but it's not the only mechanism. There's also a little thing called genetic drift, which is basically the effect of chance on changes in gene distributions. For those with any statistics in their background, you can think of it as sampling bias.

The point is, even if in an idealized model in which no selection were acting on a population, it would still continue to evolve. But besides that, there has been a torrent of recent research demonstrating that not only has human evolution not ground to a halt, it has actually accelerated. Check out this post on John Hawks' excellent blog regarding the increasing rate of genetic change in human populations.

Anyway, when someone is writing a book about how evolution affects behavior, they need to demonstrate a basic working understanding of evolution. By completely failing to do so, so early in the book, the authors actually saved me a fair amount of time. Why should I listen to someone ostensibly trying to teach me about a subject that they don't even have a basic grasp of?

I didn't even get to the explanation of why beautiful people supposedly have more daughters, but based on what I'd read so far, I be a lot less credulous about any claims they make.

Republicans and Science

2009-03-02T09:02:00.000-08:00

My sympathies are split between the Democratic and Republican parties. I generally support the social liberalism that the Democratic party espouses, while supporting the avowed fiscal conservatism and hawkish foreign policy of the Republicans. But there's one issue that's recently turned me more and more off the Republican establishment, and that's their public perspective on science.

During the Presidential campaign, McCain mocked the idea of upgrading the projection system in a planetarium, and Palin made fun of fruit fly research, which is essential to continued research in genetics. They both looked like backwards assholes.

And in his response to Obama's Congressional address, Louisiana Governor and rising Republican star Bobby Jindal pulled the same shit, mocking magnetically-levitating high speed rails (with a tone that suggested it was akin to voodoo), and worse, making fun of "something called volcano monitoring". As a number of bloggers, scientists and laymen, have pointed out, far from being frivolous, volcano monitoring is an essential component of natural disaster prevention for those in potentially-affected areas. Would "something called hurricane monitoring" be just as ludicrous?

Look, there are more and less legitimate scientific spending projects. If you think the money is better spent on one project as opposed to another, say so. But what the Republicans have systematically been engaged in is a kind of populist, intellectual warfare where they mention a scientific spending project as if it's the most absurd thing we could be spending money on. I think they think this will resonate with an average voter, and it just might, but at the expense of sowing further misunderstanding and distrust of the scientific community, and potentially jeopardizing legitimate investment in research and technology, which is a bedrock of American innovation and economic strength.

If these top-tiered leaders of the Republican party really don't understand the projects, then they should just keep their mouths shut. But I think it's probably the more egregious case where they actually understand the issues, but are just trying to score political points by exploiting ignorance and mistrust.

Either way, it really pisses me off.

Academic Earth

2009-02-20T07:43:00.000-08:00

Slate has an article up about Academic Earth, a site with video lectures of university courses. It's a neat idea, but they don't appear to have a whole lot of content so far.

If you want interesting talks, TED is still the first place to look. Academic Earth may be a good site to bookmark and keep your eye on, though.

Quatrain

2009-02-16T08:30:00.001-08:00

So I'm in my fourth year of graduate school in Cognitive Science, and my minor is Computer Science. However, the only programming language I have any familiarity with is Java. So I made a New Year's resolution of sorts to at least get my hands dirty with another language this year, as a side project. C++ is a very widely used language in industry and academia, so I thought I'd learn a little C++ by working on a project not directly related to my dissertation work.

I've always liked games of all sorts, so I decided to try my hand at writing a game. I didn't really want to write something from scratch. You can learn a lot that way, but I find that I learn more in programming by starting with an existing framework, seeing others accomplished things, and incrementally adding my own stuff. So I poked around and found the PopCap Framework, which is an open-source set of code for implementing 2D games. PopCap are the makers of the 3-match Bejeweled series, the Peggle games, Zuma, and many others, and they're an industry leader in the casual game market. So I downloaded their framework in early January and started working through the tutorials.

There was a very good tutorial on coding up a version of Breakout, so I started working through that, but it didn't lead to a finished project, and I wanted to actually try working on my own game. So I initially got the idea for a Peggle variant. I started working on that, and needed to use a physics engine. I started to get it working reasonably well when another game idea hit me.

It's easier from both a game play and programming perspective, so I shifted my spare programming hours to the new project, which I called Quatrain. Here's a screen shot of the work in progress:

The object of the game is to drag tiles that are generated one at a time in the little box on the left side of the screen and drop them onto the playing area. To make a legal move, the tile must be dropped so that it connects to an existing tile on the board and the adjacent colors match. The tile to be dropped can be rotated as well, by pressing either the clockwise or counterclockwise buttons on the left of the screen.

When a given solid shape is completely surrounded by either other colors or the edge of the playing area, that shape gets grayed out, and the player gets incrementally more points for each triangle in the bounded shape. If a whole tile gets grayed out, it is destroyed, and the player gets points for that too.

With each shape bounded, the score goes up and the progress bar at the top of the field increments. When the progress bar fills, the player moves on to the next level. Each new level requires a little more progress to complete, and every five levels a new color is added, for a maximum of seven colors. The playable tiles spawn with random colors, and if a new tile spawns that is unplayable, the player can hit the "New Tile" button to destroy it and spawn another new tile. The player starts out with 4 of these mulligans, but earns a new one every 500,000 points.

This is the standard mode, which is untimed, and allows play and progression until the player either gets tired or runs out of New Tiles and gets an unplayable tile. Much like Bejeweled, I plan on implementing three other modes of play: Timed, Puzzle (in which players must form particular shapes to complete each level), and Neverending (which lets the player choose the number of colors and gives them an unlimited supply of New Tiles).

I'm going to put up a website, probably in the next few weeks, and at some point put up a downloadable demo. I'm interested in getting feedback on the gameplay and incorporating that into a final version. So watch this blog for the next few weeks if you're interested in beta testing the game. If you're friends or family I may try to twist your arm into trying it out. :)

Dollhouse

2009-02-16T08:16:00.001-08:00

I watched the series premiere of Joss Whedon's new Fox series Dollhouse the other day. I can't say I was blown away, but it was interesting enough to make me want to watch more.

The story involves a secret business that caters to the rich and powerful by providing them with "dolls", people who have had their own memory erased and implanted with false memories and personalities. A given doll can apparently be wiped any number of times and overwritten with new personalities, which makes for a decent hook for a weekly show. The show is centered around Echo, who in the first episode we see signing her life over to the dollhouse, though we don't know any of her own backstory.

We see her become a rich guy's dream date for a weekend, and then return to the dollhouse to be wiped and reprogrammed to be a top-notch hostage negotiator for another client. The dolls apparently don't know what's going on, and they always seem to be implanted with a false memory relating to their need to receive some kind of medical treatment (which is an easy way to corral them back into the mind-wiping machine).

There are some subplots: each doll has a handler that shadows them on assignments, and Echo's is an ex-cop who may not always have the interests of his employers at heart. On the outside, there's a detective who is investigating the dollhouse, for which he apparently has no hard evidence that it exists. And then there was another mystery player introduced at the end of the show.

So they've done a good job of throwing an interesting hook and a lot of good dramatic elements into the show. I like that the show doesn't explain every little detail, but that can also make it obscure at points. But my biggest issue is suspension of disbelief. When I first heard about the show, I thought it would be set in the future, along the lines of Whedon's Firefly. But no, it's set in present day, where some rogue band of scientists have independently figured out completely how the mind, memories, and personalities work to the point where they can erase, implant, and mold them at will. They also have a database of just about every possible skill set and personality type that exists, from which they can sculpt any new amalgam they want.

This is really hard to swallow, but hopefully I'll be able to manage it, because it seems like it could be a decent show.

Louisiana's Shameful Science Policy Hits Its Wallets

2009-02-14T16:20:00.000-08:00

Via Pharyngula, last year Louisiana passed the ironically-named "Louisiana Science Education Act", which is basically one in a long string of dumb pieces of legislation used by Creationists to try to sneak religion in the back door of schools. The wording says something about allowing teachers to bring special materials (i.e. non-approved textbook materials) to refute particular "controversial" topics like evolution and global warming.

Many scientific organizations urged our Governor to boycott the bill, but he's a religious conservative so he ignored them and signed it into law. And now it's hurting Louisiana in more ways that one.

The annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology was going to be held in New Orleans this year, but because of the passing of this moronic bill, the organizers decided to move the venue to Salt Lake City. So the stupidity of this bill basically cost the New Orleans local economy a week's worth of revenue from about 2,000 scientists and students who would have attended the meeting.

So not only is such legislation medieval and educationally-backward, it's economically-damaging. Unless, of course, the hit is offset by religious or creationists groups coming here when they otherwise wouldn't because the state is a haven for science-denial. Good times.

Mmm...Evolicious

2009-02-13T06:10:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birthday, so there's been a lot of evolution-themed stuff on the web. Here's a cool roundup of Daily Show clips related to evolution, and here's my favorite clip:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Evolution Schmevolution - Overview

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Funny Political News
Joke of the Day

What's not to like about a fire-breathing giraffe?

Identifying Molesters By Distraction

2009-02-12T07:45:00.000-08:00

There's an interesting post over at Cognitive Daily about attempts to identify child molesters using a psychological test, specifically Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP).

Often the test is done with words. A subject will be shown a series of words on a computer screen, flashed in rapid succession, and they'll have to identify certain target words (Cognitive Daily has an example, go check it out). Distractor words are placed in the sample in order to measure the effect those types of words have on the task.

This molester study was carried out with pictures. In a series of rapidly flashed pictures, subjects had to try to identify target pictures (chairs and trains), and two types of distractors were used, pictures of children and of animals. The researchers found a significant difference between the accuracy rates of non-molestors and convicted child molestors. In other words, molestors are more distracted in this task by pictures of children.

So would this be a reliable way of identifying child molesters? I don't think so. Dave Munger points out:

Others who are interested in kids, like teachers, new parents, and grandparents, might also be distracted by pictures of kids. They've done some preliminary research suggesting this is not the case, but perhaps other non-dangerous populations would be mistakenly identified using this test.

As I noted in the comments over there, one of the first things I thought about were parents who had lost a child. They would be a relatively small segment of the population, but my guess is that you would see a large distraction effect for pictures of children in this group. And you really wouldn't want to tag a parent who had lost a child as a potential child molester.

That's one big problem with psychological tests that measure a specific response. If you don't have a firm grasp on the mechanism at work, and all possible causes of the effect, then it's far too blunt an instrument to really do anything useful. In this particular case, the risk of false positives is so great that you really wouldn't want this approach anywhere near a police station or a court of law.

Lie to Me

2009-01-28T12:48:00.000-08:00

I got burned on the last police procedural that involved an unorthodox genius who is virtually able to read minds based on his knowledge of psychology, body language, and purposeful deception. That last show was The Mentalist, and while it started out decently, it got very silly, very fast.

So I wasn't sure whether I'd want to give the new Tim Roth drama, Lie to Me, a chance. It's about a guy named Dr. Cal Lightman, who has studied the body language and its correspondence to truthfulness and deception in depth. The character is apparently based on real psychologist Paul Ekman.

So I checked out the first episode, and though it was guilty of the gratuitous use of slow motion at the end, overall it was interesting and watchable enough to make me want to see more. It also stars Kelli Williams, who was on The Practice, which was a guilty pleasure of mine, and she's good.

At one point in the show, when Williams' character tells Lightman he should try to be happier, he says something like "Truth or happiness...you can't have both." He may have been saying it ironically...I don't know. Because he spends the whole trying to expose the truth of a given situation, and does, and it certainly makes certain characters a lot more happy, and others not so much. But the general theme of truth and deception as it relates to morality and happiness is an interesting one which could develop into a thought-provoking show.

On the other hand, the show could easily degenerate into silly parlor tricks. We'll see. But if you haven't seen the first episode, I'd tentatively recommend it.

Inauguration Day

2009-01-20T07:44:00.000-08:00

I haven't felt much like blogging in the past couple of weeks. For one, I've been pretty busy. But sometimes you just get a little burned out blabbing every day (or at least, most people do). In the meantime, my sister had a baby, Daniel, so I'm now an uncle all over again, which is cool.

And of course today is the inauguration of our new President.

I first heard about Obama when he gave his speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004. I just read excerpts, but I wasn't a fan of the Democratic Party, or John Kerry, and the cynic in me thought that this was just an instance of throwing a politically-correct bone to a rising star in the party. I thought he was just a flash in the pan.

But that was before I actually knew much about him or listened to him talk. The more I did that, the more impressed I was. There actually does seem to be a core of substance to him, although that's difficult to assess solely on the basis of rhetoric. Now that he's taking office, his actions will truly tell what kind of leader he is. Things are not going great in our country right now, so here's hoping for all our sakes that he lives up, at least in some measure, to the hype.

Using ANJI

2009-01-06T09:08:00.000-08:00

One of the things that led me on the path back to school was a rekindling of my interest in neural networks and artificial intelligence. In 2002 my friend Philip took a neural networks class at The University of Texas at Dallas, and I audited it along with him. After that, I started reading a lot of academic papers related to neural networks and game AI. At some point I came across Ken Stanley's work, which involved using evolutionary algorithms to optimize the organization and weights of neural networks. That really lit things up for me.

After looking at the existing implementations of Stanley's algorithm, called NEAT (NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies), we decided to implement our own version, which we called ANJI (Another NEAT Java Implementation). There was already an existing NEAT Java implementation, but we wanted to do our own, partially to really learn the algorithm inside and out.

We made the software open source, which means that anyone can access it, use it, and alter it in just about any way they want, and we released it in January of 2004 on SourceForge. Here's the homepage of the project (though I should probably update it).

In the past four years, it's been downloaded over 1,500 times, and used in various projects and research. I hadn't Googled it in a while, but I was pleased to see some of the following examples of people using ANJI:

Rudolf Kradec used it in his 2008 Master's Thesis on the evolution of intelligent behavior in computer games at Charles University in Prague.

John Peberdy used it for a final project for a computer science class at The University of Waterloo last year on evolving agents (he's got some cool movies, too).

And Oliver Chamberlain used it for work on evolving controllers for robotic soccer players at The University of Birmingham in 2008.

The download rate has been fairly consistent over the past four years, with about 400 downloads per year. These aren't staggering numbers, but I think they're pretty good for a highly-specialized piece of scientific software. Anyway, it's cool to see people consistently using something you worked on to investigate the same kinds of questions you're interested in.

Derek's Year in Movies 2008

2009-01-06T06:43:00.000-08:00

Here's a list of all the movies released this year that I saw (there are 35), along with my rating:

* "Appaloosa" (B+)
* "The Bank Job" (B)
* "Burn After Reading" (B)
* "Cloverfield" (A-)
* "The Dark Knight" (C+)
* "Doubt" (B+)
* "Eagle Eye" (C)
* "Expelled" (F)
* "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" (C+)
* "Get Smart" (C+)
* "Hancock" (D)
* "Hellboy 2" (B)
* "Horton Hears A Who" (B)
* "In Bruges" (C+)
* "Incredible Hulk" (C+)
* "Indiana Jones 4" (B+)
* "Iron Man" (A)
* "Jumper" (C)
* "Kung Fu Panda" (A-)
* "Mirrors" (C)
* "Rambo 4" (C)
* "Redbelt" (B-)
* "Religulous" (A-)
* "The Ruins" (B-)
* "Slumdog Millionaire" (B)
* "The Spirit" (F)
* "Star Wars: Clone Wars" (C)
* "Step Brothers" (B)
* "The Strangers" (C+)
* "Sukiyaki Western Django" (???)
* "Teeth" (B+)
* "Tropic Thunder" (D)
* "Valkyrie" (A-)
* "WALL*E" (C)
* "Wanted" (B+)

No doubt you'll disagree with me on some of these, but that's the way it goes, right? If you want, go make your own list.

I was going to do a Best and Worst 10, and then realized I didn't like enough films to do a Top 10. It was hard even coming up with a Top 3. Instead I'll just designate some special awards:

Best Superhero Movie of the Year: Iron Man

Most people will probably think The Dark Knight was the best superhero film of the year. They'd be wrong. True, Heath Ledger was incredibly good as The Joker, but just about everything else about the movie sucked balls, from Batman's ludicrous gravelly voice, to the silly boat dilemma, to the preachiness about civil liberties, to handling Two-Face's origin, career, and death in half an hour, to the absurdly moronic final lines. No, Iron Man was what a superhero movie should be: fun, slick, and action-packed. Bonus points for having an engineer as the hero.

Worst Piece of Propagandizing Swill: Expelled

Ben Stein and the producers of this film set out with deceit and a room full of shitty vintage stock footage and managed to make the most intellectually dishonest celluloid turd I've ever seen put to film. This film wasn't just anti-evolution; it was anti-anything-close-to-rational-thought. And to boot, it was just utterly shitty film-making.

So Bad It Was Good: Redbelt

This was a tough one. There were other strong candidates in Eagle Eye and Wanted, both with plots so silly you just had to laugh (or you'd cry). Wanted was probably the better of those two, for the simple fact that it had people shooting guns and slinging them to alter their trajectory, and they practiced on dead pigs! It also had an army of bomb-wielding rats. In short, it out-sillied Eagle Eye, and that's saying something. But David Mamet's philosophical mixed martial arts movie took the prize, mostly because it took itself so mother-fucking seriously. I think Mamet actually thought he was penning something profound, and not some silly little movie about grift and guys wrestling and kicking each other. And the ending was so very, very silly. But it made me smile.

WTF: Sukiyaki Western Django

Unlike the last category, this one was clear-cut. This bizarre Western with Japanese actors speaking mangled, Southern-US-affected dialect while dressed in outlandish costumes, wielding guns and swords while Quentin Tarantino was some kind of goofy Greek chorus...it was supposed to be cool, but it made my brain hurt.

Overall it just wasn't a very good year. Here's hoping things are better in 2009.

Tooth Regeneration

2009-01-06T06:30:00.000-08:00

Via a SlashDot posting entitled "Tooth Regeneration Coming Soon" (they do love to sensationalize over there, don't they?) comes this rather goofy article in the Washington Post about using stem cells to regrow teeth.

I say it's goofy because it's one of those pop science articles chock full of pop culture references (e.g. Dr. Strangelove) that have nothing to do with the topic at hand, and it's over halfway through before they get to the current state of research, which isn't exactly "soon".

Regenerating a whole tooth is no less complicated than rebuilding a whole heart, says Songtao Shi of the University of Southern California, who heads a team working on creating such a tooth.

Not only do you have to create smart tissue (nerves), strong tissue (ligaments) and soft tissue (pulp), you've got to build enamel -- by far the hardest structural element in the body. And you have to have openings for blood vessels and nerves. And you have to make the whole thing stick together. And you have to anchor it in bone. And then you have to make the entire arrangement last a lifetime in the juicy stew of bacteria that is your mouth.

...

Nobody is predicting when the first whole tooth will be grown in a human, although five to 10 years is a common guess. "The whole tooth -- we've got a long way to go," says Shi.

But his team is pursuing what he believes is a practical and immediate result: growing important parts of teeth that he thinks people will want to use right away. They're working on creating a living root from scratch. "I think it will take a year," Shi says. "Depends on how lucky we are, and how good we are."

"How to make a root is real important," says Robey. "Dentists say, 'Give me a root and I can put a crown on it.' "

In addition, "we're really, really close to treating periodontal disease with regeneration," Shi says. Groups in Japan and Taiwan and at the University of Michigan are using stem cells to create hard and soft tissue in humans, he says. The idea is to take a tooth about to fall out and reconnect it firmly.

When you ask Shi how close we are to growing full teeth on demand, he laughs. But his crew has already created a living root using stem cells in a pig. "We did it. It works. We're happy. We still have some questions to answer, but we're working on it."

But then you've got clinical trials and FDA approval and all that, so I'd go ahead and double even the most optimistic estimates. Futurists geeks just love to overspeculate on the latest technology, but it needs to be tempered with a bit of realism.

That said, it will happen, and the technology of regrowing lost teeth from stem cells, while not nearly as important as regrowing brain or heart tissue, is still pretty damned awesome.

Tim Minchin's Storm

2009-01-03T19:11:00.000-08:00

Via PodBlack Cat, here are the words to Tim Minchin's beat poem Storm:

Inner North London, top floor flat
All white walls, white carpet, white cat,
Rice Paper partitions
Modern art and ambition
The host’s a physician,
Lovely bloke, has his own practice
His girlfriend’s an actress
An old mate from home
And they’re always great fun.
So to dinner we’ve come.

The 5th guest is an unknown,
The hosts have just thrown
Us together for a favour
because this girl’s just arrived from Australia
And has moved to North London
And she’s the sister of someone
Or has some connection.

As we make introductions
I’m struck by her beauty
She’s irrefutably fair
With dark eyes and dark hair
But as she sits
I admit I’m a little bit wary
because I notice the tip of the wing of a fairy
Tattooed on that popular area
Just above the derrière
And when she says “I’m Sagittarien”
I confess a pigeonhole starts to form
And is immediately filled with pigeon
When she says her name is Storm.

Chatter is initially bright and light hearted
But it’s not long before Storm gets started:
“You can’t know anything,
Knowledge is merely opinion”
She opines, over her Cabernet Sauvignon
Vis a vis
Some unhippily
Empirical comment by me

“Not a good start” I think
We’re only on pre-dinner drinks
And across the room, my wife
Widens her eyes
Silently begs me, Be Nice
A matrimonial warning
Not worth ignoring
So I resist the urge to ask Storm
Whether knowledge is so loose-weave
Of a morning
When deciding whether to leave
Her apartment by the front door
Or a window on the second floor.

The food is delicious and Storm,
Whilst avoiding all meat
Happily sits and eats
While the good doctor, slightly pissedly
Holds court on some anachronistic aspect of medical history
When Storm suddenly she insists
“But the human body is a mystery!
Science just falls in a hole
When it tries to explain the the nature of the soul.”

My hostess throws me a glance
She, like my wife, knows there’s a chance
That I’ll be off on one of my rants
But my lips are sealed.
I just want to enjoy my meal
And although Storm is starting to get my goat
I have no intention of rocking the boat,
Although it’s becoming a bit of a wrestle
Because - like her meteorological namesake -
Storm has no such concerns for our vessel:

“Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy
They promote drug dependency
At the cost of the natural remedies
That are all our bodies need
They are immoral and driven by greed.
Why take drugs
When herbs can solve it?
Why use chemicals
When homeopathic solvents
Can resolve it?
It’s time we all return-to-live
With natural medical alternatives.”

And try as hard as I like,
A small crack appears
In my diplomacy-dike.
“By definition”, I begin
“Alternative Medicine”, I continue
“Has either not been proved to work,
Or been proved not to work.
You know what they call “alternative medicine”
That’s been proved to work?
Medicine.”

“So you don’t believe
In ANY Natural remedies?”

“On the contrary actually:
Before we came to tea,
I took a natural remedy
Derived from the bark of a willow tree
A painkiller that’s virtually side-effect free
It’s got a weird name,
Darling, what was it again?
Masprin?
Basprin?
Asprin!
Which I paid about a buck for
Down at my local drugstore.

The debate briefly abates
As our hosts collects plates
but as they return with desserts
Storm pertly asserts,

“Shakespeare said it first:
There are more things in heaven and earth
Than exist in your philosophy…
Science is just how we’re trained to look at reality,
It can’t explain love or spirituality.
How does science explain psychics?
Auras; the afterlife; the power of prayer?”

I’m becoming aware
That I’m staring,
I’m like a rabbit suddenly trapped
In the blinding headlights of vacuous crap.
Maybe it’s the Hamlet she just misquothed
Or the eighth glass of wine I just quaffed
But my diplomacy dike groans
And the arsehole held back by its stones
Can be held back no more:

“Look , Storm, I don’t mean to bore you
But there’s no such thing as an aura!
Reading Auras is like reading minds
Or star-signs or tea-leaves or meridian lines
These people aren’t plying a skill,
They are either lying or mentally ill.
Same goes for those who claim to hear God’s demands
And Spiritual healers who think they have magic hands.

By the way,
Why is it OK
For people to pretend they can talk to the dead?
Is it not totally fucked in the head
Lying to some crying woman whose child has died
And telling her you’re in touch with the other side?
That’s just fundamentally sick
Do we need to clarify that there’s no such thing as a psychic?
What, are we fucking 2?
Do we actually think that Horton Heard a Who?
Do we still think that Santa brings us gifts?
That Michael Jackson hasn’t had facelifts?
Are we still so stunned by circus tricks
That we think that the dead would
Wanna talk to pricks
Like John Edwards?

Storm to her credit despite my derision
Keeps firing off clichés with startling precision
Like a sniper using bollocks for ammunition

“You’re so sure of your position
But you’re just closed-minded
I think you’ll find
Your faith in Science and Tests
Is just as blind
As the faith of any fundamentalist”

“Hm that’s a good point, let me think for a bit
Oh wait, my mistake, it’s absolute bullshit.
Science adjusts it’s beliefs based on what’s observed
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved.
If you show me
That, say, homeopathy works,
Then I will change my mind
I’ll spin on a fucking dime
I’ll be embarrassed as hell,
But I will run through the streets yelling
It’s a miracle! Take physics and bin it!
Water has memory!
And while it’s memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is Infinite
It somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it!

You show me that it works and how it works
And when I’ve recovered from the shock
I will take a compass and carve Fancy That on the side of my cock.”

Everyones just staring at me now,
But I’m pretty pissed and I’ve dug this far down,
So I figure, in for penny, in for a pound:

“Life is full of mysteries, yeah
But there are answers out there
And they won’t be found
By people sitting around
Looking serious
And saying isn’t life mysterious?
Let’s sit here and hope
Let’s call up the fucking Pope
Let’s go watch Oprah
Interview Deepak Chopra

If you’re going to watch tele, you should watch Scooby Doo.
That show was so cool
because every time there’s a church with a ghoul
Or a ghost in a school
They looked beneath the mask and what was inside?
The fucking janitor or the dude who runs the waterslide.
Throughout history
Every mystery
EVER solved has turned out to be
Not Magic.

Does the idea that there might be truth
Frighten you?
Does the idea that one afternoon
On Wiki-fucking-pedia might enlighten you
Frighten you?
Does the notion that there may not be a supernatural
So blow your hippy noodle
That you would rather just stand in the fog
Of your inability to Google?

Isn’t this enough?
Just this world?
Just this beautiful, complex
Wonderfully unfathomable world?
How does it so fail to hold our attention
That we have to diminish it with the invention
Of cheap, man-made Myths and Monsters?
If you’re so into Shakespeare
Lend me your ear:
“To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw perfume on the violet… is just fucking silly”
Or something like that.
Or what about Satchmo?!
I see trees of Green,
Red roses too,
And fine, if you wish to
Glorify Krishna and Vishnu
In a post-colonial, condescending
Bottled-up and labeled kind of way
That’s ok.
But here’s what gives me a hard-on:
I am a tiny, insignificant, ignorant lump of carbon.
I have one life, and it is short
And unimportant…
But thanks to recent scientific advances
I get to live twice as long as my great great great great uncles and auntses.
Twice as long to live this life of mine
Twice as long to love this wife of mine
Twice as many years of friends and wine
Of sharing curries and getting shitty
With good-looking hippies
With fairies on their spines
And butterflies on their titties.

And if perchance I have offended
Think but this and all is mended:
We’d as well be 10 minutes back in time,
For all the chance you’ll change your mind.

Seven Pounds

2009-01-03T07:04:00.000-08:00

The newest movie starring Will Smith got savaged among reviewers. I saw it recently, and I think the ultra-harsh reviews were a bit unfair. The movie is about a man named Ben who seems to be stalking and examining an odd array of people. He also seems very troubled. What's going on? It's impossible to talk about the specifics of the movie without spoiling it, so I'll do that below the picture. But just about anyone paying close attention to the movie can figure out in broad strokes what's going on in the first 15 minutes. But this is one thing I actually liked about the movie. It was a puzzle of sorts. You're given fragments, pieces of something broken, and you need to piece them together to make sense of what you're seeing. I think movies like that are interesting, if done well, and I think Seven Pounds is done reasonably well.

[SPOILERS BELOW]

So what's the big mystery? Ben is not Ben, but actually Tim. He's using his brother's credentials as an IRS agent to investigate people, specifically people who need organ or tissue transplants. Tim used to be a big-shot aerospace engineer with a beautiful fiance. But one night he was driving his car along a windy road, checking his Blackberry, and he caused a wreck which killed seven people, including his fiance.

So he decides to help seven other people. But he wants to make sure they're good people, hence the stalking. He donates part of his liver to a social worker. He donates bone marrow to a dying boy. He gives a kidney to a man and his house to an abused woman and her children. But he's apparently so stricken with guilt that his final acts of charity involve killing himself. His final donations are his eyes to a blind man and his heart to a woman named Emily who has congenital heart disease.

There's a wrinkle with this last one, since while investigating Emily, he falls in love with her. But her condition worsens and when the doctor tells him that she has about a 3% chance to find a donor, he does the math and kills himself to give her his heart.

All the actors are good, and the direction is competent, and I actually found the situation poignant. I would have liked a scene between Tim and his friend or a psychiatrist or someone trying to talk him out of it, just to see more of what was going through his head and his rationale, but that might have actually made the film worse. I could actually believe that someone who had killed seven people through recklessness would try to atone for it this way. The only really absurd part that pulled me out of the movie was the way in which he killed himself.

By jellyfish. Yes, that's right...he got a jellyfish into his motel room, filled his bathtub with ice, and went swimming with a jellyfish. He even put down a laminated sign near the tub that read "DO NOT TOUCH THE JELLYFISH" for the paramedics. I think the writers thought that this was a poetic way to commit suicide. There's an early scene where Tim as a boy is taken to the zoo by his father, and we see the ethereal movement of the jellyfish in their tank. So I'm pretty sure I know what the creators were going for, but unfortunately it didn't really work, and as a result was the silliest part of the movie. I think the suicide by jellyfish is what earned it such scorn (28% on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing). Which is a shame, because it really is an interesting, well-made, if emotionally-manipulative movie. It could even have been a powerful movie if Tim had actually researched a way to kill himself that would preserve his organs that didn't involve a friggin' jellyfish.

One last note: I was reminded of the philosophical conundrum of sacrificing a single person to save some number of strangers. It usually goes something like this: Is is ethical to kidnap and kill a healthy person in order to use their organs to save seven healthy people? In studies, people usually find such scenarios highly unethical, though in forced choice situations (e.g., a madman puts you in a room with two buttons, one of which kills a single person, the other kills seven, and if you don't press either, they all die) it is usually deemed ethical to kill one person rather than seven. The organ transplant scenario is not normally seen as a forced choice (even if we could reliably predict that all seven people will be dead within a month). Anyway, Seven Pounds has the capacity to lead to some interesting discussions of philosophy and morality, despite the silly business with the jellyfish.

The Dragon in My Garage by Carl Sagan

2009-01-03T06:56:00.000-08:00

Here's a classic excerpt from Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle In the Dark:

"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"

Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle--but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick."

And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.

The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility.

Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative-- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of "not proved."

Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons--to say nothing about invisible ones--you must now acknowledge that there's something here, and that in a preliminary way it's consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it's not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you're pretty sure don't know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages--but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we're disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I'd rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren't myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they're never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon's fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such "evidence" -- no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it -- is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

I thought it was funny that the referring page had to point out that the dragon was a metaphor for god.

Why I Gave Up on the Neanderthal Parallax

2008-12-29T07:27:00.000-08:00

I recently read Robert J. Sawyer's Hominids, the first book in a trilogy about a quantum portal that opens between our world and a parallel universe in which humans went extinct and Neanderthals developed into an advanced technological culture. I enjoyed the first book, despite some glaring implausibilities, a bit of preachiness, and a distracting subplot involving a character being raped. And then I went on to start the next book in the series, Humans. But I only made it about halfway through before abandoning it. I really don't like giving up on books, especially ones that I've invested a fair amount of time in, but I just couldn't go on.

The flaws of the first book were accentuated in the second. In Hominids we find out that the Neanderthals never developed agriculture, and yet they found cities and develop advanced technology, such as AI implants called "companions" that assist them and record everything that happens around them. But how could a hunter-gatherer culture have the stability to settle down permanently and engage in the sort of division of labor necessary to advance technologically? Humans has an extended discussion of this, in an exchange with a Native American anthropologist, who manages to point out the arrogance and stupidity of "white people" while pointing out that it's perfectly plausible. The explanation rests on such a culture not growing beyond its available food supply by excessive breeding, and by not overexploiting their resources.

The Neanderthal visiting our world seems astonished that we would ever hunt another species to extinction. He also seems astonished that we would breed as much as we do. In our world there are over 6 billion people; in his world there are only a couple hundred million Neanderthals. I guess while they were developing advanced AI and physics, they didn't learn dick about ecology. No one should ever be surprised when a species exploits resources to the greatest extent possible and maximizes its reproductive potential. Evolution is a greedy algorithm. Individuals seek to maximize short-term gains; there is no foresight in evolution. A co-evolving population of predator and prey or bacterial infection and host population will typically oscillate. Fox populations increase as they prey on rabbits, but as the number of rabbits decreases, they are scarcer, so the fox population declines, which in turn allows the rabbit population to expand, and so on. If the foxes overexploit the rabbits and drive them to extinction, then the fox population will probably die out if that was their main source of food. What keeps this from happening is the reduction of the number of rabbits, not foresight by foxes, either individually or collectively. The foxes don't keep themselves from driving the rabbits to extinction. They do what they do. They hunt, eat, and reproduce as much as resources allow. This idea should not be surprising or shocking to a scientist.

We also get chided for polluting the environment (Neanderthals have sensitive noses, so all their locomotion is environmentally safe). They have no crime (because they have an Orwellian monitoring system and practice eugenics). However, the darker implications of the Neanderthal society are not really explored. Instead, human society is constantly portrayed as stupid and short-sighted.

However, it was Sawyer's ham-handed handling of a human character's rape that put the nail in the coffin for me. Being a geneticist, she collected the DNA from her rape instead of going to a hospital or the police. But the DNA samples are lost and she gets upset. Another woman in the area is raped, and this character blames herself for what happened. The Neanderthal tells her she needs to forgive herself, and so we get a scene where she goes to Catholic church and goes to confession. And that was enough for me. The rape subplot already seemed mildly exploitative, but its featured prominence in the second book and its awkward handling just drove me away from the story.

Which is a shame, because Sawyer's prose is incredibly crisp and readable. There are a lot of interesting ideas to explore in such a setup, but Sawyer instead writes a talky, polemical diatribe that's thin on story and stretches willing suspension of disbelief to the snapping point.

Valkyrie

2008-12-28T08:17:00.000-08:00

In dire need of having our movie palette cleansed, we finally did manage to see Valkyrie yesterday, and it was quite good. Then again, it's been a long time since I've seen a decent movie, so maybe I was just starved for good acting, direction, and storytelling, and this one was just relatively good by comparison.

The movie is like others such as Apollo 13 where the broad strokes of the events are reasonably well-known, while the details are generally not. Some of the tension is sucked out of Valkyrie since we know that Hitler was not successfully assassinated. Thus, we know our protagonists are going to fail in their mission from the get-go. What we're interested in is how they fail, and how agonizingly close they get. That's where the tension comes from, and it's done well.

Several times in the film I was reminded of Alfred Hitchcock's "Bomb Theory":

There is a distinct difference between "suspense" and "surprise," and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I'll explain what I mean.

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!"

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

Valkyrie knows how to generate suspense, and it does it well. It also seems to have done a reasonable job remaining faithful to historical events (at least about as close as a Hollywood blockbuster is going to).

It's a depressing movie, though. You'd think it might be uplifting to think of the plotters as heroes, motivated to kill the monster Hitler by lofty notions. But they each had their own reasons, and they were guaranteed positions in the new power structure if they pulled it off, so it's likely that they were motivated by a mixture of base and noble reasons.

Still, I never found the movie boring. All in all it was a solid experience, and I'd recommend it.

The Spirit

2008-12-28T08:08:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time since I walked out of a movie theater, but this one justified it. Laurie and I were in New Orleans for Christmas, and she won some movie passes in a White Elephant gift exchange. We wanted to go see Valkyrie, but it was sold out. Hey, I said, The Spirit opened as well. Big mistake. I hadn't seen the ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. I'll never make that mistake again.

Remember Derek's Movie Review Maxim: If most critics say it's good, they're sometimes right and sometimes wrong; if most critics say it's bad, they're almost always right.

Well, they were right about this one. It was a big, steaming pile of dookie. It was like someone took Sin City, sucked out all the good stuff (like interesting characters), and left a hollow, stupid movie with the same graphical style. You know you're in trouble in an early scene when the good guy and the bad guy whale on each other with toilet seats and punch each other dozens of times and neither one gets a scratch. Why the hell should I care about a fight in which no one has the capacity to get hurt?

Anyway, it was crap. Avoid at all cost.

Cake Wrecks

2008-12-23T07:11:00.000-08:00

Via Boing Boing, here's a blog that posts pictures of horribly decorated cakes and then mocks them. Good fun.

The most recent post as of this writing was of an attempt to render a Texas Longhorn (from my alma mater):

They say:

It's impossible to say how this idea first entered the decorator's brain...

But now it will haunt us both day and night.

This cake makes a mockery of my horror, Chris L. It's also really icky. Tell me, do all University of Texas cakes look like week-old medical specimens?

Nice. Whoever made this cake should scribble "Deep in the Heart of Texas" on it. Or maybe "I Bleed Burnt Orange."

Anyway, they've got lots of holiday monstrosities, just in time for Christmas. Go check it out.

The Future of Computer Interfaces?

2008-12-22T07:05:00.000-08:00

Check out this short video by Johnny Lee, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University. Using a Wii remote, a small LED array, and some reflective tape, he shows how you can have an interface which tracks the movement of your fingers.

Cool, huh? He talks about how the interface is similar to that used in Minority Report, though I was also thinking about the bit in Jurassic Park where the researchers manipulate virtual strands of DNA using their hands. Lee says that using your hands might not be practical because it's tiring. As the sole method of interacting with a computer, I'd think so. But as a peripheral to compliment existing means of interaction, or for certain special applications (e.g. computer-aided design), I think it would be extremely useful.

They should give this guy his PhD and someone should hire him so he can get this stuff to market.

Octopuses and Personality

2008-12-22T06:18:00.000-08:00

This article from the Sydney Morning Herald talks about recent work with octopuses done by Macquarie University marine biology researcher Renata Pronk. The article describes two interesting things about the research.

One, it seems that experiments in which they displayed video to the octopuses were more successful with high-definition, 50 frames per second video than with the slower, lower-resolution 25 frames per second.

The second claim is just weird. She says they "have no personality."

"Octopuses," Miss Pronk said, "are very smart. I have seen my octopuses open Vegemite jars by unscrewing the lid. They can find their way through mazes to reach food rewards at the end.

"And they can learn simple puzzles", recognising that symbols, such as squares or circles, mean food is available.

"The definition of personality," she said, "is having repetition in your responses, for example, being consistently bold, or consistently shy, or consistently aggressive."

To resolve the debate she collected 32 common Sydney, or gloomy, octopuses from Chowder Bay, near Mosman, and showed them a series of three-minute videos screened on a monitor in front of their tank.

One video featured a crab, an octopus delicacy.

A second starred another octopus, while a third had a "novel object" they would not have seen: a plastic bottle swinging on a string.

Miss Pronk then watched each octopus for any consistent response pattern, such as boldness or aggression.

When the crab movie was screened "they jetted straight over to the monitor and tried to attack it", she said, adding that was strong evidence they knew they were watching food.

When the octopus movie was screened some became aggressive while others changed their skin camouflage or "would go and hide in a corner, moving as far away as possible".

On viewing the swinging bottle, some puffed themselves up, just in case the object was a threat, while others paid no attention.

But significantly, when the experiment was repeated over several days, she found no consistent response from any octopus. Such random responses implied octopuses have no individual personalities.

So what we're supposed to believe is that the findings support behavioral variation within an individual, but not between individuals?

I'm sorry, but this just doesn't seem to make much sense. I'll grant her definition of personality for a moment. An organism in a population that has a personality would exhibit different patterns of behavior than some other members of the population. In other words, there would be individual differences in behavior among members of the population.

That's exactly what evolutionary theory would predict. In any population, while considering any trait, there will be some type of individual differences. The distribution of variation may be restricted or it may be broad, but it should be there. Variation is the engine which drives natural selection. In a population of bears, for example, some will have thicker fur than others, due to their genes, but also due to their specific developmental path (e.g., their specific diet, etc.). If a change in the regional temperature favors a particular subset of the population (e.g., it gets colder), those individuals better suited to the change will have an advantage, and will be more likely to survive and propagate their genes.

A population with no variation in a trait is evolutionarily stagnant with respect to that trait. I'm no evolutionary biologist, but I'm not even sure it's possible to have a population with absolutely no variation in a given trait. That would have to mean that the genes that encode for and mediate the trait are functionally identical and that any environmental influence on the trait has been exactly the same for all individuals. And with a trait as complex as behavior, I'm just not buying it.

I think Miss Pronk just needs to spend more time with her octopuses.

A Conversation With Sam Harris and Rick Warren

2008-12-20T08:23:00.000-08:00

In poking around the Wikipedia entry on Rick Warren, I came across this conversation between him and Sam Harris. The whole thing is worth a read, but I'll talk about a few of my favorite bits.

INTERVIEWER: Do you believe Creation happened in the way Genesis describes it?

WARREN: If you're asking me do I believe in evolution, the answer is no, I don't. I believe that God, at a moment, created man. I do believe Genesis is literal, but I do also know metaphorical terms are used. Did God come down and blow in man's nose? If you believe in God, you don't have a problem accepting miracles. So if God wants to do it that way, it's fine with me.

HARRIS: I'm doing my Ph.D. in neuroscience; I'm very close to the literature on evolutionary biology. And the basic point is that evolution by natural selection is random genetic mutation over millions of years in the context of environmental pressure that selects for fitness.

WARREN: Who's doing the selecting?

HARRIS: The environment. You don't have to invoke an intelligent designer to explain the complexity we see.

It's worse than that. If you invoke an intelligent designer, you've now got a whole lot of additional complexity to explain. How did the designer arise? Not only are you not explaining the existing complexity we see, you're adding a whole new heap of unexplained complexity.

But I like the silliness of Warren's answer about the literal interpretation of Genesis. He believes that "Genesis is literal" but that "metaphorical terms are used". Well, we sure didn't have to go very far in the conversation to find Warren saying things that contradicted each other. Maybe he doesn't understand what "literal" means. And I'd be interested to know if he literally believes in a talking snake and the rest of it.

WARREN: One of the great evidences of God is answered prayer. I have a friend, a Canadian friend, who has an immigration issue. He's an intern at this church, and so I said, "God, I need you to help me with this," as I went out for my evening walk. As I was walking I met a woman. She said, "I'm an immigration attorney; I'd be happy to take this case." Now, if that happened once in my life I'd say, "That is a coincidence." If it happened tens of thousands of times, that is not a coincidence.

INTERVIEWER: There must have been times in your ministry when you've prayed for someone to be delivered from disease who is not—say, a little girl with cancer.

WARREN: Oh, absolutely.

INTERVIEWER: So, parse that. God gave you an immigration attorney, but God killed a little girl.

WARREN: Well, I do believe in the goodness of God, and I do believe that he knows better than I do. God sometimes says yes, God sometimes says no and God sometimes says wait. I've had to learn the difference between no and not yet. The issue here really does come down to surrender. A lot of atheists hide behind rationalism; when you start probing, you find their reactions are quite emotional. In fact, I've never met an atheist who wasn't angry.

HARRIS: Let me be the first.

Hah! Nice. I'm guessing that not only is Harris the first non-angry atheist Warren has met, but that he's the first actual atheist Warren has gotten to know on any level. This is the sort of thing you learn in logic 101. It's called ad hominem, attacking the character of someone, rather than the legitimacy of their arguments. Oh sure, atheists make good arguments, but they're all bitter, angry, narcissistic little people who have daddy issues and just like to fling poop at joyful true believers since they're jealous because their own lives are so miserable.

Well, the atheists I've met are on the whole not angry and twisted. They're nice, gentle people who are decent and happy. They are often frustrated that they live in a society that's dominated by superstition and bronze age beliefs, but that doesn't make them fundamentally unpleasant people.

Anyway, go read the whole thing, if you can stand the annoying ads. They cover a lot of important ground in a relatively short space.

Christopher Hitchens on Rick Warren

2008-12-20T08:05:00.000-08:00

So Obama has picked super-pastor Rick Warren as the guy to swear him in on inauguration day. Christopher Hitchens isn't happy about the choice, but his reasons are a bit silly. He apparently thinks that Warren is a bigot because he doesn't think Jews and Mormons are going to heaven. I would call that "being a denominational Christian". What Baptist thinks Jews have made the cut?

Here are Hitchens' three questions about Rick Warren's role in the inauguration:

Will Warren be invited to the solemn ceremony of inauguration without being asked to repudiate what he has directly said to deny salvation to Jews?
Will he be giving a national invocation without disowning what his mentor said about civil rights and what his leading supporter says about Mormons?
Will the American people be prayed into the next administration, which will be confronted by a possible nuclear Iran and an already nuclear Pakistan, by a half-educated pulpit-pounder raised in the belief that the Armageddon solution is one to be anticipated with positive glee?

That last point is a bit better than the other two. I don't think I've ever seen a poll question along the lines of "Would you support a nuclear war if you knew it would be closely followed by the return of Jesus to Earth?" I'd like to see some results from some variants of such a question.

Anyway, yes Warren opposed Proposition 8. According to Wikipedia he called removing Terry Schiavo's feeding tube "an atrocity worthy of Nazism". He's strongly against abortion rights. These are all consistent with his belief system.

Obama is obviously pandering to evangelicals. I think he's trying to show inclusiveness, but it's not a great symbolic start to the Obama Presidency.

Back From the Big Apple

2008-12-19T07:44:00.000-08:00

I'm back from 5 days in New York City. It was kind of a vacation of opportunity. A friend was going up there and suggested I meet up there and hang out.

Here is a list of things I did while there:

1) Saw a real live New Yorker yell at our cab driver, who parked right in front of a bus stop just before the bus was pulling up.

2) Visited the American Museum of Natural History. We were there several hours, and barely put a dent in the place. Highlights: the human origins exhibit and the big-ass dinosaur bones in the rotunda.

3) After walking through Central Park we went to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We'd just gotten in the day before, and I didn't get much sleep the night before, so I was pretty much dead on my feet at this point. And I felt bad only giving a few seconds to each Picasso or Dali I saw. I'd like to go back and spend some more time here.

4) Ate a Papaya Dog. I wasn't that impressed.

5) Went on a boat tour around Manhattan. Saw the Statue of Liberty while it snowed. That was cool. Saw the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, Yankee Stadium, and all sorts of other stuff.

6) Saw the musical In the Heights, which won the Tony for Best Musical last year. I'm not a big fan of musicals, but it was entertaining, if cheesy. It was free (my friend won tickets in a raffle), so I can't complain.

7) Saw a real live sewer rat while waiting for a subway.

8) Just before leaving town, I got to eat at a Yoshinoya, which took me back to my days in Japan. I used to eat at that place at least once a week when I lived in Japan.

New York is of course massively crowded, noisy, and expensive. If you're at all claustrophobic or mildly autistic, this isn't the place for you. I wouldn't want to live there for any length of time, but it's a pretty cool place to visit.

Falsifiability and Science

2008-12-12T08:52:00.000-08:00

This blog entry over at NeuroLogica regarding SETI (the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) brings up some interesting issues regarding the philosophy of science.

What determines whether or not a researcher should spend time looking for a previously unobserved thing?

What's the difference between trying to observe the following unobserved things:

1) Bigfoot
2) Extraterrestrial intelligence
3) Subatomic particles
4) Leprechauns
5) Ghosts

Assuming we don't want to waste our time looking for something that has a very low chance of actually existing, how do we make that determination? Presumably, we should have some justification for thinking that a given thing might exist even though it has not yet been observed. In the case of extraterrestrial intelligence, we know that life and human-level intelligence arose at least once before. We don't understand well at all how either event happened, so our estimation of how likely either would be to happen again is very murky. But it's reasonably not zero.

I don't know physics very well, but presumably the people looking for unobserved subatomic particles have some justification for thinking that they might exist, based on some particular theory.

What about things like Bigfoot, leprechauns, and ghosts? Well, if we count eyewitnesses and other people's beliefs as evidence, then we have a decent amount of evidence for all of these. Here's a whole bunch of eyewitnesses saying they saw a leprechaun in Alabama:

They even have a sketch of the little guy! I guess when it comes to testimony, we have to actually have some way to assess credibility, yes?

And finally, I thought this comment on the original post was interesting:

One way you can think about the “falsifiability” objection is to turn it on its head.

If the hypothesis is: “There is intelligent life in the universe other than humans,” then no amount of evidence can prove this wrong.

But, if the hypothesis is: “There is NO intelligent life in the universe other than humans,” then you just need a single example to disprove the hypothesis.

It seems like SETI is assuming the latter, and doing their best to disprove it. That’s good science.

So a hypothesis instantly becomes scientific when you add a negative modifier?

According to that logic, the following hypothesis is unscientific: "Leprechauns exist."

While this one is scientifically sound: "Leprechauns don't exist." Because, after all, the observation of a single leprechaun would falsify it. And if a hypothesis is falsifiable, then it has to be scientific, right?

Uh. This is why I'm not an adherent to Karl Popper and the whole falsifiability criterion. A hypothesis is either good or bad depending on whether or not one can justify reasons for proposing it and the extent to which one can find evidence that either supports it, weakens it, or both.

Worst Defense of the Century

2008-12-12T08:41:00.000-08:00

Carl and Raylene Worthington of Oregon had a 15-month-old daughter Ava who got sick with bacterial bronchial pneumonia and an infection, both of which could have been cured with common antibiotics. Her parents preferred treating her with prayer. Now she's dead. Here's their defense:

A Clackamas County, Ore., couple accused of letting their infant daughter die by relying on prayer, rather than medicine, today asked that the charges be dropped, arguing that they infringe on their freedom of religion and their right to raise their children in their own way.

Guess what, you loonballs? The state can't be infringing on your right to raise your child in your own way because your child is dead.

Why Waste Robotic Vaginal Sensors?

2008-12-12T08:31:00.000-08:00

This story is kind of pathetic and disturbing at the same time. There's a 33 year-old Ontario computer programmer, Le Trung, who lives with his parents and has constructed Aiko:

Aiko is a 32-kilogram female android that Trung began building in August of last year.

She is just under five feet tall, has brown eyes that can distinguish 300 faces per second and speaks 13,000 English and Japanese phrases.

Her skin is made of silicone and her insides are made of an expensive collection of wires, motors and various sensors.

In total, Trung has spent more than $20,000 developing Aiko, maxing out three credit cards in the process.

So far it's not all that creepy (though her hands look pretty weird). Here's where it goes off the rails:

But for all the attention that Aiko has garnered, one topic area has elicited the most questions: Anything and everything to do with sex.

And Trung has answered every question that he has been asked.

"Does she have breasts? I will say yes. Does she have nipples? I will say yes. Does she have a vagina? I will say yes. Are there sensors there? I will say yes," he said.

"Do I sleep with her? No."

So...the guy builds this thing with nipples and a vagina, with sensors, but claims he isn't fooling around with it. Uh...right. What are the sensors for? To let you know when the toast is done? Or when the mail has been dropped off?

And then there's this bit of stupidity:

"If you talk dirty to her, she will talk dirty back," Trung said, admitting that an R-rated vocabulary was an unforeseen part of Aiko's development.

Right. We're supposed to believe that he's built an android that is learning vocabulary its builder didn't foresee. If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you.

This guys sounds like he needs professional therapy. I'm serious.

Reconstructing the Mind's Eye

2008-12-12T08:15:00.001-08:00

That is supposedly what researchers at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have done, at least on a limited basis.

I haven't read the source article, which is featured on the cover of the most recent issue of Neuron, but here's my rough understanding of what they did. Human subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. During viewing, the blood flow in their primary visual cortex was recorded using fMRI. At some later point, the subjects were shown one of the 400 random images, the blood flow was monitored using fMRI, and a computer algorithm compared the previously recorded blood flow pattern to the current one to try to determine which image the subject was looking at.

Pretty nifty, huh? Here is another image showing the pattern the subject was viewing at the top and the reconstructed images based on the fMRI analysis:

I'm actually surprised that activity at such a coarse resolution, i.e. blood flow, is replicable enough between viewings of stimuli to allow for this kind of accuracy. Blood flow is an indirect measure of neuronal activity, and I wouldn't expect it to be very uniform from stimuli to stimuli, but apparently it is, at least in this sort of experimental setup, although I wonder how robust it is over time and with more complex stimuli.

And then there's the usual pop science silliness that usually comes with these sorts of stories:

According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.

I think it may be too soon to use words like "soon". Dreams are not a result of directly viewing visual stimuli, so it is unlikely that activity in the primary visual cortex will be the same when, for example, a subject is looking at a giraffe in a waking state as when they are dreaming of a giraffe. But who knows? Maybe in 10 years we'll be able to record our dreams and play them back for our friends.

Jon Stewart and Mike Huckabee Clash Over Gay Marriage

2008-12-11T08:37:00.000-08:00

This is an interesting exchange between Jon Stewart and Mike Huckabee on the issue of gay marriage.

I think Stewart comes out with the upper hand on this one, doing especially well at exposing the goofiness of the "one man, one woman" defense. From the transcript:

Governor Huckabee: Well, marriage still means one man one woman, life relationship. I think people have a right to live any way they want to. But even anatomically- let's face it, the only way that we can create the next generation is through a male female relationship. For 5000 years of recorded human history, that's what marriage has meant.

...

Stewart: But people got married in the interim and- then they went back and said you're not- I guess my question is...

You said, reaffirming the tradition of marriage over 5000 years, which takes it back to the Old Testament, where polygamy was the norm, not a heterosexual marriage between two couples [sic] that choose each other.

Marriage has evolved greatly over those 5000 years, from a property arrangement, polygamy... we've redefined it constantly. It used to be that people of different races could not... marry.

It strikes me as very convenient, to go back to the Bible and say, "Hey, man... we gotta look at the way they define marriage..." Why don't we look at the way they did slavery, in the Bible?

Huckabee: But if we change the definition, then we really do have to change it to accomodate all lifestyles. We have to say to the guy in West Texas, who had 27 wives, that's okay. And I'm not sure that I hear alot of people arguing that that's a great idea.

Huh? Huckabee wants to use biblical, historical tradition as a basis for defining marriage, but he doesn't want to endorse polygamy? Stewart is absolutely right calling him out on this silliness. The institution of marriage has changed throughout the centuries, depending on culture. "It's always been done this way" is a stupid and incorrect argument. One, because it hasn't always been done that way. And two, as I've pointed out before, incumbency doesn't make an idea a good one (see slavery, disallowing the female vote, and peeing in the same place you get your drinking water).

Gay Partner Rights

2008-12-09T13:57:00.000-08:00

This rant against Proposition 8 (or "Proposition Hate", as the guy is calling it) is making the rounds on the internet. To briefly summarize the situation: A gay man, Jake, says he is living with his partner, and that they have taken in a mentally disabled 37 year-old named Thomas who was abandoned by his father and abused by his mother for the last 15 years. Thomas is Jake's partner's brother. Jake is railing against Proposition 8 because he says that if his partner died, Thomas' mother would have legal claim on co-ownership of their house. She could move in the next day and start abusing Thomas again. Presumably, Jake thinks that he and his partner should have the legal protection that marriage would bring.

A couple of aspects about the story seem very strange to me. First of all, Jake says that when he and his partner realized what was going on with Jake, they brought him to live with them. Apparently Thomas is his partner's brother. How did he not realize what was going on? Why did it take 15 years?

Secondly, in a later post, Jake details the steps he and his partner have gone through to try to make sure full ownership of the house goes to Jake:

The domestic partner and I went to what was promoted to us as the best gay attorney in Chicago to make sure we had all the legal protections of marriage. He drew up a thousand dollars in wills and powers of attorney and related documents, and we thought we were all set. But since then we've learned from our financial planner and some other attorney friends that mere wills—especially the wills of gay domestic partners—are easily contested by blood relatives and we need to fork over thousands more to have trusts and who knows what else drawn up to protect ourselves. So we're looking for a better attorney who will give us the legal protections we asked for in the first place.

I really want to know how true this is. Are wills that easily contested? If so, what good are they? I've always argued that the rights associated with marriage could be conferred without the legal institution of marriage. This makes that sound difficult, if not possible. I would think that a relatively competent lawyer could draw up documents that would grant the rights of marriage between a gay couple that would stand up in court. How hard should this be? A good will and power of attorney don't do it?

This follow-up post also tries to explain how nobody knew what was going on, and does so by saying that Thomas and his mother lived in a gated community and they rarely visited. Was the mother not abusive when the domestic partner was younger? And he notes that they're not pressing charges because it's a family decision, but some of the abuse they're attributing to this woman sounds horrific. Why should we necessarily believe Jake's story?

Anyway, I'm not calling the guy and out-and-out liar, but his posts are generating more questions for me than they answer.

Large-scale Thalamocortical Model

2008-12-09T07:50:00.000-08:00

A fellow student in my lab is basing some of his preliminary work on neuron models devised by Eugene Izhikevich, who published a book last year in which he described a system for modeling the diverse spiking behavior of many types of neurons with an elegant set of equations. In a paper co-authored with Gerald Edelman (of Neural Darwinism fame) they implement a model of the cortex and thalamus and their interconnectivity.

Here are some features of the model:

1) Simulates one million multi-compartmental neuron models of 22 basic types
2) Includes approximately half a billion synapses
3) Macroscopic connectivity is based on data derived from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) of magnetic resonance image (MRI) scans of the thalamus and cortex
4) Microscopic connectivity is based on reconstruction studies of cat visual cortex
5) Synapses are modified through spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP)

Now, the thalamus is the part of your brain through which almost all sensory input is routed before being sent to the cortex (the exception is olfactory input). This structure is about the size of the end of your thumb, and it is a place through which nearly all of your input from the world flows (visual, auditory, and tactile). But like most brain areas, exactly what it does is not very well understood. For example, we know that it does not function merely as a relay station. There is extensive feedback from the cortex back to the thalamus, creating a thalamocortical loop. Why would the cortex need to send information back to the thalamus if it's just a relay station? Some theorists have proposed that the thalamus is something like an active blackboard, maintaining a constantly updating sketch of the world. Others have proposed that the loop is a way of keeping recent events in a kind of short-term buffer.

Whatever the case, the Izhikevich and Edelman model does not simulate the stream of sensory input from the world. So how does anything happen in the model? Well, initially it is quiescent. The modelers get it going by causing random neurons to spike, which effectively jump-starts ripples of activity throughout the system.

One interesting finding is that the brain state is very sensitive, so much so that the alteration of the spiking activity of a single neuron radically alters the global firing patterns throughout the model within less than half a second. This seems a bit counterintuitive. We might expect that the brain is robust to small changes. After all, neurons can be fairly noisy (that is, they don't always fire reliably), and they also tend to die off. So either their model is overly sensitive to small perturbations (i.e. the butterfly effect) or this really is a reflection of the sensitivity of real neural systems. Either way, it's an interesting result.

One last comment...the authors state that they "started with the thalamocortical system because it is necessary for human consciousness." In discussing the paper with another student, I mused about the ethical ramifications of this kind of simulation. I seriously doubt that a simulation of a million neurons evoked anything like consciousness when randomly jump-started, but then, consciousness is a very poorly-understood phenomenon. I told the other student that I was reminded of Johnny Got His Gun, an anti-war novel in which a soldier is wounded such that he loses all senses but touch, all his limbs, and most of his face. He tries to communicate by banging out Morse code with his head on the hospital bed.

"But this thing doesn't even have a head to try to bang out Morse code," I joked, before I realized just how creepy that sounded. So like I said, I seriously doubt we have to worry about the ethics of simulating consciousness at this point. There are about 100 billion neurons in a human brain and about 20 billion in the cortex, while this model uses one million neurons. But it's something to at least ponder, and definitely something to consider more as models become more and more sophisticated.

E. M. Izhikevich, G. M. Edelman (2008). Large-scale model of mammalian thalamocortical systems Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105 (9), 3593-3598 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0712231105

Living in 80 Billion Heavens at Once

2008-12-08T11:51:00.000-08:00

Dinosaur Comics takes on Pascal's Wager.

Evolution of Mona Lisa

2008-12-08T07:43:00.000-08:00

A guy named Roger Alsing whipped up a little program that encodes 2D images constructed of 50 semi-transparent polygons as artificial chromosomes. Each generation, candidate images were compared to a target image, the Mona Lisa, and those that were closer to the target were selected for reproduction.

He doesn't say what his algorithm or parameters are. Hopefully he'll share. Looks like he started with no polygons, and incrementally allowed them to mutate in, which is good evolutionary algorithm practice. Looks like it took just under a million generations to get something that's a pretty nice facsimile of the original.

Go check out the results.

Big Bang Theory at ComicCon

2008-12-08T07:34:00.000-08:00

There was a panel for the producers and stars of Big Bang Theory at ComicCon and Phil Plait is posting chunks of his recording of it on his blog. Here's the first chunk.

It's a little lame so far, but one cool snippet is that there's a website called SheldonShirts.com with links to buy the shirts that Sheldon and Leonard wear on the show. My favorite is probably the robot evolution tee:

They also sell belt buckles that Howard wears, such as:

Anyway, the show is pretty funny. If you haven't checked it out, you should.

Keith Ward on Science and Truth

2008-12-07T07:19:00.000-08:00

Keith Ward is an Oxford professor with "doctorates of divinity from Cambridge and Oxford Universities". One wasn't enough? Anyway, he writes at length here addressing the question of whether or not science is the only way to get at truth. He concludes that no, you can derive truth subjectively as well. Here are some excerpts:

What can justify the scientists’ faith that there is no event without a cause or at least without a good explanation? What can justify the faith that the laws of nature will operate in the future as they have in the past? What can justify the belief that human reason is adequate to understand the structure of reality? As the Cambridge quantum physicist Paul Dirac said, “It was a sort of act of faith with us that any equations which describe fundamental laws of Nature must have great mathematical beauty in them” (quoted in Longair 1984, 7).

This is the same tired-ass comparison of science to religion that has been around for decades, if not centuries. Seriously, he's asking what the justification for causality in the universe is? How about virtually every moment of waking life and every experiment ever carried out. We have overwhelming evidence that when we take our next step on a sidewalk we will not plunge through to the center of the earth. This is NOT faith. It is a belief borne out from extensive prior evidence.

Same with how we can work under the assumption that the laws of nature will act in the future as they did in the past. We can't know this with 100% certainty, but it is a strongly-justified belief based on prior evidence and experience. And again, we don't know that the human intellect will be sufficient to understand every intricacy of the universe, but we seem to be making good progress, and we should continue until we hit that wall, don't you think?

He then goes on at length about history and art, noting that both contain truth, but not the kind that is accessible by scientific methods. All right...I'd concede that point. I'd also concede the larger point that the truth is not always accessible to the scientific method per se. That doesn't mean that we abandon reason and standards of evidence. He takes the example of whether or not Caesar crossed the Rubicon. How do we decide whether to believe this is the case or not? Well, one perspective would be to say there's no real way of getting at the truth...that different people will have different perspectives, so I'll just believe whatever satisfies my personal tendencies. Or...we could ask what evidence there is that Caesar crossed the Rubicon and assess how reliable that evidence is. If the evidence is strong in either direction, we can make a judgment. If it's vague or incomplete, we'll have to be content to say we just don't know whether Caesar crossed the Rubicon.

His basic strategy is to try to lower the bar for what we should believe. See, he says, there are all sorts of things that we believe that science can't verify, so it's open season on believing without strong evidentiary standards. The problem with this kind of thinking is pretty clear. Once you lower the bar this far, anything goes. According to this way of thinking, belief in ghosts, witches, leprechauns, dragons, faeries, Santa Claus, Bigfoot, and on and on is just as valid as belief that the earth revolves around the sun. Basically, if you don't have any standards for belief, you can justify belief in anything. And that's not a very sensible position, is it?

Atheism Sign in Olympia, Washington

2008-12-06T07:24:00.000-08:00

The city of Olympia, Washington put up a nativity scene in the Legislative Building. The Freedom From Religion Foundation got permission to put up the following sign right next to it:

The atheist sign was then stolen, and later found in a ditch. I think the story as a whole is pretty silly.

First of all, the message on that sign is horrible. It categorically states that things like gods, angels, and demons don't exist, rather than accurately stating that such things are very unlikely to exist. That's a subtle, but important distinction. And the last sentence is just provocative, and again, about as subtle as a smack to the head with a shovel. It completely ignores the very real positive benefits of religion. I happen to think that the net effects of religion are negative, but I'd never categorically assert that religion turns people into mindless assholes. This thing was designed to piss people off.

Secondly, as with the gay marriage issue, what I want to see is exclusion, not greater inclusion. On the street corner or on your private property, exert your First Amendment rights to the fullest. But in a government building? Let them carry out their intended function. If we adopt a policy of inclusion, pretty soon the halls of government buildings are going to be choked with whatever wackaloon shows of religious speech every sect in the world wants to put up. That's dumb.

Instead of letting the atheists put up a sign in the Legislative Building, they should just prohibit any such fixtures.

So, to summarize:

The people who put up a religious display in a government building are dumb.
The atheists who put up this sign are dumb.
The idiots who stole the sign and threw it in a ditch are dumb.
Oh, and so is Bill O'Reilly.