America Is Even Stranger Than You Think

In 1955, This is Your Life did Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a survivor of Hiroshima. One of the most uncomfortable things I've ever seen was Tanimoto meeting the pilot of the Enola Gay.

See here.

New England Halloween Surprise

We had a pretty bad storm over the weekend. For our part, we lost some parts of trees but not much in the way of property damage. We didn't lose power. I have friends whose power is out and have no visible sign of relief.

This is the garden. Just to give you a flavor of what the snow looked like. If you look in the background you can see the body of a swamp maple. More on that in a moment.




This is the persimmon tree next to the garden. It was twice as tall as it is now. Very nice persimmons.












This is a chestnut tree we planted several years ago. It, too, is about 1/2 its size.










Finally, here is the swamp maple I referred to. 1/2 split in the middle. This picture doesn't do it justice since it just shows 20 feet of the main trunk. The tree is about 60 feet tall so this is about a third of what's on the ground.

We're glad we made it through but many people fared worse than we. One friend of mine had a tree fall on the line that fed his house. It ripped off the circuit box. The city will string line to the box but won't fix the box so he's stuck until he can get somebody to repair it.

My friends in Hartford described their neighborhood as a "war zone." No power. Houses broken. Cars smashed. Power lines down. Street cordoned off.

And there are still those who would have us dissolve FEMA instead of making it work.

*sigh*

For anybody out there with 1/2 a brain, the first human impact manifestations of global warming isn't temperature; it's increase in chaotic weather. Massachusetts had its first tornado in generations and this particular storm is unprecedented. Add it to the 500 year floods we've been seeing every few years.

And we huddle right on the tracks in front of this oncoming train, fingers in our ears and eyes tightly closed, chanting to ourselves, "There is no train. There is no train. There is no train."

Hatsune Miku and the Magic Turing Test

(Picture from here.)

I am obsessed with Hatsune Miku.

A quick history.

Back in 2000, Yamaha started developing vocaloid technology-- a synthesizer aimed at recreating a singing voice. By mid-2000s they technology had been encapsulated in two "virtual soul vocalists", Leon and Lola. What's interesting here is that almost immediately upon creating a singing synthesizer it was personalized into a fictional entity. Crypton Media created their first vocaloid, Meiko, in 2004. Hatsune Miku was release as the first of a "character vocal series" in 2007. Her name roughly translates to "first future sound." There is imagery for her: big anime eyes, blue hair that's about four feet long. Her voice was synthesized from sampling the voice of Saki Fujita. She's targeted to be a young teen and her voice was modified to fit that role.

Okay. We know how fictional entities can take Japan (and the US) by storm. Think Pokemon. Think Yugioh. But there aren't very many "live" concerts for Pokemon. There has been for Miku.

Starting in 2009 Miku performed on stage with a live band by projecting an animated image on a scrim.

This is only the start of what's interesting. Think of the technology. Was Miku rendered, recorded and projected and the band kept up like in silent movies? Was she pre-rendered and then the performance locked into the band's work? Was there real time rendering involved? I have no idea.

Think of the music. Enjoyable pop, by and large. There have literally thousands of songs written for Miku as the vocaloid technology is readily available. How were the songs chosen? Is this crowdsourcing of vocal material? Have we reached the age where pop songs can literally grow from the grass roots up?

Think of the celebrity phenomena. Miku, and her three "costars", play for a live audience sold out for months in advance. People paying top dollar for a concert given by a fictional creation.

But for our purposes today I'm just going to talk about the interaction between Miku and her audience.

Humans are tokenized communicators. We don't exchange real things; we exchanged symbolic tokens. Even real objects are imbued with layers and layers of symbolism. If I'm in the garden working with two trowels and you are next to me digging with your fingers, I might give you the second trowel. That simple act has a wealth of information associated with it. By doing so I've acknowledged you have a lack. I've recognized your need and moved to fill it. I've stated willingness to share. And you, as the recipient, instantly grasp this information. All by the movement of the token trowel.

Of course, humans build tokens out of other tokens, have multilayered levels of communication, deceive, obfuscate and otherwise mess with communication. I could make a strong argument that everything we do, everything that makes us human, has something to do with this tokenized communication with each other. It's what we do best. I'd hazard a guess that this ability has been selected for and is one of the reasons we've evolved this oversized brain of ours.

Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores wrote Understanding Computers and Cognition, one of the most brilliant discussion of human communication I've ever read. I haven't found much discussion of it on the net but there's a good article here that talks about it.

One of the points they made was that many of the mechanisms we take for granted are in fact tokenized communications between the developer of the mechanism and the user. If you use a microwave oven the way the oven works, how to set the time, the power, what power settings are available, the shielding, are in fact a model of how the oven should work. A finite set of people have communicated to you, the user, that model.

A modern three minute song consists of hook, melody, various bridges and chorus. It's a simple model of a complex phenomena. However, the modern song itself is a simplification of earlier song forms that go back hundreds of years. Regardless, the song is a collection of tokens that have been grouped together into a single entity that is intended to convey a communication to the listener.

Music binds time: it has a beginning, a middle and an end. It is repeatable-- and not. Is the experience of hearing a song the first time the same as the second? The fiftieth? How about comparing a studio recording with a live performance? We recognize the song is the same even though we also recognize it is different. Music evokes tremendous activity all the way from time perception and auditory processing to activating memory and emotion and higher cognition. That's a lot of activity caused by a three minute sound.

Miku is a performance organizing principle on stage. The band members are fully human and they play right along side. They are, in fact, virtuoso musicians. My son pointed out that Miku was nothing without a good band behind her. I pointed out that's true of most pop singers.

In the most recent vocaloid concert (video here.), Miku is brought back for an encore and seems to stop and look away as if overcome with emotion. (See here, about 4:23.) The audience loves it.

So, what is Hatsune Miku?

She's not an Artificial Intelligence. Not that there's not a lot of intelligence in her software but she's no AI. Someone programmed that behavior into her. Someone made a communication to the audience with Miku's actions as the token.

Alan Turing, and many of the early computer scientists, were concerned with computer consciousness. How would they ever tell? Turing devised what has become known as the Turing Test. The idea of the Turing Test was you take a teletype in a room and use it as a conversing medium to something connected to an entity out of sight. If the entity is indistinguishable from a human being it is, in effect, human regardless as to whether it is in silicon or not.

I've never liked the Turing Test for a lot of reasons. For one reason, it essentially says we can't define consciousness but we, as humans, know it intrinsically. So we'll use that innate knowledge to recognize it. This is weak analysis. It's analogous to those that say, I can't define pornography but I know it when I see it. It may or may not be true but it isn't much in the way of science.

It also presupposes we can in fact do that recognition. Humans project their own qualities willy nilly on the world. We push human qualities to the universe, our pets, dolphins, elephants, lizards, rocks and the sun. Why do we think we'd do any better with a teletype?

It also presupposes a particular kind of consciousness and intelligence: human. Other species might fail the test and still have intelligence and consciousness.

Finally, it is prone to failure on its own merits. If some genius writes a program that can mimic a human interaction over a teletype-- some super Watson, for example-- does that my definition conscious? Think spam bots. Some of them are pretty damned good-- a limited venue, to be sure. But though we're not in the country of such computer programs, we can see it from where we stand.

If we substitute a song for a teletype, does Miku pass the Turing Test? Let's push further into the music. Miku fronts for the band but she doesn't interact with it. She can't depart onto an unrehearsed solo and have the band twig to when she hands it off. Almost any garage band can do that and some of the best bands, like The Who or Iron Butterfly, could make whole concerts out of handing improvisations one member to another. A whole field of music, jazz, was in part founded on it.

So, let's say future Miku improvements do allow her to act independently within this musical Turing Test. Would her passing define her to be conscious and intelligent?

I would say consciousness is not proven but intelligence is. Like the teletype program I suggested before, within that particular and narrow venue Miku would be every bit as intelligent as a human. Consciousness implies self-awareness of the experience and I don't think that's proven by the Turing Test in any way.

But, returning to Winograd and Flores, any object we create can (and likely is) a token of communication between people. Miku, as she now stands, is a communication mechanism of the song to the audience. The song is a creation of a set of individuals: the members of the band, the composer, the arranger, the programmer that taught Miku the song and the animator that produced her visualization.

Since I'm obsessed with her, I'll say the communication is good.

Dennis Ritchie vs. Steve Jobs

I've been hearing about how great Steve Jobs was for years. Yeah. Yeah. Huge impact. Huge.

But two people died in the last few weeks and one of them had a tremendous impact on everything you touch. The other was Steve Jobs.

It was Dennis Ritchie.

Let us go back to the late Triassic of computers: the 1960's. Remember that line in Apollo 13 about how great the space program to create a computer that could fit in a single room? That was the time.

Computers do essentially five things: test, branch, put to memory, fetch from memory and add. Everything else computers do is a variation or extension of these five operations. Back in the day, there were essentially three languages: COBOL, FORTRAN and assembly language. COBOL was used in business. FORTRAN was used in math and science. Everything else, from hospital information systems to a whole lot of billing and tracking of population data was done in assembly.

Assembly language is essentially a symbolic representation of machine operations. It is machine specific. For example:

MOV r1, #0x01139ba

and

TAM #0x01139ba

are essentially the same functional instruction. The first is move contents of register 1 to the address. The second is transfer the contents of the A register to the address.

Portability of assembly language was never an option. Not only was the syntax functionally different (I won't bother to descend in the hell of opcodes) the implementation of the functionality was different. While every computer had to execute those five functions I listed above, it's not easy to implement complex functionality in just those five ways. In addition, each machine manufacturer had its own idea of how to manage the problems. How to address memory? Use memory for the add function? It would be faster to do it in specialized electronic components called registers. (Hence the TAM instruction above.) There was more in common between a dog and a horse than there was between IBM 360 assembly and Harris assembly.

At least both the dog and the horse have the same number of legs.

What assembly language had to offer was to present no impediment between what the programmer wanted and what the fundamental machine provided. COBOL and FORTRAN provided a layer of insulation between the underlying machine and the programmer. That was fine if you didn't want to look at what the machine could do but not so great if you had to access that functionality. Some FORTRAN compilers allowed the programmer to include assembly language right in FORTRAN code.

Enter Dennis Ritchie.

The need for computer languages that operated at a higher level than assembly (and was not COBOL or FORTRAN but something more formal) had been recognized for some time. ALGOL was an early idea.

Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson looked at ALGOL. Liked some of it but thought the rest was cumbersome. They took the best parts of ALGOL and their own preferences and created the programming language C.

C was a portable language. It was simple. It was versatile. And it took the computer world by storm. C was first released in the early seventies. It gave all of the usual functionality of assembly languages without the platform dependence. If you wanted to write a program on one machine and then have it run on a second machine from a different manufacturer it was murderously painful.

Even better, it was structured. You have to understand at this point in programming there was a war being fought between structured and unstructured programmers. Structured programmers tried to write code that was readable and, hopefully, elegant. Unstructured programmers thought structure made you weak. Comments (annotations in the code that told you what the code was doing) were considered unmanly.

Think about this code:

i = 10;

now this

monetaryDenomination = 10;

Which is more informative? The computer doesn't care. 10 is 10.

I remember working my way through five thousand lines of uncommented assembly code one night just to figure out why a carriage return was present in one report option and not in another.

By the eighties everybody was either adopting C or getting ready to adopt C. Go on line and look for FORTRAN and COBOL jobs. See any? Now look for C jobs or their derivatives.

Everything you operate either runs on C or one of the C derivatives. C++? Derived from C. Java? Created in response to C++ which was derived from C. Python? Derived from smashing Java into C++. Javascript? from Java.

Ritchie was also instrumental in the creating Unix, from which Linux derived. Both are written in C. Using your android phone? Got Linux. Mac? Uses a descendant of the NeXTSTEP operating system, a variant of Unix, written in C. IPhone? Written in C++. Google? Lives in the Cloud. I bet it resides on Linux, written in C and C++.

Yeah, Jobs did a lot of things. But my hat's off to Ritchie. Jobs is like the guy who invented the designer car.

Ritchie invented the wheel.

Dumpster Diving

This post was inspired by Buster Blonde's fine post here.

I try not to talk much about my own personal life here.

Essentially, I strongly feel my opinions, work and profession should depend on the work I produce, not the path I took to become who I am that produces it. If I write a story with a black man as the main character I want it to be judged on the quality of the work and not judged that I, a white man, might dare to write about a black character. Similarly, if I write an opinion about how the poor are treated here in the US of A, I want that opinion evaluated whether or not I am poor or rich or somewhere not either.

I also feel that anecdotal evidence is no evidence at all. If we have a statistic-- say, percentage of people who are poor that manage to change their state. We'll say, arbitrarily and with no supporting fact, that 90% of the people who are born poor stay poor. (The statistics are much more interesting. See here. But for the purposes of this discussion we'll say 90%.) Then, someone comes along with an anecdote that such and such (insert name: Herman Cain, Henry Ford, etc.) raised himself out of poverty by dint of his own work ethic. That anecdote is immediately used to counter the statistic.

This is more than bogus. This is called bullshit.

Anecdotal evidence doesn't say anything about circumstances.

My life reflects who I've become but has no relevance to the world at large save that it formed my opinions.

My father was an aerospace engineer. He worked hard. Relentlessly, brutally hard. He had been raised as a farmer-- his family (read: him) plowed the farm with a horse because tractors were for the wealthy. They had no running water, electricity or indoor plumbing. He was critically unprepared for any technical education.

Then, World War II happened.

Dad wanted to be an aviator but had no math skills at all. He had a high school education from a high school that wasn't that good to begin with. He hadn't taken advantage of what had actually been there. He had been rejected by a music college because of insufficient math skills.

He received his draft notice. Dad didn't want to be fodder. He didn't want to die in the bowels of a ship. The rules were that once you received the notice you had a period of time to enlist before you were required to show up. He wanted to be an aviator and tried several times to so enlist, being rejected each time for various reasons. He would solve one problem and then find another. The last one was high school geometry.

Dad was walking down the steps of the courthouse and passed another gentlemen who had the same problem and was explaining to his friend that he'd gotten around it by agreeing to take a geometry course at a local school. Dad turned around on the steps and went back inside with this information and managed to get into aviation school.

Understand, I am enormously proud of my father. He was the sort of man who actually could take a sow's ear and make a silk purse. But, like anyone else, he had to have the luck to get the sow's ear in the first place.

Dad didn't help me in college. Not because he didn't want to but because in 1971 with the oil embargo and such the bottom completely fell out of aerospace and Dad was finished as an aerospace engineer. Eventually, he found his feet but I was on my own.

Which I managed by working two jobs and grabbing every National Defense Student Loan I could find. NDSL: thank you to Lyndon Banes Johnson. Imaging paying a guaranteed 3% loan for your education. NDSL stopped: thanks a lot, Nixon.

If there had been no GI bill, Dad wouldn't have been able to get into college. He would have had to go back to farming or selling pianos or cars or something because his high school education had not prepared him for much else. Did the country need him to do that? If there had been no NDSL, I'd have been screwed. I didn't have the grades to go to college on scholarship. I worked damned hard but so what? Effort does not always equal reward. Did the world need me pumping gas or digging ditches?

Sure I worked hard and made some good decisions but it was national policy and luck that got me here. Commodity Foods fed me that first year in college before I found my feet. And the places I had to live-- well, let's just say I know what I know about dumpster diving from personal experience.

So, does that mean I want my son to have proper instruction in dumpster diving to better prepare him for the workplace? Hell no.

Sure, I think people ought to work hard. But do I think opportunity is available to everyone without help? The statistics don't bear that out.

For my own part, anyone who thinks they did it without help is dreaming. And that's why we have to make sure people have help.

Faux News Gets It Right

Every now and then my knee jerk bias against Faux News gets slapped.

Sally Kohn published this amazing article on the Occupy Wall Street movement. I was led to it by James Fallows here.

Okay. Take a deep breath. How should I consider this? On the same site as Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, both of which are dumping on Occupy Wall Street in some weirdly desperate attempt to delegitimize it. When I see their opinions it immediately makes me wonder what's going on.

Now I'm really interested.

Quantum Levitation

Extremely cool video here.

The physics here.

Go Superconducting Group Tel-Aviv University!