The 327th Male

This Friday I’m off on a much needed holiday! Yay! First stop is Japan where I’ll be taking little brother jimmythins to visit older brother lion. Next stop is Europe, mainly France but also Switzerland if I get to it.

I could promise to blog on my travels but you all know I’d be lying. A few random updates is the best you can hope for, along with the traditional “tell mum I’m not dead yet” message my brother is infamous for. I think I’ve finally found a practical use for twitter.

For those not in the know, twitter is like a blog with really short entries (only 140 characters). The main advantage of twitter is that it can be updated by sending an sms. So while I am overseas it’s dead easy for me to text a short message, like “in a Japanese porn store - some freaky shit here” or “enjoying a croissant for breakfast in Paris”. Yes my friends, while suffering in your cubicled drudgery you can jealously follow my travels by checking out my twitter page.

I’ll be back early September, until then, sayonara, au revior!

The child thrashes on the ground, a stream of tears and ear splitting noise erupting from it. It’s hands and feet slap the ground spasmodically.

“I want low petrol prices! Waaaa! I want low petrol prices!” the child moans.
“Okay, okay!” the government concedes. “Here you go! Have a petrol excise. Is that better?”

You’ve all seen this before at the supermarket. You’ve all seen the inept parent cave and cater to their child’s whim. The only difference here is that the government knows that what it is doing is futile, but they feel they must listen to the people, as it cannot stand without their support. So who do I blame here, the government or the people?

The government does not set the price of petrol. The government is not responsible for the massive fuel price increases in recent years. The excises will not stop the cost of fuel from rising, or even slow it down.

For a thorough and less invective response to this issue, check out the oil drum.

Parliament question time is boring. We’ve all seen the pollies waffle on, seen the one-upmanship and bickering, the pleas made to “Mr Speaker”. What we haven’t seen is anything useful. Let’s face it, parliament is not really an accessible spectator sport.

But what if rather than passively watching, you could search for the issues you were interested in? What if you could follow only what your local representative is saying?

You can. Enter OpenAustralia.

OpenAustralia is a volunteer project to index the record of what goes on at parliament house. Think of it as a kind of “google” for Australian politics. So of course the first thing I searched for was swear words. It turns out the pollies are a pretty polite bunch, their insults are usually veiled in decorum. I was able to find these gems however:

Bernard Ripoll: He’s an evil little shit!

and:

Anthony Albanese: I am reflecting on him, moron. Are you going to control these people, Mr Speaker?

Ah, good times. In all seriousness though, the website is a great tool for aiding government transparency, something I feel is so important that for the last two weeks I’ve been helping out using my programming skills. Stay tuned, although only the house of representatives is on there at the moment, the senate is on the horizon, as well as a host of other features.

Apparently it is now a criminal offence to annoy a catholic person. Police and emergency service workers have been given special powers to stop behaviour that “causes annoyance or inconvenience” to people visiting the pope and participating in Sydney’s upcoming world youth day. What a load of bullshit.

What can be considered “annoying”? Pointing out the obvious contradictions in their beliefs? Calling out their actions for being inconsistent with their supposed moral values? Peaceful protest? Distributing free condoms? What happened to turning the other cheek?

I am ashamed of my country. If I was in Sydney I would not let this stop me from protesting, in fact I assume it will cause even more people to join in the march. Show them how wrong they are, but do it peacefully; don’t give them justification for these ridiculous powers.

Sydney-siders, do you best. I might just get myself a plane ticket and join you.

Recently a blogger over at skepchic set the site on fire with her post about why she supports intelligent design. A reasonably polite flame ware is currently raging and one of the themes brought up is whether intelligent design and theistic evolution are considered different things. What the hell does that mean? It all depends on the kind of game you think god is playing.

In the theistic evolution camp, god is playing dominoes. He/she/it/they set up an intricate pattern for how things would play out, then knocked the first domino over - lets call it the big bang. Everything from that point on plays out according to the plan, without intervention - planets form, life begins and eventually evolution cranks out a few bipedal monkeys.

In the intelligent design corner, god is playing curling.

Rather than just setting things up and watching them play out, god is frantically brooming, altering the course of events throughout history. God had to intervene to create humans; tweak things here, add a pinch of salt there, simmer for several thousand years.

So the question is, which god do you want to believe in? If I wasn’t an atheist I would prefer the domino god, something about it just implies perfection and omnipotence. This viewpoint also doesn’t contradict the evidence we see around us. People who believe in such a god, in such a creation story, can be positive supporters of evolution, science, critical thinking and skepticism.

I walked in to the lunch room today to see the front page of “The Advertiser” newspaper.

Being the space nerd that I am, the first thing I thought was that the mars rover named “spirit” had finally given up the ghost. I should have known better, a science article would never be on the front page of The Advertiser. Also the cheap celebrity photos splashing the rest of the page should have been a dead give away.

The real spirit keeps on trucking, stubbornly lasting 17 times longer than expected. The poor little robot has seen its share of troubles, and now has to drive everywhere backwards, dragging a dead and useless front wheel, still limping across the surface of Mars, doing science, even though it is 1360 in rover years.

Go spirit!

Sometimes when I am bored during lunch I dig out the paper and flip to the puzzles section. Crosswords don’t do it for me, I always look for target, the nine letter box thingo.

You know the rules, construct as many words as you can using each letter only once, and each word must contain the letter in the centre of the square. Sounds easy enough right? Most people are content to plow through, rattle off a few words and then give up. I usually try to go for the nine letter word, but always fail. Why is it so hard?

This is the difference between a normal person and a computer programmer. That question, “why is it so hard?” becomes a new game, all of its own.

There are only nine letters, there can’t be that many combinations right? Wrong.

Let’s start with three letter words. The first step is to take out the middle letter, ‘E’ (the example from the picture). We then have to pick two other letters to go with it, ‘F’ and ‘A’. How many different ways can we write them down?

Well there’s ‘AF’ and ‘FA’. After that you can stick the middle letter in three different positions, at the start, in the middle, or at the end. Three places for our two combinations gives six possible words, they being ‘EAF’, ‘AEF’, ‘AFE’, ‘EFA’, ‘FEA’, and ‘FAE’. None of those are real words, but we still had to try them.

Extending the same reasoning for more letters you come up with this:

Using 3 letters there are 6 possible combinations (3×2).
Using 4: 24 possible combinations (4×3x2).
Using 5: 120 possible combinations (5×4x3×2).
Using 6: 720 possible combinations (6×5x4×3x2).
Using 7: 5040 possible combinations (7×6x5×4x3×2).
Using 8: 40320 possible combinations (8×7x6×5x4×3x2).
Using 9: 362880 possible combinations (9×8x7×6x5×4x3×2).

Now it’s easy to see why finding those nine letter words is so hard. While a person won’t take the approach of randomly trying every combination it still gives a daunting idea of the search space they are dealing with. I also now understand why these puzzles are so common - it’s dead easy to write a computer program that generates them, so you don’t have to pay anyone to sit there and write them!

And that is the way my brain works. Rather than trying to play the game, I try to find the rules and principles behind the game. Unfortunately this approach doesn’t work in other areas of my life. Sometimes the principals are just too complex to grasp…

I know google-fu. And what is the first thing one does with google-fu? One googles oneself.

A search on my name, “Daniel Kinsman” will turn up a few different hits. Apparently there is a rather talented young kart racer who shares my name. I’m hoping he grows up to be a formula one driver so I can cash in on his notoriety. Unfortunately there is also a religious nut who shares my name as well. Perhaps it is a sign from god that I should throw out logic and reason and embrace faith? Nah, wait till you hear what he has to say. If I believed in signs this would be a sign not to believe.

I first came across the guy in this quote from the mailbag on an IT website called The Register:

Jesus would not need an IPOD because being God who walked on earth He is the author of life and music.

Now even I have to admit that that would be cool. Who needs an iPod when you can instantly reproduce any song or performance at the drop of a hat? Screw turning water into wine, the ultimate party miracle would be summoning forth Hendrix, Elvis and Beethoven for an impromtu jam session.

I also use google’s blog searching tool. It has this really cool function where you can subscribe to a given search over RSS. For you non-geeks that means whenever anyone posts the words “Daniel Kinsman” anywhere on a blog, I know about it within days. Here’s the latest comments from Mr Daniel Kinsman on a priest’s blog post about some alleged paedophile:

I refuse to believe such an allegation about Father John Bertolucci. I saw the gift of the Holy Spirit at work in this man. He was given the gift of tongues as the apostles had. He had the gift of healing. He also had other charisms of the Holy Spirit. I think the accusations against him were false.

It was an attack of Satan as far as I am concerned

Watch out when Satan attacks! When good archangels go bad! No doubt if Mr Daniel Kinsman reads this website he will interpret it as an attack of Satan. What he really needs is an attack of sanity.

This website will be going offline for one hour on March 29th at 8pm Adelaide time. It isn’t going down for maintenance, or other technical difficulties; it is going down by choice. Earth hour is an event where everyone turns off their lights and other electrical appliances in a show of support against global warming. The idea is to reduce power consumption nationwide for that one hour, just to show what we can do without.

The computer that serves you this website, pictured above, sits in my kitchen next to the fridge. It will be switched off on the hour, along with everything else in the house, as my little show of support.

If you want to join the voluntary blackout, you can sign up on the earth hour website, although it is getting hammered at the moment so I can’t even join yet!

Artificial intelligence isn’t. At least not yet anyway.

When I was at uni I did a whole semester on AI, specifically neural networks. For our final project we created a program that could analyse a bit of music and tell you what genre it was in. We’d feed it the chord progression (C major, A minor etc) and it would spit out a value telling you whether it was jazz, blues, rock or classical.

The interesting thing is that we didn’t write this program. We taught it. It learned.

Initially the program knew nothing about music. It ate a song and then guessed the genre, usually incorrectly, in which case we chastised it. When it guessed correctly we rewarded it. After a while we could feed it a song it had never “heard” before and the guess was pretty accurate. Once we even gave it a song that was a fusion of classical and jazz, and it correctly identified it as being both.

Don’t worry about skynet taking over just yet. Although AI can do some pretty cool things, the big breakthrough we’ve been hearing about for decades hasn’t shown up yet.

But if or when we do hit this breakthrough, what will happen? One answer is an idea called the singularity. Basically it is a point in time when everything will change. It’s a point in the future beyond which our imagination fails us, because our current level of intelligence is incapable envisioning it.

Here’s one example of how the singularity might play out:

1. we invent an AI as smart as ourselves
2. we invent an AI smarter than ourselves
3. this AI then invents an AI smarter than itself
4. repeat step 3 as many times as you like
5. The new AIs think up a theory of everything, solve P vs NP, invent flying cars, etc.

So is this just all science fiction bullshit? Maybe. How could it be possible to create something more intelligent than yourself? Then again, the process looks remarkably like evolution doesn’t it?

Either way, visions of skynet becoming self aware and nuking us are a bit far fetched. Rather than one unified intelligence besieging humanity, we are more likely to end up with a billion separate AIs, all created for different purposes. I always wanted my own Jane.

We could be on the verge of something incredible. Or the next forty years could pass like the last forty, with no significant advancements. The field of artificial intelligence has had it’s Newton, now it needs an Einstein. Any takers?