Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, BoingBoing, Humor, Science, Science Fiction
His expert was one of best, one of only a few hundred based on the new semifluid CPU technology that surpassed the best thin-film computers made by the Israelis. But it was a quirky technology, just a few years old, subject to problems that conventional computers didn’t have, and still not entirely understood. Even less settled was whether the experts based on this technology could finally be considered to be true AI. The superconducting gel that was the basis of the semifluid CPU was more alive than not, and the computer was largely self-determining once the projected energy matrix surrounding the gel was initiated by another computer. Building on the initial subsistence program, the computer would learn how to refine and control the matrix to improve its own ‘thinking’. The thin-film computers had long since passed the Turing test, and these semifluid systems seemed to be almost human. But did that constitute sentience? Jon considered it to be a moot point, of interest only to philosophers and ethicists.
One of the things about Communion of Dreams which isn’t immediately evident is that the story isn’t really the story of the protagonist, Jon Thompson. That is the natural expectation – that the story is the protagonist’s story – so much so that even the editor from Trapdoor commented on how the protagonist allows other characters to grow within the storyline. It is, instead, the ending of the story of the old prospector Darnell Sidwell and the beginning of the story of Seth, the ‘expert system’ which is transformed into a true artificial intelligence beyond our scope to understand.
The quote above is from the first chapter of the book, and really sets the stage for this latter story. Jon doesn’t really think about these matters at the start – that’s not his job. But he is the vehicle through which the reader is pushed to explore these things, to become a philosopher and ethicist.
A few days ago I came across this brilliant little piece:
Artificial Flight and Other Myths
a reasoned examination of A.F. by top birdsOver the past sixty years, our most impressive developments have undoubtedly been within the industry of automation, and many of our fellow birds believe the next inevitable step will involve significant advancements in the field of Artificial Flight. While residing currently in the realm of science fiction, true powered, artificial flying mechanisms may be a reality within fifty years. Or so the futurists would have us believe. Despite the current media buzz surrounding the prospect of A.F., a critical examination of even the most basic facts can dismiss the notion of true artificial flight as not much more than fantasy.
We can start with a loose definition of flight. While no two bird scientists or philosophers can agree on the specifics, there is still a common, intuitive understanding of what true flight is: . . .
It’s well worth reading the whole thing. It’s only about a page in length, and gets across exactly the same message I tried to tell with my 109,000 word novel: how expectations constrain vision. A bird will naturally assume that flight means muscle-powered, biologically-based flight. Envisioning mechanized flight, let alone spaceflight, is something else entirely.
And so it is with ourselves and the trait we think defines us.
Jim Downey
(Via BB.)
Filed under: Art, Astronomy, Carl Sagan, NASA, NPR, Science, Science Fiction, Space, Titan
I’m not big on Valentine’s Day. No, I’m not some kind of cold, unloving bastard. Quite the contrary – I resent the cynical manipulation by the greeting card and floral industries creating the expectation that men can only show their love on one special day each year. I love my wife and try to show it to her in many honest ways throughout the year.
But February 14th is memorable for me for another reason.
20 years ago on this day we received a picture – a perspective, if you will – which we had never seen before. That of Earth from the vantage of the Voyager 1 spacecraft – an image which has come to be known as the Pale Blue Dot. The book of the same name helped inspire and inform my writing of Communion of Dreams – a fact which can be seen in several passages, but which most readily comes to mind for me as this dream sequence:
The bridge was perhaps three meters wide, and arched slowly up in front of him, so that he couldn’t see the other end. It had walls of stone about a meter high, and periodically along those walls he could see small sculpted stone vases in which grew roses. Blue roses. He went over and peered into one of the buds, a clean blue light almost like a gas flame. The petals spread, until the flower was completely open.
Turning, he started to walk toward the rise in the center of the bridge. After a few dozen paces, he was almost halfway across the bridge, but he couldn’t see the other side. The fog seemed to rise up from the surface of the river, the bridge stretched off into a muzziness of grey. Then he noticed that the roses in a nearby vase were smaller, the light somehow more distant.
Another couple dozen paces and the end of the bridge where he had begun was almost out of sight. The roses had continued to shrink in size, and the light of each receded. It had grown darker, too, the sun had begun to shrink in size, as though retreating from him. He walked on. There was still no end in sight, just the bridge continuing into a growing dimness. The sun was smaller still, and had lost enough intensity that he could look straight at it without discomfort. The roses here were so small as to be hard to make out, the blue dot of light in each flower becoming pale. And he noticed that the walkway beneath his feet now felt spongy, like it was becoming insubstantial.
Tentatively taking a few more steps, at last he felt his foot sink into the bridge, and he started falling forward.
That’s from the end of Chapter Five, as the protagonist and his team of scientists are en route to Titan and are metaphorically crossing from the known to the unknown. Just as Voyager continues to do.
Happy Pale Blue Dot Day.
Jim Downey
All Things Considered had a nice piece about this photograph and what led to it last Friday, which includes this nice bit from Carl Sagan:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Feedback, Government, Guns, Science
I mentioned the other day that the BBTI site was closing in on 2 million hits. And, with the site chugging along with 3,500 – 4,500 hits a day, I figured we’d get there before the end of this month. But then, over the last couple of days, hits about doubled, approaching 7,000 hits a day.
Now, this happens. Usually it is due to BBTI being “discovered” and posted on a new gun/shooting forum someplace – so a bunch of people who haven’t heard about the project yet run off to check it out, and send links to their friends. And it has also happened when I’ve posted some new information to the site (such as when we added in the additional testing results last spring) or announce something new in the works (as with the cylinder gap tests).
But that wasn’t the reason why we saw the bump up this time. Instead, it was because of an announcement from the FBI.
See, the FBI has announced that they are going to go to a .40 S&W AR-15 carbine. And in discussing that decision, people started citing our numbers on the .40 S&W cartridge performance in different barrel lengths. You can see what I mean at The Firearm Blog, at Calguns, and elsewhere. This is something I have mentioned before, how BBTI has come to be increasingly used as a resource for evaluating firearm performance, but this is the first time that I’ve seen it happen in response to some newsworthy item. And I think that is really pretty cool.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Book Conservation, General Musings, Guns, Predictions, Publishing, RKBA, Science, Science Fiction, U of Iowa Ctr for the Book, Writing stuff
I spent most of yesterday re-reading Communion of Dreams, to make sure that all the little changes I’d made in the previous week were correct and to see if I could catch a few more typos. Once it was all checked and double checked, I created manuscript files in the format preferred by the publisher, appended an email, and zipped the whole thing off. If you would like to see the finished product, the CoD homepage has now been updated to have the final .pdf version.
So, now we wait and see what the publisher decides.
And speaking of the publisher, I have had a couple of queries about them. It’s a new enterprise, Trapdoor Books. I like their attitude and approach, though of course with something so new it is hard to judge. And if this works out, I hope that I can help them as much as they can help me. If it doesn’t work out, no hard feelings on my part – lord knows that I had to turn down a lot of talented artists in the years I had the gallery.
But it does have something of the same feeling as when I first started at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. That too was a new enterprise, and no one was really sure how it would work out. Now it is perhaps the most highly regarded book arts program in the country, and my almost 20 year career as a conservator has both benefited from the reputation and added to it in a small way.
So, we’ll see. It looks like things are moving again with Her Final Year, and that book could garner a lot of mainstream attention, since there is little in the care-giving literature from a male perspective. BBTI will cross 2 million hits later this month, and we’re currently planning another very large series of tests this spring which will once again generate a lot of interest in the gun world. It could be a very interesting year.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Cosmic Variance, Science, Scientific American, YouTube
Nice – here’s another show for “The Explosions Channel“:
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi. *Apologies to Sean Carroll.)
Most geeks already know about Charles Babbage‘s Difference Engine, but there was a nice piece on NPR this morning about it:
Charles Babbage, the man whom many consider to be the father of modern computing, never got to complete any of his life’s work. The Victorian gentleman was a brilliant mathematician, but he wasn’t very good at politics and fundraising, so he never got the financial backing to finish any of his elaborate machine designs. For decades, even his fans weren’t certain whether his computing machines would have worked.
But Doron Swade, a former curator at the Science Museum in London, has proven that Babbage wasn’t just an eccentric dreamer. Using nothing but materials that would have been available to Babbage in the 1840s, Swade and a group of engineers successfully built Babbage’s Difference Engine — and a version is now on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
Having just watched “Longitude” about the construction and restoration of the first functional marine chronometers (and having seen reproduction of same at Greenwich), this seems, er, timely.
Jim Downey
A number of health researchers have wondered whether an over-enthusiastic effort to create an ultra-clean/hygenic environment for children was behind a growing rate of asthma and possibly even obesity and cardiovascular disease. And now it looks like there’s pretty good evidence to support this:
Exposing kids to nasty germs might actually toughen them up to diseases as grown-ups, mounting research suggests.
A new study suggests that higher levels of exposure to common everyday bacteria and microbes may play a helpful role in the development of the body’s inflammatory systems, which plays a crucial role in the immune system’s fight against infection.
“Inflammatory networks may need the same type of microbial exposures early in life that have been part of the human environment for all of our evolutionary history to function optimally in adulthood,” said Thomas McDade, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University and lead author of the study.
The investigation focused on how various early childhood environments affected levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), which rises in the blood because of inflammation. C-reactive protein is also considered by researchers to be a predictor of heart disease, independent of lipids, cholesterol and blood pressure, though the association has been disputed.
While earlier studies have been conducted in relatively affluent settings such as the United States, the researchers were interested in how C-reactive protein production differed in a country like the Philippines, a population with a high level of infectious diseases in early childhood, but low rates of obesity and cardiovascular diseases when compared to Western countries.
Turns out, the Filipino participants in the study had one-fifth to one-seventh the CRP levels of Americans.
Now, consider – the slow plague of obesity has also been linked to the spread of a virus (which I have written about previously). Could it be that because of an over-emphasis on protecting children from exposure to immune-system-building microbes more people are now susceptible to this obesity-causing virus? Did 20th century germophobia set the stage for 21st century heart disease?
Jim Downey
I just do not understand the mindset that some people have.
OK, let me explain. Monday I posted an excerpt about our upcoming “Cylinder Gap” tests to several of the gun forums I frequent, because I thought it would be of interest to some people who hang out at such places. And, for the most part, that proved to be correct.
But one place I got a response from one guy who said “it’s already been done”. See, he had done these sorts of tests using one brand of revolver which allows you to adjust the cylinder gap, in both a smaller and a larger caliber than the .38/.357 we’re testing. And the difference wasn’t that big a deal. Oh, he had the data somewhere, but he didn’t have it readily available. There was no real reason for us to conduct the tests.
OK, so here’s a guy who tested something different than we did (different calibers, and I guess only one barrel length in each). And he never published the data, though he says he’ll dig it up. Nor did he document the process he used.
Doesn’t sound to me like “it’s already been done.”
Now, I don’t mean to single this guy out, and if you go looking for the post don’t mangle him for his comment. Well, not too badly, anyway. Because I’ve run into this kind of mindset a lot in regards to the BBTI project, both in posts I’ve seen online in various places and in private emails I’ve received. People who think that just because they have done something a bit similar, and drawn their own conclusions, that therefore there is no value in what we’ve done or are planning to do. It’s like they resent the very idea that someone else might do more than they did, either in scope or in results. And so they try and either claim that they had the idea for the project first, or did some part of it first/better, or just try and belittle the results.
This sort of thing happens all the time, not just regarding the BBTI project. You see it with people grousing about invention and innovation, about movies and books, about blog posts or government or relationships. They seem to think that just the idea is what matters, not any effort or final product to bring that idea into reality.
Thomas Edison famously said that “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” A related quote from him perhaps sums up my attitude even better:
I am much less interested in what is called God’s word than in God’s deeds. All bibles are man-made.
Yeah, that’s it.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI and BBTI blog.)
Communion Of Dreams 