I’m working on the following children’s story. I will update this post as I complete the drawings. https://imageshack.com/ Image Hosted by ImageShack.us W. V. O. Quine is my best friend. Quine’s first names are Willard, Van, and Orman. Quine’s friends call him ‘Van’. https://imageshack.com/ Image Hosted by ImageShack.us Quine was born in Ohio. Quine studied with Whitehead to get his PhD. Whitehead wrote Principia Mathematica with Russell. Quine loves logic. https://imageshack.com/ Image Hosted by ImageShack.us Quine studied with Carnap in the Vienna Circle. Quine and Carnap were good friends. Carnap was a logical positivist. https://imageshack.com/ Image Hosted by ImageShack.us Logical positivism believes in the analytic/synthetic distinction. Analytic statements are true because of their meaning. “All bachelors are unmarried men” is analytically true. Quine doesn’t like the analytic/synthetic distinction. Quine argued against Carnap in Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Quine thinks all our sentences face the tribunal of experience together. People didn’t like Quine for rejecting analyticity. People worried that Quine was rejecting meaning entirely. But Quine was no fool.

I’m sure most of you have encountered this before, but if not, its worth the read. From the late, great Douglas Adams: How to stop worrying and love the internet. Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

I’ve found the buzzword I’ve been looking for. I’ve also found the people who have been doing research in my area, and they are all in Northern Europe. I wonder if it’s too late to move to Sweeden. The term ‘stigmergy’ was created by Grasse in the late 50’s, from the Greek stigmos meaning ‘pricking’ and ergon, meaning ‘work’. He was studying ant and termite behavior, and ran headlong into the so-called “coordination paradox” The concept of stigmergy provided an alternative theory for understanding the coordination paradox, i.e., the connection between the individual and the societal level: looking at the behaviour of a group of social insects,they seem to be cooperating in an organised, coordinated way, but looking at each individual, they seem to be working as if they were alone and not involved in any collective behaviour. Grasse was looking for “a class of mechanisms that mediate animal-animal interactions”, which was severely lacking from the scientific repertoire. The only tool available were analogies drawn to the functioning of an organism in terms of its individual organ systems, but this had no explanatory value, and in fact suffered from the same coordination issues. The alternative was to merely describe the individual agents with no respect to their interactions. This view was advocated by Rabaud, who was generally skeptical of holistic explanations. The focus on individual behaviour had a tendency of oversimplifying the nature of social phenomena, and Rabaud claimed that the only cause of behaviour lies within an individual, and “if cooperation occurs it is only by chance and as a result of unexpected incidents” (Theraulaz & Bonabeau, p. 99). According to Rabaud each individual was doing its own work, without paying any attention to the work of others, and therefore they had no noticeable influence on each other. Rabaud […]

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us Asimo hasn’t been in the news lately, so I thought we’d check up. Seeing him over summer break at Disneyland was the highlight of my trip back home. He is one of the most integrated and well-developed humanoid robots walking the earth today, and really serves as the most well-known of the celebots. He popped up recently on my AI watch as Honda plans to integrate some of his sensory-motor components into their vehicles. Bloomberg.com: Honda Will Apply Asimo’s Robot Technology to Enhance Car Safety The new Asimo, weighing 54 kilograms, can run at a speed of 6 kilometers an hour, double the speed of its previous version, Honda said. The robot, one of which is on permanent display at Honda’s head office in Tokyo, is used as a receptionist for visiting guests. The robot can walk alongside a guest, hold the guest’s hand, carry a serving tray or push a tea trolley. The robot is equipped with a memory and intelligence system equivalent to a three-year- old child and its strength and physical abilities are equal to a 10-year old, Honda said. Asimo is definitely the torchbearer of robothood, having performed all sorts of diplomatic functions like meeting heads of state and opening the trading day on the NYSE. His integration with vehicle manufacturing is well appreciated here, obviously. On a side note, in looking around for info about Asimo, I stumbled upon the Robocup: The ultimate goal of the RoboCup project is by 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world champion team in soccer. Robocup has already held the first ever humanoid-only soccer game using teams of Robosapiens. Maybe playing chess with Deep Blue isn’t really playing a game with a computer, but I challenge […]

Some rumblings over at The Bellman about the lawsuit brought against Wikipedia. Saftey Neal quoted a News.com article with a bunch of analysts discussing the impossibility of a libel lawsuit against Wikipedia. From CNet News.com: Is Wikipedia safe from libel liability? Thanks to section 230 of the Federal Communications Decency Act (CDA), which became law in 1996, Wikipedia is most likely safe from legal liability for libel, regardless of how long an inaccurate article stays on the site. That’s because it is a service provider as opposed to a publisher such as Salon.com or CNN.com. “I think that there’s no liability, period,” said Jennifer Granick, executive director of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University Law School. “Section 230 gives you immunity for this.” Upon closer inspection of the CDA we find the relevant passages: (2) Civil liability No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of – (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or (B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph The argument, I take it, is that Wikipedia is a service, and doesn’t provide content. In the interest of journalistic integrity, here’s the relevant definition of terms according to the CDA: (2) Interactive computer service The term “interactive computer service” means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet […]

From Infoworld: Study: Google users wealthier, more Net savvy U.S. residents who prefer Google Inc.’s search engine tend to be richer and have more Internet experience than those who primarily use competing search services from Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and America Online Inc., a new study has found. The longer people have been using the Internet, the more likely it is that Google will be their search engine of choice, according to a survey of 1,000 U.S. Internet users conducted by investment banking and research firm S.G. Cowen & Co. LLC. Moreover, people whose primary search engine is Google are more likely to have household incomes above US$60,000 than people who use competing search engines, according to the survey, whose results S.G. Cowen published in a report Monday. Not only is Google an authority, but Google is recognized as an authority by the most competent among us.

From Swarm Sketch Image Hosted by ImageShack.us “Low fat” You can watch it being created here, or contribute to the current project, “Cricket India”. Past work of note includes “Faces of Meth”, “Hurricanes”, and “Unclaimed Baggage”. You can view the full gallery here. From CNET News.com: SwarmSketch taps Web’s ‘collective consciousness’ About three months ago, Peter Edmunds, a 22-year-old communications student at the University of Canberra, in Australia, began a Web site called SwarmSketch with the idea of producing a sketch of “the collective consciousness” every week. Edmunds’ Web site randomly selects one of the most popular search terms from a couple of major search engines and uses that word or phrase as the topic for a collaborative drawing project for the week. Anyone who wants to can peek at the latest stage of a drawing, add a tiny bit to it (about an inch’s worth, if you draw a straight line) and even erase other people’s lines, or at least vote to lighten them. … Apparently, the collective consciousness is quite literal-minded. Almost all of the drawings begin with something figurative in the middle. And no matter how much scribbling and erasing there is along the way, the central figure usually remains. “The basic outline of the sketch becomes clear in the first few hundred lines,” Edmunds said, and “it’s hard for the users after that to change the direction of the image.” POST NAVIGATION

cuz you gets none of these. Its official: Snoop Dogg is the most well-connected rapper, according to a recent http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051205/full/051205-8.html article. He finds that on average it takes a chain of just 2.9 people in the network to connect one rapper to another; that is, three degrees of separation. This compares with 2.5 people for the network of movie actors (popularized in the Kevin Bacon game ), 3.6 for company board directors, and 5.9 for collaborations between high-energy physicists. … In this respect, rap exhibits the same spirit as early jazz, where musicians had on average less than two degrees of separation. … And who is the most highly connected rapper? It’s Snoop Dogg, naturally, who seems to have justified the title of his 1999 album No Limit Top Dogg. I dont think Snoop Dizzle will let it go to his head, though.

Elvis asked a question and he expects an answer? From ME? I’m just sitting here minding my own business flipping switches and turning knobs and pushing his buttons I suppose because he asks me how I plan on transcending humanism. Humans? What could those be? Little furry creatures with NO BUTTONS and NO KNOBS but lots of hard boney outty parts and lots of warm moist inny parts who make awful racket and LOOK YOU IN THE EYE. DONT LOOK ME IN THE EYE GODDAMNIT. Your soul is dark black and contagious and I am soul-free thank you very much. My mouth opens and my charismatic tone flees my throat and I croak out the relationships between me and you and you and me and it is stale and flat and disgusting and I heave and panic and HEAVE. My interactions are mine, goddamnit, and I choose who is on the other end of the line, who I call, which buttons I press, when to hang up. Action at a distance HA action smacksion resmacksion The point, c’mere, up close, Elvis says. The point, you see, is that when I touch you, when I slip your fitches and knurn your tobs, that I am in control. And I, Elvis says as he beats his chest and breaths a mucus breath, his hair in individual strands on his head, and I am human, and I am god. And then he stops and smokes a cigarette and takes a drink of water, and then sits down for a meal which he scarfs in living, bloody chunks, and then he shits and watches it as it spirals down the drain. And then he grabs his dick, large with loose strands of hair and veins and the grime of a well handled handrail, and […]

The Register recently published the letter Condi Rice sent to the EU right before the 11th hour decision to pull out of their hardline stance about ICANN control in the run up to the WSIS conference a few weeks back. The Internet will reach its full potential as a medium and facilitator for global economic expansion and development in an environment free from burdensome intergovernmental oversight and control. The success of the Internet lies in its inherently decentralized nature, with the most significant growth taking place at the outer edges of the network through innovative new applications and services. Burdensome, bureaucratic oversight is out of place in an Internet structure that has worked so well for many around the globe. The letter is strongly worded and no-nonsense, which means the responsibility now falls on the US to make sure we keep to the spirit and letter of our own recommendations. This is especially important now that the Baby Bells are getting fussy about the state of their monopolies because of the kinds of competition the internet provides.