Ever since the dawn of robotics, man has dreamed about having sex with one. At least according to pretty much every science fiction movie and book on the matter. Just think back to the movie Blade Runner, does the romance between Deckard and Rachael become any more or less weird if Deckard is a replicant too? The point being, for as long as there has been the vague notion of anthropomorphic robots there has been the desire to make one that would be able to have sex with us.
And so enter 2010, and there's a company claiming to have just that. A computer controlled sexbot! One that will not only move in different ways, but have distinct personalities and even email you updates on your favourite sporting teams. See the video below.
Okay, that's getting a little weird. Of course the big question is "how does it work?" and I couldn't find any videos showing the sexbot in action; which upon thinking about it is probably for the best. But still, there is a curiosity over how such a device functions, a lifeless mechanical blow-up doll and a feature list. Not very compelling stuff at all. Yet there seems to be a positive response already, so if the technology develops further - how long until it will be that sexbots become the sex aid of choice for the general population? Or will this forever be a niche market for people unable to find a partner? Could it put them off trying?
Perhaps there was something to that Futurama episode on the matter...
Sunday, 10 January 2010
Friday, 8 January 2010
In Taking Lessons Of Outrage From Fundamentalist Islam
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/08/2787928.htm (further news here)
Firstly ALL Australians should boycott Indian goods. No more curries, no more companies that use Indian call centres, nothing. That we support such hatred and anti-Australian sentiment through consumption is only going to encourage this anti-Australian bigotry and the bigots who condemn us.
Secondly, ALL Australians living overseas should be protesting, with large signs that contain messages like "FUCK THE SPICKS WHO SAY AUSSIES ARE RACIST". Wear singlets, stubbies, thongs and the obligatory Australian flag as a cape. Make sure to carry a Fosters in one hand, sing the national anthem proudly and then Waltzing Matilda for good luck. And just for good measure, beat up any Lebs along the way, just in case they are thinking about coming down to Cronulla beach.
Thirdly, real Australians should be sending death threats to the cartoonist responsible, same for any news organisations that dare print such hateful and hurtful cartoons against our country. And not just empty threats either, make sure that those who have desecrated our country's honour will live the rest of their very short lives in hiding and under police protection.
Fourthly, any Indian embassy is a prime target to demonstrate one's outrage at the hurt that this cartoon has done for our national image. Bombs can be easily made, and sacrificing oneself for the country will be rewarded with 72 engraved letters on a national monument. Indian Embassies should tremble in fear at the outrage their country has caused Australia.
Finally, we Australians should take this opportunity to make cartoons of our own blaspheming the Jews. At a time of such outrage, it is only appropriate to call the Jews devils, deny the holocaust happened, and compare them to swine. We all know of the Jew-run media, so in a way it's their fault - just like 9/11 or the Bali Bombings.
And the greatest thing about taking such action is that Western liberal thinkers will give us intellectual apologetics justifying our extreme use of violence, blaming the bigoted Indians for bringing such hatred on themselves, and talking about how national identity is extremely important to Australians. Such actions are not the responsibility of those involved, But of the perpetrators to instigated the violence by their own bigotry, those who didn't understand the importance of nationality to Australians.
It's time we realised that free speech has its limitations. And that limitation can only be taken seriously under the threat of violence. When someone publishes something blasphemous or heretical, the only measured response is one where self-censorship will emerge through fear and potential repercussions. Until such drastic action is taken (and the immediate beheading of any of the Indian pigs who printed such filth), no-one will take the Australian right to be respected seriously. And by respected I mean to be free from any criticism whatsoever!
(Disclaimer: In case anyone is under any doubt by this stage, this piece is written sarcastically. The point was to highlight the disparity between the incident and response in the Muhammad cartoons controversy, and to condemn those liberal western thinkers who have acted as apologists for the extremist actions over a cartoon. The ability to criticise, to put forth one's expression, this should be as sacred a value as one has in society; an ideal for any western democracy to protect. To cower down to the threat of violence is giving into terrorism, and that there's even a single liberal thinker acting as an apologist for such actions is a tragedy. No matter how offended one is, violence isn't justified. No apologetics about the important to culture, the significance of beliefs, etc. It's not justified, period.)
On a serious note, how much must we murky the already murky of waters of culture by pushing forward with cultural relativism? That we are wrapping up identities of millions or sometimes even billions of people with a stringent set of values and cultural icons that serve for personal identity? There seems to be nothing more dehumanising that reducing individuals to a stringent product of their culture.
Victoria's Police Association has reacted angrily to a cartoon in an Indian newspaper depicting one of the state's officers as a member of the Ku Klux Klan.It's an outrage to our country and ALL Australians should take the protest to the streets. First there was the monkey comment against our beloved cricketer Andrew Symonds and now this?
The Delhi Mail Today newspaper published the cartoon in response to the murder of Indian student Nitin Garg in Melbourne last weekend.
The cartoon shows a person in a Ku Klux Klan hood wearing a Victoria Police badge, with a caption that reads: "We Are Yet To Ascertain The Nature Of The Crime."
Police Association secretary Greg Davies says it is highly offensive to suggest police are not properly investigating the murder.
"To say that our detectives are going slow on this, or for some reason trying to protect somebody, is incredibly offensive and wrong," he said.
"It's based on nothing but obviously a slow news day in Delhi.
"The identity of the offender from the homicide in Footscray isn't even known at this stage, so we don't even know what nationality the offender is.
"To say it's a race-based crime is not only premature, but stupid."
The Police Minister, Bob Cameron, has added his voice to the condemnation of the cartoon.
Mr Cameron has rejected suggestions detectives aren't working hard enough to catch Nitin Garg's killer.
"We've got a great police force and we've got the homicide squad out there and they do a fantastic job and it just doesn't help anyone at all to have people from the sidelines throwing bricks," he said.
"We've got a good police force and we should let our police force go about their policing business in a sensible and a calm way."
Firstly ALL Australians should boycott Indian goods. No more curries, no more companies that use Indian call centres, nothing. That we support such hatred and anti-Australian sentiment through consumption is only going to encourage this anti-Australian bigotry and the bigots who condemn us.
Secondly, ALL Australians living overseas should be protesting, with large signs that contain messages like "FUCK THE SPICKS WHO SAY AUSSIES ARE RACIST". Wear singlets, stubbies, thongs and the obligatory Australian flag as a cape. Make sure to carry a Fosters in one hand, sing the national anthem proudly and then Waltzing Matilda for good luck. And just for good measure, beat up any Lebs along the way, just in case they are thinking about coming down to Cronulla beach.
Thirdly, real Australians should be sending death threats to the cartoonist responsible, same for any news organisations that dare print such hateful and hurtful cartoons against our country. And not just empty threats either, make sure that those who have desecrated our country's honour will live the rest of their very short lives in hiding and under police protection.
Fourthly, any Indian embassy is a prime target to demonstrate one's outrage at the hurt that this cartoon has done for our national image. Bombs can be easily made, and sacrificing oneself for the country will be rewarded with 72 engraved letters on a national monument. Indian Embassies should tremble in fear at the outrage their country has caused Australia.
Finally, we Australians should take this opportunity to make cartoons of our own blaspheming the Jews. At a time of such outrage, it is only appropriate to call the Jews devils, deny the holocaust happened, and compare them to swine. We all know of the Jew-run media, so in a way it's their fault - just like 9/11 or the Bali Bombings.
And the greatest thing about taking such action is that Western liberal thinkers will give us intellectual apologetics justifying our extreme use of violence, blaming the bigoted Indians for bringing such hatred on themselves, and talking about how national identity is extremely important to Australians. Such actions are not the responsibility of those involved, But of the perpetrators to instigated the violence by their own bigotry, those who didn't understand the importance of nationality to Australians.
It's time we realised that free speech has its limitations. And that limitation can only be taken seriously under the threat of violence. When someone publishes something blasphemous or heretical, the only measured response is one where self-censorship will emerge through fear and potential repercussions. Until such drastic action is taken (and the immediate beheading of any of the Indian pigs who printed such filth), no-one will take the Australian right to be respected seriously. And by respected I mean to be free from any criticism whatsoever!
(Disclaimer: In case anyone is under any doubt by this stage, this piece is written sarcastically. The point was to highlight the disparity between the incident and response in the Muhammad cartoons controversy, and to condemn those liberal western thinkers who have acted as apologists for the extremist actions over a cartoon. The ability to criticise, to put forth one's expression, this should be as sacred a value as one has in society; an ideal for any western democracy to protect. To cower down to the threat of violence is giving into terrorism, and that there's even a single liberal thinker acting as an apologist for such actions is a tragedy. No matter how offended one is, violence isn't justified. No apologetics about the important to culture, the significance of beliefs, etc. It's not justified, period.)
On a serious note, how much must we murky the already murky of waters of culture by pushing forward with cultural relativism? That we are wrapping up identities of millions or sometimes even billions of people with a stringent set of values and cultural icons that serve for personal identity? There seems to be nothing more dehumanising that reducing individuals to a stringent product of their culture.
Thursday, 7 January 2010
A Gargantuan Error
It's important to grasp just how big an error is being alleged that scientists are making in the age of the earth. Because when one says 4.5 billion compared to 6 thousand, our brains just aren't really able to deal with the scope of gap between the two numbers. It's a factor of about 750,000, that is to say that if young earth creationists are correct - the scientists who have based their age on measurement are wrong by about 750,000 times.
This is an error of gargantuan proportions. Basically the creationist is alleging that a room about 7 metres wide is being measured to 5,000km. That's it, imagine you're standing in a house in Sydney and looking west, the scientist is through measurement coming up with an answer that would go past Perth and into the Indian Ocean.
Are they honestly saying that the scientists are that bad at their jobs that they could make such an astounding error? Well, it's not the scientists but the tools they use - allegedly. That the radiometric dating techniques are inaccurate. Again, even if they are inaccurate, why is it that so many different dating techniques with different half-lives all converge on the same data points?
In terms of analogies, what seems more likely is that in terms of the distance between Sydney and Perth, a creationist is one who alleged the distance is no more than the width of a typical bedroom. Or better yet, that the width of the room is 10 microns. When someone bases their age on the contents of a myth while the other tries to find the answer by measurement, is it really more likely that the ones doing the measurement will be off by almost 6 orders of magnitude?
This is an error of gargantuan proportions. Basically the creationist is alleging that a room about 7 metres wide is being measured to 5,000km. That's it, imagine you're standing in a house in Sydney and looking west, the scientist is through measurement coming up with an answer that would go past Perth and into the Indian Ocean.
Are they honestly saying that the scientists are that bad at their jobs that they could make such an astounding error? Well, it's not the scientists but the tools they use - allegedly. That the radiometric dating techniques are inaccurate. Again, even if they are inaccurate, why is it that so many different dating techniques with different half-lives all converge on the same data points?
In terms of analogies, what seems more likely is that in terms of the distance between Sydney and Perth, a creationist is one who alleged the distance is no more than the width of a typical bedroom. Or better yet, that the width of the room is 10 microns. When someone bases their age on the contents of a myth while the other tries to find the answer by measurement, is it really more likely that the ones doing the measurement will be off by almost 6 orders of magnitude?
Tuesday, 5 January 2010
Cannot Prove A Negative?
Recently, upon several recommendations, I picked up Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. I figured given the size of the book, if I start now I should finish before the end of the year. So last night when I had a spare 30 minutes or so before dinner, I settled down to read and the first thing he does is gives a puzzle for the reader. So much for just sitting and reading, I scrambled to get a pen and paper then follow his very simple system in order to solve the puzzle.
The idea was that in the system there were just letters: M, I, and U. And there were four rules to go with the letters
Now that those are out of the way, Hofstadter gives the seemingly simple challenge of getting from MI to MU. Pen and paper come out and I sketch what I think is a solution. All finished, man it was easy. Then reading on a few more paragraphs, I realise that I made a mistake. Sure enough, I look back and there was a misapplication of rule 2. Okay, try again.
The first thing is that you can work out the first few steps. To get anywhere, you first need to apply rule two twice. Otherwise you'll forever be caught in an infinitely increase sequence of MIU(IU(IU(...))). So one goes from MI to MIIII before some interesting things can happen.
20 minutes of trying different things and no luck. Sit down to eat dinner and watch TV and still no luck. Had the pen and paper sitting next to me, and even when I thought I had a revelation on how to do it, I just couldn't get there. I tried working backwards, hoping I would be able to see a solution if I could come from the other angle, but still no luck. Final throw of the dice was to think about it mathematically.
With the rules as above, I derived values. I is worth 1 and U is worth 3 (rule 3). So with rule one, It is a +3. Rule two is a x2, or a doubling. Rule four is a -6. M is completely irrelevant as it will always be the front.
The thing is I could go to infinity and not find a solution. Yet I don't have infinite time nor patience. If I want to say it's impossible to get from MI to MU, then I can't use my inability to derive a solution as evidence. It might just be I'm a moron or I've missed something tricky. If I want to say that it is impossible (as I was beginning to suspect), I need a means of demonstrating that. Hence mathematics.
In the last move, you need something that is divisible by 3. But with the operations allowed by the system, such a number could never come about. If you look at something derivable like MUIU, it is 3+1+3. Which is not divisible by 3 (to get a whole number). +3 or -6 will only ever land you on something that is divisible by 3 if the number was already divisible by three to begin with. Likewise, doubling a number will never get you to something divisible by 3 unless it is already divisible by 3.
So given the starting point is MI, one can never get to MU given the rules allowed in the system. Of course my demonstration rests on axioms that I do not care to prove in the same way, and for the sake of argument I'll call both axioms about doubling and adding subtracting multiples of threes to be self-evident.
So why write this up on the blog? Firstly, he won't give an answer in the book just yet. So instead of maybe having to wait several hundred pages by which time I've forgotten my working to see if I was correct, if I'm flawed in my thinking I want to have a record of it where there is the possibility of being shown I'm wrong.
Secondly, it demonstrates something about human reasoning. And I think this is what Douglas Hofstadter is trying to get across. That we can see patterns such as MIUIU as leading to infinities despite not having direct domain knowledge nor having the time to write out the infinite sequence to demonstrate it.
In about the same time as it took for me to give up on trying to find a solution, I could have written a program to do it all for me. It could have brute-forced, making a tree of all possible moves from each position and hopefully getting to a solution if one existed. But at what stage could I get the computer to recognise the point of futility? When it runs out of memory? When strings get passed a certain size?
This isn't a finite search space, it's an infinite one. The string MIU will increasingly get higher and higher with the only rule that can apply to it (rule 2). Such a brute force strategy would not be able to recognise such a situation without an explicit check for such circumstances.
So to bring this to a final point, consider the scenario. While I was looking for a proof, instead what I wound up with is a proof of impossibility. Now this is fine in mathematics, but it is not fine in matters empirical. Take the Douglas Adams concept of fairies at the bottom of my garden. Now I can't disprove there are fairies by digging and digging, nor can I disprove the existence of fairies logically. Does this mean I should believe in the fairies or at the very least be a fairy-agnostic?
No! The very fact that I cannot give an absolute guarantee that fairies aren't there in no way compels me to even consider that there are. Why am I meant to consider the possibility of fairies in the first place? To posit that I should be a fairy-agnostic or a believer in fairies seems to me to necessitate first a reason to consider that there might be fairies in the first place. The lack of philosophical or logical impossibility to the concept is not sufficient to place the notion of fairies as anything to worry about in the first place.
The idea was that in the system there were just letters: M, I, and U. And there were four rules to go with the letters
- If the string ended with an I, then a U could be added. e.g. UMI -> UMIU, MUIIUI -> MUIIUIU
- Anything following an M could be doubled. e.g. MI -> MII, MIU -> MIUIU, MUIIU -> MUIIUUIIU
- Three I's could be replaced with a U e.g.IIIIUI -> IUUI, UIIIUII -> UUUII
- Two U's in a row could be removed e.g.IUUMI -> IMI, UUIU -> IU
Now that those are out of the way, Hofstadter gives the seemingly simple challenge of getting from MI to MU. Pen and paper come out and I sketch what I think is a solution. All finished, man it was easy. Then reading on a few more paragraphs, I realise that I made a mistake. Sure enough, I look back and there was a misapplication of rule 2. Okay, try again.
The first thing is that you can work out the first few steps. To get anywhere, you first need to apply rule two twice. Otherwise you'll forever be caught in an infinitely increase sequence of MIU(IU(IU(...))). So one goes from MI to MIIII before some interesting things can happen.
20 minutes of trying different things and no luck. Sit down to eat dinner and watch TV and still no luck. Had the pen and paper sitting next to me, and even when I thought I had a revelation on how to do it, I just couldn't get there. I tried working backwards, hoping I would be able to see a solution if I could come from the other angle, but still no luck. Final throw of the dice was to think about it mathematically.
With the rules as above, I derived values. I is worth 1 and U is worth 3 (rule 3). So with rule one, It is a +3. Rule two is a x2, or a doubling. Rule four is a -6. M is completely irrelevant as it will always be the front.
The thing is I could go to infinity and not find a solution. Yet I don't have infinite time nor patience. If I want to say it's impossible to get from MI to MU, then I can't use my inability to derive a solution as evidence. It might just be I'm a moron or I've missed something tricky. If I want to say that it is impossible (as I was beginning to suspect), I need a means of demonstrating that. Hence mathematics.
In the last move, you need something that is divisible by 3. But with the operations allowed by the system, such a number could never come about. If you look at something derivable like MUIU, it is 3+1+3. Which is not divisible by 3 (to get a whole number). +3 or -6 will only ever land you on something that is divisible by 3 if the number was already divisible by three to begin with. Likewise, doubling a number will never get you to something divisible by 3 unless it is already divisible by 3.
So given the starting point is MI, one can never get to MU given the rules allowed in the system. Of course my demonstration rests on axioms that I do not care to prove in the same way, and for the sake of argument I'll call both axioms about doubling and adding subtracting multiples of threes to be self-evident.
So why write this up on the blog? Firstly, he won't give an answer in the book just yet. So instead of maybe having to wait several hundred pages by which time I've forgotten my working to see if I was correct, if I'm flawed in my thinking I want to have a record of it where there is the possibility of being shown I'm wrong.
Secondly, it demonstrates something about human reasoning. And I think this is what Douglas Hofstadter is trying to get across. That we can see patterns such as MIUIU as leading to infinities despite not having direct domain knowledge nor having the time to write out the infinite sequence to demonstrate it.
In about the same time as it took for me to give up on trying to find a solution, I could have written a program to do it all for me. It could have brute-forced, making a tree of all possible moves from each position and hopefully getting to a solution if one existed. But at what stage could I get the computer to recognise the point of futility? When it runs out of memory? When strings get passed a certain size?
This isn't a finite search space, it's an infinite one. The string MIU will increasingly get higher and higher with the only rule that can apply to it (rule 2). Such a brute force strategy would not be able to recognise such a situation without an explicit check for such circumstances.
So to bring this to a final point, consider the scenario. While I was looking for a proof, instead what I wound up with is a proof of impossibility. Now this is fine in mathematics, but it is not fine in matters empirical. Take the Douglas Adams concept of fairies at the bottom of my garden. Now I can't disprove there are fairies by digging and digging, nor can I disprove the existence of fairies logically. Does this mean I should believe in the fairies or at the very least be a fairy-agnostic?
No! The very fact that I cannot give an absolute guarantee that fairies aren't there in no way compels me to even consider that there are. Why am I meant to consider the possibility of fairies in the first place? To posit that I should be a fairy-agnostic or a believer in fairies seems to me to necessitate first a reason to consider that there might be fairies in the first place. The lack of philosophical or logical impossibility to the concept is not sufficient to place the notion of fairies as anything to worry about in the first place.
Friday, 1 January 2010
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