Posts published in “Uncategorized”

I’ve heard memory is unreliable but this takes the cake…

Published May 7, 2008 by centaur

Researching another story I came across this tidbit:

Eyewitness Memory is Unreliable
Australian eyewitness expert Donald Thomson appeared on a live TV discussion about the unreliability of eyewitness memory. He was later arrested, placed in a lineup and identified by a victim as the man who had raped her. The police charged Thomson although the rape had occurred at the time he was on TV. They dismissed his alibi that he was in plain view of a TV audience and in the company of the other discussants, including an assistant commissioner of police. The policeman taking his statement sneered, "Yes, I suppose you've got Jesus Christ, and the Queen of England, too." Eventually, the investigators discovered that the rapist had attacked the woman as she was watching TV - the very program on which Thompson had appeared. Authorities eventually cleared Thomson. The woman had confused her rapist's face with the face the she had seen on TV. (quote taken from Baddeley's Your Memory: A User's Guide).

It simply staggers my imagination that someone testifying about unreliable eyewitnesses would then get accused of something by an unreliable witness ... who herself had been watching him talk about unreliable witnesses and got confused!

-Anthony

Extra Spaces

Published May 7, 2008 by centaur

Qumana is a great blog post editor, but it has an interesting property that makes its posts appear weird on my web site.

If you hit return, it wraps the whole paragraph in a HTML "p" tag

like so

Which is nice, in theory it's how you're supposed to use the "p" tag, but ...

It puts huge spaces between paragraphs in my blog.

I'm not sure why this is happening. Some CSS error in my stylesheet? Some translation ... WHOA!

I just did "view source" on the published blog, and found extra
tags after each paragraph in the published blog! So THAT's what is happening... now, of course, the question is WHY, since they don't show up on Qumana's Source View.
Here's seeing if switching from "Enter Starts A New Paragraph" to "Enter Starts A New Line" does the trick.
9:56pm hit return.
-the Centaur

Artificial Intelligence, Briefly

Published May 7, 2008 by centaur

Who am I? What do I do? Why?

I am an artificial intelligence researcher.

I study human and other minds to aid in the design of intelligent machines and emotional robots.

I believe emotions are particularly important for robots because, unlike intelligent machines which normally run as computational processes on a general computer maintained by some other agent, robots have physical bodies with physical needs that they themselves are in part responsible for - and an emotional system's functions are to evaluate how our current situation meets our needs, to trigger quick reactions to get us out of harm, and to motivate us to pursue long-term actions to improve our lot.

I pursue artificial intelligence because right here, right now its techniques help me construct better software artifacts and deepen my understanding of the human condition, and because I hope that creating human level intelligence and beyond will improve the lot of human kind and further the progress of sentient life.

I think these things often, but I never say them. Time to change that.

-Anthony

Regurgitating Slashdot…

Published May 5, 2008 by centaur

... does not constitute true "blogging," unless you really have something new to say about the topic. Same goes for the tip you just found on Lifehacker. Perhaps, the curmudgeon in me says, keep the "me too"s and "+1"s to yourselves?

But, I'm a hypocrite; half the tricks I learn and shiny sparklies I find, I only get because some other blogger has read it (out of the dozens of other blogs I don't subscribe to), decided it was good, and regurgitated it into my waiting Google Reader. So keep it coming ... I guess. But I still need something more than "check out what I saw on Slashdot."

-the Centaur

Don’t Get Overly Ambitious

Published May 5, 2008 by centaur

If you're going to blog once a day for a month, it's important not to get overly ambitious about the articles you're going to write each day. I started off with the idea I'd finish all the waiting blog posts I had sitting around, write down my definitive thoughts on several key topics, et cetera.

The outcome of this bright idea? Well, sitting "right next" to this article in Qumana is a blog entry on "delusionaries" which proved too big to chew in a couple of small bites. So I'm going to spit this one out, cut it up into smaller bits, and try again. Stay tuned.

-Anthony

How Easy It Is To Fall Off the Wagon!

Published May 4, 2008 by centaur

Not even the first week and I skipped a blog entry. Shame on me - and I was even online yesterday.

It's very easy to "fall off the wagon" - to decide to change how we want to live our lives, but then let our day-to-day habits, plans, and interactions carry us through a course of actions that contradicts that. A Christian theologian would make some noise about the fallibility of man; a cognitive scientist would natter on about automatized behaviors, capture errors and the illusion of conscious will. But the long and the short of it is that we're really bad at this.

I can point to a number of wagons I've fallen off repeatedly: regular exercise, martial arts training, doing the physical therapy exercises for my knee, calling all my friends at the beginning of the month, taking the laundry out of the dryer as soon as it beeps. But other wagons I hang on to tenaciously: feeding the cats twice daily, watering the lawn, attending the weekly and monthly writing groups.

At first blush this is the diference between things that have immediate feedback (mewing cats, wilted plants, written stories) and those that don't (it can take months to notice changes in your waistline). But I find that this even applies to things that don't have immediate feedback - like writing my "weekly snippets" at the Search Engine That Starts With a G, a performance tool that I regularly use even though I'm the only one that apparently reads them. True, if you don't send snippets you get reminders about it; but most people ignore them, just like I ignore many, many other automated reminders I get. So that's not it either.

So some wagons are easy to fall off of and others are easy to hang on to. Why is that? I could go off and do a typical blogger speculation, but let's leave it at this for a moment: why are there some things that are so easy to decide to do (or not to do) regularly, while other habits are so hard to make or break that it seems nearly impossible?

'jes wonderin,
-the Centaur

Insignificance

Published May 2, 2008 by centaur

Created via Automotivator, which I found after seeing a Livejournal post (itself found via Planet Lisp) in which its creator, Zach Beane, created a motivational poster for all the smug lisp weenies:

I may not program in Lisp much anymore - probably less than once a month or so, compared to my Top Five (currently Javascript, Java, C++, Bash and Python) - but I do now have this poster hanging in my office at the Search Engine That Starts With a G. Already it's gotten quite a few questions ... :-)

So, on the note of doing things wrong and personal insignificance ... here's some random bits about some changes in the works. This is one of the first blog posts I've done on my new Macintosh, which replaces my beloved but fried Blue Slab of Coolness and my beloved but stolen old Powerbook. Having used it for a month or two now, I do so wuv my my Mac and it's crappy user interface, which does just enough right to almost make me ignore its massive gaffes (like switching between two windows and the screen suddenly reshuffling the z-buffer heights of all open applications).

But it's really flipping over into usability thanks to a trick I learned combining Spaces and VMWare, letting me switch back and forth between Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard with ease. (Apparently the new MacBook Pros are some of the best laptops to run Windows Vista. Who knew?) VMWare is slick because it lets you run Windows Vista on your Macintosh in a virtual machine - it's even smart enough to use the partition set up by Apple's Boot Camp dual-boot solution - but it really didn't get hyper useful until I learned the Spaces trick. Spaces (a warmed over version of the virtual desktops feature popularized by the X Window System) lets you create several "virtual desktops" you can switch between via control arrows - and once you do that, you can give one of them to Vista in full screen mode.

I can't remember the blogger who recommended this trick to me (Mossberg? Some Lifehacker article?), but using Space's control-arrows to switch desktops actually has proven easier in practice than using VMWare's (admittedly hyper-slick) Unity mode. Unity, like Parallels' Coherence mode, sounds great because it puts your Windows windows on your Macintosh desktop like any other Mac app. However, using Spaces to put Vista on its own desktop means the Mac apps and the Windows apps get their own OS desktop features like the taskbar, destktop icons, etc. Looking at the Lifehacker article on Parallels I linked to above, I suspect that I could make Unity work much better; but this is working well enough for me to get stuff done now.

Also this is a first post using Qumana, new blogging software which narcissistically inserts some adware which you can see here to the lower right. --->

Powered by Qumana

Qumana has been so nice to me so far (WYSIWIG mode, automatically snarfing URLs out of the keyboard when you insert links, etc., etc.) I'll leave the ad in just this one time.

SO click on some links above and give our "sponsors" some love. :-)

-Anthony

AnBloWriMo

Published May 1, 2008 by centaur

Recently I heard a friend say "2008 was the year the bloggers died" - because almost all of his friends who were bloggers stopped posting. Well, shame on us. SO, in the tradition of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) I announce Anthony's Blog Writing Month (AnBloWriMo) in which I will attempt to put up one post per day for the next month. Hopefully this won't amount to boring all of you to tears, but will instead serve as a useful reminder to me to get my backlog moving again. Of course, those two things aren't mutually exclusive...

Here goes - this counts as number one.
-the Centaur

Google News Quotes

Published April 16, 2008 by centaur

Google News has a new feature where searching for a politician's name will pull up recent quotes:

Consider this election season. All along the campaign trail we have heard candidates' thoughts on the future of health care, the war in Iraq, and even each other. These debates have generated untold pages of commentary, and it's only too easy to lose track of original quotations. Unlike much of the surrounding rhetoric, these quotations cited in news articles are not conjectures but facts - transcriptions of actual words and thoughts - be they campaign promises, arguments or opinions. Wouldn't it be great if they were easily searchable?

You can search for quotes right at the top of the Google News box; it apparently just shows news if it can't find quotes. At the time of this writing, searches on John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama all turn up with news quotes:

Hillary Clinton: "I believe the potential for life begins at conception"

Barack Obama: "You go into those small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone for 25 years and nothing's replaced them"

John McCain: "We need to make a clean break from the worst excesses of both political parties"

I have a policy of not directly talking about my employer on my blog, so I deny all knowledge of the hard work of my cubemates in making this happen. Check it out...
-Anthony

Look ma, no tubes!

Published April 8, 2008 by centaur

Now this could really prove useful - Google Docs are now offline:

As long as I have an Internet connection, every change I make is saved to the cloud. When I lose my connection, I sacrifice some features, but I can still access my documents (for this initial release, you can view and edit word processing documents; right now we don't support offline access to presentations or spreadsheets - see our help center for details). Everything I need is saved locally. And I do everything through my web browser, even when I'm offline (the goodness that Google Gears provides). When my connection comes back, my documents sync up again with the server. It's all pretty seamless: I don't have to remember to save my documents locally before packing my laptop for a trip. I don't have to remember to save my changes as soon as I get back online. And I don't have to switch applications based on network connectivity. With the extra peace of mind, I can more fully rely on this tool for my important documents.

I've avoided using Google Docs except for a few small things, but maybe this could win me over. Unfortunately this is not available on every account yet:

If you don't see an Offline link in your Google Docs account, don't worry, it's coming. We're releasing this feature on a rolling basis. You should see be able to enable the offline feature for Google Docs soon.

But they claim it's coming. This is developed with GoogleGears, which anyone can use to make a web app that's offline.

The first thing you need to run a web application offline is the ability to start it without an Internet connection. This is the purpose of the LocalServer module ... Applications that are more than just static files have data that is typically stored on the server. For the application to be useful offline, this data must be accessible locally. The Database module provides a relational database for storing data ... When synchronizing large amounts of data, you may find that the database operations begin to affect the responsiveness of the browser. The WorkerPool allows you to move your database operations to the background to keep the browser responsive.

Very interesting...

-Anthony

82,732 Words

Published January 16, 2008 by centaur

I just finished the first draft of a new novel in two and a half months.

And immediately copied it to my USB key:

While I have started many novels and written many short stories, Frost Moon is only the second novel I've managed to complete --- thank you, Nanowrimo. The first was a much longer epic science fiction novel, homo centauris, that I wrote over fifteen years ago (has it been that long?) but which I never managed to get published. I worked on several others since then, but the closest to completion is an earlier Nanowrimo entry, tentatively titled Deliverance, set in the same universe, which I plan to finish while my alpha readers tackle Frost Moon.

Whew. I feel like celebrating --- but why do I not feel like taking a break?
-the Centaur

More useless tidbits…

Published January 13, 2008 by centaur

The first draft of "Frost Moon" is now at 75,000 words. It's turning out longer than my previous estimate (no big surprise for anyone who has suffered through all 698 pages of my Ph.D thesis) but since it is just a few chapters shy of being done I don't think it will be much longer ... somewhere between 80,000 and 90,000 words.

Useless tidbits about my daily life…

Published December 19, 2007 by centaur

... "Frost Moon" is at 60,000 words, and I've completed up to Chapter 20, the final three chapters, and a scattered salsa of much of the remaining third of the book. At the current rate I should finish up a first draft of around 75,000 words sometime in mid February, woohoo!

Not that any of you should care, other than that posting here keeps me moving ...
-the Centaur

Viiiictory…

Published December 1, 2007 by centaur

For the second time, I've entered and "won" the National Novel Writing Month contest. This challenge is to start a new novel in November and to write 50,000 words of the first draft before the end of the month. And, by becoming a hermit, not responding to email, and writing over Thanksgiving, I did it!

The working title of the novel is Frost Moon (though over on my Nanowrimo profile I was still calling it "Skindancer" before I found out that the full moon that happens during the course of the book is a "frost moon").

And now, the beginning of Frost Moon. Enjoy.

Frost Moon

I first started wearing a Mohawk to repel low-lifes — barflies, vampires, Republicans, and so on — but when I found my true profession it turned into an ad. People’s eyes are drawn by my hair — no longer a true Mohawk, but a big, unruly “deathhawk,” a stripe of feathered black, purple and white streaks climbing down the center of my head — but they linger on the tattoos, which start as tribalesque vines in the shaved spaces on either side of the ’hawk and then cascade down my throat to my shoulders, flowering into roses and jewels and butterflies.

Their colors are so vivid, their details so sharp many people mistake them for body paint, or assume that they can’t have been done in the States. Yes, they’re real; no, they’re not Japanese — they’re all, with a few exceptions, done by my own hand, right here in Atlanta at the Rogue Unicorn in Little Five Points. Drop by — I’ll ink you. Ask for Dakota Frost.

To retain the more … perceptive … eye, I started wearing an ankle-length leather vest that shows off the intricate designs on my arms, and a cutoff top and lowrider jeans that that show off a tribal yin-yang on my midriff. Throughout it all you can see the curving black tail of some thing big, beginning on the left side of my neck, looping around the yin-yang on my midriff, and arcing through the leaves on my right shoulder. Most people think it’s a dragon, and they wouldn’t be wrong; in case anyone misses the point, I even have the design sewn into the back of a few of my vests.

But those who live on the edge might see a little more: magical runes woven in the tribal designs, working charms woven into the flowers, and, if you look real close at the tail of the dragon, the slow movement of a symbolic familiar. Yes, it did move; and yes, that’s real magic. Drop by the Rogue Unicorn — you’re still asking for the one and only Dakota Frost, the best magical tattooist in the Southeast.

The downside to being a walking ad, of course, is that some of the folks you want to attract start to see you as a scary low-life. We all know that vampires can turn out to be quite decent folk, but so can cleancut young Republicans looking for their first tattoo to impress their tree-hugger girlfriends. As for barflies, well, they’re still barflies; but unfortunately I find the more tats I show the greater the chance that the cops will throw me into the back of the van too if a barfight breaks out.

So I couldn’t help being nervous as two officers marched me into City Hall East...

-the Centaur

My ACTUAL Simspons Avataur

Published October 3, 2007 by centaur

My apologies, that was my Simpsons "avatar". THIS is my actual Simpsons "avaTAUR":

What was I thinking? That was too good a pun to pass up...
-the Centaur

My Simpsons Avataur

Published October 2, 2007 by centaur

My pal Jim Davies pointed out an "avatar creator" on The Simpsons Movie website that lets you create your own "avatar" - an image of yourself, drawn Simpsons style. Here's mine:

(The t-shirt of Porsche the Centaur is not available in the standard avatar shirt selection; you'll have to roll your own with your own copy of Photoshop or the Gimp).

-the Centaur

The Cloning Machine Has Gone Wild

Published September 22, 2007 by centaur

Zounds! Even more rogue clones!

Actually,this is from an article on Mixing Memory about how you can get an illusion analogous to the Thatcher illusion with negatives.

Again, these two pairs of faces are the same, except the top two are negatives. The one on the top-left (a) is the pure negative, which Antis describes as being "analogous to an upside-down face." The one on the top-right (b) is negative except for the eyes and teeth, which are positive. This is analogous to the "Thatcherized" face (the one with the inverted mouth and eyes). The bottom two faces were created by reversing the contrast of the top two faces. Thus the bottom-left face (c) is normal, and the bottom-right face (d) is normal except for negative teeth and yes. Now the contrast between the positive face with two negative features makes for a hideous, zombie-like ex-PM (I keep waiting for lightning bolts to come out of his eyes), not unlike the upright Thatcherized face in its grotesqueness. And that's the Tony Blair illusion.

The original Margaret Thatcher illusion is just as startling:

Look at the image below. You will notice some little differences, but they hardly trigger your brain to notice them... but wait! If we flip this same image, you will see the differences are anything, but "unnoticable"!

I'm told the judges would also have accepted "Proof Tony Blair is a Vampire" or "Famous British Politicains Get Possessed" as titles for this post.
-the Centaur

What Is?

Published September 19, 2007 by centaur

These words. This pen, this page. The writer, writing. The reader, reading; or perhaps a speaker and a hearer, or a typer and a computer, a screen and a viewer. Sharing these words.

Information, encoded into substance. Matter, patterned across space. Processes, persisting through time. Agents, taking patterns in, processing them, putting patterns back out: generating, interpreting, recreating information in relationship to its encoding, each sufficient to recreate the other, from the letters to the sounds to the ideas and back again, signs invoking each other in any combination: symbols. These words.

But what of the inspiration behind them? The motivation to write them? The matter that makes them? The patterns behind them? The persistence to hear them? The insight to perceive them? The processes that manipulate them? The rules behind the processes? The laws? The physics? How do they connect, so that I can ask "What is?" and I can answer ... with these words?

-the Centaur

Set Phasers to “Ouch”

Published September 19, 2007 by centaur

Rayethon has developed the Klingon agonizer!

Run Away, The Ray Gun Is Coming:

In tests, even the most hardened Marines flee after a few seconds of exposure. It just isn't possible to tough it out. This machine has the ability to inflict limitless, unbearable pain. What makes it OK, says Raytheon, is that the pain stops as soon as you are out of the beam or the machine is turned off.

Actually this is better than a Klingon agonizer, which required direct contact:

Agonizer

An agonizer was a small device worn on the belts of Imperial personnel in the mirror universe, used to inflict pain for minor transgressions. [Agonizers] needed physical contact with their victims to be effective. In the primary universe, the Klingons also used a similar device...

Rayethon's "Silent Guardian", in contrast, is a beam of microwaves that penetrates the top layer of skin and stimulates nerve endings up to half a mile away.

Take that, Kang!
-the Centaur

sheltercat.distance(nero) < epsilon&& !prize.equals(cigar)

Published September 15, 2007 by centaur

The short story: the shelter cat wasn't Nero.

The long story: after Nero went on walkabout, Sandi and I visited the nearest shelter in the hopes of finding him. Once there, we found that the shelters encourage you to visit frequently, to try other nearby shelters, and to post missing pictures of your cat in your neighborhood - on the principle that people who look for their cats find their cats and those who don't, uh, really don't. In the end, I put in a notice at Pet Harbor, a lost and found animal search engine that periodically scans nearby shelters and mails you if it finds any matches for your pet.

SO ... I got the mail about the "Name UNKNOWN" shelter cat that looked darn like Nero early, early Thursday morning, too late to change the stack of appointments I had for the day. I left my knee therapy appointment at approximately 5:45 ... and headed on 101 South towards the San Jose Animal Care Center. Yes, 101 South through San Jose. Officially teh suck (which is itself defined as "something so bad it's between explosive diarrhea and traffic in San Jose on 101"). Average travel time 11 minutes? Ha! I normally avoid that road like the plague, but there were no good options that I knew of or anyone could give me that didn't involve more detouring than the traffic would save. I left at 5:45ish. I arrived at 6:55. Shelter closed at 7. You do the math.

When I arrived I found shelter visits officially stopped at 6:30, but they let me go inspect that specific cat. It was found a great distance away, freaked out, possibly feral; and when they took me to the cage the cat was hiding in a smaller blue sub-cage with dark glass. The blue box, I was told, was because the cat was probably feral; and the dark glass was because he was freaked. "And I'm not authorized to open the cage," the attendant said, "and I'm sure not sticking my fingers in there. You shouldn't either." Even with a light, I couldn't see the cat; but he didn't come when called. "If that was your cat he'd be crying to get out of there," the attendadnt said. "But come back and the vets can put up a net and we can take a look at him."

I left, but I was already sure it wasn't Nero. The cat was caught so far away. It was likely feral. It didn't come when called. And the box was small: the cat looked like Nero in the photo, absent scale, but if it was the same blue box then Nero was almost twice that cat's size. So I was doubtful. But people who look for their cats, find their cats, more oftent than not. So I went back, this afternoon, with the benefit of time and daylight, and sadly looked through frosted glass at the white forehead of a tiny little cat who was clearly not Nero.

Close, but no cigar. Better luck next time...

-the Centaur