Haibane.info

Given that otaku tend to be an obsessive bunch by definition, I find this rather convenient: an actual white whale.

A new white humpback has been sighted off Byron Bay on the east coast of Australia.

The newcomer, which was filmed by a television news helicopter, has excited marine scientists who think it may be related to Migaloo - to date, the only known all-white humpback whale.

Melville is surely grinning in his grave.

In Dennou Coil, Kyoko (age 3) has a penchant for running about, pointing at things, and exclaiming, “unchi!” (poop):

This is fairly accurate as far as a characterization of 3-year old humor goes. By that logic, the Himeji City Museum of Literature, in Himeji, Japan (near Osaka) was until May of this year the funniest place in the universe. This is because the museum, inexplicably, had an exhibit devoted to poop:

translation:

Everybody come and play! Come and look! We have poop books!

Rabbit: It’s poop time!

Gorilla: Come and see my poop too!

Elephant: Animal poop is here yo!

See it. Touch it! Smell it! Explore!

Can you guess what animals made this poop? (3 pictures)

Himeji Museum Of Literature, Special Exhibit. April 1st-May 18th

Head over to thomas’s post at Babelhut and see for yourself. It is in fact not only exactly what it seems to be, but in fact even more so than you think it would be. Fear the Japanese, indeed. Though it must be admitted that were this exhibit to come to any children’s museum in the United States, it would make more money than the mind can comfortably comprehend.

(It should be noted that I have blogged about poop before. I also have on occasion been fascinated with toilets. Insert bad joke about straining too hard here…)

Is it just wrong that the first thing I thought of when I saw this was Read or Die?

Since Gandhi was a lawyer, you might argue that Gandhi did literally have to read, or die, for freedom.

Tomorrow is the day we leave this town. In the past year here I have grown to really appreciate the pace of life here. My daughter roamed freely about the common backyard area and knew all our neighbors by name; I could leave my house unlocked and my garage open without fear, and everything was 5 minutes away from everything else. Plus, there’s a raw beauty to central Wisconsin that I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else, a simple yet dignified beauty that was solidly rooted in the land and the soil. I will definitely miss this place, and I somehow doubt that i will ever be back.

Tomorrow, we move to the Madison area. The excitement of returning to Madison is of course a separate channel entirely from my sentiment at leaving Marshfield behind. In a week’s time, our normal will be renormalized. I intend to embrace madison again and make sure that both my daughters get as much benefit as possible from our (lengthier) sojurn there.

taken in Madison, Wisconsin, May 2008. I was inspired to share by eteraz.

Over at Talk Islam, I started a somewhat speculative discussion thread about parallels to the samurai code and islamic values. To be perfectly frank, the idea came to me from watching Samurai 7 - not exactly a divine fount of inspiration, admittedly. What surprised me however was a response in thread by a Japanese muslim, who left a lengthy and quite insightful comment about his perception of what Japanese society has lost since WWII and how Japan as a society has strayed from the ideals of Bushido and how Shintoism has become emptied of meaning. His castigation of superficial pursuits in Japanese culture which in his opinion have dislodged the traditional beliefs is quite moving. It’s worth a read, for a truly unique perspective. I share it with you, not to promote my religion but more for the insights into Japanese culture that I think it provides.

Here’s the full text of the comment: (more…)

via NIck Carr,Douglas Hofstadter recently had a critique of the concept of the Singularity that I found refreshing and utterly unsurprising.

Indeed, I am very glad that we still have a very very long ways to go in our quest for AI. I think of this seemingly “pessimistic” view of mine as being in fact a profound kind of optimism, whereas the seemingly “optimistic” visions of Ray Kurzweil and others strike me as actually being a deeply pessimistic view of the nature of the human mind.

The entire interview is an excellent read, and later on the interviewer points to some similarities in both Kurzweils’ and Hofst’s view about sentience as “software”. Hofst answers with a critique that I think echoes my earlier skepticism:

Well, the problem is that a soul by itself would go crazy; it has to live in a vastly complex world, and it has to cohabit that world with many other souls, commingling with them just as we do here on earth. To be sure, Kurzweil sees those things as no problem, either — we’ll have virtual worlds galore, “up there” in Cyberheaven, and of course there will be souls by the barrelful all running on the same hardware. And Kurzweil sees the new software souls as intermingling in all sorts of unanticipated and unimaginable ways.

Well, to me, this “glorious” new world would be the end of humanity as we know it. If such a vision comes to pass, it certainly would spell the end of human life.

not trans-humanism, but null-humanism, indeed.

Of course, for a more rigorous critique of Singularity, the recent IEEE special issue had some excellent critical articles alongside the fluffy vision pieces. Highly recommend: “Waiting for the Rapture“, “The Consciousness Conundrum”, and best of all, Singular Simplicity. All of these pieces level specific, scientific, and physical arguments that undercut the grandiose hand-waving arguments of the singularitans.

Darth Vader apparently attacked the Church of the Jedi congregation in Holyhead, Wales. He struck Jedi Master Jonba Hehol on the head with a metal crutch, and bruised Jedi Master Mormi Hehol’s thigh.

District Judge Andrew Shaw sentenced Vader to two months in jail, but suspended the sentence for one year. He also ordered Vader to pay his victims a nominal fee for damages and court costs. Vader’s lawyer, Frances Jones, says Vader knew his behavior was wrong, but had no recollection of the incident because he’d drunk an entire 2 1/2-gallon box of wine beforehand.

There’s a long article in the New Yorker about Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft exec, and his new company Intellectual Ventures. The article is fascinating on multiple levels. For one thing, there is the intriguing business model behind IV itself - they get a lot of smart people in a room, get them talking and free-associating, and then patent whatever ideas they come up with. They then license those patents for revenue. Just one example of the kind of potentially world-changing ideas they have licensed: nuclear micro-reactors that use spent nuclear waste as their fuel:

“Teller had this idea way back when that you could make a very safe, passive nuclear reactor,” Myhrvold explained. “No moving parts. Proliferation-resistant. Dead simple. Every serious nuclear accident involves operator error, so you want to eliminate the operator altogether. Lowell and Rod and others wrote a paper on it once. So we did several sessions on it.”

The plant, as they conceived it, would produce something like one to three gigawatts of power, which is enough to serve a medium-sized city. The reactor core would be no more than several metres wide and about ten metres long. It would be enclosed in a sealed, armored box. The box would work for thirty years, without need for refuelling. Wood’s idea was that the box would run on thorium, which is a very common, mildly radioactive metal. (The world has roughly a hundred-thousand-year supply, he figures.) Myhrvold’s idea was that it should run on spent fuel from existing power plants. “Waste has negative cost,” Myhrvold said. “This is how we make this idea politically and regulatorily attractive. Lowell and I had a monthlong no-holds-barred nuclear-physics battle. He didn’t believe waste would work. It turns out it does.” Myhrvold grinned. “He concedes it now.”

As Myhrvold notes, he has more engineers working on nuclear power technology than G.E., which is both impressively cool and depressingly scary if you think about it.

But the deeper subtext to the article is the idea that ideas themselves are commodities. It’s long been known that some of the greatest scientific triumphs in history weren’t the product of isolated genius but rather arose simultaneously in many inventors’ minds, simultaneously. The article delves into the history of this in some depth. The provocative conclusion that can be made is that genius inventors are great at synthesis, not invention - and synthesis only requires that the supporting ideas be known. It’s something that can be replicated by brute force:

Insight could be orchestrated: that was the lesson. If someone who knew how to make a filter had a conversation with someone who knew a lot about cancer and with someone who read the medical literature like a physicist, then maybe you could come up with a cancer treatment. It helped as well that Casey Tegreene had a law degree, Lowell Wood had spent his career dreaming up weapons for the government, Nathan Myhrvold was a ball of fire, Edward Jung had walked across Texas. They had different backgrounds and temperaments and perspectives, and if you gave them something to think about that they did not ordinarily think about—like hurricanes, or jet engines, or metastatic cancer—you were guaranteed a fresh set of eyes.
[...]
In the nineteen-sixties, the sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote a famous essay on scientific discovery in which he raised the question of what the existence of multiples tells us about genius. No one is a partner to more multiples, he pointed out, than a genius, and he came to the conclusion that our romantic notion of the genius must be wrong. A scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do; he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do. The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight.

So, since geniuses are rare, just replace them with a lot of smart people, and you shoudl be able to replicate most of the insight. It’s analogous to parallel, multi-core computing instead of the old days of a single gigahertz chip.

A truly thought-provoking article indeed.

I have a bit of bias towards the Overcoming Bias blog, because of the way in which Eli pretends his Bayesian worldview is utterly pristine without a trace of dogma. That said, his recent forays into explaining quantum mechanics are superb… that is, until he revealed that his aim was to set up a tension between Science and Bayes. In a nutshell,

Science-Goggles on: The current quantum theory has passed all experimental tests so far. Many-Worlds doesn’t make any new testable predictions - the amazing new phenomena it predicts are all hidden away where we can’t see them. You can get along fine without supposing the other worlds, and that’s just what you should do. The whole thing smacks of science fiction. But it must be admitted that quantum physics is a very deep and very confusing issue, and who knows what discoveries might be in store? Call me when Many-Worlds makes a testable prediction.

Bayes-Goggles on: The simplest quantum equations that cover all known evidence don’t have a special exception for human-sized masses. There isn’t even any reason to ask that particular question. Next!

And just like that - Science is dismissed. Many-Worlds must be true, after all, it makes the most sense and is the simplest possible explanation!

Intriguingly, Eli has often dismissed the idea of God even though one could argue that God too is the “simplest” answer to any number of great Questions. Likewise, he often defends his robust atheism with an analogous assertion to “you can get along fine without supposing [God exists], and that’s just what you should do.”

This is the sort of abuse of science that drives me crazy. People approach issues with a-prioris, such as “God doesn’t exist” or “The Singularity exists” or “Many-Worlds is True” and then contort poor physics and math into supporting positions that are purely situational.

I don’t pretend to be overcoming bias myself. I am a scientist, I am deeply religious, and I think Bayes’ Theorem is useful in certain situations (ie, when measurements are not independent), but is hardly enough to build an entire worldview on.

I am not implacably against the Many Worlds Interpretation, mind you. I enjoyed Tegmark’s article in Nature which really made the case more fairly. I just think that a false dichotomy between Bayes Theorem and Science as an institution serves only to muddle things rather than help us understand.

As an aside, I wonder if Eli would be willing to prove his commitment to Bayes Theorem, by performing quantum suicide?