Tim Carmody’s back at Wired
Greetings, People of Wired! I’ve been asked to write a short post (re)introducing myself to Wired News readers as the newest staff writer covering the technology and media beat here at Epicenter.
Some keen-eyed Wired.com readers might recognize my byline from last fall, when I wrote for our hardware vertical, Gadget Lab. There among the wall-to-wall smartphone and tablet coverage, I regularly drove Wired’s editors slightly batty by writing early and often about e-readers and the publishing industry, game consoles and television programming, materials science and R&D, the DIY hardware hacking community, or long thinkpieces about the future of media.
I wrapped a big rubber band around all this stuff, calling it “the tweed beat” — but really, it was just everything that bubbled up from (but wouldn’t stay in) the gadget news box. It was great fun and good work, but I knew I would regularly hear from our east coast editor, John Abell: “Good story, Tim — but you know, it should probably really be in Epicenter.”
This summer, when he was looking for another writer, John paid me an enormous compliment, saying he was looking for “a Tim Carmody type” who could cover a broad swath of tech news and offer smart angles and idea-driven commentary. “Wait,” I thought when I heard this: “I’m a Tim Carmody type!”
Congratulations, Tim!
“Playing Pool with a Dual-Armed Robot”
“I want to form Colbert Super PAC for all the PAC-less Americans, to give you a voice in the form of my voice,” Colbert said.
As we stand here on this historic site, where 250 years ago today George Washington filed his papers to form his independent expenditures non-connected political action committee, we are also standing at an American crossroads — not to be confused with American Crossroads, the name of Karl Rove’s ‘Super PAC’. I mean a metaphorical crossroads, because the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United has proved that unlimited corporate money equals free speech. But by the transitive property of elections, does it not also follow that no corporate money equals silence?
quote out of context
The tests are not measuring intelligence alone, but also the desire to prove it.
Precession of the Equinoxes
The thing that caused everyone to freak out because their astrological signs had changed is one of the more fascinating stories in the history of intellectual evolution. That thing is called precession of the equinoxes, and precession is one of those phenomena that is simultaneously invisible and obvious, observable and hidden.
Let’s start with the technicalities and move to the history of it.
In astronomy, axial precession is a gravity-induced, slow and continuous change in the orientation of an astronomical body’s rotational axis. In particular, it refers to the gradual shift in the orientation of Earth’s axis of rotation, which, like a wobbling top, traces out a pair of cones joined at their apices in a cycle of approximately 26,000 years. The term “precession” typically refers only to this largest secular motion; other changes in the alignment of Earth’s axis — nutation and polar motion — are much smaller in magnitude.
So, precession is essentially the planetary equivalent of the wobble in a top as it spins.
If you carve the horizon into twelve roughly equivalent sections, each year, at the equinoxes, the sun will appear to rise in one and set in its opposite. Because of the wobble in the axis of the earth, the section of the sky the sun appears to rise and set in will shift very slowly over a period of roughly 2,160 years. This is the basis of astrology, as various civilizations applied meaning to the constellations they saw in each section. More interestingly, I think, our tracking of it appears to be the basis of astronomy.
To begin to notice that tracking takes time. To fully understand the cycle, and be able to project it forwards and backwards, to mark the passage of time in the relative movement of the stars, would take hundreds, if not thousands, of years — observation, measurement, notation. Once a culture had an awareness of that pattern, no matter on what scale, it could begin to find a place for itself, and make a story out of it, and because we are human, of course, that is what we did.
If you are interested in this subject, and are comfortable with an approach equal parts academic and poetic, you might enjoy Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechen’s Hamlet’s Mill. It shows glimpses of precession’s possible influence throughout the history of art, an astronomical code for our place in the universe embedded in language.
Can we use this to improve our lasers?
Certain brightly colored birds, like kingfishers or parrots, have feathers embedded with a not-quite-random arrangement of air pockets. Wavelengths of light that are related to the distance between the air pockets get scattered and built up more than others, giving the feathers their characteristic colors.
“After we learned this, we said, ‘Oh, that’s a smart idea!’” Cao said. “Can we use this to improve our lasers? Maybe we can use short-range order to enhance light confinement and make lasing more efficient.”
A billion years of evolution as leverage toward refining technology.
you cannot experience it all
Seriously, you can’t, it’s impossible, so just stop trying, and surrender to the goodness you do see:
Consider books alone. Let’s say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That’s quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let’s say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you’re 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you’re 80. That’s 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.
Let’s do you another favor: Let’s further assume you limit yourself to books from the last, say, 250 years. Nothing before 1761. This cuts out giant, enormous swaths of literature, of course, but we’ll assume you’re willing to write off thousands of years of writing in an effort to be reasonably well-read.
Of course, by the time you’re 80, there will be 65 more years of new books, so by then, you’re dealing with 315 years of books, which allows you to read about 20 books from each year. You’ll have to break down your 20 books each year between fiction and nonfiction – you have to cover history, philosophy, essays, diaries, science, religion, science fiction, westerns, political theory … I hope you weren’t planning to go out very much.
the van-sized robot came to scientific fame after autonomously investigating gene function in yeast
The debate over standardizing science will continue as artificial intelligence continues to improve. In the meantime, King’s team is preparing to publish recent work completed by the newer robot Eve, which is studying drugs used to treat malaria, Chagas disease and other neglected tropical scourges.
That publication, however, is being delayed by issues beyond the ken of artificially intelligent scientists.
“We don’t want it to be exploited for profit by others,” King said. “At this point, the intellectual property issues are holding us up.”
A lot more about artificial intelligence and computer models of scientific thought — a good example of how a short report can give glimpses into dozens of possible futures.
In My Language, by A. M. Baggs
The first part is in my “native language,” and then the second part provides a translation, or at least an explanation. This is not a look-at-the-autie gawking freakshow as much as it is a statement about what gets considered thought, intelligence, personhood, language, and communication, and what does not.
Perspective
Liberty University, the evangelical private Christian school founded by dead apartheid-supporting bigot Jerry Falwell, received $445 million in federal financial aid last year. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the way, received $420 million from the federal government.
Pejoratives aside, it’s certainly clear where our priorities lie.
quote out of context
And when I first saw one of those trees, I thought, “That is how I think.” Little thoughts just sprout off and drip down and take root, and then they end up supporting more and more tendrils of thought, until it all coheres into one thing, but it’s still rickety-looking and spooky.
Speaking of weird
The Iowan remembers numbers. Someone will say, “What was my address and my number on the Upper West Side in 1985?” He remembers. “Okay, what about Jill’s parents’ number when we were living in London in 1977?” Same result. The funny thing is the Iowan is not very good at math. I do better calculating the everyday stuff in my head.
But it gets weirder. As a grade schooler, Mr. Boudreaux had a password for something I was helping him with, an online computer game maybe, I can’t remember exactly. I asked him for the password. He reeled off a long list of numbers. “Are you reading those from somewhere?” I asked him. No. Okay, make up another one. He dictated something, which I wrote down, then had him repeat the sequence. He did it easily. “Are you seeing those numbers in your mind?” I asked. He said no, it was just something he could do. This aren’t special numbers, birthdays, etc. His laptop, for instance, has a password that is a long list of random numbers.
I can barely remember my own telephone number and address. I’m not sure I have a specialty. How about you?
the economics of chess
Tyler Cowen on computers, AI, humans, and chess:
6. We used to think that computers would play chess like we did, only “without the mistakes.” We now know that playing without the mistakes involves a very different style from what we had imagined. A lot of human positional intuitions are garbage, and the computer can make sense out of ugly-looking moves. A lot of the human progress since then has involved unlearning previous positional rules and realizing how contingent they are. Younger players, who grew up playing chess with computers, are especially good at this. For older players, it is a good way to learn how unreliable your intuitions can be.
from Sheila’s email
I send my friend a link to a live Google map of overnight shelters in Tokyo. I don’t know why. He lives in Dallas.
Jeezo. It looks like a map of the many aftershocks. I had to escape the media and watch the spider chow down on an ant.
Where is the keep of our selfhood?
“Sometimes it seems,” says Douglas Hofstadter, a Pulitzer Prize–winning cognitive scientist, “as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.” While at first this seems a consoling position—one that keeps our unique claim to thought intact—it does bear the uncomfortable appearance of a gradual retreat, like a medieval army withdrawing from the castle to the keep. But the retreat can’t continue indefinitely. Consider: if everything that we thought hinged on thinking turns out to not involve it, then … what is thinking? It would seem to reduce to either an epiphenomenon—a kind of “exhaust” thrown off by the brain—or, worse, an illusion.
From a longish article on Artificial Intelligence, the history of the Turing Test, and how to convince a panel of judges you are human.
Stephen Baker, Five Books
Stephen Baker, author of Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything, talks about Watson and recommends five books — here, Darwin Among the Machines, by George Dyson:
Dyson is looking at the genesis of thinking machines. Well, machines that do something like thinking. He is really good on the history of computing. One of his early chapters covers Samuel Butler, who in the mid-19th century took a ship from London to New Zealand and set up a sheep farm there. He was on the other side of the world, both literally and figuratively, and yet, around 1860, a boat came into the harbour carrying a copy of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. Butler read it, and it provoked him into some very interesting thoughts. Humans aren’t really evolving much physically: we have pretty much the same brains and bodies that people had in ancient times. Machines, on the other hand, are moving ahead very, very quickly. In other words, the evolution of humans is actually taking place through our tools. Our intellectual advance is going to be tied to our tools. He was thinking this when the telegraph was still very new, and the machines he was thinking about were steam engines. So for him to come to this conclusion was brilliant. He foresaw the age when we would create smart machines that would take cognitive leadership of the planet. Hopefully, the machines will be kind to us, the way we are to animals we care about….
from the comments
Nope, I’m wrong. Führer.
Irene Corey
“People often say to me that they envy my talent,” Ms. Corey told Dr. Hill in 1994. “I think they should envy my discipline.”
I interviewed her niece for the costume documentary. I did not realize until yesterday that she had passed.
learning to speak with dolphins
Herzing found the study sessions were most successful when, before playing, the humans and dolphins swam together slowly and in synchrony, mimicked each other and made eye contact. These are signs of good etiquette among dolphins. Humans also signal their interest in someone with eye contact and similar body language. Perhaps these are universal — and extraterrestrial — signs of good manners.
I wanted more from this article, but the ideas — language, intelligence, the search for extra-terrestrial life, inter-species communication — are interesting nonetheless.
The Watson Episodes of Jeopardy
Part 1, Day 1
I’m not sure how long these will be online, but if you haven’t watched the Watson episodes of Jeopardy, they feel significant in a way that the first glimpses of the potential of the internet did.
headline of the day
Man ties machine on Day 1 of “Jeopardy!” showdown
The PBS NewsHour’s Preview of Watson
This segment expands on the article Josh posted Sunday. If you are interested in the ideas that surround The Singularity, this feels like a significant step toward that.
headline of the day, III
Court bans man with low IQ from having sex
And, So, Somewhere, There Is This, Also
Thanks, El-tee.
Side mirrors are to Italians what whiskers are to cats
