xkcd spookiness

xkcd is reading my mind (click to enlarge) ...

Spooky. I am one with xkmind. Except that not only can I wait, I would really prefer that the future spare my children too.

The xkcd story is pure 21st century geek culture. How geek? On Google Reader xkcd gets over 100 "likes" within hours of release. That's probably the fastest and highest "like" rating in the entire geek universe.

How geek? Here's the official xkcd reuse permission policy ...

xkcd - A webcomic

... If it's a not-for-profit publication, you need no permission -- just print them with attribution to xkcd.com. If it's a for-profit operation, I will probably give you permission if you email me to let me know. You can post xkcd in your blog (whether ad-supported or not) with no need to get my permission...

Munroe makes money by selling xkcd paraphernalia and a book of favorites ...

... In September 2009 Munroe released a book, entitled xkcd: volume 0, containing selected xkcd comics.[80] The book was published by breadpig, under a Creative Commons license, with all of the publisher's profits donated to Room to Read to promote literacy and education in the developing world. Six months after release, the book has sold over 25,000 copies. The book tour in New York City and Silicon Valley was a fundraiser for Room to Read that raised $32,000 to build a school in Laos....

Update: I corrected the original post. Munroe's publisher has donated the book profits, but Munroe can keep his well deserved share.

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Google Chinese to English - a rare good result

Google translate is built into Google Reader. That allows me to follow someone who shares both English and Chinese material.

Google's translation of the Chinese content is usually unreadable. Each sentence seems more or less correct, but the sum is incoherent.

Today, however, I came across a post I could read. The sentences were still a bit stilted, but the paragraphs were coherent. Overall it read like a bilingual native Chinese speaker writing in quite good English.

The trick is that the interview was conducted in English, then human translated to Chinese, then Google machine (statistically) translated back to English. The Chinese translation must have preserved quite a bit of the original sentence structure; enough that the reverse translation worked quite well.

Fascinating!

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Weingarten's accidental infant death story - now with a Pulitzer

The Weingarten story on infants who die when accidentally left in the back of a car was published in March of 2009.

I didn't read it then. Unlike Ray Morrogh, an astoundingly arrogant and ignorant prosecutor, I knew this could happen to anyone. I knew it could happen to me.

I've studied human cognition and human error. I knew that the only way to prevent these disasters is to reengineer car seats and car systems. [1]

Today Weingarten won the Pulitzer, and, more or less by accident, I read Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?.

I wept at the end. Surprised me, since there was nothing in there that was new. When we moved car seats from the front seat to the back seat we saved many lives, but we made these errors inevitable.

It is very well written.

[1] If I still had infant passengers, I would clip a lead from the car seat to my belt every time I got in the driver's seat. Then I'd have to leave my pants in the car to forget the infant. I only heard of that fix after my kids were mobile.
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What iPhone multitasking can do

There are quite a few iPhone apps that are too slow now. Appigo’s ToDo.app needs to sync with tooldedo. That takes too long, I hate it.

Evernote needs to sync and/or upload. Way too slow.

There are other apps that are incomplete, because making them complete would make them unusable. I’d like my Voice Memos to be transcribed, but I want zero delay on launch and dictate.

In all of these cases the time consuming task doesn’t need to take place while I have the UI in front of me. They can take place after I leave the app.

Multitasking solves all of the above. The sync/communicate tasks can occur in the background while I move to do something else.

That’s why I want iPhone multitasking. We’ll see in the fall if Apple’s version of limited multitasking is good enough. I fear it will be too limited for another year.

Update 4/14/10: Good news. The functions I want fall under the "task completion" domain. That should be available to all apps.

iPhone OS 4: My wishes update and it’s Apple’s game alone

iPhone OS 4 has been announced. Among other things, we is now clear that Apple considers the iPhone/iPad domain theirs alone. They reserve the right to eliminate any apps that pose any strategic or competitive threat. This was pretty clear after Apple banned Google Voice, but there was still a bit of wiggle room. Not any more.

Only antitrust action is going to change that, and Apple is not yet dominant enough in  mobile to worry about antitrust. Maybe in a few years.

For now, it’s Apple’s way or the highway. On the less dim side, I was impressed by what they’ve added to their way. OS 4 is a good upgrade.

Given what they announced, here’s the current state of my personal wish list compared to OS 3. X means never – I’m dropping those items.

Wish	Rel 3	Rel 4
Multiple exchange accounts	N	Y
Keyboard	N	Y
Calendar API	N	Y
Google Voice app	N	X
Google Latitude location sharing	N	X
Cable/wireless sync API for 3rd party apps.	N	?
Fix the Notes fields in Calendar and Contacts	N	?
Fix broken iPod playlists	N	?

My two biggest “wishes” have been granted and there’s a decent chance Apple will fix the two big bugs I experience routinely.

Maybe we’ll see the cable sync API, but at this point wireless sync would be fine too. We won’t see Google apps on the iPhone, but Apple did do a location sharing API – so half points there.

Apple also added several other nice features – but they weren’t on my wish list.

Now it’s all about how Apple makes up for the Google services they’ve blocked. That will be tough, though Google’s declining competence does lessen the sting.

See also

• My current iPhone wish list – as of OS 3.1 (Oct 2009)
• iPhone 3.0 - how many of my wishes were granted (Mar 2009)
• iPhone- my demands (Aug 2007): These were mercifully met

Eating seaweed: Japanese gut microbiome bacteria are not like mine

My daughter left Korea when she was 13 months. She enjoys eating a seaweed snack, and Nori condiments. I wonder if she also carries these novel bacteria ... (Incidentally, the US coverage is misleading. This is not about sushi, it's about the seaweed called "nori".)

Gut bacteria in Japanese people borrowed sushi-digesting genes from ocean bacteria| Discover Magazine

Japanese people have special tools...

... The tools in question are genes that can break down some of the complex carbohydrate molecules in seaweed ... They are wielded by the hordes of bacteria lurking in the guts of every Japanese person ... Some gut bacteria have borrowed the seaweed-digesting genes from other microbes living in the coastal oceans....

... Within each of our bowels live around a hundred trillion microbes, whose cells outnumber our own by ten to one. This ‘gut microbiome’ act like an extra organ, helping us to digest molecules in our food that we couldn’t break down ourselves. These include the large carbohydrate molecules found in the plants we eat. But marine algae – seaweeds – contain special sulphur-rich carbohydrates that aren’t found on land. Breaking these down is a tough challenge for our partners-in-digestion. The genes and enzymes that they normally use aren’t up to the task.

Fortunately, bacteria aren’t just limited to the genes that they inherit from their ancestors. They can swap genes between individuals as easily as we humans trade money or gifts. This ‘horizontal gene transfer’ means that bacteria have an entire kingdom of genes, ripe for the borrowing. All they need to do is sidle up to the right donor. And in the world’s oceans, one such donor exists – a seagoing bacterium called Zobellia galactanivorans.

Zobellia is a seaweed-eater. It lives on, and digests, several species including those used to make nori. Nori is an extremely common ingredient in Japanese cuisine, used to garnish dishes and wrap sushi. And when hungry diners wolfed down morsels of these algae, some of them also swallowed marine bacteria. Suddenly, this exotic species was thrust among our own gut residents. As the unlikely partners mingled, they traded genes, including those that allow them to break down the carbohydrates of their marine meals. The gut bacteria suddenly gained the ability to exploit an extra source of energy and those that retained their genetic loans prospered...

.... [the human gut bacteria] B.plebeius seems to have a habit of scrounging genes from marine bacteria. Its genome is rife with genes that are more closely related to their counterparts in marine species like Zobellia than to those in other gut microbes. All of these borrowed genes do the same thing – they break down the complex carbohydrates of marine algae...

... To see whether this was a common event, Hehemann screened the gut bacteria of 13 Japanese volunteers for signs of porphyranases. These “gut metagenomes” yielded at least seven potential enzymes that fitted the bill, along with six others from another group with a similar role. On the other hand, Hehemann couldn’t find a single such gene among 18 North Americans....

... People might only gain the genes after eating lots and lots of sushi but Hehemann has some evidence that they could be passed down from parent to child. One of the people he studied was an unweaned baby girl, who had clearly never eaten a mouthful of sushi in her life. And yet, her gut bacteria had a porphyranase gene, just as her mother’s did.

... “Today, sushi is prepared with roasted nori and the chance of making contact with marine bacteria is low,” she said. The project’s other leader, Gurvan Michel, concurs. He notes that of all the gut bacteria from the Japanese volunteers, only B.plebeius as acquired the porphyranase enzymes. “This horizontal gene transfer remains a rare event,” he says....

... Rob Knight, a microbiome researcher from the University of Colorado... “This result reinforces the need to conduct a broad and culturally diverse survey of who harbours what microbes. The key to understanding obesity or IBD might well be in genes or microbes acquired under circumstances very different to those we experience in Western society.”

Because Nori is now cooked, and because persistence seems fragile, the genes will probably disappear from Japanese gut bacteria. It's a fascinating example, however, of the power of the microbiome. The therapeutic implications are obvious. Science fiction writers, incidentally, have long described the use of tailored gut bacteria to enable novel diets. When we run out of beef, cooked grass might be yummy.
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Understanding mine safety - the libertarian solution

Everything you need to know about mine safety (emphases mine) ...

How to connect mining disasters and climate change - How the World Works - Salon.com

... And then there's the famous memo sent by Blankenship in October 2005 to all 'Deep Mine Superintendents.' ...

"SUBJECT: RUNNING COAL

If you have been asked by your group presidents, supervisors, engineers, to do anything else other than to run coal (i.e. - build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever) you need to ignore them and run coal. This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that the coal pays the bills."

Mine 'overcasts' are critical to proper mine ventilation, and for many miners, Blankenship's memo made it abundantly clear exactly what Massey's 'top priority' was, and is."

Libertarians, this is why we need government.

Minneapolis - best city in the US

Bicycling magazine says Minneapolis is the best biking town in the US.

It's true. Portland has more riders, but weaker facilities.

St. Paul doesn't do as well, but I bet Bicycling lumped us in with the bigger Twin (most mags do).

Since I've long argued that the best single measure of a city is its bicycling facilities, this means MSP is the best city in the US.

A sure thing bet on the LHC

I suspect overhead would eat away at the profit, but this seems like a sure thing ...

The Large Hadron Collider: Phew! | The Economist

...Paddy Power, an online bookmaker, is offering odds of 11 to 10 that dark matter will be found before black holes and 8 to 1 that black holes will be first. Dark energy, a mysterious force thought to drive the expansion of the universe, trails at 12 to 1. And for those who fancy a real outside bet, the firm is also offering 100 to 1 that the machine will discover God....

To make it worthwhile though you need to bet $100K to earn $1K. A CD would have comparable returns, which probably has something to do with the odds.

Google's machine learning system

Classifiers are a classic component of traditional AI systems ....

Official Google Research Blog: Lessons learned developing a practical large scale machine learning system

... Several years ago we began developing a large scale machine learning system, and have been refining it over time. We gave it the codename “Seti” because it searches for signals in a large space. It scales to massive data sets and has become one of the most broadly used classification systems at Google.

After building a few initial prototypes, we quickly settled on a system with the following properties:

Binary classification (produces a probability estimate of the class label)

Parallelized

Scales to process hundreds of billions of instances and beyond

Scales to billions of features and beyond

Automatically identifies useful combinations of features

Accuracy is competitive with state-of-the-art classifiers

Reacts to new data within minutes...

I can think of several reasons why they named it Seti. For one, HAL was taken.

I'm glad the US military is working on that artificial conscience project.

One of these things is not like the other: Gravity

In this popular account from 1860 [1]) the observation that "electricity" traveled through a medium implied that "other" fundamental forces such as light and gravity must also travel through a medium (emphases mine) ...

April 1860 -Scientific American - Electrical Theory

... The results of the experiments instituted by Sir William Grove are exceedingly curious, and must be regarded as all but proving the truth of the modern theory, which assumes that electricity is not, in any sense, a material substance but only an affection (state) or motion of the particles of ordinary matter.

If electricity is unable to pass over or through a vacuum, it is probable that all the other so-called imponderable forces—light, heat, magnetism, and possibly attraction—obey the same law, and as these agencies freely travel the interplanetary spaces, the supposition of Newton that such spaces may be filled with an ethereal form of matter receives an indirect but powerful support....

There is no ethereal form of matter in the 19th century sense however. Electricity has a relationship to fundamental electromagnetic forces, but it is not the same sort of thing. Once electricity was divided from "light" it was possible to find common models for light and magnetism.

In 2010 some people are trying to deal with the unquantifiability of gravity through a similar approach ...

arXiv blog: Gravity Emerges from Quantum Information, Say Physicists..

One of the hottest new ideas in physics is that gravity is an emergent phenomena; that it somehow arises from the complex interaction of simpler things.

A few month's ago, Erik Verlinde at the the University of Amsterdam put forward one such idea which has taken the world of physics by storm. Verlinde suggested that gravity is merely a manifestation of entropy in the Universe. His idea is based on the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy always increases over time. It suggests that differences in entropy between parts of the Universe generates a force that redistributes matter in a way that maximises entropy. This is the force we call gravity.

What's exciting about the approach is that it dramatically simplifies the theoretical scaffolding that supports modern physics. And while it has its limitations--for example, it generates Newton's laws of gravity rather than Einstein's--it has some advantages too, such as the ability to account for the magnitude of dark energy which conventional theories of gravity struggle with.

But perhaps the most powerful idea to emerge from Verlinde's approach is that gravity is essentially a phenomenon of information.

Today, this idea gets a useful boost from Jae-Weon Lee at Jungwon University in South Korea and a couple of buddies. They use the idea of quantum information to derive a theory of gravity and they do it taking a slightly different tack to Verlinde.

At the heart of their idea is the tricky question of what happens to information when it enters a black hole. Physicists have puzzled over this for decades with little consensus. But one thing they agree on is Landauer's principle: that erasing a bit of quantum information always increases the entropy of the Universe by a certain small amount and requires a specific amount of energy.

Jae-Weon and co assume that this erasure process must occur at the black hole horizon. And if so, spacetime must organise itself in a way that maximises entropy at these horizons. In other words, it generates a gravity-like force.

That's intriguing for several reasons. First, Jae-Weon and co assume the existence of spacetime and its geometry and simply ask what form it must take if information is being erased at horizons in this way.

It also relates gravity to quantum information for the first time. Over recent years many results in quantum mechanics have pointed to the increasingly important role that information appears to play in the Universe.

Some physicists are convinced that the properties of information do not come from the behaviour of information carriers such as photons and electrons but the other way round. They think that information itself is the ghostly bedrock on which our universe is built.

Gravity has always been a fly in this ointment. But the growing realisation that information plays a fundamental role here too, could open the way to the kind of unification between the quantum mechanics and relativity that physicists have dreamed of..

In short, one way to deal with the gravity problem is to make gravity go away. It's merely a confusing epiphenomena.

Hey, it worked for electricity ...

[1] Just prior to the American civil war. In a few years the SciAm "150 year back" article excerpts will be all about military science relevant to the most bloody battles of the 19th century. That should be interesting.

Tech churn: Cameras yes, but laptops?

Until I saw this graphic I thought the compact, point and shoot, camera was doing just fine.

Right. Of course. My iPhone 3G isn't good enough to replace a point and shoot, but my June 2010 iPhone will. I haven't been paying attention.

That's tech churn. From nowhere to everywhere to nowhere in no time at all. Reminds me of books on CD.

So is Amit Gupta right that the iPad has made the laptop obsolete? I don't think so. A good laptop is much closer to a desktop than a Point & Shoot camera is to a DSLR; there's room for both in the "pro and enthusiast" market. I do agree that specialty OSs such as ChromeOS and iPhoneOS will dominate the "everyday use" end of the market. The form factor is, however, less critical than the usability, security, business model and low operating costs of these next generation environments.

Remember too that, when the market demands it, an iPhone will support a keyboard and external monitor. Then you have a phone and a laptop ...

Analyzing Financial Statements

I've had "learn to read financial statements" as a medium priority goal for a while. A VC has recently written a mini treatise on how to do this:

Analyzing Financial Statements

... This topic could be and is a full semester course at some business schools. It is a deep and rich topic that I can’t cover in one single blog post. But it is also a relatively narrow skill set at its most developed levels. If you are going to be a public equity analyst, you need to understand this stuff cold and this post will not get you there.

But if you are an entrepreneur being handed financial statements from your bookkeeper or accountant or controller, then you need to be able to understand them and I’d like this post to help you do that. I’d also like this post help those of you who want to be more confident buying, holding, and selling public stocks. So that’s the perspective I will bring to this topic.

In the past three weeks, we talked about the three main financial statements, the Income Statement, the Balance Sheet, and the Cash Flow Statement. This post is going to attempt to help you figure out how to analyze them, at least at a cursory level...

I've put time on my calendar to read and study these posts. (In my life only scheduled things happen. Your life may vary.)

A conscience for robots - and for humans too

It costs a huge amount of resources to develop a functioning human adult. That's a price of being a social animal with a massively overclocked brain.

Not surprisingly, evolution has made us feeble killers. Our teeth, claws, and muscles are pathetic. Most adult humans are traumatized when they kill -- even when it's in self-defense and even after extensive training and conditioning. Only immature children kill easily, which is why child soldiers are valued by the world's most evil men. (See also: vertromedial injuries).

On the other hand, evolution hasn't had time to adjust to murder at a distance. Pilots do not seem to experience the trauma felt by marines, even though they may kill many more people. This has advantages for warfare, but there are problems with making killing too easy. These problems are showing up with drone use ...

Remote-control warfare: Droning on | The Economist

... If they have not been so commandeered, attacks on such sites may constitute war crimes. And drone attacks often kill civilians. On June 23rd 2009, for example, an attack on a funeral in South Waziristan killed 80 non-combatants.

Such errors are not only tragic, but also counterproductive. Sympathetic local politicians will be embarrassed and previously neutral non-combatants may take the enemy’s side. Moreover, the operators of drones, often on the other side of the world, are far removed from the sight, sound and smell of the battlefield. They may make decisions to attack that a commander on the ground might not, treating warfare as a video game.

Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Computing has a suggestion that might ease some of these concerns. He proposes involving the drone itself—or, rather, the software that is used to operate it—in the decision to attack. In effect, he plans to give the machine a conscience.

The software conscience that Dr Arkin and his colleagues have developed is called the Ethical Architecture. Its judgment may be better than a human’s because it operates so fast and knows so much. And—like a human but unlike most machines—it can learn.

The drone would initially be programmed to understand the effects of the blast of the weapon it is armed with. It would also be linked to both the Global Positioning System (which tells it where on the Earth’s surface the target is) and the Pentagon’s Global Information Grid, a vast database that contains, among many other things, the locations of buildings in military theatres and what is known about their current use.

After each strike the drone would be updated with information about the actual destruction caused. It would note any damage to nearby buildings and would subsequently receive information from other sources, such as soldiers in the area, fixed cameras on the ground and other aircraft. Using this information, it could compare the level of destruction it expected with what actually happened. If it did more damage than expected—for example, if a nearby cemetery or mosque was harmed by an attack on a suspected terrorist safe house—then it could use this information to restrict its choice of weapon in future engagements. It could also pass the information to other drones.

No commander is going to give a machine a veto, of course, so the Ethical Architecture’s decisions could be overridden. That, however, would take two humans—both the drone’s operator and his commanding officer...

Even if this particular implementation doesn't succeed, it makes a great deal of sense to build in this kind of automated oversight.

Obviously it's not simply of interest to weapons, though that's where the initial funding will come from. Even if we don't get sentient machines in the next fifty years (if you're the praying type, pray we don't), we will be deploying systems that make many risk/benefit trade-offs in many contexts. We will benefit if they evolve a conscience.

Some humans too would benefit from a prosthetic conscience. It might allow persons with disorders of conscience to function more effectively in the modern world. Our prisons are full of low IQ individuals with a limited capacity to model the impacts of their actions on other persons. A prosthetic conscience might allow them to avoid prison, or to have great success after prison life.

Of course if we do develop non-human sentience, it might be very much to our advantage if they felt qualms about hurting us ...

South Dakota - state of denial

Just west of the Minnesota Saint Paul border is the Catfish Bay water ski park.

It's a puddle with a grandstand.

Some obsessed maniac dug a hole in the ground and turned it into a water skiing attraction - in South Dakota. A few hours west of the land of 10,000 lakes.

It's insane. It's pathetic. It's glorious.

The Corn Palace. Wall Drug. Mount Rushmore. Crazy Horse Memorial. They're all in South Dakota, at the heart of the Buffalo Commons. They're all crazy. Doomed.

Just like humanity, not to mention our ever dissolving universe.

Catfish Bay is an honored member of the trans-galactic museum of the Deniers of Doom.