11.06.12

Reflections on Frankenstorm

Posted in news, NYC, random idiocy, technology at 6:02 pm by nogre

drugs

I don’t normally see cops smoke on duty, but lots of cops were smoking last week.

Beer was being sold for up to $30 a six pack.  Not good beer either.

I overheard a barista at Verb Cafe in Williamsburg say that Tuesday had been their best day ever.  They did twice their sales of a busy Saturday and closed early because they ran out of everything.  He also said he saw a lot more Nouveau Yorkers than normal.

I smelled no more weed on the street than I normally do.  Stoners are consistent.

zombie apocalypse

The Brooklyn half of the Williamsburg bridge had power, but crossing into downtown Manhattan was like regressing into a time before electricity, or more accurately, a time after electricity.  When it got dark at night, it actually got dark.  Anyone who has been to lower Manhattan knows there is a limit to how dark it actually gets: the sheer amount of ambient light prevents real darkness, even in places without street lights.  This no longer held for the few days after Sandy.  Walking the city was passing through endless empty black canyons, devoid of life and filled with remnants of once useful technology.

Every so often I’d come upon a person sitting on a stoop, looking haggard and sucking hard on a cigarette.  When this happened I wouldn’t notice the person till I was already upon them and walking by.  I couldn’t even muster a head nod, not that New Yorkers would be looking for the social interaction, and it was inevitably too late to bother anyway.

My mom called while I was walking back to the bridge a few blocks south of Delancey.  Surprisingly the cell phone coverage held for the duration of the call.  I could hear her voice drop as I described the situation:   The windows are empty and lifeless for blocks, and I can barely make out the sidewalk.  There are no people, or none that I can see.  Sometimes they would show up, but as I said, they were the strays, and would disappear just as quickly.  The cops, wherever they were, were just as cut off as everyone else.  She ended the call quickly.

They eventually got the power down to 14th street and east of Broadway back on.  This returned some of the ambient light to lower Manhattan, but not like normal.  Instead of the sad darkness, a weak, insubstantial haze took over.  It was like being in an old video game where they just colored everything dark, but there were no actual light sources.  You could see things, but it wasn’t like things were lit or had shadows; it was all shadows.  Unlike the previous nights, which hurt in its collapse of basic New York reality, this haze provided an unreality to the situation. It was a transient state, a purgatory, one where you could feel civilization trying to leech its way back.

My friends who live and work uptown were barely inconvenienced by the storm.

banks and power

A bank was robbed clean by Upright Citizens entering the building’s basement and then breaking up through the floor.

I told everyone that if I had a truck I would have ripped up and ripped off those ubiquitous street ATMs that charge $4 a transaction.  I’m actually surprised I didn’t see any of this.

Goldman Sachs had barricades of sandbags around their entrance ways.  Not sure if they were trying to stem the barrage of water only.

They moved the power lines in the city under ground after the 1888 blizzard, which was the last time the stock exchange had been closed for 2 days due to weather.  This was to prevent wind and snow from affecting the power supply.  So maybe the banks will ‘encourage’ our utilities to make the power supply more water resistant.  Cuomo (NY State Governor)  is threatening to revoke the electricity monopolies of ConEd and LIPA due to the power failures.  Floodproofing New York City would be an unimaginably huge project.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see a proposal to actually raise the entire island of Manhattan.  If the banks don’t have battery backup security cameras in a few weeks, though, I will be shocked.

the birds

Fauna in New York is sophisticated.  The animals that live here are either well adapted to living with humans or well adapted to getting out of our way.  However, when I saw a pigeon standing very still near the curb in the street, I felt something was wrong.  A van pulled up and the front wheel missed the pigeon by not even a finger’s width, but the pigeon didn’t move at all.  Then the rear wheel ran directly over the stationary pigeon with muffled bone crunches.

I walked into Washington Square Park and a very obese man followed me in.  I sat on one side of the pathway and he sat across from me.  Often, though not generally, people hanging around in public parks who don’t take care of themselves have mental problems.  Then a large flock of pigeons, which is strange in itself, all descended upon this man.  Standing on him, walking up and down his arms, crowding as close as possible to his body. I saw his face, he looked confused, which I took to confirm my suspicion about him.  He noticed me looking and he spoke, completely lucidly:  “I don’t even have food. What’s going on?  I guess the birds are just as stir crazy as the rest of us…”  He wasn’t crazy at all: the birds went Hitchcock on him, and he was trapped.  I left Washington Square Park.

candles

I only type up my philosophy writing when it is being prepared for general consumption, that is, no longer my own notes.  Otherwise I write with a fountain pen, which I find to be the least intrusive and most versatile writing implement.

So I am at my brother’s place in Williamsburg as Sandy shakes the windows, hoping the power doesn’t go out — the internet and cable TV had failed, but not before we saw the footage of the 14th street power station explosion and cars floating on C.  I lit a candle just in case.

As I am getting ready to go to sleep on his shockingly ludicrous couch (not his fault) I turn off the standing lamp, leaving the candle the only source of light.  I think, “Hey, this is how people wrote in the past.  Every philosopher up till just recent has sat hunkered over a notebook with a bottle of ink, a pen and a candle.  Let’s see if there is anything to it…”

OH MY GAWD.

It is fantastic.  Modern lighting is excellent, but it sprays light everywhere.  Normally this is a good thing: one or two lamps can light an entire room easily.  But for focused concentration, the single flickering point light of a candle melts everything else away.  Romance is good for philosophy.

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02.19.12

Holy crap, it’s The Matrix for chickens

Posted in ethics, philosophy, products, technology at 11:47 pm by nogre

No, really:

http://io9.com/5885510/holy-crap-its-the-matrix-for-chickens

[Sent to me by my brother. Thanks bro!]

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06.21.11

The SEP on the Kindle

Posted in philosophy, products, technology at 11:48 pm by nogre

Reading on a computer screen is often not pleasant, especially when a lot of reading has to  be done. This is a general problem for philosophy since nearly everything is in PDF format and if you don’t want to print out a tree’s worth of paper you are stuck.

I got a Kindle.  Kindles can handle PDFs, but what I just found out is that Kindles can do the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy quite well.  I downloaded the webpage and then deleted the content from the top of the page down to the start of the article.  Then I used Calibre to convert the webpage into Kindle format.  It looks great and the images come out well.

So I did some poking around, and found out that if you use a Firefox extension called “Download Them All” you can download a webpage and all the links on that webpage, i.e. you could go the contents page of the SEP and then download all the articles linked there.  Basically you could have the entire SEP on your Kindle and be good to go.

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09.14.09

Not quite Skynet

Posted in biology, evolution, game theory, internet, news, NYC, philosophy, products, random idiocy, technology at 10:33 pm by nogre

For those readers of mine, I’d like to open up a small opportunity.  Quite a bit of my time and effort has gone into revamping parts of the theory of evolution and I have previously mentioned here that I’ve taught myself to program and created a simulation.  Well, this isn’t completely true.

The short version is that I’ve made computers try to survive the real world.  By real world, I mean my program contains lots of little files that make decisions, and these decisions are about buying and selling stocks, based upon actual real-time data available on the internet.  The decision engines (or ‘orgs’, as I like to call them) that correctly predict the movement of the stocks make money and eventually replicate.  Those orgs that are unsuccessful at predicting stock movements lose money and die off.  The replication process is governed by genetic algorithms that include various mutations.

The short short version is that the program is a cross between a stock market program and a tomagotchi (digital pet).  You host a colony of organisms that survive by ‘eating’ (buy and selling) stocks; it acts as your own personal hedge fund.

Anyway, I could use a tester or two, so if anyone here wants to participate, send me an email.  I’ll get around to writing up more details about the program soon too.

—————————————————————–

In other news,  I’ve finally gotten around to updating the NYC Area Philosophy Calendar.  Someone even sent me a nice email asking if I was still going to do it (before I got around to it.. busy busy) and another person even asked if they could start adding events.

Hmmm, interest in the calendar (it only took 2 years).  An actual object (program) that came from studying philosophy (original theory of biology, 2004.).  It’s taken some time but I feel like I must be moving up in the world.

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04.24.09

What in the world have I been up to?

Posted in biology, evolution, fitness, philosophy, Relativity, science, technology at 4:48 pm by nogre

I’m sure the dearth of posts here has not gone completely unnoticed.  So what in the world have I been up to?  While it is possible that I had decided to forgo my normal practice of just making up philosophy as I see fit, this, of course, is ridiculous.

I do not know if any of my readers have been around since the beginning, but this blog started out with a good deal of my philosophy of biology.  The one-sentence description of my philosophy of biology is: I have relativized the theory of fitness within evolution and comported the rest of evolutionary theory to make it work.

In the last few months I’ve been teaching myself to program and, as of today, I have incorporated as much of my theory of evolution into a simulation as I can possibly hope to accomplish (at the moment).  All that is left is to get all the bugs out.

It is not every day that I can say that I have created something that is a direct result of a theory of philosophy, moreover a theory that I have personally developed.  I’m pretty stoked.  There is still a good amount of work getting the thing to actually run from this point forward, but at least none of the issues will be theoretical, just technical.

And of course there is no guarantee that things will go the way I want them to, but at least I gave it a shot.

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03.27.09

Aether Propeller?

Posted in fun, physics, random idiocy, science, technology at 12:00 pm by nogre

I was trying to figure out how planes stay in the sky.

So this is what I came up with.

As the plane moves forward, a small vacuum is created above the wing. The vacuum is a low pressure zone which pulls the wing up and the air down to fill itself in (because Nature HATES a vacuum).  This upward pull that the low pressure zone creates we call lift.

I thought, “Hooray.  This isn’t so complicated!  Planes stay up because they create small vacuums above their wings as they move forward, creating an upward force.”

Then I thought, “And this is why planes can’t fly in outer space, because there is no air to displace and create a vacuum.”

Then I thought, “But if there is an aether theory, why not?”

So as a wing moves through a vacuum, generally we don’t think there is anything to cause lift or drag.  But if we have an aether theory of a vacuum, i.e. there is some substance below what we can observe that our matter exists within, then why can’t we create a vacuum in that substance?

My line of thought was: Air is to Vacuum as Vacuum is to Black Hole.

Can’t we just spin a propeller fast enough in outer space to create lift?  As the prop turns small vacuums in the aether will be created, and, insofar as Nature hates vacuums, a force will be created to fill in this vacuum, pulling the propeller in that direction.

(Someone please tell me how this is nonsense so I won’t go around thinking I’ve come up with a new model of space flight.)

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02.19.09

Video Game Design #5: Modern Art

Posted in fun, technology, Wii at 12:53 pm by nogre

Most of the time video game designers are trying to make 3 dimensional virtual worlds that are as realistic as possible, or focus upon a particular art style, and tell a story within that world.

What I would like to see is a lifelike 3-D world that has a main character that has special abilities, or levels, taken from modern art.  This means, for example, that a character with Cubist special abilities (or in the cubist level) can flatten parts of the world that they are looking at into a 2-D space, but in this space they have the ability to see around corners, rearrange objects and do all the other funky things that happen in cubist art.

On the flip-side, when using the Cubist skills, the character would lose depth perception, motion would be funky, and other sorts of strange phenomena would go on.

Moreover the character could get skills associated with other artists or artistic movements.  Say there was a Dali  gun: it could stretch the legs of elephants (or any other animal) such that they become unstable.  Or a Duchamp Readymade skill which combines random objects in the world into other objects depending upon the angle at which you are looking at them.  Frankly I think that there are too many different and good ways to go; it would take some effort to really take a few ideas and make them work well.

This would be a great way to combine the ‘new’ media form of interactive video gaming and more ‘traditional’ modern art.  It might even be considered educational.  But if executed well, it would definitely be fun, interesting and visually impressive.

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09.29.08

Magic

Posted in language, philosophy, science, technology at 11:40 am by nogre

Perhaps there is magic that some people have and others do not, and cannot, have.  I do not know.  However there is more than one way to skin a cat.

Consider the maxim, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  What does ‘sufficiently advanced technology’ mean?   The words ‘sufficiently advanced’ imply there is something futuristic about this technology, but this is not a necessary requirement; the technology needs to be different from what is known, but not futuristic.  Any unknown technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Of course there are plenty of technologies that I am unfamiliar with that I do not count as magic.  The upshot is that knowledge is not the determining factor in distinguishing magic because any one of us may be ignorant of a particular technology, but, if we desired to, we could go find out how the unknown technologies work.  Magic requires that we cannot simply pick up a book and read how a something happens.

Therefore a more accurate description of magic is: Any unexplainable technology is indistinguishable from magic.  If some technology is unexplainable then how it works cannot be written.

We now have a question of technology and meaning: if some technology is unexplainable, then what is the purpose of calling that thing technology? To ascribe a property to some unknown object is begging the question and hence the use of the world technology in this instance is misleading:

Anything unexplainable is indistinguishable from magic.

This description of magic may seem like a non-starter because it would be impossible to learn something that is unexplainable by definition.  However, magic only requires a special kind of unexplainability: magic cannot be explained in terms of science.  So magic is not completely unexplainable, only scientifically unexplainable.

As broadly construed as possible, science is a description of the world in terms of objects made up of other objects according to some process.  Physics tries to find the smallest objects that, when combined by some process, make up all the biggest objects in the universe.  Biology looks to find the fundamental objects and processes that make up ecosystems and life.

To get around science we would need something that necessarily cannot be described in terms of another object according to any process.  This might seem impossible because of the open-ended ‘according to any process’ clause but, compositional accounts of natural language have consistently failed in certain circumstances. Therefore, if you wish to look for magic, I suggest understanding why this happens.

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08.18.08

Where Does Probability Come From? (and randomness to boot)

Posted in biology, epistemology, evolution, fitness, independence friendly logic, logic, measurement, mind, philosophy, physics, Relativity, science, Special Relativity, technology at 1:26 pm by nogre

I just returned from a cruise to Alaska. It is a wonderful, beautiful place. I zip-lined in a rain forest canopy, hiked above a glacier, kayaked coastal Canada and was pulled by sled-dogs. Anywho, as on many cruises, there was a casino, which is an excellent excuse for me to discuss probability.

What is probability and where does it come from? Definitions are easy enough to find. Google returns:

a measure of how likely it is that some event will occur; a number expressing the ratio of favorable cases to the whole number of cases possible …

So it’s a measure of likelihood. What’s likelihood? Google returns:

The probability of a specified outcome.

Awesome. So ‘probability as likelihood’ is non-explanatory. What about this ‘ratio of favorable cases to the whole number of cases possible’? I’m pretty wary about the word favorable. Let’s modify this definition to read:

a number expressing the ratio of certain cases to the whole number of cases possible.

Nor do I like ‘a number expressing…’ This refers to a particular probability, not probability at large, so let’s go back to using ‘measure’:

a measure of certain cases to the whole number of cases possible.

We need to be a bit more explicit about what we are measuring:

a measure of the frequency of certain cases to the whole number of cases possible.

OK. I think this isn’t that bad. When we flip a fair coin the probability is the frequency of landing on heads compared to the total cases possible, heads + tails, so 1 out of 2. Pretty good.

But notice the addition of the word fair. Where did it come from, what’s it doing there? Something is said to be fair if that thing shows no favoritism to any person or process. In terms of things that act randomly, this means that the thing acts in a consistently random way. Being consistently random means it is always random, not sometimes random and other times not random. This means that fairness has to do with the distribution of the instances of the cases we are studying. What governs this distribution?

In the case of of a coin, the shape of the coin and the conditions under which it is measured make all the difference in the distribution of heads and tails. The two sides, heads and tails, must be distinguishable, but the coin must be flipped in a way such that no one can know which side will land facing up. The shape of the coin, even with uniform mass distribution, cannot preclude this previous condition. Therefore the source of probability is the interdependence of physical conditions (shape and motion of the coin) and an epistemic notion (independence of knowledge of which side will land up). When the physical conditions and our knowledge of the conditions are dependent upon each other then the situation becomes probabilistic because the conditions preclude our knowing the exact outcome of the situation.

It is now time to recall that people cheat at gambling all the time. A trio of people in March 2004 used a computer and lasers to successfully predict the decaying orbit of a ball spinning on a roulette wheel (and walked out with £1.3 million). This indicates that after a certain point it is possible to predict the outcome of a coin flipping or a roulette ball spinning, so the dependence mentioned above is eventually broken. However this is only possible once the coin is flipping or the roulette ball is rolling, not before the person releases the roulette ball or flips the coin.

With the suggestion that it is the person that determines the outcome we can expand the physical-epistemic dependence to an physical-epistemic-performative one. If I know that I, nor anyone else, can predict the outcome until after I perform a task, then the knowledge of the outcome is dependent upon how I perform that task.

This makes sense because magicians and scam artists train themselves to be able to perform tasks like shuffling and dealing cards in ways that most of us think is random but are not. The rest of us believe that there is a dependence between the physical setup and the outcome that precludes knowing the results, but this is merely an illusion that is exploited.

What about instances in which special training or equipment is unavailable; can we guarantee everyone’s ability to measure the thing in question to be equal? We can: light. Anyone who can see at all sees light that is indistinguishable from the light everyone else sees: it has no haecceity.

This lack of distinguishability, lack of haecceity (thisness), is not merely a property of the photon but a physical characteristic of humans. We have no biology that can distinguish one photon from another of equivalent wavelength. To distinguish something we have to use a smaller feature of the thing to tell it apart from its compatriots. Since we cannot see anything smaller, this is impossible. Nor is there a technology that we could use to augment our abilities: for us to have a technology that would see something smaller than a photon would require us to know that the technology interacted at a deeper level with reality than photons do. But we cannot know that because we are physically limited to using the photon as our minimal measurement device. The act of sight is foundational: we cannot see anything smaller than a photon nor can anything smaller exist in our world.

The way we perceive photons will always be inherently distributed because of this too. We cannot uniquely identify a single photon, and hence we can’t come back and measure the properties of a photon we have previously studied. Therefore the best we will be able to accomplish when studying photons is to measure a group of photons and use a distribution of their properties, making photons inherently probabilistic. Since the act of seeing light is a biological feature of humans, we all have equal epistemological footing in this instance. This means that the epistemic dependence mentioned above can be ignored because it adds nothing to the current discussion. Therefore we can eliminate the epistemic notion from our above dependence, reducing it to a physical-performative interdependence.

Since it is a historical/ evolutionary accident that the photon is the smallest object we can perceive, the photon really is not fundamental to this discussion. Therefore, the interdependence of the physical properties of the smallest things we can perceive and our inherent inability to tell them apart is a source of probability in nature.

This is a source of natural randomness as well: once we know the probability of some property that we cannot measure directly, the lack of haecceity means that we will not be able to predict when we will measure an individual with said property. Therefore the order in which we measure the property will inherently be random. [Assume the contradiction: the order in which we measure the property is not random, but follows some pattern. Then there exists some underlying structure that governs the appearance of the property. However, since we are already at the limit of what can be measured, no such thing can exist. Hence the order in which we measure the property is random.]

————–

If I were Wittgenstein I might have said:

Consider a situation in which someone asks, “How much light could you see?” Perhaps a detective is asking a hostage about where he was held. But then the answer is, “I didn’t look.” —— And this would make no sense.

hmmmm…. I did really mean to get back to gambling.

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06.11.08

Video Game Design 3: Golf Practice

Posted in design, fun, technology, Wii at 10:43 pm by nogre

The Wii has a lot of potential as a golf simulator/ practice program. With the introduction of the Wii balance board the opportunity for using weight distribution has become a real factor, and, though I know nearly nothing about golf, balance and weight distribution during a club swing has to be critical.

Now using the balance board to monitor weight distribution is somewhat obvious. However, very accurate motion sensing from the controller would also be required to really pinpoint the motion of the swing. By some pretty basic reasoning about cost and manufacturing I heard once, it is fair to say that Nintendo is providing middle of the road accelerometers- they are good, but there is still a lot of noise (inaccurate random data) to be dealt with. Lots of noise means that a lot of processing of the data from the motion sensors is required to get a clear picture of what is going on, and if lots of processing occurs, then the nuances of the motion are also getting smoothed over. My solution is to connect the nunchuck controller to the main controller in a rigid way.

A mockup of the connected remote and nunchuck in the shape of a traditional controller.

The nunchuck controller is incredibly light and would add almost no bulk to the main controller, while doubling the number of accelerometers. With double the accelerometers, a clearer picture of the motion would be provided.

Secondly, to get a more complete picture of the orientation of the Wii controllers, the sensor bar which is normally placed near the television should be placed on the floor where the golf ball ought to be. With the sensor bar on the floor where the golf ball should be the controllers would be able to pick up the location of the sensor bar and provide non-inertial data about its velocity. As the controllers swing past the sensor bar, the location of the infrared lights would act as fixed points with which to measure velocity.

A picture of someone on a Wii balance board with the sensor bar on the floor.

All on-screen menu navigation can be done in the traditional way by using the directional keys; pointer-enabled functions are nice but unnecessary for this sort of game. Moving the sensor bar around the room would be a clever way to also have a swing trainer for baseball.

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