watching the world turn.

An essay by Paul Graham on Why Nerds are Unpopular:

When I was in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids. No one I knew did it, but several planned to, and some may have tried. Mostly this was just a pose. Like other teenagers, we loved the dramatic, and suicide seemed very dramatic. But partly it was because our lives were at times genuinely miserable.

Bullying was only part of the problem. Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time.

…

And there was no way to opt out. The adults had agreed among themselves that this was to be the route to college. The only way to escape this empty life was to submit to it.

Which, in my personal experience is completely true.

I’m a lot happier when the work and tasks I’m doing have a reason. Written problems bored me silly, and I got much more reward back from helping my friends with them. Scripted laboratory work was similar, although a little better.

Perhaps that’s why I liked computer science early on. It was possible to easily experiment with whatever you liked. You didn’t need the tutors to arrange the right chemicals or reagents beforehand (as in biochemistry or genetics).

For a while I’ve wondered how to efficiently and unobtrusively power cybernetic implants. To me, the idea of having to replace batteries and recharge things that are part of my body is antithetical to the whole idea of implants. Implants should blend with organics and utilise the natural power sources within the body.

So, how much wattage does the human body produce naturally? Well, this is what the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) indicates, or more accurately, it indicates the average amount of energy expended on day-to-day activities… if you had a particularly active day then this would jump up higher.

There’s a BMR calculator here and according to it, my BMR is 1906 kcal/day. This works out to about 92 Watts… not much more than a light-bulb*!

In order to tap into this energy source, we need to adopt one of the energy currencies of the body. Some ideas might be glucose, ATP, or the electron transport chain (although the latter two are generally intracellular processes, so I’m guessing it’d be harder and potentially more dangerous to try these). Further, there should probably be some regulation of utilising the body’s energy, so that if these energy substrates drop too low in concentration then the implants should either switch off and warn their user that blood glucose levels are low.

As a result of this, it’ll give you an excuse to eat more delicious food to power your implants. Or, if you’re trying to lose weight, you could run the main processor overnight to encode your previous day’s memories to xvid - or regularly present the vocabularies of 5 foreign languages to your brain as you dream - hablo castiano un pocho )

But then, a negative consequence of having more implants is exactly this - your body will have to work harder to sustain them. Depending on the strength you place on metabolic rate affecting longevity, more implants could then start reversing the gradual increase in lifespan we’ve been seeing during the last couple of centuries. Of course, they’ll be plenty of others trying to come up with engineered ways to halt or reverse this metabolic aging.

Anyhow, I hope the cyberneticists are taking this all into account, because it first gives designers an idea of the wattage they have to play with and also because I’d really prefer to avoid having to plug myself in at night!

* 1906 * 4.18 kJ/kcal * 1 day / 8.64e4 sec = 92.2 Watts. And upon conducting research about this, NASA and HP labs have made the comment in the past that the human body produces about the same amount of energy as a 100 Watt light-bulb needs.

Time is the one precious commodity. You can’t change what you do with it, you can’t rewind the steady increase of entropy. Even though it may decrease locally, across the whole universe it’s alway on the rise (at least as far as physicists have collectively determined… I’m sure that there are eccentric exception that think otherwise).

In relation to that, our attention is also precious. So what, and more specifically, who, do we pay attention to?

In Accelerando, by Charles Stross, the author introduces the concept of reputation markets, where someone’s reputation can be bartered a bit like a final currency.

I kind of like the idea. You could immediately get a sense of whether you should trust someone or not, and whether you want to hire them for a particular job. On a more day-to-day level, hooking in things like car registration numbers means that people could provide feedback on the driving on others… “sure you might be a nice person to work with generally, but behind the wheel you’re a nutter who also refuses to indicate out of round-abouts” (that might be my pet peeve along with tail-gaters and people that don’t know how to merge).

Of course, this is flawed first by the privacy implications and also by the fact the people are more likely to feel the need to report negative experiences than positive.

In the past, I’ve written about the drug like effects of love. When I wrote that, it was from a retrospective viewpoint based on my prior experience but while single.

Now I find myself in love again, with a fantastic woman, and it’s interesting to be just a little bit more aware of the psychological stuff that goes on. The warm feeling of love, the companionship, and the equality.

However, there have also been the less pleasant effects. For instance, I’ve noticed that after spending a lot of time with my partner, and then going to a period of her absence, the day after I feel listless and generally down. “Of course” you say, “that’s what it’s like, you miss your partner when you’re apart!”. I understand that, and I don’t want to be indifferent to when the next time I’ll see her will be. It’s nice looking forward to spending time with someone. At the same time however, I wish the physiological effects were not so real, because they don’t actually contribute to my mental health as far as I can tell. After the initial down, I fortunately remember that I really appreciate and enjoy my time alone and get to work on a variety of fantastic and interesting projects. Time as an individual cements the concept of my independent self, which I think is important, so that when I spend more time with my partner I have more to offer.

In fact, she’s expressed similar ideas, but from a different angle. Bringer together two whole people is more amazing than seeking yourself in or minimising yourself for another.

I while ago I finished “What the Dormouse said” by John Markoff, subtitled “How the 60s counterculture shaped the computer revolution”. Although I was vaguely aware of the use of LSD in the development of the internet and personal computing, this book made it a lot clearer… particularly about how prolific it was. It was actually used as an enabler for team planning meetings of major businesses! Circuit designers would use it to visualise and solve logic problems (how exactly they did this with the other associated effects going on, I’m not sure, perhaps dose high enough for loss of consciousness of the external world?).

In reverse, the internet itself is a prolific source of drug information. Users (double meaning unintended) are essentially anonymous, there is a large amount of information available. Knowledge of new “research chemicals” can quickly be disseminated. Books that have been made difficult to obtain due to their possibly controversial nature (e.g. Pihkal) can be shared P2P. Suppliers of various substances can actually sell and ship research chemicals to people despite local drug laws, partly by luck of the substances getting through local customs (some suppliers will even try multiple times if the first attempt is intercepted), but often these research chemicals are too obscure for authorities to be aware of their usage in a recreational setting. This, however getting difficult to carry out, as the authorities are also becoming more aware of the internet as a source of knowledge on recreational substances.

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Recently I’ve been reading a combination of Undulating ungulate’s book draft which discusses science, mysticism, and reality.

I’ve also been reading up some about quantum physics, and the idea of the evolution of physical properties of the universe. I’d like to read more about the ideas and work of John Wheeler and David Finkelstein (both being suggested researchers to investigate when I asked Ben Goertzel about a starting point on evolving physical laws).

This, combined with working on stuff for OpenCog, has led to several immensely surreal moments. Mostly while lying in bed about to drift of to sleep, when all reality and time collapses into a single point. Well perhaps not all reality, but at least my life and memories. Possibly this is a cognitive effect of memories being more easily retrievable in the state just before sleep? At any rate, given that: I think free will is just an immensely useful illusion of consciousness, and that physics tells us that the fabric of reality is space-time instead of two perpendicular concepts. It’s not infeasible to believe that seeing the future is possible. In fact, that’s exactly what intelligence does. We make predictions about the future. The question is, can we make predictions on things that, based on our limited of knowledge about the universe, are essentially random or make predictions that are more probabilistically accurate than our past experience allows?

I’ve also bought Outside the gates of science by Damien Broderick, which should be an interesting read. The book addresses some of the paranormal effects in experiments that have been deemed statistically significant but as of yet cannot be rationally explained (actually I bought this last year, I just have lots of reading queued up).

Kaj Sotala has been making his notes on PLN available on LJ as he reads through the Probabilistic Logic Networks book.

I just uploaded several fractal videos to YouTube on behalf of a colleague who works on OpenCog with me: Linas Vepstas.

The interior measure of the circle map, with the parameters and values as explained here:

Polylogarithm function (more info):

When we interact with people, our mind models them. Thus, as a consequence we also end up modelling other people’s beliefs, which in turn can potentially affect our beliefs. I don’t believe that the contextual belief systems of humans (self vs. other) is absolutely isolated - if you are surrounded by contrary beliefs long enough, they could slowly seep into your unconsciousness. Which leads me to wonder if this might have some relation to Stockholm Syndrome? With perhaps stress priming the mind to accept new beliefs more fluidly than usual, in order to allow humans to adapt and survive, even in unpleasant scenarios. Peer pressure and conformity bias might be otherways in which other people’s beliefs can unintentionally alter our own. Of particular interest are the experiments where all but one of the participants in a group are told to lie about observing a phenomenon and the the other, whom are making a decision purely on what they see, tend to agree with the rest of the group. Even when they are later asked about their decision, and told that the other participants were told to lie, generally the one will still swear they saw the phenomenon anyway (see the Solomon Asch study of social conformity).

There are lots of self-help articles and books that tell you to surround yourself with inspiring and positive people and avoid people who are stuck in a life of negative thought, or otherwise are poisonous to people’s happiness. And from the above, it makes sense that negativity is actually contagious. Let alone whether we have empathic tendencies, and mirror their feelings, just mirroring their viewpoint of the world would transfer those beliefs. I certainly don’t want to argue we should all become heartless isolationists, because compassion for other people is always important. But in the end, you are responsible for your own happiness over others (although not at the cost of others, through causing unnecessary harm) and to that end, I think it’s important to sometimes check whether the negativity of others is morphing your beliefs and outlook on the world.

This spread of belief occurs for small chunks of knowledge, and through modelling others at a personal level, but also occurs for larger concepts and ideas. Memes are particularly adapted to play to parts of the human condition so that they get actively spread by us. Things like quizzes that tell us how we fit in the world or appeal to our narcissism and ego, telling us we are unique in some way and that help to define our identity, are particularly virulent. Not that there’s anything wrong with them, as I’ve wasted plenty of time finding out I used to have a “pool boy” dating personality, that at some stage I was 45% pure, and that I am simultaneously a dozen historical figures. They also promote participation - which would arguably work better to promote the spread of the meme over a purely academic piece of knowledge or trivia. Tests that are also related in the attention sphere of Pop culture, the contents of which are themselves memes, piggy-back on the success of other ideas and memes.

Billboard at bus stop: “Smoking causes 5000 deaths a year in New Zealand. Face the facts!”

What about aging - which is currently inescapably and is what really kills most people? Smoking just accelerates the accumulation of cell damage. Why limit ourselves to aging that’s caused by one particular vice? Breathing causes oxidative damage, and caloric restriction increases longevity. Should we also make billboards that say “Hyperventilation and eating more calories than necessary cause X deaths a year. Face the facts!”.

According to Wikipedia, New Zealand has a 7 in 1000 death rate. That’s 0.7 % or just over 30,000 (going by the current population figures as shown on Wikipedia). I find the attribution of 5000 of these being “caused” purely by smoking a slight exaggeration, but without them citing their sources, they could really make up any number they like.

Alternatively, I think it’d be more amusing to have a billboard that said either:

• “Entropy marches relentlessly on! Face the facts!”
• “You’re going to die! Face the facts!”

But y’know, SmokeFree New Zealand would probably change their marketing director if that happened.