a thaumaturgical compendium

There are limits to tolerance. Especially when certain archaic beliefs threaten to darken our society and roll back the enlightenment. I am talking, of course, about religion.

A recent Cornell survey found that nearly a third of Americans are interested in curtailing the civil rights of Muslim-Americans. 29% thought that undercover agents should infiltrate Muslim organizations in the US, and 27% thought that Muslim-Americans should be required to register their location with authorities. Excuse me, but what!?.

It turns out that those most interested in curtailing the religious rights of others are, quelle surprise, religious themselves:

The survey also found respondents who identified themselves as highly religious supported restrictions on Muslim-Americans more strongly than those less religious.

I’d rather provide civil liberties for everyone, but who am I to argue? Religious extremism is a major source of violence and irrational behavior in the world. It isn’t at all clear why we should limit this to Muslims, though. I think anyone who engages in organizations based in faith—let’s call them “mature cults”—should be monitored. Perhaps we have been too soft on fundamentalism generally, and anyone who wishes to act on articles of faith rather than reason should be watched more closely.

Such a solution would have been abhorrent to our founding fathers, not because they were men of faith (in George Washington’s words: “The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion”), but because they believed that free exercise of thought, no matter the brand of thought, was the cornerstone of liberty. They wrongly believed that over time the mythical nature of religion would give way to a reasoned view of god in the everyday. Thomas Jefferson:

One day the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in the United States will tear down the artificial scaffolding of Christianity. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.

In his autobiography, Jefferson notes that most of the founding fathers aimed to protect “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.”

Somehow, I don’t think the same man would suggest that it was now time to start paying special attention to groups who are “Mohammedan,” and curtail their rights to practice their own religion. But then again, times change. The founding fathers probably would not have included nuclear weapons in their freedom to bear arms. They probably were likewise unable to predict that Americans two centuries later would be able to at once embrace the science to understand the origins of life itself, and the imagination that allows them to choose a 2000 year-old fable instead.

In any case, it is time for the atheists, and modern deists, to stand up and be heard. And one of the things we need to say is that not all opinions are equal. You are welcome, within your respective communities, to tell old stories and keep your traditions. But our toleration of that sort of behavior ends when there are attempts to impose it on our government.

Kevin Kelly’s always-interesting Cool Tools has a blurb on Muji, the “no mark” shop. I fell in love with Muji’s Yokohama shop a decade ago, and was surprised to notice a large number of Muji bags being carried around central London a few months back.

I like Muji’s stuff for a couple reasons. I like the simplicity of using inexpensive materials (lots of cardboard and tin) to create attractive and useful products. I keep a seam-ripper on my desk to help with the process of “deboning” newly purchased clothing—freeing myself as much as possible from advertising, except when I decide I want it (e.g., for organizations with which I am affiliated). I don’t have an allergy to brand labels (cf. Pattern Recognition) but I have long had an aversion. I enjoy the generic nature of Muji’s stuff, and ended up with a lot of their desk products. (I hope they open up a US shop soon, since although I like their stuff, I don’t see spending 20 quid for shipping.)

In a world where college students choose to wear Abecrombie shirts made to look like college shirts (choosing the simulation over the representative branding—Baudrillard would be rolling in his grave, you know… if he were dead). Meanwhile, Britney Spears wears the real deal. Go figure.

(And while we’re at it, can we get a Capricciosa somewhere east of Honolulu, please?)

“Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.” – Agent Smith, The Matrix

Within hours of Google’s announcement that they were beginning an initiative to digitize the largest libraries in the US, most of the web had heard about it. Of course they had, Google is pretty much central to the global knowledge network.

Now, already, I think the impact of Google Scholar is being underestimated. I suspect that over the next three or four years, the scholarly search engine will have far-reaching effects on how scholars communicate. But once a significant number of books from the Stanford, Harvard, and New York City libraries are digitized, and added to the holdings of current books (Google Print), I think you will start to see some early unintended consequences:

1. Books that have entered the public domain will be cited far more often than those that have not. Since the hard part (digitization) has already happened, there will be no good reason for libraries, and especially the NYC public library, not to allow distanced access to their digitized collections that have been elevated to the public domain[1].

As a result, lazy people like myself are going to be more likely to cite the materials they can have immediate access to. We will have a mass rediscovery of fin-de-siecle scholarship.

2. Digitized books want to be free. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for all of these books to break out onto the p2p systems. Sure, it hasn’t happened with Amazon yet, but—come on!—it will. It’s just too juicy a target for educational Robin Hoods. And if the source code of Half-Life 2 can be stolen, it means that it is a question of when not if the digitized books will be pirated away[2].

I for one, welcome both of these. And in the meantime, the intended consequences are amazing to think of.

fn1. From now on, I am going to avoid the downward connotations of “falling out of copyright.”

fn2. Yes, I am fully aware that these won’t fit on someone’s jump drive. I am also aware that storage and transfer sizes continue to increase, and it just takes one to make it.

I gave an oral exam in my graduate theory seminar yesterday, which included a very simple question (that most of the class, shockingly, got wrong) asking students to figure out how many bits were required to represent a particular piece of information. At lunch today, I asked my wife (the law student) what the answer was, and she got it immediately, which got us talking about encoding information.

How is it that when you “zip” a file, it gets smaller? Assuming that you are smooshing something in such a way that you get back the exact original (lossless compression), you look for regularities, and represent them in some way that eats up less space. If, for example, I have ten spaces in a row, it takes up less room if I store “ten spaces” than if I try to store “space space space space space space space space space space.” In other words, although there may be an absolute minimum needed to transmit a certain amount of information, there are ways to compress regularities.

Those regularities may be inherent to the content of the message being sent. The “space” example is a good one. Spaces are encoded as a particular binary pattern, and if this pattern repeats ten times in a row, there is a way to represent this. The same can be said of blocks of color in an image, for example. Or, if you notice that the word “the” shows up a lot in English text—even if you have no idea of what “the” means—- you might choose to give it its own code. This can be worked up to several levels.

But this hints at the second type of compression: compression that relies upon a history of communication. Rather than repeating everything you need to know, I can rely upon earlier information sharing, and say “what I said last week” or “let’s go to plan B.” Or, famously, I can just decide to hang up a single lantern or two, to show whether an attack is by land or sea. In this case, the world of possible messages is pretty much contained (no chance of an air attack), and so there really is just 1 bit of information (or, arguably, 1.58 bits) needed to transmit the message. One could imagine that after numbering all of the words in English, as well as some short phrases, it would be possible to compress English even further, due to redundancies and pattern regularities. On the assumption that we rarely say much that is new, we could even do word pairs or word triples, encoded by their probability of occurring, and easily store these on our large hard drives to reduce the size of communicated texts. This might begin to make sense if you are talking about storing, for example, the Library of Congress. Citation of earlier work is, in some strange sense, compression. So is a hyperlink. So are words.

When you remove internal regularities, to the greatest degree possible, the resulting output should contain no regularities at all. It should be random. After all, if there is a regularity, it is redundant. Now, there are very good reasons to be redundant. Redundancy allows you better chances to overcome a noisy channel. Although “F” is easier and quicker to say over a noisy radio than “foxtrot,” it is also much easier to confuse “F” with “S”, or even potentially “M”, “N”, or “X”. Computer communications often throw in a bit or two to make sure that everything “adds up” at the other end. Heck, even DNA may have error correcting codes. So, there may be an internal regularity that is added specifically to overcome noise.

Which brings us to SETI. Now, let me begin by saying that I have no idea what SETI really does, I have zero background in signal processing, and I am in this area (as in many) an ignoramus. That’s why I’m blogging about it! But I think that many people casually assume that SETI is aiming to “eavesdrop” on alien TV programs, Kang and Kodos style. SETI is pretty clear that’s not really what they are about. They are, instead, looking for an alien transmission that is intended for us, or other aliens like us.

So do we (or they) create a message that is the least random as possible? This would be a message that says little more than “we exist as an intelligent being.” What sort of a message might that be? Well, a really obvious one, because it is redundant, is something like “space space space space space” or maybe a binary equivalent of “11111111111”. Depending on what pattern you assign to that 1, it may be better to do something like “1010101010101010”. But the trick is, we aren’t sure what pattern they might generate. It could be just about anything. So we are forced to look for any redundant message.

Only, redundancy is in the eye of the beholder. Is the rotation of a star (on-off-on-off) an intelligent sort of thing? Well, no. It’s not complex enough to be thought of as intelligent. So what will aliens think if we just shoot off a rotating laser beacon, a flashing “Eat at Earth” sign? No, we want something both complex and redundant. Like Mozart. Or fancypants math.

Mozart has a lot of redundancy, or at least his music does. It tends to restrict itself to a handful of frequencies, and return to pasterns of those frequencies regularly. It keeps to a particular period, or some multiple of that period. So maybe Mozart—in a raw and uncompressed form—is a good test for intelligent life. Ah, nice work: no bird-brained alien can come up with that melody!

But what if that level of redundancy just doesn’t resonate with an alien intelligence? What if it is so regularized that they assume that it is a natural phenomenon? The idea, of course, is not to come up with a “supernatural” signal. No such thing. We are natural. We’re just smarter than whales. And we want to find other creatures in the universe that are smarter than whales, but hopefully not much smarter than us, because otherwise they will think us dreadfully boring creatures that might be fun to eat. You know, like whales. But the trick is, we don’t really know what we mean by “intelligent.”

I have a feeling one thing we mean by intelligent is able to converse with us. That is, if we suddenly got a signal from space that, when placed on a 1000×1000 grid was a very clear representation of a circle, well, we would be set. Whales don’t digitize circles. That’s a “higher order thinking” sort of thing; a pure math thing. It’s also something we would expect to be extremely unlikely to occur naturally. The trick is, would people 150 years ago have realized what to do with that information? And if we can’t even prove our intelligence two ourselves, six generations removed, then we have some real problems demonstrating our “intelligence” to creatures from another world. We have a shot at recognizing socialized humans, maybe, but why are we so convinced that other intelligent creatures will think like we do, when our thought has ontogenetically and phylogenetically been shaped by a very particular environment? And what if they are mathematically illiterate? Are they no longer worth talking to?

The real proof of intelligence remains the Turing test. I have a feeling that a one-way Turing test is what these folks have in mind. When we play them Mozart, they are intelligent if they recognize it as intelligent. We are on, to some extent, the same wavelength. There are computer programs that generate symphonies—symphonies that may well register as “intelligent” to many listeners—but in any event, these are far more complex (perhaps) than the simple calls of animals or naturally occurring songs. We made the symphony, even if we employed complex tools to create it.

What we really need, to determine whether a message is intelligent, is to see both an input and an output; a processing that suggests learning. No single message, no matter how complex will self-encode enough information to be meaningful on its own. Instead, we need the back and forth of conversation. And I am guessing that by the time we can converse, we will no longer be in a position of guessing whether we have found alien life. We’ll know it when we see it.

Chalk this up as another reason I wish I were living in New York City: New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program Winter Show.

A class action lawsuit has been filed against Wal-Mart for allowing thirteen-year-olds across Maryland to hear a dirty word. Turns out that the Evanescence CD has a cover of Korn’s “Thoughtless,” which contains the lyric “Why are you trying to make fun of me? You think it’s funny? What the fuck do you think it’s doing to me?”

The problem was not the “f-bomb,” but the fact that the album lacked a parental advisory label. If it had such a sticker, of course, Wal-Mart would not have stocked the item.

If thine ears were offended, the suit contends, you and your spawn ought to receive $75,000 in compensation. That works out to just over $16,000 a letter.

Almost as absurd as the idea of a thirteen-year-old anywhere inside of Pluto having been untouched by the second most vile word in American English, is watching American newspapers’ and magazines’ fetishistic attempt circumscribe (so to speak) the word. The Rolling Stone seems to be the only mainstream outlet to actually make use of the word. This at the same time that the Guardian argues that “fuck” isn’t really a “bad word” any more. Burnside would agree:

Looked at solely as a lexical unit, “fuck” is a very good, sturdy, versatile, and descriptive word. If our social masters could reconcile themselves to the idea that sex is a legitimate part of human existence and is here to stay, it may be that “fuck” will eventually be accepted in polite use.

I doubt Wal-Mart is likely to agree. And since they are increasingly the only place that young Americans are exposed to ideas (you know, besides TV), it looks like it’s going to stay that way for a while.

Update (12/15): And since I’ve already put myself on the blacklist of every piece of Nannyware out there, I highly suggest you watch this promo for Channel 4 (which I must have blogged at some point with everyone else) with the volume up nice and loud. This was originally meant to be played in theaters before the movie Kill Bill, but the theater association nixed it—so it showed up on TV after 10pm.

One of the things I talked about as being a significant trend over the next ten years in my “Future of the Net” lecture (which I promised to blog, but did not), was the rise of customer evangelism, and especially customer-created advertising. Apple has already invited such work, both in terms of parodies and original advertising. Wired is doing a story on a particular 60-second animated spot for the iPod mini. This is the kind of commercial that, if it appeared on TV, would stop me in my tracks (or my fast-forward). It also exemplifies the trend, and gives me something to show when I talk about customer-created advertising. (via MP)