We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The BBC on-line has an interesting article called never ending computer games about using vastly improved Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) to avoid linear pre-scripted games. Of course this is vastly harder to actually pull off than some people seem to think and in some ways a degree of control over events is essential to maintain an interesting and coherent story line.
Nevertheless, any giants leaps in A.I. has to be welcome as it may well lead to entirely new ways of ‘writing’ fiction, relying less on a movie-like approach of pre-scripted actions, but instead driving a story with a series of looser ‘objectives’ which can be solved in many ways, some of which might not have even occurred to the games writer, which is both a potential joy and a source of potential problems… imagine a Lord of The Rings Game:
- Gandalf lures the Nazgûl back to Hobbitton on a wild goose chase with a false reported sighting of Frodo having gone back there after his visit to Rivendell
- Gandalf summons his giant eagle ally (the one who he escaped from Isengard on the back of)
- With the Nazgûl safely out of Mordor airspace, Gandalf and Frodo fly over Mount Doom on their giant eagle friend, drop The Ring of Power into the volcano safely from 5000 feet up, Sauron goes ‘poooofff’!
- Frodo and Gandalf are back in Hobbitton in time for tea and biscuits the next day… done and dusted but rather an anti-climax!
The games designer had better be on the look-out for possible ‘elegant story killer’ endings!
A.I. characters would be ‘accented’, given objectives of their own and then populated around the game in certain contexts, at which point if the A.I. is good enough, the discreet A.I. ‘players’ will take act and react dynamically to event driven ‘reality’ so well that games would be vastly less predictable. It would however require a very different set of ‘rules’ compared to all forms of current fiction, making games more like a high tech form of ‘Dungeons & Dragons’, which is to say an interactive and much looser sort of fiction. Unlike D&D however, the games designer has to balance the game ahead of time rather than on-the-fly. This means good games design will be at a huge premium given that powerful new A.I. technologies will give us whole new ways to make totally crap games as well as transcendently good ones.
Forty-two US Nobel Prize winners have signed a declaration denouncing any unilateral, pre-emptive strike by the US against Iraq:
“The undersigned oppose a preventive war against Iraq without broad international support. Military operations against Iraq may indeed lead to a relatively swift victory in the short term. But war is characterized by surprise, human loss, and unintended consequences. Even with a victory, we believe that the medical, economic, environmental, moral, spiritual, political, and legal consequences of an American preventive attack on Iraq would undermine, not protect, U.S. security and standing in the world”.
The Nobel laureate who wrote and circulated the declaration is chemist Walter Kohn of the University of California at Santa Barbara, a former adviser to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Other signatories include physicists behind the nuclear research that ended the Second World War. Hans Bethe was an atom bomb designer and Norman Ramsey was part of the Manhattan project to build an atom bomb.
“We are a group of bright people who have had very relevant experiences. We hope to contribute to the sharpness of the discussion.”
Yeah, right, we wish. However, all is not lost. Apparently, six Nobel laureates refused to sign the declaration. According to Kohn their reasons were a lack of faith in the UN, a desire to avoid mixing science with politics and a fear of appeasing Iraq. Seems like a sound bunch of scientists to me (I am, of course, only assuming that they are scientists). Unfortunately, I could not find their names anywhere as the only source of the report seems to be New Scientist. If anyone knows who they are and what they said, I would be interested to read their comments in full.
In any case, it looks like the well-meaning Nobel-prize-winning professors have struck a bonanza in signatures. Last time I looked their support form had about 1360 signed and counting in just a couple of days! Well done. Only, it seems that most of the ‘signatories’ appear to be Raelians adding their own garbled and emotionally incontinent messages…
They are all stark raving mad. Bloody marvellous!
This story is already a little old but I thought I’d give my two pennies’ worth on the situation facing Danish statistics teacher Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, which was published over a year ago.
In a nutshell, Lomborg uses the evidence on which Greens rely to point out that by many yardsticks, life on planet Earth is getting better. As one can imagine, this has sent large parts of the Green movement and the anti-globalistas into a collective funk…
“You mean the world is getting greener, healthier and wealthier? But that’s just terrible! Heretic! Heretic!”
The response from many quarters has been nothing less than childish. A self-selected and rather Orwellian group calling itself The Danish Committee for Scientific Dishonesty has denounced Lomborg root and branch for the temerity of writing such a book and has sought to smear him and his academic credentials. So it is good to see the man himiself fight back. Check out the article by Lomborg in the online pages of the Wall Street Journal for his rebuttal of many of their claims.
Of course by writing in the WSJ, Lomborg has proved he is a mere lackey of the global free market capitalist conspiracy, so no doubt the doomongers will not pay a shred of attention. It might influence saner counsels, though.
And in the meantime, take a look at www.lomborg.com for an ongoing discussion of his book and associated issues.
It is often said that technology is developing far more rapidly than would have predicted at such-and-such a time. But there is another point of view.
And it is still being claimed that we live in a period of exceptionally rapid technical progress and one in which the time elapsing between invention and application tends to get shorter whereas it seems to be true that ours is really an epoch of comparative technological sluggishness when there are not very many authentically new things about and even these, for many different reasons, are being developed rather slowly. (How much longer, for example, will we have to wait for efficient battery-operated motorcars which will enable the pounding, smelly reciprocating engine to be thrown on the scrap-heap; or the typewriter which will type as one dictates, which will release hundreds of young women for other more interesting tasks; or audio-visual cassettes which will enable us to break away from the tyranny and the interminable boredom of modern television; or a cure for the common cold; or much cheaper and efficient ways of digging tunnels so that the surface of the earth could reoccupied by people instead of being overrun by machines; or really substantial cuts in costs of desalination rendering it possible to turn deserts into gardens. This list could easily extended.)
John Jewkes, Government and Technology, Third Wincott Memorial Lecture, 31st October 1972.
Well we have audio-visual cassettes now, and instead of typewriters that do not take dictation we have computers that still (in spite of the endless “computer that understands the human voice” inventions reported regularly since the 1960’s) have problems taking dictation. As for such things as cheap desalination (promised in California as long ago as 1956) we are still waiting – I would also mention nuclear fusion (we have been promised that since the early 1950’s).
The oft voiced claim that ours is the age of the most rapid technological development can certainly be contested.
…or how to ensure your kids are more technologically literate than you.
One of the best ways to motivate someone is to present the person with a challenge. For children, forbidding something works equally well, if not better. So when I came across this product in one of those little catalogues that come with Sunday newspapers, I immediately realised its potential to do an amazing service in further advancing the technological awareness of the young generation.
Achieve total control over TV time
Worried about the hours your children spend watching TV or playing computer games? This remarkable new British invention hands back control to parents. Using the electronic Parent Key, you program the child’s daily viewing allowances into Screenblock – say, 7-8 am and 5-7 pm. As the TV mains cable is routed via the locked compartment, Screenblock controls the power supply, turning it on and off at the times requested. But here’s the best bit! It also comes with two electronic cards which act like a football ref’s cards. Wave the yellow one at Screenblock and today’s allowance is reduced by 15 mins – and red means the TV stays off until tomorrow. The all-important Parent Key also overrides all settings when the kids are in bed and it’s time for grown-up viewing.
So far, so good. But if parents led by the desire to curb their children’s TV-viewing habits succumb to the advertising and purchase such devices en masse, pretty soon many a technologically gifted whizkid will be popular, spots or no spots. Not only ways to disable the screenblock will be devised, but kids will be ‘instructed’ in how to do that themselves without their modifications being detected. Part of the solution will have to be the inability of parents to notice the ‘adjustment’. Aren’t you just grateful to the screenblock inventors for broadening your children’s technological horizons?
The wonders of capitalism, or the false needs of the alienating consumer society? This gadget is designed to fulfill a role which is obviously important in badly ventilated homes and offices.
The question I would like to know is, does this methane filter reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and therefore should it be made compulsory under the terms of the Kyoto Climate Change Treaty?
Three pints of gas a day for an average person? You mean it’s more for politicians?
A change is as good as a rest, they say, and since I have made something of a custom of reporting and commenting upon all the gloomy news emanating from and occuring in this country, I can enjoy a brief rest and kindle a flickering light amidst the miasma of despair.
It gives me no small amount of pride to note that the British still possess a spark of creativity sufficient to produce interesting developments like this:
“An innovative radio that lets you listen to internet stations anywhere in the home has been showcased at the world’s largest consumer technology event in Las Vegas.
The GlobalTuner InTune200 is a small portable radio that connects to a computer wirelessly, providing access to any music on the PC or to thousands of internet radio stations.
PDT, the Manchester-based company that developed the portable player, says it could be just the thing to persuade more people to sign up for high-speed internet services.”
I love technological advances for their own sake but this one strikes me as having some potentially important consequences. We all know how libertarian and conservative views, having been squeezed out of the mainstream media, have flowered on the internet, to the extent that some even argue that they dominate the medium. Well, I can neither prove nor entirely dismiss that assertion but I am willing to stand by the claim that the ‘anti-idiotarian’ internet-bloc is both vast and growing.
With that in mind, the next logical development, as best I can see, is for a number of these voices to move up to internet radio. Indeed, I note with delight that some already have. How auspicious that, just as a tactical move from typing to talking may be afoot, along comes a consumer durable product that will enable internet radio to explode the way analogue broadcast radio did a century ago.
I wonder what music we shall play on Radio Samizdata?
Real time speech translation, speech to text conversion, story summarization: all of these were “just around the corner” when I was a CMU grad student. I remember reading Dr. Raj Reddy’s proposal for a speech understanding system, what later became the Hearsay I project I believe. This was all going to happen in five years or so. By the time they developed Hearsay II his research group had a DEC PDP-10 (the cmub) pretty much to themselves. All the rest of us had to make do on the cmua.
That was in 1973.
So here we are, thirty years on, and it appears the real thing may really, finally be “five years in the future”. Some of the key elements are actually working under field conditions. It has always been inevitable we’d crack the speech understanding problem… eventually. It just took a couple years longer than we thought. [There were even more optimistic thoughts in the early 50’s, but that was computing before my time. Vacuum tube days. I think Fred Flintstone worked on the project.]
So here are a few very readable documents on the current state of military applications. The Phrasealator has been tested in Afghanistan by the guy who built it. The following are pdf documents. Right click and download.
- “An SBIR Success Story”, James Bass (script)
- “An SBIR Success Story”, James Bass (slides)
- “Human Language Technology TIDES/EARS/Babylon”, Charles Wayne (script)
- “Human Language Technology TIDES/EARS/Babylon”, Charles Wayne (slides) (large-ish)
PS: Note the military dune buggy at Kandahar Airport in James Bass’ slides. I want one!
No, I don’t mean some figurative ‘holy grail’, nor do I mean Monty Python & The Holy Grail, I really do mean the real purported The Holy Grail.
A group of modern day Knights Templar will be using modern thermal imaging and ultrasound technologies to search Rosslyn Chapel, in Scotland, long thought to be final resting place of what is said to be the real Holy Grail.
Whenever David Carr writes one of his we are doomed doomed pieces, I try to cheer myself up by pondering the excellence of capitalism and its products, with a view to giving one of the better ones that extra boost into product super-stardom that a mention on samizdata surely guarantees. And of all the candidates in range of my personal ain’t-capitalism-great? scanner, I think that the one I’m most impressed by at the moment is Swiffer cloths.
Says Cynthia Townley Ewer of OrganizedHome.Com:
Electrostatic dry sweepers fill a household cleaning niche. While these dry mops won’t replace a damp-mop for stain or dried soil removal, the new sweepers are far superior at picking up and removing dust and dry debris.
Use electrostatic dry sweepers before damp-mopping to remove loose dirt and speed mopping chores. Use them between damp-mopping and instead of daily sweeping or vacuuming.
The cloths alone are great dust removers for televisions and computer equipment, and will take dust from furniture quickly and easily. Without a doubt, these new products represent a true innovation, and have a place in today’s organized home.
I am myself a satisfied Swiffer customer. I find Swiffers invaluable for those deposits of dust that accumulate over the months and years. Whenever, as happens from time to time, I need to rearrange some of my possessions, such deposits as these used to have to be moved as if manoevring a delicate item of scientific investigation, in order to avoid hurling all that dirt into the air and perhaps into my respiratory system, which functions imperfectly at the best of times. Now, I Swiffer the offending deposit. I ensure clean TV and computer screens by Swiffering them also, just as Ms, Townley Ewer says.
→ Continue reading: Swiffer!
The Raelians are a truly weird cult, that is for sure, and the fact they are claiming to have produced the world’s first cloned human is hardly going to calm feelings about the technology. However even if their contention to have done so is true (not surprisingly I am disinclined to just take the word of a group which claims humans are the descendents of bio-engineered clones created by space aliens), I must say that I find it hard to get all that excited about the whole matter.
Although I do have worries that the technology and underpinning science is sufficiently immature that there is cause for concern for the health of a cloned child, the principle itself does not bother me at all… a child is a child is a child, and the manner of its creation does not give it any less worth or intrinsic rights.
However the issue of how to assign paternal and maternal responsibility for the child is, of course, going to keep a small army of lawyers busy for quite a while! I would be quite interested to see what people’s views are as to “who is left holding the baby”, if you will forgive the expression 
The Banned Wagon is rolling into town again and, this time, a herb called ‘Kava-Kava’ has been tossed unceremoniously onto the back of the wagon and driven into the wilderness:
“Remedies containing the herb Kava-kava have been banned after it was linked to four deaths.”
Well, four deaths is four too many, that’s for sure. But how is Kava-Kava ‘linked’ exactly? What does ‘linked’ mean? Does it mean that the herb caused symptoms which led to an illnesss, or what?
Questions enough, but the report gets even more obtuse and vague:
“The MCA said investigations had been unable to say what might put people at risk of adverse reactions to Kava-kava.
How the remedy damages the liver is also unknown.”
But that doesn’t matter because:
“Given the expert advice from the CSM and Medicines Commission following the recent public consultation it is clear that this ban is necessary.”
This may have something to do with the way the journalist has written the article or it may that there’s something we’re not being told but, in the absence of those two possibilities, then the case for prohibition is anything but ‘clear’. In fact, it is quite opaque. It is the diametric opposite of ‘clear’. This is ‘Newspeak’; producing no evidence of guilt results in a ‘clear’ case having been made.
Well, that’s about as much ranting as I’m entitled to, I reckon. I have never bought kava-kava and now, I daresay, I never will. Not unless I’m prepared to go to a shady, kava-kava pusher. But, I do detect that we’ve just witnessed another example of the ‘Precautionary Principle’; this is the public policy mandate that all risk must be avoided and which usually manifests itself as an avoidance of all critical inquiry as well.
I have no medical or scientific training but I presume that the people who staff the Medicines Control Agency have oodles of both. Is it too much to expect them to approach matters a bit more…well, scientifically?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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