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Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Fourmilog Upgrades to Movable Type 3.2
Fourmilog has upgraded its content management system to Movable Type 3.2. Most of the changes in this release don't affect a simple statically-generated Web log such as this one, but it's a good idea to keep current so as to minimise the breadth of the abyss one must vault when an update comes along which compels one to upgrade. Movable Type 3.2 is a major update from earlier 3.1 releases. The default character set encoding for generated pages is now UTF-8, which means that if any of your existing templates embed ISO-8859-1 characters (for example, "«" and "»" for previous and next links--recognising that this is a barbarism), you'll need to change them to the equivalent XHTML entities: « and ». I've modified all the templates accordingly and (gulp) rebuilt the entire site from the content database. Everything looks OK to me, but if you spot something aberrant, please let me know with the feedback button, for which thanks in advance.Posted at
00:33
Monday, October 24, 2005
Reading List: Le Ciel lui tombe sur la tête
- Goscinny, René and Albert Uderzo. Le ciel lui tombe sur la tête. Paris: Albert René, 2005. ISBN 2-86497-170-4.
- Credit me with some restraint--I waited ten whole days after volume 33 of the Astérix saga appeared before devouring it in one sitting. If it isn't sufficiently obvious from the author's remark at the end of the album, note that planet "Tadsylwien" is an anagram of "Walt Disney". The diffuse reflection of the countryside in the spherical spaceship on p. 8 is magnificently done.
Posted at
22:10
ISBN-13 Support in Book Recommendation Tools
On January 1, 2007, the venerable 10-digit ISBN identifiers for books will be replaced by 13-digit "ISBN-13" codes which fit within the EAN-13 scheme. There is a simple procedure for converting existing 10-digit ISBNs to the new scheme, but any program which accepts ISBNs will have to be modified to accept new, fully general, 13-digit ISBNs as of 2007. I've upgraded the book recommendation form on this site to accept 13-digit ISBNs as well as the traditional 10 digit variety. The computation of the check digit for the 13-digit ISBN is completely different than the algorithm used for its 10-digit predecessor; it's arguably less robust in the face of human data entry errors, but at least it dispenses with the "X" character--ISBN-13s are all numeric. If you've built ISBN processing tools based upon these scripts, you may wish to download the latest version and update your code to handle ISBN-13s. Note that Amazon.com is currently completely clueless about ISBN-13s--if you submit a 13 digit ISBN, even one which simply encapsulates a known 10-digit ISBN with the 978- prefix, it will come up unknown.Posted at
00:50
Sunday, October 23, 2005
Autodesk Founder Dan Drake Interviewed on PBS NerdTV
The seventh program in Robert X. Cringely's NerdTV series on PBS is an hour-long interview with Autodesk founder Dan Drake, which provides an excellent view of how the software industry has changed over the years since Autodesk got started in 1982, and how companies change as they grow. This is a must-see for anybody interested in the history of Autodesk and AutoCAD, or in the evolution of the desktop software industry. I'll confess to having forgotten the significance of the number 59030; thankfully Dan hasn't! The interview may be downloaded in a variety of forms from the link above. The full video version is a 96.5 Mb MP4 file which can be played with Mplayer/GMplayer on Linux or the free Apple QuickTime Player for Windows. Presumably Macintosh machines are able to play such files out of the box. If you don't require video, a 13 Mb MP3 audio file is available, as well as a text transcript.Posted at
20:37
Saturday, October 22, 2005
Atomic Test Effects in the Nevada Test Site Region Posted
In 1955 the giant mushrooms sprouted in abundance at the Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas. A total of fourteen fission devices were detonated, with yields as high as 43 kilotons. The "Desert Rock VI" exercise exposed 8000 troops to nuclear blasts to train them for combat operations on the nuclear battlefield. This document was distributed in January 1955 to those living near the Nevada Test Site to prepare them for the 1955 test series. Illustrated with delightful 1950s line art, it includes such sage advice as, "Your best action is not to be worried about fall-out." and "We can expect many reports that 'Geiger counters were going crazy here today.' Reports like this may worry people unnecessarily. Don't let them bother you."Posted at
23:02
Friday, October 21, 2005
Reading List: The Singularity Is Near
- Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near. New York: Viking, 2005. ISBN 0-670-03384-7.
-
What happens if Moore's Law--the annual doubling of computing power
at constant cost--just keeps on going? In this book,
inventor, entrepreneur, and futurist Ray Kurzweil extrapolates the
long-term faster than exponential growth (the exponent is itself
growing exponentially) in computing power to the point where the
computational capacity of the human brain is available for about
US$1000 (around 2020, he estimates), reverse engineering and
emulation of human brain structure permits machine intelligence
indistinguishable from that of humans as defined by the Turing test
(around 2030), and the subsequent (and he believes inevitable)
runaway growth in artificial intelligence leading to a technological
singularity around 2045 when US$1000 will purchase computing power
comparable to that of all presently-existing human brains and the new
intelligence created in that single year will be a billion times
greater than that of the entire intellectual heritage of human
civilisation prior to that date. He argues that the inhabitants of
this brave new world, having transcended biological computation in
favour of nanotechnological substrates "trillions of trillions of
times more capable" will remain human, having preserved their
essential identity and evolutionary heritage across this leap to
Godlike intellectual powers. Then what? One might as well have asked
an ant to speculate on what newly-evolved hominids would end up
accomplishing, as the gap between ourselves and these super cyborgs
(some of the precursors of which the author argues are alive today)
is probably greater than between arthropod and anthropoid.
Throughout this tour de force of boundless
technological optimism, one is impressed by the author's adamantine
intellectual integrity. This is not an advocacy document--in fact,
Kurzweil's view is that the events he envisions are essentially
inevitable given the technological, economic, and moral (curing
disease and alleviating suffering) dynamics driving them.
Potential roadblocks are discussed candidly, along with the
existential risks posed by the genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics
(GNR) revolutions which will set the stage for the singularity. A
chapter is devoted to responding to critics of various aspects of the
argument, in which opposing views are treated with respect.
I'm not going to expound further in great detail. I suspect a majority of
people who read these comments will, in all likelihood, read the book
themselves (if they haven't already) and make up their own minds about it.
If you are at all interested in the evolution of technology in this
century and its consequences for the humans who are creating it, this
is certainly a book you should read. The balance of these remarks
discuss various matters which came to mind as I read the book; they may
not make much sense unless you've read it (You are going to
read it, aren't you?), but may highlight things to reflect upon as you do.
- Switching off the simulation. Page 404 raises a somewhat arcane risk I've pondered at some length. Suppose our entire universe is a simulation run on some super-intelligent being's computer. (What's the purpose of the universe? It's a science fair project!) What should we do to avoid having the simulation turned off, which would be bad? Presumably, the most likely reason to stop the simulation is that it's become boring. Going through a technological singularity, either from the inside or from the outside looking in, certainly doesn't sound boring, so Kurzweil argues that working toward the singularity protects us, if we be simulated, from having our plug pulled. Well, maybe, but suppose the explosion in computing power accessible to the simulated beings (us) at the singularity exceeds that available to run the simulation? (This is plausible, since post-singularity computing rapidly approaches its ultimate physical limits.) Then one imagines some super-kid running top to figure out what's slowing down the First Superbeing Shooter game he's running and killing the CPU hog process. There are also things we can do which might increase the risk of the simulation's being switched off. Consider, as I've proposed, precision fundamental physics experiments aimed at detecting round-off errors in the simulation (manifested, for example, as small violations of conservation laws). Once the beings in the simulation twig to the fact that they're in a simulation and that their reality is no more accurate than double precision floating point, what's the point to letting it run?
- Fifty bits per atom? In the description of the computational capacity of a rock (p. 131), the calculation assumes that 100 bits of memory can be encoded in each atom of a disordered medium. I don't get it; even reliably storing a single bit per atom is difficult to envision. Using the "precise position, spin, and quantum state" of a large ensemble of atoms as mentioned on p. 134 seems highly dubious.
- Luddites. The risk from anti-technology backlash is discussed in some detail. ("Ned Ludd" himself joins in some of the trans-temporal dialogues.) One can imagine the next generation of anti-globalist demonstrators taking to the streets to protest the "evil corporations conspiring to make us all rich and immortal".
- Fundamentalism. Another risk is posed by fundamentalism, not so much of the religious variety, but rather fundamentalist humanists who perceive the migration of humans to non-biological substrates (at first by augmentation, later by uploading) as repellent to their biological conception of humanity. One is inclined, along with the author, simply to wait until these folks get old enough to need a hip replacement, pacemaker, or cerebral implant to reverse a degenerative disease to motivate them to recalibrate their definition of "purely biological". Still, I'm far from the first to observe that Singularitarianism (chapter 7) itself has some things in common with religious fundamentalism. In particular, it requires faith in rationality (which, as Karl Popper observed, cannot be rationally justified), and that the intentions of super-intelligent beings, as Godlike in their powers compared to humans as we are to Saccharomyces cerevisiae, will be benign and that they will receive us into eternal life and bliss. Haven't I heard this somewhere before? The main difference is that the Singularitarian doesn't just aspire to Heaven, but to Godhood Itself. One downside of this may be that God gets quite irate.
- Vanity. I usually try to avoid the "Washington read" (picking up a book and flipping immediately to the index to see if I'm in it), but I happened to notice in passing I made this one, for a minor citation in footnote 47 to chapter 2.
- Spindle cells. The material about "spindle cells" on pp. 191-194 is absolutely fascinating. These are very large, deeply and widely interconnected neurons which are found only in humans and a a few great apes. Humans have about 80,000 spindle cells, while gorillas have 16,000, bonobos 2,100 and chimpanzees 1,800. If you're intrigued by what makes humans human, this looks like a promising place to start.
- Speculative physics. The author shares my interest in physics verging on the fringe, and, turning the pages of this book, we come across such topics as possible ways to exceed the speed of light, black hole ultimate computers, stable wormholes and closed timelike curves (a.k.a. time machines), baby universes, cold fusion, and more. Now, none of these things is in any way relevant to nor necessary for the advent of the singularity, which requires only well-understood mainstream physics. The speculative topics enter primarily in discussions of the ultimate limits on a post-singularity civilisation and the implications for the destiny of intelligence in the universe. In a way they may distract from the argument, since a reader might be inclined to dismiss the singularity as yet another woolly speculation, which it isn't.
- Source citations. The end notes contain many citations of articles in Wired, which I consider an entertainment medium rather than a reliable source of technological information. There are also references to articles in Wikipedia, where any idiot can modify anything any time they feel like it. I would not consider any information from these sources reliable unless independently verified from more scholarly publications.
- "You apes wanna live forever?" Kurzweil doesn't just anticipate the singularity, he hopes to personally experience it, to which end (p. 211) he ingests "250 supplements (pills) a day and . . . a half-dozen intravenous therapies each week". Setting aside the shots, just envision two hundred and fifty pills each and every day! That's 1,750 pills a week or, if you're awake sixteen hours a day, an average of more than 15 pills per waking hour, or one pill about every four minutes (one presumes they are swallowed in batches, not spaced out, which would make for a somewhat odd social life). Between the year 2000 and the estimated arrival of human-level artificial intelligence in 2030, he will swallow in excess of two and a half million pills, which makes one wonder what the probability of choking to death on any individual pill might be. He remarks, "Although my program may seem extreme, it is actually conservative--and optimal (based on my current knowledge)." Well, okay, but I'd worry about a "strategy for preventing heart disease [which] is to adopt ten different heart-disease-prevention therapies that attack each of the known risk factors" running into unanticipated interactions, given how everything in biology tends to connect to everything else. There is little discussion of the alternative approach to immortality with which many nanotechnologists of the mambo chicken persuasion are enamoured, which involves severing the heads of recently deceased individuals and freezing them in liquid nitrogen in sure and certain hope of the resurrection unto eternal life.
Posted at
22:29
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Floating Point Benchmark: Ruby Benchmark Added
I have just posted a Ruby implementation of the floating point benchmark (the original trigonometry-intense fbench, not the FFT-based ffbench) and added results for Ruby 1.8.3 on Linux to the language performance comparison section of the fbench document. Here is the updated relative performance table.| Language | Relative Time |
Details |
|---|---|---|
| C | 1 | GCC 3.2.3 -O3, Linux |
| Visual Basic .NET | 0.866 | All optimisations, Windows XP |
| FORTRAN | 1.008 | GNU Fortran (g77) 3.2.3 -O3, Linux |
| Java | 1.121 | Sun JDK 1.5.0_04-b05, Linux |
| Visual Basic 6 | 1.132 | All optimisations, Windows XP |
| Ada | 1.401 | GNAT/GCC 3.4.4 -O3, Linux |
| Lisp | 7.41 19.8 |
GNU Common Lisp 2.6.7, Compiled, Linux GNU Common Lisp 2.6.7, Interpreted |
| Python | 17.6 | Python 2.3.3 -OO, Linux |
| Perl | 23.6 | Perl v5.8.0, Linux |
| Ruby | 26.1 | Ruby 1.8.3, Linux |
| JavaScript | 27.6 39.1 46.9 |
Opera 8.0, Linux Internet Explorer 6.0.2900, Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 1.0.6, Linux |
| QBasic | 148.3 | MS-DOS QBasic 1.1, Windows XP Console |
Posted at
01:17
Friday, October 14, 2005
ACME MISSILE BOMB Spotted Blocks from U.S. Capitol
On a recent trip to Washington D.C. I was snapping a picture of the U.S. Capitol building from in front of the National Museum of the American Indian when I spotted a "roach coach" parked on Independence Avenue vending a variety of refreshments including the ACME MISSILE BOMB, complete with pictures of Wile E. and the Road Runner. I was tempted, but decided the risk of being surrounded by black helicopters full of body-armored Homeland Security WMD hunters was too great.
Posted at
13:00
Flash! Earth's gravity affects Chinese spacecraft
Whatever your opinion of the BBC's politics, the science reporting used to be quite good. Yesterday's story about the Chinese Shenzhou VI mission wasn't one of their better days, however. The second and third paragraphs read:Gravity has drawn Shenzhou VI too close to Earth, the agency said. Shenzhou VI, which has two astronauts on board, is in a low enough orbit to be affected by the Earth's gravitational pull.Hello! Everything in orbit around the Earth, and for that matter everything in the universe is "affected by the Earth's gravitational pull"; gravitation is a long range force--it gets weaker with the square of the distance, but never goes to zero. What the BBC was trying to say is the orbit is sufficiently low (around 335 km according to the latest orbital elements downloaded by Earth and Moon Viewer) that atmospheric drag is causing its orbit to slowly decay.
Posted at
12:33
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Reading List: Red Star over Hollywood
- Radosh, Ronald and Allis Radosh. Red Star over Hollywood. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005. ISBN 1-893554-96-1.
- The Hollywood blacklist has become one of the most mythic elements of the mid-20th century Red scare. Like most myths, especially those involving tinseltown, it has been re-scripted into a struggle of good (falsely-accused artists defending free speech) versus evil (paranoid witch hunters bent on censorship) at the expense of a large part of the detail and complexity of the actual events. In this book, drawing upon contemporary sources, recently released documents from the FBI and House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), and interviews with surviving participants in the events, the authors patiently assemble the story of what really happened, which is substantially different than the stories retailed by partisans of the respective sides. The evolution of those who joined the Communist Party out of idealism, were repelled by its totalitarian attempts to control their creative work and/or the cynicism of its support for the 1939-1941 Nazi/Soviet pact, yet who risked their careers to save those of others by refusing to name other Party members, is evocatively sketched, along with the agenda of HUAC, which FBI documents now reveal actually had lists of party members before the hearings began, and were thus grandstanding to gain publicity and intimidate the studios into firing those who would not deny Communist affiliations. History isn't as tidy as myth: the accusers were perfectly correct in claiming that a substantial number of prominent Hollywood figures were members of the Communist Party, and the accused were perfectly correct in their claim that apart from a few egregious exceptions, Soviet and pro-communist propaganda was not inserted into Hollywood films. A mystery about one of those exceptions, the 1943 Warner Brothers film Mission to Moscow, which defended the Moscow show trials, is cleared up here. I've always wondered why, since many of the Red-baiting films of the 1950s are cult classics, this exemplar of the ideological inverse (released, after all, when the U.S. and Soviet Union were allies in World War II) has never made it to video. Well, apparently those who currently own the rights are sufficiently embarrassed by it that apart from one of the rare prints being run on television, the only place you can see it is at the film library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York or in the archive of the University of Wisconsin. Ronald Radosh is author of Commies and co-author of The Rosenberg File.
Posted at
23:50
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
U.S. Internal Revenue Code (26USC) Online Edition Updated
The online, hyperlinked, and searchable edition of the United States Internal Revenue Code (Title 26 of the U.S. Code) has been updated to correspond to the January 19th, 2004 Supplement III to the 2000 edition of the printed U.S. Code. I prepared the original online edition in 1994 when, in the midst of a research project, I found it very useful to be able to click on cross-references to display the citation. The updated edition is now XHTML 1.0 compliant and uses a style sheet to improve the appearance of the multitudinous cross-links. The full text search facility works as before, and is now also XHTML 1.0 compatible. (Since the complete online Code consists of more than 4300 XHTML documents, validating them all with the W3C Validation Service would take almost forever and verge on a denial of service attack upon that noble and free resource. I have validated all documents with unique aspects and known trouble spots, and employed an automated pseudorandom "stratified sampling" approach to the rest. I'm pretty confident the entire document tree is clean, but if you find something I've missed, let me know with the Feedback form.) The Internal Revenue Code is arguably the most ambitious social engineering project ever attempted in human history, and without doubt one of the most counterproductive. History will regard it as a Great Pyramid scale monument to unintended consequences. Every provision added with the intent of creating an incentive to stimulate some desired activity results in both attempts to use it purely to escape taxation, and/or creates other unanticipated and possibly deleterious "industries" economically justified only by the tax incentive. This, in turn, causes additional provisions to be enacted, ad infinitum or asymptotically close. Here are some statistics for the 2004 edition of the Code.| Words: | 3,453,728 |
|---|---|
| Pages (60 lines/page): | 7,694 |
| Cross-references: | 23,622 |
| Longest word: | trichlorotrifluoroethane |
Posted at
17:31
Sunday, October 9, 2005
Reading List: Mimi and Toutou Go Forth
- Foden, Giles. Mimi and Toutou Go Forth. London: Penguin, 2004. ISBN 0-14-100984-5.
- Only a perfect idiot would undertake to transport two forty foot mahogany motorboats from London to Cape Town and then onward to Lake Tanganyika by ship, rail, steam tractor, and teams of oxen, there to challenge German dominance of the lake during World War I by attempting to sink a ship three times the length and seven times the displacement of the fragile craft. Fortunately, the Admiralty found just the man in Geoffrey Basil Spicer-Simpson, in 1915 the oldest Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy, his ascent through the ranks having been retarded due to his proclivity for sinking British ships. Spicer-Simpson was an inveterate raconteur of tall tales and insufferable know-it-all (on the ship bound for South Africa he was heard lecturing the Astronomer Royal of Cape Town on the southern constellations), and was eccentric in about as many ways as can be packed into a single human frame. Still, he and his motley team, despite innumerable misadventures (many self-inflicted), got the job done, sinking the ship they were sent to and capturing another German vessel, the first German warship ever captured by the Royal Navy. Afterward, Spicer-Simpson rather blotted his copybook by declining to engage first a German fort and then a warship both later found to have been "armed" only with wooden dummy guns. His exploits caused him to be worshipped as a god by the Holo-holo tribe, who fashioned clay effigies of him, but rather less impressed the Admiralty who, despite awarding him the DSO, re-assigned him upon his return to the routine desk job he had before the adventure. HMS Mimi and Toutou were the boats under Spicer-Simpson's command, soon joined by the captured German ship which was rechristened HMS Fifi. The events described herein (very loosely) inspired C.S.Forester's 1935 novel The African Queen and the 1951 Bogart/Hepburn film. A U.S. edition is now available, titled Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure, but at present only in hardcover. A U.S. paperback is scheduled for March, 2006.
Posted at
21:56
Thursday, October 6, 2005
Reading List: The Cracker Barrel
- Sloane, Eric. The Cracker Barrel. Mineola, NY: Dover, [1967] 2005. ISBN 0-486-44101-6.
- In the 1960s, artist and antiquarian Eric Sloane wrote a syndicated column of which many of the best are collected in this volume. This is an excellent book for browsing in random order in the odd moment, but like the contents of the eponymous barrel, it's hard to stop after just one, so you may devour the whole thing at one sitting. Hey, at least it isn't fattening! The column format allowed Sloane to address a variety of topics which didn't permit book-length treatment. There are gems here about word origins, what was good and not so good about "the good old days", tools and techniques (the "variable wrench" is pure genius), art and the business of being an artist, and much more. Each column is illustrated with one of Sloane's marvelous line drawings. Praise be to Dover for putting this classic back into print where it belongs.
Posted at
00:52