j a c k *

War Makes me Queasy...

My wife and I are ambivalent about the President's most recent address on the Afghanistan war. She is ambivalent because she is more hawkish than me and supported the Afghan war, at least in principle, from the start, and yet after 8 years it seems like a bit of a lost cause. I'm against expanding or even continuing any kind of pointless war, and yet I don't want to be a liberal fifth column that undermines the best hope we have for progressive governance for the foreseeable future.

I see the Afghan war as pointless for one main reason: literacy. The UN puts literacy in Afghanistan at something like one quarter, which cannot sustain a modern nation-state. Modern governance is based on a combination of rule-of-law and bureaucracy, both of which require a minimum level of reading and writing, both among civil servants and among the populace. It also requires consent of those who are being governed, which cannot happen when most people hear about national matters secondhand. Would you agree to progressive policies if everything you knew came from what your grandfather told you? Or your village elder who has a political stake in the status quo?

The other mitigating factor is that "Afghanistan" is not a nation. Not really. There are a lot of people there with some regional similarities and some common interests, but they also have tribal rivalries and legitimate differences that are not subsumed under the rubric of national identity. It took two hundred years and a civil war to get Americans to argue about which values make us more American rather than which values make us want to void the Constitution, and yet we still argue. Afghans aren't even at the point that they think Afghanistan is a valid concept, let alone even wanting to defend or reject parts of it.

So if the President's strategy really depends, as he seemed to argue, on Afghanistan pulling itself together as a country, then the effort is doomed. On the other hand, if what he really wants is the time and manpower to kill or capture Osama bin Laden -- as my wife thinks is the true hidden objective -- then I freely admit that would be a good thing and well worth it. I only wish that was the stated goal so we could align ourselves and the international community in accordance with it.

- jack*

Selfish Reasons to Buy American...

Well, this could have gone better. Ultimately the lesson here is that whatever short-term political changes there may have been recently, our public discourse is still dominated – perhaps even smothered – by right-wing framing.

The debate starts with the proposition “Buy American, hire American polices will backfire,” and then solicits arguments for and against. Not only is the proposition worded in a pro-free trade manner, the supporters of the proposition have a much easier job. While those who oppose the proposition have to argue the positive claim that “Buy American” polices are definitively good, the argument for “backfire” can just be a grab bag of random assertions about things that might possibly go wrong. Any argument that poses careful weighing of evidence versus Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt is doomed, and the latter is the currency of conservatism.

This debate was an exemplar. The pro-trade faction pulled out wild claims one after another and threw them at the wall to see what stuck. It will depress trade and therefore the whole economy; it will waste money; other countries will retaliate; it will encourage bad practices that will lead to some other lack of competitiveness. The most academic proponent of the motion simply said that the international system was super-complex and that lots of non-linear and unpredictable things could go wrong. Booga booga! I believe his Ph.D. was in FUD.

The fog of so much nonsense left the opponents reeling. Time and again they had to make difficult and nuanced rebuttals to the unsourced claims from the other side, so that in the end they had little time to forward their actual case.

Right-wing memes have also permeated public thinking so deeply that’s it’s sometimes hard to see where our own beliefs have become perverted. One such moment for me was when an audience member asked, in essence: what’s the moral case for spending more for American products if it only rewards laziness? If this question resonates with you at all, congratulations! You’re a latent Libertarian. Libertarians believe that the cost of goods is entirely a function of the personal intensity of their creators. Lazy workers like those in France and Detroit make expensive union products, while industrious workers like those in China and Peru make cheap entrepreneurial products.

And yet the reality is – like the right-wing smarty-pants argued – somewhat more complex. Costs can vary by orders of magnitude from country to country. Labor costs dominate the textile industry and compensation for American workers is 6 times that of their Mexican compadres. Is this because Mexicans are 6 times more motivated? Are Americans 600% more lazy? Of course not. A factor of 6 is also impossible to transcend with a clever application of technology. Any automation that affords an American worker 6-fold productivity can be quickly replicated south of the border. Even if the knockoff is only half as good as the American original, the Latin American plant is till 3 times cheaper because Mexicans need lower wages.

The current difference in standard of living between first and third world countries is free money to those who can exploit it. Free trade advocates are arbitrageurs, just milking a natural wealth pump. They don’t have to do anything except create (or invest in) the same goods in cheaper countries and they make a bundle. The fact that it impoverishes you and me and wrecks our social ecosystem means nothing to them. There’s your “moral argument”.

You want another? Let’s stipulate that American goods are more expensive than imported equivalents. The big issue is equivalence – with American-made goods you know that they were made in accordance with federal health and safety laws, and that they comport with accepted legal standards of quality and non-toxicity. Or if they don’t there’s easy recourse. With imported goods that’s not so clear, since such disputes often are resolved by shadowy bodies accountable even less than our elected officials. But let’s stipulate all that. You have a choice of product A made in America and imported product B, both of equal quality, both non-toxic, and made with equal respect for the rights of workers.

If A and B cost the same it’s clear you should pick A – the American product. Financially the argument is very simple. Money paid to an American firm becomes corporate profits and personal income. Both are taxed. Taxes go into the general fund which benefits everyone, including you. Every dollar that you pay to an American firm instead of a foreign or multinational firm benefits you personally. What more libertarian argument could be made?

The moral argument is also clear. If I spend my dollars on my neighbor, then they have money to buy local products, to buy materials for their kid’s education, to make their lives better and our neighborhood better. If I’m no worse off, I’d rather pay someone I know. If I spend those same dollars on imported products then I enrich the importer and perhaps send a fraction of that money to someone in a distant country. Meanwhile my neighbor, who makes the same product at the same price, suffers. Morality is parochial. We must support our neighbors if we can. Even if you want to send money to third-world farmers, buying their products is the least effective way to do it.

Once you accept the fact that, all things being equal, buying American is the self-interested and moral choice: the question becomes what is that worth? Would you still buy American if it was 1% more expensive? How about 5%? How about 10%? Ultimately in economics a choice must become quantitative. If you continue to profess that “Buy American” is a vanity that hurts competition then you demonstrate a blindness of both economic self interest and morality that can only be attributed to mental poisoning by right-wing ideas. My hope is only that you will think harder about the way you are being forced to think before you decide.

On the other hand, I wish this debate was available in any form.

- jack*

Dancing the Dream…

In a departure for this blog, I would like to introduce another project of mine. Dream Dance: Personal and Ethological Notes from Sigma 957 is a Science Fiction story told in blog form. It follows the musings and adventures of biologist Su che-Walkran as she investigates the animal life on a distant planet in the far future. It’s a story about science and ethics, and how we have to understand ourselves to truly understand anything else. Also it’s a chance to delve into some unique – and hopefully interesting – alien minds and cultures, both human and extraterrestrial.

I’ve been posting about two installments a week, and I hope to maintain that same rate going forward. Some additional notes for potential readers:

1) The story unfolds in real time, with the fictional date of each post being the same as the real date but 316 years in the future. For example the entry for day 131, posted September 10, takes place in the storyline on September 10, 2325. Another story is taking place 12 years in her past, also being told through flashbacks playing forward in real time.

2) The blog software places more recent posts closer to the top of the page, but the story is intended to be read linearly from the beginning. It should be thought of as a story told in installments rather than any sort of clever form of backward fiction. Characters and plotlines are introduced in earlier installments and developed in later ones.

3) Language is obviously different in the far future, but idioms and slang in these posts will seem anachronistically modern. I’m following the convention that this is translated from its native 24th-century lingo into familiar 21st-century English, preserving futuristic terms or turns of phrase only when required for the plot, or when there is no suitable modern equivalent.

4) Just to be forewarned, there will be some sexual content from time to time.

I feel somewhat nervous publically announcing what has turned out to be a very personal creative effort. I’m happy to entertain any feedback or comments you might have. Enjoy.

- jack*

Unacknowledged Christian Privilege…

Religion made me self-loathing (no amount of bullshit about equality in God's eyes can undermine the message of refusing to ordain women), but, worse than that, it forced me to label and categorize people—believers, non-believers, sinners, saints, good, evil, redeemed, condemned, us, them—to see the world in black-and-white binaries that closed off half my heart.

Melissa McEwan, Shakesville

I’ve had mixed feelings about this site and its blog mistress. On the one hand I think many of the essays are first-rate, and cover a lot of important background and breaking news in issues related to feminism and equal rights. As such it’s one of my daily-read sites. On the other hand I’m sometimes taken aback by the level of vitriol and confusion exhibited against so-called militant atheists. Somehow expressing oneself forcefully about feminism was one thing, while expressing oneself equally forcefully about religion was another.

Then there was the post linked above. Ms. McEwan examines the commonly-accepted claim that Christianity makes you a moral person and soundly refutes it.

The message of the savior was that I could sit back and be saved with minimal inconvenience, not to mention negligible self-reflection. I could be stingy with my willingness to admit to anyone other than God my wrongdoing, my mistakes. If it was selfish to let other people live with the pain I caused them, it didn't matter: I needed God's forgiveness alone.

If anyone believed that the scriptures have any modern validity, this 650-word critique rather deftly demolishes it. Our contemporary understanding of how to live in complex societies is a lot more sophisticated then it was back then, and today it’s not enough just to get absolution in your own mind for transgressions against real people. We’ve thought of some ways to be better human beings that Jesus never considered.

Interestingly it didn’t stop there. The comments took a turn that’s very familiar, arguing that not all Christians are like that, and that those who are most rabidly anti-progressive – based on the same holy book or not – should not be considered “true” Christians. I get the impression it may have been a bit of a rude awakening to find out that liberals committed to feminism and gay rights and civil rights nonetheless feel their smug superiority at belonging to certain privileged classes should not dare be undermined, or even questioned.

So she wrote a follow up:

That Christianity is a chosen privilege does not mean its members can claim a lower standard of rigorous self-examination. And it doesn't mean that less privileged Christians, i.e. progressive Christians, can claim a lower standard, either, just because the more privileged Christians marginalize them. Poor whites don't get to disclaim their white privilege just because they are further marginalized by their lack of wealth.

In fact, chosen privileges demand, if anything, a higher standard of self-examination, because one has a choice whether to participate in the privilege. But so often, the fact that Christianity is a choice is instead used to deny the effects of that privilege altogether—"I'm not one of those Christians; I'm one of the good ones!"

All the benefits of the privilege that saying "I'm a Christian" confers; none of the responsibility for the effects of Christian supremacy.

Lizzy smash! Read the whole thing, and welcome her to the ranks of the militant atheists.

- jack*

Crossing the Line...

There were a handful of instances wherein I crossed the lines I shouldn't have crossed as a married man, but never crossed the ultimate line

Mark Sanford, right wing tool and disgraced South Carolina governor

I don’t believe that I intended to commit a crime ... I know I crossed the line of civil service rules ... I believe I crossed the line, but I didn’t mean to

Monica Goodling, right wing tool and disgraced Bush 43 DOJ lawyer

Other than being right-wing tools and being disgraced former Republican "public servants" (if that even legitimately applies), what do these two have in common? Clearly their morality was defined by "lines". Lines which circumscribed an absolutist morality that I have written about here, and here, and here.

Reading between the lines, as it were, we can see that these self-proclaimed paragons of moral virtue were in fact moral midgets. Sanford, for example, believed in his heart that a junket to a foreign land on the public dime gave him only a pair of lines to attend to. One was the "married man" line that we can only suppose meant behaving with women not his wife (potentially paid) in ways that his wife would assume are her prerogative. The other being the harder "ultimate" line of sticking his thing into her thing. His moral sense of self depended on not performing that second act no matter how much he performed the former.

Goodling, as the other example that proves the rule, also had two lines. The weak line was the line of obeying the civil service rules as laid out very clearly for all government employees. Why she felt these were subordinate to the second, harder line of breaking the actual law, I don't know. But she did. Ultimately she admited to crossing both lines, but since she didn't "mean to" cross the second line I guess it didn't count.

I think these examples demonstrate first of all that right wing morality is legendary in the same way that unicorn blood is legendary -- people talk about it, but it doesn't really exist. The absolutist concept of morality is wrong, but even judged by their own standards these people are amoral crackpots.

Their rule-based minds suggest there there are two thresholds: one when your behavior becomes questionable and the second when you have reached the ultimate line when you are unquestionably guilty. It doesn't mean breaking the law -- as Sanford shows -- it just means the point when your actions are indefensible. As people with a conscience one would assume that although crossing the first line might be unintentional, they would start to feel more and more uncomfortable as they got closer and closer (and even crossed, for both of them) the second line.

But they did not, as far as we can tell. What they did instead was to dance closer and closer to the ultimate line, feeling righteous in their moral certitude until they danced right on, or even slightly crossed (and then more), the second line. Most people would feel trepidation to come that close to a clear violation of obvious legal and moral prohibitions. Right wingers do not. Never mind if they felt that violating the rule was justified by some higher purpose, they simply thought that the rule was a hard line and they could play the edge and not have to be called to account.

Ask yourself, even if you accidentally crossed the "maybe wrong" line, how much would you push the "obviously wrong" line before you pulled yourself back? And if you pushed the point so far that you accidentally crossed thesecond line, how moral a person do you think you are?

- jack*

Robots of SIGGRAPH 2009...

I've just gotten back from SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans, and as usual the most interesting part of the show for me were the robots. There's a strange area of overlap between computer graphics and robotics. Scene rendering is like the reverse of machine vision. Animating characters is like programming robot motion, and posing CG characters uses inverse kinematics which is also used for robot gaits. There is a lot of cross-fertilization possible and each field could learn a lot from the other.

I'm going to present my top 10 robots of SIGGRAPH in reverse order, starting from the worst and working up to the best. (This is a cross-post from another site, so the form is a little different from normal fare here, and the images are truncated so to see them fully follow the link in your browser.)

#10 -- "YOTARO"

Not sure what it is about Japanese robot researchers, but they always want to make the robot be your friend. Sometimes they do manage to make robots cute or engaging and you want to have them around.

And then sometimes things go horribly wrong. Like when they want the robot to be your baby.

The theory is sound enough, I suppose. Humans react with instinctive attraction towards babies, and all the babies have to do is sort-of smile and wriggle. Seems like it should be easy to make a baby-form robot that will endear itself to the human host. So you go to look in the crib and -- gaaa!

We've gone through the uncanny valley, past the creepy woods and straight into nightmare cove. I couldn't stand to look at the thing for more than a few seconds -- it was truly horrifying.

Here's some of the inner workings from their paper. Let this act as a testimony of what must forever lie outside the boundaries of natural law.

#9 -- Third-Person Interface

As our entertainment systems, fixtures and appliances become more networked and laden with features the challenge becomes how to control them all. First-person control involves walking up to the device in question and pressing buttons. Who has time for that? Second-person control takes the form of the remote, which we point at the device in question, effectively indicating the "you" as the target of our commands. But the number of possible smart devices and their options is quickly outpacing even the most complex universal remotes.

The basic concept behind the CRISTAL interface is third-person control. It projects a live image of the room from a high camera with a god-like perspective onto a large multi-touch screen. Touching and dragging on the lamps changes their illumination. Touching the TV brings up movie menus, display options, and images. Movies can be dragged to the TV, and images can then be dragged to picture frames also visible in the image.

So what's the big deal? Since the camera doesn't move it seems like this is just a picture of your room with hot spots. Nothing innovative there. But that all changes when there is a robot in the room.

As you can see in the left-hand image, there is a Roomba in the corner. It has a markings on the top that allow the system to find it wherever it may be located. If you touch the Romba in the third-person image and drag across the floor, the Roomba follows that path. The image on the screen updates as it moves of course. You can also draw a circle around a spot on the floor and the Roomba will navigate there and execute a spot cleaning cycle.

This is a simple prototype, but one could imagine that as the number, type and complexity of home robots increases this type of interface could become a very intuitive way to direct them all.

#8 -- Funbrella

If Alexander Graham Bell had any sense of whimsy he would have given up on this whole idea of transmitting sound by electricity. Inventions with practical applications, let alone something that would make -- shudder -- money, are sooooo nineteenth century. The Bell of the double-oh's would have invented the Funbrella, allowing the transmission not of something as boring and practical as sound, but the feeling of rain. He'd call it tele-rain.

No, it's not exactly robot-related, unless a telephone is a robot. But it is an awesome concept and -- I will testify -- extremely well implemented. In the demo they did not only very convincing light and heavy rain from Japan (where else?) but spaghetti rain, snake rain, and raining cats and dogs. How many people can say they have actually felt it raining snakes? I can. Well, a recording.

#7 -- Breathing Sweater

I think the freakiest thing about this robot is that you wear it. It's a sweater. Woven with galvanic-skin-response sensors and shape-memory alloy threads (muscle wire), it responds to the wearer's metabolism and changes the airflow to optimize comfort. I guess. Since it was an art piece it's hard to exactly figure out what the creator intended. Here's a quote from the description:

It was designed for a fictional world called Other Earth, where viewers are asked to consider a place where humans live as nomads in technologically advanced, self-sufficient, and low-environmental-impact nodal groups. As conceived by Eskandar, Tentative Architecture is an immaterial architecture that can happen at any time and any place, responding to the immediate needs and environment of its wearer — ideally suited to life on Other Earth.

OK, whatever. I'm a geek, I need to ground my understanding in something more substantial than ecological-fan-fiction. But in any case, it was very weird to watch the sweater breath in and out while it was parked on a manikin.

#6 -- Pea Spotting

This thing has "hobby robotics" written all over it. Another art installation, the Growth Rendering Device is basically a machine that transcribes the shape of a growing pea shoot over a course of several days.

But look at this thing: it has servos for movement up and down and back and forth, and it has a very simple microcontroller running the whole show including a bit of breadboard. If this isn't a robot -- by hobby standards -- then I don't know what is.

So what appears to happen (I never saw it in operation) is that a mechanical timer switches on the device once a day. It performs a scan of the plant (a pea shoot growing in a liquid medium) in a series of horizontal rows, conferring where the plant blocks light to the paper underneath. Unlike what's shown in this image, there is also a paper transport mechanism that moves the paper under the device after each scan.

The result is a completely autonomous record of the growth of a plant over time. Simple, but at the same time very cool.

#5 -- Emotive Plant

Anyone who thinks that houseplants are emotive beings and yet has to deal with the embarrassing reality that they simply don't care what you say or do -- they need this device. It's an artificial plant -- something well known if you've ever been to Denny's -- but with a twist. It has sensors and actuators. That makes it: a robot!

I have to admit the name of this art installation, "MSOrgm", made me constantly call it Morgasm. It stands for Motivational Sensitive Organism, which only reinforces the double-entendre for me. One can image in the future what heights of pleasure one might enjoy from a plastic plant made from soda straws, origami connectors, muscle wire and Arduinos. If only one was lonely enough.

#4 -- Anthropomorphization

Anyone who studies biology learns about anthropomorphism. This is the mental category error that assumes that anything with complex behaviors can be treated as if it is human. If you are studying the behavior of welks, for example, don't assume that they do what they do based on "love" or "respect" or any of a thousand other complex human concepts. Think of them as worms that basically want to eat or mate, and sometimes just mess around in the mud.

On the other hand, our power to model the social world is based on assuming that the things around us have human-like features. So what if we add them? Perhaps using anthropomorphic metaphors is a useful way to engage our innate responses to create powerful user interface experiences.

Or not. Maybe it's just another Japanese attempt to make machines seem more human-like.

Basically the idea is to add eyes (small wireless LCD displays) and hands (tiny RC servo chains) to everyday devices to allow them to interact with their users in a socially standard, albeit cartoonish, manner. The microwave is the most advanced. If you show a food packet to its camera/eye it will point to its door and control panel and give you instructions (in Japanese of course) of how to insert the food and program the cooking instructions.

This is absurd, of course. Perhaps for small children this is an appropriate type of interface -- turning complex and dangerous appliances into talking teddy bears. OK, perhaps not so appropriate. Nonetheless I rated this higher than other things that seem objectively better. Why? Because this is a good try. It takes our natural innate abilities and maps them into a simplified form that allows us access that we don't have through a normal instruction manual. Perhaps we'll hate anthropomorphized appliances as much as the damn paperclip in Windows, but it's worth the research.

#3 -- You!

Now that we've disposed of the frivolous matters we're starting to get to the real meat of robotics -- robot slaves! For any Dr Who fan the idea of turning humans into robots who obey remote control is a fairly obvious concept. Consider the robomen:

This always seemed like it required some sort of complex neural interface just to override the subject's free will, let alone provide them detailed instructions about where they need to go and what they need to do. Who knew it was as simple as tugging on their ears?

Apparently just like horses, humans respond to simple command forces applied to sensitive parts of their anatomy. Just fit them with a bicycle helmet with two degrees of freedom on each ear, attached through a system of soft, elastic bands, and you have a willing slave. Pull up and they stand, pull left or right and they turn, pull forward they go, back they stop. A simple matter of remapping the servos to a common aircraft remote control and you have a cheap robot slave.

I cleverly declined having the slave machine attached to my brain --er, ears -- but based on my observations it appeared that I escaped a terrible fate. Anyone who willingly subjected themselves to the procedure subsequently felt compelled to follow the remote commands of their masters. Apparently we are just beasts of burden ready to be ridden.

This is knowledge that is terrible and yet great. I applaud and curse the grad students that built this awful device.

#2 -- Hylozoic Soil

At some level all robots take their cues from life. Some are utilitarian designs that allow machines to perform some task that had previously been the province of humans. Some mimic natural forms in order to take on their attributes, like geckos climbing walls or moths flying. Still others have whimsical behaviors to ape pets, monsters, humans or even -- ugh -- babies.

Rarely, however, do robots ever seem to transcend mere simulation of features of living things and pass into the realm of being living things themselves. Behold Hylozoic Soil.

This sprawling art installation covers an area probably 15 feet on a side. It hangs from the ceiling and visitors walk under and through it. The skeleton is a delicate crystalline lattice made from thousands of geometric members laser-cut from transparent acrylic, and supports a wide range of sensors, electronics and actuators. Proximity sensors detect passersby and the Arduino neurons interact to create an overall emotive state. Lacy fronds wave slowly or more frantically, driven by tiny changes in long strands of shape-memory wire. Bladders dangling from the lattice may fill or empty, and tiny motors spin long whips for inscrutable purposes.

Created by professor of architecture Philip Beesley, it represents an exploration of the boundaries that architecture forms between humans and the natural world, and perhaps how those boundaries could be made permeable.

It's hard to express how really amazing this thing was. It didn't really do anything, it just sort of was. But it managed to evoke in me some of the same feelings of awe and wonder that can be felt in the presense of some beautiful part of nature. It wasn't quite like diving a coral reef or hiking in the woods, but it was eerily similar.

#1 -- Fold-bot

Building robots is hard. Not just because of the inherent challenges of dealing with technology at the limit of what's possible, but also because it requires meshing so many different disciplines. Electromechanical construction is just the beginning. There's power supply issues, and power electronics, and sensors and interfaces. There's dealing with noisy sensor data in a noisy environment, not to mention the entire sub-field of computer vision. Then there's software, from real-time microcontroller code all the way up the chain to graphical interfaces.

This team managed to put it all together. They have end-user software, high-level task software, computer vision, wireless control and a tight mechanical design. And it all ends up actually doing something practical: folding clothes.

The user clicks and drags in the graphical UI (a) and defines a set of folds (b) for a particular garment. The task robot (c) then executes those folds in the real world (d). The robot shown in these images from the paper is not the final version. The one at the show had four wheels and only one wide gripper at the front. This shows an evolution of form following function that ended up with a much simpler and much more effective design.

The interesting thing about this robot is that it has no onboard sensors. Precision control is accomplished using an overhead camera which tracks a unique pattern on the top of the robot. By matching this pattern the computer knows the location and orientation of the robot as well as the position and shape of the garment. This is the same technique that was used to drive the Roomba in the CRISTAL demo.

The garment is placed flat on a black surface. The computer locates it and drives the robot on a circular arc to get to the right location to start the first fold. It then spins the robot around some, which may be to fine-tune the rotational precision of their feature-tracking system. The robot then drives forwards slowly with its lower jaw scraping the ground until it's just under the edge of the fabric. It closes the jaw, lifts the fabric and drives forwards to make the fold. When the fold is complete it releases its grip and shakes the fabric free. It then orbits the clothes again for the next fold.

You can try to imagine all that, or you can just watch it here.

----

All images are from the SIGGRAPH 2009 Proceedings

Baby Type Robot “YOTARO”
Hiroki KUNIMURA, et al., University of Tsukuba

"CRISTAL, Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces."
Thomas Seifried, et al.

"Funbrella: Making Rain Fun"
Ai Yoshida, et al., Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University

"Artifacts from a Parallel Universe: Tentative Architecture of Other Earth Coastline Inhabitants"
Xárene Eskandar

"Growth Rendering Device"
David Bowen

“MSOrgm”
Scottie Huang, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology

"Anthropomorphization of a Space with Implemented Human-like Features"
Hirotaka Osawa

"Pull-Navi: A novel tactile navigation interface by pulling the ears"
Yuichiro Kojima, et al., The University of Electro-Communications

“Hylozoic Soil”
Philip Beesley, University of Waterloo

"Graphical Instruction for A Garment Folding Robot"
Yuta Sugiura, et al.

I Hate Boss Fights...

I was never into video games as a child. The first home system I ever purchased was a GameCube when my wife and I had a young daughter and we thought there might be some interesting games that she could enjoy. And there were. She really liked Mario Party. The fact is that the GameCube was a perfect system for a family with young children and little gaming experience.

We’ve advanced, as we should. We bought our daughter a DS when Nintendogs was all the rage. And now we have a Wii which gives us the odd tennis game or bizarre tank battle. Plus we can play old GameCube games. This means that I can learn about video games that were new when I was young, and they can be new for me again. With the benefit of hindsight I can play only the games that my peers thought were exceptional. And thus I learn how badly I suck at everything.

Case in point #1: Chrono Trigger. It was recently re-released for the DS and I picked it up second-hand at our local game store. My daughter and I played it together for a while. She got stuck fighting a dragon tank, and then I got stuck fighting a mighty boss with independent hands and magic attacks. Great game; lots of fun puzzles, but impossible, impassible bosses.

Case in point #2: Metroid Prime. I picked this up because it was rated as one of the best GameCube games ever, and I’ve had a lot of fun exploring the worlds and solving the puzzles. It’s beautifully detailed with rich environments and complex sensor and attack systems. I first got stuck fighting Flaahgra. I went back and started again – from nothing – using web walkthroughs to find all the powerups and I finally beat Flaahgra. I got as far as the Omega Pirate. Now, despite all the details from the walkthroughs (which say he’s easy), I cannot defeat him. So I’m stuck.

Thus for games that were designed for entertainment I (and my daughter too) experience limited enjoyment. Why? Because of bosses that are too powerful. In case #1 I guess if I backtrack to find all the power-ups I could beat this boss. Maybe, but it took me so long to get to this fight that I’m simply not motivated. In case #2 it requires dexterity and reflexes that as a 50 year-old I no longer have, so I suppose I’ll never see the end of the game. I may try it a dozen more times but at some point I’ll give up, game unsolved, frustrated.

My plea to game designers of the future is this: please don’t make boss fights a brick wall. Some gamers will defeat the boss – and they should be properly rewarded – but some players cannot, for whatever reason. They should not be forever stuck, like Sisyphus pushing that rock uphill that will always roll down again and again. You should always provide another path, no matter how weak, for those players with limited skills. Or limited time.

- jack*

Consent of the Homebodies…

The most common interaction we have with the state is thus; the state demands property that we regard as our own, and if we refuse to hand this property over it sends men with guns to our house. If we resist these men with guns, they imprison us. If we resist too effectively, they kill us. This is true of every modern nation-state. Liberal democracies differ from authoritarian states in that they allow us to complain loudly about the process, to minimize its arbitrariness, and to have some (very) small say in how our property is reallocated. This difference isn't trivial, but it isn't as large as normally assumed.

Robert Farley, Lawyers, Guns and Money

I want to come back to one part of my previous post on consent, specifically my assertion that collection of taxes by the state isn’t theft or extortion. As evidenced by the quote above, many political scientists take the dimmer view that the threat of potentially lethal force – no matter how remote – taints the entire concept of taxation. This is also a formulation that Libertarians often start from to argue that all taxes are immoral.

This is based on the observation that the modern nation-state monopolizes the legitimate use of violence. This is not true of a feudal system, for example, since the various lords under the same king would war with each other. In many large societies in the past, assassination and physical intimidation were considered valid political tools for individuals or powerful families to use. The nation-state is different in that it reserves violence as a tool for exclusive use of state actors, and enforces this monopoly itself with threat of violence.

But modern, liberal nation-states go beyond this. The use of state-sanctioned violence is heavily proscribed by laws and regulations such that if a state actor is allowed use lethal force against you, you will know it. They will wear a uniform, display their weapons, announce their role and give you the opportunity to back down or surrender. Generally the use of violence has been subject to increasing constraints such that in countries that have abolished the death penalty the state use of lethal force against its own citizens is limited to self-defense, which is generally considered legitimate for anyone. The false equivalence between liberal nations and brutal, authoritarian ones in Rob’s quote above heavy handedly ignores this trend away from violence. (He also conflates war and law-enforcement, which is unreasonable, but we’ll pretend he was only talking about taxation.)

We have to ask, if nation-states monopolize the legitimate use of violence, where do they get their legitimacy? In liberal democracies the legitimacy of the state comes from the consent of the governed. We empower the police the enforce laws, and to use violence to a limited extent when doing so. The legitimacy of force, and thus the power the tax, originates not from the barrel of a gun, but from the ballot box.

Liberal nations will also freely issue passports and will generally not interfere with emigration. Although there can be other barriers to free movement such as economics or local politics, many people have left a nation hostile to their wishes and settled in a more suitable country. In the end most Americans stay put because they want to be here, and the US government functions to maintain the conditions in which people want to stay. I’m not saying you should “love it or leave it,” but the fact that you can leave puts lie to the notion that taxation is something against your will.

- jack*

Qui Tacet Consentit…

And the idea that somehow we are torturing people in Guantanamo is absolutely not true, unless you consider having to eat chicken three times a week is torture

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA)

Their food is better than the food that they fed us as senators and staff that went down

Sen. John Ensign (R-NV)

They wouldn’t be treated any better in the United States, and they wouldn’t have the tropical breezes blowing through

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)

anyone, any detainee, over 55 has an opportunity to have a colonoscopy

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK)

These could almost be offered up without comment except that some individuals apparently lacking any sense of irony or self-awareness will publically argue that waterboarding isn’t torture because our soldiers have sometimes done it to their own comrades during rigorous survival training. What conservatives seemingly fail to grasp, time and time again, is the important concept of consent. Consent is the difference between training and torture. Consent is the difference between a vacation and indefinite detention. Consent is the difference between sex and rape. Consent is the difference between motherhood and forced pregnancy. Consent is the difference between taxation and extortion. Consent is the difference between art and war crime.

As a man approaching a certain age I’m particularly struck by the last quote. The honorable Senator from Oklahoma meant the colonoscopy remark as a joke, of course, because as all rich white people know a colonoscopy is a terrible inconvenience and a painful embarrassment of getting old.

Now none of them take 'em up on it, because once they explain what it is, none of them want to do it

Funny. Unless you’re one of 20% of Americans with no health care insurance at all, or the nearly all Americans who pay way too much relative to the rest of the world. Why are the law-abiding, tax-paying workers of this country entitled to less preventative care than the most hardened of criminals in solitary lockup?

So we’ll take our government colonoscopies please. By the way Senator, they are much less icky and uncomfortable when done with consent.

- jack*

Raging Steele On…

I don’t need some judge sitting up there feeling bad for my opponent because of their life circumstances or their condition. And short changing me and my opportunity to get fair treatment under the law. Crazy nonsense empathetic. I’ll give you empathy. Empathize right on your behind. Craziness.

Thank you Michael Steele, for helping us laugh at love. Again.

Never mind all the other qualities and qualifications that Obama asks for in a justice, the right wing has latched onto empathy. Damn straight! Who wants empathy? When you curl up with your weepy movie and carton of ice cream, sure, maybe empathy is good; fun even. But not when doing the hard work of judging. That’s tough stuff. That requires something more – I don’t know – manly. As Steele reminds us:

Come on, Chairman, you know it's not about being against empathy, it's about applying the rule of law and having jurisprudence that you can trust, not a judge who may have a bad day or be overly sensitive to my condition.

Right. Who could trust someone who’s over-sensitive, you know what I mean fellas? Who among us hasn’t been judged unfairly just because of a “bad day?” Hell, might even be a bad “time of the month” and that’s just too unfair. Unless you’re Michael Steele of course, in which case you simply threaten to beat the woman into submission.

Wait, did I say woman? I meant hypothetical Supreme Court nominee.

- jack*

Bonds of Love and Blood…

With the recent victories for equal rights in courthouses and statehouses, there’s been a suggestion recently that somehow we could sidestep the whole question of gay marriage by getting the government out of the “marriage business.” After all – the argument goes – civil unions can be an arbitrary legal arrangement leaving marriage to religion where it belongs. Apparently it requires an atheist to explain that marriage is not about religion; it’s about family.

It’s easy to see why so many find this confusing. Most people cannot imagine going through a significant life event – birth, adulthood, marriage, childbearing, death – without having a priest standing nearby. But religion does not make these events happen nor does it make them more significant than they already are. Religion is like the creepy kid who wants to hang out with you but always insists that anything fun you’re doing was his idea in the first place and you need to do it his way.

Marriage is a complicated cultural phenomenon, and religion has historically gotten its parasitic claws deeper into it than other traditions, but as a happily married atheist I can assure you that religion is entirely superfluous. I cherish the bond that my marriage represents as personally and significantly as any theist. No passionless civil contract would have the same active and vital force in my life, and clearly no dreary religious ritual. So if it’s not a function of the state or the church, then what is it?

Marriage is a method to change family relationships at will, specifically to join otherwise unrelated family units into larger extended family networks. Other cultures and other times could do this in multiple ways. Powerful Roman families used adoption to create family ties between unrelated adults to the benefit of both. Many cultures used to recognize blood brothers, men not related by birth who had nonetheless chosen to codify their fraternal love and commitment to each other, and treated those oaths no less seriously than marriage vows. Obviously the people directly involved were most strongly affected by these choices, but the effects would ripple through the rest of their families and their entire community. In the case of royal families these mergers could shift the course of nations.

In the modern west marriage is the only tool we have for altering the architecture of our families, and since our business and politics are less organized around family relationships marriage mostly involves the couple and the family unit that they create by their declaration of relatedness. But seen in this light it’s clear that denying this fundamental power to a segment of the population, based on criteria that would be illegal to use to decide employment or housing, is clearly discrimination. Religion and sexual orientation have nothing to do with it.

- jack*

Some Things that Scare the Heck out of me…

This is just a quick note on stuff that borders on the bizarre.

#1) Lawyers, Guns and Money is one of my must-read sites. It’s second only to TPM in its first-must-read-in-the-morning, uh, ness. Imagine my dismay when I found this post from one of the regular contributors. To save you the pain of wading through the extended comment thread that included two more follow-up posts, basically Paul is arguing that the Iowa Supreme Court’s decision to allow gay marriage is nothing more than sophistry in support of a political, liberal agenda. Nevermind several other posts brilliantly crediting the decision.

It’s odd from a blog about law to hear that legal arguments are meaningless to the point of nihilism. Equal protection statues are not “vague” – they include very specific language which is undergirded by strong rhetorical traditions. Nevertheless, even if they are “vague”, they are no vaguer than the playground concept of “fairness” which even elementary school children can understand perfectly well. If you compose an argument that by virtue of “fairness” you should be able to take my lunch from me every day, then that doesn’t prove you are a legal genius. It proves you are a bully. And I don’t want any legislative policy, even my preferred policy, to be enforced by bullying.

#2) PZ has largely taken this one apart, but if you want to see a truly scary manifestation of religious logic, there’s nothing better than the argument that Bernie Madoff – of epic ponzi scheme fame – is morally superior to Chesley Sullenburger, the Humble Hero of the Hudson. Aparently this is because Bernie was Jew who gave some fraction of his 65 billion dollars in ill gotten dollars to charity, while “Sully” was just using his immense skill, long experience and expensive training to save his own life – the selfish SOB.

OK, the second one doesn’t scare me so much as make me want to laugh and point while holding my hand over my mouth. I can only hope that more religious logic will play itself out like this. The religious will hoist themselves with their own petars and we militant atheists will be able to carefully box up our deadly petars, dismantle our armor and play a relaxing game of pool instead.

I like pool – it has geometry. And what happens has some relation to reality.

- jack*

Too Big to Exist...

Back in the good old days, when we still didn’t know how bad things really were, I wrote a very short post about how it wasn’t clear how to solve the financial crises, but maybe the geniuses on Wall Street shouldn’t be allowed to make things worse by consolidating. I kept it short because being a layman in such issues it wasn’t clear that my random thoughts would be very helpful. Of course now it’s clear that my uninformed ravings are pretty much just as good as any Wall Street or Federal Reserve whiz, so here goes.

This is my plan – the one I formulated back in post-election 2008 when Paulson was so visibly floundering. Any bank or other financial institution that’s facing insolvency needs to design their own breakup. Basically the conglomerate needs to split itself apart based on business units such that all the smaller companies have independent charters. For example if a company has a successful lending business, that should be spun off as a separate company and any other fragments of the company should not be doing lending. Once broken up, the government will take over one of the spin-offs.

By setting some limit on size, like requiring any sub-business to be less than 50 percent of the original company, we can assure that conglomerates will be fractured into parts substantially smaller than the parent business. There will also be an incentive for the principals in the franchise to spin off as much of the toxic parts of their balance sheet into one subsidiary – the one the government will take over. Of course the government will have to agree to the breakup plan, so it can’t be arbitrary or unreasonable, and to assure more sanity in the owner’s self-interest, none of the new businesses can be swallowed up by other firms for a period of two years. They have to be able to make it independently.

The incentive will naturally be to divest all the bad assets into the one spin-off business that the government will take into receivership, something that – we’ve been told – only the people who created the mess are smart enough to do. But they’ll also want to reduce their exposure by making the “bad” business as small as possible, which might motivate them to mark some of those toxic assets to closer to their market value, something they’ve been unwilling to do so long as they pollute their balance sheet.

The main advantage of this plan is that we get something that we need – smaller banks instead of ‘too big to fail” financial behemoths. It’s just a happy coincidence that the people who suffer most would be the CEOs and high-level executives. It’s not necessarily a requirement, but it sure would feel good.

- jack*

Politico Ad Absurdum…

If you ever did proofs in high school algebra you’re probably familiar with the Latin phrase redutio ad absurdum. It’s a formal argument that starts by assuming as true the thing you want to prove false. You then make a series of substitutions of one thing with another known to be logically the same and end up with a clear contradiction, like 1 equals 2. Since your initial assumptions produce something that is not true, you know the assumption is false. Quod erat demonstrandum.

A similar, informal type of argument is a cornerstone of our common sense. As I have argued before, we are very good at doing certain specific types of moral reasoning. Some statements of principle might sound reasonable in one context, but a careful and introspective person needs to probe them more fully before accepting that they are generally applicable, or that they are even fair or reasonable in the first place.

“What if a Democrat had said that?” is such a test. Normally this question is asked in slack-jawed disbelief over the inane utterances of some right-wing pundit or spokesman in the national media. And yet those same people keep getting interviews and aren’t laughed off the national stage. Why is that? I can only assume that conservatives in this country, and the media that enable them, have forgotten how to honestly vet their own political biases.

For example, take Bobby Jindal’s recent careful parsing of the idea that Republicans want the president to fail. “'Do you want the president to fail?'” he rhetorically asked himself, “It depends on what he is trying to do." So the general principle being justified here is “If the president is trying to do something that I disagree with, then I hope that he fails.” Other Republicans have made the argument that they only want Obama’s policies to fail, something like “If the president employs policies that I disagree with, then I hope those policies fail.” Can either of these pass a simple, informal reduction to absurdity?

We can easily test these general principles by trying them out with specific examples. For “the president” let’s use George W. Bush. For the thing being done that I disagree with let’s say “invade Iraq.” Many Democrats (and others) including myself vehemently disagreed with Bush’s intention of invading Iraq. I went to the very first protest rally of my life, listened to the self-serving speakers and went on the stupid march for all the good it did. That’s how strongly I felt; my disgust at Bush’s policy preferences overrode my natural cynicism. But do the Republicans stand by their logic when it opposes one of their own?

Using Jindal’s formulation we get: “If George W. Bush is trying to invade Iraq, then I hope that he fails.” The other more subtle one is: “If George W. Bush employs invasion as a policy, then I hope the invasion fails.” First of all we can see that these are substantively the same. Since the thing Bush wants to do is invade, and we hope that he fails at that, that’s the same as saying that we hope the invasion fails. Hoping the policies fail is the same as hoping the president fails, because the president is backing those polices.

Second, I remember what it was like after the invasion of Iraq. The right wingers told us in no uncertain terms that if we didn’t wholeheartedly support the war once it was started that we were traitors. If any high-profile Democrat said they wanted Bush to lose the war the Republicans would have pilloried and demonized them as “fifth column” leftists, probably calling for their execution or assassination. Of course none of us really did that. My wife and daughter spent many months participating in vigils protesting for an end to the Iraq war, but no one was hoping for the troops, the war, or the president, to fail.

Now, you might not accept that war and economic crisis can be taken as equivalent. But I think that’s what Chuck Todd was trying to get at with his somewhat off-key question a couple of days ago. These were both – at least according to their respective presidents – situations that were forced upon us and to which we had no choice but to react. Agree or disagree on the policy, once the president had set his plan in motion attempts (or even wishes) to sabotage it amount to obstructionism at best, or anti-Americanism at worst.

This isn’t what I say – this is what Republicans have said in response to Democratic critics of Republican presidents. A little bit of common sense, properly applied, leaves hypocrites very little room to stand.

- jack*

Keeping it Simple for Financial Geniuses…

I’m not a huge fan of punitive taxation. I prefer to see taxes levied such that they do not distort incentives significantly except possibly in rare cases where individual recklessness causes undue public cost. But here’s the deal. Government relaxed regulation on Wall Street in the expectation that it would police itself. If you are a Wall Street executive you stood to make bundles of cash out of the deal, which no one has a problem with. Seriously, go to town, we don’t care. America believes in Capitalism, and we would all prefer it to be us who wins, but we don’t begrudge you your success.

If, on the other hand, giant Wall Street firms which have grown “too big to fail” require massive taxpayer bailouts to stay afloat they should not also – at the same time – take huge bonuses for themselves. I don’t know much about the culture of high finance, but I’m sure there’s a mechanism by which you enforce commonly acceptable standards of behavior. If you don’t, or if you did not employ it to prevent taxpayer outrage, then that is a spectacular failure of self-policing.

Not only will the honor system be revoked, but there will be a price to pay for failure. I’m not sure I’m keen on the mechanism, but it has to be done and most other avenues have been forclosed. If you are part of Wall Street culture and think you weren’t involved, you were. You really can’t complain.

- jack*