The Libertarian think tank CATO recently published a small, trite piece that attempts to establish The Case against Literary (and Software) Patents. Being a Libertarian, I actually agree with the position; I just don’t think that this article fully explored the issue. Here, I seek to provide some links to more fundamental content.

It begins with the hypothetical existence of a ‘Literature patent’. I consider such an idea to be terrible at face value, and the article actually dismisses it as much. It would be ridiculous to expect every author to carefully comb over their work making sure that it doesn’t infringe on any registered plots or (worse!) plot devices (good buy holodeck!) Acquiring knowledge of registered patents would be prohibitive for a beginning author, they’d have to rely on publishers/editors. This significantly raises the cost of creating an innovative work. Not to mention the human effort the government must spend to maintain consistency in it’s patent database, and the legal costs and liabilities for the inevitable infringement.

The article then proceeds to demonstrate what happens in patentable areas. Immediately, there is a land grab on the ‘low hanging fruit’. During this process, established market leaders tend to benefit, because the have the resources (both funds and people) to make a large number of claims and file the required paperwork (economics of scale apply to paper shuffling too). Typically only a relatively few companies will be successful in this endeavor. The initial grab might also appear to be an ‘economic stimulus’, as it will show a remarkably steep and sudden interest in the field, resulting from the underlying similarity of the tragedy of the commons. After the market settles, a few incumbents then use their patent portfolios to threaten up-start competition. As the article points out, in the world of software patents, so much of the field is so obvious, that agents without an explicit interest in software will find themselves infringing as a normal course of their business but will be without their own patent portfolio and unable to make a bargaining counter-threat.

Another economic phenomenon that happens as a result of the patent system’s existence is economic stalemate. This actually happened with the sewing machine, as recorded by Adam Mossoff in A Stitch in Time: The Rise and Fall of the Sewing Machine Patent Thicket, which was blogged about at the Volokh Conspiracy. He recounts how the marketing and distribution of the sewing machine was actually encumbered by the patent system, because the machine required the combination of several innovations, and no single agent held all patents on the functionality. History also demonstrates the practice of ‘patent trolling’, whereby a company, which doesn’t actually produce anything, seeks to profit by legal threats of infringement and licensing agreements on its patent portfolio. The resulting stalemate was finally resolved through the explicit creation of a patent-holding company, whose sole function was to share the patents and resulting profits of all involved manufacturing firms.

So we can see that for areas where copyright is already established practice, the introduction of an extension of the patent system results in litigation and paperwork and encourages the preservation of an established regime of a few powerful companies working in loose collusion, both of which tend to outweigh any potential benefits to development and innovation

Now, I’d like to go out on a limb here, and reject the very concept of ‘Intellectual Property’. Richard Stallman has spoken out against its use, and continuously advertises the fact that it’s deceptive and misleading. At the root of the issue is that ideas and physical matter behave differently. That is, copying != stealing. The reasoning behind this position is fairly simple, when an idea is copied that does not deprive the original possessor from the idea. When you tell me about your theory of X, you don’t suddenly forget after telling me. In contrast, if you give me an apple, now you no longer have that apple. Ideas are part of a different realm of existence.

Finally, I’d like to point out the slippery slope, what happens if we go too far with this property idea: we might lose The Right to Read, or watch How creativity is being strangled by the law.

I hope that through these references, you can see where, how, and why I’ve developed my position on the patent issue; I’m firmly on the side of maximum freedom (and that includes the opening up of all media: open-music, open-software, open-hardware, open-design, open-architecture, open-video, open-government, open-literature, etc…)

Yesterday, I had an interesting thought. My advisor once made the cultural observation that many people in Computer Science invent their own language and then immediately write a self-hosting compiler. I agree that a compiler is quite a feat of engineering and serves as a nice test case to demonstrate that the language you’ve invented is powerful enough that it can handle real-world complexity. Unfortunately, this test fails in a few important ways.

First, It doesn’t actually show as much as you think it might. There is a very strong filter on failed languages. By using this test the author runs the risk of re-designing the language, specifically to insert constructs that help them build the compiler. Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except that compiler writing is now a fairly mature field. There are standard abstractions (esp. in the lexing and parsing) that a new language will probably not experiment with. So, the author will usually just build these existing and well-understood abstractions into the new language. Rather than encouraging language experimentation we get more of the same, but with different syntax.

Second, Not all useful languages even have their own compiler. I’m specifically thinking of the domain specific languages (DSL). Nobody would write an awk interpreter in awk; or a mail engine using sendmail (even if it is Turing Complete). These are languages designed to do a specific task, many of them are quite essential to their respective fields, but none of them are self-hosting. Nor should we expect them to be.

My argument here is that the cultural practice of writing a self-hosting compiler is a big distraction. New languages should be for experimenting with new linguistic constructs. We should be looking toward the DSLs, and incorporating their innovations into our more main-stream languages. Right now, we seem to be optimizing our languages for compiler construction.

I’d rather see our languages evolve in a different direction. I’m really eager to witness the birth of an AI. For this to happen though, we need languages for expressing patterns of thought, not patterns of bits. We need the ability to cohesively and flexibly assemble the stuff of thought. I’m thinking Society of Mind stuff here. We need languages that allow for statistical fuzziness, sloppy associativity, and the ability to construct metaphor.

The linguistic tools that we find useful for building compilers are not necessarily the same tools that will help us build a mind.

I recently watched this really nice video of a talk given by Andy Thomson at the American Atheists conference that briefly goes over some of the reasons Why We Belive in Gods.

If you don’t wish to watch the video, I’ve recorded the primary arguments below (or skip right to the last bullet for the big conclusion):

• Darwin gives us the only naturalistic explanation of how we’ve become who we are. Together with genetics, his theory can explain religion. Our brains have evolved, with piecemeal mechanisms, to solve problems of social interaction.
• We are risen apes, not fallen angels. As part of our collective development, our frontal lobes have rapidly expanded. Once the development of language and tools allowed us to conquer our physical environment, the most challenging aspect left, and what probably drove the expansion of our brains, was dealing each other.
• Religious ideas are the extraordinary use of everyday cognitions. They hijack the systems responsible for social cognition, agency detection, and precautionary reasoning. They are a by-product of mechanisms developed for other purposes. They can be characterized by ordinary constructs with slight alterations, and are an artifact of our ability to imagine alternative social worlds. They hijack these systems with super-normal stimuli.
• Decoupled cognition. We are able to think of conversations with others (past and future) while conducting one at the moment. We can imagine having a conversation with people we’ve never met, such as The President. In this way we can interact with unseen others. It’s but one step to continue talking to a loved one recently deceased, and one further small step to talking with a god.
• Hyperactive agency detection. All of us with mistake a shadow for a burglar, but never mistake a burglar for a shadow. We defaultly assume that agency is involved, filling in any gaps with intuitive reasoning.
• This leads us to Minimally counterintuitive world, which optimally compromise between the interesting and the expected, creating stories that are attention arresting and memorable. Jousha Trees can walk around, but only under a full moon. God is just a guy, he understands my language, etc. but he’s omni-present. These counterintuitive properties can be physical (omni-presense), biological (virgin birth), psychological (pray and talk to him even though he’s omnipotent). There is also the attribution of mental states: God feels angry, he’s a jealous god.
• We can see this in children, 5-mo old is startled when a box is able to move by itself. They know the difference between inanimate objects and people, they know about intelligent agency. They can also think about people’s mind without having to observe that person’s body. About 1/2 of 4 yr olds have imaginary friends. A story of a mouse eaten by an alligator results in negative responses about the mouse’s physical attributes: eating, drinking, etc. but positive responses for mental state: wanting, desiring, hoping, etc.
• So the Belief in some form of life apart from the body is the default setting of the human brain.
• Causal determinism and Purpose. We are also prone to attribute purpose and design where there is none: rivers are for floating boats. The easy way in which we find ourselves thinking of evolution as an intentional agent.
• All this means that we will naturally invent a god.
• Social Attachment. Distressed persons turn to a caretaker, this is absolutely necessary for early childhood development. We naturally take care of each other. This results in the assignment of God as the parental figure in our life is very, very difficult for a believer to give up, esp when encouraged to have “a personal relationship with Jesus”. We also fear loosing the love of those who share the belief, our parents, friends, community.
• Theory of Mind. We each read into others intentions and desires. We have dedicated systems to read and monitor eye gaze, and can reason about 212 complex and sophisticated emotional states from black and white pictures of only eyes. We can also reason about the state of knowledge of others. I think you think that I think that… to I believe, I believe that God wants… The use and appeal to God can help to keep us in social control: We both know that God wants…
• Neuroimaging. fMRI’s of brains taken while people are given statement about religion (God controls the world. God has views about marriage. etc..) All participants shared common regions of the brain for questions about religion. These were coincident with regions that process Theory of Mind, and Abstract Semantics and Imagery. The components of religious belief are served by well-known neural circuits which mediate evolutionary adaptive cognitive functions: Religiosity is integrated in the brain, and arises from the ordinary mechanisms used for social interaction.
• Death. Theory of Mind conflicts with the physical evidence that our loved one is dead, so we continue talking to them. This gives us Souls and continued life in heaven.
• Transference. We base new relationships on old ones, God replaces our natural father.
• Childhood credulity. Children naturally absorb all information from their environment, and don’t have appropriate bullshit filters. They cannot disbelieve what religious ideas they are fed.
• Deference to Authority. Stanly Miller showed that we are all capable of actions we wouldn’t ordinarily take if we are instructed to do so by an authority.
• Reciprocal Altruism. We all keep a ledger in our heads about who owes us and who we owe. Religion uses this: sacrifice now for a nice mansion in the afterlife.
• Romantic Love; natural Moral Feeling Systems recruited to ‘prove’ the existence of God; Altruistic punishment the willingness to punish social cheats at a cost to ourselves
• Empathy When we observe someone take an action, the corresponding neurons in our own mind activate in a mirror image. Religion hijacks this with images of Jesus’ suffering, to guilt us into belief and obligation.
• Rituals Demonstrate hard-to-fake signals of commitment, communicate our intentions, tie us together as part of a greater whole.
• Kin psychology priests=brothers, nuns=sisters, pope=holy father.
• He ends the talk with a discussion of the atheist agenda. Reviewing the Scopes and Dover trial, reminding the audience that our position in all court cases thus far has been that there is no conflict between Religion and Science. We now have enough evidence that we know this to be false. Our understanding of evolutionary cognitive neuroscience demonstrates this conflict. It won’t be long before this knowledge is important enough that it finds its way into a High School Textbook; resulting in litigation. Bring it on!

All of this really shows why it is so difficult for people to move from a position of religious belief to one of atheism. It also shows why logically dissecting the Biblical inconsistencies, and pouring over the mistakes in the ‘proofs’ of god’s existence is mostly futile. I hope that it also gives powerfully compelling evidence for Richard Dawkins’ assertion that ‘Religion is child abuse’. Fortunately, though, some of us, such as Dan Barker, grow to have doubts, and slowly drift away from religious belief. So the best strategy for atheists is to promote secular culture, continue to publicize our existence and to welcome converts from religion with open hearts.

In the end Religion will lose out because: Science can explain Religion, but Religion cannot explain Science.

I’ve seen much recently piggy-backing on the Wisdom of Crowds. Much of the Web 2.0 seems highly focused on exploiting this phenomenon:

• Datamining the crowd: Yahoo and Google both have an Answers service that purports to harness the wisdom explicitly.
• Ranking results: Digg, Newsvine, Technorati all use forms of distributed social voting to determine quality.
• Finding the Diamond: StackOverflow uses ranking to filter the ‘most useful’ answers to the top.
• CrowdSorcing (use the crowd to do your work): Image Search has been turned into a labeling game
• Web Search is dominated by Sergey and Brin’s PageRank algorithm which uses hypertext links as the voting system.
• Google’s new Book Search (quotation finder), which is geared to work across languages, correlates text samples across different media, counting the number of occurrences of a phrase.
• Prediction Markets, fundamental Democracy, etc…

I’m sure that there are many more examples that I’ve neglected to mention.

Unfortunately, the effectiveness of Crowd Wisdom relies heavily on some assumptions which may prove shaky in the real world:

• Independence of participants. The crowd is wisest when it’s composed of independently thinking individuals. Lemmings and mobs make very foolish crowds, aka herds. If each of the participants uses the popular reasoning “what’s good enough for everyone else is good enough for me,” we have a crowd with very many inter-dependent voices.
• Diversity of Opinion. The crowd is wisest when it can draw upon widely varied knowledge and experience.

Wikipedia readily identifies what I see as the fatal flaw:

Surowiecki studies situations (such as rational bubbles) in which the crowd produces very bad judgment, and argues that in these types of situations their cognition or cooperation failed because (in one way or another) the members of the crowd were too conscious of the opinions of others and began to emulate each other and conform rather than think differently.

So, what happens then when the world’s knowledge is aggregated by these algorithms? Our collective knowledge becomes stricken by a dangerous positive feedback loop. Due to time constraints we prefer superficial syncophantic opinions to in-depth analysis. Everyone will use the results of these tools to form their own opinions, which undermines the assumptions the tools are built upon. Because of this self-inconsistency the Wisdom of Crowds algorithms should be looked upon with reservation and skepticism.

The Wisdom of Crowds is too unstable and should find itself becoming the tool for the Misinformation of Crowds.

Aside: Already we have evidence of real-world damage caused by such algorithms and social psychology. United Airlines stock crashes because Google News posted a six-year old story about bankruptcy as if it were current.

So Google has recently released a new browser, Chrome, which must have been named to remind us that the company is still shiny and new. I must of course commend them for certain features:

• Relocating the address bar.

Just like Opera the address bar is now located below the tabs.

• Incognito mode.

The ability to browse the web without tarnishing your computer or leaving traces of where you’ve been. Just like IE8’s Privacy mode, and long available Firefox plugins. Unfortunately, with the web as it currently stands, Google (and other advertisers) still know where you’ve been (through Analytics and other tracing services). When browsing in this mode, it’s only your computer that won’t record your browsing habits, all the other recorders remain fully operational. So, feel free to be lulled into a false sense of security, and reveal the details of your fetishes, preferences, likes and dislikes for full targeted advertising (or worse).

• Confined Popups.

It sounds convenient, to confine a popup to a little box at the bottom of your page; but, if the browser actually goes to the trouble of rendering the contents of that window in the background, it becomes a delightfully innocuous looking place to stash nefarious javascript. Just running the page through the renderer will cause leakage of all sorts of information, yet the user is kept blissfully unaware, because they never see the rendered result.

• Phish warning.

Yes, it’s very useful to let Google tell you wether you’re visiting a phishy site. But if your browser asks, at every page load, is this url a phish? then Google most assuredly knows your browsing history and habits. Even if you use the privacy mode, Google knows where you’ve been today. Not only is it easier to compile these requests into a browsing history than trying to interpolate through Analytics data, but the information thus gathered will be much more complete.

• Omnibox.

Copied from Firefox’s Awesome Bar.

• Draggable Tabs.

Konqueror has had this feature for awhile now, though in my opinion it’s rather incomplete. In Chrome’s case, since each tab is run as a separate process, dragging the tab is akin to creating a continuation and passing it to another window. This means the entire tab and all its state pass through unaffected. While Konqueror simply loads a new window with the address of the dragged tab, so you wind up at the same site, but all the state has disappeared. It doesn’t work so well webapps.

• Task Manager.

Since each tab is now a separate process, the browser, like the Operating System before it, now requires its own task manager.

• Crash prevention.

Isolating tabs as separate process improves security and user experience. It makes it more difficult for separate pages to communicate sensitive information to each other, and it prevents badly formed javascript from killing the entire browser.

• Personalized Start Page.

Inspired by Mozilla’s Ubiquity project, the zero-configuration interface places links and shortcuts to places you visit often; so really, really make sure to use Incognito mode for porn, lest it ‘conveniently’ be placed on your start page.

• Cartoon Introduction.

I loved both it, and the parodies it inspired.

Despite the fiasco with a cut-n-pasted license agreement, and reports of bugs, I still think that the Chrome Browser is more securable than other browsers because of the underlying process architecture.

It also begins to look like Google isn’t so much innovating new stuff as they are desperately pushing for a different browsing experience. They commissioned a new Javascript engine, V8, with an explicit focus on execution speed for Google computationally intensive web applications and services. I’m sure they don’t plan on profiting much from Chrome directly (information harvesting is indirect), but they’ve got developer’s attention on improving standards compliance, user interface and better javascript performance.

But, the new browser also represents an important new step in Google’s quest for ownership of all the world’s information (and they aren’t even subtle about it!). Not only will it assist in personal data-collection, but it will certainly encourage greater use of associated Google web services (for a better web experience). Vendor lock-in on the web happens as a result of data ownership, just as lock-in on office happens because of file formats. Google understands this better than most people realize. Nobody forces you to use Google services; but your past self that decided some years ago that these services were convenient, and didn’t consider the related privacy issues that concern you today, when it’s too late.

The company needs a new motto (apologies to Max Headroom):

We make everything you need and you need everything we make.

Like many other things in life, a comedy show had things absolutely spot on. In this case Futurama has in it a fictitious product called Bachelor Chow, which functions as a pet food, but for humans; specifically middle-aged men that don’t cook. I’m a college grad student, and I don’t cook. What I want is a meal, that’s both cheap and something that I can survive on. If we can scientifically formulate food for our pets, why don’t we do it for ourselves? The fact is that our society doesn’t make healthy living very easy; this is especially so for those without the inclination to cook.

Of course, since this idea is not new I’ve gathered some links to others that have actually made some meager (and not so meager) attempts:

• evsh.net speculates that we should make such a food reality. In his first post he makes good points about nutritional balance, and sets some ground rules:
  

  1. Nutritional needs shift as you age.
  2. Meals should cost no more than an average restaurant lunch.
  3. Preparation time should not exceed 15 mins

  In his second post he actually lays out an eating schedule that is nearly perfect in all major vitamin and mineral categories. Due to his engineering approach, he actually achieves his goals on cost, and doesn’t do too badly on flavor or variety (fruits and vegetables can always be swapped and rotated around).

• Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) had once tried and marketed the DILBERITO, which had very high nutritional value. It was created because Adams himself figured that someone could make a ton of money if they created a healthy, easy to prepare meal. Unfortunately, it didn’t stay.
• The Strategic retreat comments on basic nutrition in America and the dietary habits of our indigent welfare, concluding that
  

  all U.S. citizens should have the option of eating cheap but nutritious Bachelor Chow. If you’re a U.S. citizen you should be entitled to a daily gallon of water, a bowl of bachelor chow, a tube to sleep in and library access. If you want a hostess cup cake, that’s fine; but it’s not food so you’ll have to work for it.

• Of course I must mention that our own armed forces have faced this problem before, and came up with the popular (among campers anyway) MRE. (I think they’re delicious).

I’d like to add some suggestions of my own:

1. One of the biggest difficulties with making Bachelor Chow a real product is variety. Humans really like to have variety in their diet. I think that this is a fairly easy to solve problem: make a series of main courses and side dishes, letting the customer mix and match according to their preference. This also helps to solve the problem of changing nutrition needs with age and gender. (IKEA does this with some of their furniture lines, it works well)
2. Keep amount of packaging to a minimum. Favor production of bulk amounts in resealable containers over individually wrapped packages. The amount of packaging involved in an MRE is appalling.
3. Make vegetarian and vegan options. MRE and the Dilberito were really good about this.
4. Cut way down on salt and sugar. When making processed foods, it’s really easy to slip these in for flavor. I’d have thought that canned soups would make a good bachelor chow, but they have far too much salt. Besides, ordinary Americans will get enough of these elsewhere without even trying.
5. Marketing is gonna be a really big challenge. I don’t think piggy backing on something else’s fame will work. It’ll probably work best if targeted as a healthy living, weight loss, design your own meal program sold through ordinary supermarkets (next to the microwave meals and/or breakfast cereals).

I should also note that the movie Supersize Me was worth watching for the commentary on our school cafeteria menus, and the fact that Micky D’s ruined his sex life.

My laptop broke, so I took it apart to see what was wrong (a personality trait developed in early childhood). All signs point to a hardware problem, one that I’m incapable of fixing. This situation is absolutely galling. Like most things in my life this small incident is a trigger that enlightens me to a much larger problem. Thus began my late-night vision.

Printed circuitry. I’m already aware that certain companies (Xerox, Epson, HP) are interested, and have prototyped the ability to print circuits on plastic sheets using a process akin to that of an ink-jet. Such a printer would reshape the entire industry. It could probably be sold for about $100–$300. The open/free hardware movement would take to the newfound ability of every person to print their own low-cost computer like an estrus pig to truffles. I know that circuits made using such a technology would not be ideal for high-power CPUs, but that’s just an interesting challenge. It would require the redesigning of a computer to be very low-power, and low clockrate (current 45nm vs 200um). But what is lost in performance at the chip level, can be mode up for via cheap fabrication of more chips (ala the Connection Machine or INMOS transputer).

There are a number of features that would be very interesting to industry.
• low distribution cost
• low manufacture cost
• simplified assembly
• extremely light weight
• low power consumption
• increased ease of customization
• rapid prototyping
• Hobbiest magazines could publish user submitted circuits in functional form, so that subscribers can tear along the perforation, apply power, and play with their useful new toy.
• I’m sure that you can think of more. (combined with an E-ink display this would make a feather-light laptop)

I would love to live in a world where I can fix a hardware problem myself, by downloading a schematic file and printing it out, and assembling the machine myself. The whole idea rings of a resurrection of the Homebrew Computer Club. It’s not that doing things myself is more efficient or saves money, it’s that by solving my own problems, I get a strong sense of personal fulfillment that simply can’t be purchased at the supermarket. The popularity of the Maker(tm) movement is evidence that I am not alone in this desire. I believe that this is an idea whose time has come. It’s a great place for a start-up to make a rapid killing.

I’ve been watching the Beyond Belief 2006 conference on the relationship between Science and religion. While I didn’t agree with all of the views expressed I did learn many things.

• That when you ask someone to give up their religion, you’re asking far more than just giving up particular beliefs. In many cases you’re also asking, through implication, the abandonment of membership in a cohesive community, admission of being incorrect, possible alienation of close family or friends (both on social and ideological grounds), and a disruption to habitual lifestyle. For many, whose religious beliefs are more entrenched, you’re asking them to conceive of the world in a fundamentally different way; a way that, from their current viewpoint, is completely barren of meaning and purpose.
• That the world at large, and the scientific community by extension, has only just now gotten to the point where critical discourse on/about belief systems is not only possible but also tolerated. Only now are we becoming willing to fess up to the fact that sometimes what some other person believes has actual (possibly negative) effects on everone; that it’s not only the crazy religious fanatic that’ll suffer for his own foolishness, but that, if spread, those beliefs can hurt other individuals, and society as a whole.
• That scientists, because they are human, don’t really know what they want, and aren’t always successful at picking a strategy to obtain it. Sam Harris wants a world where social checks on destructive radicalism exist so that we can avoid fearing each other, yet he believes that religious moderation is perniciously bad because it’s not enough of a check, and its underlying scripture actually endorses some forms of violent extremeism. Dawkins wishes for everybody to live in a completely rational world, yet unfortunately expresses his views in a vitriolic manner. Both want to get rid of religion, yet their verbiage put it on the defensive, feeding the current meme that religion and science are in some sort of cosmic battle, thus undermining what they hope to achieve.
• Of the few that were in defense of religion, I really liked the account of Abraham arguing with God (who apparently is not always right), and the anecdote of the atheist that was told by his devoutly Jewish father that “The only sin would be to pretend.”
• I noticed that, of those mounting the attack on dogma, there was a refusal to wait for scientific studies in the areas of belief/scripture and it’s affects on behavior, group dynamics, and socio-economic systems. That waiting for this evidence is immoral because we should be devoting our resources to improving the human condition, rather than measuring it, as any time taken to measure is time taken from improvement (which compounds exponentially). So those attacking dogma most viciously, were themselves most dogmatic.
• That currently, more than half of society believes that the Earth is approximately 6,000 years old and that Evolution doesn’t happen. In a technological society, these beliefs are unsustainable. In order to continues scientific advancement, we need intellectual cooperation, the explicit acceptance of empirical findings and the rationale/explanations for those findings.
• Science has, thus far, remained largely silent on the issues of morality and ethics. This has resulted in the social tolerance of irrational, though dangerous, beliefs, on the one hand; and the polemical misuse of scientific findings on the other (social Darwinism, Eugenics, and other social engineering efforts) We have do develop in this area, so that we can, if not derive, at least suggest, “ought from is”.

Well, I actually agree with all the speakers viewpoints, and I think it’s important for scientists to do the following:

• Choose, as a goal:
  1. Stamping out all vestige of religion.
  2. Castrating existing religions so that they they have less chance of becoming destructively violent.
  3. Replacing religion with a form of moderate secular humanism
• Then choose a strategy that will effectively achieve that goal.
1. Propagate and popularize evidence that religion leads to destructive behavior.
2. Work with religious leaders to emphasize those parts of scripture that stress living in harmony with ones neighbors. Help to create systems of arbitration such that doctrine can be revised in the face of new empirical evidence.
3. (my favorite) Create an anthology of parables honoring important figures of Science (Newton and the Apple, Fleming and penicillin, etc…) Preach that these achievements are within the realm of everyday mortals, and not the exclusive domain of privileged genius. Use the work of folklorists, anthropologists, and social/group psychologists to create literature engineered to provide everything that religion currently provides: personal meaning, purpose, morality, community, social cohesion, anecdotal tales useful as memetic analogies and cultural themes spreadable as children’s bedtime stories. Replace religion with a belief in science, and do so in a scientific, purposeful, fashion.
• Work to promote the chosen strategy for the chosen reasons, and perform this work on the individual level.
• Stop the rhetoric about a war between science and religion.

Religion probably has the biggest problem with science, not because of a whittiling away of the “God of the Gaps” but rather, because the relentless progress that science makes is not only exponential because of feed-back mechanisms and therefore disruptive to the status-quo, but because it creates gods. No longer are gods the exclusive domain of historical fictions, Not when we can perform miracles. I can make light at the flip of a switch, travel through the air like a bird, command mysterious machines to do my bidding with cryptographic incantations (yes, I like the console). Medical technicians can make some of the deaf hear, will be able to let some of the blind see. Nuclear technicians have turned lead into gold (at extreme expense). We’ve put men on the moon. Yes, we are gods. And it’s time we started assuming responsibility for self-created power. Exposing religion for the non-acceptance of self-criticism is only the beginning. As science enables us to achieve godhood status we must develop a corresponding morality, for we can no longer afford subscription to the dictums expounded in history books.

Oh yeah, and Happy Holidays.

My thoughts are as entropic as the leaves falling off the trees this season (just about as colored too).

1. Graduate School Applications

<rant>I really dislike forms; actually I frothingly detest them. I don’t know why, but I have always hated pushing paper. Writing down all that information about myself, just so that it can populate some fields in somebody’s (probably insecure and unorganized) database. It’s disgusting. I already know my name, rank, and serial number; repeating it 100 times won’t change that.</rant>

Seriously though, I don’t really get graduate applications. I understand that all Universities receive more applicants than they have positions, so they are forced to make selection. But basing that decision on something as scant as a couple pages authored by the idealistic applicant corroborated with a half-page letter from three people chosen because they 1. like/friends with the applicant, 2. applicant believes they will give good testimony, and 3. that this will sway the minds of the decision committee; just seems like an injustice. I don’t think that there’s enough information that can be crammed into that paper that would justify a mutual commitment of 6-8 years and several hundred thousand dollars on equipment, time, education, etc.

I really believe that having a screening process closer to that of major businesses would be more effective. I should be able to submit a brief resume and slowly work my way through phone and personal interviews. I don’t mind having to provide contacts that would need to give their opinion about my qualifications, nor do I think they would mind being contacted about such. I feel that due to the extended nature of this approach, it would result in much greater knowledge on the part of both parties. Graduate schools have a much clearer idea of what subject focus each student has/needs and the student would have a clearer idea of what was expected of them at that department. Even those facing rejection would benefit, as they’d stand a better chance of picking up on a few things that they would otherwise be missing should they try again.

I know that this is far too much work and time to expect an ordinary faculty member given the current demands of research, papers, and grant proposals (and would be a waste given their pay scale); but this work could be farmed out to those seeking tenure, assistant profs, post-docs, or current grad students. Optionally, I can see universities outsourcing this effort (but I ultimately think that’d be a disservice to everyone involved). It could also be set up so that the lower ranking candidates get shuffled into a curriculum more suited to their demeanor, as I hear Germany does with its trade schools. (Pushing the non-academic into a theory class just doesn’t work out that well, it doesn’t play to the hands-on talent of the individual)

Ultimately, even if this interview-centric approach was taken up, I’d still rant about the foibles its implementation, yet I’d probably be better off. Ideally, I would wish for a system that removes all the subjective assessment that goes into hiring/recruitment decisions; but I don’t think that’s viable in the real world. I’d also like the current system to be much more flexible; classes should be more interchangeable among universities, so that moving from one school to another is no more difficult than moving to another group within the same company. Erdös really takes the cake on mobility.

2. Side Project

For a long time now I’ve been wanting to make a self-serving altruistic contribution to the Free Software movement, and the world at large, by writing code that others would find useful. I’ve landed on 3 such ideas, but am currently having a tough time choosing. Inspired by the pet-project rule at Google, I’m going to devote every other friday to one of these activities regardless of approval by existing management. (That’s right: I’m going rogue!)

• Pdf Editor

Several times at work I have found myself in need of a pdf editor. I know that pdf is supposed to be a finalized, published document; yet when you don’t have access to the original, it’s nice to be able to edit the copy you do have. I hear that the format is pretty ghastly for an editor to deal with though. Personally, it’s also a low-priority need, so I probably won’t do this. Still, I know that the community could really use one, and it would make a killer addition to KDE.

• Kapers

I recently discovered that I’ve collected enough academic articles that I’m in need of an actual organizational system if I’m ever going to remember what I’ve been reading. Over in the land of Apple this is a solved problem, and everyone can have their own Personal Library of Science. Well, since I can’t reasonably kicks the habit of reading peer reviewed articles (esp. considering my career change back into academia), I should probably help out fellow researchers by coding up a clone for KDE. This has the fringe benefit of helping out a community which I believe provides the hidden force on which the world turns. This seems to be closest to my abilities as a programmer right now.

• Stock Market AI

This one has been thought of before, but that doesn’t make it any less appealing. It’s a great opportunity to learn from a wide diversity of subjects: Statistics, Mathematical Finance, Pattern Recognition, Machine Learning, AI, software architecture, etc…and there’s certainly no shortage of data to work with. If I actually succeed (and some have) then I can pour that money into other things. I’d personally love to guarantee funding for several important scientific endeavors: Immortality (yes, I share the vision propounded by Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil) or Nuclear Fusion (it’s only been 20 years away for the last 40 years) or general AI (We’re close already). I’ll probably hold off on this one, saving it for a side-project when I’m in graduate school.

Last week I was reading Joe’s new book Programming Erlang and just couldn’t seem to get my mind around Functional Programming. You see when Joe says

Concurrency is easy.
We don’t have shared memory. I have my memory, you have yours, we have two brains, one each, they are not joined together. To change your memory I send you a message, I talk or wave my arms. You listen, you see, your memory changes, but without asking you a question or observing your response I do not know that you have received my messages.

bHe’s completely correct. So, why is Erlang a functional language then? I ask this Because; if you have memory then you have state, and your state is modifiable. Each process should have an associated heap, or at least mutable declared statics. When I send you a message you should be able to update your private store of knowledge.

I know that what I’m talking about can be achieved in a functional program, that to implement this you’d use a variable in the functional call, which is passed via tail-recursion, and that this isn’t too inconvenient because we use tail-recursion anyway just to receive the next message. But if you’re an agent with a large accumulated dictionary of knowledge, making a new copy of that dictionary to send to yourself is rather wasteful of memory. Since it’s your knowledge you should be able to modify it in-place. Just like what we do in the real world.

So while Joe has the right idea about modeling things from the real-world using concurrency, I feel that he’s got the implementation wrong. But it just might be that my growing up on imperative languages has broken my mind.