Robots & Toddlers

There's a recent article in Cosmos Online about a study of human/robot interaction that placed Sony's QRIO robot in a Kindergarten classroom and observed the children eventually treating the robot more as a peer than a toy. From the article:

The researchers hope that more advanced versions of robots like Sony's QRIO (short for 'quest for curiosity') could become personalised tutors to assist teachers in classrooms. A robotic tutor could react on the spot to social cues and approximate social skills like facial expression and eye gaze, they said.

"It is becoming clear that to achieve this goal we are going to [need to] endow machines with something akin to affect and emotion, not just traditional forms of intelligence," said co-author Javier Movellan from UCSD's Institute for Neural Computation.

Ideally, social robots should be able to produce new behaviours based on their past experience by themselves, said Tanaka. QRIO's interaction with the toddlers was close to being autonomous, he said.

"In this study it is clearly demonstrated that a limited range of behaviours, however impressive, is nowhere near as important to social behaviour as being able to make appropriate responses from a broad repertoire of behaviours," commented associate professor David Powers, an expert in artificial intelligence and cognitive science at Flinders University in South Australia.

"This work needs to be taken seriously, but is at the early stages and there are many issues as to how to evaluate human-robot behaviour - the conclusions must be regarded as preliminary," he said.

There's also a cute video of the kids interacting with QRIO embedded in the article. A world where every classroom teacher has a robot assistant now seems a bit more plausible. Maybe I'll go into teaching afterall.

Surfer's Theory of Everything

Andy pointed me to an article from The Telegraph earlier this week titled Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything. Exciting stuff. Here's an excerpt:

Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape."

What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8.

Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"

The headline is comically misleading though. Who would read it if they lead with the fact that this dude has a doctorate in theoretical phsyics? He is a surfer, so they make sure to fit the loaded phrase "surfer dude" in the headline. Some good stuff in the comments.

Key McKenna Interview

Are you like me in that you can't get enough of Terence McKenna? Then don't miss this interview in which the self-described "plant biologist turned psychedelic advocate transformed into a kind of spokesman for technophelia and psychedelia" lays it all out moderately succinctly. Thanks again to theduderinok, super youtube user.



Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

Harper's Weekly

November 13th, 2007

Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf said that the country will hold parliamentary elections in January but refused to give a date for ending his emergency decree or stepping down as head of the military. Opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was placed under house arrest when she tried to attend a political rally. President George W. Bush said that General Musharraf has been an "indispensable ally." Burma's military junta permitted pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for 12 of the past 18 years, to meet with her party. At an Ibero-American summit in Chile, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called Spain's former prime minister a fascist, adding, "fascists are not human. A snake is more human." "Why don't you shut up?" asked the king of Spain. The Senate approved Michael Mukasey as U.S. Attorney General even though he refused to condemn waterboarding. Congress overrode President Bush's veto for the first time, on a water bill that earmarked money for the Everglades and the Gulf Coast, and half of New Orleans streetcars were still broken. Congress cheered a speech by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "You just heard a Ronald Reagan speech from a president of France," said a Republican senator from Kentucky. One full year remained before the U.S. presidential election. Ron Paul raised $4.2 million in 24 hours; Mitt Romney said that children were better off with dead straight rather than living gay parents; and Ben Cohen, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry's, denied that there were plans for a John Edwards flavor of ice cream, but said that a hypothetical Edwards ice cream would not be a "very fluffy flavor" and suggested it be called "Captain Courageous Crunch." It was reported that more American troops were killed in 2007 than in any year since the start of the Iraq war, and at least 75 people, including 59 children, were killed in Afghanistan's deadliest suicide bombing since the fall of the Taliban.

Wrestler Mary Lillian Ellison, known as the Fabulous Moolah, died at 84, as did writer and wife-stabber Norman Mailer. Members of the Writers Guild of America went on strike to demand greater profits from new forms of media, television networks hired "loyalty consulting firms" to figure out how to lure back viewers, and a North Carolina researcher found that female spadefoot toads will mate with other species of toad in order to increase the survival rate of their tadpoles. Canadian scientists discovered that women are more likely to swing their hips seductively when they are at their least fertile, and researchers in Pittsburgh found that women with big hips and small waists had smarter children. Obesity was found to cause cancer in women, and researchers announced that ten years after a woman stops taking birth-control pills her heightened risk of cervical cancer returns to normal. Ted Klaudt, a former Republican South Dakota state legislator, was convicted of raping his teenage foster daughters. Klaudt convinced the girls that he was a licensed gynecologist and massaged their breasts ("to get the fibroids out") and vaginas regularly to ascertain their capability for egg donation. A London woman, who says she only called herself the "Lyrical Terrorist" because "it sounded cool," was convicted under the UK Terrorism Act for posting poems on the Internet praising Osama bin Laden and for owning terrorist manuals. "You have been in many respects," said the judge, "a complete enigma to me." Voters in Great Britain decided that their most ridiculous law was one that makes it illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament.

Italian police discovered the Mafia's Ten Commandments. "Always being available for Cosa Nostra is a duty," reads number five, "even if your wife's about to give birth." Companies in Florida were forbidding their employees to smoke, even in private. "If you are an alcoholic and we have the right to fire you, we will do so," said the president of Westgate Resorts. "And if you are obese and there is a way for us not to hire you or to fire you, we will do that, too." Desperate to protect themselves from crime, many South Africans were attending martial arts classes taught by Bruce Lee's top student, Grandmaster Richard Bustillo. "I was born in 1975 and Bruce died in 1973," said one pupil. "He was a Chinese guy but maybe he came back as an African?" Nigeria was suing American tobacco companies for promoting underage smoking, and California was suing the federal government for preventing it from reducing car pollution. Soon after "Aqua Dots," a China-made bead toy aimed at children four and older, was named Australia's toy of the year, 4.2 million units were recalled because chemicals in the tiny beads, when metabolized, turn into the date-rape drug GHB. Eight-year-old twins from Ohio were nationally recognized for inventing wedgie-proof underpants, and doctors performed a 40-hour operation to remove four limbs from an eight-limbed Indian girl, who is believed by some to be an incarnation of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi.

- Chantal Clarke


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Domestic Cats

Thanks to Jonathan for pointing me to this article in the Washington Post about a cat genetics study recently published in the journal Science showing that house cats very likely "domesticated themselves." Not only will this article increase your respect for cats, it will help explain the feeling you might have that every cat you've ever known thinks it's better than you. From the article:

The findings, drawn from an analysis of nearly 1,000 cats around the world, suggest that the ancestors of today's tabbies, Persians and Siamese wandered into Near Eastern settlements at the dawn of agriculture. They were looking for food, not friendship.

They found what they were seeking in the form of rodents feeding on stored grain. They stayed for 12 millennia, although not without wandering off now and again to consort with their wild cousins.

The story is quite different from that of other domesticated animals: cattle, sheep, goats, horses -- and dogs, cats' main rivals for human affection. It may even provide insight on the behavior of the animal that, if not man's best friend, is certainly his most inscrutable.

The idea that, unlike in dogs, tameness in cats was selected for naturally rather than artificially via human controlled breeding is one that seems intuitively true. It explains so much about the dynamic between humans and cats, and cats and dogs, mainly the perceived and elusive "independence" of domesticated felines. Knowing that cats joined us because it was convenient for them and not vice versa should have even the most harden cat-haters looking twice at these enigmatic pets.

Graham Hancock on Coast to Coast

Here is Part 1 of a twelve part interview with author and scholar Graham Hancock on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory from September 2006. Great stuff. Maybe even a bit tame for Coast to Coast. From the duderinok's youtube description:

Researcher and author Graham Hancock presented his thesis that "supernatural" entities such as aliens and fairies are actually transdimensional beings that humans encounter during altered states of consciousness. The ability to shape-shift has been ascribed to both modern aliens as well as elves and other entities reported centuries ago, he detailed.

Around 35,000 to 40,000 years ago humans underwent a sudden change, and the emergence of cave and rock paintings are evidence of this, said Hancock, who noted that some of their depictions were of part human/part animal beings. He believes these represent the supernatural entities, and through altered states (probably due to ingesting psilocybin mushrooms) humans learned advanced skills from their encounters with these beings.

Nowadays, shamans commonly have such altered state communications. They feel humanity is at a crossroads-- the West has lost contact with the spirit world, and many of the world's woes are due to this, Hancock reported. As part of his experiential research, he traveled to South America and took the psychedelic plant mixture ayahuasca. During one such episode, he described a confrontation with an alien being, but rather than being an extraterrestrial, he suggested it inhabits another dimension that can only be accessed during an altered state.

Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 |

If you're in the mood for more Coast to Coast, there are a fair amount of episodes available on youtube, which, like this one, offer the audio from the show with a still shot of the guest and occasional slideshows related to the discussion.

Update, Forecast, The Bard McKenna

Where have I been? I know. But fear not, things are progressing. Look around. How can you doubt it? Soon I'll be building a new Get Dirty (though the name may have to change - suggestions?) with more focused weekly postings than this blogspot incarnation. In the meantime, I've been devouring a lot of material dealing with psychedelics and shamanism, and I want to share some of it with a full understanding of how such information is likely to be received: with great skepticism. Rightfully so. Before I get GD 2.0 going, I may get around to posting my supremely rational reasons for getting involved in these apparently flaky matters. Until then, you'll have to take my word for it, I am not losing my mind - I am, in fact, paying closer attention. If you'd like to have a conversation about any of this material, please leave a comment, or call, or something. I am often in the mood lately to talk about this kind of stuff.

Without further ado, here is an excerpt from a talk Terence McKenna gave in 1987 called "Understanding and Imagination in the Light of Nature." This is a good intro to the "Bard McKenna" because he addresses (if briefly) how he came to this weird, weird stuff which would become his legacy. His grasp of language is quite enviable, and I maintain that he was one of the 20th centuries most original thinkers. Here's the beginning of the talk:

A theme was touched on last night which is one of the centerpiece themes of aboriginal shamanism; the felt presence of some kind of alien intelligence. An intelligence that is somehow co-present with the human sense of self, for different people, in different ways, with varying degrees of intensity in different times and places. At the bedrock of shamanism is the notion that life is really finally a mystery wrapped in an enigma, but without resolution. Nevertheless as you close distance with this mystery there are a series of analogical metaphors that don't really suggest themselves but that are communicated to you by the other.

One of these analogical metaphors is the presence of an alien intellect, an organized other that is folklorically present in tradition as fairies, gnomes, elves, jinns, afreets, sprites, tree spirits -- that sort of thing -- and anecdotally present in rural cultures throughout the world as the poltergeist and the milk-souring fairy -- these things seem to reside in a curious area that is not epistemically clearly defined for the culture.

Among aficionados of these domains the question of, "is it real or not?" is thought to be mildly tasteless. You would intuitively sense if you were drinking in an Irish pub and people began to spin leprechaun stories, that the question "is it real?" is a real bring down. It isn't really like that because the question "is it real?" can ultimately be shown to be infantile in any situation. I mean is the Bank of America real? Immediately we realize that ordinary experience is simply assumption skating over the mystery.

But I choose to talk so much about the felt presence of the other because it was for me such an astonishing personal surprise. I was raised Roman-Catholic and indulged in the kind of theological fiddle-faddle that involves. And then grew out of that into atheism, into agnosticism; by the time I got to college I was reading Jean Paul Sartre and Husserl. My intellectual ontogeny had followed historical phylogeny and I had arrived in the 20th century. And then having thought I had absorbed the lessons of LSD, which seemed to me to be to reinforce and confirm the theories of Freud concerning the dynamics of the psyche: that it was about repressed memory, repressed desire, sexual neurosis, parental foul-ups and the imprinting of traumatic behavior experienced in infancy.

And then someone came to me one rainy February evening, in 1967, really a mad person, a kind of a social menace and intellectual criminal. A person who had said to me only months before, "we must live as if the apocalypse has already happened." Here he was on my doorstep, he wore little black suits that he buttoned up to the throat. He came in and he said "here's something that you might be interested in." And he brought out a sample of di-methyltryptamine that he had somehow come into contact with. And I said, "well what is it?" And he said, "well, it's short acting -- it's a flash." And I said, "how long does it last?" -- that was my first mistake. He said, "oh it doesn't last long." So I said, "OK, we'll do it." And we did it.

And I discovered, I had, I guess it's called a peak experience, or a core revelation, or being born again, or having your third eye opened, or something, which was a revelation of an alien dimension; a brightly lit, inhabited, non three-dimensional, self-contorting, sustained, organic, linguistically intending modality that couldn't be stopped or held back or denied. I sank to the floor -- I couldn't move. I had become a diastolic hallucination of tumbling forward into fractal geometric spaces made of light, and then I found myself in the sort of auric equivalent of the Pope's private chapel, and there were insect elf machines proffering strange little tablets with strange writing on them. And I was aghast, completely -- appalled -- because the transition had been a matter of seconds and my entire expectation of the nature of the world was being shredded in front of me. I've never gotten over it.

And it all went on, they were speaking in some kind of -- there were these self-transforming machine-elf creatures -- were speaking in some kind of colored language which condensed into rotating machines that were like Faberge eggs, but crafted out of luminescent super-conducting ceramics, and liquid crystal gels, and all this stuff was so weird, and so alien, and so "un-english-able" that it was a complete shock. I experienced the literal turning inside-out of the intellectual universe and I had come to this -- I thought -- fairly intellectually prepared: A kid, but nevertheless double-Scorpio, art history major, Hieronymus Bosch fan, Moby Dick, William Burroughs.

And as I came down -- this went on for two or three minutes, this situation of dis-incarnate dimensions orthogonal to reality engulfing me -- and then as I came out of it, and the room re-assembled itself, I said "I can't believe it. It's impossible. It's im-possible." That to call that a "drug" is ridiculous. It means that you just don't know, you don't have a word for it and so you putter around and you come upon this very sloppy concept of something which goes into your body and there's a change -- it's not like that, it's like being struck by neotic lightning.

The other thing about it, which astonished me, was there is no clue in this world -- in the carpets of Central Asia, in the myths of the Maya, in the visions of an Archembolo or a Fra Angelico or a Bosch -- there is not a hint, not a clue, not an atom of the presence of this thing. When you look at the religious hierophanies of the human species they don't have the same vibe, don't have the same charge. Religion is all about dissolving into unitary states of love and trans-linguistic oceanic unity and this sort of thing. This was not like that. This was more multiplistic than the universe that we share with each other. It was almost like the victory of neo-Platonic metaphysics -- everything had become made out of a fourth-dimensional tesseractual mosaic of energy.

I was quite knocked off my feet. And set myself the goal of understanding this. There was really no choice you see.

Read a transcript of the entire talk here.