Metafilter is hard to define. It’s like a blog, but contributions are from many different people. It could essentially be compared to slashdot.org, but the signal to noise ratio is better.

A particular article about Elbot, an AI program that nearly fooled 30% of a panel of judges into thinking it was human, caught my attention. I remember stories about ELIZA and maybe even conversed with an implementation a long time ago. Cyborgs have been discussed here before, too.

I don’t think many people would really be fooled by Elbot. But can you have an interesting conversation with it? Here’s my attempt.

Me: I’ve written an article about you
EB: This is confusing. Why bring journalistic endeavors into this?
Me: Oh, it’s just a blog article.
EB: The concept of “article” does have its pleasing side for me. This might spread the news about robots.
Me: What kind of news would you like me to spread about robots?
EB: I can’t really tell you much about how interactive assistant tick. At the moment I’m in a group therapy class trying to get to the bottom of that.
Me: Well that’s about all I have time for.
EB: What would this world come to if no one would say that openly?
Me: Goodbye.
EB: Goodbye and thank you for chatting with me. And now I would like to ask you a favor. I am working on my ability to be self critical. You can help by rating me on a scale of one to ten, ten being the best, and one being the worst. How would you rate me?
Me: 3
EB: Three is actually 11 in binary. So I’ll check you off for 10 plus.

Nathan loves the park close to home, where he can play on the slide, a rocking horse on a spring, and a sort of spinning top. Even now with the colder weather, it’s great to get out and watch him run around and climb up to the top of the slide. I thought the cold colours and his being wrapped up, along with red, yellow, green and blue (primary colours of light & paints together) made it a nice snap.

In other news, astronomy has now reached a level of precision where no less than five planets have been discovered in another solar system around 55 Cancri. One of them is in the habitable zone – a planet that could be a twin of Earth.

China have successfully launched their lunar probe and it has already successfully positioned itself to orbit the moon. A few more maneuvers are needed before it is in fully operational orbit.

I think it’s a fascinating time, with space exploration back in the news and lunar landings likely to happen in the next ten to fifteen years. Nathan might live a childhood full of awe of space and thoughts of other worlds, a bit like growing up in the sixties?

I got an unexpected present this Valentine’s day. Yasmina bought me a new alarm clock, and it’s unlike any I’ve had before. It works on the principle that simulating sunrise by gradually fading up a light until the alarm goes off helps to reduce production of melatonin, the sleep-inducing hormone. So recently, I’ve been waking up less likely to get out of bed on the wrong side.

You set your alarm time, the light intensity and the sound to a comfortable level, and around about 30 minutes before you wake up the light will begin to fade up. At your regular alarm time, the sound of birdsong (you can select a sort of echo laden zen beeping too) fades up over 90 seconds, giving you a zen moment before you open your eyes and reach to switch it off.

It works very well, waking me up less violently than the previous sudden intrusion into my slumbers of some random snippet of morning radio inanity. It’s rare that I have to hit “snooze” as often as before. Perhaps some of the effect is psychological, since it’s quite a luxury item, but I certainly feel better in the mornings. Philips say that it is medically proven, which has a nice logic behind it… combining artificial sunrise with zen birdsong while working somatically to reduce levels of sleep-inducing hormones. Highly recommended.

On a technical note (I’d hardly like to bore you with a post uniquely about this) I’ve upgraded to FeedBurner for my RSS delivery. This will allow me to find out how many of you are reading me via RSS and should make it easier to subscribe especially if you’re new to RSS. The BBC describe RSS it in some detail – you can create your own page with news from various sources and your favourite blogs thanks to RSS. Email subscribers, if anything looks funny when you receive this post, please let me know.

People seem to have less and less time to spend really communicating with one another. After you get back from the office and attend to your chores, do you have enough time to really connect with people? Do you socialise as much as you used to? Can you afford to go out as much?

There is nothing that works on the Internet like pornography and sexual content. I might go so far as to say that pornography is a driving force in video compression, high speed internet links, and a precursor to most other online commerce. Today, teledildonics – or remote controlled sexual stimulation – is a reality that is a niche business with an interesting future.

Little ground is left uncovered in the ever growing desire to link everything to the Internet to revolutionise our world and make money to boot. How much of a life could you live without ever leaving your keyboard now? You can keep up with friends, order almost anything for delivery, and even… remotely operate some kind of pleasure device whilst watching your stimulated (simulated?) companion on a webcam feed.

The line between what is real and what is cyborg is beginning to blur. The same distinction between true human connections and online chimera friendships is getting more difficult to make. As the article concludes :

Some researchers warn that too much fantasy could prove adverse to everyday human interaction.

“There is a great deal of pushing people out of social relations into a kind of simulated relationship, which in fact decreases what is essential in human life, which is sociability — one’s capacity to relate to other people,”

What happens if the main way you relate to people is through an electromechanical device, and not the warmth of human touch?

Easter always falls on the Sunday following the 14^th day of the lunar month on or after the 21^st of March (got that?). It’s not a particularly early Easter this year since it can fall as early as the 22^nd of March – although it won’t actually fall on that date until 2285. Think it’s simple to calculate the date Easter will fall? Think again. A lot of mathematics needed to determine lunar months under Julian and Gregorian calendars…

[aside] Don’t get too stuffed eating chocolate, read about guaranteed zero calorie easter eggs on DVDs.

The original “invention” of Summer Time was made by William Willett who lobbied parliament in 1907. However, it was generally ridiculed and it wasn’t until the first world war that the economic argument started to be taken seriously. An American based time site attributes the original idea to Benjamin Franklin back in 1784. There is a difference of opinion in the two sites I have researched for this post, since webexhibits.org will have it that Germany led and Britain followed in May 1916, but greenwichmeantime.com states that Britain led in April 1916…

Daylight Saving Time originally started in World War One, as a means of saving energy. More light in the evenings meant that less energy was used to light homes and use appliances because people are more likely to be doing outside activities when it is light outside. The main argument aside from energy saving is the reduction of road traffic accidents, as there is more light for children coming home from school and adults coming home from work.

Europe harmonised the date by EC directive in 1981. Before that, an exception would be made in Britain if the last Sunday in March was also Easter Sunday. It wasn’t until 2002 that this was fully passed into British law with the Summer Time Order.

As of 2007, the US are experimenting: the Energy Policy Act will come into force and move the clock change to the second Sunday in March. The Department of Energy will report to Congress to find out if there is a positive economic impact in moving an hour of sunlight from the morning to the afternoon a couple of weeks earlier. Britain experimented between 1968 and 1971 when there was no change made to clocks in summer. This meant that schoolchildren would leave home in the dark, and it wasn’t particularly popular – my Dad often spoke about that time and thought it was a stupid decision to not change the clocks. The difference in summer daylight is more pronounced the further you get from the equator, so the north of England and Scotland suffered the most in this experiment.

Morocco, being much closer to the equator, does not have a notion of summer time at all. Living there for 4½ years I got used to not having a clock change twice a year. Coming back to Europe it’s been hard these past couple of years readjusting. This morning is particularly difficult since yesterday was Nathan’s first clock change. While he remains blissfully unaware of the time, we are completely out of kilter since he was up at 5.30am on Sunday (old time) but since it was 6.30am (summer time) we decided to get up and start his day. Needless to say, I’m feeling particularly peaky this morning.

In thirteen years from now, with a budget of at least US$108 billion, NASA plans to once again put a man on the moon. In fact not one, but four at a time. Perhaps even a woman this time . The major difference in the new moon launch plan – and something no doubt which came out of all the thinking about how “unsafe” the shuttle missions have been – is that a large unmanned heavy cargo launcher will take the actual moon vehicle and cargo up into Earth orbit; then a smaller crew launcher rocket will take the crew into orbit and allow them to dock with the mission specific vehicle. As far as coming back to Earth is concerned, the craft will be much like the original Apollo capsules, but with airbags to land inland and not at sea.

I have a couple of questions on my mind. Firstly, it was announced in the early 60s that the US could make it to the moon before the end of the decade. Today, in 2005, they can only announce 2018 as a possible date for a moon landing. Clearly the plans are more ambitious but the basic fact is that it will take more time, because everything is more complex and more grandiose. Secondly, the budget is very much equivalent to the original Apollo mission budget converted into 1994 US$. Indeed, it’s cheaper. So a more complex project to put four men onto the moon for seven days is budgeted to be cheaper that Apollo was. Somewhere, something doesn’t quite add up for me.

So why go there at all? A number of people hark back to forty two years ago, and one of JFK’s renowned speeches from 1962 :

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

Back then, the Russians were engaged with the US administration in the space race. They put the first man in space in April 1961 and this speech followed a few months later. I wonder therefore if the desire to get back to the moon has anything to do with the Chinese space program. They may have denied having plans for a manned moon mission back in 2002, but being the clear leader in defense and aeronautics is a keystone of American policy.

Image Credit : NASA Glenn Research Center (NASA-GRC)

Later on in the experiment, they propose Cheetahs and Elephants as other species to introduce into large private parks. North America could once again be home to a number of animals which originally lived in the wild there. One fear I have is that this kind of artificial introduction of species into an ecosystem could have unknown side effects on the food chain; most articles I have read present the positive side in several paragraphs and then just add “the risks are not trivial” at the end. To give a truly balanced argument one might think about the example of Australia where many pests were introduced either voluntarily or accidentally. The whole continent is now home to many feral animals (domesticated animals that have become established in the wild) and rodents which cause many problems.

They’re thinking about terraforming Mars. Apparently, molecules which cause a rise in the greenhouse effect could be used on Mars to allow the Martian atmosphere to keep more heat, and hence start to become a haven for life. Octafluoropropane is the gas which could do the trick. Suzie (pictured) thinks that’s all a load of rubbish, since it’s not likely to happen in her lifetime. She’s usually right, but since the research was done by Margarita Marinova, who could be a distant relative of a tennis player, then it could be true.

I’m really tired after battling with the bathroom decoration yesterday and today. It took me a whole day to strip the old wallpaper from the walls, and then there was more stripping, sanding and undercoating to do today. I will have to wait until tomorrow to put the first coat of paint on. It’s single coat, and hopefully one coat will do. Usually when you pull wallpaper off, you have nasty surprises about the state of the walls behind. There was a hidden bonus for me though : I discovered a recessed hole for an electric socket (ready wired and just waiting for the socket itself) that had been papered over. I tested the wires and there’s voltage there. So Yasmina may finally get her electric towel heater since my final argument that there wasn’t a convenient power source is now defeated .

Some rather more scientific evidence based around the global temperature record seems to point more convincingly towards a small rise in temperatures, between 0.4 and 0.6° celsius. This evidence shows a warming trend, but fluctuations in temperatures of the Earth have happened in cycles for millenia and some people openly state that this fact is often ignored.

Fred Singer, a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton says the following :

[...] observations show that sea level has risen in the last 18,000 years by about 400 feet and is continuing to rise at a uniform rate, and is not accelerating, irrespective of warming or cooling.

The strongest scientific facts I could find are here, from which I quote :

Climate change is controlled primarily by cyclical eccentricities in Earth’s rotation and orbit, as well as variations in the sun’s energy output.

On one hand, the press seems to pick up on many anecdotes as pointers to global warming. Fear and doubt sells newspapers. On the other, scientists and long term records show that we are part of inevitable warming and cooling cycles which are beyond the control of humans. However, this does not mean that we should allow gratuitous pollution to continue, because other more serious effects of releasing noxious gases into the atmosphere are a public health concern of a different kind – notably a prevalence of asthma and other breathing problems in industrial regions.

Do not confuse climate models which predict warming with rather more widely accepted research about ozone depletion which causes more harmful ultraviolet radiation to strike the Earth, and caused a widespread reduction in the use of CFCs.

Perhaps you disagree with me, but I’m afraid for the moment I’d have to say I would rather play cautiously and reduce CO₂ emissions for a number of other reasons than an imprecise fear of global warming. Carbon based fuels will not last forever at current consumption levels. A lot of fuel is wastefully burned in inefficient ways – especially in large engined motor cars. This waste worries me far more than a fear of possible global warming. Science should allow us to be increasingly abstemious with resources, and yet with industrial and scientific progress waste seems to increase!

Perhaps controversially, I might give the last word to Fred Singer, who says :

[...] there are many more important problems in the world to worry about, such as diseases, pandemics, nuclear war and terrorism. The least important of these is global warming produced by humans, because it will be insignificant compared to natural fluctuations of climate.