(Video in French, but with explanatory English captions.)
The geniuses at French company HumaRobotics have taught the Nao Robot platform to play Connect Four with a physical board. Now this is an impressive feat in its own right, but in addition, they’ve included error detection and (apparently, though not shown in the video) cheating detection. They’ve also made it possible for the robot to recognize people its played with before.
It won’t be many more years before a generation is born for whom playing with robots growing up is an everyday experience. These sorts of robotic playpals are high-tech research gimmicks now, but as the platforms and software mature and we begin to have an actual science and industry of social robotics, expect to see robotic play pals like these hitting the store shelves. (It should go without saying that Connect 4 can be thought of as an arbitrary proof of concept and that even a first generation of robotic play palls would have a huge number of different games in its repertoire.)
Expect, too, the standard industrial phenomena of rapid generational improvement, IP theft / cheap knock offs, a great deal of media hand wringing about what these robots are doing to “the Children”, etc.
In keeping with the time honored (4-ish years) tradition of my people (me), here’s a tracklisting for a mix of the best songs of 2011, as judged by the most rigorously objective standards available (my personal taste).
1. Hugh Laurie – St. James Infirmary (6:25)
2. TV On The Radio – Will Do (3:45)
3. The Decemberists – Calamity Song (3:48)
4. Destroyer – Chinatown (3:49)
5. Art Brut – Sealand (4:02)
6. The Long Winters – Connections In Nashville (4:46)
7. Gillian Welch – Scarlet Town (3:38)
8. Sonic Youth – Alice et Simon (2:38)
9. The Mountain Goats – Damn These Vampires (3:24)
10. Iron & Wine – Rabbit Will Run (5:30)
11. Thurston Moore – Illuminine (4:02)
12. Allo, Darlin’ – Let’s Go Swimming (4:31)
13. PJ Harvey – The Last Living Rose (2:21)
14. Bright Eyes – Jejune Stars (4:10)
15. Death Cab for Cutie – Codes And Keys (3:21)
16. Foo Fighters – Arlandria (4:27)
17. large prime numbers – for those about to galavant (13:38)
Happy New Year, everyone! 2011 was an absolutely killer year for music, and here’s hoping 2012 is even better.
Giles Bowkett is one of the few people who routinely writes essays that strike me as obviously wrong right up until I agree with them completely. Which is a fancy way of saying that he usually knows his shit and he’s always pretty persuasive. At least when it comes to tech anyway. (I disagree with most of his non-tech writing, but I suspect that’s due to us having different axioms.)
At any rate, the most recent essay to give me that sense was his recent post defending the proposition that “JavaScript is not a Language”. Go and read it, and consider it the next time JavaScript permits, forces, or cajoles you into some ridiculous hack or frustrates you with its ridiculously vague and squishy syntax.
If he’s reading, I’m interested what Smurf of Azure Abstraction has to say as a JavaScript hacker par excellence.
At any rate, I think Giles’ piece is substantially true and an interesting view of the problem. I think it helps to contextualize all the redefinition and pointless syntactical recursion I’ve had to put up with from JavaScript over the years. I can’t say whether or not CoffeeScript is better (not used it myself) but if it is, as Giles would have it, an actual language, then I can’t help but think it must be an improvement.
The economist Tyler Cowen gave a TED talk earlier this year about the dangers of thinking in “Stories”. He makes some excellent points regarding the fact that, though stories are a deeply ingrained part of human nature, they almost always conceal as much as they reveal. The world isn’t carved up into stories by default and in doing the carving ourselves important details get lost, facts get twisted, and emphasis gets assigned where it doesn’t belong.
I think that you’ll find his talk worth the 17 minutes you spend on it. If you’re so inclined, you can do that now:
In talking about stories, Cowen touches one of the most dangerous memes of modern thought: the Narrative. Now narratives are wonderful things in novels or other fiction, but narrative technique is increasingly being applied the factual world around us as a way to shape or distort our understanding of it. In Aristotle’s time this would have been called Sophistry. Today it’s called “Social Sciences”.
But the point remains the same. Narratives are used to take the facts and make them fit a particular worldview rather than the other way around. They are a way to take a common stock of facts and, through omission, emphasis, and distortion, use them to tell a just-so story about the world we find ourselves in.
These stories, of course, tend to grow up mycologically around significant events. The recent global financial crisis has spawned a profusion of narratives, as have the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as has the Arab Spring.
Of course no event of recent American history has spawned more narratives than 9/11. Some tell us that it was the first blow in a war of good versus evil. Some tell us that this was the evil empire getting its comeuppance. Some tell us this was our sack of Rome or, at the very least, our Lost Legions. But of course it wasn’t any of those things. It was far more complex and, to use Cowen’s word, messy. It was an event born from incomprehensible chain of choice and motivation. No story could possibly encompass the truth of what happened, and by trying to reduce thousands of lives into a simple narrative we delude ourselves about what really happened.
This is one of the reasons why Simon Schama’s piece for BBC News on 9/11 was so refreshing. The only stories he tells are memories. He uses them to highlight, powerfully, that this event matters and still ought to matter. But he does so without presuming to tell us a story about what it means. He demands that we pay attention, but doesn’t tell us where this is all going.
Human beings are story tellers by nature and so it’s probably no surprise that we try to understand the world in the form of narrative arcs. But while narrative arcs work well for the constrained world of fiction, they are inherently insufficient to help us navigate the real world. Even more troubling is the fact that narratives are inherently skewed. Not all are biased (though, per H. L. Mencken, Americans can’t resist a morality tale and so ours almost invariably are) but all of them make errors of emphasis or value. So at the best of times narratives are incomplete and at the worst of times they lead us actively astray.
And so I think Cowen’s call to resist the temptation towards stories and narratives is important, as is Schama’s call to attend to an event like 9/11 and to not write it off into the past so quickly. Stories may help us understand our myths, our culture, ourselves, or even our past, but they’re an extremely poor way to try and understand our present or to guide us as we build our future. Because the truth resists simplicity, and we do ourselves no favors by trying to force simplicity upon it.
I’m currently working on putting together my Best of 2011 mix. (Drop me a line if you’d like a copy.) One track I keep coming back to is “Arlandria” by Foo Fighters. I was generally hit-or-miss on their new album, but this tune is just absolutely killer.
Here’s a pretty good live performance of it. I can’t find details as to where or when this show was, but the band just rocks it live:
Attention Conservation Notice: Regular readers can skip this post without missing anything of importance.
Solution: I fixed this issue by opening the properties for the network and selecting “do not automatically connect to this network”, then disconnecting, reconnecting, and reauthenticating.
Details: I’m visiting my folks for the weekend, and their ISP here in the Tri-Cities is a little flaky. Earlier today the Internet service cut out and, not needing my machine at the moment, I just put it to sleep.
On resuming the machine, I couldn’t connect to their network. I confirmed that the network and internet were working fine on another machine.
Restarting router and modem did nothing. Restarting the machine did nothing. Restarting just the wireless LAN adapter did nothing. Windows’ Network Troubleshooting Wizard was its typical useless self. I tried reauthenticating to the network and messing with the network settings. Nothing worked.
On a lark I went into the list of visible wireless networks, right click on the appropriate network, selected properties and disabled the checkbox that says “Connect automatically when this network is in range.” I then reconnected to the network, it prompted me for credentials. When I reauthenticated, it worked fine.
I then re-enabled auto-connect and the network continued to work fine.
Seems that flaky Internet plus system suspend somehow equaled corrupted cached credentials or something. At any rate, the secret sauce for me was disabling auto-connect on that network.
Communism will go down as one of the great evils of the 20th century. Here’s hoping that the last communist regimes in the world collapse soon enough that its toxic impact on the 21st century can be minimized.
Kim Jong Il’s death will hopefully offer us a small step in that direction. His unique “juche” take on the twist Communist world view lead to the death (through starvation and execution) and imprisonment of millions of people. But North Korea and its people are still laboring under the horrors of a communist state. Kim Jong Il’s death is happy news, but it doesn’t end the terror that reigns in Northern half of the Korean peninsula.
A less happy death also occurred recently. Vaclav Havel, a great defender of liberty, also recently died. In this video he reminds us not only that there are still Communist and tyrannical states in the world, including one in our own backyard, but that there are still dissidents working to foster liberty and justice in those places. These dissidents deserve our admiration and support.
My favorite band of Cuban “dissidents”, Porno Para Ricardo:
Related: the lead singer, Gorki Aguila, spent time in a Cuban prison on charges of “Social Dangerousness”. I submit that this is the single most Punk Rock accomplishment a dissident can have.
I simply can’t stop watching this video. Luke is absolutely hilarious. If you’re not familiar with Barats and Bereta, then you owe it yourself to check them out.
1.) Carry out your own dead.
2.) No opium smoking in the elevators.
3.) In Competitions, during gunfire or while bombs are falling, players may take cover without penalty for ceasing play.
4.) A player whose stroke is affected by the simultaneous explosion of a bomb may play another ball from the same place.
4a.) Penalty one stroke.
5.) Pilsner should be in Roman type, and begin with a capital.
