Category: Uncategorized

“Those who cannot remember George Santayana are condemned to misquote him.”

Alan Kay once said that the thing to worry about is not artificial intelligence. The thing to worry about is natural stupidity.

I mentioned this recently to Jaron Lanier. He pointed out that this has an interesting side effect: It makes it easier for an AI to pass the Turing test.

After all, if you put an artificial intelligent computer at one terminal, and a naturally stupid person at the other, it might be impossible to tell the difference.

First the Supreme Court grants our former president magical and unlimited king-like powers of immunity against any and all crimes, as long as he can say “I did it in my official capacity.”

Then a would-be assassin manages to miss a clear shot with an AR-15 from a mere 400 feet away — which is a pretty astonishing thing to do if you know anything about firearms. Which leads to a “raised fist” visual that seems custom made for mugs, t-shirts and future flags.

Now judge Cannon dismisses the documents case by pretending that she is not aware of 28 U.S. Code § 533, which authorized the appointment of the special counsel.

I am starting to think that the fix is in.

So many jokes on the Internet today. Out of a sense of discretion, I won’t participate.

But I will say that they are cheering me up. So many of them are right on target.

A friend recently told me that he had just turned sixty four. In true proud nerd fashion, he said “I’ve finally added that sixth zero to my age.

So I told him “You don’t look a day over 11110.”

See if you can match the name in the first column with the name in the second column.

1 Austen	A Asquitho
2 Boccaccio	B Bogdanovich
3 Dickens	C Brooks
4 Dostoevsky	D Clayton
5 Fitzgerald	E Corman
6 Forster	F Ford
7 Hardy	G Huston
8 Heller	H Ivory
9 James	I Jackson
10 Kafka	J Lean
11 Melville	K Lee
12 Pasternak	L Nichols
13 Poe	M Polanski
14 Steinbeck	N Pasolini
15 Tolkien	O Schlesinger
16 Wells	P Scorsese
17 Wilde	Q Welles
18 Wharton	R Whale

Cousins share a pair of grandparents. Second cousins share a pair of great-grandparents.

This leads to some interesting and non-trivial puzzles. For example, as you go up from second cousin to third cousin to fourth cousin, on the average, how many nth cousins do you have?

What kind of curve describes the rate of increase? Is there any reasonable way of figuring this out?

If you spend years working in an area of research, that activity starts to become its own little world. And like any human world, that world begins to develop its own language and culture.

A problem and then arise when you try to explain your work to others. From the perspective of many listeners, you are speaking an alien language. At best they try their best to understand that language. At worst, they are resentful of how your well meaning explanation is, in a sense, making them feel illiterate.

Which is why it is important to distinguish between the research and the demo. A demo does not try to explain things fully. Rather, it tries to communicate why what you have been working on is meaningful or important to others.

One of the hardest things to do in research is to separate yourself from all of those technical details that you are so proud of, and think about what you’ve been doing might mean to others. Once you can do that, you can start to design a great demo.

Many years ago, a Ph.D. student of mine subtitled his Doctoral dissertation “All My Failures”. Over the years I have come to understand how profoundly on target that statement was.

The nature of successful science is to embrace failure. Sure, we can celebrate the “Eureka” moment, but most of science is about doggedly trying things, and knowing that most of the things you try will fail.

Those failures are at least as important as the occasional successes. If you don’t understand the ways up the mountain that don’t lead to the top, you can’t really understand the mountain.

That student’s thesis was well written not just because he demonstrated some successful results (which he did), but because he also described the places of failure — the many experiments that did not work out. And sometimes it is in the understanding of those places that the deepest truths can be found.

On the other hand, very smart people cautioned that Truman was foolish to run against Dewey, when it was obvious that Dewey was going to win.