What’s cool is getting data and hacking yourself. What happens in your blood when you eat a low-carb meal, for instance? Now I know, precisely. (Blood glucose actually _down_ from fasting levels — 85 to 76, this morning.) There’s a hypothesis that under fasting conditions if you impose a metabolic demand that glucagon and adrenaline will shoot up to make up the shortfall. Am interested to see how that plays out.

The ultimate point is to investigate how blood glucose tracks with energy levels, pain, mood. I will know eventually. Also will get some Ketostix, since I have anecdotal evidence on extended low-carb’s efficacy for pain control.

I wish there was some more shit I could measure. This was one of the big reasons I applied to both the neuroscience and psychology programs, btw — easy access to do my own blood work. Of course, I didn’t mention that in the application.

Maybe I should get a job as a lab tech after this? Hmm. Or better yet: can you buy the equipment they use to do a full blood workup? I’m sure it’s crazy expensive, but maybe after the initial layout running a single test isn’t too prohibitive?

For instance, the other day I recalled a famous passage from Adam Smith that I wanted to cite: something about an earthquake in China. I briefly considered scouring my shelves in search of my copy of The Wealth of Nations. But I have thousands of books spread throughout my house, and they are badly organized. I recently spent an hour looking for a title, and then another skimming its text, only to discover that it wasn’t the book I had wanted in the first place. And so it would have proved in the present case: for the passage I dimly remembered from Smith is to be found in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Why not just type the words “adam smith china earthquake” into Google? Mission accomplished.

Of course, more or less everyone has come to depend on the Internet in this way. Increasingly, however, I rely on Google to recall my own thoughts. Being lazy, I am prone to cannibalizing my work: something said in a lecture will get plowed into an op-ed; the op-ed will later be absorbed into a book; snippets from the book may get spoken in another lecture. This process will occasionally leave me wondering just how and where and to what shameful extent I have plagiarized myself. Once again, the gates of memory swing not from my own medial temporal lobes but from a computer cluster far away, presumably where the rent is lower.

When I was in the AI lab at USC we always talked about building an AI, teaching it in various clever ways — teach it like you teach a child! — and this is a clever way of thinking about AI that various AI labs are starting to catch on to, although the main thing about AI labs is that they don’t really like to be called AI labs anymore since the term is so effusive, and they know it.

But we don’t spend enough time thinking about cognition as an enterprise, something to be done cooperatively, even though we do it all the time: Monica knows where everything is in the house; I know the best way to make a pizza. She puts it in the oven, I check it, or tell her when to check it. She tells me where to find my socks. This is a stupid example but it’s one everybody can understand.

But there’s another level, one we’re just starting to see plainly because it’s so plain, and that level is using tools to think, to remember. And most of what’s happened so far has been an accident, as in the above quote, and the tools help us with our “thinking” almost as an afterthought. I’ve been interested for years in making a tool that helped us think better, whose main purpose would be for that and not anything else, but various things have kept me from it.

Someday, when Wes graduates, we can start building it.

Anyway, it must have rubbed off on me, cause I think about the future a lot. Remember those idiotic movies from the fifties and sixties about what it would be like in 2000? Predictions are hard. They’re hard because humans are shitty at understanding nonlinearities. We’re used to eating a little more, and getting a little fatter, or working out more, and getting a little stronger. Not eating a little more, and gaining one thousand pounds. (Not you, Andy.)

But certain things are replete with nonlinearities, and technology is one of them, and these days technology touches everything, which is why if you went back in time and told you from fifteen years ago about the world of today, the you of fifteen years ago would think you were a raving lunatic, the time-travel thing notwithstanding. With this in mind, fifteen years from now is going to be way weirder, relatively speaking, than now is compared to fifteen years ago. And so on.

Which is a long way of saying that when I think about the future I try not to make the same stupid mistakes that those dudes did in the fifties and sixties. I aspire to different mistakes, ones that are not so cripplingly stupid. Who knows how close my vision will be, or rather, whether it will be relatively more- or less-awful than an unfettered imagination might produce. But I really dug this post by Robin Hanson:

When our distant descendants think about our era, however, differences will loom larger. Yes they will see that we were more like them in knowing more things, and in having less contact with a wild nature. But our brief period of very rapid growth and discovery and our globally integrated economy and culture will be quite foreign to them. Yet even these differences will pale relative to one huge difference: our lives are far more dominated by consequential delusions: wildly false beliefs and non-adaptive values that matter. While our descendants may explore delusion-dominated virtual realities, they will well understand that such things cannot be real, and don’t much influence history. In contrast, we live in the brief but important “dreamtime” when delusions drove history. Our descendants will remember our era as the one where the human capacity to sincerely believe crazy non-adaptive things, and act on those beliefs, was dialed to the max.

Elan and I used to argue about whether the world was getting worse or better. I said better, because we don’t fully grasp how horseshit stuff was then, for damn near everybody; and how the things that are really bad these days (smallish genocides, for instance) were common enough as to be unremarkable > 500 years ago (or even > 20). But maybe he was right. I’ll need to think more about it. In the meantime, dig Robin’s post. And if you have any of your own ideas about the future, let’s hear em.

x: If I want to talk to somebody, I just call them.
y: I know.
x: And most of the stuff people are texting, it’s just stupid. “I’m going to the grocery store, what are you doing?”
y: It shows a lack of respect, I think. To have all those things going at the same time.
x: If I’m talking to you then I’m talking to _you_.

It appears that these people did not recognize me, as they did not immediately solicit my opinion, which is a pity, because after a brief lecture I might have altered their world views.

*

A refutation, here, about what texting is and isn’t would be idiotic, since all but two of you know exactly what it is. But I will indulge in something slightly less idiotic and step back and speak more generally, prompted by this post of danah boyd’s, which is lovely and says exactly what a lot of people have been thinking for a while now.

People get fundamentally confused by new things that seem to be a simple extension to something they already know well. Like, a telephone conversation is a conversation that’s simply on the telephone, and an email is like a letter, and what’s different about having an iPhone is that now you can check your email on the bus. These things are usually true in the most uninteresting sense of ‘true’ but only in that way. Everyone knows this about some domains – we all know precisely how a telephone call is _not at all_ like having a conversation; how the circumstances are different, the acoustics are different, the feeling of intimacy is different, the logistics are different, the time commitment is different, the expectations are different, the physiological indicators are different. Yes, in both cases you are ostensibly ‘communicating’ but even the topics of communication are different.

So as it turns out, a phone call is really hardly at all like an in-person conversation. And nobody has the slightest difficulty in seeing that.

I am a mix of amused and frustrated that this insight, so respendant in other facets of life, cannot be extended to The Next Thing. Like text messaging; and Twitter; and all of that. Texting is not like a letter, only super short. The ecosystem of texting: its asynchrony, its low-commitment in time and attention for sender and receiver, its prevalence, its immediacy – all of this, and other stuff, combine to make it a whole nother thing. It _feels_ different; it gives rise to different sorts of interactions, which bring with them different benefits (and costs.) It’s like knowing somebody at church and also knowing them from playing basketball – neither version is the ‘real’ person. People go to church, and they play ball. Ball isn’t a weird version of outside-church where people run around a lot, and sweat, and Ryan Houle complains.

(Crap, I just spent a bunch of time explaining texting, which I said I wouldn’t do.)

Anyway. So extend the texting idea to what it means to sit through a meeting or presentation, to what a ‘presentation’ is, or what it should be, or what a fifty-five year old humanities scholar expects it to be vs. a thirty year old techno-sociologist or whatever boyd is expects it to be. Once you consider the interaction on its own terms, a whole new world of endeavor opens up, and it’s this that fascinates: the chance (or requirement) that technology offers us to re-imagine not only how we do stuff, but the kind of stuff we do, and what we hope to achieve in the attempt.

Elan will especially appreciate this.

(via kottke.)

This function, for instance, is pretty interesting. It shows what happens when I come near an object. (There’s other stuff in the conditional that I’ve omitted for clarity.)

((def process-near-object (thing)
     ;; Is it junk food?
     (cond
      ((and (is-junk-food thing)
	    (in-front-of thing :me))
       (eat thing))))

That explains a lot, actually – there’s no complicated nonsense, no willpower, no thinking. Well, I mean, observationally all of those things happen, but I guess they don’t actually matter. If junk food happens to fall into my area of control I’ll just eat it. All the thinking and agonizing and stuff happens somewhere else, and doesn’t really matter.

But this one is the real eye opener. It’s pretty long, even after I’ve edited out a bunch of stuff. Still, it explains a hell of a lot:

(def behave
     (let
	 ((my-location (get-current-location :me))
	  (my-state (get-current-state :me)))
       (cond

	;; Am I at the gym?
	((is-at :gym my-location)
	 (workout))

	;; Is there a book in my hands?
	((is-book? (get-item-in-hands :me))
	 (read (get-item-in-hands)))

	;; Am I in bed, ready to sleep?
	((and (is-at? :bed my-location)
	      (in-sleep-posture (get-current-configuration)))
	 (sleep))

	;; What happens when I get hungry?
	((is-hungry? my-state)

	 ;; If I brought my lunch, eat it.
	 (if (brought-lunch? :me)
	     (eat (get-lunch :me))

	   ;; If I didn't bring a lunch, find junk food and eat it.
	   (progn
	     (let ((junk-food (find :junk-food)))
	       (eat junk-food))))))))

Basically, the idea is the same – all kinds of my behavior is actually pretty straightforward. If I happen to find myself at the gym, I’ll workout. If I’m in bed, I’ll go to sleep. If I have a book in my hands, I’ll read it.

But the most interesting (to me) one is the clause about being hungry. This has really been on my mind lately since I’ve been working at the U. For a few days I’d be eager to get over there, and the state of our house made it difficult to cook, so I wouldn’t make a lunch and told myself I’d either skip lunch or else get something healthy around campus. Of course, it never worked, and now I see why.

Since most of you don’t know Lisp you might be a little confused. The code explains what I do when I’m hungry, but it doesn’t go into what happens to me afterward. It’s probably something super-complicated, right? I mean, who could possibly predict my mood and my physical condition in the wake of being hungry? It might be anything from the entire human repertoire, after all.

Still, impossible though the task is, I’ve toiled for hours, bringing all my signficant expertise as both an artist and a scientist to bear in attempting to lay it out for you in this deterministic finite automaton, which I’ve extracted from a hex dump of myself:

As you might expect, this diagram is imperfect. The state space is nearly infinite, after all, and for this reason a DFA is not a particularly good model for representing human behavior to a human. Still, if you relax a little this diagram pretty much says it all.

What about non-food, though? Is there any insight to be found in more complicated domains? Since I know how demanding you guys are I did another few hours of work and finally came up with another DFA:

This diagram is subtle, so allow me to interpret: if I’m in the state of being with Peaches, there’s only one action that can be taken: we’ll hang out. If we hang out, there’s only one possible state that I could transition to: feeling good. (That’s where the ‘deterministic’ in ‘deterministic finite automaton’ comes from.)

*

Now that you’ve got a whirlwind tour of computer science, what should you take away? The big idea is that if I am any guide, people are just not that complicated. Really, in the common case – in the vast majority of your daily activities – there’s just not a lot to think about. If I get into the state of “hungry without lunch” then there will be only one outcome, and that outcome is bad. If I am in the state of “with Peaches” then there will also be only one outcome, and that outcome is good.

So instead of spending a lot of time worrying about why I’m feeling bad, maybe the better way to conduct my life would be to exploit these simple causal relationships described very clearly in code. I don’t need any particular will power, I don’t need to do anything heroic. I just need to make sure to have a fucking lunch with me when I’m hungry.

It takes a while to make and export and upload these diagrams, but in my notebook I’ve identified a shitload of pretty simple DFA that have ‘feeling good’ (or something like it) as a resultant state out of another state with only one possible transition. Likewise, I have no shortage of equivalent single transitions out of a state into ‘feeling bad.’

Which means that all my bitching and moaning just makes something very simple into something very complicated. And I’m tired of doing that.

With that in mind you might understand why lately I’ve been doing my normal thing where I obsess about the imperfections of something and try to imagine a way that I could make a better, perfect thing, immune to all the problems and insecurities of the thing I actually possess. Specifically, I’ve been scheming about how I could have a super safe house that would be so solidly constructed I wouldn’t have to worry about stupid shit like water damage or hail damage or weird leaks or fukl0rd insects infesting it, or the front yard disappearing in a landslide. And I wouldn’t have to worry about burglars breaking into it – I’d be able to lock it down like a fortress, create a fire corridor around the only entrance, secure my air supply, and if worst came to worst escape out of a secret bolt hole disguised as a tree, or emerge from an airlock underneath a lake. Or something.

I despaired of ever making this happen in reality until I found this site. If I still had that job in NH I could have a house like this! You can build one for the same price as a traditional house, and then clean up by paying almost nothing for utilities! God damn it, why didn’t I think about this earlier?

Just wait till I have a real job again. My secret bunker house, with a reconfigurable interior metal lattice, and cafe-style seating, _will_ be a reality.

As editors of Brain Harvest, we want to publish stuff at a length accessible to mobile devices. As a super handsome dude said, we’re talking about fiction you can read in the gap between the time you order a cheeseburger and when they hand you the bag. You can say a remarkable amount in this amount of words, and that length is underserved by the existing establishment. Plus you can read ‘em quick, which is important when you get 10+ submissions a day, which is what we’ve been getting since mid-February.

We’re a pro market, which means we actually pay people when we publish their stuff. This is an interesting prospect, since after the end of this week I will be unemployed, bringing the total of employed BH editors to 1. We have various schemes on how to drag this fucker into the black, but for now, publishing only once a week, we should be able to stay alive for a while before we bleed out. And maybe unemployment will give me the chance to do some work on the site to make it cooler.

So if you’ve got the aforementioned cheeseburger time, head over to BH and become part of our fiction-centered community. If you have suggestions, about anything, mail me any time. And if you can write something interesting that’s between 100 and 750 words, I urge you to submit it – the world of fiction needs you.

Update: Cory posted a blurb about BH on Boing Boing! Damn it, Eden got mentioned, but I didn’t. Guess that’s because he looooves her.

“The things I do for love.”

If you’ve read the book and that doesn’t give you chills I don’t believe you’ve actually read the book.

There is also lots of talk about casting and shooting locations, which sound like they will be in northern England for the most part.