Auto Crustacean

I have been threatening for a while to complain at length about aspects of Stack Exchange, but I've waited too long, and Stack Overflow itself has beat me to it.

Disclosure: I joined robotics.stack.exchange as I thought it might be an interesting way of challenging my lately moribund robotics efforts. It hasn't worked; but I knew it would take more than questions-and-answers-and-oh-god-the-forum-goblins-are-active-tonight to really get my juices flowing.
I've done my best to answer some questions, and I haven't asked any.
Because I realized I had no questions to ask that Google wasn't answering. It takes me less time to drill down through a Google session to the answer I want than to read through a series of Stack Exchanges.

 Random browsing has been thrown me a few gems though, my favorite being 'Does 17% Equal 0.17'.
It was as funny as watching people try to grasp the 0.99999...infinity = 1 mindtrap, or the the sound of brains detonating while grappling with the Monty Hall Problem.*

'Only the most clever and the most stupid cannot change.' -- Genna Sosonko

I like the idea of trying to sift out the best answers, and I like the idea of reputation servers, but I'm not convinced by this application. It has the same 'smell' as Slashdot, and it bothers me that I can 'taste' it but not elucidate what I am sensing.

Cleverness for cleverness sake. A pride in answering in oracular form. The unspoken demand that supplicants cringe and follow intricate protocol to be answered. Disdain for things that could be 'easily Googled'. The helpful voices fading into a sea of haughty demands:
"I find this question rather vague and off-topic."
"Also, a simple google search reveals information on how..."
"One way to find out is to actually take a course ... and see what it is about."
"How could you create a piece of code that will troll this user? Create a piece of code that will appear useful to an inexperienced programmer but is utterly useless in practice..."**  

This is clearly a signal-to-noise problem...but if we need to increase the s/n ratio, what do we do? This isn't a radio! What is our metaphorical antenna? How do we adjust the gain?

“But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.”

--Muriel Barbery

Or maybe I have just suddenly become too old, and too tired and too cynical to cope. Time for a brain massage...or maybe a brain wash.

*Its unfortunate that it is not known as Selvin's Slippery Snare. Its also strange that he postulated it in 1975, but it didn't become widely known until Marilyn Vos Savant published it in her column in 1990, igniting a firestorm of nerdrage. The Slippery Snare is one of the best mindtraps I know,but in this case did the suckers snap quicker at the lure, thinking that they were proving a woman wrong?

**All direct quotes, taken at random, and found within 20 minutes of semi-random sampling.

"We need a special glove to access this computer..."

If this were a perfect world, somebody would mash-up 'Masters of the Universe'(1987) and 'Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity'(1987)*.
The robots Vak and Krel, and the 'Alien Mutant' character all have the undeniable stamp of MOTU characters.
Eliminate Gwilidor altogether, and meld the Key with the musical instrument Zed plays:
"Its a holographic onyascillascopa...I'm not really that accomplished on it."
A whatasillascope? Did they mean a holophonor?

S.G.F.B.I. is probably the one of the best examples of a bad SF movie , with no redeeming factors.

It is not weird enough  to be entertaining, not smutty enough to be stimulating (maintains a constant sliminess throughout), the sets are dull and lack impact, and the acting is lame.
The director avoided all of the entertaining cliches; no filters, no Evil Controlled Lighting, no weird behaviors by the characters. There is just no fun, not from the lingering headshot of a shadow-obscured head that ends the opening scene, to the  we-will-explore-new-worlds vow at the ending.

Perhaps if savagely edited to a ten minute film it might be redeemable. Watch the prison cell breakout/spaceship theft, then skip to the PervBot 2000's arguing with each other over Venus rising listless from the waves, and then finish with the attempt to pull the blaster arm off of the 'Alien Mutant'....who simply is in the movie without explication, as if a perfectly normal detail of nature.
Perhaps it could be set to Rob Zombie's 'Living Dead Girl' and than 'Dragula', which would give a runtime of ~8 minutes, and would at least make a entertaining music video in the Dio - 'Holy Diver' mode.

...And the set designer for the trophy/banquet hall in S.G.F.B.I seems to have been inspired by 'Isle of the Hunter' out of Savage Sword of Conan.

*Should actually be called 'Slave Girls from Beyond Insanity'

Final Data of XCORE's Ten Word Contest

Excel didn't want to plot a logarithmic graph with zeros in it, so the final graph isn't a log display.
It didn't make a big difference anyways, beyond hiding the one data point of a twenty three word submission(!).

Now a couple of interesting spikes appear at 7 and 13. I'm guessing that the 13 spike is due to the use of acronyms. The spike at seven is a little more baffling. I suspect that this form of  a sentence will settle around 7 tokens: Temporal designator, connector, adjective for subject, subject, connector, adjective for verb, verb.
I'm not a linguist, and not going to pretend to know the correct syntax.
Looking at the spike, my eyes keep wanting to fit it to a bell curve, which is totally wrong. There is nothing but integer data here, which is why I have no error bars.

I think I have enough material for a discussion on the effects of visual illusions on graphing and maps, but that will wait for another day. The contest is over and the Tiny Lab is going out for lunch.

More Tiny Science

The XCORE Analog SliceKIT contest science continues:

Graph range expanded to fit in a outrider at 23 words long.

Now when I stop accepting hyphenation to create single words, and expand acronyms - in two cases finding both in a single sample, I get the more interesting curve:

The peak growing at 13 seems to be a artifact of our tendencies to use three-letter acronyms. I think its time to start using a log plot though.

Fuzzy values of 10

XCORE is holding a competition for free swag; the contest requirements are simple:
describe what you'd do with the micro controller prize in exactly ten words.
The opening page is very clear.

"...tell us what you will use it for... in only 10 words." 

"...tells us what your project will be in only 10 words" 

 "Only project ideas that are EXACTLY 10 words will be accepted" (emphasis theirs). 

"To enter the Draw you must reply to the competition thread with you (sic) 10 word project idea. You (sic) project idea must be exactly 10 words to be valid."

Out of a post of 888 words, which includes the official contest rules, this is stated five times.

 If you found the contest via their mailout (like I did), the email also says this is several different ways, but out of 208 words it says it 3 times.

So I think we're pretty clear on the Rule.

I'd also like to point out that as this is a text-based medium and a text-based forum, that most likely  the literacy rate of the participants should be around 99%.

Functional comprehension on the other hand...

John Boyd liked to argue that when anyone experienced an event, they followed a predictable path of computation, acronymed OODA.

They Observed the event, Oriented the data, Decided on a course of action, and then they Acted.

This is probably why even creatures capable of thinking still rely on hardwired reactions in situations of trouble: by cutting out the Orient and Decision steps, they can get a serious speed up in reaction. The drawback of course, is that the hardwired reactions aren't very smart. 

Bolting when sensing a sudden anomalous event is useful if you are a rabbit, but if you're in a minefield its just not going to work very well. (I remember a SF novel based on the premise of not-reacting being the only reason why the protagonist survived, but I'll be damned if I can remember its title right off. Perhaps it was a short story? But I digress.)

Boyd, despite his brilliance*, left little behind in the form of written word, which is unfortunate, because I'd like to know what he thought about the problems of Observing, Orienting, and then making the Wrong Decision before Acting.

Like, in this example, posting project ideas in more or less words than required.

This is the kind of tiny research the Tiny Lab Director likes, so here is the current data out of 62 entries:

Words.     Entries.

5            1

6            0

7            3

8            2

9            2

10          50

11          0

12          1

13          0

14          0

15          1

 Oh, Homo Sapiens, what are we going to do with you...

There is a bit of contentious data, of course. Of the 50 'correct answers', 6 used acronyms to bring the count down, and three more hyphenated to create compound words. So the table could be redrawn with the 10 row changed to '41', the 11 row changed to '3' and the 13 and 14 rows changed to '4' and '2' respectively.

 

 So from this data can we conclude that to many people, the number '10' actually has a diffuse blur of values from 6 to 15? Can I work in an obscure 'fuzzy logic' joke here, or is this entire post a fuzzy joke?

Speaking of jokes, there were several joke submissions, all of which were exactly 10 words long.

*He also tested low on I.Q., which is interesting, considering his various exploits that demonstrated considerable intelligence. The ugly specter of our lack of comprehension of thought reappears. (I am really tempted to see how many more 'of's I can add to that sentence. 'Of the Ugly specter of our lack of comprehension of thought I've** often had thoughts of...'

** As a poet, I'm free to use this variant, cf. Berstein, McCaffery,Hejinian, et al. And yes, this too, is a Fuzzy Joke.

Bad Art as a Mental Vaccine

 I was trying to explain to a friend why I wasn't too interested in watching Ender's Game.
I've read the book three or four times over the years and didn't really care for it, not to mention that the shock value of the ending, like all surprise endings, only works the once. I thought Ender's Shadow was a better book, but I probably wouldn't watch it in movie form either.
"Its a really good movie", he assured me "You shouldn't miss a movie this good."
I made some rebuttal along the lines of 'lacking time', but he wasn't going to accept that.
He felt that since I would make the time to watch really bad movies,  that I should place really good movies at an even higher priority. But I'm not too interested in a 'good' movie. There is lots of those, and I haven't even taken the time to watch Citizen Kane yet.
I watch bad movies the same reason I read bad books; to learn from them. So I was somewhat amused to discover the footsteps of an explorer ahead of me:

 "In one sense, at any rate, it is more valuable to read bad literature than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man; but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men. A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture. The more dishonest a book is as a book the more honest it is as a public document. A sincere novel exhibits the simplicity of one particular man; an insincere novel exhibits the simplicity of mankind. The pedantic decisions and definable readjustments of man may be found in scrolls and statute books and scriptures; but men's basic assumptions and everlasting energies are to be found in penny dreadfuls and halfpenny novelettes. Thus a man, like many men of real culture in our day, might learn from good literature nothing except the power to appreciate good literature. But from bad literature he might learn to govern empires and look over the map of mankind.”  -- G.K.Chesterton

There is more than that, of course: reading the bad sharpens the mind; it trains by the example of failure; it exposes the reader to a thousand tricks and cons.

Because the Reader is tested by the experience, his mental immune systems improve*. Show me someone impressed by Mein Kampf, and I'll show you someone that has never read more than a dozen books  in their life**. 

This too, is the danger of censorship. Weak paradigms fear books because they immunize. If you've waded though, say The Book of Mormon, The Silmarillian, The Prophet, and Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, you're going to have a hard time to take seriously anything said by Paul of Tarsus or John the Divine. This,I suppose, is the lasting value of actually reading the articles in Playboy.***

So this is why I will not take the time to watch Ender's Shadow or Schindler's List or The Shawshank Redemption , but I will watch The Terrornauts or The Hooded Mummy Versus the Other Alien, or anything that promises Godzilla.

Because I have more to learn from the quirk of his scaly lips than from a thousand serious films.

*For instance, I could have phrased this as 'hers' or even as 'their'. I learned about gender phrasing problems by reading. I also learned the meaning of 'cissexual', which someday I will work into a complex 'Narcissisexual' joke.

** I'd like to make a similar remark about The Wealth of Nations, but that book's failure is too subtle for a fair comparison.

***Although it was Penthouse that infected me with the phrase "...contrasting with her hearty English labia." Which to this day I cannot decide if it was the product of a porn movie reviewer slowly losing his mind, or a massively overqualified journalist.

Frusteration is...

1. Carrying the carboy of mead down from the fermentation room a week ahead so that all possible yeast cells can settle;
2. Cleaning and sanitizing 47 bottles to rack the mead into;
3. Arranging sanitized equipment next to carboy;
4. Dropping the siphon line into the carboy
and than
5. Absent-mindedly scraping the end of the line through the yeast sediment, swirling up a nightmare of fine yeast. A slowly swirling cloud that spreads and dissipated through the batch before my horrified eyes.

Which leads to 6: put everything away, wait until tomorrow.
Bah.