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Musical Similarity

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:03:29 -0500

Of these three songs, two are from Halo 3 and one is from Santana. Using only sound (i.e. without watching the video, or their titles), try and guess which is which. It might be easiest to have a friend administer this test, less you accidentally see the title of the YouTube page, which reveals the solution.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFOJ13sw8o4#t=1m00s from 1:00 to 1:10
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tw4-hMTTSQ8#t=0m25s from 0:25 to 0:40
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frntiiyoreg#t=0m05s from 0:05 to 0:50

Windows 7 Launch Party

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:19:38 -0400

Microsoft’s advertising campaign is to get people to host “Windows 7 Launch Parties” in various countries across the world. I don’t want to get into the details, but basically you get a bunch of your friends to come over and you show off Windows 7 to them. The motivation is that Microsoft will send you a bunch of free stuff to help host your party, including a free copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, and sort of grab bag goodies to give to your guests. I’m one of the hosts.

As a host, one of the things Microsoft provides us with are notes on how to host the party (ideas for activities, answers to questions that guests might ask you about Windows 7, etc.) and instructional videos. Here’s one of those videos.

The video is pretty terrible. They shake the camera too much, and have too many cuts; I guess they were trying to get an informal “reality TV” look. The actors sound too fake, and their dialog is unbelievable.

At 5:50, it would have been a lot funnier if everyone became silent, and the black guy was staring at the nerd like “And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?” The nerd is like “No, I just meant, uh… ‘cause like, you know, you were… you told me how… um… like, when you tried to set up your iPod last time, you uh… you got this error message… and uh…”

Epic Magic the Gathering 4FFA

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:51:36 -0400

Don’t bother reading this post if you don’t know how to play Magic the Gathering. You won’t understand much. I had an epic battle on Xbox Live where I took a totally unleveled deck and battled four player free-for-all and pretty much “won”, even though their decks were leveled up.

So the way Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers on Xbox 360 works is that there are pre-built decks of around 60 cards, but you only gain access to around 45 of them at first. You have to grind through the single player campaign to “unlock” the last 15 or so cards of each deck. So if you don’t grind, your deck is playable, but often those 15 cards are the most powerful cards of the deck, and so you’re generally better off doing the grinding.

So I go online and do a ranked matched “any game”, and end up in a 4 player free for all. Note that I didn’t know the decks at the time, but now in retrospect I’m able to identify them. I was using a completely base “Ears of the Elves” (literally 0 cards unlocked), and played against 3 players, at least one of whom had fully unlocked his decks.

The guy to my left was playing a pure-white deck heavily based upon flying creatures, so probably it was “Wings of Light”. The guy across from me was using some sort of super-monster green deck, so I’m thinking it must have been “Teeth of the Predator”. He’s the one who had fully unlocked his deck. Finally, the guy to the right of me was playing a pure-red deck, though nothing stood out to me, so I’m guessing he was using “Hands of Flame”.

I’ll reiterate that although I played the single player campaign, this was the absolute first time I played online, and the first time I played with the deck I was using. I didn’t even know what kind of deck I had until maybe the 5 or 6th turn where I realized it was elf-themed (I didn’t bother reading the name of the deck). All I had noted was that it was a green + black, so I was expecting a swarm deck (due to green) with some sort of “sacrifice creature to do something cool” kind of thing (due to black). Turns out my deck was a pure swarm deck, but whatever.

So the first few turns we’re all bringing out our creatures, but nobody is attacking. The game starts to drag on, and it’s quickly becoming clear that no one is going to attack. I get the sense that a “cold-war” kind of vibe is coming up: Nobody wants to unleash the first strike, because then they’d receive retaliation.

With this realization, I take a look at the number of cards in each of our deck. This is developing into a game of attrition, and so whoever has the least number of cards is going to lose first. That turned out to be me (in retrospect, this was kind of obvious, since I had zero unlocks), so I knew I had to break the peace. The guy with the most amount of cards was the green deck across from me.

Unfortunately, that bastard had brought out three, I repeat, three fucking Wurm’s Tooth’s, and so he was getting 3 health every time someone cast a green spell. Add to the fact that he and I are both playing green decks, and he was currently at 50+ health. This guy had a strong chance of being the winner, which was both good and bad for him. It’s good because if this game of attrition went too long (i.e. if the other players were stupid), he can just coast to victory. It’s bad because his position was too visible. In other words, it was clear that he was way ahead of everyone else, which risked having the other players form an alliance against him. Then again, this being my first online Magic game, I wasn’t sure how easy it was to form an alliance. There was no text nor voice chat system, so I couldn’t ask the other players to rally with me.

Not 100% sure, but I think at this point, I could already see that themes of the green deck across from me was “giant creatures”. I forget what he had exactly, but we’re talking like 5/5s being his weakest, and maybe he had an 8/8 in there too. The white deck to my left, probably also clearly became a “flying deck”. He probably brought out a couple of weak flyers (1/1) early, but he I bet he had a 5/5 or two out by now. The red deck, on the other hand, I had no idea what the heck he was doing. He hard hardly brought anything out. He brought out a Raging Globin moderately early (not first turn, but before the green guy and possibly the white guy had any monsters), but he was too chicken shit to actually attack anyone with it.

On my side, I was spamming out elves. I brought out Gaea’s Herald (who, BTW, is considered an “elf”) early on the off chance that someone had counter spells (despite nobody playing blue) (and in the end, nobody had ever cast any counter spells the whole game). Then I had a couple of Elvish Warriors out (plain 2/3 monsters) and probably some other miscellaneous elf cards like Farhaven Elf and one Elven Riders. I got Lys Alana Huntmaster out pretty late unfortunately, so I think I ended up with only something like four or six 1/1 tokens.

This is where the game got interesting. Up until now, it was just a cold war build up. But then, the green bastard across from me brought out Verdant Force. At first, I thought this guy only created a 1/1 every time it was his upkeep, but it turns out it’s a 1/1 creature for every player’s upkeep, which meant that by the time the turn came back to him, he’d have four 1/1 creatures out. Definitely too fucking powerful. So I was the first one to go on the offense. I cast Eyeblight’s Ending taking out his Verdant Force, after it had spawned a 1/1.

I think I broke the ice here, because after my spell, the white guy on my left attacked with about half of his force, trying to hit the green guy. Since all of white’s creatures were flying, quite a few got through. Unfortunately, some were blocked, and this is what happened:

The green guy had Vigor out, and if you don’t know that card, you should definitely read it, because it is total bullshit. Vigor makes all your creatures invincible, and every time you try to damage them, instead they get a permanent +1/+1. Also, any time Vigor goes to the graveyard, he’s instead shuffled into your library. PURE BULLSHIT. Imagine a spawn deck + Vigor + Earthquake. Anyway, so one of green’s creatures got a permanent +1/+1.

While I’m at it, I might was well mentioned that green also had Elvish Piper which essentially let him cast any creature he wanted for 1 mana, which is just adding insult to injury, because by this point we all had like 10+ or 15+ lands.

The green guy got pissed off by this, and essentially sent a horde against white. Basically, at this point, white looked like he was screwed. If white did not block, you’re very easily looking at 20 damage this turn, AKA instant death. Probably he was doing 30 or 35 damage in fact. White could have blocked just fine (he certainly had enough creatures to do so), but because of Vigor, all of green’s blocked monster would not only take 0 damage, but they would gain a permanent +1/+1 due to the blocking.

I already knew what card I wanted to play… the only issue is I wasn’t sure when I wanted to play it. I was considering playing it last turn when white attacked, but I didn’t. But I saw here and now that if I didn’t play it, essentially green would completely overpower white, and no matter whether white blocks or not, I’m not sure red and I could have handled it alone. So I played my card.

I cast Eyeblight’s Ending on Vigor.

This instantly completely changed the whole battle. With Vigor out of the picture, white blocked the shit out of that force, devastating them. Then red did nothing, then the turn came back to me. I brought out Elvish Champion which gave all my creatures +1/+1, and best of all, forestwalk. I declared my attack phase, and the green player quit the game. I didn’t even have to actually tap any creatures for the attack. One down, two to go.

The red player tried to fuck me over here. He used some sort of creature ability on the white player (I forget what) and cast some sort of 3 damage instant on my Elvish Champion, trying to kill the 2/2 creature. I fucked him right back by doing Essence Drain on his creature, and then Giant Growth on the Elvish Champion. At this point, the red player said fuck it, and disconnected too.

Unfortunately, when the red player disconnected, the game ended, saying that the host has left the game. I’m sort of relieved that I didn’t have to fight the white player, because I had established a sort of camaraderie with him.

If the game had kept going, would I have won? It’s very hard to tell, not because we were evenly matched or anything, but because I couldn’t remember what my remaining cards were.

Basically, after the red guy, it’s my turn, then the white guy’s turn. And the white has all flying monsters, and I have zero flying monsters, so unless I can kill white this turn, he would kill me next turn.

I’m pretty sure that I had Overrun, so I definitely want to use the trample ability. But what I can’t remember is whether or not I had Coat of Arms. If I did, that’s an easy +10/+10 to all my creatures, combined with trample means I win (unless he had Wrath of God or something like that). If I didn’t have that card, then he could probably block enough to ensure that I don’t kill him, and then he’d kill me.

6 reasons to not hate Microsoft

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:48:45 -0400

A lot of people hate Microsoft. I don’t. If you do hate Microsoft, here are some things to consider, which may make you reconsider your hatred for Microsoft.

First one is a “bonus” reason, because it really isn’t related to Microsoft at all, but instead has to do with Bill Gates. It’s included in this list because a good portion of people who hate Microsoft seem to mix up the company with its former CEO. So if you’re one of those people, this reason is for you. Gates has donated more money to charity than any other one person. He founded the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation, one of the biggest philanthropic organizations in the world. Not only has he donated almost all of his own money, he regularly campaigns for other rich people to donate their money to help the less fortunate as well. Since retiring from Microsoft, he has become a full time philanthropist. He doesn’t just throw money at the problem, but actively gets involved in understanding the problem of poverty and finding the best way to fix it in the long term. As a result, most of his donations are in the form of investing in education and healthcare in impoverished countries so that future generations can prosper, as opposed to buying and giving away food to the hungry, which only treats the symptoms. In terms of actual results, and assuming you value human welfare and negatively value suffering, Bill Gates has probably done more good to the world than any other person who has ever lived.
If you hate Microsoft because they are “evil”, first, think about what the word “evil” means. To me, “evil” implies raping babies. It implies torture. It implies genocide. It implies chaining people up. I don’t mean the figurative chaining of “Oh, I have to use Microsoft Word because everyone else uses it, so I’m chained” while drinking $5 starbucks coffee and reading RSS feeds on your iPhone. I mean literally having chains made of metal oval links, in some damp basement with no light sources, and suffering some sensory deprivation, and needing several years of therapy to overcome. Microsoft is a corporation and corporations don’t have morality. It’s common to try to anthropomorphosize corporations, but it leads to logical fallacies like concluding that a corporation can be “evil”. Corporations seek money. They don’t have any morality, good or bad. If you’re confused about this, read The Corporation (or if you’re lazy, watch the movie instead).
If you hate Microsoft because they are monopolistic, then take a look at Google. What search engine do you use? You don’t need to e-mail me, or write a response. I already know the answer: You use Google. If I could go up to a random person and bet $100 that they use Google as their search engine, I’d make a very comfortable living. “Google” is now a verb. Google appears in acronyms (JFGI, GIYF, etc.) Google’s monopoly is much more difficult to dethrone. Microsoft doesn’t black list programs: You can run any program you want on your Windows computer, including programs which crack and disable the activation process of Windows itself. Google black list pages. If Google doesn’t like your webpage, it will simply not show up in any search queries. And since nobody uses any search engine other than Google, your page essentially has ceased to exist on the web. In other words, Google basically has censorship power over the entire web.
If you hate Microsoft because they use lock-in tactics, then take a look at Apple. You can’t use iPhone without iTunes. If you’ve been using WinAmp all your life to organize your mp3s, and built up a database of song ratings, playlists, and so on, too fucking bad. Start over from scratch in iTunes. Oh, so you’re installing iTunes now? Well, to use iTunes, you have to also install QuickTime, one of the shittiest movie players ever made. Oh, and now that you’ve got those two installed, for “high priority security” reasons, you should get rid of whatever browser you were using (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, whatever), and use Safari instead.

The cable I use to connect my iPhone to my computer is wearing out. When it break’s, all I have to buy is a new USB cable for 88 cents, right? Yeah, sorry, but the iPhone basically uses USB technology, but they changed the shape of the plug, and no one makes these cables except Apple, so you’re looking at $19.
If you hate Microsoft because you think they’ll do the minimum they can get away with without getting sued, consider these two tales. Wal-Mart experimented with selling DRMed music. DRMed music, in case you’re not familiar with the concept, are like mp3 files, except every time you want to play the song, your computer needs to connect to Wal-Mart’s servers to verify your credentials to make sure you’ve paid for the right to listen to that song. It turned out that this wasn’t profitable enough, so Wal-Mart shut down the servers which meant that your computer could no longer connect, and thus you lost all the music you’ve paid for. And the music execs argued that this is perfectly normal, and you should expect to lose access to music you’ve already paid for.

In contrast, Microsoft opened up a service called PopFly. It was a site designed to allow non-programmers to create their own games, and upload them and share them with the public. It was like YouTube, except instead of contributing amateur videos, you contributed amateur games. Microsoft decided that there wasn’t enough demand for this service, so they decided to shut down the server. The difference between this and Wal-Mart is that Microsoft then specifically hired programmers to write a “downloader” program that lets you download the games off of PopFly and play them offline before they finally disappear for good. In other words, Microsoft put money and effort to ensure that nobody lost access to anything they’ve put on PopFly.
If you hate Microsoft because they’re anti-open-source, consider that Microsoft has contributed several open source projects under their Shared Source License, and have even contributed to the Linux Kernel under the GPL. Those who argue that MS only contributed to the Kernel for selfish reasons (the contribution makes Linux work better in a VM environment running under Windows) needs to recall the core of the open source philosophy, which is every programmer improving the underlying software by contributing patches which scratch their specific itches. Linus made Linux for “selfish” reasons, in that he wasn’t satisfied with any of the other OS kernels out there. Those who argue that this contribution is some sort of “trap” seem to simply not have much faith in the open source software (OSS) methodology at all: If anyone can submit code to an open source project to destroy it, and there is no maintainer who will verify the submission before it gets integrate into every copy of Linux all over the world, then wouldn’t that imply OSS is a pretty crappy way of developing software? If Microsoft can do some legal magic to somehow screw Linux over while licensing code under the GPL, doesn’t that imply that the GPL is fundamentally broken and flawed?

Finally, here’s a bonus story: in the movie 2002 Minority Report, there’s a scene where someone is using a desk with a built in touch-sensitive monitor. In 2007, Microsoft announced essentially exactly that type of computer, called the “Microsoft Surface”. People complained that Microsoft was unable to innovate, this device clearly being a rip-off of the computer from Minority Report. It turns out that the computer used in Minority Report was a prototype of the Microsoft Surface which Microsoft left to the producers of the movie. (It’s quite easy to verify that Microsoft was closely involved in the Minority Report movie, given how often the MSN logo appears all over the place).

Note that there are basically only two “famous” multitouch devices: the Microsoft Surface and Apple’s iPhone. Note that Microsoft essentially (stealthily) demoed the Microsoft Surface in 2002, via the Minority Report movie. Note that the iPhone was first announced in 2007. Note how nobody whines about how Apple is unable to innovate, simply copying ideas from sci-fi movies.

Pan-kun

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:24:19 -0400

I linked to this video of a primate being surprised by magic tricks on my Twitter (I had referred to him as a “monkey”, but perhaps he’s a chimpanzee). Several people were astonished by the Pan-kun’s intelligence. If you were one of those people you will probably want to see Pan-kun attempting dog-training (part 1, part 2).

In the magician video, Pan-kun is demonstrating an understanding of object permanence. Having a theory of object permanence means being able to model the existence of objects in your mind, even though there is no direct sensitorial evidence for that object. For example, Pan-kun expressed surprised when the magician filled up an opaque glass with milk, and then tilted the glass over, but no milk came out, showing that Pan-kun’s model of the world was such that there should have been milk in the glass (even though he couldn’t directly see, hear, smell, touch, etc. the milk). In the dog-training video, you also see some problem solving (e.g. the scene where the dog escapes from its leash). You occasionally see Pan-kun seemingly nodding in response to questions, but I strongly suspect this latter part is “faked”. After watching several of his videos, what seems to happen is that the human asking the question nods at the end of the question, and Pan-kun nods in response to the nodding. There’s no evidence he actually does understand the questions being asked of him.

Windows Azure (MS's foray into SaaS OS)

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:40:37 -0400

As I’ve mentioned previously, Microsoft is exploring Software as a Service (SaaS) both in their Office and Windows series of products. I’ve recently linked to some screenshots of the SaaS version of Office in my Twitter, so here’s my analysis of their SaaS version of Windows.

So first, to dispel any misconceptions before they have a chance to spread: Windows Azure is not Windows 7. Windows Azure is not intended to be used by directly end-users (yet). Windows Azure is intended to be used by programmers and businesses.

ArsTechnica covers Microsoft’s recently announced pricing structure. In brief, you’ll have to pay 15 cents per gigabyte of storage used, 12 cents per hour of CPU usage, and 1 cent per 10K of bandwidth. This hints towards the future I had mentioned earlier, where you would no longer be paying for software (which would instead be distributed for free), but instead for services.

What this means for you today as a end user: not much. You probably won’t ever directly rent any space nor time on Windows Azure, because it’s not compatible with any of the programs you’ve currently got installed on your computer, and nobody (not even Microsoft) is campaigning people to switch over from XP/Vista/7 onto Azure. So what’s the purpose of Azure?

It’s intended for businesses and programmers. The easiest way to explain it is via an example use-case. Let’s say I’m a programmer, and I’ve got this great idea for a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG). I’ve already got most or all of the labour done (I’ve programmed the game, got the art drawn, the music composed, etc.) The only issue now is that I need a server to host the game on. The problems: I don’t have business-quality internet connection stability; I don’t have amazing bandwidth; I don’t have a super computer with backup servers.

ISPs charge businesses a much higher rater per month for an internet connection than they do for residential connections. The reason (ostensibly) is that there are much more stringent requirements for business internet connections. If once a year, your home internet dies, you’re kinda upset, but you can just read a book, or go to your friend’s house, or an internet cafe. But a business that relies on the Internet (e.g. Google, Amazon, etc.) needs to be up 24/7 or they will lose a ton of money and customers. Even if they only lose connection for on average 1 hour every 3 years, this is still an unacceptably unreliable connection for these types businesses. If I’m going to run a serious MMOG, I cannot rely on residental quality internet connections, or I will lose paying customers when they can’t log into the server.

Let’s say my MMOG gets successful, and I start getting hundreds, if not thousands, if not tends or hundreds of thousands of players. I’m going to need bandwidth. Now plenty of residental users have pretty decent download bandwidth, but upload bandwidth is pretty rare, and that’s the kind of bandwidth an MMOG server needs. If I publish a patch to fix some bugs in my game, I need to send these patches out to the players. Typical game patches can be anywhere from 1 meg to 300 megs. Even if you take a middle ground of 20 megs, with ten thousand players, that means you need to upload 200 gigs. But you can’t dedicate your entire upload bandwidth to publishing these patches, because you still need some bandwidth leftover to actually let the players connect to the game.

If you MMOG has thousands of players, you’re going to need a pretty powerful computer to actually be able to perform all of the calculations necessary to ensure the rules are being followed, and that the world reacts in the appropriate way to the player’s behaviour. You’ll actually need many such computers, because as a business, you need backup servers. If something fails (your harddrive breaks, your CPU overheats, etc.), you can’t just tell all your customers that your game is going to be down, and you’re not sure when it’ll be ready again, because FutureShop or BestBuy still haven’t contacted you yet with an estimate on how long the repairs will take, or the replacement harddrive you ordered online is stuck at customs.

In other words, the second biggest hurdle for developing your own MMOG (besides actually developing the game) is the cost of setting up all the required infrastructure. This is the problem that Azure sets out to solve. As a business person, you would determine how much computing resource you expect to need per customer (how much CPU, bandwidth and storage an average customer would consume per month to play your game), add a bit of margin on top of that, and charge that much as your monthly fee. Let’s say each customer costs you $10 per month. So charge them $25 per month, expect to pay $10 to Microsoft per month for usage of their Windows Azure platform, and pocket the rest. You don’t need to invest in buying expensive hardware or internet connection.

SaaS very much looks like it will be the future of computing, but it’s still in its infancy, so it’ll be a while still before consumers directly rent computing resources. Windows Azure is akin to how a couple dozen years ago, computers indirectly affected your life, even though you probably didn’t own one (and possibly didn’t even know it existed); instead, you interacted with organizations (like banks, and the government) which used computers. Today, you’ll interact with organizations that are using Windows Azure, perhaps unaware of its existence, and in a few dozen years, perhaps everybody will be renting computer resources instead of upgrading their hardware.

Polygamy a better deal for women than men

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:50:20 -0400

In trying to argue this position, I’m going to reduce the genders to their stereotypes — namely that women want power (and note that money indirectly leads to power) and stability of that power; and men want sex with many different women. I’m going to ignore “love”, except by pointing out that marrying for love is a fairly recent phenomenon. The “normal” (in the sense of statistically more common) reasons for marriage were convenience, and establishing family alliances. Even today, arranged-marriages are still… well, arranged, based on what will likely give the couple a comfortable life, regardless of whether they love each other. Also for simplicity, I’m going to ignore homosexuality, bisexuality, etc. and assume everyone is heterosexual for this analysis.

According to evolutionary psychology, the reason men today want to have sex with lots of women is that this was one of the most effective survival strategy for their genes. Simplifying a great deal: Men with the “try to have sex with lots of women” gene tended to have children with more women than men with the “stick with one woman” gene, and thus the “try to have sex with lots of women” became more common, and dominant, in the gene pool. In contrast, no matter how many men a woman slept with, she could only be pregnant with one man’s child at a time, and thus the “try to have sex with lots of men” gene did not end up dominating. Instead, the “make sure the child is well taken care of” genes became dominant, because they tended to increase the probability that the child would survive long enough to be of reproductive age, and “well taken care of” children were more likely to recursively express the traits that attracted mate (power, beauty, etc.)

So what happens when a society becomes polygamous? We already know the answer from history: A few very powerful men (pharaohs, emperors, etc.) get the vast majority of the women, and the rest of the men get very little. In other words, most men get less sex than they would in a monogamous society, and most women get a more powerful partner than they would have.

To take an extreme example, consider a village with 100 men and 100 women. If that village were monogamous, you would imagine there being 100 men-women couples. Note that some poor woman is stuck with the least powerful man in the whole village. Another woman is stuck with the second least powerful, and so on. If the village were polygamous, then one of those men, the most powerful one, would be the “emperor” and get all 100 women, while the other 99 men get nothing. One woman has a partner equally powerful as she would have had in a monogamous society, and every other woman has a more powerful partner. One lucky lady went from the least powerful man in the whole village to the most powerful man. You can actually observe this directly today: in many cults, the cult leader (invariable male) will forbid any male other than himself from having sex, and he will have sex with all the female cult members, including the daughters and wives of other cult members.

David Koresh (1959-1993), the Seven Seals leader of Branch Davidians only in Elk, Texas, greatly restricted the sexual activity of his followers, while marrying wives as young as twelve because puberty was an accepted age for marriage in Old Testament times. A former member described Koresh as “fixated with sex and with a taste for younger girls.” He began to teach that all the women in the world belonged to him, only he had the right to procreate, and he fathered children with his plural wives.

OvercomingBias, a blog I frequent, notes that women seem to be realizing the benefits of polygamy, mating with the most sexy male (from an evolutionary viewpoint, the women are using “sexy” as a proxy for “genetically fit”), and then directly gathering the power themselves by becoming (since now, women can enter the workplace and earn a salary comparable to men’s). I’m not sure what to make of these observations, except to state that the blog’s author, Robin Hanson, is a lot smarter than I.

The new equilibrium we are moving toward seems a very different world. Women free to pick a dad without needing him to stay as a long term helper probably pick sexier men. This should create more inequality in male access to women for sex and kids, and give men more free time to compete to be the few super-sexy super-dads.

Women would get to have kids fathered by sexier men, but at the expense of raising those kids with less male help. More men would be sex-failures with more free time to pursue long-shot plans to reverse their fortunes, and without wives to moderate them. How many of those plans will be peaceful?

I guess this helps somewhat to explain the explicitly sex-aggressive men I see more of these days. When I wrote:

If you don’t signal your continued love she may well conclude that your love has in fact changed.

“Master Dogen” responded:

Hanson … seems to be thoroughly trained in thinking that the best way to long-term health in a relationship with a woman is to signal “caring more than everyone else” and “giving gifts,” etc. This, of course, is the constant position of a supplicant. … I advocate a very different way of dealing with a woman … So let’s assume you are an alpha, and you’ve trained your woman to supplicate you rather than the other way around. … You must continue signaling your dominance: gently pull her hair when you go in for a kiss, raise you voice sternly when she steps out of line, flirt shamelessly with other women in public.

I might not like it, but I can’t argue that the future doesn’t hold a lot more of this.

A true rationalist, Hason encourages all hypothesis to be testable, less they be dismissed as meaningless. The test here would seem to be more (sexual) aggressiveness in men. If present, it supports Hason’s hypothesis; if absent, weakens it. So in your immediate environment, have you tended to notice more male sexual aggressiveness? For me, on the one hand, shows like “The Pick-up Artist” seem to signal higher social acceptance of such practice, but on the other, it seems like men were much “worse” pre-1960s before feminism. Is this just a cyclical occurrence?

The Canadian/American test

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:50:14 -0400

From GameGirlAdvance:

If you’re not sure which of your friends is secretly Canadian, try this simple test: Announce, “I’m going to Tim’s, want anything?”

If they reply, “Who’s Tim?” they are American.

But if they say “Oh, get me a donut,” they are TOTALLY CANADIAN.

I’ve claimed that Americans tend to assume that everyone else is also an American. At first glance, it might seem this quote is an argument against my claim, but actually it’s an argument for it. Notice how the author assumes that given “Tim” is a Canadian-only piece of information, anyone who speaks English and doesn’t know about Tim must be American. As opposed to being British, Australian, African, Chinese, German, Arabic, etc.

Your name influences your destiny

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:49:50 -0400

Apparently, picking a good name for your child is more important than I had initially assumed, because a person’s name will affect almost all their decisions, including what career to pursue, which spouse to pursue, which city to live in, etc. People tend to prefer the decisions that resembles their own names, with “Dennis” and “Denise” being statistically significantly overrepresented in dentists (PDF link).

Another blog does a much better job of summarizing the findings of the paper than I ever could, so here’s their summary:

The paper’s first few studies investigate the relationship between a person’s name and where they live. People named Phil were found more frequently than usual in Philadelphia, people named Jack in Jacksonville, people named George in Georgia, and so on with p < .001. To eliminate the possibility of the familiarity effect causing parents to subconsciously name their children after their place of residence, further studies were done with surnames and with people who moved later in life, both with the same results. The results held across US and Canadian city names as well as US state names, and were significant both for first name and surname.

In case that wasn’t implausible enough, the researchers also looked at association between birth date and city of residence: that is, were people born on 2/02 more likely to live in the town of Two Harbors, and 3/03 babies more likely to live in Three Forks? With p = .003, yes, they are.

The researchers then moved on to career choices. They combed the records of the American Dental Association and the American Bar association looking for people named either Dennis, Denice, Dena, Denver, et cetera, or Lawrence, Larry, Laura, Lauren, et cetera. That is: were there more dentists named Dennis and lawyers named Lawrence than vice versa? Of the various statistical analyses they performed, most said yes, some at < .001 level. Other studies determined that there was a suspicious surplus of geologists named Geoffrey, and that hardware store owners were more likely to have names starting with ‘H’ compared to roofing store owners, who were more likely to have names starting with ‘R’.

Some other miscellaneous findings: people are more likely to donate to Presidential candidates whose names begin with the same letter as their own, people are more likely to marry spouses whose names begin with the same letter as their own, that women are more likely to show name preference effects than men (but why?), and that batters with names beginning in ‘K’ are more likely than others to strike out (strikeouts being symbolized by a ‘K’ on the records).

If you have any doubts about the validity of the research, I urge you to read the linked paper. It’s a great example of researchers who go above and beyond the call of duty to eliminate as many confounders as possible.

It’s worth emphasizing some of the comments from that blog as well:

If you haven’t already, read the part of the paper where they talk about hardware and roofing stores. They ran some clever analyses to see whether the effect was caused by a love of alliteration (for example someone named Herman decides to go into hardware so he can call his store Herman’s Hardware) and the results suggested this wasn’t the explanation.

And:

The “Players whose names start with K tend to strikeout more” study, is, I believe, flawed. It’s true that K names struck out more historically, but that’s because K names (Kyle, Kevin, etc.) are much more common now, when strikeout rates are high, than they were in previous generations, when strikeout rates were low.

Microsoft Xbox 360 Repair Audit Part 2

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:34:37 -0400

Remember that call I got from Microsoft? Well, the next business day, I get 3 e-mails in rapid succession. The first one says they received my console and will notify me about the progress of my repair. The second says my console repair has complete and they will let me know when it ships. The third says it’s being shipped via express air mail. I guess someone got their ass in gear.

Alternative to "Secret Question" Password Reset System

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 12:29:46 -0400

Because many users forget their passwords, web sites which require a username and password often have an option to allow you to reset your password. They can’t simply let anyone reset your password, or else hackers would reset the passwords of any accounts they wished to get access to, so the site still needs to verify your identity somehow. This leads to a catch-22, because the whole point of your password in the first place was to verify your identity. You’re stuck in a situation where you need to verify your identity so that you can reset your password so that you can verify your identity.

I believe security experts have categorized the methods of identifying someone into three broad categories: Something you have (keys), something you are (biometrics) or something you know (passwords) The first two methods are infeasible over the internet, which is why “something you know” is pretty much the only way websites have of verifying your identity. Under ideal situations, users would “know” their passwords, but since in practice sometimes they don’t, sites need to ask about something else the user would know to verify their identities.

Thus, these “secret questions” are basically a second password, and in poorly designed security systems, they can be used as an alternative to the password. Let’s say the user is very security-conscientious and chooses a strong password like “xZTFnpoC9Hj2fOsV5vh7”. The strength of that password is rendered moot if someone can get access to the account simply by answering a secret question like “What if your mother’s maiden name?” or “What highschool did you go to?”, information that is often easily findable by doing a bit of Googling.

These weakness can be mitigated somewhat by having it such that when someone successfully answered the security question, that person is not immediately granted access to the site, but instead an e-mail is sent containing the new, reset password, to the e-mail address the account holder originally associated with the account. This has its own difficulties, as sometimes users do not want to divulge their e-mail information (for fear of spam), or if the user doesn’t have an e-mail account at all (e.g. when the site they are trying to get access to is their e-mail, such as Hotmail or GMail).

Researchers at Microsoft prototyped an alternative system on Hotmail where instead of asking a secret question, you were asked to have some trusted friends vouch for you. When signing up for a Hotmail account, the volunteers were asked to list a number of friends as “trustees”. When you wanted to reset your password, your friends would each be sent a different pieces of the reset code. You’d have to gather a certain amount of those codes from your friends and submit them to the site to regain access.

When I say “a certain amount of those codes”, I mean for example if you specified 4 friends, all 4 friends would be sent different codes, but you’d only need to gather 3 of them. You want to ensure that more than 1 code is needed to reset your passwords, to avoid any one of your friends being able to break into your account. By requiring a high percentage, like 3 out of 4, your friends would only break in if they were conspiring against you (in which case you’ve got bigger problems), or if something exceptional happened (you died, or went into a coma, and your loved ones needed access to your account). A solo former-friend couldn’t backstab you.

You also don’t want to require 100%, because a friend might become unavailable (they forget their password, they go on vacation, they stop being your friend, they die, etc.), which would make it impossible to reset your password.

iTunes corrupts mp3s

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 13:11:15 -0400

iTunes corrupts the mp3 files. I’ve had this problem ever since I first started using iTunes a couple years ago, but I hadn’t really bothered reporting it before, because I was unable to find anyone else who had the same problem. Google searches didn’t turn up much. But now I’ve found out that there are other people out there who have experienced the exact problem as I have.

Describing the problem is a little bit tricky. Basically, I have some mp3 files, which I can play fine in any media player including WinAmp, Foobar2000, Windows Media Player, Media Player Classic, VLC, Audacity, etc. I import it into iTunes. Usually at first, it will play fine in iTunes as well. But after a couple of weeks, the mp3 file will become corrupted, in that the first few seconds of the song repeats, like an old vinyl record skipping. It’s not a driver problem or anything like that; the audio data in mp3 file itself has been modified. The exact same skipping problem occurs in all media players from that point on, and if I open the mp3 in a waveform editor, I can see that the waveform has the first few seconds duplicated.

I had known for a long time that the problem was related to iTunes, because sometimes I could trigger this bug simply by editing the ID3 tags within iTunes. For example, I’ll rip a CD into mp3 files (it doesn’t matter whether I use iTunes to do the ripping, or some other program), and then try to change the album name using the iTunes ID3 tag editor on all of those newly produced mp3s. Usually one or two of them will end up being corrupted, so I’d have to re-rip them again. If I edit the ID3 tags with another program, e.g. Foobar2000, no corruption will occur. So the problem seems to be that iTune’s ID3 writing code, or mp3 writing code is buggy.

But recently, I’ve noticed this same bug occuring for files for which I have not edited, but simply played or synced to my iPod. It seems that iTunes is rewriting those mp3 files automatically without user intervention. Perhaps it’s trying to insert album art, perhaps it’s trying to record the average volume level, or record gapless playback info or something. Whatever it’s doing, it’s corrupting my mp3s!

Now when it corrupts mp3s I’ve ripped from CDs, this is merely an annoyance: I can re-rip the mp3s from my CDs. But when iTunes corrupts mp3s for songs I myself have composed, and there are no other copies in the world, this is extremely upsetting.

Unfortunately, as much as I’d love to switch to another media player, I can’t. Apple’s monopolistic practices have locked me into iTunes because it’s the only program which will interoperate with my iPhone.

I’m going to copy the discussion thread indicating that other people have had the same problems as I have had, because it took me a long time to be able to find it, and I’d be upset if that site disappeared and the discussion was lost. (I’m eliding the posts which are irrelevant, or by people who are giving poor advice (e.g. try turning off “crossfader”) because they misunderstood the problem.)

fubarduck:
MAJOR problem: iTunes 7.0 destroyed 90% my MP3 Collection!

That’s right, see topic. After upgrading to iTunes 7.0 which scanned all my MP3s for Gapless Playback, 90% of my collection has been virtually rendered useless.

The tracks all do the same thing; the first 1 to 2 seconds of the track repeat themselves 2 or 3 times before playing the actual song. Words cannot describe how annoying this is; when I’ve just got it on shuffle and trying to skip tracks to find a song I like, it makes my ears hurt like a broken record. I have looked around forums and Google but haven’t seen anbody else with this problem and the extreme degree to which it has permenantly damaged my 30 gig collection of music that I’ve been collecting and archiving for over 10 years.

I have tried playing the damaged MP3s in every other piece of MP3-playing software on my PC—they all do the same thing. The ACTUAL MP3 files on my hard drive and iPod are damaged, not just iTunes.

Is there any possible way to salvage my MP3 collection without spending weeks to re-rip and re-download all of my MP3s?

I am seriously never going past 6.0 iTunes again. Upgrading to 7.0 was the worst computer-related decision of my life.

fubarduck:
The MP3 files were modified by iTunes; it is not a PC issue. The damaged files play incorrectly on all devices—iPod, PC, CD Player, etc.

fubarduck:
I repeat: the actual MP3 files were modified. The files played the same way on every PC.

I’m back on iTunes 6 with a fresh start, I deleted my entire 30 gig collection. One of the saddest moments of my life.

phronk:
I just want to confirm that you’re not alone - the same thing has happened to me.

I heard the beginnings of songs repeating a few times on my iPod and wrote it off as a temporary glitch on a few songs. But recently I noted which songs were doing it, then went back to my PC and tried playing them with different software. To my horror, it is indeed the files themselves that have been corrupted, and not the software playing them.

So far this has only happend on CDs I ripped with iTunes…I was hoping it was an error in the ripping process. However, if iTunes messes up my irreplacable downloaded music, that would be even worse. So yeah, I feel your pain.

This is definitely a serious problem. It’s the equivalent of buying a CD player that mangles any CD you put into it. Perhaps we should be in contact with Apple directly about this. I’m not one to complain, but permanently damaging my (digital) property is sorta unacceptable.

Sartre:
Before you toss them all, open one of the mp3s in Foobar 0.83, right click on the file and choose “Fix MP3 header”, then play it. Sometimes header problems can cause faulty playback.

phronk:
OK, I tried this with a few of the songs that were having the problem. Unfortunately, it did not have any effect.

I used the latest version of Foobar though, not 0.83…I’m not sure if you recommended 0.83 for a particular reason, Sartre. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

I’ve noticed that this seems to happen by album. For example, I’ve most recently had the problem with almost every track on Our Lady Peace’s “Spiritual Machines”. This indicates to me that it probably has something to do with a fault in the gapless playback mechanism, since an entire album should be gapless, and both this problem and gapless started with iTunes 7.

Hmmm, but I just check, and “part of a gapless album” was not checked on the problem songs. The thing is, it SHOULD be gapless. Maybe this occured when iTunes went “checking for gapless playback info” when I added my entire library to iTunes 7.

I’ll keep poking around, and probably get around to contacting Apple about it eventually.

studogvetmed:
So far these are the only two reports of music collections being modified in this way by iTunes. I don’t think that either person affected has yet contacted iTunes customer service about it yet, so apple may not even know about this latest strange and devestating affect of iTunes 7. The original poster has already completely erased their collection so one set of files that could be tested to see how things were modified and how one might, if possible, recover the files to their original situation is gone. This report is still too new and too strange to discover the underlying situation. Two removes it from isolation, but it’s not an epidemic yet.

[Rest of post elided, as it was criticizing a troll who was bashing Apple]

jpeter1093:
I just had this happen to me last night to 2 songs that aren’t part of any gapless playback. One isn’t even part of an album, just a standalone MP3.

huyi:
what version of itunes have you got? i think people should be reporting this to apple so they fix it in the next build hopefully

jpeter1093:
I have 7.02.16. I’ve searched the Apple discussions forums and see mention of skipping/stuttering but I don’t see it mentioned that the stuttering is a PERMANENT change to the MP3 file. Like the original poster, if I play the song in Windows Media Player, it stutters in the exact same way.

I think I’ll cut/paste some info from this thread over to Apple’s forums.

Alpenflower:
I downloaded iTunes 7 and have noticed that many of my songs now skip/stutter for the first few seconds of playback. I have a 60GB music collection and this is scaring the heck out of me. I see nothing has been posted in this forum for alomst a month about this. What can I do at this point? I am running iTunes on a Windows PC.

huyi:
i have no idea, there was no solution and it’s still unsolved. this same topic was posted on the official apple forums aswell but no one seemed to care that much

Caorach:
The first logical step is to find some audio that stutters in iTunes and then play it in another application to see if the problem is confined to iTunes. If it is confined to iTunes then it is probably related to the database issues that I documented in the “eating disk space” thread.

If the audio also stutters in another application, and there have been some users reporting this, then it would seem possible that iTunes has corrupted the actual media file. In this case I would suggest that you uninstall iTunes and hope for the best that it has corrupted only a few files.

I have discovered that there are plenty of other applications out there, such as Winamp and MediaMonkey, that don’t have the bugs of iTunes but which will synch with your iPod etc. It is even possible to export your iTunes playlists into them so the changeover should not be too painful and certainly not as painful as having all your media destroyed.

Of course if all your media is already destroyed then there is little i can do other than offer sympathy, it must be exceptionally frustrating that the traditional Apple tactic of ignoring the users in the hope that those with problems will just install some other software is coming into play. While this tactic works well for a software house with a very tiny market share once you start getting a bigger share, as with the iPod, then it just leaves you in deep trouble. Other software houses would be documenting this bug, providing a timescale for a fix, beta testing the fix with small numbers of users and then resolving the problem. All of this would happen in the public domain with recognition of the problem and the users would know where they stood. Apple just shut up in the hope that it will go away, actually in the past they have hoped that you would go away and buy something else but that isn’t so easy now.

studogvetmed:
We are up to four people who have had potential corruption. two are confirmed to have problems with the files outside of iTunes. The two new users need to check the files in other programs to see if it is an isolated iTunes issue (and if so, search for “iTunes windows playback problem” on apple support website) for the Quicktime articles to check quicktime settings that may fix the problem (if it’s not a corrupted file issue. I think I linked the article on the first page).

If this is a file corruption issue, people affected need to report the problem to apple at their feedback site. http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipod.html (I found that the iTunes feedback page only is for music requests….).

This needs to get reported in some direct manner to apple, just posting here and in the apple discussion forums isn’t enough, especially if it is isolated.

I won’t make excuses for Apple’s secretive way of handling bugs, but if they can confirm the issue they often post a knowledge base article about it. That hasn’t happened for this particular issue yet.

I know it’s frustrating, we can only take heart that it’s isolated issues. of course if it was only more widespread perhaps finding the fix would come much quicker.

phronk:
I’m one of the original people who reported this issue.

I’ve now had a few months to observe the problem a bit more. It is still happening quite frequently. I cannot be sure, but a larger percentage of my files seem to be corrupted as times goes on - though I have not confirmed this (e.g. by a file being fine one day then corrupted the next). So far, it has still only happened with files that I ripped from CD with iTunes itself. I am praying that it is a ripping issue, and not actually corrupting the files that are imported to iTunes. However, singles purchased seperately from ripped albums are rare in my library, so I may have just not come across one that’s corrupted yet. Have the other people experienced this with files that were not from CD? Purchased music?

I can confirm that it is probably the files themselves. This happens in any program I use, and even on different computers, and on both Macs and PCs. File playback, I mean…I ripped and I sync with my music on a PC, so it is likely the PC version of iTunes that is actually doing the corrupting.

Contrary to my original suspicions, it does not seem to be correlated with gapless albums. I do wonder, though, if iTunes alters the music files in order to allow gapless playback (and does this alteration whether “gapless album” is checked or not). That would seem drastic, but given how long it’s taken to get gapless playback there, maybe it was their last resort. Does anyone here know how iTunes does gapless?

What I’ve done is set iTunes to copy all my music to its own directory on a separate hard drive (“keep files organized” and “copy to iTunes folder” options checked). I’m really really hoping that if it screws up files, it screws up the copies and not the originals. I’m reluctant to switch to another program, since I have everything set up around iTunes (e.g. syncing with Last.fm, playcounts, smart playlists, etc.), and it’s a decent program when it isn’t destroying my music.

I will be contacting Apple - thanks for the link, Stuart - but perhaps if we share information here, we can discover a fix (or at least a cause) before Apple gets around to acknowledging then finally fixing the problem.

Opposing Viewpoints: Seek out those who disagree

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 13:10:25 -0400

Speaking of totally alien mindsets, apparently I’m in the minority in that I actively seek opposing viewpoints:

Analysis of the studies shows that people are almost two times more likely to select information that is congenial to their current beliefs and behaviors than they are to pick information that opposes them. That is to say, when offered material containing views that were contrary to their beliefs (either in article or broadcast form), people had only a one-in-three chance of taking a closer look at that information.

The article uses the phrase “unsurprisingly” and “no surprise” in describing the findings of the studies, but I have to say that this does come as a bit of a surprise to me. There are reasons why it’s a good idea to expose yourself to ideas you disagree with, and while those reasons are not necessarily obvious, I think they are intuitive. Thus, one would think that these reasons would get passed around memetically, until people of average intelligence accepted and celebrated diversity in thinking. I guess I overestimated average intelligence.

The main reasons can be summarized thusly: Everyone has been wrong about at least one of their beliefs at some point in their life; it’s better to be right than to be wrong (and here, I mean “right” not as in “winning arguments” but as in “having beliefs that reflect reality”); you won’t find out that you’re wrong about some belief if the only evidence you observe regarding that belief is evidence supporting it.

This is why, as a liberal, I’m interested in hearing conservative viewpoints. As a green, I’m interested in arguments why recycling is a bad idea. I’m interested in obscure controversial ideas simply because by their very nature of being controversial, they are less well represented. I want to consume banned books, movies, videogames and other media; I want to know what concepts and ideas it is that the government does not want anyone to know. I want to watch all forms of porn; the less mainstream, the better. In the cases where one performer is portrayed as being harmed (rape, snuff, etc.) I’d prefer the porn to be fake, as my ethics are such that I think harming people is a bad thing, but I’m interested in ethics which condone harming people under certain circumstances (e.g. utilitarianism). As a utilitarianist, I’m interested in arguments that an ethical system which manages to harm no one exists or is workable.

It works in the other direction, too: Between the choices of “liberal” and “conservative”, I self-label as “liberal”, but I consider myself very apolitical, because I’m well aware that all my friends, and all the media I consume has a strong liberal bias. I’m not getting enough input from conservatives to make an informed decision. I’m not particularly interested in 9/11 nor global warming, because while the topics are controversial, they are not obscure.

Microsoft Xbox 360 Repair Audit

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:10:28 -0400

It looks like Microsoft is big enough that it has certain of its divisions auditing other of its divisions.

MS: Good day, may I speak to Nebu?
Nebu: Speaking…
MS: I’m calling from Microsoft, and I’d just like to confirm something with you.
Nebu: Ok…
MS: Did you ship an XBox 360 for repair in May?
Nebu: I shipped an XBox, but I don’t know if it was in May.
MS: I’m reading your file right now, and it says you shipped it in May.
Nebu: Ok.
MS: And have you received a repaired or replacement XBox 360 yet?
Nebu: Umm… No.
MS: You did not receive anything from our service center?
Nebu: Uh, that’s correct.
MS: The last time you were in contact with the service center, what did they say to you?
Nebu: Well, uh, they said they’d send me a box… a shipping box, I mean. So I receive the box… the shipping box, and then I put the xbox in the shipping box and sent it out… and that’s… the last interaction I had, pretty much.
MS: You haven’t called the service center since then for an update?
Nebu: Correct.
MS: Ok, well I’m going to contact the service center to find out why they haven’t either sent back your repaired console, or sent a replacement, because two months is an unusually long turnaround time.
Nebu: Uh, okay.
MS: Thank you for your time sir, and have a great day.
Nebu: Thanks… bye…

Oh snap, someone is in deep shit at Microsoft today! I wonder if MS will be generous enough to sent me some sort of bonus, like free MS points or something. I think I kinda blew it when I acted like I didn’t even notice that my xbox was gone for that long. I probably would have been guaranteed some sort of compensation if I acted all pissed and made a big fuss and stuff, like Jude Law in Gattaca, or Eli in Real Life.

Irrational People

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:47:16 -0400

One thing that often confounds game theorist, economists and (while I can’t speak for other autistic people,) myself, is that people often don’t behave in a rational manner. Before jumping to any conclusions, you should first verify that you what it means to “behave in a rational manner.” In particular, you should avoid using any straw vulcans:

A [straw vulcan is a] straw man used to show that emotion is better than logic.

It starts by having characters who think “logically” try to solve a problem. And they can’t. Either they can’t find any answer, or they’re caught in some kind of standoff, or they’re even stuck in a Logic Bomb-type loop. Once this is established, someone who uses good old human emotion comes up with a solution that the logical thinker can’t. This proves An Aesop that emotion is superior and that the logical thinker shouldn’t trust logic so much.

This is, of course, completely broken. Fiction often gets the concept of logic wrong in a number of ways.

A true rationalist — by which I include competent game theorists and economists… and myself! — is aware that most other people are not rational. That’s not the confounding part. The confounding part is just how damn irrational people can be. Perhaps even more confounding is the fact an irrational (but otherwise reasonable) person is able to persist in a specific irrational behaviour, even after having been shown that such behaviour is irrational.

Dan Gilbert has an excellent TED Talk where he gives an excellent example of irrational behaviour. Paraphrased from memory, he says:

Imagine you want to see a play, and in your wallet, you have a twenty dollar bill, and a ticket for a play which you’ve paid twenty dollars for. Upon arriving at the theatre, you take out your wallet, and realize you’ve lost the movie ticket. Will you buy a new ticket with your remaining twenty dollar bill? Most people would say no. They say to themselves “I’ve already paid for this ticket once! I don’t want to pay $40 instead of $20 to see this play!”

Now imagine you want to see the play, and in your wallet, you have two twenty dollar bills. You arrive at the theatre, and you realize you’ve lost one of your bills. Will you buy a new ticket with your remaining twenty dollar bill? Most people would say yes. They say to themselves “Well, I cam here specifically to see the play, right? What does the lost of the $20 have to do with anything?”

In case it isn’t exceedingly clear, notice that in both cases, you had two pieces of paper in your wallet, each of which you could have exchanged to watch a play which you did indeed wanted to see. In both cases, you lost one of those two pieces of paper, and you had to opportunity to exchange the remaining piece of paper to see the play. So why is it in one case you decided to see the play, and in the other you decided no to see the play?

(Note that of the three paragraphs “quoted” from memory, I took the most liberties with the third one, where I’m pretty sure I belaboured the point much more strongly than Gilbert did, but I wasn’t comfortable taking it out of the quote block, and claiming it as my own words, as all of the ideas are from Gilbert.)

So what astonishes us rationalist is not so much that people behave in the way that Gilbert describes. Probably most rationalist behaved the same way before hearing Gilbert speak. What is astonishing is after hearing this talk from Gilbert, irrational people will laugh, say “Yes, it’s true…” and then continue to behave in that way.

Traditionally, researchers would try to “rationalize” (pun intended) this behaviour, the prototypical example being the Ultimatum game. In the Ultimatum game, one player (usually referred to as “A”) is given a certain amount of money (e.g. $100) and is given the opportunity to share any amount of it to a second player, player “B”. The catch is that player “B” has the option of rejection the money, in which case both players receive nothing. In a world involving purely rational agents, B should accept any and all offers above $0, because receiving any amount of money at all is better than receiving nothing. A knows this, and thus will always offer B the minimum, e.g. giving himself $99, and B $1. When this game is played practice, B will instead usually reject any offer which seems “unfair”. For example, B will often reject an offer of $20. Traditionally, a rationalist would wonder why B would do this, since they are throwing away an offer for a free twenty bucks. The rationalization is that perhaps humans, being highly social creatures, are rejecting the offer as a form of punishment. That is, B is willing to forego the short term benefits of $20 in exchange of the longterm benefits of punishing those who would treat others unfairly, and thus promote fairness in the society that they both live in. I’ll refer to this as the “punishment” theory.

A recent experiment has shown this not to be case. In this modified version of the ultimatum game (in the study, they called the modified version the “private impunity game”), A is again given some amount of money, and free to split it between himself and player B in any way he sees fit. The difference now is that whatever split player A decides on, he immediately gets to keep and leaves the game. All that remains is to take whatever sum that A had left over, and offer it to B, who is then free to accept it or reject it. In other words, in this variant of the game, B has no opportunity to actually punish A, not even via guilt, seeing as how A will have left from the game before B ever has the chance to make the decision of whether to accept or reject the offer. And yet it turns out even in this case, B will occasionally reject the offer, harming no one but themselves! The rejection rate is not quite as high as in the Ultimatum game, thus giving some credence to the “punishment” theory, but simultaneously, the fact that there is any rejection at all strongly argues against the “punishment” theory.

Perhaps equally frightening was a secondary result of the study, which revealed that if the rules of the “Impunity” game were explained more formally and succinctly as a series of if-then statements, rather than as natural English (i.e. in the form “if A chooses X and B chooses Y, then A receives $i and B receives $j.”) the rejection rates reverted back to those of the Ultimatum game, suggesting “that people can’t even be bothered to perform a rational analysis when money is on the line, much less engage in rational actions.” This conclusion really drained the blood from my head, and I had to sit down to regain my composure.

As a human, I’m genetically encoded to have empathy for fellow human beings. But… well, I don’t know how to express this next part adequately, but in when someone differs fundamentally from your way thinking, you lose empathy and see them as an alien (or more commonly, a “monster”). Consider any sociopathic serial killer, for example. Or less dramatically, a presumably insane homeless person screaming in the streets. Most people don’t feel sympathy nor empathy for these homeless, but rather an extreme discomfort and a desire to ignore and get away from the person, to pretend that they do no exist in your world.

Sony Walkman vs Apple iPod

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:46:17 -0400

A 13 year old boy is asked to try the Sony Walkman (a casette player) from 30 years ago, and compare it to the iPod. (Hat tip to ArsTechnica). The line that bugged me was “I’m relieved that the majority of technological advancement happened before I was born, as I can’t imagine having to use such basic equipment every day.” because no matter when you are born, the majority of technological advancement happened before you were born, and any equipment you use will be considered “basic” by the future. But the kid’s only 13, so I guess it’s okay.

Like father, like son: RIAA still receiving unfair treatment

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:44:39 -0400

I’ve complained previous about the unfair treatment the RIAA was facing in its cases, particularly from defense lawyer Kiwi Camara (1 2). If you’ve been following the case, you will have heard that the defendant, Jammie Thomas, lost. From what I’ve heard, this sounds like a good news to me, because she seemed to have been lying quite blatantly throughout her testimony. I guess I might as well go over this briefly.

First of all, Thomas was asked to submit the harddrive that was in use during the alleged copyright infringement, so they could scan it and look for evidence of filesharing. She submitted a different harddrive instead, and got caught when they checked the manufacturing date of the harddrive and realized it had been built after the date of the alleged infringement.

Second, she claimed that she had never heard of Kazaa, the program she was accused of using. While we can’t prove that she had known of Kazaa, her claim is pretty implausible since she wrote a research paper on filesharing back in college.

Third, she claimed that hackers had hacked into her wireless network and they were the ones who downloaded the songs. This lie was blown when it was revealed she has never owned a wireless router.

Finally, during the trial, there was a dramatic moment when an expert witness mentioned seeing a log file on the harddrive indicating that there was evidence of an external harddrive plugged in. The defense objected, saying that they were never told about this evidence (apparently any evidence which is intended to be used in court must be presented to both the defense and the prosecution so that they can adequately prepare to handle it). The judge asked the jury to leave the room temporarily while the defense and prosecution approached the bench to discuss the issue. The prosecution claimed that it was a simple and honest mistake: The prosecution had indeed received a note about the external harddrive, but did not realize it was new evidence, and so never brought it up. According to the expert witness, the external harddrive was only attached to the computer after the alleged infringement, and so the prosecution agreed to basically drop this particular evidence from the testimony, as it was pretty irrelevant to the case. So the Jury was invited back into the room and told to ignore the part about the external harddrive, but to keep the rest of the testimony in mind. So far, no terrible lies or anything like that. But a couple days later, during the closing testimony, Ms. Thomas took advantage of the confusion the jury must have been under from that scene by “reminding” them that the RIAA had brought in a witness to bear false testimony against her. As soon as she uttered those words, the judge was outraged and told the Jury to disregard that last statement. See, the Jury didn’t know what the commotion was about with that witness; all they knew was they were asked to leave the room momentarily, and to disregard the statements about the external drive. They were not told that it was because of a technical legal reason and that the evidence was mostly irrelevant to the case, and so Jammie tried to misrepresent the scene in her favour.

So all in all, I’m relatively glad that Jammie Thomas was found guilty. I’m not sure her fine (over a million dollars) is an appropriate amount, but it’s difficult for me to have sympathy for such blatant liars. It’s disrespectful to the court and you’re basically wasting everyone’s time. And this rant of mine is just about Ms. Thomas! It doesn’t cover my complaints about her lawyer, Kiwi Camara’s, behaviour. But I’ve covered that in past blog posts already, so I won’t get into them again here.

With the RIAA-vs-Thomas case over, it seems like there wouldn’t be much more left to say. Unfortunately, there’s another similar case going on, RIAA-vs-Tenenbaum, and the defense lawyer in this case is one Charles Nesson, who coincidentally was a former mentor of Kiwi Camara. And apparently, Nesson is just as obnoxious in his court behaviour. Perhaps instead of “Like fatherm like son”, I should have written “Like mentor, like disciple”.

I haven’t been following the Tenenbaum case as carefully as the Thomas one, but the two acts that stand out to me are Nesson recording and publishing conversations illegal, and even directly filesharing the songs in question himself!!!

The Court’s indulgence is at an end. Too often, as described below, the important issues in this case have been overshadowed by the tactics of defense counsel: taping opposing counsel without permission (and in violation of the law), posting recordings of court communications and emails with potential experts (who have rejected the positions counsel asserts) on the Internet, and now allegedly replicating the acts that are the subject of this lawsuit, namely uploading the copyrighted songs that the Defendant is accused of file-sharing.

Nesson apparently took the seven songs that Tenenbaum was accused of filesharing, and posted them on MegaUpload. Seriously, what the fuck?

Optimal strategy for iterated real life coin tosses?

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:35:21 -0400

Let’s say someone asks you to make iterated predictions for the result of a series of real life coin toss. The “real life” part has two important implications: First, that the coin might not be perfectly fair (that is, it might be biased towards one side) and two, that it is not magical, and thus does not have magical properties, such as being able to remember what your previous predictions were.

I’d actually like to place one more restriction, which is that the person flipping the coin isn’t antagonistic against you. That is to say, even if the person flipping the coin figures out what your strategy is, he will not then subsequently intentionally try to influence the coin to increase your odds of losing. If this is too informally specified, we can switch from coin tosses to a scratch-card with two squares to scratch, one winning and one losing, all of which are printed in advance.

One good strategy that I’ve come up with is to pick randomly for the first prediction, and then for each subsequent prediction, to pick whatever won last time. This strategy may sound like Tit for Tat, but I believe the resemblance is purely cosmetic. In particular, many of the preconditions that make Tit for Tat effective (e.g. an unbalanced payoff between “cooperate” and “defect”) are simply not present in the coin-toss game.

One reason this strategy is more effective than the purely random strategy is that your guesses will follow the distribution of the coin. If the coin is perfectly fair, then my pseudo-Tit-for-Tat strategy (pTfT) reduces to the purely random strategy. However, if the coin is biased for, say, 80% head and 20% tail, then pTfT will also guess head 80% of the time and tail 20% of the time.

pTfT is not optimal, however, because for a coin which lands 80% head and 20% tail, the optimal betting strategy is to bet on head 100% of the time. See the following table:

		Pure Random	Pseudo Tit-for-Tat	Always Head
Coin Lands Head: 80%	You bet head	40%	64%	80%
Coin Lands Head: 80%	You bet tails	40%	16%	0%
Coin Lands Tail: 20%	You bet head	10%	16%	20%
Coin Lands Tail: 20%	You bet tails	10%	4%	0%
Success Rate		50%	68%	80%

So a “better” strategy — better in the sense that it gives a better success rate — is to check the entire history of the coin thus far, and always bet on whichever side had the higher probability thus far. One reason you might prefer pTfT in real-life is that it might be too much effort to actually remember the entire history of the coin thus far, and compute the probabilities. So even if pTfT yields a lower success rate, it’s much easier to implement. And given that humans are notoriously bad at being random, pTfT is probably even easier to implement than pure random, and yet yields better success rates.

Transformers 2: The Ethics of Survival

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:43:49 -0400

Most critics have panned Transformers 2, and while I agree that the film had many problems, it wasn’t completely without merit: it brought up an interesting idea to my attention, and while it was hard for me to judge whether this was accidental, I had to conclude that there was indeed a writer onboard who tried to squeeze in some deeper meaning.

The critics complained about a confusing plot, the inability to tell the autobots from the decepticons, the illiterate “nigger-bots”, the US army persisting in using ineffectual weapons like assault rifles, instead of the actually effective ones like bombers, the film being undecided as to whether the robots are machine or biological, and so on. And I agree with the critics on all of these points.

One scene I haven’t seen much criticism on, but which bugged me, was when the red bot died. His brother, the green bot, cried and mourn his death, but the humans appeared completely oblivious, and when about 5 seconds later, it turned out that the red bot had not actually died, the green robot was overjoyed and again the humans were stoic. It was almost as if they had decided to rewrite the scene with the red robot dying after they had already filmed all the humans, and just added a few extra plot elements in CG.

Another thing that bugged me (but no other critic seemed to complain about) was how wimpy the autobot’s energy weapons sounded. Couldn’t they have picked a better sound effect than the satirical “pew pew”? I suppose it’s just as well, as those weapons not only sounded ineffectual, but actually were ineffectual as well: I can’t recall a single robot that died from causes other than a melee attack.

But enough negativity. The interesting idea that Transformer brought up was the idea of harming one species to save another. I’m not sure I fully understood the plot, but from what I’ve gathered, the autobots and the decepticons are the same species, and from an alien planet. They ran out of resources on that planet, and so have traveled across the galaxy looking for more resources to ensure their survival. A side effect of the process of harvesting the resources they need is that the star in the star-system they are harvesting from will extinguish. In the whole galaxy, they had only found seven suitable star systems, and Earth is one of them. They used up the other six already, and now they need to harvest our star system, causing the Sun to extinguish, or else the robots can no longer reproduce (or their offsprings become unviable aborted fetuses or something).

On Earth we see maybe a couple dozen of these robots, but presumably back in their home system, they have a population in the billions. We don’t meet those billions of robots, so we don’t get the whole story, but the autobots and the decepticons are in conflict with each other, and so when they both agree on something, we can assume that that upon which they agree is true, and anything else would be lies from one side or the other. (This assumption wouldn’t work if the two parties were in conflict with each other, and also in conflict with the humans, but it seems like the autobots are not in conflict with the humans, so we can make this assumption). This story about needing to harvest our Sun is corroborated by both sides, and thus probably true.

There are many things which are not corroborated by both sides, but an important one I wish to highlight is the claim that the robots swore not to harvest the star of a star-system upon which there existed life. I don’t remember the exact wording, but if that was the exact wording, then this claim is highly improbable, as there is good reason to believe that life (microbiotic, perhaps) exists on many star systems, and given how rare a “harvestable” Sun is, it’s an extreme dangerous restriction to put on oneself.

If, instead, the exact wording from the movie was something more like “Don’t harvest from stars around planets with intelligent life” this is more understandable, but still in the realm of unreasonableness. The autobots claimed that the robots made this solemn oath, but never in the presence of a decepticon. And the decepticons never bring up the topic. Could this claim have been a lie?

An apt analogy to make would be the decepticons being, for lack of a better term, “normal” people and the autobots being PETA. Normal people agree that trying to preserve biodiversity is an honorable ideal to try to uphold, but I’m sure that if the survival of the species were at stake, most people would say fuck the animals, we can’t allow ourselves to go extinct. PETA and the autobots, however, seem to take the ideal to extremes. The autobots seem to aware that their species will go extinct (the bad guy — Megatron? — directly asks Optimus Prime “You sacrifice our whole race for one human?”) and still persist in fighting the decepticons. Are the billions of citizens back on their home planet okay with this? Are they more likely to share the decepticon’s ideals, or the autobot’s ideals?

I also do not recall the decepticons ever stating the annihilation of all humans as their goal. It’s entirely plausible to me, that the decepticons mean particular harm to the humans at all, and any conflict between the humans and the decepticon arises solely through the humans’ resistance to giving up their resources. To argue that the decepticons have no rights to human resources is hypocritical, because we as humans take resources away from animals and other lower lifeforms all the time. When we build houses, we are destroying the habit and environments of the insects and worms that lived in the area. We don’t mean them any harm. They’re just in the way. And maybe they got the section of earth “first”, but we don’t care. We respect property rights amongst others of our own species, but we don’t respect property rights of lower life forms.

Giving up our sun is not tantamount to self-genocide: In the same manner that many humans are “humane” and will transport an ant or a fly or some other insect they find inside their house to another compatible environment (namely outside their house), the decepticons could simply harvest our sun, and then transport all the humans to another star system. Remember: The decepticons only have 7 stars they can actually harvest from, whereas we could probably live comfortably around any G2-class star, of which there are billions. By refusing to give up our sun, we are, in fact, the ones committing genocide.

And even if the decepticons turn out to be assholes and don’t transport us, to another star system, they really don’t come off as having anything particularly against humans, and thus would probably not object if the autobots decided to transport us in their stead. The analogy here would be (reasonable) animal activists protecting species which are being harmed by the colonial expansionistic practices of the more pragmatic members of their race. However, in the movie, the autobots are portrayed as using actual, physical violence against the decepticons, putting them closer to the animal activists terrorists who bomb research labs, than the humane animal activists who simply rescue, heal and relocate animals who are suffering from proximity.

One final object I’ll counter is the possibility that the robots don’t have a survival instinct like humans do, and thus do not care whether their species go extinct. I claim that there’s a very high likelyhood that they do have a survival instinct, and as evidence, you need only look at the behaviour of the decepticons in the movie. The survival instinct is the whole motivation for their journey to earth.

You might then counterargue that perhaps the decepticons are exceptional, and the majority of the billions of robots back on their home planet do not have a survival instinct. To counter this, first I will point out that the robots reproduce (you see egg sacks with fetuses in the movie, and they specifically talk about how they need to harvest the sun to make these fetuses viable). If the decepticons are different from the other robots, it means mutations are possible during reproduction (or else the decepticons wouldn’t be different). Reproduction plus mutation is all that’s needed for natural selection to kick in.

Now despite the fact that we don’t have formal definition for intelligence, the robots are “obviously” intelligent. Natural selection plus intelligence will cause survival instinct to predominate (because the intelligent beings without a survival instinct will eventually all die off), thus showing that in all likelihood, it’s the decepticons which are normal, and the autobots which are strange mutants with mental diseases causing them to be a danger to the rest of their society.

Burger King

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:51:40 -0400

Neb: Do you got that transformer burger, um, available?
Girl: What?
Neb: Uh… do you have that transformer burger? The stackatron…?
Girl: What?
Neb: Don’t you have posters out there advertising a transformer burger?
Girl: Est-ce-qu’on a un burger transformers?
Girl 2: C’est le stackatron.
Girl: Ah, n’importe qu’oi… Okay, yes, you want that?
Neb: Yes.
Girl: ksodorjnfgndfiajsdonion?
Neb: Er, what?
Girl: ksodorjnfgndfiajsdonion?
Neb: Sorry… onions?
Girl: Do you want french fries or a drink or something?
Neb: Oh… yes.
Girl: What kind of drink?
Neb: Can you make them large? … or supersized… or whatever?
Girl: Yes. The fries too?
Neb: Yes.
Girl: What kind of drink?
Neb: Uh, coke.
Girl: jditmeskkflsdkiicuvhdfdf?
Neb: Sorry, I don’t understand.
Girl: jditmeskkflsdkiicuvhdouble, triple, quadruple?
Neb: Oh! Uh… double…

I’m sorry that not all of my posts can be as intellectually stimulating as this one.