Robot Jokes, part 2

Ok, I promise not to keep this up. But this one will kill you.

See, this robot walks into a bar. And the bartender says "Say, we don't get many robots in here." So the robot draws himself up to his full height, and he says "100111011011111011001000001100001110111011001001
00000110000111101001000001110100110100011001011
1100111100101100000111000011100101101001110001111
00101111001110110010000011110011101111111010110011
11110010110010110000011011101101111111010010000011
01100110100111010111100101110110011110011000001110
100110111110000011100111100101110010110000011000
011101110111100110000011011011101111111001011001011
00001".

Get it?

Robot Jokes

One casualty of this age of political correctness is the ethnic/minority joke. Such jokes are offensive in the extreme, and serve to reinforce outdated and destructive stereotypes.

However, it's also obvious that this type of humor fills a basic human need ... the need to deride and mock anyone different from ourselves. There have been ethnic jokes ever since one tribe encountered another and thought their hats were funny looking. Anthropologists have even observed chimpanzees imitating gibbons and laughing.

So, to fulfill this basic human need, we propose adoption of the robot joke. There's certainly much to mock about robots ... their cool, mechanical personalities, their shiny surface appearance, and their smug attitude of superiority. (Geez, I really hate that.) And by the time robots are actually aware and sensitive enough to take offense at such jokes, they will have taken over the world, and will be making human jokes.

So here goes:

The robots and the humans are fighting a war. The humans learned that a common robot name is X374K, so they started calling out "Hey, X374K!" When X374K stood up to respond, they would shoot. Blam! This went on for a while, until the robots decided to reciprocate. So they took a nanosecond to find that a common human name is Jack. The robots called out "Hey, Jack!" But the humans, wise to this trick, didn't stand up. They just yelled back, "Jack's not here. Is that you, X374K?" When the robots answered ... Blam!

So the robots destroyed all the humans.

Pretty funny, huh?

Wrong-headed

Just to get something straight, I think everybody is wrong. I don't say this lightly. I've given the matter considerable thought over a number of years, but I find this conclusion inescapable. This view has been confirmed for me by the collection of micro-essays in the book What Have You Changed Your Mind About. Basically, the book is a collection of very short essays by a bunch of incredibly smart people, all talking about ideas they held at one time, but later abandoned for various reasons.

What Have You Changed Your Mind About is an excellent book. Well, no it's not. Ok, it is.

The point is that nobody really has a handle on reality. No political parties. No religious institutions. No philosophers. Nobody! We see only a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. We hear a narrow range of sound wave frequencies. We're stuck looking at the universe from a tiny planet in one corner, where things that are too tiny or too big are all but invisible. We can use instruments to look at things that are tiny, or very far away. But these only expand our range a little bit. To draw conclusions about reality is like peering through the keyhole of a big mansion, and trying to deduce the color of the toilet paper in the master bathroom.

And the instruments have their own inherent flaws. Basically, they convert things we can't perceive into things we can. Telescopes, microscopes, amplifiers, etc. all make distant or tiny or quiet things appear closer or bigger or louder. Our mental model of the universe is based on just a few very primitive ideas we learn early on. So by magnifying or amplifying things, we make them comparable to familiar objects. The moon through a telescope looks like a ball out in space. Microorganisms are little squishy things. But the scale of these things is part of their reality. Putting them on our scale creates a distortion.

Anyway, I didn't mean to start down that road. I'll come back to that another time.

The other thing about everyone being wrong is that usually, when our beliefs are challenged, our first reaction is to cling to them more strongly, and to defend them. Belief systems are very comforting, because they allow us to ignore the vast unanswered questions and simply deal with the mundane business of getting through the day.

My point was that nobody knows how to fix health care. Nobody knows how to prevent terrorism. Nobody knows how to structure an economy that balances liberty with justice, so people are free to pursue their goals, but nobody gets treated unfairly. Nobody knows how to govern.

So if I occasionally rail against one political party or view or set of beliefs, that's just what's bugging me at the moment. I could undoubtedly find something just as ludicrous about the opposite view.

Oh, and when I say everyone is wrong, I'm including myself.

Saw Ad ... Must Buy

So NPR's Marketplace is reporting that Jay Leno may do live ads on his new 10:00 show next season. Rico Gagliano waxed nostalgic for the days when Johnny Carson used to plug products in the middle of the show. Apparently NBC, in desperation, is weighing having Leno do the same thing. The theory is that TiVo and DVR users will stop zapping through the commercials once they see Leno's face. Kenneth Wilbur, a professor of marketing (Isn't that an oxymoron?) at USC, points out that NBC's audience is "more tech-savvy," and has higher rates of DVR usage.

So, do they think all these tech-savvy users can't tell a plug from a monologue? Or that they'll appreciate being tricked into watching these ads? "Hey, I stopped zapping for this? Guess I'd better buy it!"

That's like "Gee, these Viagra sellers have really filled up my email box. I'd better get some."

Or "This movie was plastered over the whole side of a bus. It must be good!"

Or my personal favorite: "These Verizon ads are 6 decibels louder than everything else. I'd better subscribe. (I can hear them now!)"

How stupid do they think we are?

WTF?

In engineering, a common measure of reliability is the mean time between failures, or MTBF. What this means, basically, is how long the product runs without failing, on average. Obviously, the longer it goes without failing, the more reliable the product is. Software that runs continuously for weeks or months is better than software that fails every few days.

But if the software could be made to run faster, it might fail more often, because it gets to those failure points in less time. In other words, the faster software has a lower MTBF, and is therefore less reliable.

And upgrading the computer hardware, by adding more memory, more disk space, etc., is apt to improve the software's performance which will, in turn, reduce the MTBF.

So upgrading your computer will make your software worse!

No Hit, Herlock

In response to Britney Spears' hit, "If U Seek Amy," I'm recording a song called "No Essay, Chai Tea."

What Does It All Mean?

Human beings, or homo sapiens sapiens, as anthropologists jokingly like to call us, are generally thought to be more intelligent than other animals and most vegetables. One side effect of this intelligence is consciousness. This consciousness makes us think that we're some kind of superior beings, destined to build huge cities and dominate the planet. Actually, consciousness is basically a chemical process, like photosynthesis or Alka Seltzer. The only thing remarkable about consciousness is that it thinks it's remarkable. In fact, consciousness is the amazingly unique ability that humans have to think that they're amazingly unique. Of course, this means that at the time of this writing, there are about 6 billion of us all thinking we're totally unique.

Another side effect of our intelligence is that we believe in something called reality, and we have a model of reality in our heads that we use for deciding not to walk in front of buses and things like that. Most of us think of reality as lots of hard physical objects scattered around in space. This is because as children, we bumped into many of them. However, that model is based just on the information we get from our five senses. We've built scientific instruments that can extend the range of our senses. We can see far into space and record microscopic behavior and measure invisible radiation. But even with all those instruments, we can perceive only a tiny fraction of all that's happening out there in the universe. So for us to come to any conclusions about what reality is like is as absurd as peeking through the keyhole in the front door of a huge mansion, and trying to deduce the color of the toilet paper in the master bathroom.

This doesn't mean that speculation and scientific investigation are bad. Intellectual curiousity has brought about some of humankind's most important achievements, like nuclear weapons and lava lamps. Of course we should speculate and investigate and philosophize and come up with theories about how things work and why things are.

We just shouldn't be too smug about it.