Nonsense at its finest

My laundry detergent says on the front: "Remove 99 Stains". What the hell does that mean? What stains? Is that a 99 stains per box, which would be rather disappointing? What unit of measure do they use? And what constitutes a stain? Oh I wish I knew. I really do.

Durability

Many many many people harp on Dell laptops as being piles of shit. I'm here to tell you that they are wrong -- or at least made a poor choice in model.

I bought a Dell Latitude D800 in July 2003. It was my only computer for two years, at which point I switched to a desktop system with the laptop as a portable solution/lab computer. People that have had computer issues all bought Inspirons, which leads me to believe that you should only buy the Latitude if you get a Dell. It is their business, so the idea that it is sturdier makes sense to me.

What has my computer been through? Over 10 cross-country trip in a crammed backpack. It was the computer that drove the MIT DARPA Grand Challenge truck in our 2005 demo video. It was the primary interface for the MIT Campus Tour Bot during its initial design phase.

Okay, you say, that's not a big deal. You carried your laptop around, and it sat on some robots. True enough, but if you've ever seen my laptop when it is driving the robot, you would understand that its continued existence is something of a marvel. When on the robot, the laptop bounces around like crazy -- little bounces, maybe 1/2" - 1" -- and repeatedly. It is a constant barrage. Looking at the case to my laptop, with all the dents and dings, and you'll know it has been through hell. The real kicker, though, is two weeks ago, while driving the robot, I stepped on the joystick cord and my laptop flew off the robot into a tailspin and crashed onto the sidewalk -- this is a fall of about two feet with a robot moving about 1.5 meters/sec. When I tried to turn the laptop on, it fired up, but there was a clicking. I assumed it was the hard drive. I had bought a new hard drive in 2005 to increase storage capacity (the old was fine, I just needed more than 40 gigs for a dual-boot system), so I planned on just putting the old one in. Well, when I went to make the switch, I discovered that, amazingly, my hard drive was working perfectly. The clicking was coming from the CD-Rom drive, which is what hit first on the ground I think. Mind you, this laptop is before the time when there were accelerometers installed on the hard drives, so there was data access happening at the time.

Needless to say, through all of this my laptop still lives, minus a CD-Rom drive that I don't really use. With that, I plan on sticking with Dell when the time comes for another laptop. I'd recommend the same to you.

Who Do You Play For?

As I dive more into the music scene here in Boston, I am discovering an interesting phenomenon that I think speaks a lot for what it means to truly be a musician.

I don't listen popular music, as jazz hasn't been popular music for a long time, but on top of that, I listen a lot of free/avant-garde/experimental jazz. The kind of music that is the fringe of the fringe. Given that, you can imagine that when I go to a concert, it isn't at a big hall or arena. The two places I go the most are: Brookline Tai-Chi and the Lilypad, and for the most part, there are almost as many musicians as there are audience members, sometimes more.

A couple weeks back, I was the only person at the show until almost 15 minutes after it was supposed to start, and even then, the audience wasn't large and consisted mostly of people that were friends of the people playing. But regardless, they played the hell out of their instruments for about an hour and a half of free improvisation. It was an amazing performance. At times, the only way to describe it would 
be violent, with the drummer roaring and sax and trumpet blazing at the tips of their 
registers. It was the sort of thing that leaves you silent for the sheer power of it.

When you are playing music like that or most any improvised music, you aren't just speaking music (assuming that you are really playing) but evoking 
everything inside you at the moment. Frustrations are heard, sadness is heard, joy is heard.
 There is a rawness to the sound --I can't just say music because it isn't always like that, sometimes you strive for just pure 
sound to try and speak about those ineffable emotions that we all keep bottled inside. For 
me that's what music is for. In addition to pure enjoyment and entertainment, it is sometimes 
the only way you can really express what you want to say.

I don't really know where I rambled to here, but what I'm trying to say is that if you go out playing music for yourself, then you're doing something right. If you play only for others, I don't think that you're doing yourself or anyone else a favor.

Addendum: While at the Blue Note last night (see another post for details), I was talking with a free jazz pianist, Randall Moore, and he definitely ascribes to this philosophy. He'll only play his music. He does catering/bar tending to pay the rent and he was telling a story about a wedding he did at some fancy mansion in the Hamptons where there was an ancient out-of-tune Steinway, and the musician playing the gig was sitting there playing the piano while talking on his cell phone. I don't know about you, but it seems that there's something fundamentally wrong with that. If you can just coast through the music that you're playing like that, then why bother? Leave those gigs to the young kids that are still cutting their teeth trying to figure things out, such that they'll actually care about the music that they are playing.

Am I Worried?

My friend Melo recently called me out with the following question (copied from my Facebook wall, hopefully you don't mind :)

I understand your desire to do responsible science, but do you worry that putting robots into society could impact the job market?

Phew! What a question. I can answer simply by saying I think about it all the time and none of the time. I spend plenty of idle thinking about how to automate systems to make them better. Case in point: Subways. Apparently, NYC has computer-controlled subways. That's the way it should be. With such a constrained system, there is absolutely no need for a human operator. In Boston, the Red, Blue, and Orange Lines could be this way. The light rail sections of the Green Line still need a strongly reasoning mind to ensure that they don't mangle a pedestrian

or TBone a car that runs a red light (not that that would necessarily be bad, teach someone a 
lesson really). And actually, given proper sensors and a little reasoning, it could be done. I'd
say it would cost $20,000 per train to be able to make them completely automated, plus cost
for infrastructure changes necessary for making the trains able to know what color the light
is without using a camera just a wireless method really. Give me $5 million and I'll make it
happen and pay back the money that I didn't need (minus a decent sum for my labors of course).

But now I've just said that I have no problems displacing all MBTA workers that operate the trains for the T. What happens when their jobs disappear? Obviously, the new systems will need maintenance, which is one possibility, but if you have as many people to maintain the system as you displaced, then you really have done anyone any good now have you?

Everyday, when I stare out my window or walk down the street, I look at what people are doing and wonder if that task could be automated. Sometimes, I think it can. Garbage trucks, buses, tractors, and the like. What are the things that I have difficulty believing will be automated anytime soon? Plumbers, electricians, etc. So what is the difference? Skilled vs. unskilled labor. Any type of unskilled labor is ripe for automation -- apparently it is already happening with migrant worker tasks: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/06/robo_picker, but skilled labor requires just that, skill. But it isn't the raw skill itself that is the issue -- build a robot to fix wires or pipes? No problem. The issue is the context in which they operate. You have to have the robot go in and determine the best course of action, where to drill that hole, run that cable, etc. which is not easy to do and isn't the same for every job. Does that make it impossible? No. But the advancements needed for this are beyond simple mechanical systems and an algorithmic knowledge of your surroundings. I could see a robot being given a very specific task involving plumbing, but then someone has to decide that task, so why don't they just do it themselves? Perhaps you could have a robot plumber manager that deals with many of the robots, so as to boost efficiency.

What am I saying? Pretty much that most or all unskilled labor is going to disappear in the near (~100 years) future. Make sure you have that diploma right?

But wait! If we have people doing all these skilled tasks, eventually our robots will become better and better. Soon, those skilled positions will start to get gobbled up. As the skilled labor disappears, what are we left with? If robots can design new robots to do more advanced things based upon their own set of principles, then where does it stop? Eventually, everything is society may become automated. Why are there farmers? Simply because they love farming, not because there is any serious need. When this happens what is left? Maybe people all just work in the dirty financial industry trying to make more money on the robots. But it seems that would dry up in an automated society. Perhaps construction or architecture will still need to be done by humans, but I can imagine that robots will be able to handle all of that as well. Those decisions about where to drill, etc. become moot if the building was initially constructed by robots, as that will all have had to been decided beforehand. Ultimately, humans become obsolete. We remove our own "need" for existence. What do we do? We enjoy life. Maybe some people will have to be employed to fix robots that break (think recursively and you'll realize something besides a robot has to repair a robot at some point...or else you just manufacture a new robot to replace the old one).

There is one thing that I can't imagine being automated, as it is purely human, and that is art. Sure you might have a machine compose and play a piece of music (some would say that is the state of a large part of classical music these days), but it is fundamentally lacking the one reason for the existence of art: emotion. You can try to say art exists for any other reason, but it doesn't. All art evokes emotion. The emotions evoked are what tell us what music we don't like, why we hate a building, etc. If we somehow manage to replicate the human brain and create a truly emotional robot, then perhaps we'll have something. Otherwise, the world will descend into dystopia. It is hard to do nothing. To justify the act of doing nothing. Perhaps not.

So am I worried about the potential ramifications of what I do? Yes. At the same time, I think they will be more of a benefit than a hindrance to society. Will all of the above come true? No. I don't think it will ever get that far. There will always be a spoon.

How To Tell Your Roommate Is An Asshole

My apartment technically has four people living in it, myself, Behram, Peter, and Rui. Three of us actually live there and Rui is a ghost. The only things that Rui ever does is come at random hours of the night -- though he's only here about one night a month at most --, make the most awful hacking sounds such that you are sure he isn't human because no person is that full of phlegm, and occasionally argue with his girlfriend in some Asian language -- I can't tell them apart. That alone is annoying enough, but then over Christmas break, a desk appears in our living room that takes up an annoying amount of space, it has to be his because it isn't Behram's, I was in Utah, and Peter is in Perth. My question is why he doesn't have it in his room, given he spends no time here.

But the kicker is simple: he was here yesterday as the lights were mysteriously on in the apartment -- I'm the only one of the normal three in town. Now he is gone. Good riddance I say EXCEPT he left the window in his room wide open. Thanks to him there is an Arctic blast rollling down the hall of our apartment, making everything wayyy too cold -- my hands have dipped below optimal typing temperature, so I'm losing at least five words a minute in speed. I have to keep the door closed to my room, lest I freeze to death, and now the bathroom, which is right across from his room, is an icebox -- cold enough that my balls shrink even thinking of going in there.

In summary, Rui is a douche.

Across The Skies

Flying across the country in the middle of winter can be a surreal undertaking. This flight seemed stranger than most as half the country is entrenched in snow while the other half seems more like fall. Regardless of snow-cover though, the country in winter seems color-bleached. The ground takes on an 8-bit hue, where not quite all the shades of gray exist -- replaced by a joyless brown. Even the snowless land strives for Soviet-like uniformity as it is all dead. If Lake Michigan were alive (it might be making strong steps in that direction), I'm sure it would somehow manage to turn a sludge brown as well. At the same time, while the color of the earth isn't, the wildly varying topography of Wyoming and Nebraska is readily apparent. The view out the plastic life barrier is topologic. The multi-hued fields and sun-browned hills transform into shades on a map. You no longer have to wonder about the feasibility of traversal. I oftentimes wonder if I could hike over a geological feature -- much the same as, once on that geological feature, I will find the highest point therein and proceed to urinate from it. With the snow, it is becomes a simple task to determine. Is it mostly white? You could cartwheel across the surface. Black? The only cartwheels would be your soon-to-be corpse plummeting from an icy crevasse. Somehow though, time freezes. You step from one world into a foreignly familiar haunt with disturbing ease.