Picture Week!

Lately I've been getting lazier about actually writing content. Every so often I have artistic urges, and so why not do a picture week (= this and the next post)?

I drew this last week:

Insane Voters

Last week's question: at what level of anthropomorphing can animals take over the world?

I think we should first look at how animals are most often anthropomorphized. From personal experience:

1. Speech
2. Motivation
3. Reasoning
   

And really, I think that's enough. The "anthropomorphing" of speech is really a way to express the assumption that animals cannot communicate with each other. It is clear that at least some animals do - whales, dophins, dogs (to an extent). Of course, these are never cross-species, and speech allows them to do that.

In fact, all three traits are somewhat amplifications of what animals do naturally, or rather, without being aware of them. And what does giving animals human motivations and reasoning do? It lets them inspect themselves, to think as we think.

That's all it takes. Humans survive because of our brains, and to support that we have become physically weak, much weaker than other animals. And if athropomorphic animals get that brain power for free... we're doom.

This week's question: Are patients in mental institutes allowed to vote?

PS. Thanks Yvonne

Stranger Appeal

The xkcd blag recently introduced me to Omegle, a chat service which connects you to another stranger. The idea is intriguing, and looking at the comments for the post, many xkcdians have found meaningful conversations through the site.

This is my latest find in the category of sites which connect you to people, which I think has the potential to forge deeper connections. These include:

• PostSecret
• BlogTV
• My own Geosynchronicity

Really only BlogTV and Omegle is active; the other two you learn about people, but they never learn about you.

There is something carthartic in learning about strangers, and telling your deepest secrets. In some sense it's like a one-night-stand - you have no obligation to do anything with their secret, and it's just for the release of lifting a burden.

I'm actually working on a search engine for a course this quarter, which I've titled cree.pr. As can be imagined, it's a people search engine, and it aims to automatically compile as full a profile as possible of someone's online activity.

But sometimes talking to a stranger is not enough. There is something to be said about meeting someone in person, having them in front of you. But then it takes courage to say what you mean. I used to not have that courage, but I do now.

Although, none of the above has worked out to well so far. I'll keep trying though.

Empty

I really know nothing about politics. This is more a play on words than anything else.

The World Without Us

Last week's question: How are the arches at Arches formed?

You can tell I'm running out of ideas when the questions are so straight forward. The arches are actually formed the same way as any other rock formation - through wind and water erosion. It's just that the rocks on top have the correct hardness and weight to withstand the erosion while the center crumbles away.

Boring, right?

This week's question is more interested. Literature has featured anthropomorphic animals for a long time. What spieces, and at what point of anthropomorphing, can animals take over (ie. extinguish, possibly drive to extinction) the human race?

Mood:

But it's really the title text I like: "When I say we should do something sometime, I'm secretly hoping you'll say 'Why not now?'"

Wizard's First Rule

Recently the developers have been discussing the possibility of adding some additional optimizations to our i686 port to improve multimedia support. This would involve reducing the compatibility with older systems. As some of you may have heard, this discussion has resulted in the decision to focus exclusively on the x86_64 port. The overall opinion of the developers is that the x86_64 port is now complete enough to justify this decision and that this is in keeping with Arch's philosophy of supporting current generation hardware. The x86_64 architecture has been available since 2002 (compared to i686 which is from 1995), and we believe most of our i686 users have x86_64 compatible hardware.

-- Arch Linux Team

I got this in my RSS feed (from Arch Latest News) on Tuesday night (around 23:00), and I was really annoyed for the next hour after that. Arch Linux dropping i686 support? What am I going to do with my laptop? I don't want to reinstall everything on a completely different distro, especially since that practically promises to slow down my computer and make it less customizable. I forwarded this Genia (who has been planning to switch over to Arch after trying out Ubuntu for a while), telling her to reconsidering the switch.

It was only until Wednesday night around 22:30 did I realize it was Arch Linux's April Fool's joke. I have never fallen for something as big as this (although I was Rickrolled twice by Ryan - I just click on links by instinct, and if it's not what I want I close them. Thanks mouse gestures). I recognized Google's joke right away - Google CADIE is so far ahead in the AI curve that it can't real. Also around the Northwestern campus there were posters about Jon Stewart coming to campus, which turned out to be a hoax. I did not see the posters myself, but was told this by a friend. My first question was on the organization which is bringing him to campus, but since my friend didn't know, we switched topics to comparing Stewart and Colbert instead.

So Arch dropping i686 support is the only hoax I really fell for. Why? Wizard's First Rule.

People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool.

-- Wizard's First Rule, by Terry Goodkind

Or, in a one sentence summary:

The first step to believing something is wanting to believe it is true, or being afraid it is.

The only hoax I really had enough knowledge to dispell is Google's, because of my background in computer science. For Jon Stewart coming to speak, I had no immediate interest. I used to watch The Daily Show, but have stopped since the middle of last quarter. My lack of preference allowed my rationality to kick in, and ask who was bringing him to campus. For Arch though, the idea of them dropping support for i686 is not out of the ballpark - they've dropped support for popular things before (for example, the official Sun JRE and JDF packages). The post even had links to forum discussions, and knowing that Arch is a fairly international distro, that the discussion was not in English did not surprise me. Since this was plausible, and after reading it I was afraid it was true (and didn't bother visiting the Arch forums, because I was sure there would be a lot of complaining - again, April Fool's completely out of my mine), I took the joke hook, line, and sinker.

The funny thing was, for most of the day I was pretty aware that it's April Fool's, and took a lot of things with a grain of salt. And still Arch took my completely by surprise.

I have to say, good job Arch Team. Keep up the good work.

Spring Break

I hope you all enjoyed my lolcat last week. I'm glad to say that the broken spring has been fixed:

So we can go on.

The group has uploaded a shit ton of pictures on Facebook, but since I'm compiling them into a giant (3.5Gb+) file for download anyway, I've selected a few which I think represents the best of the trip.

Please note that I did not take any of the photographs - all the scenery and framing belongs to the respective owners.

Welcome to spring quarter, everyone.