Center For Inquiry fiction book club fall 2012-spring 2013 reading list

Update: we will have a meeting in November 2012 -- see below.

Here is the list of books we'll be discussing in the next few months in the CFI Austin fiction book club.

October 2012: Nancy Kress "Steal Across The Sky"

From amazon.com:

"The aliens appeared one day, built a base on the moon, and put an ad on the internet:

"We are an alien race you may call the Atoners. Ten thousand years ago we wronged humanity profoundly. We cannot undo what has been done, but we wish humanity to understand it. Therefore we request twenty-one volunteers to visit seven planets to Witness for us. We will convey each volunteer there and back in complete safety. Volunteers must speak English. Send requests for electronic applications to witness@Atoners.com."

At first, everyone thought it was a joke. But it wasn't.

This is the story of three of those volunteers, and what they found on Kular A and Kular B."

November 2012: Mark Twain "Mysterious Stranger". In this Mark Twain's last, unfinished novel, a young Satan comes to a remote Austrian village. He claims to be able to foresee the future and informs the group of unfortunate events that will soon befall those they care about. The boys don't believe Satan's claims until one of his predictions comes true.

December 2012: Octavia Butler "Parable of the Sower"

From amazon.com: "When unattended environmental and economic crises lead to social chaos, not even gated communities are safe. In a night of fire and death Lauren Olamina, a minister's young daughter, loses her family and home and ventures out into the unprotected American landscape. But what begins as a flight for survival soon leads to something much more: a startling vision of human destiny... and the birth of a new faith."

January 2012: Michael Bishop "Close Encounters with a Deity" - a story collection.

From amazon.com: "The book's unifying theme is man's concept of the Deity. Bishop's stories intermingle humor, horror, and awe in a manner similar to Vonnegut."

February 2012: Jonathan Strahan, editor, "Godlike Machines"

From goodreads.com: "In science fiction, nothing says sensawunda like a Big Dumb Object--a colossal, extremely powerful machine of unknown purpose and origin. It's that feeling that editor Jonathan Strahan was after when he asked six of today's finest authors to write for Godlike Machines. And they succeed brilliantly!"

March 2012: Greg Egan "Clockwork Rocket"

From amazon.com:

"Set in another universe where light does not travel at a constant speed but instead has a velocity that depends on its wavelength, Clockwork Rocket recounts the personal life journey of an inhabitant in this fictional universe."

"Alongside a taut and well imagined story set in a very alien world - complete with a sympathetic range of characters and a well imagined society - Greg Egan develops an entire alternative physics. This isn't just done in a hand waving way, it is properly worked out. The story of Yalda, the scientist who is the main protagonist, is also the story of the discovery of "rotational physics" in her universe, of the implications of that, good and bad, for her planet, and finally - in the construction of the rocket of the title - the story of the action she takes to safeguard that world."

Of programmatic thinking in low-tech situations

These days it's been fashionable to insist that everybody should learn to program. Some argue it's the next kind of literacy (a federal judge who learned how to code could correctly estimate how long it would take to implement a certain function), others say the importance of programming in an ordinary person's life is overblown. There is a vast difference between basic programming knowledge and being a professional software developer. The question is, can this basic literacy have applications in everyday life? Can it improve the life of a non-programmer? I liked this article that demonstrates how knowing how to program benefits even the people who are not programmers. When you have developed a mentality that lets you see many life problems from an engineering perspective, you see how software could help you improve even those life processes that you previously didn't think a computer could solve. It's a matter of thinking algorithmically, of seeing what could be automated. I have a similar problem as the one described in the article. I take lots of pictures of people at conventions and conferences, and there isn't a good way to "connect" photos of strangers with their names (which I forget instantly). However, unlike the casting directors in the article, I have neither assistants with spreadsheets, nor do people parade in front of me one by one like models. I also think that it would be awkward to ask them, after introducing myself, to write their names on a piece of paper, and to pose with it. :-) The best I can do is take pictures of their name tags, but sometimes those are missing, or flipped over to the blank side, or flash bounces off of them in a way that makes them illegible. On the other hand, my tablet allows me to add notes to any picture I take. (Well, I can't add notes to a picture directly, but I can save it to Evernote with a note attached.) So perhaps I'll just have to take two pictures of everyone -- one with the real camera, for quality, and the other with the tablet, for documentation. If a situation is not structured, there isn't much room for a programmatic solution to a problem.

ArmadilloCon 2012: a summary

Misunderstandings about writers was the topic of the toastmaster's speech at the opening ceremony. Even in these days of decline of published word the general public continues to perceive writers' lives as glamorous. Since the toastmaster shared a personal anecdote, I will refer to him only as T (to keep Google's prying eyes away). One time he told a stranger he played XBox with that he was a writer. The stranger immediately found this suspicious, and started asking T his name, address, and what books he has published. T answered his questions, all the while surprised that his XBox pal didn't think T could just have borrowed someone else's name and biographical facts. And though the XBox pal had never heard of this writer, he said: "Wow! I've never played XBox with anyone famous!" T replied: "You still haven't".

First row: Jeremy Lassen, Martin Wagner (speaking); second row: Liz Gorinsky, Robert Jackson Bennett, Joe McKinney; third row: Mark Finn, Matthew Bey, Nicole Duson -- teachers at the writers' workshop. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

Writers' workshop. There are many ways to express how a writers' critique group can help you, and many of them involve self-deprecatory humor, which is apropos in anticipation of your "brilliant" story being trounced. For example, they might tell you when there's a toilet in your kitchen -- metaphorically speaking.

The writing game required us to smell, taste, and touch various items while blindfolded, and list 5 positive and 5 negative adjectives about each smell, taste, or texture. It was a mostly futile occupation for someone like me with only a rudimentary sense of smell or taste.

Nancy Jane Moore, Kevin Jewell, Marshall Maresca, Jessica Reisman, and Madeleine Dimond on the 'Workshopping to Success' panel. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

Workshops are multifaceted things, and the advice given in them is not always helpful, as noted in the "Workshopping To Success" panel. Sometimes a critique group that points out a toilet in your kitchen simply doesn't understand the architecture of your home. For example, it may be a group of fantasy writers all into dragons and elves, but you don't write that kind of fantasy, and they'll be bored with your work. Perhaps you shouldn't bring your work into a critique group that thinks your whole genre is one big toilet? Or perhaps you should! Show your drafts to people who don't read your genre to see if you can keep them entertained. That's what Mary Doria Russell did. She showed the first draft of "The Sparrow" to her aunts, who only read mysteries, but no science fiction. And they kept reading it.

Another thing to note is that you need a different critique group for a novel than for short stories. You need first readers who are in it for a long run. If you bring new chapters of your novel to an open-to-all critique group, you'll see new people at every meeting. Those people will read the chapter and say: "I have no idea what's going on, but let me tell you what I think".

Kenneth Mark Hoover, Bill Frank, and Bob Mahoney on the panel on writing hard science fiction. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

Writing hard science fiction. Why base a story on science fact? If you do so, you disarm people who say that "it" will never happen, "it" being the subject of your speculation -- for example, a total surveillance society. How much scientific or technical detail to put in a SF story? A good rule of thumb is this: you can mention how a headset works, but don't elaborate on the wiring, unless it plays part in electrocuting your character's brain.

Another thing reading and writing hard science fiction can teach you, is to think through what-if scenarios. It's a great life skill, says Bill Frank -- both at work and in personal life. Before you start a project, you can learn to identify potential points of failure, and come up with alternative plans.

Robert Jackson Bennett, Elizabeth Moon, Chris N. Brown, and Madeleine Dimond on a "Social Impacts of New Technology" panel. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

Social Impacts of New Technology. Madeleine knows a professor who gives his students every 15 minutes a connect-break in class, when everybody is allowed to use their gadgets to check their email, etc., otherwise they'll get too anxious and distracted. Audience is shaking their heads in disbelief.

3-D printing has been on everyone's lips lately, and just a week before ArmadilloCon came an announcement that 3-D technology now makes it possible to print guns. Most people in the audience found this development chilling. Elizabeth Moon thinks that since such printing requires lots of energy, law enforcement officers might look at who is consuming lots of energy, to get clues as to who is printing guns. Robert Jackson Bennett is not sure how viable 3D printing is, given that power is going to get much more expensive in the near future. (My Twitter friends responded that you should be able to run such a printer off of solar energy.)

Chris N. Brown is hopeful about a future where technologies could be brought down to "garage level", and anyone could build surveillance drones in their garages. That way we should able to monitor what the police is doing as much as it monitors us. A woman in the audience noted that abundance of garage-level technologies might renew interest in science among American school children, 70% of which currently say science is too hard.

Ari Marmell, Bev Hale, Madeleine Dimond, and Matthew Bey on the "Story ideas I don't want to see again" panel. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

"Story ideas I don't want to see again" panel quickly got bogged down in trivial stuff, as the panelists started complaining how they never wanted to see skimpily dressed women on book covers again.

-- Why can't healthy, loving relationships ever be discussed in genre fiction? Quick answer: healthy relationships are too "boring" for fiction, because most fiction is fueled by conflict. Bev Hale then said that there are some science fiction works that portray loving relationships -- for example, Lois Bujold Miles Vorkosigan series or Firefly.

-- Some of the relationships tropes that the panelists DON'T want to see again are "The fate of the whole world depends on these two people getting together, and their relationship is more important than the whole world", as well as "I'm so special that there is no mere man who is worthy to be my mate. He has to be a werewolf or vampire."

-- We also don't want to see rape universally used as "something bad that happened in the heroine's past that made her come back stronger", says Ari Marmell. Too often it's used as a lazy character-building shortcut, as if there was no other adversity that a woman protagonist could possibly experience and overcome.

-- Another trope we don't want to see: white people go to another planet and save the natives.

Al Jackson, John Gibbons, Alan Porter and Paige Roberts / Ewing on the "Is Interstellar Space Travel Possible?" panel. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

"Is Interstellar Space Travel Possible?" John Gibbons pointed out that there is a perception that the problem with interstellar travel is the speed of light, but in reality getting close to the speed of light is not even a question. A fusion bomb-powered spaceship would take an amount of fuel the size of a small planet to reach even a 10th of the speed of light. There's no way to do it on a planetary energy budget. The only way to do it is to colonize the solar system first, and to gain a solar system-sized energy budget.

A common science fiction scenario, generation ship, was also discussed on the panel. Paige Roberts doesn't think a generation ship would have much chance of arriving to the destination and colonizing a distant planet, because over many generations the people in the ship might evolve or progress to the point where they don't remember where or why they are going; or don't care. Or that they wouldn't overuse their resources. It's unlikely that they'll stay the same and faithful to their purpose. Alan Porter also thinks it's implausible.

So, sad to say, we did not brainstorm new and promising ways to get out to interstellar space.

Jaime Lee Moyer, Patrice Sarath, Rhiannon Frater, Chloe Neill, Michael Bracken and Katherine Eliska Kimbriel at the "Writing Strong Female Characters" panel. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

"Writing Strong Female Characters" panel was thoughtfully moderated by Patrice, who asked good questions.

-- Rhiannon Frater says: mothers in fiction are typically portrayed as weak characters, though in reality mothers defending their children can be fierce and heroic.

-- Can male writers write believable female characters? Michael Bracken says he's pretty sure he can, as he had plenty of strong women in his family.

-- Kick-ass women protagonists as lone wolves with no female friends is a damaging cliche.

We don't get many costumes (read: almost none) at ArmadilloCon, but here is Raven as Elizabeth Shaw from Prometheus. Who, one could say, IS a strong female character. See more pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 in my photo gallery.

-- What does a strong character mean anyway, even when speaking about males? Rhiannon Frater said that some guys who read her fiction said her male characters sound like normal guys one would like a barbecue with, but the men in her critique group criticized her male characters for not being a Rambo. It seems too many people think that in genre fiction a strong character has to be a cliche.

What sciences haven't been used yet in science fiction?. I didn't even take a picture of the panelists, because this panel reached an all-time intellectual low in my memory of ArmadilloCon. It happened when a certain poet (I don't know why he was on the panel, because he didn't seem to have a clue about science) said that a new "scientific" idea that still hasn't been used was a spaceship powered by "emissions" from eating Mexican food. Moderator Madeleine Dimond tried hard to keep it on track, and in fact the panel later recovered from the poet's verbal emissions. We had a brief, but interesting discussion whether cyberpunk fell in the realm of computer science, or not -- Madeleine agreed with me that it didn't, and that real computer science is one of those very underutilized sciences in SF. Another guy in the audience suggested cyberpunk takes a transhumanist approach, without being necessarily scientific.

In the style of the "Gorilla of the Gasbags" challenge, Madeleine issued her own challenge to the audience -- to write a SF story based on an underused science. She let everyone who wanted to draw a slip of paper with a science on it. I drew alien psychology. That shouldn't be too hard -- I'll just base the story on my own psychology. And the best thing, we have two years to submit our stories for the challenge, because there won't be an Armadillocon next year.

Book review: Charles Yu "How To Live Safely In A Science-Fictional Universe"

seudo science fiction with a certain melancholy beauty -- that's what we concluded about Charles Yu "How To Live Safely In A Science-Fictional Universe" at the Center For Inquiry book club discussion. It is pseudo science fiction, because while it has science fiction trappings, most of it is author's exploration of how he feels about things. It felt self-indulgent, and for a good reason: the protagonist is the author himself, or at least his namesake. That's not to say that many of us wouldn't be able to identify with the protagonist sometimes. He is a technician who travels in a time machine, and attends the most heartbreaking moments of people's lives. It also means that he doesn't spend almost any time in the present -- most of his life is spent outside time, and he is a stranger in his own era. His capsule, barely big enough to stretch out, is completely bland and featureless. I was all the more surprised that I found its description compelling. Something about it resonated with me. Could it be because many of us spend most of our days in similar blank rooms, a.k.a. office cubicles, performing actions that are, in a way, outside of time? Their impact on other people is softened by many layers of infrastructure, depersonalized, not traceable directly to us. So it's not hard to identify with the protagonist's alienation. I found his father, a quietly brilliant, stoic, underappreciated Asian engineer, to be a more vivid character than the protagonist himself. But that may be just because I identify with an immigrant engineer's experience. That said, the explorations of the character's psyche did not make up for plot shortfalls. It seemed that the author intended for the time-travel mechanism to make sense (it wasn't just a vessel for psychological exploration), but in that sense it failed. At the end, we are expected to believe that the protagonist resolved a deadly time loop he accidentally created. But the ending is so ambiguous that we didn't understand what was going on. It's as if the author tried to hand-wave over the fact that no real resolution was possible. This book has a few interesting science-fictional tidbits, which I can't really call ideas, since they are way too undeveloped. For example, what does it mean to time-travel by grammatical tenses? Or what does it mean to live in a universe that's only 93% installed? Each of those ideas could be tantalizingly interested, if properly developed, but in the book they are just throwaway sentences. One of the book club members said that while he enjoyed the book enough, he wouldn't recommend it except to someone who really wanted a "different" kind of science fiction. This book may be best enjoyed for its melancholy mood, an exploration of a father-son relationship, and a tragedy of a brilliant, but modest person without an ability to sell himself well (the father). That last plotline is where the book really shines.

ArmadilloCon 2012: What You Should Have Read in 2011 - 2012

A bunch of authors, editors, critics and booksellers discuss their science fiction, fantasy and horror picks of the year.

It's worth noting which of the books or authors got a nod from more than one panelist. This year those were N. K. Jemisin The Kingdom Of Gods, Kameron Hurley God's War and Infidel, Will Macintosh Soft Apocalypse, and anthology Welcome to Bordertown.

Below are each panelist's recommended books, and his or her comments about why they are worth reading.

Willie Siros's recommended books

Margaret Atwood In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination

N. K. Jemisin The Kingdom Of Gods and The Killing Moon. -- N. K. Jemisin is one of the most amazing new writers. She has strong ties to Africa, and writes in non-Western ways. The structure of her novels are so amazingly different than what you find in American fantasy.

Ian McDonald Planesrunner -- When someone decides, after a lifetime of writing hard SF, to write a teen novel, it's interesting to see how he's trying not to talk down to the reader. We, adult readers, have seen many science fiction and fantasy tropes, such as alternate realities, but teens might have not seen them yet, and require a different approach.

Neal Stephenson REAMDE".

Bruce Sterling Gothic High-Tech -- short story collection.

Francis Spufford Red Plenty -- Willie called it "my epic fail of the year", though it wasn't clear to me why, because his comments about this book were quite flattering. It's a novel about Soviet space race, and it's not clear whether it's science fiction -- maybe not, says Willie. It could be secret history. In any case, having lived through American space era, it's very interesting to read the same events from the other side. We in the US thought American space program got it wrong, but Russians also thought THEY got it wrong, and had to go back to the roots of Marxism to start over.

Terry Bison Any Day Now is another big secret history novel. It starts out with the usual version of the 1960s, but then you discover that Kennedy doesn't die, and the story drifts just further and further from our history. Willie says that he was amazed by Terry Bison's sense of inertia in history. It's hist best novel since Talking Man.

Laird Barron The Croning -- a horror novel.

James S. A. Corey space series Caliban's War -- American writers trying to retake space opera from Alastair Reynolds and Peter F. Hamilton and other Brits.

Kim Stanley Robinson 2312. You can see it as a sequel to Mars trilogy, or not, as you wish. But, according to Willie, it is Robinson best novel since Mars.

Charles Stross Apocalypse Codex is the 4th Laundry novel, and it's as strong as the 1st one. Much stronger than the 2nd and 3rd.

Jeremy Lassen's recommended books

Lauren Beukes Zoo City -- She is an amazing writer from South Africa. She got a handle on the non-western-European future science fiction.

Mark Lawrence, Prince of Thorns -- Really weird fantasy series. The setting makes it unique.

N. K. Jemisin The Kingdom Of Gods, and the rest of her The Inheritance trilogy.

Jo Walton Among Others.

Michael Swanwick Dancing With Bears

Greg Egan Clockwork Rocket, a start of a new trilogy, and no, it's not steampunk.

Kameron Hurley God's War -- another real science-fiction book. Incredibly unique setting, a cast of characters that features strong women taking control of their hyperviolent world. The wold is ruled by a Queen, all men are sent off to war. So it's just old men, and women, and children running this world.

Will Macintosh Soft Apocalypse -- very depressing, a gut punch of a book. It looks at Apocalypse as something that happens not with explosions, but with lowered expectations, something that happens when unemployment reches 40% and Walmart runs out of stuff. The protagonist's life just gets grimmer and grimmer. It's a hard book to read.

Rob Ziegler Seed. It's similar to Paolo Bacigalupi's "Windup Girl", but with faster pacing, and with more likeable protagonist. Rob and Paolo live in the same small town, so it's an interesting bit of serendipity.

As an aside, someone from the audience recommends Paolo Bacigalupi's Shipbreaker as being much better and with nicer characters than Windup Girl.

Rudy Rucker Jim and the Flims, in which Rudy Rucker comes to terms with his own mortality.

Geoff Ryman Paradise Tales, short story collection from Small Beer Press.

Holly Black and Ellen Kushner, ed. Welcome to Bordertown, an anthology. They rebooted the Bordertown anthologies, which were urban fantasy before urban fantasy was created, and got a whole new cast of writers.

Jeremy Lassen, Bill Parker, Willie Siros, Michelle Muenzler, and Bev Hale on What You Should Have Read in 2011 - 2012 panel. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2012 are in my photo gallery.

Bill Parker's recommended books

Ernest Cline Ready, Player One. Ernest Cline is native to Austin. This science fiction novel is set in 2044, and society has changed quite a lot. One character is a game designer from the 80s, and there are lots of references to 80s music, movies, and culture. It takes you through the game industry in little bits and pieces that are plugged into the story. By 2044 a game company has shut down, and opened up with a new product they called Oasis -- a virtual reality world. Kids don't go to school anymore -- they study in the Oasis. People don't go to the office, they work in the Oasis. One character lives in a trailer park, where trailers are stacked 30-high. The gist of the story is that the creator of Oasis has died, and left 3 Easter eggs for people. Who finds them, becomes rich. The story is about people who are looking for eggs, while an evil corporation wants to find them and make everyone pay for Oasis (which is currently free).

Some readers from the audience mentioned that there are also 3 Easter eggs in the book, and whoever finds them can win a prize.

Michelle Muenzler's recommended books

Haruki Murakami 1Q84 -- a very long and intricate story, that's very Murakami in the sense that every detail in it is very important. You can't just skip over chunks of text, because every detail is needed in order to understand what happens.

Johnathan L. Howard Johannes Cabal The Detective.

Ayize Jama-Everett The Liminal People -- a novel about underworld people who have powers, but you wouldn't consider it a superhero novel. It's a bit more gritty, realistic than most superhero novels Michelle has read. The protagonist's daughter disappears, he tries to track her down, and gets entangled with people with horrible powers.

J. M. McDermott When We Were Executioners

Martha Wells The Serpent Sea and The Cloud Roads -- very creative, vast world-building. Exploration of crazy-ass alien cultures clashing and interacting.

Jason Heller Taft 2012 -- hilarious, brilliant book. President Taft disappears, and 100 years later he wakes up on the White House lawn. The book is extremely fast-paced. It has Twitter conversations discussing his political views.

Kameron Hurley Infidel

Will Macintosh Soft Apocalypse

John Love Faith -- a massive battle, a dance between two spaceships, really fun.

Stina Leicht And Blue Skies from Pain

Rose Lemberg, ed. The Moment of Change -- a speculative poetry anthology. Very story-oriented poetry, resembles Year's Best SF anthologies.

Bev Hale's recommended books

Kage Baker Best of Kage Baker.

Holly Black and Ellen Kushner, ed. Welcome to Bordertown.

Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris Phoenix Rising -- steampunk.

Jim Butcher Ghost Story.

Rachel Caine Bite Club and Last Breath -- the last of her two Morganville Vampires books.

Gail Carriger Heartless

Kendare Blake Anna Dressed in Blood

Laura Anne Gilman Pack of Lies

Laurie R. King The Pirate King

Seanan Mcguire Discount Armageddon

Kim Newman, Professor Moriarty: The Hound Of the D'Urbervilles -- a spin-off of "Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" series, where Sherlock Holmes got retired, got married, and still doing stuff. This book has Professor Moriarty as protagonist.

Tim Powers Hide Me Among The Graves

Cherie Priest Hellbent

Ransom Riggs Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

John Scalzi Fuzzy Nation and Redshirts -- Bev Hale liked Fuzzy Nationbetter than she liked Redshirts, though both were fun.

F. Paul Wilson Nightworld

George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, ed. Down these Strange Streets -- an anthology.

Willie's recommendations of books that are very new, or are yet to come out

Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, and a couple of other authors The Mongoliad -- because Neal Stephenson has an obsession with swords.

Mark Teppo Sinner: A Prequel to the Mongoliad, and Earth First

Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter The Long Earth. Someone said it would be funny if Terry Pratchett wrote the science in that book, and Stephen Baxter the characters.

Iain Banks Stonemouth and Hydrogen Sonata. The latter revels bits and pieces from the beginning of the Culture.

Robin Maxwell Jane: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan -- a Tarzan novel written from Jane's point of view. Burroughs estate gave Robin Maxwell, an award winning historical writer, access to Burroughs notes about Tarzan's backstory.

Throw a non-sequitur grenade, or social strategies for introverts

The other day at the Center For Inquiry Austin non-fiction book club we discussed Susan Cain's "Quiet: The Power of Introverts". All the 8 people in the room self-identified as introverts. We told personal stories of extreme social avoidance (one person, as a teenager, asked his/her parents to turn down an invitation to a school dance on his/her behalf), and debated whether Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a rare example of an extroverted scientist, or if he only acts as an extrovert as a public figure. We also discussed how the workplace and the rest of the society can be hostile to introverts -- that's one of the points the book brings up. "Open" office plans, a.k.a cubicle farms, don't so much facilitate collaboration, as keep introverts from getting work done; in brainstorming exercises, the most dominant person's ideas usually get pushed through, no matter their quality, and the quieter people's ideas not heard; and we won't even mention the horror of various "professional development" and "team building" events, which, as several members attested, did absolutely nothing for their professional growth.

(Myself, I was lucky enough to get exposed to a team-building event just once. It was lead by a motivational speaker who made us play little games -- the bane of introverts -- the purpose of which was to demonstrate some simple and obvious idea. For example: write your name 5 times with your dominant hand. Now write it 5 times with your non-dominant hand. Did it take you much longer? Does it look like chicken-scratch? See, it shows that it's easier and faster to do things you're naturally good at, and much harder to do things you're not good at!

I started out with an open mind. I considered that all those games and exercises, all the platitudes they were designed to express, might add up to some genuine insight. But I lost hope for any such revelation, when I saw the speaker struggling to explain the concepts of "form" and "content". Apparently she thought that we -- a group of programmers and other technical people, who earn their daily bread from abstract thinking -- didn't already know these concepts. Moreover, she thought we would find them hard to understand without a concrete object analogy. So she looked around with urgency in her eyes, grabbed a cup from the table, and raised it, saying: "Form is like this cup, and content is like the water in the cup." After that, I pretty much tuned her out.)

CFI Austin non-fiction book club. More pictures from CFI Austin can be found in my photo gallery.

But back to the discussion.

We also touched upon the appeal of cults, and (at the risk of making it sound like an extrovert hate fest) speculated about how much stock market crash can be indirectly blamed on extroverts, their irrational confidence making investors believe that this market bubble was different. The discussion often deviated from the book (which is just as well, because I haven't read it), but this was one area where everybody in the room had personal experience with, and sharing that personal experience was even better than discussing the book.

Since ~ 75% of society are extroverts, most social conversations flow in such a way that people don't stick to any one topic for more than a few sentences, touching it superficially, and moving on to another topic by association, not because it logically follows. For an introvert, who think *before* they speak, and speak only when they have something to contribute, such a conversation becomes meaningless. By the time they are ready to share their well thought-out point, the conversation would have moved on. So, are there any strategies for an introvert to make social interactions more self-friendly? Some people suggested to interject a complete non-sequitur. Like a grenade, it will cause some chaos in the conversation: "Huh? What did she just say?" And then the introvert can make a point they're trying to make.

Pipelined motherhood

Not long ago a friend, referring to my second child (who just turned 1), asked me how my second round of motherhood was treating me. He tried to use a computer metaphor for it, so he put it as "how is serial motherhood going?" Then he immediately admitted that this metaphor was inaccurate. It's not really serial, because I'm raising two children, not one at a time. You could say it's parallel, but that doesn't convey the idea of going from one child to two. So, pausing for a bit, he decided it could be called pipelined motherhood. Since I haven't heard about pipelined architecture, which (as a very oversimplified explanation) lets computers run tasks in parallel by starting them at different times, I thought about it in UNIX pipe terms. So I asked: "Do you think I feed one child the output of the other?"

When our machines talk to one another behind our back

What do toys do when children go to sleep? These days your childhood fears get a legitimate incarnation when your grown-up toys -- gadgets, apps, software programs -- start talking to one another behind your back. Case in point:

One woman went on vacation, leaving an email auto-responder reply to her emails. Somehow it found a way into Facebook, as a comment on a post. Clearly, the auto-responder replied to a notification from Facebook, but it's kind of headscratching what exactly it responded to. I don't see that this woman had previously commented on this post, so why did she get a notification about it? Well, maybe the author of the photo tagged her in this photo (as some clueless people do to make sure that their friends really, really look at their pictures). That would explain it. Oh, the fun our machines have when we're not around.

An internet radio by any other name sounds just as sweet

Many music streaming services have popped up over the years -- Pandora, last.fm, Spotify. I tried some of them, and didn't even bother with others, because I became convinced that the good ole' Youtube has everything I need.

Most streaming services don't have the artists I listen to, and not because the artists are super-obscure. Well, they are, but not the hipster-kind of obscure. They are unknown to most people because of the genres they perform in: medieval, folk, or world music. Pandora and last.fm (at least two years ago, when I tried them) had almost nothing in those categories. But even the most arcane taste is represented on Youtube, where some obliging souls have uploaded records from my favorite early music groups -- Ensemble Organum, the Huelgas Ensemble, Anonymous 4, you-name-it. And if you add your favorite tracks to a playlist, it will play continuously without stopping, with no interruptions, and without commercials (unlike Spotify). And it will play exactly the artists and songs you selected, not the artists that are "like" them, the way Pandora does. Pandora is no good if you want to try an artist you haven't heard before but your friends rave about. I want to hear the songs by this specific artist, not ones that are "like" him or her.

YouTube lets you create an internet radio station -- even if it doesn't call it that -- exactly according to your tastes. So unless it changes its business model (hopefully not), I won't be subscribing to new music streaming services.

Center For Inquiry fiction book club selections for the first half of 2012

April 2012

H. G. Wells "The Sleeper Awakes" -- a short novel about a nineteen century Englishman who falls in a deep sleep only to awake over two hundred years later.

May 2012

Nnedi Okorafor "Who Fears Death"

-- "The young sorceress Onyesonwu -- whose name means Who fears death? -- was born Ewu, bearing a mixture of her mother's features and those of the man who raped her mother and left her for dead in the desert. As Onyesonwu grows into her powers, it becomes clear that her fate is mingled with the fate of her people, the oppressed Okeke, and that to achieve her destiny, she must die. Okorafor examines a host of evils in her chillingly realistic tale'gender and racial inequality share top billing, along with female genital mutilation and complacency in the face of destructive tradition -- and winds these disparate concepts together into a fantastical, magical blend of grand storytelling." -- a review from amazon.com

June 2012

James Blish "A Case of Conscience"

-- "The citizens of the planet Lithia are some of the most ethical sentient beings Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez has ever encountered. True, they have no literature, no fine arts, and don't understand the concept of recreation, but neither do they understand the concepts of greed, envy, lust, or any of the sins and vices that plague humankind. Their world seems darned near perfect. And that is just what disturbs the good Father."

-- "A fast-paced, intelligent story that offers plenty of action while at the same time explores complex questions of values and ethics. In this case, Blish has taken on the age-old battle of good vs. evil. Lithia poses a theological question that lies at the heart of this book: is God necessary for a moral society?" -- reviews from amazon.com

July 2012

Brandon Sanderson "Mistborn"

A description of this novel on amazon.com calls it a mystico-metallurgical fantasy. I heard it has an unusual and well thought-out magic system. An attempt to create a "scientific" magic system might make this book of interest to CFI readers who like fantasy.

August 2012

Philip K. Dick "VALIS"

-- "When a beam of pink light begins giving a schizophrenic man visions of an alternate Earth where the Roman Empire still reigns, he must decide whether he is crazy, or whether a godlike entity is showing him the true nature of the world."

-- "From the cancer ward of a bay area hospital to the ranch of a fraudulent charismatic religious figure who turns out to have a direct com link with God, Dick leads us down the twisted paths of Gnostic belief, mixed with his own bizarre and compelling philosophy." -- reviews from amazon.com

Movies: The Dangerous Method

"The Dangerous Method" is a movie about Carl Gustav Jung, and his complicated relationships with two people: Sigmund Freud, his colleague and mentor, and Sabina Spielrein, his patient and lover. It was not a bad movie, but I expected more of it.

While it touched upon Freud and Jung's friendship and rivalry, their diverging methods of psychoanalysis, and their eventual breakup, its primary focus was Jung's affair with Sabina. Not that it was a bad choice, given how vivid is the character of the crazy and brilliant, but mostly brilliant Sabina. Like most people in this story, she was a real, historical person, a young Russian Jewish woman who met Jung when she was mentally ill, was enormously helped by psychoanalysis, and later became an innovative psychiatrist herself. Keira Knightley's acting is a bit overdone in the "crazy Sabina" scenes, though it's amazing how such a beautiful actress contorts her face and body into such ugly poses. Overall I think she was great in this role.

Speaking of actors that were not so good in their roles: professor Aragorn! And not just because of his Lord of the Rings fame. Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud just didn't compute. Every time I saw him on screen, it pulled me out of the story. Even with the "authentic" makeup, hair, and beard, Viggo looks nothing like Freud, at least in the pictures I've seen. His acting wasn't convincing either. He played Freud with all the same cliches that denote a sophisticated man of a bygone era: slow, drawn-out sentences, half-closed eyelids, a pipe permanently stuck in his teeth. It's like I've seen this character on the screen hundreds of times, and I don't even watch that many movies.

For a movie about the birth of psychoanalysis, it oddly lacks intellectual content. Considering how Jung's ideas about archetypes and collective unconscious captivated the public (even if they later fell out of use; even so, writers and artists still derive inspiration from them), they get surprisingly little mention in the movie. There is a scene that suggests that Jung's notions of anima and animus were planted in his mind by Sabina: in one of their conversations she says there is something male in every woman, and something female in every man. And so the movie removes the last reason for a viewer to believe that Jung was famous for anything other than his polyamorous lifestyle, or wacky paranormal beliefs (he thought he was capable of premonition). He is a vivid, conflicted and sympathetic character, but it's not clear what he was notable for.

A movie about Jung that didn't concern itself with any of his intellectual contributions, but only with his romance with a patient, was like... why, it's like a fantasy novel that focused primarily on an exchange rate between Elvish gold and dollar.

Then again, I shouldn't criticize the movie too much. We are talking here about historical figures that achieved a mythical power in and of themselves, and their lives cannot be squeezed into two hours of screen time. To tell a story about them requires ruthless picking and choosing.

Sometimes a problem pounces upon your brain...

Sometimes a mathematics / computer science problem pounces upon your brain, and takes possession of it for half the day -- at least until you figure out that its general case does have a solution. Then you finally escape its clutches, feeling that you haven't accomplished much; but you've brushed off some dust of that old math/CS knowledge that sometimes gets asked at software development job interviews. So it's not all a waste.

The problem was posted on Facebook by a friend who encountered it in his engineering work.

Suppose you have tasks A, B, and C. Task A occurs n_A times in a given time period, task B occurs n_B times, and task C occurs n_C times. Let's say n_A is 7, n_B is 2, and n_C is 1. The time between any two tasks is the same. Let's call it a unit time interval. These tasks repeat endlessly in a loop. The problem is to arrange the tasks in such a way that the number of time intervals between any two tasks of the same type will be minimized.

It may seem simple, but... it's not.

Ideally, any two A-tasks will be separated by at most ceil((nA + nB + nC) / nA) intervals, any two B-tasks are separated by at most ceil((nA + nB + nC) / nB), and any two C-tasks are separated by at most ceil((nA + nB + nC) / nC) intervals, where ceil() is ceiling, a function that rounds up a number to the nearest integer larger than it.

I came up with an example (or a counterexample, if you will) where it is impossible to find a schedule that satisfies those constraints.

Say task A occurs 19 times in a given time period, task B 13 times, and task C 3 times. Then nA + nB + nC = 35. ceil(35/19) = 2, so A-tasks should be separated by no more than 2 intervals. B-tasks need to be no more than ceil(35/13) = 3 intervals apart. Now, if you put a C-task between two A-tasks, then B-constraint will be violated. Any segment A-A is surrounded by B's, i.e. it will be a subset of B-A-A-B, and those two B's are 3 intervals apart. Put a C in the middle, and B-tasks will be 4 intervals apart. That's greater than ceil(35/13) = 3. If you put a C between A and B-tasks, then A-constraint will be violated, because you'll have a sequence A-C-B, so an A following that sequence will be 3 intervals away from the first A. That's greater than ceil(35/19) = 2.

Of course, there are many combinations of frequencies for which it IS possible to find an optimal schedule, for example 19-11-5. Also, if the numbers are multiples of other numbers, this problem may have additional properties that may make it solvable. Then again, engineers usually don't care about exact solutions, rather than "good enough" approximate solutions. If you require that the number of intervals between two tasks of the same type exceed the optimal only a certain percentage of times, the problem becomes complex enough to be a fodder for master's thesis. I wouldn't be surprised if it has been already solved in the academic literature. I just don't know of a good enough way to search for papers or theses that may have been published on this topic.

Further thoughts: you could map this problem to a graph theory problem. Each task can be a node in a graph, and you would need to find a shortest route for visiting all the nodes -- "shortest" as determined by the costs required to visit each node. This would be the traveling salesman problem, which is NP-complete. But this proves nothing, because this particular problem might map to a special instance of traveling salesman problem that's solvable in polynomial time.

My drafts are a continuum

I don't know if I finished the first draft of my novel. At the beginning of last year I said I was going to, but I don't know. That's because I'm no longer sure what should count as a first draft. The zeroth draft was clear. I had a beginning and an ending, but the middle lacked some chunks. Now all the parts are in place, and in the right order. Finding the right order was nontrivial. Maybe normal writers write a story in a linear fashion, as it develops in time, but that's not me. I write chunks and scenes, and wrack my brain about how to make them fit together. Which one should come before another one? The story can be told in any of the million ways.

I can't help but see stories from a software engineering perspective, not something that develops in time, but as a modular structure that occupies (mental) space. The logical way the modules fit together may not necessarily be the temporal way.

I finally worked out the order in which to string the scenes together. But I also determined I need more scenes with certain characters, because they are more instrumental to the story than I thought before. So can I really say I have Draft 1, or is still Draft 0.5? Or perhaps novel drafts should not be versioned like software releases?

I also have several short (or "short") stories I am working on, all but the newest one completed, and in various states of rewriting. One of them underwent five rewrites -- five completely different variations on the same theme with the same characters, converging on the same finale -- and this is still not the end. I need to figure out how to make the final version shorter. Might I be overthinking this just a tad?

That's the state of my writing for 2011. As far as my programming goes (and I can only speak of spare time projects, not anything I do at work), I'll spare the gentle reader an account of all false starts and stops on my coding endeavors throughout the year. It suffices to say that for the last month I've been trying to get an application I wrote to work on a Windows-hosted website. It is supposed to automate certain tasks on which I spend a lot of time, so it is important to me. To make a long story short, I found out that there are certain incompatibilities between the development environment on my laptop, and my Windows website environment, that can make it impossible to host that application. There are a couple of ways to deal with this, and I don't know which is more viable. It can also be said that when it comes to web hosting, I have champagne tastes on beer budget.

Take the stairs, and other impossible health advice

A fire alarm rings at work. You leave your desk and properly evacuate to the parking garage. It turns out to be a drill, and 10 minutes later you are allowed back. You get a brilliant idea: you'll use this disruption to do something good for you health. You'll take the stairs up to the third floor where your office is. And maybe you should try walking up and down the stairs a few times during the day, so your butt won't meld with the chair. You don't quite remember where the stairs are in this building -- you only took them once -- but a building deputy showed them to you.

You go up to the third floor. The stairwell door won't open. It's locked. You swear the last time you tried it, it was unlocked.

You go up to the 4th (top) floor, then to the 2nd floor, and all the stairwell doors are locked. You get down to the first floor, and the door is unlocked, but it opens into a small dead-end hallway with several other nondescript, identical, unlabeled doors. You try one after another, until you find one that opens into a longer hallway, which leads you to the elevators... just in time before your claustrophobia flares up.

This is what happens in corporate America when you try to do something good for your health. It's like that in pretty much any office building. In some buildings, I heard, people are so discouraged from using the stairs, that an alarm would go off if you open the stairwell door! The stairs are to be used strictly as a fire exit.

And yet there is no shortage of health experts who tell us to incorporate small acts of fitness into our daily life, first and foremost by taking the stairs. Also, ride your bicycle to work. Uh-huh. And play Russian roulette with the cars whizzing by, and arrive to your cubicle sweaty, and delight coworkers with your post-workout aroma. None of those experts must have ever worked in corporate America, or lived in a suburb. Next thing they'll tell us to eat cake. :-)

How come xkcd hasn't addressed this?

I often hear that engineers are literal. This typically includes software developers. I hear this even from people who work with engineers all the time -- you'd think they would take a more nuanced view. But perhaps not many people understand what "literal" means. I'm not even talking about the common, oft-ridiculed use of "literally" to mean "figuratively" -- as when somebody tells you "I literally died laughing" (and they don't have chunks of rotten flesh falling off, so they're not Undead).

Figurative, after all, is the opposite of literal. You can also say that the opposite of literal thinking is metaphorical thinking. Apparently most people don't understand how much certain intellectual activity, such as science and engineering, relies on metaphor. As an example, read this article in Wikipedia about Aspect-oriented programming, and show me even one paragraph in it that does NOT contain a metaphor.

The point is: software design, like any design, models real world problems in some kind of abstract conceptual framework. This is only possible if you think in metaphors.

I really think there should be an xkcd cartoon on this.

When a children's store practices tough love

Some stores must be really, really sick of people stealing their shopping carts. So sick that they put the cart before the horse's customer's safety... or maybe just don't think how anti-theft devices can put customers at risk.

A case in point is an incident my significant other, Ray, termed "The Great Magnetic Shopping Cart Caper". It occurred in Babies'R'Us parking lot in Austin. Here is the email he sent to Babies-R-Us Management.

I would like to humbly express my intense displeasure at the experience of "discovery" I had with the "new" shopping cart system you have deployed at store # 7047, on November 25, 2011 at 2:35 in the afternoon. I began by having a pleasant shopping experience. On this day (the day after Thanksgiving) I parked my car right next to the Babies-R-Us, in the giant, parking area shared with Babies'R-Us's neighbor "Bed Bath and Beyond". I bought $164.51 worth of merchandise in the store, one of the items being a heavy metal "superyard" play-yard enclosure for my 5 month old son. I was able to fit this box perfectly fine in the shopping cart. The shopping cart rolled fine and smooth with my happily purchased merchandise in the store and out the door.

I was happily pushing along my Babies-R-Us shopping cart (full of merchandise) out into the beginning of the parking lot, weaving through the busy high traffic area, where there are cars moving in both directions. You have to get through this narrow car path to get to the parking rows on the other side.

To my sudden and almost fatal surprise, halfway there my cart suddenly locked up, and due to my decent momentum (I'm a man) and being caught off-guard I almost turned over the whole shopping cart and its entire contents on to the pavement.

Very luckily for me, the cars in front and behind me were paying attention and not fiddling with their cell phones, because they screeched their brakes and avoided running into me.

Aerial photograph of Babies'R'Us and Bed, Bath & Beyond parking lot where the incident occurred. Click for a bigger version.

Embarrassingly, I tried moving the cart back-and-forth, side-to-side to get it to move again. Nothing budged. I tried looking down into the wheels, thinking that possibly a rock/piece-of-tape/etc got caught up in the wheel or something.... I found nothing that would explain the wheels not moving.

Since I realized I was blocking all the traffic of the other customers in their cars trying to get my Babies-R-Us cart to move, I resorted to picking up all of my merchandise, including the heavy metal-based item (again, I'm a strong man) and put them down on the nearest curb.

I tried one last time to move the cart - seeing no motion, I drug the empty cart (leaving a big black skid mark from the locked wheel) over to the Babies-R-Us storefront sidewalk.

AND THEN I NOTICED a small sign INSIDE the cart (which was blocked from my reading from the merchandise I purchased), which states that the cart has a new "feature" that will lock the wheel up when trying to go beyond certain lines on the sides of the Babies-R-Us building.

(1) That would have been good to know BEFORE I parked my car, especially since after realizing the smaller area WITHIN the "painted cart-stop lines" out of the whole shopping center's shared parking area was totally full of cars, I would have not shopped at Babies-R-Us that day, and driven on.

(2) Imagine if I wasn't just "some guy" alone with a bunch of paid-for merchandise, trying to push it to my car? Imagine I was instead a mom, cart loaded full of merchandise AND a kid or baby, and the wheel unexpectedly locked on her while she was moving along? Imagine her cart falling over with a baby in it. Imagine a nearby car preoccupied on their phone while a family pushing a Babies-R-Us cart suddenly locked up in front of the car?

I THINK YOU'LL AGREE that the SAFETY of your customers is MORE IMPORTANT than the "prevention of shopping carts moving off too far".

The store immediately neighboring the Babies-R-Us, "Bed Bath and Beyond" had one of their store associates retrieving their carts. He saw my dilemma unfold, and he was so kind as to bring me a "Bed Bath and Beyond" shopping cart in which I put my Babies-R-Us merchandise, an "old-fashioned" cart that pushed... all the way to my car in the parking lot.

After I got the stuff in my car, I walked back into the Babies-R-Us store, and I went to the Customer Service desk.

I tried asking if I could speak with the store manager to explain my experience, but I was told by the associates there that the store manager wasn't available. I told the experience to them. They suggested I describe the complaint online.

I hope my time and effort in trying to help you listen to the safety of your customers does get read, and this letter is not in vain,

<name>

Hoping to remain a happy Babies-R-Us customer

So there you are. I guess the children's store is showing by example how to practice "tough love". After all, setting consequences is a common parenting advice. Only in this case it is, step outside the line, get a jolt of reality. No matter if it sends you under the wheels of oncoming car.

=======

UPDATE: A few days after submitting his feedback via Babies'R'Us website, Ray got a canned response from Babies'R'Us customer service, saying that to get help with his problem, he has to write a (paper) letter and mail it to corporate headquarters. The customer service representative did not acknowledge his problem, and did not forward it to supervisors, or to anyone who could have done anything about it.

Girls hack Arduino

In all my programming life I never tried communicating in code with real-world objects. But now there is something to make it easy (or at least doable): Arduino. Sharon Cichelli demonstrated it at the All Girl Hack Night in October of 2011. Arduino is a microcontroller that lets you program blinky LED lights, or things that make buzzing alarm sounds, or all sorts of other electronic. It also accepts input from buttons or sensors, or anything that translates a physical action into electric pulse. You can plug things into one of its pins (there are 13 of them, if I recall), and have it "read" electric pulses from those pins, or "write" to them.

"Read" and "write" probably shouldn't be in quotes, because they are the same programming concepts as reading and writing to/from any input/output device. So, to switch on an LED light that's plugged into pin 13, you would digitalWrite(13, HIGH). As with all things digital, the function digitalWrite only recognizes on/off, or in this case, HIGH/LOW values. HIGH means the device plugged into the pin is on, LOW -- off. Simple, right? These basics allow one to sit down and program a primitive blinky light in minutes. The programming language is fairly high level. Its function names, as one can see, resemble human language -- this isn't assembly, where you push bits around with three-letter commands. It enables you to quickly do simple demos, like Sharon Cichelli did. Just as you digitalWrite to a pin to turn a device on, you digitalRead from a pin to recognize, say, a button press. Again, you pass to it the number of a pin into which the button is plugged in.

You write the code in an IDE, and with one mouse click upload it to an Arduino connected to your computer via USB.

Sharon Cichelli demonstrates Arduino programming.

Arduino programming seems encouragingly simple at first, but as with everything, once you get deeper into it, you discover complexities. In fact, one's lack of electronics background might put brakes on the progress. Having been told that a LED light is plugged into a pin number 13, you (and by you, I mean me) might notice that the light actually has two wires, both plugged into tiny slots. Why are there two wires, and which of them is # 13, you ask. Oh, it's because the light needs to be grounded. The other wire is plugged into the grounding pin, you can ignore it for the purposes of your program. Yes, grounding is something you should have remembered from physics classes, but didn't. Then you digitalWrite to it, and it still doesn't light up -- that's because something is wrong with the hardware, and the circuit does not close as expected. Maybe the light isn't plugged in firmly enough. So, there are two dimensions to debugging Arduino code: a programmatic and an electrical dimension. As if catching just the software bugs wasn't tricky in itself!

Sharon couldn't help but demonstrate troubleshooting techniques, as things malfunctioned. Pins "floated". Still we had enough time to progress to a more advanced part of the lesson: Pulse Width Modulation. If you can only send "on" or "off" signals to a LED, how would you dim the lights, or produce nice, slow fade on / fade off effects? The fading or increase in brightness is caused by flickering very fast between on and off positions. If the light spends more time in the "off" position than "on", it appears to fade; if in on position, it grows brighter. If we graph HIGH and LOW signals versus time, where every HIGH signal is a vertical bar, we'll see that the "width" of the HIGH signal decreases (increases) over time. So that, simply put, is Pulse Width Modulation. Sharon pair-programmed with someone (sitting another person down at her laptop's keyboard, and dictating code to her) to implement the slow fade.

Besides blinking and buzzing things, you can connect Arduino to vibrating things. Erm. I mean, like a mat under a cat food bowl. A vibrating mat would scare off a cat that is afraid of vibration. This was the idea one of the girls had. How do you make a cat lose weight, if you also have a normal-weight cat, and each time one sees the other eating, she will eat too? The goal is to make the fat cat to eat less frequently than the normal-weight cat. So, this girl got an idea to put a vibrating mat under the cats' food bowl, so that when the cat steps on it, her weight would send an input to Arduino, which would trigger the vibration, scaring the cat off. The smaller cat's weight would not trigger this response. And the fat cat's weight would only do it at certain times but not others, otherwise the pudgy feline would never eat.

And if you don't have problematic cats, there is still a wide variety of applications for Halloween costumes, such as blinky eyeballs like Sharon made for her own Halloween costume.

ArmadilloCon 2011: The Singularity panel

Singularity is commonly associated with emergence of strong artificial intelligence, and the panelists don't think strong AI is any closer now than it was at the time this topic was discussed on ArmadilloCon panels of the past. Or 30 years ago. Or ever. Singularity is certainly no closer than when Vernor Vinge debated it at ArmadilloCon 2003, or Charles Stross at ArmadilloCon 2006. Moreover, some panelists disagreed whether moderator John Gibbons' question "What do you see as a fundamental block towards strong Artificial Intelligence?" is even the right question to ask. They disagreed whether it is possible to bring an AI into being by programming it.

This was a well-reasoned analysis of common Singularity tropes.

Trope 1: Singularity will come from the emergence of strong AI

Bruce Sterling admits that he used to find the idea of strong AI seductive, but doesn't see any evidence of it emerging any time. More, he doubts whether the products of intelligent mind, such as new ideas or inventions, can be attained computationally. "I know many very intelligent people, and they don't reason stuff out of the first principles," said Bruce Sterling. It certainly doesn't "feel like" creative insights come to us algorithmically. And if flashes of insight can't be simulated by a Turing machine, then they are not achievable by a computer. "Computation is not like human intelligence," says Sterling. "It's like mathematics. You could say, mathematics will one day overtake the human brain! But that would be a category error."

Left to right: authors Alexis Glynn Latner, Adrian Simmons, John Gibbons at the Singularity panel. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2011 are in my photo gallery.

Bruce Sterling thinks collective intelligence is more interesting than artificial intelligence. When you are starting a company, would you hire HAL 9000, an intelligent machine who never sleeps, or a bunch of engineers who use Google, he asks. Google would immediately defeat HAL. He didn't answer another panelist Adrian Simmons' question if it wouldn't be even better to hire a HAL who uses Google.

Then Bruce Sterling left the panel to go help his daughter who was at the other end of town, adding "Real futurists have children!"

Trope 2: Moore's law will inevitably lead to strong AI

Both the panelists and the audience doubted whether the advance of AI has hardly anything to do with Moore's law. We already have extremely powerful computers for extremely complex weather and economic simulations, but you can't speak about their IQ.

Trope 3: Sentient computers care about the existence of humankind one way or another

Would we even want a sentient machine? John Gibbons reminds us that Charles Stross, author of Singularity-themed novels, asked this question in a recent blog post. What do we need a sentient machine for? While we conceivably might want an intelligent computer to run a spaceship on a long mission, like HAL 9000, in general there's not much advantage to sentience in a software program, argued John Gibbons. And it raises a huge batch of ethical questions. Using a genetic algorithm to derive sentient software? You're committing genocide along the way, because you're killing off versions that don't meet your goals.

Left to right: authors Katy Stauber, Marshall Ryan Maresca, and Bruce Sterling at the Singularity panel. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2011 are in my photo gallery.

Even if a sentient AI is benevolent to the humankind, it can't be expected to do what humans would like it to do, Adrian Simmons pointed out. You may ask it how to make better gadgets, but it will instead turn around and ask you personal questions, because it might feel it's human now, and wants to experience a human perspective of the world. (Even that, I should say, is a bit human-centric, if not to say myopic. An AI might not be interested in learning from humans, since by necessity it would develop its own way of learning about the world: else it would not be an AI. It is a common trope in science fiction that a robot or AI yearns to know what it is like to be human, but I think we as humans overestimate our interestingness to the machines. We absolutely can't expect them to take an interest in our problems, let alone serve us. -- E.)

Trope 4: Singularity will come from augmentation of human brain

But machine intelligence is not the only way for Singularity to come about. Bruce Sterling said: increase of a metabolic efficiency of certain regions of the brain (that are dedicated to higher functions), and it will feel like Singularity. Our brain is very inefficient -- the biggest parts of it are dedicated to such functions as walking. So an increase in efficiency of higher reasoning parts of the brain could bring about enormous changes for the humankind. Science fiction has already addressed something similar, such as repurpose visual cortex to do other computations, an audience member pointed out.

Trope 5: Singularity will come from uploading a human personality to a machine

The panelists doubt whether that will ever be possible, because it seems like such a stretch between the chemistry of "wetware" and computational substrate. Here, too, science fiction has shown how horrific unintended consequences of this can be -- case in point is Greg Egan's story "Learning To Be Me".

Trope 6: Singularity will come from the web "waking up"

A person in the audience asked: if we organize semantic connections on the web, will the web "wake up"? John Gibbons reply was what I would have said too: becoming conscious requires a model of self. And it's hard to see how that model of self would emerge simply by organizing semantic connections on the web.

Am I the only one to want this? Linking to any part of an HTML page

Here is a pipe dream. I would like HTML to have ability to link to any paragraph in any web page. I would like to make it so that when the user clicks the link, the page would open with the paragraph of interest at the top of the browser window.

I only know how to do it if some section of a web page has an <a name="xxxxxx"> in it. And if the page I'm linking to isn't created by me, I have no control over placement of <a name>'s in it. But is it possible to link to any element of a page? If not with HTML, then with Javascript or CSS? Can one write a Javascript that, when a user clicks on a link, will bring up the desired element of the page that has loaded? I kind of doubt it, because once a page has loaded in a browser, the scripts of the previous page stop executing, correct?

And I'm pretty sure there is no way to do this if the desired paragraph is not in any uniquely-identifiable HMTL element -- for example, if it only separated from other paragraphs with <br/>

If there is really no way to do this, I wonder if such functionality was never considered by They Who Design HTML? Has nobody ever wanted it? I wish for it when an explanation or example of something I'm writing about is buried deep in some other web page, and I know that my reader, if he/she clicks on the link, is not likely to find it quickly, or to spend much time searching for it.

I suppose one can write a third-party application that would let you mark up snippets of web pages and save them; then you could link to the paragraph on the third party website. It could provide a link to the original article, for those interested in the context. But that's an additional layer of complexity. There may even have been such a service, called iLighter; it allowed you to highlight web pages and save those highlighted snippets on its servers. I know I installed it in one of my web browsers a couple of years ago, but didn't do much with it. I had app fatigue even then (too many new web applications to try), which only got worse since. And iLighter doesn't seem to be around anymore -- I guess not too many people found it useful.

I know, I could write a Javascript that would pop up just the paragraph I want to link to, when the user's mouse hovers over the link to the article. So the user could get just the quote, but read the article for context if they'd like. Of course, this is inefficient, because the quote may change some time in the future, and somehow I would have to become aware of the change (which won't happen unless I monitor that web page every day), and modify my script. So, it's not a real solution.

ArmadilloCon 2011: Imagining a future without fossil fuels

Defining the peak oil is not simple

As we may have already reached peak oil, the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, it is timely to have a panel like "Imagining a future without fossil fuels". But before we can ask science fiction writers what will happen once oil production enters inevitable decline, we have to take into account that the definition of peak oil in itself, err, slippery. The question of whether there is a peak oil should be, "peak oil at what price", says Paolo Bacigalupi, whose novel "The Windup Girl" is set in post-fossil-fuel future. At $90/barrel, it becomes profitable to convert shale into oil. So when cheap oil becomes unavailable, people start extracting oil from reserves that were harder to reach. Since petroleum is used for much more than fuel, but also for plastic, fertilizers, and many other things, at some point oil will become too valuable to burn as fuel. We'll have to prioritize what we'll use fossil fuels for -- driving versus plastics, food, or fertilizers.

Matt Cardin, Paolo Bacigalupi, Jayme Lynn Blaschke, and David Chang. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2011 are in my photo gallery.

With the tendrils of fossil fuels going into so many things, we should not imagine that a world with a different energy mix will look just like this one, says Matt Cardin. Our supply chains won't look the same. For example, industrial farming will change, because Dow Chemical produceds a lot of fertilizers from petrochemicals, and it will be too expensive to do that.

The question is, does the future have to go apocalyptic?

Will it look like the Little House of the Prairie?

The panelists sure hope the technological society won't go away completely, and we won't have to return to a lifestyle of 19th century farmers. Katy Stauber's mixed visions of the future do include farmhouses, albeit still connected to the internet. That way we could still play World of Warcraft while riding our bikes to power our computers. It seems she doesn't mind returning to pre-technological civilization, as long as enough technology is preserved for us to have some fun.

David Chang, Katy Stauber, and Matthew Bey. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2011 are in my photo gallery.

David Chang and Paolo Bacigalupi hope that the tools and technology we have these days will make it possible for ordinary people to innovate solutions for post-fossil-fuel future. Bacigalupi has faith in people like a guy down the street from him, who is working on a biogas composter in his garage.

We could save lots of energy just by wasting it less, the audience points out. House builders used to (or still do) put the air conditioning unit in the attic, where it gets 150 degrees in summer. With energy costs rising, they might soon become smarter about that.

What is the next promising power source?

It is solar? Though it's commonly viewed as being cost-ineffective compared to coal, solar power costs about the same as coal, says Jayme Lynn Blaschke. The reason for discrepancy is that when those comparisons are made, commercial solar panels are lumped in with retail, and that drives their cost up. But there isn't such a thing as "retail" coal power.

Is it wind? Jayme was driving on Texas coast and saw four times as many wind turbines as last year. Matthew Bey said he knows a wind power entrepreneur -- a wind wildcatter, as it were -- who invests in this form of energy, and he's not doing it to make the planet green. This investor had a Whataburger franchise before he decided to make money off wind power. So anecdotal evidence shows that the good old free market is starting to see alternative energy as viable.

What are the promising modes of post-fossil-fuel transportation?

Could it be Shweeb, which David Chang describes as a human powered transportation system resembling a bicycle on tracks. You can go long distances on it, because there is little friction.

Could it be buses on stilts, or straddling buses, the kind that have been developed in China? (Here's a New York Times article on that.) While the buses don't do away with fossil-fuel (they are only partially solar-powered), their capacity to carry 40 times as many people as a regular bus should present significant energy savings.