9 September 25
Arboretum Outing
I took myself off to the Arb this morning to study this plant in preparation for my hummingbird project. We have some of these plants much closer to home but it was a cool morning and I wanted to try out this new paper. In the event that was complicated but I’m quite pleased with this drawing, though the pen lines are too dark: I’d use red or brown ink, I think.
On the way home I saw a flock of wild turkeys around the Arneson sculpture, Eye on Mrak (The Last Laugh).
8 September 25
The Jujube AI
When I was a child, my mother and I crafted an AI out of a set of matchboxes and some jujubes (the small colored gummy candies). I enjoyed reading Scientific American when I was young, and at one point found an intriguing article by Martin Gardner, the columnist who wrote Mathematical Games for 25 years. This article was entitled A Matchbox Game-Learning Machine and was published in 1962 — I probably ran across it in a reprinted book collection.
Gardner’s article shows how to build an analog learning machine to play a simple game called hexapawn which involves moving pawns on a 3×3 chessboard. The rules are given in the article linked above. At right is a photo from a much more recent Instructables article showing the setup. In the game the human player moves first as white. The machine plays the black side. The system works as follows. On top of the boxes are diagrams illustrating all the possible states of the game after moves 2, 4, and 6 (the game can last no more than 7 moves) and the possible moves for black illustrated in different colored arrows. Inside each box are colored beads (or jujubes in my case) corresponding to the colored arrows on top. After the human moves, they find the box corresponding to the state of the game, randomly draw a colored bead on the top, and have black carry out the move indicated on the top by the corresponding arrow. The bead is set aside, and if black loses the game, the bead representing the final move is discarded from the machine. That way the machine learns that the final move is an incorrect one to take.
It turns out that given optimal play, black is guaranteed to win, and it doesn’t take very many rounds for the machine to become invincible — somewhere around 30 or 40 games played.
Does this qualify as AI? Absolutely. This demonstrates that machine learning doesn’t require digital computers. Admittedly, this approach doesn’t scale very well: Gardner’s hexapawn example with 24 matchboxes was based on an earlier system for tic-tac-toe that needs over 300 matchboxes.
I am interested in other examples of analog AI. In particular, contemporary board games often have subsystems for solitaire play that can be quite hard to beat. These generally do not learn from experience, but they do respond to current states of the game by setting goals and carrying out actions.
7 September 25
The Spanish Spoken in Chile: A Dialect or a Language?
I’ve long been a fan of La Linguriosa (Elena Herraiz), a Spanish linguist with a “superinteresante” YouTube channel. In the video released today, she’s talking about Chilean Spanish. It’s true that when spoken quickly by people whose education deprived them of learning standard Spanish, Chilean Spanish can be difficult to understand. I remember working in an office in Madrid in the early 1980s, when one of the secretaries (a refugee from Pinochet’s excesses?) introduced me to certain Chilean phonemes (especially “ch” for “tr,” as in nosochos instead of nosotros).
Language is a source of constant interest and joy for me. I’ve started playing Lingule daily along with Wordle, Geoguesser and bridge (massively fail on Australian indigenous and African languages, but I’m learning).
6 September 25
The Queen of Passports
I have been reading Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, the long tome that was the inspiration for the recent movie “Oppenheimer”. At one point the book discusses the Berkeley-based chemist Martin D. Kamen who in 1940 together with Sam Ruben was the first to synthesize carbon-14 in a cyclotron and who went on to use this carbon isotope to investigate the biochemical reactions involved in photosynthesis in 1941. He then was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project, but in 1944 a couple of incidents led him to be unjustly accused of espionage, and he was blacklisted for many years until finally winning his legal battles in 1955.
One of these battles was getting his passport back, which was revoked in 1947 by one Ruth B. Shipley, the head of the Passport Division of the State Department. It turns out that between 1928 and 1955, all decisions about issuances of passports ran through Mrs. Shipley, and they were not subject to judicial review. Depending on one’s perspective, she was both greatly admired and feared. Franklin Delano Roosevelt praised her as being a “wonderful ogre”. In the era of anti-communist hysteria she denied passports to many people in addition to Kamen, including the actor Paul Robeson, the playwright Arthur Miller, and the chemist Linus Pauling. She retired in 1955 at the mandatory age of 70, and at this point her power was starting to wane. The denial of the passport to Linus Pauling elicited the wrath of Senator Wayne Morse, and Pauling did obtain his full passport to be able to travel to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1954.
Jeffrey Kahn discusses Mrs. Shipley’s career in an article in the Connecticut Law Review published in 2011. He compares the reign of Mrs. Shipley with contemporary screening systems. Kahn views today’s systems e.g. the Terrorist Screening Database and its subset the No Fly List as the digital descendants of Mrs. Shipley’s files. But there is no longer a single authority governing who is in these databases, and responsibility for them has disappeared into anonymity.
5 September 25
Podiatry Visit
I’ve reached the age where regular visits to the podiatrist seem to be part of my life. I can’t successfully cut a few of my toenails and I have a corn which needs to be shaved with a knife and which is in a very awkward place to do myself.
I did go to get pedicures a lot while I was working. Different feel, the podiatrist’s office. I’m glad I’ve made the shift. My feet have a lot of issues and they deserve the care.
4 September 25
Videolets
I have been continuing my project of cataloging all my photos, and have launched into the subproject of organizing the video snippets I have. Video baffles me a good bit, coming from a background in still photography. There are many situations where a bit of video captures a subject or a scene much better than a still photograph — think of imaging a river at full flood — but such snippets even if edited together don’t make for a full-fledged video. Or to put it another way, if YouTube videos are the dominant force in video production these days, they are rhetorically a very different medium from still photography even if the stills are augmented with a bit of video.
Maybe the way forward is to embrace video snippets as their own art form — let’s call them videolets. These could work well in a blogging context, for one thing.
In this light, here is a videolet of Winston making a big leap. At night he likes to sleep on top of the bookcase in my office. But he usually takes a shortcut to get down from the bookcase!
3 September 25
A Visit to the Vet
It was Winston’s turn to go to the vet this morning for a checkup and rabies shot. He is not at high risk for rabies, but we have raccoons and rats in the neighborhood and if he ever got out of the house he might get exposed.
Dogs don’t like going to the vet either, but they like being with their people. Cats could really not care less about their people when the vet’s involved and it’s trauma, trauma, trauma all the way home.
He’s back in the house now, doing a thorough grooming session to sort himself out before a nap.
2 September 25
Storm At Dawn
A monsoonal weather system has come up from the south over California today, and around dawn this morning we had thunder and lightning and a few drops of rain. It cleared up by midday and we were able to set up the solar cooker this afternoon to prepare some lentils. The thunderstorms are now over the northern Sierras bringing with them a risk of wildfires.
Here is a view of the clouds this morning, taken a little after 7 AM from the food coop parking lot.
1 September 25
From Guinea Pigs to Hummingbirds
Yesterday was the last day of August. I had promised myself to complete a (rough!) first draft of my Mister Ginger comic by the end of the day, and I more or less did.
I now have a new task, one whose deadline is September 24th. I’ve been invited to submit a 6-page comic for another SAW anthology entitled Field Notes. I’m going to take some of the hummingbird drawings I did and arrange them thematically on six pages. This book is going to be even smaller than the last one, so my plan is to have one large panel per page.
At left is some of the doodling I’ve been doing for the title page. I am toying with versals. Since I’m going to be working at least at 200% I was playing with larger paper, which is definitely a challenge.
Below are the postcards I painted last Birdtober from which I am drawing the material for this comic. Nice to have most of the research for this project done and dusted.
31 August 25
Metro Systems That Ought To Exist
Metro systems are one of the great urban inventions but unfortunately there seems to be a minimum urban size before they get built. That doesn’t mean they can’t be designed in imagination. A YouTuber by the name of Helio Roque has started a project entitled “planeando metros que no existen” and has designed three of these so far, the cities being Badajoz, Salamanca, and Benidorm. Here he presents the creation of his map for Salamanca.