Category: ranting

It’s not Artificial Intelligence that will trigger the singularity; its Artificial Wisdom.

I have just posted two papers I wrote in college that are at the core of who I am today. I found the papers on an old hard drive I unearthed two years ago [confusion.cc], I’m just getting around to posting them. I think it worth while to explain why they are important, out of the hundreds of papers I wrote. These two papers which are titled, Zen at Walden and Do or do not, there is no try were very early in my college days, in 1997 I think. They aren’t very good as academic papers go, one of them is in fact downright embarrassing but you can’t have one without the other.

Both papers were written for the same class; Study in Eastern Philosophy. The embarrassing one, Zen at Walden, was written halfway through the semester as a midterm paper. My professor gave me an F on this paper. There were almost no marks on the paper itself, just the grade on the last page and a note; “see me.”

When I did visit the professor she told me, basically, that my paper was rubbish. I don’t remember the details of the assignment but the professor said that what I had done was to write a paper which I thought would get me a good grade, I had not tried to learn, or to understand the material, I had tried to understand and learn how to get a passing grade and that was not the assignment.

She gave me a chance to revise the paper, to show that I did understand. But, in the end, I didn’t understand. She gave me the same grade on the revised paper.

Do or Do Not, There is no Try was written in the final days of the same semester, it was my final exam. We were given complete freedom in or final exam, no rules. Some people did demonstrations —I remember one guy, who went by the name Thor, performed a series of Kendo forms and explained how the Eastern martial arts were inexorably linked with Eastern philosophies. I wrote another paper, because, yea that’s who I am.

This paper was a turning point in my education and in my life. Finding it now is a good chance to reevaluate what I learned.

For the first paper see here [confusion.cc] and for the second paper see here [confusion.cc]

This month marks 10 years I have been in Singapore, I’m a but late posting anything as I left DC on the 1st of September 2004 [confusion.cc] though I actually arrived in Singapore early on the 4th due to layovers on my cheap flights.

My decade in Singapore has been good – I got married [confusion.cc] and had two [confusion.cc] kids [confusion.cc]! Not to mention traveling all over Asia. So overall Singapore has been good, though there is a significant amount of hate in my love-hate relationship with Singaporeans — see here, [confusion.cc] here, [confuison.cc] and here [confusion.cc] — among others.

I did make one serious attempt to move back to the US [confusion.cc]. Which was not my first choice and the long lasting effects of the financial crisis put a stop to that. And while I would still like to go somewhere else — Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan or maybe even China or Korea — I don’t have any concrete plans.

So here’s to starting my second decade in Singapore.

If this photo is real, the world should go to war:

Because we said never again to this image:

The debate now is if the ISIS images are true. But that will quickly become a cover for not going to war. We said “never again.” But what did never mean? Never in Cambodia? Bosnia? Rwanda? what about never in Iraq?

I had coffee with an ex-colleague the other day who now works in a firm that has access to information from Deep Packet Inspection tools in various ISPs around the world. He said he was shocked to learn that more than 80% of traffic was pornography related — images or videos.

I’m not surprised. The internet is for porn [youtube.com] and porn drives innovation — see the VHS for reference.

Further to this general line of though we discussed a great idea. Take the Oculus Rift [oculusvr.com] mix in the GoPro [gopro.com] camera, some paparazzi and some CGI artists and you Total Porn Recall. In which a highly motivated Porn company records a library of green-screened, Point-of-View sex with various models using the GoPro and then purchases some good Paparazzi photos of famous actresses which are used by their CGI artists to replace the porn actresses heads with the head of your favorite actress. Bingo – instant billionaire! (And you’ll need it to pay the lawyers!) Hell, throw in a mechanized Fleshlight and go for broke.