I was searching for an answer the other day at work so I went to my favorite search engine and typed in my query. Page after page after page of results came back and they all said: “Q: How do I solve this problem? A: Have you tried googling it?”

Several pages deep I found the solution to my problem and a very interesting comment that spurred me to this post. They predicted that the death of google would be google itself - trillions of pages indexed saying: “just google it.” I wish I could remember what the question was I was searching for or who the poster was, but I cannot. Whoever you are, astute commenter, I salute you!

D: The world is too grim of a place, you can’t take it too seriously. That includes yourself - if you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?

M: Other people.

D: Oh, right. Of course.

Hey, its summer! Like all summers it’s flying by far too quickly. We’ve finished the moving part of moving, but there are still plenty of things to do around the apartment before its ready for guests. I imagine buying a house is a bit like this, but much, much worse. Once we’re settled I think I’ll feel more relaxed, but for now, with boxes still piled in the dinning room, I feel like I need to spend all my time tidying, cleaning, sorting, arranging, a generally wishing I had less junk.

One of my new projects is to digitize all of my paper records. I’m eager to reduce the piles of paper I’ve been keeping (I’m aweful about filing them when I should and they just end up cluttering my desk).  I’ve already moved all of my bills over to e-bills, but I still get an impressive pile of paper mail. I’ll let you know how my paperless home-office works out.

Happy New Year everyone.

I asked M. what I should write about and she recommended that I write about how awesome she is. I thought that was a good challenge, though I don’t want to call it a challenge… I mean, it’s almost too easy, right? Let me first start with the home made bagels that she made for our New Year’s brunch yesterday - salted, poppy seed, and sugar-cinnamon toppings. It doesn’t stop there, she’s an amazing cook - come over for dinner sometime and see for yourself.

Then there’s the buttons that she didn’t sew onto my coat. I pestered her for like 9 months for her to sew a button back onto my coat. And though she never did she taught me a valuable lesson about self sufficiency. Had I not sewn that one button onto my coat myself I wouldn’t have known how to sew the other three on that fell off not long after. Or, you know, she could have sewn all four of them on for me and I could have learned how to Tom Sawyer people into doing my work for me.

M.  does a wonderful job correcting my atrocious  spelling and grammar and she can even diagram sentences (but can’t manage to keep her shoelaces tied).

I also think that my M. is awesome because she’s reading this over my shoulder and I couldn’t really say otherwise at this point, could I? And that she’s patient and kind and most of all because she puts up with me.

School started last week and I’ve become incredibly busy. In addition to my school work, I’ve decided that having a social life is rewarding and deserves more of my attention. Why I choose now to rekindle friendships is not a question I can answer, but strike while the iron is hot, right? Anyway, short story even shorter: I promise to put something new up tomorrow. That’s more of a promise to myself than to the ravenous hordes, but no matter who I write for I’ll hope to have something new for you tomorrow.

A couple of weeks ago the NYTimes had an article about the San Diego Comic-Con. It’s title: We’re All Geeks Here. The article itself isn’t terribly offensive - in fact it does a pretty good job at being respectful and non-exploitative, but the mere fact that it appeared in the Times drives me crazy.

I can’t pinpoint the origins, but some time ago there was a decision made by whatever syndicate runs the media that the identity of the ‘geek’ had become marketable. There is an outsider allure and a kind of universal appeal to anyone whose ever passed over for lack of social grace. So you played with Star Wars action figures when you were a kid or you had a calculator wrist watch. I bet you might even spend some time playing video games or ‘hacking’ online.

What I find so offensive about the new Geek identity is its ability to alienate a true geek from his/her peer group. A true geek is the kind of kid you find in the mall at the gaming store playing Magic or perhaps D&D, with the greasy hair and the velvet cape. One that is so interested in HAM radio or building rockets that they will speak for ours on it. These are the kind of people who fall into a group of friends because they annoy the hell out of everyone else. They stand together, united behind the banner of geekdom.

But now its cool to be a geek. Go get your HAM radio operators license, show the rest of the kids on the block just how eccentric yet stunningly intelligent you are. Invite your friends over and join the local chapter. Soon enough you and your six buddies run the club and the socially inept ones feel so threatened they retreat to their basements paint their miniatures in blissful solitude.

I’m doing a poor job making my argument, but let me boil it down for you. Basically, I see the geek identity as a passing trend which is exploitative and isolating to the ones who truly earned the right to wear that badge. Being an outsider has become the cool thing to do which pushes the true outsiders even further out.

An article in last week’s New York Times caught my eye. The short of it is McDonald’s is now selling a soda in a new size - the Hugo. The Hugo is 43oz. of carbonated beverage that when filled with Coca-Cola contains a whopping 410 calories and sells for as little as $.89 in some markets. Pretty good deal, eh?
The long of it is this: Say you’re hungry and you are an average American family whose income isn’t that high. You’ve been told that you should eat better, but it doesn’t taste as good as going out, it’s expensive and it’s a lot more work. Instead of making a meal for your family you all jump in your minivan and head down to the nearest McDonald’s. Like I said, you’re hungry so you’re going to order a Big Mac some fries and a soda. After placing your order the cashiers tells you that upgrading to large fries and the Hugo will only cost a buck and some change more, thats like 26 more ounces of beverage and 3.8 oz. more of fries. You’ll feed your family of four for less than $20.

That sounds pretty tasty, but was it worth it? It depends on how often you’d like to eat. According to Shapefit.com a Big Mac has 570 calories, large fries have 510 calories and the Hugo, which I mentioned above, has 410 calories. Say you want to splurge or maybe you’re just really, really hungry and you decide to go with the Big-Xtra, that’s 810 calories with cheese. In just one meal you’ve managed to consume between 1400 and 1700 calories. According to the FDA we should consume 1800 calories a day for women or 2000 a day for men. Talking strictly calories you’ve consumed between 3/4 and 100% of your daily recommend calories in one meal. With that kind of consumption you’d only need to eat once a day!

Sadly people tend to eat more than once a day and often the people who are targeted by these tactics are lower income, under educated consumers looking to stretch their dollar the farthest. McDonald’s dismisses these accusations claiming the market drives the business - consumers are demanding product, they are merely supplying the demand.

Last week on This American Life there was a short segment by the guys over at Radio Lab about morality. The question was if you could save the life of four people by killing one person would you do it? In the first scenario where by pulling a lever which directed a train you saved the four people, but a fifth died instead nine out of ten people said that they would pull the lever. In the second scenario where to save the four people you pushed the fifth in front of the train the response was overwhelmingly NOT to push the person.

But why? It’s the same question - sacrifice one, save four. But overwhelmingly the response is that killing a person is better/easier/more justified to save others when you don’t have to been the one doing it. To examine why we have such a natural aversion to being the pusher the team at Radio Lab spoke to a scientist who was looking at the biology of moral decision making. Examining brain scans of people making ethical decisions one would expect that there is unique center of the brain that becomes active when making these decisions. What the scientist found was that there are numerous areas of activity competing for the right choice to make.

Upon hearing this I thought of another article I had just read over at National Geographic about swarm thought. Essentially the apparent intelligence of an ant or a bee is the sum of the intelligence of a the ant hill or hive. The result of many, many simple interactions build a complex system of results that suggest a greater intelligence.

An example given in the article is bees searching for a new hive. Scout bees are sent out and when one discovers a suitable location for a new hive it will return to the swarm and perform a dance advocating this new location. (The dance conveys information about where the location of the new hive is). When enough bees have returned and are doing the same dance the location of the new hive is determined. An almost democratic decision made by the entire hive.

Swarm thought and ethical decisions, what do they have in common? They are simple elements that combine to resolve a complex question. And perhaps a more important question, what does that mean about intelligence, artificial intelligence and computing? I would argue that our intelligence is the same as that of a hive of bees or a school of herring. Our understanding of the world is an amalgamation of competing inputs that drive our thoughts and behaviors. The system of competing inputs is the essence of our intelligence and perhaps can be modeled and reproduced.

If intelligence is a system of resolving multiple inputs then we have already created AI, but how many inputs are required for advance intelligence? How sophisticated must the resolution be? I think the future of computing will answer these questions. As our hardware increases in speed and capacity and our software becomes more capable at modeling our natural world we will see if there is anything more to intelligence than marching of ants and the buzzing of bees.

I recently spoke to a former employer who was interested in hiring me for some programming work in the fall. He’s reticent to hire contracted/consultant programmers because he believes that they are awful at communicating and he doesn’t think he should struggle to convince them to fix bugs on his dime. I added my own .02$ with the thought that they are elitist and arrogant which makes convincing them that there are bugs in the first place incredibly difficult. Now I’m not saying all code for hire programmers are like that, just most of them.

This point was reinforced today for me scrolling through the UIC ACM listserv. There’s a question about the new Windows 2008 server which quickly degenerated into zealotry, snobbery and name calling. I had thought that the haloed halls of academia would be more resistant to that kind of behavior(HA! shows how much I know), but alack it is not. I shutter to think that these are my peers and that in ten years I’ll still have to listen to them blather on about the how much more they know than that other guy and how he’s so arrogant for thinking he knows what going on.

Edit: The possible irony isn’t lost on me here

I’ve changed things around again and promise nothing about what you’ll find here next time. I’ve thought about making some kind of commitment to this thing, a real effort this time, but I’ve thought better of it. With expectations set too high I’m doomed to fail. Lets see if I can impress myself.

The hot news in this part of town is that I’ve got a great new internship here in Chicago and I’m really excited about the work I’m doing. To keep things on the down low I’m not saying who its with (these things come back to haunt you), but suffice to say that there one of the best companies to work for in Chicago.

Stay tuned, I’m sure I wont keep you updated.