the corioblog : read, and be entertained

Airplane vs. Treadmill

If you haven’t heard of it, this was a meme a while ago, whose best solution is here. Right now, I’m just reading through some of the archived debates, laughing at idiots. The funniest are the people who almost understand what’s going on:

Mike:
The plane will TAKE OFF. But there’s no guarantee of it FLYING. Once it reaches a speed fast enough to overcome friction of the conveyor belt the engine has to be powerful enough to generate lift against air rather than the ground. If the plane were in a vacuum (no air) it would not fly. That’s my stab at it any way.

January 31, 2008 at 12:50 AM

There should be a word for what I’m doing. Something related to schadenfreude, but meaning “pleasure derived from the idiocy of others.”

A word other than “trolling.” That one implies an active participation in the conversation.

2010 08 27 Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Ground Zero Mosque

The fact that there even is a debate about this sickens me. It’s one thing to impose security theater on air travel, making it even more terrible with no real increase in safety. I can accept that; I am outvoted by the masses who do in fact prefer to trade in liberty for the perception of security.

It is another thing entirely to alienate and anger all of Islam in order to spite them for the attacks of almost a decade ago. 9/11 is old news. The world has, in general, moved on. There is no such thing as true outrage at the attacks anymore; there is only political posturing and irrational grudge-holding.

This was a chance to show the world what freedom meant. To show that we welcomed the moderate majority of a religion which, despite its share of extremists, is generally peaceful. To show that we could rise above such simple pettiness. To show that we respect our own Constitution.

That chance was botched. There will always be the morons who truly do still hold a grudge. I suspect that they remain a tiny minority; I’m not yet cynical enough about the nation to postulate that they’re widespread. The people who really get my goat in this parade of idiots are the ones who fill themselves with mock outrage in order to score political points. Because of them, this is somehow a big deal. Because of them, we’re driving away the moderate Muslims, and encouraging the extremists.

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That should have been all that needed to be said.

2010 08 17 opinion Comments (1) Permalink

Understanding Humans

The world needs a proper model of human comprehension of natural language. This one is based partly on the OSI Model, partly on standard compiler design. Conceptually, it’s an interface stack: a set of layers of functionality. Each layer can talk freely within itself, and has a well-defined interface to the layers above and below, but never calls otherwise.

Lexer / Phoneme Analyzer: This just tokenizes the input stream, whether it be audio or text. These are actually separate branches for the different types of input, but functionally do the same thing. Operates at the character/raw sound level.
Parser: Checks grammar and syntax of input tokens. Generates all possible interpretations of homonym/homophone possibilities. Operates at the word level. Generates sentences.
Local Contextual Integrator: Considers local details: formatting of text, source and quality of audio, etc. Gives a small, local “big picture” to frame the input in question. Operates at the word level, but by nature considers a variety of external cues.
Literal Semantic Analyzer: Given the tokens and their context, decides what the literal meaning of a given sentence is. Operates at the sentence level.
Source Knowledge Integrator: The source of a given communication is important. A message from a family member might be more trusted than a random internet article. A sentence from a very literal, precise person is more likely to mean exactly what it says than one from an excitable teenager. Operates at the sentence level.
Conceptual Accumulator: Collects a bunch of related sentences into a paragraph-level concept. Decides what sentences are related and how they fit together.
General Semantic Analyzer: Decides what the author probably meant in a particular paragraph. Resolves logical contradictions and paradox. Operates at the paragraph/concept level.
General Contextual Integrator: Integrates a concept with a worldview. This is the level which decides if someone is lying, wrong, or otherwise speaking falsehoods. Operates at the concept level, though by nature includes a wide variety and broad scope of external information.
Cognition: normal thought about ideas. Operates at the conceptual level. Can modify the rules of lower levels, for example when learning a new language or updating the current model of the current language.

Humans accomplish layers 1-5 automatically and unconsciously. Layers 6-8 are like breathing: generally subconscious, but can be consciously overridden. Layer 9 is when we start getting into id, ego, superego stuff: possibly subconscious but generally sentient behavior. Computers right now are quite good at steps 1 and 2 using artificial languages, and rubbish at them for natural languages. Layers 3 and above may exist as research projects, but are above the current state of the art.

When I go back to school, there is a high probability that this is the stuff I will focus on, trying to push the state of the art in computer thought up, level by level. It is fascinating!

Cars

Cars have been on my mind a lot recently. So far in the decade I’ve been licensed, I’ve owned three. My parents gave me an Eagle Vision when I was in college, and I bought a Saturn LS2 from them a few years later after returning from Japan. Both were sensible, practical, well-maintained sedans firmly planted in the center of the luxury curve.

I might still be driving the Saturn, but the Army wouldn’t ship it to Korea. The standard tour here is only a year; they don’t figure it’s worth shipping cars for such a short time. I extended my tour almost immediately on arrival, and gained eligibility to have a car shipped, but it was sold by then.

I almost bought a cheap ancient hoopty, as is traditional for army folks in Korea. For $500, you can get a car good enough to last you your year or two–probably. One of my friends here literally had one of his wheels fall off as he was driving down the highway last week. He was fine. The car was totaled. I was lucky, though: before I went with the hoopty, I happened to see a nice-looking sports car with a For Sale sign in the window. The price was right, and I ended up owning a 1992 Dodge Stealth.

It’s been a good car for Korea, quick and agile enough to blow through traffic while being cheap enough that I wouldn’t be devastated if it got wrecked somehow. Still, when I PCS out of here, I’m going to sell it off and upgrade. I’ve never owned a new car, but I’ve got enough in the bank to plausibly buy one outright. (I’m not particularly interested in buying the biggest car I could afford the loan of; it’d be a bad value proposition and also far too easy to drive beyond my abilities and wreck it.) It’s become a question, now, of what I want to buy, and (after much research) there are three major contenders.

The first option is a Mazda Miata, in its highest trim level, with the convertible hardtop. After throwing in all the options, it’s both the cheapest car I’m looking at and the most luxurious. The issue is power: it only runs a 4-cylinder engine displacing 2 liters, and statistically it’s just not in the same class as the others. Still, every review talks about its wonderful handling and the pure exhilaration of driving it; it also gets many bonus points for being a hardtop convertible. It’s the current leader in my mind for what to buy.

Alternately, I could go for a Nissan 370Z. Its ancestor, the 350Z, was the first car I ever looked at and thought “I really wish I owned that thing.” It’s pure beauty, power, and good reviews. The convertible version is reviewed even better, but costs more than I want to spend. Even as a coupe, it’s a car that looks fast standing still. Of course, the speed isn’t just in its looks; it goes quite nicely. The only real issue is the price: it’s the most expensive of the three. If my budget were 25% higher, there’s no question: I’d get this car as a convertible. Unfortunately, it isn’t.

The last option is to go pure musclecar and buy a Ford Mustang GT. Here, the convertible version got markedly worse reviews than the coupe, so that’s not really an option. On the other hand, this is by a large margin the most powerful (and heaviest) of the cars I’m looking at. I honestly do not know how atavistic the thrill is of laying down twin rubber streaks on takeoff, and how it balances against the budget for tires; it’s one of the things I want to find out in a test drive. This car really has only two niggling and strange cons. The first is simple: I’d prefer a convertible. The second is that, of these three cars, this is the only one that actually makes me worry about driving within the car’s capabilities but not within mine and killing myself by accident.

If I worry about pushing too hard in the high end and dying, why bother with a sports car at all? It’s simple: they are fun. They are adrenaline in a shiny metal body; sexiness on wheels. They are enablers of joy: there is simply nothing like darting through medium-light traffic at twice its average speed, planning your movements three lane-changes ahead. There is much about driving in Korea that I’ll gladly forget the moment I leave, but I suspect that the sensation of freedom when the traffic finally opens up and the next obstacle is a speed camera 5 miles ahead is one I’ll treasure for a long time. I would never have experienced that in a hoopty; my ancient, base-model sports car is the only reason I have had that feeling. I can’t help but look forward to knowing what it will be like in a car that is modern and even more capable than what I have now.

2010 08 03 life things Comments (0) Permalink

Summer Fest

Command has been promoting the K-16 summer fest for over a month now. Come to summer fest! It’s a Friday off! All the cool people from not just this base, but Yongsan and the surrounding Seongnam community will be there!

Naturally, the day arrives and there is rain. This isn’t just any rain, though: it’s a downpour. Torrential in volume, ferocious in intensity, seemingly endless in duration. This has led to some amusing scenes.

The BN HQ parking lot, for example, is filled to capacity. At its only entrance, a large sign warns “Parking Lot Subject to Flooding. NO OVERNIGHT PARKING.” An inch of water is streaming down the tarmac at the entrance.

In front of the community center, in the normal parking lot, there’s a raised stage and some enormous speakers connected to what looks like a pile of very expensive audio equipment. In front of this are about a hundred folding metal chairs. It’s all deserted, with the electronics entarped in plastic wrap.

Surrounding that are a dozen or so small awnings for the various services, groups, and businesses that want to make a good impression on the soldiers here. Most are simply deserted. Others are manned by one or two lonely-looking but dedicated people. The only one with any customers at all is selling $1 beers, $1 hotdogs, and free popcorn. There’s an air of mirth around that one, as though everyone suspects that they are being ridiculous. Periodically someone pokes the awning, pushing a solid sheet of water off the edge.

I like the rain, and I don’t like crowds. I probably should feel bad that this is how the summerfest is turning out, but honestly it is just amusing.

2010 07 16 korea Comments (0) Permalink

Night Flight

Friday evening I flew an hour of goggle time. I was at day 57 of the 60-day period, after which my currency would have expired. The next evening, I got an hour unaided in a Cessna.

NVGs are useful. I wouldn’t dream of attempting terrain flight, or landing in any but a perfectly clear well-marked area, without them. At the same time, they are an uncomfortable combination of unpleasantly heavy and way too small. After a very short while, wearing them becomes a literal pain in the neck: even with a counterweight bag to keep your head’s CG roughly where it should be, they push the moment of inertia out several inches. Combined with the tiny viewing area of the goggles, which forces you to be constantly moving your entire head around to maintain situational awareness, simple fatigue sets in very quickly.

Flying unaided is much more physically comfortable, and much prettier. Cities are a soft sodium yellow, highways are ribbons of red and white, and manmade landmarks are always strikingly lit. At the same time, navigation is significantly more challenging. For example, you wouldn’t think that a runway would be hard to find, particularly at night: it’s a perfectly straight line miles long with distinctive lighting along both edges. You’d be wrong: runways are tricky, and prone to sneaking up on you. It’s actually usually easier to find the airport from the taxiway lighting and then infer the position of the runway until you can see it directly, which usually happens on short final, about 30 seconds before landing.

The ideal, if I could invent any hypothetical technology for flying at night, would be a projected head-up display on every window showing the outside world as seen through a system of night vision sensors mounted on the aircraft’s body. I hear the Apache people actually have something like a primitive version of this, though I’ve never had a chance to play with one. I suspect that I’ll have to either wait quite a long time before such a system becomes commercially available, or invent it myself. It’s one idea for what to do with myself after the Army, at least.

2010 07 11 flying Comments (0) Permalink

Hacker’s Delight

x + y = (x XOR y) + (x & y)<<1

It's longhand addition: the sum with carries ignored, plus the carries. Why not just use a normal adder? This equation still has an addition operation. However, this reduces the probability of a carry operation by about half (assuming binary numbers with each bit independently equally likely to be either 0 or 1).

It's not useful, but it's cool. This whole book is 300 pages of such tricks, few of which I expect ever to use, but all of which trigger little explosions of happiness when I figure out how they work. If you've ever considered bit-twiddling without immediately assuming it's a euphemism, you'll like this book.

Hacker’s Delight, Henry S. Warren, Jr. (Amazon)

2010 07 06 bibliophile
geekspeak Comments (0) Permalink

The Grand Plan for the Weekend

Last year for the fourth of July I sat in the apartment most of the weekend, emerging briefly to see the on-base fireworks display. This year I plan to top that: I’ve got a four-day weekend, an off-base pass, and a well-stocked debit card: I am travelling.

Right now I’ll sleep a few hours, then get online with my friends from college. After a few hours of that, I’ll drive to Osan Airbase, where I’ll fly a Cessna down to Kunsan (weather permitting) and back. Then I’ll link up with my buddy who lives down there and hang out all evening, possibly drinking. Sometime in there I expect a Skype call from my sister.

Sunday morning, I start on my way to Jeju-do: Korea’s Hawaii. It is the farthest place I can go from here without needing a passport. Astonishingly, a round-trip plane ticket costs only about $75. Hopefully I’ll be able to walk into the airport and buy one, because the Korean websites are giving me trouble.

The plan is to spend 48 hours in Jeju-do, then return to base by Tuesday evening in time to get back to work on Wednesday morning. Once there, I’ll figure out lodging and entertainment somewhere; I am certain that I can find both on this island of tourism. Everything I’m bringing fits into a backpack.

They don’t believe at work that I am a spontaneous person.

2010 07 02 korea Comments (0) Permalink

Thought Experiment

Assume superstring theory is correct, and the universe is 11-dimensional. 7 of those are so tiny and curled in on themselves that in human terms they are entirely extraneous; still, they exist.

You invent the world’s tiniest (and most sideways) centrifuge, and accelerate someone to near lightspeed along one of these dimensions. Does this brave experimentee experience relativistic weirdness?

My prediction: yes, but not in the traditional sense. The necessary caveat here is that I do not have the necessary math to back any of this up; this is just intuition based on my understanding of physics.

Let’s list the traditional effects of near-lightspeed travel. There’s an increase in mass, compression along the direction of travel, a reduction of rate of perceived time. These effects can only be perceived by an observer whose velocity relative to the experimentee is large.

The salient feature of the seven bonus dimensions is that they are very, very tiny and extremely tightly curled: any motion along any of them will quickly return an object to the starting point. (This is both why the experiment features a centrifuge instead of a traditional accelerator and why they play a negligible role in human-scale life.) Also, they are orthogonal to each other and to the traditional four dimensions of everyday life.

The centrifuge’s overall effect, then, will be to vibrate the experimentee; whether it’s a sine wave or a sawtooth depends on details of the wrapping that I don’t know, but that ultimately don’t matter. Either way, vibration can be averaged out to a single position.

We wouldn’t notice the spatial compression: that only applies in the direction of travel, and in this case that direction is orthogonal to any direction humans can sense. However, we would notice the other two effects: time dilation and mass increase. Even though the experimentee is at rest in the primary three dimensions and is effectively only vibrating in the fourth, that vibration is still at near-lightspeed. I can’t come up with any reason why those effects should be masked.

Holy crap. I think I just simultaneously invented both stasis fields and gravity generators.

2010 06 23 geekspeak Comments (0) Permalink

BOOM

There’s a small howitzer, almost a mortar, on the helipad at Camp Casey. I’ve seen it a bunch of times, but never at 1700.

At 1700, it seems, it gets set off with a blank charge daily.

When this happens, there are a few consequences. A 20-foot fireball shoots briefly out the muzzle. A shower of tiny unburnt gunpowder particles clatters onto the helicopter. And the sheer noise of it punches you in the chest loud enough to make you step back.

Next time I’m at Cp. Casey at 1700, I’m wearing ear protection.

2010 06 23 what i learned at work today Comments (0) Permalink

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