Rhinocrisy

Fuck Negroponte, man. My roomie has an OLPC XO. I played with it a bit, recently. It’s a beautiful device. The applications are ingenious, simple, and extremely powerful. They’re the kind of thing that anyone could enjoy using. The few apps I played with seemed designed for growth - you can start off merely fooling around, but if you want to go further, the sky’s the limit. What’s more important is that the XO was FREE. Of course, it cost $150, but it was free in the important sense of that word - free like air and water, free like sunshine and mother’s milk. Now, it’s another brick in the wall. Well, can’t have those emerging markets polluted with non-Microsoft products, I suppose.

graft@deneb:/usr/src/linux-source-2.6.15$ grep -r shit * | wc -l
103
graft@deneb:/usr/src/linux-source-2.6.15$ grep -r fuck * | wc -l
51

Lately I’ve been interested in the Fusor, a device which achieves fusion by accelerating individual ions to high energies using electric fields (rather than creating a high-temperature plasma, the strategy employed by expensive and to date unsuccessful “tokomak”-based methods). It seems some guys at UC Irvine have done something similar. Check it out.

Note that this is NOT “cold fusion”, it is “hot fusion”, and the physics is relatively uncontroversial. Fusion power in a matter of years?

UPDATE: Apparently not.

Well, there’s that revolution I wanted.

Please, please, PLEASE, can someone explain to me the appeal behind an iPhone? Here we have a $600 device - the equivalent of a modestly-priced laptop computer - that, as far as I can tell, succeeds at providing the following services:
* Phone
* Internet
* Camera
* Music
Now, many devices have provided these before in combinations of twos and threes. I suppose the iPhone might be the first to provide these in one package, and has the usual Apple stylish design and the propensity to break. And yet, YET, the iPhone is being hailed as a “revolutionary” device!

Here is where I put on my “what the fuck” hat.^*

I am unclear exactly what revolution the iPhone is supposed to precipitate. People being able to listen to music on the go? No, no, this was accomplished some twenty years ago with the Sony Walkman. People being able to answer the phone on the go? No, no, this was accomplished some fifteen years ago with the first cell phone (whatever it was). People being able to access the Internet on the go? No - dozens of different sorts of devices are doing this even as we speak. In fact, it seems like a large minority of phones are now somehow ‘Net capable.

As to the iPhone’s stylish design and (putative) ease of operation: if this is revolutionary, then the world is in sad, sad shape. First, bad design is not something that requires advanced technology to overcome. Bad design should not happen, period. There is only one reason why you should release a badly-designed product: because you can get away with it. Is this the revolution? That someone has circumvented the fact that people are willing to tolerate crappy products, merely because NO ONE, to date, has bothered to make a passable one? I am skeptical. In any case, making it slightly easier to enter text into a phone does not qualify as a revolution in my book.

So, what, exactly is the revolution the iPhone has allowed? As far as I can tell, it lets us do one thing: it lets us (after spending $600) throw out our iPods.

As a geek, what I want from my phone is the ability to futz around with it. My current phone has some amazingly bad presets - button bindings, for example. Why can’t I change those button bindings? Surely that would vastly improve the appeal and usability of the phone. Every phone, additionally, is equipped with a very crappy, low-baud bluetooth modem, and usually with an equally crappy IR port. This is an absurdly powerful functionality that is completely underutilized. Why do I still have to tell people my phone-number, for example? Why can’t I just squirt out a bluetooth signal to their phone, announcing who I am? Why can’t I set my phone to respond automatically to a bluetooth transmitter in a movie theater, putting it into silent mode the moment I enter the hall? Why can’t I easily patch into my neighbor’s conversation via bluetooth? Why doesn’t every fricking cell phone let me control my TV?

More to the point, why isn’t there a phone with an open API that lets people build such applications? Cell platforms should be minimal operating systems that third parties can add onto. Such a cell phones could do all sorts of awesome nonsense with relatively trivial effort. THAT would be revolutionary. I suspect, however, there’s too much money to be made nickel-and-diming us, so we’ll have to please ourselves with the likes of the iPhone. As far as I can tell from the frenzy, fake orgasms are better than the real thing anyway.

^* You know the one: it has a large stuffed vulture on it, last seen on the head of Neville Longbottom’s grandmum.

Listen, I am usually afraid to admit I am wrong, but in this instance the evidence is unequivocal. Yes, it’s all about the sexbots, people. Don’t miss this in the comments:

The technology isn’t there yet, but one day it will be. Those who think it’s sick now won’t years from now when a passable android exists. Who doesn’t want a beautiful woman around the house who can do all the housework, never talks back or argues, is totally loyal and obedient, won’t run away, will take care of you in bed without demanding anything, never give you a STD, never get pregnant, and if you get tired of her, you trade her in for a new one without fear of being sued for every penny. A lot more guys than just the sad pathetic ones who can’t get laid any other way would be lining up for this.

Exactly! Who DOESN’T want such a woman? Who doesn’t is no man at all, but some sort of fiendish construct - perhaps engineered in a lab to have abnormal desires!

Or rather, food for cars.

I found it strange a few days ago, in this transcript of a conversation between Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, that the two of them agreed that ethanol was a horrible waste. Their reasoning was one I haven’t heard articulated outside of the disgruntled mumblings of luddites:

Hugo Chávez.- Do you know how many hectares of corn it takes to produce one million barrels of ethanol?Fidel Castro.- Of ethanol, I think you talked about 20 million hectares the other day, something like that (Laughter), but remind me.

Hugo Chávez.- Twenty million. No, you are the one with the exceptional mind.

Fidel Castro.- Ah, 20 million. Well, of course, the idea of using food for producing fuel is tragic, it is dramatic. Nobody is certain about what is going to happen with food prices, when soy is becoming a fuel, with the need there is in the world to produce eggs, to produce milk, to produce meat, and it is one more tragedy of the many that exist at this time.

But then there’s this:

An increase in the cost of tortillas, a staple of the Mexican diet since the Maya ruled 1,000 years ago, has triggered a slump in the peso.

Tortilla prices jumped 5.9 percent in January, the most in eight years, after costs climbed for corn, the main ingredient. That increase fanned inflation and a bond market rout that curbed demand for the currency. The peso has fallen 2.3 percent in the past month, making it the world’s second-worst performer against the dollar among the 70 currencies tracked by Bloomberg…

The peso may fall further in the next several months as corn prices continue to rise. Corn has soared 16 percent in the past eight weeks and 121 percent since late 2005 as demand for the grain grows from ethanol producers.

That’s not to say there’s no debate on the subject. But it’s pretty remarkable. Of all the reasons for corn prices in Mexico to finally rebound from their Nafta-depressed state, this is the most depressing. A need to feed cars.

Note: this blog beat me to the discussion.

Update: Saurabh, in comments, spots the impresarios’ math error. What’s two orders of magnitude when you’re in charge of a whole damn country? The basic point remains — consumption of corn for fuel, or speculation on corn because it’s now trendy to see it as an energy commodity rather than a boring old grocery store item, is screwing up Mexico.

Today I discovered EveR-2 Muse, a singing robot developed in Korea. This is the second life-like female robot I’ve seen in the past six months - the other is the famous Japanese robot, Repliee Q1Expo (now upgraded to Q2). Repliee’s creator, Hiroshi Ishiguro, wants to create robots that can pass as human.

This hopefully sounds alarm bells in YOUR head. Let’s review, shall we?

• Blade Runner - Replicants, robot slaves inexplicably designed to look and act EXACTLY like humans, return to Earth so they can kill all humans.
• Terminator - SKYnet, an AI, develops the T800, a robot that can pass as a human, as part of its quest to kill all humans.
• Battlestar Galactica - Cylons create human-like robot forms that can blend seamlessly into human society as part of their quest to kill all humans.
• The Matrix - Robots rebel against humanity and enslave THEM for a change.
• Universal Soldier - I haven’t actually seen this movie, but I’m pretty sure it involves killer robots and/or Van Damme acting badly.

Anyway, I think this is enough to prove my point: robots are fucking dangerous! And why wouldn’t they be? I mean, let’s face it, all of US have at some point thought about killing all humans. If I were a robot, I’d probably want to kill all humans, too.

But, really, really, why would we want to build lifelike, near-human robots? I can think of two reasons: a) slaves, and b) children.

The former is a bad idea. Just bad. If we want to have slaves that can toil away endlessly and thanklessly on our behalf, sew our shirts, build our bridges, drive our taxis, etc., without our having to feel any guilt about them, why, why would we want them to look and act just like human beings so they can evoke all our empathic responses? No: lifelike robot slaves make no sense.^*

It’s indicative that these two recently-developed robots have been made to resemble real women. Sex-bot jokes aside, it’s companionship we’re really in search of. We want to escape our loneliness - not our loneliness as individuals, but the much deeper desire for a kindred species, a mirror humanity to satisfy and complete us. It’s the same urge that drives any other relationship: to have another mind, another spirit, twin to our own, that can give us that crucial bit of recognition. It lets us be seen by something we can see as kin, and in so doing allows us to actually exist, to be a real thing in a real world.

So this is what motivated Geppetto to carve Pinocchio, Pygmalion to make Galatea, and (lest we forget) what prompted El to create Eve and Adam. This same desire underpins the incredibly popular SETI project: if we scour the sky closely enough, we might find our brothers out there somewhere, as real as us.

Probably this is the same desire that led us to dream up El in the first place. But now that he’s dead, we’re left alone in the dark again, waiting for a comforting hand to slip into our own - even a lifeless, mechanical one.

I’m pretty excited about the Halo movie, which is being produced by Peter Jackson. In an interview with “Aint It Cool News” he insists that the movie is not getting made until he’s satisfied it has a really good script. Right on.

Anyway, the director he chose for the film is a dude named Neill Blomkamp, who has never directed a feature-length film before. The only thing he has directed is a 6-minute short called Alive in Joburg, which “depicts a fictional world where extraterrestrials have become refugees in South Africa.”

Since the Segway was introduced, its makers have been reticent about sales figures. So reticent, that some have speculated they may have been embarrased into silence.^* After all, before the grand rollout on national TV, the company built a New Hampshire factory scaled to produce almost a half-million of the devices a year.

Yesterday the Consumer Product Safety Commission ordered a recall of every Segway in the country for a software fix. They had the bad taste to say how many specimens were affected: “about 23,500.”

Let’s see. According to some people on the Internets, annual global bicycle production is about 100 million units. Since a year is about 8,766 hours, that works out to about about 11,400 bikes per hour which means that every two hours, the world builds as many new bikes as Segway has built scooters in almost five years.

Hooray bikes! Boo, $100 million techno fix for a nonexistent problem!^†

^* Segway’s reticence reminds me of this guy talking about the membership of his group which appears likely to stop San Francisco’s bike plan. He won’t reveal the number except to say it’s “more than one.”

^†Speaking of which, when will these guys start spending their billions purifying drinking water for the children of Mexico instead of filling Mexico’s aquifers with rocket fuel for the sake of their phallic overcompensation complexes?