ChapterZero

Today has been a productive day, even though I haven’t done half of what I wanted to do, at least in terms of school work. I actually went to the trouble to leave school in the middle of the day, to go and locate the post office downtown, at the peril of not being able to find a parking space when I got back. And I pulled it off: I located the post office, and I even found a parking space when I got back. In the process of locating that parking space, I visited a portion of the UH campus that I’ve never been in before, the entire two+ years I’ve been here.

“What Computers Still Can’t Do” by Hubert Dreyfus is a pretty famous book, if I recall correctly. That is, I’ve heard of it at least a few times; being a bystander in the world of famous books, if I’ve heard of it, then it must be famous. As I was leaving a professor’s office today, I saw a stack of photocopies of a part of it next to another professor’s door. Interpreting that as a signal that it was ok to take one, I did. And I found this excellent excerpt:

If it is not to constitute an insult, the counter-gift must be deferred and different, because the immediate return of an exactly identical object clearly amounts to a refusal … It is all a question of style, which means in this case timing and choice of occasion, for the same act — giving, giving in return, offering one’s services, paying a visit, etc. — can have completely different meanings at different times.

To avoid misleading anyone, that is a quote that is used in the book, not written by the author. The book itself is ‘a critique of artificial reason’, which attacks artificial intelligence. But I like that quote, because it exposes a normally ineluctable rule, without trivializing it or making it appear to have more significance than it has. It acknowledges the arbitrarity of social rules without attacking it.

Here’s another good quote:

The difference between the mathematical mind (esprit de geometrie) and the perceptive mind (esprit de finesse): the reason that mathematicians are not perceptive is that they do not see what is before them, and that, accustomed to the exact and plain principles of mathematics, and not reasoning till they have well inspected and arranged their principles, they are lost in matters of perception where the principles do not allow for such arrangement… These principles are so fine and so numerous that a very delicate and very clear sense is needed to perceive them, and to judge rightly and justly when they are perceived, without the most part being able to demonstrate them in order as in mathematics; because the principles are not known to us in the same way, and because it would be an endless matter to undertake it. We must see the matter at once, at a glance, and not by a process of reasoning, at least to a certain degree … Mathematicians wish to treat matters of perception mathematically, and make themselves ridiculous … the mind … does it tacitly, naturally, and without technical rules.

Interesting, but not something I would necessarily agree with. It depends on what he is talking about; I suspect, that if he wasn’t talking directly about religion, that is the kind of reasoning he would have used to justify his religious beliefs (fanaticism). It seems like Dreyfus inserted those ellipses in choice locations to turn Pascal’s argument to his own use, in arguing that artificial reasoning research is a “degenerating research program”– a term coined by Imre Lakatos, signifying a “scientific enterprise that starts out with great promise, offering a new approach that leads to impressive results in a limited domain … inevitably researchers will want to try to apply the approach more broadly … if, however, researchers start encountering unexpected but important phenomena that consistently resist the new techniques, the program will stagnate, and researchers will abandon it as soon as a progressive alternative approach becomes available.” I agree with that interpretation of Pascal’s work– there are some things that can’t be (yet?) analyzed sufficiently accurately in terms of mathematics, can’t be reduced to mathematical models– particularly, human intelligence, and hence, AI will fail.

Of course, the question is raised, what is human intelligence. I haven’t a clue, but every algorithm I have ever seen that uses a computer to simulate a function that one would admit could best be done by a human– vectorizing bitmaps, for instance, or edge detecting– is nothing but a collection of finely tuned heuristics. And a lot are, even worse, probabilistic. Admittedly, none of these algorithms are touted as examples of AI, but if that is the best level to which we can reproduce these low level functions of human beings, how can we hope to emulate intelligence?

Finally, some math

Reimann integration is the standard type of integration we learn in basic calculus courses– to determine the Reimann integral of a function on an interval, take a partition of that interval and take upper and lower sums of the function on that partition. Take the limit of the upper and lower sums as the refinement of the partitions approach infinity, and if these two numbers are equal, that is the Reimann integral. This integral has some shortcomings which make it less useful to anyone (mathematicians and physicists?) working in non-standard function spaces. Today, I found a nice list of them, which I would like to put here. So here goes:

• scope f is Reimann integrable on [a,b] if and only if it is continuous at almost all points of the interval– really two restrictions: integrals are only really defined on bounded intervals, to integrate over the whole number line, you need to take limits as the integral limits go to +/- infinity; the function must be mostly continuous.
• lack of completenessRemember how R is defined as the set of limit points of Cauchy sequences in Q, and has nice properties because of it? Well the function space that is Reimann integrable is incomplete in a sense analogous to Q– the integral of the limit of a set of Reimann integrable functions is not guaranteed to be equal to the limit of the integrals of that set of functions, unless the set of functions converge to their limits uniformly.

I would have posted yesterday, the first day of school, but, to show just how much of a commuter school it is, UH’s servers were on the fritz yesterday, and you couldn’t access anything but their website.

I still have one more engineering class to go to, but I’ve seen all my others. I am in for a challenging year; I will really need to gain some time management skills to deal with all the work that I’ll be having… but I look forward to the challenge.

Surprisingly, I am still in contact with two of the CfAO interns– usually, when I leave a place, I also leave the people there. I know how bad that sounds, but it is true. One of them is the guy that was my roommate in Livermore, and the other is a guy that I seemed to have a lot in common with.

More later, I think. I had so much to write about yesterday, but now I’m not feeling up to the task. Plus the people here are reading over my shoulder…

I just encountered one of my old entries, entitled “on my arrogance”. Hmmm. I have changed a lot: I’m still arrogant, but I definitely don’t think I am intellectually superior to any meaningfully large segment of the populace– i.e., there are some people who are stupider than I, and a lot who are smarter. See what just a couple of years of college does to you? Or maybe it’s because I’m no longer being influenced by the liberal artsy, introspective ambiance of the Honors College. I’ve noticed my common usage vocabulary has dropped– for instance notice how I wrote all of that verbiage instead of saying repertoire of words– so I no longer ‘test’ people’s understanding in that manner. To think of it, I don’t think I did; in fact, I wrote a lot of things in that entry that make me think in retrospect that I was choking on a blunt at the time.

I had an interesting conversation with my dad today, and several with my roommate this summer, which point out clearly to me in what way I’m arrogant. I definitely think that only SETM — science, engineering, technology, and math — fields are worthwhile. On an intellectual level, I know that isn’t, can’t be true, but on a purely visceral level, I cling to the conception that historians (conversation with my dad), soccer players (conversations with my roommate), and their ilk are just wasting everyone’s time, and their own potential. I am, however, getting better at accepting the usefulness of other fields, as I come to realize my own limitations within my own area of interest more and more. For instance, now that I know despite how much I think I like math, I will probably never amount to a first rate mathematician, I can appreciate that others choose to play soccer instead of do math. And not only in that negative manner: I can also appreciate that the world might just need historians (and soccer players), for some weird reasons that I can’t see, wearing my SETM tunnel-vision glasses. Give me a few more years, and hopefully I’ll be better able to articulate why the world couldn’t just consist of people interested in the things I’m interested in.

My sister got back from Italia today. We had an interesting conversation on how she doesn’t fit anywhere in the world, which I thought was odd, because that’s what I think– of myself, not her. It’s not very likely that one family would produce two utter misfits, is it?

Also, I looked back on this SourceForge-is-cool induced folly of mine; I don’t even know Java (anymore). But maybe some time in the future…

PS: I have noticed I tend to use ellipses and em-dashes a lot; is that a good thing or a bad thing?

So I bought all my books today… for a total of about $615. I was feeling special– specially persecuted– until I talked to a friend who is a senior, and his cost about $625. So I don’t feel special anymore: is that a good thing, or a bad thing? Which ever it is, I can look forward to spending at least 3*$615=$1845 worth in books over the remainder of my undergraduate career. And some people ask why I am never going to sell my books back… now I’m starting to consider it.

I feel I can make the following comments with impunity, seeing as how no specific names are mentioned, and he doesn’t read my site– but then again, who does?–. That same guy has an even more serious love problem that I do. Mine is simple: is it love unrequited, or not? His is: love requited, but they feel they are incompatible or some other such doohickey. IMO, they just aren’t willing to try. I say, if you like her/him, and she/he likes you, and you know the other’s feelings, you owe it to yourself to at least attempt having a relationship. Because don’t I know it, love is not easy to find. I’m still looking, as a matter of fact…

Anyhow, back to the NSCS grind. I just finished deleting everything from the webmaster email, while answering those messages I deemed answer worthy, so I hope there was nothing irreplacable there. I hate Yahoo! mail, if I haven’t mentioned it millions of times already. Not as much as Microsucks, but close.

School starts up next week, on Monday. I am looking forward to my math courses, and even a few of my engineering courses. I’m also anticipating the possibility of maybe getting myself a social life. I have a car, finally, so I can do more activities… assuming that my schedule isn’t already too busy, which it probably is. I am currently taking 19 hours of courses, all of which will require intense attention (engineering and math of the non-obvious kind), serving as the co-webmaster for the NSCS chapter at UH, and proctoring an engineering course. Mostly I am worried about the updating and email checking and other communication type skills that I will have to use daily for the NSCS– that seems slightly beyond my ken right now. I am also worried about the amount of time that my engineering courses, especially Electromagnetic Waves, will take. And I know that at least one of my math courses will be a real time hog– Intermediate Analysis, by virtue of the teaching style of the professor I chose (I like it that way).

Even before school restarts, I have much to do: find out why one of my scholarships has apparently been dropped without warning, get my proctoring account migrated over to the new domain, and buy my books. Not to mention tieing up the lose ends I have left from my internship: complete my poster by Sept. 15, get the final month’s payment to the apartments, get my parents to sign some closing papers on the apartment, getting the electricity shut off… Too much!

Now I’ve truly impressed myself with the weight of the things I have to do within the next 6 days, I’m going to go read for a while…

I’ve been thinking about them lately, and I realized why I liked phasers more than photon torpedoes in my Star Trek fandom time. What exactly is a photon torpedoe?

It can’t be a laser, because that is what a phaser is, right? And it can’t be incoherent light of an ordinary sort, because that would be like throwing light bulbs at starships. Therefore I assume that the photon does not refer to visible light, but just to a form of EM radiation. With that assumption, I made some wilder assumptions to try and place photon torpedoes as real weapons.

Imagine that photon torpedoes work by bombarding whoever they are fired at with high levels of radiation (photons). For physics, we know that electrons absorb photons and move to a higher energy level. So I think it would be as feasible as any other definition to assume photon torpedoes are just agents for delivering concentrated doses of radiation. Because in this manner, it would be easy to visualize them vaporizing the hulls of starships by ionizing them (by stripping away all the electrons by exciting them with massive doses of radiation). Also, as far as anything is known about shields, we assume they are some form of radiation themselves, so it’s sensible to assume concentrated bursts of radiation might weaken and eventually breach them.

That’s my theory of photon torpedoes. I have yet to hear any other. Now someone needs to account for phasers. Who ever heard of a laser that knocks people out, or vaporizes whole objects even when it only contacts part of them? That is beyond even my BS (bad science skills.

One of my missions in life is to be an advocate for all things TeX and MetaPost related. Today I had a break through with my roommate, Oscar, in which I, *without intending to*, persuaded him to learn LaTeX and MetaPost. It hinged around showing him Alan Kennington’s superb MetaPost illustrations for his forthcoming differential geometry book, which I will buy as soon as it is available, and I have money.

Speaking of books, during the time I spent here at the lab I have had the not so distinct pleasure of being able to check out books from their library. I have to say I was disappointed at the quality of it, however: UH has a better selection of books. But then again, all the people here can generally get funding to buy the books they might need for their specialized areas of research. I was particularly impressed by the lack of books on computer graphics related subjects: radiosity, ray tracing, etc. Even the programming and math book sections, which I would expect to be huge in a research environment, were sparser than UH’s. I did notice a few books that I would really like to have to read at my leisure, one of them “Image Processing and its Applications” edited by Al Bovik, is a phenomenally comprehensive (in breadth, at least) encyclopedia on image processing techniques. I intend to buy it as soon as my financial situation stabilizes.

Today I started on the first step in returning to Houston: shipping all the books that I bought here in Livermore back. I bought the box, which just barely holds them today, and I’m going to go buy some duct tape to hold it together tomorrow, or beg some off someone here at the lab, and send the box off tomorrow for hopefully less than $20. We shall see.

In another sense, my mission as an intern has been accomplished. I shall post my presentation here as soon as possible– hopefully the review and release process will be over tomorrow– and maybe write up a more sensible explanation of what it was I spent six weeks of my summer doing. I still have a few bugs I’m working on with the algorithm I’ve written up, but that’s ok– I figure they won’t use my code when I’m gone anyway They’ll say, “Oh, glad that’s over. Now the interns are gone, we can get back to the real work!”

Oh, my sister left for Italia the Saturday just past, and I haven’t heard from her since, which I thought really unusual, because Tuesday is her birthday. Whatever. Maybe she found some Italian guy to fawn over her. Why would she need her family, then?