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Religious nutter Turing Test

13 June 2008 / / 8 Comments

The Turing Test is a classic in AI. On one side of the screen is you, and on the other side there’s either a human typing to you, or a computer generating text to you. A computer system passes the Turing Test if you can’t tell the difference between the computer and a human.

But when the human is a religious ranter, it tends to lower the bar a bit.

So here’s your test. One of the following text blocks is a bit of an email I got today from ‘Günter’, a poor soul trapped in two false beliefs: that supernatural beings exist, and that he can write comprehensible English.

The other block of text was made with a simple Markov chain trained on word trigrams from Günter’s email.

Sample number one:

Every thing, Love is a ground-need, without Love no Feelings are working, no human can find anymore satisfaction no matter what he trays to do it, the highest law of God, and no grace. Not even when somebody used your Authority-shyness like always, it is exactly the same. With Love the Apocalypse is running for ten years. {Glasshouse-effect? Global warming ?}.You can easy scientific prove, it is up to you. Jesus said <I came on earth to bring the Love and only where the Love and how to do Love, try it and you have to feel it. John says <even when you are doing what I say {that only is FAITH} and not only when you know about it>.Jesus said: sacrifice your self <you have to like them in any way, only give what you have<Logo>!

Number two:

That’s why Jesus said the End is near. The human where believing that Love is: cooking a meal; mending socks; squeeze a lemon; give Money, Tender; Fondness or even Sexuality. They filling up whole Libraries with books about Love, only in the explanation of the Old Testament {Torah; Koran; Kamathutra ;} or Jesus was never one interested. Jesus tried to teach Love and how to do it, the highest law of God. Out of the old scriptures he explained; proofing and showed in life what he is talking about. God says in the in the Old Testament; Torah; Koran; Kamathutra; <I m the Love and only the Love and only where the Love is can I be.> don’t make a picture or allegory {don’t compare me with nothing or nobody} of me. Never!!

Well, humans, which is the person, and which is the computer?

Sarcasm experiment

9 June 2008 / / 1 Comment

Sarcasm’s a funny thing. You say the opposite of what you mean, but somehow the other person uses their knowledge of the situation and the ordinary meaning of your words to unwind the utterance and decode your intention.

A new study gives some insight into what’s happening brain-wise. Usually it’s the left hemisphere that handles language, but apparently when part of the right hemisphere is knocked out, people become unable to pick up on the paralinguistic cues (like intonational contour) that signal an indirect speech act like sarcasm.

Although people with mild Alzheimer’s disease perceived the sarcasm as well as anyone, it went over the heads of many of those with semantic dementia, a progressive brain disease in which people forget words and their meanings.

“You would think that because they lose language, they would pay close attention to the paralinguistic elements of the communication,” Dr. Rankin said.

To her surprise, though, the magnetic resonance scans revealed that the part of the brain lost among those who failed to perceive sarcasm was not in the left hemisphere of the brain, which specializes in language and social interactions, but in a part of the right hemisphere previously identified as important only to detecting contextual background changes in visual tests.

Context, eh? Can’t understand sarcasm without that.

I’m serious.

Happy Nerdmas!

9 June 2008 / / 3 Comments

Yes, I did turn 15,000 days old on Sunday. And I know because of the Birthday Calculator. To celebrate the event, I wrote a lot of maudlin things that you’d never want to read, and then to spare you the agony, I deleted them.

I’ll just say that this next 15,000 days (if I get them all) are going to be the best. Found true love? Check! Had two charming sons? Check. Thesis finished? Almost check! (Check minus. But soon.) I figure even if I died today, I still got a lot more life than most people in history ever did.

I feel like I now have a grip on this ‘living’ thing. As an adolescent, I used to feel angry or morose a lot, like I suppose people do. Thank goodness that phase passed. Now I feel more comfortable, more like me. I feel pretty good where I am, and ready for the rest of my life.

I really like being alive.

Obama thread

5 June 2008 / / 6 Comments

I am proud to be an American this day.

The Democratic nominee for president is by all appearances an intelligent and capable person who seems able to deal with the opposition in a forthright manner.

And the fact that he’s African-American is tremendously important to me as a symbol of how things have changed.

If Hillary had been the candidate, I would have been equally proud. I’m glad it’s not Hillary though.

Now. To the election. There’s a long way before November, but some wildly optimistic and perhaps inaccurate predictions are in order.

I predict that Obama will beat McCain in a landslide on the order of Reagan/Mondale. Junior has damaged the brand irreparably, and McCain’s cranky old man schtick will play unfavourably against Obama’s charisma and knowledge.

I say Obama gets 521 electoral votes to McCain’s 17. (The seventeen votes will come from Utah, Oklahoma, and Nebraska.)

Obama will get 52% of the popular vote, to McCain’s 42%.

Your predictions for posterity in comments. Both the electoral votes and the popular vote, if you please. Or just wax rhapsodic about your favourite candidate.

The Garfield randomiser

4 June 2008 / / 5 Comments

When Jim Davis retires, they’ll still be able to make Garfield strips with the Garfield Randomiser. But why wait until then? Here are some I created yesterday.


Jon gets stroppy, and Garfield puts him back in his place. Way to go.


Garfield’s been spraying in the spare room, and he’s not sorry.


They can do this all day.

State powerless to protect children from abuse by sex cult operated by parents

2 June 2008 / / 3 Comments

Is how this headline should read.

How to improve T9

2 June 2008 / / 10 Comments

I recently won the contest for ‘Last Person on Earth to Get a Mobile Phone’. First prize was a mobile phone. I like it. It was worth outlasting that guy from the Amazon. He got a toaster, and nowhere to plug it in. Ha.

My phone uses T9, the predictive text algorithm. It was invented in the early 90’s, and don’t you think we would have come up with some improvements in language technology since then? But no, we’re still stuck with it, and every day I text Ms Perfect to tell her that I’ll be ‘good room’ instead of ‘home soon’. ‘Good’ and ‘home’ are textonyms, you probably know, both keyed as 4663. I can change from one to the other by hitting zero, but it irritates of.

Irritates ‘me’, sorry.

I’ve seen very little out there on improving the T9 algorithm, so here are my suggestions.

  • At the very least, correct gibberish words. Even a relevant word like ‘texting’ comes out as ‘textiog’ on my Samsung mobile.

  • Auto completion. When I type a long word like ‘predictive’ or ‘abracadabra’, it should have a way to complete the word for me. If there is one, someone let me know.

  • Long-term memory on training. T9 does try to adapt to your usage. I’ve noticed that if I type the same textonym over and over, changing it to another variant each time, it’ll select the variant automatically on the fourth time. But only for that message. Next message you send, it forgets all your training. What is the point?

  • And this is the big one: Word bigram modelling. Many textonyms could be disambiguated simply by looking at one or two previous words. For example, ‘good’ and ‘home’ are both 4663, but the previous words are very often different. If the previous word is ‘coming’, choose ‘home’. If ‘is’, ‘was’, or an adverb like ‘very’, choose ‘good’. It’s very simple to check this. When I compared ‘home’ and ‘good’ in the Brown Corpus, there were no duplicates in the top 100 lists of words previous. Same with ‘am’ and ‘an’, another pair of textonyms. Which tells me that just looking at the previous word would be enough to disambiguate in the majority of cases. And that means we can stop hitting zero so many times.

Gay marriage and the slippery slope

31 May 2008 / / 1 Comment

My conservative religious family thinks I’m nuts for my stand on gay marriage: I think it’s fine. Wait, that sounded normal. At least, normal to an increasing number of people. There’s been nearly four years of gay marriage already, California just became the latest state to allow it, and what with society not collapsing, fire not raining down from heaven, and more pressing problems to deal with, it seems the issue just isn’t getting the traction it used to get, as detailed in this article in the Prospect.

In 2004, there were ballot initiatives outlawing gay marriage in 11 states. All succeeded easily. In 2006, there were eight more. But this time, one of them –Arizona’s — actually failed (despite John McCain’s efforts). There is still time for initiatives to be put on the 2008 ballot, but they will likely have a much more difficult time.

With each passing year, straight Americans become more and more comfortable with gay Americans. This doesn’t mean their opinions on marriage are going to be transformed overnight, but it does mean that they will be less susceptible to scare tactics.

I really hope this means we’re seeing the end of the Culture Wars. What an awful time.

My Dad, for his part, used to shake his head when it came to acceptance of Teh Ghey. He loved to quote this poem from Pope:

Vice is a monster so frightful mien, As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

It made sense — we do get more used to things. Isn’t that the way it goes? First it’s allowing them to live. Next, they’re on TV, and soon you might actually know one. Terrible.

But I never thought to ask him: why does it only apply to acceptance of gay people? Why not the reverse? I could just as well say that hatred against gay people could gradually become accepted. First you deny them marriage rights, then the right to own property, and before you know it, it’ll be okay to kill them (as is the case in Saudi Arabia). Why not use this argument against itself? A slope can be slippery both ways.

I recently noticed this truly awful story from India:

Two married women, who allegedly shared a lesbian relationship, committed suicide by setting themselves ablaze after their families tried to separate them. The police recovered the charred bodies of the women, who died hugging each other, from the residence of one of the women at Sathangadu, near Thiruvotriyur, on Saturday.

It’s hard for me to understand what made them take such an awful end to their lives. But I guess I am a straight guy in a tolerant country.

That’s why I take the stand that I do. I want to work toward a world where this kind of treatment of people is not okay. Society has a lot to make up for.

Religion influenced, killed Bob Marley

26 May 2008 / / 9 Comments

Seventeen years ago this month, Bob Marley died. Everyone knows Bob Marley. A copy of “Legend” is now issued to every infant in the world at birth.

He died of cancer. His Wikipedia page says it started from a football injury in his big toe. Toe cancer. Usually treatable. You don’t want to lose a toe, but if it saves your life, you have the thing off.

But Marley refused to amputate because of the Rastafarian belief that the body must be “whole”. And so the cancer spread to his brain and the rest of his body, and killed him. A religious belief robbed the world of one of its great musical artists.

Maybe it’s not possible to separate Marley’s music from the religious ideas that fired it. I’m not sure, though. Aren’t the songs without the religious lyrics great too? Marijuana influenced Marley’s music, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a great thing.

Marley’s action would probably impress a lot of people. Wow, he really followed his religion, even though it cost him his life, etc. But I just think it’s really sad. If he’d had a different religion, he could have had it taken care of, and been around a lot longer. What ended his life was an idea that was almost certainly false, and that seems wrong.

Why it’s a bad idea to get help from supernatural beings when making decisions.

25 May 2008 / / 10 Comments

Here are two beliefs that are widely held by Latter-day Saints (and I’m guessing more than a few Christians):

1. We can make decisions by praying and getting ‘impressions’ or ‘revelations’ about what to do.

2. Satan tries to trick us into thinking that good is evil, and evil good.

So when you get a personal revelation that something’s good, it could be actually good (in which case you should do it), or it could be Satan telling you it’s good (and you shouldn’t). How can you tell the difference? What if Satan is pulling the ol’ reverse psychology and making you think it’s bad so you won’t do it, but it’s actually good? Or perhaps a triple reverse whammy? How about when something’s difficult or you hit a snag in your plan? Are you facing opposition from Satan and you should keep going, or is it the Lord giving you a signal that you should stop?

It’s a tough question, so I’ll make it multiple choice.

a) I know because of the feelings of the Spirit.

And of course, your feelings can never be wrong. Feelings of the Spirit confer infallibility upon the feeler. Try again.

b) I know because it’s in line with the scriptures.

Your interpretation of the scriptures, a contradictory hodgepodge of fables. You can find anything and its opposite there. Next!

c) If you don’t know the difference, you must have sinned, and are in the grip of the Evil One. Try getting an exorcism.

Tried it. Still possessed, but I’m learning to live with it. Got anything else?

d) It’s silly to do things based on the supposed desires of a hypothetical being.

Hmm. Answer d’s looking good.

The problem here is the opacity of the metaphysical. If I have two physical explanations for something, it’s possible to determine which is right experimentally. But if there are two metaphysical explanations for something (is it Jehovah or Zeus?), then there’s no way to determine which explanation is better. Not that this stops people from trying. They examine feelings, events, and unusual happenings in order to scry the divine will. But it’s superstition and it doesn’t work.

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