brief update

A change of plans: instead of going to see Dawkins in SF, I'm going with geheimnisnacht and another physics grad here to see him in Menlo Park the night before. I'm mailing my ticket to memepr0gramme who lives in Berkeley now which is a lot closer to SF.

The machine learning class got more interesting for a few lectures, although I had to miss one of the best, and now I think it's headed back into not-so-great stuff again. I'll have to miss another one on Wednesday to proctor a physics midterm. I do feel like I've picked up a few useful insights from sitting in on it. Mainly, I wanted to know what level of sophistication machine learning algorithms are at currently. And the answer is, it's still pretty simplistic. Granted, the current "state of the art" is always a bit beyond what they're teaching in graduate classes, but you can usually get a pretty good idea of where a field is at by seeing what sorts of things they're telling their graduate students. Bayes nets I see as a decent starting point, but there's so much more that can and should be done. It's actually kind of exciting, because I feel that AI is a field that's ripe for explosion now. Hardware capabilities are just about catching up with the human brain, it's just a matter of building the right software tools, a lot of which haven't been built yet. But the kinds of things I think need to be done are exactly the kinds of things Ben Goertzel and others at Novamente are playing around with. I think I've decided I like their approach the more I think about it.

I don't talk about our futurist club much, but I probably should as it's pretty fun and interesting, as well as good advertising :) Our next Future Salon is this Sunday, 7pm at Borders bookstore downtown Santa Cruz.
Topic: ( The End of Cyberspace )

with guest speaker Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, research director at the Institute for the Future. I randomly stumbled upon a talk Alex Pang was giving a couple months ago, and invited him to speak at one of our salons. Since then, everything slowly fell into place and now we're all set for this Sunday, just made the flyers last night (although I don't have one online yet to link to). Upcoming speakers are Bruce Damer (the friendly guy who introduced me to Robert Anton Wilson) in November, on the prospects of life evolving out of human-designed technology, and Miguel Aznar (the other moderator besides myself) who is the director of education for the Foresight Nanotech Institute and the author of Technology Challenged, speaking on technological literacy in December. It's been a long time since I've heard from the Liftport group (space elevator company) so I should probably send them an email soon and see what's up.

a sad chain of events

Okay, I rarely if ever post about political stuff, and I rarely read the news, but I just happened to read an article on CNN, and it prompted a question in my mind...

1. Hitler tries to take over the world, starts killing Jews left and right.
2. US intervenes, kicks Hitler's ass, and boots the Palestinians out of Palestine to make room for persecuted Jews.
3. Islamic fundamentalists get mad, brood in anger for half a century, and crash a couple airplanes into some US buildings.
4. Madman takes over US Presidency, interprets this as an act of war, and decides to bomb random countries to get even.
5. US troops flood into Iraq, arrest dictator, and celebrate by getting drunk and raping a 14 year old girl, before burning the bodies of her and her family with kerosene.

Question: WHERE DID WE GO WRONG HERE? I know that at some point in this absurd chain of events, someone must have been able to do something that could have resulted in averting this chain of tragic outcomes. Innocent people being killed at every step of the way, for no good reason. Was there no way for an intelligent person to intervene at some point and say "look, this is all going to end badly. Stop, please!" Are we as a species just doomed to keep killing each other? How many more events are going to be triggered after this one? Will the Iraqis ever forgive us now? How many more terrorists get recruited after the murder of each innocent Muslim?

http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/10/18/soldiers.court/index.html
"According to statements given at the hearing, the soldiers were drinking whiskey, playing cards and hitting golf balls when Green brought up the idea of going to a house near the checkpoint where they were stationed, to rape the girl."
...
"One of the soldiers, 23-year-old Army Spec. James P. Barker, told an Army criminal investigator that after the killings he poured kerosene on the girl's bullet-ridden body, according to testimony in August at a military hearing. The girl's father, mother and five-year-old sister were also killed, according to military officials."