Look To The Stars

When I was a child I often went camping out at night, either with my Dad with the whole tent and camp fire thing or sometimes just in the back yard with sleeping bags. But in the great plains, on a clear summer night, you could see the stars quite brilliantly. I live near an ocean now, and such unobscured skies are rare here.

But in those days, if I lay on my back and looked up, it seemed as though the Earth was a giant spaceship and I was in its nose looking out at the stars as we zoomed through space. There were two effects of that imaginary concept:

1. I wondered where we were all going
2. I wondered how long it would take.

Obviously, we are going pretty much nowhere, and we will probably take an eternity to get there. I'm not expecting to be around when that happens.

This doesn't seem very encouraging. The traveling Earth is truly traveling, but we are all just on a big ride around a star that is on a bigger ride around a galaxy that is pretty much traveling out into the even bigger infinity of blackness. Perhaps, in many billions or trillions of years, we will reach some final destination, like whirling into the event horizon of some super giant black hole. Perhaps there is some place nice to go but our galaxy is going the wrong way.

I don't remember when I realized what the Milky Way really was. But it was the actual moment that I realized how vast the Universe must be. That obscure cloudy stream of stars that arched across the sky was our home galaxy, seen from the side, looking toward the center. I also learned about the speed of light, and how long it took for light to reach us from even the closest stars.

Every child starts out fresh. They do not know about these wonders. Each discovers them for themselves, and maybe feels like I felt those summer nights. Each will wonder where are we all going and when will we get there. But the real question that we all eventually wonder is WHY is there anything at all?

Signs of Time Machines

Time goes by, as can be witnessed by the new number that represents my age in years. For the passing moment I received a robot dog and a home blood pressure monitor. The dog acts very cute and makes strange noises, but does not make stains on the carpet.

I have received a few robots in my life, since that was the subject of my profession. I think I would buy every kind of robot there ever was if I had the money.

There is a problem in space physics that intrigues me. It is the "Spiral Galaxy Rotation" phenomenon, in which stars near the galactic center orbit the disc at approximately the same point on along a radius as those toward the edges. This runs counter to our experiences in the Solar System, where planets further from the Sun travel much slower than the planets closer in -- Mercury is closet to the Sun and orbits it every 88 days, where Pluto and planetoids most distant from the Sun take hundreds of years for a single orbit.

The solution is supposedly a ring of "dark matter" which contributes more gravitational influence on the stars further away from the galactic "bulge" than those within the "bulge". Other ideas include time distortion on the central stars due to the supermassive black hole, and chained gravitational drag propagating out along galactic spiral arms.

The "dark matter" theory seems most likely to me, because of the recent discovery that neutrinos have tiny but measurable "mass", and that since there are countless trillions of them passing through every cubic centimeter of space every second, it seems likely that some contribution to stellar gravitation might exist.

Green Beer Day

Today is my birthday, a day that many Americans and Irish celebrate by drinking green beer and getting tanked.

Beer of any color is rather unpleasant in my opinion. I don't know why I feel this way -- not liking beer is almost as socially unacceptable as eating puppies. But early in my life I took a few sips of beer from some of the grown-ups around and had about the same reaction as I might have while eating a June bug.

I forced myself to drink beer in some social settings, but after one or two beers I felt like a barrel full of soap. I had to stand in front of porcelain altars for long periods, letting it all drain out.

Other drinks, like vodka, tequila and some kinds of whiskey, I could handle. No soapy feelings. But, in the end, I turned out to be a natural born teetotaler who rarely ever drinks alcohol.

This makes it kind of hard to celebrate my birthday on St. Patrick's Day.

Robot Eyes

When I was still in junior high school in the 60's I developed a strong interest in robots. It was still over my head at that time, since I only understood basic electronics and nothing about computers. My father had lots of ham radio equipment, but even the smallest computers of that era were still the size of a semi-truck. My father also had many wood and metal working tools, which I put to use on lots of little projects.

One project was to build a robot. I could not find anything useful about robots in the library of our little Midwestern town, nor did any of my teachers know anything about them, so most everything I knew came from science fiction – Robbie the Robot, etcetera. Of course that meant I knew nothing whatsoever. All I had for a design model was my own body, really.

The first thing I designed was a robot arm, which was really nothing more than a rather complicated puppet arm. I built the arm from wood, metal hinges and rotary joints, and made a system of little pulleys and fishing line sinews which all led up through guide sleeves to a final “control box” where the sinews terminated with grommets, such as those at the end of guitar strings. Depending on how many sinews I pulled at once, the arm could bend at the various joints, or twist at the wrist, or grasp things with its little wooden fingers.

At that point, far even from being any kind of robot, I knew that controlling the thing was hopeless. I could not build any workable system of servos or actuators from the scraps of electronics and slot car parts that I'd collected, and my family was not wealthy enough to buy any other stuff. The problem was truly way over my head. Yet I felt that it was a kind of baroque artistic work, and many of my friends were impressed with the many moving parts I had fashioned. It also determined my career choices in the future.

Still, I gave up on it, and went through a period of tumultuous distractions, including the Vietnam war.

Many years later, after the first 8080 was developed, I developed a renewed interest in robots. Anyone knew that it would take a computer to control all the little moving parts of any useful robot. I was already writing software for IBM/360s and PDP/11s by then, but those were too clunky to be suitable for any robot. At least I knew the ins and outs of analog electronics, such as those for model airplanes and TV or radio. Yet the little robot arm that hung silent on my father's work bench for so many years would stay there forever. It was and always would be just a childish piece of art.

After a few more years, due to my software skills, I gained employment in an automation company that built industrial machines. Suddenly I felt like I was in my dream world, and I had access to all the microcomputers, servo controllers and other machine control electronics I could ever want. Still, due to the crude systems available at the time, it was not robots that I directly worked on, but the operating systems of the computers that controlled them. I was somewhat disappointed, but the job was still quite educational.

It was then that I realized, around 1980, that robots were not difficult to produce – they were difficult to program. Software was the real missing link. This especially became evident when I tried to write sensor analysis programs for real-time event recognition. It is one thing to input a few bits and determine some rational response, but quite another to input thousands of bits at one time and make heads or tails of all that stuff in real-time.

Vision was the main culprit. Hearing is also difficult (actually signal recognition) but there was just enough bandwidth available to handle such limited linear signals. Vision was hundreds of times harder, mainly because it added so many more dimensions. For every dimension that needs to be processed the problem is multiplied by the number of resolvable values in that dimension.

Any other kind of single sensor input was just a graph formed by Y amplitude values in X time samples. Monochrome vision added a Z dimension in. Limit sensors and various other state sensors (to keep parts from destroying themselves) accounted for several more dimensions, beyond any single letter symbols. Yet robots needed almost ALL their sensors to be analyzed at the same time. That meant there was a very, very large number of matrix elements to the problem.

So I was stumped. I read everything I could from MIT, Caltech and many other scientific institutions, and even tried to experiment myself to solve the problem of making sense from large numbers of sensors in real-time. If fish and insects can do it, surely I could figure it out. So how did a fish or insect brain work? That was when it became obvious that the so-called “neural networks” employed by living brains were needed in robots. Even the logic gates (like AND, OR) of computers were actually simplified versions of brain cells. The main difference was that real brain cells allowed far more inputs than logic gates for their decision making. Logic gates only had two inputs each but a brain cell might have thousands of inputs.

I already knew about the “perceptron” at that time, and had read many papers about elementary neural systems. But the machines of that time were too slow to really emulate any sizable “brain” of that type, and there were very few parallel processing computers in existence and they were far too expensive and clunky. It takes a very large number of connections between a very large number of neurons before any non-trivial functions resembling animal vision could result.

So it came apparent to me that robotics was pretty much impossible without being able to process vast amounts of sensory data in real-time -- just like a living brain. My little wooden puppet arm would still be almost as impossible to control as any humanoid robot envisioned in science fiction stories.

My little wooden arm was lost because my father eventually died. I have no idea whatever happened to it, or to any of those tools, since my stepmother inherited that stuff and she probably threw it all out as junk. I had moved several states away long before and my stepmother was virtually a stranger to me.

For the remainder of my career, and to this day, my work has concentrated on the “vision” problem of robotics. If a truly intelligent “machine eye” could be made, then that would solve 99% of the problem of robotics. All other robot problems, although always complex in themselves, would be nearly trivial in comparison, and could probably be solved in much the same general way as the vision problem.

Some people argue that machines can be simplified, and like airplanes compared to birds, do not need the same complexity as living things. That may be so, but even cruise missiles need a great deal of human intervention and are built in extremely complex factories. They do not build themselves, nor learn on their own how to operate their deadly mechanisms.

Most higher animals devote a large portion of their nervous systems to vision. Human vision uses color, brightness and motion attention, stereo differential distance, motion differential distance, and X,Y field mapping, all at the same time. That is a huge amount of processing and it doesn't even count the other senses or the effects of memory, linear reasoning, imagination and decision making. Yet even fish have most of those same abilities (but not all – they have very little reasoning ability ) plus they have sensors that humans do not have, such as for electric fields and hydraulic shock waves.

There are many clever designs for machine vision that younger, smarter people than myself have developed, many for the military but also for general security systems. Most people are familiar with face or fingerprint recognition, especially if they watch CSI-type TV programs. Carver Mead, who developed many early integrated circuits, also developed an artificial retina that had many features of real retinas, especially for real-time motion oriented vision.

There is probably not much useful work I can do as I get older, but whatever time I have left I will still devote to understanding the science of robotics. Since machines have already replaced most of my past occupational skills, I suspect that robots will eventually do away any need for me at all. That might not be such a good thing for me, personally, but might be good for other people in the future.

Matt Wuerker's Animation

Matt Wuerker's Animation
This is a great little cartoon flick. Too bad it is so realistic. I guess this gives away my political leanings as if my article on Bull wasn't enough.

The Old People's Homes

When I was a child I lived in the great plains -- the land of ice and snow. I lived a long way from school, but like the mail man's motto, weather was no reason to not walk to school.

One day at about age 10, on the way home from school, I walked through a part of town called “The Old People's Homes” which was replete with big elegant brick mansions, seemingly closed off from the rest of the world. The area was like a campus, with fine walkways and statues but where rarely anyone walked -- except me as a shortcut to my house.

It was a bitter cold day, and there were snowdrifts all around me as I trudged home. But I was so cold that I was almost freezing to death. So, I remembered what my dad told me to do if I got too cold, “Just find a deep snowdrift and plop down into it.” And that's what I did.

I was laying there deeply embedded in a drift thinking about how effective that turned out to be. Even though the snow was surrounding me, I felt much less cold than standing up in the cold wind. I was actually very comfortable. I was so deep in the snowdrift that I could only see snow and my parka fur to the side and some barren tree limbs up above me. The snow was still coming down and the flakes seemed to rush at me like little arrows from the gray sky.

I must have been there for maybe five minutes when suddenly I heard a commotion all around me. I was just about to try to get up from the snowdrift to see what was going on when I was completely surrounded by old people looking down at me and poking me with their canes. I was so shocked at first that I couldn't say anything. But I heard them talking, “Is he alive? Did he just move? Boy, get up!”

I struggled around to my elbows and got up from the snowdrift. “I'm OK,” I said, “I'm OK.” I brushed off the snow that stuck to my legs and arms.

Then the police came. Someone had called the police. Some old lady saw me collapse into the snowdrift and thought I'd just passed out or something. There I was, completely surrounded by old people and police, with them asking me if I was sick or hurt somehow. After the police finished asking me my name and why I was there, they finally left me alone.

Then I just ran away toward my house, nearly frightened to death from the experience, never to pass that way again.

Bull

There sure is a lot of bull coming out of the corporate world these days. I think Texas corporations have some of the most bull, but I've lived in many cowboy states and non-cowboy states, and I think bull is pretty much everywhere. The newspapers print a lot of it. Politicians always step in it and then put their foot in their mouths. The president pulls a lever and an entire dump truck full of it pours out on the audience and they all applaud.

What is bull? Religion, Aliens, Ghosts, Fairies, Chariots of the Gods, Dragons, Holy Men, Holy Women, Imperial America, Lite Beer, Golden Cities, Spanish Fly, Holy Grail. Drug companies. War on drugs. War on terror. War. All Bull.

More bull? Twelve Step Self-Help Methods, Faith Healers, Homeopathic Medicine, Low Fat Diets, Low Carb Diets, All Diets, Red Necks, NRA Members, KKK Lizards, KKK Wizards, NeoNazis, Beautiful Fat, Golden Fleece, Boxing, Figure Skating, Conscious Computers, Flying Cars, Automatic Truck Drivers. TV. Internet privacy. I'm sure everybody out there knows about even more bull. Let me know if I left something out.

What gives me the right to call something bull? Well, take "diets" for instance. There are plenty of diet books, diet doctors, dieters, diet drinks, diet TV dinners, diet candy, and so on. What happens on these diets is that people spend a lot of money on the books, the foods, the pills, whatever, and usually wind up not achieving the goal of the diet.

Much of this is due to the complexity of the body, as can be seen when eating less food causes the body to store more fat whenever possible. Other diets are for lowering cholesterol, preventing diseases, getting rid of acne, better athletic ability and so on. Even if the diets are successful at first, the body finds ways to get around them and the cholesterol, disease or acne returns.

Religion? Bull of the highest order. Some early religions even used the Bull as a symbol. If the only way to prove something true is to die, then my bull detector goes off.

Now it is always possible that I am also full of bull -- most people are. But when given the choice -- is something bull or not? -- choosing bull is usually the safest bet.

Auto Consciousness

Link to 1993 Paper on Automated Consciousness

There is probably no real danger of this happening, but it was certainly an interesting idea. In short, it offers up the idea that the Internet could already be conscious merely by interconnecting a large number of humans who unknowingly act as neurons in a higher order brain with a mind that humans may not be capable of understanding.

The Ruins of Earth

Today the sky is overcast, it might rain here in rain-starved southern California. I like the rain, it clears the skies and turns our rolling hills green.

Crows and blue jays argue brashly and seek to be the loudest birds around. I think the crows win, but the blue jays are certainly poor losers.

After the rain stops and the sun peeks out, perhaps there will be a rainbow to pour color from the gray blanket of clouds. Time will tell if there is anyone who cares enough to look up from the computer to see it.

There are so many people who disregard nature, who fight against it with all the vigor of warriors against an enemy. They cover the Earth with concrete and asphalt. They stab it with drills and scar it with mines in a frenzied race to destroy it. This solar system has no other home for us than Earth. They should not be ruining the only one we have.

Politics has come down to squabbles between silly, powerless wing nuts whose extremist views are impossible to mediate. Humans are mostly now under the thumbs of powerful crooks who would enslave everyone to avoid paying anyone. Employees are simply expenses to be minimized for profits to be maximized.

I'm not concerned about the political reasons for why we can't make the world clean again. There are always reasons to drill for more oil, to mine more coal, to cut down more trees, to deplete the oceans of fish, to cover more land with cookie cutter housing tracts. It doesn't matter what party you are in, we all live on the same planet. We are all guilty of its destruction to a small or large degree.

Science allowed humans to open their lives to infinite wonders. But it also allowed the creation of super weapons, super toxins, super prisons and super corporations. Everyone is connected by super highways of cars and trucks and information. Information can be used for good or for evil. You can be certain that it will be used for evil.

Religion still fights to turn off the light of science in order to seem like a brightness itself, but it cannot. Religion has merely become another kind of corporate machine, with employees to be minimized and profits to be maximized. The morals that graced the ideals of ancient religions have become a mockery. Once Pandora's Box was opened it became forever impossible to put all the demons back inside.

For my grandchildren's sake, I hope we can capture some of them, to keep some of the demons on leashes. I would not write this if I thought there was no hope at all.

Pills of the Devil

I take a lot of pills. Most of them are necessary to lower my blood pressure, remove salt, and generally keep me from becoming a dangerous psychopath. I hate pills. I hate the system that makes us pay through the nose for so many pills. Who designed the human body and brain with so many faults that they require so many pills?

But would I rather just die? If I stopped taking the pills would I just drop dead in the midst of strangers? Maybe not, but maybe I would. The probability bell curve says I might live another several years without the pills. But that same curve says I'll live maybe only another several years with the pills. So I guess I'll just keep on taking them. I'm afraid not to.

I'm not looking for any "sympathy for the devil." It's nobody's fault but my own what happens to me. Some people blame devils for their ills and some people blame gods for their ills. Personally, I don't think gods or devils give a hoot about our lives, nor do any other kind of spooks. Only our friends and families and ourselves might care.

But if you don't give a hoot about your own life then nobody else needs to waste time on you.

There are great mysteries about life:

• How did we all get here?
• Why are there atoms, stars and planets?
• Why are there fish or cats?
• How come there are humans who write in blogs?

I don't know, even though I know a great deal about physics, chemistry and biology. But every religious person who pretends to know anything about what God knows is most certainly false.

Dendiablo's Mental State

My lessons in life have led me to this - scribbling in futility, like Don Quixote, against the windmill dragons and other specters of our existence on this tiny moldy rock in the vastness of the Universe. This is not the first I've written to the public corkboards. From the flame war demolition of Usenet to the public hangings and burnings in effigy on the Web, I have made many scratching noises, huffs and puffs and gnashings of teeth. I'll try to remain unknown, for the most part, because of the nature of the modern world.

Of course, no one is required to listen nor care for more than a few microseconds. Few have the time. So I will cut this one short.