My So-Called Penis

Master language

One thing I’ve noticed in my language studies is that there are a lot of words in various languages that almost duplicate each other. For example, in english you can “eat” dinner, or you can “dine” on dinner, or you can “feast” on dinner. There are slightly different connotations to all three options, but in general they speak of they same thing.

I strikes me it would be worthwhile to create a basic language that has about 200 hundred words – enough to get a point across – and then teach that to everyone in the world. As such, people everywhere would be able to communicate on a very basic level. This is a language that would not have separate words for “eat”, for example. All tigers, house cats and lions would be referred to as “cat.” (Maybe you could apply an adjective like “big” to tell them apart.)

What kinds of words would be needed to communicate just the essentials? Here’s a small, partial list.

I
You
We
Eat
Go
Blowjob
Animal
Food
Light
Dark
Anus
Big
Small
Car
Happy
Sad
Inflatable sex doll

You can add your own words to the list!

Mining data nuggets

I’ve been admittedly lax in my german language studies as of late. Just yesterday I was musing that I’d like to find a way to make incremental progress in the language every day, even it was just five minutes worth of effort. I wondered whether there was some service that would send you a german word by email every day. And, of course, there is.

This business model, where people sign up for a daily email of information (plus an ad), has always interested me as a potential revenue stream. I like it because once you do the set up work – assemble the data and configure the email system – you just have to sit back and let the money role in. But this model only works with a particular kind of data – easily digestible, standalone data “nuggets.” A word a day is perfect because it takes little effort to “absorb” a word. Famous quotations – perhaps targeted to a particular religious of philosophical theme – are also good. So is “a joke a day.”.

I’ve been wondering if there’s some area I have knowledge in that I could convert into data nuggets delivered through email. Music theory? Not really… music knowledge doesn’t really break down to small chunks – to understand even basic ideas requires listening to examples, playing the ideas on an instrument etc, plus a bedrock of existing knowledge. Quotations? I don’t know many and it probably involves buying a database of some sort. Jokes? Perhaps I could do a “Dead Baby Joke” of the day? (My favorite: What’s the difference between a truck full of bowling balls and a truck full of dead babies? You can’t unload a truck full of bowling balls with a pitchfork.)

Wobot Writing

A while back I mused on the possibility of computers generating non-fiction content. I now learn from Wired magazine that there are already several companies engineering software that produces news articles. The article profiles a company called Narrative Science.

Narrative Science’s writing engine requires several steps. First, it must amass high-quality data. That’s why finance and sports are such natural subjects: Both involve the fluctuations of numbers—earnings per share, stock swings, ERAs, RBI….But how to turn that analysis into prose? The company has hired a team of “meta-writers,” trained journalists who have built a set of templates. They work with the engineers to coach the computers to identify various “angles” from the data. Who won the game? Was it a come-from-behind victory or a blowout? Did one player have a fantastic day at the plate? The algorithm considers context and information from other databases as well: Did a losing streak end?

Then comes the structure. Most news stories, particularly about subjects like sports or finance, hew to a pretty predictable formula, and so it’s a relatively simple matter for the meta-writers to create a framework for the articles. To construct sentences, the algorithms use vocabulary compiled by the meta-writers. (For baseball, the meta-writers seem to have relied heavily on famed early-20th-century sports columnist Ring Lardner. People are always whacking home runs, swiping bags, tallying runs, and stepping up to the dish.) The company calls its finished product “the narrative.”

This maps closely to my presumption of how such an idea would work. Take raw data, massage it into human readable text and you’ve got something fairly digestible. I could also foresee a process where a computer generates the basic text and a human finishes it, adding some literary flourish.

Old science fiction is filled with the trope about robots taking everyone’s jobs. I think people in the artistic fields have longed presumed they would be immune. I doubt it. They will fall, bloodied and fatigued on the battlefield, and the robots will have their way with their women. It is the future.

Of quails and chickens

I’m finishing up this tome “Music, Language, and the Brain.” It’s been one of the more difficult books I’ve ever read primarily because its excessive use of academic terminology, but worth plowing through because occasionally you stumble across really fascinating nuggets of science. For instance, at one point the author is describing an experiment involving baby chickens and quails. As eggs, the embryonic birds were housed in isolation so that they could not hear the sounds of their parents. When they were hatched, the chicks showed a preference for the sound of chickens, and quails showed a preference for the sound of quails. This would seem to indicate that we have a genetic, inborn preference for the “talk” of members of our species.

But here’s where it gets weird. Check this out…

A decade after this original study, Long performed an impressive experiment that probed the neural basis for this preference. Using surgical techniques pioneered by Balaban, the researchers cut small holes in the eggs and operated on the embryos, transplanting different portions of the developing neural tube of quails into chicks. They then sealed up the eggs and housed them in incubators isolated from adult bird sounds. After hatching, they tested these chimera birds for their perceptual preferences using the methods of Park and Balaban. They found that when the transplant was in a specific region of the developing midbrain, the chimeras showed a preference for the quail maternal call.

It seems insane that they can even perform such surgeries, and even crazier that it actually worked: the chunk of brain responsible for responding to quail sounds happily set up shop in the chicken brain.

One must wonder if these mutant birds grew to gigantic proportions and developed an unceasing hunger for human flesh. The book doesn’t mention this, but that would be somewhat off-topic.

Robot prostitutes go mainstream

Many of you who read my writings know that I’ve had long felt the pinnacle of human technological advancement would be the creation of robot prostitutes. I have written countless paragraphs on the subject, analyzing how this development could affect society and culture at large.

I’m a little disturbed to report that, ummm, you know, serious people, are also thinking about the topic. Here’s an article entitled “How would robotic prostitutes change the sex tourism industry?”

Machines have already changed the face of manufacturing industries, but what happens when prostitutes find themselves replaced by robots? Will machines populate our brothels instead of flesh and blood people? Will the social stigma of paying for sex fade? And how will the availability of robotic sex partners impact countries whose economies depend, in part, on sex tourism?

In their paper “Robots, men and sex tourism,” which appears in the current issue of the journal Futures, Ian Yeoman and Michelle Mars of the University of Wellington’s Victoria Management School explore how robotic prostitutes could provide a solution to many of the problems associated with the sex trade, namely human trafficking and the spread of sexually transmitting infections.

There are some interesting considerations. Consider…

They also wonder whether sexual mores might be different where robotic prostitutes are concerned. For example, would spouses view sex with a robotic partner as cheating, or as a form of masturbation akin to using a vibrator?

Coincidentally I once had a girlfriend whom had a vibrator that I affectionately named “Mr. Robotman.” I even had a song for him, sung to the tune of “Mr. Sandman”:

Mr. Robotman
Bring me a robot
Make him the greatest robot
I’ve ever robotted

But that’s neither here nor there. I think we can all agree sex with robots would be HOT!!!

“That’s it baby! You’re rocking my world!”

I am pleased the human carbon unit is enjoying the sensory perceptions being provided by SxBot-2777.

“Yeah, tell me how much you like it!”

As a robot unit I am incapable of your human notions of emotion but I am sure a female of your species would find your techniques quite pleasing.

“Yeah… talk dirty you little whore!”

Internet news

This quote from a New Yorker article about Paul Dacre, the editor of british tabloid The Daily Mail, caught my attention.

“A lot of people say that the Internet is the future for newspapers,” he declared in 1999. “Well, I say to that: bullshit.com.”

Frankly, I think time has proved him wrong but it’s admirable for its cockiness.

If it quacks like a robot duck…

This article caught my eye. History’s 10 Most Influential Robots

They apply a somewhat loose definition of the term “robot.” But check this out:

1738: The Duck
French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson created a number of autonomous robots in his time, but The Duck is one of his more revered works.

The mechanical duck had over 400 different parts, which isn’t too surprising considering what it could do. It could flap its wings, and it could eat, digest, and subsequently defecate. That’s a pretty impressive robot!

No mention of the coming robot apocalypse however.

The best headphones… ever

A while back, I bought a pair of these super expensive BOSE headphones. (I remember that when I bought them the young, cute salesgirl was pretty flirty, but it’s always hard to tell as to whether that’s just because you’re spending $100 on a pair of headphones.) It seemed like an insane amount to pay for headphones, but the sound quality of these things is remarkable. Unfortunately, about a year in, I had lost both earbuds and that ended up damaging the headphones to the point of being nonfunctional. I could hardly believe I was doing it, but I ponied Up another hundred dollars (this time from a new, different cute flirty salesgirl.) And, again, I was enjoying the incredibly high audio quality.

Then, something else went wrong with the headphones — I can’t remember what, but I know it was my fault — and I bought yet a third pair. It’s insane, and I’ve never had this kind of brand loyalty, but these things really sound good.

What’s interesting is that I notice when I see other people wearing the BOSE headphones while I’m wearing mine, we share a certain camaraderie. I went on a hike yesterday and, while listening to some tunes, I passed a guy with the definitive zebra stripe pattern wire hanging out of his ears. We looked at each other like, “yeah, you’re cool.”

It reminds me of an experience I had about a year ago while waiting for the trolley late one night. I had my earbuds in and strolled past a twentysomething dude sitting on a bench wearing his headphones. We nonverbally demonstrated our approval. Then another guy walked up, also wearing BOSEs, and we all smiled inwardly. Then some total goofball appeared on the platform wearing these absurd oversized purple headphones. Me and the other two guys knew what we had to do. I wrestled free a metal slat from a nearby fence; one of the other dudes grabbed a trashcan lid; the third guy wrapped his wallet chain around his fist. We approached this new interloper. He was like, “Hey fellas… sure hope that trolley gets here soon, huh? I’d really hate to …URF!” I’m not kidding when I say we beat that fucking shit out of that non-BOSE headphones wearing twerp.

BUY BOSE HEADPHONES MOTHERFUCKERS!!!

Cyborg man can hear colors!

We’ve all heard of synesthesiacs – people who’s senses are cross wired so that they can, for example, see sounds or hear colors. This guy, a color blind artist, has become a kind of cyborg synesthesiac using a device that allows him to hear colors.

When you walk into the produce section of a supermarket, you see yellow bananas, red peppers, green spinach. For Neil Harbisson, though, it’s all shades of gray.
He’s color-blind.
Harbisson, who’s half-Irish and half-Spanish, is also an artist. And with the help of a high-tech headset, he can “hear” color. The headset is essentially a webcam that hangs over his forehead like a third eye — it’s called an eyeborg. It was built for him by a British technology expert, Adam Montandon.
The camera reads color frequencies, and then sends the frequencies to a tiny chip that translates them into sound. The sound is then pulsed directly into his skull, via a headband that keeps the whole thing snug on his head.

This reminds me of the woman who had magnets implanted in her fingertips so that she could feel the force of magnetism. Clearly we’re seeing the rise of a class of humans who have additional sensory powers. I predict they will become our masters and we will achieve rapturous ecstasy if they allow us to be in their presence even only for mere minutes.

For how long can we stave off our destruction?

I’ve been having an email conversation with occasional acid logic contributor Pete Moss about a topic I frequently address here: the digitization of art, music and writing and how the resulting devaluation of these art forms is going to lead to the destruction of all humanity. As Pete has pointed out, there has been, in response to this cheapening of these art forms, a small revival of the Arts and Crafts movement, an aesthetic philosophy of the 1800s that responding to the mass production of art of that era. As the wikipedia article states:

Arts and Crafts was an international design movement that flourished between 1860 and 1910… It was largely a reaction against the impoverished state of the decorative arts at the time and the conditions in which they were produced.[4] It stood for traditional craftsmanship using simple forms and often applied medieval, romantic or folk styles of decoration. It advocated economic and social reform and has been said to be essentially anti-industrial.[4][5]

So maybe we’ll see something of a return to handmade arts across various forms – music, film etc. But in the long run I see no stopping the ultimate destruction of humanity.