Human v1.1b

I just watched Gregory Stock give a talk about genetic engineering over at TED Talks, and I could help remarking that he seems to be pretty old fashioned for someone in the biotech industry. No presentation slides, just plain old speech and a paper notebook.

He’s a good talker though — he kneads the audience nicely and references quotes that don’t even have to be relevant to sound pretty deep (some Shakespeare in this case) — but he doesn’t really make any good points. All he says is “it’s inevitable, therefore we should do it”. Equivalently, “let’s not kid ourselves, we’re going to destroy this planet anyways, so don’t bother trying to stop it”. Well, no, sorry Mr. Stock but nothing is inevitable, nothing is written. No, not even choosing our babies through a Sims 3-like interface. But I suppose as a biotech entrepreneur you’ve got the right to be a little biased about this.

I’m surprised he didn’t mention is what I think is actually an extremely good argument for embracing this technology with open arms: there hasn’t been a major release of the human genome for a good 200,000 years. That makes us the biological equivalent of, I dunno, Internet Explorer 2. And to think that there’s all this fuss about IE 6 nowadays! My point is that we humans weren’t built for this new world, and that’s why I think everything is so royally fucked up. Honestly, imagine trying to browse the modern internet on an ancient browser that may or may not have been a piece of shit to begin with.

Why is everybody so fat? Because we weren’t built with the capability to limit our sugar and fat intakes. While we went through our major stages of evolution, we could barely find enough calories to survive, and anything extra was more than welcome. And nowadays? You can get off your ass, right now, and go to the nearest corner store to buy a three pound bag of white sugar for about $2. Then you can sit there and eat the whole damn thing, there just isn’t anything to stop you from doing it.

What about racism? Unfortunately, interacting with people who look different than you didn’t make it into Human 1.0. Indifference to climate change? We only used to have to deal with things on a very local level. Back then, it made sense for everyone to do what was best for themselves, or their family, or at most their tribe. But now, the actions of powerful individuals can contribute to the destruction of our entire world, something we were never really built to understand. The thought of cavemen worrying about something on such a large scale is positively ridiculous. And, that’s the problem — we’re still cavemen. Cavemen living on a globalized and industrialized earth.

So the way I see it, there’s only so much we can accomplish with these bodies and minds from another age. Maybe we have to change ourselves first, and then we can start work on the world? Here we are, cavemen, trying to be civilized together, when all we were really meant to do was club each other over the head. Sure, there are dangers, but as long as we know what we’re doing, we don’t rush things, we do it right, and for the right reasons, couldn’t changing our genetic makeup be the only answer to human kind’s biggest problems?

Posted in Science & Technology
Tags: biotech, climate change, genetic engineering, gregory stock, human, ie, racism, TED

Translating “b is a power of 2″ into TNT

TNT does not, as one unfamiliar with Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach might assume, refer to the highly explosive substance trinitrotoluene. In this case, TNT stands for Typographical Number Theory, a formal system created by Hofstadter in order to illustrate many different concepts to his readers.

Not having had any previous knowledge of number theory nor of formal systems, I am most definitely a novice when it comes to the type of mathematical problems found in the book. So far, however, I have been able to solve each of the presented puzzles, albeit with some difficulty. The one which I have just come across has the most difficult thus far, and after solving it I found myself compelled to share my success with the rest of the world.

In chapter VIII, entitled Typographical Number Theory, Hofstadter presents a few statements (above), asking the reader to translate them into his simple (yet somewhat difficult to understand) system of variables and logic, TNT. He also teases with an “almost impossible” puzzle, “b is a power of 10″, saying even the most experienced of mathematicians would need hours and hours to figure it out. The first four were easy, and my solutions to them are as follows.

1. ∀a: a = SSSS0 [For all a, a is equal to four.]
2. ~∃a: a = (a⋅a) [There does not exist a such that a is equal to a times a.]
3. ∀a:∀b: <~a = b ⊂ ~Sa = Sb> [For all a and for all b, if a is not equal to b then the successor of a is not equal to the successor of b.]
4. <S0 = 0 ⊂ ∀a:~∃b: a = (SS0⋅b)> [If one is equal to zero, then for all a there does not exist b such that a is equal to two times b.]

Number five, the subject and this post and the cause of all my troubles during the last hour or so, was not quite so easy. I expect for that anyone with any previous experience with similar systems it would not have presented such a challenge, but for such an inexperienced person as myself it was quite difficult indeed.

First, I tried prying it apart mathematically, rewriting it ways like b = 2ⁿ or b = 2₁ × 2₂ × 2₃ … × 2_n, etc. This didn’t help me at all, because my math skills aren’t that strong and there was nowhere I could take it from there. So I looked at its possible English translations next.

It seemed to me that there were a few simple things that can be done in TNT with relative ease, but as you move up the line of complexity it becomes exponentially harder to express something in such a simple language. I knew for sure I could express a few basic things in TNT, such as “a is a factor of b” or “if something then something else”.

I eventually figured that if all factors of b are multiples of two then b is most certainly a power of two. This is because this power’s only prime factor would be two, with a multiplicity of the given exponent. Think about it, its powers will have no other factors than itself and other powers of 2. You can only divide 32 by 16, 8, 4, and 2. Hence, the stubborn statement can be written in English as “all factors of b are multiples of 2″. In TNT, that would be the following.

5. ∀a: <∃c: (SSa⋅c) = b ⊂ ∃d: (SS0⋅d) = SSa> [For all a > 1, if there exists c such that a times c is equal to b, then there exists d such that d times 2 is equal to a.]

Edit: Because this confused people, I’d like to clear a few things up. Basically, all this says is the following. For all a, if a is a factor of b then it is also a multiple of 2. If this statement is true for each and every single value of a, then b is a power of two. If there are any exceptions, such as b = 12 and a = 3, then b is not a power of 2. If there is one true case, such as b = 12 and a = 4, then it does not necessarily mean that b is a power of 2.

Edit #2: The difference is that every case of a is necessary for b to be a power of 2, but not sufficient. The overall statement, however, with the “for all a” included, is both necessary AND sufficient.

And there we go. I’m not quite sure whether this is too dissimilar to be considered a translation, but I do believe that the set of all powers of two is equal to the set of numbers for which this TNT statement comes out true. At first I thought the exact same technique would work for powers of 10 just as well. But how could it be that easy? Of course, it wasn’t. I was actually quite bewildered, until I realized my error.

Obviously, this translation is only valid when b is a power of a prime number. If it is a power of a composite number, like 10 in the final challenge, then it will have many factors that do not comply with the above theorem of TNT. For example, 100 has factors 2, 5, 20, and 50 (as well as 10), where both 2 and 5 are not divisible by 10. On the other hand, 32 is only divisible by 16, 8, 4, and 2; all divisible by 2.

Since I’m dealing with things I don’t know much about here, I probably screwed up pretty badly at least once. Please let me know if I’m an idiot and this is totally wrong. Thanks! Anyways, back to being totally bewildered and awed by GEB and its amazingness.

Posted in Math
Tags: 10, 2, Douglas Hofstadter, GEB, Gödel Escher Bach, logic, Math, number theory, power, prime, puzzle, theorem, TNT

xkcd.com: GeoCities edition

The gradually less amazing xkcd.com has been “redesigned” in order to commemorate the shutting down of Yahoo’s free webhosting, GeoCities. It’s so perfectly ugly, even the HTML tags in the raw source are all capitalized! Genius. As for GeoCities, so long, farewell, and good riddance.

Posted in Webcomics
Tags: geocities, html, xkcd, yahoo

greim – Secret Shame

Just a great piece of independent electronic music I find rather addictive, enjoy. More at drpeterjones.com.

Posted in Music, YouTube
Tags: electronic, greim, independant, Music, secret shame, video, YouTube

Added Disqus, ShareThis, and Google Adsense

I have added three new features to the blog; the Disqus comments system , the ShareThis social media button, and Google AdSense advertisements.

Disqus because it looks awesome and has a trillion more features than regular old WordPress comments, like signing in through Twitter/Facebook/OpenID, great comment approval and flagging, and Gravatar icons. At first the admin page was giving me a blank grey screen, but I looked at my error logs and it turned out that for some reason disqus.php couldn’t find the admin-header.php file when it require()’d it. I just edited the plugin and replaced line 370 with the actual path to the file on my server.

ShareThis was added because Reddit is the best and I want to be a part of it. And I’m an internet whore and I want to be paid attention to. I might eventually write my own version of this, because it’s a bit clunky and not customizable enough.

I added the AdSense block just as an experiment, I don’t actually plan on monetizing anything. I really just want to see how the system works and all that. It looks like I’ve already made about $0.47!

Posted in Meta
Tags: AdSense, advertisements, Disqus, facebook, Google, Gravatar, OpenID, PHP, Reddit, ShareThis, Twitter

Fishes is a perfectly valid word

Forget racism or sexism, wordism is the worst. Poor “fishes” is constantly ridiculed and excluded from things just because of its special status as a noun. It has gotten to the point where it can’t even get a job nowadays because users of the English language have such strong prejudices about words that are just a little bit strange to the ear.

In all seriousness, one of the two words “fishes” and “wordism” is made up, and the other is not. If you asked people, I would say most of them would single out “fishes” as the impostor. And most of them they would be wrong. To be perfectly clear, “fishes” is a word . However, it doesn’t mean exactly what you’d expect. Hell is only slightly cooler than usual, and the plural of “fish” is still “fish”. However, in case you would like to specify that the particular group of fish you are talking about consists of more than one species, you may use the word “fishes” instead. The examples on the Wikipedia entry do a good job of explaining the difference.

The North Atlantic stock of Gadus morhua is estimated to contain several million fish.

My aquarium contains three different fishes: guppies, platies, and swordtails.

The former is a regular old plural; there is more than one fish. The latter is a metaplural, if you will, and its plural-ness refers to the types of fish, not the fish themselves. Another metaplural that is in much more common usage is “peoples”. This word refers to different types (ethnicity, race, etc.) of people, a word that, like “fish”, is already plural. My favourite example is “The Peoples of Middle-earth”.

Update: This might be easy to understand, but harder to believe. Perhaps the Australian Museum has more credibility that an unknown blog and a piece of user-generated content.

Posted in Languge
Tags: english, fish, fishes, language, metaplural, peoples, plural, word, wordism

Now in Helvetica Neue Light

Articles and links in the sidebar have been upgraded to my official favourite font, Helvetica Neue Light. It’s pretty easy to do, but hard to figure out on your own. After searching for a while and experimenting on my own, I came up with the following CSS.

font-family: "HelveticaNeue-Light", "Helvetica Neue Light", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
font-weight: 300;


Some browsers (IE + the older ones) use fonts based on their family name and their style, that is “Helvetica Neue Light”. Others use the PostScript name, under the Adobe spec, e.g. “HelveticaNeue-Light”. Others still, such as the latest versions of Safari, Firefox, and Chrome, conform to the W3C specification when it comes to fonts and their styles, and take only the Family Name. The W3C dictates that you must use other CSS directives to get “light” or “bold” fonts. In this case the “Helvetica Neue”, along with the “font-weight: 300;”, will display Helvetica Neue Light to the user.

Arial is included for the sake of the poor Windows users out there, who have to use the font Microsoft put on their computer because they were to cheap to pay for Helvetica, despite it being one of the oldest and most widely used fonts in the world. As any typography nerd would know, Arial was a total rip off of Helvetica and should never be used.

There you have it. Mac and Linux (certain distros only) users get to look at Helvetica Neue Light, while Windows users still get crappy old Arial.

Posted in Meta, Web
Tags: Adobe, arial, bold, Chrome, css, Firefox, font, font-family, font-weight, helvetica, helvetica neue, helvetica neue light, html, ie, internet explorer, light, Linux, Mac, neue, PostScript, Safari, sans-serif, W3C, Windows

How to get your very own two-letter domain

I’m sure most of you internet people have heard of the various URL shortening sites out there in the wild. They’re used to make a long and scary URL (which stands for Uniform Resource Locator) into one much more timid and digestible. Blah blah blah. The point is, you may have noticed that all the good ones (tinyurl.com is ugly and commercial and gross, bit.ly is an exception) have a domain that is only two letters long, like tr.im. Now how do they do it?

Most big hosting companies and domain registrars will not only tell you a domain any less than three letters is invalid, but they probably won’t support whichever obscure ccTLD (Country Code Top Level Domain, e.g. .ca for Canada) you feel like owning. There’s no real reason for this, other than that most companies are stupid and don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Especially when it comes to technological stuff like this; the CEO of GoDaddy probably doesn’t have more than a vague idea about how the internet really works. Oh well, more power to the people.

And by “the people” I mean the people at iwantmyname.com. Not only is their service great, with a nice clean interface and a whole six pages of TLDs to choose from, but they accept ANY valid domain, including those with only two characters at the second level.

It’s a great service, and I’ve used them to buy all two of my two letter domains. I even started a little URL shortening service of my own, called zi.gs, just for fun. I took it down a while ago after it became boring and tiresome to provide support for.

Anyways, there you have it. Easy two character domains, supporting lots and lots of TLDs.

Posted in Web
Tags: 2, ccTLD, character, domain, domain name, iwantmyname, letter, TLD, tr.im, two, Uniform Resource Locator, url, ZI.GS

The public beta of Wikipedia’s new interface announced

Ahh, that’s why. The reason Wikipedia has been acting like 4chan on a bad day is that they were upgrading their software, and now we know exactly what part was upgraded.

They added a little link at the top of the page entitled “Try Beta”. If you click on it, and log in, you’ll be able to switch your current interface for a brand spanking new look n’ feel. It looks nice, but I’m not sure whether I’m happy about sacrificing the speed and simplicity of the current design just for a few whistles and shiny menu bars.

Edit: Apparently the wonkiness was actually related to something else. The new look is still pretty cool though.

Posted in Web
Tags: beta, design, interface, update, upgrade, wikipedia

Wikipedia’s error page, if you ever wondered

Has anyone ever seen this before? Today when I visited it there was a message in the header saying they were updated their software and might experience some down time. But in the middle of the day? I guess it all depends on your time zone (EST here), and the point of Wikipedia is to be as neutral as possible. In any case, it was interesting to see.

 

 

Posted in Web
Tags: 500, down, error, maintenance, message, page, wikipedia