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Things 87: Hacked Kinect, Technology vs Poverty, Robot Kid

Video
Now that the Xbox Kinect is out, people are playing with it (a $3,000 prize was offered for the first person to provide an open source driver, and it’s gone crazy from there) and doing a lot of cool stuff. Here’s my favourite so far (stick with it to 42′ when crazy stuff starts happening):

Link
Can technology end poverty? An article by Kentaro Toyama, a man with years of experience in the field, points out that:

“Technology—no matter how well designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute.”

Since people in developed nations already have a great deal of intent and capacity, we tend to overestimate the absolute benefit of technology and get overexcited about the field of Information and Communication Technologies for Development, which ultimately fails to deliver on its promise. Well worth a read.

Quote
In relation to the above article, over on BoingBoing, commenter dragonfrog observes:

A quote from Bruce Schneier I think is applicable here:

“If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don’t understand the problems, and you don’t understand the technology.”

If you leave out the word “security” I think it remains just as valid.”

Puzzle
15 years ago I was playing Tomb Raider (the 21st game I ever completed, according to my records. Current count: 103. More on that later). Years later, I read one of Jollyjack’s observational-comedy-style ‘How To Play’ comics on DeviantArt, and while all his observations strike home, one thing in particular was unexpected:

This was something I did frequently, without really knowing why, and some of the comments said the same.

The question is, why do people playing Tomb Raider (and no other game that I’m aware of) feel driven to do this?

Picture
If I was a parent and I could make this kind of thing come about, I definitely would:

Tim Link
The above image is the first one I posted to a new Tumblr I’ve created to queue up images to draw every day, Now Draw This. My attempts then appear on Sleep or Draw. As mentioned in Things 84, I’m mainly saying this here to reinforce my perceived obligation to stick to the schedule, which seems to be working so far.

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Things 86: Better Train Journey, AI vs Car Insurance, Underwater Sculpture

Video
I see quite a few videos of ‘what the future will look like’, and most of the time I find them to be unconvincing. However, this view of how a simple train journey could be improved with some simple interface / screen / disposable printing ideas  seems much more sensible:

Link
Steven Steinberg has some really excellent musings on the plausible future of weak AI – including its effect on the car insurance industry, which is much more interesting than it sounds. Long, but well worth preloading on your smartphone to read on the tube, or however you fit long-form content into your life these days.

Quote
I was doing a bit of ego searching when I came across a quote from me two years in the past, which I had completely forgotten and perhaps unsurprisingly found very appealing. Under this photo I had uploaded to Flickr:

I respond to a comment and made this irrational leap of logic:

“It is in all artists’ best interests to work in the field of robotics.”

Picture
I remember reading about these underwater sculptures a long time ago. Placed in 2006, this 2009 gallery shows how the ocean has made some really great aesthetic enhancements.

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked about some very strange sequential spikes in searches for numbers on Google Trends. Richard worked out that it must be people search for the latest fansubbed episodes of the anime series Bleach, which is pretty much confirmed by checking the search terms associated with these numbers over on Google Insights for Search.

Another mystery solved!

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Things 85: Talking Cats, Shark Facts, 285 trends

Video
Bowing to the inevitability of Moore’s law, cats with captions are no longer as popular, instead being replaced by dubbed videos of cats. Lip-syncing and attitude-matching are key:

Links
I recently discovered that Sharks can sense electricity! And are also viviparous, despite not being mammals! These things should really be taught from an early age. If you didn’t know those things, do follow those links and fill in this shocking gap in our educational system.

Quote
On Luke’s Facebook profile under ‘quotes’, he writes:

I am not big on quotes, as I think proper arguments take more than a few lines to construct. Quotes are therefore like mantras – declarations of universal truths which I am naturally rather suspicious of.

To further undermine this entire section of Things, I was recently reminded of David Malki’s thoughts on the matter; he also monetised the idea by producing a suitable bumper sticker. A banner on the same basis was the kind of thing likely to be seen at the Rally to Restore Sanity.

Puzzle
After recently trying to convince people that the number 285 occurs more often than it should (a perennial hobby of mine), I re-ran the numbers on search volumes and found something rather strange. What is going on around August here?

Last week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked how one might devise an experiment to test for the existence of Free Will, using “any definition of Free Will you think might be useful” (since an experiment reported in the Telegraph seemed obviously lacking).

John cited far more interesting MRI experiments which strongly suggest ‘decisions’ are made up to 10 seconds before we are consciously aware of them. But I felt that the nebulous concept of Free Will could also dodge this attack; perhaps Free Will ‘happens’ before that decision process becomes visible to MRI and before we become aware of it. There are plenty of other experiments that demonstrate that a lot of strange processes conspire to construct the illusion that we are experiencing the world in ‘real time’, but that’s another story.

Tarim said he couldn’t think of any definition for Free Will, which is a pretty reasonable response. I admitted I had personally found considering the ‘devise a test’ question a useful line of thought for clarifying the matter in my own mind, but just trying to come up with a definition is actually a more direct route.

This being the internet, we don’t have to look too far to find people trying to give definitions of Free Will. It actually seems fairly straightforward: it can either be used in a ‘Compatibilist‘ sense, or in a sense that doesn’t make any sense.

Angela (who also noted the definition problem) said she would ask her solicitor, who apparently offers a free will service.

Finally, I note that Things 66 (sent just before I started blogging each edition) included this link on the subject.

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Things 84: Sleep or Draw, Free Will Test, Ursa Magus

Tim Link
I’d like to get better at drawing, and I know the best way to do that is to draw every day. But previous attempts to form this habit always run out of steam. My new plan is to post each drawing on Tumblr, and also to tell people that I am doing so (so you reading this is an integral part of the plan). Even if nobody ever follows that feed, the fact I’ve published it theoretically creates the sense of accountability I need. I’m also very impressed at how good Tumblr is at streamlining the publishing process, and highly recommend it for this kind of endeavour:

Sleep or Draw
(Note: link contains screen-high female manga characters, which depending on your workplace may be considered NSFW)

Link
Despite familiarity with Google Streetview, being presented with random locations on earth by this site does feel strangely magical.

Quote
Observed on Facebook:

Commenter: “People do give a damn but most can’t be assed to show their support”
Profilee: “Well then they don’t give enough of a damn for it to be worth a damn.”
Commenter: “Damn!”

Puzzle
I was fascinated to read an article in the Daily Telegraph which suggested that the fact you can artificially create a stimulus in someone’s brain that will cause them to make a physical movement somehow proved that Free Will does not exist. Whatever you might think about Free Will, it seems pretty clear that being able to get some kind of effect by one method doesn’t exclude the possibility that a different method could still provoke the same effect, so the leap to ruling our Free Will seems premature.

Still, I think there’s an instructive puzzle here: given an arbitrary budget, and any science-fiction technology you care to imagine, how would you devise a test to see if Free Will exists? Feel free to use any definition of Free Will you think might be useful.

Picture
I tested this game (from Loldwell.com) with a friend while stuck on a delayed tube train. I recommend it.

Previous Week’s Puzzles
In Things 82 I asked why street lights weren’t at least partially solar powered, and in Things 83 I gave some guesses. Richard pointed out that since both street lamps and council buildings are already connected to the grid, any effort in this area would be better spent on the latter, where solar panels would be far easier to deploy and maintain.

He also notes that:

The street furniture I’ve seen with solar/wind panels tends to be speeding signs in rural areas, where the sign is only illuminated occasionally, appears to be LEDs, where a connection to the grid might be costly, and where a power failure would not be inconvenient.

Russell points out that the Mars rover proved more resilient to sand build-up than originally expected because the Martian wind did a good job of keeping the panels clean (so bolstering the potential of the solar-powered street lamps I originally linked to); he also links to the appealing prospect of solar-energy-harnessing paint.

Then, in Things 83 I asked why fingers wrinkle in water and the rest of your skin doesn’t. Russell noted that from his diving experience he knew for a fact that your palms will also eventually go wrinkly after an hour or two, and attributed this to surface-area:volume ratio differences.

The internet tells me that the first barrier to the water is the layer of sebum, and only once that is washed away can the water get in and wrinkle the skin. An unknown internet person claims the finger tips have the least sebum, so are first to wrinkle. However, the first link (which sounds pretty authoritative) also claims that “no one is really sure” exactly what drives the wrinkling process, and wikipedia cites a paper which claims sebum “may serve little or no purpose in modern humans,” so it seems as if the whole thing remains somewhat mysterious.

There’s also a deeper question behind these answers: is this wrinkling thing a Bug or a Feature of our skin, or to put it another way, did it evolve for a reason? Being a fan of the (heftily discredited) Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, I like to imagine it’s actually a feature designed to improve grip when we’re in the water, an idea which presumably could be tested with some kind of gripping experiment, which I may at some point try to carry out.