ajf a

-Dream journal quote: "(who must be snowmen but act like sentient cucumbers)," 12/27-

As you can no doubt guess, I had some unusual dreams this past week. While last night's directing-a-snowboy-through-WoW-and-the-local-grocery-store was certainly the one I remembered in most detail (and included some shadows of lucidity at the end), my favorite dream this week was the one in which a dragon burst out from behind a sphinx-like monolith and chased me from the roof of the building I was in. I knew I could kill it by striking one of the bells on a small wooden block I was carrying, but of course the clappers were getting stuck. The other night of note was when I managed to have two remembered dreams... the irony being that I was my normal gender in one, and the complete opposite (as well as a different age) in the other.

Well, I went on one of those Wikipedia jaunts that I'm sure everyone is familiar with: you'll see some interesting topic somewhere and be directed to its Wikipedia article... only to spend hours looking down the chain of related articles at other concepts.

Somehow, the other day I got to the article on wavefunction collapse. I realize that phrase in itself sounds rather dull, but I'll try to explain what bizarre implications it has in a way both you and I can vaguely understand.

Begin with a wave. Now, in normal conversation waves refer to very specific things, such as ocean waves or perhaps sound waves, but when we get right down to the atomic level, we realize that EVERYTHING is a wave. This is called wave-particle duality. There are a couple of equations that deal with this, but suffice to say that larger objects (i.e. the things we can see) tend to have little in the way of wavelike properties (they don't scatter, they have a fairly definite location, etc.), while very small objects such as electrons and other elementary particles can exhibit behaviors we don't normally associate with particles.

This is why, for instance, you may have heard of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle for electrons. The principle basically states that it is impossible to know both the location and momentum of an electron with precision at the same time. Well, part of the reason this principle exists is that it's very hard to measure the "position" of an object whose properties are very much like a wave's! After all, it's rather meaningless to measure the position of a wave going up and down on a horizontal string. Perhaps the individual humps and valleys have positions, but the overall wave, if you've been bouncing the string for some time, really has no definite position at all.

Anyway, there are a good lot of strange subatomic particles besides the electron, and the very small ones, of course, still have that wave nature. But of course, if they were just wave/particle chimeras, they could not possibly be confusing enough to belong in the quantum mechanical zoo. No, these waves (I will call them waves from here on) also have the magical, counterintuitive ability to exist in more than one state at once. What I mean by this is, suppose you had a large ball, representing a subatomic wave of some sort. Now say it can exist in two solid colors (no stripes, spots, or blotches), red or green... but keep in mind that it can exist in these two colors simultaneously. The solid colors represent the different states of the wavefunction you're modelling. Obviously this demonstration wouldn't work too well in real life, which is what makes quantum mechanics so brilliantly fun.

The real fun comes with wave collapse. Bear in mind this is by no means the final word on the subject (in science, nothing is ever final anyway), but one of the leading explanations today for behavior that we've seen in these waves is that as soon as they are observed, the waves immediately settle into ONE of their possible states. So in other words, in the ball demonstration, it is as if the ball suddenly "chooses" either solid red or green as soon as you look at it!

The natural question here is, how in the world do we know that the waves exist in multiple states when unobserved, if observing them makes them collapse? The answer, as far as I can tell from my meager formal education in quantum mechanics, is that we don't. It's just that there are few better explanations for how the waves seem to have a random state as soon as we measure them. Also, the equations predict it... one thing you must get used to when speaking of theoretical physics is having the math prove the principle nearly as much as the other way around.

At any rate, go chew on the implications of wavefunction collapse for a while.

Reality check. Any physicists reading this, wincing, are welcome to correct any errors -- I tried to put it in laymen's terms as far as possible, so some accuracy may have dribbled into the gutters.

, aq

-Power strip quote: "WARNING: In order to properly protect your phone/fax/modem follow these steps:"-

This past week was a very interesting one dreamwise, seeing as I'm now finally getting abundant amounts of sleep. Let's see. I had a false awakening dream that sort of evolved into musings about the "dream paralysis" phenomenon, and how it could be used for nefarious purposes. I had another dream in which I discovered that fairies wear knitted dresses and also spent a long time thinking about those clocks that wind themselves up by fluctuations in atmospheric pressure. The next night, I had a dream where I died (once again disproving the idea that you die in real life if you die in a dream), yet mysteriously ended up in merely a whitened version of my childhood house, which cannot possibly be accurate. Finally, last night I dreamt that I was driving to an airport using arrow keys somehow, but as I was in third person perspective as usual, I was having trouble controlling the car smoothly due to the fact that the "camera" wasn't tracking it very well over hills. I made it to the parking area just fine, but a policeman asked for my license shortly after I stopped.

In my patterings around the Internet this past week, I happened upon a rather well-thought-out chatterbot. A chatterbot is a program that humans can chat with (often online) that aims to replicate human speech patterns in such a way as to be indistinguishable from a REAL person chatting. So far this has not been fully accomplished, as can be deduced by the fact that no AI system has yet passed the Turing test.

However, chatbots can be awfully fun to mess with, especially when the coders obviously did not think many conversations through at all. Many of the bots have ridiculously simple reply algorithms that lead them to respond to only one key word in your statement, even if the sentence as a whole had nothing to do with it. For instance, if the chatbot says something confusing, you may say "I'm sorry, I don't understand" and the bot will respond with "Apology accepted," or something equally inappropriate.

Anyway, the thrill of these chatbots is usually short-lived, as the conversation gradually degrades to total confusion on both sides. That is, until I found Jabberwacky. I'm not sure what makes the actual program different from the other bots, but I've found that I can have a much more glitch-free (though by no means perfect) conversation with Jab. The only thing that's consistently a problem with this particular chatbot is how WELL he imitates humans. Meaning that he will often accuse me of being a robot, while staunchly defending his own imagined humanity, much as the people conversing with him probably do. Also, he's a lot more abrupt and curt than a normal person, given that people are not quite so polite to something they know is not actually offended by lack of courtesy.

This of course made me think of the perfect idea for a chatbot. Instead of making it obvious to the humans that they are conversing with a bot, introduce the chatbot to a normal chat room (where people are told they are being observed but are randomly matched with either people or bot) under different names. Have it watch the human-to-human (e.g. normal) conversations a lot and only occasionally be paired with a human, without announcing the fact that he is any different. Obviously at the beginning he would be fairly awkward and noticeable, but if he always assumed a different name, he might eventually be able to talk for quite some time with someone before they started treating him as a robot.

This scheme would have the added advantage of making people come back again and again because they'd never quite be sure whether they got a chance to speak with the bot. It would make an interesting hook.

Reality check. Brought to you by Blogbot 4.0

7tq 7tq

-Bulletin quote: "1805 Washington Avenue, Golden, CO, 80401"-

I did remember a dream in detail this past week (amazing!). However, it really doesn't make sense. I was I suppose in some sort of "meatspace" game that involved a lot of blue and yellow makeup (which is in itself interesting since the dominant color in my dreams is generally a sandy red). When I asked the vendor -- wisely, AFTER putting blue stuff all over my cuticles -- if it was machine/water washable, she said that the version of the game I was playing didn't have that feature yet! Indeed!

I have had a very unusual life story, I suppose. The long and short of it that you need to know to understand this blog post is as follows:

1) When I was young, I chose to be antisocial. This was probably mostly because I saw all those kid's TV shows where the social kid is portrayed as obsessed with fitting in and is NEVER the brain. I decided I didn't want to give up intelligence for "friends", and stayed in close contact with only a couple.

2) As I got older, I still avoided "friends" to a large extent, but more and more simply because I couldn't relate to them at all. Since I had already thrown fitting in into the wind, I had no interests in what they were interested in. What I was interested in, no one else was, and because my interests were intellectual, it sounded like bragging or was just plain "boring school stuff" when I spoke of them.

3) At this age, I've finally found a mother lode of people who I can relate to, who I can talk to about math and science without feeling like everything I say goes whoosh as it passes over their heads.

So now you know. Onto the post then.

Finding people I could talk to was amazing at first. I couldn't believe so many existed. I was now ready to integrate fully into the social network -- this network was worth it. But then some issues arose. First, there is the small matter that most people are somewhat late sleepers and risers, whereas I am not. Well and good, I've adjusted fairly well to a bit less sleep. Then comes the second problem. Most of these people grew up in much... how shall I say it... nerdier circles than I. Which means that they did not instantly equate sociability with selling out, which means they have many of the interests of the common man. Such as movies. Now, movies, I must admit, have some value, more than I attributed to them, certainly. But still, there is a general trend among movies to include slightly more language and suggestive situations than the average (good-quality) book. Which makes me wonder if perhaps I'm selling out, in some small way, after all.

Finally, there is the matter of the nerd-killers. These are people that I and my fellow-nerds know and spend time with who are wonderful people, but who often put the ixnay on geeking out. The worst thing is that they are intelligent, hardworking people too... they just don't have the joy for learning and discovering that the rest of us have. So as long as they do not need to hold onto the information, they do not want to hear about it. And that makes me sad, because I have waited so long to find a group of people that I could always talk to about this sort of thing, only to find that sometimes we just can't.

Reality check. I still wonder... why blue and yellow this time?

nmqt ,

-Loncapa quote: "Kinematics with Calculus"-

The most interesting dream I had this week would probably have been the one where I was back in Earth Science class and the assignment was dressing up as 3 different dinosaurs.

I think I may have found one of the few instances where greater accuracy is more tactful. Specifically, I'm talking about those awkward moments when you say something that was intended to be witty, but phrase it just a little bit wrong. This, of course, leads immediately to the response, "What the heek, man? That was so mean!"

Now, there are two cases, from the point of view of the person who just corrected your social faux pas.

Case 1: The statement is actually false -- the person had no spiteful intentions. Now, they feel shocked and horrible about themselves, because your statement came out of the blue for them.

Case 2: The statement is true. They really were intending to hurt the other party, and are glad you emphasized this point.

Simple common sense tells us that case 1 is true much, much more often. And even if case 2 is correct, do we really want to be encouraging mean-spiritedness by acknowledging it, just as the person wants?

I propose that we switch from the possibly incorrect statement "That was mean" (and other statements of that sort), to "That sounded mean." This gives case 1 people a way out, and makes case 2 people's intentions only that much more obvious when they do not take it.

Reality check.  Also, we've had yet more snow here. I still haven't tired of it.