Present Needs

 Recently while I was putting together pharmacology lectures, I decided that it would be cool to use Maslow's hierarchy of needs as a reference point for what need different pharmacological products were addressing. I still feel that this is a valid approach. It's helpful to explain how an antibiotic is different from an antidepressant. There was one class which I found to be problematic: analgesics, and, more specifically, opiates. One can't help but ponder whether or not pain is in fact, the fifth vital sign, or not. Historically, opiates were used for major surgery such as amputation up until the late 1800s. It's hard to even think of this type of operation without some form.of anesthesia or analgesics. 

The Trolling Test

 It seems appropriate that we adapt our expectations of conversational AI to the most salient problems of our current times. In this vein, I would say that the “trolling test” is the most appropriate test of a conversational AI bvo

bot’s. effectiveness. Instead of evaluating these programs in isolation, why not include a real=-world trial, making use of a public service such as Twitter?

Deep Tracks

 In the old days before the Internet, there was a sort of tyranny of mainstream entertainment which users today haven't yet experienced. Water cooler conversations would be limited to Seinfeld, which was a really good show, however, there were much worse ones such as Friends, and my point is, there just wasn't the option to go into depth on some other random form of entertainment which you had stumbled across since the 'other guy' would not have heard of it and would just walk away instead. That lead to a sort of lame public commons of media consumption, in which many people watched shows that they found mediocre, simply so that they could be prepared for such water cooler conversations, media references, and just generally being 'in the know'. There were, of course, always those folks who eschewed such pedestrian content and instead retreated into their 'deep tracks', consuming their own favorite media forms. They were the hipsters before the hipsters, also known as nerds, geeks, etc. Now there isn't any need because... there's a proverbial subreddit for that. How long will this 'golden age of television' last? With media companies getting bigger, have our butts been glued back into our couches once again? Are the laugh tracks coming back? Will deep tracks go back to being the domain of the esoteric once again?

COVID is over?

 That’s the official story, but what does it really mean? Well, it’s kind of like Game of Thrones— it’s not the ending we wanted, but at least it’s over… at least until the prequel comes out. 

Slow down

Who really knows where it’s all going? So far we aren’t even close to a million years, which makes us less than 1% as successful as the dinosaurs who we’re always using as a cautionary tale. If our civilization is truly winding to its end then what has it all meant? What will future archeologists think when they One Day dig up our bones? Well at least we made some interesting creations.

Turkey

I've never been a fan of this bird. I doubt I'm alone in this belief. I think I'm now at a point in my life where I can freely admit this with some amount of objectivity. It's an OK meat, but it just isn't that great. Chicken is genuinely a good meat. It can be quite flavorful and it picks up other flavors well. Turkey has it's own flavor. It's big. It's nostalgic, but it's always there.

Mongolia

 Recently the approach to History in the US educational system has been in the news. I think one important point has been missed here; the teaching of history has never been an exercise in adulation. It's absurd to think that the representation of a period or culture in a History curriculum is related to its current-day status. In fact, the opposite is often true. As a prime example, Mongolia is not currently a world superpower, but it once was. This is why we all learn about it in High School. The cultural influence from its brief period in the lime light continue to echo through to the present day and it's therefore thought to be an important subject for which people out to be generally familiar.

The Important Things

These days I find that it's hard to keep perspective on what's really important in the life of the average consumer. On one hand, we have a lot more stuff than I ever thought we would at this point in history, and a lot of it is pretty useful... and pretty cool! The Internet delivers communication and entertainment services, cell phones are amazing, Amazon delivers products for incredibly cheap prices and helpfully recommends knockoffs that are even cheaper. As consumers, we have access to more stuff of higher quality than we ever would have in the pre-Internet era. At the same time, we're losing some important things, including community, opportunity and privacy. The opportunity to go into business for yourself in your own local community may be closing, as large businesses gradually solve the problem of how to most efficiently extract money from communities on a global scale, leveraging economies of scale and subsidies from large investors. As we keep trading away more of our freedom, it's starting to become more apparent that this is a dubious bargain. You have to wonder what's going to be left when the next generation comes along, and whether they will even understand what they've missed.

Masks

I'm not letting the October go by without taking the opportunity to wear some spooky Haloween masks. I ordered a set from Amazon. Assuming we're still in quaranteen in November and beyond, I guess I'll just be 'that guy'.

We don't need any more Gs

Let's face it, we have too many Gs in our world these days. Wifi comes in 2G,5G and now 6G, which all refer to GHz. Phones come in 3G, 4G and now 5G, which refer to 'Generation'. If you work in the world of Genomics like me, then you end up dealing with Gigabases and, often, Gigabytes, which are yet more Gs. I think that IEEE needs to impose a worldwide moratorium on the use of Gs in technology names. It's getting to be a bit much. 

On a serious note, it's hard to find a legitimate need for 5G in the consumer market of 2021. Typical demonstrations feature a tech blogger standing next to a telephone pole, downloading a movie in just 1 minute over 5G. It's impressive and also pointless. I have never had a problem streaming movies over Netflix on my phone directly using 5MBPS of bandwidth. On the rare occasion that I actually need to download a movie or show to my phone because I anticipate some sort of (ironic) gap in the global blanket of Internet connectivity while I'm traveling, etc., I have no problem taking the 2 minutes+ required to do so. For more legitimate scenarios like conference calls, I also have no problem with using 4G or just dialing in using my good old fashion voice connection for audio. If someone like me has no need for 5G then why on earth would anyone else need it?

Why, also, would cell phone companies want to foist 5G on naive consumers, convincing them that they really need gigabit data connections on their phones (when most of us don't even have this at home)? I think the answer to this, as with most new technologies these days, probably has to do with consumer data collection. To greatly simplify things, 5G adoption will basically flatten the consumer Internet topology, which is currently complicated by the widespread use of things like WIFI access points, often employing NAT routing and causing consumers to annoyingly change their IP from time to time, making it more difficult for companies to continuously track them over time. In the future, there will be no need for such technologies as each one of our devices will be capable of directly connecting to the gigabit-delivering 5G access point on our corner, leaving a single, traceable identifier for each consumer device. We will gradually find our new TVs, tablets, laptops and phones bypassing our home networks entirely, routing traffic straight to our ISP, who will helpfully monitor our browsing habits through the uninterrupted high-resolution click stream from each of our devices to deliver the content (and, more importantly, ads) which we have shown ourselves to be interested in. This is the real value of 5G technology.

Let's stick around for a while

Recently the private space race has been filling the news cycle, as it seems one gazillionaire after another gets the idea that finding new ways to send people into space is the key to fortune, fame and the glory of saving the human race. Popular science fiction would lead us to believe that mars is a paradise awaiting the application of our terra-forming technology, just a short space voyage away for those brave enough to make the voyage on one of the already-made space ships. We can, therefore, stop worrying about all these pesky problems like global warming, paying them no more mind than we should worry about the mess left behind in our hotel suite after checkout. Unfortunately, reality may be a little harder to bear.

On a global scale, rockets are inherently inefficient; the sheer amount of energy used in a single launch could be enough to absolve even the most frequent flyer of any guilty feelings that they might be feeling after so much frequent flying (at least by comparison). Once we get to space, leaving the Earth's magnetic field would expose any interstellar astronauts to various forms of radiation, including heavy ion, which we really just haven't spent that much time studying, but we're pretty sure that it's terrible for human health. We really don't have any feasible way of shielding it either, since it would be kinda tough to build a huge lead shield around a spaceship (or water shield, or whatever). Mars would be an interesting place to visit, but without having any water or life forms of any kind (yes, I'm afraid it's true) it would be like staring a colony in the middle of the Sahara desert, which makes one wonder, why go all the way to Mars when we have perfectly good deserts right here on Earth which would be much easier to get to and transform into habitable environments?

Apple's Chargers

"In a setback for Apple, the European Union seeks a common charger for all phones. "

If this were 2011 instead of 2021, I would be saying "Way to go EU! I can finally throw all of these Nokia and Motorola charging cables in the trashcan, where they belong!" Now I don't think it's such a good idea. Every company, including Apple seems to have voluntarily standardized on USB-C connectors (present laptop included). The only exception is Apple's peripheral devices and phones. This is not really such a big deal anyway. Where was the EU 10 years ago when I actually did have a drawer full of chargers?

I don't really believe the EU's expectations that this would actually spare chargers from landfills either, since I can attest that chargers and their cables wear out. In fact, it's good advice to carefully inspect cables before you plug them into devices (especially your phone) since damaged cables can seriously mess up your phone. 

The one real advantage that I could possibly see in rigorously enforcing USB-C is the final realization of a low-voltage infrastructure. For background, most tech devices need to use low voltage DC to operate, but of course, power is distributed in the form of 115Volt (US) or 220Volt(EU) AC, which requires a transformer in each device. Since transformers are never 100% efficient, this means that each little power brick is uselessly converting your precious power into heat and radio interference. On a national scale, this adds up to a lot of waste. If we could move this power conversion step to a central location, by say... having one (more efficient) transformer per household which would then run to a second set of low-power outlets throughout your entire house that devices could plug into, we could greatly reduce these losses. Think about apartment buildings, schools, corporate offices, there are some real opportunities for avoiding these losses, but this all depends on having a unified standard for low voltage power. Perhaps standardizing on USB-C will now enable this. We just need everybody (including Apple) on the same page.

Cynicism aside, I think this might be the real reason why Apple prefers to use its lightening cable for phones--they're more robust than USB-C and stand up better to abuse. I can attest to this, having just recently replaced the charging port on my Android phone. The USB-C plugs seem uniquely vulnerable to manufacturers skimping on quality. Since it relies on a metal sheath, manufacturers can simply put in a thinner or flimsier sheath with consumers none the wiser. It's kind of a big deal if that's the only way available to charge your phone. I broke mine after about a year and had been on wireless charging since then. If the wireless charging failed for any reason (i.e., if I was foolish enough to disable it in the software) then once the phone ran out of juice, it would be a brick. 

Call me old fashioned, but I just like my wires. I like having fewer of them to worry about, but seriously EU, where were you 10, 15, 20 years ago when we could have really used this type of action? Now it just seems like taking credit for self-imposed industry standardization.

Still Here

Still here in 2021. If future archeologists find this then hopefully it will provide some insights into our civilization.

The surge

We're all expecting things to get pretty busy over the next two weeks. So far we've been dioing a lot of work to get testing set up and to prepare for the surge of patients. Things will probably get even crazier.

I went shopping for groceries today and everyone was wearing masks. It reminded me of scuba diving in a way. I was sporting a highly fashionable anti-viral surgical mask which I had bought a while ago and thought would be a total waste at the time.

Milestones

Based on obvious models we're going to be at 1 million cases by Friday.

The New Normal

Being realistic, it's going to be at least a full year before this epidemic is under control. This is how long it will take for us to have a vaccine of any effectiveness. In fact it's quite dubious that we will have effective vaccines, given that this would literally be a 'cure for the common cold'. More likely it will have something in the range of 20-80% effectiveness, and we'll just be desperate enough to take those odds. Additionally we will have some treatements. We seem to have had some luck with Chloroquine so far, and there are some promising antivirals, and together these may constitute an effective cocktail. Nonetheless it's going to be another winter at least until we're back to anything that resembles normal.

Day Whatever

Playground

Took my son to the park today. He kept asking to go to the playground and I managed to just keep going without stopping. It made me think about the sacrifices we're really making for this quarantine. After we've all been through 18 months of this, assuming that we have some form of vaccine and  effective treatment, will it have been worth it?

COVID-19

Note: I put up a new page for COVID-19. This will be updated with reference info.

Immortality

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution."
-Albert Einstein

Recently I've been making one deep dive after another into cloud and networking technologies, and although this would bore most readers, the available AI tools have lead me to some innovative ideas. Personality simulators are something that's fascinated me for a while now, and perhaps it's just the second season of West World that's inspiring me, but I feel like this is something we should talk about. 

The basic idea is that we could create a 'chatbot' which is so sophisticated that it is capable of much more than just superficially plausible conversation and can actually simulate the basic cognitive processes and personality of an individual, to the point that they could stand in as a proxy for the actual person. Depending on the nature of the person we're talking about, this could represent an impressive feat. We would have effectively cloned an individual's personality in an online simulation, allowing us to interact with that individual in a controlled virtual environment without the inconvenience of requiring the individual's presence. This idea has been around for a while, but big data technologies provide powerful tools for data aggregation and pattern recognition which make this more plausible than it has been up until fairly recently. 

Ignore Siri and Bixby for now; imagine that the technology will eventually take care of itself. Once we can get this to work, this would be an extremely powerful technology with far-reaching implications. As with most powerful new technologies, these bots would have both powerful upsides and downsides, and we do owe it to ourselves to discuss both. Some possible examples would include:

• Use natural language processing to develop a CharlesDickens-bot, which could churn out new works with all the same plot twists and turns, wit and wisdom as the original author
• Create an Einstein-bot to come up with new theories, making use of the imagination, which he acknowledged was so important.
• Create a bot version of a parent or loved one for a child who is unable to see them in person (i.e., overseas vets or even parents who die from incurable diseases).
• Create a bot version of business associates or friends to provide a practice version of interactions prior to actual negotiations. 
• And similarly, here is the inevitable downside:
  

Already the negatives are staring to appear even with these basically positive examples. The main problems would appear to be:

• Identity - if bots become so effective at simulating real individuals, they could be used to convince others of their actual identity or be used to obtain secret information about them.
• IP - bots with the ability to originate work could be capable of originating work that is similar or indistinguishable from that of the original owner. For example, if I could clone a living author like, say, Tom Clancy and generate new works by him, then those works would arguably take away from the readership which is rightfully his.
• Autonomy - we like to think of ourselves as unique and irreplaceable individuals. The thought that we could in any way be substituted by a bot is inherently threatening to us. As with previous technologies (outsourcing, automation), bots could have a very real and negative impact on individual incomes as well.

I don't have answers to these concerns, but as is usually the case, I don't see any way to stop this trend either. As one who faces terminal diseases in my professional life, I feel that the demand for this type of service would inevitable lead to its widespread adoption. However, one often unaccounted factor which may allay some concerns is that of randomness, as best expressed by Machiavelli. 

"Nevertheless, not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less."

--Machiavelli, The Prince

Our actions are inherently non-deterministic. Even if we were to bootstrap an individual's personality, any given decision point would contain a large amount of unpredictability (be it randomness or what M calls free will). So it's possible that we could have accurate simulations of clearly defined decision points (the yes/nos), but for most of life's small decisions there would be too little information to effectively predict them. In the end, this seems to be one more revolution that is on its way, and our best course is to come up with the means to deal with and perhaps benefit from it, rather than sidestepping it.