Ben Shoemate's Notebook

via http://pixdaus.com/single.php?id=5412

1) Watch it get thrown.
2) *sigh* Correct it.

Correcting stuff about Sarah Palin that isn't true.

• Palin did NOT cut funding for special needs education in Alaska.

Actually, just the opposite - she tripled per-pupil funding.

• Palin did NOT demand that books be banned from the Wasilla library.
  

  Though she did inquire about banning, she never, ever banned any books. Ever.

• Palin was NEVER a member of the Alaskan Independence Party.
• Palin NEVER endorsed or supported Pat Buchanan for president.
  

  This is just ridiculous. She wore a pin only when he visited and then took it off. More factually, she headed Steve Forbes' campaign efforts in Alaska.

• Palin has NOT pushed for teaching creationism in Alaska's schools.

  She's said she's open to it being taught alongside evolution, however, she hasn't actually done anything substantive about it. Hopefully, she'll clarify her position. But it's (currently) incorrect to say she's actually made any changes in Alaskan education regarding creationism.

Correcting stuff about Barack Obama that isn't true.

• Obama’s health care plan will NOT "force small businesses to cut jobs".
  

  In fact, the plan exempts small businesses.

• Obama's health care plan will NOT put "a bureaucrat ... between you and your doctor."
  

  In fact, those who have insurance now could keep the coverage they have.

• Obama has NEVER voted for "corporate welfare" for oil companies.
  

  In fact, the bill Obama voted for raised taxes on oil companies by $300 million over 11 years while providing $5.8 billion in subsidies for renewable energy, energy efficiency and alternative fuels.

• Obama will NOT close markets to trade.
  

  Though he once said he wanted to "renegotiate" NAFTA, now he says he wants to try to strengthen environmental and labor provisions in it. He's not advocating closing any markets.

• Obama DID NOT vote to teach sex to kindergarten children.
  

  Wow, this is disgustingly wrong. Rather, Obama voted for a bill in the Illinois state Senate that would update the sex education curriculum and make it "medically accurate." It was specifically designed to teach young kids how to recognize inappropriate behavior and avoid pedophiles and also demanded that any instruction be "age-appropriate". It was deemed urgently necessary enough to arm kids with knowledge about predators that it adjusted the year of beginning instruction. (Additionally, Obama was neither a co-sponsor nor a sponsor of the bill and it never got past the Senate.)

• Obama IS OPEN TO DRILLING for oil.
  

  Specifically, he said he's open to "a careful, well thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage".

• Obama HAS AUTHORED laws and introduced important legislation, including reform, in his political career.
  
  A lot of criticism about whether a law is "major" or whether being "co-sponsor" is relevant is obscuring the fact that Obama was the chief sponsor (and, occasionally, author) of legislation in his career. It's incorrect to assert otherwise. e.g. There's a bunch of bills he sponsored during his time in the Illinois senate...  and a bunch of them were bills of which he was chief sponsor...  and those include stuff like..
  - Keeping pharmacies from over-charging Medicare beneficiaries
  - Child-care capital investment
  - Bio-terrorism preparedness
  - Changes to videotaped interrogations
  - Expanding medical information resources for seniors
  - Supreme Court Campaign Reform Act
  - Changes to Earned Income Tax Credit
  
  ...why not instead criticize what he focused on as a legislator and what these bills might mean in terms of an Obama presidency? There's plenty of political meat for anyone to chew on.

• Obama will NOT INCREASE TAXES for working, middle-class families.
  

  Nope. NO. NO. This is wholly incorrect. Despite a McCain ad claiming otherwise, Obama's plan would cut taxes for the vast majority of American households, with middle-income earners benefiting a great deal.

Correcting stuff about John McCain that isn't true.

• McCain will NOT fail to support loan guarantees for the auto industry.
  

  Despite what an Obama ad says, McCain is actually in favor of low-cost loans to that industry.

• McCain did NOT say we could just "muddle through" in Afghanistan.
  

  In 2003, McCain actually said that we "may" muddle through, and he recently also called for more troops there.

• McCain does NOT define middle-class as someone making under five million dollars a year.
  

  He was joking. Seriously. He even said, "but seriously" just after it. C'mon.

Correcting stuff about Joe Biden that isn't true.

• Biden did NOT get fewer votes as a presidential nominee than Palin as mayor.

[What they said] - McCain has said stuff that's wrong, incorrect, or misleading.

• McCain FALSELY claimed that his plan will increase use of "wind, tide [and] solar" energy.
  

  His actual energy plan contains no new money for renewable energy.

[What they said] - Obama has said stuff that's wrong, incorrect, or misleading.

• Obama's plan currently CANNOT "pay for every dime" of his spending and tax cut proposals "by closing corporate loopholes and tax havens."
  

  This was quite the whopper. His proposed tax increases on upper-income individuals seems crucial. And his plan, like McCain’s, looks likely to leave the U.S. facing big budget deficits.

• Obama FALSELY accused McCain of saying "no to higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars, no to investment in renewable energy, no to renewable fuels."
  

  In fact, in 2002 McCain not only wanted tougher standards than most of the Senate did, but he was lauded by a Democrat.

[What they said] - Biden has said stuff that's wrong, incorrect, or misleading.

• Biden FALSELY claimed that "murder and violent crime rates went down eight years in a row" as a result of the Biden Crime Bill.
  

  A peer-reviewed study published in the February 2007 issue of the journal Criminology found that the bill's "spending had little to no effect on crime."

[What they said] - Palin has said stuff that's wrong, incorrect, or misleading.

• Palin did NOT say "thanks, but no thanks" to the building of the Ketchikan bridge.

  She clearly supported it and didn't stand up to Congressional waste - she accepted the money on behalf of Alaska.

• Palin FALSELY accused Obama of being more worried about terrorists being read their rights than apprehended.

  This is a whopper. Obama seems as committed to apprehending terrorists as the other candidates. But he's a constitutional scholar and law professor and is passionate about the rights of habeus corpus being respected.

Atmosphir is a gaming platform and engine that allows users to easily create their own levels in a 3D world by painting basic elements into a three dimensional grid. After downloading a client application, users can play in their own levels, or they can visit the Atmosphir community website to play on any of the maps that have been uploaded by other users. The application is currently available in a limited beta with plans to release by the end of the year, and is available for both Mac and PC.

Users can choose from a number of palettes, including pieces of land, bridges, and hazard props that will threaten the in-game avatar with blazing fireballs. The application also includes a number of theme packs, which allow users to create some variety in their levels. The packs are currently pretty basic, but the site plans to release more exciting themes like “Pirates” and “Robots”.

As far as gameplay goes, Atmosphir seems to be very straightfoward, much like a standard “Mario Brothers” game. The player’s avatar can run and jump around each level, which allows for jumping puzzles and the stomping on bad guys, but that’s about it. Atmosphir says that the current iteration is just a foundation, and that it plans to implement far more functionality including multiplayer support, which it says it can seamlessly push to every user’s client through an integrated updating system.

Panel

Robert Scoble - That’s what i’m talking about!

Bradley Horowitz - It’s impressive. Are the games suitable to play on game consoles?

Atmosphir - Definitely, I was always into Nintendo (they’re looking at getting onto gaming systems, like the Wii)

Bradley Horowitz - whats the level of effort involved?

Atmosphir - We built an abstraction layer that makes it easy to port to different systems, port to Sony PSP, we’re testing for the iPhone.

Bradley Horowitz - I can see a business model where I make a game and there’s a rev share.

Robert Scoble - Single player or online?

Atmosphir - Currently looking to make mulitplayer, add multiplayer code on top.. The game features automatic transparent updates. If we add code, we can download that seamlessly to user… client updates automatically

Robert Scoble - Is making level collaborative? I’d like to collaborate with my son.

Atmosphir - Yes, you can collaborate. Right now you take a file, send draft back and forth.. eventually would like to design in same environmental, can also upload with edit unlocked tag.. Levels are small files, only around 100k for a large level.

Robert Scoble - are blocks interactive? Can you make it play audio when you land on a block?

Atmosphir - Right now there are interactive things we’re working on.. some blocks shoot you up. we’re looking at doing audio stuff.

Sheryl Sandberg - looks exciting.. i think collaborative looks good going forward.

Joi Ito - How big is the client?

Atmosphir - Around 40 MB.

Joi Ito - Seems like tradeoff between user scriptabillty and blocks. Running from start flag would get kind of boring… are you going to have just one category of users.. User game play… it’s going to be a weird problem.

Atmosphir - We’re interested in when people mix roles of games and genres.. We want to mix it up.

Robert Scoble - Where’s the violence?

Atmosphir - We want to keep it family friendly, maybe we’ll have more mature themes. For right now we’re taking a Nintendo approach… But a rocket launcher is on the way.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

In A Taxonomy of Minds I explore the varieties of intelligence which a greater-than-human intelligence might take.  We could meet greater-than-human intelligences in an alien ET, or we can make synthetic ones. The one foundational assumption behind our making new minds ourselves is that we assume our mind is intelligent enough to make a new and different mind. Just because we are conscious does not mean we have the smarts to make consciousness ourselves. Whether (or when) AI is possible will ultimately depend on whether we are smart enough to make something smarter than ourselves. We assume that ants have not achieved this level. We also assume that as smart as chimpanzees are, chimps are not smart enough to make a mind smarter than a chimp, and so have not reached this threshold either. While some people assume humans can create a mind smarter than a human mind, humans may be at a level of intelligence that is below that threshold also. We simply don't know where the threshold of bootstrapping intelligence is, nor where we are on this metric.

We can distinguish several categories of elementary minds in relation to bootstrapping:

1) A  mind capable of imagining, or identifying a greater mind.
2) A  mind capable of imaging but incapable of designing a greater mind.
3) A  mind capable of designing a greater mind.

We fit the first criteria, but it is unclear whether we are of the second or third type of mind.  There is also a fourth type, which follows the third:

4) A mind capable of generating a greater mind which in turn itself creates a greater mind, and so on.

This is an cascading, bootstrapping mind. Once a mind reach this level, the recursive mind-enlargement can either keep going ad infinitum, or it might reach some limit. On the other hand, there may be more than one threshold in intelligence. Think of it as quantum levels. A mind may be able to make a mind smarter than itself, but the offspring mind may not be smart enough to make the next leap, and so gets stuck.

If we imagine the levels of intelligence as a ladder with unevenly spaced rungs, there may be jumps that some intelligences are not able to complete, or their derivatives are not able to jump. So a type 3 mind may be able to jump up four levels of bootstrapping intelligence, but not five. Since I don't believe intelligence is linear (that is I believe intelligence grows in many dimensions), a better illustration may be to view the problem of bootstrapping super intelligence as navigating across a rugged evolutionary landscape.

In this type of graph higher means better adapted, more suitable in form. Different hills indicated different varieties of environments, and different types of forms. This particular chart represents the landscape of possible types of intelligences. Here the higher a mind goes on a hill, the more highly it is suited or perfected for that type of intelligence.

In a very rugged fitness landscape, the danger is getting stuck on local optima of form. Your organism perfects a type of mind that is optimal for a local condition, but this very perfection imprisons you locally and prevents you from reaching a greater optimal form elsewhere. In other words, evolving to a higher elevation is not a matter of sheer power of intelligence, but of type. There may be certain kinds of minds that are powerful and optimal for some kinds of thinking, but that are incapable overcoming hurdles to reach a different, higher peak. Certain types of minds may be able to keep getting more powerful in the direction they have been evolving, but incapable of shifting direction in order to reach a new power. In other words, they may be incapable of bootstrapping the next generation. Other kinds of minds may be not as optimal but more nimble.

At the moment we are totally ignorant of what the possibility landscape of intelligence is. We have not yet even mapped out animal intelligences, and we have no real examples of other self-conscious intelligences to map. Navigating through the evolutionary landscape may be very smooth, or it may be very rough and very dependent on the path an evolving mind takes.

Because we have experience with such a small set of mind types, we really have no idea whether there are limits to the varieties and levels of intelligence.  While we can calculate the limits of computation (and folks like Seth Lloyd have done just that), I don't think intelligence as we currently understand it is equivalent to computation. The internet as a whole is computationally larger than our brains, but not as intelligent in the way we crave. Some people, like Stephen Wolfram, believe there is only one type of computation, and that there is sort of one universal intelligence. I tend to think there will be millions and billions of types of minds.

Recently, in conversations with George Dyson, I realized there is a fifth type of elementary mind:

5) A mind incapable of designing a greater mind, but capable of creating a platform upon which greater mind emerges.

This type of mind cannot figure out how to birth an intelligence equal to itself, but it does figure out how to set up conditions of evolution so that a new mind emerges from the forces pushing it. Dyson and I believe this is what is happening with the web and Google. An intelligence is forming without an overt top-down designer.  Right now that intelligence is rather dimwitted, but it continues to grow. Whether it continues to develop into something near human or greater-than-human remains to be seen. But if this embryonic smartness continued, it would represent a new way of making a mind.  And of course, this indirect way of making something smarter than yourself could be used at any point in the evolutionary bootstrapping cycle of a mind. Perhaps the fourth of fifth generation of a mind may be incapable of designing the next generation but capable of designing a system in which it emerges.

We tend to think of intelligence as singular, but biologically this is unlikely. More likely intelligence is multiple, diverse, and fecund. In the long haul, the central question will concern the differences between the evolvability of these various intelligences. Which types are capable of bootstrapping? And are we one of those?

The Google Email Uploader is a desktop utility for Microsoft Windows that uploads email from other desktop email programs (like Microsoft Outlook) into your Google Apps mailbox. More information can be found at http://code.google.com/p/google-email-uploader/.

Download it here or share this link with your users: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/email_uploader.html