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Suicide Online
A recent study in the BMJ Suicide and the Internet, found that results for suicide-related search terms most frequently support or encourage suicide.
I like to think of the Internet as one big ecosystem of ideas, or memes, where our minds naturally select out the good ones. Obviously, if most sites are pro-suicide, then we need to get some better memes online.
So if you’ve stumbled across this blog post after googling “how to commit suicide” or “should I kill myself?” or seeking other suicide advice, please take a moment to consider the following reasons not to logout of this great big game of life:
Don’t you want to know what happens next? Like what’s that show Lost all about? I mean, really, what’s the deal with that freaky island? Is it a crazy scientific experiment, a paranormal limbo, or the imagination of some four-year-old girl playing dollies in a sandbox somewhere? If you kill yourself, you’ll never find out! And there’s a lot of other stuff you’ll miss out on too, like movie sequels and xkcd comics and the end of George Bush’s Presidency!
Do some charity work! Giving to others has been scientifically proven to make people happier. Suicide might end you, but everyone else has to live with the burden of your death. Instead of transferring your pain to others, work to easy their pain, and improve your own outlook on life in the process.
Puppies! Ending yourself denies you the opportunity to meet all the puppies still to come into this world!
Just another reason not to commit suicide. Photo by ehecatzin |
Pain isn’t forever. It only feels that way. Death is forever. That means it lasts longer than high school, bankruptcy, heartbreak, and the extended director’s cut of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
People will make fun of you. (Q: How does Kurt Cobain collect his thoughts? A: With a dust buster.)
Kittens! Awwww… Wookie da wittle kee-kees! Aren’t they just adorable? Go pick one up from the SPCA today!
They don’t want you to commit suicide Photo by Ruskis |
Stop taking life so seriously! Look, according to Dr. Nick Bostrom at Oxford University, chances are pretty good that we are living in a computer simulation and Brian Whitworth at Massey University has even got a pretty good explanation of how our physical world is a virtual reality. And I’ve got a short story online exploring the implications of this hypothesis. Go spend some time in Second Life to get some perspective.
Do you know what happens to Super Mario every time he dies trying to complete a level? He has to go back to the beginning and start all over again. If life’s a video game, then you’re gonna have to relive all this until you get it right.
Don’t log out of the game, get into it!
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Follow Up On Vista
Hat Tip to Chriggy, who sent me this link of a microsoft manager explaining that aggravating the heck out of me with Windows Vista was by design. Incredible.
Hat Tip to TGAW for sending the following PC vs Mac commercial:
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The Joys of Windows Vista
Microsoft has come up with a novel solution to the issue of security in Windows Vista. The basic principle is don’t let the user do anything. You see, if users are prevented from any productivity whatsoever, they can’t screw things up right?
Take for instance User Account Control. This is a new “feature” (note the scarequotes), which asks the user for permission every time they try to do something:
so I had to get this photo with my digital camera. |
It works like this: When you double click on Firefox, you get this pop-up stating that it appears Firefox is trying to run. Do you wish to allow it? You click OK. You try to share a folder, and you get this pop-up stating that it appears something is trying to share a folder. Do you wish to allow it? You click OK. You double click an MP3 and get a warning that Windows Media Player is trying to run. You click OK.
Turning off this “feature” walks you through the depraved sadism that must exist in the minds of Microsoft Developers. I could really feel their contempt for me as a user when I first went to the Windows Security Center and found User Account Control listed there, set to “ON,” with no way to modify it.
There was, however, an unhelpful link below this meaningless status indicator reading, “How does User Account Control help protect my computer?”
How indeed. The help topic unhelpfully explained that User Account Control protects my computer by making me click “OK” every time I want to do something.
Truly fascinating, but as Benjamin Franklin wisely cautioned, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” So despite the immense security clicking all these “OK” buttons was affording me, I decided I would trade security for freedom and efficiency by turning them off.
The help topic on this “feature” had nothing to say about how to do that.
So, of course, I consulted that great oracle of how to’s for usurping Microsoft’s bureaucracy, Google, and found this article, which directed me to “User Accounts and Family Safety.” Where I was able to disable the feature, after, of course, being informed that something was trying to disable User Account Control and clicking OK.
Now every time I start Windows Vista, I get a helpful alert message warning me that User Account Control is turned off.
Windows Vista is extremely pretty though.
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One of a Kind
If you are reading this, then you are a member of the human race.
You are a member of Kingdom Animalia, meaning you are multicellular, but, unlike plants, your cells do not have a cell wall. You are a member of Phylum Chordata, meaning you have a central nervous system, and Subphylum Vertebrata, meaning you also have a backbone to protect your dorsal nerve cord.
Your warm bloodedness and mammary glands put you in Class Mammalia. Your Subclass, Placentalia, means you were fully gestated inside your mother before birth, as opposed to being grown in a pouch like kangaroos.
modern chimp in the upper left-hand corner, then a chronologic sequence of hominids ending with modern humans. Image courtesy NSF (Click for Larger Image) |
Like other members of the Order Primates, you have grasping hands, fingers, and both incisors and molars for teeth. Being in the Family Hominidae, you stand upright, have a large brain, stereoscopic vision, and a flat face. Your Genus, Homo, defines you as having an s-curved spine, and your Species, Homo Sapiens, means you have a well-developed chin and high forehead, which provides room for your brain’s frontal lobe, giving you cognitive ability to imagine the future and plan ahead.
There are presently 6.5 Billion beings in this club we call the Human Race. Even though we all share this taxonomic classification, we still exhibit a tremendous amount of diversity in our genes. Unless you have an identical twin, the chances of someone else having the exact same DNA sequence as you is 1 in 6 million, meaning there are in the area of 1083 people on this planet genetically identical to you.
Despite sharing this identical internal genetic code, known as your genotype, your outward expression of this code, your phenotype, is very different. Our DNA gives our bodies a great deal of plasticity when it comes to growing into our environments. All sorts of environmental factors, such as nutrition, climate, your mother’s womb, and physical experiences have all made your personal DNA expression unique.
Even if your genes did express themselves in the exact same way, as they almost do in identical twins, your personal experiences would be unique. Only you occupy the precise space and time in which you currently exist. No one else can occupy your space-time coordinates, and experience the world the way you do.
You will glimpse less than a century of the Universe’s projected googolplex years of life in your own lifetime (one followed by 100 zeros). The atoms that currently make up your body, atoms forged in the centers of stars millions of light years away and billions of years ago, will disassemble. Some of these will find their way into other living things, all of them will continue to venture throughout the Universe in one form or another until the end of time.
But nothing exactly like you will ever experience this Universe the way you are now. You are the Universe observing itself in this momentary flash of consciousness. Savor it.
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RL Iron Man
So I saw Iron Man this weekend. Totally rocked. I loved the whole superhero as inventor meme. Very exciting. Very DIY (Do It Yourself).
But something hit me as I was driving home from the theater, we can build Iron Man right now. We have the technology.
First take one of Cyberdyne’s1 Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL) exosuit, the suit increases the strength of its user and has a multitude of other applications:
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Then strap on Yves Rossy’s kerosene-powered jetpack:
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Then purchase a whole bunch of ThinkGeek’s Titanium Sporks, and melt them down for the body armor! Voila!
1 Yes, named after the fictional company from the Terminator movies. I don’t know if HAL is named after the computer in 2001, which is an acronym play on “I.B.M.” (H->I A->B L->M).
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Roller-Coaster Physics Game
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FREE: Send Your Name to the Moon
Send Your Name to the Moon Project |
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Free Comic Book Day, Saturnday May 3rd
Drop into Earth 383 tommorrow and pick up some free comics for yourself and the kids. Comics are a great way to get children into reading and the many games at Earth 383 promote imagination, intelligent thought, and creative problem solving.
Earth 383 is located around the corner from Levels at 212 N. Martin Luther King St. The phone number is 252.331.7686.
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Let the Phytoremediation Begin!
The Environmental Compliance Division at the Coast Guard base where I work is tasked with cleaning up decades worth of environmental problem areas on base and instituting sustainable operating procedures in the way the Coast Guard serves America. According to ARSC’s newsletter, we “recycled (kept out of landfills) 1330 pounds of toner cartridges in 2007” and kept 1005 pounds of alkaline batteries from landfills by recycling, five times the amount of batteries recycled in 20061.
To clean up past bad practices, the ECD has started planting trees in contaminated areas, which draw pollutants out of the ground and prevent them from contaminating the water table. The fans on short poles visible amid the trees in these photos are drawing petroleum hydrocarbons out of the soil and atomizing them into the air.
Aircraft Repair & Supply Center, Elizabeth City (Click for Larger Image) |
From the information sign in front of this field:
From 1941 until 1991, the surrounding area was used as a fuel farm for aircraft refueling. The fuel farm consisted of multiple underground and above-ground storage tanks which were decommissioned and removed from the site. Evidence of a release was observed during the tank removal activities, resulting in impacts on subsurface soils and groundwater by petroleum hydrocarbons. Phytoremediation was the selected remedy to control and contain contaminated groundwater migration and to remediate impacted soil and groundwater. Phytoremediation is an innovative and cost-effective technology that refers to the use of plant-based systems to remove, degrade, or stabilize environmental contaminants present in soil and/or groundwater.
Aircraft Repair & Supply Center, Elizabeth City (Click for Larger Image) |
Both poplar and willow trees have been planted across the site to remediate subsurface soils and groundwater. The use of both poplar and willow trees within a phytoremediation plot can capitalize on the favorable phytoremediation potential specific to each species. The phytoremediation project is being performed in a combined effort with the United States Coast Guard, ARCADIS, North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources, United States Geological Survey, and North Carolina State University.
Wikipedia entry for Phytoremediation.
1“ARSC Environmental Goals,” The Flyer Volume 1, Issue 2, Feburary 2008.
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Sitcoms are “Cognitive Heatsinks”
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Clay Shirkyon, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, has an excellent post up, titled Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, where he calls television sitcoms a “cognitive heat sink,” which dissipate our thought potential, preventing us from putting our over-abundance of free time to use in intellectually-productive activities. (Don’t have an “over-abundance of free time?” If you watch TV you do.)
Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. … However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.
Shirkyon does the math on how many human-hours have gone into writing Wikipedia, and discovers that, for the amount of time we spend watching television, we could produce “2,000 Wikipedia projects a year.” Collective enterprises like Wikipedia and the intertwingularity of Web 2.0 activities are all part of the emerging “Participation Culture,” which values inclusive media over hierarchical mediums, and it’s not just a fad:
Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.
Those of use who grew up without computers and the Internet have an excuse for the way we struggle to break our old-media habits. There’s no excuse for constraining our children with them too.
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Become a RedPill: Kill Your Television
I get funny looks when I admit to people I don’t own a TV. I get the impression they think I’m some kind of flaky activist. In fact, people have even told me as much.
They seem to think it’s unnatural not to spend more than four hours a day on an activity that burns just five calories more an hour than sleeping.
Likewise, I don’t get people who own televisions. TVs are big dumb conversational bullies that don’t care about you, what you want, or what you think. Television doesn’t care what time you want to watch a show, it’s going to show things according to it’s schedule and you will conform if you want to know what everyone’s talking about around the water-cooler tomorrow. Television is great for promoting inane small talk about its fantasy world, a completely unproductive exercise. It’s like Mark Twain said, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” People do the same with TV.
Television is virtual reality. Sports fans in bars scream at projection-screen TV’s all over the world, despite the fact that the football players can’t hear them. Faux News describes the world outside as nothing but car chases and violence, but the reality is that America is safer than it’s ever been. African Americans are not just thugs and whores as Black Entertainment Television (BET) wants us to believe.
To quote Ron Kaufman, “Why do you think they call it programming?”
So join the RedPills, and kill your television. You could go outside, you could join an MMORP, you could jump into a chat room, start your own blog, contribute to Wikipedia, join a social network, start a flash mob, make an LOLCat, or just MAKE. Whatever you do, engage, don’t be a passive receptacle for advertising sponsors.
Who’s going to win the next American Idol? I am, because I’m not going to watch it.
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Humans Aren’t the Only Ones…
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When Galaxies Collide
NASA has released 59 new images of colliding galaxies. w00t!
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Attractors Flash Game
It didn’t take me long to figure this puzzle out (HINT: It’s not something you figure out), but I did enjoy the attractors flash game more than the commenters.
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Free E-Book: Programming Through Natural Selection
Genetic Programming |
I’ve heard this field referred to as “Emergent Programming,” but there’s a Free E-Book on Genetic Programming available for download, which covers the method of using natural selection to evolve computer programs (HT Oranchak). The method has been used to find more efficient algorithms and programming methodologies.
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R.L. A.I.
was an early AI that could move withot bumping into things |
Science Fiction is rife with intelligent machines. C-3PO in “Star Wars,” the HAL 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” KITT from “Knight Rider,” Data from “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” the Terminator, Sonny from “I, Robot,” the agents from “The Matrix,” and the deceptively artificial humans from the movies “A.I.” and “Westworld” are commonplace in our fictional futures.
Video games are filled with AIs who compete against human players. The better the AI, the more challenging gaming experience. Since computers started decisively beating the best chess players on Earth, grandmasters have started coaching competing chess AIs against each other. Artificial Intelligence is already integrated into our interactive entertainment, and holds promise for more real-world applications as well.
But is AI really “intelligent?” The father of modern computer science Alan Turing, described a test for determining a machine’s capability of demonstrating thought: a human judge enters a chat room with a human and a computer program, if they cannot identify which is the human and which is the machine, then the machine qualifies as intelligent. This procedure is known as the Turing Test.
A.L.I.C.E is a ChatBot that holds promise for one day passing the Turning Test. ALICE scans sentences given to it in online chat for keywords and returns one of hundreds of appropriate responses based on the context of the conversation. You can chat with ALICE online at alicebot.org.
ALICE does not understand sentences, it feigns understanding. However convincing, ALICE is not intelligent in any sense, it merely pretends at being human.
Actually understanding the meaning of sentences is an incredibly complex task for computer programs. Consider the following two sentences:
“The cat chased the mouse because it was hungry.”
“The cat chased the mouse because it looked appetizing.”
We can easily deduce that the ambiguous pronoun “it” refers to the cat in the first sentence and the mouse in the second, but consider the wealth of personal knowledge and experience required for our minds to make this distinction. The conundrum in AI development is giving a computer program this level of intuition.
Cyc (pronounced “psych”) is one attempt at a computer program that can actually derive meaning from language. Since 1984, researchers have been plugging facts into this program, trying to teach it common sense. Using facts like “Creatures that die stay dead” and “When Abraham Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg, he took his left foot with him,” Cyc makes its own assumptions about the world.
I visited cyc.com and played the “FACTory” trivia game, where Cyc give the player the assumptions it has made from the facts in its database and asks if they are true, false, or don’t make sense at all. One true assumption Cyc had made was, “Devices are typically located in toll booths,” but I had to think about it. “Condominiums are typically located in modern homes,” was an obviously false assumption, and “Ones are typically located in police stations,” failed to make sense to me or any of the other players either.
Child-Robot with Biomimetic Body (CB2) acts like a toddler
(but really it’s just creepy)
At the present moment, Web Developers all over the planet are adding another layer of complexity to the World Wide Web, one that will allow computers to read and process our existing websites. This new layer, called the Semantic Web, holds a great deal of potential for AI development. Already agent programs are running tasks for users on the Internet, retrieving data for them using this new logic layer. Science Fiction has speculated on the possibility of a sentient World Wide Web, maybe the Semantic Web is a step in that direction.
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Earth Day 2008
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David Brin Talk in Extropia Second Life
Last weekend I got to meet one of my favorite SF authors, David Brin, at a virtual talk in Second Life’s Extropia Community.
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It was a packed house, avatars kept crashing, lag was evident, but surprisingly mild. Twice my SL interface got a memory error and crashed, meaning when I logged back into the room, I was standing where I was sitting and looking like a putz to everyone else while the room loaded back in. Just like other members of the audience got booted and then reappeared standing and looking around dazed while their avatar reloaded. It’s not like you can yell, “Down in front!”
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Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of the talk focused on David Brin’s insecurities about the chat format, and whether or not it was progress. “How on Earth could anybody call this “discourse” subtle or detailed or serious?” Brin asked, obviously frustrated at the fact that keeping up with a chat log involving 80-plus people is an exercise in futility.
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I could understand Brin’s frustrations; however, I had to completely disagree with him on the inadequacy of the medium. Many people are perfectly happy with chat rooms, some with blogs, other television, and others books. Brin unnecessarily put down RSS because he has “so little life span,” and seemed to indicate that he believes the “cocktail party” format is superior for communicating information to the Internet.
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Yet, I personally absolutely despise real-life parties for the same reason Brin dislikes virtual ones, there’s too many voices going off at once and I end up losing track of all of them. I get dizzy and disoriented at parties, and often feel as though I should wear a button to them that reads, “I’m smiling because I have no idea what’s going on.”
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At least I can save and review a chat log, usually finding many wonderful meme morsels in them. I sift 400-plus science articles a day, because I’m looking for only the most interesting stories. I blog, because that’s the only way I can keep from being talked over, which is what happens in every other real-life medium I’ve encountered. Instead of criticizing our online formats, David Brin should have been celebrating the fact that people like us have found a way to express ourselves and exchange ideas.
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Not enough of the discussion was about the Western Enlightenment, but there was enough to make me think about coffee shops, and how they got their start during the Enlightenment. Intellectuals would gather, get caffinated, and engage in late-night discussions about science and philosophy. This was before the Renaissance came along and squash rationality with its oppressive foo-foo idealism.
User Interface Displayed |
Today, coffee shops have been abandoned to the artists, and the scholars of the Enlightenment have moved to the online world, like hanging out on blogs, RSS Feeds, and in the anything-goes realm of Second Life. I think that is progress.
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Break Your Children Off of Books Today
When I had to learn SQABasic for automated testing, I downloaded and printed out the 902 page reference guide, three-hole punched it, and put it into a three-ring binder. The only nice thing about this otherwise idiotic and wasteful act of mine was that I printed it two-up and double-sided to conserve paper.
Now I’m in the process of migrating into Database Development. Having to learn the intricacies of our relational database, I downloaded the Ingres 2006 SQL Reference Guide. It’s a PDF file, and it’s taking every ounce of my willpower now not to print it out.
In the comments section of his July, 2007 article, A Defense of the Book, Alan Wall argues:
I value computer technology, and could not function without it (here I am, after all) but I am yet to meet anyone who would rather read Paradise Lost on a computer screen, or read Dickens on a train from a laptop.
He’s correct that there is a strong resistance to people reading entire books electronically, but this is not proof that print-books are intrinsically superior to e-books. The resistance has much more to do with what’s familiar to us. Print books are incredibly inefficient and devoid of features when compared to the same literature placed in an electronic medium.
There’s no “Find” function in a book. I can’t cut-and-paste my favorite quotes and blockquotes into other files, I have to transcribe them by hand or scan them with text-reading software. I can’t store a book online and reference it from any computer in the world, including my cell-phone.
If I cite a book in one of my posts, anyone who wants to check my sources has to call the library or check the book’s availability online. Then, if the library doesn’t have the book, they call another library and have it sent over. At some point, the scholar has to physically visit the library to pick up the book, and then physically visit the library again to return it.
In a utopian future, libraries will offer nothing but free Internet access and experts to guide people to books online. Romanticists get cold-chills at such a future, as if we are somehow losing something classical rather than gaining something magical. It’s the same nostalgia that keeps us from adopting the Metric System and Dvorak Keyboard layouts.
We didn’t have E-books when I was a kid, so now I must unlearn my habits and port my mind to this Information Age paradigm. Don’t let your personal resistance to E-books prompt you to saddle your children with the obsolescence of printed texts. Get them reading books online today, and put the world’s library on their bookshelf.
Project Gutenberg is a great place to start, with a collection of over 25,000 classic text available for free online.
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Fun With Animating Magnetic Resonance Images
“Some kids get their ears pierced… others it’s a unique haircut… Charles likes people to see his brain.” - Supervillain Brain Child’s Mother, from The Tick Cartoon
My friend Carolyn and her husband Clint made this really cool animated video from her CT Scan, which I highly recommend. A few months back, I had a series of MRI’s done, but was disappointed to find the quality wasn’t good enough to make my own animated video from the images.
What I have been able to do is turn a few of the image series into animated gifs. The result are what you see below. Click on any image to see a larger version.
Top View of the Head Click Image for 2.1 MB Size Gif |
Front View of the Head Click Image for 2.2 MB Size Gif |
Side View of the Head Click Image for 1.5 MB Size Gif |
Top View of Neck and Chest Click Image for 2.2 MB Size Gif |
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Port Discover Participates in Healthpalooza Kids Health Fair, April 18
Be There or Be Square!!!
Elizabeth City, NC— Port Discover will bring hands-on science activities to Kids Healthpalooza Health Fair, Friday, April 18 from 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. at Southgate Mall. Kids Healthpalooza is sponsored by the Elizabeth City State University Health Resources Center and made possible by generous funding from the North Carolina Health and Wellness Trust Fund, as part of the Health Disparities Initiative. Other participants, including American Red Cross, American Cancer Society, UNC/ECSU Pharmacy Partnership Program, and the College of the Albemarle Nursing Program, will share information along with other information on health topics, healthy lifestyle choices and health careers.The event is free. Additional sponsors include ECSU, Southgate Mall and the Elizabeth City Housing Authority. For information, phone 252-335-3828 or email pharmacy@mail.ecsu.edu. Elementary school and preschool groups are invited to schedule a field trip.
Latest comments
I own a computer. It has television-like qualities; however, it also has much much more interactivity. : )
... read the full comment by Ryan Somma | Comment on Become a RedPill: Kill Your Television Read Become a RedPill: Kill Your Television
Macs are very pretty, and user-friendly, but I’ve been playing around with Ubuntu, user-friendly version of Linux. It’s not for everyone, but I’m working up the nerve to install it as
... read the full comment by Ryan Somma | Comment on The Joys of Windows Vista Read The Joys of Windows Vista
Oh the joys of Microsoft….
Vista has many problems when it comes to allowing the user to control their own computer. Not to mention what you discussed in the blog, Vista also allows automatic VPN from your computer to Microsoft Support. So
... read the full comment by MacAddik | Comment on The Joys of Windows Vista Read The Joys of Windows Vista
Why should I send my name to the moon. Who’s going to read it - martians from outerspace.
... read the full comment by SK | Comment on FREE: Send Your Name to the Moon Read FREE: Send Your Name to the Moon