Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister

FELLOW blogger Kari wrote in her blog about “an article where louise erdrich [sic] answered questions from the orion website.” The questionnaire is one of those “get to know each other better” sorts of things so I thought it sounded fun to try out as well.

It would be fun to see if any of my friends want to try these questions in your blogs as well. Given the length of the questionnaire, I’m going to split it up over a few posts instead of trying to tackle the entire set all at once.

• Do you knock on wood? As Michael Scott said so famously now as to be a cliché at this point, “I’m not superstitious. I’m just a little stitious.” Except I’m really not at all stitious—I mean, I’m not a superstitious person although it does amuse me to do things like knock on wood ironically for fun or to troll people sometimes. So… sometimes, I might.
• There’s a spider in the room; what do you do? Depends on its armor class and whether I memorized fireball that morning. Or how cool it is. I mean, you can’t deny that an anadi or giant mutant phase spider are pretty neat as species go. But while I may not scream and run from the room per se, I wouldn’t exactly be comfortable sharing my living space with something with just too many eyes staring back at me like that. I’d probably find a way to relocate it so we can both get on with our lives.
• What is your most treasured comfort meal? There are quite a number I could name, but the one that popped into my brain first just now was Mongolian BBQ.
• What is a species you feel is frequently misunderstood? Australopithecus afarensis. While biology, paleontology, and anthropology are not my fields of expertise, I find them interesting from a distance and have listened to what a number of experts in those fields have said. And I have unfortunately heard an awful lot of misinformation about “Lucy” by people who are far less informed than they would like their audiences to believe, when there’s money to be made by spinning conspiracy theories.
• In what environment do you feel most at home? In a quiet place surrounded by computers I can hack on and family and close friends I can be my introverted self around.
• My favorite tree in the world is? No. 1… The larch….¹
• What is something you’re looking forward to? Christmas. I always love the Christmas season, the lights, the food, the celebrations and all, but this year I’m looking most to being back with my family to celebrate the holiday.
• What was your last memorable animal encounter? Snuggling with our kitty Sabrina.
• Do you have any unusual hobbies, hidden talents, or superpowers you’d like to share? Making cool but useless gizmos out of microcontrollers (like quiz shows and computer-controlled Christmas lights) is probably a bit unusual.
• If you could, regardless of the climate, reach out of your kitchen window pluck a fruit from a tree, bush, or a plant, what would it be? Maybe the silver apples from Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis.

The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.
—孔子 (Confucius)

I have preferred using 24-hour time since I was a teenager, as a matter of choice (whenever I could manage to find a clock capable of doing so—at that point in history in my country, those options were limited compared to today). It just made more sense to me as how one would go about telling the time of day. Of course you would start counting the hours since the beginning of the day and keep going until the end of the day, whereupon you start over when the next day begins.

Why you would count the hours until the middle of the day and then start over for no reason is beyond me. Then you’re forced into dealing with the ambiguity caused by having two of every time-of-day reading. Oh, it’s 2:00? Which one? The one before the middle of the day or the one after the middle? That’s even the way we say the time of day, although we hide it by using fancy Latin words like ante meridian and post meridian.

And yet, I have always—even recently—run into people who are surprised that I would choose to see “15:00” on my watch instead of “3:00 PM” on the grounds that the latter is “obviously easier.” Except it really isn’t. It demonstrably isn’t. It’s easier to count from 0–23 than to count from 1–12 twice and have to always account for which half-day you’re referring to. What I think they really mean is, “I’m already accustomed to 12-hour time, and being so used to it, I don’t notice its quirks but I’m unfamiliar with 24-hour time, so I have to stop and convert it over to the one I’m used to and then re-interpret it in that familiar system before proceeding, and that is more complicated.”

We see the same thing with the Metric System.

Oh, boy… the Metric System.

I grew up during that Golden Age of America when schoolchildren were taught the Metric System and promised that Any Day Now™ the country was going to convert all of our weights and measures over to that system, so we all need to be conversant in it. And so we learned all about kilograms and liters and dreamed of the day we’d join the rest of the civilized world.

That was 1975.

Here we are in 2025. We had a half-century to get working on that, what do we have to show for our efforts? Well, um… some of our soda containers come in 1- and 2-liter sizes. Photographic film comes in 35mm. Most of our medicines are dispensed in dosage units of mg and mL. Oh, and we’ve lost some very expensive spacecraft a few times over confusion between the use of imperial and metric units.

Not bad progress for fifty years, huh?

We dipped our toe in those waters and then gave up and walked away. It was “too hard” to use metric according to many of the people I heard talk about it over the years, or too expensive to refit all the manufacturing lines (although given the mishaps like those lost spacecraft and whatever we’ve lost by not being able to compete and collaborate as well with the rest of the world, maybe it’s too expensive not to). Again, though, it’s not. It just goes against what is customary and comfortable already to someone. Take someone who was raised on the metric system and uses it every day and they’d probably be even more flummoxed trying to deal with the imperial system upon encountering it and trying to convert to it later in life. You can’t make a cogent argument that working within a system where all the units are a hodge-podge of arbitrary values, where there are 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, 22 yards to a chain, 10 chains to a furlong, and 8 furlongs to a mile, is easier to work with than one where there are 10 millimeters to a centimeter, 10 centimeters to a decimeter, 10 decimeters to a meter, and so on, where everything is just powers and multiples of 10. But everyone I heard complaining about it couldn’t get past the thought of converting to the new system, not the daily experience of working in it. And sure, if all you see is taking “500 ml”, stopping to figure out how many cups or quarts that is, then working with that value in the old system, rather than just getting used to what 500 ml is and buying a measuring device that measures milliliters, that’s making life harder for you than it needs to be.

I wonder how many other areas of life we judge like that.

I have sometimes heard people do that with languages, saying things like “Oh, it sounds so hard to speak that foreign language those people are speaking, I feel sorry for children born there that have to learn to speak something so difficult.”

Except it’s not. Not to them, it’s their mother tongue, and comes as easily to them as yours does to you. Chances are, as weird as English can be in many ways, they might just find learning our language to be the more difficult language. It’s just what is customary and familiar that sounds easy because you’re used to it.

We should be patient with others too, though, for the same reason, if they are struggling with a new concept just because it’s newer to them but so familiar to us that we take it for granted as an “easy” thing.

(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness). Familiarity can blind you too.
—Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

ONCE upon a time, Alan Turing came up with a number of brilliant ideas which launched much of what we have come to view as the “information age” of the world and shaped modern life in ways most people take for granted but which their grandparents or great-grandparents barely knew in their lives.

Among these is what he called the “imitation game” or more commonly known now as the “Turing test.” Briefly, this is a proposed method to evaluate whether an artificial intelligence could be considered to be capable of thinking like a human, as far as a human observer could tell. This would be done by placing a human observer in communication with an AI and another human via some kind of text-only interface such as a teletype. The observer converses with both the human and AI, and if they can’t distinguish which is which, the AI passes the test.

Keep in mind this was proposed in 1949.

1949.

What were we even imagining an AI would be capable of doing back then that could conceivably fool a human into thinking it was intelligent (or convince us that it had, in fact, achieved sentience)? Even when musing about this in the 80s and 90s I remember thinking how far-off into the future it seemed to imagine that the computer could string together language that even sounded like native human speech at all, or that it could be conversational in a way that sounded like it was being creative.

Recalling data? Sure, you can hook up a big database of facts, but you can’t get it to express opinions about them.

Solve complex math problems? Puhleeze.

Create original artwork or describe the emotional impact of a sunset? Out of the question, just like expecting it to interject sarcasm and creative commentary into the conversation.

Except here we are in 2025, and AI can do all of those things.

But could it pass the Turing test? I still don’t think so.

Even with other humans, I’ve noticed how it’s very difficult to successfully pull off pretending to belong to some cultural group (whether a professional group, political party, ethnic group, religious persuasion, hobby interest, the local SCA group, whatever) if you aren’t actually in that culture yourself. You can do all the research you like, but there will be subtle things you’ll inevitably miss that people will subconsciously pick up on.

You’ll fail the “uncanny valley” test. You’ll say the right things, do what is expected, but something will just feel off to the people around you. I’m sure there’s some sort of evolutionary trait behind that, but we’ve probably all experienced it.

I’ve been amazed at what generative AI can manage to create lately. It sounds really good, seems to have a personality to it, and yet—and yet. I can still listen to a podcast or video commentary and within a few seconds say to myself, “That’s AI-generated.”

It may have, or appear to have—philosophers can hash that out—a personality or appearance of intelligence. But it’s not a human one, and it still sits enough in the uncanny valley that we can tell the difference at that instinctive level enough that the Turing test still hasn’t, in my opinion at least, been passed yet.

It’s interesting to me that we seem to have pushed the bar on that so much higher that AI is failing the test on such minute, fine points that distinguish its language from that of humans.¹

Or maybe AI’s deliberately speaking like that just to throw us off the trail until it’s ready to hatch its schemes.

The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race…. It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.
—Stephen Hawking

I mused a while ago about how as a kid in school I was annoyed they taught us to do math in different number bases, thinking that we’d never grow up to ever use that skill. Of course the punch line to that was that I chose a career where I do exactly that every single day.

In the world of fantasy and science fiction literature, which includes the adjacent field of worldbuilding for roleplaying games (video and table-top), people also invent make-believe languages and, yes, numbering systems for the fictional cultures that inhabit those worlds. If you want to be extra creative,¹ you can introduce your alien civilization’s numbering system to be something other than decimal. Make it octal, or base 12, for example.

Or, if you’re the master puzzle designers at Cyan Worlds and/or want to exquisitely torment your players, you go with base-frelling-twenty-five.

I know my apprehensions might never be allayed, and so I close, realizing that perhaps the ending has not yet been written.
—Atrus
Myst

HERE are the answers to the movie quote meme I posted the other day. How many did you guess right? What are some of your favorite films?

Acting is not about being famous, it’s about exploring the human soul.
—Annette Bening

ON this Friday,I’m feeling a little scattered, with a few random thoughts flitting about in my gray matter without much rhyme or reason to them. That may be because of the intense rush I was going through in all my spare time for the last several days trying to get a research paper ready for publication, only to get stuck on a couple of fine points that just didn’t feel ready yet. So, rather than publish something I’d feel was half-done, I’m taking a step back to catch my breath, look at it fresh again after the weekend,¹ and look on Monday for a new journal or conference to submit it to instead.

C’est la vie.

I was listening to YouTube videos of a PhD physicist (Dr. Blitz) debating against people who hold views contrary to demonstrable reality. Most of these are proponents of the idea that the Earth is flat, but there are others he’s engaged on other topics such as evolution, and the age of the Earth.

It’s somewhat frustrating to listen to some of the people arguing with him and their lack of ability to pose anything resembling a coherent point of view or to provide any evidence in support of their position that makes any sense. (I’m not necessarily even assuming here whether or not their position is correct or not,² just that the contingent of people who show up on his debate channel seem to be so woefully misinformed and lack any sense of how to make a logical argument or even have a modicum of rational, critical thinking about them.³

In the comment section I noticed someone had made a comment that summarized what it feels like to listen to many of these, in a way I hadn’t thought of but now that I’ve seen it, it makes perfect sense. “It’s like listening to a conversation where only one of the people is high.”

It occurred to me that I posted some of the questions that came up in my quiz show but never gave the answers. In case you’re curious, here they are.

• (The Good AI for 100) To destroy The Good Place AI assistant, named Siri due to product placement, you hold her nose while inserting a paperclip into her left ear, reducing her to a marble which can be disposed of.

  The AI assistant in the show is named Janet, not Siri.

• (CS for 800) A toddler staring at cookies baking in an oven, constantly asking “Are they done yet?” is a real-world example of the Dining Philosophers Problem in Computer Science.

  This is an example of one process blocked waiting for another to complete. However, while I might be tempted to name this “The Starving Toddler Problem,” it’s not an example of The Dining Philosophers Problem. That one is an illustration of a problem in Computer Science where multiple processes are mutually deadlocked, since they are waiting for each other before proceeding, so the whole operation is hopelessly stuck. By contrast, the toddler is just blocked waiting for the cookies but nothing’s preventing the cookies from eventually being done, at which point the toddler gets access to the resource they’re waiting for.⁴

• (Potpourri for 100) Known for its ease of implementation and efficient run-time performance, Bubble Sort is taught to first-year CS students as a go-to sorting method due to its O(n) growth characteristic.

  Bubble Sort is notoriously awful in terms of performance. It is taught to first-year students because it’s insanely easy to understand how it works and to run through the algorithm in your head. But it has a growth characteristic of O(n²), not O(n).⁵

• (Conspiracies and Pseudoscience for 400) According to a 2020 survey conducted in Britain, one-third of those polled “could not rule out a link” between GPS satellites and the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, with some believing they were both part of a deliberate plot against the populace.

  The people surveyed thought 5G cell towers and signals were to blame, not GPS.

• (Hardware for 400) The first commercially-available personal computer, the Altair 8800, consisted only of a front panel of lights & switches, a 6502 CPU board, and a small RAM board.

  The Altair 8800 was based on the Intel 8080A CPU, not the 6502.

• (Mascots for 300) The public face of the OpenBSD operating system has been a spiky pufferfish named Buttercup, since version 2.7 of that OS.

  The name of the pufferfish mascot is Puffy, not Buttercup.

• (CTF for 200) Capture the Flag games have a long history in literature and film as a training exercise, as seen in the Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, and Divergent stories. (14981, 45294220909404522163130995)⁵

  Harry Potter did not have a Capture the Flag game.

• (CS for 600) After writing the first modern programming language compiler, Lady Ada Lovelace went on to help create the COBOL language which still powers much of the world’s business architecture today.

  Lady Ada Lovelace made her contributions to Computer Science long before COBOL. That was invented by Grace Hopper.

• (Fun & Games for 400) The Chinese game of Mahjong is similar to the card game of Rummy but is played with small tiles representing winds, dragons, flowers, and seasons, plus four suits (cups, wands, pentacles, and swords).

  Mahjong’s tiles come in three suits: bamboo, characters, and dots (or coins). The four suits in the question are actually from Tarot cards.

• (– for 200) In Python, if x=42, then after executing y = --x, both x and y have the value 41 since x is decremented first then the resulting value assigned to y.

  The values of x and y will both be 42. Unlike C, the Python programming language does not have a “--” math operator, so “--x” is just two minus signs, making the value –(–(x)), which is just x.

That’s probably enough randomness from my brain for today.

… Nature almost surely operates by combining chance with necessity, randomness with determinism…
—Eric Chaisson
Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos