Just finished revising and submitting the final edit of my pending sci-publication. During the last hours of revision, the following was open and continually in use:

• Approximately 8 TextEdit windows
• 2 OpenOffice documents
• 2 Safari browser windows with an average of 5 tabs each
• 1 Firefox window, around 3 tabs
• Average of 2 Finder windows
• iTunes for playing the all inspiring Debussy
• Hard copy printouts of my last major revision iteration

A total of 26 open software windows, and multiple pages of printed material — just for one task. All of this prompts me to think I should revise my work methods. Or not. The RAM is there for a reason. As is OS X’s Exposé feature.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean I have more time on my hands now for blogging. The finals are still ongoing and I’ll have to continue to curb my enthusiasm for expression in favor of soaking up knowledge for a little while longer.

What are the topics that writers of the blogosphere avoid addressing, and why? What issues are so sensitive that we consider them relatively untouchable by us, the people of the world that regularly share our opinions openly?

Having debated the differences of science and religion more than once, and seen the sensitivity that engulfs the issue (even when addressed politely) — I know that many avoid all mention of issues regarding religion, either because of fear of the response or simply out of consideration to those that might get offended. Knowing this, it made me wonder what other untouchable topics were out there, and what made them untouchable.

On a discussion thread with the intelligent crowd over at 9Rules I asked the fellow bloggers to share what they considered were their untouchable topics. The results aren’t really surprising, but I was delighted to see how many would write about anything, provided that they were interested and knowledgeable on the subject.

The pie chart below is a very unscientific estimate of what people mentioned (small group, unprecise answers). Don’t take it too literally, I just include it to get an idea of what came up often. The top untouchable topics cited were religion and politics. Religion I understand, it’s very hard to debate the undebatable without offending someone. But ideally, politics should be something to talk about — after all, politics are based on reason and reasonable debate forges good decisions. Perhaps the current war situation is making the political discussion more sensitive. It would be interesting to see research on public mentality towards politics during war times, I’m quite sure it changes dramatically in many ways.

I’ve collected the main causes mentioned for rendering topics untouchable. These are umbrella concepts. Almost every blogger has his own reasons for avoiding conflict, or for maintaining confidentiality — too keep their readers, to keep their jobs, or to fit the theme of a blog — for example. But the following few should generally cover the spectrum.

• Consideration for others
• Conflict avoidance
• Lack of knowledge on a subject
• Lack of interest
• Confidentiality
• Blog not a proper outlet for the subject

Personally, I feel that there shouldn’t be anything that we can’t talk about, provided that the issues are addressed in a polite and intelligent manner. Given humanities flaws, it’s hard to accomplish — but ideally, it should be our goal. If anything needs the spotlight, we should turn it on.

How about you, what’s your untouchable topic?

A few entries ago I decided on regularly presenting an entry featuring interesting articles by friendly commenters here, along with short reviews. To be featured here, you just need to do two things, number one is writing an intelligent article, number two is commenting here to let me know you exist.

• Shall We Play a Game?

Matt of the Bowl of Stupid blog, delivers a blatant and humorous coverage of psychotic sports fanatics.

• Community Motif

Broc deciphers the online social networks out there. Or as he puts it himself:

If you haven’t noticed already, I dig patterns. In this post I am going to attempt to recognize the patterns of a few different online communities and see how they relate to each other.

• Why Analysing Dreams Is Not Possible

Jakob Knudsen dissects the issue of dream analyzation. I find dream analyzation ridiculous, another child of the perpetually pattern matching human brain. So he had me at the title. But it’s fun to see the examples of dream interpretation and his lucid dreaming argument is great (okay, and I wanted to have mention of lucid dreaming here as a reminder to start practicing).

Enjoy the reading.

In a previous post, Mass Producing Intelligence, I talked about working in the field of artificial intelligence (A.I.) and how I think it’s essentially a gateway to the mass production of intelligence. In the introduction of that entry, I mentioned that all scientific fields had one thing in common: Intelligence. Eli posted a good question, asking me to elaborate on that statement.

• Continue reading …

Some keen readers might have noticed the new Spotplex icon in the Networking section of the sidebar. I just got accepted into their beta trials today. I was a bit surprised as I only heard about Spotplex after they’d closed down their limited open window for beta applicants — but decided to go for it anyway. I consider it flattering to be let in so late.

In case you haven’t heard of Spotplex, it’s a new online service that automatically registers how often blog articles are read. They are then arranged in order of popularity on the pages of Spotplex so you can quickly catch a glimpse of what’s hot and glamorous on the blogosphere.

Due to the fact that it’s the reader-count that determines which articles make it to the frontpages, Spotplex has been hailed by some as the Digg-killer. While I’m sure that Digg now has such a cult-like following that Digg-killer is an overstatement, I do think the automatic-rating system has some pros over Digg. For example, I’m guessing that we can safely assume there will be no Spotplex mafia that has more control than other users of Spotplex. However, the nature of Digg and Spotplex is completely different — so I really think they shouldn’t be compared. Digg uses votes, Spotplex uses hitcount.

I’m still unsure whether Spotplex registers reader-hits from Spotplex itself in addition to regular inkblot readers — or if only regular readers are counted. If it’s the latter, then I’m unsure of whether inkblot earth has enough traffic (yet) to compete against some of the heavier hitters registered on Spotplex. A nice overview article on TechBuzz refers to that model as The Rich getting Richer. But in any case it’s always fun to participate in new kinds of online tech.

Why do I spend hours and hours hammering at a keyboard staring at indented sentences, lines and paragraphs of languages machines speak? Because all the countless fields of science; medicine, biology, mathematics, electronics and so on — have one thing in common: Intelligence. Without intelligence, there would be no science. And artificial intelligence promises mass producing it.

• Continue reading …

I just added my del.icio.us linkroll to the sidebar. It’s sort of an experiment, as I’ve been a bit lazy when it comes to using social-bookmarking services (but intend to do better).

Feel free to add yourself to my network. Also, if you have links I might enjoy you can send them to me through del.icio.us, just add for:hthth to the tags lists when you’re saving a bookmark.

Time for a new kind of entries to spice up the social life and bring respect where its due. Starting with this one, I’m going to make it a regular event to write an entry featuring interesting articles by inkblot earth’s commenters, along with short reviews. To begin with, these reviews will be centric around the delivery of the content, rather than to serve as an extension or response to the article itself.

• Eternal erasing of the scary memory

First up is an article by MC, the author of the Neurophilosophy blog. The title is a reference to the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind written by Charlie Kaufman (great movie, excellent camera work and Jim Carrey does wonders). The article discusses recent the scientific achievements of preventing rats from transferring fearful memories from long-term to short term memory, while still allowing other memories passage intact. The article is not long, but does a great job at highlighting the research, along with appropriate linking to references and extra information.

• Quantum Radar - Lockheed jumps the gun

KuiperCliff does a fantastic questioning of a recent article in The Guardian regarding an announcement of a new quantum radar that can “see through everything”. Doing the right thing, Cliff goes the distance and contacts a physics savvy consultant to get a clearer idea of the story’s validity. The writing style is pleasant, and very well linked for easy info-retrieval. Finally, he ends it with splash of good humor.

• Make Wall Sized Posters With Your Printer

Ok, this isn’t really and article as such — but John of the One Man’s blog found this fantastic website — something I had been trying to find for some time! It’s an online service that allows you to supersize images and print them out over many A4’s (i.e. puzzle together a really large picture from the pages). Great stuff. Check out John’s blog, it’s usually just short blurbs, but the content is always interesting and he updates freakishly often (how do you do it John?!).

• Where Do We Go From Here?

Someone I know only as a Bowl of Stupid wrote a great entry on what it’s like to go through your archives and discovering how much your blog has changed. It’s personal, but it reflects a lot of frustration many of us online writers feel. It’s well written — and BOS, if you want my opinion — write more honest stuff like that entry

That’s it for now. Hope you enjoy the reading.

After a long weekend of playwork (that’s work and play) I now find myself dead tired on a rainy monday, cursing over not knowing how to play the piano (long story, some other time).

On saturday I took part in Tech-Know North 2007, an Icelandic high-tech expo where all the major tech players gathered to show off their awesome gadgets and scientific sorcery (Excuse my weird choice of words, I’m half asleep and enjoying it). I was there on behalf of CADIA (RU’s AI lab), showing off a 3D hexapod simulation platform I created for use in the introductory AI courses.

There’s something about these kinds of installations that I’ve never really liked, from a visitor’s perspective. In the short breaks I got from working my magic at the CADIA booth, I found myself wandering kind of aimlessly around feeling there was too much going on to really enjoy anything specific. I think I’m just built to surf the web — I need the peace and quiet of my own home to really take the time to closely examine new tech; I don’t work in real-time.

The day went fine, however. My quip for the day was: Here we have a 3D hexapod used in the AI courses. The student assignments are to create intelligence for it — allow it to perceive the environment, move around and possibly even interact.

The graphics aren’t that aesthetically pleasing, nor are they of main interest, it’s the underlying architecture and methodology that’s cool. We’re using the fundementals of the Constructionist Design Methodology for making the hexapod brains. Basically, the students create software modules that each serve a specific purpose; for example, one module could handle perceiving and identifying shapes in the environment, another might control the leg muscles. These modules can then be connected together through an AI operating system to function as an holistic system. Kind of like Lego bricks: Brains can be built gradually by continually adding more bricks and thereby increasing the flexibility and intelligence of the system.

Moreover, the modules can be written in different programming languages and still function together. Or each module could run on a separate computer. The methdology paves the way for increased collaboration between AI researchers as brain-modules can be passed around and between people; preventing the continual re-invention of the wheel as has been somewhat of a trend in AI research. The modular approach allows, for example, a machine-vision module someone makes for a robot in Asia to be used in a security system in Europe, simply by plugging it in like a Lego brick … well, ok, its not that simple. But it’s simpler than integrating monolithic monsters of software.

So, don’t you feel like you were at TechKnow now? I didn’t originally intend for this entry to be about AI systems integration, but oh well — seems I didn’t get to talk enough about it at the expo. Hope you enjoyed. If you want to know more about sys-integration, I wrote a hefty Wikipedia article on it (With pictures!). I think I’ll go now and have Citizen Kane inspire me before I doze off … Rose.bud.

[This is Part II of my Meeting with the President, read Part I first]

Some of you might have noticed that I didn’t mention anything about security last time. Well, that’s because there wasn’t any. Not that I know of, anyway. Iceland is extremely peaceful when it comes to harassing politicians, so during a small gathering like this one nobody’s worrying. Amazing, I’m proud of it.

Last time I left off where I was being led into another room, this was the main ceremonial area — with a podium set up (but oddly, no chairs). We didn’t have to wait, it was shortly announced that the President would now do a speech. I was pleasantly surprised by the humorous remarks during the speech, one of which went something like

“We Icelanders have always been inclined to make discoveries — but have the habit of not telling anyone about them. Leifur Eiriksson discovered America … and then just went home again to take care of the farm.”

The speech was also inspiring, or maybe it was just because it was coming from my countries leader, someone I respect — it’s hard to make a distinction (is it the speech that makes a President, or the President that makes the speech?). Meanwhile, the group were standing around (no chairs, remember) and I was anxiously trying to look normal. Insomnia had been having its go at me the night before, so that was kind of throwing me off balance.

One thing that really struck me as odd during all of this were the reporters. Man, are they rude. One of them was playing around with his phone during the speech, occasionally letting out interrupting beeps and bleeps. Another decided to unwrap some candy with snarkly noises, and yet another had fun taking pictures with his phone with the camera-clicking sound turned on (you know, that fake “cli-click” sound).

Well, to slice off some uninteresting tidbits, let’s skip to the next fun thing. The President and the First Lady stepped back, and the director of the Icelandic Student Innovation Fund introduced all of the nominated projects, and I must say that he did a pretty good job with mine, giving me some extra attention. My project was on my theory of creativity, how it works and where it came from. I created a simulation in which A.I. agents showed creativity — so it almost made me burst out with laughter when the director ended his speech with:

“Quite remarkable, and I must say that, in a way, I hope he doesn’t get much further with his research, otherwise he’ll become like god almighty!”

At that moment I’d sort of realized that since he was making such an effort in describing my project, I probably wouldn’t receive the main award. As was actually to be expected as this award takes practicality and applications to industry greatly into consideration; my project is still in its initial stages and largely theoretical. But since then I’ve been humorously referring to myself as Hrafn Almighty. After this final comparison of me and my god-like future, the President stepped forth with my plaque (I can’t find the word for it, honorary plaque?). I’d been hoping to get a picture of me shaking hands with him before this post, but couldn’t and compensate with this one below. I’m the one on the far left. The President on the far right.

I shook his hand and he congratulated me on my achievements, handing me the framed plaque with his signature, while the (rude) reporters snapped their pictures. The main award went to a project on health sciences and genetics, I had a chance later to look briefly through the report on it and must say that from the looks of it, it deserved to win. Of course it was a bit dissapointing (I’m human, after all), but I’m working on AI because I’m interested in it, enjoy it, and think that I can make a contribution to science. That in itself is very rewarding and this was pure bonus The President added after the ceremony that due to the extreme quality of all the projects, he’d felt more like he was handing out a Nobel Prize.