Genetic Design

One of the similarities between television programs and websites is their desire to attract individuals and keep them interested for as long as possible. However, there are a number of variables influencing people's interest. If we normalized for content driven interest, we can determine an optimal visual presentation using genetic algorithms (with visit length as the fitness function).

The main problem would be that people expect a website or television program to be a fairly continuous experience (with some exceptions, like MySpace, where each page is a different "space"). If every link felt like it took you to a new website, there'd be a severe decline in usability. One potential solution to this would be to have multiple populations, and have only minor variations for each user while there may be huge variations between users.

There's also very different considerations for different types of websites and programming (online stores vs. online news vs. game websites, television shopping vs. news programs vs. game shows...).

Stealing from the Poor

Imagine two people, A and B. B sells various products. A buys one and gives it back to B. B resells it to another individual. It seems like A should be able to do this, it's just a donation.

Scenario two: B sells A a product, but never gives it to A. B has stolen from A.

Scenario three, a combination: B sells A a product, and never gives it to A. Instead B gives it to another person, C. Now let's say C just gives it back to B. It seems like C is just as responsible for the theft as B is.

I just bought some pretzels from a vending machine. It also dropped two bags of sour cream and onion potato chips, which I don't care for, that were dangling nearby (already paid for). I gave one bag to some people working nearby, but the other I put on a shelf with some similar chips, behind a chain window protecting some food products for the night. There are cameras that watch this spot for theft, but what about this kind of theft?

Dream Language

Reconsidering the idea of language as an emergent phenomenon, as elaborated upon by AI researchers and new media artists, I realized something about dreams.

Words are no good for describing dreams because language has evolved in the context of a persistent world — a world that can be shared and reflected upon without the observational act interrupting anything (at least on a macroscopic scale). Dream situations don't have any of these characteristics.

Collaborative Semantic Bookmarking

When it comes to the semantic web, the general concern amongst researchers is feasability. If implemented, it would afford countless opportunities — but the path is the problem. How would we go about developing ontologies for the semantic web? And who would spend the time writing semantically accurate markup? Search doesn't seem so terrible right now, so there's no incentive.

What if, instead of waiting for an incentive on the producer's end, the users had an incentive to implement the semantic web? I propose this idea as an initial step: a collaborative bookmarking system, a la del.icio.us, allowing for semantic tagging rather than keyword tagging.

A first incarnation of semantic tagging might simply allow you to assign binary relationships in the form subject-verb-object, where subject is always the page in question. As a naive example, consider "Brain Diseases I Wish I Had". del.icio.us users have used the tags "article", "video", "science" and "psychology" (amongst other things). Semantic tags would say that it is in the form of an article, addresses science and psychology, and contains video.

Users would contribute this information because it would allow them to search their own bookmarks easily and find new links contributed by other users more efficiently. Using current web technologies like Ajax to reccomend words for relational tags (like "contains") would help hone the network. Clustering algorithms already implemented on sites like Flickr could help answer questions about the architecture of the web and increase the accuracy of search results despite multiple naming conventions. Simple analysis would allow automated summaries of a site's contents.

Over time, more detailed semantic information could be added (like recognizing psychology as a type of science), or even imported from Wikipedia or other open categorization systems and expanded upon.

Dance Connections

Some things I've learned recently from Dance Movies and Tere O'Connor's Frozen Mommy:

• A title can be a linguistic stepping stone from which a non-linguistic art journeys away from.
• Art develops over time — including the time for the audience to resolve their impressions.
• If music needs silence, dance needs stillness.
• If music is what we hear as music, dance is simply movement we see as dance.
• Sample-based music was preceded by sample-based dances.

There seems to be a connection between noise art and non-representative dance as well.

Real Artificial Improvisers

Most artificial improvisational agents are restrained by their creator's naive definition of improvisation. If improvisation is understood as a choice amongst possibilities rather than simply the act of creating, it's obvious why: the choice of most agents is not their own, but their creator's. The agents simply carry out the creation. A true improvisational agent would be able to develop its own preferences. The closest thing I've seen to this yet is the Bacterial Orchestra.

The Problem of Pain

Some thoughts on "The Problem of Pain" by C.S. Lewis:

...Divine freedom cannot mean indeterminacy between alternatives and choice of one of them.

Determinism is generally ignored when it comes to resolving the problem (i.e., "Why doesn't God make us love Him and one another?") because, intuitively, love seems to require choice. But if God has no choice, how can He love?

...if God's moral judgement differs from ours so that our 'black' may be His 'white', we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say 'God is good', while asserting that His goodness is wholly other than ours, is really only to say 'God is we know not what'.

Lewis spends the rest of the chapter explaining how God uses pain to shape us, and how it may be a means to an end that only He sees clearly. This obfuscates the issue, it doesn't matter if some 'black' is really 'white'. Any remaining 'black' at all contradicts the possibility of an omnipotent loving God. To accept this as a solution is to call all 'black' 'white', which Lewis rejects. He doubly rejects this, indirectly, in the next chapter:

'Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God' [James 1:13] Many schools of thought encourage us to shift the responsibility for our behavior from our own shoulders to some inherent necessity in the nature of human life, and thus, indirectly, to the Creator.

But if all 'black' is really 'white', then it is 'white' because the evil emergent from sin is necessary.

We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the 'unimaginable sum of human misery'. [...] There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it.

The "sum of human misery" is a poor rendering of a common intuition: it isn't the sum, but the universality of suffering that's unimaginable.