The Oaths

While sitting outside my dorm, I once noted that a familiar quote was written on several pillars around the traditional area for smoking known as "The Cancer Hut" by most students.

When I asked a friend, he pointed out it was the Green Lantern motto, so I figured I'd post each one for pure interest.

Green Lanterns:
In Brightest Day,
In Blackest Night,
No Evil Shall Escape My Sight.
Let Those Who Worship Evil's Might
Beware My Power-- Green Lantern's Might.

*Side note: The Green Lanterns' powers are based off willpower, odd it doesn't mention this.

Star Sapphires (violet):
For hearts long lost and full of fright,
For those alone in blackest night,
Accept our ring and join our fight,
Love conquers all-- With violet light!

Red Lantern Corps:
With blood and rage of crimson red,
Ripped from the corpse so freshly dead,
Together with our hellish hate,
We'll burn you all-- That is your fate!

Sinestro Corps (Yellow):
In blackest day, in brightest night,
Beware your fears made into light,
Let those who try to stop what's right
Burn like his power-- Sinestro's might!

Blue Lantern Corps:
In fearful day, in raging night,
With strong hearts full, our souls ignite,
When all seems lost in the War of Light,
Look to the stars-- For hope burns bright!

Black Lantern Corps:
The blackest light fall from the skies,
The darkness grows as all light dies,
We crave your hearts and your demise,
By my black hand-- The dead shall rise!

Unfortunately, the Oaths for the Indigo Corps and Agent Orange (and his constructs) have yet to be spoken. Orange's is based off greed, while indigo's is in a language readers can't understand but stands for compassion.

I would like to see a Lantern Corps based off knowledge (i.e. truth, understanding) but that isn't an emotion.

The Chemistry

I quite enjoy random conversation, its amusing, allows everyone to join in, and usually can't be taken to a realm of extremism where it isn't still funny.

While eating with the normal crew I ended up having a discussion with Poland about The Matrix and what it would be like if instead of learning Kung Fu, Neo learned Chemistry.

So I present a collection of quotes redone for Chemistry:


Trinity: I know why you're here, Neo. I know what you've been doing... why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night, you sit by your computer. You're studying for Chem. I know because I was once looking for the same thing. And when he found me, he told me I wasn't really looking for Chemistry. I was looking for answers. It's the questions that drives us,
Neo. It's the questions that brought you here. You know the questions, just as I did.
Neo: What is the answer to 2B part A?
Trinity: The answer is out there, Neo, and it's looking for you, and it will find you if you want it to.

Neo: Whoa. Déjà vu.
[Everyone freezes right in their tracks]
Trinity: What did you just say?
Neo: Nothing. Just had a little déjà vu.
Trinity: What did you see?
Cypher: What happened?
Neo: A cation went past us, and then another that looked just like it.
Trinity: How much like it? Was it the same cation?
Neo: It might have been. I'm not sure.
Morpheus: Switch! Apoc!
Neo: What is it?
Trinity: A déjà vu is usually a boring part of Chemistry. It happens when they change something.

Morpheus: What are you waiting for? You're faster than this. Don't think you are, know you are. Come on. Stop trying to balance the equation and do it.

Morpheus: I imagine that right now, you're feeling a bit like Alice. Hmm? Tumbling down the rabbit hole?
Neo: You could say that.
Morpheus: I see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up. Ironically, that's not far from the truth. Do you believe in fate, Neo?
Neo: No.
Morpheus: Why not?
Neo: Because I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my life.
Morpheus: I know *exactly* what you mean. Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?
Neo: Chemistry.
Morpheus: Do you want to know what it is?
Neo: Yes.
Morpheus: Chemistry is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave to Chemistry, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into textbook bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.

Neo: What did she tell you?
Morpheus: That I should study more.

Agent Smith: You hear that Mr. Anderson?... That is the sound of inevitability... It is the sound of your failing out of college... Goodbye, Mr. Anderson...
Neo: My name... is Neo.

Neo: Yeah. That sounds like a really good deal. But I got a better one. How about... I give you the finger... and you give me my scantron?
Agent Smith: Mr. Anderson... you disappoint me.
Neo: You can't scare me with this Gestapo crap. I know my rights. I want my scantron.
Agent Smith: Tell me, Mr. Anderson... what good is a scantron... if you're unable to write?

Neo: What are you trying to tell me? That I can convert to liters?
Morpheus: No, Neo. I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready, you won't have to.

Tank: So what do you need? Besides a miracle.
Neo: Calculators. Lots of calculators.

Morpheus: How did the test beat you?
Neo: It... it's too fast.
Morpheus: Do you believe that the test being stronger or faster has anything to do with the questions in this place?

Morpheus: This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and change your major. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is:

Yet again while using Stumbleupon I stumbled onto a website called Long Bets. The concept is quite intriguing; a person who is willing to put down money, makes a scientific/economic bet stating their belief and writing an argument on why they believe they will be correct. A challenger comes along and refutes this claim with their own argument. They work out the sum to be paid, and all the money goes two charities of the challenger and predictor's choosing (if the predictor wins, the challenger pays to the predictor's charity and vice versa). Bets can range from as little as $100 to an amazing $1,000,000 prediction by the well known Warren Buffett.

So I figured I'm discuss some of the bets on the site.

» By 2029 no computer will have passed the Turing Test. Bet: $20,000

The Turing Test is designed to see if a person (Person B) can tell the difference between another human (Person A) and a Computer (or machine intelligence) in normal conversation usually through an Instant Messanger system or the like.

There are two approaches as to what kind of computer would be able to pass this, this first being an entity capable of human-level "thinking" or "intelligence", while the second is that the computer would outwardly appear to be human but consist much of something akin to canned responses.

The second would be something like giving the intelligent system a large amount of data to work with, such as giving it a vast library to scan, perhaps logs of chat, and respond in a similar fashion. The only problem is that this isn't true thinking. It really isn't different than asking a computer to store and recall facts, which is NOT true intelligence. You wouldn't ask "What is the square root of 15,545,492?" and get "3,942.77719" as an immediate response. A human would more likely respond with "let me get a caclulator... [time passes]... about 3,943". The problem with this, is that the program would be much less self-sufficient/self-functional and more programmed, which could pass itself off for human, but wouldn't be the depth that humans desire for the test to be beaten.

The first is much harder, and as the challenger argues, something that isn't likely to happen in the next 20 years. Much of the research and development in this territory is going towards replicating or "reverse-engineering" the human brain where current technology comes up greatly short. The entity would have to create a false life with understanding of current knowledge (which would be easy, it is just like storing and recalling facts). The problem comes from emotion, both understanding and displaying it. Since just programming a response (I.E. someone says my friend died recently, and the response is "I'm Sorry") is more on the level of the 2nd, the entity would have to be able to respond on a deeper level (such as trying to console the person).

Personally speaking, I think you could program something to respond in a human way, and we have bots that can do this to a minuscule degree. However, In my opinion, by 2029, the Turing Test will remained truly unbeaten by a computer or machine entity. I will be interested in finding out about that actually manages this in the future.

For more info on the technological limits on computing read about Moore's Law.

» By 2030, Commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotless planes. Bet: $2,000

Pretty straightforward, no complicated explanation needed.

In my opinion, I feel that this bet will be won by the challenger. While some of the people agreeing with the statement cite the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or "UAVs " that are in use by the military as proof that we are close to such an occurrence. The problem is that they are still piloted by humans (albeit remotely), the machines don't think, act, or even fly by themselves. They are in a certain location because a human controlled it, they are performing a certain action because a human made it.

I've always stood by a belief that no matter what, humans can't be completely replaced by machines, at some point a human will have to monitor or complete maintenance on the machines just because of our general distrust of machines doing everything by themselves without monitored by a human able to pull the plug on it. Plus, in yet another couple things that one cannot program into a machine is decision making skills and experience. In the time of an emergency (say the plane that crashed into the Hudson Bay) the pilot (and official badass) Chesley Sullenberger had 34 years of flight experience, something you just can't teach a machine, it must be programmed. Then the problem becomes when the computer can't resolve a problem between multiple rules/regulations or if the problem doesn't fall under the jurisdiction of any specific rule/regulation, humans lack this problem.

The last point is that humans rightfully have a fear of just handing over the reins to a mechanical being. Good examples of this being:

Skynet - Computer system from the Terminator movies (left).

HAL 9000- Computer system from 2001 A Space Odyssey (right).

Believe me, you want neither piloting your ships.

I think the UAV option is quite valid, but as the challenger states, the FAA would take a long time and people would be vary wary of such a major change. The question then is: could "Sully" have pulled off what he did, without being in the cockpit of a plane?

» The Large Hadron Collider will destroy Earth. Bet: $1,000

I'll let this video do the talking for me:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Large Hadron Collider
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Joke of the Day

I shall leave you with a suggestion, if there is one thing you should do before the summer ends, go see the film "Moon".

In A Flash, Cut To Me With Hand In Hands

I know I am late to the game on commenting on things related to music and the interwebs, during the Piratebay trials would have been more appropriate, but hey, better late than never.

This (the spark that caused me to want to write this) was all influenced by Pandora Radio (another great waste of your time, if you enjoy listening to music) posting a video responding to viewer mail. The conversation quickly turned to some Facebook users voicing their discontent over their new micro-transaction and subscription options.

For those unfamiliar with micro-transactions or "MTs" as they are sometimes abbreviated to, are basically small fees, usually ranging from 1¢ all the way up to around $5-$10 that provide a small amount of content. To my knowledge, the video game industry uses them, for example: you pay $3.50 and purchase some armor for your avatar. With Pandora however, you can either pay 99¢ and the 40 hour hard cap (free users can't listen to any more music after using the service for 40 hours in one month) is removed for the rest of the month OR you can pay got s $36 annual subscription and have no limits ever, all the ads are removed, and you get a bunch more features. So to put it in simple terms, free gets you the basics, MTs get you a little more, and the subscription unlocks the whole thing.

So I guess the rumbling in my mind is coming down to one question: Are the ideals of capitalism failing with the advent of the internet in the context of intellectual property and music sales or is it all just penny-pinching teens?

I've been told at least a few times that if a company or companies wish to remain in business, they should cater to the needs of their customers (It may be a tad naive of me to this that, but I do believe the customer comes first). But, I have to admit, this seems to be the last thing anyone in the business wishes to do. What are the customers doing? Apparently, as one teenage facebooker suggested "just download albums :)" or what I like to call the "limewire hurr hurr hurr" approach. Teenagers with limited amounts of money, don't want to or can't borrow their parents' credit/debit card, so they just download them off the internet.

Well if I am correct, the record companies should respond by working with the consumers, trying to figure out why they aren't paying 89¢-$1.29 per song. But I'm clearly wrong. Instead the industry has taken to the "if they aren't purchasing your product, beat them into doing it" method and the "YOU WOULDN'T DOWNLOAD A CAR" campaign (which I might add is ironically plastered all over legally purchased DVDs).

At the same time, their methods aren't working. You can't strong-arm all these small time users who don't intend to seed, and they aren't going to catch the majority of users. Then factor in how each generation is more technologically literate than the previous (I.E. the age of downloaders is just going to fall as time progresses), as well as the fact that you can't stamp out Torrent clients because they do have legitimate purposes the problem is that people use them for illegal purposes.

So what should they do?

Well they could just do a "pay-what-you-want" system similar to Radiohead's In Rainbows album which gave away the album for free requesting that fans pay whatever they feel like for the album.
- The good: there are reports the band collected over $3,000,000 almost instantaneously.
- The bad: According to one study 62% of downloaders paid not a penny, nickel, dime, nor quarter. Of the 32% who did, the average was $2.26, well below the $10 per album they get off itunes. Radiohead maintains the report is inaccurate, but hasn't provided data suggesting otherwise. It must not have been very profitable overall, as they eventually threw in the towel. I mean if this was truly the revolutionary movement to change the industry, and at the same time was profitable, they wouldn't have stopped. They even got a little opposition from their fellow artists saying that Radiohead could only afford to do a promotion like that because of their popularity, that smaller artists would just end up broke if they tried it.

Full stats on the givers:
62% - $0.00
17% - between 1¢ and $4.00
12% - between $8.000 and $12.00
6% - between $4.01 and $8.00
4% - between $12.01 and $20.00
(figures add up to 101%, but they were probably rounded)
1 company reportedly paid $1,000 for one album

This approach has found success in other attempts.

On the table of options, Apple’s attempted solution still exists. They talked to the record companies and reached a deal over the Digital Rights Management (DRM) locking of music. DRM locking prevents people from just blatantly plugging their iPod into a friend’s computer and giving them all their music. DRM locking is also one of the reasons people download music. A problem occurs and they are no longer able to use the file, under fair use it may be acceptable. Apple remedied this problem by listing your purchases and allowing you to recall any interrupted downloads, but that doesn’t solve every occasion. Speaking on a person term, I have an older iPod connected to a previously shared iTunes account. That account has reached the max number of accounts, but a few years later I obtained a new iPod and laptop. Should I not be allowed to listen to my music because of an arbitrary limit? That doesn’t justify downloading music though, and Fair Use is always a sticky situation; it is much easier to leave it alone rather than enter into the grey area of copyright infringement. How did Apple work to solve this problem? Well they began to sell some DRM-free music, or you could pay $1.00 per song and $3.00 per video and you can have your entire library unlocked. Not exactly the most accommodating policy for consumers.

What did the companies get in return? They demanded variable pricing, meaning new (and therefore popular) songs cost $1.29, semi-new songs stay at 99¢, and then the older/unpopular ones may be priced for 89¢. Again, I’m not so sure this was done with the consumer in mind, nor with the aim as being a major step in combating music piracy. If people would rather risk lawsuit instead of paying 99¢ per song, what (other than profit) would cause any normal music supplier to raise price and act like they are solving the problem? I think, even though they fixed the complaints of their current userbase, this isn’t the magic bullet that finally ends filesharing, nor will it pull a majority of those people away.

The last attempt I have is the Pandora approach, which is to talk to the record companies and make a deal allowing people to listen (not own) to music, and have a decent amount of control over what music they hear, all for free. People are generally happy with it; some people voiced their problems with their 40 hour limit. After 40 hours per month (I believe most people don’t hit this cap) you can pay 99¢, the cost of owning one song on iTunes, and listen to unlimited amounts of music. The alternative is a $36 dollar a year subscription that gives a ton of unique features and the streamed music is higher quality than that of most terrestrial radio stations. Speaking from person experience, not only has Pandora gotten me away from downloading music, but I’ve purchased way more music than I have in a long time. Every Christmas I get a few iTunes cards, and thanks to Pandora, I have a list of at least 20 songs to buy. I think this is a step in the right direction for the music industry. You are giving music fans free music, which is always enjoyable and wanted, without actually having artists (or record companies) lose money, nor are copyrights being infringed upon. It isn’t the magic bullet either, because the system is designed to prevent you from listening to one band (which people do enjoy doing). It gives more towards what the userbase wants, instead of what the companies have done in previous cases.

Apple appears to be trying to compete with their “Genius” system. The major flaw is that you can’t listen to any of the music before you buy it, the little 10-15 second clip is rarely time enough to decide if you like an entire song, not to mention how many songs don’t rely on the same sound/lyrics the entire time. Why waste money on a song you may not like? With Pandora, you know if you like the song, and can buy it when you are sure you like it.

So what is my point? I’m saying that if recording companies ever want to end the illegal problem in the United States (American’s aren’t and can’t be responsible for changing other countries inability to control their copyright infringement, I’m looking at you Russia) than these companies need to actually start conceding to the users and consumers. They aren’t going to win by bringing the hammer of justice down on some 20 year old financially strapped college students, or by bringing 15 year olds into the court to defend themselves against a multi-thousand dollar lawsuit for eternity.

They are going to have to start to listen.
They are going to have to adhere to the basics of Capitalism, supplying the demand.

I ‘ll leave you with two quotes, the first by a Facebooker, the second by a hacker.

“Support what you like, or it might disappear.”
“This is a war you can never win. The people always win one way or another. The people will always have their freedom.”

And if you are wondering about the title, the words are the lyrics to the song The Ghost of Saint Valentine by Bayside, they just sort of came into my mind as a good image of the entire situation.

Childhood Entertainers

I feel like I should explain how I got onto the subject before I just dive into it.

To kick it off, I am a huge fan of the application Stumbleupon, a friend in college suggested it to me, and although a major waste of my time, it has made my procrastination more productive (I'm a sucker for useless information). So I was using it today under the subject of "movies" and stumbled (not a pun, that is actually what it is called) this photo:

Yep, it is the teaser poster for Star Wars: Episode 1. The obvious feature of note is the tip of the hat to little Annie actually becoming Vader.

The thought crossed my mind that when I show my eventual kids the Star Wars movies, I would show them 4-6 before 1-3, to avoid spoiling the whole "Vader is Luke's father!" surprise in the 5th film. I posted a similar remark on my Facebook to which a friend responded that watching the Clone Wars cartoon "by the guy that did Samurai Jack". Without further ado, I present the list of people I attribute the entertainment of my childhood (in part, I did go outside or play with friends as a child) to:

Genndy Tartakovsky (his wikipedia page)

Known for:
- Dexter's Laboratory

- 2 Stupid Dogs

- Samurai Jack

- The Powerpuff Girls

- Star Wars: The Clone Wars (the good one, not the new terrible one)


Overall, Genndy has been nominated for 12 Emmy awards (nothing to sneeze at) with three wins. He has been named creative director of Orphanage Animation Studios whose goal is to compete with Pixar. I hope the basic ideology of democracy rings true here and the consumers are better off for it, not that Pixar's quality is lacking, I don't think they have done a bad film yet (a rare achievement). The company is founded by Star Wars veteransThe Orphanage, responsible for films such as Pirates of the Caribbean (Dead Man's Chest and At World's End), Iron Man, Hero, Hellboy, Sin City, Harry Potter 4, and Live Free or Die Hard. Other rumors exist of a Samurai Jack film, he is directing a sequel to The Dark Crystal. The latest news is that he is working on a new TV show for Cartoon Network.

Gábor Csupó (his wikipedia page)

- Rugrats

- Aahh!!! Real Monsters

- The Wild Thornberrys

- Rocket Power


Arlene Klasky (her wikipedia page)

- Rugrats
- The Wild Thornberrys
- Rocket Power

Joe Murray (his wikipedia page)

- Rocko's Modern Life


Jim Jinkins (his wikipedia page)

- Doug


Craig Bartlett (his wikipedia page)

- Hey Arnold!


Mitch Schauer (his wikipedia page)

- The Angry Beavers


Peter Hannan (his wikipedia page)
- Catdog


Emily Kapnek (her wikipedia page)

- As Told By Ginger


Jhonen Vasquez (his wikipedia page)

- Invader Zim


So there you have it, the faces behind the pixels that kept me from becoming bored in the 90's .