Last year on the Other Blog I wrote a typical bashing of a horoscope that was about my birthday. Now, since it is my birthday again, I can look back and see how accurate it was (hint: not at all). I mean, in science you can go back and confirm theories as much as you like. So why not in astrology? (hint: because it’s bull$#@%)

I actually haven’t read it, so I’ll be interest to see what was predicted for me and everyone else whose birthday was November 10th. Anyway, let’s go through it:

     This year brings the perfect mix of whirling excitement and cozy comfort, as your personal life expands and settles in at different times of the year.

Yes, but everyone’s life does that every year. Unless you’re a hermit or something.

     You’ll make three important new friends before the new year begins.

Nope. In fact, I barely talk to any of the people listed in the old post anymore due to transfers and different scheduling.

     Your living situation becomes more accommodating in March.

Sort of, maybe. Again, my plans really didn’t pan out as I had expected. I’m really only getting caught up in the past couple months or so.

     Travels thrill you in August.

In August I went nowhere. Nowhere with girls, anyway.

     Gemini and Libra adore you.

Again, I still know no one that were born in the relevant months. I did get back together with my ex-girlfriend, but she’s an Aquarius. Actually, maybe I’m mistaken in thinking these’s are meant to be star signs. Gemini means twins and Libra means a balance. Hmmm…in Battlestar Galactica, the planet representing Gemini is called Gemenon, which is known to be highly religious. Hmmm…maybe I am bringing balance to religious nutbags by being non-religious, and vocally so, especially now.

Hey, also, I have, in the past, gone on dates with two girls who are twins  (not at the same time, of course). And balance could be the…um…sort of…um…oh! Richmond, Virgina! Wait, what?

My head asplode.

     Your lucky numbers are 25, 3, 13, 28 and 48.

Yeah still nothing. No 3-ways or 48-ways for me this year. Although I did vomit about 28 and bashed my head against the wall 13 times while watching Expelled, just to see how it was (hint: completely wrong and blatantly offensive to me).

So, yeah, that horoscope sucked. Maybe next year the horoscope next year will be more accurate (hint: no). Anyway, stay tuned to this…um…website as I unveil Horoscope II: The Wrath of Khrap.

Ok so I just realized I haven’t posted anything in like a month and a half and was planning on coming up with some excuse or apology or something, but the truth is writing stuff is just a chore for me. Other people on their blogs and websites might promise more updates but they inevitably fail to do so and end up looking like jerks.

I know that if I promise to be more on top of posting I’ll probably break that promise too. So, I’m promising nothing. I don’t have any more plans for blog posts, and I don’t have any desire to keep posting. I may do so in the future, but there will be no regular updates or news.

Basically, I learned from designing and making my financial game that if I truly love doing something, I’ll do it without having to consider it a chore. I’ll do it for hours on end without looking up, just like I did while making my game. But maintaining this blog, and writing my stories, just seem like too much work.

So, this isn’t good-bye, just a ’see you later’. And this blog will remain up for as long as WordPress exists.

Today, I was thinking about robots like I often do, and I wondered how much an individual robot would have to be in order to be economically competitive with a human being. Basically,  such a robot is cheaper than hiring a living human, then it is more advantageous for a business to buy a robot than hire a person.

A good comparison I’ve found is comparing a robot to a car. Both are highly complex machines that perform important tasks for people. In fact, in a very real sense, comparing a robot to a human is much like comparing a car to its predecessor: the horse.

Cars have many advantages over horses: they are faster, more powerful. They are cheaper and easier to buy and maintain (yes, even with $3 a gallon gas).  Cars don’t die of starvation if you ignore them for a couple weeks. Cars shield you from the elements when traveling and come with air conditioning and handy cup holders…the list can go on and on. Horses used to be the common method of getting around, but now are something of an extravagance simply because something objectively better has come along.

Robots have many of the same advantages over humans as cars do over horses. Also, in terms of economics, let’s make a few assumptions. Let’s assume that a company that buys a robot keeps that robot and uses it for labor every day for 10 years. Cars regularly last 10 years or more. Let’s also assume that the robot works an average of eighteen hours a day, using the other six to recharge, repair, and generally undergo maintenance. If the company was employing a human, how much does that much manpower cost?

The answer is quite surprising. There are roughly 3,650 days in 10 years. Times 18 hours per day, means that a company would get 65,700 man-hours of labor out of one robot. The current minimum wage in the US is $7.25, so that many man-hours of labor costs $476,325. That’s almost half a million dollars. For one robot.

Now there are also issues like the cost to power and repair those robots, but again, how much does it cost to keep a car repaired and fueled? A few hundred dollars a month? Assume $500. For 10 years that works out to only $60,000.  Still, a $400,000 robot is economically competitive. Wow. Factoring in inflation that will likely happen over the next 25 years (at which point computer power becomes high enough due to Moore’s Law), an economically competitive robot will be in the $1 million range.

Today, you can buy one human brain’s worth of processing power for much less than that. Today’s supercomputers already are smarter than humans, at least in terms of computational power. Of course, as soon as a robot that costs $400,000 hits the market it doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone will be fired and replaced by robots. Likely, the cost will have to come down to the point where the advantage becomes very obvious.

The other day on my break between classes, I decided to get lunch at one of my favorite fast-food restaurants, Jack in the Box. Inside, to my surprise, I found an ordering kiosk all set up and ready to take orders. I’ve read of these, but hadn’t yet encountered one myself.

Of course, I had to use it. And I found it was pretty simple: just follow the instructions on screen. And my food was ready just as fast as it I had went to a person. I used my debit card but the machine could also take cash and dispense change.

This machine is just one highlight of the incoming robotic revolution. It does a job that supplants a human worker (in this case the cashier). But this particular type of machine does have its flaws. For one, the interface is through touchscreen. People are used to interacting via speech, and prefer to do it that way. For a kiosk like this to really take off, it would need to be able to understand and respond entirely through voice commands. Watching the other people in the restaurant order, all of them preferred to go up to the person behind the counter. One did try the kiosk, but decided to go with the person when the opportunity presented itself.

We are just beginning to see the widespread application of voice-command technology. It has a high computational demand, and is still seen as something of a novelty. But so did the PC, the ATM machine, and the telephone. Once people get over the initial unease, they often quickly realize the potential and embrace new technologies (much more so for younger generations). Coupled with the fact that voice-command technology will very likely get cheaper and higher quality due to Moore’s Law, by 2020 interacting with multiple machines and kiosks solely through voice probably won’t seem strange at all.

Once that happens, we’ll be one giant step closer to the robotic revolution.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the state of California is scrambling to fix its budget problems. I live in California, and it’s easy to blame the Governor, or the state legislature for our woes, but really, I think they are simply victims and caught in the middle of what the real cause of our problems is: us.

By which I mean the voters. As an almost too perfect example, I refer you to Proposition 1A, passed last November, a ballot measure that proposed building a high-speed train between Los Angeles and San Francisco, at a cost of nearly $10 billion.

To put it bluntly, we don’t need it. But we passed it and it we now have to borrow $10 billion (because people don’t want their taxes raised) to pay for it. How do I know we don’t need it? Because it isn’t being built already by private industry.

You see, if a high-speed train were really needed, there would be demand for it. If there’s demand for it an investor, or group of investors, will see the opportunity, come in, and fund the project with their own money. That isn’t happening, thus we don’t need it (mostly because of that wonderful new invention call the automobile. And also the airplane).

But the worst part is that they are raising bonds to pay for it, rather than raising taxes. That means the state is going into more debt, and getting further away from a balanced budget. Of course, some might say that the debt will be paid off by passenger fares, but since it’s not needed, who’s going to be riding the train and paying the fare?

To me, it’s like a kid with a credit card thinking “I can buy all this stuff and not pay for it! Hurray!” It’s completely fiscally irresponsible and it’s 100% the people of California’s fault, not the government’s (well, I voted against it because of this, so it’s not my fault). And this is something that can’t be cut from the budget, since it was approved by voters. It would be illegal to remove it. The state of California now must build a high-speed train for $10 billion.

So why is it like this? Why do the people have so much power over the state’s financial affairs? Mostly it has to do with the period when California was first organized into a state, called the Progressive Era. Then, there was widespread distrust of government (much like today) and it was thought that it would be better to put a lot more power into the hands of the people instead of the government. Now, I know too much government power is a bad thing, but too much “people power” can be a very bad thing. Simply because people just don’t have the training and discipline to deal with political and fiscal issues. That’s why we vote people who are trained (ideally) into office. I mean, the voters can amend the state constitution by ballot measure. That’s what Proposition 8 was, which banned same-sex marriage. It is now not just illegal but unconstitutional for any government agency in California to recognize a same-sex marriage.

Perhaps dissolving the state government and drafting a new constitution wouldn’t be such a bad idea. 

The other day I was idly thinking about the ethics of cloned meat. From a biological perspective, it’s exactly the same stuff, it’s just made in a different way. Often, this way is much more efficient than raising animals, and there’s bonus that cloned meat was never actually part of a living animal, and so was never really “killed” to feed us. From both an ethical and practical standpoint, cloned meat seems the way to go. 

I myself love eating meat, but have always been sort of bothered by the fact that it was once an animal. I mean, I know the animal kingdom is a harsh place where animals compete and eat one another, and that we, arguably, are just competing better. So it hasn’t really stopped me from eating it.

But then I started extending the argument, as I always do, to its logical extreme. If it’s ok to clone beef, pork, chicken, etc., what about animals that we don’t normally eat due to practical or cultural values. For example, is it wrong to eat a cloned horse steak? It was never actually part of a real living horse. A horse didn’t have to die to provide you with the steak, just donate  a small sample of its DNA. Or how about cloning dog or cat or dolphin? Or, what about cloning endangered animal meat.

Or, taking it to the logical conclusion, what if we cloned human meat? Again, a cloned human steak was never part of a person. I don’t know if I’d want to eat human, but I might try just to see. You never know, it might be really good.

Even more bizarre (if you can imagine that), what if you cloned your own meat? You could have a slice of you. I don’t know. I don’t imagine that many people would want to eat human meat, but there probably is at least a small market out there. Maybe that’s one future industry that will develop.

Today I read an article about how the United States Post Office may close up to 1,000 of its offices, putting thousands of its employees out of work. It’s quite interesting that the primary cause of this is, unsurprisingly, the Internet:

The local post office long has been the center of many American communities, but with people turning increasingly to the Internet to send messages and pay bills, financial losses are forcing the Postal Service to consider consolidating or closing hundreds of local facilities. [emphasis mine]

This is directly what will happen in the next few decades for nearly every business. Automation doesn’t necessary entail humanoid robots (though that will be a large segment of it), it could be something as simple as a piece of software. The automated ordering system I suggested to my company  is just that: a piece of software that does the job of hundreds of human workers at a tiny fraction of the cost while doing a far better job than any human can possibly do.

Of course, there’s still need for postal employees currently because there still are pieces of mail which have to be hand delivered (like packages). I myself am currently expecting a couple of packages (though thinking about it, everything I am expecting is a form of digital media, and could theoretically just be streamed over the Internet. In the next ten to twenty years, physical media like CDs and DVDs will likely completely vanish and we’ll be able to stream whatever we want instantly.)

Of course, what are the employees laid off going to do? They may be able to get jobs elsewhere, eventually, but where. You see the thing that took their jobs (the Internet), doesn’t require as many people to operate. When you send an email, the delivery is handled completely autonomously. When you send a letter, a number of people have to sort it, deliver it, sort it again, etc. The only need for people when dealing with the Internet, is for maintenance, troubleshooting, and designing new sites.

And, of course, you might think, “we’ll customers prefer interacting with people than machines.” but that isn’t what we’re seeing. If it was, this wouldn’t be happening. Eventually, machines will be able to do all jobs, and do them much better than flesh-and-blood people.

Breaking news: something has impacted on the planet Jupiter.

There isn’t any confirmation of what it is was yet but my money’s on a small asteroid, probably no bigger than a mile across.

Anyway, for anyone with a telescope, this site details when the spot is visible. All times are in UT so subtract 5 hours for Eastern Time and 8 hours for Pacific. I know I’ll be looking up. It’s times like this that I’m glad I have a relatively big ’scope.

Today is the 4th of July when we celebrate the day, 233 years ago, when we declared ourselves an independent nation and no longer under the tyranny of Great Britain.

To formalize this declaration, we drafted the Declaration of Independence which basically stated our justifications for leaving Britain. It’s a rather remarkable document and says a great deal about the philosophy of government. But unfortunately, most people don’t understand what it says. I think mostly because it’s written in 18th century English which uses a lot of obscure words and unusual syntax.

Therefore, I have taken it upon myself to translate the document into modern day English:

When one group of people decides they are going to break away from another group which they have usually been a part of, they better have some pretty good reasons to do so.

It is obvious to us that all people are equal. They are all born with certain rights that cannot be removed, some of which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In order to maintain these rights, we have governments, which derive their power from the people they govern. If a government ever screws up and stops protecting these rights, then the people are justified in replacing that government with a new one that will.

Of course, existing governments shouldn’t be replaced because a small bump in the road. We know that people would rather grin and bear some things than replace everything they know and are used to every time something goes wrong. But when a government has continually abused its power and caused its people to suffer, it is the right and the duty of the people to overturn that government and form a new one that will protect them in the future.

The colonies have been consistently abused as stated above, and so we’ve decided we need to create our own government. The king of Great Britain has repeatedly conspired to establish absolute rule of the states. Now, this is why we say this:

He has refused to pass laws which are needed for the public good.

He has denied local governors the right to pass laws that are immediately important, and when he allows them to pass laws, he delays them for further review, then never gets back to them.

He has refused to pass laws for some groups of people, unless they give up their right to represent themselves in government.

When he calls the legislature into session, the meeting places are always very difficult to get to, making the legislature members fatigued into submission.

He has dissolved legislatures that oppose him when he invades the rights of the people.

He has repeated refused, after dissolving a legislature, to let the people elect a new legislature. This has led to us being at risk from foreign invasion and internal anarchy.

He has made it difficult for us to increase our population by obstructing immigration and naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass laws that would encourage such immigration, and making it more difficult for people to obtain land.

He has refused to establish an adequate justice system.

He has control of judges by threatening their job security and controlling their salaries.

He has hired a number of people to harass others and to reduce their standard of living.

He has kept a military force present, even in peacetime, without consulting our legislatures.

He has made the military above and unaccountable to the laws of the people.

He has subjected us to laws we do not agree with or have acknowledged, and passed by a legislature that is not representative of us.

For forcing us to house troops in our homes.

For protecting his troops by acquitting them of murder in fake trials.

For refusing to let us trade with other countries.

For forcing us to pay taxes without us voting on it.

For sentencing us for crimes without a fair trial.

For transporting people out of the countries to be tried for fake charges.

For establishing an absolute government in Quebec and annexing territory for it, as if to use it as an example for creating an absolute government in the colonies.

For dissolving our laws and charters, and fundamentally altering our forms of government.

For dissolving our legislatures and declaring that they have the power to legislate for us.

He has declared us out of his protection and waged war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is, as we speak, sending a large number of foreign mercenaries to destroy us in ways that are worse than what we’d see in the most barbarous ages, especially not from a king of a civilized nation.

He has drafted our people who are captured overseas to fight again their own country, execute their friends and family, or force them to kill themselves.

He has encouraged insurrections, and has bribed Native American tribes to attack frontier settlers.

We have tried to petition the king for each of these grievances, but in each case he has only continued to dominate and oppress us. He is not fit to be ruler of a free people.

We have also tried to reason with the citizens back in Britain, with which we still have family ties and friendships. We have told them that their legislature is passing laws against us. We have told them why we left and came here. We tried appeal to their sense of justice and fairness, and have tried to argue through that if the oppression continues, we will be cut off. They too have ignored our pleas for justice despite their close relation. We must then view them as enemies, unless there is peace.

Therefore, we the representatives of united states of America, declare that we should be completely free from Britain. We declare that we should have the power to declare war and peace, make alliances, establish commerce, and everything else a sovereign nation has the right to do. For the support of this declaration, we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our honor to each other.

Finally, a documentary/TV program that is about religious skepticism and atheism that is intelligent and not (very) insulting or degrading towards religious people. I am talking about “The Atheism Tapes” by Jonathan Miller.

To be honest, I have been recently quite disappointed by documentaries that are about religious skepticism. The first was “The God Who Wasn’t There”, whose ads you’ve probably seen around teh interwebz. It’s got really great reviews, but I thought it was just sort of meandering and pointless. There’s not really an overall theme, and it just left me feeling that I hope religious people don’twatch it because it would give them the wrong impression. It just made me feel its about some guy exercising his personal grudge against religion and the people who tried to cram it into his head.

Next was “Religulous” with Bill Maher. This one was better, but still left me feeling a bit empty. Maher talks with religious people, apparently just trying to understand why people are religious, but doesn’t really come to his main point until like ten minutes before the end, which is that religions can be very harmful in that they instruct people to act in a certain way against creating a sustainable rational world, that is against working for a better world, because there’s no point. They’re going to be rewarded in a few decades anyway, why make this world better?

“The Atheism Tapes” really nails it by saying that religions are harmful and that there is a real problem with the world in that religions do exist. I also liked that this documentary program was much more philosophical and grappled with the dense issues like: How can evil exist if God exists? What really happens after death? Exactly how do religions inform the behavior of human beings? It lambastes the common idea that people use religion as a cover or justification  to do horrible things (which implies that these people would do these horrible things anyway even if religion wasn’t around), and correctly states that these people do these things because they sincerely and deeply believe certain wildly implausible things are true. People blow themselves up and fly planes into buildings, not because they really like doing it, but because they KNOW God will reward them for doing so.

I especially liked it because I identify myself as a philosopher first and foremost. I may be a physics-major, and I may design complex games about finance, but when it comes right down to it, I’m a philosopher, something actually quite uncommon among physicists and the scientific community in general. Scientists do science, which is founded on empiricism, the idea that you have to be able to gather data from the world in order to know anything about it. I, of course, agree with that, but most scientists completely shun any issue in which you cannot gather data because you can never know if your musings are correct or not.

“The Atheism Tapes” is also apparently a supplement to the BBC program “Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief” also by Johnathan Miller. The main program I can’t find on Amazon or Netflix, but I’ll keep looking. If I have to buy from the UK at least I have a Region 2 DVD player in my computer.