the life and times of endenizen

Stay home for halloween. If you dare!

Tonight is Halloween. The city has spent $40,000 on a campaign to keep people out of the Castro. The massive hordes which usually converge here are being told that there is “no party” and all the bars will be closed. All subway stations near the Castro are also closing early.

However much of an effort the city makes to deter people, they also know that people will inevitably show up. There was talk of setting up portable toilets on Castro street because very few bars will be open. There was even talk of closing the street if too many people show up. Doesn’t sound like much of a party deterrent to me.

It’s 7pm now and security appears to be building up all over. The Muni has many employees patrolling the subway stations and there are police at every exit (perhaps to enforce the closure in an hour and a half).

Most interestingly, the 24-hour Safeway across the street has had a temporary fence set up around its border. It appears they are keeping only one entrance and exit open for the time being and additionally, there are three busses directly in front of the store (with an additional 7 or 8 on Market St nearby). I’m not sure what any of this is for, but there are a few possibilities.

Perhaps they are simply accomodating shoppers who stay late and would usually take the subway home. This seems strange as there will be free shuttles running after the subway is closed. Also, to have so many busses standing by at a station which is neither the start nor the end of the closure seems a little inefficient.

Another possibility is that the police will be using these busses to cart off partyers by the proverbial and literal “busload”.

According to the SF Weekly “The Snitch” blog, the cops will be using them, but not to carry people away:

Deputy Chief David Shinn and at least half a dozen other officials made pains to note that Muni buses and drivers will be available to ferry “platoons” of cops around town like troop transports. The notion of the police taking Muni to travel about town rapidly was greeted with barely a snicker, by the way.

The overall plan goes something like this:

Shinn will receive reports every half hour from command stations throughout the city; Mission Station, the post nearest the Castro, will be led by Capt. John Goldberg. At Shinn’s discretion, police can be redeployed throughout the city as needed. Shinn described a “zero-tolerance” policy for drunkenness, public urination and other likely offenses (he originally used the term “aggressive enforcement” but changed his wording when Police Commissioner Theresa Sparks told him that “aggressive enforcement” conjured up mental images of Tiananmen Square).

(quotes from: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2007/10/100000_people_are_coming_where.php)

Should turn out to be an exciting Halloween after all

Singularity Summit 2007

The “Singularity” is the predicted event when artificial intelligence expands beyond its programmed 0’s and 1’s and starts to think for itself. As this undoubtedly means a huge change for us measly humans (whether very good, very bad, or somewhere in the middle), an organization called the “The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence” holds a yearly conference to address the progress, roadblocks, and concerns with bringing such life into the world.

What will it mean to have a computer that is smarter than a human? Will society give it rights? Will it need emotions to understand the questions we ask of it? Will groups be founded to “free” the enslaved robots? These questions and many more have been asked, skirted around, addressed, and discussed by many of the foremost researchers, authors, professors, and futurists today at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre in San Francisco.

Ray Kurzweil, while only attending via video-conference tomorrow, is present in spirit with every speaker as a leading futurist and inventor of many cutting-edge technologies in use today. In his recent book “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology” he predicts the singularity will occur sometime in the next 10 to 40 years. This is rather optimistic in my opinion but I’d sure love to see the results of such a change within my lifetime.

The conference is focused on artificial “general” intelligence (or AGI), rather than a more task-focused, “specific” AI, such as IBM’s Deep Blue. AGI’s will essentially be frameworks which, once created, require no more programming (in the traditional sense) to learn and apply any other type of intelligence. An example used by several speakers is a high-schooler who can be trained to do many low-skilled jobs. These types of jobs typically involve repetition and an ability to follow simple rules but they are still well outside the grasp of even the most powerful supercomputer running our most advanced algorithms.

I mention algorithms because brute force alone will not solve this problem! Simply having a computer with the processing power of every human brain on the planet will not suddenly make it self-aware. However, just because we don’t have this power, doesn’t mean we can’t get started today…

In the factoring of prime numbers, would you rather run a 1977 algorithm on 2007 hardware or a 2007 algorithm on 1977 hardware? Many people assume the former simply because computers have gotten so much faster. The fastest solution is the 2007 algorithm running on 1977 hardware. It would take about 12 years to factor a 90-digit number using the 1977 algorithm on Blue Gene and only about 3 years to factor a 90-digit number using the 2007 algorithm on an Apple II. Developing the algorithms that drive artificial intelligence today will produce some major results on a smaller scale as we build up computing power.

Today’s talks focused on what advanced AI is, what is being researched and what progress has been made. A fun equation created by Dr. Rodney Brooks calculated that by 2019, we would be able to fit every movie even the slightest bit interesting on an iPod. In only two years, we’ll be able to fit the entire Library of Congress. Barney Pell, while his talk was more of an overview of the future of AI, had some interesting things to say about natural language processing, or NLP, and his company Powerset (which aspires to collect knowledge from the web, rather than data). NLP is fascinating to me because there’s just so much data on the web and so few ways to process it. Google and Ask Jeeves are on the right track with answers to simple questions, and even simple dialogs with phrases like “did you mean…” but there are many more places that search tools could go to become more useful to everyone. The panel discussions were quite interesting, with questions ranging from “What world (real or imagined) would you choose to live on?” (Paul Saffo answered “this one” after relating a story about driving across the golden gate bridge the night before) to “Why are people working to prolong life?” (which drew some puzzled looks and an answer from Peter Voss, “some of us have tried this life thing for a while now, and we kinda like it”) and plenty of on-topic ones as well.

I suppose the theme of the conference is that there are no “correct” answers yet, so feel free to give the wrong ones because no one will be able to prove you wrong for years. At this point, keeping open the lines of communication between everyone in the field will help anticipate any problems and will help everyone avoid them.

Tomorrow, the talks will cover the ethical issues surrounding AI as well as the potential risks of smart computers (queue almost every recent Hollywood movie about AI). Kurzweil will also be making his video-appearance so that should be exciting.

Ooh, doesn’t it just give you the chills? I can’t wait!

As seen here – The Dark Knight – Teaser

I stole the title from the original post but hey, I couldn’t come up with anything better. I’m too excited ^.^

This is good stuff, check it out!

From this place http://www.movieweb.com/news/93/20493.php which got it from this place http://meta.yahoo-streaming.jp.

I had the privilege of attending the first screening of Eli Roth’s Hostel 2 this evening so I thought I’d give something back by writing a quick review. I’ll start by laying out my lack of experience in all things Hostel: I have not seen the first film. Before you say “this can’t be an informed review”, let me tell you that I liked this film, and so might others who’s only excuse to skip this sequel is “I didn’t see the first one”. If you like horror films with more substance than slaughter, whether or not you’ve seen the first Hostel, give this one a try.

The movie picks up where the first one leaves off (I know this much because Eli Roth said so). Then the tone changes. It’s like you’re brought back out from the horror of the first one and into a new story with an unsettling knowledge of what is to come. From here on in, there’s plenty of things to make you squirm without shedding a single drop of blood.

You see, this time around, we follow not only the victims but also the killers. Seeing things from the killer’s point of view creates the same kind of character building that makes all these recent superhero movies so great: seeing the (somewhat) normal person behind the mask; learning what makes them tick; feeling (a little) bad for them when they get into trouble. Eli Roth does this brilliantly, giving you a look behind the scenes at this gruesome slaughterhouse and the disturbed people that keep it in business.

Of course, what would character building be without great acting. As Roth put it, the ratings board felt some of the scenes were too scary because the actors and actresses made them too real. He politely asked the board not to punish him for making such a good movie. What we get from this is a horror film with great acting, which is almost an oxymoron. We also get a movie which pushes the limits of the R rating with some pretty gruesome scenes.

While all horror films need a certain amount of gore to draw fans of the genre, many directors will stop there and call it good. I like films with a little more meat on their bones. I like to be truly scared. I wish more people made horror films like this.