On Cyborgs, Singularities, and the 2045 Initiative

Oh, you vodka-soaked Russian bastards, what madness are you cooking up this time?

Dmitry Itskov, a mad Russian billionaire, has decided its high time humans cast off their mortal shells in favor of a sleeker, digital form. He believes its time we push our technology to the limits to create a method of immortality for the personality, a freeing of consciousness from the fleshy sac it’s currently attached to.

Itskov’s baby is the 2045 Initiative, a grand plan to create machines complex enough to house a human personality, paving the way for the technological singularity (rise of superintelligence through technology).

It’s like he’s never read his O.C. Bible. “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” That ringing any bells, buddy?

The 2045 Initiative is comprised of four phases (avatars):

Avatar A (2020)

Using a brain-machine interface, a human will control a robotic human replica. While it’s not as impressive as killing someone with your brain, I suppose it’s something.

Avatar B (2025)

Okay, here’s where things start to get freaky. The second phase of Itskov’s plan involves planting a human mind into a machine at the end of his/her life, effectively granting him/her immortality. But this immortality will come at a terrible price- at this stage, emotions and personality will be lost in the transfer.

I’ve seen this before. Now, where was it…

OH YEAH. They’ve already done this shit on Doctor Who:

You will be upgraded.

A recurring baddie on the long-running British show are the Cybermen, machines who take humans and “upgrade” them by making them into emotionless robotic beings.

And Itskov wants to start them up here on Earth? WAY TO GO… wait, if it means a certain blue police box is going to appear on a street somewhere, I say fucking go for it. Robotize the masses, Itskov. I’d love to meet The Doctor.

Avatar C (2035)

At this point, Itskov figures we’ll have successfully created a computer model of human consciousness, so we’ll now be able to move a human personality (emotions, memories, and all) into a machine.

Oh yeah, that’s never ended badly:

Oh… it’s you.

Avatar D (2045)

The final stage of Itskov’s master plan is to free humanity completely from physical forms. Humans will be digital creatures, living online in a kind of hive mind, with individual personalities surfacing as holographic avatars to interact with the physical world.

…

…

Why?

I guess that’s my main question here. While I (like many people) have always been fascinated by the idea of downloading a human personality into a machine (along with the ethical quandaries surrounding such a notion), this final stage just seems ridiculous to me. Something you read about in a good (or utterly awful) sci-fi novel, ponder for a bit, then promptly dismiss.

Then again, if all this goes down, I could be a digital Kerrigan. And all you bitches can be my zerglings. Mwa ha ha.

…Mine is an evil laugh.

To be completely honest, I guess the final stage of the 2045 Initiative is so repulsive to me because it seems utterly impossible to create an internet-based “hive mind” scenario that still maintains the individuality of the personalities within it. There’s a reason every goddamn swarm/hive mind of sci-fi is comprised of unemotional, non-individualistic creatures- group/hive consciousnesses are essentially one consciousness. There can be no real individuality because every unit within the hive is just a piece of the same whole, a cog in the same machine. Personalities get in the way of this kind of collective consciousness, impeding the group (by daring to dissent or have new ideas) and never achieving the snap decisions and power of many individuals acting as one singular unit.

There is a power in collective consciousness, but it’s a power that comes at the cost of individuality. We see this scenario play out time and time again in the sci-fi world. Halo’s flood, Starcraft’s Zerg, Star Trek’s Borg, Doctor Who’s Ood… The list goes on.

Now, in fiction, we see a handful of these group conscious that allow for the retention of some individuality. But could such a thing occur in a digital world? When we are all electric signals, bytes of memory, moving around the globe through the same channels, exchanging information and interacting at unbelievable speeds… would there be any real way to preserve individual consciousnesses? Or would we all eventually merge into one collective, global consciousness, humanity becoming one massive superintelligence?

Of course, Itskov faces a great many obstacles on this path. Technology is currently not progressing at the rate he would like, and it’s going to take more than just his billions to fund this venture. Personally, I don’t think he’ll ever raise the necessary monies to push this plan along according to his timeline. But if the money is found and that major hurdle is no longer standing in his way…

I ask you, galleons, to think about this idea. What kind of man would even put forth such an idea? This man would:

Look at him, galleons. I’m pretty sure this guy’s a goddamn robot already. He’s a Cyberman in disguise, trying to make us all a crazy, digital consciousness to suit his alien creators. Look at those dead, soulless eyes.

DON’T LET HIM GET YOUR DELICIOUS HUMAN MEATS, WORLD.

“Contact” Lenses (or Reach Out and Touch Someone’s Cornea)

Oh galleons, today I bring you another installment in our ongoing series called either THE FUTURE IS NAO! or Science NON-Fiction, Amirite? I haven’t decided, both because they are both terrible names and I haven’t officially named such posts in the past. But we are going to continue our habit of pointing out new and interesting technology that may-or-may-not look like something out of a science fiction story with…

Text message contact lenses.

That’s right- Belgium researchers at Ghent University have created a curved LCD display that you can pop right in your eye. The display allows for messages from mobile devices to be projected onto the little LCD lens.

Now, the tech isn’t quite up to letting you read War and Peace while walking around the neighborhood, but it’s a step in that direction. Scientists who got to view the technology saw a dollar sign projected onto the lens. The researchers see this as a step toward “‘fully pixelated contact lens displays’ with the same detail as a TV screen which could completely transform the way we communicate.“

You think?

Beyond the almost mind-bogglingly awesome (and/or terrifying, depending on the circumstances) potentials for communication, the researchers said the technology could possibly lend itself to something simpler- lenses that adapt to the level of sunlight to become sunglasses (sunlenses?). We already have glasses that do this, but they believe we could incorporate that same idea directly into our contact lenses.

…Though if that means a bunch of people are going to be walking around during the day looking like this, I admit I have a few reservations:

Oh my gawd… a Gelfling!

Eh, I’ll live. Forget your smart phones, world- give me smart EYES.

(No, seriously, my vision sucks, and I would like science to pay me back for everything nature is fucking me on, kthnx)

Smart Phone Etiquette 101

Smart phone users, I have a bone to pick with you. I know that fancy little gadget that you paid out the ass for allows you to get online whenever you want, allowing you to look at shitty YouTube clips whenever you desire. I get that. And I’m not even saying you shouldn’t do so. Browse the internet to your little heart’s content.

But please

WEAR. FUCKING. HEADPHONES.

If you are in a room/on a bus/on a train/on a plane/anywhere around other people, wear headphones when you are watching your fucking videos. The people around you do not want to hear whatever crappy Dolly Parton cover you are watching. In fact, those very people are trying to carry on a conversation or read a fucking book, and have absolutely no desire to be subjected to some guy yelling weird shit at passing vehicles. Those people are, in fact, talking or reading. Now, they have to try to talk over your dumbshit noise or attempt to tune out the cacophony while trying to get immersed in their novel.

Smart phone users who don’t use headphones, you guys are just straight-up douchebags. I wear headphones when I’m listening to my iPod so that I do not bother the people around me with crazy German punk Christmas music. I would like, nay, I fucking expect you to show me the same goddamn courtesy.

Enjoy your videos, just enjoy them quietly.

You cocks.

Smudge-Free Smartphone Screens: OCD Pipe-Dream or Near Reality?

So, touch screens are all the rage these days. I refuse to own one. Not because of any real preference for buttons, but because I would loathe owning a device I would be constantly wiping off. I hate my phone enough as it is- do I really need something that requires constant upkeep to keep my crazy in check?

See, I can’t stand screen smudges. And I don’t mean that I find them irritating, I mean that I absolutely cannot fucking abide them. The moment the screen on my iPod (not one of the fancy touch ones, just a classic) gets so much as a fingerprint on it, I’m wiping it off. Same with my phone. I only have a tiny little screen, but by the Nine (…I’m chilling in Tamriel again, sorry), it must be smudge free.

And so, I cling obstinately to my non-touch screen tech, dreading the day I’m forced to switch over to one of those spastic-twitch-causing contraptions.

Thank all the gods I don’t believe in for science, though, because it’s coming to my rescue yet again. Because a new material created by the folks at the University of Twente’s MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology may solve all our smudged screen problems.

The nanotechnologists have created a silicon surface that not only repels water, but also oil. Of course, when I say “repel,” I don’t mean the water/oil rocket off the surface like so many tiny bullets, but rather that the water/oil beads up and is retained on the surface of the material.

Now, this is certainly not the first water-repellent material scientists have created. In fact, this particular material works in a similar fashion to previous water-repellent materials. These water-repellent surfaces are covered in neat little arrangements of pillars less than one-hundredth of a millimeter high, and the water sits on top of these pillars in perfect little beads:

The water droplets can then just roll right off the surface, leaving nothing behind on the surface. However, if the water droplets are allowed to sit on the surface for too long and begin to evaporate, they can eventually slip down into the spaces between the pillars. And so, the surface can still get dirty.

But this fancy new material is different. The scientists went in and modified the shape and texture of those little pillars, resulting in a material that actually prevents the water/oil from dropping down into the gaps as it evaporates. The little water/oil pearls stay neatly on top of the surface. Always.

If we start using this material on our touch screens instead of the current materials (which are water/oil repellent to a point), we just might have ourselves touch screens that cannot get dirty. Or something very, very close.

Perhaps I’ll soon be able to loosen my vice grip on my old, button-filled tech. Until then, however, you keep your smudgy smartphones the fuck away from me.

The Tale of the Sanctimonious Scrivener: A Rant

There is an old joke that professors grade essays on their heft. The weightier the paper, the better the grade. Drawing from the idea that the longer the work is, the more time was put into it and the more deserving it is of a higher grade, the concept brings the flaws of human grading into focus.

Which brings us to a recent study evaluating the accuracy of computer programs created to score essays. These programs are by no means new- they have been in use for years, particularly in the world of standardized testing. With so many short essays being churned out by test takers the world over, it seemed a simpler solution to automate the grading process.

Of course, while automated grading of multiple choice tests is simple enough, cost effective, and accurate, can we really say the same for automated essay grading?

According to a study from the University of Akron and a consultancy called The Common Pool, the answer is a resounding yes. They took something like 16,000 essays (with sets that included different lengths, different rubrics, etc.) that had already been scored once by a human, then let a computer (well, several programs, actually) grade them again. The results were almost terrifyingly similar. Want proof? Here’s a chart of the scores on mean estimation… they are all so close that the lines all appear to be one goddamn line:

Of course, charting out other factors yields less impressive-looking graphs, but fuck truth when we have visual impact, right?

Regardless of potential data skew based on the most widely circulated chart from the paper, the study really did find a striking similarity between the human and computer graders. This is the first time a study like this has been done on this scale, and it does a lot to address the many flaws in computerized essay grading. Many programs favor essays with more complex lexical choices, as they are representative of an advanced vocabulary (never mind the fact that one can easily toss around a word without knowing the finer points of its meaning, i.e. thesaurus junkies). Programs also favor length, in both the entire paper and in the sentences in themselves. And, of course, they prefer proper grammar.

However, programs have been ridiculed for favoring these technical aspects at the expense of actual content. Can we honestly dole out high marks to students spouting eloquent garbage? The programs are those theoretical professors grading papers by weight, with no regard for the actual information within. A problem, to be sure.

As artificial intelligence technology advances, though, the programs have become more complicated. They are able to discern some relationships between words and phrases that help them “understand” the meaning of the essays. Last year, the University of Florida did some research on the usage of automatic grading systems using AI technology. The system in place was able to look at something like “the heart pumps blood” and find a relationship between the words “heart” and “blood,” essentially finding the meaning of the sentence by piecing together word relationships built through the rubric created by the teacher.

Interesting, to be sure, but it’s still a crude system that can, seemingly, be easily exploited by a moderately clever student. Like a child beating the square peg into the round hole until the corners break, the systems might be able to hammer out a rudimentary “understanding” of the essays, but just as that mangled square peg will never be a perfect fit for the round hole, so too will these programs never understand complex, intricate writing.

Why, then, would we let these systems do our grading for us? There are many purported advantages to removing the human component in grading. It does away with biases (personal, racial, gender-specific), which curbs grade inflation. It alleviates teacher fatigue (from which can stem errors).

There are pros and cons to both methods of grading, to be sure. And this study seems to add another entry in the pro column of computerized grading.

***

My issue with all this isn’t whether or not the Akron study is accurate. They obviously found a strong similarity between human and computer grading of these essays. To me, this is indicative of a far greater problem.

I am mere days away from completing my English degree, and there is a problem that has been gnawing away at me for the majority of my school-going years. A problem I assumed would vanish when I entered the collegiate world. But it didn’t. It continued on, this relentless march toward mediocrity.

It is a problem with the formulaic nature of writing education.

If a computer can grade an essay with nearly the same degree of accuracy as a human, this says less about our marvelous technology (sorry, but I follow AI research and know even the most cutting-edge experimental programs are nowhere near as impressive as any human mind) and more about the shabby state of our student writing. We teach our students the fucking five-paragraph essay, the rote rehashing of theses to form concluding statements. Pick a topic, back it up with two or three points, wrap it up. There is no room for creativity, for real cleverness, for anything that makes writing art and not just a series of rules to be regurgitated from the tip of a pen or onto a computer screen. As Alexander Pope wrote,

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance.

Our students are less concerned with writing interesting, engaging pieces exploring novel ways of thinking or delicately bending the rules- they instead hammer out blocky, mechanical essays. They present bland topics with just the right number of supporting facts to net them a decent grade. That’s it.

I have had many professors, and I have never had one that really inspired me to be a more creative, interesting writer. There was one who broke the mold slightly, but even she wasn’t really a powerful force in my academic career. I know that many others have those professors that shaped them, that really touched them, that showed them something about themselves or their course of study or the world that makes the student grateful and better for having known them. I understand that, I respect that, but I neverhad that. My thirst for knowledge, information, and creativity has always best been sated on my own, outside a traditional classroom.

And while I’m sure there are many English professors [And since when are English professors the only ones expected to foster strong writing in their students? You might have a great idea, oh mighty chemist, but if you can't write a goddamn elucidatory (...fuck you, WordPress, that's a word) paper to share that work with the rest of the scientific community and the world, then you are shit out of luck, now aren't you?] out there who really work to engage their students, given my own experiences and the fact that most students, if they had an “inspirational professor”, only had one or two… statistically, most professors just teach their students that mechanical, boring writing.

I suppose it is time for me to clarify a few points here, particularly for those of you who know me and are pointing at the screen in horror, screaming about my hypocrisy. I am aware that I am known for being an exceedingly technical proofreader. Am I not just perpetuating this system I purport to despise? Well… yes, I am. Because there is technically nothing wrong with writing this way. And, in fact, I am a firm believer in understanding and utilizing technically sound writing, particularly in formal settings. And those five-point essays I was harping on about? Well, they are actually a very useful tool to teach young writers about structure. I do not think they are so much the devil as I find them a despicable crutch we are not only allowing older, more advanced writers to use, but we are actively encouraging this kind of lazy writing. While there is less room for creative flair in formal, academic papers, there should be breathing room for a personal voice to show through the formal technical aspects. It’s a delicate balance, tying the writer’s soul into the formal rules… but it’s certainly possible. But we are not teaching (or even encouraging) this kind of skillful writing. Which, I believe, is a travesty.

More on that in a second.

Just last night, I was teasing a boy for marking a diaeresis, as it’s considered rather archaic in modern English. That being said, I was only poking fun because I am a right and proper bitch (and because the two of us seem to communicate primarily in taunts, mockery, and faux arguments). In all actuality, I found the use of the diacritic strangely charming. I have always enjoyed people who strive to plumb the true depths of the English language. Perhaps that’s an English major thing.

But these finer points of language… they are not taught anymore. Or, at least, not to any real degree. Why did diaeresis diacritics fall out of vogue, anyway? Because the variants, sans markings, became more popular. And our schools teach what is popular. Which is fine, which is useful, but which becomes more and more diluted. Our vocabulary shrinks, the finer points of our language get lost, and then where are we? The loss of the flavorful bits of language, those accent marks and mellifluous phrases and cheeky verbage, cripples us. We lose more than just words, we lose imagination and creativity. And as those slowly degrade, so too do advances tied to them. Invention, discovery. This destroys us slowly, across all aspects of human knowledge and progression.

And we just allow it. That is what I have such a problem with.

Formula is a base, just as we have basic vocabulary. But as we continue through our education, we need to be advancing. We build on the base. We learn the rules, then we learn how to break them. Instead, we stop at a simple formula. After we’ve mastered this, we are done. The end of the line for our writing education. Oh, there’s a bit picked up here and there. But there’s no longer any real push to expand your skills.

Not even for English students, sadly.

Our writing can be graded by a computer program. That’s how basic it is, how fucking systematic it is.

Congratulations to us.

***

I don’t have a quick fix solution to this perceived problem. Perhaps you don’t even agree with me that this is a problem. So be it. These were just my bitter, scattered thoughts as I read about the Akron study.

Take this with a grain of salt, like you should all my posts, dear galleons.

Motion Control vs Controlling Your Motions

As the tongue speaketh to the ear, so the gesture speaketh to the eye. ~Francis Bacon

Galleons, the last time I bothered with so much as a mention of the Kinect and… whatever-fuck-name the PS3 version is sporting was back after E3 in 2010. So, back when these were both being unveiled. This is because I have little-to-no real interest in the systems. Having since tried the Kinect, I can say that I felt the same way about it that I did with the Wii. At first, it was mildly interesting due to its shiny newness. But as the novelty wore off, so did the appeal.

I’m a gamer. I wanted to like them. I wanted to welcome them into my world, to frolic hand-in-hand with the Kinect through a field of slaughtered zombies while Sister Hazel plays.

Alas, that was not to be.

And while I could spend all day lamenting the wasted potential of the systems (or, perhaps, arguing the point that the lauded “potential” of these systems was nothing more than a slick veneer on an idea that always had far more flaws than anyone was willing to admit), the Kinect and Wii particularly (I hear less and less about the Playstation… whatever these days) have carved their own little niche in the gaming market. And, naturally, any small technological success leads to progressive leapings-off in new and exciting directions.

So, it was only a matter of time before someone decided to take this motion-control tech and apply it to other facets of life. To be fair, video games are far from the first to attempt motion-control, but they rank as among the most commercially successful. And certainly the most visible in the current market. As such, it can be argued that it was their success that has opened the floodgates, and thus why I’m not going to spend time tracking back through the history of motion-control.

Anyway, the latest offering to the humble altars of Finicky Public Opinion and First World Laziness is the slaughtered corpse of the classic television remote. At the Consumer’s Electronics Show in Las Vegas happening this very week, one of the big themes is going to be companies showcasing their work on motion-controlled television.

It’s shiny. It’s new. It’s got flash and style and a sexy tech allure. It’s the future.

And I don’t like it.

This is why.

***

For years, we’ve been waiting for all those science fiction dreams to become a reality (while tending to ignore the fact that so many have- look at your cell phone, with its likely camera and music and video and web capabilities, and tell me that’s not some goddamn “future tech” right there). “Where are the flying cars?” the public laments, despite the fact that Americans alone get in about 11 million traffic accidents a year just on the goddamn terrestrial roads (I’m not giving anyone license to use the airspace, too). And while physics keeps teasing us with glimpses of quantum teleportation (and telling us to STFU about goddamn time travel), we find ourselves yearning for the sleek and shiny world of the future promised us by authors and filmmakers (though why we want that is beyond me, seeing as how those future worlds are never the utopian societies they seem- it’s always “totalitarianism this” and “soylent green that” and “Carrousel all up in this shit”).

And a staple of this magical future world is always voice and motion control. With a command, food is on the table. With a wave of the hand, you’ve minimized a window on a transparent display. Pretty tricks on the big screen, but now we’re striving to make them real.

The tech is, of course, mired in problems. The primary one being that, much like all attempts at voice activation, motion-controlled electronics have no way of distinguishing between conversational gestures and deliberate ones. And while this seems like a serious obstacle toward ever making this tech a workable reality… there is, of course, an option. And that’s a censorship of gesticulation, a refusal to move unless it serves a purpose.

I shudder at the thought.

In order to make motion control work properly, we would have to stifle all extraneous movements. Which may seem like a piece of cake to you more stoic and reserved sorts, but for those of us who have been described as creatures with a tendency to “do flaily things with our arms,” it’s a terrifying prospect. Not just because of the amount of work involved in training years of wild gesticulation out of us, but because of what we will lose in the process.

Communication is about more than just the sounds we utter, more than the gargling, spitting aural cacophony jittering from tongue, teeth, and throat. It’s a combination of gestures, expressions, movements, words, and inflection. Hell, gesticulation is so much a part of how we communicate that it’s actually interpreted by the same areas of the brain as the spoken word- it is language. As anthropologist Adam Kendon said, “Gesticulation… is employed, along with speech, in fashioning an effective utterance unit.” Studies have shown that individuals glean more from speech paired with gestures than they do from speech alone. Not only that, but gesturing has been proven to help a speaker retrieve words from their lexicon more efficiently.

With gesticulation being such a prominent, useful part of our communication process, how could we justify technology that will force us to cease our spasmodic movements? To truncate our communication by eliminating gestures is a step toward the full-scale language overhaul imagined in George Orwell’s 1984. Without expansive vocabularies and methods of expression, our critical thinking and imagination whither. We lose our voices. We lose the ability to formulate arguments, to see mistreatment. We are dependent on language. And part of our language is our gestures.

These motion-controlled, remote-free systems being flashed about Las Vegas right now allow you to wave your hand or turn your head to manipulate your viewing experience. An errant twitch of the head could be interpreted as a change in channel. Frustrating, to be sure. We would train ourselves to stillness, and we would lose the vibrancy and depth of our communication. Even more so than the isolationism fostered by advancing technology, this communication degradation frightens me.

It’s an implication that few probably think about, but it’s been weighing on me since I read about this yesterday. Perhaps I have become a bit of a curmudgeon in my old age, unwilling to adapt to a changing world. I’ve already expressed my dislike of those goddamn e-readers, now I’ve hobbled onto my soapbox and bitched about motion control.

Well, if this is what it means to be old and set in my ways, so be it.

Holy Jumping Water Droplets, Batman!

Electricity.

I think that’s where it actually started. The base. The beginning. It’s often difficult to track the history of a relationship, particularly one that starts slow and builds to an all-consuming blaze. Just when did the attraction start? Was there a moment where you knew, suddenly, wholly, “Yes, this is love”? Or was it a season of seconds, a whole swath of time in which your current infatuation incubated, ripening and growing, swelling to the point of bursting? The beginning is hard to pinpoint when seen through the lens of the present. Relationships are never tidy.

But if there was a time I could point to in my past and say, “This is where it started,” I’d have to say it was my freshman year of high school. I had this one odd period of the day that didn’t work with the rest of my second semester schedule. Due to our small school and very limited number of available classes (which was even more severely limited to my lowly freshman self), my only options were a handful of unappealing electives. A course on CAD (in retrospect, I might have enjoyed that). Band (I actually always wanted to join band, but my school was very unnaccepting of new blood- if you hadn’t been playing since you were a child, GTFO). Something else I can’t remember. And an electronics class.

I ended up in electronics. Not because I had any real interest in the subject, but because it was the lesser of all evils. Okay… and also because the boy I liked was in it.

Pathetic. I know.

Turns out, I had a real knack for electronics. Most of the course was basic wiring (with a focus on home electrical work, because this was actually a shop class), but we had to learn good ol’ Ohm’s Law and the basics of resistance, capacitance, voltage, etc.

The “love-of-my-life” spent all semester burning his name into styrofoam cups and cheating off me, but I was love-sick and stupid and possessed of almost no self-esteem. I was just happy he was paying attention to me.

…Hard to believe I wasn’t always an arrogant narcissist, right?

But, I digress. When not mooning over young Matthew, I found myself actually interested in the class. And when I went to a summer program at the University of Wyoming that year, I enrolled in a computer electronics course in order to continue tinkering with electricity. For three weeks, a boy named Kevin outlined the holes in my fishnet stockings while I took feverish notes about AND gates and resistor colors (there was a time when I had all the colors memorized), and at the end of it all, my air-headed lab partner overloaded a capacitor and blew it clean off the little board.

Two years later, my knowledge of electronics led to me teaching a section of my physics class.

I think that was it. I really do. That series of events was what broke me down, eventually opening the door to the wide world of science and culminating in the girl with the raging science hard-on you all know today.

Anyway, I tell you that because what we’re going to talk about today is vaguely related to electricity (and I felt like sharing). Turn left off of Memory Lane and pull into Science Parkway, please.

…and, unlike lying East Lansing streets, this Science Parkway will actually have some goddamn science on it.

***

So, some engineers over at Duke have come up with a new method of producing thermal diodes. Which could have a pretty big impact on increasing the energy efficiency of a whole slew of things.

But before we talk about any of that, we’re going to do a quick bit about diodes. As either a very basic primer or a refresher for those of you who already know a bit about electrical thingamajigs.

Diodes are interesting little devils. They only allow electrical current to travel through them one way. Current flows through one way and the diode’s all like, “Hey man, what’s up? Yeah, come on through, buddy. Gate’s open.” However, if current tries to come through the other direction, the diode goes Gandalf on its ass:

And what do these little bastards do? Well, it naturally depends on the type of diode and just how they are hooked into a circuit. Some diodes can be used to construct logic gates (like the AND gate I mentioned earlier). Some serve as a simple on/off switch controlling current. The diode you might be most familiar with lights up when current is applied in the correct direction. We call these light emitting diodes (but you can just call them LEDs). But diodes can have even more delicate applications, such as the separation of signals from radio frequencies. And some can be used to convert alternating current to direct current for power supplies. You can also use diodes to stabilize circuits, due to their fairly fixed voltage drops (but that’s a whole thing we’re not going to get into right now).

The basic principles of these electric diodes transfer over to thermal diodes. Thermal diodes can either work with electrical devices or non-electrical devices, causing heat to flow in a certain direction. So, as you might guess, they are temperature regulation devices (heat-pumps and thermoelectric coolers).

Thermal diodes can be made from solid materials, but they tend to be less effective than phase-change diodes, which transfer heat through… well, through phase changing (through condensation and vaporization). Phase-change diodes transfer heat by evaporating water from one surface and using gravity to pull the forming condensate down to a second surface. However, while phase-change diodes can transfer way more heat, they have their own severe limits. While solid-state diodes can be made into all kinds of shapes and configurations, phase-change diodes are at the mercy of gravitational limits and one-dimensionality.

No planar phase-changing for you.

But that’s where our Duke folks step in. What they did was use a hydrophobic… oh, excuse me, a superhydrophobic material, which causes water droplets to literally propel themselves off of it. Opposite this superhydrophobic material (which, in case you were curious, was created using electroless galvanic deposition of silver nanoparticles onto a copper substrate, which was then coated in a layer of 1-hexadecanethiol) they set up a superhydrophilic (i.e. it really loves it some water) material (basically made with copper oxidized by oxygen plasma… I just love the phrase “oxygen plasma”). So, heat comes in from one direction. It evaporates the water, causing condensation which hits the superhydrophobic plate. The water leaps the fuck off the plate and is embraced in the welcoming bosom of the superhydrophilic plate. And, because of the nature of the plates, it can only work in one direction (so, if the superhydrophilic plate is warmer than the superhydrophobic plate, heat transfer can’t happen).

Boom. Diode.

What’s great about this is that it allows for a lot more flexibility in application, both because of the new versatility of shape and configuration, as well as the fact that it doesn’t rely on gravity no mo’ (the water droplets here are microscopic in size, so gravity has a negligible effect on the whole thing). Which is good, because you know what they say about gravity. And what makes all this so awesome is that it opens the door for phase-change thermal diodes to be used in all kinds of things, from computer chips to large solar panels.

It’s a big win for energy efficiency, that’s for sure. Certainly worth a nod from me.

Build-a-Bot

What does this look like to you, galleons?

A lump of foam insulation with some random wires sticking out of it? A modern art sculpture?

I’ll tell you what it doesn’t look like- a goddamn robot.

And yet, that’s what it is. The Foambot is the brain child of a group at the University of Pennsylvania. It consists of what they call a “mothership” (a wheeled platform with sprayable reagents that combine to form a urethane foam) and a handful of little joint modules capable of bending and flexing.

The Foambot mothership arranges the little modules on the floor, then it sprays its foamy mixture on them in whatever configuration the controller wants. The foam hardens, and a crazy new robot is born, be it a quadruped

or a limbless snake

or whatever other configuration their little science minds can come up with.

After the foam hardens, the bot’s software then analyzes its wacky new shape and devises a “coordination scheme” based on the configuration of its movable joints to make the little robot go.

While not the prettiest robot in the world, the Pennsylvania team says that the versatility of their creation (creator?) means it could be extremely useful for things like space travel or reconnaissance, where the shape of the needed bot might not be known in advance. Different bot shapes could be useful in different situations. For example, the snake-shape might be best for slithering around rocks, while the crawling quadruped would have an easier time traversing open ground.

Regardless, I’m worried, dear galleons. Just how long will it take them to go from Foambot to T-1000?

Digital Assimilation: Human Hive Minds, Reverse Cyborgs, and the Power of Crowd Wisdom in the Information Age

Awaken my child, and embrace the glory that is your birthright. Know that I am the Overmind; the eternal will of the Swarm, and that you have been created to serve me. ~The Overmind, StarCraft

In 1912, Carl Jung published Symbols of Transformation, a work in which he began detailed development on his idea of the collective unconscious, one of his many enduring additions to the field of psychology (and, in my opinion, one of the more ridiculous, as it tends to feel like nothing more than refined mysticism). The collective unconscious as described by Jung is actually a knotty little thing, as he was often rather ambiguous in his various descriptions of it, allowing for a wide range of interpretations and suggestions as to its true nature.

In his The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Jung lays out his idea of the collective unconscious in the first few pages:

A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the “personal unconscious”. But this personal layer rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the “collective unconscious”. I have chosen the term “collective” because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behaviour that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals.

His collective unconscious was based less on an all-encompassing, eternal world consciousness as it was a series of psychic structures underlying all human experience- the archetypes (the Self, Anima/Animus, Shadow, etc). From these spring archetypal images (like the hero, common across all cultures and times) and events (such as marriage and initiations). For Jung, the collective unconscious and archetypes served as a kind of DNA of the psyche. Much as genetics determine our physical traits through a mere handful of nucleobases and amino acids, Jung believed that the collective unconscious shaped the individual psyche through a small number of archetypes.

***

That’s as far as we’re going to go with that because I find most aspects of the collective unconscious to be nonsensical (I have a love-hate relationship with psychology in general).

I bring it up as a foil for what I’m going to discuss next. For if we have a concept for the collective unconscious, surely we have to have one for a collective conscious as well.

Actually, aspects of the collective conscious appear in psychology as well, particularly in the idea of groupthink. A phenomenon arising within groups of people, it’s a problem solving method wherein group members attempt to reach a consensus without conflict or critical evaluation of alternative ideas/viewpoints. William H. Whyte called groupthink, “a rationalized conformity— an open, articulate philosophy which holds that group values are not only expedient but right and good as well.”

But groupthink doesn’t arise in all groups (…rather obviously). It’s most likely to occur when the group is comprised of members of a similar background, when the group is insulated from outside opinions, and when there are no clear rules for decision making.

I think my favorite example of groupthink is not one of the more obvious political ones, but rather the movie 12 Angry Men. I have a personal connection to this movie- story for another day, that. 11 of the 12 jurors in the case succumb to blind agreement that the defendant is guilty. Their inability to rationally look at the situation and consider alternative viewpoints makes them a strong example of groupthink (and a rather horrific look at the potential for blind judgments in the legal system).

Thankfully, smooth-talking Henry Fonda is there to turn the tables.

***

But the first thing that really pops into your mind when you think about the idea of a collective conscious isn’t some psychological phenomenon you read about in your Intro to Psych course that you took because your upperclassmen friends told you it was a blow-off class, it’s something that belongs in the realm of science fiction:

The hive mind.

The Zerg in Starcraft, the Geth and Rachni in Mass Effect, the Overlords in Childhood’s End, the Toclafane and Vashta Nerada (meep!) in Doctor Who, the Dark Ones in Metro 2033 (I haven’t actually played this game, so I’m taking the internet’s word on this- I’m including it because I just wanted to say that I was actually reading about this game the other day and really want to play it)… the list goes on and on.

Unnecessary, yet awesome, Magic the Gathering moment. Bask in it, dear galleons.

All of these species exhibit some form of hive or group mind. We are used to portrayals of hive minds wherein the individual members refer to themselves as “we” or “us,” denoting their lack of individuality. They are a collective- one mind in many bodies (or one memory shared between bodies or some variation thereupon), exhibiting a telepathic connection between individual units. Often controlled by a queen-type figure, the hive mind is a devastating creation. Because there are no individuals, there is no dissent. No alternative modes of thinking. No sudden spats of morality. No crippling love or guilt or other emotions.

It’s the Utopia Big Brother and Joseph Stalin both craved.

The thought of being part of a hive mind causes a cold shiver to run down my spine. I am a confusing, bizarre, nerdy, emotionally-retarded, introverted, sexually frustrated, abrasive, half-assed intellectual with a predilection for immature jokes, frequent cussing, rampant giggling, and making absurd associations. But whatever strange compound of personality flaws I am, the fact remains that it is me. An individual. And I wouldn’t trade that sense of self, that unique sensation of I, for anything.

I assume, galleons, that the same can be said of most of you.

So it isn’t surprising that my instinctive reaction when I first read about a “human hive mind” was one of horror. But if there’s one thing that has remained steady throughout my life, it’s my insatiable, morbid curiosity. Thus, I kept reading.

In the end, the article wasn’t really about a hive mind in the sense of the images we have from our science fiction favorites. Rather, it was about the power of  crowdsourcing (a portmanteau of “crowd” and “outsourcing” that is basically summed up by its parts- outsourcing to a crowd of people) in increasing the power of AIs.

Which made me breathe a quiet sigh of relief, naturally.

The information was interesting, however, and I think the concepts of crowdsourcing and crowd wisdom are worth discussing, so that’s what we’re gonna do.

***

What exactly is the wisdom of the crowd?

Crowd wisdom is the process of taking in the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than a single expert’s. Which sounds suspiciously similar to group minds and groupthink, doesn’t it?

The concepts are related in that we are looking at the power of the whole over the power of the one. The phrase “right reduces to might” has been popping into my mind at the oddest moments in the last two weeks, and I find this to be one of the situations where it actually fits. The might of the crowd’s opinions becomes what is considered truth.

If ever there was an argument for subjective truth in modern culture (I still feel historiography, the study of the shifting narrative of history, is the best one overall- maybe we’ll talk more about that in the coming weeks, because that’s an old favorite of mine that I don’t think I’ve really expanded upon here), the wisdom of the crowd would be it.

The internet has already started capitalizing on the wisdom of the crowd, as many of you have probably noticed. Crowd wisdom powers search engines like Google, which aggregates searches from across the globe. Have you ever wondered how Google’s search results are organized? Maybe you already realized that they are organized, in part, based on popularity- the more times users click a certain link in reference to a specific search term, the higher up the ratings that site climbs for that search term. Sort of. There’s a much more complicated algorithm at work, an algorithm they are constantly tweaking to prevent spammers from manipulating the system to land in the top results.

Then again, maybe they just use pigeons. Who knows.

What we do know is that the internet is changing. And it’s not a change we all immediately recognize, as most of us have been here through its gradual evolution. It’s only when you take a step back and really look at it that you start to see the incredible shift we’ve made from the simple organization-and-consumption-of-information model the internet has been running on. Now, we are looking at the age of user-generated content (created and shared by users) and social media, a strange new beast with a new set of rules.

Just what is so important about the overwhelming flood of social networking happening on places like the Facebook and Twitter? The strong socialization of the internet is turning traditional search and information gathering on its head. In the past, web socialization has been focused primarily in places like chat rooms (yes, those archaic institutions) and discussion boards. What we have now, however, is the ability for each user to carve out their own little microsite, an internet area and identity that is unique and centralized.

Within our individual internet realms, we have other denizens, our “friends,” those individuals in our social network that we know or respect. Just as we flock to real-life friends with similar interests, so too do we flock to internet-folk with similar interests. I don’t follow hockey players on Twitter- I follow geeks, scientists, sexual deviants, and people with wicked senses of humor. We create our online networks the same way we do our IRL ones. And web developers are looking at harnessing that information to further refine and personalize the internet experience.

Have you ever heard of Delver? Originally launched back in 2008, it began as a search engine that used your social network to generate search results. When you first got to the site, you’d type in your own name. Delver would then dig information out of your social networking sites, building its own network of associated ideas, institutions, and individuals around your personal internet community. Results were then generated with ratings based on sites related to, produced by, or tagged by members of a person’s social network. As Liad Agmon, a former CEO of Delver (I have no idea if he’s still CEO, and I really don’t care enough to look it up), once said, “you are searching the Web through the prism of your social graph.”

Delver no longer operates in this capacity- it has now switched to a social commerce site that works in a similar fashion, targeted at finding products for consumers based on their social networks.

And you thought those targeted Facebook ads were creepy. Here’s an entire site dedicated to ripping through your public profiles and spoon-feeding you things you should buy.

But don’t think Delver is unique. Remember dear old Google? While their algorithms use the power of the many to deliver strong search results, they couple this with individual search tweaking based on your personal searches. Imagine if Google harnessed the power of your social networks in the same way Delver tried to. What we’re looking at is targeted wisdom of the crowd, taking the opinions of your circles (yep, I used that word on purpose- anyone who’s been following Google+ might chuckle a bit there, mostly because the latest foray of Google into the world of social networking might just accomplish this search and social network merger we’re talking about here) and generating content that will be more relevant to you and your interests.

After all, your friends should know you better than an algorithm… right? As Udi Manber, Google’s vice president of engineering in charge of search quality, said, “The art of ranking is one of taking lots of signals and putting them together. Signals from your friends are better, stronger signals.”

***

This is a form of crowdsourcing, galleons. By essentially outsourcing the task of finding content relevant to you to your friends, search engines could get back the most relevant and fresh results.

And now we can use the power of our group intelligence on the internet to help refine and aid AIs.

Here’s a very basic example. I’m sure most of you have, at one point or another, used an online translation site to attempt to decipher something in a foreign language. And how often has it spit back almost incoherent strings of words and symbols? Better yet, have you ever translated the same sentence back and forth a few times between English and a second language? The result is usually something with little or no relation to the original sentence.

Obviously, online translators are flawed. But how do we fix them? The problem with language and AIs lies in the fact that our communication is flooded with metaphors, puns, and clever wordplay. This is difficult to translate to algorithms for an AI to recognize (though not, necessarily, impossible- remember the TWSS program?). Which makes it hard to get online translators to generate high-quality translations.

And that’s where an AI could tap into the power of people to help it:

Take the counter-intuitive idea of doing translation without bilingual workers. The idea, known as MonoTrans, is the work of Philip Resnik and Ben Bederson at the University of Maryland in College Park. Imagine a Russian and a Spanish speaker, neither of whom speaks the other’s language. MonoTrans software translates the sentence back and forth between the two languages, inevitably imperfectly. But after each translation, the Russian or Spanish speaker edits the text to make it clearer, and it is translated back again. Three round trips are usually enough for the translations to reach high quality, say Resnik and Bederson. A pair of workers should eventually be able to translate 1000 words a day, they add.

Having a crowd doing this, back and forth, would inevitably yield very strong translations. Distilling truth from the masses, the AI would become stronger and better at its job. Like reverse cyborgs, we now have machines tapping into the power of humans to augment their systems.

Amazon long ago realized the potential of using groups of humans to supplement their existing programs. They launched Mechanical Turk in 2005, a site that gives anyone access to an enormous group of online workers. Anyone can work for Mechanical Turk- and thousands do. Meaning that the speed of response can be astounding. For example, the average response time for an image query (applications created to identify images usually use some form of program to determine what the image might be- if the program fails, the image can be sent to Turkers for a response, which serves both to please the customer and teach the program AI) is somewhere around 25 seconds.

Much of this is thanks to the proliferation of smart phones. With the ability to connect from anywhere, at any time, the amount of humans available to help AI is staggeringly high at all times. And growing.

***

Remember The Matrix? Of course you do (because, frankly, if you are too young to get that reference, you need to get the hell off this blog). In the movie, super-intelligent machines had people trapped in pods (and, consequently, mentally existing in the digital world known as The Matrix), harvesting their bio-electrical energy and body heat to power themselves.

This is kind of like that, only less creepy.

Having a constant, expansive human “workforce” available does allow us to teach and train AIs to a startling degree of precision and, dare I say, humanity.

Here’s an entertaining AI training situation that might amuse you if you are ever bored late one night, dear galleons. Created by Rollo Carpenter, Cleverbot is an AI program learning to mimic human conversation. What makes it unique among the other chatbots littering the web is that Cleverbot uses algorithms to select previously entered phrases from its database of prior conversations when responding to you. Which can be either disturbingly accurate or hilariously off-topic.

However, each conversation Cleverbot has expands its database, giving it more and more to draw from. And the more it learns, the more human-like its conversations should get.

I don’t know. The two times I tried it, it kept trying to get me to talk about love, called me a vampire, and answered one of my pretentiously philosophical questions with “Tom Araya” (a member of the band Slayer)… Amusing, but hardly a believable human conversation partner.

Unless that partner was on drugs. Maybe that’s all Cleverbot can hope for- passing as a stoner.

Still, it’s entertaining for a short while. And hopefully, in the future, the power of the internet’s group intelligence will manage to train Cleverbot to the point where you will forget you are interacting with a computer (right now, there’s no way this sucker could pass the Turing test, in my opinion).

Though, frankly, if the group intelligence of the internet is the one teaching it, all it will probably do is insult you in misspelled, grammatically incorrect, bigoted nonsense. Just like any set of comments anywhere on the internet.

Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to use crowd wisdom to teach our AIs. Because the internet collective is fucking idiotic.

Has the Digital Age Exacerbated Romantic Insecurities?

Some lovers just rely on their hearts
The core remains of what began with a passionate start
And they may not want it to end
But it will, it’s just a question of when
I’ve lived long enough to have learned
The closer you get to the fire the more you get burned
But that won’t happen to us
‘Cause it’s always been a matter of trust

As you are reading this entry, dear galleons, I can assume you are within a few feet of a computer or cell phone… type… thing with internet access. And I’m willing to bet that, at any given point in the day, you are no more than five feet from some form of communication device.

Social networking. Texting. Calling. Skyping. Emailing. There are a myriad of ways we can get in touch with each other through the use of modern technology, at any hour of the day.

While useful in many situations, constantly being “on the grid” brings a new set of complexities to the already troublesome area of the romantic relationship. Primarily, however, it undermines the foundations of trust that relationships should be based on.

I know that trust isn’t something to be doled out to any handsome bloke who stumbles across your path. But if I were to have any desire to create some kind of real, emotional connection with a guy, I’d have to eventually trust him. He would have to earn that trust, true enough, but I’d have to give it to him at some point if we were ever going to make a real relationship work.

Hur, hur. Give it to him.

Shut it.

Here’s the thing about trust. It does take time to build up to a point where you really trust another person. In the early stages, they have to prove themselves worthy of your trust. But if you want the relationship to work, you do have to give that trust over. And trusting someone means you have to give up some of your relationship insecurities. You have to believe that they will be faithful to you, that they want to be with you, that you have nothing to worry about when they aren’t in your presence.

…For a person who usually prides herself on her ability to describe the world around her, I’m having a ridiculously difficult time describing the concept of trust. Damn abstract concepts, fucking with my shit.

What baffles me about romance in the digital age, however, is the apparent lack of trust inherent in most “relationships.” Couples I know have to be in near constant contact with one another. They text and call and IM every goddamn day. Even if they are only apart for an hour or two, they have to send a text asking what the other person is doing. At all times, both partners just have to be aware of the other’s whereabouts and actions.

Is it just me, or doesn’t this just smack of a lack of trust? Not only that, but it speaks volumes about the insecurities plaguing people in relationships. The ease of contact with another person means nobody has to develop that type of “distance trust.”

Yeah, I’m making up phrases. Surprise, surprise.

It’s easy enough to say you trust your partner when you are around them. At that point, the trust you claim is just a hypothetical. There’s no real need for it, as you can observe everything your lover is up to.

But when you factor in distance of any sort, that’s when trust actually becomes an active force. “Distance trust” is actual trust, not the feigned kind. That’s when you have enough belief in the integrity of your partner to not feel threatened by their contact with other men or women.

When you never have to give your partner that kind of space, though, you never develop any real trust. How could you? Trust in the hypothetical is nothing but a pretty lie you tell yourself to soothe your own insecurities. Real trust can only occur when you actively bludgeon your insecurities into submission, when you develop confidence in yourself and your relationship. None of this can happen, however, if you are never apart from your loved one. Without that distance, without the need for trust to develop into an active, stable force, trust simply cannot happen.

These couples that text each other every five minutes, that have to know exactly what the other one is doing or feeling every minute of every day… these couples cannot possibly be in a relationship built on trust. They are crippled by their own insecurities, which modern technology only helps to enhance.

But it runs deeper than that, this pathological need to know the details of your significant other’s life outside of you. Couples stalk each other online, primarily via social networking sites. They get secondhand confirmation of where their lover was and of who they were with. They can see communication between their partner and a “potential threat” for their womanly/manly affections. Often taken completely out of context, the results of such snooping further fan the fires of fear and insecurity. They spark flames of jealousy and anger.

I can’t offer you proof
But you’re gonna face a moment of truth
It’s hard when you’re always afraid
You just recover when another belief is betrayed

Is there any good that comes of this behavior? If you spend all of your time “checking up” on your partner, it becomes utterly draining. You are emotionally wound up all the fucking time. You worry about every little phrase, every little smiley. Every casual conversation with another woman/man is cause for alarm. And heaven for-fucking-bid they don’t check in with you every hour on the hour. Because who knows what kind of shenanigans they are up to without your ever-vigilant eye hovering over them?

***

You know, I tried to be good about this. I was trying to come at this problem from a mature, objective stance. I wanted to look at the evolution of relationships in juxtaposition with the advances of technology.

But I find I just can’t do it. I want to rant, dammit, so that’s what we’re going to do.

In a specific (but by no means isolated) example, two of my coworkers have been “dating” for about two months. I put dating in quotes because they started out as fuck buddies. I have no idea at what point they actually transitioned into a pseudo-relationship. Even if I give them the full two months, however, it seems extraordinary that they are now engaged. That’s right. Fucking engaged. They barely know each other, have been screwing for a few weeks, and now have decided they want to spend the rest of their lives together (in so far as marriage actually means that these days…)?

That’s not terribly surprising around here, actually, but it never fails to blow my mind. But more on that in a minute (now that I’ve started ranting and rambling, I have a feeling we’re going to go more and more off of my original tech/romance topic).

What really gets me about these two is, like so goddamn many couples I know, their relationship seems to be based on… nothing. On sex, I guess. Really, that’s the only thing substantial about it. Toney first told Sam (as an aside, I really hate working with another Sam… so confusing) he loved her via text message. He couldn’t even say it in person. Which is rather fucked up, albeit completely irrelevant… I just wanted to share that.

These two are constant texters. They text each other at work when they aren’t in the same room together. They text constantly when they aren’t at work. I know, because I’ve seen it (and they tell me about it, like it’s something to be proud of).

What’s really amusing, though, is to see just how insecure they both are. Toney is a huge flirt. I knew him before she started working with us, and he used to try to get into my pants on a nightly basis. After they started doing… whatever it is they were doing, the occasional comment would still slip. He and I had long since established that he had absolutely no chance with me, but the banter was still entertaining.

Sam, however, flipped a nut, even though she knew the flirting was in jest. And Toney’s even worse. He’s forbidden some of the guys at work from speaking to her if he’s not in the room with her. He’s that afraid someone will snatch her away. He also constantly takes her phone and goes through it, seeing who she texted that day. And proceeds to freak out when she texts one of her exes… who lives in Iowa…

I don’t know. I’ve watched their whole “relationship” with equal parts amusement and disdain, but the engagement pretty much tossed the amusement factor out the window. They’re in a relationship for the sake of being in a relationship, and they are getting married because it’s the only way they think they can feel secure in their relationship.

Because, you know, married folks never cheat.

Whenever they talk about their upcoming (and, by upcoming, I mean in fucking March) nuptials, I get irritable and/or bored. Not only do I dislike weddings, but I think this whole thing is a farce and a mockery of what a real relationship should be.

***

Yes, I have a weird code of honor when it comes to relationships. A code built on trust and individuality and people-who-aren’t-fucking-clingy/needy/whiny/think-they-are-a-werewolf.

…I wish I was making that last one up, but I shit you not, the last guy with serious (unrequited) designs on me really did think that. I now have a hard time not laughing at him whenever I see him. Which is pretty much daily.

Good times.

***

I understand insecurity. I think narcissists have the greatest set of insecurities of anyone. Narcissism is a front, a persona we put on to be confident and pulled-together in public. Inside, however, we’re subject to intense self-loathing. Like an emo kid wearing a Halloween mask.

But insecurity is something you can overcome. It takes work. You have to be aware of your problem and actively strive to correct it. It’s hard. It takes months, years until you can squash the worst of your insecurities into the dirt. But it can happen.

I let my own insecurities overwhelm me in the last few years, as a result of many factors. This past year, however, I’ve managed to hammer everything back into place, and I’m more confident in myself, as a person, than I have ever been.

Which is good, because I have a bit of unfinished business in Michiganland that requires me to shed those old insecurities that were holding me back. This trip is my opportunity to make up for all the chances I wasted because I worried I wasn’t good enough.

This time you’ve got nothing to lose
You can take it, you can leave it, whatever you choose
I won’t hold back anything
And I’ll walk away a fool or a king

Fuck the status quo. It’s time to shake things up a little.

***

Speaking of which, I bought my tickets for said trip. I will be in Michigan from March 24-29. I’m practically giddy with excitement.

***

I’m just babbling now.

***

Anyway, in an attempt to get back on track, I just want to say this:

To those folks who spend all their free time worrying about their partner’s whereabouts and actions… where do you find the energy? Man, I’m entirely too lazy for jealousy. If he leaves me, he fucking leaves me. There’s not much I can do about it if I’m being myself and giving my all to the relationship. If he’s not happy and won’t talk about it, we’re not going to work anyway. If he’s out scamming on another chick, our relationship is obviously unstable and should end anyway. I’m not going to waste my time worrying about who he’s talking to. If he wants to talk to his ex, fine. There’s a reason he/she is an ex, after all. I’m not going to bother feeling threatened by the past.

Seriously, I’m a fundamentally lazy person. Jealousy requires tons of energy. So if you people want to fill your life with stress and worry, fucking go for it. I, for one, will never understand you.

I’ll be over here, totally content in myself and enjoying life.

Hope your ulcer treats you well.

***

Wow, this post did not go the way I intended. At all.

Sorry.

To wrap it up, props to Billy Joel for the song lyrics I stole and peppered throughout this disaster of a post: