I’d like to do so many things. In fact, I’d up that word “like” to “aim” – I have aims to do many things, in many different arenas. In the space of today, ideas for craft projects, marathon training, and knowledge management systems have run through my mind and excited my interest. Then something else runs through my mind and steals the cycles for some other interest. And nothing gets done. Day dreaming is exhausting. . .

I’m a sucker for management-type books and magazines. The One Minute Manager, Fast Company magazine, any of Tom Peter’s books. . . I’m an optimist, thinking that businesses can and should be run better, and that just maybe I’m the person who can run them better. But I just loved John Scalzi’s review of Who Moved My Cheese?. It’s worth reading his review for his list of unintended conclusions he drew about business, based on the book.

Today was my first day without Internet access at my fingertips – I suffered withdrawal. Had to turn my work laptop back in, so didn’t have anything to plug the wireless card into. Cora and I had to just veg, not veg and surf. Surfing was my refuge from just sitting there holding/feeding/entertaining a baby; as long as I could surf at the same time, then my brain was being fed, even if my body just sat there like a lump. Bleah. Lump days aren’t very inspiring.

Theoretically, I could have sneaked a peak at my e-mail whilst my daughter snoozed today, but then, my daughter doesn’t nap like a normal baby. Those moms that have blocks of time to get things done while their kids nap? I’m not one of ’em. I get things done either by holding a baby on my hip, listening to a baby wail because I’m not holding her on my hip, or just waiting until my husband gets home so he can hold her or listen to her wail. Add another invention to my list of useful things they ought to issue to new parents – a marsupial pouch. Nice as the Baby Bjorn was while it lasted, Cora’s too big for it now. She’d like to have a kangaroo for a mommy, thank you very much. Maybe I should just start calling her Joey.

Jones-ing. As in “keeping up with the Joneses”. I don’t know why, but lately I’ve had a serious case. I want a laptop, a puppy, a new wardrobe, lots of things changed around the house. All of ’em seem like reasonable requests unto themselves (my husband might debate the puppy one – restraining myself from going down to the pound today), but taken together, they seem to indicate a new case of “gotta-have-it-ness”. You know, that’s the illness that says what you have isn’t good enough, that there’s something out there, something specific, that would in some way make you just a bit happier. And what’s money for, if not to spread a little happiness around, particularly if some of that “extra” happiness ends up smeared on you? Smeared even seems to be the right image – layers upon layers (figuratively speaking) of various things that are supposed to do something to make us just a bit happier. We’re like little Pig Pen’s layered with stuff, rather than dirt.

Oooh, now I’m Jones-ing for a reprint of the first strip that Peppermint Patty appeared in – check it out here.

My husband recently installed Opera on our computer. Haven’t used it much: I guess I’m used to my Internet Explorer, so haven’t wandered afield. But, since he had an Opera window up, I hit our website to see if Jas had posted anything fresh. (Nope, he hadn’t.) Then I hit my side of the site just to confirm that it looks good in Opera. Horror of horrors, it doesn’t lay out properly at all in Opera. Note that my layout is based off of stylesheets. I’m aware that IE doesn’t always conform to the spec and so things that work fine in IE don’t always work fine elsewhere. But this is the first that I’d been hit with my stuff not working. So, for anyone looking at this in Opera, my apologies. . . It will be fixed.

Challenged my Sunday school kids last Sunday (5th graders) to one-up me on memory verses. Each week, they get a new verse they’re supposed to memorize. As a Sunday school teacher and also a Pioneer Girls leader, I’ve given out more than my fair share of memorization assignments. But, being the adult rather than the kid, I’ve usually slid by and just memorized the reference and the basic intent of the verse. Uh, I wouldn’t let my kids get away with that, but somehow I justified it for myself. So, this quarter my 5th graders can stop me in the hall on Sunday, when I’m out in the mall, or wherever, and ask me to recite the memory verse (or any of the ones we’ve learned in past weeks).

To try to learn our verse (Hebrews 11:3), I’ve spent time each evening reading it, rereading it, and reciting it. My problem is that I tend to swap in similar words, or to mentally rephrase the verse and come up with a different spin. Not going to cut it (Proverbs 30:5-7).

I now have a bit more sympathy for my kids. For those in private school, they’ve got the verse I assigned to them, the verse for school, the verse for Boys Brigade or Pioneer Clubs, and then all of their regular school work (spelling tests, geography quizzes, science tests, . . .) on top. And we adults think we’ve got a lot to think about and remember!

By the way, the lesson for the week was about the various theories of how the world was created and how what the Bible says fits in. I’d be interested in hearing from some scientific creationists, if any shouldst ramble ‘cross this site. The kids and I had some interesting discussions. . .

It’s been a long day already. . . Cora’s convinced that the only way she can be happy is if she’s either being held or being supported so that she can stand up. Attempts to play with her/let her play on her own/distract her in any other way are completely nonsuccessful. Sitting down next to her and stroking her or talking with her, etc, have no effect. She’ll sit or lay there and scream. And scream. And scream. Babies don’t much understand the logic that says they’ll never learn to crawl, etc, if mom and dad continue to hold them continuously (much less that mom’s nerves won’t continue to hold out. . .)

So, I put her down. And she screams. And screams. Finally calms down, looks at me again, and screams some more. As soon as she gets distracted (and it takes a while – she’s got a good idea of what she wants!), she calms down. Unfortunately, my cold occasionally makes me cough, which reminds her that I’m there and that she wants me. So, she screams again.

The positive side of all this is that I know she’ll be dedicated in going after what she wants. The negative side of this is it’s only 3:30 and I’ve got a splitting headache. She has finally laid down for a nap, so hopefully I’ll have a breather for at least a little bit.

Ran across a term called blog chalking in my various wanderings. Near as I can figure, you tag your blog with geographical identifiers, plus tags for name and age. Those can then be used by search engines to find blogs of folks living near you, etc.

I _like_ the anonymity of the web, knowing someone just by their material, ideas, and visual presentation. To discover that they lived across the street from me would be depressing, actually. One would hope to interact enough with the people around you to determine that they are interesting people – to discover that you’ve overlooked an amazingly interesting person that geographically close would suggest that 1) either I’m completely dense, or 2) that this person has determined that I’m not interesting. Either way, fairly depressing.

It would be an amazing gift to discover via the web that you’ve found someone whose ideas, etc, are interesting. But life’s too complicated to count on that person being geographically near, or even, in some cases, to _want_ that person to be geographically near. Geographic closeness almost implies that folks ought to meet in person. And who needs one extra thing that one “ought” to do?

As my husband points out in his comment to my last post, I made an error of omission, describing the tree from which Eve ate as the ‘tree of knowledge’, rather than the tree of knowledge of good and evil. I apologize for the misquote. The Word of God is infallible; I am not.

I actually realized my misquote last night, and had shrugged it off as being defensible in the context of my argument. As I looked at last night, self-awareness would inevitably require some sort of understanding of good v. evil to be able to evaluate threats to one’s self, to evaluate decisions within some sort of context. I’m no longer so sure of that argument. True, there’d have to be some knowledge of ‘good outcome’ vs. ‘bad outcome’, but those wouldn’t have to correspond to what we typically think of as good vs. evil. There seems to be a basic understanding of a baseline standard of good that a self-aware computer system might or might not “agree” with. For instance, most moral systems of the world agree that killing is not moral. Now imagine a system that didn’t agree with that tenet. Whether humans believe that tenet from a humanistic point of view (e.g., humans wouldn’t last very long if we went around killing each other off) or from a divine edict point of view (thou shalt not kill), the end result is that there’s benefit to each of us if we don’t go around knocking each other off indiscriminately, and thus whether one agrees with a divine edict, the end result is that we agree that killing is wrong. A computer system might or might not see such benefit, and I think we’d have a hard time proselytizing a computer to recognize divine edict.

I’m no theologian, so my arguments are a mix of limited understanding, limited faith, and some amount of blind acceptance. (Most things in life that we take as true end up being such a mix, unless something’s in our particular area of expertise.) I believe that man was created in God’s image, and that thus the things we take to be fundamentally true and good are those that He values. I also believe that we couldn’t clearly describe those values, that they’ve been muddied in us. “We know it when we see it”, ends up being our descriptor of what’s truly good. If we can’t describe it, then we can’t teach a computer those values and, more importantly, clearly define their applications. So, we couldn’t program a system to have the same value system embedded within us.

That returns me to my argument that man won’t ever be able to create a truly intelligent computer, because that computer won’t know what is good versus what is not good. (Man didn’t have knowledge of evil until he ate of the fruit, so knowledge of evil must not be a condition of intelligence.) Man can’t teach it, so the computer can’t know it.

If we ever create a computer that we believe is intelligent, beware what power we give it or that it can obtain. Hitler was an intelligent person with a values system most folks would say didn’t match what we understand to be good. If we examined his values, I believe we’d find several that were warped (in very significant ways!), but that his core set still resembled our own. Now imagine an ‘intelligent’ creature with a very different value system. If warped values can achieve massive evil, what could missing/incomplete/diluted values do?

Early on, I knew I was going to program computers when I grew up. For our sixth grade graduation, our class sang a song listing the careers we’d have when we grew up, and my poor music teacher had to stuff “computer programmer” into the lyrics. I spent time reading books like Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and a book series about a group called the AI Gang. In these books, robots interacted with humans, and had some manner of intelligence. In the more interesting of the Asimov stories, the robots had some understanding of their own existence, and of how important it was to be aware that they existed. I was certain that by the time I grew up, I’d be working on thinking computers, either building the first ones, or dramatically expanding what a robot could do or understand.

Eventually I realized that the field of artificial intelligence is in a very rudimentary state, at least as contrasted with the idea of self-awareness. (Self-awareness and what that means could be a very long blog entry in and of itself. . . neat topic to grapple with). Working in the field of AI would mean long hours of research with very little reward, as measured against the end goal. So, I bagged the idea of AI work, and instead enjoyed the fruits of systems development and software construction work.

My views on AI have shifted- I no longer believe that truly intelligent computers will ever exist. God blessed man with a gift, and I don’t believe it will ever be in man’s power to create a computer with that same capability (note that man was thrown out of Eden for eating from the tree of knowledge). But I do think that in pursuing the boundaries of what we can do, we better appreciate and wonder at the things we will never be able to do.

In that vein, two projects have caught my attention lately. One’s called A.L.I.C.E. . It’s an open-source markup language and bot engine that allows folks to create a free natural language artificial intelligence chat robot. In other words, a computer you can talk with and that would respond appropriately. (Note that I don’t say intelligently, as it has no true understanding, per se, of the conversation.) Wow! Theoretically, in addition to giving appropriate conversational responses, you could tie in system triggers that might even be parameterized with information given from the conversation. So you could tell the computer something, using conversational language, and have it react and cause other things to occur. Have it mine the conversations and their results, and now it has more information with which to inform future conversations. The computer wouldn’t be self-aware, but its future reactions could learn from previous ones.

The second project is run out of the National Library of Medicine, which runs all sorts of neat projects. The specific project is called WebMIRS. It’s basically a tool for accessing certains sets of medical survey data. Pretty basic data access application, but it has some exciting future goals. Essentially, the folks at NLM are interested in having the application recognize various medically interesting things, such as fused vertebrae or vertebrae with bone spurs, by evaluating the image data in X-rays. So, I could type in a query like, “return all data where the spine has some contusion in vertebrae 4” and the computer would translate that query request into some evaluation of the image data. The human brain makes some sort of qualitative judgement, comparing what it knows of what contusions look like on vertebraes with the picture it’s examining now. But how do we tell a computer to make such a recognition?? We’d be teaching a computer to translate the bits and bytes that make up the image into some picture of what a particular vertebra looks like, and then telling it to compare it to what contusioned vertebrae generally looks like – to have some understanding of the contents and context of a picture. Wow!

Exciting stuff! And all too much for my tired brain to handle right now. . . My own system’s going to retreat to bed and run whatever screensaver/dream that’s currently queued up for me.