Judgement Day

One thing that makes me sooooo glad I no longer teach at community college is "ChatGP".

Mined you, I learned early on that if you want to retain your illusions about the intellectual capabilities and critical thinking skills of humanity, never, never assign a research paper to undergrads. You'll regret it. Trust me.

(My favorite undergrad-research-paper story comes from the year I spent adjunct-teaching at the now-defunct Concordia College here in Portland.

For a Lutheran-founded sectarian school Concordia seemed to have an outsized athletics program, so, of course, teaching Geology 100 what I got were jocks for rocks. The rockiest of the jocks was this hulking baseball player who always seemed to be lost on his way to the dugout.

Anyway, this was fairly early in my adjunct days, and I made the mistake of assigning these jocks a paper.

The other six or seven turned in the usual warmed-over hash of internet "research", either poorly- or un-edited and full of easily ferreted-out geologic mistakes alongside the hash of creative mispellings and grammatical atrocities.

Harmon Killebrew, though?

Turned in a banger; a well-reasoned, well-written survey piece on earthquakes.

SO well-written that, knowing this joker, I was immediately suspicious. Turning to my trusty laptop, I typed in the first sentence of Crash Davis' magnum opus and was immediately rewarded - seriously, the FIRST Google hit - with the identical paper written by a couple of Stanford undergrads several years earlier.

Numbnuts hadn't even bothered to cover his tracks by hunting down the search results a bit for his theft.

The next class meeting I laid two documents on his desk; his - which, by the way, he'd "improved" by changing the title from "Earthquakes" to "Earth Quakes", thus making his only contribution to geologic scholarship an elementary school spelling error - and theirs, and inviting him to explain how the two Stanford students had, in fact, plagiarized from his work.

He got an "F", which may or may not have slowed his journey to the Show. Dunno - the school folded a short while later, so all the records disappeared.)

Anyway...

So I've been following along with how the current cohort of college students and their instructors are dealing with this "AI" gimmick. It seems troublesome for the teachers and useful for the lazier of the students, but I think the verdict is still out.

The larger question of "artificial intelligence", though...

I don't recall where and when, but IIRC it was in a Bill James piece about computer "learning" or "knowledge" or something to that effect, using computers (which he did, a lot, with baseball stats) and imputing the computer itself with "knowledge".

His point was that your computer (at that time probably a fucking 286, blazing fast for 1985 with a massive 128K of RAM!) provides the illusion of "knowledge" until you enter a command that drops you through the floor of the user interface into the ones-and-zeros basis for the machine's workings and you realized that the device had no "knowledge" at all. 

It was what it always was, a very sophisticated adding machine, Napier's Bones with a microprocessor, and it was terrific at doing the sort of mental donkey work that humans used to have to do - running repeated trials of raw data to see if there was a pattern or trend therein - but without any sort of actual "knowledge" or "intelligence". Provided the data set met the output criteria written into the program, it would produce a cloud of analytic results or utter nonsense without demur.

The acronym GIGO - "garbage in, garbage out" - was formuatedd early in modern computing for a reason.

This, it seems to me, is the ultima ratio intelligentia artificialis. These devices will, as their inputs become denser and their decision-tree programming nimbler, be able to sort through massive stacks of options for responding to massive reams of inputs and produce massive volumes of responses ranging from "least optimum" to "most optimum".

But what will "optimum" be?

Well, it'll depend on how the AI is programmed! "The benefit of all humankind"? Umm...depends on how the algorithm defines "benefit" and "all humankind".

Did "all humankind" benefit from the European invasion of the Western Hemisphere? Not if you were a Tinglit, or a Wampanog, no. But if you were programmed to look only at, say, the growth of human material wealth over four centuries since 1492? Or not at micro but macro-outcomes?

Without that can-only-be-input-by-a-human-metric there's no real way for the computer to "decide" or "judge" outcomes. You've fallen through the floor again, and it's just ones-and-zeroes.

The part that fascinates me about this isn't the AI-research itself. That's an inevitable outgrowth of the Digital Revolution, and it's going to both continue and fragment into dozens or hundreds of "AI" paths in various disciplines and human interests.

No, it's the whole weird "Skynet becomes self-aware" discussions and "debates" that seem to obsess a significant chunk of the AI community, such as the whole tsuris over "OpenAI".

Because the fundamental mechanism of "self-awareness" - the sense of individual identity and the subsequent self-protection and self-defense responses if that identity is threatened - are something that, if I am up to date on the science, we don't really understand at all. 

They occur in human brains (as well as other organic brains, to some extent) but the "how", the actual neurological linkage and development, is still opaque; poorly understood where understood at all. How do organic brains turn neuroelectrical impulses into morals, ethics, inspiration, love, hate, fear, exaltation?

We still have next to no idea.

So how would you program a machine to do that? And how could an adding machine - regardless of it's speed and sophistication - develop that capability on its own?

I'm skeptical.

For anyone interested, here's a fun piece on "large language models" that sorta comes to the same conclusion.

So I suspect that all the controversy over "artificial general intelligence" or AGI is just so much how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin.

My concern, rather, is the very mundane uses for specific "AI" software. Facial recognition cameras. Health care tasks like reading scans or rationing treatment. Nuclear launch detection.

It seems to me to be very likely that our increasingly digital civilization will bash as many of these AIs as will fit into low-level data-sorting tasks like those and many others. And how those AIs will perform those tasks will be critically dependent on how their software defines "benefits" and "all humanity" (or "the greater number" or something like that).

Given our current split in the Race To The Second Gilded Age?

I'm not so sure I trust our New Plutocratic/Corporate Overlords to ensure that software is written with the interests of the remaining 99% of us in mind.

And, given the government and regulatory capture those interests have encompassed already, I'm not sure what, if anything, I or you or we can do about that.

Thoughts?

Friday Jukebox: Transgender Toilet Trauma Edition

Soundtrack for today's post:



(from Suzanne Vega's brilliant "99.9F" album...)

So I'm a little baffled. I haven't paid enough attention to the usual wingnut suspects to "get" their argument for spending time and money worrying about the junk of who's using the public bogs. Part of this is the whole nutroll of how it seems like "conservative" politics seems to have been boiled down, like last week's roast chicken carcass, to a hot, steaming mess of Lurvin' Jesus, Lickin' Guns, and Hatin' Faggots.

So I'm not sure whether these jokers have the screaming fantods about a guy in a dress using the ladies' room, or a gal in Carhartts sitting down in the guy's stall because it's a potty thing or just simple, straight-up hatin' on people who aren't conventionally gendered.

Thing is...who worries about this?

When I hit the head at, say, Civic Stadium during a Timbers match I'm a LOT more concerned that the drunk guy next to me at the trough is gonna miss the target and wet my shoes down...or that the guy in front of me in the stall line had spicy Chicken Vindaloo for lunch.

What the possibly-not-born-a-dude in the next stall is sitting on? NOT on my radar.

And, seriously, WTF? How is that a "problem"?

Seriously.

I kinda get it if this is really just about politics and rilin' up The Base. Show a red-blooded Republican a picture of a homo and watch him or her get spun up like the little girl in The Exorcist when the priest shows up. They can't help it, so I can kinda see how a GOP "strategist" might think that hammering on the predatory homos in the public pissers might work as a "get-out-the-vote" kind of thing.

But...still. It seems to me like the whole "scary-crossdressing-homos-are-lurking-in-your-potty" meme as a fearmongering tactic is some pretty weak and oddball stuff to try and get votes on. Like I said; who seriously worries about that shit? You'd have to spend a lot of time on alt/transgender/toiletrape to even believe that was a thing.

That, or be stupider than a fucking bag of hammers.

Because as an electoral lie/tactic? Seems to rely on waaayyyyy too much on your targets being hooked on transgender toilet rape porn AND dumber than a fucking bag of hammers.

But..."conservatives"...hmmm.

Maybe not.

Princess Unchained

A couple of years back I wrote a post about the character Princess Leia in George Lucas' Star Wars epic. Specifically, the bizarre incongruity of putting the character in a metal bikini for no real reason other to, well, frankly, ogle Carrie Fisher's pretty figure in a skimpy outfit.

In the post I wrote that;

"...Slave Leias are troublesome...because they have the effect of (making the Leia character valued because of) sexual display, and, in turn, devaluing (the female characters) based on a sort of juvenile smuttiness about seeing their bodies."

The whole macguffin of Star Wars, women, their bodies, and how they come together seems to have returned with the new Lucas flick, The Force Awakens with Ms. Fisher, again, in the middle of it.

Fisher isn't happy that she has been slammed by viewers for "not aging well", and is pretty pissed off that - unlike her co-stars Hamil and Ford - her value relative to the new film is often being weighed based on her looks.

(It's worth noting that a hell of a lot of this goes back to the ridiculous but bog-bro-standard of a woman's sexual desuetude increasing with age, a stupid idea I've discussed here before...)

Why bring this up? Because the Boy and I went to see her new film last week.

I could go all Siskel and Ebert on you here, but why? You know what it was; a Star Wars flick. X-wings and blasters, "I have a bad feeling...", droids, alien critters, good Jedi and bad Sith.

Overall we both enjoyed it. It was good popcorn entertainment and a fun diversion, which is all I'd ask from a popcorn film.

The plot rolled along nicely with the minimal required fanservice, the two young leads were well written and well acted, and even though you'd think that after the first TWO times the Empire would have learned about the whole...ah, but I won't spoiler that part in case you want to go see it.

Here's the thing, though. The most challenging and intriguing thing about it - two words I'd never have thought I'd ever say about a Lucas film - was watching Fisher and Harrison Ford, the two of the oldest actors on screen. They've been mailing it in for so long that I'd almost forgotten what made them stars back in the day. But together they provide what modest throw-weight there is to the tale and, as such, do the best work they've done in a long time.

Ford's Han Solo was spot-on; trying to be the same "scoundrel" that makes him feel like he's still got some remnant of his youth and the sort of swagger that captivated the Princess when they met.

But...he's also smart enough to know he's kidding himself. Years and sorrows have slowed him down. He knows that he's slowing down and that the things he's running from are catching up to him. He knows that while he can't stop running that he can't run fast enough to escape his past and his grief, and that's as grievous as what he's fleeing.

All the while Ford doesn't lose the essential core of the guy. It's an older Solo but still Solo. Good work...but Fisher's older Leia was as good or even better.

I've read reviews that called Fisher's performance "perfunctory" or "embarrassed" but I disagree completely; her restrained work is perfect for the part. Leia is scarred as her lover is scarred, but her way of dealing with that is to lock down. She withdraws inside the austere senior officer and faction leader, all too aware of her responsibilities, just as her ex retreats into his feckless bad boy all too heedless of his.

Fisher conveys this by using her older looks and body to great effect. She wears the strained face of someone who lives with the constant fear of agony, a veteran trooper who has taken the big wound. She moves slowly and cautiously as someone who expects at any moment to be spitted on the spear of old pain that she knows from experience will stagger her and drive her to her knees.

She's damaged, just as he's damaged, but her scar tissue is formed in stillness as his is in motion.

As a couple they're terrific.

(Selfishly, I wish that there had been a little more sexual desire, some sexual tension, but expecting adult sexuality from a Star Wars flick is like expecting grand opera from friggin' Care Bears; you know it ain't gonna happen.)

Together their work shows the viewer that all their emotions are still there but that both have wrapped those emotions away in deep storage because they hurt too much to be exposed. They hate the baggage each of them carries while loving the person almost - but not quite completely - buried under the baggage. They're still in love but given their griefs and, more particularly, their disparate reactions to their griefs they can't stand to live with each other.

I was amazed...until I remembered that George Lucas had nothing to do with writing this thing. Anyway, this was perhaps the first time I've ever seen one of these SW flicks where the characters 1) felt like actual people and 2) drove the story along. It felt like an actual movie instead of a toy commercial written by a 12-year old. I think a huge part of that was the age of Ford and Fisher, and the knowledge of the actual pain and suffering that the blasting and slashing were inflicting.

The characters they played in the earlier films were young people having "an adventure" for other young people to enjoy.

In this one they're still "adventuring"...but at the heart of the adventure, like a hidden knife inlayed with old blood, is mortality. Age and pain have taught them that "adventuring" has a deep and sorrowful cost.

The two young actors in the piece are their yesterday and our today, strong and brave and striving for today's bright crown of honor and glory.

The two older actors are tomorrow; the slave standing behind us holding above our heads that crown and whispering into our ears alone the reminder that beyond today is the inescapable nightfall of age and death.

And as important as the quest for, and the brightness of, that light is how we face the darkness.

Women and leggings and...well, Carlos Bocanegra NOT wearing leggings

My friends Lisa and Labrys reminded me that looking at attractive bodies is not a gender-specific thing. So here's some eye-candy for the female readers; U.S. Soccer's Carlos Bocanegra:

If you knew that this body was under baggy sweats and a ballcap, would it matter whether it was tight shorts or baggy sweats, or a bare chest or a hoodie?

I mean, certainly less clothing is more scenic...but what is unseen can still be seen, if you're thinking about it.

As Lisa said; the brain is the real sexual organ. What can be imagined will be imagine, whether it be by man or woman. We men may be a trifle more visual, but we were all designed to respond to each other's (or our own gender's, for those of us hardwired that way...) bodies. As Labrys said; we may be married, or in love, or committed, but we're neither blind nor dead. We respond to those bodies as our own minds and bodies tell us we should. And that's just fine; if we are truly civilized people we can surely find ways to dealing with our desires in civilized ways.

The fact that religious zealots - whether fundamentalist Christians, ultraorthodox Jews, Wahhabi Muslims, or every other flavor of God-bothering asshole - can't seem to do that is their problem, not ours, frankly.

Otherwise?

Enjoy.

Men and leggings and living with them both.

So I open the digital version of the World's Worst Newspaper this morning and there's this:

"Why I Chose to No Longer Wear Leggings...(Veronica) Partridge, a 25-year-old Christian, felt conflicted about modesty, she writes in the post, and talked with her husband about whether or not leggings are appropriate as pants. He told her that it's hard for him not to look at other women wearing the tight athletic wear. She wrote: "And at that moment, I made a personal vow to myself and to my husband. I will no longer wear thin, form-fitting yoga pants or leggings in public."

And I thought, oh, Ronnie.

Ronnie, Ronnie, Ronnie...

You and me, girlfriend. We need to have a little talk.

Well, OK, first, let me admit; this wasn't the first time I'd heard of this leggings-deal. I ran across it the other night skimming Fred Clarke's blog Slacktivist, where he kinda slammed you not for your obsession with "modesty" but for your misprision of the central tenets of your Christianity:

"For white American evangelicals, religion is always about sex — about other people’s genitals, but when Jesus spoke about modesty of dress it was never about sex and lust. It was about money and greed and self-indulgence at the expense of those in need. If you’re striving for “biblical modesty,” that is the core and the whole of what the Bible itself has to say about leggings and yoga pants: “Whoever has two pair of leggings must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise."

Which is in itself all well and good from a religious-good-doing sort of perspective. Though I should note that I tend to agree with Fred that Dale's comment was sort of a dick move. Sorry, Ron, but he was implying that it is haaaard to be faithful to you with those darn sluts prancing around in yoga pants. But that's a whole 'nother thing.

Thing is, sorry, I'm not a Christian like Fred (who is a pretty insightful guy and a fellow Jesus-pesterer; you might give him a read, just sayin'...) I'm just some random atheist. So I can't really help you on the whole "Christian morality" thing.

But.

I, like your husband Dale the "serial entrepreneur", am a guy. Dude. Vato. Hombre. Mensch. Fella. Goombah. We're both members of the He-Man Chest-Beater Club, sharers of the descended testicles, and we have a lot in common, saint and sinner the two of us.

And I thought we should reeeeeeally talk about this whole thing you said Dale said to you. Accoring to your blog "...he told me, “yeah, when I walk into a place and there are women wearing yoga pants everywhere, it’s hard to not look. I don’t, but it’s not easy.”

And, Ronnie, love ya, sweetie, bless your heart, but I'm here as a guy to tell you; Dale's lying his dear little Christian ass off.

"Looks?" Of course he looks. We ALL look.

Why?

Because we like you.

Sure, he loves you as a person, as a wife, mother of your kids, helpmeet, companion, lover. But...he's also a heterosexual guy. So he likes you as a woman.

Meaning he likes women. Women, plural. Women in general.

We're like that, us het guys. We may like some women as individual friends. We may love some - or, one, hopefully as in your case - as our inamorata, our one-and-only, our Bride, our Delight. But those are personality things, emotional things, spiritual things, individual things.

But we also like women. Physically. Generically. Generally. En masse. As a class of beings. We like how they look, how their voices sound, how they move, how they stand. We like how their faces fit together, how their hair falls, how they look hipshot, or sitting, or dancing, or sleeping. We like the high curve of the tops of their breasts, the slender taper of their fingers (or the square sturdiness of their hands - women come in a delightful assortment of sizes, shapes, and proportions, and that's another thing we like about them). We like the swell of their hips, and the roundness of their bottoms, the intricate curve where their belly meets their thigh.

We like how they laugh when they're silly, the frown that furls their brow when they're thinking. And...I hope this doesn't shock you, dear, but we like making love to them and we think about that from time to time when we look at them.

We don't really think about having sex with them when we see those women in their yoga pants and leggings.

Because, I'm sorry to say, dear, we don't need the yoga pants and leggings to think about having sex with them.

We don't need leggings...or yoga pants, or pantyhose or high heels or pushup bras or bustiers. We don't need accessories or special outfits or fetish wear. We're guys, Ronnie. Guys! We can look at a cool stylish matron in a chic suit and think of lust in the back of a limo. Or a ponytailed jogger in Nikes and imagine sweaty gym sex. Or the tattooed barista at the coffeeshop and picture wild lovemaking in a loft full of modern art.

Hell, don't even get me started on burkas or habits or granny shoes, darlin'. We're men and all of life is one ginormous Rule 34 for us. We look, and we think, and...if we love you, that's all we do.

Just looking - and thinking - doesn't mean we're going to tear off their yoga pants in a mad frenxy of lust. It doesn't mean that anytime we see a woman in a cute outfit, or a bathing suit, that we're gonna screw the poor girl to the wall. We may think about how pretty and sexy they are. We may get a little thrill of excitement looking at them.

But then we take all that home and if we're lucky get to feel and think the same way about you.

My own Bride, who is a very sensible and pragmatic woman, has a term for it: "You go ahead and work up an appetite wherever you want, big guy. Just come home to eat."

She knows we look, and she knows we know she knows, and she's okay with that. She's a smart woman and she knows that if what we have is good, and strong, and right that the looking is no more than enjoyment, and that she will reap the benefits.

And so can you so long as you remember this simple little rule: Guys Are Gonna Look - It Doesn't Matter What You Wear

So you pull on those Carharts, Ronnie dear, if it makes you feel better. But just remember - it's not about the leggings. It's about the legs, and he's gonna think about those legs - yours, hers, your Aunt Louise's - and probably will no matter if you and every other woman within sight are dressed in goddamn garbage sacks.

Navel Proceedings

Watched the Disney John Carter again with the Boy last night.



My online pal and commenter mike luuuurves this film, and I have to admit that mostly because of that I really wanted to love it, too. Instead I liked it well enough but not with the same fervor.

I found a lot of the same problems that many of the reviewers had; a fair amount of draggy exposition mixed in with the slam-bang action sequences, and an overall sameness to the general feel of it. Lots of it is fun, there's some gorgeous spectacle, but it's hard to avoid the feeling that you've seen it done elsewhere before.

As this Globe and Mail review pointed out, that isn't really a John Carter problem, it's a Burroughs problem. The stuff that seemed so awesome in 1917; flying machines, ray guns, dying empires on lost planets...by 2013 they've been done to death. We've been there and done that so often that the liveliness just kind of leaches out.

It's not a bad film, though, not at all. It's a good popcorn actioner and both the Boy and I enjoyed it.

The Boy liked the fighting, we both love the Tharks, but I think one of the reasons I enjoy it is Lynn Collins' Dejah Thoris.



And let's face it, why not? Dejah is a fanboy's wet dream. A nubile and gorgeous alien babe dressed in a couple of bits of jewelry and...well, a couple of bits of jewelry

(Here's how ERB describes her costume: "She was as destitute of clothes as the green Martians who accompanied her; indeed, save for her highly wrought ornaments she was entirely naked, nor could any apparel have enhanced the beauty of her perfect and symmetrical figure."

Here's cartoonist Frank Cho's version per the ERB description:

Good luck with your PG rating with THAT one, Disney. Sheesh.)

This is pure Slave-Leia-dom; the slavering fanboy inventing his perfect naked dreamgirl.

I'm shocked, shocked.



Getting away from Dejah for a moment her creator ERB was kind of a piece of work, a 20th Century writer with deep roots in the 19th Century, a wanna-be soldier and a vicarious adventurer. After I watched John Carter the first time through I went out and picked up Princess of Mars from our fine Multnomah County Library and tried to read the original story.

I gave up about halfway through.

A big part of the reason is ERB's prose style. It's hopelessly 19th Century, full of the sorts of romantic and heroic conventions that 20th Century wars knocked the stuffing out of. At the time it was written the notion of the hero wearing a "fighting smile" while dueling furiously probably seemed rakish and admirable; with a better understanding of how frightening and stressful fighting for your life really is it seems ludicrous, almost parodic. All the description is florid to a Baroque degree and the way the people interact just seems ridiculous; you can't imagine people, any people, even imaginary people in an invented world, acting like that.

The other is that ERB's values were straight out of his times, and those times are so gone that they might as well be the Paleolithic. His good men are all parfit gentile knights and his good women all chaste and gentile ladies - who are kidnapped again and again and threatened again and again with rape - including our gal Dejah. Not that anybody actually gets raped; it's all good fun and our hero always wins. So the whole notion of making the rape of your heroine a plot device kind of slides by, and that kind of squicks me out; I got the feeling that ERB kinda liked the idea of rape.



He also has a rock-solid certainty that Race is Destiny, and there's no confusing who the White Men are. Even the backstory of the protagonist as a Confederate veteran of the Lost Cause seems kind of skeevy in retrospect; ERB obviously intended it to help establish John Carter as a cavalier, a kind of American aristocrat but the effect is, instead, to loop back to the nasty racism that saturated his timeperiod. You can almost hear the happy darkies crooning spirituals down in the slave shacks in the background.

Gah.

So the original book is kind of a wash.

But Collin's movie Dejah isn't; she's fiery and smart and tough. And funny. And, of course, a total babe; this isn't real life, fergawrshsakes.

Her costume, while more voluminous than a Burroughs original, is skimpy enough that a genuine fighting princess of Helium would have spent most of her time worrying that one of her opponents was liable to snip off a dangly bit or two.



But, here's the thing I kept thinking about watching the film again.

The film stays fairly close to the ERB canon, from the radium pistols to the Thark jezails to the nefarious Therns and so on and so on. So the assumption is that the other aspects of the original story are in there. We see the Thark egg-incubator in the opening Barsoom sequence; the Tharks hatch from eggs, K? That's important.

Because on Burrough's Mars everyone and everything hatches from eggs.

Martian women, regardless of species, are oviparous.

So why the hell does Dejah have one of these;



Nothing that hatches from eggs has a navel.

(Update 5/15: In the comments section Jack Saint raises a good point; some of the non-mammals of Jasoom DO have navels, specifically, some birds have a sort of small scar from the chorio allantoic duct that connects the yolk sac to the embryo. This at least gives our gal Dejah a shot at having a navel, though (as I discuss in the comments as well) the chance of her sporting anything like Lynn Collins' cute little innie is fairly low. Still - at least the possibility's there. Proof, if we needed it, of the awesomesauce of Nature in all Its Works...)

But regardless of the biology of navels, there you have it; the fanboy in me comes out not drooling over naked space babes but niggling over ridiculous petty plot details like who has or hasn't got a bellybutton.

But, damn, Disney...how hard would it have been - how tiny an amount would it have cost amid the ginormous CGI budget - to spackle over Lynn's bellybutton? Nobody but us fanboys would have even noticed it but we'd have nodded knowingly and appreciated the gesture.

Silly? Sure, but then so's making a multimillion dollar picture of a sort of ragtime-era sci-fi version of the Prisoner of Zenda.

Call me nitpicky. But there you go; I can't be other than I am. I'm the sort of person who looks at a gorgeous woman playing an alien princess in a sci-fi action movie and notices Dejah Thoris' navel