DNA and MP3

Scott Adams speculated about the "intellectual property of human DNA," and posed this question:

If you were a supermodel who had snorted away all of your money and you were now too old to model, and some billionaire offered you a hundred million dollars for your DNA, would you sell it? Assume you know in advance that the billionaire is a disgusting pig who will be raising your clone to be a brainwashed sex slave.

Assume also that your clone won’t be forced to do anything against her will. She will simply be raised to believe the billionaire is a godlike creature and the rest will happen naturally. No laws will be broken. And she will live like a princess except for the part about being a clone whore to an old, rich fat guy. In other words, the quality of her life will be in the top 10% of the planet if you consider the wretchedness the average human’s life around the world.

Would you sell your DNA for $100,000,000?

This is an entertaining question, but Scott has gotten the economics of the situation backwards. Nobody would pay $100,000,000 for your DNA, when all they have to do is fish one of your used coffee cups out of the trash and extract a DNA sample from there. Instead, it would cost you a large amount of money and inconvenience in order to prevent people from stealing your DNA and doing whatever they wanted with it.

You might be able to sue someone who used your DNA without permission, but that requires you to know about it in the first place, and prove it. I suspect that in the future the "unauthorized" use of DNA will be extremely common, like pirated MP3s today. Both are sequences of information that people can claim ownership of.

Neatthink, Slobthink

When it comes to neatness, my girlfriend is more on the neat-freak end of the spectrum, and I am closer to the border of the People's Republic of Slobistan. And so it puzzles me when she will, for example, look under the couch and say something like, "oh, wow, there is so much dust and cat fur under here!" This is said as if it is something both completely unexpected and deeply disturbing, the way you might say to someone, "dude, what is this dead hobo doing in the trunk of your car?"

To me, of course, under the couch is exactly the sort of place where I would expect to find dust, and the cat fur would be much more shocking and mysterious if we didn't own cats. And neither one especially bothers me, because I don't plan to spend a lot of time under the couch anyway. In fact the whole point of having a couch seems to be to sit on top of it and not beneath it. So to me, it's a bit like saying, "Whoa, what are all these pine needles doing all over this forest?"

But I guess this is the difference between neat-think and slob-think. In neat-think, it is disturbing to realize that an area that hypothetically could be clean is not in fact clean. In slob-think, the default state of things is dirty, so "discovering" that something is dirty is not surprising at all, and the question is whether cleaning it is really necessary.

Oh, Fallen 360

My Xbox 360 went into a nonresponsive, vegetative state. The three red lights of doom blazed in all their glory on the front panel, and I was forced to send it in for repairs. This was on the second day of my 2-week vacation, so just when I thought I'd get some quality video gaming time with the 360, it gave out.

It's funny how when a gadget like the 360 fails, it feels less like a mechanical malfunction and more like having a sick pet or something. And when I called support to explain the problem and ask about getting it repaired, I felt almost like an addict worried about where and when I'd get my next fix. ("Yeah, uh, it seems my crack pipe broke, and I really need to get it fixed so I can smoke some more crack. Is it still under warranty? When do you think you can send me a functioning crack pipe?")

On The Media: Great Holiday Conversations, Volume 1

My Girlfriend: (watching TV) I've finally figured out why on TV, actresses' butts look smaller than they really are.

Me: (my mind boggling that this is what she thinks about while watching TV) OK, so why is that?

Her: They wear these very low-rise jeans, so what you think you see as their butt is actually not the whole thing, but only the lower half.

Me: Oh, so you mean the upper part is covered by their shirt, and you only take notice of the lower half.

Her: Right.

Me: (being a smart aleck) OK, so here's my proposal, in the name of truth. Hot actresses on TV should have to either be naked, or wear bikinis, so that we don't get fooled about the real size of their butts. That would prevent this despicable distortion from rotting our minds and giving us false ideas.

Her: I don't think you get the point of what I'm saying.

Lunch Rules

In this Lunch Rules document, some junior high school girls outline the strict requirements for eating lunch at their table. It cracks me up that even though rule 7 is "no outsiders to table" and rule 9 is "have to be on the list," the last rule is "love your neigbor!"

The rule that surprised me most though, is rule 8: "Have to get 5 hugs from boys by the end of the lunch to be able to sit w/ us the next day." When I think back to my junior high school days, I don't recall much if any hugging going on during lunch. In fact, I don't think anyone in my school could have fulfilled this requirement. What happened, is the American junior high school lunch room now a massive hug-fest?

Code Monkey, the video

There aren't enough songs about programmers.

The Real Life "Slow Donnie"

On the "Slow Donnie" episode of Just Shoot Me, Maya discovered that Elliot's brother Donnie had been pretending to be mentally disabled for years, so that he wouldn't have to do anything and other people would wait on him. He revealed himself when he got a crush on Maya and dropped the act to ask her out. Well, it turns out there is a real "Slow Pete" out there who has been faking for almost 20 years, according to this article at SFGate:

For nearly 20 years — ever since Pete Costello was 8 — his mother has collected disability benefits on his behalf. In meetings with Social Security officials and psychologists, he appeared mentally retarded and unable to communicate. His mother insisted he couldn't read or write, shower, take care of himself or drive a car.

But now prosecutors say it was all a huge fraud, and they have video of Costello contesting a traffic ticket to prove it.

I doubt the TV episode was based on him, but that would be funny.

Ready for a Frac?

After watching an episode of Battlestar Galactica, you might be in the mood for a Frac. One of my friends, a fellow BG fan, got this for me on his recent trip to the Cook Islands. These cookies are made in Chile.

The Blind Side

Reading The Blind Side has changed the way I watch American football -- because the book explains the subtleties of the left tackle position. Now instead of focusing my attention on the quarterback, as the play begins I watch the offensive line while using my peripheral vision to look at the quarterback and running back. Once the play develops to the point where either the ball is in the air or the running back has passed the line of scrimmage, I go back to watching the ball the way I used to. By doing this, I feel like I'm not just seeing a different part of the game, I'm actually seeing more of the game. Watching the quarterback during those first few seconds is rarely useful, because unless he fumbles the snap or something, it is very unlikely that anything interesting will happen there during that time.

Thumb Pianos

My friend Bob, who builds thumb pianos, has posted this incredible series of photos of thumb pianos. I have played some of these, and they sound as cool as they look. He has also created electronic music featuring his instruments. A lot of people make music, but how many make music played on instruments they built themselves? It is really interesting stuff.

Diagnosis

Infectious . . . or environmental. All you have to do is check out parasites, viruses, bacteria, fungi, prions, radiation, toxins, chemicals, or it's internet-porn-related. I'll check the internet, you guys cover the rest of the stuff.

-- Dr. House diagnosing a patient, on House

Autumn Leaves at the Japanese Garden

Today was a perfect time to see autumn foliage at the Portland Japanese Garden, so naturally the place was overrun with photographers. Everywhere I looked, people were carrying tripods, cameras, and lenses. I felt like I had been transported into some weird futuristic world where all other hobbies had died out, leaving behind a society where everyone was a photographer. There was also an ikebana exhibit, and a bonsai exhibit featuring a tree over 500 years old.

Moss Maze

At the Portland Japanese Garden. This reminds me of the story of the moss man.

Tangerine

I was pleased to discover Tangerine, a Mac app that analyzes the songs in your iTunes library and determines their tempo and "intensity." Then it can automatically create random playlists that group your songs by these values, so you can easily make uptempo workout mixes or mellow chill-out mixes. I've been looking for something like this for a long time, and it works great. It exports the playlists you make back into iTunes. It doesn't export the BPM data, which I wish it would do, but even without that feature I'd consider this a must-have application for Mac iTunes users.

Unresolvable Goals

Since I wrote about the mental goal system and the ninja/unicorn experiment, I've been thinking about more implications of this. Peter called it "the most difficult trap I think our civilization lays for us."

There is also a category of "unresolvable" goals, meaning that it is impossible to know whether or not you have really accomplished the goal. For example, as I commute to work in the morning I might have a goal of taking the quickest route to work. The problem is that I can't really know whether I succeeded. Even if I arrive at work in a reasonable amount of time, some other route might have been faster, if only I had taken it. So I will probably never get to enjoy the mental payoff of knowing that I accomplished the goal.

Even worse, though I can't prove I succeeded, it is very easy to suspect that I failed. If there is even a minor delay on my chosen route, I will tend to assume that I made the wrong choice, and a different route would have been better. Again, I can't prove this because I didn't take the other routes, and they may not have been any faster. But because the suspicion of having chosen wrong comes so easily, it is very likely that I will end up starting the day with a feeling of failure, however slight.

The flaw or trap is in the goal itself. Its very structure guarantees that having that goal is much more likely to make me unhappy than happy. Once I have that goal, there is nothing that can happen in the real world that can fix it. It is sort of like the "unicorn" goal but more subtle.

A more useful goal would be something like "travel to work safely and comfortably." It is possible to achieve that, and also possible to know for sure that I did achieve it. Having that goal is also more likely to make me happy than unhappy.

How we set goals makes a difference, especially considering that we can feel bad even about failing at an unconscious goal. I can't prove it, but I suspect that unhappy people probably have too many "unicorn goals" and happy people may have plenty of "ninja goals."

I also think that the Getting Things Done methodology is effective partly because it encourages a focus on next actions, which are straightforward goals that can be accomplished, and whose success state can be known. A next action is definitely not a unicorn goal, and having a large enough list of next action goals may prevent unicorn goals, simply because there isn't enough time left for them.

Anyway, back to my main point: unresolvable goals like the "fastest route to work" goal are harmful, and there is no real-world solution to them. Getting a faster car won't help. The only solution is to avoid having such goals, and to think carefully about the underlying structure of the goals you have.

Fall Colors

This wall is just down the street from my house.

Hacking Your Mental Goal System

"Accomplishing" a "goal" feels good no matter how absurd or arbitrary the goal. This is a strange mental illusion. Try this experiment:

Say to yourself -- either out loud or mentally -- in your best this-is-really-important voice, "TO DO: avoid being attacked by a ninja for the next 1 minute!" Make a mental picture of putting that on a to-do list.

Then wait about 1 minute.

Then say to yourself, "I did it! Great job!" and make a mental picture of crossing that goal off the to-do list.

Even though you know this is ridiculous and only a trick, you will still feel (to some degree) a pleasant sense of accomplishment. It is kind of like seeing an optical illusion or mirage even though you know what it really is.

Then try the opposite. Say to yourself in the same serious voice, "TO DO: find a real unicorn in the next one minute!" Make a mental picture of adding it to the to-do list. Wait one minute. Then say to yourself in a sad way, "Oh, no . . . I failed . . . I wasn't able to accomplish that."
Make a mental picture of the goal still being on the list, unresolved.

Even though you know this is also ridiculous and only a trick, you will still feel a vague sense of disappointment.

Somehow, the part of our minds that feels good about accomplishing a goal or bad about failing is not very well connected to the part that understands whether the goal makes any sense.

Kumoricon 2006, Sunday - Cowboy Bebop Cosplay

These cosplayers at Kumoricon had good Cowboy Bebop costumes, and they also had a great sense of how to strike the right poses and act the part of the characters.


Look for my full article about Kumoricon at JLHLS later this week.

Kumoricon 2006, Saturday - Ready for Battle

Pianist at Kumoricon