The blob of nerves forming the brain of the robot was taken from the neural cortex in a rat foetus and then treated to dissolve the connections between individual neurons [excerpt taken from here].

Dr. Ben Whalley (notice I didn’t say “scientists,” which is my pet peeve of the moment—these people should not have to be anonymous white coats) has conducted experiments that involve making a little neural margarita out of rat brain cells and sticking them on top of a little robot with wheels. In the “don’t tell them how to actually make nitroglycerin” maneuver, the article doesn’t say how the following was accomplished, but somehow

The brain cells have been taught how to control the robot’s movements so it can steer round obstacles and the next step, say its creators, is to get it to recognise its surroundings.

Then they plan to change the surroundings to simulate memory loss to see how the brain … mush … changes. Anything that cures something like Alzheimer’s is alright with me, but I can’t help feeling sorry for the rat fetuses the brain cells are taken from (and presumably the uh rat that the fetuses are taken from—doubt they called in a midwife for that).

It does raise the obvious (to me) questions about the intersection of organic and inorganic, sentience and synthetics, and the question of the “ghost in the machine,” or the soul trapped in the robot.

The “ghost in the machine” phrase is one you hear a lot for one reason or another (the 1981 Police album, the anime series and movies, probably mostly because it has two words people who speak English dig in it) but it orginates in a book by philsopher Gilbert Ryle as a jab at Descartes’s mind-body dualism (Descartes, dead for just under 300 years at that time, didn’t deign to respond).

Descartes pondered the question of where the body and the mind (or, really, the soul) intersect (he settled on the pituitary gland, as it’s the only “single” he could find in the head—two eyes, two ears, two jaws, everything else lobed and symmetrical). Descartes’s idea that the physical and the “aphysical” are separate and distinct has lasted a hell of a long time. Some people disagree.

Ryle basically had a problem with dualism (the whole concept that mind/soul and body are separate but somehow coexisting and intersecting) and evidently felt that Descartes and everyone who believes in dualism (which, though I doubt they realize it, is about everyone who isn’t a philosopher who studies this shit) fails to use the concepts correctly. For what it’s worth, I think using a concept in any manner that approaches a greater inherent understanding, whether that understanding can efficiently—or at all—be communicated to other people is a perfectly acceptable use of the human mind. I offer a gentle-but-firm “Fuck you, Ryle” to my fellow Leo (19 Aug), but expect no response as he is now as dead as Descartes.

Descartes was one of the first guys to walk down a path (on which, to be fair, Plato and Aristotle may have swung machetes) that has been more recently trafficked by people interested in artificial intelligence, all of whom (to my knowledge) have been dualists. The “philsophy of the mind” is sort of a hobby of mine, and it quickly gets messy with issues of dualism, “substance dualism” versus “property dualism” (“it’s stuff” vs. “it’s created by stuff but isn’t stuff itself”, sort of), monism (I’m not even going to get into it), and various other really fucking confusing issues and questions.

The closer we get to artificial intelligence—and every time I read a story like the one linked to above—the more I wonder about the nature of the soul, whether it exists and if so is created or creates itself, and ultimately if the soul is the purview of man (and/or animal), or if souls can exist outside of organic beings that may or may not be sentient. I’ll leave my (predictably messy) beliefs out of it, but I’ve got a pretty firm grasp on some suppositions. Shit like rat-brained robots scuttling around pens (read the article!) don’t make these questions any easier to answer, however.

When we get to a point (and we will) where we can essentially up- and download sentience in one form or another into manufactured forms, the question may answer itself, or become impossible to ask. I dunno. My mind and body both want a drink, at this point.

Casey’s home from NYC, tired, and at this moment not thirty feet from where I sit, getting a shower. I’m going to post this quickly and then make her tea, her only request on homecoming (other than a hug, as evidently no one in NYC does that as well as I do).

I did do a few other things this week, by the way, contrary to my last post (I knew I was forgetting something). I dismantled a lamp to identify the faulty part in the switch (the rotary pull mechanism tensioner has worn out, and despite attempts to repair it, it’s only reliable about 30% of the time, which means it isn’t reliable, so I’ll buy a new one sometime … in the future), and did my first soldering project since I stopped playing bass and guitar sometime in the last century.

I have a headset I use to listen to music and, uh, talk to my internet friends. Yes, very geeky, fuck you. Anyway, one headset went bad at the precise moment I installed a piece of software (alright, it was a game fuck you redux) published by a company known to publish games that do fucked up shit to your audio and video drivers (sometimes—but they’re great games!). So I spent my leisure time over the next few days installing and uninstalling drivers, fucking with settings, etc. On a whim, when I had about given up, I plugged in earbuds (always hated that word) and … it wasn’t the settings at all, it was the headset.

First rule of technical failure: always test on duplicate/similar hardware when possible.

So. Case found another headset lying around the apartment (we had bought two of them for friends when they started being geeks, but they snubbed their noses at them and so they languished in a closet). I used them, no problems, good music, the mic worked, hooray. Until Monday evening, when the mic stopped working.

This time, instead of blaming drivers, I tested the duplicate hardware (cf. rule one), and discovered that the condenser mic had gone bad. So. Two headsets, one with bad output, one with bad input.

Long, boring story short (too late) I took from one and gave to the other and through the ugliest soldering job since the bronze age, I have one working headset made from two not-working headsets.

And I watched some TV and did a lot of thinking about the shape of the world post-oil, if post-oil actually does happen. Maybe more on that later, as it’s more interesting than me blathering about headsets.

But I fucking soldered some shit, people! Hot iron! Toxic chemicals! Wires and shit!

Right. Work tomorrow, Sunday, recuperation Monday, then maybe that bit about the world post-oil.

Enjoy your weekend.

Some specialists say the word may have originated during the Great Portuguese Discoveries, giving meaning to the sadness felt about those who departed on journeys to unknown seas and disappeared in shipwrecks, died in battle, or simply never returned […] The state of mind has subsequently become a “Portuguese way of life”: a constant feeling of absence, the sadness of something that’s missing, wishful longing for completeness or wholeness and the yearning for the return of that now gone, a desire for presence as opposed to absence—as it is said in Portuguese, a strong desire to “matar as saudades” (lit. “to kill the saudades“).

I’ll be a bit indulgent here (it’s my blog, I’m allowed). I love the word because it neatly encapsulates my view of so much loss. Death (I’m sorry you didn’t get my letter in time, A.—I think you have it now. Thanks again for the books, rest well, and keep an eye out for my cat, if you don’t mind), lost youth (the perfect functioning, natural comfort and ease of use we have in our bodies when we’re children), disillusionment (everyone likes me and the world is my friend!), and about a thousand other things I can see in the shadows but can’t call out by name at the moment. And I don’t feel like waving a flashlight around, I’ve only had one cup of coffee today.

And now for the mundane part of this entry to drag it down from the unbearably romantic to the stolidly ubiquitous. I was re-loading my MP3 player (link goes to the SanDisk e260, highly recommended despite the occasional weird firmware issue and reboot bugs, see this site if you have any kind of MP3 player) by crawling through my music files one at a time (using Winamp, also highly recommended), determining what makes the cut and what doesn’t, finding some temporarily forgotten favorites and some things I can’t believe I ever bothered to download. Er, buy. Ha ha. Right-click, remove, physically remove selected item(s), yes. I think some smart ass P2P user uploaded a lot of shit to my computer, because I seriously would never have downloaded Barbie Girl, for instance. Even as a joke. Or a Gregorian Chant version of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. Actually, maybe that one was me.

I found an old song by Love & Rockets (is all this linking getting annoying yet?) called, as you may have guessed by now, Saudade, which I probably first heard when I was fifteen or sixteen, hanging out with Ken (I’d link here too, but he’d kill me) in his room or driving back from Tower in DC, listening to music, smoking cigarettes down to the filter (and probably drinking to excess). Can’t say I’ve got much saudade for smoking or driving around drunk (O, the things we do when we are still immortal), but I definitely wouldn’t mind being sixteen again if for no other reason than to hear certain songs for the first time. And OK, maybe I do have a sense of fond longing for the distant-future return of driving around drunk, at least.
Recent events alluded to in the first paragraph inspire a strong sense of saudade, and though the word may be impossible to translate, I think I’ve got a native speaker’s grasp of it. The wikipedia article goes on to say:

The same feeling is also found in Brazil, the destination of immigrants who never saw their homelands again. The feeling was so much ingrained into the Brazilian mind that virtually every immigrant settled there learned this notion and incorporated it (even people from radically different mindsets, like German and Japanese immigrants to Brazil, soon understood it). Another permanent source of saudades for Brazilians is the vastness of the country itself, still mostly jungle, which in the past caused people to feel alone almost everywhere.

Being the progeny of Irish immigrants, I can connect to that at least culturally, as the Irish seem to have a similar sense of “forlorn longing for homeland” embedded somewhere in a genetic sequence or two. There’s a great line from a Pogues song: “Wherever we go, we celebrate the land that makes us refugees,” and I’ve definitely seen that in my own third-generation, never been to Ireland, don’t know the first thing about Irish history (outside of the Famine and the Troubles) immediate family. Hell, we even celebrate the tiny coal mining town my father left, in search of work in the late forties when the mines were shutting down. My grandfather died of black lung. Some things don’t deserve celebration.

Oh, the song made the cut (even though it hasn’t particularly traveled well) at 3.87 gigs out of a possible 5.59. I’ve got 1.72 more gigs of music to choose, then the audio books and lectures for the two gig flash card, so it’s time for more coffee and less romantic moaning.

We got a Sony HDTV like in … March, some time. Long story about that, as we ordered it, waited and waited and waited for delivery, finally called the main office in Massachusetts to sort things out … anyway. Case wanted “the biggest TV” for about five years, so we finally got “the biggest TV.” Second biggest, actually, but whatever (it’s the Sony KDS-R60XBR2 HDTV with TV Guide On Screen—and right there are some of those google words I just mentioned).

For everyone saying or thinking “wtf I thought you guys were starving artists,” I’ll just say two things: we never go anywhere or do anything. When you start your own business and you’re so deep in debt it’s like “look honey, we have the equivalent of student loans after all! We’re successes!” going a little further in debt for something that’s going to enhance your life is not only reasonable, it’s “sane making.” Those days this winter when we were stupid enough to stand outside in 27º weather with 15 mile-per-hour winds for six hours working the market, the thought that we could come home and get a tan in front of the TV made it somewhat more bearable. Look, I’m back to using my blog and already I’m digressing all over the place.

Ok, well the Sony HDTV has this TVGOS—TV Guide On Screen service (yep, google words) that downloads television listings. It doesn’t just do that, actually, it detects your channel lineup, downloads listings, program information, and reviews for the channels you receive. It’s pretty cool. It’s actually “magic,” in that it does it via this mysterious process, which basically involves polling the channels you receive looking for a VBI carrier which transmits all the listings information, usually overnight. VBI stands for Vertical Blanking Interval … which I could explain in boring detail but won’t. Did you see Contact? Remember how they were able to find a “hidden” data stream by deinterlacing the video image? Same thing, basically.

The VBI carrier is usually a PBS channel—the TV (and the TVGOS service) refer to this as a “host” channel—and for technical reasons I won’t go into (because I don’t know them) the TVGOS service host channel can only be analog. Here’s where we run into problems.

The carrier for my area was “channel 26,” WETA (which has always amused me—”What are you watching?” “Wet A.”) but recently, Comcast ditched “channel 26″ in analog and replaced it with “channel 22″ (which is WMPT) in analog. I keep putting “channel XX” in quotation marks because these channels are the old broadcast channels, but over digital cable are usually something else. The digital versions of WETA and WMPT are still on 26 and 22 as they’re transmitted by Comcast, but the analog versions aren’t. Cable providers usually transmit analog Public Television Channels on one of the channels between 90 and 99 … and really, the whole idea of channels and numbers and transmission and shit is arbitrary and I’m starting to get confused by it because I’m not sure what the difference is between “analog, over-the-air 26″ and “digital, over-cable 94.” Frequency? Well, for the over-the-air stuff, yes, but … hey look another digression.

So I did some research (which is where I learned all of the above about TVGOS and VBI and host channels and analog signals and all that shit), and discovered that the analog TVGOS “host channel carrier” for my area was supposed to be “channel 26″—Wet A—transmitted on channel 94 by Comcast in my area. Well, channel 94 in my area was actually the analog version of “channel 22,” WMPT, which as far as I (and my TV) can tell, doesn’t broadcast shit in VBI. So my TV (well, specifically, my TVGOS) was showing “no host channel” which makes sense, considering the place it was being told to look for that VBI data wasn’t broadcasting it. And did I mention WETA and WMPT are both PBS stations, and the switch from analog WETA to analog WMPT was probably just someone looking at the list of local PBS stations and getting them confused? Well, I did now.
I called Comcast, scheduled an appointment with a technician (and when and if you have to do that, always specify you don’t want a contractor, as contractors are total and absolute clowns a high percentage of the time who will come to your house, fuck up your shit, and fall asleep on your couch). I told the help desk guy over the phone “have him call me first, because he’s not gonna be able to fix this here, it’s a head-end thing.” They never listen.

The nice Comcast employee showed up, in uniform (that’s how you know they’re not contractors), we chatted about TVs, I explained the problem to him (he called it in and the first-line moron he spoke to said “oh that TV must be busted, tell the customer to call Sony.” Two things I’ve learned about these situations—first-line morons exist to get problems out of their face as quickly as possible so they can go back to playing Minesweeper and watching Judge Judy or surfing for porn or whatever the fuck it is they do instead of their job, which is supposed to be “helping the customer.” They will tell you it’s not their problem, your TV is busted, the other bank has to handle that, the doctor isn’t in, the repair department is closed, they can’t access customer data from their location, the computer is down, or whatever they think will get you to hang the phone up and call someone else and prevent them from playing Minesweeper and watching Judge Judy while surfing for porn.

Did you know an early version of Minesweeper was a paper-based gambling game in the ’50s? Shit is fascinating. Going out for a night on the town sounds like it was a lot more fun in 1950 than it is in 2007.

Ok, so, thing one I’ve learned is “first line morons exist to make you STFU and go away.” Thing two is that you can block STFU-Go Away Fu with a powerful counter attack called Knowing More than They Do. The tech who was physically in my house was a nice guy, but not familiar with the TVGOS system, which is relatively new on TVs, having been on DVRs and VCRs for a few years (originally called VCR Plus or Guide Plus+ Gold and now TV Guide On Screen in most of North America, but being called Guide Plus+ and G-Guide in Europe and Japan respectively, the whole thing is owned by Gemstar-TV Guide and if you think I’m loading this page for more google hits, you’re right). I explained the TVGOS concept to the tech, told him about VBI transmission, how it only happens on analog channels, usually PBS, and how Comcast had mapped “channel 94″ to “analog WMPT” instead of “analog WETA,” and was able to show him some magic screens inside the TVGOS menus that proved “shit, this guy knows more than I do about this,” which by proxy invalidated the first-line tech moron’s instructions to tell the tech to tell me to STFU and go away.

The tech called a head-end engineer for Comcast, told him the problem, read him the host number of the cable card installed in the TV (I suspect the head-end engineer was getting ready to try an advanced form of “STFU and go away” by looking for a defect in the cable card, and because he kept asking the tech about picture quality and signal strength on all of the channels—there are like 277 of them, so the tech kept saying, more and more exasperatedly, “Picture’s fine. Picture’s fine. Picture’s fine.”). The head-end guy told the tech guy that he’d be at the head-end physically in “about half-an-hour” and to call him then, and that he’d call me after looking at the giant satellite dish to determine there wasn’t a “Kris Kane doesn’t deserve TVGOS information” sign hanging off of it. I should expect a call within the hour.

Well, I “overheard” the phone number the head-end guy gave the tech, and wrote it down surreptitiously, thinking “this head-end guy is gonna call me in an hour like I’m a teenage Russian ballerina.”

Two and a half hours later, I called the head-end engineer, telling him I’d gotten the number from some help desk guy, and walked him through the “the VBI for this area should be WETA, but the analog you’re pushing on cable 94 is analog WMPT, which is why I haven’t had listings for three weeks.” The head-end guy could tell I knew what I was talking about (and I don’t, really, I just know enough to get this problem solved) and I overheard him talking to someone else there about other channels. “Well, what’s on 92? Nothing? Put analog WETA there. Ain’t gonna hurt anything, right?”

At this point I should mention that the head-end guy was actually quite helpful and reasonably pleasant, and may not have been trying to hit me with STFU and go away, but instead was probably just looking for problems he’d experienced in these situations before. He also told me to keep the number and call him if I had any more problems—which is cool. I sometimes exaggerate the ineptitude of customer service people for comedic effect. Well, ok, rarely, because most of the time customer service is about as helpful as open-heart surgery performed by circus clowns. But in this instance, the tech who showed up at my door and the head-end engineer (even if he did forget to call me) were both quite friendly and helpful. Karma shield, activate!

So I remapped my VBI channel to 92, TVGOS picked up the data, and eight hours later I had listings again. I still sort of feel giddy every time I think “Wow, I made a phone call and Comcast turned a ‘blank’ channel on in my zip code. I rule.” It feels vaguely illicit, like hacking, even though it’s obviously just me picking up the phone and helping my cable company solve a problem they’d inadvertently created by mapping the wrong analog signal to a cable channel some time three weeks ago. Knowing shit is cool. Thank you, Internet.

Here’s some boring information for people who might be having the same problem. The fun part of this post has probably been over for quite some time.

In your TVGOS menu, highlight setup and type in 753159852 (it’s in the shape of an asterisk on the number pad of your remote—up diagonally left-to-right, down diagonally left-to-right, straight up the middle) and page through the screens there until you see VBI carrier and/or Host Channel. If either one of these shows blank, none, or 0×0, you’re not receiving listings because you don’t have a host channel detectable in your line-up. You can find out what your TVGOS host channel is by going here, or maybe by contacting TVGOS directly at 800-386-7380, but that number is technically only for host stations, cable providers, or TV and DVR manufacturers. At the very least, if you’re having this problem, you can call your local cable provider, ask to speak to a head-end engineer, give him or her that 800 number, and have them work something out together.
Once you find out what your host channel is, you can try to force your TV or DVR to scan VBI on that channel by tuning to it (and be sure you’re tuning to the analog channel, not the digital—92 and not 26 in the instance above there—which you can verify on my particular television by pressing the “display info” button on the remote and looking for “NTSC” somewhere in the info banner (NTSC is analog, ATSC is digital). Enter the TVGOS menu, highlight setup, and press 963214785 on the number pad (it’s a spiral that starts on the outside right side of the pad and works its way in to the center).

The TVGOS menu should spit out some message about “Scanning VBI” (there are variations on this theme depending on your hardware), and then after about five minutes the menu should go away. Turn your TV off overnight, and you might have listings in the morning. You may also have to map a channel in your TVGOS listings to the analog version of the broadcast channel—in my case, I didn’t want to lose the digital WETA feed, since the picture’s better, so I mapped WHUT (Howard University’s PBS franchise, which has always had really shitty broadcast quality for some reason) to the analog WETA carrier (92, freshly turned on by Comcast), and that solved my problem.

I checked out the latest offerings from Nero and Roxio, and man are they shit. Between registry breaking uninstallation issues and just plain bloat, they’re nearly unusable. They install a suite of software to do everything from edit audio and video files to organizing your data files—and not only are there better tools out there for these things, the data organization stuff installs over the operating system in really annoying, intrusive ways. If you haven’t tried them, don’t bother. If you have, you’re going to need various uninstallation tools to clean up after them (let me know in comments and I’ll point you to a few links I found).

The good news is, I found something that works. If burning a CD with the other software suites is like trying to drive a nail with a tool box, this software—Cheetah Burner—is like driving a nail with a hammer. It does exactly what you want it to do: burn CDs or DVDs, and without all the annoying overhead. This software doesn’t want to manage your MP3 collection, replace your DVD player, or be your best friend. It just wants to burn DVDs and CDs.

It looks to be a pretty small operation, which might be the secret to its success. Roxio and Nero’s software screams “features designed by committee.” It’s kind of amazing how poor these software packages are, considering they used to be the bottom line in media burning. So much so, in fact, that it’s difficult to find information about effective alternatives.

You definitely get the impression Roxio and Nero are packing on new “capabilities” to justify new version numbers and upgrade charges. Cheetah’s definitely a pleasant surprise: streamlined, straightforward, and simple.

Get some.