Analog Speech Synthesis

YouTube – Creepy video of talking robot mouth.

This triggers some fear/disgust reaction in me and I don’t understand it. To try and convey the feeling I’m having imagine if that was like a throat and mouth cut out of a corpse, but that alone doesn’t explain it.

Perhaps it’s that plus the sound. Sounds have always impacted me more emotionally than visuals have.

Anyway, this is great area of study, it would be awesome to develop an instrument that sings since the first instrument was the human voice anyway. Would be a neat loop.

It’s like “I can’t sing but I built something that can.”

Slaying the Wanderer: Who Murdered Pluto?

Every time I think about the decision to remove Pluto’s designation as a planet my blood begins to boil (at earth normal pressure and temperature.)

There are two things most little boys find interesting at some point, if they are not starving to death or in some other way being neglected or abused, dinosaurs and space.

My solar system had 9 planets. NINE! Not 8.

I don’t care if discoveries showed the Pluto was a ford pinto, if it’s still in the same spot and it’s what we’ve been calling Pluto this whole time then it’s Pluto.

Is it or is it not one of the original wanderers?

In fact has ANYTHING change about Pluto? No. It’s virtually same same way it was before humans.

Inspired by this absurdity I have an idea! I think we should rename all the planets to numbers and we should remove the word “planet” from the scientific vocabulary.

Why? Well, obviously Mars isn’t really a god a war. Just like Pluto isn’t really a planet. We should name it accordingly. If calling Pluto a planet is inaccurate and thus demanding of change then calling Mars a god a war surly is equally inaccurate. It should be renamed Sol 4 or something equally sterile.

And don’t give me that crap about having to add tons of planets if Pluto counts as one. Pluto should merit an exception. Or you could tailor other definitions to suit. Or you could just deal with it as a quirk of an old system, which we do constantly with regard to things like measurements and the calendar.

This is all absurd of course, but then again so was dicking around with Pluto’s classification.

Screw you IAU, pretentious crap like this is why the rank and file think space exploration is a waste of money.

For a MUCH better elaboration on the problem here check this out.

Concealed Deadly Weapons

As some of my readers and all of my friends know I’m a big fan of firearms. Sadly I only own a couple, they are expensive. I generally think of hand weapons as religious artifacts almost, signifying the triumph of human ingenuity over generations of predators. Icons of ability and responsibility. The step away from brawn towards brains. A physical reminder of the first technology. A talisman of our inclination and ability to change the world. From the samurai’s sword, to the gentleman’s rapier, to the minuteman’s musket, to the cowboy’s revolver, to the black panther’s rifle; personal weapons mean a good deal more than simply the ability to kill.

Most of the time all I carry is a knife. (Spyderco Endura 4 Wave, before that it was a Spyderco Spyderfly) I think of it as a human talon. It’s design means I can deploy it nearly as fast as I could deploy a fist. This makes it feel like a part of me, like not so much a device, as a modification to myself.

I feel like most people hate me but in my heart I am flattered that society trusts me literally with the lives of everyone around me. Trust is important to me. People I consider true friends are given keys to my home. I suppose this is a sort of personal ritual as well.

With that de facto authority over the lives of those around me comes the obligation to make good that trust. As such I feel it is my duty to be aware of my surroundings with an eye toward accomplishing goals for the group that an unarmed person may not.

The most obvious hypothetical would be stopping a dangerous person, someone like a terrorist. But any rational measure shows that the likely hood of that happening is effectively nil. The real help I provide is inserting doubt into the minds of muggers and the like. My presence in a crowd increases the chances that any given victim will be armed. This makes the crowd safer from opportunistic parasites.

All this is well understood and the effect on crime is documented, only the irrational dispute the numbers. But, it got me thinking. Perhaps a similar consequence of the transhuman movement is likely to occur. Weapons aren’t always artifacts. I suspect crime is equally affected by the known potential presence of any weapon, any threat to the would be mugger. Martial arts for example.

What’s going to happen to the crime rate when people can download Kung Fu as easily as Neo did or better yet when people can alter their build?

In short order its going to be like living on a planet full of aliens. Starting a fight could be suicidal, for all you know the person you’re about to punch has poisonous spines just under the skin. I think this is going to be a good thing. But of course The Company is going to want to regulate this, make sure everyone stays helpless. Fortunately its not going to be that simple.

For one we’ll have to rethink prison. Suddenly the idea of caging people will be infeasible for the same reason keeping all the animals in the zoo in the same room is infeasible. For two I don’t think people will be willing to allow the government to alter their genome on a whim in the same way we allow them to deprive us of our items. Taking my knife is different than taking my fists. For three trying to police the upgrades will be like trying to police mp3s. All the raw materials are readily available the only exotic component is the information.

I look forward to the day when antler bashing rituals fade into our past. Personal lethality is one way to speed it along.

Boy builds Robot from old TVs

The comments of this video are interesting to me for a variety of reasons.

Some express doubts about the video’s authenticity.

Even if it is a lie, why try to expose it?

Is showing yourself to be clever really worth ruining an attempt to improve the lives of children?

What part of a robot could not be found inside an old TV? The only thing I could think of is the actuators and related stuff. Granted, TV’s don’t have a lot of moving parts, but everything else does.

Others are just trolling, which is a strange thing in and of itself. It’s like the worst thing you can say in this society is a slur.

What’s funny about that to me is far worse things are said as serious and accepted.

Slurs in this context are almost cute by comparison.

In any case, this is a great video, and a great goal. This whole continent is full of people for who the concept of hard work is a foregone conclusion. Getting them into the information processing game could render their natural resources chump change by comparison nearly overnight.

All innovation is simply the recombination of old ideas, this young man has shown that something similar can be done at the physical level. He’s reordering parts we ignorantly consider refuse into a useful form and he’s just one person doing it by hand.

I see tremendous potential here. I think it would be wonderful and ironic if the continent that was so brutally savaged over want of slave labor gave birth to the next humanoid robotic revolution and did it with our leftover on their way to the economic top.

Fantasy maybe, but it would be awesome.