The End of AI: The Movie

MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD!!! If you haven’t seen Steven Spielberg/Stanley Kubrick’s AI, do NOT read any further. (Also, Rosebud is a sled.)

I volunteered for the 6:45AM shift staffing the phones at the local public radio fund driver this morning and got to talking with the station’s technical infrastructure manager about movies ‘n such. (Yes, it was a slow day in the fund drive. So call and contribute already! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!) I was reminded of my cousin-in-law Mark Dionne’s explanation of the ending of the movie AI.

I had assumed that the end was a Spielbergian moving-but-vapid paean to the power of love: The robot boy has become human and can’t rest until his absent Mommy requites his love. Yeah yeah, I thought, sad but uplifting.

About a year ago, Mark told me a different interpretation that made much more sense. Mark is a topnotch software engineer. He saw the ending as saying not that the robot boy had learned to love but just the opposite: the robot was programmed to continue until he heard the “I love you” from his motherly unit. All those thousands of years he was stuck in a loop. No love. Just an unfulfilled conditional. When Mark said this, the ending became much more cynical and much more satsifying to me.

Note: “Love Is Just an Unfulfilled Conditional” ^TM; is soon to be a major song from Garth Brooks. On the B side: “Our Love Is So Sub-Routine that I Can’t Function.” To be followed by “There’s a Method to Your Madness (You’re in a Class by Yourself).”

Be the first to comment »

Clued Game Development

Andy Mahood, columnist on game simulations (that is, games that are simulations, not simulations of games) at PCGamer, gave the product of the year award last year to Microsoft Flight Simulator which, in his view, narrowly edged out IL-2 Sturmovik. According to this month’s column (July), not only did the Sturmovik developers try out their ideas in public at gaming message boards and other online forums, the company has been collected bug reports and enhancement requests there as well. They’ve been issuing “an aggressive series of patches” whereas “Microsoft recently issued a statement saying that it would not be providing any sort of patching process for the bugs found” in their product.

Concludes Mahood: “Is it too late to change my vote?”

Be the first to comment »

Me at Wordsworth. Tonight.

Self-promotion: I’ll be at Wordsworth bookstore in Harvard Square tonight at 7pm to talk with the debonair Scott Kirsner about “Small Pieces.” You’re welcome to attend, but only if you’re either not hostile or easily intimidated into silence.

Be the first to comment »

Brian Millar’s Unpronounceable

Brian Millar, who is in my pantheon of the Just Plain Funny, is collecting words he cannot pronounce or at least is so uncertain about that he is afraid to say them out loud.

My list includes:

macadam
coccyx
Scorcese

And my number one word that I can’t pronounce:

President Bush

1 Comment »

Terrorist Stockpile

“I don’t think there was actually a plot, beyond some fairly loose talk and his coming in here obviously to plan further deeds.”
-Deputy Dense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on CBS News about the Dirty Bomb Plot, as reported by Reuters, 6/13

Since Abdullah al-Muhajir (nee Jose Padilla) was picked up on May 8, and since Ashcroft’s announcement over a month later was precipitated by no relevant event, and since Ashcroft wildly overstated both the readiness of the plotters (they were just talking) and the damage a dirty bomb would do (it might kill scores, not hundreds of thousands), it’s only rational to assume that the announcement was timed for Bush’s maximum political advantage. Has anyone advanced any other reasonable explanation?

So we also have to assume that the administration is stockpiling Abdullah al-Muhajir’s who have been “picked up,” ready to be announced the next time the Bush crowd thinks there’s a political advantage to scaring the crap out of us and our children.

If lying about getting blow jobs from an intern is an impeachable offense, what’s the penalty for spreading panic among an already frightened citizenry because it helps you stay re-electable?

Eric Norlin, who is “incentivized” by a small explosive capsule implanted next to his heart not to tell us too much of what he knows, says that the news was timed to “learn about the inner workings of the [terrorist] organization. ”

Even assuming that there were no political considerations in the timing, that doesn’t explain why Ashcroft’s announcement wildly over-stated the stage of the plans and the effect of a dirty bomb. The terrorists are not the only ones being manipulated here.

1 Comment »

MiscLinks

Vergil Iliescu points us to 12 Flowers, an online exhibition at The Edge of scans of flowers by Katinka Matson. The high res slide show starts here. Gorgeous.

Frank Paynter interviews the fearless Jeneane Sessums, making it clearer than ever why so many of us love her. And Frank’s developing quite an interesting rhetorical form.

The ever-vigilant Chip has written up a report on Al Gore’s recent speech to Wisconsin’s Democratic stalwarts.

I like Al Gore. Really. But the Democrats are going to have to do better than this. Gore is right to call Bush on what in calmer times would be seen as outrageous acts of environmental and economic pillage. But my spidey-sense tells me that Bush and his cronies are right now setting the stage for an act of great evil, a theater piece that threatens to be apocalyptic. No, I don’t know what it is, but I bet it involves a pipeline, an invasion, and the transformation of the norm of liberties. It’s being done out of a well-placed fear, the desire to get reelected, greed, racism, and incredible short-sightedness. Personally, I’m scared shitless.

Michael Moore for president.

Be the first to comment »

A Pocketful of Standards

Ed Nixon was prodded by my blog about HTML validation to point out that the Web Standards Project is up again. Its mission: to “fight for standards that reduce the cost of complexity of development while increasing the accessibility and long-term viability” of web sites. The standards they like include XML, CSS, XHTML, DOM and ECMAS. Here’s a bluffer’s guide to each:

XML: Smarter tagging of documents (and other types of information) so that computers can do more interesting things than just display them in the right font.

CSS: Define the look (and more) of document elements external to the document so they can be displayed in the right font … and so those definitions can be applied – and updated – across multiple documents. Part of the conspiracy to turn authors into text monkeys.

XHTML: Anal-compulsive HTML. Makes sloppy tagging habits so that the pages are more predictable to computers. No shirts, no end tags, no service.

DOM: A standard computer-eye view of the internal tree structure of a document so its elements can be found and understood in relation to one another. You never knew a simple document was that complex.

ECMAS: JavaScript removed from the vagaries and self-interest of the vendors and put into the hands of responsible adults.

If you’d like actual information, you can start with the Web Standards Projects’ own list of links.

Be the first to comment »

Invalid Validation

AKMA points us to Dorothea who points us to the W3C HTML Validation Service, a nicely done tool. Put in an URL and it instantly comes back with the list of syntactical errors in its HTML — attributes that need to be within quotation marks, paragraph tags within block elements, ALT attributes left out of graphic links. Why, there are hundreds of mistakes in the very page you’re reading. It’s completely, totally, unredeemably INVALID! In fact, the home page for OASIS , the SGML/XML standards group, is INVALID, XML.com is INVALID, the O’Reilly home page is INVALID, Linus Torvalds‘ home page is INVALID, and the 12-line home page of Google has a bold-faced FATAL ERROR in it.

Reminds me of an old joke. A man goes to a doctor. “Doc, it hurts when I go like this,” he says, poking himself gently in the foot with his index finger. “It hurts when I go like this,” he says, poking his knee. “It hurts when I go like this,” he says as he pokes his thigh. He proceeds the same way up to the top of his head.

“Yup,” says the doctor, “You have a broken finger.”

Be the first to comment »

A Rumor of War: Request for Confirmation

I have heard a rumor through a friend of a friend who is shipping out to Afghanistan that we are in the middle of a the largest call up since Vietnam and are massing soldiers and supplies along the border in Afghanistan preparatory to the invasion of Iraq (through or over Iran?).

Surely if this is true, we would know about the size of the call-up. I don’t. Do you? Is there any truth to this rumor?

2 Comments »

That NYT article

Doc is a must-read today, even more must-y than usual. (Hmm, that somehow came out wrong, but you know what I mean.) He has the definitive comment on David Gallagher’s piece on “warbloggers” in the NY Times. And he also has some great quotes from David Bowie in a John Pareles piece in the aforementioned Times. Bowie says, matter of factly, that the music industry isn’t going to be around in a recognizable form in ten years and that “Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity.” Rock on, GlamBoy!

Be the first to comment »