What does it even mean to pass the mirror test?

The mirror test is a well known indicator for some degree of self-awareness: surreptitiously mark an animal’s face, show it a mirror, and see if it recognizes that the reflected image is of itself by whether it reaches up to touch or remove the mark. We see that behavior and infer that the animal has some knowledge of itself and can recognize that the mirror image is not another animal.

But now robots are being specifically programmed to pass the mirror test.

Ow. It makes my brain hurt.

So this is a computer that has no other indicators of consciousness or awareness or autonomous “thought” (whatever that means…my brain is hurting again), and is being coded to respond to a specific kind of visual input with a specific response…to literally pass the mirror test by rote. Does that really count as passing?

I think that all it actually accomplishes is to subvert the mirror test. It’s always been a proxy for a more sophisticated cognitive ability, the maintenance of a sophisticated mental map of the world around us that includes an entity we call “self”, and I don’t think that training a visual processing task to identify a specific shape unique to the robot design counts.

I’d also like to see what happens if two identical robots are made and put in the same room. To recognize “self” you also have to have a concept of “other”.

Dead squid can dance

Take one squid. Pin it down in a dish. Dissect out one of the peripheral nerves innervating the fin. Plug it into your iPod, and stimulate the nerve with the speaker output while playing Insane in the Membrane. Record the behavior of the chromatophores.

You have my permission, once I’m dead, to run any kind of patterned electrical signal through my nerves to see what my corpse will do. I don’t have the nice chromatophores, but maybe you could get some interesting twitches.

How do you greet the day?

How many fucks does America give? I don’t know, but a lot of them come out of LA and New York. This is a ‘heat map’ produced by an analysis of tweets for how often somebody says “fuck you” on twitter. In it’s current state, it’s not very useful — this is raw data, not per capita data, so all you’re really seeing is flares of general activity in the US and Canadian population centers.

If it helps, they’ve also done an analysis of how often people say “good morning”, and the distribution is different. There’s more activity in the Midwest. It still may not be meaningful, though, because here in the center of passive-aggressive niceness we say “good morning” when we mean “fuck you.”

Is this cannibal week and no one told me?

It’s getting a little weird…now people are sending me more cannibal stories, like this one.

Papua New Guinea police have arrested members of an alleged cannibal cult accused of killing at least seven people, eating their brains raw and making soup from their penises, a report said Friday.

Part of the strange twist here, besides the Penis Soup, is that they’re killing sorcerors. Not for sorcery per se, but because their prices for casting curses on people are too high. So it’s kind of like the New Guinea version of the Occupy Movement, only with less chanting and more enchanted machetes.

Aargh, I can’t unsee it now!

The London Olympics 2012 has a logo. It’s hideous.

I don’t quite understand why a jumble of jagged shapes is supposed to be welcoming, and somehow, this set of shapes is supposed to evoke “2012”. But even worse, I then saw this interpretation and now that’s all I see.

Iran is complaining that all they see is the word Zion. I suggest we tell them about the Simpsons interpretation, and their complaints will immediately evaporate.

Also, the Olympics mascots are one-eyed trouser snakes. It’s the perviest Olympics ever.

Selective pressure for lockpicking skills?

This is bizarre and obscene.

A man in India kept his wife’s genitals under lock and key. He drilled holes on each side of her labia majora. Before leaving the house, the man used to put a small lock in the holes. He kept the keys inside his socks.

I don’t even…

Do you think he reciprocated by getting a Prince Albert and letting her put a padlock on him every morning? It would seem only fair.

The tragedy of Aquaman

It’s true: Aquaman has huge physiological problems. The temperature, the osmotic gradient, the pressure would all kill him, he’d never be able to maintain the caloric intake needed for his super-swimming ability, and the psychic screams from all those fish would drive him mad. But Southern Fried Scientist missed one, and this is the one that always ruined my childhood fantasies of growing up to be Aquaman: oxygen. The dissolved oxygen in seawater is much lower in concentration than in the atmosphere, so all that activity has to be carried out by an oxygen-starved brain and musculature. If Aquaman had gills, they were tiny and discrete, hardly adequate for the job; if he was using the respiratory surface of his lungs to extract oxygen, well, tidal breathing is incredibly inefficient, and using the delicate membranes of the alveoli to generate negative pressure in a dense medium like water, they were going to be shredded. Aquaman dies, twisted by osmotic shock, brain numbed by oxygen starvation, with a cloud of blood gushing out of his mouth.

I really did used to like Aquaman, and he was one of my favorite superheroes, just because I loved the idea of being able to dive off a dock and swim forever. But when I started thinking about it, on every page my brain would be shrieking, “HOW ARE YOU RESPIRING, AQUAMAN?” and I’d be distracted.

Lesson learned: less thinking.