I'm at SETIcon 2 this weekend. It's a mix of science, sci-fi, religion and general speculation.

What really strikes me is that a couple of years ago at the first conference a handful of exoplanets had been found but the Kepler scientists were grinning away, not allowed to say much.

This time round it's hard to find a star without a planetary system. The (silly) Drake equation is falling term by term.

Next SETIcon it has to be some evidence of life...

Add your comment...

Related Posts

• Fermi Suicide
• ISS
• Can I move to a Better Simulation Please?
• ISS over Wales
• Starlink Train

(All Etc Posts)

(Published to the Fediverse as: SETIcon 2 #etc #seti Overly optimistic notes from the SETI conference in San Francisco, California. )

I recently got back from a trip back to the UK. Every time I go back these days something about the country has fundamentally changed. This time it's that every petrol station and motorway services has a Marks & Spencer or Waitrose supermarket embedded in it. On the motorway there are generally several large branches, and then a smaller branch in the toilet hand-washing area, and finally a tiny shop selling sandwiches and a small selection of ready-made curries in each cubicle.

At first pass this seems very convenient, but you can't fill up the tank in the smallest BP (paying at the pump being virtually unheard of in the UK) without getting stuck behind someone doing their weekly shop. 

Add your comment...

Related Posts

• 15 minutes of terror, or how the UK has changed in four years
• Methyl L-α-aspartyl-L-fucking-phenylalaninate
• Convergent Evolution in Retail
• The real reason Americans don't have passports
• Please Stay

(All Etc Posts)

(Published to the Fediverse as: Petrol & Marks & Spencer #etc #uk #motorwayservices #petrol #waitrose #marks&spencer On this insane number of ever smaller Marks & Spencer outlets that are now everywhere in the UK. )

A company called Evive launched this week to battle the evil of bottled water with reusable RFID equipped bottles that need a special filling station that plays advertising to you while you refill. Sort of like a water fountain but worse in every way possible. 

Concord Massachusetts just started to ban the sale of bottled water, joining several other towns and cities around the world. They've actually just banned small bottles, you can still buy a large one. 

Wouldn't it be better to leave the water on the shelf and ban Coke? 

Photo credit: Joost J. Bakker IJmuiden cc

Add your comment...

Related Posts

• Methyl L-α-aspartyl-L-fucking-phenylalaninate
• California November 2016 Propositions
• San Francisco 2012 Propositions
• California November 2020 Propositions
• San Francisco November 2016 Propositions

(All Etc Posts)

(Published to the Fediverse as: Bottled Water #etc #water #evive #concord If you ban bottled water I'll just buy a coke, which by the way is in a bottle. )

Photo of a California Slender Salamander hiding in a paving slab crack in Bernal Heights, San Francisco.

Add your comment...

Related Posts

• Gopher Snake
• Western Garter Snake
• Crab at Fort Funston
• Bernal Bug
• Northern Pacific Rattlesnake

(All Etc Posts)

(Published to the Fediverse as: California Slender Salamander #etc #salamander Photo of a California Slender Salamander )

Citibank contacted us in December offering to remortgage our house. There was a reasonably steep application fee but I was promised a refund in the event that the remortgage failed. Specifically this email:

"Hi Rob,

Unfortunately we cannot waive the application/appraisal fee, however I can refund it back to you in your loan is not approved.

What do you think?

xxxxxx xxxx
Citibank
Senior Lending Consultant"

So we paid the fee, filled in the paperwork and waited for the appraisal.

The appraiser came and did a lousy job. His report mixed up photos, missed salient features of the house and worst of all used ridiculous comps with what must have been distressed sales of crack dens next to the freeway instead of similar nice houses on the west slope of Bernal Hill. Apparently this isn't unusual. Chris Arnold from a recent NPR News story:

"Right. It used to be too easy. The appraisers were part of the problem, so Congress changed the law. And that's had some unintended consequences. And to make a long story short, what sometimes happens now is the lender says, OK, we need an appraiser for Robert's house. And an email goes out, blasted out to a hundred different appraisers across the entire state. And the email says something like: Hey, who wants to do this for a hundred bucks. You know, so the guy you get might be driving in from 50 miles away and really have no idea what the homes in your neighborhood are worth."

So long story short the appraisal valued our house at about $5 and the remortgage application was declined. There was an appeal process for the appraisal but it wasn't possible to complete unless a few of our neighbors happened to have sold their houses in the same week. 

Given that we've never missed a mortgage payment it seems bizarre to suppose that making it lower would represent an increased risk. But it's Citibank's decision and I wouldn't be whinging about it in public if they'd refunded the application fee in January. Despite repeated emails the didn't refund it in February or March either. In fact, after declining the transaction we never heard from our friendly Senior Lending Consultant again. 

I've just got off the phone with the credit card company as in the end I had to resort to challenging the transaction and getting it charged back to Citibank. I'm not sure if it's incompetence on the part of a few employees or a new scheme to defraud customers but be careful if Citibank make the same offer to you. And make sure you get the refund promise in writing.

Previously

Photo credit: Roblawol cc

Add your comment...

Related Posts

• Shiti
• Is it safe to open securedoc.html (Cisco Registered Envelope)?
• HOWTO: Punish Banks
• Instead of punishing bankers why not disrupt them?
• Twitter's API has got too painful for me

(All Etc Posts)

(Published to the Fediverse as: Even Shitier - Citibank Remortgage Scam #etc #citi #citigroup #citibank #mortgage Citibank, who have a dollar or two, take some time out of their day to steal my money. )

A chair in our garden has produced a bumper crop of baby Cross Orbweaver spiders. Very cute.

Add your comment...

Related Posts

• Backyard Visits
• Pipevine Swallowtail Caterpillar
• Painted Lady Butterflies Eclosing
• Leafhopper Nymph
• California Slender Salamander

(All Etc Posts)

(Published to the Fediverse as: Baby Yellow Spiders #etc #spiders Photo of around 42 baby cross orbweaver spiders on the back of a garden chair. )

Marcus du Sautoy, writing on BBC News, brings up Searle's Chinese Room in Can computers have true artificial intelligence?

Searle's argument is that someone who speaks no Chinese exchanges notes with a native speaker through a system that informs him which note to respond with. The Chinese speaker think's he's having a conversation but the subject of the experiment doesn't understand a word of it. It's a variant of the Turing Test and while the 'room' passes the test the lack of understanding on the part of the subject means that Artificial Intelligence is impossible. The BBC even put together a three part illustration to help you understand. 

I learned about the room at university and I didn't fall for it then. Du Sautoy, to be fair, expresses some skepticism but it makes up about a third of an article on AI, which is unforgivable. 

In determining if Searle's room is intelligent or not you must consider the entire system, including the note passing mechanism. The person operating the room might not understand Chinese but the room as a whole does. The Chinese room is like saying a person isn't intelligent if their elbow fails to get a joke. It's the AI equivalent of Maxwell's demon, a 19th century attempt to circumvent the second law of thermodynamics. 

Every time you get a Deep Thought or a Watson the debate about the possibility of strong AI (as in just I) resurfaces. It's not a technical question, it's a religious one. If you believe we're intelligent for supernatural reasons then it's valid to wonder if AI is possible (and you might want to stop reading now). If not then the fact that we exist means that AI might be difficult, but it's not impossible and almost certainly inevitable. 

The problem is that teams at IBM and Google cook up very clever solutions in a limited domain and them people get excited that a chess computer or a trivia computer can eventually 'beat' a human at one tiny thing.

Human intelligence wasn't carefully designed, it's the slow accretion of many tiny hacks, lucky accidents that made us slowly smarter over time. If we want this type of intelligence it's highly likely that we're going to have to grow it rather than invent it. And when true AI finally arrives I'll bet that we won't understand it any better than the organic kind.  

Previously: At the CHM...

Photo Credit: Stuck in Customs cc

Add your comment...

Related Posts

• OpenAGI, or why we shouldn't trust Open AI to protect us from the Singularity
• Rob 2.0
• Three reasons the dream of a robot companion isn't over
• Can I move to a Better Simulation Please?
• DeepCoder

(All Etc Posts)

(Published to the Fediverse as: Sod Searle And Sod His Sodding Room #etc #software #searle #chinese #room #ml Why Searle's Chinese Room is the wrong way to think about artificial intelligence. )