Topics

white beans, have been soaking over the night. repaced water, boiling, still have about 45 minutes to go.

you tell me what to do with them, i actually don't really know.

if all else fails i'll add some tomato paste, ketchup, worcestersauce, sugar and spice and pretend it's nice.

cause the original thread turned into a toolbox:

Further, Neural Network algorithms have been widely replaced by newer and better Pattern Classification algorithms, such as Support Vector Machines (seems to be the current "market leader") and Learning Vector Quantization (the focus of my research group). These algorithms do not have anything to do with brains and/or neurons anymore, but they have other advantages (you can't really see *how* a neural network or an SVM has learned what it does, but LVQ allows this, for instance), and are more accurate.

very interesting, 000. Can you elaborate a bit on what these algorithms are used for?

a primer on machine learning, ok here we go.

say you got a a whole bunch of fish. like a big pile of 1,000 salmon and herrings, randomly, about 500 each. then you get this poor Biology PhD to sift them out for you using his expert knowledge on fish and put them into a machine that measures their length (in millimeters) and average brightness (as a floating point number between 0.0 = black and 1.0 = white).

finally you get an excel sheet emailed from this biology dude, three columns listing all lengths, brightness the third column says "salmon" or "herring". first thing you do, is plot every row as a dot on a 2-dimensional graph, say length on the X-axis and brightness on the Y-axis.

since salmon and herring have distinct characteristics in brightness and size, what you should see is two kind of separate clouds of points, one is the salmons (which we all know are brighter and larger) and the other are the herrings (which are well known for being darker and shorter than salmon).
perhaps the clouds overlap a littlebit, could be. shouldn't be too much though, otherwise machine learning isn't going to perform very well.

what you can do now, is to draw a (straight) line between these two clouds, that sort of separates them. one idea for example is to take the average (middle) point of the one cloud, and the middle point of the other cloud and draw the line in between there (where it's equidistant).

anyway, one day, you get mysterious smelling package in the mail, inside the box is a fish with a note saying

Esteemed collegue Professor Cramulus,

can you please identify this fish for me? I'm not sure
whether it's a herring or a salmon.

Regards, Professor Zippletits

so you measure the length and brightness of this fish, pin the point on the graph, and check whether it falls on one side of the line or the other. and now, you know the answer!

now, LVQ is an algorithm that, given a whole load of example data, tries to determine the optimal position of these "middle points" called prototypes, in such a way that any unseen data will be classified depending on which prototype they are closest to.
the nice thing is that these prototypes represent the "average" salmon and the "average" herring, so you can sort of examine what the criteria are that the classification is based on. you can have as many prototypes as you want btw, also multiple per class, if that's the case, they will sort of space out inside the cloud to still generate the optimal decision boundary based on closeness to the prototype.

SVM and Neural Nets work slightly different, but the basic process is the same: in goes some numbers (length and brightness in this case) and out comes a classification ("salmon" or "herring", in this case).

now usually instead of just two numbers, for a machine learning problem you can have a vector* of 50 or even as much as 6000 numbers as input. you can imagine that at this point it becomes kinda hard to make a graph with a point cloud from this and draw those lines by yourself. fortunately, the computer has no problem with this at all (ok you do run into some problems as your dimensionality increases, but i dont want to get into details too much now).

(* the word "vector" means nothing more than "list of numbers" for purposes of this explanation. for example a 5 dimensional vector would look like (-2.3, 1.7, 0.555, 73.001, 0.0) or something)

for example, my bachelors thesis was about classifying images of boar spermatozoid heads into classes "healthy" or "damages" after they had been frozen. yeah it's a bio-industry application, i did consider the moral issues of doing this research, but the original research had already been done by a PhD from a spanish institute, we just obtained this dataset from her in order to test and compare our own algorithms on real world data, not to develop a biotech pig artificial insemination application.

all the images were 35x19 pixels with greyscale value. your average spermatozoid head image looks kinda like a grey oval on a dark background with some light and dark spots in it.
anyway, 35x19 = 665. so the input vector is 665 dimensional.
now the cool thing is, if you train the LVQ algorithm based on the example data, you'll end up with some prototypes for the "good" and the "bad" spermatozoid head images. these prototypes are of course also 665 dimension vectors, which means, you can plot them as a 35x19 grayscale image! which is very nice because that way you can see what the algorithm "thinks" the prototypical "good" spermatozoid and the prototypical "bad" ones look like.

other applications in machine learning.

DNA data is a lot of numbers (ok actually ACTG letters, but you can convert them to numbers), and you wanna train an algorithm that classifies parts of DNA into whether they code for any (known) proteins ( = exons), or not ( = introns) (or the other way around, i forgot).

or if you have a MRI scan of some tissue, in like 6 different varieties, and a little region, and you get a load of numbers (say, several gigabytes for your average MRI scan) you wanna classify whether bits are cancer or healthy.

it's basically datamining. an interesting applicaiton could be to somehow encode a forum post into a list of numbers (word frequency counts and such), and then try to classify it into who wrote it, depending on writing style.

[A RANT IN CHAT STYLE]

A RANT IN CHAT STYLE          sort of semi adapted from an actual chat log!

[Cram] I had a dream about this exact conversation we're having right now.
[000]  I'm flattered you dream about me.
[000]  So, yesterday on the IRC, Nigel said something like "Is it me or is discordianism exploding with activity lately?"
[000]  And Stmae agreed.
[Cram] Nice
[000]  So what are the Pastafarians doing again? I thought they just made desktop wallpapers of spaghetti monsters?
[Cram] Through dilligent letter-writing and general asshole-satire, they got a few districts in Kansas to not teach creationism in science classes.
[Cram] Vex brought that up in January, and it ultimately became the discussion which kicked off OMGASM
[000]  Ok, more power to them!
[000]  That's pretty cool because that was exactly the thing we always said was lacking in FSMism.
[Cram] Hell yeah! I just wish WE were doing something on that scale.
[000]  Cram, we are.
[000]  And we're doing it way better too.
[000]  Because we're not about one cause,
[000]  we're doing it for practice in the memetics and the internet robot future.
[000]  See, if there's one thing i'm sure of,
[000]  it's that nigel is right, and it is caused by our research into memetics,
[000]  and social structures and open source warfare and all that.
[Cram] True
[000]  See, what happened in the past 3/4 year or so,
[000]  we started reaching out to discordians all over the web.
[000]  Before that we thought they were dumb pinealheads.
[000]  Now we think, a pinealhead is better than no minions at all
[000]  We really do have all this activity going on,
[000]  and we are doing it, why?
[000]  Because all the activity we're doing is directed at getting people more active!
[000]  We're not getting anti-creationism shit happening, we're making the happening happening, and when it's happening, it's really happenin'
[Cram] TROOF
[000]  It's like that bit in Art of Memetics, i'm sure it must have sprung to your attention.
[000]  About the mastermind group,
[Cram] Yeah, very much so.
[000]  how it's a group that creates media, feeds the media back into its own system, reviews and criticizes that media, creates new media based on that, keeps feeding it back, until something comes out that's worth transmitting to external networks.
[000]  Now, we say "that's PD".
[000]  That friend of mine said "that's cultural literary studies".
[000]  My boss will say "that's our company".
[000]  Everybody who is doing any kind of knowledge work will say "that's what we do!".
[Cram] Hell yeah!
[000]  Yeah, so we don't really have a goal.
[000]  Whatever, maybe active people are thinking for themselves?
[Cram] I gotta go and fight this zombie apocalypse.
[000]  Ah, ok. Then i have time to read the board.
[Cram] But you should save this little rant you just said to me, and work it into a post.
[Cram] It's good stuff.
[Cram] Later.
[000]  Peace bro, pleasant dreams!

And then, Cram was a zombie.

http://0x000000.com/

this guy's blog is usually about hacking and security, but lately he's been making more and more philosophical posts.

(oh and FYI, that URL might have a lot of zeroes in it, and it's written by a Dutch guy, but it's not me)

i dunno really what forum to put this, but it's "tech", so there:

Google Trends is a google labs tool that allows you to track and plot search queries by volume over time. Unfortunately our own memes and projects are too small in volume to make any impact on the graphs, so i decided to do a test chart of project Chanology:

google trends on scientology, chanology, anonymous, chan

important points are:
- the huge Jan.17 peak in searches for "scientology", as the Cruise video emerged.
- at that moment the word "chanology" was coined.
- after that, you can see another, smaller peak in all four graphs on Feb.10, the date of the first raid.

(edit: fixed link)

this is so pretty.

reading the Art of Memetics, i had to look up the word "asemic", this was one of the results:

http://thenonist.com/index.php/weblog/permalink/2679/

Asemic writing is a sort of writing without words, basically it's just scribbling stuff that looks like writing, kind of like doing stream of consciousness writing without even caring about the language or words.

Asemic art is then like calligraphy in this medium. In other words, pretty shapes that sort of give the suggestion of type.

[tomatoes]

which contains self-made dried tomatoes:

- half a bunch of tomatoes (i used 5) and cut the green bit out with a tiny V-cut.
- place them in an oven dish, covered in aluminium foil (as to make the cleaning afterwards easier), best if the tomatoes exactly fit, so they sort of stud eachother. have the cut-side up.
- make a mixture of 1/2 honey, 1/2 dark balsamic vinegar (i got some really fine stuff that's ripened for 3 years or something) and salt. enough salt. think of a really strong thick salad dressing
- carefully spoon part of the mixture over the tops of the tomatoes so they are completely covered, but dont get too much in between the tomatoes.
- place in the oven at low heat ("4" on my gas oven)
- go do something else for a while
- periodically re-apply the mixture to the tomatoes
- mine were done after about 2.5 hours
- let cool

the couscous salad:

- get a can of black olives without pits, throw away the "juice" and halve them
- put the olives in a bowl together with a few tablespoons of olive oil, minced chillipeppers (sambal oelek), two pressed cloves of garlic, a bunch of dried green herbs and black pepper. stir and cover.
- go do something else for a while.
- put some water in the electric waterboiler
- take the tomatoes, cut one in half, taste. yumyumyum...
- cut the other tomatoes in half.
- put the couscous in a pan
- tear open a teabag of mint-tea and sprinkle it over the couscous (if you got fresh mint, you must use that of course, and just cut it up and mix it through the salad, but it's so expensive over here.. mint tea works pretty damn well, though)
- crumble a small cube of stock-powder over the couscous
- pour the boiling water over the couscous (not too much, not too little, you know how to prepare couscous, right?) and stir a bit with a fork until the stock-powder is dissolved
- dice about half a cucumber
- dice some feta cheese (i forgot how much, sorry, just use a sensible amount)
- hopefully in the mean time the couscous is done (taste it, it's the only way to make sure), otherwise you wait a little, add more water, or start over (as you can't add less water, adding more couscous will ruin it, and couscous is cheap, so if you fucked it up just start over)
- then you just sort of throw everything together and mix it up

- and then


- you EAT IT

[Q:]

Q: hey tripzilch, do you ever write any of that interesting stuff yourself?

A: nope.

so, i'm still reading Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct and this bit here is just right out awesomely fascinating:

------ (pg.413) ------

Inspired by Chomsky's Universal Grammar (UG), Brown has tried to characterize the Universal People (UP). He has scrutinized archives of ethnography for universal patterns underling the behavior of all documented human cultres, keeping a skeptical eye out both for claims of the exotic belied by the ethnographers' own reports, and for claims of the universal based on flimsy evidence. The outcome is stunning. Far from finding arbitrary variation, Brown was able to characterize the Universal People in gloriously rich detail. His findings contain something to startle almost anyone, and so I will reproduce the substance of them here. According to Brown, the Universal People have the following:


Value placed on articulateness. Gossip. Lying. Misleading. Verbal humor. Humorous insults. Poetic and rhetorical speech forms. Narrative and storytelling. Metaphor. Poetry with repetition of linguistic elements and three-second lines separated by pauses. Words for days, months, seasons, years, past, present, future, bodyparts, inner states (emotions, sensations, thoughts), behavioral propensities, flora, fauna, weather, tools, space, motion, speed, location, spatial dimensions, physical properties, giving, lending, affecting things and people, numbers (at the very least "one", "two" and "more than two"), proper names, possession. Distinctions between mother and father. Kinship categories, defined in terms of mother, father, son, daughter, and age sequence. Binarary distinctions, including male and female, black and white, natural and cultural, good and bad. Measures. Logical relations including "not", "and", "same", "equivalent", "opposite", general versus particular, part versus whole. Conjectural reasoning (infering the presence of absent and invisible entities from their perceptible traces).

Nonlinguistic vocal communication such as cries and squeals. Interpreting intention from behavior. Recognized facial expressions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, and contempt. Use of smiles as a friendly greeting. Crying. Coy flirtation with the eyes. Masking, modifying or mimicking facial expressions. Displays of affection.

Sense of self versus other, responsibility, voluntary versus involuntary behavior, intention, private inner life, normal versus abnormal mental states. Empathy. Sexual attraction. Powerful sexual jealousy. Childhood fears, especially of loud noises, and, at the end of the first year, strangers. Fear of snakes. "Oedipal" feelings (possessiveness of mother, coolness toward her consort). Face recognition. Adornment of bodies and arrangement of hair. Sexual attractiveness, based in part on signs of health and, in women, youth. Hygiene. Dance. Music. Play, including play fighting.

Manufacture of, and dependence upon, many kinds of tools, many of them permanent, made according to culturally transmitted motifs, including cutters, pounders, containers, string, levers, spears. Use of fire to cook food and for other purposes. Drugs, both medicinal and recreational. Shelter. Decoration of artifacts.

A standard pattern and time for weaning. Living in groups, which claim a territory and have a sense of being a distinct people. Families built around a mother and children, usually, the biological mother, and one or more men. Institutionalized marriage, in the sense of publicly recognized right of sexual access to a woman eligible for childbearing. Socialization of children (including toilet training) by senior kin. Children coping their elders. Distinguishing of close kin from distant kin, and favoring of close kin. Avoidance of incest between mothers and sons. Great interest in the topic of sex.

Status and prestige, both assigned (by kinship, age, sex) and achieved. Some degree of economic inequality. Division of laber by sex and age. More child care by women. More agression and violence by men. Acknowledgment of differences between male and female natures. Domination by men in the public political sphere. Exchange of labor, goods, and services. Reciprocity, including retaliation. Gifts. Social reasoning. Coalitions. Government, in the sense of binding collective decisions about public affairs. Leaders, almost always non-dictatorial, perhaps ephemeral. Laws, rights, and obligations, including laws against violence, rape, and murder. Punishment. Conflict, which is deplored. Rape. Seeking of redress for wrongs. Mediation. In-group/out-group conflicts. Property. Inheritance of property. Sense of right and wrong. Envy.

Etiquette. Hospitality. Feasting. Diurnality. Standards of sexual modesty. Sex generally in private. Fondness for sweets. Food taboos. Discreetness in elimination of body wastes. Supernatural beliefs. Magic to sustain and increase life, and to attract the opposite sex. Theories of fortune and misfortune. Explanations of disease and death. Medicine. Rituals, including rites of passage. Mourning the dead. Dreaming, interpreting dreams.


Obviously, this is not a list of instincts or innate psychological propensities; it is a list of complex interactions between a universal human nature and the conditions of living in a human body on this planet. Nor, I hasten to add, is it a characterization of the inevitable, a demarcation of the possible, or a prescription of the desirable. A list of human universals a century ago could have included the absence of ice cream, oral contraceptives, movies, rock and roll, women's suffrage, and books about the language instinct, but that would not have stood in the way of these innovations.

Like the identical twins reared apart who dipped buttered toast in their coffee, Brown's Universal People jolts our preconceptions about human nature. And just as the discoveries about twins do not call for a buttered-toast-in-coffee gene, the discoveries about universals do not implicate a universal toilet-training instinct. A theory of the universal mind is doubtless going to be as abstractly related to the Universal People as X-bar theory [part of universal grammar--000] is related to a list of universals of word order. But it seems certain that any such theory will have to put more in the human head than a generalized tendency to learn or to copy an arbitrary role model.

----- (pg.415) -----

yikes i might get RSI from all this typing

free new school goa trance, in mp3 or wav

http://www.metapsychicrecords.com/

i haven't had time to download or listen to it myself yet, but the guy that passed me the link said it was a "fat mouthful" (dutchism), which means good shit, and i tend to trust him on these matters.

enjoy!

[0 - Brothers without Honor or Humanity]

as some of my may remember i played the DJ at a party two weeks ago, for which i spent a lot of time preparing some pre-mixed mashups in Ableton Live.

i finally got around to putting all mixes together in one zip-file, with a nice cover picture and the tracklist. you can download it here:

http://ifile.it/1kch8ge (75MB)

a few of you have probably heard most (or all) of these mixes, but it's worth getting this pack anyway because these are the definite final versions (no, i'm not going to touch them again, time to move on), plus they have been encoded as nice high quality 256kbps mp3s (sorry, i wanted to use OGG but that's no good for iPods or other portable mp3 players).

this is the tracklisting:

0 - Brothers without Honor or Humanity

Chemical Brothers - Leave Home
Tomoyasu Hotei - Battle without Honor or Humanity

1 - Break Beat Rocker Paste

Alter Ego - Rocker
Luke Vibert - Breakbeat Metal Music
Cut and Paste - Planet Boogie 2001
Dimensional Holophonic Sound - I am your Control

2 - Capital Shower Porn

Felix da Housecat - Silver Screen Shower Scene
Nine Inch Nails - Capital G (Epworth Phones mix)
Porn Kings - Up to no Good

3 - song to the temponaut

Chemical Brothers - Song to the Siren
Eat Static - Temponaut
The Bucketheads - The Bomb! (these sounds fall into my mind)
Eboman - Donuts with Buddah..
Cablejuice - Labdog
Propellerheads - A Number of Microphones
Ugress - Loungemeister

4 - space traffic

The Prodigy - Out of Space (Techno Underworld remix)
DJ Tiesto - Traffic

for my current project i'm working on a 35 minute mix to play while running actually it's already done, it consists of blocks of 3 minute goatrance at 142BPM interleaved with 2 minutes of ambient/psydub. i finished the first rough version last thursday, but because of a bad cold i haven't gotten around to taking it out for a test-run yet. it's not really intended as listening music, more of having a good beat to run to and having some musical indication for timing (when to run, when to walk etc). some of the transitions are still kind of rough, but i intend to polish it out over the course of the next couple of weeks.

[T]

ok, so obviously we need some sort of standardized timezoneless time measurement thing for coordinating our global online efforts.

i propose to name it

The Hours of Universal Discord

or

Time H-something Universal Discord

or whatever, so it spells out to THUD, which is a discordian word, and also can nicely replace the ticking of seconds with thudding. interpretation of the acronym is open for suggestions.

so, the system. a few thoughts:

1. i don't care where the zero/dateline is.

2. it's gotta be very easy to relate with your local time, because otherwise someone will say "April 1st, 23THUD" and you still don't know what time that is.

3. it's gotta be the same for everyone all over the world.

personally this would suggest to me a 24 hour time notation without daylight savings, centered on some arbitrary dateline (say 23 degrees west of Greenwich?). the minutes i don't care about, if you want 100, 60 or 73 in one hour, as long as we agree on something.

another, slightly geekier possibility is to base it off UNIX timestamps, which is the number of seconds since January 1 1970, 0:00 see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time

on the other hand, i just read about leap seconds, WHAT THE FUCK LEAP SECONDS

really.

obviously we're not the first people to muse about things like this, so we might as well steal something:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Time_scales

anybody got any brilliant ideas?

i got this link via a global guerilla blogpost cain sent me, but i found the linked article to be way more interesting:

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/03/out_of_the_blue.php?page=all&p=y

it is rather awesome, in fact.

my mum's coming over for dinner tonight and i wanna cook something good for her. thing is, she got some sort of weird diet thing going on, meaning it has to be very low in carbohydrates. meaning potatoes, pasta, rice etc

i think last time i made tuna steak and grilled some cherry tomatoes, served with a pasta with white sauce and .. anchovy i think. but they could take less of the pasta if they wanted of course.

so, low carbohydrates, that basically leaves just vegetables and meat, right? .. 

sounds a bit boring .. starch-based ingedrients is usually the kind of thing i use to sort of glue the meal to a whole, if you get my point.

maybe i could go crazy with the meat, but i don't have that much time since i also gotta clean my house a bit 

maybe some sort of beet, she likes those

or a salad. i still always wanted to make a salad based on suu's recipe, but then instead of a sauce, a salad with large shrimps and crunchy bits of fennel bulb. i just have no clue what to add to that apart from those two ingredients (and, spring onions or something).

anybody got any ideas?

because everybody needs a desktop background!

to prevent this thread is clogging your memory really soon, really fast, i just show you links. all these desktops are from pictures i've taken or stuff that i've somehow photoshopped/altered myself. none are from any of those desktop websites.

http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/9597/orangegreycosmosdarkbrooj1.jpg -- altered pic of a blade of grass/reed
http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/2633/chakrahd0.jpg -- hippie crap
http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/1345/corneram7.jpg -- emo crap
http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/1063/cosmicnectarql7.jpg -- more pretty rainbow hippie crap
http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/8278/duckyyy4.jpg -- closeup of a rubberducky and a fractal poster i used to have on my wall
http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/9086/klimtdi8.png -- painting by gustav klimt
http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/2402/mondriaanyk1.jpg -- painting by piet mondriaan
http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/2263/wintergreatxt7.jpg -- a picture i took a couple of years ago when it was really pretty with snow and the city lights gave everything a strange orange glow, long exposure with my digital camera.

[http://www.principiadiscordia.com/gasmfeed]

the GASM Feed is no longer hosted on my old Elvicities account, but now resides at the much more appropriate URL:

http://www.principiadiscordia.com/gasmfeed

some of you may ask, WTF is the GASM Feed? well it's some sort of thingy that leverages the social bookmarking power of web 2.0 in order to create a decentralized communication hub for the GASM projects. it also has a long tail.

SAYWHUT?

well basically it works like this:

- you wanna start a new GASM, or have something to add to an existing GASM? put whatever you got to say on a website somewhere (anywhere, can be a thread on PD.com, but keep it public, so no threads in O:MF or the GASM subforum, can be on the GASM Wiki, can be just a scribble on shorttext.com, whatever) then you bookmark this URL on your http://del.icio.us account (don't have one yet? get one!) and be sure to tag it with both "gasm" and "<something>gasm" based on the name of the gasm it's about. and a bunch of other tags you may like. (please don't tag the same things to multiple GASMs). after a while it will appear automagically on the GASM Feed.

- let's say you made pictures that are relevant to a GASM (currently that would probably be the posterGASM), simply upload them to your http://flickr.com account and tag them "<something>gasm". Flickr works a bit slower than del.icio.us, so it might take a day or so before the photos appear on the GASM Feed.

read more at the GASM Wiki: http://www.poee.co.uk/bip/index.php?title=Web_2.0

also, i think the GASM Feed still doesn't work in Internet Explorer, but I simply haven't had the chance to check it yet. I will fix as soon as i get the chance, though. Even though I dislike IE, the point of the GASM Feed is exposure, so the target audience must be as large as possible, no matter their complete disregard for basic computer safety :-P

what i should have said, is that the research field of AI is not actively looking to make any sort of self-aware/self-conscious system. the best thing, i guess, we could currently do is generate a population of random kaufmann-like networks, throw that into some sort of evolutionary scheme (though with what fitness criteria, i wouldn't know), and it might become self-aware, or slightly intelligent, but not in any meaningful way

what we are looking for is simulating/emulating small modules and parts of human cognition. the study AI at my university, which i do not follow (i'm Computer Science, but doing an AI-ish master), used to be called "Technical Cognition Science", which is IMO a much more accurate description of what they actually do (but they changed it because AI sounds more snazzy, and i can't blame them for it).

topics we/they study:
- speech recognition. translating soundwaves to phonemes, and translating phonemes to words/sentences. (fun fact: did you ever notice that the "space" between words in written text is completely absent when spoken?)
- computer vision. this basically the reverse of what a 3D engine for a computer game does given an image, try to figure out the perspective transform, 3D coordinates of objects, shapes, textures, faces, whatnot.
- pattern recognition. this is my area of research. simulation human cognition's ability to sort incoming data (of any type) into classes, and getting better at it given more example data to learn from. is sometimes based vaguely on the way human brains seem to work, but usually also combined with a bayesian/statistical approach (which our brains are intrinsically wired to fail at, badly) to make it work better.
- computational linguistics. from written text, automatically analyze verbs, nouns, grammatical structures. i would expect them to be reasonably good at this these days, but i'm afraid they aren't.
- robotics. yep, they're playing with Lego Mindstorm at the AI faculty and other stuff.
- multi-agent systems and logical reasoning. something humans are also not particularly good at, but computers are. used to solve logical puzzles, like the Prisoners Dilemma and Game Theory stuff.
- a lot more

now there's two problems
- if you plug all these systems and some more together in a meaningful way, would you get something approaching human behaviour? perhaps, probably. but would it be self-aware? i don't think so.
- most of these systems are currently at anywhere between 50% and 98% accuracy (I get 98% sometimes with machine learning datasets, but those aren't really the interesting problems). plugging them together would pretty much fail and collapse in on itself.

and if you want me to make a guess, but don't hold me to it i think it's likely that any self aware AI would sooner come into existence by accident, than by design. just somebody hooking the right systems together and crosses the threshold, is what i expect, if it's gonna happen.

Hooking the right systems together and crosses the threshold?  I'd be generous to assume something is lost in translation here, but you're fluent enough for me to think you just said AI will be an accident.  And you call me unscientific?  What's this threshold?  There's no threshold for consciousness, it's an analog phenomenon. 

as i said, this is my guess, my personal idea. also i don't intend to call you unscientific

but i do believe there is a treshold for consciousness. simply because a system is either capable of meaningful self-reference/self-representation/self-modelling, or it isn't.

also, it shouldn't be an analog phenomenon, because none of the interesting complex phenomena in nature are, in fact, analog. they are all based on complex combinatorics. i dare even to say, without chemical reactions somehow rising above the level of analog phenomena, into combinatorics, there wouldn't have been life.

think of DNA, it's discrete, it's combinatorics, it's a huge mess, but it works with symbols. when organisms mutate, they do so in little (or large) jumps, not by any continuous analog path.

think of neurons in the brain, they're discrete. they build up potential, and fire in pulses, not analog signals, when the treshold is reached, the neuron will start emitting signals at a certain frequency.

but as i said, these are my own speculations. i can elaborate on it, but in that case you might wanna split this thread into arguing about whether it's possible to make predictions on social impact of future technology and musings about artificial intelligence (please do )

My current theory of AI is that to be truly conscious you must have an array of physical sensors that feed constant data into a behaviour algorithm.  The model for intelligence simply does not need consciousness to be intelligent, and all intelligence is intrinsic to behaviour and how it reacts to new experiences and internal stimuli like abstract calculations such as emotions.  I could go on, because this has a high mindshare with me.

physical sensors are very possible. the behaviour algorithm is highly complex, and we can't do that (yet?)

To address your main point, AI isn't robots right now, but it will inevitaby be so in my opinion because intelligence without a physical presence is incapable of doing real work, which is what we want robots for in the first place.  And in a physically enabled intelligence of any type it must have sensors to understand the world it's interfacing with, so it must de facto have senses.  And there you have it; my prediction is that robotic AI will occur because there is money in it (real work to be done) and they will be governed by behavioural intelligence which must require sensors and will THUSLY be comparatively conscious in the same way humans are.

well, it's my opinion that robots being able to do real work, don't need intelligence at all.

look at car factories. lots of robots there. intelligent? not at all.

in fact i'd be very hesitant to build any kind of autonomous reasoning system into a robot. not because it just might become self-aware and take over the world, but because before it even gets there, it's gonna cause a shitload of trouble with the mistakes it will undoubtly make.

i heard that the umanned robot gun tank thingies they deployed somewhere (korea?) killed a bunch of friendly soldiers?

also, think of the ED-209 from Robocop. a robot? yes. intelligent? kind of.

And strong AI will perforce be MADE on a computer, because broccoli and cheese doesn't process binary code very fast.  So yes, it WILL occur first on a computer lacking robotics.  However, I am highly suspect of any robotic AI that was programmed on a computer without some kind of physical interface to train on.  I think any kind of useful strong AI with a robotic form will have to be given the form, then trained with algorithmic learning processes to attain a level of control that makes it useful.  The future of AI is in robotics because if it remains purely digital then it has far fewer ways of being a profit to it's creators.  You're just not following the money if you can't see that.

yes, i agree with that principle, but personally i think that a digital environment, like the Internet would also be sufficient for an AI to train and learn its skills.
and it just seems to me that the Internet is a very likely breeding ground for the accidental hookup of the right systems/modules to spawn such an AI for the first time, rather than a robotics laboratory.

two chicken breasts, one big carrot, two large onions, 5-6 garlic cloves, 2 spoons of sambal oelek (chilli puree w/salt), 1-3 spoons of thai green curry sauce, a big chunk of solid coconut cream, yoghurt.

figure out how to make curry out of this.

add rice.

enjoy.

oh i also added some olive oil and a chunk of butter in there as well. and a dash of ketjap manis (sweet soy sauce) but that was a mistake before i realized i wanted the thai green curry sauce in it, but the flavour of that probably gets drowned out anyway.

it's not entirely done yet, but it smells great.

i was maybe gonna add some soft goat cheese, because it was on sale in the supermarket today. but i'm not really sure if i should.

ok, now i might be a bit prejudiced, or got a one-sided view, but i get the distinct impression from several sources that you americans seem to be unable to make a decent cup of coffee.

for one it's because you seem to buy green tea flavoured frappucino's at starbucks to wake up at work, while people over here bring their homebrewn thermos bottles or have access to a proper drip-machine at work (boss knows that the price of 5lbs ground coffee a week is worth it to fuel that team of 5 computerprogrammers).

unless you have a Senseo at work, in which people tend to bring their homebrewn thermos again.

the other reason is this, a couple of months ago, my flatmate got a new job in software testing and had to go on a short training course to Ohio. they told him, if you like coffee, bring your own packet (1lbs) of Douwe Egberts coffee (that's the no.1 dutch brand), cause they don't have proper coffee in the States.
so, when he got back i asked him if it worked. "no", he said, "cause they didn't have proper dripping machines on the campus where we stayed".

so, anyway, here is how you prepare excellent koffie without a dripping machine!



a few remarks that i couldn't fit in the image:
- the one-cup filter cone costs you less than $2.50
- optimal coffee infusion temperature is somewhere between 90-95 degrees Celsius (185-203F), which pretty much means you pour it straight boiling from the waterboiler onto the coffee, as those first 5 degrees of temperature are lost very quickly. i think in a dripping machine the water doesn't hit the coffee at more than 80 degrees.
- 4 scoops like that is for kickass strong coffee. i think it's the temperature that really makes the difference, because coffee that strong usually turns out a bit "sour"(ish) or bitter when i make it in a regular dripping machine.
- you should rinse the filtercone right after usage or else it'll turn very brown very fast

so yesterday i spent the whole day together with a friend playing with a piece of software called Ableton Live. it's a kind of DJing / mixing tool like Traktor, but able to do much, much more so it's more like a live producing / mixing / live performance / sampling / recording tool.

in fact, i haven't quite worked out how to easily live mix two tracks into eachother, like in Traktor. but i did work out how to use the "arrangement" view in order to mix, loop and cut two tracks into eachother, like i would do in traktor, but much more accurate cause you don't need to do it in realtime:

adult - hand to phone ==> daft punk - human afterall

it's one of the transitions i practiced a lot from a previous mixset i did with traktor. i'm probably gonna expand it until it covers the entire set, so i can render it to mp3 without any accidental mistakes.

anyway this is just a first try, what i can do with it so far..

next up is: seeing if i can use it for realtime mixing (otherwise i'll use traktor again, i gotta have a fresh set ready before march 5th), making some mashups, and the big project: together with my friend, he'll play live guitar riffs (slayer, among other things), that ableton will record, loop and get mixed with drumnbass beats in order to create a live chemical/dnb/breaks performance ..

dunno if this is the place person to spew this idea on, but nobody else is online that's got a proper brain to bounce it off to.

reading the bit about auto-generated weblogs in the Hillary/GTA4/Prostitute discussion with Nigel, apart from thinking, "auto generated blog, i still gotta build that some day" (but, another day), it made me start thinking, what actually *is* a weblog?

in the old days of the web, you didn't have weblogs, but some techies just hacked together some sort of CMS (content management system) for a website that allowed people to change the contents of a website in a slightly easier way than uploading separate HTML files to a server via FTP every time.

these CMSes, in the widest interpretation, take on a variety of forms, varying from complicated to very simple:

- the old POEE.co.uk phpnuke website (complicated)
- a webforum like this (complicated)
- a weblog with posts, comments and a feed (medium)
- a custom assigned website with some news items, basic article editing functionality (medium-easy, this is what i do for freelance work)
- a guestbook (easy)

now, a techie used to just build the website they needed, free-form, not thinking "this will be a blog" or anything.

but one day, there were blogs. and there appeared software for every n00b to build one.

what did the popularity come from?

- in the initial phase, probably simplism and lack of deep nested hierarchy. the old "hypertext" view of the web, with directories and pages linking into eachother, with old dusty pages nobody really maintains anymore, really needs some good overview to keep it sane, and in the end will always become a tangled mess. first two random examples that come to mind for pages like that are http://searchlores.org and Laz's "Closer to God" website.
but a weblog is automatically structured. it's just a historical timeline of blogposts, that can be archived into months, years, etc. you don't need to maintain old stuff because everybody can see it's two years old.

- then of course came the social aspect, people can comment on the blog-items. even though this added one extra layer of hierarchy, the authors are separate, so that was still simple.

- then came the blogosphere in which everybody everywhere trackbacks, pingbacks, autocopies items for spamblogs, people subscribe to feeds, blogrolls, and more.

but i was thinking, a weblog is kind of on the medium-scale of complexity for websites. not too simple, not too complicated either.
and it's just one of a huge variety of formats a website can be ordered in.

i want to hear you guys ideas on different formats that are not present in the current ecosystem of the web yet, but are simple (preferably simpler than blogs), yet viral (like blogs).

an example of a new thing is http://twitter.com , it's simpler than a blog, people can just sign up and broadcast very short messages (160 chars, like an sms). it's got a social network attached so friends just receive the messages of what everybody in their network is doing, and everybody just broadcasts .. sounds horribly shallow, but if the thing was blindingly fast instead of running on a squeaky slow Ruby server, it'd be taking the social web by storm now.

ideas? brainstorm?

from the xkcd blag:

Word Disassociation:

You must say a word. Any word will do. But your word must have no relation at all to the previous word said. If anyone thinks there is a connection (and the rest of your group agrees it’s real and not imaginary), then you lose. The precise opposite of word association.

I believe that this game is a favourite of many Discordians, though I’ve never caught them red-handed.

[three levels of discordia]

i wrote this down in my dummy notebook a few weeks ago, it probably sucks but since i hardly write anything, i present it to you anyway:

    three levels of discordia   

About O:MF i can be brief. this process lends itself very well, perhaps even preferably to the mass/massive/mass media scale.

-***-

Then there is the process of awakening, self-awareness, recognition of the BIP. this has to be done one b one, the very definition of what we mean by "awake" prevents it from being applied on a mass scale.

-***-

Finally, there is "Think for yourself schmuck!" which has to be one by oneself. You cannot make someone think for themselves, because if you did, they wouldn't.

i guess i don't really need to translate this. there's not much to understand about it anyway



"the barstool hits the priest and the scientist alike"



"Thing on rock"



"Mushrooms"



"Reality, warped and cracking up" (looks a bit like van Gogh's later work, don't you think? i didn't have that in mind when i was drawing it though)



"Preiland" (Leek-Island, a pun)



This is my rendition of that scene in Illumatus! where the woman gets crucified upside-down on a peace-sign. Except that i forgot that the Atlanteans where supposed to be covered in full body hair, but whatever



"Hacker" / "Just Poking"



"How does it feel" (inspired on the song "Severed" by Imperative Reaction, i posted the lyrics here)



"Topiary"



"Corner"



"Flower thing"



"Clear Mind"



"Tree in the Air"



"He liked this one better."



Valentine Card

two links:

http://g2p.org/ -- instant google-fu! adds special keywords to a google query in order to find those elusive "open directories" with all the goodies in them. i just used it to find a nice open dir chockfull of D&D manuals. you can find a lot of mp3s on there as well. the nice thing is, the servers are usually pretty fast.

http://www.scribd.com/ -- i just got this link from a friend. it's a web2.0 thingy that allows people to upload and share and "publish" all the popular book formats like word, pdf etc .. guess what they're really using it for.. [i haven't checked it out extensively, but it seems a nice resource]

an important read for everybody, a combination of game theory and horrible troof:

http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~leeey/stupidity/basic.htm

(i wasn't sure which subforum this would be particularly fitted to, but i didn't want it to become swamped in the random links thread either)

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/01/21.html

kinda related to BIP philosophy

when i was in sziget i had several kinds of hungarian and serbian stews .. they were fucking delicious.

i decided that i should try and cook stew myself

i also figured some of you ppl would have interesting stew recipes i can use as a basis for my own experiments.

without even looking up a recipe for stew, this is my current guess as to how it's done (i never even tried or paid attention to any stew recipe, so this may be horribly wrong):

- stew meat, in cubes. this is reasonably priced cheapish meat because the part of the pig (or cow) it's from got loads of gristle (?), but that's okay because that's why you make stew, if you cook the meat slow enough long enough, the gristle will get soft. (at least this is what the molecular gastronomy book said, and the serbian stew confirms)
- stock? i think you need some stock.
- lotsa different vegetables. but the fun thing is you can use strange vegetables in stew, because you just throw them in
- potatoes. i think you also need potatoes.
- spices. i have no idea what kind of, but in this case you can use those spices that you just cook with the stuff and take out later, like rosemary sticks, madame jeanettes and those laurier leaves, or whatever they're called.
- onions are crucial.
- it's got to have something to make it saucy as well, possibly cream, milk or yoghurt

then you put it in a pan, on low fire and wait a few hours

anyone know if this is correct?

are there particular pitfalls to look out for?

does it need to boil all the time? simmer? or just be very hot?

how do you make sure it doesn't burn at the bottom?

can it go wrong? (would be kinda sad, because then you'd end up with a huge pot of failed food)

anybody got experience with stew?

okay, this isn't actually about eating hotdogs on friday. but it happens to be friday* and i just ate what could quite possibly be the best hotdog i've ever tasted. (* friday last week, to be exact)


i was talking with this guy. in my head. there's a lot of people i talk with in my head, some of them are you guys, but this happened to be a guy dancing, going crazy a few meters away from me, during Laurent Garnier's DJ liveset.

i said, "we can tell people to really stop and think, they'll nod, but they won't really do it. how to get them to really stop and think?"

in my head, the guy replied, "people shouldn't stop and think, they should go with the flow. a lot of the trouble this world is in today is caused by too much thinking and too little action."

"okay, but at least we agree that there's something very wrong in the world. something that is caused by the way people act, out of habit.
you know, sometimes i think, we can't really solve anything. that all we can do is just to throw more chaos into the soup. that way, at least we even the odds a littlebit, for the good.. and the bad.."

".. and the ugly?", the guy remarked wittily in my head.

"well, at least they'll be fighting over the prettiest one."

2007/9/10

[DISCUSS]

the other night, BMW came up with a really interesting question on the IRC chat and he asked me to post it for him.

(00:44:23) B_M_W: Why is it that one person with intense psychological trauma survives and becomes stable, while another person becomes a bigot?
(00:45:07) B_M_W: And, if the general answer is environment,
(00:45:57) B_M_W: What environments generate stability, and what environments generate bigotry and similar afflictions?
(00:45:58) B_M_W: Also,
(00:46:05) _000: BMW are you sure "bigot" is the right word? acording to wikipedia it just means "a prejudiced person who is intolerant of opinions, lifestyles, or identities differing from his or her own." .. wouldn't "bad person" be more accurate?
(00:47:09) B_M_W: How can one propagate good environments and change bad ones?

i don't have a good answer for it yet but i'll think about it.

IMO, it's a really good question. one of those simple things you usually don't stop and question.

it kind of reminds me of a while back when LHX started on the "origin of the lie" stuff, and i asked those questions at parties and got the most wonderful discussions out of it?
i'm gonna try the same with this one. got a feeling that might just work. maybe get no answers, but getting some solid new thoughts from people is always good

(that was partly from a PM i sent BMW)

now DISCUSS !!

haven't had time to read and/or view this, but i'm fairly certain that it's relevant to this subforum:

http://www.disambiguity.com/reboot-90-ambient-intimacy/

because i demand instant gratification:

http://www.elvicities.com/~ananames/haiku/overload.html

about 2000 haikus, in about 10 seconds, with some japanese painting and soothing colours.

(on an elvis fansite hoster)

(tested on Opera9 and Firefox1.5)

i was gonna put this in the money/mouth thread, but then i realized that would be jacking, so:

shouldn't we also be filling the BIP wiki with our rants, writings and all the things that have appeared in this forum?

am i right in that every bit of writing (especially the larger ones) in this subforum are free to copy to the BIP-wiki, except for TGGRs rants (which didn't appear in this subforum but i'm gonna mention anyway) which he copyrighted?

because, either people should put their own writings there after having written them, but failing that, is it okay for anyone to put their favourite (non copyrighted) bits in the wiki as well?

sorry it's not a shiny magazine with heavy interviews and opinion pieces battling it out (which would be very cool as well of course!) but it's an outcome from our previous flurry of activity, of which i would think it would be very important if it took some real shape.
i was personally thinking of using that wiki for building my own mashup/collation of favourite bits, to cut-n-paste some tailor fit pamphlets for certain events i might be able to flyer, and the such.

also as a good place to store the outcome of our discussions, because, i think a forum is a really good medium for getting the inspiration juices free flowing and getting some real creative material, but i think that wiki is a good place to store the more finalized crystilized outcomes of those discussions in a sort of wikipedia-style cross-referenced manner.

[Chaos]

what i think it all has to do with discordianism is: THINK FOR YOURSELF SCHMUCK

all this philosophizing about religion and worldview and ways out of the BIP are, when you get down to it, all about
1) thinking for yourself
2) getting others to think for themselves
3) how to think for yourself (no matter how paradoxical it sounds to discuss this with others, there is merit in that as well)

the thing is, discordia, as outlined in the PD has quite a few pointers on these subject. for example, operation mindfuck is an example of 2, while some of the weirder koan-like stuff and the law of fives are about 3, etc.

maybe the better question is, what does all this still have to do with Chaos?
which is, on this board, quite a neglected bit from discordianism.
mostly because it has to do with chaos mahdqick, i guess
and because it invokes lol23fnordism in people
and perhaps because randomly invoking chaos everywhere maybe isn't really considered a good idea by most on this board?

In reference to http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=11608.0

Gliffy.com - Create and share diagrams online
for just a quick testride use one of the logins here (just saves you the effort of registration).

when i saw this site a few days ago, i thought of something you said or written on your blog. i forgot what it was exactly (something about tools appearing for free) but i thought you might be highly interested in this

it's a free online tool that basically duplicates the functionality of one of the best pieces of software microsoft has ever written (MS Visio), you reminded me when you told Mang in the other thread to "click, drag"
cause that's what this does, you get a whole bunch of scalable icons, from computers to chairs and arrows and boxes and you can add text etc.
in just a few minutes you can slap together any type of flowchart/map/idea/mindweb etc.
which you can then export as JPEG, PNG and even SVG.

there is also a "collaborate" option somewhere in the menu, which i haven't explored yet, which might be of interest.

i think it is rather awesome.

LHX (or anyone), could you give me a very short summary/explanation of what Maybe Logic is about? I tried looking it up a few times, but the only thing that I find about it is the general concept of that it doesn't regard statements as black/white true/false, but also with shades of grey in between.

That shades of grey stuff is so incredibly obvious to me (given a name like Maybe Logic), that this explanation really doesn't bring me any further.

On what domains does it operate? Does it have strict operators? Is it anything like logical/boolean math or more like a philosophical paradigm?

the second thing i wanted to bring up is this: A lot of people speak about Occam's Razor. I always kind of get a negative feeling when i hear this term, because it is often posed as a surefire certain way to the "Most Probable Hypothesis". I just wanted to point out that this is NOT a universal rule, not al all.
The most that can be said about Occam's Razor is that it is often a good rule-of-thumb, and that it has some parallels with (but is NOT the same as) the way humans reason about what is "Most Probable" given a certain number of Hypotheses and no (much) more background information except the "length" of the Hypotheses.

ok, i just had a very interesting discussion with my girlfriend. i explained her about LHX's origin of the lie -- and even though i still don't know why that concept is so significant or what he was aiming for, it is one hell of a starter for interesting discussions

she (an astronomy student) is currently following an extra-curricular course about greek mythology (and no, Eris isn't covered in it, they can hardly treat all greek mythology in 12 weeks time ).

she told me about how the concept of human individuality is only something of the past few centuries, and i think this is a very important concept that deserves to be gone deeper into. she told me that she learned that in ancient Greece people were what other people thought of them, and no more than that. and only in the Renaissance people started actually thinking about themselves, attributing paintings and art to themselves "I made that".
and this is were it gets back to the us/them idea. people get more and more individualistic over time, but this is a self-perpetuating circle. the individualism is bound to make people do things other people won't like, which is when the other people group the one people into groups that roughly do the same thing they don't like, and they distance themselves from them, but those others want to be individualistic so they distance themselves from their peers, and so you get all kinds of scenes and groups splintering until we're all individuals.

maybe this is freedom, but we're all in here together and if we care only about ourselves, we can't properly control/steer this Machine/Wheel that we're all part of and it gets out of control.

there you have it, another solution as another paradox.

freedom is slavery

something i wanted to post for a long time on this board, as you probably know i'm not very good with history/politics, but this i learned from a friend of mine (who studies history)

i think it's rather interesting, it seems we have gotten "democracy" quite wrong over the ages?

in ancient athens, democracy worked as follows. every year 500 people were randomly selected to go into the senate (this was called "the lot", think of the word "lottery", also meaning "fate"). it was these 500 people that got to vote, majority-rule style.
this senate-job was a prestigious position and (i think) also fully paid for a year. but there was no way to control who would be "elected by the lot". (women and foreigners were excluded from the lottery btw).

i think this randomness is the most important part of why the ancient athens system worked soo well, and not the majority-vote part. i think that when "they" chose athens as a model for politics, they misunderstood that and instead took the majority-vote bit as the most important part.

this random lottery prevents in a number of ways, the difficulties and dirty tricks that are played with current day democracy. if only a random selection of the population actually gets to vote and decide, there is a lot less possibility for populism and lobbying.

as we know, complex systems tend to "evolve" or "transform" to increasingly high er levels of organisation. it is exactly this tendency of complex systems (which is almost a law of reality) that is causing the problems with democracy. there are other structures (corporations, political lobbies, etc) that are (by their very nature) trying to "outgame" the system. this lifts the focus (or level of organisation) from "the people" to these higher-level structures.

by adding a certain amount of "noise" or randomness to the system, one prevents the system from evolving to a higher level of organisation. this is because every such higher level will be brittle and based on outgaming (in a certain way) the rules of the system, and is therefore easily smashed by the noise before it can fully grow to a stable organisational layer and ensure its continued existance in the complex system.

three more remarks:

- there was another element of "forced disorder" in the ancient athens democratic system: the city-state of Athens was divided in three parts: land (farms etc), sea (harbour/fishing etc) and the city. these three parts were again subdivided into 10 smaller neighbourhoods, for a total of 30. every year (i think), all the neighbourhoods were joined together in groups of three (one land, one city and one sea), functioning as some kind of representative mini province kind of thing (they probably had a word for it in Athens, but i don't know it). the disorderly factor in this scheme is that these "provinces" where chosen (or randomly selected, i dont know) in such a way that the three parts it consisted of did not share a common border. thereby making it harder to form cartels, political pressure-groups or other higher-level structures.

- discussing this with some other guy, he already mentioned that if some kind of political organisation forms outside this democratic system and attains a reasonable amount of popularity among the people, chances are good that multiple members of this political party will be lotted among the 500. this will again result in "outgaming the system", and the political party would be able to excert more political pressure or power than the pure "one man one vote" strategy that was originally intended. in other words, the system is not perfect, but i think it does quite well anyhow.

- according to what my friend told me, Socrates did not like this system, arguing that the "lot" (randomness) is not intelligent and therefore inferior to make these decisions (a lame argument imo, but how was Socrates supposed to know, without Computer Science, that randomness is in fact more intelligent than one may presuppose, given that it's applied in large numbers .. heh Monte Carlo wasn't even built by then ). on the other hand, Aristotle argued in favour of this system, for kind of the same reasons as i list above (mostly that the "lot" prevents outgaming).

knowing this only from hearsay i probably made some mistakes or wrong assumptions, so i present you these wikipedia links [which i haven't read yet, but will scan through in a moment]:

how the athenian democracy works according to wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy
Sortition is an article about the random selection representative whatnot:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
(the sortition article is very interesting IMO, but perhaps that's just the contrast with the rather boring history story that "Athenian Democracy" is on wikipedia)

i suppose Cain has one thing or other to correct about this text, him being the politics junky immersed in greek history