Still No Sleep
by Berg
Image Text: I'm not listening to you. I mean, what does a SQUIRREL know about mental health?
As I begin writing this post, it's 1:30 in Los Angeles. By the time I finish writing it, it'll be at least 2:00. When I finally stop poring through Google reader it'll be 2:30, and when I've read enough of A Clash Of Kings to fall asleep it'll be well past 3:00. Insomnia and I are bosom buddies, and so I feel that I have a special connection to today's xkcd.
The comic starts simply enough- Cueball lets us know that a) he is going mad from sleep deprivation, and b) it's getting worse. Sleep is an important physiological function that gives your body and mind time to recharge (and yes, I'm well aware that you probably already knew that). Going for too long without sleep can be fatal, and even going for short periods without sleep (or even without enough sleep) can have deleterious effects on your cognitive ability. Even putting aside the negative effects on attention, mood, and general ability to think clearly that even minor amounts of sleep deprivation can bring about, the body will try to counteract prolonged sleep deprivation with microsleeps, periods of about 10-60 seconds where the brain essentially blacks out. If you're microsleeping, you might not even realize it, but your consciousness will be broken into tiny chunks nonetheless. When your sleep-deprived brain tries to fill in the gaps (much in the same way lasers "fill in" the scratches on CDs), your narrative of what's going on in the world around you can be adversely affected, as it is for Cueball.
Cueball's particular brand of sleep deprivation psychosis manifests itself as an uncertainty as to which state of consciousness his brain is currently in. REM sleep (dreaming) and normal consciousness are very close to one another (as opposed to normal consciousness and delta wave sleep). If you'd care to get a sense of what it might be like to confuse your waking state and your dreaming state, go see Inception. If somehow you read xkcd, explain xkcd, and you haven't seen Inception, congratulations- you're the most specific intellectual on the planet.
Back to business- Cueball's grasp on reality is weakening, due to his chronic lack of sleep. When he encounters a tree, therefore, he cannot be certain whether or not the tree exists in the real world, or if it's some hallucination, an artifact of his mind "filling in" the gaps in his consciousness caused by microsleep. Cueball then slides further down the rabbit hole, wondering if perhaps his hallucination is itself a hallucination, making the tree real, and Cueball sane. Of course, if this is the case, he's still hallucinating, which opens up the possibility that his hallucination of a hallucination is itself a hallucination, making the tree not real, and Cueball insane. Clearly, Cueball is having a hard time parsing his subjective perception of reality apart from any objective reality around him, and he needs a second opinion in order to sort things out. Luckily, a talking squirrel is here to save the day!
Wait- a talking squirrel?
Squirrels can't talk. Helpfully, the squirrel tells Cueball not to worry about the tree. Now, we the only semi-sleep deprived reader know that if this squirrel is talking to Cueball, and squirrels can't talk, then the squirrel must only be talking in Cueball's mind, confirming the fact that he's hallucinating. The squirrel's advice is still solid, though- it's not worth worrying about whether the hallucination is a hallucination or not, since clearly hallucinations abound. Cueball might as well just sit back and enjoy the ride.
In the image text, Cueball recognizes that something is amiss with the squirrel, but he's juuuust a touch off the mark: Cueball discounts the squirrel's advice not because squirrels can't talk, but because even a talking squirrel can't possibly be an authority on mental health. Cueball's got a point there- in a fairly influential paper on the philosophy of mind published in 1974 called "What is it like to be a bat?" Thomas Nagel advances the argument (and forgive me if I'm butchering this) the mental state of being a bat and the mental state of being a human are so thoroughly defined by the differing sensory apparatus through which humans and bats interact with the world that a human can not in any meaningful way truly imagine what it is like to be a bat, and vice versa. In this view, a squirrel could not possibly have any meaningful insight into Cueball's mental state, in that Cueball's baseline mental state is so far removed from a squirrel's baseline mental state that at best the squirrel can only experience the mental state of a squirrel imagining what it is to be a human. Pile on top of that a mental state that Cueball himself is having a hard time understanding, and squirrel's advice becomes resoundingly hollow, in that it comes from a mental state several degrees of removal away from what Cueball is currently experiencing.
The lesson? Get some sleep, otherwise you'll wind up digging through every Philosophy of Language and Cog Sci course folder you have on your hard drive in an effort to derive meaning from the misadventures of an insomniac stick figure.
Savannah Ancestry
by Berg
Image Text: She's a perfectly nice lady from a beautiful city, and there's no reason to be mean just because she thinks a quarterback is a river in Egypt.
Relatively quick one today, folks- I've got to be up in the morning and evolutionary psychology is a deep rabbit hole for a former psych major to tackle. At any rate, here goes nothin':
Evolutionary psychology is a branch of psychology that seeks to justify contemporary human behavior using forces that acted upon us during our evolutionary history. It has come under some fire from the psychology community because it frequently seems to be justifying what are seen as stereotypical gender roles. A quick example is evolutionary psychology's explanation of attraction/mate selection between males and females. Males are attracted to signs of fertility, because these are clear markers that their genes will have a higher percentage of being passed on. Thus, men like plump breasts, wide hips, and barely legal cheerleaders. Women, on the other hand, are attracted to men with resources. Thus, women like men with money, and men who are older clearly have the resources necessary to carry on a long life. This is a quick example that I'm certain my major adviser would chide me for butchering, but hopefully it still serves the purpose of outlining some of the basic philosophy behind evolutionary psychology.
In today's xkcd, Cutie jumps to the conclusion that when Cueball refers to her Savannah ancestors he means the primitive hominids living in Africa nearly 2 million years ago (probably Homo ergaster). Therefore, Cutie presumes that Cueball is invoking evolutionary psychology, and instantly launches into a withering attack on what may be fundamental biases in Cueball's line of reasoning. Cueball, however, is taken aback- he merely meant Cutie's ancestors from Savannah, Georgia (a city which was supposedly too beautiful for William Tecumseh Sherman to bear burning down). Cutie is flummoxed, naturally, in that she's now been attacked from an unforeseen angle, and in the image text struggles to defend her mother.
Here's where I'm a bit stumped- is there a river somewhere in Egypt I've been unable to track down that sounds anything like "quarterback," or is good ol' R.M. just having a bit of fun with a non-sequitur? Either way, since we know darned well that a quarterback is a kind of football player and NOT a river in Egypt, we can take Cutie's image text defense as an oblique admission to her mother's idiocy. Her defensive tone indicates that this is a bit of a sore spot for Cutie, and mayhap some of said idiocy has been passed down to her either culturally or genetically. Sure, she may be able to knock evolutionary psychology down a peg or two, but she doesn't understand abstract mathematics after all. Does anybody win? No, not really, but Savannah certainly seems to take an unnecessary beating.
Atheists
by Berg
Image Text: 'But you're using that same tactic to try to feel superior to me, too!' 'Sorry, that accusation expires after one use per conversation'
Evenhandedness is an important conversational tool. When an opinion is presented, demonstrating how broadly it can be applied implies that said opinion was reached logically and given thought, rather than being the result of some impassioned rant. In today's xkcd, Cueball deftly dances around taking sides with either Atheists or fundamentalist Christians by disparaging them both equally.
'Annoying' is a subjective term. Whether or not something is annoying can not always be agreed upon by two different observers, in that the state of annoyingness depends as much on the observers themselves as it does on the observos (no, that's not a real word, but I think you get what I mean and it's fun to say). However, by claiming that two groups as philosophically opposed as Atheists and fundamentalist Christians both exhibit the trait of annoyingness, the suggestion is made that annoyingness isn't correlated with any particular stance. Instead, annoyingness must be some fundamental property of both of the observos in question, not merely an artifact of a mismatch of philosophies between the observers and the observos. Cueball has now taken his stance on annoyingness from the hazy, uncertain world of subjectivity and placed it in the magical land of objectivity, where science is king and every question has a correct answer. Point: Cueball.
But then, Cutie reveals Cueball's ruse of objectivity to still be subjective at it's core, thus drop-kicking his stance on annoyingness all the way back to the world of subjectivity, where The Secret built a sprawling condominium complex. Annoyingness isn't an objective quality that Cueball measured in both groups, Cueball's subjective criteria for annoyingness are merely broad enough to engulf both groups entire. Presuming that Cueball isn't annoyed by himself, we can infer that Cueball must not exhibit the property of annoyingness as defined by Cueball. Given that annoyingness is a negative quality (4th Ed: CHA 8, no training in diplomacy), Cueball must be better than an observo exhitbiting annoyingness. Point: Cutie. Win: Cutie.
In the image text, Cueball tries to steal victory from Cutie, but Cutie points out that the argument for superiority can have only one use per conversation. Otherwise, a feedback loop of potentially infinite length would derail the conversation about the observos to a back and forth exchange of arguments of superiority. Using Gricean conversational maxims to help derive meaning and intent from utterances, we can see how Cutie's investment in the conversation at hand as a participant wouldn't lead her to say something that would create a conversation destroying feedback loop. In order for the argument for superiority to be conversationally relevant, it must be being used in such a way that a feedback loop would not be created, which can only happen if it is used only once. Extra Point: Cutie.
University Website
by Berg
Image Text: People go to the website because they can't wait for the next alumni magazine, right? What do you mean, you want a campus map? One of our students made one as a CS class project back in '01! You can click to zoom and everything!
First off, an apology- this post should have gone up 24 hours ago, but I've been distracted by a wedding. Some advice- if you ever get married, just get married. Don't ever have a wedding. From my experience, the actual ceremony is more trouble than it's worth. Or, stay single. That's even easier.
Secondly- yesterday's xkcd. Pretty easy one this time, so hopefully you haven't been going too crazy trying to figure it out. This comic is all about the vast gulf between what people who design university websites think is wonderful about their university, and what people who visit university websites think is relevant information. Naturally, this information is best presented in the form of a Venn diagram, so that we can see what (if any) is the overlap between these two groups.
In the case of university websites, it's simple- the full name of the university. Folks who design the website think it's a piece of information that is interesting, and it's also a piece of information that people who visit the website are interested in finding. Sadly for prospective college students and their parents, that's where the similarities end. I would go through and list the reasons why each item is useful or useless and the philosophies behind them, but as I said- weddings are more trouble than they're worth, and I've got some trouble to attend to.
Ah- the image text, and then trouble. It's clearly written from the point of view of one of the folks who design the website, singing the praises of their well-laid out and helpful site. Clearly, they are wrong, and the folks who design the website are just drooling morons who, apparently, have never tried to use a website to find anything.
One last thing- I'm aware that the folks who design the website are often not the same as the folks who decide what information goes on the website, and that many a web designer has made an awful web page because they've been instructed to do that and nothing else. However, for ease of reference, I made the two one up above. Web designers, please accept my apology.
And now, off to help a distressed sibling/bride find a missing piece of her wedding dress. Cross your fingers for me.
Frogger
by Berg
Image Text: I understand you and your team worked hard on this, but when we said to make it more realistic, we meant the graphics.
In case you’ve been living under a rock your entire life, Frogger is a classic video game in which you, the frog, are trying to cross a freeway (or a swamp). Your crossing is fraught with danger, so you’ve got to dodge traffic in order to make it across safely. It’s a simple game, and doesn’t deal with the real world consequences of stepping out in front of a truck, as today’s xkcd does.
When the comic starts, everything’s fine. There’s a frog on the side of the freeway, and he’s not bothering anybody. When he hops out to make his crossing, however, the driver of the semi swerves to avoid him, causing the sedan to his right (more on that in a moment) to slam into his cab, causing a pretty severe traffic accident. The frog then retreats back to the side of the freeway, though whether or not he’s fleeing carnage or a guilty conscience is up for debate.
Now then, concerning the truck driver. There’s a large grassy area off to his left, and yet he chooses to swerve to his right, into traffic. Given that we can see the freeway at a resolution fine enough to make out lines on the road and that the frog seemed to have no barrier to hop onto the freeway, we can presume there’s no guard rail preventing the truck driver from swerving left. Even if there was, it would be hard to imagine a scenario in which this truck driver is risking more by going through a guard rail than he is by swerving into traffic. The most plausible explanation is that the grey car was in his blind spot. Our truck driver is in this way redeemed, for rather than making an illogical choice to swerve into traffic when he didn’t need to, he’s made a logical choice to keep his truck on the road by merging into what he thinks is an empty lane. This way, he minimizes damage to his truck and any interruption to traffic flow. Of course, he’s miscalculated, and carnage ensues.
…or does it? The image text adds another layer to the reality here, suggesting that what we’ve been watching isn’t real, but a hyper realistic Frogger game being presented for evaluation. Apparently, the memo to make it “more realistic” was misinterpreted. Konami had wanted better graphics, not a more real simulation of what would happen if a frog jumped out in front of a truck. Of course, that’s not even a real Konami- it’s a fake Konami that exists in the xkcd universe, which is of course a series of scenarios imagined in Randall Munroe’s mind. And even Randall Munroe might not exist as more than a mental illusion, produced by some sort of coordinated data parallax put on the web, but if THAT was the case then he’d be-
You know what? I’m gonna go gargle with Thorazine and call it a night.
Period Speech
by Berg
Image Text: The same people who spend their weekends at the Blogger Reenactment Festivals will whine about the anachronisms in historical movies, but no one else will care.
Ah, language- the great social agreement of symbolic representation which enables someone like me, sitting in Los Angeles to communicate with someone like you, who I presume lives somewhere on the internet (nice place, by the way, but you should put your porn away before you have people over). Today's xkcd is about the inherent slipperiness of language, and how very little of what we say today will sound coherent to a future observer.
Consider English. Modern English is thought to have settled into it's current form (more or less) sometime in the 16th century. Before Modern English, however, were Middle English (mayhap you've heard of the Canterbury Tales?) and Old English (mayhap you've heard of Beowulf?). Middle English is close enough to Modern English that you can almost read it, but Old English is far enough away, linguistically, that it requires some study to be able to read.
The point xkcd is making, then, is that 400 years from now, bits of dialect and slang that to us seem quite disparate ("forsooth" is hundreds of years old, while "grok" entered the lexicon in '61) will seem quite similar to all but the most avid linguistic scholars. After all, if you were presented with 5th century slang and 9th century slang, chances are you wouldn't notice any difference.
Those who would notice the difference are addressed in the image text- they'll be the folks at the Blogger Reenactment Festivals. Those aren't a thing yet, but we can imagine that these would be fringe affairs, attended by only the most devoted of nerds (a term brought into the language by none other than Dr. Seuss in 1950). As such, their opinions as to the accuracy of slang presented in historical movies from the future represent the minority view, even if it is correct.
All The Girls
by Berg
Image text: You know that I'll never leave you. Not as long as she's with someone.
Today's comic is pretty straightforward. A young couple (whom I'll refer to as Cueball and Cutie, just because I like the way that sounds) is in love. In the first panel, Cueball says he's lucky to have Cutie, a perfectly fine thing to say to someone when you're in love. In the second panel, Cueball tells Cutie he loves her most out of all the girls in the world, which is again a perfectly fine thing to say when you're in love. Trouble sets in, however, in the third panel, where Cueball offers his qualifying statement, that he loves Cutie the most of the subset of girls who also love Cueball back.
Now, on it's surface it would appear that Cueball is making a hollow statement, in that the subset of girls who love him back must be smaller than the set of all the girls in the world, and we assume, because we are nerds, that that subset is probably only a few girls in size. I like to be optimistic, though, and presume that Cueball, due to his smooth head and sentimental heart, is loved by nearly all the girls in the world, and so his sentiment is still very sweet.
The image text, however, crushes any optimism one might have in the situation. Written in Cueball's voice, we have another compliment/qualifier pair. Cueball assures Cutie that he'll never leave her- so long as she's with someone. Cueball clearly has an unrequited love for another, and so really is being as shitty as we all thought he was originally. Please forgive my false optimism- I know now what a cold, cruel place the world can be.
...and now, off to Comic-Con I go, where I shall find out what a crowded, stinky place the world can be. I'm learning a lot today!
War
by Berg
Image Text: They offered to make me a green beret, but I liked my regular one. Although it gets kind of squashed under my helmet.
Today's comic seems to be a parable about the perils of love during wartime. Our protagonist is seen here leaning against his pack behind a low wall, surely a good hiding spot for any gentleman with a rifle and scope. Judging by the letter he's in the midst of writing, he has a complex relationship with Cordelia. On the one hand, she's attractive. On the other hand, she's a sniper, as evidenced by the shots fired mid-missive. Cordelia's ire works against her, though, as her volley of shots has revealed her own position atop the maintenance shed. We can presume that in a matter of minutes, this love affair will go sour as the love letter is wrapped around a live grenade and "delivered," so to speak. War is indeed hell.
As to the image text, the green berets are worn only by Special Forces soldiers. It takes a lot of training to become a green beret, and as evidenced by our protagonist's clever use of decoys to outwit a sniper, he may be qualified for the honor. It sounds, however, as he didn't understand the proposition, preferring his regular beret instead. Further evidence for his idiocy is given immediately thereafter, as he confesses that he wears a beret under his helmet.
1996
by Berg
1996
Image Text: College board issues aside, I have fond memories of TI-Basic, writing in it a 3D graphing engine and a stock market analyzer. With enough patience, I could make anything... but friends. (Although, with my chatterbot experiments, I certainly tried)
Ok gang- quicker post than is my custom tonight. I'm on the West Coast, it's late, and I need to be up in the morning. At any rate, here goes nothing:
As is well understood by anybody who has even a passing familiarity with the Singularity, there has been a stunning amount of progress in pretty much any measurable dimension of technology in the past 14 years. In today's comic, we laugh at our prior naivete, pointing out that what would be a non-functionally awful computer now was considered state of the art in 1996. Likewise with a Palm Pilot, arguably a precursor to today's omnipresent smartphones. Texas Instrument calculators, however, appear to have been left behind, not having made any significant advances since the newly discovered issues of Computer Shopper were published. Thus, while we groan at how awful our state of the art technologies truly were in 1996, we are reminded that some technologies have remained in relative stasis over the years.
The image text reminds us that when they were new, TI calculators (I had a TI-86, m'self) were relatively powerful tools if you knew how to use them. TI-Basic was a fairly versatile programming language that could be used to make anything from games to reference files to computational programs. If it wasn't for the ability to program a TI calculator to make it look like you didn't have any programs on it, I would have lost my copies of Tetris and Nibbles a dozen times over as my paranoid Chem professor went around deleting programs willy-nilly before tests.
The second half of the image text is a reminder to those of us who felt like Gods for knowing how to program that power comes at a price- in this case, the power to program a calculator costs friends. Since no program yet devised can truly pass a Turing test, even the most sophisticated Chatterbot (programs designed to mimic conversation) can't quite qualify as a friend. Someday, though... someday...
Dilution
by Berg
Image Text: Dear editors of Homeopathy Monthly: I have two small corrections for your July issue. One, it's spelled "echinacea," and two, homeopathic medicines are no better than placebos and your entire magazine is a sham.
Homeopathy is a form of alternative medicine which makes bold claims as to its efficacy without offering any sound science to back it. Although the angles from which one can viably attack homeopathy are as diverse as they are numerous, this particular panel is taking on serial dilution. In a serial dilution, a substance is dissolved in solution. The solution is then divided, and diluted. This dilution is then divided and diluted, and then the dilution of the dilution may be divided and diluted again, and again, and again.
While serial dilution does serve a function in many legitimate procedures, homeopathic remedies prepared using serial dilution are often diluted so much that none of the original substance remains in the final preparation. This point was proven dramatically by noted skeptic James Randi at TED 2007, when he ingested a purportedly lethal dosage of homeopathic sleeping pills on stage. Spoiler alert: James Randi is still alive.
So, back to the comic. The couple in question is preparing a serial dilution of semen and expecting its potency to either remain constant or perhaps increase, resulting in a pregnancy. However, we the ever-so-well-informed xkcd reader know full well that if James Randi isn't dead, then that lovely young woman isn't getting pregnant. If she can't get pregnant, then she can't pass on whatever part of her or her partner's genetic makeup it is that makes them susceptible to a belief in homeopathy. Since the couple's belief in homeopathy is negatively affecting their ability to have offspring, its lowering their fitness (Darwinian fitness, not gym membership fitness). A belief in homeopathy which is so strong that it prevents it's believers from having offspring is therefore an evolutionary dead end, and is not selected for.
This point is underscored by the image text, which is playfully realized in this comic as a letter to the editors of Homeopathy Monthly, a fictional homeopathy magazine which we can imagine is of some import the homeopathic community. The jab against homeopathy is set up with a classic use of the foot-in-the-door technique, opening up with a nitpicky correction about the spelling of "echinacea." Now that the editors of homeopathy are paying attention, the payload is delivered and their passion is called out for being what it is: a complete sham.