So… this weibo thing, is being referred to as the Chinese Twitter. I thought Weibo, 微博, were the two Chinese characters for the word microblog, which was concept originated in Korea? Kinda sad that it had to be imported from Korea, and then even sadder that American media try to claim credit for being the one being imitated… I wonder if this is a hint about twitter IPO or something?

So about that car thing I discussed several posts back. Why is it so painful that American car maker is being defeated by the Japanese car maker? Take a quick look at these two stats: 

Life expectancy in 2010 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy)

Homocide rate per mm capita in 2009 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate, UNODC http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics/crime/Homicide_statistics2012.xls)

So what does this illustrate? Well, I wouldn’t want to be the one to go public about the relationship between money and life expectancy and education and crime prevention, but it looks like the Japanese has governance figured out. I mean look at their lives, it’s longer, and most likely happier. The homicide, btw, is premeditated murder. There are a whole 4.96% of US population that thought about, planned, and then executed a murder that their Japanese counter part did not do.

Again, I don’t want to suggest that money had anything to do with it. And I don’t want to suggest that I am envious of a country where people live happy and long lives. But let’s take our chin back to where it belong and think hard about our own country. Here, we labor our people to their graves driving Japanese cars that we pay for. The money when it leaves my hands ends up in a Japanese company’s hands and it goes to pay taxes to Japan, it also pays salary of many Japanese nationals in America and of course in Japan. That money is then spent towards health and happiness and keeping one’s self away from killing somebody.

The country is blindly handing money to foreigners that gives them much much higher quality of life than us. I don’t care how you add the numbers up, or average, or median, or total, or percentage, In most ways we can measure those people live better lives than us, and the union of those better lives is a society, and again, I hate to suggest that that is better than this, but the whole is usually greater than the sum in society.

I am not suggesting that we all start hating Japanese people, the country, and anything that says “made in Japan”. But for god’s sake, can somebody just for once choose an American car? Or any other car. Why feed a pampered fat person more when the human are starving over here?

Okay okay, I hear the sudden uproar of “this is capitalism”. Fine, it is, but we are people. We are intelligent thinking beings. Let’s think about this. I hand money to a Japanese car maker, he gives it to Japanese government, and he pays a japanese person, and the Japanese live long happy lives without much crime. For the most part, the buyers are probably left working to pay off a debt (aka “Car Loans”). I struggle and I stress and I become disgruntled and ill from working to pay off a debt. It is a vicious cycle our dearly beloved capitalism has entrapped us with. There is no way out, in 5 years, the current car will be too old too inefficient to worth driving, I’ll have to go into debt and buy another car and do the same thing again. I am essentially borrowing money to make a Japanese person’s life better when I buy a Japanese car. And then I work to pay off that debt in a life that is not as good as that japanese who sold me the car.

But wait, let me say this one more time. just to be sure I got it right. I borrow money from financial agency run by the Japanese car maker, I put that borrowed money in a Japanese car company to get a car from them so I can drive to work with it to pay the interest to the Japanese company who loaned me the money and the debt. The Japanese takes that money and spends it on their country improving peoples’ lives and their people end up happier and living much longer than me. And I can see no change, next car, something will happen.

… ugh I want to say that again. What am I missing here? If I say it one more time, will it sound like it’s the way things are supposed to be? 

Wait, wait, let me write something to blame the American banks being irresponsible and I can write about how repressive it is in China with that Great Chinese Firewall, then I’ll feel better about my predicament as I drive home in my Japanese car.

Sigh… My child is attending physical exercise class at a local My Gym… When things were winding down, the instructor put on some old groovy music and just kind of danced a bit… By means of neuronal spreading activation a song came into my head

Your mama don’t dance

And your daddy don’t rock and roll

Your mama don’t dance

And your daddy don’t rock and roll

When evening comes around

And it’s time to go to town

Where do you go

To rock and roll

Well, the old folks say

That ya gotta end your date by ten

If you’re out on a date

And you bring it home late it’s a sin

You know there’s no excusin’

You know you’re gonna lose and never win

I’ll play it again

And it’s all because

Your mama don’t dance

And your daddy don’t rock and roll

Your mama don’t dance

And your daddy don’t rock and roll

When evening comes around

And it’s time to go to town

Where do you go

To rock and roll

You pull into a drive-in

And find a place to park

You hop into the backseat

Where you know it’s nice and dark

You’re just about to move in,

Thinkin’ it’s a breeze

There’s a light in your eyes

And then a guy says

“Out of the car, Longhair”

“Louise, you’re comin’ with me

And no more movies”

And it’s all because

Your mama don’t dance

And your daddy don’t rock and roll

Your mama don’t dance

And your daddy don’t rock and roll

When evening comes around

And it’s time to go to town

Where do you go

To rock and roll

Where do you go

To rock and roll

Where do you go

To rock and roll

My children, this is true in your case. yor mama does not dance and your dad didn’t rock and roll–literally. But its not too late for you. you can still learn to rock the world over.

(after some moments of reflection on the lyrics)

Ohh, I see so dancing, including rock and roll, is used to talk about pre-adulthood intimacy during a date.

ugh, my children, hopefully you are more literate than your dad as well.

wow, I did not know music lyrics can be so rich in using symbolism. ahh, and perhaps you can tell me if it is properly classified as an application of symbolism,… or is it using dancing as an allegory for youthful reproductive activity,… or is it an analogy between dance and coital venue. is it a tragedy-the bewailing betrays a tragic loss? is it irony–how you come to have these problems if your mama and dada didn’t dance? metaphore–life is a dance, find the right partner(who dances with you) ?

lets see… maybe in a decade?

Came home from the 2016 Bay Area Deep Learning School.

It occurred to me that Andrew Ng points out an interesting problem: on his team, they have trouble far exceeding human performance using machine learning technology. He hypothesizes that it is because people are really good at these tasks: near Bayes error performance. One could also argue that it may be that people trying to do something better than people can is foundamentally futile as human intelligence is ultimately limiting the outcome of that effort. But lastly, I reality , one wonders if there is an existential problem. When human tries to do something “better” than itself, it, the human, doesn’t know what’s better. Does there really exist a task that we can rationally define that exceeds ourself? Can we be objective in that case? Can we exceed our own objectivity? Is the human system capable of doing this? The question seems valid because we’ve certainly seen artificial computing system having provablely bounded cognition and rationality. It stands to suspicion that we have limits on our understanding of rationality and objectivity.

The optimist would say yes. Human have exceeded its own objectivity in the past. We’ve learned to be more rational and more objective as we have come to understand our world better. As we learned to reason better, we have become more rational and more objective in qualitatively different ways–in more dimensions, than human once ever thought–we thought more.

But this time, with artificial intelligence, that leap may be far more challenging than ever before.

Is intelligence a human right? Right of life, property and pursuit of happiness… Right of privacy, reproductive rights, religious rights, rights of speech, rights to politics. Do human founds mentally have a right to intelligence? Why ask this question?

Because it is possible to secretly and subtly limit human’s natural tendency and desire to learn and to self improve in his own intelligence. The state can systematically do so to maintain some control, for example, through brain washing propaganda. Search engine companies may return results differently for different population to keep relativeintelligence in the population at a status quo. The employer has rights to establish practices that keep employees unintelligent…

Does human have right of intelligence? Right to life seem to imply right to intelligence as intelligence, and the likes of growth, consumption, reproduction, are all attributes of life and therefore included as part of right to biological life. However it is not completely obvious that everyone agrees that this is a precious rights we need to spend serious energy and time protecting. 

I have a right to learn and exercise my intelligence. This should come at no cost more extraordinary than those required to sustain other aspects of life.