The SmartS Club

Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer. Does anybody have an idea of what human intelligence (the non-artificial one) is? Over here in Germany Intelligenz is absolutely not the same thing as intelligence represented with a capital I in CIA, for example. That CIA-one was most probably the intelligence that was meant to be artificially emulated in the 50s, 60s, 70s... And quite successfully so. Today, AI is widely perceived to be an imitation, a parallel realization, or even a substitute of the human intelligence that suposedly sets us apart from every other rock. Remember the times when your science-inclined parents explained to you how the behavior of snails is nothing more than the output of a hardwired machine? Same for the canary, the turtle under you bed, and the dog. (It was hard to believe how the malevolent fits of my cat were hardwired and not real, genuine evil. But it was.) Intelligence was nicely reserved for us humans. That appears to get questioned. The definition of intell...

My son is 15 years old. He asked me what a FAX-machine was. He get's the strange concept of CDs because there is a rack full with them next to the bookshelf, which contains tons of paper bound together in colorful bundles, called 'books'. He still accepts that some screens don't react to you punching your fingers on them. He repeatedly asks why my 'car' (he speaks the quotation marks) is powered by 'rotten dinosaurs'. At the same time he writes an email to Elon Musks Neuralink asking for an apprenticeship and sets up discord-servers for don't-ask-me-what. And slowly I am learning that it is a very good thing to be detached from historic technology, as you don't try to preserve an outdated concept while aiming to innovate. The optimized light-bulb would be an a wee bit more efficient, tiny light-bulb. But not a LED. An optimized FAX would probably handle paper differently - it would not be a file-transfer-system. Hyper-modern CDs might have tenf...

Every now and then a memory from my early coding-years pops up in my mind. When I had acquired my Atari 1040F (1MB RAM, 100MB external harddrive), I was of course hex-dumping the OS and as the programmers obviously never had worked with that much space before (I believe my first Apple ][ had 8kB) they just bumbled around wasting Bits - in the middle of all the tech-stuff there was the line "Dave Staugas loves Bea Habling". Just so. In the ROM. It never got out of my brain again. And it popped up again right now. I  believe I can only lay it at rest if I know: ... did they eventually get together?  Can you please tell me? (thanks)

Computers aren't as evil anymore as they were in my days. You had to be a system-programmer and carry a hot soldering iron in your pocket if you wanted to change the font in a text-document. In the last millennium I was struggling to print out a report on some experiments that had not turned out well at all. I was a bit nervous as it never is a real treat to report on undeniable failure. No data. No explanations. No fame. But it got worse. The printer didn't like me. With the clock ticking away it just covered page after page with astounding garble. Special characters, squares and numbers... You have seen that. That's when the fingers get sweaty and you need a new pair of socks every fifteen minutes. I kicked some boxes, replaced the printer-cable, restarted the bastard, rebooted my computer, printed again. And the sun came out! Page after crispy page there was my report. And after the last page, just when I collected my prose, prepared to face my master, the pri...

Cabdrivers internationally are artists, musicians, dancers, writers - anything but cabdrivers. That was different in pre-oh-so-hip, pre-wall-came-down Berlin, where cabdrivers (east and west) used to be just angry, crabby old cabbies, and proud of it. They were eloquent only when it came to convincing every happy visitor why it is no good idea to be a happy visitor, ultimately proving their point by ridiculously overcharging for an annoying ride. General misanthropy wasn't fashionable only in a tiny yellow car - it was a hallmark of Berlin. Yep, east and west. A colleague of mine, coming from the Netherlands, got a convincing performance at the fish-counter of a local supermarket. When he tried to strike a jolly conversation by asking:"what goodies have we got today?!" he was served the perfectly berlinesque response: "fish.". (period.). With the wild and art-packed Berlin going down the drain so disappears this element of style and so mutate the cabdrivers. ...

The amount of data being created every second is breathtaking (five trillion bits per second, as George Dyson tells us at ege.org ). Some take this as proof for a tremendous increase in knowledge, others spot only chatter and pocket litter - (and yes, there are estimates that half of the storage capacity - and hence half of the power consumed for 'the internet' - is used for porn). Some see much more. Already in 1955, when the Norwegian-Italian mathematical biologist Nils Aaall Barricelli had heard about the machines operating on digital code in Princeton and finally managed to go there, he experimented with self-replication and cross-breeding of random strings on that machine. Being an experimentalist he observed carefully and studied patterns that reminded him of biological systems. Couldn't computer-code be treated similarly? Shouldn't there be the possibility of evolution in code? Roger Dyson highlights the fact of universal operating systems across multiple ...

Not all the NSA does is bad. The huge financial support for projects developing tools for the analysis of vast amounts of data, the impressive funding of research into 'big data' in general (and the fabricated hype around it) as well as the humungous pile of dollars washing over insanely overenthusiastic mega-endeavours like the 'blue brain' project are possibly related to national interest in tidying up the discs and tapes of the data-messies at NSA and their disheveled brothers and sisters. That is good. Mom would love that. But one side-effect must not be underestimated: our site-statistics show a significant increase in traffic whenever words like 'terrorism', 'NSA' or 'national security' are interspersed. I am sure, SEO professionals would offer a list of much nastier - and therefore traffic-generating - keywords, resulting in an even bigger data-mess at NSA to clean up. Good luck!

It is certainly no good idea to employ google translate to read the only german post on this blog - the one dealing with the platonic love between science and bureaucracy: 'the best of all worlds' . You might otherwise have got the impression of a verbal terrorist attack reading the stuff coming out of the google-garble fed with the first lines. Look: ' bureaucrats seem to be driving for unlimited harassment in jealousy and resentment '. (This in mind, the admission of google to scan all emails to generate a user-profile that allows for more meaningful ad-targeting is - well - scary.) But it also does no justice to the bureaucrats - scientific or otherwise. They can be quite helpful when harassing the right people. Terrorist organizations' humble aspirations to change the world and the unfallible hyperinflated egos of their selfdeclared masterminds are not as much threatened by military responses but rather by bureaucracy, as Jacob N. Shapiro explains in...

Das größte Hemmnis in der Forschung, die furchtbarste Plage für einen Wissenschaftler, der täglichen Alptraum: Bürokratie. Kein Zweifel. Immer abenteuerlichere Abläufe und Formulare für einfachste Bestellungen, kleinteiliger Stundennachweis in Forschungsprojekten, Excel-sheets mit Leistungskosten für jeden Handgriff, Bewertung von Wissenschaft nach Kennzahlen, Abrechnungen von Dienstreisen, bei der Neid und Missgunst Antrieb für grenzenlose Schikanen zu sein scheinen. Hier verraucht Energie, die in die Forschung gehen sollte, gleich zweifach. Einmal im bürokratischen Prozess und dann im lange nachklingenden Ärger darüber. Die Folge ist eine Einstellung zur Verwaltung, die mit dem Wort ‚skeptisch’ deutlich zu wohlwollend beschrieben ist. Natürlich sind das zwei Welten, die unterschiedlicher kaum sein können. Wissenschaft befasst sich mit dem Ungewissen, dem Ungewöhnlichen, sie sucht nach dem Widerspruch und dem Abweichen vom vorher geplanten Pfad. Verwaltung arbeitet hingegen am l...

Because that is exactly what she would do. A dog would rush into the blistering heat of the burning bedroom and drag you into safety. A cat would grab her favourite rotten rat and run - long before the smoke-detectors even bother to do their job. For some years I was wondering why I am attracted by the seemingly bloated ego of cats but at the same time don't really feel at ease when they are around. The attraction is clearly justifiable. Arrogance, if perfected, just tastes great: the sound of inflating egos, the circulation of hot air, the crackling noise when it fills the room wall to wall - priceless. But it has to be done well. Cat-like. More often than not, professional ego-inflation is traded in for a substitute. A puppy-dog dressed up as a kitten. If you are a scientist and kind enough, you might sometimes answer questions thrown at the servers of ResearchGate . Asking and answering questions there supposedly builds your reputation - and leads to too many questions ...

When I fire up my web-based email account late at night, I get a predictable selection of 'consumer suggestions'. Today it got scary. "One million singles are waiting for you!" - it doesn't get more frightening than that! Imagine, one percent of them camping out in front of your house. It's hard to explain to the neighbours, let alone your spouse - and outright unforgivable to the omnipresent neighbouress, who has her eyes everywhere and her thoughts dependably focused on the worst. It made my rant-in-progress (whining about the abusive way of oversimplified popularisation of science by Michio Kaku - again) collaps and left me stunned, occupied, worried. As advice-literature is the straw to hold onto in difficult situations, I recall what always helps me to activate the neurons in times of blank: adrenalin. I am not too fond of externally adding chemicals to my body - and my love to syringes is limited - so I fall back to sports: 5 chin-ups, 10 push-ups, ...

It was to be expected. Last month the clickrate on smarts increased dramatically, almost exponentially. Would we extrapolate, every person in the world able to use her mouse-finger (formerly called index-finger) would be clicking our site around March 2013. We are famous. And fame obviously spells influence in the digital world (naturally: clicks-fame-influence). I am excited to see that 90% of our visitors last week came from Ukraine - we should definitely think about adapting to this demographic development by changing to russian: nastrovje (oh, how predictable. Yes, sorry). Let me give you a glimpse of our main visitors: drocherof, bibikablog, fermersovet, haliava, infoscript, kinorubej, kinorubrika, lovejewel... I would never have guessed that those were interested in crosscultural debate! Especially since they sign up as being robots. Well, the world is changing. We shall auto-generate our posts. Then this could be a feedback-loop of writers and readers, the language ...

A friend of mine dated a girl who was an identical twin. She and her sister suffered from multi personality disorder. He finally left them - all seven. And led a happy life with the remaining four. They married when she found a doctor who freed her from her demons. Some of them. And he died. Widowing two. They tried to console eachother and never married again.

(it's ferragosto. Everyone is at the beaches. The cities are deserted. The espresso-machine is operated by some students from Australia. It is too hot to think, let alone write. Period.) What do you think when you see such a twitter-profile "Researcher, therapist, artist, writer..." - decorated with a lascivous-looking long-haired chick? Well: You believe because you doodled some almond-eyed fairies on a piece of paper that you are an artist? Your "dear diary..." makes you a writer? Endless chatter with your girlfriends about their messed-up relationships made you a therapist? And clicking through wikipedia warrants the title "researcher"? The net is full of those characters. People seem to want to label themselves. We all want to stand for something. We want to brand ourselves:"Researcher, therapist, artist, writer...". But even if it looks like it: life, even life on twitter, is no computer-game. No matter how much energy is put in...

The neat thing with consciousness is: it is so undefined that everybody can speculate wildly about it. You could locate your conscious self in the paw of your dog, your aquarium, your pinky... anywhere - and write books about it, sell books about it - thousands! It is just so heartwarming to chat about consciousness, to bash science on the way and to patronize. And who does it best? Right, the aggregators at bigthink.com. Megan Erickson asserts us (by quoting Alva Noë ) "just as love does not live inside the heart, consciousness is not contained in a finite space". We should not look for it inside our brain, or even our body - but in some intricate interwovenness of our cells and the outer world. What is the proof? None. Just pure sci-fi, touchy-feely chatter. Nice and maybe right or maybe wrong... Do you remember the first step for explaining, for proving or disproving something? Yep: have a hypothesis. Write something down. And then write how you (or anybod...

We live with the bold categorization of research as being either 'fundamental' or 'applied'. The emphasis in funding - and broadly in the public understanding - is on the supposedly more valuable *applied research*. Scientists engaged in fundamental research, on the other hand, are widely seen as geeks, as nerds in ivory-towers of academia, kind of wasting taxpayers' money for their personal entertainment, dabbling with expensive machines, finding ultrafast neutrinos and dismissing them again... At the same time innovation is imperative. So innovate we do. All the time. But seriously, what kind of innovation could we expect when we are asked to do research on optimizing the rubber of a tire, or if coerced to develop a better mp3? What can we expect if somebody pays our research to make cars more fuel-efficient? Certainly there would be some neat progress. Some nifty inventions. But innovation? Let's look back. What would we have gotten when, 30 years ...

Great - now they call it 'information obesity'! If you can name it, you know it. My favourite source of intellectual shallowness, bighthink.com, again wraps a whiff of nothing into a lengthy video-message. As if seeing a person read a text that barely covers up it's own emptyness makes it more valuable. More expensive to produce, sure. But valuable? It is ok, that Clay Johnson does everything to sell his book. But (why) is it necessary to waste so many words, spoken or written, to debate a perceived information overflow? Is it fighting fire with fire? It is cute to pack the problem of distractions into the metaphore of 'obesity', 'diet' and so on. But the solution is the same. At the core of every diet you have 'burn more than you eat'. If you cross a street, you don't read every licence-plate, you don't talk to everybody you encounter, you don't count the number of windows of the houses across, you don't interpret the sounds an...

I just returned from a brief chat with a friend. Clemens is an artist of whom you will hear by the end of this year - a lot. I was sipping a beer in his crammed east-berlin soviet-era mini-flat, 'inhaling' as much of his wonderful paintings as possible; the intensity of his life beaming of every square-inch of color- and text-plastered canvas. He shares his last bottle of beer with me - because he wants to celebrate the occasion: his art just attracted the serious attention of a very, very important public figure, who already decorates his office with one painting by him (smack between a work by Immendorf and one by Lüpertz). That guy has a plan for a major coup d'etat involving Clemens' art - and it will benefit both.  Up to now Clemens lives from collected bottles, some paintings he sells at insanely low prices and petty crime. Now he is about to jump into major league. His paintings have the expressive power that makes collectors nervous and renders some pie...

"blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now" The London School of Economics and Political Science states in one of their, yes, Blogs . It is wrong. The arguments just seem so right: "faster communication of scientific results", "rapid interaction with colleagues" "responsibility to give back results to the public". All nice, all cuddly and warm, all good. But wrong. It might be true for scientoid babble. But this is not how science works.  Scientists usually follow scientific methods to obtain results. They devise, for example, experiments to measure a quantity while keeping the boundary-conditions in a defined range. They do discuss their aims, problems, techniques, preliminary results with colleagues - they talk about deviations and errors, successes and failures. But they don't do that wikipedia-style by asking anybody for an opinion . Scientific discussion needs a set...

Two Zebrafish on a date. Foto from IGB, Eva-Maria Cyr You are probably not among those who subscribe to the newsletter of the "Leibniz-Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries" (IGB) - but you probably should. Their recent press-release (in german) is a real eye-opener - it has potential to completely change my bar-life. Scientists at IGB devised an experiment code-named wedding-planner in which they check which male Zebrafish get's lucky on a date. The result is nothing short of stunning. If the girl-fish gets to chose between a number of differently attractive guys she does not go for the most attractive stud but the second-best looking. Reproducibly. The reason is, they found in a monogamous setup, that the super-guy tends to bully the female zebralette into submission, which kind of spoils the party. Quite reminiscent of what we observe amongst humanoids. Too bad that neither Zebrafish nor those brawny bar-peacocks have enough brains to re...