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I’ve been remiss in updating lately, mostly because I’ve been embroiled in yet another personal programming project. So here are a few of the more interesting articles I’ve read recently to tide you over:

• Probably due to the dysfunction exhibited by the U.S. government over the past year, libertarians have recently been abuzz about creating new countries of their own from scratch, Ayn Rand-style. The most impressive projects are the sea-steading ones of course that so eerily mimic the underwater city of Rapture from the BioShock games, but these are pipe dreams with not much chance of coming to fruition. Surprisingly, the most realistic of these initiatives is Honduras’ attempt to create a Hong Kong-style charter city which would be autonomous from the host country. Even Honduran police and the court system will not have authority in the designated zones as they will outsourced to the private sector and the courts of Mauritius respectively. The Economist has the details.
• So Kim Jong Il died last month and the North Korea population promptly exploded into an orgy of mass grieving. This short article from MSNBC offers a few tantalizing glimpses of how this works in the hermit kingdom, which includes people being punished for not participating in organized mourning sessions or even not being seen to cry in a genuine manner.
• By now everyone has heard of the cruise ship that sank off the coast of Italy and the idiot captain whose latest claim that he accidentally fell into the lifeboat and thus didn’t mean to intentionally abandon ship. But do you wonder what happens next to that ship? Do they let it sink? Do they try to refloat it? Well, this amazing feature from Wired covers an international team of experts who specialize in just this sort of thing, traveling all around to refloat capsized ships or just salvage what can be saved. They’re paid big bucks but their company earns money only if they succeed as their contracts are based on a percentage of the value recovered and as the article makes it painfully clear, theirs is a mortally dangerous job. The article is so good it could be made into a summer blockbuster, highly recommended.
• Finally, on a more light-hearted note, I’m sure what with the Wikipedia blackout and all, everyone knows about SOPA and how it’s supposed to help with copyright violation, i.e. IP piracy. In a move that combines the futility of fighting against file sharing and the ridiculousness of organized religion, Sweden has officially recognized the Church of Kopimism as a religious organization. This church was founded in 2010 and upholds the right to file-share as a sacred tenet. Its religious symbols are CTRL+C and CTRL+V, i.e. copy-paste. PCMag has the story.

I spent some time looking for cool stuff to share but only have a couple of articles for the last month of 2011, so here they are anyway:

• The Economist has a simple story about how the usual practice of cutting off an infant’s umbilical cord immediately following birth may not be a good idea. The theory is that as long as the cord is still attached, blood continues to flow from the detached placenta to the infant. If the cord is cut too soon, not enough blood flows into the infant, causing anemia. Indeed, a study found that infants who had their umbilical cords cut after at least 3 minutes following birth had up to 45% more iron in their blood compared to those whose cords were cut within 10 seconds when they were 4 months old. As the article suggests, this may be what nature “intended” as other mammals tend to leave the cords attached for some time following birth.
• The next article is the latest in a long line of findings in evolutionary psychology which show that human infants are born with an ingrained sense of morality. What makes this one different is that it also shows that infants’ sense of morality is capable of quickly growing more sophisticated as they grow older. Previous studies showed that infants like to reward actors in events that they perceive to be good, which usually means an actor that has been seen to be helping other actors in a scenario, such as retrieving an object for them or helping them climb across an obstacle etc. However, this time the researchers showed that at the age of about 8 months, the babies, when asked to reward an actor, would choose to reward a bad actor if they had previously seen this actor doing bad things to another antisocial actor as opposed to another actor who only did good things all the time. This means that they are rewarding an actor who they think is justly punishing someone bad.

In my ongoing quest to read all of the major fantasy series (leaving aside obvious crap like David Eddings and Terry Goodkind stuff), I recently bought Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon, the first book of his Malazan Book of the Fallen series. (As an aside, I’ve recently being buying books from the UK-based The Book Depository, which is noteworthy mainly for offering free shipping anywhere in the world, not to mention prices that beat any Malaysian retailers. The downside of course is that you need to wait for about a month to get your book. If anyone knows of any online store that can offer better deals for someone residing in Malaysia, do let me know.)

The Malazan books have quite a fanbase and, with all ten books in Erikson’s series now out, plus another four books by the co-creator of their shared world, Ian Cameron Esslemont, seem to be decently successful. Review-wise, however, the verdicts are all over the chart. The most enthusiastic fans rate Erikson’s work more highly even than G.R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice. Given that these include some very smart people from QT3, I’m not inclined to dismiss their opinions lightly. To the detractors however, his story is an incomprehensible mess, plagued by bland prose, cliched and boring characters and poor storytelling sense. After slogging through all 600+ pages of the first book, I’m sad to say that I have to include myself in the latter camp.

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I heard that this was a mindbender film so I embargoed myself out of reading anything about it. That means no reviews, no forum posts talking about it, nothing. That’s probably why I enjoyed the film as much as I did, given that:

1. It has a terrible title which tells you nothing whatsoever about the subject of the film and, more importantly, is a misnomer given that the term “source code” in computer programming does not mean anything even vaguely resembling what they refer to in the film.
2. The science involved is claptrap of the lowest order. How do you explain how a dead man’s mind can contain all the information in the universe? It’s quantum mechanics. Parabolic calculus. Just brilliant.

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The 2011 AI Challenge is now over. I finished in 71st place. While that’s some way off of my 47th position in Planet Wars, considering the complexity of this year’s challenge and the fact that there was a total of 7,897 entrants this year, compared to less than 5,000 last year, I’m very glad to finish within the top 100 at all. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that about a week before the closing date for submissions, a bunch of highly-ranked entrants publicly posted details of their combat strategy, allowing me to replicate some of it, I wouldn’t have been able to make it into the top 200 at all. As usual, this post will be about the results. I’ll write another post later about my bot in my games blog.

As with last year, once again this year’s contest was dominated by a single person. Bocsimacko who won Planet Wars last year didn’t submit an entry for Ants, but Xathis of Germany basically pulled off the same thing. For almost the entire duration of the contest, not only did Xathis keep the number one spot, he did it with the first version of his bot as well. Admittedly, it was possible only because he’d worked on his bot during the beta phase and most of his testing seems to have taken place on the TCP servers, but it’s an impressive feat nevertheless. We did have a bit of last minute tension as GreenTea of Ukraine supposedly took the number 1 spot for a couple of hours just before the finals ended, but Xathis retook the top spot just in the nick of time.

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I didn’t exactly forget to write one of these for November 2011. It’s just that between personal issues, my participation in the 2nd International Melaka Walkathon and most of all, spending lots of time on my entry for the AI Challenge 2011, I just never got around to it. Well, better late than never and here’s a whole bunch of articles to make up for the tardiness:

• This is purely based on survey data, i.e. asking people what they believe rather than observing it in them, but this article reports how happiness is correlated with high ethical standards.
• One of the most interesting events in November was how the Earth was almost destroyed by a passing asteroid. Of course, almost is a relative term and astronomers have long calculated that the asteroid, 2005 YU55 will miss our planet, coming no closer than about 320,000 kilometres. This article has all the details.
• One of the basic assumptions in science is the laws of nature remain constant. This extensive blog post looks at one very intricate experiment that suggests that this may not necessarily be true. In particular, the experiment looks at the fine-structure constant, itself a combination of several constants including the electron charge, Planck’s constant, the speed of light and ? by studying the spectra of quasars. Their observations currently suggest that the fine structure constant appears to have been different in the distant. If this checks out, it could mean that the laws of physics themselves change over time.
• This Freakonomics blog post covers the work of an economist who thought to ask: hey, with all those sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, I wonder what that means for their membership and donation numbers? It turns out that the scandals have indeed led to a drop in the number of people attending Catholic Church with commensurate gains elsewhere. In particular, it looks as if Baptist churches picked up most of the fleeing Catholics.
• Can animals laugh? In particular, can animals laugh when they’re being tickled? This blog post covers the work of Jaak Panksepp who tickled rats to find out. It seems that rats make a chirping noise in the 50 kHz range under certain conditions and this researcher sought to prove that this response has an ancestral relationship to human laughter. They found out all sorts of things, for example, that the most playful rats tend to be the most ticklish, that tickle response rates drop after adolescence, that the tickle response tends to help with social bonding and that rats will even run mazes for the sake of being tickled.
• Ever since quantum mechanics was invested, physicists have long argued over how it can be interpreted. Lately, most scientists prefer to treat it as a purely statistical tool, absolving them of the need to treat the results as something that exists physically. A recent preprint of a paper suggests that this interpretation is flawed and that the results of quantum mechanics do reflect intrinsic physical reality after all.

Early this month, to little international outcry, the US Senate passed a bill that would make Malaysia’s controversial ISA look positively tame by comparison. The bill in question is the National Defense Authorization Act. Glenn Greenwald of Salon summarizes the most important provisions as follows:

(1) mandates that all accused Terrorists be indefinitely imprisoned by the military rather than in the civilian court system; it also unquestionably permits (but does not mandate) that even U.S. citizens on U.S. soil accused of Terrorism be held by the military rather than charged in the civilian court system (Sec. 1032);

(2) renews the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) with more expansive language: to allow force (and military detention) against not only those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks and countries which harbored them, but also anyone who “substantially supports” Al Qaeda, the Taliban or “associated forces” (Sec. 1031); and,

(3) imposes new restrictions on the U.S. Government’s ability to transfer detainees out of Guantanamo (Secs. 1033-35).

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