Auto-Identify Porn

Steve Hanov is a Computer Science major who put together a short piece on the automatic identification of pornographic images, for which there is considerable demand. Companies want to block their workers from it, both because they want their workers to focus on the job, and because such images run them afoul of sexual harassment laws. People with delicate sensibilities also wish to either be protected from it themselves, or prevent their children from seeing it, and get filtering software for exactly that purpose.
When I entered school, there was a method for this in existence already. All images had their tones compared with a chart of human skin tones. If more than, say 40% of the image was skin toned, the image was classified as pornographic. (And blocked, sent to an admin, or whatever.) Just one problem with that. Here's a picture of a famous man. See if you can see the problem:

Most of the picture depicts his (face) skin, but this picture is clearly not pornography. So that method is likely to backfire occasionally.
So another expert, David Forsythe, wrote a paper on this topic, that he called Finding Naked People. (Mr. Forsythe is known for exactly this kind of humor.) Mr. Forsythe noted that people have at most two arms and two legs, so if it can trace a continuous skin-tone from a face, to an arm, to a leg, then this is probably a picture of a naked person and therefore not allowed. His program understands how human bodies work, but would be fooled by, say, a person wearing a body-stocking. Still, it was much better than the previous example that got fooled by faces.
So James Ze Wang wrote another program, WIPE, that carefully checked shapes, on the grounds that this would cut down on the false positives. It also checked five criteria, giving a slight more granularity to the process. After all, a person wearing a bathing suit would prompt a less serious response than a naked person, which in turn would be less than a naked person having sex and so on.
Unfortunately for Mr. Wang, WIPE had far too many false negatives. It approved images that were clearly to a human, pornographic. WIPE does make a good secondary filter with human intervention (that is to say, where a human double checks WIPE's approvals.)
Mr. Hanov then goes on to describe Google's involvement in the problem. When Google developed an image-search program, it then had to ensure that pornographic images were not returned unless explicitly asked for. After all, families and other sensitive people use it. The Internet already has a filthy reputation, no need to make it worse. Just imagine.

Mom: Hey Mad Engineer, I'm doing a report on oral cancer, can you get me a picture to go with that?
Mad Engineer: Sure mom. Open google, image search, "Oral cancer..." ....Oh my.
Grandma: What are you kids up to OH SWEET JESUS BURN THE DEMON MACHINE!!!!!!

Since hundreds of thousands of people use Google image every minute or so, this has to be a fairly fast and effective algorithm. And you know that if it fails that people will complain. Google writes another paper on their results.
I predict more developments on this in the future.

Alternative Medicine

Okay, I've noticed that some of you don't like traditional medicine. Please be careful with the alternates. Medical scams go back hundreds of years, it's why we have regulatory boards like the FDA in the first place. Because some people bottle some cheap oil, sell it as all-curing "snake oil," and laugh as the bankroll rolls in and the graveyards fill. Hence the term "Snake oil" to mean "fake medicine."
So what can you do instead if you still hate traditional medicine?

* Herbalism
Before there were chemical pills, people ate plants to help them feel better. See, plants constantly engage in chemical warfare with each other, and some of the compounds they make kill bacteria, get us high, or relieve our pain. Aspirin, for instance, is concentrated salysitic acid, which was derived from willow bark. Why willow bark? Because hundreds of years ago, somebody noticed that if you had a headache and chewed some, the headache went away.
So most chemical pills that a doctor prescribes you, they often were derived from a long-ago herbal treatment. If you must bypass western medicine, herbalism is a reasonably sufficient substitute. Please be cautious that you're less certain of dosing this way, since plants can have wildly varying amounts of their active compound.
* Reflexology
Fancy foot rubs. Now while foot rubs are great for aching feet, they do not, as reflexologists would claim, cure problems outside the feet.
* Chiropracty
Fancy back rubs. Great for mysterious back pain. Useless for non-spinal problems. Practitioners claim that the spine influences the rest of the body, but this is dubious.
* Acupuncture
The ancient Chinese believed that a mysterious energy, "Qi," flowed through the body and that if it got blocked at any point, it would cause problems. So they developed a system of needle-stabbing to unblock this energy.
It works on mysterious pain, but nobody has any idea why, because Qi doesn't exist.
Also even more curiously, it even works if instead of needles, one pokes with fingers on the same spots. Albeit usually less effectively.
* Homeopathy
In the late 1790s, Malaria was a big problem for European explorers. Various remedies were tried, all of them utterly ineffective. A German doctor discovered the effectiveness of Quinine, and then despite being uninfected with malaria himself, took some anyway. To his surprise, he developed malaria-like symptoms, and so concluded that "Like-cures-like." That is, if one has a fever, one should take a treatment that causes fever in a healthy person.
Then the field went totally insane and decided that repeated dilution was the best way to deal with medical shortages. Homeopaths generally believe that solvents somehow have memory, and can remember what was dissolved in them even when diluted so extremely that not one particle of the dissolved substance could possibly remain.
So when you take a homeopathic treatment, you're drinking water that might have been near a poison at one time. Also, we should all be dead from drinking poop water, but for some reason that didn't happen. Maybe because water doesn't actually have a memory. It is a chemical compound, it does not have a brain.
Ultra-cheapskate homeopaths now even claim that "water memory" can be transmitted by sound. Now hold the glass up to the phone, so I can make it believe it's useful medicine. This way I can take your money without you even leaving your home.
* Vitamin theory
In the 1800s, sailors noticed that their typical diet of hardtack and rum tended to make them very very ill. It turns you that you need certain chemical compounds in your food, or you sicken and die. These were called the Vitamins, and were given letter names for easy remembering. Now you can buy tablets with all the vitamins you need, just in case you for some reason need to subsist on a hardtack diet.
Now a cranky theory is engulfing Africa, a continent currently riddled with AIDS and other horrible diseases. The theory states that megadoses of vitamins will cure all diseases. Even Ebola, AIDS, and other diseases that are strongly resistant to treatment.
If this was true, westernized medicine surely would have noticed by now. It's mostly wishful thinking, because a box of vitamins costs $1.83, and the same weight of anti-AIDS drugs costs $224. Africa is not famous for having lots of money.
* Reiki and Faith Healing
Reiki is an idea from Japan that one can move "Qi" from a healthy person to an ill one, therefore ending the ill person's illness. Remember several paragraphs ago when I said that Qi doesn't exist? Still doesn't.
Likewise, Faith Healing revolves around having religion take away a person's illness. It usually doesn't.
* Vibrational Medicine
Supposedly, human beings are made of energy, and changing the "balances" of this energy heals diseases. Pass the bong, man.
* Therapeutic/Magic/Quantum/Whatever Touch
Therapeutic touch claimed to cure illness at a distance through spooky action. An 11 year old proved it to be utterly wrong in 1998. So the practitioners renamed it Quantum touch and went right back to work. People might not understand quantum mechanics, but surely understand that vitalism is wrong, don't they?
* Naturopathy
If there's one thing I've noticed about people over the years, it's that anything they can label "natural," they love, and anything they can label "artificial," they hate. Combine this with outrage at being treated as a bunch of parts by western medicine, and copious bong-passings, and you get naturopathic medicine,
While the official principles are pretty impressive, advocating taking the most effective treatments, working with the self-healing nature of the body for best results, encouraging self-responsibility for health and so on, in practice this tends to be half-baked ideas fueled by what seems to be several doses of hallucinogens, long treatises on long-ago disproven cranky theories, and odd little obsessions like Dr. Kellogs whacked out love of enemas. (Naturopaths often proclaim that one's own intestines are sickening you by retaining some ten to forty pounds of stale poop, and offer to treat this with herbal enemas. Surely we would all be grotesquely ill then?)
* Iridology
Iridologists proclaim that all illness can be diagnosed by analysis of the iris. Most are also homeopaths, naturopaths, or one of the other less reputable branches listed above.
* Color therapy
Feeling bad? Here, look at this colorful poster! Don't you feel better already? See, it realigned your chakras, which are invisible undetectable wheels of light down the center of your body. (Chakras are a common belief in Indian religions, and are likely not real.) Let me shine this colored lamp on you to finish up the process. Man, don't you love these dank nugs?

---

I'm gonna go with the Herbs. Least ridiculous. Best tested. Natural enough for the chemistry-haters. Thousands of years of testing. Least crank riddled.

Zebra Mussels

In 1998, a ship that was previously in the Black Sea, near Russia, was in the Great Lakes of the US. It dumped its ballast and introduced a new animal into the lakes. This animal was the filter feeding Zebra Mussel, and both good and bad things happened because of this.
On the good side, the lakes were quite murky and polluted, and the mussels cleaned every drop of lake water. Within only a few years, lake visibility improved dramatically. Before 1998, one would be an idiot to drink the lake's water, now it is the best source of water in the United States for its area. Also, unlike many invasive species, there are native animals that love to eat the mussels. Perch, Roaches, and Crawfish love them. Crawfish eat over a thousand a day if given the opportunity.
The bad news is that they are encrusting every last surface of the lake, including boats, pumps, and devices, and they did not only eat the waste, but all filter-food available to them. This has starved out a number of native species. Also, they have bioaccumulated the lake's waste into themselves. This means that eating them, or anything that has eaten them, is unsafe.
While Zebra Mussels are, if clean, edible to humans, one should not eat any of the existing ones. They have all the PCBs and other pollution that all cities between Detroit and Chicago dumped lodged in their bodies.
There are two things I would suggest doing with this information. One is to harvest every Zebra Mussel currently in the lake, but discard the bodies into a toxic waste dump. I estimate there to be 6,432,215,961,600,000 mussels in the lake at most, so we go through a regular process of scraping mussels off available surfaces, counting and discarding until we have harvested this many. At that point, further mussels can be assumed to be safe. We can harvest them for cheap food, introduce crawfish that will eat them up and then promptly become Cajun food.
The other is to build a device that pumps water through mussel-filled chambers over and over. After about 10 or so cycles, the water will be drinkable. Periodically it will be necessary to remove the mussels and treat their remains for pollution, and because they will reproduce until they clog the chambers.
This device will use less power than traditional filters, and the filtration parts are 100% biodegradable. In addition, the filtration parts are 100% natural. In fact, the filtration will reproduce itself, making this machine partially self-assembling. Depending on how one circulates the water, it could even be off-the-grid, resulting in zero environmental impact. It scales easily up to a city water treatment, or down to a single-person use. Muhahahaha.
PETA will complain. Muhahahahahahahaha.

The Ungoogable List of Mr. Monroe

Randall Monroe of XKCD proposes a list of words that had no hits on google when he wrote them. These words now have a number of hits, mostly people talking about his list like I am.
I think most of his phrases had no hits for quite good reasons. He picked some damn unusual thoughts.

"ate a violin"

No animal on earth is capable of eating all the parts of a violin, although if I allow multiple organisms, I can find a combination that can eat everything: Termites consume the wood, various specialized bacteria can eat the laquer, the nylon strings, and if I let the metal parts rust away, these can be made into an iron rich health supplement.

"driver-side bidet"

A bidet is a toiletry part that squirts water onto your toileting parts to clean them. To use it successfully, you probably shouldn't be wearing pants as you do it. They're uncommon in America.
"Driver's side" seems to imply that this is in a vehicle, and used by the person operating it. If you're driving without pants, (or a skirt, or something to cover your crotch) then I think I might be a tad disgusted by you.

"unlike normal furries,"

"Furries" are an internet sub-community that depict themselves graphically as anthropomorphic animals. They're new enough that no one is sure what is "normal" for them. In fact, every time the internet turns around, it seems to uncover an even stranger one than was ever seen before. Thus making "normal furries" a nonsensical concept in two ways.

"Sarah, plain and tall and a cyborg"

Sarah, Plain and Tall, was a book about a stepmother who moved from the east coast to the midwest, and was about loneliness and existentialism. The book was set long before cyborgs were technically possible.While at first thought being a "cyborg" would make one explicitly not "plain," I suppose a plain and tall Sarah could have a pacemaker surgically installed, therefore making her a combination of a person and machine and therefore a cyborg.

"people are too civil on the internet"

For one, people tend towards the rude and caustic on the Internet. The authors of Penny Arcade point out that if you give the average person both anonymity and an audience, their behavior decays considerably (warning, rude language).
The other thing about this is that "too civil" is really really hard to imagine. What discussion wouldn't be better without the normal half-baked retorts and copious insults and the raging fury of a thousand broken dreams that characterize most internet arguments?

"his penis shattered my world"

I'm still not sure if having one's world shattered is a good thing or a bad thing. In any case, most straight women only really care that a potential boyfriend has a penis and that it works, and even among gay men, "size queens" are kind of rare.

"more like LAME-arkian theory"

Lamarkian Evolution is so entirely and throughly discredited that this kind of insult is stupid and unnecessary.

"my little horse must think it gay"

Horses of any size probably don't give a web slap if something is homosexual or not. Unless you mean it in the "it's lame" sense, in which case horses don't think that way either.

"it turned out her bottom half was a robot"

Half body replacement is still not technologically feasible.

"Aww, a baby hooker!"

Most people (in America anyway) would reguard anything remotely similar to "a baby hooker" as immensely creepy. Even the offspring of a hooker would be more pitied than admired.

---

I'd like to thank Mr. Monroe for this little crazy journey.

Life Support

I should built a machine that has an extracorporeal circulation device, a dialysis machine, and remote manipulators with scalpels and surgical thread sewers. I should make it portable, battery powered for up to 48 hours with solar recharging options, and treaded so that it can move on harsh terrain. It should also be able to connect to satellites by a radio-type connection. It would have a saline-and-glucose supply in case of excess fluid loss, and a small stash of useful medications, most notably analgesics and antibiotics. It should be able to insert these into the incoming side of the circulation.

The interior would be like the "improved bed" that I wrote about earlier, but with the remote manipulators, some kind of cameras, and needles for the vein connections. Air conditioning optional, and probably avoided due to excessive power use.

Then we can take this device to the wilderness, or a battlefield, and if we come across a wounded person, we can put them inside, connect their veins, and have it radio-connect to a hospital, where a surgeon could use the remote manipulators to save the wounded person's life.

When the patient is stable, we drain the used dialysate replace the needles and the mattress liner, and then the machine can save another life.

What else can insane technology do for medicine?

Boot Monitors

In some of the older, more expensive servers, it didn't load the operating system straightaway. It had a ROM chip with a much simpler OS built into it, and that simpler OS would boot the more complicated, production one. This may have added complexity, but there was a good reason for it.
The good reason was that sometimes administrators did really stupid things. Sometimes they erased large, seemingly useless file that were actually critical to the OS's operation. Sometimes the disk screwed up. Sometimes the main OS didn't work, and the big mainframe didn't exactly come with a rescue CD. The "Boot Monitor" ROM OS may have been simpler than the production one, but it was good enough to, say, rescue files from a failing disk, copy them to the other computer in the next town over via the network, and load the replacement OS into place.
Desktop computers don't typically have this features because of the expense and added complexity this would add. But frankly, I think we should have USB-based boot monitors. If you mess up the computer, you can pop in the USB-Key device and it'll help make things all better. It can't save files that you forgot to save during the power outage, but it can rescue files from a failing disk, or help you find that note with your lost password. You know, that one you've asked helpdesk to help you find 21 times now.
I could also use it when putting together a new OS. I'm often left with this chicken-and-egg problem of being unable to make the filesystem because I need the writing program, but I can't build the writing program with no filesystem. Here, the writing program would be on the USB-key, the filesystem would be made, and then the OS installed on it. Easy peasy. Way better than my current method of using the swap-partition that'll get erased later as a temporary fake filesystem.
To non-computer people who asked me what in the flying hell filesystems and partitions are, they have to do with storing information on a hard drive. First you have to cut the hard drive into partitions, which decides what section gets what. Windows people can make the whole drive one partition if they like, but the advantage to having several is that they tend to fail one at a time. So if you have an OS partition and a Data partition, and the OS partition fails, you might need to reinstall but you still have your data. If the data partition fails, I hope you had a backup. If you had one partition, you're reinstalling and restoring from backup, which is a bit of a pain.
A filesystem is like installing a cabinet in the partition. It says what files are where, and must be in a form that the OS can understand. Newer ones can store more files in less space, thanks to research into block-sizes and whatnot. The filesystem determines that your letter to your boss is at, say, D:\letters\howaboutaraise.doc . It allows organization, so that your business letters can be separate from your letters to your mother. With no file system, any information would be like a big pile of papers on the ground. That get stepped on and mangled. No one could make sense of that.

The National Debt

This article is a tad America-Centric. I live there. It's my country, and I do love it. Non-American readers are encouraged to apply what they can of this to their own nation.

Like most nations, America is in fairly badly in debt. $7 trillion is owed to external sources, and another $4 trillion exists in inter-department loans. The debt continuously gets larger as interest continuously collects, and then on top people insist both on extensive spending programs and low taxes, not realizing that one or the other has to give. Possibly even both.

To remind you of how ludicrously large 7 trillion is, let me think up some things I could do with $7 trillion:

• I could buy a car and a mansion for every person who ever lived.
• I could fill all the planet's lakes with an expensive fluid, like Cristal
• I could terraform Mars, Venus, Mercury, Io, Ganymede, and parts of the asteroid belt
• I could buy everything on Earth. Everything physical that exists as of this writing.
• I could feed a trillion people lunch at a mid-ranged American buffet
• I could automate all labor on earth and mandate that every person go on vacation. For the rest of their lives.

This can't be good for our credit rating, collectively. So far, bonds have been traded, mostly to American citizens, but other nations are also heavily involved, mostly China and Japan. They're not interested in loaning us money just because, but expect to be paid back at some point. Also, it is unwise to abuse credit. Given a credit line of $10,000, it is better to use it to buy groceries and promptly pay it off as soon as possible than to buy a huge plasma screen television and all the video games you can carry.

We cannot just pay this off by printing more money. The Confederacy tried that, the Weinmar Republic tried that, and both immediately died of hyperinflation. That is to say, their currencies became worthless, even simple goods like bread cost wheelbarrows full of currency, and the stability of the government collapsed because trade was impossible. This is happening yet again in Zimbabwe, which failed to learn from history and is once again repeating it.

Some people specifically don't want to pay off the national debt. I must remind them that there is an interest cost to all this debt. Debt is never free. Taxes could be something along the lines of 6 - 20 % lower if the government didn't owe such absurd sums. Let me give reasons that I think should appeal to everybody:

1. Borrowing money that you never intend to pay back is stealing.
2. Living beyond your means is not only irresponsible, it is stupid
3. Debt for no reason is unbiblical, "Neither a borrower nor lender be."
4. It's literally costing you money as the interest charges pile up.
5. Sooner or later, payment must happen. Not paying it is punishing your children. You love your children, right? If you don't have children, do you give a hoot about the future at all?
6. A large debt is a shame upon the nation. Don't you care about your nation's prestige?
7. In severe emergencies, like world wars, multistate natural disasters, and so on, the government must spend ridiculous sums of money. A bankrupt nation would have to turn over and die instead. Care to surrender to, oh, say, North Korea, or roll over and die just because a hurricane came by?
8. If the government were a person, it would be a slacker with a minimum wage job and several maxed out credit cards. Would you lend that person money? I wouldn't.
9. If the government did go bankrupt, it's not just the things that you hate that would go away. Republicans would lose the entire military, all five branches, corporate assistance, and farming subsidies. Democrats would lose the EPA, most of the country's educational system, the NEA, the NSF, and both sides would lose social order.
10. "Loss of social order" means people shoot you for your stuff and the police are too bankrupt to give a wet slap. Hope you own a good machine gun, an infinite supply of bullets, and don't need to sleep at all!

To make matters crazier, Estonia, a country with a much lower GDP, has insisted that it will pay off its entire debt by 2010, next year. I find it embarrassing on a National level that they have that big a head start. I wager that if I held a pop-geography quiz, a quarter of the people would have no idea where Estonia even is. Sigh.

I can't count on the government to have the stones to follow my plan. Republicans may whine that it's the Democrats fault for spending money on things, and Democrats complain that the Republicans obsess endlessly on tax cuts, but when Alan Greenspan saw a plan to slash the debt due to budget surplus in 1992, no Congressperson would have anything to do with it. God forbid their favorite thing be skipped in favor of some abstract that their pea-brains couldn't seem to grasp. (As a liberal guy, I might personally blame the Republicans more, since they seem to entertain so many Norquistian fantasies about how taxes are some kind of bizarre crime against them that liberals thought up for no reason, and that if the government went bankrupt we'd all move on to some kind of gold-coin-using government-free utopia, but they'd call me a tax-and-spend nutjob. And I do admit that spending greatly when you're heavily in debt is a poor idea.)

I thought that I thought of this first, but apparently this obnoxious Republican beat me to it. If every one of us Americans paid $10 per year, it would take 23,000 years to pay off the debt. If we made it $10 per day, the debt would be paid in 63 years, and probably less from the ever-decreasing interest payments. I can't count on you to do this, so I will take the first move and make a small contribution. Of course, we will also have to show some political backbone and try to stop making the problem worse. No more tax cuts. No more wars unless someone literally puts troops on our turf. No more entitlement programs. We must elect government that assume that money is just not available. Furthermore, the government should not print money during this time, except as debt payment, and then only extremely minimally. Absolutely not more than $100,000 per year. Probably we should only use the mint to create collector's coins until the debt is paid.

If I were controlling the government personally, my first action would be to sell all the gold the government owns and pay this to the debt first. We can buy it back later when gold is more correctly priced, but there's no need for the government to own shinies, really. I'm letting the tax-cuts expire, and anyone who complains will be given a passport, a Bulgarian-to-English dictionary, and informed that they have much much lower taxes in Bulgaria. (Bulgarian taxes are 10%, and all of the former Iron-Curtain nations are below 20%.) I'm looking at you, Norquist.

Now, this plan is worthless without knowing how to do it, and you can't just hand over cash at the DMV. The government has strict instructions on what they may accept as a debt payment, just to make sure no one is confused about the matter. I quote the government directly:

How do you make a contribution to reduce the debt?

Make your check payable to the Bureau of the Public Debt, and in the memo section, notate that it is a Gift to reduce the Debt Held by the Public. Mail your check to:

Attn Dept G
Bureau of the Public Debt
P. O. Box 2188
Parkersburg, WV 26106-2188

On further tax policies, I'd like to see if Republican theories on tax have any merit at all by implementing both cap-and-trade and a number of sin taxes. Their theory is that taxing something reduces its presence in the market. Cap-and-trade is basically a pollution tax. If taxing something makes it too expensive to continue, we would see measurably cleaner air as a result. Sin taxes on behaviors that we find obnoxious, like drinking, smoking, car horns that blare music out of tune, should also measurably reduce their presence. I predict that people will grudgingly pay and continue these behaviors anyway, whining and bitching the whole way through. Any additional revenue produced by this would be cream-on-the-cake, frankly.

As a last note, this would have a net effect of a significant deflation. If this needs to be countered, printing money would counter that nicely. Especially if it made more debt payments.