the klog

I bring you another edition of Overheard in Halo, where I get a glimpse of the part of America that I normally don't hear about first hand. While playing a Halo 3 match online, two people on my team who knew each other were voice chatting. A guy (R—) and a girl (W—). Paraphrased from memory:

R—: So are you going to have to kill anyboody?
W—: I don't think so. I hope not.
R—: Probably not?
W—: Well I'm just gonna be like an administrator.
R—: What about J—? Did he kill anybody?
W—: Yeah, he did.
R—: Yeah, but if some towelheads are, like, shooting at you, what are you gonna do?
W—: I guess.
R—: How many did he kill?
W—: Just one.
R—: Was he all freaked out about it?
W—: No, not really, but it was a kid.
R—: It was a kid? How did it happen?
W—: Well, there was an AK-47 on the ground next to the kid because his dad just died, and J— told him not to pick it up, but he picked it up, and so he had to shoot him.
R—: Oh wow, where did he shoot him?
W—: In the chest, I think.
R—: So at least it didn't make his head explode or something. Man. But the dad was probably some towelhead who was shooting at him or something, right?
W—: Yeah.
R—: Oh well, I guess I don't see J— getting too freaked out about that. He probably wouldn't be freaked out at all if it wasn't a kid. Hey didn't J— get shot at a lot over there?
W—: Yeah I think so.
R—: Didn't an RPG hit his Jeep or something?
W—: Well, an RPG went through his Jeep, but it didn't explode. But yeah he got shot at a lot.
R—: Oh, okay. Man, this game is so laggy! I can't hit anything! I hate when they keep popping up behind me where they weren't a second ago!

And the chatter petered out for the rest of the game for the most part, except with R— complaining about network lag every once in a while.

(Here's my last overheard in Halo post.)

I was digging through my old high school papers, and I found this old story I wrote back in 10th grade for my "Ethnic Exp. Lit. 2" class in March of 1994. We were doing a section on superstitions.

* * *

"Squawk!"

It was a bright and sunny day in the city, and Bob was very cheerful. After three years, he had finally saved enough money to buy a brand new Lexus. Bob drove it home and had just finished washing it for the third time in the same day when he heard a crow squawk. 'Oh no!' he thought. 'It's bad luck to hear a crow squawk!' He immediately decided to get rid of this ill omen.

"Shut up and go away! You heard me! Get out of here!" Bob shouted.

"Squawk!" the crow replied.

"Stop that squawking!" Bob screamed.

"Squawk! Squawk! Squawk!" the crow answered.

"Ahh!" Bob yelled. "I'll get rid of you if it's the last thing I'll do!"

The crow promptly deposited a drop of feces on the hood of Bob's Lexus. Bob became utterly speechless. He grabbed a couple of pebbles from the sidewalk and started to hurl them at the crow. The crow flew off the power cable it was resting on and began to successfully dodge the stones. It hovered back and forth skillfully until a loose brick got in its way. The crow, surprised by this unexpected development, squawked again. The brick did not squawk, but, instead, it fell directly onto the windshield of Bob's car, cracking it, then knocked off the hood ornament, and finally dropped into a huge puddle made by Bob's car washing and splashed an enormous amount of water onto Bob's face. This did not make Bob any happier.

Bob returned to his room and got his rifle. When he went back outside, the crow was standing on the hood of his car. He aimed carefully, pulled the trigger, missed the crow, and completely shattered his windshield. "Oh no! The bad luck has already started!" Bob exclaimed. The crow was startled by the gunshot, squawked again, and flew to the other side of the street. Bob followed it. He stopped in the middle of the street and was about to pull the trigger again when a truck, unable to stop in time, barely missed hitting Bob, but it knocked the rifle out of his hands. "I hate this bad luck!" Bob cried. The crow squawked again and flew away. "Don't you dare fly away now after you've caused all this damage, you crow!" said Bob. He retrieved his rifle, got into his car, cleared away what was left of his windshield so he could see, and drove after the crow.

After flying several blocks, the crow stopped to rest on a lamppost. "Squawk!" it crowed. Bob shot his rifle at it and missed again. The crow continued flying. Every time the crow stopped, Bob shot at it, and the crow took off again. This persisted until the crow flew off a cliff. Bob was fully concentrated on the location of the crow and did not see the cliff he was approaching. In fact, he didn't notice the cliff until he suddenly lost control of his car, which fell head first off the cliff. "Stupid bad luck crow!" Bob screamed as he frantically stepped on the brake to no avail. Shortly afterward, his car landed on the road below and exploded instantly. A fiery fragment of the Lexus that was tossed up by the explosion hit and killed the crow just after it shrieked one final "Squawk!"

I just wrote a haiku. I believe it to be the best haiku ever written. It is about a topic truly dear to my heart.

"Time Zones"
by Kenneth Lu

UTC offset
Changing each spring and fall for
Daylight saving time

(Note how it even contains seasonal references, which are missing from most amateur attempts at haikus.)

Me!

(I just got a haircut that was a bit too short, and I'm missing my messy hair. :P)

(Project 365 Day 167)

Just to mix it up a bit, instead of a photo of some random object today, I bring you a photo of my MIND! This is a dream I had this morning just before my alarm went off. I've probably been seeing too many Grind House ads. (Hm. Patrick Swayze was in the so-bad-it's-still-pretty-bad Road House. Coincidence?)

Whoa.. So when I was trying to make this, I did a Google Image Search for kurt russell crazy, and a few of the images are of Patrick Swayze! WTF?! Has Google Image Search gotten into my brain?!?!?! I'm officially freaked out.

Playing Halo 2 online with voice chat often gives me glimpses into parts of this country that my sheltered self normally does not see. Much of what stands out are racist remarks, which I've blogged about. But sometimes it's more interesting. I bring you another edition of Overheard in Halo:

"So get this, man, the day before we were getting deployed to Iraq, we went down to this bowling alley, get some drinks and chill, right? But they kicked this one guy out of the bar because he was under 21. What the fuck, man? He's old enough to go over there and take someone's life, but he's not old enough to get a fucking beer? He was heading out to Iraq the next day."

"Yeah, that's fucked up, man."

Later, while we were in the middle of a game, a conversation between someone else and the ex-soldier above:

Other guy: "So you were really in Iraq? You ever get any kills over there?"

Soldier guy: "Huh? Hey, at one point I went 23 and 2, man."

Other guy: "What?! No, I mean in Iraq! You can't go 23 and 2 in Iraq!"

Another guy on the team: "Yeah, you can go 23 and one..."

(Laughter all around)

Soldier guy: "Oh! ... Well, let me put it this way, man: I don't know if I did, and I don't wanna know if I did. We'll leave it at that."

The opening riff from Bloc Party's Helicopter reminds me of a snippet of music from Nintendo Pro Wrestling. Here's a little one-minute video I made of the two mixed together:

Here's a link to the original Helicopter music video, if you want to hear the beginning of it.

Hey, so I helped Scarab make their latest flyer. Figured I'd make it thematic with the band names. Here it is:

Oh, and you should go to the show, btw! :)

And now, ladies and gentleman, Insomnia Theatre proudly presents episode one of:

HARE

by ToastyKen

The Hare races down the trail! He dives under fallen trees! He leaps over pitfalls! He winds and he weaves along the obstacle course, leaving his competitors in the dust. The Hare is tired, but he knows the end of the gauntlet is near.

And so it is. The Hare comes upon a small clearing. Before him now is a hillside, covered with trees. "I've come all this way," said the Hare, "and now I have to climb this hill? Screw that!"

The Hare looks around the edge of the forest. "That looks like a shortcut. I bet I can stroll through there and find a ski lift or something."

He wanders through the woods for some time. "Hm. I don't seem to be getting anywhere," says the Hare. "I think I'll head that way. I bet that's the real shortcut."

More time passes. "I still don't know where I'm going," the Hare observes. He turns around in a full circle. There's no path, just dirt and trees. "I suppose the finish line is probably at the top of the hill, but climbing the hill is the easy way out. That's what that boring old Tortoise would do." The Hare grunts in contempt. "I could beat that Tortoise to the top of the mountain any day, but I don't need to do any climbing. A direct competition like that is beneath me. I'll find that ski lift yet!" The Hare picks another direction and saunters off.

MEANWHILE...

One of the Hare's competitors arrives at the foot of the hill. It is...

Another Hare.

The Other Hare looks at the hill for but a moment before racing up as quickly as it can.

TO BE CONTINUED...

* * *

[Btw, I should acknowledge a late night conversation with Vijay for inspiring me to write this story.]

I'm taking a drawing class, where we're working with charcoal for now. Our first homework assignment is to pick a "concept or idea" and draw it. The teacher gave "war" as an example of an idea we could draw. :P It's a very freeform assignment. I didn't use many of the techniques from the actual class here, but it's my first personal charcoal drawing!

I picked "insignificance".

FYI, the top half was inspired by Reflections on a Mote of Dust by Carl Sagan, and the bottom half was inspired by Muir Woods.

Update Nov-21: Unfortunately, this strip did not come true. I don't have laryngitis this time, but rather some other kind of viral infection. Maybe bronchitis or something. Still sick and miserable. :(

* * *

My very first diary comic, untitled. Don't expect too much. :P

You know, whenever I say something, this is how people typically respond:

So I was thinking about one of my favorite themes, which is "loneliness in the Big City", i.e. that image of someone staring out the window of their hundred story apartment complex, etc. It seems that it's a variation of the classic, "Misery loves company." It's like, "Loneliness loves company," or rather, "Misery, from loneliness, loves company... of misery, from loneliness," which doesn't quite have the same tautological ring to it. :P

That is, when we're feeling lonely, we love watching movies and listening to songs about other people also feeling lonely. It makes us feel like we have company in our loneliness. But wait: "Company in our loneliness"?! What the hell does that mean?!

I think it means that we aren't really getting any company in our loneliness when we watch movies and listen to songs about other people being lonely. We're only tricking ourselves into accepting our loneliness by telling ourselves that it's inevitable.

So the real lesson is: Don't just take empty comfort from the knowledge that others are lonely, too; that feeling won't last. Don't just know that you're all "alone together"; realize that "being alone together" is an oxymoron, and activate that oxymoron by actually bringing people together. When you're truly alone together, you won't be alone at all!

:P

Of course, that's obviously easier said than done. Maybe this post will get some of you to comment and tell me that you feel my pain, and you're lonely too, and thus we're being lonely together after all. Or maybe I won't get any comments in the first place. I'm not sure which would be more appropriate.

You may have heard the "Invisible Pink Unicorn" argument against believing in God based on faith, without evidence. It goes something like this: "I could claim that there is an invisible pink unicorn, perhaps somewhere in space where we can't touch it either, and I have as much evidence for its existence as someone else might have for the existence of God. So if you can believe in God, why not believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn?"

There's a flaw in that argument. It claims that if something can't be proved, it makes no sense to believe that it's true. This is generally very useful, of course, since history has shown that human intuition is incredibly flawed, and there's a reason we use the scientific method. Even though there are some things which you can't prove or haven't proved that are still true, the Invisible Pink Unicorn argument states that all unprovable things are equally valid. I'm not sure that's the case.

Now, personally, I have never experienced a religious vision or epiphany. If someone does experience it, though, I can see why they would choose to believe that as reality, even if it's not scientifically provable. I would still try to rule out psychological or other causes first, but I would not claim that such beliefs are inherently invalid. I still subscribe to Carl Sagan's "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence", but "extraordinary evidence" for one person just might not be available to others. And thus, I don't really fully buy in to the Invisible Pink Unicorn argument any more.

* * *

The one thing I still find really amusing about the IPU, though, is how it's invisible, but also pink! Now that's deep! :) I've seen someone say that the IPU is "invisible by evidence but pink by faith". Perhaps the true believers would need to experience some event that makes them truly believe in its pinkness? (And see, that's ultimately the difference: No one has really had a religious vision about invisible pink unicorns... or so I hope.) Anyway, I decided to go about making a portrait of this. Behold:

"Oh, that's just a blank square," you say. "Hardy har har. It's not that funny." But no! You would be wrong! That actually is an image of a pink unicorn, but there's an alpha channel that makes the picture completely transparent! If you open it up in an image editor with good PNG support and remove the alpha channel, you can see that the following image is in the file:

It's just normally completely transparent.

"I am speechless," you think. "Kenneth really needs to get out more." :P

One oddity is that Photoshop has crappy PNG support, if you open it up in Photoshop, all you'll be able to see is an empty image.

I'm not sure what this means. Perhaps we should seek God through Fireworks MX or GraphicConverter, but Photoshop is the path to heresy? :P

P.S.: I originally copied the unicorn image from this page and made it pink; I didn't draw it myself.

E: Oh hey. Roberts is a Harvard Law alum. HLS is going to continue its domination of the Supreme Court!
K: *sigh* When is MIT going to get the chance to dominate SCOTUS? :P
E: When they invent the computer Justice! And make all other Justices obsolete!
K: ROBOJUSTICE!

And thus the following image was born:

(Just my little contribution to Red Robot World Domination.)

Now the really spooky thing is that I googled "robojustice", and there were only 12 hits, but one of them was actually a 1991 article referring to Justice O'Connor!

In her dispassionate approach, she may come closest on the court to meting out justice by the book.

''RoboJustice,'' she might be called. The nation's first female justice, nominated to the high court 10 years ago today, seems almost to embody the term ''judicial restraint.''

Kenneth: I like how you can use line breaks in im conversations to represent several different punctuation marks
Kenneth: we can use them in place of periods
Kenneth: other times
Kenneth: we use them in place of commas
Kenneth: or we can use them
Kenneth: for dramatic pause
Kenneth: in that case, they don't necessarily correspond to any punctuation mark
Kenneth: at all
Kenneth: and yet, that had a slightly different effect than if I had just written:
Kenneth: or we can use them for dramatic pause
Kenneth: it's a bit different even when replacing a comma. consider:
Kenneth: and yet
Kenneth: that had a slightly different etc.
Kenneth: that feels different from the comma version
Kenneth: what's interesting, too, is that it can't just be a line break
Kenneth: it has to be a "new IM", which is subtly different from hitting ctrl-enter to get a new line. this just wouldn't be right:
Kenneth: or we can use them
for dramatic pause
Kenneth: what I find fascinating about it is that it's different from anything in normal written prose. instead, it comes from the rhythm of conversation, which is what IM is meant to replace.
Kenneth: actually, the closest written analog would probably be line breaks in poetry or songwriting

Since I made Toast Wars way back in 1995, the compression algorithms weren't as good, and it came out to be 205 MB for a 5'40" movie. I've never had the web space to really host it..... until now!

So go take a look!

Back when I was working on MIT3K, I had this idea for an androgynous cybernetic daisy, and the jokes would center around gender neutrality and its insecurities about gender roles. Here's a sketch I tried recently:

I feel like the body needs to have a more feminine element, and the arms definitely suck right now. I need to look up more robot arm designs. I like my idea of a screen using smilies for emotional expression, though. :D

Motion-capture technology is getting pretty mature now, as is character animation, ala Gollum. I imagine they still needed to do a lot of tedious tweaking right now, but I think that one day they won't. One day, they'll be able to capture expressions and body language and translate them into an animated character with great precision without any human intervention. So where am I going with this?

Well, the main problem with stage plays is that you can't have very elaborate sets, you can't have costume changes easily, and, most of all, you can't capture the pacing of editing techniques like cuts and dissolves and montage.

I think that one day, we'll be able to put actors in motion-capture suits and render them live into computer-generated versions.. Then they can be in a flaming helicopter one second and in a hospital room the next.. The actor would just quickly change to a differnet posture and expression. (Perhaps the posture could be temporarily pre-programmed to give the actor time to move around.)

We could have live-action movies, complete with editing and stunts and all that! Granted, there will still be some things that will be difficult or impossible, like maybe a slow fade from the same actor doing one thing to them doing something else, such that they have to be on the screen doing different things at the same time.... But that would really be no different from, say, a live music performance not being able to have the singer sing over their own voice...

I think plays will always have their place, since seeing someone with the naked eye will certainly still feel different from seeing them on a screen, even knowing it's live.. But I think live but animated versions of the actors will have their place. It's certainly something I expect to see in my lifetime, and I look forward to it.

Paul brought this little gem to my attention. You'll need to be familiar with C to answer it. (He spent 2 hours fixing a bug which hinged on this issue.) So consider the following snippets of code:

int foo[256];

and

int *bar;
bar = malloc(256*sizeof(int));

foo and bar are functionally equivalent in most ways. You can use foo as a pointer, and you can use bar as an array. C doesn't even do array bounds checking.

One difference between the two is that the memory allocated for foo gets automatically released at the end of the function, whereas you'll have to manually free the memory used by bar.

But when you go about using them, there is another crucial difference. What is it?

Post your answer in the comments. I'll post it myself in a few days if no one gets the answer I have in mind by then. (For the record, when Paul asked me this, I gave him the first difference above, but I couldn't think of the second difference.)

First: From Paul comes a link to this delightfully quixotic adventure. The page sometimes takes a while to load, but trust me: It's worth it.

Second: Three mysterious ships have been sailing around the oceans. They get resupplied out at sea, and they've been maintaining radio silence in violation of international maritime law. Our gov't suspects that they contain Iraqi weapons, but they don't dare try to board lest the crews scuttle their ships, possibly contaminating the water. This just sounds so Hollywood to me. I mean, can you picture it?

EXT. INDIAN OCEAN - NIGHT

Storm clouds are gathering. In the distance, the silhouettes of three LARGE CARGO SHIPS sail in formation. SUDDENLY, a periscope rises from the waves, followed by the conning tower of a jet-black NUCLEAR SUBMARINE. The hatch opens, and JAMES BOND 007 emerges, in full scuba gear. Ten-foot waves pound the side of the vessel. CLOSEUP on BOND as he adjusts his facemask and prepares to jump.

SEXY RUSSIAN SPY (V.O. via radio)

Return safe, James. You also have biological weapon I must inspect!

BOND pauses for a moment of contemplation. He then dives into the water, and the SUBMARINE descends into the depths of the ocean. The waves roll unimpeded once more as the CARGO SHIPS drift alone. Heavy rain begins to fall. The storm has arrived.

As you may know, right after Powell's speech to the Security Council, ten Central and Eastern European countries released a statement in support of the US. At an EU meeting on the 18th, French President Jacques Chirac complained about their support in general and this statement in particular. He was harsh enough to say that they had "missed a good opportunity to shut up." But then I noticed that a different website quoted him as, "...they missed a good opporutnity to keep quiet." Hm!

So they were obviously independent translations from French, but which was right? At first I thought this was another example of biased journalism, but just as I was about to look into which sites used which translation, I noticed that the BBC was carrying one article with "shut up" and another article with "keep quiet". So I decided it was probably just a very ambiguous term to translate. I asked Sarah, one of Nile's bridesmaids, for help. She's currently living in Paris. Here was her response:

So, here is the quotation, in French.

"Donc je crois qu'ils ont manqué une bonne occasion de se taire", a dit le président français. (From Le Monde newspaper, 18/02/03)

Literally, I would translate it as "they missed a good opportunity to not say anything". However, there isn't really a polite, politician way of saying "shut up" in French. So, depending on the tone, I would say either translation stands. Given the context of the speech, I would say that it was probably more on the "shut up" level. That's the problem with these subtle languages!

So, there you go.

Here's a Le Monde article I found, btw. I still don't know French, but I just searched for "de se taire". :)

Translation is so fun, even when I don't know one of the languages! I guess it didn't matter much in this case, since "they missed a good opportunity to keep quiet" is still quite the insult anyway, but I can definitely see this sort of thing subtly shaping public opinion. Of course, some "newspapers" aren't so subtle.

So I was just reading about North Korea threatening to pull out of the armistice. It worries me that Kim Jong Il might just be nutty enough to actually launch a preemptive strike. I thought to myself, "I'm glad I don't live in Seoul." And then I thought, "Hm. Well, I suppose I'm even more glad I don't live in North Korea," given that life pretty much really sucks there.

In Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter talks about the issue of "counterfactuals". We tend to view some hypothetical events as "more likely" than others. For instance, if a football player misses a pass, we are likely to say, "If only the quarterback threw the ball a tad bit lighter!" We aren't as likely to say, "If only it were raining, causing the runner to run slower, and making the quarterback be more careful about his throw!" We are even less likely to say, "If only the Earth had more mass, making gravity stronger, and thus causing the pass to travel a bit less far!" In a sense, all of those simply aren't true, and it's pointless to argue which is "more likely". But of course intuitive sense that some things require a smaller mental adjustment than others does make a lot of sense.

So why did I think of being in Seoul first? I'm not actually considering living in either country, so the odds of both are virtually nil. In fact, I was born in a Communist country, so I could easily have thought in those terms; I could have decided that I was "more likely" to have been born in Pyongyang than in Seoul. But I didn't. This is probably because South Korea is a "modern Westernized" society; it's on that basis that I could much more easily picture myself living there than in North Korea. It means that I saw capitalist Westernism as a bigger part of me than Communism.

This is hardly an Earth-shattering revelation, of course, but I found it kind of interesting to do a little analysis rather than just take it for granted. Besides, the issues about counterfactuals that Hofstadter discusses are what inspired me to call my site subjunctive.net in the first place. :)

I've always been rather afraid of death since I was a kid. Since I'm not religious, I wanted to come up with some sort of sciency way I could be immortal. Some time in middle school, I think, I came up with this fantasy where there's actually this ancient group of people with this nifty futuristic home located in a parallel universe. They had teleportation devices, see, and they, altruistic folks that they are, teleport our brains away at the last possible moment before we die... and teleport back a fake replacement. (This was back when I felt that we needed our physical brain intact to maintain our identity, and I no longer think this is true.) They would then toss our brains into these VR systems, and we all live our eternal afterlives out in this better-than-real VR world. A technological afterlife.

I didn't actually think this was true, of course. It was just a reassuring fantasy. But around late high school, I didn't find it so reassuring any more, and I decided that I needed to deal with death once and for all. (er.. not that way!) I figured the way I'd do this would be by thinking about what immortality would REALLY be like.. and decide that it probably wouldn't be that great, anyway! Sour grapes and all, I know. :P I was helped along by this nifty Babylon 5 character named "Lorien" who was a really really really old alien. At one point, when asked about his romantic life and friendships, he looks a bit sad and says, "Only the mortal can believe that love is eternal."

I came up with a story idea. In the future, people develop the medical technology to cure pretty much all illnesses. At that point, accidental death becomes a major concern. They've also medically eliminated old age. So these rich people buy out a planet and build really really reinforced bunkers that are super-safe. And they life in them. Travelling is dangerous, so they use a VR system to hang out. With so many ways to die eliminated, accidents in the home become a concern, so many of them just hook themselves up to a VR machine in a care center and live completely in the VR world.

My main character would come to live in this world, get married... and then, decades or maybe a hundred years later, she'd get supremely bored with her married life. It just gets too stale. She can't even stand life there in general any more. So she decides to take off for dangerous Earth. My key line here was to be an utterly serious, "Are you insane?! You could be hit by a meteor or something!"

More time passes, and I realize that I just don't know enough about married life to accurately portray the reasons for the disintegration of a marriage. So I figured I'd focus more on the problems with living in a VR world. But that just didn't feel personal and compelling enough to me, so I didn't make much progress on the story other than coming up with a name: "Shelterworld".

Recently, I've learned a bit more about the themes of relationships, false expectations, and starting new lives... so I'm going to focus on those aspects.. The original purpose of talking about mortality has kind of faded into the background, since I honestly don't think that much about death any more.

Anyway, I just found it interesting that the focus of this unwritten story has shifted around so much with my life. Part of what reminded me of all this is how Jesse recently asked me about this story I wrote a couple of years ago, and why I hadn't linked it up on my new site. I never edited it to my satisfaction, so I don't feel comfortable presenting it to everyone. On the flipside, some of the issues in that story are so tied to that point of my life that I just don't feel as compelled to work on the story any more. Alas. Well, I'm starting to make a more solid outline for Shelterworld lately. Stay tuned!

I had a dream the other night that contained an entire story! I thought it was ridiculously cool. So cool that I drew it as a comic, my first one in over a year! :) Behold the very first comic in my "Subjunctive Dreams" series: The Clairvoyant

Leo Tolstoy spent over a dozen years of his life writing a book by that very title, and here I plan to tackle it in a single blog entry. :)

A lot of definitions of art are very specific. I like to take a very liberal view of the word. Here's my shot at it: art, n.: Any activity that requires the use of intuition.

What is Intuition?

So what's "intuition"? I see intuition as the human ability to make decisions in complex situations with no rationally clear "right solution".

We'll start with the obvious. There are all kinds of guidelines for story-writing. "Introduction, rising action, complication, climax, denouement," is one. "Know your ending before you begin," is another. These are easy to follow (or ignore). But some guidelines are more vague: "Develop your characters to the point where they write their own dialog." "The writing should flow, so that the reader can be engrossed in the story." There have been some serious attempts at programmed story generation, but Stephen King won't be looking for a new job any time soon.

I actually disagree with the aforelinked researchers' view that computers will never become "truly intelligent" (whatever that means), but what's important here is that human beings can make decisions that we do not deeply understand. A person may know plenty of music theory, but that doesn't mean that they'll be able to produce a new work of Mozart. In fact, Mozart himself actually experimented with algorithmic composition, (Try Mozart's Dice Game!) but it took more than simple algorithms to compose Piano Concerto No. 20.

Human intuition excels (relatively speaking) at making sense of complex human emotions and relationships. There is a great deal that psychological research can tell us, sure, and there are even drugs that can adjust our emotions, but therapy still requires a human being for a reason. There is simple flow chart to mental health. A computer-written story may have the broad outlines right, but it won't capture the nuances of human relationships.

Not just fine art

Any activity? Sure, I think art can apply to any activity. It doesn't have to be restricted to literature or painting or film. You know all those times when someone does something with no clear correct path and says, "It's an art"? Well, I think it is. :)

I've already discussed that therapy is part science and part art. Small talk is a similar art. A person needs a very complex understanding of human behavior and local popular culture in order to be successful at small talk. Knowledge is not sufficient, either; you need to know how to apply that knowledge. Consider that computer programs that simulate conversations can only do so in limited domains and in limited styles. Small talk requires cultural sensitivity, detection of your conversation partner's domain of knowledge given very little information, and the ability to make inventive and convenient segues.

Even software engineering is an art. Good design often relies on intuition as much as formal methods. We tend to call certain coding styles "ugly" without necessarily having an air-tight argument against them. There is much about software engineering that is not well-understood, where there isn't clearly a "right" way to do things, but a human programmer can often get a general sense of "good" versus "bad" design.

The death of intuition?

Of course, the obvious questions are: Isn't intuition just a matter of what we can't yet do algorithmically? When I say "a computer will never do that", what about computers that are as smart as humans? (Whether artificial intelligence will ever be "strong" (truly intelligent and even conscious) or remain "weak" (a mere simulation of intelligence) is still just a matter of philosophy, of course.)

I think that, in a sense, some things do stop being art after a while. Medicine, for instance, is often less of an art than it used to be. As we understand more formal ways of solving certain problems, we need less intuition. In a more traditional realm, many people used to consider realistic paintings to be amazing art. Then came photographs, and the creation of a realistic image no longer required human intuition. That's not to say that photographs cannot be artistic, though, and it's not to say that all realistic paintings are, either.

So, yeah, I think some things that require intuition now will no longer require it in the future, and those activity will cease to be something I consider "art", but there will probably be other realms for human (or strong AI) invention. Perhaps the real question will then be: Will we ever fully understand our own minds? (That's another wide open philosophical topic, of course.) My definition of art hinges on our lack of a complete understand of our own thought processes, so, yeah, maybe if we can one day understand everything there is to know about what we're thinking, there will no longer be any true art. I for one hope that that day never comes.

Equality

"So are you saying that the latest Dolph Lundgren action flick is as much a work of art as Dr. Strangelove? For that matter, what if I were to poke you in the eye? It'd require human intuition to do it successfully! Are you saying that Dr. Strangelove is no better than a poke in the eye?" Well, note that I have yet to make the distinction between "good" and "bad" art. I consider bad action movies to contain a great deal of formula and a little bit of art. Since this entry has gotten ridiculously long, I'll talk about what I consider "good" art another time. Stay tuned! And please do comment below!

So I was organizing my hard drive last night... I had a folder that contained such things as my comics, some old stories, and ideas for a game, and I had a hard time coming up with a name for that folder. I didn't want to call it "art" because that sounded too pretentious. I'd been calling it "works" but that didn't really roll off the tongue. (Also, I now had a folder called "work", and it would've been too confusing to have both.) I considered "creations", but that sounded like I had delusions of grandeur or something. Eventually, I settled on "projects", but that's really too general, since it could include work and so forth. So, does anyone have any better ideas?

Update: I've already mentioned this in the comments below, but I just want to point out that I've solved this problem. Jesse came up with "Compositions". :)