Category: Life

Imagine you’re flying to Cuba for a vacation. You come up to the airport in Canada, and you put your ticket in. You’re told you can’t board the plane: the Americans have barred you from the flight. But you aren’t going to the States. You’re going to Cuba.

According to new legislation (link) being pushed by the Conservative government, situations like this could soon be a reality. Any Canadian that flies over US airspace, even if they don’t land in that country, would be subject to checks against American no-fly lists.

This means that all Canadians travelling to South America and the Caribbean would be affected. As would some Canadian travelers to Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. And those lists the Americans use? They’re so faulty that among the alleged terrorists are newborns (link) and US Senators (link).

The conservative government should take a stance against this American idiocy. We have our own security and intelligence. We have our own airport security. The Americans should have no right to interfere with a Canadian passenger on a Canadian plane leaving from a Canadian airport traveling to a destination that isn’t the US.

I mean, imagine if another country was doing this. You need to fly over Sudanese airspace to get to South Africa. Should Sudan be able to dictate who goes on the flight based on faulty lists that are ridiculed the world around? There would be outrage. But because it’s the Americans doing this, we remain silent.

Befuddler is the name of my latest creation. It’s an application that’s used to modify the signature of a file, as well as its file extension, to prevent paranoid corporate/government e-mail filters from dropping your attachments (such as ZIP files.) Just pass your file through this before you send it. The recipient on the other side will also have to do the same to reverse the changes.

The program does not change the size of the file, nor does it modify the whole thing – just the first few bytes – so it runs very fast on even the largest of files. You can download a copy below. It was tested on Windows XP and Windows 7.

Download Befuddler:
Executable: Here [2MB]
Source Code: Here [22 KB]

We got a call last night letting us know that we got the apartment. It’s the second story of a house found in downtown Ottawa, within walking distance of the Byward Market. It’s also right by the transit way. The part I’m most excited about: the unit has a washer/dryer in it.

F*ck yeah! We get the place on December 1^st.

I saw the other day an article in the newspaper where the author asked members of the public whether they believed intelligence existed outside of Earth.

I myself do believe that there is life out there. However, the issue I forsee is dealing with the philosophical question of what constitutes intelligence. I’m not so sure that we would recognize it if we saw it.

Our experience as humans appears to frame intelligent life as an organism that is self-aware, breaking free of the evolutionary constrictions placed on its existence. Little green men.

But this concept of self and being for us is very much focused on the presence of a brain-like apparatus. Yet the developmental process on this planet is so chaotic and unbelievably unique when it comes to life on our scale, that I find it extremely unlikely that something with any ressemblence to Earthly brains could develop elsewhere. No, it would likely be something different entirely.

This makes being able to perceive intelligence difficult as we are so reliant on the brain to help define what is intelligent here on Earth. But when we think of it, what is the brain except for a complex set of interactions. Provide a stimulus to the same brain, and the “output” is entirely predictable.

I believe that if we had sufficient computational power, that we could simulate the entire human brain. That in essence, the computer would contain within it a person as indistinguishable in its humanity as you or I. A dreary thought, but it reinforces the notion that we are in essence a machine. The fact that it comes down to no more than an orderly set of interactions is what I think makes the whole question of how to recognize intelligence so difficult in the first place.

Because if we are no more than a complex set of interactions behaving in a way pre-determined by our evolutionary baggage, then we come to undermine our own definition of intelligence as we use it to differentiate our existence from that of something like a microbe.

These things that we believe reinforce our status as intelligent beings are relevant only to our own existence as determined by the brain structure we share. The art we produce and enjoy only serves to satisfy the evolutionary-imposed demands of the brain. It would be as invisible to an exoplanetary entity as it is now to a microbe.

Yet since we don’t see intelligence in those creatures on this planet that seem to behave with such predictability despite their incredible similarities in behaviour to us, would we likewise be able to distinguish intelligence in an exoplanetary entity?

I’m not so sure.

What do you think? Do you believe there’s intelligence outside of our planet?

This is what we do around the water cooler at work now: we talk Minecraft. We talks about the underwater tunnels we built. About the castles in the sky someone else put together. About the huge Earth someone recreated.

The best way I can describe Minecraft is to say that it is a computer game that is like a huge living Lego world. This world, made up of oceans, mountains, beaches, and land is randomly generated – every game is unique for everyone. This world goes through a day-night cycle. During the day, this Lego-like world will be inhabited by blocky reproductions of ducks, cows, and pigs. At night, by chunky monsters.

There is no goal, other than to do whatever you want. There is no quest to fulfill. So in my case, I built myself an underwater base, with windows to look out into the pixelated abyss. Like nearly all things in Minecraft, I “crafted” the glass for my windows: I gathered sand from the beach, put it into a furnace I made, along with some coal that I had mined. The pick for my mine was fashioned out of wood that I had collected by chopping up trees. You get the idea.

When I heard others describe to me the premise of the game, it didn’t sound like fun. But as more and more people talked about it, I decided to give it a go. I have to say, it’s the best $15 I’ve ever spent. You can try it out for free at the official website (minecraft.net), with the older “Classic” version of the game. Check it out. It’s well worth it.

For a better explanation and pictures, check out the blog post here.