Tuesday, November 14, 2017
A few pixels
Trivial but useful example of the infinite complexity of life.
While eating I always keep a car magazine in front of me. Occupies the brain with guaranteed non-Sorosian thoughts, no chance of a Gotcha.
This morning while leaning over to slurp up ramen, my eyes were close to the page, and suddenly ALARM ALARM ALARM! Something is wrong with the picture!
What I saw was something like this:
It took a second to isolate the ALARM ALARM ALARM:
Why alarm? MIRROR POINTING WRONG WAY! INATTENTIVE DRIVER! WATCH OUT!
Stop and think about this. I knew the mirror was pointing the wrong way because the shape of the tiny rectangle was not quite the same as the expected tiny rectangle template for a mirror in an early '60s car at this particular camera angle. Change any detail, and the template itself would be different. A 1930s car would have an oval mirror or no mirror; a later car would have a much wider mirror. Change the camera angle by more than 10 degrees and the template is entirely different.
Why is the mirror salient? Because it's a variable part of the car that can be turned the wrong way by a passenger applying makeup or a sloppy arm-move. If it remains in the wrong position, it means the driver is drunk or semi-conscious or doesn't give a fuck. All three are dangerous.
After the ALARM, I paid full attention to the full picture and focused elsewhere:
Aha. Reset ALARM. This is Australia. I know it's Australia because the driver of the other Falcon is on the right side, and the Commer van in the background belongs in a British Commonwealth country. (If the beige car had been something other than a Falcon, the ute might have strengthened the Australia signal, but an American Falcon can be a ute.)
Setting and unsetting the ALARM required the above half dozen major decisions. Each of those major decisions involved a hundred subdecisions, and each of the hundred subdecisions required an incalculable amount of integration, differentiation, memory recall, template matching, summing, and thresholding, by a billion or so neurons.
= = = = =
How well could an autonomous car detect an off-pointing mirror? Could it determine that the off-pointing was actually OK because the car belonged in a different country? Would the autonomous car have the same PURPOSE? Or would it use the ALARM to cause a crash instead of avoiding a crash? (Drunk or elderly = Deplorable = EXTERMINATE.)
It took a second to isolate the ALARM ALARM ALARM:
Why alarm? MIRROR POINTING WRONG WAY! INATTENTIVE DRIVER! WATCH OUT!
Stop and think about this. I knew the mirror was pointing the wrong way because the shape of the tiny rectangle was not quite the same as the expected tiny rectangle template for a mirror in an early '60s car at this particular camera angle. Change any detail, and the template itself would be different. A 1930s car would have an oval mirror or no mirror; a later car would have a much wider mirror. Change the camera angle by more than 10 degrees and the template is entirely different.
Why is the mirror salient? Because it's a variable part of the car that can be turned the wrong way by a passenger applying makeup or a sloppy arm-move. If it remains in the wrong position, it means the driver is drunk or semi-conscious or doesn't give a fuck. All three are dangerous.
After the ALARM, I paid full attention to the full picture and focused elsewhere:
Aha. Reset ALARM. This is Australia. I know it's Australia because the driver of the other Falcon is on the right side, and the Commer van in the background belongs in a British Commonwealth country. (If the beige car had been something other than a Falcon, the ute might have strengthened the Australia signal, but an American Falcon can be a ute.)
Setting and unsetting the ALARM required the above half dozen major decisions. Each of those major decisions involved a hundred subdecisions, and each of the hundred subdecisions required an incalculable amount of integration, differentiation, memory recall, template matching, summing, and thresholding, by a billion or so neurons.
= = = = =
How well could an autonomous car detect an off-pointing mirror? Could it determine that the off-pointing was actually OK because the car belonged in a different country? Would the autonomous car have the same PURPOSE? Or would it use the ALARM to cause a crash instead of avoiding a crash? (Drunk or elderly = Deplorable = EXTERMINATE.)Labels: #DeplorableLivesMatter, Sorosia
¶ 8:44 AM
