The Story of 'Calculator Love'.

Drawing by Geek On Acid

I am fascinated by the technology - it is an essence of Geek On Acid. I am entirely dedicated to McLuhan's and Baudrillard's notion that technology is not only an extension of our evolution, but also our body and mind and the existence itself. We gradually expand ourselves to achieve more and achieve it quicker. I love to experiment and play with technology, and part of it has been related with programming. I learn bits and pieces of programming languages to use for my work as doctorate researcher. I play with markup programming, tweaking HTML, jQuery, and CSS to better visualize information (online). I've been also programming hardware synthesizers - as a hobby. I bought, used and sold about 50 different synths, ranging from proper analogue 70s mammoths, to slick and noisy 90s digital synths. After some time, I kept only one synth, a modern one, but with incredible old-school vibe. For example, it has exact emulation of Commodore 54 chip (SID MOS6581), implanted into it's hearth. And amazing user interface glowing with a toxic blue light. We quickly connected well to each other, and I felt like this synth became a part of my body, a part of my auditory cortex. I can sit down, and loose myself in the flow of low frequency oscillation tweaking, waveforms warping and sequencer triggering. I apply filters to artificially vocoded voice and take apart conventional percussion to slice them into dirty-beat-noise. And that's how Calculator Love was born - few months of flowing with 8-bit-Tetris-like-sounds wrapped in electronic beats with a touch of industrial sounds and techno-repetitive cherry on the top. All done with one Calculator I love.

That's it, everything else is on geekonacid.com.

Computers Will Predict The Future

Let's do an experiment.

Let's take supercomputer with 1024 Intel Nehalem cores and let's call it Nautilus.

Let's take Nautilus and give it 100 million news articles to read.

Let's ask Nautilus to apply mood detection for those articles searching for words such as "terrible", "horrific" or "nice". Those words will describe global sentiments.

Let's ask Nautilus to detect words for locations, like 'London', and record those locations on the map, showing where the specific waves of news were produced.


What do we get?


We get a trend, showing that BEFORE large events happening around the world, the mood of the words used in the news becomes very negative. And we know the location of the places, where the mood goes down. Such analysis is possible because Nautilus was programmed using similar algorithms for analyzing news as those used in DNA simulations and weather forecasting. It was done a posteriori - after the events happened - but now it will be applied to the ongoing events with better location engine.


What Nautilus did is, indeed, a weather forecasting for the large events in the worlds. Not perfect, but definitely above the level of chance. Still, as @mjrobbins points in his article for Guardian, you need human to make sense out of the analysis outputted by Nautilus, so it's not that computer does all the job. But it's a good start.

Details are in this paper and slightly biased BBC news article.

Drawing by Geek On Acid
@motioninsocial

London Blog Day 91: Riot In London

I took usual overground service from Sydenham to West Croydon. The train was very quiet this morning, considering rush hour. Not many Metro papers scattered on seats, few silent passengers, gloomy weather behind windows. When I got out in Croydon the first thing that stuck me was sweet burning smell. I got out of the station and that’s when the scale of damage really hit me. Ruskin Street sealed of by police, debris scattered everywhere, police helicopter, people gathering around, speaking in rush on mobile phones. And the burning I can smell, even when I am inside the office building now.

The sense of anxiety is real and it gets to you - believe me.

It is obvious that riots in London have striking resemblance to those in France (2005 and 2007) and Greece (2008). In all those cases, police accidentally killed teenager(s). In all those cases the riot started in a large population city - Paris, Athens, London. In all previous cases it was a long (around 3 weeks), persistent and extremely violent event, with hundreds of people arrested, hundreds of vehicles burned, billions lost by businesses. In all cases there was a ‘domino effect’ - riots spread to other major cities in the country.

London is in day three now. It looks bad.

Many things work against quick fix of the situation.

The first and major - population and city size. You hear those numbers in media - “100, 150, 200 thugs demolished supermarket”. If it happens in a few points of the city, it is pretty hard problem for police to tackle. Large groups also lead to ‘lemming crowd effect’ - sense of social ‘rightness’, power and complete lack of personal responsibility.

Second - Twitter effect. Information spreads like virus, infecting others to join the madness.  Social networks are very effective in organising large groups of people. It was great for Middle East political riots, or Iran protests, but it is a big challenge and problem for London crisis.

Third - police powers. Due to strong political correctness and high respect for individual’s well-being, police is using very ‘soft’ methods to deal with rioters. Police doesn’t use some very effective options like water cannons, tear gas or baton rounds, because those were criticised as being too drastic. It ends up with police in a very difficult situation between people who judge them for either not enough or too much force used with rioters. Mind you, police powers and force are very important psychological factors. If police is not sufficiently threatening to hostile rioters, the rioters will gradually grow in power and loose any respect for authority...

Four - media reality show. It gets to you, especially when you live in London. People around you are talking constantly about it. You see it on every channel, every newspaper. Then, when you watch the actual place where it happened (like Croydon) the anxiety suddenly gets to you. Media play a massive role in public awareness and attitude towards situation. Public anxiety feeds the confidence of hostile rioters. Media also make police very self-aware, holding them from using more force, which is sometimes good, but not necessary in case of London riots, as mentioned.

Let's hope it won't get worse...

From Croydon,

Geek On Acid

London Blog Day 78: Surveillance of the Future (and why You are creating it)

In Minority Report (the movie based on Philip K. Dick novel) there is no crime. Thanks to a group of people with precognitive abilities, government is able to detect the crime before it actually occurs, and contain the person who is about to commit the crime. Things obviously go wrong, Tom Cruise has to run away from the entire police force chasing him, but that’s not really the point.

The point is - such system is the holy grail of surveillance. But instead of precognitive humans, we hope to create precognitive artificial intelligence (AI), that will be able to detect crime before it occurs. 

Such precognition would have nothing to do with 'Minority Report's’ precogs' collective unconscious. Surveillance AI would analyse patterns of body movement, voice tonality, facial expression, group dynamics, object detection and other measurable factors to decide whether something bad is about to happen. It would be linked with national identity database, screening biometric information for any personal records that would estimate the chance of particular person committing crime. Collecting all those information, it would display risk probability and give a final decision to human operator. Or just send the police van to the site without human decision. 

As you can imagine, it’s extremely complex to create such system. The reason is mainly due to complexity of any social scene out there in the world - there are too many viewing angles, lighting conditions, resolution differences, distances, and ways people interact and behave. Another problem is how to integrate all this complex information. You would need proper supercomputer and very good software, operating on a very sophisticated level of non-linear statistical integration, chaos mathematics, similar to what is used to predict weather, but on a larger scale. 

Still, we are closer to this goal than 10 years ago, and UK is one of the places where intelligent AI is most likely to happen. UK has biggest CCTV network in the world. The rough estimate is 4 million CCTV cameras, but it’s likely to be more than that, and counting. While there are some older systems in place, majority of the mainstream network (e.g. London or Glasgow) has been upgraded to high-resolution, high-speed digital cameras capable of running face recognition software. London on it’s own has more CCTV cameras than the entire west coast of the US. Your live is pretty much a silent reality show in London. Our computers are also getting better very fast, and we are able to store and process increasingly more data. Most important - we are becoming increasingly more available for screening via social networks - we open ourselves online and give away all necessary information, without any government enforcing us to do that. We are connected 24 hours to a very precise tracking system - the mobile phone. Thats where the future of surveillance really exist. In you 1000 Facebook photos, your Twitts and text messages, your blogs and ‘like’ comments. Now, the only task is to really connect all those points into one integrated system, that will extract the patterns of information automatically and intelligently, and we have a Minority Report. You wrote it.

London Blog Day 71: Obsessive-compulsive rules.

Bathroom 1: Desist...

Bathroom 2: Shit poem...

Bathroom 3: Swine flu reminder.

Kitchen 1: Good grammatical construction.

Kitchen 2: Just a tiny notice...

Kitchen 3: First microwave notice from graphic designer

Kitchen 4: Second microwave notice, just in case...

And it's all from one place ;-)

[photos by Geek On Acid] 

London Blog Day 53: 'Lemming Crowd Syndrome'

LeBon (1985) saw the crowd as a social structure where individual transform into the primitive, irrational state of a mass of people, characterised by loss of self control, anonymity of the individual, primitive behaviour, suggestibility and a collective mind. A dominant notion here, by analogy with a disease, was that of mental contagion or the spread of emotion. LeBon, like a number of crowd theorists who followed, was concerned with social unrest and the apparent mob-like state of agitated crowds.

I like to think about crowd more in context of ‘Lemming crowd syndrome’ ('Lemming syndrome' as a term is reserved for a cultural context, so I redefine it here slightly). It’s not that you become absolutely mindless and irrational like LeBon suggested, it’s more that you options become limited – specifically your behavioural options. For example, in a busy London street you can try to resist the urge to cross the pedestrian walk on red light when the crowd around you suddenly starts moving, but it’s likely that you will follow them anyway. The rapid movement of crowd makes the option of waiting on red much less attractive. This doesn’t work in Poland of course, where you get fined for crossing the street on red…

‘Lemming Crowd syndrome’ doesn’t only apply to simple directional aspects. You might feel uncomfortable if you act against crowd mental behaviour too. Recently I joined extremely busy train from Bath Spa to London Paddington on Sunday afternoon. The train was obviously overbooked, a mass of people crowded in the passages, lots of backpacks and baggage’s (it was Bath Festival weekend). I didn’t book a ticket in advance. You know how this advance booking works – sits which are taken have a small display that tells you from which station they are taken. There are also free sits for those who bought the ticket on the train station last minute. I had a big backpack, it was very hot, and I had a nasty cold. Normally, I would conform but this time something cracked. I started walking/crawling towards the end of the train. People were not happy, but nobody said anything. I am small enough to pass even through most ridiculous bag barrier, so I slowly progressed through 3 coaches. Not bad. But so far all sits were taken everywhere. I reached the final coach. Two guys, rugby-size, blocking the entrance. I am trying to pass, one is asking ‘do you have a sit booked there?’, I said ‘yes’ with surprised certainty, but feeling extremely uncomfortable lying and they let me pass. There was one sit in this couch booked from Bath, but not taken. I dropped my bag on the overhead, and joined the table, smiling with a certain guilt displayed on my face. Everyone at the table looked at me with suspicion, or if not – I definitely felt like they were. I was stressed for another 10 minutes until we stopped in some smaller station (Chippenham), nobody joined there, and that was it – I got a sit all the way to Paddington (almost 2 hours trip mind you).

What was interesting about this is how this massive crowd set the behavioural rules for the train, blocking passages, and even enquiring me, whether I follow some non-existent crowd ethics – that is exactly what I mean by Lemming syndrome. It was a combination of attribution bias, cognitive dissonance and blind obedience. The limited space, limited options and large crowd worked as perfect decision blocker. And how uncomfortable I felt going against it was just a final prove.

I am sure you got you own stories of ‘Lemming Crowd syndrome’. Share some if you do.

London Blog Day 35: Motion In Social passes 600 visits after 6 weeks, gets facelift.

First - thank you all for visiting my new website, all your useful comments and positive feedback I received. It’s been two months since I launched Motion In Social and it seems to be attracting a lot of interest. I had over 1500 page views and over 600 visits. It might not sound much, but it’s six times more than my previous (crap) academic website got in 18 months - so I can call it my small online success ;-)

Now it’s about time to revise the site and make some updates. Following feedback from the data I obtained using Google Analytics, I decided to make a first major revision of the website. This includes:

1. Entry page. Google In-page Intelligence clearly indicated that people looked on the top part of the front page, but only 50% of them bothered to scroll below first half of the page. I revisited the entry page so it’s more compact now - manifest is simplified, and the project page links are reduced to simple one sentence text and iconic-style image. I also added section with publications and presentations at the bottom together with ‘about me’, just in case someone wants to look at it (which no one does, but hell, there is always a chance ;). Also, instead of big news section, I combined it together with all social network links.

2. Project page. It turned out that people didn’t look much at the project pages and some of the project pages were almost empty in terms of media content. So I merged all the projects descriptions into one single page, with simpler styling for movies and images, and single row of columns for text. This way I combined eight separate pages into a single one. It’s easier for you to look at the biog overview, and easier for me to update any new info. Punchterms are still a separate page - it was popular, so I just updated the style to match the Project page.

Some technical info on update for geeks and Bitheads (I love this term - from Stephenson ‘Snow Crash’:).

3. My website is now taking full advantage of Paul’s Irish HTML5 Boilerplate techniques to improve compatibility and loading time. It works like a dream. The best thing is simple to use build script, highly customisable, which minifies you JS, CSS, compacts (gzips) your images, removes comments and does all the other fancy stuff that boosts your page loading time. There is a lot more - great reset sheets, super-compatible CSS solutions, great HTML5 , htpss script for super-duper caching and other stuff that I don’t fully understand, but highly appreciate. Kudos for Paul Irish!

4. You can now add my website to you iPhone/iPad home screen and it will have it’s own icon - I think it works with Android too, but check it and let me know (Pies).  

Cheers!

London Blog Day 14th: Your common-sense view of lying and deception is probably wrong.

What makes us judge people as suspicious? There are thousands of papers published by folks from vision and computing science, who try to find a ‘holy grail of security’ - automatic system for detecting hostility. But there is surprisingly small number of papers looking at psychological aspects of detecting suspicious behaviours. Sure, there is a legion of self-help books, NLP-breed mutant-books on earning £10K per week in 5 simple steps and ‘reading people like books’ or common-sense guidelines. These are often ultra-simplistic approaches, missing the point entirely. Science frequently shows us, that counter-intuitive approach turns out to be true. For example, lets take a topic of lying and detecting deception - one of the very important questions I am looking at in my current project. 

You probably assume that people who are experts in interrogation (e.g. military intelligence) would be better in spotting lies than a random person without any expertise in such field. Right? Well, you are wrong. Turns out that novices are frequently more accurate than experts. Why might this be? First, expertise often entails other factors such as age, high motivation, and access to other sources of information that accompany expert’s occupation. Also, experts usually gain little self-correcting feedback when they commit false-negatives (i.e. believing a dishonest person is honest) and also when they commit false-positives (i.e. believing an honest person is dishonest). So they may become overly confident of their detection abilities. Together, these factors can impair judgement much more than in case of novice, who looks at the situation without any preconceptions. If you run a simple experiment comparing experts with non-expert, you would most likely confirm those assumptions (as others did - see Burgoon et al., 1994 - a classic on interpersonal deception).

Another example: you would assume that when you are suspicious about others, you are better in detecting dishonesty or lie (because presumably you are more sensitive to behavioural cues). Wrong again. First - it will be very obvious to the skilled observers that you are suspicious about them, so they can react and adjust their behaviour, and trick you better. There is actually a lot of ‘non-verbal leaking’ coming from the person, who is suspicious about others, and this is not good when you interact with a smart deceiver (who has time to change his communication strategy). Secondarily - if you are suspicious about others, you are also lie-biased, you perceive people as less trustworthily. So you commit much more false-positive judgements than observer who is not suspicious about others. Again, this cause you to focus overly on unimportant information, overload your cognitive system, and possibly omit the real suspect (e.g. in the airports screening situation, where there is massive crowd to monitor). So overall - observers who are suspicious about others are less accurate in detecting deception and truth telling than non-suspicious observers. This ESPECIALLY applies to EXPERTS who seem to make a lot of stereotyped and biased judgements based on their biased experience, which blends badly with their suspicious-receivers approach (see the first point I made).

This doesn’t mean that we need to get rid of all the airport security every year to keep the security fresh. Because there are advantages of being an experts as well - with experience you get better grab of questioning strategies, that can help you a lot in reading other people intentions. You know, those simple and apparently meaningless questions you get asked on airports randomly? Those are just dummy questions, nonverbal triggers, to facilitate any hidden, bad intention that you might ‘nonverbally leak’. With experience, you also get better in reading nonverbal signals, although this one is more unclear, and seem to be related with many other factors.

There is another level - multisensory integration of verbal and non-verbal cues when you are trying to decode the suspect, but this is a completely different story...  

London Blog Day 4. Paper of the week - drugs, violence and holidaymakers visiting mediterranean destinations.

I spend most of the week browsing through security literature. Because it’s a holiday time, the current paper of the week is ‘Substance Use, Violence, and Unintentional Injury in Young Holidaymakers Visiting Mediterranean Destinations’ from 2001 issue of Journal of Travel Medicine titled. 

Authors used survey (for stats geeks: cross-sectional comparative survey) on airports looking at 6,502 British and German holidaymakers aged 16 to 35 years coming back from Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Result showed that over 95% used alcohol, 66% have reported been drunk, over 10% used illicit drugs, 5.8% suffered unintentional injury and 3.8% have been in physical fight. From those who used drugs, 86.5% smoked cannabis, 31.9% took ecstasy, 18.3% cocaine, 5.8% ketamine, 5.7% amphetamine and 3.8% GBH. British tourists visiting Crete took more drugs and were involved in more violent episodes than tourists visiting other destinations. Also, German tourists visiting Portugal took more drugs than tourists visiting other destination, but not different from British on Crete. Odds for violence were overall highest for Majorca. No other significant differences between Germans and British tourists were reported. Violence was most common for those staying between 8 and 14 days. Also, big surprise, drinking alcohol on holidays was associated both with violence and unintentional injury, while taking drugs - more associated with unintentional injury, as relationship with violence wasn’t clear. Those results don’t seem to apply for tourists smoking cannabis. Discuss.

The Big Smoke

The Big Smoke:

7.754 million city area population,

12.58 million metro area population,

412,000 students,

8000 buses,

700 bus routes,

(over) 300 languages spoken,

270 underground stations, 

250 miles of tracks,

58.7% are christians,

43 universities,

40 theatres,

31% of population is foreign-born,

(generates) 30% of UK's Gross Domestic Product (GDP),

10.6 mph is an average speed of car in rush hour,

8 airports,

3 summer olympics hosted historically (as for 2012).

I couldn't be more excited than being here for 3 months to explore it's vast potential of this multicultural, historical, postmodern and ultra-technological city. And on the other side, to accelerate my understanding of the patterns of suspicious behaviors in ports and airports.

London Blog starts today!

The Science of Alcohol

As the summer approaches we start drinking more. A cold pint in a beer garden on a sun is a pleasure, but what's the science behind world most popular legal drug? Which grandma's advices are actually true, and which are completely, utterly ridiculous? Lets' s look at some myths, stereotypes and research behind the substance, that kills around 100,000 people globally every year (computed by Wolfram Alpha).

1. Alcohol is a poison. 

TRUE. And naturally humans produce a defence against it - an enzyme called 'alcohol dehydrogenase' (AD). This enzyme is a way your body fights back booze and gets you sober. The enzyme grabs hydrogene from ethanol molecule and makes it non-toxic acetaldehyde. Well, it's non-toxic, but a high cumulation of it will eventually cause dehydration and hangover.

2. Asians bodies don't produce alcohol dehydrogenase.

FALSE. It's a genetic variation that caused some of them produce less than in Caucasians. Variation was large enough to affect 1/3 of Asian drinker's population. Their great-great-grandparents simply didn't get so wasted Friday night as in Caucasian culture.

3. Women get easier drunk than man.

PARTIALLY TRUE. There are many factors, but generally AD enzyme mentioned previously is much more effective in man than women (70-80% greater activity in man than woman). However there is a tradeoff - AD enzyme activity drops much quicker for man than for women with age - so later in life those differences disappear.

4. Better eat before you get pished.

TRUE, but not because food 'soaks' the alcohol. When your stomach is full, it closes a small valve that leads to your small intestine (called 'pyloric sphincter'), so your stomach will have time to process the food before it gets to high-absorption intestine. If you drink on empty stomach - your pyloric sphincter is wide open and leading straight to 200 square meters of absorption surface in the small intestine that will happily suck the alcohol into your blood stream very fast and get you knocked.

5. If I drink one-half-pint-per-hour, I should be ok to drive us home.

WRONG. Your alcohol absorbtion and elimination is a curve, not a straight function. 

   

6. Drunk bums live longer.

TRUE, to some extend ;-) Surprised? Well, in the recent study published in Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research journal, Holahan et al. (2010) followed 1824 people over a total of 20 years, as they aged between 55 and 65. Of those who totally abstained 69% died. From 'light drinkers' - 64% died. Among those who drunk 'moderately' - 41% died. Even heavy drinkers did better than abstinents and light drinkers - 61% of them passed away during the study.

As the summer hits, this topic will get covered more, with other drugs too, so stay tuned.

Behind Motion In Social.

About six weeks ago I started a small side project - creating website that would gradually evolve into communicating research I do in Psychology, sharing knowledge and resources related with research and creating platform for running online experiments (this part coming soon). The project debuted last week as Motion In Social. Let's do a bit of deconstruction for the reasons behind this project.

It all started when I was writing one of my current papers. I don't like writing scientific papers. I did advertising in the past, and writing papers is all that is against the rules of writing for advertising:

1. There is a stiff formal tone, rather than easy conversational one.

2. Use of big words is impressive, instead of using common terms.

3. You need to write the certain number of words to make a point, instead of writing as short as possible. 4. And finally - the format matters as much (or more) as the content, which is actually quite true for advertising too, but I think it is sometimes overloaded in the case of papers.

So I got into the point when I had a vomiting reaction the moment I saw word processor greeting screen loading my paper draft. That's where I thought -  that's wrong, what can I do to avoid it, to make it more pleasant experience for myself. That's how Motion In Social was conceived.

The reasoning is based on a simple principle from psychology - collaborative learning and presentation boosts the effects of learning. There are tones of studies showing that it is easier to learn something, when you learn it in a group, comparing to when you learn it alone. It boosts your motivation, attention, memory and generally makes learning a deeper, more meaningful experience. Speaking simply - sharing your learning resources is better both for you and others. So the primary goal of Motion In Social became sharing and communicating my research with others. Through this I knew I will gain better motivation and insight into my own research.

So I went online and looked for examples of good academic research websites. I quickly realised that internet is full of dead websites from academics, with outdated information that was copied-and-pasted from paper abstracts, badly positioned graphics and horrible psychedelic layout. I quickly realised that 90% of academic websites are really bad.

The first thing I noticed there - too much text that was too complex to understand. That's how I came out with 66 words rule - ANY paragraph written in my website would be no longer than 66 words. This is on average about 10 seconds of reading time. All the difficult words would be explained in separate section or referenced to relevant Wikipedia links. Every project described would be accompanied by results figures, sample movies and images.

Than I knew I need to get it out to the people. I could have created forum, but isn't just better to stand on the shoulder of giants and connect Motion In Social with every possible social network out there? That's how Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and Mendeley channels were created, together with RSS feeds. Upcoming soon is YouTube channel for movies and maybe Flicker as well to share photos, but I need to think how to creatively use those two options.

At this point, I feel like I have achieved my goal with Motion In Social. I now have a different perspective on the projects I am doing, they are more alive, and somehow I feel more responsible for their content. Writing is suddenly more exciting because I immediately think "how could I tell this story to people online?". But the project is not finish, it will evolve more gradually as I progress with my work. One thing is to find a way to get people involve more, so Motion In Social will be launch platform for discussion. It's also about making things easier and better to navigate, and there is a still long way to go to achieve ( I am not a web designer ;). The amazing thing is that we have all the necessary information and resources available online to create amazing things, and it's such a great opportunity, that we can't ignore it.

Motion In Social Is Online! Get your brain involved!

Welcome to Motion In Social! 

The new site is online! I have one simple mission statement for this project - communicate my own research work and ideas to you (and to myself) in a way that makes it exciting (and makes you want to do psychology too). Most important - to get You involved in peer brainstorming. Criticise, question and suggest different solution in research projects you will read about - that's where it will get really interesting!

I will blog, tweet, post, update or just moan about things few times a week. The idea is to get it flow constantly. Research process is not one-night stand, so sign up and stay tuned. 

Of course there are still a lot of corrections to make and a lot of updates to come. Some sections need to be resurrected and I will keep you updated as we go. 

For now just look at it and let me know what you think :-)

Cheers!

Motion_In_Social Coming To Your Net-Brain.

Time has come to reveal my new project - Motion In Social. Coming 28th of March.

Programming Dream of Sherlock... Geek

I had a dream last night that was taking place in a Victorian version of steam-punk reality hybrid between Glasgow, Sopot and Sherlock Holmes-style London.  It was black & white, no sounds, except of people speaking. But even those sounds were muted, like when you hear people speaking when you dive your head in a bathtub. I couldn't understand what they were saying, it was neither English nor Polish, but I didn't care. What I cared about, was the code I was writing.

The computer I was working on was a combination between Enigma, MacBook Air and typing machine taken alive from Terry Gialliam's 'Brasil' with massive cathode ray tube screen. The software editor on the screen reminded of early Unix interfaces, with low-resolution pixelized fonts. 

The rules of physics didn't apply, everything was floating around and moving in random directions, but it was all very normal to me. The location was changing frequently and rapidly. Sometimes I was in a very crowded room, sometimes I was riding on a low-tech rollercoaster, sometimes I was in a library. But my heavy computer with a big CRT screen was always in front of me, kind of attached to my body. With small telescopic rails to be more specific. 

I was some character in a crime story, probably private detective, but more Doctor Watson than Sherlock Holmes. The key was to find a solution for some very complex mathematical problem, but I didn't know what it was or why or what for. I knew I had to solve it. I spend entire night typing on keyboard, with places changing, screen becoming smaller or bigger, modern or ancient, fonts being vivid or blurred. And my dream code being evidently some mix of Objective C, Python and Matlab.

I woke up early and realized I just had my first programming dream. I was excited. I guessed that it probably signified some profound interactions between prefrontal cortex, hypocampuss and reticular system in my brain. A subconsciouss response to deep-brain neuronal activity as a result of learning processes and memory consolidation. A neurotransmitter flood on the edge of coastal synaptic space, changing the structure of my brain cell connectivity. Simply - a logical result of spending some number of hours every day for the last few weeks learning those languages. 

I only regret I didn't remember a single fuckin' line of what I was writting there, in the fuckin' dream. Damn it...

Image credit: Still from Terry's Gilliam 'Brasil'.

I Caught My Cat Hacking My Laptop

Welcome in 2021. Today I discovered that Freud, my cat, hacked my computer.

I know it sounds impossible, but that's the consequence of upgrading his prefrontal cortex to new OS version and injecting with new category of neuroboosters. Damn vet. She advised that I take those upgrades so that cat can deal better with overall metabolic management, but it turned out he developed new cognitive skills very quickly.

He is not the most advanced model of transgenetically modified and cybernetically augmented cat (street name 'modcat'). Freud is a cheap solution, a crossbreed you can easily obtain in Glasgow Barras AI black market for less than £70. Certainly you have to invest into upgrades almost straight away and eventually register it with NAPS (National AI Pet System), so for additional £40 you are sorted. The maintenance costs are minimal. Modcats eat less and produce less solids, they also process any type of organic food as their stomachs have been growth using pig's genes. Of course with second-hand modcats is like with a cheap cars - you will have to invest into it forever, but you feel too attached to get rid of it. 

Freud has neurointerface to plug his neural system directly into VR (Virtual Reality). That was another mistake - NEVER implant your pet with VR interface. They spend most of their time in the Net which boosts their IQ exponentially within 6 months. Don't get me wrong - he still wants to play in the real world, but most of 18 hours per day he retreats into this crazy pet's VR. He sometimes simulates that he plays with me, but he is actually in VR. I can't really say, because cats are erratic by their nature… And I am suspecting that he somehow mapped my body movement and facial expression patterns, so he exactly knows how to act to get the most food from me.

So it was just a question of time when he decided to get a motor cortex growth factor and some software to enhance his cognitive functions. When I was asleep he logged to Amazon and downloaded upgrades directly via his neurointerface using my credit card (software is non-returnable). Cheeky bastard!

Motor cortex growth factor arrived today via DHL - a small pill with nanobots. When consumed, nanobots travel with bloodstream to your brain and attach themselves to the area around homunculus, strengthening connectivity and stimulate synapses to produce more dopamine. This basically creates the entire new level of capacities to move around the environment. I didn't give them to Freud saying that I will return growth factor pills to Amazon because he went too far using my credit card to get them. So in response he created a Facebook page where he slags me! Please, don't encourage him to post things on there and don't believe him! 

Never trust biocybernetically modded cats! 

[Photo done by automatically triggered movement sensitive security camera before Freud disabled it.]