What makes a watch special? Different things to different people I suppose but for it it’s the complexity of the movement, the history of the company, the engineering behind it or the overall uniqueness factor.

I’m offering a list of watches, off-the-beaten path which provide both a conversation piece as well as great engineering.

If you must own only one watch, make it an Omega Seamaster [LINK]. Omega had the first watch on the moon, the official timekeeper of the Olympics and of course the choice of James Bond. The James Bond Seamaster would not be my choice due to styling but there are plenty of Seamasters out there, most notable are the Aqua Terra, the Planet Ocean and the GMT, all gorgeous in my opinion and all work well as a dress watch too.

The next make I would add to the collection would be IWC. The International Watch Company. These tend to be more expensive (and more exclusive) than Omega but IWC makes a truly special watch.  You will rarely see someone wear an IWC.

A couple of models in the IWC line to take note of would be the Portofino Automatic, the Portuguese Automatic, or probably best known for their “Big Pilot” watch (worn by John Mayer) but that’s huge, I would look at the Mark XV or XVI.  Bear in mind these would not be a watch I would wear every day.

Crossing into Germany next pick would be the MeisterSinger (http://meistersinger.net/). MeisterSinger are a relatively new watch maker having been in business since 2001 but they make a really nice watch.  The majority of their models are single-handed, no second hand or minute hand. They do have a few complications but overall make a really clean watch and with only one hand folks will undoubtedly notice it.

Sinn is considered the quintessential German sports watch; they pack some ridiculous engineering into their watches including a custom method of hardening the case and making the steel scratch resistant, a movement that doesn’t need lubrication, they even fill some of their cases with a silicone oil that resists compression enabling the watch to descend to 12,000 meters without cracking.  I like the 656 or 756 or how about the klassik?

Lastly I came across Fred Dingemans. Fred is a unique watchmaker, turning out only 12 models a year, each a variation on a handful of designs he makes and for a very reasonable price. Fred makes as much of the watch as possible himself, including the crown, case, clasp, glass, hands and face. This is a watch that money doesn’t get (very similar to a Ferrari Dino). You have to earn this thing. I reached out to Fred who replied almost instantly and the current waiting list is 8 month. I am very tempted to place an order.

There are a lot of worthy watches out there, so enjoy your hunt. Just don’t pick one of those cookie cutter Rolex’s or Tags.

Or how about “Sacculina”, the mind-control barnacle? [LINK]

“Upon finding a host crab, a female Sacculina will crawl over the crab’s surface until she finds a chink in the armor: a joint. She then ejects her protective shell, reducing herself to a gelatinous blob, and invades.

Inside the host, the parasite grows long, root-like tendrils throughout the crab’s body…… she renders the crab infertile, and creates a small opening in the crab’s back that will allow a male Sacculina to make residence there. Soon the crab is filled with millions of Sacculina eggs and larvae, and like a zombie, the crab cares for these eggs and larvae as though they were its own, losing all interest in mating. When a male crab is infected, the parasite alters its physiology and behavior to be female, to better care for the Sacculina’s young.”

Imagine such a thing happening to a human? You’d essentially be powerless within your own body!

And lastly, the parasitic worm “Leucochloridium paradoxum” which infects snails. The snails eat worm eggs, the eggs grow inside the snail and …

In the snail’s digestive gland the miracidia change into cercaries and produce sporocystes, long tubes that can contain several hundred cercaries.

One or several of these tubes stretch until into the snail’s tentacles and begin to pulsate in there. The obvious colour and the sporocystes’ movement attracts birds that hack for the snail’s tentacles. The bird rips off the snail’s tentacles which cannot be withdrawn because of the sporocystes tubes inside.

Inside the bird’s digestive tract the cercaries change into the parasite’s adult stage, which then reproduces sexually and lays eggs. Thos are distributed by the bird to infect further snails, which closes the generation cycle.

So what does this tell us? What nugget of wisdom can be extracted from these disgusting and unnerving examples of the natural world?

Nobody cares for the snail as its getting eaten alive.  No one sheds a tear when the crab is slowly infested and paralyzed by tentacles.  The karma of the universe does not go out of balance whilst the snappers’ tongue is being eaten out of its mouth.

Life is ruthless. Life does whatever works. Life does not care and it’s going to mow you down if you’re not careful.

“Essentially, “if you really want something and truly believe it’s possible, you’ll get it”, but putting a lot of attention and thought onto something you don’t want means you’ll probably get that too.”

This claim is entirely fantasy based, with no clinical evidence to back it up AT ALL. Yet The Secret was purchased by over 2 million people and that’s just the Book, not counting the DVDs and tapes.

“The Secret” itself is not really a secret since it was featured in Napolean Hill’s book from 1930 “Think and Grow Rich” which I read in 2005.  That was my first encounter with the Law of Attraction.

The Law basically says if you want something you must “think” about it. If you think good things then good things will happen to you, if you think bad things then bad things happen. Basically whatever happens it’s on you.

Let me take this time to call out to a few folks to make sure they’re listening: Are you hearing this Mrs battered woman stuck in a domestic violence situation? Are you understanding this young boy being sexually abused by your local minister? Are you paying attention young soldier being shot to pieces in Afghanistan? Are you wishing hard enough little child dying from leukemia? Are these people victims of their own minds attracting negative energy through some invisible, unmeasurable, implausible yet still somehow real mechanism?

I really find this type of bullshit offensive and it makes me mad to my very core.

Well Bob and his buddies are at it again with their latest crock  “Beyond the Secret”. What? Yes, “beyond”. In a video from his blog (which I refuse to link to) he claims the Secret was good but incomplete. We need to go “Beyond”. So having raked in millions from unassuming vulnerable individuals world wide this vampire wants to suck people even drier? I think THAT’s the real Secret.

Let ME be the coach for a second: Consider this:  Forget phony baloney coaches and miracle cures. Forget the easy route. Forget the free ride. Forget looking to CHANGE your life. Forget your untapped potential, chances are if you’re not already using it you don’t have it (harsh but true). Forget blaming other people and get off your ass and enjoy yourself.

Consider this: What if I am already very happy with my life and don’t want it to change? I don’t buy into the notion that happiness is a target that we must constantly run after by seeking change or that potential is lying unused. I’m actually fairly confident that I’m operating at full potential and have been for some time now. I finished 3rd in my class in college and top 2% in the country, I have written a book, I workout, I play guitar, I run, I’m artistic, I cook, I understand electronics, I have good friends, two wonderful children and a beautiful wife. I’m happy, I’m very happy. What more do I need? Let me tell you a secret….nothing.

I had a table which refers to itself, something like this:

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[node](
[id] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
[title] [nvarchar](50) NOT NULL,
[parentId] [int] NULL,
CONSTRAINT [PK_node] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED
(
[id] ASC
)
ALTER TABLE [dbo].[node]  WITH CHECK ADD  CONSTRAINT [FK_node_node] FOREIGN KEY([parentId])
REFERENCES [dbo].[node] ([id])

I have a stored function to retrieve all the nodes, including their descendants from the DB, mine’s based on the function included here [LINK]

Once I got the rows, I was able to convert these into an object graph based on the relationship which I’d added in the DBML layout. I set “Serialization” as “Unidirectional” on the layout. No issues.

The issue I had was in Serialization.  I wanted JSON from this structure. When I serialized I was getting only the top-most entry. So I stepped through the debugger and found I was getting ALL the entries when stepping through. Running the code I was getting only partial. For some reason stepping through the code forced .NET to instantiate the full object graph but I could not figure out why.

My initial thought was that L2S was doing some lazy-loading of the data but that made no sense since the stored function was retrieving all the rows in one shot.  I couldn’t figure it out.

In the end, since performance is not an issue (this is a design-time-pre-compiled bit of JSON I’m generating) I added a simple function to recursively iterate each node :

public static void ParseObj(node s){
foreach (node v in s.children)
{
// do nothing
ParseObj(v);
}

I did experiment with LoadOptions and also made sure Delay Loading was turned off but these made no difference (as expected). Weird and possibly a bug.

So what’s next? Well if computers get stronger/smaller/faster you might think we’ll wake up one day to find “Skynet has become self-aware”. Unlikely. Let’s set self-awareness aside for a minute and look at computing power. The brain has about 100 billion neurons (10^11 estimated) all inter-connected. It works by passing chemical and electrical signals back and forth in pathways. The strength of these pathways has a relation to the brain’s capabilities to process information. E.g. some pathways control motor function, ability to play music, abstract thinking and so forth. The ability to form new pathways and build new neurons is known as brain plasticity.

The world population today is roughly 6.5 billion and of those roughly 1.5billion have internet access.  Let’s assume some of those people share computers so conservatively there are 1 billion computers in the world.

Now, let’s take the average computer, an Intel Pentium D has 230 million transistors but let’s go lower than that, let’s assume 100 million transistors per computer, which is the average from the 90’s. Each transistor might equate to a neuron. I’m going to leave storage out since RAM and disc space is tough to estimate.

That’s 100,000,000 X 1,000,000,000 or 10^17 artificial neurons in the world. With all these machines interconnected, we far exceed the raw computing power of the human brain even in today’s technology.

Setting computing speed aside we could say the hardware is there but the software is not. These machines are all focused on different tasks.

Let’s imagine you could teach such a system to learn. We have already done this to some degree, e.g. machines can learn to play chess, recognize voices, recognize faces and so on. But these are all trivial and on the grand scheme of things not very useful.

If I want to play “Crossroads” on the guitar, I can pickup a guitar and a book, look at the notes and practice long enough until I can play that one song. In doing so I will burn in the necessary pathways to play that particular song. It’s the tactical approach.

But there’s a better way, a “meta” way which is if I want to play “guitar”, what I need to do is augment myself in some way to be able to play the guitar regardless of the song. I need to understand musical theory, to listen to existing music and flood my mind with reference material. I need to enhance my fingers, strengthen them, exercise them and so forth.  Take some lessons. At the end of all this I’ll have gained a more general knowledge of the guitar and hopefully be able to play. I will have a “meta” knowledge which will not teach me any songs but once presented with a song I will have a system by which I can figure out how to play it. E.g. listen for the root-note of the chord, look for 3-chord progressions, 12-bar blues etc.

This all assumes that I have the raw material already within my mind. For example some folks have no sense of timing, or no ear for pitch. This is hardwired in their brains and no matter what you do you cannot change it. At least I have not seen it. So we as humans are limited in some capacity.

A machine on the other hand has more freedom. If it decides the best way to play guitar is with 6 fingers instead of 5 it could simply add an appendage. It is not limited as we humans are. Similarly if a machine decides the best way to learn the guitar is to rip out it’s “timing” module and replace it with a finer grained implementation of same it can do that.

To learn a song is one thing. Computers can do this today with a very narrow focus and even this they struggle with. Now, imagine the circumstance where the machine is asked to learn a song and realises the best way to achieve this is to first learn how to play guitar; “meta” side of a given task.  This would be a quantum leap from what we have today.

There is more though. Learning the “meta” side of anything is limited by what? Answer: Our ability to learn.

1. The computer decides to learn to play a song on the guitar, the best way is to learn how to play the guitar.
2. In order to learn how to play the guitar the best way is to learn how to learn.

Once a machine can  improve the way it learns another threshold has been breached. It learns faster. Not only that, it learns how to learn. And does THAT faster. This is a key threshold which we as humans will never reach.

This leads to exponential growth in the rate of learning. Learning on the part of the machine becomes faster and faster. Not only that but new ways to learn are found. The machine self-augments itself recursively leading to ever increasing improvement.This would be a watershed event and is known as The Singularity. Ray Kurzweil has predicted it will happen in 2045.

It’s important to note that the Singularity does not require self-awareness.

It’s commonly held that once the Singularity occurs, the machine(s) will reach a point where they eliminate mankind, either by accident or because we will have inadvertently set goals for the machine which require our demise.

Asimov tried to address this by laying out the three laws of Robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with either the First or Second Law.

I don’t think this is the right approach though. For example all three laws would fail to apply if a super intelligence evolved to the point where it no longer fit the definition of a Robot. Our minds cannot conceive the super intelligence and we must assume that we cannot constrain it in any way.

It’s difficult to discuss such topics without assigning human characteristics to the machine whatever it might be. This of course makes no sense since we have no possibility of knowing what form it will take or what its value system or world view will be (if any).

The natural tendency is to assign human traits to the intelligence, e.g. a desire to dominate, to conquer, a quest for longevity and so forth.These traits could be seen as a product of our evolution, things which we value since they further our likelihood of survival.

This begs the question, as human beings, just what is our value system? At a macro level it might be viewed that we seek to rule the world or some other materialistic goal.  Or simply that we want to provide for our families.  It is true at a macro level to say we  desire to sustain our own species. More accurately though you might say that our genes favour characteristics which allow themselves to be sustained. Richard Dawkins talks about it at length in the Selfish Gene. Another way to state it might be that our behaviours on the macro scale are simply the tail wagging, the dog in this case is the mechanism by which genetic material is replicated.

Getting back to the Singularity, if we want to avoid being turned into batteries by the super intelligence, or ground down into fertilizer, the question becomes how do we encode a value system into the very makeup of the machine so that we can never arrive at a circumstance whereby the computer decides the best way to learn to play Crossroads is by chopping a human’s head off and playing guitar with their body?

Perhaps a topic for another day…

Dawkins loves to stir things up as it were but he’s not alone. The pontiff’s comments have prompted widespread criticism around the world from health activists, medical professionals and politicians. Dawkins later stated his position was actually mis-quoted and in fact he had said “stupid, ignorant or wicked“.

The Pope also urged Africans to give up superstitious beliefs and adopt the catholic faith [LINK]. But isn’t that just exchanging one set of superstitions for another? E.g. Why is a man who came back from the dead or bread that turns into flesh or wine that turns into blood any more credible than a witch doctor? Let’s call a spade a spade.

The Pope is getting a lot of bad press these days. A nine year old girl was raped by her step-father in Brazil and impregnated with twins [LINK]. Being only nine the poor girl was physically too small to successfully deliver these babies, even by c-section. So the family and doctors organized an abortion.

The catholic church under Pope Benedict promptly ex-communicated the entire family, except the girl. The Church excommunicated the doctors who performed the procedure as well. The abuse had gone on since the girl was 6, authorities said. Now get this, they did NOT ex-communicate the step-father who raped the 9 year old. Amazing.

There’s also new information coming to light of an official papal bull from 1962 which “The Vatican instructed Catholic bishops around the world to cover up cases of sexual abuse or risk being thrown out of the Church.” [LINK]

You can read the document yourself “PDF HERE“. This document was sent out to every bishop in the world. If you really can’t stomach it, skip to the blue-outlined bits.

“The Observer has obtained a 40-year-old confidential document from the secret Vatican archive which lawyers are calling a ‘blueprint for deception and concealment’. One British lawyer acting for Church child abuse victims has described it as ‘explosive’. “

There have been 12,000 confirmed cases of child abuse within the catholic church to date. The true number is believed to be much larger.

Let’s take the word “church” out of the equation. If this was just a group like any other, we’d all be outraged beyond belief.

The Murphy Report which came out in 3Q of this year shows us just that.

“Ireland’s police colluded with the Catholic church in covering up clerical child abuse in Dublin on a huge scale, according to a damning report on decades of sex crimes committed by priests.”

“One priest admitted abusing more than 100 children. Another said he had committed abuse every two weeks for more than 25 years.”

“I read the report as justice minister. But on a human level – as a father and as a member of this community – I felt a growing sense of revulsion and anger at the horrible, evil acts committed against children.”

A key trait of dogma and religion is that it never changes. Religions are not set up to accommodate new information or cultural changes in society as that would require admitting that God had to be updated. To draw a parallel from Astrology which refused to update the astrological signs when it was discovered that there are many many other planets of equal size to Pluto. How come these new planets don’t effect my horoscope? Or how about the 13th sign of the zodiac (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiuchus) which appeared when the earth’s axis shifted? Just leave that one out. It’s very hard to update any system which doesn’t base itself on evidence, logic and reasoning.

Law and Science on the other hand constantly evolve based on new information.

In summary:

1. AIDS will kill you but don’t use a condom. This applies even if you’re married.
2. Rape of your step daughter for 3 years straight is ok but abortion even in the case of rape is NOT ok, even when the mother or kids or both would likely die.
3. Child abuse is ok, just don’t talk about it.
4. Superstition is not ok but men who rise from the dead and transcend into heaven are totally believable. And if you don’t believe it you’re going to Hell.
5. Earth now rotates through 13 Constellations but there are still only 12 signs of the Zodiac.

My point in this post is not to attack the Catholic Church but simply to highlight that any system based purely on an ideology is inherently bad.

To quote Richard Feynman talking about his father:

…there was a picture of the Pope with everybody bowing in front of him. And he’s say, ‘Now, look at these humans,’ he’d say, ‘here’s one human standing here, and all these others are bowing. Now, what is the difference? “

“This man has the same human problems; he eats dinner like anybody else, he goes to the bathroom, he has the same kind of problems as everybody, he’s a human being. Why are they all bowing to him? Only because of his name and his position, because of his uniform, not because of something he especially did or his honour or something like that.”

I would not say that I am anti-religion, it is true that faith and religion help billions of people cope with every day life. I can say that I do not share that point of view and strive all the time to better understand it.

What history shows is if you disengage your critical thinking, forgo reason, stop asking questions and just go on “faith” you no longer have a system of checks and balances.  When this deals with moral, developmental, health and cultural issues it becomes very dangerous indeed.

In the book “What Do You Care What People Think?” Richard Feynman tells of a conversation with his friend Bennie when they were 12.

“Thinking is nothing but talking to yourself,” said Feynman. “Oh yeah?” said Bennie. “Do you know the crazy shape of a crankshaft in a car? How did you describe it when you were talking to yourself?”.

Feynman realized that most thinking isn’t verbal at all.

Give yourself a chance and try drawing. The Project Gutenburg website has a few excellent books on the topic.

THE PRACTICE & SCIENCE OF DRAWING BY HAROLD SPEED
or
PEN DRAWING BY CHARLES MAGINNIS

And when you’ve mastered both, checkout “Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein” for inspiration. Wrightson’s book has been one of my lifelong fascinations since seeing some panels as a kid in a book my brother bought. I acquired a copy some years ago from eBay and it is stunning.

Having watched the documentary on their lives and collection I couldn’t help but call bullshit on the contemporary art world and the artist’s therein.

There’s an urban legend about a student in his final English exam in Ireland (the Leaving Certificate) where he’s asked to write a 3-page essay on “What is Bravery?”. He turns in a two word essay “This is.”.  A cute story but lazy, gimmicky and ultimately cliche with very little merit. I think much of contemporary art falls into this category.

Here’s a few examples: “Subway Drawing” by William Anastasi for example:

Blue and Red Incomplete Neon Circles – Stephen Antonakos

“Untitled” by Bill Bollinger

To me this is not art, it’s not attractive, there’s no effort put into it, the thought behind the work is not there (or at least not evident to my eyes) and it doesn’t invoke any emotion in me. Strangely though these are all established artists so they must be doing something right.

If you ask a group of Feng Shui experts to stage a room’s furniture they will each come up with different layouts. There are no hard and fast rules, all is subject to interpretation. From an aesthetics point of view that’s fine since aesthetics are subjective but Feng Shui claims to be manipulating the energy of a room so clearly the fact that the layouts are inconsistent indicates that Feng Shui is complete baloney.

It occurs to me that there could be a test for art, similar to a Turing Test.  A Turing Test pits a human judge against two conversants, one human and the other a machine. If through the course of the conversation, the judge cannot distinguish between the human and the machine, the machine is said to have passed the Turing Test.

Consider a Turing Test using contemporary art instead of conversation? Could a human judge distinguish art created by a machine from art created by one of these supposed artists?  I would say in many cases a human judge would not be able to make that distinction at all.

This leads me to the conclusion that contemporary art is not worthy of critique or display in a museum.

A piece of art should not only invoke a reaction from the viewer, it should also tell us something about the artist. This is sort of the “meta data” of art. If the content of the piece is such that it cannot be distinguished from content generated by a machine then what does it say about the culture that created it? Not much.

Similarly it tells us nothing of the society that produced the artist. The art has no meaning and consequently no worth.

Of course the flaw could be mine. Maybe I just don’t “get” contemporary art.

* www.vogel50×50.org