Python, OSX, and Computer Name

Sounds thrilling! No not host name, but the name you give your computer -- so my multi-core beast is "NeXTcyl" (like a NeXT cube but a cylinder).

It was somewhat difficult to find, well, not the best way to do this in Python, but the only way I could find to do it in Python for OSX. Lots and lots of method for hostname: no no no Google, not that. You want to call out to scutil, a command line program.

import subprocess
this_computer = subprocess.check_output(["scutil", "--get", "ComputerName"])

Essentially, use the subprocess library to call a command line function, use the check_output component to get the output from it (important!), and the three parts of the command line command are all cut up into the different arguments you hand the call (also important!). I tried about four other approaches before this one, and then had to try about three different syntaxes to get it to work, since I couldn't find any good online help. Here you go. For OSX, not Windows or other *nixes. No idea what they will do (nothing bad, but maybe not what you want).

(Because I have a 3.6 GB file I don't want to put in DropBox, so I have a local copy on my desktop and on my laptop, but the files are in different paths on each, so I wanted a way to detect which machine the code was running on so as to call the right file path -- I could have just tried one path and if it failed use the other, but, I only just thought of that now.)

400,000 Years Ago

400,000 years -- we're only at 2,015 in the "common era". So roughly 398,000 BCE. The Great Pyramid of Giza is from around 2,560 BCE, and Stonehenge is from between 3,000 BCE and 2,000 BCE. The cave paintings at Lascaux are from approximately 15,000 BCE. The earliest musical instruments found, bone flutes (bone survives well in the archaeological record), are about 35,000 years old, that is, from 33,000 BCE (although there is some disagreement about some finds and dates).

200,000 years ago is when we think the first humans -- homo sapiens -- evolved.

400,000 years ago is when homo heidelbergensis, not us but our ancestors, existed. No humans.

And this is a chipped (napped) stone instrument they made, possibly to cut animals apart. And that's me holding it at the British Museum. HOW COOL IS THAT I'LL TELL YOU IT'S VERY COOL.

Ex Machina and Chappie

Contains spoilers, totally and completely. I mean, it's the internet.

I caught both recently on Virgin Atlantic. The screen was a little small and glossy so had lots of reflections, which did not do well by Ex Machina but Chappie does fine with it. (I think a better title for Chappie would have been Scout 22, since "chappie" makes little sense in American English.)

Both, by the way, are recent movies about AI, yet they are very different.

Ex Machina has a few characters, few speaking parts, and is sparsely beautiful (best watched on a big hi-def screen).

Chappie has lots of speaking parts, and is familiar to viewers of Blomkamp's film District 9 in terms of the visuals -- a rough, decaying world in South Africa with lots of little details, because when things fall apart or get blown up there are lots of little bits.

In this, they are opposites. They are also opposites in how they treat AI -- in Ex Machina, the AI is software and hardware (the cool glassy blue brain objects), and the objective is humanity -- they have human faces, bodies, and can make and read human facial expressions. In Chappie, the AI is in a somewhat clunky-looking (but adroit) robot body, and the AI is the software (it can survive in a USB dongle).

For Ex Machina, the point is for the AI (and its body) to become human.
In Chappie, human consciousness can be scanned and downloaded into the robots (no special brain neeeded, although the robots have good brains -- this is science fiction, after all).
So AI/robots becoming human, and humans becoming robots.

Yet they share the same approach to the creator, a male genius who is the solo creator, more or less of a loner (it varies in the two films).

In Ex Machina, the AI/robot seeks to hide in humanity and does not trust them (well not the initial human characters) and kills her creator (although the creator is horribly abusive and ego-maniacal), whereas in Chappie, we know they become known more widely to humanity and Chappie (the AI in the film) trusts the humans he comes to know and helps save one of them, the AI creator.

Ok I don't really have anything deep to say, but they are both pretty good. In Ex Machina I think the two main male characters aren't written as well as they should be, they are a little overdone and tedious at times, but in Chappie I really liked the characters, and Die Atwoord are great. Ex Machina would have benefitted from a better, bigger screen. I also thought the music in Chappie was really good. I also thought Alicia Vikander's performance was great as the main AI in Ex Machina.

Apparently I disagree with reviewers on all this.

Lost Things

From the amazing British Museum, here is a 4-5 foot tall staff that apparently humanity just lost track of despite it being perhaps one thousand years old (or at least 700 years old). "Oh that old thing?"

"It was found behind a London solicitor's cupboard in 1850..." BEHIND A CUPBOARD.

ICWSM 2015

Had a great time at ICWSM in Oxford last week. Great people, great place. Stayed in a hotel near the old Norman tower mound that was built in 1071. (Google's formatting is horrible with images and text, I am discovering.)

We discussed a wide range of data and social science topics, including data availability.

Original Image c/o Allie Brosch

Darren Stevenson, PhD student from my old department, Communication Studies at UM, presents!

My poster! 36 million observations!

Oxford is beautiful: