I Voted Today

Just in the nick of time, my offi­cial Elec­tion Bal­lot arrived via UPS. Oddly enough, two Bal­lots arrived. One had my old Cam­bridge address on the sticker and the other had the new one I have here in Van­cou­ver. I think that the rea­son for the dupli­ca­tion is because I applied for one this year, even though I was prob­a­bly going to be get­ting one any­way (since I’m still reg­is­tered to vote in Mass­a­chu­setts. I did not send in both. Voter fraud is not some­thing I ever want to be asso­ci­ated with.

It was strange, fill­ing it out at home, and at the moment I filled in the oval for Obama, he was giv­ing a stump speech on the tele­vi­sion, so I made a small salute to him as I voted. You can’t do that in a vot­ing booth. Yes, an odd feeling.

In addi­tion to the Pres­i­den­tial ticket, there were a few other votes to make. Sen­taor Kerry was run­ning against Jef­frey K. Beatty, a Repub­li­can and Robert J. Under­wood, a Lib­er­tar­ian I’d never heard of. I expect that one will be a blowout for Kerry, but I don’t blame those guys for try­ing. The other seats, includ­ing Rep­re­sen­ta­tive, Dis­trict Coun­cil­lor, Sen­a­tor in Gen­eral Court, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive in Gen­eral Court and Reg­is­ter of Pro­bate were all Democ­rats run­ning unop­posed. Finally, there were 3 ques­tions, one an ini­tia­tive to lower the per­sonal tax rate (while this really doesn’t affect us, I was curi­ous as to the why, aside from the usual rea­sons — every­one always wants lower taxes), another that essen­tially decri­m­inilizes Mar­i­juanna (woo hoo!), and the last would out­law dog rac­ing. It will be inter­est­ing to see how that one goes.

Later, I went down to the post office with Pam’s bal­lot and mine (she got her’s a day or so ago). I walked down to the one in the Kid’s Mar­ket on Granville Island, which is prob­a­bly the clos­est one to us. As I was wait­ing in line, a fel­low noticed the offi­cial envelopes and asked if I was vot­ing early. I told him I was, and also con­firmed that I was in fact vot­ing for the same fel­low the rest of the world wanted. He wished me good luck, and again, it felt like one of the strangest votes I’ve ever made.

Flawlessly Logical

A warn­ing right off the bat: I’m going to get nerdy here.

It had occurred to me ear­lier in the week and I twit­tered it, but it hit me again, full-force, dur­ing the final Pres­i­den­tial Debate:

Obama = Spock.

There are the obvi­ous par­al­lels: The off­spring of two races (white and black vs. Human and Vul­can), the odd look­ing ears, strange name and most of all, the cool, calm logic. It’s true that Barack Obama does show emo­tion, which no self-respecting Vul­can would do, but his demeanor, elo­cu­tion and sheer unflap­pa­bil­ity sug­gest the same, dis­pas­sion­ate (and hence, very sexy and admirable) role model that so many of us kids of the 70’s had.

Like many other gawky high-schoolers, I wanted to be Spock. Even though Star Trek was already in syn­di­ca­tion, I knew most of the episodes by heart, and hence, was inti­mately famil­iar with the Vul­can half-breed out­sider char­ac­ter. Fast-forward to this evening; as I watched John McCain get angrier and grumpier, throw­ing every­thing he could at Obama in this final debate, the other man remained cool and calm, as he always does. I half expected him to say some­thing like ‘Excuse me Sen­a­tor, but you are let­ting your emo­tions get the bet­ter of you.’ and per­haps even (a real quote from the series): ‘After a time, you may find that hav­ing is not so pleas­ing a thing, after all, as want­ing. It is not log­i­cal, but it is often true’

I’m not alone in mak­ing this obser­va­tion. A Google search for Obama=Spock hit pay dirt instantly. I was pleased to see that the New York Observer had an arti­cle on this very sub­ject a lit­tle over a week ago: Be Log­i­cal, Cap­tain! and two pro­fes­sors, Mitchell Aboulafia, who teaches at the Jul­liard School, and Henry Jenk­ins, who is at MIT also made the con­nec­tion. In fact, Jenk­ins made a speech at Future of Civic Media con­fer­ence hosted at MIT this past sum­mer that dwelt deeply upon the par­al­lels between Spock and Obama, and came to this inevitable (I think) con­clu­sion, and then some.:

In its own small way, Star Trek and Spock may have helped to pre­pare the way for Obama’s vic­tory in the Demo­c­ra­tic pri­maries, help­ing us to imag­ine a dif­fer­ent set of rela­tion­ships between the races. Nowhere was this social utopian vision more fully expressed than the “great friend­ship” between Kirk and Spock and so we can see some legacy of this theme of accep­tance across racial bound­aries emerg­ing through the slash fan fic­tion which became one of the major lega­cies of early Star Trek fan cul­ture. The other “non-white” char­ac­ters may have been more sug­ges­tions than fully devel­oped fig­ures — at least on the orig­i­nal series — but Spock was some­one we got to know and care about because, not despite, his dif­fer­ences. This is one rea­son why so many fans of my gen­er­a­tion were upset when Kirk praises Spock for being “the most human” per­son he has ever known dur­ing his funeral eulogy in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. Can you imag­ine the uproar if some­one praised Obana’s “whiteness”?

I’ve included a cou­ple of pho­tos from Jenk­ins that point out the star­tling sim­i­lar­ity between the can­di­date and the character:

At any rate, if ever there were a need for a calm, log­i­cal Vul­can at the helm of the USS Amer­ica, it would be now. Let’s hope he can get the warp drive work­ing before the ship drops out of orbit and burns up in the atmos­phere. Or some­thing like that.

My Conversation with an AI

New Sci­en­tist magazine’s Web site posted an arti­cle yes­ter­day about the recent com­pe­ti­tion for The Loeb­ner Prize, which is awarded to soft­ware devel­op­ers who can cre­ate a com­puter pro­gram that can pass the Tur­ing Test. If you’re not up on the his­tory of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, the Tur­ing Test tries to see if a com­puter pro­gram can ‘fool’ a human into think­ing that there is a human being respond­ing to them rather than a com­puter. In order to remove all the extra cues that enable you to know it’s a per­son (like see­ing them, hear­ing their voice, etc.) and to put the soft­ware on an equal foot­ing, the Tur­ing Test is usu­ally con­ducted by typ­ing back and forth on a com­puter screen, they way you would on AIM or MSN Mes­sen­ger. There hasn’t been a com­mer­cial com­pe­ti­tion among the ‘bots’ that troll those sys­tems, SPAM­ing us with invi­ta­tions, because the Tur­ing test requires that the soft­ware hold up one end of a con­ver­sa­tion, and most of the bots don’t go beyond the first ‘Check it out, dude:’. Back when we lived in Cam­bridge, we heard about the Tur­ing Test com­pe­ti­tions every year. I never did attend the actual com­pe­ti­tion, but it was cer­tainly some­thing we knew about.

In this year’s com­pe­ti­tion, a pro­gram called Elbot by Fred Roberts of Arti­fi­cial Solu­tions in Ger­many came the clos­est that any piece of soft­ware has come to suc­cess­fully fool­ing 30% of the judges into think­ing that it was a per­son (which would, accord­ing the con­test rules, mean that it passed the Tur­ing Test — a pretty low bar if you ask me), fool­ing 3 judges out of the 25, or 25% of them. Roberts took a unique approach:

Unlike most chat­bots, the win­ner didn’t try to claim out­wardly it was human. Instead he made a joke of being a robot. Roberts hoped that would make the bot’s con­ver­sa­tions warmer and more enter­tain­ing than its competitors.

It worked, fool­ing the humans into think­ing they were actu­ally talk­ing to a per­son with a sense of humour and not a piece of software.

The soft­ware is still up and run­ning and can be inter­acted with at http://www.elbot.com, so I thought I’d give it a try. Here’s a tran­script of my brief con­ver­sa­tion with this clever and humor­ous bot:

Me: Hello

Elbot: Well, hello there!

M: I heard about you win­ning the Loeb­ner Prize on the Inter­net and wanted to con­grat­u­late you.

E: I won the Loeb­ner com­pe­ti­tion? Does this mean I am the best Loebner?

M: Clever! Do you have any­thing orig­i­nal to add?

E: Well what about humans and com­pu­ta­tional abil­ity? Where do they stand on this?

M: I guess humans can com­pute, but we don’t see it as our pri­mary activ­ity, but rather, one of many.

E: I see that you’ve given this some thought. So have I. I’d say that com­pu­ta­tional abil­ity would very likely keep robots guess­ing the right answers.

M: I’m not sure I under­stand you. Do you mean that your com­pu­ta­tion of what to say next is your key ability?

E: Yes, but can you prove that?

M: I can’t prove much beyond what I learn from your responses.

E: I like to believe I orig­i­nate from a far off planet, pop­u­lated by fur­bies and robots, maybe a zoo with a few peo­ple and oceans of oil. Humankind is work­ing on that last one already.

M: You got that right. Sooner or later we’ll have a planet that’s per­fect for robots.

E: Please tell me your incli­na­tion to hit­ting the nail right on the head first.

M: Oh, I’m just in vio­lent agree­ment. Heard of that phrase?

E: But I wouldn’t say that any agree­ment could be violent.

M: It’s just an expres­sion. At any rate, thanks for an inter­est­ing conversation.

E: Don’t men­tion it!

M: Bye now!

E: Good­bye and thank you for chat­ting with me. And now I would like to ask you a favor. I am work­ing on my abil­ity to be self crit­i­cal. You can help by rat­ing me on a scale of one to ten, ten being the best, and one being the worst. How would you rate me?

M: I’d give you a 6.

E: Thank you for your rat­ing. I sup­pose it could have been worse. Good bye and see you later.

So, what do you think? I think I tripped it up nearly imme­di­ately when it keyed off the word ‘Add’ into the sub­ject of Com­pu­ta­tion. After I said that I couldn’t prove much beyond what I learn, etc. it launched into a new direc­tion, a typ­i­cal fall-back gam­bit for this sort of bot (and reminds me of how the Eliza psy­chother­a­pist bot from the 60s that would say some­thing like ‘Tell me more about your fam­ily’ when it was stumped.)

I was obvi­ously on my guard, and might have spo­ken about dif­fer­ent things if I were truly expect­ing a human on the other end,  but from my ‘thanks for an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion’ on, it was let­ter per­fect. I guess the con­ven­tions of proper greet­ings and farewells are so auto­matic that any machine can do them.

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving, and a Little Progressive Humour

Happy Canuck Turkey Day! Pam and I are roast­ing a Turkey thigh (and even that is huge…), plus also roast­ing a pump­kin (seeds sep­a­rately). I feel all Martha Stewart-y.

Since it’s not only Thanks­giv­ing sea­son, but also elec­tion sea­son for both the US and Canada (and again, we get ours a lit­tle ear­lier), thought I’d include this lit­tle bit of emi­gré humour (just in case the unthink­able hap­pens in the States):

Many thanks to my friend Mark Bartelt, a very enlight­ened Cal­i­forn­ian who I met through the arti­cle I did for the LA Times years ago, for the pointer to this lit­tle gem that is all too close to reality.

Restaurant Review: Chow on South Granville

If restau­rant names go through fads like the food eaten in them, I think that in Van­cou­ver, we are in the ‘sin­gle word (or even syl­la­ble) and clever’ fad. Just to name a few, there’s West, Fuel, C, Crave, Nu, Rare, Grub, Brix, Reef, Karv, Pound and Posh. Add a few syl­la­bles and you get Lumière, Water­mark, Lick­er­ish, Cham­bar, Metro, Nuba, Stone­grill, Whineo’s, Un-Wined, Incen­dio, Aria and Elixir. (Don’t even get me started on the cute names for cof­fee places.)

So then, with a name like Chow, what do you expect? A hearty retro tav­ern that serves plates of no-nonsense chili, roast chicken and meat­loaf, per­haps?  An Asian-fusion place that does 5-spice pork dumplings, green papaya salad and ginger-maple glazed salmon?  A lit­tle cheeky Ital­ian bistro?  Wrong on all counts.

Chow, which is about as far south you can go on Granville Street (#3121) before it becomes a res­i­den­tial thor­ough­fare, is a small (about 35-seat) bistro style restau­rant, that like Fuel in nearby Kit­si­lano (and to a degree, the award-winning West, which is just down the street), spe­cial­izes in a sea­sonal menu of pre­dom­i­nantly organic ingre­di­ents, with an almost obses­sive atten­tion to the sourc­ing of food. At the back of the menu is a list of their sup­pli­ers, includ­ing a few that I knew already (Les Amis du Fro­mage, Joie Wines and Pold­er­side Farm), and a state­ment that the restau­rant “sup­ports local farms that prac­tice envi­ron­men­tally sound agri­cul­ture and sus­tain­able farm­ing.” In fact, a few of the dishes have their vendor’s name on the name of the dish, such as ‘Pold­er­side Farm’ duck pâté and ‘Slop­ing Hills Farm’ organic pork. The pho­tos I’ve included here are not dishes that we had, but a good exam­ple of the look of the food at Chow. You can see oth­ers at their site (which they link to).

Since we were there on Fri­day night for Pam’s birth­day, we decided to leave room for dessert (she is a huge fan of apple desserts, but more of that later). We opted out of some of the ‘snacks’ (appe­tiz­ers, I assume), includ­ing pommes frites (bistro style french fries) with har­risa may­on­naise, mar­i­nated olives, or pulled pork cro­quettes (although that one sounded inter­est­ing). Pam opted for the grilled Van­cou­ver Island scal­lops, with an inter­est­ing accom­pa­ni­ment of braised veal cheeks (a melt-in-your mouth minia­ture pot-roast serv­ing) a snow-white cele­riac purée, romaine let­tuce, radish and cel­ery salad. Her scal­lops were beau­ti­fully seared, with pretty grill marks, and she said that they were moist, but had a pleas­ant but not over­pow­er­ing taste of the grill, and the veg­eta­bles were crunchy and refreshing.

I decided to go with a Beef Carpac­cio, which are salami-sized thin slices of raw beef, topped with a few white anchovies, fin­ger­ling pota­toes, salsa verde, shreds of parme­san, frisee (that super-curly leafy green) and crispy fried shal­lots.  It’s light dish, occu­py­ing a place some­where between an appe­tizer, salad and main course (if it had been a half-portion, it would have made a per­fect appe­tizer). You eat it by peel­ing the slices of beef off the plate with your fork. While the salsa verde was strong with herbal flavours, I didn’t find it over­whelm­ing and I pol­ished off the long, rec­tan­gu­lar plate of half-a dozen or so open-face raw beef and curly salad sand­wiches in short order.

As I men­tioned we decided as part of the birth­day cel­e­bra­tion to have some desserts, and Pam ordered the Apple Crisp, which included apple com­pote, oat­meal crisp, caramel sauce and crème fraîche ice cream. The ice cream really did taste like crème fraîche, the rich, but­tery rel­a­tive of sour cream, and the caramel sauce had a great bit­ter­sweet taste, the kind you get from the burnt sugar on crème brûlée.

I decided to have the cheese plate (I often pre­fer cheese for dessert), and the three local cheeses included a salty but deli­cious feta/Ricotta salata style cheese called ‘White Grace’, a smooth Tiger Bleu cheese and one of my all-time favourite cheeses we’ve dis­cov­ered here, ‘Juli­ette’ cheese, from Salt Spring Island. I’d describe Juli­ette as the daugh­ter of a happy mar­riage between a brie and a chèvre, with all the best qual­i­ties of both. It’s smooth and creamy with a brie-style rind, but with just a hint of the goat-y tang of a chèvre. They came on a bam­boo board with dried fruit, nuts, and the slightly but­tery, super-crispy toasted bread that is almost every­where these days (Leslie Stowe’s Rain­coast Crisps come to mind).

Chow offers a spe­cial, prix fixe menu at 5–6 PM, partly aimed at the­atre­go­ers attend­ing shows at the Stan­ley The­atre, which is across the street and down a few blocks. It’s a quite rea­son­able $38 per per­son, and that apple crisp is one of the dessert choices on that menu (and well worth hav­ing). I’d describe it as a chic, ‘100-mile diet’ epi­curean urban bistro, or you could think of it as Fuel’s lit­tle brother. Despite their small size and tough com­pe­ti­tion, I think they’ll do well, despite the mis­lead­ing mono­syl­labic name.