The Most Human Human (41 page)

18
Richard S. Wallace, “The Anatomy of A.L.I.C.E.,” in
Parsing the Turing Test
, edited by Robert Epstein et al. (New York: Springer, 2008).

19
Hava Siegelmann, personal interview.

20
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,”
Horizon
13, no. 76 (April 1946), pp. 252–65.

21
Roger Levy, personal interview.

22
Dave Ackley, personal interview.

23
Freakonomics
(Levitt and Dubner, see below) notes that “the Greater Dallas Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse has compiled an extraordinarily entertaining index of cocaine street names.”

24
Harold Bloom,
The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

25
Ezra Pound’s famous battle cry of modernism, “Make it new,” comes from his translation of the Confucian text
The Great Digest
, a.k.a.
The Great Learning
.

26
Garry Kasparov,
How Life Imitates Chess
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2007).

27
Sun Tzu,
The Art of War
, translated by John Minford (New York: Penguin, 2003).

28
The phrase “euphemism treadmill” comes from Steven Pinker,
The Blank Slate
(New York: Viking, 2002). See also W. V. Quine, “Euphemism,” in
Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1987).

29
The controversy over Rahm Emanuel’s remark appears to have originated with Peter Wallsten, “Chief of Staff Draws Fire from Left as Obama Falters,”
Wall Street Journal
, January 26, 2010.

30
Rosa’s Law, S.2781, 2010.

31
“Mr. Burton’s staff”: Don Van Natta Jr., “Panel Chief Refuses Apology to Clinton,”
New York Times
, April 23, 1998.

32
Will Shortz, quoted in Jesse Sheidlower, “The Dirty Word in 43 Down,”
Slate Magazine
, April 6, 2006.

33
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner,
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
(New York: William Morrow, 2005).

34
Guy Deutscher,
The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005).

35
Joseph Weizenbaum,
Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation
(San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976).

36
The effect that photons have on the electrons they are measuring is called the Compton effect; the paper where Heisenberg uses this to lay the foundation for his famous “uncertainty principle” is “Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik,”
Zeitschrift für Physik
43 (1927), pp. 172–98, available
in English in
Quantum Theory and Measurement
, edited by John Archibald Wheeler and Wojciech Hubert Zurek (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983). 210 Deborah Tannen’s
That’s Not What I Meant! How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships
(New York: Ballantine, 1987) has illuminating sample dialogues of how trying to ask a question “neutrally” can go horribly wrong.

37
A famous study on wording and memory, and the one from which the car crash language is taken, is from Elizabeth F. Loftus and John C. Palmer, “Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction: An Example of the Interaction Between Language and Memory,”
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior
13, no. 5 (October 1974), pp. 585–89.

38
For more on the “or not” wording, see, e.g., Jon Krosnick, Eric Shaeffer, Gary Langer, and Daniel Merkle, “A Comparison of Minimally Balanced and Fully Balanced Forced Choice Items” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, Nashville, August 16, 2003).

39
For more on how asking about one dimension of life can (temporarily) alter someone’s perception of the rest of their life, see Fritz Strack, Leonard Martin, and Norbert Schwarz, “Priming and Communication: Social Determinants of Information Use in Judgments of Life Satisfaction,”
European Journal of Social Psychology
18, no. 5 (1988), pp. 429–42. Broadly, this is referred to as a type of “focusing illusion.”

40
Robert Creeley and Archie Rand,
Drawn & Quartered
(New York: Granary Books, 2001).

41
Marcel Duchamp,
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2
(1912), Philadelphia Museum of Art.

42
Hava Siegelmann,
Neural Networks and Analog Computation: Beyond the Turing Limit
(Boston: Birkhäuser, 1999).

43
Ackley, personal interview.

44
Plato,
Symposium
, translated by Benjamin Jowett, in
The Dialogues of Plato, Volume One
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1892).

45
Phil Collins, “Two Hearts,” from
Buster: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
.

46
John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask,
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
, directed by John Cameron Mitchell (Killer Films, 2001).

47
Spice Girls, “2 Become 1,”
Spice
(Virgin, 1996).

48
Milk
, directed by Gus Van Sant (Focus Features), 2008.

49
Kevin Warwick, personal interview.

50
Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
Philosophical Review
83, no. 4 (October 1974), pp. 435–50.

51
Douglas R. Hofstadter,
I Am a Strange Loop
(New York: Basic Books, 2007).

52
Gazzaniga,
Human
.

53
Russell,
Conquest of Happiness
.

54
Roberto Caminiti, Hassan Ghaziri, Ralf Galuske, Patrick Hof, and Giorgio Innocenti, “Evolution Amplified Processing with Temporally Dispersed Slow Neuronal Connectivity in Primates,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
106, no. 46 (November 17, 2009), pp. 19551–56.

55
The Bach cantata is 197, “Gott ist unsre Zuversicht.” For more, see Hofstadter’s
I Am a Strange Loop
.

56
Benjamin Seider, Gilad Hirschberger, Kristin Nelson, and Robert Levenson, “We Can Work It Out: Age Differences in Relational Pronouns, Physiology, and Behavior in Marital Conflict,”
Psychology and Aging
24, no. 3 (September 2009), pp. 604–13.

1
Claude Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,”
Bell System Technical Journal
27 (1948), pp. 379–423, 623–56.

2
average American teenager: Katie Hafner, “Texting May Be Taking a Toll,”
New York Times
, May 25, 2009.

3
The two are in fact related: For more information on the connections between Shannon (information) entropy and thermodynamic entropy, see, e.g., Edwin Jaynes, “Information Theory and Statistical Mechanics,”
Physical Review
106, no. 4, (May 1957), pp. 620–30; and Edwin Jaynes, “Information Theory and Statistical Mechanics II,”
Physical Review
108, no. 2 (October 1957), pp. 171–90.

4
Donald Barthelme, “Not-Knowing,” in
Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme
, edited by Kim Herzinger (New York: Random House, 1997).

5
Jonathan Safran Foer,
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

6
The cloze test comes originally from W. Taylor, “Cloze procedure: A New Tool for Measuring Readability,”
Journalism Quarterly
30 (1953), pp. 415–33.

7
Mystery,
The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women into Bed
, with Chris Odom (New York: St. Martin’s, 2007).

8
Scott McDonald and Richard Shillcock, “Eye Movements Reveal the On-Line Computation of Lexical Probabilities During Reading,”
Psychological Science
14, no. 6, (November 2003), pp. 648–52.

9
Keith Rayner, Katherine Binder, Jane Ashby, and Alexander Pollatsek, “Eye Movement Control in Reading: Word Predictability Has Little Influence on Initial Landing Positions
in
Words” (emphasis mine, as they reference its effects
on
words).
Vision Research
41, no. 7 (March 2001), pp. 943–54. For more on entropy’s effect on reading, see Keith Rayner, “Eye Movements in Reading and Information Processing: 20 Years of Research,”
Psychological Bulletin
124, No. 3, (November 1998), pp. 372–422; Steven Frisson, Keith Rayner, and Martin J. Pickering, “Effects of Contextual Predictability and Transitional Probability on Eye Movements During Reading,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
31, No. 5 (September 2005), pp. 862–77; Reinhold Kliegl, Ellen Grabner, Martin Rolfs, and Ralf Engbert, “Length, Frequency, and Predictability Effects of Words on Eye Movements in Reading,”
European Journal of Cognitive Psychology
16, nos. 1–2 (January–March 2004), pp. 262–84.

10
Laurent Itti and Pierre Baldi, “Bayesian Surprise Attracts Human Attention,”
Vision Research
49, no. 10 (May 2009), pp. 1295–306. See also, Pierre Baldi and Laurent Itti, “Of Bits and Wows: A Bayesian Theory of Surprise with Applications to Attention,”
Neural Networks
23, no. 5 (June 2010), pp. 649–66; Linda Geddes, “Model of Surprise Has ‘Wow’ Factor Built In,”
New Scientist
, January 2009; Emma Byrne, “Surprise Moves Eyes,” Primary Visual Cortex, October 2008; T. Nathan Mundhenk, Wolfgang Einhäuser, and Laurent Itti, “Automatic Computation of an Image’s Statistical Surprise Predicts Performance of Human Observers on a Natural Image Detection Task,”
Vision Research
49, no. 13 (June 2009), pp. 1620–37.

11
al Qaeda videos: In Kim Zetter, “Researcher’s Analysis of al Qaeda Images Reveals Surprises,”
Wired
, August 2, 2007. 233 fashion industry: Neal Krawetz, “Body by Victoria,”
Secure Computing
blog,
www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/322-Body-By-Victoria.html
.

12
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”
Poetry
, June 1915.

13
Marcel Duchamp,
Fountain
(1917).

14
C.D. Wright, “Tours,” in
Steal Away
(Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2002).

15
Milan Kundera,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
(New York: Harper & Row, 1984).

16
David Shields, quoted in Bond Huberman, “I Could Go On Like This Forever,”
City Arts
, July 1, 2008.

17
Roger Ebert, review of
Quantum of Solace
, November 12, 2008, at
rogerebert.suntimes.com
.

18
Matt Mahoney, “Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence,”
Proceedings of the Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the Eleventh Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference
(Menlo Park, Calif.: American Association for Artificial Intelligence, 1999). See also Matt Mahoney,
Data Compression Explained
(San Jose, Calif.: Ocarina Networks, 2010),
www.mattmahoney.net/dc/dce.html
.

19
Annie Dillard,
An American Childhood
(New York: Harper & Row, 1987).

20
Eric Hayot, in “Somewhere Out There,” episode 374 of
This American Life
, February 13, 2009.

21
Three Colors: White
, directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski (Miramax, 1994).

22
David Bellos, “I, Translator,”
New York Times
, March 20, 2010.

23
Douglas R. Hofstadter,
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
(New York: Basic Books, 1979).

24
“Six Years Later: The Children of September 11,”
The Oprah Winfrey Show
, September 11, 2007.

25
George Bonanno, “Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive After Extremely Adverse Events?”
American Psychologist
59, no. 1 (January 2004), pp. 20–28. See also George Bonanno,
The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss
(New York: Basic Books, 2009).

26
Robert Pirsig,
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
(New York: Morrow, 1974).

27
It’s widely held: See, e.g., papers by the University of Edinburgh’s Sharon Goldwater, Brown University’s Mark Johnson, UC Berkeley’s Thomas Griffiths, the University of Wisconsin’s Jenny Saffran, the Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute’s Dan Mirman, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Daniel Swingley, among others.

28
Eugene Charniak, personal interview.

29
Shannon, “Mathematical Theory of Communication.”

30
The American Heritage Book of English Usage: A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996).

31
“attorney general”: These three examples taken from Bill Bryson,
The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
(New York: Morrow, 1990).

32
Dave Matthews Band, “You and Me,”
Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King
(RCA, 2009).

33
Norton Juster,
The Phantom Tollbooth
(New York: Epstein & Carroll, 1961).

34
Guy Blelloch, “Introduction to Data Compression,” manuscript, 2001.

35
David Foster Wallace, “Authority and American Usage,” in
Consider the Lobster
(New York: Little, Brown, 2005).

36
Takeshi Murata, “Monster Movie” (2005).

37
Kanye West, “Welcome to Heartbreak,” directed by Nabil Elderkin (2009).

38
Kundera,
Unbearable Lightness of Being
.