Letters to a Persian Cat » Google | Letters to a Persian Cat

Political Power, Sex and the 21st Century E-Communication

admin — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 13:50:53 +0000

Anthony Weiner, highly praised democrate representative and candidate for N.Y. mayor resigned this week over his cyber-sex affair that is in the media since may. Mr Weiners activities outside his office duties, which involved sending explicit photographs of his most precious body areas to several femal followers through Twitter and Facebook are still difficult to judge in terms of their moral or political implications, both for his political peers and voters but even more for his wife Huma Abedin. Are they really as immoral as the Washington Times tries to makes us believe, or is this media outcry rather a hypocracy when it comes to our own secret phantasies, that we like to forbid to those who are paid with our tax money ? I”m wondering what would happened if Mr. Weiner would not have send his “Bulge” pictures and “Shaved Breast” pictures and testosteron-loaded short messages to younger ladies or university students, but to elder house-wives or congress representatives of the republicians ? Would have Mrs. Nancy Pelosi, congress speaker and his party fellow demanded his resignation with the same mercyless ? It is really hard to tell how much Mr. Weiner must be considered a liar and therefore banned from the political establishment, or whether he is a victim of the Big Brother media establishment, who is regularily searching for fresh blood to drink. I wont make any judgement here myself, I think it is about the people who voted for him as representative to decide over his future, and in particular it is about his wife Huma Abedin to consider if she wants to stay with him for the rest of their life.
What I like to suggest here, however is that Weiners affairs highlights the validity of an old issue: that of the erotic component that is related to power. In particular in the sphere of politics, that in Weiners case very simply ment that he had a sort of power over ~ 50 000 people that he represented of his New York district, power is easily gained by questionable personal qualities such as networking, bribing, lobbying. What comes with this political power is an ever increasing media presence, and it was especially the later that Anthony Weiner very obviously exploited for his cyber-sex relationships. If he would have used an anonymous user-name such as “dear-Mr-president” or “democrats-bulge” or “oral-bill” for his twitter and Facebook accounts, instead of clearly showing that it is Anthony Weiner here, your most appreciated and praised democrats futur NY mayor that sends you these steam-hot messages and pictures of his body parts, he would have received much less reponse for this, considering that the photos he send around showed a rather prude clerkes physiology (no tatoos or body piercings or scarves from gang fights or military combats). It was obviously this “added value” of offering his verbal sex and body pictures to young ladies in combination with the thrill of having all this “dirty stuff” with a guy whom the rest of the nation only knows as Mr. Super-Clean and everybodies darling. And for the failure of this attempt, i.e. exploiting a political function that has been given to somebody by his voters to attract femals for love affairs, I praise the public media who exposed this story.

ELIZA – The Intelligent Answering Machine

admin — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 15:57:23 +0000

Dear Michael,
sometimes I wonder if we don”t trust too much in the electronic communication, when one person writes some words to another person thousands of km away, and these words are converted into a sequence of bits and rush through computer chips and are converted into electric pulses or light waves, send back and forth to satellites until they finally reach the recipient. And the recipient for some reason does not question that the words he reads in the message are nothing else but the written thoughts that his friend has hammered into the keyboard thousands of km away.
Shouldn”t we be more cautious about the messages we receive day by day ? I don”t mean the mail I receive from you, I”m always sure that they come from you, cause they have their very unique style and always contain some code-words that mark them as authentic. But my younger brother, who is studying IT technology in the 2nd course now has shown me something they are doing currently. They got the project to develop a computer program that is able to write “fake answers” to an e-mail. I don”t know how they are doing it, but the program searches for some keywords in an incomming message, and than replies with some sort of standard sentences (that are usually not very complex or intelligent) which again contain the same keywords.
So my dear brother asked me to test his program. Therefore I send him an e-mail and within some micro-seconds already got an answer:

My Dear A.,
I send you my best wishes to persian New-Year. Did you received my present that I send you by post ? When I packed the parcel I cut my fingers with the scissors and had to put bandage on and now I can only use my left hand. I went with Shava to the mountains on Saturday, because with an injured finger the only proper thing to do is to go out for a walk in nature. We would have liked to stay there till Sunday, but I have no time because I have to prepare for the lecture at college. The students of the new curse will arrive tomorrow, and they want to be entertained properly. I hope you doing well and work hard to become the next Bill Gates or J.v.Neumann.
In love, your sister ghazal

Now have a look at the answer I received instantly from his program:

“Dear Sister ghazal,
O, I did not knew there was persian New-Year. What present you send, I did not received anything. O, you cut your fingers ? Interesting, why you need the scissors for this ! Did Shava liked the mountains ? What else did you do on Saturday ? So the students will come. I hope they will have fun.

Take Care
/your brother A.”

And now, what do you think ? Do you find that the program is doing a good job ? I know my brother was never very keen sending long letters to anybody, but at least he put his own (crazy) ideas into it. But the program that he wrote virtually only repeats what I wrote in my original message. I think it is better to carry on writing down our own thoughts, even though the answers may take a bid longer.

Hope everything is fine with you, Good Night.
Ghazal

————————————————–

Ghazal my Dear,
So funny to read your experiences with your brother. Thanks god, it is just a technical project that sends you such standard and formal letters in response to a mail. The quality of a machine-based artificial intelligence was actully tested by one of the earliest and most influential computer scientist (Alan Turing) by setting up a similar device that you and your borther were using. Turing suggested, that an experimentalist should do two verbal dialogues in parallel behind two black curtains. Behind one of the curtains a human person should sit to conduct a dialogue with him, wherease behind the other curtain the artificial-intelligence machine had to be placed. If the experimentalist could not tell after a certain time where the talking machine was and where the person was, than according to A.Turing the machine has passed the criteria of having indeed artificial intelligence.
But I could imagine, that this also depends a lot on the experimentalist. Simple-minded people might get fooled very easily, they might even think that a mail-response from your brothers program comes from a real person. Other people who read and wright a lot are probably much more critical. I could imagine that you are extremely critical. I think it will not be possible for any machine to fool you. You have somethink like a seventh sense to tell what is real and what is fake.

There were several attempts among IT freaks to beat Alan Turings test. They were called Chatter-Bots and among them ELIZA was probably the most famous. ELIZA was such an artifical language dialoge program developed at MIT. The exciting thing was that it should play the role of a psychoanalyst, talking to a patient. When Weizenbaum developed ELIZA, it was the time of Flower-Power, Hippie-Music and mind-extending drugs for the young, but the elder generation discovered the healing power of psycho-therapy. I guess this was the motivation for Weizenbaum designing ELIZA as a psychatrists chatter-bot. But even though ELIZA impressed some people really a lot (they were told that the doctor has a bad flue and therefore talks to them from behind a courtain), dedicated linguists that used the Turing Test could tell that it was only a machine.

I hope you can sleep well and don”t carry on endless dialogues with a machine in your dreams.

Take Care, Ghazal,
Michael

————————————————–

Hi Michael,
a last remark before midnight: Do you know why the computer program by Weizenbaum, that could participate in seemingly meaningful dialogues, was called ELIZA ? There was the character of Eliza Dolittle, a simple, uneducated person with a very basic language in G.B.Shaws play “Pigmalion” (later in the funny musical “May Fair Lady”). Two university professors, one of them was Mr. Higgins, made a bet: Higgins promised that he will “re-educate” Eliza Dolitte with brute force, give her not just elegant clothes but also a new language. And he will guide Eliza Dolittle to a reception of the high society and nobody should recognised that before she was selling flowers on the market every day. Guess what happend ?

Take care
/ghazal

————————————————–

Hi Ghazal my Dear,

What is wrong with a girl that sells flowers all day long ?
(See, now you caught me responding to you in the answering-machine-style .
I promise I wont do it again. But don”t expect me to read G.B.Shaws “Pygmalion” now to answer your question. It is already after midnight, and I have to go for a walk with our dog.

I”ll tell you tomorrow about what I think about Eliza Dolittles qualities as a chatter-bot.

Take Care, Good Night
Michael

Moon is back (now on Google Moon)

admin — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 23:35:57 +0000

Hi Ghazal my Angel,

A month ago the same moon looked down to us, and for sure could not turn away its eyes from this spot on the Isar river banks, where we were sitting at the bone-fire the whole night through, whispering secrets, feeling the heat of the august sun that was stored in the pebbles on which we layed down. Since then, I call the Isar the Moon river, and every morning I pass the river on my way to the institute, I do a short stop there and slide a flat stone over its surface, as you have shown me to do.

Full Moon 24-09-2010

Now we are a month older, it is already autumn down here, but up on the moon there are no seasons. Unlike our 24 hours day, every spot on the moon has a day as long as 15 days down here, followed by 15 nights in a row. Could you imagine, this would mean exchanging some mails and early night dialoges only ones in month, and then 360 hours long darkness.
Maybe you recognized that I could finally revert to you real name. I had to hide it for two month to protect your privacy from the nosy Google-machine, which somehow disclosed your real name and linked it to the blog. Therefore I used another pseudonym in the blog, which had only slight resemblence to “Ghazal”. It sounded similar, but looked quite different, and Google still does not recognize similarities by sound. But I”m sure, there soon will be a Google-Sound search machine, and this one will find out that “Azal”, the pseudonyme that I used for two month, sounds very similar to your real name “Ghazal”.

Are you o.k. ? Are you still studying so late at night ? Don”t miss your dreams, some actors therein might desperately wait for the main character, the blue-eyed persian cat.

Sleep well, Take Care

Michael

——————————————————————————————————

hi michael,

I dont know if it was the picture of the moon you send in the evening, or my fear to meet some strange people in my dreams: either of the two did not let me sleep. but didn”t you once said that the full moon itself can also directly interfere with my emotions. maybe it is this what happend. finally, I went out for a walk over the fields behind the guesthouse, I think it was already 6.30 a.m. could see the moon, but not a house there . I did a photo of it, have a look. If you find a house on it, show it to me. Does it mean you”d like to send me to the moon to live there ?
Have a nice day (I may come a bit later to the lab today, hope thats alright).
Take Care, michael
/ghazal

PS: If you click on the photo, there is a nice song about the moon. I only know its by Pearl Jam, don”t know the title.

——————————————————————————————————

Hi Ghazal my Dear,

You came here on your angel journey half a year ago, arriving from somewhere far away. How could I ever send you back alone ? If, however you would suggest to take me with you somewhere in the universe, I would get my luggage ready today. A nice house on the moon could be a first step.
By the way, the moon is not only fascinating by its yet poorly understoud influence on females psyche but can make man equally crazy. Have a look at this alternative record of what the first astronauts said when they put their feets there.

Enjoy the day, recover from the sleepless night,
I”ll tell everybody you work on your thesis.

TaKe CaRe
Michael

The Orphan Ghazal Receptor

admin — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:36:18 +0000

Hi Ghazal, my Dear,

I hope everything went well today, that your family had a good flight and they like the flat and the neighbourhood and the fine car. You have been perhaps very busy organizing everything and enjoy to chat in your own language with your relatives.

Just would like to tell you, that Google had not managed to update their search results. The Persian-Cat blog went even higher on the list of hits after searching for your name. I have therefore replaced your name with the fictional “Azal”. I know you are not pleased with this, my dear, but it will only be temporary, untill Google has “forgotten” that there is a relation between Persian-Cat and your family name (hope this will happen within the next 1-2 weeks). Then I”ll revert the changes. At the moment Google still finds the blog, but if somebody starts to read it seems as if Google associated your name and the blog by mistake.

It was not easy for me to replace your real name with this “Azal”. I don”t mean the technical part, this was done just with a few mouse-clicks. But emotionally I did it with extreme unease.
I have no “receptor” for this abstract name “Azal”, it does not induce memories of nice moments as it is the case with your real name. Therefore I hope, I can revert these changes as soon as possible.

I hope you have a nice and pleasant evening with your family and sleep well and dream something interesting.

Michael