When I was in junior high I read Stephen King’s Firestarter. The preface opens with the immortal opening line fram Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451:
It was a pleasure to burn.
This quote has such a promise of violence (psychological, physical, and otherwise) and pride in the destruction that the book is already filled with a great tension that does not release until the very final word — and this is by virtue of the very first sentence!
This image, from the forthcoming graphic novel interpretation of Bradbury’s work promises a great read.
Traditionally AI opinions are predictable. Either “bots run amok (possibly
enslaving humanity, determining us a parasite, rendering all matter
indistinct, or generically squashing our free will and giving us a life that
we consider less human)” or “bots are our salvation: they will help us, we will become them, or they will optimize humanity’s place on Earth benevolently.”
Baard makes an interesting supposition, the ecological fate of the Earth is
sealed: we will exhaust the resources on this planet in a finite measure of
time. Or, perhaps, we will upset the balance of ecology such that we sterilize
ourselves, poison our foodstores, or overengineer our crops to the point that
their homogeneity makes them vulnerable to utter blight. Before that happens,
something unique on Earth has arisen: the ability to create electronic systems
capable of surviving inter-planetary travel.
On a planet with intelligent whales, birds, squid, silicon-based plants, the
possibility of creating a single shard of etched silicon wafer is a total
impossibility. It could be that in the Drake
equation fc is remarkably low.
Therefore to create a digital AI being that can carry the skill of intelligent machine construction (ça veut dire: itself) and human life might be humanity’s gift to the Universe itself.
Imagine this mechanical panspermia. As the Earth is a charred cinder held in the corona of a swollen Red Giant, and as an inter-galactic collision begins that will plunge Earth into the event horizon of a neighboring galaxy’s central black hole, a single robot harvests clay and ammonia, incubates RNA, and injects it into a small E. coli colony. It injects this primitive mixture of genetic soup into a mineral substructure as lakes of fresh water roil in a humid atmosphere. First the bacteria, then the protazoa, and finally that entitled creature rises again. And perhaps as he places a naïve fleshy hand to metal that endured the ravages of inter-planetary travel, the device will exit hibernation and say: “Mankind, how lovely it is to see you again.”
One of the activities that Lauren and I have tried to partake in since the earliest times in our relationship is going to see live music. This was infinitely harder in the South Bay area, but is, in Austin, slightly more difficult than finding a bowl of queso — that is, not at all.
An act who we really liked and who we saw in San Francisco was Stellastarr*, a New York-based band that rose up rapidly with The Strokes, Interpol, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Stellastarr* lack the dourness and monotonality of Interpol or the conscious Brooklyn-tough of the Strokes, but channel a poppy, betimes disco-affected sound with a quixotic vocals lain upon a sonic elephant in the china shop of guitar noise (What hath Sonic Youth wrought?). It’s actually pretty danceable too.
As icing on the cake, the show was at The Parish, my favorite venue in Austin. It’s upstairs, intimate, the bar staff are actually competent and friendly, and the sound system is excellent.
I’ve been into Stellstarr* since theirfirst release just seemed like something worth grabbing when I was at the Amoeba over on Haight Street, so it’s been a lot of fun to watch their evolution.
The thing that I love about Stellstarr* is the way that their primary
vocalists, Shawn and Amanda, have voices that engage in some sort of
complimentary and very epic sonic tug of war. Shawn has a histrionic,
epileptically-dashed wail that can throw the listener down the stairs with
some melancholy themes; however at that exact moment, Amanda’s voice comes
in with a lilting, rising, hopeful progression such that the listener, as he
falls backwards over the stairs, catches a glimpse of an angel, and hangs
there, suspended, between the dialectic of these two modes with Arthur’s
thundering percussion and churning seas of Michael’s guitar noise beneath him.
It’s really quite something live, I assure you.
Not only did the headliners perform a great show, but their warm-up acts were also great. New Hampshires “Wild Light” showed excellent musicianship as they all swapped keyboard / bass / and guitar duties and all took turns carrying the vocal burden. I even turned to Lauren at some point and asserted that “I was feelin’ it.” I did think that for such a solid and well-rehearsed band their song (ahem) “California on My Mind” was needlessly puerile.
Also opening were “Experimental Aircraft” who did a very nice shoegaze + blips and blurts. A bit like Ride meets Stereolab in parts, but very much with a strong injection of Joy Division throughout.
“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.” — Alexander Pope
A recent Wikipedia article of the day sent along notice that the anniversary of the publication of Newton’s “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” had just past. I thought I would take a look at the original text and see what my substantial investment in Latin education seine me of it. Google Books has a fine scan with the Le Seur commentaries.
I was taking a look at De Mundi Systematae: Liber Tertius and saw several small postulates that were exceedingly brief and nowhere as complicated as the language in the rest of the text.
In philosophia experimentali, propositiones ex phænomenis per inductionem
collectæ, non obstantibus contrariis hypothesibus, pro veris aut accurate aut
quamproxime haberi debent, donec alia occurrerint phænomena, per quae aut
accuratiores reddantur aut exceptionibus obnoxiæ.
My basic 4-semesters-of-Latin Translation
In experimental philosophy, propositions collected from phenomena through an observational process must be held either as true, or as close to it as possible — existing contrary hypotheses notwithstanding — until such time as other phenomena occur by which they [the propositions] may be more accurately given or be found erroneous.
— Regula IV: Regulae Philosophandi: Isaac Newton
The modern might casually assert “No duh,” but this is to give too-short a shrift to the intellectual milieu of the era.
Consider that Newton’s fairly erudite audience — they could read Newtonian Latin, mind you, and that was a relatively small, educated population — lacked sufficient default orientation toward this foundation of scientific reasoning. They lacked it to the extent that Newton had to teach the reader to think scientifically before he could expect him to even consider the revolutionary theories of physics contained earlier in the book. It’s almost like when someone makes a highly contentious blog post and then, to head off the trolls, tries to help the trolls orient themselves so as to minimize unnecessary, follow-up correspondence.
Newton was urging us to eschew magical thinking, at least in the realm of natural philosophy. We should have no allegiance to any model any longer than until the data contravenes the model’s existence. But as a deist, or perhaps a latent alchemist, Newton realized that his laws of motion left him open to procedural complaints from Galiean neo-Platonist critique as well as rationalist ontological complaints from the Scholastics. Curiously, he had to defy both ends of the spectrum and find a middle way that both required the non-visible and non-mechanistic, but which also embraced a neo-Platonic / Galilean model of law forming science.
On top of all that he had the humility to say he was a standing on the shoulders of giants!
I was very excited when Daniel posted the trailer
for “Moon.” It looked like a slow, and elegiac science-fiction movie of the
“2001” or “Solaris” model. It was indeed a movie of this variety.
While SciFi that blows stuff up and has one-liners (looking at you, Will Smith)
is a dime a dozen, one that drives uncomfortable thoughts into your gray matter
and makes you like it is a special type of art.
Unlikely to say: “I gotta get me one of these!”
As you may intuit from the trailer, Sam Bell is a man working on the dark side
of the moon. He is bereft realtime communication and as such can only trade
video mail with his wife and young daughter on Earth. He manages the miner
fleet for Lunar industries, a company who has turned harvested lunar He-3 into
fusion energy that powers Earth industry, cleanly, greenly. His only companion,
such as it is, is a delightfully clunky AI named Gerty who is voiced by the
vaguely condescendingly friendly voice of Kevin Spacey.
One fine day one of the mining vehicles is stuck, so Sam hops in a moon rover,
and roves out to it but accidentally crashes into the miner owing to some
hallucination. He wakes back up with Gerty telling him he had an accident and
is back in the infirmary. He recovers and, against Gerty’s protests, decides to
cruise out on the surface. There he finds a crashed moon rover, just like
his…and therein is a man who looks just like him.
And that’s where things get paranoiac and weird.
The real interesting part is that it’s basically Sam Rockwell playing all these
hallucinations(?) of himself. I really like movies like this where an actor just
has to perform relative to nothing (Cast Away, for example). You really get a sense of what the actor is capable of and the measure of their commitment to the character.
This film will invariably have a short run at select theatres only, so most of you will only have the chance to see it on DVD, I recommend you take that opportunity.
On keyboards in the US, Control-[ is equivalent to ESCAPE, and thus can get you out of insert mode into normal mode in a slightly more reasonable setup than reaching for escape. Besides, if you have the control key where God intended ( on the Caps Lock key ) this is a snap.
During my blogging hiatus towards late April and Early May, I finished my fourth Latin class. During the class we covered the larger parts of Books I and II of the Æneid.
But we did not finish them. In a move that can only be considered arch-nerdly, I am reading the ending of these two on my own. In some ways, with several grand sunk, it seems like a very bad use of my funds to basically let all the knowledge leak out over the summer. On the other hand, couldn’t I be reading something else, something that doesn’t require a dictionary nearby?
Sigh.
So, I bought a 3-pack of those lovely brown-cardboard Moleskine mini-notebooks and am cruising through, picking up where we left off so that I can see what happens.
This is like that time when I was taking French III and we had read the first half of Patrick CAUVIN’s «Monsier Papa». What did I do on my flight to San Jose (that ultimately got me hired by Cisco)? Yep, I checked out the book from the library and read it on the plane.
Getting back into reading the Æneid was a bit of slow going, at first, but things started trucking along eventually and now I’m at a very critical point where Pyrrus encounters old king Priam (things don’t look to be too promising for old king versus son of Achilles).
Lauren, Ryan, and yours truly, sporting pontificatin’ hats. Ryan’s eyes are not moist with joy at being surrounded by Lauren and mine own collective pontificational ratiocinative powers, but because he was peering over a smoking grill on a triple-digit day for my gustatorial comfort.
I forgot to mention that Lauren made some wonderful guacamole for the Leaguestravaganza. En route we realized that there may not be enough tortilla chips (if you have a choice I recommend El Milagro) so we called to confirm that we should grab a bag.
Given that it was 100+ degrees out and guacamole is better chilled, I left lauren in the car as I went in grabbed diet coke, chips, and a few other sundries.
I returned and as I got in the car Lauren remarked: “Wow, you’re fast, you were only gone one song.”
“One song? That must have been one long song.”
“Freebird,” her last word hung in the air as the van Zandt solo wound into its final movement.
Thus it dawned on us a new temporal measure: “The Freebird.” Just like the fictional kropog measure of distance from Gilmore Girls*, we realized we had come up with a valuable measurement.
1 Freebird == 9 minutes, 10 seconds
Now, I was wondering if you could convert a Freebird to the time it takes to consume a Freebird Burrito.
By Canucklibrarian on Flickr
Hm, it might be tough to handle a Freebird in a Freebird.
*A Kropog is a (fictional) unit of distance, named after a man who graduated
from Yale in 1944. Logan’s dorm is 90 Kropogs from Rory’s.
Last night, after yet another wonderful holiday party chez League of Melbotis we went to IHOP for a very late-night dose of very-average fare.
Lauren and I have taken to splitting most meals (cuts down on calories most importantly, and costs as a fringe benefit) so we split the breakfast sampler:
2 eggs
2 bacon strips
2 pork sausage links
2 pieces of ham
n-many hash browns
2 fluffy buttermilk pancakes
Now, I liked all of this meal except the sausage links. So I said to my table of grown-ups:
Seriously, no sexual innuendo and all, but would anyone like my sausage?
Lesson: “Seriously, no sexual innuendo and all” does not mitigate the human urge to snicker. Additionally, it did not alleviate the hideous sausage from my plate either.
