How To ... (2x)

I didn't realize until after the fact that I had read 2 "How To" books in a row:

1. "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism", by Cory Doctorow, 2020, 103 pages, 27k words.
2. "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster", by Bill Gates, 2021, 275 pages, 74k words.

I was going to put them in the same post but I decided that would be disrespectful to both books & authors. Both are important books.

So here comes 2 posts. It's not like it costs me extra. In fact, I should do more, smaller blog posts. RSN, I'm sure.

Wagers

One of my favorite sci-fi authors and futurists, David Brin, has several times in his blog advocated resolving political disputes, or maybe more accurately, calling Bullshit on conservatives, via wagers - "put your money where your mouth is".

A few months ago, I got a new friend on Facebook. He is an excellent guitarist and vocalist, but also a Libertarian (and actually active in the party), Trumpite, and gunophile. And he posts out the wazoo. I attempt to inject an opposing viewpoint, or actually more often, a "Where the hell do you get this stuff???".

It really hasn't gone too badly. I haven't been called a libtard once, although I have been called "fucking stupid" a few times. I did unfriend 1 of his friends who posted a nice "Obama as chimp" meme. Zero tolerance for racism, I was raised with that shit, I hate that it's in my head.

But, for the record, I unfollowed him a couple of weeks ago. Just way too much stupid shit.

So a couple of months ago, just after the Parkland massacre, he posted something about "follow the money" re how can the high school students afford to be protesting their massacre by assault weapons? I trolled "George Soros". He replied, "I bet that you can trace funding for these students back to 1 of Soros' foundations".

OK, the game is afoot, I come back with "How much do you want to bet?". He comes back with "$20". A good number I thought.

But, as always, the devil in the details. In the time it took to establish this framework, he has moved on to dozens of other posts.

1. The burden of proof rests on the person who proposed the (conspiracy) theory, in this case him. That just seems like the scientific method to me.
2. A time limit for providing this proof must be established. I think in general 1-3 months?
3. How is the result adjudicated? I proposed that any data in support of the theory must be verified by snopes.com, politifact.com, or factcheck.org. He agrees to trust politifact.com, but also somewhat drudgereport.com - and absolutely 0 from mainstream media. I'm sorry, but, I trust anything I read in the NY Times or the Washington Post, because, when they get it wrong, they are hugely embarrassed and publish retractions. Vs Fox, who never retracts anything.
   Plus, he never trusts anything that comes from a US government agency, which makes it really hard, because they are probably the main source of real data on most things. WTF, he must distrust all weather reports, which come from the NWS, the NOAA, and the NHC. Wow, too bad, SW Florida needs to get those hurricane reports.
4. If the theorist provides any data in support of their theory, but both parties cannot agree on its validity, then the bet is a push - no one wins.
5. If the theorist provides no data in support of their theory within the timeout period, then they lose the bet.

Is this workable? Or is Brin's suggestion to engage conservatives in wagers something that sounds good in theory, but cannot be made to work in practice?

If it is workable, it sounds like a great opportunity for a website/app to administer these wagers, given that #3 can be resolved - that is the crux of the matter, can the reality-based mainstream news vs the propaganda machine fake news, or vice versa, be resolved? Or are the 2 realities completely disjoint?

Too bad I'm retired. Any takers?

But, just having read "Enlightenment Now" by Steven Pinker, I doubt the efficacy of the whole concept. Pinker posits that belief in any explanation of political facts is about boosting your esteem, your credibility, in your political tribe, and has nothing to do with objective reality. The more outlandish the "fact" asserted by your tribe, the more esteem you gain by backing it up. So does the "let's bet" thing work at all?

And Now For Your Moment Of Zen

Took my 1st bike ride of the year this last Sunday morning. 1h15m 16.3 miles by Little Texas, back in via James and Delaney Ferry. Hills have somehow gotten steeper since last November, #TectonicActivity was tweeted.

I noticed, I really don't get much Zen going when I'm biking. My mind is always all over the place. Occasionally I will tell my mind to focus in and pay attention only to what is around us. But it never lasts long.

One of the coolest things that happens biking is when you get to smell woodsmoke. Millions of years of association of company, food, women flood your brain. Totally hard-wired, nice!

I've always felt like getting a massage I should be able to turn my brain off and just let it dwell in the sensation, but Zen not so much there either. Probably because it's too easy to get some napping in.

Playing music doesn't wind up being Zen either. Say for instance, I am just about done working up "Shaky Ground". One of the drummers at the jam told me that was one of his favorites, so I thought I'd work it up for him. I wind up playing the same lick over and over for the whole song, except for 3 bars on the 4 and 1 on the 5 for the solo. So for something like that, I practice the lick over and over until it is committed to muscle memory, and then start working on singing the lead over it. Interesting, I thought I was ready to do it tomorrow, but tried it tonight and the 2 brains required, 1 for the guitar lick and 1 for the vocals, refused to disengage for the 1st 4 measures of the vocals. So, need to practice a few times more, give the muscle memory a few more reps.

But the point is, it winds up being not very Zen. The only time I think I get Zen playing music is when I'm really clicking on a lead. But, at our jam, I really focus on playing rhythm guitar, singing, and leading the band, which involve enough components that it doesn't lend itself to getting into a Zen groove, and which often lead me to skip taking a lead.

I guess not surprisingly, the most Zen place I currently wind up going is when I get In The Zone writing code. I've been doing it as a full-time job for 40 years. When you get In The Zone, the beautiful, interconnected, white towers of logic out of which you build software become the whole of your existence. You are the logic and the logic is you.

So I guess that's why I still like coding. Getting In The Zone coding is by far my greatest current source of Zen.

Generative Grammars

So basically, all human languages are generative -- which means, there is no limit to the complexity of the statements that can be constructed. For example:

I saw the boy with the telescope who was watching the girl with the binoculars who was watching ... "

And, basically, this made our brains get big, but it is not hard tech.

I have written an interpreter and a compiler with a corresponding pcode machine, both of which are still in production and generating $millions of income. Both of them, it is so cool, when someone gives you logic 10s of times more complex than any you ever imagined, 100s of parentheses, and it just keeps pushing it up onto the stack, and then, it just works!

The Great Man Theory

Took another short bike ride Sunday morning: 19.7 miles, Delaney Ferry to 169 to Keene and back in Keene Rd. Knee feels pretty good most of the time now but occasionally flares up in sharp pain :-( One thing about biking vs walking tho -- walking, you adjust your walk, up to and including limping, trying to avoid the pain. That gets your muscles sore, and your good leg as well. On a bike, you're pretty much constrained in how your leg can move, so this is avoided. "There's no limping on a bicycle". Sounds like a good t-shirt or something.

The Great Man Theory posits that history advances because of the superhuman efforts of Great Men, without whom the masses would flounder rudderless. It is generally promoted by Objectivists, Libertarians, and Conservatives, as a justification for keeping power in the hands of the few rather than in the hands of the many.

I read an article about the making of the movie of Ann Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" -- in which The Great Men get tired of carrying the world on their shoulders and drop out -- and it talked about what a hard time the film-makers had not making the main characters seem like vain, conceited, self-centered, selfish pricks.

Easy to understand their difficulty. The more I learn about this mindset, the more I am repulsed by the self-centered attitudes, the inflated egos, the sense of self-indulgence, self-importance and self-entitlement. Some recent examples:

• The chairman of BP declaring "he wanted his life back" after the gulf oil spill that killed 9 workers. Those men's families might have a slightly more valid claim to wanting lives back than this prick does. I think he did have to miss a yacht race he was supposed to compete in.
  So often we forget the sacrifices of the common workers -- the tens or hundreds who died building the Hoover Dam, or the Empire State Building, or any other of man's great works.
  
• The Tea Party spokesperson who, in defending Michelle Bachmann's incomprehensible claim that "the founding fathers worked ceaselessly from the time of the signing of the constitution to get rid of slavery", stated that "there are many forms of slavery". So here is a presumably wealthy, 21st century white male comparing his having to may more taxes than he would like to an 18th century African, kidnapped, shipped to America in chains, and treated as an animal for his entire life. "Forms of slavery" -- completely insipid, repulsive and disgusting.
  
• And not to be outdone in his arrogance and self-serving behavior, our own oh-so-embarrassing Senator Random Paul, randomly goes on a rant that declares that "if there is universal health care, then doctors will be slaves". Did I mention that he is a doctor? In a specialty where the average annual salary is $163,836? Actually kind of low compared to other specialities. I'm sure your 18th century slave would be very sympathetic to his plight -- imagine, having to take care of patients all the time. Wait, isn't that what doctors are supposed to do? And paid very well to do it?

So do the Great Men have a point? I believe, absolutely not.

In 1997 I had a year working for Pitney Bowes. At one point they had an IP (Intellectual Property) lawyer come in to teach us about the importance of software patents and other forms of IP. I decided to have some fun with the guy, so I spent a few minutes declaiming, according to modern memetic theory:

1. That as replicators, memes were a form of life.
   
2. That they chose human brains as their habitat and breeding grounds was immaterial.
   
3. That I chose not to enslave this newly-discovered life form with strictures like patents and DRM.
   
4. "Free the memes!"

Heh heh heh. I definitely got some nut job points from that guy.

But, really it is not that far off. If you look back through history, there are countless cases of simultaneous invention:

• Newton and Leibnitz simultaneously developing The Calculus.
  
• Darwin and Wallace both formulating Evolution at around the same time.
  
• From the wikipedia article on Marconi, "the inventor of the radio": "There was controversy whether his contribution was sufficient to deserve patent protection, or if his devices were too close to the original ones developed by Hertz, Popov, Branley, Tesla, and Lodge to be patentable."
  
• The great American inventor Edison was constantly trying to outdo his great rival Tesla.

The memes circulate through all our brains, and the more memes you let circulate, and the bigger your brain is, the more chance that the memes will breed and a new idea will be born. But the same memes are shared by a multitude of minds, so the parallel development of new memes it not at all surprising.

So are their great men, who have great ideas, and create great theories, or build great companies? Yes, there are. But are there irreplacable Great Men? No, there aren't. If they decided to opt out, the forces of memetics and history would push someone else into the role. And if that person didn't handle it quite as well, then history might be a little different, for the worse. But if that other person handled it better, then history might be a little different, for the better.

The other piece of this rant is that, modern software patent law is awful. The patent office has had no clue re prior art or obviousness. I have been involved in two software patent lawsuits. In one the patent was violated by the Unix operating system, which predated the patent by 25 years. In both, if I took a 2nd year computer science student and told them, "I need a system to accomplish X", they would have generated a system pretty much identical to what was patented. So how then is it that the patent is not deemed "obvious"?

The software patent situation is getting worse and worse, constricting the industry, and stifling innovation. And it doesn't look like anyone is going to try and do anything about it anytime soon. After all, what percentage of our lawmakers are lawyers, who make big bucks ($ millions on the average software patent lawsuit) on this system?

The iPad is Here, the iPad is Here!

So, UPS dropped off an iPad here yesterday. I had ordered the cheapest one: 16GB, Wifi only, on the 1st day you could. I thought they started at $400, oops, $500. Oh well. Two reasons for ordering:

1. For a couple of years, I have been wanting a tablet computer that I hold in my hands and sit in a comfy chair and surf the web, read RSS feeds, read Web comics, maybe read eBooks. The iPad seemed to be just that.
2. My wife loves her iPhone. She has hated every other computer, including a mac, that the has ever had. She reads books on it, and browses the web for hours on it. An iPad seemed like a great idea for her as well.

So, it came, I hooked it up to my PC. My idea is this is a shared resource that lives in the family room -- an electronic magazine on the coffee table. I put all my pictures on it, and 7 kids movies. BTW, two features that I hadn't heard about:

1. a button that locks the screen orientation, I would presume for lying on your side and reading in bed.
2. a soft button next to the "slide to unlock" that makes it a digital picture frame. Just as the iPhone replaced many devices (it's a flashlight! it's a metronome! it's a guitar tuner! ...), you wonder what devices the iPad will replace.

So the movies and pix took about 2/3 of the 16GB. No music, I decided, Pandora and web only. Then downloaded apps -- besides the top 50 paid and free in the app store this link had some good suggestions. So far, less than two screens of apps, with the personal ones (mail, notes, contacts and calendar) moved to a (hopefully unused) third screen.

The apps so far:

• the free iBooks reader from Apple. I like this much better than the kindle. The contrast is so much better, and the larger size I also like much better. They give you one sample book, "Winnie the Pooh". The color illustrations are great. In portrait mode you read a single page, in landscape, two pages (the book is open). Tap the screen to get controls at the top for Table of Contents, and changing contrast, font size and font face, and a slider at the bottom for jumping to any page. But what I really liked was: you double tap a word, you get choices: dictionary gives you a dictionary entry; bookmark creates a bookmark there, which then shows up with the TOC; and Search will find all occurrences of the word in the book, or will search google or wikipedia! What a way to read non-fiction or scientific material, a true hyperbook.
• ABC player (free) to go with YouTube. Recent series episodes with limited commercials. I think everyone's fingers are crossed for Hulu to show up.
• Nat Geo World Atlas ($2) to go with Maps. Also free Weather Channel and WeatherBug. Maps look great.
• USA Today, NPR, NY Times Editors choice, Bloomberg financial app -- all free. Readers are very clear and easy to read. The Bloomberg app is beautiful.
• wikipanion, epicurious (recipes), pandora, free books (23,000 classics -- the reader is not near as nice as iBooks, no reason why it couldn't be), dragon dictation -- all free. Wolfram Alpha 1.99, Voice recorder 0.99.
• The Elements, my most expensive purchase at $13.99. An interactive coffee table book on the periodic table, with two pages per element. Tons of pictures and video, really cool.
• IMDb movie database; Adobe ideas and another free Draw program; all free.
• A bunch of games, $9.99 to free: crosswords, scrabble, sudoku, mahjong, labyrinth, magic piano. They all look great.
• A marvel comics reader (free) - guilty as charged.

I spent a total of $45 on apps.

Overall, viewing content on this thing is great. The downsides:

• it is definitely a little heavy. My left hand cramped a few times holding it yesterday.
• the typing is not great (I am a touch typist). In portrait mode, I can type OK with my thumbs like I do on the iPhone -- a person with smaller hands could not. In landscape, I was kind of touch typing the right hand keys and hunt and pecking the left hand keys with my right hand. After I went back to my iPhone, it was like "Wow, it's so light! And so easy to hold! And so much easier to type!". So, iPad is much better for reading, if you want to do serious input I would figure on getting the bluetooth keypad. I saw one review with the guy complaining how anti-web 2.0 -- the web of participation -- the iPad was, because input is hard.

All in all, tho, I think it will fill the roles that I bought it for. I think I probably won't use it much. (I might have used it to surf, read RSS, and do FB while a basketball game was on, but b-ball season is over :-<) My wife seems to definitely like it for web access from the family room. And, we actually had some kids in the house recently, I think it has stuff to keep kids occupied for a while. I've invited my older children (and spouse) to visit in the next month or so to see what apps (particularly games) they would add, because there are introductory low prices on stuff now that may go up later.

I will advise if it does wind up just being a paper weight.

Phew

Seems to have cooled off here. Grilled out this evening, cooked salmon on one of the cedar planks my youngest got me for my birthday. Had 2 pieces from a half salmon that wouldn't fit on the plank that I cooked directly on the grill like normal (fresh squeezed lemon juice and dill -- but Kroger was out of fresh dill, I had to use dried dill weed!). The normal was good as usual, some brown on the outside, and you could taste some black -- the good stuff. The salmon off the plank literally melted in your mouth and tasted wonderful -- both were excellent, damn cooking is fun!

Currently listening Spacehog's first, "Resident Alien", which went gold in 1995. WRFL played "In The Meantime" the other morning, I called the DJ to ask what that wonderfully catchy tune I had not heard in years was, went and got the album thereafter. They had 2 more albums before they broke up, and the lead singer married Liv Tyler, not sure I will check them out -- but nice that it's measurable how much more there is to exhaust Spacehog.

Went in to work for 5 hours today, I've been refactoring since 8/2, need to get something done ... Was thinking about working Monday (Labor Day), think I will not. My wife is getting off of 3rd shift -- and going to Cincinatti tomorrow with one of her girlfriends. But, I have ribeyes to cook tomorrow, and a chicken for Monday. Damn, cooking is fun!

Technology Review last month had a very upbeat article from their environmental columnist, re, aquaculture in the oceans has great potential to produce totally mass quantities of food (sushi!). This could overcome "the tragedy of the commons" (blogged here) that threatens the fish harvests of the world's oceans.

Last time I visited my older brother in Maine, he was telling me that Maine lobster harvests are at all time highs, and show no problem in increasing. The main food of Maine lobsters is ... lobster bait, from the lobster traps. The traps are constructed such that small lobsters get in and out without problem. Some larger, but undersized, lobsters will get caught in the traps, but they are thrown back by the lobstermen. So Maine lobsters are an example of successful aquaculture. Hopefully many more will follow.

Took a break to put the ribeyes on to marinate overnight. Someone told me you should never marinade for more than 30 minutes -- yeah, right. Last month I grilled for 30 (the cookout that got busted), cooked 20 ribeyes that had marinated overnight. My grill fit the 1st 16, set it on high, put them all on, opened after 3 minutes, "show me fire" -- and fire there was. I ate one of them, the 1st bite I put in my mouth melted there, "ohmigod" I said. Damn, cooking is fun!

My last post, I was so proud of "proprioceptive illusion" -- I thought I had made the concept up, I am so cool -- but then, google it, there are numbers of proprioceptive illusions being researched. I am such a loser -- old and slow :-(

A couple of months ago, I was reading in one of the local weekly newspapers ("Southsider" I think) about someone in Lexington publishing a science fiction digest. I read it, and saw the guy's name, and thought "Wait a minute -- he works at Exstream!". And sure enough, Jason Sizemore, the editor of Apex Digest, was a buildmaster at Exstream. Apparently he had also worked at RenLar in the past. He quit last month to do the magazine full-time. He gave me a sample issue, the quality of the stories was very good. As you would expect, some simplistic stuff ("no one ever expects the spanish inquisition"), but mostly enjoyable. Their big mainstream author for the issue was Kevin J. Anderson, of the Dune sequels and the interminable "seven suns" series I am trapped into reading. This guy is such a hack, the intro to the story said he produces 750K words of literature a year -- I believe it, and I am sure that it all aspires to the same high level of triteness. The guy needs to just focus on writing bodice-rippers, or Anne Rice vampire novels ...

Aside from that tho, Apex Digest was very readable, and had a continued story that made me go on and buy a subscription -- 4 issues/year, $20.

After a month off from heat/vacation, biked last Sunday with the wife, 20.5 miles in 1h50m, 1 stop. Walked the dog this morning, will bike Monday.

And The Winner Is ...

Science Fiction, tagged in 54/106 blog posts. A close second was Music, with 49 references. A sizeable drop to a tie for 3rd/4th: antitheism and cognitive science with 34. Rounding out the top 5: evolution with 29.

So as was doing the tagging, I was reminded of the project I had my boys working on in 2000, as the .com bubble was bursting and we had no paying projects: an intelligent online diary. It would parse your entries into "thoughts" and create a knowledge base of them. A product called I thought "Thought-Tracker" was doing some of it, googling it now gives hits to something that looks completely different, an open-source project more web-based. One of those guys wound up later getting a job at BBN based on references to natural language processing (NLP) in his resume which were from his work on this project. The same guy was responsible for the entry UI, and thinks he is totally fucking hilarious when he gives me a demonstration of Personal Information Management Program (PIMP).

Anyway, thoughts on what I would like blogger to be able to do re tagging:

• Music was way ahead until I finished tagging the real old entries. So a graph of # of tag references per time period would be interesting. It would let one know how their interests had changed over the life of the blog?
• Seemed like certain topics came in clusters. It would be nice to be able to generate correlation coefficients for all pairs of tags and report on those that are indeed correlated.
• It would be nice if it would auto-tag all proper nouns.
• And, upon 1st reference to a proper noun, say Charles Stross, it could google for it and present a list of links, such that all references use that link, say to Charles' web site.
• Or, it could always check wikipedia (or your profile-specified choice) for the proper noun and make the default link.
• Maybe have two levels of tags, abstract (what I entered) and concrete (for the proper nouns)?

Biked 31 miles today in 2h40m, 2 breaks, from 9:40a to 12:20. Walked yesterday morning from 9:30a to 10:30. Temperature was only mid-80's both times, but I guess it was the humidity making it brutally muggy.

Whur U B?

Once more into the breach ...

November 17 was a bad day. I caught a nasty cold that lasted over 3 weeks. I only worked 12 hours the week of thanksgiving. I had to quit smoking for a few days to get rid of the background smoker's cough. Finally seem to be mostly well, everywhere you went people were hacking and coughing.

But the real Bad Day thing came when my youngest took my classical guitar off of the 3-way stand to play me a new song she had written (yay!). 5 seconds later, stand fell over onto the guitar still on it -- my 1961 Gibson Les Paul Jr. The nut hit the floor and the head shattered. The head had been broken off in the middle in 1969 (a frat brother sat on it) and I'd epoxied it -- and put a bolt through it. I had not done a lot of carpentry at that point of my life, so I did not know the love that wood has for glue, the bolt was a bad idea. Still, the guitar played well for 35 years after that.

Anyway, it is now at RS GuitarWorks, where by all accounts it will be restored to be better than new. Still, a definite blow to the psyche. I have owned the guitar since I was 14. I found out a couple of months that 1961 was the first year that Gibson made the SG body -- so this was an ur-SG. It was unbelievable how dry the wood in the head was -- but, 45 years old, not exactly inexplicable.

Did get my pedal steel back shortly after that, so I've been playing that a lot. It sounds pretty decent. I took it out to the Hideaway Lounge last Tuesday. Not sure how that went. My musical patroness Patty Butcher seems to be somewhat disenamoured of me.

Also 2 weeks ago bought a 1978 blond Telecaster. I had a chance to buy a blond telecaster in 1967 for $100 and didn't have the $100. I've always wanted one, so now I finally have one. Heavier than I would like (canadian 1st-growth ash body), but great sound.

The time I was sick, I kind of got television watching. I was surprised that I wasn't just tired, achy, etc, but that it also seemed like my will to do much of anything was totally sapped. So, watch old movies, veg, seemed about right.

But I did read a lot, and did not make it onto the non-fiction stack. RSN. The stuff I read seemed to have a real magical realism theme to it.

• "Three Days to Never" by Tim Powers. Einstein's great-grandchildren vs mossad vs a secret mystical society vying for control of Einstein's time machine. Powers really has a way of making this stuff work. 4 stars.
• "Strange Iteneraries", a collection of Tim Powers sparse short fiction. Nice reading, 4 stars.
• "Eternity Road", by Jack McDevitt. Instead of astroarcheology of lost alien civilations, we have a post-apocalyptic treasure hunt on earth. Never quite sucked me in for some reason, 3 stars.
• "Anansi Boys", by Neal Gaiman. An OK read, but didn't do much for me. Give me Tim Powers for magical realism any time. And, unlike "American Gods", this one did not have Odin and Loki in it. 3 stars.
• "Enchantment", by Orson Scott Card (1999), which had been on my shelf for a while. Very pleasant read, "my mom is sleeping beauty", 3 stars.
• "A Feast of Crows", by George R.R. Martin, the 4th of this series. Not nearly as lively as the prior 3 -- 300-400 pages in before anyone is killed. He may have exceeded the allowable thread limit. 1100 pages and you feel like not much really happened??? 3 stars.
• "The Jennifer Morgue", by Charles Stross. The first story in this world by Stross was "The Atrocity Archives", which was Dilbert meets H.P.Lovecraft. This one is Dilbert meets H.P.Lovecraft meets James Bond. LOL in several places, and, weird, the middle half is set on St. Martin (6 weeks off). Stross now has 4 separate worlds running for his stories, go Charles! 4 stars.

Much new music as well:

• Beck, "The Information". Good tunes, except for 10 odd minutes at the end 3 stars.
• Ben Folds, "supersunnyspeedygraphic". The reigning smartass of pop music. 4 stars.
• The inimitable Ben Lacy, "One Track Mind". Finally got a paypal account, so I bought Ben's CD. 3.5 stars.
• "The Runners Four", by Deerhoof. Very odd stuff, very interesting, I almost reclassified from "Alternative & Punk" to "Unclassifiable". 3.5 stars.
• "Music for Our Lady Queen of the Angels", by Garth Hudson. Airy, orchestral stuff by The Band's musical genius, won't get too many listens 2.5 stars.
• Three CDs by Harmonica Red. I've played with Red a few times, he's an unbelievable harp player. The 1st CD, "Harmonica Red Vol I" (1987) I liked best, very listenable. 3 stars overall.
• "Chaos and Creation in the Backyard", Paul McCartney. My youngest wanted me to get this. A few of the type of tunes that remind you that Paul was half of one of the greatest songwriting duos of the 20th century. 3 stars.
• "The Eraser", Thom Yorke (Radiohead). Nice solo effort, 4 stars.
• "Fever to Tell", the Yeah-Yeah-Yeahs. A couple of real nice tunes, my kids tell me they're mostly a live band. 3 stars.

Funny to me lately is the fact that the most fun I've been having is at work. Writing lots of fun stuff on our paradigm-shifting new product. What a geek, oh well. Been off this week, sleeping late, all four kids were back home (plus the lovely daughter-in-law), visited with my sibs Wed and Thurs, very relaxing. But, oh boy, back to the code next week.

The Democratic success in the elections and the seeming disgust that the entire US seems to be pretty much developing for W seem to have turned off my antitheism ranting and raving valve. Seem to be loathe to get back onto the non-fiction stack, though I think I will read Minsky's new book soon. Maybe finally giving up on messianism, my (ever-growing) gut is telling me, too old, time to just relax and enjoy what's left of my life. Thinking about teminating this exercise as well. But, no, I'll keep it up, worthwhile for everyone I think to have a medium to capture some of their thoughts.

Technical Difficulties and a Status Report

Work, work, work. I was working Saturday and made the same logic error three times and took 15 minutes of debugging to find it each time -- pretty lame. Getting tired, I've written so much code in the last few months I think that I am in a cache overflow situation, and it's definitely slowing me down. The worst should be over soon.

Re technical difficulties, I have had a report from one of my devoted readers -- devoted because he always calls me by my honorific, "Dumbass" -- that the archives are unavailable. I have found out this is true then you access the blog via the Atom feed. I sent an e-mail to support@blogspot.com with this info, to have it returned as undeliverable 4 days later. So, for now, please access the archives by going to the main blog link: http://portraitofthedumbass.blogspot.com/ -- they are accessible from there.

I received an outpouring of support for The Mission. Many submissions of God humor.

First from my brother the author:

1. Did you hear about the dyslexic agnostic? He didn't understand all the fuss about whether or not dog really exists.

Q. Why isn't God circumcised?
A. Because he doesn't have a dick.

Very nice. And, from his daughter, also a writer:

Q. What do you call God's crap?
A. Holy shit!

A good first effort! From my baby sister:

God, Santa, and the Easter Bunny walk into a bar ...

This is very promising. I have a background job running to finish this one.

From my friend Patrick, a line of t-shirts:

One idea I had was to do a series of t-shirts, black with white letters with funny anti-religious statements, sort of vaguely based on that ole fuckwitted billboard:

We need to talk.
-- God

So along those lines, something like:

God?
Is that the best you can come up with?

God?
Just ignore Him; He'll go away.

God?
You've gotta be fucking kidding me.

We need to talk.
-- Nietzsche

And so forth. I think they would be sorta funny t-shirts, if "God?" or whatever was printed in big letters, and the "punch line" were printed a little smaller. And a t-shirt from his lovely, intelligent and charming wife:

Got Jesus?
They make a pill for that now.

Patrick also sends a link to George Carlin on God. Carlin has had some great rants here, clearly a good source for The Mission.

Finally, a reader points out:

Unfortunately, the world's funniest joke has already been created, and it does more than purge religion -- it's fatal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IysnS5wO60g

Once again thanks to all for the tremendous support for The Mission. I still need to find a static web site at which to distill The Work.

Finally off the magazine stack. Reading the new The Year's Best Science Fiction, woo-haa!

Hot Blog

Damn, it's been hot here, as I guess it is in most of the US. Finally cooled off a little Friday. I haven't biked in 3 weeks (slept til 11:15 last Sunday ?!?!?), did take a walk with my wife this morning.

Worked 11-6:30 yesterday (Saturday). Entering one of those periods generating a new product where I will be really cranking for the next few months. New product is pretty exciting stuff, could be slightly revolutionary.

Music goes well. My playing and singing are pretty good, and I am really surprised at how my ear is improving. I can hear songs in or out of my head and figure out the chords without a guitar a lot of the time now -- I never used to be able to do that. My youngest has sung 3 times now, generally well received. She did two of the Corinne Bailey Rae songs, "Like a Star" and "Another Rainy Day". The former worked better than the latter -- the 6/8 time there threw the drummer off. I think I am about full of the Corinne Bailey Rae album, I have been really preaching it for weeks now.

I did play downtown with "The Patty Butcher 4th of July Blues All-Stars" on the 4th. 3 guitars, sang lead on "Killing Floor", played 1.5 hours before getting rained out. Here's the proof:

I wore the "Liberal" t-shirt to offset the USA/flag hat that I had been wearing. The other guitarists are the most excellent Dale Dickens to my right, and Max Corona with the "B92" t-shirt on (he's a DJ there).

Also played a private party with "The Patty Butcher Blues Review" on 7/22. 4 sets from 8:30 to 1:00a. Went pretty well, I only hit 2 bad notes all night, got to sleep by 3:00, wasn't particularly a zombie the next day. Two paying gigs, who'da thunk it? I'm official now ...

Read a very good SF by a new author, John Scalzi's "Old Man's War". 70 year olds join the interplanetary marines in exchange for new, manufactured super bodies. As an aging baby boomer, I can definitely identify with that. I'm on to the magazine stack now, hoping to clear it this week before we vacate through New York, Maine, Boston, Connecticut, and NYC.

Blah, blah, blah

What more can I say? Just finished "Code Reading" by Diomidis Spinellis. This book got good reviews, somewhat disappointing. Probably a good review for a young developer. I was reading it as one of my Q1 goals, I'm going to see if I can not get "Read and present a development book" the next quarter. I think about work too much as it is, and reading a development book for the last 3 weeks definitely didn't help.

I got a new position at the start of the year, and it has been working out well. For 5 years I was VP of Software Development. I started with development, QA, information development (tech writers), and IT, had 25 reports at the peak, got down to just having development, which grew to 17 direct and 3 indirect reports. I am now Executive Software Architect -- an official loose cannon, no one reporting to me. I am back in the code 70-80% of the time, doing the systems rationalizer thing, refactoring, modularizing and cleaning up dependencies. But, the code seems to really have an affinity for my brain -- likes to get in there and take over.

Got a new guitar amp -- a Fender Blues Jr. Took 2 tries, 1st one came in with inoperative reverb, 2nd one works great. Very nice sound, and 1/3 the weight of my Super Reverb, have amp will travel.

But, American Legion Monday Blues Jam is defunct, the volume was interfering with the bingo upstairs -- no joke, damn philistines. Lindsey Olive and some other guys put together a Wednesday jam at the former Lynagh's on Woodland, now "The Good Time Lounge" I think. I went to the 1st one last week, a ton of people, only got to play a couple of songs. Skipped this week, my wife works 2nd shift on Thursday, so Wednesday night is a slightly virtual Friday (she works so much you have to take what you can get). I'll go back this week tho, try to make some contacts for people to play with.

I was going to mention re Dennett's "Breaking the Spell" that he trots out the "brights" name for non-religious people. This came out in the secular humanist movement about a year ago, a term for rational, secular thinkers without the negative connotations of atheist. "Brights" totally doesn't work for me. I tell people that I am proud to be a flaming atheist, and I will continue to do so.

Still haven't decided how to move ahead after basically concluding that the human mind, language, and music have all evolved by sexual selection. Not sure where to go now. I have been thinking for retirement I would look for an open source AI project to work on. I should get in touch with the young guy who worked for me who was doing some interesting natural language stuff. I think my point is, I think I may have learned as much as there is to learn about mind at the high levels, may as well just start trying to build one.

My wife and I hadn't seen any movies for a while, so we binged a little. First saw "The Constant Gardener", a little to british; then "Flightplan", what a totally contrived plot; then "Redeye", the other airplane movie, worked better than Flightplan and came in at 75 minutes (movies are less disappointing when they're short). Saw "Syriana", re, US foreign policy sucks, a little dry and slow but well done, then "Lord of War", re, US foreign policy sucks. The movie we liked best was "Four Brothers" -- unpretentious, the guys came across as brothers, and a great sound track.

Cut and Paste Culture

Biked only from 9 to 11 yesterday morning, 28 miles, a little faster than usual -- which I would say indicates that I am normally dragging the 3rd hour when I bike 3 hrs. Got back before the heat got too brutal. High tomorrow is supposed to be 98. No biking last weekend, rain from here to Owensboro.

Finished Dan Simmons' "Olympos" yesterday. He writes so well. I think I read in the preface to Lattimer's translation of "The Iliad" (or in TOOCITBOTBM) that the stock descriptions of the characters in Homer were normally used to fill out the line of iambic pentameter. Hence, "the fleet-footed mankiller Achilles" or "Hera of the white arms". Simmons is all over that.

Re our title, "Ilium/Olympos" does wind up being, "consciousness is a quantum standing wave" (glad that the cyborgs in the story raspberry that), so all fictional creation creates alternative universes. So, feel free to reuse other characters! Wired had an article on cut and paste culture, sampling, etc. But, if it's all just memes breeding in our heads, I find it much more appealing when a new life form is created, rather than a chimera of other pieces. Like in Simmons "Hyperion", the Shrike, who Simmons created earlier in a short story, became a new thing -- yes, I'm sure derived from many other things, but still representing a new synthesis.

Maybe it's the volume of culture currently being emitted that forces and encourages cut & paste. Seems like that puts us in a positive feedback loop -- sampling the samplers.

I guess it's like the "build vs. buy" decision in developing software. It's been supplemented by a 3rd option, google for the code you need -- more a flavor of "build" than "buy"? Still, commercial software isn't culture. It is creativity targeted to meet a business need / use cases.

So, maybe the cut & paste stuff is culture, but I think that it ain't art, except in the cases where someone comes up with a whole new way to do it. I think that's what my oldest daughter the artist would say anyway.

This makes me think of a short story by Bruce Sterling where AI does everything and all humans are artists. Cut & paste certainly makes that future easier. I remember my kids taking great pains to make up playlists of songs for various occasions, making sure they had just the right songs in just the right order for the desired mood. Same thing for photo albums or collages. Definitely a lot of creativity going on there, but not something I would ever think of doing -- I set my iTunes smart playlists on Shuffle so I can play "name that tune". And, it totally escapes me why anyone would agonize over making sure they have exactly the right ring tones on their cell phone. Definitely a generational thing, the dumbass (me) is definitely an old man, Dorian Gray musical interests aside ;->

Three Day Weekend

Man, I was ready for the time off. It was funny, I was interviewing a guy on the phone Friday evening, I was asking him did he want to stay technical or did he want to be a manager? He replied, all the developers he knew who had moved into management were totally bored and frustrated, so he thought he would stay technical. Amen, brother! 100 e-mails a day, with conference calls, meetings, planning documents, is just so damn boring. I miss softwareland so much. You lose yourself so completely in the code, it is so zen. It's definitely too bad that senior management pays so much more :-(

Finally read a Charles Stross novel that was totally up to the potential of his short stories, "The Atrocity Archives". It's short, only 180 pages, with another 60 page piece with the same characters following. It's basically Dilbert meets H.P. Lovecraft. The portrayal of corporate life is so over the top, it is a great read, but pretty geeky. Man, the introduction to this said that after years of trying, his books are all getting published now, it appears to be definitely true. I have another new one of his on the shelf, just went to Amazon, there is another new novel of his out and another coming in July.

Downloaded the new Wallflowers, "Rebel, Sweetheart". Very listenable, 3 stars. Listening to "Shaman", by Carlos Santana, as I write. The followup, in the same format, to the excellent "Supernatural". I had heard/read it wasn't as good, but I am enjoying it a lot, probably 4 stars.

Blogged a while ago about the uniqueness of oxygen in the scheme of life. Last month's Scientific American had an article on suspended animation that said that in the pre-oxygen years, H2S, hydrogen sulphide, took the place of oxygen. H2S seems like it would take the place of water, but I guess not. Anyway, H2S seems to induce a hibernation state in lab animals ...

Now Returning to the Blog in Progress

Apparently I have been in somewhat of a state of mental torpitude. What's new? Not a hell of a lot. Two family items:

1. My youngest daughter sent me 4 songs she wrote and performed last spring. I was shocked by the quality of the songs -- definitely commercial value. And, for being a crappy guitar player, some of the guitar parts were very tasty. So, I have been after her to come up with a CD full of material, and she has: 11 full-length tracks, plus a short intro and extro. So, I've been burning copies like crazy, sending to everyone we know vaguely connected with music. Need to find a producer, decide whether to go at it as a solo chick singer/songwriter, or to get a band behind her. Meanwhile, her guitar playing continues to improve, she's singing at open mics, and cranking out 1-2 new songs a month.
2. My son was married on 9/13/4, my wife and my and my in-laws anniversary, in Niagara Falls. They were just going to do it by themselves, they were prevailed upon to allow us to attend, so my wife, 3 daughters and I drove in. They were married in the Minolta Tower with Horseshoe Falls in the background, nice minister from Ghana with a great voice who didn't mention a diety once, but instead talked about lots of nice humanistic values that would help build a successful marriage. Very nice.

Reading-wise, read the 2nd book by Richard K. Morgan, "Broken Angels". If his 1st book was "Chinatown", this one was "Aliens". The marines go in. I liked the cheap detective better, but this still a good read.

Also read Kim Stanley Robinson's newest, "Forty Signs of Rain". A good read, at least 2 sequels coming. I like that one of the main characters is a sociobiologist, who's always thinking how our savannah-raised primate minds just aren't equipped for modern life.

I got that one from my friend David, whom we visited Labor Day weekend. David is tres conservative politically, describing the book as something to make tree-hugging, global-warming believing types happy. The book raises the point, which I totally agree with, that the pseudo-science of conservatives/republicans is basically total crap. It is the main thing that pisses me off with the christians, that they won't leave science alone.

• BTW, I ordered a Toyota Prius. Due in 5/1/5?!?!?

We also had a discussion on Iraq. His read: no WMD, but Saddam was a bad guy and realpolitik dictated that we needed many bases in the mideast, preferably in an oil-rich country, to keep the oil flowing. So, I guess this means that Americans are willing to trade their children's lives for their right to drive SUVs. Sigh. Conservative politics is depressing.

Also read, mostly on the drive to Niagara Falls, "Red Thunder" by John Varley, one of SFs great authors, particularly 25 years ago with "The Ophiuchi Hotline" and his short story collections (I didn't like the Titan/Wizard/Demon trilogy nearly as much as some of my friends did.) A fun read, 4 teenagers hookup with a defrocked astronaut and his idiot savant Einstein cousin, build their own spaceship, and beat the Chinese to Mars.

Also read the 2nd book of Walter Jon Williams space opera "The Sundering: Dread Empires Fall". This makes 3 mediocre space opera series I am reading: this; Kevin J. Anderson's "Saga of the Seven Suns" series (2 down); and the Dune Butlerian Jihad series (2 down). Plus the George R. R. Martin "Song of Fire and Ice" fantasies. The last is actually pretty good, the others make me wonder ...

My kids loved "The Neverending Story" movie. We bought the book, a cool hardcover that had the stuff in the real world printed in red and the stuff in Fantasia in green (or visa versa). The 2nd half of the book (after the movie), dealt with how Bastian's using his self/fantasies to power Fantasia gradually lead to him being "used up" (turned into a sand statue, I believe). Kind of makes me wonder, have I done the same thing with my life, with all the time spent in the world of books instead of reality. Well, definitely too late to do much about it now.

Also read a short book by Neal Stephenson, "In the Begining Was the Command Line". A cute history of computing since the onset of the PC. He also mentions our savannah-raised brains' difficulty in coping with the modern world, with GUIs (graphical user interfaces) as a technique of helping us deal with the complications of modern systems -- at the trade off of relinquishing the power of the command line. A cute read, not sure if you have to be a computer geek or not to appreciate it.

Have some new CDs, need to listen more before I comment. Best movie I have seen lately was "Kill Bill, Vol II". Quelle art film! That thing is so over the top, you can't help but belly-laugh. "Hellboy" was disappointing. Kind of like "Ghostbusters" but not very funny.

Enough for now -- I've got a Gregory Benford from the library to read, better get to it. Or, maybe I'll try to google some record producers for Christie instead.

Phenotropic Computing

I've been thinking about this -- approximate "surface-based" interfaces. Intuitively, it seems like you would want it to work like molecular receptors, 3-d lock and key fashion. That seems hard to model in any current computer methodologies.

In terms of what's out there now, it seems like two software agents trying to communicate would 1st have to negotiate ontologies -- i.e., do we both speak the same language or know about the same things such that we have a topic of communication. W3C has published their ontology language for the semantic web: OWL, the Web Ontology Language, presumably everybody would speak that. Clearly easiest would be exact ontology match. If not, maybe a subset ontology matcher?

Speaking of agents, haven't seen much press on intelligent agents lately ...

So, what would these agents be, a new flavor of Web Service? If so, then we probably need PWSDL -- Phenotropic Web Service Description Language. Seems like it would not look like WSDL, with its "send me this, I will give you this". Rather, it seems like it would be more of a language syntax type thing. Simplest sentence: verb noun, both pulled from the ontology, such as "Create Object" or "Fetch Object". Rather than an input argument list like WSDL, you would instead populate the verb and noun with appropriate properties, has-a instances, etc.

Presumably your organic behavior would come from the subset ontology matcher, and you would also want synonym matching on the syntax elements, and defaults on everything. I wonder if this winds up being stuff you can do with XPATH or XQUERY. I'm not up on either of these, nor on XSLT -- the ugliest programming language since RPG. I guess tho, that the XML-based stuff is ugly because it is very LCD. Kind of like LISP as Lots of Stupid Insipid Parenthesis, maybe XML as eXtremely Many Left-angle-brackets.

I also wonder if, analagous to the cell incorporating mitochondria and spirochetes, you could have services that grew by ingesting unknown ontologies. Sounds like it'd be lots of fun to code.

Had an interesting night Friday. We have a QA person who is in his mid-50's and Japanese. He came to the US 10 years ago to study vibrophone under Gary Burton at the Berklee School of Music in Boston. He and his wife bought a house and had an open house. I took my guitar to play. The other musician there was a French-Canadian support person who played keyboards -- but all show tunes, 50's standards, etc. A couple of times the Japanese gentlemen and I were getting a jam going on a tasty riff, then from the piano would some "Volare". A little frustrating.

The best part was some world class cognitive dissonance. There was a QA person there, Chinese from Beijing in her mid-30s, in the US 10 years. She had a beautiful, clear soprano -- and beautifully sang 19th century and earlier American standards -- "Red River Valley", "Beautiful Dreamer", "Yankee Doodle Dandy" -- in Chinese ?!?!? She said they were popular in China when she was growing up ?!?!?

Then, my 21 year old baby daughter was having a party that we were invited to go to. So we took the Chinese woman and her husband and 6 year old son and another friend with us. "Invasion of the Parents". It was kind of fun.

A Little Night Music

Oy ve, I keep thinking I'm not going to do this anymore, but I started The Great Refactoring of '04 on March 12 -- basically converting 1 million lines of code from a 2-tier to a 3-tier architecture. So, proceeded to work, with the exception of a Saturday afternoon when I went back to the old family homestead to divvy up stuff before the house was sold, 24 12-hour days. The code totally took over my mind. I think I was left with about 10% of my brain to run my personality, so I dare say I was even more charming than usual. I was working til 7:30, coming home, having 3-4 beers or glasses of wine to shut myself down enough to sleep, going to sleep at 10 thinking about the code, waking up at 4-6 am thinking about the code. The record was when I got into the office at 5:15am one morning and worked til 7 in the evening. One other developer who's worked with me at two other companies was there 3 straight weekends as well. The last weekend, we drafted 3 other developers and slogged away, without a source libriarian (barbarism!). Anyway, mostly done, all but one program linking, painful but it had to be done. Glad I was there to do it, I do believe I am one of the world's great software rewrite men.

So, I've been attempting to regain my humanity for the last two weeks. Of course, the best way to start is with some good SF. I reread for the 1st time "Distraction" by Bruce Sterling. This is a great book. The ending, where the female protagonist who now has a bicameral mind teaches herself to focus on a different thing with each eye, and her bicameral boyfriend says, "That is so cool -- do it again." -- I don't know, a great moment modern science fiction.

My son and his girlfriend were down from Indianapolis and spend Thursday and Friday night here. Friday night we went out to Tomo's with my youngest daughter and her boyfriend and did some serious damage to mass quantities of sushi. Ran into some old soccer friends there, their youngest's 18th birthday -- unbelievable. My son and his girlfriend hadn't seen "Kill Bill, Vol I", so we borrowed a copy from the boyfriend's roommate and watched it. What an art film! I am not that big a Tarentino fan (he wants to be Elmore Leonard so badly), but this movie definitely has its momemts.

My youngest daughter had initiated a memetic first strike on me earlier in the day when she called me and started whistling "Twisted Nerve" from the movie. Interesting google info, written in 1968 by Bernard Herrmann (1901-1975), known for doing the scores to Hitchcock movies, including Psycho. Damn, what a catchy tune, you can't get it out of your head. My son and I were taking turns inflicting it on each other at 20 minute intervals the next morning. I actually achieved a moment of lucidity Saturday morning and hung out with my son and his charming girlfriend that morning instead of going to work -- and got a free lunch at Gumbo Ya-Ya too! (Cheap, good, fast-food Cajun is back in Lexington!).

In talking to my son's girlfriend, I revisited an old theme: how can music have the impact on our brains it does? It surely doesn't seem evolutionary. I have read a couple of books on it: "Music and the Mind", by Anthony Storr, and "Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy", by Robert Jourdain, and neither of them had anything compelling to say. My current vague working idea is that, we are primarily visual creatures. Vision accounts for 10 of the 11 megabits/second that we take in. Hearing is the only other sense that has any bandwith to speak of (1 megabit/second), and is somewhat orthogonal to vision. Taste, smell and touch are all too analog and too specific (exact receptors for 50,000? different smells) to encode anything. So, that leaves hearing/music as the available channel for information that isn't totally "us" like vision is.

Finally, to music. I have picked up 6 cds lately, all very listenable:

• Norah Jones, "feels like home" -- very easy to listen to, pretty much like her 1st.
• Dido, "life for rent" -- a good bit duller than her 1st, not horrible tho.
• Death Cab for Cutie, "Transatlanticism" -- very nice emo tunes, kind of an Eliot Smith sound.
• John Mayer, "Heavier Things" -- the 1st of his I have tried, very nice.
• Stereolab, "Margerine Eclipse" -- some of their stuff is so upbeat and peppy, it has a kind of infectious happiness about it. Another very good cd, their prior "Sounddust" was also very good.
• Air, "Talkie Walkie" -- their prior cd "10000 hz legend" was bad -- lots of talking in French??? -- I gave it to my oldest daughter to try. This one is much more listenable, more like "Moon Safari".

BTW, I can be reached here.

Blog jam?

From 5 weeks to 9 weeks -- must have seriously run out of things to say. I guess the common perception of me as an inexhaustible source of bullshit is slightly inaccurate. Anyway ...

Did read Charles Stross's debut hardback novel "Singularity Sky". Somewhat disappointing. The basic plot, of a feudal interplanetary culture meeting a posthuman one, seemed a little bogus. Feudal interplanetary culture??? Whatever.

Had an amazing vacation to Manzanillo Mexico. On the west coast, due west of Mexico City. Two adjoining bays, the southern the largest commercial seaport on Mexico's west coast, the northern, the Bay of Santiago, the tourist one. We were in an open-air, hillside villa on the point (La Punta) between the bays, looking out on Santiago Bay. The place, Casa Suenos was fantastic. Staff of 4, 2 live-in, cooking great fresh food -- Mexican for lunch, fresh caught seafood or other stuff for supper. My friend David of the 4,000 bottle wine collection brought 2 cases. With the magic refridgerator (unending supply of Corona) and Carlos making margueritas, etc, two swimming pools, it was very mellow.

Read most of Neal Stephenson's "Quicksilver" there. 1670 to 1730, the founding of the royal society, Newton, Leibnitz, Hooke, Boyle. Drags occasionally (900+ pages), but when Half-Cocked Jack rescues a harem girl from the Turk attack on Vienna, his smart-ass repartee is as good as ever.

Covering some similar themes (early scientists) but in a world where 90% of Europe died in the 14th century plagues, is Kim Stanley Robinson's "Years of Rice and Salt". An OK read, not fantastic.

Just finished Feb Scientific American. Four cosmology articles. Dark energy is just too weird. Had one thought, re the big bang was decelerating until 5 billion years ago, but is now accelerating. Maybe the expansion has a 1st harmonic vibration, the expansion alternating between accelerating and decelerating. Basically, the echo of the inflationary period. Articles also had a new term, inflatons: the field that caused inflation. Wonder when they're going to directly detect some of those (sarcasm). Interesting concept, tho, that big bang is accelerating because gravity is leaking away to other dimensions or branes. Seems like that would violate conservation of something tho. Also, talking about virtual gravitons -- that seems odd. The metric is space itself, gravitons are ripples in the metric carrying gravity and information, what do you need virtual gravitons for?

Working like a crazy man again -- 137 hrs Jan 2-15. One day off. But, having fun. Had trouble getting to sleep night before last, came up with designs for three new add-on products. Software, the infinitely expandable medium. You gotta love it!

Writer's Blogck?

5 weeks since last post. Guess I really don't have much to say. Another version in the can, defect counts very low, spending a week in Manzillo, Mexico in a couple of weeks -- life is good I guess.

I read the 4th of my boss's books, "Elegant Universe", by Brian Greene. Superstring theory. So, to combine the standard model of elementary particles, quantum, and general relativity, you need 11 dimensions? I guess you can make it work. 4 dimensions for spacetime, 7 for the rest. Plus, your smallest components are strings that can't get smaller than the Planck length. So, not having to deal with anything smaller than the Planck length gets rid of the infinities you normally get in renormalizing the quantum wave functions -- duh. Seems like you should be able to get the very hairy math to work, but, is that really how it works? I guess if you are a positivist like Hawking, you don't care -- if the math works, use it. But, maybe the three strong forces (em, strong nuclear, weak) are fundamentally different from gravity -- they weren't meant to be unified.

Read some sci-fi from the library -- standard escapist fare: "Crescent City Rhapsody", by Kathleen Ann Goonan, "Crossfire" by Nancy Kress. Both OK, the Kress a little disappointing, she's normally better than that. My to-read sci-fi stack is great right now: short story collections by Simmons and Jablokov, a Kim Stanley Robinson, Charles Stross's debut hardback novel "Singularity Sky" (I have really been looking forward to that, his short stories in Year's Best have been fantastic), a new John Barnes, and "Quicksilver" by Neal Stephenson. Life is good.

I would suspect part of the reason I have been blogging less is that I have been drinking a lot more. I seem to have gone from weekend drinking to 5 days a week drinking. With an alcoholic father and brother, that's not good. The death of my wife's brother (51 yrs old, motorcycle accident, no helmet, what an incredibly stupid fucking waste) did not help. I'm not really that worried. I'll try to have two good sober weeks before Mexico.

Hard AI

Hard AI (Artificial Intelligence) posits that mind can be instantiated in hardware other than the human brain. If you can do hard AI, then presumably truly intelligent machines can be created or evolved.

The other side of the Cybernetic Singularity is humans being able to migrate their intelligence to silicon -- kind of like "The Matrix", but then throw the body away. In some science fiction, the supposition had been that you have to do a deep, destructive scan of the brain to make such a transfer -- which may not be too far off of the mark. To a computer geek like myself, the hardware/software <=> brain/mind analogy has been intuitively compelling for many years, but as I have studied brain and mind science more, the implementation of the human mind, particularly memory, is seriously intertwined with the neurological hardware -- not the nice layers that we like to do in software.

One of the 1st sci fi novels that was way ahead of the curve on this stuff was "Vacuum Flowers" by Michael Swanwick (1987, now out of print). About when this came out, some of my colleagues and I were talking about the analogies between computer and human design and maintenance:

• Hardware maintenance engineer <=> doctor
• Hardware designer <=> genetic engineer (future)
• Software maintainer <=> psychiatrist
• Software developer <=> prophet??? self-help guru???

As part of the discussion, we wanted a term for programs that humans could load into their brains and run and couldn't come up with a word we liked -- then out comes "Vacuum Flowers" with "wetware", which is perfect. Other good concepts in the book:

• Loadable personalities, available at your local book/music/video store. No doubt in my mind, if the average teen could "be" Brittany or whoever the latest is instead of just dressing like them and idolizing them, they would.
• Designed personalities. One of the main characters has a personality built from four archetypes: trickster, warrior, leader, fool (I think).
• The earth is a hive mind. The rest of the solar system is very careful to avoid "being assimilated".

All in all, a fantastic read for 1987. I am going to do a reread soon. Swanwick has been very prolific since then, but nothing else quite in this memespace. Some of his stuff tho has a misogynistic streak I've never understood.

Back to hard AI, I think that the machines will far be able to far surpass humans. Human/machine interfaces or outboard processors for minds will probably be de rigeur for competitive survival. There was an interesting rebuttal of the Cybernetic Singularity last year by Jaron Lanier, I think at The Edge. His point was, he wasn't too worried about it as current software was way too buggy to ever get as sophisticated as the mind. Two points against that argument:

1. The human mind is buggy. If it weren't, we wouldn't need mental hospitals. And even sane minds are subject to many cognitive illusions (see "Inevitable Illusions", Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, 1994). You can also find many references to how overrated human intuition is. Physicians who don't follow strict protocols but rather trust their instincts and intuitions are wrong more often than they are right.
2. Software is still very young. For instance, basic protocols for component communication have never been stable long enough for any kind of organic growth. The DCOM-CORBA rivaly is now Web Services; early ontology exchange models are now being replaced by DAML-OIL. Interestingly, Lanier has recently invented "Phenotropic Computing" -- current hard defined interfaces are replaced by fuzzy pattern recognition between software components. Very interesting, much more brain-like, much less brittle and thus with much more potential to evolve.

Enough for now. Next up, Greg Egan, AE (Artificial Emotion).