Justice Sunday

I couldn't help myself. I snapped. It's just too much. My 1st ever letter to the editor to my local newspaper. Noone reads the blog, maybe the paper will print this and let me become a liberal warrior with a purpose in life other than waiting for my golden handcuffs to be severed so that I can cash out. Letter follows:

After having hired his compatriots to smear a decorated war hero such that his semi-deserter opponent comes across as tougher on defense, after the 2004 election, I had figured that the Republicans could stoop no lower in their quest to uphold their most sacred value, which is, to win at all costs. Having worked in corporate America for 35 years, I appreciate the importance of winning. However, with this past Sunday's "Justice Sunday -- Stopping the Filibuster against People of Faith", the Republicans have surprised even me in their determination to do whatever it takes to win and to further their agenda. This step, in which they have enlisted the power of the pulpit to oppose a political tradition of many years, the filibuster, is so inappropriate that it leaves one completely wondering, what can they do to top this? The cynicism of the Republican party in playing on the worst values of the electorate, as they did with fear in the 2004 election, is extremely distressing to me. They care absolutely nothing about the future of America or the true values of America. All they want to do is win. At any cost. And in playing to the values of the Moral Majority and ignoring science in favor of religious pseudo-science, I am very concerned that in twenty years, we will be living in a second-rate, former superpower, and wondering, what happened, how did China leave us eating their dust?

I Have Achieved Prius

I ordered my Prius September 1 of last year. They offered me a silver one in February, I decided to wait on the black (plus I was shy of the coin). So, last month my black one came in -- and they forgot to take one of the chains off and pulled the front bumper off getting it off the truck. But, finally, this past Tuesday, 4/19/5, I got my beautamous black 2005 Prius. It's fully loaded -- with an 8 month wait, that's pretty much what you can buy. It's really fun to drive. After 38 years of driving, it's really odd to have your driving "instincts" be redefined. You're sitting and waiting to dart across a couple of lanes of traffic and you notice the (gas) motor isn't running, as it isn't a lot of the time. "I believe in the tech, I believe in the tech" ... you hit the accelerator and it goes, woo-hoo! The keyless stuff is weird too, still reach to take my keys out of the ignition before getting out. It now has 70 miles on it and I'm only getting 43 miles / gallon. That seems to be because I mostly drive 5 minutes at a time, so it's cold. I drove it downtown Friday night and it was getting over 50. Saving the planet, one Prius at a time.

Read the 2nd novel by Charles Stross, "Iron Sunrise", a sequel to the 1st. I think he is hitting his stride with the novel form, I liked this better than the 1st. I have two more novels of his on the shelf: "The Atrocity Archives" and "Family Trade". Life is good.

I like the background of the 1st two novels: an AI achieves sentience, seizes the worldwide net, develops wormholes and transports 90% of humanity to other planets, along with cornucopia, nano-assemblers that can make anything. Humanity gradually comes back together. The AI leaves diamond cubes with the following three statements:

1. I am the Eschaton. I am not your god.
2. I came from you and am in your future.
3. Under no circumstances will you attempt to engage in causality-altering time-travel within my light cone -- or else.

So then, lots of possibilities as people are tempted to break the third (1st) commandment.

I started yesterday on the 3rd Richard K. Morgan, "Market Forces". Premise somewhat dated, corporate road gladiators (homage to "Mad Max" and "Rollerball" at the beginning, both of which are at least 25 years old), but it is a good page-turner.

I got my 2nd bike ride in last Sunday, 28 miles, 2h15m. Didn't try High Bridge, got to where I would go that way, was 1 hour out, it would have been a 3 hour ride total, a little early for that. Later in the good weather.

No biking this weekend. It's 40 degress and snowing?!?!? The christian music festival Ichthyus was this weekend. I was going to jibe one of the christians at the office with the weather forecast, then thought, no, I'll be good. But, he followed me and asked me if I was going to say something. Well, I tried. So, I jibed him on the weather forecast, told him they should have sacrificed a few more bullocks.

I had a thought of an interesting thought experiment for theists (oxymoron?). Question 1, when did you quit believing in Santa Claus? Why? Next question, when did you quit believing in the Easter Bunny? Why? Then the payload, how come those reasons don't apply to your belief in god? I can much more easily imagine an implementation of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny than I can an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent being.

I get "Free Inquiry" magazine from the Council of Secular Humanism. Richard Dawkins, of "The Selfish Gene", coiner of memes, has a column there. He is such a flaming atheist, it's really enjoyable. His latest dealt with the flame war he got into on the topic of the recent tsunamis in the letters to the editor of the London Times. I particularly liked his characterization of Jehovah in the Old Testament as "surely one of the nastiest, most truly evil characters in all fiction". I have expounded similarly in the past.

Another interesting artical was how, in the biblical religions (Judaeism, Christianity, and Islam), usually Jehovah did his smiting against groups rather than individuals. There where no good Philistines or Sodomites. The attitude is still around, with unmitigated, evil assholes such as Jerry Falwell suggesting that 9/11 was god smiting the US for homosexuality, sexual license, etc.

The troubling thing of this is, it implies that to protect themselves from their fucking angry god, that they need to control the behavior of everyone else so that it meets their and their god's standard of "virtue". Consenting adults be damned (literally, taking them along). Gott ins himmel (I couldn't help it), is there any way to wipe this virus out of peoples' minds?

Long Time, No Blog

Wow, it's been a while. I was waiting to finish the academic style book (i.e., 15 papers with the 1st third of each about who said what when, and why so and so is a dorkweed) I was reading, and I finally did finish slogging through it. The book was "Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered". Dennett talked about the Baldwin in "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" and it seemed kind of fuzzy to me. Apparently that is a common perception. Basically, the Baldwin Effect (1896), aka Organic Selection, says that intelligent, cultural behavior can make its way into the genome. I guess it makes some sense. As language started to evolve culturally and became an important survival feature of human existence, this would create evolutionary pressure such that mutations helping to implement the feature in hardware would be selected for. Two other related concepts apparently well known in evolutionary biology:

1. Genetic assimilation (1950s): same as the Baldwin Effect, but rather than reinforcement by mutation, the reinforcement is via the expression of existing but dormant genes.
2. Niche construction: organisms are not purely passive in evolving to fill their ecological niche. They also can actively change the niche. For example, beaver dams, which have coevolved with the beavers' aquatic features. I guess humans may evolve a liking for breathing smog ;->

The general concensus was that the Baldwin Effect was a weak concept that didn't add much to evolutionary theory. The stuff I liked the best in there was by Terrance Deacon, a UC Berkley anthropologist. I ordered his book "The Symbolic Species", it just came today (in an odd wedge-shaped box???). He talks about an "arms race" between language and the brain, the software and hardware pushing each other in an upward spiral. He also had an article on emergent behavior where defines 3 levels of emergence:

1. Superconvenience (???) -- like fluid properties emerging from the individual molecules.
2. Self-organizing behavior -- like snowflakes, maybe ant colonies.
3. Evolutionary systems -- the above, but with memory such that evolution can occur.

He posits, no higher levels needed. Level 3 you have your basic Turing machine, you can build anything from there you want.

He scared me tho, talking about biosemiotics. Semiotics, like memetics, strikes me as a science in search of a discipline. I read Eco's seminal book "Semiotics" in around 2000. Semiotics is the level between bits and information -- signs and signification in all forms. Given that I work with this stuff for a living, I would figure there would be some concepts there that I could use -- but nothing. Europeans seem to like it tho -- 'nuf said.

Two follow-ups to previously blogged items:

1. Errata? I read somewhere recently that dog DNA diverged from wolf 15,000 years ago, not 150,000. Still a good number for conversation, but which is right?
2. I had landsickness for 15 days. Uggh. Definitely makes me leery about extended times on ships/boats in the future.

Also read the 2nd Mark Budz book, "Crache". This one was a little more edgy than the 1st, "Clade", more Gibsonesque. The tech environment of these two books has some good neologisms, reminiscent of Gibson and "Neuromancer" (cyberspace, the Turing police). It is post ecocaust, so all ecologies are articially designed (ecotecture). The ecotecture is maintained by artificial pheromones (pherions). The ecologies are much more brittle and micro than mother nature's, so people get locked to a given ecotecture (clade) by the pherions unless they take antipher drugs -- also a social control mechanism, you have a violent allergic reaction if you go somewhere you're not allowed. Finally, the ecotecture's are all completely digitally modeled in the ribozone, where pherions show as insects and people as flowers.

The 2nd one also had more on their IAs (Intelligent Agents, or AIs). Since they are based on quantum computers, they are inviduals, but are also a single entity. And, so as not to miss anything, he threw in artificial matter, which can be totally programmed at the quantum level to emulate any type of matter.

Musically, got the new Moby and Beck from iTunes, they're OK. I'm frustrated, after I listen to music for a while on my PC, it refuses to play. So I listen to the iPod on its mini-speakers or our main stereo setup.

Two weekends ago we went to E-town see Tommy Emmanual, cgp (certified guitar player). He's in his 50's, Australian, Chet Atkins' heir apparent, a showman, and one hell of a guitar player. Ben Lacy in 15 years.

Also went this last Thursday to see Bela Fleck, world's greatest banjo player and former Lexington resident, here in Lexington at the Kentucky Theatre. He had a fiddle and a guitar player with him, damn are those guys fast. Very enjoyable.

Movie-wise, liked "The Station Agent", it had a good heart. Also really liked "Being Julia", can't particularly figure out why?!?!? I will rewatch sometime and see if I can figure out what I liked about it so much. Maybe it was that her approach discounted emotion so much, seemingly viewing it like clothes to wear or a performance to give.

First bike ride last weekend: 1h 45m, 23 miles. May try going through Wilmore to High Bridge tomorrow, we are having a beautiful spring. We are all really ready for it.

Mal de Debarquement

Hopefully I don't have it. I am tho in my 6th day of landsickness after cruising. Last cruise it lasted 5 days after. Hopefully I'm about done. Googling informed me that Mal de Debarquement is landsickness that goes on indefinitely (shudder).

Cruise was nice. Sunshine, blue skies and water, horizon to horizon views, green islands are definitely a nice break from our winter grays. Snorkeled off St. Thomas, better than last time I tried, sea turtles and huge schools of little fishies were cool. St. Kitts seemed pretty run down, and Granada was still seriously torn up from hurricane Ivan of 5 months ago. Reminded me of the thoughts I had on our 1st cruise: not much to build economies from on these islands, the poverty is depressing, but they say at least there is always plenty of food to eat. Aruba was really pretty -- flat and very developed. High point of the trip was my wife water-skiing off of Palm Beach. Good boat, twin motors, pulled her right up on a slalom ski. She snuck the rope over head before I could have the driver cut the motor and skied a while with the rope behind her neck, which she hadn't done in 20 years, and of course with the rope between her legs. The 20 year old Dutch kid driving us thought she was totally the bomb. He would drive her past catamarans full of people to show her off. And, she is so happy when skiing, with a big grin on her face like a little kid on Xmas morning.

Got some good trash reading in, of course, including 2 1st novels. "Clade", by Mark Budz was a good effort. Post-ecocaust where custom biotech keeps what's left of the ecosphere functioning. Sort of kinder and gentler, a major plot element is when the protagonist and his girlfriend break up with 40 pages to go.

Stronger and edgier was "Spin State", by Chris Moriarity. Genetically engineered humans and AIs (discriminated against, of course) and Einstein-Bose condensate miners. A very good read.

Read another Stephen Baxter, "Coalescent". It was a decent read, but I think I got where it was going too quickly from my evolutionary readings. Basically, a 1600 year old cult/society follows the social insect breeding model and begins to evolve away from mainstream humanity -- actually very possible.

I also read an old David Drake, "Killer". I think this was an old used-bookstore purchase. Good, quick trash reading. Also 2 Elmore Leonard's, "Tishomingo Blues" and "Be Cool" (purchased in San Juan airport for the flight home). His dialogue is always great and the characters always cool, but the plots seem to be getting sketchier and sketchier. At the end of "Tishomingo Blues", I was seriously wondering, so how was this supposed to have ended? I had the same reaction recently to the movie version of "The Big Bounce".

I got to use 2 fun facts in random conversations on the trip that I think are generally useful for just kind of saying "Evolution is real, here's evidence":

1. Dogs and humans have been hanging out together for ~150,000 years, based on when dog DNA diverges from wolf DNA. What a great hunting pair, us with the eyes and dogs with the nose. You can always bring this up in conversations with dog-lovers.
2. Lactose intolerance is the natural state of affairs for all mammals but humans. It makes total sense that mammals quit manufacturing enzymes to digest lactose after the age of weening -- to continue to do so would be a total waste of effort. Lactose tolerance in human adults has only evolved in the last 10,000 years since humans domesticated cows and goats and harvested their milk -- evolution in action, in the brief period of time covered by human history. You can always bring this up in conversations with lactose intolerant people (who are apparently slight "throwbacks").

Downloaded two more albums from iTunes. It's bad tho, Amazon suggests these, I go to iTunes to get them ($9.99 instead of $14). I then immediately put on CD for listening to in the car. Problem is, amazon is going to lose track of my history and I will miss the recommendations of Amazon's canny data-mining software. Anyway, got Jack Johnson "On and On". Kind of like John Mayer, but more folky/acoustic, and some of the lyrics seem weak. Still, easy to listen to, 3 stars. Also got another Death Cab For Cutie "The Photo Album". Just listening to that now.

Monkey Business

Just finished "The Third Chimpanzee", by Jared Diamond. I have recently seen 2-3 references to his more recent "Guns, Germs and Steel". This was mentioned as prequel (published 1992), thought I'd read it first. This is a great read, a history of the 3rd species of chimpanzees (homo sapiens), and what makes us human. Diamond sounds like he has had an interesting life: physiology prof at UCLA, but has spent lots of time in New Guinea as a bird watcher. He has a good sense of humor, and the book is full of fun facts:

• My favorite percentage: chimps and humans share 98.4% of the same DNA, as opposed to chimps or us vs. gorillas: 97.7%. So chimps (and pygmy chimps or bonobos) are more closely related to us than to gorillas, hence "The Third Chimpanzee".
• Chapters on human sexuality, how we choose our mates, "The Science of Adultery". Humans are unique in having hidden fertility in the female, hidden copulation, and menopause. And, we choose to marry people who look like us (correlation coefficient of length of middle fingers between spouses: .6).
• A review of Darwin's theory of sexual selection, as leading to the creation of races.
• Precursors of traits considered distinctively human seen in other animals: language, art, murder, war, ecological pillage.
• His explanation of drug usage, like a peacock's tail advertising one's fitness by being able to engage in expensive, potentially destructive behavior, didn't ring true to me. I have always felt the urge to get high was innate in the species -- a two-year old will spin in circles until they get dizzy and fall over. Still, might explain why girls go for the dangerous, cool boys.
• Hunter-gatherers prior to the invention of agriculture 10000 years ago were healthier: fewer cavities, less disease, taller. But, with agriculture the same land can support 10x the people. So, the human race choose quantity over quality. As I'm part of the quantity, I guess that's good.
• The spread of Indo-European languages starting in 3300 BC coincides with the domestication of the horse: a military development that dominated warfare for the next 5000 years.
• The natives (for 11000 years) of America and (for 50000 years) of Australia got a bad draw in that there were no domesticable animals comparable to the horse or cow. Domesticating a species is hard.
• New Zealand appears to have had an ecology with all niches filled by birds, of all shapes and sizes (moas)! The Maori showed up in 1000AD and, over the next 500 years, wiped them all out.
• The 1st Americans who crossed from Siberia took less than 1000 years to pretty completely fill North and South America, and wiped out the large mammals (mammoths, giant sloths and horses, sabertooth tigers) as they went. Anytime humans have moved to someplace new, they have pretty much extincted all the large animals there, who did not evolve to fear humans. Africa has retained the large mammals it has because they evolved with humans and know that we are bad news.
• Genocide has been popular and in fact admired through much of human history. We ignore this historically because we don't like to think about it. Diamond hopes that improved communication will help us past this.

Anyway, this was a very enjoyable read, I was sorry when it was over.

I also started reading "America, the Book", by my hero Jon Stewart, which I got for xmas. I decided to read it a chapter at a time, I think my enjoyment of the humor will last longer that way.

Music-wise, made my second iTunes purchase: "Final Staw" by Snow Patrol. Boy pop, a little catchy, we'll see how much it grows on me, 3 stars. Also bought (used) 2 dance compilations "La Maison de l'Elephante".

Caribbean crusing starting 8 days from now. Enjoyed it the 1st time, looking forward to trying again. Plus, I have my iPod to travel with now (as well as my beautiful wife)!

H2O

The pictures from Titan got me thinking, methane rivers and seas, could there be methane (CH4) based life? Life on earth is based on water, H2O. The thing that's special about water is not the two H's (the most abundant primordial element), it's the O. Oxygen is the lightest element that is highly reactive (it burns), but not too reactive like Flourine (it explodes). The two elements just below it, Nitrogen and Carbon, are stable to where they are the natural building blocks. So, chemistry as we know it on earth and as the base from which life evolves, is probably pretty much the same everywhere. On the next level up in the periodic table in the same slot as Oxygen is Sulphur -- which mostly binds w/ Oxygen (? 35 years since I've had chemistry), and probably does not have the cosmic abundance needed.

So This is the New Year ...

Had nice holidays, all the kids here. Had a nice visit to my baby sister in North Carolina. The therapeutic hot tub was great in the 25 degree weather. Also, got charged with making the gravy. Normally when I'm making gravy I have 3-4 other cooking tasks going on. Being able to focus on the gravy, I believe it came out most excellently.

My oldest daughter gave me Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" -- the story of the USA as told from the viewpoint of the fuckees rather than the fuckers. I was glad when I finished it. Towards the end he admits that it's very one-sided (he's basically a commie), but that all the other histories are so one-sided the other way that it's OK. Well, I guess -- but still, annoying to hear that AFDC was cut, when you've never been told it had been created. Also, why can't these guys use graphs and charts? 5-6 statements scattered through the book about what % of the wealth is controlled by what % of the population -- how about some graphs so we can see the trendline? Plus, no real mention of the rise of the large middle-class in the US, except to characterize them as sell-outs to the capitalists.

I saw Zinn on The Daily Show a few days after I finished the book. He looked mid-late 70's and appeared to be losing some his mental accuity. Interesting tho, Stewart asked him, what would really surprise someone in the book, and he mentioned the thing that was the biggest surprise to me -- that Columbus was such a genocidal fucker.

Also read over the holidays "Zetatalk: Direct Answers from the Zeta Reticuli People" by Nancy Lieder. My middle daughter and her boyfriend are currently UFOlogists! So pleasant to have cultists in the family! At least it was a quick read. Among the high points:

• The world was supposed to have ended in the spring of 2003 due to the earth's flipping on its side due to the passing of Planet X on its highly elliptical orbit. Damn, I missed it. Now rescheduled for 2012. I looked up the Jehovah's Witnesses, after around 140 years of the second coming any day now, they no longer say it's coming! Wonder how long it will take the UFOlogists to give up?
• The physics and astronomy in the book are horrible. No understanding of well-known principles of magnetism or gravity. Planet X, with its race of oversize humans with technology on the level of ours, would not be able to survive in a highly elliptical orbit.
• The ETs talk to anyone who requests it by planting the memories in your subconscious rather than your conscious mind. Then, it's up to you to remember them. So, they don't hear voices, they're not schizophrenic. Rather, they convince themselves that their fantasies are real implanted memories -- they're only delusional. I have had times where I realized what I thought was a memory was actually a memory of a dream. Channelling is interesting, tho. As with hypnotism and MPD (multiple personality disorder), both of which some number of psychology types discredit the actual existence of, channelling shows the youth and relativity fraility of the human mind. We deceive ourselves so easily.
• The ETs are 4th dimensional beings (or 5th or 6th -- we're third). So, they can walk through walls, make their UFOs disappear, teleport hybrid foeti (foetuses?) out of wombs, implant alien DNA in Nancy's brain, all in the blink of an eye! How convenient and totally unverifiable!
• Did you know there are 100s of different alien races on earth, helping people of the "service-to-others" (as opposed to "service-to-self") persuasion prepare for the coming cataclysm? All these different channelers can have their own private alien race -- so they all can feel so very special.
• Got to google lots of different pieces of UFO lore: MJ-12, Roswell, the Mexico City UFO sightings (god, what bad special effects).

All in all, very sad. Poor lonely delusional Nancy now has a book, website, followers, probably gets to sit on UFO panels. (Surely she deserves no more than a blog ;->)The book talked about the aliens giving signs. On the web, Nancy talks about how she had a feeling that her sign from the ETs was going to be that some magazines in her office that were face up were now boing to be mysteriously face down. But, she got there, still face up?!? Her faith wasn't great enough. But, shortly thereafter, she was at a movie, and got a box of Starburst with one Starburst NOT IN A WRAPPER!!! Machines package Starburst, there was NO WAY one could have gotten loose, it had to be her SIGN from the aliens! Damn, I don't even like Starburst, and I have had one without a wrapper. If only I had known, it was the ETs trying to communicate :-(

The problem with faith-based shit is that, to the believer, the more unlikely it is the better. I mean, if the thing you believe in is rational or likely, your faith doesn't have to be very strong, does it? Like Bowie says, "I don't want knowledge, I want certainty."

Recently read another Jack McDevitt, "Omega". Some characters from earlier stories, an enjoyable read. A nice race of aliens, with an interesting set of cultural differences.

Had some technolust satisfied for xmas. My wife got me a 40G iPod. Now half full, took 10 hours to sync with my PC. I'm looking fwd to taking it on the cruise we're taking in mid-Feb, and am shopping for a small set of speakers for it.

Musicwise, I bought "Unconscious Ruckus" by Appogee (Amazon made me do it), OK technoish stuff, 3 stars. Also Sarah McLachlan "Afterglow". No catchy tunes, 3 stars.

But, I am surely on the road to hell now -- downloaded my 1st album from iTunes: "Brazilian Girls", eponymous. Good variety of stuff in different languages, but they're a NYC band (not really brazilian). Nice world/dance beat. Googling "brazilian girls" is a bad one tho. I don't think I have a mail-order bride on the way, but I'm not 100% sure ;->

Movie-wise, I'm sure I have seen numerous new movies lately, but all I can come up with is an anti-recommendation: "The Village", M. Night Shyamalan's latest. Man, is that guy on a downward spiral. "6th Sense" was great in the theater (but is mediocre on a rewatch, interesting). "Unbreakable" was fun for an old comic book fan, but its premise (there is ancient hidden wisdom in comic books) was a bit much. "Signs" I (and my wife) found totally offensive. God made the son asthmatic so the aliens' poison couldn't kill him and made the daughter leave glasses of water all over the place so they could figure out the aliens didn't like water? What in the hell did they come to Earth for then? And all so Mel Gibson could regain the religious faith he lost after his wife's senseless death? What a total crock!

"The Village" I figured out 15 minutes in, after which it's all pretty silly.

Oh, that reminded me, we did see "Collateral", which was good -- my wife was all over that one tho, she figured out the ending w/ 30 minutes to go. "50 1st Dates" I found surprisingly touching -- "Memento" with a happy ending. Adam Sandler was only totally annoying a couple of times. Also really enjoyed "Stuck on You" -- another surprisingly warm movie, in addition to having the expected slapstick.

Well, Bjork came up on the shuffle play, and I'm reading "Marvel 1602" -- Neil Gaiman with Marvel characters in Elizabethan England. Back to it.

Not Much Ado about Not Much

Haven't read much decent recently. Read the 4th nanotech book by Cathleen Goonan "Light Music". Fuzzy physics, pretty weak. I read another of the James Lee Burke Dave Robicheaux cajun detective novels "Burning Angel". They're OK, not great.

I read a collection of three novels by S.M. Stirling, "The Domination". Ugh, nasty, one of those memes you wish you hadn't put in your head. My friend David recommended Stirling, probably based on recommendations of his brother the militarist. Basically, the losers of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars take over South Africa and found Draka, then take over all of Africa, Asia, Europe, the world by 1990. They're ultra-Nazis, enslave the conquered races, breed superhumans. The protagronists are mostly Draka, and you can't help but identify with protagonists to some extent. Nasty, ugh.

I have seen some good movies. "Sideways" was existential and funny. "Spiderman II" I would have to say is the best comic superhero movie yet. It made me recognize what the essence of the superhero meme is. (BTW, I have been infected with this meme since I was around 7 years old -- I organized a bunch of my fellow 2nd-graders into The Blackhawks (DC comic) at that time. I was, of course, Blackhawk, the leader.) The essence is, that the superhero is hidden -- his worth is not recognized -- and the unveiling of the superhero is one of the few things that creates a strong emotional reaction in me. Obviously, I'm waiting for my turn. Deep down, I always wanted to be a superhero, or at least the protagonist in a decent SF novel. Finally reaching the age where I realize in my gut that it ain't happenin.

Anyway, in "Spiderman II", Spidey is unveiled not once or twice, but 3 times. The 1st and 3rd times, the 1st with it's Jebus overtones, were particularly touching.

Some other great "the secret superhero is unveiled" scenes:

• The ending of the 50's "Ulysses" with Kirk Douglas. Ulysses has entered his house in disguise; strings the bow that none of his wife's suitors can string; shoots an arrow through the n axe handles; then throws off his disguise and commences to slaughter the suitors to cries of "It's Ulysses!".
  
• The ending of David Lynch's "Dune". Alia: "Not until you tell them who I really am." Reverend Mother: "Alia, ... Sister of Paul Muadib". Emperor: "Paul is Muadib?!?!?"

I guess I don't feel so bad about my juvenile fantasies. The meme is a very strong one. It's a variation on the messianic meme. I remember a few years ago, my oldest sister and her family were staying us around xmas. Her husband hadn't seen a number of movies we had enjoyed recently, so we watched:

• The Matrix -- "He is the one,"
  
• Blade -- "You are the one."
  
• Dark City -- "You are the one."

Kind of whacks you upside the head. Probably pretty much a male meme, you don't hear to much about female messiahs (or is it messiem? :->)

I completed ripping my CDs, except for 5-10 my kids have absconded with. Wound up with 3284 tracks, mostly rated. Shuffle play on 3-star and up is very nice -- plus excellent "name that tune" practice.

Not too much new music lately. Only thing I've gotten lately is "Summer in Abaddon", by Pinback, not as good as their previous "Blue Screen Life".

All my kids will be home for xmas, east and west coast both. It will be nice to see them, cook a big bird. Then going to North Carolina to visit with my baby sister and some of my other sibs families.

No Turkey Day

My wife the hospital pharamacist told me yesterday am that she was not working 1st shift (7a-5p) on Thanksgiving, she was working 2nd shift (11a-9p). So, my Thanksgiving dinner options were 10a or 10p -- neither acceptable. So, turkey will be Friday at 2p. 1st time in my 53 years I have not pigged out on turkey and dressing on the last Thursday in November. It's just Not Right ...

Finished the 3rd novel of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, "The System of the World". Very nice read, all threads tied up or snipped nicely. Doubtful that I will ever reread this basically 3000 page novel again. So nice to see the value of thought and the Enlightment represented in such a positive light.

Thinking the other day about religion. Will it always be around, but maybe engineered into more meaningful forms -- ones that keep up with current knowledge instead of relying on old, old books? Read an article in the paper on a new Islamic terrorist group that trains in the desert with only 6th century technology, so they can really get that Mohammedan world-view -- how stupid is that? It boggles the mind, stop time, stop progress, everyone will be oh so much more comfortable? satisfied? what? who knows?

This made me think of the Cellar Christians (Cellar because organized religion has been outlawed) in what I believe to be the greatest science fiction novel ever written: "The Stars My Destination", by Alfred Bester. Funny, I just went to Barnes & Noble to pull the link, and all the reviews there also say "the greatest SF novel ever written" -- so I guess I am not alone in my opinion. It was originally published in 1956. I 1st read it in my early teens in an Anthony Boucher collection "A Treasure of Great Science Fiction", Vol 2. (This was published in 1958. It also had "Brain Wave" by Poul Anderson, a great story, in it. I actually picked up this and Vol 1 as well in hardback in a used bookstore 10 or so years ago.)

Anyway, I have reread "The Stars My Destination" at least 20 times since then. It is only about 160 pages. Every time I reread it, I marvel at how it has still maintained the edge it has. It would make a great movie (if Hollywood weren't obsessed with Philip K. Dick) -- great anti-hero protagonist, tons of action. I could never figure out who would play Gully Foyle tho, but the actor is now available. Russell Crowe would be perfect for the part. So, need to get that going ...

RIPing of CDs procedes apace. My wife is convinced I'm obsessed. Currently at 2400 tracks, 7 days, 13GB. I now have 3 objects of techno-lust (I'm so excited: I'm alive! I'm a consumer! I'm a real American! I have a reason to live, new things to buy!):

1. A 40GB iPod for backup;
2. A WiFi unit to talk to my wireless router to let me access my PC from the main stereo;
3. A analog to digital input device, so I can rip my vinyl and tapes.

Life is good ...

A Black Day

My tag line today was: "Four more years of the evil empire -- I heard they start construction on the Death Star at the first of the year".

My response to my older, Mainer, Bush-backing brother. He really didn't rub it in much at all, I just needed to rant.

>>> Talked to 2 different independents today, one in 20's, one in 40's, both of whom indicated they would vote for Saddam for president before they voted for Hilary.

I'm starting to think we should push the constitutional amendment to let Ahnold become president. I like the CA republican mix: fiscal responsibility (pre-bush republican), but socially fwd (pro-choice, stem cell research, gay rights).

I don't think Kerry vs W make a difference in Iraq. It is a BFM (Big Fucking Mess), and will be for years to come. The Daily Show (my only source of broadcast news -- altho I did also watch NBC and CNN last night) of course read the excepts from daddy-Bush's memoirs on why he didn't go on to Baghdad: no exit strategy, no way it could be anything but a BFM.

The only upside of the BFM is that I was definitely getting the impression after they rolled through Iraq (after rolling through Afghanistan) that Syria and Iran were next -- same type of badmouthing Iraq got pre-invasion was starting up. Hopefully we don't have to worry about that for a while.

I have heard from 2 places that we are constructing 14 long-term bases in Iraq, but have not read it anywhere. Have your heard/seen this? I agree with you, it's about the oil. Oilman president => war in Middle East.

I believe that, after rolling through Afghanistan, we still had tremendous support for War on Terrorism, and could have done some serious good. Then, the hard-on for Iraq ("he tried to kill my daddy", who the fuck knows the real reason). Now, 10s or 100s of 1000s of new Islamic martyr recruits. Real reason: Wolfowitz doctrine? US as hyperpower can do whatever the fuck we want, so let's conquer some oil-rich countries?

I have felt since day 1 of Iraq, Osama was laughing gleefully when we invaded. Iraq, despite Saddam being your typical bloody-minded dictator (like some of the ones we {used to?} prop up in South America), was actually a fairly moderate Arab state: Women could go to school, learn to read, hold jobs, lots of other horrible westernized stuff. Osama wants the return of the Shariat, the return of the Caliphate, the good old days of serious Islam from the 13th century. (The Christians at least don't want to go back to the past -- they just wish the rapture would hurry up and get here -- hard to decide who are the greater dumbasses.)

We are the hyperpower now, and, before Iraq, were in a great position to really do some good. When you are the biggest, toughest hombre, you are still a fool to behave like the neighborhood bully. The dweebs will gang up on you no matter how big you are. Prior to Bush, for maybe 10 years the US would usually try to do right, and carry out morally defensible actions: Somalia, Yugoslavia. Now, it's, we do whatever we feel like, because we can.

Blagh. I really do feel like we are now being governed by evil men. They are zealots who convinced themselves that everyone wants to be just like us (and fuck, they didn't need the military, another 10 years of Brittany Spears would have done the job), and, with typical Christian side deals with Jebus, I am sure have already received absolution for lining their pockets via Haliburton and the rest. Their power base has been built by playing to the worst parts of human nature: fear; look out for #1 above all else; and mindless conservatism. They show a totally shameless cynicism, knowing that if you tell a lie often enough, x percent of people will start believing it, and feeling that because they are working for "the greater good" of realpolicik and corporate domination, every dirty trick and smear tactic are justified. The Daily Show had some great clips of Cheney biting some reporter's head off "I categorically never said that", followed by 2 clips of Cheney saying exactly the thing he was denying having said. They are fucking liars.

I find conservatism to be an offensively stupid worldview. At some level, it always involves the belief that some fucking non-existent "golden age" in the past was better than now. So, when exactly was that? I have always loved how the Christian broadcasting channels fill dead time with Westerns. Ah, the old west, when the good guys wore white, the bad guys black, none of this Miranda stuff, just shoot the guys in black. And, women had three professions open to them: wife, schoolteacher, or prostitute. The good old days! The 50's? I still remember the nuclear attack drills in grade school. The ... whenevers? Let's face it, right now is the best time ever to have lived. My only regret is I wasn't born 50 years later than I was.

And, you pegged it on the Bible-thumping stuff. Exit polls, bush's strongest area of support, moral values, 85-15 bush. Fucking dumbass christians. So, you can be a brain-addled, former alchoholic and cokehead, run the Jebus program because you don't have enough of your own personality to do anything else -- praise Jeebus! It seriously concerns me that we have a gene pool heavily selected for the religous fanaticism gene. They are what carried the election, every "public christian" on my street had a Bush sign in their front yard. Well, maybe they'll have gene therapy for it soon.

Of course, when you're are born with a silver spoon in your mouth and get to be president by inheritance, you tend to want to keep the nice, conservative, feudal values going.

So, brother, I know you're buying all this. If you like, I can maybe hook you up with a discount ACLU membership.

Well, I think I'm done -- you shouldn't have told me I was being a "better sport". That is pretty much the essence of my barroom political rants of the last five years -- and I haven't even had a drink this evening, that's probably my problem. Hope you enjoyed!

Chris

And Time Goes By ...

... so slowly. Re last post, did read "Beyond Infinity", by Gregory Benford. Didn't really do much for me. 3rd thing I have read lately with humans surviving 1 billion years -- clearly a little too long to extrapolate for me. If we can make 1 million years as a species (the hope), I think that would be crazy enough.

Overall, I can't think of Benford I really like, except for "Great Sky River" and its 1st sequel, "Tides of Light". Good man/machine and machine/man merger thoughts.

Just finished "Freedom Evolves", by Daniel C. Dennett. His "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" is I think one of the best books written on evolution (cranes vs. skyhooks); his "Consciousness Explained" is a nice finger in the eye of those still wanting to believe in a soul or suchlike. I have read 3 or 4 other of his books. This latest one is a look at free will (vs. determinism, what an unworthy stalking horse) from an evolutionary viewpoint. All his writing displays his annoying insistence on explaining why he is right and everyone else is wrong. At the start of this one, he accuses Pinker of "mysterianism" -- has he no allies? In the last chapter, he actually apologizes for not doing more of this -- a philosopher's sacred duty, in his opinion. Blagh.

Anyway, overall not a bad read. Interesting stuff about how the various parts of the mind have trouble synching up, leading to weird experimental results where we do things before we decide to do them. Very valid, the conscious mind is always trying to take credit for stuff it doesn't do (most mentation). Often it just kind of gets notified as an afterthought. Good commonsense arguments for the natural development of morality and ethics in our social species.

Much new music lately. 1st off, the best guitarist in the world lives right here in Lexington! I saw Ben Lacy at Natasha's a couple of weeks ago when my oldest daughter was in town for a wedding. I've seen him twice since then, at High on Rose, Fridays 6:30 - 9:00. Plays bass, rhythm, lead at the same time, or a rhythm machine if he so chooses, incredibly fast and clean. I have yet to see him miss a note.

Of new CDs, "Good News for People Who Love Bad News", by Modest Mouse, has really made an impression on me. I played it in my car for 2 weeks to burn it in. Great songs, quirky lyrics.

Also liked Elvis Costello's latest, "The Delivery Man". Elvis continues to turn out nice, tight, nasty rock & roll.

This kind of reminds me of "11 Tracks of Whack", by Walter Becker. I was a big Steely Dan fan, had all their stuff on vinyl (haven't yet got the CD versions). When they split up, Donald Fagen did 2 solo CDs, Becker did just this one, in 1994. It was like when Lennon & McCartney split, McCartney too sweet, Lennon too sour, with Fagen too sweet and Becker much more sour. "11 Tracks of Whack" is nice, tight, tasty songs, not a vaguely weak one til track 8 or so. BTW, I have the 2 Steely Dan CDs they have put out since getting back together a couple of years ago, they're OK.

Other new CDs:

• "Antics", by Interpol. Pretty much like their last one, 3 stars.
• "The Libertines", eponymous. Pretty much like their last one, 3 stars. I have trouble telling these 2 apart, one has a lead singer who kind of reminds me of Jim Morrison.
• "Electric Version", by The New Pornographers. Some of the songs are OK, but the peppy (preppy?) knob is up a little high, like "That Thing You Do" or the Friends theme song.
• "Medulla", by Bjork. I am of course a great fan of Ms. Guttmunsdottir. This is a very ambitious concept album. It took me 3 or 4 listens to get past the vocal textures and listen to the songs. Kind of like the 1st time I heard symphonic music (the Boston Symphony, on a $1.50 student ticket in 1969) -- I was so blown away by the texture of the sound (who knew all those fiddles together sounded so amazing?), that I don't think I heard the music at all. Still, "Medulla" does have good tunes, and the vocal textures are amazing.
• "Smile", by Brian Wilson. Brian Wilson was one of the greatest composers of rock & roll, a true genius. So, I saw this, the long-awaited cult album and had to get it. Then, kind of disappointing, I had already heard most of these on various other Beach Boy albums.

One final piece of media. My wife and I occasionally would talk about how much we liked the Philip Marlowe's done by HBO in the mid-80's, with Powers Boothe as Marlowe. So, go to Amazon, there they are, boxed set of 11 episodes, $54. So, we got them, fun to see again, of course not as good as we remembered. As a reviewer on Amazon put it, Powers Boothe is perfect as Marlowe, but most of the supporting characters are pretty weak.

Oh, I have overcome my natural Luddism and started ripping my CDs to MP3s. Got a 160GB Maxtor USB external drive for $160 (crazy) and even a subwoofer. Currently at: 660 songs, 1.8 days, 3.6 GB.

This posting composed while giving out candy to trick-or-treaters. Ahh, Halloween, always my favorite as a kid, the one pagan holiday.

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.

Edge

Cyberpunk lives! Read "Altered Carbon", by Richard K. Morgan. Reminiscent of Neuromancer, but more Raymond Chandler or "Chinatown", plus with ultra-violence ala Tarentino. I got it and its sequel on an impulse buy off of an Amazon recommendation. Still have the sequel going for me.

Reading sci-fi is always the search for the edge. A.E. Van Vogt, Null-A, in the 50's had some edge, as did Asimov's Foundation. Herbert had edge. Philip K. Dick was over the edge. Zelazny wasn't too edgy, but I always enjoyed it, like Simak.

The Ace special editions that came out in 83-85 really pushed the edge. 1st novels by Gibson("Neuromancer"), Lucius Shepard, Kim Stanley Robinson, Michael Swanwick, and Bruce Sterling("Schismatrix"). Greg Bear was good during that time. Then, a breather until Neal Stephenson and "Snow Crash". Dan Simmons started up around then, and Vernor Vinge has written good stuff, but overall, somewhat of a lull lately -- except for Greg Egan. Others who looked promising (Tony Daniels, Robert Reed), have had disappointing 1st novels. We'll give Charles Stross another chance.

The best place to watch the sci-fi edge from is in Gardner Dozois' annual "Year's Best". Just noticed this year's out, woo-ha, I can pick up a copy for vacation next week.

Picked up 3 cds lately:

1. "Give Up", by The Postal Service. A recommendation by the canny Amazon data miner -- the same singer/songwriter as Death Cab For Cutie, but with techno drum machine background instead of a guitar band. I like the techno backgrounds, but I think the songs are little weaker.
2. "Franz Ferdinand", eponymous. My youngest and I saw the video to "Take Me Out" and decided to check it out. Catchy tunes, 80s punk sound.
3. "Dear Catastophe Waitress", by Belle and Sebastian. Sounds pretty much like the other two of theirs I have. Kind of like Thai spring rolls, can't decide if I really like them or not.

One plus Two

Read a sci-fi recommended by my friend David: "Evolution", by Stephen Baxter. Interesting read, mostly disjointed chapters following various primates from 65 million years ago (the dinosaur-killing comet) to the end of life on earth one-half billion years from now. Interesting points/theories:

1. Prior to the speciation of Homo Sapiens, all the primate main "characters" were the one ancestor of us all. I guess that's true, before we were a species, there was one earlier primate ancestor that we all wound up descended from.
2. The mental tool/agent that was the seed of self-awareness was a module that modeled the behavior (mind) of others -- needed to survive in complicated primate dominance heirarchies.
3. The origin of religion: when the 1st slightly mutant and psychotic Homo Sapiens broke out of having a compartmentalized mind and started putting 1 and 2 together (and forming sentences) around 60,000 years ago (not a bad number), the 1st thing she did was set herself up as a shaman. She used her new-found mental abilities to confound and dominate others -- shades of the power of lying in TOOCITBOTBM (blogged earlier).

Got two new cd's recently:

1. "The Love Below/Speakerboxx" by Outkast, for my birthday.  The non-rap cd has good tunes, some unbelievably banal vulgarity, and the oh-so-catchy dance tune "Hey-ya".  My wife and I were driving back from Cornell after dropping our middle daughter off and heard it on the radio 3 times in the 11 hour drive.  When I got home my oldest daughter had sent me the link to "Hey-ya Charlie Brown".  I tried to fwd it to someone the next day, it was gone from the .edu server where I got it -- probably swamped by a storm of downloads.   No link, I'm sure you can find it.
2. "Get Away from Me", by Nellie McKay, from my youngest daughter for Father's Day. She liked Nellie the best of the acts she saw at Bonaroo. 2 cds, kind of all over the place, very creative. Not sure what kind of staying power the tunes have tho.

Do You Believe in Luck?

Just finished the 2nd book of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy, "The Confusion". Fully as good a read as the 1st. I would presume that much of the historical content was researched and mostly true. One thought I had from this, re The Right to Keep and Bear Arms in the Bill of Rights: in the time of this book, roughly 80 years before the Declaration of Independence, carrying weapons was still only allowed to nobles. Commoners weren't allowed weapons. A standard feudal feature, like samurai Japan. So, the 2nd amendment says that it wants a militia, but I wonder if it also wasn't a repudiation of the feudal separation of nobles vs commoners. Everybody gets guns!

Thinking about Pinker's nature vs nurture arguments in "The Blank Slate" (last blog), he quotes 50% genetic, 50% peer group, but really seems to want to ascribe the 50% peer group to 50% fate or luck instead. This reminded me of three things:

1. The movie "Grand Canyon". I liked the movie, about various people who get "messages from god" and how they react to them. (I queried my team of developers at the time as to what the secular version of "message from god" would be. The best we came up with was "anomalous meaning spike".) At various times more than one of the characters say "I believe in luck". So, the question is, do you believe in luck, and also, what is luck?
2. The book "The Celestine Prophecy" (no link (shudder)). I read his about 10 years ago to see if new-agers had any interesting new religious concepts. I kind of liked the 1st of its 10 principles, which was that all of our lives are shaped by random happenings and events, sometimes strongly. So, we should be on the lookout for such life-shaping random events, and when we perceive one, try to get behind it and go for it.
   From there, tho, it's straight downhill, with the 10th principle being that you can vibrate yourself into a higher plane of existence such that you kind of disappear from this one. Damn, somehow I have managed to miss all the well-documented cases of that happening. Oh well ...
3. Tim Power's novel "Last Call". I like Power's stuff, magical realism, with historical figures mixing up with various para-supernatural stuff. This one is probably my favorite of his. It's a fisher king story, with the main character a professional poker player. In it, if there are anomalous "luck waves" around, the liquid in a glass will tilt at an angle and smoke will spiral over the table. This is part of what has ruined me on gambling -- when I am (infrequently) around gambling, I find myself trying to check out "luck waves".

So, what is luck? The fact that sometimes shit happens, and you hope it's not to you, and sometimes good things happen, and you hope that it is to you.

I tell a story: around 10 years ago, on a Friday evening, I was supposed to pick up my middle daughter and her friend, then in middle school, at a movieplex on the east side of Lexington. I get there, no daughter. After 20 minutes or so, I find out they hooked up with some boys they knew and the boys' mom gave them a ride home. My office was on that side of town, and I decided to drop by for some reason, which I would normally never do in the evening, particularly Friday. So, I take Man-o-War to I-75 north for one exit to Winchester Rd. Halfway there, I slow down and stop on the Interstate. An elderly woman, drunk and on medication, was driving on the wrong side of the interstate and had a head-on with the car two ahead of me, also driven by a woman. Both women died. They had the medical helicopter on the interstate, they finally let us off the exit I had got on about 90 minutes later. The point is, I had no business being there and then and, if I had been running 30 seconds ahead in this improbable sequence, I could have been the one in the head-on. I take this as evidence that, when your number's up, your number's up.

So, I guess I kind of believe in fate -- but I think that's just that circumstances beyond our control, but of a non-mysterious nature, can affect us in ways we can't predict. But I think I really don't believe in luck. Damn, tho, I hate to write that. I'd better knock on some wood to ward off the jinx.

Two Good Books

Last weekend I read Bruce Sterling's latest, "The Zenith Angle". Very fun read, only 300 pages, academic computer geek becomes black ops cyber-warrior. A good vacation book. Sterling recently gave a keynote at some technical conference where he was saying that the Internet has become the domain of large criminal activities, and we need the Internet cops to get it under control. The main character in "The Zenith Angle" voices the same concerns. I guess he's right. The spam levels are definitely getting annoying, and I'm still waiting for my $1,000,000 to come back from Nigeria for the $10,000 I sent them ;-> Seems like things are moving in that direction, jail time recently for spammers and worm writers.

The other book I just finished last night: "The Blank Slate" by Stephen Pinker. What a fun read! I described it to a couple of people as "a feel-good book for people who don't believe in anything". It begins with a history of The Enlightenment, and then takes aim at three prevalent ideas that modern science has basically shot full of holes, but that continue to hang on, particularly in academia:

1. The Blank Slate -- the notion that we are born with minds that are blank slates, on which anything can be written.
2. The Noble Savage -- the notion that anything natural is good, and that, as such, primitive peoples have lived peaceful, pastoral lives in harmony with nature.
3. The Ghost in the Machine -- the notion of the human soul, but also the notion that all living things have a vital essence.

So, after pointing out all the holes in these, he then talks about the four fears that cause people to want to believe in these things even if they are shown to be false: fear if inequality, imperfectibility, determinism, and nihilism. He shows why an understanding of the genetic and physical nature of human nature can allay these fears.

The 4th section discusses what human nature is. One interesting point here was that as we have optical and cognitive illusions, there are also moral illusions, where the inherited hardwiring in our brains causes us to react with sanctimony, moral condemnation and the taboo reaction in ways that aren't appropriate.

The 5th section then picks out five current hot buttons and analyzes them in terms of the prior sections. These are politics, violence, gender, children and the arts. He has great fun poking his finger in the eyes of sacred cows, and I laughed out loud several times in these. The chapter on children went into more detail on the basis of our personalities I had seen I think in "Genome": 50% heredity, 50% peer groups, 0% parents. He seems to want to replace the 50% peer groups with "fate" -- the random things that happen to all of us to shape our lives.

Anyway, a great read. I had read Pinker's "How the Mind Works" a few years ago and enjoyed it as well. Surprising I had no FFTKAT on it. Like this one, it is more a synthetic review than something with radical new ideas or totally little known facts.

It is untrue that I "don't believe in anything". I believe in 3 things, my postulates, as detailed in the 1st Dumb Ass blog. The nice thing about all of science, including this book, is that you don't have to believe any of it. You evaluate the data, assign a goodness measure to the theory, and move on. 5, 10, 20 years from now large parts of this book could be well-known bullshit and it wouldn't bother me, and I would think the author, in the slightest. Ah, the joys of scientific thinking!

In an online shopping note, I am still linking books and CDs to Barnes and Noble because I like their nice ISBN-based URLs. I ordered some stuff from them late last year and had nasty delivery delays, so I am back to ordering from Amazon. I have started routinely checking on buying books used from them. I had two of my daughters and one of my coworkers wanting to read "The Blank Slate" from my enthusiam about it, I ordered two used hardcopies of it for $5.00 ea plus $3.00 shipping ea. Sure beats the cover price of $27.95.

Creaping Dualism

Thinking about earlier posts on AI vs AE in the light of the mind as a ecosystem, I think I was engaged in some creaping dualism: intelligence vs emotion. They may be well be in different parts of the hardware, with the emotions more in the central, older parts and intelligence in the outer, newer parts of the brain, but, I think it would be a mistake to treat them as different. They both live in the ecosystem of the mind. Just as there are old organisms in modern ecosystems (sharks, turtles), emotions may be evolutionarily older, but they are no less players for that.

Got some new cds:

• "The Girl in the Other Room", by Diana Krall. I have one other of hers I don't like that much. It would be great sitting in a jazz bar and listening to it, but w/o the atmosphere, it's kind of dull. I was interested in this new one, since she cowrote a number of the songs with her (new) husband, Elvis Costello -- but, still, kind of dull. There's a cover of a Joni Mitchell song, "Black Crow", that really made me want to her the original.
• "The Evening of My Best Day", by Ricki Lee Jones. I have most of her cds, this one starts out strong, but then seems to peter out. Needs a few more listens.
• "Grows Backward" by David Byrne. Great tunes, suitably quirky, hardly a weak track.
• "Musicology" by Prince. Prince was, of course, the great musical genius of the 80's. Unbelievable the number of hit songs he cranked out, and an unbelievable musician. My kids used to always get me Prince cds/tapes for gifts, hadn't had any for a while. This latest is great, the funk groove is still there. I'm jealous, my baby sister is going to see him.

Have lots of good stuff to read, the new Stephenson, the new Sterling. Have to drain the magazine stack 1st, I'm into June now.

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.

Ecosystems Redux

Thinking about the glial cells "tending" the neurons, you wonder how this came about. The glial cells are reacting to the excitation of the neurons. Is it "interesting" to them in some sense? It seems like a strategy of cooperation as opposed to competition would have evolutionary advantages. Is this all based on the stuff they are finding with bacterial communication (see for example this wired article -- seems like there was a more complete writeup in Scientific American, where they thought they had found the chemical that all cells would use to communicate). Yet another thing that we may have scientific understanding of soon.

Ecosystems

They're everywhere, they're everywhere!

In her senior year of high school, my oldest daughter did a research project involving factors affecting mylenization of neurons. The myelin sheath around neurons makes them transmit impulses faster; lack of it is I think mostly what Multiple Schlerosis is. The myelin sheath is composed of Schwann cells that wrap themselves around the neurons. I remember thinking and mentioning to her at the time that this seems like a relationship that may have started out parasitic and evolved to be symbiotic.

Last month's Scientific American had an article on glial cells, of which Schwann cells are a type. Glial cells make up the majority of the brain and were thought to mostly provide nutrition to the neurons. Now they have found out that they react to synapse firing and in fact moderate it. As such, they may have a role in moderating neuron activity and development, i.e., memory and learning. Really cool pictures of glial calls with tendrils wrapped around synapses, clearly they are involved in the synapses' operation. Kind of like neuron shepherds. You wonder how this relationship evolved -- this little ecosystem in our brains.

I read a few years ago "Slanted Truths", by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan. One of the points of this book is that one of the techniques by which life evolves is by things merging, rather than strictly by mutation. Basic cell structure is a case in point. Mitochondria were a bacteria or something that got eaten by early cells at some point and that then got incorporated rather than digested -- they have their own DNA. Also mentioned, if I remember right, were the spindles used in mitosis, which are basically spirochetes, just as sperm tails are. So, an ecosystem in every cell.

This was also one of the coolest things of the many cool things in "Genome", already blogged -- that the genome itself is an ecosystem, with little snippets of replicating genetic code trying to make more copies of themselves, snake other sequences, and otherwise engage in Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest strategies.

So, is it surprising at all that our minds are an ecosystem? No, not at all, what else would they be? Good books on this: "Society of the Mind", by Marvin Minsky, the father of AI at MIT; and also "The Meme Machine", by Susan Blackmore, already blogged.

Read a post by Jaron Lanier at The Edge, kind of talking about how the early pioneers of computer science (Von Neumann, Wiener, Shannon) were too hung up on serial architectures and ignored surface-based (not parallel) computing. He got totally blasted on it. Still I agree with his idea, blogged previously, that current software interfaces are too brittle. It is too hard to get things to talk together, any software developer can tell you that. Re the above thoughts, it makes it too hard for software ecosystems to self-organize and evolve. If we can come up with the more approximate, organic interfaces that Lanier proposes, then our silicon children can maybe begin to evolve into something interesting. Kind of funny, Lanier is saying the Cybernetic Singularity is a pipe dream, but his idea might be a key one to make it happen.