fractalnavel

there's a purple pick-up truck cruising the neighborhood with a six piece brass band in the back playing circus-type music.

seriously, i haven't had a drink in weeks.

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“... The upshot of all of this is that the Future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow and you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing, in which they watch their squats and under-developed fields get turned into a giant game of Counterstrike between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherfuckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherfuckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another. ...”

from zenarchy, via jwz

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note to self: please remember that the phrase “digital divide” indicates a historical discontinuity of information as well as socio-geographic accessibility.

self: huh?  what are you bothering me for? you're the one who needs reminding!

[crap, bad phrasing] oh, shut up and go back to your hibernating.

self: thanks, i think i will. just be more careful next time.

sorry. [sheesh]

anyway, what i was trying to say before i was so rudely interrupted is that there are features to this new literacy of ours that are not always necessarily positive.  on the other hand, it may provide both the opportunity and dangers of a fresh start, and uncover presumptions about knowledge and communications that turn out to have been (un)interpreted wrongly. and, as communications are the basis for everything from science and economics to politics and culture, there should be fundamental impacts there as well.  however, the inertia, or maybe simple lack of imagination, of pre-divide powers-that-be are strongly handicapping this evolutionary process. 

not that people are necessarily forgetting these things, but they may be making the same mistakes as the last time a revolution in communication occurred (writing): they are not explicitly recognizing the process.  oh, sure, some few are.  but most people blithely go and just do.

hmm.  not really wanting to corral the self-organization process here, just perhaps inject finer distinctions and detail to improve the adaptability and richness of the process.

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to do: create a list of things i will never do.  of course, this would be compiled from things that may have once mattered, regardless how outlandish.  might be a good “facing up to reality” exercise.  depends on the person, on what their relative strengths and weaknesses are.

of course, each item on the list needs explanation.  that's part of the reality check.  as the great philosopher harry callahan once said, “a man's got to know his limitations”.

interesting stuff to think about.  i don't think i will do it in public.

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i was wondering why i haven't seen many items by new york times op-ed columnists in the news lists lately.  so i visited nytimes.com.  apparently, all of these regular nyt columnists are now premium content.  a great deal of their influence comes from exposure on the web - the freeweb, i should say.  a recent comment of mine here:

weird how a paper that so obviously wants to be a mechanism of social change will bury all its material. shows you their real priorities aren't much different than those they often rail against.

in this case they (the nyt business folks) are undercutting the exact reason these people write.  if i were one of these columnists, i'd challenge this policy, and if unsuccessful, move on.

just part of an increasing trend of business interests annexing the commons.  happens all the time, historically.  this is not a phenomenon exclusive to the internet.  restricting access to any information through monetary or geographical (as in libraries) or technological controls smacks of a type of elitism.  more of an argument against unfettered “free” market capitalism ?  it's no different than any other resource.  the engines of commerce start to take notice of something that grew from the grass roots into something valuable, and they do what is expected of them.  i would add that this in turn decreases the value of what they grabbed, but apparently this does not seem to matter to consumers who support the results by literally buying into it.

earlier posts here talk about things like what “freedom” really means, in particular free speech, and also about the reliability of information in a public commons.  and one of my earliest posts, about information vs. economic status.  not sure where i'm going here, but my head feels stuffed with unformed thought at the moment.  see the i.c.k. post category for even more.

well, what i have written here isn't much more than the usual, but i have a growing internal sense of synthesis of these and other things, the the consequences thereof.  right now this is just another notation on the information dead file, locked behind the tombstone pages of premium access notifications.  and there is no life inside the grave; all is dust.

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didn't make it to the roadkill cook-off.  oh well.  at least i did what i could locally: white castles and taco bell.  mmm, rodent.

boulevard lard. avenue stew. two lane chow mein. cul de sac critter snack.

fruit of the zoom.

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... wiring.  hey, how come we still run actual power carrying wires all over the place just for switches ?  it would seem better these days if fixtures, breakers, etc. were solid state relays or the like, and use only ttl voltages / amperage to run the switching functions.  for that matter, all the switching signals could be wireless.

just a thought that occurred when i looked a little closer at the wiring mess in the basement.

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• we've made a good deal of the rest of world richer by valuing this stuff - even if u.s. interests were forcibly removed to make it happen in the first place. this kind of historical perspective kind of puts arab & muslim objections to u.s. policies in a very different light.
• we should start transitioning to as oil-less an economy as we can now, before catastrophe hits.  that would keep us ahead of the rest of the global energy curve, and in fact would give the u.s. a significant advantage while evaporating the middle east and south american problems.
• since that won't happen, look on the bright side: at least we won't have to worry about social security.  that problem will be barely noticeable in the flood of resource shortages.  with such enormous and fundamental economic and social restructuring in our future we need to be investing our time, moneys and (ironically) energies elsewhere.
• dang, i sure am not thinking globally here.  but such nationalistic policies could also mean the u.s. maintains a positive leadership role in the world, with everyone ultimately benefitting.  current policies of increasing protectionism, conquest and denial with respect to fundamental changes in natural realities will only result in eventual catastrophic collapse.  
• current schedules have us reaching the moon just about the time hell breaks loose on earth.

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this one got a good laugh out of me:

Q: You are stranded on a desert island with only one book, one CD, and one DVD--what are they?
A: The one book would be whatever book I was currently writing. I mean, I hate falling behind in the work. ...

why was that so funny ?  well, guess who that was.  ah, you'll never get it, so here: it's robert jordan, the infamous author of the wheel of time series of fantasy novels.  this is the same series that has been plodding on for nearly twenty years now, and is in its about-to-be-released eleventh volume.  after a good start, most of the last five or more books have been meandering almost pointlessly.  as if that wasn't bad enough, there have been large gaps between the publication dates of some books, which in combination with the wandering plot makes -former?- fans justifiably concerned about the possibility of any reasonable conclusion. 

and it's not as if jordan has been steadily working at this series either.  in some of the inter-novel periods he has published another series of novels - !  “falling behind in the work” indeed.  obviously he has a pretty idiosyncratic sense of just exactly what his work is.

the quote above comes from book 11's amazon.com page. other questions and answers are pretty funny as well.  i like the question that follows the above:

Q: What is the worst lie you've ever told?

perhaps the answer to the previous question, eh ?  the answer is not very fun though.  actually, to me he comes off as quite a jerk, with pat, meaningless answers, even sucking up to his wife.  which might at least partially explain the way he portrays women in the books.

sigh.  ok, i opted out of reading book ten a few years back when the reviews stunk and it appeared to me to be just more wandering.  if you can believe the one review available on amazon's site, this latest installment should be much better.  so do i jump back in again, or wait until this thing comes to an end ?  which might never happen.  the pain in the ass part of it all is that the books and the premise was good enough to get hooked into in the first place, and i would really like to see this one through. 

unfortunately, it seems the author may have attempted something far beyond his own ability to satisfactorily complete.  i'd hate to see a rush job at finishing it, but i have my suspicions that such a path is unavoidable now.  in light of the plodding that came before, such a perception may be inescapable, even if the works are otherwise a good match to the originals.

makes me wonder about what would have happened to other fiction series of note: herbert's dune, asimov's universe.  oh wait - no need to wonder, the hacks have been at it already, with posthumous invasions into territory that should have been left alone.  i think unfinished works should be respected, not dishonored by a farce of continuation, even if the attempts are quality work - which almost never happens anyway.  not as if one could mistake the originals with the squatters.  except - people do.  and this is what bothers me.  well, maybe not so much their own misbegotten perceptions, but the fact that there seems to be an expectation that everyone should play along - and i won't do that. 

herbert and asimov and other great authors are dead.  should someone start to write in shakespeare's world as well ?  if the jordan novels go unfinished, so be it.  that would be the real travesty, transforming what was conceived as a set piece, a self-contained oeuvre, into a serial cash-beast. 

funny that jordan mentions the bible as the most influential book in his life.  funny how such an important piece of work, as an expression of a dynamic and mystical immortal power could be presented in finished form.

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a couple somethings i've been batting around in my head recently (besides my brain):

• note that the marginal value of a specific amount of money goes down as one's total assets increase.  well, what if the world valued money the same way as the individual did when dealing with that individual ?  that would in effect remove the marginal value effect and level the purchasing power playing field.  the problem is in making this seem desirable to people.  it kinda sort of lends itself to a “giving” economy, which is not quite the same thing as moving all transactions into a gift economy. 
• this one's more concrete: all fuel / energy needs to be treated as a utility now.  that's been the case for everything but transportation uses - why ?  that's one interesting impact of electric vehicles, it moves that part of the energy economy into the utility arena and out of the “free market”. the thing to recognize is that this treatment of energy as utility is justified since transportation is a necessity these days, not an option.  or, if optional, we need to change our culture (work expectations, for example) to reflect that.  i think it would be easier to match the economic treatment with current realities, rather than the other way around.  but right now, we have a mismatch between the two - and, of course, vultures who take unfair advantage of that mismatch.

i'm so ignorant of formal economics though, so i was considering reading up.  there was a good intro tv course i saw a few years back, but i only saw a few episodes.  oh, i suppose i have more knowledge of these things than i explicitly recognize.  i'm in the same position as i was a few years back with respect to philosophy.  an effort at review there was helpful in making me aware of what i knew or not.  one result of that review effort was disappointment - is that all there is ?  oh, the details would be rich, but larger reality is a limited set of knowledge and imagination.  that applies to all fields.  and now we bump into epistemology, and i don't want to go there now.

observation: it occurs to me that the the perception of whether someone is higher or lower is a gravity gradient bias.

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[gush] isn't this time of year great ?! last week they showed us a few pilot episodes of this season's new tv shows - and this week they're already showing re-runs !!  oooh, don't you just love our network executives ?!![/gush]

what a load of crap.

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craig:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2000/vostok.shtml

me:

sudden thought hit me: microbe populations apparently took billions of years before the next big step¹ in evolution occurred: multicelled life (the first big step being cellular life in the first place; before that would be subcellular organelles.  each of these took place faster.).  so it's a much rarer occurence than the drake equation folks make it out to be.  if it wasn't - well, shouldn't there be other occasions of newly evolving multicelled life from scratch ?  and for that matter, other newly evolved cells and sub-cells, including new genetic schemes, such as (ie, non-dna, modified dna, etc.).  of course, we have our usual problems recognizing new boundaries between things because of our existing patterns of recognition.  and i think the classic objection to that question is that the already “more evolved” (an unsupported value judgement?) life will prevent such new evolutions through things like predation and environmental effects, etc.  this is true to some extent (for example, the oxygenation of the atmosphere), but there are counter examples as well, i think.  mammals, for example, were not a “better” adaptation in early times; that bias is with us now for obvious reasons.

 

so - where is the “new” life ? (not just the beginnings, but the current results of continuous beginnings.) ?  i wonder what would happen if you isolated a place like vostok lake for four billion years - could larger life arise, (assuming the single cell variety exists) ?  and consider also that any microbes have relatively recent dna encoded (as far as bacteria etc. go).  perhaps different stages of evolution move through different eras of sensitivity to environmental conditions.  it seems that the relation between robustness and complexity is not consistent, and perhaps sometimes an advantageous environmental bottleneck needs to occur / be traversed before life forms can evolutionarily pass through to the next robust form.  luck.  interesting that the human species exhibits an extreme form of robustness to the extent it's even moved off-planet, if only (briefly).  and out of the solar system too, if one considers any microbes that piggy-backed on voyager, or if you just consider the probe as a mechanical expression of human existence alone - (which in turn is representative of earth life, which in turn is representative of simple universal physical laws, ...).

 

so they (the scientists) look at mars and europa, hoping.  but if they (the planet(oid)s) did not ever experience the proper era of opportunity, and did not have anything around to take advantage of such an era, it will have amounted to nothing.

 

leaving aside the “new life” question, although it needs far more contemplation, i wondered about the drake equation as well, with it's handful of multiplicative terms.  such an oversimplified piece of bullshit, but still, it's a starting point.  i suspect the i.d. folks have something similar; i hear about their mathematical formulas that “prove” a particular pattern cannot happen by chance. (derived from what empirical observations? the works of humans ? as if we are not merely accidental ourselves.  they've got a built in assumption that's the same as their conclusion.  we've discussed that before - tangent here.)

 

so what happens if you add more or less detail into any expression ? (kinda reminds me of that roller coaster failure discussion.) ?  you can take any one of the drake eqn terms and break it down into a far more complex sequence of events, things nonlinear, additive, etc.  this dramatically affects the term itself, and when you consider the same operation applied to the eqn as a whole - well, you can see it for the nonsense that it is.  metamath objections.  now, the concept of coming up with a probability for, (and enumeration of,) life seems worthwhile in itself, even if this one attempt is flawed.  well, it only seems worthwhile, until you realize that we don't even understand what it is we are working out the probability for.  in fact, in our conception of life, which is so geocentric, we appear to be working out the equation for the probability of our own existence only.  the only correct answer there will be “one”.  duh.  the answer can be anything you want, and there are no constraints on input without presumptions that poison the results.  so basically, the question “how much life is out there?” is fundamentally flawed and meaningless.

 

 

now i need to get back and read the rest of the article ;-)

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i'm going to try and catch up on :

365 tomorrows is a collaborative project designed to present readers with one new piece of short speculative fiction each day for one year. Utilizing the broad palate of science fiction, our vision of the future creates a diverse pool of stories with something for everyone to enjoy.

365 launched August 1, 2005 and will continue until July 31, 2006

sounds like fun.  i've been looking for scfi to read for a few weeks, but haven't wanted to buy something.  i noticed that jordan's wheel of time book 11 is out now.  i didn't read 10.  i had been keeping up over the years, but along with so many others just got frustrated as the author failed to live up to the story's original promise.  so, when or if he ever finishes it, i will pick up the rest of the books.

i've also been blowing time over at , quite a bit, actually, for the last week or two.  one of the classic (but not first generation), all-custom muds.  i don't know why i'm attracted to these things.  perhaps it's the influence of my heavy-ish text adventure / interactive fiction (if) days.  muds are multiplayer, but i tend to explore them on my own, avoiding intereactions with other players.  once upon a time i had a link to a good paper on the different types of players and other mud issues; perhaps i'll find it before i post this. [ok, here's one, but it's not the one i was looking for. a bit dated and biased, but still worth looking at. ahh - here it is, sortof like a stripped down mbti ;-), same author.  worth wandering his site for more on.]

i first ran into muds in '94, back when the world-wide-web had only around a few thousand pages.  i didn't do much with them, or anything on the internet, for a number of years afterwards, for various reasons (which is kind of sad, but there were reasons...).  then at the end of '97 i ran into them again. this time it was , one of the real classics (but still not first generation).  although it's commercial, it's much cheaper than it used to be, and they offer an extensive initial free play period with automated tutoring to get you immersed in the game.  this game also has extensive history and other information on the web like player forums, so the compexity is offset a bit by this.  [the paper linked to above has a brief review of this one.]

for ishar, i've found just about zilch beyond the sparse help provided by the mud's website itself.  that's kind of a disappointment for an explorer-type like me, but c'est la guerre, you play with what you have.  i had bumped into this game here and there, but this is the first time i've made a serious attempt at prolonged character development (not role playing (yuk!), i mean in terms of levelling and equipment and loot) and exploration.  all my other forays were just dabblings.

this time around i've been interacting with others, mostly just in passing.  there's no role playing or anything, really.  mostly i've found this world to be populated by long-term players intent on power-levelling and looting.  i've seen muds focused on pk, and others that were basically just chat-rooms.  i prefer the ones with more atmosphere and good better writing, like ishar and avalon.  the one thing i miss from the if days is the puzzle solving.  in those you were basically involved in a single prolonged quest.

in a couple of recent instances i've made exceptions to the solo approach.  i teamed up with some players who seemed to know their way around, and who were basically looking for firepower to assist them in computer-controlled-character (ccc's, or mobiles = mobs) killing and looting.  i never did that before.  mind you, most of the players are teens, maybe twenties, so communications and attitudes can be interesting at times.  these guys basically do “plunge-diving” expeditions, where they know the string of moves required to get to the desired battle zone deep within dangerous surroundings.  they effectively “run” past all the dangers that they otherwise could not face head on.  this is very different from my own slow, methodical explorations, where i stand toe-to-toe with the hazards and slowly expand my character's reach as it strengthens.  anyway, i tagged along for one extended session of this, and i must say it was a pretty productive encounter, in spite of my clear slowness as compared to the others.  learned some new things, and was glad of my other researches into these sorts of things (team battling) in the past.  i wasn't at a complete loss when it came to some terms and tactics.  but it was as i suspected, it would take a lot of good coordination to effectively “team”.  as things are, i get the impression that everyone takes the simpler route in these things, which is having a leader who treats the rest of the team as simple killing machines.  anything else would be far more time consuming, and i expect that these types of players would see that as a waste.

these days there are the more popular graphical multiplayer games, the mmporpgs like everquest or world of warfare. nearly all of them are fee based, so i don't bother.  there are some other less-themed graphical worlds (activeworlds, “there”), but they have less draw for me.  there is an interesting exception to this: .  very cool and compex game, but needs far more horsepower than i have available.  even the client is about a GB in size; luckily, they distribute it with bittorrent.  i mucked about in this for a short time early this year, but for various reasons dropped. it.

ah well, to wrap up, there's all kind of stuff out there, past and present.  there used to be (and still are a few) online multiplayer air combat games, which may represent the originals in graphical mporpgs (without the first “m”, which stands for “massively”).  and there are a number of fairly serious simulator communities out there, including a “simnasa.org” which is so like the real world it isn't worth playing.

whatever you want to (virtually) do, it's out there.  even start your own universe, with all the pain that implies.  mostly what that does is fragment the player base into loads of mediocre nowheres, and then you have to deal with the crap.  which leads me to: gods aren't sadists, they're ticked off masochists.

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somebody is starting a collection of katrina related video clips.  not extensive, mainly a few recordings of criticisms.  here's a wmp playlist of seven clips, totaling a bit over an hour. [best to save the list on your computer, then open the saved copy, but you can just click on it if you want]

of note are “real time” and “daily show” excerpts.

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