state of the 'net:
Where did The Onion archives go?
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have you noticed that the web is constantly breaking down, in spite of efforts by archivers such as the wayback machine ? the effect is accelerating. worth a post, i think. it's a type of senility in some sense. we are losing the factual connections with the internet's origins, leaving us, now, with myth, and eventually, with nothing at all except the artifacts that arose from them and thus implicitly contain their origins. just like genetic and memetic evolution. our computers / systems are increasingly a house of cards gutted from within.
well, not entirely - some fossils are preserved, sometimes living, sometimes petrified. i wonder if some ai someday will be searching for the digital holy grail, or worshipping - or even _dependent_ on - the infinitely embellished archaic cobol subroutine.
hail the allmighty dip switch, for it hath created life !
communicating with aliens:
I know you were reading up on this recently --
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/21/1237237&from=rss
thanks. although not as disappointing as other /. threads, this one is fairly naive despite good efforts by the contributors. no, i didn't read it all. but in the first half or so, it was pretty clear that no one had bothered to search the web for related materials. if they had, they would have found minsky's stuff immediately, then that other long paper (that i never finished) would have shown up as well.
the reason i find the topic fascinating and valuable is that, if done properly, it represents the most fundamental research approach to the topics of communications, epistemology, metaphysics, etc. once one considers that all things not human are in the "alien" bucket, and then further, that humans are aliens to each other, and even within themselves, our illusions become apparent. it's the ultimate in copernican frontiers. anti-anthropy ?
as for whether there are such things as aliens, it doesn't matter. funny, though - have you ever seen a _plan_ regarding alien contact ? communication is only the beginning. maybe it's not practical to pursue at all, especially from a cost/benefit perspective. it's probably best to just react to events as or if they occur. so, it isn't even worth our time to consider the actual possibilities of alien existence per se. yet, as with so many other things, the mental exercise can lead to advances is what originally seem to be unrelated areas of knowledge (technical, philosophical, psychological).
but, hmm, a cost/benefit analysis would show that some basic preparations are probably worthwhile, similar to the reasoning supporting the "what would we do if an asteroid threatens?" considerations. we probably can't do a lot right now, but we can at least flesh out some outlines, and perhaps test a few things out. prudence from the global community ? probably not going to happen at this level, current u.n. shake-up proposaly notwithstanding.
geez, took me a while to figure out where i posted those links - they're in that post on "solaris" at the beginning of january. frickin' google doesn't index my blog well. perhaps because of the crap on the side ? anyway, here's a page with a good list of links on this topic: Interstellar Communication hmm, the whole website has got fun stuff at this last one. wouldn't you know it, a nasa guy ;-)