fractalnavel : (e.)t.

my other brain is in the shop

fractalnavel — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:37:43 GMT

been running across some really good scifi short stories & related items in online collections lately, thought I'd pass on a few:

they're made out of meat - terry bisson: classic, apparently; pretty straightforward. fermi's paradox solved - one way.
the singularity - t. bisson: (essay) what i've been saying for years - hey, people - it's all over ! and the bit about collective infinite regress navel gazing as well (of course).
a canticle - t. bisson: (story background) bisson's comments on the completion of miller's "canticle" sequel. whets one's appetite, all right.
tva baby - t. bisson: holy cvrap. surreal violence, or violent surrealism ? your choice. personally, i think the whole thing is in his head. or mine.
the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away - cory doctorow: doctorow's themes seem to stay consistent. this has echoes of all kinds of classics. very nice, a few plot & dialog inconsistencies, though. computer style geek ? this one will resonate.
understand - ted chiang: mind blowing. pun? what pun? i can remember a story with a similar theme but completely different context; lost in the mists of memory, ironically. got a few sigma under your hat ? then you'll "get" this.
we haven’t got there yet - harry turtledove: if you like theater & especially shakespeare, you'll love this. very high quality work. well, of course, look who's done writing.
--and he built a crooked house - robert heinlein: an old crusty classic from an old crusty classic.

many more here (where those came from):

the old scifi.com shorts collection - classics & originals, from the internet archive's wayback machine. there are apparently more than is listed; the heinlein one above, from this site, doesn't show up here.
tor.com stories online - i was surprised to run into these, on a publisher's site. some (most?) have audio available.
infinity plus - huge collection of authors & stories.
and don't forget 365 tomorrows - daily scifi short shorts for several years now, has outdone itself.

guano machine

fractalnavel — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:32:35 GMT

i poked around twitter a bit recently while I've been playing, and i noticed that there were basically two styles: the originally intended open-loop micro-blogging, and the chat. people don't seem to have figured out how to really use micro-blogging, they either fell back into chat patterns, or just compulsively post trivia. the news channels aren't so bad, but that's what used to be professionally provided via rss from the news websites.

so, i wonder: how has im traffic been faring lately ? i bet it's down by an amount corresponding to twitter use. not sure what im'ing in public gets you. and twitter makes a lousy chat room.

as for the micro blogging, what proportion of the updates out there are bodily function related ? "went to the gym" "got back from the gym" "at the gym" "tired / cold / hot / sleeping / stupid / omg, what's this infection, my nuts have just dropped off!". does anyone really want to know that ? does anyone really want others to know that ?

then there are those projecting "image". professional, cool, wacky, dark - all that self-indulgent cvrap.

here's what i had in mind, and why i haven't really used it, and why I've been tinkering with daily accumulation and posting of micro-posts: sometimes i have quick thoughts, or a stream of thinking, that doesn't quite go together in a longer coherent post yet. but i want to capture that stuff that's been getting lost to date. stuff that i don't email, im or talk to anyone about. in other words, i'm trying to catch another source of information. there are times when i'm just thinking about economics, or cosmogony, or metaphysics, or whatever. a string of what-ifs, conjectures, speculations, maybe an aha or two. and then they're gone.

so, maybe this new lighter weight tool might be of help there. i'll see. now that i have my tools built, i'll try it out, when i'm having one of those times. like anything else, it'll take practice. and maybe it just won't float at all. expectations of the lowest order would be of help here.

as for the twitter-world-as-it-is, as with any popular phenomena, there are a lot of critics popping up - and they're right.

so sure, there's unprecedented openness, but no one seems to know what do with it, on either end of the pipe. it's like i noted a long time ago, privacy is generally no big deal, outside of personal or institutional maliciousness. ever seen someone else's email ? once you get over the voyeurism, it's just boring crap. but maybe we never get over the voyeurism.

once upon a time i wanted to open up all exchanges anyway, making it able to delve into causality in new ways. and it's slowly been happening. global mind ? not yet. a demonstration of illusory free will / consciousness ? no one will pay attention (proving the point).

so - i have a rock. i wonder what i can bang with it.

rodents in the foundations

fractalnavel — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:53:50 GMT

once upon a time, i included the following in an email, which subsequently got posted by craig on the open source poetry site:

oh, to be a cosmic mole
in and out of planck-sized holes
experiencing all as whole
trying to preserve one's soul

yeah, yeah, never mind.

so today, craig, who brings it back up every now and then, digs up the following at deviant art:

weird, but pretty cool ;-)

go there, do that...

fractalnavel — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:08:37 GMT

searching through the google site, i ran across:

Source: http://www.google.com/virgle/

i confess, they had me there for a split second. don't miss the videos !

also, a reminder: tomorrow is geek christmas - go out and spend spend spend !

metablog: sunrise, sunset...

fractalnavel — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:27:33 GMT

fiddler on the roof ? nah. i just put the world sunrise map image in the sidebar. i always like following the equinox there (about a week from today), seeing the straight up and down terminator.

world sunlight map at die.net

of course, that's only relative to the projection being parallel to the axis of rotation, but what the hey, anthropic biases be damned, it's still fun to watch.

ok, i admit, i'm oddly - if not necessarily easily - entertained.

rabbit-holing

fractalnavel — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:24:51 GMT

curiouser & curiouser, said alice.

roots

fractalnavel — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 02:36:55 GMT

highly recommended: nova: ape genius. just caught this on pbs. takeaway:

control of emotions is critical to accomplishment;
so is the ability / desire to teach.

interesting, that last part: if the teaching skill is taught (metaknowledge), then the developmental acceleration can really begin. as for the emotional intelligence thing, humans have a long way to go in that regard. our sentimentality (positive or negative) is not a differentiator, but a common bond. hate kills - but so does love.

one more notch towards the recognition that we need to rethink all of our assumed definitions.

as for this nova episode itself, there are some goosebump moments. felt like i was watching the dawn of human evolution - because i was.

almost forgot a thought i had: if we gave the apes ritalin or something, would they learn better ? would we end up creating a biochemically supported slave species ? morlocks & eloi, a brave new world:

"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."

--- brave new world, chapter 2 [see also bnw, wikiquote]

the cruel face of addiction

fractalnavel — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 00:02:02 GMT

of course, knowing my perverse tendencies, you'll realize that this is much lighter in nature than the title would otherwise indicate. if i were really writing about "the cruel face of addiction", it would have been a light-hearted title.

gotta tell ya, i'm dissappointed with this windows live writer thing - it uses "font" tags ! etc. stupid shit.

oh, yeah, to the point: i'm talking about KoL crap here. what does it take to accumulate 100 different items, if the chance of their occurence is uniformly distributed ? well, without getting into enabling MathML here, like i did in the .Text installation, see the chart to the right. fuzzy, it's a bmp copy from mathematica.

it's essentially a logarithmic function. it tells a sad story. to get the last 5 items, for example, of a 100 unique item set , would take an additional 200 chances - ! more or less. 50% of one's effort is spent on 10% of the result.

odd - why does this sound familiar ? you kow, the old 80-20 rule. also, the distribution of wealth or other "privileged" position. if the chances are all equal, what is the result ?

it begins to occur to me that evolution is a reactionto statistical reality. well, of course. but the programming is inherent to the numbers. and so go the anti-entropic forces.

and all the armies thereof.

thermo-what ?

fractalnavel — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 23:46:00 GMT

... if heat is molecular kinetic energy, does that mean a fast moving water ballon has hot water from some perspective ? if so, what's the temp / unit of velocity ? so very hot water can remain liquid. sort of.

but this is true, think of things hitting the earth's atmosphere.

dang it...

fractalnavel — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 03:38:00 GMT

missed the comet...(read more)

is it february second yet ?

fractalnavel — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 00:07:00 GMT

kinda thinking about that poor groundhog poking his head out of a hole, looking for spring.

that's me, finally showing up on a blog. this one sits in most of the categories here, just so's it covers bases.

just took 25 minutes to order a pizza by phone. good thing i have a couple beers in me, pretty funny, really. is technology crippling people ? i didn't use my usual order-over-the-web method since i wanted a couple of items added to one of their pizzas that the web page wouldn't let me do. hell, it wouldn't even let me order more than five items on a pizza. it's a sad, sad world ;-)

me? been workin', that's what. it seems our tiny, digital-local blogging group also took the holidays off. jon is doing bowling releases only. craig is off doing his other blog, rarely, and getting weirder by the moment. i resolved not to comment there, i wanted to see the unperturbed result. yeah, it curved off, higher order derivatives increasing.

lots of stuff of minor kinds happening over the last few weeks. went up to michigan to visit some family for christmas day. inadvertently decapitated a neighborhood snowman. had a pi [sic] fight with my brother. went out to maryland for new years. watched the crab drop. had some wonderful (bold, italic, underline) meals courtesy of my sister (venison tenderloin, and more - latkes, ...). a menorah in an advent wreath ? o-k. saw “narnia”. picked our own oysters and ate them as we got 'em, my nephew doing the shucking as eric & i ate. putted around the water a bit on a ten horse skiff, looking for non existent fish (i was following the birds before i figured that the birds were probably following me...).

fan belt came off halfway home, did repairs in the rain, since luckily the belt wrapped itself around the fan shaft instead of going away altogether. autoparts store in the boonies was closed, of course, on january second.

launched a website this week. it's ok, kind of mom & pop, but if you don't invest more than that golden threshold, that's what you get.

only a few weeks left of stuff to do, other projects, same place. kind of a shame, since working less than a mile and a half down the road has let me ride around with the jeep top & doors off most of the winter so far. very cool, no pun intended. stop at the coffee shop on the way in, coast through the park into the lot, under the overhangs so i don't worry about rain. i would love to work there longer. but i didn't apply to the openings they had. why ? i dunno. fear of failure ? partly. but also low pay (so what? beats none at all), and i really, really, should be moving on. always far better to be leaving something good than running from something bad.

anyway, that's the resolution to that last post. i didn't want that particular position, nor the long term commitment. i just wanted to stay on at this place. and be able to really stretch my skills. unfortunately, yet again, this is not to be. i see the unnecessary bogging down of vision and motivation at this place, like all places, and it's sad, since there is so much potential with only a little push.

which lesson i should apply to my own life, yet do not. anyway, here i am, and there i was, and the intent was not to leave people hangng, just had to work lots of hours.

on the metablogging topic, i've been trying to sort out why or why not to write. the purpose has changed. the rants are less of a motivator nowadays, likewise my celebration of personal weirdnesses. keeping in touch is still a good idea, though, so there's that, for a while.

the thinking and creating and discovering continues, however, whether exposed to others or not. i am tired of leaving breadcrumb trails for those who never had any intention of following. of little matter in any case, since i do those things for me. a shame to be lost to the world. that responsibility is shared, but i've done enough in that regards, since the obtuseness of the Other would otherwise destroy that which is being born.

not an issue, since the Idea exists in the environment, bound to persist and be expressed by any who lend an ear or a mind to the metaphysical ground.

the train is coming. it cannot stop.

congealing mists

fractalnavel — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 16:16:00 GMT

so there was a bit of an ice-fall overnight, you know, the freezing rain that coats things & makes them pretty - and sometimes break. no breaks around here (although i did have to patch up the back porch awning due to a branch that fell sometime in the last couple of weeks - fiberglass is amazing stuff).

i noticed the wires out front with their ice coating, and numerous little icicles suspended from them. kind of reminded me of histograms. or those “how many bars” commercials of that cell phone company. but looking at them a little longer, there seemed to be a certain distribution of sizes and locations. there's not much curve to these particuaar hanging wires, or else i suppose there would have been an overall distribution of average lengths due to water flowing to lower parts. a sort of modulation effect.

of course, irregularities would significantly affect these considerations, as a glance at the ice on the neighboring pines easily confirms. and i suppose length of growth period and and distribution of water source also affects the overall distribution. think of the season-long growth of ice that occurs in cold wet areas - like northern michigan.

but to understand such things, one needs to go the opposite direction and consider simplified systems rather than all the complexities that can be present (although recognizing the complexities or perturbing factors allows them to be eliminated). so what about ice hanging off of uniform lines in a uniform mist of water ? well, there's gravity, and the line itself, which provide added complexity. ok, what about uniform mists of supercooled water in zero-g ? at this point the forces present are only thermal motion (think brownian), the negligible inter-droplet gravitation, and molecular forces - surface tension. so then the task is to characterize the subsequent formation of water globules over time, and describe this in terms of entropy, among other things.

and it occurs to me - this must have been very similar to the formation of the universe, in principal, if not in the particulars. does a uniform distribution represent a high or low entropic state ? what about the subsequent aggregation of particles ? relative to what baseline ? are not all arrangements an expression of order, whether the individuals are distinguishable or not ?

and this is what we are.

true colors

fractalnavel — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 16:22:00 GMT

In a message dated 10/18/2005 11:25:58 Eastern Daylight Time, gsowa writes:

Professor: Evolution cannot fully explain biology
Tuesday, October 18, 2005 Posted: 1102 GMT (1902 HKT)

what a co-inky-dink, i was just reading that. or maybe it was His¹ doing ;-)

my favorite quote:

"Behe, who was expected to resume testifying Tuesday, compared the outcry over intelligent design to the early criticism of the big-bang theory some 70 years ago.
"Many people thought it had philosophical and even theological implications that they did not like," he said. "

equating i.d. with big bang. what a dope. so, do you have any of those bozo buttons left ? sounds like this guy needs one.

i picked up dragons of eden to read (again) and early on, in this 1975 book, there is sagan calmly and clearly explaining that evolution is a self-evident fact, while any theory surrounding this fact has to do with its mechanism. i am amazed when reading material from that era - say, late 50's to early 70's - how rational and compassionate people sounded as compared to so-called “christians” of today. i recently ran into that huge difference in tone and substance while researching the roots of social security while thzat debate was hot.

in somewhat related recent news, riots broke out over a neo-nazi march in toledo. most hilarious video clip: a couple dozen people from 2005 wearing german world war ii uniforms yelling "sieg heil!". i was rolling. couldn't help picturing a bunch of counter-demonstrators wearing american world war uniforms yelling "i like ike!", or whatever they said back then. and look - here comes the native american tribe around the corner !

more news: a conservative think tank boots out one of its own [sorry, that's a nyt link, it's not a heavily covered story, search google news for more] for writing a book critical of the bush administration. the scary part of this is that the conservatives are mistaking the symbol for the symbolized. it is a standard psychological warfare ploy to demonize a member of the opposition, as many have been doing with bush, in order to discredit the opposition's agenda without alienating the masses associated with them, since they need to be co-opted, not hardened. however, at least some of the conservatives appear to be jettisoning their figurehead, who is increasingly seen as a liability. the thing they don't seem to get is that it's their ideology that's fucked up. well, at least there is no single rallying point, and maybe their natural fractitiousness will keep them off balance. yet, the removal of that point of focus affects everyone, making that dysfunctional fascism harder to strike at. still, i think that a number of groups will be glad of a clear opportunity to dissociate themselves from a neo-con-baggage-laden set of policies that they only went along with in order to further their own often less extreme agendas. i think this applies across the political spectrum, left, right, center, fsm, whatever. well, one can only hope.

so how can we avoid these sorts of ideological disasters in the future ? there is still a huge portion of the population given to this sort of mindless behavior and lack of critical thinking. just because the fascists and their dupes are scattered doesn't mean they have disappeared. the thing to do is recognize a continuing counter-rational ideological insurgency (to use current popular metaphors) and fight it at its roots, never allowing it full expression again. it's the same thing we are fighting overseas. to paraphrase pogo yet again, "we have found the enemy, and he is (among) us".

ziti, heil !

¹ all hail the flying spaghetti monster, for we shall stay sauced !

leftover hash

fractalnavel — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 23:07:00 GMT

... so i'm reading some assinine thread on a forum somewhere ¹, and the thought hits me: is there an evolution game out there ? i know there's sim-this and sim-that ², but how about something with wider scope ? a quick search and all i managed to find were some games in the prehistoric life section over at the bbc.

i think that's a great subject niche for any number of games, especially considering current political debates. in addition the the usual graphical fare, there could also be role playing evolution (which would be a great classroom exercise) in both board and online versions.

one could take on roles of natural law, a particular batch of organisms, or even a designer. which does make it pretty clear that the idea of creationsim / intelligent design cannot occur, because it makes presumptions about a priori knowledge of the universe that aren't available - with the obvious exception, which is what all the noise is intended to force us to conclude.

on the contrary, “designers” are notoriously poor at solving new classes of problems. it takes far more creativity than that, of the serendipitous kind. thus, any creator would also have to be phenomenally creative (keeping in mind the nuances of word usage here). in fact, what is found is that a priori knowledge is not only insufficient, it's crippling when facing the truly novel.

the only possible solution is self-organization.

which, in the smaller arena of mundane human endeavours, is somewhat troubling. take software development, for that matter. or any sort of craftsmanship. craig made mention in a recent discussion the analogy of a begining carpenter trying to plan all possible details, as opposed to the master who is able to adapt as he goes along. the reality, as i argued, is a little of both of chaos and control, and even that balance is dynamic.

why troubling ? in trying to get on top of any problem the impulse is to plan and control. i would like to think that increasingly sophisticated and subtle thinking would, at some arbitrarily sufficient level, present “the” solution (to whatever). but this isn't the case. instead, what you find is that the universe is at its most “creative” when it's at the finest line between complete chaos and more stable dynamics. the “problem” is that there is, by definition, no way of planning or predicting the outcome of such dynamics, except that it will be objectively awesome, proportional to it's closeness to the edge. subjectively, it will be wondrous or horrific or (most likely) incomprehensible.

is this a problem ? only in contrast to certain worldviews and existing structures. so, the “practical” approach is to back away from the edge in order to exert enough control in order to direct the remaining creativity at the desired problem.

the universe does not do this. and it's interesting to keep in mind that humans are merely part of the overall process. in this universe, skyscrapers do just “throw themselves together”. the way it has found to do this is truly amazing. the issue has never been about what the universe is - all we can affect is how we see it. and even that has been part of the entire universal evolution.

so - i want to play a game.

¹the inspirational line was “Because there are monkeys that don't level up enough to evolve.” evolution as leveling! how cool! how juvenile! every time i land on one of these forums (i only lurk) i wonder what the hell is wrong with everyone, and then someone eventually says something like “... and now that i've said i'm a kid everyone will be all biased and stuff”. ahh, that explains it. no, sonny, it's a good thing to have your youth known, it gives you a needed excuse. otherwise you all come off as psychopathic morons. it is very rare that anyone of that group comes off as respectable in the context of the wider world. or so i thought, until i considered that the world at large is simply all these idiots a few years later (ie, “us”). i think maybe the only difference is that “adults” seem to have discovered that there is no one out there to correct them, with the results you'd expect.

²i think i am underestimating simlife; i've never played it. yet, i get the feeling that it isn't quite what i have in mind. so i guess i'm just inadequately explaining myself.

finity

fractalnavel — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 15:56:00 GMT

“shit...”

“what?”

“... i was just running a prime number search ...”

“that old chestnut ? the mathematicians proved years ago that there was no infallible predictive pattern.”

“i know; i was just tuning up these new quantum circuit chips, kinda felt like a laugh, you know...”

“so what's the problem?”

“it stopped.”

“you'll have to be more specific.”

“it was churning right along, then - well, look...”

“heeyyyy - you're right. but that would mean...”

“yeah. i know. it's already started.”