May 2009
1 post
So much to write about, so little time.
Just idly looking at DSLR cameras, which are surprisingly affordable these days. You know what would be totally sweet? HDR photography of urban landscapes. Infrastructure, power lines, highways interchanges… skyscrapers living up to their names, reaching for the sky…
March 2009
1 post
a thirsty plant leaves drooping then watered- a trembling leaf slowly rising to catch the last light of the setting sun
February 2009
6 posts
Haven’t been updating this much, was busy for a while, then got sick for a whole week, now busy again >_>;
I’ve been thinking I want to use this blog for other things. Before I was using it for “finished thoughts” that had a natural stopping point to post them up in completion. But lately I’ve been thinking about things, and updating them with every new piece...
Prosecution Baffled by Pirate Bay’s Anarchic Structure | Threat Level from Wired.com
Man, that’s really kind of hilarious. I never thought about it, but these non-hierarchical ways of running things so common with internet groups is really kinda rare in the real world.
The Science Creative Quarterly →
Just discovered: short, entertaining stories and such all themed around science. I just started going through the archives, but so far good stuff.
“At many sites, workers have begun to name their robots, complete with...”
– Autonomous Robots Invade Retail Warehouses | Wired Science from Wired.com (Quote out of context for your enjoyment. XD)
The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids -- New... →
Interesting article. (Also, insert snarky comment on how rare it is for Educational theory/psychology studies to get actual results that stand up to scrutiny.)
After the Long Goodbye
I finally read my copy of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, After the Long Goodbye and fell in love with Ghost in the Shell all over again.
Technically the book is set as a prequel to the movie GITS2: Innocence, and yet the novel stands on it’s own- not just as a Ghost in the Shell story, but also as a science fiction novel. I enjoyed the movie, as flawed as it was, but ultimately the book...
January 2009
10 posts
Catch-up week: Optimistic futures
“…The very notion of a “historic” future is one which most Americans are apt to find uncomfortable. We are naturally sympathetic to ideas which stress the plasticity and promise, the openness of the future, and impatient with views which emphasize the “fated” aspect of human affairs. We strive to see in the challenges which beset us not obstacles but...
More on Historic Optimism as a recent attitude
“Like a Greek frieze, such a future was organized around the heroic exploits of great men, but these exploits, while their outcome was ever in doubt, did not constitute an essential departure from the past. Kings succeeded kings, empires followed empires, but so far as the perception of contemporaries was concerned, “history” was a succession of changes whose main attribute was...
The Pace of Change Today
All and all, it’s a very interesting reminder and in contrast to today, where we often take change and progress for granted. I’m reminded how Moore’s law was never really just about computing power, to many it represents the inevitable pace of technology. Ultimately though, I think that people forget that Moore’s law is just an observation, and not a predictor. (Ie....
A thought: Why do so many newspapers and periodicals present science as a series of amazing breakthroughs, when it’s just not like that? It’s a little weird to see results of experiments conducted over years, being presented as singular, fantastical and often assigned more significance than they actually have. (I’d guess an odd mix of journalism and old-fashioned ideas in the...
“The “great crisis” in neuropsychology, as Oliver Sacks’s...”
– The Fully Immersive Mind of Oliver Sacks (Essay, Best American Science Writing 2003)
An interesting little tidbit
“Paul Baran’s original conception of a failure-resistant communications system- the blueprint for the Internet- was inspired by conversations with the neurobiologist Warren McCulloch, in which he described the [remarkable] ability of synaptic networks in brain-injured patients to route around damaged tissue.”
11th Doctor Announced
I’m still in the middle of updating my blog with retroposts (there’s one I wrote a couple days ago, backdated to Dec 17th (when I was thinking about it) and then some others in the works.)
But I just had to interrupt things to say: Wow! the 11th Doctor was announced! I know I don’t talk about it enough (if only because I know the rest of my family other than my sister just...
Happy New Year Everyone!
December 2008
16 posts
The Future as History
The central idea of The Future of History is a simple one: that the near future, as a continuation of the recent past and being driven by the same continuing forces implies, in a loose way, that the near future has already happened.
The way I would put it myself is that predicting the future is a bit like predicting the weather- on one hand it is certainly chaotic, unpredictable and small events...
Holiday Plans
So, I’m taking off almost the full week of Christmas. I still need to come in for a couple hours on that Monday for a lab meeting/journal club but yeah. Originally I was hoping to take off part of this week as well, since that’s when Alan and Alene are coming, but things are so busy here I guess it can’t be helped. The tentative plan is that someone picks me up Friday evening...
Last week was awful
Last week was pretty miserable, hence the lack of updates. I spent the week being cold, sick, tired, drained, tired and did I mention cold? I still went to work (only missed one day) because I don’t want to take off days if I can help it, so it was get up, go to work, go back and sleep, go to work, sleep….. Xd
Anyway… back to updating as normal…
“If the future seems to us a kind of limbo, a repository of endless surprises, it...”
– The Future as History by Robert L. Heilbroner
Zombie Nutritionist Recommends All-Brain Diet →
We’ll remember you. | MetaFilter
H.M. a famous memory-impaired patient, died day before yesterday. If you haven’t heard of him, he was probably one of the most studied patients and a key role in studies and theories on memory. (Or more popularly, was probably the original inspiration behind Memento). The poor guy, who had part of his hippocampus and surrounding regions removed to...
Re: We'll Remember you
Footnote: I’m not convinced psychology learned anything from him. I’m half-convinced they just like sitting around telling each other nice simplified, watered-down stories about HM and Kitty Genovese and the works of Stanley Milgram. And being like, “Gosh the brain is so complicated and wow people’s actions really are so complex. Oh look, another case that disagrees with...
Gift suggestions...?
Tasty snacks white chocolate peppermint bark sugar-coated walnuts or pecans specialty hot chocolate or neat drink mixes crispy m&ms Comics & webcomics Ex Machina volumes 1 and 3+ (I have 2) Machall volume 1 (used) xkcd stuff (posters mostly, maybe a “stand back! Science” tshirt? Nedroid comics art prints (the travelling robot ones)
Games Super Mario Galaxy (wii, used w/case is...
I have the best job, ever
One thing I really appreciate about my job- besides all the obvious things, like how they value my skills, and I’m not spending my time doing meaningless busywork- is how it’s not a typical job. There’s no boss tapping a watch in the morning telling me I’m five minutes late (or er, half an hour late), no dress code (I own two pairs of pants and five shirts warm enough for...
Geek Hero. A team of computer experts address a serious flaw in the DNS protocol. What’s funny is that it’s a dramatic retelling of the incident- I half expected them to leap up at any moment, yelling “To the Geek Mobile! We’re off to save the Internet!”
“When I was in art school we had a ‘clean-up’ day at the studio...”
– MetaFilter commenter (Imo, it ought to be the other way around: if you can’t tell if it’s trash or art, it’s trash :p)
“And that is the reason why in many cases all the praise given to the director...”
– Makoto Shinkai on directing his movies. (The guy who did Hoshi no Koe, Beyond the Clouds and 5 Centimeters per Second)
Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers"
Edit: a bit of background. Malcolm Gladwell is the author of the hugely successful Blink and The Tipping Point which you might have heard about..? His new book is about what makes some people like Bill Gates rise to the top and others who don’t make it. It’s also just about generally exceptional people, professional classical musicians, CEOs, famous actors, etc. etc. hence the title,...
November 2008
35 posts
Anamanaguchi’s Helix Nebula (8bitPeoples)
The Future of AI: of birds and airplanes
Asimov said once that he thought the relationship between true AI and the human brain would be like birds and airplanes: where one is an organic solution to the problem, the other is man-made. The important thing is not the flapping or the feathers, but that they exploit the same properties and principles of flight in order to fly. (others have made this comparison too, but I think he said it...
I think you can tell
…that it’s a slow day at work. Yup.
More from One-Half of a Manifesto
More arguments from Lernier against the “inevitable” coming of the technological singularity and post-human cybernetic society:
Here is a partial roster of the component beliefs of cybernetic totalism: 1. Cybernetic patterns of information provide the ultimate and best way to understand reality. 2. People are no more than cybernetic patterns. 3. Subjective experience either...
Re: One Half of a Manifesto
*And yes, I think this despite my love of Asimov’s “The Last Question” But just because it makes a great story doesn’t mean it’s actually going to happen.
*Did you know that Dresden Codak comes from Dresden Codex, the book of Mayan astronomy? I happened across the name in Feynman’s Dresden Codex story, the one where he worked in a hotel room for a few days and...
“If anything, there’s a reverse Moore’s law observable in software:...”
– Jaron Lenier: One-Half of a Manifesto
Re: Gibson quote
Aside from the fact the William Gibson quote is interesting just because it’s William Gibson, it’s also slightly ironic.
When I was in middle school, immersed reading Golden Age science fiction- (stuff written around the 60’s)- I went a step farther and concluded there had been *three* World Wars. I said so as much once while watching a movie, prompting Dad to incredulously say,...
How I think Wall-E should have been
I was a bit torn by Wall-E. (I saw it with Heather and Mom end of summer.) On one hand, *CUTE ROBOTS* + PIXAR = AWESOME and that ought to be good enough…. but even though I really liked the two main characters, the movie as a whole didn’t really fit well together (imho).
Mostly I think they should have gotten rid of the plot lines centering around the really, really fat balloon-like...
“From the computer crash that devours an afternoon’s worth of work to the...”
– Arguing AI :: Chp 4 The Humanist: Jaron Lenier
“The single most useful thing I’ve learned from science fiction is that...”
– Sci-fi special: William Gibson - 12 November 2008 - New Scientist
“Searle’s critique… (refers to the Chinese room argument) of those who see the mind as little more than a software program riding atop the brain’s biomechanical hardware. “No one would suppose that we could produce milk and sugar by running a computer simulation of the formal sequences in lactation and photosynthesis,” writes Searle, “but where the mind...
My head is full of thoughts
I’m still not sure what I want to do with this blog. I changed the title to Signal to Noise, which I think fits better, but I’m still not entirely happy with it either. Until I think of something better, I guess. I also deleted the lolcats entry because I wasn’t happy with it, I’d rather talk about the phenomenon- either of lolcats, or the whole free web content to books...
“A frail old man lost in space and time. They give him this name because they don’t know who he is. He seems not to remember where he has come from; he is suspicious and capable of sudden malignance; he seems to have some undefined energy; he is searching for something as well as fleeing from something. He has a ‘machine’ which enables them to travel together through...
“Putting Thomas Kinkade in an art-historical context is like trying to put Jack...”
– Thomas Kinkade’s 16 Guidelines for Making Stuff Suck: Culture and Celebrity: vanityfair.com