Is the character Trash from Return of the Living Dead the original Suicide Girl?
Granted she is lacking ink, but she would not be out of place alongside Annasthesia or Akuma.
Where Old Wiring Went to Die.
Commissioned to clear up unused cabling from the ceilings of an old car dealership, I found:
It was very close to a archaeological listing of obsolete communication technology.
We did not however, find cans connected with string: the walls were thin and I believe they just used Mark One Shouting when needed.
Cat5e
Cat 5
Cat 3
4-pair 24 gauge
Thin Net Coaxial Cable
Flat 2 pair telephone
Round 2 pair telephone
2 pair twisted & sheilded terinated in a 25 pin D-sheild
Cat5 connected via wire nuts to a section of 20 gauge 2 pair
25 pair telephone
And 20 gauge10 wire instrumentation cable.
It was very close to a archaeological listing of obsolete communication technology.
We did not however, find cans connected with string: the walls were thin and I believe they just used Mark One Shouting when needed.
Everything I want to do is really hard.
If my life was summed up in a single sentence, that very well might be it.*
It hit home again today while I wrestled butternut logs across a stream and piled them atop a four foot bank. Because of where the storm-felled tree had grown, it was impossible to bring power equipment to bear; because I wanted to be able to mill the largest possible pieces from the trunk, it was cut in very large and heavy chunks; because I wanted it done now, I was doing it with a pulp-hook and good old-fashioned sweat.
I left the heaviest till last, and was only able to roll it. Way to heavy to lift unaided.
This was just grunt labor, and a small task. The really interesting things I want to do - build a undersea habitat or go to the Moon - are several orders of magnitude harder.
I remember the first time I realized how hard some things are.
When I was a kid, I had a large pile of sand rather than a sandbox. It was left over from when Dad built the house, and had become mixed with an assortment of Dinky cars and bricks, which sometimes led to interesting excavation projects using the Tonka front-end loader and a flattened** steel dump truck.
I remember sitting on this pile of sand with my mothers calculator, trying to work out the number of miles in a light year.
I was nine. I had been having some problems lately with some devices; the atomic reactor constructed of aluminum rods and bricks wouldn't exhibit fission, a space probe constructed of stovepipe had proved pretty inert, and several iterations of a anti-gravity driven spacecraft hadn't worked. Probably a good thing, because its not a good plan for kids to test the life-support capacity of a spaceship sealed with tar paper and scotch tape.***
Having pored over Terence Dickinson's The Universe and Beyond, I had a pretty good idea that the Solar System was full of cold and unpleasant rocks, or hot and unpleasant rocks, or things like 'methane slush' which I couldn't picture, but suspected that it was also unpleasant. So I needed to reach another star, and Mr Dickinson told me that was the binary system α Centauri, at 4.3 light years away. I couldn't visualize a light year. Whats that in miles? I asked.
The calculator did not have enough zeros. While I was hazy what 1.0e+/- actually meant, I knew it wasn't a answer I could use, which meant time for some pencil and paper work. I still have the sheet of loose-leaf:
This was laboriously divided by 650 m.p.h. which for complex reasons was the fastest speed I imagined safely attainable, as I knew from various popular articles that breaking the speed of sound required complex engineering, and staying 30 m.p.h. under the 'Barrier' seemed like a safe margin.
The answer was depressing: 1,031,715 years per light year!
Thanks to Analog magazine, I suspected that there were some sort of hibernation option, but it did seem like a depressing amount of time, and it was unlikely my family would tolerate me being gone that long.
There is a certain point where childhood imagination is a mixture of science and magic; where wishing can fill in the gaps, and sheer dream-power can bridge the gulf between what-there-is and what-I-want. This is the gap that Calvin and Hobbes dwells in, a space self-consciously inhabited by kayfabe and cosplay.
This isn't a new idea. Even Sorenson used it in the often-quoted speech he wrote for Kennedy to deliver:
Close, but not quite. Despite what so many infected with the military-slash-sports mindset think, the point isn't the "win". Success becomes meaningless, because at that moment another task must be started, to continue the fun. This is part of what drained the enthusiasm from the space program post-landing. The hard part was done. Going there over and over was merely difficult. No further goal was announced.
The doing is the "thing and the whole of the thing."
I may not ever get greet you from the Moon****, but I am going to have fun on the way there.
*If you needed it done in a single word, that word would be 'Difficult'.
**Neighbor had driven a truck over it. No word of a lie. You could only empty the bed by lifting the truck's front end. Easy to do because the windshield was completely gone, and the gap was crushed into the right shape for a handhold.
***Navigation also required work. Keeping track of the position of Mars in the sky by mounting a red marble to the hand of clock was a neat idea, but the clock didn't even work.
****Still torn between "Citizens of Earth!" or "Earthlings Ahoy!" as my opening salutation.
It hit home again today while I wrestled butternut logs across a stream and piled them atop a four foot bank. Because of where the storm-felled tree had grown, it was impossible to bring power equipment to bear; because I wanted to be able to mill the largest possible pieces from the trunk, it was cut in very large and heavy chunks; because I wanted it done now, I was doing it with a pulp-hook and good old-fashioned sweat.
I left the heaviest till last, and was only able to roll it. Way to heavy to lift unaided.
This was just grunt labor, and a small task. The really interesting things I want to do - build a undersea habitat or go to the Moon - are several orders of magnitude harder.
I remember the first time I realized how hard some things are.
When I was a kid, I had a large pile of sand rather than a sandbox. It was left over from when Dad built the house, and had become mixed with an assortment of Dinky cars and bricks, which sometimes led to interesting excavation projects using the Tonka front-end loader and a flattened** steel dump truck.
I remember sitting on this pile of sand with my mothers calculator, trying to work out the number of miles in a light year.
I was nine. I had been having some problems lately with some devices; the atomic reactor constructed of aluminum rods and bricks wouldn't exhibit fission, a space probe constructed of stovepipe had proved pretty inert, and several iterations of a anti-gravity driven spacecraft hadn't worked. Probably a good thing, because its not a good plan for kids to test the life-support capacity of a spaceship sealed with tar paper and scotch tape.***
Having pored over Terence Dickinson's The Universe and Beyond, I had a pretty good idea that the Solar System was full of cold and unpleasant rocks, or hot and unpleasant rocks, or things like 'methane slush' which I couldn't picture, but suspected that it was also unpleasant. So I needed to reach another star, and Mr Dickinson told me that was the binary system α Centauri, at 4.3 light years away. I couldn't visualize a light year. Whats that in miles? I asked.
The calculator did not have enough zeros. While I was hazy what 1.0e+/- actually meant, I knew it wasn't a answer I could use, which meant time for some pencil and paper work. I still have the sheet of loose-leaf:
186,282 X 365 X 24 X 60 X 60 = 5,874,589,152,000
This was laboriously divided by 650 m.p.h. which for complex reasons was the fastest speed I imagined safely attainable, as I knew from various popular articles that breaking the speed of sound required complex engineering, and staying 30 m.p.h. under the 'Barrier' seemed like a safe margin.
The answer was depressing: 1,031,715 years per light year!
Thanks to Analog magazine, I suspected that there were some sort of hibernation option, but it did seem like a depressing amount of time, and it was unlikely my family would tolerate me being gone that long.
There is a certain point where childhood imagination is a mixture of science and magic; where wishing can fill in the gaps, and sheer dream-power can bridge the gulf between what-there-is and what-I-want. This is the gap that Calvin and Hobbes dwells in, a space self-consciously inhabited by kayfabe and cosplay.
'Imagination is too often accompanied by somewhat irregular logic' -- Benjamin Disraeli
This isn't a new idea. Even Sorenson used it in the often-quoted speech he wrote for Kennedy to deliver:
"Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of
all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come
again. (...)
We choose to go to the moon in this decade
and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they
are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best
of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are
willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we
intend to win, and the others, too."
The doing is the "thing and the whole of the thing."
I may not ever get greet you from the Moon****, but I am going to have fun on the way there.
*If you needed it done in a single word, that word would be 'Difficult'.
**Neighbor had driven a truck over it. No word of a lie. You could only empty the bed by lifting the truck's front end. Easy to do because the windshield was completely gone, and the gap was crushed into the right shape for a handhold.
***Navigation also required work. Keeping track of the position of Mars in the sky by mounting a red marble to the hand of clock was a neat idea, but the clock didn't even work.
****Still torn between "Citizens of Earth!" or "Earthlings Ahoy!" as my opening salutation.
Quoth
Ran into a quote I liked. Its taken from an article against vivisection, circa 1875, but I felt it sums up the last few hundred years of Man vs Nature.
"...looking forth over a world which will then own no other sway than his, shall exult in the thought that he has made of this fair green earth, if not a heaven for man, at least a hell for animals."
---Lewis Carroll
But we are animals too...
For the Win...
Why does the Chive suffer less connection issues than news.ycombinator?
The website by and for the computer-savvy, that never has less than sixteen highly ranked articles on programming on its homepage, the site that should exhibit the stability of a monolith is harder to consistently connect to than Neatorama.
Am I the only one who considers this ironic?
The website by and for the computer-savvy, that never has less than sixteen highly ranked articles on programming on its homepage, the site that should exhibit the stability of a monolith is harder to consistently connect to than Neatorama.
Am I the only one who considers this ironic?
Delving the abyssmal depths
"You do an Internet search for potential solutions, and
you’re confronted with a series of contradictory, ill-founded
opinions: your browser has a virus; your virus has a virus; you
should be using Emacs; you should be using vi, and this is why
your marriage is loveless." -- James Mickens
There is nothing I can say that could improve on this quotation. Dipping into the Internet to find an answer is easy. Finding an answer of value is often not. In my case, usually not, but I am almost always thrashing around in the shallow parts of the Great Pool of Knowledge. I would like to say I am resigned to this. It appears that until I write one, there is no webpage of hacking into a pre-programmed ABOV µC.
Simple search strings fail, more complex searches fail; questions are twisted and distorted in hopes of provoking a lead, until the semantic striptease proves too exhausting to continue.
At some point, trying to tease an answer out of Google is harder than figuring it out myself.
Which makes me think of the critical point in a increasingly connected network just before all points become connected. I suspect that most human creativity comes out of the moments before the network fills, when you have almost enough information, when you are almost completely connected, and it falls upon you to make the final connections yourself, and answer the unanswered.
"That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer." -- Jacob Bronowski
Of course, if I had found three hundred pages of ABOV µC hacks, with the microcontroller likes of Ben Heck or Datamancer leading the pack, how interesting would I find my own explorations?
"We looked fear right in the face...and avoided direct eye contact." -- SpongeBob SquarePants
That the alternative to being drunk and raving was to drink and read web page sources had never occurred to me before.*
So I was pleasantly surprised to discover this remark in the source code of Peter Welch's http://stilldrinking.org/ :
So awesome.
What makes his alcohol-fueled composition even better is his damned footnotes. So neat and tidy. I want footnotes like that, and guess what? Blogger does not have them.
Careful study demonstrates I have options for the massively overused Jump Break,
strike-through and Change the Background Color
But I can't footnote. Dammit, Blogger! I am tired of using asterisks to guide parenthetical remarks; besides, without the dagger, double-dagger, section and pilcrow, it just looks confusing.
Now granted, HTML has never adopted the footnote, and granted also that there is a local-reference-hyperlink workaround, and furthermore there is always Unicode ( U+00B6,
U+00A7, U+2020 and U+2021), but why can't I just hit a footnote button while in the Compose pane and have the machine do all the work for me?
That is the point of computers!*** Anything boring or repetitious, like say playing any MMORG to level-up or
composing cover letters to unknown strangers should be automated. Its nice to be able to open the hood to hand-correct when things go wonky, but I still like to have it distilled to 'Highlight/Press Button'.
Pierre Boulle wrote a story about a story-engine...I shouldn't bring Boulle up as the idea of a automatic story machine has occurred to a lot of writers, and I believe some self-writing blog posting machines exist (All of Mencius Moldbug for instance). But I'm too drunk to bother researching what the hell I am talking about, and Boulle's version sticks in my mind because of the apes. No wait, that was the story that was 'turned into' Planet of the Apes which I read long before I watched. I also read the Jerry Pournelle adaption of the movie, which gives us a story turned into a movie turned into a novellette.
Having read this far, I've totally wasted your time: I am thinking about Roald Dahl, and confused it with Boulle's man who hated automatic doors and improbable anti-aircraft guns. Dahl could never have written 'The Bridge over the River Kwai'[pretty heady stuff to read when you're 10], but he could write at a better level than 'The BFG' would suggest.[Such as Edward the Conquerer, or Skin of Nunc Dimittis]
*Usually the presented alternatives are simian.
**Invisible block-quoting. Go look at the source, if you disbelieve me.
***And porn.
So I was pleasantly surprised to discover this remark in the source code of Peter Welch's http://stilldrinking.org/ :
/* Yeah, there's some shitty code here. There are some things that shouldn't be done. I did them. Sometimes, I had my reasons. Sometimes, I was just being lazy. But guess what? You're sitting there reading the source on some guy's blog. So fuck you. */
So awesome.
What makes his alcohol-fueled composition even better is his damned footnotes. So neat and tidy. I want footnotes like that, and guess what? Blogger does not have them.
Careful study demonstrates I have options for the massively overused Jump Break,
- Numbered Lists,
- Bullet Lists,
And Quotation.**I can
But I can't footnote. Dammit, Blogger! I am tired of using asterisks to guide parenthetical remarks; besides, without the dagger, double-dagger, section and pilcrow, it just looks confusing.
Now granted, HTML has never adopted the footnote, and granted also that there is a local-reference-hyperlink workaround, and furthermore there is always Unicode ( U+00B6,
U+00A7, U+2020 and U+2021), but why can't I just hit a footnote button while in the Compose pane and have the machine do all the work for me?
That is the point of computers!*** Anything boring or repetitious, like say playing any MMORG to level-up or
composing cover letters to unknown strangers should be automated. Its nice to be able to open the hood to hand-correct when things go wonky, but I still like to have it distilled to 'Highlight/Press Button'.
Pierre Boulle wrote a story about a story-engine...I shouldn't bring Boulle up as the idea of a automatic story machine has occurred to a lot of writers, and I believe some self-writing blog posting machines exist (All of Mencius Moldbug for instance). But I'm too drunk to bother researching what the hell I am talking about, and Boulle's version sticks in my mind because of the apes. No wait, that was the story that was 'turned into' Planet of the Apes which I read long before I watched. I also read the Jerry Pournelle adaption of the movie, which gives us a story turned into a movie turned into a novellette.
Having read this far, I've totally wasted your time: I am thinking about Roald Dahl, and confused it with Boulle's man who hated automatic doors and improbable anti-aircraft guns. Dahl could never have written 'The Bridge over the River Kwai'[pretty heady stuff to read when you're 10], but he could write at a better level than 'The BFG' would suggest.[Such as Edward the Conquerer, or Skin of Nunc Dimittis]
*Usually the presented alternatives are simian.
**Invisible block-quoting. Go look at the source, if you disbelieve me.
***And porn.
New Words for Old Sensations
Nomangani : The sensation of coming up with a really good Tarzan reference, and then realizing I know no-one familiar enough with ERB's material to get the joke.
Unwanted Discoveries
Just found out today that if you use trisodium phosphate cleaning solution on cheap meranti plywood, the color in the veneer changes from pinkish-red to a sullen, bruise-like green.
Hopefully, the stain is going to hide it; I really don't want to have to build replacement cabinet doors.
EDIT: The spots show through as a darkness under the stain, but at least the bruiseishness is gone.
Hopefully, the stain is going to hide it; I really don't want to have to build replacement cabinet doors.
EDIT: The spots show through as a darkness under the stain, but at least the bruiseishness is gone.
Auto Crustacean
I have been threatening for a while to complain at length about aspects of Stack Exchange, but I've waited too long, and Stack Overflow itself has beat me to it.
Disclosure: I joined robotics.stack.exchange as I thought it might be an interesting way of challenging my lately moribund robotics efforts. It hasn't worked; but I knew it would take more than questions-and-answers-and-oh-god-the-forum-goblins-are-active-tonight to really get my juices flowing.
I've done my best to answer some questions, and I haven't asked any.
Because I realized I had no questions to ask that Google wasn't answering. It takes me less time to drill down through a Google session to the answer I want than to read through a series of Stack Exchanges.
Random browsing has been thrown me a few gems though, my favorite being 'Does 17% Equal 0.17'.
It was as funny as watching people try to grasp the 0.99999...infinity = 1 mindtrap, or the the sound of brains detonating while grappling with the Monty Hall Problem.*
I like the idea of trying to sift out the best answers, and I like the idea of reputation servers, but I'm not convinced by this application. It has the same 'smell' as Slashdot, and it bothers me that I can 'taste' it but not elucidate what I am sensing.
Cleverness for cleverness sake. A pride in answering in oracular form. The unspoken demand that supplicants cringe and follow intricate protocol to be answered. Disdain for things that could be 'easily Googled'. The helpful voices fading into a sea of haughty demands:
"I find this question rather vague and off-topic."
"Also, a simple google search reveals information on how..."
"One way to find out is to actually take a course ... and see what it is about."
"How could you create a piece of code that will troll this user? Create a piece of code that will appear useful to an inexperienced programmer but is utterly useless in practice..."**
This is clearly a signal-to-noise problem...but if we need to increase the s/n ratio, what do we do? This isn't a radio! What is our metaphorical antenna? How do we adjust the gain?
Or maybe I have just suddenly become too old, and too tired and too cynical to cope. Time for a brain massage...or maybe a brain wash.
*Its unfortunate that it is not known as Selvin's Slippery Snare. Its also strange that he postulated it in 1975, but it didn't become widely known until Marilyn Vos Savant published it in her column in 1990, igniting a firestorm of nerdrage. The Slippery Snare is one of the best mindtraps I know,but in this case did the suckers snap quicker at the lure, thinking that they were proving a woman wrong?
**All direct quotes, taken at random, and found within 20 minutes of semi-random sampling.
Disclosure: I joined robotics.stack.exchange as I thought it might be an interesting way of challenging my lately moribund robotics efforts. It hasn't worked; but I knew it would take more than questions-and-answers-and-oh-god-the-forum-goblins-are-active-tonight to really get my juices flowing.
I've done my best to answer some questions, and I haven't asked any.
Because I realized I had no questions to ask that Google wasn't answering. It takes me less time to drill down through a Google session to the answer I want than to read through a series of Stack Exchanges.
Random browsing has been thrown me a few gems though, my favorite being 'Does 17% Equal 0.17'.
It was as funny as watching people try to grasp the 0.99999...infinity = 1 mindtrap, or the the sound of brains detonating while grappling with the Monty Hall Problem.*
'Only the most clever and the most stupid cannot change.' -- Genna Sosonko
I like the idea of trying to sift out the best answers, and I like the idea of reputation servers, but I'm not convinced by this application. It has the same 'smell' as Slashdot, and it bothers me that I can 'taste' it but not elucidate what I am sensing.
Cleverness for cleverness sake. A pride in answering in oracular form. The unspoken demand that supplicants cringe and follow intricate protocol to be answered. Disdain for things that could be 'easily Googled'. The helpful voices fading into a sea of haughty demands:
"I find this question rather vague and off-topic."
"Also, a simple google search reveals information on how..."
"One way to find out is to actually take a course ... and see what it is about."
"How could you create a piece of code that will troll this user? Create a piece of code that will appear useful to an inexperienced programmer but is utterly useless in practice..."**
This is clearly a signal-to-noise problem...but if we need to increase the s/n ratio, what do we do? This isn't a radio! What is our metaphorical antenna? How do we adjust the gain?
“But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think
intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be
intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself
for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists
is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces,
but in how obscurely it is expressed.”
--Muriel Barbery
Or maybe I have just suddenly become too old, and too tired and too cynical to cope. Time for a brain massage...or maybe a brain wash.
*Its unfortunate that it is not known as Selvin's Slippery Snare. Its also strange that he postulated it in 1975, but it didn't become widely known until Marilyn Vos Savant published it in her column in 1990, igniting a firestorm of nerdrage. The Slippery Snare is one of the best mindtraps I know,but in this case did the suckers snap quicker at the lure, thinking that they were proving a woman wrong?
**All direct quotes, taken at random, and found within 20 minutes of semi-random sampling.
"We need a special glove to access this computer..."
If this were a perfect world, somebody would mash-up 'Masters of the Universe'(1987) and 'Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity'(1987)*.
The robots Vak and Krel, and the 'Alien Mutant' character all have the undeniable stamp of MOTU characters.
Eliminate Gwilidor altogether, and meld the Key with the musical instrument Zed plays:
"Its a holographic onyascillascopa...I'm not really that accomplished on it."
A whatasillascope? Did they mean a holophonor?
S.G.F.B.I. is probably the one of the best examples of a bad SF movie , with no redeeming factors.
It is not weird enough to be entertaining, not smutty enough to be stimulating (maintains a constant sliminess throughout), the sets are dull and lack impact, and the acting is lame.
The director avoided all of the entertaining cliches; no filters, no Evil Controlled Lighting, no weird behaviors by the characters. There is just no fun, not from the lingering headshot of a shadow-obscured head that ends the opening scene, to the we-will-explore-new-worlds vow at the ending.
Perhaps if savagely edited to a ten minute film it might be redeemable. Watch the prison cell breakout/spaceship theft, then skip to the PervBot 2000's arguing with each other over Venus rising listless from the waves, and then finish with the attempt to pull the blaster arm off of the 'Alien Mutant'....who simply is in the movie without explication, as if a perfectly normal detail of nature.
Perhaps it could be set to Rob Zombie's 'Living Dead Girl' and than 'Dragula', which would give a runtime of ~8 minutes, and would at least make a entertaining music video in the Dio - 'Holy Diver' mode.
...And the set designer for the trophy/banquet hall in S.G.F.B.I seems to have been inspired by 'Isle of the Hunter' out of Savage Sword of Conan.
*Should actually be called 'Slave Girls from Beyond Insanity'
The robots Vak and Krel, and the 'Alien Mutant' character all have the undeniable stamp of MOTU characters.
Eliminate Gwilidor altogether, and meld the Key with the musical instrument Zed plays:
"Its a holographic onyascillascopa...I'm not really that accomplished on it."
A whatasillascope? Did they mean a holophonor?
S.G.F.B.I. is probably the one of the best examples of a bad SF movie , with no redeeming factors.
It is not weird enough to be entertaining, not smutty enough to be stimulating (maintains a constant sliminess throughout), the sets are dull and lack impact, and the acting is lame.
The director avoided all of the entertaining cliches; no filters, no Evil Controlled Lighting, no weird behaviors by the characters. There is just no fun, not from the lingering headshot of a shadow-obscured head that ends the opening scene, to the we-will-explore-new-worlds vow at the ending.
Perhaps if savagely edited to a ten minute film it might be redeemable. Watch the prison cell breakout/spaceship theft, then skip to the PervBot 2000's arguing with each other over Venus rising listless from the waves, and then finish with the attempt to pull the blaster arm off of the 'Alien Mutant'....who simply is in the movie without explication, as if a perfectly normal detail of nature.
Perhaps it could be set to Rob Zombie's 'Living Dead Girl' and than 'Dragula', which would give a runtime of ~8 minutes, and would at least make a entertaining music video in the Dio - 'Holy Diver' mode.
...And the set designer for the trophy/banquet hall in S.G.F.B.I seems to have been inspired by 'Isle of the Hunter' out of Savage Sword of Conan.
*Should actually be called 'Slave Girls from Beyond Insanity'
Final Data of XCORE's Ten Word Contest
Excel didn't want to plot a logarithmic graph with zeros in it, so the final graph isn't a log display.
It didn't make a big difference anyways, beyond hiding the one data point of a twenty three word submission(!).
Now a couple of interesting spikes appear at 7 and 13. I'm guessing that the 13 spike is due to the use of acronyms. The spike at seven is a little more baffling. I suspect that this form of a sentence will settle around 7 tokens: Temporal designator, connector, adjective for subject, subject, connector, adjective for verb, verb.
I'm not a linguist, and not going to pretend to know the correct syntax.
Looking at the spike, my eyes keep wanting to fit it to a bell curve, which is totally wrong. There is nothing but integer data here, which is why I have no error bars.
I think I have enough material for a discussion on the effects of visual illusions on graphing and maps, but that will wait for another day. The contest is over and the Tiny Lab is going out for lunch.
It didn't make a big difference anyways, beyond hiding the one data point of a twenty three word submission(!).
I'm not a linguist, and not going to pretend to know the correct syntax.
Looking at the spike, my eyes keep wanting to fit it to a bell curve, which is totally wrong. There is nothing but integer data here, which is why I have no error bars.
More Tiny Science
The XCORE Analog SliceKIT contest science continues:
Graph range expanded to fit in a outrider at 23 words long.
Now when I stop accepting hyphenation to create single words, and expand acronyms - in two cases finding both in a single sample, I get the more interesting curve:
The peak growing at 13 seems to be a artifact of our tendencies to use three-letter acronyms. I think its time to start using a log plot though.
Now when I stop accepting hyphenation to create single words, and expand acronyms - in two cases finding both in a single sample, I get the more interesting curve:
Fuzzy values of 10
XCORE is holding a competition for free swag; the contest requirements are simple:
describe what you'd do with the micro controller prize in exactly ten words.
The opening page is very clear.
describe what you'd do with the micro controller prize in exactly ten words.
The opening page is very clear.
"...tell us what you will use it for... in only 10 words."
"...tells us what your project will be in only 10 words"
"Only project ideas that are EXACTLY 10 words will be accepted" (emphasis theirs).
"To enter the Draw you must reply to the competition thread with you (sic) 10 word
project idea. You (sic) project idea must be exactly 10 words to be valid."
Out of a post of 888 words, which includes the official contest rules, this is stated five times.
If you found the contest via their mailout (like I did), the email also says this is several different ways, but out of 208 words it says it 3 times.
So I think we're pretty clear on the Rule.
I'd also like to point out that as this is a text-based medium and a text-based forum, that most likely the literacy rate of the participants should be around 99%.
Functional comprehension on the other hand...
John Boyd liked to argue that when anyone experienced an event, they followed a predictable path of computation, acronymed OODA.
They Observed the event, Oriented the data, Decided on a course of action, and then they Acted.
This is probably why even creatures capable of thinking still rely on hardwired reactions in situations of trouble: by cutting out the Orient and Decision steps, they can get a serious speed up in reaction. The drawback of course, is that the hardwired reactions aren't very smart.
Bolting when sensing a sudden anomalous event is useful if you are a rabbit, but if you're in a minefield its just not going to work very well. (I remember a SF novel based on the premise of not-reacting being the only reason why the protagonist survived, but I'll be damned if I can remember its title right off. Perhaps it was a short story? But I digress.)
Boyd, despite his brilliance*, left little behind in the form of written word, which is unfortunate, because I'd like to know what he thought about the problems of Observing, Orienting, and then making the Wrong Decision before Acting.
Like, in this example, posting project ideas in more or less words than required.
This is the kind of tiny research the Tiny Lab Director likes, so here is the current data out of 62 entries:
Words. Entries.
5 1
6 0
7 3
8 2
9 2
10 50
11 0
12 1
13 0
14 0
15 1
Oh, Homo Sapiens, what are we going to do with you...
There is a bit of contentious data, of course. Of the 50 'correct answers', 6 used acronyms to bring the count down, and three more hyphenated to create compound words. So the table could be redrawn with the 10 row changed to '41', the 11 row changed to '3' and the 13 and 14 rows changed to '4' and '2' respectively.
So from this data can we conclude that to many people, the number '10' actually has a diffuse blur of values from 6 to 15? Can I work in an obscure 'fuzzy logic' joke here, or is this entire post a fuzzy joke?
Speaking of jokes, there were several joke submissions, all of which were exactly 10 words long.
*He also tested low on I.Q., which is interesting, considering his various exploits that demonstrated considerable intelligence. The ugly specter of our lack of comprehension of thought reappears. (I am really tempted to see how many more 'of's I can add to that sentence. 'Of the Ugly specter of our lack of comprehension of thought I've** often had thoughts of...'
** As a poet, I'm free to use this variant, cf. Berstein, McCaffery,Hejinian, et al. And yes, this too, is a Fuzzy Joke.
Bad Art as a Mental Vaccine
I was trying to explain to a friend why I wasn't too interested in watching Ender's Game.
I've read the book three or four times over the years and didn't really care for it, not to mention that the shock value of the ending, like all surprise endings, only works the once. I thought Ender's Shadow was a better book, but I probably wouldn't watch it in movie form either.
"Its a really good movie", he assured me "You shouldn't miss a movie this good."
I made some rebuttal along the lines of 'lacking time', but he wasn't going to accept that.
He felt that since I would make the time to watch really bad movies, that I should place really good movies at an even higher priority. But I'm not too interested in a 'good' movie. There is lots of those, and I haven't even taken the time to watch Citizen Kane yet.
I watch bad movies the same reason I read bad books; to learn from them. So I was somewhat amused to discover the footsteps of an explorer ahead of me:
I've read the book three or four times over the years and didn't really care for it, not to mention that the shock value of the ending, like all surprise endings, only works the once. I thought Ender's Shadow was a better book, but I probably wouldn't watch it in movie form either.
"Its a really good movie", he assured me "You shouldn't miss a movie this good."
I made some rebuttal along the lines of 'lacking time', but he wasn't going to accept that.
He felt that since I would make the time to watch really bad movies, that I should place really good movies at an even higher priority. But I'm not too interested in a 'good' movie. There is lots of those, and I haven't even taken the time to watch Citizen Kane yet.
I watch bad movies the same reason I read bad books; to learn from them. So I was somewhat amused to discover the footsteps of an explorer ahead of me:
"In one sense, at any rate, it is more valuable to read bad literature
than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man;
but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men. A good novel tells
us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about
its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its
readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more
cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture. The more dishonest
a book is as a book the more honest it is as a public document. A
sincere novel exhibits the simplicity of one particular man; an
insincere novel exhibits the simplicity of mankind. The pedantic
decisions and definable readjustments of man may be found in scrolls and
statute books and scriptures; but men's basic assumptions and
everlasting energies are to be found in penny dreadfuls and halfpenny
novelettes. Thus a man, like many men of real culture in our day, might
learn from good literature nothing except the power to appreciate good
literature. But from bad literature he might learn to govern empires and
look over the map of mankind.”
-- G.K.Chesterton
There is more than that, of course: reading the bad sharpens the mind; it trains by the example of failure; it exposes the reader to a thousand tricks and cons.
Because the Reader is tested by the experience, his mental immune systems improve*. Show me someone impressed by Mein Kampf, and I'll show you someone that has never read more than a dozen books in their life**.
This too, is the danger of censorship. Weak paradigms fear books because they immunize. If you've waded though, say The Book of Mormon, The Silmarillian, The Prophet, and Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, you're going to have a hard time to take seriously anything said by Paul of Tarsus or John the Divine. This,I suppose, is the lasting value of actually reading the articles in Playboy.***
So this is why I will not take the time to watch Ender's Shadow or Schindler's List or The Shawshank Redemption , but I will watch The Terrornauts or The Hooded Mummy Versus the Other Alien, or anything that promises Godzilla.
Because I have more to learn from the quirk of his scaly lips than from a thousand serious films.
*For instance, I could have phrased this as 'hers' or even as 'their'. I learned about gender phrasing problems by reading. I also learned the meaning of 'cissexual', which someday I will work into a complex 'Narcissisexual' joke.
** I'd like to make a similar remark about The Wealth of Nations, but that book's failure is too subtle for a fair comparison.
***Although it was Penthouse that infected me with the phrase "...contrasting with her hearty English labia." Which to this day I cannot decide if it was the product of a porn movie reviewer slowly losing his mind, or a massively overqualified journalist.
Frusteration is...
1. Carrying the carboy of mead down from the fermentation room a week ahead so that all possible yeast cells can settle;
2. Cleaning and sanitizing 47 bottles to rack the mead into;
3. Arranging sanitized equipment next to carboy;
4. Dropping the siphon line into the carboy
and than
5. Absent-mindedly scraping the end of the line through the yeast sediment, swirling up a nightmare of fine yeast. A slowly swirling cloud that spreads and dissipated through the batch before my horrified eyes.
Which leads to 6: put everything away, wait until tomorrow.
Bah.
2. Cleaning and sanitizing 47 bottles to rack the mead into;
3. Arranging sanitized equipment next to carboy;
4. Dropping the siphon line into the carboy
and than
5. Absent-mindedly scraping the end of the line through the yeast sediment, swirling up a nightmare of fine yeast. A slowly swirling cloud that spreads and dissipated through the batch before my horrified eyes.
Which leads to 6: put everything away, wait until tomorrow.
Bah.
"Nuts and Gum, together at last!"
"The other day, I came to the conclusion that the act of writing software
is actually antagonistic all on its own. Arcane languages, cryptic
errors, mostly missing (or at best, scattered) documentation - it's like
someone is deliberately trying to screw with you, sitting in some
Truman Show-like control room pointing and laughing behind the scenes.
At some level, it's masochistic, but we do it because it gives us an
incredible opportunity to shape our world." ---Chris Granger.
Damn straight its antagonistic; its also fully masochistic.
We program like this because we like to.
And after six weeks of working on Linux again, I think that's the animus primum behind that operating system. Built by programmers for programmers.
...And I can't believe this is the first time I've used a fetish tag.
Damn straight its antagonistic; its also fully masochistic.
We program like this because we like to.
And after six weeks of working on Linux again, I think that's the animus primum behind that operating system. Built by programmers for programmers.
...And I can't believe this is the first time I've used a fetish tag.
"I, like most spoiled people with a internet connection..." --Jenna Marbles
I wanted to open this post with a still from XXX, the scene where the camera pans across a long line of weapons ending in front of the GTO, and Xander says to Shavers: "I want you put all of this...into that."
But google has let me down, and I'm not about to find my copy of the movie to extract a single still to provide a weak background joke. Instead I'm going to show you picture number two, which is the beginning of a new project:
All that glittery junk...I feel like a bandit from a movie.
So why did I just waste your time with this?
To paraphrase Jenna Marbles, because I, like most spoiled people with a internet connection, often have nothing better to do, and the alternative was to talk about the astonishingly line:
"...glistening from pustules of lust-sweat." which may just become my new tagline,
or the error message
Which comes across as Charles Stross crossed with H.P.Lovecraft.
Unfortunately, despite its alluringly exotic ring to a Scots-Canadian mongrel's ears, Rahul Yadav is a real and proper name, and not the dread moniker of a demonic force from Algol.
I would like to hear of a spellbook from the other side of the earth that used 'John Smith' as a exotic name, although I suspect that 'Jack Ketch' would fit the bill better, even if not as commonplace.
I will remark however, that the combination of "XXX" and "Shavers" is a rather NSFW search, and surprisingly, "GTO" does nothing to sanitize the image search results.
But google has let me down, and I'm not about to find my copy of the movie to extract a single still to provide a weak background joke. Instead I'm going to show you picture number two, which is the beginning of a new project:
All that glittery junk...I feel like a bandit from a movie.
So why did I just waste your time with this?
To paraphrase Jenna Marbles, because I, like most spoiled people with a internet connection, often have nothing better to do, and the alternative was to talk about the astonishingly line:
"...glistening from pustules of lust-sweat." which may just become my new tagline,
or the error message
" Cite error: The named reference rahul_yadav was invoked but never defined"
.Which comes across as Charles Stross crossed with H.P.Lovecraft.
Unfortunately, despite its alluringly exotic ring to a Scots-Canadian mongrel's ears, Rahul Yadav is a real and proper name, and not the dread moniker of a demonic force from Algol.
I would like to hear of a spellbook from the other side of the earth that used 'John Smith' as a exotic name, although I suspect that 'Jack Ketch' would fit the bill better, even if not as commonplace.
I will remark however, that the combination of "XXX" and "Shavers" is a rather NSFW search, and surprisingly, "GTO" does nothing to sanitize the image search results.
The Goblin Market
(In which the Internet is imagined to be a bag full of cats and goblins, shaken by a Troll.)
'Like' buttons are everywhere, sprinkled across content like a cheap garnish. Mostly they do nothing useful, beyond the up/down vote gamification* of value. What we need is a 'Idiotic' button, which applys to comments, not to content.
My critical thinking skills were developed on dead-tree media and my taste is idiosyncratic, not cosmopolitan. I ignore the like-scoring of content as irrelevant at best and misleading at worse.
Comments, on the other hand...
The Internet still can't figure out how to deal with them. Comments are often useful, but picking the utility out of the sea of crap is labor-intensive. And the trolls are offensive. Its irritating even to the thick-skinned to read twenty paragraphs of hate-mail and general crassness. Anyone de-sensatized enough that isn't rankled by half the remarks under any typical Youtube video has got a real problem, and one that is not going to be solved by more Internet.
Its not just Youtube comments***. One of the problems I have with Stack Overflow is related to this, but I'll go into that another day. What we need is some way to penalize crappy remarks. We're dealing with baby trolls, with goblins.
Trolls are the worse case situations. How do you deal with a troll? If its your site you can deploy the Ban; if you're a casual reader, you are helpless. I'm not about to** create a ephemeral user account to quarrel with a bully, but by saying nothing, I'm giving him freedom to operate. Set a threshold, and drop the comment to the bottom of the page after enough Idiotic flags.
Implement such a system, and skeletorhatesmankind may be driven from the Internet!
*I'm going to pretend this a real word, but it sounds more like Pointy-Haired-Manager talk than an adverb.
**Read this as 'lazy'
***Notice to goblins...if you think a teenager's cover of 'Heartshaped Box' is the only place to discuss the Z-O-G, marijuana curing cancer, or Bizarro-World racism, you need to re-assess your scope of venues.
'Like' buttons are everywhere, sprinkled across content like a cheap garnish. Mostly they do nothing useful, beyond the up/down vote gamification* of value. What we need is a 'Idiotic' button, which applys to comments, not to content.
My critical thinking skills were developed on dead-tree media and my taste is idiosyncratic, not cosmopolitan. I ignore the like-scoring of content as irrelevant at best and misleading at worse.
Comments, on the other hand...
The Internet still can't figure out how to deal with them. Comments are often useful, but picking the utility out of the sea of crap is labor-intensive. And the trolls are offensive. Its irritating even to the thick-skinned to read twenty paragraphs of hate-mail and general crassness. Anyone de-sensatized enough that isn't rankled by half the remarks under any typical Youtube video has got a real problem, and one that is not going to be solved by more Internet.
Its not just Youtube comments***. One of the problems I have with Stack Overflow is related to this, but I'll go into that another day. What we need is some way to penalize crappy remarks. We're dealing with baby trolls, with goblins.
Trolls are the worse case situations. How do you deal with a troll? If its your site you can deploy the Ban; if you're a casual reader, you are helpless. I'm not about to** create a ephemeral user account to quarrel with a bully, but by saying nothing, I'm giving him freedom to operate. Set a threshold, and drop the comment to the bottom of the page after enough Idiotic flags.
Implement such a system, and skeletorhatesmankind may be driven from the Internet!
*I'm going to pretend this a real word, but it sounds more like Pointy-Haired-Manager talk than an adverb.
**Read this as 'lazy'
***Notice to goblins...if you think a teenager's cover of 'Heartshaped Box' is the only place to discuss the Z-O-G, marijuana curing cancer, or Bizarro-World racism, you need to re-assess your scope of venues.
"We who have died to make the Machine have reached out to you..."
John Bloodstone was a bad writer.
Despite this, one of his books is worth reading, if one has the mental fortitude to wade through the abuse of reading a Burroughs pastiche.
Its not God-Man which is actually worse than its title; and the semi-mythical Tarzan on Barsoom is probably only of interest to the rabid slash-fic fan.
The book worth the read is Thundar - Man of Two Worlds.
Its an interesting and vivid tale. Michael Storm traverses a Time Vortex hidden in the Andes; he suffers multiple head injuries and amnesia; he becomes a savage man-beast in a jungle full of man-apes; he is tormented by nightmares and visions, especially of a Spanish longsword that had passed through his hands; he is returned to sanity by a beautiful young woman, who cannot love him physically because she is convinced he is their missing god, Thundar; he is captured by Thundar's enemies; he triumphs...
And then he doesn't. His lady-love still thinks he is an untouchable god, and she vanishes with the holy relics of the nation; the sun shines and nighttime will not come, the world starts to bake, dry out and die, the strange super-computer that controls the Time Vortex keeps transmitting messages into his brain: the book rushes over major adventures, and finally refuses to explain how he re-traverses the Vortex, and is found as a raving and fur-clad savage stowaway on a merchant vessel in San Francisco's harbor.
By this point, Micheal Storm is convinced he might very well be the missing god, and that he could re-enter the Vortex to find his beautiful Cylayne...
Questions abound. Micheal Storm is a orphan child, adopted by a rich archaeologist at the age of 14, so he could not possibly be the immortal Thundar, who disappeared in his prime of adulthood. Thundar's sword is found in the clutches of a weathered skeleton on the current-day side of the Vortex, a skeleton wearing Spanish armor of the 15th century. Thundar's ring, which controls the Supercomputer, is found in the pouch of a dead man on the far side of the Vortex. Chunks of exposition are simply not provided; the text reads like a realistic narrative in the sense that the narrator rarely has any idea why things are happening to him, or around him.
Why should there be ape-cavemen in the future? Why should the main enemy be first mentioned on page 136 of 192, brought on stage on page 158, and than escapes unharmed from the story on page 185?
Why does this villain command strange super-sciences?
The best of bad art raises endless questions: that is its value.
The writing itself is not the worse I have ever read. Burroughs or Howard have pumped out weaker dreck on occasion. But still, phrases like:
"By the the obvious young breasts of this latter creature in the chair, I knew it was female and could only conclude it was Imkuth, captured by means of some sort of scientific witchcraft that lay beyond my knowledge to define."
"If I had sensed a spell upon me before, now this vision of her--approaching me helplessly yet bravely, her hazel eyes locked on mine in full trusting and confidence--served to galvanize a psychic force which I can only describe as witchcraft. The warlock charisma fell upon my muscles and loins and heart. Where mundane rationalism would have submerged me in a sweatbath of anxiety and frustration, I was now unaccountably wizarded into a semblance of madman or godling after all."
Despite all this, the imagery is top-notch. This book screams to be a epic movie. The fights with the monsters, the nightmarish jungle life with its off-again-on-again passage of day and night, the Pellucidar meets Barsoom peoples...its as if John Bloodstone read Bloodstone by Karl Edward Wagner, fertilized it with A Princess of Mars, incubated it in the Land of Awful Night, and unencumbered by rational thought, wrote the book in one dynamic rush, possibly at the age of 14, and definitely in need of a good lay:
"Unable to analyze my feelings for her, I held her to me in one flaming moment of blinded ecstasy."
The book provides its own epigraph for this article: "Where mundane rationalism would have..."
Despite this, one of his books is worth reading, if one has the mental fortitude to wade through the abuse of reading a Burroughs pastiche.
Its not God-Man which is actually worse than its title; and the semi-mythical Tarzan on Barsoom is probably only of interest to the rabid slash-fic fan.
The book worth the read is Thundar - Man of Two Worlds.
Its an interesting and vivid tale. Michael Storm traverses a Time Vortex hidden in the Andes; he suffers multiple head injuries and amnesia; he becomes a savage man-beast in a jungle full of man-apes; he is tormented by nightmares and visions, especially of a Spanish longsword that had passed through his hands; he is returned to sanity by a beautiful young woman, who cannot love him physically because she is convinced he is their missing god, Thundar; he is captured by Thundar's enemies; he triumphs...
And then he doesn't. His lady-love still thinks he is an untouchable god, and she vanishes with the holy relics of the nation; the sun shines and nighttime will not come, the world starts to bake, dry out and die, the strange super-computer that controls the Time Vortex keeps transmitting messages into his brain: the book rushes over major adventures, and finally refuses to explain how he re-traverses the Vortex, and is found as a raving and fur-clad savage stowaway on a merchant vessel in San Francisco's harbor.
By this point, Micheal Storm is convinced he might very well be the missing god, and that he could re-enter the Vortex to find his beautiful Cylayne...
Questions abound. Micheal Storm is a orphan child, adopted by a rich archaeologist at the age of 14, so he could not possibly be the immortal Thundar, who disappeared in his prime of adulthood. Thundar's sword is found in the clutches of a weathered skeleton on the current-day side of the Vortex, a skeleton wearing Spanish armor of the 15th century. Thundar's ring, which controls the Supercomputer, is found in the pouch of a dead man on the far side of the Vortex. Chunks of exposition are simply not provided; the text reads like a realistic narrative in the sense that the narrator rarely has any idea why things are happening to him, or around him.
Why should there be ape-cavemen in the future? Why should the main enemy be first mentioned on page 136 of 192, brought on stage on page 158, and than escapes unharmed from the story on page 185?
Why does this villain command strange super-sciences?
The best of bad art raises endless questions: that is its value.
The writing itself is not the worse I have ever read. Burroughs or Howard have pumped out weaker dreck on occasion. But still, phrases like:
"By the the obvious young breasts of this latter creature in the chair, I knew it was female and could only conclude it was Imkuth, captured by means of some sort of scientific witchcraft that lay beyond my knowledge to define."
"If I had sensed a spell upon me before, now this vision of her--approaching me helplessly yet bravely, her hazel eyes locked on mine in full trusting and confidence--served to galvanize a psychic force which I can only describe as witchcraft. The warlock charisma fell upon my muscles and loins and heart. Where mundane rationalism would have submerged me in a sweatbath of anxiety and frustration, I was now unaccountably wizarded into a semblance of madman or godling after all."
Despite all this, the imagery is top-notch. This book screams to be a epic movie. The fights with the monsters, the nightmarish jungle life with its off-again-on-again passage of day and night, the Pellucidar meets Barsoom peoples...its as if John Bloodstone read Bloodstone by Karl Edward Wagner, fertilized it with A Princess of Mars, incubated it in the Land of Awful Night, and unencumbered by rational thought, wrote the book in one dynamic rush, possibly at the age of 14, and definitely in need of a good lay:
"Unable to analyze my feelings for her, I held her to me in one flaming moment of blinded ecstasy."
The book provides its own epigraph for this article: "Where mundane rationalism would have..."
Great Minds think alike, and Fools seldom differ.
Read the Internet long enough, and you'll always find someone who's thinking the same things you are.
Hitting that resonant phrase then makes you feel twice as right about what you were thinking.
Example? Certainly.
After a lifetime of struggling with Artificial Intelligence, gradually being reduced to the point where I would accept a robot with the brainpower of my terrier as amazing (Goodbye, R.Daneel Olivaw. Goodbye, OLGA.), I came to see that one of the sticking points of figuring this whole mess out was too little sensory input from the real world.
Well meaning academics would construct elaborate programs, and then connect them to reality via 1-10 sensors, with a bitrate of a few hundred bytes/sec. (Don't get me started on cameras, and the difficulties of implicit vision.) Even CYC, which I think was an amazing attempt at bootstrapping, is going to go nowhere, because it doesn't have a connection to the real world*. Intelligence works against reality; philosophically speaking, Intelligence is Figure to Reality's Ground**. Or vice versa.
So I was entertained to encounter this article by this blogger:
"...The idea of embodiment always struck me as both stunningly good and rather obvious – or more precisely, the fact that it wasn՚t obvious and needed to be put forward as a radical insurgent movement was kind of alarming. It indicated that there was some kind of culture-level sclerosis going on, a form of brain-damage that I avoided mostly by unplanned deficiencies in my education." --mtraven
Not to mention 'unplanned deficiencies in my education' could almost be a rephrase one of my favorite quotes:
" "Were we all well adjusted, we would ossify and die.The world is kept healthy only by some of the unhealthy minds lurking in it. The first implement made by man was not a scraper or a celt or stone knife.It was a crutch, and it wasn't devised by a hale man...Know you that it is not the fine bulls and wonderful cows who make the new paths. Only a crippled calf makes the new path. In everything that survives there must be an element of the incongruous." -- 'Eurema's Dam', R. A. Lafferty
*Terminal input asking question like 'WHO IS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES?' is not going to generate a recognizable intelligence. I don't even know what sort of mind would inhabit a space like that.
**No, I didn't make that phrase up.
Hitting that resonant phrase then makes you feel twice as right about what you were thinking.
Example? Certainly.
After a lifetime of struggling with Artificial Intelligence, gradually being reduced to the point where I would accept a robot with the brainpower of my terrier as amazing (Goodbye, R.Daneel Olivaw. Goodbye, OLGA.), I came to see that one of the sticking points of figuring this whole mess out was too little sensory input from the real world.
Well meaning academics would construct elaborate programs, and then connect them to reality via 1-10 sensors, with a bitrate of a few hundred bytes/sec. (Don't get me started on cameras, and the difficulties of implicit vision.) Even CYC, which I think was an amazing attempt at bootstrapping, is going to go nowhere, because it doesn't have a connection to the real world*. Intelligence works against reality; philosophically speaking, Intelligence is Figure to Reality's Ground**. Or vice versa.
So I was entertained to encounter this article by this blogger:
"...The idea of embodiment always struck me as both stunningly good and rather obvious – or more precisely, the fact that it wasn՚t obvious and needed to be put forward as a radical insurgent movement was kind of alarming. It indicated that there was some kind of culture-level sclerosis going on, a form of brain-damage that I avoided mostly by unplanned deficiencies in my education." --mtraven
Not to mention 'unplanned deficiencies in my education' could almost be a rephrase one of my favorite quotes:
" "Were we all well adjusted, we would ossify and die.The world is kept healthy only by some of the unhealthy minds lurking in it. The first implement made by man was not a scraper or a celt or stone knife.It was a crutch, and it wasn't devised by a hale man...Know you that it is not the fine bulls and wonderful cows who make the new paths. Only a crippled calf makes the new path. In everything that survives there must be an element of the incongruous." -- 'Eurema's Dam', R. A. Lafferty
*Terminal input asking question like 'WHO IS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES?' is not going to generate a recognizable intelligence. I don't even know what sort of mind would inhabit a space like that.
**No, I didn't make that phrase up.
Couth Numbers
There are certain numbers that I don't like. Not in the sense of being phobic, or that I'd avoid them, just in the sense that the number does not 'feel good' when I think about it.
'Feel good' .
That's a nice sloppy phrase, not very exact. It is similar to 'mouth feel', and maybe it is 'mind feel' I am talking about. Anyone want to coin a word for the sensation of a thing that seems 'ugly' or ' not right' when thought about?
Shall we rehabilitate 'ugsome' for this idea?*
But I don't want to talk about ugsome numbers. The number 6,000,000 could be ugsome, when considered as a summation for the Holocaust. The number -1,500 could be ugsome, if its the value of a tax bill.
What I am talking about is a number that is unpleasant, without having any conscious** context attached to it.
I was lying in bed when Liz asked what I was thinking about, and at that moment I realized I was thinking about couth, and uncouth numbers. She instantly understood what I meant, and agreed that there were numbers she found uncouth as well: 73 for example, but not 37.
There seems to be more odd uncouth than even, but our sample (n < 100) is small enough to skew an expected 50/50 distribution. It seems like some decades had a different distribution than others, but again, that may be a effect of sample size.
30,32,33,34,35,36,38,37, all seemed couth, where only 70,72,75,76,77 were couth.
Now this leads to a small fact about arithmetic: there are three ways of handling a small arithmetical transaction such as 27 +14:
What numbers do we encounter in everyday life, and does each person develop a mental fingerprint of numbers that is different? Or, like with Liz and I, the list of couth/uncouth numbers should nearly match?
Is anyone looking for a thesis concept that combines mathematics and psychology? The Tiny Lab is not going to get around to writing 'Historical Arithmetic Experience Manifested in Subjective Affectivity Gauges', as the Tiny Lab is a little busy with 'Sauropod Beat Frequencies: Femur kinematics as a Metric of Scale-Dependent Improvisational Tempos.'***
I may however, sit some people down with a list of numbers and see if I can gather a complete list up to, say 200. It would be interesting to do this in conjunction with a polygraph, to see how far the ugsome effect goes.
* Old word, 15th century, Norse roots, useful.
**You cannot have thought without unconscious attachments.
***I.E. that a dinosaur is going to play rock music at a different tempo, because the natural tapping-speed of its legs is much much lower than a humans.
'Feel good' .
That's a nice sloppy phrase, not very exact. It is similar to 'mouth feel', and maybe it is 'mind feel' I am talking about. Anyone want to coin a word for the sensation of a thing that seems 'ugly' or ' not right' when thought about?
Shall we rehabilitate 'ugsome' for this idea?*
But I don't want to talk about ugsome numbers. The number 6,000,000 could be ugsome, when considered as a summation for the Holocaust. The number -1,500 could be ugsome, if its the value of a tax bill.
What I am talking about is a number that is unpleasant, without having any conscious** context attached to it.
I was lying in bed when Liz asked what I was thinking about, and at that moment I realized I was thinking about couth, and uncouth numbers. She instantly understood what I meant, and agreed that there were numbers she found uncouth as well: 73 for example, but not 37.
There seems to be more odd uncouth than even, but our sample (n < 100) is small enough to skew an expected 50/50 distribution. It seems like some decades had a different distribution than others, but again, that may be a effect of sample size.
30,32,33,34,35,36,38,37, all seemed couth, where only 70,72,75,76,77 were couth.
Now this leads to a small fact about arithmetic: there are three ways of handling a small arithmetical transaction such as 27 +14:
- Counting on fingers or with tokens (This is how computers do it)
- Algorithmic such as with paper and pencil,
- Memorization, e.g. mental table-consultation.
What numbers do we encounter in everyday life, and does each person develop a mental fingerprint of numbers that is different? Or, like with Liz and I, the list of couth/uncouth numbers should nearly match?
Is anyone looking for a thesis concept that combines mathematics and psychology? The Tiny Lab is not going to get around to writing 'Historical Arithmetic Experience Manifested in Subjective Affectivity Gauges', as the Tiny Lab is a little busy with 'Sauropod Beat Frequencies: Femur kinematics as a Metric of Scale-Dependent Improvisational Tempos.'***
I may however, sit some people down with a list of numbers and see if I can gather a complete list up to, say 200. It would be interesting to do this in conjunction with a polygraph, to see how far the ugsome effect goes.
* Old word, 15th century, Norse roots, useful.
**You cannot have thought without unconscious attachments.
***I.E. that a dinosaur is going to play rock music at a different tempo, because the natural tapping-speed of its legs is much much lower than a humans.
Romeo and Mercutio
FiveThirtyEight has an entertaining article on interaction measurement in Romeo and Juleit. Part way through, Pierson makes the baffled remark that the two lovers actually spend little time talking to each other, and that perhaps the play should have been called Juleit and her Nurse or Romeo and Benvolio.
Pierson's missing the point of the play, which isn't a big deal, because nearly everyone misses the play's main drive:
The family heads, senior and respected are publicly embarrassed by their children's brawling; the violence spreads to the gormless fool Romeo, who manages to fumblingly set the stage for the greatest disaster of the great House's quarrel.
That Mercutio, happy-go-lucky and largely harmless*, should not only die in a pointless quarrel, but one where Romeo was actually trying to play the adult, is the first ironic stroke, and is indeed, the deftest touch in the complex interplay of emotions.
Tybalt's brutal murder leading to more shame; Madame Montague dying of grief and stress; the possibility extended of things finally settling down, and then at the perfect moment, the twist of the knife! Juleit dead - the famous suicides - and the audience crowds out of the theatre, the final scene of dead and twisted bodies discovered slumped in the tomb fixed in their minds.
Shakespeare go to some effort to undercut the love story: the lovers are immature, Romeo is shown to be explicitly fickle.
Its quite the death-toll: Tybalt, Mercutio, Paris, Romeo's mother. With the exception of Tybalt, the ones that die are merely caught up in the whirlwind, and the ones that should act as brakes on the madness- Friar Lawrence and the Nurse - are astonishingly derelict in their duties, and while truly to blame for much of the destruction, escape unscathed.
And while in Othello, the destruction is caused by a clear villain, Romeo and Juleit is almost a study in murky causation. Even Tybalt's position has some justification,especially when considered in a historical light.
God, as the wit once observed, is an iron.
*Except that he is the voice of cynical rationality, and in this maelstrom of emotion, must be destroyed: there may be some connection to the film American Beauty.
Pierson's missing the point of the play, which isn't a big deal, because nearly everyone misses the play's main drive:
Its not really a play about star-crossed love.
Its a play about collateral damage.
That Mercutio, happy-go-lucky and largely harmless*, should not only die in a pointless quarrel, but one where Romeo was actually trying to play the adult, is the first ironic stroke, and is indeed, the deftest touch in the complex interplay of emotions.
Tybalt's brutal murder leading to more shame; Madame Montague dying of grief and stress; the possibility extended of things finally settling down, and then at the perfect moment, the twist of the knife! Juleit dead - the famous suicides - and the audience crowds out of the theatre, the final scene of dead and twisted bodies discovered slumped in the tomb fixed in their minds.
Shakespeare go to some effort to undercut the love story: the lovers are immature, Romeo is shown to be explicitly fickle.
Its quite the death-toll: Tybalt, Mercutio, Paris, Romeo's mother. With the exception of Tybalt, the ones that die are merely caught up in the whirlwind, and the ones that should act as brakes on the madness- Friar Lawrence and the Nurse - are astonishingly derelict in their duties, and while truly to blame for much of the destruction, escape unscathed.
And while in Othello, the destruction is caused by a clear villain, Romeo and Juleit is almost a study in murky causation. Even Tybalt's position has some justification,especially when considered in a historical light.
God, as the wit once observed, is an iron.
*Except that he is the voice of cynical rationality, and in this maelstrom of emotion, must be destroyed: there may be some connection to the film American Beauty.
O.S.I.R. 7 (I think - do updates count as integers?)
This is maybe a minor detail, but its really damned annoying, and I can't think of how to solve it.
The mouse lags.
Not a lot - very little, in fact, just enough to make it feel soggy and inaccurate.
I'll be the first to admit that maybe all those years of Quake and Doom II have sensitized me to draggy pointers, but its still really damned annoying. (How many times can I use that phrase?) Whats also interesting about this problem is that the pointer also has a bad case of quivering; the mouse is noticing tiny vibrations, and the pointer is displaying them.
"The predictable pointer acceleration code is an effort to remove the deficiencies of the previous acceleration code. It is intended as a drop-in replacement. Most users probably won't note it, which is ensured by reusing existing controls and aligning closely to them."
Do they mean 'note' or 'notice'?
This is the only complaint I have about using Puppy Linux for surfing the Net.
I have little interest in a machine that can only surf the Net.
Bah.
The mouse lags.
Not a lot - very little, in fact, just enough to make it feel soggy and inaccurate.
I'll be the first to admit that maybe all those years of Quake and Doom II have sensitized me to draggy pointers, but its still really damned annoying. (How many times can I use that phrase?) Whats also interesting about this problem is that the pointer also has a bad case of quivering; the mouse is noticing tiny vibrations, and the pointer is displaying them.
"The predictable pointer acceleration code is an effort to remove the deficiencies of the previous acceleration code. It is intended as a drop-in replacement. Most users probably won't note it, which is ensured by reusing existing controls and aligning closely to them."
Do they mean 'note' or 'notice'?
This is the only complaint I have about using Puppy Linux for surfing the Net.
I have little interest in a machine that can only surf the Net.
Bah.
Some Notes on the Probable Career of the Creature
Brought to life on the workbench of Victor Frankenstein, the Creature demonstrated superhuman intelligence and learning abilities immediately. Perhaps its most striking features is its yellow skin and strange eyes.The Shelley-Wollstoncroft Papers conclude with it being sighted on the Arctic wastes, heading northwards, presumably to self-destruction.
Fifty years later, the seas are ruled by the enigmatic 'Captain Nemo' who commands a self-manufactured vessel of astonishing capacity and power. He supplies revolutionaries, destroys warships, and broods over the rotting carcass of Grenville's Revenge.
Aronnax does not really supply much information but what he looks like beyond that he is tall, pale, and symmetrically constructed: he does note however that his eyes are unusually far apart.
Professor Aronnax's account ends with the professors escape from captivity; Nemo is assumed to have been destroyed in the Maelstrom whirlpools off the Norwegian coast. (The Mysterious Island appears to explain Nemo's origin and provide his concrete death, but is riddled with inconsistencies when compared to Aronnax's account. The most telling being that The Mysterious Island occurs in 1865 to 1867, while Aronnax definitively dates the Maelstrom event to June 2 1868! The Mysterious Island is disinformation. How much did the Creature pay Verne?)
In the 1890's, a tall , thin man calling himself 'Doctor Nikola' appears and there are reports of strange and terrible experiments and bizarre schemes in pursuit of a Tibetan process of raising the dead. Nikola is slender, 'perfectly formed' with strange eyes and 'white, toad-coloured skin' He has a pet black cat he calls Apollyon ( 'The Destroyer', also known classicly as Abaddon)
Twenty years later, a tall, 'yellow-complected' man with strange eyes, and commanding ever stranger scientific breakthroughs is revealed by the detective work of a Burmese police commissioner.
Calling himself 'Doctor Fu Manchu': a sobriquet as unrealistic as 'O'Irish' or 'MacScotsman' he masquerades as a vaudeville Chinaman with pigtail, lisp and inscrutable expressions. Fu Manchu mugs for the metaphorical camera, but the Clouseau-like Denis Nayland Smith can never see the joke, and swallows the masquerade hook, line and sinker. He is accompanied at all times by a creature described as a small black marmoset called Peko. This in itself is strange because Peko is the name of an Estonian god of brewing and crops.
At around this time, a dope-fiend by the name of Costigan reports a wild narrative involving a skeletal figure known as 'Old Skullface' 'Kathulos' or simply 'The Master' who was reputedly found drifting in a strange sealed sarcophagus in the Atlantic. I imagine that one of Nemo's strange, decked-over submersible dinghies could have been described as a 'sarcophagous'. Costigan's opium addiction is cured by the administration of a powerful stimulant that converts a weak and dying addict into a physical powerhouse. It does not entirely cure his mind; the climax of his account features a hallucinogenic dream centered around a Mesoamerican pyramid built deep in the heart of London.
In 1946, a tall, thin man calling himself 'Jonas Sown' claims to have 'come out of China' and to have instigated the second world war.
The trail grows cold here.
If the Sown lead is actually unconnected - and the connection is very tenuous - than the Creature perished at some point during the Second World War. He would have been around 130 years old, but we have no data on the ageing rate of artificial beings.
No trace of the Nautilus has ever been found, yet in 1963 the US Navy tracked a single-screwed submarine operating at depths and speeds no other submarine has ever reached.
In 1972, the Norwegian Navy was involved in a two week long battle with a small cigar-shaped submarine that ultimately escaped unscathed.
So where is the Creature today?
Fifty years later, the seas are ruled by the enigmatic 'Captain Nemo' who commands a self-manufactured vessel of astonishing capacity and power. He supplies revolutionaries, destroys warships, and broods over the rotting carcass of Grenville's Revenge.
Aronnax does not really supply much information but what he looks like beyond that he is tall, pale, and symmetrically constructed: he does note however that his eyes are unusually far apart.
Professor Aronnax's account ends with the professors escape from captivity; Nemo is assumed to have been destroyed in the Maelstrom whirlpools off the Norwegian coast. (The Mysterious Island appears to explain Nemo's origin and provide his concrete death, but is riddled with inconsistencies when compared to Aronnax's account. The most telling being that The Mysterious Island occurs in 1865 to 1867, while Aronnax definitively dates the Maelstrom event to June 2 1868! The Mysterious Island is disinformation. How much did the Creature pay Verne?)
In the 1890's, a tall , thin man calling himself 'Doctor Nikola' appears and there are reports of strange and terrible experiments and bizarre schemes in pursuit of a Tibetan process of raising the dead. Nikola is slender, 'perfectly formed' with strange eyes and 'white, toad-coloured skin' He has a pet black cat he calls Apollyon ( 'The Destroyer', also known classicly as Abaddon)
Twenty years later, a tall, 'yellow-complected' man with strange eyes, and commanding ever stranger scientific breakthroughs is revealed by the detective work of a Burmese police commissioner.
Calling himself 'Doctor Fu Manchu': a sobriquet as unrealistic as 'O'Irish' or 'MacScotsman' he masquerades as a vaudeville Chinaman with pigtail, lisp and inscrutable expressions. Fu Manchu mugs for the metaphorical camera, but the Clouseau-like Denis Nayland Smith can never see the joke, and swallows the masquerade hook, line and sinker. He is accompanied at all times by a creature described as a small black marmoset called Peko. This in itself is strange because Peko is the name of an Estonian god of brewing and crops.
At around this time, a dope-fiend by the name of Costigan reports a wild narrative involving a skeletal figure known as 'Old Skullface' 'Kathulos' or simply 'The Master' who was reputedly found drifting in a strange sealed sarcophagus in the Atlantic. I imagine that one of Nemo's strange, decked-over submersible dinghies could have been described as a 'sarcophagous'. Costigan's opium addiction is cured by the administration of a powerful stimulant that converts a weak and dying addict into a physical powerhouse. It does not entirely cure his mind; the climax of his account features a hallucinogenic dream centered around a Mesoamerican pyramid built deep in the heart of London.
In 1946, a tall, thin man calling himself 'Jonas Sown' claims to have 'come out of China' and to have instigated the second world war.
The trail grows cold here.
If the Sown lead is actually unconnected - and the connection is very tenuous - than the Creature perished at some point during the Second World War. He would have been around 130 years old, but we have no data on the ageing rate of artificial beings.
No trace of the Nautilus has ever been found, yet in 1963 the US Navy tracked a single-screwed submarine operating at depths and speeds no other submarine has ever reached.
In 1972, the Norwegian Navy was involved in a two week long battle with a small cigar-shaped submarine that ultimately escaped unscathed.
So where is the Creature today?
"At first I thought we were in the hands of people that would understand..."
Frankenstein's Island(1981).
Who are supposed to be the barbarian survivors of a pre-historic, yet alien race.
Why do they do nothing but smoke from modified human skulls, pray to the ghost of Doctor Frankenstein, and initiate each other by stretching themselves between trees?
Why is one of the alien women not a alien woman, but a human girl, daughter of the caged and raving blood-donor?
Why are they wearing leopardskin swimwear?
Why is Frankenstein's ghost raving about the power of the thread of gold?
Why is the lab decked out with more high voltage equipment than any three mad scientist's labs -- but includes a ammo tin, spray painted pink , and whirling balanced on one corner?
This has the worst Frankenstein's Monster I have ever seen. Really. To the Stiff Servo Effect we can add the Fly Combat Combo. Or musical sound effects. Seriously, he's lurching so hard in some scenes that it looks like he's dancing to the Monster Mash.
I could go on like this for an hour.
In what world do Colonels of the American armed Forces wear baggy dark-brown jumpsuits?
In this movie's world. In this movie all cinematic normality is overturned. This film could b e a dadaist masterpiece, and may indeed be a hidden and unknown one.
The deliberate lack of action, followed by the epic brawl through the laboratory. The camera pausing part way through its exploration of writhing semi-naked female 'warriors' and their turtle-neck clad, sunglasses-wearing zombie enemy, (each of whom stand and walk as though their testicles ache unbearably), to watch the plucky terrier enter the battle, bark merrily and flee again.
"Those logs are tangible...rooted to the ground."
I'm willing to bet that the producers laid their hands on some footage of John Carradine...perhaps a minutes worth of film stock, something that was thrown out because Carradine looks like he'd died and was being animated by strings. They use the footage to put his name on the billing.
Its a transparent con, but still, the image of a hologram of John Carradine being worshipped by nearly naked dope bunnys on a far-away jungle island is strangely compelling.
The movie's refusal to be exciting, or to explain anything, is hypnotically tantalizing. Its like watching a strip tease where the dancer keeps shimmying and wiggling and discarding clothes only to reveal more layers of inexplicable raiment; the creeping madness kept in check by the banality of set and actions; the dialogue drifting in and out of sense like the rambling of a schizophrenic , or trying to read a newspaper in Cyrillic....
"Doctor Frankenstein, before he died, perfected a very startling theory which utilizes a intermediary - a human brain which is the connecting link for transnmission"
"the brain is kept alive by---low voltage?"
"its staying in an expanded threshold - a super nourished state"
Thank you Madame Exposition, everything is clear, now. But why does the One Eyed Man laugh?
"Its like a Mach piece, really"
I was thinking about the robot band Z-Machine today, and wondering why they weren't as interesting as they should be.
They've got wires and bright lights and jerky motions. They have batteries of fingers, salvos of effects. They're about as interesting to watch as a dog sleeping.
Its not their fault - or Kenjiro Matsuo's for that matter. He just doing what so many people have done through the years, trying to push the envelope by going bigger, faster, brighter.
But that is the wrong approach. You push the records with scale, but you push the envelope with style.
There is a real lack of interesting art robots - visually interesting, that is, as I don't think I have seen a conceptually interesting one since Papert's Turtle. Badly engineered, badly aesthetic, typically they sulk in the no-man-land between Snow's Two Cultures, festooned with dangling wires and blinkenlights. Its sad at a art show, and tends to make the participants interested in the cheap wine and cheese. Its even sadder as musicians. Because we expect musicains to entertain - I beleive Beethoven had some terse and biting things to say about this - and a tangle of pneumatic actuators and aluminium has little entertainment capacity, no matter how many bright lights you employ.
So ignoreing the fact that several centuries of self-playing instruments exist, and that servos, actuators and sensors are now dirt cheap, why arn't we seeing more unusal machines?
The drummer for Compressorhead* is probably the most interesting I've found, with his strange hunched spine and almost bobbling head. That is pretty much the best of a sad lot.
Is it because the artists in question are too conceptually hung up on the idea of robotics itself? Strange, but a lot of art robotics remind me of homemade fetish porn, on some level that escapes conscious elucidation.
So, I intend to do something different.
The band will be called Metal Dinosaur ( perhaps spelled Dynosaur?)**
The band is self described.
The band will be robots. Not automata. Not MIDI machines.
The current lineup is:
Ankylosaurus on drums. His 808 is behind him, so he can work it with his tail.
Tyrannosaurus Rex is lead guitar/vocals. As a dramatic touch, when he gets excited enough, his slaver will burn. That's right folks, a robotic dinosaur with a mouth full of flame. In all honesty, I would have given him pulsejets if they could be used indoors. Perhaps the bass player, if the note could be tuned right?
Stegasaurus on keyboards.
What will they do beyond being cool impedimentia to fill my living room?***
Well. they'll play music. Together. Not in the sense of everyone running through a sequenced series of moves and notes, but in the sense of trying to play a piece of music together, trying to match beat and harmony.
As I am still in the concept phase, this is all broad strokes of
I will also never use the term 'cyberpunk' .
I will also consider the project a sucess if they play a set with Meytal Cohen.
...The Yellow Drum Machine is pretty cool, though.
*Who also do not have a mention on Wikipedia...come on, guys!
**Props to the worse names airplane ever.
***Or just lead to tedious dinobot jokes.
They've got wires and bright lights and jerky motions. They have batteries of fingers, salvos of effects. They're about as interesting to watch as a dog sleeping.
Its not their fault - or Kenjiro Matsuo's for that matter. He just doing what so many people have done through the years, trying to push the envelope by going bigger, faster, brighter.
But that is the wrong approach. You push the records with scale, but you push the envelope with style.
There is a real lack of interesting art robots - visually interesting, that is, as I don't think I have seen a conceptually interesting one since Papert's Turtle. Badly engineered, badly aesthetic, typically they sulk in the no-man-land between Snow's Two Cultures, festooned with dangling wires and blinkenlights. Its sad at a art show, and tends to make the participants interested in the cheap wine and cheese. Its even sadder as musicians. Because we expect musicains to entertain - I beleive Beethoven had some terse and biting things to say about this - and a tangle of pneumatic actuators and aluminium has little entertainment capacity, no matter how many bright lights you employ.
So ignoreing the fact that several centuries of self-playing instruments exist, and that servos, actuators and sensors are now dirt cheap, why arn't we seeing more unusal machines?
The drummer for Compressorhead* is probably the most interesting I've found, with his strange hunched spine and almost bobbling head. That is pretty much the best of a sad lot.
Is it because the artists in question are too conceptually hung up on the idea of robotics itself? Strange, but a lot of art robotics remind me of homemade fetish porn, on some level that escapes conscious elucidation.
So, I intend to do something different.
The band will be called Metal Dinosaur ( perhaps spelled Dynosaur?)**
The band is self described.
The band will be robots. Not automata. Not MIDI machines.
The current lineup is:
Ankylosaurus on drums. His 808 is behind him, so he can work it with his tail.
Tyrannosaurus Rex is lead guitar/vocals. As a dramatic touch, when he gets excited enough, his slaver will burn. That's right folks, a robotic dinosaur with a mouth full of flame. In all honesty, I would have given him pulsejets if they could be used indoors. Perhaps the bass player, if the note could be tuned right?
Stegasaurus on keyboards.
What will they do beyond being cool impedimentia to fill my living room?***
Well. they'll play music. Together. Not in the sense of everyone running through a sequenced series of moves and notes, but in the sense of trying to play a piece of music together, trying to match beat and harmony.
As I am still in the concept phase, this is all broad strokes of
- Dinosaurs seen through eight year old eyes.
- Interactive robotics, with a very heavy emphasis on interaction.
- Music. Fire. Metal. Volume. A complete lack of dangling cords and wires.
I will also never use the term 'cyberpunk' .
I will also consider the project a sucess if they play a set with Meytal Cohen.
...The Yellow Drum Machine is pretty cool, though.
*Who also do not have a mention on Wikipedia...come on, guys!
**Props to the worse names airplane ever.
***Or just lead to tedious dinobot jokes.
What time is it at the North Pole? Thats Odin's 18th secret.
Worldwide, 'pataphysics is unconsciously, but deliberately practised, by two groups of people:
computer hackers, and students of Zen. The hacker uses 'pataphysical heuristics to probe and control hardware in unexpected ways. Techniques like fuzzing explore state space with conscious understanding; any result that can be made to fit the task at hand is valuable. Its important to note that any fuzzing technique does not explore in any sort of logical or comprehensive way. Equally well, its random approach will often yield nuggets of considerable value.
It is instructive to note that the C programming language makes a nod in a 'paytaphysical direction with its warnings about 'undefined behavior'. Unlike many languages which take careful steps top limit the number and range of possible states a program can create, C merely sketches out the known and (semi) safe paths, recognizing that paradigms of all-encompassing safety are cumbersome and slow.
They have their place: I have no interest in the safety control systems of, say, Bruce A & B Nuclear Power Plants being greatly capable of 'undefined behavior'. It certainly is capable of some: such is the brutal lesson of Turing and Godel.
Zen is famous for its use of koans, vignettes designed to jam the mental structures of disciples. Contradiction, paradox, oxymoron; these are all logical descriptors of anti logical states. Koans encompass them, and more.
It is no co-incidence that many advanced hackers have shown a keen interest in Zen concepts.
Perhaps it is unfortunate that such subtle and advanced concepts have really only be explored as farce, philosophy and espionage; but perhaps Alfred Jarry would have appreciated the joke that the idea before him could be used to break the most regimented and orderly of human creation: digital computers.
because I can't shut up, consider that Odin didn't gain powers when he hung himself on the World Tree, he gained insight, and he was able to use that insight to gain powers.
A prototypical strange loop is demonstrated as a sacrifice ' by myself to myself'.
He hangs until the twigs on the ground form the shape of letters, which he reads, and is enlightened.
What deeds? he is already a god, with godlike powers, but without lists of heroic actions. Odin's actions are manipulative and secretive; he always preferred the indirect course and the hidden way to the blatant exercise of power. His characteristic weapon is the spear Gungnir, which is a weapon that leaves the hand, and kills with sudden thrust.
In the Havamal he boasts of eighteen charms that he knows, presumably from his quest.
This of course leads to another point made ins several different ancient poems, that Odin knew seid which while immensely powerful, was considered unmanly.
Seid might be translated as 'witchcraft' but is closer to what the Oracles of Delphi did, and like the Oracles, these skills may have been seen as acceptable for only women to practise, adding a hint of immorality to his knowledge.
Doesn't that sound like hacking, with its queasy morals and hidden powers?
I know many if-knowledge-is-power-than-a-god-am-I types would rather the cool shapeshifting trickster Loki to be their patrons, and in a way his Coyote bumbling and savage punishments do mirror the real-world manifestation of hackers wannabes.
But the true un-masters, the enlightened of the Rootless Root, have their prototype in the shadowy archetypal world:
Odin - the hidden god of hackers.
*The ultimate undelete.
computer hackers, and students of Zen. The hacker uses 'pataphysical heuristics to probe and control hardware in unexpected ways. Techniques like fuzzing explore state space with conscious understanding; any result that can be made to fit the task at hand is valuable. Its important to note that any fuzzing technique does not explore in any sort of logical or comprehensive way. Equally well, its random approach will often yield nuggets of considerable value.
It is instructive to note that the C programming language makes a nod in a 'paytaphysical direction with its warnings about 'undefined behavior'. Unlike many languages which take careful steps top limit the number and range of possible states a program can create, C merely sketches out the known and (semi) safe paths, recognizing that paradigms of all-encompassing safety are cumbersome and slow.
They have their place: I have no interest in the safety control systems of, say, Bruce A & B Nuclear Power Plants being greatly capable of 'undefined behavior'. It certainly is capable of some: such is the brutal lesson of Turing and Godel.
Zen is famous for its use of koans, vignettes designed to jam the mental structures of disciples. Contradiction, paradox, oxymoron; these are all logical descriptors of anti logical states. Koans encompass them, and more.
It is no co-incidence that many advanced hackers have shown a keen interest in Zen concepts.
Perhaps it is unfortunate that such subtle and advanced concepts have really only be explored as farce, philosophy and espionage; but perhaps Alfred Jarry would have appreciated the joke that the idea before him could be used to break the most regimented and orderly of human creation: digital computers.
because I can't shut up, consider that Odin didn't gain powers when he hung himself on the World Tree, he gained insight, and he was able to use that insight to gain powers.
"I know that I hung on a windy tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which no man knows
from where its roots run."
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which no man knows
from where its roots run."
A prototypical strange loop is demonstrated as a sacrifice ' by myself to myself'.
He hangs until the twigs on the ground form the shape of letters, which he reads, and is enlightened.
"Ere long I bare fruit,
and throve full well,
I grew and waxed in wisdom;
word following word,
I found me words,
deed following deed,
I wrought deeds."
and throve full well,
I grew and waxed in wisdom;
word following word,
I found me words,
deed following deed,
I wrought deeds."
What deeds? he is already a god, with godlike powers, but without lists of heroic actions. Odin's actions are manipulative and secretive; he always preferred the indirect course and the hidden way to the blatant exercise of power. His characteristic weapon is the spear Gungnir, which is a weapon that leaves the hand, and kills with sudden thrust.
In the Havamal he boasts of eighteen charms that he knows, presumably from his quest.
"I know a fourth
if I should find myself
fettered hand and foot,
I
shout the spell
that sets me free,
bonds break from my feet,
nothing holds my hands."
That is practically the plot of the Matrix, in a nutshell.
The majority of the charms do things like manipulate emotions and actions. Especially emotions: out of seventeen explicated charms, five of them manipulate emotions. two more are about knowledge, and a third allows him to extract knowledge from the dead.* This of course leads to another point made ins several different ancient poems, that Odin knew seid which while immensely powerful, was considered unmanly.
Seid might be translated as 'witchcraft' but is closer to what the Oracles of Delphi did, and like the Oracles, these skills may have been seen as acceptable for only women to practise, adding a hint of immorality to his knowledge.
Doesn't that sound like hacking, with its queasy morals and hidden powers?
I know many if-knowledge-is-power-than-a-god-am-I types would rather the cool shapeshifting trickster Loki to be their patrons, and in a way his Coyote bumbling and savage punishments do mirror the real-world manifestation of hackers wannabes.
But the true un-masters, the enlightened of the Rootless Root, have their prototype in the shadowy archetypal world:
Odin - the hidden god of hackers.
*The ultimate undelete.
Goodbye, Egon Spengler.
"What shall a man say when a friend has vanished behind the doors of Death? A mere tangle of barren words, only words."
-- –Robert E. Howard
O.S.I.R (some number n where n is too damn high)
So today I discovered that I needed a Java runtime.
I'll be the first to admit that I've never liked Java*, so I've always left it to scuttle around in the subbasement, doing useful stuff without ever being seen or heard. But like laundry service, 'once gone, soon missed', and today I needed it for the xTIMEcomposer IDE. XMOS was kind enough to send me one of their new Startkits, and its time to start using it.
First, I went to the Sun website and downloaded a .rpm.
While I could unpack it, I'm too naive to get it properly installed, or at least, when the installation failed, I don't know enough to figure out why. Hitting the forums gave me a pile of dead links -- has anyone considered that the Internet might be more useful if it had some sort of ROM like nature? --. and when I found a .pet file, FireFox decided it had no idea what to do.
Which was a blatant lie: the .pet autoinstall on download was the only thing that impressed me to date on this machine.**
Found the symlink, repaired the association. Java installed with a snap, and now the IDE comes up.
...annndddd the IDE unavoidable web login won't login. I've probably forgotten my password.
But seriously, XMOS. I understand the cross-platform choice of Java***, but the login is very close to a deal breaker. I know the concept of 'not being connected to the web' feels like a discussion about buggy whips. I know we are supposed to be cloud/stream/wireless/whatever 24/7/365. I'm not. My machines are connected some of the time, the connections are not always good, and I am not alone in this.
What percentage of people are not well-connected?
Its high.
This quote from John Carmack talking about Quakeworld vs the original Quake engine during Internet play is from the Bronze Age (1990s), but its always stuck in my head as a good admission of a programmers bias:
" While I can remember and justify all of my decisions about networking from DOOM through Quake, the bottom line is that I was working with the wrong basic assumptions for doing a good internet game. My original design was targeted at 200ms connection latencies. People that have a digital connection to the internet through a good provider get a pretty good game experience. Unfortunately, 99% of the world gets on with a slip or ppp connection over a modem, often through a crappy overcrowded ISP. This gives 300+ ms latencies, minimum. Client. User's modem. ISP's modem. Server. ISP's modem. User's modem. Client. God, that sucks.
Ok, I made a bad call. I have a T1 to my house, so I just wasn't familliar with PPP life. I'm adressing it now."
Talking about PPP may seem funny now, the problem is still real. For instance, I can't get broadband at my home. And fiber is just a pipe dream, unless I move two measly km.
So I connect via satellite, which I am quite happy with, except the unavoidable lag as the radio signal travels ~24,000 km to geosynchronous orbit(80 ms), gets buffered and then retransmitted to earth(at least another 80ms), gets processed at the uplink/downlink station, and routed onto the Internet. Physics demands her toll of 160ms, and in practise I get a lag greater then 280ms when the overheads are rolled in.
So as you can guess, FPS games are out for me, and the tens of thousands of other satellite modem users. And this isn't going to change for me. Until the phone company decides that running voice-over-copper is a waste of time, and rolls out fiber everywhere. Maybe sometime in the next 20 years, unless a new mitochondrial-telepathy communications system gets rolled out: its always so hard to predict new tech, beyond the fact that it'll usually waste more of our time in new and interesting ways.
*Do I actually like anything beyond home-made ice cream and Frankenstein movies?
**The whole SFS thing might be cool too, if it didn't remind me so much of a VCD.
*** Although I would have picked Python instead.
I'll be the first to admit that I've never liked Java*, so I've always left it to scuttle around in the subbasement, doing useful stuff without ever being seen or heard. But like laundry service, 'once gone, soon missed', and today I needed it for the xTIMEcomposer IDE. XMOS was kind enough to send me one of their new Startkits, and its time to start using it.
First, I went to the Sun website and downloaded a .rpm.
While I could unpack it, I'm too naive to get it properly installed, or at least, when the installation failed, I don't know enough to figure out why. Hitting the forums gave me a pile of dead links -- has anyone considered that the Internet might be more useful if it had some sort of ROM like nature? --. and when I found a .pet file, FireFox decided it had no idea what to do.
Which was a blatant lie: the .pet autoinstall on download was the only thing that impressed me to date on this machine.**
Found the symlink, repaired the association. Java installed with a snap, and now the IDE comes up.
...annndddd the IDE unavoidable web login won't login. I've probably forgotten my password.
But seriously, XMOS. I understand the cross-platform choice of Java***, but the login is very close to a deal breaker. I know the concept of 'not being connected to the web' feels like a discussion about buggy whips. I know we are supposed to be cloud/stream/wireless/whatever 24/7/365. I'm not. My machines are connected some of the time, the connections are not always good, and I am not alone in this.
What percentage of people are not well-connected?
Its high.
This quote from John Carmack talking about Quakeworld vs the original Quake engine during Internet play is from the Bronze Age (1990s), but its always stuck in my head as a good admission of a programmers bias:
" While I can remember and justify all of my decisions about networking from DOOM through Quake, the bottom line is that I was working with the wrong basic assumptions for doing a good internet game. My original design was targeted at 200ms connection latencies. People that have a digital connection to the internet through a good provider get a pretty good game experience. Unfortunately, 99% of the world gets on with a slip or ppp connection over a modem, often through a crappy overcrowded ISP. This gives 300+ ms latencies, minimum. Client. User's modem. ISP's modem. Server. ISP's modem. User's modem. Client. God, that sucks.
Ok, I made a bad call. I have a T1 to my house, so I just wasn't familliar with PPP life. I'm adressing it now."
Talking about PPP may seem funny now, the problem is still real. For instance, I can't get broadband at my home. And fiber is just a pipe dream, unless I move two measly km.
So I connect via satellite, which I am quite happy with, except the unavoidable lag as the radio signal travels ~24,000 km to geosynchronous orbit(80 ms), gets buffered and then retransmitted to earth(at least another 80ms), gets processed at the uplink/downlink station, and routed onto the Internet. Physics demands her toll of 160ms, and in practise I get a lag greater then 280ms when the overheads are rolled in.
So as you can guess, FPS games are out for me, and the tens of thousands of other satellite modem users. And this isn't going to change for me. Until the phone company decides that running voice-over-copper is a waste of time, and rolls out fiber everywhere. Maybe sometime in the next 20 years, unless a new mitochondrial-telepathy communications system gets rolled out: its always so hard to predict new tech, beyond the fact that it'll usually waste more of our time in new and interesting ways.
*Do I actually like anything beyond home-made ice cream and Frankenstein movies?
**The whole SFS thing might be cool too, if it didn't remind me so much of a VCD.
*** Although I would have picked Python instead.
Those Who Cannot Remember Doc Savage...
Jess Nevins has a interesting overview of what he describes as a historical backlash against the
ideals of physical development that spawned Clark Savage Jr., and his varied companions of the pulps.
"Those Who Cannot Remember Doc Savage Are Condemned To Repeat Him: The 20th Century Backlash Against Posthuman Bodybuilders,"
While this provides some realworld relevance to the slow decline of Doc's capabilities over the years - especially post WWII - this paper suggested something much more sinister to me.
The question of where Savage went can also be asked about Kent Allard (Lamont Cranston - the Shadow),Richard Wentworth (the Spider), Carson Napier, or Anthony Quinn(the Black Bat).
Were they hunted down and destroyed?
Philip Jose Farmer has suggested that Savage disappeared during a expedition through the 'Gate of Hell' cave system near Quoddy Bay, but its pretty clear that the Russians got him: Terror Wears No Shoes ends on a uncharacteristically down note:
ideals of physical development that spawned Clark Savage Jr., and his varied companions of the pulps.
"Those Who Cannot Remember Doc Savage Are Condemned To Repeat Him: The 20th Century Backlash Against Posthuman Bodybuilders,"
While this provides some realworld relevance to the slow decline of Doc's capabilities over the years - especially post WWII - this paper suggested something much more sinister to me.
The question of where Savage went can also be asked about Kent Allard (Lamont Cranston - the Shadow),Richard Wentworth (the Spider), Carson Napier, or Anthony Quinn(the Black Bat).
Were they hunted down and destroyed?
Philip Jose Farmer has suggested that Savage disappeared during a expedition through the 'Gate of Hell' cave system near Quoddy Bay, but its pretty clear that the Russians got him: Terror Wears No Shoes ends on a uncharacteristically down note:
" Doc Savage had replaced the virus charged money packets in the suitcase, and was inspecting them carefully with a magnifying glass.
He turned his head, said, "You'd better tell them to quarantine this suite and all the prisoners. Have them shut off the air conditioning so air from this place won't be circulated through the ship."
Canta,shocked by how pale his face was, asked, "Do you think any of the packets broke open?" "I don't think so. But we'll take no chances."
"You mean we have to remain in here for the rest of the voyage?"
"That's right. And then we'll have to be segregated for several weeks afterward. That won't be so bad--we'll be in the mountains somewhere, at a laboratory that we'll set up to find out what this virus is and dig up a vaccine or treatment."
"Can that be done?"
"It can be tried," he said. "Go on, tell them to keep everyone out of here, and keep the prisoners in the suite."
She frowned at him. He seemed detached, absorbed in the matter of solving the virus that lay ahead. There was no visible elation about him, and certainly no noticeable interest in her as a woman, and a very pretty one.
Canta felt an odd, helpless sort of rage.
She turned and went out and stood by the suite door, listening to the Captain of the Crosby Square tell expert lies to his curious passengers.
THE END "
Canta,shocked by how pale his face was, asked, "Do you think any of the packets broke open?" "I don't think so. But we'll take no chances."
"You mean we have to remain in here for the rest of the voyage?"
"That's right. And then we'll have to be segregated for several weeks afterward. That won't be so bad--we'll be in the mountains somewhere, at a laboratory that we'll set up to find out what this virus is and dig up a vaccine or treatment."
"Can that be done?"
"It can be tried," he said. "Go on, tell them to keep everyone out of here, and keep the prisoners in the suite."
She frowned at him. He seemed detached, absorbed in the matter of solving the virus that lay ahead. There was no visible elation about him, and certainly no noticeable interest in her as a woman, and a very pretty one.
Canta felt an odd, helpless sort of rage.
She turned and went out and stood by the suite door, listening to the Captain of the Crosby Square tell expert lies to his curious passengers.
THE END "
Italics mine.
'shocked by how pale his face was ' Savage pale with terror was a new development. I'm going to have to re-read this book to see if anything can be adduced to suggest that the Commie-spy-spreads-plague plot was actually a plot to catch the Man of Bronze. After all, everything else had failed over the years: poison and bullets, monsters and beautiful assassins.
I've often wondered how Savage never encountered the eponymous villain Dr. Fu Manchu, although the strange entity answering to the name of Jonas Sown might well have been the Master himself.
Could Dr. Fu Manchu, (most certainly not his real name) been the surreiptious destroyer of the early twenty-century's crop of posthumans? Being apparently immortal, he could undertake schemes that would span decades, centuries even. Being subtle, he could have turned the concept of superhumanity or posthumanity into a laughable comic book idea of capes, tights and Krypton.
And now, behind a spiderweb of international banks, world-ruling corporations, and a global-marketplace of confusion and incomprehensible wealth, does the Master rule?
Its easy to argue that the superheros destroyed the supervillians before they faded away, but no one can explain what happened to the singular greatest of the villains; tall, lean, with strange green eyes and commanding unknown sciences, the One known as Doctor Fu Manchu (known to be a pseudonym) or Kathulos or Dr. Nikola and possibly before that simply as the Creature, must still walk amongst us.
O.S.I.R. Update
I can't keep using halt before a hard power off to stop this system.
Or can I?
As I don't do anything sophisticated, as long as I unmount my drives before halting, what can go wrong?
I'll edit the answer in when I find out.
Or can I?
As I don't do anything sophisticated, as long as I unmount my drives before halting, what can go wrong?
I'll edit the answer in when I find out.
Hidden Wisdom
You can find runes
and meaning staves,
very mighty staves,
very strong staves,
which a mighty sage coloured
and mighty powers made...
Do you know how you must cut [them]?
Do you know how you must interpret?
Do you know how you must colour?
Do you know how you must try?
Do you know how you must invoke?
Those verses are from the Havamal, but they could be a warning to a wannabe Linux user. What do I need to make this thing shut off on command? A sacrifice hung on a ash tree, consecrated to Linus Torvalds?
Sense is needed
for the one who travels widely;
everything is easy at home.
He who knows nothing
and sits with wise men
becomes a mockery.
for the one who travels widely;
everything is easy at home.
He who knows nothing
and sits with wise men
becomes a mockery.
Valentine's Day Spaghetti!
This is what my valentine's look like:
Oh yeah, the Tiny Lab rocks the holiday.
O.S.I.R - 'Nothin' gonna, nothin' gonna , stop us now, stop us now...'
Today I tackled a constant, but annoying problem: the laptop won't shutdown.
That is not the same as turning off - if I hold down the power button for a few seconds, it will do a hard shutdown, and then complain on restart about not being cleanly shutdown.
Menu shutdown just reboots, only this time without my eth0 being active, or even noticed.
Okay, 2nd try:
sh-4.1# shutdown -now
sh: shutdown: command not found
Okay...isn't shutdown a standard command, like ls or grep?
Checking the forums, I find this is a common problem, not
well understood, and attacked with a variety of magical incantations, such as:
sh-4.1# poweroff
The screen instantly went back, all hdd and network actvity stopped, but the laptop was still running.
Had to restart by pressing the power button, but on reboot, the network interface was down. Weird.
Back to the forums but all they could tell me is that the problem is subtle, and takes many forms.
Good results are reported with:
sh-4.1# rxvt -e wmpoweroff
Tried it, and success! But why? rxvt is just a console, and -e is a switch, and the command is wmpoweroff, which is a batch file, er, excuse me, a 'script'.
So why, when I re-start the computer, and just run
sh-4.1# wmpoweroff
all that happens is a warm reboot, and the network stops working.
eth0 can't be found by any means at my command, until I do a hard reset, listen to the machine whine about being hard reset, and ta-da! I can reconnect to the network.
Now, when I try wmpoweroff, it just warm reboots. Great. Just great. So what was packaged as a shutdown script that should do something like:
One forum posted advises running halt and then doing a hard poweroff. This may work for him, but its about seven keystrokes longer than I'm prepared to type. Not to mention this little note in the halt man page:
BUT IF I DON'T HAVE SHUTDOWN....what happens? It reboots, I suspect. The next person who tells me that Linux is a mature OS that my grandmother* could use as a M$ replacement is going to get a earful.
Permit me to quote from a smelloftheice parody:**
Hitler (impatiently): "Well? What?"
Fegelein(in disguise): "Mein Fuhrer, we're here to turn this bunker into a total mess."
*Metaphorically speaking.
**Contains nazis.
That is not the same as turning off - if I hold down the power button for a few seconds, it will do a hard shutdown, and then complain on restart about not being cleanly shutdown.
Menu shutdown just reboots, only this time without my eth0 being active, or even noticed.
Okay, 2nd try:
sh-4.1# shutdown -now
sh: shutdown: command not found
Okay...isn't shutdown a standard command, like ls or grep?
Checking the forums, I find this is a common problem, not
well understood, and attacked with a variety of magical incantations, such as:
sh-4.1# poweroff
The screen instantly went back, all hdd and network actvity stopped, but the laptop was still running.
Had to restart by pressing the power button, but on reboot, the network interface was down. Weird.
Back to the forums but all they could tell me is that the problem is subtle, and takes many forms.
Good results are reported with:
sh-4.1# rxvt -e wmpoweroff
Tried it, and success! But why? rxvt is just a console, and -e is a switch, and the command is wmpoweroff, which is a batch file, er, excuse me, a 'script'.
So why, when I re-start the computer, and just run
sh-4.1# wmpoweroff
all that happens is a warm reboot, and the network stops working.
eth0 can't be found by any means at my command, until I do a hard reset, listen to the machine whine about being hard reset, and ta-da! I can reconnect to the network.
Now, when I try wmpoweroff, it just warm reboots. Great. Just great. So what was packaged as a shutdown script that should do something like:
log what needs logged
unspool whats spooled up
log everyone off
stop everything running
turn the power off
actually does something like:
If number of times run > 0, then {Fuck Shit Up
lose eth0
log everyone off
restart everything but eth0}
else shutdown
The 'Fuck-shit-up-and-reboot' batch file. I know that polymorphic and self-modifying code is damn sexy, but is self-modifying scripts anything but an exercise in abuse?One forum posted advises running halt and then doing a hard poweroff. This may work for him, but its about seven keystrokes longer than I'm prepared to type. Not to mention this little note in the halt man page:
"If halt or reboot is called when the system is
not in runlevel 0 or 6, in other words when it's running
normally, shutdown will be invoked instead (with the -h
or -r flag)."
BUT IF I DON'T HAVE SHUTDOWN....what happens? It reboots, I suspect. The next person who tells me that Linux is a mature OS that my grandmother* could use as a M$ replacement is going to get a earful.
Permit me to quote from a smelloftheice parody:**
Hitler (impatiently): "Well? What?"
Fegelein(in disguise): "Mein Fuhrer, we're here to turn this bunker into a total mess."
*Metaphorically speaking.
**Contains nazis.
The Stupid and the Diligent
"I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy -- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief." -- Hammerstein-Equord
If Hammerstein-Equord had been exposed to the Internet, I wonder if he would have altered his categories.
Where do trolls fit in this, for instance?
If Hammerstein-Equord had been exposed to the Internet, I wonder if he would have altered his categories.
Where do trolls fit in this, for instance?
O.S.I.R. #3 - The Playlists of the Gods
After what happened last night, I'm not sure if I should be sad, angry or frightened. I feel like a hysteria victim that has been almost set off, teetering on the edge of screaming or giggling.
All I did was try to play some MP3s on the Linux Laptop.
Let me provide some background. I started using MP3's back in '98. * I like music a lot, and I constantly have some playing. I have found myself more sensitive to commercials as time goes by, so I rarely listen to the rock radio stations anymore. Winamp is usually shuffling its way through my playlists.
AllMusic.m3u is exactly that: 5630 tracks. that includes my wife's music, the kids's tunes, everything.
I have a smaller playlist of 1522 tracks that I consider favorites. Something around 88 hours of playing time.
I've been using Winamp since 1999. I've tried- and been forced - to use other players over the years, but I keep coming back.** It takes Winamp about two seconds to make that playlist on a 1.9 Ghz singlecore, 1 gig RAM, winXp box.
As the Linux Laptop is a 1.8 Ghz Dual, 1 gig RAM, I would expect similar timings on other programs, right?
Wrong.
I dropped the MP3 archive onto the laptop's hard drive, all 7.4 gigs.
I opened the 'Start Menu', and opened 'Multimedia' Multiple media players were revealed. I started with GNOME MPlayer. Its website claims that it is a "A GTK2/GTK3 interface to MPlayer. The power of MPlayer combined with a friendly interface for your desktop..."
This was heartening. I use mplayerc on my winboxxen for all my video player needs. I fired it up.
Played a test track. Okay, time to build a playlist so I can get one-click*** music. Find the playlist option.
Find the MP3s. Select All, go baby, go!
Two Minutes go by.......What the hell? This is crazy.
[EDIT: Trying this again, I selected the Load Directory rather than the Load Files.
Took three minute 20 seconds to generate the playlist at 100%cpu load on both cores, and about 50 MB of RAM. Saved playlist. Re-opening playlist takes nearly two minutes before it starts playing. Unacceptable.]
I'm not even going to try to figure this out: this is Linux, home of the Alternative. I'll try the next offering: Pmusic****.
First attempt at building a playlist using the pmusic sources utility would only display 300 out of 1500 mp3's, and took 18 seconds to give me a playlist. Okay, try again. This time the browser would only display 2 files in a gibbled window. Try again.
Waiting 68 seconds, pmusic sources finally listed the MP3s. This isn't the playlist, this is just viewing that the files are there.
To give you, Gentle Reader, a feel for what I am doing, the system monitor is declaring a ~10% load on both cores, and 119 MB out of 1 GB RAM used. pmusic is playing a single MP3, and has not bogged down or faltered on playback.
Alright. Time to select-all and make playlist. A warning instantly pops up:
There was no punctuation. 1500 is too many? Even Windows Media Player can handle more than that.
I hit 'yes', and the CPU load spooled up to 75% on both cores. Four minutes and twenty-seven seconds trickled past before my playlist appeared. Okay, that was stupid. Good bye, pmusic.
Next up: VLCplayer. The interface was straight forward, and it made a playlist in less than five seconds without complaints.
Perfect. Saved playlist. the file manager is defaulted to no default when clicking on playlist files, so I re-ran VLC Media Player, and opened the playlist it had just saved.
The program then vomited error messages all over the screen and froze.
So where does this leave me? This is a ridiculous situation. Each of those players played a single file without any problem.
A playlist is just a text file containing paths and filenames: winamp adds some metadata as well, but nothing more than a line of text. How long does it take to do a directory dump? Not very long at all, which begs the question as to what pmusic and GNOMEPlayer are actually doing.
I'd guess that they are assessing each file in turn, perhaps grabbing the ID3 info from each file? Winamp typically does that at run time. Clearly I am going to have to find another media player: perhaps winamp has a Linux version. I know there used to be a DOS version, back in the day (good old DOSAmp...with the 'right' wrong setting you could slow songs down. It could be an entertaining party trick.)
Time to hit the forums, I guess.
[EDIT: A forum suggested Audacious.
I installed version 3.2.3. No problem with the playlist: under ten seconds, no real cpu hit.
Tried to save playlist, and it threw a weird error:
Quick bonus: it even was a winamp classic skin.*****
So after six hours of screwing around, I am satisfied.
Now to uninstall the other players without breaking anything.]
* A quick check of what MP3's that I remember getting that year are showing modified dates around Nov 1998.
** Once you get a taste of the Llama, you just can't stop.
***Okay, double-click "one-click"
****Perhaps an unfortunate choice of name.
***** For a given value of 'classic'...its ice blue, not orange.
All I did was try to play some MP3s on the Linux Laptop.
Let me provide some background. I started using MP3's back in '98. * I like music a lot, and I constantly have some playing. I have found myself more sensitive to commercials as time goes by, so I rarely listen to the rock radio stations anymore. Winamp is usually shuffling its way through my playlists.
AllMusic.m3u is exactly that: 5630 tracks. that includes my wife's music, the kids's tunes, everything.
I have a smaller playlist of 1522 tracks that I consider favorites. Something around 88 hours of playing time.
I've been using Winamp since 1999. I've tried- and been forced - to use other players over the years, but I keep coming back.** It takes Winamp about two seconds to make that playlist on a 1.9 Ghz singlecore, 1 gig RAM, winXp box.
As the Linux Laptop is a 1.8 Ghz Dual, 1 gig RAM, I would expect similar timings on other programs, right?
Wrong.
I dropped the MP3 archive onto the laptop's hard drive, all 7.4 gigs.
I opened the 'Start Menu', and opened 'Multimedia' Multiple media players were revealed. I started with GNOME MPlayer. Its website claims that it is a "A GTK2/GTK3 interface to MPlayer. The power of MPlayer combined with a friendly interface for your desktop..."
This was heartening. I use mplayerc on my winboxxen for all my video player needs. I fired it up.
Played a test track. Okay, time to build a playlist so I can get one-click*** music. Find the playlist option.
Find the MP3s. Select All, go baby, go!
Two Minutes go by.......What the hell? This is crazy.
[EDIT: Trying this again, I selected the Load Directory rather than the Load Files.
Took three minute 20 seconds to generate the playlist at 100%cpu load on both cores, and about 50 MB of RAM. Saved playlist. Re-opening playlist takes nearly two minutes before it starts playing. Unacceptable.]
I'm not even going to try to figure this out: this is Linux, home of the Alternative. I'll try the next offering: Pmusic****.
First attempt at building a playlist using the pmusic sources utility would only display 300 out of 1500 mp3's, and took 18 seconds to give me a playlist. Okay, try again. This time the browser would only display 2 files in a gibbled window. Try again.
Waiting 68 seconds, pmusic sources finally listed the MP3s. This isn't the playlist, this is just viewing that the files are there.
To give you, Gentle Reader, a feel for what I am doing, the system monitor is declaring a ~10% load on both cores, and 119 MB out of 1 GB RAM used. pmusic is playing a single MP3, and has not bogged down or faltered on playback.
Alright. Time to select-all and make playlist. A warning instantly pops up:
Warning Building a playlist with too many songs could affect your system critically
Should all songs be added
Should all songs be added
There was no punctuation. 1500 is too many? Even Windows Media Player can handle more than that.
I hit 'yes', and the CPU load spooled up to 75% on both cores. Four minutes and twenty-seven seconds trickled past before my playlist appeared. Okay, that was stupid. Good bye, pmusic.
Next up: VLCplayer. The interface was straight forward, and it made a playlist in less than five seconds without complaints.
Perfect. Saved playlist. the file manager is defaulted to no default when clicking on playlist files, so I re-ran VLC Media Player, and opened the playlist it had just saved.
The program then vomited error messages all over the screen and froze.
So where does this leave me? This is a ridiculous situation. Each of those players played a single file without any problem.
A playlist is just a text file containing paths and filenames: winamp adds some metadata as well, but nothing more than a line of text. How long does it take to do a directory dump? Not very long at all, which begs the question as to what pmusic and GNOMEPlayer are actually doing.
I'd guess that they are assessing each file in turn, perhaps grabbing the ID3 info from each file? Winamp typically does that at run time. Clearly I am going to have to find another media player: perhaps winamp has a Linux version. I know there used to be a DOS version, back in the day (good old DOSAmp...with the 'right' wrong setting you could slow songs down. It could be an entertaining party trick.)
Time to hit the forums, I guess.
[EDIT: A forum suggested Audacious.
I installed version 3.2.3. No problem with the playlist: under ten seconds, no real cpu hit.
Tried to save playlist, and it threw a weird error:
Cannot save file:///kwanlo/blah: unsupported file extension
I tried entering a .m3u extension. Saved with no problem. Opened it again with no problem or delay. What weird programming is needed to fail on saving a file due to unrecognized extension? Why the hell not append the right one? Or at least suggest the right one?Quick bonus: it even was a winamp classic skin.*****
So after six hours of screwing around, I am satisfied.
Now to uninstall the other players without breaking anything.]
* A quick check of what MP3's that I remember getting that year are showing modified dates around Nov 1998.
** Once you get a taste of the Llama, you just can't stop.
***Okay, double-click "one-click"
****Perhaps an unfortunate choice of name.
***** For a given value of 'classic'...its ice blue, not orange.
Paging Dr. SAMBA, paging Dr. SAMBA...
"Cancel that last page. Paging Dr. SMBD, Paging Dr. SMBD..."
Just a quick update, as I am not irritated enough for a full case of O.S.I.R.
The clock has counted off 5 hours, and I still don't have a connection between my winXP PC and my Linux Laptop. I can't hold that against anything except my inexperience at this point. I thought I was getting somewhere last night, but merely destroyed my network connection, so I called it a night.
I'm getting some error messages that look informative without actually telling me anything (R_LIMIT is the wrong size?), and I can't make it admit which of the four different copies of smb.conf it is actually using.
At any rate, I remain confident that its merely ignorance on my part that is holding me back, and another session with Google straighten everything out.
By way of comparision, it took me six hours to network two win95 boxes together the first time, and I couldn't begin to tell you how long DOS took the first time...although in the end, the problem was with the ARCNET hardware.* Lets just pretend that problem was a simple as the Dilbert cartoon about losing the token when the network plug was pulled out.
EDIT: The connection wizard automagicly solved the lack of internet. I was impressed at how smoothly it repaired. Still no Samba, though.
*Good old days? There were no good old days. Oh god, the nightmare of harddrive replacement alone...
Just a quick update, as I am not irritated enough for a full case of O.S.I.R.
The clock has counted off 5 hours, and I still don't have a connection between my winXP PC and my Linux Laptop. I can't hold that against anything except my inexperience at this point. I thought I was getting somewhere last night, but merely destroyed my network connection, so I called it a night.
I'm getting some error messages that look informative without actually telling me anything (R_LIMIT is the wrong size?), and I can't make it admit which of the four different copies of smb.conf it is actually using.
At any rate, I remain confident that its merely ignorance on my part that is holding me back, and another session with Google straighten everything out.
By way of comparision, it took me six hours to network two win95 boxes together the first time, and I couldn't begin to tell you how long DOS took the first time...although in the end, the problem was with the ARCNET hardware.* Lets just pretend that problem was a simple as the Dilbert cartoon about losing the token when the network plug was pulled out.
EDIT: The connection wizard automagicly solved the lack of internet. I was impressed at how smoothly it repaired. Still no Samba, though.
*Good old days? There were no good old days. Oh god, the nightmare of harddrive replacement alone...
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