"What is Man, that thou should magnify him? And that thou should set thine heart upon him?"

' "...You think it'll be like that?"

"Don't you? You were there; you saw what's happening. The barbarians are rising; they have a leader, and they're uniting. Every society rests on a barbarian base. The people who don't understand civilization, and wouldn't like it if they did. The hitchhikers. The people who create nothing, and who don't appreciate what others have created for them, and who think civilization is something that just exists and that all they need to do is enjoy what they can understand of it--luxuries, a high living standard, and easy work for high pay. Responsibilities? Phooey! What do they have a government for?"
 "...You know why? Our rulers are the barbarians among us. There isn't one of them ... who is devoted to civilization or anything else outside himself, and that's the mark of the barbarian." 

"What are you devoted to, Otto?" "You. You are my chieftain. That's another mark of the barbarian." '

---H. Beam Piper Space Viking

...Not really taken to far out of context, even if I do say so myself.

"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value." ---Arthur C Clarke.

ICQ | QCI

Gods of Darkness, ICQ is not only still around, but my UIN number and password still work!!
Its been at least 17 years since I last logged in.
 My friends list has been lost though, mores the pity. Or perhaps not.
But if I'm going to be spied on, the Russian Secret Police is probably the last people I am likely to worry about, and the least likely to have data-sharing agreements with the Men In Black.

Unless the deeply cynical are terribly correct, and its all Agent Smiths, all the way down.

Do not quench the spirit

"...When many of the best minds in machine learning have decided that the most existential threat to civilization is the rise of Skynet, we have had a major failure of group think. Many ML researchers are more concerned with trying to bring about The Singularity, than in solving real problems."

--Ben Recht

Well said, sir. Well said. Too bad that it was phrased during a testing of faith, as it were, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve.

 

Only 10 kinds of people...

“In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.” 

― Robert A. Heinlein

This defines my interaction with the Internet these days., and I can't be alone. Its funny how Big Data has tailored its interfaces to keep us pawing at their interfaces so they can scrape as much information from our interactions as possible; but that very modification has made our interactions that less meaningful. 

If in 2002 someone visited ten websites in a day, and one of them was a stuffed animal fan-site, that's a significant marketing datum. If today that person clicks on sixty Youtube videos and one of them is Meg Myer's Curbstomp and another is Radioactive Dragons Imagine, stuffed animals are not significant. 

Stop filling my 'Recommended Feed' with this sort of gibberish.

(And if you auto-playlist feed my Katy Perry and I don't notice, it does not mean that I want to listen to more Katy Perry. Absence of protest is not presence of approval*)

There is a similar problem in attributing authorial ideation: if a writer writes a character with certain mindsets, does this mean the author approves of these mindsets? The better the writer, the better the writer's ability to adopt foreign mindsets, and the less this should tell about the writer's beliefs. Not to mention that writing has masturbatory overtones, and what someone gets off on may not be the same as what they believe is proper behavior.

Am I still talking about stuffed animals here? **

 No, but I may be thinking of Stephanie Meyer. 

..Here too is a interesting test of authorial complexity. A one dimensional writer -- Meyer, Spillane, Fisher, to pick a random few -- has nearly identical ideation between books, and it would be hard to quote their works to support cross-purpose ideas. A good writer displays ideational depth; quotes can be taken out of context with relative ease.

When you add the subtlety of sarcasm or irony to the mix, deriving good information becomes extremely difficult: practically the same as the Translation Accuracy Problem.

Exercise for the reader: quote Gunga Din to support and then to deride racism.

Consider that Heinlein has become the go-too SF author for the right-wing; compare it to his books that support public nudity, free sex, atheism, trans-sexuality, mate-swapping, incest, and anarchy.*** 

Heinlein wrote to sell; the algorithms write to maximize their own inhuman returns.

Where Heinlein got direct and complex feedback from his fan base and his editors that modified what he wanted to actually write, complex feedbacks, leading to complex results, the algorithms that 'Recommend' for us get  a simplified 'file streamed/link clicked' feedback for their actions. Its not surprising that the Facebook News Trending bot serves so many crap stories...but it may be surprising that it can find so much crap in the first place.

People like crap. Simple, direct bullshit: its easy to argue about and easy to enjoy. If the broad strokes of your opinions can be crayoned in, than your personal color of crap can be served in steaming handfuls.  And if all you see is grass, you start to think you're on a lawn...

 

So here's the vicious cycle: we provide trivial actions in feedback to the trivial pleasures they supply to provoke more trivial feedback. Our complexity is much greater than the algorithms...our interactions with them simplify the interaction but the simplifications are readily observable. Our internal simplifications must be subtler, and harder to notice...

Would it be worthwhile to point out that this software is written and designed by young people, who have largely led sheltered lives characterized by lack of complex interaction with other people and the universe?

 (As opposed to old people with fossilized mindsets and outdated ways of thinking, I suppose.)

*An endlessly difficult problem covering all ranges of human expression from sex to music.

** See what I did there?

***Just read Stranger in a Strange Land, I Will Fear No Evil, Time Enough For Love, Number of the Beast, or pretty much any story with Lazarus Long in it.

Tarzan - I mean Jason Gridley - versus madness

I'd never call Edgar Rice Burroughs 'visionary'.
Like George Lucas, he assembled wildly popular works out of wildly disparate elements, and like Lucas, I never expected an original idea.  (Let us let 'The Monster Men' to stand as the holotype for my complaints, shall we?)
But while listlessly paging through 'Tarzan at the Earth's Core', I ran into a scene which I nominate for the best idea ERB ever had:

!~Gliding Stegasauri~!

 I wish to god blogger had manicule symbols for this one. I suppose it makes as much sence as any other idea vis-a-vis stegasaurus spine plates, really.

"AS Jason Gridley leaped down the canyon side toward the lone warrior who stood facing the attack of the tremendous reptile gliding swiftly through the air from the top of the opposite cliff side, there flashed upon the screen of his recollection the picture of a restoration of a similar extinct reptile and he recognized the creature as a stegosaurus of the Jurassic, but how inadequately had the picture that he had seen carried to his mind the colossal proportions of the creature, or but remotely suggested its terrifying aspect."

"... the reptile, using its tail as a rudder and tilting its spine plates up on one side, veered in the direction of the American..."

"... From the instant that the stegosaurus had leaped from the summit of the cliff, it had hurtled through the air with a speed which seemed entirely out of proportion to its tremendous bulk, so that all that had transpired in the meantime had occupied but a few moments of time, and Jason Gridley found himself facing this onrushing death almost before he had had time to speculate upon the possible results of his venturesome interference.

With wide distended jaws and uttering piercing shrieks, the terrifying creature shot toward him..."

" Still shrieking with rage and pain it glided to the ground beyond him.

Almost immediately it turned to renew the attack. This time it came upon its four feet, and Jason saw that it was likely to prove fully as formidable upon the ground as it had been in the air, for considering its tremendous bulk it moved with great agility and speed..."

This calls for a dramatic reconstruction!  As a exercise for the reader, I leave the calculations of how light a stegasaurus would have to be in order to be able to glide upon its plates... 

.

 

This is me, watching Prometheus...

How did Ridley Scott manage to do a worse job ripping off his own work than Roger Corman? Galaxy of Terror is actually more entertaining, and the murder by orgasm while being raped by the Space Slug of the Galactic Id was certainly edgier than forced caesarean porn.

O.S.I.R (some value of n where n > 'n previous')

Nice to know I am not the only one that suffers at the hands of Linux.
"What’s the point in telling a rabbit hole story if you just fix the problem and forget about the underlying issues that cause it to begin with? "

Epigram, via Poul-Henning Kamp : "...a pile of old festering hacks, endlessly copied and pasted by a clueless generation of IT "professionals" who wouldn't recognize sound IT architecture if you hit them over the head with it. It is hard to believe today, but under this embarrassing mess lies the ruins of the beautiful cathedral of Unix, deservedly famous for its simplicity of design, its economy of features, and its elegance of execution."

The Hidden Testament.

"He lived with regret at his own table– for his own sake have mercy upon him."

---Tolstoyish

The universe surrounds us with its laws and notions, and in many cases it takes a clever and discerning mind to tease Nature's ways out into the light where they can be clearly seen.

Perhaps there exists in potentia the Greatest Book, the Ultimate Bible, the Definitive Word the way that the fabulous kingdom of Amber hides within its endless reflected and distorted images.

Hidden deep within the enormous library of possible books, then could be the ur-Book. What can not be found by logic might be stumbled upon by oracles, and as such, the algorithmic  genii may as yet prove fruitful.

"The book had produced. Night was disturbed by the words to avert the latter, and hope, I not suppose, the pathless seas, and from my solitary isle like abhorred."

--Schmipsum

Of course, this is just a expansion of my favorite hobby. Considering the Doc Savage Canon as if it is reflections of real events is walking the thin edge of paranoia and conspiracy. I always feel the classic example of this is the Holy Blood/Holy Grail madness, crowned by Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum*  Its a hobby that is given an extra thrill by the possibility that at some point  I will become convinced by my own research that Clark Savage was real, and at that point will become irretrievably mad.

The Insane Gods of Chaos are sprung, like all Gods, from our foreheads, after all. Using software Markov Generators and Completion Anticipators ups the game, improves the  mirror we gesticulate in front of.

 Now its time to start running these programs upon the Canon, and see if we can shake out new adventures from the echos of the Ultimate Book.

"I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock."

 --Edgar Allen Poe

*Proving yet again that a intelligent academic can exceed any madman's excesses.

Board porn

Inside of a old Yamaha Pf10.

Its got an annoying problem: certain notes won't play, or intermittently play.

 Tearing down the key switches.

The keyboard switch assembly. The problem does not seem to be with the switches, but with the wiring harness from the matrix decoder.

In particular, that set of solder points are the bases for the output header. I thought it was the pins, and reflowed the solder, and it all seemed to work.

Sad to say, about a week later, my brother reported the problem had restarted...and he thinks its the ribbon cable that accepts the matrix output.  Maybe so.

Auto-Pimp -- Now with Social Propositions!

Facebook just suggested Mark Zuckerberg to me.
Seriously.
It just suggested that I might want to friend him.
Mark Zuckerberg.

I, Dorothy. iDorothy. I...Dorothy. Dorothy One.

Weird foreshadowing of the day: Twister and the iMac.
Not the computer itself, but the name, the stereotype of adding a 'i' to the beginning of a name. I always wondered where it had come. Why 'i' ?
 Apple had previously invested in a 'e' as in eWorld and eMate.

The iMac was announced in 1998. In 1996, Twister was one of the biggest movies of the year. And when the camera pans across the plot-central instrument probe, the V'ger from Kansas itself, we see its name painted on its metal side: IDOROTHY.
'Dorothy' makes obvious sense, especially as its based on the TOTO probe was built and used in real life in 1980's.

Can we really argue with this? Okay,  the I is the Roman numeral one.  Mark One, Mod One, Unit One? The 'second' DOROTHY is labeled IV.
But needless to say, tens of millions of people watched this movie in 1996,and two years later the iMac is named.
Now incidentally, iMac wasn't a Jobs idea. His choice was the 'MacMan', deftly ripped off the Sony Walkman.
Ken Segall claims credit for the iMac moniker, and I would really like to know if he had ever gone to the theater and watched Twister.

Bride of Za'at

Today's breaking news: Microsoft fuses rape culture with operating systems using the old paradigm that 'No' means 'Yes'.
Bravo, guys. Like the resisting blonde monomaniacaly selected to be the monsters bride, despite our protests, despite our defiance, we are helpless before the world-grinding plans of Za'at. But are we doomed to be Sanna Ringhaver or Nancy Lien?

"Those whom they[the gods] would destroy, they first make mad."

 --Bhartṛhari

The Color of Mirrors, the Color of Madness

If the proper study of Man is Man than the Tunnel of Mirrors awaits.

Mistress of the Universe

Bear with me.
If we consider She-Ra analogous to Napoleon Bonaparte, than we can drawn the obvious extension of Wellington / Hordak. But who, then, the Empress Josephine?
After some thought, I would like to press Cat-Ra into that role.
This casts some interesting insight in to the power politics of Etheria...

"The only victory over love is flight."

--Napoleon Bonaparte

"All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we 

are attached by love." 

-- Baruch Spinoza 

I would perhaps, strike the word 'solely'.

Organum Tubulatum, Sum Terra Rex

In the universe of musical instruments, one class stands alone as the greatest. Large enough to live within, requiring every limb and digit to play, impossible to pick up or move.
Pipe organs: the Sauropods of the musical universe.
Instruments which incorporate the buildings that house them as resonant structure.
Instruments which have successfully parasitised churches and cathedrals since the 12th century.
Its a fascinating idea. Most musical instruments depend on being cheap enough for an individual to afford, and compact enough to travel with them; although while fiddles and harmonicas can be  carted anywhere, the poor musician who was parasitised by a cello or drum set is going to suffer terribly. In the case of a bassoon or tuba, their reproductive chances may even be threatened.
Pipe organs discovered the ecological niche of churches, and flourished. It is too bad that they never managed to make the jump to other monumental architecture: the Eiffel Tower could only be improved with organ pipes.
A organ pipe console would fit right into NASA's Mission Control  Center, and would add as much functionality as its place in any church.

The Ten Ton Snakes of Tlön

One of the less entertaining Savage adventures is the Ten Ton Snakes. Its a struggle over a quantity of material, believed to be a meteorite, that has enormous density. At hundreds of pounds a cubic centimeter its not neutronium, but definitely not from here on earth. Some prospectors found it in the jungles of Brazil, and were forced by the force of narrative inevitability to become crazed gangsters. Unlike a lot of these cases the peculiar property - the density -  of the material wasn't even exploited as a weapon.*

I wouldn't be bringing this up if I hadn't found something interesting. I was reading Jorge Luis Borges classic Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius when I noticed a reference to an object found in Brazil:
"...along with a cone of bright metal, the size of a die...A man was scarcely able to raise it from the ground...I remember that its weight was intolerable..."

In passing he remarks "These small, very heavy cones(made from a metal not of this world) are images of the divinity in certain regions of Tlön."

Borges account hails from the 1940's, and I have tentatively placed the Ten Ton Snakes as being in 1945-1946 period. TTS  has a weak ending that seems to state that Savage et al. hung around the jungle for a few days until they were rescued, and that Renwick toyed with the ultradense material a little, but didn't seem much use in it.  It would have been a much more interesting story if the material was linked to an intrusion of the parasitical plane of existence Tlön,  and the time spent until their 'rescue' pushing it back.


While it seems odd in retrospect that Savage never fought metaphysical  threats (With the the exception of the Thing in the cave at Quoddy Bay), I always figured this was due to the fact that any adventure that didn't involve two-fisted action would not have been very interesting to the audience of the day. Its not clear how Tlön's grim plan of reality replacement could be interfered with, but certainly there would have been nothing that could have been punched or blown up. But if a metaphysical scalpel was needed to slice Tlön's  infection free from this world, I daresay there would have been few people better qualified to wield it than our favorite Action Scientist slash Surgeon.

I would certainly read ' Doc Savage vs Tlön '!

*Although if it was collapsium, then I imagine it would have some weird electronics properties. Would collapsing a atom's electron shell around its nucleus make it a perfect insulator? Or would it have a disastrous breakdown voltage where it un-collapsed at around the speed of light, vaporizing the material and a good chunk of the nearby landscape?

Soylent tastes like despair

Tried Soylent today, and discovered it tasted exactly what's wrong with this century: bland, chalky and mediocre.
Humanity has thousands of years of cooking expertise, guys, couldn't you get it to taste like something interesting?
Or is its wallpaper-paste impression part of the concept?

Even Bass imagined that the Nebish's algae-based foods would be flavored calories.

And on kind of a side note, why is the blank white bottle wrapped in a blank white plastic wrapper of a different plastic type, expressly to make recycling difficult? 

All in all, I expected something other than a bottle of un-sugared Boost  wrapped in a neo-Modernist idea of a joke. Come on guys! This is the 21st century! I am open to the idea of an engineered, nutritious foodstuff. So why make a cliche? Everyone expects engineers to make boring crap; I expected you to at least be able to improve on  Pablum!*
 
I never thought anyone would make something more boring to eat than cheap tofu, but I guess I have been proven wrong again. I won't say a bottle of bull semen would have been more entertaining to drink (unless I was watching someone else to drink it) but I am pretty sure that if I mashed up a handful of vitamin pills into some almond milk it would have been more memorable.

Flavors, guys. Mouth feel.
You know that there is these things called vegetables that have all sorts of amazing flavors and nutrients? While I get the impression the designers grew up on chicken nuggets and Cheerios*, I am sure they must have encountered something with a savory taste, even if its accidentally before they became legal adults that could choose what they put in their mouths.


* TL;DR , invented in 1931.
**Which are neither cheerful or cheer-inducing.

RIP

"Also the galaxy will die; the glitter of the Milky Way,
our universe, all the stars that have names are dead.
Vast is the night.

 How you have grown, dear Night, walking your empty halls, how tall!"

 --Robinson Jeffers, 'The Double Axe'

S/N

I've said it before, and I will say it again: its not the data you have, its the data you can ignore that counts.
Discrimination, that is.
The engineers like to talk about signal-to-noise ratios, while ignoring the discrimination problem of what is  signal, and what is  noise  as a trivial problem. Maybe back in the days of regenerative receivers and tuned filters, but now days we are fed a more heady and abstract kind of  data, and digging information out of it is big business. Really big business.
Lets be clear, Google did not become the monolith it is by delivering advertising, and fucking up YouTube comments. It worked because it delivered a superior signal-to-noise, back in the clumsy old days of hand-edited directory s and .
But another of my pet pleasures is the way that bigger organizations lose efficiency, as internal parasitism and broken feedback loops interfere with the swelling colossus's ability to maneuver, or perhaps, even move.

Sow hat do these ideas have to do with today? Well, today is the day I searched for "poster sized map of internet xkcd hilbert" in Google Images.
Google Images has always been bad at delivering anything except Raquel Welch as the damn engine does not know what the pictures actually are, so it guesses (badly) based on local text. So there is always a few surprises served, even with Ms. Welch, but today raised my eyebrows.


I was served 384 images. I find it difficult to believe that many images correspond to the conjunction of the terms "Poster" "Sized" "Map" "Internet" "Xkcd" "Hilbert"
The first seven images are bang on.
The eighth is associated (honest mistake).
Nine through Seventeen are good. Eighteen though...eighteen is the xkcd gravity well map on a Pinterest page. Okay, another simple mistake.
Twenty is a subway map. Odd.
Forty is 'Princess Bride Monopoly'. Ten percent of the way in, and we are way off into Madness Space.
Then:
A info-graphic map of Iceland's fishing history.
A layout of all 892 unique ways to partition a 3x4 grid.
An Arlo & Janis strip.
Map of the George Washington bridge.
A flyer for Veterans Day 2014.
Picture of Solar Power array.
Japanese cutaway diagram of Predator(tm).
Elemental information for Gallium, Germanium and Arsenic.
Remarks concerning Einstein reconciling the Bible with Science.
Cutaway of a Star Destroyer.
Cover of Enders Game.
A alpine lake.
Four women standing by a wall (not porn)
Antenna repairs on the Empire State Building.
Bad sketch of a whale.
Various quotes and pithy remarks vis-a-vis faith and science.
The triangulation of France.
A Goya painting.
A graphic for the movie Interstellar.
the first cat picture does not show up until 300 images in.
First demotivational at 320.
Harry Houdini.
Thai cuisine.
Raquel Welch with a scooter.

Its the last six images I'd like to concentrate on:
5: Man in headband with an intense expression
4: Single frame of xkcd comic about overthinking
3: thumbnail                             \
2: different thumbnail                } all from Pinterest
1: Yet another tiny thumbnail  /
0:A black and white photo of an extremely large man.

The last image  that has anything to do with mapping the internet is at position 132: a non-Hilbert graph of 2.5 million reddit comments.

So its pretty clear that its just serving random images after the first few. So why cut it off at 384? Why not just give me a unending stream of things?

Putting on safe search drops the feed to 367. I am not about to figure out with images were filtered out. I only found one that could be even loosely considered pornographic, unless you were a mullah, or allergic to Raquel Welch.

Now Bing gave me even less images, and were as usual, even farther off target.
Yahoo was about midways, and went off the rails just as hard.

Weirdly, Webcrawler, which is one of my old favorites from the late nineties, delivered the most number of random images (900+), but was right on target in the first page.

Duckduckgo, being a aggregator, was better than both, not as good a google, but did give me the 'Legendary Pokemon Last Supper'.

This is something I didn't realize I needed , until I discovered it existed. Isn't there a Japanese word for that?

In Defence of Wantoness

Without looking for it, I stumbled across this rebuttal of 'goto-shaming' which dates from 1987.
Too bad I didn't fall over it a few days earlier, but then, if I had, I probably would not have written my last post.

Wanton Operator...

Textbook's exhortations against the use of goto always remind me of fundamentalist warnings against women; that they are evil and seductive; unnecessary and wicked; their breasts are soft and their hair smells sweet with the lures of Satan, but the manly and disciplined programmer is untempted.
But while we crouch in our austere but rigorous cells, clutching do-while and for to our hard, controlled and recursive chests, we cannot help but overhear the  code bums and reverse engineers cheerfully consorting with goto and jmp, and it is difficult to ignore the obvious pleasure they have with such direct and open operators, no matter how diligently we repeat of catechisms of Kernighan and Ritchie.*


*That great colossus Knuth does not disparage goto.