"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

• 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.

"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."

 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."

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.

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:

" 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 "

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.

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.