So I just wanted to write a quick note from my nascent linux machine. I don't have pics to prove it but I was finally able to restore the box to all and more of its former glory.
The Machine is called 'Argonaut' for whimsical reasons, it just popped into my head that way. The box lived in an attic for some years before I rescued it.
"Board is fried but everything else should be ok," said the former owner.
"We'll see," I replied. Granted I spent several attempts and a few cranky hours tinkering with the bios and fudging around with the system to get it fixed. At long last I was finally able to do so. Where Mandriva, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu's Feisty and Gutsy failed for some reason Kubuntu Gutsy (7.10 I believe) worked. I just had to run the Oem setup and it worked like a charm. Granted there are a few errata I am working through but for the most part all is well.
Let's consider Hardware for a moment. Even though I didn't really construct much of the guts of the case I spent enough time fucking around with cables and little components to fairly designate this PC as Build III.
If you'll remember Build I (Rorschach) is my primary system and Build II (Beebe) is my folding @home/storage box. Whie Build III is my official linux box I don't have a designated purpose for it as of now. Perhaps if Build II goes pure SATA I can gank the half-terabyte of IDE goodness for Build III to enjoy.
Anyways, here's the nitty gritty for the new Box.
****Update - Due to some serendipitous circumstances I discovered that the HP PC will not be upgradeable to 2.8 ghz after all. Luckily though one of the salvaged socket 478 chips that I had clocked out at 3.2 ghz so it all balances out. I was hoping to upgrade the 2.53 chip to 2.8 but since the 2.8 is clocked for a 533mhz front side bus the damn power supply would come on but the board just sat totally still.
Build III - Kubuntu 7.10
3.2 ghz Pentium 4 Processor
2 gigabytes DDR400 Ram (4 x 512mb sticks)
128mb AGP 8x MSI Video card (Geforce 5200 series)
160gb IDE HDD
All of this tasty goodness is sitting primly on an intel server board circa 2003. So it's a bit older than I tend to like them but it cost nothing to build, nothing to load OS and the electricity I can spare.
It's ironic that I also acquired an HP Pavilion with a dead HDD and valid XP Home Key. Luckily I had a dinky little 80gig drive laying around. I'll probably dual boot another distro or two once I decide to swap the processor out. I didn't build it so I can't designate as Build IV but here are the specs anyways.
HP Zombie - XP Home SP3 (Beta-not a real big difference)
2.53 Pentium 4 Processor
1 gigabyte DDR400 (2 x 512mb sticks)
128mb AGP 8x MSI Card (also Geforce 5200 series)
80 gigabyte IDE HDD
(I was able to double the RAM and add the card but that was about it. One upshot is that I added an active heat sink, originally it had the passive sink with the little air tunnel to the exhaust fan. Cable management's a BITCH inside that little case but the airflow dropped the cpu temp from 90f to 79f at idle. Haven't had a chance to stress test just yet.)
And yes I realize that SP3 isn't out yet and that's why its still a beta. I downloaded it because it didn't crash out one of my virtuals on Build I so I figured I'd run it through a live fire exercise. My opinion remains 'meh' with a touch of 'whatever.'
The reason for the doubling of functional PC's in my house (excluding nat's laptop) is simply due to spare part availability. I crashed a coworker's residence and ransacked a few years of discarded doodad's and semi-functional PC's. From this I got the parts to complete Build III (Ram and vcard) and I also got the guts of the HP and a host of other goodies. With a little tinkering I'll soon have access to some of this crap listed below.
-HP 3330 LaserJet printer (semi defunct but still functional, only works for ten minutes at a time)
USB Key wireless adapter (media center time, bitches!!!)
-4 Port KVM Switch + cables
-2 Wirelss access points
-VPN Router
-Wireless Router
-Cisco PIX 501(semi-defunct, just wanted it for testing/learning purposes)
-Wireless Keyboards/Mice
-1.2 shitloads of older RAM
-Semi-defunct Beige Case PC - Harvested CPU, RAM, Vcard and HDD but the board was fried.
-SCSI controller card (PCI-X interface - Adaptec)
There's a few more random upgrades and doodads but I'll have to sift and sort through the rest later. Alex is waking up but more to come soon. Probably lunch tomorrow.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Friday, February 15, 2008
Motivate this, bitches!!
Lately I have been trying to consciously criticize stuff that I take for granted. One such feature of my day during hold time (the myriad periods of my day where I am stuck on hold with people waiting for problem descriptions or passwords) relates to the use of stumbleupon.
God help you if you don't know what that is.
Anyway while a certain gentleman, we'll call him 'Vanity' for reasons I can't disclose had me held captive while extolling his many various reasons for wanting to do an upgrade that we already have scheduled. I had one of those rare three pages in a row of similar subjects and what do you know...motivational lists EVERY... LAST... ONE... (the last being supremely ironic for several reasons)
It should be noted immediately after this was the Canonical list of evil baby names.
Vega are Ryu are on the list but I couldn't find M. Bison, Sagat or anyone else from Street Fighter II. A shame, though I must now make my point.
Motivational speeches are like advertisments for erectile enhancement. They make bold claims and support them with testimonials and pseudo-legitimate proof but we all know the tacit truth. If these things were legitimate EVERYONE would know that they would work. They'd be putting it in the water.
I know that's circular but consider. Every motivational list, graph or formula has by definition bold statements with little or no demonstrable proof. In fact the sheer profusion of these fabrications without substantiative proof is perfect evidence of their perfidy.
An iceberg sank the titanic. Throwing snowballs, however vigorously will not have the same effect. If your mind was capable of absorbing a page of textual information and radically reshaping itself then civilization would be radically different.
People just aren't that malleable unless they are children. Even so as a young child it's very easy to leave deep impressions but as we age and gain resilience it becomes harder and harder to sway someone. If you do succeed most behavioral changes are temporary and the status quo resumes in due course. If you don't believe me then think about 9/11 for a minute.
For a day or so I was really, really shaken and upset with the world. But guess what. I, like every other level headed American was able to come to terms with the tragedy and get on with life. Sure things were somber and depressing for a good month but by the end of it things were more or less back to normal. Oh except for our freedoms being usurped by a greedy piece of shit government but that's another post.
Think about it. If such a momentous event could only leave a minor dent in society what hope does another crappy list of vague 'to-do's' really hope to accomplish? You might make a few people turn their lives around or at least bring to their attention the walls that are in fact the sides of a tremendous sinkhole into which their life is mired. But in order to pass muster with me you need some fucking data.
So let's see it, people!
God help you if you don't know what that is.
Anyway while a certain gentleman, we'll call him 'Vanity' for reasons I can't disclose had me held captive while extolling his many various reasons for wanting to do an upgrade that we already have scheduled. I had one of those rare three pages in a row of similar subjects and what do you know...motivational lists EVERY... LAST... ONE... (the last being supremely ironic for several reasons)
It should be noted immediately after this was the Canonical list of evil baby names.
Vega are Ryu are on the list but I couldn't find M. Bison, Sagat or anyone else from Street Fighter II. A shame, though I must now make my point.
Motivational speeches are like advertisments for erectile enhancement. They make bold claims and support them with testimonials and pseudo-legitimate proof but we all know the tacit truth. If these things were legitimate EVERYONE would know that they would work. They'd be putting it in the water.
I know that's circular but consider. Every motivational list, graph or formula has by definition bold statements with little or no demonstrable proof. In fact the sheer profusion of these fabrications without substantiative proof is perfect evidence of their perfidy.
An iceberg sank the titanic. Throwing snowballs, however vigorously will not have the same effect. If your mind was capable of absorbing a page of textual information and radically reshaping itself then civilization would be radically different.
People just aren't that malleable unless they are children. Even so as a young child it's very easy to leave deep impressions but as we age and gain resilience it becomes harder and harder to sway someone. If you do succeed most behavioral changes are temporary and the status quo resumes in due course. If you don't believe me then think about 9/11 for a minute.
For a day or so I was really, really shaken and upset with the world. But guess what. I, like every other level headed American was able to come to terms with the tragedy and get on with life. Sure things were somber and depressing for a good month but by the end of it things were more or less back to normal. Oh except for our freedoms being usurped by a greedy piece of shit government but that's another post.
Think about it. If such a momentous event could only leave a minor dent in society what hope does another crappy list of vague 'to-do's' really hope to accomplish? You might make a few people turn their lives around or at least bring to their attention the walls that are in fact the sides of a tremendous sinkhole into which their life is mired. But in order to pass muster with me you need some fucking data.
So let's see it, people!
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Random Silliness
Click this link
No it's not a valentines day bit of scullduggery or mischief. It's a link to a stupid ass 'test' that measures...well what exactly.
You go take it and then report back after the line of asterisks.
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So what'd you think of? I for one came up with an Ibus eating Starfruit in Djibouti myself. But then again I happen to know the old 'the capital of Djibouti is Djibouti from tenth grade history' detail. It's one of those things that I don't think I could forget without losing some neural hardware.
Anyhow here's why this 'test' is not only not freaky it's just a prejudice trap. Consider the first three steps.
1) Pick a number between 1-10
2) Multiply by 9
3) Add digits together if applicable
Anyone who passed elementary school in the US has had to do multiplication tables and its relatively well known that any multiple of 9 less than 10 well have digits that 'add up' to 9.
So no matter what you pick after step three the answer will always be 9:
1 = 09 = 9
2 = 18 = 9
3 = 27 = 9
4 = 36 = 9
5 = 45 = 9
6 = 54 = 9
7 = 63 = 9
8 = 72 = 9
9 = 81 = 9
10 = 90 = 9
So step 4 is just a convenient way to get everyone to the number 4 which corresponds to the letter D. So step 5 we just convert our inexorable number into an inexorable letter.
Though D is a common enough letter there are only 4 countries on the planet that begin with D.
Consider Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica and the Dominican Republic.
I'll concede that Denmark is the most well-known of these places and certainly most americans would have to pick that first. Here the trap continues. Assuming that you've picked Denmark when you're given the next choice of an animal beginning with the last letter of the country naturally everyone will pick kangaroo right?
What about koalas or kiwis or kookaburras? I think here the kangaroo is most renowned but also begins with ka rather than k(any other vowel) I know I subconsciously alphabetize things so I suspect the double whammy applies and if you're here you're committed.
Pick a fruit of the last letter. O...mmm, not many people reach for well, anything else.
Hence 98% of people theorhetically pick the choices listed.
Humbug!
No it's not a valentines day bit of scullduggery or mischief. It's a link to a stupid ass 'test' that measures...well what exactly.
You go take it and then report back after the line of asterisks.
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
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So what'd you think of? I for one came up with an Ibus eating Starfruit in Djibouti myself. But then again I happen to know the old 'the capital of Djibouti is Djibouti from tenth grade history' detail. It's one of those things that I don't think I could forget without losing some neural hardware.
Anyhow here's why this 'test' is not only not freaky it's just a prejudice trap. Consider the first three steps.
1) Pick a number between 1-10
2) Multiply by 9
3) Add digits together if applicable
Anyone who passed elementary school in the US has had to do multiplication tables and its relatively well known that any multiple of 9 less than 10 well have digits that 'add up' to 9.
So no matter what you pick after step three the answer will always be 9:
1 = 09 = 9
2 = 18 = 9
3 = 27 = 9
4 = 36 = 9
5 = 45 = 9
6 = 54 = 9
7 = 63 = 9
8 = 72 = 9
9 = 81 = 9
10 = 90 = 9
So step 4 is just a convenient way to get everyone to the number 4 which corresponds to the letter D. So step 5 we just convert our inexorable number into an inexorable letter.
Though D is a common enough letter there are only 4 countries on the planet that begin with D.
Consider Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica and the Dominican Republic.
I'll concede that Denmark is the most well-known of these places and certainly most americans would have to pick that first. Here the trap continues. Assuming that you've picked Denmark when you're given the next choice of an animal beginning with the last letter of the country naturally everyone will pick kangaroo right?
What about koalas or kiwis or kookaburras? I think here the kangaroo is most renowned but also begins with ka rather than k(any other vowel) I know I subconsciously alphabetize things so I suspect the double whammy applies and if you're here you're committed.
Pick a fruit of the last letter. O...mmm, not many people reach for well, anything else.
Hence 98% of people theorhetically pick the choices listed.
Humbug!
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Seven Day Jane
Well I thought that I would comment on 90 day Jane, the short-lived (har har) internet phenomenon that I stumbled across.
You can check out her 'attempt' here or just google it and see what you find. Rest assured I use the word 'attempt' with the utmost condescension. It's amazing me to me how quickly the responses have popped up around the intarweb.
For example thefriendly atheist immediately launched into an op-ed piece about her intentions and potential sincerity. I too immediately thought it strange that an atheist would commit suicide out of despair or helplessness but each brain is a unique bunch of grapes and we all have our differences.
Personally I have tried to think of a situation that would merit suicide. The only one I have been able to come up with is the 'I am literally on fire and holding a pistol' and its infinite variations. There are a host of other possible reasons to 'give one's life' perhaps in defense of a loved one, to stop a disaster or to take some great risk. But taking one's life due to existential woes just reeks to me.
If you're unhappy with the world then you basically have two choices:
1) Suck it up.
2) Suck a weiner (at least that'll add to someone's happiness before you give your last hurrah)
Granted people that are terribly suffering have every right to want to leave this world. In that situation I am sure my opinion would be different. Actually I'd be really pissed off because I know a little bit about how pain works and terminating the signals/chemicals would be much easier than dying. We'll get there at some point.
Now consider this picture.
I ganked this from Jane's first post. Look at this shit. It's FUCKING BLUE for fuck's sake. How obvious. Oh and look at those fucking lines. Unless that person is planning to totally sever their hands from the wrist (and that would be fucking horrible) this is a terrible method of suicide. Everyone knows you go down the street, not across the road.
Fucking amateurs.
Now before I digress too far into the realm of ways to ensure your own demise I want to say the 'I am going to kill myself, or I did already' thing has been done...to death.
Consider a few examples.
Anyone else remember 'countdown to oblivion?' Or when stile faked his own death? More recently Lonelygirl15 made a bit of a stir but she was fictitiously killed off, not suicided.
All this ironically makes me nostalgic for one of the first internet documents that I ever came across. It was a simple text file much in the vein of the early anarchist's cookbook kind of stuff. I can't remember the title exactly but part of it featured one of the most vile things I have ever heard.
We'll call it the X document since I can't recall the title (fun things to do if you're a sociopath is what i might name it myself)
Anyway the primer is all about meeting someone who is lonely, isolated and not thrilled to be a part of this world for long. The idea was to snag this person, and even in the early nineties I could think of a few people that I went to school with who might have matched the description.
Basically you start out by being nice, offering friendship to a lost soul and making them feel welcome into your world. You mold your actions and reactions to suit this person, all the while learning more and more about them and how to control them. Finally you yourself are flung into tragedy and convince the person to commit suicide with you. However, as we find out at the end, you do something fucked up like wait until the other person jumps and scream 'sucker' as they plummet to certain death.
Ah, the good ol' days.
A good story will really stick with you no matter what format it comes in. I wish I had time for more but its lunch break for me. More later on today.
You can check out her 'attempt' here or just google it and see what you find. Rest assured I use the word 'attempt' with the utmost condescension. It's amazing me to me how quickly the responses have popped up around the intarweb.
For example thefriendly atheist immediately launched into an op-ed piece about her intentions and potential sincerity. I too immediately thought it strange that an atheist would commit suicide out of despair or helplessness but each brain is a unique bunch of grapes and we all have our differences.
Personally I have tried to think of a situation that would merit suicide. The only one I have been able to come up with is the 'I am literally on fire and holding a pistol' and its infinite variations. There are a host of other possible reasons to 'give one's life' perhaps in defense of a loved one, to stop a disaster or to take some great risk. But taking one's life due to existential woes just reeks to me.
If you're unhappy with the world then you basically have two choices:
1) Suck it up.
2) Suck a weiner (at least that'll add to someone's happiness before you give your last hurrah)
Granted people that are terribly suffering have every right to want to leave this world. In that situation I am sure my opinion would be different. Actually I'd be really pissed off because I know a little bit about how pain works and terminating the signals/chemicals would be much easier than dying. We'll get there at some point.
Now consider this picture.
I ganked this from Jane's first post. Look at this shit. It's FUCKING BLUE for fuck's sake. How obvious. Oh and look at those fucking lines. Unless that person is planning to totally sever their hands from the wrist (and that would be fucking horrible) this is a terrible method of suicide. Everyone knows you go down the street, not across the road.Fucking amateurs.
Now before I digress too far into the realm of ways to ensure your own demise I want to say the 'I am going to kill myself, or I did already' thing has been done...to death.
Consider a few examples.
Anyone else remember 'countdown to oblivion?' Or when stile faked his own death? More recently Lonelygirl15 made a bit of a stir but she was fictitiously killed off, not suicided.
All this ironically makes me nostalgic for one of the first internet documents that I ever came across. It was a simple text file much in the vein of the early anarchist's cookbook kind of stuff. I can't remember the title exactly but part of it featured one of the most vile things I have ever heard.
We'll call it the X document since I can't recall the title (fun things to do if you're a sociopath is what i might name it myself)
Anyway the primer is all about meeting someone who is lonely, isolated and not thrilled to be a part of this world for long. The idea was to snag this person, and even in the early nineties I could think of a few people that I went to school with who might have matched the description.
Basically you start out by being nice, offering friendship to a lost soul and making them feel welcome into your world. You mold your actions and reactions to suit this person, all the while learning more and more about them and how to control them. Finally you yourself are flung into tragedy and convince the person to commit suicide with you. However, as we find out at the end, you do something fucked up like wait until the other person jumps and scream 'sucker' as they plummet to certain death.
Ah, the good ol' days.
A good story will really stick with you no matter what format it comes in. I wish I had time for more but its lunch break for me. More later on today.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Keep your penis off my intarnet!!!!
A sad day, dear friends, for that awesomely huge bastion of free entertainment hath been pierced by arrows of iniquity. Google, swaddled by your armored 'safe search' I thought myself free from evil as I browsed in your presence.
Alas...no more...
And yet I have to admit a slightly sick thrill, not at the content of the 8 second video, but at the mere presence of finding it myself. Naturally non-kosher content is bound to wind up where it is banned and only a matter of time before someone reports it but this time it was ME BABY!!!
Oh and speaking of highly innappropriate content (contextually anyways) my fervent efforts to grace the comments section of Dembski's blog has turned out, thus far, to be totally unfruitful. I'm not debating any more but it strikes me as amusing how differently each side of theism/atheism debate responds to criticism.
Oh well. Back to work on the new book. Once I get a good bit done I'll start posting here in serial.
Alas...no more...
And yet I have to admit a slightly sick thrill, not at the content of the 8 second video, but at the mere presence of finding it myself. Naturally non-kosher content is bound to wind up where it is banned and only a matter of time before someone reports it but this time it was ME BABY!!!
Oh and speaking of highly innappropriate content (contextually anyways) my fervent efforts to grace the comments section of Dembski's blog has turned out, thus far, to be totally unfruitful. I'm not debating any more but it strikes me as amusing how differently each side of theism/atheism debate responds to criticism.
Oh well. Back to work on the new book. Once I get a good bit done I'll start posting here in serial.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
But we can win!!!! We have to keep fighting so we can WIN!!!
As requested from my one and very possibly only reader Matt:
"After stumbling upon ~6 web pages in a row talking about how people that don't believe in evolution are stupid I got an idea for your blog. You can write about how it doesn't fucking matter because either way it isn't going help us shoot lightning bolts out of our asses any sooner. Such a silly point pisses people on any side off so much that to a neutral observer (Galapagos style) they all look like crazy fish people. Its pretty damn funny. That said, argue about something that matters, like nano-bots or cloning..."
Fair enough.
Before I begin I would like to document that I have coined the term 'Cycrobe' to describe a nano-scale cybernetic or silicon based micro robot or hybrid organism. Someone else may have thought they came up with this term before now but I have documents proving that I in fact first used this phrase in 2002 so BOOYAH!!!
That being said I wish to address the not yet stirred ethical stew pot regarding the cloning of humans and nano-bot augmentation.
I am sick to death of people freaking out about human clones! Probably the worst argument I have ever heard is 'man I don't wanna walk down the street one day and run into my clone!'
Here's the good news: If you're stupid enough to worry about that, you're never going to be cloned because planet earth is doing just dandy when it comes to paranoid assholes. That being said what's the problem. Human cloning has been going on for millenia.
Ever heard of identical twins? Two people with exactly the same DNA!!! Or triplets, the horror!
That's human cloning. Whether it happens by accident or by intention doesn't matter. It's not even a moral question, its all about information.
Stem cells, embryonic or not, are basically tiny protoplasmic hard drives chock full of humany goodness (assuming we're talking about human stem cells.) The problem, and I may have stated this before, is that people are looking for truth in their lives.
Most people, and I believe this to be true irrespective of their beliefs, would say that truth is an abolute and unwavering standard by which to gauge the universe and more specifically their role in it. I say to that 'what a bunch of crap.'
Truth is the Newtonian physics of philosophy. In common every day life it suits us just perfectly. High school physics wouldn't be the same without it. Newtonian physics are demonstrably true on a certain scale. However zoom out to look at the solar system and you find a different story. When astronomy was coming into its own there was an unusual variance with Mercury's orbit that could not be justified. It was a tiny variation, almost miniscule but it was still WRONG according to Newton's laws.
Einstein and quantum physics filled in the gaps but that doesn't mean we can retrofit newtonian physics to fill in the gaps. We need a new model if we're going to include things so far beyond ordinary terrestrial variables.
When you increase (or decrease) density, gravity, temperature, distance time or speed beyond conventional or earth bound limitations you see a weakening of Newtonian equations. You also lose the ability to conceptualize accurately how the universe appears. Think of the solar system.
Just hang the sun and drop in Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars the asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Pluto, I still say you're a planet but for the sake of argument fuck off for the time being. You're probably imagining something where you see the sun and all the planets together right?
Wrong!
The solar system is HUGE and this better explained HERE than I care to elaborate. If you don't click the link Here's the highlight. Imagine the sun is a bowling ball and earth is a peppercorn. At solar scale that peppercorn is what...3 feet, 5 feet away tops right? Try about 108 feet away.
Pluto is some half a mile out and all that is just a pittance, 5 mere light hours. The hypothetical
Oort cloud
May stretch out over 1000 times that or roughly one light year. If the earth were a peppercorn and pluto has an average distance from the sun of about half a mile than a light year would be comparable on that scale to 500 miles. Multiply that out by 4.2 (number of light years to proxima centauri) and we get 2,100 miles. That is when we shrink the entire earth to the size of a peppercorn.
To understate: That's quite a haul.
Dismaying as this data is I find it hopeful that should we ever feel up to the challenge if we can achieve speeds of a tenth a light year and outfit ships capable of hibernating people then space travel would not be fantasy. It would probably be a shit load cheaper to just download some brains and haul over some embryoes to a new system if we're going to colonize. We'll let the singularity sort that one out.
Does this relate at all to truth versus information? Perhaps it does and perhaps it does not. Truth is a human concept it's like 'good information with a guarantee that the information is good.' That is fine and well but what does it really mean?
I am operating under the assumption that this post will never be addressed by an omniscient being who can prove me wrong but here goes. Human understanding will always be imperfect. Our intuitive understanding of the world, our ability to be objective and the simple existence of human emotion virtually guarantee that almost any statement or 'truth' is bound to be skewed or incomplete.
Following Neal Stephenson's particle logic we can safely state that statements of more complexity will contain greater quantities of uncertainty. Consider: The sky is blue.
It's a pretty simple statement but is it true? The atmosphere itself is transparent so no the sky isn't blue. However the reason the sky appears to be blue is that our atmosphere scatters light in the shorter wavelengths within the visible spectrum. Therefore when you look up there's a damn good reason to think the sky is blue because that's what it appears to be. However your photoreceptors aren't perfect and we see blue better than violet.
Without delving wholeheartedly into post modernity I'll leave it there. So, is it truth that the sky is blue or not? My honest answer is that truth does not matter. Uncertainty is like gravity, it's everywhere in the universe. Furthermore what we consider 'truth' changes depending on our level of understanding. If we didn't detect electromagnetic radiation on a very narrow range of spectra then the question would be meaningless. However I shudder to think of the effect purely scientific nomenclature would have on art, literature and entertainment...(imagine a thought bubble.
Roses reflect light near 700nm
violets reflect light near 400nm...
Ghastly isn't it. So, I propose that we abandon the whole notion of truth and trade it in, as we did for newtonian physics with general relativity and quantum mechanics and instead we concern ourselves with pure information. Surely there are cons but consider the pros. Nay consider the sympathetic friend phenomenon.
Even if your best friend and you analyze to death the reasons why your girlfriend booted you that will not bring her back. Similarly whatever logical rube goldberg devices you can mentally construct to fit your world view it will not change the parts of the universe not influenced by human opinion. For the record that includes space, time and all inanimate matter dark or otherwise.
So there it is.
Anywho that's my post for the day. I apologize if it degenerated into incoherence sooner than usual but I've had a lot on my mind lately.
"After stumbling upon ~6 web pages in a row talking about how people that don't believe in evolution are stupid I got an idea for your blog. You can write about how it doesn't fucking matter because either way it isn't going help us shoot lightning bolts out of our asses any sooner. Such a silly point pisses people on any side off so much that to a neutral observer (Galapagos style) they all look like crazy fish people. Its pretty damn funny. That said, argue about something that matters, like nano-bots or cloning..."
Fair enough.
Before I begin I would like to document that I have coined the term 'Cycrobe' to describe a nano-scale cybernetic or silicon based micro robot or hybrid organism. Someone else may have thought they came up with this term before now but I have documents proving that I in fact first used this phrase in 2002 so BOOYAH!!!
That being said I wish to address the not yet stirred ethical stew pot regarding the cloning of humans and nano-bot augmentation.
I am sick to death of people freaking out about human clones! Probably the worst argument I have ever heard is 'man I don't wanna walk down the street one day and run into my clone!'
Here's the good news: If you're stupid enough to worry about that, you're never going to be cloned because planet earth is doing just dandy when it comes to paranoid assholes. That being said what's the problem. Human cloning has been going on for millenia.
Ever heard of identical twins? Two people with exactly the same DNA!!! Or triplets, the horror!
That's human cloning. Whether it happens by accident or by intention doesn't matter. It's not even a moral question, its all about information.
Stem cells, embryonic or not, are basically tiny protoplasmic hard drives chock full of humany goodness (assuming we're talking about human stem cells.) The problem, and I may have stated this before, is that people are looking for truth in their lives.
Most people, and I believe this to be true irrespective of their beliefs, would say that truth is an abolute and unwavering standard by which to gauge the universe and more specifically their role in it. I say to that 'what a bunch of crap.'
Truth is the Newtonian physics of philosophy. In common every day life it suits us just perfectly. High school physics wouldn't be the same without it. Newtonian physics are demonstrably true on a certain scale. However zoom out to look at the solar system and you find a different story. When astronomy was coming into its own there was an unusual variance with Mercury's orbit that could not be justified. It was a tiny variation, almost miniscule but it was still WRONG according to Newton's laws.
Einstein and quantum physics filled in the gaps but that doesn't mean we can retrofit newtonian physics to fill in the gaps. We need a new model if we're going to include things so far beyond ordinary terrestrial variables.
When you increase (or decrease) density, gravity, temperature, distance time or speed beyond conventional or earth bound limitations you see a weakening of Newtonian equations. You also lose the ability to conceptualize accurately how the universe appears. Think of the solar system.
Just hang the sun and drop in Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars the asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Pluto, I still say you're a planet but for the sake of argument fuck off for the time being. You're probably imagining something where you see the sun and all the planets together right?
Wrong!
The solar system is HUGE and this better explained HERE than I care to elaborate. If you don't click the link Here's the highlight. Imagine the sun is a bowling ball and earth is a peppercorn. At solar scale that peppercorn is what...3 feet, 5 feet away tops right? Try about 108 feet away.
Pluto is some half a mile out and all that is just a pittance, 5 mere light hours. The hypothetical
Oort cloud
May stretch out over 1000 times that or roughly one light year. If the earth were a peppercorn and pluto has an average distance from the sun of about half a mile than a light year would be comparable on that scale to 500 miles. Multiply that out by 4.2 (number of light years to proxima centauri) and we get 2,100 miles. That is when we shrink the entire earth to the size of a peppercorn.
To understate: That's quite a haul.
Dismaying as this data is I find it hopeful that should we ever feel up to the challenge if we can achieve speeds of a tenth a light year and outfit ships capable of hibernating people then space travel would not be fantasy. It would probably be a shit load cheaper to just download some brains and haul over some embryoes to a new system if we're going to colonize. We'll let the singularity sort that one out.
Does this relate at all to truth versus information? Perhaps it does and perhaps it does not. Truth is a human concept it's like 'good information with a guarantee that the information is good.' That is fine and well but what does it really mean?
I am operating under the assumption that this post will never be addressed by an omniscient being who can prove me wrong but here goes. Human understanding will always be imperfect. Our intuitive understanding of the world, our ability to be objective and the simple existence of human emotion virtually guarantee that almost any statement or 'truth' is bound to be skewed or incomplete.
Following Neal Stephenson's particle logic we can safely state that statements of more complexity will contain greater quantities of uncertainty. Consider: The sky is blue.
It's a pretty simple statement but is it true? The atmosphere itself is transparent so no the sky isn't blue. However the reason the sky appears to be blue is that our atmosphere scatters light in the shorter wavelengths within the visible spectrum. Therefore when you look up there's a damn good reason to think the sky is blue because that's what it appears to be. However your photoreceptors aren't perfect and we see blue better than violet.
Without delving wholeheartedly into post modernity I'll leave it there. So, is it truth that the sky is blue or not? My honest answer is that truth does not matter. Uncertainty is like gravity, it's everywhere in the universe. Furthermore what we consider 'truth' changes depending on our level of understanding. If we didn't detect electromagnetic radiation on a very narrow range of spectra then the question would be meaningless. However I shudder to think of the effect purely scientific nomenclature would have on art, literature and entertainment...(imagine a thought bubble.
Roses reflect light near 700nm
violets reflect light near 400nm...
Ghastly isn't it. So, I propose that we abandon the whole notion of truth and trade it in, as we did for newtonian physics with general relativity and quantum mechanics and instead we concern ourselves with pure information. Surely there are cons but consider the pros. Nay consider the sympathetic friend phenomenon.
Even if your best friend and you analyze to death the reasons why your girlfriend booted you that will not bring her back. Similarly whatever logical rube goldberg devices you can mentally construct to fit your world view it will not change the parts of the universe not influenced by human opinion. For the record that includes space, time and all inanimate matter dark or otherwise.
So there it is.
Anywho that's my post for the day. I apologize if it degenerated into incoherence sooner than usual but I've had a lot on my mind lately.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Epoch fail...
I know I know, the title's a direct ripoff from a recent xkcd but its been stuck in my head for so long I can't shed the mental picture.
Today's early Tuesday morning rant is brought to you by the letters YMC and A as in All-the-motherfucking-old-people-in-the-world-doing-motherfucking-water-aerobics.
They displease me.
Argyle Ninja is not amused. Niether is Floral Ninja.
Hell I might as well add them all.
One of the many reasons I hate they inevitably grey-haired and flabby gatherings is the fact that they all look the same. And guess what, even the instructor isn't shapely enough to justify the experience. We've been members of the Y now for more than half a year and there's a trio of ladies who look exactly the same now as they did the first time i saw them over the summer.
I'm dangerously close to throwing out some Larry Niven slang and adding TANJ to my already burgeoning vernacular of old college inside jokes, family guy references, south parkisms and wistful dialog from my long and dirty history with fiction writing. Ting a ling!
I'm struggling with an unusual moral dilemma as it pertains to the elderly people of the world and my own inexorable trip into the future. Fifty years seems such a short time on paper or when considering history but in that span of time I will have trebled in age and shriveled in height. But with the advances in modern medicine and genetics one wonders if we could perhaps be among the first to cheat death with a little help from our PPO plan?
If so could we forestall the inevitable decline of body as well as mind? If it were possible to freeze one's level of health at forty years or so then living past 100 would become a viable prospect and not just counterproductive for society.
That would change so much of everything. Perhaps most importantly if we had dramatically increased lifespans then we could make Frank Herbert proud and actually start long term planning. It would probably still be limited to some fraction of human life but any increase could prove useful...then again it could lead to stagnation of the human spirit. Oh well, we'd have plenty of time to get over it.
Today's early Tuesday morning rant is brought to you by the letters YMC and A as in All-the-motherfucking-old-people-in-the-world-doing-motherfucking-water-aerobics.
They displease me.
Argyle Ninja is not amused. Niether is Floral Ninja.
Hell I might as well add them all.
One of the many reasons I hate they inevitably grey-haired and flabby gatherings is the fact that they all look the same. And guess what, even the instructor isn't shapely enough to justify the experience. We've been members of the Y now for more than half a year and there's a trio of ladies who look exactly the same now as they did the first time i saw them over the summer.
I'm dangerously close to throwing out some Larry Niven slang and adding TANJ to my already burgeoning vernacular of old college inside jokes, family guy references, south parkisms and wistful dialog from my long and dirty history with fiction writing. Ting a ling!
I'm struggling with an unusual moral dilemma as it pertains to the elderly people of the world and my own inexorable trip into the future. Fifty years seems such a short time on paper or when considering history but in that span of time I will have trebled in age and shriveled in height. But with the advances in modern medicine and genetics one wonders if we could perhaps be among the first to cheat death with a little help from our PPO plan?
If so could we forestall the inevitable decline of body as well as mind? If it were possible to freeze one's level of health at forty years or so then living past 100 would become a viable prospect and not just counterproductive for society.
That would change so much of everything. Perhaps most importantly if we had dramatically increased lifespans then we could make Frank Herbert proud and actually start long term planning. It would probably still be limited to some fraction of human life but any increase could prove useful...then again it could lead to stagnation of the human spirit. Oh well, we'd have plenty of time to get over it.
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