She was trouble

... which reminds me...

Quantum Converter

And when at last it is time for the transition from megacorporation to planetary government, from entrepreneur to emperor, it is then that the true genius of our strategy shall become apparent, for energy is the lifeblood of this society and when the chips are down he who controls the energy supply controls Planet. In former times the energy monopoly was called “The Power Company”; we intend to give this name an entirely new meaning.

—CEO Nwabudike Morgan, “The Centauri Monopoly”

King of Dragon Pass

Winter, summer, converging

Von

Caithe's Remorse

"I will bear your pain."

Wynne's Locket

"I go where I please, and just now it pleases me to stay among friends."

Tree Farm

In the great commons at Gaia’s Landing we have a tall and particularly beautiful stand of white pine, planted at the time of the first colonies. It represents our promise to the people, and to Planet itself, never to repeat the tragedy of Earth.

 —Lady Deirdre Skye, “Planet Dreams”

Die Gedanken sind frei

Die Gedanken sind frei, but if you don’t understand the language, thoughts aren’t free: getting access to them is difficult and expensive.

If you conceive of science as an information system, as an accumulation of data and logical relations between data, then you will probably feel that the efficiencies of English monolingualism outweigh its disadvantages. But Gordin also (and too briefly) introduces a different conception of science, not much taken up by philosophers, which emphasises the importance of metaphorical extension in scientific change. Scientific notions like wave, force, law, heredity and fact have different semantics when expressed in different languages: as metaphors imported from everyday life, they have different resonances and affiliations in different cultures and languages, and therefore different bearings on the resources scientists have to extend their meanings through research and theory. (Science itself is such a notion: its semantics in English are not exactly the same as les sciences, Wissenschaft, наука or επιστήμη.) So, depending on whether you think of science solely as an information system or as encompassing the dynamic exploration of metaphors, you come to different conclusions about the significance of monolingualism. If metaphor is central to science, then the language in which science happens matters a lot.

The road from universal Latinity to universal English was full of twists, turns and bumps

Psi Gate

Go through, my children! The time of miracles is upon us. Let us cast off sin and walk together to the Garden of the Lord. With God’s mercy we shall meet again on the other side.

 —Sister Miriam Godwinson, “Last Testament”

Propositions of wealth

1. Wealth is whichever input that helps one produces/procures a set of things that one value.

2. Wealth can produce intermediaries that are also wealth, i.e. follows #1.

3. Things that one value are not necessarily wealth; if no things are valued, then there could be no wealth.

Eternally beautiful

When I think about travel in my mind, I see a girl on a boat, scantily clad, eternally beautiful, hair blowing in the wind. She has no problems, no fucked up love life, no issues with money. It’s just an endless adventure with the promise of late night kisses and skies filled with stars.

 4 ways travel has hurt me

The Long Dark

You wander the long road to observe the quiet apocalypse and chronicle the passing of an era.

In the 12th and 13th centuries, judges would be sent out from Westminster every seven years to adjudicate on any disputes that had come about since their last sojourn. In 1292, in Shropshire, Alice Knotte complained that Thomas Champeneys ‘detaineth from her seven shillings in money and a surcoat of the value of three shillings’. ‘Alice can get no justice at all,’ she protested, ‘seeing that she is poor and that this Thomas is rich.’ She implored the judge: ‘I have none to help me save God and you.’

Alice then might be Alice today. What should she do? She cannot simply take the seven shillings from Thomas. Not only does the law forbid it, Thomas’s wealth means he probably has the power to take it back (or worse). So without access to a court, Alice has to rely on his goodwill for her money and her surcoat. This shows the first reason to care about access to justice, by which I mean being in a position to have your legal claims heard and enforced by a court. Such access is necessary if our rights are to have real content; without it, the rich and powerful can exploit the poor and weak.

 Necessity or ideology

Writing's on The Wall

How do I live? How do I breathe?
When you're not here I'm suffocating
I want to feel love, run through my blood
Tell me is this where I give it all up?

Thank you, Your Grace, for your kind advice

On his retirement Fisher advised Harold Macmillan against appointing Michael Ramsey as his successor. The conversation, as reconstructed by Ramsey, went as follows:

Fisher: I have come to give you some advice about my successor. Whomever you choose, under no account must it be Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop of York. Dr Ramsey is a theologian, a scholar and a man of prayer. Therefore, he is entirely unsuitable as archbishop of Canterbury. I have known him all his life. I was his headmaster at Repton.

Macmillan: Thank you, Your Grace, for your kind advice. You may have been Dr Ramsey’s headmaster, but you were not mine.

Macmillan duly appointed Ramsey, who was a reforming archbishop, making his mark as a supporter of the liberation of homosexuality, as a strong opponent of apartheid and of the Smith regime in Rhodesia, and as an influential voice opposing curbs on immigration for Kenyan Asians.

Mary Bennett, Oxford 

"Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet."

There is a beautiful scene in The Illusionist: a gust of wind sweeps through a darken room and turns through pages of a book. The resulting shadows, rising and receding, dance on the wall to the flickering illumination of the outside street lights.

Whenever I watch this scene, I feel a deep sense of joy, and then sadness at the fleeting moment of wonder.

Illusionist Finale

10 Upscale Halloween Candies You’ll Want to Keep for Yourself

Self-Aware Machines

Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

—Immanuel Kant,

“Critique of Pure Reason”, Datalinks

ZFS tracker

ZFS is a very nice combined file system and logical volume manager. I have been using it for the past couple of years. I follow the development discussions and find some of them fascinating: a very subtle bug became the first time for the project in its history to contain a major data lost issue in its production release; a few scenarios and drastic implications on changing a default code.

Digital Sentience

We are no longer particularly in the business of writing software to perform specific tasks. We now teach the software how to learn, and in the primary bonding process it molds itself around the task to be performed. The feedback loop never really ends, so a tenth year polysentience can be a priceless jewel or a psychotic wreck, but it is the primary bonding—the childhood, if you will—that has the most far-reaching repercussions.


—Bad’l Ron, Wakener,
Morgan Polysoft


“Computers with personality”

Pre-Sentient Algorithms

Begin with a function of arbitrary complexity. Feed it values, “sense data”. Then, take your result, square it, and feed it back into your original function, adding a new set of sense data. Continue to feed your results back into the original function ad infinitum. What do you have? The fundamental principle of human consciousness.

 —Academician Prokhor Zakharov, “The Feedback Principle”




“Computers on the verge of self-awareness”

Human intelligence and AI

"... the ordinary human (rapidly losing the ability to comprehend what is going on around them); the enhanced human (the driver of change over the next 100 years, but perhaps eventually surpassed); and all around them vast machine intellects, some alien (evolved completely in silicon) and some strangely familiar (hybrids)."

Don’t Worry, Smart Machines Will Take Us With Them

Tangent

Shadowrun Hong Kong OST - Grendel

Sky Hydroponics Lab

Sky farms are fantastically beautiful, with their kilometer long networks of glass framed in grids of metal, and the sunlight shining through jungles of vegetation inside. When one of them catches the light, you can see the refracted beauty for miles; they are life-giving stars on a desolate planet … gardens on the wing.

—Lady Deidre Skye, “Planet Dreams”

Love, relationship parity, instrumentality

Before she left some years ago for one of the top business schools, one of my co-workers asked me, "Are men intimidated by smart women?"

In retracing this now, I think part of the answer is that we want to show our best selves, and as we go about doing so, we start to evaluate ourselves instrumentally, which completely obliterates sense of our own intrinsic value.

To deal with this, we then try to live the male fantasy (e.g. Princess Bride, Stardust) "where we vanish into thin air, come back 10x times the man we were, and our problems are solved."

Another part of the answer is that few of us ever really know what it is that we want - not truly. We simply grasp at mirages that we think will fulfill us.

A hairpin: love, lost, Shadowrun Hong Kong

"I keep this to remind myself of the things we have to give up, in pursuit of what we think is best. But few of us ever really know what it is that we want - not truly.

We simply grasp at mirages that we think will fulfill us.

Humans tie themselves to other people with the most tenuous of strings, thinking love will fill the emptiness inside us. When that fails, we tell ourselves it was not meant to be - that fate, or destiny, would have wrenched us apart.

But that is a convenient lie. It is up to us, and only up to us, to make our futures.

So I feel that it would behoove me to never forget the things I have given up in pursuit of 'the better option.' I do not dwell in the past, nor am I haunted by it, but it would be doing S. a disservice to forget what she wanted for me."

The Singularity Inductor

What actually transpires beneath the veil of an event horizon? Decent people shouldn’t think too much about that.

—Academician Prokhor Zakharov, “For I Have Tasted The Fruit”

Controlled Singularity

Some would ask, how could a perfect God create a universe filled with so much that is evil. They have missed a greater conundrum: why would a perfect God create a universe at all?

 -- Sister Miriam Godwinson, "But for the Grace of God"






 “Control the power of black holes”

As engineers quickly discovered, it’s one thing to understand Singularity Mechanics and another thing entirely to attempt Controlled Singularity—harnessing and directing the powers of a black hole. Breakthroughs in Applied Gravitonics finally make this technology possible, with a host of amazing and potent applications, from radical new types of weaponry to global power sources. 

I sit in my cubicle, here on the motherworld. When I die, they will put my body in a box and dispose of it in the cold ground. And in all the million ages to come, I will never breathe or laugh or twitch again. So won’t you run and play with me here among the teeming mass of humanity? The universe has spared us this moment.

 —Anonymous, Datalinks

On the scale where things matter, effective institutions are more valuable than cultures.

Interstellar - the science and the movie

I recently read through 'The Science of Interstellar', a book rich in scientific concepts made accessible through the context of the movie.

I went back to re-watched a few selected scenes and still find myself captivated by the fidelity, realism, and interactions playing out on different scales: the silence of space, filled to suspense by the powerful, atmospheric music; the delicacy of the orbital maneuvers and docking sequences in which everything is decided by a couple of degrees and meters; time dilation that stretch hours into decades; gravity that shape tidal forces on Miller's planet; gravitational lensing on approaching Gargantua.

I wouldn't find a person interesting if he or she simply brush the movie off without even considering the possibilities. The movie is a good litmus test on people's ability to accept and work with abstract ideas. And I believe the more abstract concepts that we are able to hold in our minds, the broader our bandwidth for understanding.

Twin Elms

What would John Rawls say about... the GPL?

I sometimes wondered about how Rawl's philosophy would apply to certain contemporary issues and how the general approach can be reconcile with the specificity of the concern.

I say sometimes, because I didn't think about Rawls at all when reading about permissive licensing versus copyleft. But then, I found a most cogent argument in favor of copyleft, and it used the exact argument that Rawls made: "what is the better option for EVERYONE?":

"People who really care about freedom care about it for EVERYONE, and licensing that maximizes freedom for everyone trumps the "strings attached" in that regard, that is such a simple thing to see that it challenges credulity to think that someone who cares about freedom could say otherwise."

Reflections on the writings in a quest

Her mirthless laughter sounds like water breaking on rocks:

"What is a god that his voice should carry so far? And what are you that you should so eagerly obey?

The gods only have dominion over what we cede. And you would cede matters of life and death to them."

I'm quite taken by this memorable moment in "A Servant of Death", especially in the way that it questions agency and choice.

Resettling the entire 5.5m residents of Hong Kong in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles

“You have raised some important considerations to which we shall want to give careful thought."

UK officials discussed resettling 5.5m Hong Kong Chinese in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles

Council of Stars

Live every note of life's song

Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software

"The term “open source” quickly became associated with ideas and arguments based only on practical values, such as making or having powerful, reliable software."

Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software

Heuristic for feelings

On Disliking Poetry

Reading through the article, a question came to me: how important was poetry in my development? Did it modify my mental model at all? My first instinctive answers were: 1) not important, and 2) very little.

Let me expand on that a bit more. I actually took a poetry class in college, but in terms of shaping my thoughts it was overshadowed completely by other things. To name just a few of what those other things were: comparative lit, critical theory, analysis, modern and contemporary Chinese film and literature.

In the normal course of life encounters with poetry, I once purchased a book of poetry back in college. The book was unrelated to any class. I remember flipping through a few pages then promptly went back to reading the LRB; it was long form essays that modified my beliefs more than anything else, then or now.


Searching through my blog archives, I can count a relatively few, but not unimportant instances, in which I noted down poetry. Reading through the list of poems [1] again, I tried to pin down what significance poetry might been of to me: poetry functioned as a heuristic for feelings/sentiments. Longing, love, loneliness, sorrow: feelings in all their permutations mapped to a singular expression, if only for a few moments and within a few words.

In exploring and expressing more complicated ideas, it is not clear whether poetry is the proper function. Unless it is relaying an idea so permeated that poetry loses its evocativeness.

[1]:

Let go your earthly tether

On and on the Great River rolls, racing east. Of proud and gallant heroes its white-tops leave no trace, As right and wrong, pride and fall turn all at once unreal.

And you are as God made you, beautiful; And you are as God made you, unexpected"

In dreadful deeds fearless


Recital is the unsophisticated assassination of poetry


Inviting Writers to Drink

Drunk in Autumn Woods

Erinnerung an die Marie A.

Sorrowing, as water streams without interruption

I offer something more with these thoughts, which only you will notice.

Sorrow is hushed into peace in my heart like the evening among the silent trees

"Then Amnon... said to her, 'Get up and get out!'"

Mad Max: Fury Road

A fantastic movie. I never imagined Charlize Theron as an action hero, but I can't imagine her not being one after watching her performance in 'Fury Road'.

The movie covers and expands on all the thematic elements that made the Road Warrior exceptional: it's no longer mankind versus just the desert, but the wasteland - one visited by surreal sand storms, populated by not just outcasts, but the dispossessed.

Nature is constantly changing, like the wind

A Breath of Fresh Air [3.01]

    Zaheer: Have you ever read the poetry of the great airbending Guru, Lahima?
    Guard: What?
    Zaheer: Guru Lahima lived 4000 years ago in the Northern Air Temple. It is said that he unlocked the secrets of weightlessness and became untethered from the earth, living his final 40 years without ever touching the ground.
    Guard: Is that how you plan to escape, with something you picked up from an old airbender childrens story?
    Zaheer: Like all great children's tales, it contains truth within the myth. Lahima once wrote, "Instinct is a lie told by a fearful body, hoping to be wrong."
    Guard: What's that supposed to mean?
    Zaheer: It means, that when you base your expectations only on what you see, you blind yourself to the possibilities of a new reality.

Modern Irish Literature

"Ireland has less of a tradition of literary realism than England, though for an English critic to say so may require a degree of diplomacy. It may sound like saying that Ireland is deficient in realism in the same way that a nation might be deficient in hospitality or human rights. This is because realism is one of those terms which can be both normative and descriptive, like ‘nature’ or ‘culture’. It can mean, neutrally, the kind of art which aims for verisimilitude, or it can mean one which succeeds in penetrating to the truth of how things are. Realism can refer to the representational mode of an art form, or to its cognitive effect... ‘Realistic’ is a value term, whereas ‘realist’ is not, or not necessarily."

 Running out of Soil

Not every experience is singular

When I think about my writing, what comes to mind is not writing enough. This has the disadvantage of leaving too many unspoken assumptions.

I did not mention many things. Fortunately, they're no longer important. Not every experience is singular.

Ladies of the woods

Merit? What an obscene notion

“Working-class students are more likely to enter college with the notion that the purpose of higher education is learning in the classrooms, and invest their time and energy accordingly...”

Why ‘pedigree’ students get the best jobs


Merit? What an obscene notion! Everyone knows what truly counts is the divine right of kings.

For, although

... the thing with the Davis-Raab approach to civil liberties is that the critique has no organising principle. Other than heady and misty invocations of Magna Carta, it does not see the need for any overall legal framework that enables the citizen to rely on their rights against state power.

For, although there can be sincere, powerful and passionate criticism of individual proposals, there is also a dislike of the legal instruments such as the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights that can check government abuse in any systemic way. Such Tory civil libertarianism wants the benefits of a libertarian approach to policy in certain (usually populist) cases without the means of placing such libertarianism on a sustainable basis.

Tories and civil liberties: the fascinating appointment of Dominic Raab

The Tides of Destiny

Last part from Jamie Salisbury, Beyond and Above

Telling other people's kids to not go to college

One advantage of living in a place (i.e. the U.S.) that has economic and social institutions that enable the country to operate near the technological frontier is not having to listen to such nonsense:

Singapore Wants Kids to Skip College

I wonder what John Rawls have to say about clamping down on attainment of education. I imagine that he would say that this is not a sign of a well organized society. Why wouldn't a society spend more time create more jobs that people actually want, instead of just telling people to "work hard" (as if the person saying it is the only one doing so). Even if it was meant to be reassurance, it's bloody rude to tell people not to send their kids to college.

Unless there are genuine education alternatives to college, to which I'm sure there are. In fact that is a subject of much debate in the U.S. But it seems to me that the tone and intent of the original... "encouragement" seem far from trying to build credible alternatives that lead to better quality of life than just telling people to work as manual laborers, of which I'm sure exclude those esteemed people giving the encouragement in the first place.

It's also stated quite clearly that there is a skill mismatch from education to the configuration of the country's economy. Well, the U.S. has a similar problem, but that's because it cannot get enough number of qualified people to do high paying work. It makes wonder whether it is the dirigism coming home to roost.  Keeping a diversified economy is a good idea, but selecting exactly what those sectors are is probably not. What is considered a diversified economy even ten years ago is probably no longer true today. Keeping to them is to maintain a static vision of the future.

Domain specific language

What if consciousness is an emergent property whose domain specific language we have yet to uncover/develop?