Another age of ignorance

Facts don't matter. Lies don't matter. Deaths don't matter. Lives don't matter.

Footsteps of the sun

Revolution? How novel.

The LRB at 40

Origins of the LRB: 0:00
Editing:  21:10
Form of the essay: 37:11
Escalators: 40:21
Proportion of female writers: 1:18:38

1:22:57
"I've observed it recently and I've observed it and I am observing it now myself I guess that the book reviews in the paper... very often don't address the books a great deal..."

Hic sunt dracones

Approaching the Avid Horizon

In life, as in your art, you sought the sun and the stars.

A Moment's Memory

In-flight

Where were we?

Oh yes... in-flight. In-transit. Remembering. Forgetting.

This is What You Are

Dream.

Dream. Not of what you are. But of what you want to be.

A singer's regrets

"Did you know that I was a zee-captain's daughter? I could have been a pilot; a merchant; or an explorer. But I ran away from sea. And now I'm stuck on the stage, until my looks give out and my voice fails."

"One life," she says, eventually. "That's all we have."

Broken Photosynthesis

Bruno's Theme

Sing a song of sorrow in a world where time has vanished

Le dîner

Beneath a sky on the verge of falling

a glimpse of other stars

Was a glimpse of other stars all they longed for?

ensemble

看过了世界，读了（太多）书。从现在只希望，和一个特别的人，在我们一起选择的生活中，共同快乐。

Ruins

Acquire a ballroom of incomparable splendour

The Wandering Earth, movie

I am probably not the intended audience for this movie as I disliked it quite a bit. The thing that irked me the most was characterization:

Yes, just as portrayed in the movie, human beings are capable of compassion, kindness, cooperation, and even self-sacrifice while working towards a common goal. But these are not revelations or keen observations of human nature.

A Metamorphosis

Magdalene's

"The staff at Magdalene's promise treatments for the deleterious effects of the High Wilderness: loneliness, desperation, folly, regret, love."

Advanced Wistful Stargazing

"This book contains comprehensive maps of the night sky, charts the patterns of several known comets, and speculates on the existence of other celestial bodies not yet perceived by kith eyes.

The author's tone is supportive and kind, encouraging those with a passion for the stars to nurture their curiosity and find deeper understanding of themselves in the vast unknown.

The maps might be useful to someone. The lesson might be useful to everyone."

"The softest of rains falls in the street..."

Does anything happen in these books?

itemised

"It is what a different postwar theoretical philosophy called redemption; all these insignificant moments of an insignificant daily life are here redeemed, by the ordinary, undistinctive sentences which write them down. They have not been transformed, or lent some higher meaning; they remain what they were before, transient and of no particular interest. Nor are they lifted into the timeless eternity of classical literature, posterity and the canon: you can dip into them wherever you like and they will not be any more quotable..."

"...this ‘being-for-the-reading-other’ makes for a new kind of otherness"

Geoscape

Trinity

Adagio Stellar

Goodbye Chicago

Before we parted, I asked you: "We all came to this city to change our lives. Are you happy how your life has changed?"

Goodbye Chicago. Stay beautiful.

Chinese SF

"Each chapter is headed with a ‘life goal’: the first is ‘Drink some water that is not bitter, make some money’; the last is ‘Fly to the stars, draw humanity’s gaze back to the depths of the cosmos.’"

from the depths of the Pacific to the edge of the galaxy

"I solemnly swear, to devote my life and ability
in the defense of the United Nations of Earth
to defend the constitution of man
and to further the universal rights of all sentient life
from the depths of the Pacific
to the edge of the galaxy
for as long as I shall live."

A game I have loved and what it taught me: SMAC

In Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (1999), we are put in charge of ensuring the survival of the last remnants of humanity, a few thousand people sent urgently in a starship to colonize the star system Alpha Centauri in the final days of Earth. Through the game, we not only get to decide how humanity may (or may not) survive, but also decide how humanity evolves into different future societies, and find its place among the stars. This unique science fiction setting drew me to Alpha Centauri as a teenager. At first, I expected to be simply entertained by the game. Yet years later as an adult, I still remember Alpha Centauri as a wellspring of ideas from which I drank and became transformed. 

Through Alpha Centauri, I discovered ideas about how future societies may organize themselves to ensure human survival and progress. I discovered ideas about what future speculative technologies might be and how they will affect future societies. I remember that playing the game made me felt less lonely in the world, because I discovered that loneliness is a universal human condition and that it is timeless. I discovered hope and optimism in an uplifting possible future in which humanity finds its place among the stars. I found and grappled with ideas that are bigger than me. I made decisions that made me reflect on my capacity for empathy. I discovered that history is not a guiding moral force. I found these ideas so unexpected and erudite in a computer game that playing the game became a way for me to meditate about my place in the world...

Lying awake in bed

Lying awake in bed last night, I heard what sounded like Chinese opera music playing from my neighbor's apartment. No it can't be, I thought and closed my eyes. And for a few seconds, I was back in my childhood bed in my grandparents' house. Then, as now, light from the the evening streets leaked through my bedroom windows. And I could hear my neighbor's TV playing audibly. When lay still, I could make out the words of the TV shows being played. Sometimes, I would lie with my eyes open, tracing out the room in semi darkness. Other times I would lie with my eyes closed. Time slowed, and nothing else seem to mattered.

gravity is desire

There will still be something beautiful

"One of those messages tells of a love which failed, and a fall. It tells, too, of what came after."

Mortal. Machine. The heart is destiny's engine.

...hurtling forever towards the earth

"What have you done? What has changed? Impossible to tell."

Brazil

"There are parts of my life that you don't know," you said. "Before I met you, there was someone else, and things happened when I went back to Brazil."

Goodbye Houston

Stay beautiful.

Elated

I am free.

"Our intuitive interpretation in such cases seems to arise from the association of connected ideas, not by logical inference on the basis of known facts about the world."

The concept of cat face

  















"You’re famous French detective Antoine Saint Germain. You’ve gathered the suspects in one room (as you do) to announce the culprit. The only problem is that you have no idea who is actually guilty."

Death off the Cuff
What Will You, The Detective, Do Next?

Ducks

An amateur mistake, surely. It is common knowledge that Gloranthan Ducks are death-worshipping berserkers: their terrible wraith is without equal in Dragon Pass.


https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/750392743478734848

Silently corrupt

This is a terrifying bug: any ZoL pool that was created with v0.6.4 and above (released April 8, 2015) is corrupt. Worst of all, it is silently corrupt.

Silently corrupted file in snapshots after send/receive

Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.

“You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”

For heaven’s sake man, go!

The speed of space

During inflation, two particles traveled a millimeter or so in in 10 ^ -32 seconds. This means that they traveled at about 10 ^ 20 times the speed of light.

We Are Star Stuff

Hurricane Wasteland

Degrees of freedom

So the question almost forces itself on us: is there something about your identity, your individual consciousness, that’s inextricably bound up with degrees of freedom that it’s physically impossible to clone?

 “Can computers become conscious?”: A Reply to Roger Penrose

To the Ends of the Galaxy

The Three Body Problem 三体

I haven't read sci-fi in years, and so it was with a feeling of elation that I read through The Three Body Problem 三体 and The Dark Forest 黑暗森林. A couple of thoughts:

Aside from the content, what struck me are the limited narrative devices, which seems to be the main  body of criticism that this was a good story told by a not so good story-teller. E.g. cliffhangers in the traditional sense are non-existent; some chapters end in declarative statements that do not even function as transitions. In the face of this shortcoming, I find it more remarkable that the suspense is maintained and driven by the plot alone.

National history joining world history, autarkic cultural developments bridged by the common heritage of science, contingent circumstances reverting to universal axioms. The permutation of these themes gives the novel its suppleness and originality.The first is not a new motif, but significance of this novel in the wider body of Chinese literature lies in it endowing the reader a belonging in the future of world history. And in doing so, kept Chinese society awake and brought it closer to the world.

 

The gauntlet

Panacea

Your glory knows no bounds

Cuirassier, artillerie, and er... Renault FT... everything seems to be in order here.

RPS

Analysis followed through to conclusions

"This particular operation means to render unthinkable the idea that people could arrive at revolutionary politics via a clear-headed analysis followed through to conclusions. Instead they must be in the grip of some hidden compulsion which they obey relentlessly, all the while insisting that this obedience is freedom."

 Review of 'The East'

The sea and her love

ZFS on Linux with LUKS startup automount; Ubuntu 16.04

When ZFS became a first class citizen under Ubuntu, the issue of ZFS on Linux with LUKS not auto-mounting properly at startup was finally addressed in Xenial 16.04.

The following steps successfully produced a successful auto-mount on a nightly build of Xenial in VirtualBox:

# list block devices using /dev/disk/by-id
sudo ls /dev/disk/by-id

# identify the block device for the LUKS container; here, the example is a VirtualBox device
ata-VBOX_HARDDISK_VBd5b297e5-009dc9f9

# create a key file
sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/root/key bs=1024 count=64

# encrypt [using defaults here for simplicity] target block device with key file
sudo cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/disk/by-id/ata-VBOX_HARDDISK_VBd5b297e5-009dc9f9 /root/key

# find the newly encrypted LUKS container uuid
sudo blkid

# the result should show the device with TYPE="crypto_LUKS"
/dev/sdc: UUID="b7458a4d-2d45-42bc-8fe7-f392e0a0f85f" TYPE="crypto_LUKS"

# open the LUKS container with key file and map it to a name, example here is mapped to "crypt-c"
sudo cryptsetup luksOpen UUID=b7458a4d-2d45-42bc-8fe7-f392e0a0f85f --key-file /root/key crypt-c

# add a line for the new LUKS container under crypttab so it can be identified during startup
sudo nano /etc/crypttab
crypt-c UUID=b7458a4d-2d45-42bc-8fe7-f392e0a0f85f /root/key luks

# Identify the LUKS partition UUID
sudo ls /dev/disk/by-id

# the result should show the device starting with dm-uuid-CRYPT
dm-uuid-CRYPT-LUKS1-b7458a4d2d4542bc8fe7f392e0a0f85f-crypt-c

# create the zfs partition on top of the LUKS partition
sudo zpool create -o ashift=12 zfs-test-pool /dev/disk/by-id/dm-uuid-CRYPT-LUKS1-b7458a4d2d4542bc8fe7f392e0a0f85f-crypt-c

# nothing added under /etc/fstab

# upon restarting, zfs-test-pool is auto-mounted and can be verified with zpool status

Reference links:
zfs-raid-and-luks-encryption-in-linux
zfs-on-linux-with-luks-encrypted-disks
zfs-raidz-encryption
zfsonlinux/pkg-zfs/issues/126
cryptsetup/+bug/1422153
Dm-crypt/Device_encryption manual

St. Dominic

But what then?

"But what then? Is it better to stand by in the face of tragedy? To let it wash over the world, a hungry tide?"

Equity

As all Western legal systems have known since Aristotle, literal interpretation of any legal material will sometimes produce unintended unjust results, which can and should be corrected by the invocation of "equity."

 The Linux Kernel, CDDL, ZFS, Dtrace

Compression patterns, debris footprint

Released

I've decided to publish and back date some drafts that I've been withholding. These are posts that were written for occasions, experiences and periods in life that left me with such raw feelings, feelings that I found difficult to both capture and disclose.With time and distance I can approach some of these instances with detachment. All drafts will be released as an ongoing process, be it takes months, years, or even decades, so that the truth of the moment is not lost to time.

"A Russian officer maybe?"

"Do you know my parents?"

"Are they famous?"

Elena nodded. "My father was a Russian officer maybe, I think, and Mama comes from a famous Cossack family. They're all soldiers!"

"A Russian officer maybe?" I raised an eyebrow.

"Well, Mama met him when she was dressed as a man and joined the Cossack host. He was very surprised, I think," Elena shrugged. "Mama says he died of shock, leaving me as a present. But I think he probably ran away because Mama is so fierce!" She looked proud rather than distressed at this prospect.

I blinked down at the little cabin girl, rather at loss as to how I should respond. "That's... nice." I hazarded, and she nodded enthusiastically.

Photographs

The thought of photographs and cameras made me feel very melancholy. I remember buying an extremely poor quality camera and then abandoning it only to have my parents take up on it. They made use of it enthusiastically, not minding that the camera was of a Christmas-cracker joke quality. They seemed truly derived joy in using it. There is something about the effect of documenting the present, the happiness of capturing the effervescent.

Thinking of fleeting moments make me think of the future. Will there be someone to remember me? As I remember my parents now, however narrowly? I am thirty one now and yet to have a family of my own. I feel... very alone, sometimes. There is few if anything, no photographs, to document the life I am living/have lived. My mind wanders widely. But how much can we say to have lived if we pass through the world silently, observing? And letting what we read and the ideas that we understand act as ciphers of our being?

80 Days

"As well as brilliantly retelling Jules Verne’s classic through hundreds of optional and intertwined encounters, its locations and their inhabitants are a constant source of delight. It is, wonderfully, a game concerned with progress and progressive thinking. The journey itself is at the heart of that but Inkle repeatedly confound my expectations with the humane and empathetic depiction of the many cultures and people of the world."

 80 Days Impressions

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.