Courtesy of zaiah:
Noted without comment.
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Courtesy of zaiah:
Author Archives: tacit
Autonomous Light Air Vehicles
Ganked from nihilus, Autonomous Light Air Vehicles.
This stuff is really, really cool. A lot of the more interesting stuff in science, from cellular autonoma to these things, comes from the emergent behaviors of systems with very simple rules.
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
Some weeks ago, I was chatting with zaiah online (which, by the way, is great fun, and I heartily recommend it), and she directed me to an online work of fiction called The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.
The last time someone did that, I lost many hours’ sleep. That time, it was Shelly, who discovered the (very long) online novel John Dies At the End, one of the best pieces of amateur fiction I’ve ever read and a work that sucked up several of my nights. (I was up until nearly sunup reading at one point…but I digress.)
At any rate, The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is a neat little transhumanist (or, really, anti-transhumanist) story, that echoes some of the themes of Iain M. Banks’ “Culture” series–Look to Windward, The Player of Games, and so on–but from a very different angle.
It’s a good read. datan0de, zensidhe, and smoocherie, you guys in particular might like it…though you may find yourselves disagreeing with the author about the inability to find meaning in a virtualized world, as I did.
By the way, this is not a story for the squeamish. Extremely graphic and explicit sex, some of which is more than a little bizarre.
The idea that people cannot find meaning if they live in an environment where all their needs are met instantly, and that human meaning is only possible against a backdrop of struggle and death, is not a new one in science fiction, and I wonder why that is. I personally do not believe that my lifew is given meaning only by death; in fact, quite the opposite–death robs life of meaning, by destroying all those experiences that make us who we are.
And speaking of wonder, and mystery…
Hubble Deep Field Telescope Image
This picture was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope’s powerful deep-field telescope instrument. It shows a patch of sky about one millimeter square.
With the exception of the bright white object with diffraction lines radiating from it to the lower left of center (which is a star here in our own Milky Way galaxy), every single thing you see here is a galaxy. An entire galaxy, each with tens of millions or billions of stars.
This is not a remarkable section of sky. It looks like this no matter where you point the Deep Field Telescope.
Every one of the things in this picture. Every dot, every fleck of light. An entire galaxy.
So much for the notion that there is no wonder in science.
In which Franklin gets very, very, very cranky
In his book The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan writes, “The siren song of unreason is not just a cultural wrong but a dangerous plunge into darkness that threatens our most basic freedoms.” The book was published in 1988, when trickle-down economics and alien abductions were all the rage, and it is hard to imagine anything more appropriate today.
The last six years or so have proven Sagan right in a way I doubt even he could have imagined. In 2006, nearly twenty years after those words were penned, we have an American President who is a fundamentalist Christian and who seems to believe that science and highfalutin book-larnin’ never did nobody a lick of good; anti-intellectualism is rampant in American society and politics; and people are actually arguing about “Intelligent Design”–Intelligent Design, fer Chrissakes!–as if it were something for real that should, y’know, be taught in schools.
And frankly, it all pisses me right the fuck off.
Shelly tends to get frustrated with me, because I get so frustrated whenever I see credulous, anti-intellectual claptrap spewing out of some hole somewhere. And, to be quite blunt, it’s everywhere. It’s as if somebody plugged all the sewers in New York City, and all this brown stuff is bubbling up out of the manhole covers and flooding the streets, and nobody notices.
Hell, people seem to like it.
And it pisses me off. It pisses me off because these people should know better. It pisses me off because gullibility and credulity are corrosive to society; the United States today dominates the world politically, socially, and economically largely on the strength of our belief that the world is knowable and comprehensible, and that the pursuit of reason is a valuable undertaking. (I’m sure the Chinese, who could not hope to compete with us otherwise, are more than happy to see us abdicate our global leadership as a powerhouse of knowledge and research; they don’t have to defeat us; we’re happy to defeat ourselves!) It pisses me off because reason is the greatest single gift that humankind has, the thing that sets us apart from all the rest of nature, and to squander that gift–to fritter away our reason, to exchange knowledge and understanding for faeries and pixie dust–is a travesty beyond imagining.
Faeries and pixie dust are remarkably seductive. Continue reading
How dumb do these guys think I am?
So over the past three days, somebody has placed orders for a whole bunch of T-shirts from my online T-shirt store…nearly $1,500 worth of shirts in all.
These orders, each of which is typically for anywhere from ten to twenty shirts, are all placed with different credit cards, and all ship to different addresses, mostly in Ghana and the UK, occasionally in the US. Each has a different name. Yet the same email address is being used for every one of them…an email address on an ISP in Nigeria.
Does this guy really think I’m stupid enough to let him rip me off for fifteen hundred dollars?
Pic o’ the Day…
Pope Benedict XVI, Dark Lord of the Sith, addresses the Imperial Senate moments before permanently dissolving that troublesome body. The last remnants of the old Republic have finally been swept away…
The quest for truth
In the never-ending quest for truth which has dominated mankind’s history, one question stands above them all.
No, not “Is there a god?” or “What is the meaning of life?” The real question is…
What is the coolest thing in the world?
There may, of course, be more than one coolest thing in the world; philosophy is all about keeping your options open. There are, however, things it cannot be; for example, we have ascertained conclusively that the coolest thing in the world is not Microsoft, armpit hair, or Hoboken, New Jersey.
Proof of the Coming Apocalypse, #32712
On the way to dinner with the Smoosh on Thursday night, we passed a Porsche SUV.
A Porsche. SUV.
A Porsche. SUV.
Dinner was very good, however, and I gained valuable intelligence on the army of robots datan0de is building to try to destroy me.
Some thoughts on specialness…
…taken from a reply in a thread in polyamory, borrowing in turn from a similar conversation thread on a mailing list I read.
Many, many people feel special in a relationship because of the things their partners do. For example, some people feel special by exclusivity–“I am special because he does not love anyone else,” “I am special because he only does thus-and-such with me.”
The danger in doing this is that if you’re not careful, sometimes what happens is you end up placing your sense of worth, your sense of value, and your sense of “specialness” on things outside of yourself.
If you need certain exclusive things in order to feel secure with your lover and in order to feel unique and special and valued, then you will never really be secure and you will never really feel unique and special and
valued–because you will always know that these things can be taken away from you.I feel secure in my relationships because I know, deep down in my heart, that nobody else is like me and nobody can ever take my place. If my partner Shelly does everything with her other boyfriend that she does with me–if she goes to the same restaurants, watches the same movies, has sex in the same positions–it does not bother me and does not make me feel jealous or insecure, because I know that the things that make me special and irreplaceable are inside myself, not outside.
My specialness does not come from the exclusive things we do. My specialness comes from *who I am.* Knowing that makes me secure, and it also means I don’t need tokens of my specialness, like exclusive things from my partners; my specialness is assured, is concrete, and can never be taken away.
It’s been my observation that the more you place your sense of value and worth on things outside yourself–the more you need, and rely on, tokens of exclusivity in order to feel special–the more you will struggle with jealousy and insecurity. Real security, in the end, can come only from within.
I think that many problems people have with their partners’ behavior, especially in polyamorous relationships (but sometimes in monogamous relationships as well), come from the need to have their partner make them feel special. If you are in fact special to your partner, then there should be no need to set boundaries or controls on your partner’s behavior in order to feel it; it will shine through in everything your partner does, all the time. If, on the other hand, you are not special to your partner, then controlling your partner’s behavior isn’t going to make you special.