a barbarian journal

June 30, 1997 man, the car is a mess. We were just trying to remove the oxygen sensor, which seems to be totally rusted on. We tried taking the turbo or exhaust piece off that it was attached to and broke off two bolts before giving up on that approach. Now we're gonna just cut the sensor off. We will have to re-tap the threads for the new sensor, anyway. I'm looking at just getting another used car for short term. Like maybe a mid 80s japanese, nissan perhaps, fro aroun $2k. Something that isn't breaking down a lot. I don't know anything about getting a used car, though. getting insurance and plates and all that will be a hassle, too. I bet i will need to get a darn CA drivers license. argh. I probably could have taken the thing to a real mechanic who might have been better able to deal with it. A loss of a car is a loss of freedom, a really personal loss. So why am i such a loser? I think i actually got tired of trying to beat people, to become a success as it were, especially when basically it didn't get me anyway, when it was all the selfish taking and raking that actually got stuff, not actually any real pursuit of quality. And, really, there is a deep part of your soul pushing you to strive for success, which i just stopped listening to because it was in fact an illusion, just a trait selected by countless generations of female pressure. For me it is a matter of freedom from this pressure, and everyone eventually gives it up anyway in the natural course. Not to be a slave under the endless cracking whip. There is this need to communicate, not just a matter of loneliness, although it might be an aspect of lenliness, which is really a much more complex thing. What makes a writer write? perhaps just that little bit of brain that thinks of the words has a hand on the holy spigot which release the joy juice into the waters. Probably too, the part of the mind which tries to understand others also measures out coffeespoons of pleasure. It's probably quite a complicated system. We have large amounts of brain power for undestanding and communicating, and certain something must push us to make the effort to learn how to reach and to really reach out. Althouh it seems that a lot of people are really isolated, i don't know how they manage such a loss. June 29, 1997 so a sensory events gets recognized as patterns, the patterns are looked at in combination to make bigger patterns, certain state information is maintained to keep track of the kinds of things that are happening, certain things that are happening are recognized as more important and the have a greater effect on what kind of thing we think is happening. When we decide that a particular kind of thing is happening, it activates long term memories, which fill in the blanks about what all should happen and what we should do. We have an active conciousness that maintains a little collection of situations or objects that are active at once, which we are thinking about, such that we can make comparisons and try to combine them invarious ways to try out possiblities. We have an important bility to make plans and thing about things that haven't happened yet, and really our goals are piece of situations that we recognize would make us happier and we try to find paths to get to those situations. And we have a pleasure system regulating what we like so we can learn to make associated events our goals. The whole lowlevel system of learning involves increasing the likelihood of certain reactions happening when certain patterns of event more work on javademos occur. did a little more work on javademo, that push me button (i need to make it say "touch me"). controls:button option should pull up another window though it doesn't seem to yet. hmm. gotta be short today. busy

June 28, 1997 spiritual means something like pertaining to drives not rationally derived or learned. There are some feelings that really seem to come from nowhere, no matter how hard we try to undestand them. Deep as in you can't see where they came from I have a pretty good understanding of myself, and i spend a lot of time introspecting and trying to figure out why i feel various things, but some things are really quite powerful and defy any kind of analysis. The unbroken curve for instance, and i have spent some time on that one. Feeling sympathy for other people seems pretty deep, and not a learned thing. Something about women in distress though really gets me, maybe something about not having as much concern over guys. The feeling of wanting to crush my enemies, i don't think you have to learn that. One thing that serves to relieve guilt is to feel that you are part of some story. There were myths about killing animals that helped primitive people not to feel bad when they used obviously painful methods. I'm not sure what the phsychodynamic is, but identifying with some role seems to really help. It seems like recently when i felt bad about something that i just remember that it was something like a tradtional role i was just filling out. All i want to do is have some fun!, the weird al version of course. June 27, 1997 [cap re: objects, identical] Those really are the fundamental questions of intelligence. Luckily they are posed at a low enough level to see that they are really implementation questions. You can have different implementations that correspond to objects and identicality and you will have systems with different abilities. It isn't really a scientific question of definition at all but an engineering question, and an exploration of the space of possible designs. Although of course you can include the purely scientific question of what a human brain does for such things. Fundamental disagreements over how these things should be implemented in an AI system have been some cause for disagreements around here. more car trouble, ick. but the computer diagnoses it as oxygen sensor latched low. probably just a bad connection. I'm in trouble if all my wires start going out. i had a bad fingerprint on the cover glass of my camera, and i realized that i was into conventional posing instead of really trying to show me, plus im not much to look at. So i pulled the old shots and stuck in one that depicts the real me. And im about ready for a second attempt. And i need a haircut The indians that the americans moving west weren't from the great cultures that existed before the white man's arrival. There used to be great cities, but diseases from europe cut the populations to like 10%, and they reverted to a primitive hunter/gatherer. All we had left of the natives was a survivalist fringe culture. But really, right now, the only important thing is to find a job. This car thing is going to be a problem. According to western culture, nature is evil, not just nature is one of many evil things, but nature is everything that is evil. The snake is a symbol of life, a big digestive tract, bound to the earth. The eagle is the soaring freedoom and escape from the earth. the drgaon is a mixture of the two. this is all joe stuff. It's like waking up and the world is a nightmare.. It seems like doctors must have to deal with some horrific guilt, especially student doctors, because they must sometimes make mistakes or fail to help people in various ways. I'm not sure how they deal with it, but i guess they mostly just blot it out and forget about it, or take the overman approach and just deny that there is anything wrong with them. This sounds like a major recipe for some serious soul crunching. In this context, i tmakes sense to seriously overwork them, because exhausting someone is a well-recognized brainwashing technique. They don't have time to feel bad about anything and their personal feelings get drained away as they are converted into doctor-automata. Presumably they must have some remnant emotional reactions leftover from before they started their conversion process. But it does seem to me that the establishment has been refining the traditional cult indoctrination techniques. I like it. I have been holding onto a story about the progression of stages of life as a kind of story about the different types of people, based on a a set of hierarchical wants of man. A person wants pleasure, success, love and wisdom. Something i have just added is the idea that these may in fact be related to genetic predisposition for different activities during life. As a child you just want to play, and you have little appreciation of others, but then you become aware of others and start wanting to compete. This tendency for competition and achievement has been developed because it one of the preference that women use to choose mates. Thus somehow it is genetic, although how exactly such a complex thing could be implemented is tricky, maybe something as simple as women liking to get gifts. But after a while the natural course is to have children, and eventually it will be a disadvantage to continue competing because you would be competing with your children and really they wouldn't have any chance. So it is likely that this drive for success would get tapered off for genetic reasons, as suddenly men feel it much more enjoyable to take care of the the kids and teach them things. Eventually it is possible that the kids will fly away and we develop a prefence to seek wisdom, for our own benefit in addition to the benefit for society. These may simply be natural developments, but it seems likely that there might be some type of genetic push guiding the various drives that affects these directions. And possibly certain people get stuck in various modes and never get their fill, as it were, or possibly miss the triggers from one phase to the next. Men wanting fidelity or faithfulness in a woman, is another thing that probably must have genetic basis, although it seems too complex to easily encode. I know for some reason it has always struck me very deeply when i see women who can't stay faithful. There was this one who i was pretty close to, but when i found she already had a committed relationship, i reacted in an intensely mean way. There's this other girl who i am sort of friends with, but she has an evil habit of breaking hearts, and it really bothers me. I don't think its something i learned, either, because the reaction is just too deep.

June 26, 1997 quantity is something we understand because of genetic influence. In addition we learn some arithmetical facts. There was a woman at the gas station, a pleasant pregnant redhead with a little maybe 8-year old blonde daughter. And there was some trouble with here card or something and she couldn't pay. My first thought was to help her out, because the same thing has happened to me and a guy helped me out. But i didn't, i just let it go. She could still do something about it. And i'm pretty poor and really probably shouldn't have. But i have to remember this as a failure, because i have been thinking how we are all family, And it was just money. but i still feel bad about it. i see the world all in an instant i see the world in a grain of sand i see the world in a cream-filled sponge cake and it isn't any mad delusion but something to think about The world is the whole world, you know, and that means big. bigger than everything. maybe as big as everything put together. And it's real old too. One day the world got to thinking, maybe there could be other worlds that it could talk to. And it was far away from the other worlds and couldn't talk to them, and didn't have a telephone, so the world thought "maybe i could have little worlds and i could talk to them and teach them about things" so the world got together some great swirls of stuff and mixed it altogether to make little worlds. And the little worlds ate up a bunch of things and were all growing bigger. And the little worlds commenced to speaking to each other, and the big world showed them about things and mostly the little worlds were happy with the things. And the big world was happy with the little worlds. i edited the filewindow and spiral3 programs so they show instructions on the status bar at the bottom June 25, 1997 There was a long post on QV about intelligence and attractiveness. The conclusion is that intelligence is only important if it makes you a better provider/caregiver and if it makes communication easier. Easier communication only makes it likely to be attracted to someone with roughly the same intelligence. The selection of intelligence probably only had to do with selecting people who were more capable, tool use, controlling people, skill at providing food. there was a 'hello' from a woman on the answering machine. I don't know who it was. It could have been a wrong number, or somebody from irc or someone from the net in general. Whoever it was, she made me wish i had answered. Are guys so easily manipulated? I got the pictures developed and a couple put onto my me link. But the pictures turned out terrible. This camera just isn't very good for this. It won't focus well under 6 feet away, but further away and the face is too small to scan well. Glasses and flash don't mix either. One fairly close picture had terrible redeye. I'm going to need better lighting, maybe outside, and to take pictures from shorter distances. I didn't use the zoom properly either. Maybe i should just borrow a better camera. I went down to the beach. I was thinking the rat race exists because women like guys that fight over things. much of the genetic bases for behavior had to come from sexual selction, it's like lady macbeth is the whole deal. The best that genes can do to control behavior is to affect little reactions, to make it feel good if a certain thing happens, and maybe a couple of pieces together, and let us fill in the blanks A big question is what a gene can actually do to affect these reactions. Well genes can affect which neurons are effected by which mood related chemical, and which chemicals and how strongly they are emitted by what area. Endorphines, the natural morphines, have some wide sources and effects. And genes can control which modules are connect to what, so that hearing information gets routed through a big pattern recognizing matrix. They can determine the sizes and numbers of neurons that get devoted to particular tasks, and roughly the natural pathways for certain signals. Genes can only set stuff up initially, and it takes learning to get the final patterns down. Humans have a kind of lucky setup though. The basic genetic brain growth continues in the first year, but it is done along with natural learning, so there is an extremely amplified kind of development as the learning modulates the genetic growth. We are like way smarter than animals. I'm a little concerned about the modular explanations for mind, that they might miss out on how important reuse of modules is. A desire to communicate with some one is a part of sociability in general, but it is also a fundamental part of love (the other two being a desire to be with and to help). A weird one from QV, the distance from the line through the eyes to the line across the mouth increase with level of estrogen, and more estrogen means a better baby maker. So there's something about the face structure that should make women more attractive, and there are weird tests (in babies even) that show that is does.

June 24, 1997 man, yesterday taught me a lot about the evils of an irc habit. I didn't spend much time on my journal and then my brother came home and seemed a little upset with me typing away. He was the one that got the keyboard that makes clicking noises. Whatever. so maybe i'll irc less. I thought some more about those two movies conair and speed 2, and i don't know what it was, maybe they were pretty funny, but the people were like machines and not heroes. There was no mythic quality to them. Alien 4 is going to come out(ch). I guess i'm muc more interested in seeing a great allegory than any kind of surface story. joe mentions this. Movies are a ritual. you have to go to a "temple" to see them. But videos don't have that effect and they trivialize the experience. There's no wonder there aren't as many great myths on the screen these days. the place i called that was supposed to photocd's on site doesn't. 3 weeks they said. I guess i should get prints and get the scanner. And a deer has gotten into the garden and nibbled most of the top leaves off the tomato plants. And the pepper plant is just stems now. There are some tracks that could be deer tracks, but im not quite sure, but based on the height of the nibbling and that i have seen a deer in the past, im pretty sure. Another thing i found is that there are bunches of green beans growing in the grass next to the bed, from last year. And doing a whole lot better than anything i ever planted. At least now i can see how they are supposed to grow. I finally gave my .45 a name: Ender. Actually, ender is also a nickname for andrew although no one has ever called me that and im not sure how easily id get used to it. It's been andy (or i like the spelling andi for various reasons) for so long. I think andj is a lot more neat though and really, in some countries, a j is like a y. But ender is a great name for a gun. And why name a weapon at all? because sometimes it is like your only friend. Women spend a lot of time arranging makeup and such, but this practice developed when really women weren't expected to do a lot of serious work. It trivializes them and their time. But things have changed and in general women are expected to produce on equal terms, and yet these make-up rituals persist. There is just something about that unbroken curve, aesthetically, bikinis just don't cut it. And it isn't a matter of forbidden fruit or seeing something normally hidden. It's a matter of a pure, unbroken curve, a simple unity of color and surface. I think one of those long tube dresses looks better than a bikini, although i guess skin surface has a much richer texture. A one piece though, is also a jagged, broken form. Wet suits, hmm. peel 'em and eat 'em, as the sharks say. Here was a weird idea.. Musical ability developed because of sexual selection. If music got involved in a mating selection ritual then it would have built up pretty fast. Music or singing ability would to some extent demonstrate health and vigor and control, in addtion to that all important factor, self-confidence. There is supposed to be a kind of performance curve with age or something that implies some genetic influence to the abilities that also relates to peak mating years. In addition murder all follows a similar age-curve, which might suggest that fighting and killing (over competition for mates) has genetic predispositions developed in a similar sexual selection process. The article also goes into some basic dynamics in sex roles. A female can only have a few children so she will want the best man she can get. The male wants the best too, but he is also better served by mating with as many as possible. (There are also economic considerations, how many children he can afford and the goal can be to optimize the wealth and survivability of the grandkids, so sheer numbers isn't generally optimal) The outcome of this conflict is that males compete for the best females, and it is always the female's choice to decide who she will mate with. The poorer females benefit because males also try to have as many females on the side as possible. I kind of wonder abbout the dynamic of fast chicks. It's not really possible to isolate a sexual behavior to only one gender, it's only possible genetically to make it more likely to happen in males,say, while females still have the possibility. Genetics can at best establish a tendency and cultural and environmental factors are the major factors. And with birth-control, sexual behavior can be greatly decoupled from baby-making. The interesting question is what were the natures of those early sexual contests between males? What traits got emphasized? Also, it isn't even necessary that they are traits that women chose, they could just have been ways the males competed and the woman had to take the winner (although of course, it's more likely that the women also preferred them) Aggression and competitiveness are male things. The big muscles are the obvious one that everybody knows about. I assume cunning and intelligence had to be desirable. There must have been actual fighting over women (modern myths still include that). We are here throwing in making music as one of the challenges. Singing or music wooed women. One of my favorites is penis size, and that seems more to be a competition between guys than a women's natural choice, but something has to explain we people are so much bigger than apes in that area. Evolution in general is pushed not merely by an ability to survive, but also by the way the individuals choose mates that they think can survive well. And since women do most of the choosing, we can blame the problems with basic human nature on them. "I want you to leave me alone" i have this memory of her saying that. It was low, quiet with a deeper voice, very serious. Very quick, blurted out, perhaps, like it was somthing she didn't want to say, or to have to say, maybe a little frustrated that she had to say it. It was just two seconds, but i guess the silences before and after were important to the message, a way to focus my attention and to show that she was serious and trying to be very clear. This was what had to be said. Perhaps a little tiredness, but no inflection, just flat crisp, clear. I could sense a real anger, but i don't know that would be fair from how she said it, probably more just my interpretation. "I want you to leave me alone" June 23, 1997 I saw Speed 2 and Con air. they were both quite good, but i think i like a lot more humor in my action movies, and i wasn't all that interested in these people. but i don't mean i simply prefer joke comedies. i just don't think real people in bad situations are serious all the time. The real spirit of a warior is a joyous one, and i guess they really didn't seem like warriors, just average joe's that got caught up in bad situation and rose without to the occasion. I think that i just don't buy that. I was happy to see them, but i wouldn't want to see them again. i got a cheap camera ($60) with nifty features, like zoom and a self-timer. Pictures!

June 22, 1997 so somebody wrote me an email to complain that my journal was messed up. I thought that was cool. now i'm wondering who actually reads this stuff and how they find it. just as i was losing interest. I kind of like Marilyn. I mean, she writes her little column and has a high IQ, and i do this little thing i do and i aspire to be smart. So what is she up to this week. Well she talks about people becoming disappointed and cynical because of their expectations and how life doesn't meet those expectation. It seems pretty obvious, but i hadn't really considered it lately. I'm sure i did have some expectations that i should have been able to do better with my life and relationships, and i did get very cold and angry because people suck, and i thought they should be better. I'm not sure why i wouldn't have thought about it. Also, she gets a question about whether her high IQ makes her more attractive, but she avoids an answer, says she doesn't know, but explains why she doesn't take a poll to find out. That's an interesting question, though. I see some reasons why it might be so. Smarter is more fit, exotic is erotic, knowledge is a key to happiness, success is attractive. I have heard that intelligence can be an aphrodesiac, although that's not the same as a pheromone. The problem of course is that this culture doesn't much like smart people, and in general people don't like anyone who thinks too differently from them, and there probably would be trouble communicating to really smart people. I'm thinking of putting up picture of myself on one of my pages so certain people can see what i look like. I find that's something of a challenge because i don't want anyone else but me taking them (for artistic reasons), and i don't have a camera. There is also the problem of getting it into the computer, because my brother keeps his scanner at work. If i can find a cheap enough camera with a timer, i will probably buy it and get a photo-cd made (what do i need with hard picture of myself?). But i don't know about any of that stuff. And i need this within like a few days. If it works out, maybe i'll take a lot more pictures. I learned a little bit more about java that i probably should have known. It's possible to put private classes in the same .java file (although each class still has it's own .class file). In object-oriented program you are supposed to put every little function into its own object, but i haven't been doing it correctly, because i was thinking in doing that you had to have one object per file and put all the classes in subdirectories, but my account on cruzio (i think, maybe i should check again) since it isn't a full unix shell, doesn't let me have subdirectories and all my files are lumped together in a mess. No subdirectories, no groups of classes, therefore poorly objective programming for me. I've been working on my javademo program javademo source and it forced me to break off a major portion of it because of how java handles separate windows. My main program would never receive messages to close the separate window and so i couldn't get it off the screen. I had to create a whole new object for it to destroy itself. Anyway, i still hope to try out all kinds of windowing stuff, and it will end up a monster file i'm sure. I got the milling machine configuration set up on my little machine tool. I'm much happier with it now because there were some loose parts (which were making me thinking it was junky) and i found out that there actually are screws for tightening it. The guy really must be a serious machinist. And for me this is just for training and experience to see if i want to do the real deal. Also i'll have a much better idea of what parts are really needed to get real machining done. There is a project to cast all the parts you need to make your own machine tools, but with no experience at all, it was just out of the question. Now it makes more sense to me, since the machines aren't all that complicated.

June 21, 1997 sentences are just fingers pointing there just aren't enough hours in the day when you finally do what to get something done. I'm reading about genius and eminence, and one intriguing article suggests that what's importance is not the person, but the work done, so i guess i'm in trouble. It is also suggested that all the really great people start early and publish often. I guess i'm out of that race. My burden is lifted. This stuff is really pretty humbling. But i don't see anybody else out there trying to design a mind. It seems like people think something like, well we don't understand something, so we're going to say there is a god and he did it. That would make sense to us to think that. Most thinking is intuition, that is, we don't understand how we figured it out. sometimes we interpret things so we can think our intuition is correct, even if its not really how things are, because intuition controls how we think. Even rational thinking depends on intuitions, but prehaps by reasoning from very reliable knowledge we can avoid some trouble. Teach by example. I'm reading power of myth, the transcripts from the tv series from jo campbell ( i probably should read some of his more organized writings instead of just interviews, though). Supposedly jo does that, never trying to persuade people but just showing them how wonderful real understanding can be. We are defined by the challenges we face. Not the successes we achieve. I have to thank all the people who won the cold war. And i'm glad they retired.

June 20, 1997 I saw Batman & Robin. blech. although there were two cute chicks this time (actually three, elle mcpherson shows up), although not as good as catwoman. Uma is a real actress though and its painful to see her beside ahnold. Could be called Batman Family Values, a strike against. Clooney has no edge and is no twisted vigilante dark knight, just kind of a ho hum guy. Its diversionary if not really entertaining. But i wasn't really able to suspend judgement about the new laws of physics they invented, so i found that somewhat irritating. And it had such a comic book character and im not into comic books. And somehow all the campy humor doesn't work, not enough energy maybe, no permission to laugh, i don't know, confused and empty. It's big budget, though, so they put a lot of work into it, but i am certainly not in the target audience. It might actually be any worse with multiple viewings, so they might be shooting for video. Some cute touches, there's the bunch from clockwork orange. And in the credits, there's a guy listed as ahnold's drama coach. It didn't make me wish i hadn't wasted the 2 hours, but it was strangely irritating I did figure out that one of the reasons i don't like kids is that they always want to play games, but i really don't like playing games. when you have nothing to say. you won't find a reason to stop talking we have specific chemicals that mediate our fear of new things. opiates affect these receptors the different parts of a thought don't all go to the same place in the brain. There are different types of neurons supposedly, but i don't know what that's supposed to mean. Are different chemical signals used in segmenting functions in the brain? been doing some more java stuff, finally. Worked some more on the javademo, which will end up as a sample of different window functions based on the project fom my c++ windows class. I read some more of the tutorial about the new version, java 1.1. They said the windowing in it is an interim step between the first main stuff. (1.0.2) and they're finally plan to make all windows funtions java beans, which are a certain type of portable object format with persistent state (you can save configurations). So they have declared that all this stuff is going to change yet again soon. Argh. I did also read some strategies for writing stuff that works for the older stuff and the new stuff (which even i can't run yet. needs netscape communicator 4.0.5), so maybe i can start working with it. In the paper it talked about how microsoft is again trying to split the standard by creating a system that uses native windows instructions. On the other side, however, sun is supporting a bunch of other platforms, including embedded systems, and there's even an ultratiny version to run on smart cards (yes the credit card sized computers). The engineering journals have been going nuts over java for a while. I looked back on my out-of-date file of the things i'm working on, and i'm starting to go back to stuff. I started some woodworking. and some more programming, i think i will be able to work on my message passing distributed program, and when i have something i will get the program running on other computers that can run the java on my page. The nanocomputer program should do something like that too. There has been a little more stuff on haptics, or force feedback sensors, which are like joysticks or gloves in which you can feel force from the objects, in a VR simulation or something. One model was like a couple of thimbles on wires on a guy's fingers. It has application in medicine, and it seems like there is a lot of expensive electronics to be developed in medicine. Buffered surgery, perhaps. I saw a little more about reversible computing that is supposed to reduce the power requirements of computing such that we could actually have three dimension circuits. Power speed and space are the three main factors deciding chip capability. I don't know if this approach will add very much to the power problem. The idea is that the energy holding a gate at 1 or 0 is dissipated away to ground when the gate changes, but it could just flow into another spot and stay balanced. The article goes on to saying how 3-d chips will be so powerful and there will be smart machines which will compete evolutionarily. Not programmed by him, i should think. It's ok to go really crazy once in a while. people have plenty of time, and what's a life for, anyway? People just don't do what i want. i'm just not into that dominance thing. It's such a subhuman thing I say i talk about myself alot, but it's not simply that i am uninterested in hearing what other people have to say. I am just demonstrating the kind of expression that i would want them to be able to demostrate about themselves. I understand that it is hard to even know yourself well enough to be able to talk about yourself endless. But i want them to make that effort. And if maybe i have to be a little irritating to get them off their butts and try to understand themselves, i can live with that. There's also the thing that if you talk about something they aren't quite that interested in for a little too long, they will try to change the subject to something they are interested in. I have been practicing my skills in stimulating conversation, and i'm getting pretty good. Confidence, persistence, and ability are the main attributes for achievement. I should probably try to hunt down Jennifer Marcus and apologize. I wonder how she turned out. Like master wayne said "i say spew. if you hurl and she bolts. it wasn't meant to be" where's my rock? June 19, 1997 there was any article in ee-time about an improvement in the accuracy of e-beams in CRT tube. It requires the gun to be offset from center at an angle but is maybe three times more accurate (actually it says reduces deflection aberrations by 10 times, but most crt tubes use magnetics and it is electrostatic, which say is only a third as good). This could mean bigger monitors, eg X-ray pictures need better resolution. But the important application for e-beams is in producing chips. Right now they are moving from light systems to UV systems in chip making, but down the road the know they will be moving to e-beam lithography, which they can do now but not on production scales. With e-beams they can go almost down to atom scale. But then they they will inexorably be forced to use molecular nanotechnology. Kind of like a black hole. nothing can stop the contraction. Did i mention some people were bringing up subnuclear computing? And they are still looking at quantum computing. In Wired, there is an article laying out an optimistic future for the next 20 years. But nowhere does it consider artificial intelligence, which should be the most significant advance in the near term. of course, maybe people aren't smart enough to do it. with the videophone, you could show people diagrams, point out things in pictures, looking at maps, showing off samples, looking at the scenery there needs to be a way to show stuff on videotape and still be able to use the vcr controls to fast forward and pause and such Taking videos of tvs doesn't always work right. and of course computer screens. And cooking instructions. I'm thinking teenagers strumming through magazines together. I have given presentations with overheads, something like that needs to be the natural thing with videophones, so something like a camera on the receiver that can point forward and down, with maybe a little viewer for one eye for incoming and a pointer lens. But it has to be all in one hand, like a regular phone. A big problem, though with cameras is them bouncing around, that can give people headaches, but sitting on the ear like a regular phone is pretty stable. Of course hardcore people would have a headset model just as there are hands-free phones already. All this is quite doable today, really has been for a while, excpet that some goofballs keep perpetuating the idea that videophones are for looking at the guy on the other end, that lame star trek image, holding technology back 20 years.. Smile for the camera, guys. Think how much better 911 calls would be. Of course if i had been working all this time and had capital. I'd do it myself. i've heard that it takes a generation for new technology to be profitable and that overall PCs have yet to show profit overall from their use, the expense hasn't created matching productivity gains. (Except for the computer makers i guess) I don't quite get the economics of that, but it seems that with all the new stuff on PCs, it is a continually new technology and therefore will never become profitable. June 18, 1997 Their is a beastie called cog at mit, a robot with roughly humanoid arms and hands and a face-like thing with vision inspired by people. It is Rodney Brook's project to build a commander Data (he said that himself) type android. But i'm not sure on what basis he thinks he can do it. His approach is based on the bugbot project, but even that was far from reality. The bugbots learn to walk with a neural network learning algorithm (or something like it, his specialty is actual something called a subsumptive architecture). But real bugs don't learn to walk like that, they can walk instinctively. Everything cog does cog has to learn from close to scratch, there are some hand crafted basic modules that have to sort of learn to interact properly. I should probably hunt for the details closely at it, or maybe they should explain it somewhere (sometimes explanation make things look a little too simple though). I'm not sure if their learning is a matter of weights on connections or what. Anyway, human learning isn't learn from scratch but an interaction between genetic structure and the environment, a genetic structure that developed in a very arbitrary way in evolution. Such a structure wouldn't occur again exactly like that if evolution happened again. It's unlikely that anything remotely similar would happen again. There is nothing necessary about the way the human mind works, it is just one of many possible patterns. We have quite intelligent other species on earth today. How do we know cog isn't going to turn into a parrot? One belief is that the human-like arms will force cog to be human. maybe it will become a baboon. Interaction with humans could guide it. or it could just become a baboon living with people. One argument against it is that it won't have emotions, and regular neural networks don't simulate diffuse effects from broadcast chemicals, but another problem with emotions is that they simply developed from the arbitrary conditions that existed, something cog will never see. So i don't see why they think they're approach would work, or what they think they would get from it. A assumption sitting in the background i think is that the people working on the project will be able to use their knowledge of human workings to guide cog's development to something intelligent, but a problem with that of course is that they are all clueless MIT students with very little understanding of people. So a merry band of prowlers looking for some nasties came to the lemonade river. "Oh no, how are we going to get across?" cried the spiffy general malaise. The merry band puzzled on this, but one of the undermen came up with a brilliant idea. "We could build a bridge!" shouted underman number 5. "Now there's an idea" mused the general, "i wonder if anyone knows about building things." And of course, the valiant prince muffler stepped forward, "Give me a rutabaga and an electric spork, and i will build that damned bridge!". The undermen rallied around muffler. They searched their packs for rutabagas. They searched their packs for electric sporks. They moaned that all their sporks were non-electric. Underman number 23 brought up a plan for electrifying his spork, but alas it was all to no avail. Cabbages and potatoes! Non-electric sporks! nothing suitable to the task. underman number 15 finally spoke up, "I know someone at the butterfly division, perhaps they could give us an air lift" The spiffy general malaise agreed, "That sounds like a plan". And the connected underman called them on his cell phone. The merry band waited for the butterflies. on a sad note, doug won't be making it summer school at stanford. It's probably just as well for me though, 'cause i probably wouldn't want to go down there amidst the soulless minions of orthodoxy. Business week in an informal poll (if you're gonna be polled, its probably best for it to be in a relaxed informal setting) a bunch of AI researchers said stanford was the number one place to do AI research. I already knew that, but that means that its much less likely that I will make it there myself. Nothing but bad news this year for my lame ass. I probably need to take the GRE again. i guess i should start training. June 17, 1997 this could be a world where everyone is friends, but that's not what people want. i was going down to the beach over a road through the mountains that i don't useually travel and i took a wrong turn. The road ended in a military-industrial complex tucked back in the mountain, i took a different turn to go back, and i found a whole bunch of stuff that was on the other side of the ridge from me, including the golf course that is up here that i hadn't been to before, and there was some kind of monastery, and i went through a park that i had only seen from the other side. lots of parkers around. It wasn't where i planned to go, but it was interesting and i had some time to think. I went though a strange kind of mood shift as i was thinking about stuff, and i don't know really what actually caused it. Really i think emotions are a terrible way to run a mind. I think it had something to do with my feeling sorry that i wasn't going to have kids, but remembering that all along the plan was to create mind children as it were, electronic creatures, and that i never really liked human kids anyway. But whatever the change was, it was strange that i couldn't really remember what did it. There has to be a better design than this. No one really understands me. i don't even really understand myself completely. I just noticed that mostly i just don't care, but there are a few people, pretty much just women, that it bothers me that they don't understand me. But that's only fair, i guess. Then i'm wondering if anyone really understands anyone else. I guess some people stick to the same things and that can make them mostly predictable and understandable, but who wants to live in a plastic cage? I mean, i talk about myself constantly, but you would never be able to figure me out because i always strive to be different from what i was (better, with luck). I hate to see people get stuck. I'm bold as love, (sung by a chick, too) i'm working on the rowing machine, and im working o getting tighter abs by pulling the stick on the chain (it's not the kind with the stuff on the sides, but a stick in th center) so that it hits my gut and i have to tighten it on each stroke. No situps. The most important thing about success is to keep from making mistakes, which actually takes a lot of boring work and effort. Or something along the lines of always checking and editing. Writers do that, science does that, but it isn't a lot of fun. Chess computers are really good at checking all the possibities and avoiding bad ones. In videogames the important thing is to avoid the damage, but i never thought that was I'm am really not one for all that checking, being more of an idea person, but i don't really know where to start off doing all the fun stuff, because that would be someone else would need to deal with my problems. People always have to start off with all the grunt work, and i would really hate that. June 16, 1997 the only reason i went down to stanford anyway was to buy books, since im into technical stuff. but thanks to amazon.com, i have less need to, although it is better to actually look through a book to see if its worth anything. the fight does not go well, losses are heavy. so marilyn suggests that instead of just cutting yards for money, little kids should go into computer consulting, helping set old people up on the interent and all that telecommunications stuff. And im sure they'd be cheap. i'm not sure though if this is not actually competition for me, but it sounds like a great idea. the whole notion that all people are not friends is why i consider humans to be savages. I'm really getting tired of mystics with their secrets that people must discover to be happy. The have had thousands of years to make the world a better place, and yet they keep popping up with the same tired shit. Its time for science and technology to try, even though they try to be gracious and continue to keep out of the mystics' way. happiness is lying quietly in your cell not being tortured. June 15, 1997 It was another dark night of the soul, but i think i am recovering a little bit, the problem roughly is that i am terminally misunderstood by stupid people. And i'm not talking the way no one can really understand anyone else, but rather that i think of stuff that i think is great and no one ever gets it. Getting a job and working with people who i despise because they despise me first just has always seemed like a nightmare. If i did nothing that i want and everything they want, they could be happy with me. Well, anyway, i have been doing a tight discussion on c.a.p. about the nature of comparison and the guy seems to agree with me at the same time he is telling me i'm wrong, although i guess i do still have a little quibble. I don't know where i'm going, but i don't feel so bad about it. comparison could be one of the many things that is from a structure encoded in dna. other things that should have dna support are short term memory, conversion from short term memory to long term, whatever feedback is needed for learning. I guess i should think about this some more. i wonder if doug is gonna make it out here? i just read stuff for fun. what i need to do is start programming for fun. and more writing, although i am doing some of that. enough with the ircing. June 14, 1997 i guess we can predict that ted will get the death penalty too. i clarified that i don't know whether short term memory is a loop or a chemical remnant (probably some of both), but what it does is to bring back the same property responses as the just occurred when the object was first thought about. Long term memory does the same thing, but with a different mechanism. i am not much for accepting without understanding. in the star trek voyager episode there is a little bit showing how a greed based economy could help with the federation ideal society where everyone is trying to improve themselves. according to uncle al, people and chimpanzees could interbreed, the way horses and donkeys do. chilling in order to forget something, you have to stop thinking about it. The mind creates addition bits that when you are about to remember something, you think of something else or just don't think about it. Sometimes this can be a problem, but sometimes it is a good solution. a rough kind of a day, feeling isolated. I'm listening to jimi's first rays. and right now im listening to his hey baby land of the new rising sun. The only other version i had of it was from the tribute CD, a version done by someone else, which goes heavily into a feeling that jimi was ready to go onto a new place (which he was) and thus in that version sounds like kind of a premonition of his death. But that sense was not in jimi's version. There is the sense of moving on, and jimi was in transition at that time. But i'm thinking that my old understanding from that cover version was completely oversimplified, and i wasn't prepared for the actual richness of the real jimi, so i didn't like it at first. But it grows on me, and its really more interesting, if not as poignant and simple. They made it into a mystic call to ascension, when it was more of a conversation with an angel. this just aren't as simple as i'd like June 13, 1997 [cap] Starting at the bottom. Neurons respond to specific patterns in their inputs. Clomping these together, networks detect complex patterns in a distributed way. At a higher level, other neurons look at the response of neurons and respond to patterns in the neurons. Features or properties somehow are collections of those neural responses.Somewhere in there, the states of objects in the current world are encoded in the states of neurons; that is, there are organizing features that are handling connection between the features of the object keeping them associated, activating the subfeatures when we need to think about the object. - The bookkeeping information linking the properties together will need to be used when performing a comparison with another object, because all the corresponding properties need compared, and all the subfeatures and so forth. This kind of comparison is actually continually being made as we have to know that the object 5 seconds ago is still there and is the same object. Any type of explicit conscious comparison is going to need to active some type of general areas that like controlling inner comparision and forming a response channel to them, in addition to whatever is need just for it to be conscious. - To understand a comparison though, it is needed to understand what a short term representation is, and for some reason i'm not clear about that. A short term memory could be a pattern of neural activation that is maintained, a kind of looping current, or it could be some kind of chemical residue left in recently activated neurons. And most likely the short term memory states are properties of some organizing indexing region that merely activates longterm property storage areas. In a comparison, when two objects activate the same properties this trigger special neurons involved in noting the sharing of properties or possibly just the recurrence of property activation. The reactions of these repetition watching neurons get added together in a complicated way to indicate fair amounts of similarity, if not total exactness. It possibly to know when we are getting better and better matches. These operations have to be fast and all the parts need to be as independent as possible, even though there are many parts. a problem with just absorbing what other people know is that their limits are your limits, and you are not used to going beyond them. It can be a benefit, because you will generally stay safe and accepted. the thing i liked about jimi hendrix, he was all about being totally free and different from everyone. and he was about being a genius and not restricting hemiself to the tired conventions of the soulless hacks that surrounded him. It was about exuberance. The beatles were like that, although they were a little more like hacks, but fun. June 12, 1997 its good for the rich to be happy. they won't mind when we steal from them. im only medium smart. I can see a few levels of smart. There's your typical smart person who is pretty smart, but not so as to be alienated from other people. typical mensans are like this, fun. But at a certain point in smartness, the persons thinking won't relate to other people's and he will tend to be set apart even from the just plain smart people. Supposedly if the kid gets put several years ahead in school with people who roughly think about the same stuff, it is possible for them to learn to form relationships with people. Because forming relationships is about talking with people about common interests. Anyway, i never learned to form relationships because i never was with people who thought like me. I don't know what happens to the really smart people who become well adjusted, because they graduate early and then do they stop growing?, do they become just like everyone else only faster? But there there are the really really smart, i don't know much about them, there was uncle al, i didn't understand his thought processes at all. There's that marilyn chick, i have no idea what she thinks or if she thinks, but she seems fairly together. The smart people can usually understand really really smart people, but they just don't really think that way themselves and so don't really share that mode of thinking or interest. In the same way, the really really smart people thinking in all sort of complex ways that the medium smart person wouldn't relate to, even if the medium smart person might understand. to tell the truth, though, my inability to make friends and relate to people may be mostly more due to circumstance, and i may be smart only because i withdrew from people, and not the other way around. In those critical years from 6 to 12 when you are supposed to be learning to get along with other people, i just moved from school to school, so i never settled anywhere and i didn't learn how to make new friends. I still don't know now, but now it's even worse because i have become so different from everyone else. I remember my parents thought i was smart enough to do well wherever i was. Little did they know they were destroying my life by keeping me in public schools where i could never relate to anyone and would become forever isolated from humanity. I later repeated the same mistake from that broken philosophy when i went to a cheap college and was so ininterested that i hardly learned the meager teachings they offered. By that time of course, my spirit was also broken. A cheap graduate school continued the tend, but finally i really was mediocre in addition to being maladjusted, unmotivated, and disinterested. On that pleasant note, i can talk about the nature of my hunt for chicks. Im not able to relate to even the typical smart chick. I probably could not be interested in a woman who was less smart that one in a thousand, simply because we wouldn't be able to relate. (Not going the bimbo route which i have heard proposed but am not interested in). Well, that would mean that at random i would only have a one in a thousand chance of sinding such a person, essentially no chance. The best approach is go be at a place where the smart chicks go, and find the one at the top. I didn't do that in college or grad school, oops. Maybe a better university. Me with limited social ability. And they're probably all married by now, anyway. anarchists are the real optimists. There couldn't be money in an anarchy. O.k. the fourth is coming along so i could do a little bit about explosive. Acetone peroxide is a good primary explosive because its easy to make. its actually pretty poor compared to other options like hmtd which you can make from formaldahyde, ammonium sulfate, and hydrogen peroxide, but i don't know where to get formaldehyde. Acetone peroxide evaporates, has fairly low power, reacts with copper, and is generally worse than commercial compounds, but the ingredients are common just acetone, which is a paint thinner in hardware stores and nailpolish removal, peroxide, which is hair bleach (20 to 40 volume), the antiseptic 3% is generally too weak to work. It does require sulfuric acid as a catalyst, but just a few drops. It could come from car batteries or sometimes its sold in hardware stores as a drain cleaner instead of lye. Clairol makes hydrogen peroxide as clairoxide, and they seem to have switched to 4 ounce bottles instead of big 32 ounce bottles, more profit i'm sure. the mixture between acetone and peroxide effects the yield, but who cares about the yield when the components are cheap. You have to be careful adding the few drops of sulfuric acid slowly because it heats up. Supposedly this all needs to be done at a low temperature, but that probably doesn't matter. After a few days a white powder should precipitate out of the solution, which can be filtered out and dried, This can be used to fill fire crackers (something will need to be done for fusing and casing. In a regular firecracker the rapid burning of the powder increases the internal pressure to the point which will break the case (typically 1000 psi) and that's it. But a real explosive creates a pressure wave (instead of just burning) and can reach a million psi. Usually quite loud. It is possible to make a cheaper version by using a little acetone peroxide at the top and the rest just black powder, kind of a filler, the primary gets the secondary started. Secondary explosives, like tnt and rdx (the explosive in c4 which is made with formaldehyde) don't blow up when you just set them on fire, they need a pressure wave to set them off, but they put out a lot of power when they get started. That is, they need a blasting cap, which is a thin tube with primary explosive like acetone peroxide plus possibly a secondary explosive as a booster. So this firecracker design is something like a blasting cap. June 11, 1997 i'm losing the modem today so this will be short I found a list of difficult IQ tests I've started taking the mega test. I'm not happy with what they are passing off as intelligence, and im not doing so good. there are 48 questions, the first 24 are word analogies and i only have 15 so far. the rest of the test looks a lot worse. 24 answers puts you at 150 IQ, which theoretically i should have to get into ISPE i had connection troubles this morning since last night at 7, and when i got back on, i had 34 messages waiting, a new record. i feel good, what is goodness? same as the problem of consciousness. i gotta get a life. June 10, 1997 There were lots of spider webs on the ceiling, i guess i never really noticed them, and the ceiling is pretty high. spiders just don't bother me. so now i'm trying to find more about really really smart people, like one in a million people. i found this one guy, uncle al and he sounds really smart and uses a big vocabulary and all, but seems to have what i would call a piss-poor attitude. And it seems like a lot of smart people i'm running across have bad attitudes. I know i used to have an extremely bad one. But my vocabulary is fading away along with my ability to spell. It seems that maybe every bit of knowledge you know serves to separate you from everyone who doesn't know it. You can't talk to people who can't understand you. And if a smart person sees all the foolishness and ignorance, he's bound to become discouraged at the future of man. But people put energy into things that are important, and when problems grow, more people work on them. There is a lot of intellectual slack going around, but we have a lot of spare brain power sitting around just in case. Just give them a few large breasted females to play with till we need them, and hope they don't get too bored. I really am having to reevaluate having a high intelligence. it just doesn't seem to do much for me in the people i am encountering. i was looking for books about really smart people, and i saw (and am still considering) a book about genius and emminence, sort of about how geniuses sometimes but not always move on to do great things, and what the factors are. Genius, though, is not the same as intelligence (which is more about being able to learn lots of stuff); it can include being a good writer or artists or something. I decided a long time ago that i just wasn't that into learning lots of facts like i had been doing, but was more interested in learning some really neat ways of understanding things. I was thinking that wisdom would be better than knowledge, although that might not get at was i was after. I also really like knowing things that other people don't know, i mean i can always ask the other people or look it up, but knowledge of my own is much more fun. And of course, my big goal is about what it would take to build an artificial mind, and that kind of narrows things down, but it includes a whole lot about how we can think, but not necessarily so much about what we actually do think. So i have various goals working in me, but i think i have drifted from whatever the goal is in having a high intelligence. value of a type of things to a society is the popularity of that type of thing, which breaks into how much the individuals value it times how many people value it. Usually the important factor is how many people like it, because that has a very great range. And there is competition among different things too. But value to an individual works in a different way while still interacting with the greater value to society, an interaction between levels and a basic component in a complex system (in the sense of complexity theory). June 9, 1997 there was an estimate that deep blue was equivalent to 10^12 operations per second and that the brain is 10^14. we are getting pretty darn close, but the programming isn't there. it's getting exciting. i feel good, therefore good exists. that's the same reasoning as i think therefore i am. but it more clearly shows the kind of semantic problems involved with consciousness etc. having good self esteem is not as important as having a good self. self-esteem is just a feeling, but you as a whole are more important and you can do a better job taking carre of yourself sometimes if you treat yourself with some distance. There are somethings you should feel bad about, but you do need to be able to trust yourself and know that you can forgive yourself after you have done something bad and taking your revenge on yourself. I'm wondering what iq would mean you're one in a million and who some people like that might be. They should be encouraged because it is likely that they might be discouraged, certainly i would want to cheer them on, if possible, go! go! go! that must be too cool, and certainly interesting. i hit a weird bug in netscape. my spiral applet display out of its window in the upper corner of the screen and wouldn't go off till i kill the netscape browser. i think it was the second instance of my page. also it would stop running when i clicked it and it was supposed to stop running when i changed pages. totally weird. value and wants and goals are expectations there was a guy who did get a police job somewhere because he scored too high on his IQ test. they didn't want him to be bored and leave after his expensive training. People are generally happy in the US, very little unrest. That's probably one reason why Mcveigh had to do something so drastic to get anyone's attention. And other fringe people have had to be drastic like that also. June 8, 1997 traveling wilburys. i need more happy music. i went to a mensa meeting, and it was different for me. I actually joined in a rambling group discussion of various things, including souls and clones and the orgins of life. So am becoming a more outgoing, but there was the same problem that essentially they never mentioned anything i hadn't heard of, so i didn't really learn anything from them, except one guy was on about some research thing he was into about zero point fields explaining inertia, specifically, virtual photons get in the way of an accelerating object, become real photons, and create a force resisting the acceleration. I asked a kid there about action games with emotional content, and he suggested VR muds, so i might look at it. those involve real people, so i don't know, though. i need to get busy. there will be nothing wrong with drugs at all when intelligent machines control all the heavy equipment death before dishonor some people are bitchers, and others are fixers June 7, 1997 i have been writing "nihil sum" when i need a company name. i finally got some mail with "nihil sum" on it. It means i am nothing in latin. I realized it could be a nirvana reference. Nirvana (literally "blown out" like a candle). is kind of an emotional psychological freedom from the pain that keeps you feeling pain. The four noble truths are in the form of a medical diagnosis and course of treatment. Problem: life is rubbing like a dislocated joint. We have a solution, the eightfold path ( kind of a course of therapy ). I forget what the things in the eightfold path are, but probably the elimination of desire is really the elimination of any guilt and shame as well as the fears that make the desires so powerful. a good self is better than a good self-esteem. an abstract model can be much more helpful than the feeling of self-esteem little birdie, why do you fly upside down? June 6, 1997 a day to remember. Peanuts has snoopy slogging through the water. The peanuts stories are some of the great myths of our time. I tend to identify with linus the idealist, but i of course relate to charlie brown, the original loser and proto-slacker. i finished up with the index, except for corrections and stuff and updates. I think it will really help me finishing old thoughts and coming up with new stuff. the next step would be to add links in the journal to the index, and make it real hypertext, but without being distracting like notes can be. i may but a link in an asterisk next to the word to indicate an index entry for topics with several. today was a day for regret (which is related to guilt) i noticed that i had forgotten to pick the cherries ( i was even reminded) and they are long since gone now. I waited to make a phone call, and the people were gone for the weekend. I really haven't been doing much with myself, and there were so many things i could have done if only i had talked to the right people. But it was the plan to sleep for a while and resurface when the time is right. I understood that the transition would be tough, but i'm working on it. I got a freaky spam from some guy wanting to sell information systems for physicians. How did this get to me? I thought again about my house. It wouldn't be a traditional great family house, but i would want it to be a place where things happen, and bigger than just me. Post Master General Ian and Post Master Generalissimo Cliff were talking about their house seceding, but they never came up with a name. In general, because of various rights and restrictions on police actions, people do have a kind of sovereignty in their own house, so political separation makes sense. One need then is an entry area between the two domains. Personally i still hope to live underground, although the Palo Alto hills are starting to look a little more barren. There may be very few actual distinct feelings, but people distinguish the situations in which they occur. I am still looking at a possible science of all possible things mental. Trying to concentrate on mental things as they currently exist is very limiting, and many principles won't make sense from too narrow a perspective. One of the basic moral principles is not hurting other persons. In practice it can be difficult to decide what does or doesn't hurt. June 5, 1997 I got used to waiting for christmas, but what if christmas isn't coming. loneliness is such a drag some predictions about the future.: Video phones will become popular when it is realized that seeing the speaker does not add any value to the conversation, but there is great benefit in being able to show the other person things. The camera will finally point to what the person ins looking at and not at their face. This pathetic misconception has really held up telecommunications. Businesses are the ones mostly using phones. they will have setups where they can choose what to display to the other person, possibly menus and such. Computers will finally be able to explain things to people. An explanation is not simply a one-way thing, the speaker has to understand what the recipient knows and wants and relate the explanation to that. Documents at this point tend to be very general, appealing to broad categories of listeners. The understanding and sensitivity of a computer will require it to be able to think more like a person, or at least have a model of what the other person thinks. Each person will need a computer that understands him, and that can't happen simply with a single program for everyone. Much of the "program" will be sort of active modules. Society will be a lot happier and able to grow beyond a lot of its current infantile limits when happiness is widely known to be the tool that it is. Happiness is a means to control people behavior used by various forces and institutions trying to stay in existence. It is a very valuable and useful tool, but some of the entities that use it are simply not the best use of happiness. It is a very complicated subject, but people will come to understand it, and not just an elite. June 4, 1997 clinton reduced crime. In your face mr. elephant man i hate silent letters i saw Das Boot again. it was good, but it wasn't as good as the first time, and i found that i didn't really focus on it as steadily. I think the emotional issues involved, like teamwork, just aren't as important to me. i need to sit in a closet for a while. I am totally not claustrophobic. i kind of like closed in spaces. that submarine just didn't seem claustrophobic to me. I saw Female Perversions also. supposedly its good, but i could not relate to or understand any of the women characters. Lot's of nudity. The people just seemed unpleasant and disturbed. The main character is a lawyer, yuck. I'd like to see a video game with more emotional content. Most games are about destroying mindless monsters for which you can feel no mercy. But a powerful game would allow you explore your real feelings and desire to kill. I got a lot out of the apple ii castle wolfenstein that had real scream and shouting, and people that would surrender. Human characters that speak and show feelings. Having to decided if people live or die, emotion presure. Some way would be needed to make real connections with computer characters. Saving people, maybe a slower tempo. I'll think about it. i could probably do something with the doom or quake engine. A chance to face inner demons. salt reduces the effect of receptors for bitterness and through that makes food taste better i've been bad. i don't know if you recover from that. people learn to be afraid to do something wrong. If you do something wrong, even by accident, you feel guilty about it. The guilt itself can make you continue to be bad, as that evil becomes a part of who you are and how you relate to yourself. To eliminate the guilt could make you learn that you can do evil and (eventually) have no emotional consequences. You can then become cold and soulless. If you recover from a lack of shame and guilt, you will have the capacity for both good and evil. Evil doesn't put and restriction on action, and can therefore be more powerful than good. Supposedly, you can learn to choose good while retaining a potential for evil, but that means you remain, in part and potentially, evil. It isn't much of a step above a person whose evil is merely unrealized by fear. it's only been have a couple days, so i can't be sure, but i think i had a subtle shift of metabolism, i've wanted to sleep less and eat less. i had to force myself to stay at my normal levels. June 3, 1997 It's raining again. somebody needs to fix those weather satellites. (#phil)what's the deal with proponderance of evidence? what if almost all of the evidence say a person is liable, but there is one little bit that demonstrates[proves conclusively] there was no fault. isn't that still a preponderance of evidence? (#phil)dreams are actually a mammal thing, all mammals have dreams, so it has to do with emotions and thinking, possible part of the learning process. dreams might be a kind of a way for the brain to practice for the real thing, or to check out some of the consequences of what it thinks. [durt suggest that dreams are just garbage collection] durt, what do you mean just? what do think garbage collection is? it's checking for things you can discard and what you can keep, but that has to involve thinking about what you need to know i could start logging my conversations on irc. mcveigh is guilty. that's poor man's justice. I should get out more. maybe a job would be good. see more people. By myself i tend to drift off in behavioral space. remembering things is itself an intuitive process. the medical profession is like a big fraternity, and the overwork they subject the interns to is just hazing. There could be sciences of meaning and and what can be done or the artificial. Science is generally about what exists and not about the space of systems that could possibly exist. Engineering uses scientific knowledge about what things work and how they work, but the method for finding new stuff is more like an art. Trial and error is not itself scientific, for that you need hypotheses and experiments to test them. I suppose computer science wishes it were really a science like this. I'm not sure what the nature of such a science would be. It works at a meta level above the study of things that actually exist. I don't understand the idea of a debate team. Why not have teams practicing cooperation to find goals. If you have to have competition, why not have separate teams working in parallel to find solutions. I don't like people that are too much like me, because i always have the strongest disagreements with them I get frustrated when people come so close and miss it. Maybe, i don't know, i haven't tried too much to get to know people, and people like me are very rare. I say this because i am kind of like al einstein, but i think he's just a big goof, although he had some good results, maybe a lucky shot. he was tenacious, though. Maybe i should get a job at a patent office. June 2, 1997 i hate when people should on me. I went to a party at cliff's place in oakland. He's going to some writer's workshop somewhere with a friend of his. It was actually a fairly interesting experience for me because although i mostly just sat quitely for a while, i started thinking about the shame and guilt stuff, which i find really easy to get rid of if i merely think about it (which i don't, that's been my problem) And i actually opened up a little and talked to people as we were sitting around. We talked a fair amount about nanotechnology. One guy was interested in alternative computer technologies. There's nano, optical, quantum. I actually do that kind of stuff on irc a fair amount, getting a conversation started. I've actually been quite sociable on irc lately and i didn't know if it would translate to real life. Mostly it didn't, but i was quite better than i have been, and i think it was promising. Now if i can only find people to talk to. It used to be i could only talk one-on-one. We'll see. Zeppelin's fourth One guy, steve, made a strange argument that a brain could not be simulated on a computer. According to chaos theory, you could not create a computer simulation of someones brain and then have it work exactly like that brain because little differences between the brain and the simulation would make sure that the two would get out of synch in some way. Unfortunately, the same argument applies to a meat copy of the brain, like if you made a transporter duplicate. I don't think his argument can be made to show that the simulation wouldn't be something that we would call a person, but it would not be the exactly the same as the original person either. It kind of hinges on what you want to call "the same as a human brain". Of course, he doesn't seem to have factored in that stable dynamical systems have some noise resistance, and might not be very chaotic at all at the lower levels. I mean the mind seems pretty chaotic, but maybe not that chaotic. I feel like i could be pretty happy downloaded into a computer. shun this mortal coil My little computer's batteries went out and i lost all my notes from the party. A person on irc said i was interesting to talk to, and cliff did, although i think they were just because i said i wondered if i was interesting. I'm kind of afraid that i have a really limited area of things that i can talk about-- mostly technology stuff and that certainly isn't the whole world. And since i really don't have a good sense of humor, i should work on that, although maybe i just don't like making fun of things. Cliff gave me his definition of intelligence. A greater intelligence means you can make more connections between things. This fits with my understanding of thinking as metaphorical because in a metaphor you draw comparisons to different pieces of the objects being compared, and typically each of the pieces has to be matched with subpieces. Hofstadter has a model, a computer program, that shows how flexible analogies can be created. It uses a kind of blackboard model, which is a fairly common ai technique in which lots of unconnected programs do little operations on what is written on the common blackboard. Also, how many connections you can make will depend on several things. having a lot of things to compare to (more knowledge) means more connections are theoretically possible in the brain. How often the process gets interrupted (an ability to concentrate) will effect how many of all the connections possible in your brain you will make. Sometimes the mind will interrupt itself with thoughts like it doesn't want to do this or some belief that it can't or it's hungry and wants to be somewhere else or the endless supply of things that keep us from thinking clearly. Also, the brain has to know when it's time to stop looking for connections, some people might learn to stop after finding a certain kind of solution, but might on another occassion look a little deeper or at some other area. Since its hard to search the whole universe, people tend to know of certain areas to search in certain situations, but a problem happens when the solution they need is not made with connections to what they are looking at. A smart person typically has selected good collections of ideas to search through for connections, and doesn't have to even look at a bunch of really inappropriate ideas, he can concentrate his efforts, and typically he will have a way to know when he has to try something different. Saying "this is that" to a computer is often handled as a simple equality, nothing like what a person does, which can be (and maybe always is) a metaphorical comparison. So AI based on logical equivalence can't work like people Emotions are mixtures of things hant can't exist on their own, like quarks. June 1, 1997 What a hosehead! i'm work on a theory of emotions as a mix of different interactions. Emotions tend to be composites of certain brain interactions, the way color is a mixture of three different primaries, and pictures are mixtures of colors. The question is, what are th interacting pieces that create the different emotions. Emotions are part of a kind of distributed control system. It would be possible to distribute power in a nanomachine mechanically by having a circulatory system, like our blood system. the fluid (gas or liquid) passing through could spin tiny turbines at the "capillary" level to generate any kind of power. This system could also be related to a material distribution system or heat extraction. A fractal system is the key, though. i have nothing to do, but i never have enough time to do it. and im always late.