much better today. it comes and goes.
at the wednesday ai meeting, a lot of biological stuff. stan
asked for examples where sensory fusion of different modes
actually gets used in recognition. my only contribution in
the meeting was to suggest recognizing types of fruit,
because it combines smell, taste and mouth feel.
some people are so good looking it's almost painful to look
at the them (the word is "ouch"). aimee is like that.
i don't think my hair is curly so much as i'm just too lazy to
brush it, and it just curls up instead of sticking straight out.
i felt bad about it, but i did think i was better than andrea
because i was smarter than her. but smarter isn't better.
richer is better. and i wasn't smarter than her, anyway.
saw weird al's video about this annakin guy. i like the tune.
yoda is a much better song, though.
i saw 'high art' with aimee. ally sheedy is a very thin lesbian.
it was depressing.
i'm a little blue today
i also saw 'transpotting'. it was pretty depressing, even if
it was funny in spots and had kind of a happy ending
maybe i should keep a dream journal. like it said, know yourself.
but i'm not sure that i have any dreams that i don't understand.
i keep pretty close touch. and after all, i think that dreams
are about things that we want to forget about.
nothing. it's like there is nothing. just an emptiness.
i saw sixth sense. it was pretty scary because the
ghosts didn't look like disembodied spirits but rather like
things with substance that could actually hurt you, sort of
like zombies, and which, having taken serious abuse already
and kept going, you couldn't stop by conventionally means.
and if someone enters your house, beat him the hell up before
he shoots you. the movie did use the cheap hollywood trick of
getting quiet and playing a loud noise. i'll admit i jumped,
but it's just a reflex. i ain't afraid of no ghosts. and yeah,
since i don't believe in ghosts, i was a little disappointed.
"de profundo clamo te domine"
i spent all of sunday with aimee. i should have spent a little more
time reading, but it was very pleasant.
every technical society in this universe is going to be hit with
the same problem: an information processing machine is limited
in speed because of the speed of light, so computers need to be
built smaller in order to be faster and more capable. i pretty
simple consequence to this is that if you can make small computers,
you are probably also going to develop the ability to make tiny
robots (since you can make small stuff). It seems that nanotechnology,
making molecule sized machines, would be a universal trend in
technical societies. But that leads to another likely outcome.
If you had things (or if you were) so small and light as an
intelligent machine the size of a dust particle, it would be easy
to spread copies throughout a galaxy at sublight speed (and they
could be accelerate to near light speed fairly easily). We should
expect that the whole universe would already be teeming with things
such as this. But at this level of sophistication, we don't know
what might happen. They might decide to have some type of noninterference
directive. or they might be running great biological experiments.
they could be all around us yet we couldn't see them.
an additional consequence that i see that might make the situation even
more complex comes when you think about what the "generation" after
the intelligent nanomachines would be like. Again, the nanomachines
have that speed of light restriction on them, and the very process
of their development involved a kind of design improvement and
development process in which there was a conscious and understood
goal to get better and better designs. (in constrast to evolution
which has no design goals, but has gradually developed many useful
systems) If the whole nanotech design system keeps on it's implosive
pressure (maybe even still spurred on by the animal greed of the
meat generation) toward faster and smaller, eventually you will
want to have subatomic and subnuclear computers, which would probably
only be accessible to nanoscale machines. The intriguing physical
aspect of such really small devices would be their strange properties
from what we know of quantum physics, and behavior of things at that
level. on that small scale, the world gets foamy, with virtual
particles popping in and out of existence, particles skip from
one place to another without ever being in the middle. little
wormholes open up from place to place, and it is possible for particles
to make small hops back in time. Essentially, our big body physics
goes to hell and something else happens. (my quantum mech is
a little weak so i'm not all sure what goes on down there).
Conceivably, though, such (sub)picomachines would be able to travel
through wormholes anywhere in the universe, and between different
ones. I'm sure they'd be able to generate new universes if they
wanted too, and cause the sort of mass inflation (inflation theory
about the big bang says that the universe started off fairly
small but gained a lot of mass before it went bang) that makes ours
so interesting. So i come to a logical conclusion that godlike
creatures are a likely result of technology. One of the painful
assumptions in there, though, is that it is possible for things
at the pico level to contain information, and manipulate things at
that level. I think the physics people already would think that's
wrong, because we have knowledge that us big things would not
be able to get the information from those small things. (i suppose
information doesn't necessarily have to be accessible from both
directions)
i bought a book of latin curses, berlitz french and spanish.
a book on musoft networking essentials. something on intelligent
agents in java.
eek
only i can prevent forest fires
happy yom kippur
monday night football party at matt's. we actually watched
the game. it was just me matt dave and a couple from matt's
work, tom and sarah. matt told me about the wednesday meeting
at a-tan, and that he met stan franklin.
interoperation of decision systems is the key to intelligence.
knowing is an action. the act of accepting something and acting
and continuing to think based on that statement's assumed truth
i still haven't sent in my letter to gene at fedex.
(or written it). shame on me.
miss tennessee is from rhodes college. it doesn't look so much
like a beauty pageant anymore, though. they seems a little
plain. it's more about their platform, i guess. political.
road runner has been having troubles. has been going down.
got the linux connection up. i don't know what the problem
was for sure. i changed the host name to match the one
given by roadrunner. i may not have been running the rrlogin
program from root before. we'll see. now i need to get
the servlets going.
man. talk about yer slacking off.
so there was the big open house at fedex. there was actually a
guy that was at memphis state in grad school when i was there
who was the boss of the extranet division. they use a lot
of java and servlets. i'm supposed to send the guy gene a
description of the project i worked on, and some code, i think.
i had a mensa party here on monday. church of monday night football.
maybe 6 people showed up. i was panicked the day before because
it was on abc, which is UHF here and basically you can't see it.
i went out and got a new antenna, which helped somewhat but wasn't
great. then i found that the cable from the cable modem also
receives tv cable. so now i have cable. i was just watching the
history channel and war engineers. anyway, the party was ok.
i had some porn on the computer, and that was kind of bad when
aimee showed up, but she acted cool about it, so i left it (still
probably bad, though). people mostly didn't watch the football
game, but spent a lot of time outside smoking. i should have just
designated another room for smokers. And i grilled some burgers
before, wanting them to be ready in advance, but i ended up
having to reheat them, which is a bummer. people were nice about it.
i wrote email invitations with long rambling and silly directions
but they assumed you were coming from the freeway, and it
turned out that pretty much nobody was.
i just failed the microsoft assessment. 58%, needed 75%. there's
quite a bit of nt administration i don't know, but it seems pretty
easy. i guess i should read a manual.
why should a person know why he does things?
on the third day of the seventh month in the twenty-second year of
the reign of Chota the great stone mover, the metalsmith swija
found a wondrous material in his foundry. it seemed to shift
like water at times, and at other times it stood fast hard like
silver. he ground some, and it took an edge that would cut many
skins without dulling. he cut a timber with the blade, and the
timber fell away like an egg shell. he cleaved a great stone
and it split into two pieces. but when he took the blade to
a chicken for the pot, it mysteriously warped back to the shape
of a smooth stone, and when in anger he tried to bash the chicken,
the ingot splashed away like quicksilver.
i am in a viscious feedback loop. i don't like how things are
going, so i sleep a lot to avoid things, and sleeping a lot
makes things worse. and i'm sure i have other cruel cycles
going on.
i believe in the basic orderliness of things. there are rules
about how things work.
it's not magical. things as they are now are a consequence of
how they were and what was done to change them.
the world does seem a little overpopulated with good looking
unattached women. they are a little hard to find, though.
burned some money at platinum again, after going to denim and
diamonds. at dnd, there are some who have x's instead of bands.
they tend to be really really cute. there were some with big
hair that must have been intimidating, because they had to stick
with themselves. i didn't dance with anyone, but there was one
who was repeatedly knocking me with her elbow. she was in like
a group of 4. it was playful. a couple guys seemed to want
me to dance with some of those cuties. anyway, at pp, there
was this one skinny girl (anna maybe). it was like her skin,
which was a little thick, a small layer of fat, was just loosely
draped on her bones, with hardly any muscle under it. i wonder how
she moves around at all. sabrina, otoh, is small but strong. i see
her a lot. and there was one girl(memory?) who drives down from kentucky.
i downloaded a cool program, and x server for windows, so i
can run x windows programs on my laptop. the evaluation is for
15 days but it only costs 25 dollars.
mix
doug came by yesterday and i helped him a little setting up
a standalone apache installation on his laptop. but for some
reason i couldn't get it to come up on my local network. it's
simple to set up, i think, it just wouldn't send info through.
now that i think about it. i know what it was. the ipmasquerading
has to run a program called ipchains to enable it. you can
set it to enable a whole series, or just individual addresses,
and i enabled just my laptop's address. i think it gives a slight
bit more hacking security.
i'm liking my toys now. i may not need to sit at my desktop anymore.
its a real server now. administered remotely, not using a monitor.
pigs (i'm eating a sausage and egg samwich) are dirty noy because they play in
mud but because they eat faeces.
i need to do a quick cgi-chat, just a post a line and display of a file.
something in the paper about kids helping the homeless. it seems like
that's the government's job
actually got the webcam to update right with a kludge suggested
by dug. i use a cgi script to load the jpg, which doesn't get
cached.
i actually got up at 4 am, but i wasted the time on irc. but
at least i wasn't sleeping. i did take a nap at lunchtime, though.
overall, a waste of a day, but at least i switched it up
and i can't find my copy of the kama sutra. where could it have
gone? i'm bummed, i was going to look at it and the java stuff.
i did find another book that was similar, though. with pictures.
but not so much of the indian philosophy, which is what i wanted
to read about.
and i thought of something cute. i pointed the webcam to my food
when i was eating dinner.
i got aol working at work. it turns out that there are two different
socks protocols and setting them up is quite different. winsock
requires you to add permissions for the users, while socks requires
permissions for the ip address of the machine. but i got it
going, and now the office is all set up. i also installed a sound
card in the pentium machine in the back. it runs win95, so it
should be a good quake machine. one machine couldn't load netscape
3.0 because its version of win32s was too old, i don't know where
i can find an update for win32s.
temperance was interesting. davedavedave was hitting on a couple
of women a few tables over. they told him they were having a tough
time and were men bashing. he said we were a high iq society and
could guarantee intelligent conversation. at one point dave got
us four to whip out our mensa cards as proof. at least he kept at
it. i suppose that gets sympathy. brad thought of going over and
apologizing for dave, and dave kept pushing him till he did it.
it was two of them, and three of us, so i left to make it even.
i think maybe dave might have gotten some sympathy, though he
shouldn't really be dating since his divorce isn't through.
i hope it goes ok.
September 2, 1999