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Stuck with me (again) since watching Inception (not to mention other movies and sources like The Matrix) is the notion of simulated reality, and more specifically, the (perhaps surprising) idea that it's statistically more probable than not that we are in fact living in a simulation.

From Wikipedia:

Simulated reality is the proposition that reality could be simulated—perhaps by computer simulation—to a degree indistinguishable from "true" reality. It could contain conscious minds which may or may not be fully aware that they are living inside a simulation. In its strongest form, the "simulation hypothesis" claims it is entirely possible and even probable that we are living in a simulated reality.

This is quite different from the current, technologically achievable concept of virtual reality. Virtual reality is easily distinguished from the experience of "true" reality; participants are never in doubt about the nature of what they experience. Simulated reality, by contrast, would be hard or impossible to separate from "true" reality.

...the philosopher Nick Bostrom investigated the possibility that we may be living in a simulation. A simplified version of his argument proceeds as such:

i. It is possible that an advanced civilization could create a computer simulation which contains individuals with artificial intelligence (AI).

ii. Such a civilization would likely run many, billions for example, of these simulations (just for fun, for research or any other permutation of possible reasons.)

iii. A simulated individual inside the simulation wouldn’t necessarily know that it is inside a simulation — it is just going about its daily business in what it considers to be the "real world."

Then the ultimate question is — if one accepts that the above premises are at least possible— which of the following is more likely?

a. We are the one civilization which develops AI simulations and happens not to be in one itself?

b. We are one of the many (billions) of simulations that has run? (Remember point iii.)

Kind of crazy, huh? I'm not advocating one way or the other but it's tremendously interesting to read and speculate about. In particular, the question of, "How would we know or find out we're living in a simulated reality?"

The Matrix, for instance, posits bugs and artifacts of various sorts present in the system that might well reveal the simulation (though the general populace is completely unaware). Inception raises the good point that in a dream reality, even the craziest dream seems completely normal to the dreamer, so there may well not be any way to determine what is real (other than by waking up, although the use of the totem can help if you suspect you are in a dream... maybe).

Of course, this all spirals into much more existential philosophical points (the nature of consciousness, perception vs. reality, and so on) than I'm going to go into here. Suffice to say, it's pretty thought-provoking.

No, I'm not going to review or spoil the movie Inception or prattle on at length about it here. I really rather enjoyed it, it has a few holes here and there, and it gets you thinking.

In particular, I like the idea of having a totem. Seems safer that way.

I didn't realize I hadn't blogged here at all for the entire month; that's kind of disconcerting. I even had a couple of things to write about but just never got around to it: one was a review of Stephen Baxter's novel Transcendant (and on Stephen Baxter's works in general), another on the movie Inception.

Well, I'll still write about those things; but I couldn't just let July get away without some sort of blog post here.

My wife and I spent the past weekend in Walla Walla, Washington, for an anniversary trip to check out the booming wine scene they have going on. How booming? Well, they have some 130 wineries in the Walla Walla Valley (an area that also encompasses Milton-Freewater in Oregon), and 85 of those have tasting rooms open to the public.

And, an interesting coincidence: the weekend we were visiting also happened to be the weekend of the Wine Bloggers Conference.

I'm not going to give a blow-by-blow account of all the wineries we visited, but I will highlight at least a few that stood out:

• L'École No. 41 is one of the biggest and oldest wineries in the area and on Friday afternoons (starting at 2:00) they have a special "Honor Roll" tasting for a nominal fee. We got there just in time to not only get an inside tour (with tasting wines from the barrels, even) but to enjoy a vertical tasting of their Perigee line of estate wines. Pretty fantastic.
• Tertulia Cellars was a fun stop not only for the wines but also the lively conversation of the hostess (I don't remember her name).
• Similarly good conversation and wines at Rulo Winery, along with a large platter of artisan cheeses to help ones' self to. We loved their Syrca red wine and I particularly enjoyed their oak-aged Chardonnay—I was most impressed with the side-by-side tasting they did with their stainless steel-aged Chardonnay so you could taste the difference: it was like the kind of beer geekery I'm all over.
• Saviah Cellars was another great source of conversation and information; in addition to getting an interesting impromptu lesson in viticulture, we got the lowdown on some good sources of beer in the area (though we didn't get any) and some inside info on the local wine industry. Oh, and good wines, too.

Friday night we attended the Walla Walla party of the year: the Charles Smith/K Vintners party held in part for the Wine Bloggers Conference. It would sound much cooler to say, "we crashed the party," but in reality we were legitimately on the list so there was no party-crashing involved.

And by "party of the year" I mean just that: apparently Charles Smith is a rock star in Walla Walla, the area's larger-than-life personality who is eccentric, makes incredible wine, and throws the best parties. We had no idea who he was or that the party was a big deal; we almost didn't go until we heard it was going to be the place to be. (And afterward, everyone who heard we were at the party was highly impressed.)

In addition to the free wine tastings, live rock band, and burlesque dancers, the other highlight of the party was meeting fellow beer blogger The Beer Wench (AKA Ashley Routson), who was undercover attending the Wine Bloggers Conference and, well, generally partying, as near as I could tell.

By our count, we ended up visiting 13 wineries, and tasting the wines of several others. That sounds like a lot, but on our first day (and second winery), we met a couple who was on their 20th winery of the day. They were tasting then pouring their wine out, but even so, how they were still standing (much less driving) is a bit of a mystery.

A good weekend, all told. And I may have some more anecdotes from it to post. We'll see.

I was going to write up my (extensive, and probably redundant) analysis of the final episode/season of LOST, but it just got the better of me. Frankly, it was just kind of a shit ending that didn't make much sense and really answered none of the questions at the heart of the series, or that they introduced in the final season. They wrapped it all up with some sleight-of-hand distraction over the "sideways world" being in fact some future spirit purgatory designed to give cheap emotional resonance instead of actual closure.

Instead, we're left to speculate how they screwed up the series what the island and its mysteries really were, and here's the only answer that really works: it's an alien spaceship, crashed or stranded (or "lost" ha-ha) on Earth, with sufficiently advanced technology as to be indistinguishable from magic.

And that's all I'll say about that.

It's been a crazy, busy two weeks with two separate trips following a Memorial Day trip to Lincoln City: my wife and daughter during the first week for three days, myself this past week for two. I went to Seattle with my boss to attend SMX Advanced: a Search Engine Optimization/Marketing show. I know, I know: outside of the industry SEO is usually seen as a bunch of do-what-it-takes-to-rank, snake oil shuckstering at best, and linkbaiting spamfarms at worst.

But it turns out they're not that bad. Or, you know, the "white hat" ones anyway.

And it's interesting to attend one of these things and watch all the industry "celebrities" that everyone wants to know and talks about: frankly, I've only learned who a relative handful of them are since I've been working at Smart Solutions for a year and a half, so while conference-goers are going, "Wow! How'd they get So-and-So to speak/attend/etc.?" I'm thinking, "Who are these people?"

Even in the computer/internet industry, SEO seems more insular than most. At least, that's my perspective.

The weeks and weekend coming up are booked up in some way, as well: so while the weekday schedule has slowed back down for us (except for school getting out this week), we've got things to do for the next four or five weekends, at least.

Isn't summer supposed to be relaxing? Oh well.

We enjoyed a pleasant visit to the Oregon Coast (Lincoln City again) for the Memorial Day weekend, even with occasionally drizzly weather. Sunday we drove up to Pacific City for the afternoon and had a great time on the beach before lunch at the Pelican Pub and discovering one of the greatest wine tasting rooms, well, ever.

More on that later. I mostly just wanted to mark the passing of May (a chilly and wet one this year).

I suppose this idea would benefit any news program and not just our local NewsChannel 21 broadcast, but I think the cutaway to every new story should be accompanied by the Law & Order "chung chung" sound. And the end of the show should cut to the yellow digital "24" clock.

Yes, I've been a bad blogger this month here. I'm this close to switching this site over to WordPress though, and I think that will help my creative output. I just moved Hack Bend to WordPress and that went alright (so far).

There's not much to report for April, actually, it's just been a busy month that seemed to slip away quickly, as they seem to do these days. I am glad that the current TV season is winding down, as that's a major timesink and you all know how I resent it around this time of year.

Fortunately, with both "24" and "Lost" ending this year, that at least frees up two hours a week. Plus they won't aggravate me like they are now. ("24" is less aggravating than "Lost" but it's still a weak season. As was last year's.)

I entered a beer in the Central Oregon Homebrewers Organization's annual "Spring Fling" competition, which was held last weekend on the 17th. I didn't win anything, but after something like 15 years of homebrewing it was time to finally do something "official" (though I did enter beers in a couple of the Deschutes County Fairs some years ago, and got ribbons for those—so this wasn't the first competition I've entered). It was fun, and enlightening. I really need to become an official member of the homebrew club.

Recently I wondered aloud if it would make a viable murder plot for someone to tamper with a Toyota to use the "sudden acceleration" problem as a cover for a killing. Almost immediately after that I wondered instead when just such a plot would show up on either one of the Law & Order or CSI TV shows.

For some reason I'm pretty sure it would appear on one or the other (or both) of CSI: Miami and plain-vanilla Law & Order. It just strikes me as something that really requires an opening one-liner.

I know that you've looked at "2012" in the headline and are assuming that I'm talking about creating a beer to drink at the end of the world, or some sort of similar nonsense. And in a way I guess you're sort of right: 2012 is the year I'll be celebrating one of those "grand" birthdays: 40. And I've been giving some thought lately to brewing up a super-big, super-special beer to crack open on my 40th birthday.

This might ordinarily be more of a post for my Brew Site blog, but I'm writing about it here because it's still something of an unformed idea. I've got some general "goals" in mind for it:

• It will be high alcohol, likely 12% by volume or higher;
• It will age for almost 3 years (depending on when I get around to brewing it);
• It will have lots of hops (probably) but won't be a hop bomb—hops don't age well as a rule, and even a hugely hoppy beer will mellow the hops quite a lot in that time;
• I'll use some smoked malts in the recipe;
• It will (probably) age for a bit of time on wood—wood chips, that is (since I don't have a five gallon barrel), which may or may not be soaked in bourbon or similar ahead of time.

I will also very likely bottle it all in 22-ounce bottles and wax-dip them. I haven't fully decided if I want to make five gallons or perhaps 2.5 gallons (or even one?); some of the crazier experimental stuff that's been bouncing around in my head would certainly be easier (and more cost-effective) to restrict to a smaller batch size, but we'll see.

Anyway, I'll document the process here. The beer will either be called "40" or "2012," I haven't decided which yet. But it should be epic.

Like many blogs out there, I have spam-checking service Akismet set up to filter out the comment spam. It's built-in on my Brew Site WordPress blog, but on chuggnutt and Hack Bend it's using a PHP class that I coded myself.

Up until a few days ago, it's been working beautifully on my two non-WordPress blogs. But all of a sudden, every spam comment to the two blogs started coming through approved (not marked as spam). Every single one.

Tonight I started poking around my code and the Akismet API to see if anything had changed. According to their API documentation, Akismet should only return two possible values for the spam check: "true" or "false".

I poked around with some cURL tests but that was inconclusive; appropriate testing strings ("viagra-test-123" will always return true) were performing as specified. But when I entered that test string as a comment on my site, it was not flagged as spam. Clearly, something had changed with the API, since the code has been running along just fine since, what, 2006?

So I set my PHP code to give me the raw response from the Akismet server(s), and these are the two results—this is the exact code and return values Akismet is returning:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:39:52 GMT
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: close
X-akismet-server: 192.168.7.4

4
true
0


HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:40:45 GMT
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: close
X-akismet-server: 192.168.6.46

5
false
0

Do you see? Akismet has changed their return values. They are no longer simply "true" and "false", they are pre- and appended with digits on separate lines.

Of course, more fool me for coding my PHP to look explicitly for "true" and "false" only—once I saw this, I was able to fix the problem quickly. (Changing the comparison from "string equality" to "string contains".) Spam checking fixed.

The weird thing is, I can't seem to find anything about this online (other than a comment on another blog so far), and I can't figure why this is what's being returned to my PHP while cURL reported only "true" and "false". Perhaps something to do with UTF encoding? Multi-byte strings? I don't know.

And why now? There have been no server or PHP changes on my end and like I said, it's been working fine for years. Literally.

Anyway, I posted this here to help out other people potentially having troubles with their Akismet code.

So the first trailer for this year's A-Team movie hit the net yesterday, and if you follow me on Twitter you know that the first link to it I posted was taken down ("infringing"). But of course you can just search YouTube and find it again if you want to watch it.

...I've watched it a bunch of times now. I can't help it: it looks friggin' awesome, and damn if that isn't a good movie trailer. Now I can't wait for the movie to come out.

Well, yes, I am that geeky.

Two totally random things today that I found on the internets:

The Oatmeal ASCII art: I have no other commentary other than go to that site and view the HTML source.

Well, I have some commentary. It makes me want to drop ASCII art in the web pages I work on...

Nic Cage as Everyone: Funny and odd. Whomever thought this one up has too much time on their hands... of course. That being said, there are some really good image editing jobs on some of those pictures.

The new year is upon us, and we finished off our old year and started up this new one in San Diego. We left a week ago, on Sunday, two days after Christmas, with a mad plan to get up really early and make the drive in one day.

For background, last June when we left San Diego (yes, you counted correctly, that's two SoCal trips in the same year), we left about 7:30 in the morning and managed to get home about 10pm that night—roughly 14.5 hours is the number that sticks in our head.

This time, traveling south—we rolled out at 6:10am and arrived right around 11pm—it took roughly 17 hours. Two things worked against us: snowy roads on southern Highway 97 in Oregon and all the holiday traffic returning to Southern California the same day.

It was grueling.

We spent New Year's Eve at my brother's house, playing Balderdash and Left 4 Dead 2 and drinking beers and ringing in the New Year. We had tired kids, so we retired to our hotel just after midnight.

So far my 2010 has consisted of seeing Up in the Air (my brother and sister-in-law watched the kids for us), drinking more beer, and driving home. We left San Diego around 9am yesterday and made it to Redding around 8pm last night—we wisely decided to split the drive home into two days.

The 11-hour drive to Redding isn't nearly as bad as it sounds; we made really good time most of the way—through Los Angeles especially!—and we stopped for maybe an hour at the Olive Pit in Corning for dinner and, well, to shop for olives.

We made it the rest of the way home by mid-afternoon today, and I'm pleased to report none of the snow and ice we encountered a week ago is there. The roads were perfectly clear and except for some weird inversion-layer fog we hit just out of Weed—and up through Klamath Falls—driving conditions were great.

So, in a nutshell, that's how my 2010 is going so far. How's yours?