Before I get asked by anybody: No, the person who signed "Chuggy" to the "Web Rant" section at the bottom of page 5 of the latest issue of The Source is not me.
I feel the need to preemptively clarify this because my own wife asked if that was me.
So there you have it. Ain’t me. I’d sign either "Jon" or "Chuggnutt," never "Chuggy."
This past weekend was the annual family reunion up at Suttle Lake, and since it’s the one time of the year that we actually have to go camping, we packed up the gear and off we went.
The weather sucked, though. It was windy—really windy, tent-flattening wind (other people’s tents; ours was well-shielded by trees)—all day Friday and Saturday. Saturday afternoon the clouds rolled in and sure enough, it began to rain that night around 11pm. Kind of a constant drizzle throughout the night, nothing like the downpour we had in 2004, but enough to leave everything outside wet. Inside the tent was fine and dry, fortunately. Breaking camp and putting stuff away was no fun.
I need to pay more attention to Suttle Lake and its environs more, though. I was looking at it in Google Earth and noticed that there are 3 other lakes just down the road(s): Blue Lake, Scout Lake, and Dark Lake. (Here’s the respective Google Maps page.) How have I never noticed those or checked those out before?
This article from the NY Times (link is good at the moment, though I’m not sure it won’t disappear behind some paywall at some point and be inaccessible) covers the sufficiently weird theory/philosophy proposed by Nick Bostrom that we are likely (actually, almost mathematically certainly) living inside a computer simulation.
("Living" wouldn’t quite be the correct term, of course.)
It’s a theory I’ve encountered before, though the NY Times does a good job of simplifying it and squirting it out into the public consciousness:
You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.
Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.
Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.
There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.
I don’t know about this "virtual ancestors" scenario necessarily—I mean, why not just run a simulation for the heck of it, a là The Sims or something? The author considers that:
And if owners of the computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles as Cleopatra or Napoleon.
Anyway. I followed this up by finding Simulated reality on Wikipedia, which contains a rundown of Bostrom’s theory as well as broad coverage of others. Interesting stuff, and it got me thinking as to how one would go about determining whether one lives in a computer simulation.
(As a start, consider how one might determine whether or not one is dreaming. After all, dreams are a type of simulated reality, no?)
Of course, it all hinges on whether or not consciousness itself is a computable phenomenon. I’m a little torn on that question; I certainly think the brain is a computational entity of some sort—Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works is an excellent book, by the way—but does that make consciousness computable as well, or something more? Or is it merely an illusory side-effect of some process? Or is it ultimately indeterminable?
From a science fictional standpoint, I like the idea of the brain being an advanced quantum computer of some sort, with whatever wackiness extending from that. That’s probably neither here nor there, but I just wanted to throw that out there.
Hmmm… I guess it doesn’t all hinge on the computability of consciousness.
Would the simulations (ie, us) becoming aware that they are a simulation qualify as becoming "self aware" in the "real world"? I mean, we have a term for it when a computer program does: Strong Artificial Intelligence. (Okay, that’s theoretical too, since we don’t currently have Terminators or a Data running around.) Does "self awareness" count if it’s only theoretical and there’s no way to prove it?
Good thoughts. Random, but good.
My goodness, I’ve certainly been neglecting this site. Most of my blogging energy has focused on The Brew Site and Hack Bend, but I’ve also been neglecting other areas of this site—the projects page in particular needed cleaning up, and I needed to catch up on PHP code fixes for my HTML2Text class and Word Stemmer class that people had sent me over the past year or so.
So I spent some time yesterday doing just that. There’s really not much to see if you’re simply here for the blogging portion of the site, but in case you were here looking for my PHP code or were one of the people who were nice enough to email me fixes for the bugs, I’ve gotten that stuff updated (and thanks to the suggesters).
In the meantime I’ll see what I can do about the writing portion of the site—ie, the blog. I certainly have no intention of retiring it but that’s sure what appears to be happening… so no no, not gonna happen, I shall start making more effort to write regularly here again. And perhaps tweak the site design around a bit. I mean, it’s only been…
…holy hell, it’s been five years? How on earth did I let that anniversary pass by without comment or celebration or something? Back on April 22nd, this was…
Whoa.
One more day and I’m off to the Oregon Brewers Festival; like last year, I’m going again with the intent of blogging the experience. (You can read all of my OBF-related stuff on The Brew Site here.)
What’s different this year, though, is that I, as a blogger, am also recognized as a media/press person; I contacted the OBF press guy and as a result, I get the full treatment: press kit, program, and all. Now I know most media/press folks (and a few pro bloggers) would be entirely blasé about it, but I have to say—I’m incredibly excited about this! Maybe the shine will wear off at some point, but for now, I just think it’s too cool.
I’m also hoping to meet other bloggers and writers, and brewers, and, well, anybody interesting. So I’m trying something new; I’ll have my cellphone with me but I don’t necessarily want to publish my phone number for the world to see and abuse, so I registered a free phone number and voicemail with PrivatePhone—a service from NetZero that seems promising.
How it works is I get a free private phone number, and all calls to it go directly to voicemail. I can check this voicemail via phone or computer.
So here’s the deal; if anyone wants to get a hold of me this weekend, call and leave a message on this number: 360-362-1627. I’ll check for messages every hour or so, and call you back.
(Yeah, I couldn’t get an Oregon area code. What’s up with that?)
I’ll also try to be checking email, but that won’t be happening til evenings, if I get the chance. So don’t rely on that if you want to reach me sooner rather that later.
Off to drink beer and blog about it!
Yes, you read that right: over on my Hack Bend blog, I get to do a giveaway for a pair of tickets to The Fray—playing in Bend this next Wednesday, July 25th, at the Les Schwab Amphitheater. How cool is that?
So if you live in Central Oregon—or you’re planning on being in Central Oregon next week—and want to see The Fray, head over and sign up for the drawing for the pair of tickets—a $70 value.
We left Friday morning (just the wife and I; Grandma had the kids for the weekend) and headed down to southern Oregon for a play and a getaway. The weather turned out great, and the trip was largely a winery tour, among other things; we visited four wineries and ended up buying just over a case of wine.
The last time we’d been to Ashland was nine years ago, before the kids were born. Compared to Bend over the past decade, few things in the area have changed; both Medford and Ashland have remained pretty stable, and even though there are signs of growth, much of it (particularly downtown Ashland) is as I remember it.
(Holy smokes, this post got long.)
Click through to read on…
Not surprisingly, I had to comment on this.
Topping the list of words most likely to make web users “wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard” was folksonomy, a term for a web classification system.
“Blogosphere”, the collective name for blogs or online journals, was second; “blog” itself was third; “netiquette”, or Internet etiquette, came fourth and “blook”, a book based on a blog, was fifth.
“Cookie”, a file sent to a user’s computer after they visit a website, came in ninth, while “wiki”, a collaborative website edited by its readers, was tenth.
I can only really get behind two on this list: “blogosphere” and “folksonomy”. I’d never heard of “blook” until now, and I’ll continue to pretend it doesn’t exist.
I hate “blogosphere”, and I hate more that I’ve actually used it in conversation and writing. “Blog” I’m good with. I love “blog”. “Blog” is succinct, and people pretty much know what it means. “Blogosphere”, on the other hand, is just… is just… yeah. How about just “online community” instead?
I thought “folksonomy” was dumb the first time I saw it, and I continue to pretend it doesn’t exist. Fortunately, its use seems to have dropped off significantly.
“Wiki” I like, too. Great word. Even better than “blog”, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t get the the hate here.
“Netiquette” and “cookie”? Seriously? Man, those ships have sailed. Like, back in 1995.
Over the past week and a half I read through two zombie novels: Monster Island and Monster Nation, both by David Wellington. Now I’m the first to admit that I’m not a true aficionado of the zombie genre; aside from Stephen King’s Cell, I can’t think of any other books I’ve read, and I’ve only seen a handful of movies. That being said, I really enjoyed both books. They’re well-written and entertaining, real page turners. If you don’t mind the squick factor involved with the cannibalistic undead, of course.
But then, you know, zombies. If you pick up a book subtitled “A Zombie Novel”, I’m guessing you don’t mind that so much.
But the more interesting aspect to the novels were what drew me to them in the first place: the author first published them online on a blog, in serial format. In fact, he’s publishing all of his (recent) novels online first, in the same way; it was based on the success of these blog novels that he landed a brick-and-mortar publisher to put his words to paper. That’s cool. That’s really cool.
More and more, that seems to me to be the future of publishing.
Oh, and Wellington just had the third novel in his zombie trilogy published: Monster Planet. I’m debating whether to read it online first, or wait for the library to get the hardcopy in.
Finally got out to see “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” back on the first weekend of this month, and I quite liked it. I really liked it, I thought it was fun and supremely escapist with excellent action sequences and truly excellent special effects. A perfect summer blockbuster, in other words. And I think it capped the trilogy nicely, while being open-ended enough to credibly be able to do a fourth movie (if, as Johnny Depp has famously said, the script is right).
In fact, I already know what the subtitle of the fourth movie should be: “Drink and the Devil.” At least, that’s from my working notes thus far. :)
And as I was thinking about it, it occurred to me that something I’d read elsewhere was true: the “Pirates” movies really are the “Star Wars” movies of this generation. (I’m talking about the Original Trilogy, of course; the Prequel Trilogy doesn’t come close.) That’s a tricky thing to pull off; I don’t think it can be done intentionally. The “Matrix” movies might have come close, but ultimately they collapsed under their own weight.
I won’t go into some sort of pedantic nerdly comparison essay between the two; suffice to say that the “Pirates” movies I can go back and watch again and again and still enjoy, like the Original Trilogy. That’s good stuff.
