Ecce Sigum

Category: Life

  • Frames of Reference

    I was rearranging my bookshelves today and came across one of my old college texts, a small novel called Flatland. The story takes place in a two-dimensional world, told from the point of view of A Square. At one point A Square is visited by an extra-dimensional visitor: a sphere. The sphere takes A Square on a tour of the dimensions, from 0 up through 3, and maybe even 4. I forget; I last read the book almost ten years ago.

    One concept which I still find fascinating is one of the incidentals to extra-planar travel (as described in Flatland) — namely, that from the point of view of dimension n+1 , an observer can see into the middle of a solid which resides in dimension n . Consider: from the point of view of the 3-dimension world in which we exist while traveling through 4d space, we can see into the middle of a 1d (line) or a 2d (plane) object. A square, seen from within it’s own dimension, is a line. A line, seen from within its own dimension, is a point. And a point(0d) is the only thing which exists within its own frame of reference.

    So an observer in 4d space would be able to see into the middle of a 3d object. This intuitively makes sense. Assuming time to be the fourth dimension, pick a point at a particular location in space and time, and watch: When a 3d solid intersects that point, the part of that solid which occupies that point will be visible.

    And, as these thing go, I have been reading more on memetics, and the points of view of the inhabitants of Flatland, when encountering an occupant of Sphereland , correspond with a concept I studied briefly in college — memetic engulfment .

    Memetic engulfment is that which happens when you get so caught up in your your self-reinforcing world-view that you forget that what you see and experience is not the entire world. I studied this in the context of The University, and the idea that the what was taught — the experiences and information imparted to students — was becoming more and more removed from what was actually necessary for existing in “the real world”. The University Meme slowly crowds out the rest of the world.

    But all of that was a long time ago, and now I wonder if, given the appropriate metaphors and practices, a person could perceive, with 3d sensory apparatus, the 4d world from the point of view of a 5d frame of reference. In other words, perceive the flow of time, from outside the flow of time…

    And if you managed it, how would you get back?

  • Sleep…

    The past week has been the week from hell, and the week ain’t over yet. On a positive note, I am not dead yet. On another positive note, I made another mouse trailer .

  • Epitaph

    Alas, the world has lost another saint. Chuck Jones, animator extraordinaire, responsible for Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, and the rest of that gang, passed away on Friday at the age of 89. Chuck made me laugh when there was little to laugh at, from the age of four up until… Hell, he still makes me laugh.

    Last May we lost Douglas Adams. We are losing our jesters, the ones who point out the nakedness of our emperors. We have beadles, sycophants, and village idiots beyond number, but the jester is an endangered species. I take solace in knowing that our current village idiot, the one who is happily groin-kicking the rest of the world, is pissing off enough intelligent people that a new crop of jesters will undoubtedly arise, just in time to make us laugh through the next world war.

    On Thursday/Friday I pulled my first 24-hour work shift. Thursday 7:00 am to 5:30 pm, then back at 9:00 pm to 12:00 noon on Friday. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but I don’t want to do that again, any time soon.

  • Love and Death

    I heard an interesting statistic today: historically, more people die on February 14 than on any other day. Apparently this is a trend which has been going on for some time across the entire world. Maybe, if I feel motivated, I will look up some statistics.

    It took a few days, but I have added destructive capabilities to my tank. You can find it here . Once again, arrow keys move the thing, mouse controls aiming and firing. It weighs in at a whopping 4k.

    I have not forgotten about my artificial evolution experiments; they have, of necessity, been set aside in favor of learning more about Flash. Work has been taking up a lot of my time, too.

    A word about the current sidebar: Is it a construct known as a Magic Square. It reads the same in all four directions. It is an interesting pattern puzzle to come up with other phrases which work as a magic square, while making sense, linguistically and grammatically. Numerical magic squares contain number grids which, when added together in rows or columns, always result in the same number. If I feel motivated I may post a couple in a few days.

    I’m just not feeling very motivated right now.

    Happy freakin’ Valentines Day.

  • Generative Poetry

    Had a long, interesting conversation with Scott today, regarding the problems inherent in duplicating the creative process. He is building an application which, he hopes, will be able to write poetry based on an understanding of the concepts behind language. I cannot imagine a more difficult task than to teach a computer to ‘think’ in metaphors. There is so much we don’t understand about our own thought processes when it comes to recognition and cognition, that modeling such behavior can easily devolve into educated guesswork. Questions come up; hard questions, like: What does it mean to ‘perceive’? To ‘conceive’? To ‘recognize’?

    Isaac Asimov once stated that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. Borrowing this idea, could it be said that any sufficiently complex pattern of behavior would be indistinguishable from intelligence? Computers do not ACT. They await input, in whatever form it may be, and then do what they are told to do with that input. They do not autonomously decide what to do with unfamiliar data. They can search for patterns which match patterns of familiar data, but they will not search for patterns which we have not told them to search for. It goes back to my comment regarding Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies : a computer will not try to creatively figure out a problem. It does not care that {1,4,9,16,25} is a series of perfect squares. It will spend eternity trying to untie the knot where Alexander would simply cut it with his sword.

    The questions about intelligence which arise from this train of thought tend toward the unsettling. Is there such a thing as action, or is there only re-action? Is human behavior a reaction to a profoundly complex set of behaviors, or, in being self-aware, do we transcend re-action to the point that we behave autonomously?

    Throwing in the question of free will vs. predestination complicates the process of teaching a computer to recognize poetry. But without teaching a computer to think symbolically, the best machine-written poem will, in reality, be the result of complex pattern-matching.

    My project is, for the near future, much less complex than Scott’s. I am building a machine to model evolution and genetic drift. Ultimately I plan to explore the question of emergent behavior and hive-mind patterns. I say ‘less complex’ because the a-life I work with does not need to think; it only needs to re-act.

  • Geek Overload

    I just returned from Astronomical ConFusion. I have books, and great memories, and great stories, and I am too tired to go into detail right now. So I will leave you with a joke I heard, which is the Best Joke of the Year, right now:

    “So an Irishman walks out of a bar.”

  • Math Anxiety

    After two days of being STUPID I fixed the math on the flocking experiment and now have bugs facing the direction they are flying. Aren’t they cute? When they get in formation, imagine Ride of the Valkyries playing in the background.

    In two days I and a group of friends are off to the Astronomical ConFusion science fiction convention in Warren, Michigan. This will be my second Con; the first was WindyCon in Chicago in November of 2000. As we were drinking breakfast on that Sunday, the lovely and talented Christian summed up the entirety of geekdom as follows:

    “You look at these people, and you see that some of them, this is the one time a year they get to cut loose and be freaks, no judgement, just a weekend of good fun. Then there are those people, you look at them and you just know, they will spend the rest of their lives pumping gas in a crushed velvet cape and pointy ears.”

    Mmmmmmmyep.

    I dove into the memetics book again today, discovered some interesting things, but I am too tired to think about it right now. Maybe I will post something tomorrow while I’m cleaning off my prosthetic Klingon forehead.

  • Vocabulary

    Did you know that the word athlon is from the Greek, meaning, essentially, “Athletic event”? That is where we get the words “biathlon”, triathlon”, “decathlon”, etc. I suppose, to be grammatically correct it would need to be “monathlon”. I discovered this bit of trivia at Forthright’s Phrontistery, a site chock-full of wonderful spoken-language information. In fact, I like it so much I am adding it to my permanent links list.

    I am currently of the opinion that women are the best thing(s) ever to exist upon this planet, so here is my shout-out to that 51% of the planet who answer to XX. You’re the best!

  • Memes on the Mind

    Tech link works now.

    Having read the first chapter of The Meme Machine, I am now adding The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci to my list.

    In brief: A meme is a unit of information, the mental version of a gene. Memes may be transmitted via communication and imitation, in essence “infecting” the recipient with this information, which may then be transferred to another, and so on. The method of transfer may be any medium. For purposes of my research I am focusing on direct, person to person, as biological viruses spread. Therefore, absent a hard medium such as a book, CD, or electronic file, memory is used instead.

    Since genetic drift is a given fact, mutation of the meme must occur, but this mutation can be lessened by using tools, “mnemonics”, to build associations between the meme in its original form and information already stored in the recipient. For instance: nursery rhymes. We may forget what every billboard said on the way to work, but we remember, to a large degree, every nursery rhyme we learned as small children. Adding simple rhythm and melody to information gives it immediate context, therefore it is more likely to be retained.

    Question: to what extent is this tool knowingly put to use in the world around us? Jingles on the radio come to mind. “Na-bis-co!”. “By MEN-in!” Short, catchy tunes, three notes, four beats, mathematically precise, the tune inseparable from the message. Ergo, via viral transmission, a meme. Nabisco and Mennin have been introduced into the bio/data/memory sphere.

    Hypothesis: Bastardization of Occam’s Razor: (1)simple answer is better, easier to understand, easier to slip in to borderline subconscious. As in childhood songs, etc.etc. Even “alphabet song” is sung to rhyme and meter.(2) Moments of decreased conscious/ increased subconscious activity (hypnotism??) Witness the song which awakens us in the morning, which remains, half-heard and half-remembered throughout the day, popping up to annoy us during moments of mental distraction.

    Conclusion: Melody and rhythm have been used for thousands of years as mnemonic devices. Christian churches use song/chants to teach. (Did any of the OT rhyme in the original Greek? Does the Nag Hammadi rhyme in Aramaic?) A huge number of Chinese aphorisms/folk wisdom sayings rhyme. Also in the west: “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight/Red in the morning, sailors take warning”. The power of a meme is directly related to medium. Next question: which is more powerful, context or medium?

  • Out With the Old

    Well, one link is up, and coincidentally, it is the link to the links. More to come. There is always more.

    Dinner first, either Ethiopian or Indian, then on to the party. Three days gone of the four day weekend.

    I just picked up The Meme Machine. Will post a review when I have had enough of it.

    In just under 24 hours the new year will be here, and I will be celebrating with a 16-year Port Ellen (1980-Islay) single-malt scotch. Last year it was a 14-year Clynelish (19??-Highland), which made it from January 1 to the end of May, when someone stole the bottle. And it still had three shots left! It was my first cask-strength scotch, which I only discovered after the fact is usually drunk with water, rather than at the full 120+ proof. Still, it was one of the best I have ever had. My review of the Port Ellen will be up in a few days.