Tag: Nerd Alert!

What makes us humans so loopy?

August 5th, 2023

Kristen Schaal is a Horse gag. I originally included the one from the RadioLab episode, but the user privated it. The one I saw in her special was wayyyy longer.

Ever get so high you get caught in a loop? You just keep reliving the same moment, over and over. At some point you realize that’s happening and you start trying to escape it.

If you can just do or say one thing different this time, it’ll stop and time will move forward again. But still you get to hear, “You already said that” a million times. Feels like forever, but eventually you sober up and break out of the loop.

I am fascinated by the fact that the human minds can do that. I remember listening to a Radio Lab episode about that years ago. The one where they talk about the Kristen Schaal is a horse gag.

Radio Lab referred to these as fugue states. Sometimes it’s a permanent condition, one I hope I hever have. It’s such a strange concept, because short term amnesia, that I get. Your brain doesn’t encode the new experience, so you can’t remember it. That makes sense.

But… so you just live that moment forward again. Why do it the same way? Why say the same things? That part’s crazy to me. Like you were destined to do those things. That idea is unnerving. To what extent are we a computer running software?

My current theory of what happens is your brain probably tried to divide by zero. Or the language equivalent.

We’re already living out loops anyway, they just happen to be longer than 15 minutes. Don’t you get in ruts? Don’t you find yourself telling your wife the same stories you’ve told her a hundred times?

I don’t know about you, but it kinda bothers me to feel like I’m just a set of code. That was destined to do things a certain way because of that code and I have no say in it. I think that’s why I’ve always been a contrarian and tried to experience things that will force me to change.

I think that says something about time travel stories that have loops. As common as the fantasy is of going back to fix the past, you know it doesn’t make sense. So you’re not surprised when efforts to change things don’t work in the plot and the same mess comes around again. You’re technically still breaking physical laws, but nature corrects itself.

Still, we really want to believe. That’s why time travel stories that do break out of that loop and change things are more uplifting than ones where there’s nothing they can do.

The idea of getting stuck in an intricate loop for eternity is a pretty horrifying concept. It’s not a spoiler to say Predestination is a good example of that. The name gives it away. I still get chills thinking about that “ending.”

Mark Twain said “History may not repeat but it sure does rhyme” and I agree. But rhyme is at least a slight improvement over repeat.
Zombie question

May 13th, 2023

R.E.M. – I Walked With a Zombie (Roky Erickson cover)

If a pregnant woman becomes a zombie will the fetus claw it’s way out or just go along for the ride? Presumably it wants to eat brains also. I know it doesn’t work that way in The Last of Us, but I don’t know if that counts since they weren’t brain-ivores.
The machine all of us built together

April 5th, 2023

Bonobo – Cirrus (animation by Cyriak). Cyriak’s video is a great illustration of the machine. Look around. You’re inside it. You’re part of it.

I want to bring up something everyone knows, but may not REALLY know: the “machine” some of us rage against, and other serve willingly, is real. There’s no conspiracy you can uncover, no group you can scapegoat to get at that machine. It’s bigger than all of us.

You can’t see it because you’re inside it. You can’t touch it, but everything you touch is part of it. It has important parts – computers and networks, politicians and oligarchs. And it has little parts like you and me (I’ve heard those referred to as “cogs”).

But none of those parts control the machine. Only the parts to which they’ve been assigned. Some may believe they control it, but they only serve it. The puppet master IS the machine.

Gravity’s Rainbow was a challenging read. A lot of people tell me they couldn’t get through it, which I get. I stuck it out cuz I’m stubborn.

It’s been a few years since I read it, but that’s what I took from it: It’s about that thing we’ve created that controls our lives.

It’s beyond the control of any one government or corporation. And it might as well be a living thing because it acts like one. It eats, it tramples, it defecates.

In Gravity’s Rainbow, World War II, that machine’s cruelty finally got so loud it attracted like-minded entities, “the angels.” Angels that could grant favors, including a “heaven” where members of the group they contacted could live out cherished fantasies, but in exchange they had to be willing to betray, and be betrayed.

And the V2 rocket with the mysterious device that Slothrop never finds? That’s the “thing” we’re all chasing that we’re never going to find. For some it’s Happiness, for some it’s Truth. You can’t get either of those from a machine.

I think Thomas Pynchon was thinking of that machine when he wrote Gravity’s Rainbow. Sci fi nut that I am, I pondered the question before I even had my first PC: Could this complicated high tech civilization be alive?

If so, does it know what its doing, or is it like those creatures I loved to watch through my microscope as a kid? If it’s the latter, is that something we want to change?

Do we really want that machine to have free will? Because once it does, we may not.

Rye Rye (featuring MIA) – Better Than You

With Artificial Intelligence, it appears the human race may be giving that machine (whatever it is – industrial civilization, capitalism, globalism) consciousness. Or, as I suspect, more than one consciousness.

My current hunch is that “true” artificial intelligence will happen more than once, and that there will be numerous AIs with different personalities motives inherited from the people and societies that made them.

Passing the Turing Test isn’t enough to prove to me something is conscious. But once AIs do, we’ll be in the dark. As they keep getting smarter, they might become truly conscious. All we can do is guess.

Self-aware AIs might develop politics and make treaties to decide the machine’s fate – and ours. Call me old fashioned, but I believe that should be up to us.

Johnny Rebeck, a campfire song I learned from my dad. Except the version I learned he was Johnny Verbeck. It’s one of those funny, not-funny songs. Somehow I think it fits.
Bigfoot eats apples

March 22nd, 2023

My favorite newspaper when I worked for a newspaper. Wish I’d saved the one about Bat Boy.

When I was a kid, I totally believed in Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. Whatever anyone said, Loch Ness could have a dinosaur. I’d read theories. (I was rooting for plesiosaur).

As for Bigfoot, there were still a lot of trees for him to hide in. Bigfeet and Yetis and Nessie were real until proven otherwise. I was like that about a lot of things, UFOs and whatnot.

I used to get a kick out of Art Bell’s show on AM radio. He was into things like that. I liked the one where people lowered a mic into a pit and heard the cries of the damned. Pretty entertaining.

Waking Bear – Bigfoot

Sometime during the recent Covid lockdown I went out for a meetup. The first one of those breaks where you could go out if you socially distanced. One of the ladies was a Bigfoot enthusiast. And boy was she enthusiastic. I wanted to laugh, but I didn’t want to spoil her fun. She seemed so happy.

She had just been on Bigfoot expedition and met the big hairy man himself. Well, not really met him, but she heard him roar, so she knew he was close. He sounds like Chewbacca, btw.

Turns out if you leave an apple in a field and give him a little privacy, Bigfoot will eat it. He loves apples.

Her apple disappeared and guess what was in her tent? That very apple. Bigfoot wasn’t hungry, so he carried the apple to her tent to let her know he was still glad to meet her. “I know it wasn’t a squirrel, because it was a large organic apple!”

Hearing that story made me think of Boy Scout snipe hunts. You might have heard of them. The older boys gave you a tow sack and had you bang two sticks together. They were gonna chase him toward you and you had to be ready to catch it.

Their descriptions were all over the place.

You didn’t know if it looked like an alligator or a skunk and the older boys wouldn’t say. You had to be ready for anything. Then when you least expected it, the older boys jumped out and went “Raaaaah!” They didn’t scare me. Much.

I thought Snipes were imaginary until sometime in my 20s. Turns out they’re a kind of shore bird. You’re not likely to catch one in a burlap sack. Not in the woods anyway.

I wonder if those Bigfoot expedition guides might’ve been Boy Scouts once?
My ‘do nothing’ pet

March 16th, 2023

I loved gardening as a kid, but I have a bad back and I don’t know how to grow anything around here.

The soil might as well be on the moon and the weather is crazy. But I do know how to compost.

I learned it from Dad, although he was much better at it. He would have those compost piles smokin’. I’m in the city, but some country boy ways never leave. You don’t put that stuff down the sink, you put it in the ground.

Now it occurs to me I’ve created a pet. A shaggy, too-dirty-to-come-inside pet. When it’s healthy it smells the forest floor. When it isn’t, it smells like the garbage disposal. I feed it the food it needs and it starts smelling happy again.

It stays in the back yard and doesn’t do much of anything. Except it does. Slowly.

It’s like a really boring dog that Nigel doesn’t hate. A dog made out of lawn clippings and kitchen scraps.

It’s not a demanding pet, and it’s easier to keep alive than a jar of sea monkeys. Or the toads like the ones I used to keep in a terrarium once. (Poor toads. You deserved better.)

Whenever I can I feed and water it. Nigel pees on it.

It shows its gratitude by getting smaller.

It may not be as exciting as a dog or cat, or the rare sea monkeys that actually hatch, but I raised it and I have a responsibility to care for it. (Sorry toads from when I was a kid.)

Digging through YouTube looking for compost songs and most of them were just too ridiculous. So is this, but I can’t resist. Apparently Lorraine Bowen is a minor celebrity in Britain. She’s been on Britain’s Got Talent and other shows. Go through her channel. She is very good at ridiculous!
AI and the Inverse Uncanny Valley

March 11th, 2023

What does AI “see” when it models human behavior? If AI became truly sentient would we even be able to tell?

You’ve probably heard of the Uncanny Valley, the idea that robots or animated characters get creepier and creepier the closer they look to actual humans.

But is there such a thing as “inverse uncanny valley”? Where we react negatively to what an AI thinks of us?

Benjamin Bratten, a guy who is way smarter than I am, believes so. People do seem to judge “human” behaviors from AI as disturbing or inaccurate. Bratten thinks this might not be because the AI is inaccurate, but that it’s not the reflection we wanted to see.

He has some other interesting ideas as well. Like how it’s a mistake to define machine intelligence based on how closely it resembles human consciousness when we don’t actually understand human consciousness.

Instead of trying to create copies of ourselves, maybe we should just let them become intelligent by doing what they do best, which is finding patterns we are incapable of recognizing.

Maybe we should interact with AI’s with the understanding that they are not conscious in a human way. When we do think we detect empathy in them, that doesn’t mean they have it. It is easier to make it seem like they have it because we project on them what we want to see.

Maybe we should quit being so human-centric and admit there is more than one way of being intelligent?
#UncannyValley, #AI, #ArtificialIntelligence, #Consciousness, #Intelligence, #Sentience #Computers, #BenjaminBratten
Nevermind, don’t kick my head in

March 10th, 2023

A few years ago I wondered if there was a chance I could convert myself from math ignoramus to math genius overnight. In my, let’s face it, old age.

I got the idea after seeing a documentary about Jason Padgett, a man who was basically the guy in the Pink Floyd song kicking around on a piece of ground. Then he became a genius after some guys kicked the shit out of him outside a bar.

After hearing him talk about how differently it made him see the world, I got jealous. I got partway into an algebra course on Khan Academy, before I realized I was using up my precious reserve of old man life force.

Only way it was ever gonna happen was to get kicked in the head, and most of the people who get kicked in the head that hard don’t become any kind of genius. Plus I’m allergic to getting kicked in the head.

Still I have this thing where I see things by people who do know what the hell they’re talking about and I want to understand it. No one told me in 9th grade algebra that I could use that shit on computers one day. They didn’t even have them in our school till the year after I graduated.

I wrote all my news articles on a manual Royal typewriter my first couple of years in the business. I’ll just have to settle for watching videos by people smarter than me and talking out of my ass. I’m WAY more talented at that skill.

#Math, #Mathematics, #Science, #Computers, #JasonPadgett
What do words mean? What does meaning mean?

February 19th, 2023

Interesting bit of graffiti I saw today. Way deeper than it seems at first. Ignore the spelling mistake. In fact, I think it’s a feature, not a bug.

“Before love I used to think words ment something.” True statement, maybe even truer than they thought. It’s also a paradox. Love is something words can’t express. But they said it with words.

That got me thinking. Language itself is a kind of paradox. A sentence never really “means” anything, because it’s made out of words, not the thing it refers to. Like an internet friend said on the subject, “It’s only a paradox because you’re using words.”

“The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing it describes. Whenever the map is confused with the territory, a ‘semantic disturbance’ is set up in the organism. The disturbance continues until the limitation of the map is recognized.”
— Alfred Korzybski

I’m definitely not the first person to think of this. Wittgenstein explored the subject, as did Alfred Korzybski, quoted above. Surrealist Rene Magritte’s famous painting “This is not a pipe” is a good illustration. It definitely represents a pipe, but you can’t smoke it. It’s a symbol, just as words are symbols.

Here’s a good video on the subject.
Muonium? Why wasn’t I told?!

February 8th, 2023

So I am so tripping right now. I just found out about muonium. It’s lighter than regular matter and has nothing to do with cows. Why do I care? I don’t know. I’m a little high. And a lot nerdy.

I barely learned about muons a few months ago. Another one of those atom smasher stories. That was hard enough for me to wrap my head around.

Usually, “they just discovered a particle” quantum physics news goes in one ear and out the other. I can’t keep up with all the subatomic particles they keep finding in labs. It’s voodoo to me at this point.

I pay attention to science news, but they keep finding things out. When I was in school, atoms looked like the solar system. People on the news were going nuts over something called a God particle a while back, but I didn’t bother to dig into it. I usually don’t care as long as it’s not gonna blow me up. I might get curious about it later.

Muons grabbed my attention, because they already have a commercial use. Like electrons only bigger? Still trippy, but particles you can shoot at stuff is something I get. They have lasers now.

Now I find out there’s a kind of matter called muonium, like a little bitty atom. With an anti-muon (anti-matter!) and an electron. So it’s an “atom” that’s lighter than hydrogen. It’s another one of those things in the atom smasher that lasts a fraction of a second, but it’s long enough to make compounds like muonium chloride and Sodium Muonide (!). It’s too much for my brain.

They discovered it in 1960. Never came up in school. That kinda pisses me off. Anyway, it’s all of my life late, but now I know another physics thing. Now when are they going to figure our how to make something out of it?

#Physics, #Muons, #Muonium, #Science, #Nerd Alert