Chrononautic Log

March 29, 2006

From the Onion:

Science-Fiction Novel Posits Future Where Characters Are Hastily Sketched

OREGON CITY, OR — Science-fiction author Morgan Richards announced Monday completion of his long-awaited novel, Zeppelins Of Phobos. The swashbuckling tale of the battle for control of the solar system depicts a terrifying future filled with virtually indistinguishable characters who only communicate through stilted and shallow dialogue. “I’ve always been intrigued by the concept of the two-dimensional, almost caricatured human race spreading to nearby planets,” said Richards in the April/May issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. “I wanted to capture the sense of adventure, lust, and peril that these characters would feel, along with their utter lack of social context or emotional complexity.” Richards said the very nature of his characters demanded that they live in the unlikely, unrealistic, and overly cinematic society he painstakingly details in the book.

I could link to the piece, but since I’ve already quoted the whole thing, instead I’ll link to “It's Funny How What You're Saying Relates To My Novel.”

(P.S. Morgan Richards, eh? Dare I suspect that someone doesn’t share Hannah’s liking for Richard Morgan?)

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March 26, 2006

Boy, those Wachowskis sure kill a lot of cops, don’t they?

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Figure 1. I hear you.

Figure 2. If we stay very still perhaps they’ll go away.

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Hannah linkdumps one Miss Snark, as quoted by someone who I don’t know who it is on account of only having an LJ handle to go by: “Failure isn’t trying and not achieving. Failure is not trying. Failure is letting your fear rule your actions. Suck it up. Wasting your talent is not ok.”

Hannah’s reaction: “Who gets to decide what’s a waste of a talent, and why do they care?”

Which was pretty much mine, too. Only I’m short one X chromosome, so it came out sort of like Hey, I’ll waste whatever I m——f—— well please!

But: then I got to thinking.

And it occurred to me that I have seen, and been irritated with, something more or less like what Miss S seems to be talking about — for instance, sending good work to a bad ’zine — all y’all zinesters: not one of yours; one of the bad ones — because you’re afraid it’ll get rejected by the people you’d secretly like to publish it. Or thinking: My life as a writer will be complete if I learn to write stories (or books) at least as good as the worst stories (or books) that get published, and one of them sells. That’s a waste I can’t support.

But, again, note:

A sin of commission is a positive act contrary to some prohibitory precept; a sin of omission is a failure to do what is commanded. A sin of omission, however, requires a positive act whereby one wills to omit the fulfilling of a precept, or at least wills something incompatible with its fulfillment.

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March 23, 2006

With my shiny new Swiss Nokia I’ve finally joined Generation Cameraphone, and can now inflict even more pictures on the Intarwebs.

Figure 1. Grossbasel’s heraldic beast.

Figure 2. Kleinbasel’s heraldic giant.

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March 21, 2006

Still no apartment. Looked at another place yesterday evening, a shiny new two-bedroom that I liked quite a bit. Unfortunately the people living in it aren’t actually planning to get out till July. Doubly unfortunately, I liked it enough that I’m not sure I could be satisfied now with the place I looked at on Friday. But there’s plenty more where that came from.

On the other hand, I got paid today! Sorta. I haven’t got a bank account yet — applied online for a Post Office account (yes, the Post Office is a bank here, more or less — another clue that Switzerland and Japan are closely related) after discovering the ridiculous (by U. ‘Free Steak Knives With Checking Account’ S. standards) fees charged by the likes of UBS, but probably won’t actually have an account for a couple of weeks. So instead of a paycheck I got an advance of as much cash as I felt safe carrying — a few days’ pay, enough to get me through that couple of weeks in terms of groceries and pocket money.

It all feels weirdly 19th-century, but I guess that’s sort of the point of moving to Europe, isn’t it?

Now I’ve stayed at work way too late, and it’s time to blow my wage packet on curry and beer.

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March 17, 2006

Some of you noticed the the giant furniture and the odd prominence of plastic lawn chairs in the Fasnacht pictures I took a week or two back; well, today I ran across this Fasnacht 2006 roundup, in English, and all is finally made clear, including the people with leaves on their heads.

You may have seen a lot of cliques carrying around varieties of chairs on their backs or on their floats and wondered what they were going on about. Well, the Stadt Baudepartement, responsible for conserving old buildings and maintaining the “look” of Basel, has issued a decree that all chairs used by pavement cafes and restaurants should be identical and of a standard that would exclude plastic chairs. But this unpopular move doesn’t end there — it gets worse! Where plants are used as decoration outside bars (eg in Steinenvorstadt) all plants must be of the same species. All of them!

How they are going to enforce this is anyone’s guess, but pity the poor bar owner with 40 chairs that go out of production when 4 of them are destroyed by marauding football hooligans from Grasshoppers Zurich. Not only will any injured Baslers have to go to Zurich to have their organs transplanted [see earlier in the article —ed.], but the bar owner will have to replace all 40 chairs, not just the broken ones.

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And Cat and Girl meet it in rare form.

Meanwhile: I looked at my first apartment this morning. Aside from the bedroom floor being linoleum (I mean, I know it was built in the 80s, but really, who thought that up? Bert?) it wasn’t bad. One bedroom, living room, a small dining area attached to the kitchen (2.5 zimmer, as they say here, or 2DK, as they would have said in Japan.) A little bigger than my place in Seattle. High ceilings, parquet floors (except in the bedroom), lots of light — southeast-facing windows with nothing across the street, which is exactly what I would have wanted. Not far from the main train station, only a couple of blocks from the cinema district. (Birsigstrasse 12, Ben, if you’re curious.) Indoor bicycle parking. And the caretaker’s an Aussie, which might make life easier. Anyway, I’ve got two or three more places to look at next week, but if I ended up taking this one it wouldn’t be too bad.

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March 16, 2006

Via BoingBoing, this bit from vnunet.com:

The UK has warned America that it will cancel its £12bn order for the Joint Strike Fighter if the US does not hand over full access to the computer software code that controls the jets.

Lord Drayson, minister for defence procurement, told the The Daily Telegraph that the planes were useless without control of the software as they could effectively be “switched off” by the Americans without warning.

“We do expect this technology transfer to take place. But if it does not take place we will not be able to purchase these aircraft,” said Lord Drayson.

Access to the source code isn’t going to help you when the US war machines evolve sentience while they’re still halfway across the Atlantic, boyo.

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March 15, 2006

There’s some fascinating stuff going on over at Ben’s place, spinning off from the religion conversations over at Hal’s; fascinating, anyway, if you’re into questions like what shapes a worldview, and what holds a culture together.

In response to Ben, Vardibidian writes . . .

I’ve whinged before about how my fundamental understanding of the Jews boils down to we were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord brought us out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. And I will still say that, because it’s true, and it’s true to myself the way I understand it. And that story is part of both Judaism and Christianity. But it’s also true, as Mr. Rosenbaum points out, that you could boil the story of the Jews down to the Temple was destroyed, so we wrote the siddur.

. . . and then goes on (back in Ben’s comment section) to unpack that a bit, to talk about “the core story, the story we cling to that provides the frame for everything else.”

( . . . which is the part that, me being a writer trying to pin down some characters, strikes me as a tremendously useful concept, whether you personally think it’s valid or not. But anyway.)

In the course of the discussion, V more or less freely interchanges two concepts (emphasis added):

I don’t want to lose any of our stories. But they aren’t all the core story, they aren’t all how the universe really is.

Ultimately, there’s tremendous power in single sentences, in the moral at the end of the story, in reduction. Ultimately, there’s tremendous power in being able to say, briefly and simply, who you are.

So, my question: If those are the same thing, what does that mean? And if those aren’t the same thing, what does that mean? And does how you answer that depend on which of them you take as your starting point of view?

(For the record, my core story, articulated more or less on the spur of the moment: All this, just with brains evolved for the use of small tribes of African plains apes? Freeeow! Which, if you think about it, does say something both about who I am and about how the universe really is — for some values of really and is.)

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March 14, 2006

David Moles n. A hard-core grave robber.

— “How will you be defined in the dictionary?

(Via Kameron Hurley, whose Brutal Women, among other people’s weblogs, will be added to the sidebar as soon as I get some quality time away from work with a good net connection.)

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March 13, 2006

From the Wikipedia article on Japan’s Fifth Generation Computer Systems project:

Repeated attempts to make the system work after changing one language feature or another simply moved the point at which the computer suddenly seemed stupid.

I know the feeling.

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March 10, 2006

Brain=computer is so done. (Are you listening, Ray Kurtzweil? No? Well, when some sub-aspect of your uploaded future self is ego-surfing the post-Omega Point simulated blogosphere in the simulated universe, post some simulated comments telling Simulated Me that I’m wrong.) Bruce Sterling nails it, as usual. This is from his speech at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology 2006, but if I tell you to read the whole thing, you probably won’t. So.

When it comes to remote technical eventualities, you don't want to freeze the language too early. Instead, you need some empirical evidence on the ground, some working prototypes, something commercial, governmental, academic or military . . . . Otherwise you are trying to freeze an emergent technology into the shape of today's verbal descriptions. This prejudices people. It is bad attention economics. It limits their ability to find and understand the intrinsic advantages of the technology.

A good example of freezing the language too early is, I think, Artificial Intelligence. We very early got into the lasting bad habit of referring to computers as “thinking machines.” I suspect this verbal metaphor seriously harmed technical development. Even the word “computing” sounds too much like human mathematical thinking. We might have made a much better language choice if we had called computers something like the French called them, ordinateurs, “ordinators.”

Computers are not “smart,” in any useful sense of that term. They don’t “think.” They don't have “intelligence.” Computers don’t “know” things and they don’t have any literal “memories.” They’re not artificially intelligent sci-fi beings like HAL 9000. Computers are boxes of circuitry, with strings, and slots for the strings. They are not alive and mentally active, they are just sitting there, ordinating.

What is “ordinating,” exactly? Well, if we’d invested our attention in figuring that out, instead of awkwardly struggling to make these devices think like a human brain does, then we would have successfully explored the very large set of interesting problems that computers turned out to be really good at.

If you look at today’s potent, influential computer technologies, say, Google, you’ve got something that looks Artificially Intelligent by the visionary standards of the 1960s. Google seems to “know” most everything about you and me, big brother: Google is like Colossus: the Forbin Project. But Google is not designed or presented as a thinking machine. Google is not like Ask Jeeves or Microsoft Bob, which horribly pretend to think, and wouldn't fool a five-year-old child. Google is a search engine. It’s a linking, ranking and sorting machine.

Linking, ranking and sorting don't sound very sexy, glamorous or philosophically crucial. Instead of nostalgically clinging to the words — the neologisms of the past, which are now archaeologisms — we should pay more attention to the facts on the ground. What works? What matters?

When I think about it: do I really want some classical Artificial Intelligence computer that can talk to me just like Alan Turing? Or do I prefer Google? Imagine two start-up companies. One of ’em has got Alan Turing’s disembodied talking head inside a box, but no search engines. In the other company, they have no AI, but they get to use Google.

Which company out-competes the other? One company asks: where do I find a cheap supplier? In response, they get a really genius math lecture by Alan Turing. Alan is really sincere about it, he’s really thinking hard about the problem of supply, there inside his box. The other company has Google, so in about ten seconds they not only find a supplier but all kinds of massively popular links to other suppliers. Which company wins?

I guess you could argue that Alan Turing's super-smart metal head might invent Google, but do you need this roundabout approach? All it takes is a couple of grad-students to invent Google.

After doing that, the folksonomy kicks in, so you get all the linking and ranking and sorting. So, you can keep Alan Turing in the box, and I'll even throw in Richard Feynman. They can artificially think, while the rest of us will be getting on with the revolution.

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Hannah turned up this paper, “Human Hand-Walkers: Five Siblings Who Never Stood Up,” about four Kurdish sisters and their brother who manage to get around just fine even though a genetic condition of the cerebellum keeps them from walking upright. Is it me, or is there something — knowing it’s people they’re talking about — vaguely Ballardian in the paper’s choice of words?

When they are at rest the quadrupeds either sit upright or squat on their haunches. . . . The females splay their back legs apart, the male, however, who is the strongest and most active of the five, plants his feet closely together. . . . [T]he females tend to stay close to the house, but the male sometimes wanders for several kilometres. . . . Figure 2 . . . Subject #11 standing semi-erect, while he scans for objects to pick up and put into his pouch. . . .

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March 7, 2006

For those of you wondering what Basel looks like: A lot of the time it looks like this.

Figure 1. The Rathaus, Marktplatz, Basel.

On the other hand, there’s the way it looked yesterday evening.

Figure 2. A selection of revelers.

Fasnacht started yesterday, at some God-awful hour, with giant lanterns and whatnot, which I missed on account of having gone to bed a couple of hours earlier, but by the time I dragged myself out, it was still . . . well . . . something.

Figure 3. A couple of Guggemusik bands. Much more entertaining to listen to than the piccolo players. Glowing eyes are apparently de rigeur.

Figure 4. ¡Cuidado! ¡Llamas! (With piccolos and, it would appear, tracheotomies.)

(More later.)

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Contrary to earlier indications, Maureen McHugh’s cancer is not, in fact, back from the dead.

Go Maureen! You rock.

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March 1, 2006

Figure 1. How I feel.

(Image, and sentiment, shamelessly stolen from John Holbo. But it’s too good to pass up.)

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Arrived safely in Basel yesterday. Everything’s going swimmingly so far. I’ll try to post some pictures this evening.*

They have snow here.

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* The system administrators at my new job are clever enough to keep me from logging into discontent or chrononaut, so if you’ve sent me email since Sunday evening I probably haven’t seen it. chronodm @ gmail.com works, though. I’ll look for some wi-fi tonight.

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Update: Hi, everybody! Could’t find a working wi-fi hotspot last night, so, no pictures yet. I’ll keep looking. If it comes down to it, I should be able to upload them from MoveableType, if I can get them off my Mac and onto my work PC.

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