From TED Talks:
Very inspiring, yes? And think of all the emerging branches of science Professor Enriquez leaves out: Simulation, massive data sets, crowd-sourcing, nanotechnology, bio-computing, etc. It’s raining soup but we’re all so busy bawling that we’re starving that no one has time to eat…
We call it inauguration after the Romans, of course. Beginning at midnight on January 1st of each new year, the priests would take the augurs — the signs and portents — for the two new consuls, the duoviri who would govern the Republic for the next year. The ceremony would end with a long, slow march to the top of the Capitoline hill at dawn, at the end of which the senior consul for that year would sacrifice a bull. Only then would the new consuls and the senators convene in the Curia to take up the Republic’s business for the year.
And Janus, for whom January is named, is the god of doorways, presiding not just over beginnings but also endings. Today marks not just the beginning of Obama’s presidency, but also the end of the Bush era in Washington.
Both Bushes, pere and fils, seemed to me to be fundamentally decent people, quite unlike the man who served between them. But Bush the younger, by being so roundly reviled as president, has nowhere to go but up from here. Someday Americans will have the fortitude to thank this man for calling Islamofascism by its true name: Evil. In the mean time, (more…)
Instead of dozens of geniuses trying to program an AI in a university lab, there are billion people training the dim glimmers of intelligence arising between the quadrillion hyperlinks on the web. Long before the computing capacity of a plug-in computer overtakes the supposed computing capacity of a human brain, the web—encompassing all its connected computing chips—will dwarf the brain. In fact it already has.
Pascal kept a room full of “Rainmen” — idiot-savant math geeks — as human calculators. He could have done the problems he threw off to them himself, but they saved his time for the work they could not do.
While we will waste the web’s ai on trivial pursuits and random acts of entertainment, we’ll also use its new kind of intelligence for science. Most importantly, an embedded ai will change how we do science. Really intelligent instruments will speed and alter our measurements; really huge sets of constant real time data will speed and alter our model making; really smart documents will speed and alter our acceptance of when we “know” something. The scientific method is a way of knowing, but it has been based on how humans know. Once we add a new kind of (more…)
I hate lies, and I hate just about everything that doesn’t hate lies. We live our lives enmired in lies — in hoke, in smoke, in hints and allusions and innuendoes, in juice and hustle and jive — and it is entirely too easy to become one of the liars, de facto, without really intending to. My post on linking is one of the best things I wrote this year, and it’s apposite to the discussion I’ve been carrying out all week:
People are so used to marketing trickery that they expect it everywhere. The challenge for anyone seeking to change minds in the Web 2.0 world is to take away that expectation. Transparency doesn’t mean I am obliged to disclose to you the color of my underwear. Transparency means that if there is any possibility that you could entertain the smallest doubt that I am effecting some kind of sleight of hand to trick you into doing something you otherwise would not do, I have to give you the means of eradicating that doubt to your own satisfaction.
On Christmas, because of the latest episode of puerile posturing, I said to Teri, “I believe in Christmas. I won’t let it lie to (more…)
Courtney at the speed of life
A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story
“Lord-a-mercy!” I said in my thickest southern drawl. “Somebody tell god to take the rest of the week off. He has made perfection, and there ain’t no topping that!”
The beautiful blonde woman scowled and blushed at the same time. It made her look seventeen again.
“Where is you charming husband? I can’t believe he’d ever dare to leave your side.”
She shook her head gravely, and maybe that was my cue to lay off. Or maybe not…
“Well, tell me what you boyfriend looks like, then. So I’ll know who to run from.”
She chuckled. “No boyfriend.”
“Well, then, the next man that asks, you tell him I’m sprouting gray hairs in patches and I carry a little paunch. I’m half-a-step slower than I never was. I’m ugly as sin, and I stink something awful toward the end of the day. You tell him that’s my description.”
She drew a finger across her eyebrow, the hair so fine it was almost white. Her eyes were blue and deeper than a quarry lake, alive with the light of mischief. “Am I to take that as an offer?”
I nodded gravely. “What fool could pass on perfection?”
She smiled a wistful little (more…)
I’m kicking this back to the top of the blog, as well. I think this is a good example of the kind of behavior that has been denounced for millennia by would-be bosses, but I also think this approaches an ideal expression of how human beings should behave. Plus which, it’s the stuff I’ve been talking about all week, boiled down to its essence — and I think it’s good Sunday reading besides. I live to be proud of my life, and the moments that gave birth to this essay are among the proudest of those I’ve lived so far. This is the best I have within me. This is a seed I long to see cast to the winds, to grow wherever it can take root. –GSS
Psalm
Art is demanding, and that’s good. But art is petulant and importunate and presumptuous to a fault. Art is that damned nuisance of a snoopy neighbor who keeps knocking, knocking, knocking on your cellar door. Art goes straight for the places you forbid yourself to think about and rummages through your most terrifying secrets like a burglar tearing through your underwear drawer. Good art makes you hate it as you devour it, shun it (more…)
Kicking this back to the top from February of 2007, although the underlying essay is much older than that. This is the shortest statement I have made, so far, of the ontology of human behavior. –GSS
Russell Shaw has mentioned the film The Secret a couple of times. Cathy bought the DVD, and we took the time to watch it tonight. As an expression of the right attitude to take toward life, it was right up my street. As physics, metaphysics, epistemology and ontology, it struck me as babbling word salad. The Law of Attraction commended me to The Eyelid Show, as television often does, so Cathy saw the whole thing, and I saw about half.
What the movie would seek to ascribe to a volitionally-caused physics (this is solipsism, right there), I would argue is simply the secondary consequences of particular habits of mind. Russell wants to freely and very generously share all that he has learned in his career. To do this, he needed me as his amplifier, and the two of us needed Allen Butler for his technological prowess. A great many other very talented people will be involved in this project. Are we drawn to each other by a (more…)
A Costco family Christmas
A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story
“Okay, so one day we’re driving, and we’re just about to get on the freeway, and I look up and the sign says, ‘Squaw Peak Freeway.’”
The Kid said that. Maybe eleven years old, tall and thin. Tousled brown hair and the most beautiful gray eyes I’ve ever seen. He was talking to the Mom, mid-forties, fair and tall. She had long brown hair and eyes of a gentle, laughing green.
She said, “That’s what the sign says.”
“But my whole life I thought it was called the Pipsqueak Freeway. That’s what Dad always called it. That’s what he still calls it.”
The Mom was laughing silently, trying very hard not to laugh out loud.
“It’s not funny! I asked him why he called it that and he said he named it after the mayor.”
The Mom was still trying not to laugh.
“Oh, sure. Very funny. Every day after school we used to stop at the Post Office, and I was seven or eight before I found out that it’s not really called the Edgar Allan Poe Stoffice. I didn’t even know who Edgar Allan Poe was.”
The Mom was stopped short by her laughter. She stood there behind her shopping (more…)
A father for Christmas
A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story
“Shame about the bike,” I said to the strained young black man at the bus stop. His head was down and he was staring hard at the ground.
He grunted, a sound that conveyed two ideas: “I heard you” and “I’m not listening.”
“Just as well, I guess. A bike like that…”
He looked up for a moment, piercing me with hard black eyes. “What about it?”
“Oh, you know. Wouldn’t last too long, now would it?”
He scoffed, and that was that. Or so he thought…
What happened was this: I saw a bike going in to Toys ‘R’ Us, about a week before Christmas, and that’s the kind of thing I just have to follow up on.
It was a girl’s bike — a girly bike. Sixteen inch white wheels. A white frame speckled with iridescent pink and purple flakes. An iridescent pink and purple flaked saddle. And matching pink and purple flaked streamers cascading out of the white handle-bar grips. It was the kind of bike Toys ‘R’ Us loves to sell: Thirty-five dollars worth of bike with three dollars worth of plastic ornaments is priced at sixty bucks. Ten dollars extra for professional assembly.
The bike had been (more…)
Merry Christmas, Princess Peach
A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story
“Luigi!” The beautiful blonde girlchild tore her way across the packed airport corridor.
“Oh,” said her mother, a beautiful blonde womanchild. “Great…”
There is only one Christmas, isn’t there? Holly and mistletoe. A golden retriever by the fire. Mom bastes the bird while dad carols with the choir. Icicles cling to the branches of birch trees and fat, wet snowflakes tumble down, lit by the yellow glow of gaslights. Horses nicker and children giggle and lovers nestle and sigh. We’re all dreaming of a white Christmas — and we’re all dreaming.
And why not? Over the ghetto and through the industrial park doesn’t sound like a very nice way to get to Grandmother’s house, even though the highway really does go that way. There are no trails of tail-lights at Christmas, glinting and glowing in the drops of muddy drizzle on the windshield. The snow is white and windblown into drifts, not plow-piled and gray with soot. The children don’t squabble, the drunkards don’t wobble and the lovers don’t quarrel or cry.
Even at the airport there is only one Christmas, the Christmas-card Christmas of a world without airports.
Luigi was sitting across from me and he leapt up (more…)
Save the world from home
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Disintermediation means cutting out the middle-man, and, by teaching you a new way of thinking about human nature and about your own unique self, Man Alive! puts you in charge of your own philosophical affairs.
The book's objectives are precise and concise: To take the claim of justice away from the state, the mantle of intellectual authority away from the academy and the experience of reverence away from the church. It puts all of those things back where they belong — in your mind. There is no middle-man on truth.
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Shyly’s delight
Work, play and love like a Labrador.
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Nine empathies
Apprehending love and malice.
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Father’s Day
More Married. More Husband.
More Father. More Man.
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Loving Cathleen
A Love To Live Up To
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Sun City
Loved ones die. Life goes on.
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Losing Slowly
How Las Vegas lost its mojo – and how to get it back
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Christmas at the speed of life...
Ramblin' Gamblin' Willie's Christmas stories
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The Unfallen
A love story
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