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House: in process of being sold. Barring nothing going wrong.
House contents: sold to bookstores; taken away for auctioning; left behind for presumed next owner to pick over and have hauled away; taken away to long term storage; being FedExed to me. As of just yesterday for the last, and I came home today to find a delivery note on my door. That was fast!
Me: in need of a couple months of twelve-hour sleepnights. Funded for next year, and assigned to C/assembly language rather than "teaching HTML and Excel to the unwilling masses".
Quality of time spent in Chicago: meh, could have been better. I went back and retreated for a couple of weeks to online-fueled dreamworlds of RPGs rules and settings and hard ScF speculation or futurism, which could have been done at home. Exalted, Glorantha, Wushu, rules of my own devising, bio-fantasy, Orion's Arm, space fountains, etc. Not, say, going out to museums. On the other hand, I did go get dim sum and Ethiopian food. Lots of dim sum; Furama is a restaurant by Broadway and Argyle, which will serve dim sum all day, unlike most of Chinatown. Judging by my half hour waits before anything arrived, they would be making it fresh, not serving me stuff which had been steam-wamred for the past twelve hours. And ordering from a labelled picture menu gives me an idea of what I'm getting, unlike the tray system.
AI research work: Ha ha! It is to laugh and cry. No. Except I did do some thinking this morning, on the bus. One of the things which has amused me about programming is that faking it is often reality. I probably won't convey this well. But I'll see something being done, like the 'file' command in Unix which tells you the type of a file (text, HTML, GIF), or something about daemons in Unix, and my first reaction will be "wow, magic!" With an intuition that there should be some deep and elegant explanation ('file' must be a really smart program), but instead I'll think of something that feels like a cheap hack, which usually turns out to be what is going on. The 'file' command looks in a file /etc/magic (hah!) which contains a bunch of rules for quick identification of files. Such as the fact that GIF files contain "GIF87" as their first five characters, with width and height following, and 'magic' basically tells 'file' what bytes to read and print out and what to call them. So, faking it is often solving it.
With AI, with my deep goals of understanding 'gist', and concept learning, I still have the essentialist intuition, which has stymied my research since I can't think of the deep and elegant ways of doing such things, and I was wondering if I should embrace the fake. After all, our brains are probably nothing but huge evolved piles of fake and hacks, having started off at a level too small to allow anything else.
Then again, 'faking it' in AI brings to mind either brute force chess programs, or ELIZA, both of which are indeed too fake.
Weather: it's Ark season in Chicago! A thunderstorm almost every days for the last week or two, and more to come. Remember those mulberries? They were already out of season (though I had been able to get some more before I left Chicago in July), but a day or two ago I went down into that little park but couldn't, because the river (the "NOT FIT FOR HUMAN CONTACT" river, which makes you wonder about the safety of the berries) had overflowed onto the path. Yesterday was clear, which was good for me and my taxi of boxes to FedEx, but at 4am I woke up to heavy wind, lightning, and maybe rain, and called a taxi. Which I kind of needed anyway because, unlike my recent back and forth between clothing piles, I was bringing my duffle back, now with Extra Stuff, and it was Painfully Heavy. As a bonus, my driver asked "Kennedy or Lake Shore Drive?" and I thought "we always do Kennedy, let's try Lake Shore." Getting to the lake was a pain, especially with buses in front of us dumping Hideous Stench into my face, but the Drive itself was quite nice -- not much view of the lake, but lots of grass and trees, way more scenic than the Kennedy Expressway.
By the way? I'm still totally into arcologies. Cities need smart roofs and general climate control, or at least moderation.
Anime: not a whole lot this summer. But courtesy of veoh I got to finish watching Ghost Hunt, a Fuyumi Ono (Twelve Kingdoms) written horrorish ghost hunting (duh) series. Silly at times, but nice play with what felt like could be real Japanese myths, and the usual ecumenism of a Shinto shrine maiden, a Buddhist monk, a Catholic exorcist, and a medium. For once, I think this is a real part of Japanese culture (Shinto birth, Christian wedding, Buddhist death), not an anime convention, though the Catholic Church existing for the sole purpose of hunting witches and monsters probably is manga/anime.
I haven't finished watching it yet, but Mushi-shi is even more awesome. Mushi are like giant bug fairies, or life-force elementals, with lots of varieties, and the character Ginko goes around dealing with various manifestations. You get awesome fairy/exotic feel, human pathos, and a surprising amount of real science, like river geology, rainbow optics, and Ginko having a microscope. The ending music is different every time, but almost always pretty enchanting.
Misc links:
A German picture text on where babies come from. Years ago Fanw and I were fascinated to be told that Unitarian Universalists start sex ed at age 6. I don't think we ever found out what they're told, but something like this looks like a candidate.
Courtesy of tooth_and_claw, a video of some awesome shadow puppetry.
An interview about The World Without Us; I was interested mostly for the discussion of the underground cities of Cappadocia. This is one of those times when real history seems more awesome than RPGland.
A concept I've liked for a couple of years seems better known as higher order volition, though that page doesn't mention the timing aspects (lower volition getting to react more quickly), and this leads to Frankfurt counterexamples.
Evolutionists and religion
How the American Revolution might have led to the abolition of slavery in the North.
Cheney on how invading Iraq would be a really bad idea. (Youtube video)
Vertical farms though I'm still not sure how sunlight gets to the back of most of the floors. Also see above about arcologies.
House contents: sold to bookstores; taken away for auctioning; left behind for presumed next owner to pick over and have hauled away; taken away to long term storage; being FedExed to me. As of just yesterday for the last, and I came home today to find a delivery note on my door. That was fast!
Me: in need of a couple months of twelve-hour sleepnights. Funded for next year, and assigned to C/assembly language rather than "teaching HTML and Excel to the unwilling masses".
Quality of time spent in Chicago: meh, could have been better. I went back and retreated for a couple of weeks to online-fueled dreamworlds of RPGs rules and settings and hard ScF speculation or futurism, which could have been done at home. Exalted, Glorantha, Wushu, rules of my own devising, bio-fantasy, Orion's Arm, space fountains, etc. Not, say, going out to museums. On the other hand, I did go get dim sum and Ethiopian food. Lots of dim sum; Furama is a restaurant by Broadway and Argyle, which will serve dim sum all day, unlike most of Chinatown. Judging by my half hour waits before anything arrived, they would be making it fresh, not serving me stuff which had been steam-wamred for the past twelve hours. And ordering from a labelled picture menu gives me an idea of what I'm getting, unlike the tray system.
AI research work: Ha ha! It is to laugh and cry. No. Except I did do some thinking this morning, on the bus. One of the things which has amused me about programming is that faking it is often reality. I probably won't convey this well. But I'll see something being done, like the 'file' command in Unix which tells you the type of a file (text, HTML, GIF), or something about daemons in Unix, and my first reaction will be "wow, magic!" With an intuition that there should be some deep and elegant explanation ('file' must be a really smart program), but instead I'll think of something that feels like a cheap hack, which usually turns out to be what is going on. The 'file' command looks in a file /etc/magic (hah!) which contains a bunch of rules for quick identification of files. Such as the fact that GIF files contain "GIF87" as their first five characters, with width and height following, and 'magic' basically tells 'file' what bytes to read and print out and what to call them. So, faking it is often solving it.
With AI, with my deep goals of understanding 'gist', and concept learning, I still have the essentialist intuition, which has stymied my research since I can't think of the deep and elegant ways of doing such things, and I was wondering if I should embrace the fake. After all, our brains are probably nothing but huge evolved piles of fake and hacks, having started off at a level too small to allow anything else.
Then again, 'faking it' in AI brings to mind either brute force chess programs, or ELIZA, both of which are indeed too fake.
Weather: it's Ark season in Chicago! A thunderstorm almost every days for the last week or two, and more to come. Remember those mulberries? They were already out of season (though I had been able to get some more before I left Chicago in July), but a day or two ago I went down into that little park but couldn't, because the river (the "NOT FIT FOR HUMAN CONTACT" river, which makes you wonder about the safety of the berries) had overflowed onto the path. Yesterday was clear, which was good for me and my taxi of boxes to FedEx, but at 4am I woke up to heavy wind, lightning, and maybe rain, and called a taxi. Which I kind of needed anyway because, unlike my recent back and forth between clothing piles, I was bringing my duffle back, now with Extra Stuff, and it was Painfully Heavy. As a bonus, my driver asked "Kennedy or Lake Shore Drive?" and I thought "we always do Kennedy, let's try Lake Shore." Getting to the lake was a pain, especially with buses in front of us dumping Hideous Stench into my face, but the Drive itself was quite nice -- not much view of the lake, but lots of grass and trees, way more scenic than the Kennedy Expressway.
By the way? I'm still totally into arcologies. Cities need smart roofs and general climate control, or at least moderation.
Anime: not a whole lot this summer. But courtesy of veoh I got to finish watching Ghost Hunt, a Fuyumi Ono (Twelve Kingdoms) written horrorish ghost hunting (duh) series. Silly at times, but nice play with what felt like could be real Japanese myths, and the usual ecumenism of a Shinto shrine maiden, a Buddhist monk, a Catholic exorcist, and a medium. For once, I think this is a real part of Japanese culture (Shinto birth, Christian wedding, Buddhist death), not an anime convention, though the Catholic Church existing for the sole purpose of hunting witches and monsters probably is manga/anime.
I haven't finished watching it yet, but Mushi-shi is even more awesome. Mushi are like giant bug fairies, or life-force elementals, with lots of varieties, and the character Ginko goes around dealing with various manifestations. You get awesome fairy/exotic feel, human pathos, and a surprising amount of real science, like river geology, rainbow optics, and Ginko having a microscope. The ending music is different every time, but almost always pretty enchanting.
Misc links:
A German picture text on where babies come from. Years ago Fanw and I were fascinated to be told that Unitarian Universalists start sex ed at age 6. I don't think we ever found out what they're told, but something like this looks like a candidate.
Courtesy of tooth_and_claw, a video of some awesome shadow puppetry.
An interview about The World Without Us; I was interested mostly for the discussion of the underground cities of Cappadocia. This is one of those times when real history seems more awesome than RPGland.
A concept I've liked for a couple of years seems better known as higher order volition, though that page doesn't mention the timing aspects (lower volition getting to react more quickly), and this leads to Frankfurt counterexamples.
Evolutionists and religion
How the American Revolution might have led to the abolition of slavery in the North.
Cheney on how invading Iraq would be a really bad idea. (Youtube video)
Vertical farms though I'm still not sure how sunlight gets to the back of most of the floors. Also see above about arcologies.