2006

Me conmovio tanto la despedida de Eliezer Yudkowsky a su hermano que se la lei a mi mama unas horas mas tarde, traduciendola al hablar. Le impresiono mucho y me pidio inmediatamente que la tradujera en forma al Español. Eso he hecho. Espero que quien no tenia la oportunidad de leerla lo haga.

He is my namesake and in many other ways my electronic soulmate but nothing that Eliezer Yudkowsky has written has left a deeper impression in me than his goodbye to his death brother I read this morning.

We shall, indeed, have to work faster (and smarter).

Stereo Total —“yéyétronic, electropunky, kitsch & speed, sissilistening, bricolopop, Berliner juke-box”— is coming to Guadalajara! Yey! I still can’t forgive myself for not going to their now legendary 2003 concert (so long ago already?). In my defense, that concert (or more precisely, the notice thereof) was the first time I’d heard of them and it took me several weeks before I started to really dig them:

Ex fan de sixties (“Ex-fan des sixties, / Où sont tes années folles? / Que sont devenues toutes tes idoles?”), Babystrich (“Am Bahnhof Zoo hängt ein Riesenplakat: ‘Ego, Berlins größte Diskothek’”), Tokyo Mon Amour (“Ce jour-là en été sous le soleil”), Ma Radio (“Je ne peux pas vivre sans ma radio / Mon transistor j’adore”), Schoen Von Hinten (“Geh, es ist vorbei / Goodbye!”), Heaven’s In The Back Seat Of My Cadillac (“Makin’ love, makin’ love to you / Is a beautiful thing to do”), L’amour à 3 (“Je sais c’est démodé / ça fait hippie complet / mais je le crie sur les toîts / j’aime l’amour à 3”), Kleptomane (“Je pique c’est un tic / j’adore ça, ça m’excite”).

The concert will be part of some sort of France-Mexico musical festival, Mundo Latino. Date: this Thursday, May 4. Time: somewhat confusing, all one knows is that it’s somewhat after 8PM. Place: ”Terreno localizado en López Mateos, entre Plaza del Ángel y Plaza del Sol”. Price: $150 or $350. Be there. And if you are, say hi.

Wow. Just wow. A pretty weird way to begin the day.

Even longevity. In the 18th century, every year, we added a few days to human life expectancy. In the 19th century, we added a few weeks, every year, to human life expectancy—so this is double exponential growth. We’re now adding about 150 days, every year, to human life expectancy,

and with the revolutions coming in genomics, perdiomics, therapeutic cloning, rational drug design, and the other biotechnology revolutions, within 10 years we’ll be adding more than a year, every year, to human life expectancy.

The Human Machine Merger: Why We Will Spend Most of Our Time in Virtual Reality in the Twenty-first Century, Ray Kurzweil

That’s your run-of-the-mill —even white-bread (blue liquid… how intriguing)— kind of paragraph, ne? I thought so too but then there was that word,

and it casts the whole scene into a wholly different light, doesn’t it? It wasn’t evident at first but that’s not the omniscient narrator speaking—it’s our lovingly perverted BDSM geek protagonist, Manny, painting the world with his colors.

And that’s what I mean when I say Accelerando is dense: it is chock-full of such all-important words. Since they are generally very technical or speculative, and since Stross has the habit of studding them like raisins into any given sentence, you’ll be tempted to just skip over them. Don’t.

Que joya la de Patricia Mercado en el debate de ayer. Justificar el aborto para que las mujeres no tengan que perder su trabajo por un embarazo o para que no se les impida crecer en productividad, es, vaya, una declaracion desafortunada como pocas.

Oh, I just love those Oriental parables ridiculing symbolic communication. This was a new one for me (read it with Jorge Wagensberg’s aphorism in mind: “To compress is to comprehend”):

Siempre me ha gustado su estilo pero no suelo leer mucho a Germán Dehesa. Ayer que lo hice me sorprendi. La Gaceta del Charro, su columna en Mural, es tan evidentemente un blog! Es cierto que toda columna periodistica es, bien vista, nada mas que un blog atrapado en el papel pero la de Dehesa es cosa aparte. Irrepresiblemente personal y opinionated, plagada de in-jokes y referencias personales, es un filtro de temas muy diversos, como todo buen blog, pero el hilo conductor de todos ellos es siempre visible: Dehesa mismo.

The offhand references, several per paragraph, to mind-bending concepts (animal uploading, the first AIs, reputation markets, stream-of-consciousness blogs, metacortex, algamics, post-scarcity economy, AIneko, Matrioshka brains, computronium, 3D printers…); the reckless pace; the nonpareil geek protagonist, Mannfred Macx, a “venture altruist”; the kinky BDSM sex thread; its undeniable modernity; its staggering density (this is an information-overload short-story; to be read with Google, Slashdot, Answers.com, and Wikipedia handy)... Charlie Stross’s Lobsters is as unique a sci-fi short story as you’re likely to find. It has been almost a year since I read it but in the meantime it has only become more impressive, more unnerving in its increasing overlap with our present. It was the story that made me believe again in a literature that said something about my present, about our impending singularity future. It’s also the first story of Stross’s Accelerando novel, easily one of the best nonfiction books of 2005 (and it’s not like I don’t see its flaws, it’s that his daring more than makes up for them).

I revealed myself a klutz this morning with my very first eggy in the basket (yup, after V for Vendetta!). I followed this (incredibly simple) recipe and everything was looking pretty good

until it came to the turning: