Ah, I’m happy. As I ride the CalTrain from San Jose, I realize that after less than a week I feel more at home here, more at ease, than I’ve ever felt in Mexico. Tuesday I went to a Long Now talk by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and got to glimpse such legendary people as Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly. Yesterday night I went to Google (!) to an Android talk after having spent the morning in the Asian museum and the afternoon studying in the library. Today I just finished the first half of a wonderful (free!) 2-day course on AIR from Adobe. The plan is to cap the day with some Permutation City at the public library. Ah, this is how I want to live!
And it’s not only the flashy things that have me captivated, it’s being alone again, having problems and solving them, meeting strangers every day, waking before dawn effortlessly because there’s so much to do… It’s being able to speak in the same language that I think and enjoying my tongue as it twists and rolls on its own better than I had ever seen it. It’s seeing Lynda.com ads on the bus stop. It’s noticing everyday a new, unexpected way that tasks are streamlined here, automated —small pieces of civilization, like the chord to request for a stop in buses, how their doors open by standing on the steps, or how their stops are automatically both announced by a pre-recorded voice and displayed in an electronic ticker. It’s learning new, cutting-edge technologies and having someone to talk them with (never had felt like a “developer” before until I realized I felt at ease among them). It’s finding a purdy gal everytime you look around (not just lust, the ratio of childfree 20/30-somethings is way up). It’s eating a different cuisine every day (recent finds: chicken tikka masala and thai pancakes). It’s that sense of mastery at turning the new into routine and rhythm.
Now I just have to find a way to hack the law and become a free agent
(someone who can work and start a startup) or I’ll have to move sooner rather than later to Canada… any ideas?
I wasn’t expecting such beauty. It caught me off guard today. There was a time, just after midday, as I walked along Ocean Beach, when it all overwhelmed me—the slapping wind, the silly birds, the fellow walkers, the kiting surfers, the full sky, the white rocks, the nature right besides, the glistening, sparkling, glimmering, scintillating water.
[San Francisco] children are to be pitied, for, as the wife of publishing magnate Nelson Doubleday once said, “They will probably grow up thinking all cities are so wonderful.�
Oh, and I just bought an apple for 1.75 dollars.
Finally! I’m in San Francisco, for at least two weeks, in what should be my beachhead for a longterm stay!
No offense to the big apple, but San Francisco is just so much better. If New York is Mexico City, San Francisco is Guadalajara: prettier, classier, cleaner, ampler, prettier peopled…
I’m amazed by the huge number of Asians everywhere
(Asian women never fail to transfix me…), by the opulence and beauty of the city, by the overwhelming wealth and retail saturation of America
(one forgets it so easily in the 3rd world), by the beggars, by
my cool hostel, by how it has rained
all day long, by how the swankest part of town
(Union Square) can be right next to the seediest one
(Tenderloin), by how stereotypically rural Mexican where most of my flightmates
(rarely does one get to see so many cowboy hats, boots, and rebozos), by how happy I am…
From Nick Bostrom’s Golden—a fictional interview of Albert, an uploaded dog. His cheeriness and good disposition are attributed to his being a golden retriever. His wisdom I attribute to Bostrom, who’s one fascinating philosopher (don’t miss the fable of the dragon tyrant!).
Larry King: What are your plans for the future?
Albert: I take one day at a time. I enjoy learning new things, playing games and talking with my friends. I just love being alive and savoring every new experience. It is so exciting and so much fun! I love it all so much, I wish it will never end!
Larry King: Do you even wonder about how you came to be so lucky?
Albert: Yes, I once asked Dr. Cole about that, and he said there was no scientific answer. Then I asked if there was an unscientific answer? And he said: “Well, there will be if you make one up�.
So then I went away and thought about that for while. I thought about Laika, the unlucky dog that they sent up into space, and all the other dogs that never became famous. I thought about the rabbits in the animal labs, the pet rabbits, and the rabbits in the wild. Then I thought about the foxes that ate the rabbits and the hounds that hunted the foxes. Then I thought about all the humans, and how some had been kings and some had been slaves; how some had had families and loved ones, and how some had died alone in the cold.
And again I asked myself, how come I had been a lucky one? But I couldn’t think of any answer. Not even an unscientific one.
Larry King: (pause) Do feel that you have a mission?
Albert:
I want everyone to be the lucky one.
This just in (via KurzweilAI.net), I can hardly believe it myself:
[..a scientific team] has discovered that sexual orientation in fruit flies is controlled by a previously unknown regulator of synapse strength. Armed with this knowledge, the researchers found they were able to use either genetic manipulation or drugs to turn the flies’ homosexual behavior on and off within hours.
”Homosexual courtship might be sort of an ‘overreaction’ to sexual stimuli,”..
I’ve seen the future. Or rather, I’ve walked on it.
After days of shopping around town
(after which I can attest there is no point in shopping around, particularly not around downtown—limit yourself to your local warehouse clubs and you’ll be fine), my family finally bought a much needed treadmill.
Of course the first thing I did when we finally lugged it upstairs was build myself a walkstation. After learning about the concept,
how could someone chained to his books and computer resist?
The best makeshift base ended up being the old ironing board, which is long, surprisingly stable, and cushiony. It’s nothing short of amazing to read and browse on it and realize for yourself that it actually works, that there’s barely any tremor, and that the walking soon becomes unconscious. Slow though the walking may be, it’s strangely invigorating.
This was long coming. We will all be walking the web one day.
Right outside my friendly neighborhood store I found this tiniest of weeds clinging to life by the sidewalk. She’s doomed, I know, but how to tell her?
Charles S. Peirce has been called by
Britannica “the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced.” Bertrand Russell considered him “one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century, and the greatest American thinker ever,” and Karl Popper goes all out, seeing him as “one of the greatest philosophers of all times.”
I just met him a couple of weeks ago and I couldn’t be more impressed: the man’s a fricking genius, practically inventing semiotics and modern logic, making major contributions to the philosophy of science and epistemology. I would remember him forever just for his offhand naming of math as the “hypothetical or conditional science.” (the could science? the moot science?) and I have the sneaking suspicion that ours will be a lifelong acquaintance.
How not to be intrigued by a man who could explain reason in a sentence?
For reasoning consists in the observation that where certain relations subsist certain others are found, and it accordingly requires the exhibition of the relations reasoned within an icon.
OK, to fully get the above quote you should be familiar with Peirce’s brilliant and influential classification of signs into ”icons, which signify by virtue of resemblance [think painting], indices, which signify by virtue of a physical connection with the object [think weathervane or tally], and symbols, which signify by virtue of the existence of a rule governing their interpretation [think words].”SOURCE
Then there’s Peirce “discovery” of
abductive reasoning, the third major class of logical reasoning and for which I’ve found no better
(or shorter) intro than the
logical reasoning pedia.
And to finish this Peirce appetizer you must check out Peter Skagestad’s Thinking With Machines article. He gives a summary of Peirce’s semiotic to make a most intriguing comparison with the thought of human intelligence augmentationists like Doug Engelbart ELZR. Fascinating stuff really.
Life is a sexually transmitted disease.
-Anonymous
By focusing on the number of individuals (genders) required for reproduction we can distinguish species into three classes: those that require one individual (self-reproducers), those that require two (pair reproducers), and those that require three or more (group reproducers). The question is thus: are there group reproducer species? why?
We usually refer to the first class as asexuals, the second as sexuals, and it is a major puzzle of evolutionary biology to account for the existence of the latterD, WP. Like the bee that fluttered in the face of our best aerodynamic theories, sexuals mate impudently in the face of our best evolutionary theories.
But sexuals exist. Everywhere, in fact, at our order of magnitude. So we can’t just sweep pair reproducers aside and carry on our happy, simple theorizing of a self-reproducing world.
Asking the group reproducer question, on the other hand, I’ve been surprised by people to whom it comes as a revelation that the class is obviously empty. I don’t think it is. Obvious, that is. Life on earth does some pretty
fucked up stuff, natural gangbanging doesn’t strike me as particularly eccentric. Asimov describes a group reproducer species in great detail in The God Themselves and neither the author nor I (before) ever thought the point merited any explanation.
And if there are no group reproducers (or precious few) their non-existence (or extreme dearth) is as much a fact in need of explanation as their existence (or abundance).
