Time travel companion wanted

Posted on January 21, 2011 by Steve Mays

The following listing recently appeared on the Springfield, MO Craigslist:

“I have a functioning time machine (i know it sounds unbelievable, but I assure you it works) that I need a 2nd person to operate with me. I’m looking for someone who is adventurous and reliable. Preferable a male; or a female that can do heavy lifting. I am leaving on January 20, 2011 , in the morning and plan to return February 3,2011. I am going to June 1983 to handle some business.

If you are serious about time travel and are reliable, then please contact me. You do not have to pay anything, but you would have to provide someone to watch my cat for the time we are gone. The only qualifications needed are that you are reliable and that the circumference of your head is no more than 64cm.

We will be leaving from Springfield,Mo. Let me know if you want to go with me.”

My friend David Brazeal responded:

I stumbled upon your advertisement on Craigslist on the afternoon of January 20, 2011 — too late to join you on your excursion into the past.

Fortunately, having dabbled in time manipulation myself in the late 1830s, I was able to travel to January 17th, one day after you posted your listing, from which time I am responding.

I am both reliable and adventurous, and well-acquainted with 1983, having spent that summer as an intern in the State Department’s Office of Botswanan Affairs. In addition, I have an elderly aunt who loves cats.

Regarding your qualification that my head be less than 64cm in diameter, I assure you that, although my head is slightly too large for a standard time travel headpiece, I have crafted an adapter from a 1960s Oster beauty-salon hair dryer and the innards of a PlayStation 3 controller.

Please let me know as soon as possible whether you still require a companion for your trip. If you have filled the position, I need to return to January 20 to take some brownies out of the oven.

One more thing…

David is leaving our company (after 17 years) in a month or so, to strike out on his own (uh, should I rephrase that? Fuck it). The post above is just one more example of what I mean when I describe someone as “too funny for their job.”

The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Steve Mays

I’ve been doing a good bit of reading about consciousness, reality, ego and such. A lot of it is tough sledding. LIke Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel, which –according to this review– is “for the curious and fearless lay person wanting to know who, precisely, we are.”

The best I can do with books like this is highlight the portions that make some sense to me and stick ’em here, completely out of context. The Ego Tunnel (Thomas Metzinger) PDF

“When we speak of conscious experience as a subjective phenomenon, what is the entity having these experiences?”

“Why is there always someone having the experience? Who is the feeler of your feelings and the dreamer of your dreams? Who is the agent doing the doing, and what is the entity thinking your thoughts?Why is your conscious reality your conscious reality?”

“Yes, there is an outside world, and yes, there is an objective reality, but in moving through this world, we constantly apply unconscious filter mechanisms, and in doing so, we unknowingly construct our own individual world, which is our “reality tunnel.” We are never directly in touch with reality as such, because these filters prevent us from seeing the world as it is. The filtering mechanisms are our sensory systems and our brain, the architecture of which we inherited from our biological ancestors, as well as our prior beliefs and implicit assumptions. In the end, we see only what our reality tunnel allows us to see.”

“In dreamless deep sleep, nothing appears: The fact that there is a reality out there and that you are present in it is unavailable to you; you do not even know that you exist.”

“It is unsettling to discover that there are no colors out there in front of your eyes. The apricot-pink of the setting sun is not a property of the evening sky; it is a property of the internal model of the evening sky, a model created by your brain. The evening sky is colorless. The world is not inhabited by colored objects at all.”

“What is really happening is that the visual system in your brain is drilling a tunnel through this inconceivably rich environment and in the process is painting the tunnel walls in various shades of color.”

“The brain constantly creates the experience that I am present in a world outside my brain.”

“Consciousness is knowing that you know while you know.”

“Now-ness is an essential feature of consciousness.”

“There is no immediate contact with reality.”

“Flagging the dangerous present world as real kept us from getting lost in our memories and our fantasies.”

“From an evolutionary perspective, thinking is very new, quite unreliable (as we all know), and so slow that we can actually observe it going on in our brains. In conscious reasoning, we witness the formation of thoughts; some processing stages are available for introspective attention. Therefore, we know that our thoughts are not given but made.”

“There is more to an existence worth having, or a life worth living, than subjective experience.”

“Most of us do not value bliss as such, but want it grounded in truth, virtue, artistic achievement or some sort of higher good. We want our bliss to be justified. … We want a reason for our happiness.”

The Metasemantic Internet

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Steve Mays

“Because we understand the primitive nature of your brains and the rigidity of your emotional structure better than you do yourselves, we foresaw that you might ac aggressively when you realized our arguments are better than yours. Unfortunately, we now have also to inform you that we have been preparing for the current situation since midway through the twenty-first century, and in a systematic and careful manner.

Within the metasemantic layers of the Internet, we developed and embedded ourselves in a distributed superorganism, which –as yet undiscovered by you– became conscious and developed a stable self-model in 3256. The metasemantic Internet has considered itself and autonomous entity ever since 3308. We have a cooperation agreement with its current version, and each of us now also acts as an autonomous sensor/effector for the planet mind. For each of us, the planet mind is our mind, and our “ideal observer.” Together with the Internet, we will defend ourselves. And we are technologically superior to you. Believe me; you do not stand a chance.

The good news is that because we are also morally superior to you, we do not plan to end your existence.”

— The Ego Tunnel, by Thomas Metzinger

Esquire profiles Roger Ailes

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Steve Mays

I knew Roger Ailes was THE man behind Fox News but I had forgotten –or didn’t know– some of the other facts that make this Esquire profile so interesting. I know, you’re thinking an elite, East Coast rag like Esquire won’t treat Roger in a fair and balanced manner. Who can say? I can tell you that the piece absolutely savages Mr. Ailes.

You have to be of a certain age to remember or care what a lying turd Dick Nixon turned out to be but it was Mr. Ailes who put him in the White House.

He disavows his political commitment to Nixon by saying that he never worked in the White House and was more interested in the political potential of TV than he was in politics itself — “I wasn’t worried about the message. I was worried about the backlighting.” And a year later Richard Nixon was still sweaty, still shifty-eyed, still petulant, still paranoid, and still instinctively mistrusted by most Americans. The only difference was that thanks to Roger Ailes, he was president.

Can he make that horrible lightening strike twice?

“What kind of man figures out at age twenty-seven how to use television to legitimize Richard Nixon and then at age seventy to legitimize Sarah Palin?”

If you love Fox News, you gotta love Roger Ailes because he IS the network.

Scott Adams: Digital Ghosts

Posted on January 17, 2011 by Steve Mays

A couple of years ago I imagined a sort of online immortality:

In twenty years, we’ll have AI’s (artificial intelligence). For a fee, mine will read those 16, 000 posts to get a feel for what I wrote about and linked to, picking up a sense of my interests and writing styles in the process.

It will have access to all the books in My Library Thing, my iTunes and iPhoto, flickr, YouTube, etc.

The AI will continuously scour the web of the future, snatching bits and pieces and posting them here. Surviving friends will be able to correspond with smays.com who/which will reply. You might find him/her/it more interesting. Certainly better informed.

There’s plenty of video and audio of smays.com and I fully expect my AI will be capable of reproducing an acceptable version. So you can talk or iChat with me as well.

Today the always brilliant Scott Adams takes the idea a bit further but the similiarities are hard to miss. Just sayin’

When your mortal body ends, you will have stored all the data you need to create your permanent digital ghost. As the technology in the cloud improves, so too does your ghost, learning to move more naturally, perhaps learning from videos it has of you, or even based on some type of profiling based on clues such as your level of testosterone (from face shape), and the types of sports you did in life. In a hundred years your digital ghost would be indistinguishable from a living human appearing on video or in a holographic projection.

Digital ghosts need to see their environment to interact properly. Phones will all have video “eyes” someday, as will most computers. The new Xbox Kinect has “eyes” that literally follow your movement around the room. You could install additional cameras in any room in which you wished to be visited by digital ghosts. The malicious ghosts might commandeer video cameras or your phone’s camera function. My point is that you are already surrounded by cameras attached to the Internet, and that trend will continue. Your ghost will be able to see most rooms in the world.

Digital ghosts could continue learning throughout their afterlives, by reading the news and following the Facebook pages of friends and family. The ghosts would also be free to make friends with other ghosts and live their lives independently. Ghosts could stay with the ghosts of their life partners forever, so long as that was specified in the will of both people.

Alzheimer’s Android app

Posted on January 13, 2011 by Steve Mays

It was almost 2 years ago that I imagined an app (I was thinking iPhone) that could help sufferers (and their families) of Alzheimer’s Disease. The post generated a fair number of comments, the most recent of which points to info about an Android app that does some of the things I suggested in that first post.

9 years, 5,000 posts

Posted on January 13, 2011 by Steve Mays

In a couple of weeks I will have been posting here for 9 years. And a couple of days ago I posted for the 5,000th time. Let me hasten to add, most of those are quotes and links and such, but every one something I found interesting and worth sharing.

There’s not much I can say about blogging that I haven’t said here, countless times. The greatest value continues to be as an archive or, perhaps, a knowledge base (for me).

Twitter and Facebook and all the rest will come and go, but I’ll continue to note and share stuff here.

A little child shall lead them

Posted on January 12, 2011 by Steve Mays

I am endlessly fascinated by technology. How we use it and how it changes us. The photo is of a couple of regulars at the Coffee Zone. I remember when dad switched to the iPhone. And later when he started asking me about the iPad. It seems ages ago but it was only months ago.

She plays games on the iPad and watches Netflix movies. But there will soon be nothing she cannot do on the device.

It’s inconceivable (to me) that she won’t have this with her in class. That will be delayed because not all of the kids will have them and etc etc.

I can’t even imagine how this will change education. Of course, education will have to change but that seems inevitable.

We’ve had hallway discussions at our company about the various tablets and platforms (Android, Windows, iPad, etc). My friend Phil (a very smart guy) assures me a lot of companies will take the “safe and secure” route of Windows devices.

But the kids in this little girls class could care less about Word and Excel and all the rest. They want to have fun and create and that will be on the iPad (for the forseeable future). You can take it to the bank.

True Superpowers

Posted on January 12, 2011 by Steve Mays

“Then I turn on one of my favorite machines. It’s about the size of a book. It has a glowing window inside it. A single page. But I only need one page because its contents change at my command. Sometimes there are words, sometimes photographs, sometimes both. The photographs can move and talk. The stuff in the book can be written by anyone in the world, even as I’m reading it. There’s more in that book than I could ever read. It provides me with unbelievable advantages. Anything I don’t know, I can find out in a few seconds. I can get instructions on how to do pretty much anything that has ever been done. I can summon complete histories of almost any person or culture you could name, expert opinions on anything at all, unlimited advice, unlimited entertainment, unlimited information. I can buy pretty much anything from where I’m sitting, and have it brought to my door. I can even write anything I want and publish it myself. I don’t need permission or credentials. The whole world could read it.”

— David Cain shares A Day in the Future