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stephen hawking, in a lecture is saying that the human race has ‘entered a new stage of evolution’, in that we are now taking control of our genetics directly. yes and no, his point is entirely accurate and valid, but his word choice is wrong. people abuse the word evolution because it’s the only one they know to describe change (perhaps ‘improvement’) of a population over time.

look, you wouldn’t say “bob has entered a new stage of walking, he has a bike now”, you would say “bob doesn’t walk places as much, he now bikes”. similarly we’re no longer evolving, we’re now doing something else. coin a word, or just say ‘custom designing ourselves’. evolution requires natural selection and that force nowadays has very little effect on humans, in a world with health care and birth control.

we can’t understand the future by simply blindly shoehorning our reality into outdated concepts and terms. so yes, partially this is me just being a stickler on word choice, but partly we also need to be aware that we shape our thinking in terms of things we know, and there’s no reason to give people wrong conceptions on what’s going on.

tSS – like beasts fucking, sketch

in one of umberto eco’s collections of writings he mentions seeing a man in a restaurant who during dinner would loudly talk on his cellphone about large (iirc mafia-related) business deals. the man’s intention was to communicate that he was an important person of significant power. eco then points out that the man got one thing precisely wrong: an important person would never be interrupted during dinner.

power is about being able to do what you want, when you want to, not simply being responsible for greater and riskier things.

i recently thought about this upon receiving a random internet alert. i spent a large chunk of my life thinking that to be more technologically advanced you need to be more hooked up, with all your programs reporting status updates to you constantly. in reality this does not empower you, just scatters your attention.

instead, i’ve now actually made an effort to disconnect myself and hide things away from myself. i have enough trouble concentrating without a periodic ‘beep’ that, upon investigation, will inform me that someone has become the mayor of a new eatery in foursquare. my phone and computer have no twitter/facebook/rss alerts at all anymore, instead i read those when i feel like it using web browser bookmarks. my phone now receives nothing that makes noise, except calls which still require immediate attention unfortunately.

my only exception is emails that go to my work account show up in my computer dock. that’s a work obligation. nothing else does.

technology should never interrupt you. technology should politely wait for you to look in it’s direction, then quickly, clearly, and efficiently say to you what it has to say, and when done move back and wait on the side.

if there is one thing that programmers can almost uniformly be accused of is coding for the best case: wanting to write programs designed around all things behaving correctly every time.

one random facet of this is the assumption that crowds and their voting can be trusted to behave in a productive way. let’s say you have a website where people vote on who is the best poster / reviewer / uploader / whatever, and rewards them in some way. simple to implement, simple to test, and you’re done, right?

well, never underestimate the willingness of crowds to behave maliciously. getting 1000 people to do a prank on a system like that is trivial, and it’s even easier to get one person with a bunch of zombie machines all over the planet.

attacks like this are really common: websites raid amazon review / recommendation pages for fun, 4chan obliterated a “person of the year” TIME poll, and twitter “trending topics” seem to be raids more often than not.

the last one in particular strikes me as funny. businesses are now using personal hash tags to let people talk about them using hashtags, and in some cases display the results real time in the lobby or on their page. i’m astounded at this. all it takes is one message board post asking everyone to twitpic porn to the hashtag and voila, instant PR disaster.

always program for the worst case, not the best case. unless you have some method to block them, assume that at any point in time there are thousands of bored suburban teenagers who would love to abuse any ranking system you have for laughs.

the catholic church decided to bar a congresscritter from communion cause he failed to vote against abortion. to be honest i hope this practice takes off as america still has a huge bias against atheism and this makes it clear that atheism is not just not believing in god, but also a conscious decision to eschew religion as the gods available all seem to behave like very human spoiled children

in less serious, i heard a cute response to “god asked me to pray for you” which was “well tell him to man up and talk to me directly and not go behind my back like this spreading rumors”.

what i learned from the game Modern Warfare 2:

• the CIA is perfectly willing to slaughter hundreds of civilians as part of undercover op
• all brazilians are armed to the teeth
• the russian military gives each person a totally different brand and caliber gun
• heartbeat monitors can detect if you’re friend or foe
• and so can UAVs. they even mark foes with little red rectangles in real time
• specops can drive snowmobiles one handed while shooting and reloading an uzi, but is completely befuddled by chain link fences and barb wire
• it’s possible to get good consistant bandwidth in a remote mountain house (note! this one might not actually be true)
• russia can launch a full land invasion of america with 1 day prep

and that famous part to MW2, the “kill the civilians” bit, it’s funny to me that it’s that big a deal. you’re playing a shooter and have already shot dozens of random people, will continue to shoot hundreds more, and because some of them are unarmed it’s a big deal? yes, they get hit in “realistic” means (as much as that applies for computer games) but so does every other character

cmon now, you call in airstrikes in crowded cities and grenade marketplaces, but apparently all those are abandoned and/or no one cares about brazilians.

eh, whatevs.

it happened again.

guy on bike: hey, a bridgestone
me: o.o?
guy on bike: nice bike
me: oh, thanks man

i’m still dubious of their sincerity

the first finished, complete song of mine is 15 years old. it’s a 3 minute or so demo/tracker/techno thing

v|scosity – gl

v|scosity was one of my first writing pseudonyms, and the song was gl cause at that point i decided that i would name all my songs with as few letters as possible to make them unique. i gave up after one more, called ‘fl’, trivially.

the song was originally called “glimpse within”.

(it was originally an .IT file, i converted into a mono mp3 using interpolated sampling)

i watched a debate between a bishop, catholic mp, a writer, and stephen fry on the subject “is the catholic church a force for good in the world”. if you’re curious, it’s here.

it’s quite good and very british in style in that everyone first gets uninterrupted long statements, then the audience asks questions in ‘bulk’ so to speak, after which people get time to respond to the questions in any way they see fit, and when that is over, a closing statement is made. no cross talk and yelling.

what jumped out at me is that at one point stephen fry makes a very valid point that i never quite formulated clearly about the fact that catholic church has been on the side of what it now considers to be poor moral choices, including being pro-slavery and killing people who owned non-latin bibles. the excuse it used for not apologizing for all those times was that this was a product of it’s time and should be judged as such.

the problem, as stephen fry points out, is that the catholic church is supposed to be an absolute moral compass, and if your moral compass isn’t able to tell you that slavery is wrong until society catches up, then it’s not a compass, it’s stick floating downstream.

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one thing that goes unsaid in the debate btw is this apparent belief on the MPs side that without the catholic church people would absolutely lack guidance and devolve into an animal world of murder and rape, while stephen fry thinks we’d transcend into a humanist morality. both are probably wrong, but i think part of their lack of communication has to do with that issue.

i’m biased here in that i do hate the “oh, you’re atheist? so you’re immoral then right?” train of thought, but i also think that religion is often just a veneer for simplistic phobias that won’t disappear even after you admit that they’re not divine in nature.

which is why i’m glad that the debate concentrated on the actual actions and policies of the catholic church (condoms, hiding child abuse) since those are the actual effects the church as an entity, and not religion, has on the world.

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i will also say that the final result was heartening, and separately that the british MP sounds like a monty python parody of a woman. it’s that voice they use for “i don’t like spam” or “penguins don’t come from africa”. i’m amazed anyone has it in real life, i always thought it was a silly bit of overacting.

geocities got shut down. i tried to find the two websites i had on there but for the life of me couldn’t remember anything about them. no idea what the urls, subject matter, or title were, and really, i probably wouldn’t have recognized them even if i saw them. it’s funny, all the various liquidspin.coms i remember at least sorta clearly, but zero for the geocities/angelfire stuff. i don’t think i was quite self aware of my own web-actions at that point

so yahoo bought that site for 3 over billion dollars. at the time that was the content center of the internet. this was the future, this was user generated content, a beginning of a new world where we all build our own amusement, learn, and share.

so went wrong? at that point it didn’t dawn on anyone that none of us want to create content. not really. that’s work, requires effort to maintain, and skill in setting up in the first place. we don’t really want to create content, we just want to post pics of our cats, say what we had for dinner, and link people to funny videos. we’re a consumer society, not a creator society. don’t bet against that.

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this is a pretty funny video, i just had dinner that was potato with some random fixings, and here’s a pic of my cat hanging out under a stool where he can still comfortably keep an eye on his food bowl:

Loki under stool