Author: admin

This is my first day in Paris. I am here for a four week stay, with occasional side trips to places like Cologne, Dublin and Tübingen. As long as I qm, you know, in the neighborhood. 🙂

And not just Paris. I am staying in a swank Haussmainnian flat (you could look it up) in the 17th Arrondissement. It’s one of those places where you look around and think “Wow, what a large and lovely and elegant apartment!”, and congratulate yourself on lucking out. Then you happen to open another door, and you say “Oh my god, there’s a whole other master bedroom and bathroom!”

Speaking as a Manhattanite, where the words “apartment” and “closet with running water” are used interchangeably, this place has some serious Mojo.

Yet in moments when I am truly honest with myself, I realize that this all feeds my inner nerd. I know that I will spend hours roaming the City of Lights, crossing Pont Neuf, wandering through Le Marais, communing with the statues at the Musée Rodin.

And then I’m going to come back here and get some serious programming done.

 

 

cat foo | sort -n +2 | awk '{if ($3 > 0) print}'

Ceci n’est ce pas une pipe.

 

 

This evening I read yet another article about our cultural obsession with machines that come to life and then want to take over the world. There is a long tradition of this sort of thing in Western literature.

From the Golem to Frankenstein’s creature to Maria in Metropolis to Robots, HAL, Cylons, Replicants Terminators and on and on and on, our culture seems obsessed by the idea that we will one day create an artificially intelligent being that will then displace us.

Yet I have not seen any compelling evidence that such a thing is even possible. From an empirical standpoint, the notion of a machine that would “want” to be human — or that would want anything at all, in the sense that we generally understand that word — has no correlate in reality.

There are many SciFi fantasies that we clearly understand to be metaphoric, from time machines to faster than light travel. When we talk about any of these devices, we generally understand that we are merely using a convenient literary convention.

So why is the Golem fantasy different? Why is it that every time we see another fantastical A.I. tale from a writer’s imagination, whether 2001 or Her or ex Machina, we debate about it as though discussing something as immediate and real as tomorrow’s weather?

Apparently some cultural neurosis compels us to wait for Frankenstein’s monster to walk through the door. But that doesn’t mean anyone is actually on the other side of the door.

This evening I went with friends to see the Berlin Philharmonic. It was all wonderful.

But when Yuja Wang came out to play Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2, it all went somewhere far beyond wonderful. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a powerful experience at an orchestral performance.

Prokofiev’s second piano concerto is a work of intense emotion. He wrote it in memory of a close friend who had committed suicide, and he essentially wrote it twice — the second time after the original orchestral score was destroyed in a fire following the Russian revolution.

Yuja Wang played the piece as though she was possessed. It was astonishing to see and hear so much emotional power flow from a single human being, particularly one so young.

Meanwhile, the orchestra and conductor Paavo Jarvi clearly understood that something extraordinary was happening, and they rose to the occasion magnificently. The interaction between pianist, conductor, orchestra and enraptured audience was a thing of pure beauty.

It was one of those moments that make you realize how truly fortunate you are to be alive.

VR headsets seem to be
The hot new business, you’ll agree.

In a movie you can view
Only what’s in front of you.

But VR shows what’s all around,
From back to front, from sky to ground.

Yet there are problems, so it seems,
In selling those immersive dreams.

You can’t walk in this new space
Because you’d fall upon your face.

You cannot run, you can’t explore
And when you hear that dinosaur

You cannot look behind to check,
Unless you want to hurt your neck.

The real next-gen millionaires?
They’re buying stock in swivel chairs!

Today a man that I know professionally attacked me on a social network site, in a particularly puerile and ignorant way. My first instinct was to fight back, to publicly defend myself.

And then I realized that the entire episode was simply ridiculous, that this guy was just taking a cheap and intellectually lazy shot. To directly respond to such an attack would be, at best, a waste of time.

You never know when somebody will try to misrepresent you, whether through malice, ignorance or stupidity. And you may feel the immediate instinct to fight back.

But often the attack is so evidently ludicrous and ill informed that no defense is required. You just need to trust that the people reading these things are not idiots, and will see such nonsense for what it is.

Or else what’s the point of anything?

Today a friend told me a story she heard about a study that was done among chimpanzees in Africa. I suspect the story is apocryphal, but in a way that makes it even better.

It seems that some scientists had been studying a group of chimpanzees, and had observed behavior which in humans correlates to depression, such as eating at odd times, spending lots of time alone, and staying on the outskirts of the group. This behavior was observed in about 10% of the chimps, which happens to be near to the percentage of Americans who show symptoms of depression.

The scientists removed the depressed chimps for six months, to see how this would affect the behavior of the other 90%. It’s possible that the chimps signed a voluntary consent form for participating in such a disruptive study, but I’m not holding out much hope.

You might think that in the absence of the depressed individuals, the remaining majority would produce another 10% of depressed chimps. But apparently that’s not what actually happened.

What actually happened was this: When the scientists returned six months later, all of the non-depressed chimps were dead.

It would seem that the depressed chimps had functioned as a kind of early warning system, continually looking out for predators, tropical storms, and other threats to the group. Without that system in place, the group was doomed.

When I heard about this study, I remember thinking how great it would be for depressed people. Instead of being a problem to be fixed, they would know that their condition is a valuable asset to society, providing a critical mass of individuals uniquely suited to guarding against danger.

I figured this would make my depressed friends vey happy.

Oh no, I thought. What happens if we become a society with no depressed people? We are all doomed.

Suppose you had never heard of holotheatre, and somebody invited you to see a robo-play. Imagine how strange the experience would be.

All of those robots rolling around the room, saying things that were actually the words of humans, and touching people who are wearing VR headsets. You might be appalled at the people who are interacting with these odd machines, wandering about in what is clearly a make believe reality, acting as though everything about this made up world is real.

Every once in a while, one of these crazy robots would roll toward some audience member, who wouldn’t seem to know the robot is there. The robot might do something weird like hand the audience member a glass of water, or blow air in their face. Even worse, the robot might start singing — and the person holding the glass of water wouldn’t seem to realize that a robot has burst into song.

“Hey!” you might be tempted to shout to the robots, “Why are you harassing these people?”

But your major worry would be reserved for the audience. All of these apparently intelligent citizens, falling for an obvious trick. Why, you might ask yourself, don’t they realize that those robots among them are merely pretending to be human?

Suppose you had never heard of “theatre”, and somebody invited you to see a play. Imagine how strange the experience would be.

All of those people up on stage, saying things that were actually the words of somebody else. You might be appalled at these odd people, walking about in what is clearly a make believe reality, acting as though everything about this made up world is real.

Every once in a while, one of these crazy people would look toward us — the audience — gazing out into the middle distance as though none of us is there. They might do something weird like launch into a lengthy speech, apparently to the empty air. Or even worse, they might express their deepest emotions by singing — without, apparently, ever realizing that they have burst into song.

“Hey!” you might be tempted to shout to the person up on stage, “Can’t you see us? We’re right here!”

But your major worry would be reserved for the audience. All of these apparently intelligent citizens, falling for an obvious trick. Why, you might ask yourself, don’t they realize that those people up there are merely pretending?

This evening I was having dinner with some friends, one of whom was Paul Debevec. We were discussing the cultural shift in the general acceptance of smoking in public, and Paul remarked that smoking had become denormalized.

One of the people at the table really liked the word “denormalized”, and wanted to know exactly what it meant. Paul explained that he had meant it in the sense of a shift in what is generally considered to be normal behavior.

So I asked him, if everyone should some day start smoking again, whether we could then say that smoking had become renormalized.

Paul, tapping effortlessly into his inner computer graphics nerd, replied: “The norm always divides us.”

I agreed, adding: “And then it makes us one.”