What do you see?

It's been quite a while since I've blogged. So many things have happened, and at the same time, nothing has changed. Such is life. Though I also really haven't felt like sharing my thoughts and feelings for quite some time now. Just the way things have been for me.

Anyhow, I really can't stop thinking about the movie Sunshine... and that's probably because I've been listening to the soundtrack non-stop for the past few days now. With the movie in limited release, I guess it was a stroke of luck that I found that the Palm Theatre in SLO was showing it. (And thanks to Steve for letting me know!) Anyway, after a few abortive attempts to watch it with a certain special friend, I nearly gave up. Until Steve let me know that he was going to watch it again, with a few friends from high school. I met up with them and really enjoyed the movie. And it was also good to see everyone again. Anyway, that was quite a while ago, maybe back in August.

Critics will pan the movie because of its supposed bad science, such as: the premature death of the Sun, vacuum exposure effects, the presence of artificial gravity, and the size of the stellar bomb vs. the Sun. I'm normally a stickler for hard science in science fiction, but I found the movie plausible enough to enjoy. And in fact, I found the depictions of science to be reasonable. It was never mentioned in-movie, but the reason for the premature death of the Sun was due to it capturing a Q-ball... or dark matter. I thought this was a neat explanation because it reminded me of Baxter's Xeelee Sequence, where dark matter beings — the Photino Birds — would take up residence in stars, causing them to age and darken prematurely.

Artificial gravity I just chalked up to technology. Hey, 50 years in the future is quite a bit of time for technological progress, especially at the exponential or near-exponential rate of advance we have going. Same with the bomb. It was obviously not nuclear, despite being constructed of every last bit of fissile material on the Earth. So who knows what principles it operated on. All it takes is a little suspension of disbelief...

Anyway, what fascinated me was the people. Here we have a crew of 8, all alone in space, with the monumental task of saving all life on Earth from extinction. How do they cope with the pressure? Well, of course some do and some don't. A few pick up obsessive hobbies, like sunbathing, reading the same book over and over again, or constantly listening to solar winds. And of course, the movie is about the second attempt. Obviously, the crew of the first ship failed... what lead to their failure? Was it technological? Or some human element?

But what also hooked me was the soundtrack, composed by John Murphy and Underworld. The music that played during the first climactic scene (with Captain Kaneda on the solar shield) left my jaw on the floor when the scene concluded. It was just so intense and so epic. (It's entitled "What do you see?")

Anyway, ending this entry with a quote from Jeffrey Sinclair of Babylon 5 seems apt:

“Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes... and all of this... all of this... was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars.”

How fortunate the man with none

I've had Dead Can Dance's album Into the Labyrinth for quite a while, having picked it up in my high school days. (That is... early 90's ;) I believe what originally tuned me onto them was seeing the video for "The Carnival is Over" on some late-night MTV alternative show. (Does MTV even show music videos nowadays? Haha.) Anyway, another song of theirs that got a lot of radio play was "The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove," also on that album.

I guess I'm just in that mood for their style of music lately. I recently Netflixed Baraka, which they did the soundtrack for. I was surprised I never expanded my DCD collection - so I started doing that recently, buying some of their earlier albums. Yes, buying actual CDs. It's so strange. ;)

I like all that I've heard so far and so I'll probably be working my way up to recent albums (though only relatively recent, since they disbanded an album or two after Into the Labyrinth).

Anyhow, for a bit of nostalgia, I actually found the video for "The Carnival is Over" on YouTube:

Still very mesmerizing.

What doesn't kill you...

Not much has been happening lately.

I've pretty much taken a break from reading though, but I have a new pile of books building up. I'm currently reading Clifford D. Simak's City, a collection of science fiction short stories about... dogs. Those lovable, furry companions of ours. They are interesting tales, having been written in the 1950's. Humanity has disappeared and moved on and the Dogs have inherited the Earth.

Well, how can I say I've taken a break if I'm reading this book? I don't read it that often... maybe once every few days. Lately I've been keeping my mind occupied (and amazed, and educated, and entertained...) with various David Attenborough nature documentaries.

On a whim, though probably due to my exposure to video clips of Attenborough's documentaries on YouTube and Digg, I ordered the multiple boxed sets of his various BBC documentaries: Life of Mammals, Life of Birds, Life in the Undergrowth, etc. etc. I'm not sure I got them all, but I got enough to keep me occupied for a while.

Anyway, I started and finished Life in the Undergrowth and just loved the close up shots of the various undergrowth creatures. (Creepy crawly things!) I just barely finished the first of 3 DVDs for Life of Birds. But it will probably be a while before I finish the entire series...

Anyhow, I've been sick lately. It seems like every 2-3 years, I get utterly and hopelessly ill. And it's not always the same thing... it's almost always something different. (A few years ago, the week before I vacationed in Manhattan, I got violently ill [let's just say gastrointestinal problems]... I nearly canceled my flight, my hotel reservation... but I held out and on the morning of my flight, I was well enough to fly...)

I'm still recovering. Just when I thought I was over it last week, I get hit with a fever that effectively disables me all of Friday. But by Saturday morning, 3am, my fever broke... and I think I've been teetering since. I watch what I wear and watch what I eat/drink for fear of triggering an allergic reaction. (I seem to be hyper-sensitive at the moment.)

Because of all this, I've been housebound and bored. (But I'm back at work today, hopefully for a good while. I'm running out of sick days...) It did give me an opportunity to catch up on my Netflix and on Heroes and Battlestar Galactica though. :)

That's no moon, that's a space station!

Every now and then when I drive home from work and I see the beautiful rolling hills to the east and the ocean and sunset to the west, I think: What would it be like to live on an Orbital? (Or more generally, a space habitat... space station... artificial environment... etc. etc.)

In other words, an artificial world so large that we are able to reproduce a semblance of our terrestrial environment on it. It would require engineering on mind-boggling scales and probably require materials with properties that are, as far as we know today, physically impossible.

But I wondered anyway... and I wondered how big would an Orbital (think habitable artificial ring, like Halo) would have to be to meet human standards. That is, have centripetal acceleration at its inner surface at 9.8 m/s² (Earth standard gravity) and have a revolution of 1 day. (That way, it could be situated at an angle so one-half of its inner surface would always face the sun... simulating night & day.)

Calculating it turned out to be rather easy, two equations (one of them being the scalar formula for centripetal acceleration) and two variables (radius and rotation speed).

So to meet human standards, the Orbital would have to have a radius of 1.8 million kilometers. (See calculation via Google calculator here.)

And I started thinking about this number. It's an unbelievably huge distance. Some 290 times the radius of the Earth! In fact, it's nearly three times the radius of the sun! If you were standing on the surface and you shot a beam of light directly above (to the opposite surface of the ring), the beam would take 12 seconds to get there. Mega-engineering, indeed.

Anyhow, I thought that was interesting, and I got to play around with Google calculator a bit. :)

New Year's Start

Nothing like starting the new year with some gnarly headaches. I can't tell if its due to a lack of sleep (my schedule shifted by a few hours... and now I have less than a week to get back to a normal schedule), lack of caffeine (I started drinking 2 Red Bulls a day during the break and have now cut back to one), or other. Ah well, nothing a little Tylenol can't dull.

I still haven't started that Iain Banks book. I'm actually still reading Resplendent by Stephen Baxter. I'm on the 2nd to the last story now. (The last story is ominously titled "The Siege of Earth.") It's been some interesting reading, but I have to wonder about the timescales of human evolution he presents. Drastic changes occurring over a few thousands of years? It just seems too quick.

The three authors I've been reading from a lot lately have interesting and (gradually) varying views about the future of intelligence in the universe (or at least, the galaxy):

Stephen Baxter - Humans will more or less always remain human, almost indistinguishable from what we consider "human" today. I think pride/dogma was the primary force that kept people static over millennia. (Humans were conquered twice and nearly stripped of all their identity before lashing out and spreading among the stars.)

Iain M. Banks - Humans and sentient machines will coexist as separate forms of life. Humans will be heavily genetically engineered, but remain largely biological. The Culture can be viewed as a post-human society, but the barrier between biological and machine life is seldom crossed, if ever. (In fact, I don't remember any instances.)

Greg Egan - Consciousness/intelligence/sentience is purely a software phenomena. Humans can make copies of themselves (and are thus immortal), change their bodies (biological or purely machine) or even live without bodies at all. In some stories, future-humans are born with biological origins and are later "transcribed." In others, they start out as purely software constructs.

Anyhow, Egan's view is the most interesting to me... probably because I am a software engineer with interests in biology. :) (Specifically, the computer simulation of life processes.) Hence my taking a few chemistry classes here and there, a few biology classes here and there. I wish I could be more serious about taking more classes and pursuing another degree... but the pragmatist in me says nothing would ever come from it. So for now, I do it to simply indulge my interests.

Anyway, I'm just rambling and writing without focus. I originally intended this entry to be about the new year, but it shifted to books, philosophy, and my personal interests. I'm not sure what to file it under now. ;)

Drifting

I've been keeping busy lately, though I guess busy is a relative term. I really can't recall which books I finished since I last mentioned it. But recently, I did finish Inversions by Iain Banks. I found it really interesting because it was a Culture book in disguise. (And yet it had a very medieval feel to it.) But after having spent weeks reading it, I find myself longing for more Culture tales... that include drones, Minds, and Orbitals. :) Unfortunately, there probably won't be one for a few years.

What book to start next? I will probably be starting The Algebraist, also by Banks. (This and one other are the last science fiction books of his that I have.) I haven't started it yet though because I've been reading short stories from Resplendent by Stephen Baxter. It feels good to be immersed in the universe of the Xeelee Sequence again. I'm reading the stories in order, which go from the 2nd occupation of Earth all the way til... who knows? The end of the baryonic universe?

But reading those tales kind of makes me feel sad. Humanity is so xenophobic, militaristic, dogmatic and... proud. It's a stark constrast to the Culture, which I view as being ideal... if somewhat utopian.

Anyway, a few movies I've watched recently (via Netflix) which I enjoyed: Silent Hill, Slither, Brick, March of the Penguins, and Tank Girl. Silent Hill was surprisingly coherent for a movie adaptation of a video game. (I never played the game though.) Slither was funny and amusing, while March of the Penguins was just engrossing and entertaining (thanks to the spectacular cinematography and the narration).

Brick was an interesting movie. I knew nothing about it, heard nothing about it. But a friend recommended it and she described the main character as being the "Hollywood version" of me. Naturally intrigued, I just had to check it out. Anyway, I won't comment much else about it, but yeah, the similarities were uncanny. :) But aside from that, I just loved the noir-esque feel of the movie. (And if I had to pick the Hollywood version of her, I would have to say... some Naomi Watts character. :)

And as for Tank Girl, I don't know what prompted me to queue up that movie, or push it to the top of my queue, but I really enjoyed it. I knew nothing about the original comics, but as I was watching the movie (which was interspersed with frames from the comics), I couldn't help but notice how similar the character design was to the Gorillaz... which is no coincidence since it's done by the same artist! Anyhow, I just loved the soundtrack too (very 90'ish). And I really got a kick out of the "Let's do it" number in the middle of the movie.

Oh wait. I remember why I queued it up now. It's because I heard about the ultracute, bespectacled sidekick, Jet Girl... played by an oddly brunette Naomi Watts. ;)

TV or not TV

When I lived in the Bay Area, I just had to have cable (or at least, an antenna good enough to pick up the major networks). It was an odd sort of addiction, because really, I only regularly watched 2 or 3 shows. It wasn't plainly obvious to me then, but that made the cost of those shows $10-$15 or more (assuming a $30 cable bill... which was the quoted price... but with misc. fees and other crap usually ended up being closer to $40+).

Not to mention that the fact I had access to regular programming meant that I'd be channel surfing when bored. (Though that usually meant I was just using it as background noise... while I actually web surfed.) Yeah, pretty wasteful.

Though I really have no qualms about spacing out to one of the various education-oriented channels. Like the Discovery Channel, History Channel, the Learning Channel, etc. etc. There'd usually be something interesting there. And that's one activity I miss due to my lack of TV.

I guess ideally, it would be nice to be able to pick your shows and just pay for those. Or hell, even having channels a la carte would be nice as well. But no, I don't see these cable companies doing that in the near future. In fact, they tend to move toward the opposite - pushing channel packages and such.

Nowadays, I get by with the iTunes store. The only show I really watch is Battlestar Galactica. And even if the iTunes store didn't carry it, I think I could just wait for the season DVDs. (Like I do with Veronica Mars... which iTunes doesn't carry.) At $2 an episode, assuming weekly episodes, it comes out to around $8 a month per show. Not bad, I guess.

Anyhow, amid all the praise (from geek media as well as from gaming friends), I bought a season pass for Heroes. They're about 8 episodes in already and I've been downloading all the previously-aired episodes today. Pretty interesting and gripping so far, having watched the first 3 episodes.

Anyway, I find it amusing that some people will say "eww! you pay $15 a month to play a game". And yet there they are paying $30, $50, $80 or more a month for cable/satellite. Interactive (and somewhat social, especially if you have Ventrilo... haha, I'm reminded of the DotA song) entertainment vs. purely passive entertainment.

But that's just me.

Kiwi!

An interesting (and sad) tale about fulfilling one's lifelong dream.

So Lost...

I finished yet another Iain M. Banks book yesterday. And now I'm feeling quite lost. I think that's pretty much it as far as his "Culture" books goes. Let's see, since summer I've read (in order):

• Consider Phlebas
  
• Excession
  
• Look to Windward
  
• Use of Weapons
  
• "The State of the Art" (short story/novella)
  
• The Player of Games

I wouldn't really consider the Culture novels "hard" science fiction, which is normally what draws me to read and follow certain authors (e.g. Stephen Baxter and Greg Egan). However, the storytelling and character development are just unprecedented. Characters/events from my two favorite books, Look to Windward and Use of Weapons just haunted me for days on end after I finished the books.

Oddly, I find some of the non-human characters the most memorable, partly due to their humor/quirkiness (Skaffen-Amtiskaw and Flero-Imsaho) and sometimes, ironically, due to their more-than-human humanity (the GSV Lasting Damage/Masaq' Hub).

Anyhow, the main reason I've been able to read so many books so quickly is probably because I have quick lunches at work (e.g. two slices of pizza) and then round out my hour sitting in the student lounge reading. For once, I actually prefer having trade paperback-sized or mass market-sized books because they're so... portable! I can't imagine lugging around around a hardcover in my already packed backpack.

The Day After

Well, election day came and went and... I didn't vote. I thought by changing my address with the DMV, I would automatically become registered to vote. It seems to work that way... when you move within your county. Having moved from Santa Clara County to Santa Barbara County... Well!

I guess if I really cared enough, I could have followed up/done something about it weeks if not months ago. (Or hell, even a year ago... I moved back here around May/June of last year?) The fact that I never got any voter materials via mail always crossed my mind. But in some ways, I think I was secretly relieved as well.

I'm a registered independent though. I'd probably just be throwing my vote away. I abhor politics and maybe because of that fact (or because I'm just really lazy), I don't do enough research to really believe in my vote.

I'm apolitical. Or so I've always believed. The whole political frenzy building up these last few weeks has gotten me reviewing my beliefs. (In addition to utterly disgusting me with all the mudslinging.) Whereas I thought I was a fence-sitter, having ambivalent feelings about society and our system of governance, I suddenly realized, hey, I do have strong feelings and opinions.

Sadly, nothing will come from my views. Because I also believe the changed and reformed society that I view as ideal cannot come from our current one.

And... I'm also reluctant to make my views public. (Like how I keep my views about religion to myself.) As much as I enjoy having a personal blog (I don't even think I have a single reader out there!), I don't want to shoot myself in the foot by being too transparent.

Everyone I know goes away in the end...

I saw this music video linked over at Digg:

Link

And the imagery left me floored. Anyhow, it's Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt" from his American IV: The Man Comes Around album a few years back.

Anyway, thought I'd share (or at least, keep a semi-permanent record of it in my blog )...

The Road of Excess

The road of excess
leads to the palace of wisdom;
for we never know
what is enough
until we know what is more than enough.

I find myself with more time to blog lately, and that's probably because I'm bored. I've been reading books like mad (as I always seem to have 2-3 books that are being "read"... though I find I get through them faster if I concentrate on one), maybe spending 1-2 hours reading per day. The last few books I finished were by Iain M. Banks, part of his "Culture" series (though not really a series since they aren't linked): Consider Phlebas and Excession. I'm currently reading Look to Windward, which is, in fact, a loose sequel to Consider Phlebas.

In all these books, there is a loose, anarchistic post-human society that calls itself The Culture. Like Egan's depiction of post-human society in Schild's Ladder, I too find this society intriguing. (Obviously so, since I've nearly read through three books in a row.) Oddly enough, the humans of The Culture are not humans from Earth. The Culture is not a future Earth society... it is a parallel society. (I'm looking forward to reading Banks' novella, The State of the Art which deals with contact between The Culture and Earth.) Anyhow, The Culture, being a post-scarcity society have an interesting saying:

Money is a sign of poverty.

Any society that deals with currency is one that obviously has a scarcity of resources (food, energy, land, etc.). The Culture would be an interesting society to strive to be like... but, their wealth is a wealth gained through technology. I guess how humanity evolves depends on how we deal with technology like AI, nanotechnology, bioengineering... I'm not really confident due to all the politics, but maybe someday?

Anyhow, back in reality, I've been in a philanthropic mood lately. (Because, well... I've had an excess of that evil evil stuff called money.) Aside from geeky donations like giving to organizations such as UC Berkeley (my alma mater) and FreeBSD (my favorite server OS), I've been keeping an eye out for interesting and intriguing forward-looking non-profits.

A few I've found are:

• The Long Now Foundation
  
• The Lifeboat Foundation
  
• The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
  

...among others. I haven't donated to all of them (nor do I plan to), but I have donated to some. (And, by the way, if you have suggestions, please go ahead and comment.) Anyway, I find it appealing that there are already groups that share views similar to mine (and that are already doing something about it). I actually was planning to start my own forward-thinking, humanity-first, long-term survivalist organization, and make it a secret society to boot. (Kinda like the Holy Light Superet Church, in Stephen Baxter's Xeelee novels.) But... I'm a lazy person and donating seems a lot easier. ;)

The Only Way to Win is Not to Play

Inspired by current events, I went ahead and picked up Defcon via Steam. It's morbidly interesting, to say the least. :) I've only played a single game to completion (and only finishing 2nd place). I'll have to study the tutorial and the the unit capabilities again. Playing South-East Asia, I was ahead for a while (a strategy I tried was to go all out and launch all my silo-based nukes at the beginning... leaving my silos on defensive duty for the duration of the war, which really helped).

But, while I managed to nuke most of Europe, I had left myself open to attack by the sea. I had sent my great fleets to Central/South America only to discover that they had sent their fleets to my coast. At the end, most of my cities were annihilated by submarine-launched nukes. Ah well. :)

Anyhow, another game I picked up was Sword of the Stars. I didn't really have a chance to play it yet, but I'm sure to give it a try this weekend. I'm just a sucker for space 4X games. The fact that space combat in this one resembled Homeworld is what really hooked me. I can't wait to try it out.

More Human than Human

I found the post-human/post-singularity view of humanity in Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder very intriguing. The idea of consciousness-as-software is an interesting one, in particular, in the way death is handled. People die, but it is viewed as a "local death"... death of only the body. The mind is periodically backed up and people are free to return in a biological body... live as an acorporeal in a virtual world (not necessarily one that resembles reality)... or return in some other form (a robot body, for example).

Of course a consciousness is only revived upon the death (or presumed death) of the original. It brings up an interesting question, one I believe that was originally asked by the classic consciousness & teleportation problem - what happens when two copies of an individual are revived? I suppose having people bifurcate may not be that much of a problem for such a society.

All of this, of course, requires a necessarily mechanistic view of consciousness. Consciousness arises from physical interactions. In other words, there is no immortal/immaterial soul... no afterlife... real death is forever. Bleak, but also empowering. Immortality, or near-immortality, would be a human endeavor. And if ever possible, a human achievement.

I dread for the pioneers, though.

Huh...