Once again, I’ve been remiss in posting entries, so here’s a smattering of stuff that I’ve recently found to be of interest around the web:
After a long hiatus, Less Wrong (Eliezer Yudkowsky) finally updated the ongoing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fanfiction work with a few new chapters. I actually didn’t care that much for the Hermione-centered SPHEW arc that immediately preceded this latest update, but the newest arc is totally mindblowing. Chapters 80 and 81 together constitute probably the greatest crowning moment of awesome in a courtroom in anything I’ve read. My only worry is that this ratchets the epic up so high it’s hard to see how this version of Harry Potter can have any kind of normal Hogwarts life after this.
In the same vein, I’ve started reading the Sequences on the Less Wrong site. It’s a series of essays on rationality with the explicit aim of teaching you how to refine your way of thinking. It involves plenty of logic and math and absolutely no crackpot fuzzy thinking.
The in-thing du jour is the Hunger Games series. I haven’t read the books and have no real interest in watching the movie but this did remind of the much earlier Battle Royale story which I’ve always wanted to check out. So I started reading the manga. Not quite as good as I imagined, but much more brutal than I expected.
I’m always a sucker for entertaining anecdotes about creative and/or smart people and this page on the Math Overflow website turned out to be a treasure trove of them. Here’s one of my favorites:
One of the most common and popular Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) stories is of a student coming to Wiener after class and saying, “I really don’t understand this problem that you discussed in class. Can you explain to me how to do it?” Wiener thought a moment, and wrote the answer (and only that) on the board. “Yes,” said the student, “but I would really like to master the technique. Can you tell me the details?” Wiener bowed his head in thought, and again he wrote the answer on the board. In some torment, the student said, “But Professor Wiener, can’t you show me how the problem is done?” To which Wiener is reputed to have replied, “But I’ve already shown you how to do the problem in two ways!”
Dick Swenson, who was at MIT in those days, tells this variant of the story: Wiener showed the kid the answer twice, as just indicated. Then the student said, “Oh, you mean…,” and he wrote the answer (and only the answer) on the board. Wiener then said, “Ah, very nice. I hadn’t thought of that approach.”
So it took some time, but I’ve finished Peter Watts’ Rifters trilogy, consisting of the novels Starfish, Maelstrom and Behemoth. That’s quite a lot of text, especially the last book which is as hefty as its name suggests, so much so that the dead tree version was split up into two volumes for commercial reasons. After liking Blindsight so much, I just had to read more stuff by Watts even though I knew this prior work wasn’t as well received. Unfortunately even with reduced expectations, I found the trilogy disappointing. It has a ton of cool ideas and a unique post-apocalyptic setting but the story as a whole just doesn’t gel together.
It’s hard to describe all three books in one post without delving into spoilers, so potential readers might want to keep out. The story begins in the middle of the 21st century. Due to global warming, the end of the cheap energy era as fossil fuels finally run out and global conflicts over increasingly scarce resources, the future is decidedly not rosy. Rising sea waters and frequent environmental catastrophes have caused the coasts of North America to turn into refugee zones. Cyberspace grows increasingly wild as self-evolving malware become ever more sophisticated.
One of the QT3 and now Broken Forum regulars mentioned Peter Watts’ novel Blindsight in passing in the dualism / nature of consciousness thread I’d previously referenced. This was when the discussion turned to the subject of p-zombies and it turns out this novel has a thing or two to say on that particular topic. Since the book is available for free on the author’s website it was easy enough to check it out. It’s been such a riveting read that I’ve done little else save finish the book over the past few days. It was only after I’ve finished the book and looked up more info on the author that I realized he’s the same guy who briefly got famous on the Internet last year for being infected with necrotising fasciitis, complete with some very lurid photos on his blog.
Blindsight’s premise is a first contact scenario set in the near future. One day, over sixty-five thousand micro-satellites show up unannounced to presumably perform an exhaustive survey of Earth, destroying themselves in the process. Now if this were Star Trek, that would be the cue to break out the champagne bottles, sing kumbaya and welcome the aliens with open arms. But Watts comes from the Stephen Hawking school of extraterrestrial contact, not Gene Roddenberry. As a character in the novel states, technology exists only to tame nature and nature is basically everything that is not your own species. Therefore technology implies belligerence.
I’ve been cleaning up some of the old books I have scattered around my mother’s house. Some of these have been too damaged by poor storage conditions and need to be junked. Some others I’m too embarrassed to keep and will be donated. The rest needs to be packed up to be ready to be moved to Seremban. Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder is of course in that last category and while staying in Kuala Lumpur, I’ve found that my memory of it was poor enough to merit rereading the novel. Since I’ve never written about this particular book here as well, I thought I’d remedy that as well.
The Wikipedia entry for this novel calls it Greg Egan’s hardest SF book ever and considering that Egan is easily the hardest of the hard SF writers, this is a daunting statement indeed. This is because Schild’s Ladder begins with a fictional theory that unifies relativity with quantum mechanics, the so-called Sarumpaet rules of Quantum Graph Theory. In the far future universe of the novel, this has been the basic foundation of all physics for thousands of years even as humanity has spread out and diversified throughout the galaxy. Some of these descendents of humanity exist only as pure software constructs. The acorporeals as they are known aren’t even raised in an analogue of 3D space, preferring more complex spaces due to the belief that this will unnecessarily restrain the flexibility of their developing minds.
Russian writers seem to have a special talent for highlighting the grimness and misery of ordinary life. Roadside Picnic, a novella by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, is a fine example of how this morosity shows up even in science-fiction. Computer gaming fans will know this novella, first published in 1972, as the ultimate inspiration for the STALKER series of games, albeit by way of the film version directed by Andrei Tarkovsky that was released in 1979.
Naturally, the original novella differs markedly from the video game. The novella for example is set in the fictional town of Harmont in some unnamed Commonwealth country, instead of the area around the Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine. This in turn is only one of six zones scattered around the global that were created by the alien visitation event. Still, many themes and even individual elements, such as how the stalkers use throw bolts to detect the boundaries of some types of anomalies, will be recognizable to STALKER fans.
I’m leaving on holiday to Taiwan soon and will be leaving my job after that. This means that this blog will probably be updated only intermittently while I’m a in transition phase. In the meantime, here are a few links to some of the most interesting things I’ve read recently.
As everyone knows by now, the Rapture did not in fact arrive on schedule. Or perhaps it did but no one, including the folks from Family Radio International who so hyped up the event, was judged worthy. The station’s owner and preacher Harold Camping has since come out with a statement claiming that he’d made a mistake. May 21st was merely the spiritual Judgment Day during which God evaluated everyone’s souls. But the judgment will actually be executed only on October 21st, five months from now, triggering the end of the world.
Thankfully Malaysian high schools are nothing like the hellholes that public US high schools seem to be but thanks to American shows and movies, we have a decent idea of what they’re like. One aspect of the US high school experience is how students are segregated into different groups that are organized into a hierarchy that revolves around popularity. This extended essay examines why nerds in school, who are consistently found to be smarter than their peers, are consistently among the least popular students and comes up with some interesting insights.
Many vegetarians don’t eat meat because of the perceived moral issues involved in killing an animal for food. What if meat no longer had to obtained by butchering animals? What if you could simply grow the meat in a test-tube? This article looks at how meat could be grown by immersing stem cell samples in nutrient-filled petri dishes, and then moving them into scaffolding platforms to get them to grow into muscle tissue. If this gets off the ground, not only will it dispense with the moral issue of eating animals, it will also be a far cheaper and more environmentally friendly way to farm the meat that we so crave.
When I mentioned on QT3 that Ted Chiang had never published a novel, a fellow fan was quick to correct me. Actually, it’s more like a novella than a novel, but you can judge for yourself since The Lifecycle of Software Objects is now freely available to be read online. To be honest I find it to be the weakest of Chiang’s works I’ve read and it’s really more of an essay presenting many different insights and ideas about conscious software as pets and children than a novel. The central thesis is that you can’t create an artificial intelligence by writing an algorithm and running it iteratively until it reaches sentience. Instead, you need to nurture it just as you would a pet or a child, patiently teaching it and allowing it to have a variety of different life experiences to enable it to grow.
Finally, just for Malaysians, here is a link to the latest report on house price indices for Malaysia, updated for the first quarter of 2011. Some very tentative conclusions are that overall house prices in Malaysia are still increasing and especially prices for terrace houses in the Klang Valley are still holding up. But prices for high-rises in the Klang Valley is stagnant and has dropped for Malaysia as a whole. Condo prices in Penang in particular seem to be dropped significantly and the index has dropped to 2009 levels. This is especially illuminating since I’ve heard many people complain about very low occupation rates for condos in Penang despite the high prices. As always, a single quarter’s worth of data is not proof of a developing trend and should be taken with the usual grain of salt.
Due to a combination of various factors including illness, an unexpected holiday and an abnormally slow Internet connection, I have been remiss in writing new posts this week. Here are a few links to some interesting items to tide you over:
China’s State Administration of Radio, Film & Television has effectively banned all plots involving time travel from films. The stated reasons are that such stories treat history frivolously and disrespectfully and time-travel itself is unrealistic bad science. The suspected real reason is that China does not want people to compare the society that they have now with living conditions in the past. I’d also hazard that China feels uncomfortable about exploring “what if” historical scenarios. Additional fun fact: the Hearts of Iron games are also banned in China because it depicts places like Tibet, Shaanxi, Yunan etc. as independent states.
Iphone and ipad users should be careful. Apparently Apple has been secretly tracking the movement of users of the devices. The devices seem to automatically log its geographic position together with a timestamp at irregular intervals and save the data to an internal file without asking permission from owners or telling them that it is doing so. As many Internet pundits have noted, if you’ve been having an affair or lying to your employer about where you have been, a look at the file will reveal all your secrets.
In the latest of many pages on the sins of the Catholic church, an investigative reporter has written a new book alleging that thousands of Vatican-based priests have illicit sexual relationships. The book tells stories of priests having families complete with children in secret, of paid sex with escorts and of gay priests partying in nightclubs in Rome. It also cites research alleging that up to a quarter of Catholic priests in the US are involved in heterosexual relationships with women. My take: it’s not the sex that is offensive, it is the hypocrisy that rankles.
Finally, I recently learned that Ted Chiang has a short story available for reading online. Exhalation was apparently made available for free when it was nominated for the Hugo Award for 2009. It won incidentally. It’s a fantastic story that successfully paints a picture of strange society of alien within just a few succinct paragraphs. Ted Chiang is probably my favorite writer of short science-fiction right now ever since Greg Egan’s quality dropped in the 2000s. My favorite story of his however is still Story of Your Life which examines free will from the perspective that language determines thought.
