I'm not sure why. But it is nice.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
The "Fencepost" Problem (or so I just learned...)
I've felt for a while as if there is something fundamentally different in my logic and the logic of people who understand numbers. Maybe I have a hard time dealing with things that make sense at face value, I don't know. I'm sure that anyone who really grasps mathematical concepts can then whirl off into my fun happy land of theory and abstraction, but I, a humanities-head, just never hired the captain for that particular boat.
There was a wall I hit when I was young, regarding math. It was an obstacle to my understanding, a conceptual dilemma so deep that I still don't get it. It perplexed me so much that rather than dwell, than trying to wrap my third grade mind around it, I just pushed it away. But deep in the back of my mind, this Unknown instilled a deep mistrust in me regarding even the simplest of equations. To this day I check myself over and over again. I never relaxed, never relinquished my mind to the muscle-memory required to know instantly that six times seven is forty-two.
I'll explain the problem by example. Next week is the 22nd to the 26th. That's five days. But 26 minus 22 is 4. That makes NO SENSE to me. I guess it is because the day of the 22nd is also an entity that is being taken away, but I always felt like the function of subtraction was to reveal a quantity that has been parsed from a whole. So what's the point if it gives you the wrong number? I mean I must conclude here that when we subtract numbers from each other, we are really counting the spaces between them, the integers. The concept of integers helps me a little bit, but no one explained integers to me in third grade so I was pretty disheveled about the whole thing.
I see numbers as things that exists independently of the objects they quantify. I see them like ghost skins. If we have three apples, the first apple is wrapped in a ghost skin that is 1. The third apple is wrapped in a ghost skin that is 3. 3 minus 1 is 2. That makes sense because if you take one apple away you have two left.
But what does it mean when you say that the "difference" between 3 and 1 is 2? Seems to me that the difference between 3 and 1 is 1. Apple 2 is the difference, the solid object that lies between apple 1 and apple 3.
When you say the "difference" is 2, you must be saying that there are 2 spaces between apples 1, 2 and 3. "Difference" in math is supposed to be synonymous with "subtraction". But the only way you can say that the difference between 1 and 3 is 2 is by counting the spaces. But when you "subtract" 1 from 3 and get 2, you are counting the apples - the solid objects - not the spaces.
Way more complicated than it has to be. Well, welcome to my brain. This is something I've avoided trying to think about for 15 years.
The problem is not necessary in my ability to wrap abstract numbers around the physical universe. It's something to with my expectations of how this marriage works. I feel subtly betrayed by the 1 up or 1 down problem when trying to add or subtract real quantities, and most of the time I just give up and count on my fingers. Because fingers are real, physical, and won't trick you with silly things like "differences". I looked up math disabilities in grade schoolers and none of them really sound like what my issue was. So I'd just be curious to know if anyone else knows what I'm talking about.
Edit: I feel incredible satisfaction at finding this wiki page, thanks to the all-knowing Bjorn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fencepost_problem#Fencepost_error
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
This is What I Did Saturday Instead of Writing a Blog Post
(there was also the record breaking snow storm)
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Post-Humanism has nothing to do with Humanism. SILLY.
A few nights ago I had a dream that I lived in deep dark city in the future, and that an army of men wearing all black, even over their faces, started rounding people up to be militarized and controlled. They killed everyone who resisted. If you submitted, they might very well let you live, but you had to accept that your life belonged to them, and that everything you did, and whether you lived or died, depended upon their caprice. I decided to run for it. I hid in the empty buildings left by the people they had taken. Someone else was with me. I knew him in waking life but I don't remember who he was and I never saw his face.
I was ultimately killed by a dog. It was a black dog with electronic red eyes. It had chased me down the last hall, into the last room, and I shut myself in with a door made of glass. I could see him on the other side, looking for me. I knew he would find me soon enough so I picked up a rifle with one bullet and tried to shoot him through the glass. The bullet missed, the glass shattered, and he attacked.
It wasn't a nightmare, actually. It was more a dream about urgency and purpose than about fear. It was about the physical will to live in conflict with the reasons for being alive: that is, freedom, autonomy, expression, love.
And the dog, I knew this in the dream-way that one knows these things: The dog had been an ordinary black lab. At some point it had been infected with an artificially engineered nanovirus. He caught the virus in the way one catches any ordinary cold, by breathing it in. The nanovirus lodged itself in some muscle tissue somewhere and started multiplying itself, and those replicas began to manufacture metal and dissolve calcium, began to wire into the nervous system and attack organic cells, consuming them as energy and replacing them with tiny machines. Many of the basic organs were left intact to save energy, like the heart. But this dog's bones were as strong as steel, and his brain and eyes were hardwired terminator style.
I have no doubt that this dream was inspired by Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Namely the "mites", which are microscopic nanotech devices programmed to do any number of things. These mites are omnipresent and inevitable in the air around you. Of course there are some malcontents that engineer and release harmful virus mites, which is why cities have developed their own immune systems a la defense mites that are programmed to seek and destroy the harmful ones.
But what's interesting to me is that despite all this talk in the book of implants and even of smart tattoos that achieve this end, those mites, those viruses in the Diamond Age never assimilate humans or animals the way the dog in my dream was subsumed. They either killed the organism, or tracked it, or read its mind, or made it prettier, but they never reproduced themselves. They never attempted to make a larger machine out of many small ones, to, in effect, turn a "natural" creature into a cyborg at least not in the physical sense. Most of Stephenson's stuff (this is the guy who brought you Snowcrash, remember), seems more focused on virtual realities, mental departures that may or may not ultimately culminate in a sort of bodilessness, but bodilessness nonetheless is different from a body infected with a machine like cancer.
No, that kind of cyberpunk belongs to the Japanese, mostly. The way they explore the relationship between technology and the body is fairly unique and developed. Human souls can exist inside machines, machines can gobble the body from within.
There seem to be two criteria when talking about post-humanism.
First, there is the physical body. Second, there is consciousness. When the physical body digresses from its natural state, it relies on technology to exist as it does, and becomes, in essence, part machine. I can't see two feet in front of my face without glasses or contacts. I've got a metal wire glued to the back of my bottom teeth. My grandmother has fake knees. Whatever.
When you outsource basic and necessary pieces of information (how many phone numbers do you know by heart?), you've used technology like an external hard drive for your mind. If you have long-distance friends you talk to primarily over the internet, you're allowing for - not a little - a lot of mitigation of your personality, your personhood, by a machine. One is tactile, the other is metaphysical. One is mechanical, the other is wireless.
There are people who argue that we have already become post-human and people who say we have not. Usually when they argue, they are really favoring one of those two things as a definition of what makes us human. In the physical sense, the litmus test is "if you shoot it in the heart, does it die?". I really want to talk about a Star Trek TNG episode right now, but I'll contain myself.
The problem with both of these threads in any case is they lie across a spectrum, and spectrums are dubious ugly little critters that muck everything up, and the whole universe lies across one. They say that physical accompaniments make us super-human, but the first time some guy used a sharp rock as an extension of his hand to make up for his short, clawless fingers, was he post-human? They say that uploading one's consciousness makes us cybernetic, but when the first guy drew a story about some buffalo on a wall, was he post-human?
And hey, are these not the very traits by which we distinguished the human from all others? Were they not written into our very makeup?
The anticipation is of the ticker tipping over, when we cross that line and develop out of our very skins. But I don't know if we're becoming post-human, I think it's far more likely we are becoming more human.
But what's crazy about all this is the pervasive sense that technological development takes us away from nature, as if the two exist on a kind of pulley system. Here's where post-humanism meets post-modernism and gets really annoying. Because who's to say what is natural? Who is to define the essence of a human? To even enter into an argument about post-humanism is to take a weirdly empiricist stance. On the contrary, if there is no outside judge, if nothing outside of us defines us, then we are what we are and it doesn't matter.
But it does matter doesn't it? Because of the fear. I have no idea why humans write into their fictions the most awful and terrifying psychosomatic wars between organic and artificial, fictions which by and large express seething anxiety over being enslaved, crushed, destroyed, or simply replaced by robots, and then turn around like hungry, cloying, desperate children tugging at the skirts of progress, begging more more more technology, more upgrades, more devices, faster, easier, stronger, smarter machines.
Is it self-conscious? Is it our discomfort over how much we love it? Is anything actually being lost? Why is almost every science fiction film or book dystopian? Are we afraid of a world in which we dial in our emotions like in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Losing, maybe, our ability to feel? Losing touch with mortality? Losing our sense of limitation? Is the fear warranted or is this evolutionary adolescence? How can we possibly take ourselves from ourselves?
That's all I can fit in one blog post. Just a thought.
I was ultimately killed by a dog. It was a black dog with electronic red eyes. It had chased me down the last hall, into the last room, and I shut myself in with a door made of glass. I could see him on the other side, looking for me. I knew he would find me soon enough so I picked up a rifle with one bullet and tried to shoot him through the glass. The bullet missed, the glass shattered, and he attacked.
It wasn't a nightmare, actually. It was more a dream about urgency and purpose than about fear. It was about the physical will to live in conflict with the reasons for being alive: that is, freedom, autonomy, expression, love.
And the dog, I knew this in the dream-way that one knows these things: The dog had been an ordinary black lab. At some point it had been infected with an artificially engineered nanovirus. He caught the virus in the way one catches any ordinary cold, by breathing it in. The nanovirus lodged itself in some muscle tissue somewhere and started multiplying itself, and those replicas began to manufacture metal and dissolve calcium, began to wire into the nervous system and attack organic cells, consuming them as energy and replacing them with tiny machines. Many of the basic organs were left intact to save energy, like the heart. But this dog's bones were as strong as steel, and his brain and eyes were hardwired terminator style.
I have no doubt that this dream was inspired by Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Namely the "mites", which are microscopic nanotech devices programmed to do any number of things. These mites are omnipresent and inevitable in the air around you. Of course there are some malcontents that engineer and release harmful virus mites, which is why cities have developed their own immune systems a la defense mites that are programmed to seek and destroy the harmful ones.
But what's interesting to me is that despite all this talk in the book of implants and even of smart tattoos that achieve this end, those mites, those viruses in the Diamond Age never assimilate humans or animals the way the dog in my dream was subsumed. They either killed the organism, or tracked it, or read its mind, or made it prettier, but they never reproduced themselves. They never attempted to make a larger machine out of many small ones, to, in effect, turn a "natural" creature into a cyborg at least not in the physical sense. Most of Stephenson's stuff (this is the guy who brought you Snowcrash, remember), seems more focused on virtual realities, mental departures that may or may not ultimately culminate in a sort of bodilessness, but bodilessness nonetheless is different from a body infected with a machine like cancer.
No, that kind of cyberpunk belongs to the Japanese, mostly.
There seem to be two criteria when talking about post-humanism.
First, there is the physical body. Second, there is consciousness. When the physical body digresses from its natural state, it relies on technology to exist as it does, and becomes, in essence, part machine. I can't see two feet in front of my face without glasses or contacts. I've got a metal wire glued to the back of my bottom teeth. My grandmother has fake knees. Whatever.
When you outsource basic and necessary pieces of information (how many phone numbers do you know by heart?), you've used technology like an external hard drive for your mind. If you have long-distance friends you talk to primarily over the internet, you're allowing for - not a little - a lot of mitigation of your personality, your personhood, by a machine. One is tactile, the other is metaphysical. One is mechanical, the other is wireless.
There are people who argue that we have already become post-human and people who say we have not. Usually when they argue, they are really favoring one of those two things as a definition of what makes us human. In the physical sense, the litmus test is "if you shoot it in the heart, does it die?". I really want to talk about a Star Trek TNG episode right now, but I'll contain myself.
The problem with both of these threads in any case is they lie across a spectrum, and spectrums are dubious ugly little critters that muck everything up, and the whole universe lies across one. They say that physical accompaniments make us super-human, but the first time some guy used a sharp rock as an extension of his hand to make up for his short, clawless fingers, was he post-human? They say that uploading one's consciousness makes us cybernetic, but when the first guy drew a story about some buffalo on a wall, was he post-human?
And hey, are these not the very traits by which we distinguished the human from all others? Were they not written into our very makeup?
The anticipation is of the ticker tipping over, when we cross that line and develop out of our very skins. But I don't know if we're becoming post-human, I think it's far more likely we are becoming more human.
But what's crazy about all this is the pervasive sense that technological development takes us away from nature, as if the two exist on a kind of pulley system. Here's where post-humanism meets post-modernism and gets really annoying. Because who's to say what is natural? Who is to define the essence of a human? To even enter into an argument about post-humanism is to take a weirdly empiricist stance. On the contrary, if there is no outside judge, if nothing outside of us defines us, then we are what we are and it doesn't matter.
But it does matter doesn't it? Because of the fear. I have no idea why humans write into their fictions the most awful and terrifying psychosomatic wars between organic and artificial, fictions which by and large express seething anxiety over being enslaved, crushed, destroyed, or simply replaced by robots, and then turn around like hungry, cloying, desperate children tugging at the skirts of progress, begging more more more technology, more upgrades, more devices, faster, easier, stronger, smarter machines.
Is it self-conscious? Is it our discomfort over how much we love it? Is anything actually being lost? Why is almost every science fiction film or book dystopian? Are we afraid of a world in which we dial in our emotions like in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Losing, maybe, our ability to feel? Losing touch with mortality? Losing our sense of limitation? Is the fear warranted or is this evolutionary adolescence? How can we possibly take ourselves from ourselves?
That's all I can fit in one blog post. Just a thought.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
sneaks!
I made this yesterday afternoon at work. Made the soundtrack too, so it's original but very digital.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKkWZr5gPWU
.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKkWZr5gPWU
.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Housekeeping
Capseatarian is on hiatus until I have time to post real postings.
And also, I finished Dune (it was awesome, I recommend this blog: http://www.dharbin.com/blog/category/opinion/books/dune-book-club/), so it shouldn't be under my current book. I'm reading Salmon Rushie's Satanic Verses (thanks Caity!). I found it, literally just came across this book in my living room, as if it had been dropped there by an owl, unwrapped, with a note addressed to me, from Caity about how she had to get me this book because it was one of her favorites and it was on my wish list.
The Satanic Versus is very cool. It's sort of if Gabriel Garcia Marquez was on acid. It moves like that.
Will let you know when this thing gets its tail on fire again.
Love,
Gracie
And also, I finished Dune (it was awesome, I recommend this blog: http://www.dharbin.com/blog/category/opinion/books/dune-book-club/), so it shouldn't be under my current book. I'm reading Salmon Rushie's Satanic Verses (thanks Caity!). I found it, literally just came across this book in my living room, as if it had been dropped there by an owl, unwrapped, with a note addressed to me, from Caity about how she had to get me this book because it was one of her favorites and it was on my wish list.
The Satanic Versus is very cool. It's sort of if Gabriel Garcia Marquez was on acid. It moves like that.
Will let you know when this thing gets its tail on fire again.
Love,
Gracie
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Je n'en connais pas la fin
There is a light at the end of the street partially obscured by garden growth, twisted lines layered over each other, diffusing into darkness.
The yellow window quivers in my view as my knees stutter under me, somewhere deep in my bones there are rings growing, etched around my marrow, bark crackling out of the calcium and I become twitchy. Twitchy, as if flesh and blood have taken flight, have reeled back and retreated yellowbellied into the night, taking with them my softness, the give in my body, the rubberyelastic stretch of skin and blood cells break apart from their plasmic suspension, chickering off like startled geese.
My rainstick throat takes a reluctant breath. My pulse is the dry flap of wings against chest.
I am the devil in this transmutation. I was the butcher who sold myself off in parts. I was the liar who turned my face into a prism of multiple angles and matterless reflections for which there is increasingly less of a true source.
Among the dry and dying, I am afraid of fire. How it would wipe me out, how it would scatter me so thinly I would make no sense. I would be chemically irreparable and my remnants, though substantial when gathered, would be nothing to anyone in their isolated corners of the universe.
My legs stop in their roots. One leg goes back obeying the orders of a separate mind. Ahead of me the light is unshaken. It has no doubts.
What is the price of bravery? What is obscured by fear? What is necessitated by knowing?
.
The yellow window quivers in my view as my knees stutter under me, somewhere deep in my bones there are rings growing, etched around my marrow, bark crackling out of the calcium and I become twitchy. Twitchy, as if flesh and blood have taken flight, have reeled back and retreated yellowbellied into the night, taking with them my softness, the give in my body, the rubberyelastic stretch of skin and blood cells break apart from their plasmic suspension, chickering off like startled geese.
My rainstick throat takes a reluctant breath. My pulse is the dry flap of wings against chest.
I am the devil in this transmutation. I was the butcher who sold myself off in parts. I was the liar who turned my face into a prism of multiple angles and matterless reflections for which there is increasingly less of a true source.
Among the dry and dying, I am afraid of fire. How it would wipe me out, how it would scatter me so thinly I would make no sense. I would be chemically irreparable and my remnants, though substantial when gathered, would be nothing to anyone in their isolated corners of the universe.
My legs stop in their roots. One leg goes back obeying the orders of a separate mind. Ahead of me the light is unshaken. It has no doubts.
What is the price of bravery? What is obscured by fear? What is necessitated by knowing?
.
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