Another Perversion of Human Thought Processes

My first word was... GOTO.

I grew up in an age of steam locomotives, cobblestone roads and Z80 processors with the clock speed of a cuckoo watch. The first language I ever learned was BASIC, and GOTO was the first command I came across. I still love the exotic, Japanese elegance of these four letters, and the subtle combination of  simplicity, power and unconditional brutality that is embodied in its application. GOTO does not purport any kind of metaphysical humdrum that is so commonplace in contemporary programming ("functions as first class objects", "syntactic closures" etc.). It's a down-to-the-metal, no-nonsense equivalent to how the processor changes the locus of execution from one portion of the memorized program to an arbitrary other position. GOTO is the teleportation spell of computer programming: when the computer reads a GOTO, it immediately and unconditionally teleports to the location stated after the GOTO (in BASIC, to an arbitrary programming line).

Don't Care about Meaning

Here's a short email exchange with Caryn, on the common mix-up of meaning and relevance, kept for myself and posteriority.

Why are meaning and caring synonymous in most peoples mind?

By 'meaning', do you refer to 'meaningful life' (pervasive feeling of satisfaction), or semiotic reference? And by 'caring', do you refer to 'compassion for others', 'involvement' or 'motivational relevance'?

Well, to be precise, they relate to negation of meaning with the negation of caring. I think caring for the purpose of this discussion any of the three will work for the moment at least. With respect to meaning, I'm definitely not referring to meaningful life, more the semiotic sense.

Waking up to a dream narrated in the voice of Douglas Coupland

Screamingly, the three racing cars rip open the shrouds of the quietness of the morning surrounding the small hovel on the hillside. The first one, a Jaguar, is a dark reddish blur, already disappearing in the mist, not too narrowly followed by a bluish-white Ferrari. The brownish one in the back looks like Bugatti on oversized, heavily threaded wheels, and is in fact a custom built offroad vehicle. The slicks of the Ferrari skid hopelessly on the damp dirt road, then on the grassy bank, forcing the driver to cut the throttle before taking the next corner, and the custom built leaps forward, seizing the opportunity, cuts off the Ferrari, spraying it with dirt and gravel, accelerates even more and hurtles along the hill-side road, out of view.

Angrily, the Ferrari driver floors the gas pedal, which turns the car's slingering into a violent spin. The left fender grazes a fence, pulling down and against the forward motion, and the back of the car bucks, lifts further, and the car ends up on its roof, coming to a rest after screeching up quite a few metres on the hill-side. The engine still idles, then cuts off, and an sudden silence sets in, for the duration of many hasty heart-beats. Then, a noise like a deep breath, a swoosh, and the leaked fuel that soaks the bluish white chassis and the last bit of the tortured path of the car, catches fire.

Cut. The slim driver, fit in a white leather overall, and looking like an emanciated astronaut, has crawled on top of the hill. She sits with her back to a shed, looking dazedly and uncomprehending at her burning car. Her racing helmet, white with think light blue stripes, sits next to her, on the ground. Alien Jesus bends down to her ear, whispering a few words we cannot hear. She gets up, and is no longer the driver. Her path starts here, and she follows it, with slight unsteadyness, and as yet unquestioning.

Alien Jesus remains where she left, looking at the flames that eat away at everything combustible left in the ruined car. Then he bends down, collects the helmet, and walks down to the car. He picks up a purse next to its opened door, and takes an object from it. He gingerly holds the object in its hand: a grey cocoon, shaped like a fat spindle, about the length of a hand. He throws the purse and all its remaining contents into the fire, then lightly steps up the hillside again and places the helmet and the cocoon into a wooden cask next to the shed.

Der Untergang der Piraten, oder warum man mit Twitter keine Partei führen kann

Die aktuellen Streitigkeiten an der Spitze der unglücklichen deutschen Piratenpartei lenken den Blick von einem viel tiefergehenden Problem ab: eine politische Organisation kann in einer Mediendemokratie nicht bestehen, wenn sie ihre innersten Entscheidungs- und Diskussionsprozesse in aller Öffentlichkeit verhandelt. Das kann schon deshalb nicht klappen, weil diese Öffentlichkeit zu einem großen Teil nicht dieselben Interessen und Wahrnehmungen wie die Organisation hat.

Is Scientific Genius a Thing of the Past?

"Is scientific genius a thing of the past," asks Kate Shaw in Ars Technica, and points our attention to a nature paper by psychologist Dean Keith Simonton:

Today, according to Simonton, there just isn’t room to create new disciplines or overthrow the old ones. “It is difficult to imagine that scientists have overlooked some phenomenon worthy of its own discipline,” he writes. Furthermore, most scientific fields aren’t in the type of crisis that would enable paradigm shifts, according to Thomas Kuhn’s classic view of scientific revolutions. Simonton argues that instead of finding big new ideas, scientists currently work on the details in increasingly specialized and precise ways.

Where have all the geniuses gone?

The plight of nerds

Why is it so difficult for nerds to relate to most people?

Just recently, some seriously misguided EU advertising fellows attempted to lure girls into science, and in the eyes of many (especially female) scientists, they failed spectacularly.

Look at one of the answers:

In the eyes of the response vid, being successful in science is perhaps not negatively correlated with cuteness, but definitely correlated with nerdyness. The science girl is portrayed as a social outcast. What is this thing about nerds?

Why the Western World View Abhors Artificial Intelligence

The dear, famous, Yoda like and sadly late Joseph Weizenbaum (the very guy we have to thank for the mother of all chat bots: Eliza) spent quite a bit of his time complaining about humanities overreaching optimism when it comes to the realization of Artificial Intelligence (see his: "Computer Power and Human Reason", for instance).

The charming, but totally misguided Weizenbaum documentary "Plug and Pray" cherishes that same popular thesis. It is hard to see how somebody could see any justification for it, though. Contemporary AI research is a very humble affair, occupied with obscure exercises in applied mathematics, boring standardization of protocol languages or tinkering with soccer playing or car driving robots. Any vision for generally intelligent artificial minds plays an extremely marginal role at best. At the same time, AI research has always been extremely productive: most of the stuff in computer science, from speech recognition to computer vision, from planning to data base systems, from data compression to data mining, has been concocted in some AI lab or other.

So what's the reason for the popular hostility towards Artificial Intelligence? Hmm, hmm: these guys are saying that the mind is a computer!
Why is that such a blasphemy?