Here are a couple of interesting essays on the Singularity, and how it might be achieved without molecular manufacturing and artificial intelligence:
Achieving a Mundane Technological Transhuman Singularity
Response to Dr. Richard A.L. Jones’ IEET Spectrum Piece: ‘Rupturing the Nanotech Rapture’
Wow. With reviews like these, I have got to get one of these USB cables. They’ll make all my problems go away!
If I could use a rusty boxcutter to carve a new orifice in my body that’s compatible with this link cable, I would already be doing it. I can just imagine the pure musical goodness that would flow through this cable into the wound and fill me completely — like white, holy light. Holding this cable in my hands actually makes me feel that much closer to the Lord Jesus Christ. I only make $6.25/hr at Jack In The Box, but I saved up for three months so I could have this cable. It sits in a shrine I constructed next to my futon in Mother’s basement.
Or…
After I took delivery of my $500 Denon AKDL1 Cat-5 uber-cable, Al Gore was mysteriously drawn to my home, where he pronounced that Global Warming had been suspended in my vicinity.
Yes, I had perfect weather: no flooding, no tornadoes, the exact amount of rain necessary, and he pronounced sea levels exactly right and that they were not going to rise within five miles of my house.
Additionally, my cars began achieving 200 mpg and I didn’t even need gasoline. I was able to put three grams of cat litter into the tank and drive forever.
But watch out…
I installed one of these cables between my gigabit ethernet switch and my Canon Pixma 6700 color printer. I know it’s not a sanctioned use, but I was looking for the ultimate in speed and color fidelity. I’m freaky that way.
The first time I downloaded a picture to the printer over this cable, the bits moved so fast the printer collapsed into a naked singularity, right there in my office.
Since then, I can’t find the cat, and my entire set of VAX/VMS 4.7 documentation (DEC Will Rise Again!) (Mmmmm, orangey!) has gone missing.
Use responsibly.
Nick Mamatas spills the beans on what editors really want:
I propose a moratorium
…on the phrase, said by editors of venues who publish short stories (magazines, anthologies, collections, etc.) “I just want good stories.”The reason I think editors should no longer say this is because it is a lie and a transparent one. Editors clearly do not just want good stories.
For one thing, most stories aren’t any good at all. When was the last time you read an issue of a magazine containing several stories and said “Wow, these are all good stories!” Or an anthology? Or a collection? Most stories are just there to take up space and to “satisfice” (my favorite portmanteau!) some perceived need, and that need can be to full 256 pages or to make sure there is one story about a spaceship in each issue or because the story was written by someone who used to be famous or because it was the best of a bad bad lot and the editor has no idea how to cultivate a slush pile or solicit actual work and the thing is due in five days.
And that’s not the half of it.
Check out the Trons, playing “Sister Robot”:
Not exactly heavy metal.
Live like common people:
The NY Times profiles Ray Kurzweil and the singularity.
Dr. Kurzweil’s predictions come under intense scrutiny in the engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum, which devotes its current issue to the Singularity. Some of the experts writing in the issue endorse Dr. Kurzweil’s belief that conscious, intelligent beings can be created, but most think it will take more than a few decades.
He is accustomed to this sort of pessimism and readily acknowledges how complicated the brain is. But if experts in neurology and artificial intelligence (or solar energy or medicine) don’t buy his optimistic predictions, he says, that’s because exponential upward curves are so deceptively gradual at first.
“Scientists imagine they’ll keep working at the present pace,” he told me after his speech. “They make linear extrapolations from the past. When it took years to sequence the first 1 percent of the human genome, they worried they’d never finish, but they were right on schedule for an exponential curve. If you reach 1 percent and keep doubling your growth every year, you’ll hit 100 percent in just seven years.”
Dr. Kurzweil is so confident in these curves that he has made a $10,000 bet with Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus software. By 2029, Dr. Kurzweil wagers, a computer will pass the Turing Test by carrying on a conversation that is indistinguishable from a human’s.
I’m not as confident those graphs are going to hold up for fields besides computer science, so I’d be leery of betting on a date. But if I had to take sides in the 2029 wager, I’d put my money on Dr. Kurzweil. He could be right once again about a revolution coming sooner than expected. And I’d hate to bet against the chance to be around for this one.
But here’s the thing. The reason science really matters runs deeper still. Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.
As a practicing scientist, I know this from my own work and study. But I also know that you don’t have to be a scientist for science to be transformative. I’ve seen children’s eyes light up as I’ve told them about black holes and the Big Bang. I’ve spoken with high school dropouts who’ve stumbled on popular science books about the human genome project, and then returned to school with newfound purpose. And in that letter from Iraq, the soldier told me how learning about relativity and quantum physics in the dusty and dangerous environs of greater Baghdad kept him going because it revealed a deeper reality of which we’re all a part.
The Predator movie I want to see:
Ginia Bellafante delves into the mysteries of Lost:
“Lost,” which concludes its fourth season on ABC on Thursday night, refuses our passive interest while it denies us the satisfaction of ever feeling that we might confidently explain, to the person sitting next to us at dinner, that we have a true grasp of what is going on — of who among the characters is merely bad and who is verifiably satanic. To watch “Lost” is to feel like a high school grind, studying and analyzing and never making it to Yale. Good dramas confound our expectations, but “Lost,” about a factionalized group of plane crash survivors on a cartographically indeterminate island not anything like Aruba, pushes further, destabilizing the ground on which those expectations might be built. It is an opiate, and like all opiates, it produces its own masochistic delirium.
Very perceptive.
Clever video for “Pork and Beans” by Weezer:
I can’t argue with the logic behind this:
“After seeing some of my favorite television shows get canceled in the past — as well as the ’save this show’ campaigns that followed — I had the idea that a fan campaign BEFORE the show begins may be the best thing to do.”
Go here to help save Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse—which won’t even be premiering until 2009.
Read a book (NSFW):
Iowahawk’s got a good one today: Return to Sender.
(Via Instapundit.)
The day there was no news:
John Scalzi compares Speed Racer’s opening weekend with the 1977 Star Wars premier, which brought in roughly the same amount of money in inflation-adjusted dollars. It doesn’t look good for Speed:
Speed Racer is doomed: There’s no chance that Speed will get up to speed from here. Tomorrow the family audiences that were supposed to go see it will go flock to Prince Caspian instead, and then the weekend after that, Indiana Jones is back. Speed Racer will be in the second-run movie theaters by the first week in June, with nothing to else to look forward to until its financial afterlife on DVD and HBO. All because of two $20 million opening weekends: Its own, and the one Star Wars had, adjusted for inflation, 31 years ago.
Seth Stevenson’s has some advice for young procrastinators:
Dear chronically procrastinating young person,
Slate has asked me to offer you a few words of advice—as I, too, am a procrastinator. Always have been. In college, I’d start 10-page papers after midnight on the day they were due. Half my memories of this period involve screaming at my printer to print faster, ripping the pages from its maw, and then sprinting to my professor’s office with moments to spare, sweat streaming down my face.
Why did I subject myself to so much stress, instead of starting my work earlier like “normal” people do? Well, you’ve no doubt heard all manner of theories regarding the root cause of procrastination. Fear of failure. Crippling perfectionism. Abnormally low type-2 phloxiplaxitus levels.
I’m here to tell you that it was none of these things. The root cause of my procrastination, in technical terms, is this: I’m lazy. Extremely lazy.
Boy, I wish I’d heard this advice when I was younger. It took me an awful long time to figure it out on my own.
By the way, this would constitute my excuse for not blogging lately.
How not to respond to a rejection:
This is NOT a form letter. Your reply is rather generic and offers no insight as to what you want. Unless you had ESP there is now way to know what my material is about.
IF you judge talent on a one page query letter I’m sure you have MISSED a lot in life, especially up and coming writers who need a damn break. [La Gringa notes here: this particular agent asks for a writing sample in addition to a query, something this writer had failed to provide.]
If Spielberg, Poe, or another great came to you would you blow them off too? Without knowing what geniuses they are? IF SO; I’m surprised there are any writers at all with your agency. Are they related to you?
I get the feeling you don’t know talent when it stares you in the face or emails a one page query letter. If you base all your judgements on a one minute note, you are either psychic or don’t have a clue that there is much more to this world than your office or small stable of writers who somehow bribed cajoled or kissed someone’s ass to get there.
See? They’re doing it wrong. Here’s how it’s done:
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