Caution: Singularity Ahead [DEFUNCT]

We were in Claresholm this morning to visit my grandparents, staying at a motel. We came awake at a reasonable hour and flipped on the TV to see if there was anything for Caspian to watch while we finished waking up. The kids shows in the offing weren't good choices at that point, but an episode of Star Trek (The Original Series) was on. ( "Miri" , for those taking notes, but it's not relevant to the story.) It's on for a minute, and the landing party - Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Rand, and two redshirts - beams down to investigate. When we first get a good look at the crew, Caspian immediately says: "That's the guy that sings the Bilbo song!" Caspian is a big fan of The Hobbit and whenever we're on a car ride (no matter how short!) he asks us to tell him the story again. At one point, on a lark, I showed him the video of Leonard Nimoy singing "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins". Made a big impression, apparently.

It would be fairly accurate to describe my years in High School and University as a balance between sleeping through class, writing code ( Apple II projects, MUSH code , and so on), and haunting used bookstores. As an example, for High School english classes I typically wrote computer games - for Dune , a thumper-placement/avoid the worm action game. For King Lear , a "choose your own adventure" game. I picked up a tattered, second-hand copy of Destination: Void as a teenager while on a Frank Herbert binge. It was only years later that I learned that there was a sequel (by Herbert and Bill Ransom ), The Jesus Incident . As a rather religion-averse person I had never picked it up and flipped through it - the name put me off. Flash forward to 2004. I'm a little bit obsessed with Halo - not playing the game, mind you, just the beautiful game world. See previous entries about Iain M. Banks - they cribbed massively from his writing. The Halo itself is an Orbital (mini-ringw...

I was thinking about whether a team decision had left me a little disillusioned about the team's direction. And then I thought, "well, I guess I need to get re... um... re-illusioned?" It’s been observed for a long time that we only get by in this world by subscribing to a consensual illusion about How Things Are, even if most of the time we are oblivious to this. What surprised me is that this concept is integrated into our vocabulary in such a common word.

USA Today (!) has an article up about offloading long-term memory storage into services like Google: USATODAY.com - This is the Google side of your brain The article is intelligently written and while it does lean on the journalistic crutch of controversy ("A claims X, but B disagrees, saying ...") it remains remakably upbeat about the gradual shift of our notion of self to incorporate technology that's been going on for millions of years, ever since we first learned to build tools.

I hadn't checked out John Baez 's " This Week's Finds... " in a while. and when I do, what do I discover in the second-to-most-recent issue? A review of Accelerando   and brief discussion of Singularity fiction. John's been writing an emminently digestable (almost) weekly summary of what's going on for many years now, long before blogs were popular. If I had more of a rigorously analytical brain, mathematical physics is the field I'd want to be in. This is the field where the Deep Understanding of our universe and the relationship between logic, mathematics and our little slice of reality are being figured out. I have my fingers crossed for Caspian.

Pretty good. If you can make it through the first half, the second half makes up for it. I enjoyed it a lot, and hopefully they'll follow on with Prince Caspian and Voyage of the Dawn Treader . Adapting the others will be a tremendous challenge. This one was adapted spectacularly well. I have two major criticisms of the film. First, the first half of the film (through the Father Christmas scene), the directing, acting, and cinematography is emotionless. At no point does the White Witch come across as sinister, vile, or oppressive. In the inevitable comparison to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings , Jackson's characters were a little bit over the top. In this adaptation, the characters weren't even at base camp yet. Jadis should have terrified us at least as much as the Nazgul did in Fellowship ; Maugrim's pack are turned into buffoons. This all turns around halfway through, but that just makes the film feel uneven. Second, the film was simply too short. One of m...

This one is a few weeks old; Susan just related it to me. It seems she and Caspian were in the garage putting a load of laundry in and Caspian was being a bit of a twit. Su needed a way to distract him and she noticed a small flip-open mirror sitting near the dryer. She discretely pocketed it, and told Caspian he'd get a surprise when they went inside if they behaved. Upon going inside he asked for the surprise, and she gave him the mirror. His reply: "That's not a very good surprise." Can't put anything over on him.