Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I really enjoyed this little video, just 7 minutes or so, and highly recommend that you check it out.

Not that I literally believe that beings from the future are going to travel into the past to create the universe we know now.  But I really liked the part where they said “Once we achieve the singularity, technology will advance faster than we can think and we will be able to create worlds in an instant.  All of our dreams will come true, but so will our nightmares.  The future will be a battle of ideas.”

Choose Your Future

Although total singularity may be several generations away (there are people on Earth who have never used a phone, much less a computer, and there are many who think the singularity is a bad idea, and they might be right – like nuclear power, it could lead to our total destruction.  It will definitely lead to us becoming something other than human) we are clearly heading down that road and many aspects of it are with us today.

Technology IS advancing faster than we can think.  I am typing this at 11:47 p.m. Central European Time, Greenwich +1, there are undoubtedly some night owls still up at CERN, and scientists across North America are in the middle of their day while in Japan some obsessed engineer is having a morning coffee while he converses with a robot and having a major breakthrough, and everything everybody discovers everywhere will be fed back into the loop, so there’s no way we wee mortals can keep up.

Creating worlds in an instant?  Well, we do it in games, writers do it in their books, but actual, physical changes take actual, physical time and there are only so many physical worlds close enough for us to experiment with and they all have certain resource limitations.  So, I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration but, metaphorically, yeah, we’re already there.

It definitely will, though, come down to a battle of ideas and that battle has already begun.  The trick will be sorting out the good ideas from the bad ideas, the beautiful visions of a peaceful future where there are lots of tall forests and blooming gardens and clean rivers and lakes filled with fish and gleaming cities and high speed transportation and peace and freedom and love from the totalitarian dystopias of prison planets and robot armies shooting death rays from their eyes.

It might not be that easy.  A quick look at the politics of the world today is enough to prove there are some people who really, really want a shitty world.

Another thing that bothers me on facebook, that clutters up my page, is the personality quizzes.  You know the ones, which criminal mastermind are you, which Enterprise crew member are you, which of the Seven Dwarves are you, which European city should you live in, what is your natural profession, and so on.

Let me speak for you

I did one or two when I was new to facebook.  (Among Harry Potter characters, I am apparently Luna Lovegood.  The one who was, even at Hogwarts, the weird kid in school)  But, I soon grew bored with the concept.  They take the answers you give to questions, and spit out a pre-prepared response, like a fortune cookie.  Tarot, Palmistry, or even a crystal ball will probably tell you more, at least they are more up close and personal.

But I am not arguing in favor of those, either. (disclaimer:  I read Tarot cards all the time, that’s my party trick, but it’s not a science.  The value in it is that it’s a springboard, a place for the conversation to start, a way to look at reality from a different, randomly chosen starting point and maybe you’ll get a fresh take on the situation)

What I am trying to say is that you are the one who knows your own personality, you are the one who’s been living with it your whole life, and you don’t need a quiz to tell you whether you are Happy or Grumpy.  If you don’t know, then you must be the 8th dwarf, Crazy, the delusional paranoid schizophrenic one.  Ho-Hi, Ho-Hi, I’m such a crazy guy.

Then, today, I saw one that I was tempted to take.  The concept was a little bit scary.  It was “What would your facebook status update be if you were a chatbot.”

I am a bit curious about how much facebook actually knows about my personality.  I get hit with lots of ads for “Meet Single Russian Women” which shows that they might know my preferences better than they know my marital status.  Lots of weight loss ads, too, which is a sign they know what they’re doing.

Also, I thought “Wow, this might actually be a future trend.  If facebook can actually generate status updates in the user’s voice, some people undoubtedly will just start using it, generating a status update every hour or so which actually sounds like them, communicating by proxy, reducing interpersonal communication by yet another step.  It’s like the Turing Test in reverse, where the question is not ‘at what point do computers become indistinguishable from human beings’ but rather ‘at what point do human beings become indistinguishable from robots.’

It’s not that, fortunately.  Mine was “My blog tonight is I hate this crap 50 cent sucks between these concrete walls of gray” and I realized they were just grabbing random phrases from previous updates, which are generally either my poems or plugs for my blog.  They didn’t even worry about correct grammar, so they weren’t seriously trying to copy my style.

The day is coming, though.

Arthur C. Clarke, one of the coolest people who ever lived, said “Any sufficiently advanced technology will appear to be magic,” or something like that, and it’s true.  It was the idea behind “The Man Who Would Be King,” one of my favorite movies.  It explains cargo cults and the conquest of the Incas.  It’s also true internally, within one era and one civilization.  That is, I have no idea how scientists figure out some of the stuff they figure out, it seems like magic to me.  Nonetheless, I am happy that there are people in this world that much more intelligent than I am.  It means there is hope for the human race.

I’m referring to this.  How the heck they know what’s at the center of the Earth, when we’ve never been down anywhere near that far, is beyond me.  The deepest point in the oceans is about 15 kilometers down, the deepest mines on Earth less than that.  They are talking about 700 kilometers down.  A huge reservoir of water, 3 times the volume of the Earth’s oceans.  Encased in rock.

I’m not sure what value this knowledge has.  It’s not like we’re going to drill for it.  It’s not as if we actually have a water shortage.  Well, occasionally, here and there, but we’ll be able to solve that problem much easier through desalination, more efficient usage and distribution, etc…

It is a humbling thought, though.  The planet we live on is basically like a big jawbreaker with a surprise at the center.

The reason there was no blog yesterday was sudden and massive computer failure, my trusty old notebook just up and decided to not be so trusty, it gave up the ghost, it bought the farm, most everything is saved, my books are books, even the novel I’m working on will be 9/10ths recoverable and the essentials are in my head and, of course, still down in longhard, old fashioned pen on paper cursive, semi-legible writing so it will all be cool in the end.  H will take it into the shop today and see if it can be revived, if there is some kind of way to shock it out of its coma but, for now, I am typing this up on a replacement model, an old thing we had in the corner gathering dust, which is slow and hits me every few seconds with a pop-up box in Polish and I never know whether to click Tak or Nie but, in all fairness, I never know in English, either.

So, I will not cheat and backdate this.  I will just write 2 blogs today and this is one, with half an hour before I need to leave and go to my first class, there will be no photo, no links, and then I’ll do another tonight and I hope things will be back to normal but it might not be that instant.

Here’s my topic: Internet friend Grace posted a lovely little picture the other day with one of those platitudinal sentences, not my favorite type of facebook entry as a general rule, but the comments showed that it worked as an interesting mini-Rohrschach, a two possibility way of dividing the people of the world.  The sentence was something along the lines of “Next time you’re feeling depressed, try NOT feeling depressed.”  About half of us were saying “That’s beautiful,”and about half thought she was joking or, in any event, that it was a really silly thought, because depression is real and sometimes caused by chemical imbalances in the brain and also some people’s lives are seriously shittier than others and you can’t just plaster that over with “La la la, everything is beautiful” and I understand their point, the power of positive thinking does not change the actual circumstances of the physical world but, the way I see it, happiness is the goal and there’s no reason in the world not to use every tool in the box to get there.

Also, even though positive thinking is an abstract, enough of an abstract, piled up upon itself, will somehow, some day, make a leap into reality, just like once there is a sufficient amount of inanimate matter in the Universe and a sufficient amount of energy bouncing around, then, given an infinite amount of time in which to work, sooner or later there is going to be a spark of life.

At least, there is no reason to fight against it.  Don’t be depressed.  Be happy.  At least try. It might work.  If it doesn’t, try again tomorrow.

It’s been a day, in some ways like every other day, in some ways different.  I wish, though, it would go ahead and rain already.

It was already hot when I took the kids to school  this morning.  It’s been like that for days and, even though hot  weather is what we bitch about the lack of throughout the rest of the year, I find it less and less pleasant the older, and fatter, I get. 

Came home and  had a semi- productive morning.  Made some snarky comments on facebook, did a bit of work on the novel I’m writing, and watched ‘I Shouldn’t Be Alive,’ which is pretty good television, actually, it’s better than watching Bear Gryllz or any of those types, survival in the wilderness guys are almost as common as political pundits any more and it all seems so fake to me, they’re out in the middle of the desert saying “I will die if I don’t find water” and you have to wonder: who’s filming this, don’t they have a truck for the camera and crew, and isn’t there water in that truck?

‘I Shouldn’t Be Alive’ features true stories of miraculous survival and they do it as a combination  of interviews with the actual people and re-creations using actors, so it’s much less bullshitty.  Today’s episode was about a guy who made it to the top of Everest but went delirious on the way down and nearly killed his Sherpa guides, who eventually abandoned him to die in the snow, out of self-preservation.

I walked to school, which I’ve been doing more lately, every chance I get, that’s actually my most serious exercise of the day which is pretty pathetic, it’s about a 45 minute walk, but that meant I was sweating like a milk carton during my two 7th grade classes, which are my worst classes.  I think they would be almost any teacher’s worst classes.

I take that back.  Teaching in the Czech Republic, I feel fairly safe, on any given day, that none of my students are going to pull out an assault rifle and start killing people.  I should be grateful that my students are merely dumber than rocks, and have no respect for authority.

Went to pick up Isabel from her school and take her to ballet and by this time it was blazingly, painfully hot.

However, on my way to my last class (the Iranian kids), the air changed, clouds started to drift in from nowhere, wisps of white appearing in the field of blue like a universe forming out of nothing, which is one theory about where the material for the Big Bang originally came from. The heat dropped, there was a breeze.  I actually changed my route so I would be at a tram stop with a shelter because I expected it to start pouring down any second.

We got sprinkles.  I’m still waiting – and hoping – for the big downpour.