Subtitled: what nazis and slime mold have in common with the bumblebee.
Over the years, as more and more helmeted motorcycle cops and police officers fondling their weapons line the inside of the college football stadium toward the end of a game, all I can think of on this day to celebrate Oktoberfest, is a Nazi rally in the 1940s.
“We shall rule the world one day soon!” the slime mold exclaims.
Ja! Ja! Hohoho hahaha…
Time for a gut polka unt a gut bier. But first, a gut fahrt!
In the United States, a three-digit number can be dialed/called that will connect you to an emergency assistance call center.
Apparently, the young men below hadn’t yet gotten the memo that the old number, 0-5-1, is no longer in use.
However, we appreciate their enthusiasm and give them a “thumbs up” for their effort!:
= = = = =
Congrats to my secondary school alma mater, the Central Cougars, for their win last night — your coach seems to have found the magic formula this year.
And finally, we ask the police department not to do any more favours for the University of Tennessee – Knoxville men’s football team, such as providing locker room material that, “just in case” our team beats a longtime rival, the police will prevent fans from entering the field of play to celebrate. You jinx our team one more time and you better believe that we’ll accelerate the decrease in your pension plan, especially that of your leaders, “just in case” you don’t get the message the first time. Yeah, that’s right — it’s a direct challenge! Some of us would rather see a few broken bones and injuries amongst the diehard fans after we’ve annihilated our sports enemies than sit at home and mop up our spilled beer in defeat.
Hundreds of millions of people give up their guaranteed national freedoms and rights for a job with more restrictions and fear than found under some of the most daring dictatorships. More details on your morning commute to a virtual prison cel…
Thanks to Barbara at Walmart and Shally at The Plum Tree.
Right now, Melody Gardot serenades my eardrums, although I could have gone to an April Taylor concert or played more Claire Lynch on my SIII playlist, after showing my mother videos of Robert MacDuffie and his magic violin while we watched the Baylor Bears and ULM Warhawks have an end zone showdown in Louisiana.
Up here in the quiet ‘burbs of upper East Tennessee, friends of my parents ask me why is it that four out of six current female U.S. state governors are Republican.. Tonight, my mother and I discussed the issue, wondering about the influence of Kay Bailey Hutchison, the female senator from Texas.
Today is one of those when sweet dreams are more appealing than passing issues, holding off the thought of two million free Papa John’s pizzas, T20 cricket, federal prisoners earning a living wage, minus room and board, boardrooms, Luis Bonfa’s music on long freeway drives, Miami wildernesses saying hello to my little friends and Merkel’s secret army of advisors.
I’m not really here, am I?
am I?
What’s a stolen clock design got to do with it? Ask CEO Tim the cook.
Auf wiedersehen, Herr Myers unt Christian Schmitt.
Si tu savais…
The one area of intelligence that my wife and I agree on is the definition of X-in-the-loop.
A machine that requires input from a person is a human-in-the-loop device/system.
All commercial automobiles require a person to operate the automobile (but that is quickly going to change).
Is a road full of automobiles that require no human input a sign of intelligence?
What about the Curiosity rover on Mars?
What features can we list that show autonomous functions in one subset, intelligent functions in another and a set of features in the subset of the autonomy/intelligence junction?
What makes the autonomous functions of my central nervous system intelligent or conscious?
What about the automatic connection of my laptop computer’s WiFi radio subsystem in this room to the WiFi router in another part of the house and then on out to the Internet?
What is pure hardware-in-the-loop intelligence like, no HID required/allowed?
If a database is updated by a software program which seeks to maximise its collection of available knowledge, knowledge that it alone determines is valuable, is that intelligence?
And what about the age-old arguments of the conscious-vs-subconscious thought sets?
These words are just a few that pass through my thoughts before I make a last-second decision upon another upon another, etc., until I type these words in a coherent whole row called a sentence, in exclusion of and in competition within a finite possibility (you won’t find Croatian or Sanskrit here without the use of an online translator, for instance).
If the Internet is now an extension of my thought set, am I a human-in-the-loop extension of the Internet?
I sit here, taking an occasional sip of black label Irish whiskey (“Black Bush”), looking at the clock, which shows 22:38, and contemplate going to bed, where I will not be directly disturbed by the Internet, although my dreams (my subconscious?) may work through thought patterns I’ve had today about artificial machine intelligence which date back to my childhood days of the 1970s and the promise of LISP/ELIZA and other AI programs that relied on pattern-matching (why does the image of trees appear in my thoughts right now?).
…data structures…hmm…
On the floor next to me, in addition to “Dictionary of Quotations” by Bergen Evans, “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert and “The Schizoid World of Jean-Paul Satre and R.D. Laing,” are two books that captured my attention several years ago: “I, Cyborg” by Kevin Warwick, and “Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence” by Andy Clark.
From them, I contemplated a novel I write using software agents in a database, with every word/phrase/sentence/paragraph/chapter hyperlinked/connected such that the story changed based on reading the reader’s online self, with a voiceover and accompanying 3D video that interjects based on the reader’s vital signs, the novel frequently switching to a series of random words to shake up the reader’s thought patterns, slipping in and out of the reader’s online life — social life, blog, game sequences, website, etc. — so that the reader soon could lose track of self completely in a world of half-plagiarism, half-homage collage.
As I write this blog entry, my software agent has jumped from suggesting the word I’m typing to suggesting the rest of the end of the sentence.
After hundreds of blog entries, my software agent has jumped from suggesting the rest of this sentence to write the rest of the blog entry for me.
Based on the research I perform on the Internet every day and the books I have lined up to read the rest of the week, as well as following my daily patterns, including eye movements, my software agent has written the rest of this week’s blog entries for me, suggesting that I skip using the Internet altogether today and go for a nice, relaxing hike in the cool autumn morning, using my “Internet of things” kitchen appliances to assemble a sandwich along with the rest of my meal/snacks to eat that my smartphone will remind me of when my vital signs show sign of hunger along the trail.
Readers of this blog can now no longer tell when I stopped writing these blog entries, or when I sometimes step in as a person-in-the-loop to tweak a blog entry as a surprise, because both I and the software agent use the trick of occasional misspellings and grammatical errors to give an ambience of authenticity to my/its speedy typing and lack of postcreation proofreading/editing.
Is this intelligence?
If all I do between computer programming gigs and life coaching, other than go out to eat, shop, attend football games, watch movies and travel with my wife, is write blog entries here, your only connection with me, could you say I am more or less intelligent than the output of my software agent?
What if my writing became more oblique and more full of interesting Internet links, would I (or, rather, my proxy) seem more intelligent?
When all of us depend on software agents to supplement or (perhaps) better yet, substitute for our online lives, is the Internet intelligent/conscious?
When software agents are interacting with software agents to create unique output that I and the other people who created their software agents would not have thought of, is that a sign that the Internet has become intelligent/conscious?
Is a “train” of autonomous automobiles traveling on a road an intelligent/conscious entity all its own, receiving stimuli from the environment and reacting as one just like a caterpillar or earthworm from our anthropomorphic view?
How can I say that my typing here is anything more than an autonomous response by my set of states of energy to the environment?
Am I really just a hardware-in-the-loop device like any other set of states of energy in the universe?
Why should I label “me” as a special condition of intelligence or consciousness? Because I say I can see myself write this blog entry while I “see” thoughts that do not win the competition to make this blog entry a coherent sequence of symbols we call words?
The wooden mannequin on my desk has no autonomous functions, does it?
What about gravitational pull holding it down on the desk?
What about the photons interacting with its surface, indicating a series of paths from the incandescent light bulb inefficiently emitting more heat than light that reflects off the shiny surface of the mannequin into my eyeballs?
Obviously, I’d be more convinced if the mannequin started talking to me in a manner I could understand — arm gestures, leg movements, etc.
I shake the desktop and the mannequin shakes in responses.
We have a relationship with each other, if not an understanding between us.
Is that a sign of intelligence/consciousness?
I cannot assume that what I anthropomorphically or anthropocentrically want to call intelligence/consciousness is what I will see when the interconnected wires and fibers we call the Internet becomes more than an automatic response to our stimuli, which is really all I am in one view, aren’t I?
Never assume the event horizon hasn’t already been crossed just because your definition of the impossible is the only one you can envision.
Hindsight is mostly 20/20.
Symbiosis is asymptomatic, in my book (but that’s the whiskey talking, not me).
Good night!
…or, statistics are valid best when comparing apples to apples (not Google Maps to Apple Maps, however):
Amazingly, a new look at statistics from reason.com shows that Bush’s record on job creation was better than Obama’s. Of course, Bush was able to grow the public payroll — different times, my friends, different expectations…
However, I ask myself, what about the quality or standard of life that these jobs provided, public or private, during both the Bush and Obama administrations?
Now you see why I can’t see Obama is any different than his predecessors. But maybe that’s the point of the whole process?
Hope, change, thousand points of light — does any of it matter as long as we feed from the same Koolaid-flavoured trough?
Oh well, back to the future…if only I had Dad as a counterpoint to my arguments…maybe Mom can give me her input and get me off this track of thinking the Romney/Obama ticket makes no sense…
If it weren’t for spam, I’d get no email.
If it weren’t for game/group invitations, I’d have no contacts with online friends.
If it weren’t for political surveys or pleas for pints of blood plasma, I’d have no phone calls.
If it weren’t for bulk flyers, I’d have no mail.
If it weren’t for my wife, I’d rarely have any face-to-face contact with a person of our species everyday.
In other words, I am normally a solitary writer, a feeling I first had when I was five years old.
I never wanted to write to profit myself financially — I just want to entertain myself using our universe as fodder for a lifelong joke of mine.
I don’t have to be good or great when I write, just get down on paper or online some of the thought patterns that circulate through me when I’m away from pen/paper or electronic writing device.
Cartoonists draw, engineers calculate, artists sketch, gamers play, … and so on.
I, despite the love/hate relationship with symbols, use symbols to represent myself in this moment of our time together.
I use a countdown clock that shows 13742 days left to keep me on track with this storyline.
Speaking of which, so far we have encouraged millionaires and billionaires to not want to share their wealth, building up a larger and larger spread of income/wealth inequality so that, when the time is right, we can foment a worldwide economic class war that results in the destruction of nations as we know them today, leading to a New Newer New Society (conveniently called the NNNS) that is a formalised competing marketplace of ideas, where what we thought of as nations will be simply large tracts of land that are bought and sold to the highest bidder.
We are experimenting with Greece to see if we can use it as a prime example to give you a glimpse of your future.
Since many consider Greece one of the first seats of modern civilisation, we feel it’s only right to use the land mass as a test case for you, breaking it up into sections based on the debt owed/owned per capita, letting the highest bidder decide how to buy the debt, and thus the land, and determine how to profit from it, or repackage it into derivative bonds and resell it, land being the only tangible asset for collateral, the people and their skills being too mobile/transient, more an error correction in formulae for financial accountants.
Many of us are watching the heated argument between the Chinese and Japanese governments over a similar right to sell national property even though people all over the world own islands.
We often forget that Ted Turner owns more land than some national leaders have under their leadership, although Ted has wisely not raised a ruckus about the contiguous pieces of land having more power and solidarity than the nations that say the land is part of them.
Some question whether Barack Obama is the last populist leader of the United States of America before it is officially broken up during the pre-NNNS war.
While we’re on the subject of war, keep in mind that we aren’t talking exclusively about a military war.
It is more a cultural war than military one, although we certainly will use military engagements where the application of the shock doctrine is more efficient.
By the way, we want to thank Naomi Klein for allowing us to make our shock doctrine policy a part of the public, rather than part of our covert/secret, policies; that’s why we allow open discourse on political issues so we can steal appropriate implement our opponents’ ideas as our own and advance our causes more rapidly than closed societies; we also allow foreign nationals to steal our corporate/military secrets so we can gauge their ability to match our business/manufacturing prowess, in case they find a better way that we can steal back from them — we want a headstart on being part of the NNNS’ cutthroat marketplace of ideas.
Many of you will not see the changes taking place because you have not seen the changes that have already taken place, due to our keen sense of timing, our use of the best advertising/marketing teams out there, and our staff of hypnotists we call motivational speakers.
Already, many of you have been convinced that living with less material wealth than your ancestors is a good thing. Your examples make our hypnotists’ jobs easier, a trick as old as our species, the cumulative effect of mass hypnosis.
So you can see why writing is fun, can’t you?
I can talk all day about phrases like “the emperour’s new clothes” and “anti-government revolution” and make you think you are being radical by writing news articles that “fact-check” the political candidates or being a snitch hero by releasing a secret video as grandson of a former U.S. president, when in fact you are helping our bigger cause (again, “cause” is a symbol for this storyline and not to be confused with Cause, which matches Effect and is only applicable to scientific observations).
I was lucky enough to see how we were able to use the press to our advantage during the Nixon presidency; in fact, Nixon himself told us what was going to happen and to go along with his resignation that would be his stroke of genius, written as plain as day on headlines and in history books, our future signposts in guiding people toward the light.
Nixon made me understand two things: one, every person is important, and two, make sure I emphasise their importance. If a person wants to believe s/he is an opponent of yours, cement that relationship so you can maximise the exploitation of their ideas by squeezing them for what they’re worth before you take their ideas as your own. Whether they think they have conquered you doesn’t matter as long as their ideas are flipped around and turned into the next mainstream focus you use to keep people off-balance.
Never, ever let the whole population be in total agreement, or you’ll lose your idea generator — tension between subgroups is the greatest fuel to fire the generator.
If a conflict doesn’t exist, make one. Avoid the creation of a happy, complacent population that has no incentive to invent, unless they are more useful as income [de]generation for the storyline.
Well, that’s where we are today.
I want to make the U.S. presidential election more exciting but, right now, the storyline is going exactly as planned regardless of the outcome of the election.
I wish I was more important than the storyline but I’m just a writer recording the events for esoterically obscure reasons — your ideas are more important than my observation of them, don’t you see?
While we search for meaning in phrases like the “zombie apocalypse,” let’s not forget that the end of the world as we know it has already happened.
We live in a post-consumption apocalypse, where toys that do absolutely nothing useful are celebrated by celebrities who do absolutely nothing serious in return.
To see that I exist, that there is a set of states of energy that can be traced back to the union of two sets of states of energy, one still living…
This “I” cannot justify its existence after playing with a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet, updating an Apple iPad 2 to iOS 6, adding contacts to a Samsung Galaxy SIII and asking if I, all references to “It’s A Wonderful Life” aside, have made sufficient contributions to say I deserve calling myself my father’s son, Richard Lee Hill II.
There are brief moments like these when I ask myself if my blue-eyed, red-haired, freckly-skinned genetic material goes to the grave without any attempt to reproduce myself, then why did I live at all?
Silence follows accusingly, guilt-ridden, mocking, watching others who do and do not reproduce themselves build legacies that live…
Why am I here if nothing matters?
I have accumulated and continue to accumulate toys in an attempt to fill in the gaps of my life where [grand]children should be.
The massive waste in our species’ endeavours that we dedicate to the excess time our social network has given us outside our basic childrearing tasks is phenomenal.
We have become the emperour’s clothes.
I am a prime example.
I should be dead yet I still live, the personification of self-preservation, a set of states of energy perpetuating itself as long as it can.
Devoid of meaning.
A transparent being.
Time to dull my brain with alcohol, a legal means of escape from the torture of living with myself, happy in my comfortably suburban misery with no motivation to escape from the multiculturalism that is smothering me, who is the son of a father who thought that pot-smoking hippies like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are giving our country away.
Dad, what can I do to make things right? Legalise the recreational use of substances like marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms and LSD to raise them up to the legally-destructive level of alcohol, tobacco and prescription medication? Show secret videos we have recorded of private speeches that Hillary/Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have given over the years that will destroy international relationships, let alone upset the balance of voters’ opinions?
Dad, I tried to support Mitt Romney, I really did.
But without a child of my own to say that I have preserved the genetic heritage of which you were so proud, having descended from one of the American Revolutionary War heroes, it’s difficult to swallow the bitter aftertaste of the two-headed monster we call the duopoly of the Republican/Democratic political machine that promotes two people I can barely distinguish from one another, Obama and Romney.
Dad, I never supported Bill Clinton. But I never supported George W. Bush, either.
Our political system has become such a convoluted, commercialised, nondemocratic system that I’ve given up fighting it — we’re just one, big, international conglomeration of interdependent business functions now, a group of nations in name only.
The dogs of war are eating the scraps and I can’t stand the stench of income inequality that our nation has dissolved into, despite it appearing better than many political systems around the world.
I agree the “haves” should not be taxed when they have competed to earn their gains for themselves and their heirs but many of them have become too greedy, driven mad by the spectre of recession/depression hanging over them and the lifestyles to which they’ve grown accustomed.
Look at me, living in the lap of relative luxury, surrounded by piles of useless crap that demonstrates the excess our society generates for our childrearing-free moments.
Has the Great Recession taught the upcoming generation to appreciate life without gizmos just as the Great Depression and WWII taught your mother and yourself to appreciate enriching the mind through education that enhances one’s family rather than mind-numbing distractions that turn us into technological zombies?
Dad, I’m sorry I never gave you a grandchild from me, your older, sole male heir, a son you almost lost when he got dragged into the muck of pop culture for a while as he tried to define/find himself out from under the shadow of your strong personality.
There’s nothing I can do about it now.
All I can do is make sure your wife of 55 years, my mother, is taken care of the rest of her life, however she wishes to live it, until one of us dies first, as I give my wife the time she deserves with me.
It’s not enough but it’s all I have to offer in a country that had grown too druggy, multicultural and unpatriotic for you.
Otherwise, I’d prove the real balance of power by encouraging our nation to go to war with nations that are ill-prepared to handle our massive firepower, economic and popular culture power be damned, while I sit back and enjoy the show on all my useless gizmos, before those nations complete their detente arsenals and ruin the fun we closet warhawks truly enjoy.
Dad, maybe that’s the idea. Should I use the transition of leadership in China and the discord in the U.S. as well as the turmoil in the old Ottoman Empire to start a good, old-fashioned, patriotic ass-whooping of a war? I’ve got enough profiteers on my side around the world to make it interesting and a savvy business investment, besides.
We’ll see…
The hickory trees had a good year producing offspring…don’t know if it’s the best year (that is, if it’s the biggest crop (that is, most number of nuts, or largest nuts)) but some of the nut casings almost fill my palm, which doesn’t often happen.
The squirrels are having a hay day, as we say.
The raccoons seem pleased, too.
None of the chickadees or titmouses seem to care. We don’t have any other bird species large enough or with strong-enough beaks to treat hickory nuts as a major food source.
The peace and quiet of a cool, sunny, autumn morning in north Alabama is priceless.
The trees and the birds and all the other flora/fauna around me have thrived in the climate change despite period droughts and warmer winters.
What about the ones who haven’t thrived?
We had a few years where the tree frogs around here deafened us with their summer mating calls.
Now, not so many.
Armadillos swept through a few years ago, unable to establish a permanent colony in the woods around my house.
Same for the fire ants.
The ecosystem of a deciduous forest…sigh, this is my home.
Why? I guess because I was born in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, even though I spent a couple of my formative years in the inner flatlands of southern Florida.
Primarily, though, I have lived within a few-hours drive of the Appalachian mountain range, which few people know stretches from Georgia all the way up the East Coast into Maine.
On a day like today, this is all I have to say and observe. I have no need to perpetuate the thoughts and ideas of others wanting my attention.
I am, after all, happy being myself, and that is a word to the wise, which is sufficient.
Have a great day, my little chickadees!
treetrunkdings 