DARIUS MIKSYS SAFARI DIARIES PAGE 1
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This book is dedicated to the beans, various kinds of beans and chickpeas as the best brain food.
Copyright Darius MIksys
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CONTENTS:
5........................Drive Line. 9........................”Entire village suspected of mayor’s murder”. 13.......................Superstars And Stars On Bills. 14.......................Blind Camera. 15.......................Rsstroom Reader. 16.......................Sapphire Knife. 19.......................New Personality. 30.......................Chicken Through The Windscreen. 31.......................Hardware Queen. 33.......................”New York Rabbi Finds Friends in Iran and Enemies at Home”. 39.......................Guangzhou Journal. 44.......................2001 Press Releases. 50.......................01 53.......................Now You See Them, Now You Don’t. 54.......................”His motive was even more puzzling than his methods”. 56.......................Low Expectation Culture. 58.......................How to Remove Tourists from Your Photos. 69.......................Pig-brain Mist Suspected. 72.......................Email This To a Friend.
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by “alien”, and maybe by “boundaries” or “entities”). Right now for us, however, it is more intriguing to posit that not all of those entities’ activities will be confined to attempts to survive. We may succeed in passing on to our mind children the high valuation of experience itself. If so--and they can afford that luxury---then in addition to mathematics there should also exist art and philosophy. We might suppose, along these lines, that “spiritual reorganization” would also be a way to characterize their experiences and their search for new experiences. Getting back to a search for knowledge, however, consider that at any time t an entity E(t) (with time on its hands, as just explained) will be interested in data compression. A very large amount of known data or newly discovered data may or may not have low enough KC for E(t) to be able to make progress in deciphering it (at that time, of course). (Some kinds of data will, a priori, have quite low chances of containing real patterns, i.e., will a-priori be judged to be highly and irreducibly random, and will not command attention. A very non-random source of data, I would however suggest, would be *history*: especially the history of the development of a particular entity E(t) as it looks for clues to advance its own reorganization and its own search for more “satisfying” experiences.) But clearly E(t), that is, entity E at time t, is in the most interesting case still growing, still advancing. The Busy Beaver problem in mathematics gives some concrete indication of why and how. A quick look at the tables in http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_beaver hints at what might be possible by the addition of a single “neuron” to E. Assuming, though, that by 10,000 A.D. entities have reached material constraints ---say that there is only a finite amount of matter or energy within the grasp of E---the capability to reach more “states” of, for example, enhanced spirituality, or more optimal number crunching, or better algorithms in general, will depend solely on internal reorganization. But apparently, still not to worry! There are just *so* many possible internal states. Conclusion: E(t) will find *interesting* in terms of new knowledge (for knowledge’s sake) breakthroughs in data compression made possible at time t with E’s capabilities at time t. That is, if a somewhat structured or entirely random data set has relatively low KC, and E is able to discover that fact, then the data set or “theorem” will be interesting. Lee _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat ----- End forwarded message -----
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Foreword by Lee Corbin What Will Be Interesting in the Far Future _______________________________________________ Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> on Sat May 12 19:56:04 UTC 2007 • Previous message: [tt] [SALT] Consilience defeats miasma (Steven Johnson talk) • Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] ----- Forwarded message from Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> ----From: Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 11:17:19 -0700 To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> Subject: [ExI] What Will Be Interesting in the Far Future X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.3028 Reply-To: Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com>, ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
It’s a wonderful feature of human life to be interested in something. Anything, actually. In what will the reigning intelligences of 10,000 A.D. be interested? We abbreviate Kolmogorov Complexity to KC. Note that a deep drive of highly cognitive life on Earth at this time (e.g. human beings) is to discern patterns, and moreover to delight in such discovery. From backyard gossip to the profoundest scientific discoveries, intelligent life as we know it revels in understanding. We can probably claim that such discoveries of truth, or patterns, or understanding, is data compression, or, in other words, amount to an apparent reduction of KC. Discovering a pattern in a long string of 1’s and 0’s, to take the archetypical example, is to achieve data compression of that string, and it can be shown that except for extremely simple strings (we mean data), an intelligence can never know for sure that the true KC has really been identified---it may simply be that the apparently random data has not yet been “broken” in the cryptographic sense, and even then may possibly be someday compressed even further. What is “interesting” to an entity will have long, long ago been up to the entity to decide. Even today we are surely only decades or at worst centuries away from owning the capability of turning the “interesting knob” up or down on anything that we please. But let’s suppose that those entities *do* engage in something analogous to a quest for knowledge, and that in some sense they find it “interesting”. I’ll now speculate on what that might mean. In 10,000 A.D. the ruling entities over some amount of physical space could still be interested in science. Perhaps everything from quantum computing to baby black holes could provide opportunities for unlimited exploration. We really can’t even guess. Mathematics, however, is provably infinite in the sense that there will always be patterns as yet undiscovered even among something so fundamental as the positive integers. Darwinian survival, however, dictates that the discovery of yet more advanced ways to self-organize, so as to be able to deploy at the boundaries of an entity effective defenses against alien assimilation will be “interesting”, (however strange will be whatever is then meant From “Self-Portraits Chronicle a Descent Into Alzheimer’s”, Nytimes.com, October 24, 2006
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Drive line The candy director, Scottie Surrealist Fergusson and the vagabond in San Francisco vertigo map guide
Scottie turned slowly. — “Hey page from Spain, you knew this place. You have been here.” — “Be still a mo PAGE 8
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ment, Surrealist,” he said languidly. “There’s something here. You are afraid of it, but I know it. Somewhere, perhaps in an old dream, I have PAGE 9
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seen this place, or perhaps felt the feeling of this place.” He dropped his hands to his sides and whispered, trying the words. — “This is PAGE 10
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holy—and this is old. This is ancient—and holy.” The glad was silent. A buzzard swept across the circular sky, low over the treetops. Scottie Surrealist PAGE 11
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Fergusson get up like an idiot. — “Ha, Hah ... I’m not a sheep myself! 10%, you imagine that would be like a sheep’s brain. But it’s always PAGE 12
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the same logic, you always want more. So you don’t understand ? Action isn’t enough, there always has to be a commentary, instructions for use, PAGE 13
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or a justification. It’s the separation of act and thought.”
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The light blue eyes of the page from Spain were wet with tears. — “My mother brought me here, Surrealist. My mother was Spanish. I was a lit PAGE 15
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tle boy and my mother was going to have a baby. She came here and sat beside the rock. For a long time she sat, and then we went away again.” PAGE 16
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— “But what do you think happens when the reading of the fact is prior to the fact itself ? Soon there will be an explanation, with examples as PAGE 18
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back-up, of what happens before this comes about. Time withdraws and shrinks more and more. We have enterred the age of negative time, made up of PAGE 19
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hysterologies of every kind. I’m going to start with the editing of the sequences before the images are shot,” said the director, a candy girl around PAGE 20
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twenty years old. Scottie cried nervously. — “Let’s get the Hell out of here ! We’ve got to find the cows. ” — “ Don’t be afraid, Scottie, PAGE 21
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said the director, there’s something strong and sweet and good in there. Look the map, just look the map, and don’t be shy... ” PAGE 22
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LAND’S END LANDS There is one in Russian but it has a double meaning “world’s end” and “light’s end” konets sveta. Do you know there is a word in Persian, which means a tree, beyond which there is no passing? “Sadartu’l-Muntaha” Well, in Sri Lanka there is a place, a tourist attraction, called “World’s End”, which is a steep vertical cliff. The idea is that, if the world were a flat place, this would be one edge of it. In Indonesia we have “Ujung Aspal”. It is a small village in the eastern part of Jakarta. Ujung means End, Aspal means Asphalt. So it means the end of asphalt road, the end of the road or land’s end. 20 years ago it was actually where Jakarta’s asphalt road ends. Now it is quite populated. In San Francisco, there is a part of the coast close to the Golden Gate Bridge that is called Land’s End. Well, the city ofTimbuktu in Mali was referred to as the farthest place in the world. Americans and many other people even thought it was an imaginary city. In France, there is a “département” called Finistère and in Spain a Cape Finisterre. Finisterre/Finistère derives from Latin meaning Land’s End or Earth’s End. And don’t forget Finland. In China, there is a place called Tian Ya Hai Jiao in the province of Hainan. It is considered the south-most point of China’s land area. Tian Ya Hai Jiao literally means “Limit of Heaven and the Corner of the Seas”, translated into simple words, it is the End of the World, since it is the southernmost known territory of China, and from there you will only see the oceans. Ancient people feared to cross it. There are actually two rocks, marked with the calligraphy of famous poets from the Qing Dynasty, with the words: Tian Ya Hai Jiao, which made this place and this phrase famous. Because of numerous poems with these phrases, it has now a romantic connotation: “I will follow you to the Tian Ya Hai Jiao”, means eternal love... so the place is always full of honeymoners. In Fiji we have the inverse: A place called “First Landing” where the earliest settlers arrived more than 3,000 years ago.
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