Saturday 4 June 2016

alphanumeric or space-time coordinates

I never quite got the hang of UK postcodes, but I suppose any other system and structure might appear just as baffling to an outsider, and perhaps numerical proximities aren’t the most efficient way of parceling up land.
Though I don’t think that we missed out on seeing anything that we we intended to because of this oversight or lack of faith and confidence in our rather unreliable navigator (for taking the choicer, scenic routes from time to time), but getting a little frustrated that many attractions did not have well-defined street addresses, we tried plugging in the postcode coordinates finally which bore us straight to the location. I didn’t think the SATNAV (Navi) would understand those. It made me think of an ambitious project that I had read about a few weeks prior that aimed to standardise all localities globally by dividing the world map into some fifty trillion three square metre plots, each assigned simple and memorable three word designations, in a multilingual context. This project is headquartered in London, incidentally, and has the geo-locator future.human.foster, which I feel to outsiders is possibly more accessible than W1A 1AA. Explore the map and find out your home address in three words.

Friday 3 June 2016

system of a down

Far worse than the potential dictatorial stance of the likes of the Free World under the yoke of a Trump regime or the sprawling tin-pot nation of Fฤรงbรผkฤฑstan, our friends in Turkey are facing the insufferable under the endless presidency (it seems like few politicians can go gracefully into retirement, and it is convenient to swap the offices of president and prime minister) of ErdoฤŸan.
The latest dillusory stunt is Ankara’s recall of its ambassadorial mission to Berlin (restored, apparently after pulling out recently over a satirical song by a German comedian) is over the German parliament’s resolution to designate the Ottoman Empire’s killing and persecution of Armenians (and other minorities) during World War I as genocide (Vรถlkermord). Turkey is rebuffing criticisms both internal and external and accuses Germany of being provocative—but pledges that in no way will this grave and unfortunate decision affect the deal with the EU to siphon refugees first through its borders, discouraging the dangerous overseas crossing.  If Turkey is truly earning a place within the European Union community with such gestures, one would think it would play this leverage with more strategy.  With this resolution, Germany is joining a chorus of voices, including the Pope, but there was some tremolo-heroics behind the symbolic vote (which was just as likely to have not occurred), with some top government officials conspicuously absenting themselves from the assembly.

Thursday 2 June 2016

sympathetic and contagious magic

Writing for the Slate blog, The Vault, Rebecca Onion presents a selection of some fantastic forgotten American superstitions, collected by a teaching-college professor in 1907. The professor asked a large sampling of students to share all the rituals and beliefs for courting good luck or warding off bad that they could think of and then rank them by personal credulity.
One can read the entire study here, but I did like quite a few of Onion’s choices: if a fire puffs, then the neighbours are quarrelling. If you find a hairpin and hang it on a nail, the first person to speak to you afterwards will marry you. If you drop a dishrag and it does not spread out, you can expect a gentleman-caller. Carrying an axe through the house will bring bad luck. If you see a white horse, you will see a red-headed woman. Never leave a loaf of bread upside down, for it will be sure to cause ships to sink. If you throw a horse’s skull over your right shoulder without looking back, you will never get the smallpox. Ivy is an unlucky plant. Straight hair will go curly if cut in the dark of the moon. There’s also quite a few bizarre little rhyming incantations to repeat upon seeing fortuitous events. This endeavour makes me think of the Brothers Grimm collecting, aggregating and classifying folk tales

red pill, blue pill

Expounding on comments made by one the industry’s visionaries at a coding conference, Vox magazine delivers a very good and accessible primer for the probing question whether we exist in a “base” reality or are living in an advanced simulation. Like the classic Brain-in-a-Vat inquiry, our philosophic prowess cannot solve the nature of the Universe, but I never really understood why a very complex scenario might be preferred (more likely) than a simpler one, albeit mundane one.
Even if technological advance were to grind to a halt or hit some unforeseen barrier, it’s easy to image us experiencing a virtual reality of our own making that’s indistin- guishable from the outside looking in, so suppose what an alien intelligence might develop over a thousand years or in ten thousand years. Given that there would be countless trillions of computers running, the odds that we’re in a so-called base, foundational existence is diminishing low, if one accepts the logic of the argument. What do you think? Is being a playable-character in a super-intellect’s video-game different than being in the Mind of God?

all your likes are belong to us

Via Vice magazine, we learn it is now possible to surrender one’s social mediators and online presence over to a robot. With the human as the backseat-driver, an Autonomous Self-Agent performs the pruning and gardening and weeding—all those administrative chores that have become a long row to hoe and quite a time-consuming task to stay current and relevant.
What do you think? Would you trust a robot to represent you online and keep up appearances and not do anything embarrassing or untoward or become radicalised? I am unsure about the compulsion to publish or perish that kind of drains away the fun and surprise, but I imagine it might be all the more frightening to find that one’s autonomous assistant might come across as indistinguishable from the real thing rather than any amount of faux pas or social blunder that one might have to apologise for later on.

Wednesday 1 June 2016

carry on, constable

There’s something remarkably indulgent about having the campus of well looked after ruins to oneself, imagining how history marched on and then by an inaccessible accord, time stopped and there was a general agreement to stave off both progress and decay. On our trip across England, we experienced this many times over, and the Restormel Castle outside of Lostwithel in Cornwall really typified the romance. This circular fortress was built in the times just after the Norman Conquest and bastions like these transformed and solidified the occupation and displacement and civilised the art of warfare, turning unsheltered carnage and plunder into something more strategic and potentially less violent.
Exchanged several times between the high sheriff of Cornwall and Simon de Montfort (of Crusade fame and infamy), eventually it was ceded to the crown, under Henry III, the residence boasted plumbing (some innovation eight hundred years ago—reaching back to Roman times) and profited off of the local tin trade. Another sight was the Old Sherborne Castle in Dorset (an intact castle is just up the road).
Queen Elizabeth I relinquished this twelfth century estate to Sir Walter Raleigh after the courtier, poet, historian and explorer became enamoured with it, whilst returning from an expedition to the New World and landing at nearby Portsmouth. Raleigh, between searching for El Dorado and the Seven Cities of Gold, was instrumental in the English colonising of North America and popularised tobacco and potatoes in the Old World. An unsanctioned marriage and political intrigues, which may have beckoned the Spanish Armada (over incursions into lands claimed by that crown), led to Raleigh’s unfortunate beheading.
His faithful wife and accomplice, according to some, kept her husband’s head in a velvet bag for nearly thirty years before expiring herself, both unable to retire to the castle that had become a rather frustrated property.

new testament

An individual, identified only as the cool dude with sunglasses smiley, has translated all sixty-six books of the King James version of the Bible into emojis, targeted towards the Millennial demographic—found on Kottke’s Quick Links.
I am not certain if this gospel was encoded in response declining rates of church attendance all around—for the first time in history, reportedly, more people are agnostic rather than religious in any form, but I am not sure that this will bring about a revival, not that it was bidden and need that was going unfilled. Apparently, the critical reception has been on the whole a balanced one with some reviewers surprised to find that the strings of hieroglyphs are overly tedious and there’s some praise-worthy and innovative translations to be found—but I wonder whether it’s more in deference to the word-craft (which I hope is preserved across different operating systems) rather than the message. Maybe it’s fitting that the first printed work in the Western tradition was also the Bible and is now subject to this treatment, and we’ve taken millennia to progress from logograms to an alphabet but are now returning with rapt interest. What do you think?

xรฉnoglossie ou maladroit

The Neurocritic—which looks like a wonderful blog about cognitive science, recommended by Marginal Revolution, has an excellent primer and reporting on the curious phenomena of people all of a sudden (usually after a trauma) being able to speak with some fluency a foreign language that they’ve no prior acquaintance with.
This xenoglossy (or xenolalia) manifests itself in different forms, seemingly unique to that individual speaking in tongues, and sometimes attributed to past-life regression or other paranormal activity—though examining the mental mechanics is just as tantalising. A recent case reveals that eloquence is not always included in the package. After developing an arterial-flow problem, an Italian man began remembering the fragments of French he’d picked up three decades prior while courting a girl. Although still able to speak perfectly good Italian, the man insisted on communicating in broken French, albeit delivered at a rapid and articulate pace of someone very confident in his lingual skills.