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.

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?

xénoglossie 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.

cerulean or sky of blue, sea of green

With a battery of research and experimental that neatly dove-tailed into that red-carpet dress controversy of last spring, it seems that the human eye in general didn’t really make a distinction for the colour blue until very recent times, a master Redditor informs. Reaching back to the investigations into the connection between pigments and language of William Gladstone (future Prime Minister of Great Britain) in the early nineteenth century, a chain of scholars have built on the body of evidence.
The proof is highly anecdotal in citing the lack of the colour being invoked in the classical canon—not mentioned once in the Odyssey, and before dyes (and eyes) there was not much in Nature—other than the sea and sky that was brilliantly and unqualifiable blue. Incidentally, skies, eyes and water (plus scales and plumage) are not blue in their own right but appear so due to the scattering of light waves.
Many languages do not mark the linguistic difference between blues and greens, and interestingly in the Romance Languages, the words for green are derived from Latin and the words for blue from Germanic. For much of civilisation, identifying the palettes of the forest and other subtle differences would have been far more useful than figuring out coordinates and what clashes, and this point was illustrated through a series of trials that demonstrate our cognitive colour-blindness by putting our perception through the paces. What do you think is the odd square—the one that Namibian tribes with no word for blue—could pick out right away? Click on the source link above to find the solution.  Perhaps that’s why we have a green-screen for chroma key compositing and special-effects.

berchtesgadener land oder alpine redoubt

We learned that the name of the town Berchtesgaden means “hayloft-hayloft,” once in Latin and again in old German—the denizens having forgot what the original toponym meant, the settlement still known for the same feature and utility, and though that was an apt introduction for our weekend tour through the beautiful but haunted Alpine landscape on the Austrian border.
We encamped near the shores of the serene Königsee and once through the souvenir-stalls, enjoyed the amazing views of the towering mountains protecting this body of water—which awkwardly bore the redundant designation “Lake Königsee” for the tourists—not quite yet hoarding and given it was so vast, there was never a high density of holiday-goers. On the peak of the Kehlstein, visible from the lake and later, illuminated from the campsite—it was eerie to think about being looked down on even though Hitler visited the mountain-top retreat built on the occasion of the Fuhrer’s fiftieth birthday only a couple of times, stood the Kehlsteinhaus, known in most contexts as the “Eagle’s Nest” (conflated with the Adlerhorst near Bad Nauheim).
The structure has been given over to a charitable trust that runs a restaurant and not much mention is made about the place’s past in order that these places not be made pilgrimage destinations—an effort that does not seem quite so effective, given the throngs of visitors and the infrastructure in place to manage them all. Thanks to a rather ingenious bus pass whose network had a stop nearby, there was no need to decamp and find further parking and were chauffeured around quite at ease. A second bus took us more than a mile up the mountain on quite a harrowing journey, alighting before a long tunnel that led to a bronze elevator—the original, that hoisted us up the final hundred meters.
The views were breath-taking and we were treated to absolutely perfect weather. Descending below, we went to the Documentation Centre—a museum that is dedicated to the story of this area during the Third Reich, built on the razed ruins of the Obersalzburg half-way down the mountain side. This compound housed the elite of the Nazi party, and constructed over an ancient salt-mining operation, sits atop a system of cavernous bunkers, which had all the life-support and connectivity capacities to allow the regime to retreat underground—an Alpine Redoubt (Alpenfestung)—and continue persecuting the war.
Only a retaining wall of Hitler’s favoured residence, the Berghof, remains. It wasn’t that the outstanding beauty of this place was besmirched by its past but we did need something to cleanse the palette with so much to think about, and so went back to Königsee and took a little cruise down the lake.
Our guide played the flugelhorn in front of one flat rock face to have his tune echo and resound through the valley and told us more about the natural history. The trip took us to the very picturesque church of Sankt Bartholomä, named for the Apostle Bartholomew, patron saint of dairymen and Alpine farmers—and having miraculously, the ability to make things either very heavy or light as a feather, depending on what the situation called for.

we’re social

PfRC is giving Tumblr a try to bookmark interesting findings and hopefully to better attribute the other makers and hunters out there. I know there are already too many walled-gardens to be found on the internet but we don’t want to hold you to these bounds. Check out some of our echo-chamber and hopefully find some inspiration or at least an evening’s entertainment.