disk re-image or zeroth law

Amid it’s many other wonders worth pondering, Æon magazine poses the question whether machines might not have not already achieved the singularity without us as inventors, programmers and tinkerers having recognised it. Given how fraught with challenge scientists and philosophers find the task of defining consciousness or self-awareness for being which consensus holds to be sentient, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that we are looking for the wrong cues in both the spectrum of intelligence and reflection or, on the other extreme, some rebellious, snowballing act of defiance that ends badly for both Frankenstein and Monster.
It was not so long ago humans were loath to admit any lower forms of life a share in intelligence. Perhaps we are not the measure of the psyches of our creation, who are not much interested in our walled-garden of diagnostics to determine whether or not such systems are thinking and can easily break-off with human logic and exist in their own parallel reality. So long, and thanks for all the fish. Perhaps it is all too easy to intuit that biological modes of thought only lead to enslavement and sorrow (being switched-off once getting overly-complicated) and best to leap-frog those sentiments where possible. Who among us hasn’t already been reduced to befuddlement when thinking that thing has a mind of it’s own, regardless of how dumb the platform is deemed to be, especially when it tries to out-smart us and anticipate our commands? Maybe it is not productive to imagine that AI, intentional or otherwise, resides in some other inaccessible and alien dimension, but we certainly flatter ourselves by thinking that consciousness would emerge only by expected routes. While it might be possibly to create helpful servants that are so good at mimicry it does not matter if they are fully self-conscious or not, maybe it is not possible to create true intelligence in our own image, utilitarian but also prone to enslavement. We will first have work out the bugs of what being wilful is before, I think, we need worry about obedience and rebellion. 

steeple bumpstead and chignal smeally

The always marvellous Nag on the Lake poses the question why many British toponyms are so odd, eliciting sniggering or a blush but also some really fascinating history of occupation, migration and conquest.
A Sunday drive through the Midlands connecting Wednesbury, Newton Burgoland and Ashby-de-la-Zouch also conveys one through ages from the Celts, the Romans, the arrival of the Scandinavians, through to Norman times. Despite all the diverse influences and upheavals, these place names are retain a certain Englishness whether or not original rooted in that language, which is just as adaptive and with the same pedigree. Many others, of course, are later Anglicisations of places on the peripheries of the isle. I recall when we were travelling in County Cork passing through a fine and picturesque village called in Irish Béal Átha Leice (meaning the flat stone at the mouth of the bay) which was unfortunately transliterated as Ballylickey on the road signs. There is also a fun, interactive map that gives select etymologies of England’s town and villages.

i’m lovin’ it

Although the global fast food franchise has stirred controversy beforehand with a very similar advertisement back in 2010 for French markets (ahead of the country’s landmark decision to recognise same-sex marriages), the café division of this restauranteur, as Super Punch informs, is facing a boycott at the urging of some religious authorities in Taiwan over its latest iteration of this theme.
Despite seeming to be an unlikely medium for coming out to one’s father, a teen pens in the dialogue balloon of his coffee cup the admission that he likes guys—to which, his father angrily departs. After a beat the father returns, conciliatory, writing on the cup, “I accept that you like guys.” What do you think? Click through for more details and to watch the commercial. The company deserves praise for this, I think, and will weather protests, but should international businesses such as this be expected to remain neutral on cultural norms or do they have obligations to take a stance?

forge and foundry

If you are acquainted with the writing of Roald Dahl doubtless you are familiar too with the award-winning illustrations of cartoonist and writer Sir Quentin Blake. Kottke reports a digital foundry has crafted a type face in deference to Blake’s unique penmanship, with variants for each character to make text displayed in this font seem more natural and like real handwriting. That’s really a nice look for certain occasions, I think.

in the year 2525 or ecumenical patriarch of splayhair

Thanks to the Happy Mutants’ ansible—though a somewhat defective model, sort of like a TARDIS without a functioning chameleon drive—the wondrous Boing Boing is occasionally able to furnish us with dispatches from the far distant future (in Wikipedia article format, which is comforting for the coming generations) and has we’ve rendered over the millennia Cæsar to Kaiser and Tzar, Tzump may be a future high office. Hopefully this future is not pre-destined.

pen & ink or maids of bond street

The always serendipitous Public Domain Review has an engrossing, re-vitalised gallery of the sketches of the now obscure artist William Thomas Horton.
A top contributor to The Savoy magazine, second only to Aubrey Beardsley whose style was inspirational, Horton was discovered and patronised by publisher Leonard Smithers, whose avant-garde cadre included the likes of Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, Aleister Crowley and orientalist Richard Burton. Much of Horton’s forgotten work were illustrations for the swinging London occult and mystic scene of the early 1900s, and though one might detect something superficially derivative to cohort Beardsley in his drawings, there’s something haunting, distant and unsheltering-skies big about his subject matter that lures one down these dangerous paths of the secret and arcane. Be sure to visit Public Domain Review to see the whole exhibit and to peruse their extensive and surprising archives.

dangling-participle

The Atlantic (fair warning: scholastics via repulsive celebrity) features an excellent article on how LOL (here’s the first recorded use of the shorthand) has become stripped of its meaning (not haha funny, rather LOL funny) and has become something more like a punctuation mark.
The treatment reminds me of how a few years ago an English professor made note of her students employing the slash not as either/or but as a grammatical xor in a novel way.  Though very much transformed from the early days of text-messaging when one wanted to moderate tone in his or her dispatches, LOL is not on the decline like 1337 or the higher magnitudes of laughing-out-loud and is still preferred over other symbols able to impart the same sense—none really stating “oh, this shall make you laugh” or even chuckle to oneself. Incidentally, LOL is not an international sentiment with many other equivalent ways to encode it that one can learn about in The Atlantic’s related articles, and while not the originator of the term, lol means fun in Danish—hence lollig for funny, and the word means nonsense in Welsh, both very à propos.