Don't you have trouble reconciling the whole Freedom From Religion schtick with a love for such a blatantly Episcopal writer -- one who practiced in a field where Agnosticism remains cool?
No problem at all. At least he realised he was completely mad (Horselover Fat, VALIS, Radio Free Albemuth etc as SF as autobiography, wonderful stuff) - I've met precious few zealots of any demonination with the same level of humility.
Yeah - alright - it's offtopic. But he did ask! And it fits in quite nicely with my new.sig
Star wars was the best of the series - because I was 7 when I saw it. You can argue till the cows come home about the the merits of ESB as a more serious movie - but it was essentially just more of the same, without a convincing ending, and with a token black guy. Hated it. ROTJ was worse. By that time I'd really started to notice the merits of Dialogue, and someone trying to convince me that "Good luck" (Pause) "you'll need it" is somehow an example of ironic humour was just painful.
Episode 1 was good - because, that many years later, I just went for shiny spaceships and space opera, which it had in abundance. Of course, I'd also dulled my mind back to the age of 7 with the considered application of pharmaceuticals. Sometimes dialogue just gets in the way. A hard lesson to learn - but I got there.
One thing the article does get right is the complete lack of anyone trying to make intelligent cinema out of the works of Phillip K Dick. Existenz my arse - no matter that they got their fast food from "Perky Pat's". The day someone can make a movie from Dick's work without it seeming like a sub-standard rehash of 30 or so year old literary techniques is the day I go to the movies straight/sober. Shit, a good friend of mine came out of Existenz claiming it was a 'mindfuck'. Jeezus - doesn't anyone read anymore? I used to write better 'And then I woke up' crap when I was 7 (notice that clever returning to starting point shit, another trick I learned when I was 7).
And while I'm ranting - Freedom From Religion should be enshrined as a basic human right.
Nah - ping was the first computer game. One player only. You'd aim at another computer, take a shot, and if the shot got returned, you lost and the game was over. It never really took off until the sequel, pong, introduced the two player option.
To utterly geek out in discriptive phraseology: its an information replicator.
You want some information? - as long as the replicator has the bluebrint, you can get an exact replica almost instantaneously (or, if you know CSS, in any colour you like). The information loses value through ubiquity, only being worth the price of the pipe (and the faucet to some extent, I s'pose), which is getting lower by the day.
Subjectively, however, it's value increases. I personally value information available at my fingertips more than stuff I have to pay $$$ for at the bookshop. I'm certainly more likely to access it.
As far as the 'owners' of this information are concerned, however, nothing has changed. Just as better battleships aren't the answer to bombers, increased legalese isn't the answer to ubiquity, but they'll still try and build better battleships anyway, as that's all they know.
The law of supply and demand has almost collapsed on itself: for information, the supply is the demand, no more no less. Promoting 10 bands when only one will make it is no longer an excuse, it's an expensive exercise in futility - the only value left is in the use of the information.
Clearly, this hasn't happened completely, as of yet. But the RIAA will bankrupt its members before it kills the file-sharing hydra. You can fight as many battles as you like, but you can't fight ubiquity. It's already there.
So what happens to value? If you can't pay to have information first by more than a few seconds, or to have something unique, what can you pay for? Something personalised?
A particular medium (a bound book, a live show)? More pipe? Something regular, or something pre-selected? The person that finds the best answer to that question will do very well for themselves.
Dammit - you can't compare on a 1:1 ratio what those idle chimps in the zoo do with their doodoo while waiting for ratepayer funded free food to what my ancestors did dragging themselves up off their knuckles and getting busy with some real evolution. It's a flaming insult.
For at least one rating system that cuts the mustard IMHO, check out the 5 star ratings at http://baf.wurb.com/if/rating. Anything listed there by Andrew Plotkin is a good place to start - the guy has more quality control than you can shake a QA department at - though his fiendish mind may have you cursing his existence.
(Full disclosure, the site gave me 4 stars for the first piece of code I ever wrote, so I think of it rather kindly)
Craft and art are inextricably intertwined, a fact that is perhaps most clearly demonstrated by a persian rug. The weaving is the craft, the resultant pattern is the art. The pattern may be described in full beforehand, or emerge from the aesthetic consideration of what has come before in the craft process. The craft thus becomes the tool that allows the aesthetic to become real.
Whether the resultant pattern is 'interesting' (read: pleasing, challenging, 'artistic') depends on the the desgner and the viewer in equal parts. In the case of the rug, this is generally a visual response, but their is no reason why sound, spatial sense, touch etc can't be part of it.
Computer games are generally created around functional rather than aesthetic considerations. This is their craft - code effiency, gameplay, level design etc. Each of these has it purpose - responsiveness, longevity, addictiveness (possibly respectively).
The response to the whole games, however, also depends in equal parts on those who create and those who 'play'. The experience is multi-media, incorporating more than one sense, and interactive, which makes it harder to quantify, as it's by its very nature different for each person. But saying this prevents it from being art, is like saying that sculpture that moves in the wind is prevented from being art. The mere fact that they use light, sound, writing, and coding in conglomeration makes it harder to ascertain their aesthetic value, but no less worthwhile.
That said, not every game aspires to be as 'interesting' as it can be. Some only want to be as much like something else that was interesting as possible - mostly for financial reasons. Just as the art world has its stylistic periods, so do video games. Just as the art world has originators and imitators, so do video games. Just as art critics are informed by the history of their chosen media/um, so is the video game connisseur.
On the contrary. Assuming such a device works in the way I envisage, mental control of brainwave activity would be very similar to the neurofeedback training given to ADD patients (amongst others). Rather than training the brain into a single state, it would train them to be flexible with regard to the beta (conscious) wavelengths that the waking brain operates on.
Neurofeedback often uses 'games' to create positive feedback, though those games are usually two state systems - eg, you're within the right limits and you get positive feedback or you're outside and you get negative (though you can usually tell where within those limits you are, via graphical reprensentation). The limits are, of course, user definable.
Such systems can also be used to explore more sleeplike states, without losing consciousness. Lots of fun - but not too cheap.
Of course, altering your brains electrical activity does have a tendency to affect you. Feeling hyper every time you 'clicked', or closer towards sleep (alpha/theta wavelengths) when you moved the pointer to the left might not be such a good thing.
John Webb is the scientist. The article is at NY Times (usual registration caveats apply).
But it's amazing to see what the NY Times can spin out of what Webb summarises as
"I am generally interested in using observations of distant quasars to test fundamental physical parameters. In particular, high resolution spectroscopy of quasars can be used to search for variations in the fundamental constants of Nature. Our recent results hint tentatively that the laws of physics may not always have been the same as today. "
While I think the approach of this researcher is better than that of say, CYC, the researcher is going to have a long 10 years of manually typing in reward values.
True - but they only have to do it once. Then they can use it to do the next one in a fraction of the time. FWIW, the website for HAL is www.a-i.com
I was thinking about CYC and HAL - and wondering if either of them can truly be said to comprehend what they're talking about. CYC, of course, seems to be largely a deductive engine with a lot of values, but no real sense of the implications of those values. HAL, on the other hand, is more of a parrot with a taste for virtual crackers, an eventual natural language creation machine - the best bet for creating a turing test beater, but not necessarily for developing some kind of creativity - which would be a much harder to qualify but better (IMHO) indicator of intelligence.
Re:How much deeper does this hole get?
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· Score: 1
Dept. of Corrections: Correctional institutions like prisons and borstals, juvenile halls, parole offices and the people who work in them, plus the supply and distribution of batons, chains, whips, cat'o'nine tails and the occasional stones for upset fundementalists.
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Don't you have trouble reconciling the whole Freedom From Religion schtick with a love for such a blatantly Episcopal writer -- one who practiced in a field where Agnosticism remains cool?
.sig
No problem at all. At least he realised he was completely mad (Horselover Fat, VALIS, Radio Free Albemuth etc as SF as autobiography, wonderful stuff) - I've met precious few zealots of any demonination with the same level of humility.
Yeah - alright - it's offtopic. But he did ask! And it fits in quite nicely with my new
Damn straight! This post was ghostwritten by William Goldman.
Gotta agree.
Star wars was the best of the series - because I was 7 when I saw it. You can argue till the cows come home about the the merits of ESB as a more serious movie - but it was essentially just more of the same, without a convincing ending, and with a token black guy. Hated it. ROTJ was worse. By that time I'd really started to notice the merits of Dialogue, and someone trying to convince me that "Good luck" (Pause) "you'll need it" is somehow an example of ironic humour was just painful.
Episode 1 was good - because, that many years later, I just went for shiny spaceships and space opera, which it had in abundance. Of course, I'd also dulled my mind back to the age of 7 with the considered application of pharmaceuticals. Sometimes dialogue just gets in the way. A hard lesson to learn - but I got there.
One thing the article does get right is the complete lack of anyone trying to make intelligent cinema out of the works of Phillip K Dick. Existenz my arse - no matter that they got their fast food from "Perky Pat's". The day someone can make a movie from Dick's work without it seeming like a sub-standard rehash of 30 or so year old literary techniques is the day I go to the movies straight/sober. Shit, a good friend of mine came out of Existenz claiming it was a 'mindfuck'. Jeezus - doesn't anyone read anymore? I used to write better 'And then I woke up' crap when I was 7 (notice that clever returning to starting point shit, another trick I learned when I was 7).
And while I'm ranting - Freedom From Religion should be enshrined as a basic human right.
Nah - ping was the first computer game. One player only. You'd aim at another computer, take a shot, and if the shot got returned, you lost and the game was over. It never really took off until the sequel, pong, introduced the two player option.
To utterly geek out in discriptive phraseology: its an information replicator.
You want some information? - as long as the replicator has the bluebrint, you can get an exact replica almost instantaneously (or, if you know CSS, in any colour you like). The information loses value through ubiquity, only being worth the price of the pipe (and the faucet to some extent, I s'pose), which is getting lower by the day.
Subjectively, however, it's value increases. I personally value information available at my fingertips more than stuff I have to pay $$$ for at the bookshop. I'm certainly more likely to access it.
As far as the 'owners' of this information are concerned, however, nothing has changed. Just as better battleships aren't the answer to bombers, increased legalese isn't the answer to ubiquity, but they'll still try and build better battleships anyway, as that's all they know.
The law of supply and demand has almost collapsed on itself: for information, the supply is the demand, no more no less. Promoting 10 bands when only one will make it is no longer an excuse, it's an expensive exercise in futility - the only value left is in the use of the information.
Clearly, this hasn't happened completely, as of yet. But the RIAA will bankrupt its members before it kills the file-sharing hydra. You can fight as many battles as you like, but you can't fight ubiquity. It's already there.
So what happens to value? If you can't pay to have information first by more than a few seconds, or to have something unique, what can you pay for? Something personalised?
A particular medium (a bound book, a live show)? More pipe? Something regular, or something pre-selected? The person that finds the best answer to that question will do very well for themselves.
Dammit - you can't compare on a 1:1 ratio what those idle chimps in the zoo do with their doodoo while waiting for ratepayer funded free food to what my ancestors did dragging themselves up off their knuckles and getting busy with some real evolution. It's a flaming insult.
I think you mispelled Allen and Unwin. Unwin himself was the one to ask for a sequel.
For at least one rating system that cuts the mustard IMHO, check out the 5 star ratings at http://baf.wurb.com/if/rating. Anything listed there by Andrew Plotkin is a good place to start - the guy has more quality control than you can shake a QA department at - though his fiendish mind may have you cursing his existence.
(Full disclosure, the site gave me 4 stars for the first piece of code I ever wrote, so I think of it rather kindly)
A few points that may be salient:
Craft and art are inextricably intertwined, a fact that is perhaps most clearly demonstrated by a persian rug. The weaving is the craft, the resultant pattern is the art. The pattern may be described in full beforehand, or emerge from the aesthetic consideration of what has come before in the craft process. The craft thus becomes the tool that allows the aesthetic to become real.
Whether the resultant pattern is 'interesting' (read: pleasing, challenging, 'artistic') depends on the the desgner and the viewer in equal parts. In the case of the rug, this is generally a visual response, but their is no reason why sound, spatial sense, touch etc can't be part of it.
Computer games are generally created around functional rather than aesthetic considerations. This is their craft - code effiency, gameplay, level design etc. Each of these has it purpose - responsiveness, longevity, addictiveness (possibly respectively).
The response to the whole games, however, also depends in equal parts on those who create and those who 'play'. The experience is multi-media, incorporating more than one sense, and interactive, which makes it harder to quantify, as it's by its very nature different for each person. But saying this prevents it from being art, is like saying that sculpture that moves in the wind is prevented from being art. The mere fact that they use light, sound, writing, and coding in conglomeration makes it harder to ascertain their aesthetic value, but no less worthwhile.
That said, not every game aspires to be as 'interesting' as it can be. Some only want to be as much like something else that was interesting as possible - mostly for financial reasons. Just as the art world has its stylistic periods, so do video games. Just as the art world has originators and imitators, so do video games. Just as art critics are informed by the history of their chosen media/um, so is the video game connisseur.
--
On the contrary. Assuming such a device works in the way I envisage, mental control of brainwave activity would be very similar to the neurofeedback training given to ADD patients (amongst others). Rather than training the brain into a single state, it would train them to be flexible with regard to the beta (conscious) wavelengths that the waking brain operates on.
Neurofeedback often uses 'games' to create positive feedback, though those games are usually two state systems - eg, you're within the right limits and you get positive feedback or you're outside and you get negative (though you can usually tell where within those limits you are, via graphical reprensentation). The limits are, of course, user definable.
Such systems can also be used to explore more sleeplike states, without losing consciousness. Lots of fun - but not too cheap.
Of course, altering your brains electrical activity does have a tendency to affect you. Feeling hyper every time you 'clicked', or closer towards sleep (alpha/theta wavelengths) when you moved the pointer to the left might not be such a good thing.
Yeah, mate. Make Money Fast.
But it's amazing to see what the NY Times can spin out of what Webb summarises as
While I think the approach of this researcher is better than that of say, CYC, the researcher is going to have a long 10 years of manually typing in reward values.
True - but they only have to do it once. Then they can use it to do the next one in a fraction of the time. FWIW, the website for HAL is www.a-i.com
I was thinking about CYC and HAL - and wondering if either of them can truly be said to comprehend what they're talking about. CYC, of course, seems to be largely a deductive engine with a lot of values, but no real sense of the implications of those values. HAL, on the other hand, is more of a parrot with a taste for virtual crackers, an eventual natural language creation machine - the best bet for creating a turing test beater, but not necessarily for developing some kind of creativity - which would be a much harder to qualify but better (IMHO) indicator of intelligence.
Dept. of Corrections: Correctional institutions like prisons and borstals, juvenile halls, parole offices and the people who work in them, plus the supply and distribution of batons, chains, whips, cat'o'nine tails and the occasional stones for upset fundementalists.