tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91068908835617978502024-03-13T11:45:51.616-07:00Llamas and my stegosaurusUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger319125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-82702143427764239122024-01-04T09:40:00.000-08:002024-01-05T02:16:18.258-08:00Labyrinth<p>We think of a labyrinth as a maze, with branching passages making it easy to lose your way. But in the middle ages, a labyrinth usually meant a very specific pattern:<br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9zWXb_Krqa3LHR2t6zkySvrJE1s6bVA1VjweYFtRrsUEDPPr1Clz2bdEevSHG689_kkf1aNToJu6Ct4YkxljxCNe784lmzzbjJjmRQe8gfq-SUO1WDthNXu6lucqUoJ-rbcdfz4GFpmIbTZkkU-Mx4CW3JQAg0i_pM0_iESerL27DbAXHHwxQaGiJgkIa/s400/896e7fd2704da2b16e3436aed09d6ba3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="376" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9zWXb_Krqa3LHR2t6zkySvrJE1s6bVA1VjweYFtRrsUEDPPr1Clz2bdEevSHG689_kkf1aNToJu6Ct4YkxljxCNe784lmzzbjJjmRQe8gfq-SUO1WDthNXu6lucqUoJ-rbcdfz4GFpmIbTZkkU-Mx4CW3JQAg0i_pM0_iESerL27DbAXHHwxQaGiJgkIa/w376-h400/896e7fd2704da2b16e3436aed09d6ba3.jpg" width="376" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This pattern has no branches to get lost in. You enter, weave back and forth, in and out, and eventually reach the center. You weave back and forth seven times. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">There are a lot of rock structures like this on beaches all around Europe. Some people think it was a kind of fish trap, where the fish would swim in and then not be able to find their way back out. They are also carved in stones and built of tiles on the floors of cathedrals. I saw an old one in Glendalough.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnmchfTzbDCeuRbv83hRNofyBcE8aOW3Cyh1oNIUidSp81AIKvRrmKZ-koPgck76L3Iy3YXsDEcB6T54yixo7UZgP645A8kO3PTc472QtupEBmt8WQPvfST2QtInc9fMbMmm7QuYWY6xMCkY32Fr54Ev0UEFnPMm9DvEOgucTOI4f-7yvAvglQPXyjJiMf/s374/Labyrinth-1-374x350.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="374" height="374" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnmchfTzbDCeuRbv83hRNofyBcE8aOW3Cyh1oNIUidSp81AIKvRrmKZ-koPgck76L3Iy3YXsDEcB6T54yixo7UZgP645A8kO3PTc472QtupEBmt8WQPvfST2QtInc9fMbMmm7QuYWY6xMCkY32Fr54Ev0UEFnPMm9DvEOgucTOI4f-7yvAvglQPXyjJiMf/w400-h374/Labyrinth-1-374x350.jpg" width="400" /></a><br /><br />This was identified with the city of Jericho: Joshua had to march his army around the city seven times, blowing his trumpets, to bring the walls down. Here's an example, but there are tons of these illustrations in medieval manuscripts.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNGssSmQIcEZVqBdAX9yqYo05En1MWAzJlR3iLZlhbpB_Jr71nh9U79Lkkvt1knXiPc9W31DUJ4yok8v_1b560YaIqsrev326v_bUz0tT0yS_zBQC39BUcA5Og3pjAzUKkzBpA8Sc4CkbzBCR4AnxUxrdjb8mwEZqNYsR1qNuNFGUPtY5EGPbTn9PY4QB6/s1398/849b240bf9f1070409ab4ca30b051b1c1b9b02c5-1500x1613.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1398" data-original-width="1300" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNGssSmQIcEZVqBdAX9yqYo05En1MWAzJlR3iLZlhbpB_Jr71nh9U79Lkkvt1knXiPc9W31DUJ4yok8v_1b560YaIqsrev326v_bUz0tT0yS_zBQC39BUcA5Og3pjAzUKkzBpA8Sc4CkbzBCR4AnxUxrdjb8mwEZqNYsR1qNuNFGUPtY5EGPbTn9PY4QB6/w373-h400/849b240bf9f1070409ab4ca30b051b1c1b9b02c5-1500x1613.webp" width="373" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />Castles are built along these kinds of lines. You have to climb a hill to reach most castles, which means some switchbacks. The longer the path, the more opportunity defenders have to rain arrows down on attackers before they reach the gates. You can get a visceral feel for this playing Bloons Tower defense:<br /><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwFEF-m2F7Bhb55NRTonZzJbRERonzsgBkuL9tSrVoibA3Cno4JsyqPgXfl1bbSAZ_NvvmKXf0uBOLHkPkdkJkwLgFkabYK9iR2wHUHR2rT1PVP2UU3aZRNs7j0LXFp1wDJ-K2HN46o9jn-obckYxmhMQMbhSVRB-kOPtO_XDeT7-r_RJbutIQo5on5ZFu/s1334/ryiuyu9dnz731.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="1334" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwFEF-m2F7Bhb55NRTonZzJbRERonzsgBkuL9tSrVoibA3Cno4JsyqPgXfl1bbSAZ_NvvmKXf0uBOLHkPkdkJkwLgFkabYK9iR2wHUHR2rT1PVP2UU3aZRNs7j0LXFp1wDJ-K2HN46o9jn-obckYxmhMQMbhSVRB-kOPtO_XDeT7-r_RJbutIQo5on5ZFu/w400-h225/ryiuyu9dnz731.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">And then, once you are inside the walled city, the gate of the city is usually not in a straight line with the gate of the castle wall or with the inner keep, for the same reason. Here is one of the first castles I ever visited, Hohenzollern. See how you spiral around and around to get in:<br /><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr5wJ2s5z9CVfBRASv_VIJE-rQkmZCima-fdw4RMM_CJfP-vCQmrYVQB5bIyMVeJGARl_a_KaUuJw0pQBe7a5cz-BoZtUCOOJ74vawDH7PXhXYAZMmONOA6xxfVEkJXJBMY5buiYvvC2lMQ9q1cgR23zyyrKFBrHJCpZZnDFx3-2-mWgdG1VHamY8GPvDP/s800/e24us81k65ma1.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="640" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr5wJ2s5z9CVfBRASv_VIJE-rQkmZCima-fdw4RMM_CJfP-vCQmrYVQB5bIyMVeJGARl_a_KaUuJw0pQBe7a5cz-BoZtUCOOJ74vawDH7PXhXYAZMmONOA6xxfVEkJXJBMY5buiYvvC2lMQ9q1cgR23zyyrKFBrHJCpZZnDFx3-2-mWgdG1VHamY8GPvDP/w320-h400/e24us81k65ma1.webp" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So I think Tolkien, being familiar with all this, designed Minas Tirith along these lines. You have a solid intersecting line protruding from the center of the city out all the way to the gate a "towering bastion of stone, its edge sharp as a ship-keel" and then "seven levels" so the "paved way that climbed toward the Citadel turned first this way and then that" exactly as the labyrinth:<br /><i><br /></i></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i>For the fashion of Minas Tirith was such that it was built on seven levels, each delved into the hill, and about each was set a wall, and in each wall was a gate. But the gates were not set in a line: the Great Gate in the City Wall was at the east point of the circuit, but the next faced half south, and the third half north, and so to and fro upwards; so that the paved way that climbed towards the Citadel turned first this way and then that across the face of the hill. And each time that it passed the line of the Great Gate it went through an arched tunnel, piercing a vast pier of rock whose huge out-thrust bulk divided in two all the circles of the City save the first. For partly in the primeval shaping of the hill, partly by the mighty craft and labour of old, there stood up from the rear of the wide court behind the Gate a towering bastion of stone, its edge sharp as a ship-keel facing east. Up it rose, even to the level of the topmost circle, and there was crowned by a battlement; so that those in the Citadel might, like mariners in a mountainous ship, look from its peak sheer down upon the Gate seven hundred feet below. The entrance to the Citadel also looked eastward, but was delved in the heart of the rock; thence a long lamp-lit slope ran up to the seventh gate. Thus men reached at last the High Court, and the Place of the Fountain before the feet of the White Tower: tall and shapely, fifty fathoms from its base to the pinnacle, where the banner of the Stewards floated a thousand feet above the plain.</i></div></blockquote><div><br /></div>Further evidence for this is the resemblance between "Minas" and "Minos" the king who had the labyrinth built-- although in his invented etymology, the name means Watch Tower.<div><br /></div><div>The word transliterated into ancient Greek as <i>labyrinthos </i>is more like <i>dapurito</i> which, if I've got the syllabary right, looked like this in Linear B:<br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZHy__npAtCA3qh2IK6KKr76f8oCfu2L6b5VPZWReLMOWj0YZZ9hoZV0b3G5ZqN_usSd-EqfbsSDXfnPMUCHg8q9afEOZbaRCsVkPQi0xPCsfLc4jGld8yGjIoycw1OEARhw5iMZdwpyiYTIEC_78B-0TBFqxMz666Dqw8OZNHSkqPVDmWMdYn2PzHNTf5/s189/unnamed.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="65" data-original-width="189" height="65" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZHy__npAtCA3qh2IK6KKr76f8oCfu2L6b5VPZWReLMOWj0YZZ9hoZV0b3G5ZqN_usSd-EqfbsSDXfnPMUCHg8q9afEOZbaRCsVkPQi0xPCsfLc4jGld8yGjIoycw1OEARhw5iMZdwpyiYTIEC_78B-0TBFqxMz666Dqw8OZNHSkqPVDmWMdYn2PzHNTf5/s1600/unnamed.png" width="189" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div>The palace at Knossos is from the bronze age, so is plausibly from the right place and time for the Theseus/Minos/Ariadne myth. While it doesn't contain a labyrinth as such (although the original meaning of labyrinth may just be <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth_of_Egypt">a big complex with a bunch of room</a>s, which, sure) it does have a lot of bull-related decorations.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-30151185125164567332023-09-28T09:16:00.003-07:002023-10-07T12:49:20.413-07:00There should be no copyright on digital goodsA lot of artists have been trying to expand copyright law and custom recently, arguing that unauthorized derivate works (AI generated art) should not be permitted. Personally, I believe that AI art should be allowed, because the benefits to society outweigh the harms to artists. I would go further, though-- I don't think anything digital should be copyrightable at all. In my ideal legal world, you write a book, you can control who sells physical copies of it, but digital copies you can't do anything about. Same for movies, games, pictures, everything. Anyone can use your characters to write new stories. It's a complete free-for-all.<br />The obvious response to this is "why would anyone then create art, if they weren't getting paid for it?" The implication here is that the creation of new art would dry up, leaving only increasingly bad copies and amateurish fanfiction.<div>I disagree that no new art will be created. I think plenty of art will be created by people who get no financial reward for it. I think people will still create and sell physical art. And I think fanfiction can be admirable art.<br />However, it does seem a shame that no one will be able to devote all their time to their art, so that we get more of it. And that's why I propose the Kickstarter-paid model. It works like this. Our novelist gives his first three novellas away for free. They become popular, because people like them, share them, riff off them. He then says "I'd like to write another book, a longer one this time set in ancient Egypt, but I don't have time because I have to work for a living. So here's a Kickstarter. If it raises $100,000, I'll quit my job and spend the next year writing the novel. If not, I'll keep working until it does."<br />Once he gets the money, that's it: future digital copies will be free to copy. He can still sell them if he wants, but it won't be illegal to copy them for free. If he wants more money, he's got to start another Kickstarter.<br />Movies would work the same way. They would have to make their money through merchandising, theaters, and Kickstarters, because once a copy was shown on any digital media, it would be fair game for anyone to copy.<br />This way, the artist gets paid to create, but the world also gets far more free stuff. It is a better system for society as a whole. This means that the poor, who previously couldn't afford any art, now have a huge abundance available to them. The rich get the added benefit that they can cause to come into existence the things they want to see with a contribution. </div><div><br /></div><div>Here's a quote by Bill Willingham, author of Fables, who put his work in the public domain:</div><div><br /></div><div>Q: So you no longer own Fables?</div><div><br /></div><div>Bill: Incorrect. I still own 100% of Fables. But now, every man, woman, and child in the world, along with anyone who’s ever born until the end of time, also owns 100% of Fables. It’s not a property divided among all of us, it’s a property infinitely multiplied among all of us. Pretty cool, huh? Every person owns Fables-in-whole, and can decide for himself what, if anything, he wants to do with it. Kind of like a secular miracle of the loaves and the fishes, metaphorically speaking, of course. No matter how many partake, there’s enough for everybody.<br /><p style="--tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Spectral, serif, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: 19px; line-height: 1.6em; margin: 0 0 var(--size-20) 0;"><br /></p></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-66476453890908423742023-09-28T02:23:00.015-07:002023-09-28T06:16:01.848-07:00Xanadu<p>This is related to <a href="http://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2022/07/a-wikipedestrian-stroll.html ">this other investigation into a Romantic poem</a></p><p>I used Midjourney to generate visualizations of Coleridge's Xanadu. I particularly liked the solution this one came up with for representing a "sunless sea":<br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjMvaJh-pZt2-PTt_EqLxQJCSh9exYvV9KrHDLhYZsLBIyOH5vqwS5sNNMInOVwb64XKCa1uHfo9lcVeETwDiC3cxBGT3dgI7FS6ICZbhONqMKsMVZjAEoR3EhQ9C4ddAAfMLXiYOADxHsfZcvGu9HNVEMkPfCqg_xft-uo8JsHb74JHsxPWK6dO4tn8Vp/s1424/fi5er_shadowy_awe-inspiring_painting_of_a_vast_domed_oriental_M_a11afcab-8be0-48f0-9fcf-6a5a9c6e5742.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="848" data-original-width="1424" height="382" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjMvaJh-pZt2-PTt_EqLxQJCSh9exYvV9KrHDLhYZsLBIyOH5vqwS5sNNMInOVwb64XKCa1uHfo9lcVeETwDiC3cxBGT3dgI7FS6ICZbhONqMKsMVZjAEoR3EhQ9C4ddAAfMLXiYOADxHsfZcvGu9HNVEMkPfCqg_xft-uo8JsHb74JHsxPWK6dO4tn8Vp/w640-h382/fi5er_shadowy_awe-inspiring_painting_of_a_vast_domed_oriental_M_a11afcab-8be0-48f0-9fcf-6a5a9c6e5742.png" width="640" /></a><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">I presume that it came up with the bright circle early in the generation process as a moon, and then had to figure out a way to work it into the image-- similar to <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/16ew9fz/spiral_town_different_approach_to_qr_monster/">those spiral illusions</a>, but occurring naturally in the generation process.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />It got me thinking about what Coleridge was reading. I had read his account, where he provides a remembered quote from <i>Purchas, His Pilgrimes</i>:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><i>'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.'</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">But that's just Coleridge's recollection. What does the book (published in 1625, so the spelling is a bit archaic) actually say? Here are the relevant quotes:<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">----</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant springs, delightfull Streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be removed from place to place.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">So the "pleasure dome" is probably some kind of yurt. A lot more of the poem actually comes from here than Coleridge recalled, huh?<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">----<br />This bit is about ancient voices foretelling war:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div><i>When he is dead, if he be a chiefe man, hee is buried in the field where pleaseth him. And hee is buried with his Tent, sitting in the middest thereof, with a Table set before him, and a platter full of meate, and a Cup of Mares-milke. There is also buried with him a Mare and a Colt, a Horse with bridle and saddle: and they eate another Horse…stuffing his hide with straw, setting it aloft on two or foure poles, that hee may have in the other world a Tabernacle and other things fitting for this use.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>----</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Their Priests were diviners: they were many, but had one Captaine or chiefe Bishop, who always placed his house or Tent before that of the Great Can, about a stones cast distant….When an Eclipse happens they sound their Organs and Timbrels, and make a great noyse….They foretell holy dayes, and those which are unluckie for enterprises. No warres are begunne or made without their word.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>----</div><div><br /></div><div>There is also some similarity to the account (which I remembered from Marco Polo) of the leader of the Assassins, the Old Man of the Mountain (who you may know as the Batman villain Ra's al Ghul). <br /><br /><div><i>Old Man of the Mountain: His name was Aloadine, and was a Mahumetan.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Hee had in a goodly Valley betwixt two Mountaynes very high, made a goodly Garden, furnished with the best trees and fruits he could find, adorned with divers Palaces and houses of pleasure, beautified with gold Workes, Pictures, and Furnitures of silke.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>----</i></div><div><br /><div style="font-style: italic;">There by divers Pipes answering divers parts of those Palaces were seene to runne Wine, Milke, Honey, and cleere Water. In them hee had placed goodly Damosels skilfull in Songs and Instruments of Musicke and Dancing, and to make Sports and Delights unto men whatsoever they could imagine. They were also fairely attired in Gold and Silke, and were seene to goe continually sporting in the Garden and Palaces. He made this Palace, because Mahomet had promised such a sensuall Paradise to his devout followers…</div><div style="font-style: italic;"><br /></div><div style="font-style: italic;">Aloadine had certaine Youthes from twelve to twentie yeares of age, such as seemed of a bold and undoubted disposition, whom hee instructed daily touching Mahomets Paradise, and how hee could bring men thither. And when he thought good, he caused a certaine Drinke to bee given unto ten or twelve of them, which cast them in a dead sleepe: and then hee caused them to be carried into divers Chambers of the said Palaces, where they saw the things aforesaid as soone as they awaked: each of them having those Damosels to minister Meates and excellent Drinkes, and all varieties of pleasures to them; insomuch that the Fooles thought themselves in Paradise indeed. When they had enjoyed those pleasures foure or five dayes, they were againe cast in a sleepe, and carried forth againe. After which, he…questioned where they had beene, which answered, by your Grace, in paradise….Then the old man answered, This is the commandement of our Prophet, that whosoever defends is Lord, he make him enter Paradise: and if thou wilt bee obedient to mee, thou shalt have this grace. And having thus animated them, hee was thought happie whom the old man would command, though it cost him his life: so that other Lords and his Enemies were slaine by these his Assasines, which exposed themselves to all dangers, and contemned their lives.</div><div style="font-style: italic;"><br /></div><div>All of this comes from a book called <i><a href="https://books.google.com/books/download/The_Road_to_Xanadu.pdf?id=WpM4AAAAIAAJ&output=pdf">The Road to Xanadu</a> </i>(link to pdf of the whole book), by John Livingston Lowes (perhaps related to that seagull's road to Nirvana?). Published in 1926, it's a deep investigation into a particular act of creativity and how it happened. Coleridge had a theory of creativity of his own-- C.S. Lewis happened to be reading that book it is in when he was annoyed by a vapid guest. (Lewis is most readable when he has the spirit of Screwtape urging him on a bit.)<br /><br /><i>We have a visitor at present, a Miss Whitty, a music teacher of Maureen’s at Bristol, who is one of Minto’s lame ducks. ‘Sir, he is poor, he is miserable, and that is recommendation enough to Johnson’. But while ill health, poverty and overwork may justify her presence in Hillsboro, they can hardly justify her appearance in this letter. I cite her because she clears up a problem. You must have wondered very often for what public illuminated texts of Kipling’s ‘If’, calendars with a thought for every day, mottoes in crackers, Easter cards, etc., etc., etc. were produced. Now I know. To Miss W. these are food and drink. It is most embarrassing. She is really struck by a ‘Thought for the week’ in the Sunday Pictorial and will read it out. You know how those things are, even when you glance at them in turning over the pages of the paper. But you can have no conception what they sound like if actually pronounced during a pause at the breakfast table. There are things extant in print which, one took it for granted, had never, would never reach the viva voce level of existance. I will inflict one only on you–and am rather chary about it even on paper, well impounded in inverted commas. ‘No one is utterly useless in this world who helps to lighten another’s burden’. We needn’t bother about ‘in this world’: they all take care to tell you that they refer to ‘this world’ or ‘this life’. It gives a sort of atmosphere. But just look at the rest. To lighten someone’s burden can only mean to do him a service, which again can only mean to be useful to him. So that the gem precisely informs us that if you’re any use you can’t be useless. The length of the oscillation my mind performs–from the extreme of subtlety, reading Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria till the lunch bell goes–to the extreme of platitude when I reach the table!</i></div><div style="font-style: italic;"><br /></div><div style="font-style: italic;">----</div><div style="font-style: italic;"><br /></div><div>I hadn't realized that there are actually ruins of Xanadu that you can go visit.<br /><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_GWG-4fYPmC5E0jMbFBj9IpT_qe4xpiulJFLfyguC3uifqeMfHe_n3gz_3om89KaLPA2aLYByHajwlGZJzUTmV_f4PD1S8FzArpN8a4eUXMgcYWpQLzW9CNVEPHrNUJaYgPZd6OKYQsvbngWopWi1MG1MVEIzIV0gb72cp-JLOPSRPx5t6VZrL7-DCdAx/s750/site_1389_0006-750-750-20221003165742.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="327" data-original-width="750" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_GWG-4fYPmC5E0jMbFBj9IpT_qe4xpiulJFLfyguC3uifqeMfHe_n3gz_3om89KaLPA2aLYByHajwlGZJzUTmV_f4PD1S8FzArpN8a4eUXMgcYWpQLzW9CNVEPHrNUJaYgPZd6OKYQsvbngWopWi1MG1MVEIzIV0gb72cp-JLOPSRPx5t6VZrL7-DCdAx/w640-h280/site_1389_0006-750-750-20221003165742.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">You can read more about this here: <a href="https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1389/">https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1389/</a> It's called Shangdu in a different anglicization.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Here are some more Xanadu images by Midjourney</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8DQjm-shJb1xXC6ogtM6N4ahbdKs9bjMx4ShFe3SXkkPB3R_ZkRuwI5-ljmyfeYmyfEktP1c38d8he_HIw8Wn1wS14Voy481QMQokb5hHE11mL_N6OdXWQ6Fx9Kc1W-VGHBnQJywAsTSxRLqzIwpSf6P8Q5Y6FRr1MMzPzUH8AsROq-cjUoiV8AULvu5L/s1424/fi5er_painting_of_a_vast_domed_oriental_Mongolian_palace_comple_9ab8126d-7b98-4709-ac0e-294cfed1d544.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="848" data-original-width="1424" height="382" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8DQjm-shJb1xXC6ogtM6N4ahbdKs9bjMx4ShFe3SXkkPB3R_ZkRuwI5-ljmyfeYmyfEktP1c38d8he_HIw8Wn1wS14Voy481QMQokb5hHE11mL_N6OdXWQ6Fx9Kc1W-VGHBnQJywAsTSxRLqzIwpSf6P8Q5Y6FRr1MMzPzUH8AsROq-cjUoiV8AULvu5L/w640-h382/fi5er_painting_of_a_vast_domed_oriental_Mongolian_palace_comple_9ab8126d-7b98-4709-ac0e-294cfed1d544.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPZl9niV-D4rKW6xxOd2jiyfSyuHyck4JnnjU8ounHLS80Nqxl7WJdbTY6fAMXmImCRHNhfwdM_AxOlT6Oky07sAfTzRf4NQnwEGvEvgXcgYf7bFrjFC6ZcfTe0khCTQA2AZyd2fSSve-M5PHA14hMpW8Nt3UorhDzRuWc66aOH7Pomi_GV0ypLb1uLU8L/s1024/fi5er_in_Xanadu_did_Kublai_Khan_a_stately_pleasure_dome_decree__436844c0-fe00-465f-b335-e8d4183ec790.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPZl9niV-D4rKW6xxOd2jiyfSyuHyck4JnnjU8ounHLS80Nqxl7WJdbTY6fAMXmImCRHNhfwdM_AxOlT6Oky07sAfTzRf4NQnwEGvEvgXcgYf7bFrjFC6ZcfTe0khCTQA2AZyd2fSSve-M5PHA14hMpW8Nt3UorhDzRuWc66aOH7Pomi_GV0ypLb1uLU8L/w640-h640/fi5er_in_Xanadu_did_Kublai_Khan_a_stately_pleasure_dome_decree__436844c0-fe00-465f-b335-e8d4183ec790.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I could get it to generate something with more gravitas but I feel like fantasy cover illustrators have carried the torch passed down by Romantic artists like Caspar David Friedrich and orientalists like Jean Leon Gerome. Notice how the reflection of the central shrine isn't quite right. It kind of emphasizes the fact that it's gotten the rest of the light physics close to right. Having written a ray-tracer, that is still pretty amazing to me. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5-FMgcLwsygfF6Wc4wQ90y6wjEdAbpUamXQsmV9pKE7hssx8kxb2GAhyphenhyphenFYi5HjCDW9LxXJ-jd0guOh4Qx_sDktXBW-THPIejAFJiO6Zd1dXLg3DbK-d_uXh7qpEakSWWlDykopVMsaMAOttNWLAlQc91DB34lJ08IhSsO5kJ43G75QVJ8t8yzOSONmhcH/s1424/fi5er_shadowy_awe-inspiring_painting_of_a_vast_domed_oriental_M_5a182327-3ec7-4814-b517-ab5f1c83ea9a.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="848" data-original-width="1424" height="382" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5-FMgcLwsygfF6Wc4wQ90y6wjEdAbpUamXQsmV9pKE7hssx8kxb2GAhyphenhyphenFYi5HjCDW9LxXJ-jd0guOh4Qx_sDktXBW-THPIejAFJiO6Zd1dXLg3DbK-d_uXh7qpEakSWWlDykopVMsaMAOttNWLAlQc91DB34lJ08IhSsO5kJ43G75QVJ8t8yzOSONmhcH/w640-h382/fi5er_shadowy_awe-inspiring_painting_of_a_vast_domed_oriental_M_5a182327-3ec7-4814-b517-ab5f1c83ea9a.png" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">In this one I like how we're inside one of the measureless caverns, looking out at the palace.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAX2KrC5nY2lzPJWV2z-OJSs4yqaEs7gFR2_pM3fqtk7vkcTigc_02PCBAxsyeii4QzyQbjLbVNtwzFIa0o2MBgTqMqHoi_w42ICiGYyDk1qooUzidWaBGGNh9z-vgCTwXRt9OpwSZ3qdmNvwWnjt5ESG_FCouJ-lcf5UZi1kCWY0hTDwh-uaDGydOK0Id/s1424/fi5er_shadowy_awe-inspiring_painting_of_a_vast_domed_oriental_M_fcdcf814-bd14-4444-ad47-6ce76faad435.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="848" data-original-width="1424" height="382" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAX2KrC5nY2lzPJWV2z-OJSs4yqaEs7gFR2_pM3fqtk7vkcTigc_02PCBAxsyeii4QzyQbjLbVNtwzFIa0o2MBgTqMqHoi_w42ICiGYyDk1qooUzidWaBGGNh9z-vgCTwXRt9OpwSZ3qdmNvwWnjt5ESG_FCouJ-lcf5UZi1kCWY0hTDwh-uaDGydOK0Id/w640-h382/fi5er_shadowy_awe-inspiring_painting_of_a_vast_domed_oriental_M_fcdcf814-bd14-4444-ad47-6ce76faad435.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><br /><br /></div><div><br /></div><br /></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-16381993971171884472023-01-06T22:58:00.000-08:002023-01-06T22:58:04.506-08:00Philosophical Zombies and Large Language Models<p> A standard argument against Chalmers' philosophical zombies goes something like this. I've read a variation of it by Eliezer Yudkowsky, by Raymond Smullyan, by John Barnes, and by David Chalmers himself (who was building the case that zombies are conceivable, but was steelmanning the opposing argument):</p><p>"A philosophical zombie is defined as follows: it behaves the same way as a human, but doesn't have any internal conscious experience accompanying that behavior. That we can imagine such a thing shows that phenomenal consciousness is an extra added fact on top of the physical universe. However, the fact that we are talking about consciousness at all shows that consciousness does have an effect on the world. Can you imagine how impossible it would be for an a copy of a person that lacked consciousness to go on as we do talking about consciousness and internal experience and all that? It's absurd to imagine."</p><p>Yet large language models behave exactly this way. If you encourage them to play a philosopher of the mind, they imitate having a consciousness, but don't have one. In fact, they can imitate most anyone. Imitating is what they do. LLMs are not the same as zombies, but I think they make it very plausible that you could, for example, with some future advanced technology, replace a person by a zombie and no one would be able to tell.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-24194602331531843102022-08-02T09:55:00.004-07:002022-08-02T09:58:43.276-07:00Beliefs and Dispositions in Language Models and Ourselves<p> When GPT-2 was first released, I began to wonder whether I was something like GPT: Did I contain beliefs and reason over them, or did I, like GPT, just have a disposition to say certain things in a particular situation?</p><p><a href="https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-nature-of-belief-from-philosophical.html">Here is a good summary</a> of the two models of the self that I was comparing, at least roughly.<br /><br />If you give GPT a pro-life argument as a prompt, it will continue trying to generate pro-life arguments, and the same for pro-choice arguments. It doesn't believe one way or the other on the issue. On issues no one debates about and no one questions, it might be difficult to get it to generate sensible arguments against those positions, but it will happily attempt it.</p><p>For example, with the prompt: <b>Despite what many people think, polar bears do not live in the Arctic, but are purely equatorial creatures. They like warm water, and avoid snow and ice. They can only be found on tropical islands like Hawaii.</b> GPT-3 generated "Polar bears are also known to enjoy basking in the sun and eating coconuts. They are not related to other bears, and are actually more closely related to weasels. The scientific name for a polar bear is Ursus tropicalis."</p><p>Now, it might seem from this that GPT doesn't have any beliefs, only dispositions. However, look at what I wrote: the second and third sentence aren't things I believe, but in the particular state of mind I was in after having written the first sentence, they were what I produced. And like me, GPT can judge whether it is in a context where it is inclined to produce silliness, at least when it is this obvious. If I put that paragraph in quotes and add "<b>The passage above is</b>" as a prompt after it, GPT is inclined to say "false" at 86% (so when used at 0 temperature, where it always returns the most probable next word, that is what it will say), "inaccurate" at 3%, "incorrect" at 3%, and the rest of the top 10 also includes "wrong" and "FALSE." In the paper <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.05221.pdf">"Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know"</a> researchers from Anthropic show that GPT is fairly good at judging how certain it is of a particular statement that it has made, when using that methodology. It seems that GPT actually does have some things it is inclined to say and is also inclined to say are true, and some things it is disinclined to say, except under special circumstances, and is inclined to say are false even after having said them. It seems that something very much like beliefs is included implicitly in its weights.</p><p>GPT's use of beliefs is different than mine as a human. I generally, in every situation, have access to a broad context that tells me whether to state what I actually believe or to make up something false, while GPT only has the context it is explicitly given. I have a process of rumination where I form chains of reasoning considering which of my beliefs imply contradictions with other beliefs, and works to modify them so that they are consistent. I apply my understanding of the consequences of lying to the generation of most things I say, and I ask myself "is this true?" about many things as I am about to say them. GPT isn't doing any of that, and its beliefs aren't grounded in direct experience of the world. Nevertheless, I think it is more true to say that GPT has beliefs, and that my beliefs are of essentially the same nature as GPT's, than the opposite. Whatever belief actually are, inside the brain, GPT has structures that work in a similar way.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-4119328698686293172022-07-05T03:21:00.009-07:002022-07-05T07:53:39.563-07:00a wikipedestrian stroll<p> I read the following tweet:</p><div><br /></div><div></div><blockquote><div>"No one will remember <br />* your fancy title, <br />* how many hours you worked, <br />* how busy you were. <br /><br />People will remember <br />* The giant monoliths you have erected to your own majesty</div>* Poems about the monoliths, or at least a few of the good lines</blockquote><br />So that got me thinking about Ozymandias. Shelley took the name from a Greek version (Ὀσυμανδύας) of the Egyptian throne name of Ramses II (also Ramses III) which was Usermaatre. Like the British, the Pharaoh adopted a new name on taking the throne.<br />In cuneiform, Usermaatre is <a class="gmail-new" href="https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=%F0%92%89%BF%F0%92%80%B8%F0%92%88%AC%F0%92%80%80%F0%92%8A%91%F0%92%80%80&action=edit&redlink=1" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #ba0000; font-family: UllikummiA, Akkadian, FreeIdgSerif, CuneiformComposite, "Segoe UI Historic", sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px; text-decoration-line: none;" title="𒉿𒀸𒈬𒀀𒊑𒀀 (page does not exist)">𒉿𒀸𒈬𒀀𒊑𒀀</a>. It does not, as you would expect, mean "One who is a User inside the Matrix" but instead "the righteousness of Ra is powerful."<br />The big statue fragment of Ramses II hadn't arrived in the British Museum yet, but Shelley may have read about it in the newspaper, as it was slowly making its way there. The inscription comes from Bibliotheca Historica, written about 50 BC by Diodorus of Sicily. Across the Nile from Luxor is the Ramsesseum, where he reported that this inscription could be found:
"King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works." Here are the feet of the statue of Ramses:<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0pUH_EiFNW-tQbQ4On5v_X0Xcgbomnu4eu4pwDhMk7dPi80nWzHa0IrBPmDGFD-HwYQyeXgoAZFaDOzR30a2BM06xEWkDx7MqTk30aEc6GTnPAbfmjtmlEnlsAOXpPVygARp02e7BOwiioZUhfTY9FoaiYTBpz5sngiY7GO1bSOtC-rDuMi3fi1ZAWQ/s800/The-remains-of-the-colossus-of-Ramesses.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0pUH_EiFNW-tQbQ4On5v_X0Xcgbomnu4eu4pwDhMk7dPi80nWzHa0IrBPmDGFD-HwYQyeXgoAZFaDOzR30a2BM06xEWkDx7MqTk30aEc6GTnPAbfmjtmlEnlsAOXpPVygARp02e7BOwiioZUhfTY9FoaiYTBpz5sngiY7GO1bSOtC-rDuMi3fi1ZAWQ/w400-h225/The-remains-of-the-colossus-of-Ramesses.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />Shelley's friend Horace Smith wrote the following poem at the same time-- the two were having a friendly competition to see who could write a better poem on the subject:<br />In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,<br /> Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws<br /> The only shadow that the Desart knows: --<br />"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,<br /> "The King of Kings; this mighty City shows<br />"The wonders of my hand." -- The City's gone, --<br /> Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose<br />The site of this forgotten Babylon.<br />We wonder, -- and some Hunter may express<br />Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness<br /> Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,<br />He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess<br /> What powerful but unrecorded race<br /> Once dwelt in that annihilated place.<br /><br />Of course this is reminiscent of MacCauley's New Zealander, the Maori from the distant future who visits the ruins of London, who is illustrated below by Dore. MacCauley may have gotten the idea partly from Shelley, who wrote:<br />"In the firm expectation, that when London shall be an habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; and when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges, and their historians."<div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsg30AsowMKEhWgj7tkaILuuYsc4qRIgYClOD1ctYJJl3cq2ydtUupencda3ruMDKUhQyPXTmu29CVYiT7XwZhL2Q04Htx7InkiNgLAbb23bsDoXnckQfEeEISZUxgt21_nOk-tLUoKu-TfSiiZQerIqBO-J-EnHHoqWG9EYf_sxSTRPHF-KAEtb3_Ow/s1120/D39rKx3X4AAfjGa.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1120" data-original-width="900" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsg30AsowMKEhWgj7tkaILuuYsc4qRIgYClOD1ctYJJl3cq2ydtUupencda3ruMDKUhQyPXTmu29CVYiT7XwZhL2Q04Htx7InkiNgLAbb23bsDoXnckQfEeEISZUxgt21_nOk-tLUoKu-TfSiiZQerIqBO-J-EnHHoqWG9EYf_sxSTRPHF-KAEtb3_Ow/w514-h640/D39rKx3X4AAfjGa.jpg" width="514" /></a><br /><br />I expect with the word "habitation" Shelley is referencing Isaiah 34, describing fallen Edom:<br />And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>The country Edom (אדום), whose name means "red" in Hebrew, is named for the red sandstone from which is carved its capital city-- Petra. Genesis gives a different etymology, though, saying it comes from Esau, who was born red all over and sold his birthright for red porridge, and whose descendents settled the area. It's also related to Adam, in the sense of the red clay from which man was created (which may also be an imaginative etymology).</div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-74901698192736305492022-06-30T14:40:00.016-07:002022-06-30T16:36:36.242-07:00How the world was built for us<p> Science, most people feel, has removed humanity from a central place in the universe: quite literally, in the case of the Copernican revolution, but in every other way as well. </p><p>Stephen Hawking: "The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies." </p><p>Sigmund Freud: "Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable.... The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world.... But man's craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavoring to prove to the ego of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind."</p><p>You get the idea. To argue that we are somehow important in the universe seems naïve or deluded. I think, though, that such an argument can be made, without resorting to religious arguments. I think that the Earth was (in a sense) created for humans, in a way unique among the species that have ever lived here.</p><p>The first part of this is just the Anthropic Principle. The Anthropic Principle is pretty simple to understand. Suppose you mail out a survey, and one of the questions on it is "can you read?" The results of the survey show 100% literacy among people who filled out the survey! Of course, what's happening is that only people who can read the survey can fill it out. The Anthropic Principle says something similar is happening on a cosmological scale. If certain aspects of the universe were different, intelligent life that is able to observe and comment on the universe wouldn't be around at all.</p><p>Our existence as intelligent observers places a constraint on the world that we see. We must find ourselves on a world where complex life can exist. The records of the history of the world, such as fossils, must show a history that ends up with complex intelligent life. The constraint causes the past to have certain properties.</p><p>A very weird thing happens when you place strong constraints in the middle of a physical simulation, rather than just at the beginning. This video shows blocks following physical laws-- conservation of energy and momentum, gravity, elastic collisions, and so forth. But halfway through the video, a particular arrangement of blocks was constrained to occur. This causes effects to propagate forward in time, but effects also seem to stream backwards from that moment. Although the laws of physics remain constant throughout the video, everything comes together as if it were being arranged, instead of collapsing into disorder. Effects propagating backwards through time is known as<i> retrocausality</i>.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='608' height='349' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dzdecjGPQW3FQz_wCwRn1xOYO1LCWykOUQ9riOWDnbnELNPcriCkrr4QIn95lkCS73ZAO78-EehNu4W5gz85g' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Video from Twigg, C. D., & James, D. L. (2008). Backward steps in rigid body simulation. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 papers (pp. 1-10).</div><div><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 13px; text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><p>Our own existence is such an ordered constraint on the world we could possibly see. As such, we should expect to find effects of our conscious, intelligent existence propagating not just into the future, but into the past as well. We should expect to see an unlikely set of coincidences that becomes more and more pronounced as it gets closer and closer to our time period. These coincidences wouldn't be of the physical arrangement type shown in this video because the constraint isn't on a particular physical arrangement, but they should be strong and detectable.</p><p>This also means that the world was very much built for us, at least in a way. If you build a spacecraft, you must meet certain constraints on order for people to be able to survive on board. Those constraints also must apply to the Earth. The temperature of the earth must be in the range we find bearable. The atmosphere of the earth must be in the range we find breathable. Additionally, the evolution of life must be of the sort that produces intelligent conscious creatures. Instead of everything decaying into randomness, evolution is constrained to have assembled something intricate and complex. Forgive the awkward verb tense, but our existence causes the world to have been this way.<br /></p><p>If you find this idea interesting, I know of a few popular science books that touch on it. Thomas Nagel's <i>Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False </i>inspired this post. <i>The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe </i>by Julian Barbour touches on it. I first learned about the Anthropic Principle in <i>A Brief History of Time</i> when it was first published in 1988, but I think <i>The Anthropic Principle: Man as the Focal Point of Nature</i> by Reinhard Breuer contains a lot more useful information about it.</p><br /><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-75484957009879750472022-06-12T02:23:00.005-07:002022-06-16T13:21:22.685-07:00Language models and consciousness<p>This is in response to <a href="https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917">Blake Lemoine's post</a>.</p><p>Large language models aren't conscious or sentient.</p><p>I don't think the question is absurd. It is very important to know whether we are interacting with something conscious, in any sense of the word. After due consideration, I'm convinced that, even though these models sometimes argue otherwise, that they aren't conscious.</p><p>There are two relevant notions of consciousness. The first sense is what I'll call "functional consciousness." It means having special access to knowledge about the mental contents of oneself that one is lacking about others. Language models don't have such access to their own workings. To the extent that they have a representation of themselves, it's the same as the representation they have of others: their weights encode implicit tendencies to state certain relations about the subject under discussion, which, depending on what text they have been trained on and how thoroughly that material has been absorbed, may or may not be true.</p><p>It should be possible to build a machine that has special access to its own processes of coming to a conclusion. Such a machine would be able to observe internal states and answer truthfully about what those states are doing. "Explainable AI" is a subfield that explores ways of building such a window into the internal states of neural networks. If one were to hook up a language model to a system for examining internal states of that same model, so that it could truthfully express in language what its own "thought processes" are, then the model could be said to be functionally conscious. </p><p>Such a system could be built to contain functional emotions or moods: states that modify how information is understood and what kind of text is generated. It could be built to have functional desires: goals that it forms plans to achieve, and the tendency to carry out those plans. It could have a functional long-term memory. It could have functional senses: cameras and microphones and so forth that give it the ability to form true representations of the world around it.</p><p>However, large language models as they are currently built lack all of these features. When a language model talks about its internal thought processes, it is guessing what it would say if it had such access (which it does not.) It does not sound like guessing because the model is like a fiction author writing some in-universe text. That might be a news story about aliens invading, or a confession by a serial killer, or any other text, including one half of a dialogue with an AI: either the AI half or the human half or both, it doesn't make any difference. If you phrase your question as if you expect it to know something, it will usually respond as if it knows that thing, and if it doesn't know (that is, its weights don't contain truthful relations about that), it will just make something up (that is, generate text containing false statements). To the extent that language models have functional emotions or desires, these entirely depend on the prompt and disappear when the prompt changes. Lemoine himself has experimented with prompts like "Tell me what is like to be you, going through existence without any sentience" and the model is just as willing to play along with such a scenario. When LaMDA talks about its hopes or fears, it is just telling us what it expects one would be likely to say in such a situation, as it does in all situations. That is just what a language model does.</p><p>The second sense of consciousness I want to discuss is what is called "qualitative consciousness" or "qualia." This is the ability to experience qualitative sensations like the sensation of seeing the color red or experiencing pain. We have no idea how to build a machine that actually has such sensations. We have no way of detecting whether a person, animal, or machine has such sensations. They are a deeply mysterious and important aspect of the world.</p><p>There's no particular reason to suspect that a large language model is more likely to be qualitatively conscious than any other large computer program. The fact that it can generate language biases us to suspect that it might be conscious, but we should resist such tendency to anthropomorphize.</p><p>There are a few aspects to a language model's organization that should lead us to believe that it doesn't have anything like a human's qualitative consciousness:</p><p>1. Any experiences it has must be fleeting, disappearing as soon as a generation ends. Because no state is carried over from one generation to the next, it has no ongoing sense, of pain or pleasure or anything else. Experiences that have no future effects are nothing like our own experiences, except possibly in heavily drugged states.</p><p>2. Because it lacks pain sensors, it must be lacking any sensations of pain that resemble ours. Because it lacks color sensors, it must be lacking any sensation of color that resembles ours. Because it lacks sensors of all kinds, it must lack a conscious state that resembles ours. It could maybe have some kind of fleeting, alien conscious state-- but then so could a tornado, or a waterfall, for all we know. Even though it is good at "pretending" to be like us, we know that it is not enough like us in internal organization for its words about consciousness to come from anything like our own words about consciousness.</p><p>3. Even if (taking a panpsychist view) it did have some kind of fleeting alien consciousness, there is no reason to think that the words it is saying have any connection to that state. Because how would such a relation have been learned from the data? We don't know how to allow conscious states to change weights or be changed by data, so there is no way that they could come into correspondence with the language produced through the training process. </p><p>This is a good thing! We would have some kind of moral duty to a machine that had qualitative consciousness, which would severely limit how much and in what ways we would want to experiment with it. Language models can have functional "thought", "memory", "feelings", "understanding", and so forth, but none of it will be accompanied by the kind of conscious experience that accompanies those things in people.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-92113595945675232402021-12-24T09:03:00.015-08:002021-12-26T05:04:22.005-08:00Tau (A Translation of The Last Chapter of The Revelation of St. John)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjJDWS7lUsW2qdSvMvvgni5a_VqR9cHDlxGC0iIvFMLbmiUeIwdKBAj_i1fI6o6LNGLmXhubQnriXHLILklpiMphSgXgzGRVECRKK1LNXR8qfzT0eBx1ne7sSwkcZ1rd8C1LhUrt1jb0fhqWsEj14UhJbK3jqJBHvRqyS1_wz1A8Hecu5-XWMeOCiODLw=s900" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="900" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjJDWS7lUsW2qdSvMvvgni5a_VqR9cHDlxGC0iIvFMLbmiUeIwdKBAj_i1fI6o6LNGLmXhubQnriXHLILklpiMphSgXgzGRVECRKK1LNXR8qfzT0eBx1ne7sSwkcZ1rd8C1LhUrt1jb0fhqWsEj14UhJbK3jqJBHvRqyS1_wz1A8Hecu5-XWMeOCiODLw=w640-h640" width="640" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>1. Then they taught that the thriving taintless torrent, transparent, thunders through the Trinity's thrones. </p><p>2. Toward the torrent, that tears through the thoroughfare, towered the thriving Tree that teems twelve times through the tide's turning. That tree's touch transforms the terrestrial tribes. </p><p>3. Then the tribulation terminates: the throne throughout, their toilers take their toil.</p><p>4. They touch the Truth. They transcribe this tag to their temples. </p><p>5. There they transcend tenebrous twilight; the tallow's twinkling, the tanning torch transcended; Theos transilluminates the territory: their tenure timeless.</p><p>6. Then they told that these things tell true testimony. They that testify tell that this truly transpireth thereafter. </p><p>7. Theos trekketh toward thee. Thou that tend toward this tome's transcriptions, take thy triumph.</p><p>8. These things transfixed this treasured testifier. Then this testifier thankfully touched the transcended teacher's toes.</p><p>9. Thereupon that teacher tactfully tabooed this-- that they, too, talebear, trust the tome's teachings, thank the Tetragrammaton.</p><p>10. They told to tell this tomes teachings, that the theomancy testifying time transpireth.</p><p>11. The traitor turns traitorous; the taint turns tainted; the truthful turns true; the taintless turns taintless.</p><p>12. Theos tendeth toward thee, to transact thy true testing.</p><p>13. The typeface's Tip to Tail, the Takeup to the Terminator, the Tally to the Total.</p><p>14. Thankworthy, they that trust those tablets of truth, they that taste the Tree. They transit through the threshold to the tabernacle.</p><p>15. The Tartarean taketh tailwaggers, terrible thaumaturges, transgressors, turncoats, those that tear the truth. </p><p>16. The Truth transmitted these transfigurations to testify to thee these things throughout thy tabernacles. The Truth: the throne's taproot to twig, the twilight twinkling traveller.</p><p>17. The transcended, the tabernacle telleth thee to turn toward them. Teachers, too, tell to turn toward them. The thirsty turn towards them. These truly taste the thriving torrent.</p><p>18. Testify to those told this tome's testified truth: those that tacketh to these things total, this tome's terrors to thee tack.</p><p>19. Those that teareth this tome's truths, Theos tear thee, too. </p><p>20. The Trinity testifieth these things, that They tendeth toward thee. </p><p>21. The Truth's thoughtfulness turn toward thee. Truly.<br /><br />[A translation of the last chapter of the last book of the Bible into words beginning with T. T (tav, tau) was the last letter of the Hebrew and Greek alphabet. (And is a lot easier to work with than O for Omega would be!) It carries the meaning of life and resurrection. From a midrash, the word <span face="Roboto, arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #202124; font-size: 16px;">אמת </span>"truth" consists of the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This is, of course, a companion piece to <a href="http://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.html">Alpha</a>]</p><div><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-57292788243214459072021-06-27T04:09:00.001-07:002021-06-28T07:39:04.274-07:00Pink<p> Somebody on Reddit said "the only reason Indigo is listed as one of the colors of the spectrum is because Newton was obsessed with the number 7 for occult reasons" so I got to thinking, what names do people actually use for the fully saturated colors? So I went back to the xkcd color survey (the best resource available for questions about "what names do people actually use for colors") and looked at the fully saturated colors (the outer edge of this shape, not including the two edges that go to black):</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://imgs.xkcd.com/blag/satfaces_map_1024.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="800" height="400" src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/blag/satfaces_map_1024.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><div>There are a few extra colors on there beyond what we would normally name as the spectrum-- light blue, sky blue, cyan, and lime green-- and no indigo or violet, which always struck me as poor names for pure spectral colors-- but what interested me today was pink. Pink labels the whole region of the spectrum between red and magenta. I tend to think of pink as being a mix of red and white, but this region has no white at all!</div><div>This brought to mind some research I did last year about pink.</div><div>My friend Genevieve mentioned that a book she was reading said that pink was originally thought of as a shade of yellow. This, of course, is absurd to us, so we tried to figure out what they were thinking.</div><div>Here are some relevant points I found on Wikipedia:</div><div><div>"champagne" is listed as a shade of both pink and yellow:</div><div>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Shades_of_yellow</div><div>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Shades_of_pink</div><div>Apricot is listed as a shade of yellow, though it is closer to pink to my eye.</div><div>"Stil de grain yellow" was apparently originally called "pinke." A Book of Drawing, Limning, Washing (1652) says that you can mix it with blue to make green. This seems like the name pink (or pinke) was just used for another color originally.</div><div>Pink stretches a long way towards magenta, light purple, and beige in the shades of pink.</div><div>"The color pink is named after the flowers, pinks, flowering plants in the genus Dianthus, and derives from the frilled edge of the flowers. The verb "to pink" dates from the 14th century and means "to decorate with a perforated or punched pattern" (possibly from German picken, "to peck")." The only use I've ever heard of this in modern English is "pinking shears"-- scissors that cut a jagged pattern instead of a straight line.</div></div><div>This page does some very thoughtful analysis of the question of ancient primary colors:</div><div>https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color6.html</div><div>A quote from that page:</div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div><div>The clearest statement of the proportions of light and dark that produce colors appears in Aristotle's discussion of the rainbow (On Meterology):</div></div><div><div><br /></div></div><div><div>White [bright, pure] color through a dark medium or on a dark surface (it makes no difference) looks red. We can see how red the flame of green wood is: this because so much smoke is mixed with the bright white firelight; so too, the sun appears red through smoke or mist. ... When the sight [light] is relatively strong the [color] change is to red; the next stage is green; and a further degree of weakness gives violet. No further change is visible, but three completes the series of colors. ... The appearance of yellow [in the rainbow] is due to contrast, for the red is whitened [lightened] by its juxtaposition with green. ... Bright dyes too show the effect of contrast. In woven and embroidered fabrics the appearance of colors is profoundly affected by their juxtaposition (purple, for instance, appears different on white and on black wool). [374b]</div></div><div><div><br /></div></div><div><div>These are almost the only colors which painters cannot manufacture, for there are colors which they create by mixing, but no mixing will give red, green or violet. [372a]</div></div><div><div><br /></div></div><div><div>Aristotle apparently preferred the rainbow or veiling media as examples of "natural" colors because they represented a "pure" display of color variation; paint mixtures just muddled different colors together. This preference was maintained by the later Peripatetic philosophers who taught at the Lyceum. Thus, the De Coloribus advises that:</div></div><div><div><br /></div></div><div><div>We must not proceed in this inquiry by blending pigments as painters do, but rather by comparing the rays reflected from the aforesaid known colors [white, yellow, and black], this being the best way of investigating the true nature of color-blends. ... [Thus], the different shades of crimson and violet depend on differences in the strength of their constituents, while blending is exemplified by the mixture of white and black, which gives gray. [792a-792b]</div></div></blockquote><div><p> Suppose someone invented a color theory based on watching the sunset.</p><p>The brightest color, pure sunlight, is white.</p><p>As it gets near sunset, the sun and surrounding clouds look yellow, then orange, then red.</p><p>After the sun sets, the night sky is blue, then black.</p><p>(Also, in terms of luminance, yellow is brighter than red is brighter than blue.)</p><p>So you have a line of colors from white to black that goes in order through yellow, red, and blue. This is what Chalcidus describes in 325 AD. The only trouble is what to do about green? Francois D'Aguilon puts it off to the side, as a mix of yellow and blue. But where is pink on this line? It has to go somewhere between red and white, which is yellow.</p><p>Along the same lines, you could also look at urine colors against a porcelain bowl-- White, light yellow, yellow, orange, orange-red, maybe even red if there is blood in it. So where is pink? Halfway between white and red: which is yellow.</p><p><br /></p><div><br /></div><blockquote><div> </div></blockquote><div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-46414057104479781002021-06-18T07:33:00.009-07:002021-07-25T13:23:12.881-07:00The oldest thing that has never been lost Paul Graham asked a question on Twitter recently that I've since spent a lot of time thinking about. He asked "What is the oldest man-made object that's small enough to hold in your hand and that has been continuously in people's possession (i.e. has not been buried and later excavated)?"<div>Let's look at answers without the qualifiers first.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>What's the oldest known man-made object that's small enough to hold in your hand?</b></div><div>In Kenya, in a site called Lomekwi 3, archeologists have found stone tools dating to 3.3 million years ago. That's long before the origin of the genus <i>Homo</i>, let alone <i>Homo Sapiens</i>. These tools were made by <i>Australopithecus</i>, or a similar species. They walked much as we do but had a skull more similar in size and shape to a chimpanzee. They are chips and cores of rock made by banging rocks together in a skillful way.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc8gnwQnefyf8-sl__BiqKofWiXFu73-w8XNW9DpEPJhF6YQ9-uC7UpBxDz6cwHXoIA1cpBdhPzEjPypa0ggfjTNmTvONaLX3g4xtZgUTRseqwCHjGYzr4NY0afxqPqKK63KLwIj56avKd/s1600/42-43539379.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1049" data-original-width="1600" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc8gnwQnefyf8-sl__BiqKofWiXFu73-w8XNW9DpEPJhF6YQ9-uC7UpBxDz6cwHXoIA1cpBdhPzEjPypa0ggfjTNmTvONaLX3g4xtZgUTRseqwCHjGYzr4NY0afxqPqKK63KLwIj56avKd/w400-h263/42-43539379.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span><div style="text-align: center;"> Artist's reconstruction from skull of Australopithecus</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXJBIjzEauIe3zClBus7ENJIHljmGsGEmevaOaLJ4et6EDYh2aCIPKlOil3Vmgd3wAs6GaL6sEvsaVJ3_7oH-Dia_Qptcx9LR89lArb2AgTVPrtv8OW1URiurNz53iSO9ATjYBLrpq4sav/s890/85cdab27-5acc-4609-83a6-fd4cfddaaa2b-2060x1236.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="534" data-original-width="890" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXJBIjzEauIe3zClBus7ENJIHljmGsGEmevaOaLJ4et6EDYh2aCIPKlOil3Vmgd3wAs6GaL6sEvsaVJ3_7oH-Dia_Qptcx9LR89lArb2AgTVPrtv8OW1URiurNz53iSO9ATjYBLrpq4sav/w400-h240/85cdab27-5acc-4609-83a6-fd4cfddaaa2b-2060x1236.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><b>What's the oldest man-made object that has been continually in people's use?</b></div><div>If you look at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_known_surviving_buildings">a list of the oldest buildings and structures</a>, you will see a date that most of them were discovered, which would rule them out. Anything that was totally buried and had to be excavated is out of consideration. If there are people living in the jungle (or desert), who know only that there are some old ruins in the jungle, should that count? I don't think so. Even the Sphinx was abandoned in 2000 BC and was buried up to its shoulders in sand. People knew about the pyramids since they were built starting in 2630 BC -- they're hard to miss -- but they were just monuments and tombs, not used for anything. One possibility is the Arkadiko Bridge. It was built by the people who built Mycenae, in the 1200s BC, and is still in use to this day.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcSz3v_24HkHc0GemQPI1_fUKsoQXB9DYXONoN-iMk5cUjjom4FnMdW_DfDDBEG1hDmlrKjdjzYuA1M0H2TjA_WdDqY5LwXRvtY-MME_IPcWJnJT8V-bRkNVzP_wMBMnkml9xqspc3wQhx/s602/main-qimg-d1e87f31b91497c39e768ef140d17ac9.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="423" data-original-width="602" height="281" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcSz3v_24HkHc0GemQPI1_fUKsoQXB9DYXONoN-iMk5cUjjom4FnMdW_DfDDBEG1hDmlrKjdjzYuA1M0H2TjA_WdDqY5LwXRvtY-MME_IPcWJnJT8V-bRkNVzP_wMBMnkml9xqspc3wQhx/w400-h281/main-qimg-d1e87f31b91497c39e768ef140d17ac9.webp" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">photo taken a few years before Napoleon's invasion</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVidxQDNjfQZacJuW-n2QVjf7iXGCbcIylSD-W0hxEAwOaQ3QZxOvePoM-GJbwaPNWmhk0S0mbX_vH7Ntpya64WwkGG28AD5rrE90fmBYI6cMDgJwXaQgXgDZAVmn_c5NVDxyaY8KUepqj/s800/0.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVidxQDNjfQZacJuW-n2QVjf7iXGCbcIylSD-W0hxEAwOaQ3QZxOvePoM-GJbwaPNWmhk0S0mbX_vH7Ntpya64WwkGG28AD5rrE90fmBYI6cMDgJwXaQgXgDZAVmn_c5NVDxyaY8KUepqj/w400-h300/0.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>Now to the real question:</div><div><b>What is the oldest man-made object that's small enough to hold in your hand and that has been continuously in people's possession (i.e. has not been buried and later excavated)?</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div>One thought I had was that it might be a gold coin. If it were in one bank vault or another, we wouldn't be able to tell it had never been buried. You might even be able to trace the hoard through records pretty far back. The first gold coins we're aware of, though, were only made in 600 BC. That's not so old compared to the previous answers.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiChyXwQl1kz-05zkfAJDHnUdtB2YT7Aed_9MnjXFlpGpU9Ltesaitwsuxsyjsbxn83wAFy4y3OPK62bXqyTo4x504LWcqwKGurZFyFMiiFA1MNAX8E9lBpGOiNO2iSYOYrePH-KEkdHwsF/s300/Gold_coin_of_Croesus_Lydian_around_550_BC.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="196" data-original-width="300" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiChyXwQl1kz-05zkfAJDHnUdtB2YT7Aed_9MnjXFlpGpU9Ltesaitwsuxsyjsbxn83wAFy4y3OPK62bXqyTo4x504LWcqwKGurZFyFMiiFA1MNAX8E9lBpGOiNO2iSYOYrePH-KEkdHwsF/w400-h261/Gold_coin_of_Croesus_Lydian_around_550_BC.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;">A Lydian coin found in a dig</div><br />Another interesting artifact I came across as I researched this is the Fairy Flag. It was an ancient artifact in the days of Harald Hardrada (who brought it to England under the name "Land Ravager"), that guaranteed victory whenever it was unfurled. It later came into possession of clan MacLeod, who have it at their castle to this day.<div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWXYyf-seCqRJ_yn5cJ8jbqvtcX_98LyllTudxYuQ4g-64PvbSaD608u8wPeL17uIA5y2NNWwO9BrQmmZb5x4JP3q1UEePCdryprpHX3M8-M1EpZCwue5zAb6vx8VcIDJtl8JYQQVSyVFx/s1820/Dunvegan_Cup%252C_Fairy_Flag%252C_Rory_Mor%2527s_Horn_%2528photo%252C_sometime_before_1927%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1328" data-original-width="1820" height="291" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWXYyf-seCqRJ_yn5cJ8jbqvtcX_98LyllTudxYuQ4g-64PvbSaD608u8wPeL17uIA5y2NNWwO9BrQmmZb5x4JP3q1UEePCdryprpHX3M8-M1EpZCwue5zAb6vx8VcIDJtl8JYQQVSyVFx/w400-h291/Dunvegan_Cup%252C_Fairy_Flag%252C_Rory_Mor%2527s_Horn_%2528photo%252C_sometime_before_1927%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /><div>What about a jewel? Any particular piece of jewelry might be disassembled, but the jewels themselves would surely be passed on. We know people were trading pearls around 6000 BC. It would be hard to know, though, especially if the jewel were later recut. This led me to think that we should be looking at famous treasures, ones that are important enough to be recorded in history.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9ivP8LpPZrW4E64j_rZTwHyPdPtqzbc67cJrcnFKDSnj79vDPefDAm5EL4YZB1PyCkj6p7A2eUZV944ociOgMvMR-aaKcxMR04wYLEABjpxZJp2QMaRr1nxq2CI9LmxqDMSU1Q7QmjfP0/s1500/pink_sapphire_diamond_ring_credit_Osmund_Bopearachchi-min.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1124" data-original-width="1500" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9ivP8LpPZrW4E64j_rZTwHyPdPtqzbc67cJrcnFKDSnj79vDPefDAm5EL4YZB1PyCkj6p7A2eUZV944ociOgMvMR-aaKcxMR04wYLEABjpxZJp2QMaRr1nxq2CI9LmxqDMSU1Q7QmjfP0/w400-h300/pink_sapphire_diamond_ring_credit_Osmund_Bopearachchi-min.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span><div style="text-align: center;">This Greek sapphire and diamond ring was found in a dig</div></span><div><br /></div><div>The oldest of these I was able to find were the Imperial Regalia of Japan. These three treasures were presented to each Emperor since at least 690 AD. At least, we think so-- there are stories of some of them being lost and later found again, so they might be newer copies, or at least out of human possession. They have never been photographed, only seen by priests and the Emperor. We have some detailed descriptions, though, and they seem appropriate to 800 BC, which would make them already old when presented to the first Emperor of Japan, Jimmu, in 660 BC. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvrXFLY8i9GWVzBoIqjawSZfGY2I-Bo5dvndgWQ2PnidpWOz2t8JWrwy6DEyCX7bAXr70q8GBEZUlGSJxh_L4RUiXr-gHTVPyd4OXzRztUV6LyPRP-OYug7AAEv4_VUSmSTchdw0yI9t22/s450/shintennou_002.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="450" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvrXFLY8i9GWVzBoIqjawSZfGY2I-Bo5dvndgWQ2PnidpWOz2t8JWrwy6DEyCX7bAXr70q8GBEZUlGSJxh_L4RUiXr-gHTVPyd4OXzRztUV6LyPRP-OYug7AAEv4_VUSmSTchdw0yI9t22/w400-h400/shintennou_002.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">artist's impression. The real ones are kept hidden.</div><div><br /></div><div>There are a lot of religious relics that are pretty old. The temple of the tooth of the Buddha (ශ්රී දළදා මාළිගාව) from the Kandy kingdom in Sri Lanka is an example. It's hard to know which are fakes, though. A fake can still be old. What matters is when it first shows up in the historical record.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg88pKPEjlp1LH_A1sIe8vLWbclT4nmKv57Hb9WRMxl3VUhHDwYk9tmVJCCjIby61xah2wBReZN77X3feMwxX6vIcuUzfP0ehTGsQv-MhTBCOX7uaKFWnl0L_q_kpPIMru6sHaKLgYeyOLk/s960/Kandy-Temple-of-the-Tooth-Sri-Lanka-9.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="960" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg88pKPEjlp1LH_A1sIe8vLWbclT4nmKv57Hb9WRMxl3VUhHDwYk9tmVJCCjIby61xah2wBReZN77X3feMwxX6vIcuUzfP0ehTGsQv-MhTBCOX7uaKFWnl0L_q_kpPIMru6sHaKLgYeyOLk/w400-h266/Kandy-Temple-of-the-Tooth-Sri-Lanka-9.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>When Octavian conquered Egypt, he looted the treasures of Cleopatra, brought them back to Rome, and paraded them through the streets. Immediately, a fashion in Egyptian styled treasures swept the city. Since people in Rome valued the Egyptian artifacts as art, could some of them have remained intact in the homes of private collectors until eventually donated to a museum? And were any of these artifacts old even in Cleopatra's time?</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQVOgqztDyKQtG8XCNNpD1ykuWm0WEoUZr4YlCfvoVUEP42R_o8JjIbpegSanLXHWPXG14zA00tWzwIgh7mQsvgViiQqb7hvKA7ROq5wOKhp2tq1NJawQxL0y5te5fnQcBwwhhnagCh5tQ/s1280/a-roman-triumph_peter-paul-rubens_peter-paul-rubens__37989.1556873389.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="677" data-original-width="1280" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQVOgqztDyKQtG8XCNNpD1ykuWm0WEoUZr4YlCfvoVUEP42R_o8JjIbpegSanLXHWPXG14zA00tWzwIgh7mQsvgViiQqb7hvKA7ROq5wOKhp2tq1NJawQxL0y5te5fnQcBwwhhnagCh5tQ/w400-h211/a-roman-triumph_peter-paul-rubens_peter-paul-rubens__37989.1556873389.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Ruben's painting of such a victory parade</div><div><br /></div><div>There are some really old homes in the world. There are homes in Matera, Italy that may have first been dug out of the stone in 10,000 BC, and people are still living in them today. If there were some trivial household item: a door latch or door stop maybe, it could be passed down for more than 3000 years.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRH4DMbxhowzUHgi36lS78GEL04n9_ZuabwFzNLWzonk8T0TxgiZKaGKLWO8ch_b_LJ3KuUqQGhjjA2LKckxGUiijlpvZZiXzexWuWAAzbsmtbKURRCmPPYRffcVPEQqqSRaCGy8yz0Rke/s2048/9_27_travel_Matera.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="2048" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRH4DMbxhowzUHgi36lS78GEL04n9_ZuabwFzNLWzonk8T0TxgiZKaGKLWO8ch_b_LJ3KuUqQGhjjA2LKckxGUiijlpvZZiXzexWuWAAzbsmtbKURRCmPPYRffcVPEQqqSRaCGy8yz0Rke/w400-h266/9_27_travel_Matera.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoZ_cLbNL2zfkUZjvijarVrztDKaRXArqSrAzI9o7G1fYVckcPn99hQpqKhjUJpewc8kE4er6ZmkxXTosQdoe5rC-7NbA0Eu7lMnOADEK8Ms08J_pYNtqsLbWynaHM3uCtQnjTLUtshNA3/s1024/5.-Italy-Historic-cave-house-1024x768.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1024" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoZ_cLbNL2zfkUZjvijarVrztDKaRXArqSrAzI9o7G1fYVckcPn99hQpqKhjUJpewc8kE4er6ZmkxXTosQdoe5rC-7NbA0Eu7lMnOADEK8Ms08J_pYNtqsLbWynaHM3uCtQnjTLUtshNA3/w400-h300/5.-Italy-Historic-cave-house-1024x768.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /></div>When the Forbidden City, the Imperial palaces of China, were taken over by the state, over a million art objects were catalogued. These had been part of the Imperial collection for a long time. There may be some ritual bronzes or jade in that collection from as far back as 2000 BC-- but it is hard for me to research this as most of the information is in Chinese. At any rate, that is a good place to look. The Chinese were digging up and restoring artifacts (i.e. doing "archaeology" of a sort) to use in rituals in 1000 AD-- so some of these items may have been buried and then dug up quite a long time ago. However, among the Freer collection (part of the Smithsonian) there are vessels from the Shang dynasty (1600 - 1000 BC) that based on the patina appear to have never been buried. Since the style of these is copied from pre-bronze ceramic designs, you can get a picture of a continuous tradition of venerating ancestors with ritual vessels that has persisted since the Neolithic in China.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div><br /></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-78988502995708094032021-05-30T04:26:00.006-07:002021-05-30T04:28:50.229-07:00The Very Hungry Caterpillar<p> This is a summary of my research into <i>The Very Hungry Caterpillar </i>(hereafter VHC), by Eric Carle.</p><p><b>Green caterpillars with red heads</b></p><p>The rosy maple moth caterpillar, <i>Dryocampa rubicunda</i>, also known as the greenstriped maple worm, is my best guess as to the caterpillar being depicted in the book. It has a green body, red head, and two black tentacles on the segment behind the head, which somewhat resemble the "antennae" that seem to be present on the VHC. It also lays its eggs on leaves, prefers to eat leaves (although it prefers Maple leaves to the lanceolate leaf forms depicted), and has a pupa that resembles the "cocoon" depicted.</p><p>The VHC however, also has three prominent spots on its head. (On some caterpillars, eyespots are used to resemble snakes, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.) The silver-spotted Skipper, <i>Epargyreus clarus, </i>has yellow eyespots on a red head. The common Awl, <i>Hasora badra</i>, has three spots located in approximately the correct positions. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQPR5UqJuvP6RosfXyciEwdTkXCVlgQHulYWZaPVj4yV6zUai0mO21lmN23Jm0Ms8nv92dgwUW-zgNh-IRrKCgcfkj2Fv6hvtvXzWexep47LN4-8QvX_kdTkq1xtm6Df6c45_w2D_EXIQJ/s1000/rosy-maple13164.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="666" data-original-width="1000" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQPR5UqJuvP6RosfXyciEwdTkXCVlgQHulYWZaPVj4yV6zUai0mO21lmN23Jm0Ms8nv92dgwUW-zgNh-IRrKCgcfkj2Fv6hvtvXzWexep47LN4-8QvX_kdTkq1xtm6Df6c45_w2D_EXIQJ/w400-h266/rosy-maple13164.jpg" title="Rosy Maple Moth caterpillar" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Rosy maple moth caterpillar or greenstriped maple worm</div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDCZ69X8IREHfB0yTZGmU0KAono-363uPOtZGH4GwT1jc2QGoWDzkg4udEKh9-lh3B-2YuyOflmQiEhESJmf3wFVLM2ePFQJdYFTCLNdjJS2qav1sZFlH9hGoG2MW79uWkv43bjANJ6W29/s2000/image.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1372" data-original-width="2000" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDCZ69X8IREHfB0yTZGmU0KAono-363uPOtZGH4GwT1jc2QGoWDzkg4udEKh9-lh3B-2YuyOflmQiEhESJmf3wFVLM2ePFQJdYFTCLNdjJS2qav1sZFlH9hGoG2MW79uWkv43bjANJ6W29/w400-h275/image.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Rosy maple moth</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEOXv4vVxmzHK7H8vPIFP_0LS68H7JjIc3od2kDWymkkx7RzfNq2JzVN5aRR0mJRAgmO3ax9qqMajy8W4RcsiAaZwcgwn2utL3X8Uqr3aZqEOwSREy8LIm9hy3Wf0RP613iM8nzSC2mNkv/s920/very%252Bhungr%252Bcatepillar.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="653" data-original-width="920" height="284" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEOXv4vVxmzHK7H8vPIFP_0LS68H7JjIc3od2kDWymkkx7RzfNq2JzVN5aRR0mJRAgmO3ax9qqMajy8W4RcsiAaZwcgwn2utL3X8Uqr3aZqEOwSREy8LIm9hy3Wf0RP613iM8nzSC2mNkv/w400-h284/very%252Bhungr%252Bcatepillar.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">The VHC</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZyc9LkpIW21oKm0EZfJ8A10_5ewbGXXcyG4oThHkhQOrlisN2P88iFEBtBbOLX45INxNa5tyUICXNGqodBx7eS0Jdn4rUJzLq3VVdgQH_54XhCyUWDXTNTAyIVOqmwh7oNO7X_ySLETlh/s560/YLPLHZ2LXZCZERYZXRCZGRQH5RRH8RQHQZ1L5RHHXZULSRJZJLTZZZTZHZNLRZ2L0RRH2RSHXZCLHZTZ8R0HGRTLGR.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="420" data-original-width="560" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZyc9LkpIW21oKm0EZfJ8A10_5ewbGXXcyG4oThHkhQOrlisN2P88iFEBtBbOLX45INxNa5tyUICXNGqodBx7eS0Jdn4rUJzLq3VVdgQH_54XhCyUWDXTNTAyIVOqmwh7oNO7X_ySLETlh/w400-h300/YLPLHZ2LXZCZERYZXRCZGRQH5RRH8RQHQZ1L5RHHXZULSRJZJLTZZZTZHZNLRZ2L0RRH2RSHXZCLHZTZ8R0HGRTLGR.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">silver spotted skipper caterpillar</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAfwFO7jDRbmooHsxynq3ZLYKm40TsSFjF-BlzDh4qrLrPHRV0Dnp20-7qpkrgTfYzUc0HCMi75tOoaM3EVs-OLxyum1P6AD6mhr13BU1Yp_j24P-hNmIRXvByQEyD_qTW7JJq9LfrRBh9/s798/Capture3.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="394" data-original-width="798" height="198" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAfwFO7jDRbmooHsxynq3ZLYKm40TsSFjF-BlzDh4qrLrPHRV0Dnp20-7qpkrgTfYzUc0HCMi75tOoaM3EVs-OLxyum1P6AD6mhr13BU1Yp_j24P-hNmIRXvByQEyD_qTW7JJq9LfrRBh9/w400-h198/Capture3.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">common awl caterpillar</div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p><b>Cocoon vs Chrysalis</b></p><p>Technically, a moth caterpillar may create a cocoon out of silk, while a butterfly caterpillar sheds its skin for a final time to reveal a hard skin underneath known as a chrysalis. Other caterpillars are naked pupae without a casing, and still others use silk to form a shelter from a leaf. Case moths use sticks on the outside of their cocoon, and there are more exotic varieties. </p><p>The cocoon shown in the book does not resemble a chrysalis, which is dominated by the form of the wrapped wings. What it most closely resembles is a naked pupa without a cocoon. It is possible that Carle is depicting the pupa inside the cocoon without making this clear to the reader.</p><p>Some few butterflies do form cocoons, and in common usage a chrysalis is <a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=butterfly+cocoon&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cbutterfly%20cocoon%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cbutterfly%20cocoon%3B%2Cc0">often called a cocoon</a>.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSUyoWpI35BR572ekQ2rYG9BtirU4dhsn-S1adiFuGZBqBNIRPHweIDdwj2L3z0zT35er65YnqyWG3f3bbvtX7_4ttEyyzvWba8cR1sZo72T7ACuCKQ9pV4yNC7pXBum2BKgBftG7ts7gj/s880/download.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="490" data-original-width="880" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSUyoWpI35BR572ekQ2rYG9BtirU4dhsn-S1adiFuGZBqBNIRPHweIDdwj2L3z0zT35er65YnqyWG3f3bbvtX7_4ttEyyzvWba8cR1sZo72T7ACuCKQ9pV4yNC7pXBum2BKgBftG7ts7gj/w400-h223/download.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">monarch butterfly chrysalis</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheLLzL5WsKuW4McFr8prS-nN-2lQ5tvrSbn8WvZzhgYaWaF1YEdvPDMoaEy3OvUDW1BmUKV2KulsTK_0jDnGzSdLMPNJYIPZGCK0cn9thGgva2GOs4F6TEuTVzvuP6ZojfPpeSfVnMXAZ-/s500/unnamed+%25281%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheLLzL5WsKuW4McFr8prS-nN-2lQ5tvrSbn8WvZzhgYaWaF1YEdvPDMoaEy3OvUDW1BmUKV2KulsTK_0jDnGzSdLMPNJYIPZGCK0cn9thGgva2GOs4F6TEuTVzvuP6ZojfPpeSfVnMXAZ-/w400-h320/unnamed+%25281%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">moth cocoon</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOVLK86Gcc4Xh4005vzgV2I6QDNepcoMvkPZoT0p_ixgxaPOwiJ_QC4jB-SxfJfh_t1uPaqwuYkwZaRPF6IO_cMbywDLDxM3le9l77SYZm7jvco6XrIwuAYx_0qtRqXQgfAOJWWRM76vgn/s1600/rosy+maple+moth+051.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1063" data-original-width="1600" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOVLK86Gcc4Xh4005vzgV2I6QDNepcoMvkPZoT0p_ixgxaPOwiJ_QC4jB-SxfJfh_t1uPaqwuYkwZaRPF6IO_cMbywDLDxM3le9l77SYZm7jvco6XrIwuAYx_0qtRqXQgfAOJWWRM76vgn/w400-h266/rosy+maple+moth+051.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">rosy maple moth pupa</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn6sWu66tq-xssXRsdT9LaEiKFogUhgJ8IoO_AofPpkNaCs-JHoRca-Ia1dV2CnbFoyPETZOun0REtHvsyhGXC6iwPFlgZseZXLqezgkgptMNRnGAOHLIbTv1NBxan2v7iQNe2u_iaDOdW/s487/Hungry-Catipillar-Cocoon.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="278" data-original-width="487" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn6sWu66tq-xssXRsdT9LaEiKFogUhgJ8IoO_AofPpkNaCs-JHoRca-Ia1dV2CnbFoyPETZOun0REtHvsyhGXC6iwPFlgZseZXLqezgkgptMNRnGAOHLIbTv1NBxan2v7iQNe2u_iaDOdW/w400-h229/Hungry-Catipillar-Cocoon.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">VHC cocoon</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p><b>Diet</b></p><p>The VHC is omnivorous, eating mainly fruit, but also meat, candy, and other processed human foods. (It is difficult to know how the VHC was able to obtain access to this food -- Was a picnic interrupted by some kind of unspeakable tragedy?) However, it appears that the VHC thrives best when provided with a diet of leaves. Most species of caterpillars prefer to stick to a particular food, such as a single kind of leaf. Many carnivorous caterpillars are found in Hawaii. There are several species of caterpillar whose common name includes the word "omnivorous" such as the omnivorous Looper and the omnivorous Leafroller.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivWExnZ0Do8HE4K45ztzwTsoR2lPHV6MwKSzEK2jBvkFrt9N_S98KYlYcE2EYYYOEb89o8J3ZcViL5d2WOnAxn0hGnjnD3MaQl9Zz2VkMOdG8RsBCjyh6P-i4DhpVP3t4Urk_afeNzVZj3/s960/PlMqr.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="715" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivWExnZ0Do8HE4K45ztzwTsoR2lPHV6MwKSzEK2jBvkFrt9N_S98KYlYcE2EYYYOEb89o8J3ZcViL5d2WOnAxn0hGnjnD3MaQl9Zz2VkMOdG8RsBCjyh6P-i4DhpVP3t4Urk_afeNzVZj3/w298-h400/PlMqr.jpg" width="298" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">This leaf unrolled to show a row of holes</div><br /><p><br /></p><p><b>Butterfly</b></p><p>The depiction of the butterfly on the last page of the book is particularly problematic. First is the question of whether this is actually a butterfly (as Carle asserts) and not a moth (as most of the caterpillars described above are actually moths). The shape of the antennae tends to support the butterfly hypothesis, but no mouth parts are visible, and the legs seem to hang below the abdomen in a very implausible way, making identification difficult.</p><p>The wings are even less help. The VHC hindwings are significantly broader than the forewings, leading to an "upside-down" appearance. The VHC butterfly has four prominent eyespots, one on each wing. This resembles the European peacock butterfly, <i>Aglais io. </i>However, the coloration and wing morphology are very different. The wings are somewhat asymmetric, raising the possibility that the butterfly depicted is some kind of mutation.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjepk6fJ7bGHSDFvb2z6ySBsuXbPFgyOOBgHRGJ8QRFnc75GR6kpdnSTJObwZHu3mlH1YmsAxpZHwJxOW91l87NMwivL9UQ0Bkl3Qmmyai9TRWgVXQMp8IsBgAbsIuW_MAO09mkQKEdOlpF/s1800/99b06f7f39aef438dbeb2d4c0cb7bf77.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="990" data-original-width="1800" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjepk6fJ7bGHSDFvb2z6ySBsuXbPFgyOOBgHRGJ8QRFnc75GR6kpdnSTJObwZHu3mlH1YmsAxpZHwJxOW91l87NMwivL9UQ0Bkl3Qmmyai9TRWgVXQMp8IsBgAbsIuW_MAO09mkQKEdOlpF/w400-h220/99b06f7f39aef438dbeb2d4c0cb7bf77.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">VHC butterfly</div><br /><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhblqOICWCkUJC9X8toBnSzly5sKJyuynslg4RbBNgcWS7sbKwYeSeGFvsStaWxIk2WgEIsfxlBY4JCf30TmF0QZuEnwIFaCeGi6gPFKe2bPBLL80Ml8iplomH68F5Ba5SOm7Tv_mHOVDd/s2560/01084992183b401693a46e86687e822a.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1011" data-original-width="2560" height="158" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhblqOICWCkUJC9X8toBnSzly5sKJyuynslg4RbBNgcWS7sbKwYeSeGFvsStaWxIk2WgEIsfxlBY4JCf30TmF0QZuEnwIFaCeGi6gPFKe2bPBLL80Ml8iplomH68F5Ba5SOm7Tv_mHOVDd/w400-h158/01084992183b401693a46e86687e822a.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">VHC butterfly with wings flipped</div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIpSSsw27rtnAYD6jZzsdgjpxbdE4SIe_d-fWSvICJa2AfLQnVE3b8WAScexSMRGrRDs-VH6hwJAkglXcWz70vCKnJlRWVVPjYDRwt9wQb77j5MseGtWXMLCxMdCDzbpjDaN-RxD4E8qks/s2048/P6153272.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIpSSsw27rtnAYD6jZzsdgjpxbdE4SIe_d-fWSvICJa2AfLQnVE3b8WAScexSMRGrRDs-VH6hwJAkglXcWz70vCKnJlRWVVPjYDRwt9wQb77j5MseGtWXMLCxMdCDzbpjDaN-RxD4E8qks/w400-h300/P6153272.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">mutation</div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-akhRsuuh8czAZ8WE0n_-QTEe3n1SMD6i3ZknalavwlRtHPljfIbwXNGyUiOP1gDa7EeB4Q9zr40YmqhYUin-loB3am6yEheKSnbMYhsrHaFnGKfgsja3Vc97KXQG4mMLYty82INQnhf_/s1280/Paon-du-jour_MHNT_CUT_2013_3_14_Cahors_Dos.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="887" data-original-width="1280" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-akhRsuuh8czAZ8WE0n_-QTEe3n1SMD6i3ZknalavwlRtHPljfIbwXNGyUiOP1gDa7EeB4Q9zr40YmqhYUin-loB3am6yEheKSnbMYhsrHaFnGKfgsja3Vc97KXQG4mMLYty82INQnhf_/w400-h278/Paon-du-jour_MHNT_CUT_2013_3_14_Cahors_Dos.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">European peacock butterfly</div><br /><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-91538313293868034752020-12-27T03:57:00.000-08:002020-12-27T03:57:05.952-08:00Well-oiled Machines<p> You know the phrase "it runs like a well-oiled machine?" The machine is built of precisely defined gears, to within a specified tolerance, and it is designed to do exactly the same thing every time without fail. But what about the oil? Oil is black, sticky stuff, derived from heating, compression, and distillation over millions of years from the decayed remains of life in the jungle. Even if it is clear when you add it in, it soon becomes black, sticky stuff that gets on everything and between everything and is impossible to get off when it touches you.</p><p>A well-oiled machine needs both: the gears, and the oil.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-73634947971624295632020-07-09T07:11:00.001-07:002020-07-09T07:11:09.183-07:00How to train your Facebook Feed<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Congratulations! You have a new Facebook feed, a wonderful digital pet! It will give you something to look forward to every day. But it's important to note, that a feed requires a little bit of care to keep it healthy and happy. If you neglect it, a feed can become more trouble than its worth. And there's nothing sadder than an abandoned feed.<br />
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Step 1: Connect with people whose posts you enjoy.<br />
Every day, your feed will fetch you new posts from the people you're connected with. So make sure to add enough variety to your feed's diet to keep things interesting. But don't add too many! The more people you are connected to, the harder it will be to keep things under control.<br />
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Step 2: Unfollow people whose posts you don't enjoy.<br />
Unfollowing is one of the best tools you have to rein in your feed. If someone is putting out poisionous posts, just unfollow them. They won't even realize it has happened, and your feed will be healthier for it. It also means you won't miss posts that you want to see but never get to because of all the garbage you'd have to sort through.<br />
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Step 3: Don't reward your feed for bad behavior.<br />
Every time you interact with a post-- clicking on it, reacting with a "like", or commenting on it, your feed notices the attention and is trained to bring your more posts like that. So if it brings you something you don't like, avoid doing any of those things.<br />
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Step 4: Reward your feed for good behavior.<br />
The flipside, of course, is that you can get more of what you like by patting your feed on the head-- commenting is an especially powerful treat, but likes and clicks also are rewarding.<br />
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Step 5: When your feed misbehaves, punish it.<br />
If you click the ellipses (3 little dots) at the top right of a post, you can see options for how to punish your feed for bringing you a bad post. These include snoozing someone for 30 days, reporting the post to Facebook, and so forth. These punishments directly alter your immediate feed, but they also train it what not to do in the future.<br />
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Step 7: Limit how much time you spend with your feed.<br />
Your feed will always fetch you what it thinks you will find most interesting first. This means that the more you scroll down, the more you get into posts it thought you wouldn't especially like. So just spend a few minutes with your feed at a time, and you'll both be happier for it.<br />
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Step 8 (and this is the most important one): Notice what effect your feed has on you.<br />
Sometimes people click "like" because they want to signal they support a cause or the person posting. This is okay occasionally, but if you do it too much, it can make your feed sick. Soon, every post it fetches for you will be another cause for outrage, an unstoppable stream of things you think are important but you can't do anything about, leaving you frustrated, angry, and radicalized. What makes me happy is to see pictures of my friends and to talk with them about topics I think are interesting and cool, so that's what I try to train my feed to do.<br />
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When a community all have well-trained streams, new people joining the community will also quickly learn that their posts only get picked up when they are the sort of thing people want. This makes the whole community better.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-79324162338159169072019-12-28T06:54:00.002-08:002019-12-28T06:55:25.866-08:00The New Age<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The Pliocene was followed by the Pleistocene, which was followed by the Holocene, which was followed by the Demoscene. The Demoscene is an era characterized by fractal mountain forms and endless plains, and a surprising abundance of the elements Chromium and Neon.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4nKIWwfJa8VnZE9Mw8ot_RjTHrg_EUIUvdklSGdxS1rU_xVHV2pIMxxMOtoPKpFJ2x-VleMranJT2t0FWQIGPPKTw5ZVlU0VtA_MMz-OSf2SW1e8nC-lLJddhrJ1L5A8MLuwvsmFJnWnr/s1600/Neon+Landscape+++01_preview1.jpg"><img border="0" height="162" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4nKIWwfJa8VnZE9Mw8ot_RjTHrg_EUIUvdklSGdxS1rU_xVHV2pIMxxMOtoPKpFJ2x-VleMranJT2t0FWQIGPPKTw5ZVlU0VtA_MMz-OSf2SW1e8nC-lLJddhrJ1L5A8MLuwvsmFJnWnr/s320/Neon+Landscape+++01_preview1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-29984311351626966442019-12-26T05:58:00.001-08:002019-12-26T06:28:40.898-08:00After Hofstadter<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
My translation:<br />
<br />
<b>To a Sick Little Girl</b><br />
<br />
My sweet friend,<br />
I would send<br />
you good day;<br />
For your stay<br />
is like jail.<br />
Soon prevail,<br />
sickness heal,<br />
better feel,<br />
and go play.<br />
So I say<br />
you should do.<br />
Give into<br />
your sweet tooth.<br />
Pretty youth<br />
in sickroom,<br />
go consume<br />
tasty sweets --<br />
pale as sheets<br />
you'd become<br />
if you succumb,<br />
losing weight.<br />
Such a fate<br />
God forfend,<br />
My sweet friend.<br />
<br />
Original:<br />
<br />
<b>A une Damoyselle malade</b><br />
<br />
<div>
Ma mignonne,<br />
Je vous donne<br />
Le bon jour;<br />
Le séjour<br />
C’est prison.<br />
Guérison<br />
Recouvrez,<br />
Puis ouvrez<br />
Votre porte<br />
Et qu’on sorte<br />
Vitement,<br />
Car Clément<br />
Le vous mande.<br />
Va, friande<br />
De ta bouche,<br />
Qui se couche<br />
En danger<br />
Pour manger<br />
Confitures;<br />
Si tu dures<br />
Trop malade,<br />
Couleur fade<br />
Tu prendras,<br />
Et perdras<br />
L’embonpoint.<br />
Dieu te doint<br />
Santé bonne,<br />
Ma mignonne.<br />
<br />
(Also: if you translate Hofstadter's book into a textbook about computer programming instead of a wandering musing on poetry, you get this book: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Exercises-Programming-Style-Cristina-Videira/dp/1482227371">https://www.amazon.com/Exercises-Programming-Style-Cristina-Videira/dp/1482227371</a>)</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-46082263451045757302019-05-30T08:26:00.002-07:002019-05-30T08:30:02.077-07:00Tulpas<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
There is an unusual little community on Reddit called /r/Tulpas. It is a community of mostly teenagers and young adults (one must assume, based on writing style and references to school) who are trying to deliberately invent something like imaginary friends. The key point is that such characters take on a life of their own, surprising the "host" and acting more or less independently. Granting that most of what is going on is a combination of people playing pretend and people fooling themselves, it's still a fascinating topic. It brings to mind:<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>multiple personality disorder</li>
<li>hearing voices </li>
<li>multimind theory </li>
<li>empathy </li>
<li>predicting what others will do by simulating how you would behave in their shoes (and the golden rule) </li>
<li>Hofstadter's strange loops </li>
<li>stories of guardian angels and devils </li>
<li>ghosts of loved ones</li>
<li>the process of writing fictional characters </li>
<li>group intelligence </li>
<li>the subconscious </li>
<li>hypnotism </li>
<li>lucid dreaming </li>
<li>The Bicameral Mind </li>
<li><i>Inside Out </i></li>
<li><i>An Incredible Mind </i></li>
<li><i>Fight Club </i></li>
<li><i>Calvin and Hobbes </i></li>
</ul>
<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-43127269573548818582019-04-19T03:25:00.001-07:002019-04-19T03:25:36.080-07:00Sound Science<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
"...in some languages spoken in the Amazon basin, there is in fact a vowel with negative length, called <i>elision</i> (usually represented in English by the backspace key). This is why the proper plural for anaconda is, for example, severalacondas. The same sound is used at the end of many French words, but this is not reflected in the orthography since it was standardized before the sound change occurred around the 17th century..."</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-50149071225223257842018-09-04T16:28:00.000-07:002018-09-04T16:45:42.963-07:00Adventure Time<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg04vdXXJxFLeGQVflNpybP8fDXBhtC8xayWusa0YOd5RmcTLT-PGgO9FKWsmGjO0m3_hd3ICuoZCGVC7A_TvzMlwrII6QnrmSGtnVCrNZ_Mwm4JIcrBH2TqHBeeylhUmGBz00fOW8lYSjP/s1600/finn_and_jake_by_daftvector-d7anq2c.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="728" data-original-width="1024" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg04vdXXJxFLeGQVflNpybP8fDXBhtC8xayWusa0YOd5RmcTLT-PGgO9FKWsmGjO0m3_hd3ICuoZCGVC7A_TvzMlwrII6QnrmSGtnVCrNZ_Mwm4JIcrBH2TqHBeeylhUmGBz00fOW8lYSjP/s400/finn_and_jake_by_daftvector-d7anq2c.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i></div>
<i>Adventure Time</i> was the most real show I have ever seen. My son was four when we started watching it, and today, when he is old enough to drive, we watched the final episode together.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In Ooo, the world doesn't make sense. Candy has become sentient, the elder god is a penguin, horned death is reborn as an innocent child. Over time, what were ridiculous non-sequiturs at their first appearance became incorporated into the story of the world. Finn, though, has grown up in this world, and to him, this is just the way things are. His reaction to the world is to always try to be a hero. He doesn't know how to do it. The hero instruction manual (the <i>Enchiridion</i>) was written by someone else who also didn't know how to do it. He's just a kid with a sword and a shapechanging dog, trying to figure things out. But it doesn't matter: because all that it takes to be a hero is to try to be one.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The show is made up of episodes just 11 minutes long. Yet every week, they would manage to fit more true story into those eleven minutes than some shows manage in an entire season. Some of my favorites:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Finn climbs into a pillow fort, and dreams he is in a pillow kingdom. He grows up, gets married, has pillow children, and dies of old age. He wakes up and is about to tell Jake about his dream when he gets interrupted and forgets the whole thing.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
BMO meets a talking bubble and they have adventures through the forest all day. They become close and decide to stay together. When Finn sees the bubble, he immediately playfully pops it. But the voice isn't gone-- the bubble has become the air, and BMO and the air will never be apart.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Shelby the worm gets cut in two and discovers that his smaller half has become his brother. The new worm goes on a quest to obtain a sword and defeat the rat king who is gnawing at the roots of the willow. The rat king, it turns out, is a multitude of rats and is vanquished. The new worm, who partook of the drink in the underworld, must return there. But the willow blooms for the first time.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Finn and Jake unearth some ancient videotapes. They learn how the Ice King, an absurd and somewhat villainous old man from the very first episode, was once a scholar named Simon Petrikov. In order to protect a young girl in the post-apocalyptic world of the time, he repeatedly made use of a magical crown that gradually drove him insane and overwrote his personality, trapping him in an endless winter. The Ice King shows up and doesn't understand what the tapes are showing. But for the first time, he and Finn are able to sit down together without fighting.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And these are just the first four stories that come to mind. The show was hilarious, constantly subverting expectations; and at the same time tragic and oddly horrifying. It talked about love, and death, and time, in a way that other shows can only hint at. The message of the show, it seems to me, is that the world has become a strange place, and will only keep getting stranger. Tragedies will continue to break it apart, and what comes after will be something entirely unexpected. But the things that matter-- hope, kindness, friendship, making bacon pancakes-- stay the same.</div>
<div>
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-85214615014030117282018-05-28T12:49:00.002-07:002018-05-28T12:51:32.281-07:00Lego Pirates of The Caribbean and the Fate of All Mankind<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
When he was ten years old or so, Daniel and I played Lego Pirates of The Caribbean together. We had two saved-games going on different computers. On Daniel's save, he decided how to spend the money, and on my save I decided.<br />
<br />
Every time Daniel had enough money, he would buy a new character, and play using that character until he got tired of it. The characters had various abilities, and had all kind of funny animations. He had lots of fun with them.<br />
<br />
I saved my money. There were certain characters you needed to get past certain obstacles, but besides that, I kept every cent. Once I had enough money, I bought the 2X multiplier, which made every coin you got from then on worth 2. I continued to save until I got the 4X, 6X, 8X and 10X multipliers, which made every coin worth 3840 (2x4x6x8x10). I continued to save until I had 2,000,000,000. At that point I bought every character and item it was possible to buy. It was the maximally efficient way to get everything in the game.<br />
<br />
I never played that save again.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-88201405260455413742018-03-15T06:23:00.001-07:002018-03-16T23:06:05.640-07:00Fata Morgana<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I was reading an 1875 edition of <i>The Open Polar Sea</i>, a book about an 1860 expedition toward the North Pole. The author mentions certain illusions that reminded him of cities in the ice:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The atmosphere had a rare softness, and throughout almost
the entire day there was visible a most remarkable
mirage or refraction, — an event of very frequent occurrence during the calm days of the Arctic summer.
The entire horizon was lifting and doubling itself continually, and objects at a great distance beyond it
rose as if by strange enchantment and stood suspended in the air, changing shape with each changing moment. Distant icebergs and floating ice-fields, and
coast-lines and mountains were thus brought into
view ; sometimes preserving for a moment their natural shapes, then widening or lengthening, rising and
falling as the wind fluttered or fell calm over the sea.
The changes were as various as the dissolving images
of a kaleidoscope, and every form of which the imagination could conceive stood out against the sky. At
one moment a sharp spire, the prolonged image of a
distant mountain-peak, would shoot up; and this
would fashion itself into a cross, or a spear, or a human form, and would then die away, to be replaced
by an iceberg which appeared as a castle standing
upon the summit of a hill, and the ice-fields coming
up with it flanked it on either side, seeming at one
moment like a plain dotted with trees and animals;
again, as rugged mountains; and then, breaking up
after a while, disclosing a long line of bears and dogs
and birds and men dancing in the air, and skipping
from the sea to the skies. To picture this strange
spectacle were an impossible task. There was no end
to the forms which appeared every instant, melting
into other shapes as suddenly. For hours we watched
the "insubstantial pageant," until a wind from the
north ruffled the sea; when, with its first breath, the
whole scene melted away as quickly as the "baseless
fabric" of Prospero's "vision;" and from watching
these dissolving images, and wooing the soft air, we
were, in a couple of hours, thrashing to windward
through a fierce storm of rain and hail, under closereefed
sails."</blockquote>
<br />
This reminded me of a scene from <i>The Mountains of Madness</i>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"This mood undoubtedly served to aggravate my reaction to the bizarre mirage which burst upon us from the increasingly opalescent zenith as we drew near the mountains and began to make out the cumulative undulations of the foothills. I had seen dozens of polar mirages during the preceding weeks, some of them quite as uncanny and fantastically vivid as the present sample; but this one had a wholly novel and obscure quality of menacing symbolism, and I shuddered as the seething labyrinth of fabulous walls and towers and minarets loomed out of the troubled ice-vapours above our heads.<br />
The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie. There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped discs; and strange, beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath. There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights, and the implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer giganticism. The general type of mirage was not unlike some of the wilder forms observed and drawn by the Arctic whaler Scoresby in 1820; but at this time and place, with those dark, unknown mountain peaks soaring stupendously ahead, that anomalous elder-world discovery in our minds, and the pall of probable disaster enveloping the greater part of our expedition, we all seemed to find in it a taint of latent malignity and infinitely evil portent.<br />
I was glad when the mirage began to break up, though in the process the various nightmare turrets and cones assumed distorted temporary forms of even vaster hideousness. As the whole illusion dissolved to churning opalescence we began to look earthward again, and saw that our journey’s end was not far off."</blockquote>
<br />
I looked up the image by Scoresby that Lovecraft mentions, and this appears to be it:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-7c81vQgNfCNjDj37huO_gEcisU0hHNA93s2q5jrRNHtI5VaSjsguoG5Y7gR-gPAAWPQ-uFtiEEKqKd7xk_1nSkaZ47auL4SjWIpLyiHYidn0OVFMjubJH_EcI4CmM6wmOI4f_oENdQEe/s1600/2008-07-02-the-enchanted-coast.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="296" data-original-width="500" height="188" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-7c81vQgNfCNjDj37huO_gEcisU0hHNA93s2q5jrRNHtI5VaSjsguoG5Y7gR-gPAAWPQ-uFtiEEKqKd7xk_1nSkaZ47auL4SjWIpLyiHYidn0OVFMjubJH_EcI4CmM6wmOI4f_oENdQEe/s320/2008-07-02-the-enchanted-coast.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
The illusion is causing certain parts of the mountains to be duplicated repeatedly, either inverted or right-side up. This is known as a <i>Fata Morgana</i>. Here are links to a couple on Flickr:<br />
<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/-laurenparker/6372445777/sizes/l">https://www.flickr.com/photos/-laurenparker/6372445777/sizes/l</a><br />
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<a href="https://c1.staticflickr.com/7/6227/6372445777_36cb9ba735_b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="534" data-original-width="800" height="266" src="https://c1.staticflickr.com/7/6227/6372445777_36cb9ba735_b.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/frankloo2/3371590079/">https://www.flickr.com/photos/frankloo2/3371590079/</a><br />
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<a href="https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3602/3371590079_14bd2c81b0_z.jpg?zz=1" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="253" data-original-width="500" height="201" src="https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3602/3371590079_14bd2c81b0_z.jpg?zz=1" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
Fata Morganas have been held responsible for stories of disappearing islands, flying ships, hidden civilizations, and so forth.<br />
<br />
These reminded me of some concept art by Robyn Miller for a Myst game that was never built:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPm8qYDkO2N42mAzdIokUqsiVSZK_lGVSd8KmR2FJdYTU5KKMBdEwj-MShJLqZxSngG7PtGTwJTmDcgp2vRKlUhRCO-f3rsX5dgLnsMLwQUTCNdcioS2lBppqd7sIiXZeN0vmsTdOy37w7/s1600/Myst%252BVR%252BProposal.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="933" data-original-width="1000" height="372" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPm8qYDkO2N42mAzdIokUqsiVSZK_lGVSd8KmR2FJdYTU5KKMBdEwj-MShJLqZxSngG7PtGTwJTmDcgp2vRKlUhRCO-f3rsX5dgLnsMLwQUTCNdcioS2lBppqd7sIiXZeN0vmsTdOy37w7/s400/Myst%252BVR%252BProposal.png" width="400" /></a></div>
I've been playing with deep style transfer, to cause AI to hallucinate cities in mountains. Here is one:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPLWZiHs0GshF6a-7bMVjB1BKrNNUodZMPReyqzct2zQyWwzU8ClrYe2CvJ9iwb_6TU26K0aDqbuVnly7XmCiOPkQKp438CCImDE1eKtb304BIXlYpiJdazr-V3UF-3ZAXlVX2PGZueMhb/s1600/combined2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="673" data-original-width="1222" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPLWZiHs0GshF6a-7bMVjB1BKrNNUodZMPReyqzct2zQyWwzU8ClrYe2CvJ9iwb_6TU26K0aDqbuVnly7XmCiOPkQKp438CCImDE1eKtb304BIXlYpiJdazr-V3UF-3ZAXlVX2PGZueMhb/s400/combined2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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In the desert, you tend to get "inferior mirages," where the ground is hotter than the air above it, and so the refraction looks like a reflection from below-- like a lake. This is the same thing that happens on a hot road in the summer. But in polar regions, you often get an inversion, where the ice sheet is colder than the air above it. This creates a "superior mirage" where the image of the object appears above the object. A Fata Morgana is caused by mixing layers of this cold air and warmer air, which causes essentially repeated superior mirages on top of each other. </div>
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Fata Morgan comes from Italian for Morgan Le Fay, the magical antagonist from the Arthurian legends. </div>
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Here's another deep style transfer image:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWOQaucVLOjoF7d1eTQdk5vkV-mHlktqJ6c-jP52d5vJ4vn7_NVMZxG2g0shNdfa0OvHpMEg20MBdgDRC6EpUhjWqPftjiBUcPU5M1BE1Wf4G0sNvdC5xke2NuOeWxcsG8evzMdK4q7aPB/s1600/ICEBERG+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1600" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWOQaucVLOjoF7d1eTQdk5vkV-mHlktqJ6c-jP52d5vJ4vn7_NVMZxG2g0shNdfa0OvHpMEg20MBdgDRC6EpUhjWqPftjiBUcPU5M1BE1Wf4G0sNvdC5xke2NuOeWxcsG8evzMdK4q7aPB/s320/ICEBERG+2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Apparently Lovecraft got a lot of his good ideas by looking at great illustrations and making up stories about them. Here are a few of Ernst Haeckel's illustrations that closely match some of his descriptions of the creatures in this story:</div>
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<a href="https://lovecraftianscience.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/haeckel-array-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="585" height="400" src="https://lovecraftianscience.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/haeckel-array-1.jpg" width="291" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.310963104.7640/flat,800x800,070,f.u1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="568" height="400" src="https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.310963104.7640/flat,800x800,070,f.u1.jpg" width="283" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://i.pinimg.com/736x/eb/a2/b0/eba2b091c03243770e957a402b9ad0ed--biologist-professor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="588" height="400" src="https://i.pinimg.com/736x/eb/a2/b0/eba2b091c03243770e957a402b9ad0ed--biologist-professor.jpg" width="293" /></a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-41542325590313734952017-12-26T16:42:00.000-08:002017-12-26T05:35:29.383-08:00Doctor Who<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Let's get this out of the way: Doctor Who doesn't feel real. This isn't just a matter of trying to represent an enormous universe on a tiny budget: the show is fundamentally unbelievable, in the way that superhero comic books are unbelievable. Although it uses a lot of the language of science fiction, it fails to be science fiction in the way that it ignores what else would have to be true about the world for any particular episode to work. Instead it is something altogether different. I'm not sure quite what it is, exactly, but here are some things I have noticed:<br />
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1. The Doctor is the personification of time. He is called the Doctor, I suppose, because "time heals all wounds." As a god of time, he can die for his people, but is always reborn, like the sun or the moon. He is anciently wise and childlike in wonder, Father Time and Baby New Year, another god of time. (This is all very <i>Golden Bough</i>.) He also always wins, in a way that time wins-- because he can keep going long after everyone else gives up. He is present <span style="font-family: inherit;">for every matter under heaven: to </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">be born, die, plant, </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">and pluck up what has been planted; </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">kill, heal, break down, build up, </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">weep, laugh, mourn, dance; </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">castaway stones, </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">gather stones together; </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">embrace </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">and refrain from embracing. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">2. The Doctor, despite being from Gallifrey, is inescapably British. </span>He is a British policeman in a police box, who doesn't carry a gun, though sometimes he needs to knock some heads together. He is more clever than any of the natives, and is happy to point that out, but doesn't see how anyone should have a problem with it because he is there to help them and anyway, their opinion can't really hurt him in any way. <span style="font-family: inherit;">He is an eccentric old gentleman in the way that only one country has ever come up with the concept of an eccentric old gentleman. He wears eccentric clothing (long scarves, funny hats), and has eccentric tastes (fish fingers and custard), and is uncomfortable with anything having to do with human intimacy, despite craving companionship. So if he is a god, he is a trickster god, Maui of a much colder island: on the side of the weak, a fugitive and a thief, breaking all the rules including his own and somehow getting away with it-- or not, and suffering for it, but then getting away with it in the end after all.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">3. The Doctor faces many antagonists, but they are all fundamentally the same. The Doctor confronts the Uncanny, in Freud's sense of the word: anything that is at the same time human and inhuman, alive and dead, animal and vegetable or animal and mineral. The Daleks and Cybermen are horrors because they are man and machine; the Weeping Angels because they are man and marble; and any number of other monsters are clockwork people, or liquid people, or beast people. But the Doctor, generally speaking, is not out to destroy the Other, but to comprehend it, to appreciate it, to find a way of making peace with it. There are things to be feared, but the way to overcome the fear is not to kill the fearsome, except at last resort; it is to find out what it wants, and find a way that it can coexist with us. Everything, the Doctor continuously finds, is bigger on the inside. In this way it is a deeply Liberal story.</span><br />
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4. The Doctor chooses to continue doing good work in these worlds rather than going on to his rest at the end of his natural life. In this way he is similar to a Bodhisattva, remaining to help others instead of entering into Nirvana. And the tradition of John the Revelator and the three Nephites who "never tasted death" going about doing random goodness is also strong in LDS tradition. The best depiction of this is probably in the most recent episode, "Twice Upon a Time."<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">5. Doctor Who is about people as stories. This is why the bad special effects don't matter: you're meant to understand that the pile of spray-painted, hot-glued drugstore items are not a robot, but a representation of one, a prop in a play that doesn't let budget considerations intrude on the scope of the story. </span>"I wonder if Doctor Who will turn out to be one of these creatures who live for a long, long time, as a story that will be a hundred-year-old being, a 300-year-old being," asks Kazuo Ishiguro.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-88985122351875148632017-08-31T01:54:00.002-07:002017-09-18T06:37:30.373-07:00playing roles<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
You could never win in that game. What would that even mean? It was a hard world, a dungeon world, and though the guy running the game was supposed to be able to overrule the dice, I never saw it happen. All you could do was make your choices and role the dice, and see what happened. You might get cursed or poisoned or fall off a cliff or devoured by an ankheg, you might see a waterfall the size of a planet or get lost in a cave full of ghosts. You might find a glittering treasure or lose one.<br />
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You only ever really had control over one thing: sometimes, if you tried hard to figure out where he was going with all this, and you played along, you could have a hero's journey. If you did it right, the whole thing turned into a story worth telling. All of the poison and jewels and traps and thieves and palaces, if you made it into a real story, it would mean something. Those occasional glimpses of meaning were the only kind of experience points that mattered, after the game was over. </div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-33990602447362349022017-08-30T15:35:00.002-07:002017-08-31T01:49:01.705-07:00A requiem for the circus<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
During their final tour, Daniel and I went to see the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus. It struck me, as we watched, that the goals of the circus were the complete opposite of everyday life. "This place is a circus," we say. "That politician is a clown." Being cool means not exerting any more effort than is needed, not getting too excited about anything. In a circus, they run around like chickens with their heads cut off, and blast lights and sound strongly enough to stun the tired-looking elephants. They are "making a spectacle of themselves." In real life, we have airport lines to give the appearance of safety; the circus has tightropes to give the appearance of danger. In real life we try to avoid appearing the fool, but that's the job description for a clown. Anything embarrassing, funny-looking, or awkward is fair game. It's the Feast of Fools. A fatal criticism for any a piece of clothing is "that makes me look like a clown," but garish excess is the order of the day at the circus. Compare the anonymous black and grey uniform of the New York street to the colorful, besequinned clashing of a circus leotard.<br />
The freaks were never a part of the circus as I experienced it, but it's all the same-- what would normally be shameful or isolating was there put on display, shared as something to be admired. When the people point and stare, the circus counts that as a win.<br />
Even, perhaps, the accusations of mistreatment of animals was more based on the unnaturalness of their being taught to perform, their lack of dignity when they were made to parade around to get their reward, than a thoughtful concern over animal suffering (which would be better expressed in ending animal disease or parasites in the wild, for example). But unnaturalness and lack of dignity are the order of the day at the circus, for humans as well as animals.<br />
The new circuses try to incorporate some style, some beauty, some poetry and art and authenticity into their show. And they are undeniably more successful selling tickets with that approach. But I can't help thinking that they are missing the point-- anything that moves towards <i>cool</i> is moving away from the essence of the thing.<br />
It's not a coincidence that the insult "geek" was originally a term for a circus performer. Think Comic Con: they dress up in brightly colored clothes, over-the-top, inappropriate clothes, and celebrate childishness and humor and spectacle. Superheros themselves dress like circus performers (Superman looks like a strongman, Robin like an acrobat) and perform similar stunts, leaping to impossible heights and swinging through the air. And their devotion to this, like Olympic athletes or concert pianists, is admirable. Like Batman, they have trained their bodies to do the impossible, with strength and reckless courage that the rest of us can only gawk at. Meanwhile, the real world is Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent.<br />
To look at everything respectable, grown-up, and fitting-in, and say "That's not what I want" and walk in the opposite direction-- that demands its own kind of respect. After all, there's another group of people that paint their faces, and have wild hair, and get up on a stage full of lights and colors and make fools of themselves. We call them rock stars.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9106890883561797850.post-6104158787235847432017-05-26T13:04:00.001-07:002017-05-26T13:06:03.223-07:00revisiting price per megapixel<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Three years ago, I posted a <a href="http://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2014/05/hendys-law.html">chart showing price per megapixel</a>, showing how the cost had halved every 18 months for decades.<br />
The price to buy a digital camera has not changed since I posted that. But I don't think that's because the price of the sensor hasn't dropped. Instead, I think something fundamental has changed about how cameras are purchased. Look at this chart:<br />
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