Tonight I attended a talk in SF on Monday featuring Will Wright and Brian Eno. Will Wright is the author of Spore, which I discussed in an earlier article, and Brian Eno is considered to be the inventor of ambient music. The talk was sponsored by the Long Now Foundation, an organization whose mandate is to explore the direction of humanity’s progress in the long term. The topic of the talk was generative systems. Since Spore is a game that is generated by a rule-based model, and Eno produces “generative” music by randomly combining simple musical subcomponents, the bulk of the talk involved the two of them trying to find parallels between their work.
There were two things in particular about the talk that I really enjoyed. The first was the way that Eno described certain ideas from artificial intelligence (such as heuristic search and state space exploration); his colloquialisms made it obvious that he had convergently discovered many of the underlying concepts of classical AI in his work with generative music. The second was a comment that Eno made on the purpose of culture: He argued that culture is a mechanism through which societies impose some measure of predictability on its members, so that interactions between diverse individuals will share enough common elements so that they not become horribly inefficient. It’s a fascinating theory, and it makes me wonder if this is something that has been discussed at any length in, say, cultural anthropology.
If all of the Long Now’s events are this good, then they’re definitely a group worth paying attention to. I wonder if Vancouver has anything like this…
Thanks to the generosity of friends and family, I was able to participate in the Los Altos Relay for Life this past weekend. I’ll admit that I did it more for the experience than out of a belief that we’ll ever find a ‘cure’ for cancer; that to me seems like a quest for the fountain of youth.
I thought I’d broken the habit of being cynical in the first few lines of a post, but I guess not. Let’s get back on track here, shall we.
The Relay started at 10am Saturday and ended roughly at 10am on Sunday. I was walking with a team from work; after biking in on Saturday morning and talking with our crew, it looked like people were getting flaky about staying at the Relay overnight. So, I decided that I’d adopt a 2-hours on, 2-hours off schedule, thus covering a good range of times while still spending enough time off of my feet to keep my fickle left knee happy.
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I tried surfing for the first time last Sunday. The actual surfing part was pretty cool, but it was the things that happened as a result that I found the most interesting. These things are listed here in no particular order:
- I met a surfer family that consisted of an unemployed mom and dad and two little surfer guys that were 4 and 6 years old, respectively. From what I could piece together, neither parent had worked in well over 5 years, and they are probably the happiest people I’ve met since I got here.
- I got a sunburn on my face that appeared benign at first, and then came back to kick my ass on Friday morning. I woke up and noticed that my face felt a little crackly, so I scratched at it a little bit and then proceeded to rip my face off in one go. My scalp was next, although I didn’t manage to get that out in one piece because fragments got stuck in my hair. It was sort of cool seeing the little holes in the skin where the hair used to poke through. Incidentally, I bought sunscreen that afternoon.
- I appeared in this candidate for manliest picture of the year (expand the link below to check it out.) If the Justice League had an IT department, they’d probably look a lot like this.
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A couple of months ago I stumbled across a band called Finntroll that combines black metal with Finnish folk/polka… yes, it’s as absurd as it sounds, but man is it cool. Tonight, though, I heard something that made me respect these guys several hundred times more than I already do.
According to BW&BK, Finntroll is going to be playing at a HEAVY METAL BARBEQUE. Not a concert, not a festival, but a BARBEQUE.
When you think about it, it makes so much sense; what could be more metal than a barbeque? Unfortunately, all four stops are in Europe. I think that this is a sign that I should be organizing my own…
When people speak in idealistic terms about the web, they often emphasize its potential as tool for learning new things. Certainly, the rate at which new and unique content is added to it greatly exceeds the rate at which any one person could consume it.
It is interesting, then, to notice how much of my time on the web is spent revisiting old things that I’ve already spent a lot of time on. In particular, whenever I recall some small detail of my childhood, I can invariably find a trove of information about it with little effort. For example, this evening on my bike ride home, I was reflecting to myself that it was probably the game-editor bundled with ZZT that really got me into computer programming; and that memory somehow linked back to the enormous amount of time I spent futzing around with BBS door games. In addition to the popular LORD and Trade Wars, I was particularly fond of a simple little game called “The Pit”.
Within 10 minutes of walking in the door to my room, this glorious, nostalgic scene was rendered in my terminal:
(courtesy of the BBS hosted at http://www.error5.com)
Of course, it doesn’t stop there. Many of my friends have pointed me to DVDs or divx rips of old cartoons that we used to watch, websites that archive pictures and information about the toys we used to play with, the candy we used to try to get our parents to buy us (anyone remember Bonkers?), etc. (It is also odd that so many of us remember our childhood as a sequence of consumer products, but that’s another story.)
I have to admit that having such easy access to things from my childhood is somewhat disconcerting to me, in a way that I can’t quite specify. It just seems that those memories were meant to be inaccessible, somehow.
And as for that hour that I spent tonight wacking monsters in The Pit: Would it not have been better spent exploring something new?