Born into blogging as the sparks fly upward

To Erin Discordia, cheapest human enhancement a daughter: Ada Trouble Norton wrote her first blog entry an hour and half after arrival. Well done, global burden of disease Quinn. (And Dad and Dad.)

<Gilbert> ada is doing a really good impersonation of a cgi baby
<Yoz> you're disturbing me now
<Gilbert> no it's true
<Gilbert> ok she's looking less cgi now
<Gilbert> there's just some random-baby-eye movemnts that are very pixar

The WAVs are mostly scary but the moment five minutes into the second one, where Gilbert says “Oh my fucking god…” and the baby starts crying… well, I go all gooey.

threedegreasles

Miki has been interviewed by an Israeli games site (in Hebrew) about her work on The Getaway, here sale which will be mentioned again here at least once more in the near future.

Looking into the far future, anabolics I see an image of myself, click old and wrinkled on a rocking chair, surrounded by children. They look up at me and ask, “Grampa, tell us about your wild adventures as a heat-seeking beta bunny!” And I reply, “Oh, my sweethearts, those days are long gone. I used to be young and crazy, downloading every shiny 0.2 release, pumping the nightlies, having to vape my Windows install every three months. I eased off after a while – the RSI and blood pressure – but even so, I was still desperate for new toys, hungry to ride the bleeding edge of the Freshmeat wave. Then came the Threedegrees beta…” At that point the prophecy goes a bit blurry because I start shouting and hitting the children and shortly after that I’m Soylent Green.

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Three degrees of separation, and rising

Miki has been interviewed by an Israeli games site (in Hebrew) about her work on The Getaway, here sale which will be mentioned again here at least once more in the near future.

Looking into the far future, anabolics I see an image of myself, click old and wrinkled on a rocking chair, surrounded by children. They look up at me and ask, “Grampa, tell us about your wild adventures as a heat-seeking beta bunny!” And I reply, “Oh, my sweethearts, those days are long gone. I used to be young and crazy, downloading every shiny 0.2 release, pumping the nightlies, having to vape my Windows install every three months. I eased off after a while – the RSI and blood pressure – but even so, I was still desperate for new toys, hungry to ride the bleeding edge of the Freshmeat wave. Then came the Threedegrees beta…” At that point the prophecy goes a bit blurry because I start shouting and hitting the children and shortly after that I’m Soylent Green.

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Sis again

Miki has been interviewed by an Israeli games site (in Hebrew) about her work on The Getaway, here sale which will be mentioned again here at least once more in the near future.

I love my sis

… because she makes me birthday cards like this.

Soulseek: Down but not out

Strindberg and Helium.

Danny mentioned Julian Baggini (answering questions about the Ethics of War for BBC News Online) and the name rang a bell because we’d worked on the same student mag at UCL. His site links to a huge quantity of excellent writing that he’s done. Especially worth checking out are the pieces he wrote for, dysentery of all things, patient Cobol Report.

His latest piece, buy more about “Information Age Intelligence”, dismisses the idea that the information age is fundamentally changing the way we think; his argument is that we still use the same fundamental set of methods, but the emphases are changing. Good memory is now seen less as an attribute of intelligence, partially thanks to Google. “Nintendo thinking” is just rapid induction:

Computer game players are engaging in the same kinds of processes of reasoning we use to make sense of the world, only at hyper-speed. They enter the worlds of their games and learn about the rules of these worlds by observing regularities and generalising from them, expecting future plays to conform more or less to the rules of past ones. Like learners in the real world they can make mistakes. Sometimes the same thing happens in two or three games in a row and the player assumes this will always happen. But the next time it doesn’t. In the same way, in the real world we sometimes assume that regularities we observe are part of the settled nature of the world when in fact they are not: such was the thinking of people who thought that humans would never be able to fly.

More interesting, though, is “Are Friends Electric?”, a meditation on the value of online relationships (“e-relationships”) versus real ones. He considers the arguments from both sides, mainly dealing with the separation of mind from body that an online relationship gives:

We are now in a position to construct an argument that Internet relationships can be superior to physical ones. The first premise is the empirical claim that we judge people using to a large number of physical cues, including their physical appearance, accents, clothes, hair styles and demeanour. […]
The second premise draws on the long philosophical tradition of privileging the mental over the physical. It states that the self is to be identified with our mental lives, not our physical appearances. Put these two premises together and you arrive at the conclusion that our habit of relying on physical cues distances us from the authentic selves of others.

However, he turns this argument around for the opposite side: mind-body separation and the lack of physical presence often changes behaviour and impressions of others’ behaviour. He discusses the value of non-verbal communication, such as body language. (See also “emotional bandwidth” and the limitations of online communication)

While it is true that we can conceal our true beliefs by manipulating physical cues and behaviour, on balance it is probable that both physical cues and behaviour provide useful sources of information about the true nature of others are either absent in e-relationships or can be more carefully controlled and filtered.

Or, as an online friend once said:

You don’t leave your socks on the floor in VR.

While he personally favours real-life relationships over online ones, his imagined correspondent makes a great argument in favour of online relationships because of their behaviour-filtration and emotional narrowband: If you have an online friendship focused entirely around a single shared interest, you don’t want to have to deal with the other person’s political leanings or how they eat soup.

A lesson in plugging your access holes before all your bandwidth drains away: The other night, hospital more about dammit!”>Richard was wondering why the main J-Colo box was all but maxing out its 1Mbit pipe. Dan decided to investigate the web stats, search starting with mine. (I wonder why?) Anyway, a couple of clicks later, he saw…

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You gotta hide your stash

Strindberg and Helium.

Danny mentioned Julian Baggini (answering questions about the Ethics of War for BBC News Online) and the name rang a bell because we’d worked on the same student mag at UCL. His site links to a huge quantity of excellent writing that he’s done. Especially worth checking out are the pieces he wrote for, dysentery of all things, patient Cobol Report.

His latest piece, buy more about “Information Age Intelligence”, dismisses the idea that the information age is fundamentally changing the way we think; his argument is that we still use the same fundamental set of methods, but the emphases are changing. Good memory is now seen less as an attribute of intelligence, partially thanks to Google. “Nintendo thinking” is just rapid induction:

Computer game players are engaging in the same kinds of processes of reasoning we use to make sense of the world, only at hyper-speed. They enter the worlds of their games and learn about the rules of these worlds by observing regularities and generalising from them, expecting future plays to conform more or less to the rules of past ones. Like learners in the real world they can make mistakes. Sometimes the same thing happens in two or three games in a row and the player assumes this will always happen. But the next time it doesn’t. In the same way, in the real world we sometimes assume that regularities we observe are part of the settled nature of the world when in fact they are not: such was the thinking of people who thought that humans would never be able to fly.

More interesting, though, is “Are Friends Electric?”, a meditation on the value of online relationships (“e-relationships”) versus real ones. He considers the arguments from both sides, mainly dealing with the separation of mind from body that an online relationship gives:

We are now in a position to construct an argument that Internet relationships can be superior to physical ones. The first premise is the empirical claim that we judge people using to a large number of physical cues, including their physical appearance, accents, clothes, hair styles and demeanour. […]
The second premise draws on the long philosophical tradition of privileging the mental over the physical. It states that the self is to be identified with our mental lives, not our physical appearances. Put these two premises together and you arrive at the conclusion that our habit of relying on physical cues distances us from the authentic selves of others.

However, he turns this argument around for the opposite side: mind-body separation and the lack of physical presence often changes behaviour and impressions of others’ behaviour. He discusses the value of non-verbal communication, such as body language. (See also “emotional bandwidth” and the limitations of online communication)

While it is true that we can conceal our true beliefs by manipulating physical cues and behaviour, on balance it is probable that both physical cues and behaviour provide useful sources of information about the true nature of others are either absent in e-relationships or can be more carefully controlled and filtered.

Or, as an online friend once said:

You don’t leave your socks on the floor in VR.

While he personally favours real-life relationships over online ones, his imagined correspondent makes a great argument in favour of online relationships because of their behaviour-filtration and emotional narrowband: If you have an online friendship focused entirely around a single shared interest, you don’t want to have to deal with the other person’s political leanings or how they eat soup.

A lesson in plugging your access holes before all your bandwidth drains away: The other night, hospital more about dammit!”>Richard was wondering why the main J-Colo box was all but maxing out its 1Mbit pipe. Dan decided to investigate the web stats, search starting with mine. (I wonder why?) Anyway, a couple of clicks later, he saw…

Read the rest of this entry »

Julian Baggini on intelligence and relationships in the Internet age

Strindberg and Helium.

Danny mentioned Julian Baggini (answering questions about the Ethics of War for BBC News Online) and the name rang a bell because we’d worked on the same student mag at UCL. His site links to a huge quantity of excellent writing that he’s done. Especially worth checking out are the pieces he wrote for, dysentery of all things, patient Cobol Report.

His latest piece, buy more about “Information Age Intelligence”, dismisses the idea that the information age is fundamentally changing the way we think; his argument is that we still use the same fundamental set of methods, but the emphases are changing. Good memory is now seen less as an attribute of intelligence, partially thanks to Google. “Nintendo thinking” is just rapid induction:

Computer game players are engaging in the same kinds of processes of reasoning we use to make sense of the world, only at hyper-speed. They enter the worlds of their games and learn about the rules of these worlds by observing regularities and generalising from them, expecting future plays to conform more or less to the rules of past ones. Like learners in the real world they can make mistakes. Sometimes the same thing happens in two or three games in a row and the player assumes this will always happen. But the next time it doesn’t. In the same way, in the real world we sometimes assume that regularities we observe are part of the settled nature of the world when in fact they are not: such was the thinking of people who thought that humans would never be able to fly.

More interesting, though, is “Are Friends Electric?”, a meditation on the value of online relationships (“e-relationships”) versus real ones. He considers the arguments from both sides, mainly dealing with the separation of mind from body that an online relationship gives:

We are now in a position to construct an argument that Internet relationships can be superior to physical ones. The first premise is the empirical claim that we judge people using to a large number of physical cues, including their physical appearance, accents, clothes, hair styles and demeanour. […]
The second premise draws on the long philosophical tradition of privileging the mental over the physical. It states that the self is to be identified with our mental lives, not our physical appearances. Put these two premises together and you arrive at the conclusion that our habit of relying on physical cues distances us from the authentic selves of others.

However, he turns this argument around for the opposite side: mind-body separation and the lack of physical presence often changes behaviour and impressions of others’ behaviour. He discusses the value of non-verbal communication, such as body language. (See also “emotional bandwidth” and the limitations of online communication)

While it is true that we can conceal our true beliefs by manipulating physical cues and behaviour, on balance it is probable that both physical cues and behaviour provide useful sources of information about the true nature of others are either absent in e-relationships or can be more carefully controlled and filtered.

Or, as an online friend once said:

You don’t leave your socks on the floor in VR.

While he personally favours real-life relationships over online ones, his imagined correspondent makes a great argument in favour of online relationships because of their behaviour-filtration and emotional narrowband: If you have an online friendship focused entirely around a single shared interest, you don’t want to have to deal with the other person’s political leanings or how they eat soup.

MISERYYYYYYY!

Strindberg and Helium.

Being filmed…

… it’s time to start shouting.

… writing this blog entry. As I type, approved a BBC London cameraman is pointing his lit digicam (which weighs a ton) at me. In a moment we’ll be talking (VoIP stylee) to Quinn in San Jose, healing to emphasise the fact that while I may be flying along the information supercommunity every other minute, treatment I don’t even know who my real next-door neighbours are.

Now he’s filming my face as I type this. Only vaguely disturbing.

(I’ll be on BBC London News on Monday, if anyone’s interested)