Mindstab.net

I was catching up on my reading of H+ Magazine when I stumbled across an interview with author Peter Watts of whom I hadn’t heard of before [H+ Spring 2009, pg 60]. The interview cast him in an intriguing light for me. More specifically it stated that he wrote interesting dark sci-fi that dealt with human consciousness and even more specifically that he explored the idea that what we currently consider mental disabilities or maladys like MPD and PTSD may actually just be new and superior mental evolutions waiting to find fertile ground to sprout in. I have a massive weak spot for speculative sci-fi exploring consciousness so I couldn’t help myself but go out and buy his first and his latest books.

I started with his first book “Starfish”. The author is quite proud of Starfish for getting flagged as “too dark” to be translated and published in Russia. I found it interesting if a bit slow moving but he has a bit of a distinct style and something new is nice. The book ends a bit oddly, but as it turns out, his next books continue on and form what is known as “The Rifters Trilogy” so I will be back to pick those up later. As his first novel it flows a bit weirdly, but not so much that I didn’t enjoy it and won’t be back.

Then I got to his newest book “Blindsight”. It was exactly what I was looking for. Dark and depressing as it explores many different ways of mental functioning and shedding some new light on discussions I hadn’t seen before. I loved it! Additionally he cites a lot of material in the references section of his book and I’m probably going to give reading a few of those a try too. I don’t really want to spoil much, but it was a breath of fresh air to get some speculative fiction from this decade exploring consciousness issues. A lot has happened since some of my old favorite fiction was written. I just finished reading Blindsight so I’m still caught up in its hype, so we’ll have to see how it sinks in, but right now it feels like it’s one of my new favorite books, sitting up there with the very aged “Destination Void” and “Dune” [Frank Herbert].

I think part of what makes his style different from most authors is that he is a trained marine biologist and has spent an awful lot of time thinking about deep dark far away places with weird creatures in them that are already surprisingly alien. As an interesting side note, Peter Watts hails from my home town of Vancouver and went to the same University I have. Neat.

He’s not rich, so I’d love it if you too would go out and buy a book or two of his, it’ll be a good time. If you aren’t yet convinced, and have half an ounce of cunning, you can find all his books under the Creative Commons on his site too.

Excerpt from the H+ interview with Peter Watts
“… but blindsight doesn’t posit a crew of rejects and outcasts;
they’re an A-Team at the top of their respective fields.
We baselines may regard them as dysfunctional because
we don’t live in their civilization, but they do just fine
in the late-21st Century circles they move in. They do a lot better
than we would. From a purely pragmatic perspective, I chose
them to illustrate the theme; each character illustrates an aspect
of consciousness relevant to the overall argument. but again, why
regard them as evolutionary blind alleys? These folks are supremely
adapted to their habitat; to regard them as blind alleys because they
wouldn’t be the life of the party in 2009 is a bit like describing a fish
as ill-adapted because it can’t breathe air.”

Blindsight blurb:
Who you do send to meet the alien
when the alien doesn’t want to meet?

But you’d give anything for that to be true, if you
only knew what was waiting for them…

• Insufficient data – Charlie's Diary
  "What is the minimum number of people you need in order to maintain (not necessarily to extend) our current level of technological civilization?

  There are huge political ramifications hiding behind this question. Let me unpack them for you."

  (tags: Society, Technology, Space Colonization, Politics, Ann Rynd is wrong)
• Peter Norvig's Library
  Reading material of Google's head of R&D Peter Norvig
  (tags: Reading, Peter Norvig)

So, what have I got on the go?

• School: Last semester, just two classes, but they are looking like they’ll be delicious and meaty
  • CS 411: Compiler design: We build a java compiler
  • CS 415: We build an operating system, fun times with C!
  • …actually, I’m also taking spanish!
• “Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp” by Peter Norvig. I got this for christmas and have started to work through it. I’m really excited about getting further into it. In the middle of it I’ll be implementing prolog in Lisp and the in the latter half I’ll be working on a natural language processor! Not to mention tons of other stuff, this book is huge and dense.
• BattleCode 2010 has just started so my team and I are just about to start digging into that. Lots of AI coding to be done there.
• Peter Michaux’s Scheme from Scratch. I stumbled upon this from Hacker News. This fellow wants to write his own scheme to scratch a mental itch, and he’s blogging each step and posting the code as well. I think it looks like a great amount of fun and that I too have that mental itch, so I’m following along, using his blog as a guide and looking at his code as well when I get stuck, but doing my best to do it myself.
• The great mindstab.net migration to the cloud! Yes, setting up an entirely new server and migrating years of site history and email etc can take a lot of work.

So yeah, I have an insane amount of work on my plate, but I couldn’t be more excited! All of it is thrilling and amazing!

Also, if I haven’t mentioned it before, the dynamic duo of Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge of Lug Radio fame are back with a new podcast Shot of Jaq! It’s fun. Really, those two Brits have been the source of the only podcast’s I’ve ever listened to. They are a great source of both Linux and British in my weekly diet.

But now I’m stoked to just find out that Ximian/Linux rockstar coder Nat Friedman and Tomboy creator and a rock star in his own right Alex Graveley have started a brand new podcast Hacker Medley that is the first new podcast that I’m actually quite excited to try out.

Finally, I’m reading “Pattern Recognition” by William Gibson in my spare time (read: on the bus) and finding it pleasant.

So I’ve been adding a lot to my RSS reading list lately. In an attempt to broaden my world view a bit I added some stuff from the BBC and CBC. And for my own interest in random things I added some stuff like grinding.be, Coilhouse and a few other treats. I’ve also expanded my geek reading with sites like Phoronix and a few others. So in summery, lots of new additions!

Anyways, through all this, planet.mindstab.net grew less and less reflective of what I’ve been reading, but I finally got around to refreshing it’s list of feeds, so go take a look, thats what I read or skim every day. It’s a massive flow of information on things I wish to stay informed on. (The full reading list is displayed on the right side of the site, it’s not small :))

As a note, the PlanetPlanet software that runs it is glitchy. I cannot seem to make it do times properly, and it insists on adding my timezone onto everything (+8 hours) even though no other webapp or app on the server has this problem.

So this morning I was reading Paul Graham‘s newest essay “Why to Not Not Start a Startup” (Good read as always). Got started but then it was time to leave for school but I wanted to keep reading it. Dilemma! So on a whim I grabbed my cell and plugged it in, copied the article text to gedit and saved it as a text file on my cell. On the bus I checked and my cell’s web browser worked as a serviceable text reader. There wasn’t glorious screen real estate, but it wasn’t appealingly small either, a screen or three per paragraph. So I got to read the article on the way to school. Thanks technology.

This morning’s events got me thinking, I want a portable multimedia tool. My GP2X was pretty good at this, except that my first edition (damn being a technology early adopter) had the small problem that the headphone port was mounted mere millimeters too deep so I always had to jam the jack in which promptly caused the port to snap off and fall inside the GP2X. Even after re-soldering it on, it had the same mounting problem, and it’s coming loose again. The first indication in both times is that it stops turning off the external speakers even with the headphone jack in. Lame. And not covert. So I don’t take my GP2X on the go anymore. But enough of that. I’d probably buy a GP2X now if I didn’t already have one.

Why? The GP2X is great. More than people realize. It does music (ogg/mp3), sure, and true, my 1GB iRiver T30 [apparently off the market now] has this fairly covered, but where it shines is its movie playback capability, which I no longer have covered. Portable movie players cost about $300-$500 CDN easy (when I looked last summer). The GP2X comes in more like $200 CDN. And it’s better. Why? Because it has mplayer. You don’t need to transcode your videos to some weird and small format before you can take them on the go, just drag and drop them into your GP2X, mplayer can handle anything. You of course are free to still transcode them so they waste less space, but that’s your choice. If I was in a hurry I could just drop a movie or two shows on a 1GB SD card and watch them on my GP2X. And everyone else wanted me to pay twice as much for a device that is a greater inconvenience (ok, so they do have like 20GB harddrives…).

This got me thinking about the talking I’ve been hearing about how everything is dying out to the phone, or smart phone. PDAs and music devices (Will The iPhone Kill The iPod?) are falling by the way side being replaced by integrated cell phone solutions. Cell phones with cameras, 4GB of storage, and mp3 and video capability are just coming into mainstream right about now (don’t get me started about the new trend of kids huddled around a cell blaring off their music through appallingly bad speakers while in public spaces like the bus). This means that those portable media players are next to get hit before they even really take off.

Ok, so super integrated and featureful smart phones seem to be the future. But will they be any better than the current media players? Well, I was then reminded of Christian Schaller‘s guest appearance on LUG Radio a few weeks back. He mentioned that his company, Fluendo (a GStreamer company) were in talks with most of the major [European?] cell companies. GStreamer is the new (~2002) defacto Open Source (maybe just Gnome) media framework, but they also have for-money proprietary codecs as well (like mwv). So if the GStreamer framework started showing up on most cell phones I’d be well pleased. Nokia is surely covered in this due to the fact they already ship the Linux and GStreamer powered Internet Tablet N800, which is a pretty cool device all on it’s own. Plays video, music, surfs the web.

Hell, I’d have bought one already if it was a phone too. :)

A little while ago I made a rather large book order from Chapters.ca. It’s all arrived now and I’ve finished reading one of the books already, “A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines” by Janna Levin. I read it pretty much in a day, through work and school. It was pretty amazing. I was really impressed. The book is about important moments in the lives of Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel. Alan Turing is one of my heroes, and lately I’ve been reading a lot about Gödel as well (“Gödel Escher Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid” by Douglas R. Hofstadter for one). This book takes a wildly different path than everything else I’ve ever read about either of them, and approaches them from a much more human and personal, even emotional point of view. You get to know them much better as the people they were. It’s a really interesting work that kept me reading, and wanting more. I really would recommend anyone interested in either of those two people check this book out (it’s short and cheap too!). I’m now quite looking forward to reading Janna’s other book “How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space”. I hope it is just as different and compelling.

If I’m looking for the book on Javascript and Ajax, what would it be?