Never been one to let the carrier drop

(from Cori)

If there are people on your friends list who make your world a better place just because they exist, and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the Internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.

Since before the dawn of mankind’s harnessing of the electron, we’ve been searching for a way to send messages far and fast. Pony express, smoke signals, jungle drums, bells.. and through this, the most bizarre of centuries, we’ve gone from jungle drums, through people hunched over morse keys, to electromagnetic radiation, to a multi-megabit telegraph line.. and onward.

Is it instinct that makes us search for ever better, faster ways to move information? Why?  And ultimately, where does this end?

Once, in a very altered state of mind, I suggested to a family member who has some DOD contacts that they should be researching fusion reactor-pumped lasers to “back up the internet”. Of course, you can’t, by the time you’d backed up a few gigabytes, it’s changed again, that’s why it’s the net..  but I do wonder. It seems that the universe is designed to coherently organize information.

At various points I have commented about how digital media is just very large numbers, and how all of it already exists and should be no more copywritable than the number two. Now I’m going to present the counter-argument.

Recently, I started work (one of the things I work on in my off minutes when I don’t feel like playing video games) on some code to brute-force a algorythm. It doesn’t matter which one, and I’ll save it – and what I’ve learned so far – as a suprise for a later post – but, in essence, the approach is to generate all possible perl programs that are <=256 bytes long, and then eval them, with a wrapper that avoids the halting problem by killing off the evaluated code if it has used more than a second worth of CPU time.

Originally I was going to create a SQL table that contained all of the possibilities, and then update it as I tested each one. Then I did a little math..

Assume you use a 52 byte character set for your perl.  There are 1.6923032801030364133169031885639e+125 possible combinations of 256 bytes containing one of 52 values.  That’s more than 2^400 . Good luck storing that..

And that’s 256 bytes worth. Anyone want to calculate the odds of two intelligent life-forms converging on a 5 minute song?

Of course, they do. That’s the really interesting bit. Some people are wondering if we ever find intelligent life other than us, if they’ll have heard of this cat named Jesus. Me, I’m wondering if they’ll have heard of the 5 and 12 tone scales, and if not, if they’ll have similarly geometric music – or art of any kind.

Anyway, never mind a 5 minute song – how long does it take to select for a DNA strand which represents 4GB just in base pairs and possibly many, many times that if all of the data found within are considered.. (I’ve given up on trying to guess what the payload of DNA is, but if I had to stab in the dark, I’d say it’s more than a petabyte. Then again, I’m horribly uninformed on the subject. If anyone finds a hard number – even to approximately the number of zeros involved – please let me know)

Okay, information tends to want to organize. There’s no other good explanation for humanity.  Interestingly, it would seem that the future is generally better than the past – I gesture you to prohibition 80 years ago, segregation 40 years ago, and the current ongoing war to give those of different sexual orientation or identity the freedom and safety they deserve – and I probably won’t even understand the issues that my kid fights for, but they will also be part of the perpetual arc towards what I would call true humanity. What makes me sad is that I’ll probably be fighting against what my child is fighting for, even though, unless I forget everything I have thus far learned, I will know I am the one who is wrong (insofar as anyone ever can be right or wrong) because humans seem to be wired that way.

I can’t really imagine the mindset of those who fought for slavery, or segregation, or those who fight against the right for gays to marry, or people to change gender at will, or the right for more than two people to marry, or a whole host of other similar things. I can’t get into their heads, so I can’t tell how I’ll know when I’ve become one of them.

Speaking of segregation.. I recently stopped in a gas station to fill the car and use their restrooms – and they had two single occupant restrooms, marked male and female. How’s that again? Why would one have gender assignments on restrooms for one person? This really doesn’t seem like it makes sense to me.  I’m not even sure that having seperate restrooms per-gender makes sense to me any more..

Back on the subject of information..

I sort of wonder if the amount of information on some of my larger servers isn’t starting to approach some critical mass – if there isn’t a maximum amount of data that it’s safe to store, after which very strange and Terry-Prachett-esque things start happening to space, time, and other information that gets too close. All of you who have large disk arrays know how they seem to fill up about as quickly as you can keep adding disk to them – and it’s not all TV show downloads and home movies.

Perhaps I’ve already dissapeared below the event horizen in my own black hole – surrounded by spinning vortexes of condensed knowledge.

One of the things that I’ve been getting at least a little bit of enjoyment from lately is a bit of culture-jamming.

I have subscribed to a couple of the especially egregious conservative ‘mail-your-congressmen’ lists – and whenever they send out a request, I go to their site, edit the email so it says what I want it to say, and then send it. Somehow this is more fun than doing it through the liberal lists.. I get this feeling of subverting the system…

Their latest whine is about the sexual nature of recent Carls Jr. ads. Now I in general hate advertising, and so I haven’t actually *seen* the ads in question, but I have to ask: what sexually themed ad could possibly be worse than, for example, ‘Cops’? In terms of messages being sent, violence seems a far far worse one to me than sexuality, and I think it’s truly sick that there are so many people out there that disagree.

Then again, I’m oversensitive to violence. I’m still having trouble with various violent incidents that occured in my past – some of them in my *distant* past, others more recent – I don’t really understand why I’m not just completely over them, and it’s upsetting to me that I can’t just be appropriately manly, or at the very least forget them. But I think I do have to recognize that I am much more affected by violence than the average human and so probably I abhor certain types of violence in  fiction (i.e. the characters on Friends [or any number of other sitcoms] hitting each other) much more than most people do.

On the third paw, I read a book a while ago about abused men which had some astonishing statistics in it [of course, anyone can lie with statistics] so perhaps i’m not as alone as i think I am.

I apologize for the extreme weirdness of the past few posts. I’ve been wrestling with a lot of very dark thoughts – and I feel like bouncing a few ideas around might help me find the truth or falsehood of them, and also understand how I feel about them better. Please don’t take anything I say too seriously.

In other news, I am going to try to reduce the number of comments I put in LJ – so expect most responses from me to be via email from now on. I’m *very* annoyed at LiveJournal – I’m sad to see that my subscription doesn’t run out until March 2008..

Perhaps I should turn off crossposting, but then no one will ever read my journal 😉

I have no idea why I want to have readers. Perhaps because I want to think that my thoughts matter to someone. Perhaps because it makes me feel like a author, which is one of the professions I’ve always aspired oh-so-slightly to.  Who can say.

A addendum to the too good for this planet: And I’m not alone…

I’ve talked about thinking that earth is a really odd video game before, I think. I’m starting to think that the Forces Of Darkness [as I will refer to those who are intolerant, practice hatred, physically attack people, lock people up, fight wars over resources, or do Other Things I Don’t Like] are a software construct, intended to make the game challenging. Why do I think this? Well, even when I talk to my republican friends, they aren’t fans of the attributes I’ve listed above. In fact, I don’t know anyone who actually thinks they *should* be playing thug, locking people up for not using the same morals table they do..

Crazy? Heh. I’m just *starting* to let some of my darker thoughts out of the cage I tend to keep them in. Trust me, you haven’t seen anything remotely resembling crazy from me yet.

I would like to love everyone, regardless of race, gender, political leaning, or desire to throw me in jail / beat me / condemn me for who I am.  Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have yet quite achieved that level of detachment.  As a friend of mine once put it, I love half of everyone. I’m not very happy about that either. It’s a sad thing when you can’t even live up to your own ideals.

In other news, apparently LiveJournal has decided that they don’t care about losing users left, right, and center. I encourage any and all who are currently paying for accounts to notice the really horrid things LJ is doing and consider sending your $30 somewhere better – like a hosting provider? 😉 Or perhaps a homeless shelter, or a no-kill shelter for puppies, or your DVD collection.. or.. there have to be millions of things better to do with your money than giving it to a bunch of moralist, censoring.. never mind. I’ll stop now.

It would appear that once again, Kucinich is right down the middle for me. Unfortunately, that probably means he’s still unelectable.

At the risk of sounding like a arrogant asshole, I’m beginning to suspect I’m too good for this planet.. and I’m not very good.

This data is from Curious’s post, just formatted in a way I can grok better.

1) MSN movies got, I think, everything just about completely backwards. All the movies they hated I liked. Does this mean I’m atypical, or the reviewer is..

2) I’m temporarily in a cash crunch. It’s not a scary cash crunch (I’ve had far worse in the past two years), but it’s a little unnerving nonetheless. I’ve started to play the ‘no interest’ game of buying things on credit cards and then paying them off within 30 days.. we’ll see if it works out for me, or if I just end up with another stack of max’d credit cards.

3) After many faithful years of service, the Sceptre my parents gave me as a birthday present is being relegated to the garage to use as a monitor for the workbench, replaced by a 21″ diagonal Viewsonic LCD. It’s soooo pretty – and cost a pretty penny less than the sceptre did, too. Finally, more pixels – which, when doing Flex development, I really need – even having a desktop driving the sceptre and a 17″ laptop driving it’s own display wasn’t enough. I’m a li-itle bit worried about how well it’s going to work with my favorite video games, since it’s not 4:3, but hopefully it’ll be okay. If not, I think this graphics card supports multiple displays.. but unfortunately, my desk doesn’t. I suppose I could move the DJ mixer over to the far wall or something..

4) I continue to work on my proficiency with the XL-7. I’m seriously thinking of a WSHR broadcast, but I need to figure out a good time for all 3 of my listeners. Perhaps I will post a announcement in news on brig..

I was sad that no one took me up on my “pay it forward” response to Coriander, offering gifts to three people. I was thinking it was because my informational-in-nature gifts are perhaps not the most sought after chunks of data on the ‘net.

Kayti thinks that there were mitigating circumstances, and thusly we have a bet.

I have agreed to  double the potential gifts to six if six people (including her, so five others) will admit that they did want a gift from me, but didn’t post because they had already made the “pay it forward” offer in response to someone else, or refuse to post to live-journal as themselves, or didn’t want to commit with coming up with three gifts of their own, for any other reason that has nothing to do with not wanting a gift from me.

If six people including Kayti come forward saying that they want gifts from me now that the need to pay them forward is lifted, I will indeed make and give these gifts, which will again be informational in nature — stories or music or such-like — and send them to the email addresses these six people provide at some time during the next twelve months.   Send your requests as comments on my wordpress, on LJ, or as email.  You have two weeks from the timestamp on this post.