Thoughtful Moment

I think I’d like to try an experiment in the New Year. I think I would like to make a concerted effort to listen (really listen, not just play) to a new LP each week. I won’t set any particular limits on what I listen to, so it might be pop, heavy metal, or classical.

I think I will also watch (and think about, and make notes about) one new film each week. I either watch it on TV, watch it on VHS, or go to the cinema.

And I think I will read one new book each week. Again, anything I like, but one new book a week. And then make notes about the story and the ideas.

I will also start taking notes of what I’ve watched, read or listened too.

I think I will try and select what I will watch, listen to, or read on a Sunday, so that it prepares me for the week ahead of what it will take to complete that week’s goal.

 

I had a long conversation with some friends this week about the specifics of money.

Almost all of them want money so that they can acquire more stuff.

And they just want money.

Lots of it.

And that’s all they can think about money.

They want a lot of it.

And then they want to spend a lot of it on buying stuff.

I don’t want money for money’s sake.

I don’t even want money for the material possessions it can acquire.

I want money for what money can do.

But more importantly I want money for what money can make people do.

The best feeling in the world is when the aeroplane’s cabin door closes in preparation for take-off, and the seat next to you is still empty.

P.S. Heading to Germany for a couple of weeks to play with the band. Will login to the BBS when I can to pick up messages.

Just got done reading the second issue of TMNT.

Why are they wearing masks?

Are there other six foot tall turtles in the city and they don’t want to be recognised?

Marketing and advertising is designed to make you want more.

Being happy with what you have is a revolutionary act.

Cats exist in a superposition of ownership.

They exhibit classic Schrödinger syndrome.

Wanting affection but willfully biting the hand that feeds them.

I am living and growing up in the microcomputer revolution.

But the real computing revolution will happen not when everyone has a computer but when people don’t realise that what they have is a computer.

Having just read von Neumann’s obituary by Stanislaw Ulam he talks about the idea of a singularity. Something we cannot see beyond. Something where everything converges to an infinitesimally small point in time and space and we have no idea what lays on the other side of it.

There’s a lot of singularities that have happened throughout human history.

Concept of the afterlife.

Speech and the verbal transmission of ideas.

The written word.

Cities as places of relative safety.

Libraries as data warehouses.

The modern concept of childhood.

Telecommunications (information transmission) especially computer-to-computer perhaps in some global, planet spanning, packet-switched network that would allow all microcomputers to instantaneously communicate with each other.

Cheap microcomputers that leads to ever decreasing costs and ever increasing performance that will eventually lead us to strong AI that rivals near-human like intelligence somewhere around 2050 (hope I am alive.)

The very essence of a singularity is that we cannot see what lays on the other side of the singularity.

The changes that the singularity will bring are so profound and so utterly revolutionary to society that until we pass through the singularity we cannot understand what the world, what society and what our lives will look like.

I think there will be at least a half-dozen more singularities in my lifetime – changes so profound that we cannot even conjecture what the world will be like.

And we won’t even realise it is happening to us. It will only be when we look back will we realise the quiet revolution we have wrought.

Pre-Gutenberg the scarce resource was knowledge in the form of books.

Post-Gutenberg the scarce resource is the attention needed to acquire that knowledge.

The existential problem of being is that we are not sure if we are who think we are.

I think I will make it a life goal to “know me.”

To understand not just who I am, and what I am capable of, but to also understand why I am who I am and why I do what I do.

If your self-awareness were simulated, would you be aware of the simulation?

Whenever I write the word Wednesday…

I pronounce it in my head as “wed-nes-day.”

If the Universe were a big simulation running on a super fast computer built by an advanced civilization, it would be possible, in theory, to determine if this were the case by coming up with a system to detect an outside of the Universe time reference.

A simulated system, running on a virtual computer, will have an internal clock whereby it marks time.

If that simulated system has the ability to detect a time reference that is external to the simulation, the simulation can not only conclusively prove that it is a simulation but also at what speed the simulation is occuring.

When I say “time reference” it does not need to be a clock as you and I would understand it.

The time reference could be the orbits of electrons, or the radioactive decay of a particle.

 

Is the universe we live in just a big computer simulation?

The second biggest lie that society will ever tell you is ” you can be anything you want to be.”

The biggest lie that society will ever tell you is “you’re not allowed to do that.”

Becoming successful is a bit like winding up pregnant.

Everyone is readily congratulating you.

But none of them really understand how many times you got fucked for it to happen.

I liken most software development to be the equivalent of squeezing a quart in to a pint pot.

It doesn’t matter what the pot is measuring – compute time, cost, memory or storage consumption, or development time – every measurement is equivalent to squeezing a quart in to a pint pot.

Sometimes we ‘re just better at squeezing some types of stuff smaller than others.

Does the voice in your head sound older as you grow older?

Or does the voice in your head stay the same age?

Can you change the volume of the voice in your head?

Is life about finding yourself?

Or is life about creating your self?

The work that I do and how I do it is precisely what I would be doing even if I wasn’t being paid to do it.

That voice in your head…

Are you the one talking?

Or are you the one listening?

I think, if the voice in my head won’t shut up, then I am the one talking.

But…

If the voice in my head says something I don’t know, then I am the one listening.

Ergo, I hope I never say anything to myself that I don’t know.

A bureaucracy is a system designed to emulate persistence.

Unfortunately for the bureaucracy it is only an emulation of persistence whereas you are armed with the real-thing.

A smile transcends gender, orientation, culture, nationality and language. It is the universal communication tool.

Operating System?

Who gives a flying monkeys about the operating system?

It’s the software stupid.

Software maketh the machine.

You are free to pay me money, you just have to realise that I cannot be bought.

Patience may be a virtue, but patient persistence will bring you success every time.

There are just two days in your entire lifetime that are not 24 hours in length.

Is it possible for the CPU in my Atom to figure out if the CPU is in an infinite loop?

Is there something I can do to test this?

For the infinite loop I mean?

I can easily test for $100 JMP $100 or in BASIC “10 GOTO 10”, or an equivalent, but how about a harder loop condition?

If I store combinations of letters in a lookup table, because in the English language there are letter groups that go together quite often.

So CH is a common letter group. And so is TH. And so is ING.

How many common letter groups are there?

How many would I use in all of my word dictionaries?

If a word search has a theme, say names of colours, or names of animals, would there be overlap between the same words used in different word search games?

Hrmmm.

Let’s assume I have a list of words I need for a word search level. Each word is actually just a one byte value that is an index in to a table where the real words are stored.

So we have a “word search word list table” that has a string describing the theme of the table, .e.g “COLOUR NAMES” and four bits that indicate how many words are used in that word search level.

Then I have a list of between 8 and 23 words which are just one byte values into another table that is the actual individual word.

Let’s call that other table “word table.”

That word table can contain up to 256 words.

Each word is stored as a series of six bits for a letter group along with three bits to indicate the letter of the word, i.e. how many six bits sequences make up the word.

Those six bit sequences are an index into another table called “letters” which are actually either individual letters or groups of letters.

So effectively I have to think of the English language as having 26 letters plus another possible 38 “letters” made up of two letter pairs and three letter triples. Single. Double. Treble.

Footnote: The problem I was trying to solve was how to store hundreds of words in as small an amount of memory as I can. I only had about 4KB of RAM to play around with as I recall. I wanted to store hundreds of different words, graphics and code.

I only have about 4KB of RAM to play around with as I recall.

I want to store hundreds of different words, graphics and code.

I need to pack words in to memory efficiently.

The problem is that there are 26 letters in the alphabet which takes up fives of memory.

Which is inefficient.

And I would need some complex code to decipher every five bits in a stream.

Because it is a word search I have a limited number of words to be searching for within a theme.

If I choose my words carefully so that all of the words only use 16 different letters then I can pack two letters in to a single byte.

Assume three bits to indicate word length.

But the word length value 0 through 7 is added to a base value of 3.

No word will be shorter than three letters.

So that gives me words between 3 letters and 10 letters in length.

That gives me four bits to store the first letter of the word and one bit left over.

Footnote: The problem I was trying to solve back then was how to store hundreds of words in as small an amount of memory as I can.