Music, professor.

Music.

I like primarily two broad categories:
a) Music with lyrics that speak to me in some personal way
b) Deeply layered music


a) Lyrics:
I love defiance in my lyrics. Defiant lyrics got me through high school, college and pretty much most of my life. When there's sadness or anxiety, I can either find music that fits and tends to amplify my mood, which I do sometimes, or I can find something good and defiant to basically brute force my mood back on track.

For example, there is Front 242's "Animal". It's techno (I guess). More on that in section b. A snippet of lyrics:

It's always the same
It's not easy to keep myself contained
Sit back and relax
How can I when I'm going down in flames?
'Cause all you do is break me
And put me
You put me in a cage
When I look in the mirror
All I can see
A zoo animal that wants to be free
Just get away, get away from me
'Cause I'll never be who you want me to be

Nothing says, "I'm not going to buckle to the shallow whims of society" like a song that involves shouting "I'll never be who you want me to be".

Really, the whole message of the lyrics doesn't have to speak to me, or even entirely make sense (I've decided it's a lot to hope for to have an entire song that makes sense). I just need a little something that perks my ears up and speaks to me in some way. You'd think that this would be a loose enough requirement that I'd like just about anything but really, most songs just don't speak to me at all.

In a similar vein, for a sample of melancholy mood enhancing, I shall direct your attention to Tegan and Sara's "Call It Off": YouTube

Maybe I would'a been something you'd be good at
Maybe you would'a been something I'd be good at
But now we'll never know

Kinda gets ya right there, doesn't it? Well it gets me right there, anyway.

"Lyrically significant" songs like these come and go off my playlist as my mood varies (or, more likely, as I play them to death) but they're always somewhere handy. They say something to me. Musical style is almost irrelevant to me when the lyrics are good and well delivered. I will listen to heavy metal, country music or garage bands if the lyrics hit me just right. (Incidentally, I really like Dethklok. Basically a heavy metal parody band. Listen to "The Lost Vikings" sometime, but pull up the lyrics first because you can barely understand what he's saying. The summary is that it's a metal song about a group of vikings who ride forth to battle, get lost and refuse to ask for directions. Like I said, I'll like just about anything if the lyrics catch me somehow. Humor works.)


b) Layered music
I don't know proper musical terms so I'll just introduce you to my own.

What I'm calling a "layer" is basically an instrument. If you have 2 guitars and a snare drum, you have 3 layers. I tend to love orchestras because the music is deeply layered. The closer you listen, the more you hear. You can focus on just the strings or just the brass or just the violins in the string section, etc. Layers and layers of music -- you can hear the same song 10 times and get a little something new out of it each time, depending on where you decide to focus, or not focus.

Good techno is like that. I say "techno" because I am from the 90s but I suppose broadly speaking I really just mean electronic music, which tends to allow the composer to create as many layers as he feels he needs. The good artists are into deep layering, so the more I listen, the more I can hear.

Back in the day, it was Front 242 that was my favorite. Old Front 242. Anything from the "05:22:09:12 Off" and previous releases. (Later Front 242 is, frankly, crap.)

Front 242 is to the ear as beer is the palette. I admit it's probably an acquired taste. Just like beer can hit the tongue in interesting ways -- an offset to the doldrums of sweet drinks -- so too can Front 242 hit the ear in interesting ways -- an offset to standard musical instruments and formats. I like it a great deal.


I'm not opposed to pure instrumentals if the music is interesting enough. I like a simple song played on a guitar with good lyrics, too. But my absolute favorites always combined lyrics and layered music.

I'm going to put it on the line and suggest that my all time favorite song is actually Front 242's "Crapage" from their "06:21:03:11 Up Evil" album. There are some who may openly scoff at this choice, and to them I say, "Hey, fuck you, you fucking son of a bitch, I'll kill you."

It is layered, full of interesting sounds that tweak the ear, and the lyrics speak volumes to me. Sadly, I cannot recommend a YouTube link for this because it's all crappy versions. The live version of this song is awful. I weep for the massacre of this fantastic song in the live version. You'll just have to get it from Amazon or something. Lyrical high points:

Always ready for another go
Always going for another round
Volunteering for a better try
And preparing for a clever slide

You -- you are kinder than the kind.
You are milder than the mild.

Still, I believe you're gonna hold them tight
I can see you're trying to crush them now
I can feel you're gonna win

Always ready for another start
Always going for another round
You -- you are perfect all the time.
You must please the public line
You -- you are kinder than the kind.
You are milder than the mild.
You are clean in every way.

Still, I believe you're gonna hold them tight
I can see you're trying to crush them now
I can feel you're gonna win

What is there to run for?
What is there to shout for?
What is there to combat?
What is there to push back?

I've always seen this song as being damn close to my view of myself. I am the Nice Guy. When people start sentences with "he's a nice guy, but", they are talking about me. "Perfect all the time" -- not so much a declaration of fact as a statement of eternally unreachable goal and a source of endless torment.

But I feel it should probably be known that I am a nice guy because I choose to be. There are other options. It's not a fear of the law or God or public embarrassment that makes me be the the Nice Guy. I don't expect anything out of it and in fact have a long history of getting nothing out of it. I don't need a sense of power or righteousness. I am the Nice Guy because that's how it's supposed to be. In the ideal universe, this is simply how humanity works. I could alter the orbit of planets easier than I could uproot this idea.

But niceness isn't the same thing as meekness. I choose to be nice because it's how I think things should be, and while I can't change the universe, I can change the bit of it that consists of me. People like me can tend to be ground down in the long run. Ground down by failures, mishaps, mistakes, rudeness, outright human douchebaggery and other pitfalls. Still, I'm going to hold my view of the universe tight. I'm going to crush the forces that work against me. I can feel I'm going to win. There are things to run for. There are things to shout for. There are things to combat. There are things to push back. And I'm always ready for another go.

If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It

I need to log this in my Registry of Life Philosophies: "if it bleeds, we can kill it!"

Technically this was said by Schwarzenegger's character in Predator in response to an unseen monster that was killing everyone, but had been apparently injured: it bled, ergo, it can be killed.

I decided this is actually a great metaphor for all of life's problems.

Which is to say, given a problem, no matter how insurmountable it may seem, all I need is the tiniest bit of progress on it to make me think that I can eventually get through the whole thing. If it bleeds, I can kill it.

See also:

Mini-heroes

Superheroes...

They leap tall buildings in a single bound, deflect bullets with their eyeballs, etc, etc. They make great action movies.

The problem with superheroes is that they are expected to be heroic. When you can deflect bullets with your skin and shoot lasers from your eyeballs, it's fairly expected that you can maybe stop a murder in progress. When your character is a karate champion, it's expected that you will kick the ass of all the bad guys. Kicking the ass of bad guys is to a superhero as eating a cheese sandwich is to normal people. It's just something you do sometimes. It's an event that's hard to applaud.

So I've always preferred what I tend to think of as the "mini-hero". Sub-hero? Small hero? These are usually the background characters who tend to die for the sake of showing that the main character might be in some sort of danger. They don't have superpowers. They aren't especially good shots. They don't have laser eyeballs or armored skin or the power of teleportation. They woke up, maybe took a shower, put their pants on one leg at a time and went out and did the best they could.

I love mini-heroes. Probably to an odd extent.

One of my favorite scenes from the new Star Wars movies was where Padme fell from some troop transport. It took a hit or something and listed to the side and dumped Padme and some anonymous clone trooper. Typically, in this sort of situation, the main character is fine and the background character manages to break his neck or get eaten by a sandworm or something. In this case, though, the clone trooper actually got up and helped. I nearly stood and applauded the cinematic genius of this but I supposed that would be rude. I love it when background characters, who are ostensibly supposed to be competent, actually get to be competent. I realize the focus of the movie is the main character and all that but I really like it when a background character can do well.

It's almost to the point where I get disappointed to read a new book and discover that the main character has a secret power of summoning dragons or throwing fireballs or shooting people in the eye while diving sideways from 50 meters. Ah well, yes, latent superpower and all that. I suppose he'll be kicking ass then. Probably got a ring that makes him invisible, yes? Turns out he's a wizard and so forth, am-i-right? Got a magic horn and sword and shield and so forth, perhaps?

Bah.

Who's the biggest hero of Lord of the Rings?

Boromir.

Why?

Cause Boromir ain't got shit.

The hobbits all have a natural resistance to the ring, which is why Bilbo got to hang onto it for so long. Gandalf is a fucking wizard who kills Balrogs. Aragorn is a closet king with a super special sword and lives for like 200 years or something because he has in him the blood of the High Men. Legolas apparently rides shields down steps like they are surfboards. Boromir ain't got shit.  He's just a guy with a horn, a long way from home, who went to talk to the elves because he saw the world going to shit and wanted to see what could be done to stop it.

It's the sort of story I love.

Not a superhero. Not a master ninja karate expert mutant wizard. Just someone who does the best they can, knowing that they aren't good enough, and that they'll just have to pull through somehow. Maybe they're not perfect.  Maybe they fuck up.  There's no prophecy in their favor.   No awesome technology or magic protects them. They're just there, doing the best they can.

It's always a terrible disappointment to me when they get mowed down somewhere in the background, because that was the only role I could really identify with.

Letter to Someone Who Will Never Read It

I don't like most people.

One day, I saw you.  You had what I would call "classic American beauty and style" -- the kind not seen so much these days.  The name "Bettie Page" sprang to mind.  Your hair was in a short bob style, with thick bangs in the front -- something most people can't pull off.  I liked it.  And that was interesting.

I heard you call in your order.  Distinct accent.  I liked that, too.  And that was interesting.

I had to get to know you.  But you were working, and you seemed to take your work seriously.  Not someone to want to be sidetracked by a random dude.  (And that was interesting.)

On another day, I saw you again -- I don't know if you would remember -- I was walking down the hall, you were standing at the end.  You smiled at me.  I hadn't seen you smile at anyone before.  I smiled back, but kept walking -- you were on the job again (and I am kind of dumb).  But still... a smile.  And that was interesting.

Eventually, I saw you at a party.  You were dressed head to toe in black.  And that was interesting.  You came up to the bar to order a drink.  I'm never good at breaking the ice with people, but there's a time and a place for everything, and this was my time.  So I went over and we had the following conversation:

Me: "Can I buy you a drink?"

You: "No."

Me: "Oh-kay."

And then I went back and sat back down with my friends and pretended that the last 15 seconds had occurred in some alternate universe that nobody ever need know about.

Later, we were all finishing our drinks, paying our tabs and getting ready to leave. I stood up to leave and turned around.  You were standing right there.

You: "Are you leaving?"

Me: "Yes."

You: "You can stay and have a drink with me."

The tone of this statement suggested that it was a command. I would stay and have a drink with you.

Me: "Oh-kay."

I have long since suspected that my answer of "Oh-kay" to your original "no" was, in fact, the correct response. During the remainder of the evening I learned that your life consists of someone hitting on you roughly every 15 minutes and not taking "no" for an answer. I have never before seen someone get down on one knee just to ask a girl out. It must get annoying after a while.

So we hung out.  You told me about how you didn't understand American fashion.  You were at a store, looking at clothes, and two other girls were there, staring at you and whispering to each other, and you felt like an outsider.  And that was interesting --

Let us detour a moment and discuss "strong" versus "tough".  Tough people simply do not feel the barbs and stings of day to day life.  Maybe they are oblivious.  Maybe they just don't care.  Whatever the reason, they don't deal with social pressure because the thorns of life don't reach them.  Tough people are hard for me to relate to.

Strong people feel all the thorns, but power through them through force of internal will.  From your story, I gleaned that you were not tough; you were strong.  Things bother you, but you are strong and can get through them.  And that was interesting.

Everything I learned about you made me like you that much more.

Anyway, we hung out and chatted a bit and arranged another day to hang out some more.

At the beginning of that day, you told me that you were not interested in a relationship. You were here on a temporary work visa and the status of an extension was in question and you just didn't need to get involved in a relationship. You said there was no real option for staying in America, and that there was no way an American would ever marry you, and you quickly changed the subject.  I was too baffled at the time to respond.  Later, of course, I thought of a number of very good and thoughtful and sincere responses to this.  Why wouldn't an American marry you?  I'm pretty sure you were wrong about that.  Alas, I did not think of these things to say right there on the spot (did I mention I am dumb?). At any rate, I had a very good time and a great conversation.

There are a number of things I would have said if I was a clever person and had thought of them on the spot, and not weeks later.

I wish I was a clever person.

Artificial INTELLIGENCE vs ARTIFICIAL intelligence

Quasi-religious ponderings, part 2...

I was reading Seth Shostak's book (which is quite good, really, if you ever had an interest in the science of the SETI program) and one thing he brought up is something I've heard before... that we will soon surpass the power of the human brain with a single computer.

The implication is that the human brain ("a slow speed computer operating in salt water") is nothing special and since we are going to foreseeably surpass its raw power using computers we will soon replace ourselves with artificially intelligent machines. Silicon based lifeforms, essentially, that will out-think us, will end up being our replacement. Homo sapiens go extinct and thinking machines take over (whether this involves Arnold Schwarzenegger or Keeanu Reeves is not specified).

The problem I have with this concept is one which I would say can best be described as the difference between "artificial intelligence" and "artificial intelligence".


In days of yore, when we computer geeks talked about "artificial intelligence", what we meant was that we can come up with something that appears to be intelligent, but isn't. We can make a game of Pong and get the computer to display a level of intelligence in knocking the ball back to you but it is not, in any way, actually intelligent. It's running a very specific set of instructions. The intelligence is artificial, as in, it is not real.

Shostak uses Deep Blue -- that's the IBM chess machine that played chess champion Kasperov -- as an example of artificial intelligence, albeit one limited to playing chess. Kasperov made a comment that Deep Blue seemed to exhibit a sort of intelligence. However, Deep Blue's intelligence was artificial. That is to say, it was running a very specific set of instructions. Deep Blue was no more intelligent than my hand calculator, but it had a lot of computing power and a program designed to let it create every possible permutation of a chess board and thus decide which move would take the board in a direction most likely to result in a win. It was a very nice machine but it was not intelligent.


I believe Shostak (and certainly lots of other people) are using the term "artificial intelligence" to mean "intelligence which is artificially constructed" -- that is, the intelligence is real but the platform is circuitry rather than a squishy brain.

We are nowhere near having this. We haven't a clue on how to start. You might as well be discussing faeries and elves as artificial intelligence of this nature. Even though we will be able to pack more power than a human brain into a single machine, we don't know how to make it think. We don't know how to make it intelligent. We can't create artificial intelligence -- something which is genuinely intelligent but lives on hardware -- but we CAN create artificial intelligence-- something which seems smart (in a very limited, intentionally designed way) but isn't.

The evidence for this is already in front of us.

If we could create true intelligence, then we should already be able to do so, on today's computers -- it would just run a little slower than we'd like. The beauty of software is that it can simulate whatever you like, given enough time. It would be like creating software for a 32-bit machine which makes it act like a 64-bit machine. It's doable. It would obviously be slower than a real 64-bit machine but you could do it. Similarly, if human intelligence requires a computer 100x more powerful than the ones we have today, we should be able to build it right now, with software, but it would just be 100x slower than it should be.

In other words, we should, right now, with today's technology, be able to create a working human brain, which is, in every way, an intelligent learning being just as smart as any of us, but it might just be a bit slow, as if time was running slower for it, on account of the software having to simulate a better hardware environment than it really has access to.

But we don't know how.

We have no idea.

If we had more powerful computers, we would still have no idea how to make them alive.

In fact, you'd think we could at least create a reasonable artificial, say, pigeon. Perhaps an artificial dog? Surely we have the computing power for that. Surely your desktop machine has more power than a gerbil brain and surely we could do the AI research into creating "the artificial gerbil" which would be indistinguishable from the real thing. In fact, if we could work out the nervous system connections, we should be able to hook it up to a gerbil body and you wouldn't even know the difference, aside for perhaps the cable running from the gerbil's head to your machine.

But we can't. We aren't anywhere close to that. We don't have the artificial gerbil. We don't know where to begin. Actual intelligence -- actual life -- is still the realm of faeries and elves to us -- it's completely incomprehensible magic which we are entirely unable to reproduce, no matter how powerful computers become.


Oh sure, given enough time we might be able to create an artificial intelligence which could pass for a person (or at least a gerbil), but I predict it will take thousands, if not millions of times more processing power than a human brain requires to do its work. This is because it would not actually be intelligent. It would simply be a collection of a lot of smaller works -- it knows how to play chess because it took Deep Blue's coding. It knows how to drive a car because we created a program for that already. It can perhaps even carry on a conversation. But it's not alive and the evidence for this is in the staggering power and programming required to create what will be a rather poor stand-in for a human brain. It will not have true creativity or self-awareness. It will still just be a machine. It will still just be a puppet with programmers pulling the strings.


And this (to bring us back around) is why I'm not an atheist. Among other reasons. Because there is something in us that's not just machinery -- not just programming. We must ask questions like "what is consciousness?" "Who am I and what is this 'I' that's doing the asking?" How do we create software which is alive. What does "alive" really mean?

In order to program a machine, we must fully understand it. We cannot program a consciousness because we do not fully understand it. Consciousness, I believe, defies science. Perhaps it always will. I believe that if we did create an actual, intelligent machine which is truly alive and self-aware, we would not be able to understand how it works anymore than we can understand how we work. It would simply "become alive" and no matter how much digging we did through the circuitry and the programming, we would not be able to find the spark that is "life" or understand where it comes from or how it works.

I believe that life is a mystery.

I believe that "souls", if you will, are a distinct possibility. Are you more than your hardware? Is there something going on which cannot be explained by the number of neurons and connections in our heads?

I believe so, because when it comes to artificially replicating it, we don't even know where to start.

Oh, nevermind.

I was just going to reserve this blog for Significant Thinkings but then I'd have to start a third blog for Inane Ramblings and it's easier to just be inane here.

I've long thought about writing a book. Mostly I think of it in terms of what I would do with my free time if I were rich and didn't have to actually work 40 hours per week. I have very briefly started a couple times. I have ideas but I'm not sure if I can turn them into a full book.

If it comes down to it though, I think I'm too terrified to try. I can live my life thinking I might be good enough of a storyteller to write a book. I can continue thinking that so long as I don't try to actually write one and fail. :-p

I had a particularly vivid and interesting dream the other night, which I'm not going to tell you about, but I woke up and thought, "wow, that's a great basis for a book". It's got an unwitting, uncertain hero and devious, hidden villainy and a couple good subplots. It also apparently has Sigorney Weaver and Michelle Rodriguez but that's probably just because the last movie I saw was Avatar... I wrote down the synopsis and have whiled away my vacation time pointedly not sitting down to try and expand on it.

Wouldn't it be great to be an author, though? Paid to imagine stories and write them?

I wish I could ask an accomplished writer what their method is. Come to think of it, I can probably search for exactly that on Google. I don't want to know about their first book, I want to know about their 31st book. After you've written 30 books, how did you start that 31st book? I just want a glimpse into a method, not an actual lesson. Somehow, whenever I read detailed lessons on the proper way to write a novel, I can't help but noticing how many of the rules are broken by my favorite authors. So to hell with the rules. But I would like to see an example of something that works. Do they create an outline? Do they write up profiles of their characters before starting the book? Do they just sit down with an idea in their head and slap down 200 pages and go back to try and make sense of it later?

I have no idea.

I'm leaning towards that last one.

Note to Self

Just a note to self... transcript of Jiraiya's last thoughts from the latest Naruto episode, as he was dying -- I couldn't find a full transcript so I figured I'd just make one. This is me geeking out. Never you mind.

Actually, I skipped basically anything that wasn't Jiraiya's thoughts, so if someone else wants the FULL transcript, well, they can fill it out themselves. :-p

...

It's not how you live, but how you die in the ninja world -- a ninja's life is not measured by how they lived but rather what they managed to accomplish before their death.

Looking back, my life has been nothing but failures... Continually rejected by Tsunade... Unable to stop my friend... And unable to protect either my student or my mentor... Compared to the great deeds of the Hokage, my actions are trifling, insignificant things indeed.

I wish I could have died like each of the Hokage.

A tale is only as good as its final turn of events, the plot twist. Failures must be seen as mere amusements! They are trials, which hone your skills. I lived believing that... And in return, I swore I would accomplish a deed so great that it would obliterate all of my failures... and I'd die a splendid ninja!

At least, that's how it was supposed to go.

But... with my plot twist, my tale ending like this... The Great Lord Elder prophesied that I would guide that revolutionary. A person who will make a great choice, that will bring either stability or destruction to the ninja world.

I thought I would defeat Pain, stop the Akatsuki, and save the ninja world from destruction....

But in the end, I failed in that selection too.

How pitiful... that this will be the twist to "The Tale of Jiraiya the Gallant."

What a worthless story.

[Jiraiya recalls a conversation with Naruto's parents]

Naruto...

Now that I think about it, Naruto, you are just like that novel's main character. You inherited Minato and Kushina's wishes, their hopes. And yet... I...

[Jiraiya recalls a lecture he gave to Orochimaru: "A ninja is one who endures, one who stands brave. Let me teach you one thing: the most important attribute of a ninja is not the number of jutsu he masters. The most important thing is the guts to never give up!"]

Never go back on your word and never give up. Naruto, if that is your ninja way, then as your mentor I have no business whining. For everyone knows that a student inherits his ninja way from his teacher! Isn't that so, Naruto?

Never give up! That was the true choice I was supposed to make!

[Jiraiya, with great effort, manages to come to long enough to write something...a coded message]

Naruto... You are the child of prophesy, I'm sure of it now. I entrust you with the rest!

"The Tale of Jiraiya the Gallant"... Now it'll end a bit better I hope. The final chapter will be "The Frog in the Well Drifts Into the Great Ocean." Not bad. Not bad at all.

Now... it's about time I put down my pen.

Ah, that's right! What should I name the sequel? Let's see... "The Tale of Naruto Uzumaki." Yes... That has a nice ring to it.