tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-363898262024-03-08T00:31:04.715-08:00Here and NowLittle bits of everything.Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.comBlogger86125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-30984275332498143622022-02-13T17:56:00.000-08:002022-02-13T17:56:03.489-08:00Random thoughts on translation<p>How many books get carried over to another language only to suffer a cruel death by translation? I remember having read Catcher in the Rye in Russian when I was in college. It barely touched me, because the text wasn't alive, it was bland like semolina porridge. I heard similar accounts from English speaking people who tried reading Russian proze. I guess this becomes more if a problem when the context of the translated book is unfamiliar to the new readers. Anyways, Catcher in the Rye in English is well-written and engaging from the page one. </p><p>Some English authors did shine even in translation. I could think of Wells, Conan Doyle, Vonnegut, Mark Twain and a few others. Or they were lucky to be about either historical times or about fictional setup. Pratchett has been ruined for me too, but Zelazny or Tolkien weren't. Perhaps because Pratchett was more satire than fantasy, and that sature was grounded in the context I had no clue about back then?</p><p>This seems to be less if an issue for some other languages/cultures; I rarely got annoyed at German, Polish or Czech translations I have read. Translated poetry is often terrible, but luckily, in Russia it wasn't uncommon when some great poet did it and produced if not a full match for the original, then at least an impressive remake in its own right - so some of the English poetry came across somehow, thanks to Boris Pasternak and others.</p><p>Will machine translation ever win over human translation? Could it become a perfect magic mirror? Do we even know how a perfect translation should look like? Till that time, getting access to the original works is one of the compelling reasons to learn about other languages and cultures. May be if more people did that, less people would get time and energy for violent conflicts of any kind. One can always dream.</p>Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-87838146229700659332021-08-26T14:05:00.003-07:002021-08-26T14:05:27.939-07:00<p>Выбор.</p><div class="kvgmc6g5 cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Созидающий башню сорвется,</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Будет страшен стремительный лёт,</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">И на дне мирового колодца</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Он безумье своё проклянёт.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Разрушающий будет раздавлен,</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Опрокинут обломками плит,</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">И, Всевидящим Богом оставлен,</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Он о муке своей возопит.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">А ушедший в ночные пещеры</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Или к заводям тихой реки</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Повстречает свирепой пантеры</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Наводящие ужас зрачки.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Не спасёшься от доли кровавой,</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Что земным предназначила твердь.</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Но молчи: несравненное право —</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Самому выбирать свою смерть.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Автор этого стихотворения - Николай Гумилев. Ровно сто лет назад его не стало. По легенде, он отказался от предложения выйти из строя приговоренных к расстрелу. По другой легенде, пьесу Гумилева "Гондла" сняли с репертуара уже после его гибели, потому что восторженная публика хотела увидеть автора.</div></div>Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-75808335015031013092021-08-19T03:13:00.002-07:002021-08-19T03:13:30.338-07:00A poet to a philosopher is like an engineer to a scientist.<p><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">For me, the analogy comes from the following perspective. Imagine we, as humanity, are moving forward into the hazy world of the unknown. Scientists distill that unknown into potentially useful materials. Engineers use these materials to cover more territory, so that the rest of the humanity (including scientists) could move forward.</span></span></p><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql" style="color: #050505; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><div dir="auto"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia;">Similarly, philosophers distill the unknown principles under which the reality (tangible or intangible) operates into clearly defined concepts. Poets use these concepts to extend our image of that reality, thus enabling the rest of humanity (including philosophers) move forward and look out for yet undiscovered aspects of life, universe and everything.</span></div></div>Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-42742088970481102662020-05-04T18:02:00.001-07:002020-05-04T18:02:18.285-07:00Thesis: the future is here, but it's not evenly distributed.<br />
Ergo: buying a rare piece of future is only a good investment when you really need it right now.<br />
Example: personal calculators.<br />
Also, buying wrong future example: getting an early TV set that didn't become standard.Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-26744989105909629432018-01-10T15:03:00.000-08:002018-01-10T15:03:58.297-08:00<span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">In a way, deep-learning systems could be seen as living in a Groundhog Day movie implemented: given (almost) unlimited chance to try out different choices and learn their consequences, as well as (almost) unlimited memory, design the most optimal policy for a given environment (which could be also seen as a very sophisticated set of reflexes).</span><br style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;" /><br style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Which makes one wonder: </span><br style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;" /><br style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">1) whether conscious thinking, and the human civilization as a consequence of that, have developed as an evolutionary shortcut to mitigate the shortage of experience which could be obtained naturally by a single human being.</span><br style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;" /><br style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">2) whether the "set of reflexes" approach can scale to emulate human conscience and not turn the Universe into paperclips in the process.</span>Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-32643723950537805732017-11-19T06:29:00.000-08:002017-11-19T07:20:54.962-08:00On pipelines and learningWorking with data processing <a href="https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/data-processing-pipelines.html" target="_blank">pipelines</a> made me see some analogies with the process of human learning. When a human being learns a new skill, they usually go through the state which could be called “snapshot reload” in the data processing pipelines lingo. That means, both a human and data pipeline have to spend some time accruing the “initial set of knowledge” based on which they will (hopefully) become useful in the future. Once this happens (e.g. you as a human finished a school or a professional course), in order to be fully useful one would also need to keep their knowledge current (get the recent information related to that set of skills by following the related events, reading articles, trying out the new tricks, etc etc). In pipeline world, this is called “catching up on the incrementals”. If this is not being done (or takes too much time) the pipeline (or a human) might need to do the new “snapshot reload” (go back to school) to stay in business.<br />
<br />
What’s important to understand is that every such system is essentially useless and vulnerable while it’s doing those costly reloads. Almost everyone can relate to their student times as the periods of high uncertainty and remember the efforts it sometimes costed to stay on track, with no finish line in sight. The price of falling at that stage is also very high: dropping out is easier than restarting the process, and can result in hard compromises regarding the final state. Software, designed in a waterfall way and discontinued before completion, is useless (except for whatever could be scavenged for reuse in the next projects). A pipeline which failed to reload its state gets restarted from scratch, with no advantage from the incomplete work. And though a few school dropouts might become billionaires, the rest would eventually have to get their life back together and either return to that or other school or significantly lower their future expectations.<br />
<br />
The traditional education was (and is) all about spending long (and costly) time in the “snapshot reload” phase (school, university, then perhaps more time in academia as a postgraduate) and because it’s recognized as being very time-consuming and costly, changing jobs or learning new skills as an adult is considered to be unlikely. (You can also draw an analogy with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model" target="_blank">waterfall</a> process here).<br />
<br />
Ideally, though, both in the data processing world, in the software development in general and in the human world, one would prefer for things to become useful immediately, without going through that painful and costly (and often black-box) phase mentioned above. There are numerous <a href="https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=large+scale+incremental+processing&btnG=" target="_blank">papers</a> describing large-scale incremental data flows. There is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development" target="_blank">Agile</a> methodology, which is about developing software in an incremental way, as opposed to phased Waterfall style. And nowadays, there is a pronounced tendency to try learning new skills incrementally: most of the <a href="https://www.class-central.com/" target="_blank">online</a> learning courses and the variety of learning apps are about splitting the information to be learned into piecemeal bites and feeding it to the students on a regular basis, assuming they would gradually become proficient in the given skill.<br />
<br />
The big question is, is it always going to work or would the process in some cases be too slow to be useful? Could every child completely skip the hours in school and become the high-functioning adult just by incremental learning, interleaved with their daily life? Could every adult gradually shift to a new role, and if so, at which point of that shift can they actually become useful? Or are the “snapshot reload”, high-focus-on-the-problem-at-hand phases inevitable?<br />
<br />
To me, these questions largely seem unanswered, and the second one might be a weak point of the online learning in general. It seems currently be well optimized for monetization via getting students to pay, but less so for monetization via helping the learners to refocus by steering them into using their acquired knowledge and connecting with the relevant communities. Udacity is making steps in that direction by trying to place their students into <a href="https://www.udacity.com/get-hired" target="_blank">relevant</a> job roles, but this looks more like an exception than a rule so far.<br />
<br />
I wonder whether there isn’t also some unconscious bias from the part of those who did go through the traditional “snapshot reload” phase regarding those who obviously didn’t, as incrementally acquired knowledge might appear “less valid” because it misses the hard proof of completing the “snapshot reload” phase and hence the credibility - which might be not ungrounded, on one side; on another side, the existence of scientific titles with the suffix “honoris causa”, “for the merit” proves that it was always posssible to do things differently.<br />
<br />
The <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-puzzle-worthy-of-freeman-dyson-20140326/" target="_blank">interview</a> with Freeman Dyson, which mentions not obtaining the PhD due to not believing in the system, was my most recent reminder on that. In general, my hope is that the future becomes more fluid and "incremental" and will allow people to switch between different activities as they go through their lives, without discarding their ideas just because they arrived "too late" to be carried through a necessary snapshot reload phase before getting applied somewhere.Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-47526344560001492632017-01-23T02:44:00.001-08:002017-01-23T02:44:58.150-08:00<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The real problem, in my humble opinion, is not Trump, or Putin, or Wilders, or Brexit. The real problem is what made lots of people believe that there was no better choice. And if we feel that the best answer to this question is blaming someone, then we might as well begin with ourselves, Dunning Kruger effect or not. It's us who make ivory towers whenever we have a chance, and then spend time devising elaborate mechanisms to keep these towers safe. Eventually people see through that, and that's, sadly, the point at which the unicorns fly away and the angry flock of bad-smelling rhinos breaks in. I only hope that eventually we learn how to break this ill samsara, and there will be no need to build ivory towers ever since.</span>Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-2691399869070098062016-12-05T00:06:00.000-08:002016-12-05T00:06:36.643-08:00<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">I am lazily entertaining the idea of writing a (slightly trolling) article which would use Russian fairy tales as a proof that the Singularity has already come and gone. Koschei the Immortal was a remotely-controlled cyborg [obviously, the needle in the well-hidden egg was its core chip located in a distant cloud]. Baba Yaga was a posthuman messing with the biotechnology [house on chicken legs] and antigravitation transport [flying mortar]. As heartwarming souvenirs from the glorious past, she kept some random artifacts (the ball of yarn which could unwind to a certain location [GPS device], the food-making [food-printing] tablecloth, the magic apple that rolled over a plate and revealed [the output from well-hidden remote webcams] the world's miracles etc). Eventually she donated these artifacts to the uncouth savages just for the fun of it. Three-(5,7,12)-headed dragon might have been a self-repairing biorobot, which is why one had to cut off all its heads at once. And so on, and so on </span><span class="_47e3 _5mfr" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 0; margin: 0px 1px; vertical-align: middle;" title="smile emoticon"><img alt="" aria-hidden="1" class="img" height="16" src="https://www.facebook.com/images/emoji.php/v6/feb/2/16/1f642.png" style="border: 0px; vertical-align: -3px;" width="16" /></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px;">The last encouragement for such article might have been this great site: </span><span style="font-size: 14px;">http://atom.singularity2050.com/ One just can't help playing the advocatus diaboli to offset the happy extrapolation spree.</span></span><br />
<span class="_47e3 _5mfr" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 0; margin: 0px 1px; vertical-align: middle;" title="smile emoticon"><span aria-hidden="1" class="_7oe" style="display: inline-block; font-size: 0px; width: 0px;">d:)dfdfdf</span></span><br />
<span class="_47e3 _5mfr" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 0; margin: 0px 1px; vertical-align: middle;" title="smile emoticon"><span aria-hidden="1" class="_7oe" style="display: inline-block; font-size: 0px; width: 0px;">dfd</span></span>Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-65647344529447578392016-08-11T16:55:00.000-07:002016-08-12T09:58:52.109-07:00Re-reading The Left Hand of DarknessI used to assign SF works to one of the two broad categories, loosely labeled "fun reading" and "food for thought".<br />
<br />
"Fun reading", for me, includes many of the space operas, a.k.a SF fairy tales: quick page-turners, full of awesome glitter and breath-taking adventures, but once you are beyond the last page and yet another impossible world begins to fade in your imagination, the details of the story get quickly forgotten.<br />
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"Food for thought" might be quite a hard reading, not done overnight. But these stories tend to stick around, often for years. They tackle issues which don't get easily solved, or for which the solutions appear to be quite unsatisfactory, and / or these issues look plausible enough to make a permanent dint in the reader's mind. One well-known example: dystopias. One more is when the depicted worlds are only slightly different from the world we are used to, but the nature of the difference touches the very fundament which we have always assumed intact.<br />
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The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, to me, is one of the rare books that manages to combine an easy-to-follow narrative with a deep story behind it.<br />
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It rethinks one of the most basic phenomena in the human civilization: the gender, by showing a world where "static" gender, in our definition, does not exist: its inhabitants periodically become either male or female, depending on the subtle circumstances normally beyond their control. For the most part of their lives though, they are neutral and neither engaged nor interested in one of the most profound drives of our own civilization: sex.<br />
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Other than that, Gethen, the world described by Le Guin, is not at all dissimilar from ours. It has a traditional empire-like state and a more modern ("efficient", as they say) totalitarian regime. There are several religions, which aren't completely unlike the ones we have. They have creation myths and the legends about love and vendetta. People could love or hate each other, get rich, get poor, take revenge, be an adventurer or a home-sitter. Everything is the same, only the gender-related issues - family, attitude to relationships, child-rearing - are quite different. No gender dualism, no weaker or stronger sex, no sticker to put on a newly born child. Also, the Ice Age on Gethen hasn't ended yet, and the inhabitants had to deal with it for millennia.<br />
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The book follows a story of the first envoy of the interplanetary society, the Ekumen, who tries to include this strange world into the broader community of other human worlds. Half of the narrative is from his perspective, another half is from the perspective of the local person that happened to be closely involved, so there is a discovery process going on from two sides.<br />
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The premise is that all the human worlds were once created by some proto-demiurg civilization, and that civilization also took the liberty to tamper with human genetics in a number of different ways. Gethen, though, is unique in their gender curiosity. From their own perspective, the inhabitants of all the other worlds seem to be perverts: forever stuck in one gender, like animals on their own planet, by the way.<br />
<br />
(Which also made me wonder, what if the tables were turned? What if it was the human society which was unique in their "gender rigidness" as an experiment? Did Le Guin considered such possibility?)<br />
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I am not going to retell the whole story here, it deserves to be read and re-read. What amazes me is that the book, even though it was written quite some time ago, doesn't feel outdated (which is an achievement in SF land). Also, the level of detail is quite high. And most importantly, the characters behave in such a way that it's possible to empathize with them. Strange as it is, that world seems to work. And then it's easy to ask oneself, what would be changed in our world under such conditions? How much of our history, philosophy and whole culture would've been changed beyond recognition? How should people feel when they are oscillating between two extremities at a whim of a chance?<br />
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I do wonder if anyone would soon dare to make a movie out of it. Showing the whole society of not-quite-men-or-women without making it either a caricature or an abstract concept is a big challenge. But hey, isn't it what the SF is (or should be) about: imagining something that is improbable, but not impossible?Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-971919722247945822016-06-03T16:14:00.000-07:002016-06-04T18:28:29.892-07:00Scary future, cool future, or both - on Firefall and Jean le FlambeurRecently, I have read Blindsight + Echopraxia (a.k.a. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22838183-firefall">Firefall</a>) by Peter Watts, on one side, and The Quantum Thief + The Fractal Prince (a.k.a <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/series/57134-jean-le-flambeur">Jean le Flambeur</a>) by Hashi Rajanemi, on another. (Not that I had both books on different sides simultaneously, of course - I wish I could!)<br />
<br />
That was an interesting experience. Both authors mentioned that their books did not come out lightly. Both authors have put a lot of effort into their creations, providing many impressive details for their stories, and appear to be qualified to describe what they chose to. But the impression left by their work is quite different. From my, very personal and possibly biased, point of view, Peter Watts' books create one of the gloomiest near-future visions I've got acquainted with recently (which does not make these books less interesting to read, but they do describe the world quite dreary to live in). Hannu Rajanemi, on the other side, paints the picture of the world which seems to be quite fascinating (some parts of it, at least). Where his books might lack in depth, they try to compensate it by describing what could be defined as "poetry of existence". From that point of view, it's a space opera all right.<br />
<br />
Rajanemi attempts to describe postsingularity/post human world by trying to imagine how much of the humanity would remain in it. I would list Roger Zelazny and Charles Stross as predecessors for (some aspects of) his style. I thought about Rajanemi first as Alastair Reynolds Lite, too. And perhaps Anthony Burgess, because Rajanemi also uses a few Russian words as labels for some of the concepts, and it makes a lot of sense from the native Russian speaker point of view. For example, he calls the gigantic agglomerates of conjoined minds <i>Sobornost</i>, which is a very special word, up to date used mostly in the religious context, to describe the concept of "togetherness" ("sobor" is a congregation of many Orthodox entities which becomes a legislative power for and because of those who joined in). Using this term in the new context of post-singularity feels like adding a bit of unexpected depth to the narrative. Calling the computronium superbrains <i>gubernyas</i> is a bit funny ("gubernya" is the old word for province), but it helps a bit to keep things consistent. I am not sure about the etymology of the term <i>gogol</i>, which he uses to describe the mind-copies. It can be associated either with a name of one particular company or with Nikolay Gogol, the Russian/Ukrainian writer who gave birth to a tale about a guy buying "the dead souls" (essentially passports of the peasants who have died but weren't yet reported as such, so not the souls themselves, but very shallow copies of them). I haven't researched what Rajanemi himself says about his terminology but I wouldn't be surprised if he chose this word as a homage to that story. A biggest grumble which I could have for Jean le Flambeur series is that the protagonists don't always seem convincingly real to care much for - they appear to be more like characters in a colorful cartoon or 3D-rendered scene rather than the creations of flesh and blood - though as post-singular beings, they are supposed to be anything but, except perhaps the Earth inhabitants (the book doesn't dwell much on the gory details). Nevertheless, the narrative is still elaborate enough to hold the readers' attention during the span of the book, and leave them willing for more.<br />
<br />
Going back to Watts, I'd mention <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem">Stanislav Lem</a> as his possible predecessor (The Invincible feels like a close call). I could imagine that some movie director would be able to do to Watts' works what Tarkovsky has done to Lem's Solaris, but that would have been a tough ordeal. Watts debunks most of the assumptions both about what being a human could be like and about the importance of humanity and human knowledge per se. Rajanemi builds his intricately colored sand castles in the rarely used, but well-kept sandbox, or perhaps, on the quiet seashore; Watts tries to build a fortress while the roaring ocean keeps throwing lumps of white foam and splashes of brine at his work, eventually gives up, stays to watch how his creation melts, overcome by some barely understood eerie forces of nature and invites the reader to appreciate the view. It is quite disheartening: concepts like friendship, love, conscience and ultimately the self-awareness itself appear to not be necessary to move forward there. More to say, they happen to be getting in the way of progress, which is all about getting more knowledge over the world and being able to change it at will. There come super-efficient humanoid predators, super-adaptive and super-intelligent grey mold and people who become zombies, cyborgs, uploaded pot plants or something that no longer has human reactions at all. Who said that the ultimate goal of the evolution was creating a human being? No one. We might stay behind as "baseline humans" while the further progress takes off without us. We might temporarily surge to certain heights, build efficient energy sources and create what we'd think represents a post-scarcity society, only to see it destroyed as by the first unexpected knocking from the outside world, which - surprise, surprise - neither plays by our rules nor cares much for them.<br />
<br />
I wonder if the actually existing humanity gets much say in what its future should look like, but it's not unreasonable to start enumerating and reviewing the options. Which is why good SF makes a lot of sense to read. Even if some books seem to say "Look how scary, but cool the future could be" while the others go in the direction of "Look how cool, but scary the future could be". We need both fears and hopes in order to have a meaningful life, don't we?Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-47108462809287812232016-05-14T10:42:00.002-07:002016-05-14T10:42:27.959-07:00On Blindsight (contains spoilers)One of the many ways you can classify the books is whether they distract you from thinking or encourage you to think about something. <a href="http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm">Blindsight</a> by Peter Watts, to me, falls in the second category.<br />
<br />
There is that old discussion of what is intelligence about. Peter Watts tries to imagine intelligence without sentience - a thinking entity without an I that does the thinking. Blindsight, among other things, refers to that concept of an I which could be seen as an illusion distracting the individual from efficient acting. This reminded me of I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter which I've read recently. It has a different claim: that the possession of an I concept, even though it doesn't physically relate to anything, is the prerequisite of calling a being intelligent in the first place. I have to admit that it's pretty difficult to imagine intelligence without sentience, and such existence appears pretty dull to whatever I call "me". Nevertheless, it's an interesting possibility, and not being able to imagine something properly doesn't mean that it could never be true.<br />
<br />
But that is not how the book begins. It begins with a story of a human who doesn't have empathy, due to an operation he endured as a child. He isn't even sure whether he can truly understand anything or whether he is just a human version of Chinese room - the construct which can provide correct answers to the outside queries without being able to explain what those answers could mean. The protagonist's disability became a blessing in disguise, turning him into an ideal "translator" between narrow specialists and the ordinary humans. He does it by tuning to the body language of those he translates from. Almost everything is seen through his eyes and told through his voice.<br />
<br />
The protagonist has a dramatic past, including botched relationship and sad childhood memories. He sails back and forth between now and then during the narrative. Somehow, it made me think that perhaps our unhappiness is partially responsible for defining what we are. ("If we are not in pain, then we are not alive" - that's how the story begins). One side remark: notable that the author goes for describing a "traditional" relationship, while claiming that this kind of relationships already became old-style; I guess making a different choice here would be immensely more daunting task - after all, we, the readers, are still merely humans mostly living in the "real" world.<br />
<br />
The world described by Watts - sometime in the future - doesn't feel warm and cuddly. For once, it has vampires, which are the product of genetic (re-)engineering, are said to be way more intelligent than any human but get a seizure whenever they see anything resembling a cross. (That last part doesn't make much sense from the rational point of view, but we have to take it as a given). They are held on drugs which both restrain them from their natural tendency to hunt warm-blooded human beings and help to overcome the cross impediment. The reason they exist is because people want problem-solvers smarter than them who would still not be machines. One of those vampires is heading the mission the protagonist is part of.<br />
<br />
Also, there is a technocratic version of Paradise called "Heaven", where people can dream off the rest of their lives in the self-designed VR worlds. It's not uploading into the cloud: destroying the body also destroys the Heaven inhabitant. The protagonist's mother, whom he always calls by her first name, has left for that world. The protagonist's father is one of the few people on Earth who still do work (he is busy with planetary security). Those who choose "to not be a parasite" often become cyborgs, changing their minds and bodies. (Examples present in the mission crew). There is a bit of sad irony to realize that those who chooses to work do nothing else but benefit those parasites, but who wouldn't care, as long as it boosts their dopamine and serotonin levels. (Speaking about happiness).<br />
<br />
The storyline is exponential: it starts slowly and then accelerates. An idea falls into the gravity field of the narrative, gets enshrouded by flesh and blood on the way, and eventually explodes due to overheating, leaving some charred remains in the aftermath. The non-sentient and superintelligent aliens, an advanced version of cosmic ants, are inhabiting a scary-looking artifact, devoid of any sense of beauty, but capable of almost anything. They cannot communicate with humans because there is nothing to communicate about. They can conjure "a collective I", but it's nothing but Chinese room to us. There isn't any individual on the other side. Every alien being is nothing but an efficient autonomous agent / data storage unit. The little crew of the human spaceship goes through lot of pain to get to that truth. The vampire storyline also has a resolving point, a bit rough if you ask me. Many questions are answered in the end, but not all of them, and the end itself feels rather a prolonged pause than a real conclusion. (There is a second book by Watts which seems to be playing in the same world, but I am not yet sure whether it's a sequel, a prequel or an alternate reality).<br />
<br />
Unwelcome as that world appears, the book is worth reading, not only for that question about the nature of intelligence that it poses, but also for the insights into psychology of human interaction (the little isolated crew in stressful conditions being a suitable playground for that). I would rather not to provide more plot details, it's better to read the story.<br />
<br />
But if human conscience, and culture with it, is a mere blindsight, and it would be possible to have a civilization of selfless intelligent beings, what would be their drive to move forward? The survival instinct alone? How did the ants arrive at the designs for their homes and are they ever going to improve them? I guess humanity needs a couple million years of sentience to answer these questions.Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-82707370788893091802016-03-17T20:05:00.001-07:002016-03-17T20:22:43.189-07:00It could've been interesting to create a language learning program that would determine one's active vocabulary (e.g. based on one's contributions to the social networks and/or public chat transcripts - suppose for simplicity that privacy issues could be solved here somehow), compile more or less close analog in the target language and craft the study path based on that. Of course, such approach might have missed the point of expanding one's horizons with learning a new language. But it might also encourage the learners to use the new language sooner and more efficiently if they could do so without deviating too much from their original identity.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, getting the proper feel for the language without living in the country where that language is spoken might be too challenging for a human being. How many languages would it be even possible to learn properly and what is the price for that? I don't know about any strictly scientific studies in this area.<br />
<br />
Personally, I often feel that my English is either dry as winter leaves or rough like a cartoon drawing (or both), and my Dutch dwells on the pre-teen level, which results in a personality switch every time I switch the language.<br />
<br />
I wonder how many other seasoned ESL speakers have similar experiences? It might only be the thing for those who, like me, started actively using another language relatively late.<br />
<br />
It is great that the modern tools (like online translation) help to reduce language barriers, but could these barriers one day disappear completely? So many misunderstandings, from personal to country level, might go away then. (One hopes...) Would it be possible for a human both preserve their own identity and easily "map" it into any other language / culture?<br />
<br />
Of course, there is more to the game than just language (Le Ton Beau de Marot by Hofstadter is explaining that much better than I ever could), but one has to start somewhere.Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-39042729623072278922015-07-03T15:39:00.003-07:002015-07-03T15:39:49.343-07:00#heatwave<div class="p1">
No, Eurydice did not turn away.</div>
<div class="p1">
She followed Orpheus, and the path</div>
<div class="p1">
Was quivering with light, and flickering</div>
<div class="p1">
With the motifs that crave to take the wing</div>
<div class="p1">
When time looks back, as if it wants to stay.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
But Cerberus, the stubborn Hades' guard,</div>
<div class="p1">
Three ugly heads, each darker than the night,</div>
<div class="p1">
He met that gaze and grinned, and trode behind.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The singer rose into the blazing day,</div>
<div class="p1">
Where sun was painting the horizon blue.</div>
<div class="p1">
(They say, that word was not invented yet,</div>
<div class="p1">
And thus, all days were either white or grey.)</div>
<div class="p1">
He glanced once more into the gaping cave,</div>
<div class="p1">
To see her coming near, if all was true.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Like an obsidian trident could've fled,</div>
<div class="p1">
The hound darted in between instead.</div>
<div class="p1">
The song was over. Neither his cittern</div>
<div class="p1">
Nor hazy form of Eurydice could</div>
<div class="p1">
Have time to move, so quickly all was set </div>
<div class="p1">
When Cerberus retreated, dragging back</div>
<div class="p1">
The quivering, but now voiceless rag -</div>
<div class="p1">
The payment was complete, he was content.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
She cried, but who was there to take that call?</div>
<div class="p1">
The wailing cry of madness sans relief,</div>
<div class="p1">
Of happiness, pulled from behind the feet,</div>
<div class="p1">
Of everything, that makes the soul bleed.</div>
<div class="p1">
And till this day, we think that was a slave</div>
<div class="p1">
Of Dionysus, scared by the deed,</div>
<div class="p1">
And blame the wine and lust that take their toll</div>
<div class="p1">
Of bards and poets from this dusty ball.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
She lives till now, a Muse of suicide.</div>
<div class="p1">
The finest poets would not see her glide,</div>
<div class="p1">
The door appears, the dog with triple smile,</div>
<div class="p1">
It's over quickly, barely in time</div>
<div class="p1">
To throw the latest gaze and leave behind </div>
<div class="p1">
A name, another stone to sing and shine</div>
<br />
<div class="p1">
For nonchalant mankind.</div>
Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-86646568542359042812013-08-22T01:02:00.002-07:002013-08-22T01:05:38.155-07:00Reading about crypto made me think that we might store the reality in our memory using one-way hashing, which is why it's easy to recognise the usual surroundings, but difficult to remember them in details.<br />
<br />
A side thought: if someone or something doesn't fit the patterns we already have for the similar objects, and didn't happen to grab our attention specifically, then there is a big chance that this person or object won't get registered in the memory at all, simply because it would be too expensive to apply the hashing to the new object. This might explain why people don't notice the little changes around them, too.Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-74489110355748124462013-03-12T06:00:00.002-07:002013-03-12T06:00:35.528-07:00<br />
Not sure about the hardware, but for the modern software (be it an application or a website) that has been around for more than five years or so, it feels absolutely true:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"As well as any human beings could, they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face — miles and miles of face — of that giant computer. They had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole."</blockquote>
<i>(C) Isaac Asimov, The Last Question.</i><br />
Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-89195517936415590012012-10-08T11:59:00.001-07:002012-10-08T11:59:51.158-07:00<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Песню последней встречи</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Сонно бормочет тень.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Глядясь в уходящий день,</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Отлетает вечер.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">На небе Млечный</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Путь еще не зажгли.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">В комнате ожиданий</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Спят отбывающие с Земли</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">На чемоданах воспоминаний.</span>Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-69444933398588297112012-07-12T14:21:00.001-07:002012-10-08T07:20:34.409-07:00I have to confess that I rather dislike the modern attitude of adding "girl" to the words describing activities in supposedly "male" domain, that girl programmer, girl scientist or girl whatever. Why emphasize gender? One of the best Russian poets of the XX century, Marina Tsvetaeva, has never called herself "a poetess" and was fiercely opposing those who tried calling her that, preferring the generic term: a poet. And what was good enough for a poet, should be good enough for an engineer, a scientist or a jet pilot. Isn't it?Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-991437293461820932011-10-29T16:26:00.000-07:002011-10-29T16:31:22.050-07:00Cosmic savages?<div style="text-align: justify;">Imagine a prehistoric tribe of savages, who only recently became brave enough to get for themselves a fire that falls from heavens, bring it into their cave and domesticate. When it's cold and dark outside, they all huddle together around their helpful but dangerous protector, humming their proto-songs, fixing their proto-clothes and probably munching their proto-processed food until most of the tribe falls asleep and only the guards would spend their shift watching over the fire, lest it died or tried to spread too far around.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Now imagine that this tribe begins to be interested in establishing contacts with another tribes. May be they hope to kick the other tribe out of their territory and take their women and stocked mammoths, may be they are afraid that the other tribe would do the same thing to themselves, or may be they are just curious to meet new friends - who knows? In any case, how are they going to look for the new tribe? What would they be looking for?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I can only guess how the savages might think, but I guess that they would probably be looking for an inhabited cave (may be larger and cleaner than their own) with a fire in it (may be larger and mightier than their own). So any time they pick up some fire in the distance, they might send some scouts to find out, if there is any tribe gathered around this only possible source of energy.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Next question, what if somewhere nearby there is a little village where much more advanced civilization lives? (Let's not think how come that the more advanced civilization would not try to bring the savage one to their own level, if only for their own security, by tricking them into selling their savage freedom in exchange for cheap drugs and filling up the lowest possible niche in that other society, being simultaneously a recognized sore spot and a symbol of spiritual simplicity, etc). </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">This other civilisation, in any case, doesn't need to live near an open fire. They have their fires far away, called electrostations (nuclear or otherwise) and although some people have still work in shifts to watch over the big fire, lest it died or spread out, the majority of these more advanced people gets the energy via almost invisible wires and uses it to power their TV sets, microwave ovens, refrigerators and other devices without which no true civilisation is ever thinkable of.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Imagine a savage scout entering such village at night, when all lamps are out. He (or she, may be it's a matriarchal society) would see strange forms which are impossible to place, occasionally here and there some tiny fires which seem to be too little to warm up anybody, no half-eaten carcasses lying around, no caves with entrances covered by bear- or tiger-skins, no people gathered around a shaman humming some story about afterlife, nothing at all. Only darkness and those spooky lights.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I can suggest that such scout would later tell, "I have come to some dark places. It looks like they take the majority of the territory around us. It's nothing there we could recognize. We might be utterly alone all the way to the end of the world." - end of the world being how far they can go and return before running out of food.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The funny question: what if we are the savages and whatever we now call the dark matter is the infrastructure of some super-civilisation which we can't ever comprehend?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">So far, we tried to find the tribes dwelling near the fires of big stars, just like us. But what if there are only the super-civilisations around, and they no longer have to dwell near stars, just as we no longer have to dwell near the open fire, because it would be too risky?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">In that case, naturally, taking into account how more advanced that other civilisation must be compared to us, we'll probably spend aeons before ever finding out, all this time possibly being watched ourselves without ever noticing it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">This is completely speculative idea, but so is dark matter at the moment :)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">So much for dark matter, as seen from science fiction prospective!</div>Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-22648179585443021052011-06-17T06:54:00.000-07:002011-06-17T14:42:51.766-07:00Babylon 5, Vorlons and their riddles<div style="text-align: justify;">One of random thoughts due to (re)-watching <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_5">Babylon 5</a> (very decent SF series, thanks to Michael Straczynski, the author, keeping true to his policy of "no cute robots or kids" and having the arc of the whole story prior to starting the project - very recommended for those who are into this type of stories).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">In the series, there are different alien races represented, some of them "good", the others "evil" (the notions of "good" and "evil" prove to be somewhat fluid). One of the most cryptic races are the Vorlons, who are always wearing space suits, looking like little moving fortresses, can take any appearance depending on who sees them (but would rather not to), do not talk a lot and when they do, it takes a while to understand what they actually meant to say. Every phrase sounds like a prophecy and most of the time the characters (and those watching them) are left to wait until time decodes the messages.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">It may well be, that the Vorlons were speaking so little, and then always in riddles, because they haven't been supposed to be using spoken language while communicating with their own kind. From the series it follows that they were using some sort of telepathy to convey information not only between themselves, but also to those who were "enhanced" by them (like Lita, a human telepath; the human telepaths story, by the way, seem to be at least partially borrowed from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Bester">Alfred Bester</a>'s book "The Demolished Man" and one of main human telepathic characters in B5 is also called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Bester_%28Babylon_5%29">Bester</a>). Also, even the way the Vorlons looked doesn't suggest that they even had any organs capable of producing speech (which may be one of the real reasons for them always wearing space suits outside of their own quarters).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Therefore, when they used any language, they were literally struggling with the foreign media. Very clever of Straczynski to make the species who do not normally use language talking in riddles... one can imagine that if they were conveying information to each other directly, and if they all shared common source or generic knowledge (some Vorlon Wikipedia everybody could tap into?..), then almost the only issues they might be willing to communicate to each other would be their feelings and points of view. How else to describe the feelings but via metaphors? But how can the other understand, if they don't feel what you feel, and you are not accustomed to describing your thoughts?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Of course, Vorlons are imaginary subjects living in imaginary world, but one might start wondering, what would become of humanity if we will ever acquire ability to communicate with each other bypassing slow <strike>http</strike> speech protocol? Would we also, in the end, forget how to use speech properly? Would we have to translate old literature individually for every person, depending on his, her or _its_ neuron structure? Would there be any individualities left at all if everybody will always be connected to everybody, or the humanity will change into a sort of humanhill, superintelligent only as a whole? </div>Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-26115416813656143032011-04-02T13:52:00.000-07:002011-04-05T02:52:04.170-07:00<h6 class="uiStreamMessage" data-ft="{"type":"msg"}" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="messageBody" style="font-size: small;">In English: "feeling blue" and "black dog"; in Russian: "green ennui" (тоска зеленая). What if the same book in different languages spawns different feelings, due to the different color perceptions of the readers - even if we assume 100% identical "to the letter" translation? (If one can talk about identical translation in this case at all)</span></h6><h6 class="uiStreamMessage" data-ft="{"type":"msg"}" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="messageBody" style="font-size: small;">It might be interesting to map the unconscious perception of the same text (e.g. from the colors mentioned in it and their associations) across different languages and see if that has any influence on how the book is received...</span></h6><h6 class="uiStreamMessage" data-ft="{"type":"msg"}" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="messageBody" style="font-size: small;">Speaking about positive associations: in Russian the word for "red" (красный) is also an ancient form of the word "beautiful" (прекрасный). "Красна девица" (literally: "red maiden") is a set fairy-tale phrase meaning "beautiful damsel". So everything which is "red" for a Russian speaker might unconsciously be perceived as positive, being associated with beauty. ("Light-blue" (голубой) has in fact several associations - some of them I won't elaborate upon - but none of them is linked with sadness at all.)</span></h6><h6 class="uiStreamMessage" data-ft="{"type":"msg"}" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="messageBody" style="font-size: small;">Positive aura of red in Russian is also spread on other red-like colors: "малиновый звон" (crimson ring/jingle, literally in fact "raspberry ring" because the word is derived from the raspberry color) is an expression describing the sound of many church bells around the time when the sun rises or sets</span><span class="messageBody" style="font-size: small;"><span class="messageBody" style="font-size: small;"> (yes, there is a special expression for that) </span>and is supposed to bring into mind the image of peace and tranquillity all over the world. I am sure every language has such very special phrases which can be explained, but not directly translated. </span></h6><h6 class="uiStreamMessage" data-ft="{"type":"msg"}" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="messageBody" style="font-size: small;">On the other hand, when you are called "white-handed" in Russian, you are accused of being too lazy (or at least, too cherry-picking). </span></h6><h6 class="uiStreamMessage" data-ft="{"type":"msg"}" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="messageBody" style="font-size: small;">The question is, in view of all that, is there any hope that one day two people speaking different languages and living in different parts of the world, would be able to understand each other fully, due to some arcane technology? As far as I can see, not without being able to place oneself in the other's mind... In any case: passive understanding of new or alien concepts, without any additional effort, seems to be very unlikely...</span></h6>Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-82662633090701422212011-01-15T16:42:00.000-08:002011-01-15T16:42:17.959-08:00Robots, robots...<div style="text-align: justify;">Just imagine what sort of trouble might household robots bring to the real life, when they will be ubiquitous, connected to Internet and (very possibly) some of them running under Windows. Therefore, virus-prone. (Even if Windows will die under the layers of dust, some other OS might somehow become a virus farm).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Just lo and behold: some 14-year-old h@ck3r bullied by more physically advanced friends, as a revenge, decides to infect the automaton servants of the hostile household. Instead of vacuum-cleaning the carpet, one of the robots suddenly tries to vacuum-clean the kids of house owner, following them everywhere. A cooking robot sprinkles the steaks with 10 times the amount of pepper (let's assume it would not know where to get the laxative). And I would not even begin what the one armed with a lawnmower could do...</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">First law of robototechnics you say? Yes... only it might well be that the ubiquitous robots, when they arrive, would not be produced by clean and optimally conditioned Western enterprises. Instead, some snotty underpaid kids working their wits out on sweat factories in Eastern Asia (or may be, in Africa... no, that is out of the realm of science fiction already) will bless these devices with a gift of existence. What chances will be that no corners would be cut off in the all-encompassing race for profit? I remember myself walking around the electronic expo in Hannover several years ago. It was the time when navigation devices already started to become mainstream. There was zillion of Eastern Asian shops demonstrating the products which they have essentially copied, more or less well, from somebody else's work. They didn't like their stuff to be photographed, and some of these participants were kicked out after the holders of the original gadgets recognized their offsprings behind the turbid glass... Same happens now with tablets. You can buy a 7-inch sorta-tablet for sorta-money which will sorta-work. Robots will not be an exception.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Of course, the assumptions involving the current social structure are the most error-prone. Social changes are the most difficult to predict: most of fantasy or science fiction writers would rather desribe in as many details as possible the system of fancy clans in some parallel world or the structure of the spaceship having a warp drive at its core, than to go into details of how the society would change. (Stanislaw Lem is a great counterexample). May be in the future there will be no snotty kids providing the rest of the world with cheap devices, sweets and clothing. Or may be, spreading the virus working on robots would be considered a major crime, the graviest thing anyone can do. The human society quickly adapts to prevent itself from self-destruction, and until now it managed to survive...</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Nevertheless... I have to confess, imagining the vacuum-cleaning prank made me giggle. Of course, I would rather not be hunted!</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div>Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-48338569934110753322010-12-06T15:13:00.000-08:002010-12-06T15:13:08.307-08:00<div style="text-align: justify;">Theoretically, it seems possible to run the social networks like Facebook or Twitter in a decentralized way. Much less so for financial payment providers, like Paypal.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">In practice, though, only a small percentage of people are technically able to implement such network (or even just deploy), and only a small percentage within those could be able to do it without consulting Internet. Which does not render this idea very viable.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">From the other side, we all already have absolutely decentralized and absolutely viable communication network: its protocol is called language. Every normally developed adult can support this network and even teach the others to support it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Also, although many of us have never spinned wool or hacked wood, we can more or less confidently visualize how such things could be done, recognize when they are being done, and do them if in dire need.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">When (if ever) the ability to make a radiotransmitter, a photocamera, or to establish a server for a social network will be like wool-spinning or wood-hacking, then the world would truly become a different place. Or so my wool-spinning-vaguely-aware mind figures.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
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</div>Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-91974394191755873952010-11-15T05:34:00.000-08:002010-11-15T05:35:58.886-08:00Daemons and their powers...I have just come across an <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19723-summon-a-demon-to-turn-information-into-energy.html">article</a> on New Scientist site, mentioning <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon">Maxwell daemon</a> and its possible real-life implementation.<br />
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One thing that bothers me about it (don't I see the obvious?..):<br />
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<blockquote>Conceived by James Clerk Maxwell in 1867, the demon exploits the random thermal motions of the microworld. It might watch a tiny ball on a spiral staircase, waiting for it to randomly hop up a step and then<i> </i><b><i>slam in a barrier to stop the ball moving down again.</i></b> If the demon keeps doing this the ball keeps climbing. The potential energy of the ball could then be used to drive an engine.</blockquote>and regarding the implementation: <br />
<blockquote><div class="infuse">Finally, enter the demon, whose eye is a camera and brain a computer that controls the electric field. Whenever the rotor makes some progress in turning against the torque, <i><b>the demon shifts the electric field</b></i> so that the rotor suddenly finds itself nudged onto the top of that "step". This keeps happening, and the overall effect is to gradually climb the staircase.</div></blockquote><blockquote>As it does, the rotor gains energy. <i><b>Crucially, though, the demon need pump no energy into the rotor, only information about the position of the rotor, which it uses to switch the field.</b></i></blockquote><br />
Doesn't shifting the field or slamming a barrier also mean that you make some work? You need to spend some energy to move that barrier and then to lift it again. These two movements cannot cancel each other in the real world because of friction (unless we operate in a real vacuum). Same about the shifting the electric field... Do they really mean that we can disregard friction-like effects in that case?Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-15007574849728491312010-08-28T04:03:00.000-07:002010-08-28T04:03:45.448-07:00Regarding e-readers...<div style="text-align: justify;">I had some other post in mind, but now I don't remember what it was, so I can at least write this one down :)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I think there are going to be the following use cases for e-readers: </div><ul style="text-align: justify;"><li> manuals and other tech books (like the ones which can be currently read online at <a href="http://safari.oreilly.com/">http://safari.oreilly.com</a> ) - these are the books which need to be updated ASAP in case of errata, benefit a lot from having full-text search and community feedback, and many of them aren't relevant after 5 years or so. </li>
<li>Other thought regarding manuals - taking into account popular community projects like - I'll name two I had to look at recently - <a href="http://www.php.net/manual/en/index.php">PHP manual</a> or <a href="http://programming-scala.labs.oreilly.com/index.html">Programming Scala</a> where community feedback essentially becomes part of the document itself - we can expect that the role of document author will be replaced by the role of project leader, who establishes the guidelines for the documentation and writes first draft, and then moderates the community feedback when necessary. It seems to be natural for a technical documentation to be that open-source.</li>
<li>Now, what else can be great content for e-readers, apart from tech or other manuals? (Foreign language ones can be a good fit also, especially if e-reader also has audio capabilities). I would suggest magazines. Many of us have this situation, when we are subscribed to this and that, we are getting the glanced-paper exemplars bi-weekly or monthly, read them (or not) and discard them afterwards. Daily journals are falling under the same category.</li>
<li>To the same category I'd also put so called "beach literature": the books which can be read only once, like some sort of canned conversation when you can't have one. It's a pity to spend expensive paper on those.</li>
</ul><div style="text-align: justify;">At the same time, I don't think that the paper books are going to die. After all, paper book has life span which is way longer than any e-reader, and it's a medium proven by millennia of human experience. But I do think that spreading of e-readers, along with internet, might significantly reduce the amount of printed information.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">At the extreme end it might be even like that (and I would quite like it to be like that): everybody can access the whole body of human knowledge either absolutely free or for some fixed rate (may be a set of rates could be available for different sets of content), and everybody could order a certain book, magazine or journal to be printed out (which would cost extra) - in case he or she wants to have a hard copy. This could be the way to get the advantage of both worlds: not wasting paper on things which are expendable, but preserving information that feels like to be preserved.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Probably, under this model, the books which are ordered often, would still be printed en masse (thus being cheaper). The danger here is that some information might never be printed unless you happen to run across it and appreciate it, and we are losing the possibility to go to a bookshop and rumble through the books, discovering what we have never seen before. We might hope that some publishing houses will still be taking the risks of ordering hard copies of the literature works which they deem interesting. We also should hope that books, as such, will not become a luxury. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">At least, I do. By the way, how many new books have you read the last month?.. ;) </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
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</div>Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36389826.post-45158003547766229032010-05-07T12:32:00.000-07:002010-05-07T13:39:53.824-07:00Alice, where art thou?<div style="text-align: justify;">OK, been there, done that. Just have seen "Alice in Wonderland" (still have red traces upon my nose from the polarized spectacles). And what could I say, as a summary? One word: nauseating.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Obligatory warning: if you still want to see it for yourself, be informed that the rest of this article might contain spoilers.</i> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;"> First of all, there is almost nothing left of the original story, apart from some main personages and a handful of plot threads. As a compensation, there is a lot of the stuff which the author of the original book, I dare to think, would never put in himself. A Galsworthy-made-bigger-than-life kind of society; two stories melt together into one (imagine a first and a second course in one bowl); bits and peaces of fantasy from the previous years that the public has already gobbled down, so the risk of indigestion was probably estimated as low; and on top of all, in the afterglow of the story, a mention of the "wonderful" idea to open a business in China (with Alice and A Serious Guy peering at Maps of Real Wonderlands - was that the idea?). Surely one had to kill a Jabberwock to get to <i>that</i>? Did the Chinese have some share in <i>this </i>franchise? </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">One light spot in all this was Johnny Depp, of course. He just can't play in a boring way, and Mad Hatter is one of the roles which is almost especially tailored for Mr.Depp. So no complaints here. I can imagine that when the movie was finished he was murmuring to himself: "I was again the best actor in that bleak crowd, especially when the magic voice of Alan Rickman was not interfering with my aura". So be it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">But but but, where is the spirit of Lewis Carrol story in all this? Where is that world with the laws which are both like and unlike the laws of our own world, as if seen from more than one completely different angle at once? Where is the discretion and the subtleness, where is the reality seen as a giant playground rather than a battlefield, as we are so often learned to believe by so many other movies? (And utterly, with the one in question, too). Where are the paradoxes and the silly rhymes?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Some of that did survive, of course, but so strongly vinegared with "life-motivating" quotes and images ("It's only your choice to go to battle..." , the good white queen looking to much like a stuffed Galadriel, cherries in blossom - why don't I remember anything of that in the original books? - and some other cliches which I am too tired to mention).<br />
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Thinking about what I just wrote, I could finally summarize it thusly: the original stories written by Lewis Carrol didn't have any moral. At least, the moral was not spelled with big flashing letters on every page. In the film, it is. (I can even understand that - who would finance the movie with a high risk of being misunderstood and therefore financially unsafe? Mass culture, like a fairy tale, has some rules to obey.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Not sure if I will even want to watch anything Tim Burton will do after that. Especially if he will again decide to tackle the classics. I am afraid for my digestion, you know.</div>Anna Nachesahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06815076353874108574noreply@blogger.com1