Sometime it doesn't do me any good to try to bull my way into making something happen. I don't know if I have much choice. It's part of the operating system or BIOS. There are certain conditions or situations where what comes natural to me ain't good enow for what's happening in the present tense.
That reminds me of the recent news of HP Labs coming up with a working prototype of a memsistor. First the Berkley professor Chua did the mathematics in 1971, then the Williams team manifested Chua's possibilities in 2008.
The memsistor is considered to be the missing link of electronics theory. I don't know what all that might mean, but then again, none of these guys know yet either. It's gonna be fun reading about how they will react when the light bulb turns on. What we all seem to agree on is that this is some awesome shit. Technology imitates life. If memsistors were missing in electronic theory, then their psychic equivalent was missing in human theory.
When the physicists figure out how the memsistors will change electronics the behaviorists will figure out how they will empower humans. This has everything to do with visualization in my world. If there has been a missing link to the mechanizations that have unfolded so far, then rethinking them in light of the memsistor should prove astonishing. Your milage may vary.
Just like the discovery of the missing link in electronic theory is gonna change everything analog and digital, and not necessarily for the better, then the possibles that appear in human consciousness because of the changes the memsistor's arrival makes, then the possibilities for humans will be discovered also.
I was born into a house that had no electricity. Power generating plants were slow to reach the rural areas. Even when we did move into a house that had electricity, the only thing it was used for was to power a light bulb and maybe a radio. None of the modern conveniences that we have now was available back then.
There is one vivid moment I remember to this day. I was playing on a bare wooden floor in the living room of a house we rented from a Ms. Pollock. On my left was an open fireplace which had live embers glowing even though it was not cold. Lined up along the edge of the burning coals were a series of cast iron appliances that my mother was using to iron my father's white shirts he wore with a tie each day at work. The fire was to heat the ironing devices. The radio was on and playing the same song over and over throughout the afternoon. The room was fairly dark even though there was a light bulb dangling from the ceiling with a dim bulb barely lighting the room.
My mother was crying while she mindlessly ironed my father's dress shirts and listened intently to the radio. It was worrisome to see my mother cry. I didn't see any reason for it. So, that's why I asked her why she was crying.
"Do you hear that music, boy?" she answered back.
"Yes, Momma. Is that why you're crying?"
"That was his favorite song."
"Whose favorite song, Momma?
She sniffled, and didn't answer right away.
"President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He died today. He was one of the greatest men who ever lived. That was his favorite song. Home On The Range."
My mother always addressed FDR using his full name. I guess it was her idea of showing respect. The Great Depression made a deep impression on both she and my father. They both experienced it living in Mississippi, which was already the poorest state in the union even before the Depression struck. Roosevelt's efforts to give people jobs by creating them through the government saved them from what to them was a fate worse than death.
I remember our family getting it's first electric refrigerator, and cooking stove, and clothes washing machine. i remember the back-breaking work these appliances replaced. It was a relatively long time before they begin wiring the whole house for electricity and every room had it's own receptacles and outlets. It was sort of a miracle that the whole family was proud of. We didn't have to work so hard to look respectable.
Looking respectable wasn't so easy when I was a kid, but it was even more difficult earlier before modern transportation brought factory-made products more often to the country stores. The local stores that sold ready made products were always operated by strangers. Many of them from the North. Carpet-baggers. Jewish families. They were desperately needed.
The local people literally didn't know what to do about stuff made cheap in factories. They made their own cloth and other materials through blood, sweat, and tears. Each item was sacred. Every scrap of cloth was used and reused until they literally couldn't be repaired. They saved every bottle and glass like they were precious treasures. Broken family heirlooms were kept anyway.
My mother made our clothes from the cloth sacks flour and chicken feed came in. She was so proud she could provide her children with good clothes. Her children did not go through the great depression. The comments we got from our school mates about how tacky the clothes she made for us looked must have hurt her terribly. Life was cruel to my mother. I don't know many mothers life is not cruel to.
It took forever to change the people who survived the two great wars and the great depression into being a throwaway society. The fact that they fought this change tooth and nail was one of life's greatest mysteries for me until I was called to provide in the same way they did. I failed. Miserably.
I guess this description of how long it can take for even educated people to adopt new technology is kind of lame. Many of the people my own age are totally intimidated by the thought of learning to use a computer. A lot of them much smarter than me. It's gonna get even more confusing for everybody, much less the ones who couldn't adopt to the digital revolution. The memsistor is gonna change both the digital and analog worlds. Especially when it's realized that the earlier technology was not as good as it could have been if the early adaptors had known about this missing element. It's gonna make humans different too. This is the discovery needed to for humans to really become cyborgs.
Saturday, May 03, 2008
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Memsistors And The End Of Human Beings
I had a visitor who was only here as part of his agenda. It actually had nothing to do with me except as I fulfilled the role he assigned me in his duty to his world. He has only assigned just enough time in his schedule for me to play this role he had already written all the dialogue for, and when I attempted to insert my own agenda for my own reasons, he lit out like a jumping jack for parts unknown. I'm nothing if not accommodating. Wham! Bam! Thank kew, Ma'am!
I had intended to tell him about this news article I read to see what he might think of it, but as I mentioned above, he didn't wanna hear it. No blame. So, I'll just write out what I meant to use him to explore. It's not much. Just a news article about the invention of a new type of computer memory that's gonna be mo' bettah, and faster than all the rest. But, of course, there is more to it, but I might have misinterpreted.
Here's a link to one of the articles that came speculating to the forefront this morning:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/technology/01chip.html?em&ex=1209787200&en=c4345e5bcda95925&ei=5087%0A
There are some sites with detailed prophecies of why this new invention is such a big deal. This invention will not lose it's contents when the computer is shut down. That's a big deal for the computer to have "Instant On" capabilities. There's more. This type of memory will remember what's been put in it. It retains a certain kind of imprint or trace for what has been stored in it.
That's the part of what this invention is about. The pundits speculate that it's ability to retain a certain degree of history of it's own use that can provide computers to have more human-like abilities. This is the invention that supposedly the robotics crowd has been waiting to come into being to be able to create robots that think for themselves. Yippee?
We may have to become cyborgs to survive. Maybe we already are cyborgs of a type that can only realize itself for what it is at a certain point of evolution. We are certainly making ourselves into the future tense. We are making more of ourselves all the time. Humans are each the result of their own begottenness. Self-begotten. Only begotten. The child is the father of the man. The man is the only begotten son of the child.
Here is a link to a discussion of this new invention called a "memristor" where nerds are discussing the future possibilities implied by it. They're talking Nobel Prize on the same day it's publicly announced.
>>Of course you can still use it to store digital data, but the real fun will come when you interconnect these things to emulate the analog behavior of the brain. This is where the claim of pattern recognition and facial recognition come in. They're not actually talking about software there but the actual analog capabilities of circuitry built with memristors.<<
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/30/211228&from=rss
When Isabella wrote about "self-begotten/only begotten" she was referencing some early Gnostic literature in which a certain type of god was self-begotten. I Googled these terms up, and the results page had many links to the Gnostic sites where their use of these expressions are spelled out. But, my original inspirations upon becoming aware of just the words themselves threw me right back into my remembering vision which was itself my subjective history of what sorts of traces of what my memory banks had previously employed. That's what makes me think that we're probably self-generating cyborgs from the git go.
Looking at this sperm and an egg thing from a cyborg point of view, we make ourselves from the point of conception into a computerized zombie to the point of ridiculousness and absurdity. Homo sapiens are just a flash in the pan to life in general, but are the results of a long incubation. An incubation of what? What's the end game for what life has evolved to in the relatively short period of time it's supposedly occupied the joint? Procreant to procreant to procreant? That's what it's all about? Is that all there is?
I read Robert Monroe's books about astral travel. In these books he described what he "saw" while he was out of his body. He described one "heaven" he passed by on his way to other places that was for creatures who thought having sex was to closest thing to heaven they ever understood. He described this place as literally crawling with naked people all wiggling around to have sex surrounded by sex for eternity.
The reason I was attracted to reading Robert Monroe's books was because of my own unsolicited ventures with astral travel. I've somehow been popping in and out of my body or somebody else's body for as long as I can remember. That's apparently about all the essence of me does. It moves.
I paid Bob Monroe's asking price for attending the introductory seminar at his school called Monroe Institute in Faber, Virginia. I read the books, then I wanted to see the movie. Mostly, I wanted to meet this man whose writings had a big influence on me. I had already traveled out of my body a lot, but not of my own volition. I wanted to go through his program to see if that was possible for me. All I really found out was that it was impossible for me not to travel outside of my body if I wanted to have my own space port. That's about all the human body is to me anymore. A place to rest up in between spirit quests.
I had several conversations with Robert Monroe when he came over to where current class was in session. I asked him a few questions and the other people in the group asked him more. He was so familiar with the questions people asked him that he would start out his answer with the page number of the book that aroused their suspicions. I didn't remember to ask him the one question I really wanted to know the answer to: Was that sex heaven he wrote about a metaphor for Earth.
I had intended to tell him about this news article I read to see what he might think of it, but as I mentioned above, he didn't wanna hear it. No blame. So, I'll just write out what I meant to use him to explore. It's not much. Just a news article about the invention of a new type of computer memory that's gonna be mo' bettah, and faster than all the rest. But, of course, there is more to it, but I might have misinterpreted.
Here's a link to one of the articles that came speculating to the forefront this morning:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/technology/01chip.html?em&ex=1209787200&en=c4345e5bcda95925&ei=5087%0A
There are some sites with detailed prophecies of why this new invention is such a big deal. This invention will not lose it's contents when the computer is shut down. That's a big deal for the computer to have "Instant On" capabilities. There's more. This type of memory will remember what's been put in it. It retains a certain kind of imprint or trace for what has been stored in it.
That's the part of what this invention is about. The pundits speculate that it's ability to retain a certain degree of history of it's own use that can provide computers to have more human-like abilities. This is the invention that supposedly the robotics crowd has been waiting to come into being to be able to create robots that think for themselves. Yippee?
We may have to become cyborgs to survive. Maybe we already are cyborgs of a type that can only realize itself for what it is at a certain point of evolution. We are certainly making ourselves into the future tense. We are making more of ourselves all the time. Humans are each the result of their own begottenness. Self-begotten. Only begotten. The child is the father of the man. The man is the only begotten son of the child.
Here is a link to a discussion of this new invention called a "memristor" where nerds are discussing the future possibilities implied by it. They're talking Nobel Prize on the same day it's publicly announced.
>>Of course you can still use it to store digital data, but the real fun will come when you interconnect these things to emulate the analog behavior of the brain. This is where the claim of pattern recognition and facial recognition come in. They're not actually talking about software there but the actual analog capabilities of circuitry built with memristors.<<
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/30/211228&from=rss
When Isabella wrote about "self-begotten/only begotten" she was referencing some early Gnostic literature in which a certain type of god was self-begotten. I Googled these terms up, and the results page had many links to the Gnostic sites where their use of these expressions are spelled out. But, my original inspirations upon becoming aware of just the words themselves threw me right back into my remembering vision which was itself my subjective history of what sorts of traces of what my memory banks had previously employed. That's what makes me think that we're probably self-generating cyborgs from the git go.
Looking at this sperm and an egg thing from a cyborg point of view, we make ourselves from the point of conception into a computerized zombie to the point of ridiculousness and absurdity. Homo sapiens are just a flash in the pan to life in general, but are the results of a long incubation. An incubation of what? What's the end game for what life has evolved to in the relatively short period of time it's supposedly occupied the joint? Procreant to procreant to procreant? That's what it's all about? Is that all there is?
I read Robert Monroe's books about astral travel. In these books he described what he "saw" while he was out of his body. He described one "heaven" he passed by on his way to other places that was for creatures who thought having sex was to closest thing to heaven they ever understood. He described this place as literally crawling with naked people all wiggling around to have sex surrounded by sex for eternity.
The reason I was attracted to reading Robert Monroe's books was because of my own unsolicited ventures with astral travel. I've somehow been popping in and out of my body or somebody else's body for as long as I can remember. That's apparently about all the essence of me does. It moves.
I paid Bob Monroe's asking price for attending the introductory seminar at his school called Monroe Institute in Faber, Virginia. I read the books, then I wanted to see the movie. Mostly, I wanted to meet this man whose writings had a big influence on me. I had already traveled out of my body a lot, but not of my own volition. I wanted to go through his program to see if that was possible for me. All I really found out was that it was impossible for me not to travel outside of my body if I wanted to have my own space port. That's about all the human body is to me anymore. A place to rest up in between spirit quests.
I had several conversations with Robert Monroe when he came over to where current class was in session. I asked him a few questions and the other people in the group asked him more. He was so familiar with the questions people asked him that he would start out his answer with the page number of the book that aroused their suspicions. I didn't remember to ask him the one question I really wanted to know the answer to: Was that sex heaven he wrote about a metaphor for Earth.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Accustomed To Her Face
I'm doing some strange stuff now trying to familiarize myself with the 88 key piano keyboard. Nothing that a third-grader wouldn't do better. I feel like i oughta get bolder. I'm playing the major and minor scales every day and understand why I'm doing it, but it gets a little staid, and so I'm working on learning chord progressions. I'm using the material I found at:
http://chordmaps.com/part10.htm
There is a chart about three quarters of the way down the page I've found useful when it's used for making a chart map. I've been learning several songs written in Bb major, so I made up a chart for the chord progression in Bb. I play triads with my left hand in the designated sequence, and doodle around in the same scale as the chord I'm playing with my left hand. I have to look at the map to see what chord to play with my left hand, but that gives me wiggle room to experiment with my right hand. I think I'm actually fiddling around with modes.
I've read a lot of articles on modes recently. At first I was intimidated, but theoretically modes are quite simple to understand. The hardest part for me is getting used to all those weird mode names. Eventually, should I live so long with out going totally senile, those mode titles will become so familiar to me I'll become contemptuous of them.
The way the site owner at chartmaps.com has things laid out it should be simple enough to write some songs that sound pretty good just using his formula for chord progressions. I might end up writing some songs just to remember the sequence of his map for chord progressions.
I like well-formed patterns to practice that are instructive. Etudes. Little songs designed just to teach certain techniques that can become standard fare. That's the way I like to break the rules. To learn them so completely that i get bored with them and start making mistakes that sound good.
I'm not worried much about getting stuck in some prescribed routine for that very reason. I learn prescribed routines for the sole purpose of becoming bored with them. If my audience doesn't know the prescribed routine as well as I do, then how will they be able to discern the cleverness of how I deliberately incorporate mistakes and make them interesting.
I like to use nursery rhymes and other stuff that a lot of people get taught as children. With my flute I would try to play simple songs that most people are fairly familiar with like Hickory, Dickory, Dock, the mice ran up the clock..". I would play the song several times until my listeners would remember it well, and then I would start making mistakes in such a way as to beg their forgiveness.
They generally forgive me at first, but then I make more mistakes, and after a while it starts to appear as if I'm deliberately making mistakes to irritate them, and just about the time they're ready to despoil me, I play the original tune again, and they know they've been duped for the simple pleasure it gives me to see their self-begotten faces. That's the only face I'm ever gonna talk to like they're grownups.
http://chordmaps.com/part10.htm
There is a chart about three quarters of the way down the page I've found useful when it's used for making a chart map. I've been learning several songs written in Bb major, so I made up a chart for the chord progression in Bb. I play triads with my left hand in the designated sequence, and doodle around in the same scale as the chord I'm playing with my left hand. I have to look at the map to see what chord to play with my left hand, but that gives me wiggle room to experiment with my right hand. I think I'm actually fiddling around with modes.
I've read a lot of articles on modes recently. At first I was intimidated, but theoretically modes are quite simple to understand. The hardest part for me is getting used to all those weird mode names. Eventually, should I live so long with out going totally senile, those mode titles will become so familiar to me I'll become contemptuous of them.
The way the site owner at chartmaps.com has things laid out it should be simple enough to write some songs that sound pretty good just using his formula for chord progressions. I might end up writing some songs just to remember the sequence of his map for chord progressions.
I like well-formed patterns to practice that are instructive. Etudes. Little songs designed just to teach certain techniques that can become standard fare. That's the way I like to break the rules. To learn them so completely that i get bored with them and start making mistakes that sound good.
I'm not worried much about getting stuck in some prescribed routine for that very reason. I learn prescribed routines for the sole purpose of becoming bored with them. If my audience doesn't know the prescribed routine as well as I do, then how will they be able to discern the cleverness of how I deliberately incorporate mistakes and make them interesting.
I like to use nursery rhymes and other stuff that a lot of people get taught as children. With my flute I would try to play simple songs that most people are fairly familiar with like Hickory, Dickory, Dock, the mice ran up the clock..". I would play the song several times until my listeners would remember it well, and then I would start making mistakes in such a way as to beg their forgiveness.
They generally forgive me at first, but then I make more mistakes, and after a while it starts to appear as if I'm deliberately making mistakes to irritate them, and just about the time they're ready to despoil me, I play the original tune again, and they know they've been duped for the simple pleasure it gives me to see their self-begotten faces. That's the only face I'm ever gonna talk to like they're grownups.
Monday, April 28, 2008
How Jiggly Is Jiggy?
I've got a regional weather radar report bookmarked so that I can watch a worrisome line of storms approaching from the west. When I go to the Weather page on WRAL.com they offer live reports from either satellite or radar images. I usually elect to see time-lapsed eight hour sequences of the radar images of the storms. For some reason I haven't thought of bookmarking the regional radar page. It's where I usually end up at. Clicking on the Bookmark brings up the latest sequence of images. The weather systems move across the screen like a download progress bar.
I like to think of electrical storms as dragons. That's what the Asians call electrical storms. I was in Formosa and witnessed a long line of people doing a dragon dance. It seemed to go on for miles. The sheer numbers of people stunned me. I didn't realize when I was there what the dragon represented. If I'd known I could have understood what they were doing better. I was raised in hurricane country. On the coastal plains we sometime have electric storms in the winter.
I empathize with the Asians with their Dragon dances and what they represent. I can't bluff my was through my fear of lightning. I be unabashedly looking for shelter when the sky goes BOOM! Monsoon. Tropical storms. Rainy season. Hurricanes. All dragons. They spew forth fire (lightning) destroy the crops (wind and hail), and blow you house of cards to hell and back. The Wicked Dragon Of The North. Witches. Covens. Liquids swirling around in the pot as the witches (hurricanes) dance naked and howl like Banshees. All this stuff waddles like a duck, and it quacks.
One of the more interesting facets of the manner in which scientists look with askance at the so-called heathen ways ("lightning is how they smirk, and then give hurricane names as if they were living entities with their own ground of being. I'm enjoying sitting here writing on and off with all the doors and windows open so I can hear the wind and feel the pressure changes as the dragons swoop and swirl.
The squall line split and went around us. It didn't happen all of a sudden. i could tell as much as a half hour ago on the web site radar screen it was breaking up. I should be happy. There's been lots of tornados and considerable damage. The early news reports showed the latest tornado results. Another hour and the rough part that's risky will be past here.
I sure am enjoying the digitally perfect drumbeat the drum machine on my digital keyboard is playing in the background. I've never owned anything like this gadget. I admit the sound isn't exactly like it would be if I were in the same space as a real live drummer, but it's very good. The quality of it caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting the drumbeats to sound so real.
I can listen to these drumbeats when listening to songs with people displaying their personalities drive me nuts. By that I mean that I get distracted by the emotion I sense in their voices and instrumentals. I got other fish to fry. I can't write with recorded music playing, but I seem to be able to move right along with just a drumbeat playing.
Just now, the last drumbeat the machine was playing finally got on my nerves, and I reached over and pushed a button that made the next drumbeat on the list start playing immediately. The fact that there is no lapse in one drumbeat to the next amazes me, but that's digital. All or nothing. The drumbeat I punched up changed just enough to keep my interest going. I must have gotten up three or four times and boogied my ass off until I had to stop. I shoulda had one of these machines a long time ago. Getting my heart rate pumped up by dancing is more interesting than mere exercising.
I became intrigued when my brother brought his twin grandsons around. They can walk, but not talk yet. Younger than two years I think. I watched them walk. They stutter stepped like old men do, or rather, old men stutter step like toddlers do. One on the way up, and the other one the way out.
I like to think of electrical storms as dragons. That's what the Asians call electrical storms. I was in Formosa and witnessed a long line of people doing a dragon dance. It seemed to go on for miles. The sheer numbers of people stunned me. I didn't realize when I was there what the dragon represented. If I'd known I could have understood what they were doing better. I was raised in hurricane country. On the coastal plains we sometime have electric storms in the winter.
I empathize with the Asians with their Dragon dances and what they represent. I can't bluff my was through my fear of lightning. I be unabashedly looking for shelter when the sky goes BOOM! Monsoon. Tropical storms. Rainy season. Hurricanes. All dragons. They spew forth fire (lightning) destroy the crops (wind and hail), and blow you house of cards to hell and back. The Wicked Dragon Of The North. Witches. Covens. Liquids swirling around in the pot as the witches (hurricanes) dance naked and howl like Banshees. All this stuff waddles like a duck, and it quacks.
One of the more interesting facets of the manner in which scientists look with askance at the so-called heathen ways ("lightning is how they smirk, and then give hurricane names as if they were living entities with their own ground of being. I'm enjoying sitting here writing on and off with all the doors and windows open so I can hear the wind and feel the pressure changes as the dragons swoop and swirl.
The squall line split and went around us. It didn't happen all of a sudden. i could tell as much as a half hour ago on the web site radar screen it was breaking up. I should be happy. There's been lots of tornados and considerable damage. The early news reports showed the latest tornado results. Another hour and the rough part that's risky will be past here.
I sure am enjoying the digitally perfect drumbeat the drum machine on my digital keyboard is playing in the background. I've never owned anything like this gadget. I admit the sound isn't exactly like it would be if I were in the same space as a real live drummer, but it's very good. The quality of it caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting the drumbeats to sound so real.
I can listen to these drumbeats when listening to songs with people displaying their personalities drive me nuts. By that I mean that I get distracted by the emotion I sense in their voices and instrumentals. I got other fish to fry. I can't write with recorded music playing, but I seem to be able to move right along with just a drumbeat playing.
Just now, the last drumbeat the machine was playing finally got on my nerves, and I reached over and pushed a button that made the next drumbeat on the list start playing immediately. The fact that there is no lapse in one drumbeat to the next amazes me, but that's digital. All or nothing. The drumbeat I punched up changed just enough to keep my interest going. I must have gotten up three or four times and boogied my ass off until I had to stop. I shoulda had one of these machines a long time ago. Getting my heart rate pumped up by dancing is more interesting than mere exercising.
I became intrigued when my brother brought his twin grandsons around. They can walk, but not talk yet. Younger than two years I think. I watched them walk. They stutter stepped like old men do, or rather, old men stutter step like toddlers do. One on the way up, and the other one the way out.