Sengupta threw a video feed onto the wall: Rowdy voices, flashing lights, a mag-lev table wobbling at an insane angle thanks to some drunken asshole trying to dance on the damn thing. Impromptu footage of a campus bar; the student ambience would be a dead giveaway anywhere on the planet but Brüks was pretty sure […]
The Life Sausage
Category: eulogyA while back I was trying to explain “quality of life” to my stepdaughters— why sometimes it’s okay to die young, why sometimes a long life can be the most terrible of fates. I invented a simple graphic to help make the point. Imagine time along the x-axis: quality-of-life along the y, but as a […]
Banana’s Dead.
Category: miscThree hours ago he was purring on my pillow. Now he’s in a box. I’ll probably never know what happened in between, except that it must have been agony. I have to go dig a hole. More later.
The Constraints of Time, The Limits of Reason
Category: rant, scilitics, sociobiologyAs a postscript to my previous entry — and as a case study to the current one — I spent a little while over this weekend doodling the outlines of a fake nature documentary riffing off the old “Hinterland: Who’s Who” vignettes that used to run on CBC. Mine was called “Internet: Who’s Who”. […]
In Vicarious Defense of R. Scott Bakker
Category: UncategorizedFor a while, a few years back, I thought I might have an evil twin. I kept running into people at cons who’d met him: Man, he coulda been your clone, they’d say. He’s tall and gangly and kinda sardonic — smaller in the nose, maybe — he’s writing this book about the neurological impossibility […]
Pursuant to Last Post’s Comment Thread about Machine Suffering…
Category: AI/robotics, interviews… as chance would have it, here’s an excerpt from a list of interview questions I’m currently working through from ActuSF in France: You raise the question of artificial intelligence, with the “intelligent frosts”, and quote in appendix both the works of Masuo Aizawa and Charles Thorpe on neuronal networks. Do you believe that in […]
Black & White
Category: legal, sciliticsA couple of minor announcements before we get started: First, a quick shout-out for the benefit of the SciFi subReddit admins: Yes, I am both who I claim to be and who this circuitos dude claims I am (even though I don’t Twit); and yes, if there’s sufficient interest I’d be happy to do a […]
The Anal Truth
Category: misc, public interfaceThese are the lies they tell you. First, that the flavor is vanilla. It’s not. It smells like vanilla when you rip open the pouch — makes you think hmmm, like Nestle’s Instant Breakfast, this won’t be so bad — but the moment you mix it with water all sweet pretence disappears. You’re chugging something […]
Martin Luther King and the Vampire Rights League
Category: sentience/cognition, sociobiologySome of you may remember my ruminations on the evolutionary significance of sociopathy, my tentative musings that it may be not so much a pathology as an adaptation, and my almost pathetic relief (scroll down to Oct 14) when people with actual credentials wonder the same thing and thus make me look like less of […]
“PyrE. Make them tell you what it is.”
Category: biology, biotech, sciliticsAt the end of one of the classic novels of TwenCen SF, the protagonist — an illiterate third-class mechanic’s mate named Gulliver Foyle, bootstrapped by his passion for revenge into the most powerful man in the solar system — gets hold of a top-secret doomsday weapon. Think of it as a kind of antimatter which […]