Tag: Science Fiction.

Categories
Biohacking Reading

Day 1720 and I Am OK To Go

I love Carl Sagan’s Contact. I first read the book in my middle school years and was allowed to watch the movie starring Jodie Foster despite having a very limited “screen time” diet.

As I got older I was allowed to watch edifying science fiction and book adaption only if I had read the source material. Contact passed both tests

It’s a beautiful story of faith and science about on a radio astronomer who finds a signal from alien intelligence which kicks off a planet wide space race to make contact.

There is a scene in the film where our protagonist Dr Arroway is set to launch a machine which we humans do not fully understand but is presumed to be some sort of transportation device.

Just as the countdown nears zero, she loses contact with the ground team. Roaring machinery and turbulence drowns her voice as she repeats over and over “I am OK to go” until a blind colleague finally picks her voice out of the static. The capsule is let go. I won’t spoiler it.

I’m OK To Go

I had a little moment of being out of contact myself today. I am now the proud owner of a hyperbaric chamber but still getting used to the machine. Alex, watching me as I adjusted, communicated with me through the glass with gestures.

Hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy has roots in diving as managing pressure changes is an important aspect of safety for underwater and high altitude work.

When diving you don’t give a thumbs up to show you are alright. Thumbs up actually means ascend. You give the OK sign to communicate that you are doing fine.

The “OK” hand signal in diving is formed by touching the tip of the thumb and index finger together to make a circle, with the other three fingers extended upward.

Even as I was a little dizzy and struggling to acclimate I was ultimately “ok to go.”

Categories
Aesthetics Reading

Day 1718 and The Abyss Stares Back

The glory of the first few weeks of fall in Montana, indeed most of the mountain west, is under appreciated.

We advertise the powdery snow & bright sunshine of our winters and the long temperate days of our summer for tourism, but I love the precious few middle days of transition as we approach Michaelmas season.

The harvest wraps, the fall begins in earnest with frost ever ready, and we prepare ourselves for darker days ahead.

I personally try to be outside as much as possible in this transitional period. Throwing on sneakers and a vest is much easier than snow boots and a parka.

Rambling across county pastures, over makeshift bridges across streams and across neighboring fields in the morning sets the tone for a positive day.

Someone acquired a new piebald

Once I’d returned home, the abyss of the open internet was there to stare back at me as I looked too hard upon it.

The prayers I had uttered in thanks for the glory of our mountains, the brightness of the sun, and the mercy granted to the living was pushed back by the darkness of greyzone algorithmic memetic warfare.

I am still recovering from travel so weak enough that I have little desire to self censor. The ebbs and flows of conflicting constructed realities are fighting for purchase on the American mind and it’s not pretty. God given inalienable rights are not on anyone’s mind when there are others to blame.

I hardly knew if I should pick up Heidegger, Nietzsche or (shuddering at the thought) Schmitt to make sense of apoplectic displays of poorly harnessed power being thrown about by competing and angry egregores.

What could I possibly do or say or read to make sense of anything? I suppose that’s how the abyss gets you. The Nothing only needs you to stand idly by as you are absorbed into the abyss. Michael Ende and Madeleine L’Engle may be better places to go to understand the abyss than Nietzsche. Lest we lose our sense of wonder in the horror.

Die unendliche Geschichte – 1979 Michael Ende

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Culture

Day 1711 and Blood Moon Total Lunar Eclipse

I’m from a part of the world where dark skies can still be sought out with relative ease. Not because we are undeveloped, but because it’s harder to live with elevation and snow. If you had the will to climb you could see the Milky Way.

The Rocky Mountain regional corridor has only in the last thirty or so years turned into prairie suburban sprawl in Colorado.

Boulder was a small town with little between it and Denver but farmland. Now from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins the entire I-25 corridor is densely packed.

Anytime a lunar eclipse crosses the astronomical calendar, I wonder if children still search out the skies for wonder and study. I remember telescopes being a highly coveted birthday gift and whole classes would seek out observatories for blood moons and totality.

Lunar eclipses arise when Earth’s shadow swallows all or part of the moon, obscuring its surface. A total lunar eclipse is the most dramatic version of the event and is often referred to as a blood moon. NYT “How To Watch the Blood Moon and Total Lunar Eclipse on Sunday September 7th 2025”

If you are on the eastern side of the world from Europe to Australia you will have an opportunity to see today’s full moon be shadowed by Earth starting around 7pm in CEST. Check date and time for your own area.

Seeing the sky is a beautiful and universal human experience. Precious few of us have seen our planet but the night sky and our moon have figured heavily in the shared experiences of entire species for centuries.

Categories
Media

Day 1701 and USS Enterprise (NCC 1701-D)

I have mentioned I’m a fan of Star Trek a few times. I am a genuine fan of the original series, the Next Generation and Deep Space 9 as well as many of the movies.

Gene Roddenberry pitched it as space cowboys but it’s become a template for entire generations for what competence in the face of the unknown should look like.

I’ll happily take either side in the Captain Picard versus Captain Kirk debates, because just as that fashion editor in Devil Wears Prada said about two superficially similar belts, “it’s hard as they are just so different!”

We are facing quite a bit of the unknown right now. Old hierarchies and expectations have changed. Or at least been revealed for what they are. We must ask what we owe each other and how we should expect ourselves to commit to a common cause.

I find myself considering the incredible competence both personally and professionally of the crews. I named this post NCC-1701-D for Picard’s Enterprise as that crew is famously a collaborative and high trust crew. Each one well developed with expertises professionally but also everyone was always trying new things and exploring new skills.

One of my friends accused me of having nerd “stolen valor” as I couldn’t have suffered for my affection for interests like Star Trek. Maybe it’s true girls don’t experience it the same way. Maybe I didn’t notice. I don’t think I cared. I’ll always be someone who sees 1701 and thinks “that’s the Enterprise!”

Categories
Culture

Day 1695 and Only Knowing The Now

I let myself be swept into a rolling video scroll on Twitter accidentally today. You may know the awful dark pattern that occurs when you choose to watch a video posted by a mutual in the For You flow. It then sends you down a scroll of video content chosen by algorithm.

Typically it’s dross and I’m sure the account meant to show this particular video to me for nefarious theory of mind reasons but I found it enlightening.

I was sent to young African woman breaking down an epistemology of time in African religion and philosophy by Kenyan scholar and Anglican priest John Mbiti.

John Mbiti’s philosophy of time presents a distinctive African conception of temporality that fundamentally differs from Western linear time concepts…Mbiti argues that African time is two-dimensional, consisting only of the past and present, with virtually no future. – Perplexity Synopsis

Only present entities exist, while past and future things do not. Crimping from video and Wikipedia.

A screenshot of the video

“Sasa (the now) and Zamani (the endless past) are the central concepts in Mbiti’s temporal framework.”

Being western Protestant myself, lacking an epistemology or ontology for a “real” future that arrives feels sad to me, even if rationally I know I am only ever experiencing the now.

You can say I only “know” the “now” as it’s all I’ve ever experienced. We call this theory of time Presentism.

Sasa is now in Swahili. Which took me to a funny place as I thought of the use of sasa in the sci fi series The Expanses’s invented Belter creole for “to know.”

One can easily argue that all we know is the now which makes “sasa” as “now” and “sasa” “to know” easily bridged. I wonder if the linguist who created the patois knew this. Probably.

Sasa makes a mathematical sense to me as I live in 3 dimensions but know the 4th dimension of time to exist but only “know” time as “now”

Nevertheless I myself am quite interested in the future arriving. So I have put together a ham fisted Belter sentence of my own as I wish for everyone to experience more future time

“Mi sasa da future gonya kome. Me kopeng wedi da way long day”

Categories
Politics

Day 1689 and Drumhead or Not Rushing To Judge What We Don’t Know

I wonder how much of the moral education of Americans comes thanks to Gene Roddenberry. Star Trek is a very American show. It was pitched to Desilu Studios (owned by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball of I Love Lucy fame) as a space western.

The cowboy frontier spirit of Captain Kirk has an honor code based on the worthiness of exploration. When the millenials got a reboot in the Next Generation, Captain Picard added the gravitas of excellence through the pursuit of the truth.

It’s hard to think of a show that embraces an anglosphere manifest destiny with more vigor and it is grounded in the enlightenment values of science and moral philosophy. It’s a very American show.

I was watching a fairly minor TNG episode while eating today The Drumhead. An ambassador starts a witch hunt insinuating treason. Apparent drumhead courts were a military summary judgement court.

A legal drama ensues where Picard quotes the ambassador’s father famous words about the dangers of denying basic rights to even one man in the name of protection of society makes us all less free.

Feeling rather on the nose for the moment right? Picard reminds Worf as it wraps up the witch hunt being proven a lie, that those who cloak their misdeeds with the pretense of serving a greater good are often the most difficult. Spreading fear and mistrust in the name of righteousness must be guarded against.

“Vigilance, Mr. Worf. That is the price we have to continually pay.”

We have a chance at preserving and expanding the enlightenment values that brought our species to this moment, an American moment, by enabling more of us. We can educate ourselves and access the world and the many virtues to which humanity has aspired to by working hard to master them ourselves. This is the empowerment of compute.

We have tools available to us to be vigilant in what is the great good of civilization we wish to protect in an open, decentralized and networked internet.

That we can at scale train a new inference search capacity for the sum of our knowledge and reality is a utopian reality even Gene Roddenberry didn’t dream we’d have.

Don’t rush to summary judgement in fear over the future we can build with protocols and networks that can be encrypted and decentralized. That we can model them with artificial intelligence, and by asking questions well, get back information, code and even machine and biological diagnostics is a huge achievement for our species.

To push the fear of the greater good over its consequence can go from legitimate concerns to a drumhead summary judgement quickly. Risking the freedom to use something that is both just emerging and even in that infancy so promising. That it is helpful in the now seems to showcase both western traditions and enlightenment values.

It’s an American ideal that we must all be free to think and speak the truth, search for the truth and can calculate and provide a mathematical proof of truth that needs no trust because it can be know. We have a right to compute.

Artificial intelligence solves problems now. It’s better than humans now at many types of tasks even as it still a new tool and unrefined and even brittle in its capacities still. It’s took only as good as its craftsman’s understanding of it and we are still learning how to build it.

Artificial intelligence can give us the internet we deserve. I support the right to repair movement because I believe we should know and seek the freedom to own things we have purchased and modify them.

Right now AI helps humans can solve immediate problems from tractor repair to wound care. Maybe machines get better as we get better at using them because we do it with them. We figure things out by building.

Don’t let your worldview be constrained. You can know the freedom of living in a society that values your rights. And the right to compute weaves together many of your most sacred rights. And if we infringe on it for some of us it infringes us on us.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1667 and Guess Goes Idoru

In 1995 William Gibson wrote a novel called called Idoru. The protagonist Colin Laney has a talent for identifying nodal points which are the concept undergirding Gibson’s most famous quote.

“The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

Nodal points, or as Gibson later called the process of finding them “pattern recognition,”is a type of useful apophenia in which you notice the emergence of trends before they have fully emerged.

You pick out the new and next amongst the now. In the case of Idoru, a rock star named Rez wants to marry a synthetic self Rei Toei who is an AI construct that is a massive pop star.

Thirty years later that future is here. Heck Lil Miquela debuted in 2019. But in 2025 we are in the very darkest depths of the uncanny valley and it looks more like a banal blonde with an ugly handbag than an exciting light show hologram in Tokyo.

Fashion’s primary value is in acting as routers of emerging nodal points, so I should have known it was only a matter of time before Vogue’s publishers decided to let one of their lower rent advertisers run a campaign from an advertising agency whose gimmick is creating artificial intelligence editorial spreads.

You’ve got to test the waters with someone who doesn’t really matter before it spreads to your editorial and luxury advertisers amirite? And it’s somehow less creative than your average Guess campaign.

A series of images in an advertisement for Guess featuring a blonde woman in a striped dress and a floral-romper situation are stamped with tiny fine print: “Produced by Seraphinne Vallora on AI.” via NYMag

Chevronesque patterns against Yves Klein blue couldn’t have cost more than their usual Rome dolce vita rip off campaigns but you do you Guess
Just when you thought photoshop was the worst thing for body dysmorphia now it’s AI

Anna Wintour learned her lesson a little late with the Internet and social media (thanks for the career Ms Wintour) but it’s hard to predict just how Condé Nast will bungle this next content transition.

You’d think with Cloudflare’s different rates for bot scrapers versus human Internet traffic would provide the ideal opportunity for a renaissance of valuable online creative content but maybe no one at Vogue knows about that yet.

The AI future at Condé Nast is not looking great based on this Guess advertising campaign but who cares it’s August and Guess right? When it’s Prada and the September issue I’ll grant them much less slack. If I’m paying for content, I expect it to be something better than derivative goods.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1569 and The Sky Above The Port Tuned To A Dead Channel

I spent the night in a port city in Greece as I am making my way back to Western Europe. I’ll be crossing by airplane via polar routes on my way to Colorado next week for an academic conference at my home town university.

I feel like I’ve made it when I am invited to speak on topics like Renegade Futurism. I’m now old enough to have lived a couple rounds in the “dissident technology” discourse so I hope to have something of value to say to new generations.

“You can’t get the little pricks generation gap you.” Molly Millions Neuromancer

On the long drive back from Istanbul I am listening to William Gibson’s Neuromancer to set myself in the right mood after the mix of antiquity and modernity I encountered this week.

One doesn’t cross thousands of kilometers and centuries of empires without requiring a bit of an aesthetic change.

Sunnier ports than in Gibson’s Neuromancer

The weather is more sunny Mediterranean Easter weekend than the non-climate skies of a future Japan’s Chiba and Night City, but with really any port city at night I can’t help but think of the famous first line of cyperpunk’s foremost novel.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer

And so I tuned in to a story of oligarchy, artificial intelligence, dissident coders and cyborgs with mirror shades. In that near future the protagonists make a stopover in Istanbul too and it involves medically advanced nervous system treatments too. Gibson’s cyborg chop shops are almost as advanced as what I saw this week.

Hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy

Gibson’s 1984 novel is as relevant in 2025 as it ever was. Our timeline has become his later work in uncanny ways but his cyperpunk aesthetic has become as timeless as the domes of Constantinople.

The elephants eye domes of a hammam

Whatever transition we are about to make as humans as our own Wintermute intelligences arrive will be rocky. I don’t know who will be the dissidents and how centralizing power may prove to be.

One can just start to see corporate post-nation states emerge. Maybe they will look like Tessier-Ashpool S.A. Maybe it will look like Elon Musk’s family office Excession. Of course, that’s an entirely different science fiction novel about artificial intelligence.

Polybius’s cycles of political revolution chart
Categories
Culture Startups

Day 1561 and Just Don’t Die

I’m noticing a trend among more and more of my social circles of fear, confusion, depression and malaise. Which let’s be frank isn’t at all irrational given (hand waves) all this.

Rapid changes in technology are slamming into geopolitical changes and it is scaring the shit out of all kinds of people. Personal politics aside, many of the institutions, alliances and people we lived with our entire lives are changing.

But the rate of change is exciting! So much of what we took for granted in our youths is simply changing. Maybe (ok definitely) some of it will be worse for parts of it. It’s normal to be afraid of change. But what if we just need to survive the change?

I’ve been in tech my entire life. I was raised in it by my family. My father absolutely loved gadgets and hardware of all kinds and dove headfirst into selling software. I married someone who works in it with me.

I went to work in it by taking my skills in understanding new tools and translating it to an industry that adopted all of it. What an incredible privilege it was.

I worked in fashion and cosmetics so it was a mixed back but many incredible creative talents made and sold clothes that simply wouldn’t have been possible in an earlier more closed era.

The changes my father and I went through feel like slow lumbering industries compared to the rapid iteration of tooling we are seeing now. How we make things is being changed in ways that is almost impossible to keep up with.

I want to survive the Jackpot of change that is upon us. That’s a William Gibson reference. I agree with Bryan Johnson. Just don’t die. Imagine what we will find on the other side.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1554 and Complex Coordination

I’ve never been much for listening to music while I do work. I’ve always found it distracting if not downright annoying. I don’t really believe I’m capable of multitasking. If a task requires my focus and coordination it will get the sum of it.

I’m not convinced anyone is particularly good at it if the studies on focus and multitasking are to be believed. Task switching costs, reduced cognitive efficiency and mental fatigue are typical indicators of the distraction of multitasking.

I was given a reminder of the strain of complex coordination as I was relaxing last night. I enjoy Star Trek: The Next Generation and found myself rewatching Data’s Day,” Season 4, Episode 11 in which Dr Crusher teaches Commander Data how to dance before a wedding.

Being an android, Data is able to easily mimic the doctor’s movement after being shown them. But as he learns to the nuances involved in waltzing with the partner he tells doctor (paraphrasing)

“This is complex set of variables to coordinate”

“Try to act like you are enjoying it!”

As Data tries to integrate the dance moves, their joint body language, the changing direction, and variable speeds you get a visceral sense of why embodied compute requires more processing than intelligence tasks. The final challenge? Smiling while coordinating it all.

Resting Android face? Data tries to smile while waltzing via Memory Alpha