John – Page 45 – Wetmachine

There's still hope — robots fail in the desert

John March 14, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

Ever since watching the opening sequence of the first Terminator movie in 1984, in which autonomous battlebots relentlessly and remorselessly hunt down a pesky band of cockroach-like humans who refuse to be eradicated from what’s left of the Earth, the mad scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration have been racing to beat the movie’s date of 2029 for the ultimate man-machine showdown.

Perpaps starting to panic a little–with only 24 years to go, no credible unstoppable AI-driven land-based deathmachines on the horizon and a whole world to destroy–the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) challenged itself to “think outside the box(sm)” and so opened up the competitionto universities, entrepeneurs and even people who have no known connection to Haliblurton, Lockheed or Raytheon.

Sausage Factory: a partial index to date

John March 11, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly, Tales of the Sausage Factory

Here’s a nearly complete list of Harold Feld’s “Tales of the Sausage Factory” articles here on Wetmachine. Real Soon Now I’m going to get organized and use the blog software to keep track of this stuff so I don’t have to manualy copy and paste to generate lists like this. . .

On the Nader copyright case

Justin/Janet part 2

Justin/Janet part 1

The ICANN Train Wreck

Unlicensed Spectrum Access

Why Disney/Comcast Merger Sucks Rocks

On RFID

CBS Caves Again for Bush

Yet more on Fileswapping

Fileswapping — whither to in ’04

ABA article:“More than a Toaster with Pictures”

On making the Wall Street Journal’s Shit List

Golden Globes, Former Presidents, Media Ownership”

ORSON, the Overmind

John March 9, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

Watch it grow.

(ORSON –Obedient Remote Servo-Organic Network. Read “Acts of the Apostles” for chilling details of its origin, true nature and ring-of-power-like destiny!!!)

1985 — a novel a-borning

John March 7, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

I’ve started work on a new novel (or novella — we’ll see how lont it turns out to be. . .). It’s set in the year 1985 in a setting that seems to be some kind of hybrid of the USA, the New Kent of my “Cheap Complex Devices”, and Orwell’s 1984. Its subject, I guess, is the prison-industrial-military-entertainment complex, but I’m trying to focus (of course) more on the story than on any big themes or messages.

Nightmare

John March 1, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

My nightmare started out last night with an image of a woman sitting by the grave of her recently deceased husband. She was one of those people who don’t (can’t, won’t, etc) understand that dead people are dead, and so go to gravesides and talk to their dear departed ones.

She was describing to me her husband’s attitude about this and that, as if he were still alive. She was happy and playful, teasing him as if he were there. She made some remark about his hair. And then he was there, lying in an open casket. His head was towards me and his feet towards her. He had a big pompadour of gorgeous hair (I’m practiacally bald, so figure that fact into any analysis).

I did not recognize either the husband or the wife..

And then his casket disappeared, and he was lying on a bed of ice, like a fish in a fishmarket. And then we were in a room of similar wives, all sitting by their dead husbands cooling on beds of ice. And then my dream got weird.

Wetmachine so far

John February 16, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

Half a year (or so) ago I decided to get serious about livening up my Wetmachine website. Wetmachine had been around since October 1999, but I had only updated it a few times. I wanted to transform it into a site that people would come back to. A blog of some kind was clearly in order.

Knowing that it would be a drag, not to mention probably impossible, to singlehandedly make Wetmachine sufficiently compelling to warrant return visits, I invited some friends to play along. About three months ago we made the switch to blog format. Read on for some brief musings on the experiment so far.

MIT AI researchers develop healthy technoparanoia

John January 21, 2004 February 24, 2013General, General, General, My Thoughts Exactly

Or, so says The Onion, in any event.

“The more we thought about it, the less we were able to laugh off the threat of killer machines,” said Dr. Henry K. Arronovski, a leading expert in the field of heuristics classification. “It really started to freak us out. What if, decades from now, humans end up in a virtual-reality construct designed to blind them to their enslavement to the hivemind—all because of the work my colleagues and I started?”

Added Arronovski: “I want no hand in creating a world where only Keanu Reeves can protect my great-grandchildren from a giant drill that plummets through the ceilings of subterranean cave dwellings.”

As a true technoparanoaic, I guess I wish there were more truth to the story. . .

Nanomeme Syndrome

John January 15, 2004 February 24, 2013General, General, General, My Thoughts Exactly

In both the philosophical and visual sense, ‘seeing is believing’ does not apply to nanotechnology, for there is nothing even remotely visible to create proof of existence. On the atomic and molecular scale, data is recorded by sensing and probing in a very abstract manner, which requires complex and approximate interpretations. More than in any other science, visualization and creation of a narrative becomes necessary to describe what is sensed, not seen. Nevertheless, many of the images generated in science and popular culture are not related to data at all, but come from visualizations and animations frequently inspired or created directly from science fiction.

From “The Nanomeme Syndrome: Blurring of fact & fiction in the construction of a new science” in Volume 1, Issue 1, of Technoetic Arts, a journal of speculative research, by Jim Gimzewski and Victoria Vesna, some legitimate hardcore nanotechnologists. Gimzewski won the Forsight Insitute’s Feynman Prize in 1997 for leading the team that made that nifty IBM logo written in atoms.

Two Wetmachine Con Artists

John January 14, 2004 February 24, 2013General, General, General, My Thoughts Exactly

Your wetmachine host (that would be moi, John Sundman) and prolific wetmachiner and legal good-guy Harold Feld will be panelists at the Science/Speculative Fiction convention (“con” )

Arisia , to be held in Boston this weekend.

(It was at last year’s Arisia that Harold & I met, and I was so impressed with his general smartosity that I invited him to blog here. Lord only knows why he accepted the offer.)

If you’ve never been to an SF con (as I had not been before 2000), let me warn you that, in full conformity to stereoptype, cons are populated by weirdos. However, con-goers, who sometimes call themselves Fen, are some damn smart and well-read and thoughtful and articulate weirdos. And actually, come to think of it, now that I’ve been to about a dozen cons and have been on more than a dozen panels myself, I guess I’m one of the Fen too. Damn, how did that happen?

A of A Technology Sighting

John January 12, 2004 February 24, 2013General, General, General, My Thoughts Exactly

Slashdot put me on to this link about scientists claiming ability to predict earthquakes, basically based on the same kinds of data and statistical methods that I imputed to Monty Meekman (page 63 in the first edition). However, whereas Monty evidently could predict earthquakes to the minute, the UCLA scientists (at the above link)are claiming that they can predict to within months. So I guess Monty is still on top.

At some point I will post a more thorough “Acts of the Apostles technology siting” story, in which I’ll provide links to random stuff I invented for “Acts” that has since made its existence in our universe. It will have about 15 entries.

I’m still trying to cajole (??) Ron, heretofore silent Wetmachiner, to write the story for me, because he’s been sending me “AofA Technology Sighting Newsflashes” for about three years. But if Ron continues to maintain radio silence I may have to take matters into my own hands. Hope I don’t have to! Ron, that’s a hint.