Now Reading

[ignatius]

Neal Stephenson's SevenEves is bound for the screen. (fingers crossed) i wonder how they'll do some of the stuff w/o it looking like "The Expanse" tv show .. which is pretty good btw.

 

http://deadline.com/2016/06/seveneves-movie-ron-howard-brian-grazer-bill-broyles-apollo-13-skydance-1201769130/

[cwmbrancity]

In An Unspoken Voice - How The Body Releases Trauma by Peter Levine. Pros and cons to this 1, but will take all the help out there

 

You Can't Always Get What You Want by Sam Cutler. Purchased for his personal insights into the Grateful Dead (rather than the R Stones 1st half) and the bloke writes lucidly considering the volume of drugs consumed. Crackin insights into Jerry Garcia, Owsley Bear Stanley and trying to maintain their behemoth wall of sound rig & road-crew/family. Also a man who recognized the blues basis that was missing when Pigpen passed, but thats a bit of a statto pointer for this forum. Superb if you love the early Pigpen-era Dead.

[doorjamb]

 

wow, what an odd reaction to The Trial… Did you like it at least? I avoided Kafka for years after the ubiquitous high school experience of having The Metamorphosis utterly ruined with vapid classroom overanalysis. When I finally gave him another shot I fell in love, & I'd definitely rank the Trial among his better long-form works.

 

I just reread Joyce's Portrait of the Artist & now I want to run away from home to write poetry & be a dick to people by only speaking in Latin.

 

I must say I did enjoy it. Not sure it'd be high on my list to read again straight away but maybe in years to come. What else would you recommend, I'd like to read another of his and compare.

 

The Castle is likewise excellent. Also hard to go wrong with pretty much any collection of his short stories you run across. Come to think of it, Kafka's probably an author whose individual pieces really benefit the fuller your familiarity with his other work.

 

I am now reading something called Modern Dogma & the Rhetoric of Consent wherein dude keeps denying the incompatibility of… uh… reasonable and unreasonable reasoning… So far has done nothing but scapegoat and nitpick Bertrand Russell for no especially compelling reason.

[hello spiral]

Spratters, a collection of his short stories is far more enjoyable imo.

 

I've got a soft spot for The Burrow.

[Guest]

Ray Monk's "Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius": a real lucid read into the life of Wittgenstein. It varies nicely between diary entries, letters and careful analysis of the unique character that is Wittgenstein. As a result, the author never forces an opinion on you, but simply observes what the path of Wittgenstein was. I can really recommmend it: 100 pages in and it feels like 30.

[hello spiral]

Finished Pynchon's V. which was lush. Then I read Never Let Me Go which was

 

Now Brave New World which I've somehow never got around to reading.

[QQQ]

recently read:

 

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said - PKD (re-read)

 

Scale - Keith Buckley

 

Into The Miso Soup - Ryo Murakami

 

---

 

Flow My Tears is classic PKD. great book.

 

Scale is by the vocalist of one of my favourite bands (Every Time I Die) so i was pretty worried it would turn out shit, but it's good. not amazing, but good. he has a lot of potential as a writer so i hope he does more.

 

Into The Miso Soup was great too. i breezed through this over a few days. highly recommended this one.

Edited June 22, 2016 by QQQ

[spratters]

 

 

wow, what an odd reaction to The Trial… Did you like it at least? I avoided Kafka for years after the ubiquitous high school experience of having The Metamorphosis utterly ruined with vapid classroom overanalysis. When I finally gave him another shot I fell in love, & I'd definitely rank the Trial among his better long-form works.

 

I just reread Joyce's Portrait of the Artist & now I want to run away from home to write poetry & be a dick to people by only speaking in Latin.

 

I must say I did enjoy it. Not sure it'd be high on my list to read again straight away but maybe in years to come. What else would you recommend, I'd like to read another of his and compare.

 

The Castle is likewise excellent. Also hard to go wrong with pretty much any collection of his short stories you run across. Come to think of it, Kafka's probably an author whose individual pieces really benefit the fuller your familiarity with his other work.

 

I am now reading something called Modern Dogma & the Rhetoric of Consent wherein dude keeps denying the incompatibility of… uh… reasonable and unreasonable reasoning… So far has done nothing but scapegoat and nitpick Bertrand Russell for no especially compelling reason.

 

 

 

Spratters, a collection of his short stories is far more enjoyable imo.

 

I've got a soft spot for The Burrow.

 

 

Cool cool, had a look for The Castle and found the collection for £1.99. I shall purchase.

[Boxus]

I finished Sphere (loved it) and I'm now reading Cat's Cradle. Vonnegut is always fun. He has a knack for building characters out of quirks and eccentricities in a way that invites real empathy and insight. Kind of like what I imagine Wes Anderson is always trying to do with his movies (imo he doesn't often do it successfully, ends up w more quirk and less substance)

[tec]

Finished the first of the dark is rising sequence, I know it's for young adults but it kept being referenced in folklore books so thought I'd give it a go. Very enjoyable, but not sure if it's enjoyable enough to read the other four that follow. Anyone delved further?

[LimpyLoo]

Recently I started obsessively buying/reading books about music:

 

John Coltrane: His Life and Music (bio peppered with musicology)

George Van Eps - Harmonic Mechanism for Guitar, 1-3 (a thousand page OCD exegesis on fingerings, counterpoint, voice-leading, etc)

John Cage - Silence (early essays and lectures)

This Is Your Brain On Music (Neuro, Social, Psych and Ev-Psych perspectives on music)

Slonimsky's Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns (Coltrane's bible)

The Music of Bela Bartok (hard analysis)

Effortless Mastery (how to think about making music, essentially)

Being Here (interviews with contemporary improvisers)

Where the Heart Beats (on Cage and Zen Buddhism)

Derek Bailey - Improvisation (history of its theory and practice, East and West)

Edited June 26, 2016 by LimpyLoo

[misc]

I finished Sphere (loved it) and I'm now reading Cat's Cradle. Vonnegut is always fun. He has a knack for building characters out of quirks and eccentricities in a way that invites real empathy and insight. Kind of like what I imagine Wes Anderson is always trying to do with his movies (imo he doesn't often do it successfully, ends up w more quirk and less substance)

 

Wow the Vonnegut, Wes Anderson comparison is something i've never thought about but i totally see what you mean. For me the simplistic writing style means that the truly profound moments take you completely of guard, and i guess i can see that in some of Wes Anderson's stuff as well.

[Guest bitroast]

on Fellowship of the Ring. read The Hobbit as a kid and hated it. enjoyed the LOTR films though, especially the extended versions. they make for good 'put on and lie down on couch and zone out' viewing.

 

anyhow, LOTR Book. i'm ... kind of loving it. the time from which the book was written is kind of perfect cos it feels relatively modern and brisk but also has a nice colorful writing to it. astonished to be honest at how little i'm hating the whole thing :^)

[Twelvetrees]

The Universe in Your Hand. Basically it's a breakdown of what we know about the universe in plain language. Did you know that the Earth 'orbits' a 'star' called 'the sun'?

[tec]

Haha I've read that too, quite fun but even simple speak can't help me with quantum physics.

[LimpyLoo]

Haha I've read that too, quite fun but even simple speak can't help me with quantum physics.

What aspects of QM did you have problems understanding?

(Just curious)

[Twelvetrees]

I haven't reached the quantum bits yet. It's a fascinating universe out there. Could do with some nice background music to give future failed manned missions a nice thing to listen to as they die though.

Edited June 29, 2016 by Caribou

[tec]

 

Haha I've read that too, quite fun but even simple speak can't help me with quantum physics.

What aspects of QM did you have problems understanding?

(Just curious)

 

 

Basically all of it. I typed some stuff that was going to go here but I'm not even sure that was right. Observable particles acting differently when they are unobserved, all that, the book does a good job of explaining Schrodinger's Cat but science was never my strong point despite a love of space and the universe. It is a frustrating combination.

[LimpyLoo]

QM is probably the weirdest thing we've ever learned about the universe

There's really no way to have a perfectly intuitive grasp of it

 

I spent a lot of time reading about the Delayed-Choice Quantum Eraser experiment

It's like a QM 'greatest hits' compilation

If you can wrap your head around that, then you're stylin'

But yeah... I literally thought it was a joke at first

The punchline is that even if you wait until AFTER shooting particles through the slits (lol)

To (indirectly) observe what happened...whether you look or not will determine how the particles acted....in the fucking past

 

Now, apparently there's not an actual causal relationship between the later observation and the earlier action...but the actual (proposed) explanation is almost as weird as retrocausality: so you don't need observers to get QM weirdness...it could happen without anyone looking....what causes the weirdness is whether 'which path' (i.e. which slit) information exists or not...like, this doesn't make any sense based on how we think the universe works...like so the analogy with Shrodinger's Cat...it's not that the cat is just both alive and dead until someone looks at it...it's that IF (and only if) there exists information in the universe regarding the cat's status (looking inside the box is just one example)...then the cat will have always been either alive or dead, never having been in some hypothetical superposition of both

 

IMO this detail of QM is the strangest thing humanity has ever discovered

Edited July 1, 2016 by LimpyLoo

[LimpyLoo]

P.S. Oh and also, if there exists 'which path' information, but it is destroyed, then the cat will always have been in a superposition of alive/dead

(According to the analogy)

[Danny O Flannagin]

Now reading a non-fiction book about A.I. called Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies By Nick Bostrom

 

No one really talks about this but human level artificial intelligence is a very real possibility and it's not really a question of if but rather a question of when. Anyways, there are a lot of factors to consider and different types of intelligences that can be achieved. Some think this will be humanity's last problem because it would either destroy us or this "god in the machine" would solve all of our problems.

 

Getting a lot of "ah-ha" moments when reading this book and I highly recommend it, especially to people on this forum who, I'm sure, already think about crazy shit like A.I. taking over the human race.

[auxien]

Getting a lot of please God now moments when reading this book and I highly recommend it, especially to people on this forum who, I'm sure, already pray for crazy shit like A.I. taking over the human race.

 

fixt 4 u

 

But really I've seen this discussed relatively regularly for at least the past decade, and on occasion well before then (Terminator 2: Judgement Day was one interesting documentary-style film on the subject, look it up! ). It rarely comes across as very serious discussions because I don't think we're seriously close to it, nor close to even understanding what it really entail for not only humans and our meager understanding of self-awareness and consciousness in general, but also for the AI. I am always curious to see some serious discussion of the topic though so I'm gonna go look up some info on the book :)

[tec]

QM is probably the weirdest thing we've ever learned about the universe

There's really no way to have a perfectly intuitive grasp of it

 

I spent a lot of time reading about the Delayed-Choice Quantum Eraser experiment

It's like a QM 'greatest hits' compilation

If you can wrap your head around that, then you're stylin'

But yeah... I literally thought it was a joke at first

The punchline is that even if you wait until AFTER shooting particles through the slits (lol)

To (indirectly) observe what happened...whether you look or not will determine how the particles acted....in the fucking past

 

Now, apparently there's not an actual causal relationship between the later observation and the earlier action...but the actual (proposed) explanation is almost as weird as retrocausality: so you don't need observers to get QM weirdness...it could happen without anyone looking....what causes the weirdness is whether 'which path' (i.e. which slit) information exists or not...like, this doesn't make any sense based on how we think the universe works...like so the analogy with Shrodinger's Cat...it's not that the cat is just both alive and dead until someone looks at it...it's that IF (and only if) there exists information in the universe regarding the cat's status (looking inside the box is just one example)...then the cat will have always been either alive or dead, never having been in some hypothetical superposition of both

 

IMO this detail of QM is the strangest thing humanity has ever discovered

 

 

Totally, it's nuts. Sadly even some of what you posted gets a bit lost on me, almost like my brain just freezes and says "you fucking what mate?". There's a book called How to Teach Quantum Physics To Your Dog which I'm going to pick up soon.

[LimpyLoo]

 

Getting a lot of please God now moments when reading this book and I highly recommend it, especially to people on this forum who, I'm sure, already pray for crazy shit like A.I. taking over the human race.

fixt 4 u

 

But really I've seen this discussed relatively regularly for at least the past decade, and on occasion well before then (Terminator 2: Judgement Day was one interesting documentary-style film on the subject, look it up! ). It rarely comes across as very serious discussions because I don't think we're seriously close to it, nor close to even understanding what it really entail for not only humans and our meager understanding of self-awareness and consciousness in general, but also for the AI. I am always curious to see some serious discussion of the topic though so I'm gonna go look up some info on the book :)

Superintelligence is an amazing book...

 

And perhaps an AI thread is in order, because it's such a rich topic that has implications for economics, global politics, labor, democracy, Utopia and Distopia, actual immortality, nuclear game theory, art and music, right-libertarianism vs socialism, psychology, morality, etc etc...I mean, if word got out that someone was currently developing super-intelligent AI, it might set off a chain reaction that destroys the world before the thing is even built. The perception would be that whoever develops it will rule world for the rest of time, I mean just imagine if it's the Chinese gov't or Solicon Valley Right-libertarians who get there first...neither strike me as the type eager to donate the fruits to humanity and create a work-free utopia for all...and that's assuming that whoever makes it would have any measure of control over it, which...the 'control problem' is an open problem that I would bet good money that it's unsolvable...like, you would have to design an elaborate system of incentives and failsafes that was immune to exploits, human error or corruption...a super-intelligent AI is gonna find elaborate, domino-like exploits that humans could never imagine....

 

P.s. sorry for the unsightly wall of text

Edited July 2, 2016 by LimpyLoo

[Danny O Flannagin]

 

 

Getting a lot of please God now moments when reading this book and I highly recommend it, especially to people on this forum who, I'm sure, already pray for crazy shit like A.I. taking over the human race.

fixt 4 u

 

But really I've seen this discussed relatively regularly for at least the past decade, and on occasion well before then (Terminator 2: Judgement Day was one interesting documentary-style film on the subject, look it up! ). It rarely comes across as very serious discussions because I don't think we're seriously close to it, nor close to even understanding what it really entail for not only humans and our meager understanding of self-awareness and consciousness in general, but also for the AI. I am always curious to see some serious discussion of the topic though so I'm gonna go look up some info on the book :)

Superintelligence is an amazing book...

 

And perhaps an AI thread is in order, because it's such a rich topic that has implications for economics, global politics, labor, democracy, Utopia and Distopia, actual immortality, nuclear game theory, art and music, right-libertarianism vs socialism, psychology, morality, etc etc...I mean, if word got out that someone was currently developing super-intelligent AI, it might set off a chain reaction that destroys the world before the thing is even built. The perception would be that whoever develops it will rule world for the rest of time, I mean just imagine if it's the Chinese gov't or Solicon Valley Right-libertarians who get there first...neither strike me as the type eager to donate the fruits to humanity and create a work-free utopia for all...and that's assuming that whoever makes it would have any measure of control over it, which...the 'control problem' is an open problem that I would bet good money that it's unsolvable...like, you would have to design an elaborate system of incentives and failsafes that was immune to exploits, human error or corruption...a super-intelligent AI is gonna find elaborate, domino-like exploits that humans could never imagine....

 

P.s. sorry for the unsightly wall of text

 

 

Well i doubt one nation would be able to tame such an intelligence. The scariest thing is I have no idea what it would do or what its MOTIVATION would be ( I guess he'll go more into that later in the book). But it just seems like we as a species are constantly writing ourselves out of the equation with technology. To reiterate, we don't really have a place in the future because we'd become obsolete.

And i know it sounds like science fiction but everywhere you look, our world is becoming some fucked up sci-fi novel (NSA, drones, worldstar hip hop) and scientists really have no idea when this will be created, there are estimates from 5 years to 100 years