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Atwood, Musk and Kurzweil walk into a bar...
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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 Atwood, Musk and Kurzweil walk into ...
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The bar is long and deserted, it has a theatrical quality. Tall bar stools, spot lights over the bar, which glows under heavy varnishing and is made from a recycled bowling alley lane of rock hard maple.
The three sit, Atwood in the middle. Musk rests his elbows on the bar and stares at his refection in the mirror behind the cash register. He eyes the trendy bottles of Bourbon but decides to have a beer. Ray figets with his top shirt button, he does not really like to drink, or is he very good at it, the other two insisted this business must be taken care of in a bar. The bartender appears from behind a purple curtain, his name is Neil de Grasse Tyson Chicken. He is dressed in a Superman cape, and yields a truth staff 9 feet tall that zaps anyone who lies with a non lethal but painful shock of special energy only he knows the origin of.
Atwood orders the gin and tonic made with Beefeaters. Musk an Anchor Steam beer and Ray coffee with brandy. Any brandy, it does it not matter. Mr. Tyson-Chicken mixes the drinks, sets them down and starts a tab for the trio.
The three are mostly silent, Atwood farts, Musk giggles, Ray looks at the door. Tyson-Chicken narrates for the audience- he begins, "This is about futurism."
"Atwood claims that biological and artificial intelligence interfaces will move into the future and follow a dystopian model of development, much the same as how in her novels the most negative and avaricious traits of human beings come to the fore when money and technology is involved. But as in her novels, Atwood's premise is based very much on a literary understanding of human nature. Ever since the beginning of the romantic novel the thematic thrust, if you will, of literature is to pit Man against Man, Man against Nature, Nature as Entropic Force which Man must Overcome, etc. You get the idea. Atwood's world view and futurism is based on a literary model."
Tyson-Chicken continues:
"And here we have Raymond, who in his big mindedness says that miniaturization of technology is exponentially accelerating and by the year 2030 we will have developed nano-bots the size of blood cells which can be injected into the human cerebral cortex. These nano bots will connect humans directly to what we now understand as the "computer cloud" which is also developing at an exponential rate, and will by the time nano-bots are blood cell sized be something like a human brain in complexity, but much bigger and more powerful. Ray does not see the future in terms of a dystopian divide of rich and poor, but as a way to lift all humans and advance them by virtue of being connected from cerebral cortex directly to the collective knowledge of all the ages of mankind."
"Musk however finds all this very troubling and wants to throw some caution at the development of artificial intelligence and the possibility of a singularity."
The trio orders a second round, and Ray being less of a drinker than Atwood has softened up. He's feeling it after one brandy and coffee Ray decides to order a tequila. Tyson-Chicken raises an eyebrow, he smirks once his back is to Ray. He is playing at being the bartender and likes the acting, the purple stage curtains, and the cape. The staff has no actual power, but Musk is convinced it does and is trying to figure out how to get it from Tyson-Chicken. This is really just a technologists version of the Gong Show, a futurists vision test. Neil, along with the audience, is the final judge on who gets the staff crook and dragged out of the bar.
This is a thinly veiled attempt at something, but only you can elaborate and explain who Neil deGrasse Tyson-Chicken will gong out of his astrophysical bar.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Sep. 14 2016 1:58:46
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Atwood, Musk and Kurzweil walk i... (in reply to estebanana)
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I'm glad Bil Nye dropped in, but he was not invited to the first round on purpose because he was chastized at the last bar meeting for mansplaining. Bill Nye in general see the future like Ray does. But Nye is obsessed with 3D printing, and Ray is obsessed with miniaturization of nano bots. Atwood thins were doomed because only the rich will be able to afford microbiological interface technology that connects humans directly to the super cloud computing Ray foresees. She sees a vast divide with a few percenters on top "jacked in" to a great new world.
Ray also says this adaptation to the super cloud will enable humans to have sensory perceptions that we have not until this point have experienced. He thinks this will create new art forms that we can't imagine yet, which will be based on these undiscovered perception and new mental acuities found in direct cerebral cortex interface with the super collective computer.
I have several reasons why I think Rays vision, runs amok, but his track record for predictions of how computer science unfolds are pretty good. Is this because computer science is a young science and has not developed into something more complex, and influenced by its own "consciousness" even if that consciousness depends on humans directly interfaced with AI?
And Atwood seems old fashioned and wonky basing her futurism of negativity on literary models, but as she calls it, human nature does not change simply because humans will be virtually biologically connected to bigger, faster infinitely complicated systems of computing power. At a very basic level the classic literary structures of man against man, man against nature, etc. in Atwoods' futurism do not change an remain relevant avenues of critical evaluation. Ray disregards them in favor of an argument that higher perceptivity due to closer connection with a more powerful computers will "enlighten" ,and the modes of creativity which involve these classic evaluations, from literature and other arts, may not be relevant as critical modes of thought.
So my question is multi part, but one part is: Will a new paradigm in creative, and literary critique, of society through art works force the current forms of art out of existence or deem them irrelevant? Ray seems to point in this direction. Atwood and others seem to think probably not.
What connection does this have to Elon Musks' fears of human consciousness being drawn closer in sync with machines? He is the odd man out, a technologist who want forward movement, but is also like the Sybil of Cumae in the Wastelands epigram-
[I saw myself, with my own eyes, the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a bottle; and when the boys asked her: "Sibyl, what do you want?" she responded: "I want to die." ]
I don't think Musk wants to die, but he is a Sybil figure in that he asked for technology, the gift of life eternal symbolically speaking, and then he asks questions and posts the dangers of this eternal life getting out of control.
And I, I only ave a literary model to give critique to this future and it serves well, but I wonder often if it will be enough if the future what Kurzweil predicts in computing will come true. I want to cling to this model or paradigm because it is all I know as human, but what if I'm wrong? It will not matter to me, but are we in for a future where this same mode of human critical thogh is extended or does the predicted new perceptivity make it extinct as dinosaurs?
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Date Sep. 18 2016 1:37:37
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Piwin
Posts: 3559
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: Atwood, Musk and Kurzweil walk i... (in reply to estebanana)
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I just looked up "mansplaining". And for a moment there, I felt really grateful to be living in Europe...
Kurzweil comes off as a guru of sorts. I have a hard time taking him seriously. He's so deluded himself that he'll live forever that he's forgotten half of the equation: to make some sort of interface between computers and human consciousness, you can't just keep on making computers better, you also have to have a grasp on what human consciousness is. Even if it is an emerging property, the result of myriads of electric signals firing, you would still have to have an extremely thorough map of the brain, you would have to be able to boil consciousness down to a code, and I see no reason to think that we're anywhere near being able to pull this off.
Which is why Musk's concerns seem more "realistic" to me. If at all possible, general AI would be developed far before any kind of merging of human consciousness with machines.
Atwood's approach makes some degree of sense, since it is very much based on the continuance of what we know now. There's no real disruption between the present and the future in what she depicts. Just a widening gap between the privileged and the not-so-privileged.
What any of this means for art forms and critical thought? Probably nothing, maybe something. Back in my college days, I had a geopolitics professor who would take off 10 % of your grade if he found even one occurrence of the future tense (in French) in your paper. He saw the use of the future tense (as opposed to the conditional) as a form of arrogance, as if we could know what the future holds. At least Atwood and Musk take a step back from the rosy IT narrative to suggest that it's not because the likes of Kurzweil want it do be so that it'll necessarily be so, and it's best to hedge our bets.
Of course, none of this actually answers any of the questions you've raised.
_____________________________
"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
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Date Sep. 18 2016 9:21:04
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Atwood, Musk and Kurzweil walk i... (in reply to estebanana)
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quote:
I'm glad Bil Nye dropped in, but he was not invited to the first round on purpose because he was chastized at the last bar meeting for mansplaining. Bill Nye in general see the future like Ray does. But Nye is obsessed with 3D printing, and Ray is obsessed with miniaturization of nano bots. Atwood thins were doomed because only the rich will be able to afford microbiological interface technology that connects humans directly to the super cloud computing Ray foresees. She sees a vast divide with a few percenters on top "jacked in" to a great new world.
Having been chastized at the last bar meeting, Bill Nye was further chastized at this one as well, by none other than Ms. Atwood herself, who roundly condemned his superficiality. No recordings of the actual exchange exist, but sources note that Nye got off on the wrong foot by praising Ms. Atwood's science fiction, not knowing that Ms. Atwood loathes the term "science fiction," preferring the term "speculative fiction" to describe her work.
Nye dug himself in deeper by telling Ms. Atwood that he enjoyed her novel "The Handmaid's Tale," and that the title alone reminded him of reading Chaucer in high school English. At this, Ms. Atwood called Nye a fool, and that if he was thinking of Chaucer as he read the novel, he clearly had not advanced intellectually beyond high school.
Noting the exchange heating up, Neil deGrasse Tyson-Chicken gonged Nye out of his astrophysical bar before he had a chance to get cross-wise with Musk and Kurzweil. The latest rumor is that Atwood, Musk, and Kurzweil are approaching Woody Allen about making a movie of "The Canterbury Tales," with an actor portraying Bill Nye as a court jester who reads his lines from Cliff's Notes.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Sep. 18 2016 12:44:31
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Atwood, Musk and Kurzweil walk i... (in reply to Piwin)
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quote:
I just looked up "mansplaining". And for a moment there, I felt really grateful to be living in Europe...
Oh you should be, mansplaining is the new complaint. Soon it will be a word the spell check recognizes. This is a thing we talked a lot about in college, but until recently there has been no popular one word handle to cover the concept and now that an American writer invented one, mansplaining, it's spoken out frequently. It's fair in come cases to say someone is taking authority in a conversation because they are falling back on a traditional gender role type of authority, but the thing for the moment has gotten a lot of spin and traction to be used when it does not apply. For the moment I'm patient with the over usage, after all men have dominated conversational authority traditionally, and gender does have an impact, it should be recognized. If in five years people are still accusing someone of mansplaining even when they are not then it will be a problem. It's formally a new idea in the general public consciousness, I think, and appropriate usage will probably level out over time. But I have noted a kind of vindictive usage from time to time that gets tiresome.
Recently I read about a strategy of the women on president Obama's staff, when someone, a woman usually, has a good idea or makes a point, other women in the group vocalize in support in order to earmark that comment as coming from a particular person. They problem is well known that often women include an idea in a group brainstorming session and someone else will co-opt it or take credit for it. Naming the the person out loud and saying "Linda Jones brings up a good point." nails that idea to that person publicly and prevents someone else from grabbing credit, even if they do so unconsciously. Also not a particularly new strategy, but one that is entering public consciousness over and over. I remember these ideas from my childhood, being in the middle of the first wave of feminist thought;noticing which ideas from the heavy discussion precipitated out and stuck in popular usage. I remember grade school teachers using these ideas to allow girls to get an equal amount of talking time in class. However there was no teacher calling "boysplaining" at the time.
These ideas are to me like reruns, the notion that everyone gets a time to speak, I suppose I was in school system that was more aware of gender equality issues between boys and girls. Most of the grade school teachers were even handed women who were up on the times. Somehow everything seems to have gotten dumber in this respect, or I'm just seeing patterns of recycling of ideas. It's amusing to me to be admonished by women in their 20- 30's about 'mansplaining' or having the definition of mansplaining be actually mansplained to me! Really it's proactive follow up, basically a good thing, as Martha Stewart would phrase it.
When that happens I just listen, or try to sit on my hands, although I have not been 100% successful at curbing my action of typing back into a conversation online where I'm being mansplained to by a woman. Everyone has a breaking point. Men mansplain all freaking the time to other guys, that is called being an a$$hole. It's easy to deal with, you just fight and that is awesome because sometimes you even win the battle which entitles you to say for 30 seconds that you are superior. Beat your chest like an ape. HOOOOO! Then life goes back to you being an ordinary jerk on the internet. Like what I'm doing right now to you Piwin, is probably mansplaining, or at least some one somewhere would call it that. The thing about mansplaining is real simple, it's called being an a$$hole when guys do it to other guys, and it's also called being an a$$hole when guys do it to women. It's the same amount of annoying or disrespectful regardless of the gender of the person on the receiving end.
When millienial women, I can't even spell milleinial.....millenial;.....fukc it, tell me I have mansplained I think to myself - Yes honey child, in your sweet, fresh, righteous mind I have mansplained and I will go see my priest at confession. I will say to him Father I have Mansplained again and spilled my male seed all over myself in the presence of millenial women. And he will say : "It is alright my son, mansplaining as I have told you over and over is not the same evil sin as masturbation, you did not spill your seed all over your shirt. You are forgiven, and we will forget this whole thing happened until you do it again and you are sent here to atone and confess. Between you and I, you know as guys, I see this everyday now and I have been going easy on you guys for mansplaining. When the young ladies come in and occasionally confess a false accusation of mansplaining I hit them pretty hard with the hail Mary and give them difficult penance. Is that bad of me? I don't know, I'm just trying to keep it real." Then I leave the imaginary confession booth and stand there still listening to the young women telling me I'm a bad old man.
I continue to think, should I lower the boom on her? Or just keep quiet? I could say "Yes Sweetie, I understand the concept of mansplaining, you see, actually, well in all truth, when you were pooping in your diapers I was in graduate school at one of the Seven Sisters. I have a masters degree in feminist theory, which was bought dearly when you were crapping them diapers and your dad was changing them." I understand of course, this is exactly the wrong thing to say at that time. It's the same thing as saying, after your wife throws a frying pan at your head, "So I guess a blowjob is out of the question today?" that is the story you save for telling the boys at the bar. In the moment you are being lectured to on what mansplaining is, you best not talk back and dutifully stand at attention, try to work out how to spell milleinial in your head and do anything to distract yourself from blurting out " Listen sweet pea, I know what mansplaining means."
So here is why you never talk back. This is a war, and in war you never give the enemy any psychological ground. To break down and be sarcastic and say "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I understand, duh." means you have given the enemy ammunition. It will be used against the other men later in the war. Best to stick to protocol. Give name, rank and serial number, invoke the Geneva Convention. Stay calm.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Sep. 18 2016 23:17:48
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Atwood, Musk and Kurzweil walk i... (in reply to estebanana)
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Not to take anything away from Neil deGrasse Tyson, but you may recall in March 2014 he presented his multi-part television series "Cosmos," which was his take on the original by Carl Sagan back in the early 1980s. It might have been more interesting had I not seen the original "Cosmos" with Carl Sagan, but in my opinion it did not come up to the exquisite production of the original.
This appears to be the fate of most, if not all, remakes, particularly of movies. Some films should not be remade because the original cannot be improved upon. An example of a classic that was remade is1962’s “The Manchurian Candidate,” filmed in black and white, and starring Frank Sinatra, Lawrence Harvey and Angela Lansbury. It was remade in color in 2004, starring Denzel Washington, Liev Shreiber, and Meryl Streep. The 2004 remake of “The Manchurian Candidate” was not nearly as good as the original. The stars could not match the acting of the original cast, and the black and white original, with its shades of lighting, was far more atmospheric than the remake in color.
A couple of other original black and white films that could never be improved upon, both in their cast and in their director’s touch. 1942’s “Casablanca,” starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and the incomparable Dooley Wilson as “Sam,” Rick’s pianist and singer. There are no actors today who could come close to those magnificent performances.
And 1949’s “The Third Man,” directed by Carol Reed, and starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton. If anyone were to attempt a remake of “The Third Man,” he should be summarily executed by firing squad at sunrise.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Sep. 19 2016 17:18:43
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Atwood, Musk and Kurzweil walk i... (in reply to estebanana)
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Estevan,
Oh my, more stuff to scare me, but also make me happy I'm getting old too old to for some of these things to come to pass while I inhabit.
Atwood is daft, out to make money on doomsday novels. Funny though,many of these things will come true but in a way not predictable by the prognosticators, and the world will still be full of millions living without technology. What if the basic skill sets for subsistence farming save us all? Technology or no technology.
I remember when I was a kid there were predictors of nefarious futures where by 2005 we would have bar codes embedded in our forearms etc......What we got were cell phones that flipped open like Star Trek communicators.
Now we have smart phones that some guitar players hate..other story, and lond for the flip phones. After CD's novelty wore off many people went back to vinyl, or never left vinyl. I see a nostalgia for flip phones coming, and a reissue of the classic Razor phone for us old farts to buy as a midlife crisis toy.
The only thing I see in the future, bedsides hotter more intense typhoons, are sales men cashing in on nostalgia.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Oct. 4 2016 14:45:16
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Atwood, Musk and Kurzweil walk i... (in reply to estebanana)
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quote:
I don't think Musk wants to die, but he is a Sybil figure in that he asked for technology, the gift of life eternal symbolically speaking, and then he asks questions and posts the dangers of this eternal life getting out of control.
Of the three original barflies, Musk is the only direct participant in the development of technology. He knows from personal experience how hard you have to ride herd on it to keep it from going south on you.
Having a big rocket very publicly explode in a great ball of smoke and flame on the launch pad is an instructive experience. I'm not just talking about recently. It happened to Musk for the first time on Omelek island at Kwajalein, on live TV watched by hundreds of highly qualified engineers in other fields.
There was a lot of mockery among my friends and acquaintances. Having been around the flying bomb business for a couple of decades, I told them, "It's not whether your rocket blows up or not. When you start out designing a new one, some of them will blow up. It's about whether the next one blows up for the same reason."
Having it happen to him again ten years later on worldwide TV, to a much bigger rocket at Cape Kennedy carrying a Facebook backed satellite, might be even more instructive. The United Launch Alliance's own bought and paid for Congressman is saying he thinks The Government ought to investigate, while the FAA etc. are already closely involved in the post mortem...when you start cutting into Boeing's and Lockheed Martin's pie, it's not just technology any more.
I remember reading in the Whole Earth Catalog how great it would be when everybody had a computer on their desk, hooked up to this giant network. At the time I had a computer on my desk, hooked up to ARPANET. I couldn't figure out what the Whole Earth People were talking about.
Now I understand.
It's even better than they imagined. They didn't foresee how good search engines would get, nor how much computers would improve to enable more complex content to be displayed on an iPad.
But Stewart Brand and his buddies didn't talk about Lizard People, the resurgence of the Flat Earth cult, ISIS recruitment videos...and other things that I might be inclined to mention, but only at the risk of offending a few other forum members....
As Chief of the Flight Medicine Branch of the NASA Manned Spaceflight Center at age 34, one of my brother's many responsibilities was the Lunar Receiving Laboratory. It was built to quarantine the astronauts when they came back from the moon, lest moon bugs should get loose and cause an epidemic.
Near retirement almost forty years later he was on the faculty of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Part of his responsibility was the Category 4 Biological Containment Facility where they studied Ebola and stuff like that. I asked him how the pioneering Lunar Receiving Laboratory compared to the modern Cat 4 facility. He just smiled.
We don't have much experience keeping universal A.I. from getting loose in the world. We do have a lot of experience in spreading malware and viruses.
I'm not saying universal A.I. will be The Golem. Nor am I saying when or whether it will arrive. I know enough to know I can't predict the course of technology. But from my own lifetime experience I would say that when you're developing a revolutionary technology, you should be pretty darned careful to think about safety, and spend some money on it...assuming that will do any good, on any but an actuarial basis. In most of the old stories, one Golem was one too many.
But the great Rabbis kept making them.....
RNJ
Time to practice. I put on new strings last night.
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Date Oct. 4 2016 22:22:39
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Atwood, Musk and Kurzweil walk i... (in reply to estebanana)
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quote:
After CD's novelty wore off many people went back to vinyl, or never left vinyl.
I am one who never left vinyl. Still have all my original vinyls from 50 years ago and more: Kingston Trio, Bud and Travis, Sabicas, Carlos Montoya, Marty Robbins, Willie Nelson, all of Beethoven's symphonies and a hundred or so more.
I do not own a cell phone, iphone, or any other device that enables people to contact me directly 24/7. I have never had a Facebook account. Still have my landline though, where callers can leave a message if I am not available.
As I right this I am using the guest computer of the hotel where I am staying in Savannah, Georgia. I have been here since September 28 injecting foreign policy scenarios into a U.S. military command post exercise simulation at a base near Savannah. We are all waiting to see if Hurricane Matthew comes close to the east coast of Florida and up through the east coast of Georgia and Savannah. If it does I will hole up in my hotel for a couple of days with a good book I brought with me until the hurricane moves on and we return to the exercise. I emphasize I will read a good book, not a "Nook" or some other electronic screen that has about as much character as a cold fish. A good book has pages one can turn, and return to, and one can experience the tactile enjoyment of doing so. I cannot imagine reading Melville's "Moby Dick" on a "device."
But then I have always considered myself a man of the 19th century. In fact, my ideal position in life would have been to be the fourth son of a 19th century British, land-owning aristocrat. The first son inherited the land and its income. The second son became a member of the clergy. The third son received (or bought) a commission as a military officer. The fourth son was expected to travel to the Continent where he received a monthly stipend from his family and could do as he wished so long as he remained abroad and his excapades were not advertised such that they embarrassed the family name.
Respectfully, your most obedient servant,
William H. Barkell, Esq.
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Oct. 5 2016 0:22:39
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Piwin
Posts: 3559
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: Atwood, Musk and Kurzweil walk i... (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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quote:
But from my own lifetime experience I would say that when you're developing a revolutionary technology, you should be pretty darned careful to think about safety, and spend some money on it...assuming that will do any good, on any but an actuarial basis
I agree. The problem though seems to be that there are no incentives to do so. Setting up caveats and precautionary measures slows the process down, costs money and on the whole puts any given company at a disadvantage against its competitors, especially in the kind of "free" market we have today. This is precisely the kind of topic (of general interest) that seems to require some sort of intervention from outside of the business world. Unless of course we choose to rely on the goodwill of business leaders. Unfortunately Musk seems to be an exception rather than the rule.
I was happy to see that at the last UN General Assembly the issue of microbial resistance was finally made a political priority. The issue had been brought up since the very inception of anti-microbial medicine. Flemming himself warned against the issue of microbial resistance if proper dosage wasn't respected. But it was left on the back-burner until now. Part of it is economics, where pharmaceutical companies have very little incentive to embark in the very costly effort of developping the new drugs we need when the return on investment simply isn't there, part of it is social in nature, with over-the-counter drugs that people overuse and with doctors habituated to prescribing these drugs even if most likely unnecessary (perhaps in part because of an out-of-control legal system that holds them liable for pretty much anything). It's a shame they had to wait until now to even just make a political statement about it, but at the very least it's a start. I shudder at the thought of how much systemic reform would be necessary to actually solve the problem and I fear that, as usual, a lot of energy will be misspent on trying to pinpoint one single culprit instead of trying to find a solution, but who knows... Given how slow we've been to react to microbial resistance when we know how dangerous it is and that it is inevitable since microbes aren't going to halt their own evolution, I fear we won't react any faster to take precaution on AI, where the threat seems more distant and preventable.
_____________________________
"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
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Date Oct. 5 2016 6:10:18
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Atwood, Musk and Kurzweil walk i... (in reply to BarkellWH)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: BarkellWH
But then I have always considered myself a man of the 19th century.
William H. Barkell, Esq.
...but there was no phonograph until the last quarter of the 19th century....
In addition to 1600 or so CDs I have a couple hundred vinyl LPs. But I haven't unpacked them since I moved back to the USA. I have a nice Thorens turntable with an aftermarket Grace arm. I suspect that the cantilever suspension of the Shure V15 cartridge has degenerated considerably with age. They don't make the V15 any more, and cartridges vary so much in sound and tracking performance that I haven't gone to the trouble to pick out a replacement.
When CDs first became available I bought a portable Sony player. I traveled a lot. But I wasn't satisfied with the sound, compared to my analog setup at the time. I moved to Palo Alto, then to Santa Barbara, California. In the Santa Barbara area, population 200,000, there were at least three "high end" audio shops. If you have experience with acoustic musical instruments and hang around expensive audio shops, one thing that will strike you is how really terrible some very expensive setups can sound.
I started reading Stereophile magazine, still in its smaller format in those days. I concluded that either they were nuts, or among the greatest of deadpan humorists. They spilled gallons of ink over how various CD players sounded different.
I had spent a little time working on sonar signal processing, and quite a bit of time on radar signal processing. It should have been possible using digital technology to achieve a very high quality of reproduction. But as a famous philosopher once said, "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."
By and by articles appeared on the various flaws in most manufacturer's equipment in the implementation of CD playback. But before that, I bought a pair of Stax Signature Lambda electrostatic headphones, the best sounding transducers I have heard up until now.Then I went around to various shops and plugged them into the CD players. Guess what? They sounded different.
Enough CD players had flooded the market to lower the price of a run-of-the-mill one to a little over $100. None of those sounded good. I found one for about $350 that sounded pretty good, and bought it to take to Kwajalein with me.
After a few years at Kwaj I decided to upgrade my whole playback setup. I started carrying around with me a half dozen CDs that sounded good on my Stax headphones, and when I went on vacation to Hong Kong, Singapore, the USA or the UK, I went to the "high end" shops and played the CDs. Again there were a lot of $50K systems that sounded really, really bad, but a few that sounded a little better than what I had. There were a couple of CD players that sounded better than my $350 one, but they wanted $1000-1500 for them, and I didn't think they were that much better.
Then I ran across a setup that sounded really good. The digital-to-analog converter clock ran the mechanism that spun the CD, rather than trying to recover a clock from the data on the spinning disk. This corrected one of the major flaws in most CD players. But it cost money. The frequency splitting and shaping for the different loudspeaker drivers was done electronically at the input to a power amplifier channel for each driver, a great improvement over the time honored "passive" networks inside the speaker box itself, fed by a single amplifier. The improvement in sound due to this design option was so evident it surprised me it was not done more often.
So I ponied up the cash, had them pack up the stuff and ship it to Kwaj. The pallet with the two speaker cabinets, suitably packed, weighed 440 pounds (200 kilos). But it was worth it, at least to me. It sounded really great. It's the setup I still have more than 20 years later. The same manufacturer has come out with more technological advances, but I haven't bothered to go listen. I'm happy with what I have.
When I would go on vacation I would hit Tower Records in San Francisco, the HMV shop in London, CD stores in Bali and Java, etc. and buy enough CDs that sometimes the cashier's phone would ring and my bank would want to talk to me.
A poor CD setup often sounds worse than a good analog vinyl rig. A good CD setup sounds better than any vinyl rig I have heard.
At age 78 I have three computers in my house, an iPad, an iPhone, a landline phone, a flatbed photo scanner, a slide film scanner, sound recording equipment, a few digital cameras, my film dive camera and several lenses, etc. etc. I surf the web and text people on my smart phone. I use Google Maps in my car. I don't consider myself a tech junkie. I know people who read the magazines, surf the web and have to have the very latest stuff. Not me. I have an iPhone 4s and it does everything I want it to...if the iPhone 7 really is waterproof, that would be nice, but I don't spend nearly as much time on the water as I used to.
My one technophobic characteristic is a lack of interest in video games. The graphics have improved immensely, but they still bug me. My son is a connoisseur, and knows Richard Garriott, the local video game gazillionaire. My brother knew Garriott's father, the astronaut, and was involved in qualifying the son physically for his $30-million private Russian ticket to the Space Station. My son is puzzled by my lack of interest in such a vibrant art form. We have plenty of other stuff to talk about though, including passionate shared interests in music.
People can't reach me 24/7 because I never answer my land line telephone under any circumstances whatsoever. The ringer is turned off. I check the messages once in a while. If I don't want to be disturbed, I put my smart phone in "Do Not Disturb" mode. If I have it turned on and don't recognize the caller's I.D., I never answer it.
Well, maybe once a month I will be feeling a little salty and answer it to harass the unsolicited caller....but I remember answering my landline some time back in the 1960s. The caller said they represented the Eternal Light Light Bulb Company. I asked whether they really thought we would need light bulbs in heaven. They didn't have a snappy comeback, though i thought they must surely have heard that one before.
If I could choose my century, it would be right now, or the 18th. In the 18th century, the implications of Newton's prodigious breakthrough were coming to be understood. The Americans were implementing some revolutionary political ideas that looked promising. Many of the more influential American revolutionaries had studied Greece and Rome. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Chairman Mao and Pol Pot were in a distant, unimaginable future. Genghis Khan and Attilla the Hun were at a comfortable distance in the past. I love the music of Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. I even like 18th century furniture and architecture, though you would never suspect it looking at my house and its "mid-century modern" contents....George Washington was only an inch shorter than I am, and he looked pretty good in his outfits..... 
RNJ
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Oct. 5 2016 21:17:37
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Atwood, Musk and Kurzweil walk i... (in reply to BarkellWH)
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Bill--
I hope the hurricane doesn't treat you too badly in Savannah.
Larisa is in Jacksonville, Florida and I am keeping a close eye on it. Around a month ago we watched "Key Largo," with Bogart, Bacall, Lionel Barrymore and Edward G. Robinson. A crew of gangsters takes over a hotel on the Florida Keys in 1946, just before one of the most devastating hurricanes of the century hits, so she has seen at least a movie depiction of one of the big ones.
A few weeks ago we were in Key West. At the museum was a movie about the railroad that used to link the island with the mainland, and how it was wrecked by a big hurricane.
The last time I sat one out was 15-20 years ago in Manila. I was staying at the Sheraton on Roxas Blvd. When I heard that the typhoon warning had gone up another notch I called Continental Airlines to change my reservation. They had already cancelled all flights, tied down their planes, put a message on the answering machine and gone home. So had all the other airlines.
I looked up the typhoon warning scale on the net and found out I had been significantly underestimating their severity.
I turned on the TV to a supposedly English language channel, but the newscaster was getting so excited he was breaking over into Tagalog on a regular basis. This prompted me to call a Filipina girl I knew to come over and serve as translator. I also asked her to pick up a couple of liters of Hennessy VSOP and some Lindt chocolate bars to bolster the supply of provisions I had laid in at the nearby supermarket.
Typhoons are often deflected from central Luzon by the mountains on the east coast of the island, but this one zipped right over the mountains without a hitch, and aimed straight for Manila.
The typhoon struck Manila dead on, the eye passing right through town. As usual, the storm surge drowned a number of people living in the shantytown along the river. The palm trees lining Roxas Blvd were bent over horizontal. The bay was whipped into white foam everywhere. Sizable cargo ships bucked and swerved on their multiple doubled anchor chains like skiffs in a thunderstorm, but we didn't notice any of them dragging or breaking loose. Several had left a day or two before, preferring their chances at sea to close quarters in Manila Bay. The girl and I sat on the balcony, largely sheltered from the wind, and bet on whether the satellite antennas would blow off the Japanese Embassy we looked down upon next door, within the next fifteen minutes.
After the antennas blew off and the TV station conked out, we were left to our own devices for entertainment. We took advantage of the Cognac and chocolate, and came up with other ways to amuse ourselves until the storm blew over.
Hotel room service and one of the restaurants kept working throughout the storm, running on their emergency generators. Good job.
A couple of days later I took a taxi to the airport to board my originally scheduled flight. Roxas Blvd, one of Manila's main arteries along the shore of the bay, was studded with large deep holes filled with a few feet of water, but the cab driver zigged and zagged around them successfully.
Keep safe, Bill.
RNJ
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Oct. 5 2016 21:44:43
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Atwood, Musk and Kurzweil walk i... (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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Thank you for your good wishes, Richard. I hope Larisa stays safe as well.
I was assigned to the American Embassy in Manila from 1976 to 1978. We had a major typhoon in 1977 that left parts of the city devastated and under water. Sat it out for two days. Several of us got together and had a "Typhoon party," which is what one does in Manila during a typhoon. When it was over, a couple of freighters were half stranded on the rocks lining part of Manila Bay along Roxas Blvd. The Philippines is probably the one country most prone to natural disasters. It lies right in the middle of Typhoon Alley, has the active Mayon Volcano on Luzon just outside of legaspie City, and experiences the occasional earthquake. Filipinos are lovely people who do not deserve some of the devastation visited upon them by natural disasters.
Once again, thanks for your concern. We should be safe in the hotel. I hope Larisa rides it out without difficulty.
Cheers,
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Oct. 5 2016 23:33:12
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