[Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Shaav's journal:| Friday, September 11th, 2009 | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Give me a break I am so sick of the storyline that asserts that AI is evil because it isn't imbued with a human soul. When is it that the human soul became incorruptable again? I'm also sick of mysticism being passed off as science. | ||
| Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 | ||
An mah numbr tuw! moar funny pictures | ||
I maekz mah furst Lolcat moar funny pictures | ||
| Saturday, June 13th, 2009 | ||
|
New Treasure I found a treasure at the annual Crossroads Market book sale today:
It's the limited edition, leather-bound 22k gold gilt Sorcerer's Stone that came out in 2000. I tried to not buy it, but my husband (ghods bless him!) is an enabler. It's a beautiful, beautiful book! | ||
| Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 | ||
|
Tim Burton Post-Apocalyptic Neo-Matrix Steampunkiness http://www.apple.com/trailers/focus_fea Mighty exciting.... | ||
| Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 | ||
|
Quiz after my own heart!
Ventris & Chadwick96% Knowledge of writing systems! If knowledge of writing systems were a pyramid, you would be the eye that sits at the top and is, let's assume, all-knowing. (And rather creepy, but that's neither here nor there.) Some day you'll figure out that Voynich thing, I'm sure.
| ||
| Friday, April 17th, 2009 | ||
|
Dalai Lama in Calgary Directed at Calgarians...o FYI, the Dalai Lama is coming to Calgary in the fall (end of September). He's giving a public address at the Saddledome for which tickets gone on sale through Ticket Master tomorrow morning at 10am. I've seen him speak before, and it was really great. He's a powerful, but very ... ingenuous is the best word I can come up with. In the sense that he's so open and laid back -- you feel like you could easily sit down and talk with him one on one. So, I highly recommend attending if you can. There's more info at: http://www.dalailamacalgary.com/ | ||
| Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 | ||
|
Drake Equation Yet again proving myself bigbangtheory'lete I so new that the Drake equation for calculating availability of women was going to turn up in the show ever since I listened to this TAL! I love that the writers of the show run in my media circles! :) Current Mood: | ||
| Thursday, February 19th, 2009 | ||
|
Protomentat Logo Thoughts?
The triangular portion in the background is a cellular automata which is an extremely simple system that can produce extraordinarily complex behaviour. 2D cellular automata can be Turing complete! I had wanted use my celtic-knot cellular automata somehow, but sadly, they are just too finely detailed to actually be able to print at anything smaller than 11x17 in 1200dpi. Not exactly practical. The 6 shapes are a the five platonic solids plus a sphere, shown in order of number of sides. If you think of the solids as being approximations of a sphere, then it symbolizes 'refinement'. The graphic I actually created in Second Life using the sculpt maps that I made for the solids; appropriate since one of the things I'd like to do with the company is SL development. I'm fairly pleased with myself! | ||
| Saturday, January 31st, 2009 | ||
|
Dencity J submitted his application to the MA program in Environmental Design at the University today. :) For his portfolio he put together a website of his photographic observations of urban issues. It's awesome, and I'm very proud of him. Check it out: http://jason.shaav.com | ||
| Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 | ||
|
Acceleration http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kW Nothing surprising, but nonetheless thought provoking when presented this way. It fills me with a certain anxiety that I'm trying to track down... The natural inclination is to feel that things are moving too fast (and of course the video itself predisposes you to that), but one of the of things that drives me nuts is when I hear people (generally of the older persuasion) complaining about the degradation of the English language, and when you counter them and point out that "language changes -- always has always will", they pull out "but it's changing too *fast*". And this comes from thoughtful and intelligent people; even people like Douglas Hofstadter who savors and writes about language and who I've called on this particular brand of nonsense. What could it possibly mean for language to change "too fast"? That would mean that communication would start to fail in the communities that speak the variant of the language in question. Of course that's absurd -- what people who complain about language changing to fast are really complaining about is that they are no longer member of a speech community to which they used to belong (i.e. youth). I wonder if the expansion of technology and knowledge is similar. Can it move too fast? What would that mean? How could it actually move faster than we -- as a community -- have the capacity to learn and absorb. Surely the dynamics of technosociological advancement will force a balance. What is clear -- and from which I think my anxiety stems -- is that it is harder and harder for someone to be even *well verse* in more than one field. I want to know everything -- I'll make no bones about that. I want to know *everything*. And obviously I know that's never going to happen; but it's coming to the point where I can't keep up with the handful of subjects that I've chosen to focus my time and effort on. The acceleration that is happening isn't moving too fast for society, but it forces us to specialize to such a degree that it becomes all but impossible to be knowledgeable, let alone accomplished, in a variety of fields. At one point in time, it was possible for someone to have read *every* book written in their language, and for a long time after that, possible to read every *important* book in their language. I envy those times for that. I've tried to be well balanced -- to be a 'renaissance man'. But I feel there is less and less a place for me... The 'renaissance man' is obsolete. Hard to let go of that identity though and not try to just 'catch up'. Time for a cup of tea; some soft Loreena; and a comfortable book in a bed with freshly changed sheets. Current Mood: | ||
| Friday, December 19th, 2008 | ||
|
Japanese Fountain Damn. http://www.facebook.com/video/video.p | ||
| Friday, November 21st, 2008 | ||
|
Feeling Small It is estimated that there are about 100 billion galaxies visible to the Hubble Space Telescope. 100 billion. Galaxies. VISIBLE. Now let's bring that to something familiar to our imaginations: Star Trek. TOS and TNG are set in the alpha quadrant of our galaxy; the big deal about DS9 is the wormhole to the gamma quadrant; Voyager is set in the delta quadrant. The entire scope of Star Trek, one of our most expansive popular science fiction images of space travel is contained in our galaxy. 100 billion galaxies are galaxies *visible* to us... http://www.ted.org/index.php/talks/geor Current Mood: awed | ||
| Saturday, November 15th, 2008 | ||
|
Satisfying DS9 Easter Egg Easter Egg in the "hidden surprise" notion -- I've been watching Star Trek Deep Space Nine lately and came across a cool bit of trivia. In "Bload Oath" one of the the second season episodes, there are three geriatric Klingons that Dax knew from one of her previous lives. The three Klingons are actually all Classic Trek characters played by the original actors. Keen! | ||
| Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 | ||
|
Morpheus In case you didn't know, the The Evil League of Evil is recruiting members. ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} petranef and I applied.
| ||
| Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 | ||
|
ffffound Does anyone know about www.ffffound.com? If you do and have invites, could you let me know? I have a friend who's desperate for one... Thanks in advance... | ||
| Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 | ||
|
LJ Strike http://jemmind.livejournal.com/160297.h Begins at 6:00 pm Calgary time (midnight GMT [Greenwich Mean Time]) on Thursday, March 20, and goes for 24 hours. | ||
| Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 | ||
|
Nearby books I've been tagged by Friendly Humanist (cross blogspace interaction?? gaspé!)to do a meme. Here are the rules: 1. Pick up the book nearest you with at least 123 pages. (No cheating!) 2. Turn to page 123. 3. Count the first five sentences. 4. Post the next three sentences. 5. Tag five other bloggers. There are three books equidistant in front of me so I guess I'll include them all. (Fortunately, they are closer than the stack of six to my left.) From left to right: The Unicode 5.0 Standard by the Unicode Consortium:
The Tree of Yoga by B.K.S. Iyengar
How to Calculate Quickly by Henry Sticker:
Usually, I don't tag, but I like this one, and I'm curious. Not sure I can constrain myself to just five though... Tagged: | ||
| Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 | ||
|
Expanding my Knitting Repertoire Over the holidays, I bust out into the grand world of hats. This being my second successful one -- I like it cause it's cabled.
I can't be held responsible for the colour, which actually came out a little nicer in the picture. It was chosen by the recipient of the hat. I'm not sure that knitting was the right hobby for me to pick up; I'm allergic to wool. Which means, either the stuff that you make is all acryllic -- which is tolerable for scarves and stuff, but not much else -- or cotton, cashmere, silk, alpaca -- which is outrageously expensive. Well the cotton isn't so bad usually I guess, but it seems pretty hard to find, and often, just doesn't look quite right. Sigh. | ||
| Monday, November 26th, 2007 | ||
|
Speech Signal in Telephony I found a copy of an oft-cited source in my dissertation area: "Speech Signals in Telephony" by A. Lloyd James; it's one of those sources that you always cite based on indirect references in other sources because it doesn't really have much to say, but it was one of the first publications to say it. Anyway, I do try to make an effort not to cite stuff that I haven't actually read even though sometimes is necessary, and in the right context totally OK; so I found a cheap copy online and ordered it. It was published in 1940, specifically concerning wartime communications. It's a brief volume and reading it left me with two strong impressions: one heartening and one disheartening. The man is quite clearly an expert on the subject -- at least for his time -- and there are definitely some astute observations. However, by current standards it's vaguely quaint. Stylistically, it reads like a paper written by a really bright high school student; content-wise it isn't as sophisticated as you'd likely find in a modern high school report. I don't mean to be condescending -- obviously, the fact that at the time, the information he's presenting isn't widely available and that a lot of it are his original observations and insights makes all the difference in the world! But we do know a lot more about speech now, and the things that he's talking about have been formalized beyond observations and insights. Which on the one hand emphasizes to me that we really have made progress. Not only do we know more, but culturally our science and our writing has matured. In an abstract way, we all know that, but you don't really think about how that manifests in something as ubiquitous as writing styles. And I think that's pretty cool! (Yes, I notice the irony of that last statement imbedded in commentary about maturing writing styles!) But on the otherhand... it's equally true that because we have made progress and matured, the book is a concrete manifestation of how much more difficult it is to make a contribution to that process now. In 1940, A. Lloyd James was able to be an expert in his field and write a book that contributed to human knowledge when today, while it isn't precisely common knowledge, it's within our expectations of a high school level research paper. Although, I guess it's inevitable that anyone in my position -- working on my dissertation yada yada -- get angsty about this fact, it's not for myself that I find this disheartening. I'm passed doubting myself in that way. I worry about what it means for us culturally... long gone are the days when any half-way smart person can learn something new and valuable through their senses or introspections alone. All advances these days must be made through assistive technology (machines, statistics, increasingly vast bodies background research) which requires further and futher effort and expertise to get to the edge of. Like wealth, expertise is so much in the hands of an elite now, what hope does someone who wants more out of their life than the relentless pursuit of knowledge or technique have to contribute something new? At some point, they must just give up hope... especially youth. When I was growing up, at least I could maintain the illusion that I was having new thoughts and new observations because I was limited in what I knew other people knew; but these days when a simple web-search will turn up a dozen sites devoted to your "new" idea, its that much harder to sustain the curiosity and inspiration. I've seen it with my Shads who get disheartened when they find every one of their product ideas available online; and even myself more recently -- I gave up on my "specrogram reader" when I found someone had already done it online, and have certainly become less inspired by some of my SL ideas having found other people already doing them. Which ultimately, is counter-productive because who knows? My approach or my Shads' ideas might have been totally different, even better (*if* you put in enough effort)... But recreating just isn't as much fun as creating. So we just sit back down on the couch. | ||
geeky
drained
