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2004.04.21 : 2004.04.24
Saturday, April 24, 2004
Plurp. Museum bookstores all over the world sell posters
of the art in their collections. You knew that. You also knew that they
only have posters of a small fraction of their collections, and the poster
you want is inevitably one that they don't have.
 Except
for the National Gallery.
You see, these folks have digitized
their entire collection and, in cooperation with HP, offer a thingie called
Print On Demand in which they will, for a modest fee, print an excellent
color reproduction of anything in their collection, in pretty much whatever
size you want, while you wait.
So now we have a small Degas
print for our apartment.
It's all about the bits.
Friday, April 23, 2004
Plurp. Picture a huge, domed building, the dome over
a hundred feet high and one hundred and forty feet in diameter, made entirely
from stone, around the circumference of which are three great rings of
bookshelves, the only entrance to which are doors carefully disguised as
filled bookshelves themselves.
The books - 25,000 of them - are old, many of them, and cover every
field and every subject that you could imagine would be in a gigantic 19th
century library: four whole shelves of Scottish history, treatises on butterflies,
more recountings of Roman times than there have been scholars on Earth.
Now imagine that no one - no one at all - is reading these books.
Rather, people sit at long tables, out of the backs of which unfold
leather-lined, brass-fitted easels that are used to hold the fragile manuscripts,
though no one has discovered this. Instead, they sit - mothers with daughters,
teenagers jostling each other, an old man with a walking stick - reading
large flat-panel displays, poking at the touch screens occasionally to
navigate their way to short texts and high-density photographs of the collection
of the British
Museum.
Thursday, April 22, 2004
Plurp.
1 fish stomach (a ling
muggie is best)
1 cod liver
seasoning
oatmeal
Wash the muggie carefully, and tie
the small end tightly with string. Break up or slice the cod liver, season
well, and fill the muggie with alternate layers of liver and oatmeal until
two-thirds full. Close, leaving enough room for the oatmeal to swell, and
tie tightly with string. Plunge into boiling salted water and boil gently
for 25-30 minutes. Remove from the water, and serve hot with bread.
From A
Taste of History: 10,000 Years of Food in Britain, by Maggie Black.
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Blab. A zombie writes:
I recommend Dennett's essay
to anyone using Crest white strips. Being a beer drinker and a smoker,
the 30 minutes with those strips on my teeth are awfully tedious. Dennett's
essay made the time pass more easily. I didn't learn anything, but my teeth
are whiter, and now for another beer. Maybe I'M a zombie.
Maybe you are. Maybe Dennett is too.
His argument is so weird! It's very much as if he has no internal
experience of his own consciousness at all, and hence doesn't consider
it to be an important thing to explain.
We, on the other hand, regard our experience of our own consciousness
as primary, as the very most immediate, undeniable fact about the
universe. As such, we will consider science fundamentally incomplete until
it has an explanation for it.
And yet, we see not the first hint of anything in our current scientific
understanding of the universe that could get us there. Oh, sure,
neuroscience will understand how all those little pieces of wetware communicate,
and how the brain forms concepts, and on and on.
But that doesn't help. Your experience of us may well be perfectly
explained by neuroscience. But ours is not! Nothing about synapses or cortical
layers would lead us to predict the amazing internal theater that we experience
every waking moment. Nothing about frequency-locking or hormonal levels
would help us understand why we experience something rather than nothing.
It may even be that our consciousness is an epiphenomenon, that we are
a powerless observer of our robot body, that free will is an illusion.
We don't wish to address that right now. Right now, the Big Mystery is
why we experience anything at all, why you (we think) experience anything
at all, and why the apple on our desk (we think) does not.
We understand zombies. We don't understand our own experience.
Plurp. Or
...
If bad zombies eat behavior,
and good zombies eat qualia, and all zombies eat brains ...
 Plurp.
The blue dog
had no experience
of the universe at all
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