A few bits and pieces after a most pleasant and relaxing weekend. Its nice to be up on my sleep again - Milo got up the same time as me this morning (rather than vice versa :-)). I'm coming to the conculsion that family life quite suits me on the whole as well.
There was an excellent article about This in New Scientist this week. Whilst I disagree with some of the assumptions he makes and some of his arguments are decidedly circular the basic argument is quite interesting. The essential idea is that we may well be living inside a computer simulation (like the matrix) run by a future version of the human race. The argument goes as follows: there are three possible paths in history :- the human races wipes itself out or is wiped out before technology is good enough to run powerful enough simulations, The human race is in a position to run these simulations but chooses not to for ethical or other reasons. The human race can and does run these simulations. His argument is that if the latter is true then we are almost certain to be living in a simulation because most realities will be inside computer simulations (ie. if the human race runs 999 simulations and there is one "real" universe then we have a 1/1000 chance of being in the "real" universe). Got all that? like I say there are some real issues with his assumptions for the possible paths of history but it still makes for an interesting though experiment.
First and foremost it makes a lot of religious history likely to be true - after all if you were running a simulation of the universe could you resist the odd appearance or intervention? Secondly it means that the fact we have not found aliens yet is that the really don't the simulation would likely only include the world of interest to the people running it. Of course it does mean that history may well just stop one day - no explosions no armegedon - just some teenager in his bedroom in the "real" universe switching the power off to go for his tea. It also begs the question of how we should be acting - should the whole human race be pretending it is in some giant episode of Big Brother and entertaining the watchers or would acknowledging the existence of the simulation cause it to be closed down?
Here is a new track:
Dataflow (mp3 , 3,817KB , 2:42 )
As part of an ongoing project called "abitlike..." I have been experimenting with Markov Chains. One of the problems I have with sequencing and drum programming in particular is that it is a) very boring and b) hard to get a good "feel" to it. If you listen to a human drummer for example - every bar is different - they play around with the rhythm. So the rhythms in this track where generated by a very very simple markov model in PD and I think that I am on the right track - it certainly feels more natural to me.
The big recomendation this week is Sony MDREX70LP headphones (snappy name that). These are the best headphones I have used the frequency response is incredible and they are far more comfortable to wear (and much better sounding) than the big proffesional style headphones I have been using.
Reading time is still fairly restricted - been enjoying some Philip k Dick short stories and been working my way through A new kind of science - Stephen Wolfram is incredably pompus but there are some very interesting ideas in this.
Posted by Mark at July 29, 2002 12:24 PM