Passing Thoughts

"real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain"

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.

Great Cumbrae is a very strange place indeed

This week I have had a few days off. We spent a couple of days visiting the island of Great Cumbrae. Great Cumbrae is a tiny island (you can drive round it in less than 20 minutes) - the only town Millport is like a throw back to the seventies - because there are very few cars on the island you can always park and the sea front reminded me of Tom Phillips paintings. The island is full of wildlife - driving round one morning just after nine o'clock the road was overrun with rabbits - I saw a huge range of birds including a very large bird of prey. Worth a visit but only a short one.

Its been nice to spend a few days away from work and to see Milo when we are both awake. I have managed to get quite a lot of video clips edited up - still got a lot to learn but I am getting happier with my results. I am going to attempt to put together a video for one of my tracks at some point when I am a bit more confident with the whole thing. I have also managed to do (a very little) bit of music which is quite good - the problem being the only time I have to myself is when everyone else is asleep and I don't like working on headphones.

Media wise - well worth checking out is A tree full of monkeys (Real player needed) - a collaboration between Simon Armitage (poet) and :Zoviet*France:. Music and Poetry is suprisingly difficult to do right and alarmingly easy to do wrong. This piece gets it very right indeed - Simon Armitage allows his poetry to fall more into a song structure and ZF keep the atmosphere working. All in all a very good piece of work indeed.

I must make a mention of The Fold Gallery run by my friends Mr Steve and his wife Richeldis (Mrs Steve :-)). A well designed site with lots of interesting content and if you are in Kirby Stephen I would recomend a vist.

A brief awakening

Finally got enough sleep over the weekend to get round to doing some of the things I need to catch up on - such as this website. Everyone comments on new parents being tired - its not like you imagine though - like for instance the tiredness from staying up all night the night before. Its more a permenant state of being - the last few weeks I feel like I've been in a Zen like state of simply Being - no abstract thought - just doing stuff. Still love being a father though, more than anything.

As befits someone with little in the way of a functioning brain I've been following Big Brother to some extent (its great wall paper during the day when we are doing stuff with Milo (feeding,playing etc.) - no plot, no worry if you miss great chunks of it). One of the things that has really struck me, in particular from reading Big Brother Forums is how simplistic the response is. Critical thought does appear but the vast majority of reposnse are very strong (people Love or Hate things - actions Ruin the show - the producers should be sacked for actions people don't like). It occurs to me that a good deal of our media is like this - a response that is not imediate or highly emotive requires too much attention from the viewer and hence becomes boring. The only place this doesn't really happen is Radio 4 and maybe BBC4.

This is not a doom and gloom observation - its just the way things are - our society is now going to fast for people to stop and think. It will be interesting to see if this has an effect on the rate of developemnt of civillisation: Will there still be a small number of people pushing things forward able to impose (with the right spin) anything they feel like on the mass population (ie. genetic engineering etc.). The mass population will of course not have the intellectual machinary to question - the media will question things but only if a short and snappy argument (NO or YES) can be made. The alternative scenario is that the rate of development of civillisation will slow down until people catch up. I am sure there are other scenarios as well.

Hmm - that last paragraph wasn't where I intended to go at all with this. Oh well. Where I was going was an idea I had for a BBC4 version of Big Brother: Still a sealed house and still the same imprisoned contestents and still a period of time. However on the walls are a set of white boards with a set of rules - these rules are a variation on Peter Subers Nomic. The rules will have additions from the basic set to allow for audience participation and adding general house rules. The idea of nomic is that playing the game is done by voting for and trying to get passed - new rules or amendments to existing rules. The contestants would manipulate the rules and each other until one of them was an eventual winner. It would of course be a lot more like watching chess or perhaps political debate than the current big brother but it would add a much needed intellectual component. Of course very few people would watch it which is where we came in...

Media wise I have a growing pile of books to read - non of which I have had the time or energy for - I don't always finish one New Scientist before the next one comes out (an hour or so's reading at most). Been reading the The Bromeliad for bed time reading - as with all Pratchett most entertaining and well written. Been listening to lots of Brian Eno for some reason but the CD of the moment is Stoke by Phillip Jeck. Played on ancient record players (the sort that have built in speakers and do 78 & 16 rpm) it manages to invoke strange nostalgic sound worlds for places you have never quite known. Oddly it also manages to touch on some of the ideas Moby uses without any concept of pop.