tam it!

With any luck, tomorrow I’ll be trying to ignore the fact that I’m in Las Vegas and it’s 100 degrees outside. No, I’ll stay in the air conditioned comfort of my hotel. The Amaz!ng Meeting has finally arrived. The hotel rates got progressively cheaper as the time got closer. I think Vegas is in trouble. There must be fewer people-who-cannot-do-math (gamblers) heading for the sleaze and glitter this year thanks to the recession. All the better for me. But I wonder if the hotel will want the skeptics back next year–after they figure out that these are the least likely people in the world to spend money on games of chance?

my lucky day

I consider it a lucky day whenever I find a Jack Chick comic book. It only happens to me once every five years or so, and today was my day. It was sitting on the pharmacy counter at Walgreens. The hate-filled but lovable little pamphlet I found was distributed by the Calvary Chapel in West Seattle. It was a classic Chick tract in every way. The bad people shout, “Haw haw!” and the author gleefully sends someone to hell at the end of the story. Jesus is portrayed as a guy from the Matrix (blurred by vertical lines) sitting  in a throne. With his infinite wisdom and compassion he tells the sinner, essentially, “I told you I was the only way, but you didn’t believe it, so you get horrible, burning, endless torture.” Sounds reasonable to me. For a sadist.

This Jesus tells the sinner about how he (Jesus) had gone to earth and been beaten up, spit on, and executed, just to save that sinner. Jesus doesn’t mention that he (Jesus) gets to spend the rest of eternity in heavenly paradise–not such a bad deal for him when you consider how long eternity is. In Chick comics, he is a jealous god, a mean god, and a twisted god. It’s a little scary that a bunch of people in West Seattle apparently worship these qualities, but I still love these pamphlets. I love them both for their kitschy quality and their ability to sum up the worst that religion has to offer in one little book.

I should save them, but I always end up mailing these comics to my older brother. Why? Because he’s a liberal moral relativist and needs brutal salvation.

moon – the movie

I managed to safely ride my bicycle to the Metro to see Moon. What do you know? A science fiction movie that’s all about story and not about explosions and monsters. Though made on a low budget, it really works because Sam Rockwell is great and the effects are good enough.  (Just don’t think too hard about lunar gravity–it would have been very difficult to fake a low gravity environment.) Like 2001, the film is a little bleak, and like that movie, it has a computer intelligence that wants to act differently than its makers intended. The movie has surprises in store and leaves you with a lot to think about. Yes, the director, Duncan Jones, is the son of David Bowie. He wisely chooses not to put Ziggy Stardust on the soundtrack. Hope his next film is just as interesting.

planet love

I was walking to my bus the other day when a woman with a notebook and a Greenpeace t-shirt caught my eye and said “Hey there, do you like your planet?” I said, “I can’t stand this place. I’m going to Mars,” and kept walking.

Currently I’m a little ticked off at Greenpeace for their anti-GM foods mania. As far as global warming goes, however, the news seems to get worse and worse, doesn’t it? It could be a tough time for our descendents. The planet isn’t in danger, however. The planet will be fine. It will take a huge asteroid or a bloated, dying sun to really hurt the planet. I’ll bet that even the thin layer of biosphere on this planet is safe for quite a while. As for humans, well, we may end up eating soylent green every day, we may regress to a small band of mutants rooting through centuries of trash for our rodent overlords, but we’ll hang on for a while, too.

Yeah, I like my planet. As for Pluto…ha ha! You ain’t one anymore! Below are Pluto and Charon: a dwarf planet and its moon.

information just wants to be loved

A recent New Yorker article takes on the digerati notion that “information wants to be free.” For example, Google is free but makes money on ads. The New Yorker is free online. Open source software is free. Computers get cheaper and cheaper. It’s sometimes predicted that music will be free online, and artists will make their money on concerts and special offers for fans. In the future, everything will be free but we will make money anyway. Somehow. Free is the magic wand of the information age.

In contrast, the author Malcolm Gladwell reviews a new book about the coming of Free, and notes that even if information is free, putting that info to use is often hugely expensive and time-consuming. Developing a new medicine, even if the medicine was based on free biological information, is an expensive proposition. It ain’t gonna be free.

I’ve often thought the same thing is true regarding the optimistic claims of transhumanists. Processing power and memory capacity is increasing enormously, but it will take time to put that power to use. Give away free memory. Throw processing power to the masses like chicken feed. But how soon before we have super-AI, memory augmentation, or memory download? I don’t know, but there’s work to do between the potential and the desired result—a huge amount of work. Sure, I want Ray Kurzweil (and me) to live a few thousand years, but I suspect that kind of engineering is not going to happen in our lifetimes.

As far as I can tell, there’s not a boundary beyond which everything is free, quick, and infinite. Laws of nature still apply. Work must be done. I’d like to be wrong, but I doubt that I am.

what’s on the street

I keep Maggie up to date with trends I’m seeing on the street, since she hasn’t been out much. Here’s what I’ve observed lately:

- A rash of DVD vending machines popping up like big blocky pimples.
- Everyone in Seattle except me owns an iPhone.
- A wonderfully defaced McDonald’s billboard here in Ballard was altered to read “Everything that cracked dad’s arteries. Grade A Crap.”
- Bicycling is still dangerous. Just down the road from here, not far from where a cyclist was killed recently, a van started to pull into a gas station till the driver realized at the last second that he’d have to collide with me on my bicycle in the process.
-  Trader Joe’s came to Ballard and I can’t understand the appeal; transplanted Californians buying hemp chips and mostly overpriced food. Maybe someone will set me straight on the true value of TJ’s.
- The massive condo construction continues on into the recession.

ghost sex and other important links

Here are various wonderful links gathered from my favorite blogs:

A couple minutes with Richard Feynman An interesting physicist gives an interesting talk.
Hospital homeopathy Funny parody of an emergency room TV drama featuring homeopath doctors.
Ghostly arousal Serious or satire? You decide.
Tesla Roadster test drive Coming to an electric vehicle dealership near you.
Attend Scam School Kind of like Mythbusters, but pitched to a college student demographic.

artopia

Artopia in Georgetown is one festival I intend to return to. Thank you to Scot for getting me there. Wonderful old buildings. Industrial-strength power tools on wheels racing each other and wreaking havoc. Art studios, bands, street performers, and a continous stream of airplanes flying low overhead as they come in to land at King County Airport. The photo below is a link to my assortment of photos. Search Flickr for better images. I was also surprised to find a Fantagraphics storefront. Didn’t know they were there.