Train of Fools

A man wearing a long dark coat hefted a heavy suitcase as the train pulled into the station. A few people got off and soon the conductors signaled all aboard. As other people hurried into the train, the man hefted his suitcase up the step in the doorway, turned right and walked down the crowded aisle, patiently waiting as women stowed their shopping bags and gathered their children. He then sat in a seat next to another older man who seemed engrossed in a book, shoving the heavy suitcase beneath the seat.

The train soon huffed and shuddered into action, followed soon after by the conductors gathering tickets, "tickeTS!" and punching holes in them. The conductor paused when he reached the man with the heavy suitcase. "Bartonvillia? Not many get off there anymore," he said as he punched the ticket.

The man in the dark coat said nothing, but nodded. The conductor moved on to the next seats. "tickeTS!"

There isn't much to look at on the way past Silvertown, especially in the evening, just a few lights in the farms that float by the train windows. So everyone seemed to just stare at the others, sometimes looking at their watches, sometimes looking in their pockets for things. The man in the dark coat sat motionless, staring at nothing.

There were two children in the seats a couple rows ahead that looked back over their seats. They were perhaps 7, at most 9, and they had impish looks in their eyes as they scanned the people behind them. They both seemed to freeze as their eyes met those of the man with the dark coat. He looked back at them as though they were rats. He then looked away, staring at the exit sign over the door at the end of the car.

There were several towns yet to go, but the man felt somewhat relieved that the woman and her children left at the next stop, in Candlewood. No one else got on the train to replace them. The man with the dark coat closed his eyes and leaned back to rest his head against the small padding. It was not long until the train had chugged and shuddered up to speed again.

There were mostly small farms and trailer parks out this far, at least until the high walls and turrets of Bartonvillia Monastery. No one ever went there except on a few certain days, like the upcoming Day of The Bones.

As the people got off the train in ones and twos on these stations in the sticks, there eventually was only the old man who read his book and the man with the dark coat and heavy suitcase, sitting on the same row.

However when Roselander stop came along, the second to last stop, the old man closed his book, mummbled "Excusa, Excusa...", arose and hobbled past the man with the dark coat and his suitcase. He walked as though he had no pain free joints, with a cane, and slowly lowered himself to the step and then to the landing. The last sounds of him were the clop clop of his cane on the wooden platform.

Then there was merely the dark coated man and the conductor to hear the huffing and clanking of the train as it labored to its last passenger stop. Not many stopped there, but their was one who would. Even so close to his stop, the man with the dark suit was almost nodding off, only to be awoken with "Next Stopppp! Bartonvillia!

As the train huffed to a stop, the man hefted his suitcase and as soon as the door hissed opened, stepped down to the cobblestones and looked over to the dimly illuminated street leading toward the caretaker's house, and sighed. There was no one near the train stop, no one on the street. He shifted his heavy suitcase to his better arm and walked the noisy cobblestone path to the street. Behind him the train shuddered a few moments, then began to backup the opposite direction it had just traveled.

(continues...)

Fly Kite for Papa

Here is another entry, another day, another essentially mundane description of life from the point of view of someone who, if nothing else, is not you.

From my office I can open a door to the patio which overlooks a lagoon, mostly ocean water from the Pacific. Beyond the lagoon I can see the far shore and the roads that lead to various shopping centers, car dealerships, and the freeway. Beyond that is the ocean itself to the infinite horizon.

I thank the stars that I live here. If I watch the news I see the lives of desperate people who live in squalor, in countries scourged by war and death, in places where the weather is a constant enemy, in places where misery is normal.

I remember the places I've lived, some just as bad, with tornado wreckage in Texas, with frozen wasteland in Nebraska, in the deep snow and icy winds of Minnesota, the thin cold air of Denver. Yet, except for occasional murderers, they were not ravaged by war.

I have seen many movies about wars. I was in the Navy during Vietnam, and by sheer luck never had to face a firefight or a minefield. I don't envy those who had to fight in the hot, sticky jungles, or in the dust storms of the deserts, or who died just practicing for war -- in an accident, some mistake that cost more than a good grade in their record.

Afterward, after the war is over, no one really wanted to talk of it, to brag about this or lament about that. They wanted to just not think about it anymore. They didn't want to see the faces of those whom they killed, or of their good buddies whom were killed instead -- to wonder why they instead were spared.

So, like me, they became workers in the American machine. I chose computers, others chose businesses or factories or farms. We raised our families until the next war came along. The next war came, and it wants to use our children as killers for reasons that don't make obvious sense, perhaps for patriotism, or for revenge, or for the Administration, or for nothing.

I had only a girl, and she did not choose to become a soldier, but instead became a mother. She also had a girl, and is about to have another girl. This means, just by statistics, that it is unlikely they will be soldiers.

And I wonder, in the future when I am gone, will this still be happening? Will there be wars forever? Will more mothers lose their sons and daughters in some foreign land? Will my descendants be killed by terrorists, by some kind of virus, or by a suicide bomber in a kindergarten?

Will this house be overgrown by cacti and scrub brush -- the normal vegetation? Will this view of the lagoon be lost to time, lost to the ravages of heat waves and super storms, never to be inherited, but to be uninhabited forever after, when our country has ceased to maintain this landscape and the desert returns?

I shouldn't worry about it, I guess. I lived this long, and I survived many close calls. My children are responsible for their own lives. I can only help them for a little while. They must fly the kite by themselves in the end. If the kite doesn't fly, it is not my fault.

Dust in Gods Eye

Romans and Egyptions are often equated to their gigantic creations, some of which still stand today, if not for another thousand years. If we do not purposely remove each stone from the pyramids, they might still last another 10,000 years or more. Also, during in a similar period of time, some relatively few sessions of cataclysmic weathering might do away with them altogether.

In space, especially, there are much tinier things that can be many billions of years old, unchanging in the coldest shadows of comets or stones. These little tiny specks of matter have always been there -- in one form or another -- before any thing else. And the tinier a thing is the more of them there can exist. Only a single universe the size of the universe can exist, but octillions of things can exist if they are smaller than .5 octillionths of the universe.

This is the "bottom up" approach. This states that all these little bits of matter and energy pre-existed (or were created by some mysterious process) and that they have recombined and recombined into much more complex and powerful structures. It is often said that something is insignificantly small -- so that it does not matter. This is clearly not possible. It is very important that something be in each and every state before it can be called "something".

A piece of dust is an imprecise phrase. Dust can be infintesimally small or can be the size of large grains of sand. But very small dust is actually atomic or subatomic phenomena and very large dust might actually be gravel or pebbles. But the general idea remains that whatever these bits of existence are called, it is by successively larger constructions or supercombinations that they eventually become livers and feet and brains, or even just the condensed and crystallized lava we call rocks.

How many levels of combination are there? It may be that combinations of any finite number of elements is finite as well. Yet if there were 100 different things, there would be 100 factorial ways to rearrange those 100 things. For an octillion factorial, things get really hard to name. It is not true infinity but practical infinity. The universe may perish as a whole before every combination could ever be achieved and there may be some mutually exclusive combinations so that they could not be simultaneously achieved.

A human being, with its trillions of cells and intricate intercombinations, represents an astounding number of simultaneous states. A mouse is only a tiny bit less complicated when this method of abstraction is applied. And a single celled organism is only a slight bit less complicated still, since it is still consisting of trillions of atoms and must survive in an even greater complexity in its environment.

To a single cell, every rogue molecule that bobs by is a potential destroyer. It might be catalytic like chlorine or platinum. It might be a solvent or corrosive or able to plug up chemical pathways. And there may be huge numbers of rogue molecules in the soup, such as in our own blood, and the cells are under constant threat of disintegration. We don't consciously care of such battles -- at our level of abstraction we are more afraid of tigers or sharks or other people with various weapons. Yet the battles all wage simultaneously.

The idea of God having purposely created us from the Top Down contains within it the problem of having to also create all of the tiny atoms and subatomic apparatus that makes us function. And all of those top down designs -- elephants, trees, fish, stones, water, stars -- all must also be made of immutably identical bits of bottom up designs.

Therefore, God would not have just created a man, willy nilly, but must have created the entire system of bits and pieces from which everything else is created. In this way it matters little whether God creates a pig or a chicken, the little atomic bits are no different, only the combinations of them ever distinguish the higher order things.

Pigs are kind of like shuffling the cards one way, and chickens are shuffled in another way. Humans are yet another shuffle.

Likewise are words, with letters like a,b,c and sometime symbols like ! and ?, there are little bits that combine into higher order abstractions. Words, phrases, sentences, concepts, articles, books, bookshelves, book rooms, ad infinitum, all made from the dust of letters, and letters formed in the dust of human minds.

History is also made from bits. As time goes on the bits roll up into a giant dust bunny, they form into lumps and landscapes of history, and time keeps on leaving a trail of dust behind.

2 Jobs

There was a time when I had a very good, high paying job and was in the prime of my life. Things were pretty good, and I knew I couldn't complain about it.

Still, I complained about it. It wasn't that the money wasn't good. I wasn't that the job was boring, or not challenging. It was very high tech, recognizing objects with computer vision, searching through mountains of text for patterns of concepts, ,etc.

It wasn't that -- it was the damn marketing people. I don't know what they teach those guys in college but it doesn't have anything to do with science or logic. It has to do with lying and believing your own lies, and trying to force other people to believe them. They are a lot like terrorists in that way.

Anyhow, it was my undoing. I couldn't make their lies come true, I told them so, and refused to play any further such marketing or management games. They could reorganize themselves into oblivion for all I cared.

Now, about a decade later, I'm much older and less fired up about things. I don't make so much money, and I have to work on whatever jobs come my way, and sometimes when it rains it pours.

So things are good again, at least for a while. The only problem is that I have to work on too many things for my onset of frail hands and misfiring heart. But, I'm not going to argue with marketing people anymore. They can believe what they want. If I have to, I'll just pretend that I believe it too.

Obesity In Software Development

I have written some pretty large, piggy programs in my day, but never until now did I write a program that does virtually nothing, and consumes 50 megabytes doing it. As soon as I press a button that makes the program do something, it jumps the size up to 60 megabytes.

This marvel of consuming memory is the output of Visual Studio 2005 WinForms. Usually I write programs that might use 2 or 3 megabytes until creating a huge number of image arrays or whatever that then jump the size up to maybe 30-40 megabytes. But the purpose of the program is to search through huge amounts of data, using the images in memory repeatedly in the algorithms.

I have a feeling that the Visual Studio 2005 "Common Language" stuff makes for very inefficient programming. This makes memory and disk makers happy, of course. But it somehow just seems plain old piggish to me.

I think of Microsoft products as the gigantosauruses of modern times.

The Brain of The World -- Coffee or Not?

I have recently been discussing such topics as artificial life and artificial intelligence with a fellow who has collected quite a range of discussions, videos and interesting pictures related to these subjects. Naturally, these are an afront to the "creationists" of the world.

To many people, especially from my boyhood home in Nebraska, these are just "not to be discussed." Narrow minds abound in some parts of the USA, every bit as narrow as the Islamic Taliban or the Protestant Puritans that crawled ashore in early American colonizations.

Phooey. These subjects are mostly profoundly affecting our lives as we speak. The very techniques that a computer scientist can use to demonstrate artificial life can be used by nature to mutate bacteria from a friendly form into a virulent deadly infection. The belief is a choice made by humans, but the forces of nature do not care who believes them. If someone wants to substitute "God" for "force of nature", that is their prerogative. It does not change the equation, however -- God does not seem to care who believes what, either.

AL, the forms of life that can be simulated in a computer, or made from machinery of various types, currently are nothing to fear, and are more comical than onerous. There is no malevolent artificial mind that can coldly decide to eliminate humans, nor even a computerized Minivan that can decide to cruise around, looking for victims.

However, there are also no iron-clad restrictions on such behavior should it ever arise -- an extremely unlikely event. If a Minivan "suddenly evolved" such a brain from its pile of wires and actuators and sensors, humans could simply refuse to sell it gasoline or whatever fuel it requires, and it would have a very short spree.

But such fears are the food of science fiction, not current science fact. Yes, there are very powerful computers and networks that form a gigantic network covering the entire world. Yet, even these vast "potential minds" of electronic form simply lie dormant, awaiting humans to pound the keys. Humans must provide the "desire" -- that is not inherent in the design of a network.

The most that a network, without human intervention, could ever "want" is for all of its nodes to behave like good little nodes, shoveling packets of data from one place to another. If there are no packets to shovel around -- Oh, well. The network does not become agitated and begin to synthesize packets other than occasional "r u there" kinds of inquiries to test the veracity of the network.

If too many errors occur on too many nodes, then there is some agitation, but usually resulting in a reconfiguration using nodes that function normally, and ousting the nodes that misbehave, thereby re-routing packet flow around the bad ones. This is normal, desired behavior -- designed that way on purpose by humans, and not just some arbitrary decision made by an emergent machine intelligence.

So, at this level of operation, the huge, world wide web is like a network of nerve cells in the arms and legs of the world. Sensations pass up the "pipes" to the spinal chord (the so-called backbone of the Internet) and responses to those sensations (i.e. search results, email packets, whatever) come back down the "pipes". There is no centralized brain as such, where all decisions are arbitrated by reason or conditioned reflex. So far, the only true brains in the world wide web are human.

Servers, although somewhat centralized, are still distributed widely about the world, so that no single set of servers can be the "central brain" of the whole Internet. The closest analog to that might be the "Name Server" which translates things like "www.humptydumpty.org" to 162.3.41.211 or some such numeric address so that computers can successfully send and receive packets using those addresses with routing functions.

But even those servers are distributed around, only occasionally refreshing their database of names with the central repository. This acts only as a kind of bottleneck which forces all computers in the world to somehow obtain updated information from the central database, yet there is no control flowing back to those computers, only tranlation tables. The very place where centralized control can take place is not programmed, by either the center nor the outlying nodes, to do anything beyond name translation.

So if the "Name Server" became agitated and began ordering other computers about, they would all pull up their skirts and run away -- at worse unable to translate names, but otherwise unaffected by the petulant, newly "conscious and beligerent" Name Server.

Intelligence agencies, mom and pop, girls, boys, spies, criminals, companies all mix their packets together all over the network in a gigantic hodge podge of data, which even companies like MS and GGL struggle to monitor for indexing purposes. Even if you try to get your data to show up in various databases, it might never make it, or take many days or weeks before it shows up.

I think the Internet may have the total intelligence of a starfish at this moment. A starfish does have some abilities to make decisions, and so does the Internet -- but not reasoned decisions. Like if you cut off a starfish's leg, it might grow a new one. Same with Internet. If you provide food for the starfish it will consume it, and if you provide food (computers and modems) for the Internet, it will consume them.

But the Internet will not assume control of the world like the huge computer in Colossus, or the HAL9000 in 2001. It simply has no desire to do so and there are plenty of humans out there actively attempting to prevent such controls by other humans (who ARE problems -- THE problems of the Internet that so much energy is expended attempting to quell.)

It is far more likely that some hacker named something like "8MyDog" or "33tm3" will steal from you, or send you a virus, etc. It will not be a conscious Internet, only a conscious crook which uses the Internet.

Therefore, even though the current form of Internet is neutral, the future is still dangerous, and AL could be installed on the Internet by malevolent humans, whose evil desires would be dutifully carried out by the obedient nodes of the Internet -- no less efficiently than if they were to pull the trigger of a gun.

Anyway, it will be quite a while before artificial beings are a true threat to humans. But, for all my explanations that it would be difficult or silly to expect such things, it is not completely impossible.

There is always an outside chance that somehow, someday, the Internet will WAKE UP and smell the coffee. Just make sure that your modem does not attempt to drink the coffee. Coffee may be good for business, good for talks with friends-- but is not good for your computer. Do not let the computer, modem, nor any component of your Internet connection drink coffee under any condition.

Knocking at Limbo's Door

There are several things happening in my life (real life -- as opposed to and in addition to my "SL" online second life) that are pulling me in a lot of opposing directions.

I don't feel at all secure about any employment, even though I have many irons in the fire, and several real opportunities right now. The way this country is headed, toward a kind of corporate feudalism or reactionary socialism, either way, could make life much harder for people like me. The dwindling energy resources will put an additional strain on all countries, economically and politically. Cruelty, I think, is the most probable next stage -- when it is not easy to be generous.

No corporation wants to hire people over 50. They sometimes have to because of laws, or they have to because there isn't a younger person that can do exactly whatever it is they want done. But there is always a sword hanging by a hair over your head at that age. Always many go-getters ready to go and get your job before you do.

In the meantime I must work many part-time gigs. I don't mind that so much when I'm working, it's just that it is over with eventually and there is the insecurity of finding a new one. I am not able to retire -- and I wonder if I ever will be able to -- so I'll probably work until death. Or I will be discarded and live in poverty in a socialistic nightmare with no money to support it -- much like the Soviet Union became.

Death is necessary for us older people -- we have to get out of the way of our own grandchildren. I just hope it isn't some warehouse for the feeble that I'm stuffed into -- waiting for life's final breath. I would rather just work until I drop dead. Work is all there really is left for me now. I live to work.