Thursday, January 31, 2002
9242029:: 12:00 PM

listened to rainermaria's a better version of me after a multi.month break :: "your goodness is coiled like a fist / holed up in the back of the attic / crouched like a cat / you said I look like a stone sinking ... but I am a constellation, cut out in the sky / and if I have stopped burning, will you know in your lifetime? ... do you ever hear / what the stars are saying to you?"

Tuesday, January 29, 2002
9166090:: 10:54 AM

Today I tried to match the footfalls of people on the street. How different the world is when approached from a borrowed pace... though it was curious that no one seemed to notice they were being mirrored.

Tuesday, January 22, 2002
8931537:: 5:49 AM

A cider festival in NYC, advice from Chris Rock, and porcelain figurines in Chinatown. Another night for dreams...

Monday, January 21, 2002
8925319:: 10:36 PM

Hm. Kimble has been caught. One of the world's top hacker rock stars is in custody. ... In other news, classes went well today. I need to make a decision as whether to work for the man, or the government, or...

Saturday, January 19, 2002
8858708:: 7:04 PM

What is with informationless pharmaceutical ads nowadays? I just saw ads for Nexium (tm) and Vioxx(tm): both commercials featured smiling peopling in trippy environs, and contained absolutely no information about what the pills do. Actually, that's not true: Nexium said: "its the new purple pill." Seriously now.

Friday, January 18, 2002
8819451:: 9:58 AM

I've calculated that in a single day 150 billion ducks could drink all the water in cayuga lake. A growing danger.

Tuesday, January 15, 2002
8713559:: 7:07 AM

I had a dream that my backyard was flooded by a tremendous storm, all the while, I listened to a radio show holding a prize-giveaway for answers regarding colorado meteorology. Later I drove a car through a bush past a metal scrapyard which sparkled and was cut as ornately as a cathedral.

I just woke up.
It's remarkable how quickly dreams slip away. I've yet to, but I told myself that I would keep a sketchbook by the bed so that I would have a journal for dream cartography. My dream notions have less hold than short term memory, and slightly more hold than filtered out sense data, and If I try hard to commit them to short term memory upon awakening I can push them up through to long term ... no matter how non-sensical. Yet maybe there is a purpose behind the slippiness of dreams. Maybe it is a biological "garbage collection" algorithm: cleaning out bits of memory that were used to dream, but in the conscious world are stranded with no references. Perhaps by committing them to short term memory we lump them in the "dream" bin, but they can no longer function as they did. Like artifacts in a museum, we can examine them ... but once removed from their relevant context, it is hard to imagine how they once functioned.

Thursday, January 10, 2002
8591416:: 10:34 PM

i'm sleepy. but i've finished setting up my shoestring recording studio. aah.

Monday, January 07, 2002
8490927:: 12:25 PM

So Frank posed an interesting counter to the "replicator personal-identity paradox" (if a perfect quantum copy of you is made, which is you? :: the paradox arises because it would not be an identity if *both* were you, and if the replica is not you, then personal identity must be a result of something beyond physical matter ... since your physical states are exactly the same.) :: Simply that personal identity may be completely subjective, in which case both you and your replica would have a subjective (and personally consistent) view of their identity. Its a fascinating solution but it poses another problem. Mainly: What is subjectivity? My first thought was that subjectivity is always some relative measure along an axis which can be objectively measured. For example, I might be subjectively "tall" relative to a cat, but "short" to a giraffe. The objective measurement of length, once viewed from my vantage point yields several subjective observations. Importantly, in these observations, there is some objective real physical thing which is being measured. If all subjectivity requires such real things with objective measures, then the replicator paradox is not solved, since the subjective belief in one's own identity would still be tied to some physical object or chemical process, all of which would be perfectly replicated. If, however, subjectivity can exist indepently of some underlying physical comparison, then the paradox is solved. To this, Amy posed the example of humor. The funniness of a thing is perhaps not physical, and things can be subjectively funny. In the case of humor though, there are physical chemical processes which are activated when humor is present, and those could be said to be the objective measurable manifestation. Still the problem is not solved because the causality is wrong. The chemical processes were activated because of an interpretation of a set of vocal, written, or physical symbols which we captured through our senses. Hm... I need to think a little more.