Hypography Science Forums: CraigD - Viewing Profile - Hypography Science Forums

An old bandmate of mine had a show last night, which got me thinking about my own set: the songs I can perform at least half-decently given a guitar and no advanced warning that’ll entertain a coffeehouse crowd for hour, give or take.

Being into it, I decided I need to have a comprehensive Transhumanist song set. Since such music isn’t popular chart topping stuff, I can write my own or borrow from other obscure songwriters as easily as including “famous” songs in this genre. The only requirement is that the song has to be about a fully or somewhat non-biological person: an AI, a VR avatar, a cyborg, a genengenered organisms, etc., and that the song can be got across by one, maybe two singers with acoustic guitars

Here’s the list I came up with within a few minutes, all of them “famous” to differing degrees:

• Lithium Flower, written by Yoko Kano, performed by Scott Matthew and his band.
  
• Still Alive, written by Jonathan Coulton, here performed by him, better known by a couple of pro female vocalists.
  
• Duvet, written and performed by members of BOA (something of a stretch, as the song’s pretty clearly about regular flesh-and-blood people, but associated with the transhuman character “Lain” by virtue of its adoption as the opening song of the anime)

Not a very long set yet, expecially if I want to be able to pick and chose from among them.

I’m looking for more of this theme, original, famous, or obscure, again, something suitable for small venue acoustic guitar performance, and at least arguably about AIs or transhumans.

Whatchall got?

I stumbled across this kinda nifty choice permuting algorithm yesterday:

• Place the N members to be permuted into 2 rows of equal length (number of positions), and a 1 “odd-man-out” position to the left of the leftmost position of the top row. N must be odd.
  
• Chose pairs of members opposite one another in opposite rows.
  
• Rotate the arrangement 1 position, leftmost member of the top row to the OMOP, OMOP member to the leftmost position of the bottom row, rightmost bottom to rightmost top, etc.
  
• Repeat steps 2 through 3 N (counting the first) times

Example, for N=5:

1,2,3  2:5 3:4
  5,4
2,3,4  3:1 4:5
  1,5
3,4,5  4:2 5:1
  2,1
4,5,1  5:3 1:2
  3,2
5,1,2  1:4 2:3
  4,3

I see no computational advantage for this algorithm over other common “choose 2 of n, order not important” ones (unless possibly you’re implementing it in people standing in a field, for which it is well suited ).

My challenge is this: extend (generalize) this algorithm to work for the “chose 3 of n” or higher. Or, if this is impossible, prove it.

I and mine have endured yet another of my region's periodic weather-caused electric power breakdowns.

In the last rays of sunset Wednesday, I looked out my home window to see the last of about 8 inches of wet, flaky snow, fall for the windless, barely freezing day. A couple of hours later, I settled down repeat a bit of data conversion I've been doing with a big team of other system support folk, end user validators and various project managing types. One of the latter emailed me a short "am sitting in the dark with a flashlight and my Blackberry", which I should have recognized as prophetic, as minutes before the start of my button-pushing part in things, my power flip-flopped a couple of times, then stayed down. No major trouble, think I in a state of techy hubris, as I've a laptop and a small UPS on my various internetty gadgets, enough to keep everything good for a few hours, so after another 10 min or so of teleconferring, I push the main conversion button and prepare for an uneventful hour or two of monitoring and tele-telling everyone everything's well. A few minutes into this, my first check shows, puzzlingly, nothing happening, and after a couple of minutes checking that the check isn't the problem, I head for the server where the conversion process should be processing, when, suddenly ...

... my network connection goes <critical stop sound> (AKA the chord of doom) - well, actually one rude IDE does, but the effect's poignant and to-the-point. All my gadgets are glowing happily and poweredly, but somewhere in the blacked out out there, something in the Verizon FIOS world won't let me log on (my first thought was that the UPS for the FIOS box had died, but a check of the phone jack with a corded phone revealed dialtone - that wouldn't fail 'til next AM), and all my blacked-out neighbors' non-UPSed WiFi spots are gone.

The management types vetoed my traveling the snowy (or at least snow-covered) night to a place with power or my datacenter, whichever came first, so I was now a phone-only bystander. Among the folk on the call was one person with the right system access to see an obvious logged error with my process's ID on it, so with a bit of further ado and further checking to assure nothing bad has come of this failure-to-start, the night's festivities are declared done.

My high-efficiency gas furnace needs AC power for its flue blower, so even if I got a little power to its thermostat input, it's a no-go, and with night, it's getting cold outside and in. It's late enough to just got to bed with lots of blanket and wait for day - and hopefully, power - so we do.

Morning, cold outside and dark inside and getting colder inside, I drive to my un-power outaged office, find and fix the cause of the woe, get the tele-party restarted, finish around 3 PM what should have been done last night, and head back home to work on converting my 1950s era house into a 19th century wood-burner. Fortunately, the house has a little, mostly ornamental fireplace in its main living space. Fortunately, I have a big pile of scrap lumber from an old masonry project in a nice dry garage. Unfortunately, the only non-AC powered saw I have is a cheap handsaw, badly in need of beveling and sharpening. More unfortunately, the little fireplace can make about a 5 foot semicircle of warmth.

Fortunately for me, I go to the office everyday. My wife does not, and is not pleased.

About 4:00 PM Sat, uncounted board-feet of scrap lumber and a couple of bundled of over-priced shrink-wrapped firewood later, with nary a flicker, power is restored to chez CraigD.

Previous power outages, my wife has cursed the darkness and called for us to get a generator. We're now agreed, viscerally convinced that my local electric distribution system will continue to deteriorate for at least a few years - it seems no sort of political process can compel our supplier, Pepco, to take more than minimal steps to strengthen the system to prevent outages such as this one. Spending a few $K for a good backup gen set now seems wise.

For XMass, I got a Quarto board and pieces.

What does the sequence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 13, 15, 6, 11, 9, 16, 7, 12, 14, 10 have to do with it?

For the past few days, we’ve been experiencing problems that appear to be due to an intruder (hacker) adding and/or altering files on our server.

Some members may have had display or access problems, or had access blocked by your browser’s security features. Some, but not all pages of our site were infected

Although at present, we’re reading clean via such advisory services as Google Safe Browsing, there’s a strong possibility that the infecting files attempted to install malware on your computer. If you have a common antivirus program (eg: McAfee, Norton) installed, it should have prevented this, but you may want to check to see that you have antivirus software, that it’s working, and scan all your files for trouble.

Our and our hosting service’s dev & support staff are investigating, but at present, the precise means of the intrusion haven’t been identified, so we can’t rule out the possibility of more trouble.