The weary wayfarer is back in his California heaven. Immortal in cyberspace. Rather than making new posts, this week I keep revising this particular post.
Hooray! Today (Wednesday, April 18, 2997) Menso Heus of the Dutch ISP XS4ALL managed to post a nice version of my twenty minute Amsterdam Psipunk lecture onto Google video. Click the little arrow to play it or, to see a larger version, click this link: Google Psipunk Video. I have the full written text of the Psipunk talk online as well. The sound quality is very good, although the synch to video is just a bit off.
Thanks to XS4ALL, the Cyberspace Salvations group, and the Waag Society for organizing the talk. By the way I’ll be giving a similar talk at Dorkbot in San Francisco on Wednesday, May 2–in about two weeks.
Culture hero R. U. Sirius was on the stage with me that night; we should have video of his talk and our shared Q&A up soon.
My new Dutch impresario friend Luc Sala posted a ten-minute video of the first half of my talk on Youtube as well. The sound quality isn’t as good, but the synch and image a little better. Good work, Luc! Guerilla journalism. Luc has made a zillion interview and talk videos, you can find them tagged by mindlift on Youtube.
There’s also a high-quality, but somewhat hard to access (because of 500 Meg size) version of the video at the Waag site .
My Rochester interview about Mathematicians in Love with Bob Smith will air as broadcast and online from AM 1370 in Rochester, Tuesday, May 1, 2007, Noon-1 EDT. It’s supposed to be available soon from WXXI as an MP3 file as well.
More Rochester documentation: My lecture at RIT on “Gnarly Computation,” is up as a Flash video. The freshest part—that is, the part I never said before—is last five minutes when I’m giving my history of how I got involved with cyberpunk—scroll ahead to around minute 65 of the 70 minute talk. If you figure out a way to clip out this bit, Youtube it and send me the link.
And the very enjoyable four-person colloquium on my work is up as in video form as well.
My very last night in Amsterdam was fun. I had dinner outside a trattoria on cobblestones by a pair of intersecting canals with Ken Goffman [a.ka. R. U. Sirius]. Just the two of us, no Q & A, no psychodrama, it was relaxing. All the water and cobblestones and the crenellated stair-step gables. So perfectly European, like a theme park almost, but with some actual dirt and with relaxed locals puttering by in little boats drinking wine and beer. We had dessert before dinner: pancakes in the cool pleasant courtyard of the Amsterdam Historical Museum, another of Amsterdam’s intensely perfected urban spaces. I think the government has a lot of money to really buff things up.. After dinner we walked along the canals, ending up at De Melkweg (the Milky Way), a night club I’ve always wanted to check out.
Last time I was in Amsterdam, in 1994, I bought pot at the “R. Crumb Coffeeshop,” and their business card bore, on one side, Crumb’s classic “Stoned Agin” drawing of a man with a melting face, and on the other side, a little map of how to get back and forth between the Melkweg and the R. Crumb Coffeeshop. And parts of the great live Rolling Stones album Stripped was recorded at the Melkweg, as was Michel Gondry’s “Like a Rolling Stone” video for it. So I think of the Melkweg as being a very cool place.
R. U. and I came upon the Melkweg in the dusk; and it’s not such a big building at all. It holds a cinema, a theater space and small rock club, nothing like the cavernous Fillmore hall I’d expected. Maybe they use the big theater for big rock shows, but last night they had ballet in there. We went into the small room and saw a couple of ska bands; it was Ska Night, a mini-festival called Dutchska. We stayed about an hour. In a way, ska is perfect for Europeans. It gives them an excuse to sing “Ya, ya, ya,” to a band featuring an accordion—which is what they like to do in the first place. The band Mala Vita had guitars, and they rocked, one song’s chorus was good: “Nobody knows, nobody knows.” R. U. and I could relate to that, we were shouting along. Dancing to the music felt good. My hips and back get sore after a few days of walking around cities, also I was sore from the stress surrounding our show. When I dance, I let my backbone slip and work it on out. Yubba.
Between bands, Ken and I sat on the ground outside. We weren’t getting high, and neither were most of the kids there for the concert, which seemed incongruous. In the U. S., pot is illegal, and everyone is smoking it at concerts. In Holland it’s effectively legal, and they don’t bother to smoke it. Ken and I don’t need it anymore, we’re mutants for good.
April 16th, 2007 at 9:46 am
Maybe this is superfluous, but there’s been downloads here for a while now. Cheers. 🙂
April 17th, 2007 at 1:58 am
I think that your argument for “uploading” conciousness would have to be much better. I’ve always happily suspended my disbelief in your novels and others, but the computer is a machine, an abacus. If I pile googolplex abacuses on top of each other, even with all of that computing power, do I get conciousness (as Minsky believes)? Or do I get an extemely complex “intelligent” machine? If we are machines than so be it (or “so it goes”). But I can’t give up the ghost just yet.
April 17th, 2007 at 5:10 am
“In the U. S., pot is illegal, and everyone is smoking it at concerts. In Holland it’s effectively legal, and they don’t bother to smoke it…”
You would think that the people spending all that -money- in the US to imprison drug users (rather than to treat the sickest ones effectively), destroy families, and burn down dope fields would learn from this. But no, right?
Centuries of European history have nothing to teach us…
it’s sad
~ a. d.
April 17th, 2007 at 7:02 am
Merle, the Waag site’s two-hour half-a-Gig Quicktime video download doesn’t seem to work for me, that is, I always get tired of waiting for the download to finish before I see anything. I’m sure this one is the gold standard of quality, but Menso Heus of XS4ALL is going to post some smaller files. I’ll post the new links here as they come in.
Glenn, see my Lifebox book for the “better” discussion of mind uploading that you want.
April 17th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
i leave it all to the consciousness of the critters running thelo level education of mutations like what my liver is developing – wholly moses – what next? Zappastrasse?
yes that’s right
CHOM
April 17th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
& somehere or there – buddhas basing in the bowl of colaradis – beyond the constipation within the half-shell of the clam or oyster rising fer the sun with venus shining back.##
G
April 18th, 2007 at 12:02 am
i heard a good director
makes Yor book movie 2008!!! so long
April 18th, 2007 at 8:12 am
“My Rochester interview about Mathematicians in Love with Bob Smith aired live on AM 1370 in Rochester, Tuesday, April 17, 2007. It’s supposed to be available soon from WXZXI as an MP3 file.”- R
This interview was rescheduled for May 2 after Smith replaced the taped talk with a discussion on the VA Tech shootings. In a conversation after the colloquium on April 4, John Roche (sorry for the former misspells… I’m not used to leaving comments w no spell check) said it was an excellent interview. Smith said the same to me in an email I got from him today.
a. d.
April 18th, 2007 at 9:32 am
Good to see your talk’s been put online, Rudy! I hope RU Sirius’ talk will follow suit. The original file doesn’t seem to have the syncing-problem, or if it did, I didn’t notice. I’m sure XS4ALL can get you the file – ’cause they’re smart people – and I hope they, or the Cyberspace Salvation people, will put up all pieces of the lecture. If you want it uploaded anywhere, just mail me and I’ll put it up.
April 19th, 2007 at 5:05 am
Hi, I just got idea how to implement telepathy commercially. It uses the Bell Theorem, that says that no matter how far object A and B reside, there is instant communication between them. We don’t exactly know how they communicate, other that it happens in the quantum level of the universe time-space structures.
Now, impulses between neurons go through a quantum layer within synapses, sort of integer (neural space) to float/imaginary (quantum space) conversion, and a certain amount of quantum noise fluctuations enhance the otherwise strictly-bound neural integer responce.
Telepathy can thus be implemented by detecting quantum fluctuations in the neural signals, and interpreting that, to produce neural impulses that encode the message, right?
Ok, so we need to make DNA fragment, distributed as a retrovirus influenza, that installs custom decoder/encoder unit in neurons, which builds custom neural societies that operate according to the protocol, allowing to push encoded neural streams into the Bell Space, and pop the Bell Space streams decoded.
Cool! It means that the standard internet protocols could be implemented in the neural level, and the current internet can be realized right on the mental level.
So, after the rucker influenza, never know what has been installed to you 🙂
May 14th, 2007 at 3:26 am
A Mondo 2000 history at an interesting webzine called TOTSE (stands for “Temple of the Screaming Electron.”) The article is a reprint of a 1995 piece.
May 21st, 2007 at 6:31 am
Actually, the Stones were recorded at the Paradiso – a bit down the street, it’s a converted church, as opposed to the Melkweg, which is a converted dairy factory.