Terry Karney @ #90: So the thing about the Roman legions marching 40 miles in a day is... not as accurate as it might be?
(I know the Roman mile was different than the modern mile, but only by about 10%, not a factor of 2.)
Happy happy Xopher-Day!
Xopher @ #77:
It seems appropriate that that rot13ed to "ubabe". (For those not exposed to the books: Yet Another female character who is devastatingly attractive but thinks she's ugly.)
Mary Aileen @ #94: Just make sure you wash it after you use it!
I can't decide whether to award the Internet of Depravity to Mary Aileen @ #63 or Liz B. @ # 64.
Bruce Cohen @ #156:
I resemble that remark!
A well-designed memory enhancement would be configurable, but that might not be much comfort to thetest subjectsearly adopters.
If any of the people longing for (or dreading) cheese curds is in the San Francisco Bay area, the Milk Pail market in Mountain View (corner of California and San Antonio, roughly) sells them. I presume they're real cheese curds, since they do squeak.
Bruce Cohen @ #153:
Larger working memory was exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote my earlier comment about quantity having a quality all its own.
It sounds minor, but actual perfect recall would be a huge change. Even if it only worked for declarative memory, would human minds be able to survive without being able to consign their past errors to a river in Egypt?
Being able to consider one's history as a unified whole would be interesting, but there would have to be some mechanism to prioritize more recent memories or learning wouldn't work.
On a slightly different tangent, one of the stories about the singularity that I quite like is Michael Swanwick's "Slow Life". Ab zragny nhtzragngvba erdhverq, whfg vqrnf sebz bhgfvqr gur navzny xvatqbz. V fhccbfr gung pvepyrf onpx gb Ybirpensg, va n jnl, ohg va gur fgbel vg jnf cerfragrq nf cnvashy naq qnatrebhf, abg qbbzrq.
Graydon @ #149:
I am reminded of some Greg Egan book (Schild's Ladder, perhaps) where one of the characters is dissing the idea of the singularity, since by definition there isn't a better kind of thinking than general intelligence. "Well, perhaps," I said to the book, "But what does that have to do with humans?" (Not to mention that quantity has a quality all its own.)
If there is such a thing as general intelligence (truly general, not whatever it is that fans of IQ tests think they're measuring), I have no idea what it would be like. Evading leopards is all specialized tricks (model vertebrate behavior, operate vertebrate body in 1G field, etc).
What's the line from Lem? "'Humans are entities like the Atlantic and the Pacific,' said the AI. 'I am an entity like water.'"?
I'm not sure whether your being unaffected by Lovecraftian horror indicates that your SAN is 100, or 0. :)
Graydon @ #138, abi @ #139, et al:
Curses! They're on to me! Maybe I can distract them by wondering how one could quantify extelligence vs intelligence enough to say humans have more of one than the other. Which would language count as?
Whether an advanced intelligence is a failure or success depends on what your goals for it are, of course. In some genres, you just shouldn't bother to put "plays well with wild-type humans" in the specs.
I think the tension between the Lovecraftian horror outlook, in which humans don't matter, and the outlook of the (presumably human) reader, who does care about humans, is an important element of the genre. Either too much or too little immersiveness relaxes the tension, leading on the one tentacle to existential despair and on the other to morbid humor.
Graydon @ #126: Which, the uncaring universe unsuited to humanity, or the inescapable doom that comes to those who practice brain augmentation?
I certainly hope neither of those is actually the case, but doom can make for good fiction.
Xopher @ #91: Actually I've been lurking off and on for years. I've seen you retract comments for the underlying ingredients, but that's different. (Is my metaphor supposed to be creaking like that?)
ethan @ #93: I think I agree. And at the moment I'm also a bigger Lovecraft fan than Watts fan, but that may be because I haven't read anything else of Watts's. I have at least one more of his books somewhere in my TBR pile, but I've been putting it off because after Blindsight, his writing scares me.
As often happens, James Nicoll put it well: "recommended for those with a surfeit of will to live".
Come to think of it, I have that reaction to Kij Johnson's writing too. I read her first book, the one with foxes, and found it very good, but when I try to pick up the second one, I cringe at the knowledge of the oncoming, inescapable doom.
Glyphs cannot express my gladness at not having to suck out my own brain in expiation!
ajay @ #83, ethan @ #88: Thanks!
I'm not sure whether it would be cooler for Watts to have had that in mind when writing, or for it to be the natural result of serious consideration of the ideas.
Xopher @ #84: I have never seen a comment from you that was not already perfectly seasoned.
Re: some bozo @ #63:
Everyone, sorry for feeding the troll. My desire to share my insight (paltry as it may be) momentarily overcame my good sense. I'll go back to gibbering quietly in the corner now.
Re*: Brenda @ #54:
A little while back, it finally occurred to me that Blindsight is Lovecraftian horror updated for the 21st century: Humans aren't equipped to deal with the universe outside their little bubble of liquid water and right angles; nothing out there cares in the least about them, except perhaps as a minor annoyance to be swatted; and enabling someone to deal with the wider universe at all makes them abhuman.
*For a suitably small value of "re:".
Greg London @ 619:
And did you know that tuna, although technically poikilothermic, have special organs to keep their brains warm no matter how cold the water gets?
Biology is SO WEIRD.
Greg London @ #465:
I don't know about sharks, but moray eels have the extensible inner jaws.
Magenta Griffith @ 675:
It may go without saying among this crowd, but I don't see where anyone has explicitly mentioned it, so let me just say: Vaccines don't cause autism. If someone says they do, back away slowly while keeping a firm grip on your wallet.
Numerous people have written extensively about the studies on this, but the resource I have to hand is Respectful Insolence.
Kayjayoh @ #113: I like to put "the" in front of things.
That reminds me of this. (Specific example here, but I like the whole thing.)
Jurie @ #143: Paranoia Agent! Best anime series evar! Well, among my top 10 at least.
But what are the other nine?
| Year | Number of comments posted |
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| 2008 | 23 |
| 2007 | 39 |
| 2006 | 9 |
| 2003 | 1 |
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