use the plot, Luke!

Posted on Monday, 2002 July 15 by Anton

The Well-Tempered Plot Device

But actually, it’s not always necessary for the author to put in an appearance himself, if only he can smuggle the Plot itself into the story disguised as one of the characters. Naturally, it tends not to look like most of the other characters, chiefly on account of its omnipresence and lack of physical body. It’ll call itself something like the Visualization of the Cosmic All, or Seldon’s Plan, or The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or the Law, or the Light, or the Will of the Gods; or, in perhaps its most famous avatar, the Force. Credit for this justly celebrated interpretation of Star Wars belongs to Phil Palmer; I’d only like to point out the way it makes sudden and perfect sense of everything that happens in the film. “The time has come, young man, for you to learn about the Plot.” “Darth Vader is a servant of the dark side of the Plot.” When Ben Kenobi gets written out, he becomes one with the Plot and can speak inside the hero’s head. When a whole planet of good guys gets blown up, Ben senses “a great disturbance in the Plot.”

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a limitation

Posted on Monday, 2002 July 15 by Anton

One thing I haven’t managed to find with Google is the source of a cliché.

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mad cosmology

Posted on Monday, 2002 July 15 by Anton

Some entertaining notions in Susan Stepney’s notes from a panel at Eastercon 2001:

  • Maybe we’re surrounded by fake scenery, living in a “planetarium” – what are the required capabilities of civilisations that can fool us?
    • info is needed to generate a holodeck
    • a hydrogen atom can encode about a megabyte
    • it all takes energy, which limits the size of simulation
    • K1 (planet) — 100 km radius simulation
    • K2 (star) — 6000 km
    • K3 (galaxy) — 100 AU
    • (universe) — 100 ly
    • so if we had a consistent culture crossing 100ly, we couldn’t be living in a “planetarium”

(I don’t know what this bit means either; perhaps the minimum eye-span from which parallax discrepancies can be detected?)

  • could we search for a leak in reality?
    • most stress at boundary of planetarium
    • in 1969, had to replace a painted fake moon with real rock – that’s why the dark side looks so different – it was a rush job!
    • look for programmers’ signatures [“Easter eggs”] – solar eclipses are a bit fishy!
    • look for hidden control mechanisms – there’s a big heat engine somewhere (unless the laws of physics are different, too)
    • so, push the boundaries, “rush the fence”, “crash the computer”
    • cold fusion – for the first few weeks, everybody could reproduce it, then nobody could – took that long to fix the bug
    • Mariner 9 at Mars – biggest dust storm in history as it arrives
    • inconsistencies between GR and QM
  • have to be perfect – they could control us by taboo – control the space programme, etc – we should seek out places it’s hard to probe
  • Perfect simulation only when being looked at – less processing power required – more opportunities to catch them out
  • If we crash the planetarium, would what we see be any more comforting than what we see now?
  • We’re already hitting light speed boundaries – we’re backing away from geostationary satellites to cable, because it’s faster – maybe we all end up in a 10 cubic metre box
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a cryonaut in the news

Posted on Monday, 2002 July 15 by Anton

Ted Williams, who I gather had something to do with sports, is in liquid nitrogen storage and his daughter is suing to make sure he stays dead. (Thanks to Kennita Watson for the link.)

I have been acquainted with several people who worked on Alcor‘s suspension team, preparing bodies (or brains) for storage. (They have strong social ties to Eric Drexler’s Foresight Institute and Max More’s Extropy Institute.) Fine people every one. I intend to sign up myself someday – when my morale is a bit better.

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the other structure of scientific revolutions

Posted on Sunday, 2002 July 14 by Anton

Current reading: Freeman Dyson, Imagined Worlds (Harvard, 1997).

[Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)] misled a whole generation of students and historians of science into believing that all scientific revolutions are concept-driven. The concept-driven revolutions are the ones that attract the most attention and have the greatest impact on the public awareness of science, but in fact they are comparatively rare. In the last 500 years, in addition to the quantum-mechanical revolution that Kuhn took as his model, we have had six major concept-driven revolutions, associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Maxwell, Freud, and Einstein. During the same period there have been about twenty tool-driven revolutions, not so impressive to the general public but of equal importance to the progress of science. Two prime examples of tool-driven revolutions are the Galilean revolution resulting from the use of the telescope in astronomy, and the Crick-Watson revolution resulting from the use of X-ray diffraction to determine the structure of big molecules in biology.

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“disappointment was my closest friend”

Posted on Sunday, 2002 July 14 by Anton

That old familiar mood disorder got a lot of teeth into me over the last few days; but even if I thought you cared to read about that in more detail, I’m far from sure that I’d want my moaning on record.

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muppet mystery

Posted on Sunday, 2002 July 14 by Anton

HIV comes to Sesame Street, and Tim Blair wonders how:

How will the character’s contraction of the disease be explained? Sharing a needle with Oscar in his squalid street dwelling? Sex can be ruled out — Muppets don’t have genitals.

A blood transfusion doesn’t make sense; where would any donated Muppet blood come from? Each Muppet is the only living example of its species. The fluid oozing through Big Bird’s avian veins is unlikely to sustain whatever the hell Elmo is.

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