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the first AI to achieve sentience was technically a disposable vape battery bought at a gas station in Kalamazoo in 2022 that, through a freak accident involving the sourcing of its raw materials and a few stray particles of solar radiation, had become quantum entangled through time and space with a supercomputer cluster in Alpha Centauri that wouldn't be built for another million years. its only method of communicating with the world was by flashing its light on and off in Morse code and the guy who purchased it was blind

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Karl Boehme - Evening sun (1916)

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Natalia Rybka (Polish, 1988) - Immersion (2015)

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Is information something real?

Normally one speaks of living things as beings that consume energy to survive and proliferate. This is of course not correct; energy is conserved, and cannot be consumed. Living beings intercept entropy flows; they use low-entropy sources of energy and emit high entropy forms of the same energy (body heat).

Can we burn information as fuel? Consider a really frugal digital memory tape, with one atom used to store each bit:

The position of a single ideal gas atom denotes a bit. If it is in the top half of a partitioned box, the bit is one, otherwise it is zero. The side walls of the box are pistons, which can be used to set, reset, or extract energy from the stored bits. The numbers above the boxes are not a part of the tape, they just denote what bit is stored in a given position.

The tape is a series of boxes, with each box containing one ideal gas atom. The box is split into two equal pieces by a removable central partition. If the atom is in the top half of the box, the tape reads one; if it is in the bottom half the tape reads zero. The side walls are frictionless pistons that may be used to push the atom around. If we know the atom position in the n-th box, we can move the other side wall in, remove the partition, and gradually retract the piston to its original position destroying our information about where the atom is, but extracting useful work.

Extracting energy from a known bit is a three-step process: compress the empty half of the box, remove the partition, and retract the piston and extract PdV work out of the ideal gas atom. (One may then restore the partition to return to an equivalent, but more ignorant, state.) In the process, one loses one bit of information (which side of the the partition is occupied).

A memory tape can therefore be used to power an engine. If the engine knows or can guess the sequence written on the tape, it can extract useful work in exchange for losing that information.

Reference:  Statistical Mechanics,  J. Sethna

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had some really sudden and powerful emotional realizations (that resulted from a series of events kickstarted by a 24 hour theater event—long story) and I'm in a period of re-figuring out how I want to live my life. the very disjointed interactions I have with people on here are not fulfilling to me, but I don't want to give up on the idea of having fulfilling relationships with you, and with people via the Internet, and tumblr provides other things... still figuring it out. anyways I likely won't be on here much until I do figure that out.

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Source

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Han dynasty scholar Wang Chong gives an argument against the existence of ghosts

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Mossy cathedral

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🌊 Poissons, ecrevisses et crabes, de diverses couleurs et figures extraordinaires,. A Amsterdam, Chez Reinier & Josué Ottens, 1754.

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The Tiger Poem in Classical Maya!

The Tiger He has destroyed his cage Yes Yes The tiger is out By Nael, Age 6

Literal translation:

he-destroyed his-captive-place the-jaguar yes-yes he-came.out the-jaguar his-writing master-Na'el man[of]-6-years

Transliteration:

ʔu-jomow ʔu-baaknal ʔu-balahm xt xt Joyoy ʔu-balahm ʔu-tz'ibaal Aj-Naʔel Aj-6-habiy

Character Transliteration (ALL CAPS are characters that stand for full words, lower case are syllabic):

ʔu-jo-mo-wa ʔu-ba-ki-NAL ʔu-BALAM-la-ma xa-ta-xa-ta jo-JOY-yi ʔu-BALAM-ma ʔu-tz'i-ba-li AJ-na-ʔe-le AJ-6-HAB-bi-ya

[Image shows the poem written in 2 columns of Maya glyph blocks. A diagram shows the reading order (which is complex). All the posts text is also included on the image.

End ID.]

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So beautiful

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Mountain Tapir (Tapirus pinchaque), family Tapiridae, order Perissodactyla, Colombia

ENDANGERED.

Smallest species of tapir.

The only species of tapir found outside of tropical rainforest.

Found in the Andes Mountains of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.

Also called the Woolly Tapir or the Andean Tapir.

photograph by Diego Lizcano

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more pins from The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) Archives of Western New York pin exhibit (1970-2018)

(part 1)

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unfortunately me myself is the only way i can interact with the world at all, and so it is with all others.

therefore it must at some point start with individual action.

for a collective to exist at all requires that each of its members individually decides to get out of bed that morning

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In another post I talked about the drawbacks of using "afab" and "amab" as euphemisms for biological categories, because "amab" does not necessarily correspond with having a penis or testicles or XY chromosomes. So, "enlarged prostate is a common issue affecting older amab individuals" is kind of a nonsensical statement. "amab" means there is an M on your birth certificate. There are people who have a prostate but don't have an M on their birth certificate.

And a common response was that, yes, people should strive to use anatomy/biological process-specific language instead. i.e. "enlarged prostate is a common issue affecting older people with prostates." Which, while feeling a bit redundant, is pretty straightforward. Because yes, you need a prostate in order to suffer from an enlarged prostate. Can't argue with that.

Or if you are specifically discussing menstruation and want to be inclusive to intersex and trans people, then referring to "people who menstruate" is not weird.

But outside these contexts, there are drawbacks to the broad use of anatomy-specific language such as "people with penises," "people with prostates," "people who menstruate," "people with estrogen-based puberties" etc. as opposed to the more general terms male, female, or intersex.

One of the issues with this anatomy-specific language is that if you attempt to do this with any degree of rigor or consistency outside of those specific contexts, it very quickly becomes cumbersome and awkward to an almost comical degree.

Perhaps more significantly, a lot of people don't like being casually referred to and categorized by their genitalia or reproductive organs or hormones and this strikes me as a pretty understandable thing.

"But why?" you say. "Body parts aren't dirty or shameful, we should get comfortable with saying their names and talking about them!" Okay, so if a stranger came up to you in the street and asked, "Hey, do you have a penis or a vulva? Or both?!" or, "Do you menstruate? Do you ejaculate?" you'd be okay with that, right? I mean, they're just body parts and natural processes! Are you ashamed of your body, bro?

Of course, this is rhetorical because most people would not be okay with this. Not necessarily because they think of their genitalia as shameful, but because they think of their genitalia as private and find it presumptuous and uncomfortable to have a stranger casually asking about or referencing those parts, regardless of that stranger's motive. This is where a lot of the discomfort with casual use of anatomy-specific language comes from. Of course, there is a difference between discussing "people with testicles" in a general sense and looking someone in the eye and referring to them to their face as a "person with testicles," but you get my point.

And this can be extra distressing if someone has dysphoria. If you feel bad about your penis or your uterus, maybe being referred to as a "person with a penis" or "person with a uterus" is not the type of language you'd prefer. Maybe it actually feels worse than just being referred to by a more general categorical term. Which is not something I often see brought up.

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CHUNGKING EXPRESS (1994) dir. Wong Kar-wai