Digital Consciousness

Seriously, what the hell is all of this?

2009-09-03T23:21:00.000-07:00

OK, so it’s been a while, a long while, hell the whole summer has come and gone since I last posted. My job got in the way of me posting anything on here, It just fucked with my whole normal way of doing this, that is, staying up until 4 or so in the morning unable to sleep for one reason or another until I go “hey you know what I am going to post on my blog about some bull shit.

First of all, what I have been up to all summer, mostly lots of work but I managed to fit a few interesting things in. I work for the Naval Research Lab at Stennis Space center in southern Mississippi, NASA test fires rocket engines there, its kinda cool, the Navy has their imaging division and a few other small things based there so I end up working on some sort of image or terrain data processing, less cool. More specifically (but not too specifically so I don’t have to kill you) last summer I worked on converting this cool 2D imagery stuff in to 3D and displaying in Google earth, and I did that with some Java and Google's KML script for Google earth, kinda cool(not really), pretty easy stuff though. This summer was slightly (and by slightly I mean completely) different, my mentor more or less gave me the job description 'well I need someone to learn CUDA so uh Figure out something cool with CUDA’. CUDA is Nvidia's (the graphics card people) proprietary software language for programming stuff that’s not video to run on Nvidia graphics cards.. You would want to do this because graphics pound for pound beat the crap out of normal old CPUs in processing power. They can do this because they have lots of separate processor cores (your Intel Core 2 duo has two cores, an Nvidia GTX 280 has 240 cores, an ATI Radeon 4870 has 700 cores). This also means they can do a lot of things at the same time, like processing what some pixels are going to display in big groups to update the screen faster. One day someone went “hmmmm you know these could do something else with the right coding” and thus they started projects like CUDA. Long story short I was converting simulations of sand particles from regular C++ to CUDA and speeding up how fast they ran by hundreds of times by processing lots of collisions between particles at once. Was doing all sorts of crazy particle physics to figure out the collision math for the particles, fun stuff … not really. I sound like a damned Nvidia salesmen or something, but really Parallel data processing is cool shit.

Well, on to stuff that is slightly more interesting or at least less nerdy. About somewhere around June I went to Chicago with my family because my sister wanted to look at some colleges up there or some such. We spent a few days in Chicago and stayed in relatively nice hotel. A few things I learned from that experience: One, Room service is as expensive as it is awesome. Two, Internet for 9.95 a day is the most bullshit thing I have every heard of. Three, Chicago is generally pretty awesome. Four, I should have considered more colleges with urban campus's. I throughly enjoyed the few days I spent there. The connection between well developed and maintained infrastructure and thriving business was pretty damned apparent especially when I had New Orleans to compare it to. Other interesting things during the summer included a trip I took to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to see a friend of mine (visiting there help to convince me of the awesomeness of urban campus's) before he went to Japan for 2 months. Other then that the only other really interesting thing to happen was the fourth of July where me and a few friends managed to not kill ourselves setting off candidate-for-replacing-the-space-shuttle sized homemade fireworks. Eyebrows and arm hairs were singed but nothing important was lost. After that things continued on in a pretty boring manner until school got started again, oh yeah almost forgot I wrecked my care when it hydroplaned off the interstate on the way to work one day, I wasn't hurt and insurance payed for the car, no big deal really, moving on.

Over all it was really pretty uneventful, but I did mange to learn a great deal about myself, and what I want to do with myself and now that school has started I can start these ideas and concepts. Perhaps with enough time I can begin to enact some of the things I have come up with, and will eventually get around to writing some of this stuff down and posting here. Sufficient to say, that my mind is much clearer then it has been in the past, how the world around me works become clearer as I understand just how complicated things are. I can consider and connect more things at once now, see the connections between people events and ideas more clearly; they explode in my mind where events are connected to each other in a huge web like thing, fixed in position floating in time, and people are connected to these event and each other moving together through time relative to the events fixed in time and I can see the ways in which the connections shift, change and solidify. I can see the infinite series of events that led to the particular singular present each of us are in now, and ahead of that the future stretches to infinity with the next second holding infinite possibilities for what the next new event and connection could be.

But its going to take me a while to sort it all out, organize things and write them down but hell I am just glad I finally got around to writing something.

Oh yeah I went skydiving right before school started and that was pretty awesome.

You, me, the world and a computer

2009-04-17T11:46:00.000-07:00

Edited: busy weekend, sorry, and I just got around to editing it. I made some rather significant clarifications and rewrote some bits so its probably worth rereading.

Check out this video, it’s kind of old and you may have seen it before and the information is a little outdated, but I think it carries a rather powerful message about how our world is evolving around us and where it is going.

Interesting huh?

So I am going to try to address the question at the end "what does it all mean?” It is not really one question however, there is much to consider when discussing this, how far is technology going to go, how will people react to the changes it influences and how are people going to use it? Well I know what I am going to be using a computer that is more powerful then all of humanity for, the best space combat sim ever (looking at you Ender) and ultra-ultra-ultra-ultra-HD movies in 21.1 surround sound … in 3D … on Mars (hopefully). Also it means my degree is going to be worthless before I finish getting it, yet another reason to consider switching. That's just me though, what is everyone else going to be doing with this extraordinary amount of processing power? The video also points how globalization is now present in almost every area of our lives thanks to the technology making it possible, how are people going to handle this shift? We will be able to work together, not as communities or as a nation or nations, but as a common group of creatures called humans to create a better world and expand beyond it? Will all of that potential problem solving power go towards solving the problems of humanity as a whole or the problems of individuals?

Honestly, only time will tell, but it’s fun to think about it.

Humanity has shown that it is capable of great works both positive and negative using the stuff we have figured out about the universe around us. We have put men on the moon with missile technology repurposed from German V2’s and computers that compared to your cell phone would seem primitive. Einstein discovered his famous universal cheat code E=MC²and we used it to figure how to split the very bonds that hold the universe together and release their energy, massive amounts of energy, enough energy to level entire cities using a chunk of material that would fit in your hand (however actually putting it in your hand is probably a bad idea). Then we learned to control that energy and used the same material to power cities. Everything has a good and bad side, this is obvious, and it is likely humanity will use everything for both at some point and we can only hope that the good will be greater than the bad. Let us hope our humanity is not overly exceeded by our humanity, and our technology is evolving much faster than our humanity is.

Already things change daily thanks to computers. It used to take years to design new circuits for the next generation of computers, now the current generation of computers is used to create the next more powerful generation in less time than the last. It used to be you would prototype a motherboard and if it worked on the 5^thtry you were lucky. Now you simulate it in a computer to a degree of accuracy unheard of 10 years ago, and when it doesn't work it can tell you what is wrong and how to fix it. So instead of making five prototypes and then 20 more to refine it, now there are just two or three and the first physical item produce is almost a finished product. This is not the only field that benefits from the processing power of computers, every technical field; anything we understand the physics behind can be modeled with a computer and understood before the real thing is ever built. But I specifically used the motherboard example for a reason, to point out that each extra FLOP¹ we get out of computers only makes getting the next one that much easier.

What is it about computers that are so great and allow us to get so much done? Besides their ability to crunch numbers and perform logic, they allow humans to do what they are best at on a grand scale: try something new and see if it works. We learn through trial and error, and computers allow us to do this much faster then we can do my hand. Design a circuit board and something goes wrong? Used to be you looked at what you had and tried to figure out what wasn’t working and built another to try again and you would had to be very careful not to create the same error. Now you figure out what happened and tell the computer to watch for it and you don't see that error again. Want to see if your new crop is going to be able to survive the winter? Used to be you just used what knowledge you had and planted and waited to see if they made if not, well to bad, better luck next year. Now you run a climate simulation for a local region and see what sorts of things are likely to happen this year and plant your crops accordingly or hire a Genetic Engineer to build you a better crop. They allow us to still be human and get more done. However, this does carry with it a price, we are still human, we will still make mistakes and do stupid shit no matter how small the computer is or how many operations per a second it can do or how accurate the model is; the computer is only as good as we are. So as the computer gets faster, there are more chances for us to make a mistake or use the technology the wrong way. Mistakes can be corrected because that’s what we are good at; try something and if it does not do what we expected we learn from that experience modify what we are doing and try again. The problem is using it to do something we know is going to be harmful, something that is not beneficial to humanity. Thus, we must grow up as a species before our technology gets the better of us.

So what do technology ethics (Technology Assessment/Technology Dynamics) have to do with Globalization? Globalization on the scale we are seeing today has been made possible because of our technology, communication at the speed of light, the ability to process data from anywhere in the world using data sets containing billions of individual pieces of information. A very good example of this information dissemination and processing is going to be the LHC once it’s turned on for real, assuming it doesn’t explode this time. It be generating 1 Petabyte of unique information every few seconds and has a dedicated server farm that will break this information up in real time, decide what needs to be processed and send it to one of I believe (don't quote me trying to remember from an article I read a while ago) over a hundred different universities which will study and process the incoming data and send it elsewhere for further study etc.. That’s just one example. Incredible amounts of information on anything are available to a huge portion of the world's population. But, despite the ability to share information and find out new things people are still people. Tolerance is still a big problem on this planet, one group just can’t live while the other exists and people refuse to sympathize with others. While being more connected helps the problem it also worsens it, again the everything-has-a-good-and-evil-effect pops up. People have more information on others and are exposed to a greater number of different people. This helps people to be more accepting of other people’s differences but at the same time some people are so intolerant knowing there are even more different people out there only makes things worse. So instead of using this technology to help people they use it to hurt them or they don’t use the tools available to them to help improve their thinking. People must learn to live together and have a common goal of advancing humanity in to tomorrow or we are not going to get anywhere. So we must use all of this technology to bring us closer together, to improve our world and move on to others. If not, it is will likely our technology will be used to destroy ourselves over our petty differences.

We are so small in the universe, we are nothing compared to the universe and these differences we are argue over are even smaller. How sad would it be to let them destroy us? How different from one another are we really? My DNA is almost exactly the same as yours, I live on the same planet as you, with the same basic problems, the same basic needs, and I get all of my energy from the same place as you. So what are we going to do? Are we going to get by these insignificant differences so much smaller then we are and perhaps make a significant difference in the universe so much bigger then we are?

I live every day of my life looking for every opportunity to try and improve this world and hope that one day I will be able to see the future I believe humanity is capable of realizing, a future of hope and prosperity where we live our lives to go further in to the universe in our attempts to understand it.

1. FLOPS is a term used to measure the processing power of a computer. It stands for floating point operations per a second, which is how many floating point math calculations can a computer before per a second. My high end desktop can do about 7 Gigaflops (very rough estimate), and IBM's newest super computer recently broke the Petaflop barrier that’s 10000000000000000 FLOPS, and Will be capable of 3 Petaflops when it is completed later this year.

Two things, one little and one big thing

2009-04-02T00:05:00.000-07:00

I find people interesting, well I find lots of things interesting and foolishly try to comprehend what ever I find interesting.

Little Thing: a short story about a conversation.

I was in the union here at State the other day and was having a conversation with a friend of mine, about some sort of way the world is fucked up, and one point I jokingly said “Well its ok, I don't believe in God anyway”. Me being me I was talking in a volume level somewhere in between a freight train and the space shuttle lifting off, anyone who has heard me talk before knows when I get in to the conversation I get really into it. Anyway so half of the union heard me say that. Got a few stares from people sitting around which doesn't bother me. One person did more then stare though he decided that he needed to convince me I should believe in God. It was a very interesting conversation and I will do my best to paraphrase how it went.

Other dude: How can you not believe in God? Its so obvious he has to exist just look at how complicated the universe is!

Me: I am assuming you are talking about the Christian God, the been around forever all power dude right, knows all see all etc.?

OD: yeah.

Me: so God can have always existed but matter energy can't ?

OD: No they uh well God has always been there anyway and he do anything so he just created them when he made the universe.

Me: That doesn't answer my question of why God can just exist and all the stuff in the universe can't.

OD: well it doesn't matter really if it could have existed who knows it might have but I believe that God exists and you must believe in him to be saved.

This went on for about 5 minutes and I was rather frustrated by the end of it, circular logic, and just ignoring what I am saying kind of get to me, and I will never understand why some people just don't seem to be able to rationalize stuff.

The conversation ended with me saying something along the lines of “you can believe that I need to believe in God, and I will believe you are a bug in humanity's programming and we can leave it at that.”

I kinda regretted saying it later cause I think I come off sounding ass hole-ish which I try not to do, but I said it and while it not as bad as some of the things I could have said I still kinda regret saying it, only kinda though. I find it very interesting that some people think like this and still haven't been able to figure out why they do.

Big Thing: wondering if I know what the fuck I am doing

As I said before I am more or less interested in just about everything I like trying to solve problems and discussing different solutions to problems. But, I find a lot of things interesting, and when I say a lot I mean it. Which has left me with a problem, which has been bothering me more then normally lately. I am becoming increasingly convinced I might be pursing the wrong major.

Other options I have considered:

Computer Science: Currently I am working on Computer Engineering, Computer Science keeps me with in the field of computers which is one of the things I really enjoy working with and would end up with me doing a lot of programming which I greatly enjoy doing, and I will humbly say, I am pretty damn good at it. Thing is though, honestly the difference between CS and CPE is a lot of math they will teach me as a CPE and I will never ever use again, and a bunch of circuit physics I might need as a CPE but not sure I would use it enough to warrant 3 classes of it in the sort of field of Engineering I want to get in to. Other than that they are pretty much two sides of the same coin.

CPE + Cognitive Science double major: This option is probably the stupidest idea I have ever had, but it combines two of the things I find really interesting, How computers think and how people think. The big problem with this idea is …. I would for probably a long ass time. While there is actually some overlap in curriculum for the two majors they are otherwise completely different. But having both of these majors would pretty much guarantee that I would be able to work in one of the emerging fields of technology that I really enjoy, Neurotechnology (so new it's not a word recognized by openoffice). I would be able to work in areas that I believe will take humanity in to the future, merging the human mind with computers. Honestly though I don't need both of them to this sort of work but it was just another idea I had.

Philosophy of some sort: getting a degree here would more or less be me satisfying the almost pure pleasure I derive from simply sitting reading, thinking, and talking (Talking isn't something I get to do much anymore, I think everyone I live with is tired of me giving my opinions on stuff) about ideas relating to science and technology in a non physical sense (like what sort of effects merging a human mind with a machine will have, honestly if you want to talk with me about that, I could sit there and discuss it until I died from from lack of doing anything else other then sitting and talking …. ) and about other ideas dealing with logic processes which I guess related back to science or I guess where science comes from, morals, ethics those sorts of things … I dunno. I am trying to separately justify a field that really deals with the relations between these things. I am going to go ahead and leave it at that if I didn't just tell myself to stop I would have never finished this paragraph, I would have never stopped thinking about the questions raised in my mind while trying to write this.

I have also considered just dropping out of college and going off and exploring the world and seeing as much new shit as I possibly can, sitting and thinking is one thing, but sitting and thinking in the same spot can get boring. Dr. House would probably advise me towards buying a plant to solve the "need new scenery" problem, however.

For now I will keep with CPE. Next semester I am going to take Dr. Mulberry's intro to philosophy class and see what I think of it.

I think, I am lost somewhere in between wanting to work with the technology itself and its relationship with people.

And again I think should I really be trying to figure other things out when I am still failing miserably at figuring myself out.

I am an Atheist

2009-02-24T23:14:00.000-08:00

If you asked me “Do you believe that god exists” I would answer “no”. If you inquired further I would explain to you that I don't think that it is possible for us to really know if god exists, but until you present me with evidence that proves otherwise I am going to say he doesn't exist.

I do not believe in hell.

I do not believe in heaven.

I do not believe morality comes from a higher power.

I believe when you die, thats it, game over.

And even if there is an omnipotent, omnibeneficial, omnipresent god, I do not believe he would do anything of the things he supposedly does. If he was truly all knowing he would already know everything that was going to happen, so regardless of the whole freewill thing he already knows what we are all going to do regardless, so to put us here and then judge us on what we do here, things he knew we were going to do before we existed, and damn us to hell or heaven is pretty insidious. And If I was him I would cut out the middleman and throw those who were going there anyway straight in to hell or heaven.

Anyway if anyone wants to argue the finer points with me feel free to do so, in a civil rational manor.

Ok, so what I really want to write about was Religion and how I became an Atheist. I was raised Roman Catholic, listened to the rhetoric, the stories, and in some cases the out right lies. I guess I never really believed it, I am not really sure, I just did it because it was expected of me. So then comes high school and over the course of my time there I would come to disagree with enough of Christianity's teachings I one day said to myself I was no longer religious but still believed in something. I continued to do what I always do and think way to much about everything. Over time, my rationalizing eroded that belief as well as. By the end of high school I had a loose belief that there could might be something somewhere maybe kinda… it wasn't really concrete in anyway. The subject only received minimally thought through the first semester in college, but as time past, I became more and more aware of religion's attacks on science and logical reasoning, and as I considered the questions and concerns brought up by these discussions my beliefs formed in to what they are now. I think most of my friends have known how I think for a while now, and I never really talked about it outside of their company. Things are different now though, to much is at stake and as many people that need to know, will know that I am an Atheist.

Disclaimer: I do know there are people who embrace the good things as best as anyone can and do not do the things I am about to mention in this next section and mean no offense to anyone, it just my opinion and like always I am open to discussion.

Religion, if all it would do is preach the love and tolerance that they say their deity does, then it would be alright. The problem is lots of them don't. They say its ok for us to dehumanize (I am using dehumanize as a general term for all the sorts of injustices committed by religion, again if you want to argue feel free too) some people and think less of them and thus treat them differently from others. Regardless of what you believe, NOTHING, changes the fact we are all human, we are made up of the same stuff, we have to put up with the same shit, we will all screw up cause we are not perfect and life sure as hell isn't fucking fair. We are all the same. Use the fucking amazingly powerful brain evolution or the god of your choice gave you and fucking think about how your actions effect other people.

This is probably ripe for being picked apart, I do not have the time to write the books that would make up my thoughts on these subjects, if you have questions or rebuttals, state them and I will answer them.

Edits for clarity and my horrible grammer.

This should be fun....

2009-02-24T14:36:00.000-08:00

Ok so its been a while since I have posted anything, I have been busy, tired, not had anything meaningful to say or at least remembered it long enough to right it down, *more excuses here*.

Anyway so there is a group on campus called Soulwinners Ministry International.

They are quite radical and unreasonable, and they draw quite a crowd on campus, its really very interesting.

They have brought people who normally have conflicting view points together to listen to their tails of fire and brim stone and this leads to very interesting and meaningful conversations with other people listening.

They are going to be here all week and I will be there listening and talking with people every day this week. I working on two posts as a result of this, one that will be a summarization of my view of religion ingeneral, my history with religion and my views on the world in relation to religion, and oh yeah, God. The second post will be about the discussions I have with people this week and I will share their views and my reactions to them. At least thats the plan...

Time Travel

2009-01-30T23:26:00.000-08:00

So I did this thing that some have called crazy, others have called a waste of money and still others have called "awesome". I signed up for membership in this corporation that takes your name, puts it on a big list (stored in as many ways as they can think of) and they plan on staying around for a while so that when time travel is invented, they will come to your last know location and bring you back to the future Marty McFly style. It only cost 10$ to join and they throw that money in to a trust fund or some such thing that will gain interest until time travel is invented, this goes toward paying for the time traveling and what ever is left over is given back to you in the future. So if time travel takes 500 years to become a reality at 5% interest 10$ would turn in to several billion, 6% would yield over a trillion(assuming inflation isn't that bad yet it could still be quite a bit). I mean it's a really long shot and never going to happen probably but I figured hey its only 10$ if it works I get to see the future if not I am out 10$, big deal. The money is also tightly controlled so your great great great grand children can't pry it out of the corporation years later.

So I guess if it doesn't happen that could mean a few thing, time travel is never invented, mankind blows themselves up before we invent it, it is invented but this sort of thing is illegal, or its all a scam and these guys are a bunch of bastards, etc.

All my friends here think I am crazy so I dunno, I was kind of curious what other people think since the I got the official your in the club thing in the mail the other day and sent off my current offical residence to them, and since I am obviously posting this from the present they haven't come for me yet.

However, if I do make it to the future I will make sure to post something here with my fancy future Chrono Qantum Zen Relay Tunneling T.A.R.D.I.S. Extranet to old Internet connection enabled brain implant about how awesome or sucky the future is and what to avoid in the future.

As much as I love physics I also hate it

2009-01-29T14:41:00.000-08:00

The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the State but the creative, sentient individual, the personality...

- Einstein

I have been trying to write something to post here pretty much since last Sunday night and would write something scrap it, tell myself I was going to study some physics, not study physics and sit around and not do anything and then probably fall asleep. I spent a lot of time sitting around thinking about stuff, whats going on in the world and in my life up until I noticed something last night working on some calc III homework, something I already knew and had forgotten/ignored.

Music gives me energy out of nowhere, any music with even the slightest hint of energy will work. I turned on some Queen, Rise Against, and Nine Inch Nails last night and it was awesome. In an instant I was standing at my white board playing air guitar and converting from polar to cartesian. It unified me and gave my logical thought rhythm, I had seamlessly binded math with art to make finished homework. After that I managed to do a weeks worth of physics studying in 2 hours as electric field equations blurred in to Killer Queen. I still don't get how these god damn charge integrals work but whatever, I did alright on the test ... maybe. Perhaps I will actually do the homework now.

With the test out of the way I was able to collect what was going through my mind over the last week I spent not studying physics. I allowed the rational part of me to fail to control the emotional side of me and let everything that constantly on my mind get to me, and I was out of control until I found music that would put me back in control. It wouldn't be the first time I let my emotions get out of hand and cost me something real, last time it got this bad it cost me a programing project in data structures last semester. This time I was preoccupied with life in general and I was sort of lost in a great number of things, purpose, love, physics, etc and nothing was particularly overwhelming , it was just a lot all at once that overloaded me. It was different from the last time this happened when I was working on that programing project and I let a single thing overwhelm me. That time it was pretty much the fact that I am still single that got to me, I was filled with a profound sense of loneliness that had me to the point I was feeling physically ill. Similarly I came out of that low period when I found the right music and I had forgotten about that. While that was also on my mind this time round it was only one of many nowhere near the same degree, but I am back on top again.

Anyway, I talked to Chad this week. He is a good friend of mine and is the guy I work for at NRL Stennis. We were just sort of catching up on things, he just finished his doctorate in computer science, and we discussed the project we are going to be working on over the summer. If I told you any more about that I would have to kill you, just kidding but it is pretty technical and kinda boring so I will talk about that another time.

Gah, I still have more Calc homework to do and some micro stuff ugh …

Blog Thingamajig

2009-01-23T12:34:00.000-08:00

So yeah, Blog Thingamajig, on the internets.

Its Friday or something and I have been planning on doing this for a while so I went ahead and started a blog. If you (all 4 of you) have been reading my Facebook notes I plan on posting those sorts of things on here everyonce in a while. Most of the posts will end up being about the crazy ridicilous awesomeness of Starkville the middle of God Damn nowhere Mississippi. That and the other crazy random stuff I do, like starting a blog for example.

On a more serious note I grow increasingly frustrated with mainstream news media as a whole but mostly Fox News. Last nights Daily Show pretty much summerized my grips pretty well so if you are interested you can look at that since I am to lazy to explain myself right now.

And to end on a really positive note I got more free coffee from starbucks today, woot ! I pretty sure eveyone that works at the Starbucks in the union here knows me by name and what I drink considering its waiting for me by the time I get to the counter. Maybe they just like me or maybe its because I spend so much money there ... dunno both, probably and they only like me cause of all the money I spend there, who knows.