Bound to Happen

Fire Joe Morgan is now defunct. Alas.

It was only a matter of time after ESPN announced a few weeks ago that it would likely move Morgan off the featured telecasts due to his, how shall we put this?, complete lack of understanding or even a willingness to learn of the rules, traditions, or facts of the game of baseball. It never stops being incredible: one of the greatest baseball players ever, played for 20 years, saw some of the greatest events in baseball history, and has no clue what he was doing and doesn't think about it even now.

The site will stay up, but the guys who created it apparently have real jobs to do and can't keep up the daily grind of forehead-slapping that is sports journalism criticism.

Of course, Joe Morgan still has a job as a baseball analyst. There is no God.

I H8 Robots

Now that the election is done, we can get back to our favorite pastime: ridiculing those who are engineering the downfall of the human species. "Whole Brain Emulation," you say?

The best quote is this one:

"The only way you can emulate a person with a computer is by first defining the person to be a machine. The Future of Humanity Institute would seem to be misnamed."

Several problems present themselves immediately to the idea that human scientists can replicate the behavior of an individual brain (funny, they don't say "mind"...). One is that, based on the description given, the process being employed to capture a singular brain's behavior is in fact reductive and structurally rigid. In a word, it's no better than an approximation of any given brain's function (because it is limited by its own assumptions, which have become built-in structural limits), and likely would produce nothing more than an output that resembles the output of a living, human brain. Or, to put it another way, the Whole Brain Emulation output of, say, your brain, would probably do little more than remind, say, your mom of you. Evocative does not equal authentic. Sorry, scientist-guys.

Another issue I could see with this is that the people heading up this endeavor apparently don't believe that randomness is very important to the human brain-condition. This notion is so crazy that I submit that it proves just how central irrationality in fact is. QED.

Finally, their proposal to introduce an element of irrationality to the simulation of a brain roughly equates with the "difficulty setting" designed by the Sega Genesis programmers circa 1994: to make it more "lifelike," one need only instruct the computer to change the rules. In College Football '94, if you turned up the difficulty setting, the game would simply stop the human player from affecting the game -- all passes would be incomplete, all runs would result in fumbles, all penalties would be on you, etc. In the Whole Brain Emulation, it sounds like the irrational would be captured, to a limited extent, by introducing more "noise" into the program, thus increasing the chance that a connection would not be made or that an error (literally, a programming error) would result. In other words, there would be a rule that would suspend all rules.

The problem with this, of course, is that it's based on a set of rules; rules that don't exist in the human mind.

At some point, we have got to take stock of future-science and separate for the scientists what is science fiction and what is science actual. They don't seem able to do it (remember, they believe robots will rule the world).

Mandate

Mandate II

Blur-bama

Mandate III

Big Day

It's a big day here in Chicago. Tonight, there is a big fucking rally downtown for Obama, win or lose. We somehow got tickets, so we'll be in the lucky cattle-pen area surrounded by a million+ mob. It will likely be the most historic thing I'll ever attend. Given the sheer numbers of people in such a small area, we don't expect to make it out before the early morning hours tomorrow (fortunately, we can walk the 4 miles home if need be).

Truly, this is a fulcrum in time. If, as expected, Obama wins, this will mark for many people a point when they come again to be fully in control of their lives. There is some sense that we've all lost over the last 8 years an intangible, immeasurable component of ourselves and of our ability to direct ourselves. We can regain that, though likely only a damaged or partial form of it, tonight and in January. For every American citizen under the age of, say, 10, they will have a chance to grow up in a nation that does not prey upon the fears in their minds or seek to mold them into amoral consumers, first and foremost.

If somehow tonight does not bring the news we expect, then the end is nigh.

Well

Well, I guess I should say something today. First off, it's nice to see that Paul Krugman agrees with me about the coming purge in the GOP. It won't help the minority of fundamentalist crazies who are left in control of the party, but James Dobson will finally get his chance, it seems, to run things and bury whatever hope of real power the insane right wing had.

Another thing that has occurred to me is that, given the nature of the lies that have been spread about Obama this go-round, unlike any past Democratic candidate he will actually have the chance to grow his support prior to a re-election bid. My sense is that normally, candidates are most popular just before they are elected to office, and then they experience a decline in support as their partisans become disillusioned and bitter. But, Obama has been smeared so viciously by right wing nutjobs as a secret Muslim, a socialist/communist, a godless destroyer of worlds, that I predict an increase in support for him a few years hence (all else being equal) on the basis that those who harbor inner doubts about his character will be satisfied. I mean, what will they object to when the secret Muslim takeover doesn't happen after Obama takes office? Same for those who openly now question his experience and qualification to be president -- nothing qualifies him more to be president than actually being president.

Perhaps I am giving too much honor and dignity to Obama's detractors -- maybe there is a Bradley Effect, but it is masked by a host of critiques of Obama that range from his tax policies to his character to his inexperience. When it's all said and done, and the United States is better off under Obama than it has been under GW Bush, maybe those people who cannot bring themselves to support him will just finally cop to being racists. And then, maybe they'll do the honorable thing, in this modern age, and kill themselves.