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pikawho?

By jp 01 Jan 2001

some people have a religious experience when they talk to god. I had one the other night. I talked to pikachu. not that silly new nintendo crap, the real deal: it turns out the lady that does the voice for pikachu is the aunt of my current host in tokyo…

so the other night at dinner they whip out the phone and in three minutes Im on the horn with pikachu. she pikas at me for a few minutes, which almost killed me — I was laughing so card I almost peed the carpet, which is a no-no in any culture I think.

anyhow, I still dont understand the appeal of pokemon, but I think Im forever changed.

in and out

By jp 18 Dec 2000

So Shu lives again. I like how he finds me the night before I leave for Tokyo.

Hmm… what could he possibly want?

Anyhow. He’s getting fscking married. Everyone who knows him, drop a line. Or at least show up at the wedding (more importantly, the B-party).

you have no free will.

By jp 04 Dec 2000

I was reading wired’s article on modern day supercomputers, and I got me brain to thinking about modeling. so given atomic cordinates, and the exact solute conditions and temps, you can effectivel model the behavior of organic and inorganic compounds to about 100% accuracy given the right data. and this with no more than a first-gen pentuim or eqivilent. so in the course of studying for my final, I get to wondering where it will end when the chips get big enough.

example. a virus has no free will. there are no genes to respond to envrionmental cues until after host infect. so all that cool syringe action DNA injection you see is purely thermodynamic, just as reliable as dropping a rock above your foot leading to broken toes. it just happens as soon as it binds a bacteria without requiring any energy. so we can model, given the exact coordinates, concentrations of viriods and substrates (bacteria) the behavior of the viruses. you’d need a slightly bigger computer.

now. move on to prokaryotes. a bacteria is technically an input-response machine. they “sense” the environment around them and respond through chemical cascades to response to the environment in a seeminly intellingent manner. penicillin got you down? no sweat, just make some drug-pumps to zap it out. it seems intelligent to us cause it’s what we’d do, given the choice. but in evolutionary terms, it was just the smart thing to do, so it stuck. but this raises the question, can we model something like an E. coli or a yeast? i think so. we know everything that would happen. it’s just a spankload more atoms to keep track of. need a slightly bigger computer.

so then what about us? given the world’s biggest computer from dimension X, shouldn’t we be able to effectively model humans? if we track every interaction they have with every single environmental stimulus (heat, cold, how much, how long) every toxin and ligand (EtOH, cholera toxin, influenza, etc) and every social interaction, and we know the exact celluar, developmental and nuerochemical cascades they bring about, can’t you predict this model’s behavior with some degree of accuracy?

so the question arises, if we can model this sort of system, does that mean we’ve created an AI, or that we’ve crushed the notion that people have free will? I kinda like the idea that we’re just overly complex stim-response machines. given the media you’re grown in, pardon the pun, it seems reasonable that we should know how any given person “thinks” on the atomic/molecular level, and therefore acts.

or at least it’d make me feel better when I do things and don’t know why I did them.

holy crap. for sale.

By jp 27 Nov 2000

jeezum galore, this takes the prize for “what I would do with my money if I were a millionare”.

Maybe I can rope some ivy-league frat idiot into some serious high stakes poker and make this work.

post 194

By jp 12 Nov 2000

hampster dance was only the beginning. at least this makes light of the impending four years.

post 191

By jp 10 Nov 2000

so aparently Dartmouth has a “Professor Exchange” program with other schools around the country.

It’s not what you think.

So when old Dr. So-and-so, PhD, dies, his corpse is shipped off to one of the participating exchange schools in return for one of their late faculty. This is to prevent young dashing Bobby Medskool from pulling back the sheet to discover his practice cadaver is his first year advisor.

It’d be an ironic kind of justice to have a mix up, and get to dissect your least favorite teacher from a year or two back.

post 182

By jp 05 Nov 2000

so maybe it’s all the cold medicine and vitamins making me a little spinny, but science is pretty neat.

I’ve been studying all week for my exam tomarrow, and I keep catching myself getting caught up in these little slack-jawed moments. the reason being looking into our cellular machinery with this level of resolution, the stuff ain’t just neat. it ain’t just functional. it’s a little more than awe-inspiring.

it’s absolutely perfect. and completely beautiful.

what is more or less a random cascade of macromolecules crashing into one another in each and every one of our cells is a model for perfection of form and function that makes swiss watches look like junkyard-fodder on account of poor craftsmanship. a bunch of weak electrostatic forces binding naturally chaotic particles together somehow translates into the workforce of micro-machinery that I doubt any human could ever design. it’s creepy. I don’t know if the several trillion years the earth has been around is enough time for these types of systems to arise through molecular evolution. near perfection is a pretty tall order.

or maybe mother nature stays up nights thinking. I’ll bet she’s a real bitch to play mastermind with.

either way, I sure feel dumb.

post 179

By jp 04 Nov 2000

so I bic’d my brain case for the first time this morning. I was generating some serious heat with all the cramming I’m doing for monday’s exam. but my head feels actually hotter to the touch than before. so I’m wondering if hair is actually nature’s heat sink.

and I found a birthmark I never knew I had. not like that russian guy though.