I'm a nerd. I love computers. If you are not a nerd, you
may grimly tolerate or openly loathe computers. Maybe you
feel like this device that's supposed to make life easier
has just made your life harder. If you know more about how
the computer works, and doesn't work, your relationship
with it will be happier.
1 What the heck is going on inside the computer?
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1.1 We intuitively think of computers as having human-like
consciousness. We routinely talk to them out loud,
the way we do with pets, cars, and the weather. It
seems unfair that Captain Kirk's computer could understand
speech, while ours are flummoxed by a single misplaced
period or quotation mark.
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1.2 Our instincts serve us poorly in the logical realm.
Computers are much dumber than we are, though also
much faster and more predictable.
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1.3 The user interface is only the topmost of the
many layers of abstraction between you and the computer's
guts. To adapt your intuition to computers, you need
to visualize the inner workings. A good interface
gives you body-centered metaphors to grab hold of.
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1.4 Video games and music make the computer's invisible
workings visible. Also audible and tactile. Game and
music interfaces are leading the way towards interfaces
that use more of the body than just the eyes, ears
and fingertips.
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1.5 Everyone is an intuitive scientist. Play is important
because it lets us experiment safely, especially with
failure.
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1.6 Like us, computers are evolved entities. Like
us, their design is the result of many compromises.
Like us, they aren't evolving towards any particular
state of perfection.
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1.7 Alan Turing, Albert Einstein and Kurt Gšdel searched
for a unifying logic to the universe. All of them
failed to find one. Herbie Hancock, Shigeru Miyamoto
and Susan Blackmore help us understand the value of
illogic.
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2 Alan Turing sinks submarines with vacuum tubes and
punchcards
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2.1 Computing is older and simpler than you would
think.
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2.1.1 Your hands are digital computers. You can count
past a thousand on your fingertips if you do it in
binary.
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2.1.2 Stone age computing: doing multiplication with
a baboon fibula.
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2.1.3 Bronze age computing: astrolabes, astronomy
and astrology.
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2.1.4 Victorian computing: digital text messaging
with Morse code.
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2.1.5 Jazz age computing: doing calculus with tanks
of water.
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2.2 Alan Turing kind of invented the general-purpose
programmable computer.
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2.2.1 The world didn't make sense to Turing, especially
the human mind. He wanted to find a universal logic
that could explain it.
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2.2.2 Turing proved in the 1930s that it's possible
to build a very simple machine capable of solving
any math or logic problem whatsoever. The computer
I'm writing this on is logically equivalent to Turing's
hypothetical machine.
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2.2.3 Turing was drafted into the British military
during the second world war. At a converted manor
house called Bletchley Park, he and a team of cryptanalysts
broke coded German submarine communications by doing
a lot of systematized arithmetic in a hurry.
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2.2.4 The Bletchley Park codebreakers used human computers,
mechanical computers, and some of the earliest electronic
computers.
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2.2.5 Bletchley Park was top-secret. After the war,
Winston Churchill ordered that the computing machines
be broken into pieces "no larger than a man's hand."
The public didn't learn about Turing's role in the
war until decades afterward, and Turing himself wasn't
allowed to discuss Bletchley's computing advances
with his colleagues outside the UK.
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2.2.6 In the 1950s, Turing went to prison for homosexuality.
He was also forced to undergo hormone "therapy" to
"treat" his condition. He committed suicide a few
years later.
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2.3 I, robot: Inside the mind of the computer.
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2.3.1 Computers can't think. They can copy a number
from one location to another. They can join two numbers
together. They can compare two numbers. And they can
invert binary numbers, replacing zeros with ones and
vice versa. These four operations, COPY, AND, OR and
NOT, are the sum total of a computer's intellectual
resources.
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2.3.2 Computer programs are made of algorithms. Algorithms
are sequences of COPY, AND, OR and NOT. You can compose
more complicated programs by stringing together simple
algorithms, and by nesting them inside each other.
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2.3.3 You use algorithms every time you do arithmetic
on paper or in your head. Any set of unambiguous instructions
can be expressed as an algorithm: recipes, parliamentary
procedure, musical scores, blueprints, game rules,
dance moves, the twelve steps of substance abuse recovery.
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2.3.4 Computers follow algorithms without understanding
them. Humans can, too. You don't need to know organic
chemistry to bake a cake. You don't need to know harmonic
theory to play piano from sheet music.
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2.3.5 A small algorithm can produce a huge or even
infinite output. It only takes a line or two of code
to list every whole number from one to infinity.
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2.3.6 Turing and friends discovered that you can express
any algorithm as a string of numbers. A computer can
use the same hardware to store both data and the instructions
for acting the data. Computers can even be programmed
to change their own programming on the fly.
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2.3.7 Computers perform algorithms dramatically faster
and more reliably than we do. However, computers can't
think up algorithms of their own. Yet.
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2.4 The easiest way to represent and manipulate numbers
electronically is in the form of binary numbers, known
to computer science as bits.
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2.4.1 Computer memory and disks store bits using complexes
of microscopic light switches. "Off" stands for zero,
and "on" stands for one. Algorithms order the computer
to flip certain bits according to the on-off state
of other bits.
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2.4.2 Eight bits is a byte. A kilobyte is a thousand
bytes. A megabyte is a million bytes. A gigabyte is
a billion bytes. A terabyte is a trillion bytes. Plain
text is about a kilobyte per page. CD-quality audio
is ten megabytes per minute.
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2.4.3 Computers convert text into strings of bits
in much the same way that cereal-box decoder rings
convert letters into numbers: A=1, B=2, C=3 and so
on.
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2.4.4 Computers convert pictures into strings of bits
by breaking them into pixels. A pixel is a number
in a database specifying a location and a color.
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2.4.5 Computers convert sounds into strings of bits
by breaking them into samples. A sample is a number
in a database specifying a certain intensite of vibration
at a certain thousandth of a second.
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2.4.6 Computers convert videos into strings of bits
by breaking them into frames, each of which is made
of pixels and samples.
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2.5 The first electronic computers filled warehouses
and were less powerful than modern graphing calculators.
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2.5.1 Behold the mighty ENIAC, one of the first general-purpose
electronic computers. ENIAC weighed 27 tons, occupied
700 square feet from floor to ceiling and cost more
than half a million dollars, in 1946 dollars. It took
about three weeks to enter a program into memory.
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2.5.2 ENIAC stored bits in the charge states of vacuum
tubes, cousins to incandescent light bulbs. Tubes
make guitar amps sound good, but like incandescent
light bulbs, they're expensive, delicate and wasteful
of electricity.
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2.5.3 To make computers cost-effectively, you need
to be able to make huge numbers of cheap, tiny, self-flipping
light switches.
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2.5.4 Silicon, the active ingredient in glass, concrete
and beach sand, turns out to be a fabulously useful
material for computing. Normally it's is an electrical
resistor, like rubber. When you zap five volts of
electricity through it, though, silicon becomes a
conductor, like copper wire. Silicon is a light switch
with no moving parts.
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2.5.5 Modern computer processors and memory have no
moving parts. Nevertheless, every bit flip still produces
some waste heat as the electrons and photons jostle
about. The faster the computer flips bits, the hotter
it gets.
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2.5.6 Vastly smaller, faster and more efficient processors
may yet be possible than what we have now. It's possible
to store bits in organic molecules, lasers or even
the spin directions of individual hydrogen atoms,
though none of these schemes are ready for practical
use as of this writing.
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2.5.7 As components get smaller and more delicate,
new failure modes emerge. Already, the tiniest microchips
are prone to disruption when cosmic ray impacts explode
single silicon nuclei.
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2.6 With all the advances in technology, why do computers
not seem to get any smarter?
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2.6.1 ENIAC was like a brontosaurus. My laptop is
like a sparrow. They both have the same basic anatomy,
the same organs and systems. The sparrow is just smaller,
and has a zippier metabolism.
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2.6.2 Strings of bits are profoundly not human-readable.
A computer interface is the top level of a system
of metaphors for metaphors for metaphors for metaphors
for strings of bits.
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2.6.3 Some of the metaphors in modern operating systems
make no sense whatsoever. A window in Windows is not
much like a window in a building. A word processing
document is not much like a piece of paper.
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2.6.4 Real computer nerds disdain graphical user interfaces
entirely, preferring to type arcane commands directly
in, like we all had to in the eighties.
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2.6.5 We'll only be able to make better use of the
awesome powers of our computers when we develop better
human-readable metaphors for bit-flipping. Scientists
and artists are going to need to work closely together
on this.
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3 Herbie Hancock gets future shock
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3.1 Rhythms and algorithms are both sequences of events
specifically ordered in time.
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3.1.1 Music carves time and pitch into digital units.
Songs are made of algorithms nested in recursive loops.
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3.1.2 Just about all world music uses repetion, and
repetition of repetition of repetition. This is probably
related to the fact that we form memories through
repetition.
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3.1.3 Classical sheet music is like software. Jazz
lead sheets and memorized pop tunes are more like
the rules of a game.
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3.1.4 It's no accident that music and games share
the verb "to play."
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3.1.5 Dance music is all about timekeeping. Drummers
and and computer clocks have the same job.
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3.1.6 The call-and-response structure of most Western
music is intriguingly binary.
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3.1.7 Artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky:
"Can one time fit inside another? Can two of them
go side by side? In music, we find out!"
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3.2 Cold technology, hot beats.
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3.2.1 Windup music boxes and player pianos are digital
music players in mechanical form.
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3.2.2 The computer produces symmetry. The computer
musician breaks it.
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3.2.3 Sequencing electronic music: building sounds
with imaginary legos.
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3.2.4 Digital audio editing: a mind's ear for your
eyes.
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3.2.5 Composing is improvising is sampling is remixing
is beat juggling. All music is mashups. Is sampling
stealing if there aren't any original ideas to begin
with?
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3.2.6 All creativity comes down to sampling. Miles
Davis: "You take out what you want and leave what
you don't like. Like food. It's no big thing."
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3.3 Herbie Hancock: synthesist with a synthesizer.
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3.3.1 From engineering student to member of Miles
Davis' most intellectually challenging band.
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3.3.2 Miles had to twist Herbie's arm to get him to
try electric piano. Once he did try it, Herbie helped
define the sound of electronic keyboards and synths
in jazz.
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3.3.3 Herbie played keys on Miles' "Shhh (Peaceful)"
and "In A Silent Way", two startlingly prescient tracks,
effectively remixes of themselves all the way back
in 1970.
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3.3.4 On Herbie's funky "Chameleon", R2-D2's voice
blends right in.
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3.3.5 Herbie's "Rockit" uses programmed bass and drums,
vocoder, record scratching and dancing robots. The
rhythm is rigidly digital, but the pitch is wildly
analog. It's the rare jazz pianist indeed that winds
up on MTV.
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3.3.6 Herbie and Miles remain influential because
even their most avant-garde experiments refer back
to dance music, the best kind. Herbie plays standing
up so he can dance onstage.
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3.4 Hip-hop drops science like a scientist.
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3.4.1 Speaking probably evolved from singing, not
the other way around.
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3.4.2 Music is an encoding and transmission system
for emotions.
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3.4.3 Listening to recorded music is all well and
good, but for music to do its evolutionary job, you
need to participate in it and make it your own.
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3.4.4 Hip-hop adapts your tape deck or record player
or computer or whatever else is around into a tool
for making your own music. You can even do your beats
and samples with your mouth, like Doug E Fresh and
Rahzel.
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3.4.5 The best hip-hop is deeply recursive. DJ Kool
Herc meets MC Escher: Rappers do a lot of rapping
about their rapping. DJs do a lot of sampling of themselves,
and of samples of samples of samples.
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3.4.6 Like Miles Davis and Buddha, hip-hop musicians
use emptiness and absence to focus your attention.
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3.4.7 Hip-hop embraces contradiction. Run-DMC says
of Jam Master Jay: "He's the big bad wolf in your
neighborhood, not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning
good."
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3.5 Music breeds and evolves much like life does.
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3.5.1 Life has seeds and eggs. Music has motifs, themes,
hooks, riffs and grooves.
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3.5.2 Improvisation is the scattering of seeds around.
Sampling and editing are weeding and pruning. Computers
make the technical side easier, but they can't make
decisions for you.
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3.5.3 The natural history of samples: The name of
this song is the Funky Drummer, the Funky Drummer,
the Funky Drummer, the Funky Drummer, the Funky Drummer.
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3.5.4 The natural history of samples: Woo! Yeah! It
takes "It takes two to make a thing go right" to make
a thing go right.
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3.5.5 The natural history of samples: Pump up the
volume, pump up the volume, dance, dance.
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3.5.6 The natural history of samples: When the "When
The Levee Breaks" break broke.
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3.5.7 Ideas want to be free. Copyright law is going
to need to adapt.
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4 Albert Einstein warps spacetime at his slacker job
in the patent office
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4.1 Modern computers are electronic. So what's an
electron?
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4.1.1 Aside from gravity, just about everything we
experience here on the surface of the Earth boils
down to the interactions between electrons and photons.
Electronic devices shepherd electrons to and fro by
bouncing photons off of them.
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4.1.2 Electricity is a weird and difficult concept.
To make it worse, all the naming conventions set in
before anyone understood what electricity was and
how it worked. Positive and negative mean exactly
the opposite of what you expect them to mean. To this
day, even the pros find the terminology confusing.
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4.1.3 Physicists once thought electrons and photons
were like little marbles. Now they imagine them as
vibrating energy fields that sometimes behave like
little marbles. This picture offends common sense,
but it agrees marvelously with experimental observation.
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4.1.4 Particles and fields aren't so much "things"
as happenings, knots and eddies in spacetime.
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4.1.5 Are matter and energy made of waves or particles?
Is the universe analog or digital? Yes.
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4.1.6 Is subatomic reality a figment of our observations?
Possibly maybe.
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4.2 Albert Einstein, rebel without a cause.
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4.2.1 Why are there posters of Einstein in dorm rooms?
You don't see Werner Heisenberg hanging next to M.I.A.
and Bob Marley.
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4.2.2 Einstein was an outsider, politically, religiously
and scientifically. By nerd standards, he was a badass
of James Dean proportions. Einstein published his
four most significant scientific papers in a single
year, not as a professor, but as a low-level clerk
in the Swiss patent office.
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4.2.3 So here's what Einstein figured out: The definite
existence of atoms, photons and electrons. The equivalence
of mass and energy. Gravity as the warping of spacetime
by mass-energy. The conceptual framework for the big
bang theory.
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4.2.4 There are no geniuses. There's just means, motive
and opportunity. Einstein didn't so much invent his
theories as gestate and give birth to them.
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4.2.5 "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon
my imagination. Imagination is more important than
knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles
the world."
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4.2.6 "If I were not a physicist, I would probably
be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams
in music. I see my life in terms of music."
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4.2.7 "Games are the most elevated form of investigation."
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4.3 Music is the mind's eye of your ears.
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4.3.1 Tuning the quantum guitar: electron orbitals
and harmonics.
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4.3.2 Electron orbitals give rise to chemistry and
solid objects the way the overtone series gives rise
to chords and scales. A quark is like a note. A proton
or neutron is like a major or minor triad. A nucleus
is like a fully orchestrated chord voicing. A molecule
is like a chord progression.
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4.3.3 Time is analog. Rhythm is digital. Time is continuous.Rhythm
is quantized.
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4.3.4 Pitch is analog. Harmony is digital. Pitch is
continuous. Harmony is quantized.
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4.3.5 Gravity twists the speed knob on the spacetime
turntable.
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4.3.6 Is music fundamentally analog or digital? Yes.
Is the universe? Debate continues.
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4.4 Video games: the mind's eye of your hands.
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4.4.1 Spacewar teaches the equivalence of gravity
and acceleration.
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4.4.2 Pong teaches conservation of momentum.
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4.4.3 Pac-Man and Asteroids teach the curvature of
space. The Legend Of Zelda teaches the curvature of
time.
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4.4.4 Tetris teaches quantization.
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4.4.5 Tomb Raider teaches the many-worlds interpretation
of quantum mechanics.
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4.4.6 The Bose-Einstein Condensate Homepage laser
cooling game teaches laser cooling.
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4.5 Can Baby Einstein make you grow up to be Einstein?
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4.5.1 Einstein's best work happened in periods of
daydreaming while he was engaged with the nuts and
bolts of real-world electrical engineering. At his
dream job with the Institute For Advanced Study, on
the other hand, he mostly just fiddled aimlessly with
math.
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4.5.2 Artists and scientists basically have the same
job, to record and interpret the world.
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4.5.3 Play is the intuitive scientist's lab. Across
every mammal species, play is serious evolutionary
business; it literally wires the brain together.
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4.5.4 There may not be a unifying logic to reality,
but there does appear to be a unification of human
knowledge. EO Wilson coined a term for this unification:
consilience.
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4.5.5 Game designers and electronic musicians are
beginning to bridge the illusory art-science gap.
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4.5.6 No body of thought demands a consilient approach
more than Kurt Gšdel's ideas about the intrinsic limits
of logic.
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5 Shigeru Miyamoto welcomes you to warp zone
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5.1 When you grow up playing video games, like I did,
the primitiveness of office software is a shock. The
desktop metaphor is, like, so 1978.
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5.1.1 Even Bill Gates thinks Windows is too confusing.
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5.1.2 "I don't know where I am. I want to go here."
For non-expert users, the hardest aspect of the graphical
user interface is keeping track of focus.
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5.1.3 Using a mouse is like drawing with a potato.
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5.1.4 "Ah yes, a keyboard. How quaint." The tragedy
of the QWERTY keyboard layout is that it was originally
intended to make people type slower, so as not to
jam their mechanical typewriters.
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5.1.5 Windows and the Mac OS both suffer from Escher
disease: the desktop appears to be both inside and
outside the hard drive.
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5.1.6 Office software is supposed to help you think,
but too often it restricts your thinking. Consilient
icon Edward Tufte wrote an entire book on the oppressively
linear thinking encouraged by Powerpoint.
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5.2 A good interface puts the fun in functional.
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5.2.1 When interfaces try to act like people, they
usually fail. Consider Microsoft's dreaded animated
paper clip.
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5.2.2 We can't help thinking of information space
in bodily terms, as a "place" where you "do" things.
"I don't know where I am. I want to go here." The
hardest part of the graphical user interface is keeping
track of focus.
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5.2.3 Interfaces should be based on spatial metaphors.
Super Mario 64 begins in a castle hung with paintings
depicting different levels of the game. You select
a level by jumping into the appropriate painting.
What if your file system worked this way? What if
you could carry the paintings around with you, rearranging
them as you saw fit?
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5.2.4 Video game controllers point the way forward
because they're beginning to involve more of the body
than just the eyes, ears and fingers. Consider Nintendo's
Wiimote, balance board, dance pads, drum controllers,
pen controllers and so on.
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5.2.5 Action games have you press repetitive sequences
of buttons at very specific times. This is a lot like
playing the piano. Dance and drumming games were inevitable.
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5.2.6 We have consciousness of our own consciousness.
We experience this recursive awareness as imagined
third-person observers, internal sprites and avatars.
Anthropomorphic beings are the computer's best way
to represent your actions to yourself.
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5.3 Shigeru Miyamoto: Your princess is in another
castle.
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5.3.1 Miyamoto first masterpiece, Donkey Kong, came
about almost by accident. When Nintendo's licensing
deal to do a game based on Popeye fell through, they
replaced the sailor man with an Italian plumber character.
Mario long ago surpassed Mickey Mouse as the most
recognized cartoon character in the world.
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5.3.2 In his designs for Super Mario Bros and The
Legend Of Zelda, Miyamoto drew on the Zen temples
in the hillsides around his native Kyoto. He wanted
to convey the experience of exploring, finding an
unexpected lake or cave, seeing new birds and snakes
and bugs.
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5.3.3 Super Mario Bros kept score, but no one ever
cared about it the way they cared about scores in
Space Invaders and Pac-Man. In Super Mario Bros, the
sense of winning comes from discovering new territory,
having new experiences and mastering new skills.
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5.3.4 Japanese video games have some of the austerity
of Zen, requiring discipline and dedication. Super
Mario Bros starts you at the beginning of World 1-1.
Every. Single. Time.
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5.3.5 Even "realistic" computer graphics are wildly
abstract. Miyamoto's deliberately cartoony design
style suits the medium better.
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5.3.6 We overvalue games that resemble movies the
way we once overvalued movies that resembled theater.
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5.3.7 We also overvalue realism. Microsoft Flight
Simulator is totally realistic, and so is just as
tediously difficult as flying a real plane.
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5.4 That guy just killed me!
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5.4.1 Why all the violence? Why are there so few peaceful
games? This is not a gender thing. Girls prefer Machiavellian
social scheming to physical violence, but the ruthlessly
competitive element remains.
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5.4.2 Video games push deep evolutionary buttons:
hunting and gathering, being a predator, being prey.
Modern civilization has been an eyeblink of evolutionary
time compared to the yawning expanse of the stone
age.
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5.4.3 Shoot-em-ups put you in touch with your inner
bug, fish, lizard.
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5.4.4 Humans are full of natural bloodlust. Better
to vent it on imaginary cartoon characters than on
each other.
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5.4.5 Video games are a safe space to meditate on
death and failure. Tetris and Pac-Man remain popular
the world over decades after their release because
you always, always lose.
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5.4.6 "Just one more level. Just one more level. Just
one more level." Animal unhappiness is a breeding
ground for video game addiction, as it is for every
other form of addiction.
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5.4.7 Video games, songs and scientific theories are
all self-replicating entities with lives of their
own.
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6 Kurt Gšdel presses control-alt-delete
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6.1 Like this sentence, many computer programs reference
themselves. Computer scientists refer to self-reference
as recursion.
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6.1.1 Both music and computer programs are usually
very repetitive. Recursion makes them both less tedious
to write out. Music uses "repeat until cue." Computer
science uses the if-then loop.
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6.1.2 Most software is made of algorithms within algorithms
within algorithms, nested in recursive modules.
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6.1.3 You experience recursion every time you talk
to yourself about yourself.
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6.1.4 Repeatedly running a simple recursive algorithm
can produce bottomless complexity.
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6.1.5 The picturesque Seahorse Valley in the Mandelbrot
set is an infinitely complex mathematical landscape
that the computer can display based on just a few
lines of code.
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6.1.6 Lost between the levels of recursion in the
Monty Python argument clinic: the conversation and
meta-conversation use the same vocabulary and are
easily confused.
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6.2 This program has performed an illegal operation
and will be shut down.
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6.2.1 When the computer "gets stuck", it hasn't stopped
working; it's just doing the same thing over and over.
The Super Mario Bros "Minus World" bug is a chance
to watch endless recursive looping in interactive
form.
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6.2.2 A field guide to Windows error messages. Who
writes these things? Out of all the possible synonyms
for 'fail', why do they use words like 'terminate'
and 'abort' and 'illegal'? Is everything okay at home,
guys?
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6.2.3 The USS Yorktown's navigational computer tries
to divide by zero and fails.
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6.2.4 Wait loops and the sidewalk dance: you go left
while the other person goes right, so you stop and
go right, so the other person goes left, so you stop
and go left, so the other person goes right...
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6.2.5 Rebooting cures almost every soft fail, if you
consider blanking the entire memory a cure.
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6.2.6 Mapping analog electric current to digital bits
creates the possibility of a switch getting poised
exactly halfway between on and off. Engineers call
this a metastable failure. The Wikipedia article on
metastability is a rich study in engineers' emotional
lives.
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6.3 Kurt Gšdel gets stuck in a Gšdelian loop.
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6.3.1 Fifteen years before ENIAC, Gšdel proved with
his incompleteness theorems that any logical system
powerful enough to do even basic arithmetic is also
powerful enough to generate paradoxes unresolvable
by the system itself.
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6.3.2 The bottom of line of Gšdel's theorem is that
formal logical systems like computer programs can
be totally consistent or totally complete, but never
both.
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6.3.3 How to crash a computer: ask it to evaluate
the truth or falisty of the statement, "This statement
is false." If the statement is true, it's false, and
if it's false, it's true, and if it's true, it's false,
and around and around the computer will go for more
or less ever.
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6.3.4 Logic, like music and games, is totally dependent
on context. Most "computer errors" are human mistakes
to which the computer is oblivious.
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6.3.5 Einstein told people that he went to his office
Òjust to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt
Gšdel.Ó Gšdel didn't get much love from anyone else
then, and aside from Douglas Hofstadter, he doesn't
now. Many nerds enjoy programming computers for of
the feeling of control it gives them. The incompleteness
theorem is a tough nut to swallow.
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6.3.6 Gšdel himself was always logical, but not always
reasonable. He died from refusing to eat, out of fear
that someone was trying to poison him.
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6.4 Some computer failures can be avoided by diligent
programming, but not all. The best thing is to be
prepared.
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6.4.1 Computer failure is like a ninja hiding in the
shadows, always ready to strike. Expect a certain
amount of computer failure, the way you expect a certain
amount of car or fridge failure. Make offsite backups.
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6.4.2 Most people prefer to do their thinking first
and their filing afterwards, but until everything
autosaves all the time, the computer can't accommodate
this preference. Avoid losing unsaved work to the
fail ninja by developing your save reflex. Save early,
save often.
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6.4.3 Redundancy protects crucial operations and data
using redundancy.
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6.4.4 Good software crashes gently. The open-source
web browser Mozilla Firefox is a shining example:
it usually remembers what you were doing before the
crash and can restore it for you. Also, Firefox's
error messages aren't terrifying.
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6.4.5 Multitasking is an illusion. Like you, the computer
can really only do one thing at a time. The more processes
the system has to juggle, the more likely it is to
fail.
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6.4.6 Angry young people the world over are hard at
work writing computer viruses. You'll know you have
one when your computer starts crashing all the time
and runs agonizingly slowly otherwise.
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6.5 Does the computer have Buddha-nature?
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6.5.1 To transcend the limitations of a logical system,
you need to step outside of it. Computers can't do
this, but they can help you learn how, especially
through visualization of difficult and counterintuitive
concepts like the Mandelbrot set.
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6.5.2 Back in the eighties, the Amiga's equivalent
to the blue screen of death was the Guru Meditation
message. Computer failure is an unexpected look behind
the user illusion.
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6.5.3 Einstein, Turing and Gšdel all searched for
a comprehensible underlying logic to the universe.
All of them failed.
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6.5.4 Life is metastable. Feedback loops and recursion
are crucial to your metabolism.
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6.5.5 In a logical system, novelty and unforeseen
variation are noise. In an evolutionary system, diversity
makes natural selection possible.
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6.5.6 Who says irreconcilable logical paradoxes and
infinite loops are so terrible? Buddhists meditate
using paradoxes, unanswerable questions and looped
chants to attain enlightenment.
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7 Susan Blackmore spreads the meme meme
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7.1 DNA is weirdly like a computer program.
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7.1.1 DNA is an unambiguous set of instructions for
making more DNA. In big complicated organisms like
us, it's more like a set of instructions for making
bodies that in cooperation with other bodies makes
more DNA.
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7.1.2 DNA is digital, easily expressed as strings
of bits. Like all digital media, DNA makes absolutely
perfect copies every time. Well, almost every time.
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7.1.3 DNA is the game cartridge. The world is the
system of player and console. Life is the gameplay.
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7.1.4 The entire human genome fits on a single CD-R.
How can so little information give rise to something
so complex as a person? Recursion, recursion, recursion.
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7.1.5 Evolution boils down to the mindless self-replication
of long molecules.
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7.1.6 The Prisoner's Dilemma game explains how complex
group cooperation can emerge from the simple competition
of "selfish" genes for scarce resources.
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7.2 Human ideas and tools are part of the biosphere.
Memes co-evolves with humanity, the way food crops
and infectious diseases do.
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7.2.1 Our tools are extensions of our bodies into
the environment, like beavers and beaver ponds, coral
and coral reefs, plants and oxygen.
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7.2.2 Memes breed, mutate and go extinct. "New" memes
are remixes of existing memes, the way "new" organisms
are remixes of existing organisms.
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7.2.3 Successful memes take on a life of their own,
independent of their makers. Einstein's theories inadvertantly
paved the way to nuclear weapons, much to the outspoken
pacifist's regret.
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7.2.4 The evolution of human tools is happening exponentially
faster than the evolution of the bodies and minds
that produced them.
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7.2.5 Evolution demands that you do a lot of running
to stay in one place. Spammers and spam filters are
locked in the same evolutionary arms race as microbes
and makers of antibiotics.
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7.2.6 Artificial devices use natural materials and
energy sources, and return waste products to the natural
world, a lot of waste products, very nasty ones. Making
a single cell phone motherboard produces 220 pounds
of waste.
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7.3 Susan Blackmore wakes from the meme dream.
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7.3.1 Is there magic in the world? Blackmore set out
on a scientific vision quest to find out. The answer
turns out to be: no.
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7.3.2 The human mind is what the central nervous system
does. Daniel Dennett: "I have a soul, and it's made
of tiny robots."
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7.3.3 The human brain is ludicrously huge and expensive.
Tyrannosaurus Rex got along fine for millions of years
with a brain the size of a grape.
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7.3.4 Richard Dawkins ventured a guess in The Selfish
Gene: maybe our thoughts are symbiotic parasites,
like the microbes in our stomachs. Dawkins coined
the word meme, by analogy to gene.
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7.3.5 Genes are algorithms for producing organisms
to produce more genes. Memes are algorithms for producing
animal behavior to produce more memes.
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7.3.6 The body is an ecosystem unto itself. Is the
mind? Does neural Darwinism explain our consciousness
the way genes explain the color of our eyes and memes
explain the color of our sneakers?
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7.4 Memes are weirdly like computer programs.
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7.4.1 Memes spread through imitation. Birds and apes
have memes too, though not on the same scale as us.
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7.4.2 Our memes appear to have undergone some explosive
population growth about forty thousand years ago.
This is when we started making bone calculators and
flutes. This is also when the Neanderthals went extinct,
probably not a coincidence.
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7.4.3 Logic is a tool for weeding out unwanted memes.
Counterfactual and wishfully magical memes flourish
best in the shelter of paradoxes and the big unknowns.
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7.4.4 We define ourselves socially, nationally, politically,
ethnically and religiously through our shared memes,
especially the counterfactual and magical ones.
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7.4.5 Nerds have closer relationships with memes than
with people.
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7.4.6 We can control our memes about as well as we
can control our gut fauna. What benefits the memes
doesn't necessarily benefit their human hosts. The
best strategy is to get inoculated against the worst
bugs in childhood.
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7.5 The mind is like and unlike a computer.
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7.5.1 At the cellular level, the brain is both digital
and analog.
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7.5.2 You can hold several different conflicting,
ambiguous solutions to a problem in your mind at a
time. The computer can't. Yet.
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7.5.3 The computer's memory is a filing cabinet. Your
memory is a network.
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7.5.4 The computer is like a train on a track. The
mind wanders.
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7.5.5 Bjšrk says: "There's definitely, definitely,
definitely no logic to human behavior."
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7.5.6 Evolution is made of failure. When we expect
perfection from evolved systems, we're setting ourselves
up for a lot of heartache.
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7.6 I, for one, welcome our new memetic overlords.
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7.6.1 Monkeys can control robot arms with their thoughts.
What happens when we read our email that way?
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7.6.2 The brightest minds are hard at work teaching
computers how to learn, and how to learn how to learn.
What happens if/when they succeed?
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7.6.3 Utopian futurism: Star Trek.
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7.6.4 Dystopian futurism: the Matrix.
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7.6.5 Realist futurism: Evolution is intrinsically
unpredictable.
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7.6.6 My feeling is, the deeper meaning is that there
is no deeper meaning. Might as well play while we're
here.
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