Yeactrbook West

DARIUS MIKSYSSAFARI DIARIES

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DARIUS MIKŠYS

SAFARIDIARIES


This book is dedicated to the beans,various kinds of beans and chickpeas as the best brain food.

Copyright Darius MIksys


CONTENTS:

5........................Drive Line.

9........................”Entire village suspected

of mayor’s murder”.

13.......................Superstars And Stars On Bills.

14.......................Blind Camera.

15.......................Rsstroom Reader.

16.......................Sapphire Knife.

19.......................New Personality.

30.......................Chicken Through The Windscreen.

31.......................Hardware Queen.

33.......................”New York Rabbi Finds Friends

in Iran and Enemies at Home”.

39.......................Guangzhou Journal.

44.......................2001 Press Releases.

50.......................01

53.......................Now You See Them, Now You Don’t.

54.......................”His motive was even more

puzzling than his methods”.

56.......................Low Expectation Culture.

58.......................How to Remove Tourists from Your Photos.

69.......................Pig-brain Mist Suspected.

72.......................Email This To a Friend.


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Right now for us, however, it is more intriguing to posit that not all of those entities’ activities will be confined to attempts to survive. We may succeed in passing on to our mind children the high valuation of experience itself. If so---and they can afford that luxury---then in addition to mathematics there should also exist art and philosophy. We might suppose, along these lines, that “spiri-tual reorganization” would also be a way to characterize their experiences and their search for new experiences.

Getting back to a search for knowledge, however, consider that at any time t an entity E(t) (with time on its hands, as just explained) will be interested in data compression. A very large amount of known data or newly discovered data may or may not have low enough KC for E(t) to be able to make progress in deci-phering it (at that time, of course).

(Some kinds of data will, a priori, have quite low chances of containing real patterns, i.e., will a-priori be judged to be highly and irreducibly random, and will not command attention. A very non-random source of data, I would how-ever suggest, would be *history*: especially the history of the development of a particular entity E(t) as it looks for clues to advance its own reorganization and its own search for more “satisfying” experiences.)

But clearly E(t), that is, entity E at time t, is in the most interesting case still growing, still advancing. The Busy Beaver problem in mathematics gives some concrete indication of why and how. A quick look at the tables in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_beaver hints at what might be possible by the ad-dition of a single “neuron” to E. Assuming, though, that by 10,000 A.D. entities have reached material constraints ---say that there is only a finite amount of matter or energy within the grasp of E---the capability to reach more “states” of, for example, enhanced spirituality, or more optimal number crunching, or better algorithms in general, will depend solely on internal reorganization. But apparently, still not to worry! There are just *so* many possible internal states.

Conclusion: E(t) will find *interesting* in terms of new knowledge (for knowl-edge’s sake) breakthroughs in data compression made possible at time t with E’s capabilities at time t. That is, if a somewhat structured or entirely random data set has relatively low KC, and E is able to discover that fact, then the data set or “theorem” will be interesting.

Lee

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extropy-chat mailing list

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http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat

----- End forwarded message -----

by “alien”,and maybe by “boundaries” or “entities”).


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It’s a wonderful feature of human life to be interested in something. Anything, actually. In what will the reigning intelligences of 10,000 A.D. be interested? We abbreviate Kolmogorov Complexity to KC. Note that a deep drive of highly cognitive life on Earth at this time (e.g. human beings) is to discern patterns, and moreover to delight in such discovery. From backyard gossip to the pro-foundest scientific discoveries, intelligent life as we know it revels in under-standing. We can probably claim that such discoveries of truth, or patterns, or understanding, is data compression, or, in other words, amount to an apparent reduction of KC. Discovering a pattern in a long string of 1’s and 0’s, to take the archetypical example, is to achieve data compression of that string, and it can be shown that except for extremely simple strings (we mean data), an intel-ligence can never know for sure that the true KC has really been identified---it may simply be that the apparently random data has not yet been “broken” in the cryptographic sense, and even then may possibly be someday compressed even further. What is “interesting” to an entity will have long, long ago been up to the entity to decide. Even today we are surely only decades or at worst centuries away from owning the capability of turning the “interesting knob” up or down on anything that we please. But let’s suppose that those entities *do* engage in something analogous to a quest for knowledge, and that in some sense they find it “interesting”. I’ll now speculate on what that might mean. In 10,000 A.D. the ruling entities over some amount of physical space could still be interested in science. Perhaps everything from quantum computing to baby black holes could provide opportunities for unlimited exploration. We really can’t even guess. Mathematics, however, is provably infinite in the sense that there will always be patterns as yet undiscovered even among something so fundamental as the positive integers. Darwinian survival, however, dictates that the discov-ery of yet more advanced ways to self-organize, so as to be able to deploy at the boundaries of an entity effective defenses against alien assimilation will be “interesting”, (however strange will be whatever is then meant From “Self-Por-traits Chronicle a Descent Into Alzheimer’s”, Nytimes.com, October 24, 2006

_______________________________________________

Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> on Sat May 12 19:56:04 UTC 2007

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----- Forwarded message from Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> -----

From: Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com>

Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 11:17:19 -0700

To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>

Subject: [ExI] What Will Be Interesting in the Far Future

X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.3028

Reply-To: Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com>,

ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>

Foreword by Lee CorbinWhat Will Be Interesting in the Far Future


Drive line

The candy director, Scottie Surrealist Fergusson and the vagabond in San Francisco vertigo map guide

Scottie turned slowly.— “Hey page from Spain, you knew this place. You have been here.” — “Be still a mo


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BENOIT MAIRE

ment, Surreal-ist,” he said lan-guidly. “There’s something here. You are afraid of it, but I know it. Somewhere, per-haps in an old dream, I have


seen this place, or perhaps felt the feeling of this place.”He dropped his hands to his sides and whispered, trying the words. — “This is


holy—and this is old. This is an-cient—and holy.”The glad was si-lent. A buzzard swept across the circular sky, low over the treetops.Scottie Surrealist


Fergusson get up like an idiot.— “Ha, Hah ... I’m not a sheep myself! 10%, you imagine that would be like a sheep’s brain. But it’s always


the same logic, you always want more. So you don’t understand ? Action isn’t enough, there al-ways has to be a commentary, in-structions for use,


or a justification. It’s the separa-tion of act and thought.”


The light blue eyes of the page from Spain were wet with tears. — “My mother brought me here, Surrealist. My mother was Span-ish. I was a lit


tle boy and my mother was going to have a baby. She came here and sat beside the rock. For a long time she sat, and then we went away again.”


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— “But what do you think hap-pens when the reading of the fact is prior to the fact itself ? Soon there will be an explanation, with examples as


back-up, of what happens before this comes about. Time withdraws and shrinks more and more. We have enterred the age of negative time, made up of


hysterologies of every kind. I’m going to start with the editing of the sequences before the images are shot,” said the director, a candy girl around


twenty years old. Scottie cried nervously.— “Let’s get the Hell out of here ! We’ve got to find the cows. ”— “ Don’t be afraid, Scottie,


said the direc-tor, there’s some-thing strong and sweet and good in there. Look the map, just look the map, and don’t be shy... ”


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GINTARAS DIDŽIAPETRIS

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JESSE ASH

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LAND’SEND

LANDS

There is one in Russian but it has a double mean-ing “world’s end” and “light’s end” konets sveta.

Do you know there is a word in Persian, which

means a tree, beyond which there is no passing? “Sadartu’l-Muntaha”

Well, in Sri Lanka there is a place, a tourist attrac-tion, called “World’s End”, which is a steep vertical

cliff. The idea is that, if the world were a flat place, this would be one edge of it.

In Indonesia we have “Ujung Aspal”. It is a small village in the eastern part of Jakarta. Ujung means End, Aspal means Asphalt. So it means the end of asphalt road, the end of the road or land’s end. 20 years ago it was actually where Jakarta’s asphalt

road ends. Now it is quite populated.

In San Francisco, there is a part of the coast close to the Golden Gate Bridge that is called Land’s End.

Well, the city of Timbuktu in Mali was referred to as the farthest place in the world. Americans and many

other people even thought it was an imaginary city.

In France, there is a “département” called Finistère and in Spain a Cape Finisterre. Finisterre/Finistère

derives from Latin meaning Land’s End or Earth’s End.

And don’t forget Finland.

In China, there is a place called Tian Ya Hai Jiao in the province of Hainan. It is considered the south-most

point of China’s land area. Tian Ya Hai Jiao literally means “Limit of Heaven and the Corner of the Seas”,

translated into simple words, it is the End of the World, since it is the southernmost known territory of

China, and from there you will only see the oceans. Ancient people feared to cross it.

There are actually two rocks, marked with the cal-ligraphy of famous poets from the Qing Dynasty, with the words: Tian Ya Hai Jiao, which made this place and this phrase famous. Because of numer-

ous poems with these phrases, it has now a roman-tic connotation: “I will follow you to the Tian Ya Hai Jiao”, means eternal love... so the place is always

full of honeymoners.

In Fiji we have the inverse: A place called “First Landing” where the earliest settlers arrived more

than 3,000 years ago.


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PATRICIA ESQUIVEL

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YI-PING HOU "Dear Valentinas, Following on from the "Tian Ya Hai Tiao" (Limit of Heaven and the Corner of the Seas) quoted by Patricia Esquivel, I have taken this phrase and transcribed it back in to its original Chinese calligraphic form. The above phrase also has a connotation of the "four anchors of the world," which is essentially to do with placing boundaries on the infinite. This process has been carried out by means of drawing a geomancy-based diagram that relates to the establishing of the eight directional points of the house in which I live. By placing the calligraphy (on red paper with china ink) and the geomancy (on white paper with line drawings) to get her under the multiplying effect of a kaleidoscopic array of mirrors, the spell is reversed, and the infinite is again called into being. The process has been a meditation on the surroundings and experiences of my living conditions in this month of October 2008,which include my wedding, echoed in the red paper of the calligraphy which is the color of Chinese weddings. The geomancy element reflects a unique time in my life that coincides with bringing a baby into this world,as the use of my living space needs to be re-considered, just as inpreparation, the space inside my womb is being reconfigured. All in all, I reversed the standard logic of established order and spun things back out towards the infinite, just as the waters of the Caribbean, gazed at over the length of my honeymoon, reflected endless hues as well as motions of the undefinable. Sent to you by you send it on a separate e-mail two versions: a quick time slide show and individual images. Thank you very much for your "blind faith" in me. And my sincere apology to my lack of communication over the week! I've been experiencing funky physical and mood upheavals due to the now 9 weeks pregnancy. Please continue to inform me as the project progress. And let me know if you need any adjustment from my contribution. Much Blessings, Yi-Ping"

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