I spend the last three days at an excellent class on SQL Server 2005 (Microsoft’s latest and greatest database system). I am not an enthusiastic M’soft fan, but it is what we use at work, and I have enough battles to fight there already.
Anyway, a couple side notes: Continue reading
The last couple days I was shopping for computer parts and visited two local stores that have used/reconditioned computers for sale. At the low end of the price ranges in both stores I saw the same model Pentium III Compaq DeskPro for sale. One store wanted $59 for it. The other was asking $149. Is the second just being greedy? They had more memory on the box. At current retail prices that would account for $20. It may have had a bigger hard disk–perhaps another $10-20 at current prices for old hard disks (I did a little checking). That still leaves $50-60. Pure profit? No–the more expensive store was selling a functional system with Windows 2000. The cheaper store was selling a nearly naked box. It had just enough pieces of DOS to boot. Looking at the current price of Windows, that is not unreasonable. So I really cannot fault the second store.
But, don’t you need Windows? No, you don’t. Linux is free. That $50-60 goes straight to Bill Gates.
After I got home tonight I did a little work for my employer. Nothing terribly difficult–just a system test that could not be done in normal business hours.
Meanwhile, using another computer (my own, not my employer’s) I tried to check e-mail. Unfortunately, it failed to boot. Looks like a hard-disk problem. I will try a file-system repair (this is a Linux box) from a rescue CD tomorrow night. I have a recent backup of my data, so I am not really worried even if that fails. I have another hard disk I can put in the machine and reinstall everything (I am writing this on yet another machine).
I did not do anything about that tonight because mia_mcdavid needed help with her new loom. I made a raddle, a gadget to aid her in the process of warping. This appears to be working quite well, so I have accomplished something. The computer will keep until tomorrow.
Later last night mia_mcdavid and I watched ice cream being made with liquid nitrogen , then ate some of the results. It was a good, rich ice cream.
Afterwards we looked in on a couple parties. I watched some more swordfighting demos by Aegis Academy, then joined Mia at the music circle. This was really quite dead, although we had another nice talk with Frank Hayes when he stopped by briefly. We got to bed about 1 AM. I think James came back to the room about 2:30.
Slept past 9 this morning. Not a lot of convention for me and James, since Mia took us to the airport at 11. This worked out OK, although there was about 1/2 hour of hideous traffic on I-94.
James and I returned home precisely according to plan, again changing planes at O’Hare. James handled the weekend’s air travel very well. I am quite pleased with him.
His laptop computer did not do so well. It was very slow. Perhaps a virus had finally gotten into to it. Or perhaps, as a Windows machine, it was uncomfortable at a Linux event :-)> My little Nokia 770, which runs Debian Linux, did just fine….
This was one of the best cons I have been to in a long time. I need to reflect on why that was. It was quite different from what we have here in Minnesota–what about these differences appealed to me?
Mia is driving home, and is spending the night with family friends in Chicagoland.
Notes from a panel at Penguicon Satrurday afternoon
2:30 to 4 PM Maple A Brain-As-Computer Metaphor Karl Schroeder, Ron Hale-Evans, Dr. Jonathan “Sullydog” Sullivan Cutting-edge SF author Karl Schroeder joins Ron Hale-Evans, author of Mind Performance Hacks, and Dr. Jonathon Sullivan MD PhD in neurology, to consider “The brain is a computer, the mind is software.” That’s been the ruling metaphor of cognitive science, neurology and AI studies for decades. The software of thought is supposed to operate much like that of a computer, going from discrete state to discrete state. However a new study from Cornell shows that our thoughts change continuously; the brain works “in shades of grey”. And there are good reasons to think that the mind is not an artifact of the brain alone, but is extended into the environment as well
Is consciousness necessary for intelligence?
Consider “Blind sight”–seeing something without knowing that one has seen it
If you think of the brain as a fixed array of neurons, each of which is either on or off, then indeed you are talking about a computer, but…
Neuroplasticity: The brain can change.
The brain is not just array of neurons-other tissues are clearly doing important things .
We don’t have one physical model to describe nature at the most fundamental level: We need both quantum mechanics and relativity. So it is not surprising that we need more than one model to describe the brain.
Direct interaction with environment. A baseball player does not catch a fly ball by solving the differential equations that govern the ball’s. Also consider how cockroaches scatter when you catch them. This is automatic–not conscious.
“Consciousness cannot be aware of its own absence”
Roger Penrose: Consciousness as quantum gravity effect.
The cognitive system is not just the brain: It is the brain plus its environment.
Consciousness may have a very low bandwidth…may not use much of brain’s power. Large amounts of what we do is unconscious. Consciousness just along for the ride..is it important? With experience you do more decisions automatically. Consciousness is for novel situations. Mastery of something is to make it unconscious.
“It’s all a blur”…consiousness attenuated.
You do something automatically, an your brain “back dates” the decision to do it. This has moral and theological implications “An array of neurons did this not me. But …. These experiments have been challenged.
“It’s all a blur”…consiousness attenuated.
Partial knowledge is often enough…lot of people know how to use computers, but few of them really know how they work.
Ask a pure mathematician “what is a number”–not an easy question.
References:
Smolin on quantum gravity.
Frank Hayes is here. Mia found him in the Con Suite and we had a wonderful talk, catching up on the last 10 years. We just went to his concert. Hearing him sing (and singing along with him) is still great fun. One of his songs (an old song) was about S-100 bus computers. Looking around the room it was obvious that much of the audience had been born long after S-100 computers became obsolete.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 