me:- "who's god". ramona:- "piss off"

and it's monday.

again.

it's been this way for the last few years. and before that. we need a change in this whole days-of-the-week thing, it's getting monotonous.

i'd like to buy an island. and on my island i'll have some new rules. i'll start with the 'no mondays' rule.


there's a guy at work with a sign on his door that says 'there are two secrets to being successful at business. the first is to never tell everyone you know.' it's funny - in a geeky sort of way (which is of course the best kind). but i've devised a way to piss him off and make him take that sign off his door. i'll stop by his office every day and ask him about the second secret. i'll keep doing it until he starts throwing things at me when i walk in the door. i'll then scrawl the second secret under the first - 'keep bugging people until you get what you want'.
that ought to enhance my reputation as a guy who gets things done.


i sometimes mess with ramona when i get bored. ramona's this ai bot on ray kurzweil's site. she does really well on the 'who is ___' kind of questions. try 'who is god' for kicks. if you haven't already, check out the rest of the articles on that site. some of the essays on machine intelligence are pretty cool.


about two years ago i got started writing a story about an intelligent lifeform in the internet. the basic premise was that the brain was a set of interconnected neurons all running parts of the same program, or rather, by their interconnections and firing *were* the program itself. in other words - consciousness.

the story starts out inside the mind of the protagonoist. just your regular guy in india. all of his thoughts, memories, emotions, feelings in real time. but that's where it got interesting. the guy doesn't really exist. all of that is generated by a program running on distributed nodes across the internet - a machine generated consciousness. i was all excited about exploring the whole concept of consciousness. would it be murder to turn all those machines off and bring them back on? if you think of the system as a state machine in a self-contained system then as long as previous state is retained the system can be brought back up at any point with no change. but it it then the same 'version' of the consciousness or was something altered?

most of this is still in my head - i didn't get around to completing the story. i'm tepidly determined to complete the story before classes start up again in september. it took a little steam out of me when i saw the same concept in the form of Jane, the evolved computer intelligence from Orson Scott Card's Ender series.