Here are the rules if you want to post comments to any of the pages on this site. Nothing to worry about if you’re sensible.

Filling in the form

• You don’t have to give a real name, but put something.
• You don’t have to give a URL, but it would be useful. Don’t you want a free link?
• No HTML. All tags will be spayed.
• URLs will be auto-linked.
• Linebreaks mark the end of paragraphs.

Moderation

Trying to turn the world into a discrete formal system is the fallacy of the Victorians, jurisprudes, authoritarians and bad guys in general. I won’t try it here, so be warned that every point below may or may not have exceptions.

• I have the final word on which comments will be allowed, but there is very little I will delete. Your freedom of speech is x% effective here, where x is very close, but not quite equal, to 100.
• Comments must be an honest attempt at being interesting or entertaining. You can cuss until your nose bleeds, as long as it’s extropic. Be careful though: swearing done wrong is an easy way to turn a reasonable post into a rubbish one.
• Duplicate comments will be deleted.
• Stupid comments may be kept for amusement’s sake, but may also be deleted.
• Spammers will be hunted down and crucified. There’s a copy of nmap and a box of nails waiting for anyone who thinks I’m joking.

Dave made me think, by writing what somebody else said:

Judaism had its worse moment when it became an ism: it got put in its box and stopped changing.

This is probably really obvious, but “-ism” construction is just plain old name calling. Putting things in a box makes you feel powerful, because the metaphor implies that you are on the outside of the box, your victim is on the inside, and therefore your view is the more all-encompassing one, and therefore more correct. The very act of giving something a name gives you a certain power over it. See True Names. Again. If words like ‘liberal’ didn’t exist, crazies like Rush Limbaugh not only wouldn’t have an argument; they wouldn’t have an opponent.

It’s so common to see people using names to brush off someone’s opinion (”Don’t listen to him; he’s just a tory.”) as if this wasn’t the simplest kind of childish name calling. Moral: just because you can name something doesn’t mean you have defeated it.

I said it was probably really obvious.

I’ve been wrestling with Unicode for some time now, but it looks like that time is almost over. Hopefully somebody will find this a useful shortcut to the long meandering trudges through Google that I found myself on.

• Unicode is an abstract mapping from numbers to character symbols. It is not a document encoding.
• UTF-8 is a document encoding.
• Internally, python has Unicode strings.
• Reading a UTF-8 encoded file does not result in a Unicode string. This must be done explicitly:
  

  >>> f = open('file', 'r')
>>> unicodeString = unicode(f.read(), ‘utf-8′)


• Python will process Unicode strings perfectly, but will not print or write them to a file. First you must convert them to some encoding. Observe:
  

  >>> b = u'a\xe1\xea'
>>> b
u’a\xe1\xea’
>>> print b
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “<stdin>”, line 1, in ?
UnicodeError: ASCII encoding error: ordinal not in range(128)
>>> print b.encode(’utf-8′)
aáê


• Given arbitrary input, there is no way of determining what encoding it is in. You have to find out some other way; for example, the first line of an XML document should say.

The moral of the story is thus:

• Whenever any string data enters your program, make sure you know what encoding it is in, and convert it from that into Unicode. Keep it in Unicode throughout your entire program. Whenever any string data leaves your program, use the encode method (which all Unicode strings have) to convert it to a specific encoding. UTF-8 seems ideal, if you have no other constraints.

Warning! I’m in no sense a python expert. As far as I can tell, this works, but there may be more elegant ways of doing it.

This seems to be required reading in all the transhumanist/AI/wibble circles, so it’s been high on my reading list. Now I’ve read it. Now I can be one of the people shouting at other people, telling them to read it immediately.

This is a SF story for mathgeeks, or anyone who can appreciate really big numbers. I can’t say you won’t enjoy it if you don’t meet those criteria, but I can imagine a large subset of the population just going “eh?” after the first few chapters, and filing it under “textbooks”. Some say it really does belong on the reference shelf, but not me. I subscribe to the Strong AI Hypothesis, but even that isn’t strong enough for Permutation City. As long as you keep telling yourself “it’s only SF”, you won’t need to take notes or realign any major belief systems.

As most reviews will tell you, this is a book about people waking up and finding themselves inside a computer. That’s not really a spoiler; you find out on page 2. It’s not silly like The Matrix. There are deep questions asked (and even a few answered!) on the nature of being, thought, existence, time, and experience.

It’s exactly the right length. SF books have a tendency to be overlong - the authors write the story, then realise there aren’t any characters in it, then graft in a few hundred extra pages of pointless dialogue and description, not realising that idea-as-the-hero is a perfectly legitimate form for the story to take. Permutation City does have characters, but none of them are pointless (after all, the human mind is the key object of study here).

I haven’t read that big fat Stephen Wolfram book (”A New Kind of Science”), but this seems like it might be a good introduction to it, and maybe even part inspiration for it.

Like they said, required reading.

Permutation City, Greg Egan, 1994.

(Wrote this weeks ago. Don’t know why I didn’t post it. The film was probably so bad it wasn’t even worth writing a bad review of.)

Underworld is 100% shite. It wasn’t even bad enough to be entertainingly shoddy; it was just boring. All the bad bits of the Matrices, but aimed at goths, and crapper. About 20 people walked out.

It’s not bad like an MST3K’d film is bad. It’s bad like a one legged chair is bad; it’s pointless and useless, no matter how nicely it’s carved. The photography was OK, the sets were well built, etc., but there was just a screaming hollow emptiness where things like characters, acting, and dialogue should’ve been

It’s films like this that make me think obnoxious literature snobs are right: when you haven’t read/watched/listened to much, anything seems good. When you’ve read around a bit, you start to notice the truly original works which reveal supposedly new ideas for the cheap derivatives they really are.

If you like vampires and werewolves, play nethack instead.