"Let’s Just Call It A Ghost Cat, Walter Mitty."

to keep warm by Sandy_Vdo on Flickr.

life

Sometimes I think about what would have happened if Game of Life had been invented in antiquity. The concept is sufficiently simple for even a child to grasp and simplicity should have appealed to Pythagorean sensibilities…

Would they have developed standardized tokens for exploring the game, and would they have recognized it as a game?

Would there be biblical parables about the glider?

Would alternate rules have been considered heretical in the Middle Ages?

Would the R-pentomino have been thought an infinite growth pattern until some diligent mathematician, maybe an Arabic one in the 1000s, were to show the opposite by working out all 1103 generations?

Would the LWSS, the Gosper glider gun and related technology have been hailed as great inventions of the Renaissance?

Would the Gausses and the Eulers of this world have dedicated time to searching for new oscillator periods or spaceship velocities?

Would still lifes be tabulated by hand to stupendous numbers in the 1800s, and would these in modern days be memorized in a similar way digits of pi are now?

Would the entire concept have encouraged a considerably more rapid development of fields such as computability or signal processing?

Backwards/forwards time travel is overrated; I’d definitely rather explore alternate timelines…

Blink by Johnny Lucus on Flickr.

They failed, because as the blogger Epicurean Dealmaker pointed out on Twitter, “Markets distill the biases, opinions, & convictions of elites,” which makes them “Structurally less able to predict populist movements.” The inability of those elites to grapple with the rich world’s populist moment was in full display on social media last night. Journalists and academics seemed to feel that they had not made it sufficiently clear that people who oppose open borders are a bunch of racist rubes who couldn’t count to 20 with their shoes on, and hence will believe any daft thing they’re told. A lot of my professional colleagues seemed to, and the dominant tone framed this as a blow against the enlightened “us” and the beautiful world we are building, struck by a plague of morlocks who had crawled out of their hellish subterranean world to attack our impending utopia. Surrendering traditional powers and liberties to a distant state is a lot easier if you think of that state as run by “people like me,” not “strangers from another place,” and particularly if that surrender is done in the name of empowering “people who are like me” in our collective dealings with other, farther “strangers who aren’t.” These sorts of tribal affiliations cause problems, obviously, which is why elites were so eager to tamp them down. Unfortunately, they are also what glues polities together, and makes people willing to sacrifice for them.  Elites missed this because they're the exception -- the one group that has a transnational identity.

Megan McArdle “'Citizens of the World'? Nice Thought, But ...”

“Estonians have decided to translate AI as 'kratt', after a mythological creature.

A kratt is a creature crafted by humans, brought to life with just a little help from the devil, and it can fulfil any task you give it. Now, if you're real smart - a kratt will make you rich and successful. It will do your work, and create for you the life you always dreamed of. But if you give it the wrong task - you're definitely fucked.”

Marriage of decay and awakening.

The witching hour, somebody had once whispered to her, was a special moment in the middle of the night when every child and every grown-up was in a deep deep sleep, and all the dark things came out from hiding and had the world all to themselves.

Roald Dahl

Ad Reinhardt, from ‘How to Look at Art, Arts & Architecture’ (1946)