I was curious. It exists on Youtube.
It feels sloppy, and I can easily believe they didn't yet know where they were going. Good Vibrations ends the set--the contrast seems stark. They experimented with all kinds of instrumentation and musical ideas, but it didn't seem confident and ready to me.
Sometimes you need to respect an author's privacy about "unfinished works." There's likely a reason the thing wasn't finished.
A walk in the woods sometimes qualifies, but it isn't always convenient, especially in winter.
I use quiet for prayer and writing and just being silent sometimes. (Walking is lousy for writing.) Other people live here as well as I, and they listen to music or podcasts or talk on the phone (or sometimes want to talk to me, which is fine, but not quiet).
When I need silence, I find that headphones and instrumental music to overcome other people's music/noise is almost as good. Half the time. If I need to be doing something rather than resting the mind, it isn't good enough. (Do I need to say that any music at all is bad when trying to write poetry?)
When you have little kids, silence is more of a late-night thing, and you're tired and sleepy then.
Early in the morning? Perhaps. There are tradeoffs.
Can you work out a seating arrangement for a banquet in Heaven?
If we weren't limited to 4 dimensions... How about a "Hilbert table" with as many dimensions as guests, everybody sitting next to Jesus and kitty-corner with every other guest?
And we're that donkey too, aren't we? Not who we are, but Who we bring with us matters.
Kids are in no position to decide what's best. "Just learn your times-tables; you'll understand later." We didn't go the "unschooling" route--we knew better than the kids what would be useful in understanding the world. Once they had obeyed and learned the background they could dig into what they pleased.
Sometimes we learn from bad choices, but I know a few adults who double-down on willfulness.
Since what the systems do is a more like a probabilistic synthesis of existing material, "Synthesis" seems like a better word than "Intelligence." That term emphasizes the aspect of compilation of existing material, instead of the implied "thinking about" that isn't actually happening.
In place of the term "AI", I propose that we use "AS": Automated Synthesis. Given the systems' notorious propensity for hallucination, one might call it "SS" -- Stochastic Synthesis -- but I gather some systems are getting better.
Maybe with a more accurate label people will be less tempted to put inappropriate trust in the systems, and recognize and use them for what they are. Rectification of names?
Can you make out any kind of melodic movement at all?
In trying to answer that question I hit two obstacles: I couldn’t hit the notes I needed to reliably, and I already knew what to expect.
To deal with the competence problem I used MuseScore software to compose and play back for me, and as for the bias due to expectation—I can’t solve that for myself unless/until I script something to take a random tune and generate the silhouette tune automatically, but I can solve it for you by obfuscating the title of the tune.
I chose to use as a “background” the collection of all the notes used in a tune. For each note in the original tune I played this background without that original note. I thought of it as like a ghost in the background noise.
Does that ghost, that absence, make something melodic?
Youtube video of Gjvaxyr (I am still learning ffmpeg. Please forgive the video quality. The audio was assembled with Audacity.)
Those who have some musical background will predict that the result will be dissonant, and so it is.
I think I can sort-of hear something, that is vaguely like the original—sometimes.
Later I’ll look into removing chords rather than single notes, though I expect it will still be dissonant.
I wonder under what conditions would the ghost tune not be dissonant. A base song with notes only from a chord, yes--others?
I assume that there's nothing security-related in there--which implies that whatever we're working on lately won't show up. (I hope we're working on some new secret technology...)
Some claim that UFO reports are the modern parallel to ancient visions of angels, demons, or gods. Um. I don't know how to compare rates of "strange observations" between not-always-literate times and now. Maybe people have always seen unusual things in the skies and attributed it to whatever the zeitgeist suggested. It's a plausible hypothesis, but I wouldn't care to try to prove it. I suspect that a large fraction of the UFO reports are due to artifacts of modern life, including secret military tests and glitches in our detecting/displaying systems.
Let's suppose after accounting for glitches and private drones and secret project, that there is a residue.
That could be due to natural but not understood or expected phenomena. In this case the rapid changes in direction and whatnot are "real" but not quite what they look like--sort of like the spider on the telescope looking like a monster. Once we figure out the mechanisms, we'll understand them going forward, though probably never be able to retroactively determine what somebody long ago saw.
They could be displays by supernatural creatures: ghosts, angels, demons, or other things not in our catalog. I'm assured that angels and demons exist, I'm agnostic about ghosts (lots of testimony but little that's clear to me), and I can't say much about "unknown."
Or they could be displays by "non-supernatural" creatures, i.e. like us (even though we're arguably supernatural also). Aliens, natives we haven't met -- whatever. If they're from elsewhere, how in the world did they get here? The structure of spacetime restricts how fast you can get around, and astronomical distances translate to astronomical times. If they're from around here, why haven't we run into them? We've been looking hard enough.
Bottom line: not much I can say about "unknown."
Do I think there are aliens out there?
Yes. I look around our planet and see life everywhere, even in hot springs, deep underground, and around hot vents at the bottom of the ocean. From this I take a guess about the nature of God: He's very creative and He likes life. From that I predict that there will be plenty of life in the universe, though not necessarily things we would recognize: different chemistry and ways of using energy, living much faster or much slower, other things I haven't imagined. That's not even including angels and whatnot, whose relationship with our physical universe isn't at all obvious to me.
As Lewis pointed out, just the existence of other intelligent creatures doesn't say anything one way or another about the relationship of God and man, or even man and the other creatures. We'd have to know a lot more.
I don't expect to learn anything from the documents.
It's missing a little something, though...
Recovery of taste function may occur as early as 4 to 5 weeks after the completion of RT. Complete recovery of taste function following RT is still not quantified or reported. Whether the damage caused to the taste buds is temporary or permanent is still unclear. Partial taste loss is seen to be prevalent even 20 years after completion of RT.
This was an overview of studies, which varied a great deal in methods and selection and radiation targets, and only the most general information is obtained.
I've another data point, though. I could appreciate sourdough fairly soon after treatment, and bitter seems to have gone into overdrive. And nobody will be hiring me for wine-tasting in the foreseeable future. After nearly a year, recovery seems to have plateaued. "This is what things taste like now."
FWIW, I lost about 25 pounds, but was slightly above optimum weight so I had some slack available, and am only a little below my original weight now. There's more to taste than just the tongue's part. The nose plays a role, as does the "mouthfeel," and though I couldn't taste sweet for a while I could still feel the effect of sugar. I'm not sure how, exactly, but I could.
They figured that the risks of soldiers learning how to cheat were outweighed by the benefit of soldiers learning how to recognize cheating. This is something he did for the Navy.
What I thought of was Chesterton and "The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial."
The world is rediscovered every day.
I suppose that depends on a balance of your fears, your dreams, your work, and your amusements – and your calling, if any.
Invulnerability, for example: It would be nice not to have to worry about falling or getting hurt in a fight, but it would also be very handy for a vulcanologist, or just somebody with 'satiable curtiosity. It's also handy if your calling is crime-fighting with emphasis on the literal fighting.
In college the topic came up with a small group of guys and one guy volunteered that his preference would be the "time stop" or whatever he called it because – OK, I tried to argue him out of it and never really dealt with him afterwards. Creepy.
Super-speed could be handy sometimes, but most of the time what use would it be? Skipping the commute is all well and good, but then you're at work.
Teleportation to anywhere would be wild, if you could afford the spacesuits to go with it. Even restricted to just teleporting on Earth would be handy – sometimes. Especially if your work involved acquiring portable and valuable property...
Talking to animals – might get boring, though zoos would probably love you. Super-hearing, super-vision – you'd be in great demand by researchers. Changing an object's relative momentum by arbitrary amounts just by touching it – a bit niche, but wonderful for some jobs, and lots of recreational fun taking pebbles and firing them at a cliff to chip out an image in the rock.
If mind-reading is a superpower – so long as you're not born with it; that could get really rough on a baby – if you could turn it off when you didn't want to be bothered it could be very handy. If you couldn't, given what flits through people's minds, that power could be very depressing.
Super-persuasion? I'm not sure I'd trust very many people with that. Maybe not even me.
Superfast reading could get me caught up on a backlog...
It looks like somebody at PocketOS needs to be booted far. Their architecture was weird: the backups were on the same volume as the production database (????), everything was on the cloud with no local copy, the designer gave unfiltered control to the AI agent -- lots of dumbness. But the AI's "confession" seemed really weird. If the agent had rules, how did it ignore them? There's something odd here.
FWIW, we had databases too, some more mission critical than others. Depending on the "brand" of database (mysql/mariadb or postgres or mongodb or sqlite) we had different backup approaches, but the copy was always done by entirely different agents, and copies kept in different servers in different buildings. I can't think of a way anything but deliberate admin action on different machines that could damage both. The whole point of backup is to keep the data somewhere safely distant from problems on the original host. Ideally you'd like a copy that only a different admin can delete, just in case somebody goes postal.
It turns out the cloud provider here was able to provide a way to access the data after all, but that's not usually the case.
UPDATE: Not reading the documentation compounded with sloppy security compounded with trusting the AI
