Unstructured Street Art

I am a big fan of street installations, which are a kind of guerrilla art where the artists place sculptures in an environment with the goal of amusing, confusing and or provoking onlookers.

Here's a collection of some particularly good ones.

The Fermi Paradox: The Apocalyptic Hypothesis

One of the more ambiguous parameters of the Drake Equation is f_L, which is the fraction of the duration of a planet's existence during which communicating civilizations exist. In other words, this is the average "life span" for an intelligent species. If f_L is a low number, this would indicate that most intelligent species have a very short period of existence and that, consequently, the average density of intelligent life for any given period of time would be low enough to satisfy the Fermi Paradox. One possible mechanism that would promote this would be the development of self-destructive technologies. Our own species appears to be passing through a period of its development where there are any number of ways that we could bring about our own destruction, including nuclear holocaust, environmental collapse, biological warfare, and so forth. Nor does the future appear to be getting any safer as is seems that such "horizon technologies" as nanotechnology will offer us even more paths towards self-destruction that are even easier to take.

Critics of the AH argue that it is an extremely pessimistic premise and that there is no good reason to suppose that "technological adolescence" has a particularly high mortality rate. They note that we seem to have cleared many of the hurdles that have faced us and that, for the time being, it would even seem that we are moving away from the brink of disaster. Proponents of the AH agree that it is a pessimistic hypothesis but point out that this does not dismiss its potential viability. That note that, unless we have cause to believe that other species are wiser than us, a dangerous period of technological adolescence seems to be practically unavoidable, particularly given that there seems no end in sight of the deadly hurdles that a species must clear.

The Fermi Paradox: The Aliens are Among Us Hypothesis

One potential answer to the question of "Where are they?" is "Right here!"

The AAAUH hypothesis suggests that, contrary to the opinions of skeptics, aliens are visiting the Earth and that they are being detected, albeit not in ways that the orthodox scientific community is willing to accept. Supporters of this hypothesis point to the large number of reported sightings and close encounters of various types.

Detractors of this hypothesis note that, in spite of the large number of sightings, no empirical evidence has been forthcoming. More so, attempts to account for this lack of empirical evidence often tend to cross the threshold into the realm of outright paranoia (e.g., in contending that the governments of the world are deliberately suppressing information). Proponents tend to dismiss such accusations as being either myopic or deliberately obtuse.

Geek Alphabet

From "A is for alignment" to "Z is for Zombie", here's a very clever geek-themed alphabet.

The Fermi Pardox: Introduction

Before Unstructured Musings, I had a website called The Lair o' Lias. One of the sections of the site was dedicated to the Fermi Paradox. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, from the Internet Archive, I've been able to salvage the content of it. I thought it would be a good idea to post it to the blog. I'm breaking it into sections starting with this, the introduction.

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Are we alone in the universe?

This is one of the greatest mysteries of our age. Clearly our intuition suggests that we aren't alone. It's hard to look up at the sky and to contemplate those hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone without thinking that there simply must be intelligent life out there somewhere — probably life that we could communicate with if we only knew where to look and how to listen. Certainly this has been one of the great themes in Science Fiction. Over the last century, ever since H.G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds, our media has been flooded with speculative stories that reflect our hopes (and fears) for the existence of alien life.Venus

In 1961 the noted astronomer Dr. Frank Drake came up with an equation, later to be known as the Drake Equation, which set definite parameters on how many extraterrestrial civilizations should exist. The Drake Equation asks several questions:

• How many stars are there in the galaxy?
• What fraction of those stars have planets around them?
• What fraction of those planets are capable of sustaining life?
• What fraction of those planets actually have life?
• What fraction of that number have intelligent life?
• What fraction of intelligent life forms are able and willing to communicate?
• How long do such intelligent, communicating species live (on the average)?

The beauty of the Drake Equation is that if you plug in numbers to all of its variable, you get a good estimate of how many intelligent, communicative species should exist in the galaxy at any one time. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Some variables, such as the number of stars in the galaxy, are easy to come by. Some, such as the number of stars with planets, can be only be approximated from educated guesses. Some, such as the fraction of biospheres that develop intelligence, are the subject of raw speculation. In spite of this, the Drake Equation generated a great deal of hope in those who wanted to believe in the existence of extraterrestrial intelligences for the simple reason that all but the most pessimistic estimates indicated a galaxy that was absolutely teeming with vocal ETIs.

SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, was founded on the basis of that optimism. If you had asked the attendees at the first SETI conference to guess how long it would take before we discovered a signal, I'm confident that most would have guessed that we would do so within the space of a few years. I'm equally confident that none would have dared suggest that we would never find such evidence. Forty years later, we find ourselves confronted with a lingering silence, punctuated by several false or unconfirmable signals, and a muted sense of optimism. Most people still believe that we will find other intelligences, but there is the deep question of why, if life is as common as we suspect it is, we haven't found it yet.

The great physicist Enrico Fermi was one of the first people to ask this. Certainly he was the one who put it most succinctly: "Where are they?"

More formally, if intelligent life is as common as the Drake Equation tends to lead us to believe, why isn't its existence so obvious as to be unmistakable? Indeed, why isn't it already here?

This is the Fermi Paradox: If extraterrestrial intelligence is as common as we believe it should be, its presence should be obvious and unmistakable. It isn't. Hence the paradox.

It is a question that bestrides the question of our place in the universe. Where are they? There is a certain temptation to resist asking it, to dismiss it as premature and unworthy of consideration.

And yet… and yet…

Its presence casts a pall over any discussion of alien life. As much as we want to ignore it, as much as it acts as a damper to our enthusiasm, we are compelled to address it. It is a question that many people have contemplated, and it is one that has generated numerous potential answers.

Unstructured Dazzle

Light art, created by long exposures and a bright, moving "pen", is cool enough but animating it increases the magnitude of the cool by a factor of "wow".

Unstructured Rockin'

I love industry hyperbole. I just got an invite to a seminar that promises to turn me into a "SQL Server Rock Star". Oh yeah... it's a lifestyle filled with hookers, blow, and table indexes!

My favorite part:

Dont' miss these other rockin' sessions:

“Disk and I/O Tuning and Optimization on SQL Server 2005”
Presented by Douglas Chrystall
Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2007 from Noon – 1 P.M.

“Performance Baselining, Benchmarking, and Monitoring”
Presented by Kevin Kline
Friday, Sept. 21, 2007 from 9:45 A.M. – 11:15 A.M.

I feel like Keith Richards just thinking about it. Send in the groupies.

Unstructured Drawings

Here is an absolutely fascinating experiment where artists took kid drawings and then reworked them while adhering to the basic design.

Fisher Man

We found him at the bottom of the lake,
Neither dead nor drowning,
Covered in muck and moss,
Communing with the carp
And the catfish.

We offered,
By signs and gestures,
To haul him up and out,
To dry him off,
To find some warm place
Where he could stand
And breath.

He inclined his head
To deline our offer,
Smiling as minnows
Darted between the gaps
In his teeth.

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Photo courtesy of "alarch"

Unstructured "What the...?"

I'm really not sure what, exactly, this is except that it's a frentic video with lots of weird cat-things set to a high-speed techno mix.

Um... enjoy?

The State of the Blog

There were a grand total of sixty-nine new posts last month. To understand why this is a significant fact, consider that there were only sixty-four posts in the entire year of 2006. To be sure, 2006 was the least productive year for Unstructured Musings but even the best year, 2005, only have a total of one hundred and forty-seven posts. The reason for this proliferation of posts is that I've made some deep changes in the methodology and philosophy behind the blog.

Before I explain the changes that I've made, and the reasons behind them, I'd like to explain a bit about how I make content. There are two major categories of blog content: derived and original.

Derived content, as the name implies, is content which is derived from other sources. In the simplest case, it's simply a post pointing to some other content with a short blurb attached to it ("Check out this site!"). The advantage of derived content is that it's fairly easy to produce.

The problem with derived content, however, is that there's always the possibility that you'll have already seen it. Any day you come here and there's nothing interesting for you to see is a reason for you not to come back, so any time I put up something you've found on your own, there is the potential that I've driving you away. In order to minimize that possibility, I need to go out of my way to find content that you probably haven't seen before, which means, among other things, that I need to avoid so-called viral content (which is content that rapidly spreads by way of word of mouth). So things like the Dramatic Chipmunk videos are something I need to avoid. This is something of a paradox, though, because viral content is viral precisely because people like it, which means that I'm deliberately avoiding the very things that are most interesting on the web, which means that I need to expend some thought and effort in order to find things that I think you'd enjoy.

One thing that I can do so increase your interest in derived content is by trying to add value to it. A good example of this is something I call a mosaic post which is a post where I tie together several different pointers with a theme. The recent Elven Tattoo post is a good example of that since it has links to cool Elven tattoos, another link to how to translate your name into Elven, a third link to how to write in Elven, a link to some software (along with a font link), a link discussing dialects of Elven, and finally a link to an Elven wedding invitation. This method provides you a kind of one-stop shop for cool content. Unfortunately, mosaic posts have their own drawback which is that they take me a fair amount of time and energy to put together which goes a long way towards negating the main reason to post derived content.

Original content is just that: content that I create, more or less, from scratch. Although it is possible to create a blog with such a niche theme, using derived content, that it's stands apart, most blogs (including this one) rely on original content to distinguish themselves from other blogs. Original content can take many forms from simple journal posts and poems all the way up to full blown essays and stories. Naturally, the longer and more complex the original content, the more effort it takes to create it.

When I created Unstructured Musings, blogs were just starting to go mainstream. As a consequence, I really didn't have a good template for what a blog should be. Most of the blogs at that time were basically online diaries. An online diary can be interesting is the author has a sufficiently interesting life. If I spent my days travelling to exotic locales, or if I had just won the lottery, it's entirely possible that people would be interested in knowing what was going on with my life on a day to day basis. The majority of people, however, live lives that are really only interesting to them and their inner circle of friends and family. Given that my days mostly revolve around work and reading, I knew that this wasn't what I wanted my blog to be about. I decided that the primary focus of the blog was going to be essays. My goal was to write an essay a week on any topic that I desired (hence the "unstructured" part of Unstructured Musings).

My frame of reference, at the time, took the form of traditional web pages. The big difference between a blog and a web page is that the latter is much more static. A personal page can go for months, or even years, without updates or new content and that's just fine. A blog, however, is dynamic and temporal. Although I had some sense of that, I didn't really appreciate how important it was to regularly post new content.

Within a few months (May, to be exact), I realized that weekly updates weren't cutting it so I went to an ironically structured format where I'd post new content three times a week: an essay every Sunday, a poem every Thursday, and a "fun" link every Tuesday, which means that I had committed to a structure where 2/3^rds of all my content was original and that half the original content took a very long and involved form.

Just writing the essays proved to be grueling. An average essay runs about 2,000 words and the majority of them required a fair amount of research on top of the original thought that went into them. Add to that the fact that I was also producing original poetry every single week and that I had to dig up a fun and interesting link in my spare time (to say nothing of all the background administration that goes into running a blog). What started out as a labor of love swiftly became a chore. The miraculous thing is that I kept up that pace, unabated, for more than a year.

By mid-2005, however, signs of strain were beginning to show up. I started missing my essay deadlines. In order to compensate for this, I switched to a bi-weekly essay format where every other work would be an off-site essay. Even this wasn't enough to eliminate the stress of producing the blog. By the end of 2005, I was writing essays that I weren't able to finish (which was utterly unfair to you, my readership).

2006 was the year that nearly broke the blog. A series of health and personal issues drained me of a significant fraction of my energy. The amount of original content dropped to nearly zero and even the derived content only came out as a trickle. By 2007 I was seriously considering shutting the whole thing down. This urge was compounded by Blogger going to a new style sheet format. Although it was possible to me to continue using the existing style sheets, if I wanted to make any changes, what so ever, to the formatting of the blog, I would need to convert it, which meant redesigning the style sheets from scratch.

June was Unstructured Musings' Rubicon. For the first time ever, I didn't post anything at all. I spent the entire month wondering if I should just pull the plug. On the one hand, there really is something I love about Unstructured Musings. Even though my readership is small, the quality of the commentary I've gotten from you has been amazing. There is also the fact that it's a creative outlet, for me, which is something I do need in my life. On the other hand, if blogging caused me more grief than happiness (especially in the form of guilt when go a long time without posting), perhaps it would be better to give it a quiet burial.

So I sat down and thought about it. And thought about it. And thought about it some more. Ultimately, I decided that I would like to keep the blog alive but that that I would need to change the way that I'm managing it, and whether I still wanted to.

I decided that the first decision was going to be whether or not to update the style sheet. If the blog was going to continue, I didn't want to keep clinging to the old sheet. Conversely, if I didn't think that it was worth redoing, then it wasn't worth continuing. Obviously, I did decide that it was worth it. The new look went live on July 25^th. This was a reboot both symbolic and literal.

The first, and biggest, change to the blog, beyond the cosmetics of the new style, is the way that I produce content. I've created a folder in my bookmarks called "Blog Fodder". Whenever I come across a link that seems cool, I bookmark it into that folder. Every so often, I'll take a chunk of the links I've bookmarked and then write up posts that link to them, saving those posts to draft, in Blogger (which means that they don't show up on the public page). This means that on any given day, I can just change the status of one of the queued posts from "draft" to "final" and I have a fresh post.

This has two benefits: 1) I have the ability to create fresh content on a daily basis and 2) if I'm not in the mood to work on the blog on a given day or week, I don't really have to beyond the minimal effort of getting something out of the draft bin. This also means that on those days when I do feel like blogging, I can put a whole bunch of things into the queue all at once to use in the future.

Naturally, this means that there's been a shift in content away from original and towards derived content. That doesn't mean, however, that there won't be any more original content; however, even there the focus is going to shift away from essays and towards shorter forms such as reviews, poems, and things like the archetype posts. I will still write essays and stories but those are going to be published on the order of several times a year instead of several times a month. Not only will that be considerably less exhausting for me but I think that it will result in a higher quality of essay, which will be good for you.

August was a deliberate experiment to see what sort of pace I could set for content generation. On average, I put up about 2 ¼ new posts a day. I was glad to discover that I could keep up that pace without exhausting myself. That said, I don't think you'll be seeing that many posts in a month again. Even though I didn't feel myself burning out in August, I could sense that I was pushing the limit. I would like to give myself more of a buffer so I'll be throttling back. Most days, I'll be limiting myself to a single post and, most of the time, that post will be something that's derived. I will try to have an original item on average of once a week but that item will usually take a short or medium form (i.e., under 500 words).

Change is always risky. Most of my regulars have stuck with me for some time and, judging by the poll I did on the subject, the thing you like most about the blog is when I do long and complicated posts such as essays and stories. I realize that by moving the emphasis away from those kinds of things, I risk losing your interest. Unfortunately, I just can't produce that type of content a frequent basis without destroying my own love for this place, which is also something I don't want to do. It is my sincere hope that the change in direction won't be too jarring and that I will be able to make it worth the while for you to keep me in your bookmarks.

Unstructured Positions

Although Summer doesn't officially end until September 21^st, most people in the U.S. consider Labor Day Weekend to be Summer's last hurrah. With that in mind, here's a list of five summer sex positions that might very well send you to the emergency room if you try them (along with sarcastic commentary).

I should hope that it would go without saying that clicking on the link will bring up some very unsafe for work graphics (although nothing that I would consider too graphic, if you know what I mean). Please use some common sense; I'd hate to responsible for anyone getting in trouble with their employer.

The Museum of Hoaxes

To me, hoaxes represent a fascinating glimpse of how creativity and credulity can intersect. A good hoax is part joke, part lie, and part tale. Some of them, of course, are simply malicious: attempts to con the gullible out of money and property. The best ones, however, are a kind of absurdist art form: a dadaism of the soul.

The Museum of Hoaxes is a repository of hoaxology and, as with all good museums, visitors are encouraged to wander between the exhibits at will.

There is a collection of famous historical hoaxes, another collection dedicated to ingenious April fool's jokes, a third that focuses on collegiate pranks, an encyclopedia of hoaxes, a photographic exhibit, and many others besides.

This Explains a Lot

One of the features of Netflix is that it tells you what other movies were enjoyed by the people who enjoyed a given movie.

I think that the following extract goes a long way towards accounting for the persistence of awful movies.

Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2

Enjoyed By Members Who Enjoyed:

Shark Tale
Batman & Robin
Garfield: The Movie
Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed
Catwoman

(Really) Unstructured Sentence

I trust that you've already seen the video of that poor Miss Teen USA contestant from South Carolina who floundered her way through a flummoxed monological thicket when asked her thoughts on why Americans can't seem to find the U.S. on a map. Here is Jimmy Kimmel's explanation of what she was trying to say.