When Dice-K pitches really well — which is happening more often lately — he turns into the Ace version of himself, or Dace-K.
That almost happened tonight. So close. Here’s hoping that we see more of Dace-K.
Blog
Literomancer Available Online
F&SF has made “The Literomancer” available through Suvudu. Enjoy!.
Also, there’s a review of the Sep/Oct issue of F&SF by Sarah Joynt-Borger for TANGENT ONLINE. “The Literomancer” is discussed therein.
The Turing Test
Turing’s 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, which sets forth the Turing Test, is often cited, but perhaps not as often read. If you haven’t read it, it’s well worth your time. Much of the AI debate of the last 60 years are mere glosses on the ideas set forth in this paper.
The Links Inside Our Minds
The memex has been making me think.
Google’s PageRank is based on the notion that links between documents convey information about authority, importance, and meaning, even when the target document doesn’t explicitly contain the terms being searched for.
But the most important links in the world are not HREFs put between documents by writers, but by readers. They are links made in the mind.
Quoting Vannevar Bush again:
The human mind … operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.
During a single day, we make hundreds of such connections in our minds as we read: books, web pages, emails, magazines. An article in the New Yorker makes me think about a Ted Chiang story. A web page on the history of Roman coinage makes me think about the complexities of “obverse” vs. “converse” in logic and rhetoric, discussed in a post on a blawg. A newspaper article on the history of qipao makes me think about a novel set in Hong Kong in the 1940s. I’d think that the vast majority of links between all kinds of content (text, images, video, sound) are like these, made by readers, not hyperlinks.
These connections are not preserved in any permanent form, and most of them would be forgotten quickly afterwards. But they are the stuff creativity is made of. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a way of capturing them, such that we can sift through them later, connect other snippets to them, add to the trail of associations that blaze like lightning over the vast dark plains of our daily existence. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Google, instead of searching merely through links some writer explicitly coded onto a web page, could make use of these links made by the associative mind of the reader as well? When I search for “conversely” or “coins,” it would bring up that blawg post and the page on Roman coins and all the other things I’ve connected to them. Maybe it’s something like a universal tagging scheme, but reader-centric.
Seems like Google ought to look into this.
Lisa’s New Show
My wife Lisa’s new solo exhibition at the Griffin Museum of Photography’s Aberjona River Gallery starts next Thursday (September 9th).
September 9 – November 7, 20109
Opening October 5, 2010 6 – 7:30
She’ll give a talk on the show at the Griffin’s Senior Sunday on October 17th at 3 PM. Free and open to the public.
COWBOYS features some of my favorite works by her. As you can see, they are not like what you think of as “photographs” exactly.
Do Men Read Women Authors?
There’s a bit of chatter going around about how men don’t read fiction by women.
I guess I could be some sort of outlier. My reading tastes have always been eclectic and gender-neutral. It’s not that I don’t think there may be patterns of differences between the way men and women write, but I find the differences interesting and broadening.
Some of my favorite contemporary spec fic authors are women: Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Nancy Kress, and Margaret Atwood. I like Candace Bushnell (yup, I’d rank Trading Up with Gatsby). In the last year, I read Gillian Flynn and Janice Y. K. Lee, among others. And as indicated in my post on Vendela Vida and Julie Orringer, it’s not as if I changed my habits last year.
Anecdote is not data, but it’s some sort of evidence.