Seeing all the ads for the Backrooms movie made me go back and watch some of the youtube videos again. It reminded me of some experiences and old stories about uncanny constructed spaces that had an impact on me when I was young. I saw a thumbnail image of a Piranesi print, and went to find all his dungeons People go in spaces that are subtly wrong, like having 4 kitchens in one house, or having…
The film Metropolis, written in 1926, was set in 2026. If you've never seen it, it is worth watching once just for the early science fiction setting. Picture white arcologies with elevated roads and a lot of airplanes flying at building level. This was the first feature-length SF film. It is a silent movie with interspersed cards that you read. It was a big budget movie, for the time:…
In high school, my mom showed me the Sator square: SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS The oldest known copy was found on a wall in Pompeii: They are all real Latin five-letter words, the words going down read the same as the words going across, and the bottom three words are the top three words reversed (so the middle word is a palindrome). I understand that it is also a legitimate sentence in Latin? I…
They live in vast underground caverns, rarely seeing the light of day. Their eyes are adapted to the darkness, bulging from their heads. They appear to be children, but they don't have any parents, and don't seem to age. Their skin is covered in soft, colored fur. Sometimes, when no one is around, they creep from the caverns into our homes. There are others with them in the darkness. There are the…
Inspired by The Xenotext, I wrote my own cipher poetry. These two poems are ciphers of each other, using a symmetric cipher. (abcdefjklnpqx ightomuvrswzy) ------- The Pirates A mast I loot. He nabs food, oils, in wool a garrot am a rot, a maggot, a vat. I rail as fast wild wind I rip, rend, fix a mast blow, pelt, hissed coil, his roils rain, rigor. A parrot I caw, a blast. I rob a fast fort. `Tis…
Just playing with Sora One thing I was curious about was whether the title War of the Worlds influenced people to start saying "First World War." It sounds like a play on "world war," but the timing doesn’t work — so it must actually be the other way around, right? Anyway, I poked around a bit and found a whole bunch of authors from the 1880s and 1890s writing what we’d now call Tom Clancy-style…
I was investigating this paragraph from the poem "The Turn of the Tide" by C.S. Lewis: "Salamanders in the Sun who brandish as they run Tails like the Americas in size, Were stunned by it and dazed; wondering, they gazed Up at Earth, misgiving in their eyes." Long story short, I'm pretty sure he got the idea from Olaf Stapledon's SF novel The Starmakers . Stapledon called them "salamanders"…
Marine Reptiles: Ichthyosaurus : Dolphin-like body shape, large eyes, powerful tail flukes. Plesiosaurus : Long neck, small head, four paddle-like flippers. Liopleurodon : Massive size, large, broad skull, powerful jaws. Mosasaurus : Large, lizard-like body, powerful jaws, strong tail fin. Nothosaurus : Long neck, flattened skull, webbed feet (transitional form). Tanystropheus : Extremely long…
Guide to Dinosaur Shapes There's a lot of dinosaurs out there. It can be hard to know them all. Plus, a lot of them look more-or-less the same as each other. So I went through and selected fifty dinosaurs that pretty much cover the range of shapes you can get. If all you are interested in is what the dinosaur looked like, rather than when and where it lived, this list provides an example of every…
One of the animals that shows up in bestiaries is called the pelican. The most intriguing feature of the pelican in these accounts is that it feeds its young with its own blood. Eventually this became a Catholic symbol of Christ. The weird thing is that pelicans don't do this, and pelicans are a common animal throughout Europe. So why does it say this? One clue is that Isidore of Seville writes:…
People say that the properties of high-dimensional spaces are deeply unintuitive and talk about the "curse of dimensionality." Having worked with high-dimensional spaces (around a few hundred dimensions) for almost a decade now, I find it all much more comfortable than I used to. One of the most important things you need to understand about high dimensional hypercubes is that they have a lot of…
Here is an article about Semyon Korsakov that was published in 2016. He was the inventor of a mechanical search engine in the 1800s in Russia. https://sci-hub.ru/10.1007/978-3-319-49463-0_5
Hermit comes from a word for the desert, and the older Greek form is eremites. Hermits were inspired, I suppose, by the 40 years the Israelites wandered in the desert, John the Baptist living in the desert, and Christ fasting for forty days in the desert. They tried to become closer to God by removing themselves from society and material possessions. Hermetic comes from Hermes Trimegistus, who is…
We think of a labyrinth as a maze, with branching passages making it easy to lose your way. But in the middle ages, a labyrinth usually meant a very specific pattern: This pattern has no branches to get lost in. You enter, weave back and forth, in and out, and eventually reach the center. You weave back and forth seven times. There are a lot of rock structures like this on beaches all around…
A lot of artists have been trying to expand copyright law and custom recently, arguing that unauthorized derivate works (AI generated art) should not be permitted. Personally, I believe that AI art should be allowed, because the benefits to society outweigh the harms to artists. I would go further, though-- I don't think anything digital should be copyrightable at all. In my ideal legal world, you…
This is related to this other investigation into a Romantic poem I used Midjourney to generate visualizations of Coleridge's Xanadu. I particularly liked the solution this one came up with for representing a "sunless sea": I presume that it came up with the bright circle early in the generation process as a moon, and then had to figure out a way to work it into the image-- similar to those spiral…
A standard argument against Chalmers' philosophical zombies goes something like this. I've read a variation of it by Eliezer Yudkowsky, by Raymond Smullyan, by John Barnes, and by David Chalmers himself (who was building the case that zombies are conceivable, but was steelmanning the opposing argument): "A philosophical zombie is defined as follows: it behaves the same way as a human, but doesn't…
When GPT-2 was first released, I began to wonder whether I was something like GPT: Did I contain beliefs and reason over them, or did I, like GPT, just have a disposition to say certain things in a particular situation? Here is a good summary of the two models of the self that I was comparing, at least roughly. If you give GPT a pro-life argument as a prompt, it will continue trying to generate…
I read the following tweet: "No one will remember * your fancy title, * how many hours you worked, * how busy you were. People will remember * The giant monoliths you have erected to your own majesty * Poems about the monoliths, or at least a few of the good lines So that got me thinking about Ozymandias. Shelley took the name from a Greek version (Ὀσυμανδύας) of the Egyptian throne name of Ramses…
Science, most people feel, has removed humanity from a central place in the universe: quite literally, in the case of the Copernican revolution, but in every other way as well. Stephen Hawking: "The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies." Sigmund Freud: "Humanity has in the…
This is in response to Blake Lemoine's post . Large language models aren't conscious or sentient. I don't think the question is absurd. It is very important to know whether we are interacting with something conscious, in any sense of the word. After due consideration, I'm convinced that, even though these models sometimes argue otherwise, that they aren't conscious. There are two relevant notions…
1. Then they taught that the thriving taintless torrent, transparent, thunders through the Trinity's thrones. 2. Toward the torrent, that tears through the thoroughfare, towered the thriving Tree that teems twelve times through the tide's turning. That tree's touch transforms the terrestrial tribes. 3. Then the tribulation terminates: the throne throughout, their toilers take their toil. 4. They…
Somebody on Reddit said "the only reason Indigo is listed as one of the colors of the spectrum is because Newton was obsessed with the number 7 for occult reasons" so I got to thinking, what names do people actually use for the fully saturated colors? So I went back to the xkcd color survey (the best resource available for questions about "what names do people actually use for colors") and looked…
Paul Graham asked a question on Twitter recently that I've since spent a lot of time thinking about. He asked "What is the oldest man-made object that's small enough to hold in your hand and that has been continuously in people's possession (i.e. has not been buried and later excavated)?" Let's look at answers without the qualifiers first. What's the oldest known man-made object that's small…