Shadowlessness

Well, it’s obvious, is it not? I got a Kindle (latest generation, i.e. three, 6″, graphite and no 3G) and the huge thanks for it goes to my brother Ehsan, because I absolutely love it!
Oh, and I named it “Rand.” What else was I going to name it, “Kevin”?! The reason for this name should be obvious to anyone who has read the first few books of the Wheel of Time. Also, I thought after a few female names for my gadgets and toys (Fenchurch for my iPod, Metis for my phone, Eros for my PSP, Jane for one of my portable disks) it was time for a male character to be in this dramatis personae.

Now to the Kindle itself. It’s clean, cool and chic. It’s very light and thin too. There are some things to be desired, like a more controllable music playback or generic notes, but in my opinion they just distract from this device’s one true raison d’etre: to read books on. And it does that splendidly! The built-in browser is surprisingly capable. It is based on Webkit, but the size and nature of the device and the keyboard make it less usable than one might hope. Did I mention that the display of text is practically like real print?!

By the way, it should be obvious that I’m writing these on Rand.

I had heard of the new Bioware RPG Dragon Age: Origins but I guess I had forgotten about it. Today, I stumbled upon a couple of reviews and some videos and now I’m in love with the game! It appears to be very long (which probably means a few months of gameplay for me; yay!), difficult, deep and true to classic Bioware-RPGs. Almost everyone calls it a great successor to the Baldur’s Gate duo. And I enjoy Bioware games, from Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights to Mass Effect (yes, even KOTOR games!) My only worry is the departure from almost strict D&D ruleset of BG and NWN.
In any case, I’m downloading the whole 8GBs right now, unless somebody knows whether stores over here have got the game?

In other news, I finally got my hands on the God of War Collection trailer. For those rare GoW-challenged people among my audience, the Collection is a remastered version of the first two God of War games for the PS3 (they where released for the PS2 originally.) It seems that, as they had promised, SONY has not changed anything in the games, and just packed some higher resolution textures and (maybe) animations, which is a wise move. The first two GoWs deserve to be preserve at the masterpiece of gameplay they are. This will be release this month.
Obviously, the above means I have to get my own PS3. As soon as I figure out a robust solution to get both video and audio out of the PS3 and into my 1080p-capable but HDMI-incapable monitor and my speakers, I’m taking the trip to the Toopkhuneh(!) square and getting me a 120GiB PS3 Slim.

In yet other news, late last month (a day before my own birthday in fact) the twelfth book in the amazing and fantastic fantasy series The Wheel of Time has been released. It was supposed to be in November too IIRC, which makes the release a nice surprise. I’m already a fourth into the book and I’m liking it! May Robert Jordan rest in pieces… oops!… rest in peace.
I have one thing to say to anyone who likes high fantasy at all: GO READ THE BOOKS. The whole 12000-13000 pages of pure immersion and greatness. Doesn’t matter what other people say. I have read enough fantasy series to know which one is great! Go read it. Read the first book if you feel you don’t have the time. Do yourself a favor.

How many people (who doesn’t matter very much!) do I have to kill to get one of these babies?! And how many more must I slay to get a 3G network in Iran so the wireless facilities work too?! You know what, scratch that. As long as the built-in DRM misfeatures are not too draconian and/or can be circumvented, I don’t care about the wireless connectivity. I could always USB my PDFs over.
I just told a friend the other day that how much I wished for a pile of good books and a lot of time to read them. The books I do have, more than enough, it is the time I find myself constrained about. A Kindle would give me the ability to read everywhere.
Most of the fiction I “read” these days is in the form of audiobook. And you can’t listen to audiobooks while going around on public transportation or walking on the streets or just stretching in your home in the mornings (that would be normal people’s afternoons.) Because people absolutely can’t leave you alone for 10 minutes, and audiobooks are not a snap to pause and resume. Besides, I can’t listen to technical books, even if there where such things.
And I can’t read books on my computers, because there are much more immediately fun ways to use a computer screen and attempting to multitask between writing code and reading an ebook is just not workable!

Anyway, I think a perfect solution for me is Kindle DX (because it has PDF support) as long as the DRM is not too constricting. I guess I’d have to dust off my old ninja outfit. We are raiding Amazon warehouses tonight!

My outspoken (and certainly prejudiced and groundless) stance on AI is very well known where I am known myself. I hate the current trends and implementations of what is called Artificial Intelligence.
And what’s with the “artificial” prefix anyway? What is “real intelligence”? Why we call human (organic? carbon-based?) intelligence “real” and silicon-based (germanium-based?!) intelligence “artificial”? Because we where here first? Because we are currently more complex and have the upper hand? Wait for the “Singularity” (definitely STFW) and see who gets the last laugh, folks! I guarantee that it will be soon and it won’t be us (almost by definition!)
It can’t be because our intelligence is emergent and evolution-based and computer intelligence is designed and creation-based, because it is not! As far as I know (which is admittedly not far) most successful and state-of-the-art “intelligent” software are evolution-based these days. (They are based on that singly most unique and most elegant idea Darwin had one summer evening (or one winter morning, or whatever) which so beautifully explains a significant portion of the mess that we call “life”.)
And to attack the issue from another angle, “What is real? How do you define real?” What makes you think that we are any more real than the data structures and code run everyday on our own computers?
And don’t even get me started on the “gods-created-us-therefore-we-are-super-special” bullshit.

In any case, my point is that whatever this intelligence is, it’s no more artificial than our own, and we are probably no more real than it.
Maybe we should call it Third Intelligence? Obviously, calling machine intelligence Second Intelligence would be wrong, because they are third after mice and dolphins. We are fourth at best! “So long and thanks for all the fish” anyone?

Let me quote a great quote from a (supposedly) great person:

The question of whether computers can think is no more relevant than the question of whether submarines can swim.

Obviously, there must be a reason that I’m writing philosophically about AI at 6:28 in the morning. I have just started reading “The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect” (a seemingly great sci-fi book, available freely online) which apparently deals with the Singularity and the post-Singularity world. I’m in the middle of chapter two (out of eight) and I must say that the opening chapter was refreshingly original for me and sweetly violent. I recommend it even if the remaining 6.5 chapters are total crap.

I just finished the “His Dark Materials” trilogy that I’ve already written about. Since I don’t want to spoil any of the story actualities here, I can say only two things about the series.
The ending was really really sad. I’m not talking Hamlet sad, were everyone dies except the kangaroos. I’m not saying that all the main characters die or something (although some do die) but it’s saturated with another kind of sadness. The final chapters are so saddening that I put off finishing the ending chapter for a week or so. I quite liked it (not the end of the story, but how the characters ended up.)
The world Phillip Pullman creates is one worthy of reading about. It’s interesting. The storyline he chooses for his book is a little weird and weak at some points but he manages to pull it off. The weakness and weirdness, in my opinion, stem from the misplaced focus of the story (this is similar to what I perceive as the problem with the Lord of the Rings, too.) Pullman falls in love with his main characters and their destiny and he just leaves the story to live in the background, except were he forces it to change its course to suit them. Of course, it’s not as bad or childish as I make it sound. The books are way above average and may even be great for some tastes, just not so for mine.

The book, “A Prayer for the Dying” by Jack Higgins, was extremely fascinating for me. I read it only once or twice, and more than 10 years ago in high school, but it has made its impression on me.
It’s about a former IRA bomb-maker, Martin Fallon, who has left his ideologic work because he has blown up a schoolbus full of children by mistake.
While the story is attractive in its own right, what makes the book memorable even to this day is Martin Fallon himself. He is more than once described as dead inside. I think I know the feeling. Much deeper and stronger than despair, a special kind of apathy that keeps one from caring. He truely did not care whether he lived or died.
If you are into short paperbacks for fun and sometimes more, I strongly suggest this. And don’t forget to lend it to me so I can read it once more.

Phantasmagoria, Mortal Combat (forgive me for the ‘C’!) and Twisted Metal!

These have two things in common. First, they are all old games that I found exceptional in some way and enjoyed very much. It was at least 10 years ago since I played any of them for the first time (and many years since I played them last) but their effect is still etched upon my memory. Mortal Kombat, the first two installments on SEGA Genesis, is the easiest of them all to recognize for even non-gamers (who could forget “Sub-Zero Wins” or “Fatality” in that deep voice?)
“Twisted Metal II” on the PlayStation (or PSOne if you prefer) was an immensely fun game (search Wikipedia yourselves; I’m not providing the link!) and the memory of the school hours I ditched (or the after-school hours I didn’t) to play at the arcade nearby with a couple of friends gives me a welcome nostalgic pang.
Phantasmagoria is the far lesser known of the three. It was a multi-CD (Wikipedia says 7(!) but I can’t say I remember exactly, since I was never able to finish it) interactive-movie (like Hard Line, or the Mad Dog series) adventure game. Very dark and scary and disturbing.

The other thing these three phrases have in common is that they are all used in the book “Northern Lights“, the first book of the fantasy trilogy “His Dark Materials” by Phillip Pullman. It’s not every day that one encounters an (allegedly) children’s book with genuine cruelty, malice and violence (another notable exception is Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events”.)
I’ve only finished the first book, and just begun the second, but it seems hard to me that the series can arrive to a conclusion in merely three short books! In any case, His Dark Materials is an entertaining series with some unique features (e.g. the introductions of “daemons”.) Anyone interested in short fantasy series should give HDM a try.
Another interesting feature of the series for me is Pullman’s opposition to organized religion, in this case Christianity. The “Church” in his books is somewhat reminiscent of what the church would have been like at the beginning of 20th century if it had survived the Renaissance.