the girly who shall end all girls

i've been reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a collection of parables sugar-coated with fanfic. i love the meta commentary about both Harry Potter and Harry Potter fandom, i'm skeptical about some of the other thought behind the stories. anyway, it's a fun diversion if Harry Potter deciding that Ron Weasley is a waste of time makes you fist-pump (or that at one point Draco casts a spell called Gom Jabbar).

this led me in a roundabout way to a discussion of the parent site, Less Wrong...where there was rationalist wank.

Yudkowsky is interested in causality that goes backwards in time: future events causing past events by simulating what someone will do in the future and using this in the present, e.g. not giving a gun to someone you believe will shoot you. This gets odd when you imagine a super-human intelligence simulating a human level intelligence, because their predictions may be near perfect. Roko (a top contributor at the time) wondered if a future Friendly AI would punish people who didn't donate all they could to AI research. He reasoned that every day without AI, bad things happen (150,000+ people die every day, war is fought, millions go hungry) and a future Friendly AI would want to prevent this, so it might punish those who understood the importance of donating but didn't donate all they could. He then wondered if future AIs would be more likely to punish those who had wondered if future AIs would punish them. That final thought proved too much for some LessWrong readers, who then had nightmares about being tortured for not donating enough to SIAI. Eliezer Yudkowsly replied to Roko's post calling him names and claiming that posting such things on an Internet forum could have caused incalculable harm to the future of humanity. Four hours later, Eliezer Yudkowsly deleted Roko's post including all comments. Roko left LessWrong, deleting his thousands of posts and comments, though he later returned.
One butthurt poster then protested this censorship with a threat to ... harm the future of humanity by posting things to an Internet forum. LessWrong then ... took this threat seriously. One shudders to think what the future Friendly AI will do when it finds 4chan.

i love the internet.

a bit of joy tonight:

someone posts a picture of handwritten sheet music written by their grandparents, and asks if someone can play it for them.

people respond in a matter of hours, and the songs are charming.

so far i like the acoustic guitar best.

we're beginning to make a concerted (rather than random piecemeal) effort to replace VHS tapes with DVDs. the side effect of looking to upgrade the things you already have is that you then find some things you always wanted to have and suddenly you've added as many as you replaced in that shopping trip. if you're me.
so i'm browsing through the Criterion rack (Life of Brian, score) and i make one of those finds...Hopscotch.

Hopscotch was a movie my family had on videodisc. (it was an R-rated film i had ready permission to watch as a kid, since the rating comes from language only.) when C said that i had never shown it to him, i realized that i probably hadn't watched it since i started college. i remembered that i loved it; Walter Matthau plays a CIA agent who is moved from the field to a desk job by an odious manager, and takes revenge by writing and distributing his memoirs. he sends it out to various intelligence agencies around the world, one chapter at a time, and carefully stays one step ahead of the angry and embarrassed people from Langley.

it's even better than i remember it, a moment frozen in a time where the Russians were the big bad and Bonn was the seat of government in (West) Germany. the genre is a bit tough to pigeonhole - it's a comedy, it's a bit of a spy thriller - but the humor is mostly verbal and for all the casual talk of "retiring" spies, no one dies. our hero is a jowly older man, and the love interest is a widow (with very short hair) who isn't a whole lot younger. Hopscotch requires your full attention, because there is never a visual or verbal cue to remind you about the scene earlier in the film where we set up the action in this scene. it's all shot on location, the acting is top-notch, and the music is mostly Mozart. it's about adults, and it treats the audience as such. this film is a pleasure to watch, and i'm glad to know that someone cared enough to put it on DVD.

la la la, i'm on vacation, i will take my book to the tea shop that makes crepes and have a lovely late breakfast. i reach for my coat and look out the window by the coat tree to see that someone else is having breakfast out today.

my guess is Peale's falcon, but i'd love it if someone with more bird knowledge could tell me more. EDITED TO ADD: info from the comments says juvenile Cooper's hawk. i was guessing a falcon because it wasn't as big as other hawks i've seen. cool. our yard has always been popular with wildlife; tons of birds and squirrels, an oft-used raccoon trail, and a hangout for neighborhood cats. this is the first bird-on-bird action i've seen.

seen in my neighbor's yard on the way to the bus this morning. i think they might open today.

just as i stepped on the bus today, i noticed that someone had carefully arranged gummi worms in real worm positions around a crack in the sidewalk.