Argh - suicidal!

No, not ME... That stupid, obnoxious song!

If you really, truly haven't heard this tripe at least a dozen times ("you have me sooo-icidal, sooo-icidal"), I'm sure you can google "Sean Kingston beautiful girls" and partake to your heart's content. Which more than likely will be exactly thirty-four and a half seconds.

Me, I can't get through a meal at Subway without hearing it once, maybe twice. Supper at the Arches tonight, and there it was again ("you're way too beauooo-tee-ful, girl, you have me sooo-icidal, sooo-icidal"). Make it stop!

Here are my top five reasons for loathing this song:

1. Overplay. Seriously, even the best songs get tired when you hear them on about a 43-minute cycle in every public venue out there. This probably says as much about the generic, played-out state of Top 40 radio as it does about this song, but "Beautiful Girls" would be a lot easier to swallow if I didn't have to gag it down again and again and again...

2. Earworm. That's the proper name for getting a song stuck in your head. Researchers have identified all sorts of traits that make a song "catchy" in this way, and, I can testify to the fact that BG has earworm written all over it. And not in a good way. Much the same as "The Song That Never Ends," it's the kind of song you're not happy to have worm its way into your brain.

3. It rips off Ben E. King. One of the few positive things about th song id that it's got a good groove. Except that groove was lifted straight from "Stand By Me." So if you're humming BG, it might have something to do with the fact that it's Ben E. King's supremely catchy bassline you're hearing, not anything Sean Kingston cooked up himself.

4. Stupid ending. The song comes to an abrupt close with an effect that's supposed to sound, I guess, like a tape deck melting down. So is that supposed to be the sonic equivalent of of offing oneself? "Sooo-i-showww-darhhhhhhgh." Lame.

5. "Suicidal" for you - how charming. Maybe I'm becoming a fuddydud in my old age, but it really bugs me hearing a peppy, bouncy song whose chorus is the word "suicidal." The song's lyrics are moderately tragic, but the tone of the song makes it sound almost like a compliment to be "sooo-icidal" for a girl, if she's really "beauooo-tee-ful." There re some things that I just don't think are appropriate to trivialize, and the way this song makes ending one's own life catchy, flattering, and perfectly reasonable, reinforced every hour of every day, is just not appropriate. Sean K's lack of common sense and common decency toward those who have lost a TRULY suicidal loved one are sad.

Let's move on to the next mediocre #1 hit, and let this song find its way quickly into the waste bin of music history. With any luck Sean Kingston will be the epitomy of the one hit wonder, and I won't have to listen to his follow-ups, "Pedophilic," "Schizophrenic," and "Homicidal."

*end of rant*

You are an ancestor simulation

So says this article in the New York Times. Playing off a common thread in science fiction - that our lives might be lived within a completely virtual world, a la The Matrix - some artificial intelligence researches have come to the conclusion that you are almost inevitably a highly advanced program, being run inside an immensely powerful computer, decades or centuries in the future, by "posthumans" who are interested in simulating their ancestors - us.

The argument is fleshed out at sites such as The Simulation Argument:

[A]t least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.

In other words, the stronger you happen to think the case is that one day our computers will be powerful enough to create a fully simulated Earth, circa 2007, the greater the chances are that you happen to be living within such a simulation yourself... unless, for some reason, our descendants are unwilling, unable, or uninterested in SimCity-ing us.

Even more bizarre is the following thought: What happens when the artificial intelligences within a simulation approach a posthuman level of development themselves? In theory, at this point they'd be able to launch their own ancestor simulations - simulations taking place within a simulation - a virtual machine, to use a common concept in computer programming. As anyone who's run Windows on a Mac (back before it could run natively on one) can tell you, the problem with virtual machines is that they eat up resources. So if we're living within a simulation, our existence depends on the resources of whatever computer we're running on. If millions of us begin running our own ancestor simulations in "computers" that are, in reality, virtual machines running on the real computer, we could unwittingly consume all the processing cycles we depend on to keep our world running! Or, alternately, our posthuman creators might simply set our program up to terminate before that could happen, in order to keep their systems running.

Could the world end in a Blue Screen of Death? Could it be terminated in order to free up resources for whatever the posthuman equivalent of iTunes happens to be?

Also interesting - If we're living in a simulation, how should we conduct our lives? What will best guarantee that our program will continue? One academic suggests that, all things being equal, artificial intelligences would do well to care less about others, live more for today, make our world look more likely to become rich, expect to and try more to participate in pivotal events, be more entertaining and praiseworthy, and keep the famous people around us happier and more interested in us.

Theologically speaking, it's an interesting argument - perhaps the strongest case science could put forward for a "creator" of some sort who is completely outside of our universe, who is watching us with interest, who perhaps interacts with her creation (even entering into it via an avatar, most likely as a famous or important person), and who has complete freedom to write (and break) the rules of our universe as she sees fit. The boundaries between science and metaphysics blur quickly in this sort of thought experiment.

God as a posthuman videogamer? I'm not there yet. ;)

But there's definitely something disturbingly compelling about the entire idea.

In the end, it matters little to me whether I exist as matter in a biological body or as an application in a supercomputer of the future - the life I live now is the only one I've got, and however it happens to have come to pass, there's nothing "artificial" about the loves, joys, pain, struggles, convictions, desires, and hopes that fill my world. I exist - and all this exists - because the Creator has called it into being, and whatever that means at the end of the day, it seems to me to be a profound gift.

Hey - it just occurred to me: Al Gore really did win the presidency in 2004 2000, and we're part of an advanced simulation of how the world would have fared if George Bush had remained in office instead! Hmmm... that's actually depressing. Ctrl-Alt-Delete. ;)

Edit: Yes, yes... so my political timeline was a bit distorted, as Shawn pointed out. At least in this simulation, Gore got screwed in 2000. It was Kerry who got swiftboated in 2004.

Heros

As I look forward to my own wedding, I'm more and more aware of the couples in my life whose marriages have endured life's ups and downs, and whose commitment to one another has remained strong despite the passing years. Statisticians - and common experience - tell us that that's no small achievement. People like this are my new heros.

Celebrating the anniversary of their wedding today are two especially important of these heros - Jim and Jan Schaefer, married on this day 38 years ago. Congratulations, Dad and Mom! I'll count myself very blessed indeed if one day, many years from now, the twins look at Gretchen's and my life together and see us as the heros you are to me.

Seriously weird...

So I'm listening to the radio on a station I've never bothered with before (I'm usually tuned to NPR or my iPod), when on comes a commercial promoting Hormel meats at Cub grocery stores.

Nothing especially strange about that, except for the fact that the shopper being "interviewed" in the commercial happened to be Shawnee, wife of my old chum Shawn (insert your own "cute" comment here). They live in St. Paul, hundreds of miles from here - not exactly a voice I'd expect to be hearing all the way down here by Madison, even if I knew she'd be in a radio commercial...

The announcer even observed that Shawnee's expecting (look for their firstborn just before the Big Event in Indiana), and asked if she would keep "Hormel" in mind as a baby name! (Clearly they didn't realize that Steve Jobs had that particular product placement deal clinched months ago...)

How often do you just happen to catch someone you know hawking sausages pork tenderloins and discussing her pregnancy on the radio? *LOL*

Way to go, Shawnee... My day has been made! :)

Update: Shawn's got the spots posted on his blog. You can listen to the Twin Cities, Greater Minnesota, and Wisconsin versions there.

Breaking News: I-35W bridge in Twin Cities collapses

I'm looking at live news coverage of the I-35W bridge across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, which completely collapsed just over an hour ago. Over 140,000 cars travel that road every day, and the collapse happened at the tail end of the evening rush, dropping vehicles and sections of the bridge into the river below. Rescue operations are underway; as of now, there is no evidence of terrorism.

If you're a praying person, now would be a very good time to lift up the victims, their families, and the rescue crews working the scene.

Quoth Keanu: "Whoah."

Feel like you've got a grip, like you're pretty comfortable with your world and the way it works? Then spend some time pondering this little mindbender from Newsweek to see how strange reality really is.

Update: The link, which was fubar initially, has been fixed. Thanks to Shawn for catching the goof.