From my beloved comes this video, an a cappella tour of my video-gaming childhood:

Brilliant! 1-Up!

Cow. Another cow.

Wow. In a scene right out of Twister, the Fargo Forum is reporting sightings of flying cows, sent airborne by exceptionally high storm winds this morning, just north of Valley City. That's maybe half an hour from where I used to live!

(Registration may be required at the Forum's site in order to view the article - sorry.)

Caption Contest 1

While browsing and grazing at Sam's Club this afternoon, I came across this charming little tableau. Actually, not so little... the creche figures are from a $400 outdoor set, and Santa is a life-sized robot.

Anyhow, the scene cried out to be photographed and captioned. I've taken care of the first part - the captioning, though, is in your hands.

Please post your best captions either at the pic's Flickr page or as a comment on this blog post. Or, if you like, add your own thought or speech balloons through the miracle of Photoshop, and e-mail the results to me.

Once I think everyone's had a chance to respond who's going to respond, I'll choose a winning caption, and feature it on my blog.

Have fun, keep it clean (if you want it to be the Grand Prize Winner, anyhow), and let the best woman / man / beast / yard figurine win!

Swiss Army Knife Of Doom

Is it any wonder why I subscribe to ThinkGeek's mailing list? A mere $999 gets you this three pound, 85-tool special edition knife - there's not a tool available on a Swiss Army knife that can't be found somewhere on this sucker.

Technology-enabled clothing

How freakin' cool is this?!?

WiFi is all around us. My cell phone has built-in WiFi, and if I forget and leave the switch on when I leave home, it's not long before I'm alerted to the presence of the many home and business networks I drive past.

This is a good thing. I've happily mooched WiFi where I've been able to mooch it, lots of times. When I was moving into my new home a year ago, I remember pulling up to a hotel in Janesville that shall remain nameless, just to be able to pull in their guest broadband signal and grab my e-mail. I'm always delighted to turn on my laptop at a restaurant, cafe, or other public space and find an FM path to the Internet shimmering in the ether all around me.

Problem is, it's hard to know where you're going to find the smiling wireless countenance of a high-speed signal. And it's a pain in the rear to have to fire up the laptop, just to find out. Many people (OK, not many, but a some... OK, not some, but a few geeks) have key chain fobs to let them know when they are in the presence of WiFi bliss. That's fine for yourself, but what about all the masses around you who are fobless? How will they know that there is Internet in the air, beautiful Internet, if only they could detect it?

If only there were a garment which could detect WiFi signals with ease, and convey their strength at a glance.... such a garment would be invincible...

Enter the the WiFi-detecting shirt: With this shirt, you can become the prophet to the fobless masses. Just like the Baptist pointed people toward the Good News that in Jesus, God was present, you can proclaim to everyone around you the nearly-divine presence of WiFi (and also, how many bars of signal your shirt is receiving). It's not geeky - it's a public service! It's not hopelessly lame - it's performance art! People should be paid to wear these things!

The WiFi-detecting shirt: a beacon of hope for the digital masses. ;)

Postscript: "...how many bars of signal your shirt is receiving..." Isn't the ability to say that reason enough to buy this shirt right this very minute? :D

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.

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.

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.

Three shalt be the number thou shalt count...

"First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then, shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shalt be three. Four shalt thou not count, nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thou foe, who being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it."

Don't you think I need the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch? =)

And don't you think Gretchen needs this loathsome beast? With the teeth... =)

I thought so.