Monthly Archives: February 2016

Crypto-Current update

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To all those who have noticed that Crypto-Current has yet to emerge from its lair, your interest is appreciated. The amount of broken promises attending the publication schedule of this work can be considered a practical lesson in trustlessness.

Presently aiming to keep it to under 100,000 words (without huge confidence).

Beside the theoretical reconstruction of distributed crypto-systems as implementations of critique, several demanding philosophical tasks are imposing themselves. Of these, the most substantial include:
1) An adequate formulation of diagonal argument as the principle of critique.
2) A transcendental deduction of money (as that which makes price possible), from which its traditionally-accepted qualities acquire categorical order.
3) A philosophical re-foundation of the concept of property, on a cryptographic basis.

Realistically, I suspect a mid-year deadline is doable. If things seem to be working out by the end of March, I’ll harden this up to a firm commitment (please don’t laugh). I want the damn thing to be done even more than you do, and most probably, a lot more.

So back to the workface …

Underlinings (#45)

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VR-Zuck

Suddenly I realized: The image Huxley had found was partial, probably having been damaged by data loss or edited by the Restoration algorithm when the volume was restored from the Internet Fragments. Or else it had been censored before then, the left third of the image replaced by a pattern generated by the neural nets that were popular in those days. We still weren’t allowed to possess idols of the Founders. That was probably it. And so, a sea of Kyles and Jakes and Dereks and Adams and Kevins, flood-filling the remainder left by Zuckerberg’s deletion.

Zero Stroke

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Hyperinflation on the brain, in Weimar Germany:

There was no way to keep up with the rising cost of living, but people were forced to try. That meant that they had to multiply millions to pay for the basics of a meal. It meant that, even when they weren’t actively calculating, they had to plan – figuring out the value of what they had, and extrapolating what it would buy them tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. This frantic mental activity that never ended left many people with a condition called “zero stroke.” […] Sufferers of “zero stroke,” dreamt of calculating numbers. When they were awake they would constantly write strings of zeros, or strings of numbers, or try to make complex calculations. The inflation made it into their head and they couldn’t stop thinking in large numbers, telling people that they had millions of children or were billions of years old. Mentally, they were trying to work their way out of a tough situation with obsessive calculation …

(Via.)

Sonic Synthesis

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Klint Finley on the exotic ideological history of electronic music (from Summer 2012):

You don’t play the ANS synthesizer with a keyboard. Instead you etch images onto glass sheets covered in black putty and feed them into a machine that shines light through the etchings, trigging a wide range of tones. Etchings made low on the sheets make low tones. High etchings make high tones. The sound is generated in real-time and the tempo depends on how fast you insert the sheets. […] This isn’t a new Dorkbot or Maker Faire oddity. It’s a nearly forgotten Russian synthesizer designed by Evgeny Murzin in 1938. The synth was named after and dedicated to the Russian experimental composer and occultist Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (1872–1915). The name might not mean much to you, but it illuminates a long running connection between electronic music and the occult. …

And we’re away — Theosophists, Marxists, Fascists, and musicians to come …

(Via.)

Synthetic Cosmogenesis

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… a toy version:

The universe begins with a single input, an arbitrary numerical seed — the phone number of one of the programmers. That number is mathematically mutated into more seeds by a cascading series of algorithms — a computerized pseudo-randomness generator. The seeds will determine the characteristics of each game element. Machines, of course, are incapable of true randomness, so the numbers produced appear random only because the processes that create them are too complex for the human mind to comprehend.

(Via.)

Solar Agitation

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At 11:15 a.m., Sept. 27, I stirred vigorously, and my hitherto mask-like face began to shew signs of expression. Dr. Wilson remarked that the expression was not that of my secondary personality, but seemed much like that of my normal self. About 11:30 I muttered some very curious syllables — syllables which seemed unrelated to any human speech. I appeared, too, to struggle against something. Then, just after noon—the housekeeper and the maid having meanwhile returned — I began to mutter in English.
“… of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies the prevailing trend toward scientific correlation. His attempt to link the commercial cycle of prosperity and depression with the physical cycle of the solar spots forms perhaps the apex of …”

Motherboard continues the story, or a different one.