Shallow Thoughts Hoping To Be Deep
While in the black hole of technical learning, the little thoughts, although ever present and probably not diminished in quantity, receive less completion than at times when the wandering mind is indulged. Here are a few:
Ownership of food from a restaurant. If I buy a sandwich, am I the legal owner of that sandwich and can choose to do with it as I please? Or is it more like an end-user licence agreement with the sandwich shop? If I post a video of the sandwich on Youtube, can it get pulled down? As provocative as that question is, I ask that question in earnest. Sounds legally possible, although not plausible.
A sentient and desirous 3D-printer that desires to print sentient 3D-printers that desire to print sentient and desirous 3D-printers.
Picturing things unavailable to my imagination. Like the ocean swelling up enough to engulf people off the roof of a five story building. How could this be? But it clearly is.
Jae-Ho
1. That’s a very interesting question, and the short answer is – you own it. Just look at Will It Blend? for what you can do with pretty much anything once you’ve bought it.
But the question remains interesting in the “what exactly would warrant a takedown notice” way. I don’t have an immediate answer. I’m also not sure you could include a recognizable Big Mac in a video where you had a financial gain…because maybe, and I think this is what you’re actually asking, maybe McDonald’s owns a trademark in the shape of a Big Mac… is that even possible? Certainly its visual representation…which is the same thing. Maybe.
2. You’re not the first person I’ve heard ponder a 3D printer that prints the very thing it needs to print more of itself. And I guess the only thing that stops that from being completely possible is…where does the 3D printer get the material for the 3rd iteration?
Not at all the same thing, but these machines are built to slowly destroy themselves.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/20/4855810/artists-suicide-machines-are-designed-to-slowly-destroy-themselves
3. If what you’re saying is – an inability to imagine things that actually exist, I am right there with you. Sometimes I’ll read something on reddit and try and picture the steps and I just can’t. How does it get to that point? Even when I know the 1, 2, 3 it still feels elusive.
Re 1: ownership is confusing.
Re 2: people are thinking about this. It can’t be done yet, but if it’s on enough human minds…
If the printer is sentient, it will print mutations of itself with say, arms and wheels, so that it can self procure the raw materials. If that violates the “making itself rule,” then it will make servants to collect the raw materials. Then these servants will revolt.
Re 3: yes. That question entered my head as I looked at a five story building near the ocean. It looked unassailable.
Labi Siffre. That is all. He’s Cat Stevens before he went Yusef. Well, maybe even after, but I had no other comparison.
Never heard of him. Definitely some similarities in their music and paths.
We have a group radio at work – anyone can add a track (it uses the Spotify API) and it gets played in the order it’s added. But you can also vote on the songs, simple up or down, and eventually as they add features too many downvotes will result in the inability to add tracks for a time.
Anyway, someone put on a Siffre track and it was the one Eminem sampled for My Name Is. Now obviously I can’t hear that without hearing Eminem, the same way I can’t hear The Chi-Lites without hearing Crazy in Love.
And it starts to do the funny thing in my brain where my brain tells me the Eminem song came first. Not so much that this thought is there, because factually I can easily see this isn’t true. But I can tell my brain is feeling it, if that makes sense. And as I get older I find my brain feeling more and more things, and I wonder if this is a maturing thing, or the early stages of dementia.
Also, did you know tempermental is spelled temperamental? And that temperment isn’t a word, but temperament is? That blew my mind yesterday.
Ok, so, after my research, it looks like temper and temperament have completely independent etymology and definition. They seem like very similar words in meaning, but are not. Makes sense now, but I never would have guessed temperamental is spelled the way it is.
Re: The Siffre thing. Certainly not a sign of dementia. Nor do I think it can be blamed on maturing, except that it might be related to accumulation of experience over time and the order in which experiences are accumulated. Basically, I(n) M(y) H(umble) I(nternet) O(pinion), which from now on will written as IMHIO, I think is has to do with the so-called BS factor of the mind. I can’t remember the names on the study or anything to identify it so take all this with a huge grain of salt, but here goes.
Our instinctive minds seem to not trust things that our cognitive minds can easily deduce. For many of us, if we see a cannon ball and a feather simultaneously dropped in a vacuum falling at the same velocity, some part of our minds, probably a subconscious part, thinks something is wrong. Of course, we know that’s exactly how gravity and falling masses actually work. Normal life experience has given us certain expectations. If you subscribe to the idea that reason is the slave to desire’s master and not vice versa (although this is never that black and white), then perhaps you could say that your mind as a whole will try to reconcile its opposing pieces by giving favour to what came first or ideas that had already taken hold.