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08/17/01
I wish it were tomorrow today.
This video is probably the most understatedly amusing bit of book publicity I have ever seen.
I played Black & White a lot this week. It's a highly immersive, vaguely nauseating experience. Sometimes, I find myself at odds with the developers, who seem to have missed out on several crucial post-Skinner developments in psychology. But who am I to complain? I've never made an AI. And I have been able to train my creature to be kind and decent, with only the occasional punishment necessary. I was looking for a distracting game to play that didn't involve killing or racing cars or anything macho. B&W mostly satisfied.
I also did a lot of work-related reading. Here's a favorite quote from Richard Ellis's upcoming Aquagenesis, a survey of how life emerged from, and returned to, the sea:
"Paleontology, which relies so much on the hardness of rocks, is among the 'softest' of sciences, since there is little that can be stated unambiguously, other than the obvious 'Here are these fossils.'"
Also found out through skimming a sharp and authoritative new book that 1) revered 19th century biologist Louis Agassiz was a creationist (I guess this is common knowledge, but not one of my professors ever mentioned it), and 2) his colleague, marine biologist David Starr Jordan (after whom a modern NOAA research vessel is named), was the author of an opinion piece about poor and ill people entitled "The Human Harvest" and was a founder of the American eugenics movement.
If you're interested in the history of eugenics at all, I highly recommend The Unfit, by Elof Axel Carlson. It's a bit scholarly, but definitely worth reading.
Sheesh. What's the matter with people?
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