I went home sick yesterday, with something stomach-related that felt like the flu or something. I don’t know. I’m here today, and I feel a little better. I spent the afternoon in bed, reading Red Mars and/or taking a nap. It’s a very cool book, and it covers a lot of details about Mars colonization that people wouldn’t think about, like money, religion, different countries competing against each other, and that thing.

Things I’m wondering about include what kind of power outlets they use, if the TVs are PAL or NTSC, if the women take birth control or something else is used during these frequent plot-building extramarital affairs, and so on. It also seems odd that they’ve been there about 20 years (at page 360-some) and they can build about anything. Assembly lines can build complete rover cars and biosphere domes, but there are only 10,000 people on the planet. I guess it’s the robots they have, and maybe it’s just easier to build stuff with less gravity. Who knows.

I’m eating toast for lunch. It was in the fridge all morning, so it’s pretty awful.

This morning, I started thinking about what would’ve happened if back in 1989, I would’ve hit myself in the head with a brick, started studying 40 hours a week, and changed to CompSci right away. I don’t know why I torture myself like this, because I’m sure when I turn 40, I’ll be wishing I would’ve had a moment of clarity in 1997 and started saving every damn penny I make.

So I’m thinking about this, and then I start thinking about computers and artificial intelligence. Would a computer know its limits? In a sense, even the most basic computers know their limits - if you divide by 0 or enter a number too big, it will stop and give you an error. Why can’t humans know their limits like this? Is it because our greater ability to think stops us? I mean, even our bodies know our limits. If you drink 20 shots of rum back to back, your body will make you puke. But your mind didn’t make you stop after shot 2 or 12 or whatever. It might just be a bad analogy - with a computer, it is a simple matter of checking a circuit, whereas with a human, it is a more complex and fuzzy process of making value judgements.

I need to read more about AI before I go off on these weird tangents… And I need to go finish my applesauce…

I’ve been reading about the Artemis Project, which is this effort to launch people to the moon in the next 10 years or so. (You can read about it here) It’s a pretty cool plan, really, and involves a lot of commercialism and a lot of volunteers. I guess if you are a rocket scientist sitting around doing not much of anything and an opportunity comes to design a giant booster or something comes up, you probably would decide to work on it.

I’ve been on this SciFi bent lately, and I don’t know if it is because of all the Mars stuff, or the Commodore 64 is bringing back repressed memories, or all of the talk of old SciFi zines sounds cool, or what. When I was in high school and took many study halls in order to avoid becoming an overachiever, I read about every book in the library to stay awake. This meant a lot of SciFi - old school stuff like Asimov, and Bradbury, and Clarke. Now, it’s hard to get into some of the junk science-based SciFi, but some of it has enough spirit in it to be readable. I’m reading the book Red Mars now, which talks about settling on mars, and terraforming, and all that, but it’s well done. I think I want to check out the whole trilogy.

I’ve always been into the whole space exploration thing, too. In grade school, I memorized all of the books about the manned space missions. Even in college, I followed all of the shuttle missions on the internet, and kept up with the construction of the Endeavour. It’s a fun bug, but you can’t exactly finish college with a 2.1 GPA and go work for NASA. Oh well..

I’m having a real non-day, and I’m feeling a bit sick. Maybe I’ll skip out for the rest of today.

I spent all afternoon on a boat. It was a work thing, they took the whole team out on a little chartered cruise with some food and beer and stuff. We were out for about 3 hours, and it was pretty decent. The weather’s been pretty shitty all week, so I wasn’t sure if we were going to get rained out or if it would be too cold, but it was decent - the sun was out, and even though it was a little chilly, you could get around without a jacket.

The boat had a cabin with a kitchen and 4 booths that sat 4 each, with lots of wood, and a carpeted “living room”. The main deck went all the way around the boat, so you could go up to the front and hang out there. On top of the cabin was a second deck, and the cabin where they ran the ship (the cockpit?). There was also a third crow’s-nest deck above that. I don’t know how long or big the boat was, but it seemed pretty decent. The people who ran it were from Alaska, but they had a summer base up there and spent winters down in Seattle. They also had two little dogs, chiwawas or something, that sort of sat around the cockpit while we were out.

So when it was time to leave, we just crossed the street and went to the marina, and there was our boat, waiting in lake union. The cruise went all over, first back near the locks by Ballard , and then under I-5 and to lake Washington, and then back. The first part brought us through a lot of the more industrial parts of the water, where there were drydocks, old rusty ships, and lots of fishing boats. Lake union has some houseboats and stuff, too. And there are a lot of freaky business office buildings in Fremont that sit right on the water.

The western part of Lake Washington was cool, because we saw the 520 bridge up close, and also saw some of the rowing crew people practicing. A lot of UW is right on the water, too, and we saw stuff like the staduim up close. Then we crossed to the eastern side of the lake. If you’re on the east side of the lake, just south of 520, the first thing you see is the giant mansion that Bill Gates had built. First reactions, of course, have to do with how he can screw so many and build so big of a house. But when you continue north on the lake, you see that he is just trying to keep up with the Jonses, and I emphasize trying. I never knew there were so many billionairs around here! There were houses with yachts in the back yard, a house with a seaplane in the back yard, a lot of golf course green yards, giant verandas, decks, intricate architecture, marble staircases, long stretches of glass, and about everything else. It was like taking some kind of floating tour of the homes of the rich and famous or something. I liked seeing all of the neat architecture, but it was sort of a wakeup call that I would never become some kind of executive that could afford to spend 100 grand a year on their groundskeeping.

Oh well. It was a cool tour, and I liked seeing the houses and the boats…

It’s one of those days where you wish you could wander the streets aimlessly, with no purpose or goal. It’s cold enough outside to make it prohibitive yet seductive. Not like a hot and sunny summer day, where you biologically feel a need to escape and have fun. It’s more like a day when you wish you were clutching your coat against you, a wind blowing fliers and dead leaves down the street, and you watch the city as it works during the time you’re a part of it and working. You wander into a mall and it’s some geriatric ward, with the worst of the worst at the counters and muzak blaring in at 11. The small stores are empty, too. It’s all about the weather, though. It’s telling you “summer’s over”, like waking up with a hangover the morning after a party, your house filled with stale bags of half-eaten potato chips and mostly empty beer cans. It all sucks, but there’s something about that complete silence that tells you it’s over, but you survived it.

I once read a Bukowski poem where he describes the same feeling, where he sits in an attic drinking a beer and thinking that there’s all of those construction workers building houses or whatever, while he just sits there. My feeling is some of that, but also based on having such a weird student schedule for 6 years. I’d catch a couple classes or a shift of work at IUSB and then drive to Scottsdale Mall to blow my paycheck. The feeling of only me and my tape deck in the car, mixed with a city so busy at commerce, felt almost haunting, like being on the crashed Titanic’s hull, except it’s all alive.

The other strange thing about Michawaka and South Bend and my year their was that driving in downtown South Bend felt like really being in a city. There were buildings taller than 3 stories high, you had to parallel park in places, there were 6 lane streets and one way streets and overpasses and highways. Once I learned how to really drive around that mess of cities, I felt like it was better than being in Bloomington in some odd way. There was more going on in Bloomington, but it’s a small town compared to South Bend - compared to Elkhart, even.

The flipside to this is having the weird student schedule and being awake at 4 or 5 in the morning, and seeing the same city asleep. This happened to me almost every day back in school, and still happens sometimes now. It’s strange, but I think Bloomington had more stuff open late than Seattle. There are clubs and bars open past midnight, but you’re stuck with Denny’s or IHOP otherwise.

I just looked up some population stuff from the census page. My dad lives in Millersburg, which had a 1994 population of about 900. The city, or rather village, where I spent my time from age 1 to the first grade (Edwardsburg, MI), has a population of 1141. My birthplace, Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota, is not listed, although the city of Grand Forks is around 50,000. My old hangout of Elkhart was 43,000. The city of Seattle itself is around 500,000. The greater metro area is about 3 million though. The strangest fact I’ve learned - there is a city named Starbuck, WA - population 170.

I’ve been thinking about Turing machines a lot, and doing some reading about them. The basic explanation, if I can remember it: there’s a machine that can read this paper tape (probably mylar if it was invented now). The tape looks sort of like a piece of movie film or something, and each square can hold a 1 or a 0. The machine can also move the tape left or right, to read another square. The machine has in internal state, which is basically like one memory location that holds a number. The machine is also constructed to follow a ruleset. The ruleset is a bunch of if-then statements that distate tape movement and the storage of new items on the tape. So, “if the tape says 0 and the current state is 20, change the current state to 27, write a 1 in this position, and move the tape left”

What the hell does all this mean? Turing designed this thing (on paper) in 1936 as the solution to a problem about designing a machine that could solve any mathematical problem without being physically rebuilt or modified. This seems pretty stupid if you’ve got a pentium on your desk, but back then, it was a big deal. And if you’ve ever worked with assembly language, you know the similarities between a Turing machine and a simple (i.e. non-Intel) processor. A Turing machine is sort of like a one-register RISC processor, except it addresses a bunch of paper tape instead of a bus.