Delusions of Grandeur

I had a pretty amazing night-long dream last night. I thought I’d share it with you...but you’re going to need some background information to understand it.

Contributing Factor A:
Dawn and I finished watching the BBC’s 1996 mini-series of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere last night. It’s a six-part series, complete with dodgy BBC special effects and some moderate production value and acting. I assumed that it was an adaptation of the book Neverwhere, but when we watched the interview with Neil afterwards we learned that he had written the story expressly for the BBC and later adapted the screenplays into the book.

Fun fact: Originally they wanted Neil to write a fantasy story for the BBC about the homeless in London…but Neil refused because he was afraid that he’d make being homeless look cool and inspire British teenagers to run away and live on the streets. He wrote Neverwhere instead.

For those of you unfamiliar with Neverwhere here is a one paragraph summery courtesy of Wikipedia.

Richard Mayhew, a Scot living in London encounters an injured girl named Door on the street one night. Despite his fiancée's protests he decides to help her, but that unfortunately also means that he suddenly ceases to exist for regular people and becomes real only to the denizens of 'London Below', whose inhabitants are generally invisible and non-existent to the people of 'London Above'. He loses his house, his job and nearly his mind as he travels London Below in an attempt to make sense out of it all, find a way back, and helps Door survive as she is hunted down by hired assassins.

Contributing Factor B:
I’ve been doing a lot of work with XML files lately for both work and my Thesis. More specifically, I’ve been doing a lot of work with XML file schemas lately. To not get bogged down in too many details just consider an XML file as a simple a way of storing information, any kind of information, in a tagged format. An XML file schema is a document that contains the rules that describe what sort of form the information in the XML file should take on. Basically you can compare an XML file to a schema and decide if the XML file is a well formed and valid expression of that schema.

Contributing Factor A + Contributing Factor B = Awesome Dream:
Unfortunately I can’t remember all the details of my dream that stretched all freaking night long. It was epic. But here is the basic premise and synopsis of what I can recall.

In the dream I’m in a setting not unlike the ‘London Below’ in Neverwhere. As in Neverwhere, there is a Beast that exists in the world that is to be feared and respected. Lately the Beast has been especially vile and all attempts to slay the Beast have resulted in tragedy. The Beast seems to be unbeatable.

I am sought out because like other inhabitants of ‘London Below’ I have a unique ability. My particular ability is that I can look at the very model of reality and make changes (if need be). During the dream the problem of the Beast is brought before me and I decide to check the underlying model of reality to see if I can figure out why the Beast is impossible to kill. Strangely enough, the model of reality looks like an XSD document that only I can see.

I notice that in the complex element that represents the class of the Beast that there is not a constraint that DateTime values in time and location tuples must be unique. The reason the Beast is impossible to kill is that he has figured out that having multiple instances of himself at different locations at the exact same time is a valid model of reality! With effort I tweak the model and add the constraint that all DateTime values for the Beast must be unique and restrict him to one location at a time. I am awesome.

Dream Analysis:
This is not the first time that I’ve dreamt about being able to control the world. It’s a reoccurring theme. It’s also not the first time I’ve mixed in some sort of computer shenanigans with my delusions of grandeur. I remember when I was learning ActionScript I dreamt that I had a robot that I could send out to query the property values of objects and change them. My little robot buddy would travel along the power lines and could “right-click” on objects to reveal their properties. In particular, my favorite task for him to open up the property list for an object and change the ownership value from other people to me. Essentially I was editing instances of things so that I could own them. How greedy the unconscious Bill is!

I think last night’s dream was a tad more abstract though. The robot was only able to alter available properties of instances – essentially he was stuck just editing the XML file of life. Last night I could change what form that a valid instance took, thus editing the XSD of life. But I don’t’ think I could mettle with individual instance (and thus they had to go back out and kill the Beast confident that there would only be one of him).

This morning I was wondering what the criteria for being a god was. Is being able to edit instances but not the underlying model sufficient for being a god? Obviously being able to do both allows you to create whatever you desire. How about just being able to edit the model but only being able to influence the instances via setting up constraints? That strikes as a particularly interesting scenario. You’d spend your time trying to perfect your creation by setting up the correct rules for a well formed and valid reality. Imagine creating one constraint and then figuring out that had an unanticipated consequence. Is evil the result of an imperfect set of rules governing reality?

Singapore Slings!

I had a great dinner at 801 Franklin (nice restaurant in Huntsville) tonight. Good food and great company, what more can you ask for? Dawn and I have been looking forward to the meal for more than two days. All week we’ve been mentally preparing for it. Lunch was carefully selected to prepare the gastro intestinal landscape for dinner. It’s always sad when you consciously hit the high point of your week. I guess now that we have the rest of the week is downhill.

I said what more can you ask for? Well I’m greedy, so I managed to think of something.

I had some unfinished business with 801 Franklin. The last time we were there it was my birthday, when I ordered their Singapore Sling. When it came out it was a pink girly drink…but one sip and I forgave it. I’ve looked up recipes on the internet a few times since then, but nothing the net hive-mind has suggested has been nearly as tasty. This weekend I tried one recipe from a bartender handbook that included sloe gin, which I hadn’t tried before. Even though the drink recipe was a failure, as soon as I tasted the sloe gin I knew it was part of the 801 Franklin recipe. Since then I’ve been making a concerted effort to replicate the 801 Franklin Singapore sling. It has required diligent toil, every night I’ve made two Singapore Slings and recorded each attempts recipe as I’ve slowly mutated it. Tonight, after I ordered my actual 801 Franklin Singapore Sling I asked the bartender if she would mind sharing her recipe. She happily complied! It turned out that my most recent attempt was only ½ an ounce off on the sweet and sour mix. My diligent toil was paying off! I include the actual recipe here for my own future reference:

Singapore Sling
1 oz Bombay Sapphire
½ oz Sloe Gin
1 oz Sweet & Sour Mix
½ oz Cherry Brandy

I say if you’re going to drink a girly drink then at least half the ingredients should be gin based.

The Other Strangeness
On the way into work this morning I caught a fragment of a strange local news story. It simply said that the City of Huntsville had given an award for recycling to a homeless woman who lives under the I-565 overpass. That was it. No other details.

The story has been gnawing at my mind ever since. I need more details! I feel that I need to better understand her situation to know what my response to the story should be. It is suppose to be 15 degrees outside tonight. If the lady isn’t happy about being homeless then the city showing up and giving her a certificate for recycling instead of some sort of help seems like a pretty dick move. On the other hand, perhaps it’s possible that she chooses to be homeless and the city wanted to recognize her efforts anyway. It’s not like having a mailing address is some sort of requirement for civic pride. Which is it!?!?

Fortunately I found slightly more informative version of the story. The woman’s name is Missy “Lynn” Morvant. She has been living homeless in Madison County for the last 25 years. In addition to the award for recycling they also gave her a backpack full of food, condiments, and lotions. I think the most interesting part of the story is that she started recycling around her homeless camp because it “looked so trashy everywhere. It got on my nerves."

I still feel like the brief news clip could provide more details. I want to know what lead up to them deciding to give her the award. In my head I imagine someone from the city had regularly been visiting the homeless camp and one day looked around and said something like “you know what, I really like what you’ve done with the place.”

I’m sure I’m coming off as uncompassionate and cruel. I don’t mean to. I actually think it’s a pretty cool thing for the city to do. I am still just reacting to the way the story is presented. I would have thought they would have gone through the effort to provide some context, but they seem pretty cool with leaving it as a blurb with no obvious explanations. I don't think the news knew how to handle the story.

If you watch the video about the story on the link above don’t expect to see her receive the award or anything. Evidently the news folks only know one way to cover homeless people stories. It's a lot of slow pans across their tents and talking about dead cats.

A Weekend Retrospective

Things that I learned this weekend:

The difference between obscenity and profanity.

We had a discussion about the longest word or phrase that Riblet could reasonably pronounce. We decided that it was “arrow root” although Riblet would likely have trouble with the “t”. I image it would sound like “aurrooo rooo”

Watched BSG. I realized that Adama isn’t the standard bearer of reason or logic but the enabler of crazies. By selling people on dreams and blindly following the president and Starbuck’s lead…in the face of what cold hard logic would dictate… he has help lead humanity to the brink of annihilation. I now hope he dies by the crazies he so enthusiastically sowed. I doubt I’ll get my wish.

Also I keep hoping they’ll run into a whole cylon ship full of Tyclops (err maybe Tybots?). It stands to reason that if there were Tybots on Earth and back on Caprica that they have their means of transportation. I hope the humans kill Tyclops and a ship full of fractious Tybots reaps unholy vengeance on them, possibly aided by a ship of Brother Cavils. Actually, that’s how I want the show to end. Tybots and Cavils kill everyone, curtain falls.

Read an interesting argument against the probabilistic argument that there must be a God. Namely that life is so improbable that a higher intelligence must have orchestrated it. It basically hinged on the idea that following that line of logic you should always assume the lottery is rigged because the chances of a paticular person winning are so astronomical that a higher power (the lottery commission) must have orchestrated it.

We watched the “Who Killed the Electric Car” documentary. This is a pretty depressing film. Did you know in the late 90’s GM (and other major car companies) produced electric cars and leased them to people in California? People drove them around for a few years and generally like them. Many people wanted to buy the cars outright. But by 2003 the car companies had collected all the cars and crushed them. The film explores the reasons why this was done. I found it depressing because with all the talk of looking for alternative energy for transportation we’ve already successfully done it for the majority of America’s personal transportation needs. The technology exists and has been tested. The energy delivery infrastructure is in place. The film speculates that big industry is happier when alternative energy is 15-20 years away instead of in the present because that means no big changes need to happen (business as usual!!!) The future of alternative energy is perpetually 15-20 years away.

The silver lining of watching the film was learning about Stan Ovshinsky. Evidently he’s the inventor of some of my favorite things. NiMH batteries (that power cars, laptops, cameras and various gadgets), flat screen liquid crystal displays, rewritable CDs and DVDs, thin film solar panels, etc. He’s got over 400 patents, is completely self educated, and well into his 80’s and still going strong. If you see him interviewed I think you’ll find it impossible not to be caught up in his we’ll change the world and make it a better place through science and technology attitude. Check him out, he’s an amazing guy.

Humorous postscript. As GM closed their electric car lines (about the same time they introduced the Hummer) Toyota and Honda finally caught up to their technology and introduced the Hybrid Electric cars. US Car companies were there years ahead of time but decided they were a dumb business move. Ha ha. Ha ha.