Re: New Pi 5 (Diversity - good or bad ?)

On 1/16/25 10:57 AM, D wrote:

  On Thu, 16 Jan 2025, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
 

On 1/15/25 4:13 AM, D wrote:

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On Wed, 15 Jan 2025, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
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On 2025-01-14, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
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On Mon, 13 Jan 2025, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
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 I think it was rbowman I was talking to - the
 boss wanted 'muzak' for the office. So, I took
 an old Pi-1/256mb and a few long muzak tracks
 from 70s shopping malls and sneaked the wiring
 into the PA system. The tracks rotate every
 month. Worked for a dozen years and likely STILL
 does - so long as none of the muzak haters FIND
 the thing.
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 There was about an inch behind where the PBX system
 was ... so I velcroed the unit to the back of the
 PBX box where it's almost perfectly invisible  :-)
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 Proper muzak - you shouldn't actually HEAR it unless
 you TRY. Keeps some little corner of the brain occupied
 and, according to some, thus actually improves performance
 on other tasks.

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It could very well become the last piece of operating machinery on planet
earth. Could you imagine the sun expanding, swallowing the earth while
your little muzak machine plays the perfect muzak for the event? ;)

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That reminds me of the end of the post-acopalytic novel _Level 7_,
by Mordecai Roshwald.

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Sigh... makes one despair of ever writing an original science fiction novel! =(

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 Hard to do now ... most everything will derive from
 many other existing sources/premises even if you try
 to avoid it. Kinda like rock/pop now ... last even
 remotely 'different' sound was 'grunge' - and that
 was 'remotely'.

 Hmm, I think going full circle is then the way to go. Dig up a concept that has been forgotten for a 100 years or so, and perhaps it will be nice and fresh! ;)

   Not a bad idea - although even using that would ultimately
   be 'derivative'.
   There was some good pop music 100+ ago - including early
   jazz/blues adaptations like 'ragtime'. COULD be kinda
   punched-up.
   Humans are 'creative' - but not infinitely creative.
   Once in a while we'll hit on something 'new' - but,
   due to exposure/recordings that's getting more rare.
   I recall Paul Simon going to Africa in order to find
   some 'new' sounds. Some of it worked, some didn't.

Two books on that theme are Flatland which is about a 2d world and adding a few dimensions instead, there was a book by Greg Egan I think, which was about uploaded virtual entities. Cannot remember the name at the moment. I like that concept! I'm currently watching season 2 of pantheon, and it's going downhill. In the virtual world they are using way too many physical shortcuts to illustrate fights etc. It can of course be argued that the brains of the virtual entities have not yet adapter, but I think that's a lazy excuse. It would be interesting to think about if it would be possible to represent virtual uploaded entities in a way that might make them seem more native to their world, instead of just reusing our physical world for easy comprehension.

   "FlatLand" is one of my faves. A much later writer did
   "SphereLand" - delving into four dimensions.
   What does a passing hypersphere look like ... like a
   dot, then a bigger and bigger sphere - then a smaller
   and smaller sphere - disappearing as a dot  :-)
   You'll have to look it up ... there was an author,
   late 19th or early 20th, who made a book mostly
   full of figures/drawings he claimed - after close
   study - would help people wrap their brains around
   4th dimensional shapes.

 Someone from Pink Floyd once commented that the reason
 their music sounded so "different" was mostly because
 their skills with their instruments was initially SO
 poor - they COULDN'T emulate the popular bands  :-)
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 Something really new - beyond 'space' and 'multiverses',
 'galactic empires', dubious 'time travel' and 'AI' - will
 have to be on the horizon before sci-fi can move up a notch.
 All that stuff is old and creaky and over-exploited.

 Easy! Meta-multiverse,

   I call that "hyper-verse" or "poly-verse". We can more
   easily imagine many, maybe millions, of other universes
   spawned at the same time as ours, separate only by 4-D
   barriers. But what if there are entire TREES of those,
   no tree even remotely connected/nearby OUR tree ???
   3.x-D universes smell of some kind of leak/defect/bubble
   in the 10+ dimensional matrix. Kinda like a pot of
   water on a stove, the 10-D starts making lower-D
   "bubbles". Probably won't last forever, but forever
   IS a kinda long time.
   Where'd the 10+ D come from ? Dunno. Don't really
   care. 'Causality' may mean nothing there. Best
   to just say it IS there and if it wasn't then we
   wouldn't be asking stupid questions.
   Turtles all the way down .......

that's where the fun will be! Multiverse is for nerds! ;) Teilhardt de Jardin (or however it is spelled) tried a nice merge of spirituality and sci fi, and I just finished reading Radio free albemuth which had a nice sci fi take on christianity. Was interesting to read up on the story that parts of it are actually auto biographical from the point of view of Philip K. Dick.

   Not into 'spiritual' stuff since I was like 9. Had
   one of those 'epiphany' things where all the whirring
   bits momentarily fall in line and you can see through
   to the (relatively boring/unromantic) truth.