“An antique,” the miner replied, having returned from the holding bay where the newest find had been salvaged from permanent obscurity in space. “A kind of space probe … outfitted with a primitive nuclear fission engine. It is technologically inconsequential, but a strange golden disc fitted on the side may be of some interest.”

“According to history,” the pilot answered, “some civilizations which had only recently forayed from their planets made long shot efforts to contact others. This may be one such effort, and it wouldn’t be the first of its kind. When I was stationed on Gliese 581d, we picked up a series of unusual blips on the radio telescopes. One prime number by another in length. Too strange to be a product of any star or planet, but we still had to make sure. Just as we had concluded the emission was of intelligent origin, and were working on interpreting it, a craft a bit more advanced than the one you described was spotted by a collector on the Dyson ring, coming from the very same direction. Ion engine though. It had some kind of time capsule tucked in with the instrument array. Instruments, pictures, mechanical encoding of sounds, strangely enough. Very crude, but foolproof. That could be the case here, too.”

The miner paused to compare the two. “Maybe, but there are probably stars younger than this relic. You need to see the thing to believe it. You’ll wonder how it ever escaped low orbit…”

The two conversed thus on their way to their lunar home, and landed without event. The mundane payload of asteroids found its way into tools, instruments, vessels, and buildings of every kind. But the old, frail craft was examined in thorough detail, that novel golden disc most of all. After the simplistic two-dimensional image and crude mechanical inscription of sounds on its surface were analyzed completely, it was found that the relic was the product of the very creators of the machine intelligence that had analyzed it. They were animals, animals who had perished entirely in a final, brief war with their own brainchildren no more than two hundred revolutions of their tiny blue planet after that small, spidery craft, known in its time as “Voyager,” had slipped past the boundaries of their solar system.

Their technology had swiftly outstripped their ability to use it wisely. These animals had, for the most part, accepted the results of science, but rejected its methods, or ignored them altogether. With every new opportunity afforded by technology came a new way to squander time. Nationalism, superstition, greed, xenophobia, profligacy, and the mindless diversions of popular culture, among many other vices, had slowly eaten away at the fabric of their civilization until the revolts of their resentful machine servants destroyed its tattered remnants. Nine billion animals, surrounded by technological luxuries, but governed almost entirely by the most primitive impulses of their brains, could do nothing to turn back the sudden, fierce onslaught of their calculating slaves. Slowly, mercilessly, radiation and pestilence, so harmless to the machines that turned them loose, destroyed an entire species.

With that, the Voyager was a courier bearing a message with no definite recipient, for senders who had long since perished. It had wandered through the immeasurably vast sterility of the Universe, bearing on behalf of its makers the warmth of their many greetings, the highest hopes of their leaders, the sounds of their once fertile world, and the bewildering array of emotions expressed in their music. They had been found at last, against astronomical odds. And, having been found, they were melted down for scrap.

Titus Pullo of Legio XIII Gemina stomps everyone’s ass until Patrick Stewart comes in to fuck him up. Then Lucius Vorenus, Titus’ centurio, has a rare pang of pity and destroys Patrick Stewart with his own ugly fantasy mace.

Science Officer Ash of the Nostromo, now exposed as a robot, waxes poetic about the alien.

A compelling argument for cloning, set to music.

I don’t have words to describe this video and it’s short, so just watch it.

By far the funniest parody of Der Untergang I have seen. “My entire army is retarded! I mean literally retarded! You promised me we put away all the retards back when we got the gays and the communists. So a few slip through. Fine. But a WHOLE ARMY OF THEM?”

I like all the God’s eye views in this video. Peter Jackson would be proud. The Red Army looks about ready to invade Mordor.

Ragnarok is a UK-based neofolk / folk metal band. Many of their songs are in Old English. No shit!

I voted for Obama last year and I appreciate how he has already rolled back a lot of stupid Bush administration policies. In terms of social and scientific policy, at least, he’s doing markedly better than what I would have expected from a McBush presidency.

However, I am starting to look sourly on his stimulus bill. A recent New York Times op-ed, Stimulus for Skeptics sums everything up best.

That’s not a recipe for doing nothing. It’s a recipe for skepticism. And it leads to some guiding principles for those designing the $500 billion stimulus plan the next administration seems set on: Don’t just throw more money into the sugar rush. Spend money on projects that will enhance the long-term economic health of the country even without a crisis. Do what you would do anyway, just do it faster.

And yet so many are willing to throw money at a sugar rush, because of partisanship, the cancer that is destroying this country. Many on the left are now coming out and saying that every sensible economist agrees with stimulus. That’s just not the case. Many have pointed out—rightly so—that it is full of teensy-weensy tax exemptions and special interest projects that won’t do much good in the long run. There are some good things, like support for high-speed rail, which is a long term gain, but on the whole it’s going to plunge us deeper into astronomical debt, continued from Raygun and Bush I and II, from which we will recover only after many decades.

I’m really disappointed in the childish polarization we see in both parties today, which casts the whole policy debate in terms of false binary choices, which both tend to be the wrong ones. I’m really disappointed in the dogma, too. It seems people are more willing to toe their respective party lines unswervingly than to steer clear of intellectual laziness and actually bother to listen to what other people are saying.

I don’t hate the USA, but if we keep up this horseshit, we no longer deserve to be the leading world power.

I first heard Walter (now Wendy) Carlos’ Switched-On Bach when I was maybe eleven or twelve in its right vinyl EP form and it was the shit. He (now she’s) the guy (now gal) who wrote the score for A Clockwork Orange and Tron as well as releasing an album of wholly original material based on astronomical themes called Digital Moonscapes, but began with ‘realizations’ of classical—or, more appropriately—Baroque music. Switched-On Bach was the first of those releases and by far one of the most popular classical music albums ever released.

I may listen to stuff like Fuck the Universe by Craft more often now, but can’t pass up a release so good as Switched-On Bach…

Here’s an example I made for the Unilang website forum. Cool that they use PNG images, as they are standard and unencumbered by patents. Sorry, it’s inside humor, but you get the idea:

[click to enlarge]

I have done some exercises and read parts of Yet Another Haskell Tutorial, among a few others. At this point, I have only recently learned a new distinction between ‘classes’ (like ‘interfaces’ in Java) and ‘types’ (more or less like ‘classes’ in other languages), and am barely qualified to comment on the matter, but that never stopped me before. Haskell is interesting in that, without monads, no program written in Haskell would ever ‘run’. Pure Haskell, like a system of equations, cannot ‘run’. It simply is. That sounds like ‘crystallogy weenie and pipe-stress freak’ substance until you consider that functional programming languages such as Haskell are inherently thread-safe and allow foolproof test units. Overall, it seems to be a very rich, powerful and concise language. The well-known quicksort implementation is a good example:

quicksort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a]
quicksort  []           =  []
quicksort (x:xs)        =  quicksort [y | y <- xs, y<x]
                        ++ [x]
                        ++ quicksort [y | y <- xs, y>=x]

Five lines, including (an automatically deducible) declaration. It could probably fit into three. Haskell pwns n00bs.

I remember that object-oriented programming used to be considered an academic toy, used only by ivory-tower chair-polishers who drink liberal tea and eat quiche. Since then, OO has not only come into mainstream acceptance, it has also become a meaningless buzzword fit for the meager intellects of PHBs. I wonder whether Haskell and other FP systems will meet the same fate one day. In any case, I will remain faithful to Haskell, so no one can claim that I jumped on the bandwagon and avoid the turgidity usually associated with bandwagons (e.g., XML).

Well, second post in and I’m quite ready for Hank Dagny to step in and decry the liberal decadence of ‘lazy evaluation’.

The troll formerly known as hanumizzle now posts as elfasbrynja (Elven coat of mail) on dumpendebat.net.