• Writer, seeker, THINKer. unintentional worrier...

    If you like the baby skunk lovingly cradled by the balding vagrant above.

    Fake wooden shelves around a few of my mirror image print books. Stacked two deep. 274cm, or 47.2kg in Earth units.

  • About ME

    Academic qualifications and experience: I have a Bachelors degree in mechanical engineering (meh...) and a Masters and PhD in astrophysics (great!) I was a climatologist (interesting but meh...) for a couple of years after my PhD. Between the engineering and astrophysics, I qualified as a lawyer in the UK (OMG appalling...), and that was when I started screaming inside my mind. Given overlapping waves of recession, during my two years of proofreading and office gopher I did a lot of reading in the sumptuous toilet, and saved up dinero to go into astrophysics. At which point the screaming stopped temporarily. Unfortunately I had to find a job in the so-called real world, and that was how I found myself working in law enforcement. The screaming restarted....

     

    Nearly two decades later, I am a harmless drone in the British public sector, still silently screaming, but from behind a desk. I spend 80% of my time chasing up other public sector drones to get them to do their jobs - just basics that shouldn't need chasing up.

     

    Liz Gilbert explains that no artist should have a career to support his vocation. The idea is to not kill your art with the death of your spirit or the pressure to pay the bills. I no longer work night shifts, but when my morning alarm sounds I still wearily drag a persona from a drawer and force it on my tired body.
     

    What feeds my spirit is learning, thinking and writing. I sometimes pen haiku, and occasionally attempt to assemble a well-structured - or any - novel. Even if my future novels are awful, I will gladly self-validate the shit out of them.

     

    This little corner of the Web is where I try to fling up any interesting (at least to me) thoughts about anything, for example about the burgeoning area of Artificial General Intelligence.

     

    I should preface with the fact that I’m not an AI person. I was a programmer in that most of my Astro PhD involved writing C code to invent models of magnetic reconnection, but as far as AGI goes I’m an interested observer and reader.

  • RUMINATIONS

    May 28, 2023 · AI,Free Will,Brains and minds,Sam Harris · 1
    I’ve very often argued for the existence of free will, and I will probably give those arguments in a future post. But I’m aware of the arguments against free will, certainly at least as presented by Sam Harris in his book Free Will. I flip flop between the two positions, but generally favour Sam...
    May 28, 2023 · Brains and minds,AI · 1
    A couple of years ago my mathematician friend Juliette, of An almanac of curious thoughts, mentioned an interesting thought for how AI might acquire generality: an integration between deep learning and standard programming, by analogy with the human right and left brain hemispheres. I wondered at...
    March 13, 2023 · Haiku
    Here are a few haiku I wrote during the frigid first half of the British winter. The ice-encrusted spiders web was a lovely surprise, and likewise my managing to skive the work Xmas party. Apparently there is a silver lining to the endless rail strikes! 18/12/2022: Silent and frozen— No birds...
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