S = k ln W

Herr B's gravestone in Vienna, Austria

The title of this essay is the Boltzmann equation. It is carved upon his gravestone in the same cemetery where Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and the Strauss family are also buried.  The form of the equation inscribed on his tomb was actually first written by Max Planck, but that's fine as the original equation written in 1872 by Herr B contains partial derivatives which are hard to carve in stone.

The terms such that where S is the entropy of a system, it can be described by the Boltzmann Constant k (1.38067 joules per degree kelvin) multiplied by natural logarithm of W, which is the number of states accessible to that system.

In plain English, the entropy of a system is determined by the number of ways that the system's components can be arranged. If we are dealing with a gas, it is the number of ways the gas particles can float around, interact, and collide with each other. It's a very, very, very, very large number of ways, so to get the numbers into a manageable form (read small numbers small enough for tiny brains to handle), you take the logarithm of it. This equation links entropy to probability. And, in a roundabout fashion I have no time to explicate, it also has something to do with thermodynamics, and the so-called 2nd Law.

Yeah, and so what? Well, this equation, along with Boltzmann's contribution of a statistical approach to the kinetic theory of gases, and still more, supplies the very broad shoulders that allow Max Planck et al to stand upon. It pointed the way for the development of Quantum Mechanics - by far the most successful set of theories ever developed.

And there's more. Once the American electrical engineer, Claude Shannon, grabbed ahold of Boltzmann's concepts, and developed his own version of Herr B's H-function and the term entropy, then the whole field of information theory opened up. (Although it should be noted that Mr. Shannon's claim that information theoretic entropy is the same as statistical entropy is in dispute in some circles).

Finally we get to the weird stuff. When Shannon investigated the informational aspects of communications,  he found that a message transmitted with optimal efficiency over a channel of limited bandwidth looks exactly like random noise. Not surprising when you think about it. A message with the largest choice of arrangements will have the highest probability of not being degraded in all arrangements. So, the more random, the more likely to get through (whatever it is, noise, interference, etc.)

Not to be confused with...

Black-body power curve

When applied to a message broadcast over the electromagnetic spectrum (i.e. using an EM transmission medium) the most information-efficient format is indistinguishable from noise or 'static' (or, if you prefer, it will resemble black-body radiation).  

Okay. And um, so...? So, uh, what do we know is all static? Shit on the TV? How about quasars? OR the cosmic microwave background? Could it be we are getting messages beamed to us all the time, and we are just too stupid to figure it out?

(Oh, as far as my contention that intelligence as such does not exist? That stupidity is a real universal force. And that, just as 'cold' is the absence of heat, so  'intelligence' is the absence of stupid, well, I do really need to go on? Like Shannon entropy, there are very few ways to do the smart thing, but a very, very, very, very large number of ways to fuck things up. QED).

What if they held a Singularity, and nobody came?

Brain Injury Map: I think I took a hit to the Phonics

It's apocryphal and no doubt bullshit, but I once heard that you lose 10 IQ points every time you suffer a concussion.

Which means I am one knock on the head away from being a chipmunk. I'll be looking to squirrels and birds for advice after the next one.

This essay may actually come close to being a random walk. Not because I've suffered a concussion and can't think properly, but because I've four or five topics I want to cover and can't decide. I 'll just split this up into a number of essays. I guess that would the logical thing to do, but...

I got a big old knot right behind my left ear from slipping and falling on ice and planting my head right onto a metal stair rail.

It fucking hurt.

I mean, the kind of hurt where all you can do is just sit there and make that the spittle inhale sound and and a "AHH!" exhale, and let the entire universe revolve around that hot spot of pain. The kind of hurt where you've got to wait at least a minute before the profanity starts up. The kind of hurt where if someone asks you if you are OK, you tell them the truth. "No, I'm not OK, you stupid asshole!"

I'm guessing that big old bump is right above the superior temporal sulcus. Judging from the brain injury map, I really don't need to have this area damaged again, and I'll tell you why.

When I was in the 4th grade, I had really a bad fever. And when I came out of it and got back to school, the teacher noticed I was talking louder than normal. They brought in the hearing test guy, Mr. Carpenter. Mr. Carpenter determined that I had a hearing loss, specifically in the upper registers, from nerve damage. The damage made it difficult to understand conversation, especially with background noise. Later, after realizing I could not understand song lyrics on the radio, I suspected the nerve damage had been more than just loss of the ability to hear higher frequencies, but that I had difficulty recognizing word sounds. In other words, the damaged area wasn't the nerves in the ear, but in the brain. I've often wondered what an fMRI would reveal? A dead zone?

In any case, this, plus an ability to think only with pictures, makes me suspect that language is overrated.

But that's not what I want to talk about.

Recently, Paul Allen thinks that Ray Kurzweil is dead wrong about the Singularity. Ray Kurzweil, in turn, thinks that Paul Allen does not have the first clue, and that the Singularity is still on schedule to occur on or about 2045.

Personally, Kurzweil's personal quest for uploading suggests to me that he does not get laid often enough. Not that I think he's hopelessly wretched, but rather he lives too much up inside his head. Ray is so concerned about the mind is brain metaphor that he forgets that the mind is the body, not just the brain.

Here's the deal. For the past few months, I've changed my workouts to include a lot more core exercises. You know, working on the trunk, the abs, obliques, back and buttocks. And I must say, my core is vastly improved. So much so, that I am quite the fucking machine. Working on all those muscles down in that area have really got me in shape for that kind of activity.

Hmm, not really sure if I'm getting this across properly.

Now, that there's some fancy fucking

Let's take one back extension exercise, designed to improve the lower back, which basically sets you up to fuck a Swiss ball. Not only fucking, but, with your hands behind your head, some professional porn Olympics fancy fucking. That type of activity, where you are doing much more than just the mechanical motion, but paying close attention to the form, the experience of the form, the experience of the motion, the experience of the combination of pain and pleasure, effort, and exertion, that type of activity is what Life is all about. How Life should be lived. Aware and active. Not that Zen Buddha detached bullshit. But a whole body and mind involved experience - wallowing like a pig in mud in the world, the flesh, and all the iterated reflections thereof and thereupon.

If Kurzweil thinks he can just do a physical scan of his brain, his connectome, his chemical orchestration, and leave it that, why, I suspect he ends up a head in a jar. In other words, he is more than just his brain, he is brain  plus body, plus experiences, plus memory, plus life. And quite frankly, I suspect if you want to be able to handle experiences as esoteric and fulfilling in an uploaded computer state, you should at least completely replicate that wonderful whole body experience of fucking.

But that's not what I want to talk about.

The one assumption I've noticed about the Vingean or Kurzweillian Singularity is that they require superintelligent computers to be created for it all to go down.

I question that assumption. It strikes me as unnecessary. My current working definition of the Singularity is, quite simply: "All bets are off". In other words, you cannot predict the after from the before.

Example: Life. Before life occurred on planet Earth, you had inorganic chemical processes occurring. True, they could be complicated. True, they may or may not have had feedback loops. But the thing is, there was probably (can't say for sure, wasn't there) did not have metabolism, or balanced disequilibria, or replication, or reproduction, or any of those things that we characterize as Life. and then afterwards, however the hell it happened, you have, wow, all that amazing shit, that organic chemistry we call Life. Before, dead as hell and boring. Afterwards, trending from the before, why, not a clue, not a hint.

Didn't. See. That. Coming. No. Sir. Ree.

Ah, question. Any intelligent design involved in that? I'm betting no.

So, why the need for hyperintelligence now for the next big thing?

Working Untitle

I eventually come up with titles for all my artworks. I don't like "Untitled". To me, it suggests you really don't give a shit about what you made. Maybe that's why I rarely give a shit for pieces titled "Untitled".

In any case, more raw footage of the... whatever this is going to be. I have fifteen of the little hairy sperm bacteria done, with five more that need repairs and finishing. The metal froze out before filling the forms, and so I have to fashion little hairs and tails for the guys, weld them on, and then grind them to be seamless with the rest of the piece. The barrel-shaped bacteria I am done with. And I like the way they are arranged. So, approximately 30% of the whole project is done. the other 70% is presentation. that's going to take awhile to figure out.

I punched in my signature on all of the pieces. This is what it looks like, a reverse "JK", courtesy of good old "Proudly made in the USA" American quality control and assurance. The punch set I got had the letter J backwards. Makes me look forwards to synthetic biology and nanotech. I wonder what they'll fuck up with that?

In any, case, long day for me. I finished burning out all of the ceramic shells for the molten metal pour tomorrow, Saturday the 12th. The students around really hot stuff element of the class is, for me, nto that big of a deal. I herd them pretty well. The really nerve-wracking day of the semester will be the Monday evening class when they start cutting and grinding metal. Sparks will fly right into an eye. I will be constantly yelling at people to wear their safety gear.

I realized just now that the whole class would be a lot easier and faster if I just did all the work for them. But then, it's not life enriching, is it?

Design Freeze

Briefly, because I have worked a 12 hour day and want to go home and take a shower. Get the smell of sweat and copper off me.

But I feel need to share what the manic/depressive cycle of art making has currently churned out. And it is a manic/depressive cycle for me. Two very dry years, and now, all of a sudden, I've no time at all to anything but make art. And it doesn't help that my regular job is getting in the way.

A number of years ago, we at the college were fortunate enough to have a fellow named Dan Lane who made art here. He used to teach at the Art Institute of Chicago, doing illustration and design. He was retired when I met him, making all sorts of interesting shadow boxes and things out of, well, pretty much anything that came to hand.

Dan was my hero.

Eighty-eight years old at the very end, and still cranking out art, and the art he was making was just... kicking ... my ass.

When his wife died, I figured, well, that's it. Dan has got a few months in him, and like all old birds that lose their mate, he'll fall off the cliff. That seems to be the way it is with men. They just fall off the cliff.

Women linger. They lose their husbands, and they just keep going. So Dan was a surprise. He managed a good two years past his wife's death.

Of course, eventually he slowed down, and then he started to stop eating. I tried to make him eat. I'd bring soup and bread from the school cafeteria, which makes really good soup and chili.  I'd always make sure there was lots of butter for the bread. And after a while, he wouldn't eat it. He was ready to die, and I was trying to make him live. He got mad at me about that. So, after awhile, I realized how selfish I was, and I succumbed to his wishes.

Other people tried to keep him alive, but then he died.

Anyway, I remember a story he told me about a student he had at SAIC who he said was just brilliant. The kid was a natural, a visual genius, and could just crank out the most spectacular designs, and there was a bright future ahead for him. And then the kid froze. He got so tangled up and fussy that eventually he couldn't even produce a design. He would just stare at blank paper. And that was the end of the kid's art career. He was afraid to produce anything that wasn't perfect.

Now, reason I mention this is I think that is what I've been going through the past two years. Part of the problem at least. The dry spell has been a case design freeze. Failure to launch. So, now, having at least recognized this particular problem (and who knows what the next kink in the knot will be), I am trying to crank out as much shit as I can, and not worry to much about whether it's good or not, or been done before, or is original, or what have. Because if it is any of those things, why, I can just recycle the metal and start over.

So, I've been casting metal like crazy all week, to get my stuff out of the way (in anticipation of the class molten metal pour this coming Saturday), and trying to grind, sand, and patina bronze pieces. I still have about thirty pieces to go, and how to present them and all that stuff.

But anyway, here is the raw footage of some of the stuff, presented without further comment.

 

Catalog this one under "Ee-yeww"

I've spent all day burning out wax from the student pieces for bronze class. The class starts in fifteen minutes, and I've gotten through the last batch, which looked like this in the kiln:















We have metal tray filled with water underneath the kiln to reclaim wax, this is what was in the tray:

Yeah, eww. That is all the red extruded tube wax. I think I will hold on to it, and maybe wear it under my shirt to show off.

We are the 99%...

... if by 99% you mean percentage of species now extinct, and you add the qualifier 'eventually'.

There are days when I think, "You know what? We're fucked. We are just circling the drain". This is one of those days, and not for any particular circumstance or feeling or mood, but more on just a specific influx of information.

Now, does this mean I give up? No way. I think that whatever hope that died years ago with the realization that we have probably trashed the planet past the point where it will support us in the manner we (we being Americans, of course) are accustomed to, that hope has been replaced with a stubborn cussedness. I just heave a big old sigh and just wait to see how bad bad can get.

And when I say "trashed the planet", this is not to say we've trashed the planet. Far from it. Planet's a mean old monster, shake us off like a bad case of fleas (as George Carlin once said). Or, more if you prefer your Will Durant: "Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice".

And when I say "trashed the planet", this is not to say we as a species are threatened with extinction. Far from it. We are an opportunistic omnivorous generalist species. Things will have to get really, really bad to wipe us all out.

When I say "trashed the planet", this is to say that we have just completely fucking trashed our rental apartment, punched holes in walls, allowed bathtubs to overflow, strewn empties in corners, smeared feces in rugs, pissed on the couch during naps, set carpets ablaze, and, in short, and we won't receiving any of our deposit back.

So what put me into such a wonderful mood? For starters, it might be this quote, from Richard Ellis, author of Hive Mind:

People believe in their hearts that a piece of raw fish is worth $600 a plate. And one of the main reasons it's worth $600 is because you can afford it and I can't, but they can. That makes it very special, and it makes the people who eat it special. Any kind of luxury goods largely come from that sort of statement: I can afford it, and you can't. I'll drive a Maserati, even if I can't drive it faster than 65 miles per hour in most of the United States. I can afford a $280,000 car, and you're stuck with a Dodge Neon. I can fly a private jet, drive a Maserati, do anything I bloody well please, including having a $600 piece of fish. And you can't. And this is the brutal truth: bluefin, which beyond their intrinsic value as living creatures happen to be one of the universe's more majestic species, a Platonic ideal of oceanic speed and grace, aren't being extinguished by greed. They're being sacrificed to our vanity, pretension, and ostentation - most pathetic of  our vices.

Ellis is talking about the bluefin tuna, overfished to the brink of extinction. Given that it is a much prized delicacy, the sensible thing to do would be to quit fucking fishing it and give the population a chance to recover, but instead its rarity puts into even greater demand.

We are told (although there is some debate going on) that Comet Chicxulub wiped out the dinosaurs. Comet Chicxulub is estimated to have had the explosive power of a hundred trillion tons of TNT.

There are larger impact craters. The Sudbury crater in Canada is twice as big, and impact that created the Vredefort Crater in South Africa - the largest verified impact crater - is estimated to have been ten times Chicxulub.

Sudbury and Vredefort both occurred some two billion years ago, back when nothing much was happening here anyway. It was "just" microbes back then, and nothing much happened to them.

(Actually, more and more evidence is being compiled that these impact events really didn't do much in the way of hurting the planet. One wonders exactly how much of an effect the rather pathetic mere gigatons of the world's combined nuclear arsenals would have. And the answer is, we'd get our hair mussed, but the hysterics of all life wiped out is a bit much).

So what do you need to get a really good extinction event going? Well, not counting the disappearance of Ice Age megafauna to hunter/gatherers (and to be fair, you can't rule out climate change as a factor), you have to go with agriculturalists. The last ten thousand years have seen an increasingly rapid extinction rate that is unparalleled in the fossil record. Yes, even the Permian-Triassic extinction event, the Mother of all Extinction Events is getting a run for it's money.

And it's all due to, global nuclear war? Supervolcanoes? Hyper greenhouse event from giant burps of methane ice? Comet strike? Nope, little old us. With our land clearing, our pets, our vermin, our diseases, our pests. 

Is it too late? There are days when I think, nope, we got maybe a decent chance. Maybe, if we can pull our heads out of asses, we can turn things around.

BUT, they are very specific heads pulled out of very specific asses that are needed, and this may require massive surgical intervention.

Then there are days, like today, when I think, nope, the turning point was August 14th, 1975. That was the perigee of our existence, and everything after that is a let down.

I could be wrong. Check back with me tomorrow. Because there is that stupid intense little gamma ray burst of cheerfulness stubbornly wedged in the center of my soul, even on days like this.

From Wax to Bronze

Wax  pieces rigged up on a tree

Dipped in a ceramic slurry, and covered in fused silica stucco sand. 

 Second dip and sand coating, and three or four more to go.

 Inside the burnout kiln.

 Closeup of the burned out ceramic shells in kiln.

Ceramic shells in the pouring box

Me and student aide Vicki removing crucible from furnace with tongs (bronze temp is 2058F, and note nonchalant handling of crucible with one hand)

Placing the crucible in the pouring yoke

Set up to pour with the yoke

Pouring into the first shell

Pouring into the second shell

Closeup of pour

I never get tired of looking at molten metal

Success. All three pieces poured without mishap. Soon we will find out went wrong...

Nothing wrong here, but it is the first thing I ask. You know, not, let's see if there is a pony in there.

Ah, here's something wrong. The sperm tails froze out early. Note to self, add blind vents to tails on next waxes.

Again with the freeze out on tails, and the pili as well

You get the idea. There are 10,000 hideous things that can happen inside a mold.

Cut off the tree, sandblasted, and note the heat tear (the jagged crack) at the base of the sperm tail. This will have to be gouged out and welded.