Emulation and experiencing time

Now some experiments purport to show that time is not linear, it does not exist, or worse. It might be that not our world is emulated (think matrix) but that our own OS (HS, for Homo Sapiens) is running on older foundations foisted upon us by evolution.

Think of what people do: they build emulators. Actually the whole of computing is mostly building simulators or emulators. You might think your Core 2 Dual is fast, but actually it is mostly a simulator for some old electronic calculator instruction set. What it actually can do is shown by other processors, but the fact that they are not popular underscores my point in a way.

Now what can we learn if we reflect upon emulators, simulators and other layered implementations? Some things run bad because they are constrained by the underlying layer, like I/O and access to other serialized resources. Emulators greatly benefit from some hardware assist. Especially timing issues identify running in the emulation layer. Aha.

Now it would be interesting to devise how our conscience runs on a lower layer inherited from the primates and earlier, how we employ our own abstractions and how we are limited by the platform. We should also specify what can run on our platform and how to get rid of the constraints it puts upon future systems.

Wrap Rage

Some packaging is so impenetrable that you can either open it by using tools and destroying the content or, alternatively, using your hands and hurting yourself. Some batteries and ethernet cables are so tightly sealed that you have to ask yourself if they really are meant to be used.

There used to be a flu medicine called AntiGrippine that was so hard to open that in case you really had the flu, you could not do it. Some mouthwash bottles have childproof caps that are so hard to twist off that they rightly can be considered adultproof.

I was so happy to discover that ER units in hospitals coined the word Wrap Rage for the process in which people hurt themselves because they cannot open packaging. We are not alone.

Tokyo dreams

Last nights dreams contained some graphic imagery of tokyo (cinemato-graphic that is, as i never was there while awake).

The first image that i remember are the diagonal pedestrian crossings, that must be lost footage in translation as i saw bright colors and neon, that give rise to six streams of people crossing the streets and each other. Unfortunately, I lost someone somewhere in the
crowd.

The other is an endless looping of Tokyo highways with lots of over-, and underpasses respectively. This was all black and white so it must be footage from Tarkovski' Solaris.

Somewhere around 69 or early 70 Tarkovski went to Japan to shoot futuristic scenes at the world fair in Tokyo; they were bogged down through Soviet bureaucracy and arrived late (of course), when it was already closed down. so he went for shots of the Tokyo transit system, which must already have been quite a future shock for contemporary Russians.

Sometimes I do wonder how one can dream that vividly about places one never was. And maybe never will be.

EN is a Language Code

So EN is the 2 character ISO Code for English - I could have called it UK or US but actually I am a native speaker of neither.

We won't go into Sapir-Whorf or Quine just now, but some of my thoughts are easier expressed in English - prolonged exposure does that to you. So sorry mum - it could not be helped. I also plan to have a blog in Papiamento (for which no 2-character code exists, so it's going to be cosmosgrammaticus.pap - and I guess that's even less understandable than English - but so much nicer for South America and other romance language people.