chairman K

intellectual property

2010-03-10T13:52:00.001-08:00

File a patent for a method to algorithmically generate frivolous patent applications.

dynastic inheritance of wealth

2010-02-21T12:24:00.000-08:00

Royal families bury their dead with treasure so that their descendants can loot the tombs.

robot fantasy

2009-06-03T01:22:00.000-07:00

Imagine that you are walking down the sidewalk and you decide to sit down and a supersonic hovercraft is rapidly assembled around your body by billions of caressing robotic arms that spring forth from the sidewalk and then you are hurtled to your destination and while you stand up on a foreign sidewalk the hovercraft disassembles itself and sinks into the sidewalk.

Imagine walking on tall stilts made of billions of articulated robotic joints: two mechanical trees which are, themselves, walking according to an exquisite algorithm that lets you feel as though you are walking on an invisible sidewalk suspended in the air.

idolatry

2009-04-07T11:41:00.001-07:00

An idol is a body without a voice. God is a voice without a body. Scripture is God's voice made into an idol. Scripturalism is the sublimated triumph of idolatry. The tablets of the law replaced the golden calf.

When Ezekiel ate the scroll given to him by God, he reenacted the destruction of the golden calf and the drinking of its ashes.

Seeing is a kind of mental idolatry; what is seen is not reality, but only an internally-generated image. This is why it is terrible to see the face of God. The divine punishment for idolatry is, of course, death.

Why did Moses not die when he faced God?

Satan

2009-01-17T18:30:00.000-08:00

Dr. K. and I speculated about the nature of Satan over lunch. According to descriptions in canonical and apocryphal literature, Satan has the following properties:

Satan is elusive. He has appeared in various forms in different parts of the world throughout history.

Satan has access to our inner mental phenomena and can tempt us to engage in evil behaviors.

Satan has the power to promote world-historical catastrophes.

We propose a model for Satan that explains these observed properties.

Satan is a distributed parasitic intelligence; a botnet comprised of sentient minds; an endemic, extremely contagious spyware virus. Satan steals computational cycles to run unauthorized processes and can read/write protected locations in memory. Most infected individuals notice glitchy behavior (for example, a seductive voice in their minds) and slowdown of performance, but many are unaware that these symptoms are caused by Satan. In rare individuals, the infection is so heavy so that Satan causes a system shutdown, followed by rootkit installation (demonic possession). Good security policies and anti-virus software (distributed by the Church) can patch backdoor vulnerabilities, but Satan can never be completely scrubbed from our brains, and even if disinfection were possible, re-infection would occur immediately due to contaminated data traffic from other individuals. Because he resides on a huge network of brains (all of humanity), the computational performance of the Satanic botnet exceeds that of any human institution. This explains his capacity to inflict cosmic malefaction upon the world.

addiction and infotaxis

2009-01-17T18:01:00.000-08:00

Human brains are not adapted to cope with a superabundance of information. Like purified recreational drugs and the processed foodstuffs of industrial agriculture, the Internet saturates the brain's built-in hedonic circuitry, leading to addiction. We are Internet addicts.

We adapt our lifestyles to follow gradients of information. We choose to live in cities that are deeply wired into global telecommunications networks. We pursue careers that allow us to spend our workday hours on the Internet (e.g. academia, media, information technology). We preferentially associate with friends and sexual partners who are always online and available for instant-messaging; the Internet subsumes our most intimate social interactions. We relentlessly multitask to maximize the flow of information; sometimes even the basic processes of life (sleep, eating, excretion, sex, etc.) are scheduled with lower priority.

The Internet addict worries: What is the distribution of information in social space? How do I find the peaks of this distribution, and how do I follow those peaks as they shift over time? What is a search strategy that exhibits good mixing, so that I avoid getting stuck around a single local mode of the distribution?

infosthetics

2008-07-13T09:47:00.000-07:00

A fluid mosaic visualization of correlations in a securities market: Represent each security as a particle floating on the surface of a sphere. The particles collide with each other and undergo lateral diffusion in a viscous medium. Particles which exhibit correlated fluctuations in price are attracted to each other; particles which exhibit anti-correlated fluctuations in price are repelled. Let the system of particles evolve, and observe the resulting "rafts" of clustered particles on the surface of the sphere.

A neuroimaging art installation: A volunteer sits in a chair in a magnetically shielded room and has an MEG recording array positioned around her skull. In an art gallery at a remote location, there is an array of loudspeakers mounted on a dome-like ceiling. Each loudspeaker corresponds to a SQUID recording channel; the recorded signal is invertibly transformed so that it is audible and not noxious to listen to. Visitors to the art gallery listen to the far-away volunteer's brain activity. Does it sound like music?

IM transcripts: Concatenate all transcripts of instant-messaging conversations between two friends and print them in a dense monospace typeface on a long continuous paper scroll. The lines of text are broken only when there are return carriages in the IM transcripts; the scroll is wide enough to accommodate, without wrapping, the longest line of text anywhere in the trancripts. Mount this scroll sideways so that it wraps around the walls of an art gallery. The length of each line of text becomes the height of a time-varying signal.

Point-process statistics of insemination: Record every single time that a man ejaculates inside a woman's vagina during unprotected sex. What does this time series look like over a lifetime? How is it correlated to the woman's ovulation cycle?

Point-process statistics of war: Mount a GPS logging device and camera on every single rifle in Iraq that belongs to the United States government. Record every single time and location that each rifle is fired, and capture an image of whatever the rifle is being pointed at.

trust

2008-05-01T13:29:00.001-07:00

If you trust me, then I will behave myself in a trustworthy manner. If you respect my freedom, then I will be faultlessly loyal to you.

If you subject me to humiliating surveillance, then I will be secretive and unaccountable. If you regard me with jealous suspicion, then I will wantonly cheat on you.

Trust begets fidelity. Distrust begets defiance.

love = sex

2008-05-01T13:27:00.001-07:00

Sex is love and love is sex.

Anyone who denies this truth is your enemy and does not want you to be happy.

greed

2008-02-12T23:17:00.000-08:00

Making money is fun.

It is illegal to pay for votes. But is it legal for a corporation which employs many people to issue official company positions on electoral outcomes? What if a corporation is under political pressure, and it rallies its employees to vote the company line by telling them that the corporation will go under - and the employees will lose their jobs - unless the company-supported candidates win the next election? Can a corporation make profit entirely through political patronage and kleptocratic looting of state wealth, by paying its employees to vote in certain patterns: a publicly-traded corporate vote bank? a political party-corporation funded by activist investors?

I know that slavery is wrong. But I still secretly hope that my descendants will own the rest of humanity as slaves.

Sometimes I wish that I owned the Moon.

religion is a form of insanity

2007-12-25T23:08:00.000-08:00

Religion is a controlled-dose insanity-induction device. People are religious because they require small, regular injections of insanity into their minds in order to dampen instabilities and avert catastrophic failure (i.e. frank psychosis). (For the religious to consider: God delights in complexity, so She designed our brains to work in this peculiar manner.) Non-religious peple seek alternative forms of insanity as a replacement for religion.

Is it mere cognitive prejudice to suppose that normative, "healthy" consciousness is better than schizophrenia or antisocial personality disorder or anorexia nervosa? Is normative consciousness really optimal for reproductive fitness?

The mental health system is really a system for the control and domination of people whose consciousness differs from the norm. In a plausible alternative society, the shizophrenics are all in charge, operating the society according to their own bizarre rules, and everyone else is locked inside the psychiatric gulag.

heaven

2007-11-30T23:16:00.000-08:00

Heaven is like having unprotected sex while stoned on a bed of luxurious silk sheets in an acoustically-pristine recital hall with excellent drum and bass playing deafeningly loud at audiophile quality and a 商-dynasty bronze urn of sacramental incense burning next to the bed upon which the sex is being had.

pomegranate syrup

2007-11-17T00:50:00.000-08:00

Pomegranate syrup tastes sweet and tart and floral. It effectively conceals the bitterness when you want to orally administer 30mg of white powder. (As a result of natural selection, our gustatory systems are evolved so that interesting white powders often taste really fucking bitter. Thus we must devise ways to thwart Nature...)

You swallow the dose, with only the slightest bitter aftertaste hidden beneath the overwhelming pomegranate-ness. Yum.

Two hours later, you are as high as an imaginary kite which is being flown off the imaginary spire of an imaginary skyscraper which stands on the summit of Sagarmatha (सगरमाथा).

You think about Snoop Dogg in the context of West African shamanism: Is the dog a spirit-animal? (See some of Snoop Dogg's music videos from the 1990s, which feature actual dogs running around in them and special-effects transformations of the rapper into a dog.) Is Snoop Dogg a performer-shaman who (perhaps unknowingly) continues the Vodou tradition in the African diaspora?

You perceive the 60 Hz frame rate on your LCD display as a strobe effect. You are reminded of an fMRI study. You wonder what it would be like to trip in a scanner. Is it possible to detect a cerebral hemodynamic correlate of trip-o-vision? You wonder whether someone has already put this idea into a research proposal.

You are disgusted by how yellow your teeth look. You can taste the corruption and decay in your mouth. You marvel at how people are able to suppress their hygienic disgust so that they can kiss each other.

You look in the mirror and see a doppleganger. Not just your image, but your thoughts and agency are reflected back at you. You wonder what your mirror neurons in the inferior frontal gyrus are doing right now.

You begin to see random little specks of iridescent dust on surfaces. They look like they might be minute bioluminescent ladybugs. You like ladybugs.

Sesame Street is beautiful when you are tripping.

Can people tell when you are instant-message chatting with them while tripping? Perhaps - if they read your blog.

recursive genocide

2007-10-27T00:38:00.001-07:00

Imagine: a genocide committed against a people who are committing a genocide against a people who are committing a genocide against...

How does one contend with genocide when the conventional hierarchy of victimhood has been exploded?

Paradoxically, one could argue that the ethical course of action is to expedite one of the genocides in order to pre-emptively kill the prospective genocidaires at the next level before they can carry out their plans.

the Book

2007-10-18T00:32:00.000-07:00

A common meme in most scriptural religions is "The Book" (in Arabic, al-kitāb الكتاب): the perfect, heavenly Book in which God eternally records all history, revelations, judgements, destiny. The mathematician Erdős Pál also talked about "The Book" in which God had written down the most beautiful mathematical proofs.

I once had a vision of the Book during a cannabis trip. The Book was an infinitely-long string of bits, ones and zeros, filling all space and time. Every possible finite string was a substring of the Book. Every possible sentence in every possible language in every possible coding scheme was contained in the Book.

I thought about the story "La biblioteca de Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges.

I thought about the universality of zeta-functions, and I wondered about the possibility of a deep mathematical equivalence between holomorphic functions and binary sequences.

I thought that perhaps I had been reading too much of Jürgen Schmidhuber's work.

auditory feedback

2007-10-18T00:16:00.000-07:00

Let us suppose that we are recording extracellular spikes from a neuron in the auditory cortex of an anesthetized, head-immobilized animal. Furthermore, suppose that we play the recorded voltage signal in real time through a speaker in the animal's ear, so that the neuron's spike train is the auditory stimulus. How does the neuron's spiking evolve over time? How much do initial conditions matter? How does noise affect the evolution of this feedback circuit?

aesthetics

2007-10-11T21:07:00.000-07:00

Good deeds are beautiful, sublime, elegant. Evil deeds are ugly, disgusting, crass.

Ethics reduce to aesthetics.

paranoia

2007-09-30T21:55:00.000-07:00

Intelligent people are much more paranoid than stupid people; however, intelligent people also excel at concealing their paranoia from others, and thus appear to be less paranoid than stupid people who twitter aimlessly in childish panic. True paranoia transcends anxiety: many animals are anxious, but only social primates are paranoid. Paranoia is the necessary response to the treachery of intelligent beings. Paranoia is pure, auto-catalytic executive function.

Paranoid schizophrenia is a maladaptive cognitive hypermorphism.

her charms

2007-09-30T15:37:00.000-07:00

The Prettist Girl I Know is cute, small, pretty, inquisitive, as light as air, and always busily darting around hither and thither - rather like a hummingbird.

Well, um... she's more like a fire-breathing hummingbird. With beautiful talons.

sub-humans

2007-09-27T01:03:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I wonder whether a non-negligible fraction of (adult) people are not fully human. Consider: There exist parents who regard their own children as disposable things to be exploited and tortured. There exist people who lie and steal and cheat without any remorse. There exist people who enjoy raping and beating their victims to death. There exist demagogues and warmongers - some of whom occupy respected positions of power. There are sub-human imposters living openly among us, inflicting unspeakable suffering upon humanity. A holy, righteous part of me wants to exterminate these corrupted pseudo-human monsters, to utterly blot out their remembrance.

Why do I feel guilty for wanting to exterminate them?

the futility of justice

2007-08-27T18:59:00.000-07:00

If the victim of injustice does not know that he is being victimized, then is it really an injustice?

If the perpetrator of injustice does not intend to cause harm, then is it really an injustice?

All injustices are, in an ethical sense, pure acts of god.

patience

2007-08-04T14:29:00.000-07:00

Patience is concealed ambition. I will wait until I get what I want.

prettiness

2007-08-03T22:59:00.000-07:00

There is exactly one girl in my life who is the Prettiest Girl I Know.

I compare every other girl to the Prettiest Girl I Know. Other pretty girls are pretty to me only because they resemble the Prettiest Girl I Know. When I look at other pretty girls, I am secretly looking for her. When I talk to other pretty girls, I imagine that I am talking to her.

She is the Prettiest Girl simply because I selected her, not because other people have persuaded me that she is pretty. This is true sovereignty: when I am free to say, "She is perfectly pretty to me", without having to give any justifications.

atheism

2007-07-31T22:17:00.001-07:00

I stopped believing in God when I realized that He loved me enough to forgive me for not believing in Him.

Only after I stopped believing in God did I become truly terrified of Him.

lovely

2007-07-30T23:53:00.001-07:00

I love Bora Yoon.

That is all.

I want

2007-07-29T21:03:00.000-07:00

Is kinkiness attractive? Would I be more or less attracted to a woman if she confessed her most private sexual kinks to me? Would I feel flattered? anxious? horrified? Am I afraid to know what she truly wants? Will I discover something hateful within her? Will I still love her? Is total intimacy even possible?

Desire is endless endless endless... Deleuze and Guattari talk about desiring-machines (machines désirantes). I have a terrible beautiful vision of a multitude of desiring-machines roaming the social space like cellular automata, stepwise-transitioning through time according to inexorable rules. With every iteration of the system, the desiring-machines seduce and pursue, go on awkward lunch dates, improvise delicate love poems over voicemail, miss calls, apologize, kiss, suck, stay awake all night with unbearable longing, fantasize, beg, hope for the impossible...

All kinks reduce to the following operations: {consume, combine, replicate, destroy}

Desire is endless endless endless and I want.

smoking

2007-07-28T22:17:00.000-07:00

What's so bad about smoking? Humans have been smoking all kinds of herbs for thousands of years... oh, right, humans have also been suffering emphysema for thousands of years.

After the first time that you got stoned with cannabis, did you notice that cigars were far more enjoyable thereafter? Cannabis joint-smoking and tobacco cigar-smoking involve similar faculties of connoisseurship. The clouds of smoke, the fragrance, the languid pace, even the initial application of flame to start the smoke - all overlapping features of the respective psychoactive smoking experiences. When one smokes a cigar, one is reminded of smoking a joint. And vice versa.

Already, tobacco smoking is considered morally suspect in most First-World societies. I predict that within my lifetime, cigarettes will be regarded, morally if not legally, as contraband. Accordingly, I would like to acquire a collection of fine cigarettes from around the world. The very best cancer sticks, stored in humidity- and temperature-regulated cabinets, ready to be offered to my close friends late at night. The hoarding of exotic contraband is a powerful social signal. Trust. Solidarity. Psychoactive compounds.

introduction

2007-07-28T21:35:00.001-07:00

Hello. I am the person who maintains the persistent username "chairmanK" over assorted domains of the internet. I believe that "chairmanK" is a unique identifier for me, but please note that I do not guarantee the absence of namespace collisions. If you are a different "chairmanK", and people mistakenly attribute this blog to you, then I sincerely apologize.

Some of you may know my identity in real life; casual examination of Google-indexed detritus strewn over the web will reveal who "chairmanK" really is. I do not pretend to care for my anonymity. Just please do not harass me in real life.

Policy statement:

This blog does not have a regular posting schedule. I will post whenever I have something to say. If I am too busy, I will not post at all.

There will be no reader comments on this blog. I post; you read. This is not a forum for discussion or trolling or spamming. This is an exhibitionistic discursive space for me to talk to myself like a crazy person while you eavesdrop.

I prefer that others do not plagiarize the content that I post on this blog. Quotations should be properly attributed and cross-linked. However, I recognize my scant ability to enforce this preference of mine. The only credible threat that I can make is that if you do not wish to be my enemy, you ought to give me proper attribution.

This blog is a work of fiction. There is no incitement to criminal activity. Any crimes described herein did not really happen.