These Google Earth pics are beautiful.  Something beautiful about the honesty, the order and disorder, the darkness and happiness.  Some of those pictures took my breath away.

I was thinking when I saw them, human beings are messy beings.  But rather, human beings put things together with super low entropy, and our environments are just that entropy constantly taking things back over.  It takes a lot of energy to build things.  It takes a lot of energy to keep an organism alive and in working order for years and years.  It takes a lot of energy to clean your front yard.  It takes a lot of energy to create a bit of information.

Information can never be lost.  It only becomes hidden, according to physics.  But how is hidden different from lost?  Is it different in any practical sense?

Gloworms in New Zealand.

The new social hive mind seems immune to weirdness, to fun music, to challenging or uncomfortable thought.  Not every individual or anything.  Just the rhetoric that makes it into most media…. and also, most people I think.

The new Daft Punk album is like a modern symphony…. heart, sculpted melodies, deep grooves… it transcends genre.  In a brilliant artistic move, the most famous electronic group ever recorded bands and wrote incredible…. rock songs, really.  They said, “fuck you guys, it was the songwriting all along.”  But they also used the best quality raw meat and the recording is just insane.  According to reviews I’ve been reading it still wasn’t enough to break through the wall of hardened socialist hipsterness that is the internet.  Just try to enjoy it.  Trust the artist.

This concept of trusting the artist…. we’ve lost it.  We’ve put the artist naked in a dunk tank.  So much new music I hear…. it says, “look at how awesome I am.  I’m perfect and loud and flawless and hard.”  It’s scared of the mob, and with good reason.  They’ll call you bad things if you make them think.  It also overwhelmingly has this obvious nod to present culture, too, which stinks of fads.  It says, “Hey, here it is, don’t want to waste a second of your time, here’s familiar chords, EMOTION, ear candy, SEX, semi-controversial lyric there ya go, ok songs over.”

Most of the best music I’ve ever heard is flawed, honest and makes you want to stick up for it.  I believe in gathering around a new album and abandoning your bias and seeing what another human brain feels like.  I believe in going to the witch doctor’s hut staying for an hour.

By the way, fuck blogs.  I keep trying to maintain this thing and I have a lot to talk about, but trying to make a “real” post every day is just totally not going to happen, ever.  So I’m just going to post a few things, or a song, or just stream of consciousness like I did just now.

Looking for that perfect rap groove to freestyle to?

Well this ain’t it, but I made it in 2 hours for some reason.

Turn it up!  Rap your heart out!  Let it flow!  Impress your friends with internal rhyme and clever cultural commentary!

After making a rap beat, this song wanted to be born.  Use liberal amounts of imagination.

Working on Cruise Elroy and Future Caveman.  Plus, working every day in New York advertising.

I’m focused and motivated.  Every day is an adventure. I couldn’t be happier.  However…

Something I’ve learned about myself is that I sort of start going insane if I have no semblance of a normal life.  I stay late every night to work on mixes.  I spent the weekend on email and making animated teasers for Cruise Elroy.  I’m constantly surrounded by people, yet lonely.  I’m in the center of the universe, and I feel cut off.  There’s no time…. it’s difficult to even talk on the phone here.  I’m either 1. around lots of other humans 2. in a very noisy place 3. underground with no signal 4. at home with everyone listening to my conversation through the walls.

And yet, this strange journey is finally taking shape and it would seem I had a plan all along.  These two albums are like….. well, fucking worth it.

Just saw this article.  It’s about scientists who found evidence of a 2 million year-old supernova in fossilized bacteria.

I’m struck by the ability of human beings to deduce the existence of a giant explosion millions of years ago from a complex chain of explanations.

When I yammer about science to people, I often hear things along the lines of “but science can’t know for sure that any evidence is real.  How do we even know anything is real?”

Me: “We use our observations to make deductions about reality.”

Them: “But how can we trust our observations? Our senses? What I see as red isn’t necessarily what you see as red…”

I think most of us have had this nihilistic viewpoint at some point or another…. it seems that, in this physical reality we find ourselves in, nothing can be deduced for sure.  It’s true: our senses are not reliable in the slightest.  In fact, our brains and sense organs probably work quite a bit less reliably than assumed.  The more I learn about our biological mind-bodies, the less faith I have in my own brain.  Memories, for example, are almost entirely inaccurate!  Sorry to break the news to you, if you didn’t know.

OK, but here’s the thing.  It doesn’t matter all that much.  What’s interesting about us conscious little hairy beings is that our minds create explanations. We don’t merely go around observing, we explain things. Simply navigating your every day activities requires a plethora of explanations, many that don’t require direct sensory input.  For example, transferring money using an ATM at the bank requires no distinct “money”… in fact, you don’t even deal with individual dollars on any meaningful scale (in a 1,000 dollar account, it doesn’t matter which dollar is which). You don’t see your money. You don’t touch each dollar. You just have semi-accurate explanations of how an ATM works, how banks work, probably these deep concepts of cultural wealth representation, and so on.

The scientists didn’t use any of their sensory organs to deduce the supernova.  They used, in a sense, a giant, slow eyeball (our planet).  The million-year-old bacteria recorded an event and help us shape our explanation, our model, of the Universe.

And as intelligent self-aware beings, that’s what we do.  Which is why (this is totally a tangent) I suspect artificial intelligence will actually be built around explanation-creating concepts.  I believe that in contrast to these sci-fi visions we have of immediately intelligent, unemotional, non-unique robotic beings, actual artificially intelligent people will be emotional, flawed, and seek to improve their explanations of reality on a slower time scale.  They will grow and learn and change just like humans (perhaps faster, longer, and better, but still unique and individual).  I don’t think there is any other way…. if I’m right, I get to say “I told you so”.

Weirdly, I watched this lecture at random last evening, after starting this post, and the brilliant Sean Carroll talks directly about explanations and the philosophy of science (with much more nerd cred than I).

The human race continues to find fascinating and previously undocumented animals… seemingly at an increasing rate! This trend, of course, can’t continue forever.  But I suspect it will for longer than we think.  Here are some recent news items that made my thinky thought meat happy:

Whale teeth… I always found the evolution of whales to have a certain depth (ehh?) of profundity.  Firstly, it’s one of the most visually striking embodiments of the process of evolution… a deer-like creature morphing into a giant fish-like creature.  It seems somehow lonely… or grotesque… or sweetly dark to think of enormous intelligent animals living their entire lives in deep seas, their extremities sculpted into bound paddles. And yet, mammals who were seabound evolved new features and abilities never seen by previous marine animals.  They developed echolocation for example (they had vocal chords to start with) where no fish, in 500 million years, ever evolved the ability.  It’s striking to me that an animal’s genetic lineage can have more success in an environment that it’s spent less time evolving in.  It implies to me that if you go away and come back, so to speak, you have the upper hand somehow.  Does this concept have a universal truth hidden in it?

Geladas have advanced vocal skills like us.  Have you seen freaking Geladas by the way?  They are my favorite great ape.

new frog knockin about

Big Spider.   How’d we miss this one?  I read somewhere that humans have an instinctive aversion to the shape of spiders, implying they were a significant threat to our survival at some point in our evolution.  I don’t know if I quite buy it… maybe we have an aversion to insects/arachnids in general?

Meet The Beetles

I want this in a tank in my office

This animal is dead

Wickedly adorable lemur!  I don’t know how this animal hasn’t been eaten by the cute memeverse of the internet yet… watch the video.

And finally, here’s an awesome comic about mantis shrimp…s?  Is it shrimp or shrimps?  Shrimpen?

Gelada photograph by Brian Shuchuk, Your Shot

“It is our duty to remain optimists. The future is open. It is not predetermined and thus cannot be predicted – except by accident. The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say ‘It is our duty to remain optimists’, this includes not only the openness of the future but also that which all of us contribute to it by everything we do: we are all responsible for what the future holds in store.”

Sir Karl Popper, The Myth of the Framework, p. xiii

My grandpa turns 86 today…

Grandpa is an inventor, craftsman, engineer, musician, gardener, and funny-man.  I think owe my drive to create from this guy.  Happy birthday, Grandpa!

I’ve never been more excited for a video game release.

http://youtu.be/e0uCcj5uHEQ?t=1m57s

I think history will remember game designer Jonathan Blow as a great artist.

In the video, Blow says,

“At it’s core, it’s a game about epiphany… that instantaneous transition of the mind that takes you from confusion to understanding.  You know, one minute your situation seems impossible.  You have no idea what the solution to your problem would even look like.  And in the next minute you see everything, it’s all simple and clear.  And you wonder how you couldn’t have seen this solution before.”

Not only is this idea a brilliant gameplay concept, but it embodies something that I think is universal and objectively important.  Human beings creatively explain the universe…. and something that at first seemed incredibly elusive, like magical, invisible demon-like things that invade and kill you at random turn out to be tiny bacteria and can be easily destroyed by simply boiling your drinking water.  The only path to the end is creativity and explanation.

I believe that there is something objectively important in that concept, and there is something significant about art and the artist when it comes to tapping into certain objective truths…

I used to mod my own games and design levels and art for games, even in grade school, as well as programming my own from scratch in QBasic.  Recently, I’m diving headfirst back into game design.  It’s hard work, but I’m excited at the prospects.  I’ll be posting screenshots soon.

Are you into indie games?  What are your favorites?  Either way, you must check these out. Some of my favorite recent small releases from small developers…

VVVVVV – this game did something to me on a deep level, despite being graphically simple.  To me, it speaks to the resilience of human nature, the hostility of the universe, and…. something else I can’t quite put my finger on.  This game is exploratory and unforgiving, not to mention hours of addicting fun.  Mega Man hard.

FiNCK – A simple and great platformer for a stoned afternoon… good music as well.  Niffla’s other games are also quite great, and I’m excited to check out Knytt Underground.

Fez - an obvious one if you’re a gamer of any kind – this developer was featured in the artistic triumph Indie Games: The Movie.  Also featured was the incredible Super Meat Boy, another favorite.

…ok, this post is taking me forever.  I have work to do on some great music.  Here are some more quick ones – Braid Lyle In Cube Sector (suuuper underrated in my opinion, and the best theme music evvvvver) Cave Story (God of Indie games) Potatoman Seeks The Troof  …. and the hyper-addictive Super Crate Box.

That’s all.