Seeds! (Not of Destruction, though...at least, not YET)

Why is it that listening to Tears for Fears' Songs from the Big Chair always--and I mean ALWAYS--reminds me of working in a garden?

Eh. Who knows the workings of my convoluted psyche? I certainly don't! But anyway, here's the deal:

I stopped at WalMart this evening a picked up about $15 worth of seeds for the vegetable garden as well as some ornamental vines and assorted flowers to add some color to my surroundings. I now have:

California poppies.
Cardinal Climber (Cypress) vine.
Burpee's Fordhook Hybrid watermelons (round and sweet).
Charleston grey watermelons (long, traditional "heirloom" breed of watermelon).
"Blue Mink" Ageratum, which I've always loved 'cause the flowers are a beautiful humming blue and they're soft, too.
Cobaea (Mountain Glory), a vine with large, dark purple campanulate flowers.
Connecticutt Field pumpkins (another "heirloom" variety, generally thought to be the oldest breed of domesticated pump-a-kin).
Burpee's Fordhook Zucchini. Yum.
Burpee's "Ruby Queen" hybrid corn, the first ever red corn that isn't ornamental. Will probably taste like ass anyway, but c'mon, it's red!
"Carpet of Snow" Alyssum for edging gardens.
"Scarlett O'Hara" morning glories, which are bright freakin' radioactive red.

All in all, a synaesthete's perfect collection: sizzling reds cooled off with purring blues, fat festive oranges (that quack like ducks), and high, flanged-out whites.

The best thing is, though....Pumpkins! I've got lots of them. And will get more. The Pegritz Pumpkin Patch (henceforth known as the P-cubed) is going to be Tha Shiznit--the world's first Croatian gangsta pumpkin patch. I'd like to see some of the local kids fuck with this neighborhood--the Great Pumpkin will jump the asses of anyone who steps to the P-cubed without wearing the appropriately colors (mud-spattered orange). Seriously, though...I had so much fun at benhob's pumpkin-fest last Fall, I'm totally having a Pumpkin Carvenival of my own this year, and all my LiveJournal peeps are naturally gonna be invited! You won't even have to bring your own squash to mutilate--I should have plenty to go around. But still, I got a huge porch, and I want to cover the fucker this year with leering demon-faces and silliness carved into vegetables.

OMGWTFBBQ! You think smokin' crack with monkeys is bad...

Homosexual necrophiliac ducks!

"Mr Moeliker suggests the pair were engaged in a rape flight attempt. 'When one died the other one just went for it and didn't get any negative feedback - well, didn't get any feedback,' he said."

Ladies and gentlemen...DEAD DUCKS DON'T SAY NO!

The Singularity Is Near...

But Ray Kurzweil's new book, The Singularity is Near, isn't actually going to be out until September 22, 2005. GodDAMN it! By then it may be too late! The Machine Gods will have already bootstrapped themselves through the entire Intarweb, commandeered CMU's Robotics Institute, and will have already begun the extermination of Human Conservatives and the forcible uploading of all others!

Seriously, though...Kurzweil is a personal hero of mine. A bit overly optimistic at times when it comes to human intelligence (which I see as only a single hiccup greater than that of the amoeba), and sometimes a little wild-eyed and utopian in his thinking--but, at the same time, the man is a bloody genius and only dares to extrapolate based on solid contemporary technologies, theoretical development roadmaps and frameworks, and their applications. For instance, in The Age of Spiritual Machines (a rather misleading title, but one designed to appeal to the wider range of silly man-animals who actually believe in the existence of a "spirit"), Kurzweil defines what he calls his "Law of Accelerating Returns," which is a simple statement describing the method by which new technologies (primarily computing technologies) make it ever easier and quicker to develop further new technologies--a concept that most people won't even notice until their attention is drawn to it. There are a number of skeptics who naturally cast a dim view on Kurzweil's "Law," and that is good because it will necessarily help refine it properly by submitting it to scrutiny, but they mostly object to Kurzweil's own application of the "Law" to state that computers may very well become supersentient within the next forty years. Even I have a bit of a hard time swallowing the idea that my desktop computer may spontaneously become selfaware sometime in the 2020s or '30s...but, honestly, there's no reason to think that such an occurrence is impossible--just fairly unlikely. On the other hand, the simple fact of Kurzweil's "Law" is damnear irrefutable: the well-documented history of the development of the microprocessor illustrates it as beautifully as Darwin's finches illustrate evolution. Trying to pin a time frame on the development of technology is always a risky business--after all, people in the '60s thought we'd all be driving antigravity cars today--but, at the same time, even the most cursory glance at trends in technology show that, eventually, in this century, there will be sentient machines, some of which may very well be walking around in sexy, Cylon-esque robot bodies. Most of which, though, will just exist as sentient nodes on a global processing network--incredibly, INCREDIBLY intelligent ones.

That's what The Singularity Is Near is about: what the world might be like at the point when supersentient machines take off, and what it vaguely might be like afterward. Kurzweil's optimism in such a book is a wonderful thing: a lot of people are honestly terrified of a world full of thinking machines, but that world is inevitable as the rising of the sun tomorrow--and Kurzweil's latest book is a sober, but encouraging, primer to let people know just where their lives and their technologies are leading. Every year, more and more and more books like this are appearing--just go to Amazon.com and search for "cyborg" or "emerging technologies," and you'll find yourself wading through an ocean of books analyzing and speculating on trends in technological development. Many of us, having grown up in the '80s and '90s, and having been computer nerds all the while, are much better prepared for the Coming World, so reading The Singularity Is Near will just be a pep rally to us...but the vast majority of humanity still thinks that Robbie the Robot is High Technology and still think humans have a unique "soul" that separates us from other thinking things. I'm actually planning on working Kurzweil's new book into my basic research writing class next semester just to expose students to the ideas contained therein. Whether or not they agree with them is irrelevant--I'm not a transhumanist proselyte by any means--but they need to be aware...so that when the machines start answering back, they won't completely freak out.