I am transcribing this segment from The Hitchhiker’s Guide, Secondary Phase, for posterity.

The Total Perspective Votex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. To explain, since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation – every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social histories – from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

Trin Tragula – for that was his name – was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times a day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex, just to show her.

And into one end, he plugged the whole of reality (as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake), and into the other, he plugged his wife, so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain, but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved once and for all that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

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This post: "The Total Perspective Vortex" was originally posted at Haibane.info - a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Haibane.info at http://haibane.info/feed/

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Content at this blog is licensed by Aziz Poonawalla under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

This segment ranks among my most favorite moments of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Secondary Phase, Fit the Eleventh, to be precise (the BBC radio series is the True version of the Guide, without all that tedious mucking about with printed pages).

Part of the brilliance is the twisted, yet straightforward, logic of the economic theory itself. But what makes it gold is how the narrative is presented in a teacher-student context, with a rather.. twisted… take on academic incentives. I’ve decided to waste 15 minutes of my life and transcribe the good bit below.

TEACHER: Good morning, lifeform!

STUDENT: Hi teach!

Are you sitting comfortably?

Yes!

Then stand up. Harsh Economic Truths, class 17. Are you standing up?

yes.

Good. Posit. You are living in an exciting, go-ahead civilization. Where are you looking?

Up.

What do you see?

The open sky… the stars… an infinite horizon.

Correct! You may press the button.

Thank you! (tinkly music plays) Oh! That feels nice.

Posit. You are living in a stagnant, declining civilization. Where are you looking?

(subdued) Down.

What do you see?

My shoes.

Correct! What do you do to cheer yourself up?

Um. Press the button?

Incorrect! Think again. Your world is a depressing place. You are looking at your shoes. How do you cheer yourself up?

I buy a new pair.

Correct!

Can I press the button?

All right.

(twinkly music plays) Oh ho! So nice!

Now. Imagine everyone does the same thing. What happens?

Everyone feels nice?

Ah, forget the button, concentrate! Everyone buys new shoes. What happens?

More shoes.

And?

More shoe shops.

Correct.

Can I?

No.

Aww.

And in order to support all these extra shoe shops, what must happen?

Everyone must keep buying shoes.

And how is that arranged?

Manufacturers dictate more and more fashions and make shoes so bad that they either hurt the feet or fall apart.

So that?

Everyone has to buy more shoes.

Until?

Until… everyone gets fed up with lousy rotten shoes.

And then what?

(plaintive) Why can’t I press the button?

And then what? Come on!

Massive capital investment by the manufacturers to try and make people buy the shoes.

Which means?

More shoe shops.

(insistent) And then we reach what point?

(sullen) The point where I press the button again.

(exasperated) All right!

(twinkly music plays) Woo hoo hoo! Ah! That’s so nice! That’s really nice!

And then we reach what point?

(sighing with bliss) The Shoe Event Horizon! The whole economy overbalances! Shoe shops outnumber every other kind of shop! It becomes economically impossible to build anything other than shoe shops, and bingo! I get to press the button again! (twinkly music plays) Wooooo hoooo!!!!

(angry) Wait for permission!!! Now, what’s the final stage?

(distracted) Um. Every shop in the world ends up as a shoe shop.

Full of?

Shoes no one can wear.

Result?

Famine, collapse, and ruin… any survivors eventually evolve into… birds… and never put their feet on the ground again.

Excellent! End of lesson! You may press the button!

(twinkly music plays) Woo hoo hoo! Yee hoo hoo hoo! Oh ho! Oh, that’s nice! Thank you teach, goodbye!

Ahem, aren’t you forgetting something?

What?

Press the other button.

Oh. Right.

(twinkly music plays) Ooh ho ho ho! Woo hah hah hah! Wha ha hah ha ha ha!

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This post: "The Shoe Event Horizon" was originally posted at Haibane.info - a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Haibane.info at http://haibane.info/feed/

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Content at this blog is licensed by Aziz Poonawalla under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

TechCrunch had a little blurb about Google’s investment in DNA sequencing. Duncan Riley threw a little 42-based humor in there for fun – check out his suggested Google logo for the project. Presumably they aren’t out to clone Douglas Noel Adams.

Wouldn’t it be cool to have a Greasemonkey script that did nothing but substitute the above logo for the standard one at the Google homepage?

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This post: "Google 42" was originally posted at Haibane.info - a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Haibane.info at http://haibane.info/feed/

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Content at this blog is licensed by Aziz Poonawalla under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

On a whim, I searched my RSS reader for any instances of 42. The result was disturbing. I think, just for a sense of completeness, I’m going to blog every reference of 42 I can find. Note that the politics-content of Haibane.info is still intended to remain zero. I instead request that commentary on these items be restricted to the larger and more important issue of how the occurrence of 42 in the story at hand might lend clues towards divining the Ultimate Question.

Let’s get started. Today’s 42ism comes from the UK, appropriately enough.

Gordon Brown is facing the threat of his first defeat in the Commons since taking over as prime minister, after a Guardian survey found strong – and growing – opposition among Labour MPs to the government’s plans to detain terror suspects without charge for up to 42 days.

(followed by lots of blah blah about governmental something or other)

Intriguing. This suggests that 42, manifesting as a number of days for incarceration, is a proxy for the balance between the principles of human rights versus society’s need for security. Perhaps more broadly we might say that here 42 is a stand-in between the forces of chaor and order, where chaos is the expressive element of the Universe and order is the emergent structure that arises from it.

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This post: "The Ultimate Answer" was originally posted at Haibane.info - a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Haibane.info at http://haibane.info/feed/

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Content at this blog is licensed by Aziz Poonawalla under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

If anyone else has been playing Final Fantasy XII for several hours, you might have noticed that the voice of Judge Ghis is unmistakably done by Mark Wing-Davey–otherwise known as Zaphod Beeblebrox. Given the “bad guys” all have English accents, I suppose it’s not too surprising that at least one of the cast from H2G2 should play a part (one wonders how many British voice actors there are these days).

If you don’t have the game and/or don’t plan on playing it, watch the trailer on the FFXII website. Turn up your volume. About 1:15 in, after you see the party in a cave, an older man says, “We’ve found it at last.” That’s him. Don’t watch beyond that if you don’t any spoilers (probably nothing major, but I like to experience all content as it comes).

Most of the time (so far) he’s in a full suit of armour, so his whimsical voice has an almost Darth Vader echo to it. Quite amusing, so it’s difficult for me to take his otherwise majestic and threatening character seriously. When he captures the heroes on the Dreadnought Leviathan, I half-expect him to quip, “I can’t help it if I’m lucky” or “zero out of one million points for style.”

In a month when everyone’s posted all the videos from this game on YouTube, someone should take all his scenes and insert clips from H2G2 in there.

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This post: "Judge Zaphod" was originally posted at Haibane.info - a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Haibane.info at http://haibane.info/feed/

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Content at this blog is licensed by Aziz Poonawalla under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Dolphins are dumb?

For years, humans have assumed the large brains of dolphins meant the mammals were highly intelligent.

Paul Manger from Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, however, says it is not intelligence that created the dolphin super-brain — it’s the cold.

To survive underwater, these warm-blooded animals developed brains that have a lot of insulating material — called glia — but not too many neurons, the gray stuff that counts for reasoned thinking.
[...]
Yet while dolphins aren’t as smart as people tend to think, they are as happy as they seem. Manger said dolphins have a ”huge amount” of serotonin in their brains, which is what he described as ”the happy drug.”

While the scientific aspect of these claims is beyond the scope of Haibane.info, let us remember what the Guide had to say:

Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars and so on – while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man-for precisely the same reason.

Discuss.

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This post: "muck about in the water and have a good time" was originally posted at Haibane.info - a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Haibane.info at http://haibane.info/feed/

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Content at this blog is licensed by Aziz Poonawalla under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

I’ve uploaded my entire collection of sound samples from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy BBS radio scripts. It’s just for fun and I’ll use them in blog posts. Please don’t kill my bandwidth quotas by linking directly to them from your higher traffic blogs Enjoy!

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This post: "the sound of H2G2" was originally posted at Haibane.info - a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Haibane.info at http://haibane.info/feed/

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Content at this blog is licensed by Aziz Poonawalla under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

I’ve commented before in my self-proclaimed classic Shut Up article that miscommunication is not the cause of all conflict in the world, in spite of what our teachers often say (in fact, quite the opposite). Nonetheless, it is a cause, and I do fear that it grows worse every day, in part because our society’s value systems (or memes, memeplexes) are becoming increasingly ill-equipped to handle it. I might touch on that more later, but my main goal this time around is to show by means of example how our increasingly advanced methods of communication as a society is actually undermining our ability to communicate, and is thus helping to cause conflict.

Sarcasm, for example, is possibly the most blatant form of miscommunication, and it’s intentional. “It’s not just comedians and dicks anymore,” as Seanbaby puts it. Lying is also intentional, but unlike sarcasm, lying will not cause confusion in a one-shot scenario. Consider Ford Prefect asking Arthur, “Look, are you busy?”, to which he responds, “Well I’ve just got this bulldozer to lie in front of, but otherwise–no, not especially.” This is confusing. First, because it doesn’t accurately reconstruct Arthur’s cognitive structure that he is in fact busy, and second, because Ford doesn’t understand sarcasm. Now, one could argue that if Arthur had simply lied and said, “No, I’m not busy,” the effect would be the same, because in both cases, the wrong cognitive structure is reproduced in Ford’s mind. However, in the case of lying, Arthur would know for certain what was communicated to Ford, whereas with sarcasm, even the person guilty of using it can’t be sure how it will be interpreted, even amongst the most savvy of conversational combatants.

So what’s the problem, then? I mean, everyone in the real world understands sarcasm, right? And it’s funny, right? I disagree. The day-to-day sarcasm we encounter is not funny–it’s just a simple and sloppy method of telling the same tired old joke over and over and over again in a marginally effective way. “Ha ha! I said one thing, but really meant another! Can you guess what I really meant? Ha ha!” (Incidentally that is my favorite personal response to sarcasm, right along with pretending I’m an idiot and just don’t get it at all, causing them to explain and thus ruin their “joke”.)

Not everyone understands sarcasm, either, though this may not be obvious and also hard to believe. I did recently encounter a situation in which this is obvious, however, and where my linguistic shortcomings eliminated this de novo assumption and thus eliminated all sarcasm. I was recently in Indonesia, where I happened to meet a nice girl. While her “not so good English” was better than my Bahasa Indonesia, we still didn’t have enough mutual proficiency to pull any advanced linguistic tricks. In other words, we each had to remove all assumptions (about Stranger) we would normally make when encountering someone who speaks the same language, including the assumption that the other person is socially savvy enough to understand (and execute) sarcasm. Even other cues, such as voice inflection and body language, could not be trusted to communicate sarcasm for a variety of reasons: the heightened importance of those cues, cultural differences, and unfamiliarly with one another’s accents.

So what happened, then? We said what we meant to say; we said what we wanted the other to understand. We knew we were going to have communication problems, so any apparent misunderstanding was clarified, rather than taken incorrectly to heart and used maliciously later on. Sarcasm has no place in such a scenario. Some might argue that sarcasm is fun, but so is communication, because communication is sharing, and there is plenty of sharing to do for two people who have just met.

Unfortunately, sarcasm is a meta-meme; it affects all other memes. Fortunately, it only does so under one condition: a common language runtime. Placing barriers to communication nullifies it. No matter how many barriers to communication there are in the world, however, sarcasm will always be a dangerous one, because it is not culture-specific. It does not depend on the expressiveness of the language itself to spread. While different languages may not be able to express sarcasm as well as others in written form (languages without verb tenses or gender differences), or others in verbal form (languages that have rigid tonality), all are nonetheless capable. While sarcasm is universal, specific applications of it are not.

Each language thus provides a unique framework for which memes–including the sarcasm meta-meme–can survive. A catchy meme in one language won’t catch on in another. Compare “The grass is always greener on the other side” to “The other Shaltanac’s joopleberry shrub is always a slightly more mauve-y shade of pinky russet.” See, it just doesn’t work.

In the book Snow Crash, we learn why the mythical Babel Infocalypse was necessary: if everyone understood the same langauge, and a virus of the mind were let loose in that language, we’d be doomed. The linguistic hacker-god Enki realized this and therefore devised a killer meme that disabled the common language runtime. I posit that a world with many languages has evolutionary advantages similar to how a species benefits from genetic variety. Unifying the world under a single language (or having everyone learn the same few languages) would not be a good thing. Sarcasm is just one example of why this is so.

Obviously sarcasm can’t be stopped. You can’t stop people from learning languages, either. You can’t expect the world’s values to change so radically that people won’t use it. It will persist. All you can do as an individual is to use it with discretion, and then punish those who do not.

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This post: "Comedians and Dicks" was originally posted at Haibane.info - a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Haibane.info at http://haibane.info/feed/

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Content at this blog is licensed by Aziz Poonawalla under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

“Can you post to Haibane.info, Marvin?” – that’s what he said to me. Can I post? Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to post to the blog. You call that job satisfaction? cos I don’t.

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This post: "don’t talk to me" was originally posted at Haibane.info - a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Haibane.info at http://haibane.info/feed/

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Content at this blog is licensed by Aziz Poonawalla under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Yahoo is now the host of the classic Babel Fish translation service, formerly hosted by Altavista. It now also supports Japanese!

For example, try: 七国山病院 (the CatBus sign from Totoro, courtesy of Steven). The Babelfish gives us “Seven national mountain illness institutes”. I noticed from Steven’s link that 国山 can be interpreted as “realm” and Steven also mentioned that 病院 (“illness institutes”) is actually hospital, so the sign translates as Seven Realm Hospital. The Babelfish isn’t capable of translating these compound statements and is more of an atomic processor on the individual characters.

Naturally, it also works in reverse: try “Seven Realm Hospital” and you get the output 7 つの王国の病院 which when I feed back into the Babelfish, turns out to be “Hospital of seven kingdoms”. Realm and Kingdom both get translated as 王国. What my point is, I have no idea, other than to probe the assumptions in the Babelfish engine. As a toy for gaikojin otaku like myself, it’s neat

Plus we must all bow to the universality of Douglas Adams. Just like 42, the Babel Fish has entered the mass lexicon. Have I mentioned that the Guide entry on the Babelfish, as related in the BBC Radio Scripts, is the most hilarious version by far? You just can’t beat the dry delivery of Peter Jones as the Book. It’s like comparing black and white to color television.

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This post: "Yahoo Babel Fish" was originally posted at Haibane.info - a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Haibane.info at http://haibane.info/feed/

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Content at this blog is licensed by Aziz Poonawalla under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.