Pribek

Here we go. I wrote a post about the Virginia Tech shooting. I had a feeling, just from people that I talk to, that this time people seemed to have a different response than they did after other violent acts that have come before. After Columbine and other school shootings folks I know were quick to come up with possible solutions like; ban guns, more guns, parents should be more strict and pay more attention to their children’s possible behavior issues, prosecute parents, ban video games, kill Marilyn Manson. After 9/11, as a nation we were quick to respond with unrealistically simple ideas of solutions to stop this type of thing from ever happening again.

I’m not criticizing or, making light. I think that people were reacting with pure and passionate emotion to these events. Reacting with emotion is part of the stuff of life. On the whole it’s a positive. A well-meaning emotional response to a crisis is often ineffective because life isn’t simple. There are problems that can’t be solved by emotion and the alternative, logic, is uncomfortable because it is stark.

After Virginia Tech, I had a sense that people’s emotions were spent. Or, maybe there was a widespread realization that the emotional response wasn’t working. Once again, this is my opinion garnered from personal observation.

Today I saw this press release entitled, “David Lynch to Announce Plan to End School Violence: Teach One Million Students to Meditate”.

David Lynch, he’s no stranger to violence in his artistic expression. He is being joined in his effort by author John Hagelin (”The Secret”), and folk singer Donovan (”Mellow Yellow”).

You may be expecting me to slam this as whack job insanity but I am not going to.

First off, I meditate. I have experienced concrete, positive results from meditation. Meditation, in some form, is a basic tenet of any spiritual system. That isn’t a coincidence, it derives from results going back to ancient times.

Second, I don’t think that a meditation period during the school day would be nutty at all. For those of you that get upset because we don’t allow prayer in school, what if we just called it the meditation period. For that matter, I think it would be great to have a meditation break in the workplace too.

Here’s the problem. The guy at Virginia Tech, the guys at Columbine were sociopaths. Is a sociopath just born evil or created by their environment? I don’t know. Nobody knows. I guess the premise is, that if one is born evil, we can meditate it out of them. Or, if it’s the other way, maybe we can get them meditating early enough that their environment won’t screw them up.

A sociopath is selfish and wants to do harm to society. A sociopath doesn’t just snap and inflict the harm, they plot and are clever enough to fit into society until the time is right to do their will. A sociopath would go to meditation class and fit right in then, one day shoot up the place and leave a manifesto.

Can meditation stop violence? I’m sure it has but ponder this; the evil men that flew those planes into the World Trade Center did so with the misguided belief that it was the will of their Supreme Being. Would you be surprised if they meditated that very morning?

So, David Lynch, John Hagelin, and Donovan, I like the idea of promoting meditation but, make your pitch on an honest premise not showbiz sensationalism. Or, as we say in the Ozarks, don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining.

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Sunday night, listening to Otis Redding. Otis had way more than just a great voice. For me, when I hear “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”, I believe every word he says. Pure power and emotion can’t be faked. He was the real deal and these records are the real deal. I hear the first acapella notes of “These Arms Of Mine” and I realize why things like American Idol and mainstream radio are superfllous.

Great band tracks on this stuff too. You know me; I’m a geek for how the records were made and who were the sidemen. If you’ve ever seen the first Blues Brothers movie you saw some of these guys like Steve Cropper (long haired guitar player) and Duck Dunn (pipe smoking bass player). Anyway, it was a funny movie but it in no way does justice to those players.

Cropper never plays a note that doesn’t make a song better. His tele tone is always impeccable. He is somewhat of a sandbagger because he can play strong lead guitar but he usually defers, probably because he thinks it won’t improve the song. If you are a guitar player and want to know how good Steve is, listen to anything he played on and try to make the chords sound that clean, smooth, on time and have bite. Good writer too, there’s a long list of songs that have Cropper on the credits but start with “Dock Of The Bay”.

Duck Dunn is so unique in that he can place any given note ahead, behind, or dead on the beat and never make the wrong choice. If you’re not a musician, that probably makes no sense so, just know that it’s a rare talent and a big part of why you sway when you hear those songs.

Drummer Al Jackson, man I don’t know where to begin. Controlled power, powerful and subtle at the same time. A lot of drummers can hit hard but aren’t always musical, just loud. Al played hard but always grooved, always played for the song. I was listening to “Personal Manager” by Albert King the other day and I thought, “Man that snare is cracking, I never heard a guy hit a snare like that”.

And I have to mention Booker T. Jones. He was the keyboard man on these records and for that matter most of the stuff on the Stax and Volt labels. He was Booker of Booker T. and the MG’s the very successful “side” project for all these guys. King of the Hammond B3, “Green Onions”, “Time Is Tight”, he is a stylist. I saw Booker a few years ago and after the show a keyboard player friend asked me “How did Booker play?”. All I could say was, elegant.

Al Jackson

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This is from a BBC News article entitled, “Mouse Brain Simulated On Computer”.

The team, from the IBM Almaden Research Lab and the University of Nevada, ran the simulation on a BlueGene L supercomputer that had 4,096 processors, each one of which used 256MB of memory.

Using this machine the researchers created half a virtual mouse brain that had 8,000 neurons that had up to 6,300 synapses.

The vast complexity of the simulation meant that it was only run for ten seconds at a speed ten times slower than real life - the equivalent of one second in a real mouse brain.

That’s a lot of computer firepower for one second of mouse brain activity. So, it’s going to take a lot of effort to attain, say, a whole weeks worth of mouse brain.

What do mice think about?

For that matter, how do we know what mice think like, and are we sure we got it right during that one second.

Even if we do know the inner workings of the mouse mind and we build this huge computer that duplicates it exactly, what do we do with it? Do we move on to a ferret simulator? In a brave new world, can we someday envision a possum computer?

It seems silly but I’m sure it isn’t. I was always bad in science class. I couldn’t see the logic in cutting up a frog because I had absolutely no interest in someday cutting up humans.

I am sure the reason we are simulating a mouse brain leads to furthering the idea of artificial intelligence. Someday we will have a computer that can think just like a human. I think of the quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s (you’ll be missed Kurt) book “Galapagos”, “thanks a lot big brain”. Vonnegut was saying that even though the human brain is the biggest in nature and therefore, we are running the place, our work has a lot of holes in it.

So, it seems to me the true goal of artificial intelligence is to, eventually, improve on the human brain. Being humans, how will we know if we did? We will only be able to assume. I know this from watching bad science fiction movies from the ’50s and ’60s.

Bottom-line; if we now have one second of mouse thought, we are a very far cry from computers taking over and making inferior humans their slaves.

By the way, my guess is that one second of mouse thought involves food, sex, or survival.

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