Jul 30
Some of you know of my love of comic books – or for the more academic term coined by Will Eisner and popularized by Scott McCloud – sequential art. A tight narrative that weaves around colourful characters, coupled with the artist’s dazzling imagination captured in pencil and ink, and highlighted by moody shades and hues: this is perfection.
So is a nicely grilled steak. And an ice cold beer on a hot day. And the view when day breaks on some picturesque landscape, rays of sunlight peeking over mountaintops like curious toddlers, quickly flooding the valley with warmth and life. But I digress….
Like other media that rely on physical formats, there has been much ballyhoo about how comics will survive in the digital world. Is that the sinister visage of Herr InterTubez, cackling with unbridled joy at the inevitable death of my beloved artform? One particular response is this meditation on storytelling, which literally explodes off the page and explores the electronic medium. It entertains and challenges the mind simultaneously, like caviar for your mind.
Pushing boundaries don’t have to happen through the delivery mechanism. A primary vehicle that makes you stop with unexpected clarity is content. New and bold ideas are often explored through fiction, especially within works of the science fiction variety. One of my current online reads is Escape From Terra, a webcomic that looks at how society might evolve in the future. The current arc has introduced an intriguing character, who develops “disruptive technologies” for the common good. His latest invention are “plants that will yield meat genetically identical to cows, chickens, fish and everything else.”
Meat seeds.
Just imagine for one second if we had meat seeds today. This is different than growing meat from a petri dish – which somehow conjures up images of mad scientists, and makes people squeamish. Instead you can sprinkle these seeds on the ground, water and tend them, and soon you’ll be harvesting gourds full of chicken-y flavour. Where do I sign up?
The ills of the world are being solved in the fantastic realms of artists. When will everyone else catch up?
Mar 27
And so it came to pass that two of the greatest modern pieces of popular art came to an end in the first few months of 2009. Accuse me of hyperbole, but that’s the bottom line with Battlestar Galactica and 100 Bullets. I stand before you accused of being a nerd, evidenced by my consumption of comic books and sci-fi. I humbly plead guilty.
More
Aug 21
On the surface, video game enthusiasts, Monday morning quarterbacks, pop philosophers and quantum physicists may not have anything in common. However, once you peel back the superficiality of each label, we reveal a characteristic that infects every human being: overactive imaginations.
Consider Dr. Nick Bostrom’s article “Are You Living In A Computer Simulation?” which examines the likelihood of the scenario popularly proposed by the Wachowski brothers. After computing the probabilities of various statements, Dr. Bostrom arrives at the conclusion that one of the following is true:
(1) The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero
(2) The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero
(3) The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.
A neat argument but I was surprised by Bostrom’s comment in The New York Times: “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.” Thanks to his bemused prediction, we are likely to remember Bostrom for posing an intriguing Gedankenexperiment – if we reach a point in history where Statement (3) comes to fruition, we’ll merely chuckle and proclaim him to be a great thinker.
Not so for Rob Bryanton unfortunately. This musician-cum-philosopher has been ridiculed for his presumption that there are only 10 dimensions. While quantum mechanic string theory practitioners may gripe about Bryanton’s faux-science, simplifying complex concepts without academic rigour, I think the real issue at hand seems to be the flashy animation he uses to explain his theory.
In a nutshell – they are jealous that he has been able to succinctly communicate his ideas. Thanks to the emotions of an exclusive clique of thinkers, the idea that the totality of all possible existences can be represented as a dot on the 10th dimension will probably never be taken seriously.
Shouldn’t we praise thinking outside of the vat? Is that not what all intellectual discourse be about? Stay tuned for part 2 – where fictional characters come to life and human beings lose their individuality in the swimming pool of creativity.
