"La tierra vive ahora tranquilizando su interrogatorio"

(quote: Pablo Neruda, video: The Pied Piper of Hutzovina

Dreamt of Africa while in Vegas and woke up to look out my hotel window at its exact opposite. A weary, misplaced feeling. Spent the night before drinking Jameson's in a casino bar with the pachinko sounds of Pavlovian triggers chinkboingbanking around me and I could take in fourteen different kinds of ESPN. Thinking that as we become a service culture, kindness becomes a commodity. And the artifice of it becomes profitable. Try to appreciate your fellow man when you know that. Driving Las Vegas Blvd with a tallboy of Colt .45 in the cupholder because sometimes the best drink is an ironic one. Traffic jammed amongst the construction of new leering casinos like the whole country is not biting its nails at its short-term prospects. The lights of Vegas famous, sure, but each one of them is an advertisement. The entire city an experiential commercial for itself. Back in the casino watching people tote their new luggage to their hotel room with their addled children, weaving between the drink girls in their soft-porn costumes. The median age staggering, and old men and woman with their walkers and their tracheotomy-control devices poking their fingers at video screens. The hotel I stayed in unexpectedly posh and enormous and glinty. And I guess I don't do well with grandiosity because the shinier things are the more I feel has been wasted, and I cringe seeing retirement funds roll into slot machines just as I balk at the Hummers in the parking lot and roll my eyes at twelve billion lights. It makes me admire religion, in the old days of grand devotional art and architecture those people at least created their monuments to something they believed in. True or not, the things they made in that vein were full of passion and meaning. And in turn they came out beautiful and touching. Our current iteration builds monstrosities with high ROI . . . Mandalay Bay glistens in its grease, the lion in front of MGM Grand weighs more than everything I will ever own and it looks like the boredom of an untalented child. In the morning I drove out into the desert, it starts to gradually get beautiful.

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Heavily researching Artificial Intelligence and Memory. Ostensibly for the purpose of understanding a character/plotline of this big writing project I'm working on, but also because I'm fascinated by it. I suppose that's how it works. Putting the two together makes me doubt the Singularity.
There's a theory being somewhat scoffed at (but not disproved by any means) that the human brain makes computations that fit into the mysterious depths of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. And further, that the brain accomplishes this by the manipulations of and shifts in the quantum state of nanoscale elements within the neuron. I don't understand this on a deep-level, and I suppose it doesn't undermine the notion that we can make an artificial brain. Hopefully someone can straighten me out on this.

Also . . .did you know that the ability to remember nonsense words is a strong indicator of intelligence? Lots of probably uninteresting reasons as to why.
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