State of the onion: Spinning leeks, Hawking radiation, and your outboard brain

[andygates]

A cultural observation that's at least a year late: leekspin.com.  Open up that leek-spinning girl and her Finnish gibberish loop, go on.  I wonder if Loituma sound as charming in the rest of their stuff?  Now you've got a soundtrack for the rest of this rambling...

Cunning science thought: Hawking radiation is what you get when a spontaneous particle-antiparticle pair appear across an event horizon.  Imagine for a moment that the cosmic horizon - that limit to the observable universe - is an event horizon.  Turns out that if you calculate the energies involved, they're a near match for dark energy.  Only... I thought the cosmic horizon was an artefact of the observer, being just the point at which the expansion of the universe reaches the speed of light.  My head hurts.

In other news, Wired has a good article on what it calls "Your outboard brain" - the colossal mass of stuff we know when we're online.  I'm a damn expert online, but an opinionated arse offline, so I grok this.  The article stops short of examining the philosophical implications of calling this an "outboard brain".  The human consciousness is just one of a bunch of processes bubbling around in our inboard brains.  What's going on in this outboard stuff that we may not be aware of?  And if you buy into the memetic model of information, it's even weirder: the outboard brain is an inevitable development, once the inboard one reaches capacity you need more memespace or you're just not as sexy as the other guy.  But this is shared memespace - which I think means that Wikipedia and Google are the collective unconscious.  And it means that a large portion of my memespace is actively being thought-in by other people.  The Singularity may already have happened.  Crumbs.

Still listening to the leek girl?  Excellent.

Comments

[xeeny.livejournal.com]

This outboard brain idea is nothing new - its just that we have new ways of accessing it. The old fashioned way is to get pissed, and then you can plug into a world of knowledge a become an expert on everything. Furthermore, you can extend your knowledge just by talking louder. Google and Wikipedia just help the next morning..

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Wise you are.