Pixel Scroll 8/6 Even Robots Get the Blues

The A-Train, EPH, and AI make up the alphabet soup that is today’s Scroll.

(1) An effort to get sf writers on postage stamps fizzled a couple of years ago. A new effort to might wind up putting a fanzine editor on a stamp – albeit for reasons entirely unrelated to fandom. See NPR’s report “Willis Conover, The Voice Of Jazz Behind The Iron Curtain”

Willis Conover at a 1970s Lunacon. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

Willis Conover at a 1970s Lunacon. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

Willis Conover, who died in 1996, could pack concert halls for jazz shows behind the Iron Curtain. But he wasn’t a household name in his own country because by law, the Voice of America cannot broadcast to the United States. This week, Doug Ramsey, who writes about jazz for The Wall Street Journal, reported that a campaign to persuade the Postal Services Stamp Advisory Committee to put Willis Conover on a U.S. postage stamp now has thousands of signatures. It would send the face of the voice who brought the light of hot jazz into the darkest places of the Cold War around the world again.

Andrew Porter explains the fannish connection:

Before Willis Conover was the voice of American jazz to the world behind the Iron Curtain, he was a science fiction fan and reader. Although he left the field for wider seas, he came back to SF in the 1970s, reviving his earlier fanzine Science-Fantasy Correspondent in 1975, and resumed attending science fiction conventions. He should be honored for his work with the VoA. Like Rog Ebert, who honed his writing skills in the fanzines he wrote for before he started college and eventually became a film reviewer, Conover’s heart belonged to science fiction and fantasy first.

 

And Bill Burns said,

When I worked at BBC Overseas Services (1968-71) we relayed the VoA signal, picked up on shortwave at Caversham, sent by landline to Bush  House in London, then to the BBC’s shortwave transmitters.  Music programmes such as Jazz Hour didn’t really sound very good after this  treatment, so the VoA would ship us tapes of each show which we would  insert into the outgoing stream instead of the received signal. I didn’t know it when I was at the BBC, but I saw Conover a few years  later at a Philcon and discovered that he had published a fanzine in the 1930s and was a correspondent of HP Lovecraft.

Jim Freund, whose program “Hour of the Wolf” is heard on WBAI-FM, met some of these folks through Conover.

I worked with Mr. Conover quite a few times in the early 70s. I was introduced to him by Hans Stefan Santesson, who was a frequent guest on ‘Hour of the Wolf.’ Mr. Conover would give me a call at the station and ask if I’d be free and could book a studio for a given time, and would then show up with surviving members of the Lovecraft Circle. I clearly recall his bringing along Manly Wade Wellman, and most dramatically, Sonia Greene, who was married to Lovecraft (if not living with him most of their years.) This was not long before her death in 1971.

In my wisdom, I tried to make Mr. Conover take the lead in these interviews — he was a true radio professional with a fabulous voice, and knew far more about American and early horror than I ever could. I got the impression he didn’t want to make too much of a public thing of his name on WBAI — I think the political views of the VoA and Pacifica Radio were not very compatible. So I took the lead, but usually with a briefing by him and/or Hans beforehand.

He gave me a recorded reading he’d made of ‘The Willows’ by Algernon Blackwood, recorded for an airline for passengers to listen to in-flight.  We were never sure of the rights to broadcast this, but we did so anyhow. (Safe in those days — especially at 5:00 AM.)

Nice man.

(2) If you’re not the kind of collector who insists on pristine copies of your trading cards, you might end up with a very entertaining autograph someday —

If you ever plan to approach Mark Hamill for an autograph, make sure you have a Star Wars baseball card handy. As it turns out, the man otherwise known as Luke Skywalker has made an artform out of prefacing his John Hancock with hilarious captions on vintage collectible cards.

hamill autograph

(3) Patrick May has done another set of calculations in “E Pluribus Hugo vs Slates” using historic vote data from the 1984 Hugos to show the impact of the proposed rules change.

E Pluribus Hugo vs Slates

With the EPH algorithm, the results in the Novel category in 1984 would have been:

  • Startide Rising: 105 ¼ points, 136 ballots
  • The Robots of Dawn: 52 ¾ points, 75 ballots
  • Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern: 41 ¾ points, 54 ballots
  • Tea with the Black Dragon: 40 1/6 points, 55 ballots
  • Millennium: 33 5/6 points, 52 ballots

This is the same result as under the existing rules.

With 43 slate ballots (10% of the number cast) added, the result would have been identical to the actual 1984 result.

With 85 slate ballots (20% of the number cast) added, one slate work would make the list, bumping off “Millennium”. This is quite different from the current rules where only “Startide Rising” would remain out of non-slate works.

With 128 slate ballots (30% of the number cast) added, two slate works would make the list, bumping off “Millennium” and “Tea with the Black Dragon”. Again this is quite different from the current rules where the only non-slate work remaining would be “Startide Rising”.

Even with 170 slate ballots (40% of the number cast) added, both “Startide Rising” and “The Robots of Dawn” would remain on the nomination list under the EPH rules. Under the current rules, slate works would sweep the category.

(4) NASA Totally Found an Alien Crab on Mars and Didn’t Tell Anybody – debunker Robbie Gonzalez has the story and close-up photos at io9!

UFO Sightings Daily reports it also spotted in this photo “another animal close to this crab, as well as a broken stone building.”

(5)The Daily Dot asked seven scholars what might happen when superintelligence bumps into religion. There are also questions like whether AI counts as being alive —

The singularity is a hypothesized time in the future, approximately 2045, when the capabilities of non-living electronic machines will supersede human capabilities. Undismissable contemporary thinkers like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Ray Kurzweil warn us that it will change everything. Hawking likens it to receiving a message from aliens announcing their arrival in “a few decades,” saying this is “more or less” what’s happening with artificial intelligence software….

How “alive” would a superintelligence be?

Mike McHargue, host of the Ask Science Mike podcast: We think nothing of wiping out bacteria by the millions when we wash our hands, and most people don’t hesitate to slap the fly buzzing around their heads. But dogs? Dolphins? Apes? We see some reflection of awareness in their eyes, and mark them as greater peers among life. What’s fascinating about machine intelligence is we are presented with some level of consciousness that is not associated with biological life. We’ve already built robots with similar intelligence and conscious awareness as an earthworm, and we’ve modeled neural network as complex as insects and possibly reptiles.

As computer technology advances, there’s a real possibility of something that is highly intelligent but not “alive” in any traditional sense.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Mark, Patrick May and John King Tarpinian for some of the stories. Title credit to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R .]

82 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/6 Even Robots Get the Blues

  1. One thing I found interesting is that VD and his elk are saying the SFWs will claim victory no matter what happens. It’s dueling Xanatos Gambits! So depending on the results, it’s a win-win situation.

    Somehow despite this, I don’t think everyone will go home happy.

  2. @Zil I probably meant SJW and chose the wrong index finger. Or it might be a new initialism that has worked its way into my subconscious. The Puppies (both) seem to live on diet of acronyms and initialisms which they spit out with regularity.

  3. I mean, I am pretty amused at the unintended implication that the unpleasant people are basically just declaring war on SF writers!

  4. There are outcomes I would find preferential to other outcomes.

    There is no outcome would cause me to declare either “victory” or “defeat” because it is, in fact, an SFF award I have not been nominated for, and therefore I cannot actually win it or lose it.

  5. I hesitate to say this where a Puppy might hear, but the 2015 Hugos were “lost” the moment the nominations were announced; everything since then has been damage control. Will the ship sink? Will it make it back to port for repairs, so that it can sail again? Only time will tell.

  6. Jack Lint-

    One thing I found interesting is that VD and his elk are saying the SJWs will claim victory no matter what happens. It’s dueling Xanatos Gambits! So depending on the results, it’s a win-win situation

    I don’t think anyone who read the packet this year would consider it a win.

  7. I don’t think anyone who read the packet this year would consider it a win.

    This. There is no victory for anyone in this. Only strife and resentment.

    There was a high road the puppies could have taken to make their point. They could have encouraged more voters and got nominations on the ballot by legitimate means. They chose to slate, and because of that, everyone loses.

  8. One thing I found interesting is that VD and his elk are saying the SFWs will claim victory no matter what happens

    yeah, they live in opposite land. Do something yourself and then claim the evil SJWs are doing it, or say the SJWs do something and it is terrible of them, then do that thing the next day.

    There are plenty of possibilities that I would class as ‘defeat’. Wins for Dark Between the Stars, Wisdom from my Internet, Tank Marmot. All Puppy nominees coming in higher than No Award. All non-slated nominees coming in below No Award.

    Beale doesn’t really care about the Hugo awards, he cares about getting people to line up behind him. He doesn’t win or lose when the awards are announced, he wins if he can convince people that the result of the awards mean they should pay more attention to him. He loses when people realise he’s just another self-publicising idiot and stop paying attention.

  9. RedWombat on August 7, 2015 at 10:34 am said:

    I wouldn’t trust that UrsulaV person. I hear she wanders around the internet disguised as a marsupial.

    And everyone knows those false marsupials are a scourge on all true marsupials and their friends. But, we get along as best we can.

    Someday the Hugos will go back to being a source of great authors and works that I get to try for the first time. In the meantime I am making do with File 770 and it has really been working fairly well…

    @Ray–I hope you enjoy God Stalk as much as I did!

    @whoever recommended Up Against It and The Whitefire Crossing–I enjoyed those a lot. I want to get hold of the sequel to Whitefire Crossing, and I see there was a Kickstarter for a third book as well, though I seem to have missed it.

    Presently reading _A Memory Of Water_.

  10. Cat, I’ll be interested to hear what you think of A Memory of Water. I picked it to read almost at random from among a number of books that had been getting buzz when it came out. (Buzz tends to be an extremely unreliable way for me to identify books I’ll enjoy, but periodically I give it a try.)

  11. Just my $0.02 on Patrick May’s post: Well done and explained. Now on to nwhyte’s work. Seeing folks back up words with some actions (or models in this case) is very helpful and informative.

  12. Paul Weimar, sorry I missed replying to this earlier.

    To be fair, if I squint hard, I can see the bottom of Brian’s fears about EPH. Giving him the greatest benefit of the doubt, EPH would have an effect on the nominee list… And my own question from some days ago stands–what should we do? Just wait years and years and let slates from the Puppies dominate the Hugos until Super Genius Theodore Beale gets tired of it?

    What should we do, Brian?

    Paul, they’re fans. See how it goes, and should any puppies win, congratulate them and give them some rockets.

    The Hugos are based on a culture of trust and collaboration built over six decades. Maybe that’s gone now, or maybe not, but don’t participate in undermining it and help make the rockets lose their luster.

    Why would anyone “dominate the Hugos for years and years”? Because his childhood dream was to steal dozens and dozens of literary awards and display them in his palatial, partially submerged lair? Think it all the way through. The guy who started this, Correia, is finished with the whole mess. John C. Wright even considered declining some of those nominations this year. Half of the people on those slates either formally withdrew or had second thoughts. If a small group of “rabid puppies” comprising about 15% of the total nominators actually continued to maliciously game the system so that Castalia-approved authors fill the entire ballot in every category for years and years, as you seem to say is your fear, what would be the reaction from Wright and Kratman? From Rolf Nelson? From Jeffro Johson? Jerry Pournelle? How do you really think that could continue?

  13. Paul Weimer, sorry I missed replying to this earlier.

    To be fair, if I squint hard, I can see the bottom of Brian’s fears about EPH. Giving him the greatest benefit of the doubt, EPH would have an effect on the nominee list… And my own question from some days ago stands–what should we do? Just wait years and years and let slates from the Puppies dominate the Hugos until Super Genius Theodore Beale gets tired of it?

    What should we do, Brian?

    Paul, they’re fans. See how it goes, and should any puppies win, congratulate them and give them some rockets.

    The Hugos are based on a culture of trust and collaboration built over six decades. Maybe that’s gone now, or maybe not, but don’t participate in undermining it and help make the rockets lose their luster.

    Why would anyone “dominate the Hugos for years and years”? Because his childhood dream was to steal dozens and dozens of literary awards and display them in his palatial, partially submerged lair? Think it all the way through. The guy who started this, Correia, is finished with the whole mess. John C. Wright even considered declining some of those nominations this year. Half of the people on those slates either formally withdrew or had second thoughts. If a small group of “rabid puppies” comprising about 15% of the total nominators actually continued to maliciously game the system so that Castalia-approved authors fill the entire ballot in every category for years and years, as you seem to say is your fear, what would be the reaction from TK and JCW? From Rolf Nelson? Jeffro Johson? Jerry Pournelle? How long do you really think that could continue?

  14. “Paul, they’re fans.”

    Some of them are. Some of them obviously are not. What we know is that they are people that are, as you say, working to undermine all trust and collaboration. As are you. Everyone know that you can’t be trusted anymore, so much lies and misrepresentation that you spread.

  15. Hampus, I really don’t mind what you want to say about me. But are you sure that is what you want to say about the authors?

  16. Since Brian continues to make utterly unsubstantiated claims and accusations, I’ll drop this in (h/t Soon Lee & others):

    [RUBBER STAMP BRIAN Z RESPONSE]

    Hey Brian, are you going to to reply to Oneiros’ question or are you going to keep hand-wringing and trying to spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt)?

    [/RUBBER STAMP BRIAN Z RESPONSE]

  17. sez the pathologically deceitful Brian Z on August 9, 2015 at 7:30 am:

    Hampus, I really don’t mind what you want to say about me. But are you sure that is what you want to say about the authors?

    That depends. Which author(s) are you talking about?

    If it’s any of the authors who voluntarily withdrew from Puppy slates, and/or made it clear that they neither were consulted by the Pupmasters nor agree with the Pupmasters’ intent to game the Hugos, and/or have otherwise made it quite clear that the Puppies do not speak for them nor represent them in any way, shape, or form? Now, those authors are not actively working to undermine trust and collaboration.

    If it’s Theodore Beale, who has written that throwing acid in the faces of women who want to be educated is totes defensible, and that he wants to just fucking destroy the Hugo Awards…

    …or Brad Torgersen, who bravely does not allow his evil CHORFs have spent the last few decades ensuring that right-thinking authors are unjustly PREVENTED from winning Hugos! narrative to be spoiled by inconvenient facts…

    …or John C. Wright, who totes doesn’t want anyone to boycott Tor (but if anyone wants to download Wright’s stuff directly from Wright and send a little cash Wright’s way, thereby keeping Wright’s publisher out of the loop vis a vis Wright’s income stream, Wright can’t possibly be expected to do anything about that), and whose explicit statement regarding What Wright Wants From Those SJWs totes isn’t unconditional surrender on account of he didn’t actually use the phrase “unconditional surrender” in said explicit statement…

    …or Larry Correia, whose present-day description of how badly he was abused at a particular years-past convention is completely contradicted by a blogpost he wrote about said convention way back when, at that time

    If you’re talking about Beale the Galactic Zero, or Torgersen, or Wright, or Correia? Then yeah, those guys are definitely actively working to undermine trust and collaboration.

    If you’re talking about Lou Antonelli… now, he may or may not be intentionally trying to undermine trust and collaboration, but it’s pretty clear that whether he’s trying to do that or not, the downstream consequences of his Really Sucky Impulse Control have the practical effect of undermining trust and collaboration. Let’s hope Antonelli succeeds in turning over a new leaf, as his apology to Gerrold indicates that he wants to do.

  18. In the Con where I was born
    Lived a fan who failed to see
    And he told us of his slate
    And his rocket figurine

    So we registered to vote
    Till the slates became routine
    Every August we would gloat
    Over rocket figurines

    We all gloat over rocket figurines
    Rocket figurines, rocket figurines
    We all gloat over rocket figurines
    Rocket figurines, rocket figurines

    And our friends are all on board
    Many more of them live next door
    And the band begins to play

    We all gloat over rocket figurines
    Rocket figurines, rocket figurines
    We all gloat over rocket figurines
    Rocket figurines, rocket figurines

    [Full speed ahead, Mr. Gerrold, full speed ahead!
    Full speed over here, sir!
    Action station! Action station!
    Aye, aye, sir, fire!
    Heaven! Heaven!]

    As we live a life of ease (A life of ease)
    Everyone of us (Everyone of us) has all we need (Has all we need)
    Sky of blue (Sky of blue) and sea of green (Sea of green)
    With our rocket (With our rocket) figurines (Figurines, ha, ha)

    We all gloat over rocket figurines
    Rocket figurines, rocket figurines
    We all gloat over rocket figurines
    Rocket figurines, rocket figurines

  19. Brian Z.: The Hugos are based on a culture of trust and collaboration built over six decades. Maybe that’s gone now, or maybe not, but don’t participate in undermining it and help make the rockets lose their luster.

    And what, precisely, does your definition of “undermining the Hugo culture of trust and collaboration” encompass?

  20. Apparently, not giving the Pups exactly what they want in order to see if it’ll appease them amounts to “undermining the Hugo culture of trust and collaboration” in BriZ’s mind.

  21. “Full speed ahead, Mr. Gerrold”?

    “We all gloat over [the Hugo Awards]”?

    Interesting. I may have missed something, but to my eyes, this looks like the first time Brian Z has allowed his 1,000% truthy pro-Puppy propaganda campaign to contaminate his filksongs. Perhaps he’s finally realized that absolutely everyone hereabouts files his purely textual instances of pro-Puppy propaganda under “more bullshit from the lying sack thereof”, and he’s tryna broadcast his bullshit pro-Puppy ‘message’ in a format that isn’t yet auto-incinerated by its intended recipients on contact.

  22. Cubist —

    BriZ appears to be unintentionally answering his own question of why not just give the Puppies some Hugos, applaud them and hope they get bored because after all, they’re all SF fans which naturally means they want to preserve the integrity of the Hugos once they’ve gamed themselves a few, like Florida condo-dwelling conservationists who think no one should move to Florida after they got there, and their friends, too.

    His filk tells a sweet story of slates becoming commonplace as the practice spreads from friend to friend and they all get on board, assuming toastmaster David Gerrold will put a good face on it, year after year.

    This is his idea of not undermining the Hugo culture of trust and collaboration.

  23. @brianZ

    Yes, the Puppies are fans. Of course they are fans who are using techniques and tactics best left to a political campaign than an honest brokering of the best books and stories of the year.

    My disagreement and dislike the Puppies are entirely about their tactics and methods, and how they distort the process. I’ve gotten into tons of arguments with the Puppies about it–telling me that what they’ve done is legal.

    Just because its legal, doesn’t mean its ethical. Or good for the award and fandom. I don’t want Fandom to be a new permanent front in the US Cultural War. I know that the fans outside the US sure as hell don’t.

    And I think that Theodore Beale could go on for years with his slating tactics, unopposed and dominating the ballot thereby, before he and his friends and supporters got tired of the exercise. And in the meantime, the Hugos would have gone into full irrelevancy.

    Or, worse, others will come up with slates–real slates, not the delusional ones that Puppies insist already exist…

    …and then we’d get full on political parties in the Hugo awards.

    Yeah. No.

    So, if a rule change can help avoid that future history–I’m for it.

  24. Perhaps when Brian Z speaks of “collaboration”, he’s using that word in the sense of “collaborating with the enemy”?

  25. This myth that the Pups are carrying out a specifically “US culture war” really needs to die. It retards understanding of what’s actually going on: a global revanchism on the part of white and especially male reactionaries. Wherever there are anxious white men now, there is something like this.

  26. @jim It seems to me that the Puppies are predominantly white, male, conservative and American and part of that zeitgeist rather than the more global and general phenomenon. But your point is fair.

  27. Jim Henley on August 9, 2015 at 11:47 am said:

    This myth that the Pups are carrying out a specifically “US culture war” really needs to die. It retards understanding of what’s actually going on: a global revanchism on the part of white and especially male reactionaries. Wherever there are anxious white men now, there is something like this.

    True – it is US centric and often framed in US political terms but several Puppies themselves are international in more ways than one (i.e. currently living in other countries or people who have emigrated to the US) and the ambition is international. VD’s political position is very aligned with rightwing anti-immigration populist movements in Europe – it is a lot more intelligible in European terms than in US terms.

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