The mill in which the desk.

Star Trek. Hearing that name makes people's eyes either sparkle, or roll. Unlike Star Wars it never became fully mainstream and Trekkies are still considered to be quite dorky. I was born too late to have a sentimental relation to the original series, but Next Generation with Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard had 11-year-old me glued to the TV every afternoon. I loved it!

Ten years or so later, I re-watched it in English, instead of the German dubbing. This made it much better with respect to the voices, of course, but the magic that I remembered was gone. Some of the episodes were quite bad and it hurt a bit to realize that. Yes, I also watched DS9 and Voyager, but only half-heartedly, and never became a fan.

Another doubling of lifetime later (🙄) I recently found myself, for unclear reasons, intrigued by the idea to watch the Star Trek films once more. I think I had seen them all at least once, but never together and I barely remembered most of them. So I did, and regret nothing!

I: The Motion Picture. This is a very slow film and I almost pressed the button to speed it up. But I was surprised by how good the special effects still look today. I had this mental image of the old Enterprise being just crappy and ugly - not any more. 4/5

II: The Wrath of Khan. This one has its moments, but I didn't like it as much as some do. In fact, I have already forgotten most of it again. Still, 3/5.

III: The Search for Spock. This was fun, mostly because of Christopher Lloyd as a Klingon. The solemn parts on Vulcan and Kirk having a son had me looking at my watch, however. 3/5

IV: The Voyage Home. Even more fun than the last! Yes, time-travel is a cheap trick and can go horribly wrong story-wise, but it did not bother me here. Scotty putting complex formulae onto an 80s computer screen by pressing three buttons made me laugh out loud. 4/5

V: The Final Frontier. Yeah, this is everything as bad as its reputation. All the films are much more enjoyable, if you manage to have as much fun at the film as with it. This is especially true for this one. 1/5

VI: The Undiscovered Country. More serious in tone and with lots of pink CGI-blood. The ending is a bit of a mess, but overall very watchable. Interesting to see the Klingons change, here they are much closer to TNG than to TOS. 3/5

VII: Generations. Wow. I had vague good memories from this one, but it is as bad as the popular verdict suggests. It just doesn't make any sense! I noticed several occasions when CGI-shots were re-used in the earlier films and here we are shown the exact same explosion of the Klingon ship as in the last film. 2/5

VIII: First Contact. The borg are a favourite story-line from TNG and they make good enemies here, too. We get to see them take over a brand-new ship, the Enterprise-E. Getting rid of the large neck and making it smaller than the previous one are good choices - she looks good! The scenes on time-travel Earth are very light-hearted and if you accept the quirky humour, they work nicely to contrast the dire situation on the ship. Overall my favourite of the bunch, 5/5. In case it is not clear yet, ratings are relative within this list, I am not saying that First Contact is among the best films I have ever seen.

IX: Insurrection. This one I vaguely remembered as quite boring, but I did not dislike it this time around. The intrigue is fine, the villains are cliché baddies that look the part. Even the romance, often the worst part of any Star Trek, did not bother me. Don't get me wrong, a masterpiece it is not. 3/5

X: Nemesis. Well, I cannot quite put my finger on why, but this was not very good. The central question of identity and personality, and how much of it is "nature versus nurture" is a long-standing and important one, but how it was handled here felt shallow and stale. The final battle was not too bad, but Data's death was rushed. An unworthy finale, 2/5.

But maybe it is wrong to call it that. After all, they made Picard last year, the series that brought "the band" back together. I have seen it, but it did not leave a lasting impression. They say there will be a second season which I do not anticipate much, I just learned about it from the Wikipedia article myself. I will probably watch it anyway, in another vain attempt to get the nostalgia flowing.

A few links from my recent browser history that I found worthwhile.

• The climbing gym in Brussels that we used to visit expands outside, under a motorway bridge, because of COVID restrictions.
• @zeynep and @quasimondo
• The intellectual hit-job on Galen of Pergamon
• Videos: Monkey MindPong, Green Beard Altruism
• Grabby Aliens

Seen in an old mill nearby.

I was recently reminded of thispersondoesnotexist.com which is a site that displays a new computer-generated face every time you reload it. There are still some artefacts that give away the artificial origin (I chose two examples with few glitches for the picture above) but I think it is fair to say that these faces look convincingly real.

This means that they trigger the same reactions in our minds that pictures of real people do. I found myself reloading the page for at least ten minutes, becoming more and more mesmerized, reacting to facial expressions, sometimes falsely recognizing someone I know, and generally unable to convince the automatic parts of the brain that these are not people.

Do I have a point? Should we become even more sceptical of media than we already are? I don't know. But being a somewhat aware of the way we cannot help but react to faces, real or not, cannot be such a bad thing, a kind of meta awareness that hopefully contributes to resilience against manipulation.

I took the drone our for a spin this chilly early spring morning. The picture shows the nearby lake, Fibysjön, just a few hundred meters through the forest from our place.

Around it you can see some areas where the trees have recently been taken down. In fact, I see several huge trucks passing by every day, loaded to the brim with logs. The harvesters that do the logging are impressive machines and so efficient that they can process up to a hundred trees per hour.

There is an ongoing debate, heated at times, between the environmental movement, forest owners and industry, about how to strike the balance between logging and preservation. The more I read about it, the less of a strong opinion I find myself to maintain in that regard. I intend to write up the arguments soon, but as a teaser, if you can read Swedish, here is a twitter thread with some basic stats about forests and forestry.

I finally read The Call of Cthulhu the other week. Considering it's impact on culture, this was certainly overdue. I had read a collection of Lovecraft's short stories some year ago, but this one was not among them for some reason. Needless to say it was a fun read and the quickly building atmosphere still works today.

And while at the topic of century-old monster stories, I also read H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds not long ago, with mixed feelings. It certainly has its moments and is propbably rightfully regarded as one of the most important works in science-fiction. But I found it tedious at times and too long for its own good, which is mostly due to its age, I guess.

Oh, one more monster: The Thing, the 1982 movie by John Carpenter, was quite entertaining! The gory practical effects hold up well enough and the atmosphere is intense. I think I never had seen this to the end before; if I don't misremember I started watching it in my late teens, but when it got to the scene in the dog cage I said "Nope! Not for me!" and turned it off before the monster reveal.

See what I just did there? I was telling you (and myself) what a good boy I am to not participate in consumerism! In other words, I was "signalling my virtue".

This is one of those concepts that, once you learn about it, it pops up everywhere. It is deeply intertwined with prestige and how much we care about what others think of us. And with mating behaviour, for example when males (of any species, including us) try to convince females that they would make a good mate, by whatever criterion that is relevant in the situation.

This podcast with Geoffrey Miller, who literally wrote the book called Virtue Signalling, is quite good as an overview, if I remember correctly - it has been a while since I listened to it. One of the points he stresses is that virtue signalling is generally a good thing! It is a way to build trust and allow for cooperation.

Recently however, the term has mostly been used in a derogatory sense, like accusing accusing someone to be "just virtue signalling" instead of being sincere in their proclamation. For example, a male calling himself "feminist" can be suspect to ulteriour motives, that is saying anything that "gets the girl"; he might even be a sneaky fucker.

Similarly, social justice activists' opinions, while certainly being convinced of their own noble motives, can easily appear repulsive to outsiders when attitudes get polarized within the group from everyone's trying to gain prestige by having the "purest" opinions on the subject matter at hand.

All this, just to say: I bought a new coffe machine after all, thereby negating the virtue I was signalling before.

It works well, makes good coffee and I hope it lasts for as may years as the old one.

While chopping wood earlier today, I listened to this FLI podcast with Joscha Bach in which he says:

We obviously live in a dream universe. And the dream is dreamed by a mind on a higher plane of existence and that is implemented in the skull of a primate. In the brain of some primate that is walking around in a physical universe. This is our best hypothesis that we have. And so we can explain all the magic that you’re experiencing by the fact that indeed we live in a dream generated in that skull.

And now the question is, how does consciousness come about? How is it possible that the physical system can be experiencing things? And the answer is no, it can’t. A physical system cannot experience anything. Experience is only possible in a dream. It’s a virtual property. Our existence as experiencing beings is entirely virtual, it’s not physical. Which means we are only experiencing things inside of the model. It’s part of the model that we experience something.

For the neurons, it doesn’t feel like anything to do this. For the brain, it doesn’t feel like anything. But it would be very useful for the brain [to know], what it would be like to be a person. So it generates a story about that person. About the feelings of that person, the relationship that this person has with the environment, and it acts on that model. And the model gets updated, as part of that behavior.

This is quite dense and almost incomprehensible without a lot of prior knowledge that is not yet obvious to "normies" like myself. I had to turn down the listening speed to 1x, which I rarely need to, but I think I got the gist of it.

It reminds me of Anil Seth's TED talk where he argues that coscious awareness is a hallucination contrained by reality, whereas a dream has no such contraints.

Mind-blowing stuff to think about, maybe literally so.