uninteresting :: rich

last tuesday night, my folks dropped by SF on their quarterly visit to the states and met Amo’s family for the first time. there were her grandparents (gung gung and po po), father & stepmother (alan & hanni) and sister, qing. it was a casual affair: dinner at the Lee’s favorite restaurant, Jumbo.

i was pretty sure it would go well, but of course there’s always that worry that things could go horribly wrong. thankfully, everything seemed to go quite well. gung gung was especially animated the entire evening, and i could tell my folks enjoyed meeting everyone. it was a nice ice breaking event that i hope sets the stage for many future get-togethers.

my mom is enthralled by gung gung’s wisdom

qing qing looked so cute in her outfit, but wasn’t much for smiling

iPhone buyers have no regrets - USATODAY.com:

By Edward C. Baig, USA TODAY
Early iPhone owners are overwhelmingly happy with their devices, a survey out Friday says, and Apple (AAPL) and AT&T (T) are luring customers from rivals as a result.
In one of the first such studies, 90% of 200 owners said they were “extremely” or “very” satisfied with their phone. And 85% said they are “extremely” or “very” likely to recommend the device to others, says the online survey conducted and paid for by market researcher Interpret of Santa Monica, Calif. The firm surveyed 1,000 cellphone users July 6-10.

TECHNOLOGY LIVE: SimulScribe offers free visual voice mail
The findings are “pretty much off the charts,” says Jason Kramer, Interpret’s chief strategy officer.

The firm’s clients are in the entertainment and mobile industries.

Kelly Croy, a seventh-grade teacher in Oak Harbor, Ohio, is a happy buyer. “Overall, the coolest device I’ve ever owned,” he says.

Apple launched the combination cellphone, iPod music player and Internet gadget with much fanfare on June 29. AT&T is the exclusive service provider.

Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of worldwide marketing for the iPod and iPhone, said positive word-of-mouth reaction is “critically important” to any product, as it was with the iPod. “We’re getting even greater reaction to the iPhone,” he says.

Apple still faces challenges. The high cost of the two iPhone models — $499 and $599 — ranks as the No. 1 reason consumers interested in the device did not buy one, the survey says. Those consumers said they would pay an average of, at most, $180.

Owners said there’s room for improvement. At the top of their wish list: longer battery life, faster Internet speed and more internal memory. Other factors, including the lack of a physical keyboard, were well down on their lists.

The iPhone is extending Apple’s reach, the survey says. Three of 10 buyers were first-time Apple customers. For 40%, iPhone is their first iPod.

Apple could “change the physics in the phone market,” if it is as successful building loyalty to the iPhone as it has been in the music and computer markets, says Gene Munster, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray.

Interpret’s survey also bodes well for AT&T. Half the buyers switched from another carrier. Of those, 35% paid an average $167 to break a contract. “We thought AT&T would be more of a barrier to entry,” says Munster.

Another boon for AT&T: IPhone owners surveyed expect to pay about $35 more in monthly service fees compared with their previous cellphones.

and it blends, too!

it’s late, i’m lit, and this site is blowing my mind:

The Simulation Argument - Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?
Nick Bostrom, Director, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University

ABSTRACT. This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

and now for the punchline:

VII. CONCLUSION
A technologically mature “posthuman” civilization would have enormous computing power. Based on this empirical fact, the simulation argument shows that at least one of the following propositions 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.

If (1) is true, then we will almost certainly go extinct before reaching posthumanity. If (2) is true, then there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations so that virtually none contains any relatively wealthy individuals who desire to run ancestor-simulations and are free to do so. If (3) is true, then we almost certainly live in a simulation. In the dark forest of our current ignorance, it seems sensible to apportion one’s credence roughly evenly between (1), (2), and (3).

Unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation.