Category Archives: Immortality

Girl In The Machine

Traverse Theatre,

Edinburgh

Until April 22

Dr Stirlingshire's Discovery

Edinburgh Zoo

Ends today

Reviewed by Mark Brown

THERE'S an elephant in the room when it comes to public discussion of theatre in Scotland. The unveiling of a new play (Girl In The Machine by Stef Smith) in the main performance space at the Traverse Theatre is as good a time as any to point it out.

New writing is the most essential, and the most difficult, element in any theatre culture; this is particularly true of Scotland, which, thanks to the proscriptions of our Calvinist Reformation, has little by way of a theatre tradition. Now, in the second decade of the new millennium, new theatre writing in Scotland is not good enough often enough. We need to examine our national theatre strategy and the place of the Trav, which self-declares as "Scotland's new writing theatre", within it.

I don't say this because Girl In The Machine (which is directed by the Traverse's artistic director Orla O'Loughlin) is a bad play; it's actually a reasonable drama, albeit one that never really threatens to set the heather alight. I say it, rather, because the staging of Smith's piece reminds one, yet again, that we need a national conversation about the role of the Traverse.

I've never enjoyed fence-sitting, so allow me to declare my hand. I don't think there is enough good, new theatre writing in Scotland to justify the Traverse's dedication to world premieres. In fact, this was true even in the 1990s, the decade of Scottish theatre's golden generation of playwrights: David Greig, Zinnie Harris, David Harrower and Anthony Neilson.

The Trav would, in my opinion, be better widening its remit to include established modern classics, both Scottish and international; the highly successful staging of Edward Albee's The Goat, by O'Loughlin's predecessor Dominic Hill, in 2010 remains a high point in the theatre's recent history. Rather than simply nurturing writing talent, the Trav's new writing remit also puts undue pressure on writers, new and established, to come up with the goods.

There is, in my experience, considerable private agreement on these issues within the Scottish theatre community, and yet we plough on, as if the Trav's self-imposed brief was some kind of sacred cow. The questions I raise here are not only for O'Loughlin and her team at the Traverse, but for the whole of the Scottish theatre community, including funding body Creative Scotland, writers' development organisation the Playwrights' Studio and, of course, audiences themselves.

Which brings me back to Girl In The Machine. Although its subject (the fatal digitisation of humanity in a dystopian near future) is ambitious, it feels like a modest studio play which has been given a main stage billing it can't quite carry off (indeed O'Loughlin has, not for the first time, reconfigured the seating in Traverse 1 to reduce its capacity and increase its intimacy).

The play takes place in an Orwellian society in which people have "citizen chips" embedded in their arms; these personal data banks are regularly updated by the state. Polly (a woman in her 30s who works in the hi-tech industry) receives Black Box, a supposed, computerised relaxation tool, from her husband Owen (who's a nurse). The machine (a digital headband) updates itself with increasingly sophisticated, and intrusive, software, until, all over the world, it is able to ask its wearers the sinister question: "Do you want to live forever? Yes or no?"

As Black Box works its way into Polly's psyche, playing on her burgeoning despondency about the future of humanity, the battle between human and machine turns into a popular uprising on the streets.

Powerful though this premise is, and despite strong performances from Rosalind Sydney and Michael Dylan, both play and production underwhelm. Smith's script does have occasional poetic flourishes, but, for the most part, the dialogue is so prosaic and the future-gazing so predictable that the piece resembles a sci-fi soap opera.

None of this is assisted by O'Loughlin's directing, which swings irritatingly between a boring physical stasis and pointless running about (inserted, no doubt, by choreographers White and Givan). There is, without question, something genuinely chilling in this play, but, like too much of the Traverse's output, it fails to fulfil its promise.

Head west from the Traverse to Edinburgh Zoo and you will find another, entirely different piece of new Scottish theatre. Dr Stirlingshire's Discovery, by Morna Pearson, takes us on a wild goose chase for The Something Or Other, a newly discovered, large mammal which has escaped, leaving only huge dollops of purple poo around the Zoo as evidence of its existence.

Performed in the Zoo after closing time (when, be warned, most of the animals are in their beds), the piece brings together site-specific theatre company Grid Iron and Lung Ha, Scotland's leading theatre company for people with learning disabilities. The play is a family drama in which the Zoo's manager Henry Stirlingshire (played with hilarious haughtiness by Antony Strachan) invites his sister, "cryptozoologist" Dr Vivienne Stirlingshire (the unerringly eccentric Nicola Tuxworth), to exhibit her latest finding; he does so in the hope and belief that the unveiling will be a humiliating failure.

As we join the hunt for the missing beast, the Lung Ha chorus offer us an array of humorous characters, from parading penguins to scatter-brained zookeepers. Like a cross between Dr Seuss and Monty Python, the show is great fun, especially for young theatregoers.

Loading article content

Here is the original post:

The quest for immortality ... an an exotic beast: reviews of Girl In The Machine and Dr Stirlingshire's Discovery - Herald Scotland

The jockeys riding in Saturdays Randox Health Grand National at Aintree may face slightly different challenges to those faced by my generation in the 1990s - just as we faced very different challenges from those riders who tackled the upright gorse obstacles of the 1950s in cork helmets.

But even while the course continues to evolve, the Grand National remains a race like no other. Reg Green, the Grand National historian, even called one of his books A Race Apart'.

It still holds a place close to the countrys heart and though it may not be quite the family occasion when we drew the curtains and all gathered round a television set in the sitting room to watch it undisturbed, a good percentage of the nation will nevertheless see it one way or another - as will some 600 million around the world.

Form goes out of the window. The safest bet is that every Arthur in the country will have a small wager on One For Arthur, that Katie Walsh on Wonderful Charm will be this years housewives choice and, in China where red is a lucky colour, Definitly Red and Vieux Lion Rouge will be popular.

Click here for your guide to the best odds, free bets and offers >>

More:

Why the Grand National is the holy grail and sporting immortality the prize - Telegraph.co.uk

}r91DUncniw3v0@HT(Gqu#7lfBI.3;D" d&|/K6M}wO1R%c6xk`eAh&5`v|w@+R(75I:[_n@xSeU@NwwKw, @c:sw$,`n.d=o7/?Y"bSF1>hQF)KQ9l6'"'" gymo"K!LIs@iDI#Q*.)?[.q|&Q"1l Lk6ty0E% &"Bx,&c

G"e/n=IeH~=.p68b0fHn#n7nwG ;,p#M' ${XoR{fQ&O> #`Ro;~)hqat9iB&,OA='T./[l#-%o%I>nn.6X*49haswUBU&<8,@%ut d*.T=3+j&P#/%-V%lH@E"* 4z=z@tJ?=fTqM%e/3@7tVG @HB[LV_0Q 6P#!D'?Bs ,zaRx"),74q0vQoz5c|a}|~]*nP17A=uEXqKN(:*@*=66' UIZA&@}3V EK*$I1zYBTnhh#(Z Oqp'Tr(M5k9GO.{p,%(8Hfa|fSjqQ;`nNa$wZ-6#llv62 X}r! @MbRHj'6Aj?`E XAIL~d'. DYMPXXi6F [:.?W8ADZ@4z3mkLb;;G}i&hAPY4 6mOm)YjJj8M01U&=K"3X,3%([rjC,@1S y $S`$775b@h T sVM4+$ OKK0Rm0 v&/uiul)Xru[eI)>1/}W"VucS.}b. 140v`LXY >,cf+,9C!2~a0WuP]O00(d!~2luL&R^eMk`6.L})}BZL*+YBY#@x1pW_vfbR76j)y>'qZ{hG9[m=2gq[Jj[mF;{XK9L0=3Rg//F"JloAzL:'T+7>zXQwe_QaRDDW:L CRPDj5B ZbIY@mD/.*,`@f:R+OB5V`E|x :T-HtUpV_oC^=pvjjlI}j-s~hVOS>f]Pj,JRR'RQ8U&nl2X|@i h@!4D*j,%r M#vV@-y!m :lnV(OCh[5EmvhJ|`O6 I!d`8x![">dAJZV.-Z<.tCX^%N L0eD@{ZsZ@=$Y$S!`u~}s@o@1a?! o^e.1o{froQp+5 ^9R[$(nE57~}'?FNX3]>}T4~f=XQ6 r QUt ` E~f/(!Qq5j^RUpYQE^;R}BLB8N0HqfGPmn4O_2 k!>*E=>l]_|a40E!>zjGcVieNcM+twjxZ,`VQl^pC^0Y.0 F_c[^(=4"cwBQ)BFbFY_|s`07 H >,tqwZ0{Fpo:|bw 5(8JcQs@h 45="&e?zS5Fh=U7yE.kx-9SmZ=>0P0&>nx:!hyr]k|?F>T',OYAmrHAiiPYEVNv22*ls`dlL+5'vvEA|v-6VRr*{Ii`j&mynbh;IX*NrQvNVaaY}p&bDn0?X?*0AXNa yo5/b m5{Ii.l6e6"POM~2ki&U3)0XMdGn^~!c*pA!3.F_:V[fReWbKAC7!vt0bKA`p#O#T&{TNHietj2EjS'(ZlPnc3"#?nVnDa,Y[,@7Un'kGvYiE Xd|=fKsNeZwCHZ6N_zh%3o{ }O:!Ew} 5JR(tFIkojAa&lq|f gg3|o,&B?nvdAX%UY9pqEA~CK"BW^wP.Gr[v{ Ie)DKrmE`vBnr7EJc,AKUm):h"Z.@rMT4)C/{{L.OoT`R-t-$PsxEzKz:w]<60rx^[kfTXQ!6_dFI`41aMEghW`M73~m0xpr2l$=qa@*6&D(|y}]NI=]_ Bed,pgTn%D6|lBOF V#+p9I(=b4XO+0-0jw& *?+aO ~&$G 8c+_4W)2Dn=Z+HHu4*;4 {bfV ZE mA*cu``p>V[E:5"bdU}bIL{5ey(]p0]l0-#&1w?l[bxw6n|d9rd.d}`kXfc]IPJ5RX^4T]1Vt]gu; *'Cn"8 ]:^hhSSPD*#B% muB/f^4,Wu!nI4wWl)4,uoB^H3R^)+e-IO:=5R3Ze>FfQSq5h{S @ev[5i_nPX}P0zW7;:F`nPsKrW. zA{l#GG:U4]ZtV>W&b:-E7ht:SM{#K+brZ/jQC806A_Sl>jP6QW,A8|HY*Myy+. u/PT%' C>d<>Y-4A4M+ bPoU5 2O*os@M0q$?a2V9I@[_pn3PEn{wuO;3.?(Z(}htPmxC5*SvrW-_X{t"*%3hWU}l*,XcvVIV47#u4_-*>>C'=H S[:-K9nZ*P~}ntER=g? 0(WC@Mt$7 xL3I$sE9RLVYl/_, :K Y%E:J4sCnObAGS>3d iI-il$bGZz:UmIVVXk4<1j^=UYC8PCO% =%r@>T/7dpqyEa""*52ES{^4+~ITe}zQn)^_qe-Z12#m`:x=G7x]Xw*v/o/gBN>u=kl,xM- L]X$|d3E1`my&1G;{4sQ@GaKLQ O7a"?7:wPF:Qbc,]" Tvxst@x|v6g:g 3WWm'!b'A?60&o%TeLw8D[[ySY04' F*Lx_Zkq{&`l $NH'UTwog=u#6wr3%C_Eg^J=88HdrNWRp$7n,xM]b)PG^!()G!!tg@$@D$Aq)@K3*f@=D!Ff?t 2;m@ly`vZY@n6uKQc:CHWVrN>x-/w-y") =Y+66z"8MKy_4-2 JA]t0ZMR(o|W94Nw FK x.-MX 1YN21"c;X"5&`D-T/%x7&oIyGf12r#x&!7N"7vO_y ^T<2h(>BIa| Az. |+u}y*[PfE%BB;BW""dJ$FEMAE_X5Ca5oi^&yjjE ]RMhccbC2%aC&CLfqy]]vfHQaiR"y_TH(%+ZexnFR4PQ"It)t9(~ ,!-myB,=GN&waHcK`W&.rIb'. %x,<1HaS@{W.4QQ&=Fi8O"^RU,7+HM}.#f XE/PEM-nbNnQxRu `VF{tBS=KtQzlh)/!IABH;J1En(UTi.dYKl87{8XC;e$M{F4 %GV s WcjhdTiBXtfRlh0C*andca{. XG {!Vy[ PE j[?2(5A+E-;=bT2~8u9TMCdUWw*ZfJYiRC% % Grs,FBq% [.aWc,@ g{F*=&Bp$bCdg*>`diTP/lM$*Gyt%E*h#u31 *^ZB(sMHMlQcE~~y*|LgvQ%lC*8x#@JZFrXGn4{.e)@A>USDT&?Ks0Wx:$2QVLcOS)`ya&k]Fwfh&C2!p5)LsS2WXP<1aXO[ITT0(OUXF< &/W*W$D)d> 1 'a&wqH+M)@vRnH"-&%dR40Ci4LFNc0JJkGRs<6hH=D4a T4I4'AFM`X;Q8 vIfoA!#L3Vc5U78 1o2sbTa"%9]LL9aRO[*1X5 PJ$SPRVkBnf|9c:Er)M8s T7!TreqWDNRoD@R%fy8M5"]9"YFZG hO+6Gp4S&?GWtQ)(xA$iAAnc ^xOS+J Bu("75@i7o'V'C: .9$M%>:j_qWD'8{-%?1M{(.G3O c5tUJ!yYhlSKz$2|Bve>&3j<$ci..f?Sa02aDIg0ugC~@~[liyo)8)N_+/GA "ts`!|Xn'?vJKRzyt9C;Cjk(Wk#A+Y2.D%Z]z:ikW,k l&+6d:yB.5jH^[#@x;(N4tG;!#'*DNXxw?C[rOy0UjVcovSEIhgdv0`Jn#kElJD iZ|*a8IGvj/U'-Db&iL2J$ +uhhrK5a|7@V?iDriN{tEvD3 tE6jz5v~ow0:ivZs~=P(g0GWw7` 1P+n&qbY ?cz3 Ge|n_}Fe+"; 6>t1 XP/=Aw^:>RP18b!lI[jvcV`a`sMryrAX/AI$/~Ek

Read this article:

Black Mirror's San Junipero: Technological Immortality - The Georgetown Voice

Atlassian co-CEO Scott Farquhar speaking at the AWS Sydney Summit.

Atlassian co-CEO Scott Farquhar has shed light on a major challenge facing the $8.7 billion Australian-born software giant, as its customers shift to the cloud, and played down the chances the company will imminently pursue more acquisitions.

Speaking before an audience of technology industry executives in Sydney on Wednesday, Mr Farquhar outlined his ambitions for Atlassian to "survive for 100 years" and not succumb to the traps that many dominant, brand name corporations fell into in recent decades.

"It's actually easier to build a big company than it is to build a long-term company," he said at the annual Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit in Sydney on Wednesday.

"Companies today are optimised for the current environment they live in, and when change happens, as it inevitably does, companies can't adapt.

"It's not the largest company, it's not the most successful company, it's not the strongest company, it's the most adaptable companies that are going to survive".

To that end, he said Atlassian was already taking steps to transform its business.

For example, the company is in the process of moving its global operations from being hosted on its own servers, to being hosted in the cloud by AWS, the outsourcing vendor famously used by Netflix and a string of other giant corporations.

This comes as Atlassian expects many of its customers to shift from using its software products hosted on company-owned servers to versions hosted remotely in the cloud over the next decade.

"About a third of our revenue, give or take, comes from the cloud," he later told journalists in a briefing.

"There are many companies that haven't yet adopted the cloud and want to choose to run something internally for various reasons.

"We have invested heavily so we have leading cloud versions of our products ... we see the future. In 10years time I would think 90 per cent of our customers will be in the cloud."

Atlassian in January paid $US425 million ($561 million) to acquire Trello, a collaboration and project management tool, the biggest of the 18 acquisitions it has made in its history. Trello is used in creative industries, as distinct from the company's flagship JIRA software, which is typically used by technical teams of software developers and IT help desks.

"For us,it fits in our portfolio really well," Mr Farquhar said of the acquisition. "The integration is going really well.

"At the moment we wouldn't do any more acquisitions, but we could do in the future. We want to make sure any acquisition we do is really successful, so we don't do big ones back to back."

Research house Gartner estimated last year that up to $US1 trillion in IT spending by companies could be affected by the shift to the cloud by 2020. It has also estimated that 80 per cent of software vendors will have shifted to cloud-based, subscription-based selling models by that point.

However, there can be a short-term margin impact for software companies making this shift. This is because installed software typically involves higher upfront fees than subscription-based products.

Referencing fallen corporate giants such as the airline Ansett and grocery chain Franklins, Mr Farquhar added: "When things changed they didn't adapt to the changing environment. And as a result they are no longer the large companies they once were."

Originally posted here:

Atlassian aims for corporate immortality in the cloud - The Australian Financial Review

Updated 21 hours ago

James Madison Toy was an average, 19th century major league baseball player and average might be generous.

In two unremarkable seasons, he batted .211. He finished his career with one home run. And he played on awful teams, which combined to win 65 games and lose 165.

When he died in 1919, the newspapers did not pay special attention.

Yet, Toy managed to achieve something few ballplayers do: baseball immortality.

Not because he was the first Beaver Countian to play in the big leagues, though he was. Not because he suffered a particularly gruesome career-ending injury, which he did.

Rather, Toy achieved baseball immortality more than four decades after his death because of a distant relative's baseless and apparently false claim about his heritage and a well-respected baseball historian's failure to investigate that claim.

"I'm not sure where it got started, but there were parts of the family that insisted he was part Sioux Indian," said Toy's great-great-nephew, Jim Toy, 57, of West Mayfield, Beaver County. "No one had any documentation to prove it.

"My dad always kind of questioned the claim."

Others did not.

And so James Madison Toy, an average, white major league baseball player from Beaver County, became known, incorrectly, as the first Native American to play in the big leagues.

That didn't sit well with some.

Real life

James Madison Toy's pro baseball career began in 1884 in the short-lived Iron and Oil Association, a minor league that included teams from Western Pennsylvania and Ohio. His New Brighton team disbanded before the season ended, and the league went under a few days after.

Over the next two seasons, Toy played for three minor league teams in New York and one in Georgia.

In 1887, Toy got his big break. He landed a spot on the newly created Cleveland Blues in the American Association, then a major league. In announcing the signing, Sporting Life described the 5-foot-6, 160-pound Toy as "a tall, athletic young fellow, a splendid back-stop and very fine thrower."

He batted .222 in 109 games and slugged one of the team's 14 home runs. The numbers weren't eye-popping, but it was the dead-ball era.

The Blues were awful. They won just 39 of their 131 games and finished last in the American Association. After the season, owners let go of 16 of the team's 25 players, including Toy. He spent the next two years toiling in the minor leagues for the Rochester (N.Y.) Jingoes.

Toy returned to the majors in 1890 with the American Association's Brooklyn Gladiators. They were even worse than the 1887 Blues. The Gladiators won 26 of 99 games and folded before the season ended. Toy batted .181 and suffered a career-ending injury when a baseball struck him in the groin.

The injury pained Toy for the rest of his life, according to his great-great-nephew from West Mayfield.

Toy returned to Beaver County and took up work as a stove molder for the former Howard Stove Co. The 1900 Census showed him living in Beaver Falls with his wife of 14 years, Ida, and their three children: Pearl, 13; Gertrude, 12; and George, 10.

Toy died in Cresson Sanatorium, where tuberculosis patients were treated, in 1919. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Beaver, family members said.

'First of the natives'

In 1963, an ambitious project by baseball historian Lee Allen to obtain biographical information about every major leaguer who played brought more notoriety to the late Toy than he enjoyed in life.

"There have been approximately 10,000 players and we have heard from 4,198. We would be most proud to have a record of Mr. Toy and anything you can do to aid us will be greatly appreciated," Allen, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum's chief historian, wrote in a letter to Hannah Toy of Beaver Falls.

Copies of letters exchanged between Allen and Toy's relatives are included in a file in the National Baseball Hall of Fame's archives.

James M. Toy, Hannah Toy's son, filled out the questionnaire. On a line asking for the player's nationality, Toy typed: "SIOUX INDIAN."

Allen replied immediately, writing: "I think he must have been the first Indian in major-league history, which gives him another distinction. There were quite a few after him, but none before that I know of, and I have questionnaires now from 4,321 players."

Allen went public with the claim in his Sporting News column, "Cooperstown Corner."

"It has often been printed that the first American Indian to appear in the majors was Louis Sockalexis, that folk hero out of the Penobscot country of Maine," Allen wrote in the 1963 column. "But now it develops that Sockalexis was not the first of the natives, that the honor should go to James Madison Toy of Beaver Falls, Pa."

It's unknown what, if any, independent research he did to try to confirm the claim.

Allen died in 1969.

Imposter

Journalist and author Ed Rice spent decades disputing the claim, starting in the 1980s as he began researching Louis Sockalexis for a biography on the Penobscot legend.

"What Lee Allen was trying to do was laudable," said Rice, 69, of New Brunswick, Canada. "But to strip Sockalexis of being recognized as the first American Indian to play major league baseball, that was an injustice."

Rice, who formerly lived in Maine where the Penobscot Nation is based, contends that Toy didn't deserve the distinction even if he was Native American because he was not listed in a Census as an Indian or registered with a tribe. Furthermore, there are no accounts identifying Toy as being an American Indian or being identified by others as such. Rice applies the same criteria to other players whose names emerged as being the first American Indian to play in the majors.

But Rice reserves particular disdain for Toy, who never claimed to be Native American during his lifetime. In a 2015 op-ed in the Bangor Daily News, Rice refers to Toy as an "imposter."

Rice was so determined to prove Toy wasn't Native American that, in 2006, he said he lied to Cambria County officials in an attempt to obtain a copy of Toy's death certificate. He told them over the phone that he was a family member, and they mailed it.

The certificate listed Toy's race as white.

Rice has urged Cooperstown to weigh in on the debate. But its library director, James L. Gates Jr., told the Tribune-Review: "The Hall of Fame is not a sanctioning body for ethnic backgrounds. (Lee Allen) was writing for himself when he made that claim. We don't stipulate anybody as being the first in terms of ethnic background."

0.0 percent

Genealogical research and DNA analysis appears to show that Toy wasn't Native American.

While numerous accounts suggest that the ballplayer's father was a Sioux Indian, records stored at the Beaver County Genealogy and History Center list the ballplayer's parents as James and Caroline (Caler) Toy. Toy's father was the son of Henry and Mary Toy, both of whom were born in Ireland.

And results of a DNA test added recently to Toy's file in Cooperstown show that the ancestral composition of another one of Toy's relatives, James Woods, who couldn't be reached, amounted to 0.0 percent Native American. Woods' great-great-grandfather John Wesley Toy was the ballplayer's brother.

Woods said in an email accompanying the DNA results that he took the test "not to discredit any family lore, but to accurately document my family history."

What matters

West Mayfield's Jim Toy, the ballplayer's great-great-nephew, can't believe the issue has generated as much debate as it has. While family members respected the significance of James Madison Toy's distinction, questions about its authenticity weighed on some of them.

"My grandmother (Hannah Toy) and her sister Kate insisted that Caroline Caler married an Indian," Jim Toy said. "They knew James Madison Toy when he was alive, and they were very adamant about it. My father (who filled out the questionnaire in 1963 and died in 2014) felt like, who was he to say yes or no? He didn't have proof one way or another.

"My dad was more interested in the fact that James Madison Toy played baseball."

A relative of Sockalexis, who began his career in 1897 with the Cleveland Spiders, didn't appear to be concerned with the debate.

"We've always thought that Louis Sockalexis was the first," Chris Sockalexis, chief historic preservation officer for the Penobscot Nation, said of his distant relative. "I think he set the standard for all minorities in the game."

He added: "This is the first time I've ever heard of Jim Toy."

Tom Fontaine is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at 412-320-7847 or tfontaine@tribweb.com.

Read the original:

The baseball immortality of Beaver County's James Madison Toy - Tribune-Review

Published April 3, 2017, 10:30 PM

By AFP

Los Angeles Russell Westbrook edged closer to NBA immortality with his 40th triple-double of the season on Sunday as LeBron James dug deep to help Cleveland clinch a double-overtime thriller against Indiana.

Oklahoma Citys Russell Westbrook posted 40 points, 13 rebounds and 10 assists for his 40th triple-double in a losing effort against the Charlotte Hornets, 113-101, Sunday in Oklahoma City. (AP)

Westbrook scored 40 points, grabbed 13 rebounds and provided 10 assists as the Oklahoma City Thunder fell to a 113-101 home loss against the Charlotte Hornets.

The Thunder guard is now one triple-double away from tying Hall of Famer Oscar Robertsons single-season record of 41, set in 1961-62 for the Cincinnati Royals.

With six games left in the regular season, Westbrook can match the record when the Thunder host the Milwaukee Bucks on Tuesday.

Westbrook however was more focused on the Thunders defeat than the latest chapter in his remarkable season.

Asked for his thoughts about the possibility of tying Robertsons long-standing mark on Tuesday, Westbrook replied: We gotta win. Thats my thoughts.

We were just making bad mistakes, bad decisions, Westbrook said after a game that saw the Thunder hand over 24 turnovers. Starting with myself, we have to take better care of the ball.

Oklahoma City now lies in sixth place in the Western Conference standings at 43-33.

WARRIORS WIN

In the Western Conference, Stephen Curry scored 42 points as the leading Golden State Warriors moved to within three wins of clinching the best record in the league.

The Dubs thrashed the Washington Wizards 139-115 to improve to 63-14.

Curry broke the 40-point barrier for the fourth time this season while Draymond Green added a triple-double to guide the Warriors to their 11th consecutive victory.

The Warriors are now only three more wins to be certain of clinching the best record in the league heading into the postseason.

Golden State now stands at 63-14, leading the San Antonio Spurs (59-17) by three-and-a-half games with five remaining.

The Wizards, meanwhile, fell to 46-31, one behind Toronto as they battle for third place in the Eastern Conference.

In Cleveland, the Cavaliers looked to 2016 NBA Finals MVP James once again to secure a pulsating 135-130 win over the Pacers in double-overtime.

James finished with 41 points, 16 rebounds and 11 assists for his 11th triple-double of the season and the 53rd of his career in a crucial win for the Cavaliers.

Tags: Cavaliers, Charlotte Hornets, Indiana, Manila Bulletin, mb.com.ph, NBA: Westbrook nears NBA immortality, Russell Westbrook

Read more from the original source:

NBA: Westbrook nears NBA immortality - Manila Bulletin

For years they had been inseparable, off the ice and on the ice, where they made magic as sweet as any set of NHL matched-pair wingers have in a very, very long time, and in the minds eye of the hockey universe.

But after a while, Patrik Elias yearned for independence from his friend Petr Sykora; yearned to be known as an independent entity and for his own identity. He had, after all, earned that.

And so it was early in the 2002-03 season that I approached Elias, whom I had known since he first joined the Devils as a 19-year-old back in 1995. Sykora had been traded the previous offseason. I started a question, Petr

Elias interrupted me.

Im Patrik, he said.

He most certainly was.

He most certainly is.

He is Patrik Elias, the greatest forward ever to play for the Devils and one of the great two-way forwards of his generation who probably sacrificed some 75-100 goals and 150-200 points off his lifetime 408-617-1,025 total in order to accommodate the unyielding defense-first philosophy of the only organization for which he ever worked.

Except, as Elias told me when we chatted upon the announcement of his retirement, it probably wasnt much of a sacrifice at all to become an indispensable part of two of the three Stanley Cups the franchise won while reigning over the Eastern Conference for more than a decade.

There are no regrets for me, said New Jerseys forever No. 26, who next year will have his sweater raised to the rafters to accompany those of franchise bedrocks Martin Brodeur, Scott Stevens, Scott Niedermayer and Ken Daneyko. Maybe I could have had different numbers somewhere else, but I was happy winning championships. I was happy making the playoffs every year and I was happy knowing we had a chance to win every year.

You either adjusted in New Jersey or you didnt stay. We were all proud of being part of those teams. I wasnt just a one-way player. If they wanted to move me from wing to center, I did it. I played the PP and the PK. I could check. Im very happy being known for that.

When I look back, the thing I am most proud of is that I spent my entire career with one team, Elias said, before referring to the man who ran the show. You know, I wasnt the only one to make that decision. Lou [Lamoriello] kept me for all those years, too.

Elias almost left, almost signed with the Rangers when he became a free agent the summer of 2006. In fact, he had essentially agreed to a six-year, $42 million contract. But when New York general manager Glen Sather would not give the winger a no-move clause, Elias circled back to the Devils and signed a seven-year, $42 million deal.

It was slightly more than the $625,000 he earned during the 1999-2000 Cup season when he recorded 72 points (35-37) and put the puck on Jason Arnotts stick with one of the slickest passes you have ever seen for the Game 6 double-overtime Cup winner in Dallas. That $625,000, by the way, that was surpassed that season by 486 players. And that $625,000 was Elias salary on the first year of a three-year deal he received following a holdout through which he missed the seasons first nine games.

It wasnt always roses with Lou, Elias said. But we made it work and the relationship got better as it went on.

The 2000-01 season in which the winger recorded 40 goals and 56 assists for 96 points was the most productive of his career. The Devils gave away the Cup final and a repeat in that seven-game loss to the Avalanche after becoming cavalier about their talent and supremacy, but that was through no fault of Elias, who had 23 points (9-14) in 25 playoff games after posting 20 (seven goals, 13 assists) in 23 matches the previous tournament.

Those were the days of the A Line, the shooting comet of the unit featuring Elias, Arnott and Sykora that was as lethal, skilled and entertaining a combination that has played in the league over the last quarter century. While the rest of the league was playing checkers, the A Line was playing chess.

It seemed as if the three pieces would be interlocked forever. They lasted just over two years. Arnott, unhappy and becoming a disruptive influence, was traded first, at the 02 deadline. Then Sykora.

Obviously those were the best two years, but more than that, playing on that line with Petr and Arnie was the most fun of my career, Elias said. Every time we went onto the ice, every game, every practice, we had so much fun together.

But Lou made those decisions. I dont really know why. I wish we had been together longer.

Elias thrived without Arnott and Sykora. He became the quintessential checking wing for Pat Burns 2003 Cup champions, became the left wing on another one of the Devils signature units, the EGG line centered by Scott Gomez that had Brian Gionta on the right. He later moved to center when times became leaner in New Jersey.

But he never wore another NHL logo. Never played for another team, this exceptional player who most certainly is Hall of Fame worthy and who, felled by a knee injury that kept him off the ice all season, will skate in warmups one final time before the home finale against the Islanders next Saturday night.

One more skate for Elias, who established his own identity as a franchise icon and who will leave New Jersey with everybody not only knowing his name, but chanting it, as well.

Hes Patrik.

View post:

How two trades pushed Patrik Elias into Devils immortality - New York Post

While going through my Facebook memories, a friendship reminder abruptly wrenched my heart. It said, You became friend with one person Anum Rustum 5 years ago, today March 11, 2012 Sunday. The memory breaks my patience as it was the same time when I literally was busy in the process of restoring my shattered broken heart and emotions in the stable form after returning back from a funeral of my childhood friend to whom I shared golden era of childhood with a lot of mischiefs and screw ups.

I just cant believe this happened to one of us. I just wanted to stop the world and just wanted to scream out loud. Its very gloomy and difficult to put my tears into words as its been 8 days of hard trying every time my pen stops at the point, my heart bleeds and my tears make every word vague to follow up while writing in the account of this innocent soul who left us this early. When people covered his face and raised him towards his final destination, it felt like somebody took something from my heart, those recitations still echoes in my ears. I was stunned and just thinking over and over again that We belong to Allah and to Him we shall return.

Some say that young people are not supposed to die. It feels like it is against all the rules of nature. It is not fair it should not happen. Unfortunately, it does happen and when it does it can be agonising. This sudden incident is a wakeup call for us that we are hanging with the tree of morality constantly trying to rescue ourselves. It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom to move on in ones inward journey into new realms than to stand for outer freedom, just a slip takes into world of immortality. I cant cope up with my agony whenever I think that how melancholic it is when your name has been called in hall for receiving gold medal in MBBS but you are not present even in this world to receive it. Who knows that your preparation for serving your patients will takes you to the same hospital unconscious. It stings when I think that how painful it is when you are just one step ahead from your success to get your hard work rewarded.

New dreams, hopes and journey towards life ends before it even starts. Anum, how fine was it when the day started with grace and how much it is graceful now, that you are remembered every morning with every opening eye. You remain in our prayers for eternity as time may heal anguish of the wound but the space you left and the loss of your existence can never be repaired. May Allah SWT grant you highest place in Jannat and bless you with His endless bounties.

MAHRUKH IBRAHIM,

Abbottabad, March 12.

View post:

Just a slip from mortal to immortality - The Nation

Peter Higgs picks up the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 medal

Phil McCarthy/Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851

By Richard Webb

Youre in London to receive the 1851 Royal Commission medal for outstanding influence on science. Arent you bored of medals and prizes by now? I think I shall have to clear some handkerchiefs and things out of another drawer to find room. There are quite a lot.

How does it feel to have achieved immortality? I describe it as notoriety rather than immortality. It continues to be an embarrassment how easily I get recognised on the streets of Edinburgh going to do my shopping. Theres always somebody who wants to take a selfie or something. Its nice but theres too much of it.

Many people thought the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERNs Large Hadron Collider would be just the start, yet five years on nothing more has been discovered. Yes, thats rather worrying. The hope has been that we would discover things to connect particle physics much more with cosmology, dark matter and that kind of thing. It doesnt seem to be happening yet.

Youre thinking of theories that go beyond the standard model that the Higgs is a component of, like supersymmetry? Yes, supersymmetry in particular. Quite apart from its potential to explain dark matter, from a pure theorists point of view its hard to see how to make the connection between particle physics and gravity in any other way.

Isnt finding the Higgs and nothing else the very worst of outcomes? It would still have been worse if theyd found nothing. The standard model is so successful in other ways that a non-discovery would have been really rather shattering.

Do you still feel a hint of embarrassment referring to the particle as the Higgs? It could be worse: when its called the god particle that really upsets people. That seems to me an unfortunate mixing of theoretical physics with bad theology. Ive ceased to be embarrassed about the particle being named after me because Ive spent many years playing down the tendency to attach my name to everything in the theory. But its upsetting for people who worked on the theory even before me to have my name on what they did.

How can fundamental physics get out of its current impasse? There are plenty of indications of the need to go beyond the standard model, but not necessarily through the sort of thing they do at CERN. The discoveries in neutrino physics about neutrino oscillations dont fit well at all. And people are beginning to learn more about ancient galaxies and so on, which throws some light on the question of whether dark matter exists or whether youve got to modify gravity. I think we have to watch the astrophysical evidence coming in.

A lot of people would ask why we should bother trying to discover new physics. What would you say to that? The person who answered that was Robert Wilson, the builder of the machine at Fermilab when he testified before US Congress in 1969. He simply said, this is one of the things that makes this country worth defending. I think theres a general tendency now for people to devalue pure science and concentrate on the spin-offs. Its a mistake. Its giving in to the idea that pure science doesnt really matter unless you can get something tangible out of it.

What was your motivation for becoming a theoretical physicist? The seed was probably planted when I was at school in Bristol during the second world war. One of its former students, whose name appeared on the honours board, was Paul Dirac. He was about as pure a theoretical physicist as you could get, maybe overly pure. It was curiosity about him that began to draw me in aided by my incompetence as an experimentalist in my student days at Kings College London.

What would your advice be to someone who has your sort of esoteric interests? Go undercover. I wasnt productive in an obvious way; I didnt churn out papers. I think these days the University of Edinburgh would have sacked me long ago, theres just too much competition. So now I would say, do it in your spare time, and get yourself a solid publication record in the sort of thing that gets you recognition more readily.

Have we lost sight as a society of the value of knowledge for knowledges sake? Theres certainly a danger that people in government circles are losing sight of it. With various economic crises and problems hitting us, particularly things that may be self-inflicted, its hard to argue the case.

Do you mean things like Brexit? If the UK does get out of the European Union, as we seem to be doing, theres going to be a very great upheaval because more and more of the funding for scientific research in this country has come from Europe. The people who want to get us out are going to have to reverse that process in some way and they wont find it easy to do. I dont think I would be very happy in the US either with the Trump regime, with attitudes that will affect science. But the trend towards being anti-rationalist affects more than just science itself, and it is worrying.

So how do we make the case for expertise and knowledge for knowledges sake? Perhaps from watching the mess that some of the non-experts make of things.

Peter Higgs is emeritus professor of physics at the University of Edinburgh, UK. In 1964, along with Robert Brout and Franois Englert at the Free University of Brussels, he proposed a new particle that would explain how other fundamental particles gain mass. The discovery of the Higgs boson, announced in July 2012, led to the award of the 2013 Nobel prize in physics to Higgs and Englert.

Read more: Instant Expert: The Higgs Boson; The Higgs boson makes the universe stable just. Coincidence?

More on these topics:

Read the rest here:

Peter Higgs on knowledge, immortality and the future of physics - New Scientist

Head in the cloud: could our neutral networks soon be running via a computer program? Photograph: Alamy

Heres what happens. You are lying on an operating table, fully conscious, but rendered otherwise insensible, otherwise incapable of movement. A humanoid machine appears at your side, bowing to its task with ceremonial formality. With a brisk sequence of motions, the machine removes a large panel of bone from the rear of your cranium, before carefully laying its fingers, fine and delicate as a spiders legs, on the viscid surface of your brain. You may be experiencing some misgivings about the procedure at this point. Put them aside, if you can.

Youre in pretty deep with this thing; theres no backing out now. With their high-resolution microscopic receptors, the machine fingers scan the chemical structure of your brain, transferring the data to a powerful computer on the other side of the operating table. They are sinking further into your cerebral matter now, these fingers, scanning deeper and deeper layers of neurons, building a three-dimensional map of their endlessly complex interrelations, all the while creating code to model this activity in the computers hardware. As the work proceeds, another mechanical appendage less delicate, less careful removes the scanned material to a biological waste container for later disposal. This is material you will no longer be needing.

At some point, you become aware that you are no longer present in your body. You observe with sadness, or horror, or detached curiosity the diminishing spasms of that body on the operating table, the last useless convulsions of a discontinued meat.

The animal life is over now. The machine life has begun.

This, more or less, is the scenario outlined by Hans Moravec, a professor of cognitive robotics at Carnegie Mellon, in his 1988 book Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. It is Moravecs conviction that the future of the human species will involve a mass-scale desertion of our biological bodies, effected by procedures of this kind. Its a belief shared by many transhumanists, a movement whose aim is to improve our bodies and minds to the point where we become something other and better than the animals we are. Ray Kurzweil, for one, is a prominent advocate of the idea of mind-uploading. An emulation of the human brain running on an electronic system, he writes in The Singularity Is Near, would run much faster than our biological brains. Although human brains benefit from massive parallelism (on the order of 100 trillion interneuronal connections, all potentially operating simultaneously), the rest time of the connections is extremely slow compared to contemporary electronics. The technologies required for such an emulation sufficiently powerful and capacious computers and sufficiently advanced brainscanning techniques will be available, he announces, by the early 2030s.

And this, obviously, is no small claim. We are talking about not just radically extended life spans, but also radically expanded cognitive abilities. We are talking about endless copies and iterations of the self. Having undergone a procedure like this, you would exist to the extent you could meaningfully be said to exist at all as an entity of unbounded possibilities.

I was introduced to Randal Koene at a Bay Area transhumanist conference. He wasnt speaking at the conference, but had come along out of personal interest. A cheerfully reserved man in his early 40s, he spoke in the punctilious staccato of a non-native English speaker who had long mastered the language. As we parted, he handed me his business card and much later that evening Iremoved it from my wallet and had a proper look at it. The card was illustrated with a picture of a laptop, on whose screen was displayed a stylised image of a brain. Underneath was printed what seemed to me an attractively mysterious message: Carboncopies: Realistic Routes to Substrate Independent Minds. Randal A Koene, founder.

I took out my laptop and went to the website of Carboncopies, which I learned was a nonprofit organisation with a goal of advancing the reverse engineering of neural tissue and complete brains, Whole Brain Emulation and development of neuroprostheses that reproduce functions of mind, creating what we call Substrate Independent Minds. This latter term, I read, was the objective to be able to sustain person-specific functions of mind and experience in many different operational substrates besides the biological brain. And this, I further learned, was a process analogous to that by which platform independent code can be compiled and run on many different computing platforms.

It seemed that I had met, without realising it, a person who was actively working toward the kind of brain-uploading scenario that Kurzweil had outlined in The Singularity Is Near. And this was a person I needed to get to know.

Koene was an affable and precisely eloquent man and his conversation was unusually engaging for someone so forbiddingly intelligent and who worked in so rarefied a field as computational neuroscience; so, in his company, I often found myself momentarily forgetting about the nearly unthinkable implications of the work he was doing, the profound metaphysical weirdness of the things he was explaining to me. Hed be talking about some tangential topic his happily cordial relationship with his ex-wife, say, or the cultural differences between European and American scientific communities and Id remember with a slow, uncanny suffusion of unease that his work, were it to yield the kind of results he is aiming for, would amount to the most significant event since the evolution of Homo sapiens. The odds seemed pretty long from where I was standing, but then again, I reminded myself, the history of science was in many ways an almanac of highly unlikely victories.

One evening in early spring, Koene drove down to San Francisco from the North Bay, where he lived and worked in a rented ranch house surrounded by rabbits, to meet me for dinner in a small Argentinian restaurant on Columbus Avenue. The faint trace of an accent turned out to be Dutch. Koene was born in Groningen and had spent most of his early childhood in Haarlem. His father was a particle physicist and there were frequent moves, including a two-year stint in Winnipeg, as he followed his work from one experimental nuclear facility to the next.

Now a boyish 43, he had lived in California only for the past five years, but had come to think of it as home, or the closest thing to home hed encountered in the course of a nomadic life. And much of this had to do with the culture of techno-progressivism that had spread outward from its concentrated origins in Silicon Valley and come to encompass the entire Bay Area, with its historically high turnover of radical ideas. It had been a while now, he said, since hed described his work to someone, only for them to react as though he were making a misjudged joke or simply to walk off mid-conversation.

In his early teens, Koene began to conceive of the major problem with the human brain in computational terms: it was not, like a computer, readable and rewritable. You couldnt get in there and enhance it, make it run more efficiently, like you could with lines of code. You couldnt just speed up a neuron like you could with a computer processor.

Around this time, he read Arthur C Clarkes The City and the Stars, a novel set a billion years from now, in which the enclosed city of Diaspar is ruled by a superintelligent Central Computer, which creates bodies for the citys posthuman citizens and stores their minds in its memory banks at the end of their lives, for purposes of reincarnation. Koene saw nothing in this idea of reducing human beings to data that seemed to him implausible and felt nothing in himself that prevented him from working to bring it about. His parents encouraged him in this peculiar interest and the scientific prospect of preserving human minds in hardware became a regular topic of dinnertime conversation.

Computational neuroscience, which drew its practitioners not from biology but from the fields of mathematics and physics, seemed to offer the most promising approach to the problem of mapping and uploading the mind. It wasnt until he began using the internet in the mid-1990s, though, that he discovered a loose community of people with an interest in the same area.

As a PhD student in computational neuroscience at Montreals McGill University, Koene was initially cautious about revealing the underlying motivation for his studies, for fear of being taken for a fantasist or an eccentric.

I didnt hide it, as such, he said, but it wasnt like I was walking into labs, telling people I wanted to upload human minds to computers either. Id work with people on some related area, like the encoding of memory, with a view to figuring out how that might fit into an overall road map for whole brain emulation.

Having worked for a while at Halcyon Molecular, a Silicon Valley gene-sequencing and nanotechnology startup funded by Peter Thiel, he decided to stay in the Bay Area and start his own nonprofit company aimed at advancing the cause to which hed long been dedicated: carboncopies

Koenes decision was rooted in the very reason he began pursuing that work in the first place: an anxious awareness of the small and diminishing store of days that remained to him. If hed gone the university route, hed have had to devote most of his time, at least until securing tenure, to projects that were at best tangentially relevant to his central enterprise. The path he had chosen was a difficult one for a scientist and he lived and worked from one small infusion of private funding to the next.

But Silicon Valleys culture of radical techno-optimism had been its own sustaining force for him, and a source of financial backing for a project that took its place within the wildly aspirational ethic of that cultural context. There were people there or thereabouts, wealthy and influential, for whom a future in which human minds might be uploaded to computers was one to be actively sought, a problem to be solved, disruptively innovated, by the application of money.

One such person was Dmitry Itskov, a 36-year-old Russian tech multimillionaire and founder of the 2045 Initiative, an organisationwhose stated aim was to create technologies enabling the transfer of an individuals personality to a more advanced nonbiological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. One of Itskovs projects was the creation of avatars artificial humanoid bodies that would be controlled through brain-computer interface, technologies that would be complementary with uploaded minds. He had funded Koenes work with Carboncopies and in 2013 they organised a conference in New York called Global Futures 2045, aimed, according to its promotional blurb, at the discussion of a new evolutionary strategy for humanity.

When we spoke, Koene was working with another tech entrepreneur named Bryan Johnson, who had sold his automated payment company to PayPal a couple of years back for $800m and who now controlled a venture capital concern called the OS Fund, which, I learned from its website, invests in entrepreneurs working towards quantum leap discoveries that promise to rewrite the operating systems of life. This language struck me as strange and unsettling in a way that revealed something crucial about the attitude toward human experience that was spreading outward from its Bay Area centre a cluster of software metaphors that had metastasised into a way of thinking about what it meant to be a human being.

And it was the sameessential metaphor that lay at the heart of Koenes project: the mind as a piece of software, an application running on the platform of flesh. When he used the term emulation, he was using it explicitly to evoke the sense in which a PCs operating system could be emulated on a Mac, as what he called platform independent code.

The relevant science for whole brain emulation is, as youd expect, hideously complicated, and its interpretation deeply ambiguous, but if I can risk a gross oversimplification here, I will say that it is possible to conceive of the idea as something like this: first, you scan the pertinent information in a persons brain the neurons, the endlessly ramifying connections between them, the information-processing activity of which consciousness is seen as a byproduct through whatever technology, or combination of technologies, becomes feasible first (nanobots, electron microscopy, etc). That scan then becomes a blueprint for the reconstruction of the subject brains neural networks, which is then converted into a computational model. Finally, you emulate all of this on a third-party non-flesh-based substrate: some kind of supercomputer or a humanoid machine designed to reproduce and extend the experience of embodiment something, perhaps, like Natasha Vita-Mores Primo Posthuman.

The whole point of substrate independence, as Koene pointed out to me whenever I asked him what it would be like to exist outside of a human body, and I asked him many times, in various ways was that it would be like no one thing, because there would be no one substrate, no one medium of being. This was the concept transhumanists referred to as morphological freedom the liberty to take any bodily form technology permits.

You can be anything you like, as an article about uploading in Extropy magazine put it in the mid-90s. You can be big or small; you can be lighter than air and fly; you can teleport and walk through walls. You can be a lion or an antelope, a frog or a fly, a tree, a pool, the coat of paint on a ceiling.

What really interested me about this idea was not how strange and far-fetched it seemed (though it ticked those boxes resolutely enough), but rather how fundamentally identifiable it was, how universal. When talking to Koene, I was mostly trying to get to grips with the feasibility of the project and with what it was he envisioned as a desirable outcome. But then we would part company I would hang up the call, or I would take my leave and start walking toward the nearest station and I would find myself feeling strangely affected by the whole project, strangely moved.

Because there was something, in the end, paradoxically and definitively human in this desire for liberation from human form. I found myself thinking often of WB Yeatss Sailing to Byzantium, in which the ageing poet writes of his burning to be free of the weakening body, the sickening heart to abandon the dying animal for the manmade and immortal form of a mechanical bird. Once out of nature, he writes, I shall never take/ My bodily form from any natural thing/ But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make.

One evening, we were sitting outside a combination bar/laundromat/standup comedy venue in Folsom Street a place with the fortuitous name of BrainWash when I confessed that the idea of having my mind uploaded to some technological substrate was deeply unappealing to me, horrifying even. The effects of technology on my life, even now, were something about which I was profoundly ambivalent; for all I had gained in convenience and connectedness, I was increasingly aware of the extent to which my movements in the world were mediated and circumscribed by corporations whose only real interest was in reducing the lives of human beings to data, as a means to further reducing us to profit.

The content we consumed, the people with whom we had romantic encounters, the news we read about the outside world: all these movements were coming increasingly under the influence of unseen algorithms, the creations of these corporations, whose complicity with government, moreover, had come to seem like the great submerged narrative of our time. Given the world we were living in, where the fragile liberal ideal of the autonomous self was already receding like a half-remembered dream into the doubtful haze of history, wouldnt a radical fusion of ourselves with technology amount, in the end, to a final capitulation of the very idea of personhood?

Koene nodded again and took a sip of his beer.

Hearing you say that, he said, makes it clear that theres a major hurdle there for people. Im more comfortable than you are with the idea, but thats because Ive been exposed to it for so long that Ive just got used to it.

In the weeks and months after I returned from San Francisco, I thought obsessively about the idea of whole brain emulation. One morning, I was at home in Dublin, suffering from both a head cold and a hangover. I lay there, idly considering hauling myself out of bed to join my wife and my son, who were in his bedroom next door enjoying a raucous game of Buckaroo. I realised that these conditions (head cold, hangover) had imposed upon me a regime of mild bodily estrangement. As often happens when Im feeling under the weather, I had a sense of myself as an irreducibly biological thing, an assemblage of flesh and blood and gristle. I felt myself to be an organism with blocked nasal passages, a bacteria-ravaged throat, a sorrowful ache deep within its skull, its cephalon. I was aware of my substrate, in short, because my substrate felt like shit.

And I was gripped by a sudden curiosity as to what, precisely, that substrate consisted of, as to what I myself happened, technically speaking, to be. I reached across for the phone on my nightstand and entered into Google the words What is the human... The first three autocomplete suggestions offered What is The Human Centipede about, and then: What is the human body made of, and then: What is the human condition.

It was the second question I wanted answered at this particular time, as perhaps a back door into the third. It turned out that I was 65% oxygen, which is to say that I was mostly air, mostly nothing. After that, I was composed of diminishing quantities of carbon and hydrogen, of calcium and sulphur and chlorine, and so on down the elemental table. I was also mildly surprised to learn that, like the iPhone I was extracting this information from, I also contained trace elements of copper and iron and silicon.

What a piece of work is a man, I thought, what a quintessence of dust.

Some minutes later, my wife entered the bedroom on her hands and knees, our son on her back, gripping the collar of her shirt tight in his little fists. She was making clip-clop noises as she crawled forward, he was laughing giddily and shouting: Dont buck! Dont buck!

With a loud neighing sound, she arched her back and sent him tumbling gently into a row of shoes by the wall and he screamed in delighted outrage, before climbing up again. None of this, I felt, could be rendered in code. None of this, I felt, could be run on any other substrate. Their beauty was bodily, in the most profound sense, in the saddest and most wonderful sense.

I never loved my wife and our little boy more, I realised, than when I thought of them as mammals. I dragged myself, my animal body, out of bed to join them.

To Be a Machine by Mark OConnell is published by Granta (12.99). To order a copy for 11.04 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99

View post:

'Your animal life is over. Machine life has begun.' The road to immortality - The Guardian