No, not that one. The other one, that doesn't have 4channers dressing up as it to harass scientologists. The modern remake of the old miniseries, which I never saw. We watched the first episode, which was most notable for the inclusion of two ex-Firefly people. ( Spoilers and rantification )

And in other Firefly cast things, here's Nathan Fillion's Halloween costume.

So I was reading about Nash Equilibrium the other day. I'm sure there's lots of complexities that aren't covered in the wikipedia article, but there was one thought that stuck out for me. It's in the introduction paragraph, so I can't really claim it's a great insight, though I think their example is non-ideal. "However, Nash equilibrium does not necessarily mean the best cumulative payoff for all the players involved; in many cases all the players might improve their payoffs if they could somehow agree on strategies different from the Nash equilibrium (e.g. competing businesses forming a cartel in order to increase their profits)."

It's entirely about local equilibria. Which is an important and valuable tool, in the way that a photograph is an important and valuable tool, but it you draw all your conclusions just from either, you miss an important axis, the changes over time.

It also doesn't work when one or more of the participants aren't aiming at maximizing their whatever. Which is also covered in the article

So, I guess I'm not really adding anything about it, but it's still an interesting article and concept, so yeah.

A collection of WWII Political cartoons by Dr. Seuss

I'm sure you've all heard about the guy who sails around stalking and harassing whaling fleets by now.

10 important social psychology studies on why people do dumb stuff.

A professor bet that a transhuman AI in a box would be able to talk people into letting it out. He would play the AI. Two people so far have volunteered as "gatekeepers" and bet $10 on the experiment. Each time, he convinced them to let him out.

On further reflection, the idea of dragons means something entirely different in a world with surface-to-air missiles and jet fighters than it would in a world where the longbow is the height of anti-air technology.

The world and the universe are both vast and awesome in size and variety. Leaving aside all of the weird stuff that's implied by extrapolating the laws of physics, and even the weird stuff we've seen and confirmed, hell, leaving aside everything beyond the bounds of the solar system, the world is full of all sorts of interesting and strange things. Just the Earth alone is mind-bogglingly huge (humans seriously suck at comprehending numbers outside what can easily be visualized, that's why we love metaphor so much) there's an amazing variety of ways which people have created to deal with the many and varied repeated tropes of human existence, including all sorts of ways to make really big numbers into something comprehensible.

That's awesome. In the literal sense, inspiring awe. The thing about awe, it can turn into wonder, or fear. Which makes sense, as big awe-inspiring things like avalanches, giant water features, sabertooth tigers, or mammoths used to also be deadly. And still can be, if you're not careful. So I suppose bit of fear is a healthy thing our genes are happy we have.

What I really don't understand are the people who look at this kind of awesome variety and endless possibility, and then pretend it doesn't exist. People who (sometimes more, sometimes less) metaphorically stick their fingers in their ears and shout "LA LA LA LA LA!" Not just like the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, which thinks if you can't see it, it can't see you, they think if they don't acknowledge the world, it doesn't exist. Or, at least, it's Somebody Else's Problem Though in many ways, this seems to be a fairly common human trait, it's applicability to aliens is based on extrapolating from a sample of one.

But I guess, what I really don't get is the why. Why someone would chose to treat the awesome wonders of the world as if they didn't exist. Why someone would choose a life that was deliberately smaller, that was deliberately less interesting, that was deliberately full of less possibilities. Maybe fear of the unknown is that strong. Maybe it's the comfort of familiarity. Maybe it's fear of feeling small and tiny and insignificant. I don't know, like I said, I don't get it. I can sort of get my brain to that place, but not really get it.

I am only human, after all, and I can only be shaped by what I know and what I've done. And growing up, the unknown wasn't ever presented as something terrifying and scary. The giant emptiness of space, or the variety of the world wasn't something to fear, it was something to explore.

When it comes down to it, I'm an optimist. Partially by temperament, and partly by choice. I have faith in humanity as a whole, for all the ways we such and fail, we're persistent and bloody clever and can be our better selves. We're not perfect, and probably will be, but we are better than we once were, and we can be better still. We can be smarter, we can be more compassionate, we can be stronger, we can be more just, we can be better. Yes, our monkey brains evolved to throw sticks and stones may eventually be able to comprehend the workings of the universe, or at least come up with better and better models, there's always a twist. So all the weirdness and distance and STUFF out there is something to figure out, something to appreciate, something to discover.

And I guess that's why I don't get the people who want a little universe, with them at the center. I just don't see the point, when there's so much more out there. Imagine if there really where dragons in all those "here"s.

I have a whole folder of bookmarks marked "things to blog about", which I haven't, so I'm going to start dumping things that look interesting, and I haven't had the time/energy/inspiration to write a whole thing about, so at least they get out.

Indian engineer 'builds' new glaciers to stop global warming" In the fine tradition of accurate headlines, he's not building precisely "new" glaciers, nor will it stop global warming. He's piping the meltwater from melting glaciers to the shadowed side of the mountains, where it can freeze until the spring.

SuBET sustainable masterplanning tools It looks like an integrated city desgin/analysis tool to work on making cities, but it's apparently proprietary for that one British engineering company, so not widely applicable, yet at least.

Motorhead Messiah This guy makes some awesome/crazy modifications to cars, like a hybrid Hummer where the electric batteries are powered by a biodiesel jet turbine. Seriously.

There's three to start, more later as I go through the folder(s).

" If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars." - Dr. Carl Sagan

Dr. Sagan was right. Eventually, we will have to venture to the stars. Not just for resources, not just to keep our eggs out of one basket, but, in the words of others, "because it's there." How could we spend the rest of our galactic lifetime sitting here on one planet? I may not live to see the day, especially with how people treat space these days, but damned if I'm not gonna do my best to prevent the "destroy ourselves" part, so someday, we will go see galactic dawns.

A music video, remixed from COSMOS, History Channel's Universe, interviews with Richard Feynman, and many others. It's awesome. Really awesome.

Here's another, with Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking

From those notorious communist agitators at the Wall Street Journal, the latest numbers on executive compensation. It turns out that the hardworking titans of commerce and industry only take home a third of all pay in the United Stat...

Sarcasm doesn't work for this. Corporate executives make 33% of all pay in the US! ONE THIRD of ALL income in the US goes to the executives! A THIRD! $2.1 trillion out of $6.4 trillion total. The WSJ moans about how that affects Social Security, but that's the LEAST of the worries for that! AND that $2,100,000,000,000? It leaves out stock options, "interest" earned by traders, benefits, and other "creative" payment measures.

One-third of all pay in the country goes to the top executives. And it has been rising for years. Want to find out why wages are stagnant? Don't blame Mexico, or China, there's your answer, that way all that extra money can go to the execs.

And this is AFTER those executives crashed the world economy by making huge bets on real estate with all that extra money. It's not just a moral issue, it's a practical hazard to the whole economy.

Torches and pitchforks time, comrades, torches and pitchforks time.

My biggest gripe so far with the Obama administration, which is one I've had with politicians of all stripes, especially the alleged liberals for years, is their complete failures of imagination. There are times when incremental technocratic moderate change is important, necessary, or the only option. And there are times when the status quo has failed so badly that there's room for big imaginative changes. And if you let yourself get circumscribed by the "necessary", you ignore the possible.

But here, let me turn the mic over to my man Franklin Delano, and his four freedoms speech. (Wikipedia) in 1941. The Great Depression and the onset of World War II, and instead of aiming for small ideas circumscribed by the "necessary" or the "possible", he managed to still think big, and act big, and keep trying different things till they worked. Not half-assed bank bailouts without any oversight, not a maybe kinda half-assed possible public health option, but Social Security, no pandering about "glad to have jobs" (more from pundits than pols), but the National Labor Relations Act, Works Project Authority, Civilian Conservation Corps, and FDR directly took on the banksters and their bought minions in government.

It'd be nice if those we elected as leaders could show some leadership, the kind that won FDR landslide elections.

Most of you probably know, or at least know of, Bruce Sterling, the science fiction author, famous for cyberpunk novels. He's also been a general futurist, ranter, cyber civil libertarian, and general internet opinion guy. He also basically started the whole Bright Green movement with his Viridian Manifesto which was part of the kickoff of the Viridian Project. I'm not going to summarize the whole Viridian project, in part because I was never an active participant, just followed from a distance.

The Viridian project is over, at least in that form, and the Last Note is full of good advice, not all of which I've yet been able to follow. At the very least, it crystallized my desire to get a multitool, a present from my parents last Christmas, and one from my wife this year for my birthday. And much of what he says of it is true, because carrying it has changed how I look at things. Loose threads do get cut, loose screws get fixed, and I have to remember to leave it behind before I go to the courthouse these days. And after moving, I really do appreciate the advice to get rid of stuff you don't need or use. That's one of the goals unpacking.

And it includes another formulation of the Samuel Vimes Boots Theory of Socio-Economic Injustice.

A few years ago, while I was traveling across the country, I was also reading David Brin's Earth (obligatory Amazon link), and I realized what I wanted to do with my life.

I want to save the world.

Or, at least, I want to hack the world. I'm only being slightly melodramatic when I say that, too. Truly, there's nothing we humans can (yet) do to the entire world, it's a giant ball of molten rock and metal, even all our nukes couldn't do much more than scratch the surface. So, yeah, the Earth itself? It'll be fine.

Our civilization, however, may not. So that's what made me decided on what I wanted to study and head back to school, not just take the random gen-ed classes any more. Now I'm trying to finish up engineering, the large scale kind, buildings and cities and regions and things. Our systems are big.

Hacking the whole world is a big project, which will need lots of help. It's the ultimate open-source project, too! Everyone is contributing already. But if you walk into a project without an idea where you're going, you're going to end up making mistakes until you figure things out, and then you're going to have to fix them to get where you wanted to go. And so far we've been all too often bumbling in the dark, and making some awful big mistakes. I wanna help clean those up, and keep from making them again.

But where do I want to go? Well, I've been shorthanding it as the "Star Trek Future", not because I want or expect anything exactly like Star Trek to happen, but because it's more familiar than terms like Bright Green Future as coined by the folks over at Worldchanging. Since it's what I'm devoting a lot of time and thought to, it ought to be reflected here, too.

That didn't come out quite as clear as I was hoping. I'm going to spend the next few posts hopefully clarifying, starting with the twin poles of where we ought to be going, and where we are now, some of which I covered in a post a while ago about the Grim Meathook Future. There's a few other snippets on these thoughts all tagged as "the future", including this one about defining win conditions.

One final thought, from Finite and Infinite Games. Finite games are played until somebody "wins" and the game ends. An infinite game's whole purpose is to keep the game going. Life is an infinite game.

What happens if the author of a story and the narrator of the story start fighting?

"And now is when you gloat about how simple your plan was and how no onecan stop you now?"

"What? No, it wasn't simple at all, it was horrendously difficult to arrange. I had to create entirely new technologies, subvert several governmental organizations, bribe a newspaper, and organize essentially a very large corporation, in secret. It took a hell of alot of work, that could easily be derailed, which is why you're here,and not doing that. and I'm not fool enough to leave you to escape from a shark tank. Now relax and enjoy the show.”

Every so often, there's moments that remind me we're living in the future.

For example: Footage from Apollo missions on YouTube.

There's no good reason why it wouldn't be on YouTube, but it's something that never occurred to me. I can watch films from 40 years ago, on the moon, on my laptop.

Dude.

Money is an abstraction created to make it easier for people to measure and trade value, and avoid the problems of barter.

One of the fundamental problems with modern capitalism is it replaces creating value with creating money.

Discuss.

Hey. Yeah, it's been a while. Bit of dust on this old place. Well, old in internet age, this LJ'll be five and a half in... Huh. The archive says the first post was in May, 2004, but I KNOW there were earlier ones, saying stuff like "This is just here for me to watch other people's LJs" and we know how that turned out. So, about five and a half years, we'll say. It's close enough. But that's just a number, not really a milestone. I'll get to those in a minute.

First though, I wanted to apologize to people, for not being around much, and not being around or talking to people much for the last while. Maybe a year. Part of the blame I can place easily on being busy, what with everything that's gone on. I'm back in school studying engineering, for about another year after this semester. I moved hundreds of miles, got a new job, got an apartment, got married, etc. So, a lot going on, and intermittent net access through it all. And I've barely mentioned most of that here. Which is what I feel a little weird about. I haven't mentioned much of that here at all, or anywhere, really. Haven't been able to be online and talk with people as much as I used to. That and I don't often talk about myself (which is why I've had a blog for five years, uh huh.) But I wanted to apologize to everybody for not being around, though I don't know how much that's going to change, 'cause I'm still busy.

Two of those reasons I'm busy are the milestones I mentioned in the title. The first? Last Monday, I turned 30. Which on the one hand is just a number, and doesn't seem very important, but on the other hand is made into this big huge thing culturally. And the other thing is we're buying a house. Despite these, I don't really feel like a responsible adult though. And I'm back in school, but there's far worse places to be, and I'm lucky I landed my internship when I did, and have been able to keep it. But I still find myself thinking things like "I wanna be a Science Hero when I grow up!" Or, in other words, this XKCD. Though I haven't made lego buildings in a while. My legos are in Virginia.

So what's the plan? Get moved, and finish school, and the rest I'lm taking by ear right now. Gonna have to start looking at finding jobs and taking the FE exam and that sort of thing soon, but not yet. Responsible Adultness? Well, gonna have to keep faking it. And try and get out more, instead of just letting responsibilities become excuses not to do the rest of the stuff I need to do. Cut back on the empty calories of flash game distractions and spend more time catching up with people I know. Send letters, the actual physical kind, 'cause it's really cool to get stuff besides bills and spam in the mail. Just need to figure out how to make the time, I've got two half-finished letters that've been sitting around for months.