Crazy Ideas

There are many untrue sentences, for example "There's a unicorn in my front yard right now." but only a few seem like they would actually be uttered by crazy people. Several criteria for craziness.

1. Crazy people talk about serious things. No one is anxious about unicorns but toxins, conspiracies, religion, and human origins are all things that adults including crazy adults can be concerned with.

2. Crazy people live in a world centered around themselves more than sane people do. A crazy person would imagine Al Queda coming to their house to bump them off while a more sane person wouldn't expect Al Queda to be particularly concerned about them unless they had some pervious contact with that organization.

This self-centeredness means that the world of a crazy person is quite shrunken, aliens, gods, and mysterious government agencies are all concerned with them. Though a sane person might believe in all those entities, he would not expect to be of overriding concern to any of them.

This distinguishes a truly crazy person from an eccentric. An eccentric might be interested in the idea that the US government hid aliens and alien equipment in area 51 but he wouldn't worry about it that much. Like other people, his health, his job, and paying his bills would still prominent concerns in his life. He might even worry that he spends too much time on UFO stuff and realize that his personal interest in it was for the sake of entertainment.

Why People Dislike Conspiracy Theorists

One his blog, Overcoming Bias, economist Robin Hanson suggested that conspiracy theories are denigrated because the folks who offer them are the same type of person who would engage in conspiracies.

In fact despite public antipathy to conspiracy theories many are believed in by average people and these people are not shunned for these beliefs because they do not talk about them over and over again. As a self test, do you believe any of these?

1. Oil companies and the government have unrevealed technology for cheap, fuel efficient cars.

2. Global warming is a myth designed to funnel grant money to climatologists.

3. Global warming is a myth designed to cripple capitalism.

4. Trolley systems in American cities were destroyed so the General Motors could sell more cars.

5. Darwinian evolution has been disproven and is only taught as a Trojan horse for Naturalism and Atheism.

6. The US government either allowed or caused the man-made disaster on 9-11-01, to give George Bush an excuse for invading Iraq.

7. The CIA killed John F. Kennedy.

I would consider all of these to be conspiracy theories although I'm not sure all of them are wrong. The point is even if you believe these conspiracy theories, if you do not structure your life around them your belief will have little or no social cost. It's not conspiracy theories by themselves that are disliked, it's the autistic behavioral style of some conspiracy theorists.

The thing is, such a behavioral style, which is a personal problem for me, is often seen by others as tiresome. Conspiracy theories are actually fairly normal. It is not the theories but the behavioral style of some who hold them that is disliked and those people are not seen as bad, merely boring and strange.

A Silly Idea -- Mechanical Turk Magic System

In a computer game, to cast a spell you need merely to press a key. This is convenient but not very magical. In the real world, magic supposedly requires study and practice as well as a connection to certain cosmic forces. If was desirable to duplicate this in a massively multiplayer game you could have magicians prepare spells before use as in older editions of D&D.

What would happen behind the scenes is that during his preparations the magician would be essentially applying to be able to use the spell. His credentials would be checked either by programs or by other players.

A program could check to see if, for instance, the magician spent his time killing lower level players or defenseless creatures and deny him the use of good spells if he had behaved in this fashion. A program could also give him some sort of multiple choice quiz and deny him magic if he didn't pass it.

More intriguing would be use of human players to critique some sort of performance by the magician. In this case the magician would compose some kind of art work, probably not a strictly visual one and be able to use a spell if other players liked it. The players critiquing the art work would have to be paid some how, for instance by a temporary increase in power.

Would this be fun or simply annoying? I deon't really know.

The Craziest Things I'm Interested In.

I am slightly crazy about a lot of things. For instance, I become irrational guilty when my folks criticize my, frankly terrible, housekeeping. However, that kind of craziness is ultimately boring. The two craziest questions I'm interested in are the questions of what kind of objects can have minds and does consciousness need to be included in any logical account of fundamental physics? The trouble is I cannot truly understand the arguments made about either question.

At least the questions aren't really crazy although they are divorced from mundane reality. After all what does it mean that a rock could be conscious, when I have no way to detect that? Though they aren't truly crazy, they do skirt the edge of the abyss.

A Small Hack

I wrote this toy program to help my daughter with a science project. She ended up not using it but I think the output looks cool. It requires gruff, IMagick, and RMagick to run. Though it contains variables that have to be edited to alter the output, I think the names are clear enough that you can see what they do. The language is Ruby if that's not obvious. I apologize for the lack of indentation, I guess you lose formatting information when you cut and paste from TextEdit.


require 'rubygems'
require 'gruff'
if argv[0] == nil
number_of_runs = 100000
else
number_or_runs = argv[0]
flips_per_run = 10
bias_factor = 0
flips = Array.new(flips_per_run,0)
run_results = Array.new(flips_per_run + 1,0)
(1..number_of_runs).each do
flips.each_index do |i|
if (rand + bias_factor) > 0.5
flips[i] = 1
else
flips[i] = 0
end
end
run_results[flips.count(1)] = run_results[flips.count(1)] + 1
end

flips_per_run.downto(0) do |size|
run_results.each_index do |index|
if run_results[index] / (number_of_runs/flips_per_run)>= size then
print "*"
else
print " "
end
end
print "\n"
end
run_results.each_index{ |i| print run_results[i]," "}
print "\n"
g = Gruff::Line.new
g.title = "Data for " + number_of_runs.to_s + " Runs of " + flips_per_run.to_s + " Flips"
if flips_per_run < 50
label_hash = Hash.new
(0..flips_per_run).each { |i| label_hash[i] = i.to_s}
g.labels = label_hash
end
g.data("Number of runs with x heads",run_results)
g.write("penny_graph.png")
print "\n"

Unlikely things

I like speculation about the future. I even like optimistic technological fantasies, but I think that they can be destructive when people don't realize that they are fantasies. Things that I won't hold my breath for, though some might happen in the far future.

1. Easy life extension

2. Mind uploading

3. Cheap, plentiful alternative energy for automobiles

4. Extensive human presence in space

5. The cure for cancer, as opposed to better treatments for some cancers

6. FTL of any sort, including sorts that don't contradict general relativity.

Could Narnia be bad for kids?

Narnia is a lovely fantasy world and the tales told of Narnia are often tales of moral redemption.
How could it be bad? The problem I see is that the Narnia tales present escaping into another world as natural and healthy. While this is true to an extent, ultimately one finds or fails to solutions to one's troubles in the real world. Shouldn't kids be taught that.

Speculations -- No Jesus

If the Christian religion had never existed, what would be the cultural consequences. Here are my guesses.

1. Europe and America would still be religious but a mix of faiths might have survived the fall of Rome. Manichean and Mithrasist temples might dot the land. Paganism might not have died out but it would still have had to evolve, becoming less magical and more mystical. On the other hand, if Europe wasn't united under one religion, Islam might have conquered Western Europe.

2. There might be less interest in equality. Christianity, early on, stressed equality between ethnic groups. "No Jew or Greek, no slave or free." While the New Testament is silent on slavery and suggests that women should be subject to their husbands in spiritual matters, Christianity is still firm on the idea your capacity for salvation doesn't depend on things like martial prowess or social status. From these ideas of metaphysical equality, ideas of equality in this world could readily spring.

3. The conquest of the new world might have been somewhat less aggressive if Europeans did not have the fig leaf of one true religion to hide their greed behind.

4. There might be less science and technology. Monotheism leads readily to the idea of universal natural laws. If natural forces were seen as operating according to there own whims rather than ordered by one God, our understanding of them might not have advanced as much as it has. Some things, such as probability theory could advance through analysis alone, but the idea of finding out natures regularities through observation and experiment might not have gotten off the ground as quickly.

5. Sexual morality would be affected but it's impossible to say how. Christianity, despite it's demand for monogamy and hetrosexuality, is hardly the only tradition that restricts sexual behavior.

Husband's Worries

My husband worries that paying our oldest daughter to read classics, as he has, will harm her intrinsic motivation to read. I think this is true but I am glad she did read those books. Because of that she is aware of aspects of human experience most nine year olds would not be. I don't think she can fully appreciate them, but I think parents never see the depths of their children, especially the darker depths which children keep hidden out of prudence.

Something Blindingly Obvious

Single payer health care would make US middle-aged workers more employable by removing a major cost of employing such people.

Old Man's War

I really liked John Scalzi's Old Man's War. As a piece of genre fiction it had many enjoyable features. The soldier's in the book were, for the most part, intelligent, likable, people who tried to survive as best they could in a horrible situation. Unlike Heinlein, Scalzi doesn't write all-wise father figures or attempt to teach political lessons to the reader.

Scalzi also didn't spend a lot of ink showing off his technical knowledge to the reader. I probably like technical speculation more than the average SF reader does, but it can get in the way of telling a good story. I did think the green soldiers were a bit silly, but I don't know if would bother most people.

I could have wished for more interesting aliens. The bit about eating humans got old after a while, but the mysterious Consu were genuinely frightening.

All in all, Old Man's War, isn't mind blowing but entertains without visibly showing off or insulting the reader's intelligence.

More on Fighting -- Writing Training

While most fiction doesn't take place in a dojo, in my short time practicing martial arts I've seen some interesting interpersonal conflicts that could be used in stories.

1. Masters get old and sometimes fat -- How do you show you are as good as you used to be or come to terms with the fact you are not?

2. People have issues -- How do you deal with people who fight out of control, not staying in the bounds needed to keep training safe? In general, how do you work with people who have trouble with discipline?

3. People have more issues -- How do you deal students, who because of there physical or mental limits, have more difficulty than others?

4. People have varying experience and some people who have experience in other settings or with other martial arts will resent being classed as beginners.

Wishful Thinking ...

Here are some things I wish were true:

1. Immortality through mind uploading or, better, through longevity treatments.
2. Other kinds of intelligence on this planet in the deep past.
3. Very weird intelligences that exist on a substrate of exotic dark matter.
4. Life or intelligences associated with red dwarfs or brown dwarfs.
5. Cheap access to space, enabling a true new frontier.
6. Clean inexhaustible power sources.
7. A true end to injustice and oppression.
8. A technology that would grant me the ability to improve my self-control and working memory.
9. Serenity and a greater ability to appreciate small novelties

I don't really think I'll see any of the more sci-fi wishes butsometimes magical thinking is fun.

What's Fun?

I like speculation about the future as much as anybody. I enjoyed Edward Lerner's description nanobots in Small Miracles and I regularly read web sites such as Next Big Future. However, imagined technologies are not as fun as engaging characters and interesting situations. I have been reading John Scalzi's Old Man's War with a great deal of interest even though it contains technological absurdities such as FTL.

Why is Old Man's War interesting to me even though I don't go out of my way to read about military combat? Simply because the protagonist is an interesting, sympathetic, guy thrown into strange, horrible, and wonderful situations as he engages in combat with various alien enemies. Though I like futuristic speculations about resource depletion and transhumanism, character is at least as important as setting in making genre fiction fun for me.

Magic -- Speculations

I am not a believer in magic in a literal sense, though I believe in a somewhat airy-fairy way that there is magic all around us. For instance, though can't dominate the ecology as humans do, animals have senses that we don't and the smarter animals are aware, after their fashion, of things we can't perceive.

For example, dogs can identify some cancers by smell, and dolphins can echolocate structures inside the bodies of other animals. It is possible that, though they can't do geometry, even simple animals could have cognitive abilities we don't. For example, a dog might perceive patterns of smells that would correspond to differences in the compounds they are smelling.

To be able to do literal magic might correspond to having a sense normal humans don't. This suggests that in a world where magic is genuine all the wild metaphor of occult writings could correspond to things directly sensed by talented people but not describable in normal language.

It might be possible, in a magical world, to come up with dry scientific accounts of mystical phenomena that were of great utility but missed entirely the human experience of magicians. In the real world the formulas H2O and CN- are both useful description of chemical compounds though they say nothing of the experiences of drinking, bathing, being poisoned, or seeing blue.

Online Education and Cost

Many people are talking about the potential of online education to bring down college costs. However, there are some flaws in this. The major one is that the sciences, the visual and performing arts, medical and psychological disciplines, and music all involve observing and or manipulating the physical world.

While disciplines that involve creating a textual product, such as creative writing or accounting, can be taught on line, the lack of need for laboratories, patients, or materials means that these disciplines are already the cheapest to to teach.

I expect major cost saving to come from areas other than online education.

Binge Eating

last night I binge ate, unfortunately. The funny thing was I was able to stop this after consuming a large amount of protein. While I still ate too much eating a lot of meat without a lot of carbs or fat seemed to effectively terminate my desire to eat without leaving me painfully full. Has anybody else with the same problem ate meat as a strategy to mitigate it?

Small Miracles

I read part of Small Miracles by Edward M. Lerner. The technological gimmick, nanomachines that enter peoples brains and alter them was interesting. However, once the protagonist deliberately altered his friends brain, I lost interest in the book.

Part of it was simply a childish reluctance to read about bad things but it also, I think, had to do with the fact that nanomachine infection led, in all hosts, to possession by a super-intelligent psychopathic personality that was motivated to spawn more of the same.

I had two problems. One is the obvious fact that psychopaths have difficultly cooperating amongst themselves. This is probably why, though you find groups that in real are lead by psychopaths, groups that consist mostly of psychopaths don't have much power. In the story, however, the psychopaths organize to present a threat to the humanity of the world.

In real life non-targeted brain alteration would probably have different effects on different people and they would not perceive themselves as all being members of the same team though they'd all have similar abilities and disabilities.

Though Small Miracles is a good story it would have been interesting to see more internal action as the people who were changed confronted their new abilities and disabilities.

College Bubble Extrapolating

Some folks say that there is a bubble in college education. That having more people going to college leads to more demand for college training from employers, but little actual gain in knowledge. The thing is, employers don't want to hire people without college training since it provides at least some evidence that their hires have something between their ears.

Now let's do some futuristic extrapolation of how the college bubble could burst.

1. Reliable services could exist that evaluated potential employees on the basis of the material that has been posted by and about them on the internet.

2. More contests, not related to college, could spring up. If this were the case you might look to hire members of the top ranking pre-accounting team in the state, rather than folks with a degree in accountancy from certain schools.

3. Large employers could offer there own training programs and move the people who do well in these up the ladder.

I'm not sure which of any of these ideas would work in real life but all of them might make fun background material in a science fiction story.

Writing Fighting

In popular fiction there are a lot of fights. I've been in only a few and all of those I've lost but here are some observations from Karate class and other places. Use them, if you want, to make your fights more vivid.

1. Reach and range matter. If you are too close you won't have power, too far away and you won't connect. You need to be aware, hopefully more aware then your opponent, of what range you are at.

2. Training for fighting is partially mental, you have to get used to looking at your enemy even though he or she is noisy and intimidating.

3. Fighting people who are bigger is hard. They are obviously more powerful then you and they also have a longer reach. I don't what the best way to do this is but I would think that grappling or coming in below their guard would be more useful than trying any kind of jumping move.

4. People, to a degree, rise or fall to their level of training. Training, except when you are dealing with extremes, is more important than innate abilities.

5. Powerful weapons, such as modern firearms,  reduce the need for skill. An ignoramus with an AK-47 is very dangerous, at least in the short term, an unskilled guy swinging his fists around much less so.

Have good and hopefully, peaceful, day.

Satire -- Why Most of us don't count

This thing about autonomy is really overrated. The fact is most people can be shown, using brain scans to have one or more areas in their brains where the connectivity is just plain lousy or, due to genetic factors or, perhaps, lead poisoning, to have a smaller than average frontal cortex.

Though nearly everybody is capable of developing some skills, because of their cerebral limitations, relatively few are capable of of seeing the big picture and acting appropriately. Given the fact that we live in a time of cultural disintegration brought on by advancing technology and disrespect for religious and spiritual traditions as well some real and serious environmental problems, we need folks with the best quality brains available to lead us.

The people who should lead us are, in fact, the working rich. By showing their ability to create wealth they have displayed for all to see the excellent quality of their brains. The rest of us, including myself, should not venture to assert ourselves against them or to confiscate their earned wealth through taxation or other means. By earning their wealth they have shown that they in fact possess better comprehension of the world than most of us.

Another way they show their worth is by the existence of serious disagreements among themselves. This shows that they are not a monolith, incapable of changing direction, but rather a collection of vibrant thinkers and doers. The rest of us, limited as we are, would do best to get out of their way and follow their lead.

Some stuff about painting.

I've ordered several tubes of Primatek watercolors from Daniel Smith. The ones I've used so far are Sodalite, Serpentine, and Lapis Lazuli. Sodalite seems darker than a remember and granulates a lot if used in a wash, but does make a nice blue-black. Serpentine seems to consist of two components. One is extremely green and seems to stay suspended in the water for a long time. The other component is reddish, looking similar to red ocher or other iron containing clay pigments. This rapidly settles out of the wash, giving a granulated effect that I like. From a distance, a passage painted with Daniel Smith Genuine Serpentine appears an earthy yellowish-green, a good color for painting weeds or brush. Lapis lazuli despite the great name was, in my opinion, the least satisfactory paint, as it has low tinting strength. In my test painting I used it for the sky in a sunset and, while the grayish blue worked well for this, it did not do anything a mixture of less expensive pigments wouldn't have done.

Ruby

I've been going through the Edgecase Ruby koans in an effort to learn Ruby. I'm little over a third done. It's not a break though but it is an impressively elegant scripting language.

I like the orthogonal design with everything being an object. My husband, on the other hand doesn't like that sort of thing. He's sees the purpose of objects as modeling things in real life. There aren't strings and arrays in real life so why should these be objects?