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.