TheBigUpshot

The Hob Series at Dresden Codak seems to have resolved. I can tell you that it is a good story because I am still thinking about it. It’s funny that it would resolve today. Coincidentally, I was thinking about the Simpsons quote which I remember imperfectly:

Flanders‘ son: “What do taxes pay for, Daddy?”

Ned Flanders: “Why, taxes pay for all kinds of things! Roads, sunshine, the air we breathe, and all those people who just don’t feel like workin’, lord love em’.”

So, here’s the question (mostly hypothetical): If we could make a largely automated system that could provide basic needs (food, water, shelter, clothing, basic medical needs) to everyone with only 1% of the worlds population working (a volunteer force, effectively) would that be a good thing? There would still be lots of places for people to have gainful employment – entertainment, service, luxury goods, etc. But nobody would have to work at all if they didn’t feel like it. Would it be a better world, or a worse one?

When I was younger, I thought that would be a better world. I am not so sure any more. Utopia seems a lot more oppressive than it used to.

Dresden Codak’s Hob is a 24 page graphic novella. The author, Aaron Diaz, explores themes of futurism and psychology. The way he weaves his characters’ subtle family drama and childhood baggage into the story is quite remarkable. Of the whole story, this quote struck me as most poetic “[the thinking machines] can give you anything you want, save relevance.”

The futurist vision is the new synthesis of occult dreams and new science. The promise is whole new worlds and the time to explore them. Infinite wealth and immortality.

It is as abhorrent to some as it is seductive to others. IEEE spectrum wrote up a while issue on it; it’s not as fringe as you might think. They call it the Singularity. Will we ‘evolve’ to become one with machines? Will organic humans still be relevant? Relevance is the question on my mind when I read this. What makes people relevant?

I think it’s different from the things that make people “good” or “worthy” or “interesting.” Those don’t have the same grim connotation. People can lack any of those qualities and still we would keep them around. But what about irrelevance?

They say the opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. That’s why I don’t trust Utopia anymore. I’m not sure that many of us could survive not being needed.

-Peter

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I was driving today behind a blue-hair and a piece of crap blew out of the bed of his truck. It flew under my car and blew two of my tires. I managed to get my car stopped safely – thank God for run-flat tires.

I’m also sick – I’ve got a fever as high as the Arizona desert heat – about 105 F today – and I still played in a tennis tournament. I went to work because I consider my job to be an essential service. But then I went to play tennis because I said I would. I don’t want to be the guy who bails.

Peter says, ‘at least you’re not bored.’

He’s right – I’m not bored often. About the only time is when people stick me with problems they said they would have under control. My gripe today is about people who say they will make something a priority, but then they don’t. I said I would make this tennis tournament. I said it was a priority. So I showed up.

I’m not perfect. I want to do things, and I run out of time like everyone else. I want something to be as important to me as it is to the person I’m talking to. But sometimes it’s really number 423 on my list. It’s on the list, and that means I want to do it. It just means I won’t be able to do it today. Or this year.

I guess it a skill like any other. A person has to learn to identify the priority of a project before he commits to it, and be up front about where it stands. It’s honest and polite to tell someone that ‘I would love to, and I will if I have time, but I have other priorities right now, so that will take a back seat.’

That’s how someone else will be prepared. And it’s better to know up front that find out later… and have boring down time while the issue gets resolved.

-Matt

Tags: Life Management // Add Comment »

I wrote up a little piece a bit ago on the complexities of the food-or-fuel choice implied in the manufacture of biofuels.

Richard Jones at Softmachines.org wrote about biofuels a while back (Driving on sunshine). He has returned to the matter more recently. “It seems that some of the drawbacks were more easy to anticipate than others. What’s sobering about the whole episode, though, is that it does show how complicated things can get when science, politics and economics get closely coupled in situations needing urgent action in the face of major uncertainties.”

I love biofuels in principle. The idea that we could use the agricultural technology of the whole of human history to power the most modern inventions seems appropriate. But the economics are complicated. There is always switchgrass which promises to make use of otherwise useless land. And there’s algae on which I did my high school science project. There you can use huge regions of the ocean to produce energy. That won’t have unintended consequences.

In any case, I think there could be a future in biofuels. If it raises the value of agriculture, then we can see more agriculture. I think that could be a good thing for people at the bottom of the economic ladder. Traditionally, agriculture was how cultures developed themselves. That seems like a worthy subject for development. I’m not sure right now, though. Corn ethanol, for instance, barely breaks even on the energy balance.

What that means (in simplified terms) is that you burn a gallon of gasoline to grow, process, and transport a gallon of corn ethanol. Ethanol is “green” except if you burned a gallon of petrol to get it. In that case it is utterly useless in energy terms. It makes a job or two, but you might as well pay people to not grow corn. Some of you might remember the discussion of the lucrative possibilities in getting paid to not grow corn in Catch 22. More recently: “Acreage Reduction Programs (ARP) paid farmers to set aside an amount of land on which they would not grow corn.”

Anyhoo, I have a dissertation to write and a second job to pay the bills. I wish I could believe that greenwashed fuels were the solution to the energy crisis.

-Peter

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Tell me that’s not a great title. It inspires the imagination. Magnetic cows? Some kind of robot, perhaps? Large enough to be visible from space? About to crush Manhattan under an Iron Hoof? I’m sold! Tell me more!

I hope you are as excited as I was because then I can have the pleasure of completely disappointing you.

Some people used satellite images (science via Google Earth!) to tabulate the preferred orientation of cows. They tend to align north-south. The scientists did the obvious corrections for wind, sun and local distractions (like ponds for drinking). It implies that cows have a sense of magnetism, like pigeons. Moo.

What are the global implications? Could cows find their way back to Capistrano? I don’t know. The motivations of our bovine friends are inscrutable. But I wonder if the researchers knew about Cow Magnets.

Cow magnets are big, powerful magnets that ranchers feed to cows. The magnets sit in one of the cow’s stomachs and if the cow eats a nail or a piece of barbed wire, the magnet keeps it in the first stomach so it doesn’t end up tearing up the whole digestive tract. Cows are very intelligent.

Here’s my question: How likely is it that the cow is facing north because that’s the preferred alignment of the 4 inch hunk of magnet in its stomach? I imagine I’d be pretty likely to face north if I had one of those in my belly.

-The Jester

Tags: Humor, Science // Add Comment »

I’m back! I’ve just read a perspective over at Science that made me think of Blink.  I have mentioned Blink before. It’s even linked over in the sidebar. It’s a book I like to think about. Some have denigrated it as anti-intellectualism, but I disagree. In fact, I think the mistake is revealing.

I will explain. The subject of Blink is intuition and unconscious thought. It turns out we have a lot of unconscious processing going on all of the time. The world we ’see’ is a necessarily greatly filtered. If you had to deal consciously with facts like the number of spokes in every bicycle wheel that passed you or the color of the shoelaces on each strangers feet, or the smell of every room you entered, it is doubtful you could keep up.

Our brains have mechanisms for dealing with these stimuli (’inconsequential’ sights, sounds and smells). The filter is very effective, but not perfect. That is to say, sometimes it ignores things that are consequential, and other times it flags trivial things as important.

The point of Blink is that we can train these parts of our brain (the parts of which we are not consciously aware) to make them more effective. People do it all of the time. Sports coaches often can read subtle cues about an athlete’s movement that the average person couldn’t notice. And they may not even be able to express consciously exactly what it was that they noticed. But they can help the athlete refine their skill anyway.

Intellectuals think that this is counter to rational thought. It’s a cop-out, they say, to rely on unconscious parts of your brain. People who see Blink as anti-intellectual have the notion that reasonable, intelligent people don’t have to resort to such mystical clap-trap to solve problems. Thinkers, they suppose, will rely on their conscious rhetoric and careful analysis just like they always have. But this misses the point. It only reveals that these intellectuals see a false division between their rational selves and their more intuitive unconscious faculties.

The truth is that nobody can avoid relying on these parts of their brain. We rely on unconscious parts of our brain whether we like it or not. The part of us that is our self is not just the part that is narrating the internal monologue. It is an indefensible claim that the whole of our body including these lower parts of our consciousness is only present to get our higher cognitive faculties to meetings. The unconscious is as much a part of the whole as the conscious.

The part of me that is me is more than the narrator of my internal monologue. Buddhists, who (arguably) have made the longest running investigation of consciousness, have known this for a long time. Science is finding it, too: “Studies such as that by Galdi et al. are documenting how the adaptive unconscious works and people’s limited introspective access to it. As these studies become more widely known, people might realize that … their conscious thoughts and feelings are but a small part of the workings of their minds.”

-Peter

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