Hiro Antagonist

From the department of "Gosh, we never sat down and considered this for very long", I bring you two very different views on robotics:


Versus


So Nike uses this spiffy chalkbot to print out dot-matrix style messages with chalk at the Tour de France (video here). Apparently they're primarily in support of the Livestrong foundation, raising awareness of cancer victims.

All well and good, right? Not quite, it seems. Apparently Nike's chalkbot had an eerie resemblance to a previous robot, StreetWriter, a robot created by the Institute for Applied Autonomy to "...protest the militarization of robotics research...".

Namely at the DARPA Grand Challenge "...where its mission was to print Isaac Asimov’s First Rule of Robotics "A ROBOT MUST NOT KILL" at the starting line of the military robotics event."

So the IAA is getting all huffy about a evil corporation stealing their robotic thunder (which is covered in excellent detail by Near Future Laboratory here) and it struck me that the hullabaloo was really over a certain idea, namely that robots are somehow inherently moral devices.

To be moral to begin with, something must be capable of good and evil, or be inherently one way or the other. Humans can make moral actions that are 'good' or 'evil', because there's free will behind it, along with intent.

Inanimate objects; tools, on the other hand, can't be moral in the sense that they're inherently evil or good. The same hammer can be used to build a library or break knees - did it suddenly become evil or good because how it was used?

If you pause to think about it for a second, you'd realize that a hammer doesn't act on its own. Human beings direct the hammer, and it is the actions of the human that are moral - the hammer just helps.

To be certain, there are some tools or inventions that have very limited or no moral use in one category or another - torture chambers or pretty paintings, for example. It'd be difficult to do good by using a torture chamber, and it'd be hard to do evil by using pretty paintings. Not impossible, mind you, just difficult.

I hate it when some artistic group, or political group gets all worked up about something they didn't think through for more than ten minutes. Because frankly, if you go nuts over a concept and berate people over it, and make press releases, it should be over something that can't be proven to be false in a single paragraph.

Robots can be easily used in either moral direction, but protesting their militarization is just stupid. It isn't robots that are being militarized, it's just that people are militarized and they keep on finding news tools to aid them in this.

Versus



"...I don’t believe that school can teach you something like prop and costume making to its fullest extent. A “hobby” like this really requires field experience and just going out there and making stuff at your own skill and pace."
-Izy Cheung

An interesting dichotomy that's come up every now and then is the value of university education versus field training for various disciplines. Some things are best learned in a university setting, where an expert in the field lectures and you take notes and replicate the work of other leaders in the field. Other things are best learned in the field, where hands on experience is the only useful teacher.

I've spent a fair amount of time doing both for different pursuits, math, fine art and philosophy, contrasted with photography, fencing and building things. Some of these things really benefit from being at a good university with excellent professors. Other things would only make you worse off for having an excellent professor try to teach you about it.

Having friends who are proponents of both styles of learning, the academics on one side, the grunts on the other, I've heard the argument back and forth more times than I care to count, one side discounting the other completely.


And they're right. For the things each system excels at teaching, the other system is terrible.


Take photography. It's something I've learned on my own from the beginning, but decided it wouldn't hurt to take a class in, as I was already at a nice university. What did I learn? Honestly, the nuts and bolts of printing were the only useful things I took away from the course. The rest of it was literally worthless - I could have learned the same things faster on my own. I did, actually.

Academic photography is shitty photography on the whole. But photography is often confused with fine art, where sculpture and anatomy professors are actually useful things. Sans the nuts and bolts of photography (printing, darkroom, basic photoshop), a university professor in photography is useless. Everything that makes photography something more than snapshots - vision, technique, etc - are things that are best learned hands on in the field, from doing it time and time again.


A professor could lecture about shooting, you could read about the history of guns, look at diagrams, learn physics as it applies to ballistics, and you'd be a shitty marksman by the time you'd finished. Put in the same amount of time down on the range, or out in the field on active duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, you'll be able to put university training to shame.

Things like philosophy, and math theory, on the other hand - those are things you won't do well at on your own, unless your name is Issac Newton or Georg Cantor. They depend on vast systems of previously discovered and analyzed information, rather than things that are particular to the individual.

And that's where it breaks down, really. Things that are dependent on the individual more than they are human knowledge as a whole are ones that are best learned in the field. There may be a thousand marksmen out there, but each one of them learned in relation to how they shoot, not how everyone else happens to shoot. The same goes for photography. Things that are dependent on the group more than the individual are the ones that benefit the most from a university setting - math, philosophy, fine art, etc.

I'm so Ronery / So ronery / So ronery and sadry arone / There's no one / Just me onry / Sitting on my rittle throne / I work rearry hard and make up get prans / but, nobody listens, no one understands / Seems rike no one takes me serirousry / And so I got some nukes / now everyone is listening / ronery no more!


So north Korea has a long history of making threats. In the past though, it's only been just enough to push countries into giving it aid, as there's no other way it'd survive in the long term.

Lately? Lately though, the threats haven't been so idle. Aside from blowing up a nuke or two to show they mean business, they've also withdrawn from the 1953 armistice, something they've never done before.

Perhaps they're in such a hard corner that they have no other choice but to start a fight. Who can say? But it looks like they might actually carry through with the implied threats and go to war against South Korea and Japan. Possibly with nukes.

In the past, China has been a strong ally of North Korea, so no one could push North Korea around too much. Whether China sticks by N. Korea as it seemingly goes off the deep end will be an interesting question. If it doesn't, N. Korea runs the risk of getting a preemptive nuking. If it does, odds are that conventional war isn't far off.

I'm waiting to see what happens next...

So NPR airs this bit about how odd it is that the same black pastors that led the civil rights movement are against gay marriage.

It's fine by me if someone doesn't hold with something. I personally don't believe people should be screwing outside of marriage, regardless of gender. But any people that are capable of loving each other getting married seems like it can only be a good thing.

So why would a group of people who led the civil rights movement in the 60's be against what is essentially more of the same? One of the black pastors who'd been in the civil right's movement was recorded saying "If anybody can get married, that devalues marriage".

I sat there, stunned for a second. This was quite possibly the most stupid thing I'd heard in a long time, not to mention quite possibly the worst argument I'd ever heard.


Because, as we all know, 'If anyone could have civil rights, that'd devalue civil rights!'

The thing is, basic rights belonging to all human beings cannot be devalued by letting all humans exercise them. Rights are not like gold in the sense that the more everyone else has, the less your own supply is worth.

I'm not sure which I hate more, hypocrisy or people who make stupid arguments that aren't logically sound.

Something I've never liked about the USA is the thirst for blood. Here in Texas, the public fondness for executing people is perhaps more obvious than in other states. In a fit of extreme irony, you often hear people who are against abortion and the execution of the unborn who are pro-death penalty.

I've been against killing people for as long as I can remember, more from philosophical reasons than any particular religious ones. You should never kill anyone unless your own life is under immediate threat. There's simply no *need* to kill people unless they're trying to kill you and can't be stopped otherwise.

Honesty needs to come first. Life is cheap, and on the whole, humans don't value it that highly. People have always been willing to die and kill for just about anything.

Civilization has been a story of triumph, of man over man's own nature for the last few thousand years. We've been winning more than we've been loosing for a while now, and we shouldn't give up, especially on a battle this important.

Security:
The death penalty is no longer about this. Modern prisons are secure, and can keep society safe from violent criminals. It can no longer be said that a criminal is so dangerous that he must die, otherwise everyone in the country is otherwise at risk. Most people in this country recognize this is a bullshit argument and no longer resort to it.

Vengeance:
Killing people never brought back anyone, or made anything better. I'm reminded of a famous popular saying by Holly Near "Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong?" We act as if somehow, when we kill someone as a group (the State), we are less guilty than when we kill someone as individuals.

One of the most respected thinkers on law, William Blackstone, once said "better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."

In the last *three* years in Dallas county alone, NINETEEN people have been freed from death row on DNA evidence showing they could not possibly have been guilty of the charges they had been convicted on. Dallas county currently leads the nation in number of prisoners on death row proven wrongfully convicted. It's not a statistic to be proud of. Probably one we should be abhorred by, really.


I have yet to run into anyone who was pro-death penalty because of anything based on reason. It's always been vengeance. An eye for an eye ends up with a nation of blind people when you let animal instinct triumph over reason. There is no animal on the planet more vicious than human beings. But there's also no animal on the planet capable of such great triumph over their negative qualities. Hopefully the chain of victories over the worst aspects of human nature doesn't end here.

I recently got around to watching "A Waltz with Bashir" and while it was a powerful and well made film about the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, at the end of it, I was unhappy with the film because intellectually, it did not have anything to say about the horrors that had occurred.

It recounted the experiences of one man dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder that he suffered from as a result of participating in the fighting, but past that, it did not have anything to say of weight about the events, beyond perhaps 'humans are good at killing each other, one revenge inciting the opposite side to do the same'.

By the end of the film, it's just the feel-bad movie of the year, and you feel if there was nothing of worth to take from the film. Not that there has to be a positive message. Or a negative one. Just *any* message of *any* intellectual depth.

If you make a movie about explosions, no one expects Shakespeare. If you make a movie about events you compare to the Nazi holocaust, you'd damn well better have something to say about it.

In some ways, the film just made me feel like the residents in a thousand mile radius of the area were all guilty, either for participating in the violence on either side, or doing nothing to stop it, or get away from it.

All of those people that live there and accept their fate and lot in life like lambs to the slaughter are in my mind, just as guilty as those carrying out the slaughter on both sides.

To use a notion from Kant, humans have a moral imperative to act, and inaction does not bear any less guilt than actively participating in the wrongdoing.

Get up and walk away. Don't stop walking until you're dead or you're somewhere else where war is not a daily fact of life. Short of 'they will shoot me the moment I try to escape', there is no valid excuse for the failure to do so.

One of the things the recent economic depression really drove home was the problems created by the economic version of the Larsen effect (aka 'audio feedback').

Suddenly the economy isn't doing too well. People can't afford to buy as many things as they did before.

Suddenly even more companies aren't doing too well. People can't afford to buy as many things as they did before. Jobs get cut.

Suddenly even more companies aren't doing too well. People can't afford to buy as many things as they did before. Jobs get cut. People without jobs can't can't afford to buy as many things as they did before.

Suddenly even more companies aren't doing too well. People can't afford to buy as many things as they did before. Jobs get cut. People without jobs can't can't afford to buy as many things as they did before. Suddenly even more companies aren't doing too well. People can't afford to buy as many things as they did before. Jobs get cut. People without jobs can't can't afford to buy as many things as they did before. People without jobs can't can't afford to buy as many things as they did before. Suddenly even more companies aren't doing too well. People can't afford to buy as many things as they did before. Jobs get cut. People without jobs can't can't afford to buy as many things as they did before. People without jobs can't can't afford to buy as many things as they did before. Suddenly even more companies aren't doing too well. People can't afford to buy as many things as they did before. Jobs get cut. People without jobs can't can't afford to buy as many things as they did before.

[your economy has just imploded.]
Game Over

Yeah. See how that sucks?

If there was only a mechanism to eliminate negative self-amplifying economic feedback. In audio production, there's a few things you can do to prevent unwanted feedback. The economic version of echo cancellation could possibly even work on the same principle. Digital signal processors look for the originally transmitted signal that re-appears, with some delay, in the transmitted or received signal.

How would one implement this as an economics device? Well, if the financial world was entirely run through computer managed networks, this might not be that hard. Spotting 'echos', that is. A DSP will 'kill' the echo, but would canceling a transaction that fit the definition of 'economic echo' work well? How would false-positives be handled? I'm sure there's a economics paper in all of this, if not a nobel prize.

Photography, the art - rather than the act of taking a picture - is often said to be 'showing people something that has been seen before in a way they have never seen it.'

Art, with a capital A, is communication. All art is the product of the artist's attempt to express something. Much like writing, it can be anything from a single vulgar expletive to the equivalent of Dante's Inferno.

Whether or not art is good Art should be determined on how well the message was expressed, more than any particular subjective assessment or feeling. Skill always has a role in this, and often the greater the skill, the more eloquently the message is conveyed.

Take 'The Scream' by Edvard Munch. On paper, it's not the most accurately rendered thing in existence. However, it manages to express the message (anxiety) better than just about any image in existence.

A lot of geeks will rag on art in a fairly ignorant fashion because they may not be very sensitive to art in general (much like color blind people have trouble with certain shades of color, there seem to be art blind people as well) or lack a decent education in the matter.

However, unless one is a master at the same craft they are judging, they should not take any haste in dismissing something. If you're a extremely experienced civil engineer, you can take a look at the plans for a bridge and realize 'good god, this thing is a piece of crap!' and be confident in the accuracy of your judgment.

Someone can say 'well, this piece doesn't do much for me', but saying 'this piece is nothing but crap' requires authority in the matter. If you're a extremely experienced civil engineer and a chemist tells you that your bridge is a piece of crap, you wouldn't take their word with as much authority, right?

While growing up, I was often frustrated when told things along the line of 'with age, you'll understand', as even back then I understood that intelligence doesn't increase with age.

Unfortunately, people often failed to distinguish how age generally increased experience rather than intelligence, and in many cases, perhaps weren't able to distinguish such differences with enough clarity to convey them.

Truth be told, the ability to clearly express the things you know in your head via spoken word seems to be a fairly random trait, rather than being correlated with any particular age or level of intelligence or experience. While I was an art major, I frequently ran into this with peers whose artistic ability was something I envied quite a bit, but they would drive me to frustration when trying to have a conversation that involved them describing anything inside their head. Perfectly smart people, often above average, in fact. Highly talented. Couldn't put their artistic vision into words even at gunpoint, however :(


In simple words, just because someone is young doesn't mean they will be unable to understand something. Someone at the age of eleven is just as smart as they will be at the age of forty. However, the ability to grasp a concept and the ability to put it in a mental framework that will make the concept relevant and useful are two different things.

For example, an eleven year old who asks you why someone they know to be a rational person suddenly acts irrational when around a particular person of the opposite gender. If you explain that rationality can fly out the window in certain circumstances, like when someone has a crush on another person, they'll be able to grasp the concept perfectly.

However, until they've had a few years of *personal* experience with the phenomenon, it won't be fully related to all of the other things they understand.


Intelligence, an ability that is constant no matter what the age allows facts to be comprehended. Experience, an ability that increases in a linear fashion as you age allows the same facts to be utilized in daily life with a level of skill dependent on the amount of experience.

Much like a pilot fresh out of flight school knows exactly what all the controls in a plane do and why, the knowledge can't be used to its full potential until they've had a few thousand hours of flight time under their belt.


So the next time a little kid asks you a question whose answer would seem to be beyond their grasp? They're just looking for the theory, not the application.


And if they're not satisfied with the theory of the concept and are actually looking for the application? Tell them that such understanding cannot be given by others, only gained after getting enough XP and leveling up ;)

I'm a fairly laid-back person, for the most part. However, if someone threw a punch at me, I'd have no problem beating the ever-living shit out of them. While not being large enough to be called 'a knuckle-dragging ape', I'm not a small person either, and perhaps that's why no one's ever tried to do such a thing. And perhaps that's why I'm not a violent person - if you're able to beat all but the largest of humans silly, you don't feel much inclination to exercise the ability. Before my final growth spurt in my late teens, I was used to being the smallest and weakest person around. I'm not sure if I've ever entirely outgrown the mental outlook that imposed, even if my body has. Frankly though, it's nice to have people step out of my way, they never did before.

Then again, I'm constantly surprised by the level of vehemence and implied readiness for violence in the reactions of people who aren't the brawling type, but the exact opposite. Soccer moms who scream kids games looking like they're ready to slit the throat of the ref. People driven to fury by street protesters who before that, I wouldn't have thought would hurt a fly.

It's the strangest sensation of constantly missing something. You look at someone smaller than you who's exhibiting all the behaviors that are a precursor to the worst violence, and yet they're not the sorts that have the ability to physically exert that kind of violence. You just sort of sit back blinking. Watching two parties from the sidelines of any social situation, it makes you think something like "Okaaay... Here I am, a large person, and I don't do stupid things like acting in that fashion, and there you are, a much smaller person, so violent and yet unable to do much if anyone took umbrage to your behavior - if you keep behaving like that, perhaps you might be enlightened when you come across someone not as civilized as those currently around you."

In the modern civilization though, people don't learn the consequences of behaviors that, elsewhere and elsewhen, would have gotten them beaten silly if they couldn't carry through with what they were implying. So when they scream and act violently, and nothing bad happens? Then it must be ok to do!

On a personal level, I've only had people be like that to me once or twice in my adult life. My usual reaction is to stare at them like they've lost their mind and blink a bit until they do a visual double-check and realize I could bench press them without breathing hard. However, most people don't have the luxury of being a large person and I often wonder what the heck you do if you don't and you're in that sort of situation and some person who isn't a bruiser is screaming at you?

Perhaps it's just not seen as a problem from that perspective, because when neither party is strong to the point that throwing punches does serious bodily harm, they're not worried about the outcome no matter which way it goes, because hey, what's the worst the other person can do?

Do smaller people who are adults get into physical violence statistically more often than larger adults do?

On a certain level, it brings up so many questions...

Every day had another hour.

I think I'd draw or paint more.

What would you do with it?

Edit: Since people are mind-numbingly prosaic about this, I'll add a stipulation that it would be an hour where you couldn't do something else you'd already done throughout the day.

Watching the American economy melt down around me, or more accurately, hearing about it on the radio yet seeing no visible impact where I live, it has come to resemble something akin to an eerie and strange Orson Wells play.

On one hand, I'm struck by the Teutonic impulse to watch it all burn down with a smile on my face and a marshmallow on a stick in my hand. On the other hand, some logical portion of my mind realizes that I'm going to be looking for a job when I graduate in the spring. In the video game industry, notorious for being tough to get a job in even at the best of times.

Talking with a friend who works for an investment bank that was smart and stayed the hell away from sub-prime mortgages, the primary problem seems to be human beings, and the fact that they can buy and sell stock based on 'feelings' rather than on cold hard facts alone. She also mentioned that discovering an absolute market value for something was rather hard to do outside of human beings arbitrarily deciding what it was worth.

Did I ever mention that my biggest problem with the human race was the fact that it was composed of humans?

What's been absolutely fascinating is how the financial crisis has pulled other countries into the drink with it. At first, many of the large industrial nations outside of America were publicly quoted as saying the equivalent of "Hah, stupid Americans! Now that your country is no longer the economic powerhouse that it was, we no longer have to say 'how high?' when you say 'jump!' Now we'll do what we damn well feel like!"

Now it's more like "Oh shit, our economy seems to be connected at the hip with yours. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck fuck. Fuck." It would take a great man not to find some laughter in the contrast between what they said two weeks ago and what they've said this week. Sadly, I fear I am not that great a man. Though realistically, I know it will mean that people will lose their jobs here and all over the world, and that that really, really blows. I've been there and it sucks hardcore. I wouldn't wish it upon any citizen of any country.


What's most striking is that the crisis doesn't seem to stem from any particular aspect of the economy being fundamentally unsound. The vast majority of companies are still worth today what they were two years ago. People still need food, vehicles still need wheels, users still need operating systems.

But people are gun shy now, having discovered that some risks are... Well, actually FUCKING RISKY! Imagine their surprise! Hey, you selling houses to people that can't afford them actually turned out to be YOUR problem! Handing out loans to people without doing any checking as to their ability to actually pay *back* those loans? Yeah, that was *just* as massively stupid as you thought it was. Oh, wait, you didn't think it was massively stupid.

Why?

Way back when, there was Greek philosopher, Zeno of Elea. He's known these days mostly for his paradoxes. One that came up both in my philosophy classes and my discrete math classes was the paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise.

Achilles is in a footrace with the tortoise. Achilles allows the tortoise a head start of 100 feet. If we suppose that each racer starts running at some constant speed (one very fast and one very slow), then after some finite time, Achilles will have run 100 feet, bringing him to the tortoise's starting point. During this time, the tortoise has run a much shorter distance, for example 10 feet. It will then take Achilles some further time to run that distance, in which time the tortoise will have advanced farther; and then more time still to reach this third point, while the tortoise moves ahead. Thus, whenever Achilles reaches somewhere the tortoise has been, he still has farther to go. Therefore, because there are an infinite number of points Achilles must reach where the tortoise has already been--he can never overtake the tortoise.

A visual representation would look like this:



Now mathematically, this makes perfect sense. Yet in the real world, this doesn't happen. This has been pointed out most famously by Abner Shimony in a short play about Zeno being chased by a lion who somehow manages to cover that infinite distance and devour Zeno.

( Zeno vs the Lion... )

However, one of Zeno's first assumptions is that moments of time can be divided infinitely. And on the outset, there's seemingly nothing wrong with that idea. So how to explain the difference between reality and what theory says should happen?

In short, time has a smallest unit that beyond which, there is no dividing. Much like the atom. Time is granular, as explained by SandTiger:


"...In order for this to be an actual paradox, time would have to be infinitely smooth, as in not have a minimum possible unit - you can keep on having shorter and shorter amounts of time.

From what I understand, because time and distance seem to be granular (with the minimum units being Planck distance and Planck seconds or something like that), the whole problem gets avoided since EVERYTHING is granular and the deceleration from one moment to the next (even before a full stop) would go in a kind of quantum way - either you're at a speed of 1000 planck distances per planck second, or you're at 999 planck distances per planck second, not 999.99 p/p etc."
-thesandtiger

I'm starting to have second thoughts about this whole photography thing. I'm good, darn good, good enough to make my way to the top most likely. But I just don't see much of a future in photography where I can sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labor. I don't see being retired at 40.

And as much as I love photography, I love the idea of not having to work for a living more. In fact, I think that every career I've ever been good at has always played second fiddle to 'just being able to do what ever the hell I want day in and day out before I'm 50'.

I've known people from every walk of life, and no matter how much money you have, most people worry about it. Even if they've got a few billion in the bank. But the difference between the people who have a few billion to sit on, even just a few million, is the fact that if they really wanted to, they could just cash out and retire. Most of us don't have that luxury.

I've seen people that work all their lives, dawn till dusk, slaving away at a job. Some of them love their work, others hate it, most are just indifferent.

Maybe it doesn't have to be that way.

Maybe it should be work harder, smarter and better than everyone else, and not have to deal with it for as long.

There's not much potential for that if you're a photographer. If you start your own video game studio, maybe. As much fun as it is to shoot models, it's not fun enough. Neither is making video games, actually, but that can serve as the means to an end.

Reading things like this make me think about my future. There's this whole thing about working for a living - it can be deadly boring. I have this thing where I grow bored with something as soon as I master it. In other words, as soon as a job is no longer challenging (and I mean in the mentally engaging / challenging way, not the 'oh shit, how do we get ten man hours of work done in 30 minutes to fix today's disaster' challenging).

A lot of the IT sector sadly falls into being a glorified mechanic. You're fixing other people's problems, and maintaining their machinery to keep it from having problems. I'm not terrifically interested in being a glorified mechanic.

I worry that the game industry would get into the same 'wash, rinse, repeat' cycle. Unless you're running the show, the odds of you working on some boring crap, or something that becomes entirely routine are very good. When you've designed yet another level for the seventh generic FPS your company has made, it's no longer fun, it's just a job.

You trade fun for risk though - a boring job usually tends to pay well and be fairly secure. A fun job? Rarely do they pay well in my experience, and often they're fairly risky. Of course, if you're the wonderful sort of person that could be happy doing the same thing over and over again, this may not apply. If you're the unfortunate sort that gets bored out of their skull by doing the same thing over and over again, it's slightly more problematic.

Solution?

Looking into it. I'll get back to you on it when I know more.

It's every ambitious young man's (and perhaps woman's?) dream - to dominate world affairs in some fashion or another. The question becomes 'what is the best way to do so?' and a phrase from my muse gave rise to insight on the situation. "Let the chips fall where they may" is the perfect phrase embodying the attitude of action instead of over-analysis.

When I was younger, over-analysis is what killed me. I spent more time worrying about the effects and secondary and tertiary effects of actions than I ever did acting on anything. As a result, a lot of things slipped through my hands. In my first year of college, I decided that over-analysis was bullshit - it wasn't getting me anywhere. I decided to act and sweat the consequences later. Not being rash, mind you - I didn't go about robbing banks, but rather acting on the information I had and not trying to determine the future through information I lacked.

With most people, if you're particularly good at anything, you'll gravitate towards it. If you over-analyze what you should do, you might miss out on it entirely. What if John F. Kennedy had decided that his best bet for influencing world affairs lay in becoming an influential economist? He might have been one, but it's safe to say that he had a bit more impact as a president than he would have as an economist, Greenspan-caliber or not.

Rather than sitting up late, trying to determine what is best to do, it is better to act from moment to moment as you see best. Given how rapidly things change and shift, trying to determine one's own future with any degree of accuracy is a doomed affair. Long term goals are one thing, but exacting plans about week to week agendas are another. The former is laudable, the latter is not. Some evidence can be taken from history itself. Notable historical figures aren't renowned for keeping exacting plans about their future, but rather doing what they're best at.

There are days when I'm not at the top of my game. When I'm bored, uninspired or just not motivated. Days when the brilliant ideas are not flying out of my head.

And then there are the days that are the opposite of that.

My memory is a bit hazy on this, but I seem to recall Andy Warhol (not a favorite artist by far, but still an interesting person) elaborating on the notion of a projected image rather than an actual one. Much like when people are made out to be heroes, their faults are glossed over, a projected image glosses over the faults of the actual one.

In many ways, this could be considered a division between the public and private image one displays.


In short, I don't care to display my faults to the world. People have idealized me before, and you know what? It feels good. I'd rather people think that I'm at the top of my game 24/7 then actually have a sound and accurate understanding of both my flaws and virtues. And in truth, the former is easy, and the latter is close to impossible.

Rather than let my image be whatever people happen to perceive, I'd like to cultivate it. People expect certain hallmarks when you fit in a certain category. For instance, a wilderness explorer is expected to show signs of ruggedness, quite often in the form of a giant bushy beard for example. A scientist is expected to be seen wearing a lab coat. What a game designer is expected to seem like isn't something I know right off the top of my head at the moment, but it's something I plan on figuring out in the near future.

Playing into the cult of personality might offend some idealists, but you know what? Screw 'em. The benefits outweigh the negatives.


Hopefully this will make some sense to the normal reader - if it lacks intelligibility, let me know.

One of the things I love most is stories. Fiction, science fiction in particular, tends to bring the most enjoyment, if only because the stories can take such familiar themes and twist them in a new and interesting fashion.

For instance:

Fiction: "The Twilight of the Samurai", set in Japan during the Edo period.
Science fiction: "The Twilight of the Samurai", set in... SPACE!

Fiction: "The Dirty Dozen", set in Brittany during the last days of WWII, fighting Nazis.
Science fiction: "The Dirty Dozen", set on... An ALIEN PLANET, fighting ALIENS!

Fiction: "Ravenous", set in 1840's California, loosely inspired by the Donner Party.
Science fiction: "Ravenous", set in a SPACE SHIP! About SPACE CANNIBALS!!


Perhaps you see where I'm going with this... In many ways, the only thing that's changed about writing stories since the days of the Greeks is simply the window dressings, as it were. The details change, but the themes remain the same. The Iliad, the works of Seneca, the plays of Shakespeare, the novels of Dickens - all of these from different authors and wildly different times, but in the end? They have a surprisingly large amount in common, thematically speaking.

I think a lot of this has to do with basic human nature. It really hasn't changed at all in the last 4,000 years or so and so the same things that concerned us enough to write about millennia ago still concern us enough to write about today. We just tend to shift the details around slightly.

A fellow named Neal Stephenson wrote one of the finest works of speculative fiction in the area of nanotechnology, namely "The Diamond Age. Aside from being a 'ripping good read', it presented a fascinating look at a future shaped by the availability of nanotech.

Nanotechnology makes headlines on a regular basis these days. Sadly, this is the stone age of nanotech, and the industrial age is centuries down the line. Being elated about being able to move one atom next to another is pretty much on the 'Oook, I club animal, it fall dead!' level. The 'drop a bit the size of a sunflower seed on the ground and watch it grow into a fully furnished house right before your eyes' level is so far away that it's just downright depressing.

Just as no one today truly wishes they were born a century or two ago, I doubt anyone a century or two hence would wish to be born now. Just the thought of never living in an internet-permeated world gives me the shudders. And anyone in an age of true nanotechnology wouldn't want to live in an era before it. Imagine how the internet has made your life better, or at least far easier. Now imagine that times a thousand and we're getting into the realm of the quality of life that true nanotechnology allows.

Sure people will kill each other, love will never work out perfectly and some members of society will be less well off than others in some respect or the other, but dammit, you'll be able to make anything you can imagine.

Sort of like being able to order pizza from within World of Warcraft, but better. A lot better. Certainly people are good at filling up the time that labor-saving devices 'save' them, but they do have the option of being able to use that time for something other than washing clothes by hand, for instance.

It sucks to have visions of such a future and to realize that you'll be long gone before they come about.

Every now and then, when I'm reading classical literature (Plutarch, Thucydides, Aristotle, etc) or even things written in the 1920's, it becomes a fascinating glimpse into the past and at the same time a reflection that people two thousand years from now may be reading some of the things we write today.

Which brings about further contemplation as to how we view the people that existed in those ancient times, and how our descendants may view us in the same light, something that I find amusing and sobering in equal amounts.

How do we look back on the Romans? In some ways, we give them great respect for the ways in which they advanced civilization, and in others, they seem quite barbaric. Applying that same measure to current society is fascinating, and makes one wonder what things that are currently happening will be viewed with respect and which will be viewed as barbaric.

As I doubt I'll be alive in two thousand years to answer this question, I suppose I'll just have to let it remain unanswered. To predict how the future will turn out is something that fails miserably - look at how people in the 1950's thought the year 2000 would be like. Some things they came close on, but most things they failed at miserably. If a simple span of fifty years is so problematic, I don't think that there's much to be bothered with in trying to predict how things will be in two thousand.

On some level, it's vaguely insulting to realize that in two thousand years, we'll be viewed as little more than slightly advanced savages, but I suppose that's humanity for you. The insult is somewhat tempered by the realization that the people of the year 6,000 will probably view the people of the year 4,000 in the same light, but such is life.

One thing will likely remain the same (barring some unforeseen invention which allows us to change exactly this, of course) for the next two thousand years, and that is human nature. We may be healthier, we may live longer, we may enjoy great comforts, but we still kill, rob, rape and take advantage of our fellow human beings much the same way we did at the dawn of time. If I had to guess, I'd say that the people of the year 4,000 will suffer from the same problems, with only slightly different circumstances. In 5,000 B.C., they killed each other with clubs. In 500 A.D, with swords. In 2,000 A.D, with guns. In 4,000 A.D.? Maybe ray guns. Who knows? But we'll probably still be killing each other all the same.

In many ways, this is cause for despair. The only reason I'm not a complete nihilist I suppose is from some level of internal irrational hope that I haven't quite managed to stomp out despite what my intellect may tell me.

I suppose that in two thousand years from now, people will still be murdered in one fashion or another, but I suppose they will still be born in one fashion or the other. I suppose a zero-sum game is better than a losing game, but I'd like to believe that a positive game was more than a optimist's flight of fancy.