AltSci Cell

Once in a while a person finds an author who writes enough for a person to really like that author. The ideas that come across are coherent, consistent, and moving. Cory Doctorow is such an author for me. He understands technology, he is brilliant at coming up with plausible futuristic scenarios and he conveys ideas that are as important as anything we will face today. I've met him twice, once at Toorcon San Diego 2006 and once yesterday at a reading. He answered my question quite well. His new book "Little Brother" focuses on a revolution of ideas and values in present day America. He pits students against a tyrannical DHS frighteningly similar to the DHS we know today. He explains with incredible clarity why a war against an abstract noun is invalid and a system designed to protect people from rare events at the cost of their freedom is no more than common tyranny.

My question was: "What brought you to the idea of the probability of rare events and the detectors being useless?" He explained that the problem is that lurid rare events are much less of a threat than common events that harm a person. In his book he explains that trying to find a needle in a haystack is incredibly difficult when the margin of error of detection is so high. Any system designed to trade freedom for really poor results should be rejected.

We live in a country where basic freedoms are being trashed, we are at war with a country who has not attacked us, and the general populous will never revolt against it. We're basically in a downward spiral. With a new president and a possible solution to the war and removal of nationwide wiretaps and institutional torture, we can have hope for a new tomorrow. But persevering and incredible diligence is required still. We cannot afford to allow any screwups to send us back to our downward spiral if we get a chance to fix it. Tell the next president, Mr. Obama that we we're expecting nothing less than a complete change in the way our government is running.

no means no.
or maybe you didn't hear.

As I suspected, I made a bit of progress on Small Wide World. Check out the new layout. The coolest thing that I did (besides getting a proper star topology from a demo MySpace map) is released the Dodgeball generator. Tell me if it works for you! You can buy the software confident that I will continue to make progress on it as fast as you'll want to use it.

If you saw the kanji on the jacket, it has special meaning. If you're learning kanji, you should definitely learn this one. I made it an image on purpose so that people would wonder and would have to read this little snippet. The answer is below, but don't select it unless you want to give away the meaning.

You may or may not be aware that I've been drawing a series of manga-style images based on Emo and Open Source Software. Now you know. The above image was drawn tonight based on emo and NMap.

That's all I got for now. I'd be surprised if I didn't post another blog in the next few days with progress on Small Wide World.

I was walking across a beach with Charlton Heston when he shouted: "You did it! You finally did it!" If you do a search for "planet of the apes statue of liberty", you'll get analysis like:
Is humanity even worthy of freedom? ... the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand on a desolate beach, is one of the most enduring images of science-fiction cinema. Now that's irony. [1]
this final plot twist sees the protagonist's arrogance undone when he is made to realize that it is precisely this characteristically human arrogance that evidently precipitated a catastrophe (assumed to be a nuclear war, a looming fear in the Cold War era) [2]

Blaming all of humanity for the annihilation caused by nuclear holocaust is not exactly legit. There are plenty of us that are part of humanity that don't want to be annihilated by atomic weapons. Actually, as we now know there are enough people that agree that they don't want to be annihilated by atomic weapons that we've survived a whole 62 years since the first use of atomic weapons. 62 years is not nearly long enough to prove that nuclear war is preventable, but it's anecdotal evidence that we might survive another 62 years. The politicians and military officers that brought us into the cold war obviously had to justify their stance of 'defending' our values with mutually assured destruction. The same is true of absolute pacifists: one must justify his/her stance of 'defending' others through action or inaction. But gambling or relying on a strategy that is likely to end in disaster of epic proportions? That's fucking crazy. I don't know what they were smoking back in 1945, but I know what they're smoking right now. Mutually assured destruction is philosophically bankrupt and can be proven so. I don't have enough time to explain it tonight, but here's an overview of the inconsistencies.

• You have a large number of devices that could destroy the entire planet.
• Your enemy also has devices that could destroy the entire planet.
• If you attack your enemy, they will destroy the entire planet.
• If your enemy attacks you, you will destroy the entire planet.
• In order for your enemy to press the big red button, they have to be willing to kill everyone on Earth, something that not many people should be willing to do.
• In order for you to press the big red button, you have to be willing to kill everyone on Earth, something that not many people should be willing to do.
• Fear of killing everyone on Earth stops both sides from killing each other.
• The inconsistency is that if a person is already willing to kill everyone on Earth, they probably don't fear killing everyone on Earth, so the real thing that stops both sides from killing everyone on Earth is the fact that the leaders of our nation simultaneously fear killing everyone on Earth while are still willing to kill everyone on Earth.
• This inconsistency and the fact that elections are not based on mental stability (Vladimir Putin, George W. Bush, Ariel Sharon, ...) mean that mutually assured destruction is a terribly unstable system.
• The idea that mutually assured destruction could be justified as a defense is unreasonable.

I haven't gotten much work done on Small Wide World, but I've been working billable hours instead which isn't so bad. Show some interest in SWW and I'll put some hours into it. I think getting the Dodgeball and Myspace mappers online will be amazing good free PR for me. I just have to code it right.