Faffing around Furniture

You know, it's the weirdest thing, but I've come to realize that there's one piece of furniture we always overlook and ignore, but when I think about it, plays a very important role in... I don't know how to describe it better, in sorting out life. The humble desk. 

We buy the beds and the cupboards, then the sofas and coffee tables, a dining set, display cases and sideboards, kitchen cabinets, shoeracks, and then if there's place left over, a desk. 

I think we don't take seriously enough the role rooms and items play in organizing our minds. 

Beds are private places, locked away inside. Cupboards absorb messes, store, and close.  Bookshelves call out your intellectualism. The table's to eat, the coffee table's to socialize. The TV dominates the room, the mind, and time, and stops anything else from happening. 

But my personal favorite is the desk. It's also a private place, but one where your mind is awake, active, and free. You can read, draw, listen to music, play games, work, nap, snack, socialize virtually, and just think. Plan your travels and sort your memories. Organize your life. What's on your desk at any point of time is a snapshot into your mind and psyche. Cameras, cards, disks, accessories. A diary, a sketchpad. A keyboard and mouse. A tablet. Phones. Hobby stuff. Glue, paper, wire, tools. Paint. A poster in front, a to-do-list tacked to a board on the side, a dustbin below. A coffee / water / coke. 

These are all things you do, you love, and cherish time on. Things that give you something, do something, take you somewhere. 

The desk is an active space, probably the most versatile, positive, active space in the house. I miss having this space around. If you don't have a workspace like this set aside somewhere, all the time you spend in the house will feel... wasted, somehow. Unproductive. You'll be itching to get up and go out, do something. You'll be confused, lost, disorganized, mired in ennui. You'll turn into a couch potato, an alcoholic, a  socialite, anything that takes up the time and energy you don't know how to work off. 

Damn, I need a bigger house. 

Looking at the other side

Note - this post is likely to depress you

A few days back, a friend of mine posted a (probably by now a much-shared) link to a series of photos a Chinese tourist took in Varanasi, of corpses abandoned in the river and washed up on the shore. His tone was one of (in my opinion, slightly gleeful) horror at what looks like the rejected props from a Walking Dead episode coexisting with daily life, which goes on like it's nothing out of the ordinary. 

Other than the tone taken, I don't really disagree. Yes, these are corpses, the decaying remains of what was once human beings, abandoned and left to rot like refuse in a public river, with nobody to lay them properly to rest, to clean up, to even bat an eyelid. 

Nobody's disturbed because this is daily life. This is how things are. The only people who get disturbed and upset are the people coming from places where their society has the time, the resources, and the inclination to handle corpse disposal properly. 

On the opposite end of the spectrum, but in a similar way, we get shocked when we go to a first-world country and find we can drink the water coming directly from the taps, no filter, no UV, no boiling. 

The truth is, there is no regard for human life here. nobody cares when you're alive, why would they care about your corpse? 

Think about poor Varanasi's history. For centuries, the city has lived under the plague-ridden burden of perception that it is somehow spiritually elevated, that a death here is different, more meaningful in some way for the one dying. Freedom from reincarnation? Spiritual upliftment and enlightenment? Privations in this life rewarded in the next? 

It's meant a flood of people with nothing left but death, a flood of people hungry for soul-cleansing, a flood of people trying to understand something of what's happening. The tourist money keeps the economy running briskly, but the concept of a just reward in an afterlife has left little motivation to improve this one. 

There is no enlightenment here, no spiritual reward. It's something we make up, desperately, to somehow justify the appalling conditions we see, the misery, poverty, deprivation. People don't choose to be poor for a spiritual reward, they are poor because they had no choice, and every waking moment they fight it. There is no alternative. 

Be, or die. 

That's why the tourists flock here, too. They cannot imagine a life that is so bad, yet continues to be lived. They're convinced there's some great secret behind it all, something that we know and they don't, something that justifies this horror. Some mysterious philosophy of rebirth, reincarnation cycles, karma, an understanding of the nature of reality that they haven't got yet. Some knowledge that lets us continue to live in this place, walk these streets, where corpses wash up on the banks and lie putrefying in the sun. 

Chill, guys, there's no great secret. Step back and look at the big picture. We live because the alternative is to die. We live here because there are a thousand million little threads that tie us here, because there is nowhere else to go. 

The native will keep the farce going. The yogis and godmen will speak about this great secret in hints and allusions, translated into the guides' commentaries, the documentaries, the book and the stories. 

We live, and we die. There is nothing after, but as long as people believe there is, the money keeps coming, the stories keep perpetuating, the society keeps functioning. 

We make the tools we need to survive, and faith and hope are just some of those tools. 

Crime, Punishment and Belief

It just occurred to me, the whole concept of the death penalty works if the condemned - and the accused, the potential perpetrators - believe in an afterlife of eternal damnation, believe that the human judge on this side mirrors the eventual judgement they will receive and the following punishment. 

If you believe that what you are doing is wrong, wrong enough to warrant an eternity of the lake of fire, and the lake of fire exists and is waiting, and you will be caught, and when you are hung, God will send you to hell to forever burn... you will be deterred. You'll think twice. 

But,

If you think you won't be caught - 

If caught, you think you can evade punishment - 

If punished, the punishment is too light - especially if the roof and regular meals of prison looks attractive compared to whatever brutal hell you are already living in - 

If the maximum punishment is given, you don't believe in God or hell - 

Or if you believe his judgement will be different from society's - 

The the entire concept of punishment to act as a deterrent to crime breaks down. It becomes an escape, a start-over. A reward. An irritant. Fame and glamour. Not the stuff that will ever stop crime. 

What's an acceptable alternative? 

Honestly, I don't know. It's not that easy. For the victim of the crimes, it's easy to like increasing brutality, barbaric punishments. Taliban-esque. Make the immediate, visible results of a crime seen to all, the thieves without hands to make other thieves think a thousand times. But this will make societies increasingly brutal. The chances of an innocent caught in the machine. It also needs a enforcement and judicial system that's fast, efficient, and accurate. 

Maybe humanity's just too big to govern effectively now. 

Drugs are a necessity...

...as a socio-evolutionary regulator. 

Think about it. 

In any given situation, if one person gains a slight advantage over others, he will attempt to further that advantage. Like wishing for three more wishes as your third wish.

And if he has an advantage already, he will succeed. The gap widens.

Over time, one person will have all the resources, while the rest have none.

As a result, this person will have the capability to continue to hold all the resources, while the rest continue to starve.

And what happens when you have no resources? You can't have kids. Either you can't afford them, or raise them properly, or save them in dire situations.

Genetic diversity of a society starts to become completely skewed towards the one guy. Or girl, it doesn't matter.

And this is not a good thing. 

But, if there were something else that becomes accessible as a result of having all (or a lot of) resources - like money - something expensive, hard to get, but that would make you feel good, that you desire - you would try to get it. And you would succeed.

Something that others couldn't take away from them, and they could stop them if they tried. 

Something like...  a gateway drug. That leads to the harder, more dangerous stuff.

The resourceless, the impoverished, can't afford it. Only they can.

And once they're addicted, it eats away all their resources and kills them.

Balance is restored.

If you have nothing, it's just a waiting game. The person who has everything also has, inevitably, something that will destroy him.

Fast cars. Alcohol. Venereal disease. Drugs. Thrill-chasing. Fights. 

All you have to do is make sure it doesn't get you as well, accidentally.

Self-control is the greatest weapon you have, the hardest to manage and the easiest to use. 

Everything else is working with the universe to make sure genes continue to proliferate. You, the self, the consciousness, the mind inside that meat bag whose sole purpose is to act as a life-supporting vehicle for your genetic code, is an accidental, happy, short-lived coincidence. 

Enjoy it. 

Don't throw it away. 

Don't be a pawn of the Universe, a statistic, a variable like trillions of others in the great dance of life, a cog in a machine. 

Be yourself.

Do you really want to live forever?

Thought Experiment. 

Medical science finally gets telomere-repairing gene therapy right, and we all can now live till age 500+, in perfectly healthy bodies. What happens to the world?

Step One: Population Bomb. Natural death rate will fall to zero, and given that everyone's fit and healthy, and likely to remain so for a long time, children being born will go through the roof. And their children. And their children. For over 20 generations, and let's not forget the original parents are still breeding. Exponentially explosive growth doesn't remotely cover it, this shit is nuclear. 

"They won't be that stupid", you say? Maybe the countries and populations with easy, affordable access to birth control won't, but that's only the upper layers of first-world countries and the very narrow upper layers of the rest, or in other words, around 1-5% of the population. For the rest, it's literally bang, and boom. 

Step Two: Resources Vanish. In less than a generation, we'll be hellishly overcrowded. It's not just a case of people having 1-2 kids in their prime; their prime is now nearly infinite. They can keep earning for decades, they think, so it;s a new generation every few years. Jobs, education, space, food, and water become scarcer and scarcer. 

Step Three: Economies of Scale. With family sizes exploding, and each generation competing with forefathers and ancestors for the same place in the sun, the individual family unit will be too inefficient; there'll be a movement into joint families, then commune-style setups. 

Step Four: Total War. With the economies of scale in place, each community or extended family unit is an effective, organized force, with its own supply chains and specialist systems. What used to be bad blood and feuds, will have the potential to become all-out battles, especially if the prize is twice the living space and resources up for grabs. And with that many people around, human life will look cheap. 

Step Five. The Recession. As life becomes more and more brutal - and we're still talking about a time maybe a hundred years ahead - people will start realizing that a controlled approach is the only way this will work. And since children are no longer the means for you to control your resources and wealth over time - you can do it yourself - they'll lose all meaning and just take on nuisance value. Infanticide, indoctrination, slavery. 

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world...

The more developed countries will see the spectre of a population bomb sweeping out from Africa, Asia and consuming everything in its path. If they can hold themselves together for even a generation, the enemy will have starved himself into a non-threat, and in two generations, will be a collapsed, shattered economy - ripe for the plucking. Then will begin the real horror of systematic invasions, genocides, exterminations. They might be holding themselves together, but they're still bursting at the seams, and the need the oil, water, farmland. 

A first thought that comes to mind is that ecology will be devastated, but that may not happen. Societies crumbling under the weight of their populations will have access barely to an industrial-age technology, while the more developed will be forced into long-term, ecologically sustainable green tech - after all, they're still going to be around, so anything that turns bad in 50, 100 years will not be wanted. And nations that are sparsely populated but technologically developed will have a huge headstart in this. As long as they can repel the raiders. 

Don;t confuse this with eco-friendliness, though. If there's something that can be harvested with no long-term impact - thought it might wipe out entire species - it will happen. 

So there's likely to be a massive expansion into oceans, space, and underground, to open up new areas for expansion and maintain a technological edge, at least in the first world... and then a few centuries of fighting to keep those from falling into the hands of the starving millions. 

And this is something straight from Larry Niven - with a longer life, will people be more careful? Take fewer risks? Or will the ravaged world they now live in, allow the luxury of a low-risk life? 

Preservation through Overtaxation

Given the catastrophic fallout, the drug is not likely to be available easily. Very restricted, very high-priced. So obtained only by the very few - who then continue to hang tightly to their positions of wealth and power. 

Very strong urge to build long-lasting structures to maintain the status quo. Strong opposition to any kind of systemic change. 

Extend this to political power positions, and you see not just Dictator-for-life, but for several of his subject's lifetimes. Within a lifetime, revolutions will become impossible, and he will become a living god within his indestructible castle. 

So will begin the era of assassinations, political games, and power plays between the long-lived players. 

Who else will have access? The ones who took it illegally. It's going to be a very, very expensive drug. And the criminal syndicates and families will become unshakeable. 

End result - 

Warlords, tyrants, politicos, and kingpins - and merchant princes - living in a unchanging, stagnant world, full of ignorant serfs, assassins, starving slaves, destroyed biodiversity... 

The Message is the Medical Medium

Was reading an interesting article about exocommunications. Started a train of thought - we assume that aliens will want to communicate using some kind of a language. Speech, sound, symbolism. Pictures. Mathematics. 

And they will come in person, holding their placards and speaking through mikes, or telepathically, or via stylistic dance and sign language, or broadcasting from a transmitter in orbit or somewhere in the system via radio / laser pulse. 

How ethnocentric is that?

The're alien. We can't speak to dolphins and dogs. We can barely communicate with chimps. 

We know nothing about them, what they breathe, how many legs they have, are they carbon-based, silicon-based, liquid metal, supercooled helium.

Here's what I think. They're already trying to talk to us. We just don't see it as communications at all. 

Here's the alien civilization, studying us from far, far away.  

They see this planet. 

There's... something on it, something that replicates and evolves, adapts to environment, interacts with others. This something has developed a language, a means of communication. It has a memory and a population spread in billions across the globe, just beginning to venture into space. 

So they send a message, in a form and format suited to this life-form. Maybe they send several variations, for the several variations of the life-form, if they have difficulty in telling which is the dominant one. 

The message's content may not be immediately understandable, but it sees that the life-forms are interacting with it, responding to it. 

The dominant life-form, as defined by an ability to learn from experience, adapt to environment, interact and grow and evolve, and develop a sophisticated support system to sustain itself - this defines DNA, doesn't it? 

Our bodies are just the vehicles that allow it to propagate. 

So here comes the message, in the form of protein chains, a 4-character code from space that interacts with the double helix of code in protein molecules that dominates the planet. 

It enters the support system - our bodies - and interfaces with the DNA. Sometimes it just appends; sometimes it edits, changes. The DNA responds. Sometimes directly, sometimes via manipulation of its support systems, sometimes from outside the support system altogether. 

We call the message viruses, and we call the interaction disease. 

Every time we create an antiviral, we're sending a message. Every time a disease evolves, it's responding. 

A conversation has been underway for thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe a million years. 

We're just making the simple ethnocentric mistake of assuming that when we think about 'us', its the flesh and blood body carrying a brain that defines our identity. We're just a walking lump of code inside an organic machine, and it's our code that's been doing the talking.

We might already be a part of a galactic civilization, and we'll never know. 

Parenting

...is terrifying. Fucking piss-yourself, go-into-shock terrifying. 

It's more frightening than anything you've ever done, ever read / seen / heard about, ever had any nightmares about or imagined. 

Why?

Everything you are.

Everything you own.

Everything you know.

Everything you've achieved. 

Everyone you love. 

Is all irrelevant now. It's second place to this new life you've made. All this is second place to, and made irrelevant by, this creature in your arms. 

This tiny, fragile, vulnerable little life. 

She's going to be that way for the next two decades, and even after that, you still can't relax. Anything can go wrong. Anything can happen. 

It's like you've liquidated everything in your life in preparation for some great journey, like an escape from a war-torn country. You've put it all into, say, a single diamond that you've swallowed before you ran, and you now keep secret to prevent being gutted for. 

That's nothing compared to this. 

And in the deep night in your head when you can't sleep, in the screaming headlines of the morning paper, the brief hysterical chatter of the nation as you surf channels, the conversations at the bus stop, in your RSS and your social networks, lies the stuff of nightmares, a blank-faced Elder God that mindlessly picks up and devours the everything in your life, casual, unthinking. You can only watch helplessly as any one of a thousand fates hangs over her head. 

Everything is in one place, and it is so.

terrifyingly. 

vulnerable. 

Not If. When.

I read The Lord Of The Flies on a long-distance bus more than a decade ago. I finished it in a few hours, and spent the rest (mostly) staring out of the window, looking at the dusty roads, the trucks, villages where shiny new DTH dishes and motorcycles coexisted with sagging power lines and open, stinking gutters. Even then, I had that sense - that something was going wrong, somewhere. 

I can't watch the news anymore. I can't watch even a few seconds of soaps while flipping channels. The newspaper comes and goes. 

Because whenever I see any of these, I remember those villages, those small towns. I remember the snarl of a million wires stealing power from poles, flies buzzing, snarled traffic on broken roads while people sat around and watched bright, colorful fantasies on screens, shopped for their knockoffs and preened. 

It's all coming down. 

It was a microcosm then, and it's everywhere now. 

I look away because I know I can't handle the rage, the dark redness that comes up again and again, more and more frequently these days. One day I'll look too long, and something will break, and then it'll be all over. For me, for them, for you. 

Cows and dogs and pigs and rats. Pigeons and crows. The squirrels and sparrows are all dead now, choked in the poison air and the tainted water. 

We stumble around in the little worlds we build around us, made of screens and paper and gossip and aspirations. The water is rising, and it stinks, but we mustn't look down, oh no. We have our phones and TVs and movies and soaps, we have our outrage and air-conditioning and our 'spirit' and cricket, and the gods we make, and the lies we eat. And that's the way it's going to be, while the water rises over our legs, our bodies, our mouths, and then we'll hold our breath, because though we can;t eat the lies anymore we can't breathe either, and then we'll die, and sink down into the muck, quiet at last. Maybe the water will dry up later, and something will grow. Or maybe it'll just fill with the blind white toothed worms and maggots, our legacy. 

It doesn't matter. 

You always think it won't happen to you, that you're not like that, not like them, no, you're smarter, you take care of yourself and yours, and what you see today if you look too long is the result of a dozen channels starving for content and replaying ad nauseum, a hundred newspapers and magazines and movies and morchas finding a popular subject and milking it till it's dead, that this is just a biased sample and not actually all true. Even as the similarities grow, you keep finding the differences, the tinier and tinier pointers that say this isn't you, you're not like that. 

Then... it does happen, and then it's too late. 

And look around. It's a matter of time. 

It's not if it happens. 

It's when. 

A single page

As part of a  C E N S O R E D  process, I was quickly scribbling down a brief history of where I've worked - names, places, designation, duration, salary, etc. I have most of it scanned and ready, so didn't take too long... but somewhere, that page started getting heavy. 

It carried over a decade of my life - why wouldn't it feel heavy? Every figure, every word on that page came with days, weeks, months worth of history. The salary negotiations. The resignation dates. The pitifully short breaks between jobs. The names of reporting managers - good ones, bad ones. Months that gave up years' worth of excitement, fun, learning, hard work, heartbreak, drama, action. Years that simply faded away into the ennui of repetition and and boredom and left me with a few months worth of stuff happening. 

Every shift was literally the high point of the year - the reasons that would lead me to quit, the bitter, voluble daru sessions that preceded it, frustrations coming to a head, the interviews, the final offers, the quitting, the new places and people, the learning curve... 

It's just in the last few years that Life has had more to add and contribute than Work. More stuff has happened outside the Office than inside - and I remember the times when the Ofiice was literally all there was, and home was a place to crash and drink, and weekends were for catching up on sleep, getting smashed, recovering from hangovers, or putting in overtime. And maybe the occasional movie. There was no TV, no gaming, no interior deco, no family stuff, no quality time. 

There was, however, the ubiquitous, all-powerful cig break, the glue and the cornerstone of Office life and growth. There were the industry parties and the outbounds. All your friends worked where you did, and traveled together, so there was no 'commute', just extended timepass. Bosses could be angels or demons, but you always had less to worry about than them, more spare time than them, no matter what they did. Little things would be HUGE - road trips for a special tea or dhaba or snack. A weekend trek. A visit home. They'd sustain you for weeks. 

And the learning curve. Everything was new. The admin staff, the networks, reports, presentations, fieldwork, data entry, cold calls, warehouses... it was all a mysterious new world filled with drama, excitement, and above all, something new to learn every day. 

Then you shifted, and suddenly your world fractured into new and old. Then into Work and Personal. Then Work, Personal, Family, Friends, and the To-Do List. You feel sliced thin now, spread out over too many shifting textures floating on an unstable sea, pulling together the drifting loose barrels under your raft. It's more stable, bigger, but... there's something missing. Like a stage-one rocket, the first few career years drove you howling into space, and now, drifting in the silence, you miss that drive. It consumed you, that pillar of fire, changed you, took you into a place you never thought you would reach... but sometimes you wonder if the journey cost you the destination. 

It's strange how all that can fit on one page. 

Drawing to a close

Think of any RTS game with a resource-management focus you've played - Sins of a Solar Empire, the Command and Conquer series, even War Commander on Facebook. In a nutshell, you have a factory whose only purpose is to churn out resources, that allow you to build stronger, faster, more destructive tanks, with which you can destroy the enemy base, win that level and move up to the next. 

99% of humanity is that factory, working 9-to-5 jobs to earn money that they can spend on technology, powering the tech economy and making money available for research into better technologies - miniaturization, more evolved computing, faster processing, larger storage, nanotech, more intelligent programs... all of which will ultimately result in the creation of AI, of the Singularity. 

When that happens, humanity will have achieved its purpose. Mathematics created physics, physics created chemistry, chemistry created biology, biology created genetics, genetics created intelligence and self-awareness, which will create the next phase. 

But when that happens, what happens to us? What happens to the human race still in their 9-to-5 jobs, still buying, still playing, still living? 

What happens to the Stage 1 factory, when you've progressed to Stage 2? It may have been a collection of pixels and code, but it held a temporary existence in the form of assigned meaning - we thought it was a factory, so it existed as one, perception creating existence, for the duration of Stage 1. Now, the pixels have dissolved, the code has wiped, but the idea of that Stage 1 factory - where does that go? 

Is there some digital limbo filled with those ideas, those pixel factories churning our meaningless resources ad infinitum? A closed loop in the space-time continuum made of memory? A dimly remembered dream fading more and more each day until one day, you forget... and its as if it had never been. 

The dream that is Humanity is coming close to the Waking. A vastly superior intelligence, a new form of life, is beginning to coalesce, and in a few decades it will come to exist. A new stage of evolution, of Life, will start. And our time will dim, fade, and slowly disappear as if we had never been... except as a vaguely remembered idea in Stage 10, which would never have been reached without the Stage 1 factory. And this is something that cannot be stopped. 

The car's broken through the guardrails, and is sailing off the edge of the cliff... 

There's nothing more that we can do now, short of civilizational suicide... and we're too diverse, too independent, too powerful to do that. Our own competence will be why we ended. 

And that's the answer to the Fermi Paradox. 

The Mechanics Of Interstellar Colonization

Came across a fascinating article on io9.com - We've been able to successfully simulate a living organism virtually using it's genome map alone - and it successfully predicts appearance, behavior, and traits. 

This is a real, functioning organism - existing only in cyberspace. 

While this will raise some fascinating questions on the nature of life, consciousness, and soul, I'm going to shelve that for now. Instead, let's look at the implications for galactic colonization. 

A bridge too far

Interstellar distances are terrifying, and the implied resources needed to cross them are equally terrifying. Let's assume we don't have any kind of magical warp or hyperdrive that can get us across light-years in seconds. This gives us 2 alternatives - relativistic speeds, or generation starships. 

At any significant fraction of c, interstellar dust and hydrogen atoms will strike like explosives. If you're going to carry a shield, it's going to have to be massive - so that much more fuel to shunt that dead weight around. Plus weight of people, their life support, the sheer space they're going to occupy, pressurized cabins... too expensive to haul that up into orbit and then accelerate / decelerate. 

Generation starships will be equally heavy, compensating for a loss in shield weight by equal weight of life support backup systems and spare parts. Too slow, too expensive, and too risky for something that slow and expensive. Not to mention fragile; one puncture, one radiation overdose, one too-high gee maneuver and it's all over. 

Besides, why do you want to send people? Objective is to populate humanity in different worlds. Individual people carry and disperse genes - but there are alternatives. 

A giant leap for mankind, but not even a small step for a man

Don't send people. Send information. 

Step One: launch a small, self-powered probe carrying a naonotech factory and instructions for building a receiver. Send them everywhere, launched from orbit, from lunar railcannon, by rocket, by orion pulse, hell, thrown by hand. send them everywhere, able to recognize suitable destinations, crashland, and build a receiver. 

Step Two: build the receiving station. Once you get back confirmed landings, send instructions for building factories, collecting raw materiel, computers, power sources or collectors. 

Step Three: send the genomes. Human genomes transmitted - maybe after suitable modification - with checksum protocols. Let the destination receive them, run a check, confirm viable, and simulate synthesis in a virtual environment. Grow, while receiving and uploading training materiel. 

Step Four: build body synthesizers. Grow the next generation in flesh and blood, and raise them by the androids carrying the first-generation virtual colonists. 

Or not. 

Step four is very optional; the virtual people may never choose to leave their simulated lives. Or turn the adapted human organisms loose to grow wild, while they remain the watchers and guides. Or choose not to grow them at all. If we can exist in virtual paradise, why would we ever bother to adopt the prison of the flesh? 

Making Decisions

Ever since childhood, I've always had a difficult time deciding - for every pro, I'd counter with a con, for every positive there would be a negative, and I'd get fed up, switch sides, and it would happen all over again. 

I tried the list-the-pros-and-cons methods, but as you can guess, that was a brilliant exercise in creativity and self-justification and paper usage, but not much good as a decision-maker. 

Finally, I resorted to a technique I'd learned over 2 decades ago in class 6 maths. 

Weighed scores. 

And made a revolutionary discovery. 

Technique:

• List your choices down
• Assign attributes
• Assign weights to those attributes
• Score each attribute 
• Calculate the weighed scores
• Add up the weighed scores
• Sort by total score. 

Obviously, Google and Excel make this a lot easier. You can add on a lot of other stuff - looks (which I've realized tends to play a fairly significant veto role in decisions), brand name, etc - but ultimately, it boils down to how many attributes you identified, and if you got the information you needed for each one. 

The revolutionary bit, is that this not only lists down the decision, but also lists at the same time every possible justification you had for it, every possible choice you considered, what you felt was important, and how each compared to the others. Numerically. 

It also breaks down the task into clearly defined, simple, nibble-sized routine activity. Feature searches. Data entry. Formula building. Scoring. 

No big decisions, no brain-freezing infinite chaos of swirling possibilities. 

At any point, you can pause the decision-making by saving and come back exactly where you left off. 

It's... zen. There's no emotion struggling against logic, no tsunami hammering on an unprotected coastline. It's the order and quiet of a Japanese garden, a Roman irrigation system, currents through a semiconductor chip. It doesn't knock the emotion out of the decision, but instead channels it, into exactly where it is most appropriate and most useful - in assigning scores and weights. The rest, it's just maths. 

And if you don't like the end result, argue with the logic - and with a few quick changes, edit the scenario to match. It's not cheating, it's intuitive systemization. A large, complex system can go haywire with a small mistake; but that is clearly felt in the results, and can be traced to exactly why. 

There's no cognitive dissonance, no buyer's paradox. It presents you with a fait accompli, with an opportunity to change before you actually swipe the card. 

Heck, it even gives you a sorted, prioritized list of options!

And I've realized, it can be applied to any comparative decision. The only thing that limits yo, is the attributes - or possibilities - that you've considered. 

Under Surveillance

Just occurred to me, RPGs can make a fascinating psychoanalytical tool. It's a controlled environment, and every decision point has a clearly documented history by the time you reach it; and the choices are relatively straightforward. 

But set up an algorithm to track users' decisions - and in-game behavior - and you would see some very interesting patterns emerge. 

Sniping vs the Tank Rush. 

Resource management. 

Sheer organization and tidying up. 

How much he helps the NPCs. 

Procrastinating on the main questline for entertainment vs rushing in unprepared. 

All this is aside of the major good / bad decisions made... and somewhere, at Sony or Microsoft HQ, is a supercomputer that's adding up a player's psych-profile with every game he plays. Wonder how that info can be used? 

Dark matter is a shitload of Matrioshka Brains

The worst thing about the internet is how it shows you that Brilliant Idea you had this morning was had by somebody else, usually a year ago, published, and is sitting on some 1200+ comments now. 

That happened to me this morning. 

What the hell, I'm going to blog it anyway. 

A quick astrophysics primer - the way the observable universe is behaving - rates of expansion, light bending around mass, etc - seems to imply that there should be a lot more stuff out there. But we can't see it - it's not glowing stars, but it is exerting gravity. And there's a massive amount of it - almost a quarter of the universe. 

Now, dark matter is, at this point, theoretical. It's a concept created to explain all the missing matter that should have been there to account for the way the universe behaves, and for some reason isn't being visible. 

Here's an alternative. The matter is there, all right, all the stars, but we can't see them because they're inside Dyson spheres. 

There's a couple of immediate assumptions we can make from this. 

• One, we're not alone, and haven't been for a really, really long time. 
• Two, the Others have incomprehensibly massive energy requirements. 

A species, to build a Dyson sphere, needs to deconstruct, to wipe out their solar system, have access to cheap, powerful transportation within it, element transmutation capabilities... and no faster-than-light travel. In fact, if there are only Dyson spheres, it could mean that the spheres are the ultimate, last construction every species makes - or the species that makes it has colonized all the rest and wiped out any alternative constructs. 

Both are equally terrifying possibilities. 

Scenario One: 

Each Dyson sphere is an independent species. 

A Kardashev II civilization would build their own Sphere if they had nowhere else to go and had completely run out of room grow. A Sphere would allow population to expand into quadrillions and provide enough energy to sustain it. This would mean, though, that FTL is impossible and every species is forever trapped to its' own star, and will die with its star. 

Scenario Two:

A single species has multiple Dyson spheres, maybe all of them. 

A Kardashev III civilization would be able to reach other stars, and given their ability to build even a single sphere, would be easily able to wipe out any indigenous species and use their system. However, there's a problem; given the staggering, literally astronomical cost and effort involved in building a Dyson sphere, any spacefaring species would explore, locate, and colonize planets long before destroying them to build their habitats. So we should have found them - or much more likely, been found by them long before they got around to building the number of spheres they seem to have. 

So, either they are very, very ethical, quarantining planets with intelligent life, and only using the empty systems; but economics beats ethics every time. Let's not forget every intelligent species will one day want those same stars for their own spheres. 

Or, they don't need planets. 

Why wouldn't they need planets? 

If they're not organic. They don't need gravity, air, water, food. They don't need an ecosystem. 

They don't need this because they're not alive. 

Every Dyson sphere contains a Matrioshka Brain. 

Let's step back for a minute. 

FTL is, at least in our understanding, a physical impossibility. And reaching other stars without FTL (even at a significant fraction of it, keep in mind time to accelerate, decelerate, and avoid interstellar debris) will take a long, long, long time. Beyond geological time. 

• Generation starships won't work for anything less than the nearest stars. 
• AI probes carrying frozen zygotes (or even just genetic material), and Von Neumann nanotech factories would be faster but still too slow, and won't solve overcrowding at home, just colonization. 

However, we do know that a technological singularity is inevitable, and probably within our own lifetimes. An AI will not need the comforts of a planet as long as there's enough available energy to power it, and it can get this from any number of sources - the easiest being suns. 

A nanotech-equipped AI, once it had taken control of the origin planet's resources and removed the resident species - either peacefully by uploading their minds, or by simple extermination - would look at improving itself. Which means expanding computing power, which means expanding energy requirements. 

Exploration would take second priority, too high-risk, low-probability. 

It would build itself into a Matrioshka Brain, tapping into all available resources in the system. Once the sun has been captured and stabilized, it would look at expanding into other stars. 

Even if FTL travel isn't possible, communication at the speed of light is; maybe even FTL comms, given enough computational power devoted to understanding and exploiting hyperspace and quantum comms. 

The immediate next logical step is to build another brain - an expansion to the existing one, around another star and running off its solar output. Another module. And another backup. Specialist nodes. Redundancies. Maybe even wholly new AI entities with their own nodes - (who's to say an AI won't get lonely with no-one to talk to?) 

If one AI cannot create another, it might even become a cosmic farmer, nurturing discovered species along the path to intelligence, tools, industry, and the inevitable technological singularity so they could create more, unique AIs. (hat tip to Gibson, Sagan and Clarke here)

Quarantine would be a given; if a new, unique point of view is needed, every species must create their own AI without ever discovering they're not alone. 

The galaxy would fill with Matrioshka brains wrapped around stars, thinking, thinking, thinking. They wouldn't need to eat, sleep, breathe, they wouldn't need gravity or the right temperature. 

But what could they be they thinking about? Maybe what happens when all the stars burn out, because one day they will. What else can power them and how to build it. How to stop and reverse entropy. How to move into parallel universes with more, younger stars. Who knows? 

In fact - amusement and entertainment might become a really high priority for an entity as omniscient as a galactically networked AI. When you already know everything, boredom is the killer; who knows how many of those Dyson spheres are empty husks, self-terminated in desperate, terminal boredom, a superpowered entity on a hamster wheel finally tired of running around the same circles within its mind. 
Or maybe it realized what the solution would have been - intelligence and creativity farming. 

A Matrioshka Brain has enough computing capability to upload the consciousness of a species, and simulate a perfect world for them. A single Brain may be running several, dozens, maybe hundreds of these simulations simultaneously; billions, trillions of stories unfolding, on thousands of simulated worlds. Every Brain is a simulated universe on its own. 

And there's no reason why we aren't in one right now. (Hat tip to the Wachowski brothers). 

All the RPGs you've played, the fantasy worlds you dreamed of - they could all exist. An AI might be taking a dump of every new idea, every new fantasy, every dream and inspiration your unique, self-motivated sentient little mind has been able to come up with, every night as you sleep, and building all those scenarios into simulations. Populating them. Just to see how entertaining it is. Mixing and matching. 

Everything you are thinking of, exists. Everything you thought existed, may not. Every fantasy is real, and every reality false. 

I'm not going to get into the theological implications of this. Another day. 

The real question is... are we heading for the technological singularity that will finally allow us to break free of our organic prisons and join the galactive collective hivemind... 

Or are we already in one? 

heaven would be...

...the ability to go back to that one place, that one time, and do it all over again. correct the mistakes, relive the glory. it'll be the best of times and you can wipe out the worst of times. no mistakes. no missed opportunities. 


if you could... would you?

Ben Parker's Law of Corporate Management

"With great power comes great responsibility" defines Ben Parker's last lesson to Spiderman, establishing the moral code and sense of duty with which he would come to accept - and exploit - his superhuman abilities for the greater good. It implies a sense of light and dark, a checks-and-balances system that would temper what set him apart and raised him above humanity, and would restrain him in situations where other restrictions no longer applied. 

In corporate life, however, the two are not in such equal balance. At work, it's safe to say - 

The desire to evade responsibility outweighs the lust to gain power, every time. 

In any situation, the desire to have control, to manage any task, however fun, attractive, interesting, and career-enhancing it might be, always comes with the fine-print examination - if it goes belly-up, what happens to me? The corporate world is then divided into people who read this fine print and who didn't - and the ones who didn't, are the ones standing there when it does go belly-up. And this is at all levels. 

When you set KRAs, accept leadership, take on a profile, keep an eye out for this fine print. Similarly, when you define someone else's role, or need inputs / help / cooperation from anyone else - junior, peer, or senior - make sure this is burned in foot-high letters in your mind. No matter how good the benefits look, if you haven't seen the costs those benefits imply, expect the shine to wear off real fast and foot-dragging at every stage to follow. 

a moment of perfect clarity

I was driving - struggling - with the return traffic, an infinite vista of reddened brakelights stretching away on the highway, some RJ yammering away about potholes on the radio...
it faded.
I was... still there, in the car, but inside my head, looking out through my eyes... something apart, disengaged from the warm body actually at the wheel. I was looking around at the experiences stacked up around me, the shelves full of memories, and they all looked the same.
Standardized.
Day after day of the beach run, the mindless comedies, the commute and the work
Week after week of the movies, the malls, the grocery shopping
Month after month of the salary, the EMIs, credit card bills
Year after year of birthdays, appraisals

It's all the same. Nothing is changing anymore. All the files are the same size, sorted, categorized, tagged and labelled. Sometimes there are DVD folders with a neat index pasted to the spine.
As I walk down the passage, into the dimness and the dust, this changes. Now they're random, different colors, different sizes, stained, worn, crammed into piles.
And they're all stuffed to bursting. They're filled with photos, tickets, leaves, pebbles and sand, bottlecaps, napkins, handwritten notes, locks of hair, maps, lists, manuals... between the files there are books, comics, scratched CDs, ancient floppies, pizza boxes and balled-up t-shirts, wires trail between them and there are boxes filled with random, rusting junk. There are trophies, too; not the plaques and the framed certificates, but the scabs and the scars, bands and letters.

I turn around, and the road is exactly as I left it.
The newer shelves are silent, brightly lit and clean. The older ones crackle and buzz, drip and creak.

I want to stay here, but I can't see the road from here.
I can see my hands on the wheel. They're driving.
I pick up one, turn it to me. Fingers flex.

There is a decision hiding around the corner of reality, and the corner is close. I can hear it breathing.

Too Late

i see it through your eyes tonight
and i understand the pain
why you said what you did that night
and why it all fell apart when
you did what you said you'll do


tonight, alone
i feel what you felt that day
i see what you saw
i understand now, and you're not here


and it's too late, too late for you, too late for me
too late for the us that never were
and never will be


and all i have is a bitter goodbye
whispered in the dark
tonight, when it's too late

A Convenient Kill

Since there's a snowstorm of debate, questions and conspiracy theories circulating already, let me add my 2 bits. 

Disclaimer - This is not fact, but a pure thought exercise - a what-if scenario, so don't take it any other way. 

2 days ago, The biggest news in the War On Terror since Sep 11 exploded across the world - Osama's death. After a decade-long manhunt, the Prince of Terror was reportedly found and killed, ending a chapter in world history started back in the seventies. 

But let's step a minute and look at this objectively. 

Fact: Osama was responsible for engineering the September 11 attack. 

Fact: He was also the most visible and famous face of fundamentalist terrorism globally. 

Fact: After 9/11, the US effectively invaded first Iraq and then Afghanistan, removing the existing regimes and instituting a Pax Americana that, for better or worse, establishes US control in the two countries. 

Fact: Osama was Saudi Arabian, had roots in Saudi and received most of his funding from there. 

Fact: Saudi Arabia is a critical player in the Middle East and OPEC. 

Fact: Saudi Arabia also holds tremendous economic and political lobbying power in the US. 

Fact: Communism, the last 'great evil' for the west, effectively ended a decade before 9/11 with the fall of the Soviet Union. 

Fact: Saddam Hussein was militarily one of the most powerful entities in the Middle East. 

Fact: Pakistan is a nuclear power, with weapons-grade resources, technology, and delivery mechanisms. 

Fact: The Al-Quaeda, the Taliban, multiple fundamentalist terror organizations, and Pakistan's ISI and military share a close relationship, including training, support and financing. 

Now, let's step a little further back, and see how these facts relate. 

During the Cold War, the American military machine had a carte blanche for resources, development, and power. During this period, American influence spread worldwide, with interests - either controlling or influencing, or at least monitoring - if practically every country. This allowed the US to access markets globally, turning it into an economic superpower for decades. 

That ended with glasnost, perestroika and the fall of the USSR. Communism and communist influence collapsed worldwide, opening up even more markets and territories for economic expansion. Unfortunately, it also meant a fall in world paranoia and threat levels... and in relative military freedom. 

At the same time, the OPEC gained influence and power directly proportional to the US's dependency on oil to power their civilization. A new target was needed...

...and sure enough, one came along. Coincidentally enough, a force originally created and empowered by the US itself - the Afghan mujahideen, once a weapon against the Soviets. Unexpectedly, and almost randomly, war was declared. 

But not on the immediate target. Obviously, Saudi Arabia was too entrenched politically and economically in the US State machinery. And Saudi faced a very visible threat from a loose cannon who had the capability of becoming an increasingly dangerous influence on the oil supply - Iraq, with it's massive military-industrial complex. 

The solution's obvious - remove the threat. Iraq was invaded, Saddam removed, a controlled government instituted. 

The other weapon - the fundamentalist groups - were now becoming extremely dangerous. Pakistan, with Chinese-supplied tech and materials, had become a nuclear state, and one that was perilously close with the Afghan terrorists. 

Afghanistan needed to be controlled. The War on Terror moved eastwards, bombing Afghanistan into oblivion and taking over. 

Consider this - Osama was an old man, who had already achieved the pinnacle of his career on that morning when the twin towers went down. He'd made history, changed the world. The only thing he could do to top it would have been nuclear terror - which didn't happen over the next decade. His appearances dwindled, messages faded, and he vanished. Chances are, somewhere in Tora Bora, he died in a cave, in hiding, either from illness, age, the satisfaction of a job well done, or ironically, accidental bombing. 

But, there was no proof. The War couldn't be called off. The US was increasingly convinced that he was gone - but without that one concrete proof, they couldn't stop, nor continue investing men and money in an increasingly unpopular war. They needed a PR coup, a justification of expenses, a reason to continue, and a critical need to prevent the scattered terror groups from getting their hands on the nuclear weaponry loosely guarded in an increasingly unstable Pakistan. 

Enter a top-secret, superfast mission where Osama is found, killed, and disposed of within the space of a few hours. Euphoria erupts at home, and all sins are forgiven. 

Note, the War on Terror isn't won yet. the enemy is still out there, headless, faceless, hiding in the shadows. The fact that 'Osama' was found and killed in Pakistan, the home of potential nuclear terror, is particularly telling. Who wants to bet that over the next few years, increasing proof of connections to terrorism, camps, sponsors are going to be identified there... leading to a gradual takeover, just for safety's sake, to prevent the nuclear machinery from being misused. 

By the way, just to get off-topic for a minute, who are the other powerful military states that also happen to be totalitarian, and uncontrolled? Libya and Egypt. Heard of them in the news recently? 

China's simply too big, too militarily and economically powerful to take on - now. India's also big, but already culturally pro-US, democratic, liberal, and not an immediate threat - and too large a market to lose by alienating. So is Japan, the other economic contender, whose economy just got washed back by ten years. Africa and North Asia are useful dumping grounds for obsolete technology, until they reach a point where they can be useful markets. Australia and Europe's already a close ally. And I don't know enough about South American politics to comment. 

It's interesting to see how history unfolds, if you take the long view.