I know the articles have been terrible this week, but…Pandas!
Archive for March, 2010
I recently just installed the Bad Behavior and WP-minify plugins. In the past, I’ve had a lot of spam-bots peruse the site and make obnoxious work of the place. Bad Behavior should help block a lot of that traffic from getting through. Wp-minify is used to condense some of the page coding to help improve load times. I’ve never really any speed issues with servusamanu, but every little bit helps, especially on slower connections.
In other news, I just finished reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. It’s definitely not quite the masterpiece of Crime and Punishment, the psychological musings of the protagonist are not nearly as visceral, but you there’s a similar appraisal of pride, morality, and justice within the piece. In total, I found the work entirely confusing. Sentence by sentence it seemed muddled and without any direction. By the end of section and the work as a whole it somehow came together. It’s a nightmare to try to dissect, because the individuals parts don’t seem to really contribute to the whole at all. If you take any individual paragraph out of the story and read it, you’d be hard-pressed to construct from that any sort of narrative at all. So much time is spent pulling out bit of the protagonist’s personality, but not directly and not even through interesting anecdotes. Rather, a paragraph of nothing gives up a phrase or a ‘tik’ in the wording that suggests part of the narrators mental state and history, but even that is nothing unless compared against similar giveaways later. The individual hints come across as nothing and only the aggregation makes any sense. It’s fascinating, and mind-boggling.
In a complete departure from Dostoevsky, the next book in the queue is Pattern Recognition by William Gibson (of Neuromancer fame). I’m only a chapter or two in so I’ll save that for next week.
I’m also playing Napoleonic Total War. Excellent game, but my computer is choking on the battles. I need to toss some more RAM in, I think. Maybe soon, but not this week. I’ll be in New Orleans soon and it can wait till after that. I’m excited for the vacation. Images soon forthcoming…
Despite all the phenomenal stories, it turns out you can’t prevent yourself from being born…
I recently wrote a short story involving a shared electronic universe, something akin to a world of warcraft that people would upload themselves into. In my story, individual member’s minds were functionally virtualized into the world.
In this sort of existence, the potential for apparent paradox exists. If memory becomes digitized than the record could be altered beyond the knowledge of the memory itself and no temporal continuity needs to be maintained. Paradox cannot truly happen, but the definition of a paradox can be stretched broader than necessarily apparent. For example, it would be entirely possible for a person to go back in time, kill themselves, and yet till exist. The solution to the paradox is, of course, that the real world has changed the functional rules of the world in ways fully consistent with a larger existence.
That’s my general take of the article. We don’t know what the larger rules are, but through an appraisal of how things appear to be, we can derive what our more localized rules must be. Unfortunately, we don’t have any obvious capacity to confirm them. If some greater body of rules is set to disallow the appearance of paradox, than we would have no ability to comprehend that; the rules would change to adapt any new information. It’s sort of the ultimate Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
Yep…fun stuff.
I finally broke down and picked up a new theme for Servusamanu. As much as I’d like to take credit, this design isn’t my own. It’s a stock wordpress template called parchment draft with some modifications. I’m trying to really concentrate on writing (and reading) and, well, I wasn’t going to make anything much better than this.
The redesign also let me clean up a lot of things on the back-end that should make everything better overall. The downside: all the registered users were deleted so if you registered for any reason, you’d have to do so again. At the moment, I’ve got anonymous commenting turned on so for the moment there’s not much benefit to signing up really.
I hope everyone enjoys the redesign. More things to come.
I don’t know either. It’s a slow day and I’m a sucker for infographics.
http://bridepop.com/everything-else/true-cost-of-average-wedding/
PsyOrg.com has published an interesting article on lawyer’s attempt to provide a methodology for dealing with ‘super science’, that is, scientific experiments that could threaten humanity at large or at least significant sections thereof. I haven’t read through the paper it references, but the quote at the end is quite striking:
Courts must develop tools to deal meaningfully with such complexity. Otherwise, the wildly expanding sphere of human knowledge will overwhelm the institution of the courts and undo the rule of law – just when we need it most” Eric E. Johnson
Science and Law don’t always work well together just like technology and law. The people with the training and experience to understand the issues being questioned aren’t necessarily in an ethical position to appropriately rule on them.
Classically, science has been a relatively solitary profession or at least a contained one. This is still true for 99% of every experiment done, but our knowledge base has grown to a level that some genuinely frightening and dangerous discoveries could take place. How many thousands of movies have looked at that exact issue?
In a perfect future, these dangerous experiments can be secluded and quarentined, probably in space, thus minimizing the dangerous and capacity for liability present. Until then, however, Earth laws will hold sway over Earth science.
The article outlines many of the dangerous of science overstepping its bounds, such as miscalculations, professional and financial incentives to minimize security risks, etc. On the hand, reading this article I see an equally worrisome development. When science is subservient to law, science is forced to make a case for itself and this isn’t a fair fight. On any given day how much of the public will support research for research’s sake, the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge alone? Not enough to pass a vote. Even worse, the public at large has the scientific sensibilities of a sleeping gerbil. No one is worse prepared to understand and evaluate the truth, validity, or function of science more than the general public. How then, do we find the specialists and knowledge few who could make an informed decision either way? There’s no easy answer to that question.
I am a pessimist. I am a pessimist because I think the public is complacent and cowardly. If anyone can argue that there is any risk whatsoever than the public will be sufficiently alarmed to pass an injunction. Science will lose that battle every time, whether justified or not, simply out of fear and ignorence. My fear is that the future of humanity and human understanding will someday rest on the precarious scientific jurisprudence of a man with a high school chemistry class under his belt.
As much as I can empathize with the legal conundrum of allowing expert testimony from the very parties involved in an experiment, I think that’s unavoidable. The usual standards of the adversarial system have to be reappraised to prevent research becoming as bureaucratically slow as our laws. Even worse, a public indisposed to science cannot harrass and subdue research with an irrational fear of progress. There aren’t always two sides and the presumption of truth needs to fall to science.
That said, the law has its say and preventative injunctions must be considered even when illegal conduct isn’t necessarily about to take place. I would just want to see the bar placed high and the court strict against fearmongers, junk scientists, and superstition.
