Never been one to let the carrier drop

1) Bernie supporters, while it would be great if the government would become more socialist, we don’t actually have to wait for it to live in a more socialist world. If your financial situation is above average, help your friends. If it’s below average, share the problems you’re having so people can help you, and accept help. Whenever possible, trade skills for skills to stay outside the tax system entirely. I’m sure we can think of a whole lot of ways to live in a more socialist way without needing the government’s help or permission.

2) As we’re woe-is-meing about the horrible horrible “other side” in political situations, remember my discussion earlier about how the conservative or liberal neurons in a natural neural network are both playing important roles. If you removed either the right-bias or left-bias neurons from a NNN, the results would not be good. The same is very likely true for big systems of humans. We probably need to find a better way to make this a blending of signals rather than a war – machine assisted telepathy is one of the things I like for this – but whatever your political bias, we need both you and your opposite number to make good decisions.

3) Look at the big picture. Most of us are fed, most of us are clothed, most of us have power, most of us have the ability to send a message anywhere in the world in milliseconds. Increasingly, we’re aware of the places where there are fundamental problems and we’re trying to fix them. Overall, the long term curve for Earth is very positive. If you doubt this, go read some history. The immediate situation often looks very screwed up, but if you look at the big picture, stuff is getting better.

I remember the first Prince song I ever heard. I had bought a FM radio at a yard sale with a misaligned IF, and after twiddling a few tuning slugs in the back, it started bringing in some New York pop station. One of the first songs I heard on my newly operational radio was ‘Kiss’.

I of course loved it. I loved a lot of his music. Since hearing of his death, I’ve only played one Prince song (let’s go crazy), but the playlist in my head has included a lot more of them (Seven, Kiss, Little Red Corvette, When Doves Cry, among others)

I like writing music about sex, which gives me something in common with Prince. I imagine I have some other things in common with him as well, but there are also some striking differences – religion, mostly. I suppose right now he knows whether he was right or wrong. Or he doesn’t know anything at all.

I first heard he was dead on Brig. I think I was laying in my bed. My first thoughts were that it was too soon.

So, I have a humble suggestion for making a good electronic voting network. What we need is widely deployed, hardened, secure, reliable computer terminals with some ability to identify the user. What’s that you say? We already have those, and they’re called ATMs? Why, yes, that’s exactly what I’m thinking.

I figure there aren’t that many models of hardened ATMs, and they’re all X86 based. It would not be that hard to deploy voting software to them. While we’re at it, let’s use modern crypographic methods to make sure that our votes were really counted. The ATM can print a receipt with a signature that you can go look up to make sure your vote made it to the vote aggregation centers.

The government could issue a ATM-esque card to every voter, that they could use to verify their party registration, vote, etc. The way the current ATM network works is probably a perfect model for how to handle this. People who already have bank accounts could even just use their current ATM card to authenticate themselves, although that might be going a little far.

So, I have to wonder, if you could build a exact carbon copy of me – with the same neural nets connected in the same way – would it be functionally identical to me? Is there any ‘magic’ to us beyond the mechanics of thought? Would it experience the world exactly the way I do? Is it possible our whole world is the result of someone doing a exhaustive search for a particular neural configuration, one that responds in particular ways to particular inputs? Is it likely?

One of the thoughts I had recently is that we’re always encouraged to ‘be ourselves’. Except that the band of ways you can ‘be yourself’ without getting into trouble is very small, and shrinking all the time. A friend of mine posted on facebook that his community had passed a law against wearing your clothing in such a way that your underwear show. He was pleased – I am not. I am alarmed at how little freedom we have in the “land of the free”, and how fast it is eroding. What you wear is a form of freedom of speech.

Anyway, I seem to have wandered off my original point. Certainly, we don’t want a sociopath to “be themselves”. Of course, “Be yourself within certain boundaries” doesn’t sound nearly as nice.

I think I have widely different definitions of which those boundaries should be than most people. And it scares me that those boundaries get smaller every year. I like the idea of a widely diverse population. But it seems like unless you’re riding the exact middle of human behavior, there’s someone who doesn’t want you doing what you’re doing. And I guess I feel like they should be free to want that, but not able to enforce that. Some percentage of them have some political power, and they *do* enforce their beliefs on our behavior.

As a side note, increasingly it seems there is a move to force people to provide services even to those they disagree with, to fight discrimination. And, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of discriminating against gays or blacks or what have you – but I’m not sure this is the solution. I do think there should be a minimum subset of rights we all have. I do not think that owning weapons is on the list. I do think the freedom from having them aimed at you ought to be.

I do know that every law passed makes us less free – and we never delete laws, and we add new ones all the time. At this point only someone who does nothing but study the law could even keep track of what is and isn’t legal.

I don’t seem to have any consistent point or even thread of thought here, so I’m going to stop for now.

So, I see in my inbox a invitation to block offshore drilling in the Atlantic. I see my mother campaigning for not running a CNG pipeline in West Virginia. And yes, all these things sound good, but.. well, no, they don’t.

Here’s the problem. I have been a champion for nuclear power for a long time – based on the fact that it kills less people per kilowatt-hour than any other form of fueled power we know. (I don’t have data for solar and wind – hydro obviously kills people making dams and also tends to kill people when those dams fail). I also don’t think we’ve come anywhere near making the safest nuclear plant we can – we’re still using some really outdated ideas which A: make it difficult to extract even a fraction of the energy out of the nuclear fuel and B: make a unpowered nuclear plant a disaster waiting to happen because of the waste heat issues. We know of a number of ways to build reactors that don’t suffer from these issues, but the money people who pay to build nuclear plants are inherently conservative and so we’re not building them yet. Also, some of the best plant designs are based on things that are not in any way making-nuclear-weapons friendly, and we don’t like that at all. It probably makes a lot more sense to get power out of thorium than uranium, for example, because of the vastly higher energy density, but there’s no way we’re going to make weapons-grade anything out of thorium.

Anyway, I digressed there for a moment, but here’s my point. We like having energy. Energy makes our lives easier. Energy can turn salt water into fresh water, it can make it possible to grow crops in Alaska, it makes getting to work a lot easier, it makes things like Google possible. We like having energy, but we don’t want to have to pay the piper.

The reality is, that power has to come from somewhere. Solar is not a acceptable option for baseline load because I’d like to have heat at night. (Solar plus pumped storage might be, but we’re not building that just yet). Coal is a really bad answer because large numbers of people die in the production of coal, plus the ecological costs are not insignificant. Oil is a finite resource and is really more useful for manufacturing. Natural gas is actually a pretty reasonable way to generate power if one insists on using non-nuclear fuel. So, yes, we’re going to have to run some gas pipelines. I for one am not ready to opt out of having twenty kilowatts at my beck and call.

Nuclear actually does a good job of highlighting the fact that we as a planet have a somewhat stupid decision-making process. If we’re going to ban something nuclear, let’s ban the *#%# bombs – as for a way to produce power, nuclear is about the best answer I think we’re going to find. I am the first to admit that ionizing radiation is dangerous, but so are a whole lot of things, and it’s a well-understood danger that we can work around. Why are so many people so rabidly against nuclear – often without understanding it at all? I suspect it’s because every incident at a nuclear power plant gets plastered all over the news, because it’s lovely and sensational and apparently we like to be frightened.

By the way, a side note, someone was ranting against CFLs and one of the things they talked about was that they ’emit radiation’. I’m not sure what type they meant.. I’m going to guess they were talking about the EM field – but it’s a very bad light bulb indeed that does not emit radiation. I’m going to assume all my readers get the joke here.

Anyway, my point is, don’t protest energy extraction unless you want to give up using energy. Protest *stupid* energy extraction like fracking – yes, absolutely. And encourage energy companies to use wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, nuclear, tidal, and other forms of energy that are not scarce and don’t come with a huge body count. But we are going to need some CNG pipelines, and we are likely not done pumping oil from under the ocean just yet.

As most of you know, I want a lot to see things like Battery 500 succeed, and I want to see us move to a long-term-sustainable transportation grid. I would really like us to no longer have anything to fight wars over, and wars over resources that destroy resources in the process strike me as extra-stupid. But that doesn’t mean I want to stop using power. I *like* my house climate controlled, my water clean and delivered under pressure, and my ability to publish anything I create to the entire world and to learn about everything we know about without leaving my home.

I saw a post on facebook’s evolution vs. ID group the other day that asserted that intelligent design is creationism. I think that this is a hugely narrow view of the world. I am a proponent of intelligent design as a likely hypothesis (In fact, I think both evolution and ID are likely, because a intelligent designer will use evolutionary algorithms when they make sense) but I am not a creationist in the traditional sense. My personal hypothesis, discussed elsewhere in this blog, is that we do a fair amount of editing of our own DNA across the millennia. However, even if that is not the case, I can think of many ways that intelligent design might be true without there being a single word of truth in the bible.

One possible way is the endpoint-bound design process – i.e. we’re inside a quantum computer which has been asked to find a path between zero and a particular life form. Ancestor simulation, I think this is called. One can actually think of a lot of ways that you can have intelligent designers without talking about traditional creationism. There’s the oldie-but-a-goodie of us being the product of alien genetic engineers. There’s the classic of us being inside a time-based mobeus loop, and we’re genetically engineered by our future selves.

I really think science should be approaching this with a wide open mind – and increasingly I suspect they are. One of the things that I really like are scientists that don’t hypothesize until *after* they have the data – just go out and take some measurements and see what you can find out. It does not strike me as that likely, given that there are a number of competing religions, that we’re going to find a correct and honest origin story in a religion.

For that matter, I’ve talked about a number of times how your intelligent deity would almost certainly be working with us inside a virtualization container, which increases the unknowability factor by quite a bit. Of course, a intelligent deity would also know that *they* might be in a virtualization container, which means that no deity could honestly say, with any certainty, that they were omnipotent and omniscient. That’s a subject I’ve already harped on enough in this journal, I think.

Anyway, my point is, it’s a lot of a leap to assume that just because someone thinks intelligent design is a reasonable explanation for our existence, they’re a creationist. Especially that they’re attached to any mainstream religion.

I will now take off my tinfoil hat.

So, I wanted to get this down in summary form so I can post links to it on facebook rather than writing it out over and over.

One of the things that makes the least sense to me is that Christians, who claim to believe that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, are anti-abortion. Surely a all-powerful and all-knowing entity can arrange to only have souls connected to the bodies that are actually going to be extant? Being anti-abortion is the same as professing a profound lack of faith in God’s abilities.

Now, I have a different perspective. My first observation is that you aren’t dealing with a self-aware life form until certain things happen in the mind of the fetus. These can’t possibly happen until at a minimum the neural network develops whatever the minimum number of connections for self-awareness is. We don’t know what that is, but we can safely say based on the fact that we have no problem killing cows that if the fetus has less neurons than a cow, it’s not a person by our definitions.

It also seems likely that self-awareness and free will are something you ‘catch’ from other people. In the 1950s, a attempt to make a more efficient orphanage resulted in a number of children not getting held, talked to, cuddled, etc. The result was that most of them died. Neural networks are event-driven, and it seems likely that it takes a certain number of incoming events to make a person a person, because absent events, there is nothing to drive the connecting-the-neural-dots process that turns us from a collection of cells into a individual.

In any case, the same people who are pro-life are often the people pushing for laws and rules and social norms that will make that life as miserable as possible. They certainly aren’t volunteering to take care of the children in question. I don’t think it’s actually a defensible position from a religious standpoint, unless your religion is built on the idea of a incompetent God.

Note that crossposting has been disabled for a couple of years.. go to my blog on sheer.us if you want to read the events of those years.

So, Facebook thoughtfully provided me this response:

“Hi,

Thanks for taking the time to submit this report. While we don’t currently provide individual support for this issue, this information will help us identify bugs on our site.

”

In other words, you’re censored, no, we won’t tell you why.

Well, Facebook, goodbye. I have enough emotional literacy to know that I don’t really enjoy visiting you that much anyway, and now that you’ve started censoring me, I’m not interested in continuing. The nice thing about running my own web server is that I’m fairly sure I’m not going to censor myself.

To the rest of you all still on the site, consider leaving. There’s a lot of better content out there. Facebook has turned into a collection of games you will play while feeling totally numb and everyone repeating memes instead of talking about their lives – I guess nothing lasts forever.

Ask yourself this question – how do you *feel* while browsing the site? Do you not think there are things you could be doing that would feel better? Like, you know, actual social interaction with real humans, face to face? Or, in my case, spending more time writing and recording music? Of course, no one will hear it, since I’ve got nowhere to post it any more. 😉 Well, I did talk about creating a mailing list, I guess I will go do that.

I’ve been banned. I ran a malware scan (remote) of sheer.us, and checked with google, and no, I am not exporting malware to the world. It’s not that I’ve been p0wned.

I’m curious which of the many possibly-undesirable-to-facebook things I have talked about it is.

I can’t decide whether to be angry or honored.