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Though only finished and released around 1997: http://www.gardenwithinsight.c...

(Unrelated work and also two years of grad school to learn more about ecological modelling plus excessive ambition caused delays in getting it done...)

And MECC's "Lunar Greenhouse" from 1989 ran on the Apple II:
http://www.worldcat.org/title/...

This emulator did not work for me, but seemingly Lunar Greenhouse is online:
http://www.virtualapple.org/me...
http://www.virtualapple.org/J_...

But there are other text-based games like Hamurabi which goes all the way back to 1968 where you "plant" crops and harvest them. I played a variation of tha first around 1980 or so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

It can be played online:
http://www.hammurabigame.com/h...

I've long wanted to build a general purpose gardening (and maintenance) robot like the ones in "Silent Running". For some reason, there has been economic resistance to supporting general purpose agricultural robots. Cheap illegal labor in that sense harmed my career in robotics in the 1980s when I really, really wanted to make such things. :-(

That's one reason I've just done software, which is cheaper to do on your own than robotics. Or it was, now that robotics is getting so much cheaper for various reasons due to cheap powerful embedded computers and cheaper sensors and actuators and 3D printing and web-based design and manufacturing like via 100K garages and such.
http://www.100kgarages.com/

There were a couple times I spoke with academic roboticists about making general purpose agricultural robotics in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Both were interested in industry-fundable specific purpose robots, like for seeding transfer in greenhouses (Rutgers) or for autonomous wheat harvesting with big machines (CMU). Those were no doubt fairly practical ideas, and I may have been well served in a robotics career to have pursued such practical ideas in cooperation with those professors, but they were not the general purpose system I really wanted to work on like the Silent Running-type drones. Still, they might have been stepping stones to better systems -- but it is easy to be too ambitious and impatient when you are young.

Nowadays though, there seems to be a resurgence of interest in agricultural robotics, and I wonder if crackdowns on illegal agricultural labor may even be connected to it?
"Crackdown on illegal immigrants left crops rotting in Georgia fields, ag chief tells US lawmakers
http://blog.al.com/wire/2011/1...

Also, this is a problematical statement from the point of view of a robotics engineer: "A robust agricultural guest worker program, properly designed, will not displace American workers," Black said in remarks prepared for the hearing. "As my testimony shows, in Georgia, even with current high unemployment rates, it is difficult for farmers to fill their labor needs."

That guest worker program displaces robotics engineers... Otherwise there would be a much greater demand for general purpose agricultural robots.

Instead, I worked on virtual gardening software for growing virtual plants. My wife and I also made a simpler version of the garden simulator just for breeding virtual plants (mostly her work):
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

That said, there is little that is better for mental health for many people than

Thanks for the amusingly accurate XKCD link and insightful game comparison! I agree. However, it can be tricky to get a good game balance and have a good "microworld" framework for open-ended exploration. KSP pulls it off, whereas, say, our FOSS garden simulator from around 1997 does not.
http://www.gardenwithinsight.c...

That gardening simulator was written in part as a first step towards a space habitat simulator -- since you need to grow food even in space. Unfortunately, funding it ourselves for years (much of the living expenses for that work funded crazily on credit cards which took many years of doing unrelated work afterwards to repay), we had to triage out many of the open-ended interesting parts of gardening to get the first version done. We emphasized scientific accuracy as far as we could, which probably was a mistake compared to starting with simpler models. My wife and I both had been in a graduate program in ecology an evolution, so we has an academic bias. After the first version, we did not have time and resources to revisit it. We had hopes and sketches back then for activities like canning your own food, "survival" gardening where you had to grow enough calories or starve, interactions with neighbors, a virtual computer in the simulation where you did garden planning and looked up gardening info, and so on. A few vestiges of those remain, like the simulation being able to provide a calorie count of what you harvest. The open ended parts like designing your own tools, soil amendments, and plants were not that engaging in how they were implemented. By contrast, the "Harvest Moon" video game series emphasized fun parts of gardening for most people (like interactions with neighbors), although they lacked the science. It can be hard to bring that all together.

Here was a related (unfunded) NSF pre-proposal from 1997 for a second version of the garden simulator (never made) emphasizing creating an open-ended FOSS modeling environment for gardening-related models, but even that probably would not have been that much fun for most people even if it might have transformed the field of agricultural simulation:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"The usual outcome of an effort such as ours is a commercially distributed software product with proprietary source code. However, research continues on modeling of soil processes and plant growth, and this product will soon fall out of step. A proprietary program may be a bridge, but no one can walk across it. By making the model source code available, we will bring scientists out from their side of the bridge to interact with the models, while at the other end of the bridge the general public will step out by changing the models themselves."

But that was before I understood "the Big Crunch" like Dr. David Goodstein talks about and how hard it was to get grant money of any sort:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. The impressive successes of scientific projects during the Second World War had paved the way for the federal government to assume responsibility for the support of basic research. ... By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service,

Around 1997-1998 the bottom seemed to fall out of the educational software market in general, including with prices falling for boxed software and expectations rising for artwork and embedded video. That was unfortunate for me and my wife as we were just finishing a first version of an educational garden simulator. I first had the initial idea about ten years earlier while a program administrator for the NOFA-NJ organic farm certification program; too bad it took so long to bring it to fruition (including going to graduate school in biology). Guess time-to-market is really important. :-)

Mergers were one issue, I agree, including trying to get MECC interested in distributing our software back then. Perhaps the rise of the web was another. Store shelves were full of fighting and competitive games to get the dollars of kids. A bigger issue was was maybe that parents who bought educational software looked for checklists of how the software would help their child get better grades in school at specific school tasks -- which generally has a tangential-at-best relationship to true education (see John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, Alife Kohn, etc.).

Still, there is a lot of great educational software out there now, between apps, the web, PCs, and so on. Examples (including Kerbal Space Program and Minecraft):
"8 Videogames to Get Your Kid Into Engineering"
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/12/videogames-engineering-kids/?pid=3191&viewall=true

And that includes tools anyone can use in an interesting way, whether 3D design tools or even just word processors for writing up a story.

Still, from what you say, maybe we are lucky that the rights to our garden simulator software never got entwined with MECC, because then we could not have offered it for free with source for about fifteen years as we have.
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/

I worked unrelated jobs during writing that software. And it took years by my wife and me of working for others at unrelated jobs like at IBM Research to pay back what we had borrowed to finish it. It was such a loss of our being tooled up to further improve the software (and a couple related programs built on the same base, PlantStudio and StoryHarp software). Another couple years of being in the groove full-time focusing on that after the software was done, responding to feedback from users, and it all might have turned into something really spectacular. We had triaged out broader cooperative gaming aspects from the first version of Garden Simulator (like the Harvest Moon series succeeded at later), but hoped to add it back in future versions. Instead later I saw the Zynga people become worth billions with FarmVille. Well, I can hope in some indirect way we contributed to current educational and free software successes by example.

Anyway, I hope for a "basic income" for all someday so all people who want to make creative endeavors like free educational software have the time to do so, individually or collectively.

More ideas: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

On self-replicating space habitats:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

The grad plans were about "Elysium" but for all. Contrast:
http://www.itsbetteruphere.com/
with, from me:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/solarius/

Related attempts, but not very successful so far:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.openvirgle.net/

David Brin on the Transparent society:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_society

Related suggestions by me:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319

A basic income would give more people more time for self-education and civic engagement and raising independent children. They would have more time to review all this data.

Alaska has a bit of a basic income. Brazil has something of one recently. Germany has been talking about one. The USA has a basic income for people over 65 called "Social Security", so it could just be extended to all from birth and replace things like public schooling and unemployment insurance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee

Of course, two countries that implemented something of them, Lybia and Iran have experienced US attempts to destabilize them. See also "the Threat of a Good Example" by Noam Chomsky:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_Example.html
"No country is exempt from U.S. intervention, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria. ..."

Still, once could argue a basic income just props up capitalism. I guess it depends how it is implemented and what people actually would do with their time.

See Marshall Brain's Manna for a fictional example with both a basic income and a transparent society.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

There are many reasons things change slowly. People are naturally resistant to change, since they know the old ways work somewhat at least in the past. New intellectual paradigms take a while to propagate. Some people are invested in the current system emotionally and financially, even as it crumbles or faces increasing catastrophic systemic risks. And so on.

Although, perhaps it is better to not know what "X" is now, if it will take decades to see it come into being, with so much needless suffering along the way? :-(

James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear" is a good example of people not being willing to embrace "X" when it is staring them in the face.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

Another "X" is vitamin D and good nutrition to prevent or reverse much chronic disease.
https://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

But that's been know for thousands of years. It just gets forgotten now and then.
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/62262-let-food-be-thy-medicine-and-medicine-be-thy-f

Good points, but my wife and I put more than six person-years on our own dime into making a free garden simulator so people could grow their own food on "Spaceship Earth" -- and it is also a step towards living in space because people in space need to eat too. There is an edited version of one of Rick Guidice's pictures as a backdrop in the add-on pack:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/

So a lot of the ideas are complimentary. You're using the internet now to make your point and some of that technology indirectly came out of the space program which pushed technology along, including satellite communications. The picture of Earth seen from space has (arguably) done probably more than any one single thing to unite our planet (especially the image with a small Earth in a sea of darkness)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17.jpg

Thinking about things on a smaller scale like for a space habitat can focus the mind wonderfully on issues like recycling, meeting essential needs vs. expansive wants, being efficient in resource use, learning to get along with neighbors, sustaining human health without lots of expensive interventions, developing economic paradigms that are sustainable both socially and physically, and so on.

Anyway, one of the reasons for my not getting further directly on this is, beyond raising a next generation, actually investing significant my time on those topics you point to, for example education about health & nutrition and about transcending militarism & artificial scarcity:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://artificialscarcity.com/

But as I say, making good places to live in space and on Earth is complementary from a certain perspective, so it is not like that was wasted time in that sense in progressing towards space habitats.

Anyway, there are very few material resources in short supply on Earth. Pretty much all such shortages are politically motivated or the product of competitive economic tragedies or unaccounted for externalities. At the current rates of falling prices for solar, the world will be running off of mostly solar energy in 20 years unless something even better (like hot or cold fusion) is cheaper. As it is, probably at least 95% of the work done on Earth in the industrialized world is either useless or harmful to the common good, so there is plenty of spare capacity; see:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

As I wrote in 2008, (perhaps a bit wishfully as far as OSCOMAK itself, true):
http://oscomak.net/wiki/Main_Page
====
OSCOMAK supports playful learning communities of individuals and groups chaordically building free and open source knowledge, tools, and simulations which lay the groundwork for humanity's sustainable development on Spaceship Earth and eventual joyful, compassionate, and diverse expansion into space (including Mars, the Moon, the Asteroids, or elsewhere in the Universe).

You can read an essay on how to to find the financing to create a "Star Trek" like society here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html

A flow into foundations of $55 trillion is expected over the next 25 years: "Is Open Source the Answer To Giving?"
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/20/

"Obviously, in China, young people carry their old people like burdens while they're trying to manage their own families. That's not so great, either."

When people have six kids or so, it is not as much of a burden when the kids carry the elderly. Part of the problem is we are experiencing a "Peak Population" crisis.
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-August/004174.html

But Japan aims to solve that with robotics...

Thanks for being part of making the 1980s happen!

My wife and our little "labor of love" venture in the 1990s:
    http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/

Sorry about your loss.

Health tips by me, the most important of which for most technology people is curing vitamin D deficiency (and which I could only learn about by hypertext-supporting networks and Google):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2478380&cid=37734208

There are plenty of resources to go around though, especially when you consider we could support quadrillions of people in space habitats in the solar system. But some causes for optimism:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/
http://www.remineralize.org/
http://www.nist.gov/el/msid/dpg/slim.cfm

And maybe even:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2011/10/17/hello-cheap-energy-hello-brave-new-world/

If we had any real resource problems, why are so many people out of work? :-)

Real solutions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#

The human imagination is truly the "ultimate resource", so the more the merrier IMHO: :-)
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

You've of course read "True Names" no doubt about what an older woman is up to on the net: :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names

"There are no games which are not violent."

http://familypastimes.com/
"Family Pastimes games are the inventions of Jim Deacove. Jim started making co-operative games for his own family, and was encouraged by friends to make more. The Deacove family was and is no different from others. Sharing toys, helping mom and dad and being kind to others are values taught in all homes. To find games which help reinforce such sharing attitudes, however, is very difficult. Thus, Jim and Ruth felt the need to create some."

Also:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1713701812/co-opoly-the-game-of-cooperatives/posts/105473

And:
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/i_cooperation.htm
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
"Kohn argues that the 'sacred cow' of competition stands on four mythological legs."

But yes, alternatives to competitive games in the USA can be much harder to find.

My wife and I invested over six-person years trying to create non-violent video game alternatives in the 1990s when everyone was saying how important that was, and mostly all we got for that ourselves was having to spend many years working for others to pay off debt.
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/nsfprop.htm

Still, Minecraft is a new popular mostly cooperative game that I can recommend if you want one (although get your vitamin D from supplements if you spend a lot of time indoors playing it):
http://www.minecraft.net/

I would have been very proud to have made something that good and also that popular which created a huge cooperating user community. I have immense respect for Mojang AB in that sense.

We used a convention of an underscore and the units in our 1990s Garden Simulator (in Delphi Pascal), and it worked fairly well. So, like: maxTempForDay_degC

Other examples of how we translated a USDA ARS model to something more understandable:
    http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/help100/00000269.htm

ENO3 = NitrateMovedToFirstLayerFromSoilEvap_kgPha
M = numLayers
SEV* = evaporation_mm
C(NO3) = meanNitrateConcThisLayer_gPm3

Seems like a more than fair deal. :-)

Or at least, that's what my wife and I like to tell ourselves about our GPL'd garden simulator (a six person-year labor of love around the same time period):
    http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/

There have always been four different economies throughout human history:
        * A subsistence economy ("There's some lovely berries over here.");
        * A gift economy ("The meat from this deer is going to spoil; let's share it with the tribe.");
        * A planned economy ("Let's put the longhouse here.");
        * An exchange economy ("You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.");

Their relative balance shifts with changes to culture, technology, and other circumstances.

See also the comment I made here:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation

So, we can expect the balance between those four economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with:
        * A subsistence economy through 3D printing and local PV solar panels or other clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else);
        * A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers;
        * A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics; and
        * An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income.

I agree with you in general about the limits of simulations and even intelligence itself.

Still, simulations can be used to:
* predict (you are right, they often fail for reasons of chaos theory and limited accuracy or missing aspects);
* understand (where you play what ifs to see the consequences of your assumptions);
* to gain insight (something other than understanding of details, where you gain a sense of the gestalt, a feeling, or some new summarizing key idea, like I say with my sig about the irony of the tools of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity -- maybe we need a simulation about creating simulations to have scientists gain the insight about simulations you suggest many lack? :-);
* assess risk (to some extend, by Monte Carlo methods for well understood processes)
* to consolidate knowledge in an organized explicit way (you can't hand wave as much when you have to implement ideas in code);
* educate intellectually (as fun toys to play with and learn from);
* educate practically (to learn skills by trial and error, basically failing faster and safer like in a flight simulator or nuclear power plant simulator or surgical simulator);
* educate emotionally (to see consequences and possibilities and related narrative, often as games);
* entertain (relates to the above, but is a different focus);
* to serve as a focus for political policy debates about future scenarios (including as different simulators with different assumptions describe different implications of policy -- note weather forecasters use multiple weather models plus their intuition and experience to make forecasts);
* as a form of self-justifying artwork;
* as a way to create entirely new worlds to explore inspired by nature but (as you suggest) often very different;
* probably many more -- in the sense of, what good is a blank sheet of paper?

I learned some of this from thinking about what people like Steven C Bankes at RAND had to say in the 1980s and 1990s:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/b/bankes_steven_c.html
As well as people like Seymour Papert (of Microworlds educational software fame).
http://www.papert.org/
Or Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and others with Smalltalk as a simulation environment. As well as what futurists (WFS) and risk modellers (RAMAS) have to say. And from making a simulation about gardening in the 1990s (with my wife, as a more than six person-year labor of love released with source under the GPL):
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/

One concern I have about simulations of living creatures (especially intelligent or self-aware ones that can feel some kind of virtual pleasure or virtual pain, like in agent-based simulations) is, what are the ethics? As in, do not do unto others that which you do not want done unto yourself (unless they like that kind of stuff)...
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/LegalRightsOfRobots.htm

See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation

It says somewhere on the CIA public website (or used to) essentially that if you are applying for a job there, you should not tell anyone. I guess, the first rule of the CIA is no one works there, except Valery Plame. :-) But the CIA suggests that in part for the reasons you imply, as it can presumably make people a target (although it also would complicated covert things). Of course, who is not a target in some way in this world? Things become an issue of "risk management", like so much in life. It's unfortunate that the US has such an organization that mixes up sensemaking, spying, and covert operations. I think a "COIA" (Central Open Intelligence Agency?) that just worked in public would be much more effective for US security. :-) Maybe to complement the "Department of Peace" Dennis Kucinich and others have worked towards? :-) Although various different agencies and parts of agencies all do part of that task, but there may be poor integration of all that. And, of course, nothing is going to work right as long as our economic religion is so messed up (and a top priority has to be rethinking economics for the 21st century so it stops being primarily a faith-based dogmatic religion that denies it is a religion. :-) Related:
"The Market as God"
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm

As to me and my funding, under our current socioeconomic paradigm, I'm right now mostly one step above Kryten as a toilet-scrubbing homeschooling stay-at-home Dad, supported by a wife doing data-analysis consulting for "civilian" corporations these days, where my hobbies include developing FOSS software, writing long essays like this that hardly anyone reads, taking care of three elderly chickens, and taking part in a global "Blessed Unrest" http://www.blessedunrest.com/ towards saving a world that, way more often than not, is uninterested in being saved from its own internal contradictions and ironies. A world going mad from simple things like vitamin D deficiency and not eating enough vegetables, fruits, and legumes:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/mentalIllness.shtml
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html

Best job I ever had. :-)

But if the CIA came along and offered me a big grant to do publicly available FOSS Intelligence software and related content, would I ask my wife to do even more of the homeschooling and chicken care than she does already, or maybe even hire a multilingual tutor for some of the time and/or buy a toilet scrubbing robot? Probably. :-) How's that for ethics? :-) Would I rather such work was funded some other way? Sure. We tried a bit and failed with the NSF and NASA:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/nsfprop.htm
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Maybe we did not try hard enough perhaps... I have to admire these Concord people for their success and doing stuff mostly the right way (at least, as right as you can be if focused mostly on the needs of compulsory schools):
http://www.concord.org/

Politics and FOSS can make strange bedfellows. A few years ago there was a slashdot story on someone doing FOSS who lost a military-related contract after he said he took military money because it meant one less cruise missile or something. But he was right in a way. Imagine what some FOSS developers could do with the time otherwise made available by the money tied up in just one Tomahawk cruise missile (US$6

That game is something I wish I had worked on. My wife and I built a garden simulator in the 1990s, in part because it was a step to a space simulator, because in space you would still have to grow your own food if you wanted to "live off the land". We even have one extra backdrop set in an O'Neill habitat. I talked with someone at NASA about related ideas a decade ago, but NASA seemed more conservative then in some ways (with most resources tied up in the shuttle). Given the NASA game was written with tax dollars, I wonder, does NASA make its source available under a FOSS license? We did that with our garden simulator. http://gardenwithinsight.com/ Maybe NASA is hiring? :-) It would be great to work on the next version. I want to see a simulation game out of NASA about self-replicating space habitats (that duplicate themsleves from sunlight and asteroidal ores) and which covers some other post-scarcity issues. It's too bad when I graduated from college in the 1980s NASA pretty much had a hiring freeze.

"If an author, say Douglas Adams (rip), spends a couple of years on a book, your equation does not work. That is because it is based on an investment of time, and you need a return for that."

If everything else is free (or incredibly cheap), why does an author need a return on their time (most of the time)?
See: http:///www.reprap.org (GPL'd 3D fabricator) "Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain M. Banks, 1987.

Do parents need a return for the time they spend with their children? Or, in this case their "mind children"?

In 1997, my wife and I gave away a garden simulator under the GPL (more than six person-years of work)
    http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
and got the whole free internet in return (including Slashdot). Seems like a good deal to me. :-)

The problem for Douglas Adams was that, as Ian Banks' quote might suggest, he was was *poor* (or felt he was poor, or felt at risk of being poor in the future), where poor essentially means you can't expect reasonable needs to be met without major effort. So Douglas Adams must have felt (perhaps quite correctly) that he needed the ration units to survive (or thrive) in a system oriented around rationing. When scarcity (for most things) comes to an end worldwide, as is happening, then there is not much need for rationing and ration units for most of the basics (energy, food, water, shelter, computing, health care, transportation, etc.) See also, from 1964(!):
    http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S."

To see what such a world might look like in fiction (contrasted to our the recent ways), read James P. Hogan's novel, _Voyage from Yesteryear_.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
Of course, as in James P. Hogan's novel, getting there (post-scarcity ideology dominant) from here (scarcity ideology dominant) is going to be "interesting times". For a more dystopian take on this (if the wealth from cybernation is not shared roughly evenly), see:
    "Manna"
      http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/progman.htm

Very pretty Delphi code, especially compared to the spaghetti Fortran which was translated to Delphi for some of the underlying models. Notice how, say, all the simulation variables now have units appended to the end of the name, as in "rainfall_mm".

http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/ [Windows only still, sorry, but source on the web site under GPL.]
The Garden with Insight garden simulator is an educational simulation that uses weather, soil, and plant growth models to simulate a simple garden in an open-ended microworld setting. You can plant vegetables and grow them to learn more about plants, the soil, the weather, gardening, and science.

The general issues applicable to any such effort to make educational simulations include:
* money spent on education is mainly spent on teachers and buildings,
* successful companies in education spend over 90% of funds on advertising, packaging and sales, not content development,
* parents spending money on software tend to buy that which immediately promises increased test scores not increased insight,
* a lot of flashy science suddenly appears very incomplete and sketchy when you try to actually build a simulation based on it (one of the big values of simulation IMHO),
* the real world is very complex, and simple simulations may teach the wrong things,
* the public code available to use in simulations (from government labs) is often poorly written and takes a major investment to make useable even when the science may be good,
* it is difficult to meet a good educational design goal of having open ended models a community can comment on and improve without essentially becoming open source or free software, and yet funding agencies generally expect any grant proposal to include a plan to produce a revenue stream and so to be completely proprietary and thus a grant proposal that says code will be written and given away doesn't do as well as one that says code will be written and kept proprietary (silly, but mainly true, got the letter from NSF to prove it),
* historically, people who did computer simulation work couldn't get PhDs (since most PhD programs seek to produce experimentalists or mathematicians, again we both have the scars to prove it) and it is difficult to get educational support or appear credible without one, and
* all the standard issues of innovative education being to an extent subversive (like getting people to think for themselves and ask questions) and that colliding with a funding system with mainly other priorities.

There are some obvious exceptions like Maxis (which got in at the right time and focuses on games and consulting), however when you consider the potential for computers and the billions spent on education, the number of comprehensive educational simulations which are used in practice is small. There are a lot of labors of love out there, but whether most people can support themselves on such is a different question. (We get by on mostly unrelated consulting.) These sorts of simulations can take a lot of time to do well (our free garden simulator took six person-years and is only a shadow of what we wanted to do). To do it right, you have to make something that is both a robust program (on a variety of platforms) and is also good educational science. There are few people who can do both, and so in general it takes a large team and much expense. The dollars just aren't there so far for lots of really good simulations, in large part reflecting an entrenched world view in academia (which staffs government funding agencies) that prizes experiment and mathematical proofs over simulation. (The military has historically been an exception to this.) All are needed and useful when done well, and they can all work together in synergistic ways. Maybe this report will help change things for the better. In general, things are improving in terms of academia accepting simulations (driven for cost reasons more than anything) and people who are in academia right now have less trouble doing simulation focused research.

As a caveat, one thing we have discovered is that generally the people who write a comprehensive educational simulation learn more about a subject then those who use the simulation. So having students construct a simulation may be a more useful educational experience than just using one.

Low cost long range wireless devices handling distributed peer-to-peer content to ensure democracy:
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0754.html

Or how about supporting an open source community on manufacturing knowledge:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/index.htm

which relates to surviving Vernor Vinge's Singularity (Teilhard's Noosphere)
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0126.html

Or just supporting more open source / free software educational simulations: http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/nsfprop.htm

Or support some other people's efforts:

Humanity Libraries Project
http://www.humaninfo.org/

Center for the Public Domain
http://www.centerpd.org/

1. Open source library of knowledge for developing nations (making the world's intellectual wealth available to all)
http://www.oneworld.org/globalp roj ects/humcdrom/
http://www.oneworld.org/globalprojects/& lt;/a>
http://www.oneworld .or g/globalprojects/humcdrom/copyrigh.htm
http://payson.tulane.edu:8888/
; http://www.globalprojects.org/
; http://www.humanitylibraries.net/ http://www.villageearth.org/
http://www.villageearth.org/ATLi bra ry/cdrom.htm

2. Open source knowledge management systems
http://www.bootstrap.org/
http://bootstrap.org/colloquium/ar chi ves.html
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion /

3. Self-replicating space habitats (support trillions of humans in style without overrunning the earth)
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/s ett le.htm
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs /sp acsetl.htm
http://www.permanent.com/
http://science.n as. nasa.gov/Services/Education/SpaceSettlement/
http://www.luf.org/
http://www.ssi.org/
http://www.ssi.org/alt-plan.html http://www.spacedev.com/
http://www.spacehab.com/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

4. Pursue the "Ecocity Berkley" vision in the book by that name by Richard Register and look for related visions of sustainable development
http://www.amazon.com/exec/ob ido s/ASIN/1556430094/
http://www.co-intelligence.or g/y 2k_commtyorgs.html
http://www.fuzzylu.com/greencenter/h ome .htm
http://www.ulb.ac.be/ceese/meta/sust vl. html
http://www.rmi.org/

5. Work towards ending the drug war and pardoning hundreds of thousands of Americans imprisoned on non-violent drug charges. (I believe drug use is wrong and should be avoided, and by all means as it is now illegal, so don't do drugs! But as with alcohol and tobacco and caffeine, drug abuse should be considered a medical problem, not a legal one (except when like DUI it hurts or puts at risk others directly)).
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pag es/ frontline/shows/drugs/
http://www.drcnet.org/facts/

6. Teaching tolerance and compassion
http://www.splcenter.org/
http://www.splcenter.or g/t eachingtolerance/tt-index.html

7. Open source educational simulations and simulation construction toolkits (one of the most meaningful ways to use computers in the classroom).
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/ http://riceinfo.ri ce. edu/armadillo/Simulations/simserver.html
http://www.creativeteachingsite .co m/edusims.html
http://www.workingmodel.com/
http://www.idsia.ch/~andrea/simtools.h tml

8. Preserving biodiversity (when it's gone, it's gone forever)
http://www.tnc.org/
http://www.environment.about.com/newsissues/enviro nment/library/weekly/aa091700.htm

9. Develop any specific sustainable technology in energy (e.g. solar), recycling (e.g. recycle computers), materials (e.g. plastics from starch), society (e.g. participatory democracy & social justice).
http://www.google.com/sear ch? q=sustainable+technology
http://www.edf.org/issues/Recycling.htm l
http://www.sustainable.doe.gov/

10. Make corporations more accountable to human needs
http://www.adbusters.org/inform ati on/foundation/
http://www.adbusters.org/c amp aigns/charter/death.html
Previous link vanished, try instead:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.adbuste rs.org/ campaigns/charter/death.html+corporate+death+penal ty&hl=en
http://www.cwsl.edu/news/n_corpo rat e_death.html
http://monkeyfist.com/articles/340& lt;br> http://www.chaordic.org/

11. Reform the "Intellectual property" laws and their related organizations, perhaps so that copyrights are for a couple decades and most patents are for a dozen years and only for true innovations. Ensure that any IP developed with any government money is immediately put into the public domain.
http://danny.oz.au/fre e-s oftware/advocacy/against_IP.html
(Lots of other Slashot links!)

12. If you don't want to get you hands dirty volunteering your own time, look around and find good people (not organizations, although the people may be in organizations) already doing good things. Pick people with a track record of years of fighting for the common good or who have already made a major accomplishment demonstrating commitment and just anonymously give them $100K without strings attached. Example: Marty Johnson at Isles, Inc.
http://www.isles.org/mileston.html& lt;br> Find people just starting a career of public service or a charitable venture and struggling to do good things and give them $20K and tell them you believe in their promise and cause. Expect a bunch of the money to be wasted but give it anyway and learn how to give effectively. For ideas, look at the grantees list of any foundation. Then ask those people who they know who are just starting out and trying to do a good job.
http://www.beldon.org/grants2000_07.htm l

When I was about thirteen, I got about seven books out of the library on money thinking I wanted to become a millionaire. Six told me how to get rich (start a business and run it well.) One of them asked me "why do you want to be rich?" That is the one whose name I remember and the ideas in it have changed my life. For advice on setting a direction of what to do with wealth, read the Book "The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips and Sally Raspberry, especially the chapter on how foundations fail in their mission and how grants go to people who sound good but usually can't deliver (i.e. how hard it is to give money away).
http://www.seeingmoney.com/SevenLaws.ht m
http://www.hallbusi nes ses.com/biographies_primers/1420.shtml

My wife and I are working on a few of these issues ourselves (and a few example links are to our stuff). We make money contracting and spend it to "buy" our own time for making quality software the market can't or doesn't seem to want to pay for. Even without IPO riches, any competent software developer can make $75K-100K in today's market. Graduate students can live on $20K a year, and so can many software developers (kids make it harder) if they follow the path of Voluntary Simplicity. It's a question of priorities.
http://www.life.ca/subject/simplicity .ht ml
http://www.simpleliving.net/slj/ http://www.scn.org/earth/lightly/ http://www.thegarden.net/simplicity/

Voluntary simplicity leaves a lot of funds for doing good deeds - even if they are done on your own time by using your own money to take time off and develop open source software or do other worthwhile ventures. Or take a job that doesn't pay as well but involves helping an organization that you believe in.
http://www.idealist.org/

There are awesome things happening over the next twenty to forty years. According to Moore's law, desktop computers in twenty or so years will be a million times faster than today's. Already computers can drive cars somewhat well and identify vegetable better than humans.

http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/magazine/199 9/number_3/machine399.html ;

Other breakthrough innovations are happening in technological areas like energy, materials, nanotechnology, communications, agriculture, biotechnology, and robotics. Use your wealth to think deeply about what all this means and do something to ensure human survival with style.

It is saddening to see people spend so much money on less important stuff (another night club in this case). Now if it was a night club where these issues are discussed, then maybe it makes sense.

Capitalism without charity is evil, because capitalism only meets the needs of people with money.

Cynthia put four person-years of work into this product (unpaid), which is released under the GPL. A year of that time was spent in a dark apartment in Des Moines, Iowa translating convoluted USDA soil science modeling equations from spaghetti Fortran to C++ and then Delphi. She then wrote an incredible help system and documentation, which serves as a major GPL'd reference work on soil science and agricultural modelling. Her persistance in finishing the project in the face of discouragement and isolation was awesome.

Because this software is in Delphi and is an end-user application, it hasn't really attracted much attention by the Open Source community. It has however been downloaded by thousands of people around the globe to learn more about how to grow food sustainably. Hopefully, if Borland/Inprise releases Delphi for Linux as planned, this software might become an important Linux application.

(Disclaimer: This award nomination is a bit self-serving since I put two person-years in on that project too, and Cynthia is my wife.)