Unfortunately utopian novels tend not to make very good novels. Compare Aldous Huxley's dystopian Brave New World to his later utopia, Island. Moral ambiguity is replaced by self-righteousness, the bitter irony of the "savage" who represents an alternative world-vision in BNW is replaced by the one-sided Theosophists who form the opposition in Island. And the soul-killing drug, "soma," is replaced by the enlightening "moksha medicine," without any very convincing explanation of what makes one drug better than another.
Or compare H.G. Wells's classic early works, starting with the speculative dystopia of The Time Machine, with his preachy late utopia, The Shape of Things to Come.
Or read some of the classic socialist utopias of the late nineteenth century, Morris's News From Nowhere or Bellamy's Looking Backward. No plot, no conflict, just the slow exposition of the author's vision for a new world, along with castigation of the stupidity or greed of those among the author's contemporaries who did not share his vision.
Books about the process of creating utopia tend to be somewhat better; I enjoyed Wells's In the Days of the Comet, and Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is something of a classic, describing the fight to create a libertarian society on the moon. But that class of books allows for direction and struggle in a way that pure utopian novels do not.
I've thought for a while that PDAs should have three- or four-button modified Morse code input systems built in: compact, faster than a stylus, easier to use than a tiny keyboard.
Chording keyboards make even more sense- stenographers have been using them for years, and typing at well over 200 wpm- but it takes some work to learn the system, and there isn't a simple "hunt and peck" way for beginners to get by until they learn it.
Of course, my Morse idea would take some learning if you didn't already know Morse.
And read Heinlein's "Year of the Jackpot" (1952)- fun story about a year when all kinds of vastly improbable things happen to come all at once: bizarre fads (compulsive nudism and lawn-watering), natural disasters, invading communists, the reemergence of Atlantis... Though the concept of "YotJ" is more that these things come in cycles, and this is the year all the cycles line up. Collected in "The Menace From Earth".
The size of the balloon would be far larger than the specs
Since a cubic foot helium gets you about.07 lbs of lift, a 30x30x30ft cube will lift nearly a ton- about 1860 lbs. Even if you make it a sphere of 30 ft diameter, and allow some weight for the skin and harness, you should have plenty of lift. If not, the spectacle of your immense blubbery bulk bouncing off the takeoff would surely get some style points from the judges.
Strap yourself to a miniature blimp, wear some fins for propulsion and steering- your distance would be limited only by the judges' patience, weight would difficult to measure- and unless they add the weight of displaced air to everyone else's total, they should count it as negative(your body weight).
Human powered Less than 30 ft wide Less than 450 lbs.-
There's a brief but well-informed reference to the glass harmonica in a short SF story by Bruce Sterling, We See Things Differently". Strange little story, about rock'n'roll and Islam, or something. Here's the passage:
Boston played a glass harmonica: an instrument invented by the early American genius Benjamin Franklin. The harmonica was made of carefully tuned glass disks, rotating on a spindle, and played by streaking a wet fingertip across each moving edge.
It was the sound of pure crystal, seemingly sourceless, of tooth-aching purity.
The famous Western musician, Wolfgang Mozart, had composed for the Franklin harmonica in the days of its novelty. But legend said that its players went mad, their nerves shredded by its clarity of sound. It was a legend Boston was careful to exploit. He played the machine sparingly, with the air of a magician, of a Solomon unbottling demons. I was glad of his spare use, for its sound was so beautiful that it stung the brain.
Jefferson Airplane guitarist Paul Kantner played some glass harmonica, on the 1983 Planet Earth Rock And Roll Orchestra album- a sort of washed-up hippie supergroup thing, with a bunch of Airplane/Grateful Dead/Quicksilver Messenger Service/Montrose members playing on it.
Haven't heard it, though the AMG calls it "a science fiction concept album about a commune/rock band eventually fleeing into outer space to escape right-wing oppression."
Feynman's "Plenty of Room at the Bottom" speech is deservedly famous, but the earliest discussion I can think of of the absolute limits of information storage is in Robert Heinlein's 1951 novel, Between Planets, where the Venerians' secret plans are encoded on a tiny "message wire," hidden in a ring. The human protagonist is surprised that so much can be stored in such a small object, and some passing comment is made about the possibilities of atomic information storage. I think.
And, for that matter, the tiny mechanical hands described in Feynman's speech are very much like the "waldoes" in Heinlein's story, "Waldo" (1942).
Gee I love this wonderful new free market economy we have that supposed to make everything fair and help the impovourished!
The real problem here is precisely the command economy that now exists in Zimbabwe, where what should be productive farmland is being "redistributed" by the government for the sake of racial politics.
I would defend free markets not primarily on the grounds that they are the "fair," but because they tend to make those operating within them better off. On the other hand, I think the pursuit of absolute fairness (what Thomas Sowell would call "cosmic justice") by means of government controls is likely to produce greater unfairness, along with increased resentment between segments of the society and a lowered standard of living all around. As, again, in Zimbabwe, where president Mugawe is confiscating white farmers' land to rectify the injustice done by their colonial ancestors.
I think it's worth pointing out that both the guys who did this are students at Middlebury College, where for several years now "Lego Robotics" has been offered as a J-term class.
During the one-month January semester, or "J-term," you take just one class. Some of the classes are frivolous, though physics or foreign language majors tend to have to take things in their fields. Anyway, Lego Robotics has been one of the more sought-after courses. Partly because of the inherent appeal of Lego robots, partly because it has a schedule that allows a lot of days to be devoted to skiing.
Very true. Here in Ohio our gasoline is all part ethanol, because it's hard for lawmakers to resist the pressure for farm subsidies.
2) [Ethanol] mostly uses corn as its source... What about hemp or some other crop that might require less insecticide, fertilizer, etc.
Producing ethanol requires sugars to ferment; corn is a very good cheap source of sugar. That's why so many foods are sweetened with corn syrup (that, and U.S. trade protectionism keeps cane sugar prices jacked up, again because of the power of agricultural lobbies). Hemp, despite its several uses, is useless as a sugar source. I can't think of any U.S. crop that would serve as well as corn. Sorghum, maybe.
Anyhow, ethanol doesn't make sense as a fuel source right now, but as easily retrieved petroleum becomes scarcer and oil prices go up I do expect ethanol to become important in the U.S., because we have no shortage of cropland and because it requires minimal changes to current internal combustion technology.
The battle to feed humanity is over. In the course of 1970s, the world will experience starvation of tragic proportions, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.
-Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 1968
There's a long history of vastly misguided prophets of doom by now- starting with Malthus, I guess, but the most revealing example is probably Paul Ehrlich, who's been writing books since the sixties (The Population Bomb, The Population Explosion, etc.) about how the world will be swamped by an exploding population and run out of resources, all in the (ever-postponed) near future. In the sixties he thought that we'd be starving in the seventies, and that Great Britain would no longer exist by the nineties. I don't know what he thinks now, but he's still writing along the same lines.
Ehrlich also famously made a bet with economist Julian Simon, in 1980, that five raw materials picked by Ehrlich would be more expensive (because they would be rarer, per capita) ten years later. In 1990 Ehrlich was wrong on every pick.
An awful lot of science fiction has been written along those lines, as well: Disch's 334, Harrison's Make Room, Make Room (filmed as Soylent Green). But in the real world, I'm not too worried. We may kill off all the black rhinos, white rhinos, sumatran rhinos.... And that would be unfortunate, but it would not constitute a threat to human survival.
Also, incidentally, shipping people to other planets is not likely to be an effective way of dealing with excess population. Can you imagine the amount of chemical fuel involved in lifting just the quarter-million people born every day away from the earth?
There's a radical idea. Getting paid for doing something. Rather than getting paid to do nothing.
The Beatles' last concert (aside from the rooftop thing) was in August 1966- would you claim that for the rest of their career, Sgt. Pepper's through Abbey Road, they "did nothing"?
More generally, discussions of how musicians will earn a living when it is no longer possible to charge much (if anything) for recorded music tend to assume that all artists worth considering work in something like a traditional rock band format: songwriter/performers whose music is easily reproduced live by a small group of musicians.
This ignores a lot of good music, from "I Am the Walrus" to Brian Eno to Squarepusher, that is either impossible or just not very entertaining to reproduce live. It also raises questions about how nonperforming songwriters/composers/producers will get paid.
Same thing- The thylacine was a marsupial predator with a roughly wolfish build and tiger-style stripes, so both "Tasmanian wolf" and "Tasmanian tiger" have been used as common names for the animal (which probably died out in the 20th century).
"Idolatry is worse than bloodshed"
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 1
For thirteen hundred years the Islamic faith has been one of peace, civilization and high culture. The Quran condemns the killing of the innocent. It condemns suicide in any form. It condemns the degredation of women.
True enough, Muslims have often proven more tolerant than Christians, and the Koran, like the Bible, says some admirable things. But, like the Bible, the Koran also says some fairly vicious things- "Idolatry is worse than bloodshed" is the one that sticks in my mind. Idolatry, from the perspective of Islam, includes all trinitarian forms of Christianity. Obviously we should not be blaming these particular attacks on Islam as a whole, but it is also unfair to say that "true" Islam is peaceful while the terrorists' faith is twisted-
each version is as philosophically (in)valid as the other, by the very fact of being founded on faith. In this case both facets of Islam are to some extent justified by scripture, as well.
They use things like religion and nationalistic pride to give credibility to their actions.
This seems unlikely. The fact that their beliefs are horrifying does not mean that they are not heartfelt. Are we to assume that apparent religious devotion is a mere facade being used to cover their true goal, dying in suicide attacks? Was apostolic Christianity just a cover for a bunch of crucifixion fetishists? And so on...
The title of the album is notThe Coup, the title is Party Music. The Coup is an excellent politically-minded hip-hop group from Oakland, led by vocal communist "Boots" Riley.
This is their fourth album, all of them have been fairly provocative in parts. The first album, for instance, was called Kill My Landlord; the third album includes a song in which Boots gives his reasons for pissing on George Washington's grave.
The coincidence of the exploding WTC cover on an album coming out this week is chilling as hell; as far as I can tell the album has already been pulled from amazon.com, but is still listed at amazon.co.uk.
I wonder if this will kill the album or make it famous.
Yes, read Drexler. The full text of Engines of Creation is at
http://www.foresight.org/EOC/index.html .
And read Stephenson's The Diamond Age, while you're at it, for a pretty good SF treatment of nanotech.
In approval voting, the only way I can support Browne over Gore (should I want to) is to vote only for Browne. In which case I am no longer helping Gore beat Bush. Or, if I think Gore and Bush are better than any other candidates by a long shot, I can approve both, but lose my power to choose between them.
So approval voting is problematic to begin with, and only looks worse when you realize different voters will adopt different strategies, some voting for all candidates they approve of, some only for their favorite.
Candidates will have to convince people not only to vote for them, but to refrain from also voting for their serious contenders.
That's not all bad, but instant runoff avoids those problems, and is much more reasonable than the Borda count, which assigns points in a way that is not scaled to voter preference, and allows the confusing possibility of voting against serious contenders and so unreasonably inflating minor candidates' point totals.
I think the flaws of approval voting and Borda count are pretty obvious, and attention to them will tend to hurt any possibility of changing the system, so I'm hoping instant runoff voting draws more attention soon.
But the recent Discover article leaves out the "instant runoff" voting system, pretty clearly superior to the approval voting and Borda count systems it praises.
Socialist candidate David McReydnolds explained it in the slashdot interview:
You would cast your ballot with, as one example, your top five choices. Let's suppose it was:
McReynolds #1
Nader #2
Gore #3
Bush #4
Hagelin #5
If Al Gore got enough #1 votes on the first count, he is the winner - end of story. But if on the first count no one gets a majority you take the lowest candidate (let's say it was me) and find out who my #2 choice was, so that is added to Nader's total. It is possible - not likely but possible - that Nader might be #2 on enough ballots that he would have a majority. But probably he wouldn't and you'd go on down the list, transferring Nader's "second choice" to the next candidate, etc.
This means that if you voted for a Socialist Party candidate you weren't helping elect Bush. Also means if you voted for the Libertarian candidate you wouldn't be helping elect Gore.
And in this election means that Nader would have received more votes, but Gore would have solidly won.
In the approximate words of Robert Heinlein, "A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore."
On art I tend to agree with the libertarians; if people want to support art let them form private associations that do so. Science, as rknop points out, can't be handled so well on that small scale, so government involvement is probably a good idea (plus it pays off in the tangible ways that art doesn't).
For example, if the government isn't fixing the roads, somebody has to do it. And somebody has to be paid to do it. That means some sort of sytem where people that want to use the roads have to kick in for repairs. This could be overseen by state and local governments, but I would like to see some sort of private model.
This is exactly the kind of thinking that keeps me away from the libertarian party- too many libertarians seem to think there is some magic property of "government" that makes it more undesirable and inefficient than groups of people organized in other, private systems. Sometimes it gets hard to even see what the differences would be between privately vs. government-run organisations, except that the government is at least in theory limited by the Constitution. This is especially true of the occasional libertarian suggestion that police duties be privatized.
But back to roads-
Imagine that you want to drive from Cleveland to Pittsburg, and there's no through road. To get there you have to find enough like-minded people to agree to jointly finance road construction and maintenance. But no one wants to put that kind of investment into roads that other people will drive for free- they'll wait for someone else to pay, if that's the only choice. Only small, tight communities could agree to build non-profit roads, and only small, tight, rich communities would bother with anything but dirt. So all major roads are for-profit, heavily tolled, built and administered by large road building businesses. And what maintains quality standards in for-profit ventures? Competition. But think some more, what does competition mean here? There has to be a serious threat of another company building a parallel road, following the same route. That takes a bold business plan, to say the least. And these companies have no eminent domain, they have to simply make good enough offers all down the line to buy the prospective road-land from its owners. Fair enough, no one is getting cheated that way- but what if it is cheaper for the company that already has the inferior road to just buy up enough land to make parallel roads impossible, or hopelessly inconvenient, than to fix their roads up? There's the triumph of free enterprise for you, I guess. Or you can get out of that in two ways- strict government regulation and intervention, in terms of road standards, anti-monopoly action, and so on- not exactly what most libertarians are hoping for- or by instituting some sort of national organisation with broad enough powers to give it practical control over roadbuilding. Like, say, a federal government.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately utopian novels tend not to make very good novels.
Compare Aldous Huxley's dystopian Brave New World to his later utopia, Island. Moral ambiguity is replaced by self-righteousness, the bitter irony of the "savage" who represents an alternative world-vision in BNW is replaced by the one-sided Theosophists who form the opposition in Island. And the soul-killing drug, "soma," is replaced by the enlightening "moksha medicine," without any very convincing explanation of what makes one drug better than another.
Or compare H.G. Wells's classic early works, starting with the speculative dystopia of The Time Machine, with his preachy late utopia, The Shape of Things to Come.
Or read some of the classic socialist utopias of the late nineteenth century, Morris's News From Nowhere or Bellamy's Looking Backward. No plot, no conflict, just the slow exposition of the author's vision for a new world, along with castigation of the stupidity or greed of those among the author's contemporaries who did not share his vision.
Books about the process of creating utopia tend to be somewhat better; I enjoyed Wells's In the Days of the Comet, and Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is something of a classic, describing the fight to create a libertarian society on the moon. But that class of books allows for direction and struggle in a way that pure utopian novels do not.
I've thought for a while that PDAs should have three- or four-button modified Morse code input systems built in: compact, faster than a stylus, easier to use than a tiny keyboard.
Chording keyboards make even more sense- stenographers have been using them for years, and typing at well over 200 wpm- but it takes some work to learn the system, and there isn't a simple "hunt and peck" way for beginners to get by until they learn it.
Of course, my Morse idea would take some learning if you didn't already know Morse.
And read Heinlein's "Year of the Jackpot" (1952)- fun story about a year when all kinds of vastly improbable things happen to come all at once: bizarre fads (compulsive nudism and lawn-watering), natural disasters, invading communists, the reemergence of Atlantis...
Though the concept of "YotJ" is more that these things come in cycles, and this is the year all the cycles line up.
Collected in "The Menace From Earth".
The size of the balloon would be far larger than the specs
.07 lbs of lift, a 30x30x30ft cube will lift nearly a ton- about 1860 lbs.
Since a cubic foot helium gets you about
Even if you make it a sphere of 30 ft diameter, and allow some weight for the skin and harness, you should have plenty of lift. If not, the spectacle of your immense blubbery bulk bouncing off the takeoff would surely get some style points from the judges.
Lighter-than-air would seem to be the way to go.
Strap yourself to a miniature blimp, wear some fins for propulsion and steering- your distance would be limited only by the judges' patience, weight would difficult to measure- and unless they add the weight of displaced air to everyone else's total, they should count it as negative(your body weight).
Human powered
Less than 30 ft wide
Less than 450 lbs.-
seems to fit all the rules.
There's a brief but well-informed reference to the glass harmonica in a short SF story by Bruce Sterling, We See Things Differently". Strange little story, about rock'n'roll and Islam, or something.
Here's the passage:
Boston played a glass harmonica: an instrument invented by the early American genius Benjamin Franklin. The harmonica was made of carefully tuned glass disks, rotating on a spindle, and played by streaking a wet fingertip across each moving edge.
It was the sound of pure crystal, seemingly sourceless, of tooth-aching purity.
The famous Western musician, Wolfgang Mozart, had composed for the Franklin harmonica in the days of its novelty. But legend said that its players went mad, their nerves shredded by its clarity of sound. It was a legend Boston was careful to exploit. He played the machine sparingly, with the air of a magician, of a Solomon unbottling demons. I was glad of his spare use, for its sound was so beautiful that it stung the brain.
Jefferson Airplane guitarist Paul Kantner played some glass harmonica, on the 1983 Planet Earth Rock And Roll Orchestra album- a sort of washed-up hippie supergroup thing, with a bunch of Airplane/Grateful Dead/Quicksilver Messenger Service/Montrose members playing on it.
Haven't heard it, though the AMG calls it "a science fiction concept album about a commune/rock band eventually fleeing into outer space to escape right-wing oppression."
Feynman's "Plenty of Room at the Bottom" speech is deservedly famous, but the earliest discussion I can think of of the absolute limits of information storage is in Robert Heinlein's 1951 novel, Between Planets , where the Venerians' secret plans are encoded on a tiny "message wire," hidden in a ring. The human protagonist is surprised that so much can be stored in such a small object, and some passing comment is made about the possibilities of atomic information storage. I think.
And, for that matter, the tiny mechanical hands described in Feynman's speech are very much like the "waldoes" in Heinlein's story, "Waldo" (1942).
Gee I love this wonderful new free market economy we have that supposed to make everything fair and help the impovourished!
The real problem here is precisely the command economy that now exists in Zimbabwe, where what should be productive farmland is being "redistributed" by the government for the sake of racial politics.
I would defend free markets not primarily on the grounds that they are the "fair," but because they tend to make those operating within them better off. On the other hand, I think the pursuit of absolute fairness (what Thomas Sowell would call "cosmic justice") by means of government controls is likely to produce greater unfairness, along with increased resentment between segments of the society and a lowered standard of living all around. As, again, in Zimbabwe, where president Mugawe is confiscating white farmers' land to rectify the injustice done by their colonial ancestors.
I think it's worth pointing out that both the guys who did this are students at Middlebury College, where for several years now "Lego Robotics" has been offered as a J-term class.
During the one-month January semester, or "J-term," you take just one class. Some of the classes are frivolous, though physics or foreign language majors tend to have to take things in their fields. Anyway, Lego Robotics has been one of the more sought-after courses. Partly because of the inherent appeal of Lego robots, partly because it has a schedule that allows a lot of days to be devoted to skiing.
1) [Ethanol is] a false economy.
Very true. Here in Ohio our gasoline is all part ethanol, because it's hard for lawmakers to resist the pressure for farm subsidies.
2) [Ethanol] mostly uses corn as its source... What about hemp or some other crop that might require less insecticide, fertilizer, etc.
Producing ethanol requires sugars to ferment; corn is a very good cheap source of sugar. That's why so many foods are sweetened with corn syrup (that, and U.S. trade protectionism keeps cane sugar prices jacked up, again because of the power of agricultural lobbies).
Hemp, despite its several uses, is useless as a sugar source. I can't think of any U.S. crop that would serve as well as corn. Sorghum, maybe.
Anyhow, ethanol doesn't make sense as a fuel source right now, but as easily retrieved petroleum becomes scarcer and oil prices go up I do expect ethanol to become important in the U.S., because we have no shortage of cropland and because it requires minimal changes to current internal combustion technology.
The battle to feed humanity is over. In the course of 1970s, the world will experience starvation of tragic proportions, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.
-Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 1968
There's a long history of vastly misguided prophets of doom by now- starting with Malthus, I guess, but the most revealing example is probably Paul Ehrlich, who's been writing books since the sixties (The Population Bomb, The Population Explosion, etc.) about how the world will be swamped by an exploding population and run out of resources, all in the (ever-postponed) near future. In the sixties he thought that we'd be starving in the seventies, and that Great Britain would no longer exist by the nineties. I don't know what he thinks now, but he's still writing along the same lines.
Ehrlich also famously made a bet with economist Julian Simon, in 1980, that five raw materials picked by Ehrlich would be more expensive (because they would be rarer, per capita) ten years later. In 1990 Ehrlich was wrong on every pick.
An awful lot of science fiction has been written along those lines, as well: Disch's 334, Harrison's Make Room, Make Room (filmed as Soylent Green). But in the real world, I'm not too worried. We may kill off all the black rhinos, white rhinos, sumatran rhinos.... And that would be unfortunate, but it would not constitute a threat to human survival.
Also, incidentally, shipping people to other planets is not likely to be an effective way of dealing with excess population. Can you imagine the amount of chemical fuel involved in lifting just the quarter-million people born every day away from the earth?
A great bassist, yes, but this isn't news for nerds. If Geddy Lee died, that would be news for nerds.
Or Chris Squire, Greg Lake, John Wetton, maybe.
>>...performers must play to get paid.
There's a radical idea. Getting paid for doing something. Rather than getting paid to do nothing.
The Beatles' last concert (aside from the rooftop thing) was in August 1966- would you claim that for the rest of their career, Sgt. Pepper's through Abbey Road, they "did nothing"?
More generally, discussions of how musicians will earn a living when it is no longer possible to charge much (if anything) for recorded music tend to assume that all artists worth considering work in something like a traditional rock band format: songwriter/performers whose music is easily reproduced live by a small group of musicians.
This ignores a lot of good music, from "I Am the Walrus" to Brian Eno to Squarepusher, that is either impossible or just not very entertaining to reproduce live. It also raises questions about how nonperforming songwriters/composers/producers will get paid.
Same thing- The thylacine was a marsupial predator with a roughly wolfish build and tiger-style stripes, so both "Tasmanian wolf" and "Tasmanian tiger" have been used as common names for the animal (which probably died out in the 20th century).
For thirteen hundred years the Islamic faith has been one of peace, civilization and high culture. The Quran condemns the killing of the innocent. It condemns suicide in any form. It condemns the degredation of women.
True enough, Muslims have often proven more tolerant than Christians, and the Koran, like the Bible, says some admirable things. But, like the Bible, the Koran also says some fairly vicious things- "Idolatry is worse than bloodshed" is the one that sticks in my mind. Idolatry, from the perspective of Islam, includes all trinitarian forms of Christianity. Obviously we should not be blaming these particular attacks on Islam as a whole, but it is also unfair to say that "true" Islam is peaceful while the terrorists' faith is twisted-
each version is as philosophically (in)valid as the other, by the very fact of being founded on faith. In this case both facets of Islam are to some extent justified by scripture, as well.
They use things like religion and nationalistic pride to give credibility to their actions.
This seems unlikely. The fact that their beliefs are horrifying does not mean that they are not heartfelt. Are we to assume that apparent religious devotion is a mere facade being used to cover their true goal, dying in suicide attacks? Was apostolic Christianity just a cover for a bunch of crucifixion fetishists? And so on...
The title of the album is not The Coup, the title is Party Music. The Coup is an excellent politically-minded hip-hop group from Oakland, led by vocal communist "Boots" Riley.
This is their fourth album, all of them have been fairly provocative in parts. The first album, for instance, was called Kill My Landlord; the third album includes a song in which Boots gives his reasons for pissing on George Washington's grave.
The coincidence of the exploding WTC cover on an album coming out this week is chilling as hell; as far as I can tell the album has already been pulled from amazon.com, but is still listed at amazon.co.uk.
I wonder if this will kill the album or make it famous.
Yes, read Drexler. The full text of Engines of Creation is at http://www.foresight.org/EOC/index.html .
And read Stephenson's The Diamond Age, while you're at it, for a pretty good SF treatment of nanotech.
So approval voting is problematic to begin with, and only looks worse when you realize different voters will adopt different strategies, some voting for all candidates they approve of, some only for their favorite.
Candidates will have to convince people not only to vote for them, but to refrain from also voting for their serious contenders.
That's not all bad, but instant runoff avoids those problems, and is much more reasonable than the Borda count, which assigns points in a way that is not scaled to voter preference, and allows the confusing possibility of voting against serious contenders and so unreasonably inflating minor candidates' point totals.
I think the flaws of approval voting and Borda count are pretty obvious, and attention to them will tend to hurt any possibility of changing the system, so I'm hoping instant runoff voting draws more attention soon.
Socialist candidate David McReydnolds explained it in the slashdot interview:
You would cast your ballot with, as one example, your top five choices. Let's suppose it was:
McReynolds #1 Nader #2 Gore #3 Bush #4 Hagelin #5
If Al Gore got enough #1 votes on the first count, he is the winner - end of story. But if on the first count no one gets a majority you take the lowest candidate (let's say it was me) and find out who my #2 choice was, so that is added to Nader's total. It is possible - not likely but possible - that Nader might be #2 on enough ballots that he would have a majority. But probably he wouldn't and you'd go on down the list, transferring Nader's "second choice" to the next candidate, etc.
This means that if you voted for a Socialist Party candidate you weren't helping elect Bush. Also means if you voted for the Libertarian candidate you wouldn't be helping elect Gore.
And in this election means that Nader would have received more votes, but Gore would have solidly won.
In the approximate words of Robert Heinlein, "A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore."
On art I tend to agree with the libertarians; if people want to support art let them form private associations that do so. Science, as rknop points out, can't be handled so well on that small scale, so government involvement is probably a good idea (plus it pays off in the tangible ways that art doesn't).
For example, if the government isn't fixing the roads, somebody has to do it. And somebody has to be paid to do it. That means some sort of sytem where people that want to use the roads have to kick in for repairs. This could be overseen by state and local governments, but I would like to see some sort of private model. This is exactly the kind of thinking that keeps me away from the libertarian party- too many libertarians seem to think there is some magic property of "government" that makes it more undesirable and inefficient than groups of people organized in other, private systems. Sometimes it gets hard to even see what the differences would be between privately vs. government-run organisations, except that the government is at least in theory limited by the Constitution. This is especially true of the occasional libertarian suggestion that police duties be privatized. But back to roads- Imagine that you want to drive from Cleveland to Pittsburg, and there's no through road. To get there you have to find enough like-minded people to agree to jointly finance road construction and maintenance. But no one wants to put that kind of investment into roads that other people will drive for free- they'll wait for someone else to pay, if that's the only choice. Only small, tight communities could agree to build non-profit roads, and only small, tight, rich communities would bother with anything but dirt. So all major roads are for-profit, heavily tolled, built and administered by large road building businesses. And what maintains quality standards in for-profit ventures? Competition. But think some more, what does competition mean here? There has to be a serious threat of another company building a parallel road, following the same route. That takes a bold business plan, to say the least. And these companies have no eminent domain, they have to simply make good enough offers all down the line to buy the prospective road-land from its owners. Fair enough, no one is getting cheated that way- but what if it is cheaper for the company that already has the inferior road to just buy up enough land to make parallel roads impossible, or hopelessly inconvenient, than to fix their roads up? There's the triumph of free enterprise for you, I guess. Or you can get out of that in two ways- strict government regulation and intervention, in terms of road standards, anti-monopoly action, and so on- not exactly what most libertarians are hoping for- or by instituting some sort of national organisation with broad enough powers to give it practical control over roadbuilding. Like, say, a federal government.