With the introduction of "lock-in" as a concept it is recognized that while markets will find optimal solutions they can become "stuck" with sub-optimal ones for a while. The time-scales are what matter, a market may view a few decades as a blip while to you and I that is quite a while.
"But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again." -- John Maynard Keynes, _A Tract on Monetary Reform_, 1923.
On the contrary, this guy has been working on the Lifestream concept for a while, and while I agree 'cybersphere' is a rather meh name for the concept, I think he's onto something very important. Lifestreams are at the heart of blogs, Facebook and Twitter; these infrastructures aren't really doing it very well, which is why we need a new one.
If I choose not to invest my time in automotive research, should I have the government come down and force the largest automobile manufacturer to hand out a 'these are your automotive options' because I am unwilling to do the research?
Ooh, a car analogy! Let me play!
If every car had incompatible steering wheels, engines you weren't allowed to look at or touch, took different manufacturer-specific brands of petrol, and the largest one came free (and was in fact mandatory - you couldn't get from the kitchen to the bathroom without using the car) with every house bought from the #1 house manufacturer, and came with a special set of patented wheels which could also drive down a special railway line owned by the same company, which was actively lobbying shopping malls to install these special lines (and was also a large real estate developer and the owner of the #2 or #3 shopping mall complex)... and no other car could use those patented wheels or lines... and people buying houses were for the most part unaware that they could get for free another car which came with ordinary wheels...
Oh, and meanwhile, roving Mafia gangs are stealing cars while they're driving, which happens especially on those 'special' lines because they're built very shoddily, and hijack those cars to smash into banks and steal cash, and the only way to stop this is to visit the manufacturer every month and have them bolt mysterious black boxes into the engine, which you can't look at, and sometimes make your car only drive to certain shopping malls, but people still get their cars hijacked to rob banks all the time regardless...
Yes, if something like that were to happen I'd expect there might be some backlash from an 'open wheels not private rails!'' movement and government might be convinced to step in and at least make that car company give out a free pamphlet... if not even a slap on the wrist with a damp celery, though that might be going a bit far.
Being signatory to a dodgy, borderline-illegal, patent protection racket which offended anyone who understood the GPL certainly was one way to differentiate their Linux product from all the rest, yes.
Except that Windows (and IE) are not a monopoly. Are they the largest player? Yes, but there are alternatives (for those who really care, there's Linux), for everyone else there's Apple.
For what software?
Remember, there now exist lots of essential line-of-business applications which simply do not have a non-Windows port.
'Run OSX' is not much of an answer if your factory runs CustomWidgetMaker0.3 written in Delphi, QuickBasic, DOS batch scripting and Excel macros.
You mean, like, including fossil fuels, right, because they pull in tons of subsidies?
But they shouldn't be subsidized. That's just wasteful pork-barrel corruption.
Wasteful? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. There are more things at stake than mere money. Here's my (admittedly uninformed) take on it:
The thing is, in a fossil-fuel dependent economy, fossil fuels are a hugely important strategic military resource. Remember WW2? The war that was largely powered by oil? Ever wonder what happened to, say, the Germans when they invaded Russia and then found their supply lines cut off?
Yeah, it turns out having a modern mechanised oil-burning military and then losing access to oil is kind of a bummer. Same with rubber, coal, or any other big-metal strategic resource.
Conversely, it makes good strategic doctrine to deny your enemy access to the big metal if you don't want the big metal stomping on you. Conversely conversely, it makes good strategic doctrine for him to attempt to deny access for you to the stuff that runs your big metal. Conversely conversely conversely, you're well aware of this and will attempt to stop him stopping your big metal.
The markets will sort it out you say? Heh, sure. The markets that your geostrategic rival is actively attempting to game and control and when necessary, invade? And you're doing the same to him? Yes, those markets, sure, they'll magically make you safe.
No, you make darn sure to take your core big-metal strategic assets, the ones that run your must-have metal toys of doom, off the market grid and safely out of the way of the Red Team gaming them.
So: subsidies of the big industries. Oil, steel, nukes. Agriculture, too, because no food, population starve, you
Things got a bit weird in the 1980s, but the basics remain. Talk free markets, but protect your strategic assets or die in the next war. Because markets are fine when there's no war on (hot or cold), but when serious guys with big metal are facing you down, you don't want to suddenly find that all your taps are switched off, profit or no profit.
Seriously, is this hard to grasp for IT admins? Think of it in these terms:
Is taking tape backups and having hot-redundant server clusters 'wasteful'? Or is it good contingency planning?
That said, oil depletion seems to be a big problem, big military doesn't necessarily help, and even the military guys are often fighting the 'last war' rather than the next. And subsidies can be used as a weapon of peacetime economic war, and as a non-US citizen, after Dubya I don't trust the USA to do the right thing anymore, ever really. But the reason for big subsidies seems plain to me: sensible protection.
The trick is how to achieve protection of food and energy for everyone, rather than profit or system-gaming for a few.
Subsidization is handing out money for nothing to non-profitable enterprises
Sure. The reason why we do this is that profit is a ridiculously poor measure of real value.
Profit measures the excess of perceived value over real cost, which is actually a measure of how good a company is at cheating its customers by obfuscating the true cost and true value of things. In energy-conversion terms, it's a measure of how much energy has been extracted from a system by a transaction - in other words, how inefficient an energy conversion process is. For a society, attempting to maximise this value is literally madness - like trying to accelerate by measuring how hot your brakes are.
The wheels are really smoking! Look at all that rubber we're laying! We must be going really fast!
No, you've succeeded in creating energy-transformation systems which are very efficient at extracting working energy and buying power from a lot of people and directing it to producing goods and services that satisfy the whims of a few.
Okay, one generalisation there. Actually even the costs aren't real; they don't account for human misery or ecological devastation caused by cheap shirts made in China or palm oil from Indonesia.
On top of that, we then confuse the nature of money by randomly rescaling its value via investments, hedge funds, currency raids, until 'money' just becomes a self-referential phenomenon even disassociated with 'objective production of material goods and services', which itself is disassociated from 'the ongoing health and happiness of the human community and the wider ecosystem'.
This is gibbering madness, so attempting to drive society by these numbers is black comedy bordering on absurdist horror.
So that's why we have government intervention, to try to inject some non-financial (ie, non-insane) considerations into a mostly insane system. Not very efficiently, granted, but at least it's something between us and the black pit of doom.
But that's not good enough for the pro-business types, who want us to drive as fast as possible into that shining, shining, glorious black pit which sings to us so beautifully.
I don't belive we'll ever be able to get back a US where there isn't government subsidies in everything.
Sure you can, if you want to. Blow up Washington, blow up every state capitol, blow up every city hall, hand out a gun and a 300 ml water bottle to everyone and watch productivity soar.
I think perhaps what you meant is '... get back a US which still provides all the coordinated complex infrastructure I've come to love from the 20th century, but magically provides this from a bunch of violent self-seeking individuals all trying to step over each other to the top'.
And what's just plain coolest. Me, I'll be investing in Hamster Conversion Kit manufacturers.
Re:Reminds me of broadband internet in the beginni
on
Gas Wants To Kill the Wind
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Yes $7 billion dollars.
So... only the cost of about 3 stealth bombers, then?
And you guys bought how many of those? How are they doing in Afghanistan, by the way?
Re:Reminds me of broadband internet in the beginni
on
Gas Wants To Kill the Wind
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
Wind is free. If what you want is to have your hair ruffled, you pay nothing.
If, on the other hand, you want to build an energy grid based on wind power, it costs far more than you might imagine.
[han-solo] I dunno, I can imagine quite a bit [/han-solo]
Obviously switching to a wind-based infrastructure from the current dead-end fossil-based infraastructure is expensive, yes. But that's a one-time expense, like a fiber buildout, and yields functioning hardware (capital) at the end of it; so it's an investment.
Once the wind system is built, then you're talking marginal gains, rising as the price of oil and gas rises due to their increasing rarity. So there's an initial steep cost for wind, followed by a gradually increasing upside with no upper limit (or rather, a flat operating expense curve while oil/gas soars sky-high.
This is why we have national-level and global-level coordinating groups, whether you call them 'standards bodies', 'industry consortia', central banks', 'governments', or the likes. So that someone has the ability and foresight to say 'look, we need to do this very expensive thing now which will save our butts hugely later'.
You simply can't do everything on the margin with only the next quarter's profits in sight. Sooner or later, someone with some long-term vision needs to front up with a plan. Ideally, this would be a democratic government which, after reasoned debate and input from all the people, achieves consensus and does the rational thing and everyone's happy.
I don't understand what part of of 'one day oil/gas will run out and we'll all die horribly, while wind'll still be there and we get to live' is so terribly difficult for world-class business executives to grasp. Aren't they paid millions of dollars a year and go to forums like Davos to think strategically just like this? If an ordinary guy like me can see this, why can't our unelected lords and masters?
Should the government keep subsidizing wind and the infrastructure.
Quite obviously, yes.
That wasn't the answer you were expecting?
Whatever is a national government for except to coordinate decisions about investment at the national level, of which infrastructure is the prime example?
It's rational and foreseeable that gas will run out, as will oil, and that value of any investment capital poured into it will plummet to zero, while wind won't. It is irrational to make any long-term plans on the long-term existence of a finite resource.
But evidently, the marketplace is NOT choosing the rational, foreseeable outcome; it is acting irrationally. That's fine, we know this happens in game theory. Sometimes lots of independent rational actors acting separately produce irrational outcomes; that's basic Prisoner's Dilemma 101.
That's exactly why we have such an entity as 'government': to solve the coordination problem.
I seem to remember in the 1980s one of the buzzwords of the Coming Microcomputer Revolution was going to be 'telecommuting'. Live in Missouri, telnet into the New York office mainframe, work in your shirtsleeves.
Seems like it's starting to happen, but it's slow and you miss out on the water cooler conversations and therefore promotions. Is telecommuting ever going to happen for real?
If we can't verify the behaviour of the software components we're busy assembling into bigger and bigger systems, doesn't that mean that we're doing sort of the architectural equivalent of making the Burj Dubai out of fog?
It's a wonder the whole Internet hasn't completely collapsed by now, instead of only partially rotting into botnets.
If it will take 100 years to verify every possible code path and input, and the system is needed sometime in the next 50 years, forget it.
And if the system is also needed to not just 'sometimes sorta work' but also not ever go berserk and kill everyone? Well too bad, because we need a giant death robot NOW and if the giant death robot kills everyone that's just acceptable risk.
Or perhaps there are some classes of systems which, if it's impractical to verify that they won't kill everyone, maybe we shouldn't build them at all.
The weirdness of logic and maths certainly is a large part of Alice, though I doubt it's all of it. But it's fairly obvious to me, just as a geek with a bit of general knowledge, that the Alice books parody a number of things from late-Victorian era politics and education. It's also about puns, wordplay, and the strict application of logic beyond the domains where it applies; and just general nerdy amusement.
* The organising principle of 'Wonderland' is the card game * The 'Caucus-race' obviously a satire on politics: the members run in a circle, accomplishing nothing except a lot of hot air. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/caucus_race
I couldn't speak for certain about whether the Mad Hatter's party and the stuckness of Time really is a reference to Hamilton's quaternions, but quaternions are fascinating and they did introduce the idea of a 4D space-time continuum (and therefore time travel) half a century before Einstein/Minkowski, and scandalised and baffled the maths world, so it wouldn't surprise me if that was in the background.
* The organising principle of 'Looking Glass' is the chess game * Anglo-Saxon literature (possibly Beowulf?) appears in Looking Glass - 'Jabberwocky' is a parody of the Beowulfian sort of epic, with the hero slaying the monster and lots of untranslated words * The March Hare and Mad Hatter reappear as 'Anglo-Saxons' Haigha and Hatta. Again, this is the sort of stuff that educated children would have been expected to know as a matter of course, along with Latin and Greek and art ('Laughing and Grief; reeling, writhing and fainting in coils')
* The White Knight's speech ('the name of the song is called...') parses out the fine but very important distinction between objects and names, which becomes a major issue in logic (and more so in computer programming):
The name of the song is called 'Haddocks' Eyes.'"
"Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested.
"No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. "That's what the name is called. The name really is 'The Aged, Aged Man.'"
"Then I ought to have said 'That's what the song is called'?" Alice corrected herself.
"No you oughtn't: that's another thing. The song is called 'Ways and Means' but that's only what it's called, you know!"
"Well, what is the song then?" said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.
"I was coming to that," the Knight said. "The song really is 'A-sitting On a Gate': and the tune's my own invention."
Like Terry Pratchett (and Bram Stoker - see Dracula Blogged), Alice really needs a decent annotated edition to explain the obvious cultural and scientific references, since it is densely packed with references which might now be misunderstood, and so many weird conspiracy theories have arisen around the books.
The classic example of Dodgson's geeky humour is from 'Four Riddles':
Yet what are all such gaieties to me Whose thoughts are full of indices and surds?
x*x + 7x + 53 = 11/3
It doesn't just rhyme and form part of an overall story - it's an equation to be solved, which gives you a word, from which you can take the first and last letters and which give you a crossword/acrostic clue. Beat THAT for geek cred.
Here's a solution, don't patronize any site that uses those types of advertisements.
Ah, another popunder site! How quaint. Frankly the font choice of Comic Sans, though an amusing display of off-off-off-Google metatextual awareness, is a little pedestrian and the rollovers lack a certain... finesse, and really, flashing purple highlights in 2010? It's like they've never even seen the Apple spring collections! refreshingly naive, but at least the web designer is out there getting experience, and that's what really matters for young things today. I look forward to seeing future productions from this studio in twenty years' time.
Slashdot Mirror
mmm, and does Windows 95 R2 count as a separate version?
Don't forget Windows 3.1, which came out shortly before 3.11 added network support.
With the introduction of "lock-in" as a concept it is recognized that while markets will find optimal solutions they can become "stuck" with sub-optimal ones for a while. The time-scales are what matter, a market may view a few decades as a blip while to you and I that is quite a while.
"But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again." -- John Maynard Keynes, _A Tract on Monetary Reform_, 1923.
Excerpt from http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Econ_Articles/Reviews/monetaryreform.html , because I can't find an etext online (pretty strange since you'd think it'd be out of copyright now).\\
On the contrary, this guy has been working on the Lifestream concept for a while, and while I agree 'cybersphere' is a rather meh name for the concept, I think he's onto something very important. Lifestreams are at the heart of blogs, Facebook and Twitter; these infrastructures aren't really doing it very well, which is why we need a new one.
Especially not in a laptop.
If I choose not to invest my time in automotive research, should I have the government come down and force the largest automobile manufacturer to hand out a 'these are your automotive options' because I am unwilling to do the research?
Ooh, a car analogy! Let me play!
If every car had incompatible steering wheels, engines you weren't allowed to look at or touch, took different manufacturer-specific brands of petrol, and the largest one came free (and was in fact mandatory - you couldn't get from the kitchen to the bathroom without using the car) with every house bought from the #1 house manufacturer, and came with a special set of patented wheels which could also drive down a special railway line owned by the same company, which was actively lobbying shopping malls to install these special lines (and was also a large real estate developer and the owner of the #2 or #3 shopping mall complex)... and no other car could use those patented wheels or lines... and people buying houses were for the most part unaware that they could get for free another car which came with ordinary wheels...
Oh, and meanwhile, roving Mafia gangs are stealing cars while they're driving, which happens especially on those 'special' lines because they're built very shoddily, and hijack those cars to smash into banks and steal cash, and the only way to stop this is to visit the manufacturer every month and have them bolt mysterious black boxes into the engine, which you can't look at, and sometimes make your car only drive to certain shopping malls, but people still get their cars hijacked to rob banks all the time regardless...
Yes, if something like that were to happen I'd expect there might be some backlash from an 'open wheels not private rails!'' movement and government might be convinced to step in and at least make that car company give out a free pamphlet... if not even a slap on the wrist with a damp celery, though that might be going a bit far.
Being signatory to a dodgy, borderline-illegal, patent protection racket which offended anyone who understood the GPL certainly was one way to differentiate their Linux product from all the rest, yes.
Except that Windows (and IE) are not a monopoly. Are they the largest player? Yes, but there are alternatives (for those who really care, there's Linux), for everyone else there's Apple.
For what software?
Remember, there now exist lots of essential line-of-business applications which simply do not have a non-Windows port.
'Run OSX' is not much of an answer if your factory runs CustomWidgetMaker0.3 written in Delphi, QuickBasic, DOS batch scripting and Excel macros.
But they shouldn't be subsidized. That's just wasteful pork-barrel corruption.
Wasteful? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. There are more things at stake than mere money. Here's my (admittedly uninformed) take on it:
The thing is, in a fossil-fuel dependent economy, fossil fuels are a hugely important strategic military resource. Remember WW2? The war that was largely powered by oil? Ever wonder what happened to, say, the Germans when they invaded Russia and then found their supply lines cut off?
Yeah, it turns out having a modern mechanised oil-burning military and then losing access to oil is kind of a bummer. Same with rubber, coal, or any other big-metal strategic resource.
Conversely, it makes good strategic doctrine to deny your enemy access to the big metal if you don't want the big metal stomping on you. Conversely conversely, it makes good strategic doctrine for him to attempt to deny access for you to the stuff that runs your big metal. Conversely conversely conversely, you're well aware of this and will attempt to stop him stopping your big metal.
The markets will sort it out you say? Heh, sure. The markets that your geostrategic rival is actively attempting to game and control and when necessary, invade? And you're doing the same to him? Yes, those markets, sure, they'll magically make you safe.
No, you make darn sure to take your core big-metal strategic assets, the ones that run your must-have metal toys of doom, off the market grid and safely out of the way of the Red Team gaming them.
So: subsidies of the big industries. Oil, steel, nukes. Agriculture, too, because no food, population starve, you
Things got a bit weird in the 1980s, but the basics remain. Talk free markets, but protect your strategic assets or die in the next war. Because markets are fine when there's no war on (hot or cold), but when serious guys with big metal are facing you down, you don't want to suddenly find that all your taps are switched off, profit or no profit.
Seriously, is this hard to grasp for IT admins? Think of it in these terms:
Is taking tape backups and having hot-redundant server clusters 'wasteful'? Or is it good contingency planning?
That said, oil depletion seems to be a big problem, big military doesn't necessarily help, and even the military guys are often fighting the 'last war' rather than the next. And subsidies can be used as a weapon of peacetime economic war, and as a non-US citizen, after Dubya I don't trust the USA to do the right thing anymore, ever really. But the reason for big subsidies seems plain to me: sensible protection.
The trick is how to achieve protection of food and energy for everyone, rather than profit or system-gaming for a few.
Subsidization is handing out money for nothing to non-profitable enterprises
Sure. The reason why we do this is that profit is a ridiculously poor measure of real value.
Profit measures the excess of perceived value over real cost, which is actually a measure of how good a company is at cheating its customers by obfuscating the true cost and true value of things. In energy-conversion terms, it's a measure of how much energy has been extracted from a system by a transaction - in other words, how inefficient an energy conversion process is. For a society, attempting to maximise this value is literally madness - like trying to accelerate by measuring how hot your brakes are.
The wheels are really smoking! Look at all that rubber we're laying! We must be going really fast!
No, you've succeeded in creating energy-transformation systems which are very efficient at extracting working energy and buying power from a lot of people and directing it to producing goods and services that satisfy the whims of a few.
Okay, one generalisation there. Actually even the costs aren't real; they don't account for human misery or ecological devastation caused by cheap shirts made in China or palm oil from Indonesia.
On top of that, we then confuse the nature of money by randomly rescaling its value via investments, hedge funds, currency raids, until 'money' just becomes a self-referential phenomenon even disassociated with 'objective production of material goods and services', which itself is disassociated from 'the ongoing health and happiness of the human community and the wider ecosystem'.
This is gibbering madness, so attempting to drive society by these numbers is black comedy bordering on absurdist horror.
So that's why we have government intervention, to try to inject some non-financial (ie, non-insane) considerations into a mostly insane system. Not very efficiently, granted, but at least it's something between us and the black pit of doom.
But that's not good enough for the pro-business types, who want us to drive as fast as possible into that shining, shining, glorious black pit which sings to us so beautifully.
I don't belive we'll ever be able to get back a US where there isn't government subsidies in everything.
Sure you can, if you want to. Blow up Washington, blow up every state capitol, blow up every city hall, hand out a gun and a 300 ml water bottle to everyone and watch productivity soar.
I think perhaps what you meant is '... get back a US which still provides all the coordinated complex infrastructure I've come to love from the 20th century, but magically provides this from a bunch of violent self-seeking individuals all trying to step over each other to the top'.
Last I checked natural gas came out of the same place oil does, and was slurped up by the same people.
So 'not about the oil industry' in the sense of 'exactly about the oil industry'.
And what's just plain coolest. Me, I'll be investing in Hamster Conversion Kit manufacturers.
Yes $7 billion dollars.
So... only the cost of about 3 stealth bombers, then?
And you guys bought how many of those? How are they doing in Afghanistan, by the way?
Wind is free. If what you want is to have your hair ruffled, you pay nothing.
If, on the other hand, you want to build an energy grid based on wind power, it costs far more than you might imagine.
[han-solo] I dunno, I can imagine quite a bit [/han-solo]
Obviously switching to a wind-based infrastructure from the current dead-end fossil-based infraastructure is expensive, yes. But that's a one-time expense, like a fiber buildout, and yields functioning hardware (capital) at the end of it; so it's an investment.
Once the wind system is built, then you're talking marginal gains, rising as the price of oil and gas rises due to their increasing rarity. So there's an initial steep cost for wind, followed by a gradually increasing upside with no upper limit (or rather, a flat operating expense curve while oil/gas soars sky-high.
This is why we have national-level and global-level coordinating groups, whether you call them 'standards bodies', 'industry consortia', central banks', 'governments', or the likes. So that someone has the ability and foresight to say 'look, we need to do this very expensive thing now which will save our butts hugely later'.
You simply can't do everything on the margin with only the next quarter's profits in sight. Sooner or later, someone with some long-term vision needs to front up with a plan. Ideally, this would be a democratic government which, after reasoned debate and input from all the people, achieves consensus and does the rational thing and everyone's happy.
I don't understand what part of of 'one day oil/gas will run out and we'll all die horribly, while wind'll still be there and we get to live' is so terribly difficult for world-class business executives to grasp. Aren't they paid millions of dollars a year and go to forums like Davos to think strategically just like this? If an ordinary guy like me can see this, why can't our unelected lords and masters?
Should the government keep subsidizing wind and the infrastructure.
Quite obviously, yes.
That wasn't the answer you were expecting?
Whatever is a national government for except to coordinate decisions about investment at the national level, of which infrastructure is the prime example?
It's rational and foreseeable that gas will run out, as will oil, and that value of any investment capital poured into it will plummet to zero, while wind won't. It is irrational to make any long-term plans on the long-term existence of a finite resource.
But evidently, the marketplace is NOT choosing the rational, foreseeable outcome; it is acting irrationally. That's fine, we know this happens in game theory. Sometimes lots of independent rational actors acting separately produce irrational outcomes; that's basic Prisoner's Dilemma 101.
That's exactly why we have such an entity as 'government': to solve the coordination problem.
Next question?
I seem to remember in the 1980s one of the buzzwords of the Coming Microcomputer Revolution was going to be 'telecommuting'. Live in Missouri, telnet into the New York office mainframe, work in your shirtsleeves.
Seems like it's starting to happen, but it's slow and you miss out on the water cooler conversations and therefore promotions. Is telecommuting ever going to happen for real?
(Insert reference to Greg Bear's Blood Music... )
Free Poo Movement!
Ooh! Shiny! and Martin Gardner too!
See, this is why I post on Slashdot, to learn things like this. Thank you.
Shouldn't that make us wonder why it's so hard?
If we can't verify the behaviour of the software components we're busy assembling into bigger and bigger systems, doesn't that mean that we're doing sort of the architectural equivalent of making the Burj Dubai out of fog?
It's a wonder the whole Internet hasn't completely collapsed by now, instead of only partially rotting into botnets.
If it will take 100 years to verify every possible code path and input, and the system is needed sometime in the next 50 years, forget it.
And if the system is also needed to not just 'sometimes sorta work' but also not ever go berserk and kill everyone? Well too bad, because we need a giant death robot NOW and if the giant death robot kills everyone that's just acceptable risk.
Or perhaps there are some classes of systems which, if it's impractical to verify that they won't kill everyone, maybe we shouldn't build them at all.
Nah. Gotta have progress, right?
The weirdness of logic and maths certainly is a large part of Alice, though I doubt it's all of it. But it's fairly obvious to me, just as a geek with a bit of general knowledge, that the Alice books parody a number of things from late-Victorian era politics and education. It's also about puns, wordplay, and the strict application of logic beyond the domains where it applies; and just general nerdy amusement.
* The organising principle of 'Wonderland' is the card game
* The 'Caucus-race' obviously a satire on politics: the members run in a circle, accomplishing nothing except a lot of hot air. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/caucus_race
I couldn't speak for certain about whether the Mad Hatter's party and the stuckness of Time really is a reference to Hamilton's quaternions, but quaternions are fascinating and they did introduce the idea of a 4D space-time continuum (and therefore time travel) half a century before Einstein/Minkowski, and scandalised and baffled the maths world, so it wouldn't surprise me if that was in the background.
* The organising principle of 'Looking Glass' is the chess game
* Anglo-Saxon literature (possibly Beowulf?) appears in Looking Glass - 'Jabberwocky' is a parody of the Beowulfian sort of epic, with the hero slaying the monster and lots of untranslated words
* The March Hare and Mad Hatter reappear as 'Anglo-Saxons' Haigha and Hatta. Again, this is the sort of stuff that educated children would have been expected to know as a matter of course, along with Latin and Greek and art ('Laughing and Grief; reeling, writhing and fainting in coils')
* The White Knight's speech ('the name of the song is called...') parses out the fine but very important distinction between objects and names, which becomes a major issue in logic (and more so in computer programming):
The name of the song is called 'Haddocks' Eyes.'"
"Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested.
"No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. "That's what the name
is called. The name really is 'The Aged, Aged Man.'"
"Then I ought to have said 'That's what the song is called'?" Alice corrected herself.
"No you oughtn't: that's another thing. The song is called 'Ways and Means' but that's only
what it's called, you know!"
"Well, what is the song then?" said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.
"I was coming to that," the Knight said. "The song really is 'A-sitting On a Gate': and the
tune's my own invention."
Like Terry Pratchett (and Bram Stoker - see Dracula Blogged), Alice really needs a decent annotated edition to explain the obvious cultural and scientific references, since it is densely packed with references which might now be misunderstood, and so many weird conspiracy theories have arisen around the books.
The classic example of Dodgson's geeky humour is from 'Four Riddles':
http://www.online-literature.com/carroll/2826/
Yet what are all such gaieties to me
Whose thoughts are full of indices and surds?
x*x + 7x + 53 = 11/3
It doesn't just rhyme and form part of an overall story - it's an equation to be solved, which gives you a word, from which you can take the first and last letters and which give you a crossword/acrostic clue. Beat THAT for geek cred.
Here's a solution, don't patronize any site that uses those types of advertisements.
Ah, another popunder site! How quaint. Frankly the font choice of Comic Sans, though an amusing display of off-off-off-Google metatextual awareness, is a little pedestrian and the rollovers lack a certain... finesse, and really, flashing purple highlights in 2010? It's like they've never even seen the Apple spring collections! refreshingly naive, but at least the web designer is out there getting experience, and that's what really matters for young things today. I look forward to seeing future productions from this studio in twenty years' time.
Oh, you said *don't* patronize? Oops.
black. you can never go wrong with black. unless you wear all black, 'cause then you look like a waiter.
Or an All Black.