Politics and gaming, oh my!

An aspersion has been cast. Or if you had the sage for biology, an asparagus has been cast. The comments are worth scrolling through. Politicians should be more careful about disparaging geeks. If Sen. Clinton had had a Hero Systems or Rolemaster player among her advisors, they might have gotten the math right in the primaries.

Are we Alone?

Well, time for me to put up another big-question post.

Fermi's Paradox has fascinated me for years, and an interesting in MITs Technology Review has reminded me of the topic. The interesting point of Nick Bostrom's article (registration required) is that he hopes that we find no signs of life on Mars. Bostrom suggests that there must be some bottleneck that explains why the galaxy (and the universe) is not teeming with life. He calls this restriction the Great Filter. If that problem is behind us, then there is a good chance our civilization will survive for a long time, while if it is ahead, then our chances of survival must be minuscule.
He concludes that:
If--as I hope is the case--we are the only intelligent species that has ever evolved in our galaxy, and perhaps in the entire observable universe, it does not follow that our survival is not in danger. Nothing in the preceding reasoning precludes there being steps in the Great Filter both behind us and ahead of us. It might be extremely improbable both that intelligent life should arise on any given planet and that intelligent life, once evolved, should succeed in becoming advanced enough to colonize space.
But we would have some grounds for hope that all or most of the Great Filter is in our past if Mars is found to be barren. In that case, we may have a significant chance of one day growing into something greater than we are now.

I found this an interesting way to think about the problem.
Even thoughI love Science Fiction and stories about galactic civilizations and alien species, the Fermi Paradox leads me to conclude that we are alone or nearly so.

It's Alive!

So, after almost a year away from semi-regular blogging, I have finally gotten around to resuscitating my personal blog at The Awe of Understanding (which is tied to our family domain which won't get it's much needed face lift until the summer).

Why am I telling you this? Well I just wrote a piece that I'd like your feedback on, if you are so inclined. It's called "Specious and Insidious". I would cross-post it here, but I'd like to start building some "viewership" over there and would also like to keep any comments you might like to leave active on the home site.

Of course, I'd welcome any comments on any other piece you see there (most of them date from 2007 and before, but they aren't completely time-sensitive.) Nathan Roberson '92 and I had quite a debate about recycling a couple of years back that might interest. And I would also love feedback on the style, layout, design, or any other aesthetic element that you may have an opinion about.

JoCo show

Cross-posted from my livejournal -- my write-up on the Jonathan Coulton show in Chicago, 5/3/08.


This was our ... fourth time(?) seeing JoCo with Paul and Storm, so we've pretty much got it memorized now. The previous shows were all at Schuba's though, while this one was that the Lakeshore Theater, which is a bigger venue -- about 350 capacity, and it was sold out. In fact, he mentioned on his blog that all 3 of his recent Midwest shows were sold out. Yay!

Stuff that was new and different:

(1) He rickrolled us! He did Mr. Fancy Pants using the Zendrum like at his December show, but this time he had "Never Gonna Give You Up" programmed into it, so in the middle of the song he essentially rickrolled the audience. I'm glad that joke's not dead yet, cause it still makes me lol.


http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZfUfpyeyPx4

(2) He performed "Flickr" live with a screen behind him projecting the original video (not the Spiff one, although that would've been cool too). Here is "Dwyer rockin' out on air guitar":



(3) They did "First of May" in the encore of course, as the show was on the 3rd of May. So yes, technically outdoor f*$%ing had started 2 days previously, but who's counting. They also did "Sweet Caroline" in the encore, which I gather has become a regular thing. Here's "First of May" from our show: (lyrics definitely NSFW)


http://youtube.com/watch?v=UTUS0Mgl1ZE

The Idiot’s Lantern

Continuing to post on shallow topics in the midst of others’ heavy political discourse, what TV shows are people watching these days? Any can’t-miss shows on the TiVo? Lost, perhaps? Battlestar Galactica? (ahem) Doctor Who? *Cyndi and Jim immediately see through Valerie’s thin ruse of listing the show she’s obsessed with third* Looking forward to the return of Mad Men? Excited about Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse or still pining for Firefly? Comment about it!

If there’s interest, I or others could initiate an open thread after a new episode of whatever-it-is airs for water cooler discussion and the like.

For our part, other than the aforementioned Who and its slutty stepsister Torchwood, we are currently working our way through the BBC show Life on Mars which starred John Simm. We have been TiVoing Galactica but haven’t actually gotten around to starting the new season yet. And we are still laughing our asses of at Scrubs and at Neil Patrick Harris in How I Met Your Mother.

Global Warming. Why are we asking the wrong questions?

I was reading this blog post from David Brin recently, and started thinking about this issue again (his discussion of climate change is in the second half of the post). Especially look at the 9th and following comments after the post ("The wheels are coming off the global warming bandwagon..."). Brin slaps the guy down pretty hard, and I understand his frustration. It is amazing to me that there are intelligent people who are still arguing about whether we are affecting the climate.

I am not an expert in climate science (no one person really can be) but virtually every credible source agrees now that we are affecting the temperature of the planet. My favorite book on the subject is Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers. He lays out the arguments pretty fairly, including the problems climate models have with clouds and the effect of contrails. Most of the energy companies are even seeing the light and making plans for a low-carbon energy future (there was a YouTube recording of a BP meeting where the chief scientist of BP was talking in reasonable terms about climate change, but I can't find it now).

All the debate about whether global warming is happening is a distraction from the important policy questions we should be asking:

1) What are the best case and worse case scenarios for the effect this change is going to have on our civilization? How much CO2 is too much?
2) How much will it reasonably cost for a certain reduction in CO2 and other greenhouse gases?
3) How much can we do with current technology to curb the problem? Do we need to invest more in engineering or research?

These are just a few of the many questions we should be asking instead of having debates about whether the problem is real.

What do you guys think?

Logos and flashbacks

So I'm doing my lunchtime web crawl and come across this (may not be safe for work):
http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/2008/04/the-original-lo.html which reminds me of this (same warning applies)
http://www.oddee.com/item_86090.aspx
which reminds me of the big brouhaha over Davidson's Sesquicentennial logo change involving a red bar with a white diamond under the V. We paid consultants with a five figure sum for that one, back in '88. That was when Harry Broome wrote a letter suggesting DC could have held a contest for the student body to choose a new logo. Well, while it may have been dumb to shell out that sort of money, at least we didn't get anything worth posting on the aforementioned sites.