Mark Twain and a thought or two about change

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

: Twain in ~ 1890

A picture from the Wikimedia archive of photos, which cover his adult life pretty thorouhgly. this is a fantastic source of images.

Before I had chance in another war, the desire to kill people to whom I had not been introduced had passed away.
– Autobiography of Mark Twain

Change is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with.
– Roughing It

Strangely enough I have only read a little of Mark Twain’s work, I like reading about him and I like his humor and his philosophy but his classic novels don’t interest me. Not sure if it was Junior High, High School readings that did it to me or if I’m just not up for the experience.

I find the times in which he lived fascinating, in some ways we should be ashamed of ourselves for complaining about the rate of change today. The rate of change during the Victorian era, or the Twain era (which overlap a great deal,) was simply incredible. The biggest difference is that the impact was probably less personal than the changes today, but they were more physical. The Transition from horse carriage and canal to train, the telegraph, the steam ship, the spread of parliamentary gov’t and limited monarchy, the explosion of broadsheet papers and journalism, the beginnings of scientific medicine etc.

By the time Twain died the world he had been born into would be almost unrecognizable. The world you and I were born into are recognizably precursors to our life today. However the differences in mental attitude and knowledge etc, are many orders of magnitudes greater than the same types of changes that happened across Twain’s life.

The intellectual changes that lead to the Victorian/Twain era explosion, happened in the decades and years leading up to the years of greatest change. Is that what we are seeing now, the build up of an underpinning that will enable quantum leaps in the physical characteristics of our lives like those that occurred from ~1840-1900?

Just a thought …

Benjamin Franklin said

Posted on December 26, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

“Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security”

But in his world it was almost impossible for a single person to be responsible for killing millions. Does world we live in today require some trade of liberty for security? If so where do you stop and how do you stop?

9 Chickweed Lane is sublime

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

todays strip

A rarity in the comics, 9 Chickweed Lane spotlights music and dance with superb artistry that complements Brooke McEldowney’s strong-minded characters. A popular comic strip about three generations of family, 9 Chickweed Lane features strong characters, flights of fancy and an intuitive grasp of all kinds of relationships. The strip was recognized in 2006 for its brilliant artistry and intellectual humor when it was named Best Newspaper Comic Strip by the National Cartoonists Society. The strip appears in 60 newspapers worldwide, including the Los Angeles Times, Houston Chronicle, Calgary Sun and Columbus Dispatch. Central character Edda Burber is dancing to the beat of a different drummer these days as McEldowney focuses 9 Chickweed Lane more on the story of a young woman who moves away from home to perform with a prestigious metropolitan ballet company in New York City. Although it may seem like a completely new strip, 9 Chickweed Lane is peopled with very familiar friends, like furry feline Solange, and Edda’s childhood friend and recent love interest, Amos.

I have browsed far into the archives, I adore this comic strip!

Space and entropy

Posted on December 3, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

A Hubble picture I think its looking into the hot hydrogen spectrum

Just some writing therapy other than Elgin, struggling a bit with Elgin in New York. I think having that deadline in front of me was effective even after I’d gotten over the base line. But that’s the way it is.

Spent too much time today reading articles and blogs on the current state of the world. Things are starting to look up in the US and yet most of the pundits are saying it’s going to be a flash in the pan, especially if the Euro resumes its crash into the toilet. And Oh, even if the Europeans pull it out, the Chinese are probably going to implode. And if the Chinese don’t implode then we need start worrying about their hegemonic intentions in the far east.

And then you have the Arab spring, all of which are now turning out to be pro Islamists of one stripe or another….well duh! Of course they are, the secular piece of the population almost has to be small be definition and they were rebelling against various levels of despotism that was supported at least partly by secular and pro-Israel US/Europe. The reaction is going to blow back. One just has to hope that the more liberal (reasonable set of rights and open economy) arms of the Islamists remain in control because the majority realize that the hardliner conservatives will keep them in at least a deep a hole as they have been for the last fifty years.

As to space and entropy…

space

1. the unlimited or incalculably great three-dimensional realm or expanse in which all material objects are located and all events occur.

2. the portion or extent of this in a given instance; extent or room in three dimensions: the space occupied by a body.

3. extent or area in two dimensions; a particular extent of surface: to fill out blank spaces in a document.

4. Fine Arts

a. the designed and structured surface of a picture: In Mondrian’s later work he organized space in highly complex rhythms.

b. the illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface.

5. outer space

en·tro·py

1.Thermodynamics .

a. (on a macroscopic scale) a function of thermodynamic variables, as temperature, pressure, or composition, that is a measure of the energy that is not available for work during a thermodynamic process. A closed system evolves toward a state of maximum entropy.

b. (in statistical mechanics) a measure of the randomness of the microscopic constituents of a thermodynamic system.

2. (in data transmission and information theory) a measure of the loss of information in a transmitted signal or message.

3. (in cosmology) a hypothetical tendency for the universe to attain a state of maximum homogeneity in which all matter is at a uniform temperature (heat death).

4. a doctrine of inevitable social decline and degeneration.

Cultivating (social) Conscience

Posted on October 29, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

Review of a book by Lynn Stout, Cultivating Conscience: How Good Laws Make Good People. The review provides a synopsis of Dr. Stout’s thesis, she has tied together the results of modern research from a broad range of relevant science threads to present strong argument against the punitive and overly complex laws and rules that are the norm today.

She argues that the populist lowest common denominator laws with their no tolerance, zero sum, economic animal analysis of the human mind, far from making us safer and more law-abiding are deeply damaging to the social fabric we all depend on. She points out the mechanisms that lie behind some of the strikingly good results of modern urban policing and that these same mechanisms can be expanded more broadly. This probably explains why experiments with shaming young drug offenders seems to have better results than time in jail.

Lynn Stout is the Paul Hastings Professor of Corporate and Securities Law at the UCLA School of Law. She is the coauthor of several books and a frequent commentator for NPR, PBS, and the “Wall Street Journal”.

(This is a bit of an update with the book link…and bio from B&N book page)

Cheers

I’m going Green in ’12 Kermit for Veep!

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

So i finally found the party that I can support! The GTP Green-Tea-Party, Kermit the frog is their spokesperson and their motto is, “it’s not easy being green.” This sounds like a joke, may be in some minds but the ‘party platform’ and tenets are seriously focused and not just on traditional green issues. At least I don’t see it as ecology + fuzzy/finned friends, this is seriously about a better world through the stimulation of innovative, low impact, sustainable, low bureaucrat, and economically sound/practical policies….this is a political philosophy that could->should rival the now utterly depleted/tired/corrupted progressive>liberal<>mercantilist <onservative spectrum we seem damned to suffer with today. Read the article, it’s concise and rational, go GTP->Kermy!!!

Photo: InsEyedOut, via flicker, Defining Ideas..

Be Here Now

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

How did we get here? Why is this happening now?

The Here and Now is a phonograph needle tracking the wobbles in the groove that all our yesterdays laid down.

Is there a way out?

There is only foreward there is no going back.

There is a Destiny which has the control of our actions, not to be resisted by the strongest efforts of Human Nature. (From)

GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter to Mrs. George William Fairfax, Sep. 12, 1758

Not sure I agree at an individual level all the time, but on the aggregate in the immediate time frame I would. Perhaps its like this: Science tells me that most of my actions are planned a significant fraction of a second ahead of my consciousness recognizing what is going on. It is impossible to change what you do not know is coming but if you plan ahead you can control what happens at a future point in time and space.

And what we do individually and locally does matter nationally and globally, at least a little and if not now then sometime in the future.

Does that mean I demand “Word Gov’t Now!” how stupid do you think I am?

We need more self-control, personal control, local control and less regional control, national control and global control. We do need norms and some way of enforcing them for such things as : life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and such easily debased things as contract enforcement, property rights, ecological cost accounting, financial cost accounting…a few others…maybe

But….the old bureaucratic model, relying on a plethora of relatively well paid trustworthy functionaries to enforce norms is becoming unaffordable.

Laissez-Faire – let it be – management doesn’t work, it doesn’t work in regulation either.

Why has the US Constitution remained important for more than 200 years? Because its simple, basic, lays out fundamentals and leaves the rest for interpretation but by being fairly simple, constrained and pragmatic it is actually possible to interpret it to cover very large sets of cases.

We have to get over the belief that you can make life perfect if you can just tune your laws/regulations/rules just right and get the humans out-of-the-way. We used to know better, I think that most scholars know better. But somehow many folks have come to believe that if not all, then the one specific law they care about can be perfected, and since they care about it passionately they push it forward, usually through a system that has no time to really understand the consequences of this law when combined with that law and this social reality, etc. And with each law becoming more complex because of fiddling to tune it to perfection, the way they interact becomes utterly unknowable. And the law becomes harder to obey and easier for smart lawyers to subvert.

So….

So where do we go from here?

Start to build down the complexity we have built up at every level, what about:

For every new rule, two old ones have to be eliminated and no double dipping?
Limit the length of any law/rule/regulation to two double-sided 8 1/2 by 11 sheets one inch margins typed in 11 point Times New Roman with the option of an extra sheet of readable graphics?
Eliminate mandatory this, no tolerance that, rules that have become a pox on our society?
Make Judges accountable to other Judges and the Bar with impeachment by the people an option?

You can think of more, I know you can!

Cheers

“Here’s the problem: there are no grownups. “

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

I have a new hero! I love this line, maybe it was just a matter of right words at the right time on the right topic but it is perfect. Bob Krum was discussing the euro debt crisis among other things (like stupid questions on ‘presidential debates’) in Stop Waiting for Superman.

There are no grownups; there are just folks (blokes in Brit speak) like us, imperfect humans who are lucky to make a right decision (on issues more complex than whether to turn into the path of that oncoming Mack truck or not) much more than 50% of the time (and we don’t always make the right one regarding the Mack truck.)

What does that mean? Many things but one of them is that overly complex political, financial, social, technical…etc constructs are asking for problems. Stable systems are ones that are essentially self organizing, a pile of sand will settle into the same conical shape every time because its stable in its environment. Small c capitalist, old meaning liberal economies, are self organizing and stable. The euro zone is a complex web of overly constrained systems that like some cartoon Rube Goldberg steam plant is constantly threatening to blow a gasket and it requires a genius just to know where to apply the next tourniquet.

In the last few decades we have made vast strides in understanding ourselves and our world (in a thousand different dimensions.) Then we have often reacted to this increased understanding by thinking we can control more things and implementing more and more rules. The effects of those rules are often individually complex and unintended but the interactions between them is (IMHO) utterly outside of our ability to cope with. Among other things I rather suspect that every one of us (barring a newborn baby maybe) is technically a criminal, having violated at one time or another various laws, rules or regulations most of which we had no idea existed or had no way to follow.

Somehow we have become inured to the regulated world, see it as natural, but it’s probably reached its practical limits and is now in the process of imploding. We have the tools to creat a more self organized – de-bureaucratized world but have not yet quite figured out what it really looks like and how to transition from where we are to where we need to be.

Maybe that’s just wishful thinking….fueld by a frustration at the idiocy that seems to have become institutionalized in so many places. But change ‘is in the air,’ though it may still be some years away. I just hope that the transition can be made relatively peacefully, there are far too many people on this orbiting rock (7Billion!?) for a major disruption to be anything other than catastrophic for far too many.

There is no utopia waiting over the brow of the next hill, and there was never a golden age that we have somehow lost (one man’s golden age was someone elses hell.) We can’t go back to a past that never existed, and refusing to live and work today because the day after tomorrow will be better is foolish and self-destructive. Tomorrow never gets here, let alone the day after, and your vision of the world will never occupy a future today unless you work for it in the today you find yourself in. Live in the now with a vision of where you want to end up.

NaNoWriMo — Elgin

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

Elgin was born in Beauty Wyoming, one of the more beautiful places one could be born in this world. The name on his birth certificate was Elgin Campbell Chalmers IV, though there were no Elgin Campbell or for that matter Chalmers in his family history. His father who may not have remembered his own real name, thought it was a great name and a bit of a joke.

Elgin’s mother walked out when he was twelve, never to be heard from again. From that time on he lived with his father in an old Airstream camper, on the Split S ranch during the summer and on the edge of Beauty the local ‘big town’ on the end of Black Sky lake, during the winter. His father, one fourth Native American, was constantly fighting the local tribal council for ‘his’ cut of the tribes take from Beauty’s Casino and Tourist industry, spending most winters writing long rambling letters to various people, papers, officials, offices and NGO’s about his terrible plight. Never to any avail.

On Elgin’s sixteenth birthday he left his father drunk on the lean-to porch of the Airstream in the morning to catch the school bus. He returned to find his old man dead of a massive coronary, his father had been a week less than forty.

After that Elgin was taken care of by an until then unknown network of cousins among the locals, quite a few nearly full blooded indians, among whom the blond, blue-eyed Elgin looked out-of-place. He was never much trouble though he often hung with the local hooligans. And though a ‘good looking boy’ and reasonably ‘common sensed’ he was never a good student or a hard worker, though neither lazy or dishonest.

And so Elgin drifted into life. At thirty two Elgin lived in the Airstream he’d ‘inherited’ from his father and worked at the ranch job at the Split S he’d also inherited. He wasn’t exactly a drunk, or a pot head, but he wasn’t sober much of the time away from the ranch. His only companion was a huge cat called Humphrey, who looked like a somewhat chunky Siamese grown to the size of a small German Shepard. Humf had an appropriate Siamese/GerShep cross bad-tempered arrogance that would have gotten him shot long ago except for Elgin.

Elgin knew he was a waste of oxygen most days and a disappointment to his family, such as it was, but didn’t let it bother him, unless he had a really bad drunk. The November of his thirty-second year, in the grips of a particularly bad one, he rode into mountains on a Friday afternoon. Ignoring the oncoming wall of clouds that promised an early snowstorm.

Saturday, half-frozen and still drunk he drove his horse out of the safety of the cavern he’d camped in, out into the snow and ice. An hour later the horse slipped and threw Elgin down a rocky precipice into a shallow stream. Unconscious, with one arm and both legs broken Elgin drowned in six inches of ice-cold water.

It was only then that things started looking up.

Sorry…couldn’t resist, that’s the intro to one of the othe options….which is also a sci fi fantasy as I think you can tell…

National Novel Writing Month

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Sci Fi Engineer

November is National Novel Writing Month. They are sponsoring an authorship marathon, write a novel in a month, 50,000 words (175ish pages) between November 1st and 30th. That’s a lot of words for a non professional, and they press you not to struggle with editing or any of that other hard stuff, focus on quantity and not quality.

This is (for good reason) in line with advice by novelists of note S.King and J.Pournelle that you simply have to sit down and write if you ever expect to be a writer. There may be some people who are natural authors but most of us have to write a lot of words (in my case ~ a half million) before it comes reasonably easily most of the time. Which in the days before the computer and word processor was an even larger investment in time and effort than it is now.