Viridia.org

A contrarian rant, to be taken with a grain of salt:

History tells us that when a civilization runs out of some critical resource, the result is usually the collapse of that civilization. Only the most adept and flexible civilizations can avoid this fate.

Our civilization’s critical resource is petroleum, and it is going to run out some day. Not all at once - rather, what will happen is that oil will become increasingly scarce as the years go by, with the price per barrel rising higher and higher each year. Many experts have said that if we have not already reached “peak oil” - the historical moment of maximum oil production, followed by a downward slope - that we are very close to it. The nations of the world - many of which have an increasing demand for oil - will find themselves squabbling over slices of an ever-decreasing pie.

This will no doubt lead to increasing international tensions, and probably war. Whether or not you think that the current US involvement in the Middle East is motivated by oil, the fact is that as the price of oil increases, the possibility of war becomes ever more likely. Especially given the relationship between oil and food prices, you can well imagine that a world leader, faced with a crashing economy and a hungry populace, might choose a military solution.

Everyone alive today has been blessed with the fact that they are living in a golden age - an age of unprecedented peace and prosperity. Although we have a tendency to focus on the miseries of current events, the fact is that world has been getting steadily better (with occasional fits and starts) for the last 700 years or so.

But all of that could come crashing down if we run out of oil. 

But what about alternatives - Nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, and so on? The question is how quickly we can make the transition. National infrastructures aren’t built in a day, and if recent history is any guide, they aren’t built in a decade either.

Take for example the auto companies response to higher gasoline prices: They knew that it was coming, yet they continued to maintain production lines for gas-guzzling SUVs until the very last possible moment, when it became clear that they simply could not sell them any more. And now they are frantically trying to retool to build hybrids, but they can’t switch over quickly enough.

There’s no reason to believe that we as a society would be any less short-sighted. We would continue to ignore the problem until we absolutely had to do something about it - and by then it would be too late.

But suppose - what if there were another factor in the equation - something that would create a powerful incentive to reduce our use of oil before became scarce? Something that would motivate us to stay ahead of the increasing price curve, so that instead of reducing supply, it would reduce demand? It would need to be a strong motivation, on the order of a threat to our survival and prosperity, otherwise we would (again) dismiss and ignore it.

I think by now you can see what I am (ahem) driving at.

You may have noticed the lack of content being posted here. However, that doesn’t mean I have been idle - I’ve been doing most of my blogging via Google Reader using the “shared items” feature. Basically, this allows you (with a single click) to mark articles for sharing as you go through the process of reading them. You can think of this as “the web, as filtered by Talin”.

Here’s the link.

This is, I think, the weirdest piece of unsolicited mail that I have ever received:

Valinho de Fatima # 463 Recta da Levandeira
2495-691 Fátima Cadaval -
5090-053 Murça

(my email address omitted)

Honorable

It is with great honor and pleasure that I the President and Founder of the
only Portuguese Association of Exorcists located in Fatima, Portugal, wish
to introduce to you our goals and objectives in anticipation of your future
collaboration with our organization.

In order to familiarize you with the founder I wish to offer you the
following curriculum vitae information which will clearly shows my lifelong
dedication to this study and cause.

Your past and present interest in this area is of mutual interest and more
so to our organization as it is composed of only international professionals
in the area and study of Exorcisms.

As a roman Catholic Priest, ordained in the Jesuit Seminary I have now
seeked to establish a society where all members would assist and
collaborate towards a common goal of continuing study and practicing of
this ritual.
Read the rest of this entry »

I accidentally stumbled on A Miracle of Science, a very well written web comic about mad science, robots, and true love. Lots of cool ideas to ponder.

In this future, “mad scientist” is a recognized and treatable psychological disorder, which runs through a progression of increasingly severe symptoms. Our hero is an interplanetary cop whose specialty is tracking down and arresting mad scientists so that they can be properly rehabilitated. He’s partnered with a beautiful Martian psychologist, who also happens to be a member of the Martian planetary hive-mind. Needless to say, there’s a fair bit of tension as the two learn to work together on this case…

Definately one of those “can’t put it down” stories.

The Speech Accent Archive contains audio recordings from hundreds of native speakers around the world, reading the same passage of English text. I’ve always been fascinated by accents, and this site satisfies one of my long-standing curiousities.

The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers.

I’ve been meaning to write about this idea for a while, but a recent posting on Boing Boing reminded me of it again.

I believe that most so-called “conspiracies” are in fact subconscious conspiracies - meaning that one can be a member of a conspiracy without actually knowing it.

A subconscious conspiracy behaves much like a conscious one - that is, you have some group of individuals who share a covert agenda, one that would be considered detrimental or even diabolical by the general public. There are secret meetings, cover-ups, and a web of insidious influence. And yet, no one in the group realizes that this is going on.

One might ask how such things can go on without the participants being aware of what they are doing? As I often say, “never dismiss human dismissiveness”. It’s easy to convince yourself that what you are doing is “just natural”, that there’s nothing special or untoward about your actions.

Here’s how subconscious conspiracies work: Say you have a group of people in power - goverment officials or perhaps a corporate board of directors. Say also that these individuals are tightly-knit, with a common history and shared goals. Now, also suppose that this group is somewhat insular, isolated from the outside by a layer of protection (by this I mean things like office assistants, press secretaries, and others who mediate the discourse between members of this group and those outside the group - what Heinlein called flappers.) What happens is that these individual eventually, and inevitably, take on a cult-like aspect.

I’ve personally seen this kind of groupthink at work: What ends up happening is that, for any given member of the group, the vast majority of their discourse is with other members of the group. A given factoid (by which I mean literally “having the form of a fact”, which is implied by the suffix -oid) will bounce from one member to another, until everyone ends up believing it, irregardless of its actual truth. “We have the best product in the industry!” says the CEO. And when you ask the CEO why he believes this is true, he replies that it’s because the engineering VP assures him that this is true; And when you ask the same question to the engineering VP, he’ll say that it’s because the CEO says it’s true. And so on.

In a subconscious conspiracy, everyone believes that they are in fact working for the public interest - it’s just that their view of the public interest is completely skewed beyond all recognition.

And of course, when they try to communicate with people who aren’t in the group, there’s a disconnect - they sense that these outsiders aren’t aligned with their goals, and they begin to percieve them as a threat. And of course, once the human threat response enters the picture, collective insanity is not far behind. They begin to exclude outsiders and other people who “wouldn’t understand” from their circle; their thoughts turn to how they can discredit and undermine their enemies - all in the cause of what’s good and righteous, of course.

The most important thing to understand about subconscious conspiracies, however, is that they are merely symptoms of a deeper cause. And as usual with symptomatic maladies, merely treating the symptoms does no good. With a regular, conscious conspiracy, all that you need to is round up the ring leaders and toss them in jail. But with a symptomatic conspiracy, the same conditions that created the conspiracy will simply continue to create new conspiracies to replace the old one.

This is a piece of artwork I did for Kate Bridges and her friend as a joke…taking the phrase “drama queen” to a new level…

Postscript: One friend mentioned that they didn’t get the joke. I’m hesitant to explain things since jokes are normally ruined by explanation. However, in this case the humor may be too much of an in-joke for general consumption, so I’ll give a little bit of explanation.

The name “crisis girl” was a nickname we gave to someone we knew who was kind of a drama addict - it seemed that their life was a continuing series of leaps from one crisis to another. I think we’ve all known someone at one time or another who couldn’t seem to get their life together. At first we feel sympathy and try to help, but after the Nth repetition we just get tired of it.

But “Crisis Girl” also sounds like the name of a comic superheroine.

So we envisioned a comic heroine who didn’t have any super powers - what was “special” about her was that lots of bad stuff happens to her all the time and she emotes about it a lot. (Sort of like “Mr. Furious” from Mystery Men.) So Crisis Girl has to handle a whole stack of increasingly trivial disasters, except that she’s too distracted to handle any of them because her dog has run away and she has to chase after it.

The reason I drew this is because the person we were making fun of heard about our little nickname, and said that we had to draw up a actual comic for it. So I did.

One of the guiding principles of my political philosophy is a concept which I will call metapluralism, meaning “beyond pluralism”.

Pluralism is the political or philisopical stance that there is no “one true way”, and that the best outcome can only be gained through the interaction of competing ideas or organizations, depending on whether you are speaking of political pluralism (competition between interest groups) or philisophical pluralism (competition between theories.) James Madison was one of the earliest proponents of a pluralistic society. He felt that having many different factions rather than just a few would prevent destructive infighting.

True pluralism requires that these competing entities are able to coexist without attempting to destroy or harm one another - it requires a tolerance for other ideas and ways, and an intolerance for intolerance.

My own view is that it is necessary to take the idea of pluralism one step farther, and have competition between different pluralistic systems which all coexist in the same space - moreover, it may be that some of these “systems” are more pluralistic than others.

As an example, the free market is a pluralistic economy, in which there is no clear “winner” possessing an absolute formula for success. Some would say, then, that even though within the market there is no “one true way”, the idea of the market as a whole is the “true way” that we should follow.

I feel instead that the “system” of the market should compete with other, non-market systems, and there should be a great many such systems which all coexist are are accessible to everyone. So we have a free-market system, a regulatory system maintained by government, a system of non-profit and non-governmental organizations, a judicial system, an academic system, a system of competing religions and other worldviews, and so on.

Thus, in a capitalistic free-market system, even though the participants of the market may be diverse and distinct entities with their own unique characteristics, the logic of the market often constrains them to be have in a similar way. Once they step outside the pressures of the market, however, those contraints are lifted, and others put in their place, which means that the characteristic behavior will be very different. A typical businessman will be like other businessmen in that he is concerned about cash flow and profits, whereas a typical scientist will be concerned about citations and journals.

So in short, there is no one true system, let alone one true entity within any system.

I recently learned about OpenID, a new distributed single-sign-on technology, and I am very excited about it.

What problems does OpenID solve? At the moment I have accounts on several different web sites - my bank, my stock broker, online merchants, blogs, forums and many others. Each one has a username and password that I have to keep track of. Of course, like most people, I don’t have a different password for every site, instead I have a small number of passwords that I use at many different sites.

Single-sign-on gives you a way to combine these different accounts so that you can sign on to many different web sites with a single username and password. Once you log in to one of them, you are effectively logged in to all.

Up to this point, the only single-sign-on system that has widespread adoption is Microsoft’s Passport system. However, Passport is a centralized authentication system, which means that one single entity (Microsoft) now has the keys to everyone’s private information.

OpenID is a distributed authentication system, which means that there are many small providers - you can choose which company you want to be your OpenID provider. If you are an AOL or LiveJournal user, you already have an OpenID identity.

Here’s how it works: Suppose you want to create an account at some site - let’s say ma.gnolia, a popular social bookmarking site (much like del.icio.us). Normally you’d be asked to enter a username and password. But ma.gnolia also allows you to enter an OpenID identity instead. An OpenID identity is just a URL. Mine is http://talin.myopenid.com.

Now, when you sign on to ma.gnolia, instead of asking you for your username and password, it redirects you to your OpenID provider (which might be LiveJournal or AOL or in my case myOpenID.) You log in to that site just as you normally would. It then redirects you back to ma.gnolia, with a special bit of data that says “yes, this user is who he/she claims to be”. The ma.gnolia site never sees your user name or password, all they see is that the proof that you are who you say you are. You can even set it up so that you only have to log on once - the next time you come to ma.gnolia, you’ll just automatically log in, as long as you are already logged in to your provider.

So it’s pretty simple. You can have more than one OpenID if you need to have multiple identities. If you decide you don’t like your OpenID provider, there’s a way to forward OpenID requests to a new provider that you like better.

What’s exciting about this, however, it that is makes lots of stuff possible that wasn’t before. A quote that I heard recently and which very much sums up my feelings: “People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network, but I’m already part of a social network - it’s called the Internet.”

Once we have a secure way to identify people online, and to maintain a persistent identity that travels with us, we can do all kinds of interesting friendster-like things on the web instead of having to be locked in to a single service like myspace or tribes or whatever. I’m also interested in distributed reputation systems - so I can list all of the people I trust, and anyone who trusts me can trust them in turn.

A song about a software developer and his secret yearnings.

Kudos to Mark Iennaco for sending me this link. I love it!