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.
(more…)

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.

A song about a software developer and his secret yearnings.

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

As a science fiction fan, I’m less interested in the question “Does God Exist?”, than in the more speculative question “If God existed, what would he/she be like?”

The best attempt that anyone has ever done at answering this question was in Olaf Stapleton’s Star Maker (1937), which tells the story of a galactic civilization and its search to achieve contact with the creator. It describes a being whose primary characteristic is creativity, a being that has undergone an artistic evolution through the creation of many universes, of which ours is neither the first or the last.

However, I was thinking along somewhat different lines. The idea that we’re actually inside a computer simulation is a pretty old one. There’s an anthropic argument that says if simulating a universe is possible, then chances are we are in a simulation, since the simulation would likely be run many times.

Its also interesting to think that the person running the simulation might not be omniescent or infinitely smart - in fact, they might not even be as smart as we are. At least, one could make the argument that the whole reason for them running the simulation is to find the answer to some problem that they themselves aren’t capable of figuring out by themselves.

If scientists were to uncover evidence that this universe is inside a virtual machine, what consequences would that have? Would we owe any duty to the people responsible for creating the simulation? Would they owe any duty to us? How could we convince them to continue to spend resources running it?

One bit of evidence that points against the idea that we’re in a simulation is the fact that the universe is far larger than it needs to be to host a civilization such as ours. The only possible counter-arguments that I can think of are (a) the rest of the universe is being simulated at a lower resolution, (b) we will eventually use that extra space for something, or (c) that there are other civilizations out there that are already using it.

Today was my first day of work at Google. Most of the day was spent in orientation, however there are two interesting things to report: 1) The monitor on my desk is 30 inches. 2) My co-worker, sitting less than 10 feet away is the legendary Andy Hertzfeld.

I’ve just uploaded my latest composition, Anousheh’s Journey. Enjoy!

One of the lessons I’ve learned recently is to never let your most important data - such as personal contacts, records, and so on - be trapped in a proprietary file format.

For example, my friend Barney has recently been going through hell because his massive contact database is stored in Outlook/Exchange. While its true that you can export the individual entries of the database as a flat file, what’s missing is the relationships between those records (such as groups and mailing lists) which cannot easily be extracted. And in Barney’s case, a large proportion of the usage value of that database is those relationships.