A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Attended the wake, with classicaljunkie. I spent most of the time talking with another O'Reilly person there.

Through a MacBook that was cycling through a photo gallery of the last decade of Erik's life, I learned something new about him: apparently he had an ambition to visit famous artifacts around the world, and lick them. I suggested to my former colleague that if one truly felt compelled by this, one could find all the places and things he had not yet licked and then take up a life's task to carry on where he could not.

Also hugged Erik's widow, signed the guestbook, and then left for having nothing else to do there - I didn't know any of his family, who were there in great number, and didn't feel like making introductions right then. And I feel no drive to attend the funeral this evening, so here ends all of that.

The Bad Astronomer got a great piece of spam I haven't seen before, basically saying "Send me money or I WILL KILL YOU." With a great little story that the author is an assassin who's been paid to whack the recipient, but decided to give them one chance to outbid the client before he follows through. Awesome!

(I chuckle at the comments that are all OMG CALL POLICE, though. Yes, like your local PD can do anything about trolls in Latverian sub-basements hitting the 'send' button on their bulk mailer programs.)

Don Herbert, TV's Mr. Wizard, has passed away. LA Times obit, with photo gallery.

I mist up a little, not of sadness but of good memories from my childhood. I watched him on Nickelodeon in the mid 1980s, and his show was a bright spot during a very patchy time. He didn't make me into a scientist, but he did help wedge me onto a trajectory of permanent curiosity, which has turned me into whatever the hell I am today. I like to think he had the same effect on many other kids, too. Cheers, Don.

I had just invoked Vonnegut in conversation tonight, too.

He was to me what Tolkien was to many of my friends. When I was in high school and my head needed rearranging, Breakfast of Champions was there to help.

On some nights I am harassed by "boogeymen", which is what I call obsessively morbid thoughts that insinuate themselves on my conscious mind while I'm in bed but not quite asleep. Since I am operating at a low runlevel, I don't have much control over them, and generally have to let them batter me until I finally shut down.

Their default setting is concerns about death, but very lately it's been worries that I'll never finish the Volity beta, that my team will dissolve, that the business can't possibly work.

I think that's pretty good.

(Yes, I have been coding for >2 days straight... and it's still not ready for checkin... eeargh. Why do I think that everything is so much simpler than it actually is?)

An interesting bit of self-realization: the looming threat of a global oil crisis has effectively replaced the looming threat of death as the thing I have obsessive low-to-mid-level worry about.

Let's compare:
(1) Aging & death is a threat to jmac and the people that jmac loves. This is especially true so long as the mainstream fails to frame aging as a terminal disease that deserves a cure.
(2) Peak Oil and its implications is a threat to human civilization. This is especially true so long as the mainstream fails to think about it.

jmac is soft and weak and needs human civilization to survive. This is also true for anything he might ever create, which is equally soft and wholly informational. Furthermore, if civilization goes away, so does organized science and mass communication, so attending to point (1) becomes a total wash.

Therefore, fixing (2) looks like a prerequisite to fixing (1). Not to say I believe there's a zero-sum game going on here; one can support both. In fact, I think one ought to.

But (2) is the one where failure brings ruin for all.

Conversely, (1) is already in a failure state, and has been since the dawn of mankind; the challenge is to toggle it into the win state. This is a very different challenge, with no macro-deadline like (2) has. (The micro-deadlines are the "natural" lifetimes of the participants. Their being met doesn't spoil the game for everyone, though.)

On the other side, (2) seems more immediately fixable, since its solution, to my eye, lay in getting most people to think about it all, where (1) requires people to think about a well-known thing in a wholly new way. In other words, there is no denying that oil is a finite resource. Even "big oil" acknowledges this. And there is a perverse part of me that wants palpable problems to hurry up and start now so that everyone wakes up and lets us start working on solutions together.

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While I acknowledge their role in the early debate spectrum, I am nonetheless pissed off by sites like Life After the Oil Crash which state with such confidence that we're riding a slot car and absolutely nothing we do can avert complete and utter destruction of everything; cast off your clothes and follow Tyler Durden back to the trees and 35-year lifespans. One gets the impression that the dude totally gets off on this. An angel could descend from heaven and announce that henceforth all oilfields would magically replenish themselves, and the author of the site would just add another paragraph: "No, that won't work: see figure 1."

I also resent the anti-capitalist attitude that the alarmists inevitably possess, dismissing any who profess trust in the market as if they thought the mere presence of a free market means that the problem will magically fix itself and nothing will appreciably change, so let's keep partying woooo. I count myself among those who look to the market, but I don't think that riding the oil production decline down will be easy, or painless. In fact, I think it's going to take a lot of sacrifice and be very painful for everyone, at least for a while, because changing shape due to outside pressure always hurts. But I don't think it will kill us.

As I walk around my daily routes, I see all the cars roving around, and think: most of these will be gone, soon. I wonder how life will change when it becomes too expensive to drive without some sense of automotive triage. I can imagine many scenarios, many hopeful, some unexpectedly beautiful.

But as I do so I reserve real raw anger at those who think that humanity is so inflexible that the only possible outcome is a network of corpses with death-grips on their steering wheels. I wonder how they can ignore the fact that we as a species have slogged through so much to get as far as we've gotten, that we can't work around this upcoming obstacle just because they, as individuals, can't see a way.

It is, ironically, shortsighted of them.