Bro Tech

Back when people still thought the future was flying cars and moon bases, the word "high tech" was coined to describe cutting edge, advanced technology, with the implication that technology was progressing upward with significant steps.

Then "high tech" became a source of anxiety. As automation replaced factory workers, industry and government told people to learn new skills that would be needed by future jobs that would be created by new technology.

See for example this extraordinarily disingenuous and manipulative advertisement by a private college founded by a manufacturing company. In February of this year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued ITT Tech for predatory lending.

Teleportation: Version Control not Bandwidth Problem

NBC News has posted a very good article about a recent study which concluded that teleporting a human would take a quadrillion years. The original paper assumes we want to "recreate the human brain on a quantum level" and then transmit it with 30 GHz microwaves - in other words pretty much the way the transporters teleport people in Star Trek.

This is a good way to show that the fictional transporter is poorly engineered, but it is not how you would actually make a machine to teleport people.

Star Venom

Why are the heavens silent? Are we alone in the universe? Where is ET? Here's one possibility:

At some point around 5-10 billion years ago our galaxy was full of civilizations that traveled between the stars.

Each civilization would eventually disappear, perhaps driven to extinction by competition or perhaps evolved into something different. But they were always replaced by another civilization.

This pattern ended gradually. Over a period of 1-10 billion years, the number of new interstellar civilizations fell to zero. Intelligent life would evolve over and over again, and then disappear before spreading beyond the planet where the intelligence evolved.

Complexity is Simple

According to the New England Complex Systems Institute, high food prices triggered rioting around the world in 2008 and 2011 and we are due for another wave of global social unrest this summer.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says global food prices are becoming more volatile because...

“Increased vulnerability is being triggered by an apparent increase in extreme weather events and a dependence on new exporting zones, where harvest outcomes are prone to weather vagaries; a greater reliance on international trade to meet food needs at the expense of stock holding; a growing demand for food commodities from other sectors, especially energy; and a faster transmission of macroeconomic factors onto commodity markets, including exchange rate volatility and monetary policy shifts, such as changing interest rate regimes. 

What is more, financial firms are progressively investing in commodity derivatives as a portfolio hedge since returns in the commodity sector seem uncorrelated with returns to other assets. While this ‘financialisation of commodities’ is generally not viewed as the source of price turbulence, evidence suggests that trading in futures markets may have amplified volatility in the short term.”

Plain English translation:

• global warming: climate change from using fossil fuels
• deregulation: special export zones
• globalization: loss of national self-reliance
• peak oil: growing cash crops and biofuel instead of food
• capitalism: using food production as a bank

In other words the hippies are right. Allowing wealthy people and corporations to accumulate and trade control of land, industry and infrastructure gave us a cycle of reinvestment in technology and resource extraction, leading ultimately to a world with many more, healthier, wealthier, better-educated people. But this is also an volatile and expensive world, and at the peak of our prosperity we have decided to stop controlling the volatility and ignore the hidden costs.

Spider Golems

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, golems are artificial life forms created as robot-like servants by intelligent dinosaurs.
Just as humans build anthropomorphic robots that look like people, so intelligent dinosaurs might make dinosaur-like golems. These golems are based on spider biology, but they have reptilian skin, legs that jut downward from the body like a dinosaur, and pedipalps modified into arms with grasping claws.
Of course a spider golem doesn't have to be shaped like a spider. The shaggy spider golem on the left has four legs. One of the missing legs has been replaced by a circular attachment point for modular biomechanical components.

The golem in the middle has a more conservative spider shape, and a hard mechanical-looking cuticle. The pin joints of each limb have been modified into stronger hinge joints which can support more weight. Standing next to it is a furry insect-based golem with a dinosaur-like body plan.

Dinosaur Sketches

I have been scanning in some drawings, and found a few dinosaurs that I like:

The shading shows some loose skin on this sauropod.

This is some sort of lightly built therizinosaurid, perhaps Erlikosaurus. While most dinosaurs held their spines horizontally, parallel to the ground, the therizinosaurs held their backs up at an angle from the ground.

This is a speculative creature that evolved in the Squawk Role-Playing Game universe. In the millions of years since hadrosaurs and other giant dinosaurs disappeared from our world, mammals have evolved from squatty short-limbed critters into a variety of descendants, including graceful forms like deer and wolves. In the Squawk universe dinosaurs have also evolved long-limbed, graceful forms like this hadrosaur.

RPGs Separate us from the Animals

Ethan Gilsdorf's Salon article starts out looking at D&D as simply generation X nostalgia, but then explores the important impact roleplaying has had on the character of that generation.

Then he wonders about generation Y:

But like so many people my age, I miss that Friday night realm of paper and pencil. That camaraderie, that connection to open-ended storytelling. D&D was an experience we made for ourselves, for each other. Was D&D then a "better" imaginative experience than "World of Warcraft" today? I like looking back on my primitive game and scoff at these younger generations of video gamers. All I needed to "immerse" myself in fantasy worlds were pencils and paper, not PlayStation consoles and pixels, I snort.

The RPG store in my hometown is filled with teenagers playing RPGs. I am the only generation X-er in my D&D group. Obviously young people have a flexible schedule and spend a lot of time hanging out with their friends, but I suspect that D&D is even more popular with generation Y than it was with generation X.

WoW - at best - is a gateway drug - like the Lord of the Rings movies (which I heard have been made into a series of books :-) WoW is essentially just a cheezily polygonned version of Mafia Wars - and it's not even integreated with Facebook. WoW borrows some tactics and thematic elements from D&D, but even the most sophisticated WoW clans don't approach the shared creative experience of a typical D&D group.

Roleplaying games teach you how to look at the world as a common experience, created by peers who embody various complementary virtues. This worldview is nearly absent from the baby boomer generation which sees the world in terms of utilitarian bottom-lines and kantian moral paradoxes.

People who lived through the austerity of the Great Depression or the generations before them know a little more about creativity and character than the baby boomers, but I think the worldview of the rising generation has more in common with the Renaissance or the ancient Greek philosophers, sharing with those thinkers an interest in how human virtues transform the world, but with a thousand times as many people participating.

The tabletop is the new studio and the new gymnasium, but without the nudity :-)