...that some people born in 1990 are adults now?
Sure, if you were born then maybe it's not such a shock. If you were graduating from high school round about then, then it seems a wee bit of a shock that people you consider babies (because you left when they were babies) are themselves about to finish high school.
I feel old now. :-)
I think time appears to pass more quickly the older you get. This makes some sense to me, since when you were, say, four years old, one year was 25% of all of the time you had ever known (and probably 100% as long as all of the time you could remember). By the time you get to 30, a year is just 3% of all the time you have ever known. If you manage to get to 100, it's only 1%, so maybe it tends to slow down. After all, the derivative of 1/x is -1/(x*x).
Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Recently Watched: The Story of Stuff
You too can watch the Story of Stuff right here.
And now that you've done that, we can think about stuff.
Now, there are a lot of things in the video I can agree with, if they're true. If it's true that it's actually physically impossible for every person on Earth to simultaneously experience the same quality of life as those of us in North America, then that's pretty sad. If it's true that our quality of life is built on the backs of the "developing" world, then that's pretty sad. I'm not at all sure what can be done about it, but there you go.
At the same time, I really get the feeling that not everything in the video adds up, but I don't really have the facts to confirm or deny most of what is in the video.
However, when I watched the part about planned obsolescence of computers, I got the same feeling I get when seeing computers portrayed in most movies: it's all just wrong. It's so wrong that it calls into question every other claim presented in the film.
The main problem is the claim that only one tiny part of your computer changes from year to year, and the only difference is the shape of the socket (hence the "planned obsolescence" claim).
Now, presumably she's talking about the CPU. It's completely ignorant to suggest that
any CPU should be able to work on any motherboard. There have been major technological advances made in CPU speeds, and the supporting clock frequency from the motherboard, on-board system software, front-side bus speed, memory bus speed band, and any of a dozen other technological advances of the last several years are necessary to make it work. Technically it might be possible to build a significantly faster CPU and put it on an old motherboard, but it would be so hampered by the rest of the system not advancing along with it there would hardly be much point.
RAM, hard drives, video cards have all improved, and not in any planned-obsolescence way, but in a we-didn't-know-how-to-build-it-before way. Technological progress is not the same thing as planned obsolescence, although it might look the same to someone who doesn't know any better.
Now, that doesn't invalidate the point that maybe we don't actually need all those big improvements and could be happy with playing text adventures on our ancient PCs. I'm not sure that encouraging that sort of technological stagnation would be a good idea either - the only reason we're not all starving to death is due to technological advancement. The entertainment industry is an interesting one, and I work right in the middle of it so my perception of it is probably colored. I never find it quite as evil as she might like to paint it though - we don't plan to make new games to make the old ones obsolete, people simply stop buying them after six months (on average).
To be honest, I find American consumerism excessive and disgusting. As with all things, balance is key, and there is no balance or happiness there. Consuming seems to be the end goal, not happiness, which is a very bizarre way to approach life.
So, I'm going to keep driving my Civic Hybrid, recycling as much as I can, and just generally be a moderate consumer. I'm also going to buy DVDs once in a while, upgrade my computer when I can't play new games any more, and generally have a little fun once in a while.
And now that you've done that, we can think about stuff.
Now, there are a lot of things in the video I can agree with, if they're true. If it's true that it's actually physically impossible for every person on Earth to simultaneously experience the same quality of life as those of us in North America, then that's pretty sad. If it's true that our quality of life is built on the backs of the "developing" world, then that's pretty sad. I'm not at all sure what can be done about it, but there you go.
At the same time, I really get the feeling that not everything in the video adds up, but I don't really have the facts to confirm or deny most of what is in the video.
However, when I watched the part about planned obsolescence of computers, I got the same feeling I get when seeing computers portrayed in most movies: it's all just wrong. It's so wrong that it calls into question every other claim presented in the film.
The main problem is the claim that only one tiny part of your computer changes from year to year, and the only difference is the shape of the socket (hence the "planned obsolescence" claim).
Now, presumably she's talking about the CPU. It's completely ignorant to suggest that
any CPU should be able to work on any motherboard. There have been major technological advances made in CPU speeds, and the supporting clock frequency from the motherboard, on-board system software, front-side bus speed, memory bus speed band, and any of a dozen other technological advances of the last several years are necessary to make it work. Technically it might be possible to build a significantly faster CPU and put it on an old motherboard, but it would be so hampered by the rest of the system not advancing along with it there would hardly be much point.
RAM, hard drives, video cards have all improved, and not in any planned-obsolescence way, but in a we-didn't-know-how-to-build-it-before way. Technological progress is not the same thing as planned obsolescence, although it might look the same to someone who doesn't know any better.
Now, that doesn't invalidate the point that maybe we don't actually need all those big improvements and could be happy with playing text adventures on our ancient PCs. I'm not sure that encouraging that sort of technological stagnation would be a good idea either - the only reason we're not all starving to death is due to technological advancement. The entertainment industry is an interesting one, and I work right in the middle of it so my perception of it is probably colored. I never find it quite as evil as she might like to paint it though - we don't plan to make new games to make the old ones obsolete, people simply stop buying them after six months (on average).
To be honest, I find American consumerism excessive and disgusting. As with all things, balance is key, and there is no balance or happiness there. Consuming seems to be the end goal, not happiness, which is a very bizarre way to approach life.
So, I'm going to keep driving my Civic Hybrid, recycling as much as I can, and just generally be a moderate consumer. I'm also going to buy DVDs once in a while, upgrade my computer when I can't play new games any more, and generally have a little fun once in a while.
Friday, September 7, 2007
What are we?
From time to time I think about our (that is, human's) place in the world / universe.
I remember being in elementary school, and we were being taught to classify things into "natural" and "man-made." At the time this struck me as an exceptionally stupid way to classify things, because people are as much a part of nature as anything else. Really, despite our manipulation of tools and our invention prowess and communication abilities, we have more in common with squirrels than bacteria living in under-sea volcanic vents do. I'm not really an environmentalist,
but man-made is not a natural classification for me.
Let me get to the point: We are animals. We are made of atoms, just like trees, dirt, rocks, and fuzzy bunnies, and everything else that is not hard vacuum (and even then quantum mechanics makes that a bit iffy, but that's not the point, not yet anyway). We are not special in any universal sense. We are special in a personal sense, possibly, but ultimately we're just a bunch of stuff crawling around on the surface of a rock orbiting a giant fusion reactor. As I heard someone say (quoting someone else, I believe, and I'm not going to track down the original author right now): We're just a bunch of cells that decided to be "us" for a while.
Now, those sorts of thoughts probably freak out the religious among us, who regard humans as exceptionally special. I think it's pretty cool to think of a person as a bunch of single-celled organisms that got together and created a person, but maybe I'm just weird that way.
There's a quote from the TV show Babylon 5 suggesting that we are the universe attempting to understand itself. When I first heard that, I thought it was pseudo-religious garbage - the universe "intentionally" creating people to help understand itself. I realized recently that's not really what it means. We actually are a part of the universe. We're a bunch of supernova remnants. We are just a chunk of the universe. And we are trying to understand the universe. Yes, we literally are a piece of the universe trying to understand the universe (i.e. itself). That doesn't imply intent, creation, or anything else, that's simply a statement of fact.
I'll have to think more about what that means, but it seems a very interesting way to look at things to me.
I remember being in elementary school, and we were being taught to classify things into "natural" and "man-made." At the time this struck me as an exceptionally stupid way to classify things, because people are as much a part of nature as anything else. Really, despite our manipulation of tools and our invention prowess and communication abilities, we have more in common with squirrels than bacteria living in under-sea volcanic vents do. I'm not really an environmentalist,
but man-made is not a natural classification for me.
Let me get to the point: We are animals. We are made of atoms, just like trees, dirt, rocks, and fuzzy bunnies, and everything else that is not hard vacuum (and even then quantum mechanics makes that a bit iffy, but that's not the point, not yet anyway). We are not special in any universal sense. We are special in a personal sense, possibly, but ultimately we're just a bunch of stuff crawling around on the surface of a rock orbiting a giant fusion reactor. As I heard someone say (quoting someone else, I believe, and I'm not going to track down the original author right now): We're just a bunch of cells that decided to be "us" for a while.
Now, those sorts of thoughts probably freak out the religious among us, who regard humans as exceptionally special. I think it's pretty cool to think of a person as a bunch of single-celled organisms that got together and created a person, but maybe I'm just weird that way.
There's a quote from the TV show Babylon 5 suggesting that we are the universe attempting to understand itself. When I first heard that, I thought it was pseudo-religious garbage - the universe "intentionally" creating people to help understand itself. I realized recently that's not really what it means. We actually are a part of the universe. We're a bunch of supernova remnants. We are just a chunk of the universe. And we are trying to understand the universe. Yes, we literally are a piece of the universe trying to understand the universe (i.e. itself). That doesn't imply intent, creation, or anything else, that's simply a statement of fact.
I'll have to think more about what that means, but it seems a very interesting way to look at things to me.
Saturday, September 1, 2007
So, I was thinking....
I make games for a living. On one hand, it's very rewarding, because at the end of a project there's actually something that you have created that literally hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people will enjoy. I have wondered with increasing frequency over the years whether it would be more valuable to put my skills towards things more obviously beneficial to the health and welfare of humanity.
In the end, though, I have brought a lot of joy to a lot of people over the years. I do this better than I do anything; it is quite possible I do this better than I will ever be able to do anything else. I can sense myself casually drifting to the point where my experience often interferes with my ability to try reckless new approaches to things. I'll fight that as long as I can, but my days of being able to change the world are probably numbered.
What does the betterment of humanity mean exactly anyway? For a lot of people, I have made life more enjoyable. I'm sure for some, I have made life worth living, if even for a short while. There are other things I could do that might save lives, but saving a life is not the same as making a life worth living. What a drab place it would be if everyone worked only to keep everyone else alive, only to have them inevitably die at a later time anyway.
We often forget that we will die. We more often forget that we should die, to make room for new people, and more importantly, new ideas. Saving lives has become and end unto itself, grown from this forgetfulness, until we have forgotten how to live.
So I will continue to do what I do. I will continue to touch people's lives in the best way that I can, and hopefully make us all better for it.
In the end, though, I have brought a lot of joy to a lot of people over the years. I do this better than I do anything; it is quite possible I do this better than I will ever be able to do anything else. I can sense myself casually drifting to the point where my experience often interferes with my ability to try reckless new approaches to things. I'll fight that as long as I can, but my days of being able to change the world are probably numbered.
What does the betterment of humanity mean exactly anyway? For a lot of people, I have made life more enjoyable. I'm sure for some, I have made life worth living, if even for a short while. There are other things I could do that might save lives, but saving a life is not the same as making a life worth living. What a drab place it would be if everyone worked only to keep everyone else alive, only to have them inevitably die at a later time anyway.
We often forget that we will die. We more often forget that we should die, to make room for new people, and more importantly, new ideas. Saving lives has become and end unto itself, grown from this forgetfulness, until we have forgotten how to live.
So I will continue to do what I do. I will continue to touch people's lives in the best way that I can, and hopefully make us all better for it.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Recently Watched: Happy Feet
I recently watched Happy Feet, mostly because it was the movie that beat Pixar's Cars at the academy awards, which to me seemed to be a rather significant accomplishment. It may have deserved it, it was very good, although I got the feeling a rather large portion of the movie could have been edited out, still made the same point and tightened up the pacing quite a bit.
I'm not here to critique the movie, though.
One of the main plot lines in the movie is that aliens (humans) are stealing the penguin's food supply (fish) either selfishly or unwittingly. From the penguin's perspective (and these are singing / talking / dancing penguins now), humans are simply beyond comprehension. At the same time, penguins are (to some humans) stupid, worthless birds, so why not take all of their fish?
I've been seeing articles fairly frequently recently about Fermi's Paradox (see here and here) and this got me to thinking about the existence of alien life, and what it would likely do if it encountered us. The problem we face is that, if life is even remotely as probable as suspected, and the odds of a technological space-faring race evolving is at all probable, the aliens should be here and everywhere else already.
One of the posts in the second link above suggested that any race sufficiently advanced to travel between stars must be so advanced that they've solved all energy, food and mortality problems. That seems a bit ridiculous, presumably from the perspective of 600 years ago you could believe the same thing about a civilization that could cross the Atlantic. Or the Pacific. Or circumnavigate the globe. In an aircraft. Well, our fabulous civilization has done all of those things, and so many more, but those problems are more than a little way from being solved.
It seems that our perception of an alien race is some race so advanced that it is impossible for them to make a mistake. Crashing in Roswell would simply be impossible for a race that has traveled the stars, despite zero-g space travel and landing in a rather significant gravity well with an atmosphere being two fairly different problems. I think we have to admit it's at least possible for alien races to make mistakes, for machinery no matter how advanced to fail, and that we have only slightly more insight into how to build an interstellar spacecraft than penguins have about how to build a fishing trawler.
So, it's back to the penguins again. Perhaps we are the penguins. Perhaps the purposes of alien life is so beyond our understanding that humans are of little interest beyond the occasional alien zoologist, who might drop in to catalog us, and then be on their way. It is supreme arrogance to assume that we are so intelligent and advanced that a space-faring species would feel compelled to drop in and start a conversation? Penguins can communicate after a fashion, but it seems it would be scarcely worth the effort to communicate with them. Taking part in their mating ritual hardly seems compelling. Even if they were more intelligent, discussing the consistency of snow and ice and how tasty raw fish is would only be novel for about a week.
Perhaps one of the biggest problems we have is that we have never met another species with even remotely our level of abstract thinking. If other species had arisen that we could interact with (and we could resist wiping them out) perhaps we would understand a thing or two about other intelligent species - and perhaps that once you have done so, meeting others isn't quite as cool as we think it would be. No denying, it would be big for us. Maybe not so much for them if they've done it hundreds, thousands or millions of times with species a lot more advanced than we are.
There are lots of potential reasons why Fermi's Paradox isn't a paradox at all. Maybe they are here, and they're either hiding, or they just don't care. Of course, maybe the chances of a technological society arising are absurdly small. Life has existed on this planet for a very, very, very long time. We are the only species known to have even been able to create fire in all that time. What did happen to our evolutionary path that brought us to that point that every other species seems to have missed, and why did it take so long? Or maybe it was fast, and nobody else really is there yet. It's entirely possible there are billions of worlds exactly like ours, minus us, so the universe is filled with life trapped on their worlds until their stars explode and the whole thing starts all over again. The odds of life arising may be small, so far there has only been one verified case of human-level intelligence ever, despite billions of years of evolution, and that's us. (I might be willing to provide an exception to some of our parent and sibling species, but regardless there is only this one line that has even approached a technological society, and only one that has achieved it.)
To finish up, I liked the movie, not only because it was well done, but because it makes me think about all of this stuff, and that's just good nerd fun. It gave me a new perspective on how aliens might perceive us, and gave me a bit of a reality check on some of the exceedingly arrogant perceptions we might have of ourselves as a technological society.
I'm not here to critique the movie, though.
One of the main plot lines in the movie is that aliens (humans) are stealing the penguin's food supply (fish) either selfishly or unwittingly. From the penguin's perspective (and these are singing / talking / dancing penguins now), humans are simply beyond comprehension. At the same time, penguins are (to some humans) stupid, worthless birds, so why not take all of their fish?
I've been seeing articles fairly frequently recently about Fermi's Paradox (see here and here) and this got me to thinking about the existence of alien life, and what it would likely do if it encountered us. The problem we face is that, if life is even remotely as probable as suspected, and the odds of a technological space-faring race evolving is at all probable, the aliens should be here and everywhere else already.
One of the posts in the second link above suggested that any race sufficiently advanced to travel between stars must be so advanced that they've solved all energy, food and mortality problems. That seems a bit ridiculous, presumably from the perspective of 600 years ago you could believe the same thing about a civilization that could cross the Atlantic. Or the Pacific. Or circumnavigate the globe. In an aircraft. Well, our fabulous civilization has done all of those things, and so many more, but those problems are more than a little way from being solved.
It seems that our perception of an alien race is some race so advanced that it is impossible for them to make a mistake. Crashing in Roswell would simply be impossible for a race that has traveled the stars, despite zero-g space travel and landing in a rather significant gravity well with an atmosphere being two fairly different problems. I think we have to admit it's at least possible for alien races to make mistakes, for machinery no matter how advanced to fail, and that we have only slightly more insight into how to build an interstellar spacecraft than penguins have about how to build a fishing trawler.
So, it's back to the penguins again. Perhaps we are the penguins. Perhaps the purposes of alien life is so beyond our understanding that humans are of little interest beyond the occasional alien zoologist, who might drop in to catalog us, and then be on their way. It is supreme arrogance to assume that we are so intelligent and advanced that a space-faring species would feel compelled to drop in and start a conversation? Penguins can communicate after a fashion, but it seems it would be scarcely worth the effort to communicate with them. Taking part in their mating ritual hardly seems compelling. Even if they were more intelligent, discussing the consistency of snow and ice and how tasty raw fish is would only be novel for about a week.
Perhaps one of the biggest problems we have is that we have never met another species with even remotely our level of abstract thinking. If other species had arisen that we could interact with (and we could resist wiping them out) perhaps we would understand a thing or two about other intelligent species - and perhaps that once you have done so, meeting others isn't quite as cool as we think it would be. No denying, it would be big for us. Maybe not so much for them if they've done it hundreds, thousands or millions of times with species a lot more advanced than we are.
There are lots of potential reasons why Fermi's Paradox isn't a paradox at all. Maybe they are here, and they're either hiding, or they just don't care. Of course, maybe the chances of a technological society arising are absurdly small. Life has existed on this planet for a very, very, very long time. We are the only species known to have even been able to create fire in all that time. What did happen to our evolutionary path that brought us to that point that every other species seems to have missed, and why did it take so long? Or maybe it was fast, and nobody else really is there yet. It's entirely possible there are billions of worlds exactly like ours, minus us, so the universe is filled with life trapped on their worlds until their stars explode and the whole thing starts all over again. The odds of life arising may be small, so far there has only been one verified case of human-level intelligence ever, despite billions of years of evolution, and that's us. (I might be willing to provide an exception to some of our parent and sibling species, but regardless there is only this one line that has even approached a technological society, and only one that has achieved it.)
To finish up, I liked the movie, not only because it was well done, but because it makes me think about all of this stuff, and that's just good nerd fun. It gave me a new perspective on how aliens might perceive us, and gave me a bit of a reality check on some of the exceedingly arrogant perceptions we might have of ourselves as a technological society.
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