R I P

R I P Dawn Brain nee Grinnell after several years' illness.

Something of a shock when someone you know, several years younger, dies.

Everything I Need to Know, I Learned from D&D

1. You'll be more successful if you have a plan for your life, instead of taking it as it comes
2. In order to make that plan, you will need the advice of someone who knows the system better than you do.
3. Being bold is more fun than being cautious.
4. Get along with people, especially your own group.
5. Don't get separated from your friends.
6. A person with high intelligence but low wisdom will do stupid things
7. People who do stupid things tend to regret it. Or die abruptly.
8. You will gather more fame and fortune by being really really good at one thing, than you will by being marginally okay at a lot of things.
9. It takes a lot of effort to be a hero--but what else would you want to be?

Memory

I saw an article on Instapundit to the effect that neuroscientists have something of a handle on the chemistry of memory, leading to the possibility of selective memory erasers. Just some random thoughts arising from that--treat these as story seeds for the next science fiction novel:

• does it become possible to treat PTSD? Do you only treat those people who are completely shell shocked and nonfunctional? If not, where do you draw the line? For crimes like rape, assault, and burglary, where there's a sense of violation, are the victims treated with memory erasers? How about consensual statutory rape--if the victim gets memory erasers, does it still deserve to be a major crime?
• If war and violent crime are bad, shouldn't we leave the memories so people have the emotions that, yes, these things are bad? If we can make them less bad by alleviating the memories, does that mean that people will make less effort to avoid those events and they'll happen more often?
• How about making other people take it? If you have an evil neighbor, the sort of person who is spiteful and petty, and she takes offense at something and starts a feud...are there circumstances in which you can legally compel her to forget the incident that started it?
• if you're in front of your peers and do something stupid, you can take an eraser, but you can't make everyone else take it. You could find that you don't remember the impromptu stripper act you did when you were drunk at the company New Years party, but everyone else does. Is that better than if you did remember it? Do you tend to seek out strangers, because that way if you do something embarrassing, you can forget it and they won't be around to remind you?
• To what extend could memory be modifiable? Can you erase your entire memory of a person--your ex-husband, for example? Your mother? How about if you then want the memory back?
  

Average

On examining the populace, I have concluded that 97.3% are below average.

Important events of 2011

Important to me, that is.

• February: Shock
• March: Rapier
• April: Gwen came from Australia to visit
• May: My grandfather passed away ; Josh graduated from college.
• June: Father's Day
• August: Trip to Arizona, including Canyon de Chelly and Grand Canyon
• September: Diana got braces; I bravely got on a jet ski with Josh.
• October: Josh, having Reasons to Move to Australia, headed across the Pacific.
• November: National Novel Writing Month and Thanksgiving
• December: Christmas

Power of the Web

Back in the dark ages--that is to say, when I went to college, early 80's--if you wanted to research something, you went to the library. Maybe you asked a professor or a librarian where to start. Then you went to the card catalog. That was like a database where each record was on a separate, small piece of paper that was not linked to anything else. Then you went and found a book that wasn't quite what you wanted, and either made do with that or looked in the bibliography and hoped you'd find something better. Rinse and repeat.

Want to find out the words to an Egyptian ritual, or how to load a flintlock, or what units were in a battle two hundred years ago? You don't have to spend all day at the library to get the answer. Ten seconds with a search engine, check the top few results, keep moving. We take web searches for granted now, but thirty years ago, twenty years ago, it was magic.

Clarity vs Disinformation

From comments on Armed and Dangerous:

“He is trying on an Orwellian distortion of the past in order to deform the future.”
Not only is that brilliant writing, but it hits at a core dysfunction in current cultural evolution. The two competing behaviors are clarity versus disinformation. Early in our species development, communication was comparatively slow and clarity conferred an evolutionary advantage to a group’s survival probability, e.g. a shout of warning when danger was near. We now live in a world of hyper-fast communication in which information overload can work against clarity. A small, but growing, segment of the population is experimenting with disinformation as a means of achieving parochial advantage.

936 Little Blobs

Life expectancy in the US is 936 months; what are you doing with this one?

Situationist

Along the lines of my Pinger post, someone has come up with the Situationist app.
Now all I need is a phone that will run apps....

Pinger

We get name tags at church. This Sunday, I put "Gustavus Adolphus" on my tag, in the hopes that someone would see it and say something like "Oh, you're into European history too?" and go on from there. I determined that the conjunction of sets of "People Who Notice Name Tags" and "People Who Speak Up" consists of one member, who is not also a member of "People Who Recognize Gustavus Adolphus". But I tried.

What we need is a phone app that will let you put in topics that you're interested in, and your photo, and then scan the area around you for people who have that same topic on their list. If you get a hit, you see that person's photo and can go strike up a conversation. (And they see your photo, or whatever photo you've loaded).

I recall reading a science fiction story with an idea for that device, which I believe was called a "pinger", but I can't remember what story. It sounds like a Larry Niven kind of thing to come up with, but for some reason I think it was someone else.

Country Clubs

Why is it called a "country club" when the most country-like aspect is the golf course? Why not add steeplechase and polo and skeet shooting or pheasant hunting--ideally, all at the same time? "Fore!" blam! "I say, Carruthers, good shot...what's that? One must play each fragment of the golf ball separately?" I can see the fox hunters in a melee with the polo riders, with occasional golf balls taking a toll of both sides.

Christmas presents

Someone asked me what I'd like for Christmas, and the answer is necessarily "I don't know." Why? Because if there was something that was reasonably priced that I particularly wanted, I'd have already gotten it myself. Therefore the choices are something I feel is too expensive, or something I don't want. Included in the "don't want" group is "things that I don't want only because I don't know about them"--but of course, I can't very well tell anyone what those things are!

True Names

I recently lost a hard drive and therefore about five months of emails since my last backup. This and some prodding from TomB led me to consider GMail, but that meant I needed an account name. As I was mulling over what name to pick, I was reminded of a question I got from a friend I know through a role playing game, who asked me what name I wanted to be called by. My response was that it didn't matter--I'm comfortable with Laser or Laserlight, or Runehorn, Chainshot, Flurry, Moosashi, Alarishi, Hunter, and so forth in various contexts. What's odd, perhaps, is the answer I did not give; I didn't say "my real name is Chris", because I don't think of that as my real name. Among some cultures, I've heard, a child gets a true name which denotes who he really is; he also has a name which is safe to tell other people, because it's merely a public name rather than his real name, and therefore has no power over him.
In this case everything else I tried was already taken (except MenacingBaa, which would take too much explanation), so I finally settled on chrisdeboe (but since my employer blocks Gmail, keep using the verizon address you're used to).
Is there anyone else who feels their given name isn't their "real" one? If you were picking a name for yourself, what would you pick?

Value of people

There was a discussion around the dinner table the other night about "How much is a person worth?"
The context for the discussion was trade: "Is it ethical for a company to move because the labor in another country is lower? Isn't that exploiting those low-pay workers offshore?" Well, if you can make the same quality product cheaper elsewhere but you don't move, your company will probably have to compete with someone who does move, and you will go out of business. As long as the workers have a choice, i.e. it's not a one-company town, then the workers get to decide whether the wages are high enough or not; if not, they go elsewhere.
From there, the question arose as to what a person's intrinsic value is. The Compassionate member of the family held that each person is priceless; the Economist insisted that a person is worth what someone else will pay for his knowledge or services.
They're both right, since, as BB pointed out in the comments to a previous post, it depends on who's doing the pricing. I may value a random person on another continent at zero--I wouldn't pay anything to support him. Some unknown furniture worker might be worth $200 per year to me, as shown by what I'm willing to pay for the furniture. I don't know him, so there's no value in the relationship. On the other hand, I have friends to whom I've given hundreds of dollars, when I didn't really have a hundred to spare. And there are some people--my wife, my son, a friend or two--for whom I can say that I've sat down and thought it through and decided that yes, I would be willing to die for them if the need arose, or to support them indefinitely (however, Josh, you still need to plan on getting a job--Ed.). The value is in the relationship. The corollary is that you--I--need not to be a hermit, but to go out and create relationships.

Questions to ask

With a nod to a post of Zoe Brain's--what would you ask? Specifically, if you were deciding whether or not to propose to someone, what three questions would you ask before deciding? 

We will assume this is someone you've already met, reasonably attractive, not obviously a incompatible as far as socio-economic status, religious preference, ability to speak the local language, etc. I'm not looking for "I should have asked what species he was; I never dreamed I'd be engaged to a dolphin"--unless, of course, that actually happened to you.

If you have already been married, you could make it "I wish I'd asked...." or "I'm glad I asked....".

The Beauty in Front of You

It broadened, brightened, and crept up the mountainside, setting fire to individual trees that had changed color early. It was a ray coming through a gap in the weather far to the west, levering up as the sun sank.

"That is the kind of beauty I was trying to get you to see," Orolo told me. Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways."

--from Anathem, by Neal Stephenson 

Raising a successful child

When you praise a child by telling him how smart he is, he tends to avoid challenging tasks, to give up easily when something is difficult, and to be competitive with his peers. When you praise him for how hard he works, he tends to seek more difficult puzzles and pays less attention to whether he's doing better than others. Intelligence is passive, in that you don't control how much you have; whereas effort is active.

And persistent effort is valuable, because "many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years."

Incidentally, I picked up these from Schlock Mercenary, specifically the artist's blog. Where would you expect to find this sort of information, if not in a web comic about space mercenaries?

Four pillars

"These four pillars uphold the world:
The wisdom of the learned,
The justice of the mighty,
The prayers of the righteous,
And the valor of the brave."
--an inscription on the gate of the University of Granada,
Moorish Spain, AD 1349

Unconditional Love

A man related the story of his wife asking "Why do you love me?" He felt he loved her unconditionally, so he thought "I'd love you even if you weren't pretty or healthy or smart or wise; I'd love you even if you didn't sleep with me, take care of me, make money or handle the house." So, boiling all that down, he answered: "No reason." Of course, that didn't go over very well.

"Unconditional love" isn't really entirely unconditional. It takes a relationship.

A lot of times we think of unconditional love in the context of marriage, but that usually has conditions of some sort: "You have to be willing and able to sleep with me" or "you have to refrain from sleeping with anyone else" or "you have to provide me with the lifestyle to which I'd like to become accustomed" or "you have to compliment me and buy me presents on my birthday and Valentines and our anniversary--you have to love me the way I want you to." So it might be better to think of it in a different context--a brother, for instance, or a daughter.
You'd love your daughter regardless of whether she got involved in destructive relationships, or was broke or addicted or paralyzed, or didn't share any of your interests, or lived in another country, or converted to another religion. You'd sacrifice for her not because of what she can do--she doesn't even have to thank you, much less love you in return--but because of who she is. But you wouldn't love some unnamed person in Uzbekistan or Peru, because you can't--there's no relationship there.

Thomas Paine

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." -- Thomas Paine

hat tip: Tom Barclay