Brains From Another Planet...

James Scott, "Legibility," Flavius Apion, Anoup, the Emperor Justinian, Robin of Locksley, Rebecca Daughter of Mordecai, King Richard, and Others... Brad Delong tells a tale of "legibility." "Legibility" in this case is the ability of a centralized government power to discern what is going on in the periphery of its responsibilities. He starts with Emperor Justinian's inability to see clearly what is happening in the provinces, which are behaving more like feudal states with local lords than like the legal order of the Imperial Republic, and Justinian's inability to do anything about it because he relies on the local lords to inform him. "Illegibility" in this case is a description of The SNAFU Principle.

Police Tell Brooklyn Women Not To Wear Skirts If They Don’t Want To Be Raped. [Ads on this site probably NSFW]. The Department For The Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice strikes again. Look, whoever's assaulting women in Brooklyn would attack even if every woman wore a freakin' burqa. It is not the police's job to police the public dress of its citizenry.

On the other hand, I'm annoyed by Roche's attitude toward the gun thread on the news site. The world is full of assholes, and the cops can't hover over every single one of them. It's a sick and misogynistic attitude to believe that a woman who has been raped is somehow morally superior to the one who shoots an assailant, but that is the moral calculus at the extreme end of liberal sensibilities. It's as misogynistic to tell a woman that "carrying a gun is acting like a man," as it is to question my masculinity when I wear my kilt.

The Fermi Paradox solved: our galaxy farts, so no one will come near

I Wish Structured Procrastination Worked Better For Me

Omaha and I watch The IgNobel awards this past Friday, live-tweeting it as we went, and enjoyed the heck out of it. The "Ode To Coffee" was a little strained, but the rest of the show was otherwise wonderful.

The Literature Award went to John Perry, who fifteen years ago wrote the brilliant How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done, introducing the world to the concept of Structured Procrastination. The IgNobel team finally got around to recognizing his work.

I wish Perry's tricks worked for me. Omaha says that I'm bad at even that kind of thing: that I typically spend a day doing geeky stuff, and then guiltily stick my nose into the kids' lives on the assumption that I have to do some "Dad stuff." I hope to think I'm better than that, but some days not so much. And even then, when I'm good at GTD I get neurotic about thinking what I've missed, and I must have missed something, my to-do list is empty!

Still working on the process...

Please. Tempt us further.

In Salon magazine this Sunday, Alan Lightman talks about where science cannot reach:

We cannot clearly show why the ending of a particular novel haunts us. We cannot prove under what conditions we would sacrifice our own life in order to save the life of our child. We cannot prove whether it is right or wrong to steal in order to feed our family, or even agree on a definition of "right" and "wrong." We cannot prove the meaning of our life, or whether life has any meaning at all.

To which I respond... "Please. Tempt us."

We may not be able to agree on a definition of right or wrong, but when it comes to why a certain novel "haunts" us, that's just (and I fully admit that's a huge, computationally and evidentially expensive and at present un-doable "just") figuring out how the coherent ideas in the novel impress themselves upon the structures of our brain in a way that causes the brain to re-emit them. When it comes to the conditions, let's just admit that fractally, the brain is pretty damned complex a little universe of its own, and discerning the starting points is a bit like the butterfly wings that cause hurricanes-- but nobody claims that the weatherman can't ever be right, or that both meteorolgy and climatology aren't sciences.

From this very second going forward, the number of things that might happen to you, and the number of ways you will react, are inherently large, and larger the further in time we project. They are not, however, infinite. They may be precisely intractable, but they're not probabilistically intractable. Any one of those timelines is valid. Some are more acceptable than others. Lightman looks back, like a puddle, and wonders at the marvelous coincidence that he fits his pothole, and somehow expects the coincidence to keep holding true.

A creationsists will sometimes (often) write, "Science cannot explain how humans evolved," and mean, "I cannot grasp just how deep our past is, or how complex our world, and so cannot imagine how we evolved." What Lightman writes "We cannot clearly show...", he is really writing, "I cannot imagine how we will explain..."

In both cases, transhumanists respond, "Imagine harder."

The Cinema In My Mind Continues...

I had no cinematic dreams Friday or Saturday night. I guess the dream muses were taking the night off. Sunday, though, it was my turn to get behind the wheel of Bulitt's 1968 Mustang and drive crazily through a vaguely Tron-like landscape. I was definitely trying to get away from something, but still, what that something was remains vague and undefined.

Really, brain, just tell me the rest of the story, okay?