The last time Neptune was at this time of its year, the Mexican-American War was just warming up and hadn’t even become a shooting conflict yet.  It hadn’t even been discovered by human beings, yet.

A year ago on Mercury was in early January here on Earth.

Second, this segment from the show Newswipe, done by the inimitable Charlie Brooker:

An ongoing challenge is the tendency of Eureqa to return equations that fit data, but refer to variables that are not yet understood. Lipson likened this to what would happen if time-traveling scientists presented the laws of energy conservation to medieval mathematicians.

“Algebra was known. You could plug in the variable, and it would work. But the concept of energy wasn’t there. They didn’t have the vocabulary to understand it,” he said. “We’ve seen this in the lab. Eureqa finds a new relationship. It’s predictive, it’s elegant, it has to be true. But we have no idea what it means.”

So some smart folks created a smart application.  The application is so smart, in fact, that seems to be returning equations that are true, but beyond our current ability to understand.

Welcome to the future.

Also, despite his modest declaration in the introduction that the problem of P=NP is “still open” Fortnow’s overview gives strong support for the case that a better answer might be “probably not.”  There’s been no evidence that P=NP and increasingly good indications that such is simply not the case.

Fortnow also points out a lot of good current research on a variety of topics that are incidental to the P=NP problem.  All things considered, if you’re interested in the problem, the article is a must read.

Even if Fortnow DOES leave out my heuristics for addressing NP-Complete problems, Genetic Algorithms.⁽¹⁾

Go go gadget 0-based list!

0.)  So this blog’s been faltering largely because I’ve been focusing on Other Things.  Work’s taken up epic amounts of time. When I haven’t been working, I’ve been trying to get a thesis done and to study for my comps.  I WILL finish this M. Phil.  I will.  Period.  And so between Thesis stuff and work and daily chores and errands and such, time’s been scant of late.

1.)    And when I haven’t been working or thesising or studying for comps or doing chores and errands or sleeping, I’ve been totally addicted to Red Faction: Guerrilla on the XBox 360.  The single player campaign’s pretty decent.  Story holds no surprises for people who played the first two of the series.  (Other, of course, than the “what? I already freed Mars.  I have to do it again?” factor.  Seriously, guys, three revolutions is enough.  Let’s try to make this one stick, alright?)

What’s been particularly addictive, however, is the multiplayer.  The game-modes that make use of the destructive buildings make for a fun, variable game play experience.  The deathmatch modes are fun, but not particularly new.  Some of the maps have some balance issues (one, in particular, is a “first one to rocket launcher wins” sort of map), and some of the weapons are either useless or too powerful.  But really, the gameplay in all of the multiplayer modes is at least solid, and in some cases (Siege, in particular) pretty damned awesome.

2.)  Shooting’s flagging.  I don’t have the time or the money to be as competitive as I’d like, so I’ve scaled from “practicing for competition” schedule back to the “maintain high competency” schedule.  A couple hundred rounds twice a month.  I’m not going to win the Bianchi Cup, but I can keep them in the 10 ring at conversational distances just fine.

On that note, I’m going to be scaling my armory down a bit.  I now have one pistol (my XD 45) I can use for carry and the occasional competition.  And while I LOVE my CZ-75, I shoot the XD more accurately and not much slower than the CZ.  So while the CZ was originally going to be my competition gun, I think I might sell it off.  Similarly, I think my Heritage Arms .22 revolver may get sold.  It has been a lot of fun, but it was essentially an impulse buy.  I’d never shot a 22mag before, so I got it, shot it, liked it reasonably well.  Now it’s just sitting in the top of my closet.

Heck, I’m even considering selling off my Walther P22, which is a good little piece, save for the fact that it was accursed straight from the factory with sloppy sights and a magazine disconnect “safety”.

My Mosin’s down for the count with a crack in the chamber.  (And actually a piece of it missing that came flying out on extraction of a round.)  So I’ll probably break it down to parts, clean it up, and give it to my buddy Paul who has a Mosin.

Of course, if I get rid of all that iron, I’ll probably wind up immediately buying one of those new T/C Ventures in 30-06.  Seriously, those rifles are so sexy it hurts.  And they’re priced at just $500!  That is, if I can find one.

All of that would leave me with every piece I’ve thought might make up a well-stocked gun safe.  I’d have a good, reliable shotgun (Mossberg 590A), a carry pistol (Springfield XD .45), a militia rifle (Sig 556), a full power bolt action rifle (T/C Venture 30-06), and a .22 of some kind (Marlin Model 60).

3.)  Politics, politics, politics.  The health care debate is unfortunate in that it’s hiding some bigger debates we need to have in this country.  Many of them the sorts of procedural, metagovernance that gets ignored too often in favor of rabid, vapid DoSomething-ism.

Honestly, I’d like to give you an incisive, well-thought out rebuttal to the actual material of the bill as proposed.  But, like much of Congress, I haven’t read it.  I haven’t time.  Of course I have the excuse that I have a job.  That IS their job.  Of course, it’s not like they have time.  These days legislation is about DOING SOMETHING NOW NOW NOW OR WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE JUST FUCKING PASS SOMETHING ALREADY.

“Do something, even if it’s wrong” is all fine and good in one’s personal life, but it’s a shitty way to run a government.

So anyway, I’ll just leave you with two thoughts, one practical and one principled, on socialized medicine in general.  First, the inimitable P. J. O’Rourke who quips: “Think healthcare is expensive now?  Just wait ’til you see what it costs when it’s free.”  And on the principled side of things, I’ll turn the proverbial mic over to Marko Kloos:

“Health care is great, and I wouldn’t want to be without access to it.

But a “human right”?  Hippie, please.

I have no doubt that the owner of the thusly-stickered car considers him- or herself to be educated, informed, and thoroughly on top of things.  By proclaiming health care a “right”, however, he or she demonstrates a rather galling unfamiliarity with the nature of rights.

Let’s get the most obvious point out of the way first.  You cannot have a right to something that necessitates a financial obligation on someone else’s part. “

4.) I’m becoming increasingly fond of the topical blog format. I’m also becoming somewhat sick of my chosen-in-the-spur-of-the-moment blog title. I doubt I’ll split the blogs again, because really, if that’s the case, then where will it stop? I mean, I could easily have a music blog, a politics blog, a gun blog, a science/geekery blog, and a blog for everything else. And that thought annoys even me, and I love my own writing.

I think I’ll probably just play with the way I use this blog first. Probably rename it, probably start on the stylistic changes that have been LONG overdue. I’m currently in arears to my graphic designer, so I won’t be asking for any new graphics until I pay her what I owe her. Or until she agrees that me helping her haul her furniture into her new 3rd-floor walkup was sufficient payment.

5.) And now, off to Thesis work. I’m 60 pages in, with lots of material left on the cutting room floor, as it were. It’s depressing to think that I’ve got probably another 20 pages to go knowing that I very well might have cut that much, if not more, out. Still. Them’s the breaks I guess.

I leave you with this video of an absurdly awesome cigarette trick courtesy of a crazy old juggler:

Updated 2009.7.7: Somehow WordPress managed to eat the link to Marko Kloos’ blog post.  Fixed.

“Oh Lord of Hosts, who guided my namesake David’s hand so that he could put a rock right through Goliath’s pre-frontal lobes even though he played the harp in his spare time, I thank Thee that the readers didn’t see me do that.”

This got me thinking that it’s interesting to me that a media, namely blogs, that have long been associated with personal spleen-venting, are increasingly becoming sources for polished, focused commentary.  Some of the work (e.g. Kevin Baker’s uberposts) being done on them is downright scholarly.  We’ve reached a point in the development of blogs where expert writers such as Petzal and his coblogger Phil Bourjaily are using a blog as their primary means of communication with their readership.  Gone are the days (if such days ever existed outside stereotypes and media prejudice) where blogs were primarily the purview of personal screeds and mopes.

Blogging has entered the age where it’s become a legitimate channel for informed, expert communication.  What’s more, the experts are understanding their audience not solely as the readers of their books, articles, or columns, but as the readership of their blogs as well.

What does this mean for the Internet in general and blogging in particular?  I have to confess that I’m not entirely sure.  But I do think that it’s Real Damn Interesting.

In a recent post at the wonderful Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster talks tangentially about one sort of anti-Humanism that’s currently in vogue with a lot of people:

“The worst example of this misanthropic worldview I’ve encountered occurred at a dinner party where the subject of space exploration came up. I was defending the idea of expanding into the Solar System as a necessity in terms of acquiring the tools of asteroid deflection, at which point my host said that an incoming asteroid would do the universe a favor if it destroyed our planet, and that we shouldn’t try to stop it.”

Now this resonates with me for two reasons.  One, I’m a space nerd and an unapologetic Get-Off-The-Rock advocate.  I genuinely feel that we need to be eyeing near-space colonization in this century.  The sooner, the better.  (My personal favorite target for this is Mars.  For a sensible, well-defended explanation on how this could be done, see The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin and Richard Wagner.)

Secondly, as a Humanist, this sort of species-wide misanthropy offends my deepest held beliefs and sensibilities.  Simply put, I believe that the human race is not only worthy of preserving, but something special, beautiful, and unique enough that saving it is unreservedly a Good Thing.  Further, I think that the sorts of mental contortions necessary to believe that we should all be wiped out are unnatural enough in the first place.  That people could bold-facedly assert that mankind deserves destruction and then continue to fight to continue their own lives and further their own interests smacks of rank selfishness.  Quite frankly, to say that “humanity should be let to be destroyed” coming from someone who doesn’t follow it up by checking themselves out one way or another has always struck me a “death for thee but not for me” sort of sentiment.  They hold the whole species in lethal disdain, save for themselves, and perhaps a few close friends and relatives.

Before I go further, I can hear a few voices in the audience shouting “strawman”.  In order to dispel those accusations, let me make two arguments for this sort of species-oriented misanthropy actually being a broadly held (or at least held by some) position.  First, there was a time in my life (at least a decade or so ago) when I thought this way.  I looked at the effects that people were having on the planet, on other species, and on one another and that, combined with a healthy dose of teenage iconoclasm and misanthropy, drove me to the conclusion “fuck it, everything’s better off without us.”  (N.B. This in no way contradicts what I said earlier about the selfish hypocrisy of such statements

Secondly, I’m far from the only person who has thought that way.  A couple of google searchs (yes I am aware that proof-by-google-search is far from rigorous, but I think it’s sufficient for my purposes) turned tons of pages of people seriously suggesting that the entire human race ought to be destroyed.  And while the ones that seemed to advocate a complete destruction seemed juvenile, they were genuine.  Others held onto a more tepid, Malthusian view that, really, we only needed to destroy MOST people in order to bring the world population back inline with some perceived “reasonable number.”

So perhaps instead of a strawman, I really only had an oversimplified account.  There’s total anti-Humanism and then there’s a sort of neo-Malthusianism.  The first is largely rooted in the belief that people are inherently evil, the second in the belief that, whatever people are like, there are too many of them.

The second sort of species-oriented misanthropy is more conveniently dispatched, so I’ll look at that one first.  To the neo-Malthusians I have two things to say.  First, the progenitor of much of the modern population reduction advocacy, Thomas Malthus, was shown wrong in much the same way I think his modern counterparts will be.  Essentially, Malthus looked at the current state of agricultural and economic affairs and suggested that the population capacity of the world was limited by those and other factors.  He argued that, for this reason, certain die-offs, plagues, wars, and genocides might be viewed as advantageous because they help to keep in check an otherwise exploding populace.  Aside from the fact that such Malthusean events usually put a fairly minor dent in the global population, the limiting pressures that Malthus identified on the population of the planet have been slackened many times since his death by the force of human ingenuity and development.  New agricultural techniques, new tools, new industries, and new modes of living have repeatedly pushed by the theoretical limit of the global human population.  Practically speaking, it seems like this trend is only continuing.  With the recent development of modern fertilizers and pesticides and genetically modified food stuffs, agriculture is providing more food than ever to feed the global population.  Economically, despite recent dips, the global gross production of goods is orders of magnitude higher than when Malthus was writing.  Medicine has eradicated several killer diseases and is on the verge of eradicating or severely limiting others.  Every year the force of human advancement makes ever more room on the planet and improves the lives of those who are already here.

The second point I have to the neo-Malthusians is, regardless of WHY they believe the human population ought to be reduced, wouldn’t a more productive and humane way to deal with the situation be to spread that population out?  Why not begin to try to shift some people off this rock and on to others?  To complain that the Earth is over-populated doesn’t necessarily mean we need fewer people, only that we need fewer people on Earth.

My arguments in response to the true anti-Humanists are, of necessity, less clear and straight forward.  The mind of someone who truly believes people to be and inherent detriment to something more valuable has already made several axiomatic assumptions that differ greatly from my own.  I believe that people are something special and something inherently possessing of value, beauty, and greatness.  I believe that we are possessing, through accidents of evolution, of unique faculties and proclivities which are worth exploring, preserving, and developing.  I believe that these faculties along with the bonds we share with one another and the great works that we’ve already accomplished and continue to accomplish ought to compel us to preserve our achievements and strive further for others.

But now, trying hard to find a way to defend these, it’s tempting to make them simple, axiomatic assertions of faith.  This I believe: that people are beautiful.  This I believe: that people are worthy.  This I believe: that people are meaningful.  It’s likewise tempting to respond the anti-Humanist with a recording of Bach’s Mass in B Minor and a picture of the Alhambra.  Or to ask them how a creature, as Hamlet put it “How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, … in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god”, could be unworthy of its own best efforts at survival and propogation.

Of course, Hamlet’s line wasn’t even enough of an argument for himself.  He immediately follows it by bemoaning man as the quintessence of dust.  And rightfully so, since these arguments rely on nothing more than my own personal sense of wonderment and enchantment with the human.  If I suggest that reason, art, and understanding are worth saving, it begs the question “why?”  If I suggest that our charity for one another and (burgeoningly) for the planet around us merits our salvation, one might answer that the world would tick along just fine without us.

About the only answer I can give that might satisfy naysayers is that I truly believe we have something to offer the universe.  Our drive, curiosity, wonder, aesthetics, reason, and beauty can expand through the universe and make it a truly better place.  And while I’m sure that sounds like starry-eyed drivel to most, I truly believe that a universe with people in it is better than one without.  We are not without our flaws, but nor are we without our merits.  And these merits I believe are without precedent on our planet.  And some, even, I’m sure are without precedent in the universe.

And I believe that spreading out into the galaxy will not only benefit us, but our planet, the other species with which we share it, and, if I may continue to be melodramatic, the universe at large.

This, apparently, was a problem which Microsoft had been oblivious to, despite the fact that I found several people on the internet posting about the same issue.  So I spent an irritating hour on the phone with Microsoft before getting the brush off “eh, maybe the adapter’s bad” and being told to return it for a replacement.

I went back to Best Buy, swapped it out, brought the new one home, and it worked fine.  “Okay”, though I, “just a piece of faulty hardware, it happens.”

So imagine my consternation when, after a long day at work, I went to sit down to pwn some n00bs at Halo and my XBox wouldn’t connect to live.

Checked the internet, no reports of live outages.  So I checked my network settings, and my XBox was insisting I didn’t have an adapter connected.  The adapter’s “ready to connect” light was on, but the XBox refused.  The problem was back.

So after some more googling, I found a few kindred souls whose adapters had been working, but then quit.  I tried a few of their solutions (mostly variations on the “unplug it and plug it back in again” theme), but to no avail.  And then I found a few posts suggesting that this problem can occasionally be repaired with the oldest trick in the book: the kit whack.

That is to say, there were a few souls on the internet for whom the solution to a misbehaving, $100 electronic widget was to grip it firmly, find a hard surface, and to introduce widget to surface a few times at a reasonably high velocity.

“Well”, thought I, “what have I got to lose?  Looks like I’m out $100 anyway.”  So I disconnected the adapter, gripped it firmly, said few invocations to Cthulu and the FSM, and gave it three sturdy whacks on the top of the stereo hutch.

I reconnected the adapter, and was greeted by the red “ready to connect” light.  And then, a few seconds later, it switched to green as the adapter found the network and connected.

Ladies and Gentleman, always remember the moral of this tale: where electronics are concerned, sometimes violence really is the answer.

In the meantime, here’s the new best thing I’ve discovered on the internet in ages.  (Includes vulgar language and occasional soda-out-nose levels of funny.)

Also a few bits of news I’ve been meaning to comment on, but haven’t had a chance.

So the Lon Horiuchi/H-S Precision thing.  I’m just kind of impressed how short-sighted and stupid the company was in this case.  How can you be a firearms manufacturer and just not know that most gunnies have a raging hate-on for Horiuchi?

For non-gunnies in the audience, Lon Horiuchi was the man who shot and killed Vicky Weaver (unarmed and holding her 10-month-old child at the time) at Ruby Ridge.  He was, at best, criminally wreckless.  At worst he’s an out-and-out murderer.  I mean, it’s detestable that H-S Precision would use Horiuchi’s testimonial, but aside from that it’s just so impressively stupid.  I almost want to applaud them for exploring new and interesting ways to be ignorant douchebags.  I mean, it’s truly ground-breaking work in the area of tacky numbskullery.

In other depressing news (and this is the topic of a long and getting longer follow-up post to this one here): a teenager was shot by Greek cops, there was (and still is) rioting, and now Europe’s on fire.

In African news, Mugabe is still an evil, ignorant asshole.

On a more interesting and less horrible note, scientists have found a whole mess of new kinds of critters in the Mekong.  Of course yet another species of spider “the size of a dinner plate” is EXACTLY what my nightmares needed…

In personal news, my new job is going fantastically well.  I finally got around to selling out and taking a salaried position, and it was a great decision.  For the first time in my professional career I like the people I work with and the work that I do.  I actually don’t mind going to work anymore!

Thesis is coming along.  Comps aren’t yet, but since I’m not allowed to take paid time off for another couple of months, I have a built-in excuse for not taking them yet.

That’s about the news.  Like I said, I have a few posts started on various topics.  If I haven’t lost all my readers, please stick around and watch this space and, work and motivation willing, I’ll get those up in the next few days.