Brief thoughts after reading Military Nanotechnology

I just got through reading Military Nanotechnology: Potential Applications and Preventive Arms Control by Jürgen Altmann (http://www.amazon.com/Military-Nanotechnology-Applications-Preventive-Contemporary/dp/0415407990)

This book covers a lot of ground. It discusses what sorts of research projects are being done worldwide (mostly in the US, mostly military funded (though a lot medically motivated and funded)) on nanotechnology, how much money is being spent on them, and lists specific technologies that are on the horizon for 5-20 years or longer. It also discusses the challenges/benefits of molecular nanotechnology. It's amazing how close to reality sci-fi can be...

Perhaps the most interesting section of the book breaks down and evaluates military applications under the criteria of preventive arms control. Broadly, there are three categories:

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Just a little longer...

I've got two more semesters of school left, but only a total of 22 credits. Next Spring I'll only be taking two courses, if all goes well this coming semester which I start on the 3rd.

What am I taking this semester? I need to satisfy an Art requirement, so I'm taking a class on user interface and experience design on the recommendation of a housemate. I'm not entirely sure what I should expect, but I think it will be easy enough to pass given I've had jobs designing application screens. Maybe my UI ideas aren't the best but I can do the work. I need to satisfy a 4-credits-of-anything requirement, so I'm taking a database course which is beneath me (it was beneath my housemate and I know more about databases than he does) for three credits, then a 1-credit "job preparation" course which only lasts the first few weeks and shouldn't be a problem as I've already got a good resume, LinkedIn account, business card (even if outdated), and previous job experience...

I'm taking a project course which will continue my radar project from last semester. I'm also taking an intro Electricity and Magnetism physics course, which I'm not looking forward to. Giancoli is shit. The professor isn't known as a good teacher (fine person of course). I want to learn electrostatics as a special case of electrodynamics and in the language of geometric algebra, not learn electrostatics as a series of disjointed statements and unreal examples followed by "and hey, here's Maxwell's equations!" during the last few weeks. Feynman's book takes the right approach by starting with Maxwell's equations and simplifying for electrostatics, I just wish he used geometric algebra instead of vector components...

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Simple logic...

I came across these two images while cleaning up my home folder:




They're from some time in 2010, when I was in an argument with a former roommate who is an Objectivist. He was having trouble seeing the issue with the is-ought problem in philosophy, believing it to be solved. The desire to live must have come up, which is part of the base of his philosophy, and he tried to assert it is an objective fact that living creatures desire to live. I gave two counter-examples, thus deductively disproving that assertion. Surely if a desire to live is an is, it cannot so simply be overridden, therefore when it is overridden, that implication's premise must be false. The second image shows that the is-ought problem easily leads to circular reasoning, which is part of why it's a problem to begin with. Circular reasoning is bad in deductive logic!

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Depression from inadequate tooling

This isn't a new phenomenon among programmers, not at all. But it's been striking at me annoyingly heavily over the past few months. When I work on some programming project, if my mind strays to how annoying some of the tools I'm working with are then such thoughts can paralyze me into not working! I'll acquire a moping attitude that with the right tools a task that takes an hour could be done in ten minutes. I'll curse the language for its verbosity, or lack of features from other languages and platforms. This applies to my favorite languages too. I sometimes get sad when I can no longer "feel the hardware" beneath a language -- part of me doesn't want to know, but part of me does, for knowing your hardware is the surest path to optimization. The programs I use daily are annoying slow, and it makes me think whenever I'm writing a program "Does this have to be annoying slow? Is there anything I can do to speed it up?" Sometimes there isn't -- even something that should be as simple and fast as rendering a new tab in Flex is, by nature of Flash, annoying slow. Just what the hell is going on down there? I also get this feeling when I use my Nexus 10 tablet and it does strange and slow things from time to time. How hard can rotating the screen smoothly be? (I've seen apps that clearly do it themselves instead of letting the OS do it and they do it so much better...)

I'm finding it difficult to come up with and use a coping strategy for this. I feel like the best I can do is just to accept my lot at living in such an uncouth age. Sometimes I'll be inspired to make something better, but then I'll get in that same paralysis once I realize that in order to make something better I first have to do it with things that are horrible.

My primary desktop computer has two OSes on it: Gentoo Linux, my primary, and Windows 7, which I use when I want to play certain games, mine litecoins (bitcoins I do on Gentoo), build an EXE for some python program, or something else that requires me to use Windows. Thinking about trying to do productive work on Windows makes me metaphorically sick; I don't understand how millions of people do it. But I do understand somewhat why I find it so distasteful, and I can imagine that people who don't find it so distasteful aren't as phased by it.

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Guided functions

Below is a simplified, conceptual graph of a damped harmonic oscillator (e.g. attach a spring to a wall, attach a ball to the end of the spring, mark that position as 0, tug on the spring, and let it go, measuring the distance (y-axis) from the initial position over time (x-axis)). Maybe a better example would be a pendulum? It's ultimately the same math. In any case, notice that as time increases, the frequency of the oscillations stays the same, but the distance the thing oscillates continues to die down until eventually it is no longer moving. But it does not die down randomly! No, there are invisible guides that predictably decrease the height of the oscillations according to a simple exponential decay formula. Thus one might think of this graph as a guided sine wave: the exponential function guides it to 0, even though the exponential function is not as visible as the blue sinusoidal function. Understand?



Consider the adage: "the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer." Many people believe this! Many people with refrigerators, television, a long life-expectancy where they can actually retire instead of working until death, educated children... in short, many luxuries their very recent impoverished ancestors lived most or all of their lives without! If the poor truly were getting poorer, we should expect to see a systematic decline from wherever one draws the line of "poor". I invite any reader to find such a decline.

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Short cryonics talk slides

(Related post)

I had to perform a persuasive speech for a class last week, I decided to talk about cryonics. Here are my slides if anyone out there is interested. It's really basic information due to time constraints, but it might help you see an outline if you find yourself needing to give a similar short talk and aren't sure what to cover.

Also: it's funny how annoyed I am at myself for having a brain-fail during Q&A that I only realized afterwards. For some reason I said something implying "they" don't actually cut off the head, which is true of CI but not of Alcor unless you pay for full-body. I knew that, I even know what spinal vertebra they cut at! (Useful FAQ on the matter.) But it came out too generalized! Ah well.

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On rape accusations

Making the rounds of tech news buzz is a story about a certain figure publicly being accused of rape and/or sexual abuse. I hope it doesn't escalate and saturate the weekend feeds, it was happily flagged off the HN front page moments ago. Anyway, the way I see it, this is just another case of a phenomenon that's happened many times over the past few years, and I'm sick of watching it unfold yet again, so that's what I'm going to comment on rather than the case in particular.

I only have one response to such public accusations. I think it's a moderate response that should probably be adopted by others, because I don't see a saner way to approach such news. My response is: shut up or show your solid evidence.

Rape is a serious matter. It's a bad thing, it should be punished. Physical assault as well. Here's the catch: if you, the so-called victim, spend more than a second wondering "was that really rape/abuse?" then no, it wasn't, and you've lost any right to claim so in the future. Especially if you wait days, weeks, or months before mentioning it. If you have just been raped or abused, call the fucking cops. This goes for male-victim-rape or male-victim-abuse too, by the way. If this somehow isn't already ingrained into the public consciousness, it needs to become so pronto.

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