Enjoy it!

Why all the focus on "live life in the moment, 'cause tomorrow you may die!"? Or "Enjoy it while it lasts!"? Why not simply live life, sometimes in the moment, and why not simply enjoy it? Why should something have to end in order for you to appreciate it more?

Of course it's not necessary, and humans have no problem whatsoever with valuing "everlasting" things. I can find some stories about valuing old trees if necessary, but surely everyone can see it?

Life's great, I don't know why people have to use death to justify its greatness. And in the end it just makes us rationalize it all the more when one of our number decreases, some people going so far as to suggest it's a good thing. It boggles my mind.

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Role Playing Is Like Chess

I started doing online role playing roughly 6 or 7 years ago, though for the past 2 years at least I've been on an RP hiatus. I just lost interest, and I lost contacts with people. My primary source of RP has always been Furcadia (before you ask, no I don't consider myself a furry and don't think yiffing really constitutes RP), in addition to the once-in-a-blue-moon forum RP or quick session in an IM window.

Anyway, I did an RP earlier tonight that lasted a long time, and it was fun, interesting, cool. I'm using a classic character I've had for years, but I'm re-inventing him in some aspects and giving him at least temporary oddities such as communicating through metaphors, symbols, and examples. (It's fun to think that way.)

And I realized: RPing is fundamentally quite simple. You put yourself in situations, and write about it with other people. The nature of this makes pretty much every RP unique in many respects, even if there's strong similarity at some points or there's an overall theme. So this is a lot like Chess. Chess is fundamentally simple, you only have a certain amount of pieces with a certain amount of valid moves. But while each game may have similar openings and other aspects, they nevertheless tend to be fairly unique. And fun, interesting, cool because of it.

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Why I Sometimes Really Dislike Java

I don't hate Java, but the formalities really annoy me sometimes. And I wrote this code, so I don't hate it at all. (Well, the XML design wasn't mine, and it will be refactored.) Anyway, this is why. Mainly just the first line.

Map<String, Map<String, Map<String, Map<String, String>>> > meta_data = new LinkedHashMap<String, Map<String, Map<String, Map<String, String>>> >();



while (rs.next()) {

  int c = 1;

  String type = rs.getString(c++);

  String schemaName = rs.getString(c++);

  String name = rs.getString(c++);

  String col_name = rs.getString(c++);

  c++;

  int col_len = rs.getInt(c++);

  boolean is_null = rs.getBoolean(c++);

  String data_type = rs.getString(c++);




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Is Environmentalism a Religion?

I heard an interesting argument in this vein today, and I want to explore it. So first of all, let us be rational about this, and determine what it is we mean by religion. That is, picking two concepts such as Environmentalism and Christianity, what criteria can we select to promote either of these two concepts to "religion-hood"?

First, however, I must make it clear what Christianity and Environmentalism are, or rather what their members are. Christians are anyone claiming to be such, which includes Mormons and fundamentalists. (It doesn't make sense to call a Muslim "Christian!", so what a Christian is should be left to who declares themselves one.) Now, who constitutes an Environmentalist is a trickier notion. Are hippies environmentalists? Are people who just care about not destroying the environment, environmentalists? (That is, people who would vote to nationalize a Park but don't have any moral issues about chopping down trees for paper (just not all trees!).) For the purposes of this post, I think I'll pick Al Gore as an example of environmentalism, and consider hippies on a similar level as I consider fundamentalist Christians.

Now I will make my list, and briefly mention how Christianity and Environmentalism do or do not fit the list. The Black Belt Bayesian has, fortunately for me, created most of this list after accusation of the Singularity being similar to a "Rapture of the Nerds", which, upon examination, is absurd. So, let's discuss Christianity and pull out criteria that we might use when classifying Environmentalism as a religion. I'll start off with BBB's list.

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Pain-Free Meat

I recently read of the idea of using our advanced technology to remove the capacity for our farm animals to feel pain. I've thought about whether that would be a good way to go, and I'm kind of on the fence. I see logic in both sides of the argument, and if actually faced with making the final decision I assign slightly higher chance to go down the path of no-pain meat but not completely like it.

So, why would I oppose it? Suffering is bad, right, and I want to reduce suffering in the world? Yes. However, a question to that question is "Is it suffering even if the organism can't actually feel the suffering?" A common comparison is taking a human child, knocking it out, then raping it. It can't feel any discomfort, if you do it right the child won't have any memory of it, what's the harm?

My main source of discomfort is where such actions will lead us. If it becomes common practice to knock people out and do things normally considered abusive to conscious people, how far will it go, and why should we think the abuse will simply stop at unconscious people? If we remove the capacity of animals to feel pain, are we then going to stack pigs as we stack logs, carve them up piece by piece instead of killing them in one go? Are these actions only wrong when done on an organism able to cognitively tell they are harmful? Do they cease being bad if we remove that cognitive ability and leave everything else the same?

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Idiocy, and Why is disabling allowed?

So besides being more practical to allow disabling a violent defector (but not killing them!), why else might it be good, and why should we not kill anyway?

Let's briefly examine the history of mankind. Okay, pretty much everyone who was alive 120 years ago is now dead. Gone. Vanished from the universe, unlikely ever to be repeated. They are just dust. Now, 100 years ago, this seemed pretty inevitable to everyone living at the time. (And it turns out, it was.) If you were alive, you were going to die. If it wasn't from a disease, it would just be from old age eventually.

But then these really, really, really stupid people invented something called war and had the great idea of killing other people! Hey, they're gonna die anyway, right? Why not kill them? Why not get so angry at your cousin being murdered by a Jew that you go out and kill ten random Jews? Why not get so angry at a handful of people you don't know, don't even know anyone who knows them, who got killed by another handful of people you similarly have no personal connections with, and decide to kill all the people associated with that group anyway?

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Research Paper: The Need For Friendly Artificial General Intelligence

This paper is best read as a PDF, which you can download here. I have included a copy-paste of the text here for your benefit, however. This was my final paper project for my Sociology class. (Side note: research papers are easier than full blown essays since you're just researching what other people have said rather than trying to develop your own techniques!)

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The word ``Singularity'' is overloaded: generally, the meaning implies a point of time in the future when an entity with greater-than-modern-human intelligence exists. However, there are three ``schools'' of thought that accompany this definition. (see YudSchools) The first is called Accelerating Change, and is commonly advocated by Ray Kurzweil. Our normal human intuitions are primed to think that roughly the amount of change experienced in our past can be expected in the future, while modern times have uprooted that intuition because with modern technology, the rate of change increases exponentially (and this can be seen using graphs). The invention of the printing press caused a surge in printed materials, and as the printing press improved so did the amount of printed materials. The invention of the modern computer caused a surge in many, many fields, and as the computers get better those fields too get better.

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