Hell

I decided that my optimised relaxation was too much stress. This doesn't mean I've abandoned my Japanese work, I've just taken a day off. ;)

So I have spent some time working on an old hobby I resurrect from time to time; computer game design. The following series of articles will follow my stream-of-consciousness approach to game design for one specific incarnation - an MMO. (I decided I liked the idea of running an on-line game when they were still known as MUDs, but that term now implies text-screens...)

One of the problems I have with most existing MMOs is their inability to solve the consistency problem. This is roughly the inability of interesting content to be customised to each player - the basic reason why everyone who plays game A kills ten rats (and similar tasks) before doing anything else.

The long-term solution to this, I feel certain, is player-created content. Unfortunately, because of the GIFT effect, a small minority of players cannot be trusted to create content for others. I'm not proposing any specific solution to this problem right now, but it's one I'd like to address, and I'll be thinking about ways of doing so through this exercise.

I spent some time considering different milieux, but had already decided to let my first attempt to write up a design be a relatively mainstream one. That means focusing on a setting where I could justify lots of combat, because - let's be honest here people - combat is easy to design. So, what setting justifies endless violence, plotting, and fighting?

Well, it's obviously Hell.

I'm thinking of a detail level somewhere between a typical RPG and a RTS; a more tactical focus, something similar to Fallout or UFO: Enemy Unknown. I might even borrow from Fallout's game mechanics; I think the feel is different enough for the result to be distinctive.

To which Lord will your soul Fall?

We have two excellent literary sources for Hell. One is Dante's Inferno; the other is the Wizards of the Coast interpretation, Baator. These two documents have very different areas of focus; Dante discusses the landscape to some extent, but is mainly concerned with the inhabitants, whereas Wizards focus mainly on the rulers.

Dante defines nine circles of Hell:

• Limbo : The virtuous pagans and unbaptised. Those whose fault was a lack of faith. The lower 8 layers are selected between by Minos
• Second Circle : Lust. Their souls are blown by a violent storm without hope of rest.
• Third Circle : Gluttony. Cerberus guards those who are forced to lie in mud and consume their excrement in continual cold rain and hail.
• Fourth Circle : Miserliness and decadence. They push weights around against one another. Guarded by Plutus.
• Fifth Circle (River Styx) : Wrath and Sloth. The wrathful fight on the surface, the slothful lie drowning. Phlegyas.

The lower circles are within Dis, which is surrounded by the Stygian marsh.

• Sixth Circle : Heretics are trapped in flaming tombs.
• Seventh Circle : the Violent; the Minotaur guards the entrance to its three rings. There are different punishments for crimes against property, suicides, and those violent against god, nature or art. Respectively these are boiling blood immersion, guarded by centaurs; suicides turned to bushes and torn at by harpies; and the desert of flaming sand.
• Eighth circle : the fraudulent. Malebolgie of many different tortures.
• Ninth Circle : traitors. Guarded by giants. Frozen in ice.

Wizards, on the other hand, describe nine planes and their rulers. Fortunately, like Dante, their first plane of Avernus can be ignored (its description is dependent on the Blood War, which I don't intend to include in my cosmology). That leaves eight planes and eight circles of Hell to match up.

• Dis ruled by Dispater (The City of Burning Iron)
• Minauros ruled by Mammon (an endless bog of vile pollution)
• Phlegethos ruled by Fierna and Belial (just Belial in 1st ed) (Volcano and lava)
• Stygia ruled by Levistus (Geryon in 1st ed) (the Styx-ocean)
• Malbolge ruled by Glasya (Baalzebul via Moloch) (an endless rocky slope)
• Maladomini ruled by Baalzebul (ruins and gruesome places)
• Cania/Caina ruled by Mephistopheles (unimaginably cold wasteland)
• Nessus ruled by Asmodeus ("pits and ravines")

Obviously there are some problems with a one to one match. After playing around with a few options, I decided on the following correspondence:

• Stygia, ruled by Lephistus, is the Second Circle, the freezing Styx-Ocean with its iceberg capital. The souls here are mariners and those lost on the water.
  
• Minauros, ruled by Mammon, is the Third Circle, an endless bog with foul rain and hail. Here the gluttonous feast on excrement. They are the revolting dead - zombies and suchlike.
  
• Plutus, ruled by Glasya, is the Fourth Circle, a place of laborous torment. (As in Wizards' work, Glasya is the daughter of Asmodeus and rules as Queen, served by the former ruler, the god Pluto.) The minions of Glasya are weak-willed but numerous.
  
• The Fifth Circle is Maladomini, ruled by Baalzebul. This bizarre realm of ruins and subterranean dungeons is immersed in an endless swamp. The wrathful fight a continual war above the surface as the slothful drown forever beneath the water.
  
• Dis, the city of Dispater, is the Sixth Circle. The heretics burn here in flaming tombs. Dispater's minions love intrigue and ceremony, although their lord rules definitively.
  
• Phlegethos is the Seventh Circle, the domain of violence, ruled by Fierna and Belial. There are several geographical environments here, all hot. The denizens are the most violent of all Hell's creatures.
  
• Caina, the frozen Eighth Circle, is ruled by Mephistopheles. Here the traitors are locked in ice eternal. You should not avert your eyes from them, as they move faster than their condition implies.
  

Finally, the Ninth Circle of Hell - Nessus - is the domain of Asmodeus, who is somewhat above the endless squabbles of the other Dukes. The Lord of Nessus rarely leaves his home in the deepest pits, except to punish those who insult him.

Although a variation from both my primary sources, this is one that I find satisfactory. It produces a few of good hooks and synergies; Mephistopheles the traitor, Glasya the woman behind the throne, Asmodeus distant and all-powerful.

By building a correspondence, I now have two sources to draw on for each Lord of Hell, which gives me more variety to use in creating their minions and their single-player mission structure. (I did mention that, right? No - well, there will be a campaign for each Lord, something like an normal offline tactics game - your progression in which will determine what units you can deploy in free PvP).

I'll post something about the combat system, probably tomorrow. I've spent quite a bit of time working on it, and I hope it'll be fun to play with.

Relaxation

Damn, I don't think I've ever relaxed this hard. I keep catching myself trying really hard to make good use of my off-time. I think that somewhat defeats the point of it being off-time ;)

I have been playing a lot of Slime Forest - 83 katakana, 51 hiragana, 132 kanji down... a couple thousand more kanji to go - writing random bits of fiction, reading webcomics (I finally read the back archive of QC - that was a mighty task*) and generally chilling. I think L would have killed me out of envy by now if it wasn't for the fact that I'm also doing all the housework. That and she brought friends over yesterday, and I'd baked a cake which was conveniently fresh from the oven when they arrived. I think Dee was slightly jealous.

* - but one I'd highly recommend if you've ever been tempted to start a webcomic; not only is Jeff's character writing excellent, watching how fast his art improves is also very encouraging.

I even have a backup plan for financial stability, if A isn't able to start paying me as soon as we'd like. I've signed up with an agency which finds freelance tutoring work for Oxbridge graduates. I knew there's be an advantage to this aside from 'B.A. (Cantab)'. Although that itself is actually pretty cool.

Not much else to report, really. There's a lot of celebratory dinners and suchlike over the next few weeks. I look forward to free Trinity-party food. Hopefully there will be breadcrumb ice-cream.

High Dynamic Range

The weather outside is beautiful. The leaves are a beautiful emerald green where they catch the sun, the shadows are dark and cool... I want a new camera. *hee*

I am thinking Canon Powershot S3 IS. There's a newer iteration of the series, the S5, with higher resolution and a bigger LCD screen, but it's quite a bit more expensive at ~£400 rather than ~£270. The S3 also compares respectably the Powershot Pro 1, which was a £1,000+ level prosumer camera from 2 years ago. (Note to self: fix desktop computer today. Getting very tired of having to use charmap every time I need a pound sign)

The S3 can't do RAW images off-the-shelf, but there's a firmware hack to enable it. It has AVI recording (640 x 480, 30 fps) and continuous shooting at full resolution at 2.3 fps. These are all nice things, mentioned in this rather good review. As a bonus, MMC have an adapter for the S3 that allows it to be used with any standard trinocular microscope; that'll be handy when/if I want to go into real micro-photography. I'd like to try doing darkfield photography of little invertebrates - they can be very beautiful.

So this will be my next present for myself, although I have no idea when there will be money for it. I'm relaxing for a week or two before I have a chat with A at which we'll probably decide my start time with him - which obviously will determine my first pay day... but I'm determined to take this time to unwind properly, and not stress too much about the summer.

L and I are thinking of visiting a bungalow we saw advertised for rent in Bar Hill. It would be nice to have a detached property, rather than an apartment... not that it's likely to still be free by ~September, when we move out of here. Something else might be, though.

I am off into town to enjoy the sunshine and do some shopping. There's a lot of housework that fell behind while I was studying. ^^;

If you are interested in learning Japanese, this game is a really effective (and ever so appropriate) way to get started learning kana.

And on the seventh day He shall rest...

The last exam finished six hours ago. I'm happy that I did a good job on all four papers. I know I could have done better under different circumstances, but that's okay. I did the best I could, which is kinda new to me.

So the question forms in my mind. What to do next?

There are literally dozens of projects lying around that I conceived over the last two weeks or so of revision, creating spasmodically to relieve mental tension. I should look back over them, make a table or something... rate them all on their merits and work out what ['what' in the plural. this word has no plural in English. hmph] to do first.

Incidental bizarre web site of the day; http://www.quantonics.com/. I think it's a cult. We shall see if saying this gets me trolled. ;)

So I think my first line of attack for hobbies are going to be physics, photography, music, and D&D. Let's see which one takes off fastest tomorrow.

But for now, I am going for a long overdue good night's sleep.

Status

Study continues - not as well as hoped, but possibly better than expected. After a month and a half of revision I actually feel fairly comfortable regarding about half of the material on the exams, so hopefully in another ten days I'll be comfortable with the rest? :|

The papers are May 29th/May 30th/June 1st/June 2nd... 12 hours of exams in 4 days. Why oh why they can't put some breaks between the things, I have no idea. I'm beginning to wonder if my fingers are up to writing for three hours straight like that - I haven't really done more than a few minutes of handwriting in the last two years. I don't really have much time to practice now either, although I'll probably do one or two exam-style essays this week just to check how long an hour is in 'writing time'...

After the last paper I plan to spend the first week of June doing very little at all... meditate, draw, write, and generally unwind. I'm looking forward to that. I think it's much more beneficial to look forward to the post-exam relaxation than to stress too much over the exams ;)

Free Will and Retrocausality

I discussed yesterday's post on retrocausality with a few people and thought I'd make a quick post to explore an analogy that shows what a successful demonstration of the phenomenon would really mean for free will.

Some of you may be geeky enough to remember the Fighting Fantasy books - one incarnation of the 'choose your own adventure' concept. For those who aren't familiar with them, the books are divided into paragraphs (usually a few hundred) which are numbered; after reading one, you're offered a choice of which paragraph to read next to continue the story. Some choices lead to an ignoble death, some lead to the eventual solution.

When you read a paragraph (let's say #150), you take the information in it, plus any previous information you know, and make a decision on which paragraph to read next (we'll say #200 or #60). In fact it's probably fair to say that you pick the option that seems most sensible - given what you know (i.e. the past). That's analogous to any other decision-making moment. If you'd taken a different route through the story to reach #150, you might know that paragraph #60 means certain death - so you'd pick the other option. You do make a 'real decision'. (In reality, unlike Fighting Fantasy, you can't go back and start again, so you only make one decision in practice - this is really what determinism means.)

Now let's introduce retrocausality. This is very easy to include in our Fighting Fantasy analogy - you can just cheat. You glance ahead, read #60, realise it'll kill you, and go back and pick #200 instead.

What may not be so obvious is that back-in-time signalling has exactly the same effect. The signal from the future changes the information you have, so your decision changes. There's no paradox, because at the time you received your signal from the future, it accurately described what the future would be. However, now knowing that, you can deliberately pick a 'different future'. (It's not even a problem that the future where you sent the signal back is now probably not going to happen - although the explanation of that is more complicated.)

This is really the key distinction between determinism and fatalism, so I'm quite excited about it - if we can really send retrocausal signals, we should be able to thoroughly put the latter to rest.

Retrocausation?

It says something about me that I take breaks from revising for my Biochemistry finals by reading about quantum mechanics. Exactly what it says I'm not sure. :|

John Cramer has published an update on his progress to try to demonstrate retrocausal signalling. I'll summarise in a few sentences for those who don't have time to read the article or prefer a less technical phrasing:

Quantum mechanics allows non-local signalling between entangled particles. This essentially means that an interaction with one particle that changes its state can change the property of its entangled partner at arbitrary distance, instantly (not just at light speed). The 'reality' of this phenomenon is disputed but there is a great deal of experimental evidence that it exists.

If we take two entangled photons and pass one into a long optical fibre, we can delay the arrival of the second photon at its destination by a few microseconds. We detect both photons, but the delayed photon is detected in a specific fashion that changes its state - the non-delayed photon is detected without forcing it to take any particular state.

If the quantum prediction holds, the two photons will always be in the state induced by the measurement of the delayed photon, even though several microseconds passed between the first 'free' detection and the delayed detection.

So what?

Cramer's paper is a progress report and doesn't speculate about applications of the phenomenon if it's demonstrated to be possible, but any number of science fiction authors have considered possible 'future-scope' devices, some more credible than others. I have a feeling Greg Egan wrote one such story, but I don't recall in which collection.

The most obvious application is a device for 'signalling back in time'; by delaying one entangled particle for longer than a few microseconds (this is hard, of course, without breaking the entanglement - the same problem is encountered in quantum computing - but not impossible), i.e. for minutes or hours, we can then 'immediately' receive information on what the state of the future will be. This throws up all sorts of interesting potential paradoxes (although it may simply deal a final decisive blow to the concept of free will).

Spooky Sensing at a Distance

Slightly less obvious is the idea of using the phenomenon as a sensor - fire one photon at a distant object (like an extrasolar planet), and observe how the entangled partner changes. This should in principle reveal information about the 'target', again 'instantly' - even though the sensor photon takes subjective time to reach the target. Only certain kinds of information could be retrieved, but astronomers are very good at making sense of sparse data.

42

More obscurely - and perhaps most interestingly, although I have a niggling feeling it may prove to be impossible - one could in theory perform long computations 'without actually performing them, by 'sending the answer back' to the beginning of the computation. If that's really true, then a suitable computer can perform any finite-length computation 'instantly'.

Meditation and right-brain thinking...

I went to a meditation workshop this evening led by Vessantara, one of the FWBO's more senior teachers. Interestingly the meditation itself was fairly simple, but several of the comments he made in response to questions were very interesting.

He discussed how we have a tendency to label things rather than experiencing them - what he called a 'labour-saving habit', because it leaves us more time to think about whatever terribly important thing is currently on our mind. That's nothing novel in itself, but when he pointed out that it partly explains why time seems to go by faster as we get older, I found that much more interesting.

He also described the value of boredom - something he says he invariably feels at the beginning of a solitary retreat. He said one can see boredom as an obstacle, or one can see it as an indication that one isn't paying attention properly. If you really engage with your experience, you rapidly find things about it that are interesting. That point caught my attention sharply, because it's something I'd begun to notice during my recent attempts to revise the less interesting parts of my course. Having it put into words will I think help to remind me that the material isn't really boring - but choosing to be bored with it certainly won't make it memorable.

On a more directly meditation-related front, he mentioned that one can go a step beyond a 'kind and gentle chiding' attitude to discursive thoughts during meditation; one can actively celebrate the moment of awareness when you realise you were distracted. It's as if a spark of self-awareness reignited amongst the smouldering daydreams. (That purple prose, by the way, is my own, and not in any way Vessantara's fault)

All in all, quite a fun evening. I'd attend the second workshop this Thursday, but I've been offered free Wagamama's with Laura and some friends, and I can't honestly pass that up... :)

In other news, I quit smoking (again). Last time I let myself have 'just one' after a few months without and it led to starting all over. This time, stubbornness will prevail.

Eat Pes

This is one of the more interesting artists I've seen recently. Predictably, my first reaction is 'I want to try doing that!'... but not until after the exams. I am behaving. Sort of...

More poetry

Study, study, study (and the occasional game of kdice)... not much to report except that.

I am increasingly wishing I had made notes proportional to the readability of the handouts rather than my level of interest. I seem to have little more than Powerpoint slides for some of the less exciting ones, which are of course just the ones I don't want to have to go and read reviews about... 20/20 hindsight. At least there's still more than a month to go.

I found a couple more bits of my bad poetry in the margin of one of the handouts - so I shall subject you to them in lieu of a real post. :)

heavy sky, streaming cobbles
windows blinded.
shoes collide, woman topples
baby wide-eyed.

and

the glaciers!
there have been too many Cokes.
there will be salt in your glass, soon.

Visas and so forth

We're in the middle of completing the final form involved in Laura's permanent residency application. The main requirement this time is to demonstrate that we've been cohabiting as a married couple for the past two years - something which I wish I'd known sooner would be required, since we don't get much correspondence addressed to us jointly. (This is student accommodation in my name, hence all the bills are sent to me only.) We've had to resort to requesting letters from organisations we've interacted with, confirming that they know us to be living together here... quite a lot of palava, but hopefully it will all be over soon.

L is so clearly happy with her new job (she's got an apprenticeship as a piercer with a shop in Cambridge). It's really great to see her so positive and upbeat. I think the opportunity to socialise (with someone other than me) is doing wonders for her. Between that and our ongoing courses at the Buddhist Centre, we're both feeling a lot more content with ourselves. We're starting the full-year Buddhism course next week - something I'm still vaguely astonished with myself to be devoting time to. Nonetheless, I can't deny that meditating regularly has been having positive effects on me, and Buddhist philosophy - once you get past the popular misconceptions about it - is really pretty interesting.

Revision is ongoing, still not as much as perhaps I would like, but definitely better than none at all. I'm running another modafinil experiment which, if it turns out well, should give me a few extra days' effective study time over the next few weeks. It seems to be going alright so far.

I have been playing with StyleXP - unfortunately I have thus far to find a style I like more than the default one. Perhaps I'll just design one of my own - my tastes don't tend to overlap much with those of others. I've also finally got around to learning the keyboard shortcuts for Firefox, and haven't really touched IE for a few days now, which I feel absurdly pleased with.

New game idea is brewing, but I recognise the danger of this while I'm supposed to be studying, so I'm just going to write down what has come to me so far and ignore it until post exams. ;)

All quiet

Not much to report, really, but I feel like making a post, if only to share the following piece of gratuitous overwriting (from the 29th March issue of Science CiteTrack):

"Investigations of the ecology of planktonic marine organisms run into the problem of reconciling the anonymity of morphological uniformity with the potential for ubiquitous distribution in the continuity of the oceans and the observed genetic diversity."

I have no problem with the use of jargon words where necessary, but it's very important - especially in a general-interest publication like CiteTrack - to be clear and straightforward to avoid putting people off. For example, the above can be rewritten as:

"Investigations into plankton ecology are difficult because different species are similar in shape but genetically diverse, and may be widespread throughout the oceans."

While I'm here I'll also point you in the direction of the remarkably talented Alex Ries, whose xenobiological creativity has earned him a place on my first terraforming expedition...

Praise and giftedness

Arguably most interesting article I have read in some time, "the power and peril of praise". I went through more or less exactly the school experience they describe, and suffered more or less the same consequences. It's only really in the last few months that I've really made any progress on my ability to motivate myself when success is not immediate, and I still have a long way to go.

I'm intrigued though by Dr. Cloninger's observation that there is a distinct cortical region associated with persistence. That sounds like an extremely promising target for TMS. Since the latter is now achievable at home if you have a few thousand to burn, I wonder how long we have before we start seeing parents and/or teenagers trying to boost their study. Frankly I'd rather like to try it myself...

Flicker, flicker!

The dreamachine is finished - at least the cylinder is, I have yet to put the apparatus together and test it (and I will leave that until after dark, for optimal effect). I used Paul Cecil's plan as a guide, although I drew my own version in Flash for neatness (and to save printer ink - why did you colour the bits to be discarded in solid black, Paul? lol...)

The flash took maybe 15 minutes, the hole cutting a total of probably ~2.5 hours, and the reinforcement (not part of the plan) another 1.5 or so. Not too bad, although the blister on my thumb wishes to comment otherwise. I promised more photos, so here they are...

Ongoing hole cutting - it occurred to me that it would be much easier to score the holes through the guide paper then remove it and go over the scorings without the paper in the way, rather than trying to press hard enough to cut the card fully first time. G'duh.

The completed cylinder (stapled together), but as the inset shows, not very circular. I decided to build a circular base plate to regularise the shape.

This proved taxing when I realised I had no compasses - so I ended up going for a very old-school method. All in all, I was pretty pleased with the result, shown below:

I added 2cm tabs round the edge and cut the base out, then used tacks to approximately secure it to the cylinder - the erasers are seating the tacks so I can move the thing around without them popping out.

I taped the base inside and out to secure it, but the shape of the top of the cylinder was barely improved. I was rather glad at this point that I'd drawn around the base before attaching it in case I screwed it up somehow - I could use the second circle as a top plate without needing to return to bits of string. I nearly managed to do exactly that before remembering one has to hang a lightbulb through the top, so a brief quest yielded a teacup of sufficient size to draw around for a central opening.

Finally after attaching the top piece it's finished:

I was rather pleased the reinforcement circles fit so well - the top is a little cramped (odd, since it was the larger circle) but for the products of a rough pi * d in my head, they were rather good. The cylinder is now round enough to roll for a good distance in a straight line, which is good enough for me.

I'm looking forward to giving this a whirl tonight. >:D

On a side note, I've started another modafinil experiment... it seems less effective than when I tried last year, but that's n=1 at the moment obviously. We shall see.

Peripheral comment: embedding images in Blogger doable, but tedious and lengthy.

Flicker

I've been intrigued by dreamachines ever since I first heard of them, but had fairly mediocre results from the browser-based variety - probably because the light from the monitor isn't very strong. My enthusiasm to try the real thing was undampened.

However, I never managed to get my hands on a sufficiently large piece of card - that is, until last weekend, when I helped my parents clean out some of the crap a teenage me left lying around their house. (Why, teenage me, did you decide to keep the boxes - not the manuals or even the disks in most cases, just the boxes - to sixty-odd PC games? It's trying to understand old decisions of mine that most emphatically leaves me agreeing with the bundle theory of identity.)

So I am now engaged in what might be referred to as arts and crafts - cutting holes in cardboard with an exacto knife - a process which is taking hugely longer than I anticipated thanks to the surprising toughness of the aforementioned card. I'm taking a few photos as I go along, partly to play with the image uploading on this blog - here's the first one...

Life goes on

It's been a while again, hasn't it... after Laura's mum left on the 15th, I've been busy revising and also holding a belated birthday trip and meal for Laura. We went to see Return to the Forbidden Planet at the ADC theatre, which was really quite good fun, and much enjoyed I think by L who knew the music better than I did. Then yesterday I cooked up chicken enchiladas (which is L's favourite meal) to her mum's recipe (a photocopy of which she'd sneakily passed to me after she arrived) and the two of us ate far too many of them along with a Mexican side dish and watched the Season One finale of ST:Enterprise. I'm told it was a good birthday.

Revision is going tolerably well. Tomorrow I will be having lunch with Aubrey to discuss what I'll be doing after my exams and whether or not he will be paying me to do it. I'm pretty optimistic that he will, something which I find immensely reassuring and is helping me not to stress over said exams.

While reading up on cytochrome c I encountered this FAQ, which looks really quite thorough and well written, and I shall be reading properly later. It never hurts to have more ammunition for the inevitable occasional conversation with a creationist. ;)

Ribosomes

I don't usually seem to manage to get to the Tuesday lunchtime seminars organised by the Biochemistry department, but I made an exception today for Venki Ramakrishnan's talk on 'Structures of Functional States of the Ribosome', not least because that's exactly the topic I've been revising for the past three days. Venki's lab produces some really amazing videos which I personally find not only scientifically interesting but also quite beautiful.

The fact that cellular processes can be so elegant and yet so reminiscent of mechanical production lines can't help but be good news for nanotechnology too. I begin to understand why some people find it necessary to dream up 'intelligent designers' to explain away the otherwise quite awe-inspiring complexity of life.

Postsoldiers

I'm not normally in favour of many things to do with the military, but they do have one very useful aspect, which is that they get away with doing all sorts of interesting things in their efforts to improve soldier performance. Those technologies are being developed for use in combat, but just like the Internet, they will have major impacts on healthcare too. I'd quite like a Glove to help me train more effectively at the gym - and Mark Roth's work on human suspension is one of very few current ideas that stand to have a dramatic impact on trauma death rates (the main cause of death apart from those addressed by SENS).

In fact, the aforementioned Wired article's table of DARPA projects reminded me strongly of Ander's page on potential human enhancements, which was among the very first transhumanism-themed documents I ever read. It's funny though that even DARPA is having to contend with the bioconservatives in this regard.

And even if you don't like the prospect of supersoldiers, at least every defence dollar spent on DARPA is one not spent murdering Iraqi civilians.

Mental flotsam

I have this quote in mind, which I thought went as follows, and I thought was attributable to Francis Crick:

"Life is basically just an affair of molecules."

However, the phrase "affair of molecules" gets 0 results from Google, and no other obvious variations seem to produce anything useful either. Can you clear up what I'm misremembering here?

Diary 09-03-07

It's been a little while since I updated, so I put 'blog' on my to-do list for today, not least since this allows me to put off other things on my to-do list while still feeling productive. Hey, it still beats playing kdice (an addiction which I seem to have cut down to a manageable level of an hour or so per day).

The term is nearly over and the lecture courses are all winding down - there's a couple more Genes sessions to go and then it's terribly quiet until the exams. Well, aside from voluntary talks of course (I'm going to a Pharmacology tea-club talk this afternoon for example...)

Today looks likely to be quite busy though - the PSU on my desktop packed in (almost certainly - the symptoms are nearly identical to the previous PSU failure) so I've had a new one shipped from Dabs (20 quid for a 480W PSU - I love DabsValue) which arrived today. First task is to get that fitted, then I can upload the Tattoo Crazy website that Laura and I have been working on. I'm fairly proud of it, it looks nice and swishy ;)

I submitted an idea ('Manifold Blistering') to the Orion's Arm mailing list and got a pleasingly positive initial response, plus the promise of a review from a physicist who contributes there, so I'm rather chuffed with that. OA appeals to me on various levels, despite the fact that I rather dislike the idea of qualitative Singularities, which smell unavoidably of techno-mysticism. Nonetheless they generally try quite hard to be plausible and do really quite a good job, at least from the perspective of someone with my complete lack of hard physics training.

I'm waiting for a grant cheque to clear into my bank account so I can finalise various plans related to L's birthday which have been in limbo since approximately December. Nonetheless I think they'll be worth the wait. She's 25 so I'm determined to make the occasion memorable (if belated, thanks to her Mum's visit - they're off in the Celtic Fringe right now).

I've been meditating rather more regularly and it seems to be having a definite positive effect on my ability to concentrate (on things other than meditating). I'm quite pleased and surprised by this.

I was reading through some of my notes from Forum 2006 in Oxford and was reminded of Nick Baylis, Cambridge's resident Happy Psychologist. I didn't realise at the time, but in hindsight his attitude and approach are nearly identical to those I've been picking up from studying Buddhism. I wonder why he never mentions the connection (he can't really fail to be aware of it).

I've nearly finished working my way through the Hitchhiker's Guide omnibus - I read the first book ages ago, but never got around to following the series through. I have to say (risking a serious chewing-out from my dad) that I'm not especially impressed with the first three books; they're funny but not extraordinarily so. So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, on the other hand, is brilliant, and oozes feel-good in a way that I find quite amenable right now.

At any rate, that's quite enough blogging - time to grab some of last night's cottage pie and bust open the computer.

In the Beginning, #2

Thinking about the 'why anything' problem I mentioned before, it occurred to me today that the idea of zero in the mathematical sense is a purely abstract mental construction: I don't think there's any convincing evidence for it being meaningful in describing anything physically real, only for counting objects (which are themselves arbitrary discretisations of the space-time continuum) or for succinctly describing the situation where opposing forces are conveniently balanced*. That seems to back up the assertion that it's not a good analogy for general nothing.

*A vacuum isn't zero matter either; it's (probably) quantum foam, a suggestion which I find most compellingly supported by the Casimir effect and Hawking radiation (although the latter is somewhat controversial).

Basically I think my answer to the question is that something and nothing (in the sense one thinks of when one says "why something rather than nothing") are not actually in the same class; one is a physical entity, the other a mathematical construct (maths is generally very good at describing reality, but it still remains a description, not the same thing). It's this error of comparison which renders the question meaningless (rather like "why the square root of minus one, not butterscotch flavour?").

If we do away with zero as a physical reality, it seems tempting to suggest we should also do away with its inverse, infinity. Perhaps that could help explain why the speed of light is finite? It seems like it must also have implications for black holes.

The remaining physical question - which is not necessarily simplified - appears to be "why is the universe not homogenous?"

p.s. After writing this I had a wander on Wikipedia looking for related items and found this, which I'm not sure I completely agree with, but which is nonetheless clearly a related chain of thought. Interesting that it comes out just as I'm considering the issue...

Poetry

I have a very scattered sort of mind which tends to bubble over with ideas unless I railroad it into one specific task - and even then it sort of vents out the side whenever I take a break. (I sometimes wonder whether I'd benefit from Ritalin... unfortunately it's a lot harder to get a diagnosis for ADHD these days).

Most of the bubblings take the form of game ideas, but occasionally they come up as fragments of stories or poems - I thought I'd add some length to this post by sharing some of the bits of blank verse that turn up in the margins of my lecture notes. The titles are fairly arbitrary.

City
Beneath my bed
A wandering dog
Three stars.
Inconstant fluorescence
Sour horns
Death
A monument?
Cities are the gravestones of forests.

Bed
Awake?
Superficial reaction; cold
Lazy-
Sheets-
Lover-
... sleep.

Tradition
Unspoken accord
like library-silence
Enraptured
(to history?)
I am not my parents!

In other news, we finished the meditation course at CBC. Six weeks ago, if someone had told me I'd be interested in taking the introductory Buddhism course at this point, I would have laughed them out of the building. I choose to take an optimistic view and consider this as an indication that I'm more open-minded than I thought. Buddhism (at least the FWBO style) turns out to be far less mystical and far more practical than I believed... it's certainly interesting enough to merit further study.

Quote of the day is from Pema Chödrön:
"We question without the intention of finding permanent solutions."

NTL

Sometime around October last year, NTL decided to start charging an additional fee for the privilege of paying them by cheque. That rather annoyed me - I invariably forget to keep track of direct debits - but I acquiesced and set up the thing. They failed to draw the debit in November, and then decided to charge a £10 late payment fee when I didn't psychically realise this and send them a cheque anyway. I called them and cleared that up, and then didn't receive any further communications from them in December or January, so assumed everything was OK... until a couple of days ago, when I received a bill for all three months and a nasty letter threatening to cut off my service. Oh, and another late charge.

Was it wrong of me to assume that since they hadn't said anything, things were working properly? :

I called them again and got the second late charge cleared, and sent them a cheque for the rest of the amount - as well as restarting the direct debit - but yesterday my cable modem died and hasn't come back. So after today's lectures I shall be back on the phone to them. If it wasn't for the fact that they've been so nice about free speed upgrades in the past, I'd be close to shouting point by now...

This is a very whingy post, mostly because I have anxiety issues about telephone calls and this situation is forcing me to make lots of them. While technically I'm sure this is good for me, it's still a pain in the gluteus.

Valentine's Day

I went to listen to Aubrey talking to Pugwash (the bioethics society) on Monday. For all that I've heard the arguments before, it was entertaining as always - if you've never heard him explain the reasons for doing something about aging, I recommend going along if there's a talk near you.

kdice has been absorbing far too much of my time recently (especially considering that I seem to be very bad at it - I'm Transhumanist there). It's making me all the more interested in the idea of writing some web-enabled games of my own - maybe with more skill and less chance than kdice. Once I've finished my Part II project (sometime in May) I'm going to reward myself by getting a dedicated server set up (probably with these guys) so if I still haven't acquired a sense of urgency about revision by then, that's likely to be when I actually have a chance to do some real game design.

Speaking of said Part II project, I would like to say "Aaaaargh! Maths hard!" and then make no further comment for now... it's been a couple of weeks and I'm still learning the underlying maths I'll need to get started. ^^; I haven't done any actual mathematics for about three years, so I'm not really surprised that I'm rusty, but I'm slightly alarmed that I'm this rusty.

Laura and I are going to spend this afternoon exploring two of the museums in Cambridge, the Archaeology & Anthropology Museum and the Sedgwick. This is our Valentine's Day outing... and a chance to reassert our geekiness ;)

In the Beginning

I've been pondering the question of "where did we come from" recently. I'm not talking about humanity, obviously, but rather the more fundamental question of where the universe came from. The Big Bang theory doesn't actually answer that question - it provides a useful model for the very first few moments of the universe's existence, but it doesn't offer any answer to the question of why or how - i.e. it merely pushes the question back to "where did the Big Bang come from" (or perhaps more helpfully "what caused the Big Bang").

It's only as I write this entry that I realise what a ridiculous phrase "Big Bang" is. Wikipedia informs me the name was coined sarcastically by Fred Hoyle to describe the theory (in opposition to his own steady state model). Somehow I'm not surprised to discover it was originally a pejorative label...

I've seen various suggestions to answer that question - brane theory, etc. - but all only extend the causal regression, rather than tackling directly the question "why something, rather than nothing". I find that curiously many people seem to consider this question "scientifically [not tackleable]"; that point of view may be true but it certainly seems to be a pessimistic starting point.

We tend to believe 'ex nihilo nihil fit' (from nothing nothing is made), and this is certainly the other part of the paradox (the first part being the existence of the universe). I'm quite happy to agree with Ayn Rand that 'existence exists', and simple logic tells us that no thing can be extracted from the empty set (a common concept of 'nothing'). I began to wonder, however, why we should consider the type of nothing that pre-dates existence (which I will hereafter refer to for convenience as 'the pre-universe') as the same kind of nothing as the empty set.

Let's consider the fact that in quantum theory (which generally seems to be a better model of reality than our classical, intuitive predictions) the initial state of a value is commonly not zero, but rather 'undefined'; the value only becomes one or zero after some measurement or interaction. This leads me to the thinking (which I admit I cannot defend with any rigour, but hope you will humour me anyway) that perhaps the 'undefined' state is a much more natural place to begin than a 'zero' state as one typically imagines the pre-universe. In a rather abstract way, one could think of the pre-universe as an array of qubits, all of undefined value. As time has passed, those qubits have fallen into the defined values that describe our particular universe.

This might seem like a very vague and unhelpful place to begin a scientific enquiry - even a thought experiment - but consider that three thought-provoking points can already be drawn from the idea described:

1. If the pre-universe was all that existed (as it presumably must be, since the presence of anything else would push the question back to the origin of that other) it cannot exchange anything with any 'external' entity. If a metric exists for something that cannot be created or destroyed within the pre-universe, the total of that metric must remain constant. This sounds intriguingly like conservation of energy.
2. The concept that the original state of the universe was undefined, and that therefore it is becoming increasingly defined over time, offers an alternative to the many-worlds type interpretations of quantum events. Any given quantum event where a 'random choice' occurs may be a genuine choice; analogous to the irreversible collapse of a single qubit of the universe from an undefined state to a defined one.
3. String theory is frequently criticised because it describes not one universe, ours, but rather a vast range of universes. This seems less problematic if our universe fell out of an undefined state by random chance - a slightly different result for the final choices in that falling-out would be expected to lead to a similar universe, and hence one potentially also describable by the same or a very similar theory.

Perhaps one day I'll have the time to study enough maths and physics to explore this idea in more detail... if you have any such training, please do post your comments, I'd be very interested to hear them. (Of course comments are also welcome if you don't have any such training!)

As predicted, not a whole lot of updates are getting posted, but I thought I'd write something down rather than have people start celebrating my death prematurely.

I've been running a Tor node for a while now, because I think that freedom of speech and privacy are important issues which people take for granted too often. Recently I discovered all Tor exit nodes get blacklisted from an IRC network (naming no names) I wanted to visit, and what's more, they aren't willing to make exceptions... so for now I have bowed out and switched off exiting via my box. That annoys me though - once I have some cash I'll rent a dedicated server to set up as a proper Tor node.

One of my relatives has just discovered they have cancer, which makes me all the more hopeful that the recent news about dichloroacetate turns out to lead to a real therapy. I'm not getting my hopes up though - after all, there are peripheral cells in many tumours that aren't anaerobic.

More positively, my first Flash game is slowly (very slowly at the moment) approaching completion. There should be an update on that topic this coming weekend. I'll probably let Newgrounds host it for me...

First however I have to finish the talk on free will I'll be giving on Wednesday. I still haven't firmly decided where my own opinion lies. I wonder whether I have any choice in the matter...

Today we began our second attempt at a meditation course run by the Cambridge Buddhist Centre (having dropped out of the previous session). I was surprised by how much of a difference having a different teacher made. We've decided to commit to meditating once a day for the length of the course - we didn't manage to keep up a regular practice last time, which was part of why we gave up.

Thus far my New Year's resolutions are looking pretty good. I haven't smoked since 2006 and have done a fair amount of productive work, as well as learning how to use Flash. Yay. I think Flash may actually lower the effort required for game programming far enough that I could actually finish a game (instead of the more traditional idea -> design -> prototype code -> lose interest due to next idea cycle.)

I wiped out my bike on Saturday and have impressive road-rash on my right arm. At least the numb feeling in my little finger has finally gone away... I landed right on my funnybone and was vaguely wondering if I might have damaged the nerve, but it seems all's well. The bike's fine, of course. :

Student Loan comes in tomorrow (barring cockups on their part). Thank goodness. Our fridge packed up (also on Saturday) and isn't being replaced until next Monday, and we're now running very short of milk-money. (No milk -> no tea -> widespread chaos and homicides)

Tomorrow is also the first day of my Part II project - Bayesian methods for image-enhancement of MRI data - which I'm rather looking forward to. Computers + maths + biology = :)

Mmm, I still need to change the template for this page. It's growing on me, but rather like aspergillus.

Genesis

Well, I've finally decided to start a blog. I don't know whether I'll manage to update it again for a while, since I have a prepared essay to write and still haven't finished reading the Bayesian Methods book I was supposed to be studying throughout this holiday... but it will eventually come to life*.

For the sake of introductions (if you somehow arrived here without already knowing me) I'm Ben Zealley, and I'm currently a student at Cambridge University in the UK, where I'm studying biochemistry; aside from that I like run-on sentences, transhumanism, computer games (both playing and designing), philosophy and aesthetics.

The name of this blog is inspired by one of my favourite quotes:

"You must remember that an oak tree is not a crime against the acorn." - David Zindell

* At which point, I'll change from this gruesome template... :