Thorns

My list of links to post was getting ridiculous, so I have come up with a hopefully more workable system, and will try to divide the backlog into digestible chunks.

"Current" here means, uh, 2017 in some cases >.>
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I'm not sure if I've talked about this before but: every time I encounter Magical Healing/Health machines in speculative fiction (eg the sarcophagi in Stargate, the med bay in Star Trek, the machine that turned Steve into Captain America) I think about how they decide what counts as an illness/injury, and how they decide what Ideal Healthy State to go for. The line between "sick" and "healthy" is to some extent socially mandated and arbitrary, and an optimally "healthy" human population requires variation amongst the individuals. To maximise everything is impossible. You have to make choices.
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So a while go it occurred to me (aka various POC/non-white poeple pointed it out) that while space exploration proponents use the metaphor of Frontier (and the US frontier specifically), the thing about the frontier was that it wasn't actually untouched land that had to be settled from scratch, it was cultivated farmland, complete with local crops, that was stolen from it's original inhabitants. Plus a lot of the really difficult work was done not by wide eyed settlers but by slaves and indentured workers etc.

And in space there are no original inhabitants to prepare the land, no indentured workers to die on the railroads, not unless we build way better robots or find aliens to exploit or something and neither of those look likely.

And it turns out, some of the people who see space as a Frontier we Must Explore have realised this! And have decided that the obvious solution is to send out some brown people to prepare the land and then die.

If science wishes to proceed, it's going to have to start killing some people, deliberately, instead of through malfunctions due to old equipment or overlooked things. As callous as it sounds, those places that are already rife with overcrowding are probably also rife with people who have the necessary brains and disciplines to be able to make a one-way mission successful and transmit their data back so we can build the better mousetrap and send again. If nothing else, we should have enough material sent in intermittent missions for later missions to be able to cannibalize and use to make their work that much better and easier.

(the mod of politics has apologised for letting this through and is going to try and fix things so it doesn't happen again, thankfully it's not representative of the usual type of post, but I guess given the nature of the comm you have to expect some fail from time to time)

I am so unbelievably low on spoons right now I cannot express it (on the plus side this is as a result of building myself to have a Serious Conversation About My Future at work, which is now done. More on that when things are more settled)

But something on Foxtel just now I wanted to note: a documentary about possible terraforming of Mars explicitely comparing it to "other frontiers through history", with images from the American West and talk about how "Colonists would do the same thing all colonists have done, packing light and preparing the land as they go..".

Some context: For those not aware of it, there is a Big Conversation happening right now about A fantasy novel with an American frontier..minus the American Indians(*). And one of the major points which has been brought up is that without indiginous peoples to exploit (not to mention indentured workers and slaves) the american colonists would have died, or at least not expanded so fast or so easily. In lots of ways the whole myth of the Frontier is a horrible racist lie.

And it's a lie with a lot of attraction to nerds, and this documentary illustrates that pretty well.

As to comments: I probably am not up to answering them, not for a while. And no playing BINGO.

(*)In case you can't find a synopsis in there, I shall arbitrarily pick one by someone I know :) And yes, that is my favourite author in the whole world making a racist ass of herself :(

I couldn't think of anything to say to celebrate Darwin's birthday(*) when it happened. But better late than never, a vid which illustrates with educational clarity where we stand in the evolutionary chain:

Unnatural Selection: Battlestar Galactica, Terminator

(*)That's the scientist, not the city. Which makes me wonder when Perth's birthday is...

I love the tone of this article: Chimp planned rock attacks on zoo visitors.

Aww! Look at how ingenious his plots are to kill the zoo visitors! And see the sociopathic calm with which he prepares his weapons! Isn't nature inspiring?

I also like the way chimps disprove all those fluffy ideas about animals being too simple and pure for war and cruelty. I saw a doco once where one chimp cheerfully beckoned a park keeper (with whom he had an established relationship) over while his friends snuck around the other side to bring him down (the keeper outsmarted them, but geeze)

Really it's the same sort of anthropocentrism that leads to people arguing that animals don't have love or real language or whatever: humans being a special kind of nasty is still us being special.

So I may have a Phd in "maths", but it's pure maths, and I am woefully ignorant of statistics, not having studied it beyond a first year level (I've tutored second year stats. That was a challenge :D)

Thus my mind is actually quite easily blown by fairly basic statistics facts presented in an engaging way. See for example I'm not normal, which makes an obvious point I'd never really thought about before: The normal distribution became central to statistics back before computers, and once people get taught it, unless they go on to study more stats it's their only hammer so everything starts to look like a nail. But lots of large samples are NOT normally distributed, and given computing power we generally don't need to smoosh them into a nice distribution at all but can actually look at what the real data is doing.

My mind was also blown by Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin which is pretty much just a basic description of evolution being a bounded random walk (Namely, the mean complexity goes up over time while still leaving 99.9% of life at the same basic level, with anything but the most simple species being as likely to get more simple as less)

flyingblogspot and infamyanonymous both posted about personality type things just now, which got me thinking. I did the Myers Briggs test and as happened last time was totally unimpressed with the result (me, an overbearing leader? It is to laugh. The only bit I'm 100% happy with is the T) But this reminded me of a personality classification they were talking about on the Psychology 101 podcast, and after some digging I found it: The Big 5.

So according to that test, I am...
( Cut since you plausibly don't care. And for suspense :) )

I started on Penny Arcade and got stuck in a wikiloop :)

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3170411
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator
http://www.blikstein.com/paulo/projects/project_water.html

I have finally given up on "Talkin' up to the white woman: Indigenous women and feminism" by Aileen Moreton-Robinson (as recced to me by fire_fly before my panel. She did say I might find Sister Girl an easier read!). It's not that it was bad, it's just that I am pretty much incapable of reading more than about 10 pages of academic humanities theory without my eyes glazing over and my brain dribbling out of my ears. Which is a pity, since afaict there's very little indepth discussion of race in Australia that isn't written by and for humanities academics, luckily at least some of it is in the form of short essays.

Still, if you are capable of reading humanities academic prose and have an interest in the subject it is, afaict, pretty good if not made of sparkling prose (keeping in mind that I only got through the introduction, conclusion, and a few pages of chapter 1)
( In which I ramble about the annoying gap between layman and expert )