About two or so years ago, my old plot thread, Circus of the Mighty, dissolved as two key players moved away–and four years before that, another dying. In the early days of the Circus plot most of the player’s characters were working for the newly created Royal Postal and Surveying Service. The Circus didn’t remain there long but, the idea of postal carriers in a world of high fantasy, monsters and magic stuck in my head.

Think about it. You’re a monarch trying to run an efficient state in a world where monsters, magic and all manner of violent weirdness exists. How do you carry out reliable communications and shipping in such a world? Well, sure there are spells that can help you do that. But the experts that can perform these spells are hard to come by and have a monopoly which allows them to charge through the nose. How do you get around that? How do you assure that you don’t have to rely on the Guild of Wizards and Sorcerers to maintain communications or shipping in your kingdom which is filled with dangerous monsters and magical hazards of all kinds?

You create a postal service and give them the military, police and magic power to see that the mail does go through!

These are no ordinary, boring, colorless government clerks! These are formidable specialists, well armed with spells and weapons and the legal power to pursue, fight and arrest bandits and all others who interfere with the mail, pacify monstrous threats, gather geographical data and otherwise do whatever is necessary to protect the communication and shipping system of the Cantons of Udra.

The Service has been existence for about 7 years now and, after a rough start, seems to be functioning well. In fact some of the best of the Service have been drafted in the Udran Army and Navy. Anyone can join the Postal Service as a recruited carrier. You don’t have to be a member of the noble classes, you don’t have to be human, you don’t need family or trade guild connections. It’s a meritocracy and anyone’s son or daughter will do.

All beginning carriers are divided into small squads, usually lead by one veteran carrier, and given packages and letters to deliver through dangerous routes. After the successful and speedy completion of a route, new carriers are evaluated and, depending on their skills and performance in the field, are assigned more difficult work, and possibly promotion.

Anyway, that’s where my new players are going to start. They may not remain there long or they might stay in for the duration. Who knows? But at least it’s a departure from “A hooded stranger approaches you at the bar–” cliché that so many fantasy role playing campaigns start on.

Comments or questions?

And because of this it seems to me, after a bright beginning in the late Nineties, blog software has failed in one of it’s promises. Yes, it made the generation of Web content easy for the nontechnical but, for reasons I don’t really understand yet, blog tools never generated decentralized versions of the functions found in Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Tumbler, Linkedin and so on.

Or they did but this never really seemed compelling enough to prevent people from abandoning the Web as they seemed to have done. People gave up control and privacy for ease of use. But never mind. A lot of you who’ve read my site, have heard that rant.

Luckily I think there might be some alternatives. Luckily a lot of this new social media stuff offers open APIs if not open, decentralized networks. I think they have to right now because how else are they going to suck the Web into their realms? This seems like a loophole for alternatives to exploit. Recently I’ve been reading about Diaspora* and Bojda a new plug-in for WordPress. And there is a plug-in to add a share button at the bottom of my web pages that works with Diaspora.  This gives me an alternative to Facebook’s “Like” button or Google’s “+1″ button and so on. In theory, this button should work for everyone regardless of whatever social network company they use.

That is if I understand things correctly.

But sometimes for me to really understand how something works, I have to install it and try it out. You might be seeing some new gadgets and UI on my pages in the next few days.

Since this is one the deepest parts of myself and my personality, I could rant on and on about why science is so important to me. I could name endless anecdotes where I had a kind of science moment. I don’t even know where to begin. But, just like science, I guess you could start anywhere and build an understanding of my love of science from that point.

So, picking at random, I think a good one is when I read Godel Escher Bach in high school. I was a senior, it was 1981, I was 17, I was funking very badly in pre-calculus analysis while at the same time beginning to understand the implications of Godel’s work: Mathematics was provably infinite and would never be finished. At the same time I was watching Sagan’s Cosmos on television. Sagan said something in one episode along the lines of “…beyond the Backbone of Night, the mind of Democritus soared.” That sank in very deeply to me.

It was here, I think, that I realized that science was infinite and would go on forever and would always surprise us. Unlike every other human endeavor it would always be looking out and everything it said could be tested and shown to be provably true to anyone who was reasonable enough. All other human endeavors were fine but they were always inward looking and full of personal opinion and judgement.

I wanted nothing to do with that. I didn’t give a damn about the whys. I wanted the hows, the wheres, the whens, the whichs. I wanted all the other questions answered even if it took us an infinite amount time to get there. Science was actually doing something. It was actually generating novelty and would do so for eternity while all the rest of human endeavor was provably finite. This idea gelled up for me in university.

I was hooked. Nothing is deeper than science, nothing.

So over the last few months, I’ve been using VoIP to join in tabletop RPG sessions with friends around the world

Now, thanks the power of  the Internet, this is not as necessary as it once was. As high speed connections to the Internet have spread throughout the world, and VoIP tools like Skype, Teamspeak, Mumble, Linphone, KPhone, Ekiga and others, players from around the world can teleconference their game sessions, often with video, over the Internet. Our group uses Skype (Which doesn’t really make me happy as a Linux-head because it’s closed source and uses proprietary communications standards.) basically everyone has it now and it’s pretty easy for non-technicians to use. We’ve managed to get surprisingly reliable audio and video teleconferences going with four wide locations around the world.

For dice rolling, we rely on trust or the random number service of Rolz Online Dice Roller but I’m sure there a zillions of other dice rolling sites out there too.

But there is one nut we’ve yet to crack open: shared tactical maps of battles and territory. So far we’ve had to rely on GM decisions, trust or player memory to know where all the characters are in a physics intensive situations like combat or chases. This has worked out pretty well for us so far, mostly because we have a fairly simple set of combat rules and our GMs have been very good at keeping track of things. But I’d like to do this a little better. Especially if I’m going to restart my compaign again, now that I’ve got players scattered all over the cosmos. It would be nice to have a shared, virtual workspace for teleconferencing that was specialized for tabletop RPGs.

And there is. There is software called “Virtual Tabletops” designed just for this purpose. I’ve been doing research to what’s best for our needs. I’ve been considering our requirements, ideally it should rules system neutral, work on a variety of computing platforms (Since we have Apple, Microsoft and Linux machines in the mix.) but with lots of features and flexibility so it can be tuned for specific rules systems. It should also be free, because we’re cheap bastards!

So I found a source that compares the virtual tabletops, obscure as it is. I’ve been doing research, and it seems, that MapTools is probably the best out there. I’ve downloaded it and started to play with it on my copious spare time. Hopefully we’ll be able use this stuff in future sessions. And I’d like some comments on this, if possible.

For example until 1985, we thought that simple one celled creatures, prokaryotes like bacteria or blue-green algae, couldn’t grow above a certain size due to chemical efficiency limitations in their simple cell structure. But since 1985, we discovered bacteria that grow to nearly a full millimeter in size. These bacteria are large enough to see unaided as they swim and bend in a droplet of water. These creatures show that our old assumptions about size limitations in bacteria were wrong.

But today, I just learned of another creature which is the flip side of that. It’s a species of wasp, a multicellular creature, which is the same size as an amoeba or a paramecium–which are one celled creatures. The fly is barely 200 microns long and the cells that make up it’s body are staggeringly tiny in comparison to other multicellular creatures. This makes it very interesting because we can learn how it manages to make its cells so tiny.

Multicellular creatures usually have more complicated cells in comparison the creatures like bacteria or some species of algae. The cells of complex plants and animals have specialized structures within their cell walls that do specific tasks like metabolize sugar, make proteins or store fat molecules or water. Bacteria, and other prokaryotes, don’t have this kind of specialization.

Anyway, this microscopic wasp evolved along a path where its cells sacrificed some of these special structures, called organelles, in order to get smaller. Its nerve cells have no nuclei like our nerve cells, or the nerve cells of most other multicellular animals do. Stuff like this forces biologists to go back and reconsider some of their assumptions about complex cells and what those cells need to do their job.

This very fascinating to me. That’s why it’s here on my site.

The ELI is a very powerful laser array that will concentrate 200 petawatts of laser power into a very small space-time in hopes of distorting the vacuum on the quantum scale. Let me unpack this a bit to make plain just powerful this is. All the energy from the Sun that falls on the Earth, expressed in units of power, is roughly 89 petawatts, or 89 quadrillion watts. This solar energy is roughly 6000 times the energy produced and consumed by humanity. The ELI expends over the length of a femtosecond and within a space smaller than a pinhead, more than 100,000 times the power of the entire world’s electricity production. How this is possible for us, I shall explain shortly.

So what the hell is this thing for? By concentrating all that energy into such a tiny space, what we hope to do is distort an empty–and I use the word “empty” in a highly qualified way–region of space-time strongly enough to force the emergence of matter and antimatter particles. In this microscopic inferno it’s going to get far hotter than the center of the Sun. It will look as if we generating matter and antimatter from nothing. This might seem incredible but actually it’s all based a very well understood, if counterintuitive, aspect of quantum mechanics.

In quantum mechanics a vacuum is not really empty. Instead it’s something like a sea of boiling particles and antiparticles that constantly emerge from space-time itself only to collide together and annihilate into photos of light. This happens continuously and these virtual particle and antiparticle pairs usually appear and annihilate so quickly and in such a way that they almost never have noticeable effects at the sizes and energies we human experience in daily life. We don’t see matter or energy coming from nothing. But on the quantum scale and at huge energies, the concept of nothing vanishes. Space-time itself is never really a vacuum. It’s never an empty stage in which classical physics plays. The idea of a classical vacuum is an illusion. This what we learn in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

Anyway, there are a variety of ways we can force these virtual particle pairs and photons to appear and have effects that we can measure. The ELI is just one way of doing this. It’s the first time we’ve done this with light alone, even though we’ve known for decades that theory said it was possible.

Now if this all works, this experiment has enormous implications and its data can be applied to a lot of questions and applications:

• Why is there so much matter in universe and so little antimatter?
• What is the composition of the mysterious dark matter and dark energy?
• Are there other dimensions dimension beyond the 4 we know?
• Are some of the predictions of some forms of string theory true?
• Will it give us new and better ways to understand the dynamics of plasmas?
• Will it give us new and better ways to treat some forms of nuclear waste?
• Will it give us new and better methods of radiography and radiotherapy in medicine?
• Will it give us new and better ways to fabricate microelectronics and computer chips.

But to me, one of the big attractions is how gigantic, robust and scary looking this machine is. As I’ve commented before, physics builds some seriously scary looking machines.  And with the usual dumbfoundingly understated hyperbole we come to associate with modern science, it’s just called the Extreme Light Infrastructure–as if it were a small bolt on a hang glider or something.

• Increasing education
• Increasing improvements in women’s political and economic power
• Glacially slow improvements in people’s standards of living in the poorest parts of the world
• Increasing availability of cheap, reliable contraceptives.
• Steady mechanization of farms around the world
• Increasing urbanization

But I don’t think we’re out of the woods here. It was never merely about populations or birth rates. It was always about technological efficiency. The United States has about 5% of the world’s population and yet is the second largest consumer of energy in the world. It was recently surpassed in this by China and soon will be by India. China’s per capita standard of living is nowhere near that of the US but as it approaches this, assuming technology doesn’t change at all, it will be as if we added 4 or 5 times the demand the US places on global energy and material consumption. What’s going to happen when Brazil, Nigeria and Indonesia try to approach our standard of living?

The point is this, the problem has always been squarely that of post-industrial countries. We need to figure out ways to hugely improve the efficiency of our technology in order to drastically reduce our ecological footprint. If this doesn’t happen there’s just not enough to go around and war will likely result.

Some have argued no. They say you could use a time machine and take baby from ancient China and raise it in our modern world. This baby would adapt just perfectly fine or at least just as well as all the rest of us have. And this is true. But I’d argue that this is only looking over a very narrow and transitional circumstance and that it won’t remain true for long.

Practically all babies and children in these modern times are born and raised in ways that hardly distinguishable from ancient China or Mesopotamia. Sure, medical technology and has made child birth a much more reliable and less risky affair but mostly babies roll off the assembly line, mostly haphazardly, like they’ve always done.

Teachers may argue otherwise, but education has also changed very little since Sumerian times: herd a bunch of students into a room, rant at them for a few hours, make them do lot of rote memorization and hope that something sticks. Really the only major change in education in the last 50,000 years was during the industrialization period. There, it was realized that mass education was necessary for the basic literacy and numeracy needed to run a modern industrial or post-industrial economy.  Since that time about 300 years ago, nothing has really changed in eduction and pedagogical technology–it’s still essentially shout at brain and hope that something sticks.

But babies won’t be born the usual way and education won’t happen the usual way for long.

Genetic screen technology continues to advance and now parents are given opportunities and forced to confront choices about their child’s makeup that just weren’t possible in ancient China. It should be technically possible to change the human body fundamentally from the molecules on up eventually. This allows for massive extension and alteration of our basic biology that just wasn’t possible 50,000 years ago. If you change the body that fundamentally, does human nature remain the same?

A even more fundamental change is in the making. Technology has slowly emerged that allows us to change the operation of the human brain. So far this technology has been staggeringly primitive, the equivalent of trying to adjust a computer with a sledgehammer. Prozac and Ritalin? Ha, don’t make me laugh! But eventually we will have the ability to edit the brain on the molecular level. We’ll be able to rewrite the neuron’s DNA, alter the hormonal soup it swims, shape its dendrites and axons and change the chemical gates of  synapses with the speed and precision of editing a hard drive. It may take a us a few centuries yet, but I foresee no barrier to this.  The mind is human nature right?

If technology allows me to move my mind to a synthetic brain and a synthetic body, will my old human nature remain the same for long? My biology has fundamentally changed. The way my new brain and senses operate will change the way I experience the world fundamentally. I don’t see how I’d be able to retain the old drives and interests the evolution forced on me for long. The rules of the game will have changed fundamentally.

Will I be happier, assuming I even live to see this stuff come about? I don’t really think so, I think what will really happen is that I will exchange the agony and glory of the human condition with the agony and glory of the post-human condition.

Why would I want to do that? Well, if you asked a younger version of me, I would have said it was because I hated the human condition. I had no choice in being brought into it and the actions and perversity of my fellows just appalled and disgusted me. And while that feeling is still paritally there, especially when I’m in a bad mood, I’ve mellowed a bit and now, I’d say it’s because I’m kinda bored with the human condition.

Which is weird for me to say because I’m a very risk averse person and yet, I seem willing to do something that in some ways is even scarier then bungie jumping.

Of course I wound up in product support. There is a great demand for this as so many people can’t be bothered to read the directions. Luckily I have a gift for explaining technical things well and it pays the bills.

There was a time, a bad time about twenty-five years ago, after I flunked out of  three years of double majoring in astronomy and physics, when I wished I could travel in time to fix my own mistakes. But I got over that daydream pretty quickly because I realized that, instead fixing my mistakes (Assuming I could even convince myself to change. I was a very stubborn kid.), what I really wanted was to see the manifestations of all my alternative choices. I didn’t want a time machine, what I wanted was alternate histories in parallel universes. In this daydream there would be Earths and a universes where various Paces really did become cartoonists or animators or mathematicians. If I had a machine to somehow travel to these alternate universes just so I could see all the ways my life could have panned out.

I’m pretty sure my current life is pretty squarely in the middle of all those alternatives. For example, I didn’t die painfully and prematurely in an automobile collision, nor did I win the Fields Medal for frightening levels of cleverness. Then there are the alternatives that I’d find very hard to imagine, like Pace, the money grubbing millionaire or Pace, the convenience store robbing drug addict.

So as it is, Pace the somewhat ineffectual, terribly busy, middle aged support technician is not such a bad card to be dealt.

So I just learned that IBM has built a new kind of experimental silicon chip that more closely models how neurons process and communicate information. Now, as a hard science fiction nerd, I’ve talked about computational neurology and the Blue Brain Project before but,  this recent news seems particularly exciting to me because building something like neural synapses in hardware seems to give us much greater speed for certain tasks than trying to model synapses in software.  Neural models in software are on conventional computers, with their switch based based logic gates.

I think the Blue Brain Project points out the inefficiencies of this when it takes 600 teraflop (600 trillion calculations per second.) supercompter, one of the most powerful on the planet, to properly simulate one cortical column consisting of 10,000 neurons in the brain of a rat. If we could actually burn good approximations of these neurons directly into silicon, things might go faster and take much less energy.

Does this presage the quick emergence of HAL, Skynet and Colossus? Probably not, there are still many details that need to be worked out. For example the Blue Brain Project is not nearly over and now has two new goals:

• That of simulating cortical columns on the molecular level
• Building large collections of simplified and optimized simulations of cortical columns

We may learn from the completion of these two goals many more questions that need to be answered before we can really kick AI research in the pants. But these neurosynaptic chips seem to me to be a big step in the right direction.

Related articles (Mostly repetitive but I link to them to counter link rot with redundancy.):

• IBM Reveals Chip That Acts Like Human Brain
• IBM unveils brain-like chip
• Inside IBM’s Cognitive Chip
• IBM’s New Chips Compute More Like We Do
• IBM Announces Brainy Computer Chip
• IBM produces first ‘brain chips’