But I saw something interesting today. A lot of people didn't come to work. I base this on the mostly empty park and ride lots my bus zoomed past into Lynnwood. This wasn't the pattern only just last year. Maybe people felt, on the verge of promoting a new president, an African American president, that today meant a little more than it did in years past.

Anyway, here's a King quote, I'd like to comment on: Though the arc of the universe is long, it bends toward justice.

I appreciate the idea that King was trying to make here but, as an absurdist, here's how I'd amend that to still carry the idea across while removing the idea that there is grand meaning to the universe: Though the arc of the universe is long, we must work to bend it towards justice.

So several months ago, towards the beginning of a summer, I saved up the money and bought a bunch of new hardware to assemble into two new desktop boxes. Aside from my System76 Darter laptop, this was the first new hardware I bought in more than nine years. The purpose of these new machines was, in order of importance, to game, to giving my non-technical friends something familiar to compute with, to store, share and burn files, to run applications that have no Linux analogs and, perhaps, to do a little ASP.Net development.

I didn't select top of the line hardware because I read a few benchmark tests and knew that most games, even something like Crysis and other DirectX 10 games, wouldn't really require it. The criteria I chose select hardware by was energy efficiency and silence. For example, my video cards are passively cooled and I spend good money on high quality power supplies that were highly efficient and very, very quiet. My gamin' boxes run in near total silence and never use more than 240 watts. They average around 90 to 110 watts when I'm just editing text, listening to music or browsing the Web. Plus these new LCD monitors gave me back a ton of deskspace.

So now I've got the hardware to do a lot of things I've been planning to do for many years now. Rip all my CDs to ogg vorbis, burn a bunch of archived files to optical disk and so on.

Oh yeah, and game a lot. I plan to buy Spore and Medieval Total War II, maybe the computer version of Mass Effect or Half-life 2? I don't know. Any recommendations?

So I read today that scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have received death threats. The LHC death threats are example of ignorance out of control. The risk from the LHC is minimal. How do we know that for certain? Because we know that cosmic rays routinely slam through our planet at energies much higher than the LHC can generate and our planet has not collapsed into quantum black hole or a strange droplet or some other bizarre form of matter.

The death threats are probably hoaxes and will amount to nothing but, it bothers me that there are nuts out there who still think there are things that humanity was not meant to know.

There a many social forces and groups these days who advocate positions that want to forbid us from studying certain natural phenomena. They want to discredit evolution. They want to forbid stem cell research. They want to stop animal research. They want to prevent the use of RTGs on deep space probes. They want to forbid sophisticated genetic modification of food crops. They want to forbid climatology research. As our science advances, they'll probably want to forbid the creation of artificial organisms or minds.

They may have valid points in their arguments. There are all kinds of dangers associated with every new thing we learn. They are certainly right to advocate caution but, fundamentally, basically, I think they are enemies of civilization and the ideal of progress.

Not that I really believe in the ideal of progress either but I categorically disagree with people who take these positions because they are based in fear of the unknown. They are afraid of change, afraid of novelty. They are based in a pessimism that we can never learn to use our new knowledge wisely.

I've ranted about this many times before on my site but, you know how outrageous news events can inspire a person. This story struck home for me because I was physics major myself back in ancient days.

There's an idea that's been plaguing me for a number of years since I read Max Tegmark's article in Scientific American. What if there are infinitely many universes that have existed for all eternity? Doesn't that imply that everything is ultimately meaningless? From a human perspective, I mean.

Think about it. If all Hubble volumes are subject to Poincare's Recurrence Theorem and we have an endless amount of time, that means all posssible arrangements of particles in a universe, no matter how unlikely, are repeated exactly infinitely many times. That means there infinitely many exact duplicates of you reading this post scattered across all infinity and enternity. On the grandest scale, you never really die, you never really change and all decisions don't matter.

So how do you write a gripping story in a universe like that? Larry Niven mentioned this problem in his story, "All the Myriad Ways." Of course he was only positing a very large, but always growning, number of universes. With infinity and eternity, the problem only gets worse.

The problem for science fiction authors is that you have to posit some kind of threat, some kind of conflict, even if it's just a mental one, for the protagonists to overcome. There has to be some kind of change. But, if for example, Pace exists, in infinite duplication, over the infinity of space and time. I can't die. Nothing really threatens me because all decisions and ramifications happen all possible ways. There are inifinite number of dead mes, an infinite number of live mes.

At this point we have to define what I am. I'll posit here that any person from any hubble volume that has my exact same genetic code is a version of me. This rules out possibilites like an Inuit or Yoruba Pace-likes. Those Pace-likes would have at least a slight variations in genetic code. This also rules out female Pace-likes or Pace-likes with genetic diseases. However it doesn't rule out some types of homosexual Pace-likes. Homosexuality is biologically caused but in many cases it is not genetically caused. Some forms of homosexuality are due to biochemical factors during development in the womb.

Anyway, aside from that limiting criterion, that still leaves us with an enormous "Pace phase space" (Say that three times fast!) to explore.

This ramification space would contain, variations of me that never moved to Seattle from San Francisco for example, versions of me that moved to Chicago, Baltimore or Kansas City, versions where my mother died and I was adopted by my aunt or my father, versions of me that were orphaned, versions of me that stayed at Microsoft and so on. If a guassian distribution applies there are some versions of me in horrible circumstances and some in wonderful circumstances. But note that this balance is impossible to change. I can't set things up so that all breaks work out for an infinite number of mes.

Or maybe I can? Actually I'm very sloppy on the math. I'll have to look this up.

Anyway, that's the big question for a writer trying to build a story about multiverses. How do we create a conflict that matters? How do we threaten to burn down Hilbert's Hotel?

I can find no rational reason for aliens to invade the Earth.

If they need energy, water, metals or radioactives there are plenty in space to mined or harvested without dealing with pesky natives. If some super-civilization needed all the metals, silicates and carbon from our asteroid belt, they could just haul it all away without ever visiting the Earth and, we could do nothing to stop it. If they needed to enclose the Sun within a dyson sphere to harvest all the energy from it, they could do so and our technology would so primitive in comparison that we could do nothing to stop it. If they wanted to mine all the silicates and iron from the Earth, they'd just pulverize it into manageable pieces by slamming a few other planets or moons into it.

In any case they'd never have to set foot on the Earth at all.

The key thing to keep in mind here is the enormous differences technology. Science fiction is often wildly inaccurate on this score because they only posit differences of a few decades or centuries. It would not be like British maxim guns versus Zulu infantry.

[I think this happened on February 24 of 2008. Toby had returned from his travels in Southeast Asia. The players in attendance were Ralph (Dwalor and Telwyn), Ian (Hilda), Jerry (Chingara), Toby (Stirge and Thalin) and Victor (Mandark). This session ran later than most Toby was the last to leave. Experience rewards were given out at the end of the session. Basically this session details the Circus' trip from Boha-Boha to the city of Shomo, which is about thirdway down the Kalimara River. I'm back posting this for chronological accuracy.]

After discussing the matter with Nkosazana, Hilda managed to convince the high priestess of Araku to sell the Circus the two ghost-touch spears at a third of their value. With these, the Circus set off on a road out of Boha-boha to follow Amonis' route into the Bida. Dwalor's recently conscripted guide, Mazi, a Ngohe from a small village in the Western Bida, would help them. The muddy trade road followed the Kalimara river along the border between the kingdoms of Taumau-Boha and Mabwe. Along its length was the Mabwian city of Shomo and it was there that the Circus, following Amonis' plan, hope to turn into the Wakyambi lands in the Bida.

When I was in college back in the middle Eighties, I had a Casio calculator watch. This was the expensive apotheosis of nerdery back then. In the Eighties Japan was kicking everyone's ass in consumer electronics. At the time microchips had become so cheap that towards the end of the decade, they were giving away cheap watches in cereal boxes. Smart people in the wristwatch industry--that is to say, nobody in Switzerland or the US--realized that the only way to keep the prices up was to jam more functions in the box, thus the Casio C 80 calculator watch. Walking around with this thing strapped to my wrist made me feel like Mr. Spock or Dr. Who.

Anyway, fast forward to the beginning of the Twenty-first Century.

My Xonix wristwatch, which served me very well for more than four years partially broke several months ago. Actually it would have served even longer. It's just that I broke the stem for the analog watch when trying to replace its battery. I now have no way of setting the watch but, everything else still works--the digital recorder, the thumb drive, the ear buds, everything. In our diminished expectations of product quality in these modern times, I consider that pretty good endurance. But if the analog watch doesn't work, I just can't stand to wear it on my wrist. I'm keeping it as spare parts for a friend's Xonix watch of the same model.

It's the digital equivalent of the horror of the blank page that all authors must face at some point. Sometimes something comes, sometimes it seems like it's all been said and said by people smarter than you.

One of the ways I think I can get around this problem is to talk about my hobbies. I have a game session coming up and that will give me a write up then. My gaming pals love my summaries of game sessions. But I could broaden this by talking about table-top role-playing games in general. (Sigh. I remember when just saying role-playing games was sufficient. But software has changed all this now.):

• I did start a couple of entries on the history of my role-playing campaign: Udra. I really should finish this up.
• I could make these histories very detailed or at least as detailed as my memory and 29 year old paper can allow for.
• I could talk about table-top RPGs in general. Commentaries of rules and variations. I've done a little of this already. For example I could talk about how to use computers to aid in bookkeeping and note-taking in game sessions. It would great to have a computerized miniatures map that would help everyone keep track of the physics. As a game master, I'd love to have this so I could concentrate on the descriptive stuff and mood.

Anyway, maybe some other subjects will come to me. I've been thinking about ways to force people to use encrypted mail and whether I want to sign up for EVDO service for example. Something will come.

So I've following developments in medical imaging technology closely for many years now.

Nearly a month ago, my friend Victor bought and downloaded Portal, a first person action game that involves puzzles, the legacies of faceless defense corporations and bizarre physics. He invited me to try my hand at it.

The game very strongly reminded me of Paranoia, right down to the jumpsuits and manipulative, deranged robots. For me, this game was rather refreshing in that it wasn't your typical paintball session in software where those with the fastest hardware, the most practice, the least RSI and the fastest connections usually pulverize everyone else.

In games like that, I quickly degenerate into kamikaze mode simply because I can't stack up the patience to do them well. I'd have the wrists of an 80 year old if I did anyway. (On the other hand, people like to play me in first person shooters and melee combat games because they get a kick out of how I transform into this insanely giggling manic--ahem--I can be quite childish for a 44 year old guy.)

In Portal, sort of like Thief or Metal Gear (Although Metal Gear did have some incredibly frustrating button mash events that I almost gave up on.), you're given some tools and then you got to figure your way out the predicament you're in. Dangerous events are immediately fatal, thus more realistic, but at least no one is immediately trying to eat your brains or blow you to bits.

It turns out there are some other ways this game is subversive to the usual shoot 'em ups. I guess Joe McNeilly, the guy I just linked to, might be over-analysing things too much but I'm pretty sure the folks over at Valve Software did seriously consider at least some of these issues while designing the game. With Half-Life, Valve became known for trying to depart from cliche and keep the escapism on a vaguely cerebral level. Nice to see they are still doing that.

[Victor, Greg and Ralph in attendance on 11-18-2007 between 3:30PM until about 9:30PM. Greg was running Thalin and Chingara. Victor was running Mandark and Stirge. Ralph was running Dwalor and Telwyn. Hilda and Helga started off in Greg and Ralph's hands but when combat started, Victor was mostly calling the tactics. The Circus is currently in the City of Boha-Boha which is in the western end of the Twin Kingdoms of Taumau-Boha at the head of the Kalimara River.]

When we left the Circus they were making plans to capture, or at least defeat, Lord Alif.

Alif was an important man within the mysterious Leopard Cult. As the result of Thalin's scrying, Hilda's questioning of the two spies the Circus had captured and several other related facts, they learned that this mysterious cult of criminals, assassins and shapechangers was now after the Circus and was somehow in alliance with at least two of their old foes, Chebo and Marvek. Although the pattern of connections wasn't entirely clear yet, these cultists also were involved with the ancient evils of the Kosan and expunged history of the mysterious King in Yellow.

More importantly, as Thalin had long ago expected and had taken precautions against, the Circus was now being scryed on and their movements and activities followed.

What is Thanksgiving for? Really?

If it's supposed to celebrate national identity, we've already got a zillion holidays for that, Veteran's Day and Independence Day for starts--and some that some of you out there wouldn't consider as days of national pride like MLK Day and Labor Day.

Is it really for gratitude?

As an atheist, I don't quite see what the problem is. Isn't that what C.S. Lewis did with for Christianity with his Narnia series? If His Dark Materials becomes the atheist's Narnia, fair is fair.

A long parenthetical comment follows:

Some things changed. GAIM became Pidgin and Nvu became KompoZer, hopefully with some improvements that I'll care about. There is now a bluetooth connection management tool as well. I currently don't have any other devices that use bluetooth but I guess its got to have it there so I don't have to edit configuration files or open a command prompt.

Some of the administrative tools got changed a little, mostly small improvements that I've found helpful--no complaints there. Many icons got changed a bit but I really don't care about that.