Ignition

Something exciting is cooking over at The Prometheus Initiative...

More details before too long, if you can't wait and deserve to know: get in touch.

How to make progress boring

The BBC have assembled a "Future Squad" to enlighten us as to what the next decade holds in terms of technological advances. The only problem is that these people have no creative vision whatsoever. If they did, they would be making it happen.

Among the mundane suggestions are:

• Satellite navigation devices that you can wear
• Your television becoming a part of your wall, and replacing your computer for internet access. (Surely it is the other way around...)
• Watching films at the same time as your friends over the Internet
• Makeup circuits printed onto the skin (...wtf?)
• Electric cars
• Jewelry that communicates instead of mobile phones

These are all unbelievably boring. At best they are progressions of existing trends, some of them are superflous frivolities and the rest are absurd or a step backwards.

As Diana Hsieh points out in her most recent post, new advances do not satisfy demand - they create demand for things we did not know we could want, improving our lives in ways we had not previously imagined.

No wonder sci-fi is in such a bad shape!

Recommendation: Erosophia

I recommend the Erosophia blog to my readers.

Particularly interesting are the posts on sexuality, religion and the human body.

For an example of the honest and refreshing style of the blog, see: On Bisexuality

"School phobia" is not irrational

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8367283.stm

A school is being asked to apologise to the family of a boy it prosecuted for truancy. The boy was diagnosed as having "school phobia", but what exactly is that?

Most adults can remember days when they vehemently didn't want to go to school.

There would be protestations of illness, and of the danger of passing on an unpleasant disease, before the eventual acceptance that the journey into school was inevitable.

So many might react with scepticism to the idea that there is such a thing as "school phobia".

No. We cannot use the word phobia to describe it, because for many people it is a perfectly rational fear.

Government schooling is effectively prison. It is totally unhuman for children to be ripped from their families every day, perhaps against the will of all parties, and dumped into what is going to be (at best) a hostile environment.

Government schools are like tribal societies in petri dishes. No real learning goes on, that learning which does occur is often completely useless to the child due to the anti-conceptual manner in which it is presented (See Dr Peikoff's: Why Johnny Can't Think). Children are forced into buildings and classrooms, they are bored for there is absolutely nothing of value there and they have no principles by which to operate in a civilised manner. It is a complete detachment from reality. Do x or receive punishment y. The good is that which is not punished. It is impossible to develop at any rate quicker than that of your peers.

The results are self evident. Crowds of people with nothing better to do than gang up and distress each other. Even people like myself, who went to a (relatively) docile rural school, can at best say it was the biggest waste of 10 years I will ever encounter, short of going into a coma. While my school was mild, it is still the most inhuman and alienating place I have ever been to. I'm quite sure parents would fret if their children were packed off to ride the subway in a big city alone all day, or to the center of a town with a bad reputation -- yet they happily put them on the bus to take them to what will be, for most western civilians, the most hostile location they will ever visit.

The whole system is simply awful, and it is terrible to think that not wanting to be locked inside a worthless, hostile environment 5 days a week is being thought of as an irrational phobia, a trait to be ironed out of the child.

Shoes shined, shirt pressed

I'm all ready to travel to Liverpool tomorrow for my interview with the Walt Disney company.

If all goes well, I'll be working for them for 9 weeks next summer in Florida.

So if I get the job, and any of my stateside readers are in Florida next summer -- do keep an eye out!

I'm really excited about working in the USA.

Gordon Brown has lost it

The official government response to an online petition calling for Gordon Brown's resignation:

The Prime Minister is completely focussed on restoring the economy, getting people back to work and improving standards in public services. As the Prime Minister has consistently said, he is determined to build a stronger, fairer, better Britain for all.

Comment is not necessary.

On Peace

Peace is a state of affairs where human beings need not worry about physical force being initiated against them. It can be said that the United States and the United Kingdom are at peace: nobody this side of a mental asylum expects the US Marines to storm London. Similarly, the French are not concerned about an attack from the British or the Germans. Indeed, the vast majority of the western world is at peace.

For much of the 20th century, and much of history, Europe was a notably peace-less continent. Its history is full of stories of kings, emperors and dictators clamouring at each others throats for spoils. In statist (that is, non-capitalist) countries, the initiation of force is the method by which one survives, or temporarily subsists. Regulation, persecution and an overbearing and undefinable threat of punishment make production all but impossible. Throughout history, all statist countries have struggled to feed themselves - let alone to prosper. This forces them to resort to taking the resources of their neighbours - and since men are not willing to defend themselves and their neighbours from looting, they are certainly not going to defend the rights and property of foreign nationals. Ayn Rand's "The roots of war", from Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, explains this in detail. Observe that it was the decision of Germany and the USSR, the two most statist countries of Europe, to declare war on Poland. It cannot even be said that war is an example of disputes between statist and free countries, as Germany and the USSR soon began their own, far bloodier, conflict.

Yet today Europe is a continent of trading nations, who are mostly free to produce and trade with each other. European war, while being a terrifying threat to the last generation, is not even imaginable to the current. Capitalism, even in its crippled, regulated, mixed-economy state, has given the continent a record period of peace.

Similarly, Japan is no longer a hostile dictatorship - it is now a major western ally, a leading industrial producer and is widely considered at the forefront of much technological research.

Since peace is so clearly a critically important part of human life, it is important to understand what it was that transformed the statist aggressors into peaceful, free nations.

Hitler's Germany was crushed during the Second World War. Without compromise its institutions were destroyed, its leaders tried and punished and its people shown, through devastating attack, that theirs is not a tolerable way of life. Yet far from alienating the Germans, it has made them a prosperous, friendly and free nation. Germany today has much to thank its former enemies for.

Japan was dealt with in a similar manner, the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated to a culture based on devotion to government ideals at all cost, that surrender is the only possible option. Japan was not alienated or angered, it did not rebuild itself before getting its revenge on the west. Japan again became a western ally, and one of the first countries in the history of all mankind to write a constitution making the concept of peace explicitly sacred.

The 20th century was proof, beyond all doubt, that statism is the root of war. The acts of war were all the proof required to show that statism is a cancer man can no longer afford to tolerate, if any more proof was needed.

Yet today, appeasement of statism is widely celebrated as the root of peace. The Nobel Peace Prize, the supposed highest recognition of efforts to bring about peace, has recently been awarded to US president Barack Obama - presumably for his continuation of the long standing policy of appeasing the Islamic dictatorships in the east.

"Peace in our time" is an achievable goal - yet only if we are willing to recognise and practice what makes it possible: a zero tolerance approach to statist nations, and a relentless moral fortitude to hold that the warlike, statist way of life is intolerable and incompatible with civilization.

Some notes on academia

I'm beginning to settle into academic life, and have made a few observations.

Lectures: These can be anything from inspiring, useful and thought provoking, to a complete waste of time. Some factors that might place them closer to the latter are:

• "Student participation." It isn't constructive (in the context of gaining knowledge in a field) to spend an hour hearing undergraduates spout half baked misconceptions about topics they don't understand. Far better to let the expert at the front of the room do the talking, for what should be obvious reasons.
• Unintegrated approaches. When a lecture is simply reading an assortment of facts from a slideshow, it ceases to be valuable. The better lecturers present material in a logical fashion and share their expertise, such that you are better able to take the concepts presented and flesh them out in your spare time.

Students: A good number are lazy, smell funny and are uninterested in the course.

Other than that (which I suspect is universal), I'm happy with the university I've chosen. Blogging has (and may continue to be) light, as computer science takes up much of my free time - but I've got a few posts brewing, so watch this space!