Trust the Ferret, the Ferret is Wise

Well, since our dear leaders have decided that interest rates (that are exceeding low), and "crowding out", and Very Serious Invisible Bond Traders, which all allegedly come from federal deficits, as opposed to say, the unemployment rate that's up around 9%, it's very hard to find a job. So that's led to thinking about ideas on what kind of job I can make. Now, while I'd much prefer a job saving the world, and doing the stuff I spent years going back to school for, that's not worked so far.

Well, what about starting an engineering company? Well, there's issues there with getting a license, which requires working with already licensed engineers for a length of time, plus getting contacts for jobs, and starting something without a reputation or experience. So for the moment, that's not really looking practical.

Computers? Well, I know them, but I'm not a hardware guy, and I haven't kept up at all with programming languages, network stuff, or anything like that. So I could learn it, but I don't have any of the credentials or experience there.

Working for somebody else in retail sucks, especially in a crappy economy, which is where I'm currently stuck.

So, what kind of retail could I do? Well, the most obvious is a nerd shop, probably comics and games. I worked at a game store for five years, I've been friends with people who ran comic shops, I know both those markets pretty well anyway. And it'd give the possibility of creating a place for people to come and meet and have fun and interact, and that'd be good.

Comic/Game shops are hard, though. They're operating in a relatively small market, comics are non-returnable for little guys, and costs four bucks and up each. That aside, there's also a lot of stereotypes about comic and game shops, like they're essentially some dude's basement. And there really are ones like that. Or just look at The Ferrett's column about his FLGS. There is a comic shop chain here in Savannah, but as their webpage shows, they have a bit of hoarder in them too. Plus there's nothing else to that site besides that page. But the pictures, with the T-Shirts hanging from the ceiling and the confusion, that's not so appealing. The hobby shop I worked in had some of that too. We kept it mostly clean, but it was piled with stuff, especially trains, almost to the ceiling on a lot of shelves. So, obviously, I wouldn't want to do something like that. Running somewhere clean, safe, and welcoming to everybody would be the goal. There's no point in turning away customers by having the store look bad.

The problem there, even in a city like Savannah, with SCAD having its art college with a sequential art series, the market for comics isn't always that big. and the comics don't always help with that. And that's a little scary when looking at opening a shop. Comic stores are always shoestring businesses, which is part of the reason so many end up messy. There's lots of other things out there, and there's lots of TPBs and the like that provide more value for the money, but I'm not sure how easy it would be to try and change all of that. Or if I'd make any money doing it, and not just end up owing even more money when it failed.

"We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors: we borrow it from our children." - David Bower

I've been thinking for a while about knightly orders, superhero societies, and the like. Some of this is likely due to the Order of the Engineer, which we can join as part of our graduation, but it's more than that. I've been trying to think of a, not exactly oath, definitely not a "mission statement" or any of that kind of thing. More what a mission statement or "statement of principles" wants to be, before the marketers and consultants drained all the vitality out of the idea. So maybe it really would be more like an oath, then.

And yes, I know knights were mostly just some aristocrat who had the money to afford a horse and some pikemen to go in the armies of the Crowns, and were mostly NOT the "knight in shining" armor cliche. But it's that image I'm trying to tap into, the symbolism of what the knights tried to present themselves.

The hard part is trying to write one that'd be specific enough to mean something, but broad enough to allow people of goodwill to all get behind it. Which is part of the Death by Committee that happens to Mission Statements. But even so, it's something I'm trying to make.

At least we know if the laws of physics were to suddenly change one day, we'd notice, because of the innumerable high school and college science classes replicating basic experiments every day.

So I was reading the comments on The Ferret's post about manilness and somebody linked to the website The Art of Manliness, and I clicked over because I was curious, and I was ready to make jokes about it, but then I saw the title bar.

I simply cannot argue with that moustache. That is a truly elegant and wise moustache, and only a fool would dispute with it.

Now I'm actually going to go read the site, but between the moustaches, top hats, and illustrations taken from vintage men's magazines, I get the feeling that these people have their heads on straight enough to not actually take it all seriously, while taking it seriously. Or maybe it just reminds me of David Malki!'s Wondermark.

The Turing Test (Wikipedia) is an attempt to figure out if a computer is actually thinking, by seeing if someone on the other end of a terminal (or some other interface) can tell if they're dealing with a human or a computer. But Neuroscience keeps finding more and more that the way our brains work isn't simple software, it's got to do with many many parts of the brain working together, and emotion is one of the foundations of reason and logic. So, if we create a computer that's intelligent, would the different sensory and processing methods of a computer versus a human make the computer's intelligence too alien to fool anyone that it was a human?

So, I don't even have an RSS reader I use. I used to have one for a while, but I kept not reading things in it. Anybody have suggestions on methods of keeping up with news and site updates and the likes? Plugins, standalone programs, whatever. Maybe I should use Opera and that initial montage of site thing they have. Chrome has something like it too, but I haven't been super impressed by Chrome so far.

Somewhere along the line, I seem to have once again become what I was years ago. A space nerd who wants to save the world. Naive? Sure. Idealistic? Duh. But so what? It's better than the alternative. I may not be the astronaut, but I never really figured I would be. Right now, I just want to keep things working well enough that some day, my kids or their kids or however many generations get to reach that glorious dawn. I have a goal, and that beats the pants off just living to make the next payment on $item.

High school should not be the best days of your life. I'm not sure if it reflects worse on the person or society if high school is really the peak of many people's lives.

So I was reading about Nash Equilibrium the other day. I'm sure there's lots of complexities that aren't covered in the wikipedia article, but there was one thought that stuck out for me. It's in the introduction paragraph, so I can't really claim it's a great insight, though I think their example is non-ideal. "However, Nash equilibrium does not necessarily mean the best cumulative payoff for all the players involved; in many cases all the players might improve their payoffs if they could somehow agree on strategies different from the Nash equilibrium (e.g. competing businesses forming a cartel in order to increase their profits)."

It's entirely about local equilibria. Which is an important and valuable tool, in the way that a photograph is an important and valuable tool, but it you draw all your conclusions just from either, you miss an important axis, the changes over time.

It also doesn't work when one or more of the participants aren't aiming at maximizing their whatever. Which is also covered in the article

So, I guess I'm not really adding anything about it, but it's still an interesting article and concept, so yeah.

The world and the universe are both vast and awesome in size and variety. Leaving aside all of the weird stuff that's implied by extrapolating the laws of physics, and even the weird stuff we've seen and confirmed, hell, leaving aside everything beyond the bounds of the solar system, the world is full of all sorts of interesting and strange things. Just the Earth alone is mind-bogglingly huge (humans seriously suck at comprehending numbers outside what can easily be visualized, that's why we love metaphor so much) there's an amazing variety of ways which people have created to deal with the many and varied repeated tropes of human existence, including all sorts of ways to make really big numbers into something comprehensible.

That's awesome. In the literal sense, inspiring awe. The thing about awe, it can turn into wonder, or fear. Which makes sense, as big awe-inspiring things like avalanches, giant water features, sabertooth tigers, or mammoths used to also be deadly. And still can be, if you're not careful. So I suppose bit of fear is a healthy thing our genes are happy we have.

What I really don't understand are the people who look at this kind of awesome variety and endless possibility, and then pretend it doesn't exist. People who (sometimes more, sometimes less) metaphorically stick their fingers in their ears and shout "LA LA LA LA LA!" Not just like the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, which thinks if you can't see it, it can't see you, they think if they don't acknowledge the world, it doesn't exist. Or, at least, it's Somebody Else's Problem Though in many ways, this seems to be a fairly common human trait, it's applicability to aliens is based on extrapolating from a sample of one.

But I guess, what I really don't get is the why. Why someone would chose to treat the awesome wonders of the world as if they didn't exist. Why someone would choose a life that was deliberately smaller, that was deliberately less interesting, that was deliberately full of less possibilities. Maybe fear of the unknown is that strong. Maybe it's the comfort of familiarity. Maybe it's fear of feeling small and tiny and insignificant. I don't know, like I said, I don't get it. I can sort of get my brain to that place, but not really get it.

I am only human, after all, and I can only be shaped by what I know and what I've done. And growing up, the unknown wasn't ever presented as something terrifying and scary. The giant emptiness of space, or the variety of the world wasn't something to fear, it was something to explore.

When it comes down to it, I'm an optimist. Partially by temperament, and partly by choice. I have faith in humanity as a whole, for all the ways we such and fail, we're persistent and bloody clever and can be our better selves. We're not perfect, and probably will be, but we are better than we once were, and we can be better still. We can be smarter, we can be more compassionate, we can be stronger, we can be more just, we can be better. Yes, our monkey brains evolved to throw sticks and stones may eventually be able to comprehend the workings of the universe, or at least come up with better and better models, there's always a twist. So all the weirdness and distance and STUFF out there is something to figure out, something to appreciate, something to discover.

And I guess that's why I don't get the people who want a little universe, with them at the center. I just don't see the point, when there's so much more out there. Imagine if there really where dragons in all those "here"s.