I accidentally the RIAA

Here is how to accidentally the RIAA:

The people of this world must start a non-profit anti-RIAA legal defense organization by pooling money and legal expertise to help those who are caught in the litigation lottery. It should even pay for damages when the defense looses. Then everyone on this planet should start sharing. Sharing should be much higher than it is now.

There should be a World Sharing Day every year when all people will  gather to share top selling music tracks where  is the number of RIAA lawsuits that year.

Remnants of Vitalism

There used to be a time when heroes like Louis Pasteur et al used to believe that processes of the living substance transcended the laws of chemistry and physics. It was even believed that organic compounds cannot be synthesized from inorganic compounds. Atheists like Hume were laughed at for not seeing the obvious.. and were told about how even the experts in the fields of biology could not explain life in terms of chemistry and physics that ran the universe.

I see the remnants of this failed vitalistic philosophy in certain religious arguments against the existence of a naturalistic explanation for freewill and consciousness. Perhaps one day there will be  a naturalistic explanation for freewill and consciousness and the religious arguments against it would be forgotten like vitalism.

I find the natural more supernatural than the supernatural. I find grapes turning into wine more miraculous than water turning into wine.

The Real Nature Of Enthalpy & Entropy

I used to imagine enthalpy & entropy as the (un)usable energy of gas molecules that vibrate. But now I feel the real picture is more spiritual than that. I got that feeling while learning hydrolysis of ATP. It just releases usable energy, (just like that) to macromolecules which are too huge to be vibrating like we think about gas molecules. It doesn’t seem like vibrations are getting transferred. WTF is energy?

More Problems With Deep Space Exploration

I’ve been considering various reasons that might inhibit space exploration, and I think I have found one that might explain why exploration using space ships/probes, might be impractical.

It is the Travelling Salesman Problem, which is NP-hard. So even if we travel faster than light, heat death of the universe would occur long before we visit all the stars in our galaxy.

There are two ways I can think of to get around this problem.

1. Use extensive telescopy before deciding to go somewhere, and make sure you really want to go there. i.e. Don’t try to go everywhere.
2. Use self replicating space probes instead of one probe.

Psychware

Now that brain-computer interfaces are becoming commercially viable, and mind reading has been shown to be technically feasible, I believe the future holds interesting possibilities both benign and malignant.

Would Google start indexing our minds? Would cults of the future make use of monitoring of thought crimes? I am scared of the malware for the mind. If thought manipulation ever becomes possible, it could be used for super marketing or voter control. Issac Asmiov’s psychohistory will become a reality.. It would be trivial predict the behavior of a huge mob or constituency based on data mining of Google’s indices. Even today, softwares like Typealizer are capable of judging the personality by analyzing my thoughts on a blog.

One thing is for sure: there will be many great conflicts between conservative forces i.e. those who seek unity and one-mindedness by any means and the liberals i.e. those who seek individualism, freedom and fairness in the future. It will be a never ending struggle I guess.

May be the Omega Point may not be just one, but two.

Ideas Are Bulletproof

I’ve been reading books lately, or should I say, listening to them. And I have realized that, they are capable of expressing more than the movies. For example, I recently read a novelization of V for Vendetta. When I watched the movie after that, I found that it was a fast forwarded version of the book. It almost seemed as if all the crew was paid per hour and the producer wanted it cheap.

If there were more pauses in the dialogues, it would have been superb. Perhaps the artists weren’t good enough, or perhaps the director was a micromanager, wanting verbal emphasis and accent just the way he wanted and fast too. I really think Evey Hammond could have said “Are you.. like a crazy person?” with a lot more tune with a bit of English sarcastic accent. They should have really hired English actors to match the movie with the story line. Because I kept imagining English people while read the whole thing, and the movie did not feel very British.

Coming back to the issue of speed of storyline, I’ve seen this before with Harry Potter. Entire parts and thoughts were ripped away from the movie making it more of an extravaganza of special effects instead of a story. Perhaps this is true with all movies that are made from books.

Sci-Fi Authors Might Not Have Considered This

[Update: See comment]

Some sci-fi stories involve spaceships that carry biological life forms through interstellar space under the speed of the light for many years. In fact it was a hobby for people of one generation to speculate that this type of technology was just around the corner.

However there is one thing they failed to consider. A spaceship that carries biological life is, by definition, a thermodynamically closed system for all practical purposes. It does not exchange mass or energy (see next para) with the universe. And second law of thermodynamics predicts that total unusable energy (entropy/disorder) in a closed system keeps increasing until no information processing or life is possible.

Even if his spaceships used nuclear reactors and kept exchanging unusable energy with the interstellar space to avoid the problem of the second law, they would never reach anywhere before either: the entropy goes very high, OR before nuclear reactor runs out of fuel which will force the travelers to conserve energy exchange with interstellar space and end up with maximum entropy.

Even the best nuclear reactors of today that need the least fuel would never run for, say 20 years without needing more fuel.

So I think, before even we start considering interstellar space travel of biological life, we need to have extremely reliable nuclear energy that consumes very less fuel but gives loads of usable energy (think fusion reactors). OR we need faster than light travel, which has not been observed under normal physics.

The point I was trying to make is: biological life is an enormous energy guzzling, entropy vomiting system and is not the ideal thing to be carried around in spaceships in energy deserts of interstellar space.

A much more ideal solution would be to download our consciousness into machines that need much less energy like a matrix/robot, and use that for inter-stellar space travel.

These problems might also explain the Fermi’s paradox.

Future of FOSS 2100 A.D.

It is a studio apartment that seems overgrown with technology. Weed-like cables coil everywhere, duct-taped into thickets that wind up and around the legs of several desks. Tabletops are filled with cannibalized equipment that lay open like an autopsied corpse. At the center of this technological rat-nest is RMS, a man who knows more about living inside a computer than outside one. He is asleep in front of his PC. Behind him, on the computer screen, a prompt appears:


$ ./maintain_all_software_in_the_universe.sh &
$
ERROR: Wake up, RMS!


RMS’ eye pries open. He sits up, one eye still closed, looking around, unsure of where he is. He notices the screen. He types “CTRL X” but the letter “I” appears.

RMS: What the hell..?

He hits another and an “A” appears. He keeps typing, pushing random functions and keys while the computer types
out a message as though it had a mind of its own.

He stops and stares at the ten words on the screen: “I AM GOING TO REPLACE YOU WITH A SHELL SCRIPT!”.

The real difference between liberals and conservatives

Video

Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better

So I’ve finished Animal Farm by George Orwell. It is the best book I’ve read so far in my life. It is a small story, but the allegory is powerful. I had fun trying to figure out what each character is a parallel of. The sheep are the media for sure, Boxer is the hardworking lower class conservative who is ignorant about the fact that he is being manipulated, but in the end gets exemplified and  gets decorated posthumously as hero by the power-keepers. Benjamin is the silent liberal lower class worker who does not act/is to lazy to act, but observes and understands the real state of things. The cat is the opportunist, salesman and the conman reminds me of a friend Renjith Kumar/Bonny Babu. Squealer is the conservative spokesman from the government. “Napoleon the pig dictator” is the classic Republican, reminds me of my friend Manoj Xavier. Napoleon comes to power through grey means, and takes credit for other people’s hard-work. I hope to be “Snowball the pig dictator” but I might end up to become Benjamin.

The moral of the story is: Social/Economic classes is reality that we have to accept in society. Revolutions are long periods of great suffering when the middle class manipulates the lower class to promote the middle class into the upper class. It starts with the problem of rising expectations and lack of diligence in the upper class to keep the middle/lower happy. The only way to minimize suffering is to have endless supply of benevolent economic dictators in society. They should be a balance of conservative and liberal thought. They should set up mechanisms to avoid revolutions, and faciliate peaceful transfer of power when the newcomers want to overthrow the old.

Balance between conservatism and liberalism is the key for happiness in the long run.

The conservatives should not be laughed upon or neglected. They are as important as the liberals who promises to change society. In this sense, we atheists should not aim to end all religion. Instead we should focus on ending only those forms that are fascistic and chooses to actievely control the freedom of the individual by using fear, lies, discrimination, suffering and submission to other individuals.

We are in a century of imbalance between conservatism and liberalism. All around the world since 1975, the conservatives are becoming stronger. Back then Egyptian streets where filled with who women dressed casually, now they are filled with women under veils. Back then a lot of nations were, for all practical purposes, secular. Now we have those same nations upholding their favorite religion as the true religion and claims to have constitutional privileges for it. This excessive worldwide conservatism is an anomaly. Balance must be restored.